I lit up the room with my swords, sending them out to every corner to bathe the whole place in dim shimmering light. Being able to see apparently disagreed with Rito, because she had her hands clamped over her eyes and stumbled blindly towards the living room where she staggered around before sitting in a chair.

"Wow," AEGIS said, and I turned to look away from Rito at the small kitchen area. The apartment floorplan meant that immediately on entering, you were in a little dining area next to the kitchen. Passing through there led to the main hall on the left, or straight ahead to the living room where Rito was perched with all the rigidity and calm of a totem pole. One with lots of wide eyes and open screaming mouths.

I pulled my eyes away from her again, annoyed at my own instinct to dwell on the girl in distress. The kitchen just...wasn't really a kitchen anymore. The entire entryway to the apartment was full of warped, distended spears, made of the house itself. In some places, the countertop sagged in shallow concave depressions, where extra material had been siphoned off to be thrust across the room in Talon's desperate final attack on his unknown assailant.

The assailant hadn't been standing here, that much was certain. The number of imploded barbs was as dense as a thicket, coming from every angle and entwining like a drunken spiderweb. Unless they had the power to become very small or insubstantial, they must have shot him from somewhere else. The living room was the obvious angle, but I wasn't going back to Rito just yet.

On the counter nearest me, there was an electric hot water dispenser sitting out, and it too had been sacrificed to turn into one of the room's barbs. I walked over for a closer look, one of my swords flying low to cut through the gloom.

Talon's power was crazy, man. There was a spear jutting from where the water heater and countertop met, and the spear was an amalgam of both. It was like both of them were made of rubber, and his power just pushed through them, stretching them into the needle-like shape. Curious, I picked up the heater and found that despite its new, bizarre proportions, it was still the same heft I expected, it just now had a ten foot stabbing protrusion growing out of the side of it.

The barb I'd pulled it from was now just half a barb, a half-cylinder made of the cheap wooden counter, and on the impossibly smooth flat top surface, I could see the individual chunks of wood and sawdust of the counter, all still in place, but stretched into streaks by Talon's power. I touched it and found the entire needle as wobbly as any long narrow piece of wood.

So his power was just to distort the shape of things without changing their properties in any way. Not as lethal as the initial twisted embrace of the room might indicate, though getting stabbed by five or six wooden spears still probably wasn't exactly pleasant. I also imagined that like most powers, the material would change at the speed of thought, meaning the spears would literally explode into you.

Messy. And a shame that he didn't catch his attacker with any of them. There wasn't any blood or damage to the barbs anywhere.

"Anything of interest?" AEGIS asked.

"No, just attacked the air it looks like."

"So who's this guy again? And why are you so upset about a random Exhuman getting killed? It was probably just his neighbors or a cop or...well, anyone really. There isn't a person alive who doesn't have a motive to kill an Exhuman."

"He was a decent guy, AEGIS. You probably would have liked him."

"Yeah, I kinda doubt that."

I turned her around to take in the murder scene in the hallway. Off to the side was the bathroom, or what remained of it after another thousand barbs erupted from the doorway. And on the ground, blood caking the thin carpet, was Talon on his front with three obvious shots in his back.

"He was a defense attorney," I told AEGIS as I approached the body, being careful not to step in any of the now-tacky blood, and breathing through my mouth to get through the biting stench. "He got powers and never used them, continuing on like nothing was wrong. When New Eden became a thing, he volunteered for internment, even though he'd already been successful in blending in. When that place turned out to be crap, he joined a group of others to form a group dedicated to the nonviolent protection of their rights."

"They don't have rights," AEGIS huffed.

"Yeah, legally, maybe. But I still think there are rights which are self-evident. Endowed on them by their creator, and inalienable. And it's pretty shit that good guys like this can have that stripped away just because they woke up a little different one day."

She frowned at me but didn't respond, while I focused on the body.

