Chương 64: The Door to Nowhere

Alex almost walked past it, and then didn't, because a door standing in the open where no door should be is the kind of thing that stops a person. It sat near Liam's tent, off to one side in a patch of trampled ground, and in the rune light it took Alex a moment to work out what he was looking at. A frame. Freestanding, about the height of a man and a little more, an arch of material with nothing on either side of it and nothing behind it, a doorway that led from open air into more open air.

He'd have called it stone at a glance, except the surface was wrong for stone, grainy and shifting somehow even while it held its shape, a texture like packed sand that had been convinced to stand up straight and stay there. He could have walked around it in a circle, and did, half a step, and from every angle it was the same, a door to nowhere made of something that wanted to be sand and had been told firmly that it wasn't.

Liam stood in front of it with both hands raised, mana pouring off him in a slow steady stream, and he was so deep in it that he didn't hear Alex come up. His whole face was set in the concentration Alex had only ever seen on him twice, over the first Blazing Core and over a compressed sun, the look of a mind that had found something worth all of itself. Alex waited. You did not interrupt Liam when he looked like that. He'd learned that much. It took a few minutes.

The mana stream thinned, guttered, and cut off, and Liam sagged where he stood, suddenly a tired seventeen-year-old again instead of whatever he'd been a moment before, and Alex stepped in and caught his elbow before his cousin's knees could finish the thought they'd started.

"Easy. I've got you."

"Alex." Liam blinked at him, gray with exhaustion, and then grinned, because Liam grinned through everything.

"You're up late."

"So are you. You look like you're about to fall over."

"I probably am. This thing eats everything I've got and asks for more." He waved a loose hand at the sandy arch, affection and frustration in equal measure.

"Every night. I pour my whole pool into it and it takes it like a drop, and then I'm empty and it's barely moved, and I do it again the next night. It's the most demanding thing I've ever loved." Alex looked at the door to nowhere.

"What is it, actually? I keep hearing you say portal and I keep picturing something that looks like magic. This looks like somebody's back gate fell off a truck." Liam laughed, and it turned into a wince.

"Yeah. That's the disappointing part, nobody tells you the coolest profession in the camp makes the ugliest objects. But that's the whole thing, right there. That's a main gate. Or it will be." He lowered himself to sit on the ground with his back against a crate, and Alex sat with him, because his cousin needed a minute and the explaining seemed to give him energy even when nothing else did.

"So here's the shape of it," Liam said.

"A portal isn't one thing, it's two. There's the gate, which is this, a fixed anchor, a place. You build it once, out of strong material, and you spend forever pouring spatial mana into it until the material stops being material and starts being a location the system recognizes. That's what I'm doing every night, convincing this arch that it's a door instead of a pile of sand." He knocked a knuckle against it, and it made a sound that wasn't quite stone and wasn't quite anything.

"Sand's terrible for it, honestly. Metal's worse, but sand's not great. Something naturally spatial would take the mana in days. This is taking me weeks, because I'm basically arguing with it."

"And the other half?"

"The other half is the fun part. Once the gate's done, actually done, I can make small things, talismans, tokens, cheap one-use items, and each one is keyed to the gate. You carry one, and when you use it, it pulls you back here. To the gate. From a distance." His eyes lit up despite the exhaustion.

"One way. That's the limit right now, it only ever brings you home, it doesn't send you out. But think about what that means, Alex. Think about today. We got ambushed with no exit, no way out, nothing to do but fight. If everyone in that fight had been carrying one of these, the second it went bad, we're gone. All of us, home, behind the wall, in an instant." He said it quietly, the grin fading into something more serious.

"That's why I can't stop. Ever since the ambush I keep thinking, if I'd had this done, nobody would've had to nearly die out there. I could've just pulled us out." The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Alex sat with that, and felt the weight of what his cousin was carrying, the same weight he'd been carrying since the field but from a different direction.

Liam had looked at the same near-disaster Alex had and concluded the same thing, that they'd been one bad moment from losing someone, and where Alex had decided to get strong enough to make traps impossible, Liam had decided to build the door that let them walk out of any trap alive. Two answers to the same fear. Alex thought Liam's might be the better one.

