Alex pushed Riya behind him without thinking.
Ansel's head turned towards them. Only his head. The rest of his body sat slumped and loose over the steering wheel, like a puppet that someone had picked up by one string. His white eyes didn't blink.
Voice- " Don't be afraid, child. I'm not speaking to you. "
The voice was calm, almost friendly. It sounded like nobody in particular, not old, not young, not man or woman. But Alex felt the burn on his palm pulse in time with every word.
Alex- " Then speak to me. "
Voice- " I am. I have been, since you put your hand in my fire. "
The white light from the burn had climbed past his wrist now. Thin lines, like cracks in glass, glowing along the inside of his forearm. It didn't hurt much. That was what worried him.
Voice- " We were told one piece of him might wake up here. A broken piece. Most of us thought it was a story. "
The white eyes moved over his mask, his coat, and his running shoes.
Voice- " You're smaller than I expected. "
Alex- " People keep telling me that today. "
Voice- " My master will be pleased. "
Alex- " Who's your master? "
Ansel's mouth smiled. The rest of his face didn't.
Voice- " Someone who remembers what your other half did to his friends. Keep running your little races, shard. We are counting the days with you. "
That was enough. Alex had heard what he needed. The rest was just a dog barking to scare the house.
He turned his burnt hand palm up and called Hellfire into it.
Not a lot. A thread, the size of a candle flame, black at the centre and red at the edges. He let it burn on his own skin. Riya made a small sound behind him. The pain was immediate and very real. The Hellfire found the white lines in his arm and ate them, one by one, the way it ate everything, until there was only a normal burn on a normal hand, and the sun mark on his palm turned black and peeled away like old paint.
In the driver's seat, Ansel jerked as if someone had cut his string. The white drained out of his eyes. He blinked, looked around like a man waking up on the wrong train, and then fainted for real against the horn.
The horn blared.
Alex let go of the Hellfire and shook his hand. It throbbed, but it was his own pain now. No one else's.
Alex- " Riya. Go. Now. "
This time she went. He watched until Sara reached her, saw Sara grab her in a hug so hard her glasses fell off, and then turned back to the van.
He didn't have much time. He could hear sirens now, not one or two but many, coming from the main road. More than ambulances. The heavy sound of trucks.
He leaned into the back of the van. Mohan was still sitting with his hands on his knees, sweating through his white shirt.
Alex- " You're going to remember this very clearly. The gas pipe under the field burst. You came to help a sick girl and the van wouldn't start. You saw nothing else. "
He touched Mohan's forehead and fixed it in place. Then he took the memory card from Ansel's shirt pocket, the one from the kiln sensor, and a phone, and a small notebook with gold edges. He put them inside his coat.
Then he teleported back behind the scoreboard, took off the mask and disguise, and ran out into the crowd like any other scared student, just as the first army truck rolled through the main gate.
The next few hours were chaos.
Soldiers in green with rifles. Men in blue overalls who didn't look like soldiers at all, carrying cases with antennas. A police officer with a megaphone telling everyone to stay calm and stay where they were, which made everyone less calm. The football field was taped off and covered with a giant green tarpaulin before anyone could get close. All the hound bodies vanished under it.
John found him and grabbed him by both shoulders.
John- " Where were you?! "
Alex- " Washroom. "
John- " For THAT?! The whole ground opened! I saw something, bro, I swear I saw something with teeth, and there was a guy in a mask, and… "
Alex- " A guy in a mask? Seriously? Like a movie? "
John stared at him. Then he let go and rubbed his face with both hands.
John- " I need to sit down. "
Sara arrived a minute later with Marina and Riya behind her. Her knees were muddy where she had been pushed down, and there was a scrape on her elbow that she didn't seem to have noticed. She looked Alex up and down, front and back, the way a mother checks a child after a fall.
