142 The Hand That Deals in Shadows
The tunnel was dark, narrow, and reeking of rust. After several turns through them, we finally reached the end. The tal hatch above us groaned as Guesswork pushed it open, revealing a cold, gray horizon.
Flaskmoor.
The air slled of salt and decay. The shack we erged into was small, abandoned, and half-swallowed by vines. Its boards creaked with every breath of wind, its roof sagging like it wanted to collapse but didn’t quite have the courage. Beyond it stood a tall, derelict factory complex, and just beside that, the towering wall of Flaskmoor City-State.
We were on the fringes of civilization, the kind of place where no one looked twice at fugitives.
“You sure have resources,” I said, stepping into the dusty light. “I guess, as expected of an arms dealer.”
Guesswork smirked, brushing dirt from his coat. “Oh, you jest, but I don’t think you look kindly on . I’d even go so far as to say you’re disgusted, considering how I’m partly the reason your friend Bunny pulled.”
My jaw tightened. “The past is the past…”
Before he could speak further, I grabbed his throat and slamd him against the rotting wall. The old wood splintered under the impact.
“…is what I’d like to say.”
He wheezed, his grin faltering.
“When John was still here,” I continued, voice low, “I suppressed my desire to kill you. Out of respect for his rules. But John’s dead now. That respect died with him.” I leaned in, eyes narrowing. “So tell … why are you helping ?”
Guesswork coughed, half-chuckling, half-choking. “Wow, such a terrible temper… As expected of Eclipse.”
“Don’t play gas with , Guesswork.”
He glared back, his own irritation surfacing. “Hey, you’re the one playing gas! You’re giving mixed signals here.”
“Mixed signals?”
He pushed against my grip, eyes sharp. “Do you even rember what you told back then… before you tossed Missive my way? You said the SRC needed to be prepared. You said I’d be crucial, that my powers would ‘beco relevant when the scales turned.’ Or sothing along those lines… You spouted all that cryptic crap, made my powers scream, and I listened. I cooperated. And now, you’re threatening my life?”
I didn’t answer. My hand didn’t loosen either.
“What is it you even want, huh?” he snapped.
“Just answer .” I leaned closer. “Why are you cooperating with ?”
His eyes flickered for a mont, sothing between annoyance and exhaustion.
I had to be sure. I had to know he wasn’t setting up. Mother’s visions and the fractured mories she left had shown glimpses of Guesswork fighting alongside . But the future wasn’t absolute. Trust wasn’t automatic.
He finally sighed. “It’s because the end of the world’s tied to this.”
My grip loosened slightly.
“And without my powers,” he continued, “the world’s good as dead. I might not look like much, but I’ve got stakes in this too. People I cherish. So yeah, I’m helping you… not for you, but for them.”
I studied him carefully, Empathy humming in the back of my mind like a sonar. His heartbeat, his tone, his intent… they aligned. There was no deception in his words.
“Your powers are telling you this?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not really.”
For a long second, I didn’t move. Then I let him go. He slumped against the wall, rubbing his neck with a dry laugh.
Honestly, I still couldn’t bring myself to fully trust him. But considering what he’d said and what my Empathy confird, he was the closest thing I had to an ally. Paranoia could only carry so far. This ti, I couldn’t do everything alone.
Guesswork dusted himself off, glancing sidelong at . “Just so you know, my arms dealing wasn’t so independent hustle. The SRC funded most of it. I’m their errand boy, really. Of course, you should know that already, if you had been paying attention.”
I raised an eyebrow.
He went on, “I might have a colorful past, sure. Smuggling, contracts, the usual. But if you’re thinking I had anything to do with Bunny’s suffering, I’ll tell you now… I didn’t. Half the equipnt in that building was signed under my na, yeah. But I wasn’t the one calling the shots.”
I exhaled and turned toward the shattered window, where the pale light of Flaskmoor’s smog-choked skyline bled through. “How did it go?”
Guesswork straightened his coat, his tone shifting to sothing almost professional. “Quite well, actually. The data you gave , the one on that USB, was solid. SRC reviewed it. They’re… intrigued. Enough to talk, at least.”
I t his eyes. “Talk?”
“Yeah.” He smiled faintly. “They’re willing to negotiate with you, Eclipse.”
“No,” I said. “There’s no need for talks at all. I want my privilege back. That’s it.”
Guesswork groaned imdiately, as if the weight of my stubbornness physically hurt him. “Don’t be difficult, Eclipse. You just need to surrender yourself to the SRC. They’ll run a few examinations, poke around your head, maybe threaten to send you to the Box—”
I cut him off, voice cold. “Is that the best they can do? Send to the Box?”
He froze, realizing the tone I used wasn’t rhetorical. Instead, it was a warning. “Wait, wait, wait! Calm down, will you? I wasn’t finished!”
