AN: Last chapter of the arc. Buckle up!
2.8
I could barely think as the anger rose up in me, fire rippling into my chest and down my arms. As I shot forward into the darkness all I could see was her smirk as she looked back towards me, as if she was saying "and that is how a hero does it."
A blinding red blast arced past my shoulder, splashing off chitin with a dull thud. It even caused the thing to flinch back. Gallant, I thought. Stupid, but courageous. No wonder she didn't hesitate.
The light of the attack revealed my target. The monster was hunkered over its prey and even in the monochromatic glare I could see the short gasps that wracked her as she struggled to breathe. Its maw yawned open, wide enough that it must have unhinged its jaw, and a ropy tongue extended. It was as thick as my wrist and as long as my forearm, poised above her ruined throat.
THIEF
My legs burned and I pushed, as my feet came down my toes gouged trenches in the cement. The acceleration was almost painful, fueled by a fury so intense that I could barely believe it was my own. I watched as the barbed tip descended, reaching for her. I could see the minute play of muscles in the appendage as the world receded around me, leaving only my anger and the
STEALER
I felt my gauntlets stretch and swell, feeling too tight by far. The spider-silk began to give under the pressure, and then released completely.
I swung my talons in a glittering arc towards the
DEFILER
and it shattered, broke apart like a flimsy figurine. I ploughed on through, my forehead coming to rest against the basement wall. It was cool to touch, even through my mask, like being in a cave. The sound of blood pounding in my ears slowly retreated, the fire in my limbs cooled.
There was a weak cough behind me. Who ... Glory Girl. Victoria Dallon.
I spun around, withdrawing my arms from the crumbling cement and limestone in the same motion, and I saw her. Tears stung my eyes, my breath caught in my throat. She was broken.
As I bent down and gathered her in my arms I mumbled something intended to be reassuring, I don't think it was even words. She flinched and tried to speak, or maybe just moan. I couldn't tell from the sound she made.
She seemed so small and frail.
"Oh god."
Gallant had caught up with me. Aegis too, his arms wrapped around the younger Ward, support and restraint at the same time. For some reason the junior cape was in a basic undersuit, his gifted Tinker armour gone. He looked younger too, without that.
Aegis must have seen me looking. "Gallant's armour froze up, total shutdown. Had to cut him out of it." He glanced back over his shoulder towards the others, speaking softly. "Come on, Tattletale has got the vault open, let's get her inside."
It was a study in character flaws, watching them all. Kid Win was freaking out, Clockblocker was trying to lighten the mood, Gallant wanted to punch him and Aegis was trying to talk them all down.
Vista was hunched over in the corner, as far as possible from Glory Girl as she could get while still being in the vault. I didn't blame her, it wasn't pretty.
Grue and Tattletale were arguing about something, and getting pretty heated. Bitch was ignoring everything, idly scratching her dogs.
Shadow Stalker was off to one side, an equal distance from almost everyone. Perhaps slightly closer to me. She was acting like she wasn't worried by all of it, but the bugs I had on her felt the way she flinched every time her gaze strayed across Victoria. And me, for some reason.
The few remaining civilians were bunched together. They were not coping well.
The Dramatic one, the Inappropriate one, the Emotional one, the Reasonable one, the Traumatised one, the Self-Absorbed ones, the Disconnected one, the Trying-To-Be-Aloof one and the NPCs. The cliches were all here.
So what did that make me then? I felt adrift, set apart from them all.
I studied my hands, turning them back and forth to examine the exposed skin. Something had happened, but they looked no different than any other day. I couldn't even remember what it was I had felt, just flashes of an all-consuming anger that felt out of place. Alien.
The Monstrous one, maybe?
What was wrong with me, and what could I do to stop it killing them?
Not that Victoria was dead. Clockblocker could keep her alive for as long as she had a single heartbeat left. Longer, really. Panacea could work with that. With any luck, she wouldn't even have to experience the passage of time between now and then, wouldn't have to think those terrifying thoughts I had seen in her eyes as I carried her.
They were still out there, waiting. The others had come in from the street, now that they knew we weren't going to double back and escape. There was so many of them.
But the vault was holding. My bugs had felt it as the doors closed, the low thrum of power. Tattletale had said that it was Tinker built to withstand mid level Brutes, and where steel failed the forcefield generator should succeed. The power supply was buried inside the vault, some esoteric secret of physics generating enough energy to run for years.
