by Russ Linton
Ember stepped through the dripping glass. Disguise incinerated, she wore a flickering inferno, her orange mohawk licked by white-hot tendrils of evaporating glass.
"Funny meeting you here, Cyrus. Think you can heal faster than I burn?"
CHAPTER 46
BROAD DAYLIGHT ISN't the best choice, but by the time whatever local emergency crew responds, this whole damn mess will be finished. The armor, Xamse, Augments—I've put up with this bullshit for one purpose.
Tiny hatchbacks and scooters tail-dragging with passengers or bursting at the seams with cargo flood the city square. Drivers and passengers gape in wonder as I streak overhead, their erratic driving on the unlined road coming to choppy stops. I soar past the biggest building in sight, a walled-off five-story complex I'm guessing is a hospital. Power lines sway and spark as they collide in my wake.
I'm coming in hot. No need to slow down. The suit is banged up, but I've got the element of surprise, and I don't intend to lose it.
The lab isn't too far off the city square. The gate around the lot is only for show and to keep away curious passersby, but they've hardened this structure for a purpose. I know the walls are deceptively thick. The roof has been reinforced as well.
But it won't stop me.
"Collision imminent. Autopilot engaging."
"Override," I shout, selecting a point precisely where the flare-up of heat had been detected. Hot enough to seep through the concrete and metal like molten rebar piercing impregnable flesh. Searing skin, bone. This son of a bitch is dead.
I aim the Gravitational Shockwave Cannon and prepare for the impact.
A split second before, the targeting reticle outlines the guard. A rent-a-cop, he's not at his post by the gate but standing at the front door, peering through the glass. Audio enhancers pick up a shrill beep. An alarm of some sort.
Good. He'll know I'm coming. I want him to see it.
CYRUS LUNGED FOR THE computer terminal. Jackie watched Ember's face fill with malice and knew what was coming. She tried to scream an appeal. She'd just met the man and spoken with him. Did he deserve to burn? Drone footage, security cameras, reporters safe inside a green zone, she'd never watched Ember's work up close. Wreathed in flame, she fought her battles with pure destructive efficiency. What had always been missing to Jackie was the emotion. The raw feeling underpinning the Augment's actions.
Ember, she could tell now, craved the release. She enjoyed the exercise of a power barely contained under her skin.
Jackie had taken plenty of pictures of men and women in the heat of battle. Fear-drenched focus usually took over even the most brash soldier. The euphoric wash of adrenaline only happened after, once you knew you'd survived.
For Ember, the euphoria began the moment she ignited.
Cyrus didn't scream. It happened too fast. Flame engulfed his feet then his lower legs. Jackie smelled burning rubber first as his shoes incinerated, followed by the sweet, greasy smell she didn't want to admit she could recognize. Burning flesh filled her nostrils, like the Lady atop the hill or countless remnants of bombing runs. In the enclosed lab, she gagged.
Instead of smoke, a pocket of heat formed around the Augment and singed the hair on Jackie's arms. She backed away. White and blue flames licked up as he staggered. They crept just below his knees and vanished.
Cyrus toppled forward as though his strings had been cut. He hadn't registered yet the utter devastation done. His calves and feet had been rendered into blackened, twitching twigs. He rolled to his back as the agony set in but found the strength to shimmy away on his elbows.
Jackie covered her mouth to hold back a scream.
"Salaam alaikum, traitor" Ember hissed. She stalked toward the hobbled man, her scowling face made ferocious by the illumination of her flames. She crouched to survey the damage. "It's the only Arabic I know. But my daughter here, she's a smart one, huh?"
"Mother...please," Jackie gasped.
She rushed toward Ember, reaching for her mother. Searing heat nearly blistered her hand. How well did she really know her? Did she even have a name?
Ember laughed. "Tell her you'll be fine. They'll grow back good as new."
Cyrus made no noise. Blood vessels wormed along his neck and face with the strain. Short, grunting breaths caused his mustache to flutter. Bulging eyes flickered between Jackie and Ember. He tried to lash out and only succeeded in tumbling to his side. The move of the crippled man was enough to make Ember shift uneasily away.
