Chapter Text
The night that Grace first meets Simon, he’s handcuffed in the back of a military van, trying not to have a panic attack for the fifth time in three days.
“When you’re through into the anomaly radius, you’re going to be on your own,” Ava is saying, strapped into the bench opposite him, jostling with the movement of the truck. Her light-brown hair looks almost white in the harsh LED light, scraped into a plait behind her, stray tufts sticking out where they’re not quite long enough to be tamed. “You’ve got the map. It was up-to-date before the Line, so it should be current, but who knows what’s changed out there.”
Grace swallows, finding it hard to look at her. There’s a scar on her face now – right across her left eye, which is milky and blind. She didn’t have that before. He’s pretty sure he’d remember that.
But a lot can happen whilst you’re drugged into an induced coma for ten months.
He tries to focus his gaze on something other than her face – but her tactical vest, the stun-gun laid on her lap, and the rest of the soldiers sat in the truck with them don’t exactly help his anxiety. Even the presence of Carl, sat directly on his right, does nothing to calm him down. If anything, the dim reminder of their friendship before everything turned on its head only makes this whole thing feel so much worse.
In fact, the only comfort he has at all is curled up at his feet, five spider-like limbs tucked beneath him like he’s sleeping. Rocky doesn’t need to sleep – he’s a robot, after all. But with the way he’s slumped, lights flickering in standby mode, Grace can almost pretend that he’s catching a few zees before they head out into the unknown.
The mere thought of what he’s being forced to do makes him feel so sick he has to close his eyes.
“There’s a bag packed with supplies – nothing too heavy, since you’ll be on foot,” Ava continues, apparently unphased by his fear, which must be screamingly obvious to everyone watching. “If you need more, we’ve set up a basecamp just outside the radius. Radio contact will be patchy once you’re in there, and the closer you get to the Line, the worse it’ll get. We’ll be able to monitor you the whole time through your biochip, but that’s it. So, it’s in your best interest to get as close as you can, get the data, and then come back out. We’ll work out the next move from there. Any questions?”
“Yeah,” Grace manages, hating how his voice sounds – reedy and thin, like he’s speaking through someone’s hands around his throat. He opens his eyes looking up just enough that he can see Ava’s knees knock together as the truck goes down a pothole. “What happens if I just – go up to the radius and then just. Don’t go in. What do we all do then?”
Ava’s hands tighten on the stun-gun.
“I don’t think either of us want to find that out, Dr Grace,” Ava says. The flicker of regret in her voice takes a little of the edge off the open threat, but not much.
He tries to breathe in through the tightness in his chest. A familiar pressure builds up inside him with his rising panic, and beside him, Rocky shifts, beeping quietly to himself. Grace coils his hands into fists, desperately pushing back against the rising force that he can barely control – but then, suddenly, he doesn’t need to. He feels the barrier of Rocky’s dampening field like it’s a physical thing, taking the bite out of the bristling power inside him – and he can’t help the sigh that slips out between his lips, desperately relieved despite everything.
He doesn’t want this. He doesn’t want any of this.
He just wants to go back to a year and a half ago, before all of this happened, and tell Stratt he wants nothing to do with any of it.
But then, he thinks, she probably would have found out and come for him anyway.
“Rein it in,” Carl says, in that same old friendly tone. Grace winces, shaking his head, trying to get rid of the memory of the other man standing over him as soldiers shoved him down against a concrete floor, sedatives already raging through his system.
“Grace okay, question?” Rocky asks, quiet.
Ava stares at him, wary, hand still on the gun that he knows she doesn’t want to use on him, but will if she has to.
“Yeah,” he manages to lie. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
For a few long minutes, no one says anything. For his part, Grace just sits there, trying to keep himself calm and wishing desperately for a window, so at least he could see the world outside. He barely even knows what time of day it is. It’s been a few weeks since he woke up in an abandoned military bunker in the middle of nowhere, but his head is still a bit scrambled. He supposes the days upon days of almost complete isolation followed by being aggressively coerced into doing something he desperately doesn’t want to do hasn’t exactly helped him much.
Panic is a constant companion, these days – and for him in particular, that’s a very, very dangerous thing.
Because there is a way that he could stop this. If he weren’t such a coward – he didn’t care so damn much about all the people around him who are so happy to throw him into the fire – he could do it. Save himself. Technically, the only thing physically stopping him right now is Rocky – and if Grace asks, he’ll change that. It would almost certainly reveal more things than the robot would like the Hail Mary Consolidation to know – but he’d do it. For Grace, he would do it.
