Chapter 26: Chapter 25 - The Second Hands-on: Cliff

When the shelter opened, Cliff was assaulted with the smell of blood mixed with a more potent, sour scent – bile, he thought. Kneeling down next to Thalos, he extended a hand, gingerly shifting his roommate’s shirt around the wound in his stomach. At his touch, the injured boy let out the quietest of whimpers, trembling slightly. Cliff swallowed, sighing shakily – there was so much blood that for a moment he’d thought – he shook his head, forcing the dark idea from his mind.

His eyes shifted to the Spike Spitter’s quill, jutting from Thalos’s stomach like a wick from a candle. “Should we – I don’t know, pull it out, or something?”

“No,” Loria said from behind him. Her voice was hoarse from fighting with the monster. If they were not in a crisis, he’d be slapping her on the back for her performance there – he'd been right on the edge of pissing himself in fear, and all he’d had to do was jump on the thing’s stomach and tear it up with the buzz saw. “If you pull out the spike, he’ll just bleed worse.” That was hard to imagine, considering how much the boy had already bled.

“Check his PMT,” Nym said, “if his healing node is intact, we can-”

“Right.” Cliff leaned towards Thalos’s hand. They weren’t supposed to open PMTs while on the Hands-on, but rules went out the window when someone was on the brink of death. Like his stomach, his PMT had been pierced through with a quill, and its surface was slick with blood. He realized his hands were shaking, and it took him a few tries to work the latch and get it open.

A new wave of despair rose in his belly, and he turned to the other two, falling back on his rear. “It’s shattered.” The quill had sliced cleanly through the PMT, clipping through both the martial node and the healing node. He was suddenly blinking quickly, and he realized there were tears in his eyes. “What can we do?”

“I can – maybe I can cauterize the wound?” Loria said, “Or Nym could freeze it?”

“He’s barely holding on,” Nym said, “I think the shock would kill him.” She looked at Cliff. “You said you made three nodes before coming here – there’s the noise cannon and the buzz saw, but – what’s the third? Can it help?”

Cliff scowled to himself, shaking his head. “No, it’s – it won’t help.” The third node he’d made was essentially a high-powered, directional magnet. He was planning on unveiling it in their next spar to mess with the opponents weapons – stupid and childish. “We’ll just have to pray that Roose gets here in time.” Abruptly, he felt a swell of frustration, running his hands through his hair and shouting wordlessly. Why hadn’t he made some kind of healing node?

He blinked. That thought – it had started his Gift working. He looked at his other two team members. They were staring at Thalos – Nym’s lip was trembling, and Loria looked grim. “You have an ice node, and Loria has a fire, and-” He cut off, frowning, as thoughts assembled themselves within his mind. With a martial node, he could – his eyes widened, and he leapt to his feet, dashing towards the trolley.

“Cliff?” Nym called, “what’s – where are you going?”

“I need tools,” he called behind him, scrambling into the trailer and grabbing the set of engineering tools he’d been given to do maintenance on the trail trolley. They were not nearly the precision he was used to, but they’d have to do. A moment later he was back beside Thalos, and Loria and Nym were staring at him. “Nym, pull your ice node out of your PMT – I’ll take my marital node, and-” His sense finally caught up to his Gift, and he turned to Loria. “I can make a healing node – or an approximation of one. I need to use a martial node, the water part of Nym’s ice node, and – and your fire node.”

Nym blinked rapidly. “You can – doesn’t that break, basically, every rule we’re supposed to follow here? I thought you needed precise equipment to – don’t those things explode if they’re built wrong?”

“Yes, it’d be dangerous – and stupid, too. If I build it wrong, or it gets jostled in use too much, it could cause an explosion in the PMT. But I can do it.”

He stared at Loria, and she looked right back. “How sure are you?

He tried to force a grin, but the shakiness in his voice betrayed his nervousness. “Come on, Loria, you know how I am with engineering.”

She stared at him a moment more before nodding. “Fine. Do it, but I’m going to be the one to do the healing.”

Immediately, Cliff started to protest – he was, after all, the one forcing them to take the risk here, so he should be the one to do it – but she cut him off with a hand. “I’m the best with a PMT, and neither of you have probably ever used a healing node. Cliff, I know you haven’t, and Nym?” The other girl shook her head, and Loria nodded, continuing. “Right – I know what it should feel like healing someone, and I’ll know if something is about to go wrong so I can bail before the thing explodes.”

