14.1 Bunker
Maeven’s stationed herself on a roof. She’s crossing her arms over its railing, peering down with binoculars over her eyes. Two circles blur to frame the sight of a stray dog, to a man on a bicycle. Regular residential blocks, that’s all there is to this quadrant.
She turns around and sinks down with her back against the railing. She examines the binoculars for the boredom of it, arms leveraged on her knees, before setting them down.
June’s clipboard is wedged in her waistband. She can feel it pressing against her back. Warm. Subtle. Often she finds herself assuming that the intensity of one’s Resonance grows with the User’s strength, but the theory doesn’t quite fit with Captain June. He’s strong, that’s for sure, however his Will is subdued. Ember rather than flame. And there’s a depth to it that her senses find so incomprehensible.
Maeven calls her Will. Smoke begins to rise from her skin, swirling faintly into the air. She grabs the clipboard from her back and heightens the Optimisation Will in her arms and chest. She squeezes the wood. Harder and harder with her muscles bulging from her arms, gradually adding to the force while it refuses to so much as splinter. Win said the clipboard was like metal when he tried to bend it. That was wrong. Metal would shatter under such a pressure; this is like Will. This is Captain June Everolt. His resolve projected into oakwood, meaning bending the clipboard is a cryosection of bending the man himself.
She releases, arms limping by her knees. Impossible, it feels like. June must have overestimated when he enhanced the thing; one of her nails is starting to bleed. Maybe it’s because she’s a Larosa student. He thought he could get away with it, not knowing about the Will Block.
Little did you know, Captain June. Maeven twists her finger in her shirt.
Sketchy floats over to the roof with a stack of paintings clasped in its paws. She stands up, levelling with the minion, and places the board back behind her jacket.
Her brother’s Creation is better than she remembers it. Maeven pointed down to the streets, told it to fly around her assigned quadrant and paint stills every time it comes across a person. With a torch between her teeth, she sifts through the illustrations. There’s only a few faint streaks when she puts it up to the light. Other than that, it reads like a picture: a group of men playing carrom in a garage, a woman shaking a bed sheet over her window, and, most indicatively, a slouched young man in a hooded jacket pulled low over his head. She recognises the street.
“That’s over there, right?” she asks, pointing north. Sketchy nods. She hands the paintings back to the minion and jumps to the roof across the road with a burst of Optimisation.
There he is.
She finds the man getting into the passenger seat of a yellow car. Maeven picks up her pace as the engine starts, trailing abreast over shadowed roofs. After a few minute the vehicle breaches her quadrant into Eliza’s. It slows and parks into a side street, not far from the bazaars. Then it stays there, idle for almost an hour.
From the roof of the building adjacent, Maeven sits cross legged, looking down at the car with a hand on her cheek. She glances at Sketchy.
Sketchy is looking down as well.
“Do you meow?” she says.
She still doesn’t see the resemblance. Hunter used to tell her that the minion and her looked alike, that he must have been thinking of Maeven when he was making it. She still has no idea what he was talking about. Maeven can’t paint.
What is Hunter doing right now? she wonders. Getting ready for work, possibly.
The slam of a car gets her turning back to the men below. Three hooded men are now exiting the vehicle. One of them, she realises, is only a boy.
The car drives off.
Maeven follows them down another block, where they rendezvous with four more men in front of a jewellery store on the far side of the street. The store has metal bars over the entryway, newspapers glued to its windows.
The boy walks around while the rest of the men wait. He climbs up to the roof using a rubbish bin as a boost and a telephone wire as a rope, then grabs at a pile of loose mud bricks, uncovering a hole that breaks through the ceiling. He crawls in. A tight fit.
“That was easy,” she tells Sketchy. The minion returns to her chest.
Click! The shop’s front door opens and the men jerk into action at the sound. They rush inside. That boy must’ve unlocked it from the inside. She hears shattering glass. A blaring alarm as the windows flash red. Engines down the road.
Already, their getaway vehicles are rushing back from up the street.
