I was still seeing spots from the bright scintillation of electrical outburst in the subterranean darkness, but with ferenic efficaciousness, I blinked to dispel the hindrance from my vision.

And what I unearthed in its absence was a truth too pallsome to consider, leaving me desolate as I fell to my khaki-clad knees in disconsolate melancholy. In my noble heart, I susurrated a lachrymose prayer to the divinity of this cold world, prayed that even my erudite intellect could falter, just this once.

But the candoring reality stared me abominably in the face. Rito was gone, and with her, our vehicle of conveyance, trapping me in the murky gloaming of this undercity with these pugnacious incompetents.

It was sufficient to make a grown man vagire.

"Dork-hand!" yelled Stag, making me jump. "Get the hell off your damn holo and help us find a light! Goddamn prancing cockwright."

I frowned at him to make clear my discontent but put my pocket thesaurus away before Mini became involved and forced me to buy yet another replacement.

I could only tell it was Stag by his loud, deep, perpetually drunk-sounding swagger of a voice. The only lights down here had blown out during Althan's desperate electric attack, and then he and Rito had vanished as she tended to. All because of stupid Mini and her stupid inability to keep her fists sheathed for more than half a second.

I supposed it was apropos that the stupider and more impossible I found her to tolerate, the more likely that she'd thrust us into situations where I had to tolerate her. And now here we were, scuttling in the umbra like embryonic crustaceans in the pitch of the benthic abyss. The infinite vaguarities of our conundrum plied ever deeper their callous métier.

"Dork-hand! If I see that holo out one more goddamn time--"

"I-I'm using it for light!" I shouted back at him.

"Then point it at the ground, not your face, idiot."

I swept the ground with the dim light, the thought that this was a pointless endeavor growing with every second. I didn't know why Mini wasn't taking her turn berating me as well, usually she couldn't hold back and sometimes even tried to get physical at me. But not now, and I wondered if Rito had taken her as well.

Knowing my luck, she was snatched and dropped in the hands of the XPCA, and because of her violent ineptitude, they'd decided the Defiant couldn't be allowed to exist. I could just see it happening, that rowdy little dumbbell jacking up everything.

I hadn't even wanted to be here. I'd only joined the Defiant because Talon seemed like a smart guy I might be able to bounce a few ideas off of, not even as an Exhuman. I had a few plans bouncing around for making a lot of money and vanishing off the grid and thought a lawyer might be a useful perspective to have.

And then he died. And now I was saddled with the hairy dwarf and the angry midget. Just my damn luck as ever, my perfect plans getting screwed by things completely out of my control just like always.

I didn't even want these meetings. I wasn't afraid of getting shot in the back like an incompetent. I installed a camera outside my front door without the HOA knowing about it so if an assassin was going to sneak up on me, they'd find themselves being ambushed instead.

I tripped over something hidden in the darkness. Well, it wasn't really hidden, I just wasn't paying attention to what was under the light from my holo.

It was a leg. I was about to scream in a manner utterly justified by the discovery of a dismembered...member--and in a masculine way--when I realized it wasn't dismembered.

It was a whole body. Mini's. Unconscious maybe, with some minor burns on her body and a fat bleeding bruise on her forehead. I put my hand on a wooden pillar and leaned off of it to see her more closely and realized my fingers were touching something wet.

Again, I almost screamed in a justified and manly way. It was blood on the beam. But I courageously held in my alarm as only one hardened from the most gruesome shock sites the 'net had to offer could.

"What in the hell are you screaming about over there?" Stag yelled at me.

"Nothing!" I said back, my voice definitely not trembling.

"Then shut the hell up unless you find something, you hare-brained lunatic," he grumbled.

My detective skills kicked into overdrive as I analyzed the scene before me. Mini was breathing evenly, clearly still alive, but she hadn't reacted to my...to Stag's screaming. That and her eyes were shut, which meant she was clearly unconscious.

And here is where the mystery deepened, but I knew I could overcome it with my amazing intellect. She had a large bleeding bruise on her forehead, probably the reason she was out. Something had struck her. But there was nary a murder weapon in sight? Would this be a cold case, locked away in the sea of digital files under a police station, never to be cracked?

No! Because I was here, and so was the evidence, thankfully not yet washed away by the hands of amateurs.

