by wildbow
On the flip side of that same coin, he felt the betrayal of Justin leaving him behind.
Above all, he felt the quiet, perpetual horror of knowing that Crusader was still screaming, his throat never going raw, as Gray Boy’s loop continued without cease.
Kayden would be standing a short distance away, stoic, trying to keep from slowly going insane as Justin’s screams continued without end.
He’d lost people who were important to him, in maybe the most horrible way possible. He’d lost his father, and Kayden, Justin, Geoff and Dorothy, and now Aster. He’d lost them to violence and stupidity and madness, and he could see the allure in how the others seemed to be functioning, bottling it all inside.
He could see the twisted logic of it, even. As if there was a binary to everything, every enemy was somehow a twisted mess of emotion, layered by a seeming calmness, while every ally seemed to be cold inside, with only an act on the surface.
He looked down at his mask. A metal face with lenses over the eyes. Stoic, expression neutral, or a little stern. He’d chosen it at first because his real face was a little too round for a mask, but the PR teams had wanted to get more faces on the team. He’d compromised, and hadn’t given his mask much thought beyond that.
Except time had passed, and he’d found himself wondering if he liked the message it conveyed. By necessity, capes went down a road where they had to become cold and unflinching. They had to become numb, had to inure themselves to hard decisions. It jarred, to wear a mask that seemed to symbolize that transition, that while wanting nothing less than to walk down that road.
Back in Brockton Bay, New Wave had tried to start something, capes without masks. It had been disastrous. The message had been lost in the ensuing celebrity, and that had only intensified after one of the core members of the group was found and killed in her civilian identity.
He wondered if they’d been right to try. If capes really needed to just… drop the mask. To cry and let the feelings out. So many got their powers through trauma, but they bottled themselves up, erected defenses, developed coping mechanisms. If New Wave’s idea had taken off, would things be better?
Didn’t matter. Here they stood.
He could make it through this, save the world. They could find the source of the Endbringers and defeat them, could clean things up, get things in order and stop all of the real monsters… he could go to college, get a career and find a girl and marry her, and at the end of the day, Justin would still be screaming.
Aster would still be dead.
The ugly decisions would have been made.
He stared up at the bloody spikes in the wall, an image that would be burned into his mind’s eye, remembered as the point he stood at the threshold. A mirror to where he’d been in the beginning, when he’d met Jack.
Bitch paced around the edges of the room, impatient. She’d had to shrink her dogs to get them to an appropriate size, and was keeping them small in case the portal wasn’t accommodating enough. Here and there, she barked out orders to get the animals away from the bodies.
It grated.
“None of those invisible fucks,” she said.
“Okay,” Weaver answered. Her voice was quiet.
Theo almost took her voice as a cue to reevaluate how she was reacting to what had just happened, then stopped himself. Losing battle. No point.
Then, for some bizarre reason, Bitch approached him.
A sleek Doberman nudged at his gauntlet with its nose. He looked down and then scratched it behind the ear. It didn’t matter if the dog bit him—he was wearing a gauntlet.
When he looked up, he could see Bitch staring at him. Her face was barely visible behind her hair.
“Can I help you?” he asked. His voice came out harder than he intended.
She didn’t seem to notice or care. “You’re her friend, aren’t you?”
I don’t want to talk about Weaver.
He didn’t venture an answer. He couldn’t say yes, not honestly, but he suspected Weaver had a different answer to the question.
“You’re both acting different. I can see it.”
“Kind of warranted, in this situation,” he said. “In case you didn’t notice, the last few members of my family just got killed. I just need a bit of time alone to think.”
His voice had almost broken. Couldn’t break down. Not like this, here, with her.
She hadn’t taken his hint.
“They were buttholes, weren’t they? Purity and her gang. The nazis.”
The dog nudged his hand again. He gave it a more intense scratch before answering, “White supremacists. They… weren’t the best people ever. But they were still my family.”
