Ren heard it before Kessa did. That part was not a surprise. What was a surprise was the rhythm it came in on, a rhythm his chest already disliked.
He was sitting on the low step of the waystation shelter with the Fringe in front of him and the perimeter posts humming low at six paces apart in the dark. It was somewhere past two in the morning. Kessa was on the other side of the shelter door with her knees up and her arms around them, face being polite and stubborn about the cold.
The sound that did not belong came in under the insects.
It was a step rhythm. Insects did not have a step rhythm. Foragers did, but this one was too heavy for its gap between hits, and the gap was too short for the size of the thing making it. His body knew the math before his head did. His stomach was the first part of him to understand.
No, he thought. Not a forager.
Kessa said, "Did you hear that?"
"Wake Lira."
"What is it?"
"Wake her."
Kessa got up and ran. She did not run well. She was a Rank 1 on no sleep at two in the morning and her boots said all of that. He heard her cross the stone floor, then Lira's voice low and immediate, then a zip of a coat. He did not turn around. The shape through the trees was moving low and he needed to keep listening to it.
The stepping stopped.
Oh, he thought. That's worse.
It came through the tree line at the speed of something that had already decided where it was going.
The shape was low and bone-plated and moving on four legs under a back that looked wrong in the dark. It was too heavy for a forager and too fast for the weight it was carrying. Lira had read the protocol aloud at the south-district yard this morning, retreat and signal and wait for escort, and the thing running across the last six meters of open ground at Ren's position had already blown past the first two.
The perimeter formation was supposed to slow it. The perimeter formation did not slow it.
Ren was on his feet without remembering the stand. Kessa was coming back out of the shelter door three paces behind Lira. Lira had her force-blade drawn and was already moving, but two meters of open ground on an armed Rank 3 was two meters on an armed Rank 3, and the thing was not aimed at Lira.
The thing was aimed at the doorway.
Three students were in the doorway. The Group Six kid whose name Ren had not caught was in front, half a boot over the threshold, the posture of a person who had been shaken awake and did not know yet why. Kessa was behind him. Toma was a step behind Kessa with his hair flat on one side from the bedroll and his eyes still unfinished.
Toma was in front of Ren.
He moved.
It was not a decision. It happened somewhere below the floor of his head, and his body went through with it before he asked the question. He took two steps sideways, one step forward, past the Group Six kid's shoulder and into the line of the animal's charge with his left arm coming up, because his left arm was what came up when a thing was coming at his face.
The animal hit him.
The bite landed on his forearm. He felt the teeth for a quarter of a second and then he felt something else, something under the skin answering in a way he did not have a word for, a wave that ran outward from the point of contact and moved through the muscle in a shape he could feel the edges of. The flesh of his arm stiffened at the point of the bite. It did not harden and it did not armor. It answered. Something inside him had decided to be less giveable where the teeth were and it had made the decision faster than the teeth had finished closing.
The teeth broke skin.
The teeth did not break anything else.
The thing's head slammed his forearm back against his own chest with the full momentum of a Rank 2 ambush predator at ramming speed, and Ren went down on his back on the stone like a dropped sack, and he felt the wet on his arm and the grit under his shoulders and he was not dead. His arm was not in two pieces. His arm was a single arm, with teeth in it, bleeding.
He was on the ground and it was trying to open its jaw for a second pass.
Get off, he thought. Get off get off get off.
The force-blade came down.
Lira did it without sound. The blade met the animal's neck at the base of the skull and went through. The head came off in one motion and rolled off Ren's chest and stopped against his ribs with its mouth still open around a piece of his sleeve. The body went slack with the jaw still clamped on his arm, live-weight to dead-weight in under half a second.
Lira put a boot on the corpse's shoulder and pulled the jaw off his forearm with her free hand. She did it flat. She did not look at his face.
"Keep still," she said.
Ren kept still.
"Shardback," Lira said, not to him. She was saying it at the corpse, naming a thing that should not have been there. "Rank 2. Should be twenty klicks south of here, alone, and not anywhere near a humming post."
The other sounds arrived in the order they arrived. Kessa was saying a small broken sound and holding her thigh. The Group Six kid was on one knee with his shoulder at the wrong angle and his face gray. Toma was in the doorway with his hands open at his sides and no expression at all. Berran came out of the shelter with his weapon drawn and stopped when he saw the Shardback was short a head.
Lira's hand came down on Ren's forearm and pressed hard. A field bandage was in her other hand and she was getting it around the wrist. Ren watched her do it. Her hands were doing the work and her face was doing the thing a face did when the hands were ahead of the face.
She was looking at the wound while she wrapped it.
She was not saying what she was looking at.
The rest was sorting.
Berran checked Kessa. She had a claw graze down the outside of her thigh, long and shallow, a lot of blood and not much under it. The Group Six kid was Paval. Ren got the name from Lira, not from the kid. Paval had a shoulder contusion and possibly a hairline, a thing for a Rank 2 medic in daylight.
Toma was not hurt. Toma was not hurt because Ren had been in front of him.