But Grace knows how it would end.
He knows it would just make his life so much worse –
His nose prickles uncomfortably, pulling him out of his thoughts. He swallows, and is hit with an intense taste of iron. Something warm rolls over his lip, and he frowns. He glances down at his cuffed, shaking hands just as a drop of blood lands on his pale skin. It takes a moment for his brain to catch up with what’s happening. Nosebleed. Aw heck. He hopes this isn’t some indication that Rocky’s dampening field is going to start causing him problems, because he really, really doesn’t want the little guy to turn it off, especially right now –
He reaches up, wiping his nose. Red smears across the back of his hand, more droplets still dripping. It’s starting to gush. Ah, great, just what he needs. He presses his nose against his hand, not really able to pinch it how he wants thanks to the way his hands are restrained. He looks up at Ava.
“Can I get a tissue, or is that too much of a security risk?” he manages, somehow managing to be ticked off despite his nervousness – a nosebleed, at least, is a very mundane problem to have amongst everything else that is happening to him right now.
Or…maybe it isn’t. Because Ava is staring at him, eyes widening with a realisation he can’t fathom, and she turns to Carl.
“Stop the van,” she says, deadly serious, grabbing her gun. With a flicker of unease, Grace realises that her nose has started to bleed as well.
Beside him, Carl falters. Red is beginning to trickle over his lip. “Ava –”
“Simon’s here,” she hisses with open terror, before she shouts – not to Carl, but to the driver on the other side of the metal divider. “STOP THE VAN!”
It’s too late. In the next moment, there’s a sharp jolt, and then everything lurches so violently that the world stops making sense. Gravity turns on its head – up is down, and for a second that last an eternity, Grace is hanging in midair, the straps digging into his shoulders only thing keeping him from careening out of his seat. The feeling of weightlessness is familiar in a way that he hates, and it’s that more than anything that makes him want to be sick with learned horror, Pavlov’s dog trained into terror.
Not again, he thinks to himself. I don’t want this. Not again.
But then, reality hits with a crash that jars every bone in his body. The sound is so loud it shatters through everything in his head, the splintering glass of every rational thought, leaving behind nothing but confusion and fear. His head screams, having lurched back hard against the back of the seat behind him – no. Underneath him. What? He tries to lift his head – owwwww ow ow. Okay. Okay okay okay. His head spins, heart pounding. Blood rushing through his veins. He can’t breathe. He can’t think. He can taste iron running down his throat. There’s something wrong with the van. Why is he lying down? Why is the door at the back on its side –
Carl is next to him, unclipping him from his seat belt. Panic flares within him as his brain puts the pieces together and comes up with two plus two equals it’s all my fault.
“I’m sorry,” he says, breaths sharp and ragged. “I’m sorry I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I swear –”
“It wasn’t you,” Carl says. “Can you get up?”
“I –” Grace starts, blinking – but before he can properly answer, Carl is already manhandling him into sitting up, pulling him to the side. A headache swells behind his eyes, and he swats the other man away. “Aghhhhhhhhhh okay okay! Yes! I’m up!”
Carl’s hands vanish, and Grace blinks again, trying to lift his head against the screaming pain. There’s a thump! next to him, and he opens his eyes to find Carl has caught Ava where she’d jumped down, having released herself from her seatbelts that now hang limply from the ceiling. Around them, the other soldiers are already pulling out weapons and night-vision goggles, moving towards the door.
“Find him and stun him! We want him down, not out,” Ava orders. “But be careful! Follow protocol. You get an open wound, you draw back, alright?”
She’s met with a wave of affirmatives from the other soldiers, and then there are shouts and banging as they burst open the door, metal warped from the crash. A crash. Context snaps into place as Grace processes what’s just happened. Not his fault. Of course it’s not. It couldn’t be, because –
And it’s then that he remembers the one person in the whole van he desperately doesn’t want to lose. The one person who didn’t have a seatbelt.
“Rocky,” he says, not even caring how he sounds. “Rocky!”
“Rocky here!” Rocky says, appearing from around the soldiers rushing out of the van by skittering along the skewed angles of the walls like they’re flat ground. He must have been flung to the other side of the van when it flipped over.
Grace can’t help it – the moment the little guy is close enough, he reaches out for him like a scared child, taking hold of him as best he can despite his cuffed wrists. He runs his hands over his exterior, looking for any damage – but besides from a few scuffs, the robot looks none the worse for wear. Of course he is. He was built to deal with much worse.
“Not damaged,” Rocky reports. “No worry.”
