I opened the door to The Room Without Mercy. It felt natural as if I could always create a black door to another dimension. A red flag flew in the back of my mind, but I shied away from examining it and instead stepped into the strange karmic temple that was The Room Without Mercy.

  The Arbiter waited for me.

  ::You already surprise me. Typically, new Harbingers have to be enticed to complete their first mission. You went straight to it without delay. Why?::

  The Arbiter’s flowing body wasn’t any easier to deal with this time than the first time, Harbinger or not. The constant shifting, the chorus of voices, the sensation of being judged by a higher being put the hair on the back of my neck up.

  “Strike while the iron is hot, that is the saying. If I were fixing to kill a man, well, when their security is disabled, cars aren’t working, and communications are down, that is the time to do it. Didn’t realize how effective Eclipsed Veil would be.” I hadn’t. Near-total invisibility was pretty huge, and the damage wrought by Judgment Blast was more incredible than I’d anticipated.

  :: Logical. You have completed your trial mission with a passing score.:: The Arbiter’s praise felt like I was a dog, getting told I was a good boy by its master. I pushed that feeling down. Compared to whatever the hell the Arbiter was, being a dog was probably a higher comparison than I deserved.

  “So, level up?” I asked.

  :: Commence level up, Harbinger Carrow.::

  A shaft of light surrounded me.

  Welcome to level 2. Please choose how to spend your 2 attribute points. The Arbiter has granted you a +1 to Judgment.

  Kaela briefly talked to me about how to handle this. Some Harbingers went for a balanced approach, becoming versatile combatants capable of handling any scenario. Other Harbingers used the approach that Kaela herself used: double down on Lumen and only increase other statistics when needed. She called it the glass cannon approach and pointed out that with our near immortality, difficult-to-harm Lumen Arbitris bodies, and the ability to escape to our dimension, other attributes were okay but didn’t hold a candle to the power gain of extra Lumen.

  I agreed with Kaela’s logic for the most part. I still intended to find a way to increase my Adaptability a bit, and Resolve sounded good, too, but for now, I doubled down on Lumen with both of my points. I hoped I wouldn’t regret it one day, but it’d be nice if there were some graphs with comparisons of the exact details of the efficacy of attribute distribution. Maybe someone had, I’d have to ask around.

  You have gained a new power. To manifest your new power, concentrate on the name of your new ability: Writ of Condemnation.

  Writ of Condemnation: You shape Lumen Arbitris into a construct of judgment. Every weapon or construct you create is the passing of a sentence, the realization of a heavenly verdict of guilt. The description left a lot to be desired. Luckily, more information than that flowed into my mind. The limitations on the ability seemed to be lacking, other than an upkeep cost in Lumen. Still, I found the idea of being able to create weapons of solid light intriguing.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  You have reached 9 Judgment. You have learned You Can’t Hide. Wherever your targets are, whatever they are doing, you know it, see it, and hear it. Fate is inescapable.

  That seemed handy.

  I imagined a version of the M9 I’d shot in the army. Prismatic light beams flowed into the familiar form, and I lifted it to fire a shot at the wall. A bullet of light shattered into thousands of fragments against the wall.

  :: Projectile weaponry is a step backward from the power of Lumen Arbitris.:: The Arbiter’s voice, for once, seemed conspiratorial, as if it were helping me in a way that it normally wouldn’t. I suspected it simply hated inefficiency.

  The light M9 vanished from my hand.

  “Who’s my next target?”

  A dossier formed in front of me. I felt a small discomfort. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I recalled I once took an oath. Now, my alien space god boss wanted me to kill a New York State Senator. The problem, as I saw it, was how you viewed the world. If you wanted to improve it, you had to go against the status quo, which had been created by the powerful to protect themselves. In principle, I wasn’t a great fan of this, but… Elias Vance was a piece of human shit.

  “Why’d the power go out after the storm?” I asked.

  ::I created a cover while I compromised all the systems of Earth. Outages not caused by direct storm damage will be restored within the day to minimize harm to the innocent.::

  Part of me wondered if that’d been necessary. The Arbiter seemed so much more advanced than us, but the whole planet probably had a huge number of networks and systems to take over. Maybe I was overestimating the boss.

  “I’ll get on it then. Any Factors I need to worry about in New York?”

  The Arbiter shook its head but didn’t answer. It vanished the same way it had last time, and I stepped back through the black door to my apartment. I could get used to always having a quick way home.

  I dropped into my bed. I hadn’t slept during the night, and maybe after a short nap I’d deal with getting down to the city.

  “And now, a special episode of the Carlton Smith Show.”

