Sentinel 9.2

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Flechette spoke, “You’re a hard person to fin-”

Shadow Stalker, transparent and wispy, whirled on the spot, not even pausing as she fired her crossbows.  The first bolt went wide.  Flechette caught the second out of the air, staggered back a step as she was caught off balance.  Her right foot skidded to the edge of the rooftop.

“What the hell!?”

Shadow Stalker rose from a crouch, becoming opaque in the process, “Oh.  You shouldn’t sneak up on people when they’re on patrol.”

What?  I nearly get shot and she blames me?

“You nearly killed me!”

“It’s a tranquilizer shot, and you have the fire escape behind you.”

Flechette turned to see Shadow Stalker was right about the fire escape.  The bolt in her hand had a glass shaft, filled with fluid, a three-pronged head with a wider cross-shaped flare at the base of it to prevent it from stabbing too deep.  Tinker made?  “Geez.  You shaved a year off my life, doing that.”

“Sorry.  A little twitchy.  Good to see you,”  Shadow Stalker crossed the roof, offered a hand.  Flechette shook it.

“I suppose being twitchy is excusable,” Flechette excused Shadow Stalker, looking out beyond the rooftop to the dark streets.  Some of the buildings looked ready to fall over, and the main street below the pair had a two-foot crack running down the middle.  Water covered everything at the ground level, a half-foot deep.  “And the apology is accepted.”

“So.  You joining the team?”

“No.  Temporary stay, until you guys fill out your ranks again.  Maybe a few weeks, maybe as much as a month or two.  Weld told me you were out on patrol, that you might need backup.”

“I don’t do backup, and I don’t do the team thing unless someone makes me, but I’m willing to hang with another crossbow aficionado.  Is that the right word?  Aficionado?”

Flechette smiled, “It is.  The brown haired guy at the computer told me you’d be around here.  Took me almost two hours to spot you, though I did get sidetracked by some kids taking clothing from a broken display window.  We’ll patrol?”

“Sure,” Shadow Stalker agreed, lowering her eyes to her crossbows as she picked bolts out of one of the three cartridges mounted on her forearm and loaded them into her crossbows.  “You look like a rooftop type.  Fly?  Glide?  Grappling hook?”

“Grappling hook,” she patted her weapon, touched the chain that ran along her arm to the automatic-firing crossbow, her arbalest.

“If you can’t keep up, don’t worry about it.  Keep moving in a straight line, I’m mostly untouchable, hard to spot, so I’ll scout ahead for trouble, double back every minute or so to check on you.”

“Got it.”

Shadow Stalker swept her cloak over one shoulder, simultaneously shifting into her shadow state.  She turned and leaped twenty feet to the side of a neighboring building.  Grabbing a windowsill, she vaulted herself another fifteen or so feet straight up the face of the building, caught another windowsill, and then heaved herself up once more to reach the rooftop.  Her cloak billowed out around her, and Flechette saw how Shadow Stalker’s costume clung to her body.  One of the surprisingly few people who could wear a skintight costume without armor pads or features to mask minor physical imperfections and emphasize or suggest certain features.

When Shadow Stalker had disappeared from view, Flechette remembered she was supposed to follow.  She cocked her arbalest, flipped a switch beneath the trigger while sending a burst of her power through her weapon to connect the chain to the ammunition, and then fired a needle with an attached chain to the edge of the rooftop.

The needle bit deep, and the chain went taut.  A second later, she was reeling in.  The pull of the chain wasn’t quite enough to carry her straight to the rooftop, but the pull of the chain coupled with her ability to plant her cleats into the face of the building and run up the building face let her reach the edge of the roof.  A bit of momentum, one hand and her cleats gave her what she needed to hop over the roof’s edge.

Running across the rooftop, she used her index finger to flip the switch, severing the chain, then reconnected the chain to the next piece of ammunition as her free hand loaded it into place.  It took her a second to spot the vague blur that was Shadow Stalker, almost three buildings ahead of her.  The girl was practically gliding as she fell, moving more horizontally than vertically.

It was a drop to the next rooftop, Flechette noted.  She touched the front end of the needle that was mounted in her arbalest, used her power on it.

Capes with the ‘breaker’ classification were generally those who had some ability to ‘break’ the natural laws of the universe as far as those laws applied to them.  Shadow Stalker was one.  Scion was apparently another.  There were others who could slow or stop time in relation to themselves, change their effective orientation in respect to gravity or make themselves effectively larger without the exponentially increasing the stresses that the increased size and mass would normally place on their body.  Almost always, such powers came with some physiological changes that let them manage despite the altered environment they were effectively operating in, allowing them to breathe and walk at the very least.

Flechette wasn’t a breaker, though her power came close.  Technically, she was a striker, a cape with the ability to apply some effect by touch or at point-blank range.  The striker classification could include certain breaker effects as they were applied to things other than the cape themselves, but not always.  Other strikers included those who used energy weapons, those who had certain kinds of superstrength that weren’t accompanied by durability and those with pyrokinesis or such that didn’t extend more than a foot around them.  The way she used her ability, coupled with the intuitive understanding of angles, trajectories and timing she got from her secondary powers, gave her a low rating as a ‘blaster’.  A cape with a ranged attack.

She infused the three-foot length of sharpened metal that was mounted in her arbalest with her power.  The more power there was in it, the less it was affected by the natural laws of the universe.  Focusing more power into an object meant gravity, air resistance and general physics held less and less sway over it.  She could tune it, make the effect longer lived, shorter lived or bias the effects to allow for more of one element or less of another.

She could do other things, but the primary benefit, the easiest thing to do, was making her ammunition punch through anything.  It would glue itself in place on impact, if she had the effect wear off at the right time, and she was very good at timing things.  She could charge the metal of her cleats so they bit into any surface, and though it was too slow to be used defensively unless her foe telegraphed their attacks, she could make her costume frictionless.

She fired the needle through the corner of the roof just in front of her, and it passed through without resistance.  It continued on to strike the rooftop below and in front of her, nestling in deep as the effect wore off, bonding on a molecular level to the material around it.  The chain stretched down at a fifty degree angle, taut.

Flechette stepped forward, onto the chain.  The space between the spikes of her cleats made for a groove the chain could run through.  She slid down, one foot behind the other, arbalest held behind her with the chain reeling out, a safety measure in the event she slipped or was pushed off, with the added advantage that it allowed her to control the speed of her descent.

When she was close to the rooftop below, she cut the chain, let herself drop down.  She was running the second her feet met the surface, using the momentum from her slide.

It was tiring, constantly running, but she didn’t want to look bad in front of Shadow Stalker.  She was going to spend weeks with this team, and Shadow Stalker was the only other girl present that was close to her own age.  Doing double shifts of patrols, eating, showering, relaxing with her teammates, day in and day out, it would drain the life out of her if she had no friends to do it with, if she had no conversation and camaraderie.

At least this wasn’t so different from the exercise she got on her nightly patrol back in New York.  The problem was that this city was unfamiliar ground.  The buildings didn’t match together well, the skyline was jarring, didn’t flow.  Back home, traveling from rooftop to rooftop wasn’t much harder than running, with the use of her grappling hook to move her every minute or two.  Here, it was a jerky, stilted exercise, slow, awkward, demanding use of the grappling hook for nearly every building.

It wasn’t something she did often, but after too many steep ascents followed by steep descents, she bridged a gap to a more distant building with her chain, forming a horizontal tightrope, and ran along it.

Shadow Stalker was waiting for her when she got to the other end.  She did her best not to pant for breath.

“Don’t you run out of chain?”

Flechette turned, reached over her shoulder to tap her back. “Tinker teammate back home specializes in replication and cloning.  Small pack back here consumes energy from a small fusion battery to create a steady supply.  I’ve also got a kit back at the base that makes me a fresh stock of bolts.”

“I could use one of those.”

“Why’d you stop?  You see something?”

“Come.”

Shadow Stalker led Flechette to the edge of the roof.  Looking down, they could see a group of men in a loose half-circle around a middle-aged woman.  The woman was backing away from the men, who were gradually closing in.

“Why haven’t you done anything yet?!”  Flechette gasped.

“These things go smoother if the culprits are clearly committing a crime when you step in-”

A man grabbed the woman’s wrist, and she pulled back, struggled.  She screamed, attacked the man, only to get punched and knocked back on her ass, landing in the shallow water.

“-And there we go.”  Shadow Stalker leaped from the rooftop, falling at a normal speed, slowing to an almost gentle floating descent when she was partway down.

You only need to wait like that if you’re going to be violent, Flechette thought to herself.  Why?  When she has the tranquilizer bolts?

And Shadow Stalker had neglected to inform command.  Flechette reached for her ear, where an earbud was nestled in the canal. She squeezed it twice.  “Console, woman under attack by twelve or so ordinaries.  Shadow Stalker and Flechette stepping in.”

“Acknowledged,” a voice in her ear responded, “Good luck.”

She fired a bolt into the corner of the rooftop, then jumped, rappelling down.

Shadow Stalker was already engaged by the time Flechette arrived at the fight.  In a matter of heartbeats, Shadow Stalker answered Flechette’s unspoken questions.

The other heroine didn’t flinch as one of the men swung a baseball bat at her – the weapon passed harmlessly through her head.  In response, she stepped back, materialized from her shadow state, raised a crossbow and shot him in the side of the neck.  A fraction of a second after the glass arrow stuck in her target’s neck, Shadow Stalker stepped forward again, driving her armored elbow up at an angle at the spot where the bolt had struck home.  Glass shattered and the combination needle-arrowhead was violently dislodged.  The man went tumbled with a splash, going limp before he hit the water.  The side of his neck and the corner of his jaw were a bloody mess of cuts and embedded broken glass.

Shadow Stalker wheeled around, then simultaneously slammed the top of her right crossbow into her left forearm and her left crossbow into her right arm.  There was a barely audible click as cartridges loaded into the top of each crossbow.  She extended her arms to fire at the two of the men closest to the woman.  They dropped on their backs in the water, splashing.

Realizing what they were up against, the group began to scatter.  Flechette raised her arbalest, shot one bolt so it struck a wall just in front of one man’s throat.  Still running, he ran headlong into it, clotheslined himself, and fell over, gasping and gurgling.

She spared a glance to double check he wasn’t in a position to drown, which very nearly cost her.  One of the thugs turned to attack her, drawing a gun, but she had a bolt loaded and fired off before he could aim it, spearing through the gun’s barrel and out the back, to strike a wall.  She loaded another bolt even as she was already pulling the trigger to fire it, so it was sent out an eye-blink after it was in place.  The shaft of metal struck the thug through the crotch of his sagging jeans, pinning them to the wall he was backing up to.  He didn’t scream, so he clearly wasn’t well endowed enough to get hit anywhere important.  Flechette wasn’t exactly an expert -or even a novice- in that sort of thing, but she was ninety-nine percent sure that men didn’t dangle nearly to their knees.

Made lightweight by her power, Shadow Stalker leaped to the nearest wall, then vaulted herself off, careening directly toward three of the retreating men.  As she landed atop the one in the front, she dropped out of her shadow form, returning to her normal weight.  Planting her feet on his shoulder blades, she combined the force of her weight and her momentum with a downward kick of both feet, driving him into the water, hard.  She went shadowy a half second later, becoming almost invisible in the gloom of the empty lot, effortlessly reorienting her now lightweight body to land on her feet.

Both of the men behind Shadow Stalker attacked her, one swiping a knife at her, the other kicking for the small of her back.  Smoky, dark flickers appeared where limbs and weapons passed through her.

Almost casually, she holstered her crossbows, then straightened up.  A flurry of other attacks passed through her.

One man hesitated, seeing the futility of what they were doing, and Shadow Stalker took the opportunity to drop the shadow state.  She leaned out of the way of one desperate punch from the other man, then grabbed him.  She seized him by the shirt-front, pulled him forward with a hard tug on his collar and a counterclockwise turn of her body, then brought her right knee into his ribs.  He fell with a splash.

Metal kneepad, Flechette noted.  That’s going to hurt.

The other man attacked, but Shadow Stalker went shadowy just long enough for his knife to pass through her, then slammed her metal mask into his face.

While he swayed back, stunned, blood streaming from his nose, she reached out and grabbed him by the lower jaw, her fingers digging into the bottom of his mouth.  Instinctively, desperately, he bit down, hard, but the construction of the girl’s gauntlets was good enough to safeguard her fingers.  She used her grip to pull him to one side as she’d just done with his compatriot, helped by a swift kick to the side of one leg.  Rather than use her knee to deliver the telling blow, she brought the heel of her free hand against the gap between the man’s skull and his jaw.  He screamed, crumpled toward the ground, his hands moving to where the strike had hit.

Shadow Stalker waited a moment before letting go, forcing him to twist and squeal in agony before she let him finish collapsing.

After watching him a moment, perhaps to be sure he wouldn’t retaliate, Shadow Stalker glanced at Flechette.  “Your man there is getting loose.”

Flechette had been caught up in the spectacle of watching Shadow Stalker fight.  A kind of horrified fascination.  She saw the thug she’d shot in the crotch, on his back in the water, his pants still fixed to the wall.  He was struggling to work his legs out of the jeans.  She loaded a shot and fired a bolt just beneath his armpit, nailing his sweatshirt to the ground.  Another just above his opposite shoulder and behind his neck secured him.

Shadow Stalker was chasing one of the stragglers.  Going shadow-light, she closed the distance in two long paces, leaving ripples and small disturbances in the foot-deep water, rather than splashes.  As she reached the man’s side, she dropped the shadow state, gripped his ear and used one leg to trip him.  With the grip his ear afforded her, she thrust him face first into the ground with enough force that he couldn’t absorb the impact with his arms.  Water sprayed around them in the wake of the hit.

Flechette reached into her belt and withdrew a handful of darts, each nine inches long.  She channeled her power into each, and then flung them at the feet of the two remaining thugs, catching the edges of their shoes.  Their shoes fixed firmly to the ground and they fell awkwardly.  Two tranquilizer bolts appeared in the rear end of one and the upper thigh of the other.  Shadow Stalker.

Which finished the fight.  None of the men were left in any state to run.

Flechette palmed one of her throwing darts, glanced at it.  She’d been with the Wards a year before she had been given the arbalest and the chain reel.  Her darts had been her weapon of choice for a long time, alongside a rapier she’d eventually retired after too many fights using it had turned out badly.  She hadn’t had the heart to change her codename, even if it didn’t quite apply anymore.  Maybe when she graduated to the Protectorate.

“Hey,” Shadow Stalker called out, disturbing her from her thoughts.  “Here!”

Tired, she thought, mind’s wandering.

Flechette caught the device Shadow Stalker threw to her.  Investigation revealed it to be a small, thin, round device with a single button on top.  “Haven’t seen one of these since training.”

“Times like this call for ’em.  City wants us on patrol, not sitting around with our thumbs up our asses, waiting for the cops to cart these fuckers off,” Shadow Stalker kicked one man in the side, so he flopped over onto his back, no longer face down in the water.  He grunted.

Flechette winced.  That girl is a little too comfortable with violence for my tastes.

While Shadow Stalker ensured that the man with the cuts on his neck wasn’t bleeding out, Flechette  loaded another bolt into her arbalest and fired it into a spot on the wall, two floors up.

She walked briskly to the two men that had just been darted.  She bent down and used her left hand to wind the coil of the restraint device around his left foot, then did the same for the next man’s right foot.

She tossed the restraint device over the bolt she’d embedded in the wall, a metal thread trailing behind it.  She caught it as it fell, then connected it back to the cord, forming a loose loop that encircled the bolt in the wall.  She pressed the button, and the cord retracted, pulled tight around the pole, then continued retracting.  The two thugs were pulled off the ground, so that each hung from the wall by one ankle.

The device would signal nearby police and PRT officers and direct them here.  They’d use their own equipment to make the restraint device lower the men so the thugs could be brought into custody.  The cord was difficult to cut with conventional knives and saws, and those caught wouldn’t want to cut it either, given how they faced a long drop face first onto pavement.  Any buddies of theirs would have a hell of a time getting to them and cutting them free, as well.

She walked over to the man she’d clotheslined, who still hadn’t finished gasping, nor had he collected himself enough to run.  She grabbed his wrist and forced it behind his back.

As she hauled him to his feet, a collision made her stagger back.  It hadn’t been directed at her.  No, it was the man she held that slumped, almost insensate.  He hung his head, a trail of blood dribbling from his lip.

Seeing a movement just outside her blind spot, opposite the man, Flechette pushed her captive down and away.  She had to evade the weapon as it swung towards her head.

It was the middle-aged woman that the men had been attacking.  She held a metal trash can lid in two hands.  Oblivious to Flechette, she swung the lid down at the man’s head.

“Hey!” Flechette shouted, “Stop!”

She reached out to grab for the lid, but a hand on her wrist stopped her.

“Let her,” Shadow Stalker spoke.

The woman kicked the man in the ribs, hard, then struck him with the flat of the metal lid.

“You fuckers!” the woman screamed.

Stunned, Flechette spoke to Shadow Stalker, “The hell?  He’s not in a position to defend himself!”

“Doesn’t deserve to.”

“She’s going to kill him!”

“Better that we give her another few swings than render her powerless for the second time tonight,” Shadow Stalker spoke.  “Or she won’t get over it for a long time.  We’ll stop her before she goes too far.”

“No, this isn’t right.” Flechette pulled her arm free of Shadow Stalker’s grasp, then grabbed the woman’s wrist, stopping her as the lid was brought back behind her head.  Not entirely to the woman, she spoke, “You’re better than this.  You have to be.”

The woman resisted, tried to pull free to make another swing.  When Flechette maintained her grip, the woman used her free hand to throw the lid down on top of the man.

“Stop,” Flechette spoke.  As the woman struggled, she turned to bark a command to Shadow Stalker, “Help!”

“I’m on her side, to be honest,” Shadow Stalker didn’t move.

“So am I,” Flechette grunted as the woman shifted her weight towards her, knocking her off balance.  “Which means stopping her from doing anything she’ll regret!”

“Let me go!” the woman shouted at her, “Fuckers like this hurt my daughter!”

“Is she here?  Your daughter?”  Flechette asked.

“She’s home, it- it happened last week!  Let me at him!  Fuckers!”

“Stop attacking him and I will!”

The woman didn’t have a response, beyond continued struggles.  Though Flechette kept to an exercise regimen, spent four nights a week in the gym, she was still only seventeen, and the woman had a good fifty or more pounds of weight advantage.  The woman pulled free and staggered back, gave her an angry look.

When the lady stepped forward, toward the fallen, bloodied man, Flechette stepped in her way.  The woman didn’t back off, so Flechette raised her arbalest a fraction.

That was apparently enough.  The woman scowled further, then turned and fled the scene, half-running, half-limping.

“Thanks for the backup,” Flechette spat the words to Shadow Stalker.

“Told you, I don’t do the backup thing,” Shadow Stalker bent over the unconscious man, turning his head to investigate his injuries.  “He’ll live.  Him and his buddies deserve what they got.”

“That’s not your call to make.”

“Sure it is,” Shadow Stalker retrieved another restraint device and quickly strung the man up beneath a metal frame meant for an air conditioning unit.  “Times like this, we’re cop, judge, jury and if it really comes down to it, executioner.  We’re the ones with the power.”

“No.  That’s wrong.”

“Suppose we’ll have to agree to disagree,” Shadow Stalker turned her back, preparing another restraint device.

Flechette huffed, angry.  She didn’t want to get into a shouting match, wasn’t sure what to say to convince the girl.  “You can finish your patrol alone.”

“Whatever,” Shadow Stalker replied without looking back, “If you want to be like that.  I’m only on the team because I have to be, so you’re doing me a favor.  Prefer to fly solo.”

Three strikes, Flechette thought, as she strode away.  Nearly being shot for saying hello, the way Shadow Stalker had delayed helping the woman, and now this.

She’d give the other girl the benefit of a doubt.  Maybe Shadow Stalker had some unresolved issues, maybe it had been a rough week.  But for now, she needed to calm down and wait long enough to think more objectively about what had happened.  Then she’d decide whether to deal or to tell her new team leader.

Fuck.  She felt profoundly disappointed.  She wanted to like the other heroine, but this was too much.

She had one other thing she had wanted to do tonight, before she finished her patrol, went back, showered, ate and unpacked.

She squeezed the bud in her ear twice, “Console?”

A brief pause, then a voice in her ear, “Kid Win on the console.  Hi, Flechette.  Deal with those guys okay?”

“Guys are dealt with but… I’m going to do the rest of my night’s patrol alone.”

“Sorry.  I should’ve warned you.  Tends to be easier to work around her.”

So she’s always like that.

“This is unfamiliar territory for me. I might need you to brief me if I run into a cape, so I know what I’m potentially running into.”

“Of course, I’m not going anywhere.”

“And on that subject, I remember meeting someone when I was in town for the attack.  What can you tell me about the cape with the stuffed animals?  Pariah, par-”

“Parian,” Kid Win replied.  “A parian doll was a kind of doll about a hundred and fifty years ago.  Though Parian’s costume is actually closer to a more classical Victorian style porcelain doll, from the same era.”

“Oh.”  That was random.  What kind of guy knew that much about dolls?

He went on, “She’s a rogue.  Fashion student with the costume and stuffed animals as a gimmick to help her build for a professional reputation and stand out.  Tentative rating of Master-6, but we haven’t really seen her fight, outside of the Leviathan encounter.”

“Student.  So she’ll be near a college?”

“College is gone.  Kaput.  Um, let me see.  Last we heard, she was situated between the spot where the college was and the lake downtown.  If I remember right, there’s going to be a fairly thin strip of places there that are intact enough to live in.  Vista ran into her the other night, but she’s asleep right now and we’re behind on paperwork so…”

“So you don’t know exactly what happened, and I’d be going in blind.  She’s harmless though?  This Parian?”

“Nobody’s harmless at a time like this, Flechette,” Kid Win replied.

“Right.”  Flechette thought of the middle-aged woman beating her attacker bloody.

“Listen, easiest way to get to that area, you’ll find the lake to the northwest, walk the perimeter of it to reach the north end.  The area she could be staying at should only be a block or two wide.  If she’s even awake.  I’ve got Clockblocker buzzing in, probably to check in for the night and give me the cliff notes on his nightly patrol, so I’m going silent until you need me, k?”

“Sure.”

Flechette gauged the direction of the ocean, deemed that east, and then headed northwest as Kid Win had suggested.  She traveled at ground level, wading through the water, to make faster progress.  Nothing to prove, now that she had stopped patrolling with Shadow Stalker.

It didn’t take long to find the ‘lake’ Leviathan had made in the downtown area.  Given that the streets were flooded with water anyways, the crater itself was distinguishable only by the barrier around it, and a dark shadow beneath the water where there was nothing beneath to reflect light.  Hulks of fallen buildings sat in the center of the water.  The orange light of a fire on the top floor of one of the buildings suggested that someone had swum to one of the buildings and was staying there.  Maybe one of the safer places to be.

The crater was surrounded by orange striped barriers with flashing lights and portable chain link fences that were chained together.   The fencing formed a solid barrier around the hole.  She walked with the fence to her left, which roughly halved the area she had to keep an eye on, in case of approaching trouble.  Her right index finger was just below the trigger of her arbalest, and her left hand clutched a handful of darts.

The massive sinkhole Leviathan had made was roughly circular, but it was large enough that she couldn’t say for sure when she had turned and started moving more west than north.

Fresh graffiti stained buildings, some warning people to stay away, others were the crude pictographs of hobo signs.  One neighborhood had used the debris of fallen buildings to form makeshift barricades in alleys and in front of doorways.  There wasn’t much intact housing here – the sinkhole sat to her left, and two blocks to her right, from what she could make out in the moonlight, the buildings were too damaged to serve as living accommodations.

At one intersection there were two parallel, vertical lines spray painted in yellow on opposite walls.  Traffic cones, some broken, an orange striped barrier and the remains of one yellow raincoat sat in the water, much of it weighed down by rubble.  Together, the organized debris formed a brightly colored line joining the marks that had been spray painted on the wall.

She stepped over the line, and immediately felt a resistance.  It took her a second to figure out what it was – a thread caught the moonlight.

There was a muffled splashing sound, and a twelve-foot tall gorilla leaped from the nearest rooftop to land directly in front of her.  It swung its arms wildly in front of it, missing her, then slammed both knuckles down in the water, crushing one side of the orange striped barrier.  Flechette raised her arbalest to shoot, then stopped.

