by V. E. Schwab
“It’s in part because of me that you have salvaged the last twenty-two EOs. So listen when I tell you that someone this powerful belongs in the ground.”
“You know the policy.”
“I know you want to believe that all EOs are worth saving, but we aren’t.”
“We don’t decide who lives and who dies,” said Stell tersely. “We don’t condemn EOs without confrontation.”
“Now who’s letting their ideals cloud their judgment?”
“Marcella will be offered the same opportunity as every other EO we engage—to come willingly. If she refuses, and the on-site team is unable to safely—”
“Safely?” snarled Eli. “This woman can reduce people to ash with a single touch. She can decay metal and stone. Do you value an EO’s life above a human’s? Because you are sending your agents on a suicide mission to sate your pride—”
“Stand down,” said Stell.
Eli exhaled through clenched teeth. “If you don’t kill her now, you’ll wish you had.”
Stell turned to go. “If you have no other suggestions—”
“Send me.”
Stell glanced back, raising a thick brow. “What was that?”
“You want other options? Ones that won’t get innocent humans killed?” Eli spread his arms. “Our abilities are complementary. She ruins. I regenerate. There’s a cosmic elegance to it, don’t you think?”
“And what if her power is faster?” asked Stell.
Eli’s arms fell back to his sides. “Then I die,” he said simply.
Once upon a time he had believed he survived because God willed it. That Eli was unbreakable because He had a purpose for him. These days, Eli didn’t know what he believed, but he still hoped, fervently, desperately, that there was a reason for it.
Stell smiled grimly. “I appreciate the offer, Mr. Cardale. But I’m not letting you go that easily.”
The wall went solid, swallowing the director from sight. Eli sighed, and crossed to his bed. He sank down onto his cot, elbows on his knees, fingers laced, head bowed. As if in prayer.
Eli hadn’t expected Stell to say yes, of course.
But he had planted the seed. Had seen it take root behind Stell’s eyes.
Now he simply had to wait for it to grow.
XXV
FOUR YEARS AGO
EON—LABORATORY WING
THOMAS Haverty was a man of vision.
So he wasn’t at all surprised when Stell stripped him of his post at EON. Wasn’t surprised when security escorted him from the lab, took his access card, his files, his crisp white coat. So many men of genius were stymied by shortsighted fools. Scientists condemned before they were lauded. Gods crucified before they were worshipped.
“This way, Mr. Haverty,” said a soldier in a black suit.
“Doctor,” he corrected as he stepped through the scanner, spread his arms, and let them search his clothes, his skin, his skeleton, all to make sure he hadn’t stolen anything from the lab. As if Haverty would do something so obvious, so stupid.
They escorted him all the way to the parking lot, and proceeded to search his car, too, before returning his keys and signaling the security post to let him out. The gates slid closed behind him with grim finality.
Haverty drove the twenty-four miles back to the outer edge of Merit, to a small apartment on the southern side of the city. He let himself in, set the keys in their designated tray, peeled off his coat and shoes, and rolled up his sleeves.
A few stray flecks of Mr. Cardale’s blood still stained the inside of his wrist, beyond the protection of his latex gloves. Haverty considered the dots for a moment, the strange pattern like a smattering of stars, a constellation waiting to be discovered.
He held his wrist out and went to his office. A windowless room, sterile and white and lined with refrigerated shelves of samples, vials of blood, small glass jars containing a dozen different drugs, folder after folder of hand-copied notes.
No, Haverty hadn’t been foolish enough to steal from EON on his way out. Instead, he’d done it every day. Stolen his research one piece at a time. A single sample. A slide. An ampule. Each token small enough to be claimed an accident, if he’d been caught. A slip of the mind. Patience really was the highest virtue. And progress was a thing achieved one halting step at a time.
Every night—or morning—when he’d returned home, Haverty had taken up a notepad and reprinted word for word the notes he’d made in the sanctum of the EON compound.
Men ahead of their time were always, by definition, outside of it.
Haverty was no different. Stell couldn’t see—EON couldn’t see—but he knew that the ends would justify the means. He would show them. He would crack the ExtraOrdinary code, and change the face of science, and they would welcome him back. They would worship him.
He crossed the lab and drew a small glass slide from a top drawer, along with a scalpel, delicately scraping flecks of Eliot Cardale’s brown-red blood onto the surface.
He had so much work to do.
XXVI
FOUR WEEKS AGO
SOUTHERN MERIT
NICK Folsetti sank onto the bench beside the block of lockers and began unwinding the tape from his hands. He ran his tongue along his inside cheek—he could still taste the tang of blood where his opponent had landed a punch.
The last of the tape came free, and Nick flexed, watching the skin on his knuckles tighten, harden to something like stone. It wasn’t stone, of course, or anything else. It was more like all the softness went out of him. All the weakness erased. He flexed again, his fingers gaining a sudden flush of color as they softened back into flesh and bone.
Nick could only harden himself in pieces—hands, ribs, shins, jaw—and even then, it was a conscious thing.
But it was a hell of a thing.
