It took the better part of the day for Faultline to verify our threat of blackmail had reached the right ears in the ABB to get the message quickly to Lung. That meant we had to stay hidden for a bit, else we would be risking an attack by Oni Lee, the ABB’s mystery cape, or the dragon himself. ‘Mystery cape’ because, strictly speaking we didn’t know it was this ‘Bakuda’ Cornell bomber, but Faultline had quickly found in her research that ‘Bakuda’ was a play on the Japanese word for bomb, ‘bakudan.’ Cornell was located in Ithaca, which was easily a six hour drive away, but with the Cornell bomber likely being Asian, it meant they were the most likely candidate by a stretch. There just weren’t that many capes whose power revolved around bombs.
That delay meant it wasn’t until late afternoon that Shade, Labyrinth, and I finally used the sewer system to move from the safe house back to Palanquin in full costume. The patrons who had been locked in last night while it was unsafe outside were nowhere to be seen, and the club didn’t seem to be ransacked. I had to presume they had been let out peacefully at some point once it was deemed safe. Whether many, if any, would return in the future was up for debate.
I tossed Pierce a tired wave as we exited the front door, which he returned. “So where to?” I groggily asked Labyrinth and Shade. Though I had managed to get some rest once we were situated in the safe house, the adrenaline had made it difficult to get to sleep at all, much less stay that way. Labyrinth had the same trouble, and we had ended up chatting about random, unimportant topics whenever we had both woken up at the same time and were trying to find our way back into slumber. Shade hadn’t said how her night had been, but it wasn’t hard to spot the weariness in her posture or movements.
“Fuck if I know,” Shade replied. “I guess you could just… fly us around?”
Labyrinth nodded in agreement, and I chuckled. “Sounds like patrolling. I thought only heroes did that.”
“First time for everything.” Shade snapped her fingers then said with an affected haughty tone, “Well, whatever are you waiting for, dearie? Up up.”
I smirked as I wrapped her and Labyrinth in my orbs and lifted them both into the air. Shade, however, I flipped upside down. “Right away, ma’am!”
“Good heavens!” she cried, still maintaining the demeanor from before. “You have me ass over teakettle, you silly woman!”
“My apologies, ma’am,” I replied with faux remorse that earned me some giggles from Labyrinth. “It’s just that your ass and your head are both so similar. I lost track of which was which!”
“Ooo, that was a good one,” she allowed, finally breaking character.
“Very,” Labyrinth agreed with an emphatic nod.
I wasn’t quite ready to relent though. “Your sense of fashion is also quite disorienting, if I may say so, ma’am.”
“Okay, we’ve had our f—”
“And with how active your ass is, well, it really is easy to mistake for talking, ma’am.”
“Oh my fucking god, when we’re done out here, it is on.” That might have had more impact if she hadn’t still been upside down, her scowl technically curling upwards in a parody of a smile. As it was, I just chuckled and corrected how I was holding her. It wouldn’t do for all the blood to rush to her head only for us to actually run into trouble.
Now that I wasn’t distracted by our little game, I couldn’t help but notice just how fucked the area was. For blocks all around us, buildings had been reduced to little better than scorched shells, and many were no longer standing at all. The devastation stopped a only a few corners down from the old community center I had seen a few times while flying, and I could just barely make out that a line of people was stretching out from the entrance, all of them looking haggard and most carrying an eclectic mix of possessions and in some cases pets—people who had clearly lost their homes.
“Stop it.”
“Huh?” I turned from the awful sight and saw Shade had her hands on her hips.
“Can’t see your face, but I don’t gotta. Can see the sad eyes you’re throwing their way all the same. Ain’t your fault.”
“Isn’t it?” I countered, feeling uneasy. “I didn’t burn their homes, but Lung did it because of me.”
Labyrinth didn’t have anything to say to that, but we already knew she would be quieter today. It wasn’t a bad day per se, but it certainly wasn’t a good one. The shift between them wasn’t always so cut and dry, and today was a day that fell into more of a gray territory. A four on a scale of one to ten with one being a bad day.
Shade, however, had plenty to say, “And once upon a time somebody pissed in Lung’s cereal, and whabam! Now he runs around breathing fire on shit when he gets mad. Is that person responsible? What about the dude who cut him off in traffic? Or the lady who sneezed on him and didn’t apologize? Or—”
“I get it, I get it, but that doesn’t change that I feel bad.”
