A spray of broken glass was falling around me, hitting the concrete like raindrops. It was too close to the first time I saw Supercollider, when he exploded in through the window. Then, as now, shards flew past me, narrowly missing my face. That time, the glass had been the long shards of windowpane. This time, it was the small, squarish bits of safety glass.
I stared at the van when it stopped scraping backward and rocked to a halt. There were muffled screams from inside the Draft’s now destroyed vehicle. I saw one of the doors wrenched open and a man began to drag himself free, blood on his face.
There was no movement from the hideously folded metal that Quantum’s body had disappeared into.
Then Supercollider was in front of me. He was breathing hard through his nose, a weird, stentorian whistle. I could smell him; his sweat was never dirty, just endless adrenaline and salt. It felt like I had all the time in the world before turning to face him.
He smiled then. It was the most chilling thing I had ever seen, that tiny smile. Not his practiced, cavalier grin from all the promo shots. It was small and broken, arranged by muscles that had mostly atrophied.
“You can’t stop me,” he said simply. His words were certain as gravity, as the Earth circling the sun. He put one hand on my shoulder, holding me steady. He was not trying to hurt me, but I was trapped by that grip as sure as an insect with a pin through its thorax.
“I understand,” he continued quietly. “I do. You must love him very much.”
I swallowed. There was a narrative in his head that he planned to execute perfectly, regardless of what I said or did. I let it happen. It gave me time to think, in those last moments I was ever going to have.
How completely stupid I had been, I realized, to think it was ever going to be possible to confront him directly. Even with his powers at his weakest, he was capable of pulverizing flesh beyond recognition. How utterly foolish to believe Quantum Entanglement, whom he’d kept under his thumb for the better part of twelve years, stood a chance in direct confrontation. How could I think I was going to anything other than my death.
“People become selfish when they want to die,” he was saying. “They jump off buildings and don’t think of who’ll see them smash onto the pavement. They step in front of transport trucks and force drivers to hit them. They pull guns on police officers and take aim. They don’t care who they hurt.
“But you.” He shook his head. “You enjoy it. I can’t fathom how many people you took pleasure in destroying.”
I knew the answer, down to the lifehour. I let the number slide through my mind one last time, made my peace with it. “Just you,” I said.
He drew back his fist. I closed my eyes.
I felt him shift his weight to throw the punch, but then something was wrong. His momentum was thrown off, dissolved and dissipated. He made an awful, frustrated sound in his throat as he staggered.
I opened my eyes and took a gasping, gawky step back, sucking air into my lungs when it suddenly hit me I’d been holding my breath.
One hand was still cocked behind him, in the precise position he’d drawn it back. But it was pinned there; he couldn’t release the blow he’d drawn. Instead he was standing weirdly in front of and below his own fist at the most awkward angle, tugging at his arm with his free hand.
I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck and an eerie pull in my stomach.
With a last grunt of frustration, Supercollider looked over my shoulder, past me. I felt the air shiver and rearrange itself behind me, and I followed his gaze.
The demolished Draft van seemed to be turning inside out. The torn metal pulsing and then undulating outward, like the time lapse of a flower blooming. Then Quantum Entanglement pulled herself out, lifting her body from the wreckage with a combination of magic and rage.
Her face was extraordinary. She was Grendel’s mother; she was vengeance incarnate. If she’d had any doubt about what she was doing haunting the edges of her actions, all of that was burned up now. Supercollider had tried to kill her; a direct blow like that was a death sentence. If she hadn’t used her powers out of sheer reflex she would have been smashed to pieces.
Supercollider snarled, then turned back to his trapped arm and gave it one more half-hearted yank. Then he dropped his shoulders as much as he could and hung his head. He chuckled.
“I should have known. How could I have known? But I should have.” He was talking mostly to himself. Then, he lowered his voice slightly. “You cunt.”
I walked backward until I was just behind Quantum’s right shoulder. She seemed to disturb the world around her, a strange, slipping sensation when I was near her, but I felt much safer there than being between the two of them. I stared at her a moment, trying to reorder my brain into believing she was still alive. That we were both still alive.
My mouth felt like it was full of ashes and my bloodstream a cocktail of every panic hormone, but I found my voice somehow.
“That’s no way to address your better,” I said.
“My better.” He retched the word. He yanked on his arm again and this time she released the tiny force field trapping his fist, let him succeed. He was not ready for it and the sudden change in momentum threw his balance; he fell. I laughed.
He scrambled to his feet and took a wide, aggressive stance, trying to reclaim some dignity. “How could you do this? How could you betray everything we stood for?”
“You didn’t stand for much,” she said. Her voice was absolute poison.
“My greatest folly was trusting you. I gave you so much and this is how you repay me—”
I hated how he was talking to her.
“Oh my god, shut up,” I said. “You know perfectly well you held her back.”
His face went ugly, and he stared at me. “Let me do this, Quantum. Let me take her out. It won’t set anything right, but we can clear the slate. We can part ways as peers instead of enemies.”
“You’ve never considered me a peer,” she said. “I highly doubt you’re going to start now.”
