The Stargazer's War - Chapter 25

Chapter 25: Seize the Day

Martha Vesper chewed the inside of her cheek as she moved through the faux candle lit hallway to the reception area ahead. The calming music and scent of incense in the air did little to balm her nerves.

Her parents and personal tutor walked behind her, flanking her on either side as they both showed their support and cut off her only avenue of retreat. She was going through with this one way or another.

The two lesser qi absorption pills she’d already taken churned in her nerve-addled stomach. She’d have to cleanse herself of their byproducts later, but today all that mattered was getting together enough qi for what she needed to do.

At the age of fifteen, Martha had long fallen behind her brother’s record setting pace, a fact her father had no intention of letting her forget. At least now that Nick had squandered his advantage refusing to fight his way up the ranks, in theory the comparison fell more in her favor.

In practice it left her the sole scion of her parents’ expectations. She’d swallowed more expensive pills, drank more exotic teas, chewed more spiritual herbs than she could count, leaving her in a constant state of simultaneous explosive growth and painful recovery as she repaired the havoc such treatments wrought on one’s spirit.

Threads, they’d even siphoned their focus hours to her, actively forfeiting the upkeep on their own cultivation to further accelerate her advancement. Their copper cores would wither and weaken, eventually falling to tin if they kept this up, all so she could have the extra focus hour a week that all sect members received once they aged out of the cadet program. Between the two of them, it doubled her qi input.

Martha hated it.

She hated having that unfair advantage over her peers. She hated constantly being dragged out of bed at odd hours to go cultivate. She hated the realization that she only received such gifts because Nick had rejected them.

Most of all she hated the power it gave them over her, the power to dominate her training, her time, her thoughts. There’d been a time in Martha’s life when she’d considered herself her own person, and individual fighting her own battles even as her parents urged her ever forward.

They’d since freed her of that delusion. How could she give anything but her all after what they’d sacrificed, what they continued to sacrifice, in her name? How could she seek leisure, explore her own wants, make friends, when every minute spent outside of meditation or combat training was a minute squandering her parents’ gifts?

A familiar twinge of pain brought her back to the present, a sharp cramp in the space between the knuckles of her right hand. Martha sucked air through her teeth and sent a thread of qi through her spine meridian, but it did little good. Sure, it settled the constant ache at the injection sites into a dull warmth, but the spirit couldn’t dampen nerves that weren’t there.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted to shout that maybe, just maybe, the loss of her hand should’ve bought her some leeway, some mercy, rather than the relentless drive to make up for it, to overcome, to use this adversity as if her trauma were little more than a currency to be spent.

But she didn’t.

Martha could understand why Nick had made the decisions he had. She could even respect his courage to reject their parents’ sacrifice.

But she couldn’t, under any circumstances, follow suit. She wasn’t that brave. She wasn’t that certain in her wants. She wasn’t that weak.

So, her stomach churning, her phantom hand aching, and her nerves a jumble, Martha Vesper let her mother speak for her as the reached the front of the check-in line.

“Hello. My daughter would like open her muscle meridian today.”

——

I pushed open the door to the third floor bathroom with my left hand, my right occupied holding up the towel around my waist. Halfway down the hall its corner had slipped off my bony hip, coming untucked and nearly falling to the floor before I caught it.

Strictly, there was nobody there to see me accidentally expose myself, but Elder Lopez’s stunt with the footage of my encounter with the void beasts had left me deeply aware of the dormitory’s security cameras. The actual bedrooms and bathrooms maintained their privacy, and I doubted anyone was actually watching the housing D third floor hallway, but you never know.

Nick and Xavier were already waiting for me inside, leaning against the wall facing the showers.

“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” Xavier asked. “You have a warrior’s spirit, but this feels… rushed.”

“He’s cleared the trial run, hasn’t he? That sounds like ready to me.”

“Sure, but only once,” Xavier countered, a disquieting uncertainty to his tone. “The muscle meridian can be unpredictable. I went through a dozen trial runs before taking my attempt.”

Nick shrugged. “I didn’t.”

“Of course you didn’t,” I said.” What kind of child prodigy takes his time?”

“My parents had me try for it as soon as I could cobble together the qi. You’ve got the qi.”

