The downside to choosing a mask that covers the bottom half of your face, I discovered later that night, is that you can’t easily eat or drink anything. I gave my philly cheesesteak a longing, hungry look then flicked my annoyed gaze over to where Newter was distributing water into spoons using some sort of tool I couldn’t remember the name of. The two girls sitting with us, brunettes I hadn’t bothered to pay attention to the names of, were watching him with a hungry look in their eyes. “C’mon, Newter, I wanna eaaat!”
“Patience is a virtue, Thrash,” he replied with a chuckle.
I gave him a bemused look and puzzled that one over. “Not seeing it. How the hell is ‘thrash’ related to metal?”
“I get it!” interjected one of the girls. No one cares if you get it. “Like thrash metal music, right?”
“Nailed it!”
“Oh come on,” I groaned. “I don’t even like metal music!”
“Not his fault you have bad taste, Blue Steel,” the other girl quipped with a smirk while he dipped his tongue into each spoon and carefully handed her and the first girl a water laden spoon each.
“Ugh, is this another reference I’m not getting?”
“Yo, I’ve seen that one,” Newter snickered. “Earth Aleph movie. Zoo something. Stupid but hilarious.”
“Yup,” the second girl confirmed. “So I just drink it all?”
“Yes,” I impatiently answered in his place, having watched him go through the drill twice already with the five girls zonked out on the nearby reclining seats. “Just swallow it already!” I clutched my philly to me in a likely vain attempt to keep it warm and started imagining its taste. The thinly sliced, perfectly cooked steak, the heavenly melted cheese, the grilled onions and mushrooms to add texture and flavor…
“That’s what she said,” quipped the first brunette, shooting a raised eyebrow at where I was holding the sub in what I belatedly realized was a suggestive way. Both brunettes burst into giggles, and I flushed with embarrassment. I honestly debated using my powers to chuck them over the ledge for that.
They finally—finally!—drank the tainted water, and as they flopped back onto their seats with faraway eyes, I yanked down my mask and all but ripped the paper away from my sub. “Took them long enough. God.” I took a bite of the sub and failed to repress a moan as my taste buds roared their approval. The swirl of metal over the dance floor began to flicker and dance somewhat erratically, but the dancers below seemed to approve if their cheers were any indication. Faultline had suggested I keep it up as practice, if I was going to be hanging out with Newter anyway. It was no skin off my back, so I hadn’t argued against it.
Newter smirked a bit but said nothing as he twisted the cap back onto the water bottle and tucked everything away. Once that was done, he finally said, “So nothing’s clicking for you yet?” I shook my head, silent because my mouth was still full of delicious goodness. “Eh, you’ll figure it out. You’ve just got to nail it down before our next gig. You do not want PHO or the PRT to name you.”
I swallowed and took a drag from the coke at my feet before replying. “Like Chubster, right?”
“Nah, he actually chose that name himself.”
“You’re joking.”
He laid a hand over his chest in a ‘who, me?’ gesture. I rolled my eyes at him and pushed the last bite of my philly into my mouth. Unfortunately, I had overestimated how much I could fit in there and found myself with cheeks puffed out with food. Still, I wasn’t going to spit it out—ew—so I struggled to chew while I balled up the paper the sub had come in and tossed it towards the trashcan. The paper bounced off the rim of the metal can, and I moved the can with my power in an effort to catch it. The movement made it start to tip over, and in my haste to prevent that I over-corrected in the other direction and sent the whole thing tipping over.
Newter eyed the spilled waste then turned back to me with a smirk. “I’m sure that went much more gracefully in your head.” I leveled a mild glare at him, pushed myself to my feet, and started shoving all the trash back in. “Yo, mind asking Pierce to send up some more girls, since you’re already standing?”
“Seven not enough for you?”
He shrugged. “The night is young.”
I huffed as I set the trashcan upright and crossed back over to where I’d been sitting. “I don’t mind asking him, but if hanging out with you is just going to be a nonstop train of watching other girls get high, then I’ll call it a night.”
“Oh?” he said, his tone different in a way I couldn’t place. “If you’d wanted to try it out, you just had to say so.”
“What? Nooo.” I shook my head and tapped my arms together in the form of an ‘X.’
“Huh? But you said—”
“I said I’m not interested in watching other people get high all night. That doesn’t mean I want to get high. Because I most emphatically do not.”
