Sanya had to climb past barricades and crashed vehicles to enter the tunnel.  One vehicle near the entrance had a barricade under it.  The barricade had aimed to keep vehicles on the road as they left the tunnel, and it looked like someone had tried to drive off road, into the barrier and had gotten stuck on it, before sliding down the slope and blocking traffic.  From there, crashes, gridlock, and possibly fire.

This tunnel wasn’t the sort of place he liked to go.  He had no light source, and the prevailing weather conditions made making or sustaining a fire impossible, even in the tunnel.  It wasn’t a long tunnel, he could see the distant light on the other side, but it was a one that was damn close to being pitch black in the middle third, littered with bodies and vehicles in the sections he could see better.

He’d run out of good options to explore.

Even in the better-lit part of the tunnel, Sanya tripped over errant hands and legs.  Debris had fallen off one truck that had been tightly packed with the evacuee’s things, and littered the roadway.  It hardly mattered for the cars that would have come behind it, because the way forward was a gridlock of vehicles with people between them.  They had tried to evacuate and it hadn’t worked.   People were there at the edges of those singed husks of cars, eyes closed, shirts pulled up over mouths, running in the opposite direction that Sanya was walking.  Here for forever, maybe.

Sanya was, as far as he’d discovered, among the very few survivors.  If these people standing here weren’t ‘surviving’, in a sense.

Venturing into the impenetrable darkness of the middle of the tunnel, he walked into a car mirror, taking a hit to the lower ribs.  Electricity sparked out from his power, buzzing.  He groaned, wincing, and felt out with his hand until he’d found a nearby car that he could lean against, so he could recover.  It forced him to refocus, and renew his power.  He took deep breaths, hand feeling at his side so he could judge how much it would hurt.

“ ,” he muttered.  He couldn’t even hear his own voice.  The words were lost before they could reach his ears.  It made him feel lonelier, in the middle of this crowd.  He didn’t like the dark, or being surrounded by this many people.  He made himself straighten, then resume walking.

With his focus taken up by that, the pain, and his hands feeling out in the dark for more car mirrors or open car doors, he stepped on someone’s arm and nearly rolled his ankle.  Not quite enough to do damage, but he might feel a bit of soreness tomorrow, and if he did that two or three more times, he’d be unable to walk for a while.

He had to force himself to slow down, even as the light a little further down the tunnel beckoned.  Here it was more cars, abandoned supplies-

A car mirror on a truck scraped the top of his head.  Hair protected him.  He waved his hands around a bit more, to account for the height of trucks and emergency vehicles.

-and further down were more of the people who hadn’t made it.  He approached them carefully.  It looked like cars had rammed into cars, and maybe had run over the stragglers in the crowd.  Patches of brightness streaked the tunnel floor, some beneath the shelsl of the abandoned vehicles.

A family had gathered and huddled with their backs to the wall, sitting between two parked cars.  The three three adults sat with two children between them, arms behind the children.  Mother and the very young son looked down or had their eyes closed.  The little girl and two men looked up and forward.  A lot of faces looked up and forward.  Sanya wasn’t quite far enough down the tunnel to be in the daylight that came through at an angle, but it looked like there was light here.  He could have interpreted it as a hole in the tunnel ceiling where light could shine through, but it wasn’t.

He approached a woman who was standing.  Still standing.  Her eyes were open too, unlike the people near the entrance, who had no doubt been squinting against the smoke of burning cars, trying to see a way through.  Her eyes weren’t pupil, iris, and white anymore.  They were pools of color like an aurora borealis, but far more vivid.  The edges of that effect were blurry because moisture, too, had that color to it.  Tears in her eyes sat heavy on her lower eyelids and beaded on the edge of her lower eyelids and eyelashes, where they hadn’t moved for a long time, and they swirled in a lazy way with colors that shifted, mixed, and combined to make results that weren’t what they should have been.  A touch of saliva on her lower lip and in the corner of her mouth made those spots glow and seem to move slightly with the swirling effect, as if she might say something.  Across her skin, dust had settled and something about the way the moisture in the air carried that same effect made it flatten out and compress.  It looked like flaking paint.

Someone had urinated on herself and that was memorialized, color swirling in fabric that remained wet, and puddles at her feet.  People who had been caught under cars bled color.  The press of people, vehicles, and other debris on the ground and the fact most of it was under cars meant it wasn’t that bright, for the most part.

The illusion of light from a hole in the ceiling was from that shimmering effect.   Many eyes of people in the crowd were looking at one wall that it was illuminated with a soft spotlight.  Not that different from the effect of fifty televisions playing the same image, all pointed in the same direction.  It illuminated words on the wall.

ЗДЕСЬ НАС НАСТИГ СЛИПЕР
ЗДЕСЬ МЫ ЖДЕМ СПАСЕНИЯ

Sanya could interpret this.  Here, Sleeper had cornered them.  Here, they awaited rescue.  Okay.  Sleeper had passed through.

It looked like the people here had seen the collisions and fire at the end of the tunnel Sanya had come in through, and they had stopped running and started waiting for Sleeper’s arrival.  

If they were running from, then Sanya would continue his steady march forward toward whatever or whoever it was.