I flashed a grin. “That I do.” I slung my towel over the hook on the door and stepped into the shower, sending a pulse of qi through my skin meridian to inoculate me against the frigid water that rained down in the first few seconds after turning the knob. It was a frivolous use of qi, but why cultivate if I couldn’t use it to be frivolous?

Xavier raised an eyebrow at me as my skin flashed deathly pale then crept back up to its regular, sickly pallidity. He didn’t comment.

All the way up on the nearly abandoned third floor, the warm water took a few moments to arrive. It soothed my sore and nervous body quite effectively. Pleasant as it felt, I Nick and Xavier hadn’t come to watch me enjoy a nice hot shower, so I went straight to work.

Crosslegged, straight-backed, hands folded in my lap, I sat on directly the tile floor, bare and unequipped, ready for the challenge to come.

In case you’re wondering, as I did when I first researched this process, why nobody bothers to restrain themselves before making all their muscles go haywire, the answer is circulation. Since the tendon and bone meridians are both absolutely necessary to survive the procedure, nobody at this stage in their cultivation—including me—had the capacity to also cycle their blood or heart.

Any physical restraints carried the fundamental risk of cutting off circulation when pulled upon with the full force of a seizing muscle for extended periods of time, a risk someone in the throws of opening a meridian wouldn’t necessarily notice until it was too late. Apparently, in ye olden days, cultivators with all ten fingers were considered prodigies.

Okay, that last bit may or may not have been pure myth, but it sounds cool, doesn’t it?

Anyway, seated at my usual soggy perch, with my two guardians to watch over me and warm water running down my back, I evened out my breathing, sank into my center, and got started.

——

Martha forcibly stilled her bouncing knee as the two techs fitted her for qi monitors. Ten times she’d been through this process, and ten times she’d shivered with discomfort as hands clad in latex gloves pressed the cold silver sensors onto her exposed skin.

Luca, her personal tutor—another “gift” she’d inherited from Nick—stood over her, a glass of water in one hand and a blue pill bottle in the other. “Three of these next,” he explained, handing over a set of matching red and white capsules nearly half the size of her pinky.

Martha took them without question.

“Okay, now this one.” A white tablet with dull brown specks.

“Excellent. Now, we’re going to have to put on the qi bridge before you can take the paralytics.” Without looking away, he raised his right hand, snapped three times, and waved someone over. “You’re going to want your spine meridian for this one.”

Martha sullenly nodded and obeyed, running qi through her most used meridian as she raised her right arm for the approaching tech. She shut her eyes before it happened, but not in time to avoid seeing the pair two-inch probes, each nearly a quarter inch thick at their base, that would have to sink into her flesh to bridge her severed tendon meridian.

How she hated that thing.

It was a crude, inefficient solution that would hemorrhage qi over long term use, but it’d work for long enough to keep her body intact through the next hour.

Every challenge is an opportunity, she reminded herself as heat and pain flared down her arm, even muffled behind her active cycling. Every challenge is an opportunity. Every challenge is an opportunity.

It certainly didn’t feel that way, especially not as she opened her eyes to see the enchanted metal stuck to the end of her arm where her hand should’ve been. The tech wrapped it with bandages to stem the bleeding at the two entry sites. It was her third time equipped with the device. It hadn’t gotten easier.

“Okay, now here’s the paralytic.” Luca shoved another tablet into her hand, this time a dusty yellow one the size of her fingernail. “It won’t help with the seizures but will stop you from overcorrecting them. Remember, this isn’t about keeping tense. It’s about keeping still.”

Martha took it. She knew her parents had gone through the regimen with Luca and opted for anything and everything with even the slightest chance of helping.

“Great,” Luca said as she took one last gulp of water and handed him the glass. “Now get into position before it takes effect. You have…” He glanced at his holopad. “Thirty-eight minutes. You’ve got this.”

He patted her on the shoulder, a contact against which her instincts tried to flinch, but her body failed to react. Threads, that paralytic worked fast.

She kept her spine going as she sank into her center, holding the pain in her arm at bay as she pushed her spiritual senses outward into the room around her.

The air felt alive.

Warmth and life and joy danced across the focus room, a wondrous mist of everything good in the world. Martha breathed it in.

