Forget him then. I left my safe position at the far end of the row, stepping out into the open too far away for the gunman at the front of the store to notice me. One of the pairs of cart pushers swung out from an aisle a few rows up, their heads swiveling to look at me as they skidded to a stop.

  “What the hell are you looking at?” one of them growled.

  Heart pounding, I stood my ground. “I recommend you get out of here, before somebody gets hurt,” I said.

  Of course, they laughed. Who was I, but a scrawny kid flying solo. At least, they thought I was flying solo. And there were at least seven of them.

  “Only one who’s going to get hurt here is you, asshole,” one of them said, pulling a knife. “Why don’t you turn around and pretend we don’t exist.”

  I glanced over at Keep, who was still oblivious to the situation. Reaching behind my back, I wrapped my hand around the grip of my gun. “No, I don’t think I will.” I held my free hand at my side, my thoughts turning to the sigiltech ring. A tingling sensation beneath the ring followed, running from my finger all the way up my spine. The catalyst felt ready. I needed a focus word and an action.

  “Suit yourself,” knife-hood said, circling his shopping cart and rushing at me.

  Push. How hard could it be? In my mind, I saw an invisible hand shoving the hood backward, knocking him into his cart and his buddy and all three toppling to the floor.

  “Distra,” I whispered, whipping my ring-hand forward, my other hand ready with the gun just in case.

  The tingle increased, so powerful it made my hand go numb. The hood stopped as if he had run into a brick wall, and then launched back the way he had come, flying right over the head of his friend as if he were a punted football. He landed halfway between me and the guy with the gun near the register, crying out as he hit the ground hard.

  “What the hell?” the other guy said, beating me to the punch as he pulled a gun of his own. He squeezed off three rounds before I could react, still surprised by the ferocity of my push and the lack of sensation in my hand.

  The bullets hit an invisible barrier, stopping suddenly and dropping to the floor, leaving the crook stunned. Then Keep was beside me, and with a whisper he threw the guy down.

  “You aren’t even close to ready for this, kid,” he growled. “You should have left it alone.” His lips moved silently, and the gun flew from the hand of the thug at the register, leaving him unarmed.

  His words bit into me hard. Not ready? I didn’t need his stupid sigiltech to fight.

  I sprinted down the hammer aisle to the other end, nearly colliding with two more of the thugs as they tried to sneak up on us. I threw a stiff elbow into the face of the first, bowling him over with one blow, turning on the other as he pulled a knife. Setting myself, I waited for him to lunge at me with it, batting his arm aside. Grabbing it and turning it over, I brought my other hand down hard on his elbow, cracking the bone. He cried out and punched me in the ribs with his other hand, a blow I accepted while I threw a heavy right hook into his jaw. He stumbled into a display of picture hanging accessories and slumped to the floor.

  A gunshot rang out, the bullet whipping past my ear. Ducking low, I realized the feeling had returned to my ring hand. Looking at another display beside the shooter, I recreated the push, this time using it to knock the display over onto him. It shook in place but didn’t fall, and I would have taken a bullet if Keep hadn’t used pull to tug me out of the line of fire.

  “Damn it, Bennie!” he hissed. “You’re going to get us both killed.”

  I heard sirens in the distance. The clerk had probably called the police as soon as Keep took care of the thug threatening him.

  “Cops are coming!” I heard one of the hoods shout. “Leave the shit, let’s go.”

  Pounding feet followed, and one of them appeared at the end of our aisle, glaring at us as he scooped up one of the guys I had dropped. The other stumbled back to his feet, rushing away behind them.

  “If I ever see you again, you’re dead,” the thug growled at me before turning away and heading for the door.

  “We need to get out of here too,” Keep said, grabbing the cart. “Take this out the back, I’ll meet you around the corner with the car.”

  “You want to steal this stuff?” I said.

  “No, but you didn’t leave us much choice. Unless you want to spend the next forty-eight hours being questioned by the police?”

