ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-NINE: Waves V

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139

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There was a man in a tiny swimsuit here just now.

A man was here. Another Avowed. Here. Just now.

I’m not alone.

Alden’s thoughts had gone blank for a moment, but they came right back online at that.

“Sir!” he shouted, sprinting down the hall. “Dude! Liam! Wait!”

He flung open the door and ran out onto the sidewalk.

Where’d he go!?

Alden spun around in a circle once. Twice. He couldn’t see the guy anywhere.

I didn’t imagine him. I’m not that crazy yet.

“Liam!” he yelled as loud as he could. “Liam! Where are you?!”

Oh fuck. Fuck he’s gone. He must be running. Fast. Did he turn the corner up ahead? If I just…

He kept shouting, racing toward the intersection, and just as he reached the crosswalk, he heard someone call back.

“Hey! You good over there?”

Relieved to the depths of his soul, Alden looked around to see the man in the swimsuit standing in the other crosswalk, on the other side of the intersection. The yellow pedestrian lights were flashing for both of them.

“What’s that on your back?” Liam called.

An image of the woman on the motorcycle shaking her head and abandoning him flashed through Alden.

“She’s alive!” he shouted. “I’m trying to get her to someone who can help! She only looks like this because of my skill. I’m definitely not a murderer!”

“Somebody’s hurt?” The man bounded toward him. He had a friendly face. His eyes widened as he got close enough to get a better look at Alden and Zeridee. “Ho wow! What happened to you!? That’s an Artonan. That’s a very bloody Artonan. And she’s so stiff!”

“That’s my skill. It’s preser—timestopping her and shielding her. What…”

What are you doing here in swimwear? Why were you headed toward the coast? Have you seen anyone else?

Alden settled on the question that mattered the most: “Can you help us somehow?”

Liam was hovering around Alden’s back now, gawking at Zeridee, so Alden had to strain his neck to see him properly.

“What?” Liam asked.

“Can you help us?” Alden repeated. “I’m trying to get us out of here as fast as possible. I don’t know my way around the area.”

“Of course!” Liam exclaimed. “Ho wow! You’ve obviously had a hell of night already. What in Apex happened to you two? Did you come from that way? Did something go wrong with the evac up there?”

He pointed in the direction Alden had mentally marked as unsafe—the place where all the lights were out.

“No. We came from the Artonan ambassador’s house. It’s a complicated story.”

“Well, don’t worry. Unless you think your powers are at risk of giving out? In that case, we might need to worry. Yeah…” He ran a hand through his sleek, dark hair and looked up and down the street. “We’re nowhere near an emergency department, and I don’t really know how I would help with something like this.”

“I can hold her and keep her this way for a long time,” said Alden. “Running far would be hard, but if we walk—”

“You’re set then. Yeah. I know a place that’s safe.”

“You do?”

The man was nodding. “Yes. If you can really keep the Artonan petrified… You’re a hundred percent sure she won’t die of her wounds when she’s like that? She looks kind of…not healthy.”

“I can keep her like this,” Alden said firmly. “She won’t die.”

“Then you’re good, buddy! What’s your class? Healer? Never mind. I’ve got you covered. Yeah, yeah…oh, and we can probably use one of Tina’s spells to send a message ahead. For a good cause…definitely!”

Alden’s faith in humanity had taken some critical hits tonight. This guy was restoring it fast.

“Thank you so much. Who’s Tina? And where—?”

“Come on, come on! Let’s get you to a place where you can rest.”

******

To Alden’s surprise, Liam Long led him right back into Apogee Artist Spaces, talking ninety miles an hour the whole way. The “safe place” he knew about was the ground floor studio he shared with his brother and sister. The brother and sister were B-rank students at Celena North University; Liam was a B-rank, too. He had just graduated. The guys were Brutes. The sister was an Adjuster.

According to Liam, Apogee’s ground floor boom rooms were the perfect “base of operations” during a natural disaster. Basically, the things were reinforced concrete boxes that allowed artists to get more violently creative with their powers than was allowed in the upstairs studios. Hence, no windows and thick doors.

