It’s a genuine pleasure to wake up at the end of the world, with the stench of rotting skin and blood in my nose. The weight of a million perished souls all caught in an Affect soup guided by the will of a dead goddess. No cup of fake joe could ever beat it.
I’ve already been awake for two or three hours when Silent comes by my bunk and kicks it. “Up and at ‘em, ladies. We’ve got a panda to catch.”
“Time to smell the blood again!” Saw Off announces cheerily, stretching her arms in the air as she rises from her bunk. “And go out and get in the muck and-”
I’m trying to relieve my immense existential dread with a neck rub, while glaring at Saw Off. “Could we not be loud and awful this early?” I snap.
“Easy,” Epione says, already ready to go. “Don’t let this place get under your skin.”
Mateo, too, seems to be nervous, staring out the windows at the red sky and blackened rubble beyond the fence.
“It’s gonna be okay,” I tell him, and for some reason, I actually believe that. I don’t know why, but after that dream last night, feels like some hidden pressure has fallen off my shoulders. Like someone was watching us all day yesterday, but now they’ve turned their face another way.
“I- I think so, too. Just had weird dreams.”
“You and me both,” Saw Off says before swallowing another shotgun shell. “I dreamed I was ice-skating but the ice was all gooey-”
“We all saw something last night, it seems. I dreamed of a woman, weeping and gnashing her teeth,” Epione says. “I wish it was confirmation of what we’ve seen here.”
“I saw her, too,” I say. “She spoke to me.”
Epione’s pink eyes widen. Her Affect, rare in betraying itself, gives me trepidation. “What do you mean, she spoke to you?”
“She-” Is there any point in hiding this anymore? “She was in Lilac. She remembered me.”
“She- what?” Silent shouts. “You mean you knew Carnality?”
Every single eye is on me, including Mateo’s. Their horror can’t be hidden by their masks. To know that I shared a prison with the greatest terror Foundation has faced this decade… well, I guess I can’t blame them. “It’s… just a dream, right?”
“Except we all dreamed her. We’re in her Affect and anything that happens to us can’t be chalked up to coincidence,” Epione says. “Did you know her?”
“N-no! I…” I can’t tell them the whole truth, not who I am, not why she knew me. So I search for the easiest half-truth: “I was too young, apparently. I don’t remember her. I- It was-”
Saw Off scowls and jumps in front of me. “Lay off, Epione. It’s not like he did anything, he just was in the same place as her.”
The pink eyes of Epione’s mask narrow as she looks at me. “You don’t remember her at all?”
I really don’t. I don’t remember much about the lab except my brothers and what they did to us. I can barely even remember what that torture was like. But I remember the scientists who just watched as we were tortured to death. Their faces are shadows in my mind, impassive, uncaring. “She wasn’t the only monster there.”
Epione doesn’t turn away, but she nods, accepting my explanation. “Whatever it’s worth, I feel that her Affect has shifted off us.”
She’s right. I’ve felt it, too. Carnality was on my shoulder, much like Megajoule always is, but since last night, she’s left. Which is good, I think. “Hopefully she’ll leave us alone now?”
“Perhaps. We should take advantage.” Epione claps her hands. “I’ve done some initial explorations of the facility, but perhaps your talents will be better suited for uncovering hidden things.”
Silent and Epione go their own way, continuing to investigate the facility. Meanwhile, Saw Off and Mateo basically cling to my arms while we search for evidence of Pandahead.
“Maybe there’s something hidden around here,” I wonder aloud. “Like secret rooms.”
“Can’t you just find it? Like find where the air flow is different or something?” Mateo asks.
“Depends. If it’s at equilibrium with the rest of the space, no, and if it’s inert, no. That’s one way around my sense, actually.”
“I thought you could sense stuff, dude,” Mateo says, snapping his fingers.
I want to pinch his ears. “Weren’t you just listening to me? What did I say?”
“I don’t know what equilibrium or inert means.” Mateo spins around. “If there’s nothing to find here, maybe there’s like a basement level?”
There aren’t many basements in Houston; we’re too close to sea level. It’s the main reason Houston has stayed above ground all these years, when the other major cities carved out tunnels beneath themselves to escape Affected war. But the main PK campus had built several levels underground. Maybe Mateo’s onto something. I nod and we change course, looking for a stairwell.
