Chapter 82 (1/2)

The party was over, the guests had gone home. Abby was asleep, upstairs in bed. And Dan stood alone, in an underground room, facing a blank wall. The time for self-debate was long over. He'd talked himself into it. He was making the leap. Taking the plunge. Forward, unto the breach!

The wall remained in place. Dan remained in place.

This was a terrible idea. So very many things that could go wrong.

No more hesitation.

Breathe in, breathe out.

His eyes closed. His veil extended. Shimmering blue pulsed downwards, outwards, a web of silken light. Each strand tunneled through the floor with trivial ease, steel and stone giving way as easily as air. Dan could feel the ocean within him draining away, bit by bit, inch by inch. The strands grew thinner, branching off, searching.

Dan knew what he was looking for. The tell-tale sign of circuitry and gunpowder and diesel. The wall separating him from his prize was filled to the brim with wires. So thick they were, that swinging a sledgehammer into the wall would have been the same as swinging it in a jungle. Like clinging vines, like a verdant overgrowth. They all converged on a single point, a single, unadorned patch of space, invisible to the naked eye.

There was nothing different about the spot. No indentations or creases, no difference in material nor construction nor design. It was the sort of entrance that could only be found if you knew exactly where to look. No, even beyond that. Dan could see it, with his eyes and his mind; the spot practically glowed in his vision, yet he had no idea how to use it. It was a button that was impossible to press.

”Clever,” was Dan's response to the phenomenon. He could guess at what it was meant to be. His power was happy to give him a mental diagram of what lay within the wall. The wires and circuits and rails and steel. It reminded him of the Pearson Hotel, of that old boxing ring hidden in the depths of the building. The sliding wall was practically identical. The mechanism behind it, the where and how the door moved, was nearly the same. Like a fun-house mirror, twisted only slightly.

The same designer, perhaps? A shared philosophy at least. Dan didn't know enough about architecture to make any conclusions deeper than that.

He could even guess at the mechanism. Captain Quantum was an electrokinetic, though not a particularly powerful one. The wall was filled with wires, all centered on a single point. One plus one equaled two. It wasn't a difficult puzzle.

Unfortunately, this new revelation did nothing to solve the problem of opening the damn... door? The wall. Dan was neither an electrokinetic, nor did he have the means to imitate one. Now, granted, Dan didn't specifically need to open the thing. He could, if he were so inclined, simply will himself into the massive room his veil insisted was on the other side. He could do that, and then probably get horribly impaled by half a dozen different horrible traps, to say nothing of the fact that the room was likely pitch black. It was just not the thing to do.