He’d heard the whispers, of the soldiers who came looking for people like him. Had gone down the online rabbit hole, dug up everything he could on ExtraOrdinaries in those first few days before he realized that was probably a giant red flag and switched to incognito searches on public computers.
EON—that’s what they were called. He kept picturing them like the people on TV shows, the ones who believed in ghosts or monsters or aliens. Nick had never been gullible, he didn’t really think they existed, these hunters.
But then again, up until six months ago, when Nick, fresh out of the hospital, put his hand through a wall, and the wall was the only thing that broke, he hadn’t believed in people like him either.
The bookie, Tavish, whistled from the doorway, a fresh toothpick between his teeth.
“For a guy your size, you sure can throw a punch.” His chin bobbed toward the hall, the room, the ring. “Bigger stages than this, you know.”
“You want me gone?” asked Nick.
“I didn’t say that,” said Tavish, shifting the toothpick in his mouth. “Just saying, you ever looking to go big, I could help you . . . for a cut.”
“I’m not looking for more attention,” said Nick. “Just cash.”
“Suit yourself.” The envelope arced through the air, landing on the bench beside him. It wasn’t all that thick, but it was untraceable, and more than enough to get by until the next fight. Which was all Nick needed.
“See you in three nights,” said Tavish, disappearing down the hall.
Nick thumbed through the cash, then tucked it in his coat and headed out.
The alley light above the door was on the fritz again, the alley a tangle of shadows, the kind that played tricks on your eyes this late at night.
Nick lit a cigarette, the red tip dancing before him in the dark.
There was a rager going on in one of the nearby warehouses, the heavy pulse of the club’s bass blanketing the streets. Nick couldn’t hear his own heart over the beat, let alone the footsteps coming up behind him.
Didn’t know someone was there until the sudden flash of pain pierced his side. It caught him off guard, and for a second Nick thought he�
�d been shot, but when he looked down he saw, jutting between his ribs, a short metal dart. An empty vial.
He rounded, dizzy, expecting to see a cop, or a thug, or even an EON soldier, but there was only a single man, short and balding, wearing round glasses and a white lab coat.
That was the last thing Nick saw before his vision blurred, and his legs buckled, and everything went dark.
* * *
NICK came to in a steel room—a shipping crate, or maybe a storage locker, he couldn’t tell. His vision slid in and out of focus, his head pounding. Memory flickered back. The dart. The vial.
He tried to move, and felt the pull of restraints around his wrists and ankles, the rustle of plastic sheeting beneath his head.
Nick flexed, hardening his wrists, but it was no use. Solidity wasn’t the same as strength. The bonds had just enough give. They didn’t snap. He fought, then, thrashing against the table, until someone clicked their tongue.
“How quickly we devolve,” said a voice behind his head. “People become animals the moment they are caged.”
Nick twisted, craning until he caught the edge of a white coat.
“I apologize for the state of my lab,” said the voice. “It’s not ideal, I know, but science doesn’t bow to aesthetics.”
“Who the fuck are you?” demanded Nick, twisting desperately against the restraints.
The white coat approached the table, and became a man. Thin. Balding. With round glasses and deep-set eyes the color of slate.
“My name,” said the man, adjusting latex gloves, “is Dr. Haverty.”
Something glinted in his hand, thin and silver and sharp. A scalpel. “I promise, what’s about to happen is in the interest of progress.”
The man leaned in, bringing his blade to rest above Nick’s left eye. The point came into perfect focus, close enough to brush his lashes, while the doctor slid into a blur of white beyond.
Nick gritted his teeth, and tried to retreat, out of the scalpel’s path, but there was nowhere to go, so instead he forced all his focus into hardening his left eye. The scalpel came to rest against it with the plink of metal on ice.
The blur of the doctor’s face parted into a smile. “Fascinating.”
The scalpel vanished, and the doctor retreated from view. Nick heard the scrape and shuffle of tools, and then Haverty reappeared, holding a syringe, its contents a vivid, viscous blue.
“What do you want?” pleaded Nick as the needle disappeared from sight.
Seconds later, a pain pierced the base of his skull. Cold began to flood his limbs.
“What do I want?” echoed Haverty, as Nick shivered, shuddered, spasmed. “What all men of science want. To learn.”
III
ASCENSION
I
THREE WEEKS AGO
EON
“WHAT about you, Rush?”
Dominic blinked. He was sitting at a table on the upper level of the canteen, Holtz on one side and Bara on the other. After getting Dom the job, Holtz had stayed close, helped him fit in at EON. A cheerful blond kid—Dom couldn’t help but think of him that way, even though Holtz was a year older—with a mischievous smile and a perpetually good mood, they’d served together, two tours, before Dom stepped on an IED and found himself retired. It was nice to have a shared shift break, Bara’s presence notwithstanding.
Rios sat alone one table over, the way she always did, a book open beside her food. Every time a soldier passed too close, she shot them a look, and they retreated.
“What about me?” asked Dom.
“If you were an EO,” said Bara around a mouthful of sandwich, “what would your power be?”
It was an innocuous question—inevitable, even, given the environment. But Dom’s mouth still went dry. “I—don’t know.”
