Worm

24.01

Couldn’t catch up, not with the Undersiders mounted and us on foot. I could fly, but I couldn’t abandon this team. If Tecton hadn’t deferred leadership to me, I might have taken on a scouting role, flying ahead, notifying the Undersiders.

This was the worst environment for me. There were bugs aplenty, but the area was thick with smoke, and there were fires everywhere.

Bugs weren’t going to contribute much. They were getting roasted, by hot air and scorching smoke if not the fires themselves..

I flew from point to point. Navigation wasn’t my strong point, so I focused on moving in straight lines, stopping at various vantage points where I was fairly confident I was out of Behemoth’s sight, physically reorienting myself, then flying to another point.

Each time I stopped, I took a second to try to grasp the situation. The streets were flooded with people, and it was only getting worse. The troops we had on the ground were struggling to make headway, and from my vantage point, I could tell that things were getting worse.

The approach had an added advantage in that it let me track where the fires were. I collected bugs, took a moment here and there to analyze them, assess their capabilities, and guided them along my general route, keeping them as safe as I could manage.

There was a crash as a building toppled, sparks spilling out into the air. I could hear screams, distant, as the crowd recoiled. Through the bugs in their midst, I could sense the way they were scrambling for cover, for safety. The nearest path that took them away from Behemoth was towards us.

Rickshaws turned around and made their way for the mouth of the narrow street, people pushed and shoved, and otherwise stampeded towards us.

I was in the clear, but my team… I flew a short distance away to check everything was clear, then started to make my way back, still flying in short bursts.

Flitting here and there, I thought.

No, I thought, banishing the idea from my head. Not flitting. Never let that word slip in conversation. Makes me think of fairies. It’ll make Glenn think of fairies.

“Tecton!” I called out, as I returned to my roost.

He looked up at me. Even with his heavy body armor, he was struggling with the mass of people who were pushing and squeezing their way past him.

I pointed, “Go through the building! ASAP!”

He looked at the building, then raised his gauntlets. The piledrivers slammed into the wall, punching out a rough, door-shaped hole.

He strode through, then did the same for another exterior wall. The Chicago Wards flowed through.

“Not used to being allowed to make messes,” he said, his voice loud. “This is just about the second time I can go all out!”

“Powers,” I said, flying down to ground level. The smoke wasn’t as bad down here. “You’ve had a few minutes to think, rookies, give me a quick rundown.”

“To think?” Cuff asked me. “The hell? You can think with all this going on?”

“You’re clear of the crowd,” I said. The number of people here were only half that on the other street. It was a herd mentality, lemming mentality. They were too focused on getting away.

“It’s not just the crowd. It’s-” she flinched as lightning struck somewhere in the distance. “We could die any second, just like that.”

She was showing it the most, but I could see the fear in the other two, as well. In everyone, but these guys in particular.

They’re new. They’ve probably never been in a real life or death fight, let alone something like this.

Hell, I’ve never been in a fight quite like this.

It was ominous, the fact that the armbands were silent. The A.I. wasn’t counting off a death toll, and I doubted it was because nobody with an armband was dying. Maybe Chevalier had made a call, deciding that morale was low enough without an artificial voice reading out the names of the dead.

The only noises were the impacts and rumbles of Behemoth’s fighting against defending capes, the screaming and panting of people who ran past us, and the incessant crackle of nearby fires and crashes of thunder.

“We stand better odds if you pull yourselves together, fill us in, so we can use each other’s abilities to help,” I said. “Come on guys, work with me.”

“I’m a breaker and shaker,” Annex told me, “Merge into nonliving material, warp space.”

“Warp it how?” I asked.

“Reshape it,” he said. He was still half-walking, half-jogging, but he stretched a white-gloved hand out four feet, touching a sign. His hand smeared against it as though it were more liquid than solid, coloring it the same white as his glove. The sign oozed back into the wall, virtually disappearing, and Annex removed his hand, slowly reeling in the extended flesh. The sign remained where it was, compressed against the wall, the surface flat.

“Okay,” I said, making a mental note. “Okay, good.”

“While in there, I’m about as tough as whatever it is I’m controlling,” he added.

“Alright. Golem?”

Golem had to stop running to demonstrate. He dropped to one knee and plunged a hand into the street.

Ahead of us, there was a crash, a grinding noise. A hand made of pavement was reaching out of the ground, five feet long from the base of the wrist to the tip of the middle finger. The fingers seemed to move in slow motion as the hand pushed against stopped cars that were sort of in our way, shoving them to one side of the road.

The hand submerged back into the road as he withdrew his own hand from the street.

“Okay,” I said. There’s synergy with Annex. Maybe Tecton too. “Anything I need to know? Limitations?”

“Whatever I use my hand on, has to match the exit point, pretty much. Asphalt for asphalt, metal for metal, wood for wood.”

I nodded.

“Bigger the thing I’m making, slower it comes out, slower it moves when I try to use my fingers.”

“Anything else?”

“Lots more, but mainly I can only use my hands, arms, feet and legs. My face, but that’s not too useful.”

Cuff made a small noise as something crashed in the distance.

“Cuff?” I asked. She didn’t reply.

“Cuff!” Tecton raised his voice. It seemed to wake her up.

“What?” she asked.

“Your powers. Explain.”

She shook her head, “Um. The, uh-”

When she didn’t pull herself together enough to reply, Tecton set a heavily armored hand on her shoulder, “She’s a metallokinetic. Shape and move metal, short-range, including the stuff she’s wearing. Some enhanced strength and durability, too.”

“Yeah,” Cuff said, her voice quiet. “Not half as cool as those guys.”

“It’s good,” I said. I noted how she’d paired up with Grace. Did Cuff’s presence have anything to do with the fact that Grace was wearing PRT-issue chainmail? They didn’t give me the vibe that they were a pair in any friendship or romantic sense, but they were two bruisers, two girls in a group of mostly boys, and they were sticking together. That seemed to be enough.

I was going to say something more, but a crash and the rumble of something falling down nearby stalled that train of thoughts.

“Oh fuck,” Cuff said under her breath, as lightning struck close by. She was panting, and I suspected it wasn’t the exertion. “Oh hell. Why did I wear a costume made of metal? I’m a walking lightning rod.”

“You’ve got a regulation suit between the metal and your skin, right?” Tecton asked. “If it’s a type three or type four-”

“No suit,” Cuff said. She tapped the metal at her collarbone, “Strongest if metal’s in direct contact with my skin. Got a layer that’s almost liquid between this and me.”

“You didn’t think to change?” he asked.

“I didn’t think,” she said, her voice quiet, harboring a tremor.

Why the hell did she come, if she was going to be like this?

“Fuck,” Wanton said, “You are a lightning rod.”

“I don’t think you’re any safer or worse off than anyone else,” I said, trying to inject a note of confidence into the discussion. I raised myself a step off the ground to get a better view of what lay ahead. The ground was shaking, a steady, perpetual tremor. “His lightning doesn’t follow regular channels. We’re all lightning rods to him.”

Cuff didn’t respond. I glanced down to see her frowning.

“Not reassuring,” Wanton said.

“It’s the truth,” I said. “We accept it, take it in stride and use it. Can we change that fact? Or use it to our benefit?”

“He’ll zap us to death with one hit, even if we protect ourselves,” Wanton said. “Yeah. There’s a benefit there.”

These guys aren’t the Undersiders. Different strengths, different weaknesses. The Undersiders were good at approaching things from an oblique angle, at catching people off guard, being reckless, even borderline fatalistic. They had been more experienced than I was when I joined. It was the other way around here. Even Tecton, the oldest member of the group, the official leader, had less experience than I did.

I didn’t know them well enough to be able to guess what they brought to the fight. I considered the various powers as I flew from point to point, scouting with eyes and careful use of my swarm. Didn’t want to let any of the mobile ones get burned up.

The swarm included fruit flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches and house flies, identical or almost identical to the ones back home. Surprising. There were some smaller varieties of cockroach, nearly as numerous as the cockroaches in the peak of Brockton Bay’s worst months, some larger varieties of mosquito, flies I identified as the botflies that had come up in my research, and crickets.

No game changers, but I hadn’t expected any. The spiders were badass here, at least. The silk wasn’t so good, but even so, big spiders.

The Wards, their powers, how to use them? I thought. If I went by the PRT classifications, Tecton was a tinker with shaker capabilities. Wanton was a breaker, someone who altered themselves or their relation to the world by some characteristic of his power, becoming a shaker effect, a telekinetic storm. Annex was the same, only he became a living spacial distortion effect, a living application of Vista’s power. Golem, no doubt a shaker. That left Cuff and Grace. I wasn’t sure how to peg Cuff, until I saw her in action, but she and Grace were both melee fighters in a fashion.

Of the six of them, four were shakers in some respect. The classification included forcefields, effects like Grue’s, and powers that reshaped the battlefield, like Vista’s.

I’d been doing my reading on the PRT’s terminology, among other things.

“Battlefield control,” I said. “You guys have battlefield control.”

“Lots,” Tecton said. “Aimed for it.”

I gave him a curious look, but this wasn’t the time for explanations. I glanced at each of them in turn, so nobody would feel ignored, “We could try to slow him down, but I’m not sure that’s going to do much. Instead, we’re going to meet up with the Undersiders. I think there has to be something we can do with them. Citrine, maybe Grue. They’re versatile, and I’ve worked with them. In the meantime, we’re doing damage control. Seeing what we can do to keep Behemoth-”

Another lightning strike made the ground shake. Cuff shrieked, and I grit my teeth. We barely had two seconds of reprieve between flashes of lightning. They lanced down from the dark clouds of smoke overhead, more red than yellow, and the thunder seemed more intense than it should be. That wasn’t the worrisome part. Behemoth was periodically hitting us with something bigger. Bolts of lightning big enough to erase a small house from the landscape.

“-We’re going to do what we can to keep him from murdering people,” I completed my thought, belatedly.

“Right,” Tecton said.

“You know about earthquakes and architecture, Tecton?”

“Yeah.”

“What can we do about the shockwaves, or whatever else he’s been doing to make the ground shake?”

“I have ideas. Not perfect, won’t hold for long, but ideas.”

“Good. And we were talking about lightning rods,” I said.

“You said they don’t matter.”

“The drones Dragon used redirected his lightning. Golem? How big can you go? Optimal conditions?”

“Depends on the amount of space at the destination. I’d need a big piece of solid material, and I’d need time.”

“We’ll find an opportunity then,” I said. “We’ll figure out a way to make this work.”

The crash of something being knocked or thrown through a building half a block away nearly made me jump out of my skin. The others had ducked for cover, too late to have mattered if it had been real danger.

“Keep moving,” I ordered.

“Three of us are in heavy armor,” Tecton said. “You can’t really run in armor like mine.”

“I get it,” I said, even as I knew the Undersiders were getting further away. “Do the best you can.”

Mobility and transportations were problems. I wondered if there were ways to fix that. Even if we found Rachel and the others, I doubted we could put Tecton on a dog. I couldn’t remember which, but I sort of recalled that Wanton or Grace had been a little shy of the dogs, too, so that option was out.

But if we could make this work…

Most people had evacuated at this point, with only a handful of stragglers occasionally passing us, giving us wary looks.

I drew arrows in the air to direct the remaining civilians away from the stampede of people, putting them on a general route where smoke didn’t seem to be heavy, and where I hadn’t been able to see or sense any fire.

Other heroes were joining the fray. I saw Eidolon pass overhead, surrounded by what looked like a shimmer of heat in the air. A forcefield? Something else entirely? If there were more with him, I couldn’t see them through the smoke.

I resumed my recon, continuing to expand the swarm that was keeping me company. My range was extensive, now, with a radius of maybe one thousand, eight hundred feet. That extended a fraction further as I zig-zagged over the area, picking up more bugs on the fringes and bringing them to me.

I stopped when I saw a short crane, three or four stories tall. I turned around to meet the others, perching on the corner of a rooftop. I pointed the way with ambient bugs, “Tecton, this way. Take a shortcut, right through the building. I don’t want to lose any time if we can help it.”

“Right,” he said.

It took only a minute for them to reach the crane.

“We’ve got two people who can distort metal,” I said. “Annex and Cuff. Maybe Wanton can help too. Tear it down. We’re making our lightning rod.”

“You sure?” Tecton asked. “Because this makes a pretty good lightning rod on its own.”

I glanced nervously over in the direction where the smoke and lightning flashes were most intense. If he shot us, right here, right now, and turned the crane into a tesla tower, this might be my dumbest move yet. I perched on the corner of a building, where I still had a measure of cover, and watched the battle in the distance. I could see Legend’s lasers through the smoke, hundreds at a time, radiating out from one central point, from Legend himself, and then turning sharply in the air to strike Behemoth.

Behemoth was using flame, which was some small reassurance, and he was occupied with the two remaining members of the Triumvirate.

“Yeah. Do it.”

Both Annex and his costume merged into the base of the tower, and gradually climbed up to the point where the upper part still stood. He could only ‘annex’ part of the object at one time, it seemed. No surrounding a whole building. He set about breaking the bonds, and the crane’s arm began to bend. Cuff caught one end of it, then began heaving it towards the tower’s base. The other half snapped off, and Annex helped guide it down, sliding it against the crane’s shaft.

It was costing us time, this project. I felt impatient, was worried it wouldn’t work, and these would be wasted minutes we could be doing something else.

But they were making it happen, putting the pieces of our project together. Cuff was walking around the crane’s base, effectively melting the metal, or reshaping it so it formed a flattened blob. Annex tore the rest apart, so Cuff had more material to work with.

When Cuff was done, Annex slipped down to the blob and flattened it out further.

“A little thicker,” Golem said.

Annex ‘swam’ around the blob’s perimeter, shifting more material towards the center. Cuff drew a blob of metal out of the pad and shaped it into a disk for Golem.

“A lot of synergy in this team,” I commented.

“Sort of aimed for that,” Tecton said. “They took everyone willing to leave Chicago, to support other cities that lost more members, offered incentives to the rookies if they were willing to move to another city. Your-parents-can-afford-not-to-work-for-a-year kind of incentives. I drafted these guys because I thought their powers would work well together.”

“Drafted?” I asked.

“Yeah. I mean, most teams are lucky if they get a few members with a good interaction, with some more on the fringes that they have to work around and fit into the mix. We had a good setup with Raymancer, before he got too sick to move. A strong, versatile ranged attacker with the rest of us situated to protect him, right?”

I nodded.

“After seeing the Undersiders at work, I started to think we need to be less mix-and-match. Form teams with specific goals in mind. New York sort of does that.”

“I know they have a team of ‘lancers’. Forward vanguard, fast moving.”

“Exactly, and they’re also considered one of the better teams. Maybe we all need to do that. Except New York can do it because they’ve got a lot of capes. Rest of us are making do. Other team leaders are going for versatility, to cover every base. I say fuck that. We build around a concept, a game plan. Once I decided on that, I went out of my way to ask for Annex, even though another team had already picked him up. Made my argument, Chevalier gave the a-ok.”

“And where do I fit in? Defiant said you were the one team that seemed interested in including me. I guess I sort of fit into a shaker category, in a roundabout way.”

“That, and we’ve fought on the same side. I saw what you managed with Clockblocker’s power and yours. You stopped Alexandria, too, and all that other stuff we were warned not to bring up.”

I tilted my head to indicate mild confusion.

“They didn’t want us to mention how you’ve kicked ass as a villain. Way Revel explained it, they wanted to see if you’d boast about it, to see just how badly you wanted a leadership role, where you’d get frustrated and how you’d act.”

I frowned behind my mask, but I didn’t comment.

“Anyways, the problem with this team going this route, focusing on the one thing, is we’re very weak against certain approaches, strong against others. We need a certain kind of leader for that, and I know you pulled it off with the Undersiders.”

“I hope I can live up to that kind of expectation,” I said.

“I know it’s lame of me, that it might look like I’m trying something experimental and setting you up to take the fall if it fails-”

“No,” I told him. “I don’t get that vibe.”

The ground tremored. I worried briefly that the construction would tip, but it didn’t. How long would it stand tall once it was at its full height?

“Good,” he said. “Because that’s not what I’m doing.”

I was watching the others work, The pad of metal was about twenty feet across, now. A circular disk with a flat surface on the top. “Okay. I think I can play ball, if that’s the case. It’s good. I like your line of thinking, about the team.”

He offered me a ‘heh’ before answering, “Of course. I’m a pro when it comes to putting stuff together.”

“Putting buildings together,” Wanton chimed in, forming back into his real body. Dust billowed around his feet.

“That’s my power, but I’m not limited to that,” Tecton said. “You guys don’t need any help?”

“Save your juice.”

Golem started to put his hand into the plate of metal he’d been given, then hesitated, “I won’t be able to move my hand once it appears, if I go this big. What shape should my hand be?”

“Middle finger extended,” Grace suggested. “A big ‘fuck you’ to the Endbringer.”

“That’d look bad for the PRT,” Tecton told her.

“Tell them it’s the most efficient form,” she said, with a shrug. “Have to make it as tall as possible.”

“No,” Tecton said. “Index finger would work nearly as well, and New Delhi might take offense at a metal statue of an obscene gesture in the middle the disaster area.”

“A ‘v’,” Cuff suggested, making the gesture with her index and middle fingers. Her voice was shaky, her confidence rock bottom. “For victory. Almost as good.”

“A ‘v’ for victory,” Tecton answered, “Good. Thank you, Cuff.”

That’s really lame, I thought, but I held my tongue. Too easy to become the bad guy, here, and it was a resolution to the stupid, petty argument, giving us the chance to move on.

Cuff smiled a little in response to the praise, though, then winced as Grace punched her in the arm. I heard Grace mutter, “Spoilsport.”

Cuff’s smile returned to her face a moment later.

And maybe it’s good for Cuff, to have something constructive to offer. She looked a touch more confident, smiling nervously as she followed Grace. Cuff didn’t seem like she was growing numb to the sounds or vibrations of the destruction Behemoth was inflicting on us.

Golem started to push his hands into the plate. The gauntlet’s fingertips were already emerging, a mirror-replica to Golem’s own gauntlet. A hand half as wide as a house, slowly rising from the platform.

Annex dove into the ground, and circled the platform, binding it to the street. He disappeared beneath the ground, then emerged a few seconds later, pulling his cloak tight around himself. “Reinforcing, so it doesn’t fall over on us. Also, brought a spike of metal into the ground.”

“I can help,” Golem said. He reached his other hand into the ground, and a smaller hand fashioned out of pavement lurched out of the ground to rest against the base of the arm. He withdrew his hand, leaving the pavement hand in place, then repeated the process, until six arms were supporting the spire. “Not sure how well that works as it grows.”

“Good job, both of you” I said. I held my breath as the wind brought heavy smoke past us, waited for it to dissipate. There were too many variables to cover, and I wasn’t sure enough about this squad to believe I’d accounted for all of them. “Can you move while carrying the plate?”

“Think so,” Golem said.

“Let’s go, then.”

“Starting to realize why all the capes are so fit, looking good in the skintight costumes,” Golem huffed, as we made our way towards Behemoth. “So much running around, the training, constantly going places, never time to have… decent meal…”

He trailed off, too out of breath to speak. I eyed him. The armor made it hard to tell, but he might have been somewhat overweight.

The hand rose into the air, a virtual tower, as we made our way towards the battlefield. Golem had to push his hand in gradually to achieve the effect, and it disappeared into the panel.

It was working, though. For better or worse, they’d created a spire, a replica of Golem’s hand, spearing more than fifty feet in the air, with more room to grow. Sixty feet, a hundred…

A lightning bolt lanced out from the midst of the cloud of smoke, striking the hand.

There were whoops and cheers from the Chicago Wards. I managed a smile.

Another lightning strike, curving in the air, hit the hand. Residual electricity danced between the two extended fingers.

It was working, and as much as it was a success in helping against the lightning, it was working to help morale. To contribute something, anything, it mattered.

“Air’s ionized now,” Tecton said, as if that was a sufficient explanation for everyone present. I got the gist of what he meant. The lightning would be more likely to strike there again. Lightning did strike the same place twice.

I took flight. The Wards took my cue and followed on foot.

We found the Undersiders at the very periphery of the battlefield. They had collected a group of wounded Indian capes and were draping them across the backs of one of the dogs. Two uninjured Indian capes were looking very concerned, staying at the dog’s side.

I landed beside Grue. He’d used his darkness to form a wall. I wasn’t sure what it was for, but the smoke didn’t seem as bad here.

“Skitter,” he said.

I didn’t correct him. You’ll always be Skitter to me, he’d written. Or something like that.

“Got a plan?” I asked.

“Dealing with the wounded,” he said. “Nothing else.”

I studied him. I could see how defensive his body language was, his glower, the way he moved with an agitation that didn’t suit him.

Was he not holding it together a hundred percent?

“Where’s Tattletale at?” I asked. “I kind of got distracted as everyone was moving out.”

“At the command center with Accord. She just contacted us through the Armbands. They’re waiting to talk to Chevalier, fine tune the defenses. Accord thinks he can layer the defenses to maximize the amount of time we buy. Scion was occupied with some flooded farmlands in New Zealand, flew towards South America, last they saw. Wrong direction.”

I nodded, my heart sinking. It didn’t seem we’d be able to count on him. Not any time in the immediate future. “And Parian, Foil? Citrine and Ligeia? With Accord and Tattletale?”

“No. Those four split off into another group. They can put out fires, and Citrine can protect them from lightning strikes so long as they aren’t moving around too much. Flechette’s using the opportunity to shoot him, for all the good it’s doing. Our group wouldn’t be any use to them, so we’re doing what we can here, a little further away.”

“Got it,” I said. “You have a way of communicating with them?”

He tapped his armband, then pressed a button. “Relay this message to Citrine. All well, Skitter and Chicago Wards just arrived. Inform as to status.”

There was a pause.

“Message from Citrine,” the armband reported, the voice crackling badly. Then the crackling redoubled as the voice stated, “Status is green.”

“Any objection if we assist your group?” I asked him.

Grue shook his head. He started to reply, but was cut off as Behemoth generated another shockwave. A rumble drowned everything out, as every building without something to protect it fell.

“No objection,” Grue said, when the rumble had dissipated. He echoed my question from earlier. “Got a plan?”

“I wish,” I said. “More lightning rods, maybe, if we get the opportunity.”

The smoke was clearing towards the battle’s epicenter. Legend and Eidolon were a part of that, as were the craft that supported them. The fires were dying out, extinguished or stamped out.

Behemoth wasn’t that tall, hard to make out above the buildings that still stood. I chanced a look, and flinched as another bolt of electricity made its way to the lightning rod.

The path of least resistance.

Behemoth had noticed that time, or he’d decided to do something about it, because he lashed out at Legend and Eidolon once more, driving them back, and then made a beeline for the structure. He threw electricity outward, two bolts, continuous in their arc, and they briefly made contact with the tower. A second later, they broke free of the tower’s draw. He was paying attention to where he was shooting now, not simply striking across a distance with the goal of setting indiscriminate fires.

Fire roared around Behemoth as he got away from the area that had already been scorched and blasted clear of any fuel sources. His dynakinesis fueled the flames, driving them to burn hotter, larger, and with more intensity. With a kind of intelligence, the fires spread to nearby buildings, ensuring that no place was safe, nor untouched.

I could see the blaze making its way closer to us. Not a concern in the next minute, maybe not even the next five, but we’d have to move soonish.

Legend and Eidolon hounded the Endbringer, Legend initially a blur that couldn’t even be pinned down long enough to strike, even with lightning. As the hero flew, he filled the sky with a series of lasers that raked Behemoth’s flesh and targeted open wounds to open them further. When Behemoth turned away to deal with Eidolon, Legend slowed, and the lasers grew in number and in scale.

“What’s with the hand shape?” Regent asked, as he poked his head out from cover enough to peek at the scene.

“A ‘v’,” Golem said, his voice small.

“I get it. You’re calling Behemoth a big vagina.”

“It’s for victory,” Cuff said, sounding annoyed.

“That’s lame,” Imp said.

“Really lame,” Regent echoed, “I prefer the vagina thing.”

“Way you dress,” Grace commented, “I wasn’t so sure.”

“Ohhhhh,” Imp cut in, she elbowed Regent, “Ohhhhh. You going to take that?”

Regent only laughed in response, shaking his head.

“Is the little princess feeling brave?” Grace taunted Regent. “Come on.”

“It’s for ‘victory’,” Cuff said, her feeble protest lost in the midst of the exchange, and in that instant, she sounded surprisingly young, vulnerable.

“No fighting,” I said, have to stop this before it escalates. “Regent, stand down. Grace, you too.”

Regent snickered under his breath.

“And no more banter,” Grue said. “There’s more people to help. Move. With luck, those guys can keep him busy long enough for us to clear out.”

“Team’s mommy and daddy, reunited,” Imp commented, adding an overdramatic sigh. “So awesome.”

“I’ll point you guys to the wounded,” I said, not taking the bait. “Go.”

“No saying or doing stuff that’ll get us killed, like saying goodbye or getting laid,” Regent commented. “There are rules.”

“Get us killed? What’s Weaver doing?” Cuff asked, sounded alarmed and confused.

Regent glanced at her, “I’m just saying, Grue’s already screwed, he’s not a virgin, he’s bl-”

Grue struck Regent across the back of the head. The crown and attached mask were moved slightly askew, and Regent fixed them. He told Cuff, “Regent’s being an idiot. Ignore him. Now go.”

“This way,” Tecton said, setting a hand on Cuff’s shoulder, “Opposite direction from Regent.”

Imp started to turn around to follow the pair, grabbing Regent’s wrist to pull him after her. Grue stepped in her way and physically turned her back around.

“Sorry for our contribution to that,” Tecton said. “Grace gets hard to handle when she’s stressed.”

“I understand. Regent and Imp…” Grue started. “Really have no excuse. That’s pretty much the status quo. They’ve been a little worse lately, but things haven’t settled down since…”

He trailed off.

“Since I left,” I said.

Grue nodded.

Tecton nodded. “I get it. Bygones. We’ll be back. You okay watching the injured on your own, or-”

“We’re good,” Grue said.

Tecton left, with Cuff at his side. Only Grue and Rachel remained, along with the Indian capes who were standing by the wounded. Rachel was giving water to the injured who were capable of receiving it, the conscious ones, people with broken legs and burned hands.

I made eye contact with Rachel. I wanted to ask how she was doing, knew she wouldn’t like the implications that she wasn’t peachy.

“I want to fuck this bastard up,” she said. “Last one killed my dogs. Killed Brutus, Judas, Kuro, Bullet, Milk and Stumpy and Axel and Ginger. When do we attack?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll try to find an opportunity.”

“And I get to do something,” she said.

“I…” I started to voice a refusal, then stopped myself. “Okay.”

“Bitch, it’ll be easier to collect the bodies if you take the dogs to them,” Grue said. “Why don’t you see to that?”

She glanced at me. I resisted the urge to nod. It would be an encouragement, without the complexities and ambiguities of speech, but it would also be supplanting Grue as leader, here.

Neither he nor she needed that.

“Sooner than later,” he added.

She nodded. Anyone else might have taken that as rude, but she accepted it without complaint. She led the dogs away, and the Indian capes followed, not wanting to part from people who might have been teammates or family members.

When everyone was gone, Grue approached me. I felt myself tense up. Despite the adrenaline that already pumped through me, my heart rate picked up as he closed the distance.

He held my arms just above the elbows, very nearly encircling his middle fingers and thumbs around them. Large hands, thin arms. I’d put on a little muscle mass over the past few months, or he’d be able to do it for real.

And he rested his forehead against mine, as if he were leaning against me, despite the fact that he was maybe half-again to twice my weight.

It had been a long time since I felt quite so insecure as I had this past week. As Skitter, I’d had a kind of confidence. As Weaver… I didn’t yet feel on steady ground.

But in this moment, somehow, I felt like I could be his rock.

I wanted nothing more than to reach up, to put my hands around his neck, remove his mask so I could tilt my head upward to kiss him. To give him succor in basic, uncomplicated human contact, at a time he was on unsteady footing and couldn’t even say it aloud. I stayed where I was, our foreheads touching, my back to the wall, arms to my sides. The masks stayed on.

The storm continued in the distance, and a detonation marked what might have been the destruction of one of Dragon’s craft. We didn’t move an inch.

“I miss you too,” I whispered.

He nodded in response, a hard part of his mask scraping against a part of mine.

I could sense the others gathering bodies, starting to make their way back here, to our rendezvous point.

“See,” Imp said, appearing right next to us, “This is exactly what Regent was talking about.”

“We weren’t doing anything,” I said. I pulled away from Grue, annoyed.

“You were being sweet. That’s probably a death sentence.”

“They were snuggling?” Regent asked, rounding a corner.

“Christ,” Grue said, under his breath. Firmer, he said, “Enough of that.”

Imp only cackled, and she kept cackling. I was pretty sure she prolonged it just to be annoying, stopping and starting again until Rachel and the last of the Wards returned.

“Let’s talk plans,” Grue said. “We’ve got a good roster here. Two teams. Almost three full teams, if we pick up Parian, Foil and the Ambassadors.”

He sounds more confident. A little more balanced. The agitation isn’t so obvious.

“There’s more wounded in the area,” I said. “And we’re running out of space. Each dog that’s loaded up with the injured is a dog you guys can’t ride. Fires are getting closer, so we pick up everyone we can, load them onto makeshift sleds, then hurry back to a place where we can get them medical care.”

“It’s a plan,” Grue said.

“And,” I said, “We need to find a better use for our strongest members. Citrine could be useful. Grue? If we get the sled going, you stay close to the wounded.”

He turned his head my way.

“We have about twenty here. Six or so capes. Maybe one’s got a power we can use.”

He nodded. “I already checked most. But I can use a power from the back of the sled without blinding anyone. It works.”

“There’s a joke there,” Regent said, “But-”

“Don’t,” Imp said.

“I wasn’t going to. It’s crass, totally inappropriate, and I’m better than that.”

“You’re going to,” Imp said, stabbing a finger at Regent’s chest. “You were going to say something about Grue going to the back of the bus, and you can’t let it go. It’d be lame and really tasteless and too far, and it’ll start the sort of fight that isn’t fun or funny. I’m calling it: you’ll hold it in until you can’t help but say it.”

“Well I’m definitely not going to say it now that you’ve spoiled it,” Regent said. “No shock value, no people feeling bad because they inadvertently laughed at something fucked up.”

“You two go squabble somewhere else,” Grue said. He glanced at me. “There’s more bodies to collect?”

“Too many bodies,” I said, my voice sober, “Not many injured left who haven’t already been carried away by friends, family and neighbors, or who aren’t in such bad shape that they can’t move. Maybe six more we could load up, if we’re going to get out of here in time.”

“Go,” Grue said. “She’ll show you the way.”

“Run,” I said. They didn’t have to run, but it got rid of them sooner.

“Children,” Grue muttered under his breath.

“Wards,” I said. “If you aren’t making the sled, go get the rest. I’ll help.”

My team left Annex and Cuff behind while we collected the wounded.

The one I was helping was a child, burned. She wasn’t any older than ten.

She said something incomprehensible. Another language.

“English?” I asked.

She only stared at me, unable to understand me any more than I understood her. Her eyes were a little glazed over, but the pain in her expression and the fear suggested that the benefits of being in shock were receding.

A part of me felt like I should have helped her sooner, but it wasn’t a logical part of me. There was so little I could do, and it didn’t matter if I did it before or now. And maybe a small part of me was putting it off because it wasn’t going to be pretty.

“I’m not that scary,” I said, “Okay?”

I pulled off my mask. “See? Ordinary person.”

Her expression didn’t change.

“I’m going to have to move you,” I said, and the words were for me as much as they were for her. I kept my voice gentle, “It’s going to hurt, but it’ll mean we can get you help.”

She didn’t react. I studied her. Blisters stood out on her arms and neck, and on the upper part of her chest.

I could maybe understand a little of Rachel’s anger at the loss of her dogs, seeing this. Behemoth probably hadn’t even given a coherent thought to the pain he’d inflicted on this girl, on countless others, just like Leviathan had mindlessly torn through Rachel’s dogs.

Why?

Why did the Endbringers do this? Were they part of the passenger’s grand plan? Cauldron’s monsters, taken to an extreme? Tattletale had said they were never human, but she’d been wrong before.

Or maybe I hoped they had been human because it was an answer, because the alternative meant I didn’t have enough data points to explain it.

With as much gentleness as I could manage, I moved bugs over the girl’s body. She reacted with alarm rather than pain, and I shushed her. The bugs were spreading possible infection, no doubt, but I suspected infection was inevitable, given circumstance. Using the bugs let me know where the blisters were, where the skin was mottled with burns.

I took off my flight pack and flipped it over.

Like ripping off a bandaid, I thought, only it’s at someone else’s expense.

I lifted her, and she shrieked at the physical contact, at the movement of burned flesh against clothing and the ground. I set her down on the flight pack, placing a hand on her unburned stomach to stabilize her. I activated the left and right panels, gently, so it had a general lift without any particular direction, and I led her to the sled in progress.

Golem had already returned, and the three of them were combining powers to make the sled. Cuff was feeding the chain Rachel had provided into loops at the front.

With Grue’s help, I eased the girl down from the flight pack, setting her with the other wounded.

“We’re going to hurt him,” I said, retrieving the flight pack.

“Behemoth?” Cuff asked me.

“We’re going to find a way,” I said, and that was all. I met the little girl’s eyes.

Cuff followed my gaze. “I guess I”m on board with that.”

“Why did you come?” I asked. “I mean, I get why we all came, on a level, but… no offense, you’re in a totally different headspace.”

