The canyon mouth yawned like an open throat, stone walls rising on both sides until the sky was little more than a strip of cold blue. Wind funneled down the gap with a keening that scraped at Tessal's teeth. Up here sound didn't die — it echoed, multiplied, came back at you ten times louder and meaner.
Garp stood on a jut of rock, arms folded, silhouette black against the light. "Crawl through that throat and don't come out whimpering," he said. "Make it sing, or I'll make sure it's your funeral dirge." He tossed a pebble that clinked twice before thudding far below. "Survive until I'm bored. That's the lesson."
Tessal swallowed. He could feel the canyons in his bones — the way noise twisted, the way smoke pooled in eddies. He didn't like enclosed places. He didn't like being boxed in. But that made it all the better for testing inventions that worked in a pinch.
He set his bag down and worked. Fingers moved faster than thought, pulling a squat, heavy piece from its sheath. It wasn't graceful — more a mechanic's tool than a weapon — but it fit his hand like a second pulse. A short barrel, thick chamber, a winding spring visible through a glass tube. Tessal cradled it and called it nothing; it was just his gun. When he cocked the mechanism, a faint metallic tick answered. Inside, small spring-loaded hoppers clicked into place like a row of captive beetles.
Across his shoulder, dozens of Legion ants — little chassis no bigger than fists — clattered awake in a metallic wave. They scuttled from their packs, chassis clicking as they formed patterns on the ground. Their mandibles and tiny manipulators twitched as if smirking at the canyon echo.
"Smog, Screech—stand by," Tessal muttered. From a hollow behind him, the smoker beetle slithered forward, its undershell warm, vents pulsing. Screech, the cricket drone, unfolded its resonant plates and chirped, a high, tunable whine that made the hair on Tessal's arms lift.
Garp's voice rolled down: "You packing fireworks or a coffin, kid?"
"Both," Tessal answered, and the sound of his own voice surprised him with steadiness.
They moved as a unit. Smog nudged into a narrow crevice and unfolded, pumping thick gray smoke that pooled like a living thing. The smoke stank of burnt resin and oil — clever, ugly, effective. It curled through the canyon folds, swallowing outlines and swallowing sound. The cricket's plates vibrated; Screech let go a quick, glassy shriek that bounced off the canyon walls and set the air buzzing. The echo fractured into a dozen little echoes that made Garp's laugh clip for a moment. Tessal felt the vibration in his ribs and smiled.
Legion swarmed. The ant drones climbed the rock-face, anchoring wire hooks and dragging scrap plate into overlapping panels. They built on orders whispered across Tessal's jawline, working like a single, filthy organism — barricades where there were none, step-bridges to get around collapsed ledges, micro-tarps to catch the worst of the smoke so it funneled past narrow channels rather than pooling thick underfoot.
Tessal jammed a hopper into the gun's chamber and thumbed the release. The spring snapped, flinging the little round into the air. It struck the canyon wall with a ping and bounded off, angling hard, ricocheting into a dark niche where Garp had been crouched a second before. The echo came back as a dull thump, then silence — and a booming bark of laughter.
"You've rigged yourself a slingshot!" Garp called. "Heh. Use your head, brat. Don't just throw metal at me!"
Tessal's grin was half fear, half thrill. That warning wasn't helpful. He had to use the echo. He had to think in reflected sound, redirected impact, the way things came back when the walls answered. He could make Garp duck, he could make him stumble blind.
He fired again. The hopper pinged off an overhang, hopped across a slab, and clipped a loose stone which tumbled down — not at Garp, but into a narrow chasm where it hit a Legion panel. The panel collapsed outward and a cascade of small chutes deployed: a net closure that changed the slope, routing Garp's forward path into a shallow pit of punched earth the Ants had dug in thirty terse seconds.
Garp stumbled. For the first time this week he took a step and found the ground less certain beneath him. Tessal felt the canyon give him his first small victory.