  Which would leave us forty-eight hours further from returning to the Spiral. “Not really. Keep, I—”

  “Save it, kid.” He shoved the cart to me. “Go.”

  I grabbed it and pushed it to the aisle, turning right when the thugs had gone left. The back door was visible straight ahead, and I rushed to it as Keep dashed away in the other direction. The police were getting closer, but still sounded like they were a few blocks away.

  I ducked out into a small receiving area behind the store, pausing beside a dumpster giving off an awful smell. Looking at all of the tools in the cart, I hated the thought of stealing it. A smuggler in the Quad, a thief here. Why did my good intentions keep turning into criminal activity?

  The Prius came around the corner. Keep threw it into an impressive one eighty spin ahead of me, stopping with the hatchback a few feet away. He jumped out and popped it open, and together we quickly tossed most of the tools from cart to trunk.

  “That’s as good as it gets,” he announced as soon as he saw the flashing lights of the police cars. “Let’s go.” We left a few sets of tools behind, climbing back into the car. Rather than peel away, Keep pulled out extra-cautiously, slowing to a stop at the rear parking lot entrance as two squad cars rushed past, headed for the front of the store.

  The police were on the right, so Keep turned left, slipping into traffic and making our getaway.

  CHAPTER 16

  We drove in silence for the next few minutes, putting more distance between us and the hardware store. I could smell the metal of the tools stuffed into the rear behind us, our ill-gotten gains leaving me feeling more guilty with each passing second. An independent business, I doubted the owner of the store could afford the theft he had already endured, and I had made it even worse. I wanted to do good. To help people. To make a difference before I died. That’s what Keep had sold me on, that and escaping Sedaya’s ship, and like Head Case, once I bought in, I was on board one hundred percent.

  Obviously, I still had a lot to learn.

  “Keep,” I said. “I–”

  “Don’t say you’re sorry,” Keep said, cutting me off. “Because you aren’t.”

  “What? Yes I–”

  “No, you aren’t. Not really. You think you’re sorry because the end result wasn’t what you saw in your head. In your mind, you were going to use the ring to subdue seven thugs and hold them until the police arrived, prevent the place from getting robbed, and show me that you could skip a few steps to becoming everything I convinced you that you could be.” He looked over at me, his expression softer than I had expected. “You can stop me when I’m wrong.”

  I stared at him in silence. He wasn’t wrong. He pretty much had me figured out, as much as I hated it.

  “You’re not a complex guy, Bennie,” he continued. “And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You have a strong sense of justice, you’re incredibly loyal and extremely protective of the people you care about. I already knew all that. It’s one of the main reasons I singled you out in the first place. The problem isn’t that you wanted to help, it’s that you vastly overestimated your current capabilities. Or at least, you let your enthusiasm get the best of you. That’s just as much my fault as it is yours. I shouldn’t have given you the ring until we were ready to start training. I shouldn’t have told you so much about how to use it and put that temptation in your head. I’m the one who’s sorry, kid. I knew your personality and I didn’t protect you from yourself. I’ve been an archon for a long time, but I’ve never had a student before. I never intended to pass anything I know on to anyone else. This is out of necessity, not desire.”

  I stared at him, in disbelief that he was actually apologizing to me. Smug, sarcastic, know-it-all Keep admitted he had screwed up. Of course, he had screwed up by not stopping me from screwing up before I had the opportunity to screw up. I wasn’t sure how that math worked in terms of my own sense of superiority or whether or not I should allow him to apologize. Part of me wanted the win after my own failure, but I think we both knew I wouldn’t accept him taking the blame.

  “No, you warned me not to mess with the ring. You told me I wouldn’t be able to control it. After escaping Sedaya’s ship and getting away on Furion and getting out of Persephon prison, I thought I could handle a group of Earthian thugs.” I paused, unsure about saying the next thing that came to mind. “The difference is, I had help all of those times, but you refused to help me back there.”

