by John McCrae
If we died, we were dead, no question, unless I gave consideration to Alexandria’s apparent resurrection. But an injury, no matter how grave? That was something that could be remedied, it lent a feeling of invulnerability, an image of invulnerability. So we continued being reckless, and we would continue to be reckless until something finally killed us off.
Was there a way to break that pattern? Could I afford to? My ability to throw myself headlong into a dangerous situation was part of the reason for my success.
I looped back towards the main confrontation, finding the thinkers I’d helped off the rooftop. Some were moving to assist allies, others were fleeing. One pocket, at a glance, seemed to be trying to form a second command center.
I moved towards the cluster of them.
Two Indian capes, one Caucasian.
“English?” I asked.
“Yes,” the Caucasian said. “Just me.”
“Trying to enlist help. Names and powers?”
“Kismet, balance thinker,” the Caucasian said. He wore a white robe with a hard, faceless mask that had only slits for the eyes.
“And the other two?”
“As far as I can tell, Fathom and Particulate. Best translations I can give. My Punjabi isn’t strong.”
“Their powers?” I asked, with a restrained patience.
“Displaces people or things to another dimension, filled with water, brings them back. Particulate’s a dust tinker.”
What the fuck is a dust tinker? Or a balance thinker, for that matter?“Okay, I’m going to find others,” I said.
“Wait, what’s the project?”
“A mission. Finding whatever it is that Behemoth wants.”
“We’ve got others on that already.”
“Nobody’s reported back,” I said, “Or at least, nobody’s formed a defensive line or put safeguards in place.”
“You’re sure he’s after something? They’ve attacked cities just to kill people before, and this is a dense population center.”
“He’s after something,” I said. “He’s got a direction, and a friend told me he’s targeting a point beyond where the heroes are searching.”
“We’ll help look,” he said. He rattled off a few lines of Punjabi to the capes in his company. One of them, Particulate, I took it, removed what looked like a fat smart phone from one pocket. He peered at it. Some sort of scanning instrument.
“Hey, either of you have a phone?” I asked.
Kismet nodded, then handed me the phone.
“Can I keep it?” I asked. “I can get it back to you later, probably.”
He made an exasperated noise. “I thought you wanted to make a call, not keep it.”
“It’d be for a good cause,” I promised.
He sighed, “Take it, then.”
I wound silk around it and then had bugs carry it off in Tattletale’s direction.
“You think it’s a cache of nuclear weapons, or what?” Kismet asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Go look, towards India Gate. I’m going to round up others.”
“On it,” he said, before speaking another line of Punjabi. “And kid?”
I hesitated in mid-air.
“Thanks, for the escape route from that rooftop.”
I didn’t respond, taking off. Rude, maybe, but taking the time to respond was stupid, when there was this much going on. Making me wait while he thanked me was similarly dumb.
I waited until the phone reached Tattletale’s hands, then drew closer to the fighting, and the capes who were closer to the battlefront. When Rime was in my power’s reach, I contacted her.
“Tattletale thinks she has a lead on Behemoth’s objective. Mobilizing thinkers to find it.“
I was nearly drowned out by the chaos of the fighting. Behemoth was standing partially inside a building, and it was blazing, pieces of it falling down with every heavy impact the heroes delivered.
“Say again,” she said.
I repeated myself, speaking the words aloud under my breath, to gauge the proper way to form the sounds with my swarm.
“Good,” she said. And that was all. She was fighting again, trying to freeze the building so Behemoth was encased.
I found two more thinkers and gave them directions. We’d search the area beyond the Rajpath.
Behemoth generated a shockwave, and I could sense the heroes reacting to it. The only cover here was cover heroes like Golem were creating, and the concussive shock traveled through the air, knocking capes off their feet or out of the air.
I grit my teeth and pressed my back to a building as it rolled past me, fell over at the impact.
The Endbringer strode forward, using the momentary break in the attack to cover more ground. Unfortunate capes who’d been pushing their luck were left trying to run for cover, only to be caught within his kill aura.
Rachel rescued one or two, though the heroes might have debated the nature of the rescue. Her dogs seized people in their mouths, running, dropping them at a safe distance, before moving in to retrieve more people. Some of the rescued individuals were left slowly climbing to their feet, no doubt bruised from the dog’s teeth and dripping with drool.
One dog, a person in its mouth, was struck by a bolt of lightning. It fell, sprawling, then slowly climbed to its feet. I could tell with my bugs, that the person in its mouth was no longer alive. Still, it dutifully carried the body to safety and deposited it on the ground, before limping back towards the battle.
I belatedly remembered to pay attention to my team. Tecton was busy erecting barriers, raising the earth in shelves with his piledrivers. Annex was reinforcing everything, fixing other people’s work, providing loose cover for ranged heroes to hide behind, and delaying collapses. Powerful.
Grace, using her strength to carry the wounded. Wanton was venturing into more dangerous ground with the safety of his telekinetic body, returning to human form to help the wounded and trapped, then retreating with the same form, moving on to the next person. Cuff was helping a tinker.
Golem was forming barriers, limiting the movements of Behemoth’s legs, and shoring up the building the Endbringer was wading through.