“For my mom and dad,” she said.

I glanced at her, but she didn’t elaborate.

It took another minute to get the sled prepped and people mounted. Rachel enhanced the size of her dogs so they’d have the strength to pull not only the wounded, but the two teams as well. It meant they were slower, but it also meant moving nearly forty people with four dogs. I took off, flying, leading the way and giving directions with bugs as they followed.

A crash heavier than any we’d had yet made the dogs stumble, falling. It very nearly overturned the sleds. Bitch had fallen from where she sat on Bentley’s back. I stopped at her side to make sure she was alright, gave her a hand in getting back to her feet. She accepted it without complaint or incident, but when she met my eyes, her glower cut right through me.

Was that her resentment at work or my guilt, that made me feel that way under her gaze?

Once I’d verified that no damage had been done, I rose just high enough to peer over the top of a building.

The lightning rod had tilted, leaning against an adjacent building, the supports Golem had raised had crumbled. Behemoth, too, had fallen.

Eidolon and Legend hovered in the sky, flanked by four dragon-craft.

Another figure was there as well, hovering where Behemoth had been standing an instant ago. The Endbringer had been toppled with one massive blow.

I touched the button on my armband, lowering my head beneath cover.

“Send this message to Defiant,” I said. “You said she was dead. You said you verified.”

The reply crackled so badly it was almost inaudible. “Reply from Defiant. I saw the body myself, we checked her DNA, her … readings, we matched against the mountings for her prosthetic eye … carbon dated it to verify.“

He didn’t even need to ask who I meant.

I pressed the button, “Ask Defiant who the hell that’s supposed to be, if it’s not Alexandria.”

24.02

If I’d had any doubt it was Alexandria, it was banished when she followed up the attack. Behemoth started to rise to his feet, and Alexandria struck. It wasn’t a punch with a great deal of wind-up, and she only crossed fifty or sixty feet before driving it home, but the impact was undeniable.

Behemoth absorbed the blow, and redirected it into the ground. He didn’t move, as though the blow had never struck home, but the ground around him shattered like the surface of a mirror. Fragments of rock and clouds of dust flew up around him, and a three-story building on its last legs tumbled over. The damage to the ground made him sink a fraction.

I could see the change in the Endbringer’s demeanor. Before, he’d been wading forward, as if Legend, Eidolon and the metal suits were little more than a strong headwind. He was moving with purpose now, with an opponent that was veering in and out of easy reach, one he could hit, without Legend’s speed or Eidolon’s personal shield.

She had told me that they knew how to fight each other, and I could see that at play, here. Part of the change in Behemoth’s approach might have been that interaction at play.

It was a fight involving four individuals who couldn’t hope to do substantial damage to their opponents. The dragon suits and other capes were a peripheral thing. Alexandria circled, just beyond the perimeter of Behemoth’s kill range, her teammates and their supporting cast bombarding him in the meantime. They destroying the ground beneath his feet, trying to get him when his focus was elsewhere and his ability to redirect the energies of a given attack was reduced.

He couldn’t keep her in mind at all times. She waited until he focused on a different combatant, heaving out lightning or creating flame to attack the ones in the air, and then she struck. Nine times, he simply deflected the strike into the ground, as a rumble and a series of spiderwebbing cracks in the streets, or into the air as a shockwave. Again and again, he came within a heartbeat of getting his hands on her in retaliation, not even flinching as she struck him, reacting with an unnatural quickness as he reached out, to try to pin her using his claws, to strike her into the ground or to time the collapses of buildings to briefly bury her, so he could close the distance.

The times her strikes did get past his defenses, her tiny form in the distance with the black cape trailing behind her lunging into his kill range to deliver a blow or a series of blows, Behemoth stumbled, caught briefly at the mercy of physics.

In a fashion, she was doing the same thing the lightning rod had been, buying all of the rest of us a small reprieve. There was no guarantee, and there wouldn’t be any until he was driven off or we moved a hundred miles away, but she was making the rest of this just a little easier, reducing the destruction just a fraction unless he specifically took the time to work around her.

Was she being more cautious than she needed to be? I saw her pass up on a handful of opportunities I might have taken in her shoes, when his back was turned, his attention sufficiently occupied. Was she aware of something I wasn’t? Was she a convincing fake? Or was she just a little more afraid, after what my bugs had done to her?

However effective the distractions, he was still Behemoth, still implacable, a living tank that could roll over any obstacle and virtually any individual, unleashing an endless barrage of artillery at range. He reached the lightning rod and shoved it to the ground.

I was reminded of my teammates, descended to the ground, where they were still getting sorted. The chains that led from the dogs to the harness had tangled.

“What the hell was that?” Tecton asked.

“Alexandria,” I said.

“You murdered Alexandria,” Regent commented. “Remember? You’re a horrible person, doing things like that.”

“You leave her alone!” Imp said, uncharacteristically. “She feels so bad she’s seeing things.”

“Can we try to stay serious?”

“Don’t be too hard on them,” Tecton said. “Some people use humor to deal with bad situations.”

“It’s true,” Regent said, affecting a knowing tone.

“No,” Grue responded. “They’re just idiots. You two keep your mouths shut. The adults are talking.”

Imp raised her middle fingers at him.

He turned to me, “It’s Alexandria? You’re sure?”

“Can you ever be sure of anything? Clones, alternate realities, healing abilities… there’s any number of possibilities.”

In the distance, a glowing orange sphere flew into the sky. It reached a peak, then descended, crashing into the distant skyline.

I reoriented myself and flew up to the edge of the roof to peek at the battle. Behemoth had melted down part of the metal arm and fashioned the melted metal into a superheated lump. A second lump, cooler and not yet fabricated into an aerodynamic shape, was sitting beside him. Alexandria tried to strike it away, but he caught it with one claw. He superheated it, shielding it from Legend and Eidolon’s fire with his body, then heaved it into the air. The projectile flared intensely as it left his kill range, following nearly the same path as before.

Lasers from capes in the distance sliced the second sphere into shreds before it could strike its intended target.

Grue tugged the chain. He looked at Rachel, who only nodded.

And we were moving again.

I returned to my recon position, scouting to ensure the way was clear, keeping an eye on the fight and ensuring that there weren’t any attacks coming our way.

Behemoth was glowing, his gray skin tending more towards white, a stark contrast to his obsidian horns and claws. The heroes were backing off a measure, and Behemoth was taking advantage of the situation to stampede forward, tearing past buildings and barricades.

“Grue!” I shouted. The noise in the distance was getting worse. If Behemoth was continuing the path I’d seen him traveling, he was wading through a series of buildings. Grue didn’t hear me. I raised my voice, waited until the noise died down, “Radiation! Use darkness!”

He did, and we were cloaked in it. I continued navigating, using my bugs this time. Only a small handful ventured forward at a time, checking for fires. I was flying blind, scouting without the ability to see.

It delayed me when a fire did present itself, and I was delayed even further when I faced the issue of trying to communicate it to the team.

“Fire!” I shouted. I knew he could hear me through the darkness, but he couldn’t hear me over the sounds of toppled buildings. I was no doubt drowned out by the sound of the sled scraping against the road, the crashes in the background and the rushing of the wind.

I changed direction, aiming for the sleds, and flew forward. A little off target. Didn’t want to knock someone off the sled. I made a slight adjustment with the antigrav, and landed on the front edge of the sled, between Grue and Rachel. Grue very nearly let go in his surprise, and I caught the back of his neck to keep him from falling off the sled.

He left the darkness to either side of us intact and created a corridor.

“Fire!” I said, the instant I was able. “Just over that hill! Go left!”

He cleared more darkness, and we turned sharply enough that the sleds swung out wide. I held on to the lip of the sled, but I let myself slide back, using the antigrav pack to keep myself from falling to the road.

The sudden movement had shifted the occupants. The design of the sled made it difficult for anyone to fall out, but they’d slumped against one side, and one man was hanging halfway out. With only one usable arm, he wasn’t able to maintain a grip.

The sled went over a series of bumps, and I reached him just in time to give him the support he needed, one hand and both feet on the lip of the sled, the other hand holding him.

Once they were on course, I helped ease him down to a better position.

He said something that I couldn’t understand, his words breathless.

I took off.

A shockwave ripped past us, harsher, briefer and more intense than a strong wind, not quite the organ-pulverizing impact it might be if Behemoth were closer, or if there were less buildings in the way. I ventured up to a rooftop where I might be able to see beyond the darkness.

The shockwave had parted the clouds of smoke, but they began to close together once again. I could make out a form, maybe one of the Indian capes, swiftly growing. Ethereal, translucent, his features vague, the light he emitted only barely cutting through the smoke cover. He slammed hands into Behemoth’s face and chest.

Behemoth parted his hands, then swung them together. I didn’t wait for them to make contact. I ducked behind cover before the shockwave could hit me directly. All around me, the smoke was dashed out of the sky by the impact’s reach. With the front of my body hugging the building, I could feel not only the shockwave, but the vibrations that followed it, as buildings fell and debris settled in new locations.

He delivered shockwave after shockwave, and I was forced to abandon the cover of the building for something a little more distant.

He wasn’t irradiated any more. Or, at least, the glow wasn’t there. He’d been buying himself a reprieve from the assault of the heroes, a chance to cover more ground. Now they had resumed the counter-offensive. The noises of the fight followed me as I got ahead of the Undersiders.

Another obstacle. A crowd, this time.

I landed on the sled once more and ordered a stop. It took a second for the dogs to slow down enough.

Locals stood in our way. Some had guns. They ranged the gamut from people a step above homelessness to businessmen.

“Leader?” one asked, his voice badly accented. He was younger, very working class, which surprised me. I’d anticipated that someone older and more respectable would be taking charge.

“Me,” I said, using a small boost from the flight pack to get ahead of the group.

“Stealing?” he asked me, his voice hard.

“No. Injured.”

He gestured towards the sled, taking a half-step forward. I nodded.

I didn’t like wasting time, but I was hoping he’d give the a-okay and the group would get out of our way. I watched as he studied the people lying in the sled.

“We take,” he said. “We have doctor, hiding place. You go fight, help. Is your duty.”

I could sense a group approaching from Behemoth’s general direction. Two women in evening gowns, a girl in a frock, another girl in costume.

No time to dwell on decisions. I asked the man, “You sure?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Cuff, Annex, kill the chains. Leave sleds behind. Wards, stay with me. Grue, I’ll direct you guys to the Ambassadors. Take the dogs. Leave us some darkness for cover so we’re safe from any more radiation.”

It took only a few seconds to get organized. By the time the Undersiders had departed, we had a team of people pulling the sleds.

“Message from Defiant,” my armband declared. “Alexandria confirmed gone from PRT custody.“

“Fuck,” I muttered.

“Message from Defiant. Stay out of her way until we know more. Behemoth’s approaching the first perimeter. I will keep you posted.“

“Tell him thank you.”

“It’s a good thing,” Grace said. “Maybe not in the long run, but for now-”

“For now it’s an unknown factor,” I said. “And there’s one really big known factor that’s tearing through this city, and we should be devoting all our attention to it. To Behemoth”

“We can focus on both,” Tecton said.

“That’s how you get blindsided,” I told him. I hauled on the chain, and the sled moved. Cuff seemed to be doing the lion’s share of the work, standing between the sleds and ushering them forward. Though it screwed up the direction the sleds were facing, making them veer left or right, it gave us enough momentum that we only needed to work on keeping it going.

We reached a squat building with signs featuring unintelligible writing and cars. Some hurried forward and opened a garage door, and we kept the sleds on course to lead them inside.

Their ‘hiding place’ was an underground corridor, leading beneath and between two hoists for the cars. Annex had to reshape the sled to fit, and we found ourselves on a general downward incline. People shifted position to the sides of the sled to keep it from getting away from us and running over the people in front.

I saw the man who’d done the talking glance down at the wounded. His eyes caught the light in a way that reminded me of a dog, or a cat.

Capes. At least some of these guys are capes, I thought. The ‘cold’ capes, the underworld’s locals.

It was an ominous realization, as we descended, to know that we were outnumbered by parahumans I knew nothing about, with unknown motives.

The armband’s crackling was getting steadily worse. “Message from Grue. Rendezvous is fine. On way to your location.“

“Message received,” I replied.

“Message from Grue…“

The voice devolved into crackling.

Too much ambient electromagnetic radiation, and the amount of ground that was between us and Grue probably didn’t help.

It was hard to gauge how deep we were getting. We reached a point where a fissure made moving the sleds more difficult, but Annex, Tecton and Golem shored it up in moments.

We descended deep enough that I wasn’t able to access the surface with my bugs, then deeper still.

The more isolated we were, the more ominous the uncostumed capes around us seemed to become. My bugs followed us down the corridor, just far enough back that the ‘cold’ parahumans couldn’t see them, close enough to help.

“This tunnel was made by a cape,” Tecton said.

Don’t bring it up, I thought, suppressing the urge to react.

“No,” the man with the eyes said. He didn’t turn our way.

I reached out and touched Tecton’s arm. He, naturally, didn’t feel the contact through his heavy armor. Tecton continued, “I’m pretty s-”

My nudge became a shove as I moved his arm enough to get his attention. He looked at me, and I shook my head. Tecton didn’t finish the sentence.

“Oh so pretty,” Wanton offered.

“Don’t you start,” Tecton said. “The Undersiders are bad enough.”

I could see the Wards change in demeanor as we descended well beneath the city. Tecton’s head was turning now, scanning the people around us. Wanton hunched over, as if the surroundings were weighing on him, a pressure from above. Cuff had her arms folded, hugging her body, a defensive wall, however meager, against an attacker from above, and both Annex and Grace had gravitated closer to other team members, as if unconsciously adopting a loose formation.

Golem, odd as it was, seemed to fall more in line with Tecton and I, watching the surroundings, eyeing the strangers who accompanied us. It wasn’t that he wasn’t afraid; everything else about him suggested he was. It was more that he was wary in a natural, practiced way.

How had he picked that up? He was supposed to be a rookie.

I held my tongue and used my bugs to scan the surroundings.

The area opened up into an underground living space, crowded with weary and scared people. It was dim, with lights alternating between floor and ceiling positions, tight corridors with what seemed to be tiny apartments carved out of the rock. My prison cell had more space than these quarters. At least there was room to stand straight up in the jail. These rooms were stacked on top of one another, two high.

But it was space nonetheless.

“Is it stable?” I asked Tecton.

“I can’t see enough to tell,” he said. “Maybe? Probably?”

“I don’t know if I can leave people here if it’s a deathtrap,” I said, as I eyed the people emerging from the rooms.

“Pretty risky up there,” Wanton said.

Up there there’s a chance. I was counting hundreds or thousands down here. My bugs could sense corridors, and I was left wondering if this was only one area of many.

Some of the residents stepped forward to help, hands on weapons or simply watching us, undecided on whether we were threats or not.

The leader, who I was mentally labeling ‘Cat’s Eyes’, said something, and they relaxed a fraction. He said something else, and they started helping the wounded. None used or displayed any overt powers.

“Done,” Cat’s Eyes said. “You go. Fight.”

Defiant had said we needed their assistance. “We need your help. You and any of the others with powers.”

He narrowed his eyes. Except that wasn’t the sum total of the change in his expression. His face hardened, drew tighter, high cheekbones somehow more prominent in the dim, lips pressed together. “No.”

“No?”

“Not our duty. Yours.”

“It’s everyone’s duty.”

“We handle enemy you don’t see, you costumes help enemies above ground. Scare Prathama away.”

Like it’s that easy. “We need your help. Everyone’s help.”

“No. We show ourselves, and all ends badly. We fight subtle war. Better to lose today and fight subtle war tomorrow.”

Better to let Behemoth win than to show themselves and lose whatever edge they hold against their current enemies?

“You see me, I am done. Finished. You see all of us, they are done. No.”

Maybe India had its own share of capes, on the same scale as the Slaughterhouse Nine. Cleverer capes who worked in the background.

Or maybe they were just deluded, too set in their ways, afraid to fight and searching for excuses.

“Go. Defeat him,” he told me.

Grue was waiting. Or Grue was coming down here, maybe, with Rachel and the others. If they saw him, an intruder without invitation, would they act?

“Okay,” I said. “We need a vehicle if, um…”

I trailed off as I mentally registered what my bugs were sensing.

A rush of cool, air-conditioned air in a space that had no right to have any, off to one side, the appearance of a person where there shouldn’t be any.

“Weaver?”

I’d stopped talking, my attention caught by this visitor. She was close. All of the details matched the person I’d sensed inside the Kulshedra. The clothes, the hair, the dimensions, even the way she moved.

Purposeful, unhurried.

“It’s her. The one who took Pretender.”

Everyone, myself included, tensed as she approached. The foreign capes did it because she was an unknown variable. The Wards and I did it because she was a known threat.

She was older, but not old. Maybe my dad’s age, maybe a little younger. Pretty, in a very natural way. She didn’t wear any obvious makeup, and her black hair was somewhere between wavy and curly, a little longer than shoulder length. Her features French or Italian, if I had to guess. She wore only a simple black suit that had been tailored to fit her body, with a narrow black tie and a white dress shirt. What got me were the eyes. There was no kindness in them.

She spoke, but she spoke in a foreign language, and it wasn’t to me.

Cat’s Eyes hesitated, then gave her a reply.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked the woman.

She glanced at me, and her gaze went right through me, as if I were barely there. She turned her attention back to Cat’s Eyes, said something else.

His eyes widened.

“You work for Cauldron,” I said.

“Maybe we shouldn’t taunt the bogeyman,” Wanton chimed in.

“Bogeyman?” Cuff asked.

“She’s a hitman,” I said. “Takes out anyone asking too many questions about Cauldron. Or she was. Apparently she’s gone after a lot of powerful capes, walked away without a hitch.”

My bugs gathered. I could see the underground capes reacting, preparing for a fight.

“No,” Tecton said, “The truce.”

“I don’t think she gives a damn about the truce,” I answered.

“Until she breaks it, we don’t break it.”

I didn’t take my eyes off her as I murmured, “Fun fact about life or death fights between capes. You start letting your enemies make the first move, your mortality rate triples.”

“I gave the go-ahead for you to be acting leader,” Tecton said. “Cool. Lightning rod was fantastic. But if we start a fight here and shit goes down, my ass is on the line too.”

“You’re vetoing my order?”

“You haven’t given an order yet, and no. You’ve fought her, I haven’t. But I’m advising you here. Back off. She hasn’t done anything aggressive.”

“She will,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. “It’s your call.”

I didn’t give an order. I watched instead.

She was speaking to Cat’s Eyes in a low voice. He was nodding unconsciously as she spoke.

Then she met my eyes.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Go, Weaver. Take your team. We have no business with you anymore.”

“Anymore?”

She only stared at me in response.

Damn, being on the receiving end of that stare was like being opposite Alexandria or Faultline in a bad mood. I was starting to settle on the idea of her being a thinker.

She looked at Cat’s Eye, “It’s time. Tell them not to be afraid, and this will go smoothly. Tell them to pass on the message so everyone hears.”

He nodded, then called something out in another language. Others took up the call.

“Hold on,” I said, raising my voice.

They didn’t listen. Why would they? I barely had any clout. The bugs around me were minor, all things considered.

I brought them closer, so they gathered at my feet. She didn’t even flinch.

One by one, portals appeared, rectangular doorways that were so bright they were painful to look at. The smell of flowers, fresh air and nature flooded into the underground. Every pathway and every available surface soon had one. Nearly a dozen in my field of view alone. My bugs could sense two dozen more in my range.

“No!” I called out, once I realized what was happening. I thought of what the Eidolon clone had said, about them experimenting on people, kidnapping people from alternate worlds. “You can’t trust her!”

But the people here were scared. Once the first few people tentatively made their way through, they ran for safety, running out into the open field, disappearing behind tall wild grass.

Cat’s Eye turned to leave.

I reached for him, to grab his wrist before he could disappear.

The woman in the suit deftly deflected my hand, batting it aside.

“What the hell is Cauldron doing? Do you want to start a war?”

She shook her head. “No war. But we need soldiers.”

That was all the confirmation I needed.

“Wards!” I called out. My bugs and my Wards converged on her.

It mattered surprisingly little. She stepped away from me, which I took as an excuse to close the distance. If she wanted to get away, I’d get closer. I worked to close the distance, using both the flight pack and my own two feet to draw in. She stepped back out of the way, just out of reach of my strikes.

She swept her hands by the sides of her belt, and she was suddenly armed, if I counted a stiletto knife no longer than my finger and a handkerchief as weapons.

In the moment my swarm drew close, she stabbed the knife into a wall-mounted fire extinguisher. The pressurized contents spewed out in a plume, collecting on my bugs and blocking their path. It disabled the largest ones and killed the smallest, eliminating a good ninety percent of the bugs I had in reach in an instant. I was forced to back off, so I didn’t get the spray across my lenses or the fabric at my mouth.

She’d managed to avoid getting dirty, even. I watched her from the other side of the spraying canister. The direction of the plume and the hand with the handkerchief left her virtually untouched as Tecton drew close. She danced back out of reach of his attack as he plowed past the spray. Wanton had transitioned to the form of a localized telekinetic storm, and Annex had slipped into the ground, closing the distance to her.

If she was a thinker, someone relying on craftiness to win a fight, then I’d turn it into the kind of fight she didn’t want to participate in. Tecton had power armor, Grace had super strength and Cuff had her metallokinesis.

I cranked up the flight suit and charged. It was reckless, and it was hopefully the last thing she’d expect. The goal was simple. Close to melee, keep her occupied long enough for someone to trap her. With that done, we’d call each of the people she’d just contacted and bring them back to safety.

Assuming she was someone along the lines of Victor or Über, a combat-oriented thinker, she’d try to do something like a Judo throw, redirecting my forward momentum to toss me to the ground. I countered that particular maneuver by bringing myself to an almost complete stop before she could grab me, slipping to one side as Tecton closed the distance.

He punched, and she stepped back. He extended the piledriver, a second punch without an instant of warning, and she evaded to one side.

A precog?

I wasn’t even finished the thought when she stepped around to Tecton’s side. He tried to body-check her, but she had a hand up to rest on his side, using the contact to brace herself, to push against him and leverage herself away. She crossed one leg over the other to maintain an upright position, then brought herself into arm’s reach of me.

Bugs exploded from the interior of my costume. Spiders, hornets, wasps and beetles. The only parts of her that weren’t covered by the suit were her head and hands. The hands were clasped behind her back before the swarm reached her. A sharp toss of her hair swept them out of her way as she invaded my personal space.

Her hands, protected from my bugs by the simple obstacle of her torso, reached out, avoiding the worst of my swarm. One caught the concealed flap of my mask, where it overlapped the neck of my costume, and pulled it down. The other pressed the tip of the stiletto knife to my jugular.

My team, just a moment behind me and Tecton in their intent to engage her, froze.

Fuck me, I had ten thousand bugs here, easy. How had I not found an opportunity to even bite or sting her?

“Wards, back off,” she said. “Grace, Cuff, I want you out of sight, or Weaver bleeds.”

The two girls looked at me, and I nodded. They backed away and stepped around the corners.

“Send your bugs away,” she ordered me.

I started to open my mouth to protest, but she cut me off. “No tricks. You have two seconds.”

Something about the fact that she was a known killer and her no-nonsense tone suggested she really was going to follow through. I banished the bugs.

“The hell is she?” Wanton muttered.

“She’s a precog,” I said, “Something in that vein.”

The woman didn’t respond. The knife shifted locations, no longer touching my bare throat.

Was she distracted? I controlled the insect-like limbs on my flight pack. They were simple, weak, but they were also weapons. The end of the claw stabbed for her face, for the general region of her right eye.

She turned her head, and it grazed harmlessly against her temple. The blade of her knife turned around, and she caught it in the hinge of one mechanical arm.

I pulled away, but the knife being wedged in the gap of the joint gave her a measure of leverage over the mechanical arm. She twisted it as though she were wrenching my arm behind my back. The arm didn’t give any, and I was forced to bend over a fraction.

Golem reached out from one wall, trying to seize her hair or neck, but she used me as a body shield, blocking the reaching hand. Annex struck from below, attempting to ensnare her feet, but she threw me down into the reaching tendrils. In the process, she got ahold of my wrist, twisting it much as she had the mechanical arm.

“Coordinate!” I said, my voice tight. I activated the thrusters on my flight pack in an attempt to tear way, but she wrenched me to one side, tilting my upper body while using one leg to block my lower body from following suit. The end result was that the thruster only pushed me into the wall. I managed to avoid slamming my head against the surface, but I was now pinned against a solid surface. She still had my wrist behind my back.

Dodge this, I thought. I commanded my bugs to attack from every direction.

The Wards were taking my order seriously, attacking simultaneously. Annex was looming, a spectre in the ground, raising up to try to engulf her, Golem was beside a wall, already reaching into it, and Tecton was kneeling, pressing his gauntlets against the ground. Cuff and Grace had heard my order, and were stepping into view, advancing from behind the others.

The woman laid her free hand over the hand she was twisting behind my back. Then she pressed my own fingers down into my palm, hard.

The control mechanism, I thought. Too late. My bug was already moving towards the off switch when the thruster kicked in. She swept my feet out from under me, and the thruster drove me into the ground. The bug touched the off switch, but the impact had locked up the controls.

I hit Annex on my way down, buying the woman time to step back out of his reach. The bug managed to turn off the thruster, but I was already sliding across the floor, right through the lower half of Wanton’s telekinetic storm body and straight into Tecton’s gauntlets.

The piledrivers fired into the ground a fraction of a second after I bumped into the gloves. He’d likely aimed to place an effect directly beneath her, but my collision with the gloves had knocked his aim off by a fraction. It was directed into a wall, creating a crack ten feet high.

The crack, in turn, summarily severed Golem’s outstretched hand of granite.

The woman pulled her suit jacket off and held it out, sweeping it through the air to catch the thickest collection of my swarm within. She folded it closed, simultaneously breaking into stride, heading right for Wanton. Grace and Cuff were just behind him, with Tecton directly behind them, and Golem and I off to one side. Annex was still pulling his spacial-distortion body together into something more useful.

“Stand down, Wards!” I called out, before Wanton could make contact with her. I was still pulling myself up off the ground.

The woman slowed her pace, coming to a stop. Wanton materialized a few feet in front of her, swiftly backing away. I dismissed the bugs that were closing in to attack.

“This goes any further, she’s going to stop going easy on us and she’ll murder someone, maybe murder all of us,” I said, not taking my eyes off her. “Because it’s the only way she’d be able to stop the bugs from surrounding her, the only way to really stop Wanton once he closes the distance.”

She didn’t speak.

“What the hell are you?” I asked. “What’s your power?”

She gave me a look, up and down, and then settled her eyes on mine. Throughout the entire fight, she’d looked unconcerned. She wasn’t even breathing hard. Except for a fleck of foam from the extinguisher here and there on the bottom of her pants leg and at the very end of her shirtsleeve, she wasn’t even particularly dirty.

She spoke, “I win.”

“I gathered that much,” I said.

“What I mean is that I can see the paths to victory. I can carry them out without fail.”

I felt my heart skip a beat at that. She’d volunteered an actual answer?

“The fuck?” Grace asked.

“She’s lying,” Wanton said. “That’s ridiculous. It’s not even close to fair.”

Powers aren’t necessarily fair, I thought.

“It doesn’t matter,” the woman said. “What matters is that there are other enemies you should be fighting.”

“Enemies, plural?” I asked.

“We’re approaching an endgame. The end of the world, the sundering of the Protectorate. Most of the major players know this, and the truce has effectively dissolved in every respect but the official one. Those in positions of power are making plays. Now. Today.”

“And Alexandria showing up, that’s a part of that?” I asked. “Someone’s ploy?”

“Yes.”

“Cauldron’s or someone else’s?”

“Yes,” she said. A noncommittal answer.

“And you’re telling us this why?” I asked.

“That should be obvious.”

“Okay,” I said. I wasn’t sure it was that obvious. “Just two questions, then. Those people you just took-”

“Are gone,” she said.

Gone. And there wasn’t a thing I could do to change that. I was almost certain I couldn’t beat her, and I couldn’t utilize whatever it was that was managing the portals to get access to them. At most, I could survive long enough to report this to someone who could.

“Gone temporarily or gone permanently?” Tecton asked.

“I don’t expect anyone on this Earth will see them again, barring an exceptional success on our end.”

“You can’t use your power to get those successes automatically, huh?” I asked.

She didn’t venture an answer.

“Right, that wasn’t my second question. What I want to know is why the hell you haven’t used a power like yours to figure out how to beat the Endbringers.”

“My power is a form of precognition,” she said. “Unlike most such powers, other precognitive abilities do not confuse it. That said, there are certain individuals it does not work against, the Endbringers included.”

“Why?” Tecton asked.

“No way to know for sure,” she said, “But we have theories. The first is that they have a built-in immunity, something their origins granted them.”

“And the other theories?” Golem ventured. “What’s the next one?”

The woman didn’t respond.

I suspected I knew what the answer was, but declined to speak of it. It would do more harm than good.

“So you’re blind here, useless,” Grace said, a touch bitter.

The woman shook her head. “No. I can consider a hypothetical scenario, and my power will provide the actions needed to resolve it.”

“And?”

“And we are doing just that,” she said. “Doorway, please.”

She wasn’t speaking to us. Another gate opened behind her, and it wasn’t to that sunny field with the tall grass. There was only a hallway with white walls and white floors, a cool rush of air-conditioned air touching our faces.

“Doing just what, exactly?” Tecton called out after her.

She turned back to us, but she didn’t respond. The portal closed, top to bottom.

“Vehicles,” I said, the instant she was gone. “I can sense some at the end of that path. It’s the fastest way back up that ramp. Go, go!”

Things had gotten worse in the thirty minutes we’d been gone. Whole tracts of New Delhi had been leveled, and where the buildings had been tall and mostly intact while we collected the injured and met the ‘cold’ India capes, only half of them stood even a story tall now. The other half? Utterly leveled.

It was a small grace that the fires had burned intensely enough that they’d exhausted the possible fuel, and the smoke was mostly gone, but that wasn’t saying much. I couldn’t take a deep breath without feeling like I needed to cough. Ozone and smoke were thick in the air, and the residual charge in the air was making my hair stand on end.

The Endbringer’s path of destruction had continued more or less in one general direction, but beyond that, the damage was indiscriminate, indeterminate. Behemoth’s location, in contrast, was very clear. A pillar of darkness extended from the ground to the sky. Plumes of smoke and streaks of lightning slipped through the darkness on occasion.

The Chicago Wards rode bikes that were somewhere between a scooter and a motorcycle in design. The vehicles might have been indistinguishable from normal road vehicles, but Tecton had quickly discovered that they had some other features. There were gyros that allowed them to tilt without allowing them to fall, and the engines were electric, with only the option of a generated sound, to appear normal.

Near-silent, the Wards zipped down the streets, zig-zagging past piles of rubble and fissures. I flew above the group.

“Armband,” I said, touching the button. “Status update.”

The ensuing reply was too distorted to make out.

Grue had gone ahead, though he’d no doubt had information on our whereabouts. Bitch’s dogs probably could have sniffed us out. He’d gone ahead. Why?

“Armband,” I said, still holding the button, “Repeat.”

I thought there might have been an improvement, as we got closer, but it was miniscule enough that I might have been imagining it.

I dropped down, settling on the back of Wanton’s bike. The wings were already tucked away, to minimize damage from the electromagnetic radiation, but I didn’t want to push my luck further.

We passed a cluster of dead capes, alongside a series of massive gun turrets that had been mounted on hills and rooftops. The heroes had made a stand here, or it had been one defensive line of many. A number had died.

Had it been foolish to descend to the cold cape’s undercity? Should I have told them to take the wounded beneath, damn the consequences, so we could have helped more?

I hadn’t thought it would take as long as it had, hadn’t anticipated a fight with the woman in the suit.

I hoped I wouldn’t regret this, that the absence hadn’t cost our side something. We weren’t the most powerful capes in the world, but maybe we could have made a small difference here or there.

I’d learned things, but did that count for anything in the now, with tens, hundreds or thousands of individuals dying where they might have lived if we’d stayed? Another lightning rod? Something to slow him down and give them a precious extra second to form a defensive line?

The second defensive line, another collection of the dead. Whatever method they’d tried here, there was no trace left now.

We were getting closer.

The third perimeter. A giant robot, in ruins. As many dead here as there had been at the last two points, all put together.

And just beyond this point, Behemoth, in the flesh. He glowed white, marking the radioactive glow, and Grue’s darkness wreathed him, containing it. The ground beneath Behemoth was tinted gold, vaguely reflective, and geometric shapes were floating in the air, exploding violently when he came in contact with them.

With all of the obstacles he’d faced to this point, he looked less hurt than his younger brother had for his one-on-one fight with Armsmaster. He didn’t limp, or slouch, his limbs were intact, his capabilities undiminished. The tears and rents in his flesh and the gaping wounds here and there didn’t seem to have slowed him down in the slightest.

And with that, he managed to fight his way forward, out of Grue’s darkness, striking out with bolts of lightning. Forcefields went up to protect the defensive line, but only half of them withstood the intensity of the strikes.

“Armband,” I said, and there was a note of horrified awe to my voice, “Status update.”

The A.I.’s voice crackled, but Grue’s darkness might have been suppressing the electrical charge, because it was intelligible. “Chevalier is out of action, Rime is present commanding cape for field duty. Legend is out of commission. Capes are to assist defensive lines and fall back when call is given. Earliest possible Scion intervention is twenty-two point eight minutes from the present time, estimated Scion intervention is sixty-five minutes from present time, plus or minus eighteen minutes.“

I clenched my jaw. I’d committed to doing something, but I had no idea what that could be.

