At one point, an enormous warehouse had taken up an entire block of Gratiot Avenue. The original, smaller version had stood for many years before Touched had become a thing. Once the city began to be revived, the warehouse had been almost entirely rebuilt and expanded to take up much more room. Just another in a very long list of ways that Detroit had been reborn.
And now it was gone. The entire place had been burnt almost entirely to the ground. There was barely anything left, save for a few pieces of wall, some of the foundation, and scattered rubble.
In a way, that perfectly fit with the whole comparison to the city being reborn thanks to Touched. Because they did a lot of damage too. The warehouse was reborn, expanded, and improved. But in the end, it was also destroyed. The very thing that gave it new life ended up taking that same life, and now there was almost nothing left. It had been rundown before, but at least it existed. Now, after a relatively brief burst of renewal, it was all-but completely gone.
The woman known to the public as Flea truly hoped that the analogy with Detroit itself wouldn’t go that far. And yet, as she stood on the sidewalk surveying the broken remnants of the demolished building, she couldn’t help but compare it to the gang war that only seemed to be getting worse.
“There a reason Smithy doesn’t have to play detective today?”
The voice that interrupted Flea’s thoughts belonged to Dynamic. She was a speedster of unlimited stamina who was capable of draining other people’s powers by running near them, then using that power to create energy constructs with additional elements related to the powers she had drained. And that unlimited stamina thing extended as far as never needing to sleep. It truly was a bottomless well of energy. Which was one of the main reasons Flea and Dynamic worked so well together. The fact that Flea was capable of draining stamina from people to add to her own, combined with the fact that Dynamic had an unlimited amount of it, meant that any time the Detroit Conservators’ second-in-command needed a little hit of energy to keep going, she could always take some from the speedster. They had an arrangement for that.
“Silversmith had prior commitments.” As she gave that simple, pat answer, Flea glanced over toward the younger woman. At that moment, she couldn’t help but compare their appearances. Her own costume consisted of a black Tech-Touched chainmail-like top, simple blue pants that were loose on her legs and gave her very free range of motion, and a helmet that was essentially that of a samurai, with mandible-protrusions to fit with her theme. A light blue cloak with gold trim hung from her shoulders, and she carried a katana across her back along with two short swords attached to her hips.
Dynamic, on the other hand, looked very different. Her entire body was encased in gem-like purple armor that was so smooth and featureless she appeared to be a glass statue when standing still. The look was completed by the fact that the helmet she wore left only the vague impression of facial features, as if they had been chiseled into the amethyst gemstone the armor appeared to be made out of. In motion, Dynamic was incredibly fast and agile. But when she wasn’t moving, an onlooker could be excused for believing that some incredibly talented artist had sculpted her.
“Prior commitments, huh?” Dynamic made a noise in the back of her throat that made her opinion of that clear. It was… odd. While the man was a clear champion for the city, who had risked his life so many times and was loved and trusted basically above all else by basically everyone of note, for some reason Dynamic had never liked him. Oh, she followed his orders and did everything she was supposed to. She worked with the team, and he was the leader of the team. She didn’t argue with him… much. And never in battle. But she never liked him. It was a fact she kept mostly quiet about to everyone except Flea. Yet when the two of them were alone, she made no secret of her dislike for the man.
Then again, Dynamic generally liked to be contrary anyway. She was one of a quickly growing number of people pushing to have the name Conservator changed. Apparently they wanted to rename the organization Corona (as in the circles of glowing light seen around the sun or stars for Star-Touched) and call members of the group Coroknights. The movement had been gaining traction in recent weeks when several members of the senate had expressed interest.
“Yes,” Flea replied simply, “prior commitments. He has his own life he has to take care of. A… family, I think.” That was another odd thing, this time about Silversmith himself. And perhaps a big reason for Dynamic’s dislike. The rest of the Detroit Conservators had all unmasked to one another. They knew each other’s real names, their families, everything. Which certainly wasn’t required. Anyone on the team was allowed to keep their identity secret if they chose to. But the fact that their leader was the only one who exercised that right was, perhaps, a little strange. He, however, simply said that he had people he loved who had to be protected and that as long as everyone knew he never let even his own teammates know his identity, no one would try to get at those loved ones through that team.
