The Stranger charged into the storm.
Jude watched, noted that Superman was holding the perimeter — exhausting himself to buy time rather than winning — and decided that if something wasn't resolved in the next three minutes, there probably wasn't going to be a Metropolis to report about.
He dragged the progress bar three minutes forward.
The giant had stopped moving. It hung in the air above the edge of the city, vast and still, and then — slowly, then all at once — began to come apart. Not a clean resolution: the mass of compacted earth and stone that had been accumulating for the better part of a day was still enormous, still dense, and gravity was about to apply itself to all of it simultaneously. Even a collapse rather than an advance was going to register as a significant seismic event for everything within several kilometres.
Superman apparently reached the same conclusion in real time.
The shot that followed came from a dedicated photographer — steady hands, good equipment, someone who had clearly made a professional decision that Superman events were worth the risk of being nearby. Superman flew upward into the dissolving mass, positioned himself under the largest concentration of it, and started carrying it. Not piece by piece. The whole aggregate — a volume of earth approximately the size of a small town — lifted from the air in his arms as he climbed.
Higher. Higher. Smaller in the frame. Gone.
"He threw it into space," Jude said. "Obviously."
He closed the video. Leaned back. Looked at his ceiling for a moment.
"Metropolis," he said, with genuine respect. "Three separate incidents in three days. Each one a different category of impossible. And the city is still there."
He'd been half-considering Metropolis as a potential work location — the presence of Superman implied a certain base level of threat management, and a functioning economy meant employment opportunities. He had now revised this position completely.
"Absolutely not," he said. "Under no circumstances. I am so glad I didn't go."
Drake had included his new phone number at the bottom of the letter. Jude found it, picked up his phone, and dialled.
The number you have dialled is not in service.
He sat with the phone in his hand for a moment.
Then he opened the Daily Planet homepage on his laptop, because he'd had it bookmarked, and he saw the article immediately. It was small — a brief item, the kind that gets a few column inches rather than a headline — but the location in the headline stopped him cold.
CENTRAL CITY: MYSTERIOUS FIRE AND EXPLOSION — WHERE DID THE PHENOMENON COME FROM?
Central City.
Where Drake and Camilla had been going.
Drake can't be that unlucky, Jude thought. He clicked on the article and started reading, with the specific feeling of someone discovering that yes, actually, they can.
According to the report, at approximately midnight the previous evening, a column of fire had appeared above the Central City particle accelerator — Star Labs, the facility that had been decommissioned and dark for some time. The explosion sound had been audible across multiple districts. The flame column had been visible from several separate vantage points across the city, with corroborating accounts from dozens of witnesses.
Then it had stopped. A few seconds, maybe. Gone.
The subsequent investigation had found nothing. No structural damage at the accelerator site. No surrounding buildings affected. No casualties, no injuries, no physical evidence of impact or shockwave. The surveillance footage confirmed the light and sound had occurred — they were on the recordings — but the recordings showed no aftermath whatsoever. As if someone had dropped a full visual effect of an enormous explosion onto the city, let it run for three seconds, and then removed it without touching anything underneath.
The Star Labs staff were, according to the report, completely at a loss.
Untraceable, the journalist had written. Without physical samples, analysis is impossible.
The piece was short. In the absence of damage or victims, there wasn't much to say. The city had filed it under strange but not actionable and moved on.
Jude read it twice. Then he tried Drake's number again.
The number you have dialled is not in service.
He stared at the screen.
Of course it is.
He was on a train to Central City by mid-afternoon.
The journey gave him time to read, which he used to catch up on the full sequence of Central City incident coverage and arrive at conclusions he didn't particularly enjoy. The particle accelerator report was the only specific event mentioned, but the timing aligned exactly with when Drake and Camilla would have arrived. A phone number not in service didn't necessarily mean anything had happened to the people — lines failed, plans changed, numbers got updated — but paired with everything else, the odds didn't feel comfortable.
I just died, Jude thought, watching the landscape change outside the window. I had seven days of recovery. I was supposed to have some time off.
He pulled up the system.
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION
New Part-Time Job Available — Check Inbox
MISSION: Fighting Fire with Fire
The conventional wisdom holds that a person might suffer one stroke of bad luck. Perhaps two. Three consecutive strokes of bad luck, however — that only happens in novels and movies.
The Drakes believed this.
Note: The Drakes were wrong. Novels and movies are not the only narratives with a taste for coincidence. The world of comics has never been restrained in this department. Upon arriving in Central City, the couple encountered — predictably, by this point — an accident.
Additional note: Is deploying a jinx to rescue two chronically unlucky people a form of "fighting fire with fire"? The system considers this a reasonable operational framing.
Status: Pending (0%)
Reward: Intermediate Energy Affinity (Increases maximum mana; grants seven additional anti-crisis energy affinities)
Jude read this over twice.
Intermediate Energy Affinity. He'd checked the shop price on that before — one million asset points. Not a reward the system handed out for a simple retrieval job. If the system was offering it for finding the Drakes, the system knew something about what finding the Drakes was actually going to involve.
The system doesn't give away freebies, he thought. Which means this isn't simple.
He put his phone in his pocket, watched Central City's skyline begin to appear on the horizon, and thought about what kind of accident could happen at a decommissioned particle accelerator that left no physical evidence and made two people's phones stop working.
He had some guesses.
He didn't like any of them.
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