“A visit home, right, Jay?”
It was honestly a miracle that I didn’t react beyond stiffening at his words. What the fuck was that? I blinked, and he wasn’t even looking at me anymore, instead staring at Faultline like he could bore a hole through her welder’s mask if he glared at it long enough. Had I imagined him looking to me when he said ‘Jay’? Had he even said it at all? I suddenly wasn’t sure.
“I don’t appreciate you ignoring my question,” Faultline smoothly interjected. “I’m not in the habit of repeating myself, so I hope you were paying attention.”
Her words snapped my attention back to where it should have been: Grabbing the earbud lodged in his right ear canal. I pulled it backward and to the left to make him stumble then tugged it out of his ear into the air before crushing it into pieces.
“Of course, of course,” Waters replied as he caught himself before he fell, mostly unphased by my indirect man-handling of him. In fact, his entire demeanor suddenly shifted. The way he was standing and holding himself… If he weren’t still sporting mussed attire and disarrayed hair, I might have been convinced he had never been worried in the first place. I didn’t like this flip one bit. Why was he suddenly so confident? “I daresay you’re not after the money, else my staff would have cottoned onto your scheme sooner. Incidentally, I should note it’s insured. Setting it aflame is a minor inconvenience at most.”
“It’s insured if it’s all accountable for, certainly, yet it gave you pause when we entered the room. Actions speak louder than words, as the saying goes. And I’m not hearing an answer; knowing what we aren’t here for isn’t the same as knowing our objective.”
“So you say, but what you aren’t here for casts a shadow on your aim all the same,” he replied, ignoring the jab at the likelihood he could actually regain any money Spitfire torched. “Indeed, had you been after money, there are far easier targets to strike, albeit for less reward. But then that is the heart of the appeal of casinos for most, no? Why bank or invest when the quick path to riches is right there. Pity the fools, walking right into the dragon’s lair with hopes of absconding with some of its riches only to be struck down for their folly.”
Wow. The superiority complex on this asshole was astounding.
Faultline drew her pistol, its silencer already screwed into place. That was my cue—I readied myself. “It seems you are hard of hearing after all.”
“No, I hear quite well,” he rejoined. “What I hear is blatant attempts at fishing for information, futile shots in the dark in the hopes I will offer up something you can exploit. I won’t be caught on the wrong foot so easily, Faultline.”
She held out her hand, and I swiftly yanked the cell phone in his pants pocket out into the air before sending it sailing into her grasp. “You must be quite the softy underneath all that bravado and classism,” Faultline said as she looked down and tilted the phone this way and that, as if she were considering an interesting puzzle. She raised the pistol and aimed it at his leg.
The bastard didn’t even flinch. He looked like he had expected it. What the fuck was going on?
“Tell me, how much did it cost?” she pressed. Was Waters’ strange behavior not unnerving her as much as it was me? She seemed cool as a cucumber.
“More games, Faultline?”
She pulled the trigger. At least this time the son of a bitch flinched. If he had actually managed to ignore a gun aimed at him being fired, I would have called bullshit on him being a normal human.
The bullet I had caught right before it entered his thigh slowly rose up until it hovered in front of his nose. I made sure to keep it spinning and vibrating just for show. See this bullet? This one right here? It nearly ripped through your fancy, bespoke pants and the leg inside them. We’re the ones in charge here.
“If you desire to view them as such, who am I to judge? But as I said before, I’m not in the habit of repeating myself. Answer me.”
The previously unflappable Waters was beginning to sweat again. Why now? Was it the bullet or the topic that shook him more? “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She squeezed the trigger again, and this time I let the bullet actually smack into his thigh for a brief instant before I grabbed it. He jumped back with a yelp, and Faultline was already talking, “Even if you hadn’t been advised regarding this conversation by whatever Thinker you spoke with, you would know what the subject is. The elephant in the room is too big to ignore. Is making me spell it out for you worth a bullet in the leg?”
