“There’s no way,” Marissa said.
“Do we have another choice?” Cody asked.
“Yeah,” Krouse said. Cody gave him a dark look, as if he was being argumentative for the sake of it. He elaborated, “If we look inside, maybe there’s a place where we can climb through the building.”
“We could get trapped,” Jess said. “If there’s fire, or a gas leak, or if the building resettles while we’re inside…”
“And if we climb, there’s the possibility of fire, wind, or the building shaking. Let’s head through the window,” Krouse said.
As his less encumbered friends broke the window and climbed through, Krouse stood on the side of the building, his hands tucked into his armpits, watching the Simurgh as she worked.
Cody stood by, carrying Jess. Like Krouse, he was waiting for others to make sure the way was safe, and hopefully they’d be able to set up a series of footholds or makeshift ladder.
Krouse glanced at the Simurgh. She was still threading components together.
“She’s one of those gadget capes, right? What do you call them?”
“Tinker. And she’s not a tinker,” Jess said.
Krouse gave her an appraising look. “Right. You follow that stuff. If she’s not a tinker then what the hell is she? I mean, I know the basics, but I never paid that much attention. Only kind-of, sort-of, following the damage done.”
“She’s an Endbringer, obviously. When she first showed up, she just appeared and hovered there. Some place in Switzerland. They thought she was like Scion. Maybe someone who got a concentrated dose of whatever gives people powers, maybe someone who was in just the right mental state for a trigger event.”
“Trigger event?” Krouse asked.
“It’d take too long to explain in detail. The moment when someone gets their powers. The idea was maybe she and Scion met some specific set of conditions. So the whole world watched for something like three days, to see if she would be another Scion, or if she’d be something else. People approached, she even communicated with them some. Not talking, just gestures, I guess. Interacting might be a better word. And when we thought things would be okay, she made a move. The entire population of the city around her, with all the people who had come to talk with her and research her…”
Jess trailed off, stopped. Anxiety etched her face. Marissa was midway through climbing down through the window, looked up at Jess.
“What happened?” Cody asked. “I remember hearing something, but I was a toddler then, and I didn’t figure I’d ever actually see her.”
“I don’t want to say,” Jess said. “It would distract you guys.”
“Hey,” Krouse cut in, “That’s not cool. Not your call to make.”
Jess glared at him. “She-”
There was a sudden movement from the Simurgh, tearing sections of wall free from the nearest building, maneuvering them to form a makeshift barrier in mid-air. Not one second after the barrier was in place, a pair of heroes flew around the corner. One had a forcefield bubble around him that exploded on contact with the wall, while a woman fired blasts of energy that sent the fragments of concrete plummeting to the ground.
How did she know? The Simurgh had seen them coming?
The Simurgh flexed her wings, and snow raised around her. Krouse nearly lost his footing as the snow that had piled on the side of the building began drifting towards the Simurgh, an almost gentle push from behind him.
The snow condensed and pummeled the two heroes. The bubble-man formed another shield around himself, but he left his companion out of it, choosing to interject himself between the Simurgh and the woman.
A section of concrete from a building to the right of the heroes flew free and caved in the costumed woman’s skull. She dropped out of the sky, her head a bloody ruin that Krouse couldn’t make out in the midst of the flying snow.
The bubble-man flew forward, aiming not for the Simurgh, but the machinery she’d gathered to one side. His forcefield swelled, a blue-green that glowed brighter and whiter with every passing second. Just as he reached the machinery, it reached a critical level and detonated. The Simurgh was already putting one wing between him and the machinery. She took more damage than the machine did, and even that was minimal. Scorched, scattered feathers.
She retaliated, sending rubble, snow and debris in a constant, consistent assault against him. He raised forcefields to block the attacks, but each was shut down before it could approach critical mass for detonation. He retreated a hundred feet or so, and the Simurgh began working on the machine once again, giving him only cursory attention.
“Come on,” Marissa called.
Krouse cast one look at the Simurgh and the lone hero, then hurried to the window. The others had moved a refrigerator so it was directly below the window, and Luke stood on top, ready to accept Noelle as she was handed down.
It took a second to free her sleeves from around his shoulders, another second to work with Cody to lower her down.
As he watched Cody taking hold of Noelle’s arm and waistband, he was struck with the idle recollection that Cody had been one of the people who’d tried to approach Noelle, one of the first to ask her out and be soundly rejected. He’d nearly forgotten. It went a ways towards explaining some of Cody’s anger.
He had to shake his head and refocus on the task. Noelle was being handed down to the others at the base of the refrigerator, and the way was clear for him to make his way inside. He helped Jess down, then they made their way to the front hall. He opened the closet door and began handing out coats and gloves. Luke tried on some boots until he found some rubber ones that were big enough.
“How’s the leg?”
“Hurting more, but I can still walk.”
Krouse nodded. With Marissa and Luke’s help he got Noelle in position on his back, then opened the door of the apartment and hopped down to the wall beneath. That left them the task of breaking into another apartment, kicking at the door in an attempt to dislodge it. Not as easy as it looked in the movies, especially with the threat of falling through and dropping ten or fifteen feet down someone’s front hallway.
