Long Fast

I started eating before the sun was fully up, and I didn't stop for a long time.

The Mud Sleeper was the biggest thing I had ever killed, by a lot. Its skin was tough and slick, so I went in through the soft slits behind its head where my scythes had already opened the way, and worked from there. The meat underneath was pale and dense and tasted of mud and fish and something sweet, almost like butter. I ate with my whole body. I could feel the Clock climbing in the corner of my vision, faster than it ever had.

Hunger Clock: 44% → 61% → 78%

At eighty-something percent I'd usually start to feel heavy and slow, the way I had after the pike. This time I didn't. My body just kept taking it, as if there was more room in me than there had been yesterday. I kept going.

Hunger Clock: 93% → 100%

I'd never seen it at a hundred before. I stopped for a moment and just looked at the number. Then a new box opened over it.

[Trophy Trait Acquired] Long Fast
Source: Mud Sleeper (consumed)
Hunger drain greatly reduced.
Surplus food is stored for later.
Hunger Clock: stabilized

I read it three times. Trophy Trait. So that was the name for it. I'd guessed right, sitting by the breathing hole. The System paid attention to what I killed and what I ate, and sometimes, when it was something special, it let me keep a piece of what that thing had been. The Mud Sleeper had spent years sealed in the mud, needing nothing. Now part of that was mine.

I didn't fully believe it yet. I'd believe it in the morning, when I saw what the night took. But I felt something in my middle that I'd never felt in this body before. It wasn't fullness. It was more like a door in my chest that had been banging in the wind for three weeks and had finally been shut and latched.

I kept eating, more slowly now. With every bite, the Clock didn't move, but I could feel the food going somewhere, settling deep inside me, the way the warmth had settled when I was poisoned. Stored. For later.

By midmorning the scavengers came. First the flies, then the beetles, crawling up out of the wet leaves toward the smell. I let them have the tail end. Then two big black birds landed on the husks and watched me with shiny eyes, and I knew those birds. The Gloom Crow had found me once when I was poisoned and couldn't move. These two didn't know that I'd killed it.

They hopped closer. One of them made a grab for the meat by my leg.

I hooked it out of the air by the wing and threw it back the way it came. It hit the leaves squawking, flapped up onto a husk, and screamed at me. The other one tried from the other side, and I turned and struck at it so fast it fell over backward trying to get away. After that they stayed on the husks and complained. I let them. Every now and then I clicked at them, and they flinched, and I'm not going to pretend I didn't enjoy that.

When I couldn't eat any more, I left the rest of the Mud Sleeper to the crows and beetles and climbed up onto the big husk, the one that was longer than six of me, and lay on its back in the sun to dry out.

I didn't have to hunt.

I lay there and turned the thought over and over, like a stone in my scythes. I didn't have to hunt today. I might not have to hunt tomorrow. For three weeks, every single day had been the same shape, and the shape was hunger. Now, for the first time, the day was just a day. I could do anything with it. I could practice. I could explore. I could lie on a dead giant's back in the sun and do nothing at all.

I thought about my old life, and how I couldn't remember the last time I'd taken a day off without spending it worrying. I'd spend Saturdays on the couch with my phone face down, dreading Monday. This wasn't like that. I wasn't dreading anything. My shell ached where it had cracked, and my scythes still burned from the fight, and I was so full I felt like I might sink through the husk. I was happy.

Sometime in the afternoon, a pale shape drifted down out of the trees and landed on the husk, a scythe's length from my head.

It was the moth. The same one, or one just like it. Pale, almost white, with faint gray rings on its wings. I hadn't seen it since the night I'd let it go. It sat very still and faced me, the way it always did.

I wasn't hungry. Even if I had been, I don't think I would have touched it. I looked at it, and it looked at me, and I had that same strange feeling I'd had before. Not a thought, exactly. More like the feeling of walking into a room and knowing someone has just left it.

"You again," I thought.

It stayed for a while. Then it lifted off and drifted away over the stream, and I watched it go until I couldn't see it anymore. The feeling faded with it. I let it go too.

That night I slept in the tree above the shelf, and the last thing I saw before I drifted off was the Clock, still sitting at a hundred.

In the morning I checked it before I did anything else.

Hunger Clock: 100% → 98%

Two. The night had taken two. Not thirteen, not seventeen. Two.

I clicked so loud the crows on the husks woke up and flew away.

I didn't hurry home that morning. I took the long way, upstream through the dripping trees, enjoying how everything looked after the storm. The stream was still high and brown, and the low ground was full of puddles, and the forest smelled washed clean. Halfway home, I stopped at the base of an old tree to climb it and look around.

The ground in front of the tree was wrong.

It had sunk. A long, narrow strip of earth, as wide as my body, had dropped a few inches lower than the ground around it, as if something had been taken out from underneath. The strip ran from the base of the tree away into the brush, slightly curved, and the soil along its edges was loose and freshly broken. It wasn't the flood. Water didn't move dirt in a line.

I put my feet flat on it and let Sense listen.

Far down, deeper than any root, something was moving through the ground.