It wasn’t real.  Damp cloth, stitched together.  And it was blind.  It wasn’t acting as though it could see her.

She dropped the arbalest, backed over the line, and then waited.

Parian arrived at a run, feet splashing in the water.  She spotted Flechette, and the gorilla moved to place itself between the two of them.

Her creations can only see what she sees.  They’re puppets.

“Stay back,” Parian warned.  She peeked out from behind the gorilla.  Her mask, a doll’s face, was smudged, and a crack ran from the corner of one eye to the ear.  She wore a frock, different than the one she had worn for the Leviathan fight, but it was wet, dirty, and some of the lace had torn.  There was a wood chip in the damp golden curls that were otherwise too perfectly coiled to be real hair

“I’m staying back,” Flechette assured the girl.  “Remember me?”

“Yes.  You talked to me before the fight, pulled me away from that horrible little girl.”

“Yeah,” Flechette smiled, shrugging.  She stepped forward.

“Back!”  Parian called out.  The Gorilla slammed its knuckles against the ground again, then lurched forward, one fist raising as if to deliver a massive punch.

Flechette obeyed, backing up another two steps, hands raised.  The gorilla’s fist stayed where it was.

“I’m a hero.  Member of the Wards.  I’m in town for a little while.”

“Doesn’t matter.  I made a deal.  Me, my friends and my family get a place to stay here, a fair share of the food and water.  In exchange, I keep people from entering.”

“I’m a hero,” Flechette stressed the word.  “I’m not going to cause trouble.”

“I don’t know you’re telling the truth.  Nothing saying you couldn’t be lying.”

“I have ID.”

Parian shook her head.  “It doesn’t matter anyways.”

The frocked rogue climbed up to stand on top of the gorilla’s shoulders.  She added, “I made a deal.  I’m keeping to it.  One hundred percent neutrality.  You trespass, I fight you.”

And I’d almost definitely win, Flechette thought. You may even know that, but you’d fight me anyways.

“Okay,” Flechette replied, trying to sound reassuring, “I won’t step over the line.  I heard you were around here, you’re one of the only recognizable faces for me here, I thought I’d stop by, see how you were doing.”

“Coping,” Parian answered.

“Good, good,” Flechette sheathed her arbalest, hoping the rogue would feel safer.  “Look, I’m here if you need anything.  If people make trouble and you’re not strong enough to protect that neighborhood there, or if you need resources that you couldn’t get otherwise, like names or medical services, call me.  Can I give you my card?”

The gorilla lowered his raised fist, reached forward with palm upturned, and Flechette fished in her belt for her cards.  Slightly damp, but readable.  She placed it in the center of a sopping wet hand crafted out of black denim.  The gorilla’s palm was surprisingly firm.  Hard.  Its shape was a little too humanlike, in comparison to a real gorilla, maybe.  Not that it mattered.

“Okay,” Parian spoke, as the gorilla handed her the card.  Her voice was a little softer.  “Phone lines are down, but cell phones work around here.”

“You guys need anything here?  I don’t know what the situation is with supplies, just got into the city a few hours ago.  Don’t know how that stuff is being distributed, but I could see about making sure you guys have something.”

Parian sat down cross-legged on the gorilla’s shoulders.  “Yeah.  We’re low on fresh water.  This stuff we’re wading in has too much salt content, and you couldn’t even boil it clean if you wanted to, I don’t think.”

“Okay.  Fresh water.”

The doll girl shifted her weight to put the card in the front pocket of her lacy apron, fumbled with it.  Flechette spotted a tremor as the girl put the card away and moved to clasp her hands in her lap.

She’s shaking.

“Hey?” Flechette asked.

“What?”

“Seriously, are you okay?  You holding up?”

Parian turned, looked behind her, as if checking anyone was listening.

“I hate fighting.  Hate confrontation.  Even this, being here, having just thought I might have to fight you, fight anyone, it makes me feel edgy.  My teeth are chattering and I’m not even cold.”

“You faced down Leviathan.  You did better than a lot of people.”

“Do you know how long it took me to get my head together?  To actually step up and help?”

“But you did.  You stepped up.  Give yourself credit.  You’re strong.”

“I want this to be over.  I’m so, so scared that someone’s going to come and try to loot this place and I won’t be able to do anything.”

“You’ve got my card.  I can’t promise I’ll arrive immediately, but I’ll be staying at the Wards headquarters, which isn’t too far.”

Parian nodded.  Quietly, she spoke, “That helps a lot.  More than you know.”

“And I can come by on my patrols, if you want.  Check everything is okay, give you an update on what I can do about supplies.”

Parian hesitated, “Please do.  If you pluck the strings twice, I’ll know it’s you.  I’m using my telekinesis on the strings, I’ll feel it.”

“Deal.  I’m Flechette, by the way, in case you didn’t know.”

“Oh.  Um.  I didn’t.  My name’s Sab-” Parian stopped, made a barely audible groan.

“It’s okay,” Flechette suppressed the urge to smile.  Sabrina?  Maybe.  Sable?  No, the b pronunciation was different.

“I’m an idiot,”  Parian spoke.

Flechette paused, then removed her visor.  “Lily.”

I need people I can trust, she tried to convince herself, even as she knew she had other reasons.  Stuff like this could get her in serious trouble with the Wards.

Parian hesitated, then reached up and removed her mask.  Though her clothing style was western, her wig all blonde curls, her face was dark, middle eastern.  There were bands of metal extending from the edges of her face to the middle of her cheekbones, her chin and her forehead.  Mounts to keep her mask in position?  She had full lips and large, dark eyes. “Sabah.”

Cute, the thought struck Flechette.  Funny to think she’s older than me.

“Nice to meet you, Sabah.”

“I’m still not letting you over the line,” Sabah warned.  She looked so small, up on the gorilla’s broad shoulders, the threat held little gravity.  Maybe, Flechette considered, it was intended more for Sabah than for her.

“Okay,” Flechette donned her visor once more, “But maybe you want to walk with me?  Do a patrol of the perimeter of your territory?  I’ll stay on this side.”

Sabah put her mask back on, and for a second, Flechette thought she would say no.

“Okay.  Thank you.”  Parian dropped her legs down to either side of the gorilla’s neck as it moved forward. To stay decent, the girl pressed her hands down on the lap of her dress, leaning forward a little.  It was a little thing, that bashful modesty, but Flechette felt as much of a rush watching that as she did running across her chain/tightrope with a five-story drop below her.

She didn’t let it show.  Instead, she smiled and started walking, hands clasped behind her back, darts clasped in one hand in case of trouble or ambush.  The gorilla crossed the yellow line and sort of half-ran, half-loped to catch up, move beside her.  It slowed to a plodding, gentle walk

Flechette was secretly relieved.  She knew she’d manage for the duration of her stay, now.  She’d made a connection, even if it wasn’t with someone on her team.  She wasn’t in this alone.

“So, you’re a fashion student?” she asked.

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Sentinel 9.1

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

It was seven-thirty in the evening in a medium sized airport.  Weren’t there supposed to be people?

There had been staff, for sure.  The odd staff member to greet him as he got off the plane, another to see him past the gates.  Still, the terminals were empty, there were no crowds, the shops and restaurants were all closed.  Only half the lights were on.  For the first time, he was wondering if he was getting in over his head.

At least there were no people making the same old jokes about the metal detectors.

Baggage claim had three carousels, which should have been in operation, delivering a regular supply of people’s luggage onto the conveyor belts, crowds gathered around them in anticipation.  Instead, there was a single man in uniform with three large bags already piled onto a cart.

“I can take my bags, I’m stronger than I look.”

“It’s alright, son,” the man replied, “It’s good to have something to do that isn’t cleaning up.”

Son.  That bothered him more than he cared to admit.  Not that he had any ideas about his own ethnicity, but it was vaguely condescending.  A reminder that people didn’t know how to act around him.

“Alright,” he conceded, “Where are we headed?”

The man gestured toward a set of double doors, then gripped the handle of the cart to push it in that same direction.

Stainless steel handles on the doors.  He put his hands on the painted surface instead, pushed them open, and then held one of the doors open for the cart.  He was distracted enough that he almost didn’t notice the group waiting for him.

The group consisted of a squad of PRT officers with their regular assortment of nonlethal weaponry and a large woman with a bleached blonde bob.

“Weld, I’m glad you made it,” she managed to say the words without a trace of humor or smile on her face.  She extended a hand.

He glanced quickly at her hand, checking there were no rings, then shook it.  “Thank you, ma’am.  Director Piggot, I’m assuming?”

“You assume correctly.  Shall we?”

He nodded.

As they fell into step, he asked, “Where is everyone?”

“This airport was attacked by one of the local villain groups just three days ago.  The front lobby and ticket claim were ransacked, and the airport has shut down for the time being, with only special cases such as yourself coming or going.”

“I take it things are bad?”

“Yes.  We have seen this type of situation before, if not to this extreme.  Too many citizens here had been living paycheck to paycheck or were unemployed.  There was a great deal of latent frustration and unhappiness with the status quo.  A powder keg needing only a spark to set it off.”

Weld nodded, “And the arrival of an Endbringer is a bit more than a spark.  I see.  I know the Endbringers tend to target areas where they know they can do the most damage.  You think Leviathan did it on purpose?  Attacked this city because he knew this would happen?”

“If someone raised the idea, I wouldn’t dismiss it.  But our focus should be on what we do in the here and now.  Are you ready to take command of the local Wards?”

“I’m ready to try.”

“Good.  The team here is smaller than your old team in Boston.  It currently consists of Clockblocker, Vista, Kid Win and Shadow Stalker.  We had three members die in the attack.”

PRT uniforms opened the doors, and he followed the Director onto a helipad, followed shortly after by the other PRT uniforms and man with his luggage.  A black helicopter with the PRT logo on the sides sat there, propeller already whirring in preparation for takeoff.

The Director took the hand of a uniform inside the helicopter, stepping inside, and Weld followed her up, refusing a helping hand.  The helicopter shifted slightly with the addition of his six hundred pounds of weight.

When the door shut, cutting off the worst of the noise, he took the offered headphones and put them on.  When he spoke, his voice came through the headphones crystal clear, without a trace of the ambient noise of the helicopter, “So there’s only five of us?”

“There will be more.  We’ve got a lead on a young man who could be joining as a new member, assuming we can get close enough to him to make the offer.  I trust you know your classifications?”

“I do,” Weld nodded.  He’d memorized it as a rhyme, as suggested by his old boss.  Maybe that had been the intention from the start:

Mover, Shaker,
Brute and Breaker.

Master, Tinker,
Blaster and Thinker,

Striker, Changer,
Trump and Stranger.

He was classified as a brute and changer, classifications meant for the unnaturally tough and strong and for those who could change their shape to some extent, respectively.  He never liked the word brute being applied to him, even though he was aware that the labels had originally been intended for the PRT teams to identify and label villains, specifically.  It was only later that they had been extended to identifying the heroes as well.

“Right.  This potential recruit is tentatively marked down as a Tinker/Mover.  It isn’t unusual for powers to emerge in the wake of an event as serious as this.  For this reason, we keep careful track of things to see if we cannot detect any new parahumans.  This young man has been observed in the south end, moving at over a hundred miles an hour with the assistance of a mechanical suit.  His inclusion on a local team would help fill gaps left by the death of Velocity, a local Protectorate member, and Armsmaster’s retirement.”

Weld nodded.

“Others may make themselves known, and we will approach each of them in turn.  To help fill the gap in the meantime, Flechette is arriving from New York.”

Weld chuckled, just under his breath.

“Something amusing?”

He was surprised that she had heard or noticed the laugh.  “No, it’s just that we know each other.  Our teams are -were- friendly rivals, kind of.  We’d meet two or three times a year and compete, just to spar and practice our skills against less familiar opponents.  We’d joke around about which team was better, give each other a hard time.”

“I certainly hope this ‘rivalry’ isn’t going to hamper your ability to lead this team and work with her.”  There was no humor in her tone.  Just the opposite.

“Um, no, ma’am,” he replied, chastened.  The helicopter lifted into the air.  A glance out the window showed the sprawl of the city.  It was dark out, but much of the city was unlit, nothing shining through the windows, no street lights illuminating the roads, nor the headlights and taillights of traffic.

Noting where he was looking, Director Piggot spoke, “Because the current situation is serious, and it isn’t improving as fast as we’d like.  You’re going to have to be on the top of your game.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Clockblocker and Vista are your best assets.  Clockblocker is a Striker 7 with touch-based time-stopping.  Vista is a Shaker 9.  Large scale spatial distortion.”

“Geez louise.  The others?”

“Kid Win is a Tinker 4.  Guns and antigravity devices, primarily.  Shadow Stalker is more ambiguous.  Breaker 3, sublabels are Stranger 2, Mover 1.  Her particular nature as a ‘breaker’ makes her superlight, semi-gaseous, transparent and capable of passing through solid surfaces.”

“Okay.  The team sounds well rounded, I can work with that.”

She handed him a stack of files, “Here’s the files on local factions, including your new team, and a file on the solo heroes and villains.  You’ll have limited access to the databases as well, which you should be familiar with, but this should get you the essential details to get underway.  I’ve ordered those files loosely by priority, so you’ll find the most need-to-know information at the top of the pile.”

Weld took the folders and opened the one for the Wards, glanced through it to memorize the faces of his new team.  Then he went to the next file, “Then the top priority as far as opposition goes is… the Archer’s Bridge Merchants?  Superpowered drug dealers.  A Shaker 2, Tinker 2/Mover 3 and a Shifter 4.  These aren’t big numbers.  Am I missing something?”

“Context.  They’ve become a rallying point, representatives and leaders for those on the lowest rungs of society.  Too many civilians who were the have-nots think allying with the Merchants is a way to become the haves.  People that were angry, disenfranchised or both have gravitated towards the group, are seeking to overturn the social order.”

“So they’ve got, what, a following of homeless?”

“Brockton Bay doesn’t, or didn’t,  have many that you could strictly call homeless, as there were so many abandoned buildings to squat in.  When the Endbringer attacked, he chose the area with many of these buildings.”

“I think I remember, yeah.  The area where the fight started didn’t exactly look upscale.”

“The sad irony of this is that the defending parahumans protected that area, while other locations were leveled by the tidal waves.  That area, known to locals as the Docks, was not under the control of any organized crime or villain organization even before the attack.  After the battle’s conclusion, it was swiftly occupied by the Merchants and growing numbers of their followers, and is now one of the areas with reliable shelter.  Not entirely, but more than many.  By the time our local heroes were finished with search, rescue and minimizing damage, their number of followers had reached a critical mass.  In the past several days, they’ve begun attacking the city infrastructure, the airport, grocery stores, malls and they’ve repeatedly seized medical supplies and food as they come in.”

“So a big priority will be safeguarding incoming supplies from relief efforts, protecting key areas of the city so it can recuperate from the disaster.”

“Yes, for the time being.”

“Let’s see, the next group is… Fenrir’s Chosen?”

“One of two major offshoots of the Aryan villain group, Empire Eighty-Eight, which fell apart after the death of their leader, Kaiser.  Fenrir’s Chosen are led by Hookwolf.  Violent, utterly merciless, and reveling in the current chaos.”

“And it looks like he’s a Shaper 4, Brute 7, with the longest list of homicides or suspected homicides I’ve seen on someone who wasn’t already in prison.  Thick file, I take it he has lots of followers?”

“The largest group in terms of parahuman numbers, at present.”

“And this second group, The Pure, is the second offshoot of that Aryan group, I take it?”

“Small but powerful.  Their leader, Purity, is a Blaster 8 and Mover 4.”

“Yeah, there’s a Breaker 9, a Shifter 8 with Stranger 3 and a Master 6 in that group?  I buy that they’re powerful.”

“Their leader has made overtures to us, offering cooperation in helping us regain control of the city.  We have refused her for the time being.  If she approaches you, you are in no way, shape or form permitted to agree to any deals.”

“Noted.  Let’s see…  Coil, powers unknown.  The Travelers have high ratings on their powers, but their crimes are low end, pretty much.  There’s the Undersiders… three Master classifications in one team.”

“Only one of whom is of any particular concern.  Investigations into two members have suggested sociopathic tendencies, and if they’re channeling their efforts into low threat activities such as robberies, we can afford to ignore them for the time being.”

“Faultline’s Crew.  Mercenaries, low rating, mediocre rating, low rating…  A Shaker 12?  Seriously?”

“The girl has cognitive deficiencies that reduce the effective threat she poses, but yes.  Again, that group is not an imminent threat.  In the current situation, I might suggest you leave them be if you cross paths, conserve your group’s strength for the priority opponents.  The Merchants and Hookwolf’s group.”

“Okay.  I’ll have this memorized by the end of the week.”

“I expect you will.  That brings us to more mundane matters.  You’ll be enrolled full-time at Arcadia High School.  It’s close to the Wards headquarters, and your teachers have been informed about your special nature.  I’m afraid there’s no easy answers as far as your appearance and how the rest of the student body will react to you.”

Weld looked down at his hands.  His body, from skin to hair to bone, was all metal and alloys of varying types.  “I’ve dealt with it before, I’ll manage.”

“We can’t enroll you in the co-op program, as your absence would be noted, and would draw attention to others who are using the co-op program to mask their attendance in the Wards.  It won’t be easy, attending high school full-time, keeping up with your coursework and leading the team in your off hours.”

“It’s fine.  I don’t have to sleep much, anyways, so it’s good to keep busy.”

“Good to hear that.  All that said, I have asked your teachers to make special arrangements, reducing expectations toward your homework, provided you are not struggling in any subjects.  The Wards program will also provide tutors should you need them.”

“Okay, cool.”

“You’ll have time to get into the swing of things without worrying about school, as the high schools are all currently shut down for repairs and to allow time for thorough investigation of the premises.  When the schools are open, we’ll have you take three courses and attend first year classes on parahumans at the University, if that suits you?”

“Perfect.”

“You’ll be living in a private room in the Wards headquarters, and you’ll have a monthly allowance of four hundred dollars in addition to the money put into your trust account by the program.  We expect you’ll spend this allowance on necessities, such as food and clothing.  You do still eat, yes?”

“Yes,” he answered her, bending the truth.  While he did eat, it was a negligible amount.  As he saw it, there was no real harm done if he pocketed some of that extra money and said he spent it on food.  Given that his tongue was made of an alloy and the pleasures of food were a shadow of what they should be, it was only fair that he enjoy himself in some other way.  He knew that some staff back in Boston had caught on, but they hadn’t said anything.  Director Piggot here gave him the vibe that maybe she wouldn’t be so cool with it.  He’d be more careful until he knew for sure.

“Your quarters have been checked and double checked, so there is no exposed metal, no screws, nails, frames or pegs.”

“I appreciate the thought,” he told her.  His physiology had the unfortunate drawback that he couldn’t help but attach to and absorb metal he touched.  While it had been crippling when he’d first been found, dumped in a junkyard, he had learned ways around it.  He could rearrange the metals that formed his body, separate them into their composite elements, and he extended this particular trick to push all the impurities in the metals out to his ‘skin’.  The impurities, unlike the metal that composed the rest of him, didn’t bond, giving him the ability to handle things with his hands and teeth if he needed to.  It didn’t always work – at least once a week there was one embarrassing moments where he bonded with someone’s wedding ring during a handshake or bumped into a shelf display – but it helped.  Clothes helped as well.

In a more serious situation, such as when he was out on patrol, he could force parts of himself to melt and drop off, leaving a piece of himself behind, but it made him distinctly uncomfortable – pain wasn’t the right word – until he replaced the tissue he’d lost.  More often, he preferred to just tear the offending piece of metal from whatever surface it rested on, whether it was a segment of chain link fence or a hubcap.  Whenever he did it, he’d have to spend as much as an hour dissolving the metal and absorbing it into his body.  Either way, they were only emergency measures.

Which wasn’t to say he was weak.  Being made of materials and alloys as strong or stronger than steel from head to toe made him practically untouchable in a fight.  In addition, his biology fell into some optimal middle ground between organic and inorganic.  For those whose powers affected only living things, he counted as inorganic.  The opposite was also true.

“Do you understand why we have gone to this trouble for your sake, Weld?  Why we are testing your ability as a team leader in a crisis such as this?”

“You’re grooming me,” he replied.

“Yes, but do you understand what we’re grooming you for?” she pressed.

He knew, but he assumed she would prefer to explain.  Besides, how she explained would inform him a great deal about his new boss’s personality.  “Not really.”

“You likely know Director Armstrong in Boston, how he tends to prioritize research and understanding parahumans.  I concern myself with more concrete affairs.  Public relations, parahumans as a part of America.”

Weld nodded.

“What Armstrong continually fails to grasp is that if we do not integrate parahumans into society, help society bend to accommodate your kind, there is no point in lab experiments or classifications.  As bad as things might be with the periodic arrival of Endbringers and parahuman criminals, matters could be ten times worse if panic or prejudice takes hold from the public.  You understand?”

“One thing, ma’am,” Weld spoke.

“Yes?”

He took a deep breath.  Not that he really needed it, but he did anyways.  “Forgive me for saying so, but I get the impression you don’t like or respect Director Armstrong?”

“Your point?”

“I just thought you should know he’s something like a father figure to me.  He’s the one who recruited me to the Wards, got me up to speed.  I’ve already made plans to go to his house for a bit this summer.  Maybe I’m putting myself on your sh… in your bad books by saying so, but I just thought I should let you know I’ll step up to defend him if you start putting him down.”

“I see,” tiny frown lines appeared between her eyebrows.

“Sorry.”

A fire on a street below caught his attention.  A car had been set on fire, and people were crowding around it.

Not noticing, Piggot pursed her lips, “Fine.  My apologies for putting you in that situation.  I won’t say anything further about Director Armstrong for the time being.  I was speaking of the need for public relations?”

“Yes ma’am,” he spoke, feeling somewhat relieved at her composure.  He wouldn’t feel a hundred percent okay about it until he verified her as someone who wouldn’t find some other way to get back at him.

“As the number of parahumans first became clear, a long-term plan was established.  In the early phases of the plan, much effort was dedicated to setting up the Protectorate and Wards, ensuring the public had heroes they could look up to, likable faces, likable personalities.  Merchandising, interviews, tv shows, music, movies and more were all encouraged and supported with the idea of building up this image.  Law, policy and rules for the official groups were all shaped with the idea of gradually building confidence in heroes.”

Weld nodded.

“As we enter the next phase, our objective is to push the public a margin beyond their comfort zone.  We are encouraging and promoting the existence of rogues, which is an unfortunate term that heralds back to the early days.”

“Right,” Weld responded.  The term ‘rogue’ applied to anyone with powers who wasn’t hero or villain, the negative connotations of the term tying back to an era when expectations had been rather different, much the same way the brute classification had been coined.

“This is a sensitive subject, slow to advance, as major corporations are particularly litigious when parahumans get involved.  In simple terms, the big businesses do not want people with powers affecting the status quo, and it is very easy for them to derail years of work with one bad media campaign targeting parahumans.”

“I see,” Weld commented.  He didn’t like that in simple terms bit of what she’d said.  Too many people implied he was stupid because he was strong.  But could he really speak up about it, when he couldn’t be sure if her choice of words came from an offensive or judgemental perspective?  Or was he being overly sensitive?

“The second half of this phase is getting the public more comfortable with the outliers.  The people with stranger powers, and stranger appearances.  You’re likable, Weld.  You have a clearly unnatural appearance, if you’ll forgive me saying so-”

Weld shrugged.  He stood out.  There were a hundred things that bothered him more than stares and comments on the subject.

“-but you have fans, and people are interested in you.  You get higher ratings for your interviews than even the average handsome hero gets.  You’re second most popular for team leaders for number of youtube videos, possibly helped by a briefly lived internet meme featuring your face, and you have a blemish-free record, both academically and in your two years serving as a part of the Wards.”

“Thank you.”

“Provided all goes according to plan, we intend for you to become a member of the core Protectorate team within the span of three to five years.  Making your face national, even international, if you are willing.”

“Wow.  Yeah, I’m definitely okay with that, ma’am,” he tried to feign surprise.  Armstrong had already covered much of this.

“Of course, this hinges on your ability to lead your team, in the here and now.”

“Of course.”

“It seems we will land shortly.  Any questions before we do?”

“One.  I was hoping to arrange interstate training sessions with the New York and Boston Wards groups.  As far as I’m aware, the local team doesn’t do this.  They barely have regular situation training.”

