Chapter 1

I rolled my neck and looked at the non-descript, single-story prefab building in front of me. Despite feeling a few pops running through the top of my spine, the neck rolling hadn’t seemed to help, so I did it again.

It persisted in its unhelpfulness.

I’m not sure why I had expected something a little more auspicious for the meeting place of the local Conclave members, but the working-mans club in a suburb on the opposite side of the city was not what I had been picturing when I had been invited. I had expected a fancy club or an upscale bar of some downtown hotel. Hell, a stately home wouldn’t have surprised me. The conclave was an ancient, proud, vaulted institution, after all, at least as Charlotte and Marco had described them. But No ... Working-mans club.

I suppose it made sense. If this was an organization trying to stay below the radar of the Inquisitors, then low-key was certainly the way to go. But Jesus, any more low-key than this would have been off the piano.

For those of you who don’t know what a working-mans club is, let me explain. During the 19th century, at the height of the industrial revolution, entire towns were founded on the backs of the major local industry. Hell, some of the richest towns on the planet back then could be found not far from where I was standing. For the part of the country I lived in, that had been coal, iron, and steel, and these workplaces gave jobs to thousands of the local population. But it wasn’t only these industries that employed a lot of people. The products made or mined were transported by rail to the coast, where they were loaded onto docks and shipped all over the world. That meant a hell of a lot of miners, mill workers, railroad workers, dock workers, laborers, journeymen, Sailors, and a whole host of other professions were employed in a very small geographical area. Not to mention all the other industries that would normally be represented in any flourishing town or city.

These men needed a place to drink. Hence, the working-mans club was born.

Savvy local businessmen, or sometimes even the mine owners themselves, would throw up prefabricated concrete and brick box-shaped buildings with about as much character as a wet mop, throw in a bar, a fire exit, plenty of seating and some toilets, and there you have it. One ready-to-go working-man’s club.

The concept was simple. No wives, no children, cheap alcohol, and all it took to get through the door was to flash your work ID. It was a good concept, and the clubs flourished as long as the towns did ... and then, of course, they didn’t. As the mines closed and the mills shut down, the railroads rusted, and the ships sailed to other docks, the clubs started to close down. Whereas there used to be a handful in every town, now there was usually just one. Often just one between a few towns. Of course, they relaxed their entry policies, and now anyone could get in, but the beer was still pretty cheap, and they were usually more than happy to hire out their bar for functions like this one.

I’m not afraid to admit I was more than a little nervous to step through the old wooden doors.

A week had passed since the weekend of sex, sex, some karaoke, and some more sex, and life had, more or less, returned to normal. I had exchanged messages with Becky, Philippa, Olivia, and even a few with Evie. There was even a very short-lived, probably drunken exchange with one of Olivia’s friends - although I wasn’t sure which one - which basically consisted of her expressing her hope that Livvy hadn’t been teasing when she said she didn’t mind sharing. I may have switched my powers off to Olivia, but the rest of the group had been getting the full dose; this one was just more forward than the others. Whereas most of my time was, as per normal, spent in my bunker working on my project, a great deal of it had been spent with Charlotte.

I had shared with her every single detail of my time with Marco. Some things had surprised her, and other things had made her scoff in disgust, but the offer for me to attend one of these gatherings had blown her mind. A key detail that Marco seemed to have left out of his invitation was that invites were rarely, if ever, given to people who hadn’t already been welcomed into the Conclave. Even then, the initiates that were invited were known by almost everyone by the time they made it onto the guestlist.

“Just...” she had said with a hint of caution after I had shared everything with her, “ ... pay attention to your own intuit ... no, wait, pay attention to Jeeves,” she had finally finished, only to continue again after the quizzical look I had given her. “Everyone, human or Evo, has that sixth sense. Have you ever gotten the feeling you are being watched or followed? It’s that, but in us, it’s more heightened. People will try to look at your mind, most of them won’t be able to help it. But if some of them get too pushy, or if anyone tries to intentionally test your defenses, don’t question it, don’t doubt it, let Jeeves point out the issue and confront it ... loudly and publicly. That kind of behavior is a big no-no at these gatherings. If you make a scene, people will help.”

“And if they don’t?” I had been less than convinced.

“Then leave,” She shrugged. “It’s not like they can stop you. And good luck to them if they tried,” The look on my face must have said more than my words were able to. “Alright, listen. There are one or two there who I would consider to be pretty powerful, but even compared to them, you are like Superman. Marco would be one of the more powerful there, and you know how strong you are compared to him. They will all be able to feel how powerful you are. If you are there and you don’t like it, just get up and walk out. I can’t think of a single thing they could do to stop you. What you are going to see there is a fairly informal version of the conclave as a whole. If you want to know who you are dealing with, this is actually a really good way to do it.”