"How close are you?"

"Close. Days, maybe. The gate's almost convinced." Liam thumped his head back against the crate and shut his eyes.

"And it's been leveling my profession the whole time, just from the spatial-viewing work, so at least I'm not pouring myself into it for nothing. G rank now. Which, you know how that goes."

"I know exactly how that goes." Alex huffed.

"The higher it climbs the more it costs."

"Everything's like that." Liam cracked one eye.

"Speaking of. How's the manipulation? Mana specifically. You crack Apprentice yet?"

"Still Novice." Alex grimaced.

"It's the one thing that won't move for me. Thermal, gravity, those come easy, I think because of the affinity. But raw mana manipulation, the basic one, I hit a wall and I've been beating my head on it for weeks."

"Same. Mine finally moved in the fight today, of all times, but before that I was stuck for ages." Liam shrugged.

"I think that's the thing nobody warns you about with manipulation. The elemental ones ride your affinity, but pure mana control is just, hours. Ten thousand of them. There's no shortcut, you just have to be bad at it for a really long time until suddenly you're not."

"Comforting."

"I'm a very comforting person." Liam's eyes drifted back to the sandy arch, and something more thoughtful crossed his face.

"You know what I keep thinking about, though? What happens to all of this after."

"After what?"

"After the tutorial. When we go home." Liam gestured vaguely, at the arch, at the camp, at the whole strange month.

"I read the cultivation stuff in the info packet, the part they let us see, and it's basically locked. Can't touch it in here. But it's the real thing, Alex, it's the part that makes two people at the same level completely different in a fight, styles you build yourself out of understanding nature, or your element, or your bloodline, all of it strengthening you underneath the numbers where the status sheet can't even see it. And they've turned it off for the whole tutorial. We only get it back on Earth."

He shook his head slowly.

"So whatever we are now, all these levels, all these skills, it's like we're not even playing the real game yet. We're in the shallow end. And the second we go home, the water gets deep." Alex turned that over, and didn't love it, and couldn't argue with it. He'd felt the edges of the same thought for weeks, the sense of a much larger world sitting just past the walls of this one, beings who'd been doing this for centuries, depths the tutorial only hinted at.

Cultivation was another door in that same hallway, locked for now, waiting.

"Then we learn it when we get there," he said.

"Same as everything else. We were all civilians a month ago and now you're building portals out of sand. Whatever the deep end is, we'll figure it out when the water gets there."

"That's aggressively optimistic of you."

"One of us has to be." Liam grinned, and let his eyes close again, and Alex sat with him a while longer in the rune light until the worst of the shaking left his cousin's hands and he could get himself to his tent. Then Alex walked the rest of the way home the long way, through the middle of the camp, because his mother's voice was still in his ears about seeing the place instead of just standing in front of it. And it was worth seeing. He let himself really look, the way he hadn't in weeks.

The rows of tents, taller and tighter than they'd been, upgraded a grade at a time as points came in. Ace's garden off to one side, rows of things that would be medicine soon, pale green in the dark. Bartholomew's shop, shuttered for the night, the anvil a black shape against the lights. A woman he didn't know mending a piece of armor by rune light, badly, the straps all wrong, and Alex thought about stopping to help and decided to let her learn it the way everyone learned everything out here. Craft stalls.

A drying rack of herbs. The low sounds of six hundred people sleeping behind a wall that held. They'd built this. Him and his family and all the strangers who'd become something more than strangers, out of a field and a countdown and a lot of dying, they'd built a place worth protecting, a place that had decided to live. And it would go home with them, his father had said, all of it, back to the same forty miles of Chicago they'd been scooped out of. This wasn't a camp. It was the start of whatever came next.

Alex walked under the lights he'd made, past the door his cousin was building to keep them all alive, through the middle of the thing they'd all built together, and went to bed lighter than he'd been in a long time, and slept without the ache, and did not know how few of these quiet nights he had left.