Book 2: Chapter 4: [The System Has Said What The System Has Said]

Chapter 4: [The System Has Said What The System Has Said]

Wrong. His clearing was wrong.

Andy had known this before he returned to it, the way you know a room is empty before you open the door, like a house that sounds different when it has no one inside. He had known it during the seven-hour run north, through the mountains, following a trail that Gustave tracked from above, Teeth tracked from the ground, Andy tracked through the bond’s absence, the place where Veronica’s amber signal should have been broadcasting and was instead a wall of static. He had known it when Voss’s messenger caught up to him at the first mountain pass with intelligence that turned his pursuit from reckless to suicidal: the Harness had at least four fortified extraction facilities with teleportation circles in the northern range, and running into them at full gallop with no plan, no intelligence, and a horn that was currently operating at the emotional frequency of a man whose girlfriend had been kidnapped was not a rescue. It was a donation.

He had come back. Trail would keep. Voss’s rangers were mapping it. Gustave was still running patterns overhead, extending his search radius in expanding sweeps that covered more ground per hour than Andy could cover in a day.

Still wrong.

Veronica’s pillow was in the lean-to. Her second blanket, the one she had brought because Andy radiated heat in humanoid form but not enough heat, apparently, for a woman who had spent her career sleeping in forests and required proper rest equipment. Her book was on the boulder where he had placed it after carrying it in his mouth from the fight scene. Open. Face-down. Her page she would never finish marking.

He did not shift to humanoid.

He had the option. It was available, would take approximately two seconds, one intention, and he would have hands again. Hands that could close the book. Hands that could fold the blanket. Hands that could pick up the pillow and move it to the shelf and restore the lean-to to its pre-kidnapped layout, which was a series of actions that would make the clearing look cleaner but not feel less wrong.

His hands were for holding her. He had established this in the burned clearing at the northern boundary. He had shifted to humanoid. It had fit like a suit that belonged to someone else, someone whose life included mornings, breakfast, a person sleeping next to him. He had shifted back because the form without the context was a costume. Andy Snodgrass, whatever else he had become, was done wearing costumes.

Four hooves. Fifty-centimeter horn. So he did the only thing he knew how to do when all he could do was wait. He ran.

Galloping helped.

This was not a revelation. Andy had spent an entire book (the first one, the one where he had been a cell, then a jellyfish, then a frog, then a series of increasingly horse-adjacent creatures) learning to run, which had been the point. Always the thing that worked when nothing else did, the physical expression of a body doing what it was designed to do, every system aligned, every hoof placement calculating increased efficiency, the ground disappearing behind him in a rhythm that his horn matched with a golden pulse that was, for the duration of the gallop, not discordant.

He ran the perimeter. Eight hundred and forty-seven meters of territorial radius, converted to circumference: approximately 5.3 kilometers. He ran it once. Then again. Then a third time. Rhythm was there, the hoofbeat pattern that his body knew the way a metronome knew tempo: automatic, structural, the physical framework that held the rest of him together when the rest of him wanted to come apart. Running efficiency: eighty-three percent. Heart rate: elevated but sustainable. Emotional state: do not check emotional state. Do not open that menu. Keep running.

His hooves ached somewhere around the fourth lap, a deep soreness in the fetlocks that his life magic could have healed if his life magic hadn’t been occupied broadcasting DISTRESS through every living thing in range, which was causing the golden flowers to wilt in a perimeter that expanded with each lap, which was the botanical equivalent of an adult crying in public and the plants crying with him. Ferns along the stream had gone limp. A family of squirrels that had been nesting in the oak relocated to a tree outside the wilt radius, which was the wildlife equivalent of your neighbors changing apartments because you were playing sad music too loud. A pair of finches followed, abandoning a nest in the canopy that his life magic had encouraged them to build three days ago. Andy could feel them all leaving through his Life-sense. Small warm signatures retreating from his grief like boats pulling away from a storm.

Teeth ran with him for the first three laps.

She did not speak. Did not send impressions. She paced him at his right shoulder, her phantom form flickering silver-blue, two tails streaming, her presence communicating nothing more complicated than: I am here. You are not running alone. If you run a fifth lap I am going to start judging the efficiency of your turning radius because a fox can only suppress professional critique for so long.

On the fourth lap she peeled off toward the stream. Through the bond: a single impression, warm, exasperated, fond. Eat something.

Andy did not eat anything.

He ran a fifth lap.

Gustave’s report arrived at sunset, which came from altitude, crisp, formal, the dispatch format he preferred because Gustave considered emotional context in intelligence reports to be unprofessional and beneath the dignity of a Tempest Raptor whose surveillance capabilities were, in his professional opinion, being underutilized by a unicorn who had spent the afternoon running in circles.

The trail confirmed north-northeast into the Kethara Range. Three groups merged into a single location, an extraction point with a teleportation circle. Destination: estimated facility coordinates follow. A mental image: a map, rendered in the sharp detail of a raptor’s visual memory, showing terrain features, elevation changes, and a cluster of structures tucked into a mountain valley approximately forty kilometers north.

Fortified. Multiple binding arrays. Active magical signatures consistent with Harness operational patterns.

Then, after a pause that cost Gustave something, because Gustave did not offer emotional assessments and the offering was a concession: We will get her out.