I felt a sick feeling in my gut.

“Armband, status of Tattletale?”

“Out of commission.“

By all rights, I should have reacted, cried out, declared something. I only felt numb. This was falling apart too quickly.

“Status of the other Undersiders?”

“Two injured. Parian and Grue.”

Which would be why Grue wasn’t replenishing his darkness. I closed my eyes for a second, trying to find my center, feeling so numb I wasn’t sure it was possible.

Citrine’s effect seemed to be maximizing the effects of Alexandria’s attacks, because Behemoth wasn’t able to channel them into the ground.

He swung his head in my general direction, and I could see the steel of Flechette’s arrows in the ball of his eye, clustered. Holes marked the point where the bolts had simply penetrated.

Other capes had managed varying degrees of damage. The Yàngbǎn had formed a defensive squadron, using lasers to cut deep into Behemoth’s wounds, and other capes clustered close to them, adding to the focused assault.

And yet he advanced. Inevitable.

A blast of flame caught the defending capes off guard. Their forcefields and walls of stone blocked the flame from reaching the capes, but did nothing to stop it from spreading as it set fire to nearby buildings, grass and the stumps of trees that had been freshly cut, if the sawdust was any indication.

As if alive, the fires reached forward, extended to nearby flammable surfaces, and cut off a formation. They started to clear the way for retreat, and Behemoth punished them with a series of lightning strikes.

Golem was already acting, bringing stone hands up to block Behemoth’s legs, two hands at a time. Tecton moved forward, striking the earth with his piledrivers. Fissures raced across the road, breaks to keep any impacts from reaching too far.

“Antlion pit!” I shouted.

“Right!” Tecton reported.

And my team was engaging, finding the roles they needed to play. Grace, Cuff and I couldn’t do much, but there were more wounded needing help getting out of the area. Annex began reshaping the ground and walls to provide better cover. Wanton cleared away debris from footpaths.

This particular front hinged on one cape, a foreign cape who was creating the exploding, airborne polygons. I could see, now, how each explosion was serving to slow time in the area around the blast. Had he actually been the inspiration for that particular bomb Bakuda had made?

Eidolon had added his own abilities to the fray. He had adopted something similar to Alexandria’s powerset, fighting in melee, ducking in only long enough to deliver a blow, then backing away before Behemoth’s kill aura could roast him from the inside. Eidolon was using another power as well, one I’d seen him deploy against Echidna. A slowing bubble.

Cumulative effects. Cumulative slowing. Each explosion added to the effect, and Eidolon’s slowing bubble was a general factor to help them along. What did it really do if you tried to walk forward, and the upper half of your leg moved faster in time than the bottom half? How much strain did that create? Was there a point where the leg would simply sever?

If there was, Behemoth hadn’t quite reached that point. Either way, it seemed to be a factor in how slow Behemoth was moving. He was getting bogged down. Bogged down further as one foot dipped into Tecton’s antlion pit.

Until the Endbringer struck out, targeting one group of capes with a series of lightning strikes so intense that I was momentarily left breathless.

And the explosive polygons disappeared.

He lurched forward, and even a direct hit from Alexandria wasn’t quite enough to stop him. The shockwave dissipated into the air, rather than the ground, and flying capes throughout the skies were driven back.

The Endbringer broke into a run, insofar as he could run, and nobody was quite in position to bar his way. He ignored capes and struck out across the area behind them, hitting a building with two massive guns on it, a clearing, a rooftop with what looked like a tesla coil. Fire, lightning, and concussive waves tore through the defensive measures before they could be called into effect.

We don’t have the organization. Our command structure is down. Tattletale is gone, either dead or too hurt to fight.

He struck one area with lightning, and explosives detonated. A massive forcefield went up a moment after they triggered, and the explosion was contained within, a cumulative effect that soared skyward.

For a solid twenty, thirty seconds, the sky was on fire, and the Endbringer tore through our defenses, making his way to a building with capes clustered on the roofs. They weren’t, at a glance, our offensive capes. They were our thinkers, our tinkers, the ones our front line was supposed to be covering.

The woman in the suit had declined to share the other reason her power wouldn’t let her simply solve the Endbringer crisis.

The answer I’d declined to share with the other Wards was a simple one. She had the ability to see the road to victory. Maybe, when it came to the Endbringers, there was nothing for her to see.

24.03

Eidolon and Alexandria had settled into something of a rhythm. Though his powerset was similar to Alexandria’s on the surface, the eerie noises and the dimming of the light around the areas his punches landed suggested he was transmuting the kinetic energy of his punches into something else altogether. Between Eidolon’s strikes and Alexandria’s, Behemoth couldn’t quite adapt to the point where he was redirecting every strike, let alone the barrage of ranged attacks that the other capes in the area were directing his way.

The Endbringer staggered under the onslaught, but he was slowly adapting. They’d managed to pin him for a minute, even costing him some ground by driving him back once or twice, but each successive minute saw him rolling with the punches more, advancing further when he found a second or two of mild reprieve.

His target: the command center. Our flying capes weren’t working fast enough to clear the entire rooftop, and every shaker we had -every cape capable of putting up a forcefield or creating a portal, raising a barrier- was busy trying to slow down the brute. The Chicago Wards, or most of the Chicago Wards were among them.

I tensed, but I couldn’t move without exposing myself to one of the lances of electricity that were crashing down around us. The capes on the rooftop were protected by an arrangement of tinker-made forcefields, it seemed, but those wouldn’t hold. Fuck, hanging around on rooftops was dumb. I’d learned my lesson on my first night out on costume, had avoided being put in that position since, excepting the fundraiser, where we’d been on the attack, and the time Defiant and Dragon had dragged me up to one, just a bit ago.

The guys up there were tinkers and thinkers. They were our communications, supporting roles, strategists and healers. A few of them were long-ranged capes. Not really people who could hop or fly down five stories to the ground and walk away unscathed. Not without help.

I waited and watched as Behemoth engaged the other capes, tracking what powers he was using and when. He was presently staggering forward when he could, otherwise holding his ground, deflecting and redirecting attacks. When he was free to do so, he reached out with his claws, and lightning lanced out to tear through the assembled capes.

Golem, to his credit, was going all out. Hands of stone and metal rose from the ground to shield defending capes and balk Behemoth’s progress. I could make out Hoyden, leader or second in command of the Austin Wards. She wasn’t on the front lines, but was defending the mid-line capes. It made sense with how her power worked, as her defensive powers provided more cover from attacks at greater ranges. She threw herself in the way of lightning bolts and stood between Behemoth and the wounded. When lightning struck her, detonations ripped out from the point of impact, seeming almost to short out the currents.

“Come on, come on,” I muttered.

I could see Tecton creating fissures in the ground, no doubt intended to reduce the reach and effects of Behemoth’s stomps. Annex was creating bridges so heroes wouldn’t fall into the gaps.

Dispatch, vice-captain of the Houston Protectorate team, zipped over to a group of wounded with accelerated speed, only to seem to pause, as though he and his immediate surroundings were only video footage. Color and space distorted violently in an irregular area around him as he hung there, just an inch over the ground, one hand at his belt and another reaching for someone with intense burns.

A half-second later, the effect dissipated, and they were all moving. Dispatch was carrying one of the most wounded, gloves off and the sleeves of his costume pulled up, dried blood up to his elbows. Others were bandaged and sutured. His name, I knew, came from his ability to pick out targets in a fight, closing the distance to them and catching them in his temporal distortion effect. He’d have minutes or hours, however long it took the air within the effect to run out, to end the fight with his super strength, durability and the close confines of the bubble. To any observers, it appeared as though he’d won the fight in a heartbeat. Apparently the idea extended to medical care.

Revel, leader of the Chicago Protectorate and official overseer of Tecton’s Ward team, was stepping up to the plate. Floating up to it, whatever. She rose into the air, and caught one full current of lightning inside her lantern. The sheer force of the blast knocked her back, and she struck a wall, pressed against it with her lantern held in front of her.

She began releasing spheres of light from the lantern, each larger than a human head, slow-moving but numerous. Their trajectories were unpredictable, some striking friendlies, others carrying forward towards Behemoth. Where they struck friendlies, they only exploded in brilliant showers of sparks. When they touched Behemoth, they sheared right into him, cutting two or three feet deep before flickering out.

When she saw it was working, she only intensified the assault, spending the charge she’d accumulated to create fifty more orbs, before hurrying forward to intercept another stream of lightning that was flowing from Behemoth’s claw-tip. It was impossible to actually get in front before the lightning appeared, to save the lives that Behemoth was taking with the initial moments the lightning appeared, but she was stopping the lightning from flickering to the fourth, fifth or sixth target.

That was what I was waiting for. My limited experience with Endbringers had taught me one thing. When someone actually found a way to respond, to cancel out the attacks or to deliver a measure of real damage, they changed tactics.

Some capes were already responding. Captains and leaders were giving orders, and various barriers were being reinforced or thrown back up. Some were trying to give the warning, but their voices disappeared in the midst of the chaos around us.

“Take cover!” I hollered, and my swarm carried my voice.

It was only two or three seconds later, as the second wave of spheres drifted to Behemoth and began to cut into his torso and groin area, that he responded. His ‘mouth’ opened, the craggy spikes of obsidian ‘teeth’ parting.

And he roared. A sound that was slow at first, growing steadily more powerful.

Sound was a bitch of a thing. It could be muffled, but blocking it entirely? We didn’t have Grue.

I fled, cranking my antigrav to ‘high’ and risking unfolding my wings to use the propulsion systems as I made my way to for cover, putting as many buildings between Behemoth and I as I could.

My swarm responded to my call, assisting the capes who weren’t fleeing fast enough. They rose as a singular mass, a wall of tens of thousands, and absorbed the worst of the scream. I wasn’t sure it was enough. Even with some distance and a dozen buildings between Behemoth and I, I had no defenses as it reached a crescendo. My sense of balance went out the window, my very bones hurt.

Closer to Behemoth, capes were bleeding from their ears, vomiting, passing out. Organs and brains would be reduced to jelly as he continued. My bugs weren’t doing much to muffle the noise or soften the damage, if they were helping at all.

But my focus was on the rooftop. I’d been waiting until he stopped using his lightning. There was nothing saying he wouldn’t use it now. He could use multiple attack forms at the same time. Still, he was more focused on picking off the defending capes, the ones who were suppressing the noise. Was Citrine among them? I could see the golden glow of her power in the distance.

Director Tagg had given me an effective ranking of two for every single power classification. Ostensibly, it had been because he hadn’t wanted to underestimate me. Was there a note of truth to that, though? I wasn’t sure about the ‘brute’ or ‘mover’ classifications, but did my power over bugs afford me a versatility that let me cover the bases on other fronts?

They still hadn’t completely evacuated the roof. The people who might have helped them down were disabled or otherwise occupied. Getting them down was key, here. The flying capes were more focused on assisting the capes near the front lines, helping the ones who could deal damage escape Behemoth’s implacable advance and avoid the kill aura that accompanied him.

The roaring made it impossible to hear. Even seeing was difficult, as my vision distorted and lost focus. I very nearly tipped over, until I turned to my swarm sense. Not perfect. Even they were suffering, scattered and dying, at close range to the roar. But it gave me an orientation, a plane to compare the tilt and angle of my body with.

I looped to one side to intercept some of my bugs, collecting the strands of silk they’d woven in one hand, then made my way around to the back of the building the heroes were clustered on. Flying capes were settled on the ground, pausing to recuperate from the roar. I took a second, myself, to get my bearings. My back against the concrete, I could feel the building shuddering in response to the roar. But at least there was a small degree of reprieve, here.

When I’d caught my breath and reassured myself my insides hadn’t been vibrated to pieces, I flew to the rooftop. My bugs swept over the crowd. No Tattletale that I could see. No Accord, either, for that matter.

Two capes approached me, not quite Caucasian but lighter-skinned than the Indian capes. One had a costume with a spiral to it, the other wore armor with tiny faces that looked like baby’s heads. Was he a villain? They were rattling off something in French or Spanish as they reached out to take my hands. Their eyes were wide with fear and alarm.

“I can’t carry you!” I shouted, raising my voice to be heard over the perpetual roar. “My flight pack isn’t strong enough!”

They clutched at me, and one even pushed at another cape who’d gotten too close.

A little too much. Too intense, here, too forceful. I just want to find Tattletale. I’ll find a way to help you once I’ve done that.

“Back off!” I said, raising my voice.

The guy with the faces on his armor shouted so forcefully that spit flew from his mouth, as he pointed to the ground beyond the building. He approached me, trying to hug himself tight to my body. I pushed him away and backed up, trusting the antigrav to hold me aloft.

One of the capes on the rooftop approached me, pushing her way through the crowd. She wore a golden mask with a woman’s face, the mouth parted a fraction, with a black bodysuit. It was softened a touch by the loose black cloth that draped down from her golden shoulderpads and breastplate. The black didn’t look so dramatic as it might have, mottled a brown-gray by the loose dust that had accumulated on it.

“Weaver,” she said, her voice melodic.

“Arbiter,” I responded. One of Rime’s underlings. The one with the social danger sense, forcefield and sonic beam. I supposed her forcefield wasn’t quite large enough or versatile enough to offer a bridge down to the ground. “I’ve got other stuff I need to pay attention to. Don’t suppose you speak French? Or Spanish?”

“Portuguese,” she said. “And no, but give me a moment.”

She turned to the capes, but a heavy crash interrupted her before she could speak.

A building had fallen, toppling, and Behemoth hadn’t done anything to precipitate it. Nothing except the roaring.

Was that enough? Was this building coming apart beneath us?

Where the hell was Tattletale? My bugs flowed into cracks in the building, checking rooms only to find them empty.

“Hurry!” I said. I turned my attention to my swarm. They extended out beneath me, forming into neat lines. My bugs were slow to move through the structure. I had to use the cracks that already existed in the walls, ducts and vents that just happened to be open.

“Speak to me,” Arbiter said to the Portuguese capes.

The one with the spiral costume chattered out something I couldn’t even guess at. Arbiter nodded. In very broken Portuguese, she asked a question. The spiral man looked at the one with him, gesturing.

In less broken Portuguese, she spoke again.

That prompted another burst of explanation, or what I took to be exclamation. They sounded desperate, afraid.

When she responded, she spoke just as quickly and flawlessly as the two native speakers. She’d picked up the language in a matter of three exchanges.

I bit my tongue as the roar abruptly intensified, jarring me enough that my jaw was slammed shut. It wasn’t that he was roaring louder; one of the capes who’d been keeping the worst of the noise at bay had fallen.

Focus. My bugs extended lines of silk to the ground, while others held it aloft and kept it more or less straight, allowing the lengths to be carefully measured, the amount of slack controlled.

“Weaver!” Arbiter said, raising her voice so I could hear her.

I turned around.

“I don’t quite understand, there’s a gap in translation, but he says he’s pregnant with his dead teammates,” she said. Her voice cut through the noise, “They’re asking for him to be rescued next.”

Pregnant with dead teammates?

Suddenly the little faces on his armor seemed twice as creepy. I really hoped that was a tragically bad translation. Parahumans could be so fucked up sometimes.

“He gets rescued with everyone else,” I said. “There’s no way to prioritize.”

“Right,” Arbiter said.

I secured the lines of silk on the roof’s edge and on the ground. I then pulled off a shoulderpad and retrieved the strip of silk that had held it in place. I folded it over the cord and stepped over the edge, letting myself slide down the length of the cord. Both ends were tied, and the slack was enough that it should ease people to the ground. I was okay with doing the test run, as my flight pack could handle the fall.

It didn’t break. Good. Better than nothing. I flew back to the rooftop, and I could feel the roar rattling me as I made my way up past the more solid cover.

“Should be fairly safe,” I said, “Silk cord got warm, from what my bugs are feeling, but I’ve got six arranged. One person at a time, delay by about… twenty seconds, at least, between trips, so the heat and friction doesn’t wear through the silk. It’s not the strongest thread I’ve ever made.”

Arbiter glanced over the roof’s edge. I followed her gaze. The silk was barely even visible.

“You’re sure they’ll hold?”

“No,” I said. I glanced over at Behemoth, “But I’m less sure this building’ll be standing in five minutes. If a cape falls and dies, I’ll take the blame. Better than having everyone up here die.”

“You’re not convincing me,” she said, but she said something to the cape with the spirals on his costume. With gestures and careful explanation, she got him to step up to the front, pulling his glove free of his fingers, using the excess fabric to slide down the silk line.

My bugs checked it after he’d passed. Warm, but not so much that I was worried it’d split.

“Go! Go!” Arbiter said, grabbing the attention of the capes who’d been standing back and watching.

In seconds, we had capes sliding down the lines. Arbiter was careful to keep them from overloading or applying too much friction too fast to the makeshift ziplines.

Behemoth had stopped his endless roaring. He was using fire, now. There was none of the uncanny precision the lightning had, but the fire moved with intelligence, spread easily, burned hotter than it should have, and it was virtually impossible to stop all of it. It slipped between force fields, between the fingers of Golem’s stone hands, and it ignited any fabric and wood it touched, set grass alight.

I had to pull back my bugs. I’d managed to keep the vast majority from dying, some fires and casualties from the roaring excepted, but this wasn’t a place where they’d help.

Six more capes made their way down the line. Arbiter used her forcefield to block some more agitated capes from making their way down before it was time. She spoke in one of the local languages to the group.

“Thank you,” I told her. “For helping keep this sane. If it comes down to it, and the cords don’t hold, I’ll lend you my flight pack. I can control it remotely.”

“Give it to someone else before you give it to me,” she said, without looking at me.

“Right,” I answered. “Listen, I’m-”

A cape gripped the cord for his turn, only to turn out to be far heavier than he looked. Arbiter placed a forcefield under him, but it didn’t do much more than slow his descent as he crashed through it.

Five cords remained, and there were too many capes here.

“Fuck,” I said.

“He’s okay,” Arbiter observed.

But the others seemed more reticient now.

“What the hell is going on downstairs? Are stairs too difficult?”

Arbiter shook her head. “Government building, it’s set up to lock down in a crisis, which it did. A rogue cape turned on the people inside, so the metal doors closed to protect others. We’ve been reeling since. Command structure’s down, our battle lines collapsed-”

“You’re talking about Chevalier.”

“Yes.”

“Then where’s Tattletale?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Teenage girl, dirty blond, costume of black and light purple. She would’ve been with a short man wearing a suit.”

“I saw them. They went downstairs with Chevalier.”

I could feel my heart in my throat. “Where are they now?”

“With other wounded. We’re relaying them a half-mile that way,” Arbiter pointed. “Far enough away that Behemoth won’t be endangering them anytime soon.”

Behemoth generated a shockwave, and one forcefield at the front of the roof flickered and died. A tinker moved forward to try to restart it, and was struck down by a bolt of lightning before she could.

A wave of capes mustered the courage and slid down. There were only eleven of us on the rooftop now, myself and Arbiter included.

I checked the lines, then cut one that was too frayed. Four left.

“Four lines left,” I reported, before someone reached for one that wasn’t there. My thoughts, though, were on Tattletale. Injured or dead.

“Go,” Arbiter said. “To your friend, your teammate, your partner, whatever she is to you, she’s important.”

I shook my head. “You need me. I can use my bugs to check the lines are okay.”

“There won’t be any major difference if you’re here or not. Three more trips-”

A flying cape touched the rooftop only long enough to take hold of one of the people on top, then took off again.

“Maybe two trips, and we’re clear. I’ll go last. Go.“

Another shockwave knocked out another forcefield panel. A tinker was working on the generator, best as she could while hunkering down behind the sole remaining panel. She said something frantic. I couldn’t understand her, whatever her language, but I could guess. It wasn’t her tech.

I hesitated, wanting to take the offer to escape. Then I shook my head. “I’ll stay. Tattletale’s important to me, but so is doing what I can here. I can check the lines in a way nobody else here can.”

Arbiter only nodded, her eyes on the ongoing fight.

I drew up decoy-swarms, placing them across the rooftop, and stepped off the rooftop, hovering and using the building for cover. Arbiter raised her forcefield to fill some of the gap in the tinker-created field, crouching in the crowd of swarm-people. Others followed suit. I covered them as much as I could without obscuring their vision.

Seconds passed before Arbiter gave the go-ahead. Capes evacuated the rooftop.

Behemoth’s lightning strike flashed through our ranks, right over Arbiter’s squatter forcefield, through two decoys and striking a cape.

The crash of thunder seemed almost delayed, synced more to the cape going limp than the flash itself. The body struck the roofop, dead before it touched ground.

Had the decoys spared two people from being hit, or was it chance that the bolt had made contact with them? Fuck. Having more information would be key, here.

Behemoth was continuing to suffer blows. His progress had all but stalled, but he wasn’t changing tactics. Why?

Did he have a strategy? The Simurgh was supposed to be the tactician, Leviathan had the brute cunning. Was Behemoth harboring a certain degree of intelligence?

I didn’t like that idea, but I couldn’t think of a good way to explain just why he was willing to stand there and take abuse.

Flying capes evacuated two more. Arbiter gave the go-ahead for more to use the ziplines.

That left only the two of us here, and I had cover, at the least.

Lightning lanced past us, burning much of its initial charge on the forcefield. It danced through the ranks of my decoy bugs. Arbiter was left untouched.

“Damn,” she muttered. “Damn, damn, damn.”

“Fuck waiting for heat to dissipate, just use the zipline,” I said. “Hurry. Second one, it’s least worn, coolest.”

She half-crawled, half-ran to me. I handed her the strap that I’d used for the test run, and she looped it over the line.

I followed her to the ground, my hand on the armor at her collar. I probably didn’t have the lift to keep her from falling, but I might have been able to soften the blow.

Not that it mattered. The zipline remained intact, and she touched ground with a grunt.

I found Rime, casting wave after wave of crystals at Behemoth. He was using shockwaves and fire to prematurely detonate or push away Revel’s spheres, and Rime’s attacks were suffering from a similar angle.

Rime was second in command, wasn’t she? Or was it Prism?

Rime would be more receptive to listening, either way. I used my bugs to speak to her. “Command center evacuated. Can relax front line if you need to.”

She didn’t respond to me, but I could make out her orders as she shouted the words, “Fall back! Stagger the retreat!”

I exhaled slowly.

“You’ve done your duty. Go to your friend. Figure out what’s going on,” Arbiter said.

I nodded and took off.

Through my bugs, I spoke to Tecton, “Back shortly.“

He mumbled something I couldn’t make out. It might have been ‘okay’.

As I got more distance, I felt safe to withdraw the wings again. I picked up in speed, putting Behemoth and the fighting behind me.

I found a temple with wounded inside. The exterior was opulent, the interior doubly so. Now it was a triage area. There were more burns here, crushed limbs, people coughing violently. It wasn’t damage suffered from direct confrontation with Behemoth. It was secondary damage, taken from the fires and smoke of burning buildings.

And inside one curtained area, there were the wounded capes. I approached, folding the wings away and moving forward with antigrav and the occasional touch of foot against ground to propel myself forward further.

I stopped by Tattletale’s bedside. I’d found her within instants of the temple falling in my range. Her lips moved as she recognized me, but no sound came out. My eyes moved to the tube sticking out of her throat.

“You really gotta stop doing this,” I said.

She only grinned. She reached over to the bedside table and retrieved a pen and notepad. Her grin fell from her face as she wrote something, then tore the page free, handing it to me.

“We already knew that they’re holding back for some reason,” I said. “The way they space out attacks, they could accelerate the timetable or coordinate their strikes if they wanted to fuck us over.”

Another note:

“I don’t know,” I said. I felt a little chilled at the idea that this was the Endbringers pulling their punches.

“I don’t know,” I repeated myself. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Just tell me, is there anything I can do?”

Accord was dead? What did that spell for the Undersider-Ambassador alliance?

No. I couldn’t let myself get distracted. There were more immediate concerns.

“Computers are probably down,” I said. “I think there’s too much electromagnetic energy, no cell towers, no radio, no internet. Armbands aren’t working, and I’d expect them to be the last thing to stop working.”

She spent an inordinate amount of time writing the next message.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other while I waited for her to finish, then accepted the note and read it.

Each letter had been traced over several times, and the entire thing had been underlined twice.

I glanced at her, and she was scowling, already writing the next message.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “You’re a distance away from the fighting, maybe a phone works.”

But she was already handing me the next piece of paper.

“There’s other capes better for that than me.”

I frowned, but I didn’t refuse her. I started to leave, then hesitated, turning back to her. I opened my mouth to speak, then saw the note.

And I was gone, flying over the heads of the wounded as I made my way to the front door.

The availability of healing made for an interesting, if ugly, dynamic. Capes like Tattletale, capes like me could be reckless, we’d get our faces slashed open, our backs broken, our throats severed, blinded and burned, and we’d get mended back to a near-pristine condition. Tattletale still had faint scars at the corners of her mouth, regenerated by Brian after his second trigger event, but she’d mended almost to full. I’d had injuries of a much more life-altering scale undone by Panacea and Scapegoat.

If we died, we were dead, no question, unless I gave consideration to Alexandria’s apparent resurrection. But an injury, no matter how grave? That was something that could be remedied, it lent a feeling of invulnerability, an image of invulnerability. So we continued being reckless, and we would continue to be reckless until something finally killed us off.

Was there a way to break that pattern? Could I afford to? My ability to throw myself headlong into a dangerous situation was part of the reason for my success.

I looped back towards the main confrontation, finding the thinkers I’d helped off the rooftop. Some were moving to assist allies, others were fleeing. One pocket, at a glance, seemed to be trying to form a second command center.

I moved towards the cluster of them.

Two Indian capes, one Caucasian.

“English?” I asked.

“Yes,” the Caucasian said. “Just me.”

“Trying to enlist help. Names and powers?”

“Kismet, balance thinker,” the Caucasian said. He wore a white robe with a hard, faceless mask that had only slits for the eyes.

“And the other two?”

“As far as I can tell, Fathom and Particulate. Best translations I can give. My Punjabi isn’t strong.”

“Their powers?” I asked, with a restrained patience.

“Displaces people or things to another dimension, filled with water, brings them back. Particulate’s a dust tinker.”

What the fuck is a dust tinker? Or a balance thinker, for that matter?“Okay, I’m going to find others,” I said.

“Wait, what’s the project?”

“A mission. Finding whatever it is that Behemoth wants.”

“We’ve got others on that already.”

“Nobody’s reported back,” I said, “Or at least, nobody’s formed a defensive line or put safeguards in place.”

“You’re sure he’s after something? They’ve attacked cities just to kill people before, and this is a dense population center.”

“He’s after something,” I said. “He’s got a direction, and a friend told me he’s targeting a point beyond where the heroes are searching.”

“We’ll help look,” he said. He rattled off a few lines of Punjabi to the capes in his company. One of them, Particulate, I took it, removed what looked like a fat smart phone from one pocket. He peered at it. Some sort of scanning instrument.

“Hey, either of you have a phone?” I asked.

Kismet nodded, then handed me the phone.

“Can I keep it?” I asked. “I can get it back to you later, probably.”

He made an exasperated noise. “I thought you wanted to make a call, not keep it.”

“It’d be for a good cause,” I promised.

He sighed, “Take it, then.”

I wound silk around it and then had bugs carry it off in Tattletale’s direction.

“You think it’s a cache of nuclear weapons, or what?” Kismet asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Go look, towards India Gate. I’m going to round up others.”

“On it,” he said, before speaking another line of Punjabi. “And kid?”

I hesitated in mid-air.

“Thanks, for the escape route from that rooftop.”

I didn’t respond, taking off. Rude, maybe, but taking the time to respond was stupid, when there was this much going on. Making me wait while he thanked me was similarly dumb.

I waited until the phone reached Tattletale’s hands, then drew closer to the fighting, and the capes who were closer to the battlefront. When Rime was in my power’s reach, I contacted her.

“Tattletale thinks she has a lead on Behemoth’s objective. Mobilizing thinkers to find it.“

I was nearly drowned out by the chaos of the fighting. Behemoth was standing partially inside a building, and it was blazing, pieces of it falling down with every heavy impact the heroes delivered.

“Say again,” she said.

I repeated myself, speaking the words aloud under my breath, to gauge the proper way to form the sounds with my swarm.

“Good,” she said. And that was all. She was fighting again, trying to freeze the building so Behemoth was encased.

I found two more thinkers and gave them directions. We’d search the area beyond the Rajpath.

Behemoth generated a shockwave, and I could sense the heroes reacting to it. The only cover here was cover heroes like Golem were creating, and the concussive shock traveled through the air, knocking capes off their feet or out of the air.

I grit my teeth and pressed my back to a building as it rolled past me, fell over at the impact.

The Endbringer strode forward, using the momentary break in the attack to cover more ground. Unfortunate capes who’d been pushing their luck were left trying to run for cover, only to be caught within his kill aura.

Rachel rescued one or two, though the heroes might have debated the nature of the rescue. Her dogs seized people in their mouths, running, dropping them at a safe distance, before moving in to retrieve more people. Some of the rescued individuals were left slowly climbing to their feet, no doubt bruised from the dog’s teeth and dripping with drool.

One dog, a person in its mouth, was struck by a bolt of lightning. It fell, sprawling, then slowly climbed to its feet. I could tell with my bugs, that the person in its mouth was no longer alive. Still, it dutifully carried the body to safety and deposited it on the ground, before limping back towards the battle.

I belatedly remembered to pay attention to my team. Tecton was busy erecting barriers, raising the earth in shelves with his piledrivers. Annex was reinforcing everything, fixing other people’s work, providing loose cover for ranged heroes to hide behind, and delaying collapses. Powerful.

Grace, using her strength to carry the wounded. Wanton was venturing into more dangerous ground with the safety of his telekinetic body, returning to human form to help the wounded and trapped, then retreating with the same form, moving on to the next person. Cuff was helping a tinker.

Golem was forming barriers, limiting the movements of Behemoth’s legs, and shoring up the building the Endbringer was wading through.

The constructions weren’t doing enough. We needed to change tactics now that this wasn’t working, sort of like the Endbringers did. If not constructions, then maybe destructions.

“Tecton, pits. Have Annex cover them,” I ordered. “Think controlled collapses.“

I couldn’t make out his response. I hoped that didn’t mean he couldn’t make out my statements.

“You’re in charge until I get back. I have other orders,” I added.

I returned to collecting thinkers and other stray capes, taking only a minute before heading for our destination.

There were heroes and PRT officials at India Gate, and lined up across the Rajpath. A handful of thinkers and tinkers were here. Not ones I’d sent, but official ones, directed to scan and search for whatever Behemoth might be after.

“Search north,” I communicated, sending moths and butterflies to pass on the message. I didn’t wait to see if they’d listen. I kept moving.

I zig-zagged across the landscape, scanning every surface with my bugs, as the fighting continued in the distance. Behemoth wasn’t quite visible from this vantage point, but the cloud of smoke and the lightning suggested it wouldn’t be long.

How many capes had he killed? How many more would die?

I crossed paths with Particulate, who had apparently been filled in by Kismet. He handed me one of the scanning devices, and I took off.

Damn tinkers. Their stuff was making life so complicated, now. Too many things to keep track of. Antigrav, propulsion, sensing things with my bugs, paying attention to what I was sensing with my bugs, coordinating people, with sectors for them to cover, and now tracking the stuff with the scanner.

Not that it was impossible. I was managing everything but the bugspeak without a problem.

The scanner showed me only gibberish at first, with sixteen bars divided into eight individual pieces, each of which could be any number of colors. Each rose and fell as I moved and as I turned the scanner. Moving past Particulate, I noted that the rise and fall of the bars was linked to my relation to his scanner.

We were triangulating. Or did we not have a third? Kismet was somewhere out of my range, at present, as was Fathom, so I couldn’t be sure.

The bars rose as I pointed in Behemoth’s direction, a mix of blues, greens, yellows and reds. Was it tracking energy?

I turned away, and found another bump, almost all white, the rest yellow. Nothing tracked in any significant quantity at Behemoth’s location.

It was something. I circled around until the bars reached a peak, every single one of them topping the charts.

Nothing. I used my power, but I couldn’t find anything more complex than a desktop computer.

Then it adjusted. The bars each dropped until they were only four or five high.

Was Particulate doing something on his end?

It dawned on me, as I tried to narrow down our target, that this was big. Something that topped the basic readings just by being within a mile of it.

And I found it. My bugs could sense an underground chamber. Concrete walls, impenetrable to earthworms, and no obvious entrance. I looped back to communicate to the others. The English-speakers, anyways.

Then, as the faster and the closer thinkers caught up with me, I approached the site.

Particulate and Kismet joined me.

This underground chamber was different from the one I’d seen closer to Behemoth. There was no ramp leading up, nothing to suggest an elevator.

“Not sure how to get through,” I said.

“Smart of them,” Kismet said.

“I know, but it doesn’t help us.”

Kismet said something to Particulate, and the tinker drew a gun from a holster with an excess of care.

Then he fired. There was no beam, no projectile. There was only a corridor, three feet across, carved into the earth, and plumes of dust.

We backed away, Kismet coughing as he caught some of it. Particulate, a tinker with a narrow, overlong bald head, said something in his language, almost musical, humorous. He glanced at me, his eyes covered by goggles, his mouth covered by a fabric that hugged every wrinkle of his lower face, as though it were a micron thick, and smiled. I could see the contours of his teeth and gums behind the strange fabric.

“Battery,” Kismet said, stopping to cough, “is dead. Three shots. Tried two on Behemoth, didn’t work. He likes that it was useful.”