“I recall Triumph made a request for something like this, a few years ago.  I believe we refused him on the grounds that it was frivolous.”

Weld squared his shoulders.  He had to be assertive, here. “I’m firmly of the opinion that it would improve the local team’s ability to cooperate and respond to a greater variety of situations.  I’m totally prepared to eat any and all paperwork on our end.”

“Eat the paperwork?”

“I mean I’ll do it all, for the members of my team.  Give you updates after any and all training sessions.  Notes on improvements, lessons learned, weak areas, strengths, resources that could fill any perceived gaps.”

“So long as you’re prepared for me to put a stop to things at any time.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And,” the Director paused a moment as the Helicopter touched down on solid ground, “It cannot cut into the regular patrol schedule.  You and your team members would do this outside of the hours you’re on clock for the Wards.”

“I’ll see if I can sell it to them.  Thank you, Director,” Weld stood.

Secretly, he was elated.  The training games he’d led his team through back in Boston had been some of the more fun moments of his career.  It had also allowed for a harmless but fun interaction with the New York group, giving them a chance to mingle, talk and share war stories.  There was something about being able to mess with others on a level that you couldn’t with teammates you had to fight alongside.  If his new team liked the games half as much as he did, it would be a win in his book.

“Do you wish me to come down and introduce you?”

That earned a moment’s consideration.  Was this woman likable?  No.  Would the others like her?  Probably not.  Which meant that having her introduce him might be detrimental, associate him with someone they might view negatively.

“No, I don’t think it’s necessary, ma’am.”

“Your old keycards will let you in.  I’ll have replacement identification sent to you shortly.  In the meantime, I wish you luck.”

“Thank you, Director,” he handed her his headset and stepped through the door as PRT uniforms opened it.  As if welcoming him into the city proper, there was the sound of a woman screaming down on the street below, the noise turning into a manic laugh in the same breath.  Half the block was without power, and searchlights on the corners of the rooftop scanned nearby streets.  PRT guards stood at the edge of the roof, armaments in hand.  He relaxed at the sight of the guards – if they weren’t acting on whatever was going on below, he didn’t need to worry about it.

He took a deep breath, deep enough that he could feel the groan of the metal stretching to its limits inside his chest.  Then he stepped off the rooftop and through the elevator doors.  When the complex chrome doors shut, they cut off the noise of the helicopter entirely.

It was utterly quiet, inside the box.  There was barely any sense of motion or movement from the elevator.  Tinker designed.  It had to be.  He avoided touching the chrome walls or railing.  It was probably coated with something, but emerging with a piece of railing stuck to him would make for a terrible first impression.

Stepping out into a hallway, he walked up to a security terminal.  He swiped his identification card, spoke his name for the voice authentication, “Weld.”  There was a pause, and then the doors glided open.

His team was there, each with their masks off.

Clockblocker sat in a chair at the huge computer to the right of the room, swiveled to check out their new arrival, then stood, folding his arms.  Red haired, freckled, thin lipped, he wore a costume that was all white, with animated images of clock faces on it.  A white helmet sat on the counter of the computer terminal.

Shadow Stalker was leaning against a wall, thumbing through a smartphone.  She had one foot against the wall, one arm folded just under her chest, her free hand resting in the crook of her other elbow.  She looked up at him, stuck the phone in a pouch on her belt.  She was dark-skinned, pretty, and from  what he could see beneath her costume and her voluminous cloak, she had a nice body.  Athletic figure.  A part of Weld’s adolescent psyche was relieved that there was some eye candy here.

Kid Win and Vista arrived from what the ‘cubicles’ at the far end of the spacious room.  They weren’t really cubicles, but sectioned off areas with beds and room for personal effects.  The base in Boston had been similar.  Kid Win was in civilian clothes, brown-haired, ruddy cheeked in a way that suggested he had been exercising until just recently.  Very normal looking.

Vista was in pyjamas, her hair tied back into a ponytail.  He’d had someone as young as her on his team in Boston, but the boy had been a Thinker, a limited precog content to work and communicate with them from their command station.  This girl had been out in the field – three fingers on her left hand were bandaged, with crimson seeping in through the white.  Her eyes were puffy, as though she’d been crying until very recently.

Should he comment on that?  Offer support?  He wasn’t sure what to say, if it would even be welcome.

“Hello,” he spoke.  He received a chorus of muttered and murmured greetings in return.

“Look,” he said, “I won’t make a big deal of this.  The guys upstairs want me in charge.  It’s going to take me a short while to get up to speed, but I hope to prove to you guys that I can and will work as hard as anyone.”

It was hard to say what he’d expected, but surely he should have gotten more of a response than some blank stares and glazed looks.  Was it the wrong time for this?  Every single one of them looked dog tired.  Clockblocker looked like he was barely managing to stand.

“From everything I’ve heard, you guys are an excellent team, and I hope I can do you justice as a leader.  It’s my hope that we can improve on a winning formula.  I’ve talked to the director about some special training-”

“Training?” Clockblocker interrupted, “You just lost me.”

“If you’ll hear me out, I think you’ll like the idea.”

“Have you seen the situation out there?” Clockblocker challenged him, “Less than an hour ago, I saved a guy I know from my high school physics class from being dragged into an alley by a half-dozen grown men.  One of them stuck him with a needle before I got him away from them.  The Hospitals are shut down or over capacity, so I brought him here.  He’s upstairs right now, getting drugs to ensure he doesn’t get HIV.”

Weld struggled to find something to say, failed.

Clockblocker went on, “Kid Win and I stopped some lunatics in gas masks from mixing ammonia and bleach into a poison gas.  You know why?  They wanted to off the people in an apartment block so they could loot the place and stay there.  There’s people going fucking crazy out there, and you’re talking training.”

“I didn’t mean now,” Weld protested, backpedaling, “I was thinking in terms of the future.  The training would be something to look forward to, after this crisis has passed.”

“You’re assuming it’s going to pass,” Shadow Stalker replied, her voice tired.  “Some are saying this is the way things are going to stay.  I almost agree with them.  This isn’t the kind of city that bounces back from things.”

I’m losing them.  “I can’t believe that.  We’ve got to have hope.”

“Pull a fifteen hour patrol out there, then come back and talk to me about hope,” Clockblocker spoke.  “You know, I could almost play along.  Go with the blind optimism, say yippee to training.  But you don’t even mention the guy you’re replacing?  A few words for the dead?  It’s a matter of respect, bro.”

“I didn’t mean to dismiss them or their sacrifice.  I just didn’t know them, and-”

Clockblocker turned, swiping his arm angrily at his helmet to snatch it off the counter.  Tucking it under one arm, he spoke to the others, his back to Weld, “I’m going to check on my family.  I’ll head there in costume, in case I run into trouble, be back in the morning.  Mind manning the console, Kid?”

Kid Win shook his head, “I need to take a break anyways.”

Vista glanced at Weld, then asked, “Where do you guys need me?”

“Go sleep,” Shadow Stalker spoke, placing a hand on Vista’s head as she walked past the girl, “I’ll start my patrol, go with Clock to make sure he gets home and that he has some backup.  You can relieve me when I’m back, maybe get Clockblocker to go with you.”

“Thank you,” Vista’s voice piped up, with a definite note of relief.

Helplessly, Weld watched as the team split up to go their separate ways, Kid Win sitting down at the far end of the computer station, Shadow Stalker and Clockblocker heading for the elevator.

“I fucked up.  I already lost them,” Weld spoke, mostly to himself.

“No.  They’re just tired,” Vista spoke from beside him.  “And not just lack of sleep.  You’ll see what I mean.  You could’ve mentioned Aegis, Browbeat, and Gallant, but you can’t be blamed if Clockblocker didn’t give you time to get around to it.  Nobody’s really in the mood for speeches.”

“Right,” Weld replied, feeling lost, “They’re the ones who died?”

Vista gave him a look that could only be described as pity.  “You didn’t even learn their names?  Nevermind what I just said.  Yeah, you fucked up.”

Then she turned away and walked back to the cubicles.  She was halfway there when he saw her rub at one cheek with the back of her hand.

“I… I just got here,” Weld said, helplessly.

I just got told by a pre-teen, he thought.

“Shit,” he swore under his breath.  He found a chair in front of the computer and dropped the stack of file folders on the nearest flat surface.  He plucked the file folder off the top of the stack, opened it and began studying.

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Extermination 8.7

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Sophia Hess was Shadow Stalker. 

I tried to pull all the individual pieces and clues together, fill in the blanks.  Did this mean Emma was a cape, too?  No – I’d seen Emma in the presence of other capes.  At those times, I knew, she’d have reason to be in costume if she had powers.

But those times I was thinking of, when my cape and civilian lives had crossed?  Emma had been at the mall, where Shadow Stalker had been on duty.  She’d been at the fundraiser, too.  As Shadow Stalker’s plus one?  Emma’s dad had been there as well.  Was that a clue?

A sick feeling in my gut told me that Emma knew about Sophia and Shadow Stalker.

I could even guess that Emma had found out sometime before high school started, while I was at nature camp.  It would have been an exciting revelation, a juicy secret, being a part of the cape community.  Seduced by that drama, Emma would have turned her back on me, became Sophia’s best friend.  The civilian sidekick and confidante to the young heroine; it was cliche, but cliches had their basis in something.

I was probably wrong on some level, but it gave answer to questions I’d assumed I’d never get an answer to.

A  hand seized me by the back of the neck, hauled me to my feet.

Numb, I wobbled, relying heavily on the painfully hard grip to stay balanced.  He turned me around, and I saw Armsmaster, his lips curled in a silent snarl of anger.   A glance at his shoulder showed no sign of the ragged mess from when I’d last seen him, but there was no arm either.  I thought I saw a glimpse of a flat expanse of skin.  Panacea’s work?

“What are you doing here?!” he roared the words to my face.

When I couldn’t formulate an answer for him, he marched me out of the curtained enclosure, kicking the curtain so it slid shut, moved me towards the nurse’s station where Miss Militia and Legend were talking.

I apparently didn’t move fast enough for him, because he swung his arm forward, forcing me to stumble forward to keep my feet under me.

It was looking increasingly likely that I would get arrested, but my thoughts turned to the trio, and their crime and punishment.  Had Sophia, Emma and Madison had gotten off easy because Sophia was a superhero?  I had my suspicions that the schools worked alongside the Wards, things wouldn’t work if they didn’t, and the schools were a government institution just like the Wards were.  Did Sophia get easier treatment?  Two weeks suspension when she deserved expulsion?

Had my teachers been looking me in the eye while calculating ways to make things easier on their resident superhero?

Maybe.  More likely that it was some combination of ineptitude, laziness and ignorance, on top of being influenced by the school’s link to the Wards program.

Armsmaster slammed my upper body down against the counter of the nurse’s station, hard.  I grunted, as much in reaction to being brought back to reality as in reaction to the blow.

“Armsmaster!” Legend’s tone was a rebuke to Armsmaster for the show of force.

More able to take it in stride than the leader of the Protectorate, Miss Militia asked, “What happened?”

“Escaped her cautionary restraints, caught her peeping on one of the blue tags.”

“Damn it,” Legend muttered.

“Who?” Miss Militia asked, “And how bad?”

“Shadow Stalker.  Saw her unmasked.”

“I see,” Miss Militia spoke, “Nurse?  Would you see that everyone without clearance is put to work elsewhere, while we resolve this?”

“Yes ma’am,” the reply came from a man I couldn’t see.

I struggled to turn over, failed.  When I found I couldn’t budge Armsmaster’s grip, I gave up, slumped onto the counter.

“Who is she?” Legend asked.

“Skitter, member of the Undersiders, a group of teenage villains,” Miss Militia replied.  “Master-5, bugs only.”

“This situation is serious,” Legend spoke, walking around the counter until I could see him.  I saw nurses and others behind him staring, some of them being ushered away by an older nurse in scrubs.  “Do you understand?”

He nodded at Armsmaster, and Armsmaster eased his grip some, as if it would make it easier to talk.

I was opening my mouth to speak when the thought struck me – If Sophia was Shadow Stalker, did she know who I was?  She’d heard me talk in costume, hadn’t she?  I knew from the time the trio had overheard me in the bathroom and doused me in juice, that at least one of the girls could recognize my voice.

I shook my head a little, as if it could get my thoughts back on track.  “Nobody explained anything.  You guys were going to arrest me, so I thought I’d leave.”

“Hospital personnel aren’t permitted to talk to patients, liability reasons,” Miss Militia told me, echoing what I’d heard earlier.

“Figured as much when the nurse didn’t answer my questions,” I muttered.  No use dragging that nurse-in-training down with me.  She’d been nice.  “But Panacea did have words with me when she was putting me back together, and-”

“Panacea is a member of New Wave,” Armsmaster spoke, and I got the impression the explanation or excuse was meant more for Legend than it was for me, “She’s not official.”

“She’s the only person who would talk to me!” I raised my voice.

“I would ask you to keep your voice down,” Legend spoke, his voice hard, “There’s very few ways a situation like this can go, with a cape’s civilian identity at stake.  If you start shouting, specifically shouting what you know, it would severely curtail what options you have left to you.  Understand?”

When I didn’t come up with a response right away, he added, “If the tables were turned, if it was you who had your identity uncovered, you would want us taking the same firm hand, giving you that same respect.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle silently for a second there.  The armor of my mask clacked against the countertop as I let my head rest there.  Respect?  For Sophia?

Besides, I had suspicions that if the tables were turned, Shadow Stalker wouldn’t be pinned against the counter of the nurse’s station.

Taking a deep breath – no use digging myself in deeper – I asked, “You were talking options.  What are they?”

“If you were judged to have used an Endbringer situation to your advantage, you would meet the most serious penalty we can offer.  Those who violate the Endbringer truce are almost always sent to the Birdcage,” he let that last word hang in the air.

I had to keep myself from laughing again.  This shit was too ridiculous.  This was Sophia.  She was five times the villain I was.  The only difference between us were the labels that we stuck on ourselves.  I told him, “It was an accident.”

“Okay,” Legend told me.

Armsmaster told him, “Skitter here has been building a fairly strong reputation as an adept liar, so be cautious.”

“Oh?”

“She’s fooled my instincts and my hardware on more than one occasion.”

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to keep that in mind.”  When Legend returned his attention to me, his lips were creased in a frown.

What could I say to defend myself now?  Anything I said would be colored by Armsmaster’s undeserved comment on my personality.

“Another option would be for you to join the Wards.  We were willing to offer you this when we got around to talking to you, before seeing you on your way.  You would be placed under varying degrees of probation based on your past crimes, but you would earn a paycheck, you’d have a career-”

“No.” The word left my mouth before I even thought about it.

And when I did think about it?  No.  Not with Sophia there.  No way, no how.  If I stepped on her turf, I suspected one of us would kill the other.  Besides, there wasn’t one thing about joining the Wards that was even remotely redeeming.

“No?” he sounded surprised.

“Just… no.  I’d sooner go to the Birdcage.”  I was surprised that I actually meant it.  My contempt for the heroes was growing.  Armsmaster had refused to cooperate with me on any level.  Glory Girl and Panacea hadn’t done anything to earn my respect when I ran into them.  Topping it off, they had a personality like Sophia’s on their team?  I couldn’t even imagine joining them, now.

“I don’t think you understand what you’re saying,” Legend spoke as if choosing his words carefully.

I took a deep breath.  “Is there a third option?”

“You do not get to negotiate!” Armsmaster roared.  Heads turned.

Feeling a flare of anger, I retorted, “So he gets to yell, but I don’t?”

“We have the authority here!” Armsmaster shouted.

“The only authority you have is the authority people give you.”  It wasn’t me who responded.  The voice was male, familiar.

“Grue!” I called out.

“You’re alive,” Grue responded.  “We thought-”

“Is she okay?  Tattletale!?”

“I’m at about ninety percent,” Tattletale’s voice informed me.  “You’re the one that gave us a scare.”

I sagged in relief.

“I would ask you to step back and let us handle this,” Miss Militia told him.  “If any of you do decide to stay, and Skitter divulges the confidential information she’s happened upon, you could be just as culpable, face the same restrictions and penalties.”

Grue replied, “So you want us to leave a teammate in your custody, here?  No.  That’s ridiculous.  I can’t speak for the others, but I’m staying.”

Teammate.  He’d said I was his teammate.

There was a pause.

“All four of you, then,” Miss Militia replied, sighing, “I expected as much.  I simply thought you should be informed.”

“Skitter,” she went on, “Just to be clear, you would be well advised to keep your mouth shut, until we’ve come to a consensus here.  Or you could get your team in trouble.”

“Noted,” I replied.

Armsmaster let me stand, but he settled his one hand on my shoulder, held on with an steel grip that left me no illusions about my ability to walk over and join my friends.  Ex-friends?  I wasn’t sure where we stood.  I hadn’t expected them to come to my defense.

Grue looked much as he ever did, a human shape wreathed in smoky darkness.  His skull mask showed through, when he was still like this, but his face was impossible to make out, let alone his facial expressions.  Even his body language was masked beneath the layer of darkness, when it was billowing around him like it was, making him seem larger.  I thought maybe he had his arms folded, but I couldn’t be sure, and he had his feet planted shoulder width apart.

Regent looked a little worse for wear.  He was wet, dirty, spattered in blood, and he had a long cut running from the side of his neck to his shoulder, down to his elbow, all neatly stitched up.  I hadn’t heard any alerts about him being taken out of action, so I assumed it wasn’t that serious.  That, or it was serious, and my broken armband hadn’t caught the message.

Bitch, by contrast, looked to be in better shape than anyone present, physically.  She stared at the ground, hands jammed in the pockets of mud-caked, soaking wet jeans.  Her hair was wet, pulled straight back and away from her face.  A hard plastic dog mask was raised so it sat on top of her head, cord dangling.  She was intact.  Physically.

Mentally?  Emotionally?  Her dogs were the closest thing she had to family, and she had watched seven or eight of them die.  She was rigid with tension and repressed anger, but she didn’t have anyone to direct it at, so it broiled inside her, just waiting for the slightest of excuses to be released and vented.  I wondered if Grue had told her to keep her hands in her pockets to keep her from lashing out and hitting someone.

Tattletale was on crutches with one leg bent to keep it away from the ground, had a bad bruise on her face, but was otherwise in one piece.  Her eyes darted to watch the three heroes and myself.

“Skitter escaped her restraints and uncovered another cape’s secret identity, and we can’t say for sure whether it was intentional or not,” Miss Militia explained to the rest of the group.  “In the interest of protecting that cape, who I assume isn’t well enough to join the discussion…?”

She looked at Armsmaster, who shook his head.

“…We’re left with three options,” she finished her thought.  “Jail time, especially if it’s discovered that this was intentional.  Joining the Wards under a probationary program-”

Regent snorted.

“Or, as a final option, some sort of collateral.”

“That option is generally reserved for capes we can trust,” Armsmaster spoke, his voice low.

My pulse picked up as I heard Armsmaster’s words.  This was a dangerous situation, all of a sudden.

“Collateral?  Explain?” Grue asked Miss Militia, apparently not gathering the deeper meaning of Armsmaster’s statement.

“This isn’t the first time we’ve run into a situation like this, though this is a first for an Endbringer event that wasn’t a blatantly intentional attempt to gather information on a rival.  In the previous case, the villain couldn’t be detained conventionally, and the Birdcage wasn’t yet running.  To top it off, he… wasn’t Protectorate material.  For reasons I won’t explain.  Yet every individual involved was concerned that if we didn’t resolve the case, it would be a costly loss of resources on both sides with an ongoing pursuit by the heroes, and there would be potential escalation leading to serious harm or death on one side or the other.”

Grue nodded, “So?”

“So he agreed to reveal his real face to the other cape, so that any abuse of the knowledge on his part could or would be just as damaging to him.”

Reveal myself to Sophia?  No.  On so many levels, no.

“I’m sorry,” I told her, “That doesn’t work either.”

Armsmaster tightened his grip on the armor of my shoulder until I could feel the pinch.  Miss Militia leveled a very cold look at me.  I saw Tattletale staring at me.  I met her eyes.  She was easiest to look at.

“You’re making a difficult situation even more difficult for you, by being stubborn,” Legend spoke.

“Knowing Skitter, I’m sure she has her reasons,” Grue replied.

“She always does,” Armsmaster replied.

Grue turned his head sharply to look at the hero.

No.  He wouldn’t.

“Well, you’ve made a good case,” Tattletale spoke, “Let me make mine?”

“One second,” Legend spoke.  He turned to Armsmaster, “I need more details on this group.”

“The one that is speaking is Tattletale, member of the Undersiders,” Armsmaster spoke, his voice a hair away from being a growl, “A master manipulator, penchant for head games, likes to pretend she’s psychic but she isn’t.  We don’t know her power, possibly clairvoyance, psychometry, or some combination thereof, but we’ve got her pegged as a Thinker 7.”

“Seven?  I’m flattered,” Tattletale replied, grinning.

“It’s reason enough to end this conversation here and now,” Armsmaster spoke, “Before you find some angle.”

“Fine,” Legend nodded, “That’s all I need.  Miss Militia?  Escort them away?”

Green-black energy leapt to Miss Militia’s hand, materialized into the shape of a gun.  She didn’t raise it, and she kept her finger off the trigger, but the threat was implicit.

“You start a fight here,” Grue spoke, “You better pray to some higher power that you can fucking spin this well enough with all those others looking, because it’s an end to the truce if you don’t, too many eyes on this.”

Grue turned his head, and I leaned forward a little to see what he was looking at.  There were capes at the far end of the hallway, staring at the scene, kept out of the main triage area by a set of PRT officers.  Trickster leaned against a wall with a cell phone raised, recording video.

“It’s not a concern,” Legend spoke.  “Miss Militia?”

“Come on, let’s walk,” she told the others.

“No,” Grue replied, his chin raising an inch, challenging, defiant.

Tattletale raised one hand, “If  could just say my piece, I-”

“Quiet,” Armsmaster interrupted her.

“Nobody ever lets me talk!” she spoke, turning on her heel to walk away, flouncing, almost.  It was a bit theatrical, overacting.  I wondered if someone that didn’t know her would catch it.  “Whatever.  Grue, let’s go.”

Grue looked at her.

“It’s cool,” she gave him a little smile, then she offered me one, “Hey Skitter, don’t sweat it.  We’ll handle this, kay?”

“Kay,” I muttered.  In a way, I was relieved at the idea of them leaving.  I had no idea what I’d do, but it was a relief anyways.

Miss Militia raised her gun a fraction, waved it toward the others to prod them onward.  One by one, they turned.  Tattletale led the herd in walking away, followed my Regent and Bitch.  Grue was the last to turn away, with Miss Militia following him.

When they were out of earshot, Legend floated over the counter to land in front of me.

“We’ve given you three options.  Pick one or I’ll choose for you.”

I opened my mouth, closed it.  The only things I could think of to say would only get me in more trouble.

This working?  This on?  Good.  The tinny female voice rang out from the armbands of the two heroes.

Armsmaster snapped his head around.  I followed his line of sight to where Grue, Regent and Bitch were standing in between Tattletale and Miss Militia.

For those of you who don’t have a front row seat, the very well armed Miss Militia is currently doing her best to point a Beretta 92fs at my head.  If this broadcast ends prematurely, you can all rest assured that the Protectorate is willing to kill and break the truce if it means censoring its dark, dirty little secrets.

Legend grabbed me, hauling me into the air as he crossed the length of the room, Armsmaster hurrying behind as we raced towards the scene.

“Free speech is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?” I saw Tattletale’s lips moving as she broadcast the message.  She wasn’t holding any buttons down on her armband, but it was going through with no difficulty.  Miss Militia held a handgun pointed at Grue’s heart.

Other capes were in the vicinity, some of the Travelers, New Wave, out of towners.  Not quite in earshot, maybe, but close enough to see everything unfold.

The heroine looked at Armsmaster as we arrived, “She said something about deep access, offered your name, then the armband asked her for your password.  She knew your password.”

“Armband, pause announcement,” Tattletale spoke.

Acknowledged.  Her armband replied.

With his one arm, Armsmaster reached for his shoulder, but his Halberd wasn’t there.  Photon Mom had apparently decided not to bring it when she’d carried him here.  No EMP burst possible.

“Let’s negotiate,” Tattletale spoke, taking a step to one side, ducking a little to ensure that someone else was always in between herself and Miss Militia.  Bitch scowled as the gun moved to point toward her head, with Tattletale roughly on the other side.