“I don’t—”
“Meteor, don’t catch th—”
“Wait!” he shouted, his hands rising in surrender and his posture crumbling. “Eden. You want to know about Eden.”
My heart jumped in my throat. It was one thing to hear Faultline tell us in debrief that Waters may have ties to the organization behind the Case-53s, but it was another thing altogether to hear the confirmation straight from the man’s mouth.
Eden. Were they the culprits? If so, what was their endgame?
Faultline hummed. “Do not make me repeat my question.”
“Ten million.”
Forget jumping in my throat—my heart just about stopped when I heard that number. Ten million dollars? Ten million was a mind-boggling number even before it was applied to money. Ten million people? More than ten times the number of people in Brockton Bay. Ten million sheep? Your ass was falling to sleep, guaranteed. Ten million grains of sand? That was… well, it was a fuck ton of sand.
But ten million dollars? That, apparently, was the cost of super powers in a bottle.
“Better,” Faultline acknowledged. She brandished the phone in her hand. “Your PIN?”
Waters didn’t hesitate this time. “7167.”
She started to key it in. “I see. Fitting.”
Was it? I didn’t understand why.
“If I may be so presumptuous,” he spoke up unprompted as she continued to examine the phone.
“You may,” she replied without looking up.
“You won’t find contact information or any other information related to Eden in my phone.”
“Yes, we presumed as much. I trust your sister’s is though.”
“What?!” Waters blurted, abruptly pale.
“Interesting.”
What’s interesting? I wanted to ask. But this was neither the time nor the place, and my stuttering words had no place in this verbal jousting. No, this was Faultline’s arena. She was no Thinker, but she could still think better than most of them.
“Tell us everything you know about Eden,” Faultline demanded, her finger hovering over the phone’s screen and poised to strike. “Do so freely, and we don’t need to involve her.”
“Do you have any idea what you’re asking of me?” he demanded, his cool composure completely shattered. “Do you have any idea?”
“Judging by your disinterest in the safety of the roughly eight million dollars currently in your vault downstairs and your relatively cavalier attitude regarding the price tag of your niece’s powers, I imagine Eden has done more than threaten your money. Your life? Your family’s?”
“I’m a bachelor, I don’t have—”
She raised her pistol to level with his head, and he clammed up.
Stolen novel; please report.
“You dropped ten million dollars on powers for your niece, Waters. You have family.”
“And what about you, Faultline? Do you have family? Perhaps back in Albuquerque? Or are the people you surround yourself with more than just your colleagues? Does the Snail have enemies who might come after him from Charleston? What if poor little Labyrinth were taken back to the asylum?”
He looked to me. “I wonder just what you would do to protect Mister— I mean, Miss Fujiwara?”
My blood ran cold, and without conscious thought, my orbs were flooding out of my backpack into the air while the light bulb in Waters’ desk lamp fell and shattered as the body of the lamp twisted and leapt up to bind him.
“Kill me, and my people will spread your identity everywhere!” he cried, his expression manic. His eyes darted back and forth between us so quickly they would have gotten whiplash if such a thing had been possible.
His people… The Thinker. They had undoubtedly been the person on the other end of the call in his earbud, but I had cut off that avenue of information shortly after we entered the room. Most Thinkers had powers that gave them flashes of intuition in the form of colors, made them good at problem solving, detecting danger, and so on. Nothing that would let someone pull all those details about the crew, much less such an exacting detail as my la— well, my fake last name and my being trans out of thin air. And certainly nothing that would let them do that either in the scant few seconds we had been in the room before I terminated the call or, heaven forbid, before we had even entered.
What the fuck were we dealing with?
“Even if Meteor is who you believe she is, you’re talking about breaking the unwritten rules, Waters,” Faultline coolly replied, seemingly ignoring my powered outburst as she began to circle around him at a slow stalk. “As the owner of a casino that employs Thinkers, I would have thought you familiar with them.”
