The soldier fired his gun at his former teammate, striking her in the neck as she rushed him. Blood fountained from the wound and she fell to her knees, dropping the knife. The soldier who had fired the gun collapsed next to her, blood gushing from an identical wound in his own neck.
The two remaining men shouted, rushing toward their fallen team. Asclepius, meanwhile, made a break for the door. He fled into the hallway, yanked open the door to the stairwell and leapt down the stairs.
Or tried to. As he reached the first landing, his motion was abruptly arrested, caught in midstep by thin, shimmering lines stretched across the stairway. He twisted, trying to break free, but the lines pulled with him, snapping free to connect to other parts of his body. He stumbled, falling off balance, and tumbled down the half-flight of stairs. He lay at the bottom moaning, his arms and legs pinned at awkward angles.
The two remaining soldiers clattered down the staircase toward Asclepius. As they did, Alyssa climbed the stairs to meet them.
“No one touch him,” she said. “We’ll get something to pick him up. He can make people into other people? God, that’s sick.
“And quit pretending you’re hurt,” she said to Asclepius. “I don’t believe for a second that you haven’t already healed every hit you took from those stairs.”
“What are you doing?” asked Asclepius. “Why are you doing this?”
“We’re bringing in the Golden Ruler,” said Alyssa. “So we took out her support first.”
“Sucks to be support,” muttered Asclepius.
“Twice in one night?” complained Arachne.
“I wouldn’t ask you to do it if it wasn’t important,” Alyssa assured her.
“You know I hate setting the webs. They make me feel thin, empty. Disconnecting from them is like cutting part of myself off. I feel hollow.”
“Stillness, night breeze, full moon,” came Yurei’s scattered thoughts over their earpieces. “Heartbreak, loss.”
Alyssa raised an eyebrow at Arachne. “You were saying about your augment making you feel hollow?”
Arachne grimaced. “So that’s a positive, yes?”
“It is. We’re good to move. Go get set. How long do you need?”
“Two minutes. Less.”
“Go. Soak, cover her, small radius. Check in when you’re done and we’ll go on my signal.”
Soak, a bear of a man sitting across from Alyssa, nodded briefly. He and Arachne exited the van soundlessly, leaving Alyssa alone. She returned her attention to the blueprints displayed on the tablet in front of her, carefully re-examining the layout of the suburban house for any surprises she might have missed. Her eyes darted back and forth as she played out various possibilities in her mind.
“Set,” her earpiece said. Alyssa looked up from the tablet and focused on the screens in front of her, each showing a scene from a different team member’s body camera. All four currently showed mainly darkness, broken by the porch light of a house a few dozen feet away.
“Yurei, you’re first in for eyes. Go.”
One of the camera views cut out, replaced by a black screen with the text “NO FEED.” After a short pause, a brief message echoed across the wave: “Tranquility.”
“Soak, Geist, move. Soak, cover.” Two more camera views shifted, converging on the front of the house from different angles. “Yurei, go if you see movement, or on my mark.”
On screen, the front door knob twisted and opened, seemingly of its own accord. Soak, clad in combat gear and gas mask, appeared on Geist’s video feed as the two men made their way down the hallway. Although Arachne’s breathing could be heard from her feed, no sounds came from the other two. They moved down the dark hallway like ghosts.
Ahead of them, a door came into view and slowly began to swing open.
“Yurei, now,” ordered Alyssa. The “NO FEED” camera flickered back to life, offering a brief glimpse of a sleeping figure in a bed, one bare leg protruding from beneath the blanket. A hand stabbed down, a needle piercing the leg, and two cries rang out simultaneously, shattering the near-total silence.
The Golden Ruler rose from sleep like a shark attacking from the depths, instantly alert and deadly. Wind whooshed as she swept the blankets out in a tight arc, and Yurei’s camera feed shorted out again.
