Atonement

by CeruleanSlane

Taylor died in the locker. In her guilt, Madison triggered instead and became a superhero, to make up for her mistakes. Seen first on spacebattles, archived here for easier reading and for other people to find.

21. Arc 21: Warfare

Notes: Moka-girl - The lack of scene-break lines is because ffn eats my simple asterisks when I post it. I need to go alllllll the way back through and switch the asterisk spots with the horizontal lines that ffn uses. That's a project I will undertake eventually. For now, I did switch the horizontal lines in with this latest chapter, so we'll see how that works.

Imageination - Duelitist's 'pal' seen early on will show up again. ;)

HellKing666 - Yeah, the exact scene of Haley meeting Tether is from the first part of Arc 5. Now we know why she was so upset about that bag. ;) And yeah, I have definitely never seen anything about Misaka clones or even heard of them before now. Glad you like it, in any case. ;)

21.01

"So, do you think this wall is going to combust or something after we finish painting it?" Dennis asked casually as he pushed the paint roller up in a long, smooth motion, covering more of the dull off-white color with a pretty pale blue. "I mean, your bedroom's on the other side, right?"

I paused and squinted at the boy from where I was standing beside Lily and Hunter, trying to work out where he was going with that. "I give up, what does that have to do with anything?"

Three days had passed since Jalopy had brought down Sophia, and neither the PRT or PCIPS agents who interrogated her or Trickster had had any more luck in figuring out who they were working for, or where the other Travelers were. They also hadn't figured out how to remove the organic suit from Sophia without killing her, considering how literally attached to her body it was.

Dipping the roller back into the paint, Dennis looked over his shoulder back to us. "Well you know, Hunter's going for the nice, simple and elegant blue. Whereas your walls are..."

"Interesting?" I offered. "Colorful and sparkly? Fun? I will accept any and all synonyms for exciting."

"It's definitely colorful." Dennis agreed. "I just think the contrast of your... what do you call it?"

"Spiraling tie-dye glitter rainbow sunrise." I informed him, trying to sound as prim as possible.

"Spiraling tie-dye glitter rainbow sunrise," he echoed. "I think the contrast of that attached to the same wall that this," Dennis indicated the simple blue. "Might just cause some kind of implosion."

"I like her bedroom walls." Lily put in with a shrug as she slipped past me to take one of the paint brushes so she could work on the trim for the opposite wall. "They're exciting."

"See?" I grinned and patted Lily on the back. "She totally gets it." Glancing toward Hunter, I added, "Not that there's a problem with being simple. It's just not me."

Hunter just shrugged and gave me a slight smile before tapping a few buttons on her computer pad. The voice spoke up for her with, "I like simple."

"Plus your walls'll look like the sky when this is all done." Dennis realized as he stepped back to examine his work. "Which... was totally on purpose, wasn't it?" When she gave a hesitant nod, he looked back to it. "That'll look great."

Blushing at that, Hunter attached her computer pad to her belt, then stepped over to pick up the second roller so that she could work alongside the red-haired boy. As I watched, she glanced over to see what he was doing, then looked away shyly when he turned to see what she wanted, her blush deepening. Dennis's mouth opened like he was going to ask something, but in the end he just exhaled and made another stroke of the roller.

While I rolled my eyes at their little dance and heaved a silent, exasperated sigh of my own, Lily moved next to me. She leaned in close to whisper under her breath so that the other two wouldn't hear, "So, how's the plan of getting those two to admit they like each other going?"

I blinked sidelong at her and whispered back, "I don't remember telling you about that plan."

"You didn't have to." She winked at me. "You're not as subtle as you think you are." Her hand waved toward Dennis and Hunter. "And they're even less subtle than that."

"What's all the whispering about back there?" Dennis was squinting at the two of us suspiciously. "Are you guys plotting our demise or what?"

I snorted at that and gave him a thumbs up. "Yup, you caught us. Totally plotting how to kill you both and take over your lives. We're thumb wrestling over which one of us gets stuck with yours."

He made a wounded noise and put his free hand against his chest. "That hurts, Maddy, right here. I'll have you know most people would love to take over my life."

Snickering in spite of myself, I waved a hand. "Sure, Dennis, have your delusions." Ignoring his sputtering, I stepped over to where Hunter was and poked her. "I bet we could get some wispy white clouds mixed into the blue to it's even more like the sky."

