The Vault was a dingy little place on the outside, with off-white boards deliberately grey with grime. The front door was hung slightly off-kilter, and the neon sign outside flickered every few seconds. Nilo didn’t even blink as he swung the door open, letting it creak shut behind him and toeing off his shoes to put them in the shoe holder. The inner door was much sturdier, warm oak and brass, and he nodded to the hat drone that opened it as he stepped through.
The room inside was a strange, yet comfortable, combination of sleek modernity and rustic warmth. Various chairs and couches held teens and young adults playing video games or muttering over homework, but Nilo only had eyes for one head of spiked white hair, tinged faintly green by an internal glow.
“Hey, Kusanagi, you free tonight?”
Nilo gave his fellow villain a bright grin as Kusanagi looked up. Kusanagi, for his part, rolled his glowing green eyes, setting aside his phone and lounging back on the couch he was sitting on. “I suppose I can make myself free. Why?”
“Well, word on the street is that we’ve got ourselves a pair of out-of-town villains holed up in the supposedly about-to-be-demolished old printing plant.” Nilo frowned at his phone, searching through the information he’d been sent for the highlights. “Sounds like a lovely mixture of genetic manipulation and tech. Hyun Ki themselves isn’t available for backup tonight but they’re indicating that if we don’t take care of this soon, we might have to get,” Nilo shuddered dramatically, “actual heroes involved.”
“And we can’t have that.” Kusanagi tilted his head. “I do have to ask though—why me? Genetic manipulation is not my area of expertise, and it’s not as if we’re wanting for ways to shut down tech that even a brain-dead monkey could use.”
Nilo paused. When he spoke again, his voice was cold, even as he tried to keep it light. “Our new friends have an order list for new genetic monstrosities, and at the top are ones derived from Redshift, Quantum Break, and Timeskip.”
Kusanagi’s eyes flashed red. “Oh, so they think it’s a good idea to touch my family?” Nilo blinked, and Kusanagi was on his feet, teeth bared in a poor excuse for a smile. “Well, that won’t do at all; Machina has a reputation to uphold.” Nilo blinked again, and Kusanagi was at the door, dying nanomachines glittering in the air between them as they sank to the floor in a ghost of Kusanagi’s form. “I’ll meet you there at seven. Don’t be late.”
***
The sun was just setting as a hat drone deposited Coldsnap on the empty roof of the old office building across from the paper factory. The dying light painted the facade a warmer red than its dusty, faded brick truly was and reflected off of the few remaining glass shards in the windows in shades of yellow and orange too bright to look at. Coldsnap sighed as he waved the hat goodbye and tugged his helmet on. “Kinda sucks they’re tearing it down,” he muttered to himself. “It’s a cool old building.”
“And what, precisely, do you propose this mysterious ‘they’ do with it?” a soft voice asked in his ear with just the barest hint of mechanical buzz.
The only thing that kept Coldsnap from plummeting off of the roof was Machina’s hand hooked into one of the kevlar-and-plastic panels that made up his actual combat suit. Coldsnap let himself be hauled back, then aimed a swat that the cackling madman he called a friend just let phase through his head. “You are a grade A asshole. Please tell me I didn’t breathe any of you in!”
Machina rolled his eyes, which were still scarlet and now pulsing in time with the circuits that decorated his facsimile of a body suit. “I don’t let people breathe me in.” A sharp grin split his face, and he jerked his head at the plant. “I was shutting down cameras and checking their systems.” He waggled his eyebrows in a way that no human could. “They have a sprinkler system.”
Coldsnap snorted. “Okay, you’re forgiven.” He got to his feet, dusting his suit off, then stepped over to the edge of the building. There was a faint buzz behind him, and a second later, Machina was on the ground, smirking up at him. Coldsnap rolled his eyes, then scrambled down the fire escape after him.
They sauntered up to the building—or, rather, Coldsnap sauntered, while Machina gave up all pretense of human movement and glided beside him. A small swirl of nanomachines split off from one of Machina’s hands and sank into Coldsnap’s helmet, and the blueprints for the building appeared on his HUD in a translucent haze of red. Coldsnap squinted at them, then cut Machina a sideways glance. “So, what’s your plan?”
