The room looked the same. The gadgets, screens, and everything else looked the same as it had when they’d snuck in.

There was just one difference.

David and Mari were supposed to be here now. They were dressed in the company jumpsuits, with the company logo on their shoulders. David had asked what the infinity symbol over the atom had meant…

“Dunno—actually when we were putting the organization together for California, I just grabbed the first thing that looked neat off of a clip-art site,” Wilma had said.

Well, not everything has a great backstory, David thought. Then he focused on Antonio and Wilma. It was time for class.

“Right!” Antonio said, “It’s time to learn how to close breaches and hopefully not die in the process.”

David looked up from the material they’d given them both. “Die?”

“It is a risk with higher-level breaches, which is why you won’t be dealing with them.” Wilma was sitting on the other side of the room, with O12 curled up by her feet.

That was why Mari was keeping David between her and Wilma.

“So, you both read the documentation, like good interns,” Antonio continued. “What are the Aetheric levels.”

“Oh, I got this!” Mari said, perking up. “They’re a scale ranging from 0 to ten. Zero means absolutely no aetheric activity or possible breaches and ten means…”

“Run,” Wilma said. “The only level ten on record was with the original experiment. I know you read about it, but I’m going to reiterate. If you run into anything higher than a five, you back off and call us, because anything higher than a five means you will, not might, but will run into AEs, and likely powerful ones.”

“And explaining why you unexpectedly lost your arm to your parents isn’t high on my priority list. Now,” Antonio turned and touched a button on the desk. A map of Allendale appeared on the big monitor, “what is the average Aetheric level of Allendale?”

“Between zero and one,” David replied.

“Right. Most places are zero across the board. And what produces higher aetheric levels?”

“A breach,” Mari said. “But even closing a breach will still leave the region with an elevated level, unless we…” She gestured at a rack of equipment, cylindrical objects neatly placed into their niches, status lights gleaming green. “Use a storage unit or units to drain it.”

Wilma nodded in satisfaction. “Good. Now, if you run into an AE, show us how you’ll deal with it.”

“First, deploy storage units to reduce its ability to function,” David said.

“BZZZZZ!!!!!” Antonio said, gesturing at David with his forefinger, ring gleaming in the light. “First step, Mari?”

“Um… Verify if anyone is in the area and check to see if they are at risk?”

“Right,” Antonio said. “Cold-bloodedly, there’s nothing that will raise more trouble than a dead body. Light show, using some kind of LARP style blaster, hell, just arguing someone got a whiff of gas that made them see things… All of that can work because there’s not a lot left behind to cause questions. Dead bodies, or injured people—those are another matter.”

“Also remember the Man With the Bags,” Wilma added. “The fewer people in the area, the less chance you have of a realized AE.”

“And we do that by…” David said. Okay, so I missed the first step. I can do better.

“Calling us. That last breach was really unusual, and in most cases, even if you think there’s an AE running around, you can call us, especially since we’re sending you to places with low Aetheric levels and likely no active AEs. But still, both pragmatically and morally, prioritize getting civilians out of the way. If you have to smash a fire alarm, we’ll cover for you.” Antonio gestured to Wilma. “Over to you.”

“So you localize the breach and…”

“Use a sealer,” David said, pointing to a larger unit, this one looking like a small box. “Ideally, it should take about thirty seconds for small breaches, longer for larger breaches. If it can’t close the breach, call you and wait for the bigger units.”

“Right,” Mari chimed in. “But not all areas have active breaches since they can go away on their own. If we don’t find it, we just drain the aetheric energy and come back.”

“And last and certainly not least if you run into a realized AE?” Antonio said.

“That’s easy!” Mari replied. She picked up their emitter unit, looking like a small flashlight. Mari hit the stud, and moments later, it morphed into a wide-barreled weapon. “The aetheric neutralizer will break up AE’s control over its aether, so we just blast it.”

“And the safety rules?” Wilma asked.

“Don’t direct it at living beings for more than a few seconds, because it can cause first-degree burns, and there’s also the danger of damaging pacemakers or other electronic systems.” Mari grinned. “So no zapping annoying bystanders.”

“Right,” Antonio said. “It’s about as nonlethal as possible, but it’s not a toy.”

David nodded at that. It was hard to remember, given that the neutralizer looked more like some toy from a sci-fi show than it did a real gun…

Which is good news if anyone sees us and hell, we are in a sci-fi show…

“Now, I—” A low chime cut Wilma off, and she and Antonio looked over to the big map of the town and the surrounding regions.

There was a gleaming circle, light yellow, pulsing at the outskirts of the map.

It’s yellow. That means that it’s picking up a breach with an associated aetheric level of from one to three. David knew that much. Great, now we’re going to be stuck here while they go—

“Hey, you know what kids?” Wilma said. “There’s only so much you can do with book learning. Why don’t you take this one?”

Next to her, Antonio glanced over at her, eyes narrowed. Then he shook his head and smiled. “Always with the deep end. Well, you’ve got the keys to the van, David, what are you waiting for?”

Mari jumped up, pumping her fist. “Yes! I’m ready!” She turned to head for the garage when Wilma coughed politely. Mari turned back to see Wilma pointing at the transport box, with the ready storage units nearly placed into their clamps.

“Right, I knew that,” Mari said.

David fought really hard not to grin. He remembered to grab the sealer and check his neutralizer.

Right. We’re ready. David took a deep breath. He didn’t feel ready.

Mari couldn’t keep from bouncing in the seat as David pulled out onto the deserted street. The air was scorching, little heat waves rising off of the softened asphalt.

