As usual, it turned out that when able to act completely without morals, being more powerful than anyone else, and without dangerous oversight, it was almost stupidly easy to achieve our aims. Where we'd had to sneak around like crazy to chase down the trail of guns from America to Japan and finally China, going back had been painless.

Well. For us, anyway. The same probably could not be said of those who were in our way. At mostly-Karu's insistence, we weren't leaving any witnesses alive to report that we were back in the country. The good news was, between her new toy which disabled machinery and Saga, who disabled people, there really weren't too many witnesses.

So, yay. Only a few innocent people slaughtered on my behalf instead of a ton. Progress. Shitty, bullshit, fucking awful progress. But progress nonetheless.

But considering how things had gone once we had been found out in Tokyo, how completely and utterly we'd turned that city into a goddamn war zone, and thousands had rushed in to die, giving us no choice at all...I had to agree with Karu that a few missing persons here or there was infinitely preferable. We wound up walking right past so many people who had no idea, instead of causing a national panic.

And so here we were. The first place I wanted to go after we were back in the states. The outside of a house AEGIS had looked up a long-ass time ago. Looked pleasant enough a place, nice neighborhood, a little small but well-kept, though with signs of recent neglect. Probably a nice place, if you could ignore all the signs of XPCA there.

Like the recon unit posted on the other side of the street, who all seized and died at Saga's touch. Or the van parked on one end of the block, which I emptied of life just by walking past and raking the innards of with my blades. Or the man in the exosuit in the living room, whose armor proved entirely ineffective against one single penetrator round from Lia's reacquired rifle.

I walked in, AEGIS on one side of me, Tem on the other, Moon on my back, all of us tense. What I saw made me wonder if I was too late.

The whole place had been trashed. Garbage was strewn everywhere, empty bottles teetered in piles atop crushed cans inside empty beer boxes. A heap of what looked like mail was nearly knee-high in one corner of the room, and the holo blared some reality drama, the screen flecked with blood and structure foam from the exosuit Lia had punctured. It's tinny, echoing, too-loud dialogue and laughter made the room seem surreal.

The bathroom door opened with a bang, and I saw someone standing in it, haggard and wiry in the arms and legs and almost swollen in the middle. Painfully pale, with greasy, bushy hair that made the face beneath it look possessed.

"Charito, thank God, they were about do kill me," she said. And then collapsed into my arms.

I held her while she heaved heavily, giving her all the time she needed to just breathe, to just come to terms with the fact that I was here, and she was safe now.

"Jesus, Cosette, you look like shit," I said, before realizing that probably wasn't a very nice thing to say. I was just kind of...stunned by her transformation. My mind sprinted for something else to add which wasn't completely stupid. "Uh, kinda funny, I just kinda did the same thing with Moon. Saving her. At the last second. She was uh, gonna be executed too."

She looked up, her eyes watery and unfocused. And then she breathed, and the scene transformed drastically in my mind.

"Were they gonnga kil her with boredm o too?"

"Holy shit," I gagged, "You reek. Of alcohol. So bad." I dropped her with an unholy thunk to get away from the stench. "Jesus Christ, did you buy out a whole liquor store?"

"HEy, look at thsis, ist's Pulversizr, in person," she said.

I looked down at her, at the stupid grin on her face and the complete lack of comprehension in her eyes. It did not sit well with the rest of her appearance; pale, nearly-naked, filthy, and out-of-shape.

"Well, this is hard to look at," I commented.

"Perhaps...a shower?" AEGIS suggested.

"Perhaps a hose," said Moon.

"I didn't get her, did I?" Lia asked in my ear, her voice urgent. "I checked for overpenetration but...shrapnel can always be an issue...? Tell me what you guys see. What needs a hose?"

"It's fine, Lia," I said, looking down at the woman who was anything but. "Well, there is a mess, but it's not yours."

"She's been on house arrest this whole time, with…" AEGIS went to the far end of the room and started sifting through the pile of papers on the floor. "With at least thirty death sentences, all pending court-martial. Jeez, why didn't they just kill her? This is cruel."

"She's famous. 'Net-famous anyway...or…'net-infamous," Lia said. "There's like, a whole day of news reporting every week just dedicated to everything we've done and how she was all secretly behind it. They keep using her to trump up charges and shift blame. Guess they can't do it if she's dead."

I could hear Lia shrug over comms. And while her pop culture knowledge was useful, it was still disgusting. And, at the moment, useless.

"It will not be long before the guards miss a scheduled report," Karu announced. "Take what you have come for and be off."

As I hefted her off the ground and she gazed almost-lovingly into my eyes before throwing up on my shirt, I though, this is not what we came for. But it was the next-closest thing, and it'd have to do. A long time had passed since we were in the loop -- super obvious by just how long this person had to fall to shit -- and I knew we needed her intel as much as she needed our rescue.

