The man pauses for a moment, considering what he should, and maybe shouldn't, say to me.
"I was on a vessel. We were inbound back to the Earth relay station when ... there was an accident," he says.
"What kind of accident?"
"The bad kind."
"How long have you been here?"
"I'm not sure. A long time. Nothing changes. Everything stays the same. Every hour of every day. I don't know why I'm even saying 'day.' There are no days here or nights. There's nothing but this. You have to do something. You have to get me out of here. I'm slipping. I'm starting to lose it. I don't know why I'm telling you all of this. I'm not even sure if you're real."
My stomach drops as I start to realize.
"What's your name?" I ask hesitantly.
"John. John Jones. I think. I can barely even remember anymore."
It's him, Jones, the man who killed my parents and thousands of others, one of the most vile and horrific killers who has ever lived, and he's impossibly standing right here, right in front of me, and ... he's normal.
Maybe he’s not normal. He's definitely got a few screws loose still, but he's not the maniac the world watched kill for sport. He's something different. For starters, he can talk. The Jones I knew, before he died, never spoke a word, which only added to the mystery surrounding him.
I begin to open my mouth to ask another question, when my metabands start chirping like crazy. It’s a sound I've never heard them make before, something in between a notification sound and an alarm.
"What ... what is that?" Jones asks. "You have them too. You have the same as me." He holds up his wrists to demonstrate that he's wearing metabands as well, as if it wasn't one of the first things I noticed. "What does that sound mean? What are they doing?"
"I'm not sure," I tell him honestly. "They've never done this before."
The chirping becomes more rapid and louder. Jones and I catch each other's glares as we both recognize that the sound is a warning. It's increasing in frequency the same way a bomb would.
Without another word, Jones turns and runs in the opposite direction, far into the never-ending white void. There's nowhere for me to run, not with my metabands still attached. In a panic, I touch the bands together in an effort to deactivate them, hoping that maybe that would stop whatever is about to happen.
It doesn't work. The bands offer no response whatsoever. The beeping continues growing in intensity until it’s no longer a beep. It’s now one long solid blaring tone.
Then everything white turns black.
44
"Welcome back to the land of the living," The Physician says as I open my eyes.
I'm laid out in a hospital bed somewhere deep in the bowels of the facility. I think I've been here for a few days, but it's hard to keep track since I keep fading in and out of consciousness.
"We were all hoping today would be the day you were able to keep those eyelids open for more than a few seconds," he says.
"What happened?" I ask.
"Well, where to begin? For starters, it took about seven hours of searching the entire globe before they found you floating in the middle of the Indian Ocean. A nearby freighter had reported seeing you leaving a flaming trail through the sky as you plummeted back to Earth. Ellie came and found you apparently being nibbled on by a couple of frustrated sharks. Your metabands were in pretty bad shape, but they had enough juice left to keep you alive and prevent the sharks from turning you into lunch. How are we feeling today, Mr. Connolly?" The Physician asks.
"I've felt better."
"Of that, I have no doubt. Your recovery is coming along nicely, though, I must say."
"What can I say? I'm a trooper."
"It can all be directly attributed to the metabands around your wrists, but sure, the positive attitude helps too."
"So when can I get out of here then?"
"You're still going to be laid up for a few days, I'm afraid, but I do have some good news for you. Michelle looked over your charts this morning and deemed you well enough to receive visitors. In fact, I believe your first visitor is already waiting for you."
Derrick walks into the makeshift hospital room, and I can't believe how happy I am to see him. I immediately try to get out of the bed to give him a hug but find that I'm pretty well secured thanks to all the tubes and wires attached to me.
"Whoa, easy there. These things look expensive," Derrick says.
He leans over to give me a hug.
"I'm so glad you're okay," I say.
"That makes two of us. I guess I really owe you one now, huh?"
"Damn right you do. Don't worry, though. I'm easy to please. The sports package will be fine. I don't want you to have to go out of your way when you shop for my new car."
"Glad to see falling from outer space didn't do anything to your sense of humor."
"How is everyone else?"
"Everyone else is good. In fact, there's actually a few other people who wanted to come say hi to you now that you're awake."
The first face I see come through the door isn't one I expected to see down here, but it's extremely welcome, nevertheless.
"Sarah!"
"You know, you made me feel like a real dummy for not having figured all of this out sooner."
She leans over and gives me a hug, careful not to get tangled in any of the tubes. The next face that I see walk through the door is absolutely one that I never expected to see here or anywhere else. Jim.
"Jim? But how?" I ask.
He doesn't say anything and just leans in to hug me. Unlike Sarah and Derrick, Jim doesn't seem to care about the tubes and cables presumably helping to keep me alive and just goes for it. When he finally pulls back, there are tears in his eyes.
"I don't understand ..." I say.
"I don't completely understand either, but I have your friend Ellie to thank. She was able to get me to a hospital quickly enough to save my life. Another thirty seconds and I would have been gone for good."