He rubbed his temples, pacing in front of the half-collapsed shack like a man trying to keep his sanity intact. “When they threaten to send you to the Box, that’s when you give them a taste of what they want. Just snippets of the data about the otherworld… the one you just ca from. The USB you gave already had too much on it, so I only sent them pieceal. We’ll milk every byte of it for leverage. One drop at a ti.”
He turned toward , tone sharp with urgency. “The reason you have to personally talk to them is because they don’t know you’re working with . Do you understand now why this talk needs to happen?”
I stared at him in silence, letting the wind whistle through the cracks of the shack. Then I nodded once, expression unreadable. “I understand.”
I reached into my coat and produced another USB. Its tal casing glinted faintly in the dim light.
Guesswork blinked, eyes widening in imdiate suspicion. “What’s that?”
“More data,” I said, holding it out to him.
He hesitated before taking it, fingers trembling. “Please don’t tell —”
“Information about the National Supremacy Directorate,” I said, cutting him off. “Consider it a reward.”
His brow furrowed.
“The first set I gave you contained geography, resource lists, political hierarchies, and an appendix of their technology,” I explained evenly. “This one contains lottery numbers and news articles, one hundred years’ worth. Turns out the NSD existed a century in the future. The other parallel worlds were the sa… except ours. Why? I have no idea.”
Guesswork stared at the USB as if it were radioactive. His lips twitched, his eyes darted between and the drive. “What the fuck?”
He staggered backward, running a hand through his hair as he let out a sound halfway between a laugh and a scream. His expression warped through a dozen stages of disbelief: confusion, anger, glee, and hysteria.
Then ca the laughter. Loud, strained, unhinged laughter.
“You crazy bastard,” he said between laughs. “You’re keeping all of this, an entire world’s worth of classified future data, on a USB fucking drive!?”
“Take a guess.”
His voice cracked as he pointed at . “Please tell you saved copies!”
I smiled faintly. “Take a guess.”
“FUUUUUCK!”
He turned around, kicking an old chair until it splintered into dust. “Do you have any idea how dangerous this is? How valuable this is!? You’ve got goddamn prophecy condensed into binary code! We could—holy shit!—we could rewrite economies, build religions, and destroy nations!”
“That’s why I’m giving it to you,” I said. “Because you’ll know what to do with it.”
He stopped pacing, panting, then glanced at with a wary grin. “You really trust that much?”
“No,” I replied. “But you’re predictable.”
He barked a laugh with amusent and surrender.
I turned to the cracked window again, the dull lights of Flaskmoor’s skyline bleeding through the mist. “Contact Bunny,” I said. “Use what we have. You and he should be able to identify patterns in the data from correlations, constants, projections, and whatever. With the funds we’ll gather from that, we can move.”
Guesswork looked at the USB in his hand, then at . “You’re not planning sothing small, are you?”
“No,” I said quietly. “Not small at all.”
Since I’d been isolating myself and running from the SRC, contacting Bunny was impossible. I couldn’t risk it. Their surveillance grid was far too advanced, and even a whisper through the wrong channel could lead a team straight to . For now, silence was my only safety.
“I’ll do as you tell ,” Guesswork said, his tone heavy with fatigue and restrained frustration. “But can you at least tell what our goals are? It’s driving crazy, Eclipse. I know I’ve got a role to play in this whole end-of-the-world scenario you keep hinting at, but you’ve never actually told what’s causing it. So, what is it? Zombies? So kind of plague? Alien invasion? Hell, is it the other world coming for us?”
He tried to keep it light, but I could hear the tremor behind his words. Guesswork wasn’t the kind of man who enjoyed being blind to his own future. Ironically, for soone who could predict so much, he hated not knowing what he was walking into.
Recruiting capes to a cause like mine wasn’t easy. Guesswork was probably the only one who could even stomach hearing the truth without breaking imdiately. If he was truly ant to be my ally as Mother’s vision had shown, then maybe it was ti I gave him a glimpse of the horror ahead.
“I already told you, didn’t I?” I said. “It’s not so virus or invasion. It’s a fake god. I call it the Entity. Think of a cape… but twisted. A monster with powers that shouldn’t exist.”
He froze. His hand instinctively went to his mouth, as though to catch the disbelief before it escaped him. He wore sunglasses, but even through them I could feel his stare. It was wide, judging, and searching for the lie.
Then he sighed. “Shit. You’re not lying, are you?”
“I’m not.”
“By ‘god,’ you an… god-like, right? Maybe like Light?”
I shook my head. “Light’s an ant compared to the real deal.”
He let out a nervous chuckle, the sound brittle. “An ant? Christ, that’s reassuring.”
“Is the NDS involved with it?” he asked next, his tone shifting from sarcasm to sothing grimly curious.
