Chapter 74: The Neon Babysitter

  I slowly reached out and shook his hand.

  The rhinestone gauntlet was surprisingly cold, and his grip was like a steel vise hiding under a velvet glove.

  Jack, huh, I thought, a weird, nagging itch forming in the back of my mind as my Astrolabe hummed softly. I've definitely heard that name somewhere.

  I look at the ridiculous magenta armor, the holographic mohawk buzzing with hard-light static, and then it hit me. The memory of a dull, flickering grey mote I’d bought in the Wayline right before the line in Aethelgard.

  "Iron-Jack," I said, dropping his hand. "You’re the guy who sells the Functional language packs."

  "Guilty," Jack said, leaning back and crossing his arms. The servos in his suit whined a high-pitched, neon complaint. "A man’s got to diversify his income streams. The multiverse runs on Lumen, kid."

  "I sounded like a toddler with a head injury," I accuse him. "I walked up to a heavily armed guard and asked him for 'sphere-fruit' because your coding had the nuance of a brick."

  "You paid exactly one Lumen for that pack," Jack shot back, holding up a single, gauntleted finger. "One. You bought the discount bin, bargain-basement. You want poetry and subtext? Next time, fork over the cash for a Prismatic Echo. I sell those too, by the way. Ten Shards a pop."

  "I am not paying you ten Shards so I can understand sarcasm in Elvish," I mutter.

  "Boys," Vash interrupts, her voice barely above a whisper, yet it somehow rattled the glasses behind the empty bar.

  We both shut up.

  Vash returned her attention to her knitting. The glowing, ethereal scarf in her lap was getting longer, the Wayline energy weaving into a physical garment right before my eyes.

  "Kaelen. Vrex," she said, her tone pleasant but laden with the crushing weight of an Eclipse-class entity. "You are reckless, unmoored, and currently the most wanted vandals in this sector. If you step outside this tavern alone, the enraged arcanorum-battery acid loving wayfarers will turn you into an abrasive powder."

  She gestured to the magenta disco-tank sitting across from me. "Jack knows the currents. He knows the markets. And most importantly, he knows the things that go bump in the dark. He is your new teammate. Your guide. And your probation officer."

  "I object," Vrex rumbles, taking a step forward. The floorboards groans in terror. "He is visually loud. His armor provides zero camouflage. And he projects an aura of profound unreliability. We do not need him."

  "If you don't take him, you don't operate out of the Gyre," Vash stated. She didn't look up. She didn't need to. "I will lock you out of the Mnemosyne Market. I will ban you from the dry docks. You will take your little sack of stolen batteries and you will freeze in the Interstitial. Are we clear?"

  I look at Vrex. I look at the 184 Lucent Shards sitting in my Locus. Wealth was useless if you didn't have a store to spend it in.

  "Crystal," I say.

  "Excellent," Vash smiled. She stood up, her knitting vanishing into a pocket dimension with a flick of her wrist. "Play nice, children. And Jack? If they blow up another planet, I'm taking it out of your deposit."

  She turned and walked toward the back of the tavern, fading into the shadows until she simply wasn't there anymore. The oppressive, deep-ocean pressure in the room vanished with her, leaving me gasping for a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding.

  Jack lets out a long whistle, kicking his feet up onto the table. "Man, I love it when she gets authoritative. Really gets the blood pumping."

  "Why are you here?" Vrex demands, looming over the table. "You are a veteran. You sell Echoes. You have a ship. Why babysit rookies who are actively being hunted?"

  Jack reached into a compartment on his thigh plating, pulled out a small, metallic flask, and took a swig. He offered it to me. I shook my head. He shrugged and capped it.

  "Because I'm stuck, boulder-boy," Jack sighed, the flamboyant energy dropping for just a second, revealing the bone-deep exhaustion underneath. "I’ve been running the Ways for years. I’m sitting at Magnitude 210. I am near the absolute, agonizing peak of the Unchained rank."

  I blinked. Two hundred and ten. That was massive. That was over three times my total stat pool.

  "So level up," I said. "Trigger a Conjunction. Hit rank 3"

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  "It doesn't work like that, kid," Jack groaned, rubbing his face. "The waking and Unchained is just survival. You break your mundane chains, you become a Wayfarer. Rank Unchained to Ascendant? You have to actually mean something. You have to find your Paradigm. A 'Vocation.' And apparently, the universe doesn't think 'Guy Who Shoots Things Good And Sells Cheap Dictionaries' is a valid cosmic truth."

  He threw his hands up in a dramatic shrug.

  "I'm burnt out. I've ground through thirty worlds trying to force an epiphany. I've meditated on mountaintops, I've fought void-krakens, I've done the whole 'stare into the abyss' routine. Nothing. So, I went to Vash and told her I needed a vacation."

  "And her idea of a vacation was assigning you to us?" I asked, wiping another drop of blood from my nose. The Kensho burn was lingering, a hot wire throbbing behind my sinuses.

  "You guys blew up a Tier 3 capital city by accident," Jack grinned, his teeth shockingly white against his scruffy beard. "You're chaotic. You're stupid. You're a walking disaster. Following you around is going to be the multiverse equivalent of watching reality TV. I figure if I watch you idiots break all the rules, maybe I'll remember how to have fun. Or maybe you'll trigger a catastrophe so big it forces my soul to evolve just to survive it."

