Episode 26: Day Eight — The Hideout (1)

Seven in the morning, and the rain had not eased. If anything, it felt as though it were only gathering strength.

He watched the endless sheets of it and had to admit the day was a poor one for travel. The downpour was heavy enough to erase the world beyond it, and the dark — with only a little exaggeration — had the feel of a moonlit night. New channels had opened in the earth where none had been, and water ran along them toward the drop of the cliff.

He studied the ditch cutting itself into ground that had been solid a moment before, until a drop struck the top of his head, and then another, and he shifted his seat. A night spent making twelve throwing spears, each a meter long, had left him hungry. He bit into the emergency-ration belt.

Franc startled so hard she nearly jumped, thrusting her hands out and batting wildly at the belt in his grip. He went on chewing a torn piece of it, watching her with surprise of his own, and she answered by jabbing one hand, desperate, at the leaves on the tree.

"You want me to eat the leaves?"

She nodded. And nodded again.

So she had known about the edible leaves as well. She bobbed her head hard enough that it ought to have buzzed, plainly begging him to spit out what was in his mouth and tear into the foliage instead. The look on her face was so good to see that he kept working his jaw and simply watched her — and tears began to gather in those two great eyes.

Leave her like this and she would cry. He spoke with care, so the scrap of belt would not come flying out.

"This belt is food. They made it for people who get dragged into a forced summoning, the same way they made the school uniform."

Franc, with tears beaded and trembling at the corners of her eyes, opened them round and let her lips part. A single drop broke free and ran down her cheek. Curiosity got the better of him; he put his palm out at once. But her tear never reached his skin. It thinned into smoke and was drawn back into her body.

She looked at his hand for a moment. Then she leaned in, close, the way a person does when they want an explanation.

His breath caught. Ghost or not, having a face that beautiful — almost too beautiful to look at squarely — pressed in so near was murder on ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the heart of a man who had been single since the womb.

"So... you know jerky, right? It's made something like that, then treated so it keeps for a long time and you can actually eat it. A piece about as long as one knuckle is roughly four hundred calories. Tear that much off and you've made up a meal."

The longer he talked, the wider her eyes grew, and her mouth opened a little further. Nothing like this must have existed while she was alive.

"I don't know what the special processing is, but there's no trouble in eating it. Keep chewing and it even starts to taste a bit like beef jerky."

A lie, of course. The longer you chewed, the more it became the stink of fishy leather and the flavor of a rubber band, the sort of thing that made you want to retch. Telling her it was revolting would only make her worry. That was Franc. Better to say nothing.

Once the spears were done there had been nothing left to do, and his mouth had been idle, so he had fallen to stripping leaves and eating them. Somewhere in the middle of it he found himself wondering how far his Phase Power had climbed. The number was of no particular use, but with nothing else to pass the time he checked it anyway, the way a man checks a clock.

What is this?

If he stayed near a Phase Stone without touching it, hadn't the gain been about four an hour? He had not once taken the stone in hand since meeting Franc at midnight, and thirty-one hours had passed since then. At the very least he ought to have climbed a hundred and twenty-four, to five hundred and twenty-one.

Something was wrong. He drew the Phase Stone out, closed his fingers around it, and felt for the amount of Phase Power entering his body. What came flowing in was a tenth of what it had been.

A tenth?!

How? Why had it fallen to ten percent? Had something gone wrong with the stone itself?

No. It had to be Franc. Her soul had been bound into the Phase Stone, and the power bleeding out of it had thinned because of that. There was no other cause.

Eyes shut, he turned the stone over and over in his fingers and worked the analysis through. The stone was pouring out Phase Power without cease — one unit every hour.

Did that mean his absorption had actually improved? The first time he had gotten hold of a Phase Stone, he had taken in only twenty percent of what seeped from it. Now he was drinking down every bit that came out. Skin against it or not, so long as he was close, he could take the whole of it. On the question of efficiency, he had come out ahead.

He kept the stone moving in his hand and tried to set in order what this change would mean.

He still had no real sense of how much Phase Power the stone held. Even so, the knowledge that they could have decades together at the least sent a fierce joy through him. He was glad of it. For Franc, who wanted to pass on, it would be no kindness at all.

He pressed the excitement down and turned to where she sat beside him.

"...Franc?"

She looked a little brighter than before. Once she had been dark gray laid over gray laid over a paler gray; now there was only gray, and light gray. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were parted. She twisted where she sat, and both hands squirmed between her thighs.

It looked — he could not have said exactly how — obscene. As if she had been wound up, sexually, to a terrible pitch.

