Part 1: The Hero.

Years Ago

Laila didn’t let go of Brig as she died. The muscles in her hand held, even after her eyes had turned to glass and her skin had gone pale. Brig had to pull the fingers off one by one.

She looked at them. Both of them. Jess lay motionless, a hole in her side leaving her empty, black clad soldiers surrounding her like petals on a flower; struck down in one final, desperate moment. Brig was proud of them for that.

“Why.” She asked, addressing the figure at the doorway. “Why, Nat?”

“They were dangerous, Cassidy.” Said Natalie Callahan, “Laila destroyed a building, Jess had potential for worse. I had to, to keep people safe.”

“No.” Brig said, rising, “Why did you join them.”

Callahan gritted her teeth. “You lied.” she said, “The RWHS want to protect people.”

“And what would they do if they knew what you were?” Brig turned to face the woman. Callahan was taller than Brig, and a good deal stronger, yet stood like she was ready to turn and run at any moment. She knew she could’t outrun Brig, and that trying would mean surrendering every advantage she had, which meant she had backup. Brig honed her ears, extending her hearing out, further and further. A chopper, just over a mile away, and the clatter of guns and machinery, closer.

“You wouldn’t tell them.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. I used to think you didn’t have morals, that you didn’t care about our lives. I was wrong, it’s a numbers game. You’d throw us all to the dogs if it meant protecting a crowd of strangers, but you wouldn’t have me killed. Not out of revenge at least.”

Natalie Callahan was right, Brig detested wasting someone for no good reason. Instead, launched the woman out the front doors of the farmhouse.

When the first of the soldiers filtered through, Brig put up a shield and their bullets stopped midair, rattling in place, motionless relative to her. She dropped them, and launched a wave of concussive force at the nearest vehicle. The wave was narrow enough that it caught the center of the car, crumpling it inwards and pinning the driver in place. More bullets, another shield. Brig was burning, but she didn’t care. Two of her crew dead, a third a traitor. Allies that had taken years to develop. Now It was just her and the child. The cloud of bullets grew, forming into the shape of the shield she’d put up. Two of them grabbed Callahan, and her eyes widened.

“Cease fire! Cease fire! Stop shooting!” if they heard her over the rattle of bullets, they didn’t regard her as worth obeying, so Callahan did the next best thing, she sprinted behind an armoured vehicle and dropped to the ground.

Brig launched the bullets, sending them ripping outwards like an arc. The sounds of metal on metal, metal through glass, metal on bone, was deafening. And then, in the next moment, nothing. Quiet. Brig, commanding her breathing to a normal rhythm, walked to where Callahan had been, through the bodies and the ruined vehicles. There was nobody there.

The rush of air threw Brig’s hair forward almost half a second before the sound of the shot from the helicopter reached her. Brig turned, to see the round, a seven-point-six-two by fifty-one millimeter, slowly losing its spin three inches from her forehead. Her eyes refocused, and beyond that saw Jodie, hand out, straining. Brig took the round in two fingers and stared down it at the helicopter, daring them to engage further. The sniper took another shot, Jodie caught it again. Brig trusted her enough that she didn’t even flinch, and gently knocked the bullet out of the air. She raised her own gun and fired. The Polish-made WIST-94 couldn’t launch bullets far enough and accurate enough to hit the helicopter, but Brig could. The rotors screamed, then flew off, soaring over the fields and lodging in the ground like a sword. Almost in slow motion, the flightless metal tube dropped out of the sky, and landed on the farmhouse, caving the tiled roof and then the floor below n with a deafening crunch. Brig went to Jodie, slung her around her back and ran. Oil leaking would mean and explosion, sooner rather than later, and Brig couldn’t afford to lose anything more. They were over a hundred meters away when it did, sending shards of brickwork and wood flying.

“You killed those people?” Jodie asked, later, when they were at a safe distance and Brig had set Jodie down to walk.

“I did.” Brig said

“Why?”

