As feeling returned to my limbs, I could tell a few things. I was lying on my side on a moving surface, what felt like a flier or hover based on the subtle shifts and slow shudders from minor turbulence rather than the rhythmic pounding of wheels or treads rolling over pavement. The smell of ionized electronics and cheap lubricant implied it was probably a light drone carrier for repair or possibly mail delivery. A delivery hover? That meant a small crew. Two or at most three people. I could hear a steady hum and the dull, distant roar of fanjets through an imperfect sound seal, so yes, a hover. That meant we were on the ground, not in the air, which limited the possible distance I could have been taken.

  No, I didn’t have a ‘very particular set of skills for dealing with kidnappings,’ or anything like that. It’s just that anyone who’s ever been shoved into the back of various vehicles for ‘rent-a-villain’ gigs can pretty easily tell the difference between a small flier, a hover, and a true ground vehicle from sounds and vibrations alone. Could you feel the difference between being on a boat compared to a haywagon? Sort of like that, if the haywagon was full of hostile intent.

  I felt a pair of heavy bracers around my forearms, holding my wrists crossed behind my back. I recognized them instantly: quantum nullifiers. The kind of high-end hardware prisons use to keep alpha prisoners from simply using their powers to kill everyone and paint the walls with their escape. They were electromagnetically sealed together in their ‘lockdown’ mode.

  Nullifiers were terrifying for your average Alpha. They work by blocking off the connection between your energy node and the external ether with some kind of powerful scrambler field. I had the schematics for several different kinds memorized—a hobby for the deeply paranoid—but that didn’t mean I actually understood the arcane physics behind them.

  But here’s the kicker, the beautiful, ironic joke of it all: my energy node wasn’t connected to the ether. I didn’t pull my power from someplace that could be blocked off by a scrambled barrier like most alphas. My pitiful, anemic power supply was entirely internal, a sad little well I had to painfully refill myself. For perhaps the first time ever, my absolutely limited power was an actual advantage. Because while quantum nullifiers would force most alpha power levels to drop to near zero in a matter of seconds, to me? They were mostly a fashionably inconvenient pair of bracelets. It would take me a few seconds of concentration to break the power streams in the electromagnets so I could get my hands under me.

  I also had some sort of hood over my head. Not a full silence hood, but it definitely blocked my eyesight, and seemed to have some sort of clasp under my chin. That was...concerning, but after a few moments I realized I could easily scan it because, like the nullifiers, the whole hood was pressed right against my skin and well within the range of my blueprinting ability. A quick mental once-over revealed it was made of woven titanium, a piece of cheap alpha armor. It didn’t block hearing or breathing, but the bulletproof glass visor was blacked out by the simple, and slightly smelly, expedient of having been recently painted with silver spray paint on the interior. Amateur hour. And the nullifier bracelets were of a design I was totally unfamiliar with. Foreign maybe? Great. International incidents are so much harder to sweep under the rug.

  I was also wearing something that felt a lot like light alpha armor. The grain wasn’t pleasant against my skin, and it wasn’t very good stuff, made of woven Kevlar and Cosprene fibers, but it WOULD make me look like an unconscious alpha after a fight rather than a prisoner. So, a disguise. They were trying to move me under the radar.

  So, in my professional opinion as a guy tied up in the back of a van, I had three choices.

  Choice one: try and dash out of here. I could absolutely disintegrate the nullifiers and probably the hood, but then I’d be an unmasked Alpha displaying at least Class 4 teleportation abilities. Traffic cameras, dashcams, and idle bored bystanders with phones would know exactly who I was inside of a few hours and have a pretty good idea of what my powers were too. So much for my low profile. It also relied on the hovertruck NOT being airtight. I could dash through smallish cracks, but I’d never even TRIED to move through a totally solid surface before. Theoretically it was possible to slide between the molecules, but look what happened to Buckaroo Banzai! I was not scared enough to experiment in a way that could wind up with me halfway bonded into a steel wall, causing a potential fusion event depending on my luck. My luck tends to be bad.

  Option two: break free, kill or disable everyone in the truck, and try to take control before the thing crashes. From what I could hear, there were three people breathing in the truck around me, one of whom was the driver. Since I wasn’t quite ready to go on a murderous rampage, especially with zero information on who these jokers were, and I thought they expected me to still be unconscious, I put that one on the back burner. The ‘murder’ setting was pre-heating, but I hadn't put the casserole in yet.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Option three was to wait around like a good little unconscious lump of meat and hope to be rescued, absorbing as much information about what was actually going on as possible. Not a tremendously appealing idea. It felt passive, weak, and entirely too much like what a victim would do. I’d had my fill of being a victim.

