The second article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
- The 27th Amendment of the US Constitution; ratified in October 1972, less than a year after the formation of the Guardians
#
Before everything had started going to shit in their lives, Vivian’s family had spent a fair amount of time traveling. Even for a while after both her brother and mother had kil—passed, she reminded herself—she and her dad had done a fair amount of travel. These days, they were tight enough on money that the only flights she went on were to and from college, but suffice it to say that she was intimately familiar with airports.
What she was less acquainted with was the total lack of people. The jetbridge was always clogged full of economy passengers by the time she started boarding, but today, it was silent.
Lycoris and Vivian stole their way across the empty jetbridge as quick as they could. The walls were undamaged, which, honestly speaking, was a little concerning. Had the Director’s information been mistaken? She wanted to think better of the SRU than of the Guardians, but if he was leading them on a wild goose chase—or worse, into a trap—she didn’t know who she was going to be able to trust.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on who you asked), the plane door showed clear signs of forced entry.
Okay, that was an understatement. The door had been torn off of the hinges.
“Leaf-ing an anchor here,” Lycoris said quietly, drawing a preserved flower from her pocket and holding it up in front of her visor before discarding it. “Three active, four left for this op. Cut that sentence out, editor.”
Despite the situation, Vivian found herself gaping. “Leafing? That’s not even a leaf!”
Lycoris snorted. “Some content goes on TikTok, other bits and pieces end up on YouTube and the like. The viewers love stupid puns, and honestly? So do I.”
Vivian couldn’t help but shake her head. “Kids these days…”
“Aren’t you—“
“Shush,” she said, indicating the eerily damaged plane door. “Are we hitting it?”
“Twenty-five seconds to 12:30,” Lycoris said. “Looks like we’re going to be on time after all. You good waiting that long?”
Vivian nodded uncomfortably. “Uh, earlier, the Director said this is a red level op. What does that mean?” She held her suspicions, but she wanted to be sure.
“Red means red on the ground,” Lycoris recited. “Weapons free, basically. You’re authorized to go lethal as long as you’re part of the op, and you’re with me, so you are.”
“What? Lethal?” Vivian hissed.
“The total death count was two hundred and eighty-seven civilians and one superhero,” Lycoris said, flicking her wrist out. Twin oversized knives that looked straight out of a samurai movie slid out of hidden compartment in the forearm of her costume. “Your choice on what you do to them.”
Before Vivian could object or protest, Lycoris stepped into the plane.
She bit back a curse and followed.
Her first step inside the plane dispelled any lingering fear that the SRU official had led them to the wrong place.
Although she might not have been familiar with this specific make of airplane, Vivian was used to the model. It was a domestic plane, so each row had anywhere between four seats (in business) to eight (in the terribly cramped economy, where she had always sat even before her family’s financial situation had nosedived), split evenly down the middle.
But in this plane, the seats were gone. Unlike the door, which had obviously been forced off, there was no sign of damaged, broken seats. It didn’t even look like the floor was scuffed where they must have been torn off.
Not that she could see all of the floor. Off-white plastic sheets had been tossed together haphazardly, covering most of the eerily empty aisle. About ten feet down from the entrance was a barrier blocking Vivian’s sight of what lay further in the plane, but that alone was incriminating enough.
After all, she couldn’t think of many other reasons why there would be a shower curtain featuring a spray-painted icon of a laughing skull draped across an empty airplane corridor.
Lycoris whistled quietly. “Looks like we have our target. Proceed with caution. This is supposed to be a drug lab, so don’t breathe in too hard.”
“What kind of drugs?” Vivian asked, doing her best to keep her voice low.
“Oh, the usual,” Lycoris whispered. “Fent, coke, Dance, that kind of stuff. Director Williams said this wasn’t one of Killjoy’s special labs, so we should be fine.”
Fantastic. As if Vivian’s day hadn’t gotten weird enough. She’d gone from talking about why she wanted to be a hero to raiding a lab that manufactured Synth drugs in just a couple of hours. Was heroing always like this?
She resolved to ask Sunrise when this was over.