“Because they would have killed us if I hadn’t. Very few people enjoy killing, but we can never regret it. Every life taken is another saved.” Jodie nodded, solemnly, and kept walking. The two reached the car by nightfall, hidden by bushes and foliage. An hour after that, Jodie was asleep in the back, clutching the passport of Mathilde Firmin. Brig would drive them into London, she had connections there. What they would do afterwards, Brigette didn’t know, but the plan was the same. Only the person she needed to kill had changed.

Part 2: Faith

Jodie screamed. And screamed. And when she had run out of voice, she beat the ground with her fists. Sid was gone. Her hand, once rough and strong, was pallid, and limp in Jodie’s. Gone. dead. The woman who had protected her, clothed her, taught her what she was. A fighter. A mother. Everything. Another breath, another scream, louder, echoing up and out of hell into the world. Tired. Drained. Powerless, she took off her rings and waited to die.

Death took time.

Jodie wiped the tears from her eyes, and when her vision refocused the room was not as it was. Cables pulsated with information, rather than neatly letting it rush through. The existence around her, the space between air, tingled. Jodie was not in the otherworld, but it had, in some way, come to her.

Death wrenched open the lift doors, and poured out in black ceramic and metal. Jodie stood up, walked down the hallway of red, and confronted it. Death unleashed a barrage of bullets, and in retaliation, Jodie slowed time.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

She saw it now. It had taken everything, but she saw it. Lies. All the lies that she’d been taught. Time, past present and future, flicking through the the like pages in a book. Jodie only had to stick her finger between the pages, and the world obeyed. The bullets froze, mid flight. Jodie allowed time a little more, and the first of them span, before approaching her in a relaxed, tranquil arc.

Form. another lie. Each world made up the other, and the other world was all made of one thing. The space between. That made the bullets nothing, and nothing could be changed. Jodie tapped the end of one, and it splashed like water around her finger, back into the silvery liquid that all things were. Not magic. Something primal, long forgotten. Jodie would do great things with it. Allowing time to speed up to its normal pace, Jodie decapitated death. The silver arced around the room, formed into an infinitely thin blade, and returned it to her, congealing as a metal bracer.

Chloe. Chloe was gone. Jodie looked back, turning the pages, and saw it. Chloe with Sid. The judgement, the calculation. Jodie was in her brain as she killed Sid.

Traitor.

Jodie felt the sensation, the power, beginning to fade. The moment of pure disconnection began to pass, as chains wrapped themselves back around Jodie. Not as tight, not as thick, but chains. Like a raging bull, Jodie tore through corridors and stairwells, silvers spinning around her leaving death in her wake until, at last she reached the surface. The front doors, bulletproof and strong enough to stop a car, blasted off their hinges and Jodie emerged into the sun. The bright, cold sun. Without a moment to appreciate it, Jodie launched herself, upwards, the dregs of her infinite power burning away as she found meaning.

There.

Traitor.

She was driving, alone. The car wasn’t familiar, and she was near the edge of the city. From above it was like a creature, parasites sucking it thin. Jodie landed in front of the car, her knees absorbing a shock that would otherwise have broken every bone in her body. Chloe slammed on the brakes and nearly crashed. Shaking, terrified, she got out of the car.

“I had to do it. You know I-”

Jodie shot her, the space where she had been. She re-materialised behind her,

“Please.” she pleaded Jodie spun, and stabbed. Chloe dodged backwards. “Jodie I had to-” the silvery liquid stabbed her. Forming a line that lanced through the woman, leaving a neat, smooth hole in the side of her stomach.

Chloe buckled, clutching at herself, onto the hood of the car.

Traitor.

But Jodie couldn’t kill her. Not really. It was wastage.

“I-” she winced, the contractions in her stomach necessary for talking would be burning right now, every work, every breath would be agony. She looked up at Jodie, with the large, soft eyes that She had come to love. Lies. “I love- I love you.”

So beautiful. Even now. Jodie hated her for that, more than that she hated herself for seeing it.

