The loose section of fence was exactly where he'd remembered it. South side, third post from the corner, the base rusted through at ground level so the whole panel swung inward if you lifted and pushed at the same time. Silas had walked past this yard a hundred times. He'd never had a reason to go in. He had one now.
He slipped through, let the panel swing back, and stood on the other side in the dark.
The Metropolis freight yard had been decommissioned two years ago when the city rerouted its rail logistics through the new automated hub in the harbour district. What was left was a long rectangle of cracked concrete between two rows of empty loading bays. About six hundred metres end to end, maybe eighty wide, lit by nothing except the ambient glow of the city above the fence line. The nearest streetlight was out. The security camera on the north building pointed at the main gate and nowhere else. He'd timed the gap between the distant sound of traffic on the avenue and confirmed there was nothing moving in here.
Six hundred metres. Eighty wide. No walls, no furniture, no ceilings.
'This'll do.'
Silas walked to the centre of the yard, turned a slow circle, checked the perimeter. Nothing. Just cracked concrete and the distant hum of the city and the Omnitrix on his wrist glowing its steady green in the dark.
He stood there for a moment. Dial already set to position four. Thumb on the faceplate. Not pressing yet.
'Okay. This is different from the bathroom. That was an accident, it happened before you could think about it. This is a choice. You're choosing this.'
He was aware of his own heartbeat. Four seconds between pulses on the watch. Same rhythm.
'One transformation, full duration, document the physical experience, document the capabilities, note the limits. That's the plan. That's all this is.'
Silas pressed the dial down.
....
The green light came. The pressure built. The sound, that deep resonance that lived in the bones rather than the ears, and then the world shifted size and shape around him and he was standing on different legs entirely.
XLR8 was nothing like Infernoid.
Where Infernoid was massive and dense and radiated heat that kept the world at a distance, XLR8 was lean and low and quick in a way that made the air feel thin, like the world was barely enough to hold him still. The body was raptor-built, digitigrade legs standing on the toe joints rather than the flat of the foot, a long counterbalancing tail that moved independently of conscious thought, arms shorter than human proportions and ending in three-fingered hands that were clearly secondary to the legs. The eyes were compound and wide-field, tracking everything in the peripheral range with a clarity that was almost too much. XLR8 could see the fence at both ends of the yard simultaneously without moving his head.
'Okay. That's a lot of visual information.'
XLR8 took one step. The step covered four feet.
He took another. The tail swung automatically to compensate, and the second step covered six feet and he was already leaning forward in a way that his human balance instincts screamed was wrong but the body's instincts accepted completely.
'Don't fight the body. You fought Infernoid at first too. Let it do what it knows.'
XLR8 ran.
The first fifty metres were a negotiation. His human brain insisted on processing the speed as something to be managed, while the body insisted that speed was simply the default state and stillness was the aberration. The tail kept him upright through three turns he didn't consciously plan. The legs moved in a gait cycle that had nothing to do with human running, longer and lower, the toe joints absorbing impact and releasing it with a mechanical efficiency that felt like controlled falling.
By a hundred meters XLR8 stopped fighting it.
By two hundred meters he understood.
Speed at this level was not a sensation. It was a context. The yard at running pace was a different place than the yard standing still. The cracked concrete became a blur, the loading bays a smear of grey on either side, the fence at the far end arriving and then passing and then behind him and then he was turning, the tail sweeping wide, and running back the other way before the rational part of his brain had finished registering that he'd turned at all.
XLR8 did a full lap of the yard. Then another. Then he stopped in the center, standing on those strange digitigrade feet with the tail balanced behind him, and just breathed. The compound eyes tracked three pigeons roosting on the north building eave, a plastic bag moving along the fence line in a wind Silas hadn't felt as a human, the distant flash of a news drone three blocks east.
'Six hundred metres. I did that in four seconds? Less?'
XLR8 checked the black timer panel on his chest. Eight minutes, forty seconds remaining.
'You have time. Learn the body. What are the limits?'
XLR8 tested the turns, finding how tight he could take them before the tail couldn't compensate fast enough. He tested the stop, full speed to stationary in about twelve feet, which felt reasonable for something this fast and was probably alarming by any objective standard. He tested the claws on the loading bay wall and they caught concrete cleanly, and for a brief disorienting moment he was running up the side of the building before he thought better of it and came back down.
'Wall running. File that.'
Four minutes left on the timer. XLR8 was standing at the south end of the yard, tail swishing slowly, compound eyes doing their wide-field sweep, when he heard it.
....
Two streets over. East. Raised voices, one sharp and demanding, the other low and frightened. Then a crash. Glass, by the sound of it. Then silence.
The Omnitrix pulsed. Three quick beats.
'I know. I heard it.'
XLR8 stood still for a moment. Four minutes on the timer. Silas had come here to test, not to intervene, not to be a hero, just to run in a straight line and document what that felt like. He didn't know the streets well enough in this form. He didn't know what he'd find over there. He had four minutes of transformation left and then the watch would lock and he'd be a sixteen-year-old in a hoodie in a situation he'd walked into without a plan.
'You have four minutes. The fence exit is behind you. Go home. Document what you learned. This is not your call.'
The Omnitrix pulsed again. Three beats, same pattern.
XLR8 was already moving.
'I know, I know. I'm going.'
XLR8 went through the fence gap at reduced speed and still nearly took the whole panel off the post. He ran east along the alley behind the row of storefronts, the compound eyes processing the environment faster than Silas could consciously keep up with. His nose, sharper in this form than anything human, caught the spike of adrenaline chemistry and something metallic that his brain filed under relevant before he could interrogate why.