“Follow me,” Lycoris said quietly, doing that crouching thing again. Vivian was increasingly certain that it did nothing, but it did make her feel stealthier, so she followed, unbuttoning the clasp on her bag so she’d be ready with her own powders if things got dicey.
The B-rank heroine pushed the curtain aside in one swift motion, cleanly transitioning into a showy low-crouch pose with her knives that Vivian was fifty percent sure was meant more to titillate her viewers than to actually serve a purpose.
Lycoris proved her wrong a single second later when she half-rose, the muscles in her arms flexing as she cleanly threw one of her knives overhand.
It was only as the dagger sank into a hazmat-clad person’s solar plexus that Vivian properly processed what had been hiding behind the curtain.
She counted six figures of varying heights in hazmats, faces and genders obscured by hoods, medical masks, and lab goggles. Three of them were bent over a twin set of long plastic folding tables that had replaced the seats in the aisles, carefully weighing bricks and piles of a white substance that were presumably hallucinogens of some kind. Another one was in the process of taking those drugs and packaging them. Vivian caught sight of the opened carry-on compartments just above them. They were packed with the stuff.
The last two looked to be either guards of some kind. One of them was already in the process of walking towards the now-open curtain, baseball bat in hand. They must have overheard Lycoris and Vivian talking outside.
It was that last one who fell backwards now, weapon slipping out of his hand and clattering to the ground as a crimson stain spread from the point where Lycoris’ knife had slipped into him.
Oh, fuck.
“Walk that one off,” the other heroine said, and then she vanished with a faint pop. In the same instant, she reappeared right next to the falling guard, pulling her knife out and picking up the bat in the same motion. “You have the right to a fair—“
She threw the same knife again, this time hitting the other bat-carrying guard, and she teleported again.
“—trial,” Lycoris finished, pointing the bloody knife at the others in this section of the plane. “It’ll be fairer if you surrender now, though! Back away from the table, head on the ground, hands on your head, and nobody gets hurt.”
As she finished her sentence, the limp bodies of both of the guards hit the ground, punctuating the statement with a morbid pair of thuds.
The three people who’d been measuring and weighing backed away instantly, complying with her command.
“Except those two,” Lycoris commented. “Don’t worry! They’ll live. The knives are coated with a paralytic, and I hit them non-leth—“
Vivian saw the last person—a man, she thought, based on the body structure—reach down for what had to be a weapon. The fallen bat, maybe, or a boot-knife or pepper spray or a stun gun or something—whatever it was, Vivian caught the movement and dashed forward, finally unsticking her feet from the ground.
It was only a few steps to get her within range of the maybe-man, since this section of the plane wasn’t that big and was cordoned off by another pair of curtains thirty feet down, cutting this section off just past the business class restrooms.
Even in a space this compact, she wasn’t confident going for the brain. Against Whiteout, it had been possible because he’d barely been moving. Now? She could accidentally kill him way too easily, and though it had been authorized, Vivian was perfectly fine going the rest of her life without murdering another human.
So instead, she hurled her stun gun at him, reorienting it and activating its prongs midair with her telekinesis, and kept it in line to hit him in the bit of skin his mask and goggles didn’t cover.
He screeched, his entire body locking up in an instant, and he dropped like a sack of bricks.
“Badass,” Lycoris said, teleporting next to the stunned guy and toeing his downed body. She pricked his exposed skin with a somehow-pristine knife, and he froze. “Great work, Mantis.”
“I thought you said you only had four anchors left,” Vivian said, gingerly stepping around the surrendering workers. She reached a hand out and channeled her power to retrieve her stun gun. “You’d use them that fast?”
“That was one anchor,” Lycoris said.
“Really? How?”
Although Vivian couldn’t see her face, she had the strong impression that the other heroine winked at her. “Girl’s gotta have her secrets.”
And that was that.
Vivian exhaled deeply, relieved that nobody had died. It was a good thing they only had close-quarter weapons.
Further down in the plane, someone shouted a command. It was muffled, but even through the curtain and the distance, Vivian could tell he was angry.
“More bad guys,” Lycoris said, spinning her knife in her hand. It was, once again, not bloody.