“Negotiate?” Legend asked.

“Sure.  Let’s turn things around.  You gave Skitter your three options.  Here’s my three.  Number one: Shoot us now, and confirm to everyone in this room, civilian and cape alike, hero and villain, that you’ve got something to hide.  It doesn’t even have to be lethal, people will still have their concerns if you knock us out rather than let us talk.”

Legend nodded, “Okay.”

“Two: I do my little announcement, and the truce ends.  I really don’t want to do that.  I recognize how necessary it is.  But if you decide that one cape’s identity maybe getting publically revealed is worth the truce, well, that’s on you, not me.”

“And the third option is that we release the girl,” Legend guessed.

“You got it,” Tattletale spoke.

“Except that you could be bluffing,” Legend frowned.  “You’re a master manipulator, according to Armsmaster.”

“True enough.  You know, Alexandria was giving me a recap on what I missed, in exchange for my intel on the Endbringer.  Let’s see… Armband, find me the largest break in casualties from the earlier Leviathan encounter.”

Found.

“Mark this time period.”

Marked.

“The notifications in the minute before the mark?”

Sundancer down, ED-6.  Eschutcheon deceased, CD-6.  Herald deceased, CD-6.

“What is the point of this?” Legend asked.

“Please replay us the notifications following the mark, until I tell you to stop.”

Manpower deceased, CD-6.  Aegis deceased, CD-6.  Fenja down, CC-6.  Fenja deceased, CC-6.  Kid Win down, CC-6.  Skitter deceased, CC-6. Kaiser deceased, CC-6.

“Stop.”

“What is the point of this?”  Legend folded his arms.

“Skitter’s right here, she’s not dead.”

“My armband broke,” I replied.

“Did it?  Or did someone break it?”  Tattletale’s gaze went to Armsmaster, her voice dropping in volume to ensure that our ‘audience’ didn’t hear.

“What are you implying?”  Armsmaster growled.

“I’m implying that you set things up to guarantee yourself a one-on-one fight with Leviathan.  Who cares, after all, if some villains get murdered in the process, if it means stopping an Endbringer?”

Armsmaster raised his voice, “This is exactly the sort of manipulation-”

“Elaborate,” the one spoken word from Legend was sufficient to cut Armsmaster off.

“Armsmaster has a fancy computer system in his suit, set it up to predict Leviathan’s movements and actions.  Clockblocker tagged the Endbringer, put him on pause long enough for Armsmaster to set up the playing field the way he wanted it, with that predictive program.  Leviathan’s going after the people who can make forcefields, and Armsmaster uses this, dangles Kaiser like bait, puts more villains – Fenja and Menja- in the way to Kaiser.  Sure enough, Leviathan marks Kaiser as a target, charges through the conveniently arranged villains, and goes straight to the spot where Skitter is.”

“Oh no,” I heard Miss Militia mutter under her breath.

“This is nonsense,” Armsmaster spoke, stabbing his index finger towards her, “Heroes died too.”

Tattletale didn’t hesitate a second in replying, “To your credit, if any credit is due, that was an accident.  Your program can’t account for that many variables, probably, in the chaos of a bunch of capes trying to keep Leviathan pinned down.  Either way, Leviathan did as you wanted, followed the path you plotted.  You used a directed EMP blast to nuke Skitter’s armband, ensuring that she couldn’t report Leviathan’s position and call in reinforcements, buying you time to take on Leviathan one on one.  Who cares if she dies, after all?  She’s a villain, and you’re positive you’ll win, that it’ll be worth the body count you just allowed Leviathan to rack up.  Except you lost.”

Armsmaster scowled at her.

“This is a serious set of accusations,” Legend spoke.

“Sure.”

“But it’s speculation.”

Tattletale shrugged, “Take Skitter’s armband.  It’ll have damage from the EMP hit.”

“You bitch,” Armsmaster snarled, “This is a lie.”

“Check the armband,” Tattletale repeated, “And you’ll see the truth.”

“Convenient that this would take days or weeks to check,” Armsmaster spoke.

“True, so how about I just do another announcement?  Tell everyone that’s still wearing an armband an abbreviated version of the same story I just told you?  How do you think they’d react?  If you’re really innocent, I’m sure your name would be cleared eventually, after the test results came back from the armband.  If it’s wrong, we get get in everyone‘s bad books for fucking around with an Endbringer situation.  Hell, I’ll even submit to being detained while you get things checked out.  You can take me from there to jail if I’m wrong.  Either way, you get some jerk in custody.”

Legend frowned.

Armsmaster lunged forward, swatting Grue aside with his armored hand.  He shoved Regent aside, reached for Tattletale.

A laser to the right shoulder spun him around, sent him sprawling to the ground.  His armor smoked where the laser had made contact.

“Who!?  Why!?”  Armsmaster flopped over, saw Legend with one open hand aimed at him.  “Legend?”

Miss Militia pointed her handgun at his lower face.

“So, I’m guessing you don’t want this getting out,” Tattletale spoke, looking at the heroine, “Let us walk away, I keep my lips sealed.”

“I know you were tired, that you hadn’t slept all last night,” Miss Militia told Armsmaster, ignoring Tattletale, “Frustrated, your dream taken from you.  But to go this far?”

“It was for the greater good,” Armsmaster replied, without a trace of shame or humility, “If it had worked, Leviathan would be dead, the man holding Empire Eighty-Eight together dead.  All of us survivors would have been legends, and this city could have risen from the ashes, become something truly great.”

“It didn’t work,” Tattletale spoke, “Couldn’t.”

“Shut up.  You’ve said enough,” Armsmaster spat the words, looked away from her, breathing hard.

“The way the Endbringer’s physiology works?  You could detonate a small atom bomb in his face, he’d probably survive.  Take him two or three years to recover, but he’d survive.”

“Shut up!” Armsmaster raised his head to shout at her.  He stopped, eyes flickering to me.  When he spoke again, his voice was almost calm.  “You don’t know everything.”

No.

“Her,” he pointed a hand at me, “She’s not who you think she is.”

I spoke quickly, “Grue, shut him up.”

Grue raised his hand.  But he didn’t blanket Armsmaster in his darkness.

“She’s a wannabe hero.  Has been from the start, since the night Lung was first brought into custody.”

Grue’s hand dropped to his side.

“I met her that night.  She said she was a hero, that you Undersiders mistook her for a villain.  I didn’t think twice about it until she arranged a meeting with me, the night before the bank robbery.  Told me she had joined your group as an undercover agent, getting the dirt on you so she could hand that group over to us.  Talked to me again the night you raided the fundraiser, out there on the balcony.  Told me if I let her go, she’d get the details on your boss to me.  Guess she hasn’t gotten around to figuring that little detail out, yet.”

I tried to speak, to say something, even ‘I changed my mind’.  My throat was too dry to form the words.

Armsmaster turned, shouted at the capes who stood watching, “You want to look down on me!?  I tried to save this city, I got closer to killing the fucking Endbringer than Scion!  That girl is the person you should be mocking, spitting on!  A wannabe hero without the balls to do anything heroic!  Planning from the start to betray teammates for fame!”

I stepped back, swallowed hard.

“Is this true?”

I turned to look at Grue, but he wasn’t asking me.  The question was for Tattletale.

“Yeah,” Tattletale confirmed, sighing.

Bitch stared at me wide eyed, teeth bared, as if all basic human expression had left her as she regarded me.  Regent looked me up and down, turned away, as if in disgust, one fist clenched hard enough to make the area around the long stitched up cut on his arm stand out in white.

I couldn’t see Grue’s face, could barely make out his body language, but I knew that it would have stung ten times worse than anything else if I could see his expression in that moment.

Tattletale was the only one who didn’t look surprised.

I backed away a step, and nobody moved to stop me.  The heroes were preoccupied with Armsmaster, the Undersiders couldn’t or wouldn’t go around the gathered heroes to follow me.

Some of the capes that were in the vicinity were staring at me.  Murmuring.  Panacea was among them, looking at me as though I were from another planet.

I turned and ran out of the hospital, out the door and into the street, kept running.

Except I had no place to run to.

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Extermination 8.6

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All of the adrenaline, emotions and endorphins that had been building since I first heard the sirens, maybe even before them – when I learned about Dinah Alcott – made for one hell of a rush.  More relevant to the present, it made for one hell of a mental wipeout as I came down from the rush.  A low point to equal the ‘high’.

The background noise of screams, shouted orders of doctors and nurses, a hundred heart monitors beeping out of sync and my ‘cell’ of three curtained ‘walls’ cutting me off from everything else?   Didn’t help.

My arm hurt, and hanging from the manacle made that ten times as bad.  My back was the worst thing, a slow, steady, pain that terminated in my midsection. It seemed to build in intensity every second I paid attention to it, settling into a dull blistering of pain when I focused my attention elsewhere.  If I didn’t focus on keeping my breathing steady and deep, I found that I unconsciously held my breath to minimize the pain.  That only made it worse when I did have to breathe again, because it brought tightness in my throat and chest, along with agonizing coughing fits.

None of that was even touching on that growing terror over the fact that, hey, I couldn’t feel my legs, and it wasn’t getting better.

If my back was really broken, it could mean my best case scenario was surgery and years of physical therapy, years of crutches and wheelchairs.  My worst case scenario would be never walking again.  I didn’t have a power that would help too much on that front.  It would mean the end of my career as a cape, never having sex with a boy the natural way, and never going for another morning run.

I made myself take a deep breath.  It shuddered as I exhaled slowly, and not just because it hurt to breathe.

I couldn’t do anything about my back, in the here and now.  My arm?  Maybe.  The metal pole was fixed to the wall at every foot or so by horizontal bars, and the end of the manacle was stopped from descending any further by one of the bits that extended to the wall, three feet or so above my head.

I couldn’t really believe they were going to arrest me.  Like Tattletale had said, there were rules.  Largely unspoken rules, but still more important than anything else in the cape community.  You didn’t profit from an Endbringer attack, you didn’t attack your nemeses or take advantage of undefended areas to steal.  You didn’t arrest a villain that came to help.

Because when people started doing that, the truce broke and things became ten times easier for the Endbringer.

The manacle on my wrist made me wonder.  I’d made some enemies with the good guys.  Maybe I was getting some rough treatment because of it.

One ominous idea nagged at me, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.  It was that I might not get any treatment at all – for my back, specifically – because of grudges against me and capes who could ‘suggest’ that maybe the doctors’ resources could be better directed elsewhere.

If they went that route, one hundred percent deniable, excusable, then there’d be nothing I could do about it.

If that was what was going on, being manacled like this would be something of a slap in the face, a way of letting me know it was intentional, while keeping me from contacting anyone to complain.

My arm shifted involuntarily as I cringed at a painful intake of breath, swinging a little, and I clenched my teeth.

I turned my head, gripped the fabric of my pillow with my teeth, tugged and pulled my head forward at the same time.  It moved to my left.  I did it again, bumped my shoulder, making my arm swing on the chain once more.  I suppressed the noise I might’ve made at the pain, choked back the gorge that rose in my throat.

Whatever was going on with my back, it prevented me from sitting up, denied me the use of my abdominal muscles.  I could only work with my shoulders, my head, my teeth.

Shifting the pillow over several long minutes, I managed to gingerly ease it under my shoulder and upper arm.  Provided I didn’t move -which I couldn’t, really- it gave my arm something to rest on, prevented all of the weight from dangling off of my cuffed wrist.

Of course, I was now absent one pillow for my head and neck, and the propped up shoulder and arm made my back twist slightly, which only intensified the pain there.  I closed my eyes, focused on just breathing, tried not to pay too much attention to how slowly time was passing by, or the cacaphony of noise from the rest of the triage area.

I hated this.  Hated not knowing, not having any information about what had just happened, what was happening, what was going to happen.

Roughly half of my nightmares about being bullied took place in the classroom, knowing that a class was just about to end, or that a teacher was about to assign us group work.  That some group of faceless bullies were waiting to pull the worst ‘prank’ yet.  It was the idea that I was about to be put in a situation where something bad was about to happen, that it was inevitable.  Being helpless to do anything about it.

Maybe it was stupid, but I’d never failed to wake up drenched in sweat after that, even when I woke up before the follow-through.  The dreams had come less often after I got my powers, but they still came from time to time.  I had suspicions they might come even years after I left high school behind me for good.

But that state of mind in the nightmares?  I felt like that now.  Trying to keep from panicking, knowing that no matter what I did, I was counting on luck and forces beyond my control to not ruin my day, my week, my month.  Ruin my life.

I’d done the heroic thing.  Drawn Leviathan away from those in the shelter who were still alive.  A part of me was proud of myself.  The rest of me?  Faced with the idea of spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair?  I felt like an idiot of epic proportions.  I’d bought into the idea of the grand, noble gesture, and in the here and now it felt like I had to convince myself that what I had done mattered.  It sure as shit didn’t seem to matter to anyone else.

The chain of my manacle clinked taut as I yanked my right hand forward angrily.  The pain that caused me in my midsection stopped me from doing it again.

A girl in a nurse’s uniform pushed the curtain aside to enter.  I identified her as a girl rather than a woman because she barely looked older than me.  Bigger in the chest, for sure, but baby faced, petite.  Her brown hair was in a braid, and the lashes of her downcast eyes were long as she stepped to the foot of my bed, picked up a clipboard.  She was very carefully not looking my way.

“Hi,” I spoke.

She ignored me, turned her attention to the heart monitor, made a note on the clipboard.

“Please talk to me,” I spoke.  “I have no idea what’s going on, and I feel like I’m losing my mind, here.”

She glanced at me, looked away hurriedly the same reflexive way you’d pull away from a hot stove with your hand.

“Please?  I’m-  I’m pretty scared right now.”

Nothing.  She took more notes on the clipboard, noting stuff from the screen the electrode ran to.

“I know you think I’m bad, a villain, but I’m a person, too.”

She glanced at me again, looked away, returned her eyes to the clipboard and frowned.  She stopped writing as she glanced up to the monitor, as if she had to find her place or double check her numbers.

“I have a dad.  Love him to death, even if we haven’t talked lately.  I love reading, my- my mom taught me to love books from the time I was little.  My best friend, it wasn’t so long ago that she helped pull me out of a dark place.  I haven’t heard how she’s doing.  If she’s dead or if she’s here too.  Have you seen her?  Her name’s Tattletale.”

“We aren’t supposed to talk to the patients.”

“Why not?”

“While back, some cape sued the rescue workers after a battle much like this.  Hadhayosh, I think.”

“That’s one of the other names for Behemoth.  Like Ziz is for the Simurgh?”

“Yes, some heroes got hurt badly enough they wouldn’t recover, they knew they had no more income from their costume career, so suing, it was a way-” she stopped, closed her mouth deliberately, as if reminding herself to stay silent.

“You can’t tell me if my back’s broken or not?”

She shook her head, “No.”

“I won’t tell.  I won’t sue.”

“Saying that isn’t legally binding,” she frowned, again, “and It- it’s not that.  I’m just a nursing student.  I haven’t even graduated.  They recruited us to help meet demand, to do the paperwork and check that patients weren’t coding, so the people with experience could focus on handling the patient load.  I don’t have the training to diagnose you on any level, let alone your back.”

My heart sank.  “Have you seen Tattletale?  Have you heard if she’s dead or injured?  She wears a lavender and black costume, and there’s this eye in dark gray on the black part across her chest-”

“I’m sorry,” she hurried to the foot of the bed, hung up the clipboard.

I’m sorry?  Was that an answer – condolences – or was it a refusal to speak on the subject?

I might have made a noise, because she turned back, stopped.  I couldn’t be sure, though, over the sounds from the other nurses, doctors and patients.

“We’ve got a code!” someone screamed, just beyond the curtain.  “Need paddles!”

“Paddles are in use!”

“Then get me someone with electricity powers!  And you, resuscitate!”

I closed my eyes, tried to stop myself from imagining that they were talking about Tattletale, or my dad, or even Brian, though I was pretty sure Brian had made it out okay.  Even as I managed to dismiss those images from my mind, a voice in the back of my head noted that whoever was on the table was important to somebody.  So many beloved family members, friends, coworkers, gone from people’s lives.

“Do you want to call your dad?  Or try calling your friend?” the nurse-in-training offered me.

If she was offering for me to call Tattletale, that at least meant she hadn’t seen Tattletale’s body.  That was some relief.

I wasn’t sure if I should take the offer.  If I called my dad, would they track the call?  Find out who I was?  Would they track down Tattletale, if she wasn’t dead or dying?  Who else could I call?  Coil?  Way too many issues if they traced the call, and I wasn’t sure if Lisa had passed on word of our recent argument and/or breakup.  Grue, Regent, Bitch?  I wasn’t on their team anymore.

A darker thought struck me.

“Is that – would that be my one phone call?  These cuffs – am I being arrested?”

She shook her head, “I was just offering.  I don’t know if they’re arresting you.  Only thing they said was that I was supposed to fill in the charts for the patients on this end of the room that have the red tags.”

She pointed to a set of plastic tags that were clipped to the curtain rod, so that one large tag hung down on either side of it.  Was it to designate the seriousness of my injuries?  No, they hadn’t even examined me.

I drew a connection to my line of thinking from earlier – was it because I was a villain?  Did I get a mere check-in from the nurse-in-training while the heroes got actual nurses and doctors?  I hadn’t seen anyone put the tags up, but then again, I hadn’t been looking at the curtain rod right after I was stuck here.

“Okay,” I spoke, quiet, my thoughts going a mile a minute.

“The phone call, I can let you use my cell phone if you promise not to…” she trailed off, as if realizing the possibilities of what could happen if a villain had her phone number, contact info for her friends and family.  Yet she could hardly back out, not without potentially upsetting a bad guy.

I shook my head.  “No.  But it’s really good of you to offer.  Thank you,” I tried to put as much emphasis on the thanks as possible.  “With that kind of empathy, I’m sure you’ll become a great nurse.”

She gave me a funny look, then backed out through the curtain.  I could have called after her, asked for something for the pain, asked if maybe I could get some help, but I suspected she didn’t have the power to give me any of that.  I had no idea how long I’d be here, and I suspected it’d be worth more to have a potential friendly face around than go for the long shot and risk seeming manipulative or alienating her.  That, and I didn’t want to get her in trouble.

Minutes ticked on.  No more than three seconds passed without someone screaming or shouting orders or updates regarding a patient in crisis.  It would have been interesting to listen to, if I could make out more than half of it, and if the half I could hear wasn’t so horrible.

The anxiety over my circumstances and not knowing what was going to happen was gradually overriden by a maddening boredom.   I couldn’t move, had nobody to talk to, didn’t know enough about my present situation to think up contingency plans.

I closed my eyes and used my power, because it let me be outside my own body in a way, because it was something to do.

A handful of cockroaches from near the kitchen made their way through the walls, through an air intake grate in the wall, and up to my bed.  They gathered on my stomach.

I gathered them into a pyramid on my stomach, let them collapse.  Made a kaleidoscopic starburst pattern, then moved them all in sync to expand out into a perfect circle.

“You’re so creepy, you know that?” the voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“I’ve heard worse,” I replied, opening my eyes.  Panacea was entering my curtained enclosure, shutting the curtain behind her.  There was a PRT uniform with her.

“I’m sure you have,” she frowned.  Her hood and scarf were down, so I could see her face, much as I had during the bank robbery.  She had dark circles under her eyes that looked painted on.  She spoke, sighing the words, “I need your permission to touch you.”

“What?”

“Liability reasons.  Someone overheard you say you’ve got a broken back.  There could be other complications, and that takes people, time, equipment and money that the people in charge of this hospital are reluctant to spare at a time like this.  You could refuse to let me touch you, make the hospital give you the X-rays and MRI, get months or years of treatment paid for by the Preservation Act, all under oppressive confidentiality agreements that could cost the hospital millions.  It’s an option, but the treatment wouldn’t be as fast, good or effective as it would if I used my power.  You’d be shooting yourself in the foot for the sake of being stubborn.”

“Um.”

“Just agree, so I can move on to other patients.”

“What was it you said during the bank robbery?  You’d make me horribly obese?  Make everything I eat taste like bile?  What’s to stop you from doing something like that here?”

“Nothing, really.  I mean, you could sue me after I did it, but you’d have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, and that’d be damn hard if I gave the symptoms a time delay before they showed up.  Plus I’m a valuable enough resource that I could get help paying the legal costs.  And, let’s not forget, Carol, my adoptive mother, is a pretty kickass lawyer.  Whatever you did by trying to sue me probably wouldn’t cripple me as much as what my power did to you.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

“It’s not meant to be reassuring.  I suppose maybe you’ll just have to either trust in the fact that I’m a decent person or refuse my help,” she shrugged, glaring at me, “There’s a kind of poetry to this.  Like, a thief fears being stolen from the most, a scumbag… well, you get the drift.  The more horrible a human being you are, the more you’ll agonize over what I might have done to you, with a time delay of minutes, hours, days, years.  Yet if you’re a decent person, you’ll be more inclined to think better of me.”

“Are you?”

“What?”

“Are you a decent person, Amy?”

She gave me an offended look.

“I envy you, that it’s so easy for you to think of things in terms of black and white.  I’d like to think I’m a good person, believe it or not.  Everything I’ve done, I did because I thought it was right at the time.  In hindsight, some of the ends didn’t justify the means, and sometimes there were unforseen consequences.”  Like Dinah.  “But I don’t think of myself as a bad person.”

“Then you’re either ignorant, deluded or you have a very twisted perspective.”

“Maybe.”

She went on, “Don’t really care which it is.  If you’re going to call yourself a good person,” she paused, shook her head a little, “Then don’t waste my time.  Give me an answer, one way or another, so I can get on with helping people.”

It wasn’t really a choice.  A long, hard road to recovery, possibly with no recovery at all, fraught with any potential health complications that the universe decided to hand my way, or healing for a broken back, with the potential health complications that Panacea decided to give me?

I mean, whatever she deigned to inflict on me would be calculated to make me miserable, if she went that far, but at least then I’d have someone to hate.

“Please,” I spoke, “Use your power.”

She nodded at the PRT uniform, who left the enclosure.  Then she approached the side of the bed.

“I’m going to have to move some of your mask aside, to touch your skin.”

“Permission granted,” I spoke, “Though I’ve been wondering since the bank robbery – why didn’t you reach up and touch my scalp?”

“No comment.”

Ah.  Something about hair, maybe?  A weakness in her power.  Maybe it was mucked up or confused by ‘dead’ tissue?

She fumbled with my mask for a second.

“Lower,” I informed her, “The mask and body part of the costume overlap just above the collarbone.”

She found it, separated the two, and touched a fingertip to my throat, like she was taking my pulse.

The pain left in an instant.  My breathing became easier, and I felt a steady pressure deep in my broken arm.

“You have a brain injury that’s not fully healed.”

“Bakuda’s fault.”

“Hm.  Outside the scope of my abilities.”

Ominous, but I wasn’t ready to put too much stake in what she told me, and what she might be leaving out.

“Okay,” my voice was stronger, without the crippling pressure in my chest and back.

“Microfracture in your shoulder, nerve damage to your left hand, reduced fine dexterity.”

“Really?  I hadn’t noticed.”

“It’s there.  I’m not going to bother with that, either.”

“Wasn’t expecting you to.”  Couldn’t let her ruffle me.

“Broken arm, broken spine, fractured ribs, small perforations in colon, kidney and liver, some internal bleeding.  This will take a minute.”

I nodded.  It was more severe than I’d thought.  That unsettled me some.

A part of me wanted to apologize for what had happened at the bank robbery, but the tone of our earlier conversation made it feel like I’d be trying to dissuade her from doing something malicious with her power.

Relief overwhelmed me as sensations began returning to my legs.  They were quick, like being shocked, but they ranged from hot to cold to the unfamiliar, running from my abdomen to the tips of my toes, tracing every internal area of my legs.

“Ow,” I muttered, as one line of pain drew itself from my hip to my ankle.

“I’ve got to test your nerves as I re-establish the connections, but I’m too tired to do it all with my power, and I can’t dope you up with endorphins because Armsmaster, Miss Militia and Legend will be coming to talk to you in a bit, and I’ve been told you need your head one hundred percent clear for that.  So some of this is going to hurt.”

“Wait, what?  Why do I need my head clear to talk to them?  Why are they talking to me?”

