by Ryan Tang
Jared's home was just a few streets down from Stock's. It'd been repaired and repainted, but Alex still remembered what it'd looked like after his father's arrest.
"Are you mad about what happened?"
After Stock smeared Jared's father as a corporate spy, Jared's Block 1 neighbors had vandalized and destroyed his house.
Jared shook his head.
"It's the type of thing we were expected to do. Make a big show of supporting him. It wasn't personal. Once we finish building everything, I'm going to move out of here anyway. Having the kids over was fun. I think I need to be nearby people. And besides..."
He sighed and trailed off as the thought hung in the air. Stock's supporters had paid for their misplaced loyalty with their lives.
The grandeur of Block 1 was utterly foreign to Alice. She gasped and pointed.
"Holy shit! Your house is huge! Did Stock live here? Did you take Stock's house?"
"No, it's my parent's old house."
Jared shifted awkwardly.
Alex knew he'd always felt guilty about the tiny homes in the later Blocks. Southern Robotics had successfully lobbied Governor Waters to place strict restrictions on house heights so that the company's false Paragons could fly.
Jon had seen the Block 1 homes when he'd escaped from Block 12, but he'd never seen a house like Jared's neighbor's. The architecture was utterly bizarre. It was a total mishmash of shapes, all stacked up one on top of the other.
"What's this?"
Jared laughed.
"The guy who lived here was a total weirdo. He thought this kind of house was the most beautiful thing possible. He was always adding new shapes to it, too, wanted to see how strange he could make it. It was the only house that fell here during the quakes, because of how weirdly it was balanced."
Jared caught himself and winced.
Stock's quake hadn't had much effect on the higher Blocks, but that was by design. Stock had deliberately dug for Eternium far away from his home and headquarters. The later Blocks had been reduced to wastelands. The tiny little cube homes had been uprooted and destroyed. A lot of people had died that night. And in the total darkness of Block 12, even a few mild tremors led to horrific consequences.
Alex knew what that wince said. They all had to watch themselves.
So much had gone wrong that it was impossible to know what stray word or action could trigger a torrent of bad memories. It could be an innocuous comment about the quakes. It could be discovering a remaining Eternium bust of Stock, the man who'd sacrificed your family. It could be pulling your brother's Eternium shield out of the Spire floor.
Jared smiled and tried his best to stay positive.
"My dad told me it looks even weirder inside. Come on! Let's go! We'll start searching here first."
"Are you sure we can go inside? Won't he get mad?"
Jared winced again.
"This guy went back to work at Southern Robotics the day after the quakes. He probably signed a Contract or got sacrificed."
Jared shrugged.
"Don't know if the Paragons are here, but this is as good of a place as any."
He gestured at Jon and Alice to descend first. Once they'd started climbing down, Jared knelt underneath the seat and pulled out a gun. Alex's eyes widened, but her friend shook his head and gestured for her to stay silent.
"It's just in case. As I said, I don't think anything is happening. It's just like how you're carrying some Eternium."
Jared hurried forward once he got to the bottom of the ladder.
"Alright, kids. Let's get going. This one will probably be a real pain. We had him over for dinner a couple of times, and he was a paranoid weirdo. Plus, I think he mentioned most of his house is underground."
The door was locked.
Alex paused for a moment then decided she didn't feel bad breaking it open. After all, the owner was almost certainly dead. She pulled a shard out of her pocket. The metal flashed brightest blue and formed a tight glove around her hand.
When she slammed her fist against the door, it crumpled immediately. The sleek white door was just a lesser metal, nothing that could stand up against Eternium.
She brought her hand back for another blow.
There was a tremendous bang from inside the house.
Alex reacted entirely on instinct.
The Eternium fist widened and expanded, forming a shield that smothered the hole in the door. The mythical metal sang as a full round of bullets shattered against it.
Jon and Alice screamed.
Alex recognized the weapon at once. The scattered hail of bullets was common in the simulator. A shotgun had just gone off inside the house.
Her eyes widened in surprise.
"Hello? Is someone in there? I'm sorry, I thought you were..."
What was she going to say?
Dead?
He clearly wasn't dead. He'd just fired a shotgun at her. But if he heard her, there was no response.
"Idiot! Idiot!"
Jared's voice was very tight, and his eyes were dark with anger.
"Hit the door again. This time, send the bullets back to where they came from."
He started herding her students to get behind him.
"Won't I hit him?"
He shook his head.
"No. That's not him. It's a trap he set. He showed it to me before."
He muttered angrily under his breath. Her students' faces were stark white. Alex tightly gripped the searing Eternium. She was ready to protect them. She was their ace.
She slammed her hand against the remnants of the door. This time, she was ready for the shotgun blast. The fist morphed into a shield, and she angled it toward where she'd heard the bullets fire.
There was a tremendous bang.
Alex peered around the corner. Tight wires tied to the door were wrapped around a broken shotgun. The stray shots had rebounded and destroyed the whole configuration.
Jared was furious.
