She scanned the area for answers, finding Rune near the bottom of the stairwell along with two other super-powered individuals: that damned teleporter and someone else she hadn’t identified yet, most likely Skyfire or Aura. A tail of life light trailed behind Rune to give away the fact that he was encircling the area with another one of his effects.
It’s like he doesn’t learn or something, she mused as she commanded the floor in Rune’s wake to reform itself and return to a clean state.
Get the heroes out of the stairwell, Dancer commanded.
Moving them without hurting them was the hard part. How could she be sure to avoid any potential structural hazards when her life sense was showing her any rooms and inanimate objects in range as overlapping, blurry structures and gray blobs? Do it already, she thought. Two birds with one stone.
Sliding the plastic mask up to perch on top of her head, Dancer reached for Rune’s presence first, plopping him down on the edge of the roof over thirty feet away from her. She grabbed for the other unidentified EU hero next and hoped it was Aura and not Skyfire, who could obliterate her target in milliseconds. As Dancer reached for the teleporter, he vanished from her range.
Damn it.
Dancer clenched her fists and her jaw, forcing her mind to abandon the alternate reality of her life sense. When her attention was back on the roof, she found herself face to face with Rune and Skyfire.
The Swedish hero was easily identifiable by his distinctive television-primed costume, consisting of a horned helmet, a short fur cape, and a belted Viking tunic. His long brown hair hung over one armored shoulder in a tightly wound braid. His hands gripped the long wooden shaft of an ax whose humongous steel glowed red in the reflected afternoon light, marked by one of his trademarked powered runes. Dancer didn’t recognize the effect, but she knew she didn’t want to be struck or even touched by it because the Swede’s power included several runes that could incapacitate her in an instant.
Skyfire’s tight red outfit was asymmetrical and jaggedly cut to symbolize flame tongues. Long triangular shreds of fabric in varying shades of red completed the look, dangling to the knees of her bright orange leggings. A red carnival mask with rhinestones covered the upper half of her face, framed by the wisps of dark blonde hair that had escaped her bun.
To Dancer’s surprise, Rune looked straight at her. So they can see me now, she concluded, glad that Sunny invested his remaining strength to help the other Nameless escape instead of wasting it on her.
Skyfire broke the tense, standoffish silence before Rune. “On the roof,” she reported through her headset microphone. “We have a visual of the female target. We’ll bring her down as soon as the situation is secured. Standby.”
So they don’t want to kill me, Dancer deduced. One point in my favor.
Rune crossed his arms over his tunic. “Are you ready to cooperate? Or will we have to take you by force?”
“Why am I getting special treatment?” she retorted in a cool, dispassionate tone that Crybaby Sarina had never been able to pull off. A tone that said she was on top of the world, and prepared to tip the scales in her favor if necessary. It wasn’t a bluff, at least she didn’t think it was. Not if she got the chance to act first.
Rune shifted his ax from hand to hand, threatening her while his eyes were locked onto her. “All we know is that the Covenant asked us not to kill you.”
First they wanted to kill me and now they don’t? Dancer was incredulous
Her eyes shifted to Skyfire, whose right hand glowed with a multitude of bright golden sparks. According to rumors, the heroine discharged a super-heated homing missile that traveled faster than anyone could run without velocity-boosting powers. Dancer wasn’t sure if she would be able to relocate herself in time before one of those shots incinerated her, but she willed herself to appear calm. Fearless. All-powerful.
“Where’s DJ?” Skyfire demanded, her tone sharper than Rune’s.
Why would they care about him? Dancer wondered. Unless they’re stalling me like I’m stalling them….
Nice try, but no dice. Instead of taking their bait, Dancer decided to bring Crashbang into the mix and prevent him from obstructing the Nameless’s getaway. She blindly reached out without triggering her life sense. This current situation was too tense to abandon her focus on the here and now. Hoping for the best, she willed Crashbang to materialize in front of her.