Relief crashes through him. “Your dampener’s still on, right?”
“Still on, no worry, Grace.”
“We need to get him out of here,” Carl says, talking to Ava. The soldier looks back from where she’s crouched by the door. Red gushes from her nose. “We still gotta get him to the Line.”
“No-one’s getting to the Line if we don’t contain Simon,” she says, clipped. Her gaze is restless and alive as she thinks, wiping her sleeve under her nose. “Rocky – how far can you stretch the radius of your dampeners?”
Rocky trills. “Fifteen feet.”
Ava nods, lips pressed into a thin line. “Okay. He’s got a wider radius than that. Rocky, you’re with me. We’re gonna go figure out where he is and then I’m gonna need you to get as close to him as possible as fast as you can, got it?”
Rocky bleeps in wary acknowledgement.
Carl fists his hand into the shoulder of Grace’s jacket. “Ava. Rocky needs to be with Grace.”
Grace could not agree more.
But Ava just laughs, bitter. “You’ll behave. Right, Grace?”
Grace elects to say nothing. He just closes his eyes against the pounding of his head, and wishes he was anywhere but here right now.
“Get him out of here,” Ava says, already moving out of the door. “As far as you can. We’ll regroup after. And if we don’t, you get him to the Line.”
“On foot?! It’s still miles out –”
But she’s already gone. “Rocky, with me!”
Reluctantly – or, at least, Grace wants to believe it’s reluctant – the robot moves away from under his fingers, and scuttles off after her.
Already, panic worms its way through Grace’s chest.
For the last thirty-eight days, Rocky has been there for almost every single second.
“Are you hurt?” Carl says.
“I’m - um,” he manages, which arguably isn’t the most intelligent response ever, but it’s tragically interrupted by Carl yanking him upright. “Agh! Ow! Come on, man!”
“Grace,” Carl says, urgent, already dragging him towards the door. Outside, the world is nothing but black.
“If I say yes does that mean we get to sit down and hang out in here?” he asks, voice coming out squeaky.
“If you say yes, that means I carry you.”
Grace cringes. “I’m not hurt.”
“Good.”
That’s all the time he gets before he’s being pulled through the door and out into the brutal cold of the night. Immediately, his breath clouds in front of his face, and he stumbles as Carl yanks him forwards, pulling him down behind the belly of the upturned van. The engine rumbles and splutters, still switched on. Beyond it, he can hear shouts and the occasional scream, followed by gunfire. He shivers.
“I need to check the driver,” Carl says, urgent. “Stay here and stay down. Can you do that?”
“Yep,” Grace says, sick with fear, head pounding. Carl seems to accept the answer, and moves around to the front, his body briefly blocking the beam of the headlights. They’re the only light around, illuminating a scant portion of an abandoned street. There’s not a single window or streetlamp lit. Grace tries to control his breathing, thoughts racing. He remembers hearing something about them evacuating the towns in the vicinity of the Line. They’d been worried about the radius around the anomaly getting wider.
He can’t quite help the way his head turns, compass to magnetic north. He can feel it, is the thing. Has been able to since it appeared. He finds himself standing, moving forwards, changing his angle. And – there. The henge of the buildings around them line up perfectly to frame it – that impossible, bright red line of light in the distance, blazing down from the sky like a sign from a god he didn’t believe in. Even this far away, he can sense the energy coming off it. Hear the buzzing hum of raw power like an undertone to reality – or maybe it’s just his imagination. It hardly matters either way. It’s like staring at the sun. He can’t bear to look away, hypnotised, even though he knows that he’s just hurting himself doing it.
It’s perfect. It’s beautiful.
It’s the thing that had ruined his entire life.
The Petrova Line.
Power builds within him like static, growing charge. By his feet, loose chips of asphalt begin to rise, unbidden, like gravity means nothing to them anymore. Nope. Nooooooope nope nope. He tries to keep his breathing calm, flexing his wrists against the handcuffs. He wishes he could hold his hands over his ears, but he knows even that wouldn’t block it out.
Bringing him here had been a very bad idea –
Suddenly, there’s a crack, followed by the sound of shattered glass. The stones floating around Grace drop to the ground as he flinches. For a moment, he’s certain it’s his fault, but then he makes out Carl’s silhouette against the blazing headlights, dropping whatever he’d used to smash the windscreen before reaching in, struggling to pull something – someone – out onto the road.
“Grace! Help me out!” Carl shouts, clearly clocking him and deciding not to pick a fight about the fact that Grace didn’t stay down like he was told. More important things. Grace stumbles forwards, handcuffed wrists held out in front of him.
