Chapter 77: Training
The dawn air held a chill that bit through the thin cotton of Jake’s shirt. He stood at the edge of a vast, sun-bleached concrete expanse, the old helicopter landing pad behind the main house. Cracks veined the pavement, sprouting stubborn tufts of wiregrass. A single, skeletal oak stood sentinel to one side, its branches clawing at a sky that bled from indigo to a bruised pink.
The others were gathering, a silent procession in the predawn grey. Susannah, dressed in dark sweatpants and a tank top, her posture taut and ready. Anya, tiny and ethereal in a simple linen shift, her violet eyes wide and watchful. Freya, stretching her long limbs, blonde hair pulled into a severe ponytail. Jasmine, yawning but alert, her golden-flecked eyes scanning the perimeter. Lena was already there, leaning against the trunk of the oak, watching Bruce with an unwavering focus that spoke of their deep, wordless connection. Ketut stood apart, serene, her dark eyes fixed on Bruce as if reading a complex text.
Bruce stood in the center of the open space. He looked restored from the drained figure on the sofa the day before. The IV had done its work, and the shared, quiet energy of the house had fed him. He wore cargo pants and a worn green t-shirt, his shaved head gleaming in the first pale rays of sun. His hazel eyes were clear, sharp as flint.
Camille walked up beside Jake, handing him a mug of strong black coffee. She sipped her own, her expression one of affectionate pride as she watched her husband. “He’s in teacher mode,” she murmured. “Brace yourself.”
Bruce waited until the last straggler—Isabella, looking clinically alert in yoga clothes, and Sophia, her athletic frame humming with disciplined energy—joined the loose circle. Oy sat at Jake’s heel, his gold-ringed eyes taking in everything.
“This,” Bruce said, his voice carrying easily in the still air, “is where we get serious.” He began to pace, his boots scuffing lightly on the concrete. “You’ve all felt it. The bond. The network. It’s not just for fun. It’s not just for feeling good.” He stopped, facing them. “It’s a weapon. It’s a tool. And it’s a responsibility.”
He gestured to the empty space around him. “Some of you have power in you naturally. Anya. Ketut. Some of you have it from me, through the bond. Camille, Lena, the others. And some,” he said, his gaze landing on Jake, “have it from other means. Gunslinger.”
Jake felt the weight of the title, of Roland’s stark blue eyes somewhere in his memory.
“Your hands move faster than I’ve ever seen,” Bruce continued, walking toward Jake. “You can probably strip and reassemble a pistol blindfolded before most people blink. But guns…” He shook his head. “Guns are loud. Guns need ammunition. Guns can be taken. The power inside you, the touch of the Tower that lets you do that? That can be so much more.”
Bruce turned back to the group. “Here, we train. Every morning. We learn what we can do alone, and what we can do together. The more prepared we are, the better we can face any threat sent our way. And they will come. The world out there…” He glanced toward the sea, his face hardening. “It’s not blind. Our energy, our little paradise here, it’s a beacon. Thorne’s people aren’t the only sharks in these waters.”
He walked to the center of the pad and crouched, placing his palms flat on the concrete. A low hum vibrated through the ground, thrumming up through the soles of Jake’s boots. From Bruce’s hands, a wave of force pulsed outward, silent and invisible. Dust and pebbles skittered away. The cracks in the concrete glowed faintly with a blue-white light for a split second, then sealed themselves, leaving a smooth, perfect square one hundred yards on each side.
“A clean slate,” Bruce said, standing. “No distractions.”
He pointed to Sophia. “You’re first. Strength is your language. But strength isn’t just muscles.”
Sophia stepped forward, her espresso-dark eyes narrowed. “What do you want me to do?”
“See that oak?” Bruce nodded to the ancient tree. “I want you to push it.”
Sophia blinked. “Push it? It’s a tree. Its roots are probably twenty feet deep.”
“Exactly. Don’t try to uproot it. Push it. Through the ground. Use your strength, but direct it through the bond. Don’t just use your body. Use the network.”
Sophia looked skeptical, but she walked toward the tree, rolling her shoulders. She placed her hands against the rough bark, took a deep breath, and shoved.
Muscles corded in her arms and back. The tree didn’t move. A vein stood out on her temple. Nothing.
“You’re pushing with your hands,” Bruce called. “Push with us. Feel the connection. Draw from it.”