“For once, I think straightforward is our best choice.” Machina spread his arms, whirling to glide backwards so he could face Coldsnap. “You go in big, get their attention, and I give you backup while I bring down the computers. Simple, effective, and hopefully it will keep us in character.”
“And if it doesn’t, hopefully Silvertongue won’t ream us out too much.” Coldsnap leaned against the wall next to the door. At first glance, it looked like he could break the simple wood with an easy kick, but a closer look revealed metal glinting at the edges of the door, and a well-concealed keypad hidden in some sort of electrical monitor box. It was a decent job at hiding a lair, but not quite up to par for someone trained by Pain Management.
Machina’s hands hovered over the box, streams of nanomachines forming a red haze between his palms and the electronics within. “Frankly, I’m not too worried. Silvertongue knows he can’t control us, and Pain Management will be impressed.” There was a beep and a click, and the door slid open, revealing a well-lit, sterile-white hallway behind it. Machina leaned back slightly, and as Coldsnap watched, his hands began to slowly dissolve. “Ready?”
Coldsnap grinned behind the glass of his helmet and dropped into a sprinter’s crouch. “Set.”
Machina rolled his eyes, then vanished into a cloud of nanomachines that quickly dispersed into every piece of electronics Coldsnap could see. Silence reigned for a moment, broken only by the whispering of a trashbag bouncing on the wind like an urban tumbleweed.
Then the lights in the hallway went from white to red, and a soft waltz began to play over the speakers inside. The sprinklers erupted in a deluge of questionably-clean water, and Machina’s voice purred in his ear, “Go.”
Coldsnap shot forward. Before him, the water froze in an ever-expanding wave, and he tucked himself into an aerodynamic arch and skated forward over it, grinning like the madman he also was. “Swan Lake? Really? You had to go with Swan Lake?”
“It’s one of your favorites, and it’s perfectly unbefitting violence.” Machina’s voice was as even as if they were walking down the street. “Speaking of, they’ve let slip some of their creations. Sixty feet out.”
Coldsnap waved a hand, and some of the falling water coalesced into several marble-sized orbs. “Oh, good. I was worried they wouldn’t have noticed us.”
The first two monstrosities burst out of hidden panels right in front of Coldsnap—huge, vaguely doglike creations covered in bristling spikes that dripped with something oily and green. Coldsnap leapt as they snapped at him, water droplets freezing into tiny prisms as he arced through the air, then landed lightly and spun so he could send two of his orbs through their skulls while they wondered where their prey had gone.
“I’m not actually convinced they have noticed us,” Machina drawled. “I know we’ve technically gone domestic, but I thought we’d rate higher than a few mutated dogs.”
“What about a mutated fire-breathing snake?” Coldsnap ducked as said snake tried to melt his helmet to his face. His ice orbs sublimated into steam with the rest of the falling water around him, then coalesced into inch-long needles that skewered the snake and left it twitching on the ground. “I mean, I am an ice user, so—”
“You took that thing out in five point three seven seconds. No, it does not count. Cat.”
“Cat?”
Something that resembled a cat with tentacles slammed into his visor, clinging to his helmet with its suckers. With a cry of confused disgust, Coldsnap yanked the tentacat off of his head and flung it at the wall. It stuck there with a furious hiss, and Coldsnap prepared for it to spit acid or fling spines.
It started crawling down the wall. As it reached the water ponding on the floor, it put out one tentative tentacle, then hissed again and pulled the tentacle back with a wet slap.
Coldsnap blinked. “Uhhhh...so are you going to attack me or not?”
The tentacat meowed plaintively at him and crawled back up the wall until it was at head height. Two of the cat’s tentacles reached out to him, wiggling slightly, and it blinked at him with wide, frankly adorable eyes.
“I’m going to take that as a no?” Coldsnap stepped forward and gently pulled the tentacat off the wall to set it on his shoulder. It butted against his helmet, and he scratched behind its ears, then smiled a bit as it purred. “I’m keeping the tentacat, Machina.”
There was no response.
Coldsnap frowned uneasily. “Machina?”
There was nothing but the soft waltz and the falling water.
“Damn it. Coldsnap to Machina, do you copy?”