“Mmm.  I can feel your emotions in your body, hormones and altered chemical balances.  You’re scared.”

“Damn right, I’m scared – ouch.  Fuck, that stung.”  My leg jerked.

“It’s going to happen any time my concentration slips.  Best to stay quiet.”

“No, seriously.  Why are they talking to me?  Is that why I’m in handcuffs?  To keep me here until they, what, arrest me?”

“No comment,” she smiled a little.

“Hey, no.  You can’t call yourself a decent person and then leave me here agonizing over details.”

“I can.  I don’t know what they want to talk to you about, though I have… strong suspicions,” her eye drifted to my manacle.  “But I have been informed that you are to be lucid and fully mobile.”

“Why?”  I had a growing suspicion as to why, helped by her glance to my restraints.  If they were arresting me, they couldn’t have me agree to any deals or plea bargains while I was drugged up, or it would be thrown out of court.  I was pretty sure.  One semester of a law class didn’t exactly leave me an expert.

“According to the woman from the PRT that I talked to, it will work best if all of you are kept in the dark for as long as possible.”

“All of us?”  It wasn’t just me.

“A slip of the tongue.” She smiled slightly, as if enjoying stringing me along.

“Do these others include Tattletale?” I asked, “Did you heal her?”

She quirked an eyebrow.  “No.  I can tell you I didn’t.”

“You didn’t.  Because she didn’t need your help, or because she was already dead?  Ow!”

My leg jerked again, a muscle in my thigh clenching hard, not unlike a charlie horse.  It subsided.

“I think we’re done here.”

“Hey!” I raised my voice again, “Give me an answer!  Stop fucking with me!”

She lifted her finger from my throat, and many of my smaller bruises and scrapes began making themselves felt once more.  I could breathe without a problem.  I wiggled my toes experimentally, felt them move against the soles of my costume.  I moved my left arm, felt no pain.  Tugged on the chain with it and felt everything working as it should, no pain.

She leaned close, so her mouth was by my ear, “Not so fun, is it?  Let me tell you, this isn’t a hundredth of the mind-fuckery that your teammate was pulling on me, back then.”

“That wasn’t-” I stopped.

“What?  Wasn’t you?  You stood by and watched it happen, played along, took advantage of it.  Or maybe you were going to say it wasn’t that bad?  You really don’t know.  You don’t know me, you don’t know Glory Girl, you don’t know what Tattletale was saying, how she was threatening to ruin my life.  Imagine the person you care about most, finding our your darkest secrets.  Secrets that, even if they eventually came to accept it, you know they would taint and color every single conversation you have with them afterward.”

I couldn’t help but picture it.  My dad finding out I was a villain, what I’d done.  Forevermore having doubts about me.

“I’m sorry,” I spoke, my voice low.

“Maybe you are.  I doubt it.  I’m sorry to leave you wondering what happened to your teammate, what the big name capes are going to say to you, but I have others to help.”

She didn’t sound sorry at all.

“Hey!”  I raised my voice again, “Come back here!”

She turned her head to give me a dark look as she walked away, “Good luck with Armsmaster.”

I pulled on the chains, angrily.  I almost, almost sent the cockroaches on the bed after her.  I stopped when I saw the PRT uniform hold the curtain back for her in courtesy.

When Armsmaster and Legend arrived, it would be too late.

I sent the roaches after him, the PRT uniform.  They landed on him, individually squeezed into the pouches on his belt and bandoleer.

Found the keys on his belt.

Getting the keys out of the pouch was harder.  I had to be smooth, and the keychain was heavy enough that the roaches couldn’t pick it up with their mouths.  Instead, I tried lifting it up with the middle of a roach’s body, supported by the rest.  No luck, it slipped free off of the convex exterior of the cockroach’s shell.

I turned it upside down, instead, used the more textured underside to catch the loop of metal.  The rest of the roaches latched on, hauled the roach up and out of the pouch, squeezed it through the flap-covered opening, breaking it nearly in two against the metal of the ring as they drove it through the too-narrow gap.  One roach dead, but the keys were falling free of the pouch.

Instinct took over, and I unconsciously bid roaches to move into place beneath the keys as they fell to the floor, muting  the noise of metal against the ground.  They skittered my way, the weight of the keychain managed between them.

Hopefully people were too busy to notice the falling keys or the small number of bugs.  I suspected it was crowded and busy out there, from what I had glimpsed when I was brought in.  If people did notice, well, I was still getting arrested anyways, right?

Getting the keys up onto the bed would be harder.  I had the roaches put the keys beneath the bed, set them on the blanket, to start unraveling it.  Ten sets of mandibles -eleven now, as another cockroach came from the air vent- each working at individual threads.

I was torn between rushing this and doing it right.  I had to convince myself that I wouldn’t be dragged off to jail in the next five or ten minutes.  Probably.

It probably took that long to get a long enough piece of thread.  One group of bugs set to looping the thread around the keychain, tying it into a firm knot, while the others brought it up the side of the bed, up my body, my arm, and to my hand.  Once I had the thread in my fingers, I started winding it up around my fingers with a circular motion of my hands, reeling in the keys.

In a matter of seconds, I had the keys in hand.  Good.

The cockroach that had brought me the thread helped me figure out the keys that would work, traveling over them to eliminate the ones that were too large, acting as an added digit to help sort through them and putting the right keys between my fingers.  It guided the end of the keys into the lock.  The first key didn’t fit, too large.

The second unlocked the cuff.

I hurried to unlock the cuff on my left hand, flexed my hand and arm, rubbed at my wrists.

I pulled the covers off, swung my legs over the side of the bed, and gingerly tested them against the ground.  They supported my weight.

The relief was palpable.  Almost something I could feel, making me want to hug my arms around my body in quiet joy.

But my priority was getting out of here.  Not so easy, with the amount of capes and PRT personnel around.  No windows around me, but if I stepped outside the curtain and into the main area, I risked running into someone like Legend or Armsmaster.  I was assuming from what Panacea had said that they had been treated for the injuries that had taken them out of the fight and were up and about.

No, a better plan of action would be to keep out of sight.

I sent my bugs forward, tracing the lines of the curtains and wall.  Once I was sure that the curtains in the next few patient enclosures were closed, I moved the curtain to my right and headed that way.

Some cape I didn’t know was unconscious, blood smeared around his nose and mouth, almost caking the upper half of his mask to his face.

Another enclosure, an empty cot, with red stains on the sheets from whatever patient had been there earlier.

There was a window past the next enclosure.  I wasn’t sure if I could climb out, or if there would be somewhere to go once I had, but it gave me hope.

I pushed my way into the next curtained enclosure.  Stopped.

Oh.

There were shouts behind me, which might have been someone noting my absence.  I was at the point of not caring anymore.

I tried to take a step forward, to move to the bedside or around it, but my newly healed legs gave out under me.  I crumpled into a kneeling position.

Staring up at the occupant of the bed, a few things came to me.  For one thing, I got to experience first hand what Brian had told me, about how he’d gone cold, still and quiet inside on that day he’d gotten his powers.

For another, I realized why they’d had me chained up.  Kind of stupid not to, in retrospect.  A glance at the curtain showed a blue tag, the same style as the red one that had been on my curtain, plastic, unlabeled.

The bed’s occupant lay on her back, tubes running into her nose and mouth, an IV in her arm.  An ugly cut marred her right breast and shoulder, which were bare.  Smaller cuts covered the rest of her body.

Running footsteps and the sound of a curtain being heaved open in a neighboring section didn’t stir me from my daze.

The bed’s occupant wore Shadow Stalker’s costume, sans mask.

I recognized her.  Sophia Hess.

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Extermination 8.5

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Lady Photon and the eighteen year old Laserdream landed beside Armsmaster, making a small splash as they touched down.

You could see the family resemblance.  They weren’t supermodel good looking, but they were attractive people, even with their hair wet and plastered to their heads and shoulders by the rain.  Both wore costumes with a white base color, had heart shaped faces, full lips and blonde hair.  Lady Photon’s costume sported a starburst on her chest, with several of the lines extending around her body, or down her legs, going from indigo to purple as it got further from the center.  Her hair was straight, shoulder length, held away from her face by a tiara shaped much like the same starburst image on her chest.

Her daughter had a stylized arrow pointing down and to her right, on her chest, with a half dozen lines  trailing behind it, over her left shoulder, one line zig-zagging across the others.  The entire design gradually faded from a ruby red to a magenta color in much the same way her mom’s did.  Similar rows of lines with the zig-zag overlapping them ran down her legs and arms.  She didn’t dye her hair in her ‘color’ like her younger brother did -had, past tense-, or wear the tinted sunglasses, but she did wear a ruby red hairband over her wavy hair, to ensure she always had a coquettish sweep of hair in place over one eye, and to pull the magenta, red and white color scheme together.

More than anything else, though, the two of them had the look of people who had seen half their immediate family brutally and senselessly torn apart over the course of one terrible hour.  As though they’d had their hearts torn out of their chests and were somehow still standing.  It wasn’t that I had seen anyone in those circumstances before, but that look existed, and they had it.

It was painful to look at.  It reminded me of when my mom had died.  I’d been in a similar state.

Lady Photon – Photon Mom to Brockton Bay residents and the local news media – bent down by Armsmaster.  She created a shaped forcefield tight against his shoulder, lifted him with a grunt.

“Take him,” Lady Photon’s voice was strangely hollow, though firm.

“No.  I’m a better flier, and more likely to hurt that thing in a fight.  I’ll take the girl and help against Leviathan.”  Laserdream had a little more life in her voice than her mother did.

The girl.  Like I didn’t warrant a name, or it wasn’t worth the effort to remember.  A part of me wanted to stand up for myself, a larger part of me knew this wasn’t the time or place.

After a long few seconds of deliberation, Lady Photon nodded.  She looked like making that decision aged her years.

Laserdream and her mom looked at me.  I felt like I should say something.  Give condolences?  Tell them that their family had died well?  I couldn’t think of a way to put it that didn’t tell them something they already knew, or anything that wouldn’t sound horribly offensive or insincere coming from a villain.

“Let’s go get that-” I stopped, both because I suddenly felt that something like motherfucker was too crass, and because I wanted to bend down to pick up Armsmaster’s Halberd, the one with the disintegration blade, grabbing the pole of it with my good hand. “Let’s go get him,” I stated, lamely.

It took some doing for Laserdream to lift me without pressing against my broken arm or touching the blade. She wound up holding me with an arm under my knees and the crook of her elbow at my neck.  She held the Halberd for me.  I resigned myself to being cradled – there was no dignified way to be carried.  She had morning breath, a strangely mundane thing – she’d likely been woken up at half past six in the morning by the sirens, hadn’t had time to brush her teeth or eat before coming here.

She took off, smooth.  It felt like an elevator kicking into motion, except we kept going faster, had the wind in our faces.

My first time flying, if you discounted the experience of riding a mutant dog as it leapt from a building, which was sort of half-flying.  It wasn’t half as exhilirating as I’d thought the experience would be.  Tainted by the sombre, tense mood, the sting of the rain and the bitter chill that went straight through my damp costume and mask.  Each time she adjusted her hold on me, I had to fight that deep primal instinct that told me I was going to fall to my death.  She was adjusting her grip a lot, too – she didn’t have superstrength, and I couldn’t have been easy to carry, especially soaking wet.

My power’s range was almost double the usual, and I had zero clue as to why.  I wasn’t about to complain.  Using Laserdream’s armband and my right hand, I passed on details.

“He’s at CA-4, heading Northwest!”

The roads beneath us were damaged, shattered.  When Leviathan had shifted the position of the storm sewers, he’d gone all out, and he’d gone a step further than just the storm sewer – he’d also torn up the water supply network for the city.  The occasional pipe speared up between the slats in the sidewalk, fire hydrants were dislodged, and the water that poured from these was barely a trickle now.  That might have meant too much was leaking from the damaged pipes to give the water any pressure.

As he’d beaten a path deeper into the city, he had found opportunities to do damage on the way.  A police car had been thrown through the second story of a building.  A half block later, as he’d rounded a corner, he had elected to go through the corner of a building, tearing out the supporting architecture.  The structure had partially collapsed into the street.

We passed over a gas station he’d stampeded through, and Laserdream erected a crimson forcefield bubble around us to protect us from the smoke and heat of the ongoing blaze.

“BZ-4,” I reported.  Then I saw movement from the coast, called out through the armband’s channels, “Wave!”

I was glad to be in the air as the tidal wave struck.  The barrier of ice and the wreckage at the beaches did a lot to dampen the wave’s effect, but I watched as the water streamed a good half-mile into the city.  Buildings collapsed, cars were pushed, and even trees came free of the earth.

No cape casualties announced from Laserdream’s armband, at least.

We passed over the Weymouth shopping center.  It had been devastated by Leviathan’s passage, then had largely folded in on itself in the wake of the most recent wave.  From the way the debris seemed to have exploded out the far wall, it didn’t look like Leviathan had even slowed down as he tore through the building.  That wasn’t what spooked me.

What spooked me was that I’d been through the Weymouth shopping center more than a hundred times.  It was the closest mall to my house.

When I sensed Leviathan turning south, towards downtown, I didn’t feel particularly relieved.  There were enough shelters and enough space in the shelters to handle virtually every Brockton Bay resident in the city proper.  From what I remembered, not everyone had participated in the drills that happened every five years or so, choosing to stay home.  It was very possible that some shelters near the residential areas might prove to be over capacity, that my dad, if he arrived late, might have been redirected to another shelter.  One closer to downtown, where Leviathan was going.  I couldn’t trust that he was out of harm’s way.

“He’s at or near BZ-6, heading south.”

The area we were entering had been further from the heroes with the forcefields, where waves hadn’t had their impact softened or diverted by the the PHQ’s forcefield or the larger, heavier, blockier structures of the Docks.  Entire neighborhoods had been flattened, reduced to detritus that floated in muddy, murky waters.  Larger buildings, what I suspected might have been part of the local college, were standing but badly damaged. Countless cars sat in the roads and parking lots with water pouring in through shattered windows.

Laserdream changed course, to follow Lord street, the main road that ran through the city and downtown, tracing the line of the bay.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“The wreckage goes this way,” she responded.

I looked down.  It was hard to tell, with the damage already done, the water flooding the streets, but I suspected she was right.  One building that looked like it should have stood against the waves thus far was wrecked, and mangled bodies floated around it.  It could have been the tidal wave, but it was just as likely that Leviathan had seen a target and torn through it.

“Maybe, but he might have been faking us out, or he detoured further ahead,” I said.  I pointed southwest.  “That way.”

She gave me a look, I turned my attention to her armband, tried to discern where Leviathan fell on the grid.  Around the same moment I figured it out, I felt him halt.  “BX-8 or very close to it!  He’s downtown, and he just stopped moving.”

“You sure?” came Chevalier’s voice from the armband.

“Ninety-nine percent.”

“Noted.  We’re teleporting forces in.”

Laserdream didn’t argue with me.  We arrived at the scene of the battle a matter of seconds later.  Familiar territory.

I had been near here a little less than two hours ago.  The skeleton of a building in construction was in view, a matter of blocks away, an unlit black against a dark gray sky.  Beneath that, I knew, was Coil’s subterranean base of operations.

Parian had given life to three stuffed animals that lumbered around Leviathan.  A stuffed goat stepped forward, and sidewalk cracked under a hoof of patchwork leather and corduroy.  A bipedal tiger grabbed at an unlit streetlight, unrooted it, and charged Leviathan like a knight with a lance couched in one armpit.  The third, an octopus, ran interference, disrupting Leviathan’s afterimages before they could strike capes and wrapping tentacles around Leviathan’s limbs if he tried to break away.  Parian was gathering more cloth from the other side of a smashed display window, drawing it together into a crude quadruped shape, moving a series of needles and threads through the air in an uncanny unison that reminded me of my control over my spiders.

Leviathan caught the streetlight ‘lance’ and clawed through the tiger’s chest, doing surprisingly little damage considering that it was just fabric.  After three good hits, the tiger deflated explosively.

The octopus and goat grappled Leviathan while Purity blasted him with a crushing beam of light.  By the time he recovered, Parian was inflating the half-created shape in front of her, so it could stumble into the fray.  She turned her attention to repairing the ‘tiger’.

I was curious about her power.  Some sort of telekinesis, with a gimmick?  She had a crapton of fine manipulation with the needles and threads, that much was obvious, but the larger creations she was putting together – whatever she was doing to animate them with telekinesis or whatever, it left them fairly clumsy.  Did her control get worse as she turned her attention to larger things?  Why manipulate cloth and not something stronger, sturdier?

I wondered if she was one of the capes that thought of what she did as being ‘magic’.  Her power was esoteric enough.

A slash of Leviathan’s tail brought down two of the stuffed entities, and Hookwolf tackled him to ensure the Endbringer didn’t get a moment’s respite.  Leviathan caught Hookwolf around the middle with his tail, flecks of blood and flesh spraying from the tail as it circled Hookwolf’s body of skirring, whisking blades.  Leviathan hurled Hookwolf away.

Browbeat saw an opening, stepped in to pound Leviathan in the stomach, strike him in the knee Armsmaster had injured.  Leviathan, arms caught by Parian’s octopus and goat, raised one foot, caught Browbeat around the throat with his clawed toes, and then stomped down sharply.

Browbeat deceased, BW-8.

Leviathan leaned back hard, making Parian’s creations stumble as they maintained their grip, then heaved them forward.  The ‘octopus’ remanied latched on, but the ‘goat’ was sent through the air, a projectile that flew straight for Parian.

Her creation deflated in mid air, but the piles of cloth that it was made of were heavy, and she was swamped by the mass of fabric.  Leviathan darted forward, held only by her octopus, and the afterimage rushed forward to slam into that pile of cloth.

Parian down, BW-8.

All of the ‘stuffed animals’ deflated.

The girl with the crossbow and Shadow Stalker opened fire, joined by Purity from above.   Laserdream dropped me at the fringe of the battlefield with the Halberd before joining them, flying above at an angle opposite Purity’s, firing crimson laser blasts at Leviathan’s head and face.  Leviathan readied to lunge, stopped as a curtain of darkness swept over him, the majority dissipating a second later, leaving only what was necessary to obscure his head.  It took Leviathan a second to realize he could move out of that spot to see again, a delay that earned him another on-target series of shots from our ranged combatants.  Grue was here, somewhere.

It wasn’t much, I didn’t have many bugs gathered here yet, but I was able to pull some together into humanoid forms.  I sent them moving across the battlefield towards Leviathan.  If one of them delayed him a second, drew an attack that would otherwise be meant for someone else, it would be worth the trouble.

I looked around, trying to find Brandish, Chevalier, Assault or Battery, or even someone tough.  Someone that could take the Halberd and make optimal use of it.

One of crossbow-girl’s shots, like a needle several feet in length, speared under the side of Leviathan’s neck, out the top.  Shadow Stalker’s shots, at the same time, failed to penetrate Leviathan’s hard exterior.

“Flechette!  I’m getting closer!” Shadow Stalker called out, looking back at her new partner.

“Careful!” the crossbow-girl – Flechette, I took it – replied, loading another shot.

Shadow Stalker timed her advance with a pounce on Hookwolf’s part.  Empire Eighty-Eight’s most notorious killer latched onto Leviathan’s face and neck, blood spitting around where the storm of shifting metal hooks and blades made contact with flesh.  Shadow Stalker ran within twenty feet of the Endbringer, firing her twin crossbows.  The shots penetrated this time, disappearing into Leviathan’s chest, presumably fading back in while inside him.

Flechette fired a needle through Leviathan’s knee, and the Endbringer’s leg buckled.  He collapsed into a kneeling position, the knee striking the ground.

Leviathan used his claws to heave Hookwolf off his face, tore the metal beast in half, and then threw the pieces down to the ground, hard.  One landed straight on top of Shadow Stalker, the other almost seemed to bounce, rapidly condensing into a roughly humanoid form before it touched the ground again, landing in a crouch.  Hookwolf backed away, the blades drawing together into a human shape, skin appearing as they withdrew.  He brought his hand over his head and pointed forward at Leviathan.  A signal for the next front-liner.

Shadow Stalker down, BW-8.

I didn’t recognize the next cape to charge in to attack.  A heroine in a brown and bronze bodysuit.  She flew in low to the ground, gathered fragments of rock and debris around her body like it was metal and she was the magnet, then went in, pummeling with fists gloved in pavement and concrete.

You could tell, almost right away, the woman didn’t have much training or experience.  She was used to enemies that were too slow to move out of her way, who focused their attention wholly on her.  Leviathan ducked low to the ground, letting the heroine pass over him, then leapt for Flechette.  In the very last fraction of a second, the girl flickered, and was replaced by the brown-suited cape, who took the hit and stumbled back, fragments of rock breaking away.  Flechette dropped out of the sky where the cape had been, landed hard.  It took her a few seconds to recover enough to fire another bolt at Leviathan, strike him in the shoulder.  Trickster had just spared brown-suit from making a fuck-up that got someone killed.

The boy with the metal skin formed one hand into an oversized blade, as long as he was tall, managed a solid hit at Leviathan’s injured knee as the Endbringer whirled around to face Flechette.

Leviathan slapped the teenage hero down, swiped at one of my swarm-people, then was forced down onto all fours as Purity struck him square between the shoulderblades with a column of light.  A metal shelving unit shot from the interior of a store, Ballistic’s power, I was almost positive, and made Leviathan stumble back.

We had the upper hand, but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.  More than once, in the past hour alone, the Endbringer had demonstrated that any time the fight was going against him, he’d pull out all the stops and do something large scale.  A tidal wave or tearing up the streets.

We did not have what it took to withstand another wave.  No forcefields, no barriers.

I had one of my gathered swarms explode into a mass of flying insects as they got close enough to Leviathan, make their way against the drenching rain to rise up to Leviathan’s face.  Many clustered in the recessed eye sockets that looked like tears or cracks in his hard scaled exterior.  Others crawled into the wounds other capes had made.

Briefly blinded, he shook his head ponderously, using his afterimage and one swipe of his claw to clear his vision.  He scampered back as his sight was obscured yet again by one of Grue’s blasts.

He lunged forward, stumbling into and out the other side of the cloud of darkness.  A swipe of his tail batted the metal-skinned boy away.  Another strike dispatched Brandish, who was moving in to attack with a pair of axes that looked as though they were made from lightning.

Brandish down, BW-8

Flechette fired one needle into the center of Leviathan’s face, between each of his four eyes.  It buried itself three quarters deep, speared out the back of his head.

He reared back, as if in slow motion, stumbled a little.  His face pointed to the sky.  He teetered.

Yeah, no.  Much as I’d like to to be, there was no fucking way it was going to be that easy.

That top-heavy body of his toppled forward, and it was only his right claw, slamming down to the pavement, that stopped his face from being driven into the ground.  The impact of his claw striking the ground rumbled past us.

The rumble didn’t stop.

“Run!” I shouted, my cry joining the shouts of others.  I turned, sloshed through the water to get away, not sure where to get away from, or to.

Leviathan and the ground beneath him sank a good ten feet, and water swirled and frothed as it began pouring to fill the depression.  He used his arm to shield himself as Purity fired another blast from above.  As the ground beneath him continued to sink, the water lapped higher and higher around him.

The Endbringer descended, and the area around him quickly became a massive indent, ten, fifteen, thirty, then sixty feet across, ever growing.  The force of the water pouring into the crater began to increase, and the ground underfoot grew increasingly unsteady as cracks spread across it.

I realized with a sudden panic, that I wasn’t making headway against the waves and the ground that was giving way underfoot.  The growing crater was continuing to spread well past me, rising above me as the ground I stood on descended.

“Need help!” I screamed, as water began falling atop me from a higher point, spraying into me with enough force that I began to stumble back, fall.

The ground in front of and above me folded into a massive fissure.  The movement of the cracked sections of road created a torrent of water that washed over me, engulfed me and forced me under.  The impact and pain from the force of the water on my broken arm was enervating, drew most of the fight out of me when I very much needed to be able to struggle, get myself  back above the surface.  I tried to touch bottom, to maybe kick myself back up, but the ground wasn’t there.  Feeling out with the pole of the Halberd, I touched ground, pushed, failed to get anywhere.

A hand seized the pole of the Halberd, heaved me up, changed its grip to my right wrist and pulled me up and free of the waves.