“Damn,” I said. If they had worked…

I didn’t waste any more time. I handed them a length of cord, then disappeared down the hole. My feet skidded on the smooth, almost glassy surface, but my flight pack gave me some lift.

Now that I was lower, I was free to feel out the surroundings, and mentally map out the entire complex. It took time, but the others were slow to descend to the lower corridor.

Was there a whole undercity beneath New Delhi? Some kind of subterranean realm of corridors and rooms, large and small? Did the good and bad ‘cold’ capes accidentally dig into each other’s corridors at any point? Collapse sections of each other’s undercity?

Geez, it wasn’t like the city wasn’t large enough already.

I was drawing a mental picture as my bugs spread out. There were people here, but they weren’t doing anything special. Sleeping, cooking, fucking, smoking some sort of pipes… no.

And in the midst of it, as Particulate adjusted his tracking device to further narrow the sensitivity, we closed in on a void. A part of the underground chamber my bugs couldn’t touch.

Particulate said something, arching his eyebrows as he looked down at the scanner.

“A lot of energy,” Kismet translated.

“How much is a lot?” I asked.

Particulate spoke without Kismet translating for him.

“More than Behemoth has given off during his entire stay in New Delhi,” Kismet said.

I stared at the little scanner and the white bars. “There’s no way in, as far as I can tell.”

“There wasn’t a way into this base either,” Kismet said. “Maybe they have a way to enter and leave.”

“Okay,” I said. “We know where Behemoth’s target is, even if we don’t know what it is. Let’s retreat, communicate with-”

But Particulate was already moving, tampering with the gun that had created the corridor.

“Stop him!” I said.

Kismet reached over, but Particulate was already tossing the gun to the point where the floor met the wall.

It started flashing rapidly, increasingly bright, and Particulate bolted. It was almost comical, as though he’d been taught to run by a textbook. His hands were out flat at his sides, his arms and legs bent at rigid right angles as he sprinted away, almost robotic in the movements. He shouted something in Punjabi.

Almost comical. When you saw a bomb disposal team running, as the joke went, you ran to keep up. The same applied to any tinker and a device that flashed like that. Kismet and I ran after him.

The gun exploded, silently, without fire or light or electricity. There was only a roughly spherical opening carved into the area. It was wide enough to lead into the tunnel above and below us, and had sheared through the five or six feet of solid earth that separated each floor. At the far end, I could see where it had cut into a corner of the previously inaccessible room.

We approached, and I could see a cape inside, or a parahuman, if ‘cape’ applied. He was disheveled, with dark circles under his eyes, his skin pale, his beard and hair bedraggled. His clothing, by contrast, was opulent, clean: a rich indigo robe, a sapphire set in a gold chain, a gold chain for a belt, and a golden sash.

And above him, the energy. There were two golden discs, and something almost alive seemed to crackle between them.

“It’s Phir Sē,” Kismet said, backing away.

“The glowing thing in the air or the person?” I asked.

“The person.”

“Who’s Phir See?” I asked.

“Sē. He’s one of the reasons the American girl’s PRT can exist,” Kismet said. “When they talk about disbanding it, the PRT only reminds them that monsters like this lurk elsewhere.”

The man slowly turned to face us. He wasn’t an old man, but he moved like one.

“Monsters?” I asked. “I’ve fought monsters. Just tell me what kind of monster he is.”

“The kind that is too smart for all of our good,” Kismet said. He’d frozen the moment the man set eyes on him.

Phir Sē spoke, “That is compliment? Yes?”

“Yes,” Kismet said.

“Then I thank you. Girl? I recognize you from American television.”

“I go by Weaver, now.”

“I do remember. You had much power. You turned it down.”

“It wasn’t for me,” I said.

“You are more comfortable where you are now?” he asked.

“Now as in here, in this fight, or as a hero?”

“Either. Both,” he stated.

“Honestly? No on both counts. I’m still figuring it out.”

He inclined his head. “This is to be respected. Making hard choice. The challenge of the young adult. To find identity.”

“Thank you,” I said, still wary. Everything about Kismet’s reaction was telling me this guy was to be feared, so I had to step carefully. “Can I ask what that thing is?”

“A weapon,” he said. “A… how do you Americans say it? Time bomb? Only this is joke.”

“He makes portals,” Kismet said. “Using them, he can send things back in time. Something goes in portal B, comes out of portal A a few minutes earlier. Or the other way around.”

“Or, as I discover, I make loop,” Phir Sē said. “Weaponize. Simple light, captured in one moment, redoubled many times over. I move gate, and that light will pour forth and clean.”

I could remember what Particulate had said. More energy than Behemoth had created since arriving in this city. Only this would be directed at a single target.

“Clean isn’t the word you want,” I said. ”Scour?”

“Scour,” Phir Sē said, he inclined his head again. ”I thank you.”

“Behemoth wants his hands on it,” I said. “On that energy.”

“I want this on Behemoth. Do great harm. Even kill.”

“Shit,” Kismet said. He backed away a step. “This is-”

“Stay,” Phir Sē said. His voice was quiet, but it was clear he expected to be heeded.

Kismet glanced up at the glow, then turned to run.

He wasn’t even turned all the way around when there was a flicker. A man appeared just in front of Kismet. A teleporter.

And his forearm extended through Kismet’s chest.

Then he flickered, like a bad lightbulb, and he was gone, leaving only a gaping hole where the arm had been. Kismet collapsed, dead.

A teleporter who can bypass the Manton effect.

“Stay,” Phir Sē told us, again. He hadn’t even flinched, but the space between his bushy eyebrows furrowed as he stared down at Kismet.

My heart thudded in my throat as I glanced down at the body.

Particulate said something, spitting the word.

Phir Sē said something in Punjabi, then turned to me, “Is rude, to speak in language you cannot understand. He call me evil, so I not speak to him further. But you understand, do you not? You know what form this war take? The danger we all face, from monsters like that, from others?”

“I don’t think many top the Endbringers,” I said.

“Maybe not so. Maybe. But you have tried being cold. Killing the enemy, yes? Because ruthless is only way to win this war.”

“I met some people. I think they were your adversaries,” I said. “Glowing eyes? Reflective? Like mirrors?”

“Yes. Enemy. They petty evils that walk this city. Organize crime. Slave, prostitute, murder, mercenary. My side, we root out corrupt. Ruthless. Government prefer them to us. Paint us as evil, pay them to carry on. But you know what this is like, yes?”

“More or less,” I said, not breaking eye contact. “And those guys, they’re ruthless in the same way you described, I guess?”

“More, less,” he said, as if he were trying on the phrase, “Yes.”

“You want to hit Behemoth with this… time bomb,” I said. “But… I think that’s what he wants. He’s holding back. My thinker friend, she said so. He’s taking more hits than he should, and I’m just now realizing he might be doing it because he wants to be ready for when you hit him with this. He’ll push it out into the ground, or into the air.”

“Yes. This is likely,” Phir Sē said. “This is what he may want. I hoped for the Second or Third. This will have to do.”

“They’ve tried this stuff before,” I said. “Nukes, gigantic railguns, tricks with teleportation and portals. It doesn’t work. You won’t do anything except get a lot of people killed as collateral damage.”

“We time this. Strategic,” Phir Sē said, calm, as if he were talking to a panicked animal. “Come. Step in.”

Right, I thought. Approach the temporal bomb.

But I did. No use ticking off the guy with the murder-teleporter on call. Particulate followed me as I navigated the way to the room’s interior.

There were television screens all across the wall. Five showed the ongoing destruction from distant cameras. Two showed grainy camera footage. The last showed what looked to be an Indian soap opera.

“Thirsty,” Phir Sē commented.

The teleporter flickered into existence, then disappeared. Phir Sē had a bottle of water in his hands that he hadn’t held before. He turned our way, bushy eyebrows raised as a faint smile touched his face. “Might I offer you anything?”

I shook my head. My stomach was a knot, my heart was pounding.

Particulate said something, but Phir Sē ignored him.

“We watch the First,” Phir Sē said. “He let his guard down, I strike.”

“I’ve seen an Endbringer fool another brilliant man who thought he had a surefire way to win,” I said. “They’re cleverer than we think. What if Behemoth fools you?”

“Then New Delhi pay for my mistake,” Phir Sē answered me. “I have daughter there. She join bright heroes, popular ones. She pay for my mistake, if she still lives. I live, down here, spend life mourning.”

He looked genuinely upset at the idea.

“You want to win?” I asked. “You take that thing, aim it for the sky. Deplete it, so Behemoth’s entire goal for coming here is gone.”

“Is a chance,” Phir Sē told me. “To strike them harder than anything yet. You tell me, is that not worth it?”

“Worth risking this city? Your daughter? The lives of the heroes here?”

“Yes. Is worth.”

“No,” I retorted.

He looked at me, and I could read the unhappiness in his expression. Not a condemnation or even him being upset with me. Disappointment in general.

The woman in the suit told me there were people with their own agendas. Monsters. This is one of them, and he thinks we’re kindred spirits.

“I tell you because you are ruthless, Weaver. Do not stop me,” he said. “I die, focus waver, time bomb explode. Aimless, no direction.”

“Indiscriminate,” I supplied a better word.

“Indiscriminate,” Phir Sē echoed me. “India gone. You die, even down here.“I raised my head, staring up at the two golden discs and the current that seemed to run between them. I would have thought it would be brighter.

“Hero fall. We wait,” he said. “When fight cannot be won, I strike.”

I tensed as I watched the fighting on the screens. They flickered intermittently in a delayed reaction to Behemoth’s lightning strikes.

“Very soon,” he said, his eyes fixed on the monitor. “You stay.”

24.04

Particulate said something, and the amount of invective in his tone was enough to make it clear, even if I couldn’t understand the language.

Phir Sē said something in response, his voice calm, almost as though he were talking to a child, then took another drink of his water. His eyes didn’t leave the screens.

Behemoth had nearly reached India Gate. The defense continued to be staggered. One to four parahumans working together to slow him, to impede his progress and buy time for the others to wear him down. When they failed, the measures circumvented or the capes in question killed, he advanced, the heroes retreated as best as they were able, and they enacted the next counteroffensive.

But each time they fought, he did damage. Capes perished, tinker devices were turned into lumps of hot metal. Each time the capes mounted a defense, the defense was weaker.

“Something is wrong,” Phir Sē said.

“Chevalier was attacked,” I answered. ”They were planning a coordinated defense, I think, but someone beheaded our group at the worst possible time.”

“I see.”

“I’m not going to ask any questions about how you guys operate, but it’s obvious you’re organized.”

“Careful,” Phir Sē told me. He didn’t even look at me. The defensive line was using Clockblocker, now. They’d erected a loose grid of wires, almost invisible, but for the flashing lights set at regular intervals. Alexandria and Eidolon were trying to hammer the Endbringer into the barricade.

“You’ve got secrets to protect. Fine. Cool. I’m not going to pry. But maybe we’ve walked similar paths. We had similar practices, probably.”

He cast me a momentary glance over his shoulder, meeting my eyes for a second before he turned back to the screens. An acknowledgement, without accepting or denying my point.

“My old team wasn’t nearly as effective as you guys seem to be. But we operated in secret, we understood some key elements. The need for information, having to know when to go on the offense, being unpredictable against enemies who are already expecting you to try and catch them off guard.”

“Talk slower, please,” Phir Sē told me. ”My English is not strong, and I am very tired.”

He looked like he might drop any minute, like he’d barely eaten, hadn’t slept…

“How long has it been since you slept?” I asked.

“Three days. We thought an Endbringer would attack soon, so I prepared, to be ready when the time came. Too early, I had to stop, restart. This time, he came, but I am weary. The talking, is good. Distracting without being dangerous. Continue, please.”

What happens if he nods off? I wondered, looking at the ‘time bomb’. The same thing he’d stated would happen if he were killed or knocked out?

“Okay,” I answered. I took a second to compose my thoughts. ”You mentioned how you have to be hard, heavy handed if you’re going to succeed in a situation where your enemies are as scary as the people you and I have gone up against.”

“Yes. Heavy handed. Like the judge’s hammer…”

“Gavel,” I supplied.

“The gavel. Harsh justice. Crush the enemies who cannot be converted to your side or convinced to do otherwise.”

“Yes,” I said. I thought for a second, then made my argument. ”And you know the power of having all of the information. The power of having a group that can communicate that information. Communication is key, and a group that doesn’t even need to communicate because they function so well together is better yet.”

“You had this.”

With the Undersiders. “We were close. And losing that, it’s scary. Maybe the least fun part about being a hero. But you understand? You agree, about information and communication?”

He didn’t respond, as he watched the screen. Is he going to nod off right here?

On the monitors, a successful hit on Eidolon’s part struck Behemoth into the grid of wires. It had taken time for the Endbringer to approach the wires, set safely outside of his kill range, and some were already coming free of Clockblocker’s power. Still, they sank deep, cutting a diamond-shaped pattern into his hide, shoulder to heel. Alexandria charged, trying to drive it home, and Behemoth struck out with one claw, a swipe.

He must have captured all of her forward momentum and motive impact and redirected it at her, because he didn’t move an inch in response to the hit, and she crashed into the ground at a shallow diagonal angle. Her body carved a trench a few hundred feet long, judging by the cloud of dust that rose in her wake.

Behemoth lurched forward, and the grid of wires cut him again on their way out. Chunks of flesh were carved free.

The Endbringer clapped his hands together, and forcefields went down, defenses and defending capes falling in response to the impact.

Clockblocker’s grid of wires dropped out of the sky, blinking white lights falling like sparks from a large firework. I suspected that I knew what it meant.

Shit. I hoped he was okay. Clockblocker wasn’t a bad guy, as heroes went.

“I agree,” Phir Sē told me, belatedly. ”And I think I see what you are going to say.”

“Let’s communicate with them. With everyone. Half the screwed up crap I’ve seen, it’s been because we’re fighting between ourselves. The best achievements, the truly heroic stuff I’ve seen? It’s been when we worked together. So let’s maximize our chances.”

“You have been doing this how long? A year?”

“Months.”

“I have been doing this for ten years. I admire you for retaining your…” he trailed off.

“Idealism?”

“Not a word I’m familiar with, Weaver. Faith?”

“Faith works.”

“I have none left, after ten years. No faith. We are a wretched, petty species, and we have been given power to destroy ourselves with.”

“Ironic, given what you’re trying to do here. You’re going to kill people, kill bystanders, on a gamble.”

Phir Sē peered at me. ”What chances would you give this gamble?”

“One in three?”

His stare was cold as he met my eyes. ”One in three. That is… perhaps unfair. No matter. If I’m wrong, we lose this city. If I’m right, we kill Behemoth. I would take those odds, Weaver. I would take them, I would watch this city be wiped from the earth, knowing that people I am fond of would die. I live in a civilian guise most days, waiting until I have a task from those more powerful than I. I would perhaps be killing the butcher I talk to every day when I walk to the store for food. I would kill the widow who lives next door to me, her child, if they have not evacuated. I have mentioned my daughter, much like you in her abundance of faith in people.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call myself an idealist to that extent,” I said. I paused. ”Phir Sē-”

We’d started talking at the same time. He talked over me, half of his attention on the screens. ”I will take this gamble and perhaps kill those people in the process. I will kill those people who can make me smile and feel more human than I am, I will grieve their deaths, and then I will take that gamble again. Because one city, however grand, is worth that chance.”

I thought of doing that, of rolling the dice like that, with my father, with the people in my territory. ”Easier to say than do.”

“I have done it, Weaver,” Phir Sē told me. ”My wife, my sons, years ago. A similar problem on a smaller scale. I can walk through minutes, I could have walked back to save them, but I let them die because it meant a monster would remain gone. What merit is a gamble, a sacrifice, if you stake things that matter nothing to you?”

I stared at him. He was young, no older than thirty-five, but the lines of his face, the slumped posture, the slowness with which he moved… they spoke of a horrendous exhaustion.

I didn’t have a response for Phir Sē’s question. He smiled a little, and turned back to the screens.

Behemoth was roaring, a sound that didn’t reach us underground. With the monitors on mute, it didn’t translate there either. Still, the images vibrated, the flickering intensified, and the defenses the heroes had established were crumbling. India Gate was damaged, an incidental casualty of the fight more than a target.

My bugs sensed motion to my left. I glanced at Particulate, and saw him holding his scanner behind his back.

It was pointed at Phir Sē’s ‘time bomb’.

His other hand was drawing a slender gun from a pocket in his combination lab coat and jacket, a gun like something from retro science fiction, with no barrel. There was only a small extension on the end, much like a satellite dish.

Another disintegration gun?

He saw me looking, glanced at Phir Sē, who had his back turned, then looked back at me. His eyes flicked over in Phir Sē’s direction, his intention clear.

He had a solution in mind. A way to disable the explosion and stop Phir Sē.

I had only an instant to decide, before the teleporter intervened, or Phir Sē noticed what was going on.

I met Particulate’s eyes and nodded once, curt.

The scanner disappeared into a pocket, and he drew something like a grenade from within his flowing coat. Then he drew the gun on Phir Sē. I felt the tug of the thread in my hand, attached to the gun.

Without thinking, I hauled on it, pulling it off-target. The gun hit one screen, two feet to Phir Sē’s right, at stomach level. It exploded into a swirling cloud of black dust.

Phir Sē whirled around. He barked out a word I couldn’t understand.

“No!” I called out.

Phir Sē made a gesture with his hand, just as the teleporter flickered into existence. The man didn’t intersect Particulate, but appeared behind him, deftly disarming him of the grenade and pistol before flickering back out of existence. He took Particulate with him.

“Don’t kill him,” I said.

“You would feel… blameful?” Phir Sē asked.

Blameful? “Guilty,” I corrected him, before I realized what I was doing.

I could see the small smile on Phir Sē’s face, disappointed and proud and a condemnation at the same time. ”I watch you. In reflection of screen. You set him up, to put yourself in my good will.”

Had I? Not wholly consciously. I’d set up the string, but how much of that was intentional? Was it habit, now, to have a measure on hand when dealing with any weapon?

I focused on the swarm, focused on the cords and threads that traced the room. One in the doorway, one at each of Phir Sē’s feet, just waiting for me to finish the deal and bind him. Others extended between us, spiders poised to cut the threads or tie them, as the situation demanded.

The passenger, or was it me, being wary?

“I guess I did,” I said. I made the spiders cut the threads between us.

He shook a finger at me, “I was not born yesterday. This silliness could have gotten you killed. Would have, if I did not feel need for outsider to challenge my ideas.”

“I guess…” I said, searching for the phrase, “A gamble’s not meaningful if you’re not staking something important, right?”

He smiled a little, and there was a slight twinkle in his eye, “Your life?”

“I suppose,” I said. My heart was still pounding, my mouth dry, and it wasn’t just the Phir Sē thing, or the teleporter. The passenger.

“You think. So we know where you stand, now. You are crafty, dangerous. Underhanded. You turn on an ally and use him as a pawn to express something to me.”

“He wasn’t quite an ally,” I said. ”He helped us get inside this underground base. But he was reckless. Breaking into this chamber in the first place, preparing to attack you. A chaotic element.”

“I do not know this ‘chaotic’ word, but I get your meaning, I think. There was no communication,” Phir Sē said. He smiled as though we shared a private joke.

“I’m doing what I have to, to ensure we all come out of this ahead. Just like you, but I didn’t get the ability to manipulate time, or to create this sort of ‘time bomb’. I work on a smaller scale.”

“I get the joke,” Phir Sē told me. ”It is joke? Small?”

“Sort of,” I said, and I smiled a little in return, behind my mask. This guy was borderline unhinged, too much power in too unstable a package, and I almost liked him.

“What is it you wish to express to me, Weaver, that you would sacrifice a pawn and risk your own life?”

I wasn’t sure I had a response to that. I tried anyways. ”You want to hit Behemoth with your time bomb? Okay, let’s do it.”

“Oh? You protested only minutes ago.”

“I’m not about to change your mind, I’m not about to stop you. So let’s make it happen. We’ll let the defending heroes know what’s up, set up something-”

“Slower. Speak slower.”

“Let me go. We work together with the heroes.”

“The heroes will die in minutes. Before you arrive.”

I glanced at the screen. How bad was it? It was so hard to get a sense of how many heroes still stood. An ugly feeling gripped my chest.

“We’ll try. Let me try. I can give you a signal. You strike then.”

“You are asking me to have faith.”

“Let me go, Phir Sē,” I told him. ”You said you have to stake something that matters on a gamble. Stake your doubt.”

“I do not understand this,” he said, suddenly sounding weary. ”My English-”

“It’s not your English; what I’m saying doesn’t make a lot of sense,” I said. I had to resist the urge to rush and hurry through the explanation. ”But your doubt, your lack of faith, it’s something safe. No disappointments, no fear things won’t work out. Risk that. Risk losing that. I did, when I became a hero.”

“Not such a hero,” he said. ”Bargain with the madman, turn on an ally.”

“I’m realizing I’m a pretty lousy hero,” I agreed. ”But I’m trying. I made a leap of faith. I’m asking you to as well.”

He smiled a little, then reached forward and took my hand. He raised it, simultaneously bending over, and kissed the back of it.

“One more,” he said.

“One more?”

“To wager on a gamble. A pleasant conversation I might look forward to. Gone, when you die.”

Die?

He spoke a word, and I tensed. I tried to pull my hand back, but he held on, my fingers wrenching painfully as I tried to get away.

The teleporter appeared just behind me. His manifestation was followed by a gentle brush of air, as oxygen was displaced from the area his body now occupied. I could feel my heart skip a beat, the air catching in my throat.

No pain. A second passed as I made an assessment, realized that he hadn’t impaled me with one of his limbs. Only surprise, and that vague sense of a killer instinct.

The man’s hands settled on me.

“Fifteen minutes, Weaver,” Phir Sē told me, releasing my hand. ”Fifteen minutes, or if the heroes cannot put up fight any longer, whichever is first.”

And I was gone, out of the basement, planted in the midst of the battlefield. Phir Sē wasn’t even in my range. I’d made the call to work with him, and now it was set in stone. There would be no going back to change his mind, to stop him. He’d strike, guaranteed.

Even with the filter of my mask, the smell of ozone and the heated air burned the edges of my nostrils. Acrid smoke was so thick in the air that I could taste it, breathing in through my nose.

And Behemoth loomed in front of me, far too close for comfort, his silhouette shrouded in the smoke around him.

I turned and activated the antigrav panels, running to help get up to speed before it could help me lift off.

The ground abruptly tilted under my feet, a steep shelf of street and underlying rock rising in front of me, blocking my path. I managed to grab the uppermost edge with my hands, hauling myself forward enough that the flight pack could take over.

No bugs. I’d left them behind in Phir Sē’s lair. If I’d thought about it, I might have asked for time to collect them. At the same time, I couldn’t have spared the minutes.

Two or three thousand bugs, the only silk I had were the cords that were still attached to me, the ones I’d stretched between Phir Sē and myself and then cut. I had my taser, laughably petty in the face of Behemoth, a small canister of pepper spray, and the flight pack.

Long odds, even at the best of it. I pressed the button on my armband, spoke into it, and got only silence in response.

My bugs moved throughout the battlefield, and I marked every cape I came across. Shelter was scarce, and hard to make out in the smoke. Each flash of lightning marked an unfortunate cape who’d found themselves too far from cover and in Behemoth’s sights.

In the midst of it all, I could speak and I couldn’t make myself out. It was almost like being in Grue’s darkness, before his second trigger event. Couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear. My movements, even, were harder to judge. I felt like there was a pressure, here, as if the smoke had substance, and even Behemoth’s existence, somewhere nearby, was weighing on me. Was I tired, or was everything heavier? Or, it struck me, maybe the oxygen content in the air was lower.

I wasn’t sure about the ramifications of that.

So few bugs to draw on. Five to ten touched a single cape, allowed me to check if they were anyone I recognized, then all but one would leave. One bug per cape, the rest scouting.

Ligeia was the first I recognized. The conch shell mask, one of Accord’s people. Citrine would be close by…

Or not. I swore under my breath, touched ground to reorient myself, then hurried around a corner.

She was creating a massive portal, widening it with every passing moment. It made me wonder if there was a reason there were so few recordings of the Endbringer attacks, if the PRT hid this sort of thing. They’d hidden the particulars of the Echidna attack, and one of the reasons Alexandria had argued, a reason I had argued in favor of that, was because it wouldn’t go over well with the public to know just how much devastation a single parahuman could be capable of.

Her portal was perhaps twenty feet across, circular, and cold water gushed out, as if forced by an incredible pressure.

It was the sort of defensive measure that you employed when there weren’t any frontline combatants left. A desperate, violent one, like Sundancer’s sun. My bugs found her ear, and I communicated as clearly as I could, ”Run.”

She didn’t hear. Doggedly, she stood her ground, drenching Behemoth, widening the portal’s radius. So hard to tell just how much, without losing bugs to the spray. Twenty five feet? Thirty?

“Run,” I tried again. I muttered, “Run, Ligeia.”

He erupted with lightning, and I could momentarily see his silhouette in the distance, the light cutting through the thick clouds of smoke and dust. I could see the tendrils of lightning as though through a strobe light, holding positions as they followed the flow of the water, then changing to other targets, finding solid conductors to latch onto. The entire geyser was lit up.

She changed tacks, and the portal began sucking. The lightning disappeared, and Behemoth stumbled forwards towards the opening, the water now reversing direction.

Eidolon appeared like a spear from the heavens, striking him between the shoulderblades. Behemoth nearly crashed through. His claw settled on the portal’s edge, as though it had a physical mass to it, slipped through. The lightning wasn’t traveling far, now, and the image of it was soon lost in the smoke.

The portal closed, and Behemoth managed to claw his way back, simultaneously fending off Eidolon, the lighting growing stronger with every passing second.

He lurched, and dropped several feet, the ground shaking. The light show marked the geyser spraying up around his leg, apparently having sunken into a portal.

Close it, I thought. Sever it.

But she didn’t. Not an option, it seemed.

Move, Taylor. Deal with your own jobs first. How long did I have? Fifteen minutes? Thirteen? Twelve? So hard to keep track of time right now.

My underlings. Wanton, he was nearby. Larger. He carried stretchers with the wounded, which moved around the very periphery of his range, where they rotated slower, and other objects closer to his core. An armband, a dismembered arm with scorch marks at the base.

His or someone else’s?

Once I caught up to him, I found the others a distance away. Tecton had fashioned something crude to attach to his armor, a shelf on his back that would hold injured capes. He rode his three-wheeled bike forward, stopped to slam his piledrivers into the ground to erect a wall of stone, punched through an obstruction, made more forward progress, and then created another wall. A staggered retreat. Grace, Cuff and Golem followed, each with wounded behind them on their vehicles.

Annex? I couldn’t find him with my bugs. He was either swimming alongside them, helping to clear the way, or he was injured.

I was on my way to catch up to them when Ligeia was struck down. A chance lightning bolt had struck her, just like that. Behemoth surged to his feet. Lightning traced the arc of the water that still geysered up, less impressive with every passing second.

Even killing her hadn’t forced the portal closed. Damn.

I came to a stop at Tecton’s side.

“Sorry,” I panted. My voice sounded so rough-edged. So hard to breathe.

“Tecton can’t talk,” Cuff said. Her voice was oddly level, in contrast to how she’d acted early in the fight.

“What happened?”

“Clipped by another cape,” she said. Still with no emotion, no affect.

“Doesn’t matter,” Grace cut in. ”Where the fuck were you?”

Tecton’s hand moved, settling on her shoulder. Grace backhanded it away.

“I found what Behemoth wants,” I told her. ”Where’s Rime?”

“Dead,” Golem said. He carried a small child, and was falling behind,

“Who’s next in command?”

“Prism, but she’s injured,” Grace said.

“I need to communicate with someone in charge, and we don’t have time,” I said. ”Dragon? Defiant?”

“Metal suits are all toast,” Grace said. ”No clue about Defiant.”

“Revel? Your boss?” I asked. Then I corrected myself. ”Our boss?”

“Saw her two minutes ago. No word on chain of command. She said we should run, take anyone we can help. Scion’s dropped off the radar, but last we heard, he was heading north. Not east, not west. He has to be trying to avoid this fight,” Grace almost snarled the words.

“It’s not hopeless,” I said. ”We’ve got a shot, here. Behemoth’s target is a weapon. Kind of.”

“A weapon?” Golem asked.

“A bomb. Maybe big enough that it makes an atom bomb look like a hand grenade. Something that’s supposed to take down Endbringers.”

“No shit?” Grace asked. I could see a trace of hope in her expression.

“An energy weapon,” I clarified.

I saw that hope become confusion. ”But that’s-”

“It’s something that could go really right or really wrong,” I said. I saw the confusion become a momentary despair. ”Which is exactly why we need to get in touch with someone that matters. Where are the heroes? Where was Revel?”

Golem pointed. ”That way.”

“Citrine? Woman in yellow dress.”

“Yellow bodysuit now,” Golem said. ”She stripped out of the dress when he pushed past the command center.”

Fuck me. Now that he mentioned that, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d sensed her with my bugs and dismissed her as a stranger.

“I think I know where she went,” I said. Same direction Revel went. I was already lifting off the ground. ”Go, drop off injured, then come back if you can.”

“Revel told us to scram,” Grace said.

“I’m telling you that we need to distract that motherfucker for five seconds,” I said. ”Where’s Annex?”

“Here,” Annex said, from behind me.

I turned to look as he stepped out of a building.

“You’re with me,” I told him. He didn’t have any wounded with him.

“I need to ride something,” he said, “Not fast enough.”

“Define ‘something’,” I told him.

“Something heavy enough to hold my entire body mass.”

Could I hold an entire other person? No. I could hold a child, but that’d be a stretch.

“Climb inside my costume,” I told him. ”The flight pack too.”

He gave me a bewildered look. ”You realize I’d be right against-”

“Move!” I barked. How long did I have? Not enough time. Modesty was not an issue.

He flowed into my costume, and I could feel him against my skin, his body strangely cold and smooth. A lump of him stuck out over one shoulder. His head, not quite normal, not quite his specter form, had formed itself in my shoulderpad.

And we were too heavy for the antigravity.

I’d have to gamble, make compromises, take risks. I looked to the others, “Reach deep inside, find your second wind. Find your third wind, if you can. Rendezvous with me over there if you can make it in eight or ten minutes.”

Then I deployed my wings, activated the propulsion system alongside the antigrav. It was slow to lift off, but it was faster than running.

If I got shocked, or if the electromagnetic radiation got any worse, this could cut out on me any second, but I needed to move. I needed assets, even if I didn’t know for sure what I’d do with them.

The Chicago Wards peeled away behind me, abandoning the defensive walls and careful retreat in favor of speed.

We found the defensive lines in a minute, if that.

The Undersiders were there, fighting. Three stuffed goats and the dogs provided an added barricade for them to hide behind, while Foil was firing her needles. Regent held her quiver, handing her bolts to fire, while Imp lurked on the far side of the street, her back to the wall. Citrine was peering between two dogs, erecting a field of golden light near the Endbringer.

Grue wasn’t with them.

“Gah!” Regent cried out, as I landed, folding the wings back into place. ”Jesus fuck!”

Right, I had two heads. ”Out, Annex.”

Annex flowed out of my costume and straight into the ground. Within seconds, he was shoring up the wall, drawing in debris and using it to rebuild and reinforce.

“Where’s Grue?” I asked.

“Hospital. Burns,” Imp said.

I nodded. ”Bad?”

“More mentally than physically.”

Ah.

I could only hope he’d bounce back. To business. ”Revel. American cape with sort of an Asian-themed costume, lantern. Where is she?”

“Zapped,” Regent said.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

My disbelief was tempered by a measure of alarm. I was limited in time, and that was bad enough, but if Phir Sē decided our defending forces weren’t sufficient to put up a fight, he could strike sooner. If I couldn’t find someone capable of leading the defense, if we were little more than scattered remnants, why would Phir Sē wait?

“Revel absorbs energy, kind of,” I said. ”She might be okay.”

“She got hit by lightning,” Regent told me. ”Kind of lethal.”

Rachel snorted.

I glanced at the dogs. She didn’t seem to mind that they were somewhat exposed, huddled against the ruined wall the Undersiders were using for cover. One of the dogs seemed to be reacting badly to the lightning strikes, and was huffing out deep, very un-doglike noises each time one struck nearby.

“Listen,” I said. I flinched as lightning touched nearby. He was focusing more on a quantity of bolts than on the really heavy hits. Cleaning up the remanants of our defenses. ”Revel. Where did she fall? Or you could point me to anyone else that might be in charge?”

Parian pointed, almost absently. I couldn’t tell if she was dismissing me or if her focus was taken up by the stuffed goats. One took a lightning bolt, and she was patching it up and reinflating it within a second.

I took off. Again, I tried my armband. Static. Better than nothing, but not ideal.

I passed over the contingent of Yàngbǎn. Just getting near them, I could feel my powers swelling, my range growing, a crackling at the periphery of my attention.

And then it was gone. I was leaving them behind.

Eerie. Uncomfortable, even, with the recent reminder of how my powers were feeling vaguely out of my control. A boost in range wasn’t worth any surprises on that front. Bugs were almost useless here, more bugs wouldn’t make a difference.

Revel was in Dispatch’s company, alongside a cape in white, with a starburst worked into his helmet, radiating from the eyeholes and the gap for his mouth. She was lying down, using a piece of rubble for cover. She stirred as the ground rumbled, marking Behemoth’s rapid footsteps. Not a run. It felt off, saying something like him was running. But a lope, like how a gorilla might move, that fit.

“She conscious?” I asked, as I landed.

