Chương 119: 115: Not That Lesson

Staring at the sky had felt timeless, but it obviously hadn't taken that long, because no one had managed to bring the chaos down to a manageable hysteria, not even the school principal, who you'd think would be good at handling disasters. I guess dead bodies weren't quite the same as food fights in the cafeteria, though.

"Olivia! Holy shit!" Jack was kneeling on top of one of the Sovereign Ridge guys, but his eyes went wide as I approached.

"You… you…" His face held the red blotchiness and beads of sweat caused by too much exertion, or a lot of yelling, or a hard suppression of tears. Maybe all three. He looked toward the truck that had held the gun. Well, the remains of the truck. And the remains of the people that had been standing on it.

"I thought you were…" he started, before stopping and swallowing.

"Ah. Nope. Reports of my death, greatly exaggerated." Reports of Sovereign Ridge Patriot deaths would not have been. I wasn't gonna count body parts, but the guy who'd fired the gun definitely hadn't made it and at least two, maybe three, of the guys standing closest to him hadn't survived either. A few more were injured. The one who was screaming loudest was badly burned. One glance was enough. I had healing potions in my pouch. And a high-level healer, too. Where was she?

I started checking people off a mental list: Tessa, Jeff, Bobby, prepper dude, Javi, prepper dude… I had just enough time to feel a hint of panic before Jack saw what I was doing and said, "I told her to wait in the rift until we were sure it was safe out here. The dogs all bolted out, which… looked bad. And then… yeah. It looked bad." The guy he was kneeling on made an abortive movement, and Jack pressed him into the ground harder.

"This asshole still wanted to fight. As if we were the ones who killed his buddies instead of their own stupidity." He shoved his knee down with a touch of vindictiveness.

"I think you might be suffocating him," I said mildly.

"Oh." Jack lifted his leg. The guy raised his head, spit out some dirt, turned his head to the side and just breathed. The dogs had followed me over to the edge of the road and were being dogs.

"Leave it," I said sharply, as Bear took too deep a sniff at a plaid-shirt covered arm.

"To me." I backed several steps away from Jack and said, "I'll get Pen," snapping my fingers for the dogs' attention, just as the others realized I was there. Still alive, still breathing. I ignored their exclamations, backing all the way to the rift and making sure the dogs' attention was on me. I wasn't worried about Zelda or Riley, really: the scene might upset them, but it wasn't going to intrigue them. But Bear… She was trotting toward me, tail held high.

I know, not food, she said, radiating a kind of gleeful doubt. Maybe food?" Not food," I said.

"Never food." She huffed out something that was almost a laugh, tongue lolling, entirely unrepentant, and fell into step next to Riley. People were talking again, too many of them, and I just lifted my hand in a little wave and re-entered the rift gate. For a moment, inside the shimmer, the temptation to enter my RMI was almost irresistible. I took a deep breath instead. The shimmer space felt oddly peaceful. It didn't make me nauseated anymore.

Now it was nothingness, just my HUD floating in the dark, letting me choose rifts, instances, and companions. And time didn't seem to pass in here: no one ever noticed the seconds it took me to make my selections, and people who entered the rift after me emerged after me, exactly as if I hadn't paused. Unfortunately, the shimmer space didn't include tea, and my RMI definitely didn't stop time, so I chose the dogs as my companions, picked the instance that Pen and Tracy were still in, and stepped into the mall.

"Olivia! Oh!" Pen inhaled a deep, shaky breath.

"I couldn't watch. I thought…" Gus leaped from her arms, sauntered over to my feet, and began twining around my legs, purring madly. Well-done, human. My person was most distressed. We are heartened to see you alive and well." What happened out there?" Tracy demanded.

"Your dog, the little one, tore out of here like nobody's business, and then the other two ran after her. We didn't know what was going on."

"The Sovereign Ridge Patriots got to discover first-hand that guns exposed to mana will explode, I'm afraid." Yes, okay, I skipped the part about getting shot. But you can't possibly blame me for that. Under no circumstances was I ever going to let Pen know that I'd risen from the dead. Three times, in fact. Nope, that was gonna be my little secret until the end of time.

"There is maybe some work for you out there, Pen, if you want to…" I tucked some loose hair behind my ear, trying to think of a delicate way to phrase the request.

"Did someone else get hurt?" Tracy said quickly, stepping toward the gate.

"One of the guys? Tessa?"