"Franc?"

His voice made her jump. She floundered, lost her balance, and began to tip backward. Startled, she flung her arms about and tried to brace her legs, but she had already leaned too far. He lunged on reflex and grabbed for her arm. His hand went straight through arm and body alike, and she went over completely and dropped toward the ground.

"Franc!!"

He thrust his head out over the place she had fallen. She was not there. However it worked, he ought at least to have seen her falling.

He was halfway to his feet, meaning to climb down and search, when a hand — faintly transparent, long, and slender — slipped out beside his face and waved, light as a leaf. He spun. Franc was there, smiling a small embarrassed smile, waggling her fingers at him.

"Haa..."

He shut his eyes, laid a hand gone cold against a forehead gone hot, and let the breath out of him. Right. Franc was a ghost. A fall would not hurt her. Probably.

"You startled me so badly I thought my heart had dropped out."

She looked rather moved that he had worried. The one who had forgotten, if only for an instant, that she was a ghost was him, and nothing was wrong with her. He let the blame go. He sat, working to settle the slam of his pulse, and Franc settled in tight against his side, smiling with her eyes.

If she was pleased, then so was he.

He watched her pretty toes — not a blemish on them — curl and uncurl, and a crease came into his brow. Why had she worn that face a moment ago? It had been, exactly, the face of a woman in orgasm.

He weighed whether to ask, then probed, carefully.

"What was that, just now?"

She flinched.

She flinched. She had flinched. So he was right. His guess had been right.

Her head crept around the other way. The legs that had been squirming drew together, demure. Her thighs pressed shut. It was precisely the bearing of a young lady caught with her hand between them.

But what had she felt it from? Had something particular happened? He turned the last few minutes over in his head, piece by piece, and a suspicion rose. He looked at the Phase Stone in his fist.

It had to be this. All the while he had been thinking, his hand had never stopped working the stone. There was no other reason.

Set on proving the charge, he set his fingers moving again and rolled the Phase Stone between them. The answer came at once.

A flinch. A jolt. Another jolt.

Her face was turned away, so he could not see it, but her shoulders jumped with the play of his hand and her waist twitched, and that was enough. The Phase Stone and Franc's erogenous zones were joined. No question of it.

How could a thing be this good? An outlet, of all the crooked kinds, for the want he had been carrying —

Wander the internet long enough and you found people competing, on their own little pages, over who was the greater degenerate. The undisputed crown of that contest belonged to the ones who laid their sexual tastes out in public. He would spare the details. Among those tastes there was a way of feeding a private rapture by tormenting a woman and winding her desperate, and once a man acquired a liking for it, ordinary sex could no longer satisfy him. He slid, by degrees, down the road of the pervert.

He was that sort. Whenever he watched a woman suffer in it — panting, undone — the excitement came on so hard his vision swam.

But Franc had no body. And even if she had, they were not so much as courting; how was he supposed to do a thing like that? Except that with this, he could. He could watch that beautiful face crease with pleasure and come apart in orgasm.

He set his mind and swore a grim oath to himself. He would not be caught. If Franc ever realized what he was doing, the pleasure of tormenting her while pretending he knew nothing would be gone for good.

Her behavior would have looked suspicious to anyone. He acted as though he had not seen it, let the moment pass as if it were nothing, and opened his mouth.

"Hmm. The weather's foul, though. There seems to be a little Phase Power mixed into the rain — hardly any, but it's there. I wonder if it's good to keep standing in it. What do you think, Franc?"

He stopped working the stone as he said it. Franc stopped twitching. She turned to him and nodded with all her might.

Her face in that moment was regretful, and aching, and somewhere under it, relieved. The instant he saw it, a mental pleasure sharp enough to numb his heart came washing through him.

God. This was going to kill him. A depravity like this —

"Anyway, the rain isn't thinking of stopping. At this rate I don't think we can reach the hideout you mentioned."

He held an empty hand out and let the water streaming between the leaves run over it, then scrubbed the wet palm dry against his trousers. Pretending to study the flood, perfectly at ease, he started on the Phase Stone again. Franc's bod— her spirit answered at once.

Twitch. Twitch.

As if she were forcing herself to endure what kept coming, she clamped her thighs as tight as they would go. Her waist bowed. Her torso twisted. And still she held, desperate not to let it show.

He varied the pressure, and with his thumb brushed the little bumps of the stone as if he were only sweeping past them. Franc's legs shot straight out. He nearly jumped himself.

