Adam looks like he’s going to bolt.

I can’t decide if he’s Italian, Persian, or Latino. He’s olive complected with thick curly black hair that’s as bushy as his beard all of which is shot through with gray. His large eyes are wide and staring.

“How’d you find me?” he breathes.

“Luck, man, how else?” I tell him. "I pushed a bit and picked a restaurant thinking we'd get better food. My bad."

He snorts but stays very still.

“We’re not here for you, I swear,” I say. “Besides, I kind of owe you. Wait. Are they looking for you? The FBI?”

“I don’t think so,” he says and shifts his weight, preparing to stand and leave. “You seem okay but I don’t think I’ll risk it, Ben.”

I hold out a hand. “Please,” I say. “I have so many questions. Just for a moment.”

Adam relaxes, just a bit, but stays in his seat.

“What can you tell me about the kidnappings?” I ask.

Adam sighs. “Lansky was gathering victims to sell to someone else. I don’t think she was the only one. Things I've learned indicate there's quite a market around here, but she’s the only one I found and stopped. I don’t think this is for a trafficking thing,” he says. "It’s going to be a mass event.”

“A what?”

“What do you know about sponsors?”

“Not much. Batteries for practitioners.”

“That’s the company line,” says Adam. He leans in and jams a forefinger into the table. “They are so much more than that. Okay, think of a person in the present as the base of a tree. All the branches that stem out from there are all the possible futures for that person, right? They reflect the choices we each make that set us down different paths of causality. You with me so far?”

I nod.

“When a person first learns a rune and gains power, the cost is a good bit of those branches. The sponsor eats those possibilities for the energy, limiting the practitioner’s future choices. We generally think of power as giving us more freedom but, in this case, because of the nature of the sponsors, practitioners lose it.”

“Because of the sponsors’ nature.”

“Yep,” says Adam. “They want to eat. Once you’ve learned a rune and gained power that you’re not supposed to have it has a corrupting effect, and not just psychologically. The sponsor wants a practitioner to learn more runes so it can eat more. The main thing preventing us from just jumping right up through the ranks is the jealousy and paranoia of the folks who know the runes. We don’t like sharing. But there are other factors too.”

“You kill each other.”

Adam fires a finger gun at me and grins. “Bingo. Like all predators, the sponsors compete for food. Officially there are eight known sponsors, all labeled with letters of the Greek alphabet. There could be many, many more. No one knows for sure.”

“And that’s what you do? Compete?”

Adam smiles and says, “No, I’m different. Like most kinds of competition, the worst possible result is someone winning. I balance things." Something makes him frown. "Uh, is that your FBI friend?” He nods behind me.

I turn and see Ochoa. She’s standing in the lobby looking out the window, staring. A white panel van has stopped in front of the entrance.

“Oh, uh, oops,” says Adam.

“What?”

“Well, I wasn’t meeting you here, was I? I thought you were dead. I might've set up one of my targets.”

“To trap him.”

“Yep.”

“He’s trapped you instead, didn’t he?”

“Looks like he’s going to try. Duck!” He drops below the table.

I follow.

The wall explodes inward. The noise is horrendous. I feel the pressure in my chest from the shockwave and glass and fragments of drywall and splinters of wood rain down on me. When I look up I see that the whole front of the restaurant is blown in. The van’s side door is open and a metal man is standing there with a glowing mace in his hand that’s swung up like he just gave somebody an uppercut with it.

He looks like Golden Age of Comics Iron Man only nobody bothered with a paint job. He’s all burnished steel.

I don’t see Ochoa.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Adam says, “They’ll kill you just for meeting with me. Sorry, Ben.” He stands up and rabbits, leaping over a table and making for the kitchen. "Good luck," I hear him cry and then he giggles. It's high-pitched and eerie.

“FBI!” I hear Ochoa shout. “Freeze!”

She’s standing in the little corridor that leads to the bathrooms, gun out and pointing. She must've gotten behind the wall which sheltered her from the blast.

The metal man doesn’t freeze though. He steps into the restaurant through the hole he just blasted in it.

The van behind him lurches and I see another guy get out, also encased in steel. Judging by what he did to the van's suspension, he's heavy. He’s also got a fucking two-handed bearded axe. Once he steps out of the van, it peels off and zooms around the side of the building, probably to try to head off Adam.

Where were the fucking aethings? There’d been no warning!

“You will stop or I will shoot!” says Ochoa. “FBI, assholes!”

The first guy looks at her. He looks at me.

He takes a step.

Ochoa fires.

I hear the sound of metal on metal right after the gunshot and the bullet passes over my head like an angry hornet. I duck after the fact like an idiot.

The guy with the mace doesn’t look particularly bothered by the first shot, or the fourth.

I know that in a moment Ochoa’s going to say something to me and then they’ll know we're here together. They’ll kill her.

I stand up and say, “You’ll never take me alive, pig!” and run right at Maceman.

“What?” I hear Ochoa say.

I push my luck and duck and twist as I pass Maceman.