“So you don’t think going is a bad idea.”

“God, no. I think it’s a great idea,” She sighed and thought for a few moments. “Look, I’ll be honest, I don’t like the Conclave, obviously, but that is almost all based on the way they treated my parent’s generation. Yes, you may have guessed by now that they tried to recruit me, and I gave it some serious thought. But I didn’t like their organization, I didn’t like how it worked, and I didn’t like how it was set up, but the actual individual members? The ones I met, at least? Most of them were just normal, decent people.”

“Aside from Marco?”

“Aside from Marco ... Fucking Marco,” she rolled her eyes with a grin. Her dislike of him had become something of a running joke between us. “Anyway, I don’t think you have anything to worry about, Pete.”

That had been an hour or two ago. She had hugged me with a kiss on the cheek, a playful swat on the ass, and had loaded me into the uber. Now I was standing outside the club, looking at the ugly, nondescript box through the October evening darkness and rolling my neck.

“All right, Pete.” I took a deep breath and stepped forward. “Big boy pants.”

Have you ever seen one of those Westerns where the stranger walks into a bar, and the whole place just drops to silence while everyone turns to look at him? Yeah, that is what greeted me! It wasn’t quite complete silence, there were more than a few whispered conversations, but they were all about me. I could feel the scrutiny on me as I stood in the doorway and looked around the room, and the longer it went on, the quieter the room became. More and more minds knocked tentatively against the enormous walls around my city, none of them threateningly. It was more like they were trying to get a read on me, only to find themselves completely unable to. The silence started to give way to curious, almost excited murmurs until a familiar voice sounded over the crowd. “Pete, you made it!” Marco’s soft Italian accent echoed above the whispers as he stepped between a few people and walked closer to me, clapping a hand on my upper arm and guiding me back through the crowd toward the bar.

The people parted before us like the red sea.

Marco seemed to have made a point of ensuring that everyone else in the room looked underdressed. The invitation, as brief on details as it had been, had said that the event was casual. He, however, was dressed in what looked to be a very expensive, tailor-made, designer suit. If he had been wearing a tie rather than having the top two buttons open, I would have thought he worked for a hedge fund. In contrast, I was wearing the nicest pair of jeans I owned and a plain white polo-shirt, and looking around the room, most people had taken the ‘casual’ aspect of the invitation as seriously as I had.

We finally approached the bar. I was quickly becoming very self-conscious, and although I doubted it to be intentional, Marco was the primary cause of it. It was the way his arm was around me. It was less of a friendly or welcoming gesture as it was something akin to possessiveness. It was like I was being shown off. I had never been, nor had I ever had, a trophy wife, but I imagine this was how they felt at parties. I had quickly come to understand what Charlotte had meant by “they will all know how powerful you are.” I could tell that every person in the room had some vague sense of how strong my abilities were, in the same vein as I could tell that not a single person in the room came close to my levels. In fact, most of the people in this room combined were still less powerful than I was. But there was something about the way that Marco was acting that leaned itself, not to introducing me to the other members, but to being associated with the most powerful person in the room, of being the one responsible for bringing me into the fold. It was a little like fame by proximity.

The smartest dressed man in the room was friends with the most powerful Evo any of these people had ever heard of, and what was worse, it had worked. Almost every single eye was on us, and the ones that weren’t, were talking about us. I couldn’t help but think the whole thing had been staged.

I rolled my neck again as we approached the bar. This was all becoming very overwhelming very quickly. It was one thing to filter out all the inane and random thoughts of people around me, but I had specifically programmed my editing station to let me hear the ones about me, and although many of the Evos here were able to block those thoughts from me, there were plenty who couldn’t. It was like being in the center of a very loud crowd, except I could only hear the noise in my head. What made it worse was the fact that no matter how well the others could block their thoughts, that did nothing for the feeling of ghostly tendrils harmlessly caressing my city walls as the hundred or so people in the room all tried - possibly automatically, as mine so often did - to connect their minds with mine.

As if by miraculous revelation, the reason why Marco had been so keen to get me to the bar revealed itself to us through the parting crowds, or rather, himself.

I felt a flicker of something approaching nerves from Marco as we approached the large man with his back to us, maybe apprehension. It took me a few moments to realize that the man was possibly the only person in the room who was neither trying to connect with my mind nor was particularly impressed by my presence. It was oddly refreshing, even after such a short period of time.

“Uri,” Marco said with one of his trademark smiles, his arm around me loosening a little. “I would like you to meet Pete, the young man I told you about.”