Time to get to work.

She opened up her center and pulled upon the qi in the air, exerting her hard trained will upon it. It resisted.

It danced away, sprang to far walls, expanded to fill the space as best it could. Martha wrestled with it, ironclad effort that bit by bit drew in the vital force and contained it within her spirit. Here, the qi absorption pills earned their keep, the chemicals within attracting the energy into little eddies which Martha readily reaped. By the time she had enough, sweat dripped down her brow.

Next, she pushed.

With practiced technique she formed a sphere of intent around her center, trapping the qi within. In and in and in she forced it, fighting tooth and nail against its tendency to spread, to move, to escape. It struggled against her and she struggled back, unyielding in her endeavor to further constrain and condense until—

Drip.

A single drop fell to join the shallow puddle at the bottom of her center, a bright and prismatic liquid that glimmered like a diamond and exuded life-giving warmth.

Now for the hard part.

——

I began by reaching my spiritual senses out past the edge of the shower, past Nick’s and Xavier’s blinding cores, and through the back wall into the vacuum beyond. The infinite sea awaited, cold and dark and overflowing as ever. I tasted but a drop, topping off my qi reserves.

It condensed to join my own pool easily enough. It only wanted to sit and exist, content to bend or move or flow as the world around it saw fit.

Next, I set about cycling my bones and tendons, fortifying them both and tightening the latter as I’d practiced so many times. I allowed myself a few moments to settle in to the action, letting the minutes tick away until I felt comfortable diverting some attention. I’d set aside three hours for this attempt, plenty of time to open the meridian and get cleaned up.

Nick and Xavier probably would’ve preferred if I didn’t waste too much time, but I knew they wouldn’t want me to rush.

Only once I was good and ready did I form the familiar needle-and-thread shape, press it to the meridian entrance just above my left glute, and began to push.

Immediate tension shot through me as my muscles spasmed in protest. Massive soreness sent waves of aching up my back, as if I’d somehow managed the perfect full-body workout and now paid the price.

Except I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t relax or rest as over and over again I tensed and seized with no pattern or rhythm. Black ichor seeped from the wiry cords of tissue, wreaking havoc as it passed both into my blood stream and through my pores.

I kept going. Of course I kept going. The experience was a bit more… intense than I’d expected, but I could handle it. I’d passed the trial run after all.

I could feel myself rocking back and forth as I quaked, the hard ceramic beneath me grinding painfully against my tailbone with the motion. I shut it out.

The water ran down my back.

My right leg kicked out, my foot traveling just an inch along the shower floor my gridlocked physique reigned it in.

I was moving. The uneven twitches across my body sent me sliding across the wet tile.

Still I pushed, splitting my focus three ways as I ran qi simultaneously through three meridians, two freely, and one against the resistance of two decades of built-up grime. I isolated my senses, segmenting the soreness from the warmth of the shower from the ache in my tailbone from my internal qi, defending myself from distractions as that cleansing thread wormed ever forward.

It’d almost completed its first loop when the unthinkable happened.

My imperfect stillness and my inching motion across the shower floor sent the ball of my ankle across the metal drain grate at the perfect angle.

Pain, sharp and sudden and insidious shot through my foot as the drain sliced into it, sharp enough to break skin, dull enough to tear it. It took under a second to notice the injury, to parse the sensation of rent flesh and flowing blood before I could dismiss that too as a distraction from the task at hand.

But a half second was enough.

A second burst of agony bloomed, this time from a tendon in my lower back weakened by my momentary lapse. Before I could think, before I could stop, before even panic could reach my mind, a muscle, no longer contained by the bone to which it’d been bound, seized.

I shot backwards.

My head hit the wall.

I heard a terrible crack.

And the world went dark.

——

Before she could begin, Martha first had to forfeit the mercy of her spine. It proved harder than she’d expected, stopping the flow of qi and allowing the pain of the device stuck into her arm to return, an exertion of will unto itself rather than the simple cessation of effort it should’ve been.

Any other day she might’ve considered that an excellent sign of both progress and readiness to tackle her brain meridian. Today, it meant only more work.