First, though, he took a moment, his thumb inside his sleeve and pushing out, to daub away some of that altered saliva and those tears, from the woman’s face.  Then he used his hands to brush the peeling-paint layer of dust away.  There was no way to clean up everyone he came across, no way to do something for all of them, or he’d be doing nothing else.  That wasn’t what this was.  It had been a very long time since he had had human contact, cared for anyone or been cared for in turn.

Sanya navigated his way out of the dark part of the tunnel, with many patches here illuminated by the eyes or spilled bodily fluids of those who’d been escaping.  Any fluid that wasn’t dried by the time the effect swept in had been colored this way, and hadn’t dried in the time since.  

He exited the tunnel and squinted against the light.  It was bright, and the sky shifted between deep, oversaturated blues, reds, oranges, yellows, magentas and more.  As he understood it and as it had been explained to him, it was like a hurricane, drifting over the country, but it wasn’t weather, in the usual sense.  It overwhelmed anything it touched.  It was thick in the air, almost tasteable, it asserted its grip over man, machine, and more.  The Sleeper’s power.  The morass.  The colors.

Here, it seemed to be as safe as anywhere.  There were barely any living souls.  Fires wouldn’t start, nor would cars.  Bikes locked up.  Even scissors jammed.  It was like the color was thick in the air and he couldn’t see it.  Thick enough it got between the components of the simplest of mechanisms, and seized wheels.  It was safe in other ways, because slings and arrows couldn’t fly in this altered air, and the slings and arrows of words couldn’t carry either.  No words could.  Fast movements were blunted, there was no hot, no cold.

Sanya renewed his power, asserting his power over his body, and produced an impotent four-foot arc of lightning near his hand to remind himself that he had that option.  Since it wasn’t, he also had his knife, and a bat jammed into his bag.  He still carried his knives and kept his weapons ready.

One reason for that was that being a parahuman was dangerous.  

⬢

Before

It was the first living soul he’d seen in three months, if he considered the people under the Sleeper’s effects dead.

The man was distant, standing in the middle of the street, and was heavily tattooed, and wore a modified army uniform.  It was the type that was all one piece, with buttons down to the belt, but the colors were different.  Dark gray and black.  He’d taken off the top half and tied the sleeves around his waist.  One of those sleeves had an armband on it.  His arm had a blackout tattoo that matched the armband.  Sanya couldn’t read the letters.  

Spetssila, or the Elitnaya Armiya when talked about in media and to foreigners.

After a few incidents and the disaster across Moscow in 1995, the government had militarized its parahumans.  Each parahuman got a detachment of soldiers and staff that focused purely on assisting and optimizing them.  Maybe, Sanya had realized, controlling them.  The Spetsilla did missions for the rest of their lives.  

Maybe that was why this one, sent into a place his detachment couldn’t follow, had mostly removed his uniform, and seemed most concerned with looting a convenience store.  He had magazines and children’s toys he would soon realize didn’t work in this place.  He’d pulled out a dining chair from a home or nearby store, a footstool that didn’t match, and had other things he’d collected, all in a camp he’d made in the middle of the road with no concern for his own safety.

A special lack of concern for his own safety.  The nearest buildings were about four stories high, and directly above the place the treasures had been gathered, a missile was suspended in the air, slowly rotating.  There was a half-circle of energy around the nose of the falling missile that a shuttle re-entering atmosphere produced, but this was an oversaturated aurora borealis, not superheated atmosphere.

That missile would take days or even weeks to hit ground, with how slow it was falling.  It would slow more as it got close to the ground.  There was a very real chance it wouldn’t go off when it did land.  If it didn’t detonate, Sleeper’s power would claim it where it lay and then it would go inert, like hundreds of others that Sanya had seen as he explored.

If that soldier had come in, he might know the way out.  If Sanya approached, would the soldier play along?  Or would he do what the Spetsilla did for a lot of their missions, and hunt the parahumans that had dodged conscription?

Which Sanya was.

It just seemed so boyish that all the soldier wanted was porn magazines and toys.

Sanya watched as the man started to use a toy that was meant to send a little plastic helicopter soaring after the string was yanked.  It jammed.

The soldier tossed it aside, and as he turned to do that, Sanya could see his chest.  A space a handspan wide had been carved out, and something that looked a lot like a black hole was suspended in the center, with light lensing around the edges.  His face was the same, with another black hole suspended in it.  Scraggly hair trimmed the parts of his chin and jawline that still existed.

Sanya ducked behind a car before the soldier could see him.

Months of isolation played tricks with his mind.  They lied to him and said he could walk out from behind cover with his hands up and open a dialogue.  They lied and said he could shout out, asking to talk, and compare notes.  Even if they weren’t on the same side, surely the fact a bigger threat was out there meant they could work together.

It wasn’t just the isolation.  For months now, the very air had pressured Sanya, reminding him with every breath that he was breathing in the miasma.  He couldn’t sleep a full night’s sleep, because his power needed a refresh to keep the colors at bay.  He spent every day walking past people in the final moments before their ability to move, think, or speak had been snatched from them.  Every expression of fear or resignation took something from him.  He’d spent three months not knowing if he’d ever see another human again.  He’d considered taking his own life, and had stopped only because there was a chance.  A chance he might matter and be able to stop this.