  “I caught those bullets for you. I saved your life.”

  “If you had helped me in the first place, maybe we could have come up with a plan.”

  “Or maybe you should have just stayed out of it like I suggested.”

  “You just said you knew why I did it.”

  “I did. But I didn’t say it was the right move under these circumstances. Because it wasn’t.”

  I leaned back in the passenger seat. “Yeah. Anyway, bickering back and forth isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

  Keep smiled. “I’m glad you agree.”

  “What’s done is done, right?”

  “Bingo, kid.”

  “So what now?”

  “Now, we head back to Fresno. We can rent a motel room for the night, rent a car in the morning, and bring this econobox back to the Frasier’s, along with the tools.”

  “What about my training?”

  “After all that. Since George thinks I work for SpaceX during the week, I’ll have to make up a story that keeps me closer to the farm, but it’s better if we show up there after normal work hours to keep the ruse going. We’ll also have to make a run down to LA at some point so I can finalize the ivory purchase. Anyway, the thing is, your ability to activate the ring is aces. You didn’t have any trouble focusing, composing, or directing the action.”

  “I thought you said pushing is like the hello world of sigiltech?”

  “It is, but you tossed that guy a good twenty feet. That’s impressive for a first-timer, even if it was a bit too much.”

  “Thanks, I think.”

  “What you need is control, and that’s going to take time. But not struggling with activation moves you to the head of the class.”

  “A class of one. I’m already at the head.”

  “It’ll save us some time. That has to be good news, right?”

  “Definitely.”

  Keep looked over at me again, expression serious. “Don’t get too down on yourself, kid. You have a good heart. A big heart. And you meant well.”

  “The road to hell,” I started.

  “Just refrain from using the ring without my explicit guidance for now, and everything will work out just dandy. Capiche?”

  “Capiche.”

  “I’ve got the wheel if you want to take a turn napping.”

  “Do you promise you won’t teleport us across the galaxy while I’m asleep?”

  “I thought you wanted to be teleported across the galaxy?”

  “True. I’m not really that tired right now. How about some tunes?”

  I leaned forward and messed with the radio, settling on modern rock. It played for about thirty seconds before Keep shut it off.

  “I’d like to get there with my hearing still intact,” he said.

  “What kind of music do you like?” I asked. “Let me guess. Sinatra? Torme? Buble?”

  “I don’t know. I always thought that stuff Alter likes was kind of catchy.”

  “The sickly sweet technopop?”

  “If that’s what you call it, sure.”

  “And you think modern rock kills eardrums? That stuff’ll give you diabetes.”

  He laughed. “Okay wise guy, maybe we can find something we both don’t like and see if either one or both of us can acquire the taste.”

  “An interesting challenge,” I replied, reaching for the radio controls. “First one to turn it off loses.”

  “Then prepare to lose, kid.”

  “Not this time, Keep. Not this time.”

  CHAPTER 17

  We settled on Country music. I already knew I didn’t like it, and Keep had never actually listened to it before. Tim McGraw was singing again when we reached Fresno a few hours later, both Keep and I preferring torture than to either turn it off or admit it was growing on us. I couldn’t speak for him, but it definitely wasn’t growing on me. I couldn’t even really say what I didn’t like about it. I just didn’t like it.

  Though it was nowhere near as bad as the Spiral’s version of K-pop.

  Keep rented us a room at a Motel Six, and we checked in at two in the morning. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow on one of the pair of lumpy twin beds, though I woke up a few times during the night when Keep made noise coming or going from the room. I assumed he left to smoke, but maybe he was making archon-calls across the universe or something. We had bonded a little bit during the car ride back from Modesto, and while my willingness to trust him had increased, it still fell well short of solid. At least I trusted him enough to stay in bed when he left instead of sneaking around, trying to get an idea of what he was actually doing.