As we explore the facility, it reminds me a lot of what I saw of PK’s main campus. Spartan, austere. Gray slate floors and buzzing lights. “Are we sure these people didn’t just off themselves because their office sucked?” I ask.
Saw Off snickers. “Nine to fives, man. They’d make anybody start to worship a crazy blood goddess.”
The glint of metal in a nearby room draws my attention, and I poke my head through the door. The vinegar smell of Affect fills this room. Not actively, but a lot of emotions and power have flown through this place in the past. A lot of bad emotion. A dozen metal patient tables line one wall, each one accompanied by a rolling rack of screens and various tools. The screens are currently powered down, but I turn one on with the power toggle.
Green text flickers across the black screen. An old school system. I can type in an input. I’m unsure how to use such an outdated system, but there’s a keyboard, so I type, MENU.
The options that come up are:
PATIENT LOGS - TYPE IN NUMBER CODE
OTHER LOGS - TYPE IN DATE AND NAME
I’m not sure what to do with that, but there’s another menu item for recently accessed files, so I toggle over to that.
PATIENT LOG 376
DR. SEWARD 08/19/2077
I type 376 into the input to bring up the log.
METIS I HATE USING THIS THING. ANYWAY, SCANS ON THIS LAST BATCH SHOW US THE FOLLOWING:
HEAVYWEIGHT
WELTERWEIGHT
CRUISERWEIGHT
CRUISERWEIGHT
WELTERWEIGHT
CRUISERWEIGHT
LIGHTWEIGHT (OH BOY PANDA’S GONNA BE PISSED ABOUT THIS ONE - I GUESS THEY CAN STILL USE WORKERS OUT THERE)
I can’t believe what I’m reading. It takes all my willpower not to melt this thing in half, thinking of the casual torture Pandahead’s minions have doled out in this place. That last log was dated to a week ago, too, so it’s not like this was a once off thing. “Guys,” I manage, seething. “They’re using this lab for testing.”
Mateo is trembling in the corner. He says, “I didn’t know what it looked like.”
“You were here, hun?” Saw Off asks.
“Blindfolded, but yeah,” he says. “They sat us on these metal tables and I remember them scanning us, and this room just feels… like I’ve been here before.”
Saw Off gives him a pitying noise and rubs his arm. “We’ll get these bastards,” she says, quietly. “Don’t you worry about that, hun.”
I want to comfort him, too, but there’s more to uncover here. I access the log under Dr. Seward’s name.
SHE SPEAKS TO ME SHE SPEAKS TO ME I AM HER VESSEL I AM HER VESSEL SHE DID NOT KILL HIM SHE DID NOT KILL HIM
A comment has been added to this file at the bottom: CREEPY AS SHIT! HAHA!
I ignore that and go back to the patient logs. “These logs say there’s tunnels below the facility, so looks like you were right, M—” I stop myself, forgetting Saw Off doesn’t know his real name. “Volition.”
He nods. “I don’t remember much. We were drugged and dampened and blind. I couldn’t tell you where the tunnels are but I do remember stairs.”
As I pat him on the shoulder, Silent and Epione come walking down the hall, joining us in the testing room. Epione studies the room carefully while Silent appraises us of what they found: “I hear trucks down the hall, but it sounds like it’s coming through the walls. I’d guess a couple of miles out from us.”
“Damn, you can hear good,” Mateo says.
For some reason, Silent really appreciates this simple compliment. Her Affect exudes sudden warmth. She says, “I wish it were better. Otherwise we’d know where they’re coming from.”
“Where’d you hear them?” I ask.
Silent leads us to the end of the corridor. The hallway continues on at a right angle, then turns again, looping on itself around the central block of rooms until it comes back to the main foyer we entered through. “Right here,” Silent says. “I can still hear them, but it’s hard to say exactly where. I know there’s something hidden here, but blast me if I can find it.”
I listen to the heat. A portion of the wall is unnaturally cold, as if being chilled by someone blasting the A/C on the other side. This passage is roughly door shaped, but I can’t find a seam in the wall.
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“It must open by the Affect,” I say. “But it’s right here. There’s a temperature differential.”
“I’m learning so many new words today,” Mateo says.
Epione passes her hand over it. “Yes, you’re right.” As she touches it, the wall clicks, and a panel swings outward like a door. Behind it, stairs descend into the dark.
