Three looked over his shoulder, and Thirty-two stepped forward. Three murmured something, and she translated. “Your PRT was very persuasive, Chevalier.”
“I suppose we can count that as a good thing. You read the briefings and plans we sent out?”
Thirty-two continued to translate, “We did. With your permission, we’ll return to the fight with Behemoth shortly. But we’d like to make a proposal.”
“I know what you’re going to propose,” Chevalier said. “I’m sorry, it-”
“It’s somewhat counter to our usual offer,” Thirty-two spoke quickly to match Three’s attempted interruption.
Chevalier fell silent.
“Your heroes here are scared. They want to help, they are good people. We’re offering another way. They can help without risking their lives.”
“I think I understand. You have to understand why I’m saying no,” Chevalier said.
“Our group shares powers. Time and time again, the West has refused them. We would rehabilitate your criminals, and share their powers among us. They are divided in strength, but we have the ability to magnify powers. You can feel it now, being close.”
“Yes,” Chevalier said.
In the distance, a column of lightning cut through the wall of smoke above the city, as big around as an apartment building. Cody could feel the vibrations shudder through the building, as sturdy as it was, though the lightning was miles away.
“We might each have only a share of a power, reduced effect, range or duration, but we regain as much as a third of that power back with this magnification, depending on how many are together. A full third of forty powers at once. If any would volunteer, we would teleport them to a safe place, where we would borrow their power for this fight only. We would send them home when the fight was over.”
Cody could see the reactions of the capes on the rooftop. People were exchanging glances. Considering it.
A part of him wanted to scream, to warn them, whatever the cost to him might be.
“I see,” Chevalier said.
“For years, we have boasted of the strength the Yàngbǎn offers the world. But we are small, and too many citizens with powers flee or fight rather than cooperate. Today, we hope to show our strength. We have extended our support, and we ask for trust in exchange.”
“Your support is welcome, and that’s why we couldn’t ever ask you to make this leap of faith,” Chevalier said. “I understand your motives are pure, but if some accident transpired, and a good cape didn’t make it back, it would mean war.”
Cody hadn’t missed the way the hero had stressed the words. A warning for his people, more than a statement for Three.
“We would be exceedingly careful,” Thirty-two translated for Three. “Rest assured.”
Cody was watching the negotiations continue, Chevalier looking more and more uncomfortable, when he saw him.
Accord. He was accompanied by a girl in a lavender and black costume, and a dark-skinned man in a suit.
Cody had to hold himself back to keep from striking the man. It would be suicide, and no matter which power he used, Cody couldn’t be sure he could guarantee a kill.
He could see the moment where Accord saw the Yàngbǎn. Cody could see the reaction, as if the man had been slapped in the face. Accord’s shifting mask gave away his reaction, and then his expression set, his body language neutral, as if nothing had happened and nothing was wrong.
The girl beside him smiled, and brilliant green eyes settled on Cody, stark contrasts to her pale purple costume.
He hated not knowing anything, being cut off by language barriers and the rules of the Yàngbǎn. Who was the girl in lavender? Where were Alexandria, Eidolon and Legend?
Every question left him more uneasy, increasingly angry, and Accord was the person who had put him in this situation.
I’m a slave, and he’s the one who put me in chains.
“May I interrupt?” Accord asked.
“If the Yàngbǎn will excuse me?” Chevalier asked Three.
Three nodded. “As you will. We can wait.”
Cody suspected Chevalier had been hoping to end the conversation, rather than postpone it. He stared at Accord. Do they know what you do? What you are?
There was a crash, a clap of thunder, and a rush of hot wind. The cloud of smoke around Behemoth’s battlefield was growing, and it wasn’t just a matter of perspective, of Behemoth getting closer.
Capes flew off, joining the fray. The Yàngbǎn remained.
“What can you tell us? Do you have a plan?” Chevalier asked Accord.
I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him. Somehow. I just need a chance.
