*****
“I think they absolutely should have released it.”
“You promise?”
“And so there I am, absolutely losing my mind because I’m thinking ‘how did it get there?!’”
It was a warm autumn night; the same kind of night they’d had a year ago, when Matt had first gathered Acolytes outside the Academy and invited them to drink, smoke and be merry. Now, though the air floated with the same gentle cold, the world seemed irrevocably changed. So many empty spaces, shadows where people had stood only twelve months earlier. So many missing, from that warm and sacred night.
Morningstar manor, headquarters and home to the Legion of Heroes, loomed as bright as it ever did when Matt, Will and Jane teleported onto the edge of the adjacent forest. Expertly rebuilt – and three cheers for superhuman builders – it was in every way a replica of the great mansion it had replaced; a sprawling, multi-story sandstone palace interlaced with iron windows and intricate latticework. And yet though it had been restored in its entirety, to Matt’s eyes, some detail was still missing. Some lustre lost, some scars still present. Ruined no longer in body perhaps, but maybe wounded in soul.
“I mean hindsight is twenty-twenty.”
“What, you want to sniff my shirt?”
“Because I knew it was the middle one. I knew. But I’m staring there at the three pots and there it is, on the left.”
They had made their way up in relative anonymity, through back doors and passages into a closed off room in a far wing, what had previously been some kind of Ashes ‘teachers’ lounge’ before Klaus Heydrich’s explosion had claimed both lounge and teachers. Now, or for tonight at least, it had been repurposed into a makeshift private dining space, with three long wooden tables arranged into a C‑shape, the usual couches pushed to one side, odd Persian carpets over the floorboards and mismatched chairs on which to sit. This was not a formal gathering, not publicised nor for any special occasion. Yet it remained, in its triviality, fundamentally important.
It was a gathering of those who survived.
About twenty people sat around the tables in no particular order, sixteen or so Acolytes and Ashes plus the four members of Matt’s family. Around the centre sat Matt and Jane, him in a shirt and jeans, her having gone with civilian-wear over her usual white-gold uniform. They’d ended up sitting together, typically, and somehow in the middle of everything, unwittingly thrust into centre stage by a spotlight and celebrity that even here they couldn’t completely dodge. But though the attention seemed to drift towards them, it was not referred to. It was simply where they happened to fall.
“But it’s so clear when you look back at it. He was not a well man. And I think there was still a lot of stigma around it-” “Oh absolutely-” “Especially for someone of his generation-” “Absolutely-”
“Hmm. I still don’t quite believe my son’s capable of doing laundry.”
“And I’m like: ‘Did someone break in?’ Did someone move it? And I’m freaking out because the door was locked but maybe still somehow, so I’m rummaging like crazy though my stuff‑”
Giselle was there too, and Will and Wally – it was hardly unusual to see them, but at least here they smiled slightly brighter with the opportunity to host. Along with them were other remnant Ashes and Acolytes, those who had either been away from the Academy on other business when Detroit happened, hospitalised by the explosion, or otherwise spared the final, fatal fight. There was Chris Gao, replicator, who had been up in the Carpathian Mountains with a team of researchers testing how far his copies could extend from one another; a gravity‑controlling Ashes woman Matt had never spoken to but who’d been rushed to hospital after she’d been triggered into early labour by the Morningstar attack; Neil Lomachenko, a stern Senior Acolyte with thick eyebrows, a jutting jaw and the power to emit and absorb radiation, who hadn’t even known there’d been a disaster until he emerged from the Russian nuclear reactor he’d been patching cracks in; Carla Black, regenerator, who’d been under anaesthetic in the Mayo Clinic undergoing routine ablation for her Logan’s Disorder; Becky Sandstrom, flyer, who’d been hospitalised after being struck mid‑air by a chunk of Morningstar’s north wall; and the healers, hefty voracious Delores and shrewd, mousy‑haired Editha, who’d stayed behind to search for survivors of the explosion and tend to the wounded. Then, scattered amongst them, there were a few nervous newcomers, young Acolytes who had breached or were receiving their first glimpse of the inner circle; the new Bangladeshi genius girl Azleena, who Matt personally thought looked all of fifteen; Cameron, Kane and Leticia, steel transmutation, electromagnetism and superstrength respectively, who Matt barely knew; and a new offsider of Giselle’s, Helen, a quiet, short-haired muscular technopath who didn’t speak much and seemed to have replaced most of her body with cybernetics.