I didn't really know what I was looking for here. It was Talon, that much was certain. And he was dead. Not breathing, blood everywhere, his eyes unfocused, the only light in them reflecting from my swords. I thought I might want to check him for other wounds, but really didn't want to cake myself in blood. His hands were out in front of him, and despite blood on his palms where he'd held his wounds, they had no sign of injury. Not really a surprise, but it substantiated what we saw here. No fight, just him throwing his powers around and getting shot from behind.

I had to get up and leave, the smell was getting too strong and I was about to throw up all over him. I went to the windows where the smell was still just as strong but at least I didn't have to look at his dead eyes.

They were completely black even though it was morning out. I brought in some lights and saw small bubbles and fissures on the other side of the glass, but the window itself was intact. It almost looked like they'd been painted over from the outside.

I tried to open the window, and after a couple minutes of struggle, got it to slide an inch upwards, the paint now floating in the air where the glass had slid under it. I gave it a poke and found it crunchy and firmly set.

Almost like structure foam, the stuff that made the Raven's Nest self-repairing. But white, not dark. The thought of how structure foam would balloon out with all these micro-bubbles seemed consistent with what I saw here. But that stuff was expensive, it was 'smart', in that its growth could be controlled and directed by the millions of tiny robots embedded in it. Nobody would just slap it against a window.

The thought of goop exploding made me think of something else though, and checking the color again, I thought I had it this time. XPCA adhesive grenades...or missiles or mines or anything really. Planted or fired against the windows, would splat against them and expand instantly, dropping the room into blackness and prepare the ambush.

If the killer knew Talon and Rito's powers, they would know that neither of them had any way to counteract the darkness. But the dark did give Rito the chance to slip away, yet she hadn't been able to. So they'd prepared some means to be able to see in the dark

Or maybe that was overthinking things. Anyone who was going to use dark to ambush another would want to be able to see. Maybe stopping Rito's powers was just a lucky coincidence. Maybe they didn't even expect Rito here at all. Or, not to dismiss any option, maybe they were gunning for Rito and Talon was just shit out of luck in all ways but managing to save her.

I didn't like that idea because that meant she was still in danger, but it wasn't one I could ignore. I knew from Saga that she had a lot of debt, but nobody would try to collect by picking a fight with an Exhuman, right? Much less ambushing her in someone else's apartment.

The more I thought about it the more I didn't like any of this...and we were starting at square one with a murder, so things going downhill from there was a bad sign. It wasn't exactly impossible to get XPCA exotic munitions as a civilian I was sure, but the fact they'd been used definitely implied an XPCA connection. Talon didn't seem to have many enemies that I could tell before he formed the Defiant, but once he did that, he was XPCA public enemy number one.

I went over behind Rito on the couch where she was quietly moaning and writhing into her hands on her face, sweeping one small blade of light along the ground. If the attacker hadn't been in the kitchen, they must have been standing around here and might have left some trace of their passing.

The light glinted off something and I bent down and picked up a small golden tube from the ground.

"What've you go there?" AEGIS asked.

I went to her and put the spent bullet casing down on-end next to her for her to see. Then I pulled my sidearm off of my hip and cycled the action, popping the chambered round out and catching it. I put it on the ground next to the casing where the two of them were identical, but for the projectile sticking out of the unspent round.

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"It's a standard bullet," she said.

"It's standard across the XPCA sidearms, yes."

"And elsewhere."

"And elsewhere," I agreed. "But the exotic munition adhesive in the windows, that's not so standard."

She frowned and adjusted her glasses. "No, not so much."

"And night vision. Again, could be anyone. But definitely standard for shadow ops and the like."

"I don't think it's shadow ops," she said. "Look over there, near the body."

I went where she was pointing, past the body further into the hall. The blood had completely saturated the carpet here making the individual bristles of it cling together in a sticky red-brown mess. I wasn't sure what she'd sent me over here to see until I reached the very edge of the pool where it was spanning the entire hallway and impossible to walk around without treading in.

And there, in the middle, someone had tread in it. An indistinct footprint, only identifiable as one by context, since the carpet wasn't an ideal medium for that kind of thing, but definitely a regular human footprint.

