Dimensional Summoner: Infinite Growth in a Leveling Apocalypse

The sergeant handed the notice through the pedestrian gate rather than stepping inside, which told me most of what I needed to know about how his afternoon had gone.

"Quarantine extension. Carrow Deep boundary moves out to eight hundred metres on the northern face."

"Which approach?"

"Maintenance raise. The hatch you people came out of." He gave the rest in the flat order of a man reciting somebody else’s report: a two-man patrol, routine, fortnightly, checking the seals were where the seals should be—and four deposits of fresh resin on the outside of the plate.

"Breached?"

"No. Plate’s still pinned and the pour’s clean underneath."

"Samples?"

"Not their job and not their kit. They marked the perimeter at forty metres, logged it, and came back."

"That’s what I’d have wanted them to do. Tracks? Bodies? Sounds?"

"Nothing they could see or hear. It’s been raining four days and there’s scrub all over that slope."

"Anyone missing off the roster? Anything logged out there in the last nine days?"

"Nobody missing. Nothing logged." He shifted his weight. "That’s what’s got Solt’s attention. Nine days of quiet, then resin on the wrong side of a sealed door."

"Has anybody cut into the deposits?"

"Nobody’s touched them."

He wanted me there in the morning. I didn’t argue. There is nothing I want less than examining unfamiliar resin on a wet hillside by torchlight.

"Dawn," I said. "I’ll meet the party at the reservoir junction."

He was gone inside two minutes. I closed the pedestrian gate and looked back at the yard.

Eight people. Two children sat on the plinth by the water tanks with a bowl each. Sefton, both hands still bandaged, was arguing amiably with Dain about a pump impeller. Nell stood over the fire. Mira was on the workshop roof, running new alarm cord along the parapet without having asked permission. She had put it forty centimetres higher than I would have.

From the ground, hers was better.

Nine days ago, I’d have walked out at dawn and locked an empty gate behind me.

I got her down from the roof and gave her the notice to read rather than summarising it.

"’Exterior face,’" Mira said. "Meaning outside."

"Meaning outside."

"So one of them’s been out."

"One of something’s been out. It might be small. It might be alone. It might have surfaced three kilometres from that hatch. I don’t know, and neither does Greyhaven. That’s why they want somebody who’s been below."

She set the paper on the bench. "You told us it was sealed."

"It is sealed. The plate’s pinned, the pour’s intact, and nothing came through it." I met her eyes because she would have known if I hadn’t. "What I should have told you is the other part. That place learns. It watched Ashmark’s rescue and sealed an exit I’d walked past four hours earlier. It closes routes instead of charging when closing routes works better. If it’s found a way onto the surface, it’ll have tested it before trusting it."

"That’s a considerably worse sentence than the one on the paper."

"Yes."

She didn’t panic or ask me to promise that everything would be fine. That was why she was the person I talked to.

"Then we do tomorrow properly," Mira said. "Both gates barred from the inside. Sefton on the pedestrian gate—he can sit and watch, and his hands don’t matter for that. Otto walks the level fence line with the stick, twice. Jessa and Dain take the tanks and beds. Nell keeps the children inside the wall. Not indoors. She’ll take that better."

"Alarm cord?"

"Working on the workshop side. I’ll finish the western run before dark and test all three bells. The rifles stay with me and Dain. Nobody goes beyond the fence alone."

"And if I’m not back?"

She had already thought about it.

"Sundown. If you’re not through that gate by sundown, we bar everything. Two people on the workshop roof through the night. Nobody opens anything for anyone until morning. If you’re not back by the second morning, I send Dain to Greyhaven’s south gate with your name and the notice number. That’s official paper. They’ll have to answer it."

"Better than what I had."

"I know." Mira picked the notice back up. "And tonight you’re writing down the gate procedure, the generator sequence, and where the medical stores are. In the book."

"Mira—"

"You’re the only person here who knows how half this place works. That’s a single point of failure. If something bites you on a hillside tomorrow, the rest of us are standing in a yard we don’t understand." She raised an eyebrow. "You want people to depend on this place. Then it has to work without you."

I wrote four pages that night, hated every minute of it, and knew she was right.

Nell caught me at the fire afterward. "Can they get here?"

"The sign they’ve found is six kilometres away and doesn’t point this way." I took the bowl she held out. "That’s the truth. The other half is that nobody knows where the thing came out, so I won’t tell you it’s impossible."

"That’s the answer I wanted," Nell said. "I’d have believed the other one less."

I ate, checked the western bells with Mira, and slept badly enough to remember doing it. Before dawn, I changed the dressing on my right palm. The six stitches were holding, though the skin pulled whenever I closed my hand fully.

I packed water, field dressings, cord, chalk, route markers, and enough food for the day. The rifle went over my shoulder, one knife at my belt and the second in my boot. The Stoneback core stayed locked at the compound. Pell’s measured Marrowlace portions remained sealed and protected; I had no intention of turning an investigation into the second stage of an unsupervised medical experiment.

Mira opened the gate for me. I found that stranger than I should have.

❖ ❖ ❖

Deyra Solt met me at the reservoir junction with a folder under her arm, two militia who knew quarantine procedure, and a structural specialist called Ivo. He was narrow, in his fifties, and carried enough sample tubes and picks to suggest that concrete had never disappointed him as badly as people had.

"Rules first," Deyra said. "We inspect the exterior of the seal and the ground within eighty metres. Nobody opens anything. Nobody descends. Nobody touches unknown material without gloves. If I say withdraw, we withdraw and discuss it afterward." She looked at me. "You’re contracted as witness and route scout because you mapped that approach from below. That doesn’t make it your operation."

"Understood."

"Then tell me what you expect to find."

"Nothing. I’d rather not walk up that slope with an answer already in my head."

Something in her face relaxed by about a millimetre.

The last time I’d stood on that hillside, I’d been hauling four injured people out of a hatch. Greyhaven had sealed it properly since: concrete poured into the shaft head, a steel plate over it, eight pins driven through into the pour, and a skirt of concrete around the rim. The barrier had cured for nine days. Ivo’s own notes said it had been clean.

Four deposits sat along the exterior seam now. Grey-brown, fist-sized, laid flat. I knew the vinegar-sharp smell from four metres away.

"That’s Carrow resin."

"You’re certain?" Deyra asked.

"About the smell and colour. Ivo can tell you about composition. I can’t."

He worked for forty minutes. I touched nothing until he finished.

The four pads were separate rather than one seep spread along the plate. Each sat over a fastening point or a gap where the steel stood slightly proud of the concrete. The inner seam showed no stain, pressure mark, or continuous line that would suggest resin had been forced through from below.

Under the third pad, where the cured skin had lifted at one edge, grit and two short, pale grass fibres were pressed into the underside.

"That’s the useful one." I pointed it out to Ivo.

He lowered himself onto his elbows in the wet and studied it. "It went down over the grass."

"So the grass was there first."

"Or a boot carried material up from below and dropped it."

"Four pads, all centred on fastenings. A boot doesn’t do that."

"A boot doesn’t," he agreed, "but I want that written as an excluded possibility instead of an ignored one."

Deyra made him write it.

Then I saw the scores on the cured outer faces: four or five parallel lines on every pad, only a few millimetres apart. All of them pointed away from the seam.

"Tool marks," Deyra said.

"Mandibles, probably. I can’t prove what made them." I crouched without putting my injured hand on the ground. "But I can prove which side it was standing on."

Whoever had tested the seal had done it from our side of the door.

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