Uri turned round, placing his empty drink on the bar, and regarded me dispassionately.

His name immediately caused a spark of recognition in my mind, and Jeeves quickly came to my aid with where I had heard it before. It had been in the hospital all those months ago on the night that Marco had awakened me. Uri was the most powerful Evo known to the Conclave, at least until I had been awakened. He had been born from the fallout of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. His mother had absorbed catastrophic levels of radiation while she was pregnant, which in turn, due to the genetic mutation responsible for our species, had been absorbed into Uri en utero. If the severity of the fetus’s illness was directly correlated to the power of that Evo when they were eventually awakened, then it was safe to say that Uri’s mother had absorbed enough radiation to kill her, and him, ten times over. Instead, the world gained one very powerful Uri.

That thought alone made me wonder exactly how much radiation I had absorbed at the hands of a lightning-enhanced MRI machine.

Marco had called him the great Uri and had said that if the Conclave was ever said to have a leader, it was him. This struck me as odd, considering what I had learned about the organization of the Conclave in the time since then, and what was immediately even clearer was that Uri himself held no illusions of leadership. In fact, being in charge, from the brief reads I was able to get from him, was the last thing he wanted.

The man in question was a big guy. I had made myself a solid six-foot tall at my editing station and pretty well built to boot. But even with my size, Uri seemed like he dwarfed me. Easily six inches taller than me, he was the living definition of a brick shithouse. Massively broad shoulders propped up a shaved head with the hint of a tattoo creeping out of his collar and onto the side of his neck. His simple black T-shirt seemed like it was owed some sort of award by the way it seemed to cling to the enormous muscles of his arms without tearing, and each one of his legs looked strong enough to prop up a small building. What was more curious was that, just like I could see what Marco had looked like before he edited himself, I could tell that Uri hadn’t actually edited himself all that much at all. Apparently, giants were actually a thing, and I happened to be staring at one.

The man looked me over with piercing, almost luminescent blue eyes before sniffing and offering out a hand. “Hello, Pete,” I suppose that considering his origins, I shouldn’t have been as surprised by the thick Ukrainian accent as I was. “I am Uri. It is good to meet you at last.”

I didn’t need my powers to know that this man in no way thought that meeting me was a good thing.

I’m not exactly sure why, but something inside me bristled. His tone, his posture, the look in his eyes as he regarded me; all of it felt a little too much like a challenge. I took his hand firmly and shook it. “Uri, it’s nice to meet you. I wish I could say I’ve heard all about you, but...” I shrugged and glanced at Marco, letting the sentence hang in the air while I allowed the small tendril of inquiry from his mind to find what it was looking for. Not everything, of course, but just enough to see that the power that had placed him at the top of the metaphorical pecking order paled in comparison to mine to an almost laughable degree.

Uri frowned a little and seemed to straighten himself up, clearly now paying a lot more attention to who he was dealing with. He also flashed a glance to Marco, who, in turn, was grinning like an idiot. “I told you,” He said smugly.

“Hmmm,” Uri nodded, finally letting go of my hand and waving the barman over. “Very impressive. Having the biggest stick, however, is often not as important as how you choose to use it. You have a lot to learn.”

“Is that a variation on the ‘size doesn’t matter’ mantra?” I asked back, amazing myself at my ability to keep a straight face.

Uri arched an eyebrow, apparently not getting the joke.

Marco’s smile vanished in an instant.

There was a loud female snort from behind me which I chose to ignore for the moment as I held the older man’s eyes. “Never mind.” I finally said before turning to Marco. “So, do I just ... I don’t know ... Mingle or something?”

“Ummm,” Marco coughed uncomfortably, his eyes flicking over to Uri, who had turned his attention to the barman. “Yes, sure ... Umm ... meet some of the locals. Come back to chat properly a little later.” He frowned again at the larger man. Apparently, his idea of how this introduction was going to go was not quite honored by reality.

Part of me felt bad. Marco was my mentor, after all, and, judging by Charlotte’s surprise at my invitation, he had gone out of his way to get me here. But another part of me was still a little annoyed at being shown off like the prize pig at a country fair.

“Oh, don’t worry about these grumpy old bastards,” the owner of the female snort said from behind me with an easy, friendly laugh and a slight Irish lilt to her voice. “You can start by mingling with us.” I turned around to see the owner of the voice and immediately felt my jaw hit my shoes.