The fact Sanya had to say no and avoid this other source of human connection made tears come to his eyes.  His power formed a thin line of what felt like bad static electricity, a razor-thin dividing line between him and the colors that revealed themselves in the air, trying to connect to the moisture.  It was a million-to-one shot his power had protected him,

That blur of color might have given away his position, because he heard a gunshot, muffled by the thickness of the air.  

Guns weren’t supposed to work here.

Sanya’s stomach lurched, and he made a sound that the thick air swallowed up as he was pulled back hard against the car.  The car was pulled too, but being bigger, it was dragged back slowly, constantly, and inexorably, foot by foot.

His posture and position meant he had been ducking down in an awkward crouch when he’d been pulled back.  It was awkward enough a position that he couldn’t straighten out or stand to pull away.  He was pinned.

The bullet took what might have been thirty seconds before it hit the car with an impact that sounded strangely quiet.  On a physical level, it hit heavy, though, in a way that Sanya could feel within his chest, with his back to a car door on the far side

Sanya decided to sprint for it, seizing his bag before he scrambled from the parked car he’d ducked behind to the nearest corner- if he could get onto the next street, there would be buildings between himself and this soldier.

He glanced back over his shoulder.

The soldier’s hand had turned pitch black, with that distortion effect around it, like the light  was being pinched together.  He held what looked like a horseshoe, with a third black hole inside it.  The soldier used that horsehoe, and it sounded exactly like a handgun.  It also produced a bullet.

Sanya knew because, even as he ran, he could see the air distort and color flare around the bullet.  The same sort of half-circle that was around the tip of the missile, but it was around the front of a pitch-black bullet with light lensing around its edges.

Sanya, mid-run, could feel the pull, even from a distance, and it affected his balance.  It was a strange dynamic, where the bullet, like the missile, slowed more with every passing moment, reaching for that weird multi-layered stasis, and it had less effect when it was distant.  But it did have a pull to it, and as it drew closer, that pull increased.

It felt like trying to run from something in a dream, where every step he took wasn’t producing the expected effect.

He heard two more gunshots, fired off in quick succession.

Those added bullets, though distant, provided a bit more pull, that served to break that strange equilibrium that had formed.  Sanya teetered backward, then fell.  Then he was dragged and lifted just a little, his arms and legs stretching out to find anything he could use to get traction or fight.

With the balance disturbed, there was no winning.  The further back he stumbled the harder he was pulled.

It hit him in the chest, and the static of his power flared, pushing it away.  Another strange push-pull in this dynamic.  The effect, in the end, was less like getting shot, and more like being thrown by someone twice his size into a clothes hook on the wall.  He had no idea how bad the damage was, but the fact it didn’t hurt more made him worry.

Sanya collapsed, groaning, and looked up to see the soldier quick-walking around a cloud of what might have been pitch black bullet fragments, suspended in air by the same effect that slowed the missiles.  The two other shots had pulled into each other.  But they’d been shot to produce that extra bit of pull, not to hit him.

Pure survival instinct drove him to run.

Sanya had spent too long surviving in this to die like this.

He ran, and looked back, and saw the soldier getting in position to aim.  The man probably didn’t want the spray of bullet fragments to interfere with the shot any, so he was putting distance between himself and that cloud of fragments.

Sanya parsed the scene he was seeing, and he shouted something incoherent, pointing, before the soldier could pull the trigger.

The pulls of the black hole bullets had pulled at other things too.  Debris all across the road had started to scatter and travel its way toward the paths the bullets had traveled, and even bystanders who had been standing in the same place for months were pulled off balance.

Most important of all, the missile had been pulled downward, its time to detonation closed by enough to make both of them worry.

If he shot another black hole bullet, it could help that along.

The soldier saw, and holstered the black horseshoe, letting it become a pistol again.

He sprinted, with enough force the color in the air formed a slight sheen against the front of him, as if air resitance was made bright, and while he ran, the soldier drew a knife.  He shook it, as if trying to get rid of a spider that had landed on the blade.

The blade became a long, narrow sliver of crystal, made of black hole.

Sanya was traveling in a straight line, though, and the soldier had detoured to the side.  Sanya rounded the corner, and immediately turned into an alleyway.  There was a metal fence meant to close off traffic into the alley.

By the time he’d scaled it, the soldier had reached the alley.  What had taken Sanya ten seconds to climb took the soldier moments.  Some of that was Sanya’s injury.  Most of it was a gap in fitness, in training.  Sanya was up against someone who had trained and worked with teams to find clever ways to leverage what he had.

Sanya, though, had an element of surprise.  He had a defensive forcefield that pushed back more than it really stopped anything, and an offensive weapon that carried a lot of energy, even if it barely reached out three feet.  Too long to be a convenient weapon, too short to be a proper whip.

It channeled energy into the metal.  Sparks flew where the soldier’s hands touched it, and the soldier went rigid.

Sanya, running, didn’t even check to see if it had killed the soldier, or which side of the fence the soldier had landed on.

Relief and a bit of distance from the man meant that the effects of shock began to wear off.  Sanya held a hand to his chest wound as he retreated.  It would take a long time to heal, but he could reassure himself that at the very least, disease and decay didn’t seem any more able to survive here than anything else.

He hoped the soldier survived.  The words his lonely heart had conjured up to try to convince him to reach out and connect with the soldier were still true.  They had a common enemy.

