As he tried to get a handle on his new spatial senses, a gruff, barking laugh echoed from outside his tent. With a sigh, he rose to his feet and strode out.

  “This is what you meant with that little quip earlier, wasn’t it?”

  Marlon stood on the ground—the real ground—his arms crossed over his large stomach as he stared up at Terry with a smug expression.

  The onlookers had grown in number, many looking between Terry and Marlon in confusion.

  “Can you fix it?” Terry asked, ignoring the growing audience.

  Marlon chuffed, stepping forward. “Course I can—I actually know what I’m doing.”

  Terry rolled his eyes, then waved his hand to indicate the floating section of grass. “By all means, oh wise and powerful Master of Space.”

  The man grunted, his aura activating. Then, a moment later, he arched a brow. “You gonna stay up there playing with yourself or what, kid?”

  Actually, I had hoped to skip away and avoid the gloating, he thought. But since he was asking the man to fix his mistake—and wanted to figure out what he had done wrong—he moved to leap from the patch of elevated ground.

  And found himself falling through the air—not toward the grass where Marlon and the onlookers watched—but back at the now bare piece of land where his tent had been formerly staked. His D-grade physique kept him from twisting an ankle or stumbling, but the shock did send his heart thrumming.

  Aura stirred where he was standing and he rushed from the tiny crater. He could have sworn he heard a dark chuckle as the tent—and the associated ground—reappeared before him. He ignored Marlon’s obvious pleasure, instead focusing on that shift in space he had just felt.

  It looked like Marlon had simply returned the displaced space like any Traveler’s portal—though, without the telltale blue oval to signal its transportation. But to his spatial senses, something completely different had occurred.

  He thought he was seeing the issue with his first attempt now that he witnessed the fix. Master of Space was far less exacting with its capabilities than his portals in the sense that he could manipulate the shape of space. Now that he was examining it with that lens, he realized that he hadn’t brought the tent and himself to the rift field; he had brought the space to the rift field, folding the very fabric of the physical world upon itself. That was why when he jumped from the floating grass, he had appeared back in the tent’s original placement—he had created a spatial loop!

  Marlon appeared a moment later—through a normal portal—and turned to regard him with an arched brow.

  “Thought you’d just copy my Skill and experiment, did you?”

  He couldn’t tell if Marlon was angry—or rather, the man always seemed angry, and so there was nothing out of the ordinary in his demeanor. But there was a hint of seriousness there that felt a tad more accusatory than usual.

  “I guess I did,” he admitted. “I didn’t imagine it would be so…alien.”

  The man wrinkled his nose, studying the returned tent. “I shoulda pieced two and two together after you made that comment.” His eyes cut back, his lips pressed tight. “Well, since you’ve copycat me already—without permission, I’ll add—I might as well teach you to not split yourself in half.”

  Terry cringed at the rebuke. “Sorry about that. I guess I’ve gotten so used to keeping my powers hidden, I didn’t think to ask.”

  Marlon grunted, shaking his head with a disappointed sigh. “And you thought you’d show off next time you saw me, didn’t ya?”

  He thought about denying the accusation, but it rang too true. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

  Marlon’s eyes settled on him, an appraising look there. “At least you’re honest about your fuck ups.” He sucked his teeth before turning toward the tent. “Well, come on, then,” he said gruffly. “Your mother would have my ass if I didn’t at least teach you the basics.”

  As Marlon strode into the tent, aura flexed, though no portal appeared. Terry followed the man inside and Marlon’s usual wicker chair appeared just as he settled his heavy bulk back.

  The chair groaned with the herculean effort, but for once, Terry didn’t feel the desire to poke fun at the man; space had done something…something unusual.

  He squinted, studying the warping in his senses before him. The space wrapping about the chair was different in feel and texture to the surrounding space of the tent. No, not wrapping, he realized. More like the wicker chair occupied the space.

  Marlon noted his studying gaze, one corner of his lip flicking up for the briefest instant. “Good, you spotted that. Hate to think you’ve grown dull in our time apart.”

  Terry double-took between the chair and the man, noting the distinct but subtle barrier between the space Marlon occupied and the space the chair did.

  “That chair isn’t really here, is it?” he asked, a hint of disbelief in his voice.

  Marlon’s eyebrows rose skeptically. “Oh? Then where is it?”

  He tried to range his senses along that space, follow the aura back to its origin like he would have done with any other power expression. Instead, he found the pocket of space self-contained, like Marlon had scooped a section of the world out of its natural resting place and deposited it right beneath his ass.

  As he considered the possibilities, the only true answer reared its head.

  “I don’t know.”

  Marlon held his hands together in mock prayer, looking up toward the sky. “Thank the System—he’s finally learned something.”

  Terry scowled, but couldn’t argue with the man—his own estimation of his spatial awareness had blinded him to the very real danger of playing with space. He smoothed his face, nodding agreement.