“The old lady in the studio across the hall films herself smashing through all sorts of things. Bet you’ve seen some of her work in movies! Cannonball Betty? We never hear a sound.”

That does sound good, thought Alden, but…

“Did anyone say the rooms were safe to hide in during a magical flood?” He was watching Liam input his code into the panel by the door of Boom Room 6. “Or a regular flood even? They’re at ground level. Are they waterproof? Have they been rated for external impacts by, like, an engineer?”

His security code is just 123123123?

Alden had been memorizing it in case he needed to leave and come back for some reason.

Liam Long seemed a little too nonchalant about the ongoing disaster.

“Of course they couldn’t officially let people shelter here. There are only a few rooms. But Tina, Royce, and I all agreed it was safe enough. You can stay here in our boom room. I’ll get back to them fast and tell them about you. Tina’s got a spell that will signal friends on campus if any of us get into trouble. When they get it, they’ll know to send someone this way. You just sit tight!”

He smiled comfortingly and pushed open the door, gesturing for Alden to step inside.

Alden did take a step inside. Then the lights came on automatically, and he reversed course so quickly he almost fell down.

“Thank you so much, but Zeridee and I are just going to head toward downtown on our own! Nice meeting you. Sorry to bother you! I think I’ll be fast enough to get where I’m going. I hope you and your brother and sister and everyone you know have a wonderful time together in your bathing suits. See—”

“Wait!” shouted Liam.

No way.

Alden was down the hall grabbing the puzzle-piece doorknob in a heartbeat. The man’s bare feet were slapping the floor behind him.

“It’s not a torture chamber!” Liam shouted.

“I’m sure it’s not!” Alden shouted back as he shot outside. “No judgment! Just going now. For multiple personal reasons!”

He ran as fast as he could.

Liam Long caught up to him, passed him, and skidded to a halt in front of him.

He’s faster than me. Probably a speedster. I’m screwed.

“Kid, it’s not a torture chamber! I mean it sort of is, but—”

Maybe if I kick him hard enough in the nuts.

“Tina, Royce, and I just use it to scare ourselves.”

“I’m sure you do. That sounds like a thing anyone might do! Like I said. No judgment. I just realized I felt like running right now.”

Kick him and then kick him again.

“I know it looks weird!” Liam waved his hands. “But we just get together and scare the shit out of each other. I swear.”

“Why?” Alden demanded.

“Because…” He dropped his arms and gave Alden an embarrassed smile. “We’re doing it to help each other level.”

Alden blinked. “…what?”

******

This is so ridiculous and disappointing.

It was a few minutes later, and Alden was sitting backwards on a folding chair in the Long siblings’ private dungeon, staring at a tarantula. The spider lifted its hairy front legs to scrabble at the glass walls of its tank. Other habitats for roaches, a small snake, and a particularly evil-looking scorpion lined the shelves above and below it.

“Not you. You’re very scary,” Alden muttered to the tarantula.

So was everything else in this place, even though Liam Long had hinted that he and his siblings had “gone beyond” their original fears. Lately, they had been using sketchy substances on each other to make everything in the room even worse and “really get that adrenaline pumping.”

They had a lifelike model griveck. The serrated tongue extending from its maw could be controlled with a remote. There was a big drum full of liquid—Alden hoped it was water—with a bunch of massive chains beside it. And, naturally, they’d made their very own iron maiden and included a heater, so that they could risk heat stroke in addition to a skewering.

And those were just a few of the pieces Alden knew how to identify.

What the hell do they do to each other with those suction cup things?

He understood what they were going for…though it had never in his life occurred to him that anyone would get together on the weekends with their brother and sister and engage in extreme stress induction for the sake of faster leveling.

“I bet you’re thinking we’re crazy!”

Liam was chuckling to himself as he pulled open the drawers of one of the only normal items in this domain of terror—a steel office desk that looked like it had been around since the Cold War.

“This isn’t that different from how the universities train people in the hero programs,” he said. “Those are ninety percent about strengthening powers. We’ve just put together our own version of it.”

Sort of. Kind of. Seriously, though?

