The breach opened over a loading dock.
Cisco had picked it the night before — pulled up a vibe of Earth-2 industrial yards three nights running until he found one that was both empty at four in the morning local time and laid out the way I'd asked him to lay it out. Open lines of sight at the exit. A rail spur on the east side. A chain-link fence we could re-cross if the breach didn't reopen on schedule.
We came through onto wet concrete.
The air smelled like wet concrete on Earth-1 too. That was the disorienting part — the way half the things over here weren't different at all, and you'd start to forget where you were, and then the streetlamp at the corner would have a face on the side of it that nobody on Earth-1 had ever cast in iron and you'd remember.
Cisco straightened his hood.
"You know the rules."
"I know the rules."
"Forty-five minutes. We meet back here. You don't go past the fence, I don't go past the office building. We do not lose line of sight on each other for more than fifteen minutes."
"Copy."
"And the watcher thing —"
"If I feel it, I come back to this dock at a walk. I don't run. I don't make him think we're scared."
"Good." He chewed the inside of his cheek. "I hate this."
"I know you do."
"I really hate this."
"I know."
He went left. I went right.
I gave him sixty seconds before I broke the rule.
---
The warehouse I'd flagged from last month's intelligence was three blocks south.
I'd spent the four weeks between trips reading every line of every Earth-2 newspaper Cisco had vibed for me and run through the printer at his station. Local crime blotter. Police press releases that got picked up in the trade weeklies. The Hub City paper had a recurring column called Strange & Stranger that listed unsolved meta incidents of the previous fortnight, and a pyrokinetic — sorry, flame-fellow, the columnist's preferred term — had been moving uncategorized goods through this exact industrial zone for three months.
Not the pyrokinetic. He was too watched.
The man who worked for him.
The third name on the list. A mirror specialist. Nobody on either Earth had a clean catalog for his power. He was named in the column as the assistant of unusual ability and described, twice, as moving cargo through reflective surfaces.
That was a power I wanted.
I phased through the warehouse's side door at minute three.
He was sitting at a card table playing solitaire under a single bulb.
Mid-fifties. Heavy-set. A shaving cut on the underside of his jaw that had bled into his shirt collar and dried. He hadn't shaved cleanly in days. He was a tired man playing a tired game in a tired room, and when he heard the side door close he didn't even look up.
"You're early," he said. Voice was a bored growl. "I told the kid four-thirty."
I stayed in the shadow of the stacked crates near the door.
"Wrong kid," I said.
His head came up.
His hand went to a small panel at the edge of the table — and the warehouse's metal-sided wall, ten feet to my left, opened. Not as a door. As a mirror. A flat plane of silvered air that wasn't there a second ago. He moved for it.
I phased through the column of crates between us and was on him before his foot hit the second step.
He twisted. The mirror chased him — a flat plane sliding around to his other side — and he tried to step into it.
I caught his wrist.
He looked at me with a kind of professional disappointment. Reached his free hand toward his own reflection on the silver. The mirror flickered.
I put my palm on his sternum.
[Reflection Manipulation — Earth-2 variant.]
[Signature: Compatible with native storage. Dimensional variance bonus available.]
[Extraction proceeding.]
The man's pupils blew wide. The mirror behind him came apart like a soap bubble. He sagged.
I held him long enough not to drop him — set him down on the concrete with one of his own jacket sleeves bunched under his head — and stepped back.
[Reflection Manipulation — 70% extracted. Dimensional variant: +15% potency. +1,400 PP.]
The pressure behind my sternum where the System held the new thing felt different. Heavier. Like a power that had been built in a different room with different tools.
I checked his pulse. Strong.
Took the cards he'd been playing, palmed the king of spades, set the rest neatly back on the table.
Out the side door. Three blocks north. Forty minutes after I'd left Cisco I was leaning against the loading dock fence with my hands in my pockets like I'd been there fifteen minutes.
Cisco came back at minute forty-two.
He had a small piece of brass tubing in his hand and his eyes were lit up.
"The gauges on this Earth, man, you would not believe the gauges, the entire Bourdon tube design is —"
"Did you find anything else?"
"I found an entire engineering aesthetic. They went from steam to electric without going through digital the same way. Their wiring looks like a pipe organ."
"Anything human?"
"No people. Quiet building. Like you said."
"Good."
He looked at me. Tilted his head a fraction.
"What did you get?"
"Walked the rail spur. Watched the road. Cataloged signatures within range. Forty-three this time, not forty-seven, which is interesting on its own — either the local meta population is mobile or my count was off last month."
"Huh."
"Nothing alarming."
He held my look another beat.
He didn't push.
I noted, again, that the not-pushing wasn't the same as not-noticing.
We walked to the spot where he'd marked the breach return.
Cisco's hands came up. Blue light. The wall of the dock folded inward.
I looked at my watch as we stepped through. We'd been on Earth-2 for fifty-one minutes.
---
We re-emerged in the breach room. The lights were on the way we'd left them.
Caitlin was waiting on the bench by the door with a thermos of coffee and a clipboard and a pen, and she handed Cisco the coffee and put the pen in his hand and said "Vitals, intake form, you know the drill, sit," and Cisco sat without arguing and started ticking boxes.
Caitlin looked at me.
"You okay?"
"Yes."
"Dimensional sickness, headache, vertigo, anything?"
"No."
"Off the form?"
"Slight flutter in the inner ear when I came back through. Settling now."
She made a note.
"Eat in the next two hours."
"Will do."
I went to my desk in the cortex.
Sat down. Opened a blank work file I had no plans to fill out.
[Storage at maximum: 12/12.]
[New extraction logged. Storage overflow imminent.]
[Recommendation: Fusion or expansion required before next acquisition.]
I stared at the screen.
Twelve slots. All full. The pressure of the new Earth-2 power sitting in the back of my mind like a bag I'd tried to fit one more brick into.
I closed the work file.
Pulled my jacket off the back of the chair.
"Cait," I said. "I'm taking the next two days. Burned out. Sleep, food, no calls if you can help it."
She didn't look up from Cisco's clipboard.
"Noted."
I left.
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