I woke up screaming.

I had all my teeth.

You scream differently when there’s no one else around. A scream might start uninhibited and raw, but it always gets self-conscious after a few seconds if you’re aware—on any level—of others around you. The simple presence of other people is so powerful it drowns out pain, anguish, despair. It lets you put a box around the things making you scream and, eventually, close that box, and put it on a shelf, so that you can go on with your life.

I screamed.

And screamed.

And when I was done screaming, just to shake things up, I cried.

I rolled out of bed, trembling, noises coming out of my mouth that I couldn’t identify, and shuffled around on my floor for clothes that weren’t too rank. I threw on the first thing I found that didn’t smell musty. Mr. Liebowitz had washed all of our clothes by hand. I hadn’t quite gotten the hang of it yet.

I stumbled out of my room and to the bathroom, where I desperately opened the little orange bottle in my medicine cabinet. It was empty. It had been empty for three days. It didn’t matter. It hadn’t taken me long to figure out where Mrs. Liebowitz had gotten the sugar.

I brushed my teeth with the nearly full tube of toothpaste I’d gotten from the latest relief shipment. Hyperion didn’t appreciate bad breath.

After that, I stumbled downstairs. The cabinets were full, breads and cereals and vegetables. My small refrigerator was packed to the brim with meat and dairy. I still made toast and oatmeal.

I closed my eyes and listened, hearing nothing but my own ragged breathing, the creaks of my small house, feeling nothing but a phantom draft.

Nothing had never felt so…empty.

I cried into my oatmeal and didn’t finish it.

My family was safe.

My family was gone.

----------------------------------------

“I thought I said no capes.”

I froze, and turned to see Jason walk into the control room, his face a thundercloud.

It took me less than a second to read that he wasn’t angry with me, specifically, but could very well become that if I said the wrong thing. It was a skill you picked up when you grew up like I did.

“It’s just until I get my new colors,” I said, motioning to my new, plain, all-black bodysuit. The old one hadn’t been salvageable. “So nobody thinks I’m a mundie.”

He looked me up and down, and after a second, grunted. “Sooner, rather than later. That one looks like something a hero would wear.”

I huddled into it. It was something a hero would wear. It was Paragon’s.

I hadn’t told him that the superhero—the superhero—had left it at my house two weeks ago, nor anything else about the night. It was well-known that someone had given SCAR a black eye, but I kept my mouth shut. Jason knew about me fighting in Memorial Square, but he hadn’t connected the two events yet, and hopefully we would stay busy enough that he never would.

He brushed the cape off of my shoulders so that it draped down my back. He said, “Besides, I like to look at you.” His eyes ran down my body as his hands ran across my clavicle and down my arms, and he scowled. “You’re not eating.”

I wrangled my skin so that it wouldn’t crawl away and forced myself to focus. He wasn’t actually concerned about my eating habits. I wasn’t yet skinny enough that he’d find my body unappealing. He was looking for an outlet, and he had decided it would be me, one way or another. I had to make myself a balm for whatever was irritating him, or I’d turn into an avatar of it.

His emotions streamed into me through the physical contact. He was frustrated, which was a helpful clue. For someone as powerful as Hyperion, frustration was a rare phenomenon. You either got what you wanted, or destroyed it, which was occasionally inconvenient, but at least it wouldn’t be around to gloat. Frustration only occurred on the infrequent occasions that you had to restrain yourself, or were otherwise denied catharsis.

Frustration, therefore, was a side-effect of impotence, which meant that I needed to make him feel strong, important, and in control. Denial would only provoke him, especially because he was right.

In a calculated move, I pressed myself into him and laid my head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I basically mewled. “I’ve been nervous about the deal. If this works, it’s our entire future, and if it doesn’t…”

He paused, and for a second, I was worried I’d overplayed, but I felt him relax, and he wrapped his arms around me.

“Don’t worry,” he murmured into my hair, brushing my bangs back from my face. “Your plan was perfect. Everything is going smoothly.” He kissed the top of my head. “This is exactly what I meant when I said we needed your mind here, not in dreamland.”

And there it was. He was powerful, in charge, needed. I was weak, flighty, uncertain. He got to “fix” me. His frustration eased. I was safe, for the moment.

