“If I get even the slightest hint that you’re peeking inside my brain, this meeting is over,” Rai said. The woman stood, immaculate in a navy suit, exactly 41 meters away from Pema inside the shell of a hollowed-out old warehouse. She was flanked by a woman in an even snappier suit, just a step behind her. The old man chuckled. 41 meters. She knew her stuff. “I’ll consider it a violent act and respond accordingly.”

  Pema held out his hands, nodded. “Sure, sure. Of course.”

  He was a little disappointed. Sure, he could tap into his reserves, widen his range enough to catch her in it--she didn’t seem to know that he could do that. But he had a hunch that she’d be able to tell. “I appreciate you arranging such a respectful meeting, instead of the, er, alternative. Maybe fifty years ago I would’ve welcomed such a test of strength, but I just don’t have that in my bones anymore, I’m afraid. One of the curses of old age, as I’m sure you know.”

  “I really don’t,” Rai deadpanned. “You’re right in that I want to avoid a confrontation.”

  “Not because I cut such a frightening image, I take it?” Pema flexed his wiry arms, teasing. “I’m flattered, but I’m sure you’d come out on top if it came down to it.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  Pema notched an eyebrow, surprised. The second time he’d felt that emotion today. What a fun change of pace. “Oh come now, false modesty-”

  “Don’t be a hypocrite. I know what you’re capable of. I-” Rai cut herself off as the woman at her elbow tapped her arm, whispered something in her ear. It burned Pema up that he couldn’t hear it. Rai nodded and the woman hustled out of the building, fishing a phone from her pocket. “I don’t want to risk fighting you. Sure, I’d probably win, but I didn’t get as far as I have by accepting probable odds. Moreover, I don’t want to have to kill you anyway.”

  “Why not?” Pema cocked his head. “I’ve been around a good long while. I’m sure the opportunity to absorb my considerable vestiges would further your plans immensely.”

  “Yes. It would make my life easier. In the same way that flattening the city, kneecapping the military, and executing the president would technically make my life easier.” Rai rubbed her face. Pema would’ve wagered that the woman probably hadn’t slept a wink in at least two weeks. It was doable, for Qi users of their caliber, but it felt awful after a while. “I intend to come out of the coming weeks as the strongest human on the planet by a good margin. I need to practice good moral hygiene now, or I’ll become a despot the second I start wielding that kind of power.”

  “That’s… surprisingly considerate of India’s premier warlord,” Pema said. “I had a very bloody mental image of you before this first meeting.”

  “Oh, that’s still accurate. I’m not a saint like you,” Rai said. Pema blinked; he hadn’t been called a saint in a very long time. “But I see no reason to hurt or kill you. So long as you refrain from obstructing me.”

  “That’s quite merciful of you.” Pema shrugged. “Deal.”

  “That was quick.” Rai studied the old man. “Can I ask what it is you even came all this way for?”

  “I want to watch,” Pema said. “It really is that simple. Whatever happens here promises to be deeply entertaining, and I’m fortunate enough to have gifts that will keep me safe during the more… spirited events to come. I just spent far too long vegetating at the bottom of a deep sea trench. Can you fault a bored old man for wanting front-row seats to such a spectacular moment?”

  “Spectating is what you do at a cricket match. From what I understand, you see things much more deeply. It’s-”

  “Impressive?”

  “I was going to say ‘fundamentally invasive.’” Rai frowned. “I mean you no harm, but I must say that I find your blasé attitude toward invading the minds and memories of other people disturbing.”

  “And I must say that I’ve weathered the disapproval of snappy upstarts for decades and it hasn’t amounted to much yet.”

  “I don’t know if I’d call myself an ‘upstart,’” Rai trailed off as her female assistant hustled back into the room and whispered something urgent in her ear. Pema only barely managed to resist the urge to pour some extra juice into his Qi, to flex his aura the extra meter to listen in.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Rai nodded and straightened, brushed nonexistent dust from her suit. “My apologies, but something urgent has come up. I need to be going.”

  “Do tell?”

  “I think I won’t.” Rai narrowed her gaze at him. It was a stare that Pema was sure had flattened hundreds of weaker men before him. “Remember. You peek into my thoughts even once, and our civil and responsibly brokered peace shatters. I get a whiff of you in my head and I make it my first priority to kill you where you stand.”

  “I know, I knoooow,” Pema tutted. “Can’t blame me for asking.”

  “I can and will. Good day, Pema.”

  With that, Rai and her counterpart bolted from the warehouse, nearly faster than Pema could detect. At least, not at 41 meters.

  He considered chasing after her, following at a distant remove, just on the edges of his perception and well over the limits of hers, but suddenly he knew he wouldn't need to. Pema felt a massive blooming of energy, a yawning explosion drawing his attention, snapping his head around almost compulsively.