Her head bobbed in a quick nod before she pointed up at the ceiling and made a few quick wiggling motions with her fingers.

"Sure, we can get some stars up there too, no problem."

Lily looked back and forth between us. "You understood what she meant just from this?" She duplicated Hunter's finger wiggle.

I made a show of shaking my head while teasing the other girl. "No see, she said 'we need stars on the ceiling'. You just said 'I'm clearly suffering from terrible nerve damage in my hand.'"

There was a brief knock at the doorjamb before Sam stuck her head in. "Who's got nerve damage?"

Lily was huffing at me before glancing that way. "Nobody, Mrs. O'Connell. Madison's just a brat."

"Please, please just stick with Sam, Lily. So business as usual then." Sam stepped into the room, taking a look around. "Nice, I like the blue. It's not as crazy as what Maddy went with."

"Philistine." I sniffed. "Lily likes my walls. So does Ethan."

"Ethan still likes cramming himself full of cotton candy and then going on those rides at the fair that spin you around really, really fast." Sam pointed out. "He doesn't exactly do quietly elegant."

"Cotton candy's the best," I informed her before asking, "I don't suppose they got anything out of the two stooges today?"

Her head shook at that. "Nope, Shadow Stalker's still refusing to cooperate at all, and Trickster's playing his games. Giving false information and then acting surprised when it doesn't pan out. He won't even play ball with Jess or Marissa. It's just one lie after another."

Setting her roller down, Hunter turned to me and frowned thoughtfully. Putting two fingers out like legs, she mimed walking away.

I shook my head at that. "Even Krouse can't be delusional enough to think that he can just walk away from all this." Hunter repeated the gesture, except this time she hooked the finger of her other hand around the two fingers that made up her simulated 'legs' as though carrying them away. That time I nodded. "Though he might think that someone else will get him out, yeah."

"Who could he think has the kind of pull to yank him out of this level of custody?" Dennis demanded. "The only reason he's not in the Birdcage already is the information they want about Noelle."

"Which is exactly why he's not telling us anything." Sam sighed. "Because he knows that's the only thing keeping him where whoever his contact is might be able to get to him."

"Well, that and loyalty to Noelle." I pointed out. "Whatever else you can say about him, Mars and Jess both say that he'd do anything for her. Even really, really stupid things, repeatedly."

"No he won't." Sam's voice was firm. "He might think that he'd do anything for her, but that's just words. The most important thing he could do for that girl now is admit that he was wrong. And that's something he refuses to do. If he'd just admit that he fucked up and kept making things worse, we could all help Noelle, or at least try to. But if he admits that, he has to accept that it was his fault, that he isn't her savior, and he won't. So no, he won't do 'anything' for her. He'll do 'anything' as long as he still gets to be right. That's not love. It's obsession."

I heaved a long sigh. "I hope they figure out a way to make him talk soon. From what Mars and Jess said, Noelle could get really upset if he's not around. And an upset Noelle could be bad for everyone."

---

The next day I was walking down the hall at school between first and second period when a voice called for my attention, "Hey Madison, check this out." Chris was beckoning me over from where he stood by some lockers with a couple other sophomore boys.

Blinking at his call, I stepped over that way. "Err, what's up?"

"Hey, badass unicorn shirt." One of the boys gave me a mocking thumbs up. "Did it come with the glitter or did you have to add that yourself?"

Chris kicked his foot. "Don't be a dick, Roy."

"Oh don't worry about it, Chris." I said sweetly. "If I had a quarter for every person who thought I cared about their opinion on my clothing choices, I could afford to have just how little I do etched onto the moon with a laser."

"Oooh, it's got teeth with the glittery unicorn shirt." One of the other boys remarked. "Watch out, Roy. What're you, a Freshman?"

I barely restrained myself from scowling. "I'm a junior, and I'm not that small." Looking toward Chris while the other boys reacted to that, I asked, "Did you need something, or did you just want to let your friend give some fashion advice?"

"Chris thinks his lab partner ripped me off." The boy who had asked if I was a Freshman replied for him. "But I say he's crazy and it's the real deal."

"What's real?" I asked, looking back and forth between them.

"Oh, just this." Chris nudged the locker with his foot, making it swing open.

