“It’s serious?”
“Serious-ish.”
Theo turned, giving Tecton his full attention.
“It’s come up with the others, because there’s been points where things got uncomfortable, awkward, and we had to talk. You’re the only one I haven’t discussed it with.”
“Weaver?” Theo guessed.
“Weaver.”
“I think I can guess where this is going.”
“She pushed Cuff a step too far, back when we went after Topsy. It worked out. Grace found herself at odds with Weaver when we went up against Deathadder. There were hard feelings for a bit after that. I don’t think Weaver knows she’s doing it.”
“I think she knows,” Theo said. “I don’t know if she cares.”
“That’s not better.”
“Wasn’t saying it was.”
“Listen, Theo. I’m not going to tell you to stop being her friend-”
“Is that what you told the others?”
“No. But she isn’t exactly buddy-buddy with anyone else on the team, is she?”
“She’s not good at making friends. I’m not either. I get what you’re saying.”
“I hope so.”
“But we came from the same city. We’ve got common background. And we’re maybe the only people who are buying into this end of the world thing.”
“That’s- that’s good. That’s fine,” Tecton said. He didn’t manage to sound convincing. “But…”
Of course there’s a but.
“…I can tell you, she pushes herself hard. We’ve all seen it. She expects everyone to match her in that, up until you demonstrate you can’t. She’ll back off then, but… that’s not a guarantee that there won’t be some permanent damage.”
“Permanent damage,” Theo echoed his team leader.
“Physically, emotionally. Or even to your relationship with her. I hate to put you on the spot, but… do you like her?”
“As a friend, sure.”
Tecton didn’t respond. He waited.
Theo shifted his weight, felt the armor at his shoulder shift, and turned his attention to adjusting the clasp. It made for an excuse to break eye contact. “Nobody else is here, right? Nobody’s going to overhear from the hallway?”
“Just me and you. I ran into Weaver as she was heading upstairs.”
“She can hear through her bugs.”
“I know. I asked her not to listen in. I’m going to hope she won’t breach that trust. And if she does, if she is listening, then maybe hearing what I just said will be a wake-up call for her.”
Theo nodded. He ventured, “A little.”
“A little wake up call?”
“No. What you were saying. I like her a little. But that’s not really me and her. That’s me being a big enough loser that I fall in love with any girl that spends more than five minutes with me. We wouldn’t work out, I know, because I know how hard she can be to get along with.”
“You’re not pursuing anything?”
“If I like anyone, it’s Ava. But she has the boyfriend-”
“Not anymore. It was another point of contention, Weaver keeping us so busy she couldn’t maintain a personal life. We’ve… geared down on that front, made sure we had downtime, but that didn’t fix the rift in her relationship.”
“Oh.”
There was a pause.
“Wait a while before approaching her,” Tecton said. “You’d make a good pair, and I think you’re both nice enough you’d make it out okay after a breakup. Anything more, anything that happens after this, do your best to convince me and the bosses it isn’t happening.”
Theo nodded.
“But on the subject of Weaver, I don’t think it would be nearly as good or welcome. I’d even recommend you back down. I can arrange training schedules with the others, if you want to maintain your regimen. Work on your versatility.“
“I appreciate the offer-”
“-Hear me out,” Tecton said, raising one gauntlet. “You like her. Maybe you’re a little in love with her. That’s normal. I’ve been there, had that phase where I fell in love with girls really easily, ’bout a year ago. I’m glad I came out of it in one piece. So to speak.”
Tecton laughed a little at that, self-depreciating. Theo smiled in sympathy.
Tecton continued. “But there have to be times you’re… not so keen on her. You said it yourself. She’s hard to get along with.”
“Yeah,” Theo said.
“I’m worried that if this training continues, a rift will form. You’ll stop being able to function as a team.”
Theo nodded. “I understand where you’re coming from. I do. But…”
“But you’re going to keep doing it. The training.”
Theo only nodded.
“Good luck, then. I should get going to school.”
“Later, Everett. Thanks for being straight with me.”
“Later, Theo. Patrol tonight. You and… Cuff?”
Theo smiled, shaking his head a little. “Sure.”
With that, Tecton was gone, his heavy boots making surprisingly little sound as he walked over to his own quarters to remove the armor.
Theo prepared the rest of his armor, leaving the mask off, and walked briskly over to the gym.
Weaver was already in her full costume, framed by a half-circle of bugs.
“Done?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Everything okay?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“I was thinking you should work on your vaults with the hands chained together. If you-”
“Full contact,” he blurted out the words.
She stopped. “Sorry. I should have asked. Seems like you know what you want to do, already.”
“I do. Yeah,” he said. “You against me. A real match.”
She nodded. “This have something to do with your talk with Tecton?”
“Yeah. But not like you’re thinking.”
“Alright,” she answered. Her bugs shifted position.
It was a signal. Theo let himself settle into a better fighting pose, hands close to the panels.
She didn’t fly for cover. She didn’t move further away from the surfaces of the ground, walls or ceiling. She made a beeline straight for him, flying low to the ground.