Another figure blinked into existence, but it wasn’t the hero she was reaching for. Dancer recognized the new arrival’s black-and-white costume from the flash she had spotted in the studio.
The teleporter.
She wasn’t sure why this guy had appeared instead of Crashbang. She considered reaching for the super-powered human grenade again, but something told her that she would be in trouble if she didn’t first deal with the heroes who were already staring her down. Now that it was three against one, her team would have to make their way out on their own.
Once she made her decision, she turned her full attention to the newcomer. He jerked his head around to find his bearings, looking like a puppy among wolves and letting her know that she had caught him off guard at his own game. The brown-skinned young man’s costume consisted of baggy pants that were black on the left side and white on the right, a simple white paper mask barely covering the area around his eyes, and a long-sleeved black shirt with a white rook sewn onto the front.
So the newest addition to the EU heroes team likes chess. Well, get ready to play.
“So what’s your new guy’s name?” Dancer asked Rune, transfixed by his glowing ax blade. Skyfire would incinerate her if she disarmed him, she judged. That girl looked trigger happy.
“This is Checkmate,” Rune replied. Before she could reply, Rune signaled to Checkmate with his index finger and the teleporter disappeared from the roof.
“My turn to ask you a question. Why aren’t you escaping with the other villains?”
So we’re officially all villains now. Dancer was amused, but not surprised. She didn’t have any illusions about whether or not the Covenant would allow the other Nameless to live if they got caught. The villain label was equivalent to an execution order.
Dancer stalled a moment before replying, listening to the still air around her. Every second that passed without Crashbang’s power going off meant the Nameless were making more and more progress on their getaway. The instant Crashbang had an inkling of where the Nameless were, he would detonate the entire radius around them, decimating them whether they were visible or not.
Dancer resisted Rune’s question, countering it with one of her own. “Why don’t you forget about us and go after Raven instead? He’s the one who kidnapped Kovac. Isn’t it obvious we’re not in on his scheme? The Crows left us behind to be obliterated by Crashbang, who has caused more property damage than all the rest of us combined.”
“You’re lucky no one was killed,” Rune said. “I’m sure the Covenant has the Raven situation under control.”
Dancer smirked beneath her mask. “And now you’re getting me under control.”
It wasn’t an unreasonable goal for the heroes to pursue. She didn’t doubt she had the potential to kill every single person within a mile radius if she got the time she needed to extend her radius that far. Causing wide-scale destruction wouldn’t even be particularly difficult. She could collapse buildings. Cause floods. Command the ground to rise up and swallow any living creature.
The heroes didn’t know she didn’t have any reason or motivation to tap into that destructive potential. She wasn’t a murderer, and she didn’t have any desire to show the whole world what she was capable of doing. Too much attention was rarely a good thing.
“Will you call Crashbang up here if I agree to come with you without a fight?” she asked Rune. The whirling sparks drew her attention back to Skyfire’s hand, reminding her of a swarm of killer bees.
The Viking didn’t look impressed. “Or we could capture you now.”
“You’ll neve
r get a better opportunity to take me, and you know it. I’m sure the Covenant has informed you of my powers.”
What they gathered from my transition, anyway.
The hero hesitated before tapping the side of his horned helmet. “Team. Hold,” he said into his helmet headset.
When Skyfire’s head snapped around, the sparks in her palm flared. “You actually believe her?”
“Sarina Baumann is known to be an honest girl.” Rune lifted and pointed his ax at Dancer. “I don’t know why she ran away, but I was told she was very cooperative before she did.”
Dancer almost laughed. You’re confusing me with someone else.
“Besides, bringing her in peacefully is our priority,” the Swede reminded his cohort. “Athena’s protocol.”
Athena’s protocol? What the fuck? The Covenant heroine’s name made Dancer more suspicious than any of the previous talk had. Last she remembered, she’d been on the Covenant’s hit list. And now she was to be brought in peacefully? No, she wasn’t going to come along quietly, and she couldn’t ignore the fact that Crashbang was still somewhere out there going after her team.