Sophia closed her eyes. Jake felt it then—a subtle pulling, a siphon opening. It was faint, like a single string being gently tugged within the web that connected them all. He saw Sophia’s breathing sync with Lena’s, then with Jasmine’s. A collective inhale.
Sophia pushed again.
This time, the ground rippled. It wasn’t the tree moving, but the earth around its base. Soil buckled. Roots tore through the concrete with a sound like snapping cables. The great oak tilted, just an inch, with a groan of protesting wood. Then it settled, now leaning at a slight, impossible angle, its roots exposed in a crater of broken pavement.
Sophia stumbled back, panting, her hands shaking. She looked at them, awestruck.
“Together,” Bruce said, a grin touching his lips. “Always together.”
One by one, he called them forward. He had Freya focus not on growing plants, but on manipulating the moisture in the air, drawing it into a shimmering, hovering sphere of water that she then flash-froze into a dagger of ice that she tossed to Susannah. Susannah caught it, examined it, then threw it with a gunslinger’s effortless grace at a target Bruce conjured from light. It shattered on impact, but not before embedding itself six inches deep in the phantom bullseye.
He worked with Anya on focusing her ethereal energy not into vague sensations, but into a tactile, concussive wave that could knock a training dummy clean off its feet. With Jasmine, he refined her innate sense of spatial awareness, having her navigate a blindingly fast obstacle course of psychic projections with her eyes closed, drawing on the collective “sight” of the group.
Ketut needed no training in empathy. Instead, Bruce had her project emotions—calm, terror, overwhelming lust—into Jake, testing his mental shields. Jake’s head swam with foreign feelings, his own arousal or panic spiking uncontrollably until he learned, gritting his teeth, to feel the intrusion and gently deflect it, his will like a stone in a stream.
Isabella, ever the scientist, analyzed the bio-electrical output of each exercise, her fingers dancing over a tablet as she muttered about “psi-kappa ratios” and “neural bleed.”
And Lena… Lena was Bruce’s shadow. When he demonstrated a technique—shaping light into a solid, blunt weapon, or creating a short-range telekinetic pulse—she was often already doing it a second later, not mimicking, but executing in parallel, as if their minds were two hands on the same tool.
Jake watched, learned, felt the hum of the bond evolve from a background noise into a living instrument panel. He could feel Freya’s concentration like a knot of green light, Susannah’s lethal focus a cool, blue pulse, Jasmine’s soaring spatial sense a golden lattice.
“Jake,” Bruce said finally. The sun was fully up now, baking the concrete. Everyone was sweating, panting, but glowing with a fierce, exhausted pride. “Your turn.”
“What do you want me to do?” Jake asked. The gun on his hip felt suddenly irrelevant.
“Don’t draw,” Bruce said, seeing his hand twitch. “That’s the crutch. I want you to throw.”
“Throw what?”
“Anything.” Bruce pointed to a pile of old construction debris at the edge of the pad—scraps of rebar, chunks of concrete block. “Pick a target.”
A rusted steel drum, fifty yards away.
Jake focused. He’d thrown things before. Knives, mostly. He bent, picked up a six-inch long piece of rebar. It was cold, rough in his hand. He took a breath, aimed, and threw.
It was a good throw. Straight and fast. It clanged harmlessly off the side of the drum and skittered away.
“Again,” Bruce said, his voice calm. “But don’t throw it with your arm. Throw it with the why.”
“The why?”
“Why does it need to hit? What is your intention? You’re not a man throwing metal. You’re a force, willing an object to strike a point. Feel the network. Use it.”
Jake felt foolish. He picked up another piece of rebar. He looked at the drum. He thought of Roland. He thought of the stark, brutal necessity of a gun that never missed. He felt the bond, the thrum of connected lives around him—their strength, their focus, their support. He didn’t pull from them. He simply acknowledged them as part of his reality, as fundamental as gravity.
He threw.
His arm moved just as before. But the rebar left his hand with a faint, almost inaudible whine. It crossed the fifty yards in a grey blur and punched through the steel drum with a shocking CRUNCH, exiting the other side and burying itself in the earth beyond.
Silence, but for the distant cry of a gull.
“Again,” Bruce whispered, his eyes alight. “Faster.”
Jake grabbed a chunk of concrete block. He didn’t think. He simply intended for it to be where the drum was. He threw.
The block disintegrated against the drum in a cloud of dust and a thunderclap of sound, leaving the drum a mangled wreck.