"Naughty, naughty. You want a ruined stub for a hand?" Ember chided. "You won't be shutting down my powers. I've got orders to keep you alive for at least a few more minutes until my team gets here to steal your data."
"China?" Cyrus managed to grunt as he backpedaled on his elbows then palms until he'd thudded into a filing cabinet.
"You know me." Ember nonchalantly twirled her fingers. "Freelancer."
Jackie stared at the grisly trail left by Cyrus' ruined legs. Reddish streaks flecked with blackened chunks, some thin and curled, others coagulated lumps. She wanted to help him, find a way to ease the incredible pain he must be in, but her stomach churned. She had to look away.
Halfway to vomiting, Jackie felt forced to turn her head back to the scene when the first burst of genuine pain escaped Cyrus. He'd grabbed hold of his legs right above his charred shins like half-chewed drumsticks plucked of flesh. Through gritted teeth, he squeezed, and his hands unleashed a warm glow.
Flesh began to re-knit. Raw muscle came first with the blackened crust flaking away. It wrapped the bone coiling and scrubbing the surface clean into a polished, glistening white. Skin began to sheath the whole.
"My God." Jackie couldn't believe what she saw.
So many times, Jackie had seen people perpetrate violence on each other. This wasn't even the worst of it. Between the enclosed space and the casual way Ember, her mother, had committed to the horror, it had gotten to her like never before. Watching it reversed with the same ease—she'd never seen that. People were ruined on battlefields, left broken. Never were they the same, ever.
"If you so much as move toward that computer," Ember said, "you'll be patching a hole through your chest. How fast can you regrow a heart? Hmm? Before your brain figures out you're dead?"
Cyrus squirmed in discomfort as his feet grew flesh. He kicked away the smoldering remains of his shoes. "Doesn't matter. You won't get anything from me or the computer. All the data is heavily encrypted." He gave a final moan as the process worked its way to his toes and he wiggled them. "And since you've lost the element of surprise, I assure you, I can heal quicker than you think." He glared a challenge toward Ember. Her lips split in an eager grin.
"Stop it!" said Jackie. Despite the dangers, she moved to place herself between the two. "Don't try to play tough. We will get the information. They've got some hacker kid and his pet computer."
Cyrus seemed to forget about the incendiary threat. "Chroma? You brought her here?"
Jackie watched Cyrus' expression change. The guy who'd just had to regrow his own legs and was defiant in the face of Ember's power showed genuine fear. Something more to this complicated web of alliance and treason and Augment loyalties she didn't understand.
"That's right," Ember purred, latching on to the shift in his demeanor. "Her and her boy toy will get every bit of data off those systems."
He shook his head in disbelief. "What's your name?" he said, calmly to Jackie. She'd been staring at him, and he'd seen an opportunity to play the get to know you games she knew as a reporter.
"I... I'm."
"Get the door open," Ember interrupted.
Cyrus crossed his arms and set his jaw.
"Give me a second, I'll see if I can figure out how," said Jackie.
Blindly Jackie searched the lab. Cyrus grew distant. She knew he was calculating, planning his next move. Ember waited for him to take action almost impatiently.
If there were controls in the lab, they were on the locked computer. Jackie recalled
the door they'd passed, the one labeled Authorized Personnel, and rushed out through the gap in the glass wall. Open the front door, signal the group. They'd know what to do. Hound would be here and maybe help keep Ember from being Ember.
She found the room unlocked. Apparently, Cyrus hadn't been expecting any problems. It worried her. On every assignment she'd been to, security rarely got lax until things got routine.
She found a closed-circuit television swimming with an off-track, gray image inside the office. She peered into the murky black and white and saw the front porch where the guard had stood. Several buttons filled a panel on the wall. Hunched over the monitor, she turned to shout she'd found it when she saw a whiteboard on the wall behind the door. Names and times filled the surface in neat rows. She stared, counting the individual entries. The dates stretched back several months.
The Lady hadn't been their first.
