Thresholder

Perry was going to kill her. He was going to pin her to the ground and beat her face into a pudding of blood and brains, he was going to break her arms and eat her fingers one by one, he was going to pull her ribs apart and gorge on her organs. That was how he was feeling, anyway. The rage was flowing through him and the moons were full. He was going to strain every muscle in the act of murdering her, use every inch of power in his body.

The rational part of his mind was trying to work through the logistics of how any of that would be possible. Her armor was really very good, her needle was sharp, he didn’t have the armor, he was vulnerable to her light attacks, and she could immediately negate the advantage of the wolf form, which he couldn’t even control yet. These considerations were fighting with his emotional response. He kept imagining what he would do to her once he’d somehow beaten her, rather than imagining the concrete steps he would need to take to get to that point.

He was stuck within the Moth Lantern Hall unless he wanted to go out into the moonlight anyway. Going out into the moonlight would probably mean that he would transform, which would mean that he could chase after her as a wolf, but innocent people would almost certainly die, and he couldn’t win the fight as the wolf, not when she could just change him back. If she had gone back to Camp Crystal Lake, she would have their support, an army of martial artists who would be ready to move against him. She could just tell them the truth: that he had turned into a wolf and killed three people.

There was nothing to do with the anger. He’d have tried to funnel it into digging graves, but those would need to be dug outside, and the moons were outside. Instead, he tore through the empty hall, opening the rooms to see if there was anything he could use.

Lingfeng had extra clothes, though they didn’t fit quite right. Perry had no idea what the policy on stealing from the dead was in this world, but he was naked, his clothes destroyed. He would have taken other things too, if it had seemed like there was anything of value to him. Lingfeng’s room had plenty of things in it, but Perry didn’t know how to use any of it. Maybe the books were worth stealing, or the pieces of jade like the ones Luo Yanhua had, but it was all beyond him at the moment, and bringing it back to Crystal Lake Temple seemed like it would only get him in trouble. These people took their techniques seriously.

In the end, Perry tried to sleep. The moons were full and he could feel it, which would have made sleep difficult even if there hadn’t been three bodies lined up in the hall, even if he wasn’t in an enemy camp where he’d surely be put to death if found.

When sleep didn’t come, Perry meditated. His extra vessel was practically vibrating, extra energy seeping out of it, and he could feel just how easy it would be to crack it open and let the transformation take hold. If he was going to have any hope of beating Maya, he would need to be able to harness it without the transformation, so he put all his effort into that, wedging the vessel and letting its energy flow through him. It was difficult work that didn’t get all that much easier after five hours, and he was skeptical of his ability to use it during a fight. He needed the speed, the strength, the raw power of the wolf, just without the form, and with his own control.

When it felt like it was getting closer to dawn, Perry took the vambrace and the drone out to the entryway. Maya had left the door open, and moonlight was shining down, but Perry stayed well clear of it. He booted up the drone and sent it out, down the long hallway and up into the air, where it circled once before returning.

“No connection,” it intoned when it returned.

Perry swore and folded the drone up. Not having a connection from high above the trees was terrible news. March had gone incommunicado from just before they’d gone into Moth Lantern Hall, but enough time had passed for Maya to return to Crystal Lake Temple and do something to him, if she hadn’t done something already. The nanites were a nightmare, capable of getting inside the suit and frying vital microcircuitry or even killing the reactor. They weren’t built for it, but Perry wouldn’t put it past her.

The long, sleepless night had given him a chance to cool down a bit. His fantasies of mutilation had run their course. He was still angry, but it was a simmering anger, not a blistering one.

Maya hadn’t intended to turn him into a wolf. She had intended to force the fight and have him join in, not expecting that he’d leave her to her fate. It was simple escalation, a matter of her doing a dick move, him doing a dick move back, and then her responding in kind. There was no possible hope of de-escalation though, no hope for peace, not when she’d run off. Maybe she felt bad. He didn’t give a fuck.