Sara- " You're okay? "
Alex- " I'm okay. You? "
Sara- " Some idiot pushed me. If I find him, I'll break his leg. "
She meant it. Marina silently held out the Glucon-D bottle to Alex, and when he shook his head, she drank half of it herself in one go and then sat down on the grass and started laughing for no reason, the shaky kind of laugh people have after they almost died.
Riya stood a little behind them. She did not look at Alex. She looked at his right hand, which he had put in his pocket, and then at the ground, and then she held Sara's sleeve and didn't let go of it.
Alex didn't look at her either. That was the deal, without either of them saying it.
Around eleven, the men in blue overalls started walking along the rows of students with small black devices, like the metal detectors at a mall entrance but thicker, with a little screen. They passed them slowly over each person, chest to knees, one by one. Nobody explained why. Students joked about it nervously. Somebody said it was for radiation and two girls started crying.
Alex watched the nearest one coming down his row.
He pulled his aura in. Tighter than at the guest house. Tighter than he had ever done on Earth, until his own heartbeat felt muffled, like it was coming from the next room.
The man passed the device over John. Nothing. Over Alex. The little screen flickered. One green bar, then two. The man frowned and tapped the side of it with his finger.
Then it went back to one bar, and stayed there.
The man shrugged, wrote something on his clipboard, and moved on to Pawan.
Alex let his breath out through his nose and didn't look back. But he had seen the clipboard. Names, and next to each name, a number. Next to his, the man had written a 2.
Everyone else in the row was a 1.
At four in the evening they finally let the students go, after taking everyone's name and phone number. Alex went home, locked the door, and only then let himself fall face down on the sofa.
His insides felt like someone had stirred them with a spoon. The Tier 6 burst, the barrier, the Hellfire on his own hand. He lay there for a long time, not moving, breathing slowly, while his body healed itself the way it always did. Slower here than in Zaroth. Much slower.
When he finally got up, he took the things from the van out of his coat and laid them on the table. The phone was locked and its battery was at three percent. The memory card he put in an old card reader and plugged into his laptop. Hours of grey night video from the kiln. Empty grass. Empty grass. Empty grass. Then, at the end of Thursday, one perfect hour of absolutely nothing, while the grass at the edges of the frame stood frozen like a photograph.
He winced. The old man had been right. That was a very bad illusion.
The notebook he didn't open yet. He was too tired to read anything with gold edges.
He opened his status without lifting his head.
[Vessel Sync: Tier 5 · Stage 3/5 · Next stage: 41%] [Tier 6 burst: cooldown 4h 38m]
Stage 3 in four days. From almost nothing. If more cracks like that one opened, and he had a feeling they would, he would climb fast. Probably faster than his body would like.
At 8 PM the news channels finally caught up. GAS PIPELINE BLAST AT CITY COLLEGE, said one. MYSTERY ANIMAL ATTACK? said another, with a blurry phone video that showed nothing but mud and people running. On the third channel, a man in an army uniform with grey hair and a moustache was standing in front of the green tarpaulin. He spoke very little and smiled even less. The caption under him said: COL. A. VARMA, SPECIAL RESPONSE CELL.
Colonel- " There is no danger to the public. The area is secure. That's all. "
Alex looked at the man's eyes on the screen for a while. They were tired, sharp eyes. A man who knew much more than he was allowed to say.
His phone buzzed.
Unknown number. A message.
Unknown- " This is Riya. Sara gave me your number. Don't be angry with her. "
Then another one.
Riya- " I won't tell anyone. About the mask. I promise. "
Then a third. A photo. It was a page from a school notebook, a rough map of the city drawn in blue pen, with the river and the main roads. There were seven small circles on it, scattered across the city. One was on the old kiln road. One was on NK College, crossed out with a big X.
The other six were still circled.
Riya- " The singing at college stopped. But these didn't. I can hear all of them right now, from my bed. "
Riya- " And one of them is getting louder very fast. "
Alex sat up and zoomed into the photo.
The circle she had marked with three lines of underline was in the middle of the city's biggest shopping mall. Acropolis.