Chapter 2 Show Your Hand

Harper's POV

Tyler was on the arm of the couch with a can of Dr Pepper mashed flat against each cheek when I came out of the bedroom, and the sight of him — seventeen, furious, icing a face I had just hit twice — nearly put me back on the floor. He read my eyes and his jaw set the way it set before a match. "Okay. Who was it. Devon, or is this the Damian thing again, because I'll walk over there either way and put him through a wall, and I don't care whose family owns half the district."

"It's neither one." Then, because there was no gentle version of it: "I dreamed you died."

The cans came down. He stared at me for three full seconds and what came out of him wasn't a joke. "Just me?" His voice had gone flat in a way that didn't fit a seventeen-year-old. "What about everybody else?"

I didn't answer. He followed me into the kitchen talking — sorry, he hadn't meant to yell, he'd apologize properly if I would just look at him — and I stopped in the doorway, because the table was set.

Eggs with the yolks still soft. Bacon, toast in a stack, coffee going black and hot, steam curling off it in no hurry about anything. Six years, and I had eaten cold paste out of a foil pouch while wind came through a bunker ceiling, and somewhere in the middle of it I stopped being able to remember what a hot meal smelled like. I sat down and ate fast, without tasting most of it, and when my plate was clean I started on his.

Ninety days. The number was already running its own arithmetic in the back of my head, and the arithmetic started with him. In the second winter the temperature went to forty below and Tyler handed his coat and his sleeping bag to Mom and Dad and me, one at a time, and said he wrestled at a hundred and fifty pounds, he could take it, like a man explaining something obvious to people who weren't listening. A cough he never mentioned turned into pneumonia, and the winter kept him.

"Are you going to say sorry, or are you just going to eat my breakfast?" He waited, got nothing, made a noise in his throat, and turned for his room.

The instant his back was to me I let go of the thread I had been holding since I woke up, and the kitchen folded shut.

Grass, ankle-deep and green, bent flat in a circle under my feet. A stream a few yards off, running clear over stone, and past that a line of trees standing so still the air looked thick. I laughed, and kept laughing until it turned into something else, and then I stood in the middle of five square kilometers of nothing with both hands over my face, because it had come back. Not the ceiling, not the extraction line, not the white light they calibrated so that nobody in that building could tell day from night.

Then the other thing arrived the way it always did, and it arrived with heat. A year of draws, dose schedules, and a man standing in a doorway watching me go down on one knee. Purple-white arcs snapped off my forearms and ran down into my fingers, popping in the wet air. "You came back too," I said, to nobody. "Good." Pushing it down took longer than it should have.

The kitchen reassembled around me. Coffee still steaming, his plate still pushed back, less than ten seconds gone. I took the last piece of toast off the table and knocked on his door.

"Who is this?" The voice came through the wood, wounded and theatrical. "I don't know you. I don't have a sister like you."

"I'm sorry." I said it into the door and meant it, which surprised us both. "Come out and I'll take you for the new comms terminal. The lattice one. This afternoon."

The door opened so fast the air moved. He was grinning, cheeks still pink, seventeen and radiant and completely without dignity. "You are the greatest sister in the history of sisters. I want that on record."

"Not yet. There's something bigger."

"Name it." He pulled his shoulders back. "I'll walk through fire. I won't even blink."

"Tyler." I kept my voice level. "You ever hear people talk about the end of the world?"

His whole face lit up the way it did when somebody handed him a controller. "Sure, movies do it to death. World War Three first, or the sun goes weird and cooks everybody, then the floods, then some plague, then the deep freeze, then the zombies — they always run it in order, it's basically a formula." He stopped, thought about it, and said the thing that took the floor out from under me. "But you don't have to worry about that. If it ever happens, I'm protecting you."

I had to look at the wall for a second. He had done exactly that. He had done it with a coat and a sleeping bag and a lie about his own body, and it killed him.

"I'm not talking about a movie," I said. "I'm telling you it's real. In ninety days this world comes apart."

The grin died where it stood. He put the back of his hand against my forehead, and when I didn't pull away he got worse instead of better — his fingers went cold, his grip on my wrist closed. "Harper, don't say it like that, you're scaring me. Are you actually sick? Because if you're sick then what am I supposed to do, I'm the one in this house who can't even—"

I didn't explain. I took his hand, and let go of the floor.

Grass came up around both of us. The stream ran past, the trees held still, and Tyler stood with his mouth open and no sound coming out of it, taking the world in one sense at a time — dirt, water, air, light.

He whipped his head around. "This is — you have a dimension. You're an Augment."

"Yes."

"How long have you—" He stopped, because he had already heard the answer inside his own question, and then he looked at me with an expression I had never seen on his face and would spend the next ninety days trying to keep there. "You died."

"Yes. And I came back. In ninety days this world turns into hell, and I know its schedule."

He went down on his heels, dug a hand into the dirt, squeezed it, held it up and smelled it like a man checking a product, then stood and laughed at the sky with his head thrown back. "I knew it. There was no way I was just some kid from Oakhaven. I'm the protagonist's brother." He spread his arms. "That's a real position. That's a party slot. That's not the guy who dies in the tutorial."

Before I could speak he had his shirt off and was standing in the stream, pouring water over his head by the handful and then drinking out of his own palms. "Every book I've ever read says the spring rebuilds you inside and out," he announced, teeth chattering. "Internal and external. Both. If you're running point, I'm not being the weak link."

I didn't stop him. The water did rebuild, and it was the strongest card I held; I wanted to know what it did at the low end before I put my parents in it. Him first, tonight Mom and Dad. Every point of baseline we gained was margin, and margin was the only currency left.

Half an hour later I hauled him out by the arm. He dried off, dressed, threw a few punches into open air, then stopped and looked at his own knuckles, because the swelling was gone, the pink had faded off both cheeks, and his wrist didn't click when he rolled it. He went quiet, then came and stood next to me.

"So what about Dad and Mom?"

"Tonight. I'll tell them tonight. This afternoon we move." I turned to face him. "We're renting a warehouse outside the city."

"For what?"

"Supplies. The fold is my hole card, and I can't pour the world into it with nobody noticing. We need a place where things land first — no cameras, no coverage — and then we move them in quiet."

He nodded once, pulled his jacket off the hook by the door, and had one arm into it before he said anything else. "Then what are we standing around for. Let's go."

I watched him move — the momentum, the total absence of hesitation, the same thing that had carried him out into a blizzard with no coat and no complaint. Then I looked past him, out the window, at Neo-Eden at ten in the morning: glass towers, delivery drones threading the air, the ad lattice waking over the commerce dome, a hundred thousand people buying things they would never get to use.

"Starting today," I said, quietly, to the city, "we stock up. A lifetime's worth."