“I don’t think so,” I answered. “I combed through their databases for anything related. Their strongest cape was only around Rating Twenty, and they called him the Führer or sothing. Not even close to what I saw. I don’t know if I should tell you this, but I will. For transparency’s sake.”
He tilted his head slightly, waiting.
I took a breath. “Mother… she let see the future once. It was a combination of Missive’s precognition and my own possession. In that vision, I saw… the Entity. That was my first eting with it. It tried to possess Missive through Mother’s existence.”
Guesswork went still. The silence between us grew thick, stretched taut like a wire ready to snap.
“I didn’t understand it at first,” I continued. “But…”
“You t it a second ti,” He swallowed hard. “Where?”
“The NDS,” I said. “I was hunting the ones who made Light. Killed their version of the Witch, who led to the Prophet. Their Prophet turned out to be…” I paused, my voice tightening, “another version of you. That world’s Guesswork was carrying a reflection of the Entity inside him.”
His mouth twitched. He tried to laugh, but it ca out choked. “So that’s what you ant when you said I had a role in this… goddamn fate.”
“Yeah, kind of,” I said. “That was my second eting with the Entity. It spoke through him.”
Guesswork leaned back against the cracked wall, trembling slightly. “How bad was it?”
I looked at him, rembering the weight of that presence and the feeling of every molecule in existence bending under the Entity’s will, like the universe itself was holding its breath.
“Very bad,” I said quietly. “Imagine Light, but tis a hundred… or maybe a thousand.”
“You gotta be shitting , right?”
“I can show you the mories,” I offered, watching him carefully. “Like, what happened, via possession.”
“Fuck no!” Guesswork barked instantly, stepping back as though the thought itself was contagious. “If Mother beca like that just from seeing ‘it’ in a vision… no way in hell I’m letting that thing crawl into my skull! I could end up the sa way, man! Shit!”
He started pacing in circles, one trembling hand pressed over his mouth. The blind lenses of his sunglasses caught the faint light, making him look like he was glaring at ghosts only he could see.
“This is bad,” he muttered under his breath. “My powers are telling … no, screaming at … how dangerous this is. I feel like puking.”
I watched him unravel, half sympathetic, half detached. That was Guesswork’s curse: knowing too much about the things that would destroy him, but never enough to stop them.
“The crazy version of you I t,” I said quietly, “developed his powers into clairvoyance. High-level precognition.”
Guesswork froze mid-step. “That’s… really bad.” He rubbed his temples, his breathing shallow. “I an, that only reinforces my guesses. I guessed I have to develop my powers in a different direction, not precog-related at all. Because if what you’re saying is true, then every increase in precog might just bring closer to that thing. Goddamn it… and I’m already halfway there.”
I leaned against the wall, crossing my arms. “The Prophet claid that all powers co from the fake god. How true do you think that is? Are our powers alive? Or maybe…” I tilted my head slightly, “your guesses were never guesses at all… just predetermined outcos.”
Guesswork stared at for a long second. Then he groaned. “What the fuck, man? You’re not good at this. When there’s bad news and good news, you start with the bad one! You’re giving a goddamn heart attack here. I’m having a full-on breakdown.”
“Sorry,” I said. “So, I shouldn’t have started with the USB, then?”
He sucked in a few deep breaths, hands shaking slightly as he pressed them to his knees. “Okay, okay. I’m calm now. I’m calm.” He straightened his coat and exhaled through his teeth. “Here’s my guess.”
I waited.
“Powers don’t co from the fake god.”
The words hung in the stale air. For a mont, it was like the tension in the room itself exhaled. Even I could sense a faint pull of relief from him through my Empathy.
He continued, voice steadier. “It seems the crazy , your Prophet, either got it wrong or twisted the aning. Powers aren’t from the Entity, but maybe they’re… linked. Think of it like the Entity’s existence is tied to the sa fundantal rule that gives birth to powers. Maybe it’s a parasite feeding off the sa source. I don’t know. What I do know is, we need soone with a Researcher rating high enough to understand how powers work… so bio-tinkerer or power theorist. Without one, we’re blind.”
He exhaled deeply, shoulders dropping. “Now that I’m done with my ntal breakdown…” He managed a half-hearted smirk. “What’s next?”
“That’s all I’ve got to say,” I answered, pushing off the wall. My tone ca out flat and asured. “Let’s get this over with. I’m ready to turn myself in.”
Guesswork tensed. “You sure about that?”
“If your sche doesn’t work,” I said, stepping closer so he could hear the calm in my threat, “I’ll phase you six feet under the ground and leave you there to think about it.”
He laughed nervously, scratching his neck. “Yeah… noted. You’ve got a charming way of saying I trust you.”
“I wasn’t trying to.”
He sighed. “Didn’t think so.”
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