She shrugged. “I guess that’s fair. Ain’t nothing wrong with looking at a kicked puppy and feeling sorry for it. Just don’t lose your head over it or nothing is all I’m saying.”
“Food later?” Labyrinth remarked. Reading between the lines a bit, I could imagine she was suggesting using some of my money to buy some food to bring by, which really wasn’t a bad idea. I would have plenty to spare once Faultline paid us. We were being paid more than the job in Providence, even if I counted what had been advanced to me, and I didn’t have that much I needed to buy other than some more clothes to round out what I had picked up in Philly and some furniture beyond the bed I had crammed up against Elle’s. Basically everything else was handled. I didn’t need to worry about hormones anymore thanks to Amy, Faultline considered having phones a team essential and deducted money for those before it reached any of us, and shit like rent was free for being on the crew. Maybe a laptop or something?
It was a… weird feeling having more money than I knew what to do with, since I had grown up having to hustle hard for what little I got. It might be nice to… What is the saying? Pay it something…
I was just about to ask the others when Shade’s head abruptly snapped to the side, catching us off guard. “What’s u—?” I started to ask only to be interrupted by the roar of a gun tearing through the air. I jerked to the side purely on reflex, not that it would have done me any good, since I could already feel the bullet hovering at a standstill by my right shoulder. The fuck…?!
We weren’t in an unpopulated area, and the people on the street below us began to scream and flee. “Down!” Labyrinth yelled, and as I hurried to move the three of us out of the line of fire, something hit my back hard.
My concentration slipped, and for a brief moment, we were all falling. I tried to quickly reassert my control over my orbs only for several objects to hit me all over, including one directly on the back of my head. Smoke was suddenly everywhere, and I couldn’t see where Labyrinth or Shade were. I was tired already from a poor night’s sleep, and the blow to my head had disoriented me enough that I was struggling to marshal myself again. I had to at least try and catch them. Blinded by the smoke, I had no way of knowing if my orbs were actually still around them or had been knocked away, but I had to to at least try. I grabbed hold of the orbs but felt resistance, and I thankfully had enough presence of mind to recognize the feeling of Shade trying to use my power and released my hold.
Thank fuck we practiced that, I thought as she let go of the the plating in my costume, and I caught myself instead. I couldn’t recall how close we had been to a roof, and with everything that had happened, I couldn’t tell which direction the roofs would have been in anyway. Not wanting to crash at speed into a hard surface, I shot up out of the smoke cloud to regain my bearings first. As I began to emerge from the cloud, something slammed into my shin and sent pain shooting up my leg. I cried out but stayed the course and fully emerged, only to flinch at the crack of another gunshot. Another bullet was on my side in an instant, but thankfully my power stopped it an inch before it could wreak havoc on my insides.
I had no idea whether my power was going to continue saving my ass—we had never shot actual, life-threatening guns at me in training—and that meant I couldn’t rely on it. I hastily checked where the bullet was pointing, and therefore where it had come from, and dove backwards to put the smoke between myself and the shooter. With my field of view finally clear of obstruction, I reoriented myself and made a beeline for the street below at the fastest speed I could muster, with the intent of putting a building between the shooter and me. No more gunshots rang out, but I heard something whistling through the air after me instead. I leveled out to parallel with the street as quickly as my physics-bound body could tolerate and twisted to the side when the whistling sound rapidly sped up. A huge chunk of concrete blazed through the space I had been occupying a mere second earlier, and I paled at what a close call that had been.
There was another gunshot, but this time there was no bullet on me. Oh fuck. The concrete swung back at me again, and I hurried to dodge while tapping my ear. “Are you two okay?”
“Yeah, ‘m fine,” Shade said from wherever she was. “Bastards are trying to snipe me now. Trying to get over there, but they caught on.”
“Safe,” came Labyrinth’s quieter reply as I danced around the concrete once more only for it to be joined by two more just like it. “Rooftop heater.”
“I think this is Rune,” I told them as I pulled my orbs out of my backpack to fill the air and give me an edge. I couldn’t dodge forever, but thanks to my practice with the crew, I was a damn sight better now than I had been when I joined up. With my orbs making movement through the air difficult, I would be in good shape.
The loud crack of yet another shot filled the air, and Shade grunted out, “Fuck that was close! Rune’s the telekinetic toucher person, right? That’s the cape by you. Shooter’s at the edge of my range now, and there are two capes up there.”
Fucking hell, three capes? I had thought this was just Rune trying to get revenge, but having two other capes as backup made this a coordinated move by the Empire. And they had caught us on the back foot with an ambush while we were weary.