"What was he thinking? Why? Why? Why would he do something like this? Why would he still have this armed?"
"He's dead and he still almost killed someone on accident. Keep that shield up. There might be more traps."
Alex stared at the shotgun.
If she'd been one moment slower, they'd all be dead.
"Why would he do something like that? What if he forgot to turn it off! He could have shot himself! Or someone from his family!"
Jared shook his head.
"He didn't have a family. I just can't believe he would have kept this armed. He showed it to me once when we were over for dinner. I thought it was just a joke. Crazy."
He shook his head again.
"He was completely crazy. He's dead and he still almost killed someone."
Alex turned to Alice and Jon.
"I think it'll be best if we explored this place alone. It's better to be safe than sorry."
She pointed at the shotgun. She was reluctant to even let them cross the threshold. What if there were more traps?
Her students gaped.
"Why would he do that? He could have killed you!"
Alice frowned.
"Luke's dad said Waters was like that. He said he had a gun in his Paragon. He used it to shoot people when he got scared."
Like Jared, Waters always kept a gun under his piloting chair – he had hundreds of guns for his hundreds of false Paragons. Unfortunately, their idiot former governor was scared only of ordinary citizens. Both of the people he'd shot had been innocent bystanders. If only he'd treated Stock and Southern Robotics with the same suspicion.
Jared nodded seriously. He skillfully submerged his anger, and his voice turned light and cheery.
She remembered Jared telling her how he could put on a "speech voice." It was what he used to rally everyone the night of the quakes. It was what he used to condemn Stock and Waters for ignoring the lower Blocks.
Alex wished she had a speech voice.
"Yeah. You've got to be careful with t
hat sort of thing. You guys should go wait inside the machine for now. We'll call you back out again for the next one. This shouldn't take too long."
The two of them entered the house alone.
____
After about an hour of exploring, Alex and Jared hadn't encountered any traps, but they also hadn't made much progress. There was an endless array of hidden panels carefully disguised against the sleek white walls. Only the faintest of outlines gave them away. It seemed like every room had a trapdoor, under which Jared's neighbor had stashed piles and piles of money. It was nearly as bad as the Spire. It was only due to her years of exploring the black tower and its countless winding passages that Alex could find her way through the bizarre trick house.
Money was hidden throughout the house, more money than Alex had ever seen. The dead man had exclusively used paper notes. Alex only recognized it from her days on Diligence, and even then, it'd been a rarity. On Plenty, paper money was almost unheard of. There was a pile stacked inside his mattress. There were bills hidden inside cut-out books. It seemed like the strange man didn't read. Every book cover in his house was stuffed with notes, and there was never a single page remaining. It got to the point where every time Alex saw a book, she expected to find more money. There were boxes of cash stuffed inside the fridge. There were notes carefully hidden inside the lining of the house's circular doors, which emulated the ones in Southern Robotics headquarters. Despite his house's bizarre design, the man hadn't dared to deviate from Stock's recommended interior.
Alex remembered Jared explaining it to her. Stock regularly invited himself over to his executive's homes for dinner, and he expected to see their homes modeled after Southern Robotics headquarters. It was allegedly to ensure that his highest-ranking officers still thought of work when they were resting. It was just more petty bullying, but the executives of Southern Robotics didn't have a choice, not if they wanted to live on Plenty and work a high paying job.
Alex kicked another box of cash and walked on.
There was so much money. Alex thought hard about taking some for herself. Nobody on Plenty had the time to think about money since the crisis, but surely it would come up again.
Or maybe it wouldn't.
Money baffled the lost citizens of The Wastes, especially the children. They'd stopped using it in less than a generation.
She still remembered Jon's shock the first time he asked about it in class. Her other students had looked at him like he was from another planet. In a way, he sort of was.
"What? You need to pay people to get them to do stuff for you? But what if you get sick? What if you break your arm?"
"Wait. You had to pay him every day just for the sun? But wouldn't it be on anyways? You'd go to jail if you didn't pay him? That's nuts! He didn't even make the sun!"
The people of Block 12 had to stick together to survive in the forever darkness.
Alex looked at the bizarre splendor all around her, at the sleek white walls and the Old Earth artifacts hanging from the walls. Plenty already had enough for everyone to survive.
Just this home had a whopping six food generators, two on each of the floors, all of which could synthesize the most impressive meats and vegetables. The label promised Old Earth-level freshness.
Alex pointed.
"There are probably more food generators in the other homes too. We should take a look at that."
"Oh. Yeah."
They'd been using Jared's so far, but almost every home must have had them. Stock's food generators might be the best of all. They were so busy and so tired that they hadn't even thought about something as obvious as getting better food.
There were seven false Paragons buried inside the strange man's hangar. The limbs couldn't move, not without Eternium. The defective machines couldn't even stand. They lay flat on their stomachs.
Alex shook her head.
Who the hell had the money to buy seven useless machines?
She thought of her meeting with Stock again. Everything he'd done had technically been legal. All the excess and waste in this house had been strongly encouraged. After the citizens of Plenty finished rebuilding, they'd come up with a better way to live.
