Breakfast was an odd affair. Somewhere in the back of her mind, in memories from several years earlier, Arleigh Fosters remembered being able to sit in a fast food restaurant, right out in the open, and eat delicious, delicious processed junk under bright, fluorescent lighting. Of course she remembered it, that would’ve been only three years ago, back in her world. But three years of living in a place that had been so thoroughly devastated by the Cataclysm had left it difficult to picture what it was like before then. Three years of living within the absolute devastation the Breaker had created.

  The Breaker. That was what they called the person responsible for the Cataclysm. The person from this world who had destroyed Arleigh’s. It was a simple name, but effective, and everyone there knew who the term referred to. The Breaker had done this. The Breaker filled their world with demons.

  When two Abyssals came together, it was called a Collision Point. But this had been far more than that. The Breaker had dumped more than a hundred active Abyssals in that world. More than a hundred active Abyssals who didn’t change back, who remained constantly in their monstrous forms, and tore their way through anything and everything that tried to stop them. It had been hard enough to stop a couple Abyssals together. Even a small group in one of the very rare Mass Collision Points had been devastating enough on its own. But over one hundred at once?

  The focal point of the arrival, Detroit itself, had never stood a chance. Half of their Touched were killed, killed, in the first half hour. That was how long it took, barely thirty minutes, for half of the Touched, Star, Fell, or Sell, to be lying dead in the streets. Law enforcement fared even worse.

  Arleigh remembered that day, even if it was difficult to picture a time before that. It was a Sunday morning on March 4th, 2018. She had been out with her brother, Micah, doing an equipment delivery for their father. Which, itself, had been a favor for the Ministry. They’d needed the van delivered safely to some lab on the outskirts of the city, and were worried about interference from the mysterious group of interlopers who had been hounding their work for months by then.

  Heh, mysterious group of interlopers. Wasn’t that a funny thought to have, now that Arleigh knew the truth? Not that it had ever mattered, since the world collapsed, but the group stealing from the Ministry and damaging their operations weren’t strangers at all, as it turned out. It was Cassidy, Paige, Anthony, and Robert Parson himself, the man who had spent years secretly training the three of them after the murders of Anthony’s entire family, and Paige’s own creator.

  Yes, Benjamin Pittman had tried to intervene that day, only to be killed as well, leaving Paige as the only fully-functional Biolem in existence. Paige and Anthony had both been adopted by the Evans’ bodyguard and driver, Robert. They then secretly trained for a couple years to be able to take down the Ministry, before finally starting their harassment, intrusion, and thieving campaign. Cassidy was a part of it too, apparently having Touched at some point when Anthony’s family was attacked.

  Cassidy’s group had ambushed the van that morning, just as Arleigh, Micah, and the Prev troops they had brought with them were pulling into the parking lot of the facility they were supposed to deliver the equipment to. In fact, they’d been in the middle of that fight when the Cataclysm started. And that had been what saved their lives. The facility was about ten miles outside of town. Ten miles or so away from the initial devastation. Their fight, a thing that had seemed so important in the moment, instantly became meaningless as soon as a hundred or so giant Abyssal monsters appeared in the middle of the city and started to kill everyone in sight.

  They worked together after that, trying to do… whatever little good they could. Well, a few of them did. Arleigh and most of the Prev troops, anyway. Micah, stubborn ass that he was, ran off on his own to go after their dad, with some of the troops following him. Arleigh still had no idea what had happened to him. He was dead, that much was obvious. But she never saw a body, or got any details about it. The same went for her father. Somehow, her other brother, Errol, made it out, and the two of them had eventually found each other, some time after the Abyssals had absolutely leveled the entire city, killing what had to be over a million people just on that first day. With several million more to follow soon after, just due to injury, illness, the lack of services, famine, and everything else that came with that.

  Even the arrival of Armistice hadn’t been nearly enough to turn the tide. Not against something like that. Maybe they would have been, if there hadn’t been something about the way the Abyssals were sent to that world that had ended up doing bad things to Baldur’s connection with their other selves in other worlds. Baldur had fallen into a coma almost immediately, leaving the rest of Armistice to fend for themselves. Almost all of them died before that first day was out. The greatest heroes in the world, and the only survivors had been Baldur themself, still in that coma to this day, and Radiant. The latter had been the only one conscious. The Final Armistice, as the survivors of the Cataclysm called her. These days, Armistice was her name, not Radiant. She was basically the strongest Star-Touched left. And they kept her busy.

