Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Glitch conveyed that he understood.

"You can’t turn it off, you can’t turn it up, and if it starts smoking you can’t do anything about that either." Jin pushed the shapes across as clearly as he could. "If something’s wrong, be loud. That’s it. That’s your entire job."

Glitch conveyed that he was extremely good at his entire job.

Jin stood at the door with his hand on the frame and looked back at a piece of taped-together garbage keeping something alive.

It’s a cheap timer and a forty-millimeter fan and a piece of cardboard.

He closed the door.

____

Comparative Rift Environment Theory ran ninety minutes in a hall on the third floor and did not require beasts, which was the only reason Jin was there instead of somewhere else.

The instructor spent the first twenty minutes on pressure differentials in sealed pocket dimensions.

Jin heard perhaps nine of those minutes.

Cycle three should be finishing now. The fourth heat phase will run eleven minutes and twenty-four seconds, with the air phase down to two thirty-six. Still inside tolerance.

"—which is why the standard extraction protocol assumes a stable barometric gradient. Astor."

Jin’s head came up.

"Yes."

"Why does that assumption fail in a collapsed Rift?"

He had not been listening for eleven minutes. He also had spent four hours in an unmapped fracture with a burrowing beast under the floor, which turned out to be a reasonable substitute for having listened.

"Because the pocket stops being sealed," he said. "If the structure’s compromised you get exchange with the parent environment, so your gradient’s whatever the two sides are doing, and it changes while you’re in there."

The instructor considered this.

"That’s correct and phrased like someone who has been in one."

"Yes."

"Then stay awake, because the next part is about the ones nobody came out of."

Somebody two seats over snorted. Jin sat up straighter and stayed awake for another eleven minutes, and then stopped again.

Cycle four. Eleven minutes and twenty-four seconds of heat. Two thirty-six of air. Still tolerable.

He caught himself doing the arithmetic for the fourth time and made himself stop, because he had no ability to act on any of it. He had no remote scan, no remote control, no way to look at a readout from a lecture hall. The machine either worked for a hundred and ten minutes or it did not.

This is what everyone else’s problems feel like. No console. No pause. You just have to be somewhere else while it happens.

He hated it enormously.

His head went down twice in the last twenty minutes and came up both times before anyone noticed, and when the session ended a boy from his stream asked whether he wanted to stay for the optional terrain-modeling practice.

"No."

"It’s only forty minutes—"

"Can’t," said Jin, already moving, and left it there, because can’t was the whole truth and anything more would have required a lie.

He got the door open at 1241 and Glitch was standing exactly where he had been standing, alert, ears of a sort angled toward the desk, radiating a kind of stern watchfulness.

Not panic. That was the important part. Whatever was on that desk had not alarmed him.

Jin scanned before he did anything else.

[Vitality: 13% — stable]

He let out a breath he had been holding since the third floor.

Then he read the rest.

[Shell temperature: 38.9]

[Chest concentration: elevated]

[Gradient: 1.9]

The timer’s drift had gone the way he expected and the way he disliked. The heat phase had crept long and the air phase had shortened with it, while the thermal module’s slow cutoff let the shell overshoot its target. For the last two cycles, the machine had been building the pocket up and not draining it properly.

Nothing catastrophic. No damage indicator, no vitality loss. It had been going the wrong direction for about thirty-five minutes and would have been genuinely dangerous before the fourth hour.

He killed the automatic sequence, ran two manual air phases at a careful rate, brought the gradient down to 1.1, and reset the whole thing from baseline.

Then he sat back and looked at the numbers.

One hour fifty and it drifted this far. Three hours is the outside limit and I was right to be pessimistic about three and a half.

He wrote it in the notebook.

MAX UNATTENDED: 3 HOURS. SCAN ON RETURN, ALWAYS, BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE.

Glitch came over and put his head against Jin’s leg.

"You did fine."

Glitch conveyed that this was known.

That day became the first complete one.

Jin built his entire schedule around three-hour blocks: recalibrate, leave, return, scan, recalibrate. He fitted those blocks around two classes, a Supply shift he could not afford to drop, and four hours of sleep taken in broken pieces.

By that evening the egg had received more than twenty-six consecutive hours of correctly maintained cycling since the final build, including the drift that had remained inside tolerance while he was in class.

He scanned it at 2140 the way he had scanned it forty times, expecting stable, and then stopped with his thumb on the screen.

[Vitality: 14% — stable]

[Terminal maturation: INITIATED — early stage]

[Rate: slow]

Jin read the second line about six times.

Not stable. Initiated.

He ran the deep structural scan and got the same thing from a different angle. The organs were still complete and had been complete for two months. What had changed was that something was now happening to them. There was activity in the neural response that had not been there on Tuesday, and the metabolic read had a component to it that Jin’s talent labeled as consumption rather than maintenance.

It’s using something. It’s building.

He opened the Engine.

In the grey space, the chick had its eyes open and was keeping them open. Its head was up. Not lifted-and-dropped, the way it had been the previous dawn. Up, and held, wobbling slightly, for as long as Jin watched it.

It still could not stand. Its legs were folded under it exactly as they had been, and when it tried to shift its weight it succeeded only in moving about a centimeter and then stopping.

[Status: Cannot stand. Cannot move independently. Cannot engage.]

Jin sat on the floor with his back against the desk leg and worked out what he was actually looking at. Since the first night, he had only been stopping it from dying: holding the line, keeping the pocket from cooking it, preventing the number from going down.

This is different. This is it going forward.

He did the honest version of it as well, because he had learned to.

Fourteen percent was fourteen percent. Slow meant slow. The egg had needed a machine held together with a ration tin lid running every three hours to get one percent and a change of verb, and if that machine stopped, the whole thing went back the other way.

Glitch settled beside the desk and put his chin down.

"It started," Jin told him.

The bond came back with a steady, uncomplicated interest, and Glitch did not move from the desk for the rest of the night.

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