The partial collapse reveals an entrance to another much bigger public thoroughfare above and we fly through, Chamber hot on our six using honest-to-God rocket boots as random untrackable gunfire pings the air around us and Tessa gives a woof, acknowledging an impact, though she fends of my look of alarm with a teenagerly grimace.
In the chamber beyond, dust sits like nightfall on the desks and phones and monitors of the abandoned cult headquarters known world over as the world financial system. But we are not left to ponder this museum piece for long. A tidal wave of debris comes crashing towards us collecting every item of technology or furniture in its path as well as tons and tons of riven stone and earth and dirt as the lady herself makes an appearance somewhere immediately off to the edge of this scene.
We airborne ones are less vulnerable to the sideways avalanche, but it’s disorientating to see the world turn into a kinetic whirlwind of the mundane, a collage of deadly intent torn from the pages of some office supplies magazine. At the last moment before the attack fills the whole world between floor and roof in here, I remember my darkness control powers and desperately conjure a huge web of black force behind which Windsong and Chamber shelter while the storm passes.
The moment we are free I take in the aspects of daylight surrounding us, the roof of this wing now gone, open to the elements and the nonsensically whirling gulls in the chilly bleak day outside, and atop the throne of the landslide’s carnage stands a tall, statuesque figures with ropes of loose reddish hair and a mask that conceals few of her so recognizable features.
Titanium Girl.
*
SHE MAKES A fist and the wreckage around us writhes, the plastic components not within the spell of her power as the rocky ruins stab out of the debris around us like giant fingers threatening to cage us in. Shade appears from nowhere to tackle one pillar like a true linebacker, disintegrating the living column before it can reform under Earthsong’s control.
Nothing makes any sense to me. For a long moment, all that I can think is basic images and word associations understanding this woman is somehow my mother from a parallel universe that no longer exists, fused into the one in which I was the child of the woman (women) I call mother. And I know none of this explains what “Aunt Jane” is doing here, now clearly in a completely different persona than the one she was known either in the world of The Twelve or here.
Here?
The rumbling earth diverts my attention to imminent survival as the huge animate blocks curl and smash into the ground as we each dodge aside. Windsong starts tapping into the grey weather outside and already that wind builds under her command to a whistling pitch, but Shade and me are more direct-minded. Shade is a few bounds ahead already, vaulting up the rubble-strewn staircase to the top landing now open to the elements as rain starts cutting down and becoming freezing sleet and the six foot-tall woman before us in the dun and swirling dark green costume gestures again and the fist of some buried colossus cuts up through the substance of the stairs like a ghost train, collecting Shade and flinging her two or maybe three hundred feet into the sky with a noise like a tin can hit by a car. I can’t let myself get distracted by my comrade’s fate unless there’s a clear way I can help her and for all her resilience I know most the time Shade can look after herself just fine. Backing myself, I launch up and over this latest obstacle, the rubble tumbling clear as it is released from Earthsong’s control. The villainess gives a throaty laugh and skips away down the other side of the slope riding a wave of debris I can only follow by hurling myself into the air, re-entering internal dimness amid the flash of Windsong’s lightning strike coming too little and too late. I tail Earthsong into a huge library-like chamber, the roof up here no more than thirty feet above our head, but such is her command of the building’s stone skeleton that the architecture itself is under her control and the room comes slamming in on me and I blast randomly, wildly in her general direction hoping to halt the attack and I am about to be crushed by the walls and rows and rows of bookshelves crushing in on me when Chamber appears literally from nowhere and sucks me into his chest and teleports again.
We rematerialize on the roof directly above where we just were, and grateful as I may be, I allow myself a brief collapse upon the guano-spattered shingles to heave a single vomity sigh before pushing back lank hair and making myself go upright like the very earliest Man rising to his feet for the first time in some mythical Dawn of Creation back when everything was new and made sense.
“We have to press the attack –”
“Hey,” I say tiredly. “I know.”