Just another summer day in Allendale.

“We’re going on a mission!” Mari said. “We’re really going on a mission! I was afraid they were really just going to keep us sitting around and getting coffee, no matter what they said, but they actually let us go!”

David was focusing on the road. “Just don’t cause me to wreck the van on our first mission,” he said. “And remember, this is a training mission. They could always decide we aren’t really suited for this…”

“Why would they do that?”

“If we ended up burning the city to the ground?”

“Hmph,” Mari glared at David for a moment, then looked down to her neutralizer. She flipped the switch, sending it from its storage form to its emitter form and back again. On. Off. On. Off.

“Mari,” David said, “please don’t accidentally shoot me with your tool.”

Mari put the device back and folded her arms. “So, it’s between a level one or three rating. That means…”

“If it’s a one, pretty much the only way to detect it would be by instruments,” David said. “But if it’s a three, we could see…”

Mari looked down onto her company issue phone, scrolling through the information. “Intermittent failures of unshielded electrical system, minor poltergeist activity, and possible audible and olfactory illusions. If an Aetheric Entity becomes realized, it will be weak, unlikely to pose any physical threat and easily destabilized via the use of aetheric neutralizers.” She looked over at David. “See, I did pay attention.”

“What about the possibility of bigfoot attacks?” David asked.

Mari grabbed the phone and started frantically scrolling over the screen. “They didn’t say—oh. Right. Ha-hah. When you’re dangling over a giant monster, pray I don’t remember this joke.”

“Just wanting to make certain,” David said. “And… Okay, here we are.”

He pulled the van to the side. They were outside the main body of the town, and there were only a few buildings in the area, most of them dilapidated. Mari stared at a burned-out building and shook her head. “What a dump.”

David nodded. “They were going to build a new development here, but something happened, and it never got finished.” He opened the door and got out, Mari getting out from her side. “See?” David said, pointing to a rusted sign.

“Heavenly Acres,” Mari read. “Wow, I think I know why they went out of business. That sounds more like a graveyard.”

“Yeah,” David said. He stopped by the burned-out remains of a car. “Complete with dead cars.”

Mari stared at it. “Are there any… Bodies in it?”

“Nope, just…” David blinked and pulled his head away. “Some syringes.”

“So, druggies?”

“A while ago.”

Mari looked around, putting her hands on her hips. “Okay, let’s get set up!” She took out the glasses with their integrated display and put them on, the glimmering ghost image of the screen flashing in front of her eyes. David did the same. Then it was time to link them to the control units on their wrists, the displays coming alive at their touch.

Sci-fi, but it made sense. You couldn’t drop the wristbands by accident, after all.

“Hah. Who dares call glasses nerdish!” Mari said, adopting a heroic pose.

“You, for one,” David pointed out.

Mari flipped her hand at him. “That was before I discovered that glasses with a built-in display were part of the conspiracy that we are now interning for!”

David rolled his eyes. “Well, let’s get started, so we don’t get fired on our first day.”

The first thing they did was set up the sensors. Or rather, the pair of sensors. The center of the breach wasn’t something that the big sensor net over the town could localize, so Mari and David carried the tripod-mounted sensors until they were several hundred feet apart from each other.

“Got it!” David shouted.

“Yeah!” Mari shouted back. Okay, key in my access code… A few moments later, and her glasses were showing the readout from her sensor, a glowing line extending to where it was picking up the breach. So there is a breach here. Mari had been afraid that they’d just come to a place where the breach had vanished. Then all they’d do would be collecting the aetheric energy.

That’d be really boring for their first mission.

“C’mon…” the indicator beeped, and the two sensors synchronized and triangulated the position of the breach. “Level… .75,” she called. “Wow, that’s low.”

“Good,” David said. “Do you really want Wilma or Antonio to call us and tell us to back off?”

“Nope!” Mari replied. She stepped back from the sensor, careful not to jostle it. But it would be easy if it was glowing violet like the one we saw. Oh, and the people screaming. That’d also make it easier to find. She shrugged and marched forward, keeping the gleaming position indicator in front of her. A few moments later, they came to a sloping embankment, shrubs and trees blocking their view of the bottom. But that didn’t stop Mari, as she stared at the glowing indicator pulsing on her display.

“Well, there it is!” Mari said. She got ready to scramble down, but David lashed out and grabbed her by the arm. “Mari?”

“What?”

“Snakes? Sharp things in the bottom?” David gestured to a shallower part of the embankment. “Let’s go that way.”

Okay, David’s right. Maybe I’m a little too eager. But I’m not going to tell him.

Mari and David walked down, the sand crumbling under their boots. A few minutes later, they got to the overgrown section where, according to their sensors, the breach was.

“Why can’t it be in the open?” David muttered.

“Because it knows and hates you?” Mari replied. “What’s that… Buzzing?”

“Dunno. Let’s be careful.”

Mari nodded. The beeping of the proximity alert as getting sharper, warning them that they were getting closer. This close to the breach, they were well within the radius the sensors had triangulated, so they had to do the rest of the work themselves.

Almost. But what is that buzzing? Could it be an AE, could it be… Mari pushed the brush aside and froze. The sensors were painting the breach in vivid red. This close, Mari could practically feel it. Just about a foot over the sluggish stream of water at the bottom of the ravine.

That wasn’t why she’d frozen. No, that was because she had also seen the source of the buzzing.

A great, big beehive, combs of honey full of bees covering the branches that were hanging over the breach.

“David?” Mari whispered.

“Yeah?”

“About not just crashing down here? You were right.”