3.28

A heavy thoom echoes down the street, plumes of dust kicking up from the impact as G telekinetically hurls chunks of rubble vaguely in my direction. Thankfully, ducking into a nearby building, it doesn’t take long to find a busted wall I can dart through to avoid her sight.

Very important, by the way. If the numerous lacerations, shattered leg, missing fingers, and probable concussion have taught me anything, it’s that she needs line-of-sight.

And that Highlander is a bastard.

“Try the building on the left, pipsqueak,” his voice comes through only a little muffled, and a moment later I’m diving behind cover as the far wall explodes into broken glass and shrapnel. How is he doing this? Is he just calling out random directions, and his power’s directing him? Is it conscious, or is his power something that’s always active?

I stagger to my feet and sprint down a hallway, ducking out into an alley and immediately dropping into a roll at the glint of sun against steel ahead of me.

A crack, shrapnel clattering against my side, and I’m already on my feet sprinting towards the direction of this latest gunshot —

In time to watch Highlander pull back and start making distance. He’s not fast, but I don’t exactly have time to sit around and wait for G — currently stumbling into view opposite me — to turn me into a fine red mist.

It’s infuriating. I had him.

I duck around the corner, just as G lifts an arm, and I only manage to get most of me out of sight by the time her power asserts itself. There’s a guttural crunch, a hot flash of pain, and my lower left leg is inoperable. I glance back — below the knee, the entire thing is a twisted, broken mass of flesh.

I scowl. I don’t have time for this.

I dip into my power, burn the remaining vestigial flesh to accelerate the change I’m making, and sharpen the bones in my foot into a slightly curved spear of hardened cartilage. My next step hits concrete with a clack, and it takes me a couple seconds to adjust.

Temporary pegleg. No big deal. Really only one direction I need to be going right now, anyway.

I sprint down the alleyway, sticking close to the walls as the ping of bullets against stray metal echoes around me, making a beeline back towards Cook’s warehouse.

The separate safehouse Chloe went too isn’t far. I just need to get back out onto the main road, and from there I should be able to make it in like, five minutes if I book it.

Which I will be, if I want to keep my remaining limbs. I pick up the pace, occasionally dipping into my power in order to keep up efficiency and ensure my makeshift leg is still working as intended.

I can hear the enraged shouting and snarky comments coming up behind me. Maybe if I’m lucky they’ll be too busy arguing to come looking once I break line-of-sight.

A heavy rumble, and rubble and loose objects start to shiver in mid-air. Reflexively, I duck, activate a pressure booster in my leg — the one I hadn’t used earlier — and propel myself through the double doors leading back into Cook’s wider warehouse area. Battered henchmen scramble to either run away or find their weapons, tripping over themselves in their haste.

A number of them don’t react. Because they are dead.

Before any of them really become a problem, the concrete wall behind me explodes. Shrapnel tears through my exposed back, shearing flesh and muscle, destabilizing the work I’d put into remaining functional. Idly I note the stray crates, trash cans, alleyway odds and ends sailing past me — G must’ve decided to just throw everything.

Cool to know she can affect that many different objects at once. Real cool. I dip into my power, preparing to seal over the wounds and continue — the shards of concrete and warped metal are likely to expensive to efficiently break down, so it’d be better to just leave them — when I find myself metaphorically screeching to a halt.

I begin to reach for spare matter to burn, hoping to accelerate my healing, and find it’s not there. Or, rather, it is, but all of it is already in-use. I won’t be able to flee effectively without muscles, or a stable skeletal structure.

I’m… out of material.

Movement, from the corner of my eye, and a startlingly long piece of rebar heaves itself into motion, spinning wildly and catching me around my midsection.

The impact only just barely doesn’t shear me in half. I’m not entirely sure the frantic hardening of my spine helped with that.

I tumble across the ground, haphazardly transitioning into a deep crouch as my boots scrape concrete and my skin is scraped from my hands.

I stagger to my feet, my limbs feeling oddly light and the pseudo-hydraulics under my skin hissing wildly. I’m sure multiple are punctured.

Two figures, again, stroll through the hole in the wall. I can’t bring myself to make them out.

I need material. I take an unsteady step.

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My boot brushes up against a corpse.

I manage to bite down a bitter laugh at the thought that arises. It’s not something I ever thought I’d have to resort to. For the amount of times I find myself being ground into the dirt, you’d think I’d have ditched the superiority complex by now.

Still, the thought galls me. The… point of all of this is to make things better, right? What kind of good person would even think of something like this?

I snort. I’m not about to delude myself, here. Everyone and their mother complains about the gangs, and it’s not like removing them is some revolutionary idea. I’m the instrument here, not the conductor. The idea isn’t mine, it’s just something I’ve adopted.

I’m not a good person, but I don’t need to be to realize the ideas of people who are.

I reach down, forcing my body past the instinctive hesitation, and grasp the corpse by its neck.

“Sorry, buddy,” I mutter, hauling it upwards with straining, nutrient-deprived muscles, and open my second mouth.