With the air now a veritable morass of metal, Rune pulled back her weapons to try and circle around my own swarm. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this, Rune!” I called out as I tried to figure out where she was. I could see some scattered people here and there who had fled for cover when the fight broke out, but there was no sign of the black robe I had once stolen. Switching tactics as I continued to block and dodge, I tried to taunt her out. “This is twice now you’ve jumped me from behind. I’m flattered really. The smoke bombs without metal are new. I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks.”
Wherever Rune was, she didn’t rise to the bait. I was getting nowhere with this, so I sped over to a nearby alley to cut off her line of sight, if not draw her out of hiding. A couple was huddling together by a dumpster halfway down, and they both shrieked in surprise and probably not a little bit of fear as I shot past them. I craned my head to look behind me and saw Rune’s controlled items had tried to follow, but were banging against the walls or swinging at empty air in the hopes of getting lucky. Unfortunately the couple was in the line of fire of one of them, so with a twist of my power, I reshaped the dumpster into a shield around them with a narrow gap between the shield and the wall for them to flee later. While I was distracted, the other two abruptly zeroed in on me, and my efforts to dodge still resulted in glancing blows to legs that pulled a yelp of pain from me.
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I would have thought she had reestablished direct line of sight, but reaching out to the dumpster had made me properly pay attention to the metal in the alley, and I started in surprise when I realized there was a camera discreetly adhered to the wall. Worse yet, there were a myriad of them scattered everywhere in the area, all the same shape, size, and weight. I flexed my power to crush them all as I weaved between strikes from the bat and the sandbag, then fled to the end of the alley before making my way up to just shy of the roof level and peeking over. Rune was nowhere in sight still, but that made sense. She wouldn’t have needed to if she could see everything nearby. This wasn’t just a spur of the moment ambush; this was a planned, coordinated attack, and that made checking back in on the others all the more important.
“Is everyone still okay?”
“Pinned for the moment but okay,” Shade reported back, while Labyrinth simply answered, “Yes.”
I scanned the rooftops for the heating unit Labyrinth had mentioned earlier, but there were too many, and she wasn’t in sight either. “Labs, can’t find you. Give me a sign?” A few moments later a sapling began to grow off to my right out of a unit across the street. Dammit. “Found you, but Rune will probably spot me if I move to you. I’ll have to try and distract her.”
I ducked back down and into a different alley, only moving down towards the street once I had verified nobody was in it this time. I reached the junction quickly and moved up to check around the corner while also checking to make sure more cameras hadn’t gone up somehow, but Rune was still nowhere in sight. Plan B then. A few cars were parallel parked further down the way, and if I lifted them in the air, then I might be able to turn the villain’s attention that way and buy myself time to jet across the street and regroup with Labyrinth. It was a gamble, but if I could get to her, then together we would have a much better chance of fighting off attacks and could plan retrieving Shade and escaping. Fighting the Empire had not been the plan today.
A problem with my distraction plan became clear when I realized there were a couple of people sheltered in place by them. If I moved the cars, then they would be left exposed. There was a sniper in play, and misfires might happen. Hell, they might just take the opportunity to gun down the Hispanic guy I could see from where I was—or any other person of color, for that matter. My mind made up, I started to grab the manholes I could see instead, but I stopped when one of the people behind the cars peeked out then tried to sprint for the closest alley. The sniper fired again, and to my horror, the runner immediately crumpled to the ground with a scream and tumbled for a moment before losing momentum altogether. Plenty of people nearby cried out in alarm, but none of them moved to help the one who had been shot.
Holy fucking shit. I raced out into the street towards the person who had been gunned down and saw a pool of red had already begun to form under them. Oh my god, this is so bad!
The essentials of trauma first aid was something Faultline had drilled into me prior to Providence. Hell, those essentials had been used on me after Providence. Put pressure on the wound… Elevate above the heart… Don’t move the injured unless you absolutely must… I somehow doubted they would help much with a bullet wound from a goddamn sniper rifle though. Once I was closer, I could see it was a white girl around my age who had her hair bundled up in a dark blue knit hat. Her matching jacket was already turning purple from the amount of blood she was losing, and though she was still moaning in pain, she was otherwise not moving.
