Episode 049| The Price of Admission

Kaiyuan Year 1010, January 4 · 10:03 p.m. · Saint Tranya, Underground · Beyond the Line

Goran didn't ask Lika whether he wanted to.

"I don't keep idle mouths down here." He stood up, taller on his feet than he'd looked sitting. "You say you didn't come to buy goods, and you didn't take a wrong turn. Fine. Then you'd better be of use."

He walked to the wall and pulled aside a cloth. Behind the cloth was a wall pieced together out of broken screens, and on it was a map Lika had never seen — not the city's official chart, but one Beyond the Line had drawn for itself, dense with mouth after mouth running downward.

He pointed at one of them. That mouth had been ringed in red paint, ringed more than once.

"This mouth," Goran said, "I've sent 3 crews down it, one after another. There's goods to be hauled up. But every crew, some don't come back up."

He turned his head and looked at Lika.

"You go down, you bring the goods up, and not a man short. Then I'll believe you're no worm. You can't go down—" He didn't finish, but the meaning of that half-sentence was plain enough.

---

Lika looked at that red ring.

For anyone else, this was a death sentence dressed as a question. 3 crews had gone down and lost men; what made the fourth crew any different. But the thing Lika feared least was exactly what others took for a death sentence — because that kind of thing was usually not "too strong," it was "no one had read it."

"Who do I take?" he asked.

"Take 2." Goran said. "And my own man goes with you, to watch how you work it."

To watch how you work it. Lika caught that layer of it: this wasn't only a test of whether he was of use, it was a test of what he relied on to be of use. What Goran wanted wasn't the goods — it was to work out what this one he couldn't measure actually was.

---

That mouth lay a layer deeper into Beyond the Line, a crevice slanting down, its edges crusted with the same blue-white light as the Frozen Reach Instance.

Lika stopped at the mouth and didn't rush to go down. The 2 men sent down with him were already getting impatient; one of them — a broad-shouldered man, a thick layer of calluses on his hands — reached out to start climbing down.

"Wait," Lika said.

The man turned and glared at him, but stopped all the same. Goran's word carried weight here: watch how you work it.

Lika crouched at the edge of the crevice and reached the Triggerer's sense of bearings down into it.

Set against the one under the Frozen Reach, this mouth was far shallower, and far younger — it had none of that layer-on-layer structure his own past had laid down; it was more like a wound that had only just split open, still growing wild on its own. But it had rules all the same. Every Rift does.

[Rift · Layer 0 · Read]
[Structure: unstable · self-proliferating]
[Hazard source: depth 40 meters · periodic]
[Pattern: still 18 seconds → active 4 seconds]

Still 18 seconds, active 4 seconds.

Lika fixed on those two numbers. The 3 crews hadn't come back up, not because the thing down there was too strong. It was because they didn't know it had a beat — they'd gone down in that "active 4 seconds," and run straight into it.

---

"There's something down there," Lika stood up and said to the 2 men. "One cycle every 22 seconds. The first 18 seconds it holds still; the last 4 seconds it moves. I count. When I say down, you go down. When I say stop, you press flat to the wall and don't move."

The broad-shouldered man frowned. "How do you know?"

"I can see it." Lika gave him those 4 words and no more.

He didn't explain. The answer was cheap; what was worth something was that no one knew how he came by it.

---

They went down.

Lika was at the front, counting the seconds under his breath. 18. He said down, and the 3 of them edged down together; at 18 he said stop, and the 3 of them pressed to the ice wall and held still. The thing below swept across over their heads in its "active 4 seconds," grazing past the broad-shouldered man's back, and didn't bite. The 4 seconds passed and Lika said down again.

One length at a time, like climbing down a man-eating elevator shaft, keeping to the rhythm of its dozing.

At 40 meters, the goods were there. A whole cluster of rift goods, still joined to its mother-body, brighter than any piece on the stalls Beyond the Line. The broad-shouldered man froze — this spot, the first 3 crews had never so much as come near.

They hauled the goods up. The 3 of them, not a man short, climbed back up one length at a time to the beat Lika counted.

---

As they climbed out of the mouth, the way the broad-shouldered man looked at Lika had changed.

It wasn't only respect. Lika knew the thing mixed in with the respect — it was a wariness, an envy. A man who'd gone down into rifts all his life, who'd clawed out his place Beyond the Line on the strength of his own body, had just watched, with his own eyes, an outsider who measured as nothing, who couldn't truss a chicken, throw not a single punch and, on nothing but seeing, haul up the goods his brothers across 3 crews had never reached.

To a man like that, this was harder to bear than a beating from Lika would have been.

---

Back in the inner room, Goran looked at that cluster of rift goods still trembling with light, looked at it a long while.

Then he laughed. This time there was something else mixed into that laugh.

"Interesting," he said. "You don't rely on strength. You rely on…" He paused, as if picking the word, "on reading it."

Lika neither admitted it nor denied it.

Goran set the rift goods down and tapped the desktop twice with his finger — tapped just beside that screen. Lika caught the small movement: it was as if he were noting something down, or reporting something to someone.

"Fine." Goran said. "You're of use."

Those 2 words, of use, were a pass Beyond the Line, and a chain as well. Lika could hear it: Goran was keeping him on, and the same sentence had him tied down.

And those 2 taps of Goran's fingertip weren't tapped for Lika.

They were for someone higher up.

【Ch. 049 End · Saint Tranya, Underground, Beyond the Line】