Reluctantly, Cliff nodded. It was sound reasoning, but it didn’t feel good to put her skin on the line when it was his idea, especially after she had nearly gotten herself killed fighting the Spike Spitter. “Alright,” he finally said, “let’s do it.”

***

He tried to will the shakiness from his hands, but they wouldn’t listen. He glared at his fingers, realizing they were covered in Thalos’s blood. He tried to wipe them off on his shirt, but that, too, was covered in gore from the Spike Spitter. A shaky laugh escaped his lips – Lieutenant Ulster would blow a gasket if he saw these working conditions.

On the rock in front of him there were three little nodes – his own martial node, Nym’s ice node, and Loria’s fire node. He blinked when he looked at that last one. When he made his proposal, it hadn’t even occurred to him that the node was important to Loria – she hadn’t even hesitated to let him take it apart for Thalos’s sake. He shook his head, calming slightly – he couldn’t very well betray her expectations after that.

He sighed, tracing a line of thought in his mind. He wasn’t sure how exactly, but some combination of the martial node’s strengthening plus fire and water would result in an effect that healed – it was something to look up after he got them all back, safe and sound. He shook his head again, dismissing the thought for later. Clutching the little snippers in his hand – part of his repair kit – he leaned forward and got to work.

The ice node would be the base, but he only needed the water part, so he cut away the ice augment with a few careful movements. Taking the fire node, he scanned it until he spotted the proper filament, cutting it away, plus two more that would stabilize the magic. About half of the martial node was needed, too, so he carefully plucked out a few filaments, cutting them out and lining them up with the rest he’d just extracted. Finally, he took the clippers to the ice node once more, snipping a few careful spots where he’d add in the other filaments. Checking his work, he thought over his design, nodding satisfied when he decided he had everything he needed.

He grabbed a little roll of tape from beside him. “Nym, over here.” The girl was standing behind him, watching, while Loria kept pressure on Thalos’s wounds – the worst possible scenario was him bleeding out while Cliff was working. She walked up, crouching down next to him, and he held up a pair of filaments. “I need you to lick the ends of these.”

Her eyes widened. “What? You can’t be-”

“Normally, they’re fastened together, but the best I have is tape, so I’ll need something to make sure the connection remains unbroken. Magic can flow through spit, and you’ve got the highest Magic Rating of all of us – please, lick the ends. Lots of spit, too – the more there is, the longer it will take to dry.” It was an old engineering trick, using spit to secure a shoddy connection. Honestly, blood would work just as well, but he didn’t really want to ask the girl to give him blood – that would just be strange.

“Right,” she said hesitantly. He handed her the first two filaments, and she stuck the ends in her mouth, making a sour face before handing them back to him, both ends slick with saliva. He nodded, taping them together carefully. They continued to work like that for a few minutes until he sighed, furrowing his brow down at the completed node.

“It’s done,” he said. He studied it as closely as he could – he was sure it would work. It had to. Gingerly, he plucked the cobbled-together node from the rock, standing up slowly. It was, after all, quite literally held together with spit, tape, and hope.

“Loria,” Nym called as Cliff carefully made his way towards Thalos, “Cliff finished the node – how is he?”

Loria looked up at them, a new glimmer of hope in her eyes. “He’s – his heartbeat is erratic and faint, but – well, he’s alive.” As Cliff drew near, Loria set her PMT in front of him, opening the cover. There was a glaring emptiness in its internals, where there’d once been her fire node.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“You have to be extremely careful when using this,” Cliff warned, “no sudden movements, no falling, no tapping – if you move too hard, half the connections are liable to come apart – but don't go too slowly or Nym’s spit will all dry up.” Loria made a face at that comment, but said nothing. The node he’d bootlegged still had the ice node’s base, so he slotted it in place easily enough. He winced at the little click as it fastened into the PMT, but there didn’t seem to be any problems with the connection. With a sigh and a prayer, he shut the cover, turning towards Loria. “It might feel a bit more like an ice node than a healing node when you use it, but the effect will be all healing.” He cut himself off before he added ‘probably’. It would work.

Loria sighed to herself. “Alright, I’ll put it on and get my hand in position – carefully, as you said – then Nym, pull the quill from Thalos’s stomach. I’ll heal that wound, then the hand, then I'll pull my PMT off before it explodes.” She smiled at Cliff, looking far more confident than he felt. “It’s a good thing we have you here, Cliff, or this could have been bad.” He shook his head. If this wasn’t bad, then he wasn’t sure what could be.