When I blinked my eyes clear of water, Laserdream was above me.  She faced the epicenter of the growing depression in the ground, flying backwards.  Her other hand clung to an unconscious Parian.  It seemed like the two of us were too much for her to carry alone, because she hurried straight for a nearby rooftop, carefully lay Parian down.

We hadn’t set down for more than ten seconds before the building shuddered and began to collapse.  The ground beneath the building cracked and tilted, no doubt because the underlying soil and rock was being drawn away by churning water.  The flooding in the streets was diverted into the deepening bowl-shaped cavity Leviathan was creating, filling it.  It was almost a lake, now, three city blocks across and growing rapidly. Only fragments of the taller buildings in the area stayed above the waves; some buildings were already toppled onto their sides, others half-collapsed and still breaking apart as I watched.  Some capes were climbing out of the water and onto the ruined buildings, with the help of the more mobile capes.  Velocity and Trickster were working in tandem, Velocity running atop the water’s surface to safe ground, trickster swapping him for someone who was floundering, rinse, repeat.

As our footing dropped beneath us, Laserdream reluctantly grabbed at my hand and Parian’s belt, hauled us back up into the air.

Above me, her armband flashed yellow.

“Armband!” I called up to her. “Tidal wave?”

“Can’t see unless I drop you,” she responded, over the dull roar of the waves beneath us.  With a bit of sarcasm and harshness to her tone, she asked me, “Do you want me to drop you?”

Right, I’d kind of messed with her cousins at the bank robbery.  She counted me as an ally, here and now, but she wouldn’t be friendly.

Myrddin and Eidolon moved from the coast to the ‘lake’ in the upper end of Downtown.  I saw and sensed Leviathan leap from the water like a dolphin cresting the waves, moving no less than two hundred feet in the air, toward the pair, lashing out with his afterimage in every direction.

I didn’t see how it turned out, because Laserdream carried Parian and me away.  I could sense the Endbringer through the bugs that had made their way deepest into his wounds, the ones that had found spots where his afterimage couldn’t flush them out each time it manifested.  With my power, I could track him beneath the water.  He was moving so fast that it was almost as though he were teleporting, finding the drowning and executing them.

Scalder deceased, BW-8.  Cloister deceased, BW-8.  The Erudite deceased, BW-8.  Frenetic deceased, BW-8.  Penitent deceased, BW-9.  Smackdown deceased, BX-8.  Strider deceased, BW-8

“Setting down again,” Laserdream said.

“But if there’s a tidal wave-”

“I don’t see one.”

I joined her in looking toward the coast.  The water was as stable as it had been since the fight started.

“If it’s a trick-”

With a little anger in her voice, a hard tone, she spoke, “Either we set down or I drop you.  I can’t hold on much longer.”

“Right.”

She carried me two blocks away from the crater.  The ground was wet, but no longer submerged, the road was torn up, shattered, covered with debris.

Laserdream checked her armband, “It’s one of the shelters.  They sprung a leak, need help evacuating.  I’m going.”

Dad.  It could be my dad.

“Bring me,” I said.

She frowned.

“I know your arms are tired.  Mine is too, and I was just hanging there.  I can’t tell you how thankful I am that you’ve done this much to help me, but we have to stick together, and you can fly low enough to the ground that you can drop me if you have to.”

“Fine, but we’re leaving the doll kid here.”

She laid Parian down in a recessed doorway, then pressed the ‘ping’ button on the girl’s armband.

I held the Halberd out while Laserdream walked around behind me.  She wrapped her arms around my chest and lifted us off.  Uncomfortable, and she was jarring my broken arm, which hurt like a motherfucker, but I couldn’t complain after just having asked to come.

Myrddin down, BX-9.

Laserdream carried us around the edge of the ‘lake’ that was still growing, if not quite so fast as it had been.  I saw others gathered at the edge of the water, forming battle lines where Leviathan might have a clear path to make a run for it. If he wanted to make a run for it.  As it stood, he was entirely in his environment, in the heart of the city, where he could continue to work whatever mojo he needed to bring more tidal waves down on our heads.  To my bug senses, Leviathan was deep beneath the waves, moving rapidly, acting like he was engaged in a fight.  Against Eidolon?  I couldn’t tell.  Every darting, hyperfast movement dislodged a few bugs, made him harder to detect.

The shelter was set beneath a smallish library.  A concrete stairwell beside the building led belowground to the twenty-foot wide vault door.  Fragments of the building and the ledge overhanging the stairwell had fallen, blocked the door from opening fully.  Making matters worse, the door was stuck in a partially ajar position, and the stairwell was flooded with water, which ran steadily into the shelter.  Two capes were already present, shoulder deep in the water, ducking below to grab stones and rising again to heave them out.

“What’s the plan?” I asked, as Laserdream set us down, I immediatelly sent out a call to summon bugs to my location, just to be safe.  “Do we want to shut the door or open it?”

“Open it,” one of the capes in the water said.  He ducked down, grabbed a rock, hauled it out with a grunt.  “We don’t know what condition they’re in, inside.”

Laserdream stepped forward and began blasting with her laser, penetrating the water and breaking up the larger rocks at the base of the door.

I was very nearly useless here.  With one hand, I couldn’t clear the rubble, and my power wasn’t any use.  There weren’t even many crabs or other crustaceans I could employ in the water around us, and the ones that did exist were small.

Then I remembered the Halberd.

“Hey,” I stopped one of the capes that was heaving rocks out of the stairwell, “Use this.”

“As a shovel?” he looked skeptical.

“Just try it, only… don’t touch the blade.”

He nodded, took the Halberd, and ducked beneath the water.  Ten seconds later, he raised his head, “Holy shit.  This works.”

“Use it on the door?” I suggested.  He gave me a curt nod.

Enemy location unknown, I could hear the cape’s armband announce.  Defensive perimeter, report.

There was a pause.

No reports.  Location unknown.  Exert caution.

“I’m going to try cutting the door off,” the cape spoke.  He descended beneath the water.  I could barely make out his silhouette.  Laserdream ceased firing as he made his way to where the heavy metal door was, stepped around and set to burning long channels in the side of the stairwell.  I realized it was intended to give the water in the stairwell somewhere to flow that wasn’t towards the people inside.

The door tipped into the stairwell and came to rest against the opposite wall, resting at a forty-five degree angle, sloping up toward the railing.  The water in the stairwell flowed inside, an unfortunate consequence.  The cape with the Halberd set to using the blur of the Halberd to to cut lines into the back of the door and to remove the railing, so there was sufficient traction for people walking up and out of the door.

I stepped down to investigate, sent a few bugs in to get the lay of the land.  The interior of the shelter was surprisingly like what Coil’s headquarters had been like, concrete walls with metal walkways and multiple levels.  There were water coolers and a set of freezers, bathrooms and a sectioned off first aid area.

It was clear that one of the waves or Leviathan’s creation of that massive sinkhole in downtown had done some damage to the shelter.  Water was pouring in from a far wall and from the front door, and twenty or so people were in the first aid bay on cots, injured and bloody.  A team of about fifty or sixty people were moving sandbags to reduce the flow of water into the chamber from the cracked back wall.  A second, smaller team was blocking off the room with the cots, piling sandbags in the doorway.  In the main area, people stood nearly waist deep in water.

“Everyone out!” Laserdream called out.

Relief was clear on people’s faces as they began wading en masse toward the front doors.

My dad was taller than average, and I hoped to be able to make him out, see if he was in the crowd.  As the group gravitated toward the doorway, however, I lost the ability to peer over the mass of people.  I didn’t see him.

I hung back as people filed out in twos and threes.  Mothers and fathers holding their kids, who otherwise wouldn’t be tall enough to stay above water, people still in pajamas or bathrobes, people holding their dogs above water or with cats on their shoulders.  They marched against the flow of water from the stairwell, up the back of the vault door and onto the street.

Mr. Gladly was near the back of the crowd, with a blond woman that was taller than him, holding his hand.  It bugged me, in a way I couldn’t explain.  It was like I felt he didn’t deserve a girlfriend or wife.  But that wasn’t exactly it.  It was like this woman was somone who maybe liked him, heard his side of things, validated his self-perception of being this excellent, ‘cool’ teacher.  A part of me wanted to explain to that woman that he wasn’t, that he was the worst sort of teacher, who helped the kids who already had it easy, and dropped the fucking ball when it came to those of us who needed it.

It was surprising how much that chance meeting bugged me.

A shriek startled me out of my contemplations.  It was quickly followed by a dozen other screams of mortal terror.

Impel deceased, CB-10.  Apotheosis deceased, CB-10.

I felt him arrive, a small few bugs still inside him, though most of the rest had been washed away in his swim.  There were so few I’d missed his approach.

Leviathan.

People ran back inside the shelter, screamed and pushed, trampled one another.  I was forced into the corner by the door as they ran into the shelter, tried to make some distance between themselves and the Endbringer.

Laserdream down, CB-10.

And he was there, climbing through the vaultlike door, so large he barely fit.  One claw on either side, he pushed his way through.  Stood as tall as he could inside the front door, looking over the crowd.  Hundreds of people were within, captive, helpless.

A lash of his tail struck down a dozen people in front of him.  The afterimage struck down a dozen more.

No death notice from the armband for civilians.

Leviathan took a step forward, putting me behind him and just to his right.  He lashed his tail again.  Another dozen or two dozen civilians slain.

Mr. Gladly’s girlfriend was screaming, burying her face in his shoulder.  Mr. Gladly stared up at Leviathan, wide eyed, his lips pressed together in a line, oddly red faced.

I didn’t care.  I should feel bad my teacher was about to die, but all I could think about was how he’d ignored me when Emma and the others had had me cornered.

One hand on my shoulder to steady my throbbing broken arm, I slipped behind Leviathan, hugging the wall, slipping around the corner and moving up the vault door with padded feet.

It was a dark mirror to what Mr. Gladly had done to me.  What Emma and her friends had done, I couldn’t say for sure that I would have had the mental fortitude to put up with it if I hadn’t gotten my powers – and for all he knew, I hadn’t.  I couldn’t know whether I could have dealt with everything that had followed the incident in January, if I could have made it this far if I hadn’t had my powers, these distractions.  In every way that mattered, Mr. Gladly turning his back on me, back there in the school hallway, a time that felt so long ago, could have killed me.

A fitting justice, maybe, leaving him in that shelter with Leviathan.

I saw Laserdream lying face down in the water, bent down and turned her over with my good hand and one foot, checked she was breathing.

The two capes, who I took to be Impel and Apotheosis, were torn into pieces.  I ran past them.  Ran past the civilians who Leviathan had struck down, ripped apart.

I stopped, when I found the Halberd, picked it up.  Found Impel’s armband, bent down and pressed the buttons to open communications, “Leviathan’s at the shelter in CB-10.  Need reinforcements fast.”

Chevalier replied, “Shit.  He must have gone through some storm drain or sewer.  Our best teleporter’s dead, but we’ll do what we can.”

Which left me only one thing to do.  I had to be better than Mr. Gladly.

I ran past Impel and Apotheosis, passed Laserdream, and reached the shelter’s entrance once more.

Leviathan was further inside, crouched, his back to me.  His tail lashed in front of him.  Terrified screams echoed from within.

It was agonizing to do it, but I moved slowly, to minimize the noise I made, even as every second allowed Leviathan more time to tear into the crowd.  To move too fast would alert him, waste any opportunity I had here.  A backwards movement of Leviathan’s tail arced through the air, fell atop me, forcing me down into the water.  Gallons of cold water dropping down from ten feet above me.

I swallowed the scream, the grunting of pain that threatened to escape my throat, stood again, slowly.

With only one hand, I didn’t have the leverage to really swing the Halberd.  I had to hold it towards the top, near the blade, which meant having less reach, having to get closer.

When I was close enough, I drew the blade back and raked it just below the base of his tail.  Where his asshole would be if he had human anatomy.  Easiest place for me to reach, with him crouched down like he was.

Dust billowed and Leviathan reacted instantly, swiped with one claw, fell onto his side when the damage to his buttocks and the hampered mobility of his tail screwed with his ability to control the movement of his lower body.  His claw swipe went high.  His afterimage was broken up by the the wall above the door, but enough crashed down in front of and on top of me to throw me back out of the shelter, into the toppled shelter door.  I was pushed under the water, the Halberd slipping from my grip.

I climbed to my feet at the same time he did, but I had a clear route up the back of the shelter door while he had to squeeze through the opening.  I was on the street and running well before he was up out of the stairwell.

I gathered my bugs to me, sent some to him, to better track his movements.  As he climbed up, I gathered the swarms into decoys that looked human-ish, sent them all moving in different directions, gathered more around myself to match them in appearance.

With the effects of my slash of the Halberd combined with the damage Armsmaster had already done, Leviathan didn’t have the mobility with his tail he otherwise would.  When he attacked my decoys, he did it with slashes of his claw and pouncing leaps that sent out afterimages to crash into them.  A swipe of the claw’s echo to disperse one swarm to his left, a lunge to destroy one in front of him.  Another afterimage of a claw swipe sent out to strike at me.

Water crashed into me, hard as concrete, fast as a speeding car.  I felt more pain than I’d ever experienced, more than when Bakuda had used that grenade on me, the one that set my nerve endings on fire with raw pain.  It was brief, somehow more real than what Bakuda had inflicted on me.  Struck me like a lightning flash.

I plunged face first into the water.  My good arm on its own wasn’t enough to turn me over – the road just a little too far below me.  I tried to use my legs to help turn myself over.  Zero response.

I’d either been torn in two and couldn’t feel the pain yet or, more likely, I’d been paralyzed from the waist down.

Oh.

Not like I really should’ve expected any different.  Neither case was much better than the other, as far as I was concerned.

My breath had been knocked out of me at the impact, but some primal, instinctual part of me had let me hold my breath.  I lay there, face down in two or three feet of water, counting the seconds until I couldn’t hold my breath any more, until my body opened my mouth and I heaved in a breath with that same instinctual need for preservation, filled my lungs with water instead.

The lenses of my mask were actually swim goggles, it was a strange recollection to cross my mind.  I’d bought them from a sports supply store, buying the useless chalk dust at the same time.  Durable, high end, meant for underwater cave spelunkers, if I remembered the picture on the packaging right.  Tinted to help filter out bright lights, to avoid being blinded by any fellow swimmer’s headlamps.  I’d fitted the lenses from an old pair of glasses inside, sealed them in place with silicon at the edges, so I had 20/20 vision while I had my mask on without having to wear glasses beneath or over it, or contact lenses, which irritated my eyes.  I’d built the armor of my mask around the edges of the goggles so the actual nature of the lenses wasn’t immediately apparent, and to hold them firmly in place.

Even so, when I opened my eyes, looked through those lenses for their original purpose, all I could see was mud, grit, silt.  Black and dark brown, with only the faintest traces of light.  It disappointed me on a profound level, knowing that this might be the last thing I ever saw.  Disappointed me more than the idea of dying here, odd as that was.

Through my power, I sensed Leviathan turn, take a step back toward the shelter, stop.  His entire upper body turned so he could peer to his left with his head, turned the opposite way to peer right.  Like a dog sniffing.

He dropped to all fours, ran away, a loping gait, not the lightning fast movement he’d sported when he first attacked.  Still fast enough.

My chest lurched in a sob for air, like a dry heave.  I managed to keep from opening my mouth but the action, the clenching of every muscle above my shoulders, left my throat aching.

Two seconds later, it hit me again harder.

Two blocks away, Leviathan crashed down into the water.

Another lurch of my throat and chest, painful.  My mouth opened, water filled my mouth, and my throat locked up to prevent the inhalation of water.  I spat the water out, forced it out of my mouth, for all the good it would do.

I’d left the fat cape to die like this when the wave was coming.  Was this karma?

Something splashed near me.  A footstep.

I was hauled out of the water.  I felt a lancing pain through my midsection, like a hot iron, gasped, sputtered.  Through the beads of water on my lenses, I couldn’t make out much.

Bitch, I realized.  She wasn’t looking at me.  Her face was etched deep with pain, fury, fear, sheer viciousness, or some combination of the four.

I followed her gaze, blinked twice.

Her dogs were attacking Leviathan, and Leviathan was attacking back.  He hurled two away, three more leapt in.

How many dogs?

Leviathan pulled away, only for a dog to snag his arm, drag him off balance.  Another latched on to his elbow, while a third and fourth pounced onto his back, tearing into his spine.  More crouched and circled around him, looking for opportunities and places to bite.

He clubbed one away with a crude movement of his tail, used his free claw to grab it by the throat, tear a chunk of flesh away.  The dog perished in a matter of seconds.

Bitch howled, a primal, raw sound that must have hurt her throat as much as it hurt to listen to.  She moved forward, pulling me with her, lifting me up.  When I sagged, she gave me a startled look.

I looked down.  My legs were there, but there was no sensation.  Numb wasn’t a complete enough term to explain it.

“Back’s broken, I think,” the words were weak.  The calm tone of the words was eerie, even coming from my own mouth to my own ears.  Disconcertingly out of place with the frenzied, savage tableau.

Leviathan wheeled around, grabbed another dog by one shoulder, dug a claw into the dog’s ribcage and cracked  it open, the ribs splaying apart like the wings of some macabre bird, heart and lungs exposed.  The animal dropped dead to the water’s surface at Leviathan’s feet.

Bitch looked from me to the dog, as if momentarily lost.  In an instant, that look disappeared, replaced by that etching of rage and fury.  She screeched the words, “Kill him!  Kill!”

It wasn’t enough.  The dogs were strong, there were six of them left, even, but Leviathan was more of a monster than all of them put together.

He heaved one dog off the ground, slammed it into another like a club, then hurled it against a wall, where it dropped, limp and broken.

With that same claw, he slashed, tore the upper half of a dog’s head off.

“Kill!” Bitch shrieked.

No use.  One by one, the dogs fell.  Four left, then three.  Two dogs left.  They backed away, wary, each in a different direction.

Bitch clutched me, her arms so tight around my shoulders it hurt.  When I looked up at her, I saw tears in the corners of her eyes as she stared unblinking at the scene.

Scion dropped from the sky.  Golden skinned, golden beard trimmed close, or perhaps it never grew beyond that length.  His hair was longer than mine.  His bodysuit and cape were a plain white, stained with faded marks of old, dirt and blood, a strange juxtaposition to how perfect and unblemished he looked, otherwise.  There was no impact as he landed, no great splash or rumble of the earth.  Leviathan didn’t even seem to notice the hero’s arrival.

Leviathan struck at one of the remaining dogs with a broad swing of his tail, caught it across the snout.  It dropped, neck snapped.  A short leap and a slash of the claw dispatched the last.

Scion raised one hand, and a ball of yellow-gold light slammed into Leviathan from behind, sent the Endbringer skidding across the length of the street, past Bitch and I.

Leviathan leaped to his feet, reared around, swung his claws at the air ferociously.  Water around him rose, rushed towards Scion, a wave three times as high as Bitch was tall.  Three times as tall as I might be if I could stand.

Scion didn’t move or speak.  He walked forward, and ripples extended from his footsteps, soared past us with some strange motive force.  The ripple touched the wave, and the tower of water collapsed before it got halfway to us, dropping straight down.  Liquid as far as the eye could see was being flattened out into a disquieting stillness by the ripples of Scion’s footsteps, like a great pane of glass.

Leviathan lunged up to the side of a half-ruined building, leaped down to a point three-quarters of the way between himself and Scion.  His afterimage slammed into the hero.

Scion turned his head, shut his eyes, let the water wash over and past him.  When the attack was over, he squared his head and shoulders, facing Leviathan head on, raised a hand.

Another blast of yellow-gold light, and Leviathan was sent sprawling.

I saw the ripples and waves of Leviathan striking the ground wash past us.  Saw, again, how the ripple of Scion’s footstep seemed to wipe out and override that disturbance, returning the water to a perfect flatness.

Leviathan grabbed a car, twisted his entire upper body to toss it in the style of an olympic hammer-throw.  The car hurtled through the air, and Scion batted it aside with the back of one hand.  The vehicle virtually detonated with the impact, falling into a thousand pieces, each piece glowing with golden-yellow light, disintegrating as they splashed into the water.

Scion raised one hand, and there was a brilliant flash, too bright to look through.

When the spots faded from my vision, I saw that one of the damaged buildings was emanating that same light the pieces of the car had, was toppling, tipping towards Leviathan.  Scion, fingertips glowing, started his slow advance as the structure was pulled atop the Endbringer.  The ripples of his footsteps erased any disturbance in the water from the building’s collapse

Leviathan heaved himself out of the rubble, turned to run, only for water to rise and freeze solid in one smooth movement, forming a wall as tall as Leviathan was, a hundred feet long.  He paused for a fraction of a second, to gauge which way he might go, poise himself to leap over.  Scion caught him with another golden-yellow blast before he could follow through.

The movement of the water and the creation of the ice hadn’t been Scion.  Eidolon approached, flying close, raising one hand to create a ragged mess of icicles where Leviathan was to land.  Some impaled the Endbringer, but by and large, they shattered beneath him, left him scrabbling for traction and footing for long enough that Scion could shoot him again, send him through the barrier of ice as though it were barely there, tumbling.

Scion paused, turning to look at Eidolon, his eyes moving past Bitch and me like we weren’t even there.  His eyes settled on the hero, the most powerful individual in the world staring at the man who was arguably the fifth.

His expression was so hard to read.  I knew, now, what people had meant, when they said they thought his face was a mask, a facade.  Though it was expressionless, though there was nothing I could point to to explain why I felt the way I did, somehow I sensed disgust from him.  Like nobility looking at dog shit.

Scion turned away from Eidolon to focus on the enemy once more.  He blasted the Endbringer again.  Floated up and moved past Bitch and me faster than I could see, to strike the Endbringer a fraction of a second after the blast of light struck, stopping there in midair to blast Leviathan a second time as the Endbringer was still flying through the air at the punch’s impact.  Everything about Scion and his actions was utterly silent. His movements or attacks didn’t even stir the air.  Only the effects, Leviathan striking the water, the breaking of ice, generated any movement, shudders or sounds.

Eidolon froze the water around Leviathan’s four claws, giving Scion the opportunity to land another blast.  Leviathan turned, raised a spraying wall of water to cover his retreat.  Scion sent out one blast of his golden light to strike the wave, following up with a second blast before the first even made contact with the water.

Seeing the second blast coming, Leviathan leaped to one side.  No use – the blast of light curved in the air to head unerringly for him, struck him down.  Edges of the Endbringer’s wounds glowed golden yellow, drifted away into the air like flecks of burning paper caught in the updraft of hot air.  A fist imprint near the base of Leviathan’s throat glowed with edges of the same light, the wound continuing to spread and burn as I watched.

A tidal wave appeared in the distance, at the furthest end of the street, near the horizon.

Scion sent out a blast of golden light the size of a small van, darting to the center of the wave, disappearing into a speck of light before it made contact with the distant target.  The middle third of the wave buckled, fell harmlessly into a splash of water, all momentum ceased.  The other two sides of the wave curved inward, bent, to bear unerringly towards us.

Another blast of golden light, and one side was stopped, stalled.  A third blast was spared for Leviathan, who was getting his hands and feet firmly on the ground, crouching in preparation to run.  The Endbringer was knocked squarely to the ground.

Scion stopped the third wave in its tracks with a fourth blast, but the water was still there, and it still bowed to gravity.  The water level around us rose by a dozen feet, momentarily, slopping as gently over us as physically possible, like a lap of water on the beach.

When the flow of water was past us, I could see a fifth blast of light following Leviathan, who had used the cresting water to swim away.  He was making his way to the coast.  Scion rose, flew after his target with a streak of golden light tracing his movement.  Eidolon followed soon after.

Ten, fifteen seconds passed, Bitch holding me, averting her eyes from the corpses of her dogs, jaw set, not speaking or moving.

A teleporter appeared beside Laserdream, a distance away.  He looked at us, startled, glanced at his armband.

“You okay?” he called out.

“No,” I tried to shout back, but my voice was weak.  Bitch spoke for me, “She needs help.”

“Bring her here, I’ll take her back.”

Bitch carried me, dragging me by my collar to where Laserdream lay.  I grunted and groaned in pain, felt those hot pokers through my upper back and middle, but she wasn’t the type for sympathy or gentleness.

The teleporter touched one hand to my chest, another to Laserdream, who turned her head to look at me.

There was a rush of cool air, and we were in the midst of chaos.  Nurses, doctors, moving all around us.  I was lifted and placed on a stretcher, hauled up by four people in white.  There were shouts, countless electronic beeps, screams of pain.

