Voidhearts Chapter 11: Survivors
Alicia wakes up in the ruins of the void outpost to find her way home destroyed. Together with a frenemy, Alicia must find her way back to Thereafter.
The world, such as it was, materialized around Alicia in fits and starts, like whatever part of her brain was responsible for that sort of thing was lagging out and only processed the strictly vital elements. She was laying on her back, not quite touching some rough surface. The void. She was still in the void, and whatever piece she was on couldn’t be very large, seeing as her body felt no compunction to stay adhered to it as it would by gravity.
“Oh bless the five winds,” Someone spoke just out of the visible world. Alicia thought it was Lia, but she couldn’t be quite sure which. “I thought you’d left us behind for a bit there.” It wasn’t Alicia’s Lia. Even as close as they had been, “her” Lia had never been that open with her emotions, even when she had believed Alicia to be dead or badly wounded.
“I’m still kicking,” Alicia said. Her voice felt gravely, she wasn’t sure if it was from dehydration, the puking, or if the air the void pearl provided really was as dry as it felt.
“Pardon me for saying, Exalted,” Lia said as Alicia sat up, “but seeing as you probably shouldn’t punch things for the foreseeable future, kicking may be a decent replacement.”
“Huh, what do you…” Alicia didn’t get through the question entirely before her eyes fell on her right hand, or what had once been her right hand at any rate. It wasn’t that the appendage was gone or rendered entirely unrecognizable. No, Alicia thought, outright losing the thing would seem less unnerving. Her hand was still in the approximate shape of a hand, and ostensibly made out of the same material, but it felt like the similarities stopped there. It was a blotchy, swollen mess of a thing, marred by deep dark bruises, covered in something that gave it a slimy sheen. It was in part this sheen, in part how a crumbling dent in the flesh made it seem like someone had started trying to chop the thing in half, and in part that try as she might, Alicia could not move her hand, either the individual fingers or any kind of wrist movement, that sent her mind spinning.
“Why… why can’t I move it? Why can’t I feel anything in it?” Alicia felt her voice grow frantic. This wasn’t how it was going to go. She worked out, she shaped her body so that she wouldn’t get sick, wouldn’t get wounded, she was in control of her fate, she was the master of her destiny, that was how it was supposed to go why didn’t it go the way it was supposed to go what had she done wrong wrong wrong…
“Exalted… Exalted… Alica!” Something shook her. Alicia snapped out of the anxious spiral, gasping like she had breached the surface of a cold lake. “You’re going to be fine, look at me, look at me Alicia.”
Alicia didn’t want to look at Lia, she wanted to fall back into this whirlpool of anxieties and let it consume her. It was all she deserved. Still, the force of Lia’s voice dragged her back, and Alicia felt her eyes lift to meet the steppefolk woman.
“I splinted your hand up as well as I could given… the circumstances. That’s why you can’t move it. The numbness comes from a numbing ointment. Enjoy it while you can, I didn’t bring a lot.”
“Oh.” Alicia said, feeling somewhat silly all of a sudden. Now that Lia pointed it out she could see the peace sign-shaped splint that restrained her wrist and fingers with the help of some medical tape from her first aid kit. “Thanks. That’s very handy… pun not intended.”
“You’re not the first of the steppefolk to punch something so hard you break,” Lia said, there was brief humor in her eyes before she turned away. “And we’re going to need to be at our best or close to it if we’re going to make it out of this alive.”
Now able to process the world outside of her immediate proximity, Alicia realized they were on a medium-large rock, rotating lazily somewhere in the outskirts of what had been the detritus cloud. The cloud had, for the lack of a better term, scattered, shot every which way by the sudden introduction of force that had started off this catastrophe. She also realized they were alone.
“Are we the only ones who… survived?” Alicia asked.
“Not sure,” Lia replied curtly. “I saw Beth die, she got run through by three or four fragment shards. They were so fast I didn’t see the shards themselves, just the holes. Logan got pinned between two rocks. It almost looked like he’d be able to wriggle out of it until they sheared him in two. Ade and Tag’Lor… I don’t know. It looked like they made a dash for the port crystal before it got smashed to bits, but I couldn’t make out if they made it or not.
“Wait a second,” Alicia said. “The Port Crystal is destroyed?”
“Damn thing is brittle as hell as it turns out,” Lia said with a shrug. “It didn’t shatter as much as it disintegrated once the big hits started coming.”
“Shit…”
“That’s an accurate summary of our situation,” Lia agreed, there was no humor to her expression.
“We gotta… how are we going to get back to Thereafter?”
“The good news is that it’s right over there,” Lia said as she extended an arm to point to a lone blue star in the void. “And we’re not very likely to lose sight of it.”
“The bad news are that it’s… far.” Alicia said as she got up. The process was both more difficult with only one functioning hand and a general feeling of being put through the wringer, and easier with the close-to-zero gravity.
