“Me?”

  Adam cocks an eyebrow and then his head. “You got rats?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Adam holds up a hand, listening. He points at a cabinet over the stove.

  We all look at each other, waiting, but whatever it was doesn’t repeat.

  The practitioner shrugs. “Thought I heard something.”

  I get up and start going through the cabinets while the others watch, probably wondering what they’ll do if a rat leaps out. Hell, Monica looks a little pale and her hand’s on her fricking gun, but all I find is a tipped over box of granola bars. I shrug and sit back down.

  “You just said you were a Thetan,” Monica says.

  “I was a Thetan, yes. But then I left. Got a new job, walked a different path, heard a new calling, you know? But I’ve gone about as far as I can go. Now, I need you guys and Ben.” He shrugs again. “Mostly Ben.”

  “Need me for what?”

  Adam sighs hard enough to ruffle his beard. “That takes some explaining.”

  “Cultists aren’t exactly known for that.” Cal leans forward, her eyebrows arching into her hairline.

  Adam snorts. “You’re not wrong. And I’m not a cultist. Not anymore.”

  “Do they know that?” Monica crosses her legs, the one on top kicks. She’s impatient and skeptical.

  “They do not, and I’d like to keep it that way.” Adam leans back. “I don’t know what the FBI knows, but I know that Ben here is new to this world, so I’m just going to start at the beginning, okay?” He pauses for a moment, waiting for each of us to nod or whatever. “Okay, then. Most people think that the first practitioners were the Alphas. It’s how they got their name, after all. And each group has their very own ideas about that, but a surprising number agrees that it was really the Gammans. I’m not sure any of that matters to us. it’s all academic.”

  “The Gammans?” Cal smirks.

  “Who knows? It doesn’t matter, honestly. What’s important is how it all started.”

  “Yes, but no one really knows that.”

  “I do.” Adam spreads his hands. He shrugs. “It’s a closely guarded secret that only the highest tiered people are snooty enough to hear. I’ve run into three different versions in three different cults.”

  “Holy shit.” Monica shifts her weight in her seat. “You have documentation?”

  “No,” says Adam. “And shut up. This all started when what they call a Harbinger arrived on the planet. Each group has one. They get thrown into space from wherever they came from, either bodily or in some kind of vessel or spaceship, and just like their organizations, each has their own specialty. The Betans have communication and light, for example. Alphas are good with all things related to motion. Gammans work with gravity.”

  “Harbinger?” Cal asks. “Our signals guys haven’t heard that term. It hasn’t come up in any taps or surveillance.”

  Adam nods. “I’m not surprised. Like I said, it’s probably their biggest secret. You’ll see why in a moment. Now, how it works is that the Harbinger lands on Earth and starts teaching runes to people, making them practitioners, starting their cult. The magic, for lack of a better word, pulls energy from the Sponsor, an entity from deep space. In return for this power, the practitioner feeds it by giving up personal possibilities. The thinking is that they can eat the universes those decisions would have made.”

  Cal looks at me. “Say in this world, I go right instead of left, but, in another, an alternative me goes right, and the universe splits. That’s why human sacrifice amps up spells. Their deaths stoke the spell with all the alternate timelines those people would have created had they lived. What we don’t really understand is, shouldn’t power give me new options? Power is possibility, isn’t it? Choices? If I’m super strong, I can choose right, left, or straight through the wall.”

  Adam grins. “That’s entry-level, initiate-level thinking, yeah. But you’re in law enforcement. You should know that certain kinds of power limit things considerably. Examples come from both sides. A safe cracker has the power to open safes, so he will often try to crack one when most other people would maybe look through the owner’s wallet to see if he wrote down the combination there. His ability encourages his path, limiting it to cracking the safe. On your side of the badge, Pomerantz, your boss, for example, can’t go into the field as much as he wants. He’s a desk jockey. His responsibilities keep him seated. He can do more things, but the direction he can do them in is limited.”

  Monica says, “You know Pomerantz?”

  “Not personally, but you guys have wanted to talk to me for a long time. I make it my business to study the people who know about me.” Adam shrugs. “That’s really most of what I do. I’m a spy.”

  I say, “You’re a what now?”

  Adam’s smile broadens. “The Alpha and Beta Harbingers arrived close enough together that nobody’s really sure who got here after the Gammans. Alphas are only called Alphas because the world learned about them first, and not until they were here for over two hundred years. Even then, it was another three hundred before people knew practitioners were real. Anyway, what do you think each of those societies did, first thing?”

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “Well, we know they compete against each other.” Cal’s gone still. Something I’ve noticed she does when she’s concentrating. “We know they work together sometimes, but contention and conflict are more normal, like the Epsilons hitting the Iotans last year.”

  “They do both.” Adam shows his palms. “At ground level, things are hunky dory between cults. Very kumbaya. The higher up you go, though, the more bitter the rivalry. The first thing the Harbingers do when they arrive on a planet is look for one another.”

  Monica shakes her head. “Wait. Wait. You make it sound like these Harbingers go from planet to planet. Like spores or seeds? And they’re aliens? The extra-terrestrial kind?”

  “Come on. Most people suspect Sponsors are aliens, don’t they? Wouldn’t they have to be, by definition?” Adam’s eyes lose focus. He’s staring out my little window but not seeing anything. “I’ve had this talk I don’t know how many times. Always the same questions. Yes, the Harbingers go from world to world, bringing their magic, their runes, and their Sponsors into contact with civilizations on other worlds. Yep.”

  “So, there’s lots of Harbingers?” I picture a world shedding them in all directions like someone kicked a dandelion.

  “Probably billions. Space is so vast, though, that only one lands on a planet at a time. The literal astronomical odds would preclude anything else.” Adam’s tone is solemn. Dark. “You can maybe see why almost nobody knows any of this, right? Too scary.”

