Berlin, Germany.

Alex had gotten himself comfortable on a bench—knees drawn up and leaning against Gareth’s shoulder. He closed his eyes against the cool morning light. He really hadn’t gotten as much sleep as he should have. Not that he’d complain in a million years. He sat up when Gareth nudged his shoulder. Reeve and Misha were walking out of the office building, an odd looking pair among all the suits.

“News?” Hannah asked when they got there.

“Sort of,” Reeve replied. “But we should probably head back, yeah?”

Misha nodded. “Talk at home.”

Misha led the way, which was good, since Alex had no idea where they were. They walked in a staggered group. It gave Alex some time to think. Reeve was in front of him and it took some willpower not to reach out and grab his arm (or ass). Instead he ran a thumb over his own bottom lip and let himself Read for a moment, remembering.

When the Sanctuary was in sight, movement ahead of them caught his eye. A small girl, maybe five years old, in a flower dress hopped down the steps of one narrow home and stood in the middle of the sidewalk, watching them approach. He didn’t think too much of it, until she didn’t move. They slowed. At the head of them, Misha came nearly to a stop, studying her before angling himself to walk around.

“Gar-ret!” she called, making them all jump. The way she said it sounded phonetic, struggling with the th sound. She trotted forward heading towards Gareth. Reeve and Hannah moved aside to let her. That would make Alex angry later, but he knew that truly what else could they have done? What other reaction would there have been?

In front of him, she repeated his garbled name and held out an envelope, a little wrinkled from being in her pocket. Gareth’s eyes darted for a second before plucking the envelope from her outstretched hand.

Once the envelope was gone, her smile faded and her face changed into something confused. She turned to run.

“Hey,” Hannah shouted, grabbing her arm before she could take more than a few steps. Alex took a step to the side, closer to Gareth, looking at the envelope. It was plain white with a “G” scrawled on the front.

“What is it?” Misha asked.

Gareth shook his head, just looking at it.

Hannah knelt down at the girl’s level. “Hey,” she said, her voice kind and soft, “where did this letter come from? Who told you to give it to him?”

The girl spoke frantically in German and began yelling for her mother.

“Let her go,” Reeve sighed.

“She might know something.”

“She’s been wiped, and to dig the information back up I’d have to scramble her brain. She’s just a kid.”

Hannah dropped her arm and stood back up as the girl ran off without looking back.

While Alex was watching their exchange, Gareth had opened the envelope and taken out the single sheet of paper.

“We have to go.” Gareth’s voice was strung tight and too loud.

“What is it?” Alex asked.

“We have to go now,” he shouted.

“Not here,” Misha hissed, looking around. “Inside.” He tried to usher Gareth forward with his arm, but Gareth flinched and violently jerked his arm away.

“Let’s get inside,” Hannah said. Her voice was harder than she’d use if it were Alex who was freaking out. She was better with Gareth that way.

They traveled the last half a block to the Sanctuary at nearly a jog. Once inside, Gareth paced the room.

“What is it?” Reeve repeated. Gareth shoved the letter at Reeve. Alex peered over his shoulder. It was a handwritten note, but even before he could read it, he froze. It was Entropy Games' letterhead. A neat script in black pen read, “Good to see you,” and was signed simply, “M.”

“M,” Reeve said, considering. “Is this?”

“Yeah.” Gareth’s voice was husky. “It’ll be Marcus Adler.” He stopped pacing. “We can’t be here,” he urged loudly.

Alyosha came into the room at a jog, gun low but ready. “What’s wrong?” he breathed, looking around.

“I have no idea,” Misha drawled. “Hey! What the fuck is going on?” he shouted, looking at Gareth and clapping his hands on every word.

“It’s Entropy,” Hannah answered fast, voice raised, clearly trying to get him to shut up. “They know Gareth’s here. He used to work for them.”

“Okay,” Misha shrugged, “so we move to a new city.”

Gareth was pacing again. “No, you’re not getting this. Marcus Adler—” he trailed off, tongue stuck.

Alex swallowed. “This is the guy who…” Stories of Gareth’s that he’d accidentally Read over time played in his mind’s eye. They still made him sick and he shut his mouth on talking about it any further.

Gareth nodded. “And he’s here. You need to go.”

“What do you mean ‘you’?”

“He’s here for me. I don’t want him anywhere near you.”

“No way,” Alex burst out. “No fucking way.” Alex looked around to make sure he wasn’t the only one who understood that Gareth was talking crazy. His eyes froze when they landed on Alyosha, who was standing in the entrance to the hallway, gun visibly shaking in his hand. He had the same fearful look that Gareth did.

