“Suck it up,” Satyr said. “Scion’s coming, and we need to know what we’re walking into.”
“Brick took the guy Blesk brained against the wall, um. It was the clairvoyant, the doormaker, hurt, the Doctor. Brickhaus, Magnaat, Munstro, they made it inside. The others got shot down in the stairwell. Um. There was a guy with glasses, and five teenagers who looked a lot like him, only without glasses. Ordinary looking, pretty much. Alexandria…”
“Hm,” Satyr made a noise. He looked up.
In that same moment, the lights flickered out for the umpteenth time.
The emergency lights didn’t come on.
I could sense my teammates, Shadow Stalker, Canary and Lung closing ranks.
“Weaver?” Satyr asked.
He split in two. A slow, oozing process, a lump swelling, pulling free, then forming features. The arms and legs were quick enough, and the details followed, but the new him had no helmet, but slowly reshaped his exterior to match the original Satyr’s costume.
“If you keep doing that, I’m going to have to attack,” I said.
“What’s he doing?” Canary asked. There was a note of panic in her voice.
“Splitting up,” I said. I willed Canary to pull it together. Satyr bulged, clearly preparing to make another double. I called out, “Satyr, I might need to rephrase. If you finish making that copy, I’m going to attack you.”
“He can’t stop once he’s started,” Floret said. “It’s a drawback.”
“I don’t buy that at all,” I said. “So either you need to be more convincing, or I’m wrong, and Satyr has to learn how to cancel a copy in progress in the next five seconds.”
The bulge stopped growing more parts. It began retreating into Satyr.
“We need to talk, Weaver,” Satyr said, still distorted, withdrawing the mass into himself.
Imp spoke up, “Why is it always Weaver you need to talk to? Never, we need to talk, Rachel.”
“Shut up, you idiot,” Satyr snarled the words. “There’s no time for foolishness.”
“Idiot? Foolishness?”
“What is it, Satyr?” I asked.
“I’ve got to ask about your goals.”
“Ah,” I said. “Nothing complicated. Saving the doctor, getting answers, stopping Scion.”
I found my knife, beneath the staircase, suspended by threads I’d tied to the surrounding area. I set my swarm to retrieving it. We couldn’t see, but Floret shouldn’t be able to either.
“I always had a hard time trusting anyone who doesn’t have ulterior motives,” Satyr said. “And now, here, I dearly wish you had some.”
“Sorry,” I said. “If you haven’t noticed, a lot of us are pretty blunt here, straightforward. Our goals are what they appear to be. I really wish you could trust us.”
“And I wish I couldn’t,” he said. “Funny how that works.”
I sensed Blowout pacing a bit to our left. Floret had her hand cupped, like she was ready to throw one of her things. I gathered the swarm, sensed her tilt her head a fraction.
Listening?
How much noise could thirty bugs make? Or, rather, how much noise could thirty bugs make in the audible spectrum?
No. That didn’t make sense. Floret sensed details without even trying.
She was faking me out, no doubt. Distracting so someone else could pull something.
Leonid was utterly still, no doubt focusing on the various sounds. On heartbeats and breathing, the creaks of our muscles moving and joints shifting. He was the one to watch. He’d said it himself. He was the hand that drew attention so the others could pull their tricks.
Which didn’t make him any less threatening.
Secondary powers of sound detection and sound manipulation, adjusting select things to be up to twice as loud or absolutely silent. It gave him a stranger classification, a thinker classification.
His third power was a mover power.
“Don’t do this, Satyr. It’s insanity,” I said.
“Your being here fucks it all up, Weaver. There’s too much danger that you’d agree with us, that we’d have the same objectives, regarding the Doctor.”
There a distant detonation, a rumbling passed through the complex.
“What are your motives?” I asked. “Do you want to help her or hurt her?”
“Yes,” Satyr said.
“That’s not an answer. I thought you said there’s no time.”
“There isn’t,” he said.
