Chapter 340: Beyond the Shelter Walls

Chapter 340: Beyond the Shelter Walls

The map on Crowe’s projection table was so large that Meridian’s whole shelter fitted inside a circle the size of Jin’s thumbnail.

"Plan a hunt," Crowe said. "Licensed, legal, hypothetical. You pick the zone and the target. You get there, you work, and you come home. All of you, beasts included. Pairs. Twenty minutes."

Jin looked at the map and felt his first instinct arrive the way it always did. Find the strongest target he could handle, find the place that paid most for it, and calculate the margin.

Then he looked at the map properly, and the instinct stalled.

He had always known, in the abstract, that the shelter wasn’t the edge of the world. He’d ridden the convoy road to Highmarch. He’d watched the waystations go past, each one a fortified stop with a watch platform and a beast pen.

He had never seen it laid out like this.

Every waystation on that road was a dot on Crowe’s map, and every dot had a garrison number beside it. Their convoy had followed those dots all the way to Highmarch. Each stop needed people, feed, and supplies even when no passengers were coming through. Jin had mostly noticed whether the seats were comfortable.

The shelter he lived in was one walled circle among several. Highmarch was another, a little way north. Further out were others he’d only heard named on news broadcasts. Between them all lay wide stretches of green and brown and gray marked with zone numbers, patrol routes, and thin red lines where the roads ran.

And around all of it, far out at the edges of the projection, ran a single thick dark band.

"That’s the outer wall," Rowan said beside him, following his eyes. "The regional one. Everything inside it is ours, more or less."

"More or less," Jin repeated.

Rowan pointed to a patch of woodland inside the band. "Tell that to everything living in there."

Crowe heard them. He tapped the table, and a small inset opened in one corner: a generic diagram with one large circle in the middle and smaller circles around it, each labeled with a letter.

"Since half of you are staring at the edge," Crowe said, "this is the usual structure. An S-grade regional center, with A-, B-, and C-grade shelters around it. Grades account for defenses, infrastructure, population, resources, and the strength of the authorities responsible for them."

He pointed to a fortress symbol on the outer band.

"The frontier has permanent garrisons. Stronger commanders handle what those garrisons can’t. Academy teams contribute too, once they’re qualified. A wall needs people who can hold it."

Jin followed the band until it disappeared beyond the projection. Beyond it lay another stretch of country, then a separate defended region.

"That’s not a student route," Crowe said when he noticed. "Finish the one inside our defenses first."

Jin and Rowan narrowed it to two options in five minutes.

The first was a managed interior zone called Hollowmere, two hours from the shelter by road, inside the regional wall. Moderate population of native beasts, mostly ground species. Patrols culled it twice a season to keep the numbers down, but never cleared it.

"Why not just clear it?" asked a boy across the table.

"Because people need living habitats, resources, and somewhere to develop as tamers," Crowe said. "We control dangerous populations. We don’t strip every stretch of land between shelters bare. You’ll find herbs, breeding stock, and materials there, and beasts that can kill you while you’re collecting them."

He tapped the zone’s latest patrol report.

"Read these. A rating describes what we know. It isn’t a promise that nothing stronger is there."

He brought up a zone record from somewhere in the region.

"Two years ago, a pack matriarch in this zone broke through overnight. Nobody predicted it. The rating went from four to six inside a week. Closures, evacuations of two farm settlements, a response team in for a month." He closed it. "That’s why ratings change, and why you check them before you leave home, not when you arrive."

Jin thought, briefly, of the gate battles during the last Astral Tide. Some of those beasts could have come from habitats inside the regional defenses. Others could slip past them by air or underground. Either way, it explained why each shelter still needed its own gates held. He remembered how quickly a good defensive layout could become a place where someone got hurt.

The second option was the one Jin wanted.

It was an approved student sector beside a frontier base called Thornwatch, right up against the outer wall. Reaching it meant an armored airship along a guarded corridor, four hours each way, with student fares discounted. And the bounties were very different.

"Frontier postings pay about double interior rates for ordinary hunters," Crowe said, when Jin asked. "Five times, for eligible academy students on the same authorized targets. That’s posted bounties only, not every material you bring back. But frontier materials sell well on their own."

Five times.

Jin did the arithmetic without meaning to. If he could complete the same number of bounties, one week at Thornwatch could pay more than a month inside the region.

Five times. They could’ve opened with that.

"Thornwatch," he said.

Rowan didn’t answer right away. She was looking at the airship schedule panel.

"How often does it fly?" Rowan asked.

Jin opened the schedule. "Twice a week."

"So if the sector closes the day after we land—a Tide warning, a rating change, a garrison call-up—we’re stuck in the base for three or four days, paying for beds and feed, earning nothing." She tapped the schedule. "And we can’t just walk to another sector. New licensees only get the approved ones, under garrison oversight. If this one shuts, we can’t assume our permits cover anywhere else."

Jin looked at the panel. She was right. He had seen the multiplier and stopped reading.

"And past the wall?" he asked, half to himself.

"Separate clearance," Crowe said, without looking up. "Approved expedition only. Nobody in this room is crossing that line for a long time."

Jin opened the passenger information. The illustrated cabin had narrow seats and a luggage shelf.

"Where do they put Glitch?" Jin asked.

Rowan scrolled down. "Heavy-beast transport. Restraint pens. You won’t have to put him in a window seat."

"For four hours." He thought about it. "He’d hate it. And he needs to eat at regular intervals, and I’d need to check the pen’s rated for his weight." He looked at the Hollowmere route again. "Hollowmere’s road. Two hours. Waystation halfway. If the zone closes, we drive home and pick another zone the next morning."

"Worse money," Rowan said.

"Much worse," Jin agreed. "But a closure at Hollowmere costs us a day. At Thornwatch, it might cost four days of beds and feed before the next regular flight. And if one of the beasts is hurt, we’ve still got to get it home."

He glanced at Rowan’s transport allowance. "Yours needs more recovery time after long runs, doesn’t it?"

"Usually," Rowan said. "Yours eats more."

Jin looked at their unfinished budget. "We should probably write both of those down."

They wrote it up as a two-stage plan. Hollowmere for the first licensed season, to learn how hunting actually worked and build a record. Thornwatch after that, once they’d proven they could manage a closure, with a fallback booking on the return airship before they ever left home.

Crowe read it, made one note in the margin, and handed it back.

Sound. Next time, cost the feed.

After class, Jin stayed at the table while the projection was still up.

He opened the Thornwatch sector panel again and read it properly this time. The bounty boards. The materials market. The frontier feed suppliers, which carried things he had never seen listed anywhere inside the shelter. There was a line for avian conditioning supplements, high-grade, sourced from cliff colonies along the wall.

He thought of Flicker, learning to land.

The listing wasn’t an answer to Flicker’s needs, but it was somewhere to start looking. Until now, he’d searched the suppliers he could reach from the academy. He hadn’t even known these existed.

With a license, he could earn toward something he’d chosen for her himself.

I could choose my own work, he thought. Not just survive whatever gets assigned.

He saved the sector to his notes. Then he scrolled down to the eligibility line at the bottom.

[Thornwatch Student Sector — Eligibility]

[Minimum: Combat Rank 2]

[Practical hunting license: passed]

[Garrison registration: required]

He read the first line twice.

Rank 2.

Tomorrow, the First-Class cultivation block had a live Rank-2 demonstration on the timetable. Jin had been planning to sit at the back.

He decided he would sit at the front.