I was drawing a blank. What were we going to do about this Thinker? I’d neutralized their ability to aid Waters for the moment, unless there was some other hidden power use going on, but that was only good for right now. When we left here tonight, would they hold a grudge? Waters certainly would, and while I imagined his winning personality likely meant most of his employees only stuck around for the money, it wasn’t entirely inconceivable that someone, even the Thinker, might hold some degree of loyalty.
“These people, they don’t play by your goddamn rules!”
Wait. The details! I had just looked at our PHO thread earlier this week—I was such an idiot! Waters knew things about us, yes, but other than my name, everything he’d mentioned was something he could have read on PHO or some other website. He had been trying to pretend he knew about all of us when he really only knew about me.
“Funny. You say it with such distaste, but your niece didn’t play by them either.”
I had never met Waters that I was aware of, but he knew someone who did, perhaps even the Thinker. Even more telling was the name he’d been fed wasn’t June Fujiwara—it was Jay Fujiwara. The only people who would know that name and could possibly be familiar enough with me to peg my identity despite all my changes would be the people I had worked with under Rodriguez. Could we use that?
“Octavia,” he breathed out.
All my thoughts ground to a screeching halt. Octavia…? Surely not the same—
He began to struggle against my bindings so hard I was afraid he might seriously injure himself. “Where is she?! What have you done with my precious Via?!”
A shiver ran down my spine, and a feeling like ants crawling over me took root in my skin. The orbs still hovering in the air began to wobble and shake, and the urge to drop them all, to sink into myself became almost overwhelming. Was that where Faultline had procured this tip from? Her?
All around the room, the fixtures began to warp and twist. Some of it was me, but not all. Nothing went unseen or unheard in Labyrinth’s bailiwick.
The smooth, lacquered wood of the floor and walls were bulging and shifting, giving way to the new form overtaking them. Bricks so massive they would crush my body if they tilted over, laid upon and together with one another in a stalwart symphony of stone. The dead walls, born from something once living, gave birth to new life. Moss, spiders and their webs, and their insect prey sprung from the unyielding surface just as water began to flood the floors from everywhere and nowhere, bringing smaller fish and other creatures I couldn’t readily identify that darted through the murk.
This was too soon—we didn’t have what we came for yet. I couldn’t blame her. She must feel them too, the memories of our captivity crawling out of the best forgotten past where they belonged. Come to haunt us, to remind us that our freedom could be stolen with just a few whispered words, that safety was an illusion because danger was everywhere.
“Wha— What are you doing?!”
Faultline surged in close and jammed the tip of her pistol’s silencer up into the underside of his chin, causing him to abruptly still. She leaned in so her welder mask came within inches of his face and growled, “This is your last chance, Waters. Tell us everything you know about Eden. How did you contact them? Where are they based out of? Who are they? Tell us now, or we’ll be forced to pay your sister a visit next.”
“Shut up. Shut up right now, or I swear to god, I’ll command you to stop breathing. Do you want that? Huh?!”
Sconces lined the walls, and though torches sat within them, the wood was visibly rotted and dripping wet. The pitch black pervading the room was only held at bay by the moonlight streaming in through a smattering of holes in the roof, their shapes irregular and lined with partially shattered stone bricks. Wounds from whatever siege had brought the castle to its knees, the culprits readily identified asthe heavy shot hidden to all but my power within the water.
The consuming darkness, the rising water cresting above my knees—it was too much. I was sinking, trapped in a tomb fashioned against my will as it sank beneath the waves hiding a graveyard full of ships fallen victim to their grasping fingers. Just another corpse doomed to rot in the depths.
“Faultline!” I heard Gregor say as my orbs fell. He was here, but not here. A voice in my ear but not in my head, words screamed at a whisper from beyond the horizon. Distressed. Did the dark have him too? Where was my friend? “Labyrinth’s power has gone wild here!”
In a labyrinth? No. Not a—the. The labyrinth. My Labyrinth. The spider had spun her web, and we were all caught, but the joke was on her, ‘cause so was she.