  Power returned. Grace’s television practically shouted the news out into the world. I rubbed my eyes and looked out the window. Dusk. I’d slept the whole day away.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, if you can hear this… if you still have power… we are in the middle of something this country has never seen before. I don’t care what the so-called experts are saying right now—this isn’t just a storm. This isn’t just a weather event. Something else is happening. Something bigger.” Carlton Smith had the charisma of oozy, gooey cheese in a paper bag, but the genuine fear in his voice actually made me feel compelled to listen to him for the first time ever.

  “For those of you who still have television, radio, even cell service—hold onto it. Across the nation, millions don’t. The grid has failed. Power plants aren’t able to stay online—and not because of flooding, wind damage, or tornadoes, but because the circuits are just… frying.” Smith reminded me of listening to the War of the Worlds. He had that kind of despondent, apocalyptic energy.

  “New York, Los Angeles, Chicago—entire cities are still in the dark. Flights remain grounded, and crews work around the country to deal with the crashes of those flights in the air when we lost global power. The death toll is unknown and unimaginable. But here’s the part no one wants to talk about yet: we’re getting reports that don’t make any sense.”

  The sound of shuffling papers conjured the mental image of Carlton Smith digging through documents like a mad conspiracy theorist, shouting about how the end was nigh.

  “In Texas, we’ve got reports that lightning isn’t coming from the sky anymore. Instead, reports of horizontal bolts of lightning cutting across highways, frying entire rows of vehicles, and combusting houses continue to come in.

  In Boston, local police were called to an office building where every single glass window shattered at once—without any wind.

  Denver International reports passengers have gone missing from the terminal. While the people have vanished, their bags are still there, and when cell service returned, their phones all rang, with screaming voices begging for help on the other end.

  Tell me, America, does any of that sound like ‘just a storm’ to you?”

  Footage played then, I assume. I sounded like warbles and clicks and crashes, then thunder.

  “If you thought that was bad, listen to this: There are entire neighborhoods that don’t exist anymore. Not destroyed, not flooded, gone. Buildings, trees, people—like someone picked up an eraser and wiped them off the map.

  This isn’t a disaster, folks. This is an event, and no one is telling you the truth about it.”

  Silence. Then fabric rubbing. I poked my head through the wall to Grace’s to take a peak at the screen. Carlton Smith adjusted his ear piece.

  “I’m being told that certain… government agencies… are taking over the airwaves. We don’t know how long we’ll be off the air, but listen to me. This wasn’t natural! There is something else at play here, and whoever they are—whoever is behind this—they knew. They always knew!”

  Static. The feds must have cut the broadcast.

  I wondered about the missing people. Did the Arbiter cause that? One of the Factor’s? Something else? Why had the world gone so topsy-turvy in such a short time? Was it the Arbiter trying to push the world down one path while the Factors and the fifty great factions pushed them in the opposite direction? Were there other powers, too? Maybe it didn’t matter. All I had to do was kill the corrupt; the big-picture problems were for the Arbiter to deal with.

  The power stayed on. I plugged my phone in and wondered if I knew anywhere in New York well enough to form a doorway. I didn’t. That meant either flying or driving. The power was on; I could also charge the battery in my car. Or—It occurred to me—that I didn’t really need to stay in Norwich. If I left my phone, my car, and all that here, there’d be no tracing anything to me. That seemed like a good idea.

  I looked at my blood still covering the floor. I’d coughed a lot of blood up while the Arbiter pushed me into his corner. Shit, maybe someone would assume I was dead. Perhaps I was. Humans didn’t combust into karmic punishing beings of light. I shut down that line of thought. Regardless of what I could do, I wasn’t some improved being. If that were the case, I could solve problems in a way that wasn’t murder.

  I closed my eyes and thought about Elias Vance. Suddenly, I could see through his eyes. Smell what he smelled. He sipped at a nasty over-priced coffee, and talked with a man in a nice suit. They arranged a meeting for the next night. The Family wasn’t happy with him, and he wasn’t entirely happy with them. They’d have a tête-à-tête at his home in Staten Island.

  My stomach churned from watching either for long. They made my skin crawl, and they hadn’t even done anything creepy. Did the increase in Judgment make my sense of corruption and awfulness much sharper?

  I looked around the room. There wasn’t anything to take. My dog tags lay on my nightstand, but given what I was about to do, I didn’t deserve to wear them anymore. The friendship bracelet that Sophie had made me in hospice also lay in that drawer. I wouldn’t risk damaging it, so I grabbed that and my phone. Would The Room Without Mercy break my phone? I couldn’t carry it with me. It had GPS tracking; it probably listened to everything around it, but I wanted to have access to it. I needed it to deal with Harris’s funeral, too.

  I was going to find out. I might not be able to jump to New York City due to a lack of familiarity with summoning a door, but I’d been to Binghamton just the other day. From there, I’d make it to New York City one way or another.