There’s an eagerness in Ember’s walk as she strides down the stairs and ramps to the wharf, something that was lacking as she took me across the city. She wasn’t scared, but she was pretending she was. She was controlling her reactions, making herself beneath the notice of the people out on the streets. Now that we’re out of the city, on the other side of the wall, she’s letting the real her out a little.
The marina’s network of long jetties is kept separate from the rest of the city by a small gateway attached to a security office. There’s a man in there, young and bored, his face bathed in the white glow of his telephone and with the sound of some discordant mess that might be music coming from his radio. He’s clearly a guard, but his uniform isn’t the same as Ember’s people in the Red-Light district.
He doesn’t even look up as Ember steps past him and opens the gate, typing in a short sequence on some metal numbers to open the lock. She doesn’t acknowledge him, either, instead solely focused on the rows of pristine white boats on either side of the jetty. Eventually, and seemingly at random, she stops at an absolute monster of a boat that looks about forty feet long.
She reaches out to pat its side, stroking it for a moment like it’s a fine horse, before unlocking a chain around the mooring rope and tossing both it and the chain onto the front of the boat. From my position inside her coat, I feel her hand brushing into her pocket as she fishes out a pair of keys and starts the boat; a throaty and powerful engine thrumming to life.
“I’m going to be perfectly honest with you,” Ember begins as she leans over the controls, idly resting her hand on a metal lever, “I could have taken you out in the car and shown you everything you need to see, but then I wouldn’t get a chance to show off my yacht.”
She pushes a lever forward, and we start to move through the lanes of the marina, past a wall of heaped stones and out into the open water. The water glows yellow with the light of the city, fading a few dozen yards out into an inky blackness. Flashing green buoys break apart the darkness, two lanes marking out a long channel through the treacherous waters, while particular hazards are marked by red beacons of their own.
Once we’re clear of the city lights, she slows the engine and speaks.
“You can come out now, if you want. People won’t be able to see you this far out.”
I pounce out of the hood of her jacket, perching on all fours at the very front and looking back at the glowing city with beady eyes. Ember smiles at me as she sends the boat lurching forwards, almost skimming across the water’s surface. The hood of Ember’s jacket falls back, flapping in the breeze behind her, but she doesn’t seem to care. She’s lost in the moment, her teeth flashing like a beacon in the darkness as her hair whips behind her head. She pushes the lever further, and the boat moves even faster.
“I should buy a cloak!” She shouts, so I can hear her over rushing water and the throaty roar of the engine. “One with a really deep hood so you can see out of it! I could throw it at people and you could jump out and surprise them!”
I nod enthusiastically, though I’m not really thinking about how it’d help in a fight. I don’t like it when strangers see me. I don’t like their stares, or… the way they stare. If Ember’s costume had a few more places to hide, I could keep out of sight for as long as I wanted. I smile, as Ember makes the boat go even faster.
Ember ignores the lanes of shimmering green lights, ducking and weaving through the open water without fear of our small craft hitting anything beneath the waves. A truly immense ship is travelling down the lane, heading opposite us. It’s a metal behemoth, larger than every building outside the gleaming spires in the city centre. Its flanks are slabs of solid metal, topped by a towering assortment of identical metal boxes. We push past it, and I turn to look at its flat-sided back. A name has been painted there, faded white letters flecked red with rust. Taika Maru.
We hit its wake, sending the front of the boat lurching upwards before plunging down and hitting the surface of the water, dousing us both with sea-spray that fills my open mouth with the taste of salt and whips Ember’s hair back and forth in sodden strands that stick to her face. She laughs as she brushes her hair away from her eyes, pushing the boat to go even faster. I leap down onto the deck, slipping into the shadows for a moment to shake off the water.
“Pretty fun, right?” She shouts, grinning from ear to ear. “I grew up in Vegas, about as far from water as it’s possible to get, so this is basically heaven as far as I’m concerned!”
Ember looks like she’s having the time of her life, and I want to share in her joy. So I prop my forelimbs up next to the controls and pull myself up so I’m as close to standing on two legs as I can get. If I were standing up completely straight, I’d be as tall as she is. As it stands, she’s got a good foot and a half on me.
Still, it’s enough for me to see through the boat’s windscreen, to watch as we push through the inky-black water. The sight of those mirky depths plants an idea in my head, so I pounce up onto the side of the boat and leap off into the water, merging with the shadows the moment I hit the surface.