A face scrunched as if she might cry. A back drawn into a shallow bow. Toes stretched taut and trembling. She looked as though she had reached her peak. The outer corners of her eyes quivered; she had them squeezed shut, and she was biting, lightly, at her lower lip. It was so alluring that if she had possessed a body he would have thrown himself on her then and there. The sight set his heart shaking.

No. If she looks back now, she'll catch me on the spot.

As if nothing at all were the matter, he shifted, set his back to the tree, and sat cross-legged. At the sound of him moving Franc flinched, put her posture hastily to rights, and turned on him a gaze with a strange heat gathered in it.

She watched him settle. Then her eyes dropped, traveling from the Phase Stone in his two hands to his face and back again. She had begun, just a little, to suspect.

Or... not?

She was a girl who did not know how to hide what she felt. This did not look like suspicion that he had toyed with her. It looked like worry — worry that he had noticed how the stone, under his fingers, sent a shock through her body.

How could anyone be so kind that she did not even know how to suspect another person? And here he was, unable to master his own sadism, tormenting a girl like that. His conscience pricked him.

But that was that, and this was this.

Who would have thought the trick of reading a mind off a face — the one he had been able to learn thanks to his sister — would ever serve him like this? On the day his sister fell under that spell, failing to catch the words she sent with her eyes would have meant something terrible. Eight years ago he had learned the skill because the alternative was worse than dying, and he had honed it ever since. Set beside his sister, Franc's feelings were almost too easy to read. So the eight years of being hounded, and the tears, had been for this.

Sis — thank you!

He could not go on pretending he had not noticed her stare forever. He put on the look of a man just now reacting, and spoke.

"Huh? Oh — this?"

He held the Phase Stone out to her all at once, as if he had mistaken the direction of her gaze. Franc flinched, and her eyes — complicated now — went from him to the stone and back.

Judging by that innocent answer, she did not dream he was catching most of what she thought. He smiled, bright and blameless, and explained why the stone was in his hand.

"If I keep it against my skin, it's easier for my body to take in the Phase Power that seeps out of it on its own."

A short explanation was not going to loosen her. Nothing in her face had changed. He added more. If she stayed wound that tight, he would have a harder time working the stone himself.

"So ever since I got it, I've been holding it whenever I had a spare moment and taking the power in. After I met you yesterday, I hadn't absorbed any at all."

He showed her the stone as he said it, and only then did he see the tremor leave her eyes.

Heh. She seemed to believe him. And why wouldn't she? There was not a speck of a lie in anything he had actually said. Even if Franc had some gift for seeing through falsehood, she would not find a single thing wrong, or strange.

Once he was sure the unease had gone out of her completely, he opened his mouth again, to lead her attention somewhere else.

"Does it rain this hard here, once it starts? It's coming down like someone knocked a hole in the sky. It's been nearly a full day, and it still isn't thinking of stopping."

Reassured by the turn of his attention, Franc thought it over. Something seemed to come to her; she gave a small nod. She paced along the branch, and then, with hands and with the whole of her body, she told him they would have to remain here for a while.

"We have to stay here for the time being? Why?"

He asked because he genuinely did not know, and Franc began to flap, and then to dance — a soft, wobbling dance. No. Not a dance. She was trying to depict something.

He was not understanding her. Looking troubled, she came up in front of him, crouched, and pointed at her own mouth.

"You want me to read your lips? Uh... sei... z... mic sea... wave? Seismic sea wave?"

She nodded, as if that were the one.

Sea wave. The swell of the sea? No — ocean waves? And seismic was a word tied to earthquakes, if he remembered right.

"...You mean a tsunami?"

It must have been the right answer. Miss Franc smiled and clapped.

It was absurdly out of nowhere. There was not so much as a lake here, let alone a sea, and suddenly a tsunami? A seismic sea wave would be the ocean's wave from an earthquake — a tsunami born when the ground shook.

He tipped his head, then looked at the rain coming down in torrents. A fall like this could easily be a hundred millimeters an hour. Water must be pooling somewhere and then surging in. Was it really on a scale you would call a tsunami?

He pictured a wave several meters high rolling in, and a chill went through him. Still, they were above a cliff, and this tree alone stood more than fifty meters tall, its girth four or five times an ordinary trunk. He probably did not need to worry about a flood. Right?

But Franc was looking down at the ground with her eyes faintly narrowed, and that left him uneasy. Why was she like that? Was she reckoning when the wet season was due to begin? Or was it only that the rain had come on so hard, so suddenly? If it was enough to sink her into thought, it was not a thing to wave off.

