After a long overdue shower and a change of clothes, Ethan deposited himself onto the balcony behind Quinn's apartment. He knocked gently at the glass, drawing a bewildered Quinn through the living room.
"I guess I should've specified to use the front door," Quinn told him, shutting the glass door and shivering against the sudden influx of cold air, retreating into her bright red oversized Metro State sweatshirt. Her hair was pulled back into a bun and, much like Ethan, she looked like she had a rough few days, though she was wearing it better than he had.
"Right, right, sorry," Ethan sighed, taking off his sneakers. He held up two bottles. "I, uh, couldn't decide between white and red, so I got both."
"Thanks, that was…thoughtful," Quinn said, but she stayed rooted in place an awkward few feet away from Ethan. He was still right in front of the balcony door and part of him wondered if he should leave, but he cleared his throat and decided to stick it out.
"Yeah, well, there isn't exactly a gift guide for someone looking to apologize for not telling a person that you knew where their missing sister was the whole time."
"That…makes sense, but I didn't even get you anything, and it's my sister who put yours in the hospital." Quinn cleared her throat, eyes dropping to the carpet. She rushed her question, desperate to get it out. "How is she, by the way? Alex?"
"Healing," Ethan nodded vigorously to reassure Quinn, who looked visibly relieved. "She'll make a full recovery, eventually."
"That's amazing to hear. I wanted to reach out after that night in the arena, but I didn't know what to say, especially if things weren't…"
"Everything is going as well as could be. Besides, you shouldn't feel bad; none of this is your fault, Quinn."
"Still, I'm so sorry about Alex," she told him, her almond colored eyes watering. "If I had known Rainey was…capable of something like that, I would've called someone. I would've told Amory-"
"It's not your fault, it's mine, I'm the one who-"
"-never even thought this could happen and-"
They were two engines quietly backfiring, failing to start but pushing themselves to keep trying. Rather than put all of thoughts into one giant long run on sentence, Ethan decided to simplify things. He held his hand out for her to take a breath.
"Quinn, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for lying to you and for-"
"Did you mean it?"
Ethan paused, perplexed. It took him a second before he even registered what she had asked. "Mean what?"
"What you said. That you couldn't do this without me?"
"Yes," he answered quickly, stepping towards her. "I…wanted to be someone when I got powers. I thought I could be someone new, but everything I did, every mistake I made, followed me, no matter where I went in Ascension. Then I met you in Stillrock, and I thought….maybe I could be someone she likes. But, so far…I haven't been, and I lied to you and got Alex nearly killed. What happened to her is my fault, not yours. I wanted powers for myself, but this is bigger than me and I can't even start to unravel all this damage without you, Quinn."
Quinn took all that in, putting her hands in her sleeves, keeping her eyes low. Ethan held his breath, waiting for something, anything. Even a rejection was better than the silence filling Quinn's tidy living room. Finally, her eyes met his and, for the second time this week, he felt like his entire universe was about to implode.
"You shouldn't have lied to me."
"No, I should not have, and I'm sorry. I can't even tell you how sorry I am. I will-"
Before he could finish apologizing Quinn threw her arms around him, pulling him close. Ethan was surprised but the shock wore off quickly as he settled into her.
"So much has gone wrong," she whispered. "I want to fix things but I don't even know where to start," Quinn told him quietly, shaking her head. Ethan smiled, holding up the red wine.
"How about with this one?"
——
"And then the rocks caved in and I thought we were dead, only my powers manifested and suddenly I was out of the tunnel, but Rainey was still down there!"
"Typical. You wouldn't believe how many mornings I had to drag her out of bed to make it to school on time. How did she escape?"
Ethan ate the last of his noodles, grateful Rainey knew a Thai place close by. He hadn't eaten much in days and didn't realize how hungry he was until he picked up their food. Before he knew it he had eaten all of their spring rolls and he had to go back in to order more. He wiped his mouth before continuing.
"I offered her my hand but she refused, then her powers manifested and she broke through the cave-in not unlike a dolphin leaping from the ocean. It was majestic and terrifying."
"You know, there has to be something to getting powers by way of direct infusion to the Surge rather than being blanketed gently by its energy. Both her stone manipulation powers and your own teleportation abilities are many times greater than the average person altered by the Surge."
Ethan nodded. "I prayed I would get something cool and not lame like being able to memorize the periodic table better. Though, you would probably like that."
"Couldn't hurt, certainly," Quinn laughed. Her face grew tense. "So. The world's falling apart. We've established that it's mostly your fault for lying to everyone, me included, but I still feel like I share a little blame. What do we do now?"