“I can’t do much like this!” he says pointedly, nervously eyeing the still body of the driver. He can’t make out much in the dark. Ohhhh Christmas Eve, is he dead? Grace has never seen a dead body before, and he doesn’t want to start now, but judging by the way his life is going he gets the feeling that there are going to be several in the near future.
“Can’t you make him lighter or something?” Carl shoots back, still struggling on his own.
Dread drops in Grace’s stomach. “I can’t control it like that.”
“Can you try?”
“Do you want me to crush everything by accident?!”
Carl gives up, instead just gives a grunt of effort and pulls the driver out. There’s a tangle of limbs as Carl barely manages to control their crumple to the floor, and it’s in that moment that the body moves, and Grace realises with a bright flash of relief that the driver is still alive after all.
The relief evaporates the moment the driver falls forwards into the beam of the headlights, and Grace sees what’s happened to him.
His face is covered in blood – from a wound on his head, from his nose, gushing from his eyes. The man moans, leaning forwards, shaking hands coming up to his face – and even those are coated in red, oozing tendrils clotting around his fingers, his wrists in a way that doesn’t make sense, that doesn’t look natural at all. The man coughs thickly, like he’s choking, and when Carl comes to thump him on the back, the only thing that comes out of his mouth is another outpouring of red.
It takes everything Grace has not to throw up.
“I’ve got you,” Carl says to the man, wrapping an arm around his shoulder, glancing around to check they’re safe. For reasons that escape Grace completely, he seems to decide that they aren’t in immediate danger, despite the fact he can hear more gunfire, and turns back to look at him. “Grace, get down here.”
Grace comes over, crouching down, so out of his depth it’s not even funny.
“We gotta get the blood off his hands and we needed it done yesterday,” Carl says, already taking off his coat. The driver in front of him is stuttering gibberish, blood still dripping from every orifice on his face. It seeps through his clothes and down to his hands with an efficiency that seems deeply unnatural. Surely his clothes should be soaking it up? But his hands are slick with the stuff –
“Why…?” Grace mutters to himself, halfway to epiphany.
It clicks right at the driver jolts upright, lurching like he’s been puppeted by the wrists, and immediately wraps his bloodied hands around Carl’s neck and squeezes.
“Nope!” Grace squeaks as he lunges forwards, not even bothering to try pulling the guy off, but going right for the hands instead. Get the blood off! His wrists chaff against the handcuffs as he grabs for Carl’s jacket and desperately wipe off as much of the blood as he can with the fabric, horror catching in his throat at the sound of his old friend choking to death –
But then, the driver’s hands loosen of their own accord, and Grace shoves him backwards as hard as he can. The way he falls is…not quite natural, bouncing slightly on the ground like he doesn’t weigh as much as he should. Ahhhhhhhh shucks. Behind him, the crashed van is beginning to rise. Carl’s jacket, covered in blood, writhes as it begins to float.
Grace tries to ignore it, breathing hard, knowing if he tries fixing it then he’ll almost certainly make it much worse. Instead, he turns to Carl, who is grabbing onto his forearm with a death grip, gasping for air.
“Are you okay?” Grace says, thoughts spiralling, and finding that, despite being betrayed and drugged and forced into missions against his will, he still looks at Carl and sees his friend. Of course he does. His hands strain against the handcuffs, a stark reminder of his actual position in all this. “Please say you’re okay if you’re not okay I don’t know what I have to do I have no idea –”
“I’m okay,” Carl says, breathless and wheezing – but already sitting up. His eyes are alight with urgency, assessing. Behind them, Grace can hear the panicked breathing of the driver, the sound of blood still bubbling in his mouth. He doesn’t dare turn to look. “Gotta get out of here. Let’s –”
“Uncuff me,” Grace says, mouth working ahead of his brain. The urge to go go go is more than he can stand. “I can’t – I need to be able to help you, and I can’t!”
Indecision wars across Carl’s face – but quicker than Grace expects, he throws in with him, and reaches into a pocket. The next moment, the key is being jammed into the lock on his right wrist, and the cuff falls open. Something wild flits through him at the sight of it.
“Okay, but you gotta stay with – GRACE!”
Before he can think better of it, he’s bolting. Carl’s hand clasps round his ankle immediately, bringing him straight back down, face to asphalt. OW. The taste of dirt and the sharp pain of smacking into the road, followed by the certain knowledge that he’s blown it, that’s it, he’s never going to get a chance like that again, sends such a sharp spike of panic piercing through him that he feels the power burst out of him in a shockwave before he can even register the building pressure, let alone try to stop it. The force of his own making hits him hard in the chest, and the next thing he knows is that he’s rolling across the tarmac, skin scraping, momentum taking him away from the crash site. When he comes to a stop, he groans, before pushing himself up, arms shaking, knowing exactly what he’ll find when he looks up.
