Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Sometimes it’s so thick, I can’t see anythin’ else.
Other times it’s so thin, it’s like a mist.
Tonight, it’s something in between. And overlaying all that spark is the overlay itself. The Sweep Army overlay. That should not be there in the first place, let alone work.
It covers everythin’ if I let it. Meanin’, it labels things. It gives me information about everythin’ I’m seeing unless I modify the settings. Tonight, I’ve got it toggled to about half-strength so it only highlights things like the phase of the moons, or the cycles of the tides when I look at the sky or the sea.
When I glance down at the city it gives me the names of the streets and buildings, if they have one. If I’m walkin’ down the street, and have it turned all the way on, it gives me facial recognition. I can identify every single person in this city just by lookin’ at them.
Why it’s doing this, I have no idea.
I wish I’d been introduced to the other augments that have come home. But either they’ve been redeployed by Delta or he’s keepin’ them secret because I asked around at the parties Clara and I have been attendin’, and no one knows of any augments but me.
If I didn’t already know that there were several little gods down there in that school on the beach, I might let it go. But I do know they’re there, and someone had to bring them here.
“Wow, you’re really distracted tonight, Tyse.”
I look down at Clara and shrug. “Sorry. I’ve got a lot on my mind, I guess.”
She turns, pressing her back against the window. Then she walks her fingertips up my arms and rests her hands on my shoulders. “Anything you want to talk about?”
“No. I’m just thinkin’.”
“Well.” Her smile is real and big. “I’m going to take a shower. I don’t know what ‘deployment’ actually entails, but I’m assuming that hot water will be a luxury.”
Which is true, but not for her. Clara Birch can heat water with the spark inside her body just by standin’ next to it. But she’s not saying this to be literal. She’s extending an invitation.
She pats my chest, then slides around me, heading for the bedroom.
I watch her with side eye, grinning a little.
This mission is gonna be a test for us. A big test.
But the mission doesn’t start until tomorrow.
So I follow her into the bedroom.
Later in the evening, after the showering, and lovemakin’, and the easy talkin’ that always comes afterward. After the sleepiness, and the holdin’, and final kiss of the day—I lie in bed lookin’ up at the ceiling and see somethin’ that isn’t there.
Except it is. Because I’m lookin’ at it.
In my old room, back in Tau City and inside the god’s tower ruin, there was a lot of graffiti on the ceiling. Specifically, a tower with a banner and the words, ‘Sparktopia was here’ written across it in grungy letters. I looked at that image and those words every night for seven years wonderin’ about them.
Who got up there, lyin’ on their back on some makeshift scaffold, and painted the tower with the banner and the words?
And why?
I guess it’s easy enough to figure out a ‘why’. People like to leave a mark. They like to feel bigger and more important than maybe they really are. So it could a message to the future. A message to me. Or to whoever is living in that room right now.
Or maybe they’re one of those creative fucks. Like the people who lived down the tenth-floor hallway from me. They were always paintin’ murals on the walls near the stairs. Sometimes it was messages. Political, social, commentary about life in the tower. But other times it was just pictures.
I never paid much attention to the murals or the people who painted them, they were just something that was there.
That’s how I felt about Sparktopia.
It was just… there.
But isn’t it a little bit weird, that here in Delta City, thousands of miles away, that very tower is on my ceiling again?
Not literally, of course. That would be easier to explain, actually.
It’s there… energetically.
That’s the word I’m using to describe the overlay into other… dimensions? Realms? Times? I’m not really sure what these places are, I just know they’re both real and not in the same instant.
So I lie here, looking up at my ceilin’, And that very same tower, with that very same banner and those very same words, is staring right back at me as a glowin’ cyan-blue outline.
Sparktopia is here.
And I think… it’s kinda right. Because the air in Delta City is clogged with it. The spark is everywhere. Even though they can’t see it the way I do, every single person living here is breathin’ it in, all the time, all at once.