"Just like we planned," I murmured, moving my lips as little as possible to not tip Dragon off.

"We planned what?" Alyssa hissed back.

"Not you." I swallowed hard. "Something's about to happen, just try not to freak out."

She looked around like I'd gone crazy, but I really didn't have the time to hold her hand at the moment. Dragon was staring us down, his hands...hand invisible under his draped coat, which hung off of his svelte form like a cloak.

Here we go, I thought, taking a deep breath. Dragon had before waited exactly five seconds before getting to killing. I opened my mouth to say anything before he hit that timer. And then we'd have five seconds after that.

"All right, Dragon," I said. "Spare the others and we'll talk."

And then my eyes went funny, seeing something floating in them that wouldn't go away. A smear of colors that, despite knowing what was going on and what I was seeing, I was instinctually trying to blink away.

"You are in no position to make demands. Come forward with my trinket or its whereabouts. Or die," Dragon said.

"What the hell?" Alyssa whispered.

"Have you got this, Tem?" I asked, reaching back and holding Alyssa's hand and giving it a comforting squeeze.

"He hurt you," Tem muttered, her voice sharp and dangerous as bared teeth.

Good enough for me. I grabbed firmer hold of Alyssa and we ran, leaving ourselves behind.

The thing which had been in my eyes was me. A copy, anyway, an illusion made by Tem to cover our escape. Which meant that right now, Alyssa and I were invisible, and the two copies of us remained standing in our place.

"Did we leave our bodies?" Alyssa's voice asked, sounding panicked and out of breath. "What's goin' on?"

"Look, I can't really stop to explain. A lot of weird shit is gonna happen, so just...focus on staying alive, whatever happens."

"We're gonna die?"

"No. Not if I can help it."

We stopped short of the edge of Tem's power, still dozens of feet away from the nearest buildings. I clutched the device in my hands and ran my thumb over the activator stud.

"Why are we stoppin'?"

"Please. No more questions. Can you do that?"

She made a noise like she was nodding and said nothing else. I could feel her pulse pounding in the hand I held and the fear in her voice, but she was keeping it together. I was lucky to have her.

And then Dragon's patience was up, ten seconds this time apparently, and the air rent with the sound of gunfire. Two shots passed cleanly through my illusory body. Tem did her best to simulate blood and my illusion flying, but she wasn't fast enough to match bullets, and to anyone attentive, the trick was up.

Dragon was always attentive, and within moments, he had a set of optics in his hands from somewhere, fitting them over his long, stringy hair.

And exactly what I'd hoped for. The device in my hands primed and thrown right towards him, and I grabbed Alyssa and ran towards the nearest building for all we were worth. We had maybe a second before he got the optics on and set to scanning in infrared, and the grenade would go off right at that time. With luck, my timing was good enough he'd never see us.

The grenade I threw exploded with a crackle and a hiss, and I felt a wave of static wash over us like I'd just done a tango on a thick wool carpet. Even at this distance, the blast would knock out electronics temporarily, but right at his feet, it would hopefully knock the optics out of the fight for good, along with whatever tools he had on him.

The device wasn't done though, and after the initial blast, hissed with streams of white smoke pouring out of it and creating an impenetrable white fog. It wasn't even normal smoke, it crackled and buzzed with energy, meaning in the likely event that his optics were EMP-hardened enough to survive, he still wouldn't be able to see through it without fine-tuning his optics. And that was just more time gained for us.

But he didn't bother with that, just tearing them off and throwing them aside, and then spotting Alyssa and me sprinting away instantly. I couldn't stop to watch as he levelled his gun with us, but I felt a cold chill on my spine as though my body subconsciously knew death had set its sights on me.

The smoke was in position to cover Tem, not me, and Dragon wouldn't miss. I had no shield, no powers to protect me.

There was another explosion as Dragon pulled the trigger.

