Alex bristled as her phone buzzed urgently, desperately trying to ignore the emergency call currently echoing through her apartment.

A fight with Arxis earlier in the day had left her drained and she wanted nothing more than to fall asleep on her couch watching old wrestling reruns. Annoyed, she grabbed her phone and tried to pass the emergency bulletin to Velo, only for Amory herself to redirect the notice back to Alex, a rarity since the Protectors had quelled the Altered uprising six months ago. She opened the message.

“Apex Tower. Emergency. Now.”

Amory wasn’t exactly descriptive at the best of times, but her urgency did alarm Alex. Reluctantly, and still in her suit, she leapt from her balcony and flew over to Apex Tower, zipping a familiar path through the city, her cape rippling behind her. Instantly, Alex could see why Amory had demanded she come ASAP.

Her concern grew as a sea of employees poured out of the obsidian building in a disorganized tide. Apex, Alex knew, did not want to show their hand on anything unless they were forced, and this chaotic stampede belied Apex’s air of total control. Thankfully, despite the large crowd, no one appeared to be hurt, but there was an alarm blaring and red lights flashing across the building, which was usually Alex’s clue that she was in the right place.

“Titan,” Amory’s voice cut in over her comms. Normally calm in times of chaos, her voice was urgent. Whatever was going on, Apex itself must have been at risk. “Are you here yet?”

“Hovering over the front entrance,” Alex replied, slowly lowering herself in between groups of people running in the opposite direction. “I’ll head in and-”

“No time for elevators,” Amory told her. “We need you to fly to the roof and down through the metal tubing looping around the building as quickly as you can. It’ll take you underground, right to us.”

“The tube of death?” Alex asked, incredulously. Not its official name, of course, but she had heard more than one employee speculate that moving through the insides of the tube would be akin to bathing in a nuclear reactor. “The tube where all the Surge radiation came out of? Is that safe?”

“The very same,” Amory answered. “No time for caution now, you’ll be fine. Kingston is…relatively sure.”

“Oh, well, if Kingston’s kinda sure…”

There was a pause as Alex eyed the metal tunnel looping around the building, pushed off the pavement and leapt into the sky, a boom near her as the air exploded around her. She spun around on her way up the ten story obsidian tower, her cape flowing behind her in a bold white spiral. She located the entrance into the tube at the top of the tower, like a metal slide, then hesitated before she busted through.

“Hey, Amory, is this thing...clean?”

“Not...particularly,” Amory answered after a moment, leading to a frustrated sigh from Alex. “There’s some residual radiation leftover from the incident a year ago. We had money to build the release valve, but not enough to repair it.”

“You know,” Alex said, shaking her head, “we like to think I’m invulnerable to everything, but one of these days we’re going to be proven wrong…”

“Well, let’s pray that’s not today,” Amory said. “Get here, now.”

“Just hop in the tube, Alex,” she whispered, rolling her eyes. “Might be toxic, but you’re tough, Alex.”

She wasn’t sure why, but she thought she should hold her breath. Taking a deep inhale, she then tucked her arms as she dove inside the sprawling metal tunnel, twisting and turning down the waterslide-like tube that, just six months earlier, spewed radioactive energy all across the city. The trip was a dizzying ride down the ten story building that seemed to last forever, made even more uncomfortable by an uncomfortable itch permeating her skin. She pushed herself to fly faster, circling downward far longer than it should have taken her to descend ten stories, her skin on fire the entire time, ultimately bursting through a pair of metal gates that led right into what appeared to be an underground laboratory.

She brought herself down to the tile floor, taking a moment to glance down at her skin. The skin on her exposed arms were irritated, blotchy in spots, but remained unbroken. She wiped at her arms in an effort to get rid of the burning sensation, which was receding each moment she was away from the tunnel. Satisfied as the burning waned, she tapped her comms.

“Amory,” she said, “Where the hell am I?”

“Look up,” Amory answered.