Even as she acknowledged Lycoris’ statement, Vivian couldn’t help but drift into thinking about Lycoris’ power. I’m sure Rachel would love figuring it out, she thought idly. That thought brought on a sudden, inexplicable pang of loneliness, which didn’t make sense. Feelings rarely did.
Did Lycoris only fully expend the anchors if she was hurt over a certain threshold of damage? Was that how she was teleporting so frequently and frivolously?
“Hey, Mantis,” Lycoris said, snapping her fingers and pointing. “We might want to get in a better position before they come.”
“Right,” Vivian said, dazed as if she’d just come out of a dream. She shook her head to clear it, then crept closer to the next set of curtains. Here, she was close enough to the chokepoint to flood it with capsaicin or use her stun gun, and if worst came to worst, she could try to line up a nerve pinch. “Are we going to them, or are we waiting for them to come to us?”
“We always make the first move,” Lycoris said. “It makes for better TV. Come on, it’ll be fun! Follow me.”
Vivian bit her lip. She had a plan for what happened if someone came busting into this room—not so much for one in which she was the one who did the busting. That sounds wrong. No, wait, that’s not the point right now. Stay focused!
She crept closer and unlatched the bathroom door, ready to retreat if the situation got sticky. Lycoris had an anchor and Vivian didn’t. They therefore had very different understandings of risk.
“Three, two—one!” Lycoris said, shouting the last word, and she tossed one of the curtains aside.
“Shit!” a woman in the next room over yelled. She was quickly drowned out by an overlapping cacophony of voices, alternately shouting orders and crying out in pain.
Vivian chose that moment to make her move. She used her power to push the curtain aside, stun gun in hand, and she advanced forward—just in time to go temporarily deaf as thunder split the air apart.
No, she realized, her head whipping around to the source of the sound. Not thunder.
Three of the six people seated around what looked like a temporary living room were bleeding, already succumbing to the fast-acting paralytic coating Lycoris’ blades.
One of the remaining three had a gun.
Vivian’s eyes widened as she took the scene in, and she knew the sight would be seared into her mind forever. Just like the memory of her brother flatlining after his third attempt to end it all finally succeeded, or the one of the phone call telling her Mom was gone, or that night she’d thought Dad had joined the rest of the family.
Lycoris gurgled, blood spewing forth from the crater in her face, and her assailant shot her again.
The pistol was black, barely large enough for the man’s meaty hands to grip it, and importantly, it had just blown a hole in someone’s brain.
Vivian’s heart leapt into her throat, her fight or flight response in full gear.
Lycoris’ body dissolved, and though Vivian wanted to run more than anything else, she couldn’t be the coward this time. She couldn’t run away and pretend nothing had happened.
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That had already gotten too many people killed.
So even as every part of her cringed away at the gun, she leapt into the room and let her cloud of mixed powders fly. The mixture she’d developed with Lachlan’s materials and Rachel’s too-enthusiastic guidance was a blend of capsaicin powder, chalk, a hint of black powder, and a dollar store lighter.
The black powder exploded, dispersing a thick cloud of smoke and chalk dust across the cramped confines of the plane. Even with the seats removed, there wasn’t much room for it to go, and it spread quickly. Vivian took a swift few steps backward, telekinetically pushing as much of the cloud as she could to keep it from touching her.
From the hacking coughs within her impromptu smoke bomb, it seemed like it was working.
“Hey.” A hand clasped Vivian’s shoulder, and she nearly leaped out of her skin. It was only thanks to her rearview camera that she didn’t make a decision she would regret. “Thanks. Saved my ass.”
“Oh, thank god,” Vivian said. Lycoris’ anchor had worked. Even though she’d known Lycoris’ whole power kept her from dying in situations like this, the animal part of her brain only showed her the exposed musculature and brain matter and blood and—no, she chided herself. She’s alive. “You scared me.”
“He’s got a gun,” Lycoris said. “Shot me… but other than that, nothing. Nah, no killing yet.”
“Yet?”
“It’s bad for my image,” Lycoris explained with a beaming smile. “I’ll be right back. That smoke won’t last forever, right?”
