Max pulled the Rustbucket off the highway just after eight in the morning and followed a dirt road into the trees until the road stopped being a road and became a suggestion.
He cut the engine.
"Out," he said.
Ben looked through the windshield at the trees. "We breaking down?"
"Training," Max said. He was already opening his door.
Ben and Gwen looked at each other. Then they got out.
The clearing Max had found wasn't large but it was good, uneven ground with roots and rocks breaking the surface, trees close enough on the edges to serve as obstacles, enough open space in the middle to move properly. Morning light came through the canopy in long pale strips. Birds somewhere above. No road noise. No people.
Max set the Plumbers case on the hood of the Rustbucket and opened it. He took out the scanner and two other things Ben hadn't seen yet, a flat square pad that unfolded into something like a screen and a small device that looked like a compass but wasn't.
"Two days to the HQ," Max said, not looking up. "I want you both at least partially prepared before we get there. Not combat ready, we're not doing that in two days. Just basics." He looked at Ben. "You especially. Because whatever that facility shows you about the Omnitrix you need a foundation that isn't just hitting that thing and hoping for the best."
"I saved people," Ben said.
"You also set a car on fire and melted a hydrant," Max said. "So we're doing basics."
Ben opened his mouth. Closed it.
"Gwen." Max turned to her. "You're going to work on control today. What came out of you at the park and at the lumber yard is real and it's useful but right now it comes when it wants and leaves when it wants. We're going to work on that." He paused. "Ben. Hand to hand first. Come here."
Max started with falling.
Not hitting, not blocking, falling. How to go down without getting hurt, how to roll out of a throw, how to land on your side instead of your back. Ben thought this sounded boring and was wrong about that within about thirty seconds of Max demonstrating the first throw.
"Again," Max said, after Ben hit the ground for the fourth time.
"I'm doing it right," Ben said, getting up.
"You're tensing up at the last second. That's why it hurts. You have to commit to the fall before it happens."
"That doesn't make sense."
"It will after you do it right." Max reset his stance. "Again."
Ben went again. Max was not rough but he was not gentle either, the kind of teacher who gives you exactly as much difficulty as you need and not a bit more, which in Ben's case turned out to be quite a lot. The first twenty minutes were mostly Ben meeting the ground from different angles and Max telling him what he did wrong each time.
Then something shifted.
It was gradual. The Omnitrix on his chest stayed quiet, no transformation, nothing dramatic. But the way Ben was moving started changing in small ways. His balance found itself faster after each fall. His feet started reading the uneven ground without him looking at it. When Max came in for the fifth throw Ben's body adjusted before his brain told it to and he came out of the roll clean and was already upright before he'd finished thinking about it.
Max stopped.
He looked at Ben standing in the clearing, slightly muddy, breathing steady.
"Do that again," Max said.
Ben frowned. "Do what?"
"What you just did. Coming out of that roll."
"I just stood up."
"You read my weight shift before I committed," Max said. "I didn't teach you that."
Ben looked at him. Looked at the Omnitrix. Back at Max.
Neither of them said anything about it.
Max reset. "Again."
Across the clearing Gwen was having a different kind of morning.
She sat cross legged on a flat rock with her hands on her knees and her eyes closed and the expression of someone trying very hard to do something that had previously happened by accident.
Nothing came.
She opened her eyes. Looked at her hands. Closed them again.
Still nothing.
She stood up and raised both hands the way she had at the park, the way she had at the lumber yard, and pushed, the feeling of pushing, the intention of it, and a small flicker of pink-white light appeared at her fingertips. Faint. Barely there.
She pushed harder.
The barrier came out at full size.
It covered approximately forty feet of clearing in one direction, rising eight feet off the ground, solid and bright and thoroughly excessive for the context. Two birds that had been sitting in a nearby tree left immediately. The light of it threw sharp pink shadows across everything.
Gwen stared at it.
"Little big," she said to herself.
She let it go. It dissolved. She tried again, smaller this time, more careful, holding the intention tight and controlled before releasing it.
Sixty feet. Higher than before.
She put her hands down.
From across the clearing Ben looked over at the light. "You okay?"
"Fine," Gwen said tightly.
"That was quite large."
"I'm aware."
"Like the whole clearing basically."
"Ben."
"Just saying."
"I will put the barrier directly on you."
Ben turned back to Max.
Max came over to Gwen after the first hour of Ben's session while Ben practiced the same roll sequence on his own.
He watched her try three more times. Three different sizes, none of them what she intended, all of them too large.
"The power isn't the problem," Max said.
"The size is the problem," Gwen said.