He slips on some debris and his weapon swings wide. I can feel the heat of it on my skin. The damn thing's hot!

I angled my run to put the axe guy between us. He’s moving but I’m faster. I leap over the wreckage, land on a large piece of glass, and surf it out of range. I hear the axe cleave into the asphalt behind.

I hear the roar of an engine and look up to see a van speeding at me.

The glass bites into something, stopping it, and I tumble off, rolling ass over teakettle between a couple of parked cars. I wind up on my hands and knees.

The trunk of the car to my left leaps forward as the van smashes into it and I’m scrambling forward. I’m scared I’m not fast enough to get clear so I leap onto the hood ass first. You know, like they do on television to slide to the other side? Only my belt gets hooked on that little thing that sticks up to squirt water onto the windshield and I’m brought up short.

I look back.

I thought the van that was after me was the same one that chased after Adam but no, this is another van and two more men ease out, causing the van to bounce on its axels. One’s got a sword bigger than I am. The other has a spear.

None of the helmets the metal men are wearing are particularly expressive. Glass-covered eyeslits and a grill over their mouths make for a pretty good poker face, but I would swear that Maceman is grinning when he golfs into the rear of the car I’m sitting on and I go flying.

It’s quiet for a moment as I tumble through space.

I expect ground before now but then I remember we’re on the side of a big hill. The side parking lot I’d just been clobbered out of was on the steep side of it.

A shadow passes over me and I know the goddamn car is above me.

I push and reach out with my feet.

Somehow a toe hits dirt and I find myself running down the hill.

There are gunshots behind me and squealing tires. Ahead, the slope eases and I'm coming up on a dubious-looking bar with a bunch of motorcycles leaning there, the chrome heliographing into my eyes. The view is interrupted by the car crashing down, front first, and flipping over.

I hurl myself to the side before I slam into it, trip, and roll the rest of the way down.

I’m okay. I don’t hit my head on any rocks or anything but now the aethings kick. They flash black. Maybe I was pushing too hard? Or too long?

I start looking around for the next disaster.

I see the two vans, one right after the other speeding down the road toward me. They’ll be here in moments.

I look at the bar. Its patrons have started to spill out to see what’s going on. They're standing there. Gawking. Pointing.

Otter. He's right there. He’s pointing right at me, eyes wide, the goddamn human-trafficking pedophile son of a bitch. I’m about to call him out when I realize that everybody he’s standing with has matching jackets.

Right. Time to go.

I run.

Some start after me. The rest, I bet, are going for their bikes.

Next door, across a narrow strip of grass, is a strip mall. The first store is a big sporting goods place. I crash through the door.

I have no idea if the bikers are armed or when the metal assholes will get here but better safe than sorry. I yell, “Get down! Active shooters! Call nine-one-one!”

There are screams and people get the fuck away from me. I hurry and duck into the clothing racks with bikers right behind me. I pull one down, push, and hear swearing.

There’s a wall of guns over on my left but I see the bikers heading me off that way, so I go the other. Here the aisles are taller and by doubling back and generally making no sense as I run, I lose a couple off my tail.

Praise Jesus, here’s the baseball section. The balls are in a bin and I empty it behind me and grab a bat. There’s a guy a the other end of the aisle. He pulls a sawed-off shotgun, thrusts it in my face, but I knock it straight up with my Louisville Slugger.

The gun goes off, deafening me and showering us with glass from the lights above.

I feel somebody tug on the bat and I immediately let go and hear somebody fall on his ass. The shotgun ratchets and I duck into the next aisle.

At the far end, I see the exit into the employees only section of the store. To either side of me are skateboards. I start knocking them down behind me as I go. I stumble, tripping over nothing at all, and smash into the skateboards to my left just as the ones on my right are blown to flinders by the shotgun.

I roll to my feet, grab a skateboard, and blow through the swinging doors into the stock room.

There’s an employee with these huge headphones on and a clipboard, just bopping to his tunes. He has no idea. I tackle him to the left as I hear the shotgun fire again and a hole as big as my head appears in one of the doors.

The kid looks at me, one earpiece over his eye. He says, “Thanks!”

I pat him on the shoulder as I stand. “Run.”

There’s daylight and I head for it. The loading area. It’s empty. There’s a slim road that runs behind the mall, weeds, grass, and specks of trash on the upward slope ahead. To my left is the long length of the mall. If I’m caught on that there’s nowhere to go.

To the right is back towards the bar. I tell myself they won’t be expecting that and run off with my stolen skateboard.

Oh my God, I'm a thief.

Oh well, something for the Wests to do later.

I haven’t been on a deck for ten years and even then the most I could do was stay on pretty good. Never learned any tricks or went to a half-pipe or whatever. It's never too late, I guess. I throw it down and hop on, figuring any extra burst of speed I can manage will help.

I hear shouts behind but I make the turn before they get a shot off. I don’t see anybody on the side of the sporting goods store but the air is shuddering with the sound of motorcycles and I see the two white shapes of the vans making the turn into the lot ahead.