“Grady’s heat sick!” Sushi said like she’d just solved a riddle. “Sushi forgives Grady.”
“Thanks.” I gave her some scratches. “Sorry for being a jerk.”
No one else was up and about yet, even though it had to be getting close to noon. Somebody was snoring at a cartoonish volume, but other than that, the only sounds were jungle birdcalls and whining bugs.
I took a leak outside of camp, then came back and rehydrated a MealBag for breakfast. It didn’t taste like much, but it was more filling than I expected. I wished I had some coffee to go with it. Maybe that fever was from caffeine withdrawal. I hadn’t had a Coffee Drank since we were on the ship over from Van Diemann, and it didn’t occur to me to pick some up with the supplies while we were in Tikrong.
Not a mistake Kest would’ve made. She was basically addicted to those things. She always made sure we were stocked on them when we weren’t going to be around civilization for a while.
It worried me a little that I hadn’t gotten any messages from her since she and Rali left for Sarca. We had texted each other back and forth the first time she’d been implanted with the Technols, so not hearing from her started all kinds of bad scenarios running through my head.
She and Rali were probably fine. The Technols probably had no idea Kest was there to spy on them. She’d probably just been so busy running errands for her probationary mission that she hadn’t had time to message.
I stared down at my cracked HUD screen, trying to think of something I could say that wouldn’t blow her cover. I went with, I’m camping out in the middle of nowhere and like a total doofus I didn’t bring a single Coffee Drank with me.
My HUD buzzed with her reply a few seconds later.
A Metal Spirit would’ve never forgotten something so important.
Then before I could answer, a second message popped up. Rali says to tell you they’re bad for you, anyway. Full of impurities.
Which I took to be her way of letting me know he was with her and they were both okay. Also that I shouldn’t send anything I didn’t want her twin to see, because he was reading over her shoulder.
Full of caffeine, too, and that’s more important, I replied.
We texted for a few minutes before she had to get back to work. She made fun of me for sleeping the day away. I didn’t mention that I’d spent the night before in a firefight and packing supplies through jungle, but from the way she talked about the Technols’ industrious nature, I got the feeling they wouldn’t have considered that an excuse for getting up late anyway. We signed off with some innocuous joking instead of the usual girlfriend-boyfriend stuff, which made me resent Rali a little for still hanging around. But I did feel better knowing they were both okay.
The sun was already past the noon position, but still none of the artifact team was awake yet. I went through taiji practice, then sat down to cultivate and convert the Spirit around me. It wasn’t that I needed more—after yesterday, I was topped up on Miasma—but supposedly, every little bit of extra work got me that much closer to advancing.
What exactly do you think’s waiting on the other side of Ten? A Get Out of Killing Anybody Else Free card?
That caustic sneer was coming from me, not Hungry Ghost, but I shut it out anyway and focused on converting.
After a while, the rustling of canvas made my ears perk up. Warcry scowled around camp all puffy-eyed, then headed off into the woods.
When he got back, he scarfed a MealBag, then dropped into a low stance and started practicing punches at impossibly slow speeds, putting resistance into every motion until veins bulged on his arms and neck.
Smoky’s snoring abruptly cut off. The sudden silence seemed to be everybody else’s wake-up call, because a few seconds later, the artifact team started stirring around in their tents. Within a few minutes, grouchy hooligans had gathered around the fire pit for breakfast. Smoky growled at everybody, and Unu slugged from a liquor bottle.
Valthorpe was the only one in a good mood. “What do you say we get to work, gentlemen?”
“Pass,” Smoky grunted.
Unu gestured at us with the neck of his bottle. “We got to wait for these newbies to clear the place anyway. Go ahead and send them in. We’ll catch up.”
Valthorpe’s thick simian brow wrinkled.
I shrugged and got up. “I’m ready to kill some ferals.”
Warcry wadded up his empty MealBag. “Let’s get a shake on.”
The ruins were farther from the camp than I’d imagined, and there wasn’t a trail worn through the underbrush yet, so it was slow going.
“Galston was the one who discovered it, really,” Valthorpe explained as he pushed through the growth ahead of us. “Based on some old Colonization Era adventure writings, he had us move to this area and start sweeping the surrounding jungle. Took a few days, but we finally turned up the temple complex.”
If someone had told me before I’d ever walked into a jungle that they couldn’t find a whole building, I would’ve assumed they weren’t trying very hard. But clawing my way through the trees and underbrush, I was impressed that these guys had found it at all.
Coming up on the temple was like walking into a documentary about lost cities. One second we were surrounded by green, the next, massive stonework loomed out of the vegetation as if it’d grown there. A colonnade wrapped around the sides, holding up thick, boxy tiers, and vines and plants grew out of cracks in the masonry.
I craned my neck to stare up at it.
Six stories high, and every surface covered in bas-reliefs of hundreds of stone figures—demons and angels, or maybe just the regular aliens who had lived on this planet way