“I want to see your whole team up here so I know you’re not lying,” she told Rune.
He sounded offended. “We’re heroes. We don’t lie.”
But you don’t care much about the truth, either, do you? You just believe what other people tell you about me.
After all, when this was over, she would get labeled a villain. Dancer had no doubt about it. She didn’t expect that Crybaby Sarina would take it well, but one could always hope.
“Fine, I’ll call them up,” Rune finally agreed when she didn’t reply. “But first I need to mark you with a rune.”
“Get your team up here first,” Dancer insisted, backing away. The pain she had ignored shot through her ankle as she moved.
Rune tapped his headset with an irritated flick of his fingers. “Checkmate, come back up to the roof. And bring Crashbang with you.”
Checkmate and Crashbang appeared on the roof a brief moment later. The teleporter shot an inquisitive glance to Rune, but Crashbang’s eyes were warily fixed on Dancer.
“See? We’re all here now,” Rune stated the obvious. “As I said, I have to mark you. It won’t hurt if you don’t move.”
He shifted his grip on the ax and brought his other hand up to his chest. His fingertips faintly glowed as they moved back and forth against his tunic, coding some sort of message. Whichever rune he was creating, Dancer knew that she couldn’t wait for him to finish and attach it to her. She had to get away. Now.
The easiest thing to do was to throw them off the building before Skyfire had a chance to vaporize her. She didn’t think the teleporter would keep hopping around if his legs were broken. But Sarina’s voice nagged at her from somewhere deep inside, pleading with her not to hurt the heroes.
Fine, Crybaby. You win.
There was only one way she could think of to disarm the heroes without killing them.
Water.
An instant after she willed the command in her mind, a section of the overcast sky ripped open, and a high-pressurized jet of thick, brown, foul-smelling fluid spewed down on the roof from the gaping hole.
Checkmate got the worst of the downpour that came out of nowhere and smelled suspiciously like sewage. The pungent smell was so powerful that Dancer took a step back.
That’s liquid shit, not water, she thought sourly as her cloak got soaked with back splash. Not exactly what I had in mind.
The other heroes evaded the worst of the downpour. The cluster of red embers were extinguished in Skyfire’s palm, and Rune shouted something incomprehensible, causing the rune on his ax blade to steam as the sludgy water made contact.
Get me down into the studio, Dancer willed herself, reaching up to pull her mask over her face again. Her power flared on cue, whisking her away to the wardrobe room beside the studio that the Nameless had stepped through minutes ago. The blind leap through spatial reality made her crash into a kind of countertop with a coffee machine on it. A sharp pain shot through her hip while her ankle screamed in protest. When she reeled in response, a yelp of surprise from behind prompted her to whirl around to find a guard in full body armor standing inside the wardrobe room door, one hand dropping to the gun on his belt.
Shit.
The guard shouted into his radio as he drew his gun.
Remembering the window she saw above the coffee maker, Dancer spun back around and pushed her physical presence into the sky beyond the glass. A millisecond later she was a hundred feet beyond the building’s brick exterior, suspended ten stories in mid-air, falling while her cloak flapped above her head.
She looked down without conscious thought, not giving herself the time to feel afraid. A red Ford was parked below her so she willed herself to exist there. Her power flared, sending her through spatial reality to appear on the sidewalk right next to the car. She landed on her knees so hard the impact sent a wave of agony through her legs.
Dancer cried out in pain even as she tucked and rolled to take cover against the car. She blinked away the annoying tears, forcing herself to focus. Someone shouted in the distance as the shrill whine of sirens closed in from all directions.
She gritted her teeth before pushing herself up from the rough pavement, and gasped in pain. Now that she was back on her feet, she was beside the main road in front of the NBE Britain building, about sixty-five feet from the main entrance. An alarming number of police cars were closing in on her, on their way to join the dozens of other cruisers already parked in the vicinity.