It was too much, like being asleep for months and finally waking up, only to discover that the only thing inside him was rage.
“…optimal timing,” Accord was saying. “I’m still working out the particulars.”
Krouse thought he was smart too. When I’m done with you, I’ll find him and kill him.
“What do you need?”
“Contact information for your various squads.”
Cody virtually twitched with a need to move, a craving to fulfill some deep-seated desire for revenge, but the group around him wouldn’t afford him the chance. Each member of the Yàngbǎn was simultaneously a prisoner and a guard, some more of one than the other.
Chevalier nodded. “You’ll have it. Rime?”
A woman in blue limped forward, “I’ll handle it.”
The girl in lavender glanced at Cody before falling in step with Rime and Accord.
Had she sensed his emotion? She hadn’t said a thing.
“He just reached the first perimeter,” someone reported. “Tore through our skirmishers. Some teenagers were killed. Eidolon and Legend are fighting, but they’re not in good shape. We didn’t expect him to move this fast.”
“The Triumvirate’s missing a key member,” Chevalier said. “Our more mobile capes should move out now. Meet him at the first perimeter if you’re fast enough, hold at the second if you aren’t. Maintain cover where possible.”
“Qiān chū.” Three ordered.
The negotiations were over, it seemed.
But he could feel the tickle of new powers taking hold. The three they’d collected from the shattered building were joining them, like it or not.
The first power was an easy one to grasp. He could feel his body surging with some added strength, and that strength swelled a step further as the power-enhancing auras took hold.
The second was a tinker power, he was almost positive, or it was a thinker power with a focus on guns. Nothing useful.
The third… another thinker power. His vision clarified a step. The ability to see through smoke?
No. The ability to see through surfaces.
He was disappointed, and he couldn’t be sure why. What had he wanted? What did he want, in general?
Even now, he was alone. The Yàngbǎn wanted to collect capes, to prove themselves. The heroes wanted to stop Behemoth.
Cody didn’t care about either.
He entertained the notion that helping Behemoth go loose would almost be better. It could mean the end of the Yàngbǎn, Accord’s death. Even Trickster’s death, if they had decided to show up.
Except there was no reasonable way he could do that. Not for a lack of wanting to, but because he couldn’t hope to oppose the Yàngbǎn and the heroes at the same time.
Needed an opportunity.
The Yàngbǎn passed through the worst of the smoke, into the blasted, shattered ruins of the city. In the moment they joined the fight, Cody held back.
They sensed he was gone, but they couldn’t disengage, not as Behemoth gathered up a ruined section of building and melted it down, hurled massive globs of melted plastic, metal and stone at them.
The process took a minute at the best of times, with help. His destination couldn’t be a distant one, and he couldn’t hope to behead the Yàngbǎn on his own, not with the members they’d kept in reserve, th
e precious ones, with powers they couldn’t afford to lose, like Two’s.
He nearly lost his concentration as a massive crash knocked him off his feet.
The fight’s only beginning, Cody thought.
The teleportation took hold, and he found himself back at the building the Yàngbǎn had just left, three stories down.
The command center.
Accord, the lavender girl, and Chevalier were leaning over a table with computers arranged along it, papers strewn out across the surface.
It brought back memories of the moment everything had turned upside down, the computers, the interrupted tournament. Finding themselves in another world…
If he needed a push to act, that was it. The biggest one first.
The laser didn’t cut the armor. It was capable of cutting granite like a hot knife through butter, but it didn’t cut the armor. Chevalier turned, drawing his sword, a six-foot long beast of a weapon. The armor glowed orange as the laser concentrated on his belly.
“You lunatic!” he shouted, charging.
Cody switched tactics. A forcefield-
The sword shattered it with one swing.
He flew out of the way as another swing came within an inch of decapitating him.
A laser with one hand, a vacuum sphere with another, pulling Chevalier off balance.