“Copy,” Machina finally responded in a flatly mechanical voice that sent a shiver through Coldsnap’s body. “I need you on the third level. Sending path now; all non-friendly non-recoverable monstrosities neutralized. Supervillains still unlocated.”
Coldsnap slowly started skating again. “What did you find?”
“What they wanted with my family’s DNA.” There was a soft crackle of static, the sound of Machina imitating a steadying breath. “Just...get down here.”
And with that terse order, Machina closed the line.
Coldsnap skated in silence, following the small map that Machina had made to guide him. Occasionally, he passed the bodies of various monstrosities, and after the first ones made the tentacat hiss and spit, he was careful to cover the poor thing’s eyes whenever he saw a new one.
(He couldn’t blame it. The bodies looked perfectly fine. No sign of struggle, no sign of illness. They had just dropped where they stood, leaving eerily still corpses behind like hyperrealistic statues.)
The winding path took him down two flights of stairs and dead-ended at a thick steel door labeled “Lab 1.” A fisheye lens stared down at him from above the door, and as he stared up at it, the door slid open. For a moment, he hesitated. Then he slowly stepped into the dry, red-lit room beyond. “Machina?”
“Over here.”
Coldsnap did not scream. He jumped, and a sound escaped from his throat, but it was not a scream–more of a breathless squeak, almost immediately swallowed up by the silence. His head snapped around to the source of the voice, and he let a little whimper of relief free when he saw Machina floating in front of a bank of monitors. “Don’t do that!”
Machina didn’t so much as blink. The only sign he hadn’t just frozen was the slow pulse of red light that ran through his circuits and the dying nanomachines that fell in a golden stream from his hands and feet. Coldsnap eyed the small mounds of electronic ash below his friend, then tentatively asked, “Are you okay?”
Machina vibrated slightly as his voice emanated from his entire being. “Fine. Go check on the kids.”
“The ki—?”
“They’re behind you. I’m searching for the assholes who hurt them.” Machina flicked a glance at Coldsnap without even twitching his head. “And your cat.”
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
Coldsnap blinked, then turned to find two plexiglass cells wedged into the other end of the room. One was blacked out, but through its shattered door Coldsnap could see that it was empty save for a cot with a thin blanket rumpled on the floor. Vague streaks of dust were smeared on the floor that were probably dead nanomachines, marring the red reflection from the doorway. Coldsnap traced the dust as it made its way out onto the concrete and into the other cell, then pulled up short.
The floor was covered in the remains of an IV pole and its contents, torn apart by Machina’s nanomachine blades. Another small cot was in the corner of the cell, the remains of medical restraints lying shredded around its feet, along with a discarded hospital gown. And huddled on the cot were two young adults, one unconscious and clad only in underwear and the other staring straight at him with unbridled terror. Coldsnap noted the end of a tube poking out of one nostril, the blood trailing down one arm despite the bandage wrapped around the elbow, the hollow cheeks and the greasy black hair and the dark circles around the wide green eyes, and felt his stomach drop like he’d missed a stair on a staircase.
Then the conscious man’s eyes clenched shut, and an exact copy of him flickered into being in the doorway, teeth bared despite the way he wavered on bare feet. “I don’t know who you are, but you’d better not come in here.”
“Whoa, hey, easy. I’m not here to hurt you.” Coldsnap carefully reached up and raised the visor on his helmet. “I’m Coldsnap. I’m here with my friend Machina back there, and we want to help you and your friend there.” He glanced at the pair again, and realized with a jolt of alarm that he wasn’t sure if the unconscious one was breathing. “What happened to her?”
The double on the bed opened his eyes and looked down at his friend. His eyes were glazed, barely focused, and when his standing double spoke, his voice shook around the disjointed words. “I—the men who—Bell. Their name is Bellami, and I’m Kostas, and the men who kidnapped us put them in that cell and blacked it out, and they’re dying. They need—light, even a flashlight—please—“
Coldsnap held up his hands. “Whoa, slow down.” The double’s mouth clicked shut, and Coldsnap continued in a gentler voice, “Your name is Kostas?” He nodded. “Your friend’s name is Bellami?” He nodded again. “They need light, and the overhead lights aren’t enough?”