AEGIS grabbed armfuls of the papers. Lia kept up chatter about inane things, but also the status of anyone passing by, cars and pedestrians both. Over comms, I could hear Karu spinning up our sneaky, fast, and utterly stolen Sirius-class VTOL. Saga was scouring the neighborhood's minds for anyone who saw us or heard Lia's gunshot and convincing them all they'd just dropped a plate. She was chuckling at the thought of them all talking later and realizing they'd each dropped a plate at the exact same moment.

Before I knew it, we were back outside the OA and clambering into our bird, a mission well-done, one Cosette would have been proud of, if she wasn't just a drunk piece of shit. I buckled her in, and used her arm to wipe the puke off my front, while she mumbled incoherently.

"Well aren't you a right ray of sunshine?" Saga said as I tapped Moon back into her own body next to her.

"Just drop it, Saga," I warned.

She grinned in a way which let me know that no dropping whatsoever was about to occur. "Oh? I just wanna know why my favorite boy looks like he's pissing out a toothpick sideways. You're normally such a ball of bubbles."

"Are you okay?" AEGIS asked, checking my seatbelt and peering into each of my eyes in turn. As she bobbed in front of me, I saw Saga's grin grow enormous at her successful meddling.

"Yes, I'm just fine. This is the one you should be checking out. She might die on her own vomit any second."

"Yeah, she's...not great," AEGIS said, giving Cosette a sideways glance. "But I've checked, and she's just very drunk. Nothing which hasn't killed most of the planet by now. We've got a DD, so...she's set. But you, Saga's right, you seem--"

"I'm just fine."

"Just fine?" Saga asked with pretend shock. "Why sir, how can you claim to be just fine when you're sorta halfway-wishing we'd just left Cosette there to die! What a terrible thing for anyone to think, ever!"

"Okay," Lia said, pulling out her earpiece and climbing in the side of the VTOL, rifle-first. "The interrogation I can deal with. But not the shockingly-ignorant Saga routine. Spare us, please."

"Yes, please do. Beginning checklist," Karu said from the front. "Buckle in, ladies, gentleman, Tem and Saga."

Tem snapped her harness shut next to me with a satisfied click and looked up at my chin-area with a dopey grin. "Buckled," she whispered.

"I'm just a little irked that we came all the way out here, endangered everyone by being at risk of discovery...and by everyone I mean everyone, who might get caught up in a warzone if we're found out...all for one drunk space-cadet. We need intel, and she's…"

I lifted her arm and dropped it back in her lap. Wiped-off puke splashed onto her, and she reacted with all the enthusiasm of a cadaver.

"Oh, is that all?" Saga asked, relishing her audience, and opportunity to be as huge an ass as she could manage.

"Why don't you just fucking tell me what's in my head, Saga? Save us all the trouble."

"Because," she grinned. "Less fun that way. But you are adorable."

"Wait," Lia said, looking up. "Saga, you can cure drunk, right? You did it to me."

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

All the focus in the room went from staring at me to glaring at her. Her grin turned sheepish as the turbofans spun up and the VTOL got its rattles out before leaving the ground.

"Um, yeah, do that," AEGIS said.

"You're no fun at all," Saga sighed at Lia.

"Sorry sweetie, I'll buy you a lollipop next time we're at the store."

"Only if that's a euphemism," Saga said.

"Ew, for what?" Lia pulled in her legs. "Wait, don't tell me. I don't wanna know."

That seemed sufficient to put the grin back on Saga's face, though it dipped low again as I thought real hard at her about how she should undrunk my former CO.

"Fiiiiiine," she complained. "But she's gonna have a monster hangover."

"I have water," AEGIS said, a thermos in her hands as though by magic. "Do your code-X thing, if you please."

It took a few minutes before Cosette undertook a slow, hideous transformation. Instead of sprawling out, lifeless and relaxed, she went utterly rigid, her hands too small to clamp over her ears and eyes at once, pale and sweaty and pained. It sounded like she was moaning in pain, and then wincing at the sound of her own moaning.

Personally, I felt kind of vindicated, in what I knew was a sadistic way. Served her right for drinking her ass off all day. She might reconsider next time, if she knew there was an instant-hangover waiting for her at the end of it.

Saga and AEGIS continued their care for awhile, though it wasn't until we'd finished flying and landing and the engines had spooled down that she looked anything less than death. Which, still, step up from dead. But not much of one.

"Oh gods," she moaned. AEGIS handed her the thermos by pressing it into her hands, and she took a few sips, moving gingerly.

