Ruben stepped back into the bedroom, the heavy oak door clicking shut behind him. The morning light was filtering through the heavy drapes now, casting long, dusty beams across the floor. Corbin was awake, sitting on the edge of his bed, his elbows on his knees, staring intently at the small boy huddled in the opposite corner.
Oscar looked like a frightened animal. He was picking at a loose thread on the quilt, his eyes darting between the two older boys.
"My name... is Oscar," the boy whispered, his voice trembling so much it was hard to catch the words. "I don't know where I'm from. I just know that I have been hurt... a lot."
He hugged his knees to his chest. "Then Paul came. Paul freed me. He took me out of the dark. I... I'm supposed to be paying him back."
"Paying him back?" Corbin scoffed, his brow furrowing. "With what? Your lunch money?"
"By letting my Ego run free," Oscar said simply, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be a human weapon. "He said if I help him, I won't have to go back to the box."
Corbin leaned forward, his intensity radiating off him. "Who hurt you, kid? Cause from my perspective it was looking like it was Paul?"
Ruben moved to sit on the end of his own bed, crossing his arms. "It had to be Paul. He's the one we found holding you hostage."
Oscar shook his head violently, his hair flopping over his eyes. "No. No, not Paul. Before him. It was... other people."
"Who?" Corbin pressed.
"I don't know," Oscar stammered. "They were always dressed the same. In white clothes. And they covered their faces with white masks, too. Plastic ones. I could never see their eyes. They just... they did tests. They hurt me."
Ruben exchanged a dark look with Corbin. The bodies in the sewer container, Ruben thought. Dressed in white uniforms. Number 9. This wasn't just a kidnapping, this was an institution.
"How many more were there like you?" Corbin asked, his voice dropping, dangerous. "In the white place?"
Oscar froze. His breath hitched, and he started to whimper, a high-pitched sound of distress. He rocked back and forth. "I... I don't..."
"Think, kid," Corbin snapped, his patience fraying. "Five? Ten? A hundred?"
"I don't know!" Oscar cried out, shrinking away from Corbin's volume. "I don't know, please don't be mad."
"Corbin, ease up," Ruben warned, shooting his friend a glare. He turned his attention back to the boy, softening his expression. "It's okay, Oscar. You don't have to know the number. Just tell us about you. What is your Ego? What does it actually do?"
Oscar wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I don't know what it's called. It just... it makes people really angry."
"Angry how?" Ruben asked.
"Inside," Oscar said, tapping his small chest. "It comes out of me like... like smoke. And if people breathe it, they stop being themselves. They just want to hurt. They start fighting each other until they fall down."
"And you have no control over it?" Ruben asked.
Oscar shook his head sadly. "No. It just happens."
"What about Paul?" Corbin asked. "If you were walking around with him, why didn't he go crazy and try to kill you?"
"Paul stays far away usually," Oscar explained. "Or... or he wears a mask. Sometimes he wears a mask and it makes him safe."
Ruben and Corbin looked at each other, confused.
"A gas mask?" Corbin asked.
"No," Oscar said. "Just... a mask."
They shrugged at each other. It didn't make tactical sense, a simple face covering shouldn't stop a neuro-chemical agent or a psychic field, but they let it slide for the moment.
Suddenly, Oscar's eyes widened. He sat up straight, his hands flying to his throat. The color drained from his already pale face.
"Oh no," he whispered. "Oh no, no, no."
"What?" Ruben stood up. "What's wrong?"
"I haven't taken my medicine," Oscar gasped, looking around the room frantically as if the pills might be hidden in the curtains. "I missed the time. Paul always gives it to me in the morning."
"What medicine?" Ruben asked sharply. "Is he drugging you?"
"It's to dull the effects!" Oscar cried, his breathing turning ragged. "If I don't take it, the bad air comes out. It builds up and it hurts and then everyone gets angry!"
He started shaking, wrapping his arms around himself and digging his fingernails into his skin. "I need it. I need it or I'm going to hurt you."
"Hey, hey," Ruben moved closer, keeping his voice low and steady, trying to ground the kid. "Look at me. Breathe. Nothing is going to happen right now. You're safe. We're in a big house, plenty of air. You aren't going to hurt us."
Oscar squeezed his eyes shut, rocking faster.
Corbin stood up, frustration etching his features. "What about Paul's Ego? Does he have a power that stops this?"
"I don't know!" Oscar wailed. "He never told me!"
Corbin let out a loud sigh, running a hand down his face. He looked at the terrified kid, then at Ruben. The situation was getting complicated. They weren't just hiding a fugitive; they were hiding a biological time bomb that needed specific medication to keep from detonating.
Corbin walked over and crouched down in front of Oscar, forcing himself to smile, though it looked pained.