The constructions weren’t doing enough. We needed to change tactics now that this wasn’t working, sort of like the Endbringers did. If not constructions, then maybe destructions.
“Tecton, pits. Have Annex cover them,” I ordered. “Think controlled collapses.“
I couldn’t make out his response. I hoped that didn’t mean he couldn’t make out my statements.
“You’re in charge until I get back. I have other orders,” I added.
I returned to collecting thinkers and other stray capes, taking only a minute before heading for our destination.
There were heroes and PRT officials at India Gate, and lined up across the Rajpath. A handful of thinkers and tinkers were here. Not ones I’d sent, but official ones, directed to scan and search for whatever Behemoth might be after.
“Search north,” I communicated, sending moths and butterflies to pass on the message. I didn’t wait to see if they’d listen. I kept moving.
I zig-zagged across the landscape, scanning every surface with my bugs, as the fighting continued in the distance. Behemoth wasn’t quite visible from this vantage point, but the cloud of smoke and the lightning suggested it wouldn’t be long.
How many capes had he killed? How many more would die?
I crossed paths with Particulate, who had apparently been filled in by Kismet. He handed me one of the scanning devices, and I took off.
Damn tinkers. Their stuff was making life so complicated, now. Too many things to keep track of. Antigrav, propulsion, sensing things with my bugs, paying attention to what I was sensing with my bugs, coordinating people, with sectors for them to cover, and now tracking the stuff with the scanner.
Not that it was impossible. I was managing everything but the bugspeak without a problem.
The scanner showed me only gibberish at
first, with sixteen bars divided into eight individual pieces, each of which could be any number of colors. Each rose and fell as I moved and as I turned the scanner. Moving past Particulate, I noted that the rise and fall of the bars was linked to my relation to his scanner.
We were triangulating. Or did we not have a third? Kismet was somewhere out of my range, at present, as was Fathom, so I couldn’t be sure.
The bars rose as I pointed in Behemoth’s direction, a mix of blues, greens, yellows and reds. Was it tracking energy?
I turned away, and found another bump, almost all white, the rest yellow. Nothing tracked in any significant quantity at Behemoth’s location.
It was something. I circled around until the bars reached a peak, every single one of them topping the charts.
Nothing. I used my power, but I couldn’t find anything more complex than a desktop computer.
Then it adjusted. The bars each dropped until they were only four or five high.
Was Particulate doing something on his end?
It dawned on me, as I tried to narrow down our target, that this was big. Something that topped the basic readings just by being within a mile of it.
And I found it. My bugs could sense an underground chamber. Concrete walls, impenetrable to earthworms, and no obvious entrance. I looped back to communicate to the others. The English-speakers, anyways.
Then, as the faster and the closer thinkers caught up with me, I approached the site.
Particulate and Kismet joined me.
This underground chamber was different from the one I’d seen closer to Behemoth. There was no ramp leading up, nothing to suggest an elevator.
“Not sure how to get through,” I said.
“Smart of them,” Kismet said.
“I know, but it doesn’t help us.”
Kismet said something to Particulate, and the tinker drew a gun from a holster with an excess of care.
Then he fired. There was no beam, no projectile. There was only a corridor, three feet across, carved into the earth, and plumes of dust.
We backed away, Kismet coughing as he caught some of it. Particulate, a tinker with a narrow, overlong bald head, said something in his language, almost musical, humorous. He glanced at me, his eyes covered by goggles, his mouth covered by a fabric that hugged every wrinkle of his lower face, as though it were a micron thick, and smiled. I could see the contours of his teeth and gums behind the strange fabric.
“Battery,” Kismet said, stopping to cough, “is dead. Three shots. Tried two on Behemoth, didn’t work. He likes that it was useful.”
“Damn,” I said. If they had worked…
I didn’t waste any more time. I handed them a length of cord, then disappeared down the hole. My feet skidded on the smooth, almost glassy surface, but my flight pack gave me some lift.
Now that I was lower, I was free to feel out the surroundings, and mentally map out the entire complex. It took time, but the others were slow to descend to the lower corridor.
Was there a whole undercity beneath New Delhi? Some kind of subterranean realm of corridors and rooms, large and small? Did the good and bad ‘cold’ capes accidentally dig into each other’s corridors at any point? Collapse sections of each other’s undercity?
Geez, it wasn’t like the city wasn’t large enough already.
I was drawing a mental picture as my bugs spread out. There were people here, but they weren’t doing anything special. Sleeping, cooking, fucking, smoking some sort of pipes… no.
And in the midst of it, as Particulate adjusted his tracking device to further narrow the sensitivity, we closed in on a void. A part of the underground chamber my bugs couldn’t touch.
Particulate said something, arching his eyebrows as he looked down at the scanner.
“A lot of energy,” Kismet translated.
“How much is a lot?” I asked.
Particulate spoke without Kismet translating for him.
“More than Behemoth has given off during his entire stay in New Delhi,” Kismet said.
I stared at the little scanner and the white bars. “There’s no way in, as far as I can tell.”
“There wasn’t a way into this base either,” Kismet said. “Maybe they have a way to enter and leave.”