I aim between my feet to unleash a light blast which I allow myself to fall through, birthed into the gloom of the rubble created by Earthsong’s collapsing library trick. I spy her on the far side of the grey waste maybe a hundred yards distant. Again she gestures and the ground leaps to her command, but it is only a distraction so she can slip away through a doorway miraculously etched into the exposed interior wall of the next upright wing of the rearmost surviving Stock Exchange building, state-of-the-art stockbroker offices fitted into the hitherto unyielding stonework of the famous financial district. Earthsong leaves destruction in her wake as she flees past a swarm of her machine gun-toting henchlings who advance on us opening fire to support her escape. I throw up random blobs of darkness which take a bullet or two, and then I go to ground, actually flying full force into crash landing to get to cover as the riddled offices are a write-off. I desperately miss being Zephyr and feel the first real trill of physical fear as the bullets chirp and eat the flimsy furnishings around me. I’m doing the plank keeping low and scan behind me to see Windsong curled in a similar fashion clutching one bleeding shoulder.
I scuttle across to her as the various goons advance, reload and triangulate, but they’re still yards off and my baby girl’s life’s blood spatters the Ikea furnishings reduced to their flat-packed state.
“Tessa! How bad is it?”
“You used my name,” she says. “I haven’t heard you say that since you left mom.”
“Honey, I didn’t leave your mother. What are you talking about? You’re hurt.”
“Dad . . . Jesus, there I said it. Get your head back in the game. I’ll be OK.”
She looks weak and teary, but the dozen-odd foot soldiers close in on us. I nod and rise in one languorous move to appear standing beside one of the gunmen whom I clasp by skull and jaw and kill in one easy movement. He’s still slipping from my grasp before I reach across him to unleash a solar flare attack in the face of the next two gunmen. They’ve barely started screaming before I vault and flip over in front of the farthest gunman just turning at my appearance, slamming the assault rifle from his grasp and then driving him twenty feet away with a forearm blast to the chest.
A zephyr of my daughter’s conjured wind blasts through and knocks down two more goons and gives me the chance to scoot forward and get in among a knot of three advancing gunmen. I am in the zone. These guys are in slow motion by comparison, though this is nothing like the speed at Zephyr’s command. I palm strike the first guy in the jaw, sending him snap-flipping away as I twist and turn back and heel-stomp the second woman’s in-step. She shrieks and goes down under my axe-like downwards elbow strike, the same fist reversing to take the third goon in the Kevlar’d ribcage, force sufficient to flip him 360-degrees a dozen yards away and disarming him in the process.
Bullets rake my position, but they’re cut short as Shade crashes down through the ceiling and grabs and then hurls the gunman like a vengeful creature possessed, a black-skinned demoness from some Hindu nightmare. I use the distraction of her arrival to vault over a particular angular chunk of wreckage, high kicking another goon in the visor, and then I carefully twist, throwing darkness into another two of these asswipes. It flattens them, and the one who gets up takes a devastating right cross from Shade as she strides back to me and I nervously scan the immediate horizon of this disaster scene and the earth rumbles again, though this time I’m not sur
e why. A couple of unscathed zealots scuttle away into the understorey created by Earthsong’s last attack and I forge past Shade a moment only to remember my daughter injured behind us.
“I can’t leave Tessa here,” I say.
I would say more, except the ground back the way we came bursts into a column of debris to form itself into a hulking brute wrought of granite and bedrock and marble flagstones and electrical cables and other junk caught in-between. Maybe twenty feet high at a stretch, the golem swivels with a noise like God’s pepper grinder and I feel a fluttering sinking feeling in my chest that kills the momentum for me. Shade checks my crestfallen sigh and kens the stone giant crunching his way towards us.
“What the fuck. . . .”
“Earthsong has to be nearby to control it,” I say and pull myself to my feet. “I’ll scout.”
Coward’s option be damned. I light into the air and open my powers full bore on the earth controller’s giant puppet. The light burst works like a laser to slice deep grooves into the golem’s exterior, but I may as well be pouring ketchup on the fucking thing. Down below, Shade valiantly charges the giant’s leg and the hulk hesitates a moment before finding or having its center of gravity found for it, and the simulacra rights itself and brings down one of its colossal fists on Shade and she astonishingly catches it in her two much smaller hands and wrestles the offending limb away. Chamber rockets in from another angle and opens with the shockwave and the thing shields Shade at the same time the vibrational blast topples it. Indeed, Chamber’s cannon seems the perfect antidote to Earthsong’s control of the ground, since the waves seem intent on pulverizing everything flat.