I try not to pay too much attention. It’s not difficult to dissociate, with my power active and my focus centered on breaking down foreign matter and preventing blood loss.

Sealing external wounds, retaining structural stability. I take care to make sure the pressure boosters are all active, as well. I have a feeling I will need them.

“Ugh, gross!” G’s exclamation draws me from my semi-trance. Lucky thing, too. Guess I should be glad both of them are so prone to banter.

I grin, because if I don’t I think I will puke. “You try regrowing three limbs in as many minutes. Takes a lot of calories.”

G’s face, now that I’m paying attention, just twists further. “Ugh,” she grunts, raising her hand. Idly, I note her ashen skin and stained red lower face. Someone should get her a napkin or something, her power seems to take some sort of toll on her.

I activate a pressure booster anyway, even just the couple of minutes of running around enough to ingrain the reflex into my Ship of Theseus-style bones. I drop into a forward crouch, slam a palm into the ground, and fire myself upward, extending my secondary limbs to force my momentum into a slight twirl. It’s not exactly graceful, but the force is enough to propel me temporarily out of line-of-sight. I graze the steel beams criss-crossing the ceiling, reach out, catch one in a hand that I use to pivot off to the side, slamming into the concrete behind a half-destroyed crate and sprinting for the entrance.

“Wh — hey!” Small footsteps, from a ways behind — only one pair. I round a corner, and a bullet immediately whizzes past my head.

My practiced grin abruptly drops into a snarl at the sight of Highlander, somehow managing to be in the worst possible position for me yet again.

“How are you doing that?!” I growl, not breaking my stride as another bullet flies past me, and I take a couple long strides to close the distance.

The man just gives me a winning smile. “It’s all luck, baby.”

I’m thinking of revising my guess at his power out of spite. This is way too targeted.

I move to engage — and again, he moves away. He’s flighty, not physically imposing, and seems to have an almost perfect sense of range and risk calculation. It’s infuriating.

Thankfully, though, it means he’s not a very good sentry. His distance means I have a clear shot to the door.

I take it. The pressure boosters in my legs finally refilling means My leap carries me a good distance out into the street and down the road even before G manages to catch up. Two minutes of winding alleyways, and I’m already sure I’ve lost them.

But — it’s not over yet. I grit my teeth and focus, pushing against the way my draining adrenaline weighs heavily at my limbs, and propel myself through the docks, firing a pressure booster every minute, altering the mechanism on the fly, forming pressurized gas particles in real-time from my calorie stores.

It’s been about seven minutes since I watched G make that call. Dread begins to pool in my gut. I can’t seem to stop my mind from racing.

Chloe’s fine. Surely. She’s strong, competent, practically unshakable. Assuming she’s in mortal peril feels almost insulting.

I’d wanted to send someone with her, but we don’t have the manpower, and she’d given me a glare when I’d even mentioned it offhandedly.

Subconsciously, I pick up the pace. Gray brick buildings, warehouses, slivers of open dock and salty sea air — and finally, there, towards the end of the docks area — the admin building. I pivot, boots slamming into concrete, sprinting around back towards where I estimate the raid would finish. Pressure booster firing, launching me towards the opposite wall, firing again —

I land in the center of a mid-size courtyard out back, cracking ground and automatically taking in the chaos around me.

Crush, his men, some of them downed, scattered rebar, broken contraptions that ping as Chloe’s work, Kickback up front, Jumpcut flanking —

My train of thought halts.

Chloe is missing an arm.

Ice fills my chest, and my mind floods with an endless refrain of ‘oh fuck’ and ‘please no not again’ and —

‘I was almost too late’.

It’s barely a second too long before I shake myself out of it — I might still be too late if I dont’ get my ass into gear.

Crush had been advancing from the opposite side of the courtyard while Kickback seems to be — if slightly reluctantly? — taking Chloe head-on, while the grunts keep their distance.

She’s close, but she has her back to me.

That’s for the better. I’m out of pressure boosters in my legs, so I dip into my newly-acquired stores in order to force a refill and dash towards her, not bothering with a bone needle and instead planting a secondary arm a couple inches into her back.

Two seconds. Seal external wounds, replenish blood supply, restabilize fractured shoulder. A significant amount of my own biomass is lost.

Chloe chokes out a gasp, and there’s no time to reassure her — not that I’m any good at that. I clamp a hand on her shoulder and shove her down, out of the way of Kickback’s targeted jab, snag a net claymore from her belt, and detonate it in his face.

He sprawls, Jumpcut jolts into action, Crush reaches down to prepare a ranged attack, and around him his men start to brace themselves —

I jump, twist, drag Chloe with me as I turn my back to the approaching shrapnel, fire another hastily refilled pressure booster, and dash past Jumpcut almost before he has time to flicker out of the way. My heart pounds in my ears in time with my boots on the pavement, even as I start to make distance between me and my pursuers.

Through the pulse of blood and haze of combat, a number of things make themselves clear to me.

This was a disaster.

This cannot happen again.

I really need to crack open Vincent’s notebook.