  "We are not entertainment," Vrex growls.

  "You're a giant rock monster and a human who looks like he just lost a fight with a lawnmower," Jack pointed out. "You're hilarious."

  He leaned forward, squinting at me. He tapped his own temple. "Speaking of hilarious, you're bleeding from your brain. You scanned the landlord, didn't you?"

  I grabbed a napkin from the table and pressed it to my nose. "I just wanted to see what we were dealing with. The Astrolabe freaked out. Gave me a black circle and a migraine."

  Jack laughs. A loud, booming bark of a laugh.

  "Oh, you're precious," Jack says, shaking his head. "You tried to put a tape measure on a hurricane. What’s your Kensho at, kid?"

  "Fifteen," I muttered.

  "Fifteen," Jack repeated, mock-amazed. "Wow. Look out, multiverse. We've got an omniscient god over here." He dropped the sarcasm, his expression turning deadly serious. "Listen to me, rookie. The Astrolabe isn't a video game UI. It's a resonance detector. It bounces a signal off a target and reads the echo. If you bounce a signal off a brick wall, you get a ping. If you bounce it off a black hole, it rips the signal out of your hands and drags your mind in with it."

  He held up three fingers.

  "It's called the Parallax Limit. The System protects your fragile little mortal brain by cutting the feed when the math gets too big. There are three points of failure. You need to know them, or you're going to accidentally lobotomize yourself."

  I leaned in, despite my annoyance. This was the kind of data I couldn't buy in a cheap Echo. This was survival mechanics.

  "First point of failure: The Warning," Jack said, pulling down one finger. "That happens when the gap between your Magnitude and the target's is somewhere between ten and fifty points. You can still see their number, but it vibrates. It turns red. The system gives you a [High Variance] tag."

  "I know that one," I say.

  "Good. That means, 'This thing can kill you in one hit, but you can comprehend the physics of how it's going to happen,'" Jack explained. "You can still run. You can still use tricks."

  He pulled down a second finger.

  "Second point of failure: The Glitch," he continued. "Gap is fifty-one to two-hundred-and-fifty points. The numbers stop rendering. You just get static, or a smear of light. The Astrolabe screeches like bending metal. You get the [Unstable] tag."

  I nodded slowly. I’d seen that when I scanned the Magister on his palanquin, and when Vrex had scanned the elite Enforcer squad.

  "At the Glitch level," Jack said, his voice dropping, "the scale is trembling. Exact measurement is impossible because their metaphysical weight is warping the local reality. You don't fight a Glitch unless you have a serious environmental advantage, or you're ready to burn your soul out trying."

  He pulls down the third finger, leaving only his fist. He knocks on the wooden table.

  "And then there's what you just did. The Eclipse," Jack said softly. "Gap is over two-hundred-and-fifty points. You don't get a number. You don't get static. You get a vantablack circle. The system UI physically shatters in your mind's eye to sever the connection before the target's sheer existence crushes your ego."

  Jack leaned back, looking at me with a grim sort of pity.

  "That migraine? That nosebleed? That's the Backlash. That's your soul recoiling from the vastness of the target. Vash is still Ascended-class entity, near the peak, kid. But way above your parallax limit and very capable of cleaning your ass out of existence."

  I swallowed hard, tossing the bloody napkin onto the table. "Point taken. If I see the black circle..."

  "If you see the black circle," Jack interrupts, "you don't fight. You don't bargain. You don't make witty banter. You drop your Veil, you pop a Charge of Stillness, and you stop existing in their general direction."

  Vrex grunted, a sound of reluctant agreement. "He speaks wisdom, Kaelen. The universe is not scaled for your convenience. It is scaled for its own."

  "Right," I said, shaking the lingering dizziness from my head. I looked at Jack. The guy was annoying, loud, and dressed like a cyber-punk flamingo, but he knew his stuff.

  "Okay, Iron-Jack," I sighed, standing up and pulling my canvas jacket straight. "You're hired. Or, well, we're conscripted. Either way, you're on the team."

  "Don't sound so thrilled," Jack snorted, standing up and hoisting his massive rifle. "It's bad for my ego."

  "we require preparations. My armor is compromised. Kaelen's gear was destroyed. We need the market."

  "Oh, we're going shopping?" Jack's eyes lit up, a genuine, terrifying spark of glee appearing in them. He slapped his gauntleted hands together. "Fantastic. I know a guy who sells contraband gravity-weaves. I know a guy who fences stolen hyper-tech. What's our budget?"

  "One hundred and eighty-four Lucent Shards," I say.

  Jack stopped dead. He slowly turned his head to look at me, his jaw hanging slightly open.

  "You... you're joking," he whispered. "You're a pair of homeless vagrants. How do you have nearly two hundred Shards?"

  I grinned, patting my sash. "Like you said, Jack. You kids blow things up. It's entertaining."

  Jack throws his head back and laughs, a genuine, booming sound that echoes in the empty tavern.

  "Oh, this is going to be the best vacation ever," he declares, slapping my shoulder hard enough to make my knees buckle. "Come on, rookies. Let me show you how to spend irresponsible amounts of money."