  “They look for each other to kill them, don’t they?” asks Cal. “They’re trying to eliminate their competition before it gets started.”

  Adam’s eyes widen. “Very good, Agent Tyler. If they can, the Harbinger hits their rival to knock them and their coalition out of the running. To do that, they have to find them first, so they try to spy them out right away. They watch each other all the time, looking for, and sometimes arranging a weakness before they strike. The Iotans are new, for example. Everybody’s best guess is that they’ve been here no longer than two years, and that stuff at the church a while ago was a quick ramp up to survive. The first thing anybody knew about them was when they started blowing up last year. It’s thought that they somehow brainwash folks to turn them into subversives. Spies, soldiers, whatever. Their members don’t seem to have a will of their own, but it’s still early days and nobody’s sure about anything.”

  “So, you’re a spy for the Thetans,” I say. “Besides your… balancing?”

  “No. I mean, they think so. They brought me in because my mom had stage four stomach cancer when I was in art school.” Adam shrugs. I’ve noticed that when he does, he thoughtfully pooches out his lower lip in something short of a pout. “Runes are drawn, right? These societies do a lot of recruiting from schools like that. I was pretty good. I learned a rune that helped mom deal with the pain, then I found one that cured her cancer. Tattooed it right over her belly button.”

  “You can cure cancer?” I’m shocked. “That’s amazing!”

  They’re all just looking at me.

  “What?”

  “You mean, they haven’t got rid of cancer in your world?” Monica asks.

  “No! Well, some. And sometimes they can beat it back with radiation and drugs, but—.”

  “Radiation and drugs?” Monica’s screwed up her face like she’s bitten into a rotten lemon. “Barbarians.”

  “Well, we don’t have magic, do we? You guys don’t have Stephen King, so there.”

  “Who’s Stephen King?”

  Cal sighs. “Adam, you got recruited out of art school because you can tattoo runes?”

  “Yeah,” says Adam. “I didn’t even know that most people couldn’t do it until mom’s oncologist had me working in his office. I—.”

  “What do you guys need oncologists for if you’ve cured cancer?”

  Monica rolls her eyes behind her glasses. How does she do that? “Can’t cure it if you don’t detect it, smart guy.”

  “Oh.” Dammit, I’m pretty sure I’m blushing. “Um, so… why’re runes so hard to tattoo?”

  Cal taps a finger on the table. “It’s not just drawing them on a piece of paper or etching them into metal. The process varies….” She stops herself, looking at Adam, who’s smug.

  “Watch.” Adam plops his forearm down and pulls a magic marker out of his pocket. There’s a pun in there somewhere, but I decide to let it go. He holds it up, point down, gives it a swirl, like he just drew a circle in the air, then brings it down two inches below his wrist. With an artist’s exacting skill, he draws a line in increments, stuttering his progress across his skin. He raises the marker, swirls it the other way, then stabs it down. We all wince, watching its point dimple deep into his arm. He lifts it away, leaving that single dot of black surrounded by reddening flesh. Next comes a series of quick, agitated lines, which look like hash marks in no particular order, but with what seems to be random flourishes and arabesques in an irregular rhythm, which continues until he caps the marker with a grin. The design took maybe two minutes to create. It looks like an impressionistic outline of a tick crawling over the letter A done in calligraphy. The lines are precise, often of differing widths, despite having all been drawn by the same marker.

  “What’s it do?” I ask.

  “My eyes are now blue.”

  “What color were they before?”

  “Brown.” Monica and Cal say it at the same time with a distinct note of disapproval at my incompetence.

  “What? I don’t go staring into another dude’s eyes.”

  Monica smirks. “And what color are our eyes, luck boy?” Her index finger indicates herself and Cal.

  I’ve had it with her snark. I point at Cal. “Green, like a fern in the rain.” I point at Monica. “Brown, like bronzed milk chocolate. Huge and….” Yeah, I’d better stop there.

  Cal lifts a hand. “Shut up.” But I’m not sure which of us she’s talking to. Me for doing my best to wax poetic? Or is she hushing Monica’s abortive, biting response?

  “Ben, you can see how difficult it would be to do that with a tattoo?”

  I nod.

  Adam sighs. “Yeah, it hurt mom like hell. And some runes you just can’t tattoo. Some you don’t need to, but the ones you want to make permanent?” He shrugs, and his lower lip swells. “The lines have to be that wide, that long, drawn in that particular order with varying degrees of pressure. You weren’t watching my other hand, which was inscribing another part of the rune in the air under the table. That’s why people can rarely duplicate it later when they see somebody create it, even if it’s on video.”

  Cal nods and Monica grunts.

  “And this was a fairly simple Thetan rune. The more complex ones can take hours, even for experts.”

  “Adam, you say the Harbingers arrive, hunt each other, and compete? That they spy on one another, and you’re one of those spies?” Cal is quiet, weighing her words.

  “Yeah. The Thetans recruited me, and eventually I made it into the second tier. They only have the three. I have a talent for altering my appearance and other things.” Here, Adam held up his hands, crossed and recrossed all his fingers all at once, then he waggled them all, bending them in ways that they shouldn’t bend. “All double-jointed with suped-up dexterity.”

  “Your girlfriend must be so happy,” snorts Monica.

  “What’s a girlfriend?” says Adam.

  “It’s world domination, isn’t it?” I say.

  They all look at me.

  “It’s always world domination. What the Harbingers are competing for,” I explain. I want no talk of girlfriends.

  Adam shakes his head. “I’m not sure you’ll believe me if I told you, but I know of a way to convince you, but they’ve got it, and we need to go get it.”

  “Which is where I come in,” I say.

  “Yep. That’s where you come in.”