But I wasn't the only one with powers. While the plan had been to stall so that others outside could reach us and help, it served another purpose. While juggling our invisibility and illusions, Tem had also been at work manipulating a web of photons into alignment. Somewhere inside the barrel of Dragon's gun, a razor-thin spiderweb of light had been put together as fast as she could manage. It was barely a construct, but it was enough to wreck hell on the bullet explosively twisting through it.

Inside the barrel, the bullet sliced, tumbling on itself as the barrel's rifling forced it into a shredded knot. And then it jammed, and blocking the force of the explosion, the gun just detonated in his hands.

His hand, actually. Since AEGIS already tore off his other one last time we met. He seemed to do little more than flinch on reflex as metal shards of his weapon blasted into his forearm, but the remnants of the gun fell from his fingertips as his grip failed.

Alyssa and I never looked back. I threw the door open and dragged her through it.

"Where to?" she asked, panting and leaning on her knees.

"People will have heard the gunshots," I replied, my breathing a lot more even than hers. "We just need to hide somewhere he won't find us until the police get here."

"But if my mobile has no signal, nobody's will." She was sharp. So much better suited for this shit than when I'd had to deal with Rito.

"Yeah. But campus is also big, and his optics are down...and Tem's still out there holding him up." I walked over to press the elevator call button, which did nothing, reminding me that oh yeah, I did set off an EMP grenade just outside.

"This way then?" she asked, opening a door to a set of stairs and eying them with some resignation.

I had to think about it for a second. We could slip away now and keep running, maybe get somewhere with signal and call for help. But that would run the enormous risk of being out in the open. Whoever had put together this campus hadn't made it much of a priority to be able to move between buildings with any degree of cover, and given how mostly-dead it was here on the weekend, the two of us running in the open was going to be easy to spot, even if the observer wasn't someone crazy overpowered like Dragon.

On the other hand, staying here presented its own dangers. If nobody was on campus to hear the shots, we'd be holing up and just waiting to die. Dragon might suspect we'd hide in the first building we ran into which would narrow his search considerably. But he also was down a set of optics, meaning if he wanted to check, he'd have to look in each room individually. That was an enormous waste of his time.

Being trapped in here wasn't even really a thing either. If he found us, in here or out on the plazas, we were dead anyway. He wasn't someone we could outrun or outfight, despite my training.

"No, let's not go up," I said. "Let's creep out the other door, double-back and enter the next building over. Minimizes our time outside to when Tem is probably still keeping him busy, and he'll have to check two entire buildings to find us.

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"Sure," she said, letting the door swing shut with a clang that echoed up the stairs. We headed for the opposite end of the building, Alyssa still breathing hard. "So who's Tem? Can I ask that?"

"Tem's…" I hesitated. Was it time to come clean with Alyssa about everything? It seemed like a terrible time to do it. But she wasn't stupid, and probably had her own theories already not far from the truth. "Tem's an Exhuman. A good one. She works...or worked for the XPCA."

"Oh," she said, her brow furrowed, like that answer just created a thousand more questions. "And who's he?"

"He is Dragon, a Sino and an international assassin. And he wants a thing I have."

"Yeah, he said that. He also said he's interested in ya personally."

"I wasn't really listening," I said. "Was trying to make sure he wasn't going to act too fast, and I had to time things with Tem just-so."

We pushed open the heavy glass door on the far side of the building and stepped blinking into the light. The next building down was maybe thirty feet away, and we saved our breath for running it. We were in the college of engineering, and that meant the mini-skyscrapers around us were even taller and more ugly concrete than average.

The sound of lasers torching through the air informed me that Tem was still up and fighting. All of her moves had been carefully planned by Lia and myself well in advance, but she was unpredictable enough that both of us had our reservations whether she'd manage. Fortunately, I hadn't suffered any rage-mode-inducing harm, and so things seemed to be going...not well, but smoothly, I guess.