“It keeps getting worse. The music,” Marissa complained. “It’s like it’s stretching between three notes, and the moment I think there’s a pattern to it, it changes.”
Krouse glanced at Jess. What does she know? To Marissa he said, “It gets worse if you pay attention to it. Focus on what you’re doing. Distract yourself if you have to.”
Marissa bit her lip.
The door broke, and they had to catch Oliver before he dropped through. They climbed down using handholds from the closet door and doorframe, then made their way to the lowest point.
“That smell,” Marissa wrinkled her nose.
“Raw sewage,” Luke said. “Pipes were destroyed when she tore this part of the building free, probably, and they’re spilling out here.”
It isn’t raw sewage, Krouse thought. It’s the smell of death. People had shit themselves as they died, somewhere nearby.
Wherever they had been when they died, he didn’t have to see the bodies. They headed straight out into the sunlight, stepping onto the snow-covered roads.
The Simurgh was fighting a trio of heroes now, including the man with the forcefield bubble. Using telekinesis, she was fending off the worst of their attacks and either building or rebuilding parts of the construction she’d been working on. In the ten or fifteen minutes it had taken to get down through the building and break down the one apartment door, she’d nearly finished creating a complete circle of various components, thirty feet wide. It looked like only a stray attack had slowed her progress, knocking out a piece of the overarching work.
She made the fighting look easy. Every time an attack was directed her way, there was something already in place to protect herself or her device. One cape began to launch ice crystals towards the hoop, and the Simurgh caught the shards out of the air with her telekinesis. The crystals flew into the man with the force
field bubble, shattering. The resulting shards and flakes of crystal didn’t fly away, however. They turned around in the air and condensed in a thick shell around the force field.
The ice-encased sphere slammed into the ground with a speed and force that suggested it was the Simurgh, not the cape, who was controlling his movement. He skidded and rolled, the ice shattering first, followed by the collapse of the forcefield. With momentum still carrying him forward, the cape rolled on the ground, his costume tearing from the friction.
When he finally stopped a few paces from Krouse and the rest of the group, the cape managed to stagger to his feet. He bled from a dozen open wounds, his skin abraded, his costume in tatters. He had more ice, blood and dirt on him than he had clean skin or costume.
A tide of snow and ice hit him like a truck, driving him into the ragged edge of the building. Oliver yelped as he threw himself out of the way. Marissa’s shriek seemed oddly delayed, until Krouse noted what had happened to the man. The cape, in a bodysuit of velvet blue with gold armor, had been impaled on a tangled mess of rebar, his intestines pushed out the front of his stomach.
It took Krouse a moment to realize the man was actually saying a word, and not just letting out a long, guttural groan, “Fuuuuuck! Uuuuunh!”
“Grandiose down, Z-D-6,” a mechanical voice blared from the armband that was fixed to the man’s wrist.
“I’m not…” the cape tried to pull himself forward. ”Not… down!”
“Stop!” Marissa rushed to the man’s side. ”Don’t move! You’ll bleed out if you move!”
The man seemed to notice them for the first time. His eyes went wide, “What… doing here?”
“Don’t move!” Marissa said. She stepped forward, reaching out, and he swung one fist in her direction. The motion seemed to pull something, because he coughed up a mouthful of blood and folded forward.
“Go,” the cape grunted. ”Evac. Or you… good as dead. Might be… late already.”
“Grandiose,” a voice sounded over the device on the man’s wrist. It didn’t quite sound the same as before, “She’s shut down most of our movers, and your time-”
“No!” Grandiose grunted. ”Have… have time!”
“I know exactly how fast you fly. You couldn’t get out of her reach in time, even if you left now.‘
“I have time!”
“I’ll let your wife know you fought bravely. Do you want me to keep a recording for your son, for when he’s older?“
“Dragon! Damn you!”
“I’m sorry.“
The armband beeped, then beeped again a second later. There was a steady repetition, beep, beep, beep.
Grandiose turned his head, “Why are you…”
Beep.
“…Still here!? Run!”
Krouse grabbed Marissa and turned to run, barely managing to keep his feet under him with the uneven ground and Noelle’s weight. He glanced over his shoulder to see the cape pressing the armband against his collarbone.
They weren’t four paces away when the armband detonated, a small, localized blast that didn’t even consume him in entirety. It did take his head, most of his upper body and his left arm. The remainder of him was scattered around the surrounding area.
Krouse stared.
“The fuck!?” Cody screamed, staring.
“Go!” Krouse said, “Go, just run!”
They ran, putting distance between themselves, Grandiose’s remains and the fighting with the Simurgh. One wave of capes was retreating, backed up by another squad. A woman with a black costume, a heavy cape and straight black hair flowing from the back of her helmet led the charge. Alexandria.
The heroine dove at the Simurgh, and the Endbringer was quick to fly to one side, reaching out to catch Alexandria with her telekinesis and use her momentum to force her into the street. The road caved in, sections of pavement with accompanying drifts of snow falling into a sewer or storm drain beneath the street.