A laugh burst from Jake’s chest, sharp and wild. He’d never felt power like this. It was clean. Direct. It was the essence of the gun, without the gun.
“Good,” Bruce said, walking up to him, clapping a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Now you’re starting to see.” He looked at the group, their faces smudged with dirt and glowing with sweat and accomplishment. “This is day one. We have a long way to go.”
The walk back to the house was quieter, filled with a new, simmering awareness. The world seemed sharper, more malleable. As they entered the cool, tiled kitchen, the scent of coffee and frying plantains washing over them, the dynamic had shifted. The earlier intimacy was still there, woven through them, but now it was underpinned by a sense of shared purpose, of forging a weapon together.
Camille handed out glasses of cold guava juice. Bodies slumped onto couches, onto the floor. The adrenaline was leaching away, leaving behind a deep, buzzing fatigue.
Lena watched Jake as he drained his glass, his throat working. She felt his exhilaration through the bond, the roaring echo of unleashed potential. It called to her own power, a mirror held up. She stood, stretched, and walked over to him.
“You’re buzzing like a live wire,” she said, her voice low.
“I feel like I could rip that fridge in half with my mind,” Jake admitted, a slightly dazed smile on his face.
“Maybe later,” she grinned. Then her expression softened into something more intimate. “That intention thing Bruce talked about. I want to feel it.”
She took his hand and led him from the kitchen, down a side hallway to a small, sunlit lounge filled with cushions and low bookshelves. The others were too tired to do more than offer lazy, knowing smiles.
In the lounge, she turned to him, her dark eyes serious. “I’m going to try something. Just… open up to it. Don’t deflect this time.”
Before he could ask, she placed her hands on his chest. He felt it immediately—not an emotional projection, but a pure, raw surge of desire. It wasn't a vague feeling; it was specific, detailed. The memory of her tongue inside him from the previous day, the taste of him, the submission, the dirty, glorious fullness. She poured the sensory memory directly into his nervous system.
Jake gasped, his back arching. His cock, already half-hard from the residual thrill of power, swelled to full, painful rigidity in an instant. It wasn't a thought; it was a physical imperative.
“See?” Lena whispered, her own breath hitching. She was feeding him the desire, and feeling his amplified reaction loop back to her through the bond. “Intention.”
She pushed him down onto a large, velvet-cushioned divan. Her hands went to the waistband of his sweats, yanking them and his boxers down in one rough motion. His cock sprang free, thick and already dripping.
Her intention was crystal clear. She didn't just want to suck him. She wanted to consume him, to feel that power in her mouth, to taste the energy he’d just unleashed. She dropped to her knees, and without preamble, took him all the way down her throat in one deep, wet plunge.
Jake cried out, his hands flying to her hair. The sensation was doubled, tripled—the physical act, the memory she was projecting into him, and the feedback of his own pleasure hitting her and bouncing back. She established a brutal, perfect rhythm, her head bobbing, her throat working, her nose buried in his pubic hair with every descent. The wet, gagging sounds filled the sunlit room.
She pulled off, a string of saliva and pre-come connecting her lips to his shining tip. “Your turn,” she rasped. “Project. Show me what you want.”
He focused. He didn’t just think of fucking her. He formed the intention. The image of bending her over the divan, of her round, perfect ass in the air, of him spreading her cheeks and driving into her from behind. He pushed that image, that raw, carnal want, through the bond toward her.
Lena moaned, a shudder wracking her body. Her own cunt was suddenly sopping, an aching void. “Yes,” she hissed. “Fuck yes, do it.”
She scrambled up, turned, and bent over the back of the divan, pulling her shorts and panties to her knees in one frantic move. She presented herself to him, glistening wet, utterly open.
Jake moved behind her, his own need a white-hot brand. He guided his cock to her entrance, the head slick with her juices. He pushed the intention, the focused will to possess, to fill, to claim. Then he drove forward.
He buried himself to the hilt in a single, deep, splitting thrust. Lena screamed, her fingers clawing at the velvet. He didn’t wait, didn’t tease. He set a punishing pace, each thrust a hammer blow of pure intention. The divan rocked with their violence. He gripped her hips, his fingers digging into her flesh, holding her steady as he pistoned into her.
“Harder!” she screamed, pushing back against him. “Use that fucking power!”