Soak charged into the room, his camera capturing the blankets settling to the ground through Yurei’s insubstantial form. Golden noted his entry and reached for her spear, which was missing. She wasted no time looking for it, but immediately adapted to the situation, snatching up the lamp from the bedside table and charging at the masked and armored intruder.
Although her mouth was open and moving, no sound came forth. The entire room was silent, blanketed by Soak’s deadening augment. It tended to unnerve those who were unused to it, causing them to hesitate and providing Alyssa’s team with an edge in combat.
If it was affecting Golden at all, though, it was impossible to tell. Though she was freshly awoken, nearly naked, deprived of her weapon and injected with a sedative, she still appeared to be completely in control of the situation. She drove Soak back with short, vicious stabs with the lamp, yanking the cord from the wall and coiling it around her hand as she did so.
She swung the lamp twice in a small circle, then lashed out at Soak with it, using it as a makeshift flail. Soak batted it easily away, but the attack had been a feint. Golden spun, striking out with her left foot in a rib-breaking kick to Soak’s exposed side. He staggered backward, and Golden pressed the attack, raining punishing strikes down upon him.
Suddenly, she stumbled forward, knocked off balance. The lamp had risen from the floor and struck her a glancing blow across the back of the head before tumbling to the ground. She struck out with a punch, hoping to catch her unseen attacker, but hit nothing but air.
In the doorway, Geist rubbed the back of his own head.
Her aug responds to TK, too, he messaged Alyssa. Too bad. Would’ve been a nice loophole.
He swept up a pile of coins with his augment and began to circle them around the room, looking for an opportunity to distract or disrupt her without doing anything that would cause him to take too much damage in return. He settled for hurling them at her forehead, striking her between the eyes with a rapid-fire stream of four pennies. Although the pain in his own forehead was sharp enough to bring tears to his eyes, Golden missed barely a step.
It was enough, though. Taking advantage of her distraction, Soak closed the distance between them and wrapped a thick arm around her neck. He locked his other hand around the back of her head and began to exert a crushing pressure. His own throat closed up, seized by an invisible hand, but he only bore down harder and hoped he could outlast Golden.
Golden did not waste her time pulling at his arm, but immediately began to strike for his head. Soak had tucked his head down against her shoulders, though, and that in conjunction with the awkward angle meant that she could land only comparatively light blows. They still hurt, and combined with the pressure on his neck he was beginning to feel dangerously light-headed, but he was fairly certain that Golden would fail before he would.
Without warning, she lashed her foot up and backward, striking with her heel. Retributive pain flared in Soak’s foot as Golden smashed the cup he was wearing, driving straight through it and connecting with his groin. His body jerked as she hit, his grip loosening, and Golden seized his arm and dropped to one knee, throwing him over her head to crash into the floor. She twisted his arm behind him at an angle sharp enough that Alyssa was sure she would have heard it crack, had there been any sound. Soak’s mouth was open in a scream, but he maintained his focus and kept his augment up.
Without sound and with her back to the window, Golden had no way of knowing that the gas canisters had been thrown into the room until the mist began to surround her. She dropped Soak’s arm and ripped the mask from his face, jamming it against her own and wrestling the straps into place as the obscuring mist rose.
The straps, enc
ouraged by Geist, refused to secure. Golden struggled with them for a moment before realizing the source of her difficulty. Her head snapped toward Geist, still crouched in the doorway. Their eyes met and in a panic, he slammed the door shut, forming a flimsy barrier between them.
Alyssa swore.
Geist, open that door! Soak’s facedown and the only shot I have is from Arachne outside.
As she sent that message, though, Yurei’s screen cut on briefly, showing a momentary glimpse of the dark, mist-shrouded room. It was gone as soon as it arrived, more a still picture than a video, but moments later it appeared again, equally fleeting.
Info, Alyssa sent.
Web, replied Arachne, equally terse. Her camera view still showed the outside of the house, though, looking in through the bedroom window. Alyssa frowned, uncertain what was happening.