He said nothing for a moment, and I almost repeated myself, thinking he hadn’t heard me over the loud music, but he finally spoke up. “So what did you have in mind?”
I shrugged. “Nothing in particular, I guess. We could maybe ‘window shop,’” I threw in finger quotes.
“No independent stuff, sorry. Boss hasn’t laid out all the rules for you yet, I guess. Since you’re part of the team now, anything you or I do alone affects the team too, y’know?”
“Well fuck. That’s annoying,” I complained, crossing my arms. It made sense if I was being honest, but that didn’t mean I had to like it. “Um, we could talk…? Anything else would be an improvement.”
He tilted his head. “Bad experience with drugs?”
“I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve smoked weed once or twice. Not my favorite thing, but I get it. I just don’t want to do that right now.”
“Then why…?”
I hesitated a bit, unsure how much I wanted to mention. Ultimately, I decided to just be frank, since there was a not insignificant chance I would let it slip by accident at some point anyway. It was awkward topic, but I didn’t mind super much beyond that. “Well… I mentioned I’m new to the Bay, right?” At his nod, I continued. “I don’t want to get into it, but my mom died from OD’ing.”
“Oh shit.”
He looked honest, but was it just an act? From what I’d seen so far, he was all about letting the good times roll. He didn’t seem to actually be capable of being serious. I ended up grunting out, “Yeah,” and left it at that.
We sat there in silence—well, we weren’t talking, but it was for from silent—for a bit, and eventually I sank more of my focus into finding and touching all the metal nearby with my power. Another thing Faultline had asked me to start practicing. ‘You need to know where metal is before you need it,’ or something like that. I was annoyed I had ‘power homework,’ but at least it was a damn sight better than the regular kind.
“I don’t remember my family at all,” he abruptly announced, catching my attention once more.
I looked at him in surprise. “Really? Why not?”
“I’m a Case 53. Gregor too.”
“Is that supposed to mean something? It sounds… vaguely familiar, but I’m not familiar.”
He languidly stretched in his chair before laying back and resting his head against the headrest. “Means we just showed up one day with no memory, a creepy tattoo, and a monster body.”
Is that what the tattoo over his heart is then? He had a stylized ‘C’ there, and it was the only tattoo I’d seen on him. Considering he was almost always shirtless, I would only have missed other tattoos if they were on his legs. The last part of what he said made me frown. “You’re not a monster.”
“We are to some people,” he said with a shrug. “Doesn’t bother me too much, but it used to bother Gregor a lot. He’s better about it now though.”
“You’re not a monster,” I repeated, leaving no room for discussion. “You’re more than your appearance, and fuck anyone who says otherwise.”
He smiled just a bit at that. It was fleeting, and I almost missed it in the dark club lighting, but I was confident I saw it before his expression settled back into something vaguely neutral. “Maybe you could wear a suit of armor, dress like a knight? It’d fit with this whole, ‘defender of the downtrodden’ you’re evoking right now.”
I snorted at my mental image of myself riding around the city on horseback in medieval armor. “Ah yes,” I intoned with mock severity and a florid bow. “Lady… um, Knightsalot at your service, sir.”
Newter burst into laughter. “You are so shit at names!”
“Hey, I came up with June just fine!” I bit out, somewhat offended at the declaration.
“Huh?”
Ah hell. “Anyway, I’m getting tired,” I said with a faux yawn. “I’m gonna go catch some Z’s. Night, Newts.”
“God, please don’t call me that,” he remarked with an over-exaggerated cringe, obviously struggling to maintain a straight face. “Have mercy on me!”
“No promises,” I replied in a cheery, sing-song tone as I carefully reclaimed and deposited all of my coins into my bag to the disappointment of the crowd.
----------------------------------------
“We’re here.”
I looked up from where I’d been perusing the phone Faultline had provided me this morning—complete with an explanation of “this will come out of your paycheck,” the money-grubber—and paled when I saw where she had driven Newter and me. “No.”
Newter twisted around in his seat with a confused look, while Faultline’s eyes flicked to me in the rearview mirror but didn’t betray what she was thinking. “Elaborate?”
“Somewhere else.” I struggled to not cringe away from the sight of the Boat Graveyard clearly visible through the tinted windows and windshield. “Not… not here. Anywhere but here.”
