Dimensional Summoner: Infinite Growth in a Leveling Apocalypse

I woke because the light had changed, not because anything was wrong, and that was strange enough on its own to keep me still for a while.

Grey light came through the office window instead of lamplight. Liora lay against my side with one arm across my ribs and her tail draped over both our legs, dead asleep in the way she only managed when she had decided a place was safe. It had taken three visits for her to reach that point with me.

[Manifestation Remaining: 04:52:16]

Nearly five hours.

I lay there and did nothing with them for ten minutes, which was possibly the most extravagant thing I had ever done.

She woke when I moved, made a noise of complaint, and put her face into my shoulder.

"It’s light," I said.

"Barely."

"The gates are still shut. Wires are fine. Nothing came."

"Mm." Her ears flicked. She went back to sleep for another twenty minutes, and I eventually got up because my bladder was not a romantic organ.

The morning after was its own kind of strange.

I filled the jug from the workshop tap. Liora drank half of it while standing at the bench in one of my shirts, complained about the cold water again, then found the four marks on my shoulder in daylight and looked enormously pleased with herself.

"Those are yours," I said.

"I’m aware. I was there." She prodded one. "You’ve got a matching set from a hedge and a Ridgeback, so it’s a collection now."

"You’re not going to be normal about this."

"No." Liora held out her hand. "Palm."

I gave it to her. She unwound the dressing, held my hand toward the window, and made a face.

"It’s held. Badly, because you cut it and then went and levered a gate hinge with it."

"That was three days ago."

"It was yesterday, Adrian. I found the pry bar with your blood on it."

She redid the dressing properly, and I let her. While she worked, I noticed that she had crossed the workshop and taken the correct supplies from the medical corner without asking where anything was.

That was what got to me in the end. Not the previous night. The fact that she opened the right drawer, came back with antiseptic and a fresh roll of gauze, then returned both to their places afterward.

She had been inside the compound for a little over five hours, and she already knew where things went.

I made breakfast—eggs from Greyhaven’s north market, which had cost more than the onion and were worth it, along with the last of the meat and flatbread from the night before. I put out two cups without thinking and only registered the second when she picked it up.

"You’re doing a face," Liora said.

"I’m not doing a face."

"You’re doing the face where something ordinary has surprised you." She sat on the bench with her feet resting on a crate. "It’s the cups, isn’t it?"

"...It’s the cups."

"You’ve never had a morning."

"I’ve had thousands of mornings."

"You’ve never had a morning," she said, and ate without making me answer.

We got to work by eight. Neither of us wanted to waste the time we had left being sentimental at each other.

The problem sat on the workbench where I had left it three days earlier: the copied map of the drowned eastern greenhouse, the failed-harvest report in my handwriting, and one sentence at the bottom of the page.

They read the water.

Liora read the report twice without interrupting, which for her was a substantial gesture.

"Right," she said. "So the skill’s no good."

"Predator’s Veil suppresses what I put out. Sound, scent, presence. It doesn’t stop my leg from pushing water aside every time I move."

"And the water is the thing watching." She tapped the report. "This man’s honest. I like him. He says what he saw, then admits what he can’t prove. That’s more than most people manage."

"So the answer has to be something displacing water somewhere else."

"Obviously." Liora was already looking around the workshop. "What have you got in the way of containers?"

The first prototype was mine, and it was rubbish. I capped a length of forty-millimetre pipe, weighted one end with a bolt, attached a cord, and dragged it up and down the water tank on the plinth.

Liora watched for about six seconds.

"No."

"It displaces water."

"It displaces water beautifully. That’s the problem." She reached in, stopped it, and pulled it back to the near end. "Watch what it does. Exactly one speed, exactly one line, and it never stops. What moves like that?"

"A fish."

"A fish that isn’t in trouble, which nothing will cross a field to catch." She released it, and the pipe slid smoothly away. "That’s a boat. You’ve built a very small boat."

"What does prey do, then?"

Her ears came forward. "It goes hard, then stops, then goes hard again in a different direction. The second struggle is weaker than the first. It stops because it’s exhausted, starts because it’s frightened, and tries to go somewhere even when it can’t."

The second prototype was hers. It was worse, but in a useful direction.

She wanted a sealed bladder rather than a rigid object, so we used one of Pell’s spare container liners, a hinged frame taken from a scrap toolbox, and a cord that pulled the frame shut around it. When the cord relaxed, a bent strip of leaf spring forced the frame open and let the bladder expand again.

It worked exactly once and produced a surge large enough to spill water over the tank’s lip.

"Too much," I said.

"Too much at once," Liora agreed. "And then nothing. That’s a body hitting the water, not one struggling in it."

"So it needs to be smaller and repeat."

"Smaller, repeating, and coming from more than one place. Three points at least. If it’s one point, everything converges there and finds nothing. Three points that don’t agree with each other look like a mess. Like something thrashing."

"And when it stops?"

"Then it might be dead, and dead things are food. They could come closer instead of losing interest." She looked at me. "How long do you actually need?"

"I don’t know. That’s what the first trip is for."

The third prototype we built together, and it half worked, which was the correct amount of success for one morning.

Three bladders in three frames. Three cords leading to separate anchor points along the tank. I stood at the far end and pulled them in whatever order Liora called. Water went everywhere. My palm bled through the new dressing. The result looked convincingly chaotic, but it required one man to remain on dry ground with three cords in his hands for as long as the disturbance needed to continue.

Liora changed the sequence every time. Hard on the left. Nothing. Two short pulls on the right. A weak pulse from the middle, followed by all three badly out of agreement. When I fell into a rhythm, she stopped me and made me begin again.

"You’re making it predictable," she said.

"I’m trying not to tie my own hands together."

"Injured prey rarely prioritises tidy cord management."

By the end, the water no longer looked as though somebody was operating three devices. It looked as though one frightened animal occupied too much of the tank. That was the first genuinely useful thing we produced.

I wrote the problem beneath the earlier sentence.

Cannot pull the lines and be inside the greenhouse.

Liora read it over my shoulder.

"Good," she said.

"Good?"

"Now you know what you haven’t solved." She tapped the page. "That’s considerably safer than thinking you’ve solved everything."

The timer continued falling in the corner of my vision while three damp cords lay across the floor between us.

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