ONE HUNDRED FORTY-ONE: Waves VII

 

141

******

 

Alden shifted Zeridee on his back and peered out of the gaping hole in the front wall of Apogee Artist Spaces.

Liam had just made it to the intersection. The man’s chest was wrapped in white light; he’d found some kind of flexible, glowing tubing in his studio or the wreckage. And his feet were covered now—one with a shoe, one with something Alden couldn’t identify from here.

Good luck, he thought as the Brute leaped over what looked like a destroyed refrigerator and disappeared around the corner.

My turn to go.

He wanted a flashlight, but while he’d listened to Liam frantically searching his ruined studio for supplies, he’d decided that it would take too long to find one in this mess. Better to get off this street and to a clearer area first.

The boom rooms had only partially lived up to their names. On this hall that connected directly to the building’s entryway and exterior, most of the rooms were standing, but their doors had been blown inward by the force of the water. All kinds of things had gotten scrambled and smashed. Some of the mess had drifted into the hallway or out of the building altogether when the water retreated. He was guessing most of it had left through the giant gap where the puzzle door and the stretch of concrete wall on one side of it had once been.

There was an entire room missing there, just behind Alden and to his left. Reinforced walls had been turned to rubble, and so much of the ceiling was gone that the second floor was exposed.

He couldn’t help looking back at that area one last time, wondering if he could possibly be correct about how it had happened.

It looks like a torpedo hit the front of the building and burst through there instead of just the big wave.

“Hey,” he said, staring at the thing he suspected of being that torpedo. “You don’t happen to have a package with a flashlight in you, do you?”

A glowing red hand sign appeared, illuminating an odd nook in the rubble as it waved hello. It looked like something largish had been sitting there, supporting the debris as it fell all around it, and then that something had disappeared.

Now, there was a single Post Drop in the precise center of that space, standing upright.

Alden wasn’t sure it was fair of him to be suspicious of the Drop. The mailbox wasn’t totally unharmed. Its solar panel top was broken from where a broken pipe had hit it. The screen that was displaying the hand was shattered. And some rubble around it ruined the perfection of the strange pocket it sat in.

But the pocket was still there. It looked like it could have been created by a water bubble that had surrounded the Post Drop and launched it into Apogee. And the mailbox was in unexpectedly fantastic shape if it was a regular victim of a massive wave.

The glowing hand turned into a smiley face.

“I’m sorry, customer. I don’t recognize you. My connection to System information seems to be malfunctioning. Please input your name on the touchscreen if you’d like to send mail.”

“Where did you come from?” Alden asked it, thinking that he might at least get the name of a location. He’d know to avoid going that way as he traveled, since missing mailboxes didn’t bode well for the conditions there.

But there must not have been a programmed response for that question. The device said “I’m sorry, customer,” again in that same tonelessly polite voice. Much more boring than the one Alden remembered from the Post Drop he’d used to send his message to the Velras.

That feels like it was years ago.

Before he left home. Before he was a Rabbit. Somewhere on the other side of that chasm in his life.

He took a deep breath. “All right, Zeridee. Let’s go for a walk.”

He stepped out of the building onto what had once been a pristine sidewalk, but before he could go any farther, a motion a few feet ahead caught his eye.

Then the light of the mailbox winked out, and he couldn’t see clearly enough to make out the source of the motion anymore.

“Post Drop.”

The red light came back on behind him.

“I’m sorry, customer. I don’t recogni—”

Alden ignored it. He took another step, debris crunching beneath his feet, and looked down. There was a small snake, curled up on top of a piece of fiberboard beside a plastic bento box decorated with cherry blossoms.

The animal wasn’t moving now, but it was still in one piece.

“You got washed all the way out here? That must have been a cold, scary swim.”

Liam’s snake was pencil thin and even though Alden couldn’t make out the color right now, he knew from seeing it in its habitat earlier that its patterned skin was primarily dark orange.

“I hear you’re friendly. But are you deadly?”

He glanced at the bento. It had a lid.

Practically fate then.

Alden groaned like an old man as he bent down with Zeridee’s weight on his back.

The bento had a pair of chopsticks clipped to the inside of the lid.

“I’m neutral on snakes,” he said, slipping the sticks under the creature. “I’m not neutral on being bitten by venomous ones. So please forgive me for poking you with these things and trapping you in a lunchbox instead of carrying you around on my nice warm body.”

The snake was really sluggish. From the temperature and exhaustion, Alden assumed. It barely twitched as he scooped it into its new carrying case.

“Sorry.” He shut the lid on the snake and tucking the bento into his bag. “The ride might be bumpy, but I think your chances are better with me than out here in the street. If you live, you’ll be my easiest ever rescue. So please do that.”

