The Loop

I didn’t like cleaning up other people’s messes. Even sticking around long enough to clean up my own messes was antithetical to my whole approach to being a Hype—to being a person, for that matter.

But here I was, defending the actions of a man for whom my feelings were altogether mixed up and tangled, because—and it was hard for me to admit it—I was part of the reason he’d taken those actions. If I wasn’t always pressuring him to be a doer instead of a bystander … Of course, there was what Lincoln had said, too, so I wasn’t solely to blame. But I wasn’t innocent.

“Something was not right with that guy,” said Brigadier. “His eyes were black from edge to edge, but even before that, before they changed … Motherfucker’s eyes were empty. There was no one behind the wheel. He could have killed me.” He paced as he spoke, his feet stomping harder than necessary, his words louder than necessary. He punched one hand into the other to accentuate his points.

“If I’d had a little more time to evaluate the situation, I’d have taken his goddamn head off. And where the hell were you?” He whirled on his partner. “You were supposed to be my lookout.”

She shrugged. “I was looking out, wasn’t I? Not my fault they snuck by. How was I supposed to know they had a teleporter?”

“It’s not really teleporting—” Ingress began.

“But you saw them near the docks, and you didn’t even go over to ask them what the hell they were doing here?” said Brigadier, ignoring Ingress completely.

Mother of Exiles just shrugged again.

They might as well have been having this conversation without the rest of us there for all they were allowing our input.

Finally, their back and forth lapsed long enough for Lincoln to interject. “Something was not right with him; you’re right about that. And his actions have to be considered in light of that.”

The rest of us looked at him inquisitively. I knew what he was talking about, but I wasn’t sure how much he was going to share with these two Hypes we barely knew. Especially in light of the fact that Cerebro had told us they were of the hit first and ask questions later sort.

“He have some sort of disease?” asked Brigadier. He spoke with a heavy Brooklyn accent, or at least what I, a Northeast Texan, thought of as a heavy Brooklyn accent.

He was a big guy, tall and muscled. He must have weighed at least two-hundred and twenty pounds. He moved with a sort of angry, jerky motion; all discrete, deliberate movements. The overall effect was intimidating enough that even I, despite my seeming physical invulnerability, was staying well out of his path.

“Call it an illness, sure,” said Linc. “Something has infected his mind. I’m sorry. I assure you we wouldn’t have brought him on such a volatile mission if we’d realized sooner.”

“We had an encounter a little over a month ago,” Jaleel said, hopping in to make it seem less like Lincoln was making excuses up on the fly. “Something happened and it’s been slowly messing him up since. It was so slow that I guess it slipped under our radar.”

Lincoln had filled us in on his theory of what exactly was going on with Adam on our way over to Brigadier and Mother of Exiles’s hideout. I kept reminding myself that, despite their somewhat aggressive attitude, the fact that they’d allowed us to come to their secret base to debrief before the police had shown up to the docks showed that they were willing to extend a significant amount of trust our way. It was the least we could do to trust them back, at least a little.

“Well, regardless of the reasons for your friend’s actions, we still need to turn him over to the police,” said Mother of Exiles, indicating Ahmed, who was seated on a comfy looking sofa nearby. The hideout was inside an abandoned fire station with all the entrances save for the one on the roof completely bricked over. Inside was spacious, comfortable, and well appointed with modern furniture.

The rough exteriors of these two Hypes disguised the fact that they had such good taste.

“Well we can’t let you turn him over just yet. He’s important,” said Cerebro. He and his team hadn’t spoken much up to this point, and I had the impression that he was fairly unimpressed with the way Adam had behaved, and the way that reflected on the rest of us. But he was devoted to the mission.

“Well you can question him, but you’re not going to get anything more out of him than we did,” said Brigadier. “His lips are sealed up tighter than a nun’s—”

“Shut the fuck up, Donny,” said his partner. I was shocked at the casualness with which she’d just outed her friend’s identity. But then, how could we be sure that his name really was Donny? We’d all learned quickly that half of being a Hype was subterfuge and theatrics.

“It’s okay,” I said, talking for the first time in what felt like forever. I hadn’t been able to articulate my defense of Adam. I wasn’t able to string words together to say much of anything where he was concerned, but I could help with this. “We don’t need any answers out of him, we just need his phone.”

“It’s locked. You don’t think we thought of looking through his phone?” said Moe, a sarcastic sneer in her voice.

“Buncha geniuses,” added her partner. “Us simpletons didn’t even know phones could hold useful information. What a fuckin’ revelation. You can’t get past his phone lock, and he’s sure not going to tell you the passcode.”

I didn’t feel quite so bad about what Adam had done to this guy at the moment. Hell, I had half a mind to give him a little taste of my power.

“It won’t be a problem,” said Shannon.

She could have cracked into his phone in minutes, with whatever advanced hacking skills she’d acquired. But even that would be an unnecessary waste of time when we had Lincoln. The fastest way to find out if he’d been in contact with Gethsemane yet would have been to get Adam to pull the information straight out of his mind. This was a close second, though.

Lincoln had already tried to access Ahmed’s phone remotely, but it seemed that he didn’t keep a SIM card in it when he wasn’t using it, and, as Lincoln had explained to us with dwindling patience, text messages weren’t stored anywhere in the cloud. Without direct access to the device, he wouldn’t be able to get anything off of it.

“Well knock yourselves out, then,” said Brigadier. “But the minute you’ve got what you need, we’re calling the police in and you guys can scram and we’ll all go our separate ways.”

“Thank you,” said Cerebro. “This has been … an odd first encounter, but my team is based in New York, too. I hope we can work together again in the future.”