"I'll probably continue to apologize until I'm dead, and when I'm done with that, well…I've been thinking about this, and I have a plan. Amory told me that Kingston was working with your sister, so he should have an idea of what else she's planning. If we find Kingston, we can find Rainey."
"Agreed, but how do we do that? Rainey definitely has a part two to her grand designs for Apex, and with Alex out of the picture we know we're running out of time."
Ethan rolled his shoulders, thinking. "Well, you worked with him for a few months, at least. Do you have any idea where he might have gone?"
Quinn thought for a moment, but ultimately shook her head. "He mentioned a cabin out in the mountains, but he didn't say where it was. Or maybe I didn't ask. Frankly, I did not like the guy."
Ethan sighed, leaning his head over the back of his chair. "I can move fast, but not fast enough to scour the whole mountain range for one guy. We're going to need somewhere specific to look."
"Well," Quinn said, "if Rainey wants to ruin Apex, she's going to do it publicly, which means she's going to try and pull something off in Ascension."
"Right," Ethan said slowly, reality dawning on him. He grimaced. "There's a slight complication to all of this."
"Lovely. What is it?"
"I'm…not exactly sanctioned by Apex anymore. If I use my powers anywhere near the city I can be arrested or, worse, beat up by one of the Protectors. I'm basically an Altered in their eyes."
"Amory still won't make you a Protector?"
Ethan rubbed the back of his neck. "I, uh, did kind of hide the fact that I knew someone could hurt Alex, which was wrong of me. I also wouldn't hire me, at least not now."
Quinn sighed deeply, swirling her glass. "That is a problem. You can't even beat Rainey in a fight; you certainly can't beat her and a few Protectors tracking you down for operating in the city."
"I knew I should've made more friends at work," Ethan groaned.
"Wait," Quinn said, pulling out her phone, "that gives me an idea."
"I really think it's too late to try and befriend Velo and Rayvon, but we can certainly try if you think they'd like me and-"
"What? No. Kingston had a daughter," Quinn explained. "Teenage girls are the most angsty people on the planet, and if my dad made me go out on a trip in the middle of a school week I would've posted all about it."
Ethan raised an eyebrow. "So our current, best plan is that we're going to cyberstalk a teen?"
"It's not stalking," Quinn paused, then smiled widely. She pulled up a photo of Kingston's daughter pouting in front of a golden mountain, "if it works. They're at the Dunes down south."
"It's still stalking, but you're brilliant for it. I'll call Raz and loop him in on the way."
"On the way? You just had a whole bottle of wine!"
"There is no law stating you can't have a little wine and teleport and plus I don't exactly have a job to lose. Now, no time to waste, I'm going to…"
Ethan stood shakily and then opened his palm to make a portal out the balcony but accidentally opened it too small. He tried to poke his head through to see what the problem was but only managed to smack his head in the edge. Quinn chuckled as he groaned.
"Maybe we call it a night?"
"Might be smart," Ethan agreed, sitting back down, "save our strength for our kidnapping tomorrow."
Quinn went to her closet and pulled out a blanket, placing it on the couch. Quinn turned back to him, standing in her doorframe.
"I'm still mad at you for lying to me."
"For sure," Ethan nodded, lying down on the couch. "That tracks."
"Never again, okay?"
Ethan held out his pinky. Quinn walked over, leaned over him, and gave him a kiss.
"Never again," Ethan agreed. As Quinn shut the door behind her, Ethan pulled out his phone, giving Raz a call.
"Ethan, what's going on?" he said. "Is Alex okay?"
"Yes," he answered quickly, speaking quietly. Then he paused, backtracking. "Well, probably. I'm not there but nobody's called me. They'd call me if she wasn't, right?"
"I would assume," Raz told him. "Where are you?"
"At Quinn's."
"Oh."
"It's not like that! Well, it's a little like that," he clarified, grinning so widely he was happy nobody was around to look at him. "Anyway, I don't know if you noticed, but things are not going our way."
"No, they are not," Raz agreed. "And, on top of that, Altered related incidents are up with Alex being sidelined. Plus, Quinn publicly threatened the entire city and people aren't sure of what's coming next."
"Quinn and I have a plan to find out, except we have to do it off-books. I'm…not exactly welcome to use my powers in Ascension, so we need to get somewhere with a lot less eyes."
"Okay, where are you thinking?"
"Meet me at the apartment tomorrow."
Raz laughed. "Where do you think I am? Not everyone sleeps on hotel rooftops in the cold."
"Not that one," Ethan told him. "Ascension…hasn't exactly worked out for us."