He obeyed. He fucked her with the same focused, unleashed force he’d used on the steel drum. It wasn't just physical. He was pouring the afternoon’s revelation—the clarity, the directness, the sheer force of will—into every drive of his hips. The bond screamed with the feedback, a crescendo of shared, animal frenzy.
He felt her climax building, a tsunami gathering force at the edge of his own awareness. He pounded into her, his balls slapping against her skin, the sound obscene and loud. Her cunt clenched around him, spasming, and she came with a ragged, shattered shriek, her inner muscles milking him violently.
It tore his own orgasm from him. With a final, grinding thrust, he pulsed deep inside her,
emptying into her convulsing depths in thick, relentless spurts. The bond between them didn't just carry sensation; it became a reverberating chamber of climax, each wave of his release amplifying the aftershocks of hers, a loop of raw completion that left them both gasping and collapsed.
They stayed locked together, his weight pressing her into the divan, the only sounds their ragged breaths and the drip of sweat from his chin onto her back. Sunlight warmed the naked curve of her spine. Slowly, the world reassembled itself—the hum of the distant kitchen, the cry of a distant gull, the soft nap of velvet beneath her cheek.
“Jesus fuck,” she finally whispered, the words muffled by the cushion.
He pulled out slowly, a mingled trickle of their fluids leaking down her inner thigh. He sank back onto his heels, his body buzzing, spent. The focused, weaponized energy from the training ground had been transmuted, channelled into this equally primal, equally potent act of union. It felt like alchemy.
Lena rolled onto her side, facing him. Her dark hair was plastered to her temples, her face flushed and sated. She traced a finger through the cooling sweat on his chest. “Your intention,” she said, her voice hoarse, “needs work.”
He let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “Seemed to work okay.”
“Too blunt. It was just ‘fuck’. Pure id.” A smirk played on her swollen lips. “Effective, sure. But next time, try for some… artistic flourish.” She stretched, a cat-like uncoiling of limbs. “Still. For a first attempt at psychic dirty talk? Not bad, gunslinger.”
A shadow fell across them. They both turned.
Ketut stood in the doorway, silent as always. Her black eyes held no judgment, only a deep, knowing observation. She had sensed the eruption, the psychic shockwave of their joined climax. “Bruce wants you,” she said softly, her gaze shifting to Jake. “When you’re… presentable.”
Her lips twitched. “He says tomorrow, you’re throwing something heavier.”
Ketut left as silently as she’d arrived.
“Shit,” Jake muttered, scrubbing a hand over his face. The realization of being summoned, of returning to that other world of discipline and power, felt jarring.
“Yeah,” Lena said, sitting up. She leaned over, found her shorts, and began pulling them on with a wince. “The fun part’s over. Now comes the real work.” She looked at him, her expression shifting from post-coital languor to something sharper, more like her usual watchful self. “What you did out there today? That’s just scratching the paint. Bruce will peel you back to the metal.”
He stood, his muscles protesting. He pulled his own sweats up, the fabric rough against his sensitized skin. “What’s that mean?”
She walked to the door, pausing to look back at him. Her eyes were ancient in her young face. “It means the power you touched today, that felt so good and clean? It comes from the same place as everything else. The pleasure.” She nodded toward the divan. “The pain. The fear. He’s going to open the cellar door, Jake. And he’s going to make you look down into the dark.”
She left him there, the warmth of their fucking rapidly cooling in the sunlit room.
The kitchen was empty, the aftermath of their communal breakfast cleared away. Jake found Bruce alone on the wide veranda that overlooked the sea. He was sitting in a worn rattan chair, a mug of coffee steaming in his hands, his gaze fixed on the horizon where the ocean met a bank of towering, purple-clouded stormheads.
“She’s right, you know,” Bruce said without turning. His voice was low, almost swallowed by the sigh of the surf below. “About the cellar door.”
Jake walked to the railing, leaning against the sun-warmed wood. “I don’t know what’s down there.”
“You do.” Bruce finally looked at him. His hazel eyes were calm, deep. “You’ve seen it. Felt it. In the Dutch Hill Mansion. When you looked into the doorway. When you felt the thinny. That cold. That endless, hungry dark.” He took a sip of coffee. “Gunslingers see it sooner than most. It’s the price of the focus, of seeing the world in lines and targets. You see the emptiness between. The Tower holds everything up. But underneath…”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. Jake felt a chill that had nothing to do with the sea breeze. He remembered. The silent, screaming void behind the world’s fragile paint.
