“It works. And I know Grace is going to say something to me about it, about it being fake or false, but the thing is, you do that, and you start to do it because it’s genuine, because you care about their feelings, or because-”
I cut him off. “Tecton.”
He fell silent, turning my way.
“We don’t have time to get into anything complicated,” I said.
“It’s retarded anyways,” Rachel added.
I turned to her. “Rachel, did you ever have a dog with a deep attachment to another person or dog? Someone they lost, before they found their way to a shelter, or to you? Where they were still dealing, after the fact?”
She gave me a one-shouldered shrug.
“How would you treat that dog?” I asked.
“Dunno, depends on the dog.”
“Basically, though? You’d just be there, right? Do that for Imp. Stay close, make sure she doesn’t run off, as much as that’s even possible with her, and give her the benefit of your company without intruding into her space. Make sure she has all of the basics, both in the near future and in the next few days.”
“Okay,” Rachel said, frowning a little.
“I know it’s not the easiest thing, but she’s a teammate, all right? It’s what we do for our team.”
“Right.”
“And just like a dog that’s had a recent bad experience might snap, bark or growl, you need to understand that she might do the same. Only it’ll probably take a different form. She’ll swear a lot. She’ll probably try to get a rise out of you, try to provoke you or someone else. That’s how Imp growls.”
Rachel didn’t even offer me a monosyllabic response at that. She frowned instead.
“Trust your instincts, Rachel. You’re smarter than you think, and your gut responses, the decisions you make on the fly, they’re good ones. Turning around and using the chain for a second cut, back there? That was good.”
Anyone else might have accepted the praise with a smile, but her frown only deepened.
“How was your advice better than mine?” Tecton asked. He sounded a touch offended.
“Customized to the individual,” Grace said. “Don’t be a sore loser.”
“I’m not sore. I’m just usually pretty good at this, and I got called retarded.”
“The advice was called retarded,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll explain another day, if we make it through this. How’s Cuff?”
“Skin’s badly burned, but the burn didn’t go much further than that. She’ll have the most amazing scars, too. No serious internal or mental damage, as far as we can tell, but her muscles convulsed so badly they broke a bone.”
I winced.
“She’ll make it to tomorrow, provided this doesn’t turn ugly,” Tecton said.
I nodded. I sensed a rumble. I couldn’t tell how distant the attack was.
Where the hell was the bastard? I was a little caught off guard by how quiet things had gone. He was giving us a chance to regroup? Or was he letting us gather, so he could take us all out at once?
“Don’t suppose you can sense seismic activity?” I asked.
“Not with my suit. My computers got toasted. I’m running purely off the basics, and my intuitive understanding. Stuff I reinforced, so I wouldn’t get trapped in my suit like I did with Shatterbird.”
I nodded.
“Generally, though?”
“He’s taking his time.”
If he was massing his strength for one good retaliatory hit, how would he do it?
Volcanos? Earthquake?
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Go?”
“I’ve got a bad feeling,” I said. I turned to look for Rachel, saw her a distance away, her arms folded as she stood beside Imp. They were looking at the sea of injured capes. “Rachel!”
I saw her attention snap to me.
“Go! Get your dogs!” I said. I turned to the Chicago Wards, “Wards! Bikes!”
“You’re serious,” Tecton said.
“Everything I know about Endbringers, about basic parahuman psychology, it demands retaliation. What’s he done so far? Saturated an area in radiation? Thrown a few lightning bolts around?”
“You’re expecting worse.”
“I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop. Go. Spread out. We might need to respond to an attack on another location, with no time to spare.”
Tecton nodded. He turned to his Wards, “Go!”
I pushed my way through the gathered crowd. I could see Defiant, with Dragon beside him.
“Weaver,” he said. “Dragon says that was you, with the blast.”
I shook my head. “I helped coordinate, nothing more.”
“You hurt him.”
“We hurt him. And he’s burrowed. He’s looking for a target, and I can’t think of a better place for him to hit than this.”
“We’d be able to put up a fight. We have defensive lines.”
“Probably,” I agreed. “But my guys are moving out anyways. We’ve never done this much damage to him, and yet he’s sticking around. What I’m wondering is, why?”
Defiant glanced at Dragon, then spoke. “He’s-”
The ground shuddered. Again, as before, the rumbling intensified.
This time, it didn’t stop. It got worse with every passing second.
“Reinforce!” A cape hollered. Someone else took up the call in an Indian language. Hindi? Punjabi?
I could see Annex flowing into the entryway, soaring through the wall’s surface to the ceiling. Golem created his hands, protecting the rows and columns of injured capes.
There was a press as the bodies flowed out the door. I used my flight pack to fly over their heads, but even then, I bumped shoulders with others who could fly. I wanted to help, but there was little I could do inside.
Eidolon and Alexandria had arrived at the building. Eidolon touched the exterior wall, and an emerald green glow started to surround the structure.
The rumbling reached the point where capes were unable to keep their balance. I raised off the ground, but the movement of the air in response to the shuddering was enough to make me sway.
Tattletale. Grue. Parian.
