“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 to 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.