I targeted another facility. All of the ranged attacks, channeled through open portals, ripping through an unoccupied facility.
In quiet horror, I watched meters flip over into the red, gauges hitting maximum capacity, bars filling, characters on screens going nutso until they were all the same digit, repeated ad infinitum.
One by one, monitors went blank. Server banks I hadn’t even touched began to spin down, fans stopping, lights fading. Whole grids of blinking green lights winked out, some in order, others at random.
I watched, silent and frozen, as the process continued.
Stop, I thought. That’s enough.
You have backup servers, I thought. Those servers need to stay online. They have to stay online, because you can’t exist in stasis any more than I could.
She needed life support, at a bare minimum. She couldn’t go any length of time without something running any more than I could go for a duration without a heartbeat or breathing.
But the lights continued to go out.
She said things to others, over the comms systems. To Chevalier and other various heroes. A few words or a statement or two, specific to each of them.
Some longer words and phrases dedicated to Defiant, and more acerbic words for Teacher and Saint.
Saint didn’t react, but Teacher raised his phone, tapping it a few times before saluting the air with the device.
The drones close enough to do so sank to the ground all across the mountain’s peak. Her suits had already retreated and settled on the ground. Defiant was very still as he watched them land.
Then Scion attacked, screaming incoherently, and Defiant moved, taking control of one ship.
The last of Dragon’s lights went out.
I stood in a daze as the various machines went still, surprisingly hot as the fans stopped spinning. All of the server rooms and data banks were utterly dark and quiet.
Drones that hadn’t been close enough to the surface to land dropped out of the air. They hit the ground, along with one or two members of my swarm, and I flinched with the crashing, as if they were striking me.
I’m sorry, I thought, but it wasn’t my thought. A memory.
It was good that my power was saying it, because I couldn’t. My own thoughts were a jumble.
My feelings were a chaotic mess. A lump was growing in my throat, swelling beyond my ability to tolerate it.
I hunched over, and I very nearly let go of the clairvoyant’s hand before remembering that I couldn’t. Instead, Doormaker and the clairvoyant both pulled at my mask until it was halfway up my face. I felt the lump become a wave of vomit, spattering over the rooftop. It hurt, not just the physical act, and yet it felt like so little. Still a scene I was experiencing while half-numb, experiencing from a distance.
I miscalculated?
Had she been vulnerable because of what Teacher had done to her?
Something else?
Did it even matter?
I felt the need to throw up again, almost wanted to, just for that relief from what was welling up inside.
She’d been an ally, a friend.
I wanted to scream, to yell at her for being like all of the others and refusing to play along, to listen and cooperate. I wanted to do the opposite, to beg her forgiveness, and hate myself for being exactly what I’d criticized others for.
I wanted to put all of those feelings aside and start dealing with Scion. I wanted to give up on that entirely, because, fuck it, what was I even trying to save, at this point?
If I’d been whole, if I’d been balanced, I might have been able to find the middle road between the conflicting ideas. But I wasn’t. I remained hunched over, almost paralyzed.
My anchors… what had I chosen, again? Tattletale, Rachel, Imp… Grue’s cabin. My interlinking hexagonal portals were a mess. In the course of fighting Dragon, I’d closed portals and opened others without any attention to keeping it together. That was something to pay attention to. If I wasn’t feeling my emotions as clearly as I should, I had to look for the external clues, and that jumble was suggestive of an emotional turmoil I’d been suppressing.
I began pulling the grid back together, not feeling any better.
What else?
I reached out, trying to remind myself of the anchors I’d set up.
My mom… I found the graveyard.
My old house…
Where had it been again?
The streets were such a mess, one pile of rubble virtually indistinguishable from the rest. What was I supposed to even do to identify it, if there were no landmarks?
I’d hoped to use the anchors to help push myself forward, but reaching for one thing that I’d known from the very beginning and failing in the process left me in a more unbalanced state.
I was…
I was what?
There had been an idea I’d been reaching for, a word, a symbol, something. Yet I couldn’t clarify it in my head.
Don’t panic, I thought, but the words sounded panicked in my head. Rushed. Sloppy. My breathing was hard and fast, my heartbeat pacing out of control. Between the two, it was getting to my head, affecting my thoughts.
Don’t panic, I told myself. The repetition felt good, helping.
Or had it been my passenger telling me not to panic?
No. I had a perfectly normal lapse. Perfectly normal. A person in a stressful situation like this is going to have moments where she can’t come up with the right word.
Perfectly normal.
My breath wheezed a little as I panted.
You don’t want to, but you have to, I told myself. Stop Scion.
The portal slid open.
Except I hadn’t ordered it.
You want to take over, passenger? I thought. I began to struggle to my feet.
The drones moved.
Defiant?
Saint, taking over her systems again?
They flowed through the doorway to Shén Yù, blitzing him in passing.
No. Neither of the two seemed to be paying attention to me. They were focused on Scion.
I began erecting portals, shooting the drones out of the air, defending myself against the initial bombardment of tear gas canisters and containment foam. If I was slow to react, it was because of the disorientation, the lack of knowledge of who and what I was up against.
