The Loop

“Walk us through it again,” said Adam, “because it still sounds like you don’t really know what’s in that warehouse.”

“Oh, but I do, my friend. Of course I do! I heard it from a very reliable source.”

“One of the Twins? I’d hardly call that reliable.”

“Depends,” piped up Christine, who Adam knew was already sold on the plan but who was still willing to go along with his questioning, if only to help convince him. “Which twin was it?”

“Are you kidding me? Can you tell them apart?”

“Well … No,” she admitted.

They were in a small storage shed less than half a mile from the warehouse where the intended object of their proposed heist was supposedly being stored. Between them and their goal lay only the same deserted scrubland that covered most of the earth. No cover, no shadow, no concealment. All this concerned Adam, but perhaps not as much as it should have. What concern he had was overpowered by a feeling he hadn’t had much of in longer than he could remember: hope. If what Tomas was saying was true—and Adam had the means to determine that Tomas at least believed that it was—then his hope was not baseless. This plan could work.

“Let’s run through the plan one more time,” said Christine. Once the consummate hot head who would run into any situation with her metaphorical guns blazing and without considering the repercussions, she had been molded by time and experience into a veritable tactician. Now she never went into a situation without a carefully considered plan in place, but when the unexpected happened and the plan fell apart, she was still more than willing to improvise, which for her generally meant blasting the bad guys until order had reasserted itself.

“Right, one more time for good luck,” said Tomas.

“For good luck,” echoed Adam.

“Adam, you fly up to the roof. Stay out of sight. Feel inside the building for anything hinky.”

“Anything hinky?” laughed Adam.

“Shut up. Anything out of the ordinary then. If you feel a single one of those fucking abominations, you get out of there, keeping in mind that you won’t be able to fly down, so you’ll have to use the fire escape. We’ll be watching you with the binoculars.”

“And if I signal to you that one of them is inside, the two of you get the fuck out of here. Don’t look back to see if I’m coming.”

“Shut up, we’re not leaving you behind.”

“Oh yes, you are. We can’t fight them anyway; there’s no reason to lose all three of us just because I might be caught.”

“I for one have no qualms with leaving you behind, but—”

“But nothing,” said Christine, whirling on him, “We are not leaving anyone behind, not even you, Tomas, much as we might like to.”

“—But, it won’t matter what we plan to do if we encounter one of them, because there aren’t any of them in there. My friends, I know this. Why would one of them be out here in the middle of nowhere? Why would one of them be guarding some random warehouse in some small town in Arizona?”

“Well they could be there to guard the very thing we’re here to steal. Did that ever occur to you?” asked Adam.

“They don’t know it’s there. No one knows that that warehouse is anything but what it appears to be from the outside.”

“No one except the twins, right?”

“Exactly. They were both stationed here in the early days. And by stationed I mean held captive. That warehouse housed the very secret facility where the HRA developed so much of the tech that helped them keep control in a world overcome by chaos.”

“Chaos not caused in any small part by people like you,” chimed in Christine.

“I will admit to having contributed more than my fair share to the chaos, yes,” he chuckled to himself almost nostalgically.

Adam considered the warehouse more closely. It was too far away for him to feel anything inside it from here, so he had nothing to rely on but his sight. And it did look, for all the world, like any other abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of any other heavily industrial blue collar small town in America: big and boxy with a shallow sloped roof which peaked more than fifty feet off the ground. There were windows high up on the walls all the way around the building, and several of these were smashed. He had trouble imagining that a laboratory working with the most advanced technology developed in his lifetime could have existed right here, but then he supposed that was the point.

“And when they packed up, they just left some of those devices lying around?”

“Not on purpose, of course. This lab was still in operation the day the Abominations arrived. They left in rather a hurry.”

“And the twin who told you about this place, she was in captivity?”

“Exactly. They have these massive sort of prison complexes, but they’re not even there guarding the place. They’ve already stripped the prisoners of their powers, but they leave them there unattended. Why they keep them alive at all is beyond me, but the twin told me they come back sometimes and conduct experiments on the prisoners. Giving them back some of their powers and seeing how they react to various situations. Never enough power to fight back against them, of course.”

“Enough,” said Adam, “We’re here. We’re doing this. Now let’s get back to the plan.”

Christine had only been poking and prodding because she had an inherent distrust of Tomas—of most men, in fact. But in the end, she trusted Adam, and she knew that he wouldn’t lead her into any situation that he didn’t believe they could make it out of, and he would never put their lives in any danger unless there was a good reason to. And besides, she was already sold. She'd have been sold on a plan much more harebrained than this one. Adam knew she was as desperate to act and to hope as he was.

“Fine, the plan,” she said, shooting Tomas one more distrustful look. “Once you’ve scoped out the place and determined that there’s nothing in there but dust and lab equipment and, hopefully, the thing we’re here to grab, you’ll glean the layout of the interior, and Tomas and I will make our way in. I’ll be keeping him guarded, since he’s a little bitch and can’t protect himself.”

“Actually, you’ll be guarding me because this whole plan is pointless without my power, but sure, it’s because I’m a little bitch if you want.”

“Once inside, Adam will continue to guide us from the roof, keeping his eyes and his other sense on any danger that might approach from outside. We’ll get to the device, I’ll plug Tomas into it, and Adam will meet us downstairs.”

“To take the journey of a lifetime.”

“And that’s that. Easy as pie, my friends. Indeed, I think this is an overabundance of caution. I really think we could just walk in the front door arm in arm and meet absolutely no resistance. However, if this level of caution makes you all feel better about the plan, then I’m here for it. Frankly, whatever gets us into that building so that we can wish Adam bon voyage is fine by me.”

Christine gave Adam a puzzling look. Or at least, it was a look that to anyone else would have been puzzling, but Adam understood its meaning intrinsically. Not because he was using his power on her—he had sworn never to do that without her permission or without necessity—but because they had known each other so long and so closely that there was little that passed ambiguously between them. It was a look that conveyed much: if it doesn’t work then his power will leave you braindead; if it does work then this entire timeline will cease to exist, and me with it; if it doesn’t work then I’ll be left in a world without you; if it does work then you’ll be sent back to a world without me, or at least without the me that you love.

And love her he did. And that was what the look that passed between them conveyed most of all.

Without another word or any warning, Adam lifted off the ground gracefully and began floating in the direction of the warehouse, still facing the two of them on the ground: the woman he loved and the man he barely liked but was forced to trust.