Flashfire groans in my arms as I alight in the Rothko chapel, my mind still reeling from what just happened. Mateo taken from me, no way to get him back. He’s with the Vanguard, now, but I’m already thinking of how I can rescue him. I’ll dig information out of Flashfire… I’ll get in touch with Kitsune again…

Metis! Kitsune and Bedevil! One and the very same. I guess I’d never really listened to Bedevil on the news or anything, but I can’t believe I didn’t recognize her voice. Megajoule’s admonishment that I’m an idiot comes back into my mind. I very well might be.

I have to wonder; did she recognize me by his voice? Or maybe we’re different enough that she didn’t. I hope to Metis she doesn’t know. The truth… it would hurt her so bad. She was his fucking sidekick, his teammate. I can’t even imagine what she felt when he died.

But then again, what do I fucking care if it hurts her? She just tried to capture me.

Maybe it’s a testament to how different I actually am from Megajoule. After weeks of hanging out with me, she still didn’t seem to know I was his clone. And I didn’t know she was Bedevil until she gave it away.

A scary thought enters my mind and runs a knife down to my core: Unless she does know, and she’s hiding it. My chest is hollow again, like my heart collapsed in on itself and left me with a black hole.

I can’t think about that now. There’s so much more shit to deal with, like the woman that left me to die at the hands of the capes. Still holding Flashfire, I run up to the Rothko portrait and shout: “Hola, fuckers! I know you’re there!”

The black portal softens as it has before, but before I can step up into it, Silent leaps out of the void, her sword drawn and trained on me. I can’t help but imagine a ghoulish snarl behind her tinted visor.

Silent steps into a thrust aimed for my head. I drop Flashfire to the ground and let Silent see how useless her sword is against me. So useless that with her strength and my power, the blade shatters on my skull without even disturbing a single hair.

I give her my best “That all you got?” look.

That is not all Silent has got. Without missing a beat, she peppers me with a flurry of blows. They come lightning quick, like viper strikes, like bullets from guns. I can barely follow her flow with my thermokinetic sense - as soon as I’m aware of the way she’s moving, she’s already landed her attack and started the next one.

From how much energy I absorb from each blow, she’s head and shoulders stronger than the average Affected person. Almost Heavyweight. But still, it’s nothing much for me to drink it up. I let every single blow land just to show her I can, just to show her she’s only giving me more power.

She changes tactics, stepping forward, and swims her arms under mine to lock us in a clinch. Her hands snake behind my neck, locking in a vice grip, and she swivels her hips, trying to tilt me over. I can’t exactly drink the energy of something like this, so I struggle to stay on my feet, using kinetic energy to try and counteract her grappling.

She hooks her foot under my leg, climbing up my body, and tilts forward to roll me into the ground.

I warp forward with my power, trying to throw her off me with the momentum. She clings to my neck and leg like a boa constrictor. I needle her with my elbow, infusing each strike with energy. Not trying to kill her, just do some damage. I’m just a little too slow. She wriggles out of my range, still clinging to my back.

She gets me into a choke hold.

“She knows where you’re weak,” Megajoule hisses.

No other option. I tilt forward, grabbing her by the collar of her jacket, and fling her off me with a final burst of kinetic energy. I hurl her into the portal and warp in behind her, hoping that Portrait will open it to spare her friend being splattered. I grab Flashfire from the ground as we fly by.

I’m right and I don’t really care that if I was wrong, Silent was dead. All I know is that she vanishes into the darkness and I’m right behind her, and then the next second I’m in the club hallway, still thumping with music.

I turn around, expecting the other women to attack me, but I only find Epione, with one hand each on Saw Off and Portrait’s shoulders. None of them move, either to run or attack me, but Saw Off looks like she wants to punch someone. Can’t really tell what Portrait is thinking.

“You brought us a Houston Hero,” Epione says. “Well done.”

Oh, this gaslighting motherfucker. “You’re not gonna pretend this was your plan the whole time.”

Epione shrugs, looks away, the frost queen of all frost queens. “I figured you’d survive.”

Meanwhile, Silent climbs to her feet, rage rolling off her like smoke.

“You fucking abandoned me!” I roll up my sleeves, getting ready for round two. Instead of attacking me, however, Silent simply returns to Epione’s side.

“I told you he was too much trouble,” she says, but Epione hushes her.