I hear a shocked shout from Ember, before it turns into a full-bellied laugh as I start to leap out of the water like a salmon swimming upstream, easily keeping pace with the boat. I catch a brief flash of a fierce grin on Ember’s face before she pushes the handle all the way forwards and the boat speeds ahead.
I chase her, the two of us dancing through the waves. Each time I submerge myself in the depths, merging with the darkness, I catch glimpses of the debris that litters the floor of the channel. Wrecked cars, crashed planes, sunken ships and great chunks of concrete barriers litter the sea floor, the largest obstructions marked above the water by flashing red buoys. It’s a morbid sight, but I’m too caught up in the mood to care.
When Ember’s boat swings to a stop just ahead of me, the propellers shifting their flow to counter her movement, I leap, bone dry, back onto the deck. Immediately, Ember’s by my side, whooping and cheering as she pulls me back against the side of the boat, one arm wrapped over my shoulders in a tight hug. I match her cheers and laughter with chirps, whistles and shrieks of my own until we’re both sitting there with our backs against the side, laughing like lunatics.
It feels nice, comfortable… intimate in a way I never was with Mike. I feel like we understand each other, like I can trust her to keep me safe in this strange and confusing world. She’s like… she’s like an older sister, who gets what I’m going through because she’s been through it herself. She hasn’t, of course, but she knows this world, this city. Knows it like the back of her hand.
She knows how to survive it, and how to live in it. All the little cultural things that come from having powers, all the strange and confusing things in this city that everyone else finds so normal, that everyone else takes for granted. Right now, I feel safer than I ever have before, but it’s more than that. I feel accepted.
It’s why, when the boat drifts around so we’re looking at a long stretch of wall running along the coast and she flinches, I get worried. She didn’t bring me out here to have fun. She brought me here to teach me, and maybe to warn me.
The wall looks like it started life as one of the sea walls the city has further south, but it’s clearly been patched up in places by much thinner walls. The whole thing is ringed by blinding floodlights that fill the air above them with a harsh white glow, but they’re not pointing out towards the water. They’re pointing inwards, a whole section of the city sealed off and kept perfectly illuminated.
Ember lets out a long, drawn out, sigh. Her shoulders slump and she takes her arm away from the hug, standing up and staring out at the patch of incandescent light. I get up and move over her, putting her in-between me and that sterile, dead glow.
“The Triad are the new threat,” she begins. “They’re hitting hard and fast. They’re flashy, dramatic, in every paper and on every local news broadcast. That is the old threat. They call it the Hive. It’s slow, quiet most of the time, and so old it’s become part of the scenery.”
She shakes her head, an angry scowl showing on her face.
“It was scary enough when it first showed up. Before I moved here, of course, but I think I remember seeing it on the news, way back when. But the threat stayed long enough that the news moved on. The people moved on, too. The problem never went away, but dealing with it became… routine. It’s just human nature, I guess. It exists, but there’s nothing we can do about that. So just put your hood up and press on, never mind the storm. It’s the only choice we have.”
She turns away from the sight, sitting on the edge of the boat to look at me. I don’t look back. I’m transfixed by the light, unable to look away. Like a deer, frozen in front of a hunter.
“That right there is the Lynnwood Exclusion Zone. They used to call it a Quarantine Zone, till they realised it wasn’t quarantining shit. Oh, the Hive stays in there, but that’s because it wants to. Every now and then it’ll send out groups of drones and augmented cyborgs, to snatch raw materials for whatever fucking reason. People too… sometimes.”
The machine men. Those soulless creatures I saw fighting the Cape in the armoured suit.
“You know what the real kicker is?” Ember smiles, but it’s a bitter thing. “We’re pretty sure he’s one of ours.”
I blink in shock, my gaze snapping away from the light to look at Ember with a desperate, pleading question I can’t ask. I know the Elite aren’t… completely nice. I’ve seen Jaeger and Wovoka, but those things… They’re so much worse.
“There was this Cape, back in ninety-nine. He was a Tinker who specialised in virtual reality interfaces, or something like that. He called himself Game Master, tried to set up an arcade in Lynnwood where people could immerse themselves in other worlds, live out their fantasies. Nothing explicit, mind you. He wasn’t that sort of guy. The Elite reached out to him, offered to handle the legalities of it all in exchange for a cut of a profit. Pretty standard practice. There’s about half a dozen Parahuman businesses in Seattle using our support.”
She stretches out a finger, dragging it along the coast either side of the light. It’s clear that an enormous sea wall used to run along the whole thing, like it does to the south, but it’s broken and shattered, with great chunks of concrete taller than some buildings littering the shore.