As she did, Alex realized she was on the ground floor of a two level lab. As someone who was virtually invincible, not a lot scared Alex. After all, she had been hit with any weapon you could name, some things she couldn’t, and some things she’d rather just not remember. But there was a collective panic in the room above that let her know that if whatever was happening in here couldn’t be fixed, it wasn’t just her who was going to be hurt.

“Whoa,” Titan exclaimed as she looked around. Above her, lab technicians stood on metal grating comprising the base of what she assumed to be an observation deck, which was shielded by thick glass and a thin, nearly translucent layer of metal that Titan couldn’t identify. In front of the glass was a team of scientists each wearing a different color lab coat, around ten in all, ignoring monitors and equipment that, as best Titan could tell, were all beeping in a very fancy way of telling them that something was deeply wrong.

“What is all this?” Titan asked, bewildered. “How is this even down here? There’s no way you guys got the permits to build this.”

Ignoring her, Amory gestured towards the glass, speaking quickly as they joined the other scientists gathered around the observation deck. For the first time since she got her powers, Titan was completely ignored as the other scientists all murmured quietly amongst themselves, pointing occasionally and grimacing every time they threw a glance at a monitor. She would’ve enjoyed the moment, but the collective dread was almost palpable in the air, and she knew she was going to have to act soon to stop something big.

“We do not have a lot of time, so I’m going to make this as simple as possible,” Amory said. “Five years ago, a team of geologists from Apex drilling for oil around the state discovered an anomaly nearly a mile beneath the ground in the base of the Maroon Range. There was an energy pulsing deep beneath the soil that we didn’t understand and could not quantify. However, what we could discover…was disastrous. Testing showed that the energy was surging, vaporizing everything in its path as it marched towards Ascension. Our best scientists tracked the energy’s path for months and ultimately determined that this would culminate in a massive explosion of energy right beneath our feet in the very spot you now stand.”

Alex suddenly became very conscious of where she was standing. She took a few steps to the right, for all the good that would do her.

“And, ultimately, that’s what caused the Surge?” Alex asked.

Amory nodded. “Unfortunately that’s still pretty much all we know about it. So, Apex built their headquarters right on top of where we knew the energy would breach and built this massive fortress of a skyscraper in order to disperse it rather than let it burst in the center of Ascension and destroy the city entirely.”

“Conveniently giving Apex total access to...whatever’s down here, without having to alert anyone else,” Titan spat.

“Well...yes,” Amory admitted, “but it’s a bit late to relitigate all that.”

Alex shot her a look, but Amory ignored her and continued.

“We had no idea that the Surge would alter DNA, or that it would lead to people like your or Maelstrom. Worst of all, however, we didn’t know that it wasn’t over.”

“What are you talking about?” Alex asked. “Are you saying the Surge could happen again?”

The alarm that had faded into background noise freshly blared overhead, creating a new sense of urgency at another threshold crossed. The team of scientists suddenly gasped and rushed to a monitor on the far left, watching as a line on the monitor spiked up into the orange, held there for a moment, then fell back into the yellow, similar, Titan thought, to a heartbeat.

But that wasn’t all that happened. When the energy surged, Alex noticed a beam of light shooting out from behind her hat instantly disintegrated a scale model of Apex Tower, leaving nothing but ash as it retreated back behind the metal shielding. She jumped to the side, avoiding the beam but poking her head up a moment later.

“What...was that?” Alex said, both curious and terrified.

“That...is what we need you to fix,” a scientist answered over the comms.

“Alex, meet Kingston Roy.”

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“Radiation specialist, huge fan, incredibly scared,” Kingston told her in rapid succession.

“Don’t be,” Alex said, shaking her head. She gave Kingston a warm smile. “We’re going to fix this, okay?”

Kingston nodded, unsure, but hopeful. With the team of scientists all still huddled around the monitors, typing furiously and taking notes, Kingston stood to the side, glancing down at Titan.

“What the hell is that?” Alex pointed to the metal shielding behind her.

