Dimensional Summoner: Infinite Growth in a Leveling Apocalypse

Deyra would not let us leave until she had checked everything we carried.

"Coats off. Boots up. Packs open." She had it laid out on a tarp from Vasse's kit before anybody had got their breath. "Resin strands, organic material, anything you didn't have this morning. Nothing goes off this ridge until I've seen it."

We found eleven filaments: two on my trouser cuffs, three on Corran, one in Ivo's boot tread, and five on Rhea's coat. Deyra bagged and sampled them herself with gloves.

"Your equipment," she said to Rhea.

"You're not taking it."

"I know I'm not. It goes home with you regardless of what I want, which Vale has explained." Deyra crouched by the chain reels. "I'd like to look at the resin on the hooks and remove what I can. That's the whole request."

Rhea looked at her for a moment and then held out both forearms.

"That's fair."

Vasse went east with the priority report: survey the other drains, close the hillside, and send a containment detail. Deyra stayed to secure the site rather than following us.

I gave Rhea the manifestation brief before we left, the limited version.

[Manifestation Remaining: 03:41:18]

"Three and three-quarter hours," she said. "Then the rooftop."

"The same instant. The same stride."

"With a shoulder that feels like this." She flexed it and winced. "That's going to be an interesting landing."

Mira opened the gate.

She came down from the workshop roof in four seconds and looked first at my hand, then at the armed stranger bleeding beside me.

"You said sundown," Mira said.

"It's not sundown."

"It's not. You're bleeding through my dressing, and you've brought somebody." She put her hands on her hips. "Start with her."

So I gave the residents the truth I could give.

"This is Rhea Calder. She's a real person from another world. An ability brought her here, and she'll return automatically in a few hours." I kept my voice level. "She's not under my control. She keeps her weapons and her judgment, and five people came off that hill because she helped us."

"And your ability," said Mira.

"Is mine, and I'm not explaining it, and I'd rather you were annoyed with me than that anyone here could be made to answer questions about it."

Mira held that for about three seconds and then let it go, which was more grace than I'd earned.

"Right." Mira turned to Rhea. "You've been watching the roofline since you entered. What's wrong with it?"

Rhea laughed out loud — the first genuine one I'd heard from her.

"Oh, I like you." She pointed at the vehicle gate, then the pedestrian gate. "Two exits, both on the same side. Everything funnels toward them."

"Walls need openings."

"Walls need openings. Predictable openings are an invitation." She walked into the yard, and every resident in earshot followed. "If something comes through that gate, where does everyone go?"

"Toward the other gate," said Otto, leaning on his stick.

"Toward the other gate. Which is thirty metres along the same wall, and by the time you're all moving that way you're a queue." She turned round. "How fast are you, with that ankle?"

"Not."

"Then you and I are going to be honest with each other about who this place is actually built for."

They worked for two hours while I mostly stayed out of the way.

Nell checked Deyra's clearance note before feeding her. Rhea ate the first few bites standing, then sat for a second helping and grew noticeably warmer once nobody was circling her.

The children wanted the chain-blades. Rhea unloaded and locked both reels, laid the hooks safely away, then let the younger child turn one crank while she held the case.

Sefton's bandaged palms kept him from handling them, so he asked about the ratchets and received an enthusiastic lesson on tension springs.

Jessa and Dain talked her through where the goats go during an alarm and got a genuinely useful answer about not moving livestock and people along the same line.

Rhea and Mira chalked four changes on the workshop wall: a secondary rally point behind the storage units, two roof lines with rope anchors, and a north-east route keeping children and slower residents away from the defenders' gate.

Nothing was built that day, but the chalk and argument gave us a plan. Mira understood how the compound worked; Rhea understood how people moved once the obvious routes became dangerous. Neither needed me to translate for the other.

Nell treated the thigh while I checked the shoulder with my left hand, and we reached the problem I'd been dreading.

"Nothing from here goes home with you," I said. "That includes a bandage, and I won't risk one sticking to the wound when you return."

"Then don't use yours." Rhea was already digging in a coat pocket. "I carry a field wrap. It's mine, it goes home with me, it'll hold for four hours."

We cleaned the wound, then wrapped it with the field dressing from Orith.

She caught me looking at the hand Nell was rebandaging.

"You've got a whole system," Rhea said. "Bolt-holes, alarm lines, an evacuation route, a woman who knows the generator. You've planned for every single thing failing except you."

"That's not—"

"You've been running on that hand for four hours and you didn't stop once." She raised her eyebrows. "Who's the fallback for you?"

I didn't have an answer, and she let me not have one, and went back to arguing with Mira about rope anchors.

A Greyhaven courier arrived a little after four, mud to his knees and carrying a preliminary map copied for the contracted witness. I unrolled it between Rhea and Mira.

The expanded search had checked eleven pre-Merge drains inside the widened boundary. Two showed fresh resin.

One north-north-west of the mine head, four kilometres from our culvert. One almost due east, further out than the quarantine line had been drawn a week ago. Nobody had entered either. Nobody knew whether they were occupied outposts, transit routes, or things that had been tried and abandoned.

Rhea looked at the three marks — ours and the two new ones — for a long moment.

"That's not one road," she said. "That's somebody trying doors."

[Manifestation Remaining: 00:03:40]

"You'll get a report on this," Mira said. "You'll go and look."

"Probably."

"Then write down where you're going first."

Rhea gathered her hooks and checked the satchel buckle, which she'd done perhaps nine times that afternoon.

[Relationship parameters updated.]

Desire: 64/100

Trust: 23/100

Resonance: 5%

[Resonance threshold reached.]

[Signature state: Preserved.]

[Repeat Selection Chance: 5% following a C-grade roll.]

"So there's a chance," she said, when I told her the honest version of it.

"It rolls a grade first. If it rolls C — and it's never rolled C before today — then there's a one-in-twenty chance it picks you out of everyone in that band. That's the whole of it and I can't improve it."

"One in twenty of one in however many." She shrugged with the good shoulder. "I've made worse deliveries."

"Rhea—"

"Don't." She was grinning again. "If you find me, pick somewhere flat. No collapsing buildings, no hillsides, nothing on fire. I'd like a field."

"I've learned not to promise terrain."

"That's the least reassuring sentence anyone's said to me all day, and I've had a busy day."

She was still laughing when the timer took her. One instant she stood beside the workbench; the next, the space was empty. Somewhere in Caldris, she had resumed the same wet rooftop jump with a strained shoulder, a cut thigh, a jammed reel, and medicine for people whose names I didn't know.

The yard was very quiet for a moment.

Then Nell said "well" in a slightly unsteady voice and went to see about the fire, and the children started arguing about whether the chains were real, and Mira picked up the chalk and went back to the wall.

I stood there with an ache I couldn't name. Five hours by my clock. In Caldris, no time had passed, but Rhea returned carrying the injuries and memories of a hillside outside Greyhaven.

[Blind Call Charges: 0/1]

[Natural recovery initiated: 72:00:00.]

I went back to the bench and looked at the map again.

Three resin sites. One collapsed and two untouched, spread across nine kilometres of a quarantine boundary that had been drawn a week ago on the assumption that the mine had one way up.

It hadn't found one road into daylight.

It had been testing a network.

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