He created hands, but she reacted with an inhuman quickness. A fault of his power, that it was so easily telegraphed. Kaiser wasn’t so unfortunate.
But that wasn’t the entirety of it. Her bugs crawled on the ground’s surface. She felt their movements like she felt a touch on her own body. The moment a hand started protruding, she knew.
Bees, wasps and cockroaches settled on his armor, covered his lenses. He shook his head to clear his vision, saw her fly right between his legs, turning her body to slip through the gap.
He turned, felt a hand on the side of his head, a pull that capitalized on his shift of balance.
He looked up just in time to see the lights of her flight pack go dark. She let herself fall, settling one knee on his shoulder, the other at the space where his shoulder joined his neck. Over a hundred pounds of weight settling on top of him while he was off-balance, disoriented.
He fell, and she leaped off him, out of reach.
Roll with the attacks, use them.
He let his chest strike the ground, his arms sinking into the ground. He reached.
But she was too quick, already reacting. She positioned herself on the battlefield, not behind him, not on either side, but above. Forcing him to look up, disorienting. A slight shift of position forced him to turn around to keep her in sight. A failure to keep her in his sights saw her darting close to strike, to knock him off-balance.
And that was her. The bugs were massing, looping threads of silk, biting and stinging.
Short of her refusal to deal permanent injury or kill him, she barred no holds, showed no mercy, offered little kindness, if any. There wasn’t a thought to his morale, to the fact that she was sys
tematically, methodically destroying the confidence he was building up.
No. Not heartless, not wholly inconsiderate. She tore him down because she trusted him to pull himself back together, to rebuild that lost confidence and redouble his efforts.
Nevertheless, this was one of those moments where he found himself hating her a little. His fondness for her shrunk a fraction. He felt, even though he’d asked for this, the slightest sense of betrayal.
Nothing Tecton had said was new. He knew this stuff. Knew that walking down this road and continuing this training was going to hurt things between himself and Weaver in the long run. Somewhere along the line, their friendship would suffer. They’d dial up the seriousness of what they were doing, focus more on business than friendship.
He knew.
She knew.
Weaver caught his legs, flying between them, catching his knees in the crooks of her elbow, dropping him onto his back, hard. He was already feeling trepidation at the run they’d scheduled for after this. It was going to suck.
But it was necessary. If she could just impart one useful lesson, it could make all the difference. Some technique, some of her ruthlessness… something.
Anything would do.
■
Hookwolf’s storm of blades had been augmented to an endless range, the strength of the cuts, thrusts, slashes and stabs augmented a fraction by Jack’s power. It didn’t make the cuts more severe, but only extended the strength and severity of the cuts to the peak point in the blade’s movement. Heavy armor plates were scarred, cut and torn away. The wounds to Golem’s face, arms, chest and legs were different, the pain oddly delayed, as if it took time to sink in.
“Blue.“ The voice sounded so far away.
It was the push he needed. He twisted around, very nearly collapsing in the process. The blades scarred the armor at his back, and precedent suggested it wouldn’t last more than a few seconds. It was a chance to move. To run. He’d have time to run, to get to the nearest alley, before the armor was shredded. He could use his power to block it off, to buy himself time, contact the others…
All he had to do was put one foot in front of the other. Get away first, then attend to the rest.
His foot raised off the ground, and as if he were walking through a doorway that marked the point between reality and a dream, he felt the strength go out of him. He felt red-hot pain that seemed drastically out of proportion for the small areas it was concentrated into, all across his front. Felt warm, damp blood in his boots, squishing between his toes in their spider silk stockings.
The shock of it was the worst part. Stunned, unable to shift mental gears, Golem collapsed. The pain was worse, as he landed flat on his stomach. He let out a guttural groan, mingled with despair.
Too hurt, too damaged.
“I’m sorry, Theo.”
The last words he’d ever hear?
He waited for the end to come, but Hookwolf had stopped.
“This is the point where we have a long talk, Theodore,” Jack said. “So I’ve had Hookwolf ease up on you. You can bleed out while I taunt you, and maybe I talk about what I could do when we revisit your stepmother. Gray Boy is the only person who may be able to touch her, but that doesn’t mean Bonesaw can’t give him a few things.”
Golem’s fingertips scraped against the surface of the road, as if he could find some kind of traction there. When that failed he clenched his hand into a fist.
“It’s my favorite part,” Jack said. “Except… you’re clearly not interested. Stop talking, Jack. Which means we skip right to it.”
Golem couldn’t see, but he felt it as Jack struck him. Not Hookwolf’s blade, but that damn sword. It hit him in the side, shearing through the metal of his armor, stopping at the reinforcing struts and spider silk armor beneath. The force of the blow was enough to flip him over onto his back. He was left gasping.
Golem shifted his head, saw his own chest as a mess of blood and grit from the road, a ruin of shredded armor. The damage extended down his legs to the tops of his boots.
Further down, Jack rode Hookwolf like Hannibal astride his elephant, a small contingent of his ‘army’ behind him.