XLR8 came around the corner onto the side street and slowed to a stop.
Convenience store. Twenty-four hour, the kind with the flickering sign above the door. Inside, visible through the plate glass front, a shopkeeper stood behind the counter with his hands raised, another man in front of it with his back to the window. The second man had something in his right hand. The broken glass was a display case on the near side, knocked over. XLR8 could see the shopkeeper's face clearly, an older man maybe sixty, his expression very still in the specific way of someone who had calculated that stillness was the safest option available.
'One perpetrator. One victim. Confined space. Three minutes on the timer, maybe less.'
XLR8 moved to the alley on the store's south side. Service entrance, door slightly ajar, the interior lit yellow behind it.
'XLR8 is not built for this. Too fast for a small space. What you have is speed, claws, and the fact that he doesn't know you're here.'
....
XLR8 came through the service entrance at about a quarter of his maximum speed, which was still fast enough that the door came off one hinge when he misjudged the angle.
The man at the counter spun. XLR8 registered the weapon, he'd been right about the metallic smell, in the fraction of a second before he covered the distance and made a decision. Not the weapon hand, too risky at any speed, but the arm. XLR8 caught the forearm with both three-fingered hands and applied lateral pressure, not enough to break anything he told himself, though he wasn't certain he had the fine control at this speed to guarantee that, and the man went sideways into the shelf of energy drinks. The cans cascaded across the floor in a wave of aluminium.
The weapon slid under the bottom shelf. The man lay on the floor tangled in energy drinks with the expression of someone whose entire operating model of the evening had just been cancelled.
"Don't move," XLR8 said, planting himself between the man and the door. The voice came out as a rapid chittering click that bore absolutely no resemblance to anything the man had expected to hear. Behind the counter the shopkeeper said something in a language Silas didn't recognize, shock rather than a question from the tone of it.
The Omnitrix pulsed red.
'No, not now, give me thirty more seconds'
The green light came anyway. The pressure reversed, the resonance travelling back the other way, and then Silas was himself again. Sixteen, human, hoodie, crouched in the middle of a convenience store with a man on the floor staring up at him and an elderly shopkeeper staring at him and the recharge lock cycling red on the Omnitrix under his sleeve.
Two full seconds of silence.
"Hi," Silas said.
The man on the floor looked at where XLR8 had been standing. Looked at Silas. Looked back at the empty space.
"What," the man said. Not a question. Just the word on its own.
Silas looked past him at the shopkeeper, whose expression was cycling rapidly through several stages and settling on something between relief and complete bewilderment.
"Are you hurt?" Silas asked him, keeping his voice steady.
The shopkeeper shook his head slowly.
"Good," Silas said. He looked back down at the man on the floor, who had decided that not moving was still the correct strategy even with the seven-foot alien gone.
"I'd stay right there. Police are going to want to talk to you," Silas told him. He located the weapon under the bottom shelf near the door, stepped carefully around it without touching it, and turned back to the shopkeeper.
"Can you call 911?" Silas asked him.
The shopkeeper was already reaching for the phone behind the counter. Silas moved to the front door, pushed it open, and stepped out onto the empty street.
He was two blocks away before the first sirens started.
....
Window. Hoodie off. Shoes by the door. 11:14 PM.
Silas's mother's light was still off. He stood in the dark of his room for a moment, just standing, letting the adrenaline finish cycling through. His hands were steady, which surprised him slightly. His heart rate was elevated. The Omnitrix on his wrist sat dark red, recharge lock, long cycle after a run like tonight.
Silas sat at his desk and opened his notebook.
He wrote for twenty minutes straight. XLR8's physical profile, the digitigrade stance, the tail mechanics, the compound eye field, the wall running, the stopping distance. Speed as context rather than sensation. The way the body's instincts and his own had negotiated over the first hundred metres before he stopped fighting it. He wrote all of it in the careful sequential order that made him feel like he had a handle on things, even when he wasn't sure he did.
Then Silas wrote what had happened at the store.
He wrote it straight. What he'd heard, what he'd decided, how he'd gone in, the misjudged door, the intervention, the timeout. He wrote: reverted in front of two witnesses. Neither appeared to connect Silas Foster to the transformation. Perpetrator was on the floor disoriented, shopkeeper in shock. Low identification risk. However.
He underlined however twice.
He kept writing. This was not controlled. I went in with three minutes on the timer in a form I had used for eleven minutes total in my life. I misjudged the door. I misjudged the stopping distance on the arm grab. He might have a bruised forearm. I reverted at the worst possible moment and had no exit plan for being human in that room.
Silas sat back and read what he'd written. Then, at the bottom of the page, he wrote two lines.
'It worked.'
'It almost didn't.'
He looked at both of those for a long time. They were both true at the same time, and that was the thing he was going to have to get used to. Things being simultaneously true that felt like they should cancel each other out.
He closed the notebook and looked at the red hourglass on the Omnitrix.
'Nine forms left. Nine more things you don't understand yet. Nine more bodies you haven't been in.'
He turned off the desk lamp and sat in the dark for a while.
'And a shopkeeper who saw a sixteen-year-old in a hoodie appear where a seven-foot alien used to be, who said hi, and left. That story is going somewhere. Just don't know where yet.'
The Omnitrix cycled back to green at 11:48 PM. Silas was already asleep.
(Image)