  Back the way he'd came, maybe fifteen miles away, a titan was roaring. No– two. Three? A colossal blow met by one even greater, then one greater still, the echoes of each reverberating through the ether, pounding against the edges of Pema's skull.

  He remembered Gloria, the cafe he'd left her at, and knew immediately that it was the epicenter. He felt a pang of guilt–not much more, he really barely knew the woman–and set off.

  Within ninety seconds he was close enough to see the first signs of the carnage: the highway he streaked over was packed with retreating traffic. Another mile, two, three passed under him in a flash, and now he could smell the smoke, hear the distant rattling booms and shudders of collapsing structures. Screams, now, too, he heard screams. His senses went wild as he flew-jumped, just forty meters off the ground, barely enough to scrape the consciousnesses of bystanders scrambling below:

  The kids. The kids are alone. No sitter. The one time I decide not to call the sitter-

  Terrorists! Always knew it would happen here. Momma said no, said it'd be LA if anything, New York again, but that's what they'd want you to think-

  Four horsemen. Pastor Sammy was right. It was starting soon, starting now. Those were the four horsemen-

  What the fuck, why does this shit always have to happen on my birthday. Laser tag's fucking ruined-

  Please oh please wake up oh please God please please we got the bookcase off your chest please just breathe just take a breath for Mommy-

  Pema's brain was awash in beautiful, delicious variety. Powerful emotion, felt in the present. Of all the unutterable majesty he'd seen, from the atomic scale to the cosmic, this was always what felt the most enlightening. The panoply of the human perspective, its limited scope, its imbecile ignorance, its overwhelming intensity. He savored the sampling platter of confusion and exultation and suffering as he traveled, each taste excruciatingly brief.

  Because he was already arriving. Uptown Minneapolis was a smoldering wreck. Everything in a roughly five block radius of the cafe had been reduced to shimmering slag, hot enough to cast its own blanket of livid heat waves into the spring air. In parts the asphalt of the road had been heated to an obsidian-like reflectivity, blast-burned by temperatures doubtless comparable to cooler patches of the surface of the sun.

  The fighting was omnidirectional, scattered and zigzag. Bodies caromed through the air and ricocheted, accompanied by blasts of light and energy: heat, electricity, sound, radiation, good old fashioned kinetic force. Pema caught glimpses of the combatants: a man in increasingly tarnished armor had driven what looked like a dirk through the torso of a bleating man in a ruined jumpsuit, who was himself stuck elbow-deep through the knight's breastplate. They flew through the air, crashed into the mirrored facade of an office building hard enough to send it groaning, careening down off its foundations.

  And now they were gone, hidden from his gaze by the rubble and smoke. Pema couldn't see the third figure, either, had no idea who it might be. He couldn't find Gloria. He didn't know if Rai was here yet. The curiosity burned him alive, and within seconds he was reneging on a promise he'd made to himself days ago: not to crack into his emergency supply too early.

  Pema reached into the Bardo, into the not-space he had spent the better part of so many years shunting heat from a deep ocean vent into. He found the effervescent ocean of energy waiting for him, put a straw in, and began to drink. Instantly he was flooded with power, and with a manic grin, he pumped it into his sensory field.

  Forty meters. Forty-two. Forty-eight.

  The edges of his perfect knowledge, the boundary of his many senses, grew.

  Fifty-five. Ninety. Two hundred and twelve. Six hundred eighty.

  His brain reeled with data, an exhaustive enumeration of people, possessions, vehicles, street names, buildings. Flora, fauna, root networks, ectoparasites, aberrant genomes, hidden fossils, the language of pigeons, the march of motor proteins, the shimmering paths left behind by wandering ghosts. More, more: forces, vectors, probabilities, temperature gradients, gravitational forces, astronomical shadows, the trajectories of tunneling neutrinos, the lumbering of tectonic plates, the exact temporal address of all of this, its exact, reserved place set in the churning river of causality.

  More, more, MORE. Two-thousand, four hundred, and ninety meters. Within: eighteen thousand and sixty-one people. Forty-eight billion, nine million, six hundred and seventy-three thousand, five hundred and six trichomonas bacteria. Two hundred and thirty-seven European Starlings. Forty-eight Honda Odysseys. Six trillion, five hundred and twenty-two billion, three hundred and thirty-three million, six hundred and nine thousand, one hundred and seventy-eight copper atoms. Three men named Gary. Fourteen hundred and one dead or dying mammals.

  For a brief second, his brain held an excruciating fraction of every possible thing, before nearly a century of honed instinct reined him in. Yanked from the precipice of ego-obliterating information overload, Pema narrowed his focus.