by Drew Hayes
“Guess Tori is different than you,” Morgana said. “But I wasn’t talking about her needing the competition. A bunch of new metas, all at the apprentice level... it might be good to have someone in the group with a head start. Should do a great job of pissing off the rookies and inspiring them to catch up to Tori.”
Wade tilted his head slightly as he mulled over the idea. He unfolded his hands and reopened his laptop, typing away while still keeping his gaze on Morgana. After several seconds of nothing but the clacking of keys filling the air, he finally finished thinking and began to speak.
“You raise valid points, Lynn. Tori could be very useful in getting the new recruits on their feet. Her somewhat abrasive personality would go far in making sure they wanted to surpass her, if nothing else. However, I don’t think we would need to go so far as to separate her from her apprenticeship to Ivan in the process.”
“Are you saying we should have one apprentice under a guild councilor and the rest lumped together in a class? I don’t think that’s going to work quite as well. They won’t see Tori as a true peer, so it won’t light as much of a fire under them when she pulls ahead.” Morgana resisted the urge to put her hands on her hips or show defensive body language. Wade was a reasonable man, the most reasonable she’d ever known, and he was willing to discuss something endlessly so long as he believed the other party hadn’t dug in and shut down.
“It may be less effective; however, I think it’s the best solution all around for several reasons,” Wade said. “Firstly, you forget how many of the guild members still look to Ivan as a legend and leader. Circumstances are irrelevant; the mere fact that he took an apprentice has reignited an interest in many of our members to do the same. I predict most, if not all, of whatever recruits we can scrounge from the confluence will be under a guild teacher before the weekend is over. Thus, they will be in the same situation as Tori, if with somewhat less infamous teachers.”
Morgana nodded her head slowly; Wade was right about how Ivan was viewed. Outside of Balaam and the others who believed no one should be allowed to retire, Ivan was still treated with as much respect and deference as Wade himself. She’d also considered the possibility that he might reignite the trend of taking on apprentices, but she hadn’t expected Wade to be so on board with the idea.
“Secondly, I’m hesitant to put any sort of plan in motion until I see what the components before us are. We may indeed get a large amount of recruits from the confluence; however, we could also come up empty-handed or with very few. It’s certainly happened before. There’s no sense in planning for a situation we don’t know is even going to occur. The third reason I don’t want to separate them is the most important, though.”
Wade paused for a moment, typing a few more things on his computer, and then slightly lowered the screen.
“Right now, Tori’s association with Ivan is both her greatest threat and protection. When we voted before, she was a nameless recruit that no one had interest in. So long as she is in her apprenticeship, only he has the right to kill her. Now that I’ve aligned her with Ivan, Balaam and his faction would vote to have her removed the minute she was up for discussion. The vote last time was too close—only apathy kept her alive, a protection she no longer possesses.”
“I get it,” Morgana said. “Tori Rivas either finishes her apprenticeship under Ivan, or she won’t live to have any other chance.”
Chapter 13
Thunder rattled the house although no sounds of rain joined it. The only accompaniment, besides the continuous blasts of lightning, was the barking of the neighborhood dogs, yelping enthusiastically with every boom of sound. Ivan left the kitchen with a glass of sweet tea and a can of beer, the latter of which he set down before Tori.
“Is it okay for us to just be eating dinner like this?” Tori accepted the drink and eyed her plate of pasta hungrily, but at the same time, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. “I mean, with shit about to go down at any given minute and all?”
“A confluence is a gathering of forces,” Ivan reminded her. “This strange storm front may well be one of them, but on its own, it poses no more danger than any other sky full of clouds. Even once the confluence starts, it’s not as though a buzzer will sound and chaos will descend upon the city. Only those aware of what’s happening and the few caught up in the side effects will ever realize what has transpired.”
Tori popped open her beer and took a sip. It was still cold, despite the tension in her gut about all the impending unknowns. Ivan’s lessons on control were definitely taking; Tori couldn’t remember the last time she drank something while nervous and didn’t accidently heat it up.
“That seems kind of far-fetched. You all made it sound like powers would just be raining from the sky.” Tori got the words out before another clap of thunder drowned her out, but only barely.
“Let me put it this way: before you joined the guild, you had never heard of a confluence. You’d never even suspected such things existed, because the only aftermath is an influx of new metas, which both we and the capes manage carefully. So, if someone as smart as you never put together that metas were often created en masse, why would you suspect mundane minds to be capable of piecing it together?”
“Using my own ego against me, that’s a low blow.” Tori speared a large bite of pasta and promptly wolfed it down before continuing. “I did notice the grouping, though; most people do. We just associate it with the big events that create lots of metas. Stuff like the discovery of that magical city beneath Indianapolis, the alien ship that blew apart and scattered debris across Nevada, and, of course, the original explosions at Wilshire Applied Technologies back in the forties. All were big events that saw the rise of people with new powers, and I’m guessing all occurred during confluences.”
“Some, but possibly not all,” Ivan said. “New metas spring up outside of confluences all the time. This is just when we see a wide range created at once.”
