Four days traipsing around the mountains with very little rest made every muscle in Shara’s legs ache and tremble beneath her. She grabbed onto the tree branch to her right and pulled herself up the last step of the incline. The slope leveled out and the tent peaks that she had seen from the bottom of the slope came into full view. This was the last known location of one of her trap teams.
Shara looked over what was left of the camp. The fire pit smeared out from the central point of the camp, a trail of burned material leading up to a large log. Metal plates and cups splashed out from the log. Did something go through the fire to get to the men who had been sitting comfortably around the log? The tent behind the utensils had a slice extending from the ground to the peak of it, freeing one half of the front flap to whip away from the beam. The support had been knocked over, leaving the tent askew with the loose flap and collapsed side whipping in the cold mountain breeze.
A pile of bodies sat at the western edge of the camp, the striking contrast of the light snow fallen over them and the mountain peaks behind the stack of pale and twisted limbs. A large circle of blood had grown outwards from the pile. Small crystals were growing out of the puddle, climbing their way up the pile. An arm that had been gaping open from a gash that started at just below the shoulder and ran down to the elbow had a series of red crystals growing in it. The arm didn’t seem to be attached to a body. The uneven edges that ended the arm at the top had grown a larger crystal, which folded back into the pile, curving gently, creating an impression of a shoulder. A torso near the dismembered arm had a similar crystal sloping down from the shoulder, where the arm should have been. The crystal grew down and thinned out before ending in a jagged crown of red jewels.
Shara stepped carefully over the remnants of the camp’s chaos, toward the bodies. Her men crested the hill and stayed at the edge, looking around the camp without moving, as if ignoring the bodies meant that they were not there. Some atrocity had happened, but not to them, and they could choose not to look. Shara could not. It all meant something. It had to mean something.
She picked up a thick stick, charred on one end, and used it to poke at the crystalline formations on the corpses. The bodies gave way under the pressure of the stick. Not stiff. The layers of skin, fat and muscle reacted like any living thing would to being prodded with a stick. She looked around. One tent on the opposite edge of the camp showed no signs of being gone through or destroyed. Glancing back at her men, she saw they still stood in the same grouping, ignoring the bodies in favor of pointing to the destroyed fire. She walked to the single standing tent.
As she pushed through the flap, she immediately noticed a book laying across the cot, opened and face down as a marker of where the reader had left off. She flipped it over. It was a journal.
We made it halfway up the mountainside without running afoul of any enemy patrols. It is silent here. I have not heard anything other than the wind since this afternoon. Charlie is making dinner. He takes over all the cooking when he is nervous and needs to do something with the energy. He feels the stillness, too. Not like I do, however. He is an untrained Grimer. Funny that he is the only one that understands.
I tried to tell the Commander that there was something wrong here. There should be birds. There should be bugs. There should be other living things, besides the trees. There is nothing here. I spent a half hour circling the camp site that Commander chose. I felt the trees, the ground, the air itself. They are lonely. They felt to me as if they have been lonely for quite a while. I cant help—-
The passage ended cleanly after the last word. From the state of the camp, she assumed Charlie had finished creating the final meal for the troop. She flipped through the pages, stopping when she saw a drawing of the men—her men—making soup around a campfire. This was the journal of the Inari boy that had watched them make their pitiful soup the night their mission had began. A wave of sorrow passed over her. Poor kid. To know something was so wrong, but not be able to express it so that others understood. It was a common problem among the Inari, but it usually expressed itself in less lethal ways. A frustration they had to bear due to their nature. A frustration that usually did not end in a pile of bodies.
She placed the journal back on the cot as it had been and bent to look through what was left in his pack on the floor next to the cot. A small pile of clothes covered another journal. She plucked the leather gloves from the bundle and tucked them into her belt before picking the journal out of the bag. The second journal was empty. The boy had planned to live much longer and to document his life. For whom? She found two small sheathed daggers attached to a belt next to the blank journal. She pulled the belt out and wrapped it around her hips, below her own belt. Can’t have too many knives. She turned to leave, but then thought better of leaving the journal. She scooped it up from the bed, closing it. She brushed her fingers over the light, smooth leather cover and then slid off her own pack to place the journal inside. She put her pack back on and left the tent, heading back to the pile.
Shara ordered her men to scavenge for usable supplies as she began to pull on the leather gloves. She pointed to the other Inari in the group.
“You, keep watch.” She pointed to a spot near the edge of camp away from the pile of bodies, not too far from the untouched tent.