“Can you… breathe in there?” Vivian asked. “I was going to wait—“
“Nope!” Lycoris said, and she sprinted straight in.
She joined the symphony of suffering, but to her credit, the pepper spray that had to be getting into her nose and mouth didn’t stop her. Vivian’s idea had worked too well, and she wasn’t going in there, so she had to judge what was happening based on sound.
One by one, the remaining three people stopped coughing abruptly, punctuating their complaints with soft, pained grunts, followed by the sound of a body collapsing to the floor.
Within fifteen seconds, Lycoris was the only one left suffering, and then she cut off too.
This time, it took her a solid half minute to return, jogging up behind Vivian from the direction they’d come.
“That was the anchor I left in the entryway earlier,” she explained. “I’ve burned through both of the close ones now, but that’s fine! I left a new one in the same place. Worst comes to worst, I have my real backup anchor in the car. I don’t think we’ll need them, though!”
Sure enough, once the cloud of general nastiness dispersed and settled onto the walls, ceiling, and floor, nobody was left standing. Apart from their conversation, the plane was now dead silent.
“I wonder why they picked a plane,” Lycoris mused, carefully picking her way through the room, avoiding the prone bodies. “And also, guys, quick tip for the next time—maybe put your guards at the door, not the lab?”
Nobody replied. Vivian would’ve been impressed if they had.
She deigned to grace Lycoris’ joke with a snort. “Yeah, these assholes didn’t seem the smartest.”
She couldn’t quite hide the quaver in her voice. She’d seen guns before in movies and once in real life by Lachlan, but this was the first time one had been leveled at her. The adrenaline surge from witnessing Lycoris’ temporary death hadn’t gone away. Neither did the image of her lifeless face staring up at Vivian.
“How long do you figure they’ll be in jail for?” Vivian asked, trying to get her mind to go somewhere, anywhere else.
“Drug manufacturing felony, five to ten years,” Lycoris replied. “Non-super gun possession, another five or ten. Attempted murder, maybe thirty? Don’t worry yourself over legal stuff. That’s what lawyers are for!”
“So they’re gone for a while,” Vivian said. “Okay. Should we call the SRU on them now?”
“They didn’t have any supers,” Lycoris replied. “Which means it’ll be slower, and it’s a fifty-fifty on whether we get the SRU or just the regular police. I figure half an hour? We can clean up and babysit in the meantime.”
“Clean up?” Vivian asked.
“Oh,” Lycoris said, grinning devilishly. “Did I not tell you about my favorite part of corpo heroing?”
“I thought that was the media attention,” Vivian said.
“That’s my other favorite part. You know the London Accords, right?”
“‘Course I do.” Vivian was vaguely offended that anyone would ever assume she was dumb enough not to.
“One of the smaller subdivisions isn’t brought up much, because the Guardians don’t follow it. Basically, as long as it only affects villains or gangs or villain-gangs, superheroes have free pickings of stuff.”
Vivian thought that sentence over, then frowned. “We’re looting the plane?”
“We’re looting the plane.”
Her mind jumped to the bricks of drugs earlier, and she cringed before finally processing what was in the area she’d smoked off.
It was still an airplane, so there wasn’t much space, but there were empty chip bags and bottles strewn across the tables, a few cell phones, a fully-used whiteboard—what really drew her attention, though, were the rubber-banded stacks of dollar bills.
“Hell yeah,” Vivian said.
#
Lycoris narrated their finds the entire time.
“It’s for the editors,” she explained after Vivian asked her why she was staring at a bag of white, powdery bricks and explaining the effects of the Dance drug to the air. “Also makes it easier to package onto YouTube if we choose to do that.”
Vivian did her best not to be irked by it, but Lycoris just wouldn’t stop.
“This operation is on the newer end,” Lycoris explained, both for her future viewers’ benefit and Vivian’s. “Mantis, have you ever cleared one of these out before?”
Obviously not. Vivian recognized the necessity of what the other heroine was doing, at least. She could play along. It only got on her nerves a little.
“Nope!” she said, trying and failing to mimic Lycoris’ unwavering cheeriness. “Do you want to explain what we’re looking at here? Why a plane?”