#
Downstairs, we find a huge chamber, large enough to hold a dragon’s horde. A huge, hollow place where the only sounds are our footsteps. Filthy concrete makes up every surface. Mateo sidles up next to me, trembling and drenched in fear. Saw Off shivers. “Somebody just walked over my grave, babe.”
It’s giving me the creeps, too. Quiet, cold, like a tomb.
“Like the warehouse,” Megajoule whispers. “The void.”
Like the Fear.
There are blood stains on the floor. Shit stains. Piss stains. Chains riveted into random spots along the walls. Cages lined with nothing more than straw. Two passages on each end of the massive chamber are just large enough for trucks to trundle through single-file. I can see tire tracks on the tile floor. One must go to the city, but the other, a harbor perhaps?
“So that’s how they travel the Null Domain,” I say to Mateo.
“I just knew they put us in a truck after the boat,” Mateo replies.
“Speaking of,” Silent says, “They aren’t far now. Maybe a couple of minutes before they’re here. I can hear them down a turn.”
“Find a place to hide,” Epione says.
My heart hammering, I search for an adequate hiding place. Luckily for us, there are plenty of crates and cages pushed against the walls, and we’re able to crouch behind some to lie in wait.
As Silent promised, it’s not too long before I hear engines and tires echoing down the passage. The chamber lights up from high beams rounding a corner, and the trucks pull into the chamber. There are three in total, average-sized box trucks, comparable to the ones Thanh uses for his smuggling operation. You could fit twenty people in the trailer comfortably. Although my guess is they don’t care about comfort.
The drivers climb down from the cabs and open the trailer doors.
Twelve guards in unmarked, gray clothes emerge from the back of the first truck, machine guns dangling lazily at their waists. They wear simple balaclavas to mask their faces. One of them has his scrunched up over his nose while he smokes a cigarette, and another two laugh and murmur beyond the edge of my hearing.
“There’s a Heavyweight among them,” Epione whispers.
The drivers begin to yell into the other two trailers, shouting, “Come on! Come on!” like shepherd dogs barking at a flock of sheep. Dozens of people step out of the trucks, clanking down the metallic ramps, each one bound by PK dampener cuffs. “We gotta get these people scanned!” one of the drivers shouts to the guard. “We’re already behind schedule.”
“What’s the plan?” I ask, ready to jump into action.
“We wait, observe,” Epione says. “We can learn what they do here, perhaps put a tracker on one of the trucks.”
But I’m stuck on the “not doing anything about the slaves” part. “You just want to let them go about their day?”
Epione takes a pause. She breathes one long sigh out and then says, “What would be more productive: saving some slaves right now, or shutting down the entire organization that will regroup and continue to trade slaves if we try to play heroes?”
I understand what she’s saying. I really, truly do. But these people are suffering, right now. “It’s not about playing heroes. It’s about saving the actual lives in front of us.”
“Listen to Ep, jackass,” Silent hisses. “You can’t seriously think that trading these people out for every single victim Pandahead will have after this is worth it.”
I glare at Silent. “I’m not gonna accept watching innocent people get carted off just so I can learn a little more about the people doing it. In fact, the less I know about them, the better.”
“Bull with a vase,” Megajoule whispers in my ear, but I ignore him.
“C’mon, y’all, they’re gonna spot us,” Saw Off says, peeking over the crate.
“Yes, their situation is pitiable and unjust,” Epione says. “But we can’t lose the war for a single battle. Please, Home Run. We must be strategic, and unfortunately, that means we must be cruel. Do you want to feel good about yourself or do you want real change?”
“I don’t have to choose.” I look over to Mateo, who locks eyes with me. He nods.
Epione tries to reach out, to stop me, perhaps even to influence my emotions with her empathy, but I warp out of her touch. I pull Mateo into my arms and with a huge expulsion of heat, launch us toward the trucks.
The guards are still laughing and shoving at their prisoners when I sail into them. I catch two of Pandahead’s thugs, one with my fist and one with my shin. They don’t even have time to register what’s happening before they’re face down, unconscious or worse.
Mateo’s been practicing with his power. He flips forward onto a surfboard of light, hurling baseball sized disks like shurikens at the soldiers. He jumps down on top of one of them, pulling the gun off him before he can use it, and tosses it out into the dark chamber somewhere.