The most dangerous thing now was how good it felt. That’s the thing about situations like mine—as dangerous as he sometimes was, that just made the relief of safety all the more addictive, and he was the source of that safety as well. I would probably be in his good graces for the rest of the day, unless I made a grave miscalculation or careless misstep. It was important to stay vigilant, and to avoid chasing the high.

You use marijuana. I play emotional matador with a man-child of mass destruction.

We’re not the same.

“Look,” he said, turning me so that I could look out the big picture window. “They’re raising it now.”

On the floor below, workers—all Siege—and boxy, clumsy-looking drones worked to raise a twenty-feet tall segmented metal three-quarters ring from the ground, and into a mount clearly made for it. Hyperion could have done it in a half-second but I guess he thought it was more fun to watch. The bottom of the circle, where it broke, fit over a long metal ramp, and as we watched, Siege and the floating drones brought it safely to rest.

Telegates were an extremely rare and jealously guarded form of ultratech, allowing instantaneous transmission of people and goods between two connected gates. While they came with a few drawbacks—potentially exploding being the most notable—having access to one was invaluable, as they were a form of travel which nobody had yet found a way to interdict.

We were raising this one in the depths of Hyperion’s compound, an old SCPD precinct headquarters, with the help of the Zaibatsu.

Two weeks was a long time in the Skip. In the two since my heist plan had been shot down, the issue of supplies had become paramount. The first food riot had happened quicker than any of us could have predicted. We didn't get many coherent details—the only survivors were traumatized children who babbled about a grey man with golden eyes who emerged from the shadows to punish.

Siege and I went into overdrive brainstorming solutions.

We couldn’t strike out for supplies. There was no possible way the six of us (plus however many Sieges we needed) could bring back enough food for the entire borough. Hyperion could carry any load you could give him, but it’s not like you’d find that much all in one place, and even if you could, it’s not like you could put it all in a big bucket. It highlighted one of the fundamental ironies of metahumans—enormous power could be brought to bear, but typically, only ever on a very localized scale.

Organizing larger groups to go out was also problematic. One, many factions in the Skip hated each other, and that would be like putting a hundred cats in a small cage with a single can of tuna and telling them to share. Two, a massive amount of villains and metahuman fugitives flooding into the city would trigger an equally massive response, and not just from SCAR this time, but from the heroes themselves. They didn’t call Sanctum City the City of Superheroes for no reason, and while most superheroes were unwilling to comply with the HERO Act, they wouldn’t be able to ignore thousands of break-ins and robberies happening simultaneously every week. According to Siege, we could also expect to lose a tithe of our available volunteers every time, eventually whittling our metahuman population to the point that we could no longer count on it to exert control over the mundane population.

That meant we had to find an outside source with huge logistical capabilities willing to bring the supplies in. While many shady enterprises maintained a foothold in the Skip, few had those kinds of resources. We narrowed it down to about three.

First was Club Hellfire management. They seemed to have an endless supply of food. That one was discarded pretty quickly. Siege had sent one of their copies to query bill for a price on a favor like that, and bill had asked if they knew the Guardsman’s weakness. That was like asking for the Holy Grail, the Fountain of Youth, and the road to El Dorado all at once, so that was out.

Second, the Council. The sorcerous Italian mafiosos had blossomed since the Horror, absorbing most of the major criminal interests in the Western hemisphere that hadn’t been strong enough to protect themselves from the increasingly militant law enforcement efforts. The problem was, they weren’t known for working in good faith. Whether it was the dark magics they worked with, or just the natural tendency of old-fashioned machismo, they couldn’t help but try to strongarm, backstab, or otherwise screw over anyone they came into contact with. We’d likely end up spending more time fighting with them than with SCAR. The chances of Hyperion working peacefully with them were almost zero.

Third was the Zaibatsu.

Once they’d been a faction within the Yakuza, Japanese mobsters who had seen the potential of emerging ultratech and invested everything they had into it—literally, their whole selves. They had decided that flesh was a weakness, and had shed it in favor of enhanced, cybernetic bodies and tools. In the aftermath of the technophage, they’d completely subsumed the rest of the Yakuza by force.

Japan had more ultratech inventors than any other nation, and not just per capita. In the aftermath of the Battle of Tokyo Bay, the entire city of Tokyo itself had been rebuilt into the most ultratech-integrated city in the world, surpassing even Sanctum City itself, largely thanks to the Zaibatsu. Now, they weren’t just gangsters. They were businessmen, supervillains, and the single most powerful political force in the Japanese government. They could get us our supplies.