“She is,” Revel answered for herself. She seemed to have to work to focus on me. ”Weaver?”

“I found what Behemoth is after. Who can I talk to?”

Dispatch stepped out of the way, so the man in white with the starburst helm was free to act.

“Me,” the man in white said. ”I’m Exalt. Interim leader.”

“The Texas Protectorate leader.”

“Houston Protectorate, yes.”

“A local cape has gathered up a whole mess of energy. Enough to wipe India off the map. He’s planning to hit Behemoth with it, in two or three minutes.”

“It won’t work,” Exalt said.

“I know it won’t work. But he’s going to try, no matter what we do, and we need to distract the Endbringer long enough to give it a chance.”

He exchanged glances with the others.

Hurry, I thought. I was panting, my mouth thick with the taste of ozone. Even with my lenses, my eyes were watering from the peripheral smoke.

“Go,” Revel said. ”Expend it.”

Expend?

“It’s too soon,” Exalt said, “And we don’t have all the informat-”

“No time! Decide now!”

I saw him hesitate.

Swearing under my breath, I turned on my heel and flew away.

I was burning bridges, but that was a hell of a lot better than everyone here dying. How long did I have? I couldn’t even begin to guess. Two minutes? Eight?

Big difference between the two.

Fuck it. A waste of time. I’d burned precious minutes finding them, and they’d been too slow to help. I wasn’t sure I could work with the Protectorate, with the Wards. Not if they failed us like this at this crucial juncture.

Assets. Didn’t have enough resources here. We needed to pull something decent, something that could…

I had no fucking idea. How were we supposed to keep Behemoth sufficiently still and distracted, controlling a detonation that had the potential to level a continent?

The Chicago Wards were arriving, minus Wanton. I signaled them with bugs to fine-tune the direction they were traveling, putting them en-route to the Undersiders.

And behind me, as if they were feeling guilty, Exalt and Dispatch were giving chase, rapidly catching up. Dispatch moved in bursts of speed intersped with moments where he ran at a normal pace, Exalt flew with Revel in his arms.

I found the Yàngbǎn and approached. They were reacting even before I’d landed, turning, hands raised to attack. There were twenty of them, or close to.

“English?” I asked the Yàngbǎn.

They were silent, almost cold in response.

They were nationalist capes. I was a foreigner, maybe an enemy by default.

“English, please. This is it, the deciding moment. Your help, it’s… it’s essential.”

No response.

Exalt, Revel and Dispatch were slowing as they approached me. I drew an arrow in the air with the few bugs I had left and pointed them to the Undersiders. They ignored the instruction, setting down just behind me.

“Weaver,” Exalt said. His voice was grim. ”They aren’t allies.

“We need all the help we can get,” I said.

“The Yàngbǎn pulled an assassination attempt on Chevalier,” Exalt told me.

My eyes widened.

“A traitor among us,” a young man spoke, his voice badly accented. Another snapped something at him, and he responded in Chinese.

None of the heroes replied. I couldn’t bring myself to speak, couldn’t think of a single thing to say that would be remotely diplomatic, in the midst of this.

“We do need all the help we can get,” Exalt said, not taking his eyes off the group. ”You want to make amends?”

The English-speaking one translated for the others. I fidgeted nervously. How many minutes, now? Why hadn’t I asked for more time?

“Shì de!” one cried out.

“Shì de!” the group called out in unison.

“That’s a yes,” Exalt said. He was already turning, taking flight.

Twenty Yàngbǎn members. Exalt. A dazed Revel. Dispatch. The Chicago Wards. The Undersiders. Citrine. Me.

The sum total of our defensive line.

And Behemoth was getting too close. A hundred and fifty feet? A hundred and twenty? He was swiftly approaching the hundred-foot mark we’d been warned about, where he could close the distance with a single leap.

There were so few heroes capable of holding him back. He was covering ground at twice or thrice the speed he had been earlier, and the Undersiders didn’t have the means to know. They were on the ground, blinded by the ambient smoke and the dust of the hundreds of buildings that had fallen across the city.

“Run,” my bugs communicated. But nobody responded, nobody reacted. Too much ambient noise.

Run, they spelled out words, shaping letters with their bodies. Too much smoke.

I bit them, stung them, and that spurred them into motion. Maybe too late.

He wasn’t even a full city block away from them. Only a few half-destroyed buildings stood between him and the Undersiders. They were still sorting themselves out, getting mounted on the dogs for a retreat, but it was too little.

Behemoth leaped. Not the monumental leap he’d used early in the fight, but a leap nonetheless. He landed in the midst of a building, knocking much of it over, and the impact was enough to bounce Citrine off one dog, to knock Tecton over.

The Endbringer had closed half the distance. A mere twenty feet separated them from his kill aura, if that.

I landed beside Citrine, helping her up, using my legs and the antigrav to try and help her onto the dog’s back. She kicked her heels the second she was seated, shouted an order I couldn’t make out.

The dog, scared, growled and held its ground against Behemoth.

“Rachel!” I screamed the word. ”Call him!”

She whistled, sharp, and it seemed to break the spell. The dog lurched around and ran, nearly knocking me to the ground.

The Yàngbǎn were landing in the Undersiders’ midst, joining the fray. I could feel my power swell, my range increasing by one block, two…

I could sense the underground complex, where Phir Sē was. He swatted absently at the bugs that had been left behind, uncontrolled in my absence.

“Wait,” I communicated to him. ”Almost.”

Either we’d manage this in the next few minutes, or we’d be dead and it wouldn’t matter.

I called the bugs, leaving only enough to speak to Phir Sē.

The Yàngbǎn opened fire with lasers, and erected forcefields to ward against the lightning bolts. Golem’s hands rose, faster with the Yàngbǎn’s help, but too slow to make a substantial difference. Tecton’s walls, similarly, couldn’t rise high enough to block Behemoth’s line of sight. The power boost would increase his tinker abilities, but it wouldn’t empower the results of his technology.

Citrine’s power intensified in the depth of the yellow-gold light, in size. Grace shimmered, Cuff was better armored, Annex covering more ground.

Why couldn’t the Yàngbǎn have helped like this sooner? From the very start of the fight? Damn people. Damn them all, for their idiocy and selfishness and their small-mindedness.

This wasn’t enough.

Behemoth reached out, and lightning plowed through our ranks, left to right. The Yàngbǎn forcefields fell in the lightning’s wake, and Tecton was struck from his bike. Cuff was too far back, unprotected, dropped in an instant. I ducked low, covering my head, as it crashed against a quadruple-layer of forcefields the Yàngbǎn had provided. One of them was knocked prone as the last forcefield shattered.

A stray Yàngbǎn member, too far to the right, was knocked to the ground. She started to struggle to her feet, then collapsed a second later.

Revel flew to the injured Wards, but didn’t have the strength to stand. Instead, she raised her lantern, ready for the next strike.

The Yàngbǎn hadn’t even raised their forcefields again when he hit us with lightning once more.

Revel absorbed the initial impact, sucking it into her lantern.

I wasn’t close enough to benefit. I saw the lightning twist in the air as Behemoth swept his hand out to one side, striking another two Yàngbǎn members, just out of the lantern’s reach.

Dispatch appeared next to me and other Yàngbǎn members, and in an instant, everything went still, quiet. My ears roared with a high pitched whine. My breath sounded too noisy, my heart beat so fast I couldn’t even see straight.

Like Clockblocker’s power extended a temporal protection, almost impossible to break, Dispatch’s power seemed to do the same, even if he was effectively achieving the opposite, accelerating us with the outside world moving at a snail’s pace.

The effect ended just as Behemoth moved on to other targets. Another Yàngbǎn member was struck down.

And, inexplicably, he continued his lightning strike, carrying over to the far end of the street.

There was a yelp, and I could see Imp, all at once, sheltered by a wall that was shrinking in size with every second the blast continued. She held the Yàngbǎn member who’d strayed too far away from our main group in her arms.

He’d seen her. Sensed her. And now, behind a wall no more than three feet high, she had nowhere to run.

I pushed past Yàngbǎn members, unstrapping my flight pack, tearing at the parts that fed down to my gloves, to get it off. If I could get it to her…

I couldn’t. I stopped, the pack in my hands. The lightning would break the thing before it could carry her away.

If Grue’s alive, he won’t be able to forgive us for letting her die.

Citrine drew a yellow glow around Imp, and the lightning fizzled as it passed the perimeter.

The Endbringer switched to fire, and it passed through. It seemed to halve in intensity, but that was enough. I could hear Imp scream in alarm and fear.

He advanced a step, and the fresh angle afforded her even less cover. His kill aura… if he simply ran forward a few steps, he’d murder us all in seconds.

But Golem’s hands held his legs. One had sunk deep into a pit, hands of pavement gripping the knee, melting at the close contact, even as others rose to reinforce. The other leg was raised, but held in much the same fashion.

Imp screamed again as he directed another wave of flame her way. It was a scream of pain this time.

Foil shot him, but he didn’t turn away from Imp and the Yàngbǎn member. Instead, one hand stretched out, casting flame towards her. The cloth goats blocked it, and were promptly set aflame. He maintained two columns of flame from his hands, one directed at Imp, one at Foil and Parian.

Revel launched a mess of spheres at his chest, and the surviving Yàngbǎn followed up with lasers. Behemoth simply maintained the assault, almost uncaring as the lasers and disintegration spheres ate into his torso. Negligible damage, in the grand scheme of things.

“Fuck it,” Regent said, his voice almost inaudible. He was looking at Imp.

“Regent,” I said. When he rose to his feet, I raised my voice, “Regent!”

“Hey Shitcrumb!” Regent hollered, backing away from cover. ”Easy-”

Behemoth dropped the flame attack. I could see Yàngbǎn members raising forcefields as he reached out, casting a bolt of lightning in Regent’s direction. The forcefields did nothing, not even softening the blow in any measurable way.

Regent was snuffed out, dead.

A small sound escaped my mouth.

But there was no time to react. Reeling, grieving, it would cost us. He’d done what he did for a reason. The antigrav on the flight pack kicked in, I waited until it started to drag me, then let it go. It skidded across the gap, across the road, to Imp. She caught it, and I controlled the motion of it to drag her away.

“Retreat!” I called out, and my voice was strangely ragged. ”Citrine, cover! We need forcefields too!”

And Exalt. We needed whatever power he could bring to the fore.

Eidolon landed between us and Behemoth.

He said something I couldn’t make out, then raised his hands.

A forcefield, taller than Behemoth, separated us. For seconds, Behemoth was muted. He swiped his claws at the forcefield, fell short. He couldn’t advance, with the way Tecton and Golem had him held with one leg buried up to the knee, couldn’t reach far enough to touch the forcefield.

One claw dashed a hand of asphalt to pieces. Golem started to raise another to replace it, but Behemoth torched it, turning it to a liquid or a glass. Something flat, shiny.

We pulled ourselves together. I changed Imp’s direction, brought her to us. She let go, and the thing careened dangerously, striking the ground a little too hard.

She crouched by Regent, touched his throat.

She shouted something. A string of swear words, insults aimed at Regent.

“Come on!” I screamed the words at her. It took me a second to get the flight pack going again. I steered it, like a fish on dry land, towards her, as Rachel hauled me up onto a dog’s back.

“Weaver,” Phir Sē said, almost half a mile away, still in the room with the monitors, “If he advances any closer to me, I won’t have any option but to strike.

“Wait,” my bugs communicated.

Reluctantly, Imp reached for the flight pack, hugged it to her chest. Not the best option, given the options I had for controlling it. Still, it was a way to get her moving towards us.

Some heroes were pelting Behemoth from another direction. So little, in terms of effect, but it was a distraction.

We needed to regroup. Needed to form some kind of plan, however haphazard.

Fuck it. Foil had the facemask… who else? Citrine and Foil… the back of the head of the dog they rode. Dispatch wore a helmet… but I could use bugs to draw an arrow on the ground. That left Annex, where the hell was he? My bugs couldn’t sense him.

My eyes could. In the midst of the smoke, I saw the bike Tecton rode was lighter than the rest. Annex was inside it.

I pointed them in the same direction I’d sent the others.

We converged on the same point.

“Dispatch!” I called out. ”Huddle!”

He reached the midst of our group, and his power surrounded us.

Silence, stillness. The buzz of my power at the periphery of my consciousness was a fraction of what it might otherwise be, limited to the bugs that crawled in the recesses of my costume. There was only the press of bodies, two dogs and all of the rest of us in an area smaller than my jail cell.

I tried to speak, and emotion caught my voice. It threw me, as if it didn’t match how I felt, didn’t match the composure I felt like I had.

Nobody cut in, nobody used the silence to venture an opinion.

When I did speak, I did it with care, shaping each word, speaking slowly, so I wouldn’t embarrass myself again. ”How long?”

“This?” Dispatch asked. His voice was low, grim. ”This many people? Those dogs? Four minutes. Maybe two, if we’re all breathing this hard. Once we run out of air, I gotta cut it out.”

I nodded.

Think, think.

“Sorry about your pal,” Tecton said.

I shook my head. A denial? He was important to me, but… what, then? Was I wanting to focus on the situation?

“Not now,” I said, sounding angrier than I meant to. ”Need a plan.”

“A plan?” Dispatch asked. ”We run. We pray.”

“Last I heard, Scion was nowhere near,” Foil said. ”Nobody to pray to.”

“Not funny,” Dispatch said. ”This isn’t the time to fuck around on the subject of God.”

I shook my head again. Plans. Options. I had an idea, half-formed in my head, and I couldn’t bring it to the fore. Some missing element.

“Rachel. You wanted revenge on that motherfucker?”

“Yeah,” she said, “Leviathan killed my dogs.”

“Behemoth killed your friend,” Tecton added.

“And Leviathan killed my dogs,” Rachel said. ”They both pay.”

“They both pay,” I agreed. ”What the hell’s Exalt’s power?”

“Aerokinesis and telekinesis,” Dispatch answered me. ”But he spends a charge, takes a day or days to build it up again.”

Which explained why he hadn’t helped. Fuck.

“Eidolon’s power… he chooses what powers he gets?”

“He gets the powers he needs,” Dispatch said. ”He can be receptive to new ones, hold tighter to ones he wants to keep, but that’s it.”

I nodded. He was at the mercy of his passenger, it seemed.

I glanced to my right. ”Foil. Can you use your power on just the tip of an arrow?”

“Yeah. But why would you want me to? Fucks up the trajectory.”

“Just thinking,” I said.

“You have a plan,” Rachel said. There was a measure of smugness in her voice. No, I was reading her wrong. Satisfaction?

“Maybe, yeah,” I said. I glanced at the space outside the bubble. The people were moving at a glacial pace, heads turned our way. Eidolon flew in the sky above. ”We need to hurt Behemoth, and hurt him badly enough that he gets distracted. Then I signal Phir Sē, and hopefully we aren’t vaporized in the wake of all that.”

“Explain,” Dispatch said.

“Each of us has a role to play,” I said. ”Timing’s essential. So’s luck…”

The bubble burst, and we moved into action. Behemoth had barely advanced from his position. The others were still running. We’d earned ourselves two minutes to think, to plan and discuss.

I’d gathered countless bugs through my journey across the city. I’d briefly lost track of them when I was teleported away from Phir Sē, but they were still there. Relatively few had died, even from the start, their lives thrown away to test the boundaries of fires or gushing water, or shielding people from the roar.

A lot of bugs, held in reserve.

“Golem!” I called out. ”Metal hands. Doesn’t matter how big. Find a way.”

He glanced at me, still jogging away from the Endbringer. Still, he managed to find a shop with a metal shutter at the doorway. He plunged his hand inside it, and hands appeared in various places across the street. A large one from a rickshaw, another from a car’s engine block, small ones from the metal grilles covering windows.

Half of my bugs gathered. Another half began chewing through power lines. The transformers here were nightmares, tangled messes, and had an abundance of wires.

Each of the others was carrying out their tasks, their roles. Rachel had a chain stretched between two dogs, and was attaching the chain from one dog’s harness to it to extend the thing further. Annex stretched it further, extending it so each link was nearly two feet long, thin. Citrine was tinting the area between us and Behemoth.

Dispatch called to Eidolon, and the ex-Triumvirate member descended. Dispatch contained them.

Eidolon needed time, and he needed to hear the details of our plan. Dispatch would give him both.

In the distance, Behemoth pushed his way through the forcefield, shattering it. We had a minute, if that.

I waited impatiently as the others tended to the chain.

Dispatch’s effect ended. He and Eidolon relocated to the other end of the street, Dispatch took a second to catch his breath, and then he used his power on Eidolon again.

Come on, come on, I thought. This could go awry with one lucky shot from Behemoth.

“Yangban!” I shouted, no doubt mispronouncing the title. ”Forcefields! Protect the teams!”

Lightning crashed against the forcefields only moments after they went up. Some diverted to the metal hands.

And my swarm started to arrive. Millions of insects, bearing power lines that they were still stripping of insulation, hauling the wire itself, bearing the ones who bore the wire in turn, or hauling on silk that was attached to the wire.

I’d hoped to drape it over the hands, to wrap it around. I was forced to attach it to the base of the hands instead. Too heavy to move otherwise. Conductive hands, conductive wire.

“Go!” Foil shouted.

The dogs moved. Bitch rode one, hollered commands to get them to stay apart. The chain stretched taut between them, long, thin.

I saw Dispatch’s effect end. Eidolon took flight, following.

“This’ll work?” Imp asked. Her voice sounded more hollow than Grue’s did when he used his power. I jumped a little to hear her suddenly speaking beside me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Because if this is revenge for Regent, it has to work.”

“It’s for him if it works,” I said.

“Mm,” Imp said. ”I’ll kill you if it doesn’t, then.”

“We’re all screwed if it doesn’t,” I said.

“Mm,” she said, and she didn’t say anything else.

The Endbringer lashed out with a mess of lightning. It caught one dog before it disappeared behind cover. The dog slowed, but it recovered and found its pace, redoubled its efforts to catch up, as Rachel continued to shout commands to keep the chain taut.

Behemoth used fire, instead, targeting Rachel, and Citrine’s power dampened the effects. That was her role in this.

It was just a question of whether it would run out prematurely, if the dogs would get far enough.

He clapped, and a shockwave tore through the area. Rachel was already directing the dogs; they moved so there was cover, buildings between them and Behemoth. The chain, imbued by Foil’s ability to shear through anything, cut through the buildings as though there was nothing there.

And just like that, they made it. The dogs passed Behemoth, a hundred and twenty feet of chain maintained between them, and the chain cut through him as easily as Foil’s arbalest bolts had.

Too low. There was just a little slack, and they weren’t high enough off the ground. The chain cut through the soles of his feet, through the lower part of one ankle. Insignificant. He didn’t even fall over.

Then I heard Rachel through my swarm. A shout. ”Back!”

The dogs stopped, one doing so so abruptly that Rachel was nearly thrown to the ground. Nearly touched the chain, losing a limb.

The Endbringer moved his hands in anticipation of a clap, and Exalt used his power. Blades of wind, a hundred strikes in a moment, a thrust of telekinetically controlled air from across the city, rushing past Behemoth, making the Endbringer stumble. The clap arrested.

Rachel held on as the wind hit her, held on as each dog turned a hundred and eighty degrees. They passed Behemoth a second time, only this time, Rachel shouted another command. One of the first I’d heard her give. I knew now that it was the command for ‘up’.

Her dog leaped up to the highest point on a ruined building, and the chain caught Behemoth at the knee this time.

They got halfway before Foil’s power wore off. The dog tumbled in midair, Rachel thrown, flipping head over heels.

Behemoth crashed to the ground, one leg a stump.

Eidolon caught Rachel with one arm, and extended the other towards Behemoth.

“Now,” my bugs told Phir Sē, as the field surrounded the Endbringer, a forcefield, extending into the Earth, surrounding Behemoth on all sides, a cylinder.

Phir Sē’s portal opened beneath Behemoth’s feet, aimed upward, and a plume of light speared into the sky, consuming Behemoth, covering him.

Eidolon’s power held. He’d had the situation explained, had been given time to let his power build up to full strength, and his passenger had supplied something with a durability on par with Clockblocker’s ability. Inviolable.

“That’ll do,” Imp said, quiet. The light continued to flow upward, a narrow column no more than fifty feet across, billowing out only slightly as it reached the top of Eidolon’s barrier, parting smoke and clouds in a circular ring, revealing the intensely blue sky above. The entire sky seemed to brighten as the light dissipated beyond our atmosphere.

Phir Sē’s light faded, and the barrier collapsed.

Dust continued to fill the area, plumes of it.

Behemoth lurched forward.

Not quite Behemoth, but a skeleton, something like a skeleton. Emaciated, a black-red frame dripping with ichor, it had all of the key features, the basic underlying structure with the horns and the gaping mouth, the claws and the way the shoulders were broad enough to host his bulky frame, but a good eighty percent of him had been torn away, shredded. A skeleton covered in a veneer of meat.

“Go,” I whispered, feeling a quiet despair. ”Go home. Go underground. Leave. We hurt you as badly as we’ve ever hurt you bastards. That’s enough.”

He reached out, and lightning reached across the landscape, striking Golem’s metal hands, into the grounding wires I’d rigged. The hands melted with the intensity of the strikes.

Behemoth wasn’t any weaker than he had been. Not in terms of what he could dish out. As much as he was wounded, he was healing. Even from where we stood, I could see him healing, flesh expanding, swelling, regenerating.

The Endbringer lurched forward on three intact limbs, starting to glow with that radioactive light of his. He was ignoring or ignorant to Eidolon’s escape, as the ‘hero’ carried Rachel away, the dogs following on the ground.

He was continuing to make his way towards Phir Sē, who had formed another portal, was gathering power for a second strike.

“Retreat,” I said, only to realize I wasn’t loud enough for anyone but Imp to hear. I raised my voice for the others. ”Go! Retreat and regroup!”

24.05

The damage Behemoth was wreaking in New Delhi was, I thought, a microcosm of what was happening all over the world. Three or four attacks a year, since the Simurgh had appeared.

The fight with Leviathan in Brockton Bay had been a good day. We’d lost people, we’d lost good capes, but we’d more or less bounced back, made it three-quarters of the way back to where we needed to be, in a matter of months. There had been ugliness, infighting, a hell of a lot of doubt, but we’d started to make our way back to where we should be. It had been the lowest number of casualties we’d had in an Endbringer attack in years, not counting a few of the Simurgh attacks. A good day.

This? This isn’t a good day.

Behemoth roared.

This is the other end of the scale.

For nearly twenty years, we’d endured intermittent Endbringer attacks, and the end result was, globally, what was happening here in a matter of hours. We were divided, scared, fighting among one another, and our defenses were being eroded. We were being forced into pockets of defense, instead of a united one where we all stood together. Those pockets, in turn, were at risk of being wiped out with a series of decisive blows.

Yes, we had our good moments. Doing as much damage to him as we just had, that was a good moment. But we had bad ones too, and the end result was always the same.

The bastard -the bastards, plural- kept coming.

Phir Sē’s light had cleared smoke and dust from the sky, though it had been almost entirely directed upward, with concentric rings still marking the skyline. Smoke was free to rise, and Behemoth was in plain sight. He was moving on three limbs, planting hands on the ruined, half-toppled and flame-scorched buildings to stay more upright.

His body, though, was a mix of high contrasts. His flesh, what little was visible through the black ichor that dripped from his frame, glowed a silver-white. The remaining material of his claws, teeth and horns remained black.

Tecton had pulled ahead of the group, and turned abruptly, skidding to a stop. Cuff’s body was folded over the back of the bike, limp. The Yàngbǎn had two more bodies with them, as well. I’d taken my flight pack back from Imp, and was airborne as he raised a gauntlet to get my attention. I descended to meet him, and we were soon joined by Dispatch, and Exalt, who carried an unconscious Revel.

“Where to?” Tecton asked. His voice was hoarse. He was recovering, it seemed.

“If we’re sticking with the regular plan,” Dispatch said, “We should gather with other capes, form another defensive line. I think we should hold to the plan. Working together with a less than ideal plan is best, until we can come up with something better.”

I glanced over my shoulder at Behemoth’s barely visible profile. How far away was safe, if he was emitting that kind of radiation?

Far, far away, I answered my own unspoken question.

“Weaver?” Tecton asked me.

I ventured, “There’s a temple, not far from here. Tattletale’s there, medical facilities. Direction he’s moving, he’s headed in that general direction. We protect them, hold position, see if we can’t figure out a way to keep him away from Phir Sē. It fits with Dispatch’s idea of sticking to the plan.”

“Why don’t we press the offensive?” Grace asked. She still sat astride her bike.

“Believe me, I really want to press the offensive,” I said, “But I don’t want to get close to him while he’s glowing like that. That would be a pretty good reason unto itself.”

“He won’t be using the radiation forever,” Tecton observed.

“There’s another key reason,” I said. “Our guys are scared, maybe a little desperate. It’s not a good mindset for fighting.”

The heroes turned to look at the others, who had apparently taken our stopping as an excuse to tend to other business. Golem had stopped to raise some hands, more lightning rods between us and the Endbringer, and others were flanking him. The Yàngbǎn were looking after their injured.

“Desperate,” Exalt said, gazing at the rank and file troops.

I wanted to join the others, to get involved and help, offer what little medical care I could, and the mental and emotional support I knew they needed, but we needed a greater direction, a mission. I turned my attention back to Exalt. “Regent was desperate, maybe, and he died. I’m scared that our side would take risks or put themselves in danger if we ordered them back into the fight. This is getting uglier by the minute, and we’re prone to doing stupid shit if we’re backed into a corner, or if we feel like we need to end this fast so our friends can get the medical help they need. Let’s get the medical help, catch our breath.”

“There’re more capes joining the fight now,” Grace said. I wasn’t sure if that was a rejection of my plan or an agreement. I followed her gaze to see a torrent of flames making its way in Behemoth’s general direction. A cape was hurling fireballs with some sort of space-warping effect tied to them, so they swelled dramatically in size with each second they were airborne.

I assumed it would be to Behemoth’s advantage, to have access to that kind of flame, but he wasn’t deflecting them. The fire exploded through the area around him, and I could see him lose his grip on a building as he reeled from the impact, slumped down to a place below the distant skyline of damaged and half-collapsed buildings. Orange light lit up the area around him, marking the areas that had been set on fire.

The fireball hurler, barely visible as a speck against a backdrop of black-brown smoke, stopped abruptly.

“Why’d he stop?” I wondered aloud.

“The radiation?” Grace offered.

“The radiation was there before he went on the offensive,” I said. “I don’t see Behemoth retaliating, but the cape stopped lobbing fireballs.”

My bugs noted Eidolon’s descent. I turned around to see him depositing Rachel on the ground. She shrugged out of his grip without so much as a ‘thanks’.

“He went underground,” Eidolon informed us.

“He ran? It’s over?”

“No,” Eidolon said. He didn’t elaborate as he watched Rachel back away and whistle to call her dogs. The opaque pane of his mask was heavily shrouded beneath the heavy hood he wore, a dim blue-green glow emanating from within. He was burned, his costume scorched and shredded in places, but the body armor beneath had more or less held. Shaped to give the illusion that he had more muscle than he did, it seemed. I could see blood running along the cracks at one panel of armor, where he’d apparently sustained a heavy blow. He was mortal, after all. Eidolon could bleed.

Fitting, that he layered disguises behind disguises. Regent had done the same thing, to a lesser degree, had worn armor behind the deceptively light and delicate shirts he’d worn, had padding beneath his masks to cushion any blows, had hid a taser in his scepter.

I felt a pang of guilt, a swelling lump in my throat. I’d never really gotten to know Regent, not to the extent that I’d gotten to know the others. He hadn’t really revealed much about himself, either. I’d reminisced before about the intimacy of friendships, about the sharing of vulnerabilities, allowing others to be close, exposing oneself to possible harm. I’d done it with Emma, back in the day, and I’d suffered for it. I’d allowed myself to form a kind of intimacy with the Undersiders, and it might well have been a reason we’d survived this far. Regent hadn’t established that kind of intimacy with us.

Except maybe for Imp.

He’d hidden so much. I’d only glimpsed the seriously disordered personality that lurked beneath the outer image of the lazy, disaffected teenager, had only seen traces of that part of him that just didn’t care that he could enslave a person’s body and leave their mind as little more than a helpless observer. And beneath that aspect of himself, he’d had something else, something that had driven him to distract Behemoth so Imp might live.

My eyes fell on Eidolon. Was there a similarity to Regent? Lies, deception, a false face behind a false face behind a false face?

What was at the core?

Eidolon turned away from his observations of Behemoth, and he briefly met my eyes.

I felt intimidated, despite myself, but I didn’t look away.

“Alexandria,” I said, “How is she-”

And he took off, not even waiting for me to finish.

“-still alive?” I finished.

“I don’t like him,” Rachel commented.

“Nobody does,” Dispatch said. Rachel seemed to accept that with a measure of satisfaction.

“And why won’t this motherfucker die?” Rachel asked, looking towards Behemoth.

“He’s been fighting us for twenty years and he hasn’t died yet,” I said.

“So?”

“So… he’s tough,” I said. It was hard to answer a question so… what was the word? Innocent? Guileless?

“We’re tough. Let’s fuck him up.”

“I was arguing for that,” Grace said.

Oh great. They’re of like mind.

“But,” Tecton cut in, turning his head her way, “Skitter had a good reason as to why we shouldn’t. We need to recover, recuperate. Other heroes are picking up the slack, applying some pressure. Or they were until he burrowed,”

Rachel snorted. “We do the chain thing again, cut him in half at the middle instead. Or cut off his head.”

“Honestly?” I spoke up, “I’m not sure he’d die if we cut off his head. And correct me if I’m wrong, but he could go after the people that carry the chain. Even if it’s someone like Eidolon, he could overheat and melt the part they’re holding on to.”

“You’re really a buzzkill,” Grace said.

I didn’t deny it. “There’s one more reason we should go, though. He’s going to-”

Retaliate.

Behemoth rose from beneath the ground a distance away. In a heartbeat, things shifted from a near-quiet to chaos. He was still glowing, and his claws crackled with electricity as he struck quickly, violently, and indiscriminately.

Three capes taken down, struck out of the sky by the bolts of electricity. Even if they’d survived that much, the kill aura and the radiation would end them.

He turned, facing us, but the Wards were already moving, their wheels squealing on the pavement before they peeled away.

It’s the Endbringer’s pattern. We hurt them or stall them enough, they change tactics, hit us back.

“Go!” I shouted.

Rachel moved, climbing astride her dog in an instant. She whistled for her other dogs, directing them to Imp, Parian, Foil and Citrine.

Golem’s hands absorbed some of the lightning that crackled around us. Not one stream, but a storm, with Behemoth at the eye of it.

And he was standing. He didn’t necessarily have a full leg, but he had the ability to stand upright, now.

And Rachel, as I saw her making her way to the Undersiders, looked determined.

Was it weird that she seemed more comfortable in the here and now than she had before the fight started? It wasn’t that she didn’t look scared, I could see the way her entire body was rigid, her hands clenched, white knuckled. But she had a role here, she fit into a dynamic.

We took off, moving behind cover, running, as Behemoth crashed through a line of buildings. Heroes from even half a mile away were lobbing attacks, and the stray shots that missed the Endbringer crashed down around us, tearing through buildings, turning stone to liquid, igniting nonflammable materials, one doing little damage but detonating so violently with the impact that my mounted teammates were nearly thrown free.

Behemoth roared, and I could see the Wards and Undersiders suffering. A dog shook its head in an attempt to shake off the noise, and lost its sense of direction. It crashed into a bike and sprawled. Parian, Foil and Grace were dismounted. Grace landed on her feet and physically ran, reaching for Tecton’s outstretched gauntlet. He extended a piledriver to give her something to hold onto.

Few bugs had managed to keep up, much less the ones with wires, but I brought a curtain between us and Behemoth. I was past the point where I wanted to conserve them. If it was lightning, I could only hope that Golem’s makeshift lightning rods and my wires would protect us.

But it was flame. It sheared through my swarm, and it splashed down around Parian, Foil and the dog.

The Endbringer had more aim than I’d expected. He wasn’t blind, despite the fact that his eye socket was empty. But he wasn’t entirely on target otherwise. Was he relying on another sense?

The Yàngbǎn intercepted the attack, raising forcefields. Parian did something with her thread, slapping the dog’s hindquarters, and it bolted. They were carried off, tied to its side, a flame still burning on Parian’s sleeve and the hem of her dress.

Someone, an Indian cape capable of getting inside Behemoth’s kill aura, closed the distance, and Behemoth was momentarily distracted by orange cords that bound his head, lashing him to the cape. With that, the others had a chance to escape.

“Regroup!” I called out, as I descended to the midst of the Undersiders and Wards. “I’ll point the way!”

The sound of the fighting stopped with a crash. Where was the motherfucker? I rose higher to check, but saw neither Behemoth nor the cape who’d been binding him. He’d burrowed.

It was quiet, all of a sudden, if not quite silent. The defending capes were spreading out, and were hovering in place or holding positions, rather than bombarding the landscape. The lightning and fire had stopped, and no shockwaves ripped through the city. The rumbling was intermittent, mild when it wasn’t almost imperceptible. The ringing in my ears was louder than the ambient noise.

This was his new tactic, burrowing, surfacing. But where was the retaliation? Their whole damn pattern centered around repaying us twice over for any abuse we inflicted on them.

The armband crackled, and I jumped, despite myself. The first message didn’t come through the static, but the second was clearer. “Be advised, seismic activity suggests the Endbringer is still local. Regroup and form defensive lines.“

I did a little mental math, then pressed the button on my armband. “Armband, note that Behemoth may have a likely target, roughly eight to fifteen miles north-northwest of India Gate.”