Behemoth emerged with a plume of gray-brown smoke, and the landscape shattered. It was Tecton’s natural power, taken to an extreme. Fissures lanced out in every direction and disappeared into each horizon. Secondary fissures crossed between each of the major ones, like the threads of a spider’s web.
As far as the eye could see in every direction, terrain shifted. Hillsides abruptly tilted, standing structures fell like collapsing houses of cards.
A full quarter of the temple collapsed. The bugs I’d kept to the edges of the room could sense it as a small share of the capes who were in the entry hall were caught beneath the falling rubble. The ones furthest towards the back. Eidolon’s protective effect kept the remainder intact.
Behemoth emerged from the smoke. He was more robust than he had been, but that wasn’t saying much. Seventy percent burned away, perhaps. The regeneration had slowed, but it was still functioning to a degree. He’d recuperated, built his strength, and he’d used the time to, what? Burrow through strategic areas? Had the distant rumbles been controlled detonations or collapses at key areas?
The temple was the one building that stood. Everywhere else, there was devastation.
How many refugees had just died, with this? How many had stayed within their homes, rather than try to evacuate?
I felt hollow inside, just standing there, stunned, trying to take it all in. The area around us was still settling, sections of land tilting and sliding like sinking battleships sliding into the water.
How many of us were left? Seventy? Eighty? How many of them were hurt, exhausted, their resources spent? Could we even coordinate, with so many of us speaking different languages?
“Last stand!” a male cape I didn’t know hollered the words, his voice ragged with fear and emotion.
; Behemoth, three or four hundred feet away, responded to the shout with a lightning strike. Our capes were too slow to erect barriers, and the protection insufficient. Capes died. For the first time, I averted my eyes. I didn’t want to know how bad the casualties were. Our numbers were too thin.
I saw our Protectorate, what remained of it, stepping forward to form our defensive line. Our last defensive line. The major ones, the ones I’d been introduced to, too many had died, or were injured. These were unfamiliar faces. The ones who were second in command, if that.
Eidolon landed to one side. The Triumvirate had often posed in that classic ‘v’ formation, with Legend in front, Alexandria to his left, Eidolon to the right, the lesser members in the wings, Eidolon was now apart from the rest of the group. His cape didn’t billow, his posture was slightly slumped. He was tired, on his last legs.
There were murmurs as Alexandria advanced from within the temple. Unlike so many of us, she didn’t flinch as Behemoth struck out with lightning, the barriers holding this time. Golem had raised lightning rods on either side of the road, fingers splayed as if he could gesture for Behemoth to stop.
Alexandria found her way to the end of the crowd opposite Eidolon, to our far left. Satyrical and the other Vegas capes followed her. Only a small fraction of them remained. Others had apparently been injured or killed in battle.
Alexandria glanced over our ranks, and her eyes moved right past me, not even recognizing me. For the briefest instant, I met her eyes behind that steel helmet of hers, and I saw that one had a pink iris.
That answered my question, I supposed. Pretender couldn’t take over a corpse, but there was no reason for him to take over Alexandria if she was alive and well. Cauldron had collected Pretender, and they had him controlling her because she was no longer of any use to them on her own.
Our side was busy getting sorted into groups, spreading out so he couldn’t hurt too many of us at once. We were finding our formations, as our toughest capes absorbed and redirected the lightning he was throwing in an almost experimental manner. He changed tacks, throwing flame, and a team composed entirely of pyrokinetics caught and redirected it with a concerted effort. I backed away, and found Tecton at my back, with the remaining Chicago Wards. Bitch stood just off to one side, her dogs ready.
One structure among several hundred thousand still stood, and our adversary was wounded, though undiminished. Our ranks had been thinned in the most violent ways possible, through fire and lightning and a roar that could render organs to mush. We weren’t stronger than we’d been at the start of all of this. I couldn’t even say that the weak had been thinned out, or that we’d been united through hardship or loss. Behemoth had picked off some of the strongest of us, and the trust between our factions was thin at best, with some eyeing the Yàngbǎn, others watching Satyrical’s contingent. We were just less.
“Hold the line,” Exalt called out. Other capes translated for him, echoing his words with only a few seconds of delay, in four or five different languages. “We defend until the ones inside can be evacuated, and then we leave. There’s nothing left to protect here.”
A thin heroism, but that was heroic, wasn’t it? Protecting the wounded, defending the ones who’d put everything on the line to stop this monster.
If this was all a kind of microcosm for the world at large, that small heroism had to count for something. I wanted it to so badly I ached for it.
Behemoth roared, and the last engagement opened.
24.x (Interlude, Chevalier)
Hero ushered him into the headquarters. “This is the last one. I’d like you all to meet Chevalier.”
There was a chorus of replies. Mumbled greetings with one exceedingly enthusiastic response from a girl in the crowd. It was almost mocking.
Chevalier ventured inside, a touch hesitant. Not afraid. He’d told himself he’d never be afraid again. No. But this was unfamiliar territory. The others were difficult to read. Nine youths.
His eyes roved over the group. Five girls, four boys. His addition made it an even split. Intentional?