"Oh, no." I waved away her concern.

"None of us. But the Sovereign Ridge guys… some of the ones near the explosion survived."

"Is that what—" Tracy looked through the shimmer and swallowed, then turned back to me and Pen.

"You want her to go out there to heal the bad guys? The ones who just tried to kill us?" I shrugged. I had mixed feelings about the ask, too. Healing dangerous people so they could get back to having fun bullying people weaker than them felt like a bad idea. But that guy with the burns was suffering. Maybe he'd learned his lesson. And maybe not, but if we were all learning lessons, I wasn't ready to learn the one about ignoring people who were screaming in pain. I didn't really want Jack or Pen to learn it either.

"Yeah, all right." Tracy sighed, probably going through the same thought process. She glanced toward Pen.

"You okay with that, hon?" Pen raised her chin.

"I ain't healing people so's they can go kill more people. But I'll heal 'em if they swear not to kill no more." Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"That works for me." I gestured toward the gate, and we all exited the rift. I hung back with the dogs while Pen crossed to the injured men and Tracy joined Jeff. He and Mike were confronting two of the Sovereign Ridge guys. In the short time that I'd been gone, Jack had pulled his opponent to his feet and had marched him over to stand next to the others. Or at least I assumed that was what he did, based on the way he had the guy's arm twisted behind his back.

Bobby and Tessa were standing over three others who were on the ground. One was sitting but injured, holding his leg. Another was lying down, maybe unconscious. The third looked as if he might be in shock. Javi was trying to soothe the burned guy who'd collapsed on the remains of the pickup bed and whose screams had dropped to a low moaning and Leon… ah, Leon was at the edge of the clearing, puking into the bushes. I sympathized. The pickup truck that had held the gun was totaled.

No one was ever driving that thing again. The rear half was mangled, sand everywhere, pieces of metal, blood and gore. I didn't want to look too close. The other two trucks hadn't pulled as far into the clearing, and they looked more or less okay. Missy's Highlander was parked at the edge of the road, and it looked fine. Not that it mattered, really, but I wondered if it really did have a government tracker on it.

I was a little surprised that Colonel Whitaker and his men weren't here, making a fun situation even worse.

"Stay here," I told the dogs, using the hand signal, too, and adding, "Wait." I waited, watching, until all three of them planted butts on the ground. Zelda turned her head away in offense, letting me know how little she appreciated being treated like a puppy in training, and I added, "It's just for a couple minutes. I don't want to be cleaning blood off your paws later." Riley lay down with a sigh. Good time to rest.

"Exactly," I said.

"Rest. We've got lots more monsters to kill before we go home, so just nap for a bit. And stay here." Bear huffed, but she lay down next to Riley. Zelda remained sitting up, but she stayed by the gate. Pen had already healed the burned guy. He was sitting up, Javi still next to him, touching his chest and face with tentative hands. His clothing was in shreds, burned off of him, so he was probably pretty cold, but I was not going to go grab him a jacket from the mall.

He'd survive and being cold was the least he deserved. Pen was kneeling next to one of the other Sovereign Ridge guys now, but she was resting on her heels, her arms crossed, shaking her head, so I walked over. As I got closer, I could hear what the Sovereign Ridge dude was saying.

"Self-defense. What about self-defense?"

"Quit looking for loopholes. You can see what it says same as me. No initiating violence, no unjustified harm to sapient beings." Pen's words sounded a little stilted, making it clear that she was reading from her HUD.

"What's going on?" I asked, half my attention on Pen and the other half on the dogs. Okay, on Bear. I wasn't worried about Riley or Zelda misbehaving.

"Oh, Olivia." Pen twisted to look at me.

"I got this thing now." She scrambled to her feet.

"In my—you know." She gestured to her face.

"It's a System-enforced contract, it says. I said what I wanted and it gave it to me. I get to choose penalties for iffen he breaks his word." She turned back to the guy on the ground and glared at him.

"Not that he's gonna, right?" He closed his eyes, not looking at her. Compared to some of his friends, he'd gotten off easy. No obvious burns, just a bloody leg. Maybe he'd been hit by shrapnel? He'd have bled out by now if it had severed an artery, so it was probably just soft tissue damage. He could survive without healing, although if I were him, I'd take the deal. But then, I wasn't someone who looked forward to harming other people.

"What's the penalty?" I asked.