Beside him, Reeve’s face contorted. He started to say Alyosha’s name, but Gareth cut him off. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why didn’t he kill you?” he asked Alyosha, voice accusatory. “If he knew we were here, Adler would have left your body here for us as a message.”

“Gareth,” Reeve started.

“Maybe he didn’t know he was here,” Hannah offered.

Gareth scoffed. “He knows.”

Alyosha shoved his gun back in its holster and looked up at Gareth. Even from across the room, Alex could see his eyes were raw.

Alex interrupted any further discussion by ripping the letter out of Reeve’s hands and taking it into the empty kitchen.

Alex ran his fingers across the front of the letter and let his consciousness sink into its History.

Immediately, Alex flips back from Gareth’s trembling hand and the little girl on the sidewalk. He knows these Stories already. It’s not what he wants. He reaches back.

The letter is in the inside pocket of a man’s coat. It’s already written on and sealed. Alex studies the man's unshaven face, but he already knows this isn’t the man Gareth calls Marcus. It’s not the face Alex has seen in other Stories. The floor beneath Alex’s feet bounces and sways. Looking around him, he sees that he is on a train. Inside the Memory, Alex blinks slowly. It helps him go a little deeper in a controlled way. He doesn't have time to get lost right now. The man with the letter’s name is Edward, and he is sitting alone in the middle of a row, staring out the window. He has a blocky frame and dark hair. Edward is thinking about where he is going to be staying in Berlin once he gets there, trying to remember the name of the hotel he’d used the last time he was here. Edward is a telepath, but no where near as strong as his boss.

Alex turns the page back, staggering a little as the moving train dissolves under his feet.

He heard voices calling his name, some urgent, some angry. He was too focused to pick out who was who.

Edward is there again, in a different set of clothes. Edward stands in front of a heavy wooden desk. He is nervous, almost scared, and Alex can feel it keenly, like cold fingers on the backs of his knees. Shifting, Alex looks at the man behind the desk. This is a face he recognizes and he’s not sure anymore if the fear he’s feeling is his own or Edward’s or both. Edward is awaiting an assignment, watching as Marcus Adler licks and seals the white envelope.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Adler is older, in his late forties, but with a full head of wheat blond hair just long enough to style. He’s wearing a suit and Alex isn’t used to seeing him with glasses on in Gareth’s History.

“How soon can you get this in his hands?” Adler asks without looking up. Alex knows the voice, that same British inflection.

“Tomorrow. Day after at the latest.”

Adler is silent and Edward knows this means Adler isn’t displeased, but not particularly pleased either. Adler picks up his pen and scrawls a G on the envelope. He holds it out along with a fold of bills. “Make sure your men in Munich who made the report get this.”

Before Edward can walk forward to get it, Alex steps past the desk, to the window, careful in his movements. Outside, he can’t recognize any of the architecture. Too much to ask that he’d have his office in view of Big Ben or something. Alex scans the papers on the desk, wishing he could reach his hand out and flip over the torn and opened mail. He spots one envelope hanging slightly over the side of an inbox and Alex squats, craning his neck to read the underside of the letter. By now Edward has taken the letter and begun to walk out of the room. Alex feels the tug of the letter’s Story pulling him along with it, leaving the room behind. He lets go of the pages.

When he opened his eyes, Alex saw he was basically surrounded. Reeve, Hannah, and Alyosha were crowded around him, with Misha a few steps behind. Gareth hadn’t moved from his spot across the room, but he’d stopped pacing and stood stock still, watching him. Alex cleared his throat and pitched his voice to Gareth.

“He’s not here.”

“What?”

Alex held up the letter, giving it a shake. “He wrote this in France and handed it off. He’s not here. Someone who works for him in Munich tipped him off.” Alex pushed the letter into Hannah’s hands, nodding to Alyosha and happy to be rid of it. The rest thankfully took the hint to back off. As they drifted back into the living room as a group, Gareth started pacing again. Still catching his breath, orienting himself in the present, Alex backed up to lean against the wall next to Misha, who was quieter than normal, watching them.

“That’s good,” Hannah said.

Gareth didn’t agree and instead bit his lips between his teeth, eyes elsewhere. “They know I’m here. He’s just toying with me.” He looked at Alyosha and amended, “Us. Jesus, Reeve, you took one of their agents, you stole their jet—this isn’t going to be only me. We’ve got to split up.”

“Out of the question,” Hannah spat just as Alex let out a sharp, “No.”

