Chapter 144: The Rim

Logan heard it, and he did not ask.

Rishin had already turned away from the edge. Whatever he had meant by those three words, he had said them to the dark and not to Logan.

Behind them, the platform filled with light.

The units came through in a long ripple, one after another.

Billy rolled out first and nearly went straight off the edge before Terry caught him by the rim of his wheel. Sonic came out already airborne. Xairon arrived in three shapes at once and settled on none of them.

"Boss." Sonic hung in the air out over the drop with static crawling along his arms. "Boss, it goes down forever. Can I go look?"

"No," Rishin said.

Sonic turned in the air. "I was asking the boss."

"And I am answering." Rishin did not raise his voice. "Nothing of yours goes over that edge until I have told you what the first layer does to things that fall fast."

Sonic looked at Logan. Logan pointed at the platform, and Sonic landed with a great deal of wounded dignity.

Logan opened his panel.

It looked the way it always looked, except for the lines at the bottom.

[ Location: Hollowreach, the Rim ] [ Tower Points: 0 ] [ Abyss Points: 0 ] [ Time remaining: 365 days ]

’Zero Tower Points.’ It was the same number every match started with, and it had never bothered him before. ’Except every match used to hand me waves of monsters to earn them from.’

He glanced at Alice. She had her panel open too, and she was frowning at the same lines.

"Zero and zero," she said.

"Zero and zero." Logan closed it. "And three hundred and sixty-five."

"Stop saying the number," Alice said. "Rishin told you not to count them yet."

They walked into Hollowreach slowly, because nobody could walk through it any other way.

The street leading off the platform was cut straight into the rock. Steps ran up and down it at odd heights, as if the people who carved it had legs of very different lengths.

Lanterns hung from iron hooks along the walls, and the light inside them was pale blue and did not flicker.

The first native Logan saw was selling fish from a cart.

It stood nearly three meters tall and was built from overlapping grey plates like the shell of a woodlouse. It had four arms, and it was using two of them to gut a fish with a long needle-toothed jaw that was still trying to bite.

The native looked down at their group as they passed. Its head tilted to one side. Then it went back to its fish.

"It did not care," Daniel said, half under his breath. "We walked past it with an army and it did not care."

"It has watched people arrive with armies before," Rishin said. "Some of them arrived with more."

He was right.

A little further up the street, a woman with bright green skin was arguing with a merchant over a coil of rope. Behind her stood a unit Logan did not recognize at all.

It looked like a jellyfish the size of a house, floating a meter off the ground with its long tendrils folded politely against its body.

Two children with feathers instead of hair sat on a step and shared a loaf of bread. A cluster of players who looked almost human, except for their silver eyes, walked past with heavy packs and ropes coiled over their shoulders.

None of them looked at Garen and Isolde twice.

’Two Tier-9 players,’ Logan thought. ’On Earth, people stopped on the street to watch them walk. Here they are just two more people carrying bags.’

Isolde seemed to have arrived at the same thought. She was looking around with an expression Logan had never seen on her before, and he had to search for the word.

She looked small.

Vina had not stopped asking questions since the platform.

"What is that? Why does it have four arms? Grandpa Rishin, what is that one? Is that a unit or a person?"

"A person," Rishin said.

"How do you know?"

"Because units do not haggle."

Vina considered that and appeared to accept it.

Helen and Daniel had gone quiet. They walked close together with their hands locked, and Logan saw his mother’s eyes move from one impossible thing to the next without landing on any of them.

’They became players in our garden,’ he thought. ’They have never even seen the inside of a match, and this is where I brought them.’

Daniel caught him looking. He did not smile, but he nodded once, steady as a post.

’He is going to be fine,’ Logan thought, and believed it.

The street opened into a square cut halfway into the cliff.

In the middle of the square, a ring of carved stone sat flush with the ground. Symbols ran around its edge, glowing the same pale blue as the lanterns. Logan knew what it was before his panel told him.

[ Summoning Circle ] [ Tower Points required. ] [ Your Tower Points: 0 ]

A player was kneeling beside the circle. He had spread out his hands on the stone and was staring at it, and his shoulders were shaking.

"He is out of points," Alice said quietly.

"He will earn more," Rishin said. "Or he will not. Either way, he will learn to stop kneeling in the open."

Alice looked at him sharply. Rishin did not look back.

’He is not being cruel,’ she realized. ’He is telling us what the rim does to people who wait for things.’

Logan was still looking at the circle.

’In the Warlord match, I fed Boundless Genesis five hundred summons at a time,’ he thought. ’Down here, I cannot afford a single one.’

He had walked in with every unit he owned. For the first time since his awakening, that number would be far easier to lose than to grow.

Rishin led them out of the square along a ledge that ran around the outside of the town.

There was no rail. On one side was the rock wall with its blue lanterns, and on the other side there was nothing at all.

Helen kept her free hand on the wall the whole way. Vina walked on the inside, between Solveig and Rishin, and did not complain about it once.

At the end of the ledge, somebody was fishing.

He sat on the very edge of the rock with his legs hanging over the drop.

He was grey-skinned, with four fingers on each hand and eyes that caught the lantern light like a cat’s. A fishing line ran from the rod in his hands straight down into the dark, and Logan could not see where it ended.

He did not look up as they approached.

"New," he said. "How many days?"

Logan hesitated. "Three hundred and sixty-five."

The fisherman nodded slowly, as though that was the answer he had expected.

"Mine stopped counting," he said. "Rim is full of people like me. We stayed a while. Then we stayed for good."

Helen’s grip on Daniel’s hand tightened.

The fisherman reeled in a length of line and let it settle. Then he finally looked up, past Logan and past Alice, to the small girl standing between an old man and a knight whose armor gave off light.

"You brought a little one," he said.

Helen stepped in front of Vina before anyone else could move.

The fisherman did not seem offended. He let the line back out, hand over hand, into the dark.

"Keep her close," he said. "The Abyss is fond of children."

Rishin’s hand came down on Vina’s shoulder. Logan saw his knuckles go white.

"We know," Rishin said.

The fisherman glanced at him. His eyes went to the old man’s white knuckles and then back up to his face.

"Yes," he said. "You would."