He closed the flap on the bag and looked around him. The swift movement of the water out of this area seemed to have carried the worst of the debris away from this particular spot, but there was some unfathomable shit going on anyway.

Something that Alden could only guess was a steel industrial vat was on its side in the road right in front of him, and a mound of detritus had piled up behind it. He could barely pick out what any of it was.

Whole houses are missing. That vat is big enough for cars to disappear inside it. This is all too big to deal with mentally, never mind physically.

From the sixth floor, he’d marked the general area he wanted to head toward. He was going to get out of this demolition zone and then try to dodge the places where the absence of lights indicated some other picturesque corner of Apex had been ground into suburban paste.

He patted Zeridee’s braid and the bag.

Finding the snake had made him feel a little better. Like it was proof that he would survive, too. He didn’t care if it made sense or not.

“Let’s all live then,” he said. “How does that sound?”

******

******

Well, this looks different than it did earlier today, doesn’t it?

Lute Velra stood on his toes and craned his neck to examine the crowd in the MPE gymnasium.

The facility the students in the high school’s hero program used was huge, as spaces for Avowed talent training and athletics tended to be. Lots of superhumans needed room for their powers to shine, and there was plenty of that here. Usually.

Right now, Lute was wondering if they were going to have to start stacking students on top of each other to fit them all in. Like in Emilija’s photo.

The image the F-rank Rabbit had taken of the human stackers outside the casino was the last bit of internet access Lute had enjoyed. And that had been over an hour ago. He’d been slow arriving here at his designated evac location because people who recognized him had kept stopping him to ask him for wordchains, and once he’d realized there was a significant problem on that front, he’d been trying to correct it.

Only to fail hard.

They’re all going to think I’m a greedy Velra who won’t share even in a crisis. That’s what everyone is going to think no matter what I say.

The truth wasn’t much better, and his reputation could hardly sink lower. So in that sense he supposed it was fine.

People bumped into him. He was still standing in the doorway that separated the building’s front vestibule from the gym itself, and the crowd was so thick that he basically couldn’t move until everyone else did.

Lute was being careful about how he moved.

He’d stacked quite a few wordchains on himself, since he could still do that just fine, and he wasn’t accustomed to carrying this many at once.

Hazel got her jollies by turning herself into a faux Brute. His own preferred daily chain list was more moderate.

He didn’t think he’d gone overboard yet, but his body still felt like an ill-fitted suit.

Self-mastery chains—two of them—were keeping it all manageable.

He heard someone mention the Teleportation Complex, and he focused on the other boy’s voice, tuning out the rest of the clamor.

“…got in touch with Mom finally on Bilal’s infogear watch. Took forever. Anyway, she’s night shift, and she said they had her chipping ice off the magic symbols. Some side effect from heavy use. You’d think it would be heat if it was anything, wouldn’t you? She said the System was dropping hundreds of kids at once in the concourse, not even bothering with bays. It made them clear all the furniture out. She said the kids were there and gone so fast that she heard one batch yelling and crying, and when she turned around it was just voices echoing around the place. The kids were already gone on to who knows where.”

Lute couldn’t see the speaker through the crowd.

There was a pause, then the boy added, “It was kind of scary. She said the tiles on the concourse floor were starting to crack in places. She pried up a piece because she thought she saw something strange, and there are symbols under there, too. Just like in the bays. She asked one of the security people who’s worked there forever what that was about, and he said the whole building is actually a teleporter. The bays are just more refined or something.”

“That’s not scary,” said a girl. “It’s cool. I didn’t know that.”

“I wasn’t done. The security man told her that the Artonans who come to do maintenance don’t just work on the building. They always check the lots and the parking garage and part of the streets around the place. When he first started working there, he asked them why the full teleportation area was so big, and one of them actually answered him.”

“What did they say?”

“That the whole thing would only be used ‘if Anesidora was no longer a suitable place to live.’”

Lute shivered.

This is what I get for eavesdropping, he thought. Nightmare fuel.

But in one way, it made him feel better. The System was mass teleporting people. With that plus shelters being available, his parents were probably already somewhere safe, or they would be very soon.

Mom might not even have needed a teleport. She’s almost always with Aulia.

If nothing else, Aulia was powerful.

And they could be living at the penthouse right now. They’d be totally safe there.

As the throng of people finally pushed its way into the gym proper, a local interface message appeared:

 

[This is a secure location. Do not leave.]

 

“Okay then,” Lute muttered. “I will not leave. Easy enough.”

The noise level was ridiculous. A few people crying. More people laughing and joking around with their friends. There were around thirty young children in a group on the white floor, singing Donguri Korokoro with the grown-ups who were watching them.