  He got me up at six, and we drove to a small diner for breakfast. Keep had country fried steak. I settled for a more traditional bacon and cheddar omelet and a strong cup of coffee. The normalcy continued to feel surreal to me. Sitting in a diner eating eggs while knowing how much was going on in the universe beyond our solar system, while knowing Matt was in danger, made it hard to relax. I stuffed my face in a hurry, eager to get the show on the road.

  We went from the diner to a rental car place, where Keep splurged on a van that would carry the tools and eventually the sigiltech catalyst and the ivory he planned to buy more easily and discreetly. We were on the road back to the Frasier’s farm by seven-thirty—Keep in the van, me behind the wheel of the Prius.

  I noticed smoke on the horizon when we were still a good ten miles out, rising over the hillside in a thick, dark column. I knew this area was no stranger to wildfires so it didn’t really register as anything out of the ordinary to me, at least not right away. But as we moved closer to George’s farm, I realized the smoke was too localized.

  A sudden wave of panic crashed through me. The thought that my damaged starfighter had caused a fire in the barn and burned it to the ground took hold. I sped up as a result, desperate to disprove my imaginary catastrophe. Keep kept pace behind me as best he could, but the large van couldn’t handle higher speed and he began to fall back. He had to see the smoke too. Did he have the same concern?

  My heart pounded as I reached the entrance to the farm and turned onto the long dirt road leading to the house. The smoke was definitely coming from the farm, too dark and thick to be intentional, at least in my mind. I sped along the road, bouncing and rocking over the uneven terrain, my sharp turn of the steering wheel the only thing that kept the car from careening into a tree.

  Nearing the edge of the tree-lined roadway, I finally spotted the aged bronze weathervane that sat at the highest point on the barn roof, suggesting the barn itself remained intact. I began breathing a sigh of relief, and then the breath caught in my throat as I emerged from the trees and could see that the smoke wasn’t coming from the barn at all.

  It was coming from the house.

  I cursed softly at the flames engulfing the entire top floor of the house. The roof, for the most part, had already collapsed.

  Head whipping back and forth, I searched for any sign that the Frasier’s had made it out of the fire. George’s truck wasn’t parked at the house, and I didn’t see it near the barn either. Had they called the fire department? Gone for help? The house was burning down, and no one seemed to be here.

  A flash of energy to my right drew my attention a split second before it hit the Prius. The engine exploded instantly, the hood flying open as smoke began pouring out. Without a second thought, I threw open the driver side door and released the seatbelt, throwing myself out of the car as it rolled to a dead stop. A second energy bolt slammed into it, followed by two more. One of the shots must have hit the car’s battery, because it exploded in a fireball that quickly engulfed the rest of the car.

  I rolled to my feet, fear augmented by adrenaline as I pulled the gun Keep had given me, momentarily hidden by the dense smoke of the car fire. As far as I knew, there were no guns on Earth that fired plasma, ions, or otherwise. Which meant the shooters weren’t from Earth.

  Keep had said he was the only one who could fast travel between the Spiral and here. Had he lied to me? Or were Sedaya’s archons-in-training a lot more advanced than either of us realized?

  Whatever the explanation, the ramifications were chilling. The Frasier’s house was already well on its way to burning all the way to the ground. What had happened to George, Gloria, and Kyrie?

  An unaimed energy bolt blasted through the smoke, reminding me I had more immediate problems. The attackers knew I had gotten out of the car even if they couldn’t get a full bead on me just yet. A frantic look around showed me I was stuck out in the open. The smoke helped, but it wouldn’t protect me for much longer. I only had one choice.

  My attention shifted to the ring on my finger. I knew from the tingle beneath my skin that it had activated with only the slightest thought, a fact that would probably impress Keep. Turning it on was one thing. Using it effectively was something else.

  But I didn’t really need to be careful. Not out here in the open. In fact, if I was going to survive I needed my move to be as unbridled as possible. Full force. No holds barred. To that end, I lifted my hand and looked at the trees. Unable to see the shooters, I didn’t waste time trying to be subtle.