“Then Leviathan hit in oh-three, and his arcade was caught up in the worst of it. He reached out to the Elite for support, but they were stretched to breaking point. They told him to abandon his arcade and they’d get him out of the city, but he refused. Things got worse, and he went dark. Then, about a month later, these things start coming out of Lynnwood. People with crude circuitry controlling their bodies, and drones run by the brains of stray pets.”
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Ember turns away from the light, a sad smile on her face.
“I’m told things were pretty bad. Half of the city was still underwater, about a hundred thousand people had suddenly been turned into homeless refugees and, right in the middle of all that chaos, the Hive paints the streets red with blood. The worst part is that all of it could have been avoided if he’d just swallowed his pride and evacuated.”
The smile falls as she leans forwards and looks me right in the eye.
“The number one killer for Parahumans is arrogance. You’re powerful, sure, but be smart about it. You can’t fight the world on your own. If you’re ever stuck in a hopeless situation, don’t try and fight it. Just run, as far and as fast as you can.”
I nod. I don’t even have to think about it. It’s been my first instinct for as long as I can remember: to duck into the shadows at the first sign of trouble, to avoid being seen whenever possible, to strike from ambush, if I need to strike at all. It comes naturally to me.
Ember stands up, nodding seriously at me and getting back behind the wheel.
“Good. You’re my responsibility, after all. The last thing I need or want is you getting hurt because you were too stubborn to run. I’d blame myself, and that’s not very healthy.”
So, she does care. There’s not much I can do to show that it’s mutual, except using my forelimbs to prop myself up next to her so that we’re both looking out over the console. I’m not fully upright, so she’s still got a good foot or two of height on me, but I’m standing as straight as my joints allow. I know I won’t ever be able to walk on two legs, but that’s okay. Neither of us are normal, I’m just a little more obvious about it.
I can’t help but let out a relieved sigh as Ember turns us away from the light, heading further away from the city, out along the straits. Gradually, the lights on the land either side of us start to drop off until there’s just the guiding lights of the buoys to separate the water from the land.
Ember’s fallen strangely silent, almost contemplative, as we get further and further from the city. We start to pass more ancient debris, huge concrete blocks that’ve been uprooted and tossed back by some force so immense I can’t even begin to imagine it. A force strong enough to shatter a city so thoroughly that the fractures are still there seven years after the event.
Ahead of us, a wall of blocky stone stretches between two narrow spurs of land, sealing in the waters around the city. Pinpricks of red light run along its balustrade, flashing a repeating pattern no-doubt meant to draw the eyes of approaching ships. As we get closer, it becomes clear that the wall is far from intact. Parts of it are simply missing, the lights strung on a wire between the gap, while others have shrunk or been damaged.
One side of the wall is topped by a tall lighthouse, whose slowly-circling spotlight illuminates clusters of needle-like debris jutting out of the water and a shoreline warped and distorted by Leviathan’s passing. There is only one passage through, a single deliberate gap marked by long rows of green buoys that chart a winding path through the treacherous water.
Ember steers away from the main passage, instead following a winding route along a narrower path to the rightmost side of the wall, where a simple metal staircase clings to the stonework, ending in an empty jetty.
Without saying a word, Ember cuts the engine and leaps onto the jetty, tying her boat to one of the moorings with a length of rope. Once she’s secured a second line, she takes off her raincoat and tosses it into the back of the boat, leaving her in just her costume.
I pounce onto the jetty and fix her with a quizzical look. She’s been disguised since we left, so why stop now?
“A place like this… you don’t hide who you are. It’s about respect. Nightcrawler, what I’m about to show you… it’s important. It’s something you need to see.”
I’m a little anxious as I follow her up the simple metal stairs, up the side of the towering fortification. It’s like a great weight has settled on her shoulders; there’s a solemness to her walk that wasn’t there before. The climb isn’t long, maybe four or five stories up from sea-level, but it feels like it takes an eternity.
At the top of the wall, a section of ground has been deliberately flattened, compensating for the slight tilt of the structure itself. An obelisk stands in the centre of the flat expanse, a perfect needle twelve feet tall. It’s made from some perfectly-black stone that’s been polished to a perfect mirror-shine, enough that I can see six faint pinpricks of yellow as my own eyes stare back at me.
One side of the obelisk catches the red light of one of the emergency beacons, revealing a long list of names carved into the stone, only visible as faint dimples under the light. Slowly, I pace forwards and rest my hand on the side closest to me, the one shrouded in darkness, and feel more names beneath my fingers. Cape names, all of them, with regular names written out next to them. Their secret identities? There must be dozens of them.
