Someone was yelling. “Get that kid out of here!”

It wasn’t someone I was paying attention to. I was trying to move across rubble, but I wasn’t making much progress. When the building had fallen, it hadn’t had the decency to fall flat. Every footstep had to be angled, and most surfaces weren’t wide enough to get a foothold.

I pushed aside what I could, but I wasn’t sure where to start. There were so many things I didn’t know.

Where was Tess?

She should have been far back into the theatre, but I knew there was a counter along the side of the building. She might have taken cover there because it was less distance she had to move.

So where was the counter? Where did the theatre end? Where had the walls been? The dust had mostly cleared, but the only thing I could use to place myself was the road.

Everything was too loud. The sound of the Eclipse wasn’t reaching crescendo, but even if I started running now, I wasn’t sure I’d make it to shelter. Other than the big monster were three gifted and that’s all I noticed from a glance up.

One was standing on two small disk shaped platforms with energy coalescing underneath. He had devices on his arms that similar energy flickered off of and extended far beyond the end of his limbs, crackling endlessly. I didn’t recognise him. Another was floating on his own. His body was altered, with sharp corners travelling up and down his body. He was large, at least three times the size of the guy on the disks. His power was generating a continuous sucking noise that I couldn’t determine the purpose of.

Other than that was a woman in a blue and white costume with an avian mask. Her arms and legs had transformed into literal twisters that were pushing air through themselves, and were generating a high pitched whine. She was the closest.

Take the distance between me and her, double it, and that was the distance between me and the Eclipse. I barely cared.

“Get the fuck out of here kid! We can’t save you!” The female hero shouted before flying towards to the Eclipse, which had just regained some air.

The others were shouting too, but I didn’t know what they were saying.

Too many voices.

I couldn’t find one to listen to. I didn’t want to hear that I couldn’t be saved.

I flinched as my ring tone played too loudly through the bud in my ear. I stumbled and fell against some rubble before I could focus enough to accept the call.

“Who-” I started.

“Michael!” The voice on the other end hissed, sounding relieved. “We’re at the shelter, near your school. We just checked all around and you’re not here. Where are you?”

“Dad...” I didn’t know what to say. Heroes were still yelling at me.

“That noise.” Dad said. “You’re still outside.”

I looked at the Eclipse. He was fighting off heroes now. I watched a tendril pass through Victorious, who I only identified by the green light. “Yeah.”

Dad made a sound that was somewhere between an explicative and and a sigh. “You fool. Where are you?”

“Um.” My eyes darted. The heroes. The rubble. The rubble further back where I thought Tess was. The other spots. My phone with the wire connecting to my earbud. The heroes again. The guy standing on the disks was approaching now.

“Michael.” Dad repeated.

“Tess…” My voice was shallow.

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Kid!” The guy on the disks got my attention. He was moving by making long strides that shouldn’t have given him any push on the air, but gave him a lot more than if he’d been on the ground. “You need to get inside. It’ll start singing again now that it’s up.”

“My-” My voice broke. The words didn’t come back.

The hero looked over his shoulder then back at me. I wasn’t sure what he was looking at. “Arm. Permission.”

“What?” I didn’t really hear him. Dad was talking at the same time.

“Give me your arm.” The hero demanded, not really focused on me.

“She’s really gone.” Dad said.

The song of the Eclipse entered its rising action, and the hero stopped asking for permission. Instead he wrapped me up with a hug that put me perilously close to those long lances of energy. He rushed to the nearest building, two floors up, and leaped through a window. Lifting an arm from me and using a blade of energy to slash the window while he was still a fair distance away.

The window broke cleanly enough. The impact still jostled me, but we made it through with only a few cuts.

We’d arrived in an office building that had an open floor. That meant we could see the sky on all sides. It wasn’t very safe.

The hero’s energy lances were carving out chunks of the building, and he had to carefully turn some dials while still moving him and myself towards the centre. The energy sputtered one last time, then reduced in length until it barely extended past his hands.

“Get under something.” He told me while he did the same.

