Death Cultivator by eden Hudson (knowledgeable books to read .txt) 📗

I paused halfway to picking up another marble. “No way. You guys are third-genners. You can buy your way off Van Diemann if you keep clean records. You’re not getting slapped with a criminal label because of me.”

“Hake,” Rali said, “we just attacked the OSS, stole their script remote, kidnapped their hooligan and indentured servant, and destroyed their very costly Transferogate. We’re not getting out of this alive without an affiliation to someone much bigger and stronger.”

“But...” I felt sick to my stomach, and I couldn’t tell whether it was partly due to the exhaustion or a hundred percent because I’d sucked my friends into something they’d been avoiding their whole lives. “Kest, what about your plan to work for a major manufacturer?”

She shrugged. “This will give me a fallback option if I don’t get headhunted for my builds. The Big Five have connections to all the major corporations—the Technols more than anybody. If I get in with them, I’ll have access to so much more material and censored information. And not having to stay away from contraband anymore will really open up my build options.”

I dragged my hands through my hair. There was probably a way to push back against this, but after all the fighting and running and strategizing and chaos marble storing, my brain felt like a corroded battery. I wished I had chugged that Coffee Drank back in Kest’s workshop. It was probably still sitting on her workbench, going to waste.

“I notice you didn’t say anything about my hopes and dreams,” Rali said, elbowing me.

“Do you have hopes and dreams?” I asked.

“Not really.” He grinned. “I just like to be included.”

I huffed out a laugh, then shook my head. “Fine.”

“Fine, we’ll do it?” Kest asked.

I shrugged. “Yeah, fine, riot bracket small gang fight. Whatever it takes. We’re probably all on the Bailiff’s hit list now, anyway.”

“Oi,” Warcry snapped. “I didn’t say I’d do bleed all.”

“Honestly, dude, I don’t give a crap what you do.” I picked up the last of the marbles and started absorbing them. “Go beg the Bailiff for your spot back if you don’t think you can win at the tournament. The rest of us—”

“I could win the Territorial in my sleep, grav. I just ain’t joining no small-time riot bracket. I fight alone.”

“Then we need to get to work.” I looked at Kest. “How many pickaxes did you say you had?”

“Only one,” she said. “But I’ve got the components to make a sledgehammer and stake, too.”

Blocking the Signal

WE TOOK TURNS CHIPPING away at the rock, one person resting while the other three worked. Most of the night, Kest worked the pickaxe, and Rali, Warcry and I traded off swinging the sledgehammer and holding the long metal stake in place. That last job was the scariest, especially when the person wielding the sledge started to get tired and sloppy, so the sledge and stake person swapped out a lot. After making it a few feet into the wall, the broken rock underfoot got to be a hindrance, so Rali stopped swapping into the sledge team and started clearing it out.

When Rali wasn’t working, he spent his time infusing food with his All-Nighter Erasing ability. All we had to eat was some dried fish and fruit Kest kept in her storage ring, the last of a batch Rali’d made for when they were scavenging down in the Shut-Ins. I wasn’t a huge fan of fish, but I was so hungry by the time Rali called us over to eat that it tasted like heaven.

With the first bite, the burning ache in my shoulders and back eased off, and energy flowed in, waking my drained muscles back up. Even my throbbing, scraped-up fingers from Warcry’s most recent missed swing stopped hurting so much.

“Sage Rali, you’re a genius,” I said, scarfing down a handful.

Warcry looked reluctantly impressed as he chewed. “What’re you, then, some kind of Organic supertype with Healing affinity?”

“Heart Spirit,” Rali said. “But I specialized my kishotenketsu to Warm Heart when I got to the Ten stage.”

“Restrictions or covenants?” Warcry asked.

“Restrictions. I can use it for others’ gain, but not my own.”

“What does all that mean?” I asked. “I haven’t read anything about changing your Spirit from one thing to another.”

“Specialization doesn’t change your affinity,” Kest said between bites. “It narrows your range of abilities, but makes each one more powerful, kind of like the stake concentrates the force of the sledgehammer in one spot. Focus it, and you can penetrate farther, faster.”

Rali nodded. “If you decide to specialize, you either do it by restricting your Spirit or making a covenant with it. Break the promise or step outside the boundaries you set, and you lose your specialized abilities. In some extreme cases, all but your most basic levels of kishotenketsu can be destroyed.” He gestured at Warcry. “You’re specialized, too. Something from the Entropic supertype, right?”

“Hatred Spirit,” Warcry said. “I specialized it to Burning Hatred last year.”

“Is it possible to put restrictions on such a chaotic supertype?” Rali asked.

Warcry shrugged. “I went with covenant.”

No one asked Warcry what his covenant was, and he didn’t put it out there like Rali had, so I figured it was probably an unspoken rule that you didn’t pry into something like that.

The Spirit boost from the food made the rockbreaking go a lot faster when we got back to it. No one said much, but you could feel that everybody was throwing everything they had into tunneling.

We’d already gone about twenty feet in when Kest lowered her pickaxe and said, “We’re idiots.”

I stopped the sledge midswing and turned to face her.

“The second we step out of the Shut-Ins, the OSS is going to be standing there waiting for us.” Kest pointed at me, then Warcry. “They’ll be watching the trackers in your tattoos.”

“What do we do?” I rested the sledge’s handle against my leg and shook some of the sting out of my hands, then looked down at the tattoo on my