William breathed in deeply, closing his eyes as he did so. Like liquid warmth, the relaxing balm of the held-in breath billowed gently through his body, and he focused his mind on the air in his lungs as it distributed its revitalising invigoration through his every vein, artery and capillary, doing this in the manner that the Teacher had shown him many lifetimes ago. The craving for heroin began to crumble away, and as it did, he retreated into the deepest recesses of his mind. Eventually he found himself in the monastery on the mountainside, where eagles raked their claws through the mists of clouds, and the silver ribbons of mighty rivers in the canyons below seemed as mere strands of angel hair, flickering brief flares of reflected sunlight at him from miles away as they snaked through the green mounds of forested hills and valleys.
‘Yes, yes! You are there now, aren’t you?’
It was Zakaria’s voice, but it sounded so muffled and so distant that it was as a half-forgotten whisper. Zakaria’s words faded out to an inaudible echo, and now the Teacher started to speak his wisdom inside William’s mind, his voice sounding just as crisp and clear as it had all those years ago.
‘Feel the forces of the universe flowing through you, William. Feel their pulses, their electricity, their vibrations as they course through your body. Now, tune the vibrations of every tiny part of your own being to the speed and frequency of these microscopic particles … yes, yes! Let the forces of space and time ripple through you as you become a conduit for their power. You are the lightning rod, Tiger, and you are the lightning! You and the forces are one!’
An electric charge rippled and buzzed within William, building up with exponentially increasing force into a crackling and absolutely devastating surge of pure power, enough to pulverise great boulders into powder, to smite whole mountains of granite into piles of rubble, to split planets in two. The power pulsed through him in impossibly rapid waves, like electrical current coursing along vast power lines, blasting out from a gigantic transformer. He began to chant the sacred mantra, losing his individual mind – a mere droplet of water – in the vast sea of collective consciousness. As he did this he started to bring hovering particles of the combined power and life-force of the infinite network of billions of spider-web-bound minds and souls into his physical form, imbuing each and every cell of his body with this energy, molecule by molecule, fusing them with the core of his being as his mind’s eye ventured deeper into the intricate depths of microstructures, and the minutiae of vibrating particles that formed the essence of everything material in this world, and all others. His skin, in the eye of his mind, began to turn bright electric blue, as did his blood, his bones and the fibres of every muscle and sinew that held his physical form together. The power pulsated and hummed with an increasingly intense glow; now bright, now burning, now searing everything away like a million lightning strikes in the dark, all condensed into one gargantuan arc.
‘I’m there, and I’m here, all at once. I am … the Tiger.’
William awoke to the reality of the present with a jarring jolt. He was lying on the ground, having fallen over during this experience, but now the fear was gone, the self-doubt was gone, and the cravings were gone. They had been replaced, all of them, with an indomitable strength. Zakaria was staring at him with awe gleaming like raving madness in his one good eye.
‘You did it,’ he gasped. ‘You travelled, you broke through the barriers of space and time, didn’t you? I saw your body temporarily die! I saw your breath stop and the life leave your eyes, just for a few seconds … and then, then you were back, recharged with new life! Is it you, William Gisborne? Is it really you in this body?’
‘It’s me, brother,’ William answered calmly. ‘Aye, it’s me, but not only me. It’s me, and it’s everything. It’s the me I’ve always meant to be, the me I’ve been running from all these years. The me who is no longer a mere individual, but who is all energy united. I am … The Tiger.’
Zakaria beamed out an ear-to-ear grin and then roared with joyful, triumphant laughter, punching a fist into the air. He clapped a heavy, steel-encased hand upon William’s back.
‘The Tiger is with us once again! Finally, the Tiger is back! Come my friend, come! We have a lot of work to do.’
‘We will destroy the Huntsmen and the Alliance,’ William whispered, clenching his fists. ‘We will hurl them back into the depths of whatever hell they crawled up from.’
‘That we will, William, that we will.’
45
ADRIANA
31st October 2020. KSM Nightclub
Chloe had never been in a place like this nightclub; the vast dancefloor, like the bowl of a sports stadium, was presided over by bars on multiple levels, each with its own theme and closed-off VIP area. Taken as a whole, the aesthetic of the place made it seem like some sort of spaceship, almost; ominously dark, like the innards of some sort of cybernetic superorganism on the cusp of a singularity. Nodes of LED buttons pulsed their sinister glow into the omnipresent shadows, waxing and waning alternately, illuminating the dark bowels of the beast in ghostly hues, while arrays of bewildering lights and dazzling laser beams spun chaotically and control stations buzzed frantically, as if inundated by a glut of data. The overpowering electronic music – the booming heartbeat of this titanic android – was crushing in the immensity of its volume, the buzzing sound waves so intense as to seem as if they were perforating the membrane of her skin and vibrating their irresistible energy through every muscle, vein, bone and sinew of her body. The atmosphere was surreal; blinding lights arced through