“Sid doesn’t like our kind dying.” Jodie said, walking through her, back into the city, and then stopped. “But if I see you again, I’ll kill you last.”

Part 3: We are such stuff as dreams are made of

The air was dead around Orpheus. Recyclers carried acrid, bloody air up, cleaned it poorly, and then rushed it through the vents, through him, to be distributed back out to nobody. He and Argus might have been the only things left alive in the building.

They would leave. Leave Sid, Leave Jodie and her lost cause of a pet project, leave the fight. They’d done nothing for him, and he owed them the same in return. Tannedown, he had family in Tannedown. Not close enough to be compromising, a distant uncle or a cousin, Orpheus- Addie, no longer Orpheus, could ask for a job or a rental. But he was done. He stank of death, an apt metaphor, and refused to be associated with Sid. She was a monster, a demon made flesh that threw away lives like bullets. There, through a grill in the vents. Katrine.

Oh, Katrine.

She was sobbing. She never cried, curled up against a wall with her head between her knees. She’d crawled there, leaving a trail of blood from a mass of bodies. So many bodies, so much killing. Addie though he recognised some of them, had stolen from them, but they weren’t complete enough to count, much less discern features. Had she done this? Had Katrine killed so many people? No, she couldn’t have, that wasn’t her. But Chloe.

Maybe we’re beyond help

He’d wanted not to believe her, to believe that Sid’s group could produce someone free of her touch. But this. What human could grind so many lives around a friend? That was the attitude of a wild animal, something that couldn’t understand the value of a life, even one as evil as this. It could have been the RWHS, it could have been Sid. Addie, in that moment, didn’t give a shit.

“Katrine.” he dropped out of the vent, landing on the wet marble with catlike grace, “Katrine we have to go.” She looked up at him, chest heaving with silent, guttural tears. Addie pulled her helm off, she couldn’t see out of it for how red it was. There was a slit in the armour, a small one, between the helmet and breastplate. It left a line, on her throat, that something could get through. Foreign meat, flecks of bone and blood lined that space, making it look as if her throat had been cut. Addie wiped it away, making sure the skin under wasn’t broken, then helped her up.

“Come on. I’m taking you away.”

Katrine produced more tears that day than he’d ever seen her cry before. He stripped her out of the armour, piling it in the back of the car, and drove away. Not to the hideout, not to his flat. But away. That was where they needed to go. Far, far away. The emergency stash had £1000 in small notes, enough to fill the car up and pay for a hotel room, and Addie extracted the £250 he could on the card Sid had given him at a cash point, then left the card in the cistern of the toilet. Someone would find it and leave a paper trail in the wrong direction. He stopped by a river and took Katrine down to was the blood off her. She’d stopped crying, but looked like she’d aged five years in five hours. The river was lazy and wide, and the two of them ended up lying still in it, thinking about nothing.

“I think that one looks like an ankh.” She said, pointing up at a cloud. It was the first thing she’d said since he found her.

“I think so.” he replied. An ankh was an Egyptian symbol, he knew that, but beyond that, it was meaningless to him. It meant that Katrine was talking again, that was good. They lay in the water, silently holding on hand on the same rock to stop them floating away. When they were done they set a fire and burned their clothes, changing into the baggy spares in the car, and spent the night in a small b&b.

“Addie?” Katrine asked, curled up on the bed

“Katrine?” Addie answered, staring up at the ceiling from the sofa on the far end of the room.

“Can you come here? I don’t want to be alone.”

Addie got up and crept across the floorboards, avoiding the creaky ones, and curled up beside Katrine, clutching her hand in his. It was cold, and bony, and shook slightly if he didn’t grip tight enough. “Thank you.” she whispered, and went to sleep.

Tannedown. A sleepy, normal town on the edge of Norfolk. It was perfect. They could keep their heads down, Katrine had long since learned to pass in the world of cis, white academics and Addie could learn. He was, after all, an actor.