When the sun rose, Perry stepped out into the open air. For all the holes that Moth Lantern Hall had poked in it for ventilation, it was stuffy, and the clean air felt good in his lungs. He could feel the moonlight, but it wasn’t enough to put a strain on him. It was energizing, a mild buzz that could be mistaken for something else. He felt like going for a run, but there was work to do.

Moth Lantern Hall had a shovel, and Perry spent a few hours digging shallow graves, just as he’d done on his first day on the Great Arc. The work was faster, even without the power armor, a sign of how far he’d come into the second sphere. The whole thing would probably have gone twice as fast if he had Luo Yanhua’s power, but he tried to put that thought out of his mind.

Once the bodies were in the ground and covered, Perry did his best to recreate what he’d seen from the previous funerals he’d been witness to. He was hoping that he had done it right, that the ritual wasn’t exacting, because another fight with these three in zombie form wasn’t something he was eager to do.

He hadn’t gotten dirty in the course of digging the graves. He would probably never get dirty again, not for longer than a few minutes. There was no blood or grit beneath his fingernails, and his bare feet were pristine, spotless. The clothes were the same, as clean as when he’d put them on, and they fit better than they had in the morning. If Perry wore them for a week, he imagined that they would fit as well as if they had been tailored to him. He’d been paying attention to his clothes through his whole training process, and still wasn’t entirely clear on what was happening, except that some small amount of his energy was being harnessed by what he wore.

There was still no response from March, even with the drone flying up high. Perry was hesitant to risk having it do more complicated maneuvers, since its brain was tiny and the list of commands it would listen to was small. The lack of connection was very worrying. The night before, Perry had all kinds of explanations for why March wouldn’t be able to connect, but now the worst case scenarios were feeling likely. Maya had the night to do whatever she wanted.

Perry made his way through the forest, moving swiftly but not flying with the sword. He wanted to keep a low profile.

When he was near Crystal Lake Temple, he crept through the bamboo, trying to see if he could spot Maya. There was no telling what she might have said to them, but they were on war footing, and she’d had her chance to play dirty.

It was Luo Yanhua who found him, before he’d made his way into the temple grounds. Just as she had the first time they met, she’d felt his eyes on her, or perhaps just noticed him creeping in the woods from far away. She approached, and Perry stood, taking it as a good sign that she wasn’t armed or calling in others.

“Is there a reason you’re taking the indirect path?” she asked.

“Has Maya returned to Crystal Lake Temple?” asked Perry. He gripped the hilt of his sword as though he was squeezing a neck.

“Not to my knowledge,” said Luo Yanhua. “Were you able to weather the full moons last night?”

Perry pursed his lips. He couldn’t keep dodging questions, but if he spoke, it needed to be considered. The dead bodies would be found eventually. The only question was whether throwing Maya under the bus was the right strategy.

“Maya and I went to Moth Lantern Hall, seeking information on the murder,” said Perry. “We had dinner with them, as they had offered us shelter for the night. In the course of conversation, Maya decided that they could not be suffered to live, and when it seemed as though they would overwhelm her, she forced me to transform into the wolf. All three died by my hand, and I believe I would have killed Maya as well if she hadn’t transformed me back. She ran away, injured, and I had no hope of following while the moons were so full, not without potentially putting civilians in danger. I buried the bodies this morning and gave them the proper rites, then came here.”

Luo Yanhua was silent.

Perry was worried that he had just done something stupid, but there was no way that the murders last night wouldn’t come to light. Any lies told now would be unearthed later on, and it wasn’t as though he could have said ‘oh, I was nowhere to be found, these people whose place you had mentioned died, that’s terrible news, and it was a giant wolf? What a crazy random occurrence, I turn into a giant wolf sometimes.’ He couldn’t even have tried to pin it more firmly on Maya, not when examination of the bodies would show the wounds from his claws and bite marks from his teeth. Maybe they didn’t do autopsies here, but they would surely move the bodies from the shallow graves he’d dug.

“You were unable to control yourself,” Luo Yanhua finally said.

“Even under the light of the three full moons, I would have withstood it,” said Perry, though he wasn’t sure that was true, and he hadn’t felt that confidence the night before. “I have control of it, have learned a lot about that power and how it integrates with the matrix, but she has developed her ability to exploit it.”