⬢

Now

There were signs of life here.  It was a validation of everything he’d been doing.

Sanya folded up his map, careful to preserve the other maps and papers he’d attached to it.  Above him, dozens of bombs drifted downward at a glacial pace.

He had rules for how he navigated.  If people were running away, he’d head in the direction of whatever it was they had been running away from.  If he spent more than a few days in a place and there was no evidence, or if he found himself retreading old ground, then he tried to find a new area.  Everywhere he went, he took notes.

Months ago, he’d met the second parahuman and the only other living thing he’d found here.  Artem.  Artem existed as a living infection, leaping from one of the stationary bodies to another.  Artem wasn’t doing well, because each second of exposure between hosts was time Sleeper’s power would get a grip on him, and then he would need to recuperate.  The problem was, he killed every host within fifteen minutes.  He’d been in the midst of this from the beginning.  He could turn off his power, but like Sanya, he was stuck relying on it, and where Sanya had to wake up regularly, Artem didn’t even get the luxury of sleep.  

It was hard to embrace the fact that Artem had killed... countless people by now.  It had been years, though it was hard to tell when no clocks worked and the sky was a morass of shifting color, with no night or day.  Years of killing four people an hour, give or take.  Maybe, in another lifetime, Sanya wouldn’t have been able to accept that.

But they had a common enemy and Artem was both willing to talk and exchange information.  In a sense.  Talking was next to impossible.  They’d written what they could, which was a struggle in itself.  Tool use was hard, most surfaces were protected and made resistant by the effect, Artem needed to constantly find new hosts, and Sanya hadn’t written much since he was in grade school.  He hadn’t graduated high school.

Still, Artem had passed on that he’d intuited Sleeper’s location.  He’d given his own recommendations, like traveling where the bombs were pointed.  That had led to discussions.  Whether Sleeper was a ‘him’, and if he was possibly an Endbringer.  Artem had thought so, but after Sanya shared recollections about what he had seen in written evidence, notices, and more, they’d mutually agreed it was unlikely.  

They’d also agreed that it was likely authorities couldn’t see Sleeper, but they were maybe trying to intuit his location based on how this effect moved.  Artem had been spending months looking for spots that had been targeted and working out the best direction to get away from those areas.  It was possible to track Sleeper’s movements, he had said, and he assumed that if he made fast enough progress in a straight line away from Sleeper, he’d get out of this hell.

For Sanya, it had been over a year since he had seen another person.  He’d wanted to stay with Artem to soothe his desperate loneliness, but he had his own aims.  He’d seen too many faces frozen in horror, too many tears stuck perpetually in place, glowing with lazy swirling colors.  This had to be for a reason.  

In the end, though, he had walked in the opposite direction that his new companion did.  Toward Sleeper.  That goal was the main reason he was armed.

So he followed and mapped out his navigation rules.  He went toward what others ran from.  Toward the places bombs were being dropped.  He avoided doubling back or retreading old ground.  He mapped out everything, drawing out arrows to show the directions people had traveled.  When he came across any military vehicles that had been unable to evacuate, he searched them, breaking into them or getting keys from nearby people until he found the right car keys.  Sometimes there were maps of the storm.  He’d ordered them by the date that was printed in white in one corner of each map, and could work out what the storm had looked like at different times.

He wished so desperately to talk to Artem again, and share what he had figured out.

He searched for clues about why or when people went the directions they did.  He worked out when a given group evacuated.  The clothes they were wearing suggested a time.  Nightclothes meant they evacuated in the middle of the night.  Artem had had the idea that people who’d left on the first day had left on a day it was colder, or were prepared for bad weather, or they’d taken more time to prepare themselves and get things, because they hadn’t realized the urgency.  People who left on the second day had been more rushed.  Either they’d been lied to or they’d lied to themselves about the threat until the last second.

All of that had led him to Saransk.  Tall buildings loomed in the distance, more than half a block away, but a lot of the buildings were relatively tidy rural places.

Three bombs had touched ground and gone off in the distance a few days ago.  They’d been big as explosions went, unusual in that there were three in rapid succession, when most bombs refused to go off in the midst of all of this, and they had stirred up Sleeper’s power.  The shockwave had produced color and resistance and made for a very handy and lasting marker as Sanya took notes on his map from multiple angles, and got to a rooftop to look at it through binoculars.  It was still visible in the air as a scattering of color after he’d taken a few minutes to hurriedly gather his things and set out.  It was as good a place as any to visit.

Chasing that had led him here, and now finally, finally, he’d found concrete evidence.  Two people on the street had had the dust brushed off of them.  Artem couldn’t and wouldn’t do that.  He’d take them over.

He cautiously walked down a city block, turned, walked down another, and then backtracked to try out different streets near those two people who had been cleaned up.

He found another clue on one of the streets he had backtracked to.  A puddle of liquid that shimmered like many other fluids, be they bodily or machine.  A trash bag had been laid over a pile of shit that someone had deposited on the side of the road, covering it.  The shit, too, glistened with rainbow colors.

The same thing happened when Sanya relieved himself, and it didn’t make sense that someone would have gone to the bathroom out in the open just before Sleeper had arrived.  Whoever it was might have made themselves sick, because there were other deposits nearby.  Sanya pivoted to using this as a new place to explore out from and loop back to.