“That’s good.” Tori stabbed at her food with a bit more gusto this time then quickly reeled in the pasta violence. It was almost a subtle enough change for Ivan to miss it. “I’d hate to think people were on watch every time a chemical lab blew up or an experiment went awry but chose to do nothing because they wanted more metas in the world.”
“You sat in on the council meeting where we made plans to deal with the impending confluence. As of right now, you see exactly how much information we have to work with,” Ivan told her. “Do you feel as though we can do much to alter however this will play out?”
“Nope. Feels like we’re going to end up being caught flat-footed, dicks in our hands, and have to scramble to do what little damage control we might manage.”
“That’s a crude and somewhat inaccurate analog—”
Ivan was interrupted by another clap of thunder, this one so powerful that his dishes rattled across the table. From outside, he and Tori both saw a bolt of what appeared to be purple lightning strike the street, lingering longer than any bolt of true electricity would. Before the thunder’s echoes had fully faded, they were both out the door, spilling out into the street along with the rest of the neighborhood.
The asphalt was warped and melted where it had been struck, and Ivan held his breath as he waited for some manner of animated road monster to pull itself into being. After a few heartbeats, it seemed that the lightning hadn’t been enhanced, or at least wasn’t that powerful. Ivan let the air slowly slip from his lungs. Tori tapped him on the shoulder, softly at first, but with increasing fervor until he finally followed her gaze skyward.
Overhead, the dark clouds of the impending storm were colliding with strangely-colored smoke from one of the corporate laboratories outside the bounds of Ridge City. Multi-colored veins crept through the clouds, arching in irregular patterns as they wove through dark swells of rain and lightning.
Ivan could feel threads of magic up there, weaving about amid the warping storm. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but it didn’t mat
ter. Understanding the cause was a job for after the dust had settled. From the growing chatter among his neighbors, it seemed this wouldn’t be one of the low-key confluences. People knew something was up, and that would put them on edge.
“We should get inside,” Ivan announced, as much to the people around him as to Tori, who he took lightly by the shoulder. “Whatever that stuff is doing, the strike was too close for us to be out here in a lightning storm.”
The chatter seemed to swell with consensus, and to his relief, Ivan saw many of his neighbors follow his lead and head back into their homes. Right now, the guild members on standby would be getting prepped; he and Tori weren’t due for a shift until the following night. That didn’t mean he might not be needed before then, though. Until Ivan was called in, the best he could do was encourage his neighbors to stay safe and make sure he had privacy to work.
Ivan slammed and locked the door behind him as another clap of thunder tore through the sky, followed by the soft patter of raindrops finally slapping against his roof.
Just like that, the storm was upon them.
* * *
She flung open the attic door and was nearly pushed back by the wind screeching through what had been a window only moments before. The rain soaked her clothes as she struggled to find something to block the hole with. The lightning had struck through a window, of all things, and as another bolt flashed outside, a glimmer of light among the boxes it had struck and charred caught her eye.
Kicking aside the smoky remains and debris, she uncovered a strange pendant. It was silver, with runes etched across it and some sort of creature in the center. One of her great-grandmother’s “treasures,” no doubt. The woman could have been on that hoarding show if it had been around when she was alive. There was always someone in the family who said they were going to tackle the boxes in the attic and see if she had left behind anything valuable, another bit of real worth aside from what was already lost, yet somehow it never got done.
The wind and rain seemed less important the longer she stared at the pendant. Everything around it was burned or destroyed, but this was completely unharmed. Her delicate fingers brushed against the surface, and she almost drew away in surprise at how warm the silver object was. In fact, she tried to pull back, but her body wouldn’t listen. Her hand wrapped around the pendant, lifting it reverently from the ground as water continued to pelt her. It had gone from warm to hot in the span of seconds, and as she stared at the curious bobble, she saw a flicker of movement.
That creature in the center had flinched, moving its long scaly head so that silver eyes were staring into her own. Wings stretched from its back and a spiny tail whipped about from behind. The burning of the metal had gone from hot to unbearable, yet she could have no more let go than she could have torn off her own hand.
A clap of thunder drowned out her first scream, but not any of those that followed.
* * *
He staggered through the street, trying to let out a yell of pain and instead releasing only a high-pitched roar. The windows of nearby cars cracked at the sound, but he paid them no attention. The pain in his body, the shifting of his bones and the growing of mass, it was all too much to bear. Despite lobbying against gun ownership for most of his adult life, he’d happily have put one in his mouth at that moment if it would have made the pain stop.
A crunching sound reached his ears and he realized he’d hip-checked a car, the feeling so minor that it hadn’t even registered. The car, on the other hand, had a serious dent and looked like it had been shoved away from the curb. A low moan escaped his lips, and he pushed onward.
Overhead, he could see streaks in the air, along with a strange cloud that was sending out oddly-colored lightning bolts. Probably metas—or, rather, other metas. That thought was bitter as it scorched across his brain, but there was no denying what was right in front of him. Whatever was in that drug he’d taken, it was clearly not FDA approved. All this because of his damn blown-out knee. Now he not only wasn’t going to play football again, he’d be lucky if they let him back in his college.