"I chose that they get kicked outta the System," Pen said, sounding proud of herself. I shaped the wordless wow, but didn't say it. That was… that was big.

"It doesn't really go away," Pen added.

"Not like he gets to go back to last week. But no more levels, no new abilities, it's—" Her voice went careful again as she read the words aloud, "—an end to progression." The guy on the ground didn't have a red aura. I scanned the survivors, looking for the guys who did, but didn't see them. Did the color come and go? Maybe it tracked their mood, and they'd been in a bloodthirsty mood before? You might think I ought to know the answer to this, given that I'd been seeing these haloes around people for years.

But I'd never actually investigated my hallucinations. Rule #1 for survival in a hostile world: ignore hallucinations, don't interact with them. That includes dwelling on them, analyzing them, searching for consistency between them, and especially, especially developing theories about them. A person with bipolar disorder who is developing theories about the deeper meanings of her hallucinations is on the fast track to an institutional stay. On the other hand, maybe Dale and the other guy weren't here anymore.

I took a slower look around, tapping [Analyze] and taking my time. No Dale, and no berserker, either. And no red auras. I crouched next to the guy Pen was bargaining with and looked at him thoughtfully. The folks from Spruce Gap Middle were in the midst of some kind of heated discussion with his friends, but it didn't look like it was going to come to blows, and the Sovereign Ridge dudes were outnumbered, so I left them alone. Not my business when it came right down to it. But I did have questions.

"Was Dale the one who fired the gun?" I asked the guy on the ground.

"Stupid idea," he muttered, not looking at me.

"But yeah. Dale and his brother were gung-ho and… They aren't really the kind of guys you argue with."

"His brother. Was he the berserker?" The guy nodded, wordless.

"Standing next to Dale when he fired the gun?" He nodded again.

"So were, then," I said, correcting his earlier statement.

"They weren't really the kind of guys you argue with." He closed his eyes. I didn't get the sense that he was grieving for them, though. It looked like denial. His version of contemplating the sky, maybe. So the two men with those sticky red auras were related. Was it genetic? Environmental? Rationally, it was nothing. I knew it was nothing. A hallucination. Meaningless. Neurons misfiring in my brain, causing visual stimuli disconnected from reality.

Irrationally, I knew Dale and his brother were—had been—killers, and the red aura was a warning signal.

"Were they your leaders?" Another wordless nod.

"You do understand that they're dead, right? If you're reluctant to commit to non-violence because they're gonna throw you out of the commune if you do, you don't have to worry."

"Commune!" His eyes met mine for the first time, sheer indignation driving him. I shrugged.

"What else would you call it?"

"We aren't hippies."

"If it looks like a commune, and it walks like a commune, and it squawks like a commune…" I said lightly. Then I patted his arm and said, "Make your vow of non-violence and let her heal you. The System understands the difference between justified and unjustified violence. As long as you don't hurt people who aren't hurting you, you'll be fine." Standing, I walked over to the other conversation.

I listened in for a minute, long enough to realize that Team Spruce Gap Middle was demanding the food they'd been promised for surviving the rift. The Sovereign Ridge Patriots didn't want to follow through on that promise, but they were outnumbered. And outleveled, although they probably didn't know that. From their perspective, the deaths of their own were accidental, and the folks from Spruce Gap Middle were the pushovers who were healing their wounded.

"Hey," I interrupted the conversation with a bright smile directed at the Level 4 Fighter-slash-asshole speaking for the Sovereign Ridge Patriots. I let [Analyze] rest on him until his name popped up.

"Wade. Level 4 Fighter." He drew back, startled by my knowledge, but before he could speak, I continued, "You're gonna give these nice people the food you promised them, or my Level 20 dogs are gonna tear through your compound like it's a beehive and they're bears." I gestured at the dogs, who were being good and staying by the gate. I was lying about their levels: only Zelda actually had a level that high. But it wasn't like Wade was gonna check.

"You remember my dog, right? The little one? You met her before. She's the sweet one. The Malinois mix and the Rottweiler/pittie, they're the guard dogs." Another lie. Riley was the sweet one. But again, it wasn't like Wade was gonna know, and I was ready to be done with this bullshit. Wade looked at the dogs, looked at me, looked back at the dogs. Bear, being her usual brilliant self, sat up and yawned. Boring was what the yawn told me, but to Wade, it probably read more like, Look at how sharp my teeth are.

He folded like a poker player holding a pair of deuces.