The Spider-Sense—Spark Sense, he mentally corrected, the name Miles had given it feeling more accurate—did not relent. It was a drill bit of pure dread boring into the base of his skull, its pitch shifting with every minute movement from above. It wasn't just watching. It was scanning.
Rez remained perfectly still on the floor, his back against the bed, playing possum. His eyes were slits, his breathing shallow. The salsa-sticky kitchen felt a mile away. All of his new, screaming senses were funneled into one task: understanding the threat.
The vent. It had to be. The feeling was a cold, electronic gaze emanating from that dark rectangle in the ceiling.
His mind, operating on a new, frightening dual track, analyzed. Track One: Primal Fear. (They found me. The lab. The military. They're here to cut me open.) Track Two: New Instinct. (Sensor package. Low-grade EM field. Not human. Drone. Small. Rotary.) The information appeared not as words, but as gut-knowledge, synthesized from the frequency of the hum in his skull and the faint, almost imperceptible whine now threading through the building's ambient noise.
He couldn't stay here. This room was a cage.
Moving with a sloth's deliberate care, he peeled himself from the floor. Every shift of weight was calculated to be silent. He needed to see. He needed to get out.
The window was his only exit besides the door, which led to the hall, to Leo, to exposure. The window it was.
He crept forward, his new footfall instinctively light, the electrostatic grip in his soles engaging just enough to prevent a scuff. He reached the wall beside the window, pressing himself flat against it. The Spark Sense's scream localized directly above and slightly behind him. The drone was repositioning, following his heat signature through the drywall.
He chanced a glance out the window. The world was a tapestry of impossible detail. He could see the individual grains of sand on the roof of the convenience store across the street. He could see a moth, its wings a intricate map of dust and scales, beating against a streetlight three hundred feet away. And he could see, parked at the far end of the Desert Palms parking lot, a nondescript black van. Its engine was off, but a faint thermal plume, invisible to normal sight, rose from its roof—a sign of active electronics and life within.
Base of operations. The watcher in the van, the eye in his vent.
Anger, hot and sudden, cut through the fear. This was his room. His terrible, messy, private sanctuary. They had no right.
He looked at the vent, then at the van. A plan, reckless and half-formed, clicked into place. It involved using the very thing that marked him as a target.
He raised his right wrist, aiming not at the vent, but at a spot on the ceiling two feet to its left. He focused, not on panic, but on a specific tensile strength, a particular adhesive coefficient. His Tech-Vision, still a confusing peripheral overlay, flickered with stress calculations.
Thwip.
A single strand of Ion Web shot out, striking the ceiling. It wasn't a rope; it was a anchor. In one fluid motion, he leaped, his other hand catching the strand, and his body pivoted upward. He swung, a short, tight arc that ended with his feet planted on the ceiling directly above the vent.
He hung there, inverted, a silent spider over its own web. The Spark Sense's scream was now a localized shriek in his head. The drone was directly below him, separated by only a thin metal grille.
He couldn't see it, but his new hearing mapped it from its sound. Four tiny brushless motors, a whirring gimbal, the faint zip of a laser rangefinder activating.
Now.
Rez balled his right hand into a fist and slammed it down, not with uncontrolled strength, but with the focused impact of a hammer driving a nail.
His fist punched straight through the drywall ceiling, through the thin aluminum ducting, and into the cavity beyond. There was a sharp, satisfying CRUNCH of plastic and carbon fiber, a violent electronic ZZZT, and then silence. The Spark Sense's scream cut off instantly, replaced by a ringing quiet that was almost as loud.
He pulled his fist back. Clenched in it was the mangled remains of a micro-drone. It was sleek, black, no markings. One rotor blade spun feebly before stopping. A single red LED on its carcass blinked twice and died.
He dropped to the floor, landing softly. He stared at the wreckage in his hand. Evidence. They had hard evidence of his location now, and of his… capabilities.
No time.
He moved to the window, unlatched it, and slid it up. The desert night air, cool and smelling of asphalt and distant fryer grease, washed over him. The van was still there.
He had to move. He had to disappear. But a raw, defiant part of him refused to just flee. They wanted data? He'd give them a data point they wouldn't forget.
He crouched in the window frame, gauging the distance. The parking lot was a forty-foot drop away. The van was another sixty feet across the asphalt. An impossible jump for anyone else. For him, it was just physics.
He coiled the muscles in his legs, feeling the strange, potent energy there. He focused on the van's roof, visualized the arc.
He jumped.
It wasn't a leap; it was a launch. The world became a streaking blur. He crossed the forty-foot drop in a heartbeat, his trajectory carrying him in a shallow descent. He landed on the van's roof not with a crash, but with a heavy, deep THUMP that dented the metal.
Inside, he heard shouts of surprise.
He didn't stop. Before they could react, he scrambled to the front of the roof, flipped over the edge, and landed in a crouch on the hood. The windshield was tinted, but he could see two silhouettes inside, fumbling for gear.
Rez looked directly at the driver, his eyes undoubtedly glowing with reflected streetlight. He raised his left hand and placed it, palm flat, against the center of the windshield.
Then he pushed.
The safety glass didn't shatter. It crazed. A spiderweb of fractures exploded from his palm, radiating out to every corner of the windshield with a sound like falling ice. The two men inside froze, staring at the impossible fractal pattern and the shadowy figure at its center.
A message. I see you. I am not just prey.
He held the gaze for a two-count. Then he pushed off the hood, backflipped into the air, fired a webline at the roof edge of his own apartment building, and swung away into the labyrinth of alleys and neon-lit streets, a ghost in a stolen hoodie.
He ran. Not with direction, but with desperation. The cool night air was a balm on his feverish skin. He stuck to shadows, moving over fences and dumpsters with an ease that was becoming second nature. His Spark Sense was quiet, for now. The immediate threat was neutralized.
But the encounter had changed the game. He was no longer just a victim of a bizarre accident. He was an actor. A destructive, powerful, and wildly unpredictable variable.
He finally stopped, chest heaving, in the recessed doorway of a shuttered pawn shop. The glowing sign for the Lucky Star casino painted the street in pulsating red. He looked at his hands. They were trembling, but not from weakness. From the after-shock of unleashed potential.
He had a power. A terrible, confusing, magnificent power. And someone, with drones and vans and cold intent, knew about it.
He was alone. He was hunted. And he had just declared war.
Rez Crown, the gamer, was gone. What emerged from that doorway was something else. Something still taking shape. Something with venom in its veins and a crown of chaos in its future.
The awakening was over. The struggle had begun.