“What was it I said, back then? Crotch…”
Jack lowered the blade, pointing. He stabbed it forward a fraction, and Theo felt the impact on his armor, between his groin and his thigh.
“To…”
Jack moved the blade. It dragged along Golem’s intact armor, and he could feel metal parting, the armor shifting, pulling against his ravaged chest.
Like a dream, something surreal.
He thrust his hands into the panels at his sides.
Hands emerged from his ruined armor, no larger than his own. Each hand grasped the wrist of the other, pulled to draw each other closer together, to draw the ruined armor together. Jack’s blade moved faster, before Theo could shore up the rest, raking across his ribcage, shoulder and the edge of his chin. He could feel the blade rasp through bone.
Jack didn’t lower the sword after striking. He left it there, his arm extended, the point aimed at the horizon.
It was a cue, an order. The Nine began advancing, a crowd of them.
“D-” Golem started to speak, but his face was too ruined. Couldn’t see out of one eye, and that cut to his chin made even moving his jaw too painful.
“Red. Eleven.“
He didn’t even have to think about it.
He created two more hands. Large hands.
It was a gamble, but any maneuver would be in a situation like this. Two hands, each on opposite sides of the street.
Just as Theo had created hands to jab at Jack’s knees or to strike at Crimson’s weak points, he created them to strike at a different sort of weak point. Shaped into fists, the hands slowly, inexorably extended into the corners of buildings.
When the hands stopped making headway, he opened them, felt how slow they were to move, as if he were flexing his hands inside thick clay.
Nevertheless, he closed the hands on major supports, and pulled, withdrawing them back into the ground.
Had Bohu made the buildings sturdier in the course of attacking the city?
Theo used the last vestige of strength to wrench with one hand, to twist, in an attempt to get that one vital support to come down.
The building remained standing. Too thick, too solid.
But the building on the other side of the street, the one he hadn’t touched, it shifted, then slowly toppled into the middle of the street, leaning slightly away from Golem in the process.
Which helped less than he might have hoped.
He reached down once more, feeling the pull against cuts on his chest as he moved his arm, and a large hand emerged from the ground, helping him to his feet. He used it for support as he got his feet under him.
He felt as lightweight as a cloud, but that was deceptive. His armor was heavy, and his strength was dribbling out of him in a hundred thin streams. He moved in a deliberate way as he planted one foot in front of the other.
He could patch up his armor or he could knock down more buildings.
“D- muh,” he mumbled.
“Red. Help’s on the way. Ten questions left. Do your best.”
Golem began tearing down the next set of buildings. Too many in that group of Nine would survive or avoid the impacts, but it was something.
Ten questions, and Jack was still okay. Jack was too quick, too fast.
It reminded Golem of sparring against Taylor.
He hadn’t won those fights either.
Hadn’t won any, up until the point where the deadline for the end of the world was imminent. He suspected that was a mercy, a small encouragement. An intentional loss.
The buildings crashed down behind him. He couldn’t run, but he could manage a limping jog. He began to patch up his armor.
There was a sound of a blade leaving its sheath, somewhere behind him.
He turned, and saw a Mannequin approaching, rounding the corner at
the end of the alley. Blades extended from the tinker’s forearms. The expressionless face still managed to stare. If anything, it was more expressive than half of the people Golem interacted with, by virtue of body language alone. It moved with a kind of anticipation, let itself shift and flop this way and that, almost in a taunting way. With swagger.
Golem backed away, found himself at a corner, and turned to enter the adjoining alley.
A wall of criss-crossing blades barred his way.
Bohu’s work.
It made him think of his father, a man he had to go to great effort to see as his dad.
Golem reached into the wall, saw the Mannequin move, dodging the outstretched hand.
He extended another hand, and it reached out from the first’s palm, catching the Mannequin around the throat.
Entomb, he thought, almost hearing Weaver’s voice uttering the word.
He created more hands, binding, holding, getting as much of a grip as he could manage against a foe that was as smooth as chrome, hard as crystal.
His target struggled and squirmed, very nearly slipping free as he let his neck disconnect, cut the chain that attached torso and head. Golem caught one leg around the ankle.
Mannequin disconnected that too, leaped-
And was cut short by a hand emerging above him, knocked back down atop the lump of frozen hands of concrete and brick. Theo gripped Mannequin’s arms and legs, then extended one arm and punched one hand into the neck-socket the head had fit into.
Others were approaching at the end of the alley. A Crimson, swollen with blood.
The man barreled through the alley, his path of destruction not reaching the hands that held Mannequin a matter of feet over his head. A Murder Rat followed just behind him, pointing with one foot-long blade.
Signaling others.
Theo used hands of stone to break and bend the lattice of blades, then created more to fashion a set of stairs, footholds to walk up as he made his way to the roof.
Footholds too fragile for Crimson to use, with his excessive weight and massive feet.
The man started to climb, and Golem interfered.
The Murder Rat was a bit of a problem, though. So were the ones that were due to follow.
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