Jackie heard flames crackle followed by a scream of pain.
"Hurry up," Ember shouted. "Before I finish this asshole off!"
Jackie stabbed at the button labeled "front door". An alarm sounded. She stood frozen in bewilderment, resisting the urge to flail at the button and try to make it stop. The guard appeared off camera. He danced nervously at the window, trying to see inside. She'd been too hasty. The label applied to all the buttons in the row. She tried the next and could hear the metal screen rapidly ascending. Her triumph was short-lived.
"Damnit," she said as the guard rushed inside. She pressed herself against the wall beside the door, wondering if she could find a way to disable him before Ember melted the hapless guy into ash.
A massive rumble shook the building. She bounced along the wall, smacking the crown of her head. The foundation shivered, and a tremendous crash filled the hallway. Debris skittered outside in the hall from the direction of the lab.
"Die motherfucker!" came the distorted scream of the Black Beetle.
"TARGET ACQUIRED," WORMFOOD says.
That eagerness in the way he says it used to give me pause. I'm not sure the tone is even there, but I hear it. The same psychotic ravings heard as the man himself pounded my head into his office floor. This time, I'm on board with the bloodthirsty fucker.
Those other Augments decommissioned along the way, they'd been problems, or would be. Criminals with no way to contain them, what else could have been done? Negotiation wasn't ever an option. Tomahawk taught me that much. Neutralize the threat. Then maybe you can think about saving anyone.
Two targets display on the HUD, both obscured in a haze of pulverized concrete. One crouches, seeking cover behind a filing cabinet. The other is on their feet, hunched over, taken by surprise but ready to act. That's the one wreathed in otherworldly heat.
Vulkan.
"Fire!" I shout.
Wormfood and I, we go for the big guns. No sense blasting through the roof and not wrecking the place. The Shockwave Cannon is offline, but I've got plenty of other options.
Hot rounds streak toward the target. Heat spikes in a wavering shield before me, but I don't let up. I'm screaming so loud inside the helmet I've drowned out the sounds of the internal systems, the ambient noise. I almost hope he'll survive long enough to know who did this.
Eric wanted to get in here, probably steal their bullshit secrets. Hound, he maybe wanted to file a report with the U.S. Government. Fuck all that. We're gonna end this. Now.
CHAPTER 47
JUST AS THE PULVERIZED concrete settles, my guns add to the fog. Warning lights flash. I realize I can't hear the alert because I'm still screaming at full volume filling the armor's cramped space with an almost liquid rage.
Silence.
My breaths reverberate sharp and heavy. Each one fogs the HUD and evaporates, a recreation of the receding dust. The heavy machine gun has overheated. The gravitational wave cannon is still offline after blasting through the ceiling. I stomp closer to the figure now lying on the floor of the lab.
"Is he dead? Is our target down?"
"Target critically injured. Death imminent." The report sounds cold. Wormfood's imagined enthusiasm is gone.
Vitals appear on the HUD beside the figure. He's still alive. I'll choke the life out of him if that's what it takes. I bend and reach with a pincered hand.
Smoke and dust cleared, my breath held, not fogging the screen, my initial rage gearing up for another release, I can't quite understand what I'm seeing in the HUD. Vulkan's form seems so much smaller. I wonder if it isn't a trick of the eye where having met him first as a vulnerable weakling no higher than his chest has given me a different perspective now that I'm in the Battle Armor elevated above him. It's made him what I was. Fragile. Insignificant.
No. That isn't it.
A woman screams. She rushes forward on the HUD from my extreme right. I stay eyes forward, trying to piece together the body on the floor. I'm seeing double. She's both on the periphery leaping through a melted hole in a glass wall. And she's on the ground, lying bent and broken.
Ember.
I stagger away, the heavy booted feet crushing concrete, bending steel. My footing wobbles on the debris. My knees lose their rigidity. If not for the corrections made by the armor, I'd be down. Her vital signs continue to drain away.
