A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0028

Chapter 28

The laughter died down, as it always does with fires of this kind, all at once, leaving the ground colder than before, and when it was gone, Jack felt the old part of himself return to the place behind his eyes, the part that didn’t trust that a good day would last. He still smiled. He let the smile remain because Kevin had earned the right to see it, and because there was no honest reason to hide it yet, but beneath it the arithmetic had already begun again, the silent ledger that never closed. A pile of money and steel in concrete wasn’t wealth. It was raw material. Wealth was what you did with it before the world realized you had it, and Jack had spent eighteen years learning that the gap between having something and keeping it was the only territory that truly mattered.

He stood up, bracing himself on his heels, and stopped over the open crates, observing the extent of the material. The question that had been waiting for him since morning finally found space to be heard. Not the quantity. They knew the quantity. The question was what would remain in that building and what would be absorbed by the machine that fed on value and returned whatever it pleased.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s split it.”

Kevin wiped his face with the back of his large hand and straightened up with a grunt, his good humor settling into the concentration he was capable of showing when it mattered, which happened more often than his round, calm face let on to strangers. “Divide how?”

“Keep what we actually use. Feed the rest to the system.” Jack crouched down again and rested his forearms on his knees. “We’ve done this twice already. We know the floor goes up when the supply goes up. So the supply should be everything we can afford to lose, not something we can’t.”

“And we found out which was which through guesswork.”

“Thinking.” He paused. “To suppose is what we do after we’ve thought about how far our thinking takes us. There is a difference, even if it’s small.”

They started with the money, because it was the simplest thing. Forty-eight thousand dollars, clean, untraceable, the kind of paper that asked no questions and answered none. Jack physically separated it from the rest, carrying the four bundles to the battered table near the stairs and lining them up on the wood, and the act of removing it from the pile was in itself a decision. The system assessed the value and returned a roll of the dice. Cash was the only thing in the building whose value never changed in his hands, never disappointed, never returned like a needle to the floor instead of a gun, and a man didn’t bet the only chip on the table that was already worth exactly what it said it was worth.

“Some of this goes to your uncle,” Jack said, and the word still felt borrowed in his mouth, the way most words for family did. John was not his uncle. John was the closest thing Kevin had to one, an aging fixer who had looked at two boys with a stolen future and decided, for reasons Jack still did not fully trust, to let them have the warehouse on a promise instead of a price. “We owe him for this place. We pay down a real piece of it now, while we can, before he starts wondering whether the promise was worth the paper it wasn’t written on.”

Kevin nodded slowly. There was no argument in him about John. “How much?”

“Enough that he sees we’re serious. Not so much that we leave ourselves empty.” Jack tapped the top bundle with two fingers. “The rest stays liquid. We’re going to need to buy things the system can’t hand us. Fittings for this floor. Tools. The boring spine of an operation that nobody writes stories about, because the stories are about the night you steal a third of a million dollars and not about the eleven days afterward of buying brackets and paying men to forget your face.” He looked up. “We’ve been lucky. Luck buys you the first jump. After that you build, or the luck stops mattering because there’s nothing underneath it to land on.”

He moved on before Kevin could turn it sentimental, because Kevin would, given any opening, and there was work to do.

The weapons were harder, and the weapons were where the real reasoning lived. Jack walked the length of the pile once without touching anything, the way he walked everything once before he committed, and then he began to pull pieces out and set them apart, narrating as he went so that Kevin could argue if Kevin disagreed, which was the entire point of saying it aloud.

He took one of the Kalashnikovs first. He weighed it across his palms, the long familiar ugliness of it, the weapon that had armed half the wars Jack had ever read about precisely because it forgave so much, dirt and water and neglect and the trembling hands of frightened men, and kept firing anyway. “This one stays,” he said. “For me.” He did not have to explain the reasoning to himself, but he gave Kevin the short version because it touched on the thing neither of them said out loud often enough to wear it smooth. The rifle had a recoil that punished ordinary shoulders, climbed on you, walked your aim off target across a long burst until you were spraying brick and praying. An ordinary man fought the weapon as much as he fought whatever he was pointing it at. Jack was no longer obliged to be an ordinary man whenever he chose not to be. With the suit feeding strength into his frame, with two months of stolen growth layered onto a body that the world had once built only for endurance and hunger, the climb of the muzzle became a thing he could ride and correct, the rifle settling into a controlled hammer instead of a wild animal. Power in the arms paid for by power borrowed from elsewhere. He had a long memory for the elsewhere, and the bill it always sent. But the rifle, in his hands specifically, became something close to precise, and precision out of a weapon designed to forgive its absence was a small private miracle he intended to keep.