The roof is half torn away here and the broody skies have succumbed to Windsong’s temptation, the rain spattering down in fist-sized drops, the black clouds churning above us, lit from within by massive thunderheads which flash like the electrical impulses of a vast cosmic organism, the downpour its excretion, the birds and trash and building supplies swirling in the cyclonic conditions all part of the nascent ecosystem. From above the building I can see the gaping crater where the revered National Library used to sit and understand what made Earthsong’s creature’s bones so strong. Already we have devastated about three city blocks and I scan the east wing of the ACSX for sign of Earthsong or her minions and instead nearly miss the attack from my blind side as a muscular red shape blurs past, radiant heat giving me instant sunburn down one side of Holland’s fair face.
“Aw, just missed you, chickadee,” Infernus jeers.
He reverses on a dime, poised to shoot back like some flaming arrow as he allows his native radiant energy to boil over and manifest in long licking flames scintillating like ribbons on the infernal breeze. I flay my right hand wide and a huge sheet of darkstuff materializes between us and then collapses in on the mercenary villain, keeping his hands full burning bright enough to dispel my encloaking efforts and letting me focus on more pressing threats.
There are shouts from below and I see Tessa stumbling, clutching her wounded shoulder and running with two more Earthsong minions and the katana-wielding Ruse on her tail. I don’t hesitate in the least, abandoning my resistance to Earth’s gravity to plunge at the ground, landing behind the Asian girl with a percussive thump as my doubled-together fists knock her out cold. The closest of the gunmen swivels, gun in my face, and I lift a phosphor-burning hand and fuse his unshielded eyes to carbon, kneeing the screaming goon in the balls as the other one scarpers.
I let the militia go so I can make sure Ruse is unconscious, but then Killswitch hurtles past, followed through the wreckage by Raveness, who gets one whiff of me and grins and bounds towards me, except she’s barely moving again when lightning peals out of the storm-riven clouds to illuminate her like the wrath of God or Thunor or Perun. I take in my daughter Windsong thirty feet ahead still clutching herself and looking pained, halfway up an incline of rubble and broken statues, the elements under her one-handed command, and then the sixty-foot structural wall behind her explodes and Shade comes tumbling through, pursued by the lumbering behemoth rudely fashioned out of the surrounding civic scenery by Earthsong.
I think I hear gunfire over the screaming wind, the walls of another part of the Stock Exchange sheltering us from the worst of the furious elements as Chamber N-doors in and puts Raveness down point-blank as she struggles to rise from nature’s electrocution.
The stonework monolith barrels down the slope of wreckage towards us and I see Earthsong rides its shoulder like some uncomfortable sports car model masquerading as a pageant queen. Shade picks herself out of the rubble at the elemental’s feet and runs before it, but she misses a step as the ground-floor foundations buckle and heave at Earthsong’s command, the stonework monster surfing the carnage and immune to the dirt and dusty chaos. Shade narrowly escapes getting buried beneath a few dozen tons and rolls free with her customary clattering noise, any lesser debris just more collateral damage in her wake.
I stir the mix by focusing my light powers on the middle of Earthsong’s oncoming attack. The golem’s granite and marble barely scorches, the rock no more than engraved by my most tightly-focused beam.
I’m saved from any other market research as Killswitch blind-sides me. Pain lances through my ribs as I’m cast aside and Chamber’s concussive blasts fill my ears the next few seconds as I roll backwards, blind through the chaos and painfully over the rubble, getting back on my feet as the armored hero gives ground until we are level and Shade once again grapples with the creature Earthsong has summoned to crush as all flat.
“Your daughter was right. We needed to attack in force,” Chamber says.
I stare at him sideways and agape and wonder whether this is really the time or place for an argument.
“Get reinforcements,” I say.
Chamber inclines his head and nods once, then the black trapdoor opens in his chest and I have to avert my gaze anyway as Shade tears the legs from beneath Earthsong’s golem and I leap into the air and weave around another huge fist that springs up seemingly readymade from the ground to descend in a wrecking-ball arc which misses me and narrowly does the same for Shade. Amid the crunch of its impact I scan back at the ground where Chamber stood before and then cast my eyes across the storm-crowded rooftops of this devastated section of the financial district and descend, wreathing myself in a banner of darkness.