“Oh, come on,” pressed Bara. “You can’t tell me you haven’t thought of it.”
“I’d want X-ray vision,” said Holtz. “Or the ability to fly. Or the ability to transform my car into other cars whenever I get bored.”
Rios looked up from her own table. “Your mind,” she said, “truly is a marvel.”
Holtz beamed, as if it were a compliment.
“But,” she continued, “if you bothered to read the eval files, you’d know that an EO’s power is tethered to the method of their NDE and the state of their mind at the time of incident. So tell me,” she said, turning in her chair, “what kind of accident gets you the power to change the model of your car?”
Holtz made a comical frown, as if genuinely trying to puzzle it out, but Bara was clearly bored.
“What about you, Rios?” he shot back. “What would your power be?”
She returned to her book. “I’d settle for the ability to create quiet.”
Holtz let out a nervous laugh.
Dominic let his eyes slide over the group.
He hadn’t expected it to get easier—hadn’t wanted it to get easier—but it had. That was the thing, it was amazing what you could get used to, how quickly the strange became mundane, the extraordinary normal. After leaving the army, he’d missed the camaraderie, the common ground. Hell, he’d missed the uniforms, the orders, the sense of routine.
What Dominic could never get used to were EON’s cells. Or rather, the people kept inside them.
The complex’s crisp white walls had become familiar—the obscure maze reduced to clean lines of rote muscle memory—but there would never be anything comfortable about the purpose of this place. If Dom ever found himself forgetting the building’s true design, all he had to do was look at the surveillance footage, click through the images of three dozen holding cells.
Now and then, when Dom drew rounds, he had walk those cells, deliver meals, listen to the EOs beyond the fiberglass beg for him to let them out. Sometimes, when he drew eval, he had to sit across from them—the prisoners in their cells and Dominic in his camouflage as human—and ask them about their lives, their deaths, their memories, their minds. He had to pretend he didn’t understand what they meant when they talked about those final moments, the desperate thoughts that followed them down into the dark, the ones that pulled them back out.
Across the table, Holtz and Bara were still tossing around hypothetical powers, and Rios had gone back to her book, but Dominic stared down at his food, his appetite suddenly gone.
II
TWO YEARS AGO
DOMINIC’S APARTMENT
HE turned the business card over in his hands, waiting for Victor to call him back.
The black ink caught the light, illuminating the three letters.
EON.
Ten minutes later, the phone finally rang.
“Take the job.”
Dominic froze. “You’re not serious.” But he could tell by the ensuing silence that Victor was. “These are the guys that hunt us. Capture us. Kill us. And you want me to work for them?”
“You have the background, the qualifications—”
“And if they peg me as an EO?”
A short, impatient sigh. “You have the ability to step outside of time, Dominic. If you can’t avoid capture—”
“I can step out of time,” said Dominic, “but I can’t walk through walls. I can’t open locks.” Dom ran a hand through his hair. “With all due respect—”
“That saying usually precedes a no,” said Victor coolly.
“What you’re asking me to do—”
“I’m not asking.”
Victor was a hundred miles away, but still Dominic flinched at the threat. He owed Victor everything, and they both knew it.
“All right.”
Victor hung up, and Dom stared at the phone for a long time before he turned the card over, and dialed.
* * *
A black van came for him at dawn.
Dominic had been waiting on the curb, watched as a man in street clothes climbed out and opened the back doors. Dom forced himself forward. His steps were slow, a body operating against drag.
He didn’t want t
o do this. Every self-preserving nerve in his body was saying no. He didn’t know what Victor was thinking, or how many steps ahead he was thinking it. In Dom’s head, Victor went around acting like the world was one big game of chess. Tapping people and saying, “You’re a pawn, you’re a knight, you’re a rook.”
Dom chafed a little at the thought, but then, he’d learned not to ask questions in the army. To trust the orders as they came down, knowing that he couldn’t see the whole scope. War needed both kinds of people—those who played the long game and those who played the short one.
Victor was the former.
Dominic was the latter.
That didn’t make him a pawn.
It made him a good soldier.
He willed his body toward the van. But before he could climb in, the man held out a ziplock bag. “Phone, watch, anything that transmits data and isn’t hardwired to your body.”
Dominic had been careful—there were only a handful of numbers in his phone, and none of them named; Victor was boss man, Mitch was big man, Syd was tiny terror—but he still felt a nervous prickle as the bag disappeared and he was ushered into the van.
It wasn’t empty.
Four other people—three men and one woman—were already sitting inside, their backs against the windowless metal walls. Dom took a seat as the doors slammed and the van pulled away. No one spoke, but he could tell the others were military—or ex-military—by the set of their shoulders, their close-cropped or tightly wound hair, the steady blankness in their faces. One had a prosthetic arm—an elaborate piece of biotech from the elbow down—and Dom watched the man’s mechanical fingers tap absently on his leg.
There was one more pickup—a young black woman—and then the ground changed under the tires, the world outside drowned out by the engine as the van gained speed.
Dom had spent half his career in convoys like this, being transported from one base to another.
One of the men went to check his watch before remembering it had been confiscated. Dominic didn’t mind—he could wait.