She kept looking at him, almost glaring. She didn’t answer or elaborate, leaving the conversation to die.
Go away. I don’t want to hit you.
He kept silent, hoping she would just leave. Willing her to leave.
“Stay, Huntress,” she ordered.
Then she walked away, leaving the dog at his side.
Theo scratched the animal under the collar, and watched it crane its head to one side, enjoying the contact.
It helped, oddly enough. Having contact with another living creature without all of the issues and hassles of dealing with people. No judgement, no worries, just… this. Being alone without being alone.
His father had always preferred cats, and the creatures had never been easy to bond with. This was nice.
Theo sighed. He glanced at Weaver in his peripheral vision, and saw that there was a dog sitting next to her. A mutt, at a glance. The animal was resting its chin on her shoulder.
She saw him looking, glanced at Bitch, who was walking with her husky puppy following behind her, then shrugged.
He lowered his eyes from Weaver… no, from Taylor, then scratched Huntress again.
“We have the coordinates. Waiting for a charge,” Defiant announced. He was already flanked by the Dragon’s Teeth he’d brought with him.
“All gather,” Chevalier ordered.
Bitch snapped her fingers twice, and her dogs returned to her.
Theo raised his hands to his face to rub his eyes, and he felt damp on one cheek. One tear, fresh. He wiped his face, glancing around to check if anyone had seen it. No, not judging by the angle.
He donned his mask.
Golem now, Golem thought.
“We need to decide who goes where,” Defiant said. “The first teleportation marked coordinates on Houston.”
Weaver spoke up, “I noted Shatterbirds and Burnscars leaving, some Damsels, bunch of others I didn’t catch, but they had weapons and I’m thinking Winter or Crimson. There were some I parsed as hostages, but it’s only in retrospect that I’m thinking they were Nice Guys.”
“The second group made their way to New York.”
“Bonesaw and a captive Nilbog that’s apparently rigged to create things on demand,” Weaver said. “Crawlers, Breeds and a handful of others I didn’t identify.”
Chevalier reacted to that, flinching.
His city, Golem thought.
“And the last group headed to Los Angeles.”
“Jack’s group?” Golem asked.
“Yes,” Weaver said. “He brought the Siberian, Hookwolf, Gray Boy, all eight Harbingers, and there are Psychosomas and Nyxes. One or two others I didn’t place.”
“Los Angeles?” Chevalier asked. “What area?”
“That area,” Defiant answered, looking at the computer.
Chevalier nodded slowly.
Golem stared at the screen. He could see the satellite image, the concentric circles that marked the area around the blinking blue dot.
“Charge prepared. We can send one group at a time. They’ve already got a twelve minute headstart. It’ll be another eight minutes before we can send the second group, eight minutes after that before we can send the third.”
“The first group to arrive can call for help and get support to the other locations,” Chevalier sai
d.
“Then why split up?” Weaver asked. “We should all hit Jack’s group, trust others to help in New York and Houston.”
“Everyone else is closer to New York,” Chevalier said. “But Houston…”
“We can call in favors,” Weaver said. “Moord Nag’s apparently on board, though we don’t know why. Cauldron’s on board. If we can get Tattletale in contact with them, that’s handled. But we can’t do that unless we leave.”
“That’s my city,” Hoyden said.
“I get that,” Weaver replied. “But we’re doing nothing constructive if we split up, and we’re definitely doing nothing constructive as long as we sit here.”
“Once we leave,” Defiant said, “we break the configuration cell and everything here breaks down on a Euclidean level. There’s no going back, changing our mind.”
“I get that,” Weaver said. “But two or three of us aren’t going to do anything special. We need big guns.”
Golem closed his eyes.
There she is. Weaver.
“She’s right,” Chevalier said, looking at Hoyden. “We’ll send every set of reinforcements we can, but it’s not worth what it costs us, to break up our group.”
“Shit,” Foil said.