“So this is your decision. This is all it took to send you over the edge to evil, a hair’s breadth from the abyss this whole—”
“I can’t handle this melodrama,” I said. “Let us take Leviathan and go.”
His face contorted, and he charged us, throwing his invulnerable body forward like a bullet train. He would have smashed us both in that moment. It was almost a relief to see him finally embrace the fact he was willing to kill us.
Quantum caught him with a force field. It wasn’t like he hit a wall. No, it was more like he hit water from a great height. He broke its surface, but a strange kind of viscosity caught him. The world seemed to stretch around him for the smallest moment before his forward momentum was reversed, and she threw him backward.
Two of the other vehicles that had led us into the Dovecote compound were parked behind him, in front of the entrance to the security gate. His body hit both of them, unevenly, sending one spinning into the guard shack with an awful metal-on-metal squeal. His body smashed into the other and sent it flying backward with him through the security gate and into the inner courtyard. It was a rather pleasant parallel, I thought.
The heavy chain-link shredded and tore like wet wax paper, coils of razor wire wailing awfully as they were severed.
There’s your hole, Keller, I thought.
The armored van scraped to a halt just in front of the second wall and gate, this one made of concrete. It had folded around Supercollider completely, both halves of the van bent toward each other and enveloping him. The metal had twisted together so that the site of the impact looked distressingly like a steel orifice.
It was eerily still. I felt frozen in place, trying to will the vehicle into staying still forever. I wanted him to be simply dead, like an ordinary person. Even though I knew it was impossible, for a moment, I wished.
Quantum, much more practically, strode toward the van before it had completely stopped rattling. I shook myself and followe
d, awkwardly arranging my comm back into my ear.
I was immediately greeted by Keller hollering, even before it was fully settled in place. “—now, we should move now, Auditor, we should—”
“No, stay put until this place is blasted open. It’s going to get a lot uglier before I want any of the Meat deployed.”
I listened to him curse as Quantum drew up short and I almost crashed into her back. The wreckage was starting to move again, a terrible rocking wriggle. The twisted armored panels rippled before being torn open, Supercollider furiously rending his way out. I wondered how much blood and bone of those Draft members inside was also being mangled in his effort to get out. I watched as his hands left awful claw marks on the van’s body. He looked like something being born, or else summoned, slithering with wretched awkwardness out of the crash.
Quantum was on him before he could stand, trapping his feet to the ground, causing him to pitch forward violently. He would have fallen on his face if she hadn’t shoved him backward, lobbing a force bubble contemptuously at his chest. He snarled and lunged at her. She almost absently avoided him, and responded by pinning him down more securely, phase-shifting his feet and calves down into the pavement and then leaving him there, submerged. He spat obscenities as he freed himself, ripping out a huge chunk of the concrete in the process.
I was riveted, watching Quantum fight for the first time. I’d seen her perform support: defending her teammates, rescuing hostages, gracefully dodging attacks, and redirecting the flow of a battle’s energy. But that’s clearly all it ever was: performance. I’d never seen her go to the wall. On paper her powers seemed ill-suited to offense, all force fields and shifting through matter. In practice, she was capable of using them viciously to frustrate, smother, and entirely overwhelm.
She was difficult to predict because she wasn’t trying to wound, but exhaust. She repeatedly turned Supercollider’s momentum against him, deflecting his blows so that instead of crashing into her he went careening into a reinforced concrete wall, or falling hard. She would block or surround other swings so that his limbs were temporarily trapped. She’d sink his nearly indestructible body into the walls or ground, forcing him to gouge out hunks of earth or asphalt to free himself.
He was still very dangerous. The concentration required to create and maintain the force fields, to sink matter into matter, was immense, and she was working so fast it was difficult to follow. More than once, he got his hands on her, and it was only by phasing out and through his grip that she narrowly escaped him crushing her.
Once, she sank her own leg into a wall along with Supercollider; he was trapped up to his torso, but there was a terrible moment when she went to move back smoothly and found herself tethered. She fell badly, crashing to her one free knee and scraping it bloody. For a moment she lost her control over the small circular force bubbles she had wrapped around his hands. He dug into the concrete wall itself, searching for purchase on her leg, for the flesh inside the masonry, and it seemed sheer luck she was able to sink farther into the wall and away from him before reemerging intact, shielding herself while Supercollider tore more chunks out of Dovecote’s exterior walls.
Supercollider had a great deal in common with a diamond: aesthetically tacky; value artificially ascribed by corporate greed; cultural significance vastly overinflated; and incredibly hard to damage. I’d theorized that the only thing really capable of hurting him would be himself, the way that diamond was used to cut diamond.
Quantum was proving me right. She waited until he was struggling to keep his hands up, like a boxer deep in the late rounds of a title fight. Then she backed off, just a little bit, so I could have a go at him.
I opened my comm channel so that everyone on my team could hear, and tore into him.
Channeling my most disgusted and haughty voice, I told him how pathetic he was, how worthless. How false and feeble his artificial moral code was, and how now everyone knew. I told him he was empty and useless and impotent, until rage gave him a second wind. He turned, stopped trying to attack Quantum, and started going for me.