Kostas shook his head, and Coldsnap twisted to look at Machina, who stood rigid beside the computers. When there was no response, he turned back, fishing a tactical flashlight from his belt. “Here. It’s like 90,000 lumens, so hopefully it’ll help. We’ll get you both out of here ASAP.”
Kostas fumbled the flashlight, and Coldsnap helped him close his shaking fingers around it. The tentacat on his shoulder gave a plaintive mew and transferred itself to Kostas, and Coldsnap couldn’t help a chuckle. “Looks like my new friend here wants to help you too.”
Kostas swallowed, staring at him. “Th-thank you. I–I think I have it now.”
“You sure?” When Kostas nodded, Coldsnap let go, and Kostas turned and made his slow way to the cot with movements that implied he’d forgotten how knees and ankles worked. When he got to the cot, he just let the flashlight fall into his double’s hand, flickering out of existence as the tentacat dropped to the cot with a wet thud. Kostas stared at the cat as it curled into Bell’s side and started purring, then looked at the flashlight in his hand.
Then he raised it and turned it on.
For a long moment, Bell didn’t react to the new wash of white light over their pale, freckly body. Then they turned their head, golden hair shimmering despite its oily state, and Coldsnap let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding when he saw the shadows of their breasts slowly rise with their breath. Coldsnap gave Kostas a smile as he looked up, then pulled his visor back down. “Hold tight, okay? We’ll get you out of here as soon as we find the guys who put you down here–”
The sound of a gun going off in a closed room was less a sound and more a full body experience, especially when you were the target. There was an explosion of sound, then an explosion of pain between his shoulderblades, and as he staggered forward, it continued, one shot after another.
On the fifth shot, one of the bullets made it past his damaged body armor.
On the sixth, the bullet hit his helmet, sending him pitching to the floor.
The world had gone black before he hit the ground.
***
Coldsnap woke up to pulsating agony in his back. The only reason he wasn’t sobbing was because he could barely breathe, and he was surprised that he couldn’t hear the no-doubt embarrassing whimpering noises that he had to be making. Then he realized his ears were ringing from the gunshots, and probably blood loss and a concussion as well if the way his head was spinning was any indicator. The fact that he was alive at all to hear it was something he could thank his well-armored helmet for, but right now he was kind of wishing it hadn’t worked so well.
Still, he should probably see who had tried to kill him. He laid on the floor until he could draw a deep enough breath to stop the black spots in front of his eyes from multiplying, then tried to decide which arm hurt less. Trying to move his left arm sent a jagged blade of pain up into his skull and turned the world white and glowing, and he could swear he felt the bullet grinding under his shoulderblade. The right arm hurt less, in that the jagged blade became more of a needle and there was no grinding sensation, but it was at least ten seconds before he was fully upright, swaying slightly as he looked around.
As it turned out, the world hadn’t been white and glowing only because of pain. Someone had turned on the full overhead lights, and he’d apparently shattered his visor in the fall, because he was getting the full force of the bright white lights bouncing off of the white walls and floor. He grimaced and clenched his eyes shut against the pain that spiked in his head. This is going to make finding the guy who shot me kind of hard…
The ringing in his ears became louder. He swallowed, pressing a gloved hand to his mouth in a desperate attempt to keep from vomiting. Then the ringing kicked up another notch, and he realized that it wasn’t just ringing.
Someone was screaming. Someone he knew.
He spun around, panic making him ignore the way the world started to blur and waver, and found a scene right out of a nightmare.
In the middle of the room was a red cloud, writhing as it screeched in the mechanical, buzzing tones of a dying speaker. Sparks jumped through it as a steady rain of dying nanomachines piled on the floor–as Machina died by torturous inches as one of the men in front of him did something to him, hands outstretched and a smirk on his face. Coldsnap figured the man was a technopath, but he didn’t have much time to care, not when the red cloud of Machina’s scattered nanomachines was getting fainter and fainter.
The remains of the IV and the puddle of blood on the floor froze into four thick spikes with a resounding crack. Both men jumped, beginning to turn, and Coldsnap flung out his right hand in a desperate arc.