“That,” Kingston pointed down, where the light had shot out from a moment ago, “is the Junction. It’s easiest to think of the deep underground radiation vein as a river, okay? It’s constantly flowing, changing directions as it runs into, or through, different obstacles. It can’t be stopped from moving forward, but we can, much like scientific beavers, dam it, slowing its flow and pushing it back where it came from. However, if anything disturbs the energy on the backend, we’ll suffer the effects here.”

“Why?” Alex asked.

“Once the initial Surge event was over, we built that-” he pointed down, towards the shielding covering the Junction, a several inch thick piece of light blue metal. “Our containment shielding. We don’t know where the Surge starts, but this is where it terminates.”

“Right in the middle of the city? Whose idea was that?”

“This is where the distance between the surface and the Surge was the shallowest,” Amory cut in. “You may be able to fly, but do you know how much it costs to bore underground? Attract top talent to the middle of the woods?”

Alex grumbled, but didn’t protest further.

In the middle, however, was a slight crack with multicolored light shining through, illuminating the observation deck. Alex noticed, for the first time, a scale model of Apex’s Tower sitting on a table directly in front of the Junction. The model was smoking, with a hole cut through the middle of it.

“We designed this place so that the ground floor would be completely dark if all was well. The brighter it gets, the more trouble we’re in, basically. We had a model of the building leftover from the original build, but...”

“So, if that metal continues to split like it has, what happened to the scale model of the building will happen to the real thing?” Alex asked.

“Correct,” Kingston answered, grimacing. “And, also, to most of the city.”

“Alright,” Alex popped up, stretching her neck. “What do I need to do?”

Kingston pointed to a thin layer of metal shielding that was placed in front of the glass, lying next to the Junction.

“We put the contaminant shielding on after the Surge. I had them make extra, just in case something like this happened and we needed to patch it.”

“It was astronomically expensive,” Amory pointed out, “and when Kingston asked for more, I had to beg the board to approve the expense, but we got it. This piece is all that’s left.”

“Of what, exactly?” Alex knelt down, running her head over the blue metal.

“This metal is an alloy of the five most dense metals on Earth, and, as far as we know, it’s the only combination of metals that can block the radiation from leaking out into this room and, eventually, the entire city. It’s called-”

“Please don’t tell me you named this after yourself, please-”

“King’s Alloy.”

Alex shut her eyes and shook her head.

“Now, I typically weld distressed areas, fixing the typical wear and tear, but our problem is that the King’s Alloy is so dense that we had to get several cranes just to lift one section of the shielding and weld it all together offsite. It’s too heavy for us to break a piece off and we can’t exactly send, well, me down there to weld it back to full strength in case the energy surges again or else I’ll end up like the model, only we can’t rebuild my insides.”

“I see where this is going,” Titan said, already eyeing the crack in the shielding, no more than a few centimeters wide, but more than enough to let a blast of radiation through that, if left uncontained, could eat its way through the entire building.

“If you can, break off a piece of the shielding and weld it onto the containment unit. We’re up here, monitoring the radiation levels on all of our sensors across the state. If there’s another surge coming, I’ll tell you so you can get out of the way.”

“Got it. Break the dense thing, hold the heavy thing up, weld it, save everyone’s lives. I can do that.” Alex eyed the size of the crack, no more than a foot long, and picked up the spare piece of metal beside them. Kingston’s eyes grew wide as Alex put her boot on the edge of the metal then wrenched upwards, tearing off a gnarled, but effectively sized, piece of the alloy.

“Ready?” she asked.

Kingston smiled, nodding. Alex put the piece of metal up to the shielding, grabbing a welder off a nearby bench.

“Okay,” Kingston’s voice was shaky and quiet. “You’re going to want to avoid the surges, because...well, I don’t know what’ll happen to you. If you see the lights swirling around inside, get out of the way, and we’ll try again.”

Alex nodded, ready to begin. Up close, she noticed that there was almost scarring around the shielding, like something had been eating away at the it for a long time now. She pushed the piece of metal up to the crack, blocking the light.