Then the gunfire starts. The prisoners, even dampened by their collars, shout and scramble for safety. Mateo shields himself from the bullets, but I can feel him panicking. I get between him and the guards, hoping to keep him safe, but before I can deal with them, a woman rushes out from the back of one of the trucks.
She looks like Pandahead found her in a boxing league somewhere. Her red hair is cut into a short bob, her nose looks like it’s been broken several times, and unlike the guards, she’s wearing this spicy leather vest piece that shows off arms rippling with muscle.
The woman hits me with a blow strong enough that I struggle to absorb all of the energy, causing my grip on my power to strain for a few seconds.
She’s gotta be the Heavyweight, because she’s almost as fast as Silent and as sturdy as me, and as she wrestles me across the chamber I have to put more heat into fighting her than I’ve ever used with most people. Bursts of hot air flow from me, enough to char the tile below my feet and send hissing steam out from us, but she’s not bothered at all.
Meanwhile, I’m struggling to keep my attention on Mateo, too, just in case he needs help. He’s trying his best, but the gunfire from ten different guns has him pinned down.
I pile a huge portion of my heat into one blow to the woman’s gut. She doubles over, groans, and then stands back up, ready to continue fighting. I take advantage of the brief opening by flipping over her and warping to Mateo’s side. “Come on, kid, fight!”
Mateo only gasps, floundering to be effective. He looks at me with wide eyes, then says, “Duck!”
I don’t, but I should have. I get hit in the back of the head hard, hard enough to make the world spin even while I’m trying to absorb the impact.
The woman kicks at Mateo with the speed of a viper strike. A shield of light spirals out of his hands just in time to take the brunt of her blow, but the force still knocks him off his feet. He fights to get back up, all while covering himself from the haphazard gunfire of Pandahead’s other soldiers.
I pull him up. “Go back to the crates, I’ll deal with these g-” Before I finish my sentence, the woman slams into my back, sending me flying.
I rip through a truck trailer like paper and sail across the chamber, splintering through metal and insulation. I end up crunching through some of the cages on my way down. The metal groans and the whole structure topples, starting a domino cascade bringing down all the cages. Truck alarms start to go off somewhere behind me.
I climb to my knees as the boxer catches up to me, launching into a series of blows that would make any fighting cape green with envy. That’s not a problem for me, because even though she’s fast, my kinetic sense gives me an almost prescient sense of the battle flow. I step out of most of her attacks, then hit her hard with a hook loaded with a payload of energy equal to a ton of TNT. The shot crumples her but doesn’t knock her out. She finds her feet again in a flash.
Instead of us having another round, the Front finally joins the fight, Epione at their lead. She rushes past me, and I say, “Woah, wait!” while trying to reach out to her, but she’s already in between me and the woman.
The woman reels back for a haymaker and swings at Epione.
I wince on instinct, thinking I’m about to witness Epione get her arm shredded clean off. But there’s no spray of blood, no cracking bone. Instead, Epione catches the fist and stops the woman dead in her tracks, and the woman says, “Oh, what the biscuit?”
Right, an empath.
Silent chases them down, jumping over Epione’s shoulders to land a single blow with her sword, puncturing the woman’s heart through her back.
The guards, seeing their champion go down, retreat up the stairs. “Ladies, can you please deal with them?” Epione asks Silent and Saw Off.
Silent shoots me a dirty look as she goes to do just that. Saw Off lowers her bandanna and quirks her mouth, radiating sympathy.
Epione shakes her head as the Front scatters to do her bidding. “Home Run, you just cost us our lead.”
I know she can feel my anger. “I’m not gonna apologize for stopping these people from suffering horrible fates. It’s not like we’ve lost everything.”
“We have!” Epione snaps. “We could have put trackers on these trucks, we could have learned where Pandahead has hideouts in the city. Now, we’ve burned this whole damn route for him.”
Our conversation is interrupted by a spurt of gunfire from upstairs. Machine guns being silenced by a handful of screams and the odd shotgun sneeze.
Once it passes, Epione says, “I’m actually trying to stop Pandahead, not just slap his hand every time he reaches out. I’m trying to win.”
“Now who sounds like a cape?” I ask.
I wasn’t trying to rile her up, but I am kind of hoping that comment sets her off. Unfortunately, it does not. She remains as cold as ever. “It’s done. Let’s make the best of it.”
#
Silent and Saw Off come down the stairs again, not looking much worse for wear. The guards must not have had any powers to speak of.