  Detroit might have been the first hit, the origin point of the Cataclysm, but the rest of the world wasn’t spared. From there, the monsters moved on, somehow staying mostly intact rather than spreading out. Like they were being directed by something else. They didn’t fight each other. Or if they did, it was minor skirmishes. They operated more like a unified pack, traveling across the continent and then the world, killing and destroying everything in their path. Nothing could stop them, or even delay them for very long. Survivors did their best to pick up the pieces, and just tried to live in their new reality. A reality full of monsters, of both the human and Abyssal variety. Because there were plenty of humans willing and able to take advantage of the world’s new situation for their own gain.

  All of which was to say, Arleigh hadn’t actually sat down in a restaurant to eat a meal like this since the day before the Cataclysm. For three years, she had barely survived, eating whatever was available in the ruins of first Detroit, then other cities as she and the other members of their group, led by Robert until he died, then by Paige, tried to find the answers they all desperately needed. Answers about who had caused this, who was responsible for the Cataclysm. They knew it had to be someone, a person, a group, something had to have made it all happen. There was a face and real name behind the title of Breaker that the world had bestowed on their destroyer.

  They eventually found the answer. This world, this one she was on right now, was the source. Someone on this world, someone in this version of Detroit itself, had sent those Abyssals onto Arleigh’s world. It was some sort of test, that much was clear from the notes they’d found. When the person, whoever it was, created the Cataclysm, part of their own lab had fallen through the rift between worlds. Pieces of the lab, with their notes and tools, had spread across the North American continent. It took over a year and a half of traveling between pockets of surviving civilization to locate enough of them to get a somewhat clear picture of what happened that day.

  To be honest, Arleigh probably overdid the eating thing. It really had been a long time. She gorged herself on three breakfast sandwiches and three orders of hashbrowns. All of which was washed down with a large, ice-cold Coke and a coffee. Real coffee, with cream and sugar and everything. She ate all of that, telling herself she needed the fuel to do what needed to be done.

  Finally, an hour after sitting down (itself a pretty major change from normal, given how much she was accustomed to wolfing down rations in about five minutes while constantly looking over her shoulder), Arleigh was done eating. She rose from the seat, tossed the trash, and made her way out of the restaurant. As the door closed behind her, the girl found herself standing on a busy street across from the motel she’d stayed in the night before. Her eyes slowly shifted, taking in all the people passing by, on foot or in cars. Detroit. Home. Yet not home. This was the Detroit that distant, childish part of her only sort-of remembered, before the Cataclysm. Before that whole new life.

  A life she had left behind forever. The trip she took was only one-way. There was no method for actually getting back. But that didn’t matter at all. She didn’t have anything to go back to anyway. Errol had been killed five months ago, by a bandit trying to steal what little food they had at the time. He had been the last person Arleigh had been clinging to, the last person whose life meant enough to her to want to stay in that world, after losing… after losing everyone else. And now that he was gone, it hadn’t taken long for her to volunteer to make this trip. There was no one and nothing left for her back in that world.

  Even after volunteering, there had been no real guarantee that Arleigh would be the one sent here. The method they were using to send someone to this world, a method created by Wren Donovan, required the person who made the trip to have a dead doppelganger here. Arleigh didn’t understand the details, and didn’t care enough to really dig into it. All she knew was that after volunteering, she’d had to wait until the version of her who was alive over here was gone.

  Everyone on the list, all the people in their little community who wanted to make this trip, had been waiting to see which of them would get that opening first. All that mattered was which of them would end up having their doppelganger over here die first. In the end, a little over eight months since they had all started that waiting game, Wren’s machine had pinged. There was an opening, and Arleigh was the lucky winner. Her counterpart in this world had died. They’d had to work fast. It was barely a day since they got the news before Arleigh said her final goodbyes. Then she was locked in that pod, and blasted through the wall between universes to come here.

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  The only thing that mattered now, the thing that had motivated her to come to this place to begin with, was revenge. Someone, someone in this world was responsible for what had happened to hers. They didn’t know who. The notes weren’t signed, and there weren’t enough details to pick out a specific identity. But someone here in Detroit had dumped those monsters into Arleigh’s world, and that person was going to pay for it. Arleigh wasn’t here to negotiate or try to stop them. The damage was done. They couldn’t go back. This wasn’t a ‘go back in time and fix it’ situation. The Breaker had done the damage three years ago. It was done. Arleigh was here to find the person and kill them for it.