  After a few minutes, I decided to combine all three into a glorious, chaotic mess of a plan. I would wait and see, try to get as much information as possible about who and why I was being intentionally misplaced, and then eventually dash or disintegrate my bonds. I’d decide on the killing part later, but if they had hurt Mindy, Chinook, or even that creepy, possibly-mind-wiping Abigail getting to me, that option would definitely be moved to the front of the menu.

  Yeah, me, weak-ass Class 6-in-disguise, thinking about getting vengeance if they ‘hurt’ the Class 4 and 5 girls who could beat me like a pi?ata with their hands tied behind their back. How pathetic was that? Me big strong caveman, beat chest and protect woman wearing power armor from dangerous raccoons! The ego on this guy. But that didn’t stop me. They were becoming my friends, my allies, my… something. And for a cynical bastard like me, that was a terrifyingly powerful motivator.

  “Coming up on the interchange,” a male voice mumbled quietly from the front. “Deacon, prop up his highness so casual scans show him sitting up next to you. Baelfire? Get ready. If anything goes wrong, if it looks like the checkpoint defenders are going to inspect, burn everything. Witnesses, defenders, whatever… half mile radius is scorched. No witnesses.”

  Well, shit. That escalated quickly. Okay, that made a new plan, plan four, the best one: Do not let the pyro burn a half-mile radius of innocent people. A pyro, quite possibly a powerful one. ‘His Highness’? What the hell was that about? I felt hands dragging me up to a sitting position, and let my head loll forward bonelessly as someone tried to maneuver me into a decent sitting position leaning against the metal inside wall of the truck.

  Okay, I admit it, I was enjoying myself a little. Flopping forward like a landed fish as I heard a female voice cursing and trying to hold me steady. She clearly wasn’t particularly possessed of any kind of alpha might or physical enhancement, and I won’t hesitate to admit that my bone density and mass were a LOT higher than my already-large size would suggest. Cultivation, it turns out, makes you dense in more ways than one.

  “Stop fucking around, Deacon,” a female voice said angrily.

  “He’s a lot heavier than I thought he was. I’m not used to handling unconscious people. You want to do it?” a second female voice, Deacon, I guess, whined.

  “Duct tape his helmet to the shelf.”

  After the ripping of tape and the feel of my helmet getting unceremoniously taped into place, I still tried to make sure that my ‘unconscious’ posture looked as unnatural as possible. Sleeping people unconsciously adjust to make sure they are still comfortable; people who are knocked out or dead just tend to dead-weight and sometimes their natural muscle tension makes their limbs settle in ridiculously awkward positions. I was going for ‘ragdoll thrown down a staircase.’

  I didn’t want to attract attention if there was an IR scan, though, because… well… if this ‘Baelfire’ was nasty enough, all that raising a ruckus would do was get a lot of people killed. In fact, I decided to sort of modify plan four on the fly, because even pretending to be unconscious or unwilling stood a very good chance of triggering the murder-pyro. I wasn’t a hero, but that didn’t mean I needed to be the indirect cause of a neighborhood barbecue.

  “Excuse me,” I said quietly, my voice a little muffled by the hood.

  “What the fuck?” I heard the voice in front of me, sounding startled. Baelfire, I guess? I felt a quick flash of heat wash over my front, a promise of incineration, but Deacon’s hiss made it stop.

  “You are awake? Dammit. Enhanced physique. I should have guessed even ACP wouldn’t hold you down long,” the male voice said, sounding more annoyed than surprised.

  I sighed, the picture of weary cooperation. “Look. I am fine with cooperating if you have to cross some inspection checkpoint. I had my fun flopping around while Deacon was trying to prop me up. You have very delicate hands, by the way, Deacon… I wish I could have felt them under different circumstances, like maybe not during a felony. But I really don’t want Baelfire here to roast however many people might be at that checkpoint if they get suspicious.”

  I let that hang in the air for a second. “I mean, if she does it, she does it. It will be her killing them, not me. But she sounds like she hasn’t murdered anyone in a while and is getting antsy about it. So, I will cooperate. I’ll keep my mouth shut until we get to someplace more private, where I can properly deal with you.”

  “Don’t you mean where we can properly deal with you? You are not in exactly the position to be making threats. I don’t know if you noticed, but toxin resistance or not, you have a set of electro-locked quantum nullifiers. Right now you might as well be a normal guy instead of an Alpha.”

  I shrugged a little as I felt the duct tape being ripped off the helmet. “Whatever makes you feel better about your life choices.”