The red light stayed on for ten seconds. Then it went back to blinking green, slow and lazy, as if nothing had happened.
Alex didn't move. He had seen enough traps in Zaroth to know that a light changing colour means somebody, somewhere, just got a notification.
Alex- " So you sent a message to your owner. Good boy. "
He could break the box. One finger would be enough. But then whoever was watching would know for sure that someone had found it, and they would run. He wanted the opposite. He wanted them to come.
So he used Invisibility, walked to the broken chimney, and sat down on top of it, forty feet above the ground, with his legs hanging. From there he could see the drying yard, the crack, the box, and the small mud road that came from the highway.
Then he waited.
It was boring. Mosquitoes didn't care if he was invisible. He killed eleven of them and got zero EXP each time, which he thought was a little insulting.
To pass the time, he looked at the white cloth on the fence. A sun with an eye. He had seen something like it before, and it took him a while to remember where. The Holy Church. Back in the new world, when their priests had come to Zeon Kingdom asking for land to build a temple, their robes had been stitched with a golden sun. No eye in the middle, but the same style of rays, thin and straight like needles. He had refused them. Serena had said later that the head priest's face had gone the colour of curd.
It could be a coincidence. Suns were common. Half the religions on Earth had one.
But Alex had stopped believing in coincidences somewhere around the time he woke up as a god. At around 12:40 his phone vibrated in his pocket. Serena.
Earth's Serena, this one. Two years older than him, in the final year of her degree at a college across the city, tall, with a laugh too loud for libraries. She was the only person who called him every night. Her family had money and opinions, and both were against an orphan boy who lived alone in a small old house. She had the same name as the Serena he had left behind in Zaroth, and sometimes the same way of saying his name, and he still hadn't found the courage to ask her what that meant.
Serena- " Sleeping already? 😴 "
He typed with one thumb.
Alex- " Almost. Reading something. Good night. "
Serena- " Liar. You never read at night. Good night, mom 😂 "
Alex- " I'm serious. It's a very boring book. About bricks. "
Serena- " Bricks?? "
Alex- " History of brick making. Very important. "
Serena- " You're so weird. Did you eat properly at least? "
Alex- " Butter naan and chicken. John paid one fourth. "
Serena- " Good boy. Okay sleep now. Tomorrow I have a test, pray for me. "
He sent her a folded-hands emoji and a sleeping one, and she sent back a heart, and that was the end of it. He looked at the little heart on the screen for a few seconds longer than he needed to. Then he turned the brightness all the way down so the glow wouldn't show from below, even through Invisibility, and slipped the phone back into his pocket.
Somewhere across the river a truck changed gears on the highway, a long grinding complaint that faded slowly into the dark.
He smiled and put the phone away. Then he saw headlights on the mud road.
It was a white Maruti Eeco van with no name on it, the kind people use for school trips and small deliveries. It stopped at the broken gate of the kiln. Two men got out. Both wore white jackets, like lab coats but thicker, and both had small torches. One was tall and thin with a shaved head. The other was short and round and kept wiping his face with a handkerchief even though the night was cold.
They walked straight to the box. They didn't look around like people who were scared of being caught. They had been here many times.
Short- " See? Spike at 12:07. Same pattern as Tuesday. "
Tall- " Something came out. "
Short- " Then where is it? Usually the rats eat for one hour and then go back near the line. "
The tall one turned his torch towards the grass. The light found the dead rift rat with a perfect brick-sized hole through its head. Both men went quiet.
Alex, sitting above them, thought that he should have thrown the brick into the river. Well. Too late.
Tall- " That's not an animal kill. "
Short- " Some villager? Some drunk with a brick? "
Tall- " A drunk who can throw a brick through bone? "
The short one wiped his face again and laughed nervously. He was round and sweating even in the cold, with a pen in his shirt pocket and a steel watch too tight on his wrist, the kind of man you see arguing with a bus conductor over two rupees.
Short- " Don't make it scary, Ansel bhai. It's already scary enough working at night near this thing. "
The tall one was about forty, thin and clean-shaven, in a khaki jacket with too many pockets. He talked like a schoolteacher who had never once needed to raise his voice. Ansel, the short one had called him. He crouched by the body and touched the hole with a gloved finger. Then he looked up slowly. First at the fence, then the dark fields, and then, for a long moment, at the chimney.
