Victor’s attention flicked between his watch and the ex-soldier, who was busy examining himself. People took their bodies and their health for granted. But Dominic Rusher seemed to savor every painless flexing of his hands, every stride. He clearly understood what a gift he’d been given. Good, thought Victor.
“Dominic,” he said. “What I’ve done can be undone. And for the record, I do not need to touch you to do it. That was for effect. Do you understand? What I’ve taken can be given back in a blink, from a city away, or a world away. So do not cross me.”
Dominic nodded solemnly.
In truth, Victor could only influence a person’s pain threshold if they were within eyesight. The farthest he’d gotten in prison was dropping a man from across the football-field-sized yard with only a finger gun. Once he’d managed to crumple an inmate at the other end of the cell block, only his hand visible through the bars, but still. Out of sight, and his accuracy quickly vanished. Not that Dominic needed to know any of that.
“Your power,” asked Victor. “How does it work?”
“I don’t exactly know how to explain.” Dominic looked down at his hands, and flexed and stretched them as if working out a lingering stiffness. “Yea, though I walk in the shadow of the valley of death—”
“Biblical allusions aside, please.”
“After the mine blew, it was bad. I couldn’t … it was inhuman, that pain. It was animal and everywhere. And I didn’t want to die. God, I didn’t, but I wanted quiet and dark and … it’s hard to explain.”
He didn’t have to. Victor knew.
“I felt torn apart. I was. Anyway. They brought me back but they couldn’t seem to pull me through, not all the way. I spent weeks in a coma. All that time, I could feel the world. I could hear it. Swore I could see it, too, but it was like everything was far away. Murky. And I couldn’t reach out, couldn’t touch any of it. And then I woke up, and everything was so sharp and bright and full of pain again, and all I wanted was to find that place, that dull, quiet place. And then I did. I call it walking in shadows, because I don’t know any other term. I step into the darkness and can move from one place to another without being seen. Without time passing. Without anything. It looks like teleporting, I guess, but I have to physically move. I could cross a city in the time it takes you to blink, but it would take me hours. I’d have to walk the whole way. And it’s hard. Like walking through water. The world resists, when you break its rules.”
“Can you take others with you?”
Dominic shrugged. “I’ve never tried.”
“Well then,” said Victor, taking hold of Dominic’s arm, ignoring the moment when the man winced intrinsically away. “Consider this your audition.”
“Where are we going?”
“My friend is still inside,” said Victor, nodding toward the bar. “He should have come out after you. But he didn’t.”
“That big guy? He said he’d cover me.”
Victor frowned. “From who?”
“The one who wants to kill me,” said Dominic, frowning. “I tried to tell you, that guy sat down next to me and said there was a man who wanted to kill me, and that he was in the bar.”
Victor’s grip tightened on Dominic’s sleeve. Eli. “Take me inside. Now.”
Dominic took a steadying breath, and put his hand over Victor’s. “Don’t know if this is even going to—”
The rest of the words dropped away, not fading out but plummeting into silence as the air around them shuddered, and split to allow the two men through. The moment Dominic and Victor stepped through the seam, everything hushed and darkened and stilled. Victor could see the man whose arm he was touching, just as he could see the alley around them, but all of it was cast in a kind of shadow, less like night and more like the world had been photographed in black and white and then the photo had aged, worn, grayed. When they walked, the world rippled thickly around them, the air viscous. It pressed in on them, weighed them down. When they reached the door to the bar, it resisted Dominic’s pull before finally—slowly—giving way.
Inside, the photo world continued. People caught middrink, mid-pool-shot, midkiss, midfight, and mid-a-dozen-other-things, all stuck between one breath and the next. And all the sound caught, too, so that the space filled with a horrible, heavy quiet. Victor kept his hand on Dominic’s arm like a blind man, but he couldn’t take his eyes from the room. He scanned, searching the frozen faces of the crowd.
And then he saw him.
Victor ground to a halt, jarring Dominic backward. He glanced over his shoulder and asked what was wrong, the words mouthed, but never formed. And it didn’t matter, anyway, because Victor didn’t see his lips move. He didn’t see anything but the dark-haired man caught midstride as he wove through the crowd, away from them and toward the front door, hand reaching out for the handle. Victor wondered how could he know that man without seeing his face. It was the posture, the broad shoulders and the arrogant way he held them, the edge of his sharp jaw visible as he turned away.