by Hayes, Drew
72.
Vince was holding back. No one yelled at him about it or called out the fact that he was taking twice as long as it should have to drop his opponent. The rest of his team was busy dealing with their own challenges, and besides, Vince didn’t need someone else to point out his current failing: he knew it from the moment the new Sims had appeared.
As much as he’d tried to treat the old Sims like stand-ins for real people, at a certain level he’d always understood they were just machines, circuits and wires that could be rebuilt after he tore them apart. And, yes, on a fundamental level, Vince grasped that nothing had changed. The problem was that seeing these human-like models was driving home just how different it would be when he was actually in the field.
Maybe it wouldn’t have been as bad if he’d never left the HCP’s safety on that fateful night in May. Then he’d be able to dismiss the concerns, convince himself that when staring down real criminals, he would have the strength of his convictions and the knowledge that they were killers to carry him through. But Vince wasn’t blessed with such ignorance. He understood—he knew—what it was like to look into someone’s eyes as their life slowly drained away. If not for Camille, Vince would have seen the task all the way through.
Dodging an energy blast from a woman in one of the prison jumpsuits, Vince came up with electricity dancing in his hands. For a moment, looking at her, he saw past the artificial enemy: in her place stood the speedster from so many months back. Before this battle, Vince would have expected such a sight to bring him up short, for guilt to cause him to falter. Instead, the electricity in his hands surged, sparking brightly as Vince fought to regain control. All these months, and he was still so goddamned angry—angry at the man who’d killed his friend, at all of the criminal Supers who would chip away at other Heroes, to say nothing of civilians.
Pushing the rage down, Vince throttled his energy and hit the woman with what he hoped was enough juice to knock her out. Unfortunately, all it did was stun her. He readied for another attack. The issue wasn’t that Vince didn’t want to attack the new Sims; it was that he wanted it too much. All the pain, and fury, and loss, it was all still there—and now that he was being handed a supposedly appropriate target, that darkness wanted to come bursting out. Vince was pulling his punches and holding back because he had to. If he didn’t, if he let himself give in, he feared it would become a rampage.
That was when he noticed them. More Sims, though these weren’t wearing jumpsuits and slinging powers. No, this duo was a woman in a red jacket crouched over a shivering child, the two of them peeking out from the corner of an alleyway. Civilians. The team was still on the outskirts, but the deeper into the city they went, the more civilian Sims there would be. Vince had been so caught up in the second curveball he nearly forgot about the first one: saving the civilians was deemed secondary to stopping the criminals.
His opponent had noticed that something had diverted his gaze. She began to turn in place, swiveling her head toward the hidden pair. As soon as she saw them, there would be hostages in the equation. Maybe, maybe Vince could stop her before she unleashed a few blasts, but if he failed then he’d have to bring her down while she hid behind innocent people. Those lives would be as good as lost, all because Vince had hesitated.
The bolt of electricity that roared through the air was so powerful it half-blinded anyone who’d been looking in his direction. When the spots in their eyes faded, what remained on the scene was a smoking, melted husk where an energy-blasting Sim had once been. That, and Vince, slowly lowering his hand as small sparks danced between his fingers.
“No more.”
The words came without stopping by Vince’s brain to see exactly what message they were supposed to impart, surging up instinctually, just like the massive attack he’d unleashed. As soon as they hit his ears, Vince understood what a more primal part of him was trying to say. No more innocent lives lost. No more bystanders buried. No more friends’ funerals. He refused to let his anger overtake him, to forget that the people he’d be fighting were just that: people. But all the same, he wouldn’t lose any more lives, not when he had the strength to protect them. And he would protect them, no matter the cost, no matter how the blood weighed him down.
Around Vince, the rest of his team was finishing up their opponents. Alex released his focus from clearing out the mist. The others had made it through largely unscathed, and as Vince did a full sweep of the field, he realized something that lessened the tension in his heart a touch. Though there were other civilian Sims tucked about in the building and on the street, none of them had been injured. Even with their vision reduced, the team had managed to bring down its opponents without sacrificing a single civilian. One fight down, unknown more looming before them.
“We’re clear,” Alex said. “Next cluster is a ways up to the north. Should be around seven in total. This time, we won’t let them catch us by surprise.”
Wordlessly, Vince joined the others in jogging down a nearby street. He noticed the worried look on Roy and Mary’s faces but thought little of it. This was a test meant to tax them mentally; it wasn’t exactly a surprise that the others might be struggling as well.
* * *
By far, the fastest moving team was Chad, Shane, Britney, and Amber. Though the latter two had shown some initial hesitation, by the end of the first battle they were adjusting to the new dynamics. After the third fight, Britney was sneaking up on Sims and slicing spines with her rapier while Amber’s sonic attacks stunned entire groups. With Chad and Shane quickly cutting through the enemies, striking before most criminal Sims could recover and endanger nearby civilians, their group was tearing through opponents at an exceptional rate. Dean Blaine couldn’t help but feel a small hint of semi-paternal pride as he watched Chad handily dispatch Sim after Sim, though of course he showed none of it on his face.