Why wasn’t it funny?
“This isn’t how it was supposed to go!” Waters cried, his words aflutter with a mania that painted him as not quite sane as the water lapped at his chin. Ramble damble, speak your truth if you wish, but don’t forget breathing water is for fish! A man locked away, clink clink in the dungeon. A girl wheeled hither and thither, never allowed to settle. The light’s right there, but we’re trapped all the same. A fake carved from the real. A new real, made true because it’s all around. “I had the future on my side! You were supposed to lose!”
Not-Melanie said a not good word, her mask slipping but not the face one. “Stay where you are, Gregor—we’re on our way!
She saw the wall was lonely and moved to console it. Too bad it was chicken and ran away. Crack, like an egg, and out pours the yoke! The beavers worked hard on their dam, but the river was not to be stopped. She held fast to the not so fowl half of wall, and her metal face looked to me.
My cue, but the dance is off beat. Was the problem my feet? Chip-man was all thunder but no zap. Him? No. Me. Me me me.
“Meteor!” She waved. It was for me, but I didn’t like the waves. I escaped my tomb, and I wouldn’t go back!
“No, no, no…” I was forgetting. I wanted to forget, but not this—not everything. This was supposed to be kept! I had a part in the dance! Tongue tangle. Practice practice, or you’ll never have a chance! Tell Not-Melanie! The star of the show, she would know the cue. “Scuh-air-duh!”
Another not good word. She swam upstream, and I shivered at the water slipping past. I was cold. Then she was upon me, a mama bear come for her cub. I held tight. It was warmer in her arms.
“Juniper,” she whispered in my ear. A voice in my ear and my head. “I know you’re scared, but we have to go. The crew needs you. We need you to be brave.”
A full name—not good, but not bad, not this time. The cue! The dance was on the tip of my toes, ready to go. Be brave! Leap, little dancer! No. No, not dancer—conductor. Everyone was ready for my direction, and I had but to give the word.
Up!
My dancers, my troupe of ballerinas took to the sky, a stage where only we could perform. The water retreated, and with it so too crept the fog. The water was still there, but we were flying above it. I directed my ballerinas—my orbs—and we shot through the breach in the wall.
There were shouts below us, but there was one far closer. Waters fell through the wall, plummeting with the water towards the ground, but I grabbed hold of the bindings I had shackled him with and threw him back into the sunken castle Labyrinth had dreamt into this world. A quick manipulation of the bindings had them secured to the wall, then I turned my focus entirely to Faultline.
Oh. Whoops. I split the orbs holding us aloft and pulled us apart. “Here.”
“Good. Immediate regroup.”
The earbuds in Gregor’s and Spitfire’s ears weren’t far away, and we flew towards them. The Protectorate would be on their way. How long had it been since Labyrinth began twisting the casino? Five minutes? More? We needed to get out of here pronto before the Protectorate could arrive.
We reached them a second later, and Faultline was already on the comms. “Labyrinth, we need you to open the wall by us. We need to get Gregor and Spitfire.”
A beat passed with no reaction, and I began to gather my orbs, preparing to coalesce them into a battering ram. My precaution fortunately proved unnecessary when the bricks began to peel away, creating a hole that more water began to pour through. Spitfire nearly tumbled through along with it, but Gregor’s bulky hand grabbed hold of her before she could fall over the lip, and I encased them both in orbs a second later. Wet, soggy bills began to flow around them, tumbling out with the water, and even though the money had pointedly never been the objective, I still couldn’t help but bemoan its loss. Eight million dollars, down the quasi-literal drain.
Labyrinth was comparatively farther away, but we were there in a matter of moments all the same. Faultline didn’t need to direct her to create an opening this time, and I spared the poor housekeeper an apologetic glance as I hastily secured her to the wall while retrieving Labyrinth. The water level looked to have been only a smidge above the mattresses, so hopefully her bribe had made it out intact.