I was placed on a bed.  I would have writhed with the pain of being shifted if it weren’t for my general inability to move.  There was a heart monitor on one side, a metal rack with an IV bag of clear fluid on the other, thick metal poles beside each, stretching from floor to ceiling.  Curtains loomed on either side of me, making for a small room, ten feet by ten feet across. The emergency room, triage or whatever was in front of me, past the foot of the bed, a dozen more cots, doctors doing what they could for the massed injured, civilian and cape alike.

All around me, nurses moved with a rote efficiency, to put a clip on my finger, and the heart monitor started beeping in time with my own heartbeat.  One put some sticky glue on my collarbone, pressing an electrode down there.

“My back, I think it’s broken,” I said, to no one in particular.  Nobody in particular replied.  All of them too busy with set tasks.  People seemed to approach my bedside and leave to go attend to another patient elsewhere.

“Your name?” someone asked.

I looked to the other side of me.  It was an older woman in a nurse’s uniform, pear shaped, gray haired.  A man in a PRT uniform stood behind her, holding a gun on me.

“Skitter,” I replied, confused, feeling more scared by the second.  “Please.  I think my back’s broken.”

“Villain?”

I shook my head.  “What?”

“Are you a villain?”

“It’s complicated. My back-”

“Yes or no?” the Nurse asked me, stern.

“Listen, my friend, Tattletale, do you know-”

“She’s a villain,” the PRT uniform cut me off, touching his way through some blackberry device with his free hand.  “Designation Master-5, specifically arthropodovoyance, arthropodokinesis.  No super strength.”

The nurse nodded, “Thank you.  Handle it?”

The man in a PRT uniform holstered his gun and stepped up to the bed.  He grabbed my right wrist, clasped a heavy manacle around it, fixed it to a vertical metal pole by the head of the bed.

“My other arm’s broken, please don’t move it,” I pleaded.

He gripped it anyways, and I couldn’t help but scream, strangled, as he pulled it to one side, clasped a manacle down on my wrist, hooked the other side of the manacle to the second pole.

“What-” I started to ask a nurse, as I forced myself to catch my breath, stopped as she turned her back to me and pulled the curtain closed at the foot of the bed, walked past it.

“Please-” I tried again, looking to the PRT uniform, but he was pushing his way past the curtain, leaving my company.

Leaving me chained up.  Alone.

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Extermination 8.4

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

I got my orders and left behind a bizarre scene where Armsmaster was working hand in hand with Kaiser, of all people.  Kaiser worked to build the same sort of trap that he’d imprisoned Lung in, some time ago, creating bars of metal between and around each of Leviathan’s limbs, a cage tight to the body.  Rune and another telekinetic were working to bend the metal from Kaiser’s shaken barrier around Leviathan’s limbs and face.

It wouldn’t last.  Leviathan was too big, his tail extended a long distance behind him, and it was thin and supple enough to slip through almost any barrier Kaiser could erect, strong enough that it could bend metal.  Leviathan would get free, there could be no illusions on that front.

While Kaiser worked, Armsmaster was simultaneously ensuring that he could maximize the damage delivered the second Leviathan moved again.  Gingerly, he worked with the grenades the Protectorate had liberated from Bakuda, the same explosives Miss Militia had been firing at Leviathan, and hooked them up as motion activated or proximity mines.  A complicated affair, I imagined, when your target could start moving any second, and when you couldn’t fully know or understand what the individual bombs did.

In the end, though, it was still our best bet to do one final measure of damage against Leviathan before he was free to wreak havoc once more.

There were a little more than fifty of us left.  Hookwolf, Fenja, Menja, Genesis, Aegis and Manpower were among the fifteen or so standing combatants that remained and were able to go toe to toe with Leviathan.  Parian, the girl in the doll costume, had formed some massive stuffed animals – a lion and a pig that stood as tall as Leviathan’s shoulder.  Tougher than they looked, according to her.  I had my doubts.  I mean, it wasn’t just that they were stuffed animals, but according to Parian, this was her first fight.

Too many others were capable of delivering the hurt, but were too fragile: Browbeat, Shadow Stalker, Lady Photon, Purity, Laserdream, Brandish and others I didn’t know.  The Ward with the crossbow, some guy with crimson skin.  There was a light show in the sky above as Kid Win teleported in pieces of the cannon he’d had at the bank robbery, manifesting them onto a hovering platform set directly in front of Leviathan.  He’d get anywhere from a few seconds to a minute’s worth of concentrated fire with the gun firing on the highest settings, directing a beam through a gap in the bars to where Narwhal’s razor sharp forcefield had opened a gap in Leviathan’s neck.

Beyond those first few moments after Leviathan woke up, it woul be anyone’s guess.

I hurried away from the site Armsmaster had indicated to me, my right hand on my left elbow, keeping my arm from moving too much.  Sector CC-7, a block and a half South, a block West.  So strange, to think that this was an area I’d walked through a dozen times, on my way to or from the Loft.  Now I was looking at it as a battlefield, trying to figure out what routes Leviathan would take.  What things I had to watch out for – the grates leading down to the storm sewers, the rain barrel on top of one of the buildings that might or might not be intact enough to retain any water in it.  Puddles.

Stuff I could use…  hardly.

It wasn’t like there was any weapon I could deploy, no feature of the terrain I could use to deliver the critical blow.  This was Leviathan.  A creature that had killed more people in the last 12 years than I had even seen in my entire life.  Seen in person, anyways.

I was scared.  A huge part of me wanted to just close my eyes and hope Leviathan didn’t come, that I wouldn’t have to deal with him.  It would be nice to join the three hundred and fifty thousand other Brockton Bay residents that were trusting the heroes to handle things, find a peace of sorts in surrender and helplessness.  Except I couldn’t.  I’d seen firsthand how Leviathan had taken down some of the strongest capes.  I couldn’t find refuge in that kind of trust anymore.  My mental and emotional resources were better spent on figuring out how to help than they were on hope.

I was hurting, too.  The only thing keeping the throb of my arm from consuming my attention was the fear.  It was a kind of grim cycle:  the pain reminded me of why I should be scared, but the emotion and the adrenaline kept the pain as this intensely unpleasant background chatter in my brain, where it might have crippled me otherwise.  It was a teetering balance that had me on edge in a way I’d never experienced to this degree.  There were probably people who lived for that hypervigilant, heart-racing, brain-going-in-overtime experience.  I wasn’t one of them.

Priorities.  Back to what I was thinking about – there obviously wasn’t anything to be found here that would win me a fight against Leviathan or even hurt him.  Ridiculous to think that way.  Any advantages to be gained would be ones that kept me alive.

I wiped the beads of water from my lenses with my glove, which only seemed to divide each of them into a mess of smaller droplets.  Leviathan was bigger than me, stronger, faster, tougher.  I had to think like a mouse who might run into a murderous cat at any moment.  Like prey.  Use my small size.  Hide.  I needed a position that kept me out of sight, gave me a good vantage point, but left me free to make a run for it.  A spot where I had an escape route if things got bad.  To top it off, in the event Eidolon couldn’t stop the wave, I could also do with cover.

It was the sort of street you saw often enough in the Docks.  Large buildings lined either side, like giant boxes made of concrete or brick.  I could have maybe found a fire escape to climb up, in the hopes that I’d be out of reach of the wave, but my experience with Lung back on day one had taught me better.  The higher ground was an advantage, sure, but if your opponent could get up or down from that location faster and more easily than you could, that stopped being an asset really damn quickly.  If there was anything that was going to be useful, it would be on ground level.  I saw a rusted van that had sat in front of an old workshop since I’d first passed through this area, all tires flat, windows broken, interior gutted.  A chain link fence stretched between two buildings, but someone had cut the wires that connected the fence to the frame, so half of it was curled back and waving slightly in the wind and rain.

No, those things weren’t useful.  Larger scale?  There was an old roof supported by two pillars, attached on one side to a building, a carport, perhaps.  The roof was mostly intact, corrugated steel with a smallish hole in one lower corner, which meant the area beneath it was largely dry, but for a small puddle.  It was also exposed on three sides, which meant I couldn’t stay there.  My bugs could.  It was a place they could keep dry until I needed them.

I’d been acutely aware of my bugs since the battle started, and for the second time I could remember, I found my power was responding far more effectively as I called for them.  My reach extended further, my bugs were fractionally more responsive.  The last time this had been the case, it had been when I teamed up with Bitch, Sundancer and Newter and wound up fighting Oni Lee and Lung.  I couldn’t explain it, but I wasn’t going to complain.  I needed every small advantage I could get.

As they began gathering under the carport, my mind returned to that notion of being successful ‘prey’.

When I’d originally designed my costume, I’d picked the darker colors, made sure that the varieties of chitin I used to make the armor were spaced out so the individual shading would retain some ‘speckling’ after being painted, all for a reason.  Camouflage.  I’d known I’d have my bugs all around me.  I’d known I would be standing in the midst of them while they gathered into swarms, would have them crawling on me from time to time.  So I’d picked darker colors and made my armor mottled to blend in with the bugs that were, obviously, specks.

Just hiding inside my swarm wouldn’t be enough.  Too easy for him to attack just the one cluster, tear through me.

So I gathered more than one smaller swarm, clustering them in areas where it was dry.  The interior of the rusted van, under eaves, in doorframes and on a roof, under a large rain barrel.

Then, struck by a little inspiration, I condensed the nine swarms into human-ish shapes.  Black silhouettes crouched, stood tall with arms akimbo, leaned against walls, leaned partially outside the driver’s side window of the van.  In the gloom, through the rain, it was deceptive.  Deceptive enough?  I couldn’t be sure.

I felt the bite of cold air.  A chill breeze, going straight through the soaked fabric of my costume.  When I looked down to where the long road sloped to the edge of the water, I saw the reason for the chill.  Eidolon was flying at the coast, focusing blue rays on the water around the shattered boardwalk and debris at the water’s edge, hardening the waves into irregular sheets and glacier-like formations of ice.

Dangerous.  I could remember seeing on TV that they’d tried something like this a few years ago.  A Tinker using an ice engine, I think.  I didn’t know exactly how or why, but judging by the fact that they hadn’t used the tactic again, I got the impression It had turned out really badly.

My guess was based on the notion that hydrokinesis was the movement of water, and ice was just water in another form.  It wasn’t that Leviathan would levitate the chunks of ice.  Nothing so blatant.  Rather, when a tidal wave did break through the ice, rolled up onto the battlefield with frozen shards and chunks caught up in the current, Leviathan might move those chunks a little faster in the wave’s passage, make them hit a little harder, and give them a tendency to strike where they could do the most damage.

That was my suspicion, anyways.  The heroes didn’t exactly dish out the full details at press conferences, afterward, so I could only make an educated guess.

Either way, it was a delaying tactic.  Holding off the damage, in the hopes that we could end this or get reinforcements before Brockton Bay became another Newfoundland.

We were hoping for Scion.  The first cape, the golden skinned man.  The guy that could go toe to toe with an Endbringer and win, if things hadn’t already gone too far south.  If Behemoth hadn’t already turned the area into a radioactive, magma-ridden wasteland.  If Leviathan hadn’t built up enough momentum with his waves.  If the Simurgh… Ok, the Simurgh was different, I had to admit.  The issue with her wasn’t so much winning the battle.  It was what came after.  Win every battle against her, lose the war, more or less.

The problem with waiting on Scion was that the guy wasn’t exactly in touch with the rest of us.  There was speculation he had at least one human contact – someone that had given him clothing and a costume, at least – but he never bothered to stop long enough for anyone to pass on any requests, to tell him to go to X place when we gave him Y signal.  He rescued people twenty-four-seven, three hundred and sixty five days a year, handling crises only as they came to his attention, which meant that sometimes an Endbringer came and Scion was wholly occupied with saving sinking ships, stopping landslides and putting out housefires.  I wondered what he was doing now.

My swarms were in place, which left me having to decide where to hide.  The carport was too in the open, none of the eaves left me a good enough escape route, and as for the space under the rain barrel on the roof, well, I wasn’t that stupid, and I’d already dismissed the roof as an option anyways.

I started toward the rusted van.  I was halfway there when I reconsidered.  As comforting as it might be to have the safety of metal around me and to be more or less concealed, it posed some of the same problems as the rooftops.  If things turned sour or if an unexpected situation arose, I’d be trapped.

After a moment of tense consideration, I reluctantly decided on the carport, hunkering down in the gloom and hoping the shadows there would help conceal me.  It offered me an escape route – around the back of the building, or through the side door, it gave me cover from the rain and any debris, and it gave me concealment.  I’d have to cope with the lack of cover from any incoming waves or Leviathan himself.

Secure in the amount of bugs around me, I collected the ones that could go out in the rain and manage reasonably well.  Primarily roaches.  I sent them out in the general direction of where Leviathan and the others were.  The better a sense I had of any imminent encounters, the better I could react.

Manpower deceased, CD-6.  Aegis deceased, CD-6, my armband spoke, at the same moment my bugs reached the area around where Leviathan had been.

He was awake again.

Aegis would have been covering an aerial route, keeping Leviathan from heading to the rooftops, which meant Leviathan went up.  I had the mass of roaches ascend, trying to get a sense of his location.  I tried to use my armband to help gauge the direction he was traveling, but since I couldn’t move my arm, it was difficult at best.

Fenja down, CC-6.  My head snapped up.

I found them.  Fenja and Menja were duking it out with Leviathan.  Both were nearly as big as he was, which was saying a fair bit.  I knew their power warped geometry to make them bigger, simultaneously reduced the effective size of incoming attacks by an inversely proportionate amount.  Six times as tall and a sixth of the hurt, on top of the benefits of being bigger.

Fenja deceased, CC-6.

It wasn’t doing them a lot of good.  Not Fenja, anyways.

I saw a light as Kid Win rose above the level of the buildings, fired a painfully bright beam down at the Endbringer.  After the laser petered out, he rose up higher again, to keep out of reach.  He was in the middle of firing another beam when the laser flicked around nearly three hundred and sixty degrees, spun by a massive impact.

Kid win down, CC-6.

And then Leviathan was in view, entering the same street I was on.  As if to herald his coming, a massive wave crashed hard against the barrier of ice Eidolon had erected around the wrecked Boardwalk, the spray seemingly reaching nearly to the stormclouds above.

One shoulder was bloated, five times the normal size, twisted, like it was covered in elephantine tumors, bleeding openly.  He was injured in other places, had a hole through the side of his stomach, a larger blackened wound at the base of his neck, and a fifth of his face was missing, torn off below the cheekbone.  He didn’t seem to be suffering much.  He held Kaiser’s upper torso in the one claw, tossed it casually to one side.  The man’s legs were nowhere to be seen.

Wait, what?  I hadn’t heard the report on Kaiser’s death.  I checked my armband, where my arm hung immobile at my side.

It was dead, offline.  Black screen.

I didn’t have another second to worry – Leviathan was extending one claw in my general direction.

The water that had pooled shallowly beneath the carport trickled his way, as if it were moving downhill, gathered in a rising bulge of water on the street in front of the carport, swelling to five feet in height, fifteen feet across.

Unsure what to do, I remained absolutely still.

A movement of his claw, and the bulge broke, spilled to one side as an onrushing wave.  It swept beneath the rusted van, suddenly rose to heave the vehicle in Leviathan’s direction.  The van rolled once, skidding toward the Endbringer, threatening to strike one leg out from under him.  He stopped it by punching it through the roof, into the front end of the van.  He stabbed the other claw through at the same point, tore the van into two halves that he tossed to either side of him.

A flick of his tail, and he sent a blade of water slashing through the air at the rain barrel, slicing through the swarm and stilts.  The barrel crashed to the rooftop, and water cascaded out.  A twisting movement of his claw, and that cascade of water flowed off the roof in a small, controlled wave, moving like a speeding car, straight towards the carport on the other side of the street, toward me.

I caught a glimpse of Leviathan rearing back in reaction to something as I legged it, left my swarm behind as I ran perpendicular to the wave’s direction, away from Leviathan.  I leaped as I felt it make contact with the swarm, felt it slam into my legs a fraction of a second after.

I’d cleared enough ground that the angle of the hit didn’t throw me straight into the side of the building.  I was thrown a distance, rolled on my side, on top of and over my probably-broken arm.

Pain consumed me.  I writhed, my good hand pressing on my bad arm.  I gagged, pulled my mask up to throw up, as if my body was trying to find some way to rebel against the pain.  I tried to climb to my feet, but I was too weak, dizzy, and my good arm gave out.  I landed face first in dirty water.

I had no idea how long it took me to pull myself together.  It could have been two minutes, it could have been ten seconds.  I managed to climb to my feet.  Stumble back toward the carport, staying to the shadows.

As I approached the corner of the building, I saw Armsmaster fighting toe to toe with Leviathan, a Halberd in each hand.  One was similar to the one he’d used the night we attacked the fundraiser, capable of unfolding into a grappling hook, the other was simpler, a dull stainless steel from tip to butt end, with no decoration or style to it.  The head was surrounded by a strange blur that seemed static, unmoving around the blade and point.

Leviathan slapped his tail at Armsmaster’s legs, and Armsmaster leaped over it, swiped out with the blurry Halberd.  It carved a chunk out of Leviathan, left a cloud of dust that the rain quickly drove down into the expanse of water beneath them.  The Endbringer reared back in pain, and Armsmaster stepped forward, leaped up higher than any normal human could, and caught Leviathan just above the knee with the Halberd, driving the blade nearly a third of the way to the bone.

Leviathan retaliated, swiping at Armsmaster, but the hero planted a foot on the uninjured part of the knee, and kicked himself back and out of the way.  The afterimage followed him, and he swiped at it with the other Halberd.  The blade erupted with a flame like a giant purple blowtorch, turning the worst of the afterimage into steam before it could crush him.  He turned his back so the steam didn’t billow against the exposed flesh of his face.  Some remains of the afterimage struck his armor, but he slid back and rolled with the impact, keeping his feet on the ground the entire time, enabling him to leap and roll to one side as Leviathan’s tail came down from behind and directly above him.

Leviathan was badly injured.  Ichor poured from six large wounds that hadn’t been there when he’d arrived on the street.

“You dumb brute,” Armsmaster growled.  He was panting for breath.  “Every fight you’ve done so far, that we’ve got on camera?  I’ve watched it, put it through programs.  I’ve got a computer on my back that’s relaying to a supernetwork, noting your every move, using subsonic pulses to read every aspect of the street, the surrounding buildings, every feature of the terrain.  I know exactly what you’re going to do next – you’re going to try to catch me from behind with a wave.”

Leviathan lunged, swiped with the oversized claw.  Armsmaster rolled to one side, then swung both Halberds behind him to intercept the wave that was coming from behind, vaporize it.

“You don’t even speak English, do you?  Or you’d know what I was saying, you’d know I already won.  The others helped, slowing you down, stopping the waves.  But this victory, this killing blow?  It’s going to be mine.”

Leviathan lunged, stopped, letting his water echo get ahead of him, then lunged again, a half second later.  Armsmaster leaped out of the way of the echo, drew his knees to his chest to avoid a claw swipe while he was still airborne, and sent his grappling hook between Leviathan’s feet to pull himself to the ground in a flash.  He skidded with the momentum, right between Leviathan’s legs, and raised the blurry Halberd to strike Leviathan between the legs, against the first ten feet of Leviathan’s tail.  The tail was turned to dust where the blade made contact, the plumes of it briefly obscuring Armsmaster.

“This cloud around my blade?  Nanotechnology.  Nano-structures engineered to slide between atoms, sever molecular bonds.  Cuts through anything.  Everything.  Like a sharp knife through air.”

Leviathan whipped his tail at Armsmaster.  Armsmaster stepped out of the way, slapped at the tail with the broad side of the blade.  More dust, another chunk of flesh gone, ichor pouring from the injury.  He ducked the echo as though it were an idle afterthought.

Leviathan turned to run.  Armsmaster sent out one blade like a grappling hook, circled the smaller of the Endbringer’s claws with the chain.  Leviathan moved, oblivious or uncaring, and Armsmaster waited until the slack was out of the chain, pressed a button.

The chain and Halberd ceased moving, and even Leviathan’s strength ceased to move it.  Rather than pull away, the Endbringer skidded, fell on his back, wrist still held by the chain.

A half second later, the chain went briefly slack, then rigid again as Armsmaster reeled himself in. He drove the blurry blade straight into Leviathan’s face with all the force of his forward momentum.  He pulled it free, slashed again, then freed the chain and used it to pull himself across the street, out of reach of Leviathan’s violent response.

Armsmaster called out, “Let’s see how quickly you respond to classical conditioning.  Every time you try to run, I’ll do something like that.”

Leviathan had no reply.  He simply climbed to his feet, swiped a claw through the air.  Armsmaster parried the afterimage that sailed through the air toward him, using the purple flame.

“For the record, that last trick was a temporal stasis trigger, with thanks owed to the cooperation of a subordinate of mine.  Drains my battery reserves, but you don’t understand that, do you?”

Leviathan lunged, and Armsmaster fired out the grappling hook, stopped it in mid air by freezing it in time.  Leviathan ran himself through on the chain, the thing spearing deep into his neck and out the back of his torso.  Uncaring, the Endbringer continued to charge at Armsmaster.

Armsmaster let the chain go slack, ducked a swipe of the tail, leaped forward and to one side to avoid the claw that followed.  Another small hop and roll ensured he moved right beneath the afterimage, and he made two swipes with the blurry Halberd at the back of Leviathan’s thighs as he passed behind the Endbringer.  His chain reeled in, pulled free of Leviathan’s neck wth a spray of blood, came down and across Leviathan’s hip to snap back to the top of the Halberd.  He fired it off again to get himself more distance, pulling himself across the street, spinning to face Leviathan once more as he stopped.

He passed one Halberd to the other hand, so he held two, wiped some frothing spittle from his mouth with his gauntlet.  “I am going to be the one to take your head, abomination.  I can only hope you know mortal terror in your last moments, know what you’ve inflicted on so many others.”

Leviathan stood, straighted itself, touched its claw to its ruined face, then its neck.  The amount of blood it was losing – it seemed somehow more than Leviathan should have been able to contain within himself.  I mean, he was big, but this was a lot of blood.

For several long seconds, Leviathan didn’t move.

“Delaying, buying time for a tsunami?” Armsmaster laughed, and Leviathan cocked his head at the display of emotion.  “No.  Three point four minutes before the next big wave breaks through the ice.  Dragon’s probes are giving me the data on that.  This will be over before then.”

He stepped forward, then stepped again, waiting for some cue from Leviathan.  On Armsmaster’s third step, Leviathan took a small step back, lashed his tail behind him.

“Finally scared?” Armsmaster taunted.  “Good.”

Nausea and pain was welling up in me again as I watched from the corner of the building, under the carport, threatening to override my sense of awe.  It was all I could do to keep quiet, keep from distracting Armsmaster, or distracting Leviathan and throwing some wrench in Armsmaster’s data.  The last thing I wanted was to become the hostage that made Armsmaster hesitate for the fraction of a second that cost him -cost us all-  the fight.

Armsmaster went on an all-out offensive, slashing as fast as his arm could move, cutting leg, knee, tail, leg again, moving out of the way of Leviathan’s attacks as though it were easy.  For ten seconds he continued, relentless.

“I should thank you, monster,” Armsmaster spoke, after he’d just finished a backflip that had carried him near enough to Leviathan’s torso to strike the creature across the lower belly.

Leviathan lunged, dropping to all fours, as if trying to swamp Armsmaster with a huge volume of water by way of his afterimage.  Armsmaster was already casting his grappling hook out, pulling himself out of the way.  In the final moment before he pulled away, his other Halberd swung up and into Leviathan’s neck, making a wound mirroring the spot where Narwhal’s forcefield had cleaved deep, the one Kid Win had undoubtedly opened wider with his laser turret.  Armsmaster reeled the hook back in.

The Endbringer turned, as if to run, only for the loop of the grappling hook’s chain to pass under his ‘chin’.  Armsmaster heaved himself up and onto the Endbringer’s back, drove the Halberd into one side of the neck, lengthening the cut he’d just made.  He stepped on the top of the Endbringer’s head, leaped down, catching the Endbringer across the face with the Halberd as he descended.  Leviathan collapsed, going spread-eagle.