The theater. I'm there again in an out of body experience, floating above the scene and watching myself huddled over Dad's corpse, crying, screaming, demanding the impossible. That's the part where I broke. Where I took the gun and the only power I had in that devastating moment, and I murdered a man. Justice. That was my rationalization. I needed revenge. A thirst which became an insatiable appetite.
I still don't know the girl's name, mini-Ember. She's trying to keep her mother alive, her hands on the bullet holes, struggling to hold her together while the temperature recedes, and pulse flattens. She hasn't even acknowledged me. A ton of killer robot and she's blind to it.
I know that emptiness and futility. I've given mine to her. That's all I've accomplished.
The other target Wormfood originally detected, stirs. Blasting through the roof, I hadn't given much thought to who would be here. Lab techs, doctors, anyone at this facility was complicit in my mind. Vulkan's presence overruled all of their lives. A man who wasn't ever here. The girls tortured sobs, my own callousness, I start to feel sick. Maybe I can salvage something or save somebody. I shift my view to the other person.
Stunned again.
Another face takes me back to Detroit and his arm around my Mother's throat, his inability to save the man he'd crippled. I hadn't been in the hospital that day when Cyrus confronted Dad, but the man had lived. A once trusted ally had reached out and held the most incomprehensible strength this earth has ever known long enough to shut it down. What kind of lie did he use to get that close? Say he'd been kidnapped? Plead for mercy?
Cyrus starts to move, and I pin him to wall. Pincers tear flesh. They sink into the concrete under the impact. He struggles. I struggle.
I've got his ribs corseted with a clamp capable of rending steel. Collapse them, and he can heal the damage, maybe. Leave them that way? No chance he survives.
I can see in his face he knows exactly who I am. He knows the culpability for the pain he took part in granting me. Whether he understands or not how badly I need to escape it, I'm not sure. There's no going back and changing that day. But I change this.
"Help her. NOW."
I release the pincers.
No questions, no pause to seal up the lacerations on either side of his torso, Cyrus gathers himself and hobbles to Ember's side. Her daughter doesn't see him there at first. When he gently directs her away and stretches out his hands, I can tell she knows exactly what he can do. She has hope.
That's what was missing that day in the theater. I'd lost all hope. I'd convinced myself there was one way out and I'd been wrong.
More people are rushing inside. The whole gang is here. Hound, Danger, Eric and his portable waifu, all come charging through the observation room to assess what the fuck has
happened. Mom is the last one in. She spares a pained expression for the mother and daughter then wanders oddly toward the far wall.
Cyrus' powers form a sheath of cleansing light around his hands and forearms. The blood, all the blood pooling around her stays, but the holes torn through her flesh in neat, circular entries, and others missing hunks of flesh, begin to close.
I open the armor. Wormfood argues, complaining there are hostile targets, potential danger. That's fine. If somebody needs to exact their revenge, they can fucking have it.
The air has cleared, but my mind is a smoke-filled, scream-saturated mess. Breathing hurts, and the sounds around me are only distant echoes. Mom's sticking somewhere to the far side of the room, away from all the commotion. Hound kneels with a hand on Jackie's back as she sobs into blood coated palms. Danger's on high alert, but his normal twitchiness has an odd, resigned feel to it. Only Eric comes at me. He's shouting in my ear, but I don't' hear him, and Chroma's voice begins her own little chant. I'm near Ember's feet before the world catches up in a sudden burst of activity.
"Dude, get the fuck out of here before she comes to," Eric pleads. He's shaking me as though to wake me.
"Suit up, Spence! She'll come kill you for that! You gotta finish her!" Chroma offers her own twisted advice from a speaker built into Eric's headset.
Aghast, Eric shuts down his headset and rips it from his ear. She's not broadcasting anymore, but I can hear her anger exploding over the earpiece. "Fuck, she's gonna go mental about that. Look, dude, get the fuck out, we'll handle this."
"I need to know she's okay."
Wounds are sealing. Ember has yet to move. Her daughter sinks deeper against Hound, and her grief becomes a silent mantra, an incantation of sorts warding away death. One man in the room knows that force better than most. Danger. He's not at all concerned with the medical miracle. He's watching Mom.