Alden couldn’t even argue with the guy about the validity of the project. It sounded like the Longs were setting up stressful situations for each other that demanded use of their Avowed abilities to escape from.

Locking your sister in an iron maiden and refusing to let her out until she’d learned how to use her skill on an object twelve centimeters farther away than she’d been able to manage last weekend was not normal.

But Alden had been burned, darted, impaled, and thrown off a fifty-foot-high wall this week. So he really didn’t have as much righteous ground to stand on as he would have liked.

Competitive environments, going up against other Avowed, being forced to try new things with your magic or else…

“Listen,” said Alden, “I’m in the Talent Development program at CNH. I was in the gym a few hours ago. I know what kind of environments we use to promote growth and lead to new discoveries about our powers. But it’s not dangerous when we do it. We’re extremely well protected, even from pain most of the time. What you and your brother and sister are planning tonight is different, and it makes me so—”

“You’re a hero student! At B-rank? WOW! Way to go!!”

—damn frustrated, Alden finished in his own head.

Just as well that he hadn’t said it out loud. Liam didn’t owe him anything. Not even common sense.

But Alden was still baffled, annoyed, and disheartened that the person he’d found who was somewhat willing to help him was in the middle of treating the emergency like a personal training ground.

“You must be awesome,” Liam continued. “We all tried to get in. Did the whole application cycle in high school, then in uni. So brutal at B. I swear they autorejected me every time just because my GPA wasn’t perfect. Tina made it to the combat assessment in high school once. Royce is still thinking of trying out one more time for the uni program. Can’t age out of that one at least. If he can bash through three levels in the next twelve months, that’ll put a lot of the admissions committee’s doubts to rest.”

He rummaged through the drawer and slammed it shut. Reaching for the next, he sighed. “Tina, what’s the point of having a filing system if you aren’t going to use it? Where’s the ‘currently active’ folder?”

Tina Long—who was with the other brother, on their way to play chicken with the oceanic anomalies—had a skill that magically paired objects, along with spells that took advantage of the pairings in a few different ways. She could make temporary, short range communication devices with it.

Liam had an earring his sister could use to signal him. He was going to give Alden something else she’d recently used her skill on so that he could get in touch with the siblings to share emergency news.

If Liam could actually find it.

I have to try one more time, Alden thought. These guys should absolutely come with me. What they’re doing is nuts.

“You were listening when I told you that a magical substance is causing all of this, right? There are a bajillion particles of it in the water. From what I understand, they latch onto stuff and try to sink it or throw it around. Tons of magic, pulling water onto shore. I think sometimes the effect is pretty weak.”

The blob of water around that high heel shoe on the bridge had seemed relatively self-contained and innocuous.

“But sometimes it’s crazy strong. It moved The Span. It covered the bridge and yanked it. Plopstar is out there attacking the whole ocean on System orders—”

“So casting spells at it might affect it, then?” Liam turned to him excitedly. “That’s good intel! I still can’t believe the night you’ve had. On The Span! Carrying an ambassador’s assistant around. I bet you level up after this!”

“I’d better fucking not.”

Liam looked startled.

Alden shook his head. “What I mean is—this is serious. And it’s not just water. It threw a truck across the bridge so hard that it smashed through a bunch of other vehicles like bowling pins. My classmates had to help rescue drivers. The ocean will be moving in really unpredictable ways. It’s not like a wave at the beach. You won’t be able to guess how big or which way—”

“Ho! This is it!” Liam waved a large accordion folder through the air and did a little victory jig in the middle of his family torture chamber. In his swim briefs.

Alden held back the urge to yell.

Liam dumped the folder onto the desk, and bric-a-brac tumbled out. He grabbed a pair of black cardstock rectangles and passed one of them to Alden, who held an arm over the chair back to take both it and the small, pointy wooden stick the man offered along with it.

Alden examined the card. The word “testing” was visible on the corner in rainbow letters.

“This is one of those scratch art things where you scrape the black layer off, and the colors are underneath?” he asked.