"Would a shadow ops leave that behind?" she asked. "Seems amateurish to me, for a professional assassin."

"Just because they ambush from stealth doesn't mean they never leave any traces," I said. "They have the whole XPCA to clean up any mess they make after they get the kill. But still, I think you're right…"

I thought back to the only shadow ops I'd ever met, who'd tried to kill AEGIS and me in the annex facility outside of New Eden. He'd had the whole spectrum of stealth tech, not just invisible to every type of sensor AEGIS could throw at him, but also dead silent, inertial dampeners which would have prevented a distinct footprint from showing up like that. More, the one we'd faced could crawl around on the ceiling without any apparent trouble, which definitely would have let him avoid the blood pool if he wanted. But there was one more thing.

"You're right, definitely not a shadow ops," I said, crouching near the stinking mess and giving the footprint another look.

"Of course I'm right," she beamed. "But you can tell me why, I don't mind."

"It's a normal footprint. Recon and shadow ops in full gear don't run around like normal people, they wear weird stilts on their limbs and scuttle on all fours. Lets them keep their heads low, move faster, and creep the shit out of me."

"And these aren't stilt tracks, just footprints. So it's not a shadow ops."

"Yeah, exactly."

We both sat and thought for a minute.

"Hey, Athan? Why did they step in the blood anyway?"

"Dunno. Think they were looking for something in the back?"

"Oh. I think I got it. There's only one footprint."

"And?"

"Meaning they never came back this way. What they were looking for in the back, they found. It was an exit."

Of course. The front door was behind a huge mess of barbs and the windows had a ton of gunk on them. It only made sense that the attacker had escaped another way. I picked up AEGIS and prepared to take a running jump over the blood.

"Rito, we're going to check out the back room, okay? We'll be right back."

"Wait," she said. I looked back at her, and had to squint at seeing her backlit by the window behind her.

"Wait for what?" I asked.

"Um, I took us," she said. I blinked and realized, oh yeah, that would explain the light from the window.

We were in a bedroom, pretty large, but half of it seemed converted to an office. A bookshelf was full of thick law books, carefully kept dust-free, and the bed in the corner was carefully made.

The window was the primary attraction, though. This was the only room in the house filled with light, and as I opened the door and found us just around a corner in the hall, confirming this was the only room in the house we hadn't already been in. The window was thrown wide open and looking down, I could see the remains of the screen down on the dirt below, the straight lines of the orange-yellow painted adobe walls making the ground seem so far away, despite being only on the second floor.

"The screen's been kicked out, this is how they left," AEGIS said.

"It's a two story drop."

"Which really isn't much. There's a big dirt lot down there, so it's not like you're landing on rocks or anything."

I gave the office/bedroom another once-over but didn't find anything other than vague guilt for poking around a dead man's things. Rito sat on the bed quietly, waiting for us to finish, but seeming much improved for being in a room which didn't reek of blood or being a few feet from a body.

"I guess we're done?" I asked AEGIS.

"Guess so. I don't know what you were hoping to find here in the first place."

"Well, we've ruled some things out and gotten important information. I bet it'll help."

"I have a lot of data to analyze at least. If I can put together a fabric simulation, I might be able to get a partial footprint for you from the carpet."

"That'd be amazingly useful. If nothing else, all the XPCA boots use the same tread. If we can eliminate both a shadow ops and an XPCA soldier, I think that would narrow the suspect pool considerably."

"Or confirm it to be an XPCA soldier," she said.

"Well...I'd hope not. It'd be pretty fucking stupid of them to provoke the Defiant like that. But the XPCA does a lot of pretty fucking stupid things, so...let's just hope for now, okay?"

"Can we go now, then?" Rito asked.

We agreed and I turned around and waited. It was pretty hard to tell when nothing was happening, so I gave it a few seconds but was able to confirm we weren't going anywhere.

"Someone's watching," she whispered urgently.

"Um, me?" AEGIS said.

"Oh. Turn her around please," Rito said with relief.