The hoop nearly tipped over, and the Simurgh caught it with her power. There were four other capes in the area, two on the ground and two in the air, and she was forcing each back with pelted ice and fragments of concrete.
Unmolested, the Simurgh spread her wings wide and rose into the air, towing the hoop of exposed computer chips, wires and assorted pieces of technology after her. Wires trailed from it to nearby buildings.
“That explosion,” Luke was saying, panting as he ran with a lopsided gait. ”They blew up their own person. Why?”
“Because he’d been here too long,” Krouse said.
He glanced over his shoulder, saw the various components of the circle crackling with current as it rose behind the Simurgh, like a gargantuan halo, wide enough that it nearly exceeded her wingspan.
Alexandria was pulling herself out of the rubble, shouted something. They were a distance away, but her voice could carry.
The electricity died, the great circle going dim. They’d cut the city’s power.
“Come on!” Luke urged them.
There weren’t any more people on the streets. Were they hiding inside, crossing their fingers? Or had he underestimated how fast people would clear out?
There was a flash behind them. The hoop was live, with twice the power as before, and the brightness of it made the overcast sky seem dark by contrast. The snow and dust that the Simurgh and Scion had kicked up weren’t helping on that count, either.
The heroes had cut the power, and the Simurgh was still managing to activate the thing.
The heroes had been working in waves, because apparently too much exposure to her, to this fucking screaming in their heads that never stopped or let up, it was dangerous somehow. Only a few heroes fighting at a given time, enough to maybe try to disrupt whatever it was she was up to. Staying for an allotted amount of time.
Except whoever was calling the shots had seen fit to override that battle plan. The heroes were arriving en masse now, waves of them, in the air and on the ground.
The Simurgh lifted Lucas’ apartment building into the air and tore it into shreds. The various fragments, the little things, the bodies and pieces of furniture, they became part of a protective maelstrom around the Simurgh, orbiting her and blocking the barrage of long-range fire that the good guys were directing at her.
The screaming was getting worse, fast. It shifted between a half-dozen different sounds, each only vaguely different from the others, a chant, a pattern.
Krouse was wearing a borrowed hat, gloves and jacket, but the jacket was probably better suited for fall weather than winter. He was cold, his teeth chattering, the temperature sucking the warmth from his body and legs, making him feel just a little more fatigued, a little more tired.
Yet he was drenched in sweat. It was freezing cold as it ran down the side of his nose to his chin. His shivers weren’t entirely the cold, either. He was terrified, terrified for himself, terrified for Noelle, and for his friends. Terrified because of the countless little things that didn’t make sense, and because he couldn’t shake the idea that if he paid too much attention to that screaming, that keening song that the Simurgh was singing in his head, it would start to sound like words.
The circle flared with more light than before, and the resulting shockwave threw Krouse and his friends into the air. Windows shattered and snow was kicked up into clouds as tall as the high rises around them. The sky visibly darkened with the clouds that had been kicked up, heaping snowbanks dissolved into their constituent snowflakes and water molecules. The indistinct and distant noises of the heroes firing on the Simurgh had stopped all at once, as the heroes were killed or left reeling from the aftershock of the device’s activation.
The protective wreath of flying objects and debris that surrounded the Simurgh slowed, then stopped circling her entirely. One thing after another dropped out of the sky, as if the Simurgh was consciously letting go of each individual object.
The first of the heroes were already recovering, pelting the Simurgh with long ranged fire or fly
ing up to her to engage in close-quarters combat. Her wings shielded the worst hits, her telekinesis let her catch or deflect projectiles and she floated out of the way of a handful more. For the ones who charged in, the Simurgh used thrown debris to strike them out of the air. One tried to attack the Simurgh’s halo, but was struck out of the sky by a flash of electricity before they got within fifteen feet.
A low rumble shook the city, and the gate began to bulge with a dark shape that stretched out from within the metal, like a soap bubble emerging from an enclosed loop.
Or a lens, Krouse realized. It flared bright, rays of light meeting, and things began pouring forth from the point the lines met. Piles and piles of solid matter flowed down to land at the heart of the city: debris, fragments of architecture, and tiny shapes that were very likely to be people, in a stream as wide across as the Simurgh’s wingspan, lit in high contrast by the light of the halo.
And there were tiny shapes that most definitely weren’t people, but were alive.
It’s a portal. A door.
“How the fuck is she not a tinker!?” Krouse shouted.
“She isn’t!” Jess called back. ”She’s never done anything like this before!”
The heroes were making an offensive push, and the Simurgh moved her halo out of the way of one series of attacks. The halo tilted at a right angle as she moved it, continuing to spew its contents forth. Objects and sections of building were scattered across the city. More than a few things sailed over the heads of Krouse and his friends as they fled.
One figure landed a city block in front of them, contorting itself in mid-air to land on all fours. It had the vague shape of a man, but dark gray skin like a tree’s bark and a froglike mouth filled with jagged teeth. Each finger and toe was tipped with a claw.
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