“My power,” Bruce continued, “what I’ve shared with all of them, what’s growing in you… it’s a thread spun from that same darkness. We take it. We weave it into something else. A weapon. A shelter. A bond.” He set his mug down. “But you have to be able to look at the raw material without flinching. Without letting it look back into you.”
“How?” The word was a dry leaf in Jake’s throat.
“Tomorrow. Before dawn. We go back to the pad.” Bruce stood, his joints popping. “You won’t be throwing rebar at drums.” He placed a heavy hand on Jake’s shoulder. “You’ll be holding the darkness in your bare hands. And you’ll have to mean it no harm, even as it tries to unmake you.”
Bruce walked back inside, leaving Jake with the horizon and the approaching storm.
That night, the house was quiet. A different quiet. The laughter was subdued, the touches lingered but were thoughtful, weighted. They had all been pushed, their limits tested, their private depths stirred. Anya drifted through the halls like a ghost, her violet eyes seeing things in the shadows. Susannah cleaned her guns with a ritualistic intensity. Camille cooked, the clang of pans a sharp, comforting music.
Jake sought out Isabella. He found her in her makeshift lab, a converted sunroom lined with monitors and biological scanners. She was studying a graph, her brow furrowed.
“I need to understand,” he said, leaning against the doorframe.
She glanced up, her ocean-blue eyes assessing. “Understand what?”
“The bond. Biologically. Psychically. What it’s doing to me.”
She gestured to a stool. “Sit.” She turned from her screen. “You’ve seen the MRI results. Your pineal gland is… active in ways that defy current neurology. It’s producing trace amounts of an unknown polypeptide, let’s call it Psi-factor. The same factor is present, in varying concentrations, in everyone here. Bruce has the highest load. You and Anya are next.”
She tapped a keyboard, pulling up a swirling, three-dimensional model of interconnected nodes. “The bond isn’t a metaphor. It’s a low-level, persistent quantum entanglement of consciousness. You share sensory data, emotional states, hormonal cascades. When Lena made you come,” she stated with clinical detachment, “your prolactin and oxytocin levels spiked. So did hers. Instantly. No normal biological delay.”
Jake absorbed this. “So when Bruce talks about drawing from the network…”
“You are literally borrowing neurochemical potential. You are sharing a reservoir of will. When Sophia pushed the tree, she wasn’t just using her muscle fibers. She was channeling a cascade of adrenaline and neural firing from Jasmine, from Lena, from Camille. It’s psychosomatic, taken to a literal, physical extreme.”
“And the darkness?” Jake asked, his voice low. “The cellar Bruce mentioned?”
Isabella’s composure flickered. For a moment, the scientist was gone, replaced by the woman who had knelt in the shower. “The Psi-factor. We’ve traced its neurogenesis. It originates in the limbic system, specifically the amygdala and the hippocampus. The seats of fear, memory, primal emotion. It is a biochemical manifestation of… potential. Pure, undirected creation. But its substrate is the raw stuff of nightmare. That is the ‘darkness’. The unformed clay. Bruce… he can shape it. We are learning to shape it because our brains are now wired to. But you must first face the clay. In its raw state.”
She looked at him directly. “It will show you things. Your deepest fears. Your most buried memories. It will feel like dying. Because on a neuronal level, it is a kind of death. The old pathways must be burned away to make room for the new.”
A silence hung between them, filled with the hum of computer fans.
“Why?” Jake finally asked. “Why do this at all?”
Isabella’s gaze was unwavering. “Because the world is full of people who found that clay and shaped it into only horror. Thorne was one. There are others. We must build something better. Or we must be able to break what they make.” She reached out, took his hand. Her touch was cool, precise. “Sleep, Jake. Your cells need to consolidate the new neural pathways. Tomorrow will be… formative.”
Sleep was a fractured thing. Dreams weren't dreams, but disjointed impressions swimming up from that dark clay. The house on Dutch Hill, its door yawning. The chill of the thinny. Roland’s eyes, lost and blue. The Man in Black, laughing. And beneath it all, a terrible, yawning silence.
He woke before dawn, drenched in a cold sweat. The bond was a low thrum of anxiety—not just his own. It was a chord struck in every room. They were all feeling it. The approach of the cellar door.
He dressed in the dark. Oy whined at his feet, his gold eyes worried.
