Chapter 192: 192: The First semester XV

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They squealed. Someone tried to hand him a paper crown. He tried to accept and also remain dignified. The result looked like a very small king in a very large hurry.

"Later," John murmured.

Fizz tossed the crown back like a frisbee. "Later I will sign faces."

They cut west, angling through side streets where shutters blinked awake and cats evaluated humanity with frank hostility. The city gate reared up at the end of a long straight — the northward arch where caravans lined like beads and guards checked passes with the resigned flair of men whose coffee had been ruined by other men’s decisions.

A line of students formed its own tributary to the outbound river. Ray Flame stood in it, coat immaculate, hair announcing he respected mirrors. He pretended not to see John and Fizz; they pretended not to notice his pretense. Farther up, Rhea Flame’s red ribbon caught the sun and threw it back differently. She listened to some tall boy flexing about his fake attempt courage with his mouth and let him finish without awarding points. John looked away first.

They filed through under the arch. The guard stamped John’s pass and tapped the red corded field tag to activate it. "Back by seven days," she said. "Earlier if eaten. Try not to be."

Outside the gate, the road widened and quickly forgot the city. Fields rolled out like folded cloth. Hedgerows stitched the seams. A tight clutch of students gathered a hundred yards ahead where the first bend offered privacy to the anxious. John angled left instead, into a shallow cutting lined with broom and thorn.

Fizz lowered his voice to a whisper that fooled no bird. "It’s the moment."

"It is the moment," John said.

He stepped behind the tallest furze and pulled the world’s simplest trick: he reached into the place where night waits, and he asked it for a machine.

The M15 answered like a grin.

Light didn’t flash so much as rearrange. Lines drew themselves in the air — arcs, braces, a lattice that made sense before it existed. They folded in with a crisp metal hymn, and the bike’s frame blossomed out of nothing with an engineer’s smugness. Matte-black, low-slung, two wide wheels ribboned with a sigil that drank sun instead of reflecting it. No chain. No exhaust. A single spine of a chassis that claimed it had never heard of a bump it respected. Along the stem, the faintest blue glyphs lit up and then cooled, like someone breathing an answer.

Fizz’s jaw fell in a condition known as existential joy. "Steed," he whispered, reverent. "Steed. My steed. Our steed. The steed of two circles."

John swung a leg over. The seat adjusted itself to an argument it would not lose. He touched two fingers to the control rune and felt the bike decide to be his. The front grip warmed. A ghost-speedometer traced a pale arc at the edge of his vision. He rested his boots on pegs that did not exist a breath before. The hum that rose was not an engine’s growl; it was a tone that lived halfway between the first and second circle and reminded both to behave.

Fizz hovered in front of his face. "Where do I sit? Do I become a very aerodynamic hat."

"You hold the front headrail," John said, and pointed to a small, flared brace above the wheel. "No fingers in the spokes. No chewing the glyphs. No leaning when I am not leaning."

Fizz assumed a dignified perch and then lost all dignity. "We ride like a rumor that knows the truth. Go."

John risked a small smile and rolled the M15 forward. It drifted like a fish answering a current. He gave it mana the way a man gives a friend a push on a swing —steady, not too much— and the bike accepted. They slid out of the cutting, back onto the road ten lengths behind a group of students and then, unhurried, off the road again into a line of hedge-shadow that stitched the fields together.

"Quiet mode," John murmured, and the glyph by his thumb dimmed to a responsible glow. The hum tucked itself away. Wheels kissed rutted turf without complaint. They arrowed north.

The city sank behind them, roofs like shrugged shoulders. Wind tugged at John’s coat and then learned to be polite. Fizz kept both paws wrapped around the rail and occasionally let one go to gesture at the world, issuing commentary.

"Look," he breathed. "Geese mending the sky. A scarecrow that is clearly lying about something. A very judgy cow."

"Hold on," John said as they crossed a shallow ford. Water lifted, silver-sharp. The bike did not bother to spray; it had better manners.

Fields gave way to low woods, then to heath where the road gave up pretending to be flat. John let the bike have more mana, felt the drain as a tickle against the constant draw he fed to the egg in the void. He kept back a margin the way Snake’s warning had taught him. Do not be empty. Do not lose the egg to the place where lost things go to become stories.

By late morning they had put the miles under them like a tablecloth pulled cleanly off a table. John guided the M15 up under a copse of hawthorns and let it idle in a whisper, eyes on the bend ahead where a caravan paused with one wheel in need of negotiation. He didn’t want to pass twenty students who would recognize him by the shape of his silence.

Fizz craned back. "We are faster than gossip."

"We are quieter than gossip," John said, and that seemed safer.

They let the caravan creak forward, then swung wide along a sheep path that pretended to be a road when no one watched. Fizz sang a road song he invented on the spot:

Wheels of night and wheels of day

hum the miles polite away

hedge and ditch and sky in tune

tea at noon, the world by noon

do not tell the warden, please,

We are good, just fast, with ease.

"Needs work," John said, and the smile pulled like a stitch he did not mind.

They ate at a wayside — the practical bread, the practical cheese, the practical apple that pretended to be fancy because it was red. Fizz negotiated pastry from a farm wife with charm and a small spark that toasted the top just enough to be a service rather than a crime. John stretched, counted, breathed to let the circles settle again.

"Mana," Fizz said, tapping the side of his head like a conspirator. "You’re feeding three bellies. You, the wheels, the egg."

"I have room," John said. "If I keep a wall empty."

Fizz’s face went briefly sober. "Keep a wall," he said. "I like that egg. I like your heart more."

Afternoon sagged hot. They rode in shade where the hedges allowed it and in sun where shade forgot its job. John practiced holding speed at a whisper and then letting the M15 drink a deeper draft with a long, low surge. The machine loved open country. It disliked cobbles and the philosophy of towns. He made a promise to both that he would remember.

They were far enough from the capital by evening that the road’s personality changed. It stopped offering inns every few miles. It started telling you to know your own water. The Black Jungle made its first statement on the horizon: a dark smudge with edges, the way a rumor looks just before it turns real. Birds that preferred lists and names were fewer here. Things that liked edges lived closer to the ground.

They found a rise a quarter-mile off the road that offered both concealment and a view like a map. John set the bike to rest with its frame folding down into the void with that smug little turn of metal. Fizz sighed as the light-lattice disappeared. "Bye for now, darling," he whispered to the front headrail, then pretended he had not.

They made a cold camp. John chewed bread with the concentration of a man practicing indifference. Fizz cracked a seed and declared it "metaphorically delicious." The egg pulsed faint and stubborn in the void, 30 percent alive, hungry the way secrets are hungry.

"Plan," John said, laying out the next day in the dirt with a twig. "We arrive before most. Register. Find a small team. The kind that wants the points but won’t ask questions if we are gone a lot."

"We call ourselves Team Unremarkable," Fizz said. "Our banner will be beige."

"Something like that," John said. "We do the work. We don’t make speeches while we do it."

Fizz lay on his back on the grass and paddled his paws in the air. "In the jungle, do we hunt loud or politely?"

"Polite," John said. "Listen first. Watch long. Fight short."

Fizz nodded. "And if we see a very rude mushroom."

"We do not eat it," John said. "We destroy it."

He slept in fits, the egg tugging like a child in a crowd who wants to show you a window. Twice he woke and fed it a touch through the black, grinding the memory of beast-parts cleaner with his void and letting the system guide the trickle toward the seed. He kept his wall up. He was not empty.