“Kids center floor! Kids center floor! Háizimen…”

Lute tuned out the people shouting instructions for non-Avowed. But a couple of minutes later, a young woman wearing a bright red vest over her t-shirt forced her way through the crowd toward him.

“Hi!” she said brightly. “Are you looking for your family? I’ll find them for you if you want to go ahead to the floor with the other minors.”

“I’m an S-rank.”

She looked confused for a second, then she gasped, “You’re the Velra boy!”

Lute bit back a sigh. “That’s me.”

Please don’t ask me for a wordchain right now.

“I’m so sorry!”

“It’s fine.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“It’s nothing. I’m only fifteen.”

“But I should have recognized you! I see you all the time.You look different without your…we both have a class in Mele Center around the same time. I’m taking throat singing!”

She didn’t recognize me without an eye patch, Lute thought.

He’d been too flustered on his way out of the room to worry about something like that.

“Anyway, the whole place is supposed to be safe,” she said, “but they told us to put more vulnerable people in the center of the gym floor, and less vulnerable people around the edges. If you want, you can even go sit in the side halls and classrooms. There’s more room there. For now. Doesn’t look like it’s going to last. The uni combat facility is filling up fast, too. Don’t leave the building or you might not get back in.”

A little room to breathe sounded good, even if it wasn’t guaranteed to last.

I wonder if I should just have stayed in my room.

The Celena North campus wasn’t very close to the coast. He couldn’t imagine the ocean reaching them here unless the whole country was screwed.

Lute made his way slowly through the crowd and eventually reached one of the side halls. He could actually walk in here. The classrooms were open, but all the desks were full. He didn’t feel like sitting down anyway, so he wandered for a bit, poking his head inside of rooms to see what footage of the disaster was playing on the projection screens and listening in on peoples’ conversations.

“I swear on my skill, that’s what they said. The old Nilama high-rise was completely underwater for a while.”

Lute wondered briefly if Paragon Academy was still there. Then he frowned. That high-rise is where Lexi’s family lives.

He assumed most of the newest first year hero class, including his roommates, had gotten stuck at Rosa Grove when everything went wrong.

“If that place was underwater, the whole family neighborhood would be. That’s just not possible,” someone said.

“No. Re-read the System update. ‘Observed effects include: forced submersion—usually but not always of elementally defined objects, rapid motion of submerged materials, sudden influxes of water in limited coastal areas.’”

“What are you saying?”

“A building is an object. It would be like what happened to The Span.”

A girl’s voice chimed in. “I just talked to someone in the bathroom who was there. She only just made it back to campus.”

“In Nilama?”

“At The Span!”

Lute stepped aside to let a group of older teens enter the room where the discussion was taking place. A moment later, his ears picked up on another conversation happening behind him.

“You’ll let me know if they reply back, won’t you, Vandy?”

“Of course I will. Just don’t leave the building. We need to keep track of everyone.”

“I’m after Heloísa.”

“No, Sanjay. You’re after Olive. She put herself on the list before you did. It won’t be long.”

Lute turned. He could only make out a slice of Vandy Carisson’s face and torso, thanks to the gaggle of people standing around her as she sat with her back to the wall.

He moved closer, trying to see around the backside of an appallingly lazy guitarist he knew from a shared class.

Vandy had claimed one of the only outlets on the hallway, and she’d plugged in one of those power strips that was made for infogear. Three of the latest model phones were linked to it by their tiny chargethreads, and all of them were currently being held by people who were texting on them. With one hand, Vandy was passing a fourth phone to that Adjuster girl who could make illusions of herself; with the other, she was writing in a spiralbound notebook.

“Heloísa, now that you’ve had your turn, would you go ask the instructors and the helpers if they have any messages that should be sent?” she asked an athletic girl who was wearing sneakers with pajama shorts and a hoody. “Since they’re so busy, we can do it for them. Just make sure you get names and enough information.”

Vandy ripped some sheets of paper out of the notebook and passed them over.

“Thanks for the mission!” Heloísa sprang up from her squat on the floor and raced off.

Lute took advantage of the gap left by her absence to slip even closer to Vandy.

Are all the phones hers? Where did she get so much infogear?

She’d never carried the stuff back at Paragon, and he couldn’t imagine why she would suddenly have started once she got her own interface.

Vandy was wearing her gym suit. Lute wondered if it was for safety, or if she’d run out of the dorms in such a hurry that the unitard was more appropriate than whatever she’d had on.

Her brown hair was uncharacteristically unkempt, and strands were escaping from a cloud-shaped barrette to fall around her cheeks as she focused on the chart she’d made inside her notebook. There were a ton of names on it already.