A dark line passed between us and the silver moonlight above. It was a miracle I even saw it with how dark it was outside and my attention focused elsewhere. The pulse of my heartbeat thrummed loudly in my head as I desperately threw the four of us towards Labyrinth, who was still safe, sat upon the mattress—a throne for the queen of her castle of dreams. Some of the orbs I had hovering in the air all around us shot together to form a makeshift tunnel, and I had only just pushed it into elsewhere when the moon, the castle, and the people below us all vanished, leaving pitch black behind in their wake—all except a narrow, circular cut in the black void showing a glimpse of Labyrinth. Faultline, Gregor, Spitfire, and finally myself all shot through to safety with some quick redirection from me.
As I came to a rapid landing on the mattress next to Labyrinth, I couldn’t help staring at the hole of pure emptiness hovering in the sky behind us. Of all the heroes who could have arrived, I was absolutely flabbergasted that Cache had gotten here first instead of someone with a power involving enhanced mobility. The New York Protectorate and Wards weren’t just the largest groups of heroes in the nation. They were the largest groups of capes in the US period. Even with my own knowledge of the cape scene in New York, there were far too many heroes to remember all of their powers. But Cache—him I remembered from our briefing because he was one of the capes my power might counter.
But this… it was only sheer dumb luck that had saved us. Happening to notice the warning signs while simultaneously being the only cape who could do anything about it. Even that much had been a guess by Faultline—that the immutability of anything I put into elsewhere would preclude Cache sealing the space it inhabited.
“Through the castle! Escape B!” Faultline bellowed, and I hastened to comply, moving us all into the dank corridor. The lack of light meant it was damn near impossible to see, but her follow up order, “Light the torches!” had the tips of the rotting wood bursting to life with gloomy blue flames. Labyrinth’s power to bring the impossible to life at work.
Some brave souls were out in the corridor instead of bunkering down in their twisted rooms, and they cried out in alarm as I steered us up to hug the ceiling as we accelerated towards where the stairwell had been. Labyrinth could freely reshape everything in her sphere of influence, so it wasn’t a guaranteed route down, but she tended to leave the general shape of structures intact despite the warping unless guided to do otherwise. We turned a corner, and relief flooded me. The stairwell remained, albeit far more precariously with no railing, large chunks cracked or crumbled away, and water sloshing out on each floor and leaving the stonework perpetually wet.
Fortunately for us, those were hazards only to those who couldn’t fly. We dove into the depths, and Faultline ordered over comms, “Make us a large hole, Labyrinth.”
I heard the shifting stone below us before I saw anything in the dim light. I tugged us to a safe stop before we bottomed out, perhaps a couple dozen feet below where the base of the stairwell ought to have been, and as Faultline directed Labyrinth to seal us in, I set about my own task.
Escape B. Discreetly flee to the sewers, leaving no path to follow. Meanwhile, throw our pursuers a feint by sending figures flying away from the building. Being this close to ground level limited my reach, but hundreds of feet was still nothing to scoff at. Old, broken cannons littered the battlements far above us that I reshaped into five vaguely human shaped and sized objects. I sent them rocketing off into the night sky while the path up into the stairwell disappeared and a new path down towards the sewers began to take form as quickly as Labyrinth could orchestrate the changes.
When we emerged into the sewer, I don’t think any of us expected the lanky hero floating over the water. Thankfully, he likewise didn’t expect the orange tail that slipped down from the ceiling to rub along his cheek.
“So what’d I miss?” Newter casually remarked as he shoved the still floating form of the unconscious hero towards the walkway. He let himself down enough to hang upside down from the ceiling by his feet alone.
“The escape,” Faultline humorlessly replied. “Guide us out of here.”
“Can do,” our orange teammate acknowledged as he quickly scurried off ahead, leaving us to follow in his wake.
I directed us after him, but I cast a contemplative look over my shoulder at where the hole in the roof had been. Had Faultline really gotten the tip on Waters from Octavia? If so, when?
… Would I like the answers?
I set my jaw and turned away.