On one of those subsequent streets, after he’d thoroughly turned himself around, he saw a door that had been forced open.  Splinters still hung in the air, floating with the faintest of aurora borealis shimmers trembling around them.

The air was always the same, the temperature was always the same.  There was no real heat or cold.  In a way, it felt like it dulled and slowed the mind when it couldn’t affect one’s body.  Or maybe it was the isolation, or the fact he only ate food he could eat without needing it to be heated or refrigerated.  Mostly food out of packages.

He was fighting against that dullness of the mind as he tried to stay focused, here.

There was a very slim chance that the person here was another one like Artem.  The fact they’d tidied up the people on the street nearby suggested it.

A much higher chance they would attack on sight.

And the slimmest chance that it would be Sleeper.

He hadn’t slept well, and had woken up after three or four hours, as per usual, only to find he couldn’t get back to sleep.  Whatever reserves he was meant to draw on to jump to full alertness were long depleted and he hadn’t done what he was meant to do to replenish them.

He had been a bad student, a poor employee, a disappointing family member.  He had friends he could hang out with, but no best friends.  He’d had a very pretty girlfriend for a very brief time, and then he’d bungled it.  He’d panicked and he’d made an asshole of himself and then her new boyfriend had come after him with a few friends in tow, to convince him to go and stay gone.  That had been the day he got powers.  He knew they weren’t powers anyone would envy, and when one had powers, there were three places they could end up.  Spetsilla, on the run, or dead.

Maybe his powers were meant to grow into something more over time.  Maybe this was stifling them.  Even if it wasn’t, and he escaped triumphant with the same powers, he was sure they’d see him as a hero.

That was what kept him going in dark moments.  Even if he had a weak power, if it opened the way to him figuring this out and killing Sleeper, it was the right power.  It meant something.  he would mean something.  Killing Sleeper would generate enough international attention that Sanya wouldn’t be able to be quietly dealt with or strongarmed into the military.

People could wake up.  The gaping wound that was this storm of colors would heal.  Maybe a good woman would be drawn to him.  The world might see him as someone worthwhile.

He caught a glimpse of a human’s profile in a reflection in the window, and hurried to take cover.

It was the same soldier that had shot at him before.  

Sanya’s heart sank as he realized this wasn’t Sleeper.   The soldier wasn’t alone.  It was a group of three.

How many parahumans had the government sent into this morass, trying to fix this problem, before they’d found three who could survive it?

He hid as they gathered into a group.  One was a woman whose hair was slicked back tight into a ponytail.  She was looking up a lot.  The two men stood off to the side, tense.  The one with a black hole for a face wasn’t relaxed in the way he had been when Sanya had seen him, before.

Sanya waited until the three were preoccupied and facing the other direction before he made a move.  When the man with a black hole for a face was digging through his bag for food to hand over to the other man, Sanya entered the store they had broken into.  He had to work to make the hinges cooperate, jammed as they were.

All the signs suggested Sleeper was close.  He wanted that to be true, still.  Sanya opened his map, feeling a rare kind of gratitude for the muffling effect of the color storm.  They wouldn’t hear a rustle.

They were here for a purpose.  It didn’t strike him that they had been together as three for very long- from his glimpses of their dynamic, they were wary of each other, standing a measured distance away.  Alone and away from supervision, the black hole soldier had relaxed.  He hadn’t found a way to relax with those two, yet.

So something had brought them close.  Something had brought Sanya close.

He studied the maps and the arrows he’d drawn to show evacuation routes, the ‘x’ marks that showed where the bombs were.  There were clusters of bombs in some areas... and this was one such area.  He tried to work out if there was anything he could determine now, from here.

Sanya saw that a broken sunglasses rack had been stashed below the counter, where the unseemly broken plastic was out of sight.  He got his knife and pried some of the mirror away from the plastic, then awkwardly tried to orient it so he could glimpse around the counter first.  Then out the window.

The woman and the black hole soldier were facing him.  The other man was running.

They knew.  It wasn’t the first time that the black hole soldier had spotted him.  It was almost like that black hole was a special eye that could catch anything in its peripheral vision.

Sanya stood.  They didn’t even flinch when they saw him.  The woman picked up speed, though.  She already had a knife in her hand, held so the blade was pointed downward.

With this perspective, instead of the narrow view of the mirror, Sanya could see what the black hole soldier was doing, as he backed away.

He’d learned his lesson from their prior encounter and now the man was applying it.  He was throwing things out into the air, each with their own pull, and was creating a trail of things for the bombs in the air to follow.  The pull would give them renewed momentum, and the direction of it was set to send those bombs straight into the convenience store.

Sanya fled, pushing at a door with his whole body.  It didn’t want to move.  He glanced back, and saw the woman hurdling the counter, and behind her, the bombs.

The bombs detonated.  There was a succession of blasts, some large, and some small.  The shockwaves rippled through the building, stirring up color and making the air thicker.  An explosion one could almost walk away from.

Sanya burst through the fire door almost at the same moment the shockwave did.  It hit him, and his power flared.  He was thrown, still, against the wall of the building opposite the door.  Again, the static crackled and cushioned things.  He recovered fast as a result, and immediately found another place they had broken into, next door, with the door blown open again by the shockwave.  He went inside.