Reeve walked to Gareth, hands out and placating, long fingers spread wide. “We know how to hide and we can be more careful from now on.”

“You’re not hearing me,” Gareth ground out.

“We’ve gotten this far.” Reeve clapped a hand on the top of his shoulder, giving him a gentle shake. “We can handle this.”

Something in Gareth snapped, and Alex flinched as Gareth grabbed Reeve by the shoulders and threw him into the closest wall hard enough to make the house shake and held him there.

Beside Alex, Misha took a sudden half step forward as if to intervene, but Alex put a hand out to stop him and shook his head. Better to let them move through it.

Gareth’s shoulders were rising and falling fast and Alex could see the veins pumping in his temples. Reeve’s face was impassive. Gareth took a step back with one leg so he could lean forward into Reeve, arms out straight.

“You know how Sol’s telepath scale says at one end, you’re not a telepath and at the other, you’re so powerful you’re insane?”

Reeve’s eyelids fluttered. “That’s not really what it says.” Alex shot a glance at Hannah. In true Reeve form: missing the fucking point.

Gareth ignored him. “Adler’s a psychopath, so take a guess where he falls on your stupid scale.”

“Gareth,” Reeve said softly, but that only made Gareth give his shoulders one more good, violent jerk, shoving him into the wall again.

“I’ve had both of you in my head and he’s better than you,” Gareth hissed. It seemed like he was trying to whisper, but wasn’t pulling it off. “He won’t just off you like Neptune. He will make you kill Hannah and Alex and he will make you love it. More than you’ve ever loved anything in your life. Then he’ll let you wake up to that, and if you’re lucky, he won’t make you live with it for too long.”

Reeve raised his hands up and set them on Gareth’s arms, without pushing him off. His eyebrows were stretched high on his face. “Okay.”

“What?” Gareth and Alex both said it at the same time. Alex’s heart had skipped to double-time.

“I said okay. You have a better handle on what all this means. We do it your way.”

Gareth dropped his arms. They all stood there in a stunned silence for a moment. Alex’s heart sank.

Hannah shook her head several times before she could speak. “No. This is stupid.”

“It’s not,” Reeve replied evenly. “I don’t like it and I don’t want to do it, but it’s not stupid. Anywhere we go right now, six people moving together in the Church draws a lot of attention. And without the Church, we’re undefended for the time being. We can’t keep Sol off our backs without help right now.”

“He’s right,” Misha sighed. “About this at least.”

“The only reason we’re alive right now is because we’ve stuck together,” Alex yelled. He was pacing now, he realized. He came to stop but he was shaking too much to stand still, so he sat down in the nearest chair.

“I know.” Something in Reeve’s voice caught, sounding like it had stumbled over the same lump that was threatening to choke Alex. He was glad he’d heard it before Reeve had taken that slow breath to even himself out. “But two groups of three have a better chance of moving unnoticed.”

Alyosha gestured to the three of them. There were hard lines forming around his eyes. “And you three haven’t done anything to piss them off. They should focus on us.”

Hannah threw her hands up. “And what if you’re wrong and this Adler guy decides to come after us to punish you? That sounds like the shit you’ve talked about.”

Alex shut his open mouth. It wasn’t something Gareth had ever talked about with him. All his Entropy knowledge was stolen, contraband, unwilling.

“That’s the risk,” Gareth said, finally able to stand still. “Either they definitely find us in a pack of six and what you said happens anyway, or we split up and they might be able to track down a few of us. And I know they’ll be more pissed off that I got away.”

Reeve turned to Gareth. “The place must be being watched. How do we get out?”

“I’ve got that,” Misha called, unfolding himself from his position on the wall. “I have an idea, but we need to wait until dark.”

“You’re on board with this plan?” Reeve asked, eyebrows high.

Misha shrugged one shoulder. “It’s not your plan, so I like it.”

Hannah let out a huff. “Can we at least vote on this or something?”

“Sure,” Reeve said, looking around. “All those opposed, raise your hand.”

Hannah’s arm shot up and Alex raised his with her. No one else did. His stomach dropped.

Reeve nodded. “Okay. It’s only temporary. We’ll wait, what, two weeks? Until we can lose them and then join up again.”

“Three weeks,” Gareth said quietly.

“Fine,” Hannah huffed. “Where do we meet?”

“No,” Gareth said quickly. “I don’t want to know where you are. We shouldn’t be able to contact you.”

“What?”

Misha sighed. “We’ll ditch our burner and get a new one. You keep yours. In three weeks, we’ll call and set up a location.”