An ordinary man fought against the gun as much as he fought against anything he was pointing it at. Jack was no longer obliged to be an ordinary man whenever he chose not to be. With the suit infusing strength into his body, with two months of stolen growth added to a body the world had once built only for endurance and hunger, the rise of the barrel became something he could control and correct, the rifle transforming into a controlled hammer instead of a wild animal. Power in weapons paid for with power borrowed from elsewhere. He had a long memory for that other place, and for the bill it always carried. But the rifle, in his hands specifically, had become something close to precision, and the precision coming from a weapon designed to forgive its absence was a small, private miracle he intended to preserve.

The pistols came next, and here the logic forked. He set aside two of the Glocks and left the rest in the pile. “These two I keep,” he said. “Same reason.” He did not belabor it. The hands the system had given him were quick in a way that had nothing to do with practice and everything to do with whatever invisible ledger had decided he should be quicker, and a sidearm in those hands recovered between shots faster than the eye that watched it could quite credit, the recoil swallowed and the sights already back where he wanted them before an ordinary shooter would have finished blinking. The Glock asked for very little and gave a great deal back to a man built to use it. Two was the right number. One on him and one within reach was a margin, and three was a museum.

Then he did the thing he had been thinking about since before the boxes were open. He reached into the pile and found the older pistol, the first Glock, the one that had been his through the early weeks before any of this, scarred at the slide and honest in a way the new ones weren’t yet, and he held it out across the space between them.

“This is yours.”

Kevin looked at it. He didn’t reach for it right away. “I’ve got the fruit,” he said, which was true and was also, Jack understood, a kind of modesty, the boy who turned into something the size of a small car protesting that he didn’t need a tool because the tool seemed beneath the gift. “I don’t miss a wall when I’m the size of a wall.”

“You’re not always the size of a wall. And when you’re not, you’re a man my height and a head shorter, with no reach and no range, walking into rooms where the other side has both.” Jack kept the pistol extended, patient. “The fruit is your last word. This is your first one. There’s distance between a problem starting and you deciding to become the problem’s answer, and in that distance I want you holding something that reaches across a room. You know this gun. It knows your hand. Take it.”

Kevin took it. He turned it over once, checked the chamber the way Jack had drilled into him in the cold hours on this same floor, and something in his shoulders settled, the small reassurance of a familiar weight. “All right,” he said. “First word.” He said it like he was filing it away to use later, which he probably was.

The shotgun stayed. Jack pulled a single Mossberg from the rack of them and stood it against the wall with the keepers, and this one he kept not for himself and not for Kevin but for the building. A weapon whose shot opened into a spreading fist of lead was a poor instrument across a field and a magnificent one across a corridor, and the warehouse was nothing but corridors, long throats of brick and shadow where anyone who came uninvited would have to funnel themselves into the killing geometry of the place. The rifle could do the job. Of course the rifle could do the job; the rifle could do nearly any job, which was exactly why it was a mistake to lean on it for all of them. Redundancy was not waste. Redundancy was the difference between a plan and a hope. A defense that depended on one weapon working perfectly was a defense that had already decided how it was going to fail.

He kept four of the vests and left the rest. Four was enough to armor both of them twice over, to keep a spare against the day a plate cracked and there was no time and no safe way to go shopping for another, and the thought that followed the vests was one he turned over slowly because it pleased him. He could adapt one. He had hands and patience and a long evening ahead of him at some point soon, and a vest was only panels and stitching and a problem of geometry, and Kevin’s geometry was a peculiar one. A man who spent half his fights wearing a different body needed armor that understood the arrangement, or armor he could shed in the half-second before the change without leaving his human throat bare in the meantime. Jack thought he could cut one down, restitch it, build something that sat on Kevin in either shape, or close enough. He kept the idea, the way he kept all his ideas, by saying nothing about it and adding it silently to the list of things the next quiet week would hold.