“Okay,” I said. “We know where Behemoth’s target is, even if we don’t know what it is. Let’s retreat, communicate with-”
But Particulate was already moving, tampering with the gun that had created the corridor.
“Stop him!” I said.
Kismet reached over, but Particulate was already tossing the gun to the point where the floor met the wall.
It started flashing rapidly, increasingly bright, and Particulate bolted. It was almost comical, as though he’d been taught to run by a textbook. His hands were out flat at his sides, his arms and legs bent at rigid right angles as he sprinted away, almost robotic in the movements. He shouted something in Punjabi.
Almost comical. When you saw a bomb disposal team running, as the joke went, you ran to keep up. The same applied to any tinker and a device that flashed like that. Kismet and I ran after him.
The gun exploded, silently, without fire or light or electricity. There was only a roughly spherical opening carved into the area. It was wide enough to lead into the tunnel above and below us, and had sheared through the five or six feet of solid earth that separated each floor. At the far end, I could see where it had cut into a corner of the previously inaccessible room.
We approached, and I could see a cape inside, or a parahuman, if ‘cape’ applied. He was disheveled, with dark circles under his eyes, his skin pale, his beard and hair bedraggled. His clothing, by contrast, was opulent, clean: a rich indigo robe, a sapphire set in a gold chain, a gold chain for a belt, and a golden sash.
And above him, the energy. There were two golden discs, and something almost alive seemed to crackle between them.
“It’s Phir Sē,” Kismet said, backing away.
“The glowing thing in the air or the person?” I asked.
“The person.”
“Who’s Phir See?” I asked.
“Sē. He’s one of the reasons the American girl’s PRT can exist,” Kismet said. “When they talk about disbanding it, the PRT only reminds them that monsters like this lurk elsewhere.”
The man slowly turned to face us. He wasn’t an old man, but he moved like one.
“Monsters?” I asked. “I’ve fought monsters. Just tell me what kind of monster he is.”
“The kind that is too smart for all of our good,” Kismet said. He’d frozen the moment the man set eyes on him.
Phir Sē spoke, “That is compliment? Yes?”
“Yes,” Kismet said.
“Then I thank you. Girl? I recognize you from American television.”
“I go by Weaver, now.”
“I do remember. You had much power. You turned it down.”
“It wasn’t for me,” I said.
“You are more comfortable where you are now?” he asked.
“Now as in here, in this fight, or as a hero?”
“Either. Both,” he stated.
“Honestly? No on both counts. I’m still figuring it out.”
He inclined his head. “This is to be respected. Making hard choice. The challenge of the young adult. To find identity.”
“Thank you,” I said, still wary. Everything about Kismet’s reaction was telling me this guy was to be feared, so I had to step carefully. “Can I ask what that thing is?”
“A weapon,” he said. “A… how do you Americans say it? Time bomb? Only this is joke.”
“He makes portals,” Kismet said. “Using them, he can send things back in time. Something goes in portal B, comes out of portal A a few minutes earlier. Or the other way around.”
“Or, as I discover, I make loop,” Phir Sē said. “Weaponize. Simple light, captured in one moment, redoubled many times over. I move gate, and that light will pour forth and clean.”
; I could remember what Particulate had said. More energy than Behemoth had created since arriving in this city. Only this would be directed at a single target.
“Clean isn’t the word you want,” I said. ”Scour?”
“Scour,” Phir Sē said, he inclined his head again. ”I thank you.”
“Behemoth wants his hands on it,” I said. “On that energy.”
“I want this on Behemoth. Do great harm. Even kill.”
“Shit,” Kismet said. He backed away a step. “This is-”
“Stay,” Phir Sē said. His voice was quiet, but it was clear he expected to be heeded.
Kismet glanced up at the glow, then turned to run.
He wasn’t even turned all the way around when there was a flicker. A man appeared just in front of Kismet. A teleporter.
And his forearm extended through Kismet’s chest.
Then he flickered, like a bad lightbulb, and he was gone, leaving only a gaping hole where the arm had been. Kismet collapsed, dead.
A teleporter who can bypass the Manton effect.
“Stay,” Phir Sē told us, again. He hadn’t even flinched, but the space between his bushy eyebrows furrowed as he stared down at Kismet.
My heart thudded in my throat as I glanced down at the body.
Particulate said something, spitting the word.
Phir Sē said something in Punjabi, then turned to me, “Is rude, to speak in language you cannot understand. He call me evil, so I not speak to him further. But you understand, do you not? You know what form this war take? The danger we all face, from monsters like that, from others?”
“I don’t think many top the Endbringers,” I said.
“Maybe not so. Maybe. But you have tried being cold. Killing the enemy, yes? Because ruthless is only way to win this war.”
“I met some people. I think they were your adversaries,” I said. “Glowing eyes? Reflective? Like mirrors?”
“Yes. Enemy. They petty evils that walk this city. Organize crime. Slave, prostitute, murder, mercenary. My side, we root out corrupt. Ruthless. Government prefer them to us. Paint us as evil, pay them to carry on. But you know what this is like, yes?”