For a moment, the two women looked at each other. Flea imagined she could see Dynamic’s much younger (nineteen compared to her own twenty-eight) Hispanic face through that violet gem-like helmet, staring pointedly at her, eyes silently yet clearly insisting that their team leader was just as much of a dick as she had always been convinced he was.
However, before either of them could speak again, the sound of footsteps approaching made them turn to see the rest of the team (sans Silversmith, of course) approaching. Three figures, all male. They came from the van that they had clearly just arrived in and parked across the street.
“You guys found anything important yet?” Kriegspiel asked. He was the oldest member of the team. Older than Silversmith even, Flea was pretty sure. The man had turned fifty a month earlier, though he was in pretty good shape for that. Which was helped by his Touched ability. It allowed him to enhance the strength, power, speed and so forth of everyone in an area he considered an ally, as well as allowing them all to communicate with one another mentally and even see through each other’s eyes or share what they were seeing. He always used his power on himself to even greater effect than others, meaning that though just over fifty, he had the physical attributes of someone half his age in top condition. For ten minutes at a time (one minute less for each additional person he was aiding beyond himself), he could push his power and raise that boost to about double what a normal human was capable of. He was also a fairly tall man at nearly six foot five, with gray-black hair worn long, to his shoulders. His costume consisted of tan body armor under a brown duster, with a black mask that covered the bottom half of his face, and a wide-brimmed sable fedora identical to that worn by Indiana Jones. He wore what appeared to be an ordinary revolver, but was actually a Touched-Tech gun, from a holster on one hip.
“Nope.” The answer didn’t come from Flea or Dynamic. Instead, it came from the shorter man walking to Kriegspiel’s left, who had been the youngest member of the team at barely twenty-two before Dynamic had joined them straight out of the Minority. RePete (his real name wasn’t Pete, he just thought it was amusing to make people think it had to be) wore his usual costume of green camo pants, army boots, a black turtleneck, dark gloves, a green ski mask, and quite possibly half of the guns in the city. He wore a pistol on either hip, a shotgun across his back, a smaller pistol on either ankle, and another pair of small pistols holstered halfway up either arm. Those last two were holstered with one on the outside of his right arm and one on the inside of the left, their grips positioned so that he could cross his arms and yank both weapons free.
And those were just the guns that were in plain sight. Flea was confident that he had more.
“They just got here, same as us,” RePete continued.
“Reap,” Dynamic flatly reminded the man while using what the team had settled on as the more serious ‘nickname’ version of his chosen moniker, “you know everyone hates it when you do that, right? We’ve made that clear?”
“As crystal,” was the response. If he was abashed at all, the man didn’t show it. No matter how often they complained, he would still randomly use his power to, in his mind, speed along conversations. His gift was a powerful, though limited one. It allowed him to set a marker and then repeat (hence the name) the previous five seconds with everything he already knew from that time. After that, he could choose to repeat four of those seconds again, then a third time for the last three of those seconds before the marker would expire. It gave him three increasingly short-windows to change or react to something.
Or, in this case, to answer a question someone else had answered in the original timeline.
“Hey, hey, be nice to the ladies!” Those words came from the final member of their team. And what a member he was. Walking on Kriegspiel’s right, opposite from RePete, was a wiry black man in his late thirties, just over six feet in height. His costume consisted of full padded body armor. But rather than being dark or camo-colored, the torso part of the armor was colored and patterned after a bright, loud Hawaiian shirt (he had several versions using different specific colors, this one was blue with bright palm trees). The pants part of the outfit were the usual black. Meanwhile, his identity was concealed behind a metal helmet that covered the top half of his face and almost his entire head, leaving only his mouth exposed. His eyes were covered by lenses whose color matched that of whatever Hawaiian pattern he was wearing at any given time.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
He was, in short, not what people pictured if they knew that his chosen name of Bokor referred to a male vodou sorcerer who created zombies. That was, however, a decent name for someone with his power, which allowed him to create zombie-like duplicates of any person he could see. The duplicates weren’t able to use any Touched powers the original had, but they were very strong and tough. Plus, they could expel a gas from their mouths that made people who breathed it in tired, weak, clumsy, and generally more likely to surrender.
