Nexus Bazaar: I Know How Every World Ends

Bonus chapter.

The train to Greyhill still smelled like morning coffee, exactly like it had when he was fifteen with a school bag between his feet.

Somebody had reupholstered the seats since then. Nothing else had changed. Outside the window the fields were cut down to yellow stubble and a man was burning a hedge at the far end of one of them.

A month ago Adam had watched an army melt into the sand. Now he was on the four-twenty out of Kerenth with a woman asleep on his shoulder and a paper cup going cold in his hand.

Ren stirred without opening her eyes. “Are we there?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“You said that twenty minutes ago.”

“I said thirty minutes ago,” Adam said, and got an elbow for it.

Sector Nine only needed one standing Level 5 now that the world had been formally absorbed and the fighting had moved off the sector line entirely. Lyra had volunteered for the first rotation without being asked, which said something about Lyra, and Brandt had signed the leave paperwork with a speed that suggested he had been waiting to. So they had come home.

Ren sat up properly as the fields gave way to houses. “Do I need to be nervous?”

“About what?”

“Your aunt.” She was picking at a loose thread on her cuff. Ren does not fidget. “Last two times we had a meal together she was… let’s say interested. Expectant. About certain things.”

Adam turned that over. “Oh. I get it… I think?”

She elbowed him again. “No. No, I don’t think you do.” She let it sit a second. “This is the first time we go to your family properly. Since we got together. It’s different now, and I don’t know why, but the pressure is higher.”

Adam put an arm around her.

“Yeah,” he said. “I feel it too.”

Lena had the door open before they were through the gate. She had been watching the road, then.

She hugged Ren first — deliberately, Adam thought, and he was probably right — and then she took hold of his face with both hands the way she had done since he was nine, and she looked at him for a long moment, and said, “You’ve changed your hair.”

“I haven’t.”

“It’s darker.”

“It’s been darker for two years, Aunt Lena.”

“Yes, yes.” She let go of him and stepped back, and her eyes went straight to his forearms, because he had rolled his sleeves on the train like an idiot. “And what are those?”

Here it was, then.

“Just a new power I got,” Adam said carefully. “About a month ago. Nothing bad.”

Lena took his wrist and turned it toward the hall light. She was not squeamish about it. She had been a nurse for eleven years before she stopped.

“Are they spreading?”

“No.”

“Hm.” She let go. “Come in, both of you, the food’s been ready for an hour and your uncle has been eying it like a hawk.”

From the kitchen, Henrik said, “I’m reading.”

Aunt Lena rolled her eyes. “He’s been reading the same page since three.”

Aunt Lena made too much again.

Sophie came in halfway through, still in her guild coat, apologised to everybody twice, kissed her mother on the cheek and stole Adam’s bread roll on the way past. She had grown maybe an inch, and there were shadows under her eyes she was too young for. She talked for eleven minutes straight about a rotation she had just finished before anybody could ask Adam anything at all.

Adam let her. He was quietly grateful for it, and he suspected she knew that.

It was Henrik who finally turned the conversation. He does it the same way every time, by asking about something mechanical.

“How many guild members do you have under you? At this point.”

“Sixty on rotation. About four hundred in total, across the whole guild.” Adam turned his glass. “Why?”

“Because on the news they kept changing the numbers.” Henrik pointed his fork. “I was worried that many died.”

“Ah, no. We were careful. Many were injured but no deaths.”

“Good, good, you need to take care of your people, back in my days…”

Lena said, “Henrik.”

“Ahm.” He went back to his plate, satisfied. “Nobody listens anymore. I’ve made peace with it.”

Adam laughed, and it came out easier than he expected. He had been braced, on the train, for the version of this evening where they were careful with him. It had not occurred to him that they would simply be themselves, and that being themselves would be the most restful thing that had happened to him in a month.

Ren caught his eye across the table and raised an eyebrow very slightly, which meant see?, and he ignored her, and she knew what that meant.

Then Lena put her fork down, and the table changed temperature. Adam realised she had been building to this since the start.

“Are you well?” she asked.

“I’m fine.”

“That is not what I asked you, and you know it.”

Adam opened his mouth and shut it again. Then resigned himself.

“I sleep fine,” he said instead. That part was true. “I eat. Nothing hurts. Ren makes me stop when I’m being stupid.”

“Does he listen?” Lena asked, turning to Ren.

“Sometimes,” Ren said. “Not the important times.”

“Traitor,” Adam said.

“You asked me to be honest with your family. That was your instruction. I have it in writing.”

