Glitch in the God Complex (AmpCore #1)

20 - Dangerous World

 "I still think this is a bad idea," Odiye muttered.

"Yeah, you said that already," Piper chuckled, nudging him with one elbow. "Seriously, are you always this uptight?"

"I'm not uptight," he grumbled. "You don't know these people, Piper."

"I didn't come down here to pick a fight," she assured him. "So would you loosen up a bit? We might actually get to have some fun for five minutes."

"We'll see." Odiye relented a little though, forcing a smile onto his face. They walked on, deep in the depths of the AmpCore Academy, beneath one of the tertiary training facilities, and Piper could hear the growing swell of voices echoing down the passages towards them. Up ahead she could see other figures in the black fatigues of the academy, gesturing wildly as they spoke.

They all filed through a large, square-framed doorway, where she could see the glow of lights. Piper let her implants stir, reaching out to the world. It was a strange sensation, like being able to reach out and touch the very atoms of the world all around you.

In those atoms she could feel the cauldron of power just across the threshold. A gathering of powerful AmpCore students raging like a storm.

"Do you feel that?" she asked quietly as they approached.

"Feel what?"

"Like, in the air, the other people? It's like everything's ... on fire."

Odiye nodded slowly. "I can, if I try. It takes a bit of time to be able to filter your new senses properly." He glanced at her. "You can feel them?"

"Yeah." Piper searched for the words. "It's kind of weird. Intense."

"Your implants, however you got them," he said. "They seem to be a bit more sensitive than normal."

"Yeah, Arrow said something about my implants being deeper than everybody else, or something like that."

"They told me." Odiye's face remained impassive.

She fixed him with a beady eye. "Is that good?"

"Good and bad." He looked at her. "It means you've got a lot of potential, but it could be hard to control it." His mouth twisted as he gathered his explanation. "It's like ... peaks and troughs. Some people here are very stable. Like Arrow; they have a solid baseline, not a lot of variance. They'll probably never be able to throw around the power you can, but they'll always have control."

He inclined his head to the doorway. "Then there are people like Ferra and Toran. Volatile, but if they can maintain control they are a lot more dangerous than most people here."

"What about you?" she asked. "Where do you fall on that little scale?"

Odiye smiled thinly. "I'm sure you'll find out soon enough."

Before she could ask what he meant, they were through the archway, and Piper's breath caught in her throat at the sight that met her eyes.

There must have been two hundred people here, the vast majority of them AmpCore students or fledgling operatives in their late teens and early twenties. More surprising than that, she spotted at least three instructors – out of their white uniforms at the moment, but their demeanour gave them away.

Several years older than most of the people here, they stalked warily back and forth, keeping an eye on the gathering.

The den of the Sharks formed a kind of coliseum, a long oval with broad arcs of seats rising up on the long edges, looking down onto a stretch of armoured flooring. Here there were plenty of corporate advertisements blazing around the upper walls, a constant stream that she could feel flowing, as though she'd dipped her fingers into a flowing river.