Accelerated by Vaughn Heppner Page A

shouted, getting excited again. I raised his head and slammed it down hard against the cement, rendering him unconscious but still leaving him very much alive.
    The whole thing had taken less than thirty seconds, but my head was already hurting. Sucking light at its source was hard; so was shading it. I had one more ability, and it was much easier for me. I could walk in shadows, and particularly in darkness, like a phantom. It was my compensation for being vulnerable to the sun.
    Taking an electronic key from the man’s pocket, I headed for a nearby door. It was time to take my cut from this little operation and replenish my money supply.
    ***
    Thirty years ago, they would have called this spaghetti. Now it was pasta. Some talk-show host had a monologue about it or a poem, a Bay Area fellow. He wasn’t a radio announcer, exactly. He was more of a radio shouter.
    The checkered red-and-white tablecloth where I ate a late supper was clean except for the tomato-sauce dots Blake and I had made. The lights were low and the waitress was a middle-aged woman with a woolen wrap around her left forearm. She put another bottle of Corona down for Blake and glanced at my plate before she retreated.
    Blake sipped his Corona and made an “aah” sound of contentment before examining me.
    “Did the cube make any noise?” he asked.
    I had been telling him about Kay and the cube. Blake was one of the few people outside of the Shop and the scientists on the Reservation who knew about my condition. He was one of the few people I trusted.
    I loosened my belt, shifted in the chair and managed a quiet belch. “Do you mean like old-fashioned metal fillings that were supposed to make your teeth pick up radio waves?” I asked.
    Blake grinned. He was a technical writer, at least when he wasn’t busy drinking. He was thin, wore glasses and had short hair. He could eat more food at a sitting than anyone I knew, and the man could drink. Where others would become sloppy drunk, Blake merely swayed a little on his stool, smirked in a knowing manner and blinked too much.
    “There weren’t any sounds,” I said, as I twirled spaghetti around the tines of my fork.
    “Do you know where Kay works?” he asked.
    “I thought I told you: Polarity Magnetics.”
    “Oh,” he said.
    “You’ve heard of them?”
    He nodded and sipped his beer.
    “What can you tell me?”
    “They have several government contracts,” Blake said. “It’s for some new battlefield weaponry. I don’t remember what right now. They’re a relatively new company,” he added.
    “Did the company appear in the last four years?” I asked.
    Blake closed his eyes, and nodded after a moment. Despite all the booze, the man had a phenomenal memory.
    “You mentioned the Reservation,” he said. “You’ve never said exactly where it was before, although I’ve always assumed it was in Europe. What country was it in?”
    “I didn’t know you had a death wish.”
    He pointed the open bottle of Corona at me. “My curiosity is not self-preserving. I’ll die eventually. Until then, I must fill the void in my mind, meaning there is no knowledge I will not embrace.”
    “Would you like to know the time of your death?”
    He nodded emphatically. “It would be priceless information. Knowing it, I could become the world’s greatest stunt man, leaping from planes without a parachute and landing on my feet and strolling away.”
    “Maybe you’d break all your bones and linger in a coma until your death.”
    “You obfuscate the point, sir. Now where is this Reservation, or where was it?”
    “On the south side of Hell,” I said, “in the Projects.”
    Blake sipped his beer. “I grow tired of your evasions concerning the Reservation, so let’s continue discussing the cube. I definitely believe it’s part of a machine.”
    Earlier we had been trying to figure out the cube’s function.
    “Do you think it powers the machine?” I asked.
    “No. Not if it drains energy.” Blake