“I never wrote anything down—”

“I have it emotionally in writing.”

Sophie snorted into her drink, and Henrik said “Ha!” much too loudly, and Lena let the whole thing carry the table away from her question. She was letting him off. It was not the same as giving up. She had asked. He had not answered. She would ask again in a month, and in a month he might have a better answer. They both knew the shape of that arrangement without needing to say it out loud.

The news was on in the other room while Lena made coffee.

It was the same segment that had been running for three weeks, with the same map. Earth-Prime, marked in blue, and every marker on it grey and inactive. DAY 31: NO REGISTERED INCURSIONS. They had started counting the days on screen, in a box in the corner, like a lottery.

“Thirty-one days,” Henrik said, from the doorway. “You know what that is? That’s the longest we’ve gone since I was thirty-four years old.”

“Is it strange?”

“It’s unbearable.” He said it happily. “Nobody knows what to do. The sirens still test on Tuesdays and everybody still stops what they’re doing, and then we all remember and feel foolish and go back to work.”

They switched to the other map after that, the one with the rust-coloured surface, and the picture stopped being comfortable. The absorbed world had its own markers now, and they were not grey. Four active. One flagged red at the northern edge.

The presenter said the same every night: that the defence was holding, that the transition had gone as expected, and that the Commission remained confident.

“So they still come,” Ren said quietly, next to him. “They just come there.”

“That was the reward.”

“I know what the reward was. I’m asking how you feel about it.”

Adam watched the red marker pulse. Their home ground was finally free of danger.

Humanity could prosper again.

“I feel like we can finally move forward,” he said.

Ren didn’t answer that. She took his hand under the table instead.

What forward meant was yet to be seen.

The call came at nine. Adam was surprised. Usually Sage filtered all his calls through the guild, and if it had been an emergency she would have alerted him. Adam let Lena answer it because she was closer to the phone.

Lena took it, listened for about forty seconds, said “One moment, please,” in her telephone voice, and then held the phone against her chest and looked at Adam with an expression he had never once seen on her face.

“It’s Late with Danny Oakes,” she said.

“No.”

“They want you Thursday.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Adam.” Lena had not moved the receiver. “I have watched that programme every night since before you were born.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“In this case everything,” Henrik called from the other room, “stop wasting everybody’s time and accept it.”

Sophie chimed in. “Say yes. Say yes right now. Uncle Adam, I will never forgive you—”

“I’m your cousin.”

“I will never forgive you, cousin.”

Adam looked at Ren, who had the expression of a woman enjoying herself enormously and intending to be no help whatsoever.

“Don’t look at me,” she said. “I want to see it too.”

He took the phone.

The green room had a fruit bowl in it that nobody was ever going to eat and a monitor showing the studio with the sound down. A young woman with a clipboard had explained the segment timings to him twice, very fast.

“Do you get nervous?” she asked, on the third pass.

“No, since, well, a while now.”

“Right. No. Obviously.” She checked her clipboard for something that was not on it. “Sorry. It’s just that we had an L6 in here in the spring and he threw up in that bin.”

Adam looked at the bin.

“Different bin,” she said quickly. “We replaced it.”

Sage.

[ Your heart rate is elevated. ]

Really, I don’t feel it.

[ This is logged and will be added to the archive. ]

Adam exhaled in exasperation.

Danny Oakes was shorter in person and much warmer. He came over before the segment to shake Adam’s hand with both of his, which turned out to be sincere.

“You’re going to be great, we’re going to have fun, and if I ask you something you can’t answer, just say ‘that’s classified’ and I will make it my problem,” he said. “That’s the deal. Also, are you aware that you’re very young?”

“I’ve been made aware.”

What does my age have to do with anything?

“It’s upsetting, is all. Young people like you holding the sky up for us old guys.”

Then the band played, and the curtain went, and eight hundred people stood up.

“So.” Oakes let it settle, hands flat on the desk. “I want to start with the part nobody can get over. You are twenty-two years old.”

“I am.”

“Twenty-two.” He looked at the audience. “When I was twenty-two I had a job at a garden centre and I got fired for reversing a van into the greenhouse.”

“That’s worse than anything I’ve done.”

“It is not worse, you—” Oakes stopped. Started again, more carefully. “Okay. Fine. Let’s do it your way. You founded a guild at nineteen. Nineteen. Can you tell us a bit about your team?”

Adam sat forward. This was the part he had actually wanted to talk about.

“Two people,” he said. “Everything you’re praising me for, two other people did most of it.”

“Go on.”