The Shardback's head had stopped close to Ren's right boot. Ren moved the boot.
His arm hurt at skin-level, all around the wrap where the teeth had gone in, and it did not hurt under that. Where a Rank 2 bite should have been grinding on broken bone, there was nothing to hurt. The absence was louder than the wet on his sleeve. Something was working under the wrap, the same shape he had felt moving through his muscle when the teeth were closing.
He was not going to look. Looking at his own arm in front of Lira was not going to happen. He kept his eyes on the grass.
Dask came out of the shelter.
His hair was sideways and his coat was open at the throat and his face was not doing the Dask face. He looked at the corpse. He looked at Kessa and Paval. Then he looked at Ren and came over.
He did not make a sound when he walked. That was information. Dask was a loud person.
He crouched next to Ren and looked at the wrap and then at Ren's face.
"You okay?"
Ren said, "Yeah."
It was the amount of word he had.
Dask looked at him for another second. Whatever he was seeing on Ren's face, he did not ask about it. He put his hand on Ren's uninjured shoulder and left it there for two breaths, no squeeze, no pat, just a hand where Ren could feel it. Then he stood up and went to help Berran with the corpse.
Toma had not moved from the doorway.
The cold came in.
The insects had stopped in the first thirty seconds of the attack and had not come back. The posts were still humming. Somebody was going to have to look at the formation in the morning and decide whether it had failed or had never been designed to stop a thing that big coming that fast, and that somebody was not going to be Ren.
Lira finished the wrap and tied it at the back. She checked the tail. She sat back on her heels and looked at him for the first time without the bandage between them.
Her face was not doing anything he could read. A Rank 3 Hunter who had just watched a Rank 2 Shardback close a full-load bite on a student's forearm was supposed to have a face, and Lira's face was not giving him one. It was the same face she had used at the morning yard, maybe a little harder around the eyes. She was looking at the wrap and she was not looking at the wrap. He could feel the not-looking.
She said, "We go back at first light."
"Okay," he said.
"Sit here."
"Okay."
She got up and walked over to Berran and started talking in the low voice of two Hunters making a choice. Ren could have listened if he had wanted to. He did not want to.
He sat on the stone in the cold for a long time after that.
Somebody put a coat over his shoulders. He did not see who. His arm was warm inside the wrap and cold outside it, and both of those were doing work his head did not want to think about. The wet on the sleeve had gone tacky.
His left boot was pressing on the blister it had been pressing on for two weeks and the pressure was sharp in a way that was absurd given the rest of what his body was doing. A heel blister was the sharpest sensation he had right now. His eyes would normally have rolled at that, and the eye-roll did not make it up the chain.
He was thirsty. He noticed that. The ration bar he had eaten at dusk was sitting in his stomach and not moving, and the taste of it had turned sour at the back of his throat. He kept swallowing and the dry copper taste kept not going away.
The sky was the color sky got at three in the morning. He stared at it for a while.
Under the wrap, the shape of the wave answered quietly. It was doing something to the place where the teeth had been, and it was not doing it slowly, and he did not have a word for what it was doing that was not also a word he had promised himself he was not going to think in front of other people.
Fine, he thought. Fine. Think it alone.
He thought the word once, in the back of his own head, and did not make a speech of it. He set it down as a label, a shape he could pick up later, the same shape Brekken had set careful down in at the counter yesterday morning. Then he put his uninjured hand on his knee and left it there.
The plan had been never let anyone see what my body does.
The plan had been the plan for eleven days.
Lira had seen whatever she had seen when she wrapped his arm, and she had not said anything. Toma had watched from the doorway with his hands open. Dask had looked at the wrap when he crouched down, and Dask was not stupid.
Paval was going to wake up tomorrow in a medic's room and remember a thing that had not made sense on the dirt. Kessa was going to remember that Ren had said wake Lira before Kessa herself had heard the step.
That was five people added in the last forty minutes.
Berran was going to hear about it at dawn, whatever Lira told him, and that was a sixth person once removed.
His surveillance tally had been four for two days. The tally he kept was for people who watched him on purpose. The five he had added tonight had watched him by accident. Accident was worse. There was no way to make an accident not have happened.
His arm was not broken. He could not decide if that was a good thing yet, because what he knew about his own arm being not-broken was a thing other people also now knew, and the not-broken-ness of his arm was the entire problem, and the fact that he was still alive to have the problem was what made the problem exist in the first place.
Cautious, he thought, without any heat in it. Stay cautious.
The line had worked at the crest yesterday. It did not work here.
His arm worked under the wrap. He sat in the cold and watched the sky start doing the thing it did before dawn. He did not sleep. Toma did not come out of the doorway. Somewhere past his left shoulder Lira was still in the low-voice conversation with Berran, and neither of them had looked at him in the last ten minutes, and the not-looking was loud.
The hum of the perimeter posts was still going. The posts had held against a thing they had not been built to hold against, or they had not held and the Shardback had come through anyway. Either way the posts were doing the only thing they knew how to do. They were humming.
First light was an hour off.
He sat.