  Marlon’s wry smile slipped away, the man seeming to study him now. After a moment, he clapped his hands loudly. “Good—first step to unfucking yourself is to realize you’re fucked in the first place.” Terry didn’t roll his eyes, but the temptation pulled at him. “Your first mistake was trying to move the tent. Doing it like that is like going at space with an ice-cream scooper. Sure, you can move the sumbitch, but all you’re really doing is transposing it.”

  Terry nodded, recognizing the analogy as fairly accurate to what he had felt. “Does that mean Master of Space shouldn’t be used for travel?”

  Marlon shook his head. “Course it should—once you know what you’re doin’.” His aura flexed, just the slightest ripple on Terry’s senses. Space shifted, forming two micro portals near Marlon’s outstretched index finger of either hand. Terry leaned in, running his aura over them. “What would happen if I swapped the position of my two fingers?”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Terry’s eyes widened at the question. “They’d probably be cut off from your hand.”

  Marlon grunted. “Probably?”

  “Most likely,” Terry replied with a shrug. “I’m not entirely sure.”

  “And what if they occupied the exact same space?”

  Terry puzzled at that—it wasn’t a question he had considered before. “They would…explode?” He knew even before Marlon’s frown that the man hated when he answered a question with another question. “I don’t know,” he eventually added.

  Marlon’s frown softened, his eyes holding Terry’s. Slowly, he began to push both index fingers into their respective portals. But Terry wasn’t even considering the ramifications of that, instead finding his mind short-circuiting as he realized Marlon had created a bi-directional portal.

  “How are you doing that—”

  He cut off, though, as Marlon’s forward movement stopped dead, the tips of his fingers pressed tight against the edges of the portals, just the barest sliver of flesh entering the blue oval. Pulling his left hand back, his right index finger pushed forward, still pressed tight to his left finger. Then, he reversed direction, his left entering the portal and appearing out of the second.

  “Space,” Marlon said, his fingers tug-of-warring back and forth inside the portals, “cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be shaped.” With that word, Marlon retracted his fingers and released the blue portals. But the connective space between where the portals had been suddenly shifted, seeming to stretch in Terry’s senses. As Marlon’s fingers entered that stretched space, they too began to visibly stretch. The further his finger pushed, the longer it appeared, until it elongated to cover the foot-long distance and delicately touch the other finger. “Do you see what I’m doing?”

  “You’re stretching the space between your fingers,” he replied in awe.

  “Yes, and how about now?”

  Space contracted, even as Marlon’s finger began to shrink—at least to Terry’s eye. As he pushed and pulled his finger through the contracted space, it covered the distance faster than when it had been stretched.

  “This is how portals work, except we do the contraction behind the scenes. When I want to transport myself across a hundred miles, I don’t swap my space with the destination. I contract it, so that point A to point B takes a single step rather than a hundred thousand.”

  Terry furrowed his brow, studying that section of space. “How do you do that without impacting everyone in between you and the location?”

  Marlon nodded as if he had been expecting the question. “That’s where sub-space comes in. You can think of it as a separate dimension where we can safely condense and contract to pass through to our destination. You’d have felt it every time you’ve portaled.”

  He had felt it—even consciously used it when Marlon had initially taught him to condense matter for his portal Skill. But he had never intentionally accessed it; it had always felt baked into that Skill.

  Now that Marlon had put his thoughts onto that path, he was reminded of the sensations he had felt with the Metaphysical Singularity inside of him. Back in the Underworld, he had teleported, rather than portaled. The distinction felt small, but was not something he had been able to replicate since.

  But he focused on that sensation now, remembering back to how it had felt. Initially, he had thought that he had swapped locations, much how he had used Master of Space to move his tent a hundred yards. Now, though, he realized that he had unconsciously done what his portals had been doing for years.

  Accessing that hidden dimension—that sub-space.

  “What is it?” he asked with a frown. “What is sub-space?”

  Marlon grunted in annoyance. “That’s the wrong question, kid.”

  Terry arched a brow, pressing his lips tight. He was used to the man’s method of teaching by now, so turned his full attention to puzzling out that statement.

  What was the right question, then?

  After a moment, he met Marlon’s gaze. “How do we access sub-space—naturally, without a Skill guiding us?”

  The man didn’t smile, but Terry knew from the flash in his eyes that he was pleased. “Pay attention, kid. I’m only gonna explain this once.”

  It was two hours later before Terry managed to unlock the trick to sub-space. After extensive trial-and-error, he had realized that it was very similar to how he cataloged skill molds. Reaching sub-space was like peeling back the top layer of a mold, accessing the underlying folds beneath.

  Once he made that connection, it wasn’t long before he was able to bridge space in the same way as his normal portal skill. It took a little more manual effort but was more aura efficient and had plenty of other applications that he hadn’t experimented with yet.