It was another setup question, but Vivian did actually mean it. She wanted more details about this place.
“My guess? This plane was supposed to be a mobile drug lab. It’s not completely unprecedented, even! I’m blanking on the exact name right now, but I’m sure one of you viewers can remember—this isn’t the first time a villain’s co-opted a plane, right?”
“We can take whatever, right?” Vivian asked, looking around nervously. Even though she’d played a critical role in subjugating this plane, she still felt out of place here.
“Yep!” Lycoris replied. “If you want to take drugs, I recommend cocaine over heroin and anything over Dance. Also, don’t take more than a bag.”
“I wouldn’t loot hard drugs,” Vivian said, offended that Lycoris would even bring it up. “Do you—stupid question. You can avoid addiction with your power. Of course you have.”
Lycoris gave her a knowing chuckle, then gestured back to where she was standing, indicating the sort-of-common-room the gang had going on back here. “You’ll like the loot better there, I imagine.”
Even if the whole superhero influencer thing was starting to get old, the contents of the plane were exciting enough that Vivian didn’t particularly care. Lycoris had said that she would be paid $7,500 as well as “standard hero rate,” however much that was, but that definitely paled in comparison to how much there was here.
To her disappointment, most of the stacks of bills were lower denominations, not twenties or hundreds—but there were a lot of stacks. Each of them had to be a hundred bills or so, and even if those were all ones or fives, that added up quickly when there were a few dozen bundles lying around.
Vivian whistled as she stuffed her bag full of as many high-value bundles as it could fit. She added an extra couple into her pockets, too.
“Crime pays, huh?” she wondered aloud.
“It sure does!” Lycoris commented, strolling over. She lightly kicked one of the moaning, twitching bodies on her way as she did. “For a while, at least. Criminals hurt people and make money, and then before they can even spend it, people like us come in and put a stop to their activities. Don’t be like these guys, chat.”
Chat? She decided not asking about it was the wiser choice.
Vivian screwed her nose up in disgust as she stepped around the people by the common room. One of them had pissed themselves, judging by the wet patch around his crotch and the acrid smell. She was thankful the helmet kept most of the smell out.
Lycoris, of course, seemed unaffected, and she continued chatting away merrily.
The rest of the plane didn’t hold much. There were a few unmade beds past the common room, lined up side-by-side with personal effects placed haphazardly on them. Vivian riffled through them without hesitating.
She got the idea that she should feel guilty going through someone’s stuff, but though she could admit to a bit of a general awkward, I-shouldn’t-be-here feeling, she was all out of guilt for the day. Yeah, they had the right to privacy, but they had shot at her, and they were bad people, right?
The first bed had a framed photo of a family next to it. Whoever its owner had been was married, evidently, and had a daughter who looked about nine or ten.
What drives a man like you to crime? Vivian decided she’d rather not look too deeply into that while she was robbing said man blind.
Okay, to be fair, it could’ve also been a woman she was robbing blind, but she was reasonably sure a woman wouldn’t be carrying around a box of condoms, which this guy had in the space under his bed.
Slowly, she pieced together a picture of the people who now lay unmoving at her feet. One was a student at UChicago, which had rejected Vivian. Another was a fan of saucy vampire novels, and a third liked Rubik’s cubes enough to own six different cubes.
There wasn’t that much of value here, she had to admit, but it was interesting and scary at the same time to look through their lives.
They weren’t all that different from her, she mused. The student had a letter about a missed student loan payment stashed away in a backpack. Could this have been Vivian, in another life? If she’d gotten desparate enough?
It was scarily plausible.
There were guns, too, and that disturbed Vivian more than it should have. She knew guns existed, of course, and she’d heard tales of policemen misfiring theirs and getting innocents killed, but they were a felony to own in forty-eight states, including both of the ones she’d lived in. To see brick-sized chunks of metal that could kill people with ten pounds of force just laid out here was quietly terrifying in the same way discovering there was a boogeyman in your basement might be.
She took one of them and clipped it onto her left stocking. It was heavier than she thought it would be, like it carried the weight of the lives it could end.