It took a moment to parse what he’d said, but I did it. Seconds passed, then the crescendo came.

It lasted longer this time. I could see on the floor the black parts where the bending light had burned it already, but this one burned new patches of carpet. At one point the light came disturbingly close to me.

Then it ended.

The hero was up and at it quicker than I was, but I could see around his mask of flickering red energy that he was far more tired than I was. He worked his arms again, bringing the lances of energy back to their previous length.

Part of his leg was burned. His teeth were gritted.

He didn’t even look at me as he gave me parting words. “Take the stairs. Get away. Stay inside.” Then he leaped and his disks took him far away from me.

My earbud had fallen out at some point. I put it back in. “Dad.”

I heard relief through the line. “You scared me, Michael. Where. Are. You?”

“Where Quetzalcoatl just came down.” I finally answered, looking over the blackened rubble that covered Tess’ body. “It came down over her.”

There was quiet. “I’m sorry, Michael. There’s no time to grieve. You need to come to someplace safe. Come to the shelter.”

I nodded. Then remembered to say, “Okay.”

I took the stairs, as the hero had told me to. I was nervous when I saw that his energy arms had actually sliced through the concrete at one point, but it was still standing, and it ended up holding my weight. Then I was back on the street.

I ended the call with my dad. I couldn’t move through the city with someone in my ear again. I would’ve started talking and commenting on everything around me, and that would’ve made me spiral into something like hysteria. I needed to keep my mouth shut.

There were bodies on the street when I had been moving towards Tess. Now that I didn’t have her as a distraction, and now I was moving more slowly through the city, taking more time to wait, not taking any chances, I noticed more of them.

Or I noticed what was left of them.

Quetzalcoatl’s light hurt more than it burned, but things that stayed in the light for both that and the more intense stuff got hit hard. Buildings turned black, but they didn’t really get destroyed. Flesh, on the other hand, got broken down at the fundamental level, or that was the prevailing theory.

Point was, the bodies disappeared quickly, left a smell, and there was a lot of dust. Nothing, not even a shadow was left behind. Clothing didn’t help much, thanks to the way light twisted.

I passed an alley that the wind had pushed dozens of clothes into. There must have been enough for twenty people in there.

All gone now.

I caught more displays of powers on my way over to the shelter. A defender with power related to air made a giant slash with some kind of green gas. It carved into the side of Quetzalcouatl and sent its blood spattering to the buildings below. That happened at least halfway across the city, and the only reason I saw it was because the slash was larger than the creature it was cutting.

It was the first wound that actually seemed to slow it down.

A building was falling down after a crescendo, and a heroine flew from floor to floor, erecting pillars made of ice to stop it from falling. I saw there were civilians on the ground floor.

It fell after the next crescendo.

Kinetic lifted a building from on top of me, but fortunately that happened after the sun stopped being deadly. He didn’t even look at me as he squashed the building into pointed tubular shape, catching any of the falling rubble and adding it to the mass to the weapon.

It eventually got jammed into the wound the slash opened up, but it took some doing.

Every so often, I’d see more heroes falling. Either not getting inside in time, or getting caught by a lazily drifting tendril that Archangel wasn’t in a position to stop. It killed people and it was barely even paying attention to them.

By the time I got close to the shelter, everything looked a little more red. Quetzalcoatl and the rest of the Calamities all had several titles. In this case there was the name Quetzalcoatl, the title of the Eclipse, which described a Calamity’s method of slaughter, then others that it earned but saw less use like the Serpent of the Sun, Droughtbringer, and so on.

When I noticed the redness encroaching, I glanced up. The moon wasn’t exactly going over the sun, but the white circle that was the sun was dimmed. I could actually look at it while squinting. A black mist of some sort was coalescing there, dimming some parts more than others, and rapidly writhing within itself.

The Eclipse was this far along already, and the best the heroes had done was drive a concrete stake into a wound. It wasn’t enough.

This place was finished.

