3

"It's out of control, and it's my fault. I'm trying to fix it. In fact, I'm the only one who can fix it." – "Why's that, because you're one of us?" – "Because I'm the only one who cares if you're alive or not, Pete." They were on a rooftop again, only this time it was the Deveaux rooftop. Or maybe not. It didn't matter. He was furious.

"Oh, yeah, and a brilliant job you've been doing! If you care whether we live or die, why did you have to convince the public we were dangerous terrorists in the first place? You don't care, Nathan, all you care for is your ego!"

Nathan just stood there before him, with an odd expression on his face, said, "Pete, I'm just trying to help," and then he suddenly flashed his broadest election poster smile, gave him a jovial pat on the shoulders, and flew off into the sky. Peter looked down at himself in horror to find he had bomb fuses strapped to his waist. He was in Kirby Plaza. He tried to fly, but couldn't move.

And then suddenly it was Claude standing opposite him, giving him that maniacal grin. "People suck, friend. Each and every one of them." He gave Peter a shove, and he felt his heart miss a beat as he started to plummet.

He was falling. He was flying. And then he wasn't. He landed hard on the ground, the wind knocked out of him as glass rained down on him from a broken window on the seventh floor.

He should have been dead, and yet he wasn't.

His shoulder hurt, and the hard floor didn't help either.

Claire was there, but he wasn't healing. He'd almost forgotten what it felt like. He groped for her hand, willing for her ability to cross over to him, but it didn't, and then she was gone. He was alone.

It was dark, and cold. He had no idea how he'd got here, where he was, or who; all he knew he was cold, and confused, and scared.

The door banged open, and in walked Arthur, a book in his hand and a hole in his forehead. Peter stared at him.

"Son," Arthur said, gesturing with the book while blood poured down his face, "until you change that attitude, you're grounded."

Peter jerked awake.

He was drenched in cold sweat, still shaking despite the fact that the attic was stifling hot.

Unsteadily, he sat up on the floor, every muscle in his body aching, as he willed his heart to stop pounding. He hadn't thought about that shipping container in weeks. His subconscious had a lot to answer for.

He took a few seconds to get his bearings, before he looked around for his first good inspection of the room he was in. Compared to this, his last hideout had been positively tidy, more of a broom cabinet than a junk room, but here, there was so much stuff of every description lying around that he probably could easily have hidden under it all even if Danko's goons would come charging in right then. The prospect was certainly worth consideration, but the place had its downsides – there was no water tap this time, and it was so hot and oppressive up here that Peter felt as if his head would split, and that had the casting vote.

He retrieved the last packed sandwich from his pocket. He must have lain on it at some point, because even through the plastic wrapper, it had been reduced to little more than a crumbling, sticky mess, but he was hungry enough not to care.

When he had finished it, the absence of water became all the more obvious. A glance at his watch told him it was early afternoon – too early to leave his shelter safely by his own definition of "safe", but he'd have to adapt.

He carefully picked his way through all the junk, one-handedly shifting stools, an ancient-looking typewriter, a Christmas tree stand and several large wooden boards out of the way, aiming for a laundry basket near one of the walls, in the hope he would find something to replace his sweaty and bloodied t-shirt. As he slightly moved one of the boards, a precarious construction of several cardboard boxes, a lampshade and, to make matters worse, a splintered guitar came sliding down, and he stood frozen in the debris for several minutes, hardly daring to breathe, until he was sure that nobody was coming to investigate.

The basket yielded mostly faded-out children's clothing, and the only thing that was approximately his size and that he could bring himself to wear, with a stretch, was a pastel yellow polo shirt. It smelled of ten years of attic, but of nothing worse.

He redressed and cleaned his wound again before he changed, and as he replaced the sling, he remembered his words to the others in Arkansas – we'll have to do things we can't even imagine to survive. Right down to pastel yellow polo shirts. He sighed. At least the white sling didn't stand out on it as much as it had on his dark blue shirt. He considered leaving the sling off – it would make him easily recognizable in case anyone was actively looking for him – but since his shoulder hadn't improved at all since two nights ago, he knew he had to favour mobility over a lower profile.

The sun was beating down outside when he carefully opened the skylight, and climbed out onto the roof. He had never flown in the middle of a crowded city in broad daylight.

He walked over to the edge of the roof to look down into the alley below. Just when he felt confident that nobody might see him if he swooped down into a deserted-looking backyard, his phone bleeped, and he nearly rolled his eyes at the timing as he opened the display.

He read:

MESSAGE FROM: UNKNOWN

59 BOX ST, NY.

YOU'VE GOT HELP THERE.

14TH FLOOR, 4TH WINDOW FROM THE LEFT.

USE THE FIRE ESCAPE.

REBEL.

"New York?" Peter said aloud. That was in Brooklyn.

He typed, I DON'T THINK I CAN.

As always, the reply came up so fast that it was impossible to believe somebody was typing the words.

YOU'VE GOT TO.

Peter wondered how much this Rebel person could possibly know about him. Tapping into surveillance cams, yes, it wasn't hard to imagine how he had found him and Matt in Isaac's loft, or in building 26. But how could Rebel know where he was now, and what his condition was?

MATT AND THE OTHERS, he typed. I CAN'T LEAVE THEM.

YOU CAN'T HELP THEM. I'M DOING WHAT I CAN. TRUST ME.

Before Peter had time to reply, the display went black again, and he nearly threw the phone down into the alleyway in frustration. "Trust you?" he shouted, causing a few pigeons to flutter up from an aerial in alarm. "You're not exactly giving me much reason to, are you?"

59 Box Street, 14th floor, fire escape – damn, what window had it been again? And he couldn't even bring the message up again for another look.

It was more than three hundred miles to New York. Under normal circumstances, that would not have been a problem for him, but the circumstances were hardly normal.

And then there was the deeply rooted reluctance to blindly trust a message from a person he didn't know, who obviously liked dramatic timing and kept his associates as much in the dark as possible, while he himself was pulling all the strings. Rebel seemed to share a lot of character traits with his mother, he thought resentfully.

A year ago, he would probably have trusted this Rebel guy without thinking, but too much had happened since then to make him lose faith in people who said they had his best interests in mind.

He dreaded the long flight, but deep down, he knew he hardly had any other choice than to take Rebel's suggestion. If the infection continued to get worse at its present rate, he wasn't even sure he would be able to fly at all by tomorrow. He needed help, and rest, in a place that was neither a public cat toilet nor heated up to 110 degrees during the day.

But first, he needed something to drink, or he wouldn't make the flight anyway.

Peter waited for a couple of minutes, making sure nobody was around, and then he flew down from the building into the backyard below.