She waves her hand dismissively, turning her attention to Flashfire. “Well, you got away, which means we don’t need to be as hasty. Where is Volition, back at the house?”

I’ve had enough of this, enough of being jerked around. “They have him, you fucking sociopath!”

“Have him? The capes?” Saw Off asks, her eyes widening. “Ep, you let them take a kid!”

“I didn’t-” Epione sighs. “This wasn’t my fault. This was his. He had a dalliance with a cape! He didn’t have the good sense to tell us, either, and now we’re paying the price.”

“How’s it my fault when the empath and the one with super senses didn’t pick up on the trap we were stepping into until it was already sprung? I’m not the one that made you do that.” I look at Silent. “You thought Epione was getting reckless because of me? Or has she been getting more unhinged since you lost masks?”

Silent starts at my question and her Affect tells me she wants to clean my clock, but with that comes… acceptance. She knows this started long before me. I’m not the cause, I’m the symptom.

“You will not turn us against each other.” Epione faces me down, her hand outstretched. A warning that she can influence my emotions if she wants, if she touches me. But I bet I could take her down before she got within ten feet with a random bit of debris.

Before this escalates further, my sleeping beauty coughs and stirs, moaning.

Epione jabs a finger at me to stay put and approaches Flashfire on the floor. She kneels and rolls him to his back, so she can look at his face. Flaky red burn marks cover his cheek, neck, and arms, like severe sunburns. It’s honestly frightening that he withstood that much of my heat and only come away with minor injuries.

His eyes flutter. He must be somewhat conscious. Epione removes her black glove and cups his chin with her hand. With this almost intimate gesture, Flashfire gasps, waking up fully.

Flashfire scowls, waves his hands like he’s conjuring his power. No blinding white fire answers his call. He blinks, confused, looks down at very normal body in a panic. “What in the shit… what did you do to me?” I thought he’d be familiar with an empath shutting off his flow of engrams. I’ve had it done to me a couple of times.

Then he locks eyes with me. The shards of club light reveal an angry man in brief flashes, and with each successive image, his face twists more and more into fury, until Epione puts another finger on his chest. Then, he goes blank, just like Mateo with the PK dampener. Epione pushes him gently to the floor. “We’ve got to go. Nothing’s changed, ladies. Home Run, you can go wherever you want. I don’t care.”

“You think I’m letting you walk away?” I ask.

“Is there anyone else you care about that Volition has seen?” Epione asks.

“What are you talking about?”

Epione rises, puts her glove back and pats her hands together aggressively. She stalks toward me but stops short when light floods my arms, ready to burn this place to the ground if she thinks about getting near me. From a safe distance away, she circles around me, instead. “Do you know who Oracle is?”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Oracle? The Vanguard’s head honcho? Yeah, might’ve heard of her.”

“She can read minds. Anyone not wearing a mask is at risk of her spying out their memories - everywhere they’ve been, who they’ve been with, and what they were doing. With Bedevil being one of her personal agents, I don’t doubt Volition is getting Oracle’s front row treatment.”

I avoid coughing nervously at the mention of Bedevil’s name. Better they don’t know the particular cape I happened to lock lips with.

But Epione can still pick up on emotions far easier than I can. She senses my discomfort. Clicks her tongue. “Really. You had to pick the single cape in Houston connected to the heart of the Vanguard to romance?”

Saw Off groans. “He and Bedevil?”

“It’s done!” I shout. I didn’t even know. Maybe I should have known.

“It doesn’t matter. We’re leaving. The capes may already have a list of locations to raid.” Epione snaps her fingers. “Home Run, I suggest you tend to anyone else, anywhere else you need to, before the capes come crawling around. If it isn’t too late already.”

Finally it clicks. The one person I haven’t seen in over a month, the only person that could potentially be hurt by this.

Paul.

“I want you to know that you’re just as bad as the capes,” I say as I leave.

Epione doesn’t look at me. “They are very quickly going to prove you wrong.”

#

I fly to the junkyard as fast as I can while still masking my presence from the fleets of drones prowling around. I stick to the dark as much as possible, gliding my way along the rooftops until I’m back in the Shells.

Our house hasn’t been touched as far as I can tell. Not yet. Maybe they saw us leaving it behind in Mateo’s memories, decided it wasn’t worth investigating. But I can’t imagine them not coming to look for the man who kidnapped one of their most heinous experiments.

