Chương 3: What's the time?

Those fools invented the method, yes. We made it useful. Where they theorised, we applied. Where they dreamed, we built. Now, by killing mutated organisms, we can absorb their energy without even consuming them. We are not heralds of humanity's advancement. We are its engine. - From the memoirs of Moman, Founding Member of the First Brain's Faction The jackals froze. Then, with a speed at odds with how they had been behaving a moment ago, they backed away. Heads low, tails between their legs, eyes on the ground.

They moved like animals reminded very suddenly of their place in the world, and within seconds they were gone, swallowed by the forest without a sound. Kara lay where he was, because his ankle was still a structural problem and because his brain was busy processing the fact that two D-grade predators had just retreated like scolded puppies. Then, slowly, with the caution of someone who had received a great deal of bad news without warning today, he turned his head to look behind him.

There was a man standing a few metres away. A violet man. He was tall, about six feet, athletic the way a body gets from years of use rather than training, and his dark brown hair ran unkempt to the nape of his neck. His beard was the same colour and looked to have gone unmaintained for what Kara conservatively estimated was several decades. He had no aura. Either he was below D-grade, or he was so far above it that the aura had folded back into itself and become something else.

Given that two D-grade jackals had just fled without him appearing to move, Kara was confident he knew which. And despite all of it, something about the man made Kara feel calm. Not safe, exactly. Calm. Like a room after a storm has passed.

"Are you planning on lying there all day?" Kara's body made the decision before his brain finished consulting it. He was on his feet, weight across both legs, and stood there in genuine confusion, because one of those legs had a fractured tibia. Or had one, until approximately now. The bite marks were still there through the hole the jackal had made in his suit. The bleeding had stopped. It still ached, the deep residual ache honest damage left behind, but ached was a different category from snapped.

"What grade are you at?" Kara blinked. That was not a thing you just asked. You worked up to it. There was a generally understood sequence in which two people who had never met exchanged names before moving on to questions considered personal by anyone's measure.

"Grade G, Tier 3," he said anyway, because the man had the kind of presence that made social conventions feel less important than usual. The violet man nodded, slowly, with the air of someone filing information that confirmed something already suspected. And then he started clapping. Genuine, considered applause. Which meant he had watched Kara spend the better part of the afternoon stumbling into invisible shrubbery and running from adolescent boars, and arrived at a positive assessment.

Kara was not sure whether to be flattered or concerned, and settled on both.

"What's the time?" He wasn't sure why that was the first thing out of his mouth. Of all the questions available - where am I, who are you, why are you violet - the time had emerged victorious. Without a day and night cycle he had lost his bearings entirely, and of everything wrong right now, the time felt like the one thing he could fix.

"Oh right. I forgot about that." The man paused, in the manner of someone rolling up his sleeves mentally.

"Give me a moment. Let me get this planet to start rotating again." Kara replayed the words once, to check.

"I'm sorry. This planet."

"Mm."

"Start rotating."

"Yes."

"Again."

"It had stopped. Happens." He said it with the energy of a man explaining that the kettle had boiled over.

"It's fine now." Kara looked up. Through the gaps in the canopy, the sky was shifting - light moving, shadows realigning, the sun tracking westward with the purposeful urgency of something that had fallen behind schedule and was catching up. The forest made a series of small adjustments, as if recalibrating. He stood very still and said nothing for several seconds.

"What's your trait?" Of the many things Kara had expected next, that was not among them. You did not ask a stranger's trait. You barely asked a friend's. It sat alongside family debt and medical history in the category of things that required real trust before they came out.

"Climbing," Kara said. Which was technically true. He had climbed things his whole life - trees, rock faces, the harbour wall back home when he was eight and absolutely should not have been. It was a real answer. It was simply not the whole answer, and no stranger should have been able to tell the difference. The violet man's eyes gleamed. Brief, there and gone, and unmistakable. He had found what he was looking for and was choosing not to show it.

Kara felt a sudden, uncomfortable sense that the conversation had been going somewhere specific the whole time and he had only just arrived there.

"Come," the man said. Kara became aware of Bodo the way you become aware of a wall that has silently moved to stand in front of you. One moment there was forest. The next there was a mammoth - twenty feet tall, occupying a volume of space Kara's brain initially tried to classify as terrain before correcting itself. He took three quick steps back. The mammoth looked abashed.