When I looked at it, it was twisting through the air in my general direction. Not quite coming at me, but at where I was going. It wasn’t even moving to a crescendo. The defenders were exhausted and too few. It had barely anyone to hold it back as it beheld the large flat structure that was the shelter.

It was mostly built underground to prevent the Eclipse from destroying it with one of its fly bys. Of course, that just made the shelter more vulnerable to Ai Laau, but he wasn’t here. Still, there were thousands of people in there.

It’s head reared up and back. It was pausing, looming over the concrete stronghold. Staring down with those orbs we called eyes.

It knew.

Not only that, it was putting on a show. It was telling us that nowhere was safe.

Quetzalcoatl blurred into the shelter and my eyes opened halfway to standing up. I listened for screams, but all I heard was the shower still going. I could hear it now. Muffle had moved away. How long had I been asleep? I checked my fingers.

Only slightly prudish. That was good. I hadn’t missed hours.

I patted my pockets and found a Vphone, not the one I wasn’t supposed to have, which I used to check the time. It, like all models of Vphone, was waterproof all the way down to the bottom of the mariana trench, and still worked fine after however long I’d spent in the shower. It was two am. That meant… when had I fallen asleep?

I shook myself, there was no point in dwelling. I felt more like myself after the shower, though that was just a feeling. Now at least, Slingshot wasn’t every second thought. Better to get moving. I turned the shower off and immediately heard someone moving around outside the stall.

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“I’m coming out.” I announced, then waited a second.

They didn’t say anything, so I assumed I was fine. I stepped out of the stall, horribly conscious of how wet my clothes were. There was a bench opposite the shower stalls, and Blinker was setting his costume on said bench. He had his hands behind his mask, though, and was putting it on. There were boxer shorts between me and his privates, so he was decent.

His body was, predictably, spotless.

He turned to see who I was. “Lock.” He said shortly.

“Blinker.” I responded. There was a lot I wanted to say to him. I was having trouble deciding what to say first. “About that thing that didn’t happen.”

He’d turned away while I was thinking. There was a bottle of shampoo in his hand that he gripped tight, then put back down. He took a breath and turned to me.

“I can’t talk about that.” He said.

“So hypothetically,” I immediately said, changing tact. “If you were to be accused of outrageous things you didn’t do by a hero you’re supposed to trust, while another hero you’re supposed to trust, and the person all of you answer to condoned ridickulous methods of interrogation and lines of questioning. Just hypothetically, if that happened, what would you do?”

Blinker winced several times during that. “I’d get angry.”

“And hypothetically, if you were the second hero I was supposed to trust, and I were the one accused, how the fuck would you justify that?”

I was coming in a lot hotter than I thought I would’ve. Was that Sedimentary? Or was it leftover from the memory? I couldn’t tell.

“Well,” Blinker said slowly. He took his sweet time picking his words. “I would acknowledge that there were some things the accused did that were suspicious.”

I shook my head. “When I worked with Waterlad, I came clean about it fifteen minutes later. I got scrutiny for that. It doesn’t justify what happened.”

“But you still did it, and you didn’t show much remorse. It stands to reason you would do it again.” He paused. “Hypothetically.”

“I’m not buying it.” I declared. “Try better.”

“You just came to us, assuming you’d be a hero.” Blinker didn’t sound too sure of himself there. “Or, that was the facade you were putting on.”

“Really?” I deadpanned. I was waiting for him to mention Fail. He was in the know about him, after all.

“Really.”

“Fucking what?”

“Hypothetically,” Blinker started.

“Hypothetically.” I repeated before he could get into it.

Blinker sighed. “Hypothetically, most heroes either come to sign up shortly after manifesting their powers. Otherwise they strike out on their own doing vigilante work, or just become villains. You…” He paused.

“Did nothing.” I finished for him.

“Seemingly.” Blinker specified. “Seemingly did nothing.”

I blinked. More because I was expecting him to admit to Fail already. “You thought I was a mole.”

“Yeah, thought.” He agreed, making me narrow my eyes. He’d just admitted that he still thought I was a mole.