The problem was, they weren’t just untrustworthy—they actively hated foreigners.

We had picked them over the Council for two reasons. One, as ruthless and xenophobic as they were, they could be relied upon to fulfill their end of a bargain, and two, they had a stake in the Skip beyond using it as a playground.

The Zaibatsu was hungry for technology, and for the resources to create it. The Skip just happened to be a tech scavenger’s dream, with more abandoned tech in one empty super-factory than in most other whole cities. Sure, most of it was junktech, rendered useless by the technophage—unless you had hundreds of ultratech designers at your beck and call, able to repurpose it or convert it into something useful.

Earning their cooperation had been tricky and required a certain level of underhanded manipulation, but we’d pulled it off. It just so happened that their biggest rivals on the international crime scene were, in fact, the Council, and though the two factions had yet to openly declare war on each other, it was looking more and more inevitable the more each expanded to fill the power vacuum left behind by the victims of the HERO Act. The Council was interested in denying resources to the Zaibatsu, and so it had been a simple matter to covertly slip them some locations of Zaibatsu hideouts and scavenge sites.

In the aftermath of the very predictable attacks, Hyperion had offered a hand of cooperation to the Zaibatsu. Get us a reliable supply line, he said, and we would help you destroy the Council’s strongholds in the Skip.

It had taken a couple more rounds of attacks to convince them to negotiate, but even they couldn’t deny the efficacy of an allied Omega-level metahuman. They’d come to the table. Afterwards, we’d simply stopped giving the Council tips, thus appearing to make great immediate strides towards fulfilling our end of the bargain.

And it had all been my idea, with input from Siege. I tried not to think of the corpses I was now indirectly responsible for. They were all bad guys, and we were doing it for the greater good. We were feeding children. It was the right thing to do.

That’s what I told myself every night as I lay in bed.

This telegate represented the Zaibatsu’s end of the deal. Through them, we could establish our first untouchable avenue of trade with the outside world. The Zaibatsu was willing to part with enough goods to take the immediate burden off of us, but eventually, the threat of the Council would either be dealt with, or it would take long enough to deal with that they’d realize we were playing them. We needed a backup plan.

And that was where we played our trump card.

“Jailbreak,” I said to the air. “You there?”

After a moment, there was a hiss and crackle over the control room’s speakers. This had once been the nerve center that controlled the entire compound, looking out over the floor of metahuman-graded holding cells, where now the telegate was being erected. Its technology was primarily ultratech, and thus, still worked.

A nasal, sardonic voice spoke up from the speakers. “Yeah, boss. What’s up?”

“Do you think you can do it?” I asked.

The electronically filtered voice chuckled. “Sweetcheeks, puddin’, apple of my eye, the day I can’t crack a piece of tech is the day the Guardsman bleeds. You’ll be zipping all over the world in no time, just you wait.”

“Watch your mouth,” Hyperion growled, and I felt his frustration start to mount again.

Hyperion hated Jailbreak, which made the fact that Jailbreak was so useful all the more grating to him. Jailbreak was an ultratech specialist, and the primary provider of our technological needs. While he claimed he was nothing special in the device design department, he had proven that his skills as a hacker and re-designer were untouchable.

If he could crack the telegate, take control of it, our issues with simple bulk would be solved. It wouldn’t be a matter of getting supplies to the island under heavy surveillance and incoming fire—it’d be about getting them through whatever gate we were connected to. Regardless of how things with the Council shook out, the Zaibatsu no doubt intended to exert control over us by threatening our supplies down the line—Jailbreak was our insurance against that.

And he never did his work in person. That’s what the drones were for. It was, he said, far too easy to die when you showed up in person and liked to mouth off.

“Yes boss, sorry boss,” Jailbreak chirped. “Never you mind little old me. I’d hate to make a move on your victim.” Unconvincingly, he amended, “I mean girlfriend.”

Jason’s arms around me tensed, tightening to the point where breathing became an issue for me.

He forcefully led me away from the console to a big, ratty old sofa. It had probably been used for midshift naps back in the day that this place had been occupied. He sat down, drew me onto his lap, and held me.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

I felt danger brewing again in his feelings.