Carl is half-embedded into a crater in the road, struggling to move. The crashed van behind him crumpled in a way that hadn’t been caused by the crash, metal crushed and distorted. But the worst of all is the driver, motionless, having taken the brunt of the hit – body flattened by excessive gravity, squashed into the ground, blood still trickling out of his mouth.
Grace doesn’t wait to take it all in. He scrambles to his feet, mind nothing but a shriek of panic, and runs into the dark, handcuff still swinging from his left wrist.
Grace knew he’d been affected before anyone even knew what the Petrova Line was.
It’s the same if you ask anyone who’d been affected. One moment, everything was normal. The next, the laws of physics meant nothing, impossible things were possible, and reality had completely turned on its head.
Quite literally, in Grace’s case. That night, at the exact time that the Petrova Line appeared like a rupture in the sky, gravity had ceased to exist in his apartment. Two minutes later, he – and all his belongings that hadn’t been tied down, which was…most of them, frankly, because who ties things down? Where does he live? In an earthquake zone? Yeah, whatever – had come crashing back down to Earth with a loud enough THWUMP that his downstairs neighbour had banged on the ceiling to make his opinions on the matter known.
He’d spent the next few minutes sat on his floor, bruised and maybe hyperventilating, trying to come up with a rational explanation for what had just happened to him.
He couldn’t.
It took him about twenty minutes after that – an embarrassingly long time, frankly – to think about looking at the news.
His class had asked him about it a week later. The only reason it took them that long was because school had been off whilst everyone freaked out, and some poor sod had to write out the risk assessment for potentially teaching teenagers who had suddenly developed superpowers. Because that was the world they lived in now.
“What’s the Petrova Line, Mr Grace?”
He remembers dancing around the question, avoiding it. Throwing it back on the parents who weren’t in the room. Tossing his little hacky sack and desperately trying to distract them with pop quizzes about the speed of light. It’s melting in your hands, Olivia! Quick!
Only, his kids are too smart.
The beanbag comes back to him – a little knitted world, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand.
“What’s the Petrova Line?”
“Uh – pass!”
“You can’t pass!”
Chants of his own making fill the room, his kids banging their fists on the table, turning his own game against him. Lava! Lava! Lava!
Well. Shucks.
He pulls up the same news report that he’d watched sat on his living floor that night, his apartment a scattered mess around him. Talks them through what everyone knows. How, a week ago, a beam of pure energy had blasted its way through the sky above the great plains of Nebraska. How it was still there, a blazing line connecting crust to firmament, like it was burned into the fabric of space. How, the moment it appeared, across the world, some individuals had suddenly displayed superhuman abilities. People who could move things with their mind – telekinesis. Manipulate water – hydrokinesis. Pyrokinesis. Terrakinesis. Umbrakinesis – he’d seen a video of a young woman in Hong Kong, weaving a shadow of pure darkness between her hands. It hadn’t looked real. He’d turned it over in his head for hours, trying to make sense of it. How did that even work? Was she altering the perception of everyone around her, making it so their eyes couldn’t perceive light in a particular area that she could manipulate? Or was she actually controlling how much light was being absorbed in a particular area of space? It had been a video – unless her powers extended to manipulating the perception of digital cameras, then it had to be the latter. Which made no sense at all, seeing as she clearly didn’t have a miniature black hole in her hands…
“It started with us, in the States,” he says, projecting a map onto his whiteboard, ignoring his abandoned diagrams about soundwaves and drawing a great big red dot roughly where the Petrova Line touched down. He resisted the urge to flip his pen in his hand. When he’d done it at home the last few days, the pen had ended up floating in the air without his say-so. “And then there was a sort of ripple effect outwards. Like a wave, travelling around the world. And as it went, more and more people got affected.”
“Why didn’t everyone get affected?”
“We don’t know.”
“Did you get affected?”
“Nope.”
The lie was easy. He’d made up his mind about that very early on, when he’d seen what other powers were getting reported. When he’d seen the panic in the governments of the world, scrambling to figure out how to deal with the fact that some of their citizens could now do things that didn’t make sense.
And it’s one thing to be able to set things on fire with your mind. To change how light is absorbed. Both potentially dangerous, but manageable. Containable.