“Blinker, something you might not know about my powers, or maybe you just haven’t thought about it, I sense forces.”

“I know about that.” Blinker cut in.

“Let me finish.” I told him snappily. “Everything has forces on it. Gravity, holding things down. Friction, stopping things from sliding. Surface tension, keeping things together. There’s a lot that I have access to, and a lot that I have to sort through to just to make something go up.” I gestured at the roof abruptly, making Blinker flinch.

“It’s always on, like Slingshot’s flight.” I continued. “But that isn’t everything. Everything would include the not insubstantial force from the moon. You know, that thing we rely on for the tides. But that’s not the kicker. Do you know about the Struent effect?”

“No,” Blinker answered with a shake of his head.

“It’s a really passive effect on most powers that most of the time doesn’t get noticed. I found out about Felwyr’s law of effect recently and had to dig deeper, which is how I found this, but I really think you should put more of an effort into training your recruits. Even the ones that you think are moles for some reason so they won’t catch onto the fact that you think they’re fucking moles.”

I took a breath, I’d gotten off track.

“The Struent effect is what keeps powers bound to the earth. Your power has it. Slingshot’s power has it. You just don’t know because it involves thinking big and in abstract, and unless someone tells you about it, you have no way of knowing.”

“I’m not getting it.” Blinker said.

“You travel into your future.” I said, making Blinker wilt, if only a fraction. “But not really. You travel to where you would be standing three seconds from now, but not really. If you were to move, say, three metres with your power. It would look like you moved three metres. Then if you moved back, you’d go back three metres, and anything that happened to your body in those past three seconds would be erased.”

I didn’t actually know if it was three seconds, but it didn’t matter for the point I was making.

“This ball we call Earth is travelling through the void at hundreds and thousands of miles an hour.” I said, “Who knows how much distance is actually travelled in each second. The Struent effect is what stops you from hopping back three seconds and appearing in the void left behind by the earth. Or going forward and appearing in the space that the earth hasn’t reached yet.”

Blinker took that in. “I see. How does that matter here?”

“I don’t have the fucking Struent effect!” I shouted. “You were wondering what I was doing for those months? I was figuring out how to walk when everything is screaming at me that we’re moving at hundreds of thousands of miles an hour, and I was trying to hide the fact that I had powers!”

Once again, Blinker took that in. “I s-”

“The fucking direction changes too!” I jabbed my finger towards a wall, near an upper corner. “That’s the way we’re moving now. I used to think I could use it to tell time, but it changes more nebulously than you’d think, thanks to the fact that we’re rotating on an angle. And I get it all. The pull of the moon, the pull of the fucking sun, the way we’re hurtling through space following the sun which is also travelling through space, and the sum of all of them! Whatever safeguards everyone else got that let them just use their powers didn’t come to me. I had to figure it out myself. And I moved here from the Sunlit City after Quetzalcoatl, and I just lost my fucking family!”

I took a breath. “Why did you lie about your power?”

Blinker probably blinked under his mask. “Excuse me?”

That had been an incredibly abrupt change of pace, but I needed to talk about something other than that bullshit conspiracy. “You lied to Common Sense. Why?”

Blinker stared at me. “It’s foolish to reveal everything about your powers.”

I shook my head. “No. Keeping pointless secrets when it puts people’s lives in jeopardy is foolish.” I pointed at his costume. “When I broke your arm, the costume got scuffed. I saw your bone poking through it. Then you went back and now it's fine. Does that extend to things you hold as well as things you wear? Because if it does, I can name a hero in Control that would very much like to give you a heavy weapon.”

“Unloaded.” Blinker said. “I know.”

“So you have this insane potential that you’re keeping on the down low. Why?” I pressed.

Blinker looked away.

“What the actual fuck is wrong with you?” Seriously, I knew for a fact that Waterlad knew about this aspect of his power. His secret was already sold.

Blinker’s head snapped back to me. “I think I’ve had enough of this.” He went into a shower stall with his mask still on and closed it behind him. I could see him going through the motions of taking off his mask.