Jailbreak was useful. I wished he’d shut up sometimes.

“This could be everything we need,” Jason said quietly.

“Yeah,” I agreed, trying not to tense up. He’d feel it if I did.

“We could build a permanent home here,” he continued, “free from SCAR, laws, or superheroes. While the outside world crumbles, we’ll be safe. I’ll keep us safe. I’ll keep us fed.”

I felt, of all things, nervousness curling its way into his emotions. It was maybe the first time I’d ever felt anything like it coming from Jason.

It terrified me.

I said, “I know.” In what felt like a bad, almost disrespectful parody of what Paragon had told me, I added, “I believe in you.”

That caused a rush of warmth in him, pride and comfort that would have been touching if he’d been anyone else.

“I was thinking—” He paused, then said, “Look at me.”

I blinked, and realized I’d been concentrating so hard on his emotions that I had let my gaze wander, and now I was just staring at a wall. I looked at him, kicking myself for such a dumb mistake.

His expression was almost shy, his heavy brow lowered, his face somber. I wasn’t super great at interpreting people's feelings through facial expressions, so he also might have been constipated.

“I was thinking,” he repeated, “now that with stability is within reach, maybe you and I could make…this, us, official. Move your stuff here. We could even—” He broke off, before seeming to summon his courage and push through. “We could start a family. You and I.”

I pushed my forehead into the hollow of his neck, hoping he’d take the abruptness for excitement, so he wouldn’t see the terror in my face.

All I could think was, Oh, god, please no.

Before I could think up a way around this new, awful development, Siege came into the room.

“Jason, Sakuraba wants to speak with you,” they said, barely sending a glance our way as they took up a spot at the console. “I think he’s curious about the drones.”

Jason’s frustration came back in full force, both at being interrupted, and at having to deal with the insufferable Zaibatsu representative. He tossed me off of his lap onto the couch and stood, lip twisting into something between a snarl and a sneer. “I told Jailbreak we shouldn’t reveal we have access to any ultratech.”

“That’d look suspicious, o captain my captain,” Jailbreak said from the console speaker. “He’ll know we have ultratech up our sleeves—let him think it’s crappy hackwork. That’s why I sent my junk drones. ”

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Siege added. “He probably just wants to condescend about it.”

“Fantastic,” Jason said, striding towards the door. “I love being condescended to.”

He left me alone with Siege—and Jailbreak, I guess.

I sat up on the couch, trying not to tremble. There were a lot of things in this world that I did not want to do, and Jason had pretty thoroughly just run down a list of them. I could stand being Jason’s human stuffed animal if it meant putting myself in a position to help protect the metahumans of the Skip. I could stand it because I got to go home every night and take a long shower and sleep in my own bed. I could already imagine how he’d react to the fact that I woke up every morning and wailed at the ceiling. I was already making a list of people who might be able to regrow my teeth again.

And dear God, starting a family. Here. Sex was a topic we had rarely broached. I’d told him I wasn’t ready and wasn’t comfortable with it, and to my surprise, he’d been more than willing to respect that. Happy, even. Of course, the much more sobering, moderately disgusting followup was that he certainly thought I was a virgin. And that…pleased him.

I realized that I was coming to an ending. It felt like that moment right before I’d taunted my stepfather, stretched out over the course of weeks. Something was about to give, and I was almost past the point of caring about the state I was in when it did.

I had to contact Paragon, I realized. If this worked, if the Skip had a route to the outside, then the only danger left was SCAR, and I wouldn't make much difference there in the grand scheme of things. I had to get away. I wasn't sure about becoming his sidekick or going to Aurora, but I couldn't stay here and turn into Jason's combination punching bag and baby machine.

It was time to go.

Siege asked, “How are you doing, Darkstar?”

I snapped out of my reverie, and glared at them. “Why do you care?”

They were silent for long enough that I thought they weren’t going to answer, before they said, “To be honest, I have no idea. It doesn’t really make sense, does it?”

“Nope,” I said curtly. “You’ve already proven that you don’t, so let’s not pretend. We work together. We’re not friends.”

They sighed. “What are you even expecting to find in the Vault that would change our situation so dramatically? Sure, we’d have some weapons, but the heroes aren’t going to sit on their hands. As far as I can tell, all you’d really be doing is provoking a war.”

