by eden Hudson
Breathe in, breathe out, don’t let the Spirit escape? I guess I have a Mortal affinity? That’s about all I know.
She sent, Do you have to cultivate with them?
I was in the middle of typing, They said I can do it anywhere when another message popped up from her.
Can you come to the boneyard? It’s on the north end of town.
I deleted the message I’d been writing and told her I would ask.
Muta’i was in the back room at a workbench, pumping a tiny bellows at a tiny Bunsen burner. A miniature roasting spit belted to what looked like an egg timer turned a bluish-purple gemstone over the flames.
“I’m going to the boneyard,” I said, kind of half-questioning, half-telling.
He didn’t look up from his gem-roasting. “I don’t need a running commentary on your day, indenture. Show up when I message you and we won’t have problems.”
“Thanks.” I headed for the exit at a speed-walk, just in case that had been sarcasm or some kind of sick joke, but the minotaur didn’t call me back.
So I wasn’t totally enslaved.
Boneyard Cultivation
IT TOOK ME A FEW MINUTES to orient myself with Ghost Town’s layout, but eventually I got headed in the right direction. At the north edge of town sat a gloomy looking fallen-in building that could’ve been a little chapel or a big shrine at one time. The dark orange-magenta rays of the black sun’s corona were starting to bleed into the horizon behind the ruined building and give it a weird, bloody cast. All around the old building was a garden of sand-scoured headstones and makeshift wood and metal markers, surrounded by a battered wrought iron fence.
Rali and Kest were waiting by the gate. Seeing them made me grin, even though I’d only known them for like a day. So far, they were the only friends I had on this planet. Heck, in this universe.
Except when I got to them, Kest wasn’t smiling and Rali’s smile looked forced.
“Hey guys,” I said, trying to sound normal. I did stop a couple steps away, though, in case of...I don’t know...a fight or yelling or something. I hooked my thumbs in my back pockets. “What’s up?”
Rali fell on his knees and pressed his face to the sandy red dirt. “I give you my sincerest apology, Grady Hake. From the depths of my soul, I’m sorry for causing the fight that got you indentured to the OSS. You only entered into it in defense of my carelessness. It’s my fault you don’t have the spotless record to buy your way off-planet now. It should be my name chained to them. Tell me what I have to do to repay my debt, and it will be done to three times your specification.”
My eyes were bugging out. “What the heck, man? Get up.”
“And you can have the blood money the OSS paid us,” Kest said.
I shook my head. “I don’t want your guys’ money or repayment or whatever. Get up, dude. Stop being weird.”
Rali didn’t move.
“It’s a matter of honor,” he said. “I refuse to go without some sort of atonement for getting you into this.”
“So make me some of that sweet mochi you were talking about and sneak it to me,” I said, shrugging. “I’m probably going to miss my Spirit quota for the day, so some food’ll really hit the spot.”
Rali looked up. “Spirit quota?”
I explained about the Transferogate and the fall short, don’t eat rule.
“That might be the most evil thing I’ve ever heard,” he said, sitting back on his heels. “Fine, I accept sneaking you food on any night you fail your quota as just payment for my careless sins.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Too late, I accepted.” He stood up and dusted the sand off. “No takesies-backsies.”
On my right, Kest leaned in and inspected the Transferogate, tracing wires and poking at the metal. Her being so close and staring so hard made me remember I didn’t have a shirt on. Also that I hadn’t had a shower in a couple days and didn’t smell great.
I tilted away from her a little. “What’re you looking for?”
“Transferogate Mark-II Spirit Siphon,” she said, but more like she was talking to herself than to me. “It’s a newer model, pretty advanced.”
She tugged on a wire, and I sidestepped out of her reach.
“It’s connected to my tattoo,” I said. “If it gets tampered with, it’s Pain City for me.”
“What he means is hands off,” Rali said, raising his voice meaningfully.
Kest looked from him to me, frowning, then pulled her hand back. I shot him a grateful look.
