Thirstfall - Memory of a Returnee-Chapter 72: The Ballerina

"Rhayne," I call out. "Do you know how to dance?"

She stares at me like I’ve lost my mind.

"What?"

"I’m not testing your sense of humor." 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

I point at the pristine white floor with Eventide’s hilt.

"You need to cross that room. And the only way to do it without becoming abstract art is to trust what your body feels, not what your eyes tell you."

Silence.

On the other side of the immaculate killing floor, three retractable machine guns are folded somewhere up in the ceiling like teeth in a closed jaw.

Waiting.

The room is alive—I learned that the hard way—and it responds to energetic disturbance.

Sudden movement. Unstable OXI. The wrong pressure in the wrong place.

Rhayne has the Void Link.

She doesn’t feel OXI. She is OXI, practically. Her field reads the ambient environment like an extension of her own skin.

If anyone can navigate this invisible minefield on pure instinct, it’s her.

I just hope her instincts are faster than the guns.

She looks at the room. Then at me. Then at the room again.

"If I die," she says slowly, "I’m haunting you."

"Line’s moving."

She exhales something that isn’t quite a sigh and isn’t quite a prayer, and steps into the white room.

What happens in the next forty seconds is going to stay with me for a while.

Rhayne stops at the first tile. She tilts her head slightly to the side, like she’s listening to music nobody else can hear. Then, with a fluidity that has absolutely no business existing in a corridor designed to kill people, she starts to move.

It isn’t walking. It isn’t fleeing. It’s something else entirely.

She glides sideways, her arms sweeping open in a smooth arc—ballet arabesque, my brain registers, completely against my will. Her foot lands dead center on a specific tile, the weight distributed with a precision she clearly isn’t calculating consciously.

She feels where to step...

The Void Link is reading the room’s energy field like a score sheet, and her body is simply playing.

She pivots on her heel. Glides again. Her arms drop, her knees bend into a slow plié—bypassing a kill zone that only I can see through Trace, exactly where a bisected spectral corpse hovers over the white tiles like a watercolor stain.

Oliver opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again.

The thug doesn’t blink.

Then Rhayne does a handstand.

Literally. Hands flat on the floor, legs straight up toward the ceiling, perfectly balanced on two specific tiles with the supernatural steadiness of someone who is absolutely not thinking about what she’s doing.

Her hair falls like a curtain.

The seconds stretch.

She comes back down. Keeps walking like nothing happened.

Beside me, Lola watches with half-lidded eyes.

"She looks like the ballerina in that music box," she murmurs, to no one in particular. "The one Teacher Mina made us watch. Except less sad."

I don’t respond.

I’m not watching. I’m cataloguing the steps. Mapping the route. Translating every movement into tactical data the others can replicate.

That’s what I’m doing.

Rhayne reaches the other side.

She straightens up, fixes her hair with one hand, and looks back at me with an expression that says, "Well, what was that about"—like she just crossed a puddle.

My best investment...

"Good," I say. "Now, the panel to our left. The black plate in the wall. See it?"

She turns. Sees it. A rectangular panel set into the stone, buried under oxidized metallic growth. The room’s energetic heart. If the room is a digestive tract, that thing is the stomach.

"I need you to put your hands on it and drain it."

"Drain... what exactly?"

"Everything. The ambient OXI. The energy field powering the triggers. You’ll feel resistance—ignore it. Hold as long as you can."

She hesitates. Not from fear. From awareness. She’s learned enough about her own Void Link by now to understand what ’drain everything’ is going to cost her.

But she places her hands on the panel anyway.

The effect is immediate. It didn’t fully shut down the room, but it definitely turned the sensitivity way down.

The room deflates. Not visibly; the walls don’t cave, the lights don’t die. But the [Trace] goes quiet. The spectral death-images flicker, blur, and dissolve. The energy field keeping the machine guns armed and the sensors live simply... evaporates, pulled into her.

The window is open.

"LOLA. NOW."

Lola doesn’t run. Lola walks fast, which is her version of running, the gear case rattling on her back. She crosses the white floor following my hand signals—here, here, here—and arrives on the other side in fifteen seconds.

She looks up at Rhayne. "Uncle did the same thing," she tells her, completely serious. "Just more crooked."

I ignore that and point at Oliver’s thug. "You."

He crosses ugly but alive, following every signal without deviation.

Oliver goes next. He’s sweating, but he moves with that body memory of someone who spent years navigating hostile ground. He makes it to the other side and bends forward with his hands on his knees, catching his breath.

The jaw-bandaged cadet is last.

I look at Rhayne.

She’s on her knees.

Not collapsed—lowered herself. Her arms are shaking. Her hands are still pressed to the panel but her fingers are white from the grip, and there’s something dark at the corner of her mouth she hasn’t noticed yet.

The Void Link doesn’t absorb clean OXI when the source is a living organism that feeds on death. What she’s draining isn’t energy. It’s corrupted organic matter. And it’s costing her badly.

The cadet looks at me. Then at her.

She looks at him.

Doesn’t speak. Can’t.

She knows.

I know.

The cadet knows.

He steps forward anyway—because what else is there to do—and his foot lands two centimeters off the correct tile.

Rhayne’s eyes begin to bleed. Her energy is failing.

The panel reignites.

The click is the quietest and loudest sound I’ve ever heard.

All three machine guns drop from the ceiling panels.

I can’t describe what happens to the cadet. There’s nothing to describe. Where a person was, there is now geometry. Meat geometry.

The silence that follows has weight.

Rhayne has collapsed sideways, her hands finally released from the panel. She’s conscious—eyes open, fixed on the white ceiling. The dark red smear at the corner of her mouth has run down to her jaw.

Nobody speaks.

Lola looks at the spot where the cadet was. Looks at the wall. Starts playing with her jacket zipper.

Oliver turns to face the opposite direction.

I kneel beside Rhayne.

"You held for three," I say. Low. Just for her. "The calculation was correct."

She closes her eyes.

"He looked at me," she whispers. "He knew I couldn’t hold anymore. He went anyway." She closes her eyes.

"Yes."

"That doesn’t—"

"No." I cut it before she reaches wherever she’s heading. "You don’t carry this. The weight here is mine."

She opens her eyes. Looks at me.

I hold the look.

"Get up," I say. "We have a corridor."