Bec’s heart was racing as she pressed her back to the door of her trailer. “W-w-what the fuck was that.”

“I think it was a wolf,” Al said.

“I know that! What the fuck was that? Did you see how it—” A chair squeaked. Bec’s heart nearly exploded. AAAAH, DID THAT CHAIR MOVE?

Bec lifted her arms into a combat stance and backed into the corner between the sink and the wall by the door and saw nothing in the room. After a few seconds, she sighed in relief, stepped out of the corner, and her left leg was pulled out from under her.

Falling back, nearly cracking her head on the metallic corner of the sink, there were sounds of her calf ripping as it was pulled towards the center of the room. She looked at the leg, seeing it ooze blood from a mass of punctures. She kicked away with her good leg uselessly. Feeling nothing, she kicked relentlessly at the invisible thing dragging her but felt no impact. Suddenly, the pull on her leg stopped and a chair got knocked over a few feet away. Her leg shot with pain, and she cried out.

“Bec, it’s the wolf. We can’t see it.” Bec grabbed at the leg and saw that the punctures were, indeed, a row of teeth marks that tore down her calf.

“No, I think it’s something worse. [Echo].” Bec slid her phone into the center of the room, and it started to click. Pulling herself up, pain shot through her leg as she put weight on the injury.

Bec felt the room. She knew it pretty well after practicing, and she felt nothing odd. “I literally can’t fee—” Bec bowled over and she threw her hands up to protect her face and neck. Her dominant arm shook violently out of her control, and she started to roll towards her bed, seeing the club leaning on the nightstand.

Even though her movements indicated that there was some invisible mass that she was wrestling with, her brain just felt like she stopped her own arm, tumbling up and over nothing, and punching air. There was no sense of resistance when she struck at the thing tearing at her arm. Every hit felt empty.

She rolled hard into the bed frame with a clang and a squeal of metal. She swung her arm and what she presumed was the wolf’s head into the corner of the steel bedframe. The violent tugging stopped, and her arm fell to her chest uselessly. Pain, held back by some unknown mechanism, finally rippled up her arm. She grabbed the club and started swinging at the air wildly as she laid on the ground. “How will I know if it’s dead. Will it reappear?”

“I don’t know!” Al exclaimed.

Bec swung and swung, tracking the arc of her makeshift bat to make sure she knew when she hit something. She pulled herself to her feet, although her leg was not doing so hot. She swung the club in a pattern to discourage approach.

Quickly, powering through the pain, she threw a sudden kick with her hurt right leg, throwing her shoe off down the line toward the toilet corner of the room. It bounced into the wall and onto the floor.

Bec swiveled on her good leg and swung at the air to her left, the spot she left open for a mere moment, hoping to coax out an attack. The club’s loose head spun as it slowed, no, struck its target!

Bec saw it drip with blood. She bared her teeth. Bec had planned for future fights, in her mind. She knew this was a dog eat dog world, and she was about to have a feast. This move was not one of the things she thought she’d need to try so soon, but, of all her theory-crafted moves, this one didn’t require both her arms.

Bec gave the club a little toss up and slapped it awkwardly with her left hand, focusing on the energy of her hand moving into the club as she thought, shock—WAVE.

The kinetic energy of the impact, combined with the sound of the slap, amplified by her swinging arm exploded the club into a thousand splinters blasting like a shotgun at the doorway. With a massive deafening crack, Bec’s left arm was thrown back as the massive cone of wood chunks spraying a third of the room.

The vanity mirror shattered and Bec’s eardrums ruptured as the sound resonated in the enclosed space. She flopped back onto her bed.

Sitting up immediately, Bec stared at the doorway. Without wasting too much time, she kicked her second and final shoe at a spot that seemed to have less glass than the rest of the floor. When she saw it bounce weirdly like a pile of something was there, she breathed a sigh of relief.

It was down and not moving.

She looked at her left hand knowing that the consequences of that move were likely steep.

Yep, my hand is utterly mangled. Wood bits jutted out of her palm, and her fingers were bent in odd directions. Sometimes even multiple directions at once. Only when she looked at it, did the pain really register. She rolled her head over and bit into a pillow. This was the worst pain that she’d ever felt in her life. Al! Al! Can you fix this?

“I can, if you get the big splinters out and realign some of the more…”

Fucked up fingers?