"The size is the symptom. The power is doing what you tell it to, the problem is what you're telling it." He picked up a stick from the ground and handed it to her. "How much force would you need to flip that stick over?"
She looked at it. "Almost none."
"Show me."
She flicked the stick with one finger. It turned over.
"That," Max said. "That decision you made, almost none, that's what you need before the barrier comes out. Not the size. The amount." He stepped back. "Try again. But before you do, decide exactly how much you need. Not big enough to stop something. Exactly how much. Like the stick."
Gwen looked at the clearing. Thought about it. Raised her hands.
The barrier came out at about fifteen feet.
Still too large. But smaller than before.
"Better," Max said. "Again."
She went again. Twelve feet.
Again. Ten.
By the end of the second hour she had it down to roughly six feet consistently, which was still more than intended but was repeatable and that was what mattered. She could feel the mechanism of it now, not just the emotion, not just the instinct, but the actual deliberate choice. Turn it on. Set the amount. Release.
"It'll get smaller with practice," Max said. "Right now you're overcorrecting because you're not sure how much you have. Once you know the range the control gets easier."
"How long did it take you to learn your skills?" Gwen asked.
"Years," Max said simply. "But you're not starting from zero. You started under pressure and got it right. That matters." He almost smiled. "You're ahead of where you should be."
Gwen looked at her hands. Something in her face was quietly pleased but she kept it mostly to herself.
They broke for food at midday, sandwiches Max had made that morning, eaten sitting on roots and rocks in the clearing while the Plumbers scanner lay open between them displaying a rotating catalogue of alien species.
This was Max's other lesson. Not physical. Just knowledge.
"Pyronite," he said, pointing at a rotating image of a fire-based creature that looked a great deal like Heatblast. "Heatblast's species. From a planet called Pyros. Combustion-based biology, plasma core temperature, highly aggressive if threatened. Known to Plumbers as generally non-hostile toward humans. Their planet—"
"Pyros," Ben said.
Max looked at him.
"You said it already," Ben said.
"I did. Their planet has been catalogued since—"
"What's the threat level?"
Max checked. "Low to medium. Depends on context."
"And if one is working for someone else? Not on its own?"
Max paused. "Then context changes everything. Why?"
Ben was looking at the scanner. "Just thinking about Hartwell. Those weapons came from somewhere."
Max looked at him for a second. "Yes," he said. "They did."
He moved to the next species.
They went through a dozen more, Petrosapien, Kineceleran, Vulpimancer, Ectonurite. Ben was quiet through most of it but his eyes moved across every entry with the same steady focus he gave everything now. Taking it in. Filing it. Gwen asked better questions in the moment but Ben, Max noticed, asked the follow up questions twenty minutes later after he'd thought about something properly.
"Null Void," Ben said, when Max flipped to a particular entry.
"A dimensional space used as a Plumber detention facility," Max said. "Criminals, dangerous species, anyone too dangerous to hold conventionally."
"Who decides that?"
"The Plumbers."
"Who decides if the Plumbers are right?"
A pause.
Max looked at his grandson eating a sandwich and reading alien data files with those flat careful eyes.
"That," Max said slowly, "is a better question than most agents twice your age think to ask."
Ben looked at him. "What's the answer?"
"I'll let you know when I find it," Max said.
Ben went back to the scanner.
The afternoon session was different.
Max had Ben and Gwen work together, not separately. Basic two person coordination. How to move without getting in each other's way, how to communicate quickly when there wasn't time for full sentences, how to read what the other person was doing without asking. Field partnership basics, stripped down to what two kids could actually use.
They were bad at it at first.
Gwen went left when Ben went left and they walked into each other. Ben moved forward when Gwen had a barrier coming and she nearly caught him in it. They argued twice, once about direction and once about something that had technically happened at the bumper cars two days ago which neither of them could fully explain how it became relevant.
Max watched all of it without stepping in.
On the sixth attempt something clicked. Ben cut right and Gwen cut left without either of them calling it and the movement between them was suddenly clean, a gap of about three feet, both of them at different angles to the same target point, and they got there without bumping or arguing or doubling back.
They both stopped.
Looked at each other.
"That was better," Gwen said.
"Yeah," Ben said.
They did it again. It worked again.
By the end of the afternoon they weren't good. They were nowhere close to good. But they had the start of something, a basic understanding of each other's movement that would need a hundred more hours to become reliable but had to start somewhere.
Max called it done when the light started going gold in the trees.
"Not bad," he said. Which from Max, they had both learned, was approximately equivalent to excellent from anyone else.
They were back on the road by five.