“Stay, boy,” Jake whispered, scratching the bumbler’s head. Oy nipped gently at his fingers but didn’t follow.
The training ground was a pool of indigo shadows, the smooth concrete cold underfoot. Bruce was already there, a darker silhouette against the dark. Others emerged from the house: Susannah, her posture straight; Anya, wrapped in a shiver; Lena, a shadow beside Bruce; Ketut, her presence a quiet anchor.
No one spoke.
Bruce walked to the center of the pad. He didn’t crouch this time. He simply stood, feet planted, and closed his eyes.
The air changed. It grew heavy, thick. The predawn light seemed to bleed away, not into sunrise, but into a deeper grey. A smell like ozone and burnt hair touched Jake’s nostrils. The temperature dropped ten degrees.
“Jake,” Bruce said, his voice echoing slightly in the thickened air. “Come here.”
Jake walked forward. His heart was a hammer against his ribs.
“Reach for it,” Bruce said, his eyes still closed. “Not with your hands. With the part of you that pulled the trigger on the sheaf of wheat. With the part that knew the path of the bullet before it left the barrel. That part. Reach down.”
Jake looked at the concrete between Bruce’s feet. There was nothing there. Just smooth, grey stone. He pushed aside his fear, his memories, his chilled sweat. He found the cold, clear center. The place of the gun. The place of the why.
He reached.
His hand didn’t move. But something else did. From the empty space before Bruce, a tendril of black smoke began to coil upward. It was not smoke. It was a solid absence, a rip in the fabric of things. It was cold. It whispered.
It whispered his name. Not “Jake.” The name from his dreams. The name from the vacant lot. “Bort.”
The tendril grew, shaping itself into a thin, black cord that hung in the air, twisting like a hanged man. The whispering grew louder, a cacophony of dead leaves and lost voices and the terrible, dry flutter of the slow mutants’ wings.
“Take it,” Bruce commanded, his voice strained.
Jake’s mind screamed to run. Every instinct blared terror. This was the thing behind the door. The heart of the thinny. The cellar.
He stretched out a trembling hand. The black cord lashed out, not to strike him, but to wrap around his wrist. The cold was instantaneous and absolute. It was the cold of the grave, of stars going out, of endless December. It seeped through his skin, into his bones, into the marrow of his soul. The whispering voices became a single voice, his own, echoing all his failures, all his deaths, all his loneliness.
He cried out, a strangled sound.
“Hold it!” Bruce roared. Sweat streamed down the big man’s face, his own body rigid with the effort of manifesting this, of keeping it from consuming them both. “You must mean it no harm!”
Jake’s teeth chattered. The cold was pain, was madness. He saw his mother’s empty chair. He saw the Pusher’s grin. He saw Roland turning away, leaving him alone in a world of needles. The black cord tightened, biting into his psychic flesh.
He wanted to kill it. To blast it into oblivion with the new power coursing through him. That was the instinct. The gunslinger’s instinct: destroy the threat.
Mean it no harm.
The words were a lifeline. He couldn't destroy this. This was part of it. Part of the power. Part of the world. Part of him.
Through chattering teeth, through the howling void in his mind, Jake Chambers did the hardest thing he had ever done. He stopped fighting. He relaxed his psychic grip. He looked at the writhing, hungry blackness wrapped around his spirit, and he accepted it. He meant it no harm.
The change was not dramatic. The cord did not vanish or become light. But the cold ceased to bite. The whisper softened, becoming just a sound, devoid of meaning. The black cord loosened, then dissolved into a fine, grey mist, and was gone.
Jake collapsed to his knees on the concrete, vomiting bile. His whole body shuddered, wracked with dry heaves.
Bruce was there, a hand on his back, heavy and real. “Breathe,” he said, his own voice ragged with exhaustion. “Just breathe.”
As the first true ray of sun broke over the eastern wall, painting the training ground in pale gold, Jake understood. The weapon wasn’t the power. The weapon was the will that held the power. The gun was nothing. The hand holding it, the eye aiming it, the heart meaning it no harm even as it killed—that was everything.
He looked up, tears from the strain cutting through the dirt on his face. The others were watching him, their faces pale, their eyes wide. They had felt it, too. The touch of the cellar.
Bruce helped him to his feet. His gaze was fierce, proud. “Tomorrow,” he said, his voice raw, “we start on making something.”