"Sorry about that." The voice arrived directly in his head, slow and warm, with a rumbling quality like distant thunder that hadn't quite decided to commit. The mammoth had kind eyes, which was not a thought Kara had expected to have about a creature the size of a small building.

"Ah yes," the violet man said, with the ease of someone who introduced telepathic mammoths regularly.

"Meet Bodo." Right. Fine. A telepathic mammoth named Bodo. Kara filed it. The file was getting quite thick.

"Now get on top of him." Kara looked at the top of Bodo, then at his own arms. The distance was not one that climbing ambitions alone were going to resolve. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Oh right, you probably can't." The man sounded like he had just remembered this after suggesting it, and like he found it mildly entertaining, which Kara was beginning to recognise as his default setting. He revised his mental designation from violet man to Pranky, a title that captured the energy more accurately.

Bodo's trunk came around him before he could form an opinion about it - a gentle, enormous, surprisingly warm pressure that lifted him and set him on the mammoth's back with the care of someone placing something fragile on a high shelf. Pranky cleared the same distance in a single fluid jump and landed behind him. Kara decided not to acknowledge it. Then they moved. Kara had been fast before, surfing currents in the Indian Ocean, riding thermal transports across the coast. This was not like that.

The speed was there, but the sensation wasn't - no wind-shear, no jostling, just the trees parting ahead as if by arrangement and the ground flowing beneath Bodo's feet. The creatures they passed moved aside without being asked. The trees on this island were all enormous. The one they arrived at was why. Its branches ran farther than Kara could track, each thick enough to be a trunk in its own right, the whole structure reading less as an organism than as a landscape feature that had decided to be a tree.

Fifty feet up sat a hollowing in the wood, smoothed from the inside, dark and warm with age. On a branch above it was a bird. Kara's brain tried several times to classify it before accepting the raw data. A Roc, maybe. Whatever it was, it made Bodo look small. Its plumage was yellow and deep blue, vivid even in the filtered light, and it watched them with bright evaluative interest, head tilted at an angle that suggested opinions were being formed at speed. Then it dropped.

The talons, each half of Kara's height and sharp enough to have opinions about most materials, closed around Bodo with extraordinary gentleness. The world lurched upward, and they were on the branch, fifty feet up, Bodo entirely unbothered by having just been carried through the air by a wingspan that could cover a city district.

"That was Kite," Pranky said. Kite, hearing its name, drew itself to full height, spread its wings to their full extension, and held the pose with the energy of someone who had rehearsed it and knew it landed.

"Incredible," Kara said, honestly, and Kite received the compliment with the quiet satisfaction of something anticipated but no less welcome. Then out of the hollow came a big cat, larger than any Kara had seen. Her colouring was tiger, deep orange and sharp black, but she had a mane - not the full-faced mane of a lion, a long silky flow of pale gold that ran from the crown of her head down the line of her back, moving with a slow elegance of its own as she walked. Why and how he knew it was a she was a mystery.

She looked at Kara. The shudder arrived before he understood what had caused it, a full-body response that bypassed conscious thought and went straight to some older, more honest part of him that had very clear feelings about what stood on that branch. His legs made a unilateral decision. He was kneeling before he had agreed to it. Behind him, Bodo lowered his great head. Even Kite, mid-pose, tucked its wings and bent. Pranky stood beside him, upright, hands in his pockets.

"Rise." The voice in his head was smooth, serene, regal. His legs found their strength. He rose.

"Allow me," Pranky said, straightening slightly in the way of someone assuming a role they found privately hilarious, "to introduce Her Majesty, Tremble." Bodo produced a sound - low, brief, the clear shape of a laugh that had tried very hard to be something else. Tremble's gaze moved to him, and the sound stopped.

"Funny name, isn't it," Pranky went on pleasantly.

"Let me tell you how she got it." She turned the look on him instead, and Pranky received it cheerfully, long past being troubled by it. Whatever story followed, involving a tiny cub, Kara could not have repeated under any circumstances, because the sound of his own heartbeat had temporarily outcompeted everything else in his sensory environment.

"Why do you look like you're being held at knifepoint?" Pranky asked, following his line of sight.

