He’d spent some time staring at the metal spike with flesh dangling from it. The others were busy. It made sense to take the time to strategize, to get equipment and gear in order, familiarize himself with every tool and technique this squad of capes had on hand.
Thing was, Theo didn’t want to, even as he knew it was the smart thing. The others seemed to recognize that and weren’t pushing him, weren’t approaching. Maybe they’d brush it off as a kind of meditative thinking, a mental preparation for the fight that was to come. Maybe they’d see it for what it really was. Avoidance.
Staring at the wall and trying not to think about anything was easier than looking down, seeing the dead members of the Slaughterhouse Nine, and maybe seeing Aster in the mess of bodies.
Being silent was easier than having to look the others in the eyes and pretend he was alright, risking that they’d offer some gentle, kind condolences, and he’d have to be stoic in the face of it.
Men weren’t supposed to cry. It would be disastrous, shattering their image of him, creating too much doubt at such a crucial juncture. He could imagine how they’d react. Some of them would be awkward. Defiant, maybe, would avert his eyes. Bitch might say something harsh.
Revel, probably, would be nice about it. Offer a pep talk, a hug, heartfelt words. Tecton would be much the same. Parian and Foil, even, might be kind, if he went by descriptions Weaver and others had offered of them and the little clues he’d seen in interacting with them.
The moment he pulled himself together, if he could pull himself together, Chevalier would be at his side, all business, outlining the situation in clear, defined ways. Framing it all into plans and setups that would put less stress on Theo, no doubt, but not in such a way that anyone could say anything about it.
Hoyden? Hard to say. She lived with this wall that she’d erected around herself. Layers of defenses, in bravado or being snarky or being sarcastic or aggressive or avoiding the situation. In combat situations or real life, Theo suspected there were very few things that really got to the heart of Hoyden. When they did, they hurt. How would she react to someone being vulnerable?
And then there was Weaver.
She was in the periphery of his vision, sitting on a computer case, staring down at the floor. As ever, her mannerisms were peculiar. She was so still. If it weren’t for the bugs, or the fact that her head would periodically move, as if she were looking over the dead, he might have thought she’d stopped, like a machine with the battery removed.
She would be assessing who was dead, who wasn’t, planning and adjusting her expectations for the coming fight, quite possibly. Probably.
In the midst of that, was Weaver thinking about Aster? The fact that she, either by aiming a gun and pulling the trigger or by giving the order to Revel and Foil, had killed a toddler?
Weaver was a hard person to deal with.
Taylor, not so much.
If that was all it was, he wouldn’t have worried so much.
There were other possibilities, ones that troubled him. What if he approached them, and nobody offered condolences at all? What if they accepted it as a cost of doing business, a necessity in dire circumstances?
What if he did show emotion, and none of his allies offered any emotional support at all?
Kayden had been the closest thing he had to a mother. If it hadn’t been for Jack’s game, then Theo suspected he might never have rated. He wasn’t her first priority. That would be Aster. Not her second. That was her mission, nebulous as it had been in recent years. He hesitated to believe that he’d even rated third place.
He struggled to convince himself he placed fourth or fifth, even.
But she’d been there. She’d shown kindness, had stepped between him and Father when the situation demanded it. There had been gentle moments, like the time they’d been watching television one morning and a cape had talked about how tinkers were their least favorite type of opponent to fight, and he and Kayden had laughed, because Kayden and her group had run into Leet just a week before.
Stupid things, in the end. Nonsensical. But stupid, nonsensical things were sometimes the most important.
He’d never had friends, before he got his powers. Even now, he wondered if he’d have really formed the friendships he had if they’d chanced to meet in some universe where powers didn’t exist.
Being alone as often as he had, Theo valued the connections he had made. Even connections with Justin, Dorothy and Geoff. Crusader, Night and Fog.
On the flip side of that same coin, he felt the betrayal of Justin leaving him behind.
Above all, he felt the quiet, perpetual horror of knowing that Crusader was still screaming, his throat never going raw, as Gray Boy’s loop continued without cease.
Kayden would be standing a short distance away, stoic, trying to keep from slowly going insane as Justin’s screams continued without end.
He’d lost people who were important to him, in maybe the most horrible way possible. He’d lost his father, and Kayden, Justin, Geoff and Dorothy, and now Aster. He’d lost them to violence and stupidity and madness, and he could see the allure in how the others seemed to be functioning, bottling it all inside.
He could see the twisted logic of it, even. As if there was a binary to everything, every enemy was somehow a twisted mess of emotion, layered by a seeming calmness, while every ally seemed to be cold inside, with only an act on the surface.
He looked down at his mask. A metal face with lenses over the eyes. Stoic, expression neutral, or a little stern. He’d chosen it at first because his real face was a little too round for a mask, but the PR teams had wanted to get more faces on the team. He’d compromised, and hadn’t given his mask much thought beyond that.
Except time had passed, and he’d found himself wondering if he liked the message it conveyed. By necessity, capes went down a road where they had to become cold and unflinching. They had to become numb, had to inure themselves to hard decisions. It jarred, to wear a mask that seemed to symbolize that transition, that while wanting nothing less than to walk down that road.
