The old Meridian City train yard was a skeleton picked clean by time. The chain-link fence surrounding it was a tapestry of rust and torn openings, offering more invitation than barrier. Raymond slipped through a gash in the metal, the corroded wires snagging briefly on his hoodie before yielding with a tired sigh. The air inside was different—heavier, older. It smelled of oxidized iron, creosote, and the damp, fungal breath of decay. The moon, a sliver of bone-white in the cloudy sky, provided just enough light for his enhanced vision to paint the scene in a thousand shades of silver and shadow.
It was a graveyard of industry. Hulking, rust-eaten freight cars sat on buckled tracks, their wheels sunk into the earth like fallen giants. Weeds and stubborn saplings pushed through the cracked concrete, claiming the land back inch by inch. A century of grime coated the windows of a long, low maintenance shed, turning them into blind, cataract-clouded eyes. The silence was profound, broken only by the skittering of unseen things in the dark and the distant, ever-present hum of the city—a sound he now perceived as a far-off ocean.
This was perfect. This was his.
He stood in the center of the main yard, letting the desolation wash over him. Here, there were no mothers to frighten, no Enforcers to scrutinize, no friends to abandon him. There was only the ruin, and the power thrumming in his veins.
He started simply. He walked to a discarded railway tie, a massive beam of treated wood half-sunk into the gravel. It must have weighed three hundred pounds. He crouched, getting a firm grip on the slimy, rotten wood. In his old life, he wouldn't have been able to budge it. Now, he focused on the concept of lifting. He poured a trickle of the strange, hydraulic strength from his core into his arms and back.
The tie came up out of the earth with a wet, sucking sound, far too easily. It felt like lifting a cardboard box. He held it at arm's length, his muscles barely registering the strain. He could feel the individual grain of the wood, the places where it was soft with rot and where it was still hard as iron. He tossed it aside. It sailed through the air in a lazy, weightless arc and crashed into a stack of rotting pallets, reducing them to splinters. The sound echoed through the yard like a gunshot.
Okay, he thought. So strength is… not an issue.
Next, speed.
He picked a point at the far end of the yard, a water tower on spindly legs about two hundred meters away. He took a breath, and then he moved.
It wasn't the frantic, uncontrolled burst from the school hallway. This was a conscious unleashing. The world blurred, but this time he fought to keep his focus. The wind tore at his clothes, a roaring river in his ears. Gravel and dust exploded in his wake, kicked up by the violence of his passage. He reached the water tower in less than two seconds, his hand slapping against its rusted leg to stop himself. The impact was harder than he intended; the metal shrieked and buckled under his palm, leaving a perfect, hand-shaped dent.
He stood there, panting, not from exertion, but from the sheer, visceral thrill of it. He had crossed the distance in the time it took to blink. He looked back at the path he'd taken, a straight line of disturbed earth through the weeds. The power was immense, terrifying, and utterly intoxicating.
But it was crude. A sledgehammer when he needed a scalpel.
He spent the next few hours in a relentless, solitary drill. He didn't just run; he practiced stopping. He would accelerate to that impossible speed and then focus everything on decelerating within three steps. The first dozen attempts ended with him plowing into a dirt berm or skidding uncontrollably through gravel. But gradually, he learned to feel the momentum, to let his enhanced muscles and bones absorb it, to become a brake instead of a bullet.
He practiced his precision. He gathered a pile of rusted bolts and ball bearings from a gutted boxcar. He would toss one into the air and then, before it could fall more than an inch, snatch it out of the air. At first, he crushed them to metallic dust in his fist. Then, he learned to modulate the pressure, to close his fingers with the delicacy of a watchmaker. Soon, he could pluck a single, tiny bearing from the air without marring its surface.
His senses were the hardest to master. The train yard was a symphony of minute sounds: the groan of settling metal, the whisper of the wind through a thousand cracks, the chewing of insects, the drip of condensation. He sat cross-legged on the roof of a freight car, the cold seeping through his jeans, and closed his eyes. He built his mental filters, not to block the noise out, but to categorize it. He assigned priorities. The sound of a rat gnawing on wire was background. The subtle shift of weight on gravel fifty meters away was a alert. He trained himself to differentiate between the harmless settling of the yard and the sound of an intentional footstep.