Luo Yanhua nodded and looked out at the temple, her back to him. “I am not sure that the Grandmaster will see it that way.”

Perry took a breath. “Then I’ll prostrate myself at the Grandmaster’s feet. I know that I’m not a member here, and would be unsuitable to being one, but —”

Luo Yanhua turned around to face him, whip-fast. “Perry, the Grandmaster does not want to hear your excuses. She will throw you to the ground and break your fingers for the insult that you have offered to Moth Lantern Hall, and then you will be cast out.”

Perry felt his lips go thin. He’d thought that it would be bad, but he hadn’t realized just how bad. They had sent him out hoping that he would wage their war and keep their hands clean. Then, despite his best efforts, he’d done pretty much exactly what they had wanted from him. Maybe they had only wanted one dead, not three, but this was exactly the desired outcome. Now he was being punished for it.

“Perhaps you misunderstood me,” said Perry through gritted teeth. “It was Maya who killed them.”

Luo Yanhua’s face went deathly calm. “That would be quite different,” she said.

“I tried to stop her, but succeeded only in taking an injury for my efforts,” said Perry. “They thought that we were on the same side, and fought against me, but I acted only in my own defense. Once Maya had killed them, she crept off into the night.”

It was a lie, a direct bald-faced lie that she knew was a lie, one that was being said only for the sake of politics and cosmic karma. Not his cosmic karma, hers. He’d tried to tell the truth, but the truth would only get him in trouble, maybe both of them in trouble, so now he was taking the hit.

Liu Weiguo had talked about being a fixer for Worm Gate, being tasked with murderous errands in indirect language, used and abused. He’d probably had to lie about it too, and if he tried to tell the truth, he would be told he was mistaken, pushed until he was only saying what they wanted to be said. There had to be a wall, always a suggestion that he do a job, or that a job needed doing, and never any confirmation from him, or at least not in direct terms.

“We will deliver the grim news to the Grandmaster,” said Luo Yanhua. “But before we speak with her, there’s something that I need to discuss with you.”

Perry folded his arms. “Go ahead.”

“This morning, when the quartermaster went into the armory, he noticed new damage to your armor,” said Luo Yanhua.

Perry stiffened. “Damage,” he said.

“The vital energies appear to have been disrupted,” said Luo Yanhua. “When I was informed, I went to go see, and it appears that sometime in the night, the armor suffered an attack. Marchand was no longer responsive to communication.”

Perry felt his blood run cold. “I was assured that the quartermaster would look after the armor,” said Perry. “I was told that you were going to hold onto it to ensure that I wasn’t —”

“Calm yourself,” said Luo Yanhua.

“I am calm,” said Perry, though he was practically vibrating with anger. “When did it happen?”

“We don’t know,” said Luo Yanhua. Her tone wasn’t nearly sympathetic enough, not by half. “No one was observed going into the armory, and the door is kept locked when the quartermaster isn’t around.”

“It could have happened in the middle of the night,” said Perry. “Or before.”

“It’s possible, yes,” said Luo Yanhua.

“I need to go see him,” said Perry. He began moving without waiting for a response, using the sword for extra speed, his feet no longer touching the ground.

“Peregrin!” Luo Yanhua called. She was following after him, and was fast enough to grab his arm. He stopped and turned on her, barely stopping himself from burying his sword in her stomach. He didn’t think he’d ever been so angry, and she was the only one to direct the anger at.

“I have two things in this world,” said Perry. He hefted his sword. “I have this sword and that armor. I explained this to you.”

“You must speak with the Grandmaster,” said Luo Yanhua.

“I need to assess the damage, to see whether I can restart him, or fix him,” said Perry. “If the Grandmaster has a problem with that, she can find me in the armory.”

He moved away from Luo Yanhua and flew to the armory, moving as quickly as the sword could carry him. When he arrived, the quartermaster was standing in front of the door, arms folded, but when he saw Perry’s face and the white-knuckled grip on the sword, he unlocked the door and stepped aside.