Brigadier and Mother of Exiles just stared at him. They were both masked, but I like to believe that under their masks they wore identical looks of disbelief.

“… Or maybe not,” said Quintain.

Shannon fetched Ahmed’s phone off the table where Brigadier had set it down and brought it over to Lincoln. He touched it and his eyes glowed green for a split second before returning to normal. “Well, shit,” he said.

“What is it?” asked Flare.

“Dead battery. We’ll have to charge it up a bit before I can look at it.”

“Give it here,” I said, not certain that what I had in mind would actually work, and acutely aware that I might end up frying the phone in the attempt. Why did I need to do it anyway? Could I just not stand to be useless?

Reluctantly, Lincoln handed me the phone. I aligned my index finger with the charging port on the bottom, used my power to cause the LEDs on my costume to glow a vibrant, electric yellow for show, and released through my fingertip a tiny, controlled burst of electricity, hitting what I hoped were the right pins to charge the phone’s battery.

The phone’s screen lit up with a battery icon, which rapidly filled from empty to full. I stopped the output from my finger before I overcharged the battery.

Flare whistled. “Wicked trick,” he said.

My own team members looked pleased as well. Lincoln took the phone back from me. “Not bad,” he said.

Once again, his eyes lit up green, and this time they stayed that way for several minutes. When the glow faded and his eyes returned to normal, they looked around at us with a startled expression.

“Search him,” he said, his voice on the verge of panic.

“What is it—” said Brigadier.

“Just fucking search him,” said Lincoln, almost but not quite shouting.

Jaleel, Quintain, and Moe had already rushed over to Ahmed and were awkwardly standing him up and patting him down. For his part, he never blinked, never showed any sign that any of this was bothering him.

“What are they looking for?” I asked Lincoln, finding his panic catching.

“He’s been in touch with the priest alright, and not just him …”

“Is this what you’re looking for?” asked Quintain, holding up a small black box with a short plastic antenna sticking out of one corner. “This looks like the sort of thing we put on criminal’s cars to track them. With a warrant, of course …”

“A GPS tracker,” said Cerebro. “Oh, god …”

As we spoke and looked around at each other in panicky surprise, we found the hideout getting progressively darker. I looked up and saw one of the giant skylights that was responsible for all of the natural light coming in seemed to have turned completely black. And that blackness seemed to be spreading downward, toward us.

“Flare?” I asked, looking over at the boy. “Do something about that?”

“For sure,” he said, pointing his hands toward the ceiling. The darkness started to recede, to be pushed back. Then the next skylight over started turning black. Then the next one.

“Who was tracking you?” I asked Ahmed. “Who the fuck is coming for you?”

“You know what they say,” he said, finally breaking his silence. “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

There was a deafening crash as all the skylights shattered simultaneously. Two portals, looking much like Ingress’s, only a little hazier around the edges, opened at either end of the space we were in. The darkness started creeping back down from the ceiling.

“It’s not real,” said Flare. “At least not all of it. My power only works on some of it. Whatever is happening, it isn’t just light manipulation.”

But part of it was light manipulation, and since only one other person that we knew of had that power, it meant …

“Hello, friends,” said Adversary, stepping through the portal I was facing. “I thought we could all have a nice sit down and chat together. Behind him marched a man in priest’s vestments. Gethsemane, I thought.

They’re working together.

Behind the two of them, and from the other portal, marched a dozen or so unfamiliar faces, as well as duplicates of themselves. We’d been given a quick rundown on Gethsemane’s power, at least as far as our New York friends understood it, so I know that it was impossible to know how much of what I was seeing was real. It all felt real enough, though.

“I see you’ve been recruiting,” said Cerebro, his voice as confident as I’d ever heard it. “And here I thought the number of faithful Catholics was on the decline. My abuela would be so happy to see this uptick.

I saw Harper’s face and body shift, saw her sneak around and into the group that was converging on us from all sides.

“This doesn’t have to get ugly,” said the priest. “This lost soul—” he indicated Adversary “—came to find me and kill me, and I changed his mind. I showed him the light. I can do the same for you.”

Ahmed had stood up and was joining his fellows. The Soldiers of Calamity. I wished Adam was here; he remembered these fuckers. But the ones he remembered hadn’t had Adversary as a recruit. That changed things. I wondered what all this was like for him, reliving a past that was just a little different than the way he remembered it, that was getting farther off the course that seemed familiar to him every day. I worried about what Lincoln had said about him. I hoped he was back home, relaxing, waiting for us to come back and figure things out together. I hoped he was staying safe and out of trouble.

But I didn’t have long to dwell on Adam’s problems, nor his safety, nor his power. Gethsemane was starting to use his power, and although I knew the half dozen images of my dead sister that were now in the crowd surrounding us weren’t real, it didn’t help much.

I felt an unbearable sadness, and I turned it into rage. I wasn’t sure if the others were seeing the same things as me, and I didn’t really care.

“You motherfucker,” I said.

I launched myself, arm extended, straight at the closest Gethsemane—there were at least ten of him now—and blasted outward with a big hit of heat and light.

Around me, the others were launching their own attacks. Our more vulnerable members, Lincoln and Jaleel, stayed in the middle of the room, relying on us to protect them. I saw, in my peripheral vision, Jaleel’s eyes start to glow. I hoped his power would find us a way out of this.

As the apparitional priest I’d attacked crumbled into nothing in my grasp, and the others started landing blows against opponents both real and imagined, I understood that Gethsemane had been wrong; it was always going to get ugly.