CHAPTER 4 - LEOPARD

What did animals do when they found themselves prey, stalked through an unfamiliar jungle by predators who would show them neither pity nor mercy? They went to ground, Leopard knew—and the rule of the urban jungle was no different to its ancient, arboreal cousin.

Leopard’s eyes ached, and his back and arms were stiff and sore. The night before, they’d put a few holes in the skiff and sunk it. Since then, he hadn’t risked sleeping. When you were in enemy territory, you couldn’t be too careful.

Especially when you were dealing with capes. Even Asclepion was packed full of empowered vigilantes, much less that government team from Australia. And all it would take would be one bloodhound with just the right knack to catch them based on some ephemeral psychic imprint, and that would be that.

From the deck of the Adriatic, the city had seemed like a beacon in the night. But here and now, sitting in an old warehouse, sunlight catching on broken glass, Leopard saw past the veneer. The city was decrepit, falling apart. A husk that was alive only on a technicality. Alive only because people refused to let it die.

The warehouse floor still stank of petrol and motor oil, and it brought to mind the Adriatic. Tiger, in defiance of those lingering smells, lit up her third cigarette as she finished cleaning her shotgun.

“So,” she said, around her coffin nail, “What’re we doing about the box?”

Leopard shrugged.

“Whatever Monkey decides.” Even here, even among the circle, you didn’t use names. Whoever they had been before the Animals, it didn't matter anymore. Names were part of that.

Tiger scoffed. She took one long drag from her cigarette, exhaled the smoke, and took another.

“Kid,” she said. “Aren’t you curious about what’s in the case?”

“No.”

“Not even a little bit?”

“No.”

“Then you’re an idiot,” Tiger said, setting her shotgun down, elbows on her thighs. “You saw it with your own eyes. That case came from the UN. That’s a way bigger target than any we’ve hit before.”

“I know.”

“Which means we might have a problem.”

“Monkey’s got a plan,” Leopard said. “He always does. Besides,” he continued, struck by some need to challenge her, “Geneva isn’t going to care that they lost some case half the world away. Can’t have been that valuable if they were smuggling it on an old refugee ship.”

“Or maybe they want to keep it under wraps, kid,” Tiger said. “Bold to make such assumptions when we don’t have a clue what they were transporting. Besides, they might care about whatever you did below decks.”

“Fuck you.”

Tiger laughed, sharp and mocking. “Oh, testy, are we? So much for no casualties, huh? I’m just saying, there were witnesses. By now, they’ve probably let everyone know what happened. Next thing we’re going to hear about it is someone dropping through the ceiling and crushing that long-haired fuck into paste.”

Ah, Rooster. Something about him rubbed Tiger the wrong way, always had. Had always rubbed Leopard wrong, too, ever since they’d recruited him. When they’d cut down Glory in the American Badlands, and Rooster had actually watched them kill his god, he’d thrown himself down on his hands and knees and begged to join them.

You could never trust anyone like that.

Since then, Rooster had always thought he was actually worth something beyond being a pair of hands and a useful mule. So, the image of his death made Leopard smile. Or think he should smile, at least. He didn’t.

“Smart thing to do would’ve been to sanitize the whole AO,” Tiger said.

“We’re not killers.”

Again, Tiger scoffed. “You’re not.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Tiger leaned back, nodding as she took another drag.

“So,” she rasped. “What do you think’s in it?”

She really wasn’t going to let it go. Leopard bit down on his sigh, his frustration.

“It could be anything,” he said. “Some new invention. Lost Golden Age technology. Maybe it’s some artifact from one of the Nine—hell, that’s why those refugees were on the ship in the first place, right?”

“It’d make sense,” Tiger said.

“Or maybe it’s just a shitload of cash from selling weapons to people. We were there in Guatemala, and how many IESA humanitarians did we see, Tiger? Not a one. Whatever it is, I don’t care.”

“But,” Tiger said. “I hear a but.”

“But Monkey said not to open it.”

If such a thing was even possible. A case like that, with those markings, was probably psyche-locked. Might fry the brains of anyone who touched it. But what was the point of a treasure chest you couldn’t open?

“Fine,” Tiger replied. “So, what’s he going to do with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“I hadn’t thought to ask.”

“Sweet Mary and Joseph, kid,” Tiger said, shaking her head. “Sometimes I wonder about you, I really do.”

The thought was mutual. Sitting there like that, Tiger looked like someone who’d be more at home baking cookies than cooking grenades. There was this little gap between her two front teeth that made her so much less intimidating. It was easy to forget that she had once told him, grinning, that she had learned Spanish just to taunt her enemies as they died.

Back then, he’d thought she was joking. Hadn’t quite figured her out enough to realize that just because she was cracking a joke didn’t mean she wasn’t being as accurate in the role of jester as she was sniper. Then, a year ago, at the end of a firefight with some Eternal Dawn zealots in Mexico, he’d watched her lean down and ask one of the dying: dónde está tu Dios ahora?

Where’s your God now?

