Prentkos eyed Ray, “And what are we going to do if, upon seeing you, Magnus notices that you’re with the people he told you to kill and decides to end our lives? I don’t know all of the people down there, but the ones I do recognize are far from weak.”
“Well,” Ray said, “that just means that I’ll have to be extremely persuasive. Look, we’re not going to be able to fight our way in or out, and this isn’t what I’d call a stealthy group.” Continue reading Singularity: Part 9
Prentkos raised an eyebrow, “What is this fixation on kidneys?”
Taking my eyes off the tower, I replied, “I’ve been told they’re an efficient way to kill people.”
Ray nodded. “Unless your skin’s too tough to get through, you’ll bleed out pretty quickly to a well placed knife wound. It’s efficient and it works about as well on supers as the rest of us. Even most regenerators take time to come back from that and you can do a lot in that time.” Continue reading Singularity: Part 8
Ray didn’t need to shout at first. He’d pointed the tower out. All I had to do was aim toward it and dodge the perspective-wrenching sections of building that jutted out, made a twist, and seemed to be either on the ground or in the sky or, more often than not, both at once.
I flew toward a distant walkway only to find out that it was close and below me, flew under a bridge over a lake that was also a walkway over a castle, and found myself at the foot of the tower. Continue reading Singularity: Part 7
“Technically,” I added, “it’s less his than Colette’s or whatever Dominator he’s using, but he’s behind it.”
Ray dropped his hands to his sides, but continued to take slow breaths. “Magnus tried to teach me something like that. He powered me up somehow and said that learning how to control energy would help.”
He turned away from me, eyes flicking around, probably to check for threats. “You said it can help me survive. What do the two of you know that I don’t?”
“The three of us,” Prentkos said. Continue reading Singularity: Part 6
I couldn’t argue with him, but if I had to bet what Ray’s orders were, I’d have bet that they were to kill or delay us. That meant that we needed to take him down.
The problem would be coordinating with Prentkos. If Ray had Izzy’s hearing, he’d hear everything and Prentkos didn’t have a League communicator.
Then another thought struck me. What if absorbing energy worked on Ray the same way it worked on Prentkos? Spark had said that everyone Magnus brought through here was descended strongly enough from Artificers that they could develop into them given time.
If I taught Ray how to remove Magnus’ commands, I might be able to trust him to a degree. Continue reading Singularity: Part 5
Ray didn’t land close to us. He gave himself 20 feet—which meant that that was as much as he thought he needed. It had been years since he’d died, but I still remembered him.
As the leader of the Executioners, he’d excelled in planning on how to take down superheroes and their families—families first to increase the stress and emotional pain.
He hadn’t, as I remembered it, been quite so effective when he’d gained powers himself. It’s one thing to carry out a plan you’ve trained for and still another to copy someone else’s powers and use them as effectively as the original person when you haven’t trained to use them.
I wondered when this version of him was from and whose powers he’d copied. My first guess would have been Power Burst, but that meant we’d be fighting Izzy for all practical purposes. Continue reading Singularity: Part 4
A human shape appeared between me and the light, stepping into it and disappearing. I followed, noting that the collapse behind me was definitely getting closer. It was maybe 50 feet behind me now.
I gave the rockets full power, feeling the speed increase and like I’d left my stomach behind. The collapse followed, growing wider, if that were possible. At first, it had only seemed like a tunnel was caving in, but after I accelerated, I saw chunks of something falling, hitting the ground(?), shattering, or bounding forward in my direction.
I couldn’t guess what substance it was. Time? Bits of pocket dimensions? Stars? Continue reading Singularity: Part 3
It would be tempting to imagine that I was pushing a lever, but this wasn’t mechanical. As I touched it, I knew what I was really doing. I was providing power to open a portal, while simultaneously drawing power to replenish my strength from the life support systems, and equalizing pressure, momentum, temperature, and other factors through subsystems in the device.
Why? Because a pressure difference could shoot you through a portal (or backwards from it). Similarly, if the different sides of the portal were traveling at different speeds or directions, it would be like jumping on or off a moving car.
The crazy thing was that I could handle all of it at once. Kee had taught me how, something that I knew was no coincidence. Continue reading Singularity: Part 2
“Great,” I said. “How? Do you have a password or cheat code or something?”
Lee laughed. “Cheat code? Are you thinking the test Kee set up works like a video game? There are parts that might, I suppose, but no. This is real. I can tell you which parts of the control system you need to manipulate to get through the test.”
“That is kind of a like a video game,” I said. “You go to Reddit and there’s always someone who got stuck at the same point and a bunch of answers on how to get past it. Some of them even work.” Continue reading Singularity: Part 1
“You know what I showed you? If you can keep on doing it, from what they said, you can wipe yourself clean of a dominator’s commands. Also, I’ve got a device that can block Dominators’ commands—up to a point. If you’re facing more than ten or maybe five, I’d run away and throw rocks at them from a distance.”
He began to laugh. “Rocks? I think I expected something more complicated from an inventor.”
I shrugged, “If it works, it works.”
Then I reached out with what might be best imagined as a phantom limb and opened a portal to bring him to me. Continue reading The Core: Part 12