Alex held still. Invisibility in this world was perfect against eyes. But he had learned in Zaroth that some people can feel being watched even when they can't see anything. Ansel's eyes passed over him and moved on.
Ansel- " Report it, Mohan. Say there's a third party. "
Short- " The Choir will ask who. "
Ansel- " Then we'll say we don't know. That's better than lying. "
The Choir. Alex put the name away carefully. They said it the way clerks say head office, half respect and half fear.
The short man took out his phone and started typing. While he typed, he talked, the way people do when they are nervous.
Mohan tore open a packet of Parle-G with his teeth and offered one to Ansel, who ignored it.
Short- " My wife thinks I'm doing night shift at a call centre. Can you imagine? Call centre. If she saw this place she'd make me sleep outside for one month. "
Ansel- " Then don't tell her. "
Short- " I don't tell her anything. That's why we're happily married. "
He ate three biscuits at once and kept talking with his mouth full.
Short- " One problem after another. First the deaf girl doesn't die on the road because some college hero jumps in. Now this. "
Alex's fingers closed on the edge of the brick chimney.
Ansel- " She's not deaf. Her ears are damaged. That's different. "
Short- " Whatever. She hears them. That's what matters, no? Before our machines, before anything. The day the bishop learned about her, he said, either she sings for us or she doesn't sing at all. "
Ansel- " Don't talk so much. "
Short- " Who'll hear? The rats? "
They checked the box, changed a memory card, and wrote something in a small notebook. Ansel walked close to the crack, closer than Alex would have dared without a reason, and held up a pendant on a chain. A small sun of white metal. When it came near the black line, the red glow around the crack shrank back, like a finger pulled from a hot pan.
Alex narrowed his eyes. That was holy magic. Very weak, very cheap, but holy. On Earth.
Ansel- " Still small. Two weeks, maybe three. "
Short- " And the big one? "
Ansel- " The bishop's readings say Saturday. Under the college ground. If the listener is standing near it when it opens, it opens the way we want. "
The short man stopped typing.
Short- " You mean… we're going to take her? From the college? In front of everyone? "
Ansel- " On sports day everyone is shouting. Nobody hears anything. "
They walked back to the van. Alex floated down from the chimney without a sound and followed them to the gate. As the van door slid open, he touched the back bumper with two fingers and left a small mark there, a red dot visible only to him. A tracking mark. One of the cheapest skills in his whole list. In Zaroth he had used it to find runaway pets.
The van reversed, turned, and bounced away down the mud road. The red dot glowed in his mind like a GPS pin, moving towards the highway, towards the city.
Alex stood in the dark field for a while.
He could still catch them. Teleport onto the road ahead, stop the van, break the short one's nerve in five seconds. Mohan would sing like a pressure cooker, he was sure of it.
But then what? The men would vanish, the bishop would hear about it, and the next time somebody tried to kill that girl, Alex wouldn't know where or when. Right now he knew both. That was worth more than two frightened men in white jackets.
He walked back to the crack instead and sat down on his heels in front of it, out of reach, the way you would sit in front of a sleeping snake.
The girl. He went over the evening again. The car going full speed. People shouting, and her not reacting at all. He had thought she was distracted, maybe wearing earphones. Then afterwards, quietly, she had said she couldn't hear properly. And now these men said she could hear something nobody else could.
Hear what? The crack made no sound. He had been sitting next to it for an hour and his ears were better than any human's. Nothing. Only the cold, and the faint red glow.
Unless it wasn't sound at all. Unless it was mana, and her damaged ear had somehow become a door for it, the way some people in Zaroth were born with one eye that could see spirits.
Alex- " Interesting. "
He realised he had never even asked her name.
A sun with an eye. A bishop. A girl who could hear cracks before machines could. And Saturday.
He took out his phone and opened the college WhatsApp group that John had added him to and which he had muted from the first day. He scrolled up through two hundred messages about jerseys and practice timings until he found it.
NK College Annual Sports Day, Saturday, 9:00 AM. Venue: Main Ground.
He looked at the date. Then he looked at the crack, still glowing quietly behind him.
It was Wednesday night.
That gave him two days.