Ever since, even though he had a good four inches on her, Leopard was under no illusion that it’d only take Tiger about four seconds to put him in the ground. But they knew where they each stood, and he appreciated that. Outside of Monkey, she was the only one he felt comfortable having at his back. She wouldn’t stab him in the back. She’d laugh and get him in the front.

“Yeah, well,” Leopard said, “feeling’s mutual.”

“Hey,” Monkey said, voice buzzing in Leopard’s ear, “Briefing in five minutes. Rooster, stick to watch duty outside.”

“I’m just saying ask him, kid,” Tiger said, grinding out her cigarette and hopping up. “That’s all. He’s your friend, he’ll listen to you. I’ll fight anyone, don’t get me wrong, but I’d like just a little bit of warning before shit gets real, you understand?”

“Yeah, I hear you.”

Besides, he still wanted to know who they had been working for.

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“Okay,” Monkey said, once the four of them had gathered around an old table. “Let me be the first to admit that things didn’t go as smoothly as we planned for last night.”

He tapped his knuckles against the tabletop, blue eyes apologetic, glancing at each of them in turn. “But we still won, and that’s all that matters.”

The thing about Monkey was that he looked like a hero. With his mane of auburn hair pulled into a roguish tail, and a leather duster over his combat gear, he looked like he’d stepped off the screen of some old film.

“Did we?” Snake asked. “I feel like we’re carrying a time bomb. Who’re we working for again?”

“No one we haven’t taken a job from before,” Monkey replied. “They swore me to absolute secrecy on this one—sorry, guys.”

It was a long list, but Leopard could narrow it down somewhat. There weren’t many empowered out there who could teleport, and less still who could do it without direct line-of-sight, and less still who could teleport others. If they were working for anyone on that short list, it was a problem—but one for later.

“So,” Leopard said. “What’s the plan?”

“For now we stay put until I can get in contact with our employer and let him know we didn’t screw him over on this.”

“I’m not sure we can stay put. We’re on an island. That means we’re trapped. It’s only a matter of time before someone finds us—given we just bombed a refugee ship, I think we can count on the capes doing a full grid-by-grid search. Right now, we should assume that someone could kick our door in at any moment.”

“Gotta say I agree with him,” Tiger said. “And if you haven’t been able to raise our guy, that means he might not be feeling charitable. If the lawmen ain’t looking for us, then he is.”

Monkey shook his head.

“We have to hold our ground for the moment,” he said. “Our employer must know we’re in Asclepion. He’s not a monster or a warlord—he’ll understand why we had to change the plan. It’s just a part of doing this sorta business and it’s not like we had a choice. And if he decides to push it? Fine—I just finished preparing a contingency for that.”

Not one he’d mentioned to him, however. Leopard frowned. “Either way, I think we should prepare for all possibilities. If we get made, we’ll need to get off this island immediately.”

“Fine,” Monkey replied. “What’re you thinking, Spots?”

He’d spent the night running through ideas and it’d just felt like he was running up against walls.

“It’ll be tough,” Leopard said. “I think we can count on enhanced security at the airport and docks. More to the point, we don’t have any identification or much in the way of hard cash. But we do have about a week’s worth of food and water, so, we’ve got some time before things get desperate.”

“Plenty of room to maneuver then. Enough time to come up with a plan. I’ve heard this city has a fairly active cape underworld. Might be someone we can lean on to get a way off this island, too. I’ll take Snake and—”

Something thumped against the roof. Leopard snapped his gaze upward as his hand leapt to his sidearm.

“You and your big fucking mouth, kid,” Tiger said, slipping bright red shells into the magazine tube of her shotgun.

“Rooster,” Monkey said. “Eyes up—do you see anything?”

“See what?”

“See—”

Something burst through the window and clattered against the concrete floor, hissing with thick vapor.

“Gas!” Leopard barked, dragging his mask up as more canisters burst around him. “Masks on!”

Their masks would filter out the worst of it, but it wasn’t much reassurance. The gas wasn’t the threat; the gas was cover for the threat. If you ever felt you might run into an empowered threat, then the first thing you did was break line-of-sight.

“Party time, people!” Monkey said, drawing his revolver. “Protect the case and kill every last one of the motherfuckers.”

Leopard followed Monkey out onto the warehouse floor. It was an opaque mess now, and dark shadows moved through it like sharks. Monkey lowered his revolver with calm precision at the first shape and fired. The shot took him in the chest and dropped him, popping straight through, some of the vapor flaring red.

Tiger caught the first person to come through the gas with both barrels, blasting his chest into a ruin of gore, bone and tactical plate. Whoever was attacking them had equipment, money, and training. Some part of Leopard’s mind narrowed his list further as he shot a third attacker in the neck, followed him and down put a bullet in his visor.

“Wait,” Snake said. “That can’t be—Oh my God, it’s Sha—!” She screamed, but Leopard couldn’t see her, and there was no time to look. But the list was down to one name now, and anger flared bright.