No one argued. Alex didn't breathe.

“We should pack,” Reeve said finally. “Please try to keep the yelling at me to one at a time.”

Alex followed Reeve close behind, back into their room, and shut the door a little too loud.

“Alex,” Reeve started, closing his eyes.

Alex took a brief moment of satisfaction seeing Reeve shifting his weight uncomfortably as he walked past him without a word, striding to the chair that held his piled clothes. He started shoving them into his bag, expecting Reeve to say something but he was silent, too. Which somehow pissed Alex off even more. He heard the floor creak as Reeve took a step towards him, then another.

Alex wanted to do everything at once, from turning and clinging to Reeve like a life raft to throwing the wooden chair at his face. Alex shut his mouth on a question and bent low to grab his shirt from where it had fallen on the floor by the bed the night before, shoving it into his pack and piling the rest of his things on top of it, sandwiching it, creating a barrier between the fabric and his hand. His face felt hot, which didn’t seem right. He wasn’t supposed to be the one feeling—he didn’t know what it was he was feeling. He wasn’t sure he’d ever felt it before. He built up the best barrier in his head that he could, needing Reeve not see this feeling. As though throwing a rug over a bloodstain meant he could pretend it wasn’t there. The skin of his ears felt like it was on fire and he kept his head lowered, hiding behind his hair. There was more creaking and Alex froze and closed his eyes, preparing himself not to jump at Reeve’s hand. A question was clawing its way out of Alex’s mouth against his will.

Alex jumped at the sound of the door clicking shut gently. When he spun around, Reeve was gone. His things were still there on the bed, unpacked, and his bag and gear were on the floor.

He sat on the floor by the wall, remembering how to breathe. When the light outside was getting low and he felt numb enough, Alex picked up his pack and left the room, taking care to avoid stepping on the same spot Reeve had been standing.

---

As night fell, five figures left the Sanctuary with the hoods of their coats pulled up against the sudden, heavy rain. They moved as fast as they dared, down dark, back streets in a tight group. They didn’t slow to hunt for dogs, just focused on covering ground.

A little over two miles into their trek, two of the Children split off and began to double back. Alyosha, Gareth, and Reeve didn’t turn or wish them goodbye, for risk of drawing attention. The two local Church members would make their way back to the Sanctuary. By then, Misha, Alex, and Hannah would have left the house, heading in whatever direction Misha was taking them. The others didn’t know and they didn’t want to. With Hannah so often invisible, all they could do was hope that a group of five would be enough for Entropy to keep their eyes on them and give the others time to get away unnoticed.

For the next hour or so, the three of them pressed on without pausing. The rain let up not long after the Children left and the weather manipulator took his knack with him, back toward the Sanctuary, but they kept their hoods up, just in case. The dark roads brightened into more populated ones. There were night sounds and figures crowding and passing them on sidewalks. Alyosha tried not to stare at them, checking them for weapons, following their hands. When Reeve’s pace slowed abruptly, Alyosha nearly plowed into him.

“What is it?” he asked, slowing down.

“I don’t know where I’m going,” Reeve muttered without looking back.

“Misha gave you a couple of Sanctuary locations?”

“Yeah, but I mean right now. The Sanctuaries aren’t in this city and I don’t know how we’re getting there or where the hell this street even goes.”

Alyosha looked over at Gareth, who didn’t acknowledge him, busy watching the crowd. Without waiting for an answer, Reeve sped up his pace for a block or so but then slowed back down again.

“Reeve,” Alyosha said softly.

“Do I just go straight until the street ends or something? Or until we pass out and fall asleep?”

“Reeve.” He said it louder this time and grabbed his arm. When Reeve turned around to look at him, his face was drawn. “It’s okay.” He tried to lock eyes with Reeve to make sure he was hearing him, but it was impossible. His eyes were darting rapidly, but unlike Gareth, he wasn’t seeing anyone.

“We need to keep moving,” Gareth urged through gritted teeth.

Alyosha’s turn to ignore Gareth, he tugged Reeve off to the edge of the sidewalk. “It’s okay,” he repeated. “We’re going to walk until morning and there will always be some place open that can point us to a cheap hostel. Tomorrow we’ll pick a city, but for now, let’s walk.”

Reeve’s eyes finally slid back to rest on Alyosha, and the sudden stillness looked unnatural. “This is wrong.” The neutral, flat way he said it made Alyosha feel cold.

“Come on,” was all he said, and stepped in front of Reeve to begin walking again. He could lead for the night. He could do that much.

***