All thoughts of alternate life paths and guns disappeared when she got to the end of the plane.
Instead of another bed, there was a single hotel-style safe resting on a table. Vivian tilted her head, examining it, then got on her phone and searched up where the pins in an electric safe were.
She was immediately greeted with three sites that each said different things, so she gave up on finding an easy way and just started prodding at the inside edges of the safe with her power.
It took much less time than she thought it would. Only two minutes in, a latch clicked open and the safe door swung out freely.
They’d gone to the extent of locking something away in a safe even when they were on an grounded plane that nobody even knew had people in it. Whatever was in here had to be good.
The only contents were a single tray of test tubes, each of them filled with—Vivian gasped.
Each of the five capped tubes in the tray was filled with an alien, translucent liquid of oil-like consistency that changed color constantly. Vivian still remembered seeing hers for the first time, amorphous and shifting so much that it looked almost like a living creature.
These, though, didn’t move as much. They didn’t quite have the same sensation of life, nor did they emanate the same raw power that true fragments of alien flesh did.
Which could only mean one thing.
“Lycoris!” Vivian shouted. The other heroine paused in the middle of a spiel that she didn’t really care to hear. “I found Killjoy vials!”
There’s six slots in the tray, Vivian thought, looking it over with a frown. But there’s only five vials. Was there a sixth?
Did someone else take a vial?
“One of the vials is missing!” Vivian added. “I think! Check our prisoners for them!”
“On it!” came Lycoris’ reply. “Keep the fake vials safe! That’s a great find!”
Vivian gingerly set the artificial vials back into the safe, closed it, and paced to the nearest paralyzed criminal.
She realized two things the moment she got there: first, she did not know how to conduct a search; second, patting down the guy who’d wet himself sounded really, really gross.
Deep breath, she told herself. You can do this.
She tried not to cringe as she rolled the first person over. Though her power allowed her to move anything, it didn’t have a sensory component, so she had to use her hands to feel inside pockets and under jackets.
“Ew, ew, ew,” she muttered under her breath. It was a bit stupid, she reflected, to be disgusted when the person she was searching wasn’t the one who’d wet himself, but she was anyway. Learn something new about yourself every day, I guess.
It took thirty excruciatingly long seconds to be mostly sure that the paralyzed woman didn’t have the vial on her. Vivian moved onto the next one once she caught a glimpse of Lycoris doing the same.
Her phone rang halfway through searching the third one—the dude who’d wet himself. Glad for a distraction, she stepped away from the disgusting puddle under him and picked it up, opting to watch Lycoris instead.
Maybe there were only five vials, she thought. Maybe we’re just getting worked up over nothing.
“Hello?” Vivian said into the phone. She hadn’t checked the caller ID.
“小宝贝,” her dad said, the exhaustion in his voice apparent even through the shitty phone microphone. “It’s been so long since you called. I wanted to hear from my favorite daughter.”
“Mantis?” Lycoris called, shoving aside the person she’d been searching. “You good?”
“Yeah, all good!” Vivian replied, an octave too high. She cleared her throat. “My dad’s calling, sorry, I’ll be a moment.”
“Who’s that?” her dad asked.
“A… friend,” Vivian said, unsure if that was a lie. “We’re, uh… I met her at a club. She’s helping me study.” That part definitely was.
“Very good,” came the reply. Vivian could picture the terse, vaguely approving nod he always gave her. “It’s good for you to make friends. Just remember—“
“I know,” Vivian said.
“—the quality of your friends affects the quality of you,” Dad finished.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” If Vivian had a dollar for every time she’d heard that, she’d have more cash than she did in her pack right now. “Sorry, I’m kind of in the middle of something—“
“I won’t be long. I just wanted to let you know that I have a new opportunity at a new company. The pay is better, and the position comes with more benefits.”
“That’s great news,” Vivian said, meaning it. “So you won’t sell the house, right?”
“I won’t. Thanks for believing in your dad.”
A gargled moan caught her attention and Lycoris’ at the same time. Lycoris had finished searching the people in the lab section already, so they were both working on the same group now—but that moan hadn’t come from the lab.