“You have to be blunt when she goes metal-crazy or she’ll never hear you,” Rali said.
She shrugged like she didn’t care. “I didn’t want to meet so we could see your new tech or apologize—”
“That’s good because I don’t want your apology,” I said.
Rali snorted, but Kest ignored me.
“Now that we know about your quota, this is an even better plan. I can’t prove this quantifiably because someone removed his implant so he could be cool and nonconformist,” she said, shooting a glare at her brother. “But before he did that, Rali was the best cultivator in Ghost Town, top-fifty ranked in all of the Wilderness Territories.”
“Numerically,” he said like that was the dumbest thing he could think of.
Kest glared at him. “You should’ve offered to teach Hake how to meet his quota instead of agreeing to sneak him food.”
“I reject the concept of quantifying Spirit,” Rali said, lazily spinning his walking stick. “Besides, the no eating is the real injustice here.”
“He has no idea what he’s doing,” Kest argued.
I walked through the broken cemetery gate and nodded at the headstones.
“I know Mortal Spirit’s easier to find around graves,” I said.
“There’s so much more,” Kest said. “Kishotenketsu and taiji and...” She threw up her hands. “I can list all the facts, but the facts don’t make up the whole of it. It’s infuriating, but that’s probably why I still haven’t made it past the Sho step of Metal Spirit, and Rali passed into Ten while we were still kids.” She turned to her brother. “Rali, say stuff. Explain.”
He raised a doubtful eyebrow at me.
“I mean, this is my life for the next year,” I said, knocking on the Transferogate with my knuckles. “Any help that keeps me from starving to death would be appreciated.”
“Well, cultivation is at the center of your food problem.” He set his walking stick in the sand and tapped the top against his chin a couple times. “All right, come on.”
He came into the graveyard with me and wandered around, looking at the headstones. After going up and down the rows for a minute, he waved me over to an old worn-down stub of stone with all the wording and dates scoured away.
“Sit down here,” he said, making an X on the dirt in front of it.
I did, and he took a seat nearby, leaning back against a corroded metal marker and hooking his arm over it.
“Close your eyes,” he said.
It was easier to relax around him and Kest, so I didn’t have to fight to keep them shut like I had at the distillery.
Instead of telling me to start breathing, Rali said, “Think about where you are. Right now. And now. And right now. Every second, be where you are. Examine it with everything inside of you. Where are you? In a garden of bones. Before the ruins of a shrine to Life and Death.”
Suddenly, his tone shifted. “Kest, if you open your mouth, I’m going to hit you with my stick. You wanted me to do this my way, so we’re doing it my way.”
Then he switched back to that flowing voice. “Garden of bones, Hake. Fallen shrine. Bodies planted six feet deep, sleeping like seeds before the rain. What waters them? What grows here?”
The temperature around me was starting to drop as I pictured the rotting corpses underneath us, sleeping in decaying wood coffins. Infinite blackness from their perspective. Tons and tons of dirt pressing down on them.
I shivered.
&nb
sp; “That!” Rali said in a harsh whisper. “You felt it. Breathe that in.”
I tried picturing the lid on my guts that Muta’i had talked about and trapping the Spirit down there.
“Nope, you lost it.” Rali sounded disappointed. “You’re breathing like you’re trying to sell me something. Like you’re adding and subtracting profits and losses. There’s no Spirit in it.”
I opened my eyes. “I’m just breathing.”
“Yeah, but you’re breathing wrong,” he said. “Close your eyes again.”
I sighed, a little frustrated, but I did it.
“Forget whatever nonsense the OSS distiller told you. Forget about quotas and numbers and money. Even forget about food. You don’t need it where you’re going. None of us do. We’re the seeds, Hake. We slowly rot and fall apart like this shrine on your right, and someday, they plant what’s left of us in rows with stone tags that let them know what sort of crops to expect. What grows here can’t be picked by hungry hands. It nourishes not the appetite of the stomach, but urgency and appreciation.”
