Chapter 9: Cores Don't Change Hands

The powder was still coming down when the man spoke.

“Nice work.”

He was standing with his weight on the leg the blood wasn’t running down. It came out of the top of his boot on the other side and drew a line across the tile, slow and steady, and he had one hand flat over his side, holding it there.

“You’re getting that on the floor,” Ash said.

The man looked at him for a second. Then he pushed off the wall, crossed the hall past the animal’s head, and crouched down at its shoulder.

He started with his fingertips. He put them on the hide and walked them along the ribs, feeling for something under the surface, and then he went in with his hands.

The gloves were thin deerskin, and something had been done to the leather, because blood slid off them in sheets instead of soaking through. Both hands stayed pale while everything else in that corridor had gone the color of the powder. His fingers went through the hide the way a thumbnail goes through the skin of a plum.

After that he was opening the animal along the ribs. He took his time about it. It was the pace of a man going through a drawer he expects to have been organized.

None of it bothered him. The face he made over the work was private and pleased, and it stayed there the whole time.

Ash looked at the animal once and then went back to watching the hands, because the hands were the strange part.

He crouched down too, at what he judged to be a reasonable distance, and did nothing. Nobody had given him anything to do.

There was a burned patch on the flank, black and stiff. He cut a slice off the edge of it with the small knife — the long one was in a room down the hall with the extinguisher — turned it over, and smelled it.

Lamb.

He took a bite.

Lamb, in fact. Roast. The skin had crisped up along the edge of the cut and there was no salt on any of it.

It walked on two legs and it had come at him around a corner on purpose, twice, and none of that had gotten into the meat. He spent a moment on whether that still made it food, and then ate the rest of the slice.

“You,” the man said, from over at the animal. It came out in the voice people use on a dog that has climbed up on the couch. Then he stopped.

Ash licked his thumb, stood, and moved a few feet down the hall to give the man the room. The powder had gotten into his hair and his eyelashes and every crease of his coat, and there was no getting it out of any of that. He looked at his own head instead.

Two small horns had come up through his hair. The hood was not going to fix that. He put the hood up anyway and both points went through the fabric on the first try and stood there in plain sight, so he took it back down.

There was a feeling under his skin that he didn’t have a word for. It was the thing in your legs two minutes after a long run, except it wasn’t going anywhere, and it seemed to be waiting.

He took two steps to see what it did.

The corridor was behind him. The wall beside a patient room was in front of him, and the wall was the thing that gave. A long sheet of drywall came off the studs, dust went up, something in the ceiling rattled and kept rattling. He came out of it standing in the room on the other side with his shoulder in the dark.

When he turned around there was a hole in the wall the size of a person, with a person’s shape to it. He looked at that for a moment. Down the hall a door moved in the draft and settled.

He put his hand over his right eye.

The room stayed. All of it — the beds against the far wall, the drip stand, the door, and through the hole the corridor bending away on both sides at once. He turned his head and got the corner behind him and the back of his own shoulder without any part of it having to move into view first.

A person saw about two hundred degrees. The eye he had left was doing close to three hundred and fifty, which was the arrangement you gave an animal that had to watch two directions at once and couldn’t afford to turn its head.

Two hundred before. Three fifty now. He had lost an eye and come out of it a hundred and forty degrees ahead.

He dropped his hand, put both hands in his pockets, shouldered the door open, and went back out into the hall.

The man was in the animal’s chest up to the wrist, in under the shoulder blade, and he came back out with a core in his fingers. He looked at it.

“Come here,” he said. “Stop breaking the building.”

Ash came.

The man opened his other hand. It had been shut since the fight, and it opened now, and inside the glove was the cobalt core, the one he’d pulled out of the animal’s belly with his fingers. He dropped the new one in with it, purple and the same size, and rolled the two of them together in his palm the way you roll dice you don’t intend to throw. Blood ran off the glove and down his forearm, which was white, and into his sleeve.

“Its cores hadn’t grown in yet,” he said. “This one changed tonight. A double core doesn’t go down that easy once it knows what it’s holding. You had some luck.”

He put his free hand out, palm up.

Ash unclipped the case from his belt and gave it to him. The counter on it had come down to 06:19.

The man dropped the blue core into one of the bays and thumbed the lid shut. He read the screen. The box read the card back at him in the same flat voice it used for everything.

Name: Goat’s Horn
Type: mutant core
Class: common
Source: goat-headed anomaly
Grade: II blue (cobalt)
Function: strength and agility, greatly increased
Limit: 30 minutes of cumulative use
Tagline: More power. Bigger miracles. You won’t feel a thing.
Resonance: unknown

Darker in the same color meant rarer. The pale blue core he was carrying around in his face had ten minutes in it, all told. This one had thirty.

That wasn’t the one that mattered. The man took the first core out and put the purple one in.

Name: Devil’s Compass
Type: function core
Class: common
Source: goat-headed anomaly
Grade: II purple (mineral)
Function: causes the target to lose its direction
Limit: 5 uses, cumulative
Tagline: Let the devil do the walking. He’s never lost a customer.
Resonance: unknown

“Blue, purple, red, silver, gold,” the man said. “The farther along you go, the rarer they get, and inside one color, the darker the core, the rarer. The rare ones cost more than you can put a number on.”

He handed the box back, got himself up off the floor with a hand on the wall, and walked a few feet along the corridor, to where it had gone dark, and sat down against the drywall there with one leg drawn up and let his head rest back.

Down at that end the hall was dark, and it made no difference to him. He was white in it with no light on him at all.

Ash sat down next to him, because that was where the man was, and went back through the last hour looking for the thing he had done wrong. He didn’t find it.

The man sat with his eyes shut for a while.

“I have never met anybody,” he said, “who would put a core into his own eye without asking one question first. Not one person.”

“Is there a problem with it, Mister Whitlock?”

He didn’t answer right away. He moved his back against the wall and got his shoulder set, and the hand he’d had over his side came off it and stayed off.

“People who can use cores are called carriers,” he said. “There aren’t many of us. Missing a piece of yourself is one of the conditions. Not the only one. And one missing piece takes one core.” He looked at the far wall. “You put it in, it grows there, and it’s yours. It stays yours until you die. Cores don’t change hands.”

He let that sit.

Down the hall, under the closed door, the extinguisher coughed once and stopped.

“That’s why a carrier takes his time. Most of them wait, and then they take something high. Something with years in it, something that can go the distance.” Then he said, “You come and work under me, and every resource I have goes into finding you the best core there is. The highest grade. The one that ends fights.”

The rims of his eyes had gone pink. All the way around.

“And you put a grade-one blue in your face without asking. God. I might as well be dead.”

“So it’s on me for good.”

Ash blinked once. He put two fingers against his eyelid and pressed, and the core came out into his hand, and the blue light went out of the socket with it. It took almost nothing. It was pale blue and wet and no bigger than a marble, and it lay in his palm.

“I took it out.”

He lined it back up with the socket and pushed it in with one finger. The light came back on. The corridor went wide at both edges again.

“I put it back in.”

The man’s mouth came open.

Nothing came out of it for a while. He looked at Ash’s face, and then at Ash’s hand, and then down at the two cores sitting in his own palm.

Ash looked back at him and wagged his little goat tail, once, side to side.