My alarm rang too early, if I could call it ringing. My implant woke me by ending my sleep cycle and bringing me to consciousness the way my body would have if I’d gotten a full night’s sleep and woke as dawn’s first light entered the room.

That wasn’t going to happen here. We were in a bunker with no windows and lots of concrete. The closest the room came to color was the dark red carpet in the section of the main room where we held meetings, and Control followed our suits’ feeds.

Meanwhile, the brief ring I heard only existed in my brain. The implant must have searched for a cue to signal that this was my intended wake-up call as opposed to a midnight bathroom break.

Though I couldn’t call it waking naturally because there was nothing natural about it, I couldn’t deny that I felt refreshed. I decided to leave my mixed feelings about the implant’s integration with my nervous system for later.

I sat up, finding that everyone else was pushing themselves into a sitting position as well. Had Travis been alive, he’d probably have been shouting at us to get moving. Well, maybe the high school version of Travis would have. Like all of us, he’d learned more about motivating people since then.

Cassie spoke over the shuffling of bodies in the room. “Is everybody up? We have 30 minutes before we have to leave. There are donuts, coffee, and juice in the hangar next to the jet.”

Everyone left the room. We’d opened up the fallout shelter’s bathroom facilities as well, something we should have done years ago, but the League kept it locked. Kayla and Tara may have been the first people to go down there since the 1980s or 90s, when the Cold War ended and Grandpa worried less about nuclear holocaust.

It didn’t take long for us to get ready and assemble in the hangar, standing next to the jet and two egg-shaped Defenders’ podjets that Alex must have grabbed for the mission. All of them fit with ease in the long, concrete gray room despite all of the tools, repair materials, and the presence of other vehicles—Cassie’s motorcycle, the Wolfmobile, and motorcycle/transforming armor that I’d used during my internship in Detroit.

Everyone arrived in time for donuts, and that included Tiger. The dog wore the suit I’d designed for him, gray and with the Heroes’ League logo on his chest.

As everyone grabbed donuts, I turned to Jaclyn, asking, “He’s coming?”

Jaclyn glanced over at him as he paced next to the jet. “I didn’t ask him to. He was here, dressed, and waiting when I got up here.”

Marcus turned away from a conversation he appeared to be having with Sydney to ask, “He didn’t get any of the donuts, did he?”

“That was my first thought, too, but he didn’t. He was standing in front of the door to the jet and scratched it when I walked up.” Jaclyn shook her head. “Look, I don’t like the idea of bringing him either, but he has armor and we’ve trained him to fight alongside us. Anyway, he wants to go, and I don’t think we’re going to keep him away. I think he’d figure out a way to go anyway.”

I couldn’t put it past him. Back in the world where we found him, dogs like him ran in packs and hunted even more massive creatures. The Abominators had created the species and dumped them there. It was anybody’s guess what they intended to do with it.

Either way, he was quick, smart, and deadly even without armor. For that matter, he was smart enough to use my armor and adjust settings in the HUD with his tongue and the mouthguard interface. Maybe I should have given him an implant.

We discussed whether to bring him a little longer, but in the end, we decided to.

Less than ten minutes later, we were in the jet, flying with ten people and a massive dog in the cabin.

Marcus sat at the weapons console while I flew.

Haley sat in the row behind me, looking out of the window even though I knew she didn’t need to. Now that she and everyone else had implants, they could access the jet’s sensors and even controls if I permitted them.

As for myself, I could have experienced the world around me as if I were the jet flying upward through the dark, star-filled November sky. I chose to experience it with normal senses, which meant sitting in the cockpit in my armor with the League seated behind me. Checking real screens and readouts wasn’t a bad thing. It didn’t hurt that I could know information like the speed or altitude simply by thinking about it, though.

Haley leaned forward, watching as we flew south, a hint of sunlight in the east, a curved sliver of the dawn’s light outlining the world’s shape.

She asked, “Do you ever get used to this? The implant keeps on labeling things and offering more information if I want it.”

“Kinda,” I said, “you get to the point where you can sip at the stream instead of taking it all in at once.”

She nodded, “And the information’s weird. It’s not for people who live here. When the sensors showed a passenger jet, it explained how primitive species used less flexible technology than anti-gravity for mass transit. Then it explained how a jet engine worked. If that weren’t enough, it also provides commentary from the Abominator’s perspective.”

“That would be interesting,” I said. Our Xiniti-created implants included information on the Abominators, but nothing else.

“Not really,” she said. “The Xiniti overlay labels it ‘misleading’ and ‘optional.’ It should have labeled them ‘repetitive.’The Abominators only saw us as tools they could modify. It’s all genetic analysis, and it’s thousands of years old.”

She frowned, “It knows the weapons, though, and it approves.”

She pointed to a new blue-green pistol at her belt. It wasn’t the same as Cassie’s gun. Cassie’s was special and we knew it, if only because it told us so. Still, the new guns could have come from the same designer.

Haley stared into the darkness ahead of us, cities glowing on the ground below. “If there’s any time to go for broke, it’s now,” she said, “but I hope we’re doing the right thing.”

Both Hal and my implant assured me the risk of being warped by Abominator tech was small and worth the risk, but it still hung out in my imagination.