23.1 BA: Cargo IV
Minutes after they began to swim back to the lifeboat, Rich’s Will weakened until it was gone. Maeven’s Intuition picked up on the passing. His Resonance slowly draining from his body, unable to sustain the life it was supporting. She told Forrest to let him go.
“Is he…” Forrest didn’t finish the sentence.
“He’s dead,” said Maeven. “There’s no point.”
Assignees sit inside the enclosed lifeboat. Gunner is driving them to the shore. Long, plastic seats are lined around the inside of the vessel and orange harnesses hang from the walls. Jackson from Sky Company is wringing his VR jacket. They can hear the squeeze of water dripping over the floor.
Maeven grips onto the harness beside her. The rush of adrenalized Will that woke her to consciousness has faded, and her body is facing the consequences of being pushed to its limits. She leans her head back and takes a deep breath, over the pain, the nausea.
“I can’t remember,” says Forrest, no longer enhanced by Victor’s Will. “I know. Maybe it was Hara that did it. Or Doom.”
“I don’t know,” Hara intones. “I couldn’t see much. I was punching—at water. Didn’t hit a thing!”
“I was too busy tryin’ to get Rich’s hands off of me,” says Doom.
“Whether you believe in what happened or not, that was something Forrest,” says Victor. “And as much as I have confidence in Synergy, there’s no way I can take all the credit for what you just did there. You have to have a lot of courage to defeat someone like that. Be proud of yourself.”
Not just courage, Maeven thinks. She observes the look on Forrest’s face, who’s seated on the opposite side of the boat. He seems to be in discomfort of himself, uneased over his widened potential.
It would be such a waste if he doesn’t tempt towards it. If he spends the rest of his life never having tried.
Open yourself, Forrest. Lean into it.
It’s not long before they reach land. Maeven exits the boat just after Eliza, who limps ahead with one of her pant legs ripped and stained with blood. Maeven looks to the shore as she follows.
There’s a port made of shipping containers under the tide. Opposite that, their Humvees are parked near a forest. She can see the path that took them to the water with a simple scan. From the vehicles, to the beach, to the port, to the now-sunken ship.
Henri is stretching his arms. Hara lets out an accomplished sigh.
“Let’s drive back a few then rest somewhere, yeah? No rush to get back to Tesset before morning,” says Victor.
“Yes please.”
“I’m pooped.”
Ocean Company changes into their dry VR uniforms and follow Sand’s Humvee out of the forest. Maeven lies down as soon as she gets the chance to. From the middle seat all the way into the boot. Then she pulls a cargo bag under her head, feeling awful.
“Win, what was that back there? You summoned a samurai out of thin air that was sick,” says Gunner, the company driver.
Win says, “Yeah.”
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“What happened to it? It disappeared?”
“I couldn’t keep it manifested once we fell into the water.”
Victor’s Synergy must have helped him too. It made his Subjection capable enough to move Heigen effectively. A useful Concept, thinks Maeven. Maybe she could have guessed Victor to have an ability like that.
“Shit was a beast. What do you call it?” says Gunner.
“Heigen,” says Win.
“Badass.”
She covers her eyes with her forearm. A VR jacket is placed over her shoulder, offered by Win, positioned by Forrest, and she acknowledges it with a thumbs up—too exhausted to say thank you.
I’ll never make myself Contract Enforcer ever again.
It’s not just the pain, nor the fatigue. Just like her adrenaline—that part of the body that also keeps you naively happy, numbingly optimistic—whatever Maeven had of it left, has collapsed. They’re thoughts that usually rear their head in the night, between the moment you close your eyes and the moment you fall into slumber.
If superpowers worked like they did in the movies, and people really obtained them through happenstance—they touched a radioactive powerline, got blessed by a god—then a detachment from power is also just a detachment in happenstance. But a detachment of Will, well—what does that mean? A detachment of the self? A resignation on the level of the spirit?
Helping Win was fun for a while. But if she was honest with herself, he didn’t need her help at all.
Are you still content with yourself?
She doesn’t know how she would answer such a question.
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23.2 BA: Respirah Hotel
Respirah Hotel, fourth floor, room 401. Eyeshot watches the leader of the Black Ammunition through adobe walls.
He’s left his curtains open. Their voices, faint but distinct, infer to Eyeshot that they’ve finally caught wind of Babda’s death. She angles the rifle, propped up by a bipod over the desk in a neighbouring hotel building, and breathes in. When she exhales, it’ll line up with his temple and she’ll shoot.
There’s the sound of a notification bell. Eyeshot swipes a 4-inch square of pad pixels from her pocket to hover over the desk. A message from Infinity.
Can I call?
She withdraws the pad. Something for later.
Eyeshot, a couple stories above, has a dioramic view of Nuwei’s entire room. He stares out the window as an Ammunition subordinate relays the news behind him. The VR takedown of his operations, particularly in Al Suit, has caused irreparable damage, and although Nuwei’s face shows no readable expression, Eyeshot could only imagine what he must be thinking.
Zzzt. Zzzt.
Her eyes flicker to the corner of the desk. For weeks she’s been keeping that thing to her body closer than a set of keys.
The phone.
She rises from her chair and picks it up, her rifle left angled in the air.
“Yes,” she says to it.
The connection is slightly unclear. There is a soft, sustained hiss through the phone’s speakers.
“Eyeshot,” says the caller. “Results are in.”
It was the only thing the phone was meant for.
Eyeshot stills facing the door of the hotel room, a hand on her hip. Will Users must stay in control of their reactions. Feelings are selfish impulses, and a User at her level would do well in mastering this notion. Nothing should be a ‘big deal.’ You take it as it comes. So when the caller speaks again, and the senses she’s Willed to perfection catches on to the word: unsuccessful, she doesn’t ask the man to repeat himself.
“Under the discretion of the President and the chamber of congress, your appointment to Secretary of Defence has been unsuccessful,” was what he said, and she doesn’t ask him anything.
Last night, she dreamt of herself exhibited before the senate. A long table, low-lit, a group of people faced her, their faces indiscernible. There was a flash of glasses here, the curve of a frown there. They were watching her like she had landed from a different planet.
“I understand,” she says.
The caller says some other things, none of them catching her interest. The Senate had unsurprisingly raised the controversy of a User in The Cabinet, and the public discourse that had already instigated had seemed to have caused enough unwanted ruckus that they were turned off by the idea all together.
After a few more words, Eyeshot drops the phone from her ear and ends the call. With a flare of searing red Will, the phone disintegrates.
All of the waiting, the thinking, the worrying. It’s all over.
It’s as if some part of her were a couple stories higher, with a dioramic view of this time—herself. She begins to analyse Eyeshot with a distance she hasn’t experienced for months. Disconnected though at the same time—piecing it together.
There’s disappointment, frustration, projection, exhaustion. A long-ago memory of a mentor’s glare. An image of the woman’s hand red from vasodilation. Things she had to overcome. This will just be another.
Interesting how prepared she feels for this moment, and if she were to be so selfish as to pluck one of the reactions, bring it a little closer than the rest, it would be this one:
Relief.
Eyeshot walks to the desk and picks up her rifle. She angles the barrel and breathes in. When she exhales, it lines up with the back of Nuwei’s head, and she shoots.