I feel the yard out with my senses from the next roof over. No elevated heartbeats, no panic, no extra bodies. In fact… no bodies at all. I vault over to the junkyard.

The lights in the house are off. No heartbeats, human or canine. I gently open the door and find our living space the same as when I left it, except cleaner. The kitchen still has a vial of pills in it. Our beds remain unmade.

“The old man seems to have become a ghost,” Megajoule says, walking out of the bathroom like he was there the entire time. “You did well back there.”

“Come on, man, leave me alone.” I try to ignore him and continue searching for evidence Paul might have left behind. Pawpaw isn’t here either, so he must’ve taken the dog with him. I check in the cupboards for spare cash or food. All cleaned out.

“Do you think they simply took him and the dog? Without any resistance? I imagine the raisin has just about zero fight left in him.” When I look up, Megajoule is laying across the counter, his head resting on his hand. “You don’t think so?”

“No. They couldn’t have cleaned all this out this fast. It would still be an active crime scene if they’d come here. They must think we really did abandon it or-” The drones probably did come here, but found it empty and moved on. I’m sure they scanned for his Affect.

I head out the front door, look for any signs that they busted their way in. But there’s nothing, no sign of a fight, not anything. I wiggle the door handle idly, looking out at the yard again.

Then I feel them. Drones. A cloud of them coming out of the sky to scan the Shells. They’re falling fast, almost like rain droplets, and I realize that they’re coming with something else, a larger shape within their number. The end of the street explodes from a sudden impact, which sends a plume of dust up from the road. A huge shadow lurks in that cloud, a smaller shadow floating above their shoulder, and a voice calls out: “Home Run, I know you’re in there.”

I know that voice. The word escapes my lips with a heaving breath, a shuddering sigh of fear.

“Krater.”

Far worse than Flashfire. Far worse than Danger Close. Krater is their bruiser, their titan, the one they call to fight monsters. I only saw him briefly tonight, but I took advantage of the chaos to run before he could really get rolling.

He rises from the broken street, from the dust and shattered concrete, with the easy smile of a hero who has fought many fights and believes in his cause. He’s a hero’s hero, a cape among capes, and he belongs to Houston; from his friendly smile to his massive, broad shoulders that carry the weight of the city. Inhumanely large, at least seven and a half feet tall, he must weigh in at five hundred pounds, almost all of it muscle. He wears a bare bones costume, a simple leotard, low cut enough to reveal the granite wall of his chest.

A cape that doesn’t need to wear armor is a cape that’s either horrendously stupid or horrendously invincible. Guess which one applies to Krater.

I panic, retreat back into our house. “What the fuck do I do?”

But Megajoule is, as fucking always, gone when I need him most.

The junkyard shakes as Krater lands on the walkway leading to our door. I make for the back exit, but sense a swarm of drones congregating there. I could shoot through them, but some of them come equipped with PK dampeners, tasers, and other things I’d have trouble fighting. I could try to melt them but… I turn my senses to the other buildings, warehouses, and houses nearby, feel so many beating hearts out there in the Shells. If this breaks out into a fight, if I try to go toe to toe, expel any heat at all, then people are going to get hurt.

I’m caught between a rock and a hard place.

Krater knocks on the door, as if he needs to at all. “Come on, Home Run. You can make this easy. There’s more capes on the way, and we’re ready for what you can dish out now. It’ll be easier if you just comply. Come with us. You can tell us what you did with Flashfire.”

“People are gonna die if you do this,” I shout back.

“No one has to die,” Krater says.

Kinda really doubt that, dude.

I’ve got one shot to move this away from people. If I take Krater by surprise, I can probably move the fight somewhere safer for everyone.

He opens the door.

I charge forward, tackling him with all the kinetic power I can muster without damaging the building. The blow is enormous, requires me to throw my whole body into it, and blows my door off its hinges. We roll together right out of the junkyard and out onto the street.

We separate and I get to my feet, drinking in energy to get another flight going. But where the hell can I go?

Krater stands up, brushes himself off. He clicks his tongue once. “Okay. We’ll do this.”

He lunges with an explosive step, shattering the pavement beneath his feet with a thundering boom.

You ever stare down an oncoming train? I do not recommend.