One of the phones chimed, and the boy holding it passed it to her.

Vandy read the message, wrote it down in the notebook beside someone’s name, then passed it back.

Why couldn’t someone else have set up a calling service? Lute wondered.

She wasn’t a person who would refuse to let him use the phone just because she hated him, but he still wished he didn’t have to ask.

“Hi, Vandy.”

Her pen stopped scratching at the notebook. Her eyes met his. “Lute.”

“Are you sharing your phones? Do you mind if I borrow one to see if I have a message?”

Cyril had bought himself an infogear watch months ago, after moving out of the apartment Jessica had provided for him while Lute was growing up. The place was empty now. She had left messages suggesting Lute could have it.

He had never answered them.

When Vandy didn’t reply, Lute added, “Not right now or anything. Put me at the bottom of the list?”

She made him wait an awkwardly long time for an answer. Just as he was growing afraid that she might actually refuse, she nodded. “All right. Stay nearby. I’ll call your name when it’s your turn.”

“Thank you. I appreciate—”

“I’d like a wordchain,” she interrupted. Her voice was matter of fact. Mostly. Lute thought he was probably imagining the edge.

“Right…”

She didn’t mean it in a bartering way. Did she?

“Do you mean I can’t send a text if I don’t…?”

“I’d like to be able to focus better,” Vandy said, still staring at him. “I’m finding it difficult to concentrate on what matters right now. I will, of course, pay back the debt at a later date. And I will give you money. Isn’t that how it usually works?”

Matadero. Her mom. She probably is finding it difficult to concentrate.

“I don’t actually charge people for that kind of arrangement…I’d do it. I really would. But, the thing is…”

He didn’t blush. Blushing was for people who hadn’t spent months learning to control their facial expressions with their self-mastery chain active.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author’s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“I can’t actually target people right now,” he confessed. “The System assist is off, and I never learned how to do it without it.”

Because why would I have needed to?

“That’s ridiculous,” the lurking guitarist scoffed before Vandy could reply. “I can still target things. He’s lying.”

Lute actually had no idea what the dude’s Avowed powers were. He also didn’t care.

“Good for you,” he said cooly. “Why don’t you try to target the right notes the next time you play instead of publicly humiliating your instrument? The System is no longer assisting me with targeting. I can’t figure out how to do it without the System’s help. Therefore, I am not currently performing wordchains for other people.”

“Why would the System—?”

“It’s none of your business. I’m talking to Vandy.”

Her brows were drawn together. “Why would the System deny you targeting assistance?” she asked.

Lute groaned. Internally.

Externally, he cultivated a persona of patience and earnest apology.

“You could do so much with your skill to help people tonight,” Vandy said. “I’m surprised you haven’t been called for duty.”

“Well,” said Lute, mentally cursing at his grandmother and his tattoo for not allowing him to fully explain, “it’s a complicated situation.”

Take it up with the Palace of Unbreaking! Chainer is theirs, and they do not want me to get panicky and cast chains on entire buildings full of humans who might bite it or shirk debt.

Not without some form of pre-payment anyway.

The only other explanation he could think of was that it was the System itself that didn’t want to play with Chainers right now.

It wasn’t just targeting that was down. Mass Bestowal was a package that came with other significant System assistance. Some of the old people had trained themselves to do things without its help, but even if Lute had been trying to learn how, he should be a decade or three away from getting there.

“I assume if the crisis continues for long enough, and if the System actually needs me, I’ll be able to do more,” he said, hoping that satisfied Vandy.

They had a staring contest.

She doesn’t look very satisfied.

“If you can’t do it, then—”

“I will try for you. I tried for some other people tonight.”

“—then it’s okay,” Vandy finished.

Oh. She wasn’t going to refuse after all.

Lute watched her write his name on the chart. There was an odd feeling in his gut.

Is your mom all right, Vandy? Do you know?

He didn’t think he was allowed to ask her that.

“I’ll try,” he said. “Mental focus? There’s one I like for that. I call it ‘zone in’ because the real name is such a pain…never mind…just a minute.”

He pressed his hands together, crossing just the ring fingers over each other in the first sign. The wordchain was one he knew well enough to cast without too much thought, so he tried to think about targeting while he whispered the words.

For all the good it’ll do. He’d tried on more than a dozen people already. More than once on most of them.

What in Apex was targeting anyway?

It was a brain button Lute could click on his interface. He had learned to do that mentally.

It was a word he could say. Or pointing with a finger. It was Hey, System, help me aim at Vandy Carisson.

When the System was ignoring you, there was none of that.