Inside the room, Golden strode toward the door, only to feel a tug at her foot. She looked down, expecting to see the blankets again or some other object moved by Geist’s augment, but through the darkness and the smoke she saw nothing but her own apparently unhindered foot. When she pulled, though, it seemed stuck fast to the carpet.
Mist drifted past Golden. Her right hand, still holding her mask, suddenly adhered to her head. A barely-visible cord bound her hand to the mask, pinning it in place. Another wrapped around her legs, hindering her movement.
In the van, Yurei’s screen flickered on and off as she momentarily materialized over and over again, depositing the single strands of web Arachne was producing. Each one bound as solidly as any glue, trapping the Golden Ruler in place. In minutes, she was completely entrapped.
Geist re-entered the room and helped Soak to his feet. Soak dropped the dampening field and stood there groaning, his right arm bent unpleasantly at the elbow. On the ground, Golden spit curses, struggling against Arachne’s bonds.
Alyssa entered the house and knelt down in front of the fallen Golden Ruler. “I’m missing a team. I hear you know where they are. Care to share?”
Golden spit at her. “I’m missing a team leader. Care to share where he is?”
Alyssa straightened up and motioned to Geist. “Get her up, put her in the van. We’ll search here before we take her back for interrogation. Maybe we’ll get lucky here.”
She turned to Yurei, now in solid form again. “Yurei, upstairs. Keep in wave contact.”
To Arachne, who had joined the others inside, she said, “This floor. I’ll get the basement.”
“Can I get the basement?” asked Arachne. “I want to collect my web. It’s an easier recovery if I can get it back.”
“Fine, you’re downstairs. Good initiative with the web strands, incidentally. And with having Yurei carry them.”
Arachne shrugged. “I just didn’t want her running into the big web. This is easier on me.”
Alyssa smiled. “Well, it worked. Now, move. Let’s find our team.”
XX
“Spoiler alert: it wasn’t good news.”
“I’ll notify their families,” Mat said heavily, ending the wave call. Though it was the middle of the night, both men were in the otherwise-empty control center hoping for good news from Team Spectre. The Golden Ruler had been brought in half an hour earlier, and an investigator had been attempting to pull information from her about the whereabouts of Cannon and the rest of his team. Although he had not yet been successful, Alyssa’s exploration of the basement beneath Golden’s house had borne bitter fruit.
Across the room, Raul looked distraught. “This is impossible. How could she have done this? Something’s wrong. Something’s missing.”
Mat angrily threw the pictures across a wave link to Raul, shoving the digital images at him as if he hadn’t been on the same call with Alyssa, hadn’t already seen the gory photos. “What’s wrong is that she butchered a team of federal Augments! Kidnapped them from their houses, tortured them for information, then killed them and hid their bodies beneath her house. I’d say that’s pretty wrong.”
“But why? Why would she do that? She’s been a force for good in this city, the second face of Foresight’s team for the last decade.” He paced restlessly, needing an outlet, then abruptly stopped. “I’m going to talk to her. Holding Room C?”
“Holding Room C,” said Mat. “Loop me in if you find out anything relevant.”
“Absolutely,” said Raul. He exited the room.
Mat opened up a blank document to begin writing, but then just stared at the screen for a long minute. Over the years, he had written these condolence letters dozens of times, and although it never got easier, they had begun to serve a cathartic purpose for him. By writing down the accolades of his dead agent, he was able to celebrate, mourn and let go all at the same time.
But although arguably every one of those deaths had been his fault as the man who gave the orders, never before had they been so closely attributable to his actions. Golden had killed these men because he had kidnapped Foresight, had spent her fury on them because she did not know it was him she sought. They had died not for their country, but for him.
And had it been worth it? Six federal agents dead, the greatest vigilante Augment team in the country dismantled and imprisoned—and how would they cover that up?—all because his augment, an Aug-0, had sounded an alarm. Could it possibly be worth the cost?