The thought carried a tail of grim amusement, because it touched the strangest fact about his friend, the one Jack had verified with the dogged literalness he brought to everything. He had gone looking, once, for the limits of what the boar could shrug off, the way you test the depth of water before you trust it with your weight, and he had found the videos the way you find anything on the internet if you are willing to look at things most people would rather not, footage of wild boars in places where men hunted them, animals taking a round to the skull and not falling, not slowing, the bullet finding bone built like the prow of a ship and skipping off it, the beast wheeling and crashing away through the brush and running, by every account, for kilometers, alive and furious and unconvinced that anything important had happened. Kevin’s skull, when the fruit took him, was that skull. It was a fact Jack filed under reassurance and never said aloud, because saying it aloud invited Kevin to test it, and there were experiments Jack preferred to keep theoretical.

He kept eight radios, all of them, because there was no version of any future in which two people running a building full of secrets would regret being able to talk to each other quietly across distance, and because radios were among the least romantic and most decisive items in the entire pile, the unglamorous nervous system of any operation that intended to outlive its first mistake.

Last, he sorted the ammunition, and he did it by the cold logic of what the keepers actually ate. Four thousand rounds of nine millimeter, which the pistols and, at need, other things would feed on, enough that he would not have to count rounds in a fight, which was its own kind of freedom. Two thousand of the rifle’s caliber, the lighter one, the five-five-six, because the weapons that took it were the ones staying, and there was no virtue in keeping bullets for guns he was about to feed to a hungry god. He left the heavier rifle rounds and the shotgun shells beyond the handful the keeper Mossberg deserved in the sacrifice pile, because the math of ammunition was the math of the guns it served, and you did not keep food for a mouth that was leaving the house.

When it was done he stepped back and looked at what he had set aside, the small honest arsenal of two men who intended to survive, and then he did the arithmetic that turned a pile into a number, because the system did not understand piles. It understood value, and value was a column you could add.

The kept gear, the weapons and armor and electronics he was pulling back out of the offering, came to six thousand nine hundred dollars by the catalog’s reckoning. The rifle at fifteen hundred. The two pistols at a thousand for the pair. The shotgun at six hundred. The nine-millimeter rounds at eight hundred, the rifle rounds at another eight, the four vests at twelve hundred for the set, the radios at a thousand. He wrote each line in the notebook in the small careful hand that did not change whether he was recording a fortune or a debt, and he ruled a line beneath them and held the total in his head while he built the other column, the one that would go into the dark.

Everything else stacked up the way it had the night before, only larger now, because this time the van went in too. The night before, the van had been the thing that carried the cargo. This morning it was cargo. He had thought about that for a while in the shower and decided it was the right call, cold as it felt to offer up the black anonymous vehicle that had served them so well, because a van was fourteen thousand dollars of value sitting idle in a corner under a tarp, and idle value was the system’s favorite meal, and he could buy another van with the clean cash he was keeping liquid for exactly the boring practical reasons he had just finished explaining to Kevin. Sentiment about a vehicle was a luxury for people who already had everything else. So the weapons came to seventy-two thousand one hundred, the ammunition to nine thousand eight hundred, the equipment that remained after he pulled his keepers to four thousand six hundred, and the van to fourteen thousand, and the four lines made one hundred thousand five hundred dollars of value piled in the deepest corner of the floor.

From that he subtracted the six thousand nine hundred he was keeping for the two of them. The pencil did the work and his stomach did the rest, the particular vertigo of writing down a number that large and knowing he was about to set it on fire on purpose.

Ninety-three thousand six hundred dollars.

He underlined it twice. That was the offering. Nearly fourteen times the dagger. More than twice what either of the bigger leaps had cost him. He read it once to himself and once aloud, flat, the way he read all his numbers, and then he sat with it in the cold for a moment and let it be real.

“You’re sure about the spare gun?” he asked, not looking up, because it was the last loose thread and he disliked loose threads. “You take one of the rifles too, we can spare it. Once it’s in the box it’s gone.”

Kevin gave the question the consideration it deserved and then shrugged, the big easy roll of the shoulders that was as much a part of him as the laugh. “What for? You’ve got the long one and the short ones and the spreader. I’ve got a fist the size of your chest and a head a bullet bounces off.” He turned his old new pistol over in his hand again, comfortable with it now. “We’re carrying more iron than the two of us could shoot in a year. If I start hoarding it I’m just keeping value out of the box because it makes me feel safe. And feeling safe isn’t worth ninety grand of better odds.” He grinned. “You taught me that. You don’t get to be annoyed I learned it.”