Even so, the odds of being stranded were low. He had thirteen days of emergency-ration belt, and the leaves that held water were plentiful. Food and drink were no worry, and in seven days he would return to reality. Even if he ended up isolated in this tree, it would not be a serious problem. Wasn't it actually safer? A downpour like this — if the ground below turned into a sea, the Aberrants would only roam less.

He swept the earth with his farsight. Trees as huge as the ones rising around him had driven their roots wildly through the ground on every side, and the roots of the lesser trees were well spread too. The cliff did not look likely to give way.

"Don't worry. This belt alone will last me more than ten days, and there's plenty of water, isn't there? The tree's tall. Even if it floods, we'll be safe."

He soothed her, meaning for her to calm, but the worry did not leave her face. If it was not the flood, and not food, then was there an Aberrant that walked in rain like this?

"Is there something you're worried about?"

At that her eyes brightened for a moment. She nodded, looking from him to the drop below and back again. The instant her gaze went down the face of the cliff, he understood.

"You're worried the cliff will collapse? It's all right. I checked with detection and analysis. There are plenty of trees, and the roots are spread wide under the ground, so it doesn't look as if the cliff will go. The slope tilts toward the drop, too, so water won't pool here the way it would in a sea."

As he said it he watched the rain, where a small channel had already formed and was running toward the cliff.

Oh. So that was why so much sediment had piled up in the river below. He had wondered why the lower river was rich in good clay while the upper reaches had so little. That was the reason.

Franc heard him out, shook her head again, pointed at him, and shivered.

"I'm... what you're worried about?"

She nodded, hard.

She had been afraid the rain would soak him, that he would take a cold, that his condition would worsen. He had teased her out of sheer meanness, leered at her nakedness, and gone so far as to play tricks on her body with the Phase Stone — and still she had been worrying over him. She might not know about the third of those. She would know about the first and the second. And still. Something clenched in his chest. Guilt came with it, and he looked away from her eyes.

Even so, the wicked work of his hands was not a thing he could give up.

I'm sorry, Franc.

He sighed where she would not see it, looked around at the monstrous thickness of the trunk, and spoke.

"Then how about we hollow the tree and get inside? It's enormous. Carve the heart out the way a woodpecker would, and it ought to make a decent shelter for the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠time being."

She nodded and nodded, as if she thought it a fine idea — and then a troubled look came over her, as if something had just occurred to her. She must have decided there was no way to hollow a tree. And that the digging would take a long time besides.

Not that he was without a way. He had a horn awl hard as anything, a claw-spear sharp beyond reason, and analysis and detection on top of them.

"Does this rain go on for a long time?"

He asked it while he got ready to work. Franc's face firmed a little. She spread both hands and showed him a two, and a five.

"...Somewhere between two hours and five?"

She shook her head.

"Right. It's already poured all night, so that can't be it. Then two days to five?"

She shook her head again.

"...D-don't tell me it falls for ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠twenty-five days?"

Even an ordinary rain, falling all day, left a place on the edge of flooding no matter how well the drains were built. He tried to imagine this coming down, at this pace, for twenty-five days, and the picture was hideous. You could have named the stuff a sea wave and no one would have argued.

He turned to Franc in shock. Flustered, she shook seven straightened fingers at him.

"Ah — seven days?"

She nodded, and nodded.

Trust Franc to make it confusing.

"Still. Seven days of rain. That's an awfully long time."

Only then did the stiffness leave her face, and she nodded. A mercy it was not a month — but what kind of rain fell for an entire week? He had better hollow the tree and get a hole made, and quickly. Just as Franc had said: take this damp, moisture-choked wind and rain for seven days straight and his condition would plunge to its worst. Catch a cold on top of it and he would be in real trouble.

He lifted the claw-spear, analyzed the grain of the wood where he meant to dig, and analyzed the spear's durability as well. The result came back that if he worked by careful scraping, the tip would not snap. Feeling every inch the woodpecker, he took out the horn awl and began to stab, madly, at the stretch that would become the mouth of the hole.

The wind and rain might blow fierce. Better to set the entrance thirty centimeters up from the branch. The trunk was wide enough for him to lie down in alone. A hundred and eighty centimeters long, then, and about a hundred high, so he could sit.

He was sketching the entrance with the awl when a thought struck him, and gooseflesh rose on the nape of his neck. Climbing the cliff had been a blessing beyond measure. If he had stayed where he was, he would have been on a one-way course to drowning, no question about it. Especially if he had been tucked inside that doghole —

He swallowed.

Enough of that. He shoved the ghastly image aside.