"Agreed, but we don't have anywhere else to go."
"For once," Ethan relished the moment. The night was dark from an overcast sky, leaving the small mountain towns visible from Quinn's balcony, dotting the vast landscape. He zeroed in on one set of faint light in particular, their old home barely shining through the darkness. "I get to tell you that you're wrong. Pack your bags, because we're going back to Stillrock."
"Well, we knew we wouldn't stay at Alex's forever," Raz sighed. "I'll be ready."
"Awesome," Ethan said. "Hey, one more thing."
"Shoot."
"If Quinn's here, and Kingston's in the wind, who do you think is monitoring the Surge in that creepy underground lab?"
"You know, I'm not sure," Raz laughed, "I hadn't thought about it."
"Whoever they are, they better be good."
——
"You know why we're here, right?"
As much as he hated to admit it, Derrick was, in fact, not exactly sure how he ended up in a secret laboratory underneath Apex Tower.
Yesterday morning, when he clocked into work at Apex Tower, he was just a reserve Protector, one of about fifteen that worked inside Apex's secretive headquarters. Unlike the high flying, energy slinging Protectors in Sector One, Reserve Protectors lacked the skills that allowed them to fight against the Altered throughout the city. Derrick, for example, woke up the day after the Surge, went to his job as a stock broker, and set a record for single day earnings. Over time, he realized that he had developed an ability to internalize information more efficiently than before and accurately predict outcomes.
Catching word of his exploits, and despite his lack of combat abilities, Amory plucked Derrick from his stock broker position at a large firm in the city (where he probably would've ended up shorting several gigantic companies, including Apex itself, eventually getting accused of insider trading) and stashed him inside Apex Tower, keeping him occupied by having him work with logistics to try and anticipate future Altered attacks.
Following the news that Titan was injured and wouldn't be returning for the foreseeable future, Derrick stood up and pulled a red folder out of his filing cabinet. He had modeled this exact situation three months prior and found that Ascension would experience an almost overwhelming number of Altered attacks throughout the city, straining their defenses that would poke just enough holes in the dam that were the Protectors to overrun the city, unless Amory called up every single Reserve Protector to help stem the tide.
He wore his best shirt, maroon with khaki pants, and stood in front of Amory, proudly, expecting Amory to press him into service as a Protector. As expected, after reading the report, Amory told Derrick that she was reassigning him, just as he predicted.
Derrick did not predict, however, that he'd actually be reassigned to a position below the headquarter's basement in a lab that wasn't listed on any plans and was almost certainly illegal. In Quinn and Kingston's absence, Amory tasked Derrick with monitoring the shielding that blocked the Surge from breaching out into the city. Derrick took one look at the weathered shielding tasked with blocking an all-consuming radiation and told Amory that was like asking an ant to watch out for a nuclear explosion. She smiled and told him that at least he wouldn't be alone.
Derrick desperately wished he had pushed back on that second part.
"Because I was too greedy in my last position and the universe wants me to reevaluate. Now I have to stare certain death in the face in the middle of the night while sitting a few feet away from the most annoying person alive."
"Wrong, on all counts, especially about me being annoying," Gabriela told him. Her long black hair covered her face as she spun dizzyingly fast in her chair. Derrick had no idea how she hadn't puked on the floor yet.
"We're here because we're expendable."
Unfortunately, Derrick couldn't argue with her on that, a realization that forced him to channel his frustration into tapping away aggressively into his chair's armrest.
In his spare time, Amory had also tasked Derrick with another project: rank every Protector in her employ by combat readiness. Naturally, Titan ended up in the top slot, while Derrick ranked himself second to last. Last place was sitting on his right, spinning slowly in her chair like a fan blade in a deserted motel.
Gabriela had nominally better combat skills than he did; she could throw anything she could get her hands on and hit her target, dead center. This would've been impressive and highly valuable, but she was also incredibly weak, limiting her abilities to little more than an annoying hit in the nose with a tennis ball or paperclip. Not nothing, but in Derrick's estimation as close as you could get to nothing.
"You're expendable," he told her. "I actually work with Amory. You seem to just take up space in the break room every time I need to eat my lunch."
Gabriela stopped spinning, pushing her hair out of her face to level her eyes at Derrick. "Oh, you do a lot of work with Amory? I didn't know that. Does she read your reports, listen to your recommendations?"
Derrick nodded. "I predicted the current wave of Altered violence."
"Amazing. Hey, question…if you're so smart, why did she seat you directly in front of the death ray?" Gabriela started cackling. "She at least sat me just to the right of it!"