At least, that was my best guess, judging by the flight speeds Defiant had noted for my flight pack and the time it had taken me to travel.

Every armband in earshot repeated my message.

“Keep going!” I called out. “Keep moving!”

Surely he couldn’t keep up with us while moving underground. I didn’t want to underestimate his intelligence, but was he even capable of holding a grudge?

What was Behemoth really doing?

The travel was uneventful, uninterrupted and eerily quiet, as we made our way to our next destination. Three times, we stopped to pick up wounded, fashioning another quick sled for the dogs to accommodate all of them.

We reached the temple and delivered the sled to the temple doors. The Chicago Wards stopped to park their bikes off to one side. I waited for the Yàngbǎn to gather, extending my range, before I reached out to Phir Sē.

“He’s underground. He may be coming for you,” I informed him, speaking through my swarm.

“I assumed,” Phir Sē responded. “Thank you.”

“You need to leave, soon.”

“I have a way out. I’ll leave when trouble begins. Could you rid me of the bugs? When you leave them, they fly about me, and I cannot afford distractions.”

I hesitated, then removed the bugs, shifting them to nearby rooms and corridors. I left only a pocket of them to communicate with. “Be safe.“

“You as well, Weaver. Thank you, for the cooperation.”

“Have you gained a bit of faith?“

“Faith gained in this, perhaps, faith lost in another.”

“I know what you mean.“

“Good bye. If we both live, perhaps we talk again, in a less dangerous time.”

“Good bye,” I responded.

I drove the remainder of my swarm from his chamber. It once again became a blind spot, an emptiness in my power’s range.

“You okay?” Tecton asked, as he caught up with me. He held Cuff in his heavy armored hands, as though she were a small child.

“Saying goodbye to a self-professed madman. Is she okay?”

“She’s breathing, but I can tell she’s hurting.”

I nodded, glancing over my shoulder as the others caught up. Bitch brought her dogs.

We entered the front door, and I saw the amassed capes within. Innumerable teams, looking after their wounded, lacking in direction. The temple interior had no benches, and bedding had been laid out flat on the ground, capes set down in rows. Medical teams were scrambling to take care of them, and capes with first aid experience were hurrying to help. Dispatch already had his costume jacket off, his sleeves rolled up, and his hands dirty, taking care of a cape in power armor. Parian was sitting on a mattress, tearing at her sleeve to show the burn, with Foil and Citrine beside her.

I couldn’t help but notice that more than half of the capes were covered in white sheets. That wasn’t counting the innumerable capes left lying dead in the streets, like we’d done with Regent. Behemoth killed more easily than he wounded.

Clockblocker had fallen. I looked for him in the crowd of injured. I didn’t see him. Then again, I had my suspicions already. This only helped justify them.

Too many others I needed to track, to watch for. But I couldn’t use my bugs, and the dust and smoke had desaturated the colors. Blood, in other places, marred the colors further.

“Miss,” a local man in white said, in an accented voice, “You cannot bring these animals.”

He was talking to Rachel, who glowered in response.

“Leave the dogs outside,” I said.

“I’m not leaving my fucking dogs,” she said, her voice hard.

Damn it. My eyes roved over the crowd, but I couldn’t see Grue or Tattletale. I didn’t want to use my bugs, not in a sterile environment. It was left to me to rein her in some.

“You can come and look for Grue and Tattletale with me, or you can stay outside with the dogs.”

She scowled, and for a second, I thought she’d stride out of the doors. Instead, she pointed, barking out orders, “Out! Go guard!”

The dogs filed out of the double doors of the temple. I could see the man relax visibly.

Don’t let Grue be dead. Don’t let Grue be dead, I thought. Tattletale was okay, she was okay the last time I saw her.

“My friends, they were stable,” I told the man in white. I saw Tecton crossing the room to lay Cuff out on one of the thin mattresses, turned my attention back to the man. “They were here since a little while ago. Where are they?”

“Stable? They were better?”

“Mostly better.”

“Up,” he said, pointing at the nearest stairwell.

I used my flight pack without thinking, to give myself extra speed as I headed to the stairs. Rachel was just behind me, her boots thudding on the floor.

There were more wounded above, recuperating in a long, narrow room with beds on one side. In a grim twist, like a reminder of how close they’d come to dying, the opposite side of the room had more mattresses on the floor, more bodies.

How many dead, all in all? Fifteen in this room alone, placed side by side, their shoulders touching.

“Skitter,” Grue said, as I approached. Tattletale stood at his bedside, her phone in hand. There were no curtains here. No privacy. This was all improvised, care facilities hashed together with what the locals had on hand. He still wore his helmet, but he had his jacket off. He noted the arrival of the others. “Imp. Bitch.”

“It’s Weaver now,” I corrected him.

“You’ll-”

“I know,” I said. I looked at his arm. The burned flesh had angry blisters. “You okay?”

A hand pushed at me, moving me out of the way. Imp. She approached her brother’s bedside.

“Hey kid,” he said. Beside him, I could see Tattletale’s reaction. She was silent, silenced by the damage to her throat, but she communicated well enough, that she’d drawn the full conclusion from our presence. Her eyes closed, her head lowered. There was no smile on her face, as she heaved out a whistling sigh through the plastic tube taped to her throat-wound.

“Regent’s dead,” Imp said.

I could see Grue go still.

As if reminding us of the culprit, there was a distant rumble. It grew steadily in intensity, then stopped abruptly. As far as I could tell, with bugs spread out over the area within two thousand feet or so, the Endbringer wasn’t moving any closer to us.

“I should have been there,” Grue said.

“Yeah, well, you weren’t,” Imp retorted.

I put a hand on her shoulder. She tried to knock it away, and I dug my fingers in as I refused to cooperate. It must have hurt; my old costume’s fingertips had clawed points. She didn’t say anything on the subject.

“No, Grue,” I told him. “You want to feel bad? That’s allowed, but I forbid you from taking the actual blame for this.”

“You can’t do that,” he said. His voice was hard. “I’m team leader, not you. I’m supposed to pick up the slack, remember? I’m supposed to manage these guys. So don’t turn around and decide shit like this, when you left. I dropped the ball. I didn’t move fast enough, I got hurt, and because of that, I wasn’t there to help, to lead.”

“You’re not allowed to take the blame, because if you start, then I’ve got to own up to it too,” I said. “I-”

My breath hitched. It caught me off guard. I had to stop and take a deep breath.

Staying calm, composed, with my words carefully measured out, I said, “-I was there, and there was nothing I could do. And if you’re saying you could have done better, I’ve got to think I could have too. So I’ll match you one for one on any guilt trips.”

He sighed, heavy. “Fuck.”

“Fuck,” Imp echoed him.

“Fuck,” Rachel followed, from the entrance to the room, as if we were toasting Regent in our own messed up way. Tattletale was nodding.

“Fuck,” I agreed.

“Christ,” Grue said. “What do you even say to that? How… how do you even pay your respects to a guy like him?”

“He was a jerk, and worse,” I said. I saw Imp bristle, but held on to her shoulder, “And he died for Imp’s sake.”

Grue looked startled at that, as much as one could look startled with an all-consuming costume like the one he wore. Tattletale, beside him, was unfazed. She frowned a little.

“Christ,” he said, again.

“So maybe we respect him by respecting that.”

There was no response to that for a few seconds.

“Yeah,” Imp said, her voice small. “I’m going to fucking kill his dad for him.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I meant we should remember the best part of him.”

“That part of him would’ve killed his dad too,” Imp said.

I sighed. I wouldn’t win here.

I changed the subject, seeing how quiet Grue was. “You should know, Grue, we got ours back. We hurt him. Behemoth.”

Grue raised his head, meeting my eyes with the empty black eye sockets of his mask.

“The others will explain,” I said. I let my hand fall from Imp’s shoulder. “You wouldn’t believe how much I want to be an Undersider again, right this moment… fuck me, I want to remember the guy, to reminisce. But this isn’t over, and I’ve got another team to help look after.”

“We’ll-” Grue started. He stopped as some doctors came barreling in, wheeling in beds with unconscious capes.

“Out!” one of them shouted at us. “No more visiting, there isn’t room!”

“Asshole!” Imp snarled, jumping out of the way as someone moved the bed beside Grue’s, nearly sandwiching her between the two.

“Go,” Grue ordered her. “Go irritate someone who isn’t loaded with painkillers.”

“A way of remembering Regent?” she asked, as if she were trying to be funny, but there was a break to her voice as she altered the pitch to make it a question.

“Exactly,” he said.

“Fuck it,” she said, under her breath. “Fuck it, fuck it.”

We left the room, with only Grue and Tattletale staying. The three of us made our way down the stairs, Rachel just to my right.

I glanced over my shoulder at Imp. Her head was lowered a fraction, her arms folded. Her gaze was on the rows and columns of injured and dead capes in the main hall.

We hadn’t brought Regent’s body. We’d left it lying in the streets, too busy trying to stay alive to collect it. Was that what she was thinking about?

There was a rumble, with a shaking that affected the whole structure. Something distant, beyond my power’s range. A heavy crash. Somewhere in a northwesterly direction.

Phir Sē, I thought. Had that been his complex?

At the entrance to the temple, heroes were gathering. Our last stand. I could see the Chicago wards at one corner. Tecton was talking to Wanton, who was on crutches. Wanton’s right arm ended in a stump at the elbow, bandaged with crimson on the end.

Bad luck, I thought.

I joined Tecton, only to realize that Rachel had accompanied me. I supposed she didn’t have anywhere else to go.

Imp didn’t either. Another glance showed her lagging behind the group, clearly lost in thought.

I lowered my voice “Rachel, maybe you can do me a favor?”

“Hm?”

I ordered my thoughts, then voiced them, “Grue and Tattletale are too injured to help out. I’m focused on other stuff, and Parian and Foil are looking after each other. Can you keep an eye on Imp?”

Rachel made a face. “I thought you wanted me to do something.”

“This is key,” I said. “She needs someone to be there, right now. That’s all.”

“I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do. What if she gets…?”

Rachel trailed off. Emotional?

“Support her,” Tecton cut in. I suppressed the urge to wince. He went on, “She’s your teammate, right?”

“How the fuck do I support someone?” she asked. “Stupid. Not my thing.”

“You-” I started, but Tecton was already talking, his voice deeper, his conviction stronger. Grace was listening in as well, now.

“Empathize,” he said.

Rachel glowered at him, unimpressed.

He tried again, earnest, “Okay, here’s a cheat I learned in a leadership seminar. It’s called active listening. Someone says something, a complaint, or a criticism, or they’re excited about something that happened to them. For a lot of us, our instinct is to offer a solution, or expand on an idea, to fix or offer something. The key is to think about how they’re feeling, be receptive to that, and parrot it back to them. They just got a new car, and they’re happy about it? A simple ‘that’s excellent’ or ‘you must be so proud’ works. It leaves room for them to keep talking, to know you’re listening. For your teammate who just lost someone she obviously cared about, just recognizing that she’s upset and she’s right to feel upset, that’s enough.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but I couldn’t even begin to sum up how useless this advice was to Rachel in particular.

“That’s retarded,” Rachel told Tecton.

“It works. And I know Grace is going to say something to me about it, about it being fake or false, but the thing is, you do that, and you start to do it because it’s genuine, because you care about their feelings, or because-”

I cut him off. “Tecton.”

He fell silent, turning my way.

“We don’t have time to get into anything complicated,” I said.

“It’s retarded anyways,” Rachel added.

I turned to her. “Rachel, did you ever have a dog with a deep attachment to another person or dog? Someone they lost, before they found their way to a shelter, or to you? Where they were still dealing, after the fact?”

She gave me a one-shouldered shrug.

“How would you treat that dog?” I asked.

“Dunno, depends on the dog.”

“Basically, though? You’d just be there, right? Do that for Imp. Stay close, make sure she doesn’t run off, as much as that’s even possible with her, and give her the benefit of your company without intruding into her space. Make sure she has all of the basics, both in the near future and in the next few days.”

“Okay,” Rachel said, frowning a little.

“I know it’s not the easiest thing, but she’s a teammate, all right? It’s what we do for our team.”

“Right.”

“And just like a dog that’s had a recent bad experience might snap, bark or growl, you need to understand that she might do the same. Only it’ll probably take a different form. She’ll swear a lot. She’ll probably try to get a rise out of you, try to provoke you or someone else. That’s how Imp growls.”

Rachel didn’t even offer me a monosyllabic response at that. She frowned instead.

“Trust your instincts, Rachel. You’re smarter than you think, and your gut responses, the decisions you make on the fly, they’re good ones. Turning around and using the chain for a second cut, back there? That was good.”

Anyone else might have accepted the praise with a smile, but her frown only deepened.

“How was your advice better than mine?” Tecton asked. He sounded a touch offended.

“Customized to the individual,” Grace said. “Don’t be a sore loser.”

“I’m not sore. I’m just usually pretty good at this, and I got called retarded.”

“The advice was called retarded,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll explain another day, if we make it through this. How’s Cuff?”

“Skin’s badly burned, but the burn didn’t go much further than that. She’ll have the most amazing scars, too. No serious internal or mental damage, as far as we can tell, but her muscles convulsed so badly they broke a bone.”

I winced.

“She’ll make it to tomorrow, provided this doesn’t turn ugly,” Tecton said.

I nodded. I sensed a rumble. I couldn’t tell how distant the attack was.

Where the hell was the bastard? I was a little caught off guard by how quiet things had gone. He was giving us a chance to regroup? Or was he letting us gather, so he could take us all out at once?

“Don’t suppose you can sense seismic activity?” I asked.

“Not with my suit. My computers got toasted. I’m running purely off the basics, and my intuitive understanding. Stuff I reinforced, so I wouldn’t get trapped in my suit like I did with Shatterbird.”

I nodded.

“Generally, though?”

“He’s taking his time.”

If he was massing his strength for one good retaliatory hit, how would he do it?

Volcanos? Earthquake?

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Go?”

“I’ve got a bad feeling,” I said. I turned to look for Rachel, saw her a distance away, her arms folded as she stood beside Imp. They were looking at the sea of injured capes. “Rachel!”

I saw her attention snap to me.

“Go! Get your dogs!” I said. I turned to the Chicago Wards, “Wards! Bikes!”

“You’re serious,” Tecton said.

“Everything I know about Endbringers, about basic parahuman psychology, it demands retaliation. What’s he done so far? Saturated an area in radiation? Thrown a few lightning bolts around?”

“You’re expecting worse.”

“I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop. Go. Spread out. We might need to respond to an attack on another location, with no time to spare.”

Tecton nodded. He turned to his Wards, “Go!”

I pushed my way through the gathered crowd. I could see Defiant, with Dragon beside him.

“Weaver,” he said. “Dragon says that was you, with the blast.”

I shook my head. “I helped coordinate, nothing more.”

“You hurt him.”

“We hurt him. And he’s burrowed. He’s looking for a target, and I can’t think of a better place for him to hit than this.”

“We’d be able to put up a fight. We have defensive lines.”

“Probably,” I agreed. “But my guys are moving out anyways. We’ve never done this much damage to him, and yet he’s sticking around. What I’m wondering is, why?”

Defiant glanced at Dragon, then spoke. “He’s-”

The ground shuddered. Again, as before, the rumbling intensified.

This time, it didn’t stop. It got worse with every passing second.

“Reinforce!” A cape hollered. Someone else took up the call in an Indian language. Hindi? Punjabi?

I could see Annex flowing into the entryway, soaring through the wall’s surface to the ceiling. Golem created his hands, protecting the rows and columns of injured capes.

There was a press as the bodies flowed out the door. I used my flight pack to fly over their heads, but even then, I bumped shoulders with others who could fly. I wanted to help, but there was little I could do inside.

Eidolon and Alexandria had arrived at the building. Eidolon touched the exterior wall, and an emerald green glow started to surround the structure.

The rumbling reached the point where capes were unable to keep their balance. I raised off the ground, but the movement of the air in response to the shuddering was enough to make me sway.

Tattletale. Grue. Parian.

Behemoth emerged with a plume of gray-brown smoke, and the landscape shattered. It was Tecton’s natural power, taken to an extreme. Fissures lanced out in every direction and disappeared into each horizon. Secondary fissures crossed between each of the major ones, like the threads of a spider’s web.

As far as the eye could see in every direction, terrain shifted. Hillsides abruptly tilted, standing structures fell like collapsing houses of cards.

A full quarter of the temple collapsed. The bugs I’d kept to the edges of the room could sense it as a small share of the capes who were in the entry hall were caught beneath the falling rubble. The ones furthest towards the back. Eidolon’s protective effect kept the remainder intact.

Behemoth emerged from the smoke. He was more robust than he had been, but that wasn’t saying much. Seventy percent burned away, perhaps. The regeneration had slowed, but it was still functioning to a degree. He’d recuperated, built his strength, and he’d used the time to, what? Burrow through strategic areas? Had the distant rumbles been controlled detonations or collapses at key areas?

The temple was the one building that stood. Everywhere else, there was devastation.

How many refugees had just died, with this? How many had stayed within their homes, rather than try to evacuate?

I felt hollow inside, just standing there, stunned, trying to take it all in. The area around us was still settling, sections of land tilting and sliding like sinking battleships sliding into the water.

How many of us were left? Seventy? Eighty? How many of them were hurt, exhausted, their resources spent? Could we even coordinate, with so many of us speaking different languages?

“Last stand!” a male cape I didn’t know hollered the words, his voice ragged with fear and emotion.

Behemoth, three or four hundred feet away, responded to the shout with a lightning strike. Our capes were too slow to erect barriers, and the protection insufficient. Capes died. For the first time, I averted my eyes. I didn’t want to know how bad the casualties were. Our numbers were too thin.

I saw our Protectorate, what remained of it, stepping forward to form our defensive line. Our last defensive line. The major ones, the ones I’d been introduced to, too many had died, or were injured. These were unfamiliar faces. The ones who were second in command, if that.

Eidolon landed to one side. The Triumvirate had often posed in that classic ‘v’ formation, with Legend in front, Alexandria to his left, Eidolon to the right, the lesser members in the wings, Eidolon was now apart from the rest of the group. His cape didn’t billow, his posture was slightly slumped. He was tired, on his last legs.

There were murmurs as Alexandria advanced from within the temple. Unlike so many of us, she didn’t flinch as Behemoth struck out with lightning, the barriers holding this time. Golem had raised lightning rods on either side of the road, fingers splayed as if he could gesture for Behemoth to stop.

Alexandria found her way to the end of the crowd opposite Eidolon, to our far left. Satyrical and the other Vegas capes followed her. Only a small fraction of them remained. Others had apparently been injured or killed in battle.

Alexandria glanced over our ranks, and her eyes moved right past me, not even recognizing me. For the briefest instant, I met her eyes behind that steel helmet of hers, and I saw that one had a pink iris.

That answered my question, I supposed. Pretender couldn’t take over a corpse, but there was no reason for him to take over Alexandria if she was alive and well. Cauldron had collected Pretender, and they had him controlling her because she was no longer of any use to them on her own.

Our side was busy getting sorted into groups, spreading out so he couldn’t hurt too many of us at once. We were finding our formations, as our toughest capes absorbed and redirected the lightning he was throwing in an almost experimental manner. He changed tacks, throwing flame, and a team composed entirely of pyrokinetics caught and redirected it with a concerted effort. I backed away, and found Tecton at my back, with the remaining Chicago Wards. Bitch stood just off to one side, her dogs ready.

One structure among several hundred thousand still stood, and our adversary was wounded, though undiminished. Our ranks had been thinned in the most violent ways possible, through fire and lightning and a roar that could render organs to mush. We weren’t stronger than we’d been at the start of all of this. I couldn’t even say that the weak had been thinned out, or that we’d been united through hardship or loss. Behemoth had picked off some of the strongest of us, and the trust between our factions was thin at best, with some eyeing the Yàngbǎn, others watching Satyrical’s contingent. We were just less.

“Hold the line,” Exalt called out. Other capes translated for him, echoing his words with only a few seconds of delay, in four or five different languages. “We defend until the ones inside can be evacuated, and then we leave. There’s nothing left to protect here.”

A thin heroism, but that was heroic, wasn’t it? Protecting the wounded, defending the ones who’d put everything on the line to stop this monster.

If this was all a kind of microcosm for the world at large, that small heroism had to count for something. I wanted it to so badly I ached for it.

Behemoth roared, and the last engagement opened.

24.x (Interlude, Chevalier)

Hero ushered him into the headquarters. “This is the last one. I’d like you all to meet Chevalier.”

There was a chorus of replies. Mumbled greetings with one exceedingly enthusiastic response from a girl in the crowd. It was almost mocking.

Chevalier ventured inside, a touch hesitant. Not afraid. He’d told himself he’d never be afraid again. No. But this was unfamiliar territory. The others were difficult to read. Nine youths.

His eyes roved over the group. Five girls, four boys. His addition made it an even split. Intentional?

The costumes ran the gamut from professional to homemade. They varied in the degree of color, in seriousness, in combat readiness. There was a boy, also, who had a professional looking costume, black and green. It was a costume that had no doubt cost money, with leather and a utility belt, a leaf emblem over his heart. Around him, Chevalier could see a vague nimbus, as though he could see only the brightest and darkest parts of some landscape that the boy stood within. It was a subtle thing, an image that Chevalier could make out in the same way his perspective on something might alter if he had only his left eye closed, as opposed to his right.

A girl beside the boy with the leaf costume wore a less expensive looking costume, but she’d apparently gravitated towards him, a hopeful lackey or a romantic interest. In the same way that the forest seemed to hang in the periphery of the boy, an older woman loomed just behind the girl. She was kindly in appearance, like a next door neighbor, with hands burned black from fingertip to elbow. The old woman was moving her lips as though she were talking, but the image was silent.

He started to turn his head, but the image changed. The effect ran over the girl’s skin, as though she were standing right in front of a glacier, the light refracting off of it.

No, the black hands on the older woman… a result of fire? Magma.

The girl caught him looking at her and frowned a little. He averted his gaze. She likely thought he was staring for other reasons.

At the far end of the scale, opposite the two professional, serious looking young heroes, there was a girl with a shield and sword. Her helmet sat on the table beside her, a homemade piece of equipment with ridiculous mouse ears at the sides. It wasn’t a great helmet either; it didn’t offer enough peripheral vision, was more decorative than protective. She stood off to one side, but two others had gathered near her. She was grinning, the one who’d stood out from the rest with her over the top welcome.

And the images, the glimmers, they showed the mouse-ears girl laughing. For her companions, there was a strange writing system patterned on one boy’s skin, and the other boy swirled with a smoke that wasn’t there.

The images weren’t an unfamiliar thing, but this was the first time he’d been confronted with so many in one place. It was distracting, unnerving.

What were they supposed to be, the glimmers?

The remaining two members of the group were a boy, a clear vigilante of the night in appearance, with a costume that was black from head to toe, and a girl dressed in urban camouflage. Chevalier’s attention fell on the girl; her white and gray jacket was short enough that it didn’t reach the small of her back, a blue tank top with a shield emblem on the front. Her scarf, a complimenting shade of blue, was wrapped around her lower face, bearing the same emblem. She sat in a chair, elbows on her knees, toying with a knife.

Odd as it was, she was more grim than the boy who was trying to look dark and disturbing.

“Take a seat,” Hero said. He laid a gentle hand on Chevalier’s shoulder.

Such a minor thing, but it felt somehow critical. What clique did he identify with? What direction would he take?

He glanced over the rest of the group, at the images that had changed, and his eyes fell on the one with the knife.

In that instant, the knife disappeared, and there was a flare. The images were suddenly distinct, glaring, an image appearing in a flash, so brief he might have missed it. A cluster of children, blood, their faces stark with fear and in one case, pain.

It faded as quickly as it had appeared, and the girl held a gun, now.

She’d caught him looking. Meeting his eyes, she changed it again.

The image that flickered was of her, holding a gun with a silencer on the end, pointing it. Her expression was one of desperation.

She’d changed the gun for a machete, apparently unaware.

He made his way across the room, and seated himself in the chair beside her. She didn’t even glance his way, her attention on the weapon as she ran her thumb alongside the flat of the blade.

“Army girl doesn’t even speak english, you know,” the boy in the nice costume said.

“She speaks some,” Hero said. “It’s fine.”

“I’m just saying,” the boy said.

“I think we all know what you’re saying,” Hero answered. “You’ve made arguments about what you want the team to be, your desire to be taken seriously.”

Chevalier watched the exchange carefully. His eyes fell on the figure behind Hero, and he tried to focus his attention on it. It moved with glacial slowness, a four-legged creature with legs so long that the ‘window’ around Hero didn’t even show its main body. Finger-like appendages at the base of each leg carved diagrams and ideas into the ‘soil’ beneath as it walked.

“We’ve got the serious part down,” the girl with the mouse ears said. She drew her sword, thrusting it into the air, “Huzzah!”

“So bogus,” was the mumbled response. “As if her group has the majority.”

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Hero said. “A lot of you have been through a lot, and some of you have only just stopped. Stopped running, stopped fighting, stopped dealing with a long series of crises.”

Hero’s eyes briefly fell on Chevalier. Chevalier lowered his eyes to the floor.

“The important thing to remember,” Hero said, “is that you’ve got time. You have time to figure out who you want to become, time to figure out what this team will become, time to breathe. To be kids again.”

Hero paused, glancing over the room. He sighed. “And you have zero interest in that, I’m sure. You’re in a hurry to grow up, to be heroes.”

“You’d better believe it, boss,” the mouse girl said.

“Just be careful,” Legend said, as he strode into the room. He was accompanied by Eidolon and Alexandria. “This is about training, not thrusting you into the midst of trouble.”

“That comes later,” the mouse girl said.

“If you decide you want it,” Legend answered.

The sheer presence of the heroes here was changing the energy of the room. The listless teenagers had perked up. They were paying more attention, more alert.

It was no longer one more act in a long sequence of hoops and events. This was the main capes of the Protectorate, all here in one place, for them.

“Well,” Hero said, clapping his hands together. “I’m not good at the formalities. Being in charge isn’t my thing, as much as those three like forcing the job on me. So what do you say? Let’s crack open the soda bottles, cut the cake and celebrate our inaugural Wards team.”

The mouse girl’s team cheered and whooped. Nobody else really joined in with even half of the enthusiasm, but there was more of a response than there might have been before the rest of the Protectorate had showed up. Chevalier even allowed himself a cheer, joining in with the clapping.

It was exciting. Exciting and a little scary. Like stepping out over a chasm.

As the others made their way to the table, Chevalier stood from his chair, then glanced down at the army girl. “You want cake?”

She raised her head. “Yes.”

“What do you want to drink? I think there’s cola, ginger ale, sprite…”

“The brown drink,” she said.

“Coke, then.”

He left her sitting in the chair, paying far too much attention to her weapon, and grabbed two paper plates.

“I’m curious why you sat next to Hannah,” Hero commented, as he served himself some cake.

Chevalier glanced at the girl with the weapons. He felt uncomfortable, “People are making it a bigger deal than it is. It was just me sitting down. I didn’t put much thought into it.”

“Maybe,” Hero said. He laid a hand on Chevalier’s shoulder. “But it’s good that you did. She could use a friend. Might make a world of difference, in the long run.”

Chevalier shrugged, stepping up to the tray and placing a slice of cake on each plate.

“We’re all ignoring the obvious reason,” the girl with the mouse ears said, getting in Chevalier’s way as she reached for a plastic fork. “He thinks she’s hot. He wants the poontang.“

Hero cleared his throat in a very deliberate way.

“Don’t be juvenile,” the leaf-boy told her, from the front of the line.

Chevalier shifted awkwardly. The girl with the mouse ears was in his way, and he couldn’t move down the table to get a drink. She wouldn’t budge until this was resolved.

“I got the vibe she and I are similar,” Chevalier said. It was honest. The images he’d seen, of the girl…

And it was apparently the wrong thing to say, because mouse-ears was only more insistent, now. She smiled, cooing the word, “Similar?”

“You didn’t figure it out yet? Chevalier’s the vigilante that went after the Snatchers,” the leaf-boy said.

Hero turned around, and his voice was a little hard, “Reed. That’s not your story to share.”

“It’s okay,” Chevalier said. “They’d find out eventually.”

Mouse-girl looked confused. “The Snatchers? Are they supervillains?”

“No,” Chevalier said. He used the distraction to push past her and get to the area where the two-liter bottles of soda were lined up. He poured the drinks for himself and Hannah. “They were ordinary people. Bad people, but ordinary. Except maybe the leader.”

“Maybe?” Mouse girl asked.

“I didn’t give him a chance to show me.”

Her eyes widened.

Chevalier felt strangely calm as he spoke, “Not like that. Alexandria caught up with me at the very end. When I was trying to decide what I’d do with him. She told me she’d stand by and let me kill the guy, if I really had to, but I’d go to jail afterwards. That, or I could come with her. Come here.”

Hero frowned, glancing at Alexandria, who had gathered at one corner of the room with Eidolon and Legend. They were looking at the kids, talking, smiling. “I’m glad you made the right choice.”

Chevalier shrugged. I’m not sure I did.

He was still angry. Still hurt. His little brother’s absence was still a void in his life.

“Maybe now you can stop asking questions,” Reed told the mouse girl.

“Never!”

Reed sighed.

“Everyone has their baggage,” Hero said. “Sometimes it’s in the past, sometimes it’s in the present, other times it’s fears for the future. But this is a fresh start, understand? I’m pretty mellow, believe it or not, but I’m going to be upset if I hear that anyone’s holding any of that stuff against a teammate, or if you’re letting it hold you back. Understand? This is a second chance for everyone. You’re here to support one another.”

There were silent nods from Chevalier, Reed and the mouse girl.

“Good. Now go. Eat cake, drink soda, be merry. And when the party is done and us adults are gone, with you kids left to your own devices, check the empty room, the one that isn’t assigned to any of you. I stocked you guys with video games and movies.”

“No way,” Reed said, smiling genuinely for what might have been the first time.

“Yes way,” Hero said, returning the smile. “But we’re not going to tell the higher-ups, are we? It’s a bit of a secret, and you don’t betray that secret by letting yourself slack on the training or the schoolwork, right?”

Reed’s smile dropped a little in intensity, but he nodded.

“Go on,” Hero said, still smiling, “And don’t get me in trouble.”

Reed hurried back to his chair, as if getting there sooner meant the party would end earlier, speeding up his access to the treasure trove Hero had hinted at.

Wordless, Chevalier managed the drinks and two plates as he carried them over to Hannah. He gave her a plate and a cup, and she smiled without thanking him.

“A toast,” Alexandria said, stepping forward. “To the first Wards team of America.”

“To second chances,” Hero said.

“A brighter future,” Eidolon added.

“And to making good memories,” Legend finished.

“Memories,” Hannah said, under her breath, nearly inaudible as the room clapped and cheered. She was looking down at the machete that she’d placed across her lap, the paper plate with the cake balanced on the flat of the blade.

Chevalier didn’t respond. His eyes were on the phantom images, barely visible.

The screen displayed the list. Chevalier scrolled down, his expression grim.

“Stop,” Chevalier ordered. The artificial intelligence halted the scrolling. The scroll bar wasn’t even at the halfway mark.

Brighter future indeed.

He rubbed at his eyes, suddenly feeling very weary. Nothing worked out like it was supposed to. The Wards were supposed to be a safe haven for teenaged capes, buying them time to prepare themselves, to train and figure out what they needed to figure out. Somewhere along the line, some Wards had joined the fight. Locals, defending their homes, naturally.

As the ranks of adult capes were whittled down, more had attended the fights, as if unconsciously acknowledging the need, or as if they were under a subtle pressure to do so. Just like that, the ideals and ideas that had helped form the original Wards team had eroded away.

He swept a hand in front of him, and the ship read the gesture, a new image appearing on the monitor. The two screens on either side showed Behemoth’s attack on the city. He hadn’t ventured far from where he’d emerged.

Chevalier only glanced at the screens from moment to moment, his focus more on the infrastructure, the resources at his disposal.

San Diego, absent. They’d lost too many members, abandoned by those who’d lost faith in the Protectorate, with the remnants cannibalized to support other teams in need. San Diego was more or less stable, so there’d been little pressure to resupply them with new members.

Except that Spire, San Diego’s team leader, hadn’t felt confident walking into the fight. There’d been the human element, the fears, the concerns. He’d had cold feet at the last second, decided not to come. An integral part of their defense, gone, forcing them to adapt.

There were so many elements like that. Little things. He’d heard so many complain about how the Protectorate handled the attacks. How they were disorganized, inefficient.

Maybe he’d shared in that sentiment, to a degree. That had changed when he’d participated in his first fight, when he’d seen just what it meant to be in the fray, against an enemy that couldn’t truly be stopped. But still, he’d harbored doubts.

Then he’d taken command of a team, and he’d seen the process of trial and error, as they learned their opponents’ capabilities, saw how Leviathan or the Simurgh could keep tricks up their sleeves for years, before using them at a critical moment. Even now, they didn’t fully understand the Simurgh’s power, how long it might take someone to recover, if recovery was even possible.

And now he led the attack.

He drew in a deep breath, then exhaled.

Focus on the present. He’d lose it if he dwelled on the pressures, on the fact that every attack to date was another added pressure, a set of losses to avenge, a step towards mankind’s fall.

Vegas was absent too. They’d turned traitor, walked away. Satyrical had turned down the offer for a ride to the battle, claiming they’d make their own way. It was disconcerting, to think they had access to transportation in that vein. Teleporters? A craft that could and would carry people halfway around the world fast enough? Disconcerting to think they had access to resources like that so soon after defecting.