“How many times have you had to fix the shielding?” Alex asked.

“More than I’d like,” Kingston admitted quietly. “It’s held together well. But now, it’s almost like a dam broke, somewhere out in the mountains. It’s sending the energy towards us like waves battering a shore.”

That’s a scary thought, Alex grimaced. She placed a hand in the center of the metal, using the other to weld.

“Okay,” Alex exhaled. “Let’s see if I can leave being a Protector behind to become a welder instead. Sounds safer, anyway.”

“I will never let that happen,” Amory chimed in.

“Worth a shot anyway,” Alex muttered. The sparks flew over her shoulder as she was able to weld for a minute straight without incident, then another. Alex’s thick skin prevented her from being burned by the sparks, and though she wasn’t terribly smooth, she was getting the job done, forcing the metal scrap into place. However, as Alex was working on welding the third corner, alarms began ringing upstairs.

“Impending Surge,” Kingston translated. “We’ve got maybe thirty seconds before it hits.”

“Is that enough time to get this finished?” Alex asked.

“If you go quickly, maybe,” Kingston answered urgently. Alex was working to weld the bottom of the patch together, her last phase, when Alex noticed the light swirling from underneath. “But be careful.”

“Not really my thing,” Alex murmured, working fast to seal the bottom edge back onto the containment unit. The light shone brighter and brighter and Alex felt beads of sweat dripping down her face until finally she was able to weld the final section, darkening the room once more.

Alex breathed a sigh of relief as she put the finishing touches on the last bit of welding, taking a step back to admire her work.

“Just in time. How’s it look up there?” she asked.

“Amateur,” Kingston nodded, examining the work. “But it should hold. Except…wait-”

In her haste, Alex didn’t realize that she had glided over a spot, unable to fully repair the entire patch. With a large crack the surge energy burst through, sending a beam no bigger than a dime shooting out. On reflex, Alex jumped in front of the energy, which singed her arm.

“Ah!” she gasped, the affected area on her forearm red and angry, far worse than what she felt going down the tubing.

“Alex, are you okay?” Amory called down.

“Yeah,” she answered slowly. She turned back to the Junction, ignoring the pain. She resealed the area, then worked her way back upstairs, keeping her hand over the area.

“Thank you,” Kingston exclaimed. “We couldn’t have done that without you.”

“Glad I could help,” she said. “Do we know where this came from?”

Kingston hopped over to his monitor, pulling up a map. Alex saw what she assumed to be probing stations flashing red leading down to Ascension.

“Hm,” Kingston muttered to himself. “I’m approximating here, but it looks like…Stillrock?”

“What?” Alex snapped, rushing to his side, practically bowling him over. “Stillrock?”

This couldn’t have anything to do with Ethan, could it? He kept saying he was going to find a breach point. Did he actually do it?

“I think, anyway,” Kingston shrugged. “There’s always some interference in the measurements.”

Alex pulled out her phone, gasping when she saw how many missed calls she had from Raz.

“I’ve got to go, now,” she said, starting to move out in the hall.

“Wait, Titan,” Kingston called out. She whipped her head around impatiently, but paused at the confused expression on his face.

“What?”

“Your….your arm. It’s…bleeding.”

Alex glanced down, nearly jumping at the sight of her own blood, crimson red dripping down to her elbow.

“That’s…not supposed to happen,” she said quietly, wiping it on her cape.

Amory took Alex by the shoulder, speaking quietly. “Do you want someone to look at your arm?”

Alex shook her off, preparing herself to dive through the tubing. “Later, there’s no time!”

Kingston watched as Alex shot back through the tube, flying off to Stillrock. He was quiet for a moment, then turned to Amory.

“I assume we need to keep that secret?” he asked.

Amory nodded, but her attention was clearly elsewhere. Kingston couldn’t blame her.

He glanced down at the shielding.

We rely on two things to keep Ascension safe: Titan, and this few inches of metal. I wonder what breaks down first, he wondered morbidly.