“You two made it! It is you, right? From the challenge? Thought you said you were coming by truck.”
The voice belonged to a man in blue and gray camo, the words “US Air Force” embroidered over a breast pocket.
“Yeah, it’s us.” Kurt’s words were slow and tired, with an uncharacteristic hesitance. “We had a run-in with a Titan, pretty literally. Little way up the road. You were… um… Airman Hutto?”
The man nodded. “Airman Marcus Hutto. That’s me. I assume these are the others you said you were traveling with?”
Byron lifted a hand to get his attention. “Yeah, these are our friends but… forget that. There’s something I need to tell you. There’s a wildfire north of us. Titan started it, we think. We outran it, but, it’s… uh… there.”
The airman’s cheerful smile fell away. He turned, shouting toward the main clump of defenders. “Major! Wildfire to the north, sir.”
An older man’s voice rang from the crowd near the fighting. It was the same one that had blasted the announcement into my brain a few minutes before. “How far out?”
My friends and I looked at each other.
“I don’t know how long I was running,” I said.
Byron grimaced. “We have a rough idea of your top speed, but I didn’t check my watch when we started moving.”
“There was a sign a little bit after we started going,” Davi said. “For Exit 248? Does that help?”
“That’ll do it,” muttered Hutto, before raising his voice. “Fire last seen near Algodones, sir!”
“Damn! Can I get an Analyze on their speed?” There was a pause. “Over twenty miles-per-hour? Impressive. Still, fire could be here in as little as an hour. I’ll contact HQ. We'll get the firebreak teams over here, but they won’t be able to do their work with these damn turkeys up their asses. Put your backs into it, people!”
The major’s booming voice was loud enough to be audible even over the sounds of battle.
My friends and I didn’t get up to help, and no one asked us to. I was flopped over on the ground, still breathing hard, and my friends had collapsed around me. Airman Hutto remained standing, but stayed nearby.
After a minute, Byron squinted at him. “Were you… waiting for us?”
The man nodded. “More or less. I got debriefed after the challenge and command was interested in you guys and your plan. Well, and the fact that you had intel on conditions as far north as Denver. I got assigned to the defenses here with orders to keep an eye out for you.”
“I take it we’re not free to go, then,” Byron said. It was less a question and more a statement.
Hutto held up his hands. “You’re not under arrest! But if you’re willing to come to HQ and be debriefed, Colonel Vasquez said he’s willing to offer support to your air-travel efforts.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Of course we’ll come,” John interjected gruffly. “We’re good Americans.”
Hutto grinned at John before answering my question. “Yeah. They want to get in touch with other bases, but we’ve kind of got our hands full stabilizing our area. Why not support a group that’s motivated and has already shown their capability?”
When he put it that way, it made sense.
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“So you’ll wait?” he asked. When we confirmed, he clapped Kurt on the shoulder. “Glad you made it here. I’d better get back to the gates.”
After a few minutes, our exhaustion had waned enough to drag ourselves to the shade of a nearby awning that had been set up for triage. Byron started going through a backpack.
“Hey,” I said. “Isn’t that one mine?”
“Yeah. I’m thirsty. Didn’t you pack enough to share?”
“I did, but… you didn’t pack any water?”
Byron looked evasive. “Well… it was so hard to find good scales and a working barometer. And all the rest of it, especially since I didn’t want anything to break. Water bottles are terrible packing material. I’ve got spare clothes if you want any.”
“Any spare shoes?” I lifted a foot off the ground and waved it at him. What remained of my shoe slid up my ankle, sole destroyed entirely.
“Uhhhh…. No?”
I snorted, then let my leg drop.
Steady fighting cleared the wostrich herd in about ten minutes. It took another twenty after that for a line of buses, highlighted in the blue of Animate Machinery, to careen to a stop nearby, letting dozens of people pile out. They immediately rushed out the gate and began creating a firebreak of vast width, probably close to a hundred feet across. There were clearly smaller teams within the big group. Some were travelling perpendicular to the road, using abilities or strength to chop down bushes and bury grasses beneath the earth, making a narrow boundary on either side of the planned firebreak, while others supervised controlled burns on the central area.
Hutto came back up to us at the head of a small group, the medieval axe-wielding warrior by his side. “You guys ready to go?”
We climbed aboard one of the buses. It had clearly been reworked recently. The seats had been moved into the middle, with a narrow aisle along each wall. The windows had been replaced with chain-link fence, even the front window. The driver was wearing a motorcycle helmet, and more sat waiting on each seat for passengers.
Travel aboard the converted bus was noisy, making it impossible to talk, but at least it gave me a chance to tap John and mime the shape of the gem he’d grabbed. It was our prize, our compensation for taking down a behemoth that had stolen Davi’s arm, and I still had no idea what it was.
John understood my mimicry well enough, but there was a hesitance in his motions as he pulled it from his backpack, and when he passed it to me, he didn’t let go immediately.
The moment my fingers brushed its slick surface, words blossomed in my mind.
Congratulations! You have acquired an Initiate Titan’s Heart. You may focus on this gem to consume it and boost a Specialty. Rulers may instead meld the gem with their crown to provide an increase in capability to themselves and their subjects. You may meld this Heart with a Points Siphon to increase Siphon strength. Finally, you may make your way to a Shop where this Titan’s Heart may be traded in for a variety of exclusive prizes.
Oh.
I shook my head, letting go of the gem. John relaxed, slipping it back into his bag. I was definitely curious about what would happen if I “melded” it with my crown, but I wasn’t going to make a unilateral decision. Especially after how our fight had gone. Davi had lost an arm. She should get to decide what we did with what we’d gained. We could wait until we’d had a chance to talk. The gem didn’t seem to be going anywhere.
Curiosity satisfied - for the moment - I focused my attention out the window.
Albuquerque was… amazing.
We traveled through the city at nearly full speed. Pedestrians were clearly working hard to keep the streets clear, and even seemed to be in the habit of standing on sidewalks or near the edges of the road to allow traffic to move through without stopping.
And there was traffic. Not a lot of it, but more than I’d seen in over a month. We probably spotted twenty other vehicles on the road during our hour-long drive. All of them were luminous with the blue light of alien abilities, which was impressive in its own way. Kurt had pretty good synergy, and it taxed him to move a pickup for short periods. A lot of what we were seeing were trucks and buses. To have dozens of drivers strong enough to keep the vehicles moving for extended periods? The Points Siphons were clearly being used in an organized way.
A lot of the people we passed looked thin, but at least along the main roads we were traveling, no one appeared to be starving. People were fighting monsters, but not other humans.
I was beginning to see why people had been so quick to hand the prizes over to the military forces from Kirtland.
Things seemed almost… nice. Not normal, by any means: you only had to look for a window to figure that out. There wasn’t a glass pane in sight, with every aperture either barricaded or shattered. But the shattered glass had been swept up, and the city didn’t stink nearly as badly as Santa Fe had. Maybe someone had gotten the water running again? Yeah, they must have. We’d passed a number of aid stations distributing rations, but I hadn’t seen anyone carrying the alien jugs of water.
John was right that Kirtland wasn’t the same as Redstone Arsenal. But if things in Huntsville and Madison had gone even a quarter as well as they’d gone here, maybe…
I shook my head, standing from my seat as the bus ground to a halt in front of a practical-looking building, a boxy style common on military bases where function took precedence over form.
Focus, Vince, I told myself. You’re about to make the most important presentation of your life. The people in charge here have power, and you need to convince them to use it to help get you home.