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And then, of course, there were the survivors. For though the Legion had met Death in Detroit, Death had not quite managed to eradicate the Legion.
First and foremost was Natalia Baroque, telepath, who although immediately antipathically incapacitated the moment the fight started turned out not actually to have been killed. Having gone down so early, it seemed the Black Death had simply forgotten to finish off Natalia, leaving her to struggle back to consciousness amongst the corpses of her comrades just as magma-spewing fissures began tearing their way through the Earth. Shaken but undeterred, she now sat a few places down from Wally Cykes, wearing a black Chanel dress and gold, needle-thin tennis bracelet, listening with characteristic dourness to her Legion co-psychic talk.
The second survivor, somewhat unexpectedly, was one the Ashes, the pyromancer Charles Farrington. Matt had never had much to do with the slight, softly spoken middle-aged man during his brief stint at the Academy, and had honestly never spared him much thought. His ‘death’ too, in the battle in Detroit’s streets, had not been contextually remarkable – the Black Death had spat acid through his flames, which vaporised and began disintegrating his airway. A horrible way to die, for sure, but one would’ve thought pretty definitive – melted lungs were usually pretty final.
Except they weren’t. For when Will Herd hurriedly teleported into Detroit from the hospital, desperately trying to gather what few survivors he could before the city plunged into the Earth’s molten maw, he had found Charles Farrington still moving, twitching, his grey eyes locked in a kind of demented fury that the teleporter later admitted privately to Matt had scared him to the bone. Unbeknownst to any of them, and to Matt least of all, it seemed there was something inside the unassuming Ashes man that caused him to cling to life far longer than any sane person should’ve – a fervour, a determination bordering on fanaticism that kept him pushing through unimaginable pain and clutching furiously to the last wisps of his dying breath. It was only this persistence, this sheer bloody-minded fortitude, that had kept the pyromancer alive long enough for Will to find and get him to a hospital. He had recovered, and was now one of a select few. Klaus Heydrich had tried to kill him, and Charles Farrington had refused to die.
The third survivor, impossibly, was Celeste.
Celeste Pettit, horse girl, faunamorph, last survivor of the second Legion, had turned into a dragon during the battle of Detroit and had the Black Death unceremoniously snap her neck. Normally, again, that would’ve been pretty conclusive. But in Celeste’s case, it wasn’t.
The science behind how faunamorphs worked was uncertain. Did their cells all physically split or rearrange into the subject animal, or was their human form stored somewhere inside them or in some pocket dimension, waiting to be retrieved? Were they truly becoming an animal controlled by a human mind, or merely an animal‑shaped imitation, a sort of ‘I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Cow’? When Celeste had become a dragon, those questions had not been at the forefront of her mind, but after her neck was snapped they suddenly saved her life. Dragon biology, clearly, was not human biology – and although breaking whatever bones or nerves the Black Death had severed would have killed a regular creature, somewhere between the dragon’s gigantic form and Celeste’s own human one something deflected the killing blow. Maybe part of her original brain had persisted and instinctively triggered a partial reversion, preventing some of the damage. Maybe the complexity of a dragon’s entirely fabricated central nervous system and internal organs meant that life persevered even with a detached spine. Regardless of the how, by the time Will landed, was rounding up survivors and preparing to teleport, there had been enough life remaining in Celeste for an incredibly groggy Natalia to point to the motionless dragon and deliriously insist that the faunamorph was alive.
What followed was thirty-six hours of the most intensive, complicated surgery the attending team of healers, orthopaedic surgeons and veterinarians had ever attempted. To Matt’s knowledge, footage of the event was now doing the rounds at all major medical schools, and had already been the subject of papers in The Lancet, the British Journal of Veterinary Science, Gore Galore, and Horse & Hound. And at the end of it all, Celeste was alive. Bloodied, shaken, bedridden for the better part of two months – but alive.
And so here, half a year later, gathered the survivors of the Legion; not to celebrate, not to commiserate, but to simply be. Because there was defiance, now, in just being.