Newter turned to face Faultline, and the two shared a silent conversation for a moment. “Okay,” Faultline said. “What is it that’s bothering you? I need to know, so I can move us somewhere better.”
I fidgeted and looked down at my lap, scowling at my inability to continue looking at the place. “I, um. I triggered here.”
“Fuck,” Newter remarked, succinctly summarizing my thoughts on the matter.
Faultline’s eyes widened minutely before settling back into indifference. “If I put a building between us and here, would that be enough?” Faultline inquired. “I don’t want to subject you to trauma, but this area is the best suited to testing the limits of your power while maintaining a low profile and staying in the city.”
“Maybe?” I allowed, not quite sure.
She twisted the leather steering wheel, her fancy car smoothly rotating in response. I did feel better once I wasn’t looking at the abandoned docks and sunken boats and relayed as much to Faultline, eliciting a nod of acknowledgment from her as she brought us back a block and pulled around the other side of a sizable abandoned building made of concrete and metal that appeared to be a cross between boat repair facility and warehouse. Best as I could tell, everything in a four or five block radius of the docks was likewise deserted, which just added to the decaying air of the ‘graveyard.’ She turned towards a giant metal bay door that was street level, and taking the cue, I lifted the door fifteen feet or so—more than enough room for the sleek vehicle to slide underneath.
“How much metal is in your range right now?” Faultline asked, her tone all business as she flipped down the welder’s mask that served as her mask. The stylized crack across it passed roughly over where I expected the bridge of her nose to be.
“A lot.” She crossed her arms and waited. I did my best to resist the urge to glare. “I don’t know what kind of answer you’re looking for. It’s not like instinctively know how many pieces of metal are nearby, how much it all weighs, or whatever.”
“And now we know that about your power,” she replied in a clipped tone before opening the door and climbing out.
“Oh.” I blinked. “That… makes sense, I guess.”
Newter snickered at me as he popped open his own door, and I took a moment to push down the urge to make him trip on coins before tying my mask in place and moving to follow.
Faultline was facing me as I hopped out and seemed to be regarding me. Her costume was a weird combination of utility and style that looked like some sort of welder crossed with a samurai to me. She wore what looked like an armored vest, a large skirt split into parts that clearly didn’t hamper her movement, and wide sleeves that obscured her arms while still allowing her to easily reach the items strapped to her upper arm. In between the splits in the skirt and peeking out from beneath her billowing sleeves, I could just barely make out a myriad of belts and holsters all over that held a mix of tools in place. I could feel most, but not all, of the items she had strapped to her, and the costume made it difficult to read her body language.
“So you cannot determine the exact amount or weight of metal nearby,” she finally stated after a few seconds of uncomfortable silence. “Do you feel metal shifting into and out of your perception?”
“Um. Well, I can feel you moving around because of all the metal on you.” I trailed off for a moment then belatedly added. “Newter too. Button on his jeans.”
She nodded. “Yes, you had mentioned as much regarding your fight with the ABB. That’s not quite what I am asking. As you pay attention to any individual pieces or groups of metal, do you lose sight of metal you could see until that moment?”
“Oh, um… I can feel new metal as I walk close enough or lose sight of it as I move away, but not while I’m just chilling in place.”
“Anything else you can feel about the metal? Can you tell what kind of metal it is? Whether something else is attached to it or on it?”
“Can’t tell metals apart, but I can feel shape and kinda how heavy it is, and I’ve been making guesses about what things are based on that.”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“So you were being exact when you said you couldn’t tell how much it ‘all weighs’ earlier, however you can roughly guess how much an individual item weighs.”
I self-consciously crossed my arms. I’d known we were coming out here to test my power, and Faultline had warned me she would be asking a lot of questions, but it still felt like I was being interrogated. “It’s… easier to compare how much something weighs next to something else.” I gestured at a shipping container in the warehouse, visible only by the sunlight leaking through from where I still held the garage door open. “I can tell that weighs more than your car.” And speaking of lifting those… “I think I have a limit to what I can lift too? When I fought Rune, she tried to throw two of those at me. The second one sort of… um, slipped between my fingers. Something like that. Had to block one with the other instead of just taking control of both.”
Faultline made a considering sound. “Interesting. It’s not a limit on the number of objects. You control thousands of coins at once all the time…”
She trailed off and turned to face the shipping container I’d indicated. I looked to Newter, and he remarked, “Probably thinking up a test.”