She pushed past the torment easily enough. Even inexperienced with the bridge as she was, pain in her hand had been Martha’s only constant over the last few months. More or less of it made little difference.

Next, she meticulously divided her qi into three pools, carefully rationing her limited supply between the two meridians that would need constant feeding and the one that would claim the rest. Without a moment to spare, she set the first to cycling at once.

As in her practice, qi flowed unsteadily through her tendon meridian, seeping out where it left and reentered her body at the probes embedded in her flesh. She’d overcome it then and she’d overcome it now.

Her bone meridian similarly ran below capacity, picking up impurities left behind by the various pills abrading against them. That also, was nothing new.

Martha didn’t drop a beat before collecting up what remained of her qi, crafting her purging formation, and getting to work.

She barely twitched as the seizures set in, her reinforced skeleton taking the brunt of the force as the paralytics stopped her from trying to fight it. Impurities fell away freely from the walls of her meridian, loosened by the expensive meridian cleansing pill her father had provided.

Martha snaked her qi thread through the clogged meridian with well-rehearsed restraint, pushing solidly and consistently against every bit of resistance without rushing to finish or dragging to reduce the ache.

The focus tonic she’d downed at breakfast kept her mind on task, away from her churning stomach and mounting headache, neither of which, as far as she knew, were side effects of opening the muscle meridian.

At every step in the way, Martha worked with practiced perfection. Her qi rations were measured, her attention unwavering, her technique flawless in its execution.

So it came as a surprise when a micro-movement in her lower forearm muscles pushed the qi bridge ever so slightly out of place. It rebounded immediately, the flow through her tendon meridian recovering in under a second.

But a half second was enough.

Burning, jagged agony exploding in her right shoulder. She compartmentalized at once, reasserting her focus and halting the progress of qi through her muscle meridian. The spasms didn’t stop, but they lessened as the qi remained unmoving within the partially-opened meridian. She’d trained for this.

The shouts reached Martha’s ears through the glass that separated the observation room. She sat tight, even as her arm flailed wildly and painfully around her.

Help was on the way.

——

Xavier Honchel shifted his weight between his feet as he tried and failed to argue away the sinking feeling that’d lingered in his stomach since he’d awoken that morning. The foreboding instinct made no sense. Cal was going to be at his side when he fought as champion of the Dragon’s Right Eye, so it stood to reason the outsystemer wouldn’t die today.

Unless Xavier found a way to bring him back from the dead. Wouldn’t that make an enthralling tale! Through sheer grit and determination, the hero defies the gods to pluck his dear friend’s soul back from the very threads themselves!

He entertained himself with the possibility as the minutes ticked by, pleased with the distraction from the looming impression that something wasn’t right. He trusted Cal would be okay. Cal had a warrior’s spirit, after all.

Nick’s third forlorn exhale of the afternoon pulled him from his reverie.

“Fret not, young newcomer,” Xavier replied to Nick’s clear statement. “However distant it may seem, through perseverance, all battles shall end in glorious victory.”

“I-um… what?”

“You were saying…”

“I wasn’t saying anything,” Nick snapped. “I was breathing. I’m aloud to breathe, right?”

Xavier blinked. Why did people tell him things they didn’t want him to respond to? “Uh… of course. Apologies. I thought you meant to—”

Crack.

Xavier spun to the source of the noise. He saw Caliban slide down the the shower’s back wall, water running down his chest as his crossed legs slide forward across the floor. Next, he saw the cracks in the tile behind him.

Finally, he saw the blood.

Xavier surged forward, falling to his knees at Cal’s side and snaking his left arm under the foreigner. He effortlessly siphoned qi from his tin core through the necessary meridians to more than overcome Cal’s apparent impulse to flop his lower back around like a fish. Wrapping his hand around the base of Cal’s skull, he held his bleed ahead away from the wall, away from further damage.

“Caliban! Caliban, can you hear me?”

No response.

He reached with his right hand for Cal’s eyes, tugging open their lids to find two unfocusing orbs beneath. “Threads, he’s unconscious. Nick! Call a transport!”

“That’s… that’s a lot of blood.”

“Nick! A transport! Now!”

“I—yeah. Yes. A transport.”