But Grace had the ability to manipulate the very force that kept planets in the sky. That tore atoms apart in the heart of a black hole.
Gyrokinesis. The manipulation of gravity.
He wasn’t stupid enough to google it to see if anyone else had developed the same thing.
No-one could know. He didn’t even want to know. He just wanted to carry on with his life, keep teaching his kids, pretending that everything was normal. He learnt how to keep his new abilities tightly under wraps, and he kept them there, holding them under the water. The only time they leaked out was in his sleep – he’d often wake up in the morning and find his glasses, alarm clock and lamp floating several feet above his bedside table. He’d never been so relieved that he lived alone.
And it was fine. No-one even suspected. He got very good at the pretence. There was a kid in one of his classes who was a kinetic, as they were calling them – Rehka, who had chromokinesis. More than once, he’d check his room after class and find that she’d changed the brown surface of her table into a sweep of rainbow. She’s changing what bands of the visible light spectrum are being absorbed and what’s being reflected back. He’d told the class that, when they’d covered the electromagnetic spectrum, and wondered if there was someone out there who was able to manipulate gamma rays, and what bunker they’d been thrown into. Maybe he’d end up as their roommate.
Every time the Petrova Line came up – which was often – he’d ‘guess’ where it was. Pointing in any direction other than where it actually was. Every time, Rehka would give a frustrated no! and point in the correct direction. Because every kinetic could sense it, in the back of their minds. A sunspot in their vision that just won’t go. A force, pulling on them. Calling them home.
If anyone had really thought about it, the fact that he was so consistently able to get it wrong should have told them that he knew exactly where it was.
“Why don’t we know what the Line is?” Olivia asked him, a month or so later. The sky outside the classroom windows was dim and overcast, and there was an edge to the air. Summer, colder than it should be.
“Because no-one can get really get close to it,” he’d explained, and not gone any further.
“Why?”
“Becaaaaaause –”
Because everyone within a certain radius of the Petrova Line had died pretty much instantly. The only exceptions to that had been people who’d developed abilities…but only those on the outer most radius had actually come out. The others, it seemed, had gone right towards the line and not come back.
Which wasn’t deeply disturbing at all.
How do you tell a class of eighth graders that?
“Is the Petrova Line really making it colder?”
He’d sighed. That question had come about two months in, when the changes had started getting really noticeable. He’d spent that summer wearing jackets he normally had to wait until October to bring out. Even a cloudless day looked off, like there was some filter over reality, the sky redder than it should be. It reminded Grace of a partial eclipse – the sun still shining, but it wasn’t all getting through. And, of course, that was exactly what was happening.
“We think so, yes,” he replied, deciding to be honest. They deserved to know. It was their world too, after all. Their future. “It seems to be preventing the amount of light and heat that is getting through the atmosphere and to the surface. Based on the predictions we have, it looks like over the next thirty years, the Earth could cool, maybe, ten to…fifteen degrees.”
He didn’t spell it out for them. His kids were smart. They could understand the implications. Not every implication, maybe, but the most important ones.
The class had erupted into a nervous chatter of panic and fear – and that, he couldn’t have. He’d held up his hands, taking back the room.
“Guys, you’re forgetting something – guys, guys, IF that happens, right? They’re gonna figure this out. Right now, the best minds in the entire world…they’re on it. It’s gonna be okay.”
He doesn’t even remember how he’d finished the lesson after that. It wasn’t nearly as important as what had happened afterwards, when he’d been sat at his desk, staring up at the paper mache model he’d made of the solar system. The sun hung on his right, and Earth on his left, and he wished the assurances he’d given his class would work on him too. Back then, there hadn’t been that building pressure under his skin, even when he was afraid. The deep well of power within him was covered, closed. Controlled in an iron-clad, white-knuckled grip that was so constant that he didn’t even need to think about it.
She’d walked into his classroom like the personification of fate. Of determinism. Of the erasure of free will. He hadn’t known it then, but after, when he understood everything in its entirety, he found he couldn’t see her in any other way in his memories of that moment. She hadn’t even known, at that point. But she would find out. Nothing could be kept from her.
“Dr Grace?”
“…maybe.”
“Eva Stratt. I’m with a group called the Hail Mary Consolidation, part of the Petrova Taskforce. I need your help.”
He’d just stared at her. “…me?”
And then she’d gone and pulled his doctoral thesis out of her bag, like it didn’t haunt him enough already.
“Oh,” he’d said, and immediately began packing up his things and getting the heck out of there. He did not need that thing to come back and bite him for the billionth time, no thank you.