As the night wore on, he pushed further. He found a stack of steel plates, discarded from some long-forgotten repair. They were an inch thick. He focused, and drove his fist into one. The sound was a deafening CLANG that rolled across the yard like a thunderclap. The steel dented inward, the impression of his knuckles clear and deep. His hand stung, a bright, sharp pain, but when he examined it, the skin was unbroken. The pain faded in seconds, the minor bruising vanishing before his eyes.
He was so engrossed, so focused on the feedback from his own body, that he almost missed it.
It was a sound that didn't belong.
He froze, perched on the edge of the freight car roof, every sense dialed to its maximum. He filtered out the wind, the insects, the creaking metal. There. It came from the large maintenance shed at the edge of the yard. A soft, rhythmic scraping. Metal on concrete. Not the random sound of decay. This was deliberate.
His first instinct was flight. To vanish into the shadows, to protect his sanctuary. But the new part of him, the part forged in the crucible of the last hour, rejected that. This was his place. His territory. An intruder was a variable that needed to be understood. Assessed. Neutralized, if necessary.
He dropped from the roof, landing without a sound. He moved toward the shed, not with his full, blinding speed, but with a predator's stalk, each footfall placed with absolute precision. The scent on the air changed. Beneath the rust and decay, he caught a new smell. Chemical. Acrid. Like overheated electronics and burnt plastic.
The large sliding door of the shed was open a crack, just wide enough for a person to slip through. A faint, flickering blue light pulsed from within, casting long, dancing shadows.
Raymond approached the door and peered inside.
The interior of the shed was a stark contrast to the decay outside. A section of it had been cleared and cleaned. Workbenches lined one wall, covered in a sophisticated, if messy, array of tools, soldering irons, and dismantled electronics. Wires snaked across the floor like metallic vines. In the center of the cleared space, a motorcycle engine was suspended from a chain hoist, but it was like no engine he had ever seen. It was gutted, its internals replaced with complex, glowing components that pulsed with that same sickly blue light. The air hummed with a high-frequency energy that set his teeth on edge.
And there, with his back to the door, hunched over a workbench, was a man. He was wiry, dressed in stained coveralls, his hair a wild shock of unkempt brown. He was muttering to himself, the words a frantic, technical stream.
"...no, the capacitance is all wrong, it'll never hold the charge... unless I bypass the regulator entirely, but then the feedback loop..."
He was so engrossed he didn't hear Raymond slip inside. Raymond moved like a ghost, his enhanced senses mapping the space. He saw schematics tacked to the wall, complex designs for energy weapons and armored plating. He saw crates stamped with logos he didn't recognize. This wasn't a hobbyist. This was an operation.
His foot brushed against a loose cable on the floor.
The man at the bench froze. His muttering stopped. He slowly straightened up, but didn't turn around.
"You're not supposed to be here," the man said, his voice tight with a nervous energy. "This is a private facility."
"I could say the same," Raymond replied, his own voice low and steady. He was surprised by how calm he felt. The threat assessment part of his brain was running at full capacity. One target. No visible weapons. Environment: cluttered, advantageous for me.
The man finally turned. He was younger than Raymond expected, maybe mid-twenties, with a sharp, intelligent face and eyes that were wide with a mixture of fear and excitement. He wore thick, smudged goggles pushed up on his forehead.
His eyes scanned Raymond, taking in his youth, his ordinary clothes, his empty hands. The fear in his expression lessened, replaced by a calculating curiosity.
"You're just a kid," the man said, a note of disbelief in his voice. "What are you doing out here? You one of Krait's lookouts? He send a kid to check up on me?"
The name meant nothing to Raymond. "I'm just looking for a quiet place," he said.
The man barked a short, humorless laugh. "Quiet? You picked the wrong place, kid. This is my workshop. I'm on a deadline." He gestured vaguely at the gutted engine. "Now, why don't you run along before you see something you're not supposed to? This stuff is... volatile."