The woman emerged from the back of the still-intact convenience store.  She didn’t have a hair out of place, despite the fact that she would have been in the middle of the heat and fire of multiple detonating bombs.  Even muffled by Sleeper’s power, that was no small feat.

He continued to watch through a window of a one-story home, peeking through blinds.  He was ready to hide better if the black hole soldier showed up again.  

The woman was looking skyward again.  This time, something came from the sky.

The crash was so real that it made Sanya yelp.  The house rocked, and that rocking felt muted, again, but the fact so many things had been set in motion was unusual.  A series of warheads detonating in quick succession hadn’t stirred things that much.

There was a crater in the street, now.  It was a fourth.  Whoever it was, they’d descended without the effect that made the bomb drops so ineffectual and delayed.

A man.  Skinny, and disproportionate, all dressed in black.  Not the usual uniform.  His head and upper body were encased in a hard shell that seemed so heavy and unwieldy that it made it hard for him to keep his balance.  It looked like a doll’s head, and it was covered in scribbling and graffiti.  The characters were latinitsa.  English.

The woman did not look impressed.

They went in another direction, probably to talk to the others.  After taking three steps, the English idiot stumbled and fell.  The doll’s head touched the ground once again.

A city block away, Sanya could feel the impact low in his belly.

That lazy, dreamlike quality he’d endured for years didn’t seem to apply.

The woman didn’t help the stranger stand, or even approach.  She watched as the figure struggled to get to his two feet with what seemed to be hundreds of pounds of unbalanced weight fixed to his head and shoulders.  It took him three tries, and in two of those tries, he fell again.  Again, with the same impact.

Sanya saw movement and ducked out of sight before the black hole soldier could see him again.  He had time to think, and to open his map again.  The first thing he did was make sure his work hadn’t been scattered.  No papers had been lost.

After a minute, he peeked.  They were gone.  The colors of the various shockwaves lingered in the air.  The ones from the strange doll man had less color to them.

Sanya’s eyebrows drew together.  Seeing the radial circles of the shockwaves around the still-intact building helped Sanya connect a dot.  Some were so small, fizzled out.

The hurricane effect- he’d been working from an assumption that when the Sleeper had triggered, the cloud of effect had immediately snapped out to be a certain size.  After all, if it had started much smaller and gradually reached the big size, then people would have noticed and evacuations would have started sooner.

But if they hadn’t, if the person it had all originated from had started small and nobody had cared or noticed, or if they’d started from a relatively unpopulated area that didn’t see much traffic... Here?

He searched the map.

Had the government realized, dropped bombs to see if they could get lucky and hit the Sleeper, then sent these Spetssila in to the same site when they didn’t?

One area.  The arrows didn’t flow well from that spot.  Evacuations wouldn’t make sense.

He unpacked another map.  He’d found a whole bookstand of maps of the wider area, or just of Saransk, and he’d kept them all.  When he made a mistake, he drew it all over again.  There was one map where he’d started color coding the arrows of flow.  Blue for the first day of evacuation.  Red for later one.  He used that map as a starting point for a new version.

He used a pencil eraser to trace the lines, and reconsidered whenever he ran up against an arrow.  He drew one continuous line, starting with a mostly-complete circle with the earliest map of the hurricane that he had, that he’d taken from a military vehicle.  He drew it as a spiral, each subsequent circle accommodating earlier evacuation directions.

He hadn’t fully explored this area, but he was glad he’d walked these neighborhoods, looping back, between finding the people who’d been dusted off and the place the Spetssila soldiers had gone to the bathroom out in the street.  He could remember some of the flows and arrows.

That let him narrow things down to an area a few blocks wide.  Even on the map, there didn’t seem to be many houses there.  There were blocks of green, usually reserved for woodland.

Sanya considered for a long moment.  He had to get there.  Maybe Sleeper wasn’t there anymore, but there might be evidence.  Who Sleeper was, perhaps.  Or what he wanted.

The question that gripped Sanya was whether he should go it alone.  If he did, he’d have a shot at greatness, but he would be taking that shot alone.  If he missed, he wasn’t sure anyone would ever realize what he’d realized.  These soldiers didn’t seem to be taking the time to keep track of details.  People on the outside couldn’t see.

If he gave them the map, they would take the credit.  The government would.  He’d have no protection.

He finished the map, and noted down the details he could, as best as he could.

Then he folded it up.

He’d get it to them.  That was the important thing.  Maybe, possibly, the foreigner with the doll head would realize his contribution and pass it on.  Sanya gathered his things, took a moment to eat and drink something, and renewed his protective power.

He had no idea how to pass it to them, though.  There were no good ways to signal someone in here.  No sound, no ability to start a fire.  There were no devices.

If he got close enough to drop it near their things, he risked being caught and killed.  If he waved a white flag from a distance and left the map for them with a note, there was a slim chance they wouldn’t see.  Or the black hole soldier would shoot, and things would be scattered into the air.

He wracked his brain.

He had his power, but that wasn’t much better on its own than waving a white flag was.

A crackling?  If he generated enough charge?  He was pretty sure that sound would be muted.  But that led to another idea.  Something he had seen on the television as a child.

Sanya retreated from the house, map in his pocket.  He put some distance between himself and them, and then stood by a piece of corrugated metal that was being used to cover something in the garden.  He set his jacket down, and his bag on top of that.  He held onto the map for the time being, in case it ignited.