The damage was precise, centered in the middle of the torso. The metal had been pierced by a sword, or something like it, though it must have been moving at incredible speed to have made such a hole. Perry was immediately and painfully aware that it had been at the worst possible spot for a hole to be, but it took close inspection to confirm that the microfusion reactor had been struck through.

Perry took out the vambrace with shaking hands and pulled the cord that connected the battery. The armor didn’t have a single source of computation, it was all over, but the largest bulk of processing power was in the chest, which was where Perry plugged in. He wasn’t even sure that it would work like this, since the power was supposed to flow from the reactor to the extremities, not the other way around, but he had no one to ask. Marchand had always taken care of himself, with occasional repairs and maintenance from Perry under close supervision.

Perry plugged in, and nothing happened.

“Come on, come on,” said Perry.

He took the helmet off the armor and placed it on his own head, but it was completely dark. That was a bad sign, but unfortunately not unprecedented.

Perry took the helmet off and swore. All he needed was to get March through the boot sequence, and then …

There was no ‘and then’. The microfusion reactor was dead. It was the beating heart of the armor, the bedrock that everything was built around, and if March wasn’t responding, if the batteries had been blown, then there wasn’t just no chance of the armor functioning again, Perry had lost his most important companion — his only companion, because Luo Yanhua was a snake and Maya was a traitor.

He was alone.

“Perry,” said Luo Yanhua. She had come up to him from behind.

“What?” he asked.

“We need to speak with the Grandmaster about what’s happened,” said Luo Yanhua. “You need to tell her about Maya.”

“You need to tell me what happened,” said Perry. He gestured at the armor. “March is dead. He wasn’t ever alive, he wasn’t a person, but he was something, and now he’s not. Without the core, there’s no way that I can get power into him, and trying to revive him is …” He shook his head. It was unexpected, but he almost felt like he was on the verge of tears. Some of that was just emotional exhaustion from the night before, all the murderous rage wearing him down.

“We did our best to protect your armor,” said Luo Yanhua. “There are clearly powerful forces at work here.”

That was a piss poor excuse. It did nothing to comfort him, nor to excuse their failure. “It’s Maya,” said Perry.

“You think she came in here in the middle of the night?” asked Luo Yanhua. “The door was still locked in the morning.”

“Yes,” said Perry. “She has a skeleton key — a technique she can use. There was nothing stolen from here, was there? Nothing was damaged except the armor. She’s the only one with any incentive, and she went right for the reactor.” He turned to the armor and his fingers touched the hole. It was a thicker entry wound than her needle. He frowned at it. Did the timeline work out right? March had lost contact while they were still together, which meant that maybe it was her nanites working remotely, but they weren’t built for long distance, and they also weren’t built for attack.

“Come, now,” said Luo Yanhua. “Explain to Grandmaster Li Meifeng. We will help you to get justice.”

That, at last, got Perry’s attention. “I have a condition.”

Luo Yanhua nodded slowly. “Go on.”

“After we’re done, I want the armor moved,” said Perry. “I want it in my room with me, so I can work on fixing it.”

“You claimed to not know much about its function,” said Luo Yanhua.

“I don’t,” said Perry. “There’s no shot. But I have to try, I have to. I owe it to him.”

“Though he’s not a person?” asked Luo Yanhua.

“He was meant to evoke the feelings of a person,” said Perry. “And yeah, I had those feelings for him, even if I knew it was just a series of numbers, just bits flipping back and forth, a neural net or libraries of code or … something.”

“Then I will agree that the armor is moved to your room, even though the spell is broken and cannot be redone,” said Luo Yanhua. She nodded. “That you cannot fix major damage is something that Marchand had confirmed.”

The meeting with the Grandmaster was a blur. It had been too long since Perry had slept. He kept to the story that he’d told Luo Yanhua, the second story, but he didn’t need to fabricate new details, because she didn’t press him too hard. She wanted there to be a wall between what he had done and what she knew about. Maybe the evidence wouldn’t come to light, or if it did, they would just deny it. When the Grandmaster suggested that perhaps Maya had been responsible for the first murder, Perry could only nod.