The spikes pierced their knees and stuck there. Coldsnap twisted his hand as the men fell, freezing the flesh and blood around the spikes as they took over the screaming.
He let the men descend into whimpers that he could only barely hear, panting and trying hard not to give into the fuzz at the edges of his vision. The men tried to free themselves from the ice, but Coldsnap just weakly clenched his fist, freezing the blood that was slowly trickling onto the floor. Behind them, the red cloud was slowly forming into Machina, translucent and still with wide, terrified red eyes in an otherwise blank face.
Machina didn’t do terror. He did snark, and condescension, and anger, but he didn’t do terror.
Suddenly, Coldsnap wasn’t panicking anymore. The pain and dizziness faded into the background, subsumed by the icy, thoughtful rage trickling through his veins like snowmelt as he forced himself to his feet.
“You know,” he said conversationally as he tore off his helmet and let it fall to the ground, “We were going to just come down here and talk.” The water still on his suit began to shed into a cloud of diamond dust that followed him as he sauntered forward. “Villain to villain. Give you two a chance to realize that coming here was a mistake, and to clear out.” He left bloody, frozen footprints behind him as he made his slow way to stand in front of the two men. “It’s a courtesy, really, but we’re fond of playing our roles to the hilt. And you know, I wasn’t too happy about the animal experimentation, but we could have worked something out.”
He stared down at the men in front of him, and he could see the crooked slash of a smile spreading across his face reflected in the man’s eyes. “But there are some things I really can’t forgive. Experimenting on unwilling innocents, for one. Hurting my friends, for another.” He reached down and put two fingers under the chin of the man who had been tormenting Machina, ignoring the agony running down his spine. “Do you know what I do to people who hurt my friends?”
The man’s eyes widened. “Y-you–you c-can’t–you’re r-reformed–”
“Now whatever gave you that idea?” Coldsnap’s smile grew wider. “My name change? My new job?” When the man tried to nod, Coldsnap laughed and patted his cheek. “I’ve gone straight, true. I like having people scream because they like me and want to see more. But that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten what I learned as Frostbite–it just means I like to use it to help people. And sometimes that means getting rid of things like you.”
He ran a gentle thumb over the man’s cheekbone. “I could make it quick. My favorite way to assassinate someone was to freeze the blood in their brain, you know–you’d drop in a second, and not know what happened. But you two nearly killed those kids, you were torturing Machina here, and your friend,” he paused, eyes flicking to the revolver at the other man’s hip, “tried to kill me. Thankfully my boyfriend and datemate make very good armor, but I’m still bleeding, and that’s put me in a bad mood.”
Coldsnap let the man go and stepped back. “He’s all yours, Machina.”
Machina tilted his head, too slowly and smoothly to be anything close to flesh and blood. Then his form condensed and sharpened, quite literally.
The nanomachine blade shot forward, and Coldsnap turned his head slightly to avoid the blood spatter getting in his eyes.
When he turned back, there was something that could have been a human being if you squinted past the blood and played jigsaw in your head. Coldsnap looked at Machina, who had seemingly given up on maintaining any cohesive form and was flowing back to the computer bank in a sluggish stream, then at the remaining man, who was staring up at him, shock-white and trembling. Coldsnap gave him a smile dragged up from the center of a glacier, then looked up. “Hey, Kostas—“
He cut himself off so fast his teeth sank into his cheek. Kostas was staring at the remains of the man that Machina had killed, trembling and clinging to one of Bell’s hands. As Coldsnap watched, Bell shifted slightly and opened hazy golden eyes. They looked around, lips moving in something Coldsnap couldn’t make out, and Kostas placed a shaking hand over their eyes.
Don’t look, Bell, Coldsnap read from his lips. Kostas looked up and flinched from Coldsnap’s gaze. Please, Bell, just don’t look.
Sludgy self-disgust mixed with the icy rage in Coldsnap’s veins, and he turned back to the man in front of him with bile burning in the back of his throat. “...I’ll let Pain Management deal with you.” He reached out and clenched his right hand to freeze the blood still flowing sluggishly from the man’s knees, ignoring the grating whine of pain that escaped from between the man’s clenched teeth. “Who knows? They might even let you live. Easier to keep scum out when they know what might happen to them otherwise.”