The secondary vault upstairs that the Undersiders had robbed was like a toybox in comparison, but it only held the mundane daily money. This was the vault for the valuable stuff.
It sounded like that was what Grue and Tattletale were arguing about, she wanted to explore the treasure trove of secrets the vault offered. He thought it wasn't the time, and he had my vote. Seriously, Tattletale?
As if she could hear me she disengaged from the conversation and wandered over. Just what I needed. I idly noted Shadow Stalker glaring at her as she walked.
For the first time since I met her, Tattletale didn't immediately launch into a speech. She sat down against my wall, even a respectful distance from me. It counted for something. We sat there for a few minutes as the rest of the vault-dwellers settled in for the wait, muffled scraping noises and screeches marking the movements of our captors.
Tattletale had been wrong about something, which made me more happy than it should. The solid walls didn't stop them. They had burrowed clear around the vault, looking for a weakness. Thankfully they hadn't found one.
"You aren't like them," she said gently, breaking my train of thought. It was probably the first time I had heard her speak where she didn't sound like a cat who just found the cream. Shadow Stalker snorted.
I dropped my head between my knees. If I wasn't, then what was that anger...
"Our powers change us all, like ..." she trailed off. I looked up and saw her smiling, an honest smile for once. "Sorry, I was doing it again, answering you before you asked. A good example of what I mean." She gestured around at the other capes. "We get amplified when we trigger, or something. Whatever emotion fits our powers best. They call it conceptual reinforcement at the Universities."
I looked around the vault, reviewing my earlier thoughts.
"So yeah," she continued, voice low. "Aegis tries to soak up everyone else's hurt, Clockblocker disrupts the status quo, Vista needs to pull everyone close and push everyone away at the same time."
I glanced at the tiny girl, isolated from everyone. Vista...
"And me? I always loved being smarter than everyone. It became a compulsion." She looked right into my eyes, like she was trying to express something with more than words. She broke her gaze, face downcast. "Sorry, for everything up there," she muttered.
That ... that was unexpected.
She laughed lightly, breaking the mood. "So don't beat yourself up, ok? Whatever is going on in your head, we all feel it. Maybe we can't be like we were before, but we can deal, you know?"
I nodded slowly.
She relaxed back against the wall, looking up at the ceiling. "You know, it would have been so much nicer to do this earlier, over coffee maybe. There's something about a bank robbery and alien invasion that brings out my bad side."
I smirked a little, at that. "Mine too, I guess." I took a deep breath, and exhaled. What a day, if we were understating things. I turned to her. "So what was the plan with the Villain Seeking Bug-Girl thing? Were you looking for a recruit?"
She cocked her head to the side, chewing her lip thoughtfully. After a moment she nodded. "Yeah, something like that, but you've probably earned a better explanation. It wasn't the only motivation."
Well now she had my full attention.
"We did want you, for sure. That kind of power, along with the battlefield control you had? We probably would have cakewalked through this bank with you on board." She glanced across at Grue, who was talking quietly with Regent on the other side of the vault. "But there's more too, we have ... an employer, I guess. Another cape. And he was very interested in you. He wanted you brought into the fold, and any information we could get."
Huh. I guess I had caught more attention than I had realised.
She shook her head. "More than you think. He was always totally hands off with the team, left that up to me and Grue. Him making you a job? It was unprecedented." Now she trailed off, looking down at her feet. "I couldn't work it out. He is ambitious to say the least, I thought maybe whatever it was between you and the Cultists was what got his attention. Maybe he thought they were too destabilising and wanted an edge against them, maybe he wanted their firepower. That was the information I mentioned. I was going to warn you."
My eyebrows rose under my mask. "About him? Isn't he your boss?"
She nodded. "Yeah, he is. But that doesn't mean we agree on everything."
Well, wasn't this weird? Despite everything, I found myself relaxing more talking to her than I had to anyone recently, barring maybe Vista.
Shadow Stalker suddenly paced forward, arms crossed. "So when the hell is backup getting here?" she growled. "Shouldn't they have turned up by now?" I caught a few nods around the bunker.
I stretched out my awareness among the bugs out on the street. It was totally deserted, no-one for at least a block. I couldn't reach quite as far now, maybe because we were underground? "Nothing up there yet," I said as I picked myself up off the floor. I caught a small flinch from Tattletale, and turned back towards her. "What is it?"
