Extraction: Infinite Hunger Chapter 8: The Mirror Room

The signal from beyond the east wall held for another thirty seconds, then thinned.

Ash stayed where he was on the parapet, stone cold under his palms, and felt it go quiet. Whatever lived in that first-year’s fra was patient enough to keep to itself for now. He noted the distance, the density, the inward pull of it, and let it go. The timing wasn’t his.

The east wing pulled his attention back before he’d finished turning.

Phoebe’s Shade was louder than it had been an hour ago, climbing a single step in volu, enough to register. He stood on the roof and felt the accumulated pressure of it move outward through three floors of concrete and insulation, dense and patient, and thought: soon.

Then he went inside.

He woke at 3 AM to the east wing cracking open.

He was already a light sleeper and the Shade was close enough that what registered wasn’t sound but more imdiate. The pressure spiking through the wall, sharp and sudden, before the seal drew it back. It was the sa automatic repair he had watched her perform in the corridor with her thumb in her palm, years of practice in a reflex she didn’t know she had.

He lay still and listened to it settle. The Shade compressed back to its baseline, the fracture resealed, and the pressure dropped back to its usual accumulated weight.

It had cracked twice in the last week. Tonight was the third ti. Whatever was building behind that door had a schedule that wasn’t going to wait for him. He did the math in the dark, flat and factual, and arrived at three days. Then he rolled over and went back to sleep.

The Dominion Architecture Seminar cross-listed as an open elective once per term. Ash signed up Monday morning and received an approval by noon. He hadn’t expected it to raise questions. A Null in a second-year theory seminar read like reaching, and reaching was unremarkable.

The room held eight, usually ran six. An instructor opened each session, stayed long enough to be docunted, and left. On Tuesday, Ash arrived with three minutes to spare and took the seat two chairs from the end.

Phoebe ca in on the hour. She set her folder down, took out the week’s reading questions, and dealt them around the table without looking at anyone directly. One skipped Ash’s end entirely. He leaned over and pulled a copy from the stack in the middle.

She never looked at him. He had the sense she had already filtered him out of the room before she arrived. Not as a threat, definitely not as a colleague, and certainly not worth a position, and had moved on. He opened his notes. He felt the Shade from two seats away and kept that to himself while the session ran.

Forty minutes in, Payton said he thought the threshold model in the assigned reading was overcalibrated. He had worked up an argunt and he made it.

Phoebe waited until he finished.

"The threshold model you’re referencing," she said, at the sa volu as everything else she said, "assus phase coherence across all Shade layers simultaneously. The data doesn’t support that. It supports sequential phase shifts with variable lag between layers, which ans your predicted suppression window is off by a factor of three."

She went back to her notes.

Payton wrote sothing down. From across the table it didn’t look like a rebuttal.

Ash watched her move on to the next question. Phoebe already knew what the answer was before Payton finished speaking. What looked like precision was a task that had been done so many tis it left grooves. He wrote that down and crossed it out. He didn’t need the paper to hold it.

The session closed on the hour. Students left in pairs. Ash was last out.

Phoebe took the west corridor, which didn’t lead toward the dormitories. He followed at the distance where sound didn’t carry.

She stopped at the corner where the corridor bent toward the storage stairs. It was empty at this hour, with no foot traffic. He stayed back and watched. She rolled her neck once, a slow rotation that ended with her chin dropped toward her chest. Then she pressed her thumb into her opposite palm and stood there with her eyes closed.

Phoebe’s face did nothing. She wasn’t performing like she was in the seminar room. This was less managed than that, the face of soone between performances who had forgotten, for thirty seconds, to perform.

The Shade flared outward through the press of her thumb and sealed again. The sa reflex he’d watched two weeks ago in the corridor, but from here he could see the effort behind it. Then she exhaled through her nose, straightened, and kept walking. By the ti she turned the corner she was the sa person she always was in public.

Ash caught up to her before she reached the stairwell.

"The Veronica interpretation of layer-to-layer feedback cycles," he said. "The seminar reading contradicts the lecture notes from last term’s theory series. I wanted to make sure I had the right version."

She stopped. Phoebe looked directly at Ash. It was the first ti she ever looked at him directly, but not for long, she still didn’t look interested in him.

"The lecture notes are citing Veronica’s original model," she said. "The reading uses the revised edition. They’re asuring different things."

"That explains it."

She walked away.

The Shade hit him at close range. The accumulated years, the dam, the exhaustion running underneath the performance like a current under still water.

Constant, invisible, and without edges he could locate.

The hunger didn’t gnaw. It settled, already decided, waiting for him to catch up.

He walked back to the dormitory and ran the numbers. The Shade would crack on its own in less than a week. He was going to be there when it happened. At least, Ash hoped he would be there to see it.