If Maya was responsible for killing a second sphere member of Moon Gate, along with three second sphere members of Worm Gate, then there was no real need for tension between the sects. Worm Gate might take umbrage about this having all been done by someone under Moon Gate’s roof, but Maya had never been a member, and hadn’t come back to Crystal Lake Temple after the killings.

Perry was sure there was some world in which this made sense as hatchet-burying, but he didn’t know enough about the sect’s back channels with each other, the relative ‘worth’ of those who had died in the eyes of their respective sects, and the ways in which they usually dealt with such things. Moreover, he didn’t care. Maya had been right, they were all assholes fighting amongst themselves, the world more brutal than it had first seemed, consumed with questions of power. He wasn’t even sure that this version of events was meant to bring a level of peace, and he wouldn’t have been entirely surprised to find that it was instead an escalation toward all-out war.

When it was all done, and he’d been dismissed, Perry took the armor to over to his room. He took as few trips as he could. It felt ghoulish to move Marchand in pieces, just a pair of legs being hauled across the temple. It drew attention, but he didn’t care about that either.

Xiyan found him as he was bringing the last piece of Marchand into his small room.

“Will you be able to repair it?” she asked. Her voice was gentle.

“No,” said Perry. “No, I won’t. It’ll still be armor, but it’ll have none of its power, no intelligence, no cameras, nothing.”

“Oh,” she said. She was looking over the armor. It was the first time she’d seen it, since it had been tucked away in the armory for the whole time they’d known each other.

“I’m going to try, I have to, but … the best bet would have been Maya.” He let out a long sigh. He needed sleep more than anything.”

“Did she not return with you?” asked Xiyan.

“We had a falling out,” said Perry. “She’s wanted for murder. I don’t know what they’d do to her if she came back, but probably nothing good.” They had already decided on their preferred version of events, so it didn’t seem like there was any testimony she could give that would change their minds.

“I missed you,” said Xiyan, her fingers touching his arm.

Perry had set the armor down, and was standing just outside the door. If this had happened the night before, as he was trying to tamp down the energy of the full moons, he might have invited her in. As it was, he was strung out, wanting only to go to bed rather than taking her to bed.

“It’s not a good time of the month for me,” said Perry. He gestured to the moons. “I need sleep, and concentration when the moons are this full, though they’re past their peak.”

“There’s a risk that you would … transform?” she asked.

Perry nodded slowly.

She pulled back from him. “I don’t fear you,” she said. “I only worry that you fear yourself.”

“We can talk later,” said Perry. “For now I need to lay down.” When she didn’t move, he added, “Alone.”

She seemed disappointed, and her eyes went to the armor again, but Perry drew back into his room and closed the door as politely as he possibly could. He didn’t even really know her, and felt as though he’d done nothing to earn her affection, unless he counted the many discussions they’d had about his previous worlds.

Once the door was closed and the blinds drawn, Perry laid down on the bed. You were supposed to be able to go without sleep if you were second sphere, but he wasn’t even remotely there yet. His stomach growled, since he hadn’t had breakfast or lunch, but he was ignoring that too.

If Maya had come back to Camp Crystal Lake, it was only for long enough to put a hole straight through the reactor. Could she even have done that? He didn’t know for certain. She’d attacked him with her needle before, but it had only been a threat when it went for the weakest point, rather than the strongest. But if Maya hadn’t been the one responsible, then he had no idea who had. It could easily have been someone from within the temple, maybe even the kind of patsy that they’d tried to make him into. The Grandmaster could have whispered into the ear of a subordinate, saying that the armor was too powerful to be left intact, and then that would have been that. The quartermaster would have abandoned his post, or maybe it would have been the quartermaster.

He fell asleep and woke much later, once night had already fallen. He’d slept for hours, missing lunch and dinner, and his only option would be to go to the commissary and hope that he could find some food there. He’d never done that before, and didn’t imagine that the temple was big on midnight snacks, and there was a further complication that the moons were out again. He could feel it on his skin, even with the light from the windows blocked.

He looked at the armor in the dark. His night vision had gotten better when he’d become a werewolf, but the windows had been blocked, and it still wasn’t enough to see more than the outlines.