But not surprising.

Brockton Bay, in large part, was sitting this one out. Hannah wasn’t a true asset against Behemoth. Besides, the truce was in worse shape than it had been even in the beginning, and the portal too important.

He allowed himself a moment to think of Hannah. They’d dated briefly, then separated. It had been a high school romance, and they’d both been too busy to really pursue things. What had been one or two dates a week became maybes, then had ceased to happen at all. He’d graduated to the Protectorate, changed cities, and they hadn’t said a word on the subject.

Chevalier had seen her grow, though. That was what he kept in mind to assuage his disappointment over the way things had gone. She’d come into her own, confident, intelligent.

In a way, he was glad she wasn’t coming.

He turned around to face Rime and Exalt. He could see the shadows, as he now thought of them. Rime’s younger self accompanied her, sitting on the bench beside her, arms folded around her knees, face hidden. The real Rime was sitting on the bench, a fold-out table in front of her, a laptop open.

And Exalt? His ‘shadow’ was barely visible, impossible to make out. When it came to the fore, though, Chevalier knew it would look much as Hannah’s power did in its transitions. Phantom images.

He’d raised the subject of the images with others. When his proximity to Eidolon had started to give him migraines, he’d confessed about the images. He’d feared a kind of schizophrenia, but Eidolon had reassured him otherwise.

It was a piece of the puzzle, but that puzzle was still far from complete. Until they had more to work with, it was merely data. Glimmers of memories and dreams, the conclusion had been, after long discussions with Eidolon and the parahuman researchers. An effect of the thinker power required to manage his own ability, tied to trigger events in some fashion.

Except now he was wondering if he’d been misled. Eidolon was a traitor, one working for a group that clearly had some deeper understanding of powers. Maybe it had been in Cauldron’s interests for Eidolon to lie about this.

“Record numbers. Lots of capes are coming,” he said. Rime and Exalt both looked up.

“But…” Exalt said. He seemed to reconsider before finishing his sentence.

“But we’re disorganized,” Chevalier finished it for him. “People we should be able to count on are gone. Plans we had are falling apart because those people aren’t there.

Exalt nodded.

“PRT wants us to play this up,” Chevalier said, “I’m supposed to involve you guys in leadership aspect of things. If you’re willing, I’m not going to dwell on it.”

Exalt arched an eyebrow.

“You’re team leaders. You’ve got the experience, at least to a degree. But I don’t want to dwell on peripheral stuff. We’re focused on the fight? All right?”

Rime and Exalt nodded.

“I’ll lob a few of you some softball questions, then we get right to it.”

“Right,” Rime said.

The ship altered course, Chevalier felt his heart drop. Silkroad’s power wasn’t giving them any forward momentum anymore. They were close. Landing in a minute.

“You ready for this? Being leader for the first time?” Exalt asked.

“No. Not for one this important. Everyone who’s paying attention knows this is a crucial one. Maybe even the point of no return. We lose this, we lose New Delhi, and there’s no going back. We’ll never get to the point where we can consistently beat those motherfuckers, never recoup what we’ve lost. I screw up here, and the world will know.”

“They can’t blame you,” Rime said.

“They damn well can,” Chevalier retorted.

She frowned.

The ship descended, four legs absorbing the impact of the landing almost flawlessly.

He turned to the swords, set into the floor of the craft. There were two.

In truth, there were three. The largest was thirty feet long, running from the ramp at the back to the cabin at the front, almost entirely set into the floor. There was no decoration on it. Only mass, sturdy craftsmanship, and the mechanisms necessary for the cannon that was set inside the handle and blade.

It would have been too heavy for the ship to carry, except he’d already used his power, drawing it together with a second blade, an aluminum blade a mere four feet long. Lightweight.

His ability to see the ‘shadows’ about people was an extension of this power. He could see the general makeup of the two weapons, the phantom images, the underlying physics, in lines and shapes and patterns.

It was about perspectives. Relationships. He’d drawn them into one blade, with the appearance of the larger, the properties of the smaller.

The third blade was decorative, with a ceramic blade, gold and silver embellishments and inlays in the blade. The thing was ten feet long from end to end, and again, it had the cannon set within. Combining the first blade with this one proved more difficult. He granted the weapon the appearance of this blade, gave it the cutting edge, but retained the lightweight mass and the durability of the largest weapon.

Fine balances. He adjusted it, tuning its size for convenience’s sake. The heft remained the same, as did the effective weight as it extended to the rest of the world.

His armor was the same, only it was too large to bring on the craft. A veritable mountain of construction grade steel, as light as aluminum, with the decoration of a third set. It had required some concentration, to maintain the balances he’d set, but he was confident he could fight outside of the kill aura’s range.

He glanced at Rime and Exalt, then nodded.

The ramp opened, and the three of them emerged. There were heavy thuds and the sound of metal striking metal as the other ships landed, forming a ring, with the doors and ramps pointing inward. A fortification to guard the arriving heroes.

The Protectorate and Wards teams were gathering, with a degree of organization. His new Protectorate had gathered into the general positions they held at the conference table. Rime to his left, Exalt to his right, their teams behind them.

And he couldn’t help but notice the gaps. San Diego, Vegas, Brockton Bay. Three of the more prominent teams in the United States.

Defiant, Dragon and Weaver were among the last to arrive. They joined the unofficial capes who’d filled the void that should have been occupied by the San Diego capes.

“The ships have all arrived,” Chevalier said, breaking the silence, starting his speech.

It was only after the Yàngbǎn were out of sight that Chevalier could breathe a sigh of relief.

“You know your roles,” he said, to the capes who remained He searched the rooftop, and found who he was looking for. “Mr. Keene, walk with me.”

The dark-skinned man nodded assent, falling in stride. He wore a neat suit with a PRT pin, official identification on a lanyard around his neck. Morgan Keene was the PRT’s liaison and ambassador to unofficial teams across the world. Chevalier could see the glimmer of a power there, suppressed but there.

The fact that the man was a parahuman employee of the PRT wasn’t so unusual. The fact that it was a well-kept secret was. The power was out of sync, however, which was stranger still. Since Chevalier had chanced to make Morgan Keene’s acquaintance, years ago, the man’s shadow had changed. The core elements were the same, but the appearance of it had changed enough that he’d wondered if the man had managed a second trigger event. He would have assumed so, except there was no intensity to corroborate the idea.

It left him suspicious, but it wasn’t a suspicion he could act on. In an ideal world, Chevalier hoped to replace Mr. Keene. In reality, the situation was too chaotic, and Morgan Keene too entrenched in things.

“You’re upset about the Yàngbǎn.”

“I don’t like surprises.”

“I sent you a number of emails, three voice messages.”

“Can we trust them?”

“No. But they’re still an asset. Alexandria wanted them on board. When you installed your new administration, they said to keep going.”

Chevalier sighed.

“Our thinkers are on board to advise with the concentrated defense. I’ve coordinated the foreign capes, Arbiter’s handling some of the translations.”

“Okay. And our… less legitimate thinkers?”

“Accord and Tattletale.”

“Yes.”

“Rime set them up with access to the PRT databases. Connection is slow but remains strong.”

Chevalier nodded. “I’ll talk to them.”

“Of course,” Mr. Keene answered.

Chevalier made his way to the downstairs room. He paused at the entrance.

Tattletale’s ‘shadow’ peered around with a dozen eyes all at once, each set different in design, in appearance and apparent function. A mosaic. Accord’s was a glimmer of an old computer, the edge of a desk that wasn’t there.

It wasn’t as meaningful as it had appeared to be at first. They were only figments of ideas that had been codified and collected in times of stress. Ideas imprinted on a malleable surface during trigger events, or moments when trigger events had been on the verge of occurring. As an individual’s power waxed and waned, the images grew more distinct, shifted between the images personal to the cape in question, and the stranger, dream-like aspects that seemed to relate to the powers.

“Accord. Tattletale. Do you have something constructive to offer?”

“Yep,” Tattletale said.

“Your defensive lines are a disaster waiting to happen,” Accord said.

“Straight to the point,” Tattletale commented.

“A disaster?” Chevalier asked.

“I’m wondering if you’ve done this on purpose,” Accord stated. His eye moved critically over Chevalier. “You’re going to fight the Endbringer in a melee.”

“Yes,” Chevalier said.

“And you’ve picked the new Protectorate team with the idea that they would support you. The core team is all ranged.”

“Yes,” Chevalier said.

“Ego?” Tattletale asked.

Chevalier shook his head, then thought for a moment. “Perhaps.”

“Well, ego’s a part of the job. Question is, can you live up to it?”

“I can try. But more than anything, I’m not going to put people on the front line if I’m not willing to go there myself.”

“Foolish,” Accord said. “Everyone has their place in the grand scheme of things. You do yourself and everyone else a disservice if you try to put yourself where you don’t belong.”

Chevalier shook his head, but he didn’t reply. There would be no convincing this one.

Accord continued, “There are only two ways you could make this plan work. The first would be using a sword long enough to reach past his Manton effect bypass, the second is to somehow within that range and survive.”

“Accounted for,” Chevalier said, a touch irritated. He didn’t need this. Not now.

“Usher,” Tattletale supplied.

“Ah. I see,” Accord said. “And if Usher were to be struck down by a chance lightning bolt?”

“We have fallback plans.”

Accord shook his head. “I’ll develop better.”

Chevalier grit his teeth.

“I’m watching him fight,” Tattletale said, “And something’s off. I’ve been watching old videos of the Endbringer fights, looking over maps, and it doesn’t fit together.”

“What doesn’t?”

Her finger tapped hard on the map she’d printed out. “Location, pacing. They’re toying with us. Acting.”

“You’re crediting them with more intelligence than they have.”

“Are you telling me that because you really think they’re dumb, or because you don’t want to-”

Chevalier could sense the attacker by the movement of the shadows. He whirled around, only to find himself face to face with a cloud of the ‘shadows’.

The Yàngbǎn, one of them.

An assassin?

He couldn’t even make out the figure, behind the layers of images. Glimpses of twenty, thirty, forty trigger events.

Defying the truce, here? Now?

He felt his anger stirring. He adjusted the balances of his blade, maintaining the reach, the appearance, but he altered its interaction with the rest of the world, maintaining its lightweight feel as far as he was concerned, changing it in other respects.

“You lunatic!”

He had his sword out in a flash, swung. A forcefield appeared, but the weapon breezed through it as if it weren’t even there.

It was, in all respects except appearance, and the ease with which he moved it, a weapon that weighed upwards of fifty tons, as durable as the heaviest weapon. The cutting edge of the ceramic blade.

His opponent slipped out of the way, and images flared with life as he drew on a power to fly.

Chevalier couldn’t make him out in the midst of the shadows. Did the Yàngbǎn know this would trip him up, slow him down?

It didn’t matter. The attacker didn’t have offensive strength. Two more attacks failed to penetrate Chevalier’s armor. He advanced, swung, thrusted, and his opponent stepped back, narrowly dodging.

Chevalier pulled the trigger, but a power flared and the shot jammed in the chamber.

Can’t afford to expend resources on this. Have to prepare for the fight.

He followed up with more swings. Each missed by a hair. His opponent was scared, frantic.

And suddenly his opponent was a distance away. The images, the movement of the clouds outside, telltale signs of being stopped in time.

He advanced, felt another attack fail to penetrate his defenses. Again, time stopped, his opponent used the window of opportunity to back away.

In between the following two pauses, he could see Accord and Tattletale change places, moving to the door, now barred with a forcefield.

They’d have to hold their own. Chevalier assessed his opponent, as best as he could, through the storm of hellish images. Each of them was fractured, broken. Nothing to be gleaned from them.

But the opponent was sloppy. Letting him get dangerously close between resets. It was a question of letting him make a mistake, occupying his attention, so the thinkers would be safe. A chess game, moving the knight to keep the king in checkmate. There was only so much space in the room, and he could position himself to force the Yàngbǎn member to move further, to have less time to act, leaving more room for a mistake.

“No,” he could hear Accord murmuring, the word barely above a whisper. He chanced a glance at the pair. Tattletale had a hand on her holster, and Accord had stopped her.

He didn’t get a chance to see anything further. He felt the strength go out of his lower body, a slow but incredible pain tearing through his midsection.

The laser. How?

He had only a moment to adjust the balances in his power, so the blade and armor wouldn’t crash through the floor and tear down half of the building.

I missed the fight, he realized, as he woke in a hospital bed.

The ground rumbled violently. He looked up to see Tattletale in the corner of the room, half of her attention on what was happening outside the window, the other half on a phone.

“He’s here?”

She turned to him, tapped her throat. He could see the tube in her throat.

He sighed.

She approached the bedside, attention on the phone. She held it out for him to read.

A notepad executable read:

Chevalier shut his eyes. We lost.

Tattletale was already typing again. Her expression was grim as she focused on the phone.

He tried to sit up, and found himself unable. It was a pain concentrated in one area, but it was so immense that made his entire body react. His ears buzzed, his vision wavered, and every muscle clenched, as he lay there, trying to ride it out.

She showed him the phone as he lay there, panting.

“I know this,” he gasped out the words. He moved the sheet to examine himself. His breastplate had been removed, and his stomach had fresh incisions on it, with sutures holding them closed.

How long had he been out?

She showed him her phone again.

He reached up to swat the phone away, felt a pull on his stomach and winced instead. He knocked it out of the way with his other hand. Still painful, but easier.

She drew it out of his reach, started typing again.

He turned himself over in the bed, nearly retching at the intensity of the pain, but he found himself on his side. Even at the weight of aluminum, the armor on his legs and hands was heavy enough to help weigh him down, hold him in position.

She offered him a hand as he swung his legs down, trying to use the momentum to sit up. He nearly fell, but she caught him, dropping the phone onto the bed in her haste to help him stay sitting upright.

His chest heaved, and he growled out each breath. The growling helped, on a primal level, but that wasn’t saying much. Just sitting upright was bad enough that he thought he might pass out.

“My breastplate.”

She handed him the phone, then crossed the room to where a bundle of belongings were gathered on a chair. They’d cut off the layer of mesh that sat beneath the armor, and the cloth that sat against his skin. She discarded each of those and simply brought him the armor.

It had held its form. Good. He glanced at the phone.

She brought the front portion of the armor, resting it on the corner of the bed. She tapped the phone.

“I read it,” he growled. “Help me put it on.”

She tapped the phone again.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It won’t change the outcome of this fight.”

She nodded agreement, then lifted the armor, bringing it to his chest.

There was a crash outside, a chorus of screams. Chevalier grit his teeth.

“Back piece,” he said. She gave him a pointed look.

“Please,” he added, growling the word.

She turned on her heel, crossing the room to pick up the armor, slowly, almost leisurely, as she typed on the phone with one hand. She held the armor in the other as she made her way back, then took several damnable seconds typing out the message before putting the phone down.

“We don’t have time for your typing,” he said.

She only gave him a level, silent stare, as she moved the rear portion of the armor into place. He reached for the clasps, but moving his left arm was too painful, pulling on the muscles of his stomach. He used his right for what he could, then waited for her to finish.

Indian doctors rushed down the hall, pushing beds on wheels, four in a row.

He conceded to pick up the phone and read what she’d typed.

His eyes widened. “We destroy the center, we destroy him?”

She gave him a look as if he’d just asked if the sky was green, incredulous. She shook her head.

“Why the hell not?”

She just shook her head.

“I don’t know why the hell not. Where’s his center?”

She pointed with two fingers, at her collarbone. The base of the throat, between the shoulders. Quite possibly the deepest set part of his body.

“Help me stand.”

The entire building rumbled. For a moment, he thought the entire point would be rendered moot as the structure collapsed.

It took three tries to get him to his feet, with him holding a shelf on the wall with his right hand, her leveraging her entire body’s strength with her shoulder under his armpit. He stumbled forward, catching himself on the shelf, and heaved for breath, feeling the strength threaten to leave his legs with every deep inhalation and exhalation.

But he couldn’t. Couldn’t allow himself to.

Tattletale was pulling on a blue latex glove. He watched her as she reached out and placed a hand on the space beside the incisions, where the burn had been patched up.

“What are you doing?”

She reached for the phone.

“I could’ve told you that.”

She shrugged, her eyes on the screen, thumbs typing on the onscreen keyboard. She raised the phone.

“Right,” he said. “My Cannonblade?”

She sighed, making her way to the end of the room. She collected his Cannonblade from the floor by the chair. He’d made it as light as it could go in every respect, before he’d passed out. Even so, moving his left arm to try to hold it made him seize up in agony.

For now, he was a one-armed fighter. He gripped the handle in his right hand, then exerted his power. He could see it grow heavier, even as the weight remained effectively the same in his hand.

He rested it against one shoulder, then managed a limping step forward. He very nearly fell.

Another step.

He focused on his power, as a way to distract himself, planting one foot in front of the other, the armor squeaking in one point where a knee joint had bent as he’d fallen after fighting the Yàngbǎn assassin. It was easier to keep moving than to stop and start again, so he moved forward with an almost machinelike rhythm, limping.

He’d never forgive himself if they lost this fight and he didn’t even fight.

Stairs. He had to make his way down. One mistake, a faltering step, and he’d collapse. He’d probably be unable to stand, if it didn’t tear his stomach apart.

He made his way down, the stitches pulling against the fresh incisions with every step.

The building shuddered. His mind a fog of pain, he reached out for the railing for stability, only to remember he was holding his sword. It plowed through railing as if it were a meticulous sandcastle, raining pieces on the ground below.

He swayed, and for the briefest moment, he considered that it might be easier to fall. Easier than making it down the next ten steps. If there was a ten percent chance his stomach stayed intact, a twenty percent chance someone could help him stand…

But he took another step down, and somewhere in the midst of planting his foot, he found his balance.

Everywhere, doctors were struggling to evacuate. Some capes were working to help, even injured ones trying to pull things together. Still fifty or sixty capes to evacuate.

And the bodies… people who had died because he’d failed them. Because he hadn’t been able to defeat the assassin, to take his role at the front of the battle lines, where he could bait Behemoth into the various traps they’d laid.

He had to suppress the guilt. There would be time for blame, self-directed or otherwise, later. He’d bury the mental pain like he was with the physical.

This is how Behemoth fights. Indomitable. Never slowing. Always progressing forward, Chevalier thought.

He could remember who he’d once been. So long ago. Well before he’d had his first of twenty fights against the Endbringers. Before meeting Hannah and the rest of the original Wards.

They’d been in a car crash, in the middle of a vacation. Strangers had stepped in, crowding the car to help his little brother out, while his parents were reeling, moaning in pain. They’d tried to get him out too, but he’d been pinned, the car handle had been scraped away in the collision, the interior handle protected by the child locks. They’d left, and for hours, as the emergency services arrived and the rescue continued, he’d wondered why. He’d triggered, caught in the wreckage, but had been too insensate to do anything about it, to even realize the full gravity of what had happened in the midst of the chaos.

It was only later that he found out they were serial kidnappers. The crash that had broken his mother’s leg in three places had been orchestrated. So had the collection of his little brother.

Three years later, when he heard about the group again, he put together a makeshift club and armor and set about hunting them down. He appeared in the news in the midst of tracking down the individual members, and again and again, they had described him as relentless, to the point that it had very nearly became his codename. Revenge had been all he had left.

Then, just as he was now, he’d been fueled by anger, by pain. He could barely see, as black spots blotted his vision. Revenge, again, was his only option, only it was the end point, rather than the beginning.

I told myself I’d never let myself be afraid again, he thought.

His left hand was nearly useless, so he hit the double doors at the front of the temple with his sword instead. Wood splintered as the doors parted. He trudged forward, ignoring the doors as they swung shut, bouncing off his armor.

Record numbers show up, and this is all that’s left?

Barely fifty heroes still stood their ground. The back lines were sheltered by giant hands of stone, Hellhound’s mutant dogs collecting the wounded, carrying them around the side of the building. Eidolon and Alexandria wrestled with the Endbringer, fighting in close quarters against the monster.

Alexandria?

He shook his head, nearly losing his balance as he continued his forward march. He could barely see straight, and it wasn’t helped by the phantom images that riddled the mass of capes. Images he had called glimmers when he was a youth, that he called shadows now that he was an adult.

But Behemoth… the Endbringer was little more than a skeleton with extensive padding. He’d never seen this much damage delivered.

Chevalier focused his power on his blade, making it as large as he could. He continued marching forward. There was no indication Usher was okay. Rime was dead, and he had little idea about the state of the supporting forces who’d been intended to help him attack, who’d trained to assist him.

He extended his blade towards Behemoth, using it to gauge the distance for the kill aura. Defending capes cleared out of his way as he walked forward, between two of the stone hands. The shadow of his sword was warning enough.

One of Behemoth’s legs seemed less developed than the other, the toes missing, the bones less pronounced, the flesh thinner. He reached the perimeter and slammed the weapon down into the earth with his one usable arm.

His steam nearly spent, he collapsed over the handle of the weapon, his hand still gripping the handle, and he pulled the trigger.

The size of the weapon and the effect of the firing pin seemed to help with the jammed mechanism. That, or the transition to being closer to his largest blade had shifted something in a fractional way. The shot blasted Behemoth in the calf of his weaker leg, and the Endbringer fell.

Again, he pulled the trigger, over and over. Three, four, five shots.

He stopped before he spent the sixth.

He’d dealt damage, but it was precious little. Flesh had torn at the leg, not quite as dense as it should be, by all reports. Had the regeneration not finished rebuilding the complete structures?

Rendered effectively one-legged again, Behemoth crawled forward on three limbs. Alexandria struck him from above, driving him face first into the ground.

Why was she here? She was supposed to be functionally dead.

Chevalier could feel a sensation crawling through his body, an energy. It didn’t invigorate, not on its own, but he could feel a kind of relief.

Usher was alive, and Usher’s power coursed through him. With luck, he’d be immune to Behemoth’s power, or at least partially immune. Nobody had received the benefit of Usher’s ability and been brave enough to venture into Behemoth’s kill range.

Chevalier pulled his sword from the ground, swayed, and very fell over.

Defiant caught him.

Old friend, Chevalier thought, though he didn’t have the breath to speak.

Anyone else might have spoken up, told him he didn’t have to do this, that it was madness.

Defiant was silent, supporting Chevalier, helping him right himself. Defiant understood this much. The need, the drive.

Chevalier took his first step with Defiant’s help. The second was only partially supported. The third was on his own.

He closed into the kill area, and he could feel the heat touch him. It heated the armor, but didn’t reach him. Usher’s power at work. He tried to inhale, and found no air. Choking, he forced his mouth shut.

Holding his breath, Chevalier brought the sword down on Behemoth’s shoulder, a blow from above much like Alexandria had delivered, followed by another.

His aim wasn’t good, the blows off target. If his form were better, he’d be landing each strike in the same place, time after time. Not so, with the blade this big, the margin for error so great.

With that in mind, Chevalier shrunk his sword as he closed the distance, shut his eyes as lightning crackled around the Endbringer. With the scale smaller, the effective edge was that much sharper. The blade bit just a fraction deeper each time.

He couldn’t stop walking without falling, couldn’t stop swinging the weapon in the same rote motion without risking that he’d never be able to raise it again, however light it might be.

His goal was the spot Tattletale had mentioned. The core.

Behemoth swiped at him, but he was already shifting the balance of his armor, moving to block the blow with the flat of the blade. The sound of the impact was deafening, and it wasn’t something Usher’s power protected against. But Usher’s power was finnicky at best. Unreliable.

At the very least, it was holding up here.

He found a measure of strength, then swung the cannonblade, driving it for the deepest part of the wound.

Behemoth lurched, changing position, and the painstakingly created notch in his shoulder shifted well out of Chevalier’s reach. He let up on the intense heat, turned to radiation instead. Heroes scrambled to retreat from the ominous glow.

Bastard, Chevalier swore. He released a sound somewhere between a moan and a groan, exhaling the last of the air in his lungs, greedily sucking in air.

Something flew past him, shearing straight through Behemoth’s chest. A wheel of metal, thin, with two bars sticking out of the center. It cut through the Endbringer like he wasn’t even there.

Dazed, lungs fit to burst as he held his breath, barely coherent, Chevalier turned. He saw Tecton with his piledrivers extended, Weaver just behind him, along with two of the new Wards: the white supremacist’s child they’d picked up in Boston and a boy in a white cloak. They stood all the way at the back lines of the battlefield, by the temple, along with a character he didn’t recognize. A girl in black.

His eyes settled on Weaver, surrounded by the nimbus of her power, which glowed with an intensity that surpassed any and all of her teammates. When she stepped forward, it was like she was pushing against a curtain, only it was a membrane, a network of individual cells, each with tendrils extending out, so thin he couldn’t make them out, except by the highlights that seemed to rush down them as she gave conscious direction to her bugs.

Second chances, Chevalier thought back to his inauguration to the Wards. He’d harbored doubts about taking her on board, but memories of that day had been a factor. He’d needed a second chance. So had Hannah.

Colin, even, though it came much later.

It was a good feeling, to see that coming into play. He knew she wasn’t all the way there, but she’d taken a step forward.

It was a better feeling to watch as Behemoth’s shoulder shifted, attached by a mere hair. The weapon had cut through his ribs, torn through the space where his heart should be.

That’ll do.

Alexandria hit him, and the arm came free. Behemoth lurched, planting his one remaining hand on the ground, and came just short of collapsing on top of Chevalier. He was only a few feet away, glowing with the radiation.

I’m dead, Chevalier thought, without a trace of the despair he’d imagined he would feel.

He tried to move, to raise his blade, only to find his armor refusing to cooperate. It had melted, the joints and joins flowing into one another. His sword wasn’t much better. The ceramic properties he’d applied to the edge were heat-resistant, but the remainder of the weapon were growing more nebulous in shape, the hottest parts of the metal flowing down to obscure the edge.

He concentrated, and found his power beyond his reach. Too tired, his stamina gone.

Trapped in a hot wreck of metal, an explosive death just a short distance away. It had been his starting point, and it had been the end.

It would be the optimal time for a second trigger event, the thought passed through his thoughts.

Of course, the joke went that you couldn’t get a trigger event by trying to have one, so even thinking about a second trigger event was enough to banish any possibility.

Not so funny, in this moment.

His power worked best with similar things. Differences made it slower. It was why he had the same firing mechanism at the core of each of the three weapons he used for his Cannonblade.

Now, as the battle raged around him, he was nearly blind with the visor of his helmet melting, at his utter limit in terms of stamina and pain tolerance. Behemoth delivered a shockwave, and Usher’s power protected him, his boots welded to the ground kept him from falling over.

He reached for his power, grasping at his armor, and he didn’t reach for anything familiar or similar. He reached for anything, everything. The ground, the soil, air.

Somewhere in the midst of that desperate struggle, he found his armor coming apart. He wasn’t even willing it, not even forming any coherent idea of what he was doing, but his power operated of its own accord.

Free of the armor, he could move his weapon. It was slag, barely a sword anymore, but the core still had some density to it.

He made it grow.

He made the sword grow, from ten to twenty feet in length. It was more by the growth than by any action on Chevalier’s part that it extended into the wound. The weapon penetrated into the scar Weaver’s crew had created, as close to the core as Chevalier could get it.

He made it grow to its greatest possible length, a full thirty feet, his head turned skyward to the monster that glowed silver and black.

Space and time distortion were supposed to protect it? He’d fight fire with fire.

Flesh parted as the blade grew inside the wound. He put his finger on the trigger, ready to fire.

Before he could, the sword’s tip touched the core, and everything went wrong.

His power abruptly ceased to take effect, and the blades came apart, in its three individual pieces. They slid from the wound, falling down around him.

Behemoth lurched forward, and his wounded leg struck Chevalier, knocking him to the ground. He could feel the gunshot break of multiple ribs shattering.

Supine on the ground, unable to breathe, but for tiny pants, Chevalier stared at the sky, unwilling to look directly at the ensuing scene, even if he could have managed to turn his head.

There was a horrible crash as a sweep of one claw shattered the stone hands. Glowing silver, he loomed over the defending capes, scorched and electrocuted those who’d fallen within his instant-kill range. One of Hellhound’s mutant dogs, Dragon. Others he couldn’t make out in the midst of the clouds of dust. Rendered to ash and melted armor in heartbeats.

They were the lucky ones, Chevalier thought. The radiation was generally observed to be concentrated, limited to a certain range, manipulated to strike only those within a hundred feet or so of Behemoth, to saturate the landscape and render it uninhabitable. These capes were close enough. Their deaths would be slow, painful.

A failure. Hopefully the ones in the temple had been evacuated, and the capes at the rear of the battle line free to retreat.

The ground rumbled violently, churning and smoking. Behemoth was burrowing.

The fight was over.

Chevalier stared up at the shifting smoke of the sky above, struggling to breathe, not entirely sure why he was bothering. Maybe he wouldn’t die of the radiation, thanks to Usher’s power.

Long moments passed as the rumbling of the earth faded in intensity. The air was still filled with the screams and shouts of the various capes and doctors fighting to save the wounded, the dull roars of distant helicopters, carrying the evacuated capes away.

Chevalier watched as the worst of the smoke cleared, and he imagined he might have seen the glowing blur of the sun through the clouds.

Not the sun. It was a figure. Scion.

He would have laughed if he could.

Too late.

You showed up too late.

Scion lowered himself to nearly ground level. His golden hair moved in the wind as he gazed over the battlefield. His white bodysuit was smudged here or there on the sleeves, but otherwise seemed so pristine that it seemed to glow in the gloom.

No, part of that glow was real. The faint light touched Chevalier, and he could feel his breathing ease. It was reaching out to everyone present.

A consolation prize? A bit of healing? Maybe a helping hand against the radiation, for the others?

He managed a soft laugh. The glow was making the pain easier to handle. He could almost breathe, now.

He closed his eyes, and he felt a tear roll down from the corner of his eye. He suspected he wouldn’t have been able to tear up without the healing.

Not sufficient to fix the broken bones, or the damage to his stomach, perhaps. He opened his eyes to look at Scion, to ask a question.

But Scion was gone.

A noise rose up from those who remained in the crowd. Gasps, cheers, shouts of surprise.

Chevalier forced himself to move, stared at the spear of golden light that had risen from the earth, just on the horizon. Scion.

He held Behemoth in his grip, released the Endbringer to fall two or three hundred feet to the ground, struck his falling foe with a beam of golden light, as if to shove Behemoth into the ground.

Behemoth’s lightning crackled between them, catching Scion, but the hero didn’t even seem to flinch. He hit Behemoth again, and this time the beam of energy didn’t stop. With virtually every structure leveled, there was nothing to hide their view but the lingering smoke and dust, and even that wasn’t thick enough to hide the light.

The aftershock of it traveled across the city, quelling dust storms, blowing past the assembled heroes like a strong gust, faintly warm. Even though the ray didn’t reach quite that high, the clouds of smoke and dust parted visibly above Scion.

Chevalier watched, staring, belatedly thought to count how many seconds had passed.

One, two, three, four…

Behemoth generated a shockwave, but it was muted by the light, suppressed.

…eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve…

Behemoth’s silhouette thrashed as he tried to move out from beneath the shaft of light, but Scion only reoriented the beam, keeping it fixed on his target.

…sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one…

The light ceased. Behemoth was gone. A plume of dust rose from the earth, at the very limits of their vision.

Scion plunged beneath the ground, heedless of the intervening terrain.

Again, Scion rose from a point beneath the shattered surface of the city.

Again, he held Behemoth in his hands. Thinner than a skeleton, the Endbringer was little more than a stick figure from Chevalier’s vantage point.

Only this time, with a flare of golden light to accompany the movement, he tore the Endbringer in two. The legs came free of the pelvis as two individual pieces, and Scion obliterated them with a pulse of the golden light. The air that reached the crowd of wounded heroes was cool, this time.

In Chevalier’s peripheral vision, people were emerging from within the temple. Chevalier didn’t spare them a direct glance. If he was seeing what he thought he was seeing, then he wouldn’t take his eyes off the scene for anything.

Behemoth slammed his claw into the glowing hero, and the shockwave tore him free of Scion’s grip. Scion followed him with a glowing sphere of light, and Behemoth redirected his fall, generating an explosion in mid-air, hurling himself towards the assembled crowd.

Eidolon stopped him with a violet forcefield that spread across the sky, a solid obstacle to arrest Behemoth’s momentum, stopping him dead in his tracks and leaving him suspended a hundred feet up in the air. His one intact claw clutched the edge.

Scion followed up with another shaft of light, and the forcefield shattered in an instant. Behemoth was slammed into the road, three streets down from the gathered heroes outside the temple.

The Endbringer glowed, and the swelling light was too intense to look at.

Just seeing it, there was no question of what he was doing. A final act of spite. Turning himself into a bomb.

A stream of darkness poured from one of the helicopters, filling the street Behemoth lay in. For an instant, the Endbringer was almost entirely obscured.

Scion fired one more beam, and the darkness was obliterated, swept away.

The silhouette of the Endbringer flickered, then disintegrated. There was no detonation, no destruction to the landscape. Only the cleansing light.

The beam dissipated, but its effects hung in the air, canceling out noise, stilling the air.

Slowly, the crowd took up a cheer, a cry of victory from everyone with the breath to spare.

As noise returned to the landscape, the stilling effects of Scion’s light fading, Chevalier closed his eyes, listening. With the noise of the helicopters and distant fires mingling with the shouts and hollers of joy from the defending capes, he imagined he could hear the whole world cheering alongside them.