The gloves hung loosely around her smaller hands, but they had clearly been weatherproofed, which meant blood-proofed, to an extent. She heard her men moving around the camp behind her as she bent down to look more closely at the intertwined limbs and crystals. She poked again at the arm that was growing a new crystal shoulder. She felt the give beneath the small force and the flesh bounced back as she pulled her finger back. She used three fingers, pushing and prodding around the major wound. The flesh was equally responsive. There was no indicator by touch that a hard crystal was growing in the wound. She took a breath and placed her finger on the large shoulder-crystal. It responded to her pressure and bounced back into position. The facets and sharp lines that were visible wavered beneath her fingertips as she pushed, fading into red, transparent flesh. The corners and definition of the crystal returned when she pulled her finger away.
She systematically worked her way around the pile, testing different crystal growths in the same way. The ones attached to flesh behaved as flesh. A growth on the cross section of a bone that had been snapped, however, was hard and exactly what she would have expected from the crystals from looking at them. She grasped the hard piece of crystal, working her way up the exposed bone to where the flesh of the arm reappeared. There was a distinct difference, discernible only by feel, between bone-crystal and flesh-crystal.
She stood, carefully peeling off the gloves so that no blood touched her directly. She dropped the gloves on the pile of bodies, turned toward the tent, and returned to it. She pulled out the empty journal from the dead boy’s pack, walked back to where the campfire had been, and sat on the large log that had served as a bench. She opened the journal, pulling out the pencil that had been with the other journal, and began to document her findings carefully.
We need to know more about this. We have to find where the crystals are, see what they are doing.
After her notes, she drew a quick sketch of the bodies and the crystalline limbs. It was horrible compared to the drawing the boy had done of her teams. She stopped squinting at her scratches and looked up to focus on back to the pile of bodies, gathering the details for her drawing. A dozen men. We can’t keep fighting this war when we don’t know what’s happening. Did the Xenai do this? Is that why they wanted the crystals?
One of her men passed nearby as she drew. The scientist, Sabeen. She waved toward her, then grabbed her own LightTab and used it to gesture at the corpses.
“Tab scan them. Get a good representation then zoom in on the crystals and their structure. See if there is any way to find other Blight crystals using the Nagata’s sensors. There has to be some way to track the deposits. You’ll need my Tab’s permissions to run them. Once you get that done—” she looked at the bodies and sucked in enough air to keep her voice from falling out beneath her words, “burn them.”
The woman looked at the pile uncertainly. Shara pushed the journal and pencil off her lap and stood to place her free hand on Sabeen’s arm, “We need to protect the rest of our men. We have to figure out if there are any other areas in the mountains that have crystals to steer them clear. You can do this.”
She nodded back to Shara and reached over to take Shara’s LightTab and begin the scan, keeping a cautious eye on the pile, “Alright.”
Shara sat back down and picked up the journal, but instead she watched as Sabeen waved the LightTab in repetitive strokes up and down, a quiet beeping filling the air as she moved around the bodies. She finished the scan and stood still, uncertainty covering her face and wafting over to Shara’s intuition. Shara gave her an encouraging smile before leaning over to grab a half-burned log off the ground next to her. She brushed the snow off and felt the center to make sure it felt dry enough from the snow before standing and hefting the log onto her shoulder. She heard it clink against her amulet chain. She walked over to Sabeen with it, placing the log on the ground and putting her flint and tinder on top of it in her other hand, “We have to send them off.”
Sabeen nodded and handed Shara her tablet back, “The scan analysis is sending, but I don’t know how long it will take to get anything back from the Nagata.”
Shara nodded, “Thank you.” She turned to walk back to the log and make more notes. As she sat, she could already smell the fire in the air as it worked its way through wood, leather, and cloth. The LightTab beeped again.
Not long, I see.
She opened the file. It was a minimized set of coordinates that could overlay her locally stored map data. Sabeen was smart to request the very basics; if the Nagata had tried to send a full map, it could have taken hours to receive it. She tapped the upper right icon to overlay the map coordinates onto her local data and center it around her Tab’s location. A sharp and sour smell of burning meat filled the air as she blinked at the updated map. The crystal markers circled the camp she sat in and as the LightTab continued to beep as new data arrived, the map updated. The single circle updated to show near perfect concentric circles spreading outward from the camp, growing larger until they stopped just shy of Prin’s outer walls to the east and back to the Army’s camp to the southwest.