“Yes,” she distractedly replied. “Yes, that should work.” She turned back to face us. “Lift that shipping container into the air and hold it there. While you’re holding it, I want you to bring out your coins and see if you can still control all of them.”
I shrugged and tried to lift the container only to fall over backwards when my backpack suddenly became crazy heavy. The door also slammed into the ground with a bang, cutting off our light.
Fortunately, that meant I didn’t flash my teammates when my skirt flipped up over my belly. That would have compounded my mortification over my power failing like that.
A flashlight cut through the darkness, and Faultline crossed over to me and gave me a hand up. “Lost control?”
“Yeah,” I said frowning.
“Put down your bag and try again.”
I shrugged off my backpack and let it fall to the ground with a metallic clunk. Free of needing to control them, I tried to lift the container. Strangely, it wouldn’t budge. The hell is going on?
“Coin?”
“Trying,” I grunted through grit teeth.
“If you cannot lift it, then stop. That’s informative enough.” I released my grip on it and sagged in relief. When I tossed her an inquiring look, she explained, “I suspect the limit is not the number of items you can lift but how much weight you can lift.”
I’d thought something similar when I was robbing the store on the Boardwalk, but still… “I don’t get it though,” I protested. “This feels like the same weight as the one I used to fight Rune. I mean, I don’t remember exactly, but it’s about the same.”
“Perhaps,” she conceded. “But that container may have been empty or otherwise contained less weight than this one. Your power might only provide weight feedback for the metal itself.”
“That’s a fancy way of saying my power is really just focused on metal shit.” I turned my power on the shipping container again, but this time I focused instead on ripping it apart at the seams instead of lifting it, and when the sides and top tore away, I saw it really was packed to the brim with wooden crates that contained who knew what. More importantly though…
“Yuck!” Newter complained, pinching his nose, while I grimaced. If Faultline was bothered by the rancid stench, then it must’ve been concealed by her mask. Or else she was just completely unflappable. Both seemed equally plausible from what I’d seen of her so far. “What reeks?!”
I promptly reassembled the container over the bottom chunk that had been under the crates, and though the smell got a bit better it still lingered. “Smells like rancid milk,” I groaned, abruptly thankful for the mask covering my nose.
“It may very well be,” Faultline stated, some discomfort evident in her voice. Ha! Guess she’s not so unflappable after all! “Certainly food products gone bad at any rate.”
“Whatever it is, it’s awful,” Newter pressed. “Can we head outside where it doesn’t smell like something died?”
I grabbed my backpack off the ground and lifted the door once more, then the three of us quickly left through the gap, which I carefully set down this time, since we were ostensibly trying to be discrete.
“Do you feel any other storage containers nearby that you can pick up? I’d still like to confirm my hypothesis beyond a doubt using my original test. Put your bag on the ground first.”
“Sure, there are plenty,” I confirmed while dropping my backpack. I picked up one of the containers at random, and in less than a minute I had it hovering nearby, perfectly still in the air.
“Okay, now hold that in the air and try to bring out all of your coins.” I reached down and unzipped the backpack, and while I was able to pull out most of them out, I wasn’t able to grab them all before I began to feel like the rest were slipping between my fingers like trying to grab at water with splayed fingers. Faultline glanced down into the bag and nodded to herself. “That’s enough, Coin. Thank you.”
I carefully set down the container. “That’s it then. I can only control so much weight. Good to know.”
“Yes. It’s a shame you can only lift that much, since an armored car would be much heavier, but it’s good that you can work with individual parts. The next hypothesis I want to confirm is your compulsion.”
I was about to ask why she’d specifically brought up an armored car but was caught off guard by the last part. “My… compulsion?”
“Correct. You acted quite strangely at two separate points the night we met, seemingly fixated on something we couldn’t see. I reexamined those situations after, and from what I could glean, it seemed you weren’t controlling metal at the time. Hence I suspect you have a compulsion to use your power regularly. It would explain why you were so emphatic about keeping some of the metal we gave you that night and why you always carry around coins in your backpack.”
“That’s not why,” I objected, floundering to explain myself. “I—that is… I just don’t wanna be caught off guard like I did with Rune! The coins are easy to carry and around manipulate, especially if I need to fly!”