Jack almost smiled at that, and chose instead to close the notebook, which Kevin would correctly read as agreement.

“So.” Kevin came and stood over the offering pile, the great mound of weapons and the van behind it, and asked the only question left, the one that actually decided the morning. “How do you want to do it this time, man? You going to break it up like before, feed it in pieces and take what comes off each one? Or are you going to throw the whole thing in at once and see what the dice do with a number that big?” He looked sidelong at his friend. “Tell me straight. One bite, or a lot of little ones.”

Jack didn’t answer right away. He set his jaw against his knuckles and let himself actually think about it, which was the courtesy the question was owed, because the answer was not obvious and the cost of being wrong was ninety-three thousand dollars of irreplaceable value.

The last time, he had been careful. He had broken his money into blocks, fed them one at a time, and taken what each block returned, and it had been good. The blocks had given them the things they were standing in the middle of the consequences of. A blade that never missed. Ten green seeds that could pull a dying man back across the line. A fruit that had made Kevin into the impossible thing that had carried two boxes that should have taken six men. Good returns, every one of them. But the last block of that night had returned the dagger, and the dagger, useful as it was, sat in his memory with a faint disappointment he had never entirely talked himself out of, a small thing where he had hoped for a large one, the system reminding him on the way out the door that it owed him nothing and meant it. Careful had bought him good. Careful had also bought him, at the very end, a knife.

And the world he was carving this operation out of was not a world that rewarded good. He thought about San Diego the way it actually was now, a city loading itself like a weapon in the dark, and about the things he knew walked through it that did not bleed the way men bled, the heroes who were not heroes and the powers that made his stolen strength look like a clever trick, and he understood with the clean certainty that came to him sometimes that the difference between living and dying in a place like that was not going to be a knife that didn’t miss. It was going to be a leap. He had ninety-three thousand six hundred dollars of value to spend, and somewhere in the spread of numbers the dice might roll, there were leaps. He could feel the shape of the gamble the way he could feel a coming change in the weather, the certainty that careful had taken him as far as careful went, and that the next distance was only crossed by people willing to put everything on a single throw and live with whatever the throw was.

“All of it,” he said. “One bite.”

Kevin took that in and let out a low breath, half a whistle. “Ninety grand. On one number.” He shook his head, not in objection, in something closer to awe. “Man.” Then he spread his hands, the gesture that meant he was stepping back from a thing that was not his to decide. “It’s your power. It eats what you feed it and it gives what it gives, and I’ve never once been the one holding the dice. Who am I to put my hand in?” The grin came back, crooked and fond. “Go big. Let’s see what the universe thinks you’re worth.”

So they loaded the van.

It was strange work, loading a thing in order to lose it, and they did it mostly in silence, the two of them carrying the boxes back across the floor and stacking them into the cargo compartment they had emptied less than an hour before, the offering folding itself back into the vehicle that was now part of the offering. The crates went in with their dead metal weight, the rifles and the submachine guns and the pistols he was giving up, the shells and the heavy rounds, everything that wasn’t staying, and Kevin did the lifting because Kevin found a kind of contentment in being strong enough to make hard work look like a chore, and Jack guided and stacked and made sure the load sat right, an old reflex from a life of being paid to make sure loads sat right. When the last crate was in, they shut the doors, and Jack walked around to the front of the van and stood there a moment with his hand not yet on it, breathing, the way a man stands at the edge of cold water he has already decided to enter.

Then he placed his palm flat against the black panel of the hood, and closed his eyes, and reached for the thing he had reached for twice before.

It came faster than it used to. The warmth rose through his hand, the offering registering itself to whatever was on the other side, and behind his shut eyes the die began to turn. He never knew what to call it and had stopped trying. It was a d20, or his mind insisted on making it one, a twenty-sided shape tumbling through a dark that had no walls, every face of it a number, the numbers blurring as it spun faster, and he understood without being told that the speed was the offering, that a larger meal made the die hungrier and the spin wilder, the faces flickering past too fast to read, the whole thing rotating with a momentum that felt as though it might never find a reason to stop. He held himself still inside it the way he held himself still through everything, and waited for the slowing that always came, the gradual loss of speed as the die settled toward whatever it had decided.

It did not slow. It stopped.