Xavier didn’t look up to watch the kid swipe at his holopad. Instead, he carefully ran a finger along the back of Cal’s head, finding blood and shards of ceramic that’d stuck there, but soft spots. “He’s skull’s not fractured. Thank the threads he kept his bone meridian up, but there’s a chance he’s bleeding in his brain. How’s that transport?”

“It’s-um… eleven minutes out.”

“Eleven minutes. Okay. C’mon Cal. It’s only eleven minutes. You can make it eleven minutes.”

——

Within seconds Martha had four pairs of hands on her, restraining her arm, securing the qi bridge, injecting deadening agents into the relevant muscle. She’d lose muscle tissue over this.

“It’s okay,” Luca told her. “It’s okay. We talked about this. You did well. We’re going to implant an emergency patch to repair the tendon. That’ll mean killing off a good chunk of your deltoid so the medics can work. It won’t be pleasant, but it’s the safest way to continue. I need you to keep cycling. Can you do that?”

He knew full well Martha couldn’t respond, not through her focus on cycling through the pain, and certainly not through the paralytic. She simply obeyed.

She heard metal tools clanging together on a tray, felt another needle inject ice into her shoulder, and braced herself as best she could. At least for this, they could afford the severance of body from spirit that numbing agents inflicted. That bit of muscle wouldn’t be a part of her much longer.

Martha experienced little more than pressure and heat as they cut into her and applied their patch. They wiped the blood from her back, patched up the millimeter-wide hole through which they’d threaded their tools, and walked away as if they hadn’t just condemned her to yet another long and painful recovery. Threads, it’d probably be months before she could even move her arm again, a year before she’d fully regain her strength.

But Martha didn’t break.

She didn’t collapse, she didn’t wallow, she brooked no cracks in the dam she’d long built up. Not a single tear dared well within her emerald eyes.

Martha sat up straight. Martha kept her focus. And, once she received confirmation from Luca, Martha got back to work.

——

“—And then I reversed into The Dragon Rears Its Head before he could raise his quarterstaff in time, and earned another glorious victory!”

Xavier rambled. About anything and everything that came to his mind he rambled—mostly tales of his glorious victories. He had a lot of those.

Cal wasn’t listening. Cal was unconscious. Cal was still unconscious. On he rambled.

“Nick, how long has it been?”

“Twelve minutes.”

“You said it would only be eleven!”

“Well, now it says they’re eight minutes away.”

“Threads be—” Xavier shook his head before he could utter the curse. “Run downstairs. Tell reception they’re coming and where we are. I don’t want them getting lost.”

Nick froze, eyes wide as dinner plates, then bolted from the bathroom.

“C’mon, Cal,” Xavier spoke to the twitching form in his arms. “Just eight more minutes. Just eight more minutes.”

He paused and took a breath.

“Have I told you about my glorious victory against Wesley Blum?”

——

The seizures stopped all at once.

A brief shiver of warmth and wonder ran down Martha’s back as every muscle in her body thrummed with energy and power, practically begging to leap into action at a moment’s notice.

Every muscle except one.

She cut off the flow of qi, allowing the liquid light to fall from her three meridians back into her center. Scratch that. She wove up another thread and ran it into her spine meridian, finding some semblance of relief for the pain in her stump and shoulder. Funnily enough, both still hurt. Next came her blood and kidneys to cleanse herself of the paralytic, finally freeing her to move again of her own volition.

By the time her eyes flicked open, two mortal techs were already approaching with bandages, antiseptics, and a syringe of intradermal sealant. Luca followed.

“You did well,” Luca told her as the techs got to work removing the qi bridge and closing the two holes its probes had made. “It’s a shame about your deltoid. We’ll have to reevaluate your training schedule to accommodate for regrowth treatments and physical therapy. I’ll schedule a surgery to remove the dead tissue tomorrow, and we can work from there. Your combat training will take another hit, so you’ll have to work extra hard to…”

Martha tuned him out. His halfhearted praise meant little to her, especially undercut by his immediate thoughts on her newest disability.

A knot forming in her throat, Martha turned her head to look over her damaged shoulder, past the dark blue flesh at the window to the observation room. Her parents stood within.

No pride looked back at her.