The smoke end of the grenade was there to buy Tem an extra minute or two of obscurity for her to build herself a nice home of light-construct armor. In the last fight, we'd learned Dragon's vision was, at best, only normal levels of superhuman, and so illusions and smoke were huge for us, in our aim to waste his time. The fact that he'd go for the optics so fast meant he knew that as well, though.

I hoped that after she was fully protected (and immobile), he'd just leave. Tem hadn't been informed of this leg of the plan, for fear she'd choose to do something stupid rather than let him go after me again, but as long as we could hear her blasting away, that meant he hadn't lost interest in her just yet.

We were within reach of the door when the lasers stopped coming, and I swore inwardly as I opened it and followed Alyssa inside. Hopefully, it was all according to plan and he'd just moved on. If Tem were hurt…

I refused to think about it. She was fine. This was all according to plan. Minus the inability to send out the distress call.

Which got me thinking again. Not about Tem, but about the logistics of blocking our 'net relay. Relays were a physical thing and could be destroyed or disrupted, and to be safe I imagined Dragon would have taken out all the surrounding ones as well to create a dead zone.

But that wouldn't affect my mobile's satellite uplink. The only way that could be knocked out is if there was interference between my device and the satellite directly, which meant active jamming. And something like that had a limited range. Had to, by the way radio signal worked. I silently thanked my physics classes for covering RF propagation already, and myself for studying it so intently.

I pulled out my mobile and confirmed it had survived the EMP, hardened as it was. Still no signal, which meant the jammer had survived as well, but all we needed to do was put enough distance and building between us and Dragon to have a shot at getting a signal out.

"Up, then?" Alyssa asked, as though reading my mind.

"Up indeed."

She hesitantly pushed the elevator call button, and this one worked. "Does...that matter?" she asked.

I had a sudden thought and stepped inside, the relief on Alyssa's face palpable as she misunderstood. On the door panel, I pushed the emergency phone button, and the speaker blared a tone, and then rang once before an operator picked up. Land-lines were still working, thank God.

"Nine-one-one operator, what is your emergency?" the calm voice asked.

I told her there was a shooter on campus. There had been gunshots and explosions. She put me through a standard litany of questions, asking if I was safe, and then moving on to where exactly I was, if I had seen and could describe the shooter, and for my personal information, which I declined to provide.

"Please stay put and don't hang up. Help is on the way," her voice said as we exited the elevator.

"We're not...goin' up?" Alyssa asked.

"We are…" I pointed above the elevator at the display showing which floor each was on. "But if we take these, we'll narrow his search to just the floors the elevators are stopped at."

"Oh," she said. "I never thought of that."

"Well...it's a stretch," I said, opening the stairs door. "But Dragon is attentive as fuck, he wouldn't miss that kind of detail. I hope that operator hangs up eventually...if he finds the call still active, he knows what building we're in."

"Ya couldn't do it?"

"No end call button that I saw," I said as we started up the stairs, and then those took all our breath and the conversation died.

I never imagined the descent into hell coming in the form of climbing upwards, but that's what it felt like. After going around, and around, and around, and around, my calves were burning, and Alyssa was climbing up on all fours, panting and dripping sweat but never once complaining. We'd gone so far up and still, it seemed like the number of stairs above us was infinite.

Stopping sometimes to catch our breaths and rest, we chipped away at them regardless, moving up two or three flights at a time before it looked like Alyssa was about to break again, though she never stopped crawling forward. I had to admire her for that.

And then, suddenly, we were there. Instead of stairs, there was just a door, decorated with a red-and-white warning reading 'EMERGENCY ONLY, DOOR ALARMED', and then underneath it, penciled in rough handwriting 'stairs nervous, railing worried'.

"Thought this was the engineering department, not English," I laughed. Alyssa seemed too dead to get the joke, so while she laid there panting, I jumped up and hung off the metal pneumatic arm of mechanism that made the door close smoothly. It cracked at my weight, and I bounced on it a few more times before it ingloriously broke off, dropping me on a new bruise on my ass.