One instant it was spinning beyond reading and the next it had simply arrested, no deceleration, no settling, the motion guillotined clean, and in the same instant Kevin made a sound beside him that Jack had never heard him make, a sharp involuntary intake, the noise of a man whose mind had just been handed something it could not file. Jack’s eyes were still shut. He heard the sound and could not place it, and then he noticed the thing his hand was telling him, which was that his hand was telling him nothing at all. The cold panel of the van was no longer under his palm. There was no van under his palm. His fingers were curved around empty morning air.

He opened his eyes.

For a moment he genuinely believed he had been robbed. The van was gone, the whole black bulk of it, fourteen thousand dollars of vehicle and ninety thousand more of cargo, vanished out from under his hand and out of the corner of the floor as though it had never been parked there, and where it had stood there was the concrete, bare, and on the concrete, small and absurd and catching the grey light, lay a single needle. Gold. A sewing needle, no longer than the first joint of his thumb, fallen on its side on the cold floor like something dropped by a tailor and never missed. Jack looked at it and felt the bottom drop out of his stomach, the cold certainty of the worst possible roll arriving exactly as he had warned Kevin it could, ninety-three thousand dollars of value turned into a sliver of gilded metal you could lose down a crack in the floorboards. He had thrown everything on one number and the number had been the cruelest one in the set. So this is how it goes, he thought, with a flat interior calm that was almost admiration for the joke of it. This is the day I learn what the floor really looks like.

Then he saw the box of light.

It hung above the needle, the way they always hung, a panel of clean luminous text floating in the cold air, and the moment his eye caught the first line of it the floor under his stomach came back, because the system did not waste a box of light on a worthless thing, and the words assembling above that small gold sliver were not the words of a swindle. He read them, and a smile began somewhere it had no business beginning, given that a heartbeat earlier he had been making peace with ruin, and it climbed his face and would not be put back. He read the whole thing twice, standing very still, and then his hand went to his pocket for the notebook the way it always did, the pen scratching, the old urgent habit of anchoring the impossible to paper before the light could think better of having shown it to him. He copied every line. When he had it all, he crouched and picked the needle up between two fingers, and it was warmer than metal had any right to be, a faint living heat against his skin, and he turned it in the light and watched the gold catch.

Kevin had found his voice. “Jack. What is it? You went white. I thought we’d—” He stopped. “I thought it was over. What does it say?”

Jack didn’t answer with words. He stood, and held the notebook out so his friend could read it for himself, and watched Kevin’s lips move over the lines. This was what the light had said, and it was this:

═══════════════════════════════════════
✦ MAGIC TATTOO ✦
FORGED SPELL: PHANTASMAL FORCE
═══════════════════════════════════════

Origin: Dungeons & Dragons
Source: Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything
Type: Wondrous Item (Magic Tattoo)
Rarity: Uncommon
Attunement: Not Required
Charges: 3 per day (all charges restored at dawn)
Contained Spell: Phantasmal Force
Spell Level: 2nd

──────── DESCRIPTION ────────
This magic tattoo takes the form of a design of its bearer’s
choosing. When activated, luminous runes race across its surface
as the spell is cast. The tattoo holds a stabilized version of
Phantasmal Force, allowing even individuals with no arcane
training to wield its effect. When a charge is spent, the tattoo
emits a soft glow and the illusion blooms directly within the
mind of the target.

──────── EFFECT ────────
As a bonus action, the user spends 1 charge to cast Phantasmal
Force on a creature it can see within 18 meters. The victim must
make an Intelligence saving throw.
 ▸ Spell Save DC: 13
On a failed save, a powerful illusion is planted directly in the
target’s mind.

──────── THE ILLUSION ────────
The illusion may take nearly any form: creatures, monsters,
traps, fire, poison, objects, chains, shadows, or supernatural
phenomena. It affects only the chosen target.

──────── SENSORY STIMULI ────────
The victim perceives the illusion as completely real. It can
reproduce sound, temperature, movement, touch, pain, and smell.
For as long as the magic lasts, the target’s own mind labors to
explain away any strangeness, rationalizing the impossible into
something it can accept.

──────── PSYCHIC DAMAGE ────────
If the illusion represents a threat or a source of harm, it deals
 ▸ 2d8 psychic damageat the end of each of the victim’s turns.

──────── OFFENSIVE MANIFESTATION ────────
Should the illusion take the form of an aggressive creature, it
is treated as having an attack bonus of +5, representing how
convincingly and threateningly it presents itself to the victim.