“Far may be an understatement,” Lia conceded. “… and it’s mostly empty void from how I understand it. Even if we could accurately aim ourselves at it, at this distance, being inches off will send us flying past, we’d never survive the journey.
“You figure we’d, what, die from thirst on the way?”
“Thirst, maybe, or the cold would get us, or any number of things that could collide with us or vice versa.”
“It doesn’t feel cold…” Alicia said, noticing it didn’t feel like any particular temperature in fact.
“It isn’t technically, the lack of air outside the void pearl bubble doesn’t conduct heat, so you don’t lose much of it, but you’ll still lose warmth to that air, and that’ll be plenty over long enough time.”
“You seem very familiar with the various ways this can go wrong,” Alicia observed.
“The first couple of attempts at sending scavengers out were… less safety-minded than what we do now. The bodies we managed to recover taught us some though lessons on what we could and couldn’t do..”
“Right, so we can’t just rough it while going straight there,” Alicia summarized. “So what do we do? Are there any other port crystals nearby?”
“Hard to be sure, I don’t exactly have the maps in my mind,” Lia said, there was a note of tension in her voice. “But I fear that of the outposts I remember, we do not save much distance or time in going for them compared to going to Thereafter.”
“I was afraid of that. It is a weakness of our current system, I guess.”
“I hardly think vulnerability to sudden violent attack where nothing can live is a weakness of note,” Lia’s voice hardened.
“I suppose,” Alicia said. “Then again, while it may be that nothing can live out here, well… we’re here aren’t we.”
“For now,” Lia’s voice was still hard. “Come, we should get going.”
Lia’s first leap was on the long end for a normal person, in zero gravity by a Deep Song user, it was somewhat less impressive, though her aim was pretty good. Alicia took a second to make sure her harness/backpack hadn’t been ripped away from her in the chaos before following suit.
“So this is the plan, is it?” Alica asked as she followed Lia’s path from one shatered piece of world to the next. “Leapfrogging across the asteroids in search of a path home?”
“It’s not much… but I believe it’s our best option. If I’m not entirely mistaken, the journey will take days even under ideal conditions, so we may need to scavenge for food and water along the way.”
“Wow Lia, it almost sounds like you have faith we’ll survive this.”
“I acknowledge the possibility,” Lia answered. “It may or may not be likely, but lying down and waiting for mother death to come claim us isn’t going to help any.”
“Right,” Alicia said, hesitating slightly before making her next leap. It was so unusual to move around in zero, or near-zero, gravity. Sure, it didn’t tax the muscles much, but there was so much harder to predict ones trajectory, and considering how missing a jump could mean one was sent tumbling into the void, Alicia was careful to make sure she didn’t miss. “I suppose sitting put and waiting for rescue is a bit optimistic.”
“Yes,” Lia answered, her tone blunt, not taking the implied question into account. “Even if Ade and Tag’Lor made it home to let everyone know what happened, it’d take days to get a new port crystal out here the old way, and our plans to launch crystals at high velocity just aren’t ready yet.
“It is the kind of thing we’d do back home I think, but man is there a lot of math to it.”
“So many numbers,” Lia agreed. “But I guess that even if one could, throwing a spear three days as the windbird flies and hitting your mark wouldn’t be easy either.”
It was hard to keep track of time in the void. With no sun to define days and extrapolate hours into, or other predictable movement to measure times by, Alicia found herself counting jumps. It wasn’t perfect, some jumps were long, flying through empty space for what felt like minutes, while others were almost comically small, skipping from one fragmen to the other like jumping over a pond or small river. Seeing as she had nothing else to measure either time or distance with, Alicia settled on the somewhat counterintuitive measure of Jumps per Jump. On the bright side, they kept a steady clip of one jump per jump, and the consistency was, if nothing else, predictable.
All the while, Alicia and Lia kept as close together as they could manage. They couldn’t follow each other exactly, seeing as every landing and every launch had an effect on the fragments’ position and velocity. Most of the time it wasn’t dramatic but once in a while Alicia would kick off from a smaller fragment and it’d send it flying, or Lia would land on one hard enough to change its path through the void. For the first little while, it was hard to stay out of each other’s way entirely, but over the following thirty to fifty jumps, a sort of provisoric voidspace sharing agreement developed between them.
“We should take a break,” Lia said as their parts came close to merging some eighty jumps into the journey.
“Why? Are you tired?” Alicia didn’t mean to make it sound like a challenge, but there was some vestigial part of her PT persona in her brain that felt like shaping it in that direction.
“Not physically, but figuring all these jumps out are making my brain fog up,” Lia said, “and judging by how you almost missed with the last three jumps, I get the feeling you’re not feeling so hot either.”
Alicia wanted to say that she was fine, but she couldn’t lie to herself. Lia was right. It was one hell of a brain workout to navigate the vast, mostly empty world of the Void.