“If that’s all it is, then you won’t object to a simple test. Put all of your coins on the ground in a pile, and don’t use your power on them or any other metal in the area.” My revulsion at the idea must have shown on my face, since she added, “Newter and I are here, and we would protect you and end the test if an attack did happen.”
I begrudgingly lumped the coins together in a small mound on the ground then released my power’s hold over them. It was weird just… letting go. In hindsight, I had been constantly using it to control metal in one way or another since Monday, spare when I’d been asleep.
“Perfect, that will do nicely.”
“Sure, sure,” I muttered. Trying to distract myself from the odd feeling, my eyes flicked over to Faultline. “So. Um. What exactly is your power? Like, how does it work? Do you just split things in half?”
“Something like that,” she replied. “I make cuts in non-organic objects at the atomic level.”
I blinked, trying to wrap my head around that description. “Fancy cutting. Got it.”
“An excellent summary,” she drawled.
I smirked a bit at the reaction, but my expression quickly twisted with confusion when I realized I was staring at my coins. When had that happened? Weird. I started to reflexively settle my power over them, but paused when I remembered I wasn’t supposed to. But… why? It was suddenly hard to remember.
“Don’t use your power.”
I sluggishly tugged my gaze away from the coins. Faultline—right. She asked me to stop. “‘Kay,” I grumbled, shuffling my feet and looking around for something to distract myself. I realized I was staring at Faultline’s metal welder’s mask. Not having meant to stare, I scrambled to say something. “Fancy cutter. What’s the biggest cut ya ever made?” I pantomimed slicing through something with my arm with a “kashew!” Her power had made a sound when I saw it the other night when she split my coin. I think? Whatever.
“‘The biggest cut’ I ever made, hm?” It sounded like there was a hint of a smile in her voice, but I couldn’t tell if she was actually smiling. I was staring at her mask, so I’d see her smiling if I could. “Well, I cut through a building once, and it collapsed. There was definitely luck involved with that though.”
“Snazzy,” I murmured, trying to visualize it, but her mask was pretty distracting. My lips curled in frustration as I struggled to look away, and when I finally managed it, my gaze immediately fell on the pile of my coins. I don’t like this. Why am I doing it again?
“You’re doing it because we’re testing your power,” Faultline said. Huh. Did I say that aloud? “Yes, you did.”
I growled with frustration. I tried to turn away again, even if it meant I would just start staring at her mask again, but I just couldn’t manage it. I realized I was trembling and crossed my arms to try and stop it. So many coins. Money. I need that. Need hormones.
“Hormones?”
Newter? Yes, belt buckle. He’s the belt buckle. A whining sound reached my ears. Familiar… Me? Too much. Just… I just need to for one second. It’s just a second, right?
“Okay, I think that’s more than enough,” the metal mask said. “You may use your power again.”
Permission. The coins on the ground shot towards me at speed and abruptly twisted to swirl around me in a vortex, gently stirring the air around me in their wake. I was in the eye of a metal tornado, the world blurred by a storm of my own design. I don’t know how long it took, but I eventually stopped shivering and felt calmer, if a bit light-headed. I tugged coins from the storm and wrapped them around me as I would for flight but just used them to stabilize myself instead as I let the storm die down into a ring of coins around me.
Faultline and Newter stood nearby, and though I couldn’t see Faultline’s expression, Newter’s was pinched with a mixture of emotions I couldn’t place. “Feeling better?” he asked. Was that worry?
“‘Course I am,” I deflected, trying to wrack my brain for exactly what had happened but came up mostly blank.
“Your compulsion put you in an altered mind state,” Faultline answered my unasked question, her tone heavy with something I couldn’t identify. “I apologize for forcing you to go through that, but we needed to know how you would act at what levels of deprivation.” She waved the phone in her hand. “I recorded everything, in case we need to refer back to it later.”
“So it’s real?” I asked bemused and shaking my head. It was difficult to recall what had happened between putting down my coins and picking them back up. It wasn’t that there was a gap in my memory, but it was difficult to focus on it, and what I could remember was mostly a blur of feelings. I held out my hand and tugged the phone towards me, and Faultline made a noise half annoyance and half disappointment.
“Ask next time, but go ahead and watch it.”