“After all,” Bokor was saying, his voice bright, “we’re a team here, yeah? To be a good team, we make each other comfortable, not annoy each other. Hey, who wants to hear a joke?”
Though no one on the team answered him, Bokor nodded toward a figure who had just appeared next to RePete. A ‘zombie’ duplicate of him who stood with his arm raised. “Why thank you, ReRePete,” Bokor spoke with a broad smile at his own humor. Then, he quickly asked, “How did the man build his house out of snow? Iglood it!” As soon as the words left his mouth, he was already guffawing, pounding a fist against his own chest. “My nephew told me that one!” The pride in the man’s voice made it clear just how he felt about the joke, and about his nephew in general.
Chuckling despite herself, though mostly out of admiration for how much Bokor cared about and doted on his sister’s little boy, Flea gestured. “We need to get busy. Spread out, look for anything that might give us an idea of who or what took down this building. Anything the regular searchers might have overlooked or just missed.”
So, that was exactly what they did. Each of them began picking through piles of ashes and debris. There was, of course, very little to find. Whoever had burned this building down had done a very thorough job. They had clearly wanted to be certain that it would be impossible, or near to it, to find anything that explained what this place had really been, or who had been behind it. The original inspectors had found nothing useful. That was why the Conservators had been called in to begin with, out of the hope that something would stand out to them based on their own experiences. Or that one of their gifts would be useful somehow. It was a long shot, but then, they didn’t exactly have much else. The authorities were torn between being very confused about why this place had been burned so thoroughly, and not… particularly caring that much because it was just a warehouse with no owner stepping forward to claim damages. The biggest reason for the investigation was due to just how thoroughly the place had been destroyed. Ironically, whoever had taken such pains to ensure that there would be nothing for investigators to find had actually drawn more investigators than there would’ve been otherwise.
In any case, now it was time to find out just what there was to find around here.
******
Nothing. There had been nothing to find… in the remains of the warehouse. Fortunately, the same couldn’t be said for the area around the warehouse. The authorities had already asked nearby businesses for access to security footage, of course, to no avail. However, while doing a run around the neighborhood, Dynamic had spotted something curious. A single, almost entirely-hidden camera pointed in the direction of where the warehouse had been. The camera was small, one of those that was meant to be set up above a garage or door at home for personal security. It had been secured to the wall of a building across the street, hidden behind a dumpster in a way that ensured it was almost impossible to spot. The camera itself had sent its footage across a wi-fi signal to a device attached to the bottom of the dumpster itself, which would in turn broadcast that footage to a receiver far away.
It had taken some time, almost two hours, to get their tech people to track that signal to its source. Which was almost a miracle in and of itself, because according to the tech guys, the receiver was set up so that whoever was on the other end should have been able to shut it down the second they started tracking it. The thing had sent an alarm that way before they could stop it. Yet, the connection was never turned off. Apparently the person wasn’t paying attention to their alarm for whatever reason. The alarm they had specifically set up to warn them about someone tracking the signal, and yet they weren’t doing anything to stop that very thing?
Regardless, the tech guys found the source. Which was what led the five Conservator members to this spot out in the middle of nowhere, an hour and a half from Detroit itself. Specifically, a literal cabin in the woods near Lake Victoria.
They’d driven out here in a van, despite Dynamic insisting she should run ahead. Mostly because she got bored sitting still in a vehicle. Being capable of running hundreds of miles per hour, and having unlimited stamina, Dynamic really didn’t see the point of spending time in vehicles. Not knowing what might be out there, Flea had refused. She wanted everyone together, just in case they were about to walk into something bad. Whoever had gone through the trouble of burning down the warehouse had wanted to be damn sure nothing was ever found of it. And yet, they didn’t bother to shut down the signal from their hidden security camera after it was traced? Something strange was going on, and Flea didn’t trust any of it. Part of her wished Silversmith was here, whatever Dynamic’s reservations.