I would crack this case wide open with a shocking revelation few could match. I gave my imagined audience a moment to prepare themselves before I struck them with the barren truth.

There was no murder weapon. Boom.

I had to smile at my brilliance. It wasn't what had struck her, but what she'd struck. And the answer was right under my fingertips. The wooden pillar, splattered with blood, the evidence needed to prove my hypothesis ironclad!

Already certain of the truth, I swept my holo back and forth and found a trail of footprints, widely set but with small feet approaching the pillar from the direction I'd come. They ended at her body. All I needed was one final clue to prove my theory definitively and silence those who had ever doubted me.

I unlaced Mini's shoe, garish, tasteless floppy skateboarding shoes as splattered with every color as the pillar was splattered with her blood, and pried it off her foot, adding the pungent smell of her exposed socks to the stale air of the basement.

The shoe matched the footprint perfectly. I could already imagine the pounding of the judge's gavel as he proclaimed my proposed sequence of events utterly inescapable in their truth. The jury swooned and the defense wept, promising never to practice their pathetic excuse for law ever again, while the audience rose to their feet and applauded.

I took several extravagant bows, hearing the escalating cheers growing as I acknowledged them in my graciousness. I turned and bowed yet again and--

And pain. I held the crown of my head where I'd also slammed it into the pillar, my eyes watering. Nobody was laughing, so nobody had seen, but I felt like my face was burning bright enough that I'd be spotted even in the dark. This stupid cramped basement, ruining even my fantasies with its crappy layout. Maybe if they used better materials than dead trees there wouldn't need to be as many pillars everywhere and I wouldn't be reeling in pain right now.

"What was that bang?" Stag called from across the basement. "Find a way up?"

"No," I muttered. "Just...testing the structure." Crap, this really hurt!

"Hrmph," he grunted. "Good idea, for once. Why don't you just break us out of here?"

It sounded like he began to argue with another of the Defiant down here with us who had some objection to breaking down part of a school, but I couldn't hear it from here since unlike Stag, they spoke at a reasonable volume.

But he was right. I did have a good idea. I was sick of stumbling in the dark and banging into things. I had the power to get myself out of here, and I'd use it.

I pulled a bardiche out and then jerked it once or twice but it was stuck fast between the dirt and the ceiling. This place was entirely too cramped for a poleaxe. Stupidly designed, as I said. Perhaps something more maneuverable like a rapier...but that wouldn't even punch through the floor.

Whatever I was going to use, I had to clear up my hands first. I was still holding Mini's stupid shoe. I stooped down and tried to put it back on her foot, but the shoe was so lightweight and floppy, and she was so uncooperative that it wasn't fitting on. Her toes kept jamming in wrong or getting caught on the opening through her sock. It amazed me, but somehow didn't amaze me at all that even completely unconscious, she could still irritate me and manage to prevent anything from getting done.

I tried to roll her over so her whole leg wouldn't be flopping around, but had a hard time with how dense (in every sense!) she was. She was like a tiny lumberjack that ate nothing but steroids. Pulling and twisting her leg was doing nothing, and the more I struggled, the more progress I failed to produce, earning nothing but a thin layer of dust and sweat for my trouble.

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I soon found myself shoving her bodily with abandon, one hand on her back, the other on her butt through her jeans, yet still she wouldn't roll. Something was stopping her. I let her fall onto her back without grace and checked for the obstacle.

And there, in her front pocket, I found the culprit. As I pulled it out and the yellow light of my holo washed over it, I felt my breath catch.

Why was she carrying this on her? Was she a complete idiot? Did she always have this?

"Are you through yet?" I heard Stag yelling at me as his footsteps crunched in the dirt as he approached. Not knowing what else to do with it, I hid the fist-sized metal device in my pocket and stood to face him, painting an innocent look on my face. "What the--is this where she's been? Stop laying around Mini, get your ass up," he said, advancing on her.

"She's unconscious. I followed her footprints and they led me directly to a blood--"

"Don't care," he said. "The damn idiot. Am I the only one here with a functioning brain?"

I cleared my throat significantly. He looked at me.

"Yes, yes I am," he said. "Is that your fancy axe stuck in the ceiling? Why didn't you use a regular wood-chopping axe, you moron?"