Back in Brockton Bay, New Wave had tried to start something, capes without masks. It had been disastrous. The message had been lost in the ensuing celebrity, and that had only intensified after one of the core members of the group was found and killed in her civilian identity.
He wondered if they’d been right to try. If capes really needed to just… drop the mask. To cry and let the feelings out. So many got their powers through trauma, but they bottled themselves up, erected defenses, developed coping mechanisms. If New Wave’s idea had taken off, would things be better?
Didn’t matter. Here they stood.
He could make it through this, save the world. They could find the source of the Endbringers and defeat them, could clean things up, get things in order and stop all of the real monsters… he could go to college, get a career and find a girl and marry her, and at the end of the day, Justin would still be screaming.
Aster would still be dead.
The ugly decisions would have been made.
He stared up at the bloody spikes in the wall, an image that would be burned into his mind’s eye, remembered as the point he stood at the threshold. A mirror to where he’d been in the beginning, when he’d met Jack.
Bitch paced around the edges of the room, impatient. She’d had to shrink her dogs to get them to an appropriate size, and was keeping them small in case the portal wasn’t accommodating enough. Here and there, she barked out orders to get the animals away from the bodies.
It grated.
“None of those invisible fucks,” she said.
“Okay,” Weaver answered. Her voice was quiet.
Theo almost took her voice as a cue to reevaluate how she was reacting to what had just happened, then stopped himself. Losing battle. No point.
Then, for some bizarre reason, Bitch approached him.
A sleek Doberman nudged at his gauntlet with its nose. He looked down and then scratched i
t behind the ear. It didn’t matter if the dog bit him – he was wearing a gauntlet.
When he looked up, he could see Bitch staring at him. Her face was barely visible behind her hair.
“Can I help you?” he asked. His voice came out harder than he intended.
She didn’t seem to notice or care. “You’re her friend, aren’t you?”
I don’t want to talk about Weaver.
He didn’t venture an answer. He couldn’t say yes, not honestly, but he suspected Weaver had a different answer to the question.
“You’re both acting different. I can see it.”
“Kind of warranted, in this situation,” he said. “In case you didn’t notice, the last few members of my family just got killed. I just need a bit of time alone to think.”
His voice had almost broken. Couldn’t break down. Not like this, here, with her.
She hadn’t taken his hint.
“They were buttholes, weren’t they? Purity and her gang. The nazis.”
The dog nudged his hand again. He gave it a more intense scratch before answering, “White supremacists. They… weren’t the best people ever. But they were still my family.”
She kept looking at him, almost glaring. She didn’t answer or elaborate, leaving the conversation to die.
Go away. I don’t want to hit you.
He kept silent, hoping she would just leave. Willing her to leave.
“Stay, Huntress,” she ordered.
Then she walked away, leaving the dog at his side.
Theo scratched the animal under the collar, and watched it crane its head to one side, enjoying the contact.
It helped, oddly enough. Having contact with another living creature without all of the issues and hassles of dealing with people. No judgement, no worries, just… this. Being alone without being alone.
His father had always preferred cats, and the creatures had never been easy to bond with. This was nice.
Theo sighed. He glanced at Weaver in his peripheral vision, and saw that there was a dog sitting next to her. A mutt, at a glance. The animal was resting its chin on her shoulder.
She saw him looking, glanced at Bitch, who was walking with her husky puppy following behind her, then shrugged.
He lowered his eyes from Weaver… no, from Taylor, then scratched Huntress again.
“We have the coordinates. Waiting for a charge,” Defiant announced. He was already flanked by the Dragon’s Teeth he’d brought with him.
“All gather,” Chevalier ordered.
Bitch snapped her fingers twice, and her dogs returned to her.
Theo raised his hands to his face to rub his eyes, and he felt damp on one cheek. One tear, fresh. He wiped his face, glancing around to check if anyone had seen it. No, not judging by the angle.
He donned his mask.
Golem now, Golem thought.
“We need to decide who goes where,” Defiant said. “The first teleportation marked coordinates on Houston.”
Weaver spoke up, “I noted Shatterbirds and Burnscars leaving, some Damsels, bunch of others I didn’t catch, but they had weapons and I’m thinking Winter or Crimson. There were some I parsed as hostages, but it’s only in retrospect that I’m thinking they were Nice Guys.”
“The second group made their way to New York.”
“Bonesaw and a captive Nilbog that’s apparently rigged to create things on demand,” Weaver said. “Crawlers, Breeds and a handful of others I didn’t identify.”
Chevalier reacted to that, flinching.
His city, Golem thought.
“And the last group headed to Los Angeles.”
“Jack’s group?” Golem asked.
“Yes,” Weaver said. “He brought the Siberian, Hookwolf, Gray Boy, all eight Harbingers, and there are Psychosomas and Nyxes. One or two others I didn’t place.”
“Los Angeles?” Chevalier asked. “What area?”
“That area,” Defiant answered, looking at the computer.
Chevalier nodded slowly.
Golem stared at the screen. He could see the satellite image, the concentric circles that marked the area around the blinking blue dot.