“A war we’d have the accumulated spoils of a century of supervillainy on our side to fight with,” I said.

“They have the Guardsman,” they said softly. “We lose.”

I said nothing.

“Do you know something the rest of us don’t, Darkstar?” they asked, not snidely or skeptically at all. A simple question, honestly asked.

The answer tried to burst free from the depths of my mind, but there was no bridge between that part of my memories and my current self. It fell back into the void.

When I didn’t answer, they resumed pressing buttons on the console, silently reading the complex technical data each button press presented.

After a couple minutes, Jailbreak's speaker voice broke the silence. “Darkstar, we’re ready for you on the floor.”

I hovered into the air, because walking was for chumps, and floated towards the doorway.

“Darkstar?” Siege’s voice asked from behind me.

I stopped.

“Why is it always so much easier to get into the Skip than out?”

I turned back to them, confused. “What do you mean?”

“You’d think,” they said, diligently studying the console readouts for the telegate, “that it’d be harder to get in than it is. That they’d try harder to stop people from getting here. And you’d think that somebody would be mounting rescue attempts.”

“Hyperion’s threat—”

“—doesn’t explain why SCAR turns back anyone who makes it across the Wall by themselves,” they finished. “It doesn’t explain how nobody gets out, but a dozen new metahumans make it in every week.”

I blinked at them.

After a moment, they shrugged. “Sorry, I was just thinking aloud.”

“Siege, what are you sayi—”

“Darkstar?” Jailbreak's voice repeated. “We’re going to have the telegate fired up in a few minutes. You need to be down there.”

“Go,” Siege said. “We’ll talk later.”

I stared at them, but they didn’t look at me or say anything else.

Disturbed, I floated out of the control room and down the stairs to the cells.

The floor of the holding cells was open and tiered, intended to be a massive panopticon with every cell visible from the control room window. It was, perhaps, a wasteful use of space, but as a building built before the technophage, it had been a nearly prescient design. Ultratech was wired into the basic functionality of the building, but they still would have used normal tech for stuff like cameras and surveillance. Because they hadn’t, this building had been able to operate long after most of the rest of the Skip had been abandoned, until Red Wednesday. One of the first things Hyperion had done after taking control of the Skip was free the prisoners held in this very building.

The cells had mostly been demolished to make room for Hyperion to live. This was the most fortified part of the building, and anything wanting to tear its way in would have to make a lot of noise before doing so. Of course, now it was going to have a telegate in the middle of it, which could at any moment open to potential hostiles, so I imagined he’d probably find a new place to sleep.

The telegate was fully in place by the time I floated out of the stairwell, with the various Siege copies all adjusting wires and Jailbreak's drones fiddling with bits of technological minutiae near the top. Voidwalker and Ripper were off in a far corner, talking quietly. The man I refused to acknowledge was sitting cross-legged in one of the few remaining cells, and I felt his attention follow me as I drifted across the floor. It was like walking through spiderwebs.

Jason stood near the mouth of the telegate talking to a shirtless man. Sakuraba.

Sakuraba looked over his shoulder at me as I drew near, and immediately the illusion of humanity was obliterated. His eyes had circuitry in them, and his pupils dilated with unnatural rapidity as he looked me over. He didn’t blink. His skin had an unnatural, plastic stiffness to it, like the eggshell cover of old computers, except I knew whatever material it actually was, it was far harder, far stronger. Engraved into his action figure back were, frankly, beautiful designs featuring snake-like dragons with antlers, reeds, and lots of stylized fire. He carried a sword shaped like but far longer than a typical katana at his waist. A second glance would show you that the sheathe was attached not to his belt, but to his body. I’d seen it drawn once, its edge lighting up with plasma hotter than the surface of the Sun.

In the Zaibatsu, your rank was directly correlated with how much of your body had been replaced or enhanced. That meant that Sakuraba was as high as you could be in their hierarchy until you got to the leaders themselves—whose alterations, I’ve heard, were even more radical.

“This is your esper?” he said flatly, voice clipped.

Jason said, “This is Darkstar.”

“Your esper?” the yakuza repeated.

Jason’s eye twitched. “Our psion, yes.”

“She will need to be here at all times when the gate is open,” Sakuraba said. “Goods will not be delivered unless she makes contact with our esper on the other side and gives the correct password. Anybody attempting to cross through to our side will be killed, regardless. We are not your escape route.”