Jill’s team was having a tougher time of it. While she’d been healed, thankfully, that much damage had worn her out, and as a result she was slowing the others down. Combat was still going briskly when they engaged, the stoked fires of seeing a downed teammate burning in their souls and giving them the willpower to overcome their enemy’s human facades, but the time between those moments was dragging. Fights were taking longer than needed, and more than once that slowness had dragged unnecessary civilians into the fray. Were she on his team in a real fight, Blaine would have pulled Jill from the field. As it stood, she was endangering herself and the others.
Allen, Adam, Rich, and Selena were doing well in their own right. A team without any capacity for withstanding heavy attacks, they’d chosen the calculating route. Selena’s songs lulled nearby groups into letting their guards down, and then Rich and Adam (in his Camille transformation) raced closer to neutralize them, while Allen fired on any who resisted Selena’s abilities. Their tactics made them the slowest group on the field, but they also had by far the lowest casualty rate—only Allen was accidentally killing a few in every engagement. Thanks to the heavy emphasis on containment, none of the fighting spilled over into nearby buildings, which meant they were protecting the hiding civilian bots as well. But Dean Blaine knew more than they did, and he was aware of a few Sims in the field they wouldn’t be able to contain so easily. If they ran across one of those, their only options would be to hope Adam-Camille could manage a hit, or to break and flee.
The Melbrook team and Alex had gotten off to a rocky start, though they were quickly picking up speed. Alice’s ability to increase the gravity on her enemies, Roy’s strength to stay mobile in spite of Alice’s gravity fields, and the others’ versatility with ranged attacks were enabling them to handle their opponents quickly, if not delicately. Pinning entire groups down stopped the criminals from fleeing into buildings, thus adding more lives to the mix, but also trapped any civilians that happened to be too nearby. Vince seemed to have taken on the responsibility of balancing that aspect, striking hard—perhaps too hard—at any Sim close enough to injure a civilian. Tha
t strategy was a sound one, for this exam. In the future, it wouldn’t be so easy. The civilian bots would be mixed in with the criminals; sometimes knowing which was which would be a struggle in itself. Area attack methods would either be dismissed or used with the understanding that innocent lives could be lost. That came later, however. For the moment, they would make one adjustment at a time.
Still, as Dean Blaine looked on, watching his senior students slowly quell the fabricated uprising, he couldn’t help but notice that they did so with a certain ruthlessness, sometimes even hinging on brutality—something that had been missing in the Supers of years past. From the whispers amidst the watching Heroes, it seemed they’d taken notice too. This was something Dean Blaine had expected; after all, this was his only class to have seen what it was like to fight with real stakes. They understood that this was more than just a battle for grades or ranking; it was about survival. Overall, the sentiment would serve them well after graduation, giving them a leg up on the new Heroes who hadn’t quite grasped that lesson yet.
But for the moment, Dean Blaine couldn’t help thinking that this probably wasn’t doing much to disprove their reputation as the Class of Nightmares.
73.
“Did it just come out of nowhere?”
Roy shook his head, a vacant look shuttering his eyes as he stared down at the concrete floor. Finding a private place hadn’t been hard once the trial ended; no one had been feeling particularly exuberant after battling human-shaped Sims or failing to protect civilians. Some teams had done better than others, but none of them had managed to save every person they encountered. Those losses, simulated though they were, were weighing the students down—to say nothing of facing the fact that when they went into the real field, it wouldn’t be robots they would be forced to tear apart. Dr. Moran had been waiting for the class when it exited the gym, and the last Mary had seen a line was forming in front of her to book appointments, with Vince leading the charge. With no eyes upon them, Mary and Roy easily and discreetly slipped into a small, unadorned room outside the gym.
“I think... I think it’s been building for a while.” Absently, as if he weren’t even aware of the motion, Roy reached up and carefully touched his temple. “For the last few months, I’ve been getting something like hunches, half-formed thoughts that didn’t seem like stuff I would come up with but that were impossible to pin down. Hershel’s been experiencing the same. I guess maybe we both thought our connection was getting stronger or something. We’ve always been linked, and not just by memories; I can feel Hershel’s consciousness in my head, and vice versa. But direct communication, that’s totally new.”
“This didn’t happen even when—” Mary faltered, her tongue getting ahead of her mind as she realized that she might be about to blunder into discussing a fear Roy didn’t wish to deal with yet. She was too far along, however, and Roy understood where she was going.
“No, not even when we were Powereds,” Roy said. “But back then, it was contentious. We were fighting for control. Nowadays, it’s a lot more like a partnership. We’ve both found our roles, and it feels like we are making progress.”
The powerful hands wrapped around the grip of his bat tightened, and Mary didn’t need to read Roy’s mind to know he was mentally running through all the possibilities, many of them awful. Gingerly, she laid one of her own small hands atop his wide ones, and after a few moments, the clutching grip loosened slightly.
“Mary… what’s happening to me?” Roy whispered.
“As I see it, there are any number of potential reasons for this. Some are more likely than others. The first, which I’m sure is at the forefront in both our minds, is that something with the procedure has gone awry and you’re regressing. But that also seems to be the least likely explanation for hearing Hershel’s voice. For one thing, the rest of us haven’t seen any regression in the slightest. If anything, everyone’s control has only gotten stronger. For another, direct communication wasn’t an aspect of your Powered condition—that means you’re probably moving forward, not back.”