“Satyr, I don’t know what’s going on, but you’ve been playing this game of tricks and subterfuge so long you’ve all forgotten how to walk a straight line.”
“Oh, I remember,” he said. “We remember.”
“So you’re just going to stand here, idly threatening us, until Scion attacks? That can’t be right. You’ve lost your mind. Something with your power, messing with your heads…”
“You’ve got it wrong. Powers from a bottle, they mess with your body. Subtle things, but stuff you notice. Heh, the last straight conversation I had with Pretender, he brought it up, joked…”
“Time,” I told him.
“Ah well. It’s you natural triggers who get a little bent in the head, here and there. Isn’t that right, Ms. Lindt?”
My heart dropped out of my chest. I closed my eyes.
“Yeah,” Rachel said, her voice quiet.
I clenched my teeth.
“That’s right,” she went on, a little louder.
“Shadow Stalker. You too, believe it or not. I’ve seen your record. Your attitude, it’s not wholly your own.”
“Bull.”
“I’ve worked with worse. I could give you direction.”
“Honestly? With this shit you’re pulling now? You sound fucking crazy.”
“Shadow Stalker and I are agreeing on this count,” I said, “Trust me when I said that’s a bad sign.”
“If we’re going to resolve this, it’ll have to be soon,” Satyr said.
“You keep doing that,” I told him. “Telling us how little time we have, then delaying. Forcing us into a corner?”
Another half-chuckle, wry.
“You’re not making any sense, Satyr,” I said.
He only offered another short laugh.
“You want us to fight you. To stop you.”
“Probably for the best,” he said.
“No, it’s not,” I said. “We need help, we can’t be distracted by-”
“Enough of this,” Lung growled the words.
“No-” I said, but I was too late.
Flames erupted around his claws.
It cast light on us, on our surroundings.
With the light, Floret could see my knife, off to one side. I hadn’t been planning to use it to attack, but I’d wanted it in hand before we descended. She slung one bud at it. Encased it in crystal. It hit the ground at the base of a cell, by a spotlight.
Leonid screamed, double volume, and it was an eerie, echoing scream that bounced through the area, each echo lower in pitch than the last.
Not that he needed it to reach that far. Each echo of the scream coincided with a fraction of him fading out of existence.
Simultaneously phasing those parts of him in behind our group.
Canary had started to sing, nervous, but Leonid faded in behind her. Two seconds to teleport.
Rachel raised her hands to her mouth to whistle. No sound came out.
I turned, opened my mouth to shout, but Leonid had muted us.
I pointed, instead, but Canary didn’t get my meaning.
Rachel couldn’t get her dog’s attention with snaps or whistles.
Leonid reached out with his claw, up for her throat-
And Rachel tackled him, gripping his wrists. Canary was entirely unawares, up until one of them kicked her ankle in their struggles.
Shadow Stalker and Lung engaged two of the remaining Vegas capes. Blowout stepped in the way, protecting Floret.
And through some unseen signal, some
practiced maneuver, he knew to duck as she flung buds at the pair.
One unfolded in the air, tagging Shadow Stalker in her shadow state, and she crumpled.
The other hit Lung. Foot-long tendrils extended from his right pectoral to his right arm, binding to each.
Blowout hit the tethered Lung. Maybe he wouldn’t have been strong enough to affect Lung normally, but the audacity of it and our reactions to that went a long way in giving him a little extra kick.
Satyr forced another copy out in record time, as the other charged me.
I set my bugs on it. On her. My double. She didn’t have my powers.
She was strong. Tougher. She closed the distance to me with ease, with a runner’s strength.
So I moved the bugs to the original Satyr. That bare chest, the eyeholes in his helmet… I attacked Floret, and Leonid, and all of the other capes who had exposed skin.
Golem’s hand knocked her aside. Cuff charged the one Satyr had just created.
Even at this juncture, I knew it wasn’t an even fight. Satyr had outright admitted his team wasn’t a match for ours in a brawl.
Canary tentatively stepped on Leonid’s right hand. Rachel’s dogs got his legs. He screamed, and that sound wasn’t muted.