“Yep!” said Liam, holding the other card.“Don’t scratch it right away. They’ve already been paired, but Tina has to cast a spell on a least one half to make them start mimicking each other. I’ll take this one to her, she’ll spell it, and she’ll write you a little note to let you know it’s active. Then you can message us back.”

“Thank you.”

Alden did mean it. Even a limited ability to communicate with a single Adjuster felt like a lifeline under the circumstances. He could tell them where he was if he ran into trouble. They could tell him where danger was.

Since they’re going to be chasing it.

He shifted, adjusting Zeridee’s weight again, and the chair creaked.

“You look worried, Alden! Don’t be. We know what we’re doing.”

“Even the System doesn’t know what it’s doing tonight,” Alden said tiredly.

“Huh. Well, that might be true.” Liam shut the folder back in the drawer. “We did think we’d get a later teleport out when we rejected the first ones. It said it advised against it, so I suppose it’s fair…. But we were going to use that to plan our trials for the night. Go hard, get tired, teleport out. It hasn’t offered another time slot. Guess it was a ‘take your one shot or take care of yourself’ kind of deal.”

He looked at Alden curiously.

“I took mine,” Alden said. “It just didn’t work out. Obviously.”

He wasn’t sure if Liam’s willingness to not ask questions and take a preserved, horribly injured alien in stride was a sign of practicality or a symptom of his slaphappy approach to the events of the night in general.

“I wish you’d consider staying here in our boom room,” said Liam, smiling at him. “You could have a seat. Get some rest. The snake is friendly. We’re all coming back here after we’re done testing ourselves against the water and anything else we might find, so you won’t be alone for long.”

Alden tucked his scratchart card into his messenger bag, trying to come up with one last argument that might inject some reasonable fear into this sort of person.

“I appreciate the offer. A lot. I’ll come back here if I need to.” If everything absolutely goes to shit and I have no other option. “But the System is suggesting you leave.”

“Don’t you think if it was really safe, it would have just said ‘stay where you are?’” Alden asked. “Even if it’s just too busy and it overlooked this place, nobody else came to shelter here. Not even the other people who rent boom rooms. Maybe they’re not as safe as you think. I really…”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Maybe if I compliment him. I haven’t tried that one yet.

“I think the way you guys are training yourselves is already impressive. You don’t have to push it even farther and risk your lives. You’ve got a great thing going, right?”

“Thanks. You’re a good kid. But don’t worry so much,” said Liam. “We’ll have each other’s backs, and the thing is…this is real. We try to push our limits, but you always know it’s fake on some level when your little bro is the one threatening you with Chester.”

He jerked a thumb toward the griveck.

“We’ve never had a chance to test ourselves versus actual danger. Magical danger! And we need it. Avowed come out of real disasters changed,” said Liam.

“Do they?” Alden spoke flatly.

That dreamy tone in the Brute’s voice…

Alden’s patience and willingness to cajole Liam Long died there. All that was left was a little gratitude for the kindness and the offer of help, limited though it was. And a shadow of despondence about the fact that sometimes friendly people were hopelessly stupid.

I can’t save him and myself and Zeridee. I can’t drag him with me. Maybe with his siblings he’ll be strong enough and lucky enough to stay safe.

He stood up from the chair.

Liam still hadn’t noticed his mood shift. He was waxing enthusiastic about his goals. “Almost everyone who’s ever learned to double-on their stats has managed it the first time in a crisis. I know it’s a longshot, but we are the Longs! Tonight could be our night for that kind of rare breakthrough. If something like that happened for me—”

“Good luck,” said Alden, slapping a stimulant injector and a small roll of bandaging onto the desk. He’d taken them from his bag while Liam was rummaging through the drawers. He thought it was all right to give them away since he had two of each. “Read the instructions before you use that. Try to stay alive.”

He headed for the door so quickly that Liam didn’t react to his abrupt departure until he was turning the handle.

“You too! See you around sometime. I still hang around campus a lot because of my bro and sis. Maybe we’ll…”

He kept talking. Alden stopped listening.

He’d just stepped outside the Longs’ boom room, and the building was vibrating around him.