It doesn’t take them very long before the men exit—only a couple minutes—with the boy leaving last, hauling what looks to be a laundry bag over his shoulder. They don’t take their stash with them. Maeven watches the boy shoves it into a stationery van, parked by the store in a sandy corridor that vanishes into darkness that’s perpendicular to the main road. Then then getaway cars meet them, wheels still rolling as they clamour in and drive away with an efficiency that she assumes must have been choreographed.
She doesn’t follow. She keeps her eyes on the stationery storage van as the store’s security system continues to ring.
More alarms blare in the distance; police are coming.
The headlights of the storage van flick alight. Maeven leaps down to the corridor and follows it. The getaway vehicles are just a red herring. If the police catch them, they’ll find nothing to repossess.
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The van leaves the district mostly unnoticed. It rumbles through the streets and past the city border of Jurn. When it’s out in the open desert, it accelerates.
Maeven blinks the dust out of her eyes, distancing as to keep herself in the dark, away from the headlights. She thinks she can keep up, as long as she keeps her pace steady, but her lungs are already burning. Anyway, it’d be hard to lose track of the van. Everything else is dark and flat.
It takes thirty minutes for the car to stop, next to a cluster of mud-coloured huts. Breathing heavily, Maeven observes it crouched from behind a berm: a lady exits the vehicle, passing the sack of valuables to a man waiting by one of the huts. As he takes them inside the hut, he descends with each step.
She takes a few deep breaths. In her mouth and out her nose. She doesn’t remember it being that painful to run.
Other vehicles are humming down the road. The Sky assignees are on their way. Her aura feels like a chill of air.
Eliza Gold.
“Assignee,” addresses Eliza, breathing as she slows from a jog behind her. Past Eliza’s shoulder is her leader.
“Beat me to it,” says Victor.
Eliza whips around to him. “Are you telling me there were three separate robberies in one night?”
“Mine got away with a fair amount of sneakers,” says Victor
“Jewellery,” Maeven adds.
“Wristwatches,” says Eliza. “Shit...”
Victor looks at the huts and nudges his head. He’s not breathing like Maeven was. “Send out a Radar, Eliza.”
Upon the request, Eliza bends to the ground and places a fist against the berm. A thin line of yellow Will extends from her knuckles about a hundred metres straight ahead. Then it rotates around once, like the hand of a clock screwed to her fist. It passes through the hut, through the assignees, Maeven feels the pulse of Will when it passes over her.
Eliza points. “That hut goes down into a bunker. It’s bigger than it looks. There’s a big safe that faces the steps.”
“How many people?” asks Victor.
“Six in the bunker. Five guys facing one guy behind a table, I think that’s our boss. If you’re asking about the village, thirty-seven total.”
“Who’s in the surrounding huts?”
Eliza thinks for a moment. “I’m betting civilians.”
“Any weapons in the bunker?”
“Most of them have glocks strapped under their shirt. A few rifles. Then there’s more hanging on the racks on the walls.”
“What’s in the safe?”
It’s Maeven that asks the question, but she doesn’t really care at all about what’s behind the metal. Eliza’s an Intuitive, and it seems like anything that line of Will is able to reach, it scans into her mind like a 3D image. Maeven is only curious to see how far that radar goes, how much detail she can clarify, and Eliza looks at her like she’s reading her mind. “Gold,” says the assignee. “Wanna know the shape they’re stacked in? Pyramids.”
“Neat Concept, huh Riel?”
The girls turn to Stendahl like they forgot he was there.
“A night like this it’s exactly what we need,” he says. With a grunt, Victor sits on the berm, facing away from the huts.
“Should we take them now?” says Eliza, “Might as well.”
“Let’s wait. I want to see what they do with the goods.”
“You sure about that?”
Victor slaps the air. “We have time, Eliza.”
Eliza looks at Maeven again but as far as she’s concerned, it’s Victor’s call. She sits as he does. It might be worth it to see the operation end-to-end, and it’d be easy given that none of the thieves are Willed.
They hear a crackle and a transmitted voice. “Vic, you there?”
