“I’m fine,” I said. I had to be. It wasn’t just about going after the Bailiff. Something a lot bigger than that was eating me up from the inside, something I couldn’t put a name on. I had to keep moving, stay ahead of that gnawing blackness. But I didn’t know how to explain that to Kest, so I said, “If I take time off now, the other recruits will think I’m a walkover. I need a win. Then I can take a day off.”
She hmmed, still frowning down at my side. “I’ll ask Rali to infuse some food for you at breakfast. That might help.”
“No!” My yell echoed back at me, and I winced at how loud it’d been. “I mean, you don’t need to bother him. I’ve still got four allotted elixirs I haven’t used up yet for this week, plus all the credits I’ll get from selling this pile of feral loot. I’ll just grab another healing elixir when the distillery opens tomorrow.”
Kest looked at me like she knew why I didn’t want to ask Rali, but she let it go. Maybe she didn’t want to argue with her twin, either.
Survival Mode
I DIDN’T GET HARDLY any sleep that night. Every time I started to drift off, I felt my fingers jam up against a glass wall, the glass crumbling and the Ylef’s life point going out, crushed in my fist.
The one time I actually dozed off, the Gunsmoke theme started playing in my head along with all these flashing purple lights. Then I felt the Ylef’s corpse fall on top of me, and I bolted straight up in bed, covered in sweat and sick to my stomach.
Sushi was so annoyed with all my moving around and interrupting her sleep that she swam off and spent the rest of the night in one of my work boots.
Eventually, I gave up on sleep altogether and went down to the workout room, thinking that would be a decent way to keep from thinking about the day before and Kest leaving.
The workout room had a bunch of weird machines I couldn’t figure out, but the weight benches were basically the same as on Earth, so I went with that.
First I tried it with Ki-level strength enhancements just to see what I could do, which turned out to be way more than I’d thought. I benched three times what I could back on Earth, and probably would’ve done better if the stab wounds had been a hundred percent healed. Then I switched over to doing it without enhancements for a while, figuring if I could build my natural muscle up, I’d do even better with Ki abilities.
When my arms felt like they were going to give out, I switched over to a treadmill. With the Ki-speed, I hit thirty miles per hour—or whatever the alien equivalent of that was that my brain was translating into miles per hour. The buttons went all the way up to a hundred miles per hour, but after I made it to thirty, I backed off to jogging speed. I’d seen one too many fail videos to trust all-out sprinting on a treadmill.
I’d been running for about fifteen minutes when Warcry walked in. He stopped in the doorway, scowling.
“What’re you doin’ in here, grav?”
“Calculus,” I said, wiping my sweaty face on my shirt without slowing down. “What does it look like?”
He rolled his eyes and went for one of the machines along the far wall, a clear plastic box with a set of dials and number pads on it.
“Meaning, since when do you put any effort into improving yourself?” he said.
“You mean like besides all last month, fighting you for hours on end behind the saloon?”
“Psht.” He thumbed the number pad, inputting something. “That’s just training, grav. Any clown can show up when they’re told to. Takes a champ to show up when he ain’t.”
“That’s weird.” I turned the treadmill up a couple notches and ran a little harder. “Weren’t you the guy who didn’t want to train before day sun high?”
“Just coz I got complacent for a bit don’t mean I wasn’t still working on me own,” he said, opening the panel and stepping inside the box.
Once the door was shut behind him, Warcry sank into a low stance and started throwing punches. Every so often, the box’s number pad beeped, and the dial turned up a notch. I couldn’t tell what was going on with it, and I didn’t really feel like asking, so I went back to running. Whatever the point of the box was, Warcry was really working up a sweat. In no time, droplets were flying off his fists and elbows, splattering all over the clear walls around him.
After about twenty minutes, he switched to kicks, going back and forth between his real leg and his prosthetic. He wasn’t moving even close to as fast as he did in a fight. The box must’ve been slowing him down, adding extra resistance to his movements.
I shut off the treadmill and went to the heavy bag in the corner, working on elbow-kick combos. I lost track of time doing that for a while, almost like I was back in the trailer house practicing muay thai along with movies or YouTube.
The sound of Warcry’s box beeping brought me back to reality. The door popped open, and Warcry came out, breathing hard.
“You’re moving like a rubbish android, grav.” He grabbed a water bottle off the cart in the corner. “Your side ain’t healed, and it’s jackin’ up everything else on ya. Any clown with half a brain can see all they have to do is work your left side to tear ya apart.”
He had a point. I forced myself to stand up a little straighter so I wasn’t hunched over the stab wounds, but they still hurt like heck. That wasn’t going to work.
Usually when I needed to get through a fight injured, I used Miasma to stop the bleeding