She was chewing her lip again. "Could be nothing," she said.
Aegis walked over. "And it could be something. What have you got?"
She grimaced again. "Fine, but as long as you all know this is only a maybe, alright?" He gave a short nod. "Well, it was like I said upstairs, they didn't stop the radios last time, it doesn't really fit their powers. It is possible that they are two separate things, and the blackout is caused by something else. You said yourself it was widespread."
"How sure are you?" Aegis asked, voice tense. Why...
"Maybe fifty percent, give or take," she replied. The leader of the Wards flinched at that.
Clockblocker moaned out loud. "You are doing it again. Explain it to us, what does it matter who caused the blackout?"
Aegis turned back to them. "If this isn't the cause of the blackout, and the whole city is down, then they wouldn't even know we're in trouble."
It was at that exact moment that the colourful lights of Kid Win's laser guns flickered and died.
"Clockblocker," Tattletale said, voice tight. "Freeze the walls, right now."
Everyone spun to face her. She looked as afraid as I had ever seen. "Huh? What do you mean?" Clockblocker asked.
Kid Win pushed him in the shoulder, still looking at the weapons in shock. "She means freeze the fucking walls!" he yelled. It seemed to get Clockblocker moving. He had touched two of the walls when there was a sudden reduction in noise, a lull. Even without enhanced hearing the rest of them seemed to notice, and paused.
It took me a second to realise that it was that background hum that had disappeared, the vibration my bugs felt had stilled.
FUCK. "Forcefield just went down" I said, my voice cracking.
"Shit," Kid Win shouted. "Get the door man!"
Clockblocker spun and charged at the vault door, just as they started moving. Vista bent the space, although it seemed weaker than her usual efforts. He still had to run a few feet.
He was running the wrong way.
His hand hit the vault door, the soft sound accompanied by the scream of tearing metal. From the other wall. They had got around behind us.
I was already moving, racing towards Clockblocker as the vault erupted in chaos. The backup lights flickered and died, leaving us in near-total darkness. The civilians started screaming, everyone scrambled away from the walls. Layered over it all was the cacophonous noise of steel coming apart.
Guided by my bugs I reached down and grabbed Clockblocker by the wrist. I could move a lot quicker than he could.
He started struggling, trying to resist me. Why... shit. He didn't know who or what had grabbed him, which meant ...
I flung him as hard as I could towards the wall they were attacking just as I felt his other hand brush my wrist.
Actinic light assaulted my eyes, barely acclimatized to the dark, and I squeezed them shut. What the hell just happened?
"She's awake," someone said.
I looked around. There were a bunch of flares lined up along the wall ...
which had long gashes running through it, massive tears half a foot wide and over a metre long. Behind the ruined steel, something out there was moving.
There was a weak moan behind me. I spun, looking for Glory Girl but she was just where she had been, still frozen. There wasn't any more blood there either.
Everyone else was gathered just inside the other corner, huddled around someone.
I looked back along the wall. There hadn't been anyone there except ...
I leapt forward, barreling through the others. Scared them, if the half-heard shouts and screams were anything to go by. It was really the last thing on my mind.
On the floor, costume slashed open, surrounded by blood...
Vista.
She coughed, a thin trail of blood marring her cheek.
"Hey Skitter," she said weakly with a small grin. "Wondering when you would snap out of it."
Clockblocker said something next to me. Apologising, maybe. I just shook my head and knelt down, my hand finding hers.
She coughed again. More blood, must have got her lungs.
"So hard to tell what you are thinking, you know?" she whispered. My reply came out as a strangled choking noise, my throat didn't seem to want to work.
"Hey, don't drown in there. Another benefit of a visor," she said with a smirk. "And don't worry about me, Clockie can keep me safe."
I nodded, knowing it was a lie.
Four walls, two capes on the brink of death. Something would give, and when it did...
No fucking way.
I stood up. They were still there, prowling. Testing the sides and the rear. They had even started burrowing under the floor of the vault, but if the tactile senses of my bugs were right Clockblocker had frozen that too.
I buried them. Filled their holes and tunnels with bugs, packed them tight. Maybe it would slow them down, maybe it wouldn't. I didn't need long.
The vault door unfroze just as I reached it, textured metal to the feet of my insects instead of impossibly smooth glass. I smiled. Finally something was going my way.
I didn't even turn around, I just yanked on the handle.
"They came here for me," I said.