“Henri,” says Victor, grabbing the radio from his belt and holding it to his mouth. “Catch anything?”
“No,” says Henri. “I heard police sirens.”
“That’s our guys. We’ve followed them about—20 clicks west.”
“Do you need my help?”
“I think we’re good. Turn in.”
A pause. “Alright.”
“Thank you Henri,” he intones.
“Good luck.”
Another crack. Victor tucks the radio.
They wait. Minutes pass with silence between them. Maeven itches to reach for the clipboard again, but she doesn’t think she can make any progress right now, not after the run. So she stares out at the sand, barely making out the horizon line in the moonlight. Sometimes, the sand picks up in the wind, and her eyes follow the faint clouds northward before they dissipate.
It’s hard to imagine there’s an enemy out there, somewhere among all the stillness. There are no mortars streaming in the air, no crack of gunfire. Just stars and crickets and the rumour Howard muttered in her ear on MS Magician. The citizens here seem to carry on like everything’s normal. Then again, even in a looming crisis, sometimes that’s the only thing you can think to do.
“Larosa’s an all-girls Academy,” Victor mentions. She nods while looking ahead.
“How was that?”
She’s unsure where to start with a question so broad. The Academy. It was routine. It was back when things were familiar, when her days ran like a machine.
“It was good,” she says. “You get why they’re number one.”
“You join any clubs or anything like that?” he says.
She shakes her head.
“No? Not your thing?” says Victor. “Me I was student council.”
Maeven isn’t surprised.
“Eliza and I went to the same Academy d’you know that? Everem Academy. You probably never heard of it.” He’s right, it doesn’t ring a bell. “Yeah, it’s not a Larosa or Haitecho,” he says, clapping the sand off his hands. “It’s considered low-tier but it’s not too bad.”
Maeven thought his Resonance was pretty solid, given the fact. “I did do the tournaments sometimes,” she says.
“Yeah? You win?”
“I wasn’t trying to,” she says. “I was—” Experimenting, she almost goes on to say. Participating in school tournaments used to be a good way to practise your Will if you didn’t have training partners. But Victor wasn’t asking to know all that. “Anyway, I didn’t win them.”
Meanwhile, they can hear the scraping of Eliza’s boots. The assignee is standing up to leave. “I’m going to have a look inside,” she tells them.
“Alright,” says Victor.
The Intuitive jumps over the berm. She advances to the hut with her hands pocketed.
“Eliza was in a guild before this,” Victor then says to Maeven. “She quit because she felt she was being underutilised. She said they were only making her do the same things and she eventually got bored of it. I get what she means. They pigeonholed her. I guess she came to the VR for a reset.”
So, contrary to Ina’s theory, there are Users here that aren’t serving just for the remuneration package. The VR’s market approach really does speak to everyone, it seems. Even the Willed.
“Why did you join the Reserve, Maeven?”
“Because Captain Eyeshot was here,” she says.
His smile drops. “Oh.” She finds the utterance speaks more than words can.
“Well you’ve been noticed,” he says, and she huffs at his attempt to colour it. “Why did you join?” says Maeven.
“I want to join the army, that’s why,” says Victor.
“How does the VR get you to the army?” says Maeven.
“No, I mean—” Victor laughs. “—I wanted some experience after OCS.”
“You would have gotten experience in the real military.”
“Yeah, but you don’t get as much freedom as you do in the VR. I heard their campaign was going to be interesting this year. I just wanted to—you know, get a feel for some things before I have to go back to the yessir’s and the sergeants and the lieutenant colonels…”
Maeven hums. “So not the money either, then.”
“That’s Sand Company you’re talking about,” says Victor. “Money’s not bad though, hey?”
She doesn’t respond. Victor lays on the berm with his hands behind his head.
“You’re going to sleep?” says Maeven.
“Just closing my eyes,” he says. She turns to face the sand again.
“Do you know why your teammates joined the Reserve?” asks Victor, after a while.
“Ocean?” she says. “I haven’t asked.”
That’s when he finally stops talking, once her mind is forced to loiter on the fact.