“Charge prepared. We can send one group at a time. They’ve already got a twelve minute headstart. It’ll be another eight minutes before we can send the second group, eight minutes after that before we can send the third.”
“The first group to arrive can call for help and get support to the other locations,” Chevalier said.
“Then why split up?” Weaver asked. “We should all hit Jack’s group, trust others to help in New York and Houston.”
“Everyone else is closer to New York,” Chevalier said. “But Houston…”
“We can call in favors,” Weaver said. “Moord Nag’s apparently on board, though we don’t know why. Cauldron’s on board. If we can get Tattletale in contact with them, that’s handled. But we can’t do that unless we leave.”
“That’s my city,” Hoyden said.
“I get that,” Weaver replied, “But we’re doing nothing constructive if we split up, and we’re definitely doing nothing constructive as long as we sit here.”
“Once we leave,” Defiant said, “We break the configuration cell and everything here breaks down on a Euclidean level. There’s no going back, changing our mind.”
“I get that,” Weaver said, “But two or three of us aren’t going to do anything special. We need big guns.”
Golem closed his eyes.
There she is. Weaver.“She’s right,” Chevalier said, looking at Hoyden. “We’ll send every set of reinforcements we can, but it’s not worth what it costs us, to break up our group.”
“Shit,” Foil said.
Hoyden had gone stiff, bristling for an argument.
“I’m not saying we should abandon Houston,” Weaver said, before Hoyden could speak. “Defiant, can you postpone the collapse of this area?”
“Yes, but I don’t feel comfortable doing it,” he responded.
“I think you should,” she said. “Toybox left enough stuff behind. Use it. Stay behind, arm yourself, then throw everything but the kitchen sink at them. You remember how the scar formed in Brockton Bay?”
“Mm,” he said. “Tinker technology takes time to understand, to prepare. Too dangerous otherwise.”
“There’s a solution to that. I’ll point the way.”
Defiant hesitated.
Golem looked around the group, saw the expressions on faces, saw how even Hoyden had relaxed a fraction. Even the Dragon’s Tooth officers that accompanied them were a little more at ease. There were no answers in this situation, but there was a possibility. An option, vague as it was.
“Okay,” Defiant said.
Then, without so much as a farewell or a ‘good luck’, he hit the enter key.
■
Golem appeared a full four feet above the ground. He hit the ground and let his legs sink in, absorbing some of the fall. A second later, he pushed himself out.
Just the use of his power gave him a sense of the area. Touching the pavement gave him a sense of how all of the pavement around him was organized. It had been folded into itself, folded around, thinned, thickened, bent at right angles.
Looking around, he could see how the buildings had been altered. Textures had been removed, similar materials blended into one another, everything fortified, thickened, weaponized.
All around them, the buildings were like tombstones. Windowless, angular, all expression and human touches removed from them. Spikes studded corners and blocked alleyways, criss-crossed in front of doors, and carpeted pathways. Some were metal, others camouflaged.
They’d figured out how to fight Tohu and Bohu during the Los Angeles attack. The trick was responding quickly, stopping them before Tohu had her masks and Bohu managed her influence. They’d won, for lack of a better term, managing the fight without the casualties they’d seen in the prior attack, but they’d still lost a chunk of the city in the time it took them to be
at and batter the towering Bohu into submission. Now Santa Fe Springs and all of the neighboring districts were uninhabitable, due to the traps that riddled it, the way the infrastructure had been completely and totally compromised.
Easier to found a new habitable area than to try to fix this, routing new pipes and power, managing traps both subtle and blatant.
Those same traps would be a problem here, but they weren’t entirely incapable. They’d dealt with this before.
Bitch’s dogs grew abruptly, then shook, sending blood and bits of flesh and bone everywhere.
“HQ, come in,” Chevalier murmured. He continued to speak, delivering the information about Jack and the target areas.
“Area’s empty,” Weaver said.
“A trap,” Golem responded. “Has to be.”
“Has to be. Why else come here?” Foil asked.
“Nyx illusions,” Tecton said, “He doesn’t know we’re aware of who he brought, so he’s set them up to stall us.”
Nyx. Her gas is concentrated into solid shapes that move at her will. Break that shape and it becomes a cloud of poisonous gas.
“Not that easy,” Weaver said. “Maybe he knows we know, and it’s a double-bluff.”
“Parian?” Weaver asked.
Parian nodded. She unfurled the bundle of cloth from her back, then quickly shaped it into a roughly humanoid shape.
A moment later, it was stomping ahead, forging the way.
Golem fell in step beside Tecton. Every footfall on a surface concentrated his awareness, informing him of every surface of a matching material in the area. Lightning flashes in his consciousness, showing the landscape around him. He deliberately stepped on other materials to inform himself on concrete, on brick, on steel and glass. His heavy boots made for a rhythmic sound, accompanied by the sounds of Chevalier and Tecton’s own heavy footfalls, and the rougher patter of the mutant dogs.
“Stop.”
A girl’s voice, over the comm system. Not Tattletale.
“Golem, tell them to stop. Now.”
“Stop,” he said.
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