Andy, standing in the clearing (he had stopped running when the impression arrived, which was good, because receiving a detailed tactical briefing at full gallop required multitasking skills he had not yet unlocked), processed the intelligence: location, enemy composition, objective. His gamer brain was useful for this. It could look at “your girlfriend is in a mountain fortress surrounded by people who harvest mythic creatures for parts” and convert it into tactical variables. Difficulty: extreme. Recommended party size: more than he had. Recommended gear level: higher than his current. It could make it manageable by making it abstract. His gamer brain was also, Andy suspected, the thing keeping him from detonating a second circle of trees, because the gamer brain operated on the principle that rage was a debuff and strategy was a buff and you did not enter a raid at maximum debuff.

“Forty kilometers,” he projected.

Forty-three. Gustave corrected him because Gustave always corrected him, because precision was not a preference for Gustave but a moral obligation, and three kilometers of inaccuracy was three kilometers of unacceptable approximation.

“Fortified.”

Significantly.

“How many operatives?”

More than you can fight alone. Which is the point. Pursuit is anticipated and accounted for.

The Binder’s words echoed back “Pursuit is anticipated and accounted for.” Andy replayed that sentence in his awareness. Anticipated. Accounted for. The Harness had looked at a Tier 6 mythic unicorn and decided to extend him an invitation for dinner.

They had left the trail visible because they wanted Andy to find the facility. They wanted him to charge in alone and had planned for exactly the unicorn he was being right now: grieving, furious, operating on instinct instead of strategy.

Andy stood in the clearing. Four hooves. Horn humming. Intelligence sitting in his awareness like a puzzle with most of the pieces but not the ones that mattered.

He needed a plan. He needed allies. He needed to stop running laps and start thinking.

He needed to pick up Veronica’s book.

Her book sat on the boulder.

It had been there since he placed it after returning from the northern boundary, face-down, pages bent, the spine cracked at whatever passage she had been reading when she had been taken. The book was going to get rained on if he left it there. Veronica would be annoyed about the water damage when she came back. When.

He walked to the boulder and looked at the book. He was a horse. Horses do not pick up books. This was not a design flaw in horses so much as a design priority: horses were designed for running, grazing, and being magnificent, none of which required fine motor manipulation of rectangular objects. Andy’s mouth could grip the book (had gripped the book, had carried it in his teeth for half a kilometer with the care of a golden retriever transporting a tennis ball), but his mouth could not close it, could not fold the page, could not perform the series of precise manipulations required to move a book from “face-down on a boulder getting rained on” to “safely stored on a shelf inside the lean-to.”

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He needed hands for this. He did not want hands.

He stared at the book. It stared back, with the blank insistence of an inanimate object representing something you are not ready to process. His horn hummed. Discordant, still, but with something underneath the discordance, a thread of something he didn’t have a word for. Intent, maybe. Or need. His horn doing the thing it had always done, which was translating what Andy needed into what Andy could do, one tier at a time, one impossible thing after another.

His horn flickered.

Veronica’s book twitched.

Andy stared. The book on the boulder had twitched, it had moved, a centimeter at most, the barest movement. His horn had flickered gold at the exact moment the book moved. Andy Snodgrass, who had been a vet tech, a cell, a jellyfish, a frog, a horse, a unicorn, a man (briefly, poorly, done now), was not stupid enough to miss the correlation.

He tried again.

His horn flickered. Stronger. Gold light concentrated at the tip, not the diffused ambient glow of passive life magic but a focused point, a thread of force extending from the horn toward the book with the wobbling uncertainty of a first attempt at anything. The book lifted, one centimeter, then two and then five. It wobbled and tilted, its pages fluttered in the telekinesis field like a bird trying to fly in a wind tunnel. It rose to the height of Andy’s chin, shaking, surrounded by a faint golden glow that pulsed with every beat of his heart.

He pressed it against his chest. Held it there, horn sustaining the grip with a focused intensity that made his forehead ache, but the book was there, against him.

[NEW ABILITY UNLOCKED: TELEKINESIS (BASIC). HORN-CHANNELED PSYCHOKINETIC MANIPULATION.]

[NOTE: NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF EVOLUTION. YOU NEEDED TO HOLD SOMETHING. THE HORN PROVIDED.]

Andy held the book against his chest and did not cry, because unicorns did not cry (probably) (he had never checked) (there had not been a reason to check until now), but if unicorns had been capable of crying, this would have been the moment. He could hold things. He could hold things without hands. He could hold a book, a gift, a memory, a placeholder for a person, without the costume, without the humanoid form, without being anything other than exactly what he was.

So there he was, a unicorn, holding a book with his mind, horn glowing, and standing in a clearing that was wrong without her but was, he was beginning to understand, still his.

He carefully, shakily, telekinetically closed the book. Pages pressed together with a soft fft. Cover met cover, closed, by a horse, using his mind. If his old coworkers at the vet clinic could see him now. (They could not see him now. They were in Ohio, or had been. He was in another dimension and had no real idea of how much time had passed. The vet clinic felt like a save file from a different game, from well, another life.)

He was aiming for the shelf inside the lean-to. He successfully placed the book on the shelf with the precision of a first-time crane operator whose training consisted of “figure it out, your horn is magic now.” The book landed(unlike the last joke), mostly on the shelf. Its back third was hanging off the edge. Close enough.

Then he picked up an apple.

It rose from the pile by the stream, golden-red, surrounded by the telekinetic field’s amber glow. (TK—he shortened it immediately because, in the self-directed, self-starring autobiography he was mentally filming, abbreviations sounded cooler and saved valuable screen time.) It floated toward his mouth with what Andy considered reasonable control for a brand-new psychic ability learned under emotional duress.