I had other thinkers available. Understanding their power was easier with the Yàngbǎn’s power boost. If they were puppets, the power boost meant the puppets fit my hand. I put them to work, trying to divine just who was seizing control of these drones.
It was so much easier to operate when I was doing something. Time and again, my lapses, the slippage, it had been in the quiet moments, between the conversations and the fighting.
It was easier if I was active, in the midst of conflict.
This was me. I thrived when I had an opponent, and when I could carry out that goal I’d had from the beginning, getting the world to the point where it all made sense. Bringing people in line, subjugating those who would get in the way or do more harm than good.
That was how I functioned. I’d always reveled in the chaos, in the madness of it all.
No, the thought crossed my mind. Not always.
Once upon a time, I’d been Taylor, minus the powers. I’d avoided conflict. I’d just been trying to get by.
Does that mean this is you, passenger?
There was, of course, no reply.
The drones kept coming, and I redoubled my efforts, calling individuals to me to form a battle line.
The moment the line was in place, the drones shifted. Some entered the portal, then immediately made a ‘u’ turn, flowing back around the sides of the portal and down. They circled around the building, trying to get at me from behind. I had to redistribute my personal army to block them off.
The portals were open and I couldn’t close them. But the lights on the drones were off. No lenses glowed, the antigrav panels were the only thing that indicated any power at
all. Remote control of some sort?
The lights are off, but they’re still running.
I laughed, abrupt, an alien sound, not my own laugh.
The goddamn lights are off!
It wasn’t Saint mounting this attack against me. It wasn’t Teacher, or Defiant, or any of those other guys.
I continued laughing. My winded panting and nausea from before translated to a kind of lightheadedness.
Fucking Dragon.
Fucking with my head. Giving me a reality check. Trying to catch me off guard. She’d figured out that I had the ability to see her systems, she’d switched off the lights on the panels, put every system into hibernation, stopped the fans, and cut everything down to a bare minimum while the fans had stopped, so they didn’t overheat too quickly.
A drone that had crept around behind the building detonated in a flare of pale sparks, and every portal in the vicinity distorted, taking on weird shapes, more three-dimensional than two-dimensional. They winked out of existence.
Leaving me in the midst of an army I no longer controlled.
Fucking tinkers, I thought. But I was strangely overjoyed. I was fucked over six ways from Sunday, but I was happy. I hadn’t murdered one of my favorite people.
The capes at the edge of the rooftop were looking around in a daze.
The drones were moving, assuming a perimeter. The capes at the edge of the rooftop looked lost and shell-shocked.
And I was still laughing, clutching the clairvoyant’s hand as if it was one of the few things keeping me grounded.
Capes at the edges retreated, bumping into one another.
The laughter stopped as I abruptly let out a sound, half-roar, half-scream, incoherent, channeling every last iota of the lingering rage and despair into the noise.
I commanded the people in my range to attack the drones, and I continued screaming even as my throat began to hurt and I felt like I might pass out from oxygen.
Dragon was only just beginning to speak, some drones blaring out words in what might have been English, others in a sing-song dialect that was likely Chinese. The percussion and detonations that followed the attacks striking home drowned out most of it.
The ones at the edge took cues, attacking the drones they’d just been fighting.
Each and every one of them had been brainwashed. Some by Teacher, some by the Yàngbǎn. They hadn’t had freedom of choice for some time. Between the scream of rage, a pretty damn universal sound, and the action of the ones I did control, they defaulted to going with the crowd.
I still had to deal with Dragon. Her intent was clear, from the way the drones were moving. She wanted to target me, and stop me from the source. I needed to do the same, and I needed to do it without destroying her infrastructure. I wasn’t going to risk making that faked death into a real one.
Fuck you for fucking with my head at a time like this, Dragon.
The thought wasn’t one of malice. My feelings were so confused I could barely tell on that front. I was relieved, disoriented, but those were more states of being than actual feelings.
I was muddled.
One task at a time.
Stopping Dragon.
I watched as the suits she’d settled on the ground kicked back into action.
We’d fought Endbringers together. For a time, the Guild had been one of our biggest assets. I’d seen what happened when Dragon was taken out of action. A.I.? Nothing substantial. But when her main suit was taken out of action…
I saw the way she deployed the suits. Which was she keeping safest?
One was in the thick of things, creating different types of forcefield to try to mitigate the damage Scion was doing to our side. Capes had baited Scion out over the water, but the fact that there were less targets in range was counterbalanced by the fact that Scion was more focused on those who were there, and he was hitting harder. When he hit the water, waves crashed against the shore, doing nearly as much damage as any of his attacks might. A Leviathan with one arm, one leg, and most of its head missing was perched on the shoreline, apparently mitigating the damage.
There were two more suits on the fray, offering long-range fire.
And one more above the clouds, periodically firing exceedingly long ranged laser beams at Scion.
The drones were making headway. These capes weren’t completely under my control and they weren’t the most stable, either. They were liable to crumble where other capes might stand firm.