"Oh, is it her? She naps eighteen hours a day, and Her Majesty is grumpy it got interrupted. She's always like this." In his peripheral vision, Bodo nodded with the sage energy of someone confirming a well-established fact. One glance from Tremble, and he became very interested in a point four feet to his left. Kara felt something loosen in his chest. Whatever these four were, they were a family.

An improbable, multi-species family with a complicated internal hierarchy and a long-running argument about sleeping schedules, but a family. Pranky, watching him relax, smiled. The first time without the sardonic edge. It suited him.

"Alright then. Come on in." He passed Tremble on the way through the door and reached out to ruffle her mane. She snapped at his hand, a controlled snap that could have connected and chose not to, and arranged her expression into something meant to communicate dignity that instead communicated she was fond of him and found this irritating. Nobody was fooled. Kara waited for her to enter first. She paused, assessed him for roughly two seconds, and nodded once. He felt strangely proud of himself.

Inside was large, easily enough for Bodo, who padded in with the ease of someone navigating a familiar space. The walls were the tree itself, smoothed and darkened, lit from above by gaps in the canopy that arrived as columns of soft amber light. No panels, no devices. Nothing he could identify as made rather than grown. Pranky settled into a single rocking chair. Tremble folded down beside him and closed her eyes.

Kara looked for somewhere to sit, and a chair appeared - identical to Pranky's, definitely not there a moment before. He sat down in the chair that had appeared for him inside a tree on a planet recently persuaded to rotate, and decided that reacting to individual things was a resource he would not expend.

"So," Pranky said, in the tone of a man getting to the part he was actually interested in.

"How did you land up here? And who helped you? You couldn't have managed it alone." Kara sat up. This, at least, was a question about things he badly wanted to talk about.

"No idea. I was training by myself in the middle of the ocean. Isolation training, building my tier. Then a storm appeared out of nowhere. When it stopped it was just as sudden, and this island was right there." He paused.

"Where is this? And how do I get back?" He had wanted to ask who Pranky was, but something kept stopping him - the sense that the answer would change things in a way he wasn't ready for.

"As for where," Pranky said, "let's say somewhere you've never been. As for getting back, it's honestly not worth the effort right now."

"What does not worth the effort mean."

"It means what it means. How old are you?"

"Fourteen." Pranky was quiet a moment, in the way of someone doing arithmetic with something other than numbers.

"Three years," he said finally.

"If you prove you're worth it, in three years I'll send you back." Kara stared.

"Three years. I was supposed to go home in three days."

"Oh well. Change of plans." He said it without particular sympathy and without particular cruelty, which somehow made it worse. Kara opened his mouth and then closed it, because everything he had was either a question that wouldn't change the answer or a complaint he didn't have the energy to sustain. He tried dialling his brother's code mentally, the way he had since he woke on the beach. The same nothing.

"My family's going to think I'm dead," he said, quieter than he intended.

"Don't look so dejected." Pranky's tone wasn't unkind.

"You were training in isolation anyway. Just consider this a continuation of that."

"My parents. My brother. He's going to -" He stopped, hit by a sudden clear image of his brother's face, the kind that arrived when you understood exactly the gap between where you were and where you wanted to be.

"I miss them already." The last part was barely a whisper. He tried the dial again. Nothing. Then Bodo's voice arrived in his head, slow and warm, like something settling into a space that had gone cold.

"Don't be sad. This not bad place. Kara too weak now. Kara grow strong. Master good trainer." The trunk came around him, an enormous careful weight, and some of the tightness in his chest loosened despite itself. He let it, because he was too tired to argue with a mammoth. He was nearly under when he saw that Pranky was watching him again - the gleam from the trait question, banked lower now but not out.

"You keep looking at me like that," Kara murmured.

"Do I." Pranky didn't deny it. He rocked the chair once and let it still.

"Sleep, boy. Three years is a long time to be interesting, and you've been interesting for about a day. Tomorrow we find out whether it holds." Interesting how. Kara got as far as the shape of the question before the warmth and the weight of the day pressed down over the top of it. He knew he wouldn't get an answer, and he was too far gone to spend the question anyway. But the look stayed with him on the way under. It was not the look of a man who had picked up a lost fourteen-year-old by accident.