Again, it didn’t work. The man barely reacted as the vacuum sphere caught his legs. He aimed his weapon, and a combination of danger sense and a nullification wave stopped the shot in the chamber, disabling the gun.
The x-ray vision was barely penetrating the sword or armor. Cody had to duck, back up and rely on his enhanced reflexes to avoid Chevalier’s attacks. He had forty-four powers and not one was letting him beat, what, a swordsman in a suit of armor?
It was the lack of the power boost. The Yàngbǎn were only strong as a group, granting the aura to one another. Here, now, he was feeble. Forty powers, and not one of them sufficient.
Always second best. Always alone, Cody thought. No.
Keeping the laser trained on Chevalier, he used his own power. Perdition’s power. The thirty-sixth path.
Chevalier was moved back to where he was seconds ago. Cody backed out of the way, kept the laser trained on the hero, and the instant his opponent got too close, he used his power again. It barely set Chevalier back two seconds, but it was enough.
Slow, steady, inevitable progress. Time was one of the fundamental forces of the universe, undeniable.
Accord and the girl in lavender made a sudden attempt to run to the door. Cody created a forcefield to bar their way.
They reached for phones. He used a vacuum sphere to pull them away.
It took nearly a minute to cut through Chevalier’s armor, using the time reversals to effectively put the man on hold while he put some distance between them, and the laser to cut. The man folded over the second the laser pierced flesh, cutting straight from the front of his stomach to his back.
Obstacle gone.
“Reckless,” Accord said, sounding more sad than afraid. “Lunacy.”
“I don’t care what you think.”
“I’d hoped your placement with the Yàngbǎn would temper you.”
Cody lashed out with the laser. Accord’s right arm was lopped off.
Another cut, for the right leg. Accord screamed as he fell.
The girl in lavender hadn’t reacted, only stared down at the two dying men. She clicked her tongue, “Tsk.”
“He’s asymmetrical in death,” Cody mused. “There’s a justice in that, isn’t there?”
“If there’s irony here, it’s the fact that his desire for order led to this,” the girl commented. “We just lost our strategist and our field commander, so there’s going to be more chaos than ever.”
The windows briefly rattled with the shockwave of one of Behemoth’s attacks, halfway across the city.
“Tsk.” the girl said, again.
The anger still burned inside him, not sated in the slightest. Did I end it too quickly? Maybe I should have drawn it out more.
He glanced at her. She was staring at him. “Can you use that computer to find someone? If they’re here, or somewhere else?”
“I can,” she said.
“Trickster.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Oh, I can tell you that without looking. He bit it. Some freaky monster calling herself Noelle freaked out, made clones of him. They ate him alive. Literally.”
He blinked. “When?”
“A month ago, Brockton Bay.”
The details fit. Cody nodded slowly. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
“Sorry, if he was your friend.”
“He wasn’t,” Cody snapped. He felt off balance. This was so unexpected. How was he even supposed to react to that? How long had it been since he’d really made a call on his own?
Slowly, he spoke, as if sounding out the ideas as they came to him, “No. I suppose that’s good. Thank you. I’d tell you I’ll make it quick, but… you worked for him. You probably deserve it.”
“Nuh uh,” she said. She’d backed away, gripped the edge of a table. Her entire body was rigid. “I’ll give you my phone, you can call any one of my buddies, tell them it’s Tattletale. They’ll tell you we were constantly fighting. Only reason we haven’t offed each other is that it’d be mutually assured destruction.”
“Trickery. No, knowing him, knowing the kind of people he associates with,” like Trickster, “there’s probably contingency plans. I won’t fall for that.”
“Spare me, maybe I can salvage this mess. I mean, you’ve still got to live on this planet, right? We can’t let Behemoth win. Not today.”
“I’m dead anyways.”
“Because of the Yàngbǎn. I could help. I’ll figure out a way for you to escape. Hopeless as this feels, there’s a way out.”