Hoyden had gone stiff, bristling for an argument.
“I’m not saying we should abandon Houston,” Weaver said, before Hoyden could speak. “Defiant, can you postpone the collapse of this area?”
“Yes, but I don’t feel comfortable doing it,” he responded.
“I think you should,” she said. “Toybox left enough stuff behind. Use it. Stay behind, arm yourself, then throw everything but the kitchen sink at them. You remember how the scar formed in Brockton Bay?”
“Mm,” he said. “Tinker technology takes time to understand, to prepare. Too dangerous otherwise.”
“There’s a solution to that. I’ll point the way.”
Defiant hesitated.
Golem looked around the group, saw the expressions on faces, saw how even Hoyden had relaxed a fraction. Even the Dragon’s Tooth officers that accompanied them were a little more at ease. There were no answers in this situation, but there was a possibility. An option, vague as it was.
“Okay,” Defiant said.
Then, without so much as a farewell or a ‘good luck’, he hit the enter key.
* * *
Golem appeared a full four feet above the ground. He hit the ground and let his legs sink in, absorbing some of the fall. A second later, he pushed himself out.
Just the use of his power gave him a sense of the area. Touching the pavement gave him a sense of how all of the pavement around him was organized. It had been folded into itself, folded around, thinned, thickened, bent at right angles.
Looking around, he could see how the buildings had been altered. Textures had been removed, similar materials blended into one another, everything fortified, thickened, weaponized.
All around them, the buildings were like tombstones. Windowless, angular, all expression and human touches removed from them. Spikes studded corners and blocked alleyways, criss-crossed in front of doors, and carpeted pathways. Some were metal, others camouflaged.
They’d figured out how to fight Tohu and Bohu during the Los Angeles attack. The trick was responding quickly, stopping them before Tohu had her masks and Bohu managed her influence. They’d won, for lack of a better term, managing the fight without the casualties they’d seen in the prior attack, but they’d still lost a chunk of the city in the time it took them to beat and batter the towering Bohu into submission. Now Santa Fe Springs and all of the neighboring districts were uninhabitable, due to the traps that riddled it, the way the infrastructure had been completely and totally compromised.
Easier to found a new habitable area than to try to fix this, routing new pipes and power, managing traps both subtle and blatant.
Those same traps would be a problem here, but they weren’t entirely incapable. They’d dealt with this before.
Bitch’s dogs grew abruptly, then shook, sending blood and bits of flesh and bone everywhere.
“HQ, come in,” Chevalier murmured. He continued to speak, delivering the information about Jack and the target areas.
“Area’s empty,” Weaver said.
“A trap,” Golem responded. “Has to be.”
“Has to be. Why else come here?” Foil asked.
“Nyx illusions,” Tecton said. “He doesn’t know we’re aware of who he brought, so he’s set them up to stall us.”
Nyx. Her gas is concentrated into solid shapes that move at her will. Break that shape and it becomes a cloud of poisonous gas.
“Not that easy,” Weaver said. “Maybe he knows we know, and it’s a double-bluff.”
“Parian?” Weaver asked.
Parian nodded. She unfurled the bundle of cloth from her back, then quickly shaped it into a roughly humanoid shape.
A moment later, it was stomping ahead, forging the way.
Golem fell in step beside Tecton. Every footfall on a surface concentrated his awareness, informing him of every surface of a matching material in the area. Lightning flashes in his consciousness, showing the landscape around him. He deliberately stepped on other materials to inform himself on concrete, on brick, on steel and glass. His heavy boots made for a rhythmic sound, accompanied by the sounds of Chevalier and Tecton’s own heavy footfalls, and the rougher patter of the mutant dogs.
“Stop.”
A girl’s voice, over the comm system. Not Tattletale.
“Golem, tell them to stop. Now.”
“Stop,” he said.
A second later, he wondered if he should mention this phantom voice. A trick on Screamer’s part?
“Thirty one,” she said.