Some women are objectively beautiful. There are others who can only be described as stunning. But every now and then, you see a girl who seems to have been built from the ground up to be the walking, talking, smiling personification of perfection. I’m not talking about the airbrushed supermodels here, the ones that struggle to live up to their own photoshopped pictures, but the ones whose imperfections add to, rather than detract from, the whole. Charlotte was, until that moment, the best-looking woman I had ever laid eyes on. She had that regal, classical beauty that never failed to make me stop and just appreciate the sheer aesthetic brilliance of her. As jaw-droppingly stunning as she was, though, there was an air of artificialness to her looks. There was never a hair out of place, and she always wore just the right amount of makeup. I always found myself wondering what she looked like when she just got out of bed and how long it took her to get ready in the mornings. Don’t get me wrong, the finished product was always worth the effort, and I had no doubt that her editing station made that morning routine redundant. She was also one of my closest friends, and I wouldn’t have her any other way.

The girl in front of me, however, was not even close to Charlotte’s level of perfection. But it was those slight blemishes on her otherwise flawless skin, the slight difference in her eye colors, and the way her fiery red hair seemed to live by its own rules that added together to form ... this vision in front of me. My mind touched hers automatically, as people had been doing to mine all evening. I could see the thought process that went into her self-editing. She had looked at herself and what she wanted to change about her and decided that she didn’t give two flying shits what other people thought about the way she looked. She was going to design herself based on what she liked. It was a simple yet profound difference in thinking that I was immediately attracted to. She liked the birthmark on the nape of her neck; she thought the shape was pretty, so she kept it. She wasn’t sure about the freckles on the bridge of her nose, so instead of getting rid of them, she just thinned them out and made them a little lighter until she was. She had been teased mercilessly for most of her formative years about the difference in her eye color - two slightly different yet equally brilliant shades of green - but standing at her external editing station with the possibility of changing it, she had decided that they were hers, and if people didn’t like looking at them, then they could look somewhere else.

It was a marked difference from the way I had edited myself. Even in those early days of my powers, when self-confidence had been a serious issue for me, I had changed myself to make me into something that other people would find more appealing. Yes, my confidence had grown, and the changes had worked. But for the first time, I was being confronted by the fact that the way I now looked was based almost entirely on what I thought other people wanted me to look like, what other people wanted to see, and very little, if anything, about my new physical appearance, had been influenced by what I had liked about myself.

No, there was nothing perfect about this woman in front of me, which is exactly what made her perfect to me.

“I ... Errr...” I stammered a little, trying to retrieve my jaw from the floor. “Pete, It’s nice to meet you,” I said and held out my hand.

She took it with a smile, holding it softly. “Hi, Pete. I’m Faye. C’mon, I’ll show you around and let these two VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE get back to doing whatever very important people do.” She had almost shouted the ‘very important people’ part, making sure the teasing comment was heard by both Marco and Uri. My Mentor smiled, a little unease hiding behind his eyes. Uri pretended he hadn’t heard her. For someone Marco had referred to as the great Uri, that man seemed like a little bit of a prick.

I smiled, nodded to Marco, ignored Uri, and let Faye drag me off into the crowd.

“Eucchhh,” she shuddered as we got out of earshot, casting a look back at the bar. “Those are two men who take themselves way too seriously. It was funny to watch Uri squirm, though. Nice crack about the size thing, by the way.” She laughed.

“I don’t think he got it.” I smiled back.

“Oh, he got it. I just don’t think he knew how to act on being called out so quickly. It usually takes people minutes to realize he is a dick! At least an hour to call him one.” She giggled and rolled her eyes before turning her attention back to me. “The fact you could squash him like a bug was probably a new one for him too. I’m pretty sure that guy has been the biggest little boy in the schoolyard all his life.”

“You don’t sound like a fan.” I chuckled, following behind her and not failing to notice her hand was still holding onto mine.

“Oh, it’s not that. He’s helped a lot of us out when we’ve been in a jam, but he is a man who has been the top dog in an organization that is all about ... how big your stick is.” Another gorgeous giggle bounced musically from her lips. “We’ve all been wondering how he would act if you were as strong as we had heard. What makes it worse for him is that you are not like him. You are one of us.” She grinned and nodded toward the rest of the room.

“Oh?”

“Aye. You’re new.” Her eyebrows bounced, and her grin stretched a little wider. It immediately took its rightful place as the most beautiful smile I had ever seen in my life. “There are already enough pompous asshats around, the world doesn’t need any more of them. The rest of us have decided we are gonna keep you as one of us. So, we are gonna corrupt the shit outta ya.”