“Alright,” she said, “here we go.” With a slow movement, she slid on the gauntlet, pulling a face when it slipped into place. “It feels – strange. It doesn’t matter. The quill, Nym.” The other girl nodded, tugging the fibrous quill from his roommate’s stomach. Thalos squirmed at the action – it seemed painful, but it was reassuring to see he could still move. The quill pulled free with a wet sound, and Cliff felt a surge of nausea at the gaping hole in Thalos’s stomach. He swallowed the sickness, watching as Loria hovered her hand over the wound.

She scowled, grunting uncomfortably, but before their eyes, the wound started to close. Smaller and smaller, until all that was left was a circle of fresh, dark skin. Cliff exhaled, but before he could relax, Loria had moved on to Thalos’s hand. Cliff winced at the speed of the movement, but didn’t say anything, not wanting to interrupt her focus. Like the first wound, the second started to close, though slower than before. Suddenly, Loria yelped, jumping up and tearing the PMT off her hand. She leaned back, chucking the PMT as hard as she could away from them. An instant before it hit the ground, it exploded.

A wave of shock slammed into them just before an earsplitting boom rang out, knocking all three to the ground. Cliff blinked dust out of his eyes as microscopic shrapnel rained down on top of them.

Slowly, shakily, he pulled himself to his feet. His ears were ringing, and he turned to see Nym and Loria staring, wide eyed, at the dark spot of char left where the PMT had exploded. They all paused for a moment of silent shock. Eventually, though, they shook it off, and as a trio they moved back to Thalos.

“His heart’s still beating. It – it worked,” Nym said, relief clear in her voice. She was prodding with her fingers at the freshly-sealed hole in Thalos’s stomach, as if she could hardly believe the wound was gone. There was still a small hole in his hand, but compared to before, it was tiny.

“It did,” Loria said, turning to smile at Cliff. He could hardly hear them through the ringing in his ears, but he nodded, a grin rising to his face. Suddenly, he was laughing, and all the tension drained from his body. He felt a wave of relief as he collapsed on the ground, curling up in choked-up, relieved hysterics. He was still lying there on the ground when Roose arrived ten minutes later.

He seemed to emerge from the tree, sprouting from the bark, Dr. Harkin beside him and a third man crouched behind them. His face was deadly serious, and he had a pistol clutched in each hand. The seriousness faded to confusion when he saw Cliff curled up on the ground smiling. Nym waved a hand at their teacher, and Loria nodded towards them with a smile of her own.

“Alright,” Roose said, “I’m going to need an explanation.”

***

“So, you took apart three nodes, assembling them into some hacked-together replacement for a healing node. Then, you had Loria heal Thalos with this untested, barely-held-together node. It worked until it didn’t, and her PMT exploded, thankfully after she’d gotten it off her hand. Is that right?” Roose’s expression was difficult to read, but Cliff estimated it to be half annoyed, half surprised, and fully impressed.

“Yes, though I didn’t have Loria heal Thalos – she demanded to do it herself.” Roose was getting their testimonies one-by-one. Nym was sitting next to a still-unconscious Thalos – Dr. Harkin said he was stable, but wouldn’t wake up for a good while – and Loria was having her foot healed.

“Right, right,” Roose said, running a hand through his hair. His normal grin was gone from his face, replaced by incredulity and confusion. “Honestly, Cliff, you broke just about every rule we set out for our technicians – you know how bad it could have been if a single thing went wrong, right?”

“Yeah,” Cliff said stubbornly, “Thalos could have died.”

Roose sighed. “You’re right, of course, and I know you have full confidence in your Gift, but – what you did here, Cliff, is like using a steak knife to do surgery. If it works, you look like a genius, but if it doesn’t – well, you look like a buffoon and you’re going to get punished.”

Cliff smirked. “It’s a good thing it worked, then.”

“You’re certainly right about that – I would not have liked to tell your mother and father that you got yourself killed on my watch,” Roose said, studying him with serious eyes. Cliff’s smile faded somewhat at that thought – his momma and poppa would understand why he did what he did. He knew they would. “Listen, Cliff, I can praise you for your ingenuity while scolding you for your recklessness. I understand this was a desperate situation, but – well, if I allow this go to unpunished, then soon enough, everything will seem like a desperate situation to you. It only takes one mistake to end in a disaster.”