  First things first, she had to get a lay of the land. If she was going to identify the bastard who was responsible for the Cataclysm, she needed to find out exactly who all the important players were in this world. She had to find out if the Ministry still existed over here, and in what form. She had to identify all the Touched groups, and figure out what differences there were between this place and the world she came from. There was a lot of work to do before she could find the person who destroyed her world, drive a knife into their ribs, and watch the life drain out of them.

  Speaking of the knife she wanted to use for that, as she turned to walk down the street, Arleigh plucked a pen from the pocket of the jeans she had changed into to avoid drawing the sort of attention the skintight metallic suit she’d needed to wear on the journey over would have led to. The ordinary clothes she wore now were just a couple of the things that had been sealed in that supply crate. The crate itself had been sent through at the same time as Arleigh, but some sort of temporal instability meant it arrived years earlier. That was why it was sent underground, in what was supposed to be an empty field. At least that bar had been the biggest surprise so far.

  Turning to cut through an alley as she strode across the crowded sidewalk, Arleigh pressed the pen against the nearby wall. A slight push was all it took, before the pen cut right into the brick, leaving a deep gash through it. Apparently the Arleigh who had lived in this world before had some other power, something about creating bubbles that she could fill with rain, lightning, or other bits of weather. But that wasn’t this Arleigh’s gift. She was able to combine any number of nonliving objects, as long as they were vaguely similar in size, and manifest the effect of any of them regardless of which one was the outer shell. In this case, her pen was manifesting the sharpness of the Touched-Tech knife she had combined it with. That would only work in her own hands. If anyone took the pen from her, it would just be an ordinary writing instrument for them.

  She could combine other material effects as well, like making the pen weigh as much as the stick of osmium she’d combined it with. All of her clothes had been combined with various protective bits of armor as well, so even if she was wearing what looked like a normal tee-shirt and jeans, Arleigh could’ve been shot in the chest at point-blank range with a high-powered rifle and still been fine. And there were other special tools she used as well. She had a whole grab bag full of toys that did things no one would expect. Those guys at the bar yesterday would’ve been surprised to find themselves being shot by a Super Soaker squirt gun that actually fired anti-tank rounds, or functioned as a flamethrower, if she’d decided to be really nasty about it. She’d been nice because she really didn’t need that sort of attention.

  And, she reminded herself, because they didn’t do enough to deserve that sort of treatment. This wasn’t her world. People could have more than one strike before being killed. Errol would’ve wanted that. And so would… urgh.

  After cutting through that alley, and the small parking lot it led to, Arleigh found herself on a street she vaguely recognized. If this world was enough like the one she’d come from, there would be a library about two blocks over. That was where she was going to start the research she needed to do. There were other, more involved things she would have to get into soon enough, ways to find information that wasn’t publicly available. “Record four,” she started, after getting her bearings. “Okay, Paige, I know I promised I’d start simple, so I’m going to the library. At least, assuming it’s actually there. For all we know, there’s an ice skating rink on that corner.”

  She had to make these records, because even though she couldn’t go back, inanimate objects could. She could send the recordings through, so the people she’d left behind would know when the job was done. They would know when she made the Breaker pay for destroying their world.

  Halfway to the library, Arleigh had to stop in front of a small shop, as something caught her eye. For a moment, she just stood there, staring at the window display in silence. She was actually so distracted in that second, in fact, that she almost missed the sense of someone walking up behind her. But you didn’t live for three years in a world like the one she’d come from if you let something like that happen. Just as the person was close enough to touch her, Arleigh pivoted suddenly. The pen was right back in her hand, ready to go straight up and into the person’s gut.

  “Whoa there.” It was a stranger, some old guy with gray hair, wearing a plaid suit. “Sorry if I startled you, miss. I was just about to open the shop here.” He nodded toward the window she had been looking at. “I see you’ve been admiring our model planes. If you’d like to come in and see our full selection, I’d be glad to show y--” He paused. “Say, haven’t I seen you before?”

  “No,” Arleigh insisted quickly, already starting to walk away from the model shop without looking back. “You’ve never seen me. And I don’t make models anymore. I did that with my brother and my… I don’t make models anymore.” Stupid, fuck, she didn’t need to say all that. All she had to do was say no. He didn’t need her life story. Just shut the fuck up and move on. She had a job to do, and moping in front of some toy store wasn’t getting her any closer to accomplishing it.

  Back to recording. That would distract her. “I can’t believe I’m walking in a city like this. I mean seriously, it’s all… guys, it’s like it used to be. It’s like being home again. I mean, I know I am home again, but not--fuck. You know what I mean. And if you don’t, shut up. All the buildings, the cars, the…” Her eyes shifted toward someone who had stopped to gaze curiously her way. “What the fuck are you looking at? I’m doing a nerd project for school or something. Go away.”