Something punched Leopard in the back, slamming him against the wall. He turned, shot the shooter in the knee, as a second gunman leapt forward to beat him with a stun baton. Burning static ripped a path down Leopard’s nerves, but he staggered with it, used it, drew on the pain to feel alive—

Monkey shot him in the head. “Got your back, Spots!” And then they were back to back, firing at the shapes that slipped through the mist. There had to be at least two dozen of them, and then something hit him—big, heavy, and thrown with significant force.

The ground slipped away from him and then punched him in the face. Everything stopped, and the very idea of sound began and ended at the ringing in his ears. Snake moaned weakly some distance past him. Someone had thrown her at him.

He had to get up. Everything hurt and nothing was quite responding as it should, but he had to get up before—

Someone kicked him in the gut, driving the air from his lungs, and then struck him with a stun baton. The pain of it seemed less important than it should have, given the circumstances. Leopard knew it was bad, and he knew that for several reasons, but all of them slipped out of his mind like eels in the dark.

Heavy footsteps sounded nearby, growing closer. Slow, inexorable. The gunfire had stopped.

“Tiger...” Leopard murmured. “Monkey...”

The haze lifted. Leopard went to rise, but someone thrust their foot down onto his neck. He went for his knife and they kicked it away. Leopard’s gaze traced the lines of a limb that’d been cast as a strikingly false representation of the male form, an anatomic perspective of muscles and tendons and bones, all of it rendered in obsidian or black marble. Like someone had flayed them and found inorganic madness under the skin—flat planes and hard angles, curves too sharp to be anything natural.

Fuck me, Leopard thought. Shadow.

Not even Monkey knew anything concrete—just stories. And those stories said that, while he slept, Shadow could send his namesake to turn the homes of his enemies into charnel houses. Here he was, the bloody hand of the Syndicate.

He should’ve known. He should’ve fucking known.

His chest ached with the need to breathe. Shadow’s skull-like visage stared down at him, pure jet eyes glimmering with viridescence. Leopard thrashed like a vengeful animal, grasping at Shadow’s calf, tearing at his knee, fingernails catching and ripping free on the rough surface.

Shadow took his foot off Leopard’s throat and his shadow formed up as an eidolon, hauled Leopard to standing, arm like a tentacle around his neck.

“Where is it?” he intoned.

“Where is what?”

“No one crosses the Syndicate and lives,” Shadow said, in a voice that was far too normal for his noseless countenance. “But if you return what you stole from us, you will at least die quickly.”

He wasn’t afraid. If he was going to die, then he was going to die. To give up any information would be to betray the bond between him and Monkey. If the Syndicate couldn’t find a footlocker in an old warehouse, then at least he’d die smiling.

He caught Tiger in his peripheral, on her knees, hands on her head, and under the guns of three Syndicate hitmen. Three more lay dead at her feet. She caught him looking and raised her eyebrows. But where was Monkey?

“Go fuck yourself, freak,” Leopard said. “Death first.”

Shadow turned to Tiger’s captors, raised his hand. One of them took her by the hair, dragged her head back, and pressed their rifle to the back of her head. “Better make sure it’s not a shallow grave, boys,” Tiger said, teeth grit, “or you’ll find out what I’m like when I’m really mad.”

“I’ll count to three,” Shadow said.

A gunshot sounded, and Tiger’s executioner fell away, a hole punched through his head and helmet. Monkey stepped out of the dissipating mist, revolver up, and drew his mask off so Shadow could see his winning smirk.

“Big mistake, Shadow,” Monkey said. “If you’re in a standoff, always shoot first. Let them go.”

Shadow’s eidolon tightened its grip around Leopard’s neck. His blood left a thin red line along the edge of the darkness. There was pain but it was strange, distant. Like it was happening to someone else. Things never hurt as much as he thought they might.

“You cannot harm someone who has been touched by The Engineer,” Shadow said.

There Monkey stood, blue eyes alert and dangerous, lips set in a victorious smirk. “Sure I can. I said, let them go.”

“You will bring to me the property that you owe, or I will kill him, and then the women, and then you.”

Monkey looked to the left, past Shadow, like he was considering the threat—or disregarding him entirely. “No,” he said, “I don’t think I will.” Leopard caught Monkey’s eyes. He had a plan, he always did, and here it was.

“See, Shadow,” Monkey said, producing a detonator. “The thing about you capes is that you only have one trick. It’s all intimidation, it’s all theater. Doesn’t mean anything if you don’t buy into it. The question isn’t whether I can kill you. It’s whether you can do your trick before I can do mine.”

Shadow’s glowing gaze met Monkey’s own.

“If you press that button,” he said, “then I will kill every single person in this building.”

“Sure,” Monkey replied. “And if I press it, then your boss gets nothing, and you have to be the one to explain to him that you cost him whatever he sent you to get. It must be really quite valuable to send a squad of enforcers and yourself. So, I want to see the boss—now.”

Nothing happened. Monkey primed the detonator.

“We hold the cards here, Shadow—don’t test me.”

Shadow met Monkey’s gaze for a long moment, and then his eidolon relaxed his grip around Leopard’s neck.

“If you’ll follow me,” he intoned.