With that, Coldsnap spun on his heel, taking slow breaths that did nothing to combat the urge to cry that was building behind his eyes as he walked over to the computers. “Machina, could you let Pain Management know where we are?” A tear worked its way free, and he scrubbed it away before it could freeze to his skin. “I think we need some damage control here.”
***
The strobing red lights of the ambulances cast dizzying shadows across the parking lot. Nilo leaned against the brick wall of the paper plant, watching the paramedics finish preparing Kostas and Bell for travel. For someone who had apparently been subsisting off of low-quality nasogastric feeding for a couple of weeks, Kostas was stubborn almost to the point of combativeness. Nilo could see a flickering, unsteady double trying to get into the ambulance that Bell was being loaded into, and when Eugen started to approach, Kostas gave him a look bordering on terrified.
“You should be in the car,” Kusanagi said from behind him. Nilo stubbornly stared at the ambulances, and Kusanagi sighed, gliding forward to stand beside him and watch too.
Nilo glanced at him, and let out a quick breath when he saw that Kusanagi was solid once again. “Ties bring you a new set of nanomachines?”
“Yes. Also, you’re deflecting.” Kusanagi raised an eyebrow. “You have a healing factor, sure. You still need to go to, if not the hospital, at least to a doctor.”
Nilo smiled slightly. “Thanks for getting the bullet out before I healed, by the way.” The smile fell, and he went back to watching the ambulance. “I’ll get in soon. I just…”
“You’re self flagellating.”
Nilo watched as Kostas hesitantly nodded to Eugen. Eugen crouched beside him and began to murmur in his ear, and the flickering double vanished as Kostas began to relax. “...That’s my fault. He doesn’t trust us because of me.”
“If I recall, I was the one who disincorporated that technopath.” Nilo saw Kusanagi shrug out of the corner out of his eye. “I will say that it was unfortunate that the kid saw, but if it was anyone’s fault, it was mine.”
“Was it?” Nilo clenched his hands into fists to hide his trembling fingers. “You saw the way they looked at us, Kusanagi. They weren’t just scared of you.”
Kusanagi gave him a narrow-eyed look. “Nilo, you’ve botched performances and scared people before. You’ve also killed to protect people before, and scared people that way. What’s different about this time?”
Nilo stared out at the parking lot. “...The last time an innocent person looked at me like that, I was still under Father’s thumb.” He gave a bitter twist of a smile. “I was still Frostbite.”
He still remembered what it felt like to kill that woman. Her face still featured in his nightmares, slowly icing over as she stared at him in terror.
To this day, he still didn’t know what she’d done to upset Father.
Kusanagi gave a frustrated sigh and stepped in front of Nilo to block his view. “Look. I’m probably not the best person for you to talk about this with, considering my congenital lack of empathy. But do you remember what you told me when I asked you why you weren’t going to play hero in the kayfabe?”
“...because villains aren’t scared of heroes,” Nilo said quietly. “Not the ones that need to be scared. But they’re scared of other villains.”
Kusanagi nodded. “And you wanted to be the villain they were scared of. But you know as well as I do that if you’re going to do that, you have to follow through.” He gestured over his shoulder at the ambulances. “And this is what happens when you do—people are alive at the end of it, even if they’re a little bit traumatized. I’d call that a win.”
Nilo stared at the ambulances for another moment. Then he sighed and let his shoulders slump. “I guess. I just…”
“Took all the empathy so I didn’t have to.” Kusanagi slung an arm over his shoulders, forcibly turning him toward the car. “Look. You’ve done everything anyone is going to let you do for them tonight. Maybe tomorrow you can apologize, but for now, let’s get you back to the car before Ties either steals your cat-octopus hybrid or leaves it with a small child.”
Nilo scowled. “That is my cat! He’s not allowed to do either of those things! Come on, so I don’t have to freeze your brother solid.”
He stalked off towards the car. Behind him, the sirens wailed to life, and he glanced over his shoulder at the sound to see cars pulling out of the way.
He glanced at the ambulances. For a moment, he thought he saw Kostas’ double flickering in the back window, mouthing Thank you through the tinted glass.
Then the ambulances turned the corner and were gone.