The ache in her legs told her that she was going to have difficulty walking. She wanted to reach out with her senses to locate the others, but she would be a sitting duck while her attention drifted between realities. An easy target for the buzzing police swarm.
As Dancer scanned the road for cover, her eyes landed on a large shop window filled with mannequins dressed up in women’s fashion. In there, she commanded.
She flickered away from the sidewalk and appeared in the shop’s front display, landing on her feet. A small glass bottle toppled to the floor and shattered, releasing a scent of spilled perfume into the air. A startled woman’s shriek came from somewhere behind her.
Piss off. I’m not here to steal your stuff.
Dancer wasted no time in looking around the shop. She hopped down from the shop window to take cover behind a rack of colorful summer skirts. When she was reasonably sure she wouldn’t be seen by any passersby, she allowed her senses to expand to take in the layout of the world in a three hundred foot radius around her. The startled shopkeeper’s lone life light shimmered behind her, backing away to the storage rooms at the back of the shop.
It took her a few more seconds to locate the EU heroes remaining on the rooftop of the NBE Britain building. The distinctive white glow of the life light she identified as the teleporter lay prone on the roof feebly flickering. The other Evolved life lights clustered around their fallen teammate, shielding him from anymore peril.
He won’t die over liquid shit, Dancer assured her other Self.
She bowed her head to refocus her search for her own teammates. They were close to 100 feet behind the NBE Britain building, moving down the back alley to the empty lot where they had parked their car, staggering along with excruciating slowness. Dancer didn’t detect any guards or police following them. Sunny’s power surged life light flared with the power of a miniature sun, outshining the others so much that it was hard for Dancer to do a headcount.
Be with them, Dancer instructed herself, focusing on a part of the alley with fewer grayish inanimate material blurs than the rest of the lane. She flickered out of existence once again, hoping she wouldn’t crush a teammate by landing on them.
She reappeared on the pavement about ten feet ahead of the group. Though she landed on her feet, her useless legs collapsed beneath her. She dropped to one knee, pressing a fist against her lips to keep from crying out.
“Sarina!” Jasper’s surprised voice called out.
She looked to see Sunny’s half-collapsed cloaked figure, propped up by a much larger one. Ace, probably. The boy’s drooped head lifelessly bobbed with almost each step as Tess, whose scraggly red hair had escaped her hood, murmured reassuring words in Sunny’s direction. Jasper’s gangly figure trailed behind Snow’s shorter one. Part of her was glad to see him safe, though her opinion of him hadn’t changed. The guy was a helpless puppy.
“That you, Wondergirl?” Ace called out.
Dancer rolled her eyes before pushing her mask up to reveal her snarling face. “Who the fuck else would it be?”
“Oh, it’s you,” Ace replied.
She brushed off his weirdness because she was in no mood to argue. She made an effort to stand, crying out in agony despite her best effort to keep her lips sealed. She couldn’t help but notice that Jasper didn’t approach her to help; he averted his eyes as if it pained him to look at her.
So now you’re backing off? She would have smirked at the irony if she wasn’t in so much pain.
It was Tess who came to help her to the car. “We all know you’re tough, girl, but it looks like you could use a little support.”
For once Dancer didn’t protest.
No one talked as they walked the rest of the way to the station wagon. When they reached the vehicle, Ace and Tess helped a barely conscious Sunny into a back seat before getting into the front of the station wagon and pulling off their masks.
Ace turned around in his seat, putting a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Can you still hide us, Sunny Boy?”
Sunny’s response was a low murmur, lost in the depths of his hood. “Yeah.”
“Hide the car. Okay, Sun?” Tess lulled. “Don’t worry about anything else.”
The boy weakly nodded.
Dancer glanced at Jasper as she squeezed her aching limbs into the seat beside him, behind Snow’s seat. He still didn’t look at her. He slumped against the brown leather seat, brooding silently, not bothering to take the mask off.
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