The Law of Averages

Chapter 82

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.

If he was honest with himself, Dan would have to admit that he'd almost certainly end up doing it anyways. It was just that he felt extremely stupid going with blind teleportation as his first resort. At the very least, he'd have to remove what traps he could find, first.

His veil pulled free from the wall, dropping into the floor of the hidden room. It spread along the cracks, the panels, the hidden gaps in the steel. It wormed its way into each and every nook and cranny. Dan didn't know what it was, exactly, that he was sensing; he couldn't tell which devices were meant to maim and which were meant to disable. He couldn't tell which were harmless and which were meant to threaten.

So, he'd get rid of it all. Slowly. Bit by bit. His veil wasn't enough to do it all at once, and he should be more precise with it besides. Beyond that, there was the issue of evidence. Dan was essentially making a series of portal-cuts. Cuts that would leave a discernible, if extraordinarily thin, path to wherever he stood. His veil extended out from him, always. It wasn't subtle. That fact hadn't changed, just because he'd elected to ignore it. He still needed to exercise some level of caution. He couldn't just blindly yoink out every piece of electronics in the building. That would be like finding the needle in the haystack by setting all the hay on fire. A bonfire might get the job done, but damn was it obvious.

Precision. Dan had been practicing diligently with his veil, and he was about ready to try something new. He couldn't afford to have little ant trails leading back to the entrance. It was risky enough when he did it with the trap door. That, at least, would probably not warrant any further scrutiny. A missing bolt could be easily waved off. He couldn't say the same about what he was trying to do now.

Though, this all assumed that his little hideout would eventually be discovered. Dan hoped that assumption was wrong, but Marcus had beaten planning for the worst into his head with ruthless efficiency. Better to have some sort of plan, now, when he had time to think.

Which brought him back to the present. His veil was retracted, no longer a wide cast net. He formed it into a single tendril, pushing forward to the closest hidden panel. Thirty feet from Dan, flush against the closest wall and covered by a retractable steel plate, a box-like hole, three feet wide and deep. Whatever lay in it was large. It had a barrel, or something similar. A round, hollow protrusion, attached to some kind of electrical mechanism. Dan didn't know, he didn't care.

His power brushed against it. At this distance, the mass Dan could transport was best measured in grams. Even so, he pushed his veil into the steel, letting it spread through the heavy material. The best he could do was a shell, thin and fragile. Nothing more than an outer layer. It would be enough.

Dan's power had always responded to his will. Whether that was because it was directly plugged into his subconscious, or because of the massive eldritch being, Dan did not, at this moment, care. It obeyed him. It followed his demands. He just needed to get more specific.

"I want to stay here," Dan whispered, focusing his mind on his goal. His veil was a portal, a doorway. Nowhere was it written that one had to fully open a door. Not when just a small crack was enough.

The very tip of Dan's veil shuddered, flickered, vanished. Invisible, even to him, for just a moment. He could barely feel it, like a shadow against his senses. Nothing more than a phantom. And then, it returned. The thin layer of metal it was bonded with, gone. Left in the Gap. His veil remained intact. His pool of energy remained the same. No catastrophe had befallen him.

Dan smiled in the dark.