A Second Chance

Part 72 - My new family?

Dylan spread both hands flat on the map and looked at me.

"Talk."

I talked about everything up until now. That fake company, the office on the south district street two blocks from Colvin. 

"This, building, yeah?"

"Yeah,"

"We flagged it eight months ago. Couldn't find anything worth moving on."

"Probably because the trail was clean. But it's warehouse on Fennick Road. That's where this weird substance was being stored."

I took out my phone to show it to them. 

"Foreign material. Not from this world, not from any realm I've encountered before. But they look like energy conductors, highly efficient, completely impossible to produce outside of their origin point. Someone physically transported them across realms to get them here, which means this isn't a small side operation. We might be looking at a huge scale,"

"The hell they do with it?"

"Wait..." Libber muttered. "I'm pretty sure that's from Imperium! It's the only answer and all! That realm uses energy sources that looks just like this!"

"Imperium, huh?"

"I have no idea what Imperium is, but it's for buildings things." I explained. "The manifest I found in the warehouse had delivery schedules and a recipient. Someone called "The Coordinator," who I think I know. The language in the documentation referenced assembly, activation thresholds, structural output. They're not selling the Crystalline. They're using it for something specific and whatever it is, it's already in progress."

...

"The gang moving all of this is called The Vipers,"

"We heard it once, no idea who they are though,"

"Most people have, in the wrong way," I said. "Their main headquarters was in the world I came from. Outside of their domain, they had a good, global influence that was admired by many. Inside their territory it was completely different. They take part in crime, trafficking, extortion, all those brutal stuff. Where I'm from, they'd been operating for centuries and I mean that literally. Not decades. Freaking centuries."

"The f**k? How does a gang last centuries?" 

"Neglect," I replied. "Institutional, generational neglect. Nobody took them seriously early enough, and they used that window to get inside everything worth being inside. Government, military, media. By the time anyone tried to push back they had people in every room that mattered and enough propaganda outside their territory that anyone who spoke against them looked like the problem."

"You know, my friend who'd been there longer than me called it centuries of slow suffocation. The city they controlled was their main stronghold and it showed in everything. The infrastructure, the people, the way the whole place felt. Generations who'd never known anything different and had no reason to believe it could change."

"Don't worry, I worked together and now, their influence is over where I'm from. So, the 16 realms is all they have left. But the reason they're here is because this city is isolated and self-contained and nobody outside knows enough about it to notice what's being built inside it. The same conditions that made your city safe are the conditions they're using. They want this to be their new stronghold. And I promise you, if you turn a blind eye to it, then your city will be unrecognizable within a couple of months. It'll become as bad as the city I was in,"

Dylan looked at the map for a long time.

"Then we better get real..." he said. "The school. It's connected, yeah?"