As if on cue, a component on the workbench sparked violently, emitting a puff of acrid smoke. The man cursed and grabbed a fire extinguisher, dousing the smoldering part.
Raymond didn't move. His eyes were fixed on the man. He wasn't a physical threat. But he was a problem. A witness. Someone who could report a strange kid lurking in the train yard.
The man finished putting out the small fire and turned back to Raymond, his expression now annoyed. "Look, I don't have time for this. Scram."
"I can't do that," Raymond said quietly.
The man's eyes narrowed. He reached behind his back and pulled out a device. It was crude, cobbled together from pipes and wires, but the business end looked ominously like a weapon emitter. It glowed with the same unstable blue energy.
"Didn't want to do this," the man said, leveling the device at Raymond. "But you're not leaving me much choice. Now, get out."
Raymond looked at the weapon. He could see the energy swirling within it, could hear the whine of its poorly shielded power core. It was dangerous, but clumsy. Inefficient.
In the split second it took for the man's finger to tighten on the trigger, Raymond's world slowed. He saw the path of the energy blast, a predictable, straight line. He saw the man's stance, unbalanced. He saw every possible move.
He didn't use his full speed. He didn't need to. He simply took a single, fluid step to the side.
A bolt of sizzling blue energy shot from the emitter, missing him by inches. It struck the metal wall of the shed behind him with a deafening CRACK-ZAP!, leaving a smoldering, blackened scar.
The man's eyes went wide with shock. He hadn't even seen Raymond move.
Before he could fire again, Raymond was on him. It wasn't a violent attack. It was a simple, disarming maneuver, performed with the precise, unthinking grace he had been practicing. He grabbed the man's wrist, applied pressure to a specific nerve cluster, and the weapon clattered to the concrete floor.
The man cried out, more in surprise than pain, and stumbled back, clutching his numb hand. He stared at Raymond, his face a mask of pure, uncomprehending terror.
"You... you're not a kid," he stammered. "What are you?"
Raymond looked down at the smoldering weapon on the floor, then back at the terrified inventor. He had a choice. He could silence him. Ensure his secret was safe. The thought was cold, clinical, and for a terrifying moment, it felt like the most logical solution.
But he saw the man's fear. He wasn't a villain like Grinder. He was just a scared guy in over his head, trying to meet a deadline for someone named Krait.
"I'm someone who needs a quiet place to train," Raymond said, his voice still unnervingly calm. "And you're someone who is going to forget you ever saw me."
He took a step forward. The man flinched, scrambling backward against his workbench.
"Or what?" the man squeaked.
Raymond didn't answer with words. He looked at a heavy, solid steel vise bolted to the end of the workbench. He focused, and with a single, open-handed strike, he brought the edge of his hand down on its thick screw handle.
The sound was a sharp, definitive SPANG. The hardened steel handle sheared clean in two, the broken piece clattering to the floor.
The inventor stared at the ruined vise, then back at Raymond, his jaw slack.
"The next time I come here," Raymond said, his voice dropping to a menacing whisper that seemed to suck the warmth from the air, "this shed will be empty. You, your toys, all of it. Gone. Do you understand?"
The man could only nod, a frantic, jerky motion.
"Good."
Without another word, Raymond turned and walked out of the shed, melting back into the shadows of the train yard. He didn't look back. He could hear the man's frantic, panicked movements already beginning—the sound of tools being thrown into boxes, of frantic packing.
He had handled it. He had assessed the threat, neutralized it without excessive violence, and secured his territory. A week ago, the confrontation would have left him trembling. Now, his pulse was steady.
He returned to the center of the yard, the night air cool on his skin. The encounter had been a test. A practical exam. And he had passed.
He looked up at the sliver of moon. The crucible was no longer just a place of solitary training. It was a proving ground. He had taken his first, real step into the shadows of this new world. He had faced a threat and imposed his will.
The spark was no longer just a spark. It was a flame, burning steadily in the darkness, hungry for more.