──────── DURATION ────────
Up to 1 minute. Requires concentration, sustained by the tattoo
itself. The magic ends if the target sees through the illusion,
if focus is broken, or if the duration expires.

──────── RESISTING THE ILLUSION ────────
An affected creature may use an action to study the phenomenon,
making an Intelligence (Investigation) check against DC 13. On a
success, it recognizes the manifestation as an illusion and the
magic ends at once.

──────── LIMITATIONS ────────
 • Affects only one creature per use.
 • Creates no real physical objects.
 • Deals no damage beyond the spell’s psychic damage.
 • Highly intelligent creatures are likelier to break free.
 • Does not affect mindless constructs or creatures immune
 to illusions.

──────── NOTE FROM THE CHAOSGATE ────────
“Reality is only a shared agreement. Convince a single mind that
a thing exists, and to that mind it will be as true as any stone
or blade.”

──────── CHAOSGATE EVALUATION ────────
 Utility ….. ★★★★★
 Field Control ….. ★★★★★
 Offensive Power … ★★★☆☆
 Versatility …. ★★★★★
 Ease of Use …. ★★★★☆

Estimated Roll Value: US$ 40,000 – 80,000 of Value
═══════════════════════════════════════

Jack could not stop looking at it, and for once he made no effort to. He stood in the cold corner of the floor where a van had been a minute ago and held a warm gold needle in his fingers and let himself feel, fully and without the usual sober subtraction, the size of what he had just won. He had braced for ruin and been handed a key, and not a small one. He turned the possibilities over in his mind faster than he could have spoken them, and each one was better than the last. A weapon that did not arm his hands but his enemy’s mind. A wall, a beast, a fire, a poison, conjured whole inside the skull of a man who would feel its heat and smell its rot and bleed inside himself from the terror of it, while Jack stood untouched and watching. He thought of rooms he had been afraid to enter and saw them differently now, saw himself making one frightened man see a monster where his ally stood, making a gunman empty his magazine into a wall that was not there, making a pursuer run from chains that did not bind him. It was not a thing that broke bodies. It was a thing that broke the agreement a mind made with the world, and Jack had understood for a long time that the agreement was the only thing holding most men together.

A weapon that didn’t arm his hands, but the mind of his enemy. A wall, a beast, a fire, a poison, conjured whole inside the skull of a man who would feel its heat, smell its decay, and bleed inside from terror, while Jack remained unharmed, watching. He thought of rooms he had been afraid to enter and now saw them differently, imagined making a frightened man see a monster where his ally was, making a gunslinger unload his magazine into a nonexistent wall, making a pursuer flee from chains that didn’t bind him. It wasn’t something that destroyed bodies. It was something that broke the agreement the mind made with the world, and Jack had long understood that this agreement was the only thing that kept most men together.

Something moved in his chest that he did not have a clean word for. He had spent eighteen years as a body the world used up and threw a little more away each day, and two months clawing back inches of strength one painful debt at a time, and standing here now with a borrowed god’s small cruel gift warm in his hand, he felt for the first time that he had stepped off the edge of what a man was supposed to be able to do and not fallen. He was not stronger than a bullet. He never would be. But strength had stopped being the only axis the world turned on, and the look in his eyes, had he been able to see it, was the look of a man watching a ceiling he had spent his whole life under finally open onto sky.

“This is a steal,” Kevin said quietly, still reading, then looked up and repeated the word with emotion, using it as his best words. “This is robbery, man. Daylight robbery, and the system handed you the money.” His round face lit up with pure joy, the boy rejoicing in his friend’s joy as much as in his own. “You paid with a van and a bunch of guns we were never going to use.” He shook his head slowly. “You bet everything on one number, and that number won gold.” He paused, and his smile became more practical, the question that mattered after the surprise had passed. “So. You read it. It’s a tattoo. It’ll be whatever shape you want.” He nodded at the needle heating in Jack’s fingers. “You know what you want it to be?”

Jack closed his hand around the needle, the golden heat pressing against his palm, and for a moment allowed himself simply to consider it, as he considered everything, pondering the question and discovering, to his own surprise, that it didn’t seem to be an open question. Some part of him had already answered it. He looked at the small, gleaming object that had cost him a fortune and opened a door for him, and the corner of his mouth curved, and this time he let it turn into a genuine smile, the second of the morning and the more sincere of the two.

“I think so,” he said. “My friend, I think so.”