Garp's footsteps thundered as he recovered. He barreled toward the smoke, smashing through Legion's half-built barricade with a CRACK that sent shards of scrap flying. The cricket shrieked, and Tessal tasted copper in his mouth, the sound vibrating his teeth. Smog thickened, a living wall now, and Legion reassembled, pouring themselves into the broken gaps to hold what they could.
"Don't give him a straight angle!" Tessal barked, chest tight. "Use the echo—shield, then bounce—now!"
He shouldered the gun. The hopper-launcher felt crude but righteous in his palm, its recoil a dull thud that made his bones rattle. He fired low, aiming the first ricochet to clip off a weathered boulder. The stone skittered, bounced, and flew like a thrown spear. Garp ducked, and Tessal saw the old man's grin flicker into focus — not amusement now, but the glint of a predator assessing a new threat.
Garp smashed forward through the fog. Legion swarmed up his boots, biting and catching on his uniform with little hooks. They're not meant to injure—Tessal reminded himself—they're to tangle, to delay. Venom might have a tail to paralyze, but Tessal didn't have that kind of single-kill tool here. He had tinkery, clever, swarm.
The canyon shrieked — literal and metaphysical — as Screech pitched a high tone and Smog lit a little flare within its furnace, a blinding flash that sent Garp's eyes watering mid-charge. In that blink, Rend lunged from a side crevice, whip-arm lashing at the old man's knee. The attack staggered him just enough that one of Tessal's hopper rounds—bounced, angled—caught his shoulder and exploded into a burst of shrapnel that peppered a length of his coat.
Garp roared, not with anger but with the sound of being made to work. Tessal felt his own breath leave him in a laugh-noise. This was the moment he'd wanted: chaos choreographed.
They kept it up. Legion tore up a strip of rock, filling a hollow with a patchwork ramp that redirected Garp's charge into a narrow cleft. Bulwark's memory in Tessal's hands — the idea of ricochet — lived through the gun now, in his palm. Smog kept the edges blurred while Screech made the echoes sharp and wrong. Rend and Venom clipped at the old man like gnats, while Tessal kept firing, each hopper a nudge, a suggestion.
Sweat burned his eyes. His lungs rasped from the smoke. His hands were raw from the gun's recoil, but he felt, buried under the ache, a raw joy: he was not hiding. He was presenting his craft to the storm and making the storm dance.
At last Garp slowed, moving with deliberate steps rather than the first wild charge. His chest rose and fell with heavy breath. He looked at Tessal — not at the machines, but at the boy — and for a flickering second his features lost their perpetual grin.
"You learned to make the canyon sing and bite back," Garp said, voice carrying. "You used noise and smoke like a sailor uses wind. You made your toys into an orchestra."
Tessal's chest swelled. The echo of Garp's words rolled off the stone walls and returned, richer than before. He looked down at Legion scuttling about, at Screech's plates vibrating faintly, at the smoker beetle puffing small victory clouds. He fingered the hopper gun, its metal warm and sticky with grease.
Garp's hand landed on his shoulder — a heavy, surprising weight. "But you almost got yourself killed," he added. "Don't let cleverness be an excuse for fools' luck. Control the chaos, don't be controlled by it."
Tessal let the reprimand sink in like cold water. He nodded, the movement honest.
"Tomorrow," Garp said, stepping back to the lip of the canyon, "you'll run a place that applauds no tricks—an old Navy post. Use everything, or it'll use you. Make it your last lesson before the real test."
As Garp's silhouette receded against the canyon mouth, Tessal gathered his machines. Legion climbed back into their nests, Screech folded its plates, Smog sealed its vents. Tessal cleaned the gun with shaking hands, each motion a small, meditative ritual. The canyon was quiet now, but the echoes remained — a thousand little lessons whispered from stone to ear.
He touched the hatch on the gun and, without quite realizing it, smiled.
They were learning to make noise together. They were learning to fight as one.