And then not moving gingerly at all, she put the sips back, along with what looked like most of the remaining contents of her stomach, streams of yellow running down the sides and over her hands and splattering across the VTOL's metal deck. I could even hear her heaving over the turbofans, just to make the scene as fucking awful as possible.

"Thanks," she mouthed, handing the thermos back to AEGIS, who seemed to take it by reflex, and then wishing she hadn't. She stared at the chunky, bubbling liquid running down her fingers, and then threw the entire bottle out the VTOL's door.

Saga was delighted. Everyone else looked a bit pale. Cosette was getting streaks of puke in her hair as she continued to hold her ears and shut her eyes.

And that was pretty much the first fifteen or twenty minutes of having her back with us. I wasn't sure there was a more pathetic human being on Earth. Eventually, she seemed to settle down and come to enough to try croaking at us. AEGIS gingerly pushed a comms into her ear.

"Thanks," she said again, though we could all hear it this time. "Also, ow. Jesus, Buddha and Krishna, what the fuck did you lot do to my head?"

"Lots," Saga said, batting her eyes. "Little tweaks here and there, raising thresholds, counteracting depressed chemical reactions, fun stuff."

"Makes me want to die. I feel like I need the world's dirtiest sangria right now."

"Won't help," Saga grinned. "All I really did is make it so you can't feel drunk. You are, of course, I'm a code-X, not a...alcohol-path or whatever. But yeah. Drink that sangria. Find out what happens."

Cosette turned back to me, gingerly. "Chariot, why?"

"There are so many possible answers to that. Why Saga? Why rescue you? Why...blast your booze out of your brain?"

She frowned a little bit. "Sure. Yes."

"Because you were gonna be killed, and I wasn't going to let that happen. I didn't know that you'd...gone to...this," I said, gingerly "but...even so, I'm not gonna let you take the fall for our crimes."

She shrugged, and then winced. "Someone's gotta."

"Yeah, I kinda disagree," Lia said. "I think Athan's plan is, get the whole Exhumanity-thing smoothed out, and then what we did aren't crimes anymore, right? Then we're good?"

As much as I wanted to agree, I couldn't. "Sure...a lot of what we did might be excusable in that light but...we still killed a ton of people, destroyed a ton of property, and did awful things, Exhumanity aside. Cosette's right that someone might have to pay. But not today, and not until things are...better."

Cosette sighed, a gesture that made her look defeated and hollow given her state. She held herself and shivered, and I realized, half-naked as she was, and clammy with puke, the VTOL must be freezing. Made me wish we'd stopped long enough to grab her some clothes, though honestly, doing that anywhere with cops around was a way better option than risking the XPCA at her place.

"What we really need is direction," I told her. "The last couple months without you, we've been...just sort of drifting here and there, chasing whatever came up, and more often than not, finding out it leads to nothing. Or to pain. Oh yeah, chased Dragon down, by the way."

"And killed him?"

"No. Kinda what I mean when I say led to nothing. Turns out, he's just an assassin so he can hear about powerful Exhumans and recruit them."

"Into an army?" she gasped.

"Into a bunch of farmers and city-builders." I shook my head. "And he's utterly dependent on a tree haunted by an Exhuman's spirit to function."

"Sounds pretty typically weird for you guys." She shivered again, and I popped a blade into the air near her. She gave it a single wary glance before warming her hands on it. "Thanks...again."

"So...we've been out of the loop. What's going on around here? I heard some stuff but, not a lot of details?"

"Oh. Yeah. Well the headline is you guys destroying everything in Japan. 'Pulverizer', they call the lot of you."

"Catchy," Lia said, with an appreciative whistle.

"We have our own bad-guy team name now?" I asked.

"Well...kind of the same one. P-Force just got repurposed. Told you it was a shit name."

I shook my head. "Great. What else?"

"Plenty, but I assume you mean on the Exhuman front. Where are we going, by the way?"

"West coast," Karu answered from the front. "Picking up another friend of Ashton's."

"Whitney. Did you ever meet her?"

Cosette mused for a minute. "No, but the name's familiar. Ah, 'Whitney's Repair and Service', that's where Colonel Teryn was found dead. They said they had her and you in custody, but when I came out, you were nowhere to be found. Damn idiots. So what, you broke out together and fell in together?"

"Sure, something like that," I said, realizing just how much I was glossing over here.

"Well stay out of the southeast for the moment. Or, knowing you, dive in headfirst. There's an Exhuman zipping around out there, ping-ponging around the Caribbean, telekinetic, with flight. Some other kinds of powers too, nobody's quite certain. Seems to have a thing for destroying courtrooms and mayoral offices and law firms. Always screaming about 'justice'. People are worried he's a mutie."