  But now that he had figured out the basics, more questions presented themselves.

  “How come you still use portals?” He met Marlon’s eyes with open curiosity. “Why not just teleport things directly?”

  “Ah, I was wondering when you’d get there. There’s another component to travel that we didn’t discuss and that’s locomotion. Let me ask you something: you ever try to force someone through a portal?”

  Terry thought back, but could only remember times he had tried to bisect people. The few times he had portaled someone out of the blue had been while catching them from falls.

  “Cut a few things in half,” Terry replied with a shrug.

  Marlon chuckled, shaking his head. “Yeah, that’s fun, ain’t it? But y’see where I’m goin’ with this?”

  He took a moment to think about that question, how it related to teleporting and locomotion. Now that he thought about it, people typically stepped through portals—the portals didn’t scoop them up. His thoughts went to the consent angle; maybe portals worked better with consent? But that didn’t have anything to do with locomotion…

  He took a stab at the question, leaning on that concept. “It takes motion to cross distances?” he asked hesitantly.

  Marlon clicked his tongue, nodding appreciatively. “Got it in one. Locomotion, movement, kinetic energy. We can bridge the space, but the energy to cross the divide needs to come from somewhere. You can push someone through, use gravity, or they can just use their own damn legs. But the motion’s gotta come from somewhere.”

  Terry nodded slowly, his mind churning. “So you can open a portal beneath someone and gravity will do the rest.” He suddenly remembered what him and Chippy had been working on back in the Underworld. His eyes brightened with excitement. “What if you moved the portal?”

  Marlon pursed his lips, which made him think he was on the wrong track. “Try it.”

  Terry hesitated, but the man’s implacable face didn’t leave any other option. He activated Master of Space, tying off the framework to form the usual blue oval he was used to. It was simple enough now to form the sub-space connection, once he realized what needed to be done; he’d been doing it with his portal Skill for years without realizing it.

  But now that he tied off the portal framework, he immediately saw the problem.

  “I can’t move it without—” He cut off as the blocks seemed to fall into place in his mind.

  Of course…

  “Yep, you’ve run into the fundamental handicap all us Travelers face: you can’t move the portal without—wait, what are you doing?”

  Terry wrapped the portal framework inside Master of Telekinesis, then moved it.

  Marlon’s eyes bulged as Terry’s small portal zipped around the tent. “How are you—” Then the realization seemed to settle in. “Oh, you damned cheater!” he muttered. “Let me guess, some sort of elemental telekinesis?”

  Terry laughed with joy, mentally picking up a clump of dirt outside the tent and propelling it inside. As it floated in the air, the portal brushed over it, sucking it into its blue depths and spitting it out from the exit portal on the other side of the tent.

  Marlon grunted in annoyance as Terry played with the new synergy, throwing the dirt into the air, then moving the portal to catch it. The dirt split off into five separate clumps and he opened four more portals, creating a juggling effect as he moved the portals rather than the dirt.

  Space was suddenly wrenched from his grip, the portals contracting, trapping three of the five clumps in sub-space forever.

  Terry turned to Marlon with wide eyes. “Was that jealousy I sensed, Marlon?”

  The Traveler grumbled something explicit under his breath before turning an unimpressed look upon Terry. “What good are party tricks if someone can just snatch away your control, boy?” He rolled his shoulders, the wicker chair creaking dangerously. “You wanna create spatial constructs that can’t be co-opted or destroyed? Then pay attention…”

  The rest of the day passed with Marlon demonstrating feats of spatial control that had Terry reeling. His little discovery of the synergy between telekinesis and portals paled in comparison to what the man showed him.

  Bending space could accomplish dizzying effects—literally. Marlon bent space so completely, a ball spun in a circle, never losing speed as gravity distorted. Another time, space was wrapped around Terry so completely, any step he took in any direction simply brought him right back to where he started. Marlon managed to stretch space so long, taking a single step seemed to freeze time, while in front of him, Marlon moved at super speed.

  The implications of space weren’t just spatial—time and gravity seemed to be directly affected when Marlon used his magic in specific ways.

  Terry was specifically interested in altering the flow of time with space, but Marlon warned him off of that line of thought.

  “You’re nowhere near ready for the heavy stuff.”

  “Well, then why did you show me it was possible?” Terry grumbled.

  “So you know where not to stick your nose, kid.”

  When the sun dipped below the horizon, leaving the tent illuminated by a small lamp, Marlon had just begun to wrap up the training session when a voice echoed in Terry’s mind.

  Alert! Alert! All Awakened prepare for rift break!

  Terry shot up to his feet, looking around in alarm, when he noticed the same shocked expression on Marlon’s face.

  “You got the alert, too?”

  He nodded. “Your mom’s senses are stronger than ours, she must have—”

  Space ripped, crying out as a hundred, then two hundred, rifts rent through the air.