Zephyr 23.6 “Blast Registers”
IT IS ALL we can do to evade Earthsong’s minions as Shade and I stay in the air under chase by Killswitch and Infernus. Earthsong shoots huge boulders at us which she delivers from the ground like some perverse shamanic midwife, each new crater and its corresponding destruction adding to the warlike scenes. Somewhere off behind us a gas main detonates like a small bomb and an abandoned postal van lifts into the air as, from hiding, my wounded daughter conjures lightning from the heavens to strafe Earthsong’s position.
Aerial combat can easily fall into a vortex among evenly matched foes as the fighters adapt into concentric circuits to avoid taking combat into the open. And there are certain tactics – like the one I pull now – which I’ve deployed to greater success in past years thanks to my Zephyr body’s juiced reflexes. Now when I drop out of my sharp banking, I collide with Infernus more like something thrown out of a bus window than a graceful aerial crime-fighter. I try my best to keep myself sharp, heels and elbows in force to good effect as I slam my right hook into the red-skinned flyer’s face. He twists, body one muscular red ribbon as he throws a fist into my side that gives me nowhere to go, the cringe of broken bones in my ribcage indescribable and unforgettable in one fell swoop.
He thinks he has me. A grin that would be handsome were it not so literally devilish crosses his face as he moves right into the hand I plant over his startled grimace. I squint with the violence of my will and darkness explodes from his skull via eyes, ears and mouth.
Infernus drops practically headless to the ground as Chamber folds into being beneath me, beside the newly-minted corpse,
a half-dozen reinforcements spilling from the armored hero’s glory hole: Paragon, Lynx, Manticore, Night Angel and Nocturne.
Just a little further up the slope caged within the ribs of yet another devastated civic building, Earthsong throws up a wall of studded stone she then rams into the late arrivals, and then it is well and truly on, the earth shaking, a nearby wall giving way amid all the excitement as Paragon is flung one way and Lynx the other. A half-dozen lurking militia zealots bravely wager in, one woman going full Braveheart with her top off and a suicide run with a 9mm handgun, her death wish fulfilled when Earthsong’s now-three-legged monster accidentally backs over her in the rush to swing its giant appendages at Shade and I still flitting about in the air.
Also among the bad guys is a weird-looking cloaked chick with what looks like an fish bowl on her head sparing only her mouth and chin. With her is the yellow-skinned Fallout, big boots crunching on rubble as he wades in to tackle Night Angel, broad grin revealing teeth like white pickets in a head the size and general expression of a Jack O’Lantern. Steam oozes off the hulking brute made worse for the rain. I’m pretty sure Fallout’s left a who’s who of former teammates terminally ill, so his mere presence is enough to undermine my confidence in our chances of victory.
“Focus on Fallout!” I yell.
The cyclonic winds whipping around us don’t exactly help my Napoleon routine and I resort to waving to get Nocturne’s attention so she can relay my directions telepathically.
“Hit Fallout with everything you’ve got,” I think-yell at her.
He’s immune to my psychic attack, she emotes. It’s like he has no brain.
“Jesus Christ,” I shriek into the merciless wind as thunder booms off-set and I nearly fly right into the path of another stone fist.
Falling like a giant, ungainly moth, I land in my heels beneath the sheltering bulk of Earthsong’s behemoth as Lynx bounds by and the smell of Killswitch’s power blast registers to my nose. I dearly wish for the strength to overthrow the giant construct, though his mistress is the only reasonable target. The ground unravels around my booted feet, submerged fiber-optic cables and centuries-old plumbing oozing up out of the ground like from some wakening giant’s colon, the earth turning itself inside-out in its hunger to birth its secrets, proactive archaeology in the violent regurgitation as I glimpse Earthsong moving just out of direct line of site beyond the moving stumps of the earth-shaking creature towering over us as it maneuvers focused on its own particular battles under the villainess’s control, a noise like hammering sheet metal caroming counter-time to another flash as lighting stakes its claim on the Earth and one of the gun-toting guards shrieks his last.
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