“Fair enough,” Alicia conceded. “See that big bean-shaped one up ahead? Let’s take a break there.”
Once she settled down Alicia really felt how tired she was. It wasn’t as physically taxing to travel on earth out here in the void, but she could feel multiple muscles getting stiff and sore. No wonder really, even as fit as she was, she had trained in earthlike conditions all her life, and this free-floating form of travel required using a bunch of muscles in ways they clearly weren’t intended for. Then there was the brain fog. Alicia couldn’t describe the mind-tiredness any other way, except maybe mental myopia-inducing tiredness. Everything outside of the bean fragment seemed floaty and unreal to her, like her mind refused to entirely accept its existence.
“It’s… different, moving out here I mean,” Alicia said. She didn’t want to admit struggling, but she was very tired and couldn’t think of anything else to talk about.
“Yes,” Lia agreed. “I have yet to get use to it myself.”
“Are you thirsty?”
“No.”
Alicia hesitated at this as she retrieved one of her water bottles from her pack. She was parched, and while it was possible the steppefolk woman was simply more used to being thirsty, it seemed somewhat incongruous to Alicia that Lia wasn’t thirsty at all.
“Are you… sure? You can have some water, no problem.”
“I’m fine Mountain Wind, really.”
“Yeah but are you just saying that because you’re stubborn and worried about our water situation, or are you actually fine.”
“I do not appreciate you questioning my intentions Exalted.” Lia’s voice held a note of warning, which Alicia wasted no time entirely ignoring.
“And I do not appreciate self-sacrifice for no good reason. Have some damn water.”
“Do not presume to know my limits you mewling child, I have seen droughts that would ossify your heart-blood.”
Hot, sharp anger rose up in Alicia, filling her mind with righteous fire… but no Deep Song, in fact her reactions reared from it like from a hot stoveplate. She wasn’t sure what part of her had drawn the conclusion, but whatever part it was had convinced the rest of her. Whatever had happened, the Deep Song had been part of it, and until she knew the hows and whys, she didn’t want to draw on it at all. It was unfortunate, as it left her anger nowhere to go. Alicia swallowed a mouthful of water. It felt bitter and oily going down.
Moments passed in silence as Alicia brought herself down from the anger spike. It was slow work, and frustrating. It was Lia who had snapped at her, why should Alicia take the burn of tapering down her very reasonable reaction to it? Fair or not, though, the situation had to de-escalate, and the thing about de-escalating was that it sucked and that you couldn’t leave it to the other part to start the process. Alicia usually felt proud that she didn’t turn anger inward, but she had to concede that on occasion, one simply had to take the shit job.
Enough time passed that it felt like a new conversation when Lia spoke up again. “I’m sorry for calling you a child, that was unkind of me,” she said. “I will inform you when I am thirsty, on that you have my word.”
“Sure,” Alicia said. It felt like a shitty passive-aggressive way of accepting the concession, but it was all that she could make herself do at the moment. Beside, there was only so much else she could do. She was used to dealing with her fellow Exalted Heroes who, for all their flaws, were decently aware of their baggage, as Milennials tended to be. Lia wasn’t just from another time, she was from another world, and Alicia couldn’t claim to know the culture and traditions that shaped her worldview. Even as an important, maybe even pivotal figure in Steppefolk history, Alicia didn’t belong there, among them. Still, she found herself thinking, Lia was acting cagey. There was some kind of something going on with her, and the fact that Alicia didn’t know what that was stressed her more than whatever had gone down at the port crystal.
After yet another silence, the approximate length of ten jumps, Alicia stretched her arms and shoulders, at least as much as she could without disturbing her hand, which had started pulsing with pain that Alicia could only describe as ominous. “Ah. Are you about ready to keep going?” Alicia asked. She did her level best to sound neither worried nor angry, but she felt she did an at best passng job at it.
“Yes, we should get going before we stiffen up. We’ll need a longer rest, but we shouldn’t take that before we’ve had the chance to scavenge some supplies. Once the field gets denser we should start looking for that kind of stuff.” Lia sounded like she had a plan, and the fact that Alicia knew for a fact that they were both improvising based on limited intel did fortunately not change that much.
“Sounds like a plan,” Alicia said, pointedly ignoring the voice in the back of her head that added ‘which is impressive considering it isn’t one.’
Author’s Note: This chapter wasn’t difficult to write in the technical sense, but I did struggle with it quite a bit. Setting up a good, novel-long argument is challenging to my notorious conflict-averse brain, but I think I managed to make something workable out of it. In general I tend to think more highly of the chapters I struggle with than the ones that just kind of happen. Is it the satisfaction of passing some hurdle or other? Or is it that adversity truly breeds excellence? It could also be some secret third thing, mind.
Join me next time, when Alicia tries her hand at foraging in the void, and surely nothing else goes wrong.
VSD