Whoops. Right, trying to stay on her good side. I shot her my best look of contrition, hoping she would chalk up my behavior to this ‘altered mind state’ she claimed I’d been in. I tapped the ‘play’ button on the phone, not expecting much, then watched with embarrassment and mounting horror as the video showed me quickly grow loopy. I stared obsessively at metal, began thinking aloud… I even started acting like Mom did when she couldn’t get her fix. The whole process took only three minutes by the video’s timer. “The fuck? What the actual fuck?”
“You don’t remember it at all?” I looked up and unconsciously flinched away when I saw Newter had stepped closer while I was watching. He’d stopped just outside the ring of coins, distant enough to prevent accidentally touching him, but his silent approach had still startled me. He frowned at my reaction, an expression that seemed alien on him. For the short time we’d known each other, I had come to associate him almost exclusively with grins and laughter. I shook my head wordlessly, unsure what to say. To think, even. I shivered again at the thought that I might never have known about this if I’d stayed solo. I might have even accidentally gotten stuck like this, if I ever got trapped somewhere without metal in range.
Faultline crossed over to us and held out her hand. Recognizing the silent command for what it was and too troubled to even think about disobeying right now, I moved the phone to her hand through the air. Once she had slipped it back into her pocket, she spoke up, “There’s more testing I would like to do, but I would understand if you aren’t feeling well enough to continue.”
“I’m fine,” I groused, albeit somewhat unsteadily. I frowned then repeated myself with more certainty. “I want to continue.”
Newter made a noise of protest, but Faultline gestured at him. He crossed his arms but didn’t say anything further. She waved at the coins on the ground. “You moved those very quickly. Do you know how fast you can move them? A rough estimate will do.”
“Maybe 40, 45 miles an hour? When I fly, it looks like I’m faster than the cars on the street below.”
“Hm… I wonder if…” She didn’t finish the thought for several seconds, seemingly thinking through another test. “This would be cleaner and more exact if we had the proper equipment, but we shall just have to make do. I want you to move a coin at max speed, then I want you to move that shipping container in the same way. I will observe from the side and try to compare speeds. Your power is affected by weight, but powers are finicky. It may be that you can move them both at the same speed. It may be the shipping container moves slower or quicker. It certainly seemed to be fast when you initially retrieved it.”
It didn’t take long for me to oblige and send each item in turn hurtling forward while Faultline watched. Once I was done, there was an undercurrent of excitement in her voice. “To the naked eye, I didn’t see much difference at all—interesting. I’d bet the difference boils down to air resistance, but it’s impossible to say right now.”
“So wait,” I said, beginning to cotton on to what she was thinking. “I could just smash people with heavy objects at speed then, right?”
“No, even better!” Newter interjected with a grin. “You can pulverize them from above! They’d never see it coming.”
I grinned back, the funk from earlier finally dissipating in the wake of my excitement. “Awesome!”
“You would need to exercise appropriate restraint,” Faultline pointed out, being a party pooper. “Remember, avoiding lethal force is one of the unwritten rules. But yes, this has definite tactical advantages.” She pulled out her phone and checked the time. “I have some other tests I would like to perform, but we should head back before too long. Otherwise, Gregor won’t have enough time to help you retrieve your belongings from your cousin before our meeting.”
“Whatevs,” I replied with a shrug. “What next then?”
Apparently a lot. I actually started to regret insisting I was good to continue earlier—the woman was like a slave driver! She put me through a battery of other tests regarding how fine my control was—it basically wasn’t, but I’d already known that—and the kinds of shapes I could manipulate metal into—spoiler alert: a whole lot of shapes, so long as they didn’t require fine details. I was actually a bit upset when I realized I couldn’t use my power to make a badass sword. I’d known I couldn’t make something small like a knife, but a part of me had been hoping I would be able to upscale and find a point where I could actually make something sharp. The best I’d been able to manage was essentially a large cleaver-like sword that had something of an edge, but I’d abandoned that when Newter joked my cape name should be ‘Cloud,’ which was apparently a reference to some Earth Aleph video game. No way was I going to let myself be associated with a dumb name like that or some game I’d never even heard of.
Eventually we moved on to reviewing my fights with Rune and Lung, so Faultline could get an idea of where I was at with fighting. “Could you feel his scales?” Faultline asked when I’d finished describing the latter fight.
I blinked, nonplussed. “Um. I think I could?”