"She wanted someone she could trust down here," Derrick told her, ignoring her laughs. She shrugged, then stood to walk and stretch her neck.
"You're still taking this too seriously," Gabriela told Derrick, throwing a paper ball at him. It bounced off his head, which was locked onto the monitors in front of him. The radiology chart barely ever blipped above the baseline, but Derrick was too worried to look away. If anything went awry, one, or both of them were supposed to hit the large red button in front of their stations that Derrick was convinced even Gabriela couldn't miss.
"Nothing's supposed to happen anyway. Amory said it was, like, a one in a million chance that it even blew in the first place and nothing's gone wrong since then."
"If it wasn't important, they wouldn't have us here. I don't care that they think that we're the dregs of the Protectors. We're here to do a job."
"We're here to do a job," Gabriela repeated gruffly, laughing. Derrick rolled his eyes. "Now I see why we're both here."
"What do you mean?"
She shot a rubber band that glanced off his neck. Derrick jolted in his seat. "You're here to pay attention and I'm here to keep you awake."
"That so?" Derrick said. As much as he hated to admit, Gabriela's idea made sense. Neither of them have any combat abilities and wouldn't do well out in the field, but part of Derrick was still happy to be of use. Gabriela, as Derrick had deduced, could not say the same.
"I'd say we're doing an excellent job so far!"
Derrick groaned, checking his watch. Six hours in, six hours to go until the day crew took over. He almost wished the Surge would burst through; at least then he'd be rid of Gabriela.
While he was fantasizing about returning to the solitude of his desk several floors away from where Gabriela "worked", the ordinarily straight green line measuring the amount of radiation bombarding the side of the shielding exposed to the Surge dipped slightly, no more than two percent, then reverted back to normal a moment later.
Instantly, Derrick's mind took off like a racehorse after the starting gun. This deviation, however slight, meant something: somewhere, way out in the mountains, there had been a shift, one that would have reverberations much larger than the slight dip in the amount of radiation bombarding the shielding in front of them. There hadn't been a blip in three days and there was not, to his mind, any reason one should occur now. That meant there was an issue, somewhere they couldn't see, and that meant it was something they couldn't fix.
He brusquely interrupted whatever Gabriela had been going on about.
"Are you familiar with tsunamis?" he asked her.
She glared at him, clearly in the middle of crumpling another paper ball to throw at him. "Weren't you listening? I was asking you if you thought I could run out and grab a burger or if-"
"Tsunamis." He repeated.
She pointed to her pale skin. "Do I look like I live in California?"
"Before a tsunami hits, the waves recede." He pointed to the dip in the monitor. Even now, the radiation readings were already back to normal levels. "That was our recession in the tides. There will be more, deeper recessions than before. Then comes the tsunami."
"That's your whole power, right? Pattern recognition, or something like that?"
Derrick nodded. "It's…not impossible I'm wrong, but it would be a rare mistake for me."
"Okay," Gabriela nodded, sitting down next to him, looking serious for the first time in three days. He had properly shaken her out of whatever flighty ideas she had a moment ago. "Let's say you're right. What do we do about it? Hit the button?"
He stared at her gravely. They could, of course, hit the button, but that wasn't going to save them if another Surge hit "You need to get out of here. There's a reason Kingston-the former technician here-left, and we just found it."
Gabriela smiled.
"What?" Derrick asked.
"A minute ago you couldn't want to get rid of me and now you're not going to be able to get me to get rid of me."
She surveyed the room. The emergency button was welded into the station in front of her, but the monitors were on wheels. Ignoring Derrick's protest, Gabriella pulled the monitor to the very back of the room, swinging it behind the very last desk nearest to the door.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Giving us some cover. Or, at least, a chance at an exit."
"Couldn't hurt, but how are we going to press the emergency button now if it's all the way over-"
Derrick's heart nearly stopped as Gabriela grabbed a pencil off the desk and threw it at the emergency button, missing it by less than an inch. It clattered harmlessly to the floor.
"You figure out when this tsunami is going to hit. I'll take care of the button. Teamwork, okay?"
Derrick nodded, then sat down and got to work, watching for any more dips in the readings. "Couldn't hurt," he muttered. "Also…were you going to throw that at my head?"
"Well," Gabriela went back to spinning in her chair, this time though she held a rubber band ball she had made. "I was, but that was before I knew we were all going to die. So I think I'll hold onto it…for now, on the off chance this is all just a ploy."
"Believe me," Derrick sighed, "I wish it was, but you should hold onto that ball. I'm afraid you're going to need it."