The costumes ran the gamut from professional to homemade. They varied in the degree of color, in seriousness, in combat readiness. There was a boy, also, who had a professional looking costume, black and green. It was a costume that had no doubt cost money, with leather and a utility belt, a leaf emblem over his heart. Around him, Chevalier could see a vague nimbus, as though he could see only the brightest and darkest parts of some landscape that the boy stood within. It was a subtle thing, an image that Chevalier could make out in the same way his perspective on something might alter if he had only his left eye closed, as opposed to his right.
A girl beside the boy with the leaf costume wore a less expensive looking costume, but she’d apparently gravitated towards him, a hopeful lackey or a romantic interest. In the same way that the forest seemed to hang in the periphery of the boy, an older woman loomed just behind the girl. She was kindly in appearance, like a next door neighbor, with hands burned black from fingertip to elbow. The old woman was moving her lips as though she were talking, but the image was silent.
He started to turn his head, but the image changed. The effect ran over the girl’s skin, as though she were standing right in front of a glacier, the light refracting off of it.
No, the black hands on the older woman… a result of fire? Magma.
The girl caught him looking at her and frowned a little. He averted his gaze. She likely thought he was staring for other reasons.
At the far end of the scale, opposite the two professional, serious looking young heroes, there was a girl with a shield and sword. Her helmet sat on the table beside her, a homemade piece of equipment with ridiculous mouse ears at the sides. It wasn’t a great helmet either; it didn’t offer enough peripheral vision, was more decorative than protective. She stood off to one side, but two others had gathered near her. She was grinning, the one who’d stood out from the rest with her over the top welcome.
And the images, the glimmers, they showed the mouse-ears girl laughing. For her companions, there was a strange writing system patterned on one boy’s skin, and the other boy swirled with a smoke that wasn’t there.
The images weren’t an unfamiliar thing, but this was the first time he’d been confronted with so many in one place. It was distracting, unnerving.
What were they supposed to be, the glimmers?
The remaining two members of the group were a boy, a clear vigilante of the night in appearance, with a costume that was black from head to toe, and a girl dressed in urban camouflage. Chevalier’s attention fell on the girl; her white and gray jacket was short enough that it didn’t reach the small of her back, a blue tank top with a shield emblem on the front. Her scarf, a complimenting shade of blue, was wrapped around her lower face, bearing the same emblem. She sat in a chair, elbows on her knees, toying with a knife.
Odd as it was, she was more grim than the boy who was trying to look dark and disturbing.
“Take a seat,” Hero said. He laid a gentle hand on Chevalier’s shoulder.
Such a minor thing, but it felt somehow critical. What clique did he identify with? What direction would he take?
He glanced over the rest of the group, at the images that had changed, and his eyes fell on the one with the knife.
In that instant, the knife disappeared, and there was a flare. The images were suddenly distinct, glaring, an image appearing in a flash, so brief he might have missed it. A cluster of children, blood, their faces stark with fear and in one case, pain.
It faded as quickly as it had appeared, and the girl held a gun, now.
She’d caught him looking. Meeting his eyes, she changed it again.
The image that flickered was of her, holding a gun with a silencer on the end, pointing it. Her expression was one of desperation.
She’d changed the gun for a machete, apparently unaware.
He made his way across the room, and seated himself in the chair beside her. She didn
’t even glance his way, her attention on the weapon as she ran her thumb alongside the flat of the blade.
“Army girl doesn’t even speak english, you know,” the boy in the nice costume said.
“She speaks some,” Hero said. “It’s fine.”
“I’m just saying,” the boy said.
“I think we all know what you’re saying,” Hero answered. “You’ve made arguments about what you want the team to be, your desire to be taken seriously.”
Chevalier watched the exchange carefully. His eyes fell on the figure behind Hero, and he tried to focus his attention on it. It moved with glacial slowness, a four-legged creature with legs so long that the ‘window’ around Hero didn’t even show its main body. Finger-like appendages at the base of each leg carved diagrams and ideas into the ‘soil’ beneath as it walked.
“We’ve got the serious part down,” the girl with the mouse ears said. She drew her sword, thrusting it into the air, “Huzzah!”
“So bogus,” was the mumbled response. “As if her group has the majority.”
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Hero said. “A lot of you have been through a lot, and some of you have only just stopped. Stopped running, stopped fighting, stopped dealing with a long series of crises.”
Hero’s eyes briefly fell on Chevalier. Chevalier lowered his eyes to the floor.
“The important thing to remember,” Hero said, “is that you’ve got time. You have time to figure out who you want to become, time to figure out what this team will become, time to breathe. To be kids again.”
Hero paused, glancing over the room. He sighed. “And you have zero interest in that, I’m sure. You’re in a hurry to grow up, to be heroes.”
“You’d better believe it, boss,” the mouse girl said.
“Just be careful,” Legend said, as he strode into the room. He was accompanied by Eidolon and Alexandria. “This is about training, not thrusting you into the midst of trouble.”
“That comes later,” the mouse girl said.
“If you decide you want it,” Legend answered.
The sheer presence of the heroes here was changing the energy of the room. The listless teenagers had perked up. They were paying more attention, more alert.
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