I didn’t have to read Jason’s emotions to know the look on his face said, I’d like to see you try. I also knew the Zaibatsu wasn’t stupid, and wouldn’t make a threat they didn’t at least have a shot of backing up.

“Wait,” I said. “I have to make telepathic contact?”

“That was implicit, yes,” Sakuraba said, his flat voice growing distinctly annoyed.

I looked at Jason. "I thought you just needed me to sense the other side."

Jason regarded me for a long moment before explaining,“She doesn’t do that.”

“Then we have no deal,” Sakuraba responded. “Unless you have another esper on hand.”

“We can find someone,” Jason said. “I’ll send Voidwalker to—”

“Unless she will be back within two minutes,” Sakuraba said, cutting him off, “then we have no deal. The connection will be established on schedule.”

I saw Jason visibly restrain himself from killing the man on the spot. He stared at Sakuraba, who remained standing there, flatly unimpressed.

He looked at me, and his voice grew hard. “Anna.”

“Please, Jason,” I breathed, feeling panic start to squeeze my heart. “Don’t make me—”

“Anna, you need to get over this,” he said. “We don’t have time to wait. You’re a psychic. You can handle it.”

“One minute and forty-five seconds,” Sakuraba said, implacable.

I felt trapped, like the walls were closing in around me. I hadn’t heard anyone else’s voice in my head since I had gained the ability to block them out. Sometimes, I was afraid that if I let them in again, my powers would break. That this new me I had created would disappear. It was, I knew, irrational, but that didn’t mean it was easy to deal with.

Jason stepped forward and took me by the arm. He pulled me close, and forced me to look up at him. “For the Skip, Anna. You can do it. I believe in you.”

God, it sounded even worse coming from him.

I felt myself move just a tad closer to that ending I had sensed earlier.

But, slowly, I nodded.

If this is what I had to do to get away, my final test, so be it.

“Okay,” I whispered.

“One minute,” Sakuraba said. “I suggest you get your people in position.”

Jason called out, and my teammates got themselves ready. Voidwalker teleported herself and Ripper closer to us with a disconcerting lack of special effects, the Sieges all picked up their weapons and lined up at the base of the ramp, and the man I refused to acknowledge looked on from his cell—

—furious?

I blinked at the sudden but distinct animus radiating off of him.

“Anna,” Jason said. “Go.”

I put him—it—out of my mind and took a breath. I made my way up the ramp, stopping just short of the empty air of the as yet inactive telegate.

Sakuraba said, “Your password is ‘Watashi wa baka gaijin.’ Their response will be, in English, ‘I agree.’ Do you need me to repeat your line?”

“No,” I said. “But, for the record, I’m going to punt you through the ceiling when we’re done here.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” the yakuza said, the faintest trace of humor in his voice.

The telegate began to hum. On the inside, at the center of each segment of the ring, a tiny beam of light ignited, each one intersecting in the middle. They began to spin, slowly at first, but more and more rapidly, until it became impossible to distinguish any one beam.

Sakuraba made a quizzical noise. “Ten seconds ahead of schedule. How sloppy.”

The intersecting beams of light became a single sheet of corruscating rainbow, and abruptly, it was as though a tunnel opened up in front of me. I realized my psionic senses had expanded into space that simply had not been there a few seconds ago. Curiously, I searched through and found a group on the other side, waiting.

“We have five minutes before the energy buildup becomes unstable,” Sakuraba said. “Have they made contact, esper?”

“No,” I said slowly, feeling no psionic stirring on their end. “Should I?”

“Absolutely not,” he said. “Likely they are rectifying whatever miscommunication led to their poor timing. Be patient.”

One of Jailbreak's boxy junk drones dropped suddenly from where it floated above us and hovered next to Jason. “Uh, boss, I think I’ve got some readings you should know about.”

I could have groaned. Jailbreak wasn’t supposed to let them know he was monitoring the telegate.

Sakuraba, of course, turned sharply towards the drone. “What is that thing talking about?”

Hyperion’s face went through what I like to call the five stages of anger: anger, more anger, third anger, failed attempt to hold it down, and finally, violence.

He didn’t bother responding. He just slapped the drone out of the air, with enough force to shatter it and send the pieces scattering over the wide open floor.