“Markus Brandt runs training and everything that isn’t fighting. He taught me at Westfall.” Adam put a hand flat on the desk. “This man solved all our supply issues on the other side. During war. Without him the guild would not function. If I am the brain of our guild, he is the heart.”

“Is he watching this?”

“He’s absolutely watching this.”

“Markus.” Oakes turned to the camera. “Come on the show. We’d love to hear from you.”

“He won’t come.”

“Why not?”

“Trust me, that man hates compliments,” Adam said. “He’d rather be shot at.”

“And the second one?”

“Ren Delacroix. She runs operations.” Adam stopped, because he wanted to get this one right. “In a fight I’m in the front, while she’s directing everyone. Where everybody is, what’s about to fall over, who needs pulling out and in what order. I hit things. She decides what gets hit, and she does it while people are dying and asking her questions at the same time.”

“And she’s better at that than you.”

“Considerably.”

“You said that very fast.”

“Because it’s true,” Adam said, “and because she’s watching.”

Oakes looked at his card. Then he looked at it again, more slowly, and Adam understood about half a second too late what was on it.

“Delacroix,” Oakes said. “Now, that name has turned up next to yours in the papers a few times.”

“…Has it.”

“Adam.”

“…Yes.” He gave up. “We’re together and I love her very much. I will officially say it here.”

The room went up in cheers.

“Is she here?”

“She’s in the fourth row and she is going to kill me.”

The camera found her before Adam finished the sentence. Ren had both hands over her face and was laughing, and the audience noise doubled, and Oakes sat back with the enormously pleased expression of a man who had not planned that and would absolutely take credit for it.

“Okay. Break in a minute.” Oakes turned over the last card. “My producer wrote one word on this and it just says GERALD.”

Adam closed his eyes. “…Ah.”

“Who is Gerald?”

“Gerald is a skeleton.”

“…Right.”

“He belongs to one of my members. The guild named him. There’s a plush toy of him you can buy in Kantgade.” Adam shrugged. “It outsells mine.”

Oakes stared at him for a second.

“We’re going to have a break, and then we will hear all about Gerald,” he said.

“Okay. Now.” Oakes shuffled a card he had already read. “The animals or pets?”

Eight hundred people made a noise before Adam said anything.

“They’re not—” He was already laughing. “They’re not animals. They are called Pokémon. They are very friendly.”

“Adam, I have a photograph.”

“You have a photograph of a friend of mine.”

“I have a photograph,” Oakes said, “of a seven-foot green monster asleep on its back in a courtyard, with its feet in the air, and somebody has put a blanket on it.” He held it up. The audience lost about fifteen seconds. “Who did that? Who put the blanket on?”

“Night watch. We never found out which one.”

“And what does he eat?”

“Rocks, mostly.”

“Rocks.”

“He’s got a preference. He won’t touch limestone.” Adam shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. He spits it out.”

Oakes put his face in his hands for a second.

“Right. And the purple one. Because I’ve been told about the purple one.” He checked the card. “Is it true that he goes into people’s rooms at night?”

“…Sometimes.”

“And?”

“And people wake up with things drawn on their faces.” Adam was trying to keep a straight face and losing. “And their alarms turned off. One man found all his boots filled with rice.”

“You have a ghost that does pranks.”

“Let’s just say we are never bored in Eclipse.”

The conversation continued about all the Pokémon people found interesting.

“Last thing. And this is the one everybody sent in, so don’t blame me.” He set the cards down. “The music.”

The room changed. Adam had known this was coming since the green room.

“You put a song on every channel on a battlefield,” Oakes said. “It’s been everywhere for a month. Somebody got it off a helmet camera. And nobody — nobody — can find where it comes from. There are people at universities working on this.”

“I know. I get calls every day about it.”

“So what is it?”

Adam turned his hands over. The studio lights caught the lines on his forearms, and the front row noticed, and he decided he did not mind.

“It’s something I found on my explorations. Felt right in that moment.”

“Why that one?” he asked.

“Because it’s the one that makes me feel like I can’t lose. And let’s be honest, it’s just good.”

Eight hundred people made a sound that was not quite a cheer.

“Right,” Oakes said, and cleared his throat, and shuffled cards that did not need shuffling. “Right. We’re going to a break.”

Day after the show they decided to go back. They caught the last train and Ren fell asleep again about four stops out.

Adam looked out at the dark fields going past and thought about the thing he had not thought about all evening, which was what to buy next. The sequence 5 potion?

He could buy it tomorrow. There was nothing standing in the way — no war, no emergency, no reason at all.

Tomorrow it is.