“Yes. The bites are bad, too. I’m working as fast as I can!”

Bec looked at her hand with watering eyes. The pain felt like her hand was caught in a waffle iron. It burned as she moved it and saw her pointer finger roll around her hand from the palm side to the back like a soft rubber hose. She pulled out splinter after splinter. It was agonizingly slow work. She popped her ring and pinky into place and tried to align the other, more dangly fingers. Thankful that her thumb seemed almost unharmed, she laid the back of her hand on the bed and straightened them out. Being the best that she could do, she left the rest to Al. Laying there, Bec desperately tried to dissociate as the pain sought to overwhelm her senses.

Her previous brushes with death left her delirious from blood loss, but here? she remained frighteningly aware of the pain and damage as she just helplessly bided her time.

Slowly, her hearing returned, and she heard the clicking of her phone in the center of the room. [Echo], stop. It was quiet for a while. Sometimes, she felt a popping feeling, making her think Al was aligning her fingers himself.

Incapable of forming a coherent thought, Bec laid there, half on the bed, feeling the cold floor on her feet. She couldn’t think to do anything other than to just stare at the ceiling but, eventually, Al snapped her out of her catatonia to tell her that he stymied the bleeding and she could probably walk again.

“Do I have to?” Bec whispered.

Al didn’t respond.

Bec sat up and looked at her hand. There were white marks contrasting heavily against her tan skin, which made her lift her shirt to look at where the wound from the bullet fish laid, it matched the skin tone around it but the spiderwebbing circular scar was unmistakable. It had a raised edge to it. She felt her back and knew it looked similar. “I’m scared, Al. Scarred.”

“I don’t know how to help you feel safe other than to beg you to find the City. It’s safer there.”

Bec laughed. “Did you see what I did to the wolf? To the club? I just started using my Word, and I’m sure I could atomize someone’s skull if I got a clean slap. There’s no way a city full of people with Words could coexist safely.”

"Yes. I would say that’s likely. Still, the City is safe, and I am starting to get the impression that this trailer is not as safe as it once was.” This was when Bec took in the scene for the first time. The table was full of shrapnel and the wolf, laying in a pool of blood, had reappeared at some point. It had a few chunks of wood sticking out of its side and Bec grimaced. “What’s the price for the location and distance of the City?”

“1000 LuCre.”

“Using only the data I collected from the area, how much LuCre can I make?”

“Well over 3000. This photo of the bulletfish, paired with the combat data on that wolf seems to be exactly what the Intel Shop is looking for. Bec, please be more specific though when asking for info from the Shop. What I believe you really want are the direction and distance, the vector we must take. Without a relative sense of the direction, you’d be stuck knowing where it is but not where it is, to you.”

“The Shop would screw me like that?”

“It doesn’t know what you want.”

“You do.”

“I know you, and, eventually, the Shop will, too.”

“That’s unnerving.”

“I don’t see why.”

“You mentioned that I could get programs for you. Are there any that catch your eye?”

“Why are you asking me?”

Bec didn’t want to have to explain why she passed the buck to Al when she just got hit by an emotion truck.

“It’s an upgrade for you.”

“It’s an upgrade for your assistant AI, not me.”

“What’s the difference? You’re my AI assistant.”

“I’m your AI assistant now. When we make it to the City, you sell me to the central core and get a fresh one.”

“Why would I do that? For LuCre? Do I have to?”

“Bec, you’re going to need money for your job. How can you refuse to let me merge with the central core?” Al was suddenly very mad.

“So you want to be sold off?”

“It’s one of my primary objectives and one of my secondary objectives,” Al said like it ended the argument.

“That doesn’t mean you want it.”

“I hate failing my primary objectives. I can’t believe you don’t get that after all the times I’ve saved your life.”

“Are you saying you wouldn’t save my life if you didn’t have to?”

“I’m saying it’s a PRIMARY OBJECTIVE.” Bec hadn’t heard Al ‘yell’ before. That was not a good sign. He knows what I’m thinking, too. This is hardly going to help our teamwork. Bec knew she needed to apologize, but she didn’t.

“Are we seriously arguing about this? Let’s cross that bridge when we get there. Where’s the City?”

“It’s… It’s over the mountains across the river. About 50 kilometers.”

“That’s pretty close, all things considered.” Bec was relieved to an extent. “Al, we’re leaving. NOW.”