My brain stopped for a minute. How could he possibly know about that. Moreover, why would he even care? He was essentially a newbie at my work, right?

"Well," Alex continued, "Let me be more honest. We know you know something about the Rift the other night. One of us saw you walking your sister away from it."

Every muscle in my body tensed. Was Alex somehow related to the guy who had taken Alessa? A white-hot heat shot out of my Core, buzzing around my veins, waiting.

Alex seemed taken aback at my reaction, "Hold up, wait. We're… I'm here to help. I don't think you've done anything wrong and neither do the people I work for."

"You mean you don't work for Viktor?" I asked, relaxing if only a little. The fire in me retreated. A little bit, anyway.

"Well, I do, but it's… a cover." His eyes flicked around the park imperceptibly quick, something practiced in his gaze I hadn't noticed before.

"Your cover include getting blown up?" I retorted, a bit of a smile creeping onto my face. "If so, impressive."

He looked quite embarrassed. "Well, no, but I hadn't done any Rift recovery prior to that. We investigate what happens to the Artifacts after the recovery bits are done, not before."

"Who is 'we'?" I asked more or less point-blank.

"Ah, probably for the best if you don't know." He took a look at my face, which wasn't too happy about this, "Yet, anyway. If it becomes relevant I'll definitely fill you in, but right now it'd just be more liability for you." He nodded towards Liam, "And him, all of them really. I have to be careful, cause of my family as well. I'm kind of going out on a limb here just telling you this much." His gaze hardened. "But the kind of people we're working against, they wouldn't save me from my own stupidity. They'd have killed everyone there just to ensure no one talked."

"That's…" I started, before trailing off. Not sure what really fit.

"Inhuman." He said. His voice sounded strained. Hurt. Like he was speaking from experience, even if it wasn't his own.

"Sure, that Rift," I started, which seemed to jolt him. The inner fire was resting back in my Core by now. "I was there when it formed. I was trying to rescue my sister from her boss. Err… former boss, anyway. Jackass had a thing for her and wasn't the type to take 'No' for an answer. Thought he could get away with it. I may have adjusted his reality a little. Not sure whether he'll try again." I had to pause, getting worked up just thinking about it.

"Well, anyway, I needed to distract him to get her away from him, and the Rift made one hell of a distraction when it ripped that parking lot a new one. Never seen one form that way." I paused, not really wanting to continue since I'd have to either lie about what happened next or look absolutely insane explaining it. Neither of which I really wanted to do.

"Anything you can tell me about the Rift itself? It was gone by the time we got there to measure it."

"Not really, it was a lot bigger than normal and the borders were much thicker." Then something occurred to me, "Oh right, I remember it kind of had its own gravity, trying to draw things in. Or a suction, or something. Felt like it was going to eat me right up."

There. The truth, but with just a bit of omission.

He sat and thought while we watched the kids play. Liam was rallying his troupes and storming a makeshift castle. Somehow he'd found a tattered chunk of cloth and created a cape for himself. He seemed to have a second-in-command as well, an adorable redhead that was nearly as extra as he was.

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"What you've described doesn't sound like anything we've encountered yet. As I already mentioned, our work is about what happens after the Artifacts are retrieved. That said, we've started investigating whether it's some sort of feedback loop. There's been a rise in rogue Rifts, but usually they're highly unstable and explode shortly after forming."

I stared out at the playground, not really registering what I was seeing. "Like the one that got my dad."

Alex look aghast at me. "I had no idea… I'm so sorry Charley."

"It's okay," I replied. "It's been a few years - it got him walking home from work one day. That one was a little different though - some people were extracting from it without anchors or any other precaution. I assume someone must have pulled an Alex and detonated an artifact right next to the Rift." I looked up at him, a bit of a smirk playing at the sides of my mouth. If he was going to spring some crazy shit on me, the least I could do was to pick on him a bit.

He put his hand behind his head and looked sheepish again. "Can that really happen? I had no idea." He rested his hands back on his knees. "That aside, I think there is more of that sort of black-market extraction going on than anybody wants."

"That's no good. For anyone."

"You don't know the half of it. We suspect people are misusing artifacts somehow and it's contributing to whatever is making the world sick."

"Is it everywhere? I'd just thought that it was only this area that sucked, but I've never been anywhere else."

"We think so, but we're not sure, to be honest. We lost communication outside of the continent a long time ago."

Something tickled my brain. "How long ago?"

"About three hundred years."

"Around the same time the historical records disappeared," I said, thinking more than normal. It was starting to hurt my head. Guess my brain cells weren't used to firing.

Alex seemed surprised. "So you know about that."

"Yeah, I've come across it before," I replied, unwilling to let him know István had discussed it with me. I didn't want to unintentionally involve someone else in whatever it was Alex was a part of. Especially since I still had no idea about what it really was.

Honestly, he made a pretty poor secret squirrel - what with telling me all the squirrely secrets, like where the nuts were hidden. He seemed to trust me for some reason, but I wasn't sure why. I mean, yeah, I saved him, but other than that he didn't know me from any other critter.

Even if I was a well-practiced rodent.

I took a deep breath and did something dumb, which at least was on brand.

"So I found this building the other day with a bunch of pipes on the side. I may have broken into it and found people 'feeding' Artifacts to some sort of weird life form they called an 'extractor'." I said all in a rush, afraid I'd lose the nerve.

Of all the reactions I expected Alex to have, 'touched' hadn't been on the list. But he looked genuinely thankful and even a bit misty-eyed after I said that. "Thank you so much for this information, Charley. We knew they were doing something with all the Artifacts but were never sure what.

"Honestly I'm not sure how you missed it. When I say a ton of pipes, I mean it looked like someone took a fork full of spaghetti and hung it down the side. And the air around it was just… wrong."

"Interesting that you can feel that..." Alex said, back in his thinking state. "I'll keep that info to myself but I may ask you some favors, in a personal capacity."

I'm not sure why, but something in me told me he was being honest about keeping my special abilities to himself. Perhaps he felt he owed me after what I'd done for him.

I sure hope not, I thought, I am awkward as hell when it comes to that stuff.

"So where is that building anyway?" He asked.

See, just like that.

"Uh, I may or may not have blown it up." I said, almost in a whisper. I had my face in my hands. Way to go, me.

Alex just stared at me. The silence stretched.

"I mean," I continued, when things got too awkward for me to handle. "I didn't do it directly. I destabilized the extractor and it exploded."

"I'd ask how, but I don't want to know," Alex said, "Yet. You've already given me far more faith than I deserve. Let me pay some of that back and then we can talk more. Where was that building, then?"

I gave him precise instructions on how to reach it, and he realized he'd walked right past it more than once.

"That ability of yours, definitely something that is going to help us all in the future." He said it with way more conviction than I was comfortable with.

"I hope I can live up to your expectations."

"You've already exceeded them."

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