Armsmaster slashed at Leviathan’s forearms as the Endbringer started to clmb to his feet.  More damage done, though it didn’t stop Leviathan from rising.  While Armsmaster pressed the attack, his armband hissed with a message I couldn’t make out.  I glanced at mine – still broken.

“This will be over before then,” Armsmaster echoed an eariler statement, speaking more to himself than to the armband or Leviathan.

Leviathan hopped backwards to create some distance, staggered a little as the more injured of his two legs failed to take his weight, used his smaller hand to stop from falling a second time, poising himself on three limbs.

Armsmaster used his grappling hook to haul himself close, readying to make another slash for the neck.  He changed his mind as the ground rumbled, pulled the hook free to latch it on a garage door.  Countering his forward momentum, he swung himself to one side of the road, staying out of Leviathan’s reach.

The ground rumbled again, brief, intense, stopped.

Armsmaster touched a hand to the side of his visor, and I thought I saw his lips crease in a frown before he turned his head away from me.

Another fierce rumble, and a crack appeared like a seam down the center of the street, a straight line as far as I could see in either direction.

Leviathan raised his claw, and the road suddenly split, heaving upward as a concrete pipe wide enough to fit a man crested from the pavement like a whale rising from the waves.  A second later, water gushed forth, veering toward Armsmaster.

The storm sewers.

Armsmaster hesitated, then threw his grappling-hook-Halberd forward into the onrushing waves like a javelin.  The gush of water froze in time, and he leapt forward, stepping on the furthermost extensions of the immobile spray in a parkour-style ascent over the water and the pipe.  The water resumed its regular motion as Armsmaster took his final leaping step off the top, heading straight for Leviathan.

Leviathan moved faster than he had in the last minute, caught the blade in his claw.

Dust rose from the claw as the blade sank deep, blood poured out, but the blade remained fixed in place.  Armsmaster tugged, failed to dislodge it.  He tried to pull away, but I could see Leviathan had caught onto his hand and wrist with his clawtips, while the Halberd sat embedded in his ‘palm’.

“How!?” Armsmaster roared.

I didn’t hesitate a moment in sending out my bugs.  Three swarms, shaped like people, more as a general cloud.  The bugs all sagged beneath the drenching rain, the ones on top taking the brunt of the downpour.

Leviathan planted one foot beside Armsmaster for balance, reached out with his free claw, and pressed the tips against the side of Armsmaster’s throat and torso.  Still holding on to Armsmaster’s hand and wrist, he pushed against the side of the man’s body.  Armsmaster screamed, a frantic noise that seemed to redouble in urgency with every breath.  He tipped over and fell with a splash.

The Endbringer stood, showing none of the frailty or pain it had been displaying seconds ago.  The injuries were there, to be sure, his head hung at an angle because of the way the weight of his head hung on the intact portions of his neck, but he wasn’t suffering, had no trouble putting his full weight on his more injured leg.  Had it been an act?

The Endbringer dropped Armsmaster’s arm and Halberd, where the weight of the metal armor and device pulled them beneath the water.  A lash of his tail dispatched two of my three swarms.  He watched, seeming not to care, as the third ran up to him, smashed against his leg.  The bugs spreading out, burying themselves deep into his injuries. I was hoping to find some weakness, devour him from the inside out, but the bugs might as well have been biting on steel.  Nothing budged beneath their jaws, their stings couldn’t penetrate.

He turned, crouched, bolted West, away from the coast, full speed.

I hurried to Armsmaster’s side.

“You,” he groaned.  His left arm was gone at the shoulder, torn out of the socket.  Blood poured from the wound.  “You’re dead.”

“Hey, you’re not making any sense.”

“He killed you.”

Had my armband announced my death when it glitched out and died?  Assumed total destruction of my unit, and me with it?

“I’m alive.  Listen, I’m going to try and find your arm, my armband got broken, maybe something got dislodged when Leviathan broke my arm.”

He only groaned unintelligbly in response.

I ran over to the general area where Leviathan had dropped Armsmaster’s arm.   I tripped over the crack that ran down the middle of the street, got my feet under me to keep running, and began feeling through the water.

I came within inches of touching the submerged blade, turning my hand to molecular dust.

Finding the arm, I picked it up.  Heavy, almost too much to hold in one hand.  It wasn’t just the weight of the armor or the fact that it was a muscular, full-grown-man’s limb – the gauntlet had been crushed around the pole of the Halberd, crumpled like tinfoil.  With the arm and weapon in a bricklayer’s grip that was painful to maintain, I hurried back to Armsmaster’s side, dropped them near him.  I shook him, hoping to get him alert, to no avail.

With my only working hand, I pried the Halberd free of his glove, rested his arm across his chest, and pressed the button.

“Armsmaster down!  CC-7!  Leviathan is heading West…”

I felt the bugs I’d clustered in Leviathan’s wounds change direction.  The compass point between West and Northwest was what?  More Wests than North.

“Cancel that!  He’s going West-North-West from my location!”

My voice echoed back to me in the Armband’s tinny voice a half-second after I’d finished.  Armsmaster’s armband changed to display a red dot, tracking Leviathan’s movements, or the closest approximation the system could guess.

“Roger, sounds like he might be heading for one of the shelters, lots of people packed into a space where they can’t run, vulnerable,” someone replied, “Medical help incoming.  Whoever this is, you can track Leviathan?”

“Yes, as long as I’m within a few blocks of him.”  Again, the system relayed my message. Affirmative.  Range restriction of ‘a few blocks’.

Did it really need to reword what I said?

“Can you fly?  Chase him?”

“No.”  Negative.

“Then I’m sending a flier your way, to ensure you stay close enough.  We need eyes on this bastard, and you’re them.”

“Got it!”

There was only silence after that.  Teeth clenched, shivering, I pressed my good hand as hard as I could manage against the ragged mess of Armsmaster’s shoulder, trying to slow the blood loss.

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

Tangle 6.5

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My legs hugged the sides of Judas’ body.  I could feel his breathing beneath me, the expansion of his body as his lungs filled, then emptied.  He huffed out a breath, and it steamed in the cool night air.

He stepped forward, just a little, and I got a glimpse of the world below us.  Thirty two stories down, the cars on the street were visible only by the yellow and red points of their headlights and taillights.  I felt Tattletale clutch me tighter, from where she sat behind me.  Judas’ front paw rested on the stone railing of the rooftop, clutched it hard enough that the points of his nails bit into the concrete.

Getting up here had been easy enough – Tattletale had cracked the employee access door and we’d taken the supply elevator to the roof.  Had someone been alerted to our presence?  Spotted us on camera?  Hard to say.  But time was short, and we’d already wasted enough time waiting for the dogs to finish growing.  The moment Bitch deemed them set, we would move out.

This plan had been terrifying when we’d just been talking about it.  Actually being on the verge of doing it?  Ten times worse.

Still time to think of a reason to back out.

Bitch’s whistle, one of those ones that make you wince when you hear them a hundred feet away, cut through the faint, ambient hum of the city below us.

Last chance, Taylor.

A second later, Brutus, with Bitch and Grue astride his back, stepped over the edge of the roof.  Judas shifted forward under me, then followed.

Falling from a height like that, you don’t get to scream.  The wind takes your voice from you.  If you happen to have something to hold onto, you cling to that for dear life and you pray, even if you aren’t a praying type.  My hands clutched hooks of bone on either side of Judas’ neck hard enough that I thought I might break either the bone or my hands.

Three stories down from the roof, there was a patio.  As Bitch whistled and pointed from her position below us, Judas kicked against the wall just behind us, pushing out and away from the building.  My heart rose into my throat and stuck there as I saw the edge of the patio below us, surely out of reach.  Had he pushed too early?  The next chance we’d have to touch a surface would be when we spattered violently against the road.

His instincts seemed to be better than mine.  His front claws reached down and gripped the patio’s edge.  Every muscle in my body tensed in my effort to not be thrown off him as we stopped, even with his powerful body absorbing the worst of the fall.  He gripped the ledge, then pushed against it while leveraging his back legs into place.  With every muscle in his body, it seemed, he leaped.  Not down, this time, but out.

Time seemed to stand still as we left the building behind.  The only thing below us was the street, twenty-nine stories below. The wind blew through my hair with a painful bite of cold. We’d crossed the event horizon, it was do or die from here on out.  That made it eerily easy to cast aside all doubts and hesitation and steel myself for what came next.

The Forsberg Gallery was twenty six stories tall and was one of the more recognizable buildings you could find downtown.  If I remembered right, it had been designed by Architecture students at the university, a few years ago.  I wasn’t really a fan of the design, which resembled the late stages of a game of Jenga, with each section formed in tempered glass with steel bars and girders providing the base skeleton.  The entire thing was illuminated by lights that changed according to the time of the evening.

In the blue-gray of the evening, the tower was pink and orange, echoing the sunset that had finished just an hour ago.  As the leap carried us over it, a pink tinted spotlight consumed my vision.

My lenses absorbed the worst of the glare, and a second later, I was able to make out what was happening again.  Brutus, a matter of feet in front of us, slammed into the glass of the roof, sending cracks spiderwebbing across it.  Grue virtually bounced from where he sat on Brutus’ back, losing his seat, hit the glass of the roof with his shoulder, and began to slide.  There was barely any traction to be had, not even on the steel girder that separated the massive panes of glass, and the only thing at the end of that slide would be a very long fall.

He reached out and grabbed ahold of the end of Brutus’ tail, pulling himself to a standing position at the same moment that Judas, Tattletale and I crashed into the pane of glass to their right.

The damage Brutus had done on impact was enough to ensure that we could break through rather than simply breaking the window.  There was a moment where you could hear the sound of straining metal, followed by the sound of a lot of shattering glass.

Together we all dropped into the center of the Forsberg Gallery’s top floor, joined by a downpour of glass shards.  Grue landed on his feet and stumbled back as Brutus landed just in front of him.  All around us, there were people in fancy dress and uniforms.  Suits, dresses… costumes.  People ran screaming and running for cover.  Heroes stepped forward, some trying to grasp the situation in the midst of the chaos, others putting themselves between us and the civilians.

A matter of heartbeats after we touched ground, Regent and Angelica plunged into the room, landing just behind us.  Regent lost his seat as Angelica landed, but managed to roll as he hit the ground, bringing himself to a crouch as he stopped.  He almost managed to make it look intentional.  Angelica stepped up to Bitch’s side, wearing the same harness we’d fitted her with at the bank robbery, but with two large cardboard boxes strapped to her sides, rather than bags.

I felt weirdly calm as my eyes swept over the room.  The Protectorate was gathered around the stage at the back of the room.  Armsmaster, Miss Militia, Assault, Battery, Velocity and Triumph.  Dauntless was MIA.

Not far away was the ‘kids’ table with some of the heroes of the hour.  Clockblocker, Vista, Gallant and Shadow Stalker, interrupted from their mingling with the rich kids, teen actors and the sons and daughters of the local who’s who.  The platinum blonde in the white evening gown that was giving me the evil eye?  That would be Glory Girl, out of costume.

Standing guard by the front of the room, raising their weapons in our direction, was an on-duty PRT squad.  Their very recognizable uniforms were chain mesh augmented with kevlar, topped with faceless helmets.  The only means you had to identify them with were the badge numbers printed across their vests in bold white numbers.   Four of the five had what looked like flamethrowers.  They weren’t firing yet – they couldn’t.  They were packing the best in nonlethal weaponry, but there were elderly people and children in the crowd, and according to Tattletale, that meant they were prohibited from opening fire on us for the moment.

The civilians… men and women in their finest clothes and jewelry.  A combination of the richest and most powerful people in the city, their guests and those willing to pay the exorbitant prices for the tickets.  The tickets started at two hundred and thirty dollars and had climbed steeply as they’d been bought up.  We’d initially considered attending as guests, for one plan of attack, before we decided that it was too dangerous to risk having our secret identities caught on camera, or to have something go wrong as we attempted to smuggle our equipment, costumes and dogs inside.  Once we’d decided that much, we’d stopped checking the cost of tickets, which had gotten as high as four hundred dollars a person.  The guests could use thirty dollars of the ticket price to bid on an auction, but it was still pretty exorbitant.

I recognized the mayor – the first time I’d seen him in person.  There was a guy who might have been a lesser known actor – I thought I recognized him, too.  The rest were just people, maybe a bit better looking than the norm, a bit better dressed.

And Emma.

I could have laughed.  She was standing there in the crowd with her parents and older sister, looking scared shitless in a little sky blue dress and blue sandals. Her dad was a high profile divorce lawyer.  I supposed it was possible he’d worked for someone famous or powerful enough that his family hadn’t needed an invitation or expensive tickets to get in.

It kind of sucked, knowing I was about to give her an awesome story to share with the rest of the school when her suspension was over with.  I was really, really hoping it wouldn’t be a story along the lines of ‘these idiotic villains just pulled a stunt so dumb it would put Über and Leet to shame, and got themselves arrested in a matter of seconds’.

Tattletale laughed, with a nervous edge, “Holy shit!  Not doing that again!  Fucking intense…” Her voice trailed off as Grue blacked out the crowd, leaving only the spot where we stood and the very edges of the room clear of the darkness.  She gave him a dirty look.

“Bitch, Regent, go!” He shouted, as he stepped my way, grabbed my hand and practically pulled me from where I sat on Judas’ back.  Tattletale hopped down, following a pace or two behind us.

The three of us ran for the front of the room, while Bitch whistled for her dogs and ran for the back.  I sensed it when Regent unhitched the two boxes that were strapped to Angelica.  The boxes were heavy and  hit the ground hard, splitting at the seams.  Better than I’d hoped.  I had my bugs flow out from the top of the box and the split sides, and ordered them into the crowd.

If a few more of the biting and stinging sort headed in Emma’s general direction, it wasn’t due to a conscious choice on my part.

If everything went according to plan, Bitch, Regent and the dogs could delay or stop anyone who ventured beyond the cloud of darkness.  Everything else, our success or our humiliating arrest, hinged on Grue, Tattletale and I.

My bugs reached the front of the room just seconds before we did.  I could sense their locations, and this in turn gave me the ability to identify where the people, the walls, doorway and furniture were.

I was moving with my knife drawn before Grue even banished some of his darkness to reveal a portion of the PRT squad that was stationed at the entrance.  As the cloud of black dissipated into tendrils of smoke, I was stepping behind one of the team members, drawing my knife against the hose that extended between the flamethrower-like device he held in his hands and the tank on his back.  It didn’t cut immediately, forcing me to try a second time.  As the knife severed the material of the hose, the PRT team member noticed me and drove his elbow into my face.  My mask took the worst of the hit, but getting hit in the face by a full grown man isn’t any fun with any amount of protective headwear.

I fell back through the doorway even as the tank began emptying its contents onto the floor.  It was a yellow-white, and as it poured onto the ground, it expanded like shaving cream.  The tank was probably close to three gallons, making for a hell of a lot of foam.

Grue leveraged all of his weight to bodily kick one of the squad members into the foam, then slammed the base of his palm into the next guy’s chin.  As the man reeled, Grue grabbed at the tank on his back and pulled it up over his head.  This not only pulled the man off balance, but the weight of the tank kept him that way.  Grue, his hands still on the tank, pulled the squad member’s helmeted face down at the same time he brought his knee up.  The pane of the helmet cracked, and the man didn’t even have the wherewithal to bring his hands up to soften the fall before hitting the ground.

A fourth squad member stepped out of the darkness, and Tattletale took hold of the nozzle of the man’s weapon, forcing it to one side before he could open fire.  I scrambled to my feet to help her.  As Tattletale began to lose the wrestling match over the weapon, I leaped over the still-expanding pile of foam, then went low as I landed to knock his legs out from under him.  He fell, hard, and Tattletale wrenched the weapon from his hands.  As he climbed to his feet, she pulled the trigger and blasted him in the face.  Grue banished enough darkness to reveal the final member of the team, and Tattletale buried him under a blasting of the foam.

I’d watched a discovery channel feature on this stuff.  The PRT, the Parahuman Response Team, was equipped with tinker-designed nonlethal weaponry to subdue supervillains.  This containment foam was standard issue.  It ejected as a liquid, then expanded into a sticky foam with a few handy properties.  It was flexible and it was porous when fully expanded, for one thing, so you could breathe while contained within it, at least long enough for rescue teams with a dissolving agent to get to you.  It was also impact resistant, so PRT squads could coat the ground with it to save falling individuals or keep heavy hitters from doing much damage.

The way it expanded, you could coat all but the strongest villains in it, and it would disable them.  Because of the way it denied you leverage and was resistant to impacts and tearing, even the likes of Lung would have trouble pulling themselves free.  Topping it all off, it was resistant to high temperatures and a strong insulator, so it served to handle the pyrokinetics and those with electromagnetic powers.

While the PRT member struggled ineffectually to remove his foam-covered helmet, I pulled the tank off him and helped Tattletale put it on.  Grue already had his on, and was getting a third one off one of the foam-captured PRT team members for me.

It was heavy, and I almost couldn’t handle the weight.  Rather than stagger around, I crouched and let the base of the tank rest against the ground.

Grue pointed to our left, and we aimed.  A second later, he made the darkness dissipate, showing the buffet table surrounded by the various Wards and Glory Girl flying a few feet above the ground.  They were swatting at the bugs crawling on them, but they weren’t so distracted that they didn’t notice the sudden emergence of light, or us.

“Glory Hole!” Tattletale heckled the heroine, before opening fire on her.  Grue directed a stream at Clockblocker, to the left, so I turned my attention to the person on the far right of the group.  Shadow Stalker.

I admit, I had a reason to be ticked at her, since she wrote a note for Emma’s dad, giving him fuel for that damned assault charge.  It was with a measure of satisfaction that I unloaded a stream of foam on her.

The stream was dead on, but she didn’t seem to give much of a damn as she evaded to one side.  I caught her square in the chest with another spurt, making her stagger a bit, but she didn’t fall or get caught in the stuff like the others.  Instead, she sort of ducked low, her cape billowing, and then rolled to one side, readying her crossbow as her feet touched the ground and she shifted to an all-out run.

Whether that was a tranquilizer shot or a real arrow, I was fucked if she hit me.

I went wide with my stream, aiming to catch her a little and either slow her down or mess up her aim.  She stepped on a bit of foam and was tripped up a little.  Tattletale added her firepower to mine, and with our combined streams, Shadow Stalker fell.  We took a second to bury her under the foam, and Grue added a measure of darkness to it.

“Next!” Grue hollered, pointing.  I hauled the heavy tank off the ground and moved closer to our next target before putting it down again and aiming.

This time, I deliberately moved a force of bugs into the area for some extra distraction.  The darkness dissipated, and it was the Protectorate this time, half of them.  Battery, Assault, and Triumph.

Battery was already charged up when Grue dismissed the impenetrable shadow that had covered them, and moved like a blur as soon as she could see where she was going.  She didn’t bolt straight for us, though.  Instead, she leaped to one side, kicked Assault square in the middle of the chest with both feet, and then careened off in the opposite direction.

Assault was a kinetic energy manipulator, and could control the energies of movement, acceleration and motion much like other heroes could manipulate flame or electricity.  He used the energy from Battery’s kick to rocket towards us, as Battery moved around to flank.

Grue directed a stream straight at Assault, but the first second of fire seemed to skim right off the man.  It did start taking hold after that, but the delayed effects gave Assault just enough time to slam into Grue and send him flying into the wall beside the Wards.  After that, the expansion of the foam kept him from moving much further.

Tattletale and I focused our fire on Battery.  The woman ducked and dodged out of the way of our streams, moving too fast to follow reliably with our eyes.  She seemed to stumble into a cocktail table, one of those round ones large enough for four people to stand around, but any clumsiness on her part was an illusion of the eye.  A heartbeat later, she had the table in her grip and was spinning in a full circle.

She threw the table like an oversize frisbee, and I pushed Tattletale in one direction as I flung myself in the other.  The table edge caught the weapon in Tattletale’s hands and knocked it from her grip with enough force to make Tattletale roll as she hit the ground.

Which left only me standing, against Triumph and Battery.  Armsmaster, Miss Militia and Velocity were nowhere to be seen.  I could have used my bugs to feel out for them in the darkness, but I had more pressing matters to focus on.

Battery was charging again, taking advantage of us being off balance to build up a store of power again.  Heck, she’d probably built her whole fighting style around it.  I could see the normally cobalt blue lines of her costume glowing a brilliant electric blue-white.  I focused my attention on her, drawing every bug in the immediate area to her while I tried to get myself oriented to open fire again.  Wasps, mosquitos and beetles set on her, biting and stinging.

For just a fraction of a second, I saw the glow of the lines of her costume dim, before igniting again.  She needed to concentrate, it seemed, and my bugs had served to distract.  As I pulled myself upright and opened fire, she was a step too slow in getting out of the way of the stream.  I caught her under the spray and started piling it on top of her.

A shockwave blasted me.  I was knocked off my feet for the second time in a matter of seconds and my ears were left ringing.

Triumph had a gladiator/lion theme to his costume, with a gold lion helm, shoulderpads and belt, and skintight suit elsewhere.  He had managed to claw enough bugs away from his face to use his sonic shout.  He was one of those guys that was big, muscular and tough enough that you’d avoid him even if he didn’t have that other power, and his other power was one that let him punch holes through concrete.

Grue aimed and fired a stream at him, but Triumph was surprisingly quick in slipping out of the way.  As Grue reoriented his aim, Triumph kicked over a cocktail table and grabbed it with one hand to use as a shield against the foam.  I tried to scramble to one side, to attack him from another direction, but he opened his mouth and unleashed another shockwave that sent me skidding across the floor, dangerously close to the piles of foam that had the Wards trapped.  As I tried to raise my nozzle in his direction to spray more containment foam at him, my vision swam and I saw double, and a high pitched whine threatened to drown out everything else.  I lowered the weapon, sent more bugs his way and focused on regaining my senses.

“Here!” Grue hollered.  He raised his hand.  Triumph inhaled, gearing up for another blast-

And Brutus barreled through the corridor Grue had parted through in the darkness to slam into Triumph like a charging bull.

Maybe a little harder than I would have hit the guy, had I been the humvee sized monster making the call.  Still, you couldn’t fault a dog for not knowing.

Just to my left, Shadow Stalker pulled her upper body free of the goop and began the slow process of working her crossbow free.  Not normally possible, but her ability to go into a shadow state apparently made her more slippery than most.

“No,” I growled at her. “Stay down.”  I buried her under more foam.

I pulled myself to my feet, wobbled, straightened up, wobbled some more, and then worked on keeping my balance.

“Skitter!” Grue roared, “Move!”

I didn’t waste any time in throwing myself to the ground.  Out of the corner of my eye, I only saw a blur of blue and silver where I’d been standing.

I had to flop over onto my back to see Armsmaster standing six feet away from me, leveling the blade of his Halberd in my direction.  The silver of his visor made precious little of his expression visible.  All I could see was the thin, hard line of his mouth.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, quiet enough that I was pretty sure Tattletale and Grue wouldn’t catch it.  I aimed his way with the foam sprayer.

In a flash, he whipped his weapon around so the butt end was facing me.  There was a muffled ‘whump’ sound, and I felt something like a wave of intensely hot air that made every hair on my arms, legs and the back of my neck stand on end.  I realized the trigger of the containment foam sprayer was depressed and nothing was coming out of the end of the weapon.  I tried again.  Nothing.

That would be an electromagnetic pulse screwing up the machinery.  Fuck.

Before I could organize my thoughts and warn Grue and Tattletale, Armsmaster flipped the weapon around in his hands like you saw military cadets doing with their guns during a march.  As it whirled around him, I heard that ‘whump’ sound twice in quick succession.

Somehow, I doubted he’d missed them.

“Call off your mutant,” he spoke, in that kind of voice that people obeyed.  “I promise you, it would only get hurt if it attacked me, and I’d rather not subject an animal to that, when it’s the master that’s to blame.”

“Bitch!” Grue called, “Call him off.  He’s right.”

From a point I couldn’t see, Bitch whistled.  Brutus moved back through the corridor Grue had made to rejoin her.

“You were moving like you could see in my darkness,” Grue spoke, a note of wariness in his echoing voice.

“I’ve studied your powers,” Armsmaster told us, tapping the butt of his weapon on the ground.  Every bug within fifteen feet of him dropped out of the sky, dead.  “This was over from the moment you stepped into the room.”

Miss Militia stepped out of the darkness beside the stage, with what looked like a machine gun in her hands, Regent as her hostage.  He didn’t have his scepter.

Fuck.

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