"Okay, kid. Okay. Keep your head up," Corbin said, trying to be gentle. "We get it. You're a ticking clock. How often does this happen? The explosion part?"
Oscar sniffled, opening one eye. "Every few days. If I don't get the medicine."
"Every few days," Ruben repeated, doing the mental math. They had time, but not much.
"We'll figure something else out," Ruben said, trying to sound more confident than he felt. "We're not going to let you explode, and we're not going to let you hurt anyone. We'll find a way to manage it."
Oscar looked at them, tears still leaking from his eyes, but he nodded. He didn't believe them, not really, but he had no one else to trust.
"We need to move," Corbin muttered to Ruben, standing up. "Before he goes nuclear."
The heavy oak door was pulled shut, leaving Oscar alone in the room to wrestle with his exhaustion. In the hallway, the air was still and smelt faintly of oranges and old dust, the scent of a house that had been preserved rather than lived in.
Ruben leaned against the floral wallpaper, sliding down until he was crouching on his haunches. He rubbed his face with both hands, the friction burning his tired skin.
Corbin stood opposite him, leaning his shoulder against the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest. His eyes were dark, brooding.
"So," Corbin broke the silence, his voice a low rumble. "What do you think it is? The medicine. Antipsychotics? Sedatives? Or something from the chemist meant to suppress Egos?"
Ruben stared at the pattern on the carpet runner. He didn't answer immediately. He chewed on the inside of his cheek, tasting iron.
"There probably isn't one," Ruben said flatly. "Not a real one, anyway."
Corbin frowned, tilting his head. "What do you mean? The kid was shaking like a leaf. He thinks he needs it."
Ruben looked up, his eyes hollow but sharp. "Think back, Corbin. Remember what Dario told us? Back then, when I was... going through it."
Corbin's expression softened instantly. He remembered. He remembered the nights in the safehouse when Ruben was sweating through his sheets after his incident at the school. Dario Kosta, The Warlord, hadn't coddled him. He had sat by the bed like a stone statue and lectured him on the metaphysics of the soul.
"Egos are extensions of the psyche," Corbin recited, the lesson coming back to him. "They are powered by trauma, yes, but controlled by the will. The mind is the engine."
"Exactly," Ruben said, his voice raspy. "Dario drilled it into us. Your Ego is a muscle of the mind. Anything that alters your perception, alcohol, narcotics, heavy sedatives, it messes with the connection between the Will and the Power. It makes the signal fuzzy."
Ruben tapped his own temple. "When I was high, I probably struggled with using my Ego, not that I tried to use it much."
Corbin's eyes widened as the realization hit him. He looked back at the closed door where the small boy lay curling into a ball.
"So Paul wasn't giving him medicine to stop the gas," Corbin realized, disgusted. "He was doping the kid up to break his mental defences."
"Most likely," Ruben confirmed, nodding grimly. "If Oscar is lucid, maybe he can hold the gas back. Maybe he has some control. But if Paul keeps him in a chemical fog, keeps his mind soft and pliable... then the gas just leaks out. It becomes a raw discharge. Paul turned him into a broken faucet so he could just collect the water whenever he wanted."
"That sick prick," Corbin hissed, pushing himself off the wall. He paced a small circle in the narrow hall. "He made the kid an addict just to turn him into a weapon."
"And now we have to deal with the withdrawal," Ruben said, the weight of the task settling on him. "We can't give him whatever Paul was giving him."
"How are we going to explain that to an eight-year-old who thinks he's about to explode?" Corbin asked.
"We don't," Ruben said coldly. "We just wait him out. We let him sweat it out. It's going to be ugly. He's going to scream, he's going to beg, and he's going to hate us. But it's the only way to harden his mind again."
Corbin looked at the door, conflicted. "And if he goes off? If the gas builds up like he said?"
"We deal with that later," Ruben said, dismissing the apocalyptic scenario with a wave of his hand. "Right now, we keep him clean."
Ruben stood up, his knees cracking. He stretched his arms over his head, his spine popping. He walked to the window at the end of the hall and looked out at the impenetrable gray fog pressing against the glass.
"God, I hate this," Ruben muttered, his fingers twitching. "I hate being stuck inside. I feel like a rat in a cage. I just want to go out. Run the rooftops. Do something."
"We're stuck, Ruben," Corbin said, stepping up beside him. "We step outside, we leave tracks. The Paladins are hunting. We can't move physically."
Corbin watched Ruben's reflection in the glass. He saw the restlessness, the agitation. He knew Ruben needed a task, or his mind would start eating itself, just like the kid's.
"But you don't have to be there physically," Corbin suggested, a tactical idea forming. "Why don't you use Forge? Send something out. Something small, fast. Have it sniff out Paul Strahm."
Ruben looked at him. "A scout?"