“If you’re attempting to subvert the deal in any way,” Sakuraba said, his hand drifting towards his katana, “I will have to—”

Another drone swooped down, far away from Hyperion, and Jailbreak’s voice emitted from it. “Nimrods! That was an outgoing connection, not an incoming one!”

Everybody turned to stare at the drone in a moment of incomprehension.

It was, unfortunately, the perfect distraction.

Nobody saw the Siege from the control room sprinting silently across the floor from the opposite direction until it was too late.

They blitzed into the group of metahumans and lobbed two spherical, shiny orbs about the size of tennis balls in perfect arcs, one towards Hyperion’s face, the other towards Sakuraba. Still, nobody registered what was happening until the orbs exploded.

Instead of force and fire and shrapnel, they erupted into some kind of gooey slime. Hyperion got a face full of it and immediately rocked backwards, hands coming up to try and claw it away. It had apparently hardened as soon as it made contact, and his fingers gouged into it, getting nowhere fast.

It was smart. A normal grenade would have barely annoyed him, and a flashbang would have done even less. Bright lights and sounds did nothing to him.

Sakuraba was quicker, but still too slow. He tried to hop backwards and draw his katana, but enough goo got onto him that he was caught mid-draw and stuck in that stance. He prioritized escape, and rocket boosters fired from his feet, thrusting him away, creating distance between himself and the threat.

Simultaneously with this, the assembled Siege clones all turned in perfect unison and fired at everyone else.

They clearly had their targets already picked. That was the benefit of linked minds—seamless coordination. One shot did for Voidwalker, a crackling bolt of blue energy sinking into her chest, and she fell to the floor, spasming. They were using more stolen SCAR rifles, and these thankfully had a stun setting. Ten shots accounted for Ripper, though they only managed to bring him to a knee. It was good enough for Siege.

I got slightly less. Eight rifles fired at me.

In the second this all happened, I managed to raise a psionic shield, but the energy of the SCAR rifles burnt right through it. Every shot landed, and it was like someone had tied a rope around all of my muscles individually and was trying to yank them together. I stiffened, in enormous pain, unable to control my spasming body, and began to topple over.

I didn’t even manage to fall before every assembled Siege charged up the ramp and, as one, tackled me through the event horizon of the telegate.

I saw only a brief flash of reality distorting before I hit the floor beneath twenty-something human bodies, unable to see anything at all. I heard the telegate powering down almost before our toes were clear of it.

Somebody was shouting, barking orders. “Make sure that thing is locked! Take it completely offline if you have to! I don’t want anyone coming to the rescue!”

I recognized the voice. My blood ran cold.

The Sieges all rolled off of me and I struggled to regain control of my muscles. I forced myself to turn over and climb to my hands and knees, and look up.

Into a wall of SCAR troopers, their rifles leveled.

Sheriff Grey strolled forward from the mass, casually drawing one of the blaster pistols on her hip, blue eyes merciless.

We were in the depths of some SCAR fortress. It was dark, and I couldn’t make out too much, but I saw glinting glossy armor up on raised ledges, and across a catwalk running above. All around us, more troopers waited silently, guns leveled at me.

I tried to raise my hands, draw in power, but the stun setting on Siege’s guns apparently blocked me from doing that as well.

The Sieges, meanwhile, rolled onto their knees, hands up. “Amnesty,” the one from the control room said. “In exchange for her. That was the deal.”

“It was.” The Sheriff’s eyes rested on them for a moment. “It is. How many more of you are there?”

“Hundreds,” they said. “Most took the fishing boats and have already landed on the mainland. A few are coming over the bridges now. Do your men know not to open fire?”

“I already gave the word. They’ll be safe.” Grey yanked them to their feet easily with one cyborg arm and patted them on the head. “Don’t worry. We’ll get you your thirty pieces of silver. As a bonus, we won’t even ask too many questions about where you got that armor.”

“Traitor,” I finally managed to snarl at Siege. Power trickled into me, and I raised my palm towards them.

Sheriff Grey’s gun barrel snapped to the bridge of my nose, right between my eyes.

We stared at each other for a moment.

“Wow,” she said. “This is really embarrassing for you.”

I didn’t see her pull the trigger. All I saw was a flash of light, and then nothing at all.