Cliff scratched at his head as he considered. Honestly, he wasn’t eager to recreate the stress of putting together that makeshift healing node, not when there was any other option available. Now that he knew he could, though – well, he understood, at least a little, what Roose was getting at. “So you’re going to punish me?”

Roose nodded. “In some way, at least – I’ll have to talk to the headmistress and a few other teachers, but – just don’t be surprised when a punishment comes down.”

“Right – I did break the rules after all.” It was almost farcical that he was to be punished for saving Thalos’s life, but when you got down to the root of it, he supposed he understood. He frowned as a thought occurred to him. “Just – I should be the only one punished, right? I was the one who made the node, after all.”

“Absolutely not,” Loria called. Cliff turned to see the girl coming towards them. She was walking much more stably now that her foot was healed, though her boot had a nasty gash running along the side. “I’m the commander. I approved of his plan, I made him let me do the healing – if anyone should be punished it’s me.”

“He used my spit!” Nym called, dashing towards them, “I helped, too – so you can’t just punish Loria or Cliff.”

Roose’s eyebrows widened as he turned to Cliff. “Her spit?”

Cliff shrugged. “I had to keep the filaments connected, and tape wasn’t doing the trick – her spit, though…”

“Conducts magic, right – huh,” Roose said, expression thoughtful. He shook his head suddenly. “You don’t have to fight about it – you’ll all be punished. You are a team after all.” He paused for a moment. “Well, aside from Thalos – can’t very well punish him for something he wasn’t conscious for.”

A weak voice called out from behind them. “I’m part of the team, too, Roose." They all turned to see Thalos, conscious again, forcing himself to his elbows. Immediately Nym yelped, rushing towards him and helping him sit up. “You’re not going to leave me out, are you?”

Cliff laughed, rushing over to his roommate, Loria right behind him. “You know,” Roose said, watching them huddle together with a smile on his face. “When I put your team together, my biggest worry was that you weren’t going to get along.” He shrugged. “I suppose it’s alright to be wrong sometimes.”

***

“We’re leaving?” Cliff asked, looking around the clearing at the unfinished bridge, the trail trolley, and everything else still left around. “What about the rest of the stuff?”

Roose sighed. “You can’t expect us to let you continue after everything that’s happened, can you? He might be stable, but Thalos is in no position to do any work. And, once the adrenaline wears off, I expect you all to drop like rocks.” After a brief moment of consciousness, Thalos had quickly gone back to sleep. At the moment Dr. Harkin was carrying him on his back, though he’d complained about getting blood on his labcoat.

“But, I mean – can we really just leave all this stuff out here? Isn’t it valuable?” Cliff said – he’d been overjoyed at the chance to drive around a trail trolley, he couldn’t imagine just leaving one out here to rot in the wilderness.

“Think, boy,” Dr. Harkin grumbled, “we’ll hire a Courier to come finish the job and pick everything up for us.” Cliff frowned but nodded. It didn’t feel good to leave their work unfinished, but, well, he was feeling rather tired.

“If there’s nothing else, then let’s get out of here,” Roose said. He turned to the third, unnamed man who’d arrived with them. “Our sergeant here is on loan from the Clearspring military. His Gift lets him travel through living tree roots, as long as they are connected-” Cliff’s eyes widened. “No questions, please, Cliff. We need to keep skin contact for it to work, though, so everyone clasp hands.” Suppressing the urge to grill the man on his Gift, Cliff reached out, clasping hands with Roose on one side and Loria on the other. She grabbed the sleeping Thalos by the hand along with Dr. Harkin, and on the other end Nym took the doctor’s hand, completing the circle. Roose looked around, nodding when he saw everyone was touching. “Alright, Sergeant, take us back.”

The man grunted, and Cliff’s vision suddenly turned dark. There was a sense of movement, but he felt enveloped by bark, so he couldn't tell how far or how fast they were moving. He could still feel Roose’s and Loria’s hands, but beyond that all he felt was the rough, fibrous sensation of wood against his skin. He tried to speak, failing and panicking for a moment before realizing he didn’t have any sensation of breath, or hearing, or really anything at all besides wood.

The feeling persisted for long minutes until suddenly, they were in open air again. Cliff gasped a breath, blinking around. It took him a moment, but he recognized where they were – it was the same lot they’d initially arrived in the city at. Roose released his hand, and he did the same with Loria. “Thank you sergeant, and tell the Major I owe him one.” The man grumbled something under his breath, waving casually as he walked off. Roose turned to the rest of them. “Welcome back to Clearspring – your second Hands-on training is officially concluded.”