"It's a bardiche, and it was the pinnacle of heavy bladed polearms in the sixteenth--"

"Still don't care. Open the ceiling and then flap your useless gums."

As much as he professed his apathy, he was kneeling over Mini and with a grumble, tore off one of his sleeves to wrap around her head. Just had to show off his hairy arms and all the fat on them, didn't he? Even if there were some muscle, that really just sealed the impression of him being a big barrel of meat.

As for me, I took my own advice and pulled out a modern hatchet, an axe explicitly designed for cutting wood, and the obvious choice. I swung it ungainly upwards, but the angle and low ceiling made it impossible to get any good hits across the ceiling beams.

"You may as well piss on it for all the good you're doing," he said as he tied off the now-red sleeve around her head.

"Oh, like you could do better?"

He stood up and ripped the hatched out of my hands with a crude yank. Experimentally, he swung it slowly over his head a few times, letting it brush along the ceiling like he was going to scratch it to pieces.

"Gimme a shovel," he said. I rolled my eyes and gave him one.

Instead of slicing up towards freedom, he dug down towards...the Sino glasslands, presumably. Truly he was a man of incomparable idiocy. I had to ponder if he had gone mad, or if his lunacy derived from the patulous vexation in which we found ourselves embroiled.

His fingers closed around my pocket thesaurus.

"No, I need that!" I shouted at him.

"I fucking warned you," he said, and threw it into the dirt hole he'd just been digging, and then jumped in after it. He didn't step on it, but it illuminated his feet in the new hole only a couple feet deep. What the hell was he doing wasting his time digging that?

With his feet firmly planted lower now, he swung the hatchet overhead without hesitation, and from his new angle, scored a clean hit against the ceiling, now that he was at an optimal distance from it to swing with his arms straight.

Oh.

I watched with disinterest as he hacked apart the stupid ceiling, sneaking in when he was distracted to retrieve my thesaurus in between his strikes. Soon, the rest of the Defiant were there, attracted by the noise of the deconstruction, watching as he broke through board after board.

I had expected to see light above, but there was just more darkness. Even when he broke a hole large enough for us to go through, and we emerged into a wide room full of short, uncomfortable-looking chairs all facing the same way, it was still dark.

I checked my holo. It was midnight, I supposed. And then pulled it away as Stag reached for it again.

A few dark rooms later and we emerged through a set of double doors into the night air. It was damp here, but far warmer than Santa Fe. The humid air felt full and pleasant in my nose, and the cool was soothing after the cramped stale basement.

"So?" I turned to ask Stag and the others now that we were freed. "How do we get back? Nobody here has teleportation powers."

"Why go back?" Stag asked, sitting down as he wiped sweat off his stubble-covered jowls, laying Mini out on the grass next to him. The moonlight did little to increase his appeal.

"Because...that's where we live?" I explained to him, patience of several saints in one.

"Why?" he asked.

"Because we do. That's what living somewhere means?"

"We wound up there on account of being near New Eden, that's all, you moron," he grumbled. "It's no more our home than anywhere else. Here, nobody will be looking for us."

"Oh," I said, not sure what else to add. "Well, we still can't leave, I have belongings back there."

"I'm sure they sell queer porn here as well."

"I'm not--! You're disgusting," I said

He snorted at me but was the only one. Another of the Defiant stepped up. "If it's true nobody else would look for us here, I think we should stay. Only Rito knows we're here, right?"

"And it's obvious the XPCA don't give a shit about Talon's promise for mutually-assured destruction," Stag grumbled. "And he's dead for it, good riddance. So the least any of us can do is learn from his corpse and hide again."

The others seemed to bristle at the insinuation that Talon deserved any kind of death and I agreed. Stag might be one of the most vocal among us, but he was far from the most popular.

"Oh shut up," he bellowed at them. "We're still the Defiant Unchained, we still follow the rules. If you have anything to say, say it. If you don't, we vote."

There were a few minutes of murmured conversation, but nobody else stepped out to speak. When Stag had depleted his shallow patience, he called for a vote.

I thrust my hand out in a confident thumbs-down simply to oppose Stag's vote, but his majority carried nonetheless. The Defiant would remain in Oregon.

Not that I really cared. There was 'net anywhere I went.

Or so I thought. Until I felt cold droplets on the backs of my hands, and then the sound of a stampede as the water from the heavens began to pour down on us.