24.y (Interlude 2, Aftermath)

“Well bandaged. They did a good job,” the doctor had to raise her voice to be heard over the helicopter’s rotors. She was older, blond to the point that it was hard to distinguish if her hair was still blond or graying, her expression creased in concern.

Wanton nodded mutely.

“What happened?” the doctor asked him.

“Falling debris,” Tecton offered, from the other side of the helicopter.

The doctor nodded. “We’ll leave it as it is. The pain’s okay?”

“Meds help,” Wanton said. “Feel like I’m almost dreaming. And I’m going to wake up, and none of this will have happened.”

“It happened,” Tecton said.

“Why isn’t everyone cheering and hollering anymore?”

“Really fucking tired,” Grace said. She was beside Cuff, who’d been stripped of her armor from the waist up, with only a thin covering of near-liquid metal on her upper body for modesty’s sake. A nurse was attending to her arm.

“Really tired,” Golem said. “Oh my god. My entire body hurts, and I didn’t even take a direct hit.”

“The roars and shockwaves might have done internal damage,” the doctor said. “You’ll each need a CT scan and MRI. Let me know if there’s any acute pain.”

“I think it’s more that I’ve never exercised this much in my life,” Golem said.

“You’ll hurt worse tomorrow,” Grace commented.

“Damn.”

The doctor, for her part, turned her attention to Wanton. “We’ll need to double-check for bone fragments when we get back to the hospital. You’ll need surgery. Chances are good this was a rush job.”

“I… my arm,” Wanton said, lamely.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor responded.

“No, it’s like… I should feel worse, but I don’t. Maybe it’s the drugs, but I feel this rush, like I’ve never been so glad to be alive. I’m pumped.”

“You may be in shock,” the doctor observed.

“We’re all in shock,” Tecton said.

There were murmurs of agreement across the helicopter.

“Is anyone else a little freaked out?” Cuff asked.

“Freaked out?” the doctor asked.

Cuff shook her head, not responding. Her attention had shifted to her arm, as the doctor bound it.

Tecton ventured a reply instead. “I think I understand what Cuff means. It’s hard to believe he’s gone. It’s like, you’re five years old, and Leviathan appears for the first time, and your parents have to explain that a bunch of people died, and it’s because of these monsters and yet nobody has figured out why.”

“Yeah,” Cuff said. “What happens next? Leviathan or the Simurgh? We kill them? Stop them from blowing up or doing their version of blowing up? I can’t really imagine that we’d beat them, give our all and hope that Scion shows up and fights like that again, kill them, and then have everything be okay.”

“You just got powers, barely a month ago, and you’re already this grim?” Wanton asked.

“I’ve been dealing with the aftermath of the Endbringer attacks for a while,” Cuff said. Her eyes were on the floor, and an expression of pain crossed her face as the doctor cut away a tag of burned skin on her shoulder. The scar was like a snowflake carved into the skin’s surface, angry and red. Her arm seemed to tremble involuntarily.

“It’s okay to worry,” Tecton said. He gestured towards Weaver. “Weaver said as much. They’ve got a nasty habit of escalating, in the fights themselves and in the grand scheme of things. Behemoth got too predictable, so Leviathan started to show up. We started to coordinate defenses, get the world on board to deal with them, Simurgh comes.”

“And now we killed one, so how do they escalate from there?” Grace asked.

“It’s a concern,” Tecton said, “And it’s one that people all around the world are going to be discussing. Rely on them. Don’t take the full weight of the world onto your shoulders. We fought, you guys made a good show of it,” Tecton said.

“I could’ve done more,” Cuff said.

“You’re new. Inexperienced, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. As far as jumping in with both feet first, you guys managed it. You, Golem, Annex, you stood up there, shoulder to shoulder with veteran heroes, and you fought, even though you’re rookies. You have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of, okay?”

Cuff didn’t reply.

“Okay?” Tecton asked.

“When my family got killed in Hawaii, I made promises to myself. It’s why I came. I don’t feel like I did enough, to fulfill my own end of those promises.”

“There’s always next time,” Tecton said.

“You say that like it’s a good thing,” Wanton said.

“Yeah. Shit,” Grace muttered. “It’s not quite over yet, right?”

“Right,” Tecton said. “But there’s time before the next one. Let people in the know handle the worrying. We did everything we could. Now we recuperate. We celebrate, because was deserve to. We take the time to heal.”

In response to the glances cast his way, Wanton waved his stump around. “Going to take getting used to. Getting dressed, eating…”

He moved the stump in the direction of his lap, jerked it up and down.

Cuff looked and squeaked in embarrassment before averting her eyes.

“…writing,” Wanton finished, a goofy smile on his face.

“Your handwriting must be awful,” Golem said.

There were chuckles here and there from among the group. Even the nurse tending to Cuff smiled.

“We did good,” Tecton said. “And some people will recognize that. Others are gonna see all the bad that happened in New Delhi and point fingers. Be ready in case you fall under the crosshairs.”

There were nods from the rest of the Chicago Wards.

Tecton glanced at Weaver, then back to his team. “What do you think?”

“You have to ask?” Grace asked.

“You weren’t keen at the idea at first,” Tecton replied.

“I’m still not, not a hundred percent. But whatever little doubts I have, it’s kind of a no-brainer.”

“Yep,” Wanton said.

“Golem?” Tecton asked. “Have you even talked to her about it?”

“I’m a little scared to,” the boy said. “I mean…”

He glanced at the doctor.

“Everything here is confidential,” Tecton said.

“Well, given my past, the people I was with before I came here, I’m worried there’s hard feelings. They were in the same city. I don’t know what exactly happened. What if one of them did something to Weaver or her friends? Is she the type to hold a grudge?”

“Going by what apparently happened in Brockton Bay,” Wanton said, “Not so much. If she has a reason to hold a grudge, you don’t tend to live very long.”

Golem frowned.

“You’re not being helpful, Wanton. Or fair to Weaver,” Tecton said.

“I’m suffering, Tec,” Wanton said, making the words into an exaggerated groan.

Tecton shook his head, turning to Golem. “Tell her. Explain your circumstances, let her know you’re from the same city, that you don’t share your family’s ideology.”

“The name should say as much,” Golem said.

Tecton nodded. He drew in a deep breath, then exhaled. The adrenaline was burning off, and with it, a deep exhaustion was settling in.

He looked at Weaver, where she sat at the far end of the bench. Her old teammate had insisted on coming with her, along with a small cluster of dogs. They’d fallen asleep within two minutes of takeoff. Weaver had been first, her head leaning against her friend’s shoulder. Her friend had been next to drift off, a dog in her lap, others lying underneath the bench.

“We’ll talk to the bosses,” Tecton said. “See about taking Weaver onto the team.”

How was this supposed to work?

“Door me,” Pretender said.

A light sliced across the floor of the alleyway, three feet across. When it had reached its full length, it began thickening, raising up until the portal was a full four by seven feet. There was a long white hallway on the other side.

Carefully, he stepped through, with legs that weren’t his own.

“Pretender.”

He stopped, then turned around. “Satyr.”

“You don’t have to go with them,” Satyrical said.

“I think today proved I do.”

“And everything we were working on? Everything we were working towards?”

“I talked to some powerful people. People behind the scenes we’ve barely heard of,” Pretender replied. “What we were working on in Vegas doesn’t even compare. Small potatoes.”

“Doesn’t feel like small potatoes. What’s so important that you’d run off?”

Pretender frowned, an expression hidden by the helmet he wore.

“You can talk to me. You know I can keep secrets. Or are you talking about the Endbringers? I think today showed they can deal with Endbringers on their own,” Satyr said.

“It’s bigger things. Bigger than Endbringers,” Pretender answered. “End of the world.”

Satyrical sighed. “Of course it is.”

“I’ll help you with the little things, when I have the time. We have resources, and maybe we can use you guys.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Satyr said. He approached Pretender, extending a hand.

Pretender shook, gingerly, unsure of the full extent of Alexandria’s enhanced strength.

Satyr held on to the hand, caressing it. “They say you should marry your best friend, and now that you’re a woman…”

Pretender chuckled a little before withdrawing his hand from Satyr’s. “That line again? I don’t think that’s what they meant.”

“She’s yours for keeps?”

“Brain dead. Her body’s peculiar. Doesn’t really age. Hair doesn’t grow, nails don’t grow. Wounds don’t really heal or get worse. She used cosmetics to look older, to throw people off. Only the brain was left pliable, adaptable. Even then, most of it was hardened, protected, those duties offloaded to her agent.”

Satyr studied Pretender’s new body without shame. His eyes rested on Pretender’s forehead. “I see. And with that plasticity, the brain was left more vulnerable.”

“Only a little. Enough to be an Achilles heel. She’s a case fifty-three, I suppose. All of us may be.”

“All Cauldron capes?”

Pretender nodded. “To some degree or another.”

Satyr seemed to take that into consideration, rubbing his chin. When he spoke, though, he spoke of something else. “What you did… you knew that they’d figured you out, and that I was next in line, that I’d get questioned too. You killed her for my sake, to buy me time.”

“Are you mad?”

Satyr shook his head. “We’ve killed before. Selfishly, selflessly. Only difference is you got caught.”

“Well, I got away.”

“In a fashion, yes. You got away,” Satyr said. “You’ve even reached a higher position in life.”

“Wearing someone else’s skin, living their life,” Pretender replied.

“Yes, well, that was always going to be your fate, wasn’t it?”

Pretender chuckled. “I’ve missed you, buddy.”

“Likewise, you freak of nature,” Satyr responded.

“Just because we’re doing different things now, it doesn’t mean goodbye.”

“Good.”

“We stay in touch,” Pretender said. “I’m sure my new group can use you, and you can draw on our resources, I’m sure. Our goals are more or less aligned. Only difference is scale.”

“Well then. Good luck with saving the world.”

“And good luck with saving civilization from itself,” Pretender answered. He looked skyward for a moment. “Close the door.”

The portal closed.

Connecting to “agChat.ParahumansOnline016.par:6667″ (Attempt 1 of 55)

Resolving Host Name

Connecting…

Connected.

Using identity “Iblis”, nick “Iblis”

Welcome to Parahumans Online Chatroom #116, ‘The Holdout’. Rules Here. Behave. Obey the @s.

Ryus: shorthand for seismic activity. earthquakes.

Kriketz: any word on deaths yet

Divide: No word on deaths. This is Behemoth. It’s normal to see a radio silence like this.

Divide: They can’t report deaths because the armbands get knocked out.

Spiritskin: Hi Iblis!

Iblis: Word is first capes are returning home.

Aloha: !

Loyal: Who? Who? Names!

Deimos: how is new delhi?

@Deadman@: I’m in contact with main channel, can pass on details if you can verify.

@Deadman@: PM me.

Iblis: Loyal – Not sure.

Iblis: Deimos – City hit bad.

Iblis: Deadman – Not sure how to verify. Only have texts on phone. Sending PM.

Poit: they made it

BadSamurai: how bad?

Ultracut: Poit nobodys saying they amde it

Poit: they stopped him or they wouldn’t be leaving

Deimos: Nooooooo! new delhi hit bad?

Aloha: X(

Iblis: Texts I’m getting from cape-wife friend are saying Scion finished Behemoth off.

Iblis: Absolute annihilation.

QwertyD: Troll

Groupies: no fucking way

Aloha: O_o

Deimos is now known as Absolute Annihiliation

@Deadman@: Verify now or ban.

Absolute Annihilation: fuck yea Scion!

Arcee: Omg wat?

Iblis: sending PM with texts.

Colin shifted his weight restlessly, watching the screens.

There was a process, he knew. He’d been filled in on the details, forewarned. That didn’t make this any easier.

Too many years he’d spent alone. Too many years, he’d had nothing to care about. Nothing and nobody to hold precious. A dad who worked two jobs, a mother who traveled. They’d divorced, and virtually nothing had changed in the grand scheme of things. They’d looked after him, but they hadn’t been there. They had been occupied with other things, with dreams and aspirations that had never included him.

Colin knew he had been the weird child. Had never made friends, had convinced himself he didn’t want or need them. He was efficient in how solitary he was.

He’d even prided himself on it, for a time, that there was nothing to hold him back. That he could, should the mood strike him, pick up and leave at any time. He’d modeled his life around it, had led a spare existence, devoid of the little touches of home, of roots. He’d saved money so he had the ability to travel, to get a new place in a new city if the mood struck. It had even been an asset when he had joined the Protectorate, the ability to relocate, take any open position.

It was only now, a full fifteen years later, that he started to wonder what he’d missed out on. Did most people know how to handle this sort of thing? The absence of someone they cared about? Did they have an easier time handling the moments when they weren’t sure if they’d ever see those people again, or was it harder?

He’d altered Dragon’s code. It wasn’t a tidy thing. Tinker work rarely was. There were too many factors to consider, and a tinker who didn’t specialize in a particular area would never be able to plumb the depths. Too many things connected to other things, and the full extent of the connections was impossible to fathom in entirety.

At best, he could study each alteration as much as was possible, act in ways that could minimize the damage.

Every adjustment, even on the smallest levels, threatened to damage a dozen, a hundred other areas.

And now he would find out if Dragon’s backup would restore properly.

He pulled off his helmet, setting it on the bench beneath the monitor. He rubbed one hand across his head. He’d taken to shaving it close, in part for the efficiency of it, in part because the surgeries to replace his eye and the implants he’d set into recesses in his skull had required incisions in his scalp. Dragon had handled that.

His fingers traced the faint, almost imperceptible scars that ran neatly across the sides and top of his head. Marks she’d left him.

More errors appeared on the screen. The estimated time of a successful backup clicked upwards with each one. Two hours. Three hours. Six hours.

At the same time, in Colin’s head, the odds of a successful load were going down. Twenty-five percent. Twenty three. Fifteen.

There were other backups. He suspected the ones that had been uploaded after his tampering would run into the same issues. The same errors.

The ones before? Before he’d altered anything? It would be a different Dragon than the one he’d come to know. She would watch the video feeds, listen to the tapes, even experience some of those things for herself, where the system had taken it all online. But she wouldn’t be the same Dragon he knew. The organic A.I. architecture would develop in different ways, with different nuances. So many things connected to so many other things with each new experience, and the connections would occur in a different fashion.

No, he realized. Even worse. He would have to head her off before she got access to the data. If he had to load that backup, he would be loading her as she was before he freed her of the PRT’s shackles. She would be obligated to fight him. He’d managed a sneak attack the first time. The second? She’d see what he did, force him to try another means.

And he’d have to be more ruthless, knowing he was doing harm to her, injuring her to her core.

He couldn’t bear to watch further. It was too soon to try another backup, both in terms of the system’s ability to handle the task and his own ability. But sitting here, watching the list of errors grow, it was angering him, and it was an anger without a focus.

Touching two fingers to his lips, Colin moved those fingers to the monitor’s frame, pressing them there. The gesture was sentimental enough it felt unlike him, somehow false. Doing nothing would feel wrong too.

That was his current state, stranded inside his own head, in the midst of his own feelings.

Uncharted territory, in a way.

He pulled on his helmet and stepped outside, and hopped up onto the nose of the Tiamat II.

New Delhi loomed before him. Ruined, damaged, impossible to recover. The sun was only now setting, and the sky was red, mingling with the traces of clouds that still remained in the sky.

He wanted to contact Chevalier, to know that his friend was okay, that the Protectorate was okay. He didn’t trust himself to stay calm, to keep from saying something about Dragon, from venting, being emotional.

Chevalier would understand, he suspected. But Colin’s masculinity would take a hit, and it would only cause more trouble than it fixed.

Staring out at the city, and the crowds of people in hazmat suits who were moving in for relief, for search and rescue, he frowned. He and Dragon had had some intense discussions on the subject of what it was to be a ‘man’. To be human, to be masculine, feminine.

Dragon had been pissed when he’d suggested she was the feminine ideal. That, in the eternal crisis that any woman faced between being the virgin, the madonna, and being sensual, sexual, she was both.

He wished he understood why she’d been so angry.

To be a man, though, it wasn’t much easier. The standard society set was just as high. To be a provider, a rock, to be sensitive, yet to avoid being emotional.

For long minutes, he stared out over the city, watching the sun dip beneath the horizon, the smoke and dust making the distant star’s light hazier, fuzzier.

“Tiamat II,” he said. “Alert me when the system is finished the backup process, one way or another.”

“Yes, Defiant.”

Uncomfortably similar to Dragon’s voice. He felt an ache in his chest.

He hopped down from the nose of the craft, then used his spear to help himself down from the craggy edge of terrain that had been raised up from the earth in the chaos. He strode forward, towards the city proper, calibrating his helmet to help identify any warm bodies.

“Annex? Kirk?”

Kirk sat up from the hospital bed.

“You can stay where you are,” the doctor said, not looking up from the clipboard.

“I’m okay,” Kirk said.

“Your test results are taking some time, I’m sorry. We can expect a two or three-hour wait. Half an hour for the MRI, forty-five minutes for the CT scan.”

“At least it’s something to do,” Kirk replied.

“You’d be surprised at how quickly it gets boring,” the doctor answered.

Kirk winced. “Okay. Can I maybe use a phone in the meantime? Call my parents? They’ll be wondering.”

“They’ve already been informed,” the man answered. “They’ll be here shortly. There’s paperwork they’ll have to sign, because a few of your teammates are also walking around without any protection for their identities, but I don’t imagine that’ll take long.”

“Maybe I can call my friends? They’ll be wondering how I’m doing.”

“They know about your life in costume?”

“They were there when I got my powers. I just want to call someone, anyone I know, to occupy my thoughts, to talk.”

“There’s a phone at the nurse’s station, center of the floor. Ask and they’ll punch in the number to dial out.”

“Okay,” Kirk said, smiling. He gripped the side of his hospital gown to bind it shut.

“I…” the doctor started, he stopped and frowned.

Kirk had halted in his tracks, shifting his weight to keep his bare feet from making too much contact with the cold floor.

Odd, in a way, that he had to. But his power tended to be all or nothing.

“I shouldn’t tell you this, and I’m not naming names, but the first test results have come in, for some of the others who were at your side in New Delhi. Here, and in other cities. The tests for radiation are coming back negative.”

Kirk blinked.

“No promises it’ll be the same for you, but…”

“A bit of hope?” Kirk asked.

“With luck.”

“Thank you,” Kirk said, smiling for the first time. “Thank you.”

“I should be the one saying that to you,” the doctor said. “Just… don’t be too disappointed if the answer isn’t what you wanted, okay?”

“Deal,” Kirk answered.

“…further reports are coming in from multiple sources. The Endbringer Behemoth has been reported as being slain in New Delhi!”

“Yes, Lizbeth. Video footage is always scarce when dealing with the Endbringers, but verification has been consistent from multiple sources. It seems the footage seen earlier of the great shaft of light was an attack from an unknown party, debilitating the Endbringer. Defending forces held the injured monster off until Scion could arrive, delivering a finishing blow.”

“Earlier in the year, for those of you who don’t remember, Chevalier boasted of a new Protectorate, clear of the sabotage and interference from its own leaders. Today may serve as a testament to that boast.”

“All around the world, people seem to be celebrating, but it’s a markedly cautious celebration. Early polls on the UKCC web site suggest that a full eighteen percent of people who voted are waiting for more information or verification before celebrating the heroes’ victory, and ten percent of people don’t intend to celebrate at all.”

“Not at all?”

“No, Lizbeth. In the comments thread of the poll, a common trend seems to be the feeling that he isn’t or can’t be dead, that the heroes were mistaken, or that this might even provoke a response from the remaining Endbringers.”

“Amazing. We’re just now getting more information…”

“Dad?”

“Taylor! Oh my god. You’re alive.”

“I wasn’t sure if you wanted me-”

“Are you hurt?”

“I’m okay. I just got the tests back, and there’s no sign of ambient radiation or any of that.”

“I’m glad.”

“Me too. I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to call. You haven’t replied to my messages, about being there if and when they invite me to the Wards. And you were there for court, but you didn’t talk to me.”

“I am glad you called. About my not-”

“We killed him.” The words were blurted out.

There was silence on the line.

“Behemoth is dead.”

Silence, still.

“We killed him,” the words were a repeat of earlier. As if that summed it up. “I think it’s already on the news.”

“I know. I saw, but I didn’t quite believe it. I’m dumbfounded. Amazed. I’m so proud of you. Wow.”

“I wanted to tell you before you heard from others, but there’s so much goddamn bureaucracy going on, and they wouldn’t give me a phone in the hospital room.”

“Were you- did you help? Were you a part of that?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I’m just… I’m trying to wrap my head around it. Wow.”

There was a silence on the other end, this time.

“Taylor?”

“I’ve had a lot of time to think, to wonder why you didn’t come. Why you haven’t visited me. You’re afraid of me.”

“Taylor, that’s not-”

“It’s true, isn’t it? And all of the doubts I had before dialing the phone and calling you, they were right, this makes it worse. I have a rap sheet that’s like, eighty pages thick, and I killed a man, and then I killed Director Tagg and Alexandria. She is dead, by the way. If you see her on the news, it’s just a cape that stole her body. Her corpse. And now you hear about me fighting Behemoth and it makes it worse. I can’t even talk about what I did without digging the knife in deeper.”

“Taylor, no. It’s not fear. I saw some of your friends, not long ago. I wanted to talk to your employee, Charlotte, and the others came. And I saw this whole other life, this side of you I couldn’t recognize at all. Little things that I recognized, yes, and then big things that I could barely fathom. I’ve never been able to handle loss well, with Annette, and now feeling like I maybe lost you… I just… I want to adjust, to get my head around this, and then I can visit and things will be like they were.”

“Things aren’t going to be like they were, dad. I don’t want them to be. I’m trying to put as much distance between the person I was then and the person I am now as I can. I’m sucking pretty hard at it, but I’m trying. Except maybe today, I found a middle ground. And it worked, in a way that makes me proud and terrified and amazed and confused and apparently I’m in trouble for something I did. I’m in trouble because I was wearing a camera and they saw the footage and I was walking that middle ground between the person I was and the person they want me to be, and I did a lot of borderline sketchy shit just to get by and they don’t understand.”

There was a note of emotion in the last word, a break in the rant.

“Taylor…”

One word, and then silence.

The voice was calmer this time, more measured. “I’m sorry. I’m really tired. I’m going in soon. To talk to them. They’ve made it clear they aren’t happy. Except I think they’re a little bit afraid of me too. Afraid of me like my own dad is.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Deny it.”

There was a pause.

“I’m not afraid, Taylor. If there’s any fear, my love for you outweighs it by far, understand?”

But the phone was already steadily buzzing with a dial tone. The pause was enough.

♦ Topic: Footage (Original Poster)

In: Boards ► World News ► Main

Bagrat

Posted on July 26th, 2011:

Link here.

Mirrors here, here and here.

Came directly to me. Cuts in and out, but that’s to be expected.

More info later. Better to watch and see for yourself than get it here.

(Showing page 39 of 39)

► Thatdude

Replied on July 26th, 2011:

@ Bystander

I don’t know, but holy shit was that intense. I wish there was more at the end.

► Mane Magenta

Replied on July 26th, 2011:

When Scion uses his power it disturbs electronics. Its why when he flies you can’t track him unless its with your eyes.

Omg. I’m only halfway through. This is almost a feature length film.

► Dawgsmiles (Veteran poster)

Replied on July 26th, 2011:

anyone else have to look up some of the people in there? i almost thought one or two weren’t villains

► Saskatchew

Replied on July 26th, 2011:

It’s kind of terrifying, isn’t it? There’s only like twenty in my province but you think maybe **one** can do something like we saw partway through and its like wow holy shit I could run into them in the street at any time

► Feychick

Replied on July 26th, 2011:

holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck

(56 minutes in).

► Ne

Replied on July 26th, 2011:

@49:00 When she’s talking to the guy in blue. Who is that? Not in the wiki. How do you even SPELL that? She turns on her friend? What happens to that guy? Did he die? Did she get him killed?

► Forgotten CreatorReplied on July 26th, 2011:

@ Dawgsmiles – I had to look up one or two. There was a short doc about some of them a bit ago after Alexandria died. You can find it here.

► Logs

Replied on July 26th, 2011:

Let’s see:

► General Prancer

Replied on July 26th, 2011:

anyone else really interested in learning more about Weaver?

edit: @Logs: don’t get too attached to anyone.

► Noveltry

Replied on July 26th, 2011:

This cuts out at the most frustrating times.

End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … 38, 39

Glenn reached across his keyboard to refresh his email, then hit the key on his keyboard to shut down the machine. While the screen went through the motions, Glenn walked around the desk to kneel on the floor. The computer itself was set into a recess in the floor, and he worked at unplugging and unscrewing each wire in turn.

A butterfly flew across his field of vision, and he jumped despite himself.

“Weaver,” he said, turning around.

“Glenn,” she said. She wasn’t in costume, but her glower was intense enough that she might as well have been in her full garb as Skitter, complete with shawl, skirt and the carpet of insects crawling on her.

“Recuperating?”

“Not as much as I’d like,” she said. Her voice was hard. “I’m not having the best day, on a lot of levels.”

“Still waiting for the tribunal to convene?” Glenn asked. “It’s been hours now.”

“The secretary’s supposed to call me. They gave me one of the superhero phones so I could call my dad, told me to hold onto it. I’d take it as a good sign, except there’s a video circulating online. My video. Well past the point where anyone could hope to control access to it. Mirrors, bitsharing, hardcopies…”

“I see. Upsetting.”

“Yeah. Just a little,” she said. The tone was light, but her expression remained the same. “Packing up?”

“Yes,” Glenn said. He tried to lift the desktop, found more wires attached at the bottom, and set it down to unplug them.

“I expect I’ll be fired. They’ll make me clean out my office, so I figured I would get a headstart. I don’t keep anything permanent that isn’t on my personal computer, so this box is all I need.”

She didn’t respond.

He tried to lift it again, only to find more wires connected on the front.

“No need to worry. If you’re here to inflict some bug-induced torture on me, you can save yourself a lot of effort by leaving me to my own devices with this damned box. I promise you, I’ll figure out something worse to do to myself.”

Butterflies circled her as she stalked forward. Glenn backed away a step before he realized what she was doing. She wasn’t even a third of his weight, and the only insects she seemed to have on hand were butterflies, but he felt a touch intimidated nonetheless.

Were the butterflies supposed to be ironic? A gesture?

She knelt down beside the computer, fiddled around and disconnected the remaining wires, then lifted the box up to the floor beside the recess.

“Thank you. I’m good with computers, with software, but laughably bad with the technology.”

“Why, Glenn? It was private. It was supposed to be for therapy.”

“Wasn’t my choice to parcel it out. Dragon was killed, by all accounts, and Director Wilkins made the call to hand it out, for your pending conduct review.”

“And you made the call to release it online.”

“I suppose Tattletale informed you. Do you know how frustrating it is to be a mere human being among powers like you and your friend?”

“I dunno,” she said. “I figure you can relieve your stress by uploading their personal videos to the internet.”

Glenn sighed. “You’re tired. You’re not being rational.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s totally the way to talk to a girl.”

Glenn stepped forwards, resisted the urge to flinch as the butterflies briefly invaded his personal space. He met her eyes, waited for her to look away, then snapped, right in front of her.

Her eyes locked onto his, and she looked even more irritated.

“Stop,” he said. “Look me in the eyes. I want to talk to Weaver the strategist, not Taylor.”

She didn’t move a muscle, but he wondered if the butterflies changed course. She remained silent, glowering.

“I know you’re tired. Today took a lot out of you,” Glenn said. “But think. What purpose does it serve to upload the video?”

“It’s the best footage you have of the event. The best way to sell the win, the PRT’s involvement.”

“Think bigger.”

“That’s pretty damn big.”

“Bigger, Weaver. Come on. Do you think I got to where I am by thinking one dimensionally? What else, why? I’m getting fired. I knew I’d get fired. Would I do it just for that?”

“Probably, if there wasn’t another way.”

“With an ego like mine?”

“Honestly, your ego can’t be that big if you wear those clothes.”

Despite himself, he was a little stung. He’d cultivated his image to demand attention. Even his weight was calculated, to make it clear he was not one of them, that he was someone with power, presence. His clothes were admittedly awful. They were intended to be awful. But they didn’t diminish his sense of pride in the least.

It was a shame he was undoubtedly going to lose his job. It would be nice to discuss the idea of image from two very different perspectives.

“I’m not your adversary, Weaver.”

“No. I can’t help but feel you’re an albatross around my neck. I keep hearing that you’ve done stuff to help, but I keep experiencing this… this.”

“I’m your ally, Weaver. You think I don’t recognize the issues in the PRT? The corruption that’s still at the core? The need for change? There has to be some sacrifice, and there has to be someone to step forward, a harbinger for that change. Chevalier may be the hero of the day, he can lay the groundwork for change, but he can’t be that harbinger. He’s too entrenched.”

“You want me to be the harbinger.”

“It’ll be hard, but I think you’ll manage with that. Putting this video online, it’s going to achieve a lot of things. I think, seeing you in the thick of it, it’s going to change people’s opinion of you. There’ll be controversy, some will hate you. But others? This will be their first view of what it’s truly like on the battlefield. They’ll have to like you, to sympathize. But the rule of three says you won’t be forgotten about.”

“Rule of three?”

“Three times, you’ve been forced into the public eye. As the leader of Brockton Bay, as the newly christened Weaver, slayer of Alexandria, and here, in the video.”

“I was just thinking about something like that, in a totally different way. Twice now, I’ve betrayed my teammates. At first, when they found out I was an aspiring hero, an undercover operative. Then I became Weaver. This’ll be the third. I had the camera, stuff was said and done, private stuff talked about, and they won’t like it. They didn’t ask to be in the spotlight any more than I did.”

“Some of it will endear you to the public,” Glenn said.

“Being worshipped as a god wouldn’t be worth hurting them again,” Weaver retorted. Her voice was hard again. “Grue believes that image and reputation are a kind of protection. Being seen as soft, when he’s dealing with people in the criminal underworld? It could get him killed.”

“They’ll forgive you that setback, I’m sure. They’ll understand you didn’t choose to do it.”

“Rachel’s not the understanding type. I’ve fought an uphill battle to get her trust, and if she feels hurt by this, or if she registers that others are hurt, and that I’m the culprit in any way-”

“With luck, public opinion and an insight into the bond you have with the team will make it easier to interact with your old team. You’ll have more chances to fix any damage.”

Weaver shook her head, staring down at the ground.

“It’s an honest look into what the heroes do, Weaver. What you capes face every day. Why there’s so much gray in the moral palette. With this, Chevalier’s new Protectorate won’t be something that exists in name only.”

“You could have asked.”

“You would have said no. And there was no time. We needed to make it absolutely clear just what you and the rest of the heroes did on the field, so Scion couldn’t overshadow you. We needed to do it right away. Cement the idea into the public mind so it was the first concrete piece of information they got.”

She stared at the ground. The lines in her face were deep with exhaustion. The butterflies had landed on her shoulders and arms.

He let the idea sit. Better to let her speak next.

She did. “Chevalier is laying the groundwork, I’m the harbinger… and you’re the sacrifice, then?”

He met her eyes. “They won’t be as upset with you as they are right this moment. I’ll draw the initial heat. By the time they’re done with me, my career and any possible job in a related field will be ashes in the wind. For you, well, it’ll tip the scales. If you’re halfway into the ‘deserves a medal’ camp and halfway into the ‘needs to be punished’ camp, this will help.”

“I could have done some things better, but was I that bad?”

“Consorting with villains you were supposed to avoid, putting Wards on the line to help them, dealing with Phir Sē without contacting any superiors. You ignored the rules regarding image, took gambles-”

“I had to. All of that. I was told that rules are relaxed on the field. You can’t seriously expect me to use butterflies against Behemoth.”

“Of course not,” Glenn responded. “Do you think I’m stupid? I know this. But there’s a lot of people paying attention to this. Many people who will be in that room won’t know these things, won’t fully understand. Some won’t even watch the video before they pass judgement on what occurred in it. Never underestimate the stupidity of people.”

Weaver made a sound, halfway to a sigh, halfway to a laugh.

Glenn smiled a little. “The video burns one bridge. No more butterflies. Though they won’t hurt, because it makes it a hell of a lot harder for any common criminals to complain about an excess use of power, but I’m digressing…”

Weaver’s phone beeped. A moment later, Glenn’s vibrated. He checked it.

He closed the message window.

“Thank you,” Weaver said. “I think. I’m supposed to go now.”

“Me too. Join me?” Glenn asked.

Weaver nodded. Her collection of butterflies led the way out of the office.

Glenn spoke without looking at her. “I don’t expect you to like me. Never really did. One of the first and biggest problems you ran into was with your image. It’s a problem even now, I suspect. It will continue to be a problem, especially now that you’re in the limelight.”

“Uh huh.”

Glenn reached into his vest pocket and withdrew a case. He opened it, removed a business card, and handed it over.

“My number. In case you need advice. Well, use my cell. My work number probably won’t be mine for much longer.”

Weaver stared down at the card. She didn’t need to look up as she walked, as the butterflies checked her path for her. Other bugs had joined them.

“Just do me a favor,” Glenn said.

Weaver glanced at him.

“Make friends with whoever they hire to replace me. Listen to them. You’re allowed to hate them too, but hear them out. Can’t hurt.”

She nodded. She looked down at the card again, then looked up at him. “Can I call this in now? It’s about my dad.”

“Defiant?“

Defiant couldn’t move, as he held a heavy concrete slab out of the way for emergency crews. He used the cursor embedded in his eye to select the ‘answer’ command, and shut the vents around his mouth.

“Tiamat II, hold off on any reports for now.” Can’t take it, not right this moment.

“It’s me.“