"Yer a vandal now?"

"Only when I have to be," I said, picking up the broken metal arm and rubbing my backside. I jammed the twisted metal end of it under the metal cover of the door's alarm mechanism and with hardly any force required, popped the case free of the little screws holding it on.

And giving me access to the sweet, sweet electronics underneath.

"Gonna disable it so Dragon doesn't know we went up here?" she asked.

"Yeah. Though if he sees the damage I inflicted on this door, he'll know anyway. But better to not be broadcasting our position with a screaming alarm."

"I agree," she said, sitting up and scooting over to look at the alarm panel with me. "Oof, what a mess this looks like."

I traced the wires with my fingers. "This is the solenoid that trips if the door is opened. These wires run the power, you can see them connecting with the same junction box that touches the lightbars in the stairway. I can't touch them without the right tools or I'll shock myself. But these--"

I traced another set of lines that led out of the box. "These are the ones that connect to the alarm system. Do you have a knife or anything?" She shook her head, so I took a step back and readied my crappy broken prybar, slamming the broken head of it against the wall where the wires were mounted until they began to fray.

"Yer sure it's not a like, dead-man's switch?" she asked. "Not gonna set it off by disconnectin' it?"

"Yeah, there's a diode near the end here, means basically it's for transmission out only. And if it were transmitting out constantly, this resistor would be stepping down a lot of voltage constantly and would be hot. It's cold, so we're good."

"Jesus, ya really are into this aren't ya?"

"Well it's interesting," I grunted, as I slammed the prybar into the wires one more time, severing one of them. The other I pulled apart with my fingers, to no alarm fanfare whatsoever. "More interesting when I'm not getting chased by a madman, and when I have better tools than a caveman, but that's the nature of practical application I guess."

I stood up and Alyssa did the same, groaning as she stretched her legs. I definitely felt it too, but running everyday had helped noticeably here. I should do more hills though, there were some muscles which felt way more sore than others.

And then with a deep breath, I pushed on the door handle and held it, waiting. The door itself buzzed slightly, but no alarm went off. After several seconds it popped open.

"Perfect job," she complimented, stepping onto the yellowed gravelly surface of the roof. I followed, blinking as we emerged into the sun.

First order of business, I took the last item out of my Emergency Dragon Kit, and placed the adhesive black strip on the crack in the door behind us. I pulled a pin and looked away, remembering to cover Alyssa's eyes as I did, while the strip flared with white fire and poured out a crackling waterfall of sparks. When it was finished, the door had been welded shut, completely inaccessible to anyone of human-levels of strength.

Which I hoped included Dragon. But just in case, the second order was to check my mobile.

"Still no signal?" she asked, reading over my shoulder.

"Guess not. Damn. I really thought we could get far enough up here."

She patted me gently on the arm as she smiled. "Ye've already impressed me enough for a day. Yer math doesn't have to be right every single time. Fer the record, if I were ever gonna be in a shootin' again, I'd definitely pick ya as my danger buddy."

"Thanks," I said, absently, still thinking on my mobile. I frowned at it as my mind raced.

"It's fine," she assured me. "We already called for help. Who else were ya gonna call anyway?"

I mean, the number of people I could call up who were more capable and dangerous than the police was basically every single person in my contact list. But that wasn't what was currently making my think and frown. My mental math wasn't perfect, but even with a huge amount of rounding, we really should have been clear, and that wasn't really even taking the dampening effect of the whole friggin' concrete building between Dragon and us into consideration.

Which meant one of my assumptions was off, and that made me nervous. Because the only assumptions I'd made were the height of the building and the distance from Dragon and his jammer. I was pretty sure the height of the building was in the ballpark, which left…

"Oh. Oh no," Alyssa said, and I blinked from my thoughts to look up at her, and then towards the welded door that her horrified expression was directed towards.

There, through the little reinforced-glass window, Dragon stared right back at me, sweat and hair matted to his face, his narrow eyes promising death.