The temperature dropped again. I could feel cold winter air flowing in through my nose and coiling in my lungs. In my mind, it looked like turquoise, but smoke instead of stone. Some kind of icy mist.
“This is the comforting bed at the end of every weary road,” Rali said softly. “No matter who we are, no matter where we began, we’re all trekking steadily closer to this dark and restful destination. Where are you now, Hake? And right now. And now.”
The temperature inside my lungs plummeted as the turquoise smoke sank into the tissue, turning it cold and hard. When I exhaled, it stayed. My lungs wouldn’t move ever again, but I didn’t freak out. That was okay. Like Rali said, it was where we were all headed eventually. The last breath.
“There,” he whispered. “That’s it.”
That was it. After the last breath, there was nothing else.
I opened my eyes. “That’s—”
Everything came crashing back at once, hot and bright and unbelieveably loud, like crawling out of the grave after a thousand-year sleep. Even just the noise of the dust blowing across the ground was like someone screaming in my face. I clamped my hands over my ears to block some of it out and squeezed my eyes shut.
“Oh right,” I heard Rali say. “I should’ve mentioned beforehand that coming back is rough. You’ve got to do it by degrees.”
“Geez.” As my ears readjusted to the sound around me, I loosened my grip on my head. “That was nuts. And really cool. It was like I was breathing this turquoise ice mist—”
“Miasma.” Kest leaned over the tombstone behind me. When I looked at her, she turned her wrist over to show me the screen of her HUD. She had some sort of info page about Spirit types open. “That’s what Mortal cultivators call pockets of Death Spirit. It means that your supertype is Mortal and your specialization is Death. Less than eight percent of the known population of the galaxy has a Mortal affinity, and less than one percent of them use Death spirit. So, you’re one in sixty-four billion.”
That was sick as heck. Not the math, math is the worst, but the Death Spirit.
“How do I find that page?” I asked, holding up the Winchester. “Maybe when I get a minute, I can read up on all this stuff.” Reading was better than math any day.
“You guys ruined it,” Rali said, scowling with disgust. “You were tapped into something real and pure there, and then you went and started messing with those—” He flapped his hand at the HUDs. “—artificial, unnatural eyesores.”
While he was complaining, Kest showed me how to get onto their version of the internet, the hyperweb, with the Winchester. It wasn’t a whole lot different. I could tell that the letters weren’t English, but my brain translated them as if they were, unlike the kanji-style script of my tattoo. Maybe whatever kind of writing the stuff on the hyperweb was, anybody could understand it.
My stomach rumbled. I hadn’t realized it, but the black sun had hiked itself up a good quarter of the way into the sky while we were messing around in the graveyard.
“Crap,” I said. “I wasn’t even thinking about storing the Spirit. It probably all leaked out.”
Rali let his walking stick drop across his lap and threw his hands up. “This is the problem with quantifying Spirit. All that matters is how much do I have, how much can I keep, how strong am I, how can I get more.”
“I’m not trying to be insulting to...” What did you call something like this? Their religion? Magic? Way of life? “...to Spirit,” I said, my voice giving away that I was a little annoyed. “I just kind of have this thing about eating when I haven’t done it all day.”
“He needs extra calories, too,” Kest said. “If the script in his tattoo can’t find any Spirit, it will burn calories to accelerate the healing process.”
“I get being concerned about that,” Rali said, pointing first at her, then at me, “so I’ll overlook the loss of wonder and awe this once. Anyway, you should check your Spirit, because you were deep in a vein there, really tapping into the Miasma. I could see it flowing.”
“How?”
“Ki,” Kest answered me. “That’s the first level of kishotenketsu, the one where you’re learning all the basic Spirit abilities that everybody has. Strengthening your muscles, hardening your body against attack, speeding up your reflexes, enhancing your sight into other spectrums, that sort of thing.”
“Right, all that basic stuff,” I said.
“You’ll figure it out.” Rali flicked his hair out of his face. “You’ve got to get enough to work with first, though.”