“You look like hell,” said a man hovering a few feet in the air. He was golden in hair, clothing, and the glow that emanated from him. Landing gently on the drenched sidewalk, the man approached, showing no concern for the monstrosity facing him.
“Ap-ol-lo.” Words didn’t want to form with this strange new tongue, but he forced them out anyway. This was Apollo, one of the greatest champions in the world. If anyone knew what was happening, could help him, it was Apollo.
“That’s right, I’m the great Apollo. And you seem like you could use a hand.”
* * *
People were crawling away from the debris slowly but steadily. She’d been farther back than most of them, never much of a fan of poetry readings. Her job was just to pour the coffee while customers piled up on the couches and listened to people read. No one had expected that weird guy’s book to start glowing, for him to read in a strange, twisted language that seemed to carve its way through her ears. She still wasn’t sure if it was the lightning or him that had created the explosion, but from the remains of his cheap boots still smoking on the stage, she was betting on the latter.
The weird flash, though, and that wave that had burst forth from him... those were beyond insane. She shook her head, refusing to let herself get distracted, not while crawling through a half-destroyed coffee shop with a torrential rainstorm spewing down around them. Pushing forward, she stumbled to her feet and glanced in what remained of the rear wall’s mirror.
Soot covered her face and stained her short white-blonde hair, but she didn’t see any serious injuries. She looked a fright, but that was nothing compared to what some were dealing with. Besides, with a good shower and a little time at the hospital, she might just be able to walk out of this.
“I’ll be fine,” she muttered to herself, turning away to look at the rest of the people still trapped. “Fit, fine, and right as rain.”
The words had barely left her mouth when the storm moved inside, relentless drops pelting her and the others as though they were lying on the ground outside. It washed over her, sending her stumbling back to trip over one of the cushioned chairs. She huddled behind it, shutting her eyes tightly and praying that this night would end soon.
“Chin up,” she reminded herself. “You can do this; it’s always darkest before the dawn.”
Screeches filled the air as the last of the emergency lights cut out, leaving everyone stranded in inky black darkness.
* * *
Nexus stood on top of the Quincy Hotel, seemingly unaware of the raindrops soaking his coat and the thin body beneath it. At this altitude, he was technically at risk for being struck by lightning, but that didn’t worry him. On the rare occasions it happened, he’d always made arrangements to be elsewhere just before impact. Besides, this was one of his favorite events. He tried to get a good seat each time it happened.
Not that it always did, of course. The multiverse was sprawling, technically infinite, though after a certain point, the worlds were so far removed from his that they were essentially alien and therefore uninteresting. Still, in the core worlds he visited, this storm almost always happened. The causes changed, and with them the effects, but in some form or fashion, this storm would soak Ridge City.
Though there was ample entertainment throughout the night, the real fun would begin once the sidewalks dried and the sun hung overhead. So many new people with gifts previously unseen. So many new possibilities for how they would be used and eventually use others. Nexus had seen it play out in countless worlds already, and there were countless more to witness, but this was a show he was especially excited about.
After all, this world had not one but two wholly unique people in it, unseen anywhere else in the multiverse. Nexus was quite anxious to see how they would play these new cards being dealt to them. Perhaps good would triumph; more likely it would be evil, but no matter how things went, he would be entertained.
And when someone was in a situation like his, that was the component they cared the most about.
* * *
“Aaaaaand done!” Donald’s voice rang through his apartment, partially drowned out by the sound of pounding rain, but he made the announcement nonetheless. Despite the rain, he could hear the soft hum of power as his new system came fully online for the first time. It hadn’t been an easy endeavor; half the parts he used were either custom or personally modified to make them function as needed. But now, at long last, Donald was finally going to see the fruits of his efforts.
All three screens flickered to life as he sank into his worn but sturdy chair. Behind him, a blue light glowed from his system’s massive new power source, casting azure light on the rows of electronics lined up on either side of him. Additional monitors rested directly to his left and right. Although these hadn’t strictly been necessary, he still felt it created a more immersive environment. His hands wove around the custom controllers set up on the armrests of his chair, and before his eyes came the most beautiful sight he’d beheld to that point: the Legacy World loading screen, rendered so crisp and clear Donald felt like he could practically reach through the screen and take hold of his character.
“I am sooooo calling in sick tomorrow.” He hoped Tori wouldn’t rat him out when he said he had a stomach bug, but either way, there was zero chance Donald could tear himself away from this new toy so soon. Besides, Tori seemed solid; he doubted she’d tattle.
The hum of his electronics grew stronger as the claps of thunder seemed to come faster and faster. Ordinarily, he would have shut everything down and pulled the cord from the walls, but Donald hadn’t spent all that cash on a power management system to fear something as weak as surges. According to the specs on what he’d bought, it could, and had, been used to regulate entire sections of an old Russian nuclear test site. He couldn’t imagine why they’d been willing to let it go so cheaply, and Donald wasn’t going to pry. He had the equipment, the tech, and now, finally, the power. It was time to reach a whole new level.