“This is a memorial to the sixty-two Parahumans who died holding Leviathan back, built on top of the only reason that Seattle’s still standing. This wall kept Leviathan out for thirteen minutes, as he tried to push tsunami after tsunami into Puget Sound. Long enough for reinforcements to arrive from Vancouver and Portland. Then it broke, and Leviathan swept down towards the city.”
She walks away from the obelisk, towards the side of the wall that faces away from the city, and I follow her. Beneath us, I can see water lapping at the base of the stone, five stories down.
“This wall was made by a Parahuman, back in ninety-eight when people finally realised that Leviathan wasn’t just going to be a one-off thing. She grew this wall in a day, then negotiated a contract to build another wall around the city itself. NEPEA-5 got rushed through Congress the day before she started, and it passed when she was halfway done.”
She sits down with her feet dangling over the precipice, staring out past the channel to the open sea, with only the occasional ship providing the faintest pinpricks of light. I join her, staring not at the ships but at the churning black waters.
“Her contract was declared null and void, and the job was handed off to a whole conglomerate of construction companies. They were over the moon; they’d looked at this incredible power, capable of building a city in a week, and seen only a threat to their business. They’d won, getting control of the contract and charging twenty times as much for it.”
She chuckles.
“In all fairness, they were pretty quick by human standards. Construction was almost done when Leviathan hit, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. Their walls broke in a matter of minutes, breaches forming from Shoreline to Everett, and the city was fucked.”
I look up from the water, shrinking a little at the dark expression on Ember’s face.
“Their fear and their selfishness killed fifty thousand people. That, more than anything, is why the Elite exists. Somebody has to push the envelope, because everyone else is too terrified of change to do anything. And so what if things change? They need to change. The world’s going to shit, everyone knows it, but everyone wants us to try and fix it with one hand tied behind our back. Fuck that.”
She practically spits the words out, before looking around in panic at a faint roaring sound in the distance. In an instant, she’s back on her feet and turning to face the city. I do the same, only to watch what looks like twin stars approaching us at an impossible speed. The roar gets louder and louder, as the twin stars resolve themselves into some sort of rockets attached to a pair of mechanical wings, with the faint silhouette of a man visible beneath them.
The flying man banks upwards as he gets close, reducing the force of his rockets to land neatly on the platform. He’s dressed from head-to-toe in a suit of armour that’s been integrated with the wings, but I can’t make head or tail of it. In addition to the obvious rockets, which cut out the moment he landed, there seem to be small sections of the suit and wings that are glowing blue. Maybe they’re what’s stopping him from collapsing under their weight?
He looks at us like we’re just minor nuisances, the glowing slit of his visor menacing and impersonal.
“Archangel,” Ember says, with all the measured calm I wish I had right now. “Do we have a problem?”
“This isn’t the place for a fight,” he says, in a mechanical-sounding voice. I cringe at the thought that this is one of the heroes, the sort of person who’d lock me up just for the company I keep. I start to seriously debate the merits of throwing myself off the edge and turning to shadow when I hit the water, but, for all that every part of me is screaming at me to run and hide, I don’t want to abandon Ember. I can’t go through that again.
To my surprise, I don’t have to. Archangel ignores us, walking towards the obelisk as his wings fold back into a more compact shape. He rests a hand on the stone, just like I did, and just… stands there, lost in thought a few feet from people who are supposed to be his enemies!
And then, Ember just ignores him, walking back down the stairs. I follow her, tapping her on the shoulder to let her know that I would very much appreciate knowing just what that was all about.
“That was Archangel,” she explains. “He’s a corporate Hero with a team called the Round Table. They’re the most popular team in the city, exclusively recruiting experienced heroes from across the country. If they catch you robbing a grocery store, they’ll try and stop you, but ultimately, we’re too small-time and too good for Seattle for them to consider going after us. You don’t need to worry about them.”
There’s another roar from above our heads as Archangel launches off from the wall and streaks through the sky, heading back towards the city. I watch him go; twin pinpricks of light retreating off into the distance, shrinking and becoming fainter until they’re impossible to distinguish from the distant yellow glow of Seattle.
This is as far as I’ve ever been from the city, but I can still feel its hold on me. I know there’s so much more on the other side of this wall, but that doesn’t matter one bit. As far as I’m concerned, Seattle might as well be the whole world.
Right now, there’s nothing I want more than to go back home and crawl under the covers before sunrise.