The Rustbucket rolled through the afternoon and into the early evening and the landscape changed around them, less open highway, more two-lane roads between towns that got smaller and further apart. Max had the scanner on the dashboard showing the route. He didn't say much.
Ben was in the back going through the alien species entries on his own, reading each one twice. Gwen was doing quiet barrier practice with her hands in her lap, small ones, deliberately small, feeling the size of them before they came out. Getting smaller each time. Not looking at them. Doing it by feel.
At some point Max turned off the two-lane road onto a smaller one that ran between a cornfield and a tree line and ended in a gravel parking lot.
In the parking lot there were seven motorcycles parked in a row.
And beyond them, at the end of the lot, a building.
Low and wide and old looking, with a neon sign above the door that buzzed and flickered in the early evening. The sign said HARLAN'S in red letters. Below the name, in smaller letters, the word BAR. The windows were dark enough that you couldn't see through them. From inside came the faint sound of old music. The kind of place that had an opinion about people who didn't belong there and wasn't shy about sharing it.
Max parked the Rustbucket between two motorcycles and cut the engine.
He turned around in his seat and looked at Ben and Gwen with an expression that was completely straight and gave nothing away.
"We're here," he said.
Ben looked at the building.
At the motorcycles.
At the flickering neon sign.
At the building again.
"Here," he said.
"Plumbers HQ," Max said.
A silence.
Gwen looked at the bar. At Max. At the bar again.
"This," she said carefully, "is the headquarters of an interstellar law enforcement organization."
"Yes," Max said.
"That bar."
"Yes."
"With the broken sign."
"The sign works fine. The H just flickers."
Ben stared through the windshield. "Grandpa."
"Ready?" Max said. He opened his door.
Ben and Gwen sat for another second.
Then they got out.
Inside was exactly what the outside promised.
Dark and low-ceilinged, smelling of old wood and something fried and years of people sitting in the same seats. A jukebox in the corner playing something slow and twangy. Four people at the bar, large and leather-jacketed, who glanced at Max and Ben and Gwen when they came in and then went back to their drinks with the complete lack of curiosity of people who had seen stranger things come through that door. The bartender was a wide man with a grey beard and an expression that suggested he'd heard every story worth hearing and wasn't interested in new ones.
Ben looked around.
At the jukebox. At the pool table where two men were playing without much enthusiasm. At the collection of license plates on the wall and the old photographs and the sticky floor and the bar stools with tape over the cracked vinyl.
"I thought there'd be more," he started.
"More what?" Max said.
"I don't know. Computers. Screens. Something."
"Ah," Max said. He walked to the bar.
The bartender looked at him. Something passed between them, a look, not long, the kind of look that had a conversation in it that didn't need words.
The bartender reached under the bar.
Something clicked.
The floor behind the bar moved. Not dramatically, a section of it, about four feet square, just dropped an inch and slid to the side with the smooth mechanical certainty of something that had been built to do exactly that and had been doing it for a long time.
Below it, stairs. Metal, clean, well lit. Going down.
Ben and Gwen stared at the hole in the floor of a biker bar.
"There are the computers," Max said.
He headed for the stairs.
Ben looked at Gwen.
Gwen looked at the stairs. At the bartender who was already reading a newspaper like nothing had happened. At the men at the bar who hadn't looked up. At the pool players who were still playing.
"Okay," she said quietly. To herself mostly.
They followed Max down.
The car was parked on the two-lane road sixty meters back from the gravel lot.
Dark blue, ordinary, the kind of car that existed on every road in every town and left no impression on anyone who passed it. No plates visible from behind. Engine off.
Inside, a man sat behind the wheel with a tablet on his knee and a coffee going cold in the cupholder.
He was average height, average build, somewhere in his thirties. Brown jacket, plain shirt, nothing about him that would make anyone look twice. His face was still and patient and his eyes had the quality of someone who had been watching things professionally for a long time, taking in everything, reacting to nothing.
On the tablet screen, a map. A blue dot sitting in the gravel lot of a bar called Harlan's. He looked at the dot. Then at the bar in the distance.
He picked up a small radio from the dash.
"They stopped," he said. "Coordinates sent." A pause. "No. They went inside." Another pause. "All three." He watched the bar for a moment. The neon sign flickered. "Harlan's Bar. Cross reference it."
He set the radio down and picked up his coffee. Took a sip. Made a face at the temperature.
Put it back.
He settled in his seat and looked at the bar with the same patient empty expression and waited, the way he had been trained to wait, like someone for whom time was not something that ran out.
The jukebox inside Harlan's was barely audible from here. Just the faintest sound drifting across the quiet parking lot in the evening air.
The man watched the door.
He had all night.