He created the short lash of lightning that his power could produce, and made contact with the metal.  He let it crackle, find a frequency, and then let it sing.  The power that ran through the metal produced a mournful squealing noise.  The latent power in the air seemed to mute the sound around the edges, and kept it from reaching far, judging by the flatness of the sound and the lack of echoing.

More power didn’t mean it sang louder.  It changed the frequency.  What he discovered was that he could find a good frequency, then manipulate the lash while adjusting power, trying to hold that frequency.  That note.  That got him volume.

A whale song of power through metal, in this alien environment that looked so much like home.  

He raised the volume more and more, until his ears hurt.  He shrugged shoulders closer to his ears to try to muffle it some, but there wasn’t much he could do.

The moment he saw one of them appear, he laid his map on his bag of supplies, and then he abandoned it.

It was a sacrifice.  He hoped it would have meaning and give them enough pause that they looked.

He was a Chmo who’d gotten lucky enough to be able to survive all of this, who had nothing better to do than solve it.  He wasn’t a good student, he wasn’t a good employee.  He wasn’t a good boyfriend. He wasn’t a good planner, either.

The invincible woman and the stranger with the doll head appeared at the corner and gave chase.  The black hole soldier was behind them but couldn’t shoot without hurting them, so he only ran.

The strange man with the oversized doll head tipped sideways and fell, crashing again, and then, looking up awkwardly, opted to half-crawl, half-lunge forward, to headbutt a car.

It flew, with a speed that far exceeded the hit that had delivered it.  Crumpled to the point half of it was unrecognizable, it flipped end over end before hitting the street, and finally losing that special momentum that let it ignore the colorful miasma.  It was fast for the first few flips and impacts, then drifted lazily and slowly through the air in the aftermath.

As part of that crash, it caught the edge of Sanya’s coat.  The coat was ripped out from under the bag of supplies.  The bag was sent flying, or floating, and the map was sent into the air.

The woman ran past that without even glancing at Sanya’s map or bag.

Sanya ran for his life, and the lives of every other person in this strange years-long storm of quiet and stillness.  The degree to which his heart had dropped into his stomach when he’d seen the map get ignored was more painful than the bullet wound to his chest that had taken two and a half months to fully heal.

He kept going, because he had to, and because others needed him to.

He was not a runner, and they were soldiers who had trained.  At the same time, it was harder to keep track of someone that was running than it was to be that someone.

Sanya turned a corner, then cut through a yard.  He slipped into another yard, then circled a house.

The man with the doll head took a shortcut, a human battering ram that simply ran into the wall and crashed into the house.  The sounds weren’t muted, and felt displaced, like a cartoon in reality, or reality in a cartoon.

The doll man emerged from the far wall of the house, having done enough damage to support structures that the house should have or would eventually collapse.  The parts the doll man had touched collapsed fast.  The other parts, like roof without support below, floated down slowly.

The doll man touched soil, and immediately toppled, faceplanting.

Sanya changed directions, and saw the woman.  She’d slowed to almost a walk, while scanning her surroundings.  On seeing him, she picked up speed.

He zig-zagged between shed and house, doubled back briefly after passing the house, then crossed the street.  

He’d wanted so badly to find a place to stop and catch his breath.  He couldn’t.  He ran, with a general mind to the map he’d just been working on.  He knew the general direction he needed to go, and the direction he was going.  He also knew the type of area he wanted.

An undeveloped strech of land with some skinny trees on it, and a few lonely houses in similar terrain, near the outer periphery of Saransk.

He ran past some more figures, who were facing away from him.  He glanced back over his shoulder at them, and then saw the doll man had roused and was back on his tail.

The doll man was not slow, but fell often, and lost ground that way.  The fall, however, seemed to clue the woman in, because she had lost track of Sanya, and decided to go to where she heard the doll man making noises.

She saw Sanya.

His legs were starting to stop doing what he wanted them to.  His knees hurt, his ankle was sore from nearly rolling it in the tunnel, and he had to shift how he transitioned his weight from leg to leg to use different muscles... but that seemed to tire him out faster.

If he could just lead them there- to where Sleeper had started out?  It wouldn’t matter so much that he died.

He really didn’t want to die, at the same time.

There weren’t many houses here.  Not many possibilities.

He chose one.

With how things jammed up, it was hard to tell if the door was locked or if the hinges were jammed.  Every second he spent trying was a few paces of distance that closed between him and people who wanted to kill him.

He threw his weight into the door.  Nothing.

A few more paces of distance closed.

He used his power.  The lash.  If he could melt the metal or damage the door-

Using it helped to pull at the metal of the door latch.  It clunked.

He pushed his way through, stumbling as he entered the hallway.

It was a one story building, and it wasn’t hard to check each room he entered for some sign of life.  Nothing.

Sanya felt the impact of the doll man crashing through the front wall of the house as he exited the back door.

He crossed a yard, hopped a short, knee-high division made of brick, and his legs gave out under him as he landed.  He used the wall to stand, and then staggered his way to the next house.

He prayed.

It wasn’t dissimilar from the last house.  A woman sat at the table, eyes aglow.  She had been eating and food mixed in with saliva, and that glowed.  She’d been there with mouth partially open for years.