“One second, dad,” Vivian said. “I gotta check something out.”
“Can you stay for a bit? I just wanted to check in on you.“
Not the time. “I’ll be right back.”
She muted her phone and caught up to Lycoris, who had already tracked down the sound.
“Was that bathroom locked earlier?” Lycoris murmured, indicating the bathroom at the division between the lab and the common room. The little marker above the doorknob was red and said OCCUPIED.
“No,” Vivian said, suddenly on high alert. “I remember opening that door.”
“Shit,” Lycoris swore. “Someone snuck in.”
“How?” Vivian asked. “I—“
Lycoris shushed her. “Can you unlock the door for me, Mantis?”
Vivian nodded. After the safe, a simple bathroom lock was simple as all hell.
She stayed a healthy six feet from the door as Lycoris walked up to it with all the confidence in the world and yanked it open.
And for the second time in less than fifteen minutes, she watched and listened as a deafening gunshot took the other heroine’s face off.
She disappeared before she even hit the floor, and the occupant of the restroom stumbled out of it, gangly limbs banging against the folding door.
Vivian recognized him. He’d been one of the guys packaging drugs.
We didn’t paralyze him.
One of his hands held a single vial, its contents empty but for a veneer of toxic-looking sludge on the bottom.
The other had a gun—except it wasn’t just a gun. The pistol pulsed with energy, and Vivian watched in fascinated horror as its form changed even as he reoriented himself, his back to her. The pistol morphed into a rifle, then a baseball bat, then a long knife, then into a nasty-looking two-handed gun that looked straight out of a Call of Duty game.
“Didn’t your parents tell you it was rude to shoot a lady you’ve just met?” Lycoris shouted, bursting onto the scene again, hands raised. “Let’s talk, sir. We started off on the wrong foot, but we can end this without anyone getting h—“
Automatic gunfire sounds different from a pistol, Vivian thought distantly, watching Lycoris’ limp body fall to the ground and disappear again.
Then she returned to reality, ears ringing, and she realized she was alone. Lycoris still had an anchor, but it was in the car. She was at least ten minutes out.
Vivian sent her stun gun and pepper spray at the gunman.
“Vivian?” her dad asked from the phone. “Are you there?”
She winced. Not the fucking time.
The super who’d ingested the last one of Killjoy’s altered vials whipped around in a flash, the gun in his hands morphing again and again until it resolved into the shape of a snub-nosed revolver similar to the one Lachlan had.
Vivian had her active stun gun halfway to the super when thunder cracked and pain blossomed from just under her belly button.
She stumbled, hands flying to her side. They came away wet and red. It hurt less than she’d expected it to. Was that a bad thing?
“D-d-d-don’t move,” the super said, his full body convulsing like he was mid-seizure. “A-ah-ah-I can sh-shoot you f-faster t-than your p-power.”
Vivian cringed at the sight of his finger shaking on the trigger, the barrel pointed at her. One errant twitch and she was dead.
Options, options—if she moved the stun gun, she was dead. If she hit him with pepper spray, she was dead. Even if she hit him with sudden, massive pain, he could shoot her before it incapacitated her.
“S-s-stay there,” the gun-super said, taking a cautious step back. He tripped, catching himself on a wall. Two more steps and he’d be out of range.
She could wait for Lycoris to come back. Let this guy go free.
Two hundred and seventy-eight civilians dead, Lycoris’ voice whispered into her ear.
This man was a suicide super, just like the ones who’d killed that many. He was clearly already unstable. If she let him go now, there was no telling how many more he’d kill just to leave the airport.
I’m sorry, Vivian said, unsure whether she was saying that to herself or the gunman.
She gathered her power and punched him in the brain.
The gun fired again, but he was convulsing so hard that the shot did nothing but make Vivian recoil in fear.
By the time she managed to drag herself to her feet, one hand pressed against her wound, the gunman was dead.
“Vivian?” her dad asked again. “Are you okay?”
The first kill had been on accident. This had been intentional.
Now I really am a murderer.
She finally unmuted herself.
“Just peachy,” she lied.