Her mother refused to meet her gaze, eyes flitting down or to the sides, looking anywhere and everywhere that wasn’t at Martha. Her father had no such qualms.

With frigid eyes he looked upon his daughter, his legacy, the vessel in which he’d entrusted the entirety of his bid to flail against infinity, twice crippled in the span of a few months.

He bore look Martha had seen upon his face but once, absent his customary ire or exhaustion or disappointment. It’d harrowed her then, even directed upon someone else. Here, she felt its full force.

It was neither the pills in her stomach nor the stench of purged toxins on her skin nor even the weight of the setback she’d just experienced that set her off, but the heart-wrenchingly hopeless sorrow in his eyes.

With a newly-opened meridian, with her tutor standing over her making plans for the future, with five minutes left in her allotted focus room time, Martha vomited on the floor in front of her.

Then even her father looked away.

——

Xavier’s anxiety had reached its peak by the time three paramedics and a gurney crashed through the bathroom door. The woman in front dashed right up to Cal.

“How long has he been seizing?”

“He’s been unconscious for nineteen minutes,” Nick answered from the doorway, carefully dodging the question.

“And he’s been seizing this whole time?”

Xavier nodded.

She wrapped a hand around each of Cal’s bony ankles, one soaking wet and the other slick with blood. “Randy, Joe, get his arms.” She looked to Xavier. “Keep on his head. That he’s been non-responsive this long isn’t a good sign. How’s his skull?”

“Okay, I think.”

She shook her head. “You cultivators… Let’s hope we can get a needle into him.” She waited for her subordinates to arrive and support Cal’s back and take over Xavier’s job restraining his arms before she spoke again. “Alright, let’s get him out of here. Three, two, one, lift!”

Xavier did little more than keep Cal’s head up and away from the walls as the paramedics expertly lifted him from the slippery tile and moved for the gurney. A few tense seconds later, they had him on the cushioned surface, strapped down to limit his back’s continued wild bucking.

They got moving immediately, one paramedic checking him over while another injected him with medication and the third pushed the gurney. Nick and Xavier followed them down the hallway.

“Jaw’s clenched tight. Probably hasn’t bit his tongue off, but I can’t get a guard in there. Joe! Where’s my scanner?”

“In the pod.”

“Alright. We’ll have to settle for baseline biometrics for now. You’ve got his pad?”

“Confirming now,” the other paramedic, Randy, said as he tapped away at Cal’s holopad.

“Is he going to be okay?” Nick tried to ask.

“Too soon to tell,” the woman answered. “I’ll need a scan to see how bad his brain is swelling. Do you know what happened?”

“He slipped and fell,” Xavier lied. It wasn’t even a good lie. He absolutely reeked of meridian grime, but the mortal medics wouldn’t dare question a sect member. They were smart enough to figure out how to treat him. Xavier just needed to control what went into the report.

The paramedics didn’t respond.

They burst from the elevator into the lobby to an already growing crowd of onlookers, cultivators with apparently nothing better to do than gawk at the medical emergency in their midst. Xavier snarled at them for their laziness. At least nobody got in the way.

One of the paramedics—Joe, she’d called him—waved Nick and Xavier back as they loaded Cal into the transport pod. “No ride-alongs. You can see him in trauma center three once he’s out of surgery.”

Xavier didn’t argue. Nick wasn’t even looking at the man.

Only once Cal’s gurney was secured to the specialized mount inside the ambulance pod did either of them speak.

“Holy shit.”

“Nick!” Xavier glared at the kid. Mortally wounded or otherwise, Cal really was a bad influence on the lad.

“No, look!” He pointed into the pod.

Xavier squinted, craning his head to get one last look at Caliban before the door closed between them.

“The seizures stopped,” Nick explained.

“That’s good. The meds are taking eff—” Xavier cut off. Meridian-opening seizures didn’t respond to medication.

“He’s been seizing this whole time and now he’s stopped. Do you think that means…”

“By the threads.” There upon the transport platform, his uniform soaked in water and blood and meridian gunk, adrenaline coursing through his veins as he watched the emergency pod whisk his friend away, Xavier smiled.

Nick’s eyes widened. “While unconscious?”

Xavier clapped him on the back. “I told you he has a warrior’s spirit.”

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