“Then why didn’t you use your power to hold him in place or even slow him down?”
That was a good fucking question. “I dunno…”
She hummed at that. “I’d imagined your power was Manton-limited. A partial limitation might fight.” I tilted my head in confusion, and she tacked on, “It’s the principle that most powers tend to either living creatures or inanimate objects but almost never both. For example, my powers only work on inanimate objects. They wouldn’t work if I tried to use them on you or Newter.”
“So what you’re saying is… Lung’s scales are living metal or something, so my power might not work on them the same as normal metal?”
“It’s a theory. We don’t exactly have a readily available means of testing that, so just keep it in mind. Besides that, you mentioned trapping him using the metal from the safe, and you’ve quite clearly demonstrated that you can manipulate metal. What I don’t understand is how you kept him contained using metal. Lung is incredibly strong and, with his pyrokinesis, could have quite possibly melted a hole through the metal.”
“Oh, right! It’s hard to explain, but I surrounded him in a sphere of metal then pushed it… um, I call it ‘elsewhere.’”
Newter snickered. “‘Elsewhere’?”
I stuck my tongue out at him, or tried to anyway, getting a taste of my mask for my effort. I flipped him the bird instead. “Ass.”
“Your excellent naming skills hard at work,” he smugly retorted, seemingly unbothered by being given the finger.
Faultline cut in before we could keep going at each other. “Focus. What happens when you push something ‘elsewhere’?”
“Um. It gets tougher? I also can’t move it with my power until I bring it back from there.”
She turned on her heel and started walking towards the shipping container. “Show me.” She gave me a few seconds to push it elsewhere then reached out to touch it, the blue and red light of her power crackling over the surface of the rusted red metal.
Nothing happened.
Newter stared, his mouth agape. “Holy shit.”
Faultline placed her other hand against it and got close enough to push her toes against it too. Her power flared once more, this time much more brightly and for several seconds, but the container remained unphased.
She turned back to face me. “Can you undo this?” Her tone was tinged with the faintest signs of excitement again.
“Yeah.”
“How long does it last?”
“Um. I dunno, actually. I’ve always just brought it back.”
“It must have a time limit,” she rebutted. “Even if the PRT didn’t report an immovable sphere large enough to contain a human, I still would have heard rumblings in my network of such a thing.”
I shrugged, unsure what to say. “I did leave pretty quickly after the fight… Could be a time limit, I guess. Or maybe it stops once it’s out of my range?”
“Then here’s how we’ll test it…”
----------------------------------------
“Okay, it’s coming up,” I said as I felt the metal in my range quickly slip away as Faultline drove us back towards the Palanquin. I’d left a shipping container hanging in the elsewhere far, far up in the air above the Boat Graveyard.
“That’s a shame,” Faultline replied. “Your range isn’t quite as far as I’d hoped.” She slowed down, which wasn’t a problem, as we were still on an entirely abandoned street. I grumbled a bit at that—my power was impressive, dammit—but I forced myself to let it be. Instead, I joined Newter in rolling down my window as he did the same on the other side of the car, and together we leaned out to watch. “Right about… Now.”
The container slipped from my control, and it immediately began to plummet towards the earth. It quickly picked up speed, falling faster and faster… Until a metallic bang rang out, echoing and resounding through the area and sending a plume of concrete dust up into the air that I could see in spite of the building blocking my sight of the impact. A part of me wanted to go see what the damage was—it had to be a lot, solid concrete or not—but Faultline had already said we wouldn’t want to stick around once it hit, so I slipped back into the car and rolled up the tinted window. Safely hidden from sight, I tugged my mask down and left it hanging around my neck.
Newter shot me a grin from the passenger seat. “Like I said. You’ll pulverize them.”
“Totally,” I replied before gesticulating widely and jokingly declaring, “Watch the skies, Brockton Bay! Metal Rain is bringing the pain!”
“No, no, can’t use that name,” he said with a laugh. “Too close to Iron Rain, Kaiser’s sister.”
“It was just a joke anyway, you spoilsport.”
A sly look abruptly crossed Newter’s face. “Actually… I’ve finally got the perfect cape name for you.”
I rolled my eyes, fully expecting another joke name that I’d hate or not understand the reference of. “Uh huh. Do tell.”
“Meteor.”
I blinked. Meteor… I met his eyes, a smile slowly growing on my face.