He began to phase out, reappearing by Satyr. He climbed to his feet.
We outnumbered them, we had better combat powers. The outcome wasn’t in doubt.
Which made Imp’s maneuver all the more insane.
She stepped out into the middle of the group and held the sphere high.
Rotated it, then rotated it back.
Sound resumed around us, as Leonid dismissed the silence effect.
“Don’t, don’t, don’t,” a voice was saying.
It was Sveta, inside the ball.
“Everyone stand up,” Imp said. “And if you fuck with me, I’m opening this thing.”
“Don’t, please don’t.“
“Why?“ I asked, again, my eyes on Satyr. The real Satyr.
“I would have been content to wait. To procrastinate until we ran out of time. But you came.”
“Satyr…”
“It’s for love, in the end. Pettiest of all pursuits. Arrogance, greed, even revenge… they’re nobler, trust me. I’ve walked all those roads. But love? It twists all the other things. Makes you misstep, makes you irrational, makes you impatient, above all. We couldn’t have gone down there without getting revenge, without falling to our greed and arrogance. So I was willing to wait. To sit back and put it off, tell myself we didn’t have the firepower, didn’t have the numbers we needed to take on the group at the stairwell. Wait until it was too late.”
“You were willing to die?” Shadow Stalker asked. She sounded offended.
“Better than being the ones who pull the trigger, dash our last hopes,” Satyr said. “You can put down that sphere, Imp.”
Imp hesitated, then lowered the sphere. She locked it, with vents open so Sveta could speak.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“And you probably won’t. If you’re lucky. I’ve said it all out loud, so the lie isn’t worth it, now. You can go. We’ll stand by.”
“Your fucking head games. You’re going to stab us-”
“Weaver,” he said, and there was no pretense in his voice. No joking tone or trace of mockery. Talking straight. “Go. They’re almost through.”
“He is right, Skitter,” Lung growled the word. “I can hear him.”
Lung was looking the way we’d come.
Scion, here. On this floor. I thought I could see the golden light, but it might have been a spot in my vision from looking at Lung with his burning hands.
If we go, there won’t be any escape routes. No exits.
It was as insane as anything Satyr was doing. Everything rational said to go upstairs, to find our way to the doorway, hope that Scion was still half-blind, still holding back.
But I turned, running for the stairwell with the Case-fifty-threes, away from Scion.
I ran hard enough that I couldn’t spare the breath.
I spoke with my swarm.
“Go upstairs, if you want to go.“
Give them a way out.
I could hear the others behind me, at varying distances. I could sense Satyr’s group with my swarm. They held their ground as Scion approached.
I don’t understand.
The others were following.
“If you come, there’s no way out. This isn’t even a hail mary, it’s a hope that there’s maybe something we can do. A chance buried in a chance.“
We came face to face with the group that had been working their way through the steel. A mole-man, an ‘extreme deviation’ case that seemed to be made up of lasers, with her petrified body parts capping the ends.
And others, dead. Satyr’s clones littered the area, where they’d brutally fought and killed several of the digging capes. Where they’d died, they’d withered.
With Scion on our heels, we couldn’t afford the time to fight.
Lung, Shadow Stalker and Rachel tackled the ones who remained. A crossbow bolt delivered to the cranium of the laser-girl, dogs attacking the mole-man. Lung’s claws and flames to assist with both.
Without my asking, Cuff jumped into the hole. Imp followed.
One by one, we passed inside.
Golden light flared in the massive room we’d just left behind. No rumble, no devastation, nothing of the sort.
But I could guess what had happened.
Even if I didn’t understand it.
Golem was blocking off the path to us, while others made their way down. Lung, Canary, then Rachel and her dogs. Hands of concrete barred the way, and two larger hands extended from the column, fingers knitting together to form a fence.
It wouldn’t hold Scion for seconds, but it was something.
Three of us remained. Golem, getting ready to descend, me, watching the rear, and Shadow Stalker.