He had both hands on one wall to help prop himself up, with his legs as tired as they were.

Just across from the kitchen where the woman was eating was a basinet.  The sight of it took Sanya’s breath away.  With the sweat and moisture in Sanyas eyes, the glow of it refracted and filled the room.

Sleeper?

He heard a crash and from the impact, he could judge that the doll headed man had tried to cross the short fence and had fallen.

The woman had to be close, too.

Would it be worth it, to stand over this basinet and let them know what he’d found?  Would the doll-headed man find him first, or the woman?

He didn’t even know what the outside world looked like anymore.  The last he’d heard, giant monsters were attacking.  The last he’d known, there wasn’t a chance in hell that a Spetssila parahuman wouldn’t even think of working with a foreigner.  When the cities were attacked, they’d turned away help.  Now they accepted it?  From this joke of a parahuman?

A baby?  What would that mean?  Was that even possible?  What did it mean if he executed it?  What would the government do with it?  Or to it?

He ventured closer.

Then he stared down into the basinet.

That was it, then.

He turned, and he left the room.  He stood in the hallway.

The woman was in the hallway.  In another world or another circumstance, she’d have been the one to arrive and decide what to do and Sanya would have no legacy.  That was... soothing?  He wasn’t sure.

In this world and this circumstance, the baby wasn’t Sleeper.  The baby glowed because the mom had killed it before Sleeper’s power had reached them.  Then she’d sat down to eat.

Which, going by the timeline, meant that they’d probably known what Sleeper was.  If he added that fact to the people he’d seen evacuating toward this spot, while running from the Spetssila... he was wrong.  He’d wanted this so badly he’d lied to himself.  Too many months of broken sleep, years of isolation.  He’d convinced himself thoroughly.

He faced the woman, and he knew he couldn’t run anymore.

Behind the woman, the man with the doll head stepped into view, taking up most of the doorway, and obscuring a lot of the dull, omnipresent light of the sky above.

He charged his power, and braced himself.  She had a knife and so did he.  She knew how to use it.  He had his static, and she couldn’t be touched even by a bomb.

He let her come to him.

She was careful.  No doubt, she’d been warned about the lash.  The narrow hallway wasn’t a place to use it, anyway.  A half-step forward, then she thrust.  Then another movement, faking a cut, to see what he’d do.  He’d avoided the thrust and he hadn’t flinched at the feint.

The lack of flinching might have had to do with the way he’d gone dead inside.  The heartbreak, the disappointment, both in the fact he’d been wrong, and a general disappointment in himself.

She feinted again, and this time, she followed up with an immediate lunge, stabbing toward his face.  He put his hand up, catching the blade on the edge of his palm, and cut too.  She caught his wrist before the blade could reach her lower stomach.

Then he used his power.  A repulsive static field.  He continued forward, leg wobbly beneath him as he shifted his weight into her.  Maximizing physical contact.  His pose was awkward, and he was asking to have her punch him, or slam him into a wall, or cut his throat.  He did this knowing the risk.

He pushed everything he had into his protective field, and it had the effect of bouncing things off of it.  It pushed her away from him.  Straight down the hallway, into the man at the end.

She exploded, in the same way a water balloon filled with water exploded, and she was filled with liquid that glowed and shone with an aurora borealis of color.

Whatever protection she had that protected her against bombs didn’t save her from that.

The doll man tipped backward, hands trying to grope past the wreckage of the human being that had landed on top of him to reach the holes in the helmet-mask that he needed to look through.

Sanya didn’t wait for him to manage that.  Stumbling and staggering, Sanya exited the house and closed the door.

Across the street was a third house and the house had a shed.  Sanya let himself in, tucked himself in a corner, and pulled a sack around himself, betting everything on the fact that the doll headed man wouldn’t level every building nearby.

⬢

Later

In the end, it was a question of figuring out how to deal with hopeless circumstance.  He’d gone back to look for his notes and he’d found that the man with a black hole for a face had succumbed, and the black holes were textured like the sky and bodily fluids were.  The other man was similar.  That was why there had been only two pursuers.

He’d found his bag, and he’d gathered their things too.  He hadn’t crossed paths with the doll headed man, and so once he had everything he thought he might need, he’d retreated.  After over a year spent hunting, exploring, and gathering evidence, he’d opted to treat himself, and had gone to a hotel for luxury accommodations.  The mini-fridge had alcohol, and there were plenty of snacks and chocolates.  There were soft robes to wrap himself in, and baths that had been drawn that he could slip into.  The water was room temperature, when he would have liked a hot one, but he could accept that.

He could accept a lot of things.  The wasted months and years.  He had to struggle to make peace with that.

Sleeper, maybe, was something that could be more important if it wasn’t known or found, whether it was an Endbringer, man, woman, or baby.

He’d focus on other things.  Throughout his search, he’d struggled.  He’d been a bad student, to the point he couldn’t read well.  When he could interpret something, he wasn’t confident he was right.  In trying to gather evidence, he’d run into plenty of walls when trying to interpret facts.  So, to fill the time and accept his circumstance, he’d teach himself more.

Once dressed, he went out onto the balcony, and reclined in a patio chair with a book in hand, and began to sound out the words.

The sky looked more stormy than usual.  He made sure to renew his power.  The electricity crackled, and the colorful miasma flowed away from it in plumes.