“Last question,” I said. “Because I’m itching to get back to somewhere that you could be useful. But I’ll ask it politely. How is it that you’re the one who is captain of the Sentry?”

Blinker flashed and appeared pushing the door of the bathroom stall open. He was in the motion of going in, but then he flashed again and had my collar in his grasp.

I casually reached down and locked the briefs he still had on, then locked my shirt as well, wet as it was. Blinker stiffened when he realised he couldn’t move, but he didn’t flash away.

“I’m the only one that’s in a state to lead.” He said, his voice low. He was doing his best Orcus impression.

“Why not Collage?” I asked. “He’s about your age. He has a terrible sense of humour, but a decent sense of timing. He knows when to be serious.”

Blinker was silent.

“You’ve already admitted that it’s a touchy subject.” I said, “I’m going to ask the others if you don’t give me a reasonable explanation. As a Sentry under you, I deserve to know.”

“Fucking fine.” Blinker spat. He tried to move, but couldn’t extract his hand from the shirt. I unlocked everything and let him jerk away from me.

He stumbled, then flashed twice in quick succession, appearing a short distance back from me.

“It’s all to do with Halcion.” Blinker said.

I closed my eyes and nodded, having expected as much ever since seeing how easily Prism got drained. They hid it well, but the simple fact that Halcion was here in Graceland and had been for a while meant that casualties were unavoidable. The only question was how much had been lost to the villain.

“What did you lose?” I asked, opening my eyes again.

“Happiness.” Blinker told me. I winced. “Lucidity was recently on the team and managed to take down one of the mistresses with a taser. It knocked her down, but didn’t kill her, which is exactly what we want with those ones. I knew Lucidity before she was let on the team. I was proud. That’s when he got me.”

“How?” I asked.

“Civilian disguise.” Blinker said shortly. “Fortunately, Water… lad was able to knock me out and Lucidity was able to turn the taser on Halcion before he really got started using my power, but I still lost the ability to be happy.” He looked at me. “You can’t know what it’s like.”

I shrugged. “I didn’t claim to. So if you can’t be happy. What about the others? Unshaken and Collage are the oldest ones, what happened to them?”

“Unshaken, believe it or not, hasn’t been drained.” Blinker said, making my eyebrows shoot up. Not that he saw that, of course. “She’s fast enough that she notices whenever he starts using his effect. It normally slows his targets down, but she doesn’t do slow. Unshaken has avoided every assault. If it wasn’t for her attitude, she’d be the leader.”

I would’ve raised my eyebrows further if it was feasible, but it would’ve ultimately been pointless. This time the surprise came from a reasonable decision being made within the Sentry. Unshaken wasn’t leadership material, even I agreed with that.

“And Collage?” I prompted.

“Anger. Sadness and grief. Panic. Disgust. Calm. Guilt. Basically everything.”

I blinked. “How? He’s a lance.”

“You haven’t been in the field with him, but Collage acts more like a dagger. Like you.” Binker sighed. “He made the mistake of using a pink beam on Halcion shortly after his first outing. Halcion went after him until happiness was the only thing he had left as retribution, sometimes going to the crisis areas other villains set up to do it. Even going so far as to kidnap Collage and threaten the lives of the rest of us just to ensure he could get his fear. He’s been left alone ever since because even the villains he made enemies of think that letting him live like that is punishment enough.”

So Collage literally couldn’t feel anything but happiness… No wonder he was always making bad jokes. He was trying to feel something. “What do you feel when you would be happy?”

“Nothing.” Blinker answered shortly. “Not even a sinking in the stomach. Just a void that reminds me of what was. I get angry about it sometimes. No idea what Collage goes through.”

I thought on that. “I think I get it. At least, I get it enough.”

“Then stand by your word and get out of here.” Blinker told me, pointing at the door. Then he pushed into his shower stall.

For just a second, I saw a second copy of Blinker’s mask hung up on a hook. I only noticed because Blinker paused to look at it.

So he could make time duplicates. The implications….

Weren’t something I wanted to even think about.