“What are we doing about the captives?” I ask.
“The tunnel, as far as we can tell, is clear. We’ll to let them take a truck after we explore it.” Epione nods to me. “The Null Domain’s effect doesn’t reach down here, so please make sure it’s clear while we search for any clues on the missing masks. Got it?”
At least that much I can do. Hopefully it smooths things over.
The tunnel is not well lit, not well paved. But it is carved out of the rock in perfect angles, leading me to believe someone’s power helped make this. I can only imagine a cape or a very strong mask had a hand in this.
It only takes about thirty minutes for me to follow the tunnel to its end, dashing and warping my way back to Houston with my power. When I make it to the other end, I find, to no one’s shock, an empty warehouse. The tunnel entrance is hidden behind a false wall of shelving that’s easy to remove from the inside, but looks like it’d be much harder to find if you were coming from the outside world. Which makes sense.
I dash back down the tunnel with kinetically enhanced bounds and leaps, thinking about how to smooth things over with the Front. And to be honest, the only thing I can think of is to lay low for a while, give them some space. Do my own thing. Maybe even see if I can find out something about their friends while out on the town.
By the time I get back, the Front has gathered all the victims up and let them have a truck. The people are from every part of the world as far as I can tell, but dominated by South American folk. Mateo is going around, speaking quietly to them in Spanish. He discovers at least one of them knows how to drive a truck, thank goodness. I don’t even know what else we could do for them.
“Look up a man named Thanh Nguyen, in the Shells, the part of town you’ll come out in. There’s a high rise bank. He runs a restaurant up on the third floor. Tell him Gabe sent you.” I say to the girl driving the truck. Mateo translates for me, and she nods. The truck starts up with a loud grumble, and they drive into the tunnel.
As they drive off, Saw Off approaches me, shaking her head a little sadly. “I think you did the right thing. I know Lugs wouldn’t have been happy if we let those people get taken out into the city to do Metis knows what.” Saw Off lowers her bandanna and smiles at me, then playfully punches my arm. “I can tell you’re worried, but I wanted you to know that.”
The walk back is long and awkward, and I can definitely feel the resentment wafting from Silent. But the person I wish I could read more than anything is Epione. She doesn’t look back at me once, doesn’t say a word, not until we’re through to the other side. And even then, it’s only a simple, “I’ll call you. Rest.”
Mateo and I head back to the house, alone. I’m not much in the mood for anything, but he steals us some burgers and fries on the way. The power is still off, so we enjoy our meal in the dark.
After a while, he says, “Sorry.”
“For?” I ask.
“I froze up.”
“It happens.”
“I’m sorry I just…” Mateo says. “I couldn’t… couldn’t bring myself to… they were gonna kill us, no matter what I thought about it, and yet I couldn’t…
I pat him on the shoulder. He’s just a kid. I really shouldn’t be getting him caught up in this kind of thing.
He frowns, looks at me, and asks, “What if the guards didn’t know what they were doing? Or what if they were desperate? What if they were forced into it, too?”
All extremely valid questions, in my opinion, but not ones you can ask in the heat of the moment. “I don’t know, kid.”
“I’m not saying these guys didn’t deserve what they got. Some of them looked us in the eyes as we got transferred to the trucks. They knew what this was… But some of them looked ashamed, Gabe. Some of them looked like they hated what they were doing.” Mateo sets his burger down and grabs my arm, more so for his own comfort than to keep my attention.
I pat his arm, trying to reassure him. “I believe you. But they were still there, doing the job. And like you said, they were trying to kill us. We had our job, they had theirs, and those two clashed.”
He gives me a funny look, a look that says, that doesn’t sound very heroic.
I sigh, rubbing the back of my neck, and say, “I’m not going to promise I’m never going to kill in a fight. I had to kill Danger Close to save you and I don’t regret that.” I pick at my fries, not really hungry. “But I understand what you’re saying. I knew why we had to rescue those people. Because I’ve been through the same thing.”
Mateo turns to me. “You mean at Lilac?”
“They killed so many of my brothers. They tortured us to ‘train’ us.” I don’t want to even recall those images and make them more than vague shadows. “If we’d been confronting them, I might have frozen up, too.”
Mateo grabs my arm. “I’ll help you find them.”
“They’ll find me someday,” I say. “I know it.”