His fist swings and I duck, throwing a kick at his leg. He grabs me and pulls me in towards him. He lifts me off my feet and slams me back like an old school wrestler.

I make one successful dodge by slapping his hand away from me, using enough force that the windows shake around us, but his next grapple catches my leg. The world turns and turns and I smash against the street, throwing out energy as I can, kicking and fighting as I can, but he’s not trying to beat me into submission. He’s trying to grapple me, and against that, my power is less effective. There’s nothing to absorb and his strength and endurance are enough that my kinetically enhanced strikes don’t buy me any wriggle room. So I start flying instead. I hurl off huge waves of heat, trying to push us, hitting lift off like we’re a rocket made of two men.

Blocks of Houston roll by under us as I use my power, but Krater doesn’t let go. This is just like Silent trying to grapple me, but worse. Far worse. Silent was a stick of dynamite, Krater is an entire nuclear bomb.

We hit the ground. Debris and dust cover my face and fill my lungs. I cough and spit out what I can.

A woman shrieks behind me.

“Easy, head to the safe room!” a man orders. “It’s a cape fight!” I glance behind me and see a family of five retreating from their dinner table to the kitchen.

Holy shit, we landed in somebody’s house.

Krater rises again, like a bear emerging from hibernation. With sudden fury he grabs me and hurls me upward, through the upstairs. I just barely manage to avoid smearing a screaming young boy and his mother.

I hang in the air above the house, drinking in the energy of falling, trying to build up enough power to hit Krater hard enough to put him down. Energy floods into me as I float there.

And then I hear the screaming, the alarms from houses and cars that our path ruptured, and the distant, muffled weeping of survivors. Sirens sound in the distance. People in this neighborhood looking up at me with terrified eyes.

They aren’t looking at me like a hero, like I’m someone who just saved their lives. They’re looking at me like a demon. Like a cloak. Like Carnality.

An elderly husband and wife stare at me from just down the road. People are coming to the windows to see what’s the matter.

There’s way too many people here.

Krater leaps up out of the house, trying to grab me. I kick him hard in the chest just as he’s about to grab me, sinking in as much heat as I dare.

His whole body grows a stone shell from that single blow, but he manages to tank right through it. He grabs me by the ankle and we fall back to the earth together. He ragdolls me, making me eat the pole of a street lamp. I fight to keep on my feet, dancing backwards, trying to get to an empty lot, abandoned field, anything. “People live here, dick!”

“So surrender!” Krater tackles me and we roll toward the elderly couple. It’s all I can do to keep us from bowling over them, using my power to change our course mid-air. The world revolves, turns, transforms around me so fast that I can barely process where I am. Trees, pavement, grass, house, bursting window, shattered kitchen. All my concentration goes toward keeping us from killing anyone, which leaves me no slack to stop Krater’s vicious assault.

I also can’t unleash myself. Not in the middle of this crowded street, with hundreds of people around us. I’ll incinerate them long before I get the upper hand on Krater.

There’s only one option. As he’s hooking under my legs with one arm and around my back with the other to really lock me down, I kick against the street. All that built up power goes into this one launch.

I fly faster than I’ve ever flown, farther than I’ve ever jumped. We shoot into the ruins of Cosmoworld, an abandoned theme park built upon the remnants of a previous abandoned theme park called Astroworld. Giant, shadowed coasters preside over darkness, hulking metal corpses of excess luxury long gone.

I bounce off a metal loop de loop, ripping free of Krater’s grasp, and crash into a bumper car arena. The structure groans and collapses around me, and I’m left blinking up at the stars again. Still alive, I rise to my feet and make my way out of the wreckage.

Krater waits for me in the pavilion outside, sitting on the bench near a stagnant fountain and catching his breath. The roller coasters loom over us in the dark like monstrous skeletons, the ancient remnants of huge beasts.

“No wonder, Home Run. You’re something else,” Krater says, wiping his jaw. He’s bleeding just a little. “But you and I both know you ain’t got much more. I can tell. Look at you, you’re exhausted. Just come back to the Shrine and we’ll take care of you.”

“I really don’t wanna die, man.”

“And I really couldn’t give less of a shit. You killed my friend.” He stands up, rolls his shoulder, ready to do more.

I steel myself, then unleash the heat I’ve had restrained inside.