“Thirty one?”
“More uses of my power. I’ve been testing it, straining it, figuring out my limits. I can’t make promises. Might be less. Might be able to squeeze out more. But it’s the best I can give you.”
The numbers clued him in, belatedly.
Dinah Alcott.
“There’s bigger problems,” she said. Her voice was quiet. “In two minutes, everyone but you dies. Seventy-two percent chance.”
He stopped short.
“Golem?” Hoyden asked.
“Solution?” he asked, he raised a hand.
“Can you think in abstracts?”
“Abstracts.”
“You’re… kind of scaring me, Golem my boy,” Hoyden said.
“He’s talking to someone in the comms,” Weaver said. “Tattletale? Not Tattletale.”
“Red means forward, left, attack, team. Blue means back, right, retreat, solo… I can only ask a certain number of questions a day. Ask, I can narrow it down, but it’s less help I can give later.”
One keyword, and he had to figure out what option it led to.
“Blue, Tecton. Retreat.”
“Back up,” he said.
Collectively, they retreated several steps.
A moment later, one small group of the Nine appeared, pushing their way through solid doorways, leaving colored smoke in their wakes.
Each was young. Teenagers. Each had a matching mask, a snarling face, complete with fangs and glowing dots in the dark eye sockets. Their clothing flowed, with hoods peaking above their heads. Each carried a different improvised weapon. A fire axe. A two-handed shovel. A makeshift spear.
“Harbingers,” Weaver said. “Don’t let them get close! Finish them quickly!”
“Color,” Golem whispered.
“Blue.”
He went with his instincts more than anything else. “Retreat! Run!”
Parian’s doll reached out, and the Harbingers slipped out of the way of the hands, dodging by virtual hairs as they spun in tight circles, ducked and rolled. It was like the thing was moving in slow motion, but it wasn’t.
A fire axe and two kitchen knives slid through the creature’s body, severing seams. It deflated explosively.
Foil opened fire with her crossbow, aiming so it was on a path to hit two of the enemies, and the Harbingers dodged the shot.
She’s not supposed to miss.
Tecton shattered the ground, but it didn’t make the slightest difference. The Harbingers didn’t slow down.
They turned to run, belatedly.
Hoyden and Chevalier held their ground as others mounted dogs or took flight. Golem ran his fingertips along the panels at his armor, feeling the connections to the various substances around him flare, touched the one for pavement.
He thrust his hand inside. A small hand, emerging as fast as he could shove his hand inside the panel. He reached for the closest Harbinger’s foot.
The young villain pulled his leg up out of the way, virtually spinning as he stepped to the side, planted the same foot on solid ground, then resumed his forward momentum. No luck. It was like Harbinger could see it coming.
Weaver’s bugs were swarming the Harbingers, but they took to spinning, relying on the movement of their hoods and the flowing black clothes to drive the bugs away, batting them aside. Even the threads seemed to fail to do anything substantial, getting caught up in the approaching villains as they moved.
Like whirling dervishes, they closed the distance.
He thrust his hand into the pavement again, and this time, he created a platform like the one he’d fashioned in Ellisburg. Raising them up off the ground, out of reach.
If there was any difficulty getting down and resuming their search for Jack, he’d deal with that when they weren’t all about to be murdered.
The Harbingers scaled the sides of buildings as if they were running across horizontal terrain. Weapons, fingers and boots found traction in the surfaces, and they climbed with an easy, almost eerie ease, as though they were almost floating.
Climbing faster than the hand was rising.
Three reached the top of the building, and as if they’d coordinated, planned this well in advance, they set foot on the edge of the rooftop and kicked off. They ignored the bugs that plagued them as if they weren’t even there, weren’t binding them with silk.
They flipped heel over head, their backs to Golem, Hoyden, Tecton and Chevalier, the two Dragon’s Teeth. Rachel, Parian and Foil were on the dog’s backs, and Weaver was airborne.