There was one possibility left, and he needed to try it. If he wasn’t going to give up on Richter even after she was dead, he wouldn’t give up on Marchand either. Death didn’t need to be forever. It didn’t have to stop him.

The armor went on, piece by piece. It was difficult without any feedback, and extra difficult in the dark, but Perry had been in and out of the armor so much that doing it blind wasn’t the challenge that it otherwise would have been. He hooked in all the connections, wires going into their ruggedized ports.

Perry's clothes stayed clean. Snagged threads seemed to repair themselves. Clothes didn’t quite come back from rips and tears, not unless they were small, but the same effect that kept hair falling perfectly and skin clear seemed to apply to clothes. No one had been able to explain to him why this was the case, though Luo Yanhua had speculated that it was caused by excess energy seeping out of the body. If Perry wore the same set of clothes every day, within a week they would fit better, be sturdier, look nicer.

And if he could fix a snagged thread without giving it conscious thought, then surely he could fix a microfusion reactor with some effort.

Perry almost laughed. It was stupid and desperate, but it was all he had, the last remaining hope.

Perry moved around the small room, treading slowly and carefully, trying not to make too much noise. He focused on specific pieces of the armor, places where he knew there was damage. He cracked the window to let in a tiny sliver of moonlight, staying back from it so that it wouldn’t touch the skin of his face. He couldn’t wear the helmet, not when the screen wasn’t working, but that was the only bit of him that wasn’t covered.

With the better light, he could see the armor’s imperfections, places where the finish had been damaged in fights or just through months of constant use. He spent an hour staring at one specific half-inch nick, not even really a deformation, just a place where a bullet had struck his armor and removed a thin layer of whatever material was coating the base metal. It was the hardest he had ever concentrated on anything, all his focus going into this one tiny spot, since he hoped to start slow.

It worked, though it was so slow that it was hard to tell anything had happened at all. His eyes had lost track of the scratch, and he had only been able to confirm that it was gone by finding the other marks near it.

“This is going to work,” he said to himself. “You are a prodigy at this stuff, a once in a generation talent.” He didn’t really believe it. He wanted some music to psych himself up, but of course the thing he was trying to fix had been, among all other things, his music player. He tried humming one of his workout songs, but that took too much concentration and energy.

“So what if you’re not a once in a generation talent?” he asked himself half an hour later. “So what if you’re not a prodigy? You’re a goddamned thresholder, you’re a werewolf, and it’s not like these people wear armor anyway, so maybe it’s simple, the easy kind of thing anyone could do given half a day, if they didn’t turn up their noses at having metal to block bullets.”

That made him feel a little better. He’d gotten a second scratch ‘buffed out’ in half the time, though it was hard to tell whether they were really the same. It was something he could get better at.

He didn’t just need to be better though, he needed to master it, needed to repair something whose function was a total mystery to him. Most likely, Richter wouldn’t even have been able to fix the damage, she’d have just ordered a replacement part for millions of dollars from a company with hundreds of employees and a dedicated clean room facility that itself had cost billions of dollars.

Perry used more energy. He took in deep, gulping breaths, refined the energy of the air as it came down into his lungs, and spread it out through his entire body, not looking to fill a vessel or flush down a meridian, but try to get it to seep out his skin, which it was apparently doing naturally anyway.

Using that approach, he was able to make a fix in only a handful of minutes, again a tiny mark on the leg that must have been from one fight or the other. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought the armor was repairing in other places too, places where he wasn’t putting energy. That made sense, given that under normal circumstances it was totally undirected. Perry had no idea how long it would take for the suit to be fully repaired like this, but he also didn’t know whether it would somehow fuck up the suit’s internal — circuitry, cameras, microphones, and the reactor at the suit’s heart.

He was feeling hope in dangerous quantities.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t a project that he was going to be able to finish overnight. He was going to need power and time, and for that, he was going to need to play by Moon Gate’s rules. He wouldn’t breathe a word about his progress with fixing Marchand, if any. And when the time came, when he had accumulated every scrap of power he could, he would go against Maya with all the might and fury he could muster.