Seeking reassurance, Mat pulled up the output stream from Foresight’s chamber. His “dream log,” as Alyssa called it. There, through some complicated interaction between Foresight’s ability and Gammalock’s technological ingenuity, was a collection of future events, listing names, places and dates. It even captured stills and short videos, recording the images of things to come.
Foresight’s dream log was a nightmarish dystopia of a future in which everything failed, everything went wrong. No positive events were recorded there. Everything within had been bad enough to prompt a recoil, a temporal rewind, and when it did the coffin dutifully recorded it and added it to the list of events to avoid.
In the three months that they’d had Foresight, the dream log had already given them the information necessary to stop two nascent terrorist attacks, prepare for several coming natural disasters and locate an undiscovered and destructive Aug-5. Thousands of lives had been saved. One of the terrorists, a man named Andon Markov, was currently only four years old. At the government’s prompting, his mother’s office had offered her a promotion and relocation opportunity. When she accepted, Markov’s bombing erased itself from the dream log.
They were saving lives, fixing things in a way that had never been possible before. And they were doing it by making use of a man who had intended to choose a far darker path. This was justified. This was good. This was worth it.
Mat repeated the words to himself like a mantra, willing himself to believe them. After a while, he began to write. The phone calls and visits would happen in the morning, but composing the letters now would help him know what to say. Six personnel dead. Six families to contact. This was the worst part of his job, but also the most necessary, and he would not delegate it to anyone else. He owed them that much.
It was 3 AM before the letters were finished. Mat thought about his quiet room down the hall, which now featured a chair and a rollaway cot for all of the time he’d been spending here. He had time for a few hours of sleep before beginning his grim duties, and he would perform those duties better if he was more alert. He stood, stretched, and shuffled down the hall to the cot, hoping for a dreamless sleep.
In this, he was unlucky. His dreams were haunted by scattered, fragmentary visions of doom and destruction. Death at the end of the Golden Ruler’s spear. A lifetime in solitary confinement in prison. Being trapped in a lightless box, a space too small to move, while hands poked and prodded at him through the walls. And over and over, flashes of the same image like stills from a movie: Foresight in his coffin. A slight smile of triumph on his face. His eyes slowly opening.
Mat’s alarm roused him, and he awoke with a start. His restless s
leep had left his stomach knotted with dread, and he wondered if it had been worth sleeping at all. The feeling followed him into the bathroom as he washed his hands and rubbed water onto his face, staring into the mirror to determine how he looked. Old, he decided, and slightly haggard. Appropriate for what he had to do today, as long as he put on a nice suit.
Mat nestled his wave earpiece into his right ear. In what had become a morning ritual, he briefly brought up Foresight’s diagnostic feed, a habit meant to reassure himself that everything was as it should be. When the screen appeared, though, Mat’s heart leapt into his throat, an almost physical force momentarily blocking his breathing.
Foresight’s heartbeat, for months maintained at a steady fifteen beats per minute, was at thirty bpm and rising. His blood pressure and body temperature were creeping upwards as well. Alarms were flashing, demanding attention.
Mat tore out of the washroom, flinging himself down the stairs to the secure floor where Foresight’s coffin rested. He swiped frantically at badge readers with his keycard, cursing the time it took the doors to open. He tried to raise Alyssa on the wave, but received no answer. He assumed she was asleep, her wave sitting uselessly on a bedside table just as his had been. He prayed he wasn’t too late to fix whatever had failed in the coffin, to reverse the process, but the nauseous feeling emanating from his augment gave him little hope.
He burst into the room and stopped dead, feeling the sharp pain in his abdomen before he even heard the silenced gunshot. He staggered backward, eyes fixed on Raul and the gun in his hand.
Mat’s heels caught on something and he tripped backwards, falling heavily to the floor and cracking his head on the concrete. Through the stars and the debilitating pain in his side, he struggled to reach a sitting position. His right hand, seeking leverage, found instead something that moved away when he pushed on it. Mat rolled his head to the side to find that he was half-lying on Alyssa’s unmoving body, and had landed in a pool of her blood.
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