It was like taunting a vicious animal on the end of a long chain, standing just outside of its reach. I had to trust that chain would hold and snap tight an inch before his fists reached my face. It was impossible not to flinch and grit my teeth, but I managed to stay in place while he slammed into a force field instead of dashing my brains out with a headbutt.
My drawing his attention gave Quantum the tiny space she needed to really work. Now that she was not using every iota of concentration to keep herself alive, she could do worse to him. She threw up more shields to protect me as he flailed impotently, slamming his fists into the suddenly solid air over and over again. Then she focused a smaller force field around his lead leg as he surged forward. Instead of sinking his leg into the ground this time, she simply held him there. She threw more focus, more energy, into the fields around the thickness of his calf. After a moment it became harder to look at his leg directly. The air around it was thick and unctuous, glistening weirdly.
He slowed, then stopped attacking.
“What are you doing?” he panted. There were stress tremors in his arms and his swooping blond hair was plastered down with sweat.
Quantum was shaking as well, tensed and concentrating. She gritted her teeth and I became aware of a weird hum that seemed to be issuing both from the force fields around Supercollider’s leg and also from within my own head.
“Quantum?” He dropped his hands completely, let his fists fall open. His voice was suddenly plaintive, placating.
She was talking to herself, mumbling quietly. I could make out every eighth word or so. Most of what I heard was vicious cursing.
“Quantum?”
I didn’t know his voice could sound that small.
It happened all at once. Whatever Quantum was fighting against—the preternatural tensile strength of Supercollider’s body, the limits of her own abilities, some internal checks holding her back, or a combination of all three—finally gave out. Supercollider’s left leg spasmed in the grip of the layers of force fields, then bent, doubled over, and folded in on itself. Flesh sunk into flesh, sinew twisted and knotted, the porous calcium of bone braided through. She’d focused the fold in the middle of his calf, so his heel ended up bubbling out and through his kneecap, the toes pushed out through the back of his knee.
She let go with a gasp, putting a hand to her stomach. She drew in two huge lungfuls of air, gagging on the exhalations. I moved toward her instinctively to help and she waved me away, staggering. The agony of her exertion was too much to bear being touched, I realized.
Supercollider had fallen to his good knee, clutching at the thick, bulbous stump of his leg. His costume was torn away in places but I saw, to my horror, was also woven into and between the flesh where it had fused.
“What the fuck is happening out there, my god, Auditor—” Keller was losing his mind over the comm.
“Shut up.”
“What?”
“She phased him. Into himself. Shut up.”
“Oh. Jesus.”
I stopped listening to Keller after that and just stared. That it was bloodless somehow made it worse. Supercollider was touching his own body in a kind of absent, horrified wonder, as though unable to believe that the limb, buckled and unrecognizable, was his anymore. He’d been able to pull himself free of metal and concrete because he was harder, stronger, more resilient than those materials, but couldn’t free himself from the moors of his own flesh. He edged his fingers as far as he could into one of the folds, where his costume had been caught between and under his skin, and gave an exploratory tug.
It was then that he screamed for the first time. It was a weird, gulping shriek that seemed to surprise him as much as it horrified me. He tugged awfully at the places his flesh was most clumsily knitted, as though it were a mistake he could undo with force, like kicking a recalcitrant old television. There was a kind of creaking noise as he tried to pry
the folded halves of his leg apart that made my stomach contract.
“Oh god, don’t do that, please stop,” I said, too quietly for him to possibly hear over the mewling he was making and the groans issuing from the strain he was placing on his supposedly invulnerable body.
As he moaned, Quantum recovered. She had been bent double for a few moments. Now, though, she pulled herself upright.
“Did you know you could do that?” I asked her.
She was quiet so long I wondered if she heard me. Then she said, “This is the first time I did it on purpose.”
“Ask him if he can wiggle his toes,” Keller said over the comm.
I audibly gagged. “You’re fucking disgusting.”
Supercollider let out a wet moan at my words and I realized he thought I was talking about him. I decided not to correct the error.
He pulled at the halves of his leg a few more times, trying to ease and then jerk the folded flesh apart. When he failed again, he looked wildly up at Quantum.
“Put it back,” he said. There was spit on his chin. “Fix it, fix it, put it back.”
Quantum looked at me. Her face made it clear she had no interest in talking to him; if I wanted to negotiate, that was on me.
“Let him out,” I said.
He stared back and forth between us, uncomprehending. It occurred to me he might be in shock.
“If you let Leviathan go,” I said slowly, “Quantum will fix your leg.”
The information filtered to him through the panic. He shook his head intensely. “No. No. I won. We won, I won. No.”
He dragged himself up. He balanced awkwardly on one leg, hopping a little, a kid playing a schoolyard game. He stuck his arms out, groping, and found nothing nearby to hang on to.
“We match now,” I said jovially. “Isn’t that nice.”
He lurched toward me and fell. It was a bad fall; he wasn’t expecting it. He wasn’t hurt, of course, but it laid him out. He got up very slowly. Instead of standing all the way back up again, he half crawled, half hobbled toward me, putting weight on the stump of his leg.
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