Episode 043| The Awakener

Kaiyuan Year 1010, January 4 · 9:09 p.m. · Saint Tranya, Underground · Beyond the Line

Lika didn't move in the shadow.

The man coming toward the corner, his steps carried him to within 2 metres of Lika, and there he paused.

Lika held his breath. The other man stood right at the edge of that warm-yellow lamp's light, his face turned in profile, and Lika could see it perfectly clearly — a man as ordinary as they came, work clothes, worn boots, in his hand a coil of something that might have been cable, might have been rope. He didn't look into the shadow. He only lit a cigarette by the lamp, then turned off down a side passage and was gone.

Lika waited until that string of footsteps had died away entirely before he let the breath go.

The sign read "beyond the line," but the people down here plainly didn't make a thing of every outsider. He eased off half a breath — or else, the people down here simply weren't afraid of outsiders coming in at all.

---

Lika shifted deeper into the shadow, to where he could see that underground city without being caught by the row of lamps.

Below was a market. Stall pressed against stall, the goods on them more than he could place at a glance — metal stock stripped from the old city, dried rations come from who knew where, a few stalls with people clustered at the front, small things laid out on the tables that he couldn't make out from this distance. Some paid in cash; some pressed a wrist to a black box and walked on. There was order to it, but not the city's kind, the kind with uniforms and regulations. Down here they recognized one thing only — fists.

He was watching when a commotion broke out at the far side of the market.

A dull crash, then someone shouting. Lika turned his head — a rigged-up scaffold had half collapsed, a length of crossbeam sliding down off the top of it, dead in line with a man below who was halfway through packing up his stall.

---

Lika's engineer's brain had the beam figured a step ahead.

It was a load-bearing beam stripped from the old city, steel core poured through with Source-Stone concrete, a good 4 metres long by his eye. A spec like that, one length of it ran 300 kilos at the least. Coming down, it was a life ended, whoever it landed on.

But it didn't come down.

A man, with it half-fallen, reached out, and caught it.

Not with a tool, not with a brace. A pair of hands, bearing up that 300-kilo beam, heaving it steadily back up, setting it again into its place.

Lika stared at those hands.

He'd seen strong men, seen powered exoskeletons, seen the engineering vehicles Magnetar built itself — those he knew, every one; he'd even drawn the schematics for a few of them by his own hand. But the man in front of him had nothing on his hands at all. By reflex Lika went looking for the exoskeleton joints, the Source-Stone battery couplings, any drive structure he could recognize — and found not one of them.

Just a pair of hands. Bearing up 300 kilos, the way you'd bear up a signboard.

---

Lika knew what this was.

It wasn't that he didn't know. These past months in the city, the news tickers had carried a line of it every few days: someone else had "Awakened." Someone could lift a car off the ground bare-handed, someone could open a gap in a wall with empty hands, someone — he'd let it all slide past as background noise back then. Those months, his eyes were fixed on one thing only — the Frozen Reach, S-17-R, that thing he'd written down 85 years ago under his own signature. He'd been chasing his own ghost, chasing it all the way into the deepest part of the ice, and had never once turned his head to look at the city under his feet.

And the city under his feet, these past months, had quietly grown a new kind of person.

That crevice torn open in the Frozen Northern Reach, that event Spectra called the "Resonance" — what it had changed wasn't only him. The same one event, beneath this city, had turned a crowd of ordinary people into people who could bear up a beam bare-handed.

It was only that he'd been changed into another kind.

They'd grown strength. What he'd grown were the eyes to read that crevice.

---

Crouched in the shadow, Lika had, for the first time, a feeling he was very unused to: he'd fallen behind.

In his own city, in the underground he knew best, there was a whole set of rules, a whole world, that had grown up by itself in those months he'd had his head turned away. He hadn't even worked out yet what the people down here sorted themselves high and low by.

He was just trying to make out whether there was any mark on the arm of the man who'd borne up the beam —

A hand came down on his shoulder.

Not heavy — but unhurried. The man it belonged to had been standing at his back a long while, waiting until he'd looked his fill before he spoke.

"You, from outside," the voice came from behind his ear, low. "Watching the show beyond the line, watching this long — that costs money."

Lika didn't turn his head. He understood the painted words now — BEYOND THE LINE: down here, how long an outsider got to stay hidden was never in his own hands.

【Ch. 043 End · Saint Tranya, Underground, Beyond the Line】