“Blinker, one last thing.” I said.

He looked at me over his shoulder, not even trying to be intimidating. Even so, he was still. It didn’t matter for him, he had three or so free seconds to poise like a predator and I’d only ever have a split second to react. I’d never feel safe around him again.

I gestured between him and me. “This was rapport building. It’s something you should’ve done much sooner instead of keeping me at arms length and putting me in the gym.” Then I stayed true to my word and left.

I stopped when I realised I was still soaking wet. I was tracking water outside of the shower stalls, but that was semi alright because the adjacent locker room didn’t have a carpeted floor. Frowning to myself, I closed my eyes and focused on my clothes and put my attention in them.

My power had a strange relationship with water. One thing I was still failing to grasp at was what differentiated a body of water from something like my Vphones. I could sense the entirety of my phone’s components when I touched it, yet when I touched water or air, my power was cut off just past my fingertips.

Barely past my fingertips. Even with the help of my sixth sense it was hard to grasp just how short that distance was.

And yet, when an object got wet, I could sense that water. It didn’t count if it was surface wetness, water only snuck in when it was actually in something, like it was right now with my clothes. What irked me about this was that while I could track how much weight got added when something got wet, there wasn’t a thing I could do to help make it dry. I pulled my attention back to my more mundane senses and felt better than when I’d woken up.

Since I couldn’t do anything with my current ensemble, I just found some replacement clothes riddled with Sentinel logos, covered the logos with my power, and got in the costume that was my own. I hadn’t worn the stupidly heavy thing in a week, and I’d come to miss it. Something about having that much weight there but not really weighing on me was oddly comforting.

I diegned to keep my protective mask down until it was needed. It got difficult to breathe through after a while. After that I collected my staff and left, pausing only to grab my collapsible baton. It would be nice to have a backup.

On my way out I passed the man who spoke no words. Muffle signed a few things at me, some of which I caught, but most I did not. I did catch the handsigns for phone, talking, and both positives or negatives. Or I thought I did. It flew over my head, and I indicated as such with my hands.

Then I realised he might have been asking how my studies of sign language were going. I tried to say, “I haven’t been studying as much as I should’ve.” But the words were snatched by Muffle’s power.

He nodded and tapped his phone. He signed three letters: A P P. I nodded, getting it.

Would probably be better to rely on a learning app than the big man who couldn’t speak out loud. Especially if I was going to make a habit of getting suspended. It wasn’t something I was aiming for, but with how things went around here it was a possibility.

That all being said, I cursed to myself in the elevator when I remembered again that learning sign language had more use than just talking to Muffle. It had field uses as well, just in case being quiet was necessary. I’d needed to be quiet earlier today, and while I wasn’t sure if Forsaken knew sign language, it still would’ve been useful.

Something to work on. I’d do it while waiting for the monster to appear. Anywhere between no time at all and- I checked my Vphone- twenty two hours for that thing to appear.

I was really hoping the rumour about stronger monsters taking more time to appear wasn’t true.

When I finally got back outside, Slingshot was nowhere to be seen. That meant nothing to me since I’d figured out she had a tendency to float above the lights, so I looked up and looked for boots. I didn’t find any so I went to my phone and called her through the Sentry line.

“You’re done?” She asked, skipping the ‘hellos’ and ‘how are yous’. Fine by me.

“I fell asleep in the shower.” I answered. “Did I keep you waiting? Or did you head back to the Control area?”

“No, I’m still here.” She said. I heard the words half through the phone and with my own ears. I glanced up and then away when I saw her coming down upright from directly above me. She ended the call and I was marginally slower at putting my phone away.

“We should get back.” She showed no sign that she’d noticed my blunder. Not for the first time, I was glad no one could see my expression. There was no way I’d hide this much redness otherwise.

“Yeah.” I started walking. Slingshot kept pace, even as I sped up. She wasn’t saying anything and I wasn’t about to be the one to broach the subject. I’d embarrassed myself enough already, thank you very much.

So much for things not being awkward.