Nobody else was hiding behind the vehicle she had fled from, so I tugged it over to give us some measure of shielding in case the sniper decided to shoot again, the goddamn psycho. Weren’t the Empire all about protecting white supremacy or whatever? Why had the bastard shot this girl then? She wasn’t in a costume—she was in sweatpants for chrissakes—so surely they didn’t mistake her for one of us?
I started to ask ‘Are you okay?’ only to realize that was a stupid question and tried again. “Where did you get hit? Can you put pressure on the bleeding?”
“Under me,” she said, her voice high and strained as she tried to shift only to immediately settle back into the same position. “Can’t reach.”
Well shit. I was going to have to move her to elevate the injury and get pressure on it. Two out of three will have to do, I thought as I pulled out my phone. I dialed 911, put the phone on speaker, and set it down. “Okay, I’m going to help you roll over. It’s gonna hurt like a motherfucker, sorry…”
“Okay…” she whimpered, and as I laid my hands on her jacket to turn her onto her back, she gripped my arm.
“911, what is your emergency?” my phone projected when an operator picked up.
“There’s a person wo—” I started to answer only to be tugged forward. The girl, who had released my arm, grabbed a hold of my scarf with her bare hands, and when I tried to shove her off, my arm swung back and struck at my eyes instead, shoving my googles into my skin. A moment later, my scarf tugged itself down from my mouth and wrapped so tightly around my throat I was seeing spots.
“Hello, ma’am?” came the voice from the phone. “What is your emergency?”
Goddammit, you’re really going to swing this low, Rune?! I thought—there was nobody else it could be. I hadn’t expected her to play the injured bystander at all. She quickly moved pieces of concrete over the openings for my hip cases and backpack and laid her hands on them each in turn for several long seconds. I tried to force the hip cases open to hit her with some caltrops or some pepper spray, but I couldn’t manage it with the concrete being held in the way.
“Hello, are you still there? What is your emergency?””
She dropped me and the concrete unceremoniously on the ground, and I grunted in pain as my knees struck the sidewalk. My scarf loosened its grip on my throat, but she traded that for reaching out to choke me manually instead while holding my arms down by controlling my bodysuit.
“Oh wow, I’m so sorry,” Rune said apologetically and somewhat breathlessly. She was sweating hard and eying me intently as she slowly tugged a domino mask out of her unstained jacket pocket and slipped it over her eyes. She grimaced, clearly straining, and it wasn’t from trying to choke me, though she was doing unfortunately well with that. “My friend and I… Bit drunk, sorry. Embarrassing for a Sunday afternoon, but we were celebrating. Just realized she dialed you.”
I tried to grab the car next to us and slam her with it, but it resisted. Because of course she had fucking touched it. She did flinch though, and when I tried to do it again, she groaned. Does she have a limit? I was starting to see black at the edge of my vision, and I tried to reach out to my orbs, but it was so hard to focus.
“We’ll have to send you a patrol car by to verify,” the operator continued, entirely unaware I was beginning to black out from a lack of air and trying desperately to get free.
I redoubled my efforts to hit her with the car, and the pinched look on her face and sweating became worse, but she managed to hold on. “Kingston and St. Marshall,” she said, the words all but squeezed out of her throat. “Gonna barf.”
She reached over to grab the phone with her free hand and hurled it down the street, then she abandoned choking me herself in favor of using my scarf again. I felt her control over my hip cases cease as she laid her hand on the sidewalk under herself, and I tried to muster the will to pelt her with something—anything—but I had only managed to get a few out before a chunk of the sidewalk ripped itself and she zoomed up and away from my line of sight.
Was she going to kill me? The unwritten rules said no, but they had already been ignored once today in the early hours of the morning; there was nothing to say it wouldn’t happen again, and that terrified me. I wanted to claw at my throat, tear the scarf apart, but I couldn’t even fucking move my arms to manage that much. Helpless, choking—just waiting to die, my trigger all over again. Even if she didn’t kill me… wouldn’t worse be in store? I would be at the mercy of savages with a thinly layered coat of respectability painted over them, the Teeth with swastikas on top.
Perhaps it was the delirium setting in that made me imagine Kaiser as the Butcher, with bone ornamentation mixed in with his spiky metal armor. It was certainly tricking me into thinking my scarf was loosening… but no, a few seconds later I realized I could breathe again. I thought the bitchsicle might be taunting me, giving me a glimmer of hope before crushing it under her heel, but then I heard Rune herself blurt out from somewhere up and some distance back, “What the fuck?!”