Our eyes met.
She bolted, disappearing through the wall.
I headed down, with Golem following right behind.
29.07
It wasn’t the most comfortable journey. I could handle uncomfortable. Uncomfortable was better than being upstairs and staring down the bastard that was exterminating humanity.
The opening of the tunnel had ridges, bumps and uneven edges that scraped past me with enough speed and force that I worried it would damage my costume. Probably intentional, giving traction to the ones who weren’t digging. But we passed that area and we hit smoother metal. Traction was harder to come by, the tunnel almost a winding waterslide.
I slid, as the others were doing, bracing my feet against the sides to slow my descent. The bugs I’d planted on my teammates let me track the turns and drops, angling and bracing myself as I ran into steeper drops, sharp turns and outright ten foot drops.
It reminded me of an anthill, in a way. Winding tunnels, irregular, exploratory, treacherous and impossible to navigate.
Cuff slid down and hit the end of the tunnel. A dead end, with a person there. She didn’t slow, instead using her power to hammer her way through, splitting the steel apart and driving herself and the individual at the end through the resulting hole.
The instant Cuff was through into the room on the other side of the tunnel, she and the individual she’d collided with were attacked. Lung was the next in line, followed by Canary, and they were ambushed as well. Lung was pinned against a wall, Canary liberally tossed back into a crowd that waited to disable her.
With Golem behind me, I didn’t want to stop and get my bearings, but I was plunging towards a situation I couldn’t fully grasp. Bugs I’d planted on my allies spread out, but it was too few to get a good picture of who and what was waiting for us.
I didn’t have Defiant’s knife. Floret had encased it in crystal. I could drag it here, maybe, or use relay bugs and wait for the crystal to expire before carting it my way, but that didn’t help me here. I called for my bugs to bring the
knife anyways.
Rachel had paused before entry, getting herself sorted out with her pets, meaning she was only just arriving. Her reactions were fast, the commands to her canines quick and efficient.
They swelled as they put themselves between her and the waiting group, growing in size and manifesting their natural weapons. It was fast enough I suspected she’d been starting their growth as she approached the literal light at the end of the tunnel. Bastard’s changes were more fluid, faster, and more symmetrical than Huntress’, but he was younger, just a little smaller.
A group advanced on the canines without fear. Two people to Huntress, two to Bastard. Young men, if my swarm-sense was correct. The animals weren’t as big as they could get, but they were about as large as a couch. Yet the men didn’t show any fear.
They moved fluidly as the animals lunged, snapping and biting. Confident movements. Two caught Huntress’ head, wrenched it to the side, while the others avoided snapping jaws to catch Bastard’s forelimbs, bodily hauling him up and then throwing him to the ground.
The two animals were brought down in as many seconds. Pinned, as inexplicably as Lung was pinned. Except this wasn’t sheer strength. They were strategic, targeting body parts, one of the young men leveraging his whole body between Bastard’s forelimbs, forcing them apart in a way that the dog’s musculature couldn’t combat.
It was like holding a crocodile’s mouth shut. Jaw strength aside, the crocodile wasn’t built to force it’s mouth open. The wolf wasn’t built to draw its legs together against its chest, but couldn’t get feet under it to stand without dislodging the offending attacker. The other had his head caught and twisted to one side.
Huntress, for her part, was caught by the head alone, which had been forced down. The woman who had Lung pressed up against the wall had one foot on the dog’s muzzle, and was holding it down.
They made it look so easy it was almost effortless. A fifth boy approached Rachel, now disarmed of her dogs.
I forced myself to slow down as we approached a flatter spot. Theo’s heavy metal boots hit my shoulders.
We were still sliding down, but slower. Only seconds before we were through.
“Ambush below,” I managed.
No response. Whoever had dug the tunnel had been digging down when they reached the edge of the room. I supposed they’d stopped when they reached a layer made of a different material, going up to check. Our entry was a straight drop into one end of the room, and I landed flat on my back, nearly colliding with Rachel.
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