Interesting, I thought, that AEGIS counted as a someone to Rito's powers. So just a camera would have been enough to stop her, then? I supposed that made sense if we were going down the assumption that whoever broke in was using night-vision optics. Technically they were only looking at an image being generated by their optics and nobody was looking at her, but if her powers interpreted AEGIS as watching, then the lens of a set of optics would be the same.

Also I just loved learning quirks of Exhuman powers. I could be a nerd too, I guess.

We were back at Vegas and Saga was still stretched out in her chair like she hadn't moved the whole time we were gone. Chiho yelped in surprise to suddenly find us occupying space around her, but fortunately she was dressed this time.

"So I wasn't dreaming last night," she said, looking up from a textbook.

"Hi Chiho, sorry to drop in."

"No problem. You're welcome any time. Um, except in the middle of the night, while kidnapping a little girl, I guess." She looked over at Rito. Chiho was a few inches shorter than me, despite being a college student, but even she was a full head above Rito. "She's so cute!" Chiho suddenly burst out and advanced on the waif.

"Be nice Chiho, she's a witness to a murder."

"Oh no!" Chiho said. "Was it your mommy or daddy?"

"Um, I'm nineteen," Rito said, shifting with obvious unease at being manhandled by the larger girl.

"Oh. Well you look like you're ten."

"...thank you?"

Meanwhile AEGIS was saying nothing and just glaring daggers at Saga, and Saga was laying there completely immobile, and I got the impression that was how she always acted around AEGIS now. Trying not to stir the pot. It was weird seeing them like this.

"Let's wait for Lia to get up and then recap what we've learned," I said, glancing at the time on my mobile. Still pretty early, but Lia would normally be up by now. I must have thrown her off by waking her up last night. "The more brains we have working on this the better."

Seeing my mobile reminded me and I went to my messenger and found Karu online. I felt a twinge of guilt for forgetting all about her in the excitement of the investigation and thought I might talk to her for a few minutes if we were waiting for Lia anyway.

But before I could even think of an opening line, my wrist holo went off and I answered it.

"Chariot? Time to work," Cosette's curt voice came through.

"Again?"

"Shut it, please. There's no off days on saving the world."

"But we're not saving the world. We're just going around icing former New Edeners."

"If you've ever had a backed-up toilet you know that a janitor can save the world too. Now stop flapping your asscheeks at me and get in here to report. I don't have time to baby you right now, so do me a favor for once and don't be a pain in my neck."

I held the holo off my head and looked at those around me. AEGIS, trapped in her box, glaring at Saga like she expected her to jump up and kill her mother again. Saga, lying as still as anyone holding up a sheet in a morgue. Rito, finally getting over the shock, but still a nervous, mangled wreck.

And Chiho, I guess, who smiled as she saw me looking, and moving past tormenting the smaller girl, went back to studying.

And I sighed. Everyone seemed to be slipping out of my reach, everything was falling apart around me, and I didn't know what to do. I'd thought...stupidly, I know, but definitely held the illusion that if I went to Talon's apartment and had a look around, I'd find something concrete. I'd be able to act proactively, make some positive change in the world again, not just be here spinning my wheels with a bunch of suffering girls in a world which didn't care.

Ever since New Eden, I hadn't had control over my life for even a second, it felt like. Everything I'd tried to do was just leading to dead ends. Meeting with the Defiant had ended in Talon's death. Digging up AEGIS had led to this angry imposter. And now, Talon's apartment gave me nothing.

Less than nothing, since now I was being dragged away from even that.

"Yeah, I'm on my way," I told Cosette and hung up. "Say hi to Lia for me, guys."

"That's it?" Rito asked, confused more than angry. "I thought you were going to find out what happened to Talon? You said you would. I believed you. I sat there next to him and endured it because you said you would!"

"Hey, back off," AEGIS said. "He'll figure it out, okay? But he still has a job to do protecting people from scum," she said, glancing at Saga again.

"Okay," she said, as though slapped and taking a deep breath. "Okay. Sorry. Do you need a ride?"

"That'd be nice, thanks," I said just wondering what tepid hell my life would make me go into next.