The cabin itself was a couple of miles up a gravel road once they had passed through a metal security gate. Or what had once been a gate. Something had smashed into it somewhat recently with enough force to slam the thing open permanently. That had led to even more confusion about what was going on here. Was this whole situation some kind of fight between two mysterious parties that no one knew about? Was it possible that the person who burned down the warehouse wasn’t the same person who owned or operated it? That had been discounted by the authorities simply because of how much work and set-up burning that place down so completely would have required. It wasn’t a simple arson fire. Someone would have had to be inside for an extended time, possibly weeks, to ensure everything was set properly for it to be so thoroughly destroyed so quickly.
Hopefully, they would find some answers inside this small cabin. At least, that was what Flea told herself as the five of them stood together about twenty feet from the porch, eyes carefully scanning for anything out of the ordinary. They had parked the van so that the headlights illuminated the front door, and thus far had seen nothing suspicious. On the other hand, they hadn’t seen anything not suspicious either. They’d seen nothing, heard nothing. The cabin appeared to be empty. Which would go a long way toward explaining why nobody had responded to the alarm the camera had sent when they started tracing the signal, but still.
“Hey, Flea,” Dynamic called over to her from the far end of their assembled line, “your family’s pretty rich, how many cabins did you grow up with?”
“Just in the woods like this, or on the beach too?” Flea retorted. “Three and five respectively. Oh, six if you count the villa in Italy. That’s sort of a cabin. A little bit. Anyway, doesn’t really matter. I haven’t been to any of them since… you know.” They all knew. Her father had been angry with Flea (or rather, Irelyn) for choosing to go from the Minority to the Conservators rather than signing up to lead his own corporate security team. So angry, in fact, that he, and the rest of her family, had barely spoken to her since she’d done it almost ten years earlier. There was the occasional hurried e-mail, text, or christmas letter from her mom, and a bit more than that from her younger sister. But for the most part, they followed the family patriarch’s orders to leave the family traitor out in the cold.
It had been a hard choice, but Irelyn wouldn’t change it if she could. She was overall happier this way, even if it had meant walking away from her family and her easy, privileged life.
“We doing this?” Bokor finally asked, once the five had taken in the view for long enough.
“Yeah,” Flea confirmed. “Go for it.”
With a nod, the man gestured. Immediately, ‘zombie’ duplicates of the five of them appeared and began to walk toward the cabin. Flea and the others weren’t going to take any chances about this place being booby-trapped, just in case. In fact, they took a few extra steps back closer to the van, and watched as their clone-like selves approached the door.
“And,” Kriegspiel announced, “we’re live.”
With that, Flea was abruptly able to, with a small bit of focus, see through the eyes of her zombie duplicate rather than through her own. It had been a strange thing to get used to at first, but she had plenty of experience by now. Around her, the others would be linked to their own copies, as Kriegspiel used his power to connect each of them with the zombies that Bokor created. He also linked them with their other selves telepathically, allowing them to send messages. Normally this would simply be communication, but since Bokor had ordered the zombies to obey them, Flea and the others could essentially steer and control their duplicates through that mental connection. It was one example of how well Bokor and Kriegspiel worked together. Now if only the two of them would figure out the feelings they had for each other before she had to strangle them both. While Bokor had been an out-and-proud pansexual man since he was a teenager, Kriegspiel had grown up over a decade earlier and had more problems. He had been self-closeted through twenty years of an unhappy marriage before finally separating, and was only beginning to explore the fact that he was gay.
The two of them really were great together, in personality and the way they could use their powers, but it wasn’t Flea’s place to point that out. No matter how much she wanted to.
Instead, she turned her attention back fully to what her duplicate was seeing as they all worked their way through the cabin. Whoever had been living and working out here had something to do with that warehouse. Whether they were responsible for burning it down or not, they clearly knew something. Which meant the Conservators needed to talk to them.
“Found something,” RePete finally announced, once they had been searching the cabin fruitlessly for about ten minutes.
It was strange to hear that voice coming from just a couple feet to her left where the real RePete was standing, yet have to walk her zombie duplicate all the way through the cabin to where his was. But soon, Flea and the others had done just that, until all of their duplicate selves were standing together in what turned out to be the bathroom.
“Couple envelopes fell behind the toilet,” RePete informed them, holding them up. “Whatever was inside is long gone, but we’ve got a name, at least.
“So who exactly is Robert Parson?”