"A mutant?" Lia asked.

AEGIS pushed up her glasses. "Mutable class, like Soran. An Exhuman whose powers can change over time, in a permanent sense."

"He doesn't do that much damage, relatively, but he's embarrassing the fuck out of the XPCA. Flies in, destroys exactly what he wants to, and then zips away, often before they can even get boots on the ground." She shuffled closer to my blade, so I inched it towards her, and I could see the light of it flickering in her eyes. "I don't need to tell you how much more destructive destroying confidence in the XPCA can be beyond simple damages."

"Yeah," I numbly agreed. I realized that Cosette seemed...better already. Like somehow talking and being with us and my powers being out and just another part of the ship to her, it had all somehow clicked her back into herself. She was still stringy, vile, and gaunt, but you wouldn't know by listening to her.

"Was he like, a public defender or something before he turned? Or a criminal?" AEGIS asked.

"I dunno. They don't give me records anymore," Cosette said with a genuine grin. "But yeah, I'd say he's got some personal beef. Which is good news, sort of, because it's keeping down a mass panic about this guy who can kill pretty much anyone he wants. Having a known profile limits the panic to the legal community...and the rest of the population honestly isn't so torn-up to see them getting screwed for a change."

"You don't like lawyers?" Karu asked.

"Does anyone?"

I could hear the confusion in Karu's breathing as she tried to put together an answer. "Erm...doesn't anyone? I had always thought lawyers were well-regarded by the public, as it were. Sort of a vanguard which wrangles the serpent of legislature."

"Wow, WTF?" Lia asked. "Who gave you that idea?"

I looked up and even from the sliver of her face I could see from behind, could tell she was blushing. "Never mind. I merely...misunderstood...as it were," she mumbled.

Cosette looked at me like I was crazy. I shrugged.

"She had a weird childhood," I explained. "I think a lot of her role models were politicians and lawyers."

"So anyway, please continue in relating the details of this Exhuman?" Karu said, too quickly.

It made Cosette laugh, and seeing her do that was like watching a person breaking out of the decrepit shell I'd hauled into this VTOL.

"I don't have much more," she said. "Just what I've heard on the holo, and been able to piece together from behind that. When...when I wasn't drunk off my ass anyway. I really didn't think you were coming."

"Why wouldn't we?" I asked, a little offended.

"Because I don't live in Japan, duh. The world was watching Pulverizer news every day, tracking the latest."

"Dude, it's true," Lia said, turning around her mobile. It was a vid of some news anchor talking near a portrait of my face, cutting to various footage of us in action, interspersed with a map of Japan, detailing our path of destruction, before an arrow pointed off towards China, with a helpful, large, orange question mark to indicate the end of our journey.

"Neat. Anytime I wonder where we are, I can just look this up," Saga said. "We're in China, guys!"

"You're all idiots," Cosette said with a smile. "Why'd you all have to be such idiots?" AEGIS cleared her throat significantly, and Cosette laughed again. "I guess I should be grateful. Nobody else would have rescued me. When we land, let me...well let me find some clothes first, and then reorient myself a bit. I have some contacts I still trust, and I bet I could get us any XPCA data you need--"

"Oh I can do that," AEGIS said. "Besides, Athan already said, he didn't want you for data. Data's everywhere."

She pursed her lips. "Leadership is a much harder ask, you know. I don't know what you guys do...well I know what he does, gets into trouble non-stop. But other than that, I don't know what your goals are or anything. And it's not like you listened to me when I was in charge…"

I put a hand on her knee to stop her from continuing to go too hard on herself.

"You're sharp," I told her. "I value your insight. When I came to you, telling you that Blackett was trouble, not only did you listen to me, you already had your own doubts. So often lately, I feel…" I looked around the cabin, wishing it were more private, and that I wasn't being stared at and eavesdropped on by six other girls. "I feel like I've made...increasingly-extreme decisions. And that's why I want you, and want Whitney. Sort-of-outsiders, who can tell me if I'm taking things too far."

She looked at me pensively for a minute, reminding me of Moon. Though, the real Moon was deliberately ignoring the entire conversation, staring intently at a book she'd forgotten to turn pages on since we started.

"You know of course, that just wondering that means you likely haven't," she said.

"Maybe. But also, maybe that's not how others see it. I'm afraid, and I want help. Is that too much to ask."

She grinned. "No. But maybe it's a bit on-the-nose for me. You're not giving me a lot of room to breathe if you come at me so seriously like that. But sure. You saved me, the XPCA can go suck a dog's rod for all I care right now, I'll help you with whatever you want. Same rules as before though."

"Which was?" AEGIS asked.

"Always act in the interest of the public good," I said, and Cosette nodded her agreement.