“I’m interested in this section here,” Stratt had continued. “Page 31? Human evolution isn’t special and why everyone is wrong about life?”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Do you still stand by what you wrote?”
Loaded question. A loaded question that Stratt was so determined to get an answer to that she tailed him like a shadow throughout his thinly-veiled attempt to run away. It was what he was best at, after all. He was a coward, through and through. He knew that. Everyone knew that.
“You write about lichen,” she’d said, forcing the point. “About it being a symbiotic organism?”
“Yes,” he’d replied, finally caving as he clamped on his bike helmet – and, alas, not the cool kind. “Lichen evolved from a merging of two organisms, right? It’s a stable, symbiotic relationship between a fungus, algae, and/or cyanobacteria. Highly adaptable. Gives both halves of the organism serious benefits.”
“And you still believe that the same thing could potentially be possible with humans?”
He’d sucked in a frustrated noise through his teeth. “Look, there’s nothing magical about humans compared to literally every other organism on the planet. So, yes, potentially, at some point in our evolution, another organism could come along and do mutualism with us, and send us off down a completely different evolutional branch. And I don’t know why saying that the evolutionary pattern that happened to something else could happen to us, or anything on Earth, makes me such a nut.”
At that moment, he’d noticed the black car with tinted windows that had rolled up. The man who’d gotten out – the man he’d soon know to be Carl, later know to be a friend, even later scream at as he was held against the floor – had looked at him with a practiced nonchalance that spoke of someone who was never phased by anything. Who would grab him if he ran, and wouldn’t even break a sweat.
They were serious, he’d realised. This was real.
“We need you to come with us,” Stratt had said.
He should have said no. Told them to get lost. Buried his head in the sand and stuck to the life he knew, the life he loved despite everything, the life he was desperate to keep.
“Okay,” he’d said.
And in one word, he’d sealed his fate.
He doesn’t get far before he realises his mistake.
He stops behind a big industrial bin, crouched down and gasping for breath. He’s spent the last two minutes just blundering around in the dark, not knowing where to go, where to hide. Because they’ll be looking for him. Carl has probably already radioed everyone, telling them he’d bolted –
If every bone in Carl’s body isn’t broken, that is.
Grace chokes on a sob, but swallows it back. He feels the gravitational field around him waver, fluctuating with his distress, and he desperately tries to keep it under control. Based on the way that the bin next to him jerks down as it crunches a trench in the sidewalk, he’s not doing so well.
It’s not exactly a surprise. Ever since he woke up thirty-eight days ago, he’s been failing pretty spectacularly at keeping gravity as it should be.
Which is why –
“Rocky,” he breathes. His head snaps round, back towards the sounds of the fight he’s left behind. Dread sinks in his gut. “Ahhhhhhhhhhh I really don’t want to leave without you.”
It’s not just because of his gravity problems. He actually really likes the little guy, and at this point considers Rocky to be the only person he can trust anymore. He’s his friend.
It probably says a lot about his life right now that his only friend is the robot he possibly got overly attached to whilst being locked alone in a bunker for weeks, but he can untangle that later. When he’s not trying to escape a military taskforce that’s probably already looking for him.
He looks back into the darkness of the direction he came from. The quiet of the night is split by another shout, another scream. Behind him, all he can feel is the electrostatic gaze of the Petrova Line.
He’s gonna have to go back.
He really doesn’t want to go back.
He closes his eyes and breathes in through his nose, wishing for the thousandth time that he was a braver man than he is.
Then, he opens them, and sprints forwards into the dark.
It’s not quite pitch black. Now that his eyes have adjusted, the background glow of the Petrova Line becomes more and more perceptible, a faint red glow across the entire sky. It’s just enough to see by – but, really, he’s following his ears right now. The closer he gets, the more he hears. The sharp, pitched voice of Ava shouting orders. The crackle of radio chatter. Someone fires their stun weapon, but there’s no thud of a body hitting the ground. Grace presses himself against a wall, breathing hard, peering out from around the corner and taking stock of the vague silhouettes of soldiers that he can pick out from the shadows. They’re readying their next move, and he doesn’t even know what he’s doing. He needs to find Ava. Rocky will be with her. And then…what? Maybe he can just follow them until they deal with this Simon guy, whoever he is, and then Rocky will undoubtedly find try and find him, especially if he’s monitoring the radios and knows he’s gone AWOL –
He hears a quiet click behind him.
Grace’s heart jumps to his throat, and he flinches around.
Stood in the alley, features dimly lit by the red glow, is a soldier pointing a gun at him.