Metal was blossoming all around me, I realized, and for the briefest of moments, I wondered if the conspiracy theories on PHO about second triggers were true. I greedily drank in more air, gasping to get as much of the beautiful substance in me as I could, and it hit me that I knew this metal—or rather, I knew its shape.
The car next to me started to jostle, but I grabbed it and held it down.
“No, fuck you! I fucking had you, you son of a bitch!” Rune screamed in fury, and I pulled myself upright with my power and turned to look at her through a familiar visor. The sound of something hurling through the air reached me, and remembering how she had struggled to control several things earlier, I grabbed all three of the cars near us. She buckled, collapsing to one knee on her makeshift platform, and I managed to rip a door free from the car by me. Just like the trunk had when she’d tried to drown me, ripping a piece of the whole free apparently severed her control, and I slammed it against the piece of concrete that had been aiming for my head out of the air.
I only had a moment of uninterrupted time, but it was all I needed. I unslung the bow from where it laid across my chest while an arrow leapt to my hand, and I nocked it in an instant and sent it flying towards her. She tried to move to the side, but she was hampered from trying to control too much, and I had accelerated my projectile to a blistering pace. She failed to dodge, and it shot clean through her, rocketing out the other side. Like a puppet with its strings cut, the platform under her feet dropped out of the sky, and she tumbled down with it. She should have crashed violently into the ground—she deserved to—but on instinct I moved to catch her, killing her momentum by redirecting it with my own leap forward through the air.
Now that she was no longer in danger of splattering the pavement with her guts—thoughts of ‘Tammicakes’ made my lips twitch minutely—I softened my landing with a quick flex of my power, then I negligently tossed her on the ground. I doubted she could have rallied herself in time to touch my armor, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. I summoned my orbs to me and melted some into a makeshift cage on the ground over her that I pushed into elsewhere. Rune would be going nowhere anytime soon.
I looked up at the top of the building by where Rune had been choking me and smiled at the sight of Labyrinth’s green robe. When I remembered she wouldn’t be able to see that through my helmet, if not the sheer distance between us, I gratefully waved and called out, “Thank you.”
“Happy to,” I heard her say in my ear. It hadn’t been lost in the shuffle? I was impressed yet again by her ability to catch the small details, leaving behind the earpiece while changing the rest of my costume from Meteor’s to Fighter’s. The armor she had crafted for me in the graveyard at Octavia’s command had saved me—an irony that wasn’t lost on me.
Every time I try to forget that bitch, something brings it right back. At this rate, I’ll never get over it...
The fight wasn’t over yet though, as the sound of gunfire a few blocks over reminded me. “Jesus, motherfucker is never gonna go down at this rate,” Shade complained into our comms. “If you two are done over there, I could really use some help with getting Othala out of the picture.”
“Othala?” I asked, feeling strangely numb now that Rune was battered and beaten at my feet. I knew that name from somewhere, but I couldn’t recall where I had heard it. An Empire cape, that much was obvious, but… “Power?”
Most people might not have been able to decipher my short, clipped statements, but Shade seemed to understand well enough. We all got enough practice with Labyrinth, after all. “Othala grants powers to people she touches. Makes you invincible, heals you, eat coal and shit fire—whatever.”
That startled a brief laugh out of me, and I was grateful for it. My heart was thundering from all the adrenaline pulsing through me, and my lungs and throat still burned from being choked for what felt like ages. And the helplessness... Fuck, a laugh was very welcome. “The other?” I pressed her as I flew up to get Labyrinth, now that Shade had managed to shake me out of the funk that had started to take hold.
“Sucks skills outta people in his range. Permanently, if he does it long enough. Name’s Victor, but you probably know him as one of the sons of bitches who made me trigger.”
Labyrinth’s full-face mask was designed with protection in mind, not expressing emotion, but despite everything but her eyes being obscured, I could still read her shock as clear as day. The look on my face probably wasn’t much different. There was only one way I could possibly respond to my friend announcing the presence of a cape who had helped force her to kill her own brother.
“Shit.”
And just to add insult to injury, that announcement was punctuated by the arrival of three regrettably familiar costumes below us. “Labyrinth, unknown parahuman—stand down!” Battery barked as she skidded to a halt and the glow of the circuitry lining her costume began to grow. Blurs of red and of green and bronze arrived right on her heels—Assault and Boudicca. “Stop and surrender yourself to PRT custody. Now!”
I looked to Labyrinth once again, and in two words perfectly encapsulated our situation and all its varied, intricate minutia. “Double shit.”