I pulled up my Spirit stats on the Winchester.
“Hot dang.”
Kest leaned over my shoulder, and Rali even scooted up on his knees to see the screen.
“Three hundred and fifty?” Kest whispered. “You were only cultivating for—”
“Don’t!” Rali snapped.
She and I both jumped a little. He was serious.
“Don’t try to quantify it,” he said, taking the aggression down a notch. “It won’t work the same way twice, especially if you’re measuring and keeping track and boxing it in. Just let it be what it is and don’t try to put an equation on it.”
“What it is is awesome,” I said.
He grinned. “That is the correct response.”
“I need to do it again.” Before he could say anything, I put up my finger to shut him up. “Not just so I can meet the Spirit quota. Because it was freaking cool, and I want to learn how.”
Making the Quota
RALI AND I SAT AND cultivated for the next four hours. Kest got bored pretty fast and started wandering around the graveyard, scouring the corroded metal markers and touching up their soldering so that the lettering or designs were readable again. At first, the noise and smell of melted metal and flux were distracting, but eventually I stopped noticing them because I was so focused on the Death Spirit surrounding us.
While the night sun crept into the sky, turning the shadows all purplish-orange and dimming the light from the day suns, I went through various thought scapes Rali made up, breathing in the Miasma. The main focus of all of the talking, Rali said, was to get me to start thinking in Spirit instead of thoughts. Who I was, where I was, what death and mortality were, but also to let my mind wander until the now and I ceased to exist in the same place at the same time.
“The words aren’t important,” he said. “What’s important is finding the vein, just the right one. You try it.”
But the longer we worked on it, the harder it got to keep going. The cold wasn’t leaving my lungs when we took breaks now, and it was starting to soak into the rest of my chest and down into my stomach. I couldn’t stop shivering.
“Rali, his lips are blue!” Kest snapped. “Are you guys even paying attention?”
Her voice battered my brain, and I had to shut it out while I did the emergence trick Rali had taught me, climbing back up out of the concentration like I was fog rising out of wet gra
ve dirt. I could shut out the sound okay, but I still felt her hands touching my face, blowtorches burning my skin, and I winced, but at the same time, they felt kind of good. They were really soft blowtorches.
Finally, I opened my eyes. Kest had pulled her hands back and was staring down at me, her eyes wide and scared, with the lace pattern all thinned out.
“Do this.” She held one hand in front of my face and touched her thumb to each one of her fingers in a row.
I tried to ask why, but my teeth were chattering too hard.
Kest shot a glare to her left, where I assumed Rali was. I couldn’t turn my head to look. My neck felt like it was made out of frozen solid steak.
“It’s hard to keep track of all the basic stuff,” he protested. “I haven’t thought about internal alchemy in years. Hey, Hake, if you can hear me, you need to spend some of your Spirit on protecting yourself from the Miasma. Focus on the coldest places inside yourself and cycle some Spirit through them. They should start to heat up.”
I closed my eyes again and pictured that turquoise Miasma bleeding through the muscles and organs that were frozen and dead, then hooking itself back to the sea and around again. A little bit at a time, it started to sap the cold from the dying tissue and warm me back up.
“Am I d-doing it right?” I asked, shivering.
“You’re catching on,” Rali said. “And you got a bonus lesson in the first level of kishotenketsu. Maintaining your internal alchemy is one of the most important Ki abilities. Most people learn it around the same time they learn to cultivate. Eventually it’ll become second nature to keep some Spirit cycling while you’re cultivating.”
“Good to know,” I said, flexing my fingers into fists and uncurling them. Blood was rushing back into my extremities with that pin-prickling feeling.
The night sun was three quarters into the sky now, and the blue sun had disappeared over the western horizon.
“Should you guys get back to your house?” I asked. “It’s getting late, right?”
Rali sized me up. “How about we practice maintaining internal alchemy for thirty minutes, then we’ll call it a night?”