Grace immediately holds up his hands, the handcuff still on his left wrist swinging pointlessly.
“Hey, Dr Grace,” says the soldier – David, Grace remembers. He’d been around, before, when he’d been at the facility. Friendly enough, if memory served – that is, until he’d been holding him down against the floor as the sedatives dragged him under.
“David. Hi,” Grace replies, heart pounding. Baaaaaaaaaad idea bad idea. He tries to keep his breathing calm. Could he totally incapacitate this guy? Yeah. It would be horrifyingly easy. The problem is that he has zero control, and he’s half as likely to send the guy spinning off into the stratosphere or make him human paste on the pavement. “Fancy seeing you here.”
David hums, like he’s amused. Like he’s not still pointing a gun at him. “Yeah, well. I get around.”
Grace swallows.
“Wanna come in quietly and make this easy?” David asks.
“No,” Grace admits. “No, not really.”
David tightens his grip on his weapon, and shifts forwards. “Come on. You know how this ends –”
Grace’s pulse spikes, memories of a sharp pain in his neck and being pinned to the floor flashing through his mind – and before he can think about it, he’s scrambling backwards, feet not quite touching the floor, scraping up against the wall. David’s stun-gun starts to float, unbidden –
The soldier grabs the weapon, yanks it back down, and fires it point blank into Grace’s chest without even blinking.
It feels like he’s been struck by lightning. Every muscle in his body tenses with excruciating pain, and the next thing he knows he’s slamming back down against the floor, gravity no longer on his side. His vision whites out for several seconds, leaving him blinking spots from his eyes. Aghhhh yep. That hurt exactly as much as he remembers it from last time. Luckily, the intensity of the pain fades off pretty quickly – but that’s about the only thing the entire experience has going for it, since it leaves him pretty incapacitated nonetheless. Powers out? Check. He can barely string together a coherent sentence, let alone scrape the wherewithal together to actually get his stupid abilities to help him for once. The world spins sickeningly around him, and his entire body is useless, uncoordinated. Which means that when David crouches practically on top of him a moment later and pins him firmly against the ground, he hasn’t got a kitten’s chance against a bear at doing anything about it.
“David to Ava,” David says into his radio as Grace weakly tries to push him back with an uncoordinated swipe. “I have Grace. He’s stunned. Repeat; Grace is down.”
He tries not to let complete and utter despair flood over him, and fails. His arm falls back against the ground. Look at you go. Couldn’t even keep yourself from getting captured for five whole minutes –
All he can really do is turn his head, which just falls listlessly to the side, knocking against the rough pavement. The view he gets is the uncaring darkness of the alley behind him, and two red lights glowing in the dark.
Wait.
What?
The radio crackles in David’s hand as Ava replies, breathless and urgent. “David, I copy – what’s your location? We’ve lost eyes on Simon –”
The two red lights shutter for a moment, like the Devil blinking.
David doesn’t reply. He just makes a strange, choked sound, right as something warm and wet and stinking of iron begins to drip onto Grace’s face. Grace manages to glance up, heart pounding in his throat, and finds David frozen, eyes wide, blood pouring out of his mouth, clotting around his throat, tightening like it’s choking him –
“David? David, did you copy that?”
And out of the shadows, a figure emerges like he’d been raised in the dark, eyes blazing bright, Petrova red. In the dimness, the unnatural light of his gaze illuminates the smooth contours of his face, the blood splattered across his eyes. The dark unruly hair pulled back behind his head. As he reaches them, he shoves David back roughly by the shoulder, letting him drop to the ground, leaving him choking on his own blood. The soldier’s radio cackles, frantic.
“David! David, do you copy!”
Unmoved, the man crouches down and grabs Grace roughly by the chin, nails digging into his jaw. His fingers are wet with blood. Grace tries to pull away, but has no chance against the strength of the man’s grip. The man just frowns, considering him. Then, he cocks his head, like he’s listening to something Grace can’t hear.
Grace tries to say something – anything – but the only thing that comes out of his mouth is an incoherent murmur, his tongue as useless as the rest of him. But like it’s the catalyst that was needed, the other man flinches, his head snapping up, gaze burning red and restless. For a second, he just sits there, staring. Then, in a surge of movement that Grace has no chance of fighting against, the man picks him up off the floor and throws him over his shoulder with a grunt of effort, before struggling back to his feet and carrying him away in a lurching run.
The darkness embraces both of them like one of its own, leaving David on the ground, drowning in red, his radio relaying desperate messages into the empty air.