“That actually scares me more,” Roy said. “Ever since Owen told me that I was just a projection of Hershel’s wishes, some part of me has been terrified this day would come. Now that he’s getting stronger, what if he doesn’t need me anymore? What if he’s taking over, shifting in body only? What… what if I disappear?”
Roy Daniels was not a man to cry, not from fear at least. Instead, he merely stared at the ground with a lost, haunted expression more suited to someone facing a deadly disease than the strapping young Super who wore it. In a lot of ways, Mary would have preferred tears. Those might have been easier to comfort.
“Roy, I won’t lie to you: it’s a possibility. Your power is unique, and while that’s true for all abilities, yours is especially odd. Maybe the two of you are joining; I’m not going to say it can’t happen. But I will say that, given the evidence so far, it also seems unlikely.”
“How do you figure?” There was something almost like the pale ghost of hope that sparked in Roy’s eyes.
“Several factors, the biggest of which is that it sounds like the communication is going both ways. You said Hershel was getting the same hunch feelings, so that would speak to merging rather than him absorbing you. Looking at it objectively, it seems far more like a growth of your ability. Hershel is the smarter of you two, but you’re the bolder one with better fighting instincts. Perhaps you’re beginning to hear the other because you’ve been stepping onto each other’s turf; Hershel learning to fight and you developing tactics. All speculation aside, I do have one very compelling argument against the idea that you’re just some wish-fulfillment of Hershel’s.”
Mary paused to look around the room they’d ducked into. It was small and sparse, probably a closet at some point in time, and she couldn’t see any sort of monitoring equipment. Still, this was the HCP, and it was best to assume they were being overheard at any given time. Were it just the staff to worry about, Mary wouldn’t have been so concerned, but with the DVA around some topics had to be touched upon delicately.
“Last year, when I was working on my dream-walking and I did the group dive, you both came along,” Mary said. “Roy and Hershel, side by side. Hershel didn’t show up in your body, or alone, because the two of you aren’t one broken person. Maybe you started out that way, I can’t say for sure, but as of now you’re a pair. You’re brothers, each of you your own man. And neither of you are cowards, so we have to face this development head-on—with some additional help.”
“The dean?” Roy asked. He seemed… not upbeat, but less morose than before. She’d managed to assuage his more immediate concerns; now, she just had to get him something to focus on. A task, a trial, any method he could use to fight his way forward. Roy didn’t fare well against existential dilemmas, but once he was given a path, something concrete, there was nothing that could knock him off course.
“To start with. Probably Mr. Numbers and Mr. Transport as well, and Dr. Moran eventually, though I assume her day is going to be pretty booked.” Mary stood from the small bench where she’d perched, offering a hand to help Roy up, despite the massive difference in their size and musculature. To her surprise, he accepted, taking her fingers and carefully pulling himself to his feet.
“Then let’s get started. The sooner I have a handle on it, the better I’ll feel.” Roy hesitated, looking at Mary with an almost familial affection. “And thanks for the talk. Really.”
“My pleasure.”
“You know, I might be better than Hershel at a lot of things, but even since we were kids there’s one area where he’s whupped me good,” Roy said, yanking open the door and gesturing for Mary to go first. “Damned if my brother doesn’t have much better taste in women than I do.”
74.
There were no beeping monitors or tubes running to Jill’s veins; such technology was unneeded when their friendly damage absorber could completely remove all injuries with just a touch. The trauma, howev
er, was another matter. No sooner had they left the battlefield than Jill was taken to the infirmary to rest. Her body was trying to react to a slew of broken bones and other wounds that were no longer present, and it would take a little while for reality to catch up with her brain’s expectations. It was an aspect of healing every senior student knew quite well, having encountered the fatigue ample times in their tenure at Lander. Yet something about this still felt different as Will sat silently, resting on a plastic chair with a thin cushion and keeping watch over his sister.
Jill seemed to be awake, which was a pity, because sleep would do her a world of good. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Will filed away the idea for some sort of device to induce immediate REM sleep. It would be helpful in situations like these, and—if he could make it work fast enough—have potential offensive capabilities as well. If today had made nothing else clear, it was that he’d failed to give Jill’s suit enough tech. Already his brain was abuzz with ideas on how to better protect her.
“Sorry.”
The word was so soft that Will nearly missed it. He only realized it had been spoken because Jill rolled slightly over to better face him.
“Sorry? You jumped onto the back of a giant Sim to save me. If anyone here should be sorry, it’s me. I should have made your suit stronger, more adaptable.” Will leaned forward, eyes burning as the words continued to spew. “Don’t worry. As soon as you’re better, I’m going to get started. I don’t care how much time it takes: by the time November’s test arrives, you’ll be unstoppable. I’ll reinforce the armor, upgrade the muscle augmenters, add in external shielding generators coupled with—”
Jill reached out and bopped Will on the nose with her index and middle fingers. “Enough.”
“That’s not nearly enough. To compensate for today’s failing, I’ll redouble—”