Faye led me away from the bar and towards the corner of the room. The bar was laid out in a pretty typical working-mans club fashion. The bar was against the main back wall, but there was a gap on either side of it. One side had some more comfortable leather sofas, while the other side contained some gambling machines and arcade games. Not many, but enough to rob drunk people of their money. In front of the bar was a checkered-style hardwood floor containing the tables and chairs that the rest of the crowd were sitting on or standing around, and beyond them were the bathrooms. The main entrance had brought me in on the right-hand side of the room if you were looking out from the bar, and the doors were tucked into the corner between the comfy-looking corner and the wall holding the bathrooms. Its opposite number, the mandatorily required fire escape, was directly opposite it, halfway along the left-hand wall. The bathrooms didn’t take up the whole length of the room, however, barely half of it, and the room widened as the wall ended. That recess contained more seats and two old and heavy-looking pool tables. For the same reason that there are never any windows in casinos, there were none here either. Drinking men didn’t need to be reminded of the time. Knowing it was late and wives were waiting for them had the unprofitable habit of making them leave.

It was to the corner with the leather sofas that Faye led me to.

“You know Marco dragged him all this way from Eastern Europe to meet you, don’t you?” Faye smirked

“Who?”

“Uri. I’m not sure he knew in advance, but the rest of us have our suspicions. Marco wanted you both to meet,” she grinned playfully. “I’m not sure it went quite according to plan.”

I cast a look back over my shoulder toward the bar, wondering if I should have been a little more polite. I knew my social graces were not quite what they should have been, nor did I give a shit about that as much as I probably should have. Still, if Marco had wanted me to meet Uri, there must have been a good reason for it. At least a better reason that my cynicism was letting me see. Faye arched an eyebrow at me with a giggle.

“You’re gonna have to teach your face to use its inside voice around here, Darlin’.” She grinned, latching onto my arm, and guiding me through the last few people and into the corner where the leather seats were. “Subtly is not your strong suit.”

Sitting on, standing around, or leaning against these chairs were a group of people, all of whom looked roughly around my age - although, being Evos, their appearance probably had no correlation whatsoever to how old they actually were. What was odd, however, was that they were all sitting in complete silence with their eyes closed. I cast a confused-looking glance at Faye. “Do we ... errr ... need to call a Doctor or something?”

She giggled a little louder. “Oh, you really are brand new, aren’t yeh? They’re dueling. Have you not been shown that yet?”

I shook my head, quickly deciding that this was something I should be paying a little more attention to. Between Charlotte’s brief and fairly vague description of what dueling was when we first unlocked my city, and Marco’s cryptic references to self-defense and combat, I was sort of aware of what dueling was but had never even been able to imagine what it would look like in practice. “Do you wanna watch?” Faye grinned next to me, Giving me a look I couldn’t quite translate.

“Umm ... Sure. But ... How exactly do I do that?”

She squeezed a little tighter around my arm, and her smile grew bigger. “Oh, you and I are going to have so much fun together. All you do is try to connect to one of their minds, and that’ll pull you into the mindscape. The two who are dueling will be fairly obvious. Everyone else is usually on a high point in the middle, watching. Just come over and sit with us.” She shook herself loose, smiled at me again, then closed her eyes. Within a few seconds, a completely calm, neutral, and vacant look washed over her face.

Is that what I look like when I’m in my bunker? How the fuck hasn’t Jimmy noticed that? I bet I look like I’m having a stroke!

I cast another look over my shoulder to the rest of the bar. Marco and Uri were deep in conversation about something that looked fairly serious, but otherwise, the room looked much the same as any other bar would on a Saturday night. Groups of people talking, laughing, and drinking together. The only difference was that everyone, generally speaking, seemed to know everyone else. There were many instances of someone crossing the room, tapping someone on the shoulder, and having a quick chat before moving on, or the shrieking, gleeful squeals and two women hugging each other, clearly not having seen one another for a while and not having expected to see each other tonight either.

No, I was wrong. This was very different from a normal bar. This reminded me more of something like a wedding reception or a family celebration. It was more friendly, more intimate. It was just ... more. I smiled to myself, deciding at that moment that I rather liked it.

I shrugged, closed my eyes, and reached out to the closest mind to mine: Faye’s. And as it had done dozens of times before, existence melted away into nothingness.

The gloriously warm, sun-lit meadow of the mindscape looked the same as it always had done, with a few minor differences. Having only shared the mindscape with one other person at a time before, the group of people setting themselves up on chairs a little ahead of me made it seem positively crowded. The second difference, which I only discovered after a quick look around, was that my city was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, two unfamiliar-looking cities stood on opposite sides of the sprawling field before me. The group was on a slight rise, overlooking the halfway point between the two cities, and were in the process of conjuring up seats and drinks as I approached. Faye had pulled a luxurious-looking, cream leather sofa out of nothingness and immediately made it clear she wanted me to join her on it by patting the empty seat next to her.