"Yeah," Corbin nodded. "You said you have manual control now, right? Send a dragon. Keep it high, or keep it in the shadows. Find out where the Mime went. If he's planning an encore, we need to know where the stage is."
Ruben thought about it. It was risky, maintaining a summon at a distance took concentration, but it was better than pacing the hallway of a stranger's house. It gave him agency.
He shrugged, a faint spark of interest lighting his eyes.
"Alright," Ruben said. "I'll do that. Let's see if we can find the clown."
The apartment was silent, a stale box of trapped air and dust motes suspended in the gloom. Paul Strahm sat at the small kitchen table, his hands folded in his lap, motionless.
To look at him was to look at nothing in particular. He was a smudge of gray against the beige wall, a young man so aggressively average that the eye naturally slid off him to find something more interesting. Pale skin, dark hair, clothes the colour of wet pavement.
But inside him, a furnace burned cold.
He looked at the empty chair across from him. Oscar's chair.
The silence of the room was an insult. It was a reminder of what had been taken, and what had been done before that. They had branded him, cut him, and hollowed him out until he was a perfect vessel for their "science." He was a success. That was the bitterest pill, he was just another one of the masterpiece of the Nine Clans experiment, a weapon forged in the dark, only to be abandoned when the politics shifted.
My home was trampled, Paul thought, the words drifting through his mind like smoke. My faith was bastardized. And now I am nothing.
He didn't clench his jaw. He didn't throw the salt shaker against the wall. He simply let the thought settle, heavy and absolute. The nation of Ostara believed it had buried its sins in the sewers, but sins do not rot. They grow. This land did not belong to the Paladins or the merchants or the soft, fleshy citizens walking in the fog. It belonged to the people they tried to erase. It belonged to him.
And he would take it back. He would make them suffer as the Nine had suffered, until the only thing left of their golden nation was a scar on the map.
A faint vibration in the air disturbed his meditation.
Paul didn't turn his head. His eyes merely shifted, sliding toward the chrome reflection of the toaster on the counter.
There, hovering near the ceiling fixture, was a distortion. A small, swirling construct of golden light, shaped like a miniature dragon. It buzzed silently, a scout, looking for something. Looking for him.
The boy, Paul realized. The thief.
He didn't panic. He didn't scramble for cover. Instead, Paul reached out with a slow, deliberate hand and picked up a wax paper cup left over from a takeout meal.
He stood up, his movement fluid and soundless.
His Ego, Mime, required clarity. It required the absolute conviction that the fake was real.
Paul raised his left hand and pinched the air between his thumb and forefinger. He felt the weight of the invisible lasso, the texture of the non-existent rope. He swung it once, a gentle, lazy loop, and cast it toward the ceiling.
The pantomime became physics. The invisible loop snagged the golden dragon, not with a violent jerk, but with a sudden, confused tension. The construct halted, caught in a net that wasn't there.
Paul didn't pull it down. Instead, he widened his stance. He held the invisible string taut in his left hand, feeling the hum of the dragon's magic vibrating against his fingertips. With his right hand, he raised the paper cup.
He mimed the old game children played, the tin can telephone. He acted out the process of tying the string to the bottom of the cup. But he didn't put the cup to his ear.
He put it to his eye.
He stretched the line tight, exaggerating the tension, turning the string into a rigid rod, a tunnel of force. He looked through the connection.
Show me the other end, Paul commanded the laws of physics. Show me the hand that holds the kite.
The bottom of the paper cup dissolved into a circle of perfect clarity. The distance collapsed. The invisible thread acted as a fibre-optic cable, carrying light from the source directly to Paul's retina.
He saw a room with floral wallpaper.
He saw a boy sitting on a bed.
The boy was young, mid teens perhaps, with skin a warm, deep brown. Short, tightly coiled dreads framed a face that was too hard for its age, marked by shadowed hollows. But it was the eyes that held Paul's attention, amber, striking, and intense. They were staring out a window, looking at nothing, distant and guarded.
He saw the silver studs in the boy's ears. He saw him wearing a short sleeved shirt, as if he just got out of bed with it on. And there, on the boy's left shoulder, was the black ink of a tattoo, a crow, wings spread, ready to fly.
Paul lowered the cup. The connection snapped. The golden dragon on the ceiling, released from the tension, flickered and dissolved into motes of light.
Paul placed the paper cup back on the table.
He didn't smile. He didn't frown. He simply catalogued the face, the location, and the name. The thief was found, he was a target.
Paul turned and walked to the door. He moved with the terrifying calmness of a man who has already accepted the outcome. He buttoned his coat, checked his pockets, and stepped out into the hallway.
He was going to get Oscar back. And then, he was going to burn all his enemies down, starting with the boy with the amber eyes.