“No,” Cody shook his head. He felt so lost, so tired, so unsatisfied. There was one major enemy left to eliminate, one more group who’d wronged him. The Yàngbǎn. He already knew he wouldn’t get any more satisfaction from it. He knew he’d likely die in the attempt. “No, no point.”
“Fuck,” she said. “There’s definitely a point. Just… give me a second, I’ll think of it. Shit. Sucks I don’t know much about you. Don’t suppose you’d give me a hint?”
He raised a hand, pointing at her. “No.”
“Think about her,” the girl who’d called herself Tattletale blurted out the words. “What would she think?”
He hesitated.
Her? The first person that popped into mind was Thirty-two. The Yàngbǎn member who’d tried to teach him Chinese. They’d been close, had been friends, before the group segregated them, because they were more malleable as individuals than as a group. Members of the same team, but never given a chance to talk with one another. Always in arm’s reach, never together.
The second person he thought of was Noelle. His first love, the betrayer, the monster.
He shook his head, which only intensified the ringing in his ears. When had that started? With the shockwaves? During the fight with Chevalier?
Or before all that? Before the Yàngbǎn. Had it ever stopped?
He thought of the Simurgh, thought of all of this in the context of him being just one of her pawns.
His head hung.
Always a pawn. Always the expendable one. Kicked off the team, traded away to Accord for the team’s safety.
“There’s…” he started to speak, then trailed off. She didn’t interrupt him. “Who? Which her are you talking about? Which her? Be clear.”
He approached Tattletale, gripping her throat, feeling the added strength of the newest additions to the Yàngbǎn.
Tattletale’s voice was strained, “Honestly? I figured I’d toss it out there. There’s bound to be someone important, and saying her gives me a fifty-fifty chance.”
“I hate smartasses,” he said, and he squeezed, feeling her windpipe collapse in his grip.
She fell t
o the ground, and he watched as she struggled for air that didn’t come.
The faint screaming rang through his head as he watched her struggle to climb a chair, taking ten, fifteen seconds to just get her upper body onto the seat.
She found a plastic pen, collapsed to the ground with it in her hand. When she flopped over onto her back, it was broken. She’d caught it between her body and the ground.
This’ll have to do as a surrogate for Trickster, Cody mused, watching. Had Noelle felt anything like this when she’d killed and devoured innocent people? A kind of despair, mingled with helplessness?
Anger was all he had left, the drive for revenge the sole thing keeping him moving. Feeble and misdirected as this was, it wasn’t it.
Tattletale drew a knife from her belt, used the edge to remove the nib and the ink reservoir from the plastic case of the pen.
When that was done, she stabbed herself in the base of the throat.
She’s giving herself a tracheotomy, Cody thought, watching in fascination, even as he reached out and took hold of the plastic pen case.
He watched her expression as he crushed the plastic in one hand.
And he felt nothing. Even the paradoxical grin that appeared on her face, in contrast to the frustrated slam of one hand against the floor, it reminded him of Trickster in an odd way. Yet it added nothing to this.
Think about her. What would she think? Tattletale’s words struck him.
He thought of Thirty-two, and without even deciding to, he used his own power on the pen case, returning it to the state it had been in seconds ago.
He handed it back to Tattletale, then stood, his back to her, as he concentrated.
As goals went, it wasn’t much of one. He’d barely talked to her. As far as kindnesses went, hers had been minor at best. But he’d save Thirty-two.
It took two minutes to carry out the teleport. He didn’t have much time before the Yàngbǎn found a free moment to contact Null and rescind his powers. Maybe they were calling already. Maybe the electromagnetic radiation in the area would block the call.
He’d find a way, regardless.
He felt his power take hold and teleported. Back to the battlefield, back to Thirty-two.
Chest heaving as she greedily sucked in air through the plastic tube she’d jammed into the hole in her throat, Tattletale feebly crawled over to Chevalier. Her strength was depleted before she got halfway.
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