"Right," Thomas agreed. It was the easiest path. He was grateful for Oliver's tendency to fill in the blanks with his own overactive imagination.
"I knew it! I'm going to have to start treating the wilderness folk with a lot more respect from now on. After all, our first superhero emerged from the sticks! Hahahaha!"
Caught up in his own excitement, Oliver lunged forward to give Thomas an enthusiastic hug. He was met with a second cold, warning glare that stopped him mid-stride.
Thomas had never allowed people into his personal space, and the emotional "noise" he was currently experiencing only made his desire for distance more intense.
Oliver cleared his throat, laughed nervously, and walked a few paces ahead to lead the way.
"Ah, here she is... what do you think of my baby?"
They had walked for ten minutes across a barren, desolate stretch of land. The yellow dirt was cracked and thirsty, devoid of even a single blade of grass.
As they rounded the bend of a small hill composed of coarse, glittering sand particles, Thomas stopped in his tracks.
"Becky" was not a car. Not in any sense that Thomas understood.
She was a behemoth. It was a massive vehicle, standing at least ten meters tall and stretching twenty meters in length. It sat perched atop four sets of colossal, reinforced wheels that elevated the main chassis more than a meter off the ground.
To Thomas's eyes, it looked like a rolling monument to a dead civilisation. It was constructed entirely from what appeared to be salvaged metal scraps.
Plates of different colours, textures, and thicknesses—some rusted, some painted a faded primary red, others gleaming with a dull industrial grey—had been riveted together in a patchwork design that defied any sense of aesthetics or aerodynamics.
It was a machine built for survival, not for beauty, and its sheer scale made Thomas feel very, very small.
"That," Thomas whispered, "is your baby?"
Towering above him, the sheer height of the machine was intimidating. Thomas craned his neck, looking up toward a small, exposed deck dedicated to those driving and riding the behemoth.
He could count at least four seats in each row, with five rows in total, perched like a jagged crown atop the metal beast.
To reach that height, two sets of steep, industrial-looking stairs were welded onto either side of the metallic behemoth.
Adding to its grotesque silhouette was a chimney—a long, ugly metallic pipe that rose high into the air, reaching slightly above the level of the top-tier seats. It puffed a faint, shimmering heat into the orange sky.
The vehicle looked like a crude, nightmarish version of a bus, or perhaps what a car might look like if a six-year-old child had been asked to design a tank.
There was a dedicated compartment for the engine—a massive, unadorned rectangle of scrap that lacked even a whisper of artistry or aerodynamic grace. It was a defiant block of metal, built with zero regard for wind resistance or aesthetics.
"This is my Becky. I got her from the SA Department when I first received my commission here," Oliver said, his voice thick with pride.
He reached into one of his many oversized pockets and produced a sphere. He stepped toward the front of the behemoth and dropped the object into a small feeding tube that Thomas hadn't noticed before.
In the fleeting second before the sphere vanished into the machine's gullet, Thomas's detective-trained eyes caught its detail.
It was a glass ball, roughly the size of a closed fist. Inside, a familiar white fog swirled, but this one was alive with faint, jagged arcs of blue lightning that danced against the glass.
He only saw it for a flash, not having enough time to properly inspect it or ask Oliver to let him hold it. It was another impossible data point in a world that was quickly outrunning his logic.
"She's ready to roll! Let's go!" Oliver shouted, his laughter echoing off the metal plates. "Today is a monumental day for the Dante settlement. You can't imagine how humiliated I felt when the other district leaders boasted about finding superheroes in their territories while my place remained empty. But now? Now we have you!"
With the "fuel" delivered, Oliver began to scramble up the stairs on his side. Thomas moved toward the stairs on his own side, intending to climb parallel to the older man, but Oliver waved his hands frantically.
"No, no! Come up this way!" he pointed to the stairs he had chosen. "There's only the two of us today. Our first-ever superhero deserves to sit in the front seat, right next to the captain!"
Thomas didn't fully understand Oliver's hype, but he could connect the dots. In this dream—or reality—superpowers were clearly a rare and precious resource. He followed the instructions, finding the climb difficult.
His left hand was still slightly tender from the statue's needle, and he had to cradle his heavy Bonsai tree in the crook of his right arm, leaving him only one hand to grip the cold, metallic rails.
"I'm supposed to die tonight," Thomas muttered softly to himself, his breath hitching as he hauled his weight upward. "If this is the end, it's not a bad way to spend it. A final, crazy hallucination to close the case of my life..."
His internal monologue was cut short by a sudden, violent jolt of terror. At the very top of the ladder, a large, rounded mirror was bolted to the frame to help the driver see the rear of the deck.
As Thomas pulled himself over the final rung, he caught a clear, direct reflection of his own face in the glass.
The sight gave him an instant, paralysing fright.
"Watch out!"
Thomas's grip failed. His fingers slipped from the metallic rods, and for a terrifying heartbeat, his centre of gravity shifted toward the empty air behind him. The ground below suddenly looked a lifetime away.
The face in the mirror wasn't his. Gone was the thirty-something man with the etched lines of fatigue and the shadow of terminal illness. In his place was a youth.
He looked eighteen—maybe twenty at the most—with skin that was smooth and vibrant, and eyes that lacked the abyssal hollows Thomas had lived with for years. He looked green. He looked healthy. He looked alive.