  After that person huffed and walked off, Arleigh continued to narrate her experience in this place as she walked right up to the library. It looked different than she remembered, but then again, it wasn’t like she’d spent a lot of time at the public library back in the old days. Maybe the building was actually different, or maybe her memory of the place was just shit. Either way, there it was.

  It was hard to shake the feeling that people were watching her, but she didn’t know if it was just paranoia from years spent in a world where half the bastards you ran into would stab you in the throat to steal a fucking stale granola bar out of your pocket, or because she wasn’t used to seeing this many people around at all. It made her anxious, so she walked faster and kept looking over her shoulder, trying to catch anyone giving her too long of a glance. In the building, past the desk, up the stairs-- wait, the computers were downstairs. Back down the stairs, again asking herself if that was a real difference between both of the worlds, or if her own memory was simply wrong.

  Finding a computer she could use was one thing, but as it turned out, remembering how to get what she wanted out of it was another. Yes, yes, it had only been three years since she stopped being able to use the internet to find anything she wanted, but it had been a very busy three years. She had barely even touched a computer, or even a cell phone (though Wren had managed to create radios they could communicate with), in all that time. Not having any sort of internet meant she didn’t exactly check SPHERE or anything. Oh, right, SPHERE. Did they have that here?

  As it turned out, they did. A quick check on googol (or google, as this world weirdly misspelled it) proved that, and it only took a few minutes for her to figure out what password her other world self had used, and sign into that account. The colors were different, and the forums were in a weird order, but aside from all that, it looked close enough. She quickly perused the messages that other self had received, including something from someone called Gepetto’s Lad. A boyfriend?

  Feeling like a ghoul, Arleigh quickly signed out of that account and set up a free email so she could sign up for a fresh account. That way, she could look through the place in peace. Before long, she was getting herself caught up on recent events, and, more importantly, what active Touched there were in this city. Especially any of those that didn’t exist in her own world. Not that it was anywhere near a guarantee that whoever the Breaker really was didn’t have a counterpart in that world, but at least it was a place to start from. Paige and some of the other brains were like seventy something percent sure that the person behind the Cataclysm had caused it in a world that didn’t have a version of them still living in it. Some sort of psychological thing.

  Okay, the Conservators and Spartans existed. Ten Towers seemed to be the same as Nine Towers, but with an additional company that didn’t exist, or hadn’t signed on back in Arleigh’s world. Some other groups were the same, or had minor changes, like this world calling the medical group the Seraphs instead of Paean's Flock. Maybe Paean didn’t exist, or went by a different name.

  On the gangs side, there was some new group called Oscuro that didn’t exist where she was from. That seemed to have swallowed up three or four different gangs. The Trendscendants-- what the fuck did that even mean? They were new too. So were the Easy Eights. Three gangs so far and Arleigh didn’t recognize any of them. Oh, La Casa, that one she knew. And, of course, her father’s gang, Sherwood. For a moment, Arleigh just stared at the names on the screen, before shaking it off. She could go see her family, but… no, not really. Errol would be the only one she wanted to see, and she’d have to explain the part where she wasn’t dead.

  Instead, she looked back at two other group names that she didn’t know. Braintrust, some group of Fells focused on technology. Sounded like what had been called Inovasion back home. They were worth looking into. The Breaker had to have access to pretty impressive tech.

  Then there was the Star-Touched group, Avant Guard. Led by someone called Paintball. She’d never heard of that one either. Or… anyone listed as a member, actually. Hmm, yeah, those were going to be the first groups she looked at, on either side. Braintrust and Avant Guard.

  With that decided, Arleigh hesitated. She shouldn’t do this. She had a job to do, and it didn’t involve satisfying her own emotions. Besides, the people here weren’t her people. Errol here wasn’t her Errol, and fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Hating herself the whole time, Arleigh did the search anyway. She had to see if…

  There they were. Right there in the googol (fuck, google) results. Still alive in this reality, not murdered by bandits a year ago, like the one in her world. A living version of the only person Arleigh had loved besides Errol, the person she had spent two full years of the apocalypse building that love with, before having even that ripped away from her. The person who made her hand reach out reflexively to touch their image on the computer.

  Cassidy Evans.

  Joke Tags: For Those Wondering? Alt Cassidy Had Animal Transformation Powers