"Jim, I'm so sorry about all of this. I should have told you everything sooner. I should have never gotten you involved in any of this."
"Well, it's a little too late for that, unfortunately."
"What do you mean?"
"Jim's transferring here to the academy," Sarah informs me.
"Technically, I already have, actually. Today was my first day of classes," Jim says.
"And guess what else?" Sarah asks, but she doesn't wait for me to guess. "You're going to have some more company down here soon."
"They're admitting me and Sarah into a new program here. I know we don't have the fancy fashion accessories that you do," Jim says, referring to my metabands, "but considering everything that went down in Bay View City, they want us on board."
"Speak for yourself. I've at least got one metaband," Sarah says.
"Considering these two already know so much about the goings on here now, and because of their work in the field, Michelle thought it would be a good idea to admit them into the program. The world's going to need more people looking out for it than just those who have a pair of metabands," Derrick explains.
"Well now I wish I hadn't gone through all the trouble of making new friends."
"I'm sure they're probably pretty close to being sick of you by now anyway," Sarah jokes.
"Speaking of which, where is everybody else?" I ask.
"I'd love to tell you, but that's classified," Jim says, barely able to contain the smirk on his face.
"They gave this guy security clearance and now that's all he says about everything. It got old like three days ago," Sarah says.
"It might be old to you, but Connor's been knocked out for a week. I'm sure he thinks it's funny."
"Yup. Hilarious."
"To answer your question without being a smartass, most everyone else is on a mission right now," Sarah says.
"Already?"
"Hey, just because you decided to sleep doesn't mean the rest of the world stops turning. There's
still a lotta bad people out there that need straightening out," Sarah says. "Speaking of which, we should probably check on them. We're kinda their support team for this outing, and they should be reaching their target soon. We just had to stop by once we heard you were waking up."
"I should probably get out of here too. They say you still need your rest," Derrick says.
I give each of them one last hug before they leave. On his way out the door, Jim flicks the light switch, and the room darkens. I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about how lucky I am to have survived. That's when I see movement in the dark, just out of the corner of my eye.
"I was wondering if you were going to stop by to visit," I say into the darkness.
Out of the shadows, in the far corner of the room, Midnight steps toward my hospital bed.
"You're getting better at that," he says.
"Either that or you're getting worse at hiding."
"Unlikely."
"Why the sneaking around in the first place? You're practically faculty here now."
"I needed to speak with you about what happened, and there's no need to bring anyone else into it. I need to know where you went."
"You saw where I went. You had a better seat than anybody."
"You disappeared from my radar for over nine hours."
I think about what I'm going to say for a few seconds before opening my mouth. I don't have my head fully wrapped around what I experienced yet, and I didn't think I'd have to be explaining it so soon.
"I'm not sure where I went. It was bright. Endless."
"Were you alone?"
"No, there was someone else there."
"Jones."
"How did you know?"
"Where you went is a place that was thought to be only hypothetical, even in my time."
"What is it? Another dimension? Another universe?"
"Not quite, but you're not too far off. The science to explain what that place is doesn't exist in this time yet. The only relevant thing you need to know is that it’s where your powers derive from. It's even where your metabands go temporarily when you think you've made them disappear. We call it the Fervor.
"The Jones you met will spend the equivalent of thousands of years alone in that place. It's what will make him into the monster you came to know in this time."
"But he wasn't that yet when I saw him."
"It doesn't matter. It's what he will become."
"But if I was able to leave that place, why couldn't he?"
"I don't know. The energy he was subjected to was much, much higher than what you were."
"If I could get in there and leave, maybe there's a way to get him out of there before he turns into the Jones we know in our time."
"Connor, I'm not even sure how you were able to enter the Fervor in the first place, let alone leave it. Don't count on ever being able to do it again, even if we knew the way."
"So what now then?"
"Now you rest. You just did something no one else in history has ever accomplished, and that includes future history."
"This is starting to get confusing."
"And that's why you need your rest. We're not done. Most of the escapees from Silver Island are still out there. There's a power vacuum right now in Bay View City after the Alphas were defeated, and there are still more metahumans emerging out of the shadows everyday, some good, but a lot of them not.
“Rest up. We're not done yet."
* * *
About the Author
Tom Reynolds lives in Brooklyn, NY with a dog named Ginger who despite being illiterate proved to be a really great late night writing partner. Rise of The Circle is his third book. He wrote this biography in the third person, unlike his books.
To stay in the loop on all things ‘Meta’ and otherwise with me, please sign up for my mailing list at tomreynolds.com/list. You’ll get the first chapters of any new books before anyone else and other fun stuff early. No spam either, I promise.
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Also by Tom Reynolds
Meta
The Second Wave
Contents
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
About the Author
Also by Tom Reynolds
Meta (Book 3): Rise of The Circle Page 34