Doormaker was recovering his power. He could make portals, but it was slow.
My first instinct was to regain control. I reconsidered.
I didn’t have time to feel guilty. I didn’t have time to think. There was only a moment where I felt the weight of what I was doing, the knowledge that if this didn’t work, I’d set everyone back for nothing.
I opened portals behind Dragon’s longest-range ship, the entrance portals above my army’s heads. I began firing through the doors with every individual I could control, creating more portals to seize control of others with every passing second.
More ranged attacks joined the barrage. Dragon flew out of the way, her ship badly damaged, and I moved the portal, maintaining the assault.
The wreck of the ship plummeted from the sky, and the behavior of the other Dragon-craft changed, as though they’d switched gears. The drones dropped from the sky once again.
Something told me this wasn’t a feint.
I opened portals into the Birdcage, and Dragon didn’t stop me. No containment foam came down from the ceiling.
Maybe fifty or sixty members of my swarm had been disabled by the nonlethal measures. With the Birdcage, I added seven hundred and forty-three individuals to my army.
The nonlethal measures would wear off. It was a step forward.
I turned to my passenger to sort them out, and I sent a share of them into the fight to reinforce the others.
One obstacle, removed. Dragon would take time to reboot. I could disable her in a similar manner next time.
Defeating Dragon this way hadn’t been ideal, not completely freeing myself of the distraction and threat she posed, but it beat murdering her.
I turned my attention to the world as a whole, with the idea of recruiting other capes. I hit a dead end. The worlds were bleeding together, and it had gotten worse while my attention was elsewhere. I had to force myself to clarify what I was looking at, to tell myself that the areas didn’t make sense.
It took excruciating minutes to get my head out of that sludge, and to make sense of what I was looking at. Minutes, as Scion tore into Alexandria, to convince myself that it was all in my head, and that Scion wasn’t actively tearing apart reality.
I exhaled slowly, and the exhalation was a shudder. My throat hurt from the screaming.
The going was slow at first, but it picked up as I let my passenger handle more of the load. Capes in hiding. Rogues. Deserters who had fled for safety in our hour of need. A surprising number of capes who had no costume, and who had barely used their powers at all, judging by the way it felt when I reached for their abilities. They were rogues who’d been subtle at best, or rogues who’d gone without powers altogether.
There were the retirees, not old capes, but capes who’d been wounded, or who’d dropped out of the scene for other reasons. Their powers were more developed at their core, but rusty at best.
I reached for the insane, along with those disabled by their powers. A small few, all things considered. Glory Girl was among them, in a newly built wing of a home for non-cape invalids. Something her family had set up, no doubt.
I found members of Bonesaw’s Slaughterhouse Nine. Clones who’d fled, or who’d been left behind, lurking in dark corners, or simply hiding. A Mannequin, two Damsels that were keeping each other company, a Night Hag-Nyx hybrid, and a Crawler-Breed hybrid.
When I had the vast majority of them, I began looking to other universes.
There were capes in Earth Aleph, barely C-list by our standards. Sundancer, Gen
esis, and Ballistic were there as well, the former two in civilian clothes, retired, the latter in a lavish penthouse, fully done up in costume. My portals opened, and I had control of them. I left Oliver behind.
Other earths only had a small handful. No doubt there had been contamination at some point where doorways had been opened. Whole worlds with only ten capes at most, half of which were case fifty-threes.
Monster.
I shook my head a little, blinking.
I found another Earth with a mixture of capes, all incredibly beautiful people, all in what was obviously a global position of power. Every flag that flew in their world was the same flag, and the gauntlet emblem on that flag matched the icon on a particular woman’s costume. A blue costume, with white fur at the collar, and a heavy cape that would have done Alexandria proud.
I attempted to seize control of them as well, and the woman in blue resisted me. She spoke, and I lost my hold on everyone in her range.
It was only twenty capes. Negligible. But I wasn’t going to settle. If I was going to compromise on any level, it was going to take more than this.
I created a portal, and I ensnared Canary, who was busy rescuing the wounded, flying here and there with her Dragonslayer suit, her arms full.
She set down the wounded, and then she passed through the portal.
She began to sing.
I was controlling her, and it was my song in a way, syllables rattled off at a fast tempo and severe clip, followed by long high notes. Not English, but not my own muddled speech either. I could feel her expressing her power through the song, through each intonation and sound.
I brought her close enough to give her the benefit of the Yàngbǎn’s power enhancer. I had enough awareness of her power to know how to keep myself safe from it.
I tried again with these foreign capes, in this world where this blue-costumed woman ruled the world, portals feeding Canary’s song into their council chambers.
Those same portals let me attempt to reassert control.
An attack from two directions. She wasn’t immune, only resistant. I felt myself assert control. I understood her power, even if I didn’t understand a thing about her. A personal, point-blank trump power, allowing her to tune abilities and defenses much like Scion did. A powerful long-ranged telekinesis, a compulsion power like Canary’s, presence-based rather than voice based, and a personal power battery that let her be stronger, for limited times.
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