They walked under a tall archway, and Alex knelt when she saw a thin line running through the base.
She knocked against the wall with her left hand. Her right was ready to respond instantly. Jared clung tightly to her so the barrier would protect them both.
The wall slid open, but it was just more cash.
The two of them sighed.
When they stood again, the librarian remembered the shotgun trap and tightly clutched the bar in her hand. They couldn't get lulled into a false sense of security.
They walked through yet another circular door into yet another sleek white room, and Alex saw another panel. It was even better disguised than the others, just the slightest different shade of white than everything else.
She raised the Eternium shield and walked forward.
Then something made her stop in her tracks. It was her battle-mind, the eerie pool of hyperawareness her brain dove into whenever she sat in the cockpit of her Paragon. She stopped walking. Her mind was abuzz. Alex felt a queer spark eerily identical to how she felt whenever she decided not to peer past her cover.
There could be other traps.
The guns could be hidden elsewhere in the room.
She stared across the roof and then she saw it.
Alex pulled one of the shards out of her pocket. It flashed blue, and she threw it hard at the slightly discolored smudge on the wall. There was a melodic clang as it hit dead-center.
Then there were two enormous bangs as rifles emerged from either side of the wall, obliterating the place where she would have been standing.
Alex shuddered as the guns rattled on and on. She wasn't sure if she could have brought up her barrier in time for that.
Jared let out a yelp of surprise. He raised his pistol and fired. He missed his first pair of shots, but he brought down the rifles when he fired again.
A safe fell out of the wall and cracked open in front of them.
A single ring rolled out of the safe and onto the floor.
The color was unmistakable.
It was a thick band of Eternium, wide enough to cover a whole knuckle. The rest of the safe was empty.
To Alex's shock, Jared began to cry as soon as he saw it.
"That ring. That ring man. He was so proud of that ring. He...He...Man."
He paused to wipe the tears from his eyes, but they wouldn't stop falling. He sighed.
"He gave my dad a ring, just like it. It wasn't in my dad's things. Stock must have taken it after he killed him. I didn't like this guy, but there was a reason my dad always had him over. They talked about how once Southern Robotics discovered Eternium, everyone would have rings like that. It wasn't about the rings, it was about, you know."
Jared shrugged and gestured at the rifles.
"You know if my dad didn't see what happened, if he didn't see the brainwashed workers, he would have died a true believer. He would have been sacrificed. My mom, same thing. Probably me too. A lot of people believed in Stock. Even when he was stupid. Even when he was being crazy. Just the results we saw. And the money, you know. It was easy to look away because of the money, but still."
Jared rambled on and on as he stared at the black ring on the ground.
"It just always seemed like he was getting closer. We'll find Eternium soon if we keep pushing. It felt good to work on something so important. It felt good to think we could help people. One day, there will be so much Eternium that the rings will be cheap for everybody! We'll build out the colony with it! We'll have the Paragons too, and we'll get back to Old Earth!"
He walked forward and took the ring off the ground, turning it around in his hands.
"In a weird way, this is all that's left of him. He had no kids. He didn't have anything. We were his only friends, and we didn't even like him that much. But this
ring man...This ring...He was the real deal you know? Wasn't just in it for the money. He was the real deal, and Stock killed him for believing."
____
There was a sudden tremor as soon as Alex and Jared left the house. One of the triangles fell and hit the ground with a loud crash.
They leaped back in surprise.
"Shit!"
Jared shot an uneasily look at the rickety structure as the two of them hastily backed away.
"Don't worry. Just a reminder that we need to repair the core. It's just his stupid design, that's all. Won't happen anywhere else."
But the crash continued echoing in her ears.
It was a good thing they hadn't been inside. The Eternium barrier would have shielded them, but Alex didn't want to imagine pushing out of the rubble.
When they walked back to where Jared had parked his Hands Paragon, Alex heard her students arguing loudly with another voice she recognized.
It was Jared's friend Duncan, their former teammate in three-on-three simulator duels. She'd never heard him sound so upset before. Alex turned to Jared, but her friend was already sprinting into the distance.
Duncan was Jared's best friend growing up, but the two had barely spoken since the crisis. Duncan had been one of the first to fall under the power of Stock's Contracts. By the time they freed him, the rest of his family had been sacrificed as true believers.
The voices grew louder and louder.
"It's not their fault, okay? They didn't know! They didn't know what was happening to you!"
Duncan's voice grew louder and higher with each word he spoke.
"And look! They died, didn't they? What more could you want from them? They literally died because they didn't know! What more do you want from them!"
Alice cried out. It sounded like she was trying to pull Jon back.
"No! Don't fight! Come on! Everyone got hurt!"
"What would Mrs. T think? Remember what she told us? Everyone got hurt!"
But Jon didn't back down an inch. His eyes were angry and defiant.
"My brother died too! It wasn't his fault! He died because I couldn't help him! He died because we were locked up right next to you, and you didn't pay any attention!"