I pulled out an umbrella and opened it, the simple folding metal arms about the limit of complexity in a device I could create. I looked around and saw the others beginning to droop or run for cover and decided to demonstrate the broad applicability of my powers and the peerless generosity of my being by creating an armful more and passing them out to muttered praise.

"Thanks Dillan," one man said.

"My name is not Dillan," I informed him.

"Err, Dork-hand?"

I glared and took the umbrella back.

"Wait, no, isn't it Dillan?"

"I am Duskwhisper Demonhand," I said, glaring at him imperiously with a stare as cold and piercing as a needle of ice. "Herald of Night, Bearer of the Seven Seals."

He blinked at me. "Your parents named you that?"

I thrust the umbrella back at him and moved on. Idiots like him could never understand my curse.

One of the others with more experience and training, a veterinarian I think, was now looking at Mini. She didn't get an umbrella, on account that I'd previously already done several very thoughtful things for her, and she'd never so much as given me a date. Such an uptight bitch.

These unfortunate interactions were grating on my nerves and I separated myself from the group where I could stand nearby, alone after my brief show of mercy and kindness. Any respectable recipient would have no choice but to approach me as I stared into the dark rain and be captivated by my enigma.

But somehow, after a few minutes, still nobody had come over to thank me properly for my charity. Were these people all socially retarded? I knew they were Exhumans, but their ingratitude knew no bounds. A couple of them were on their last straw with me as well.

I spent the time thumbing through my mobile but it still thought we were back in Arizona, the stupid thing, and wouldn't connect to the 'net here until it sorted itself out. I put it away, not wanting to break out my thesaurus again in case Stag was still lurking nearby, but my hand bumped into the device in my pocket and I drew that out instead.

And then remembered to give a good suspicious glance around. One could never be too careful.

If this was what I thought it was...I could hardly believe it. I'd heard Mini mouthing off about the tech she'd constructed with her powers, too stupid to keep her thoughts inside her head at any point, but I never believed I might get my hands on any of it, much less this -- the crown jewel of a technopath's arsenal.

It was small, only the size of my fist, but heavy. Inside I knew was technology like the world had never seen, borne of thoughts so alien that even opening it for a peek would render it at best inoperable, never to be repaired or reassembled by a single soul on the planet, save Mini.

Even another technopath, she'd boasted, would never understand her genius. I didn't know if that was true, but given what this thing could supposedly do, I didn't doubt it.

The temptation to use it was enormous, but I was far too smart and disciplined to fall victim to such an obvious trap. I had to be exceedingly cautious with it, far moreso than she'd been. If I was found with it, if the XPCA could discern what it was, I'd be killed on the spot.

Because there in my hands was the world's first and only synthetic Code-X tech. Or something like that. The ability to control another, through brainwave manipulation or something Even I couldn't begin to wrap my head around, despite my genius.

I didn't know how it worked, but there were two handles on either side, a pair of thumb triggers on them, and that was it. I supposed you just...pointed at your intended target and jammed the triggers. And then they were yours. Maybe they just followed your orders from there on, or maybe some kind of...wireless neural uplink? That seemed impossible, but if it could remotely control other minds, who was to say it couldn't also remotely interface with its user's?

I pocketed it again. It would bear experimentation, but not here, not now, and certainly not with other Exhumans. Maybe in a few weeks when the heat from this whole Talon thing had died down, in a quiet town with some drunken homeless people that nobody would miss...like Stag, I thought, with a smile.

And then I remembered I was supposed to be brooding and mysterious and stopped smiling. Enigmatic and obscure...Delphic in my equivocal inscrutability. I was a soul tortured by my onerous burden, alone in a malignant firmament, my tribulations unascertainable by the stock plebeians. This locus was an anvil, and the injustices within it hammered down on my adamantine incarnation.

"Dork-hand, you baby-bushed prick," Stag yelled at me from a distance while I fumbled in putting away my thesaurus. "We're moving on, stop standing around like an unpolished knob and move."

Truly I was misunderstood in my own time. But someday the legacy of Duskwhisper Demonhand would be known across the land. For I was the Herald of the Night. I was the Bearer of the--

"Goddamn it boy, get your head out of your ass and move."

"Okay, I'm coming, don't have a freaking heart attack," I yelled back at him.