I nearly choked at what I saw. On the inside of the door was a poster of me. Or rather, a poster of Tether. It was one of the public relations shots that they made us do, that I had thus far done my level best to forget about. "Uh, oh, umm..."

"I know, awesome huh?" The boy was grinning as he reached up to point at some words that had been written toward the bottom of the poster, running his fingers along them proudly.

I read aloud, 'To Aisha, my coolest friend.'" It was signed by 'Tether.' Blinking, I asked, "Who's Aisha?"

"Yo." A new voice spoke up, and I turned to see the pretty black girl with the streak of white in her dark hair that Chris had been talking to outside of the library. "Sup?" She lifted her chin to me before looking past us at the poster. "Aww, you hung it up already, Jack." Her head shook with regret. "Man, I shouldn't have let you talk me out of it."

"Hey," the proud owner of the poster, Jack apparently, pointed at her. "No take-backs. We agreed, fifty bucks and I get the poster. Not my fault if you get seller's remorse."

I had to do a double take at that. "Fifty bucks?" I'd seen all the official Wards posters that size selling for about ten dollars each. "Isn't that a little bit much?"

"That's what I said." Chris was eying Aisha pointedly. "But you know, somebody insisted that the signature makes it worth a lot more than normal."

The other girl just smiled enigmatically. "Hey, it had sentimental value. You saw what it said. 'To my coolest friend.' Besides, there's not a lot of Tether-signed merch out there. Scarcity breeds worth."

Jack shut his locker then. "Chris still thinks you ripped me off or something."

Aisha made an obvious show of gasping, pressing a hand against her chest in mock surprise. "Rip him off? Now, is that how trusted lab partners should treat each other? Where's the trust?"

"Yeah, dude." Jack pushed off his locker and reached into his pocket. "Besides, I'm not stupid. I made sure to get the certificate of authenticity." He pulled a folded paper out and held it up for us to read.

Chris leaned close. "This document certifies that the enclosed is an official PRT sanctioned and verified poster of the Ward hero known as Tether."

"See?" Jack sounded smug as he tucked the certificate back into his pocket. "And you were worried. C'mon, Roy, let's get to gym." He and the other boy headed off together.

As soon as they were gone, Aisha started to cackle. The sound tickled my memory, but before I could focus too much on it, Chris interrupted, "A certificate of authenticity, really?"

The girl shrugged. "Hey, I didn't forge it. Is it my fault that he's too stupid to notice that it doesn't say anything about the autograph being real? Fifty bucks isn't the worst idiot tax I could've hit him with."

Chris shook his head slowly. "You're totally not giving the money back, are you?"

Aisha made a disparaging noise. "Pffft, hell no. I need that fifty bucks more than he does. Obviously, or he'd pay more attention to what he buys with it. And you-" She poked him in the chest. "Have got to stop trying to spoil my fun. Just cuz we're lab partners doesn't mean I won't fuck you up."

Turning then, she looked me up and down. "Cute shirt. You know Chris?"

"We've hung out a little bit." I shrugged, trying not to sound evasive. "You guys are lab partners?"

"Well for now we are." Aisha eyed the boy and sniffed. "If he keeps trying to fuck up my side business, maybe I'll find a better partner."

Chris didn't seem worried. "Oh yeah? Like who?"

Aisha's mouth opened and then shut and she cursed under her breath before waving a hand. "Whatever." She focused on me once again. "So what'd you think of the poster?"

"Err," I blinked at that. "Why are you asking me?"

Before the other girl could respond, there was a sudden scream from down the hall. Twisting that way quickly, my eyes widened at the sight of three full grown men in masks, carrying assault rifles.

My throat closed up at that. There were men with guns inside the school.

"This is your only warning!" The man in the lead announced. "All of you, everyone go straight to the cafeteria and nobody will be hurt." When the crowd of teenagers in the hall just stared at him in frozen shock, he hefted the rifle. "Move! Cafeteria, now!"

I looked at Chris, then down the hall toward the janitor's closet where our costumes were stored behind a false wall. It was past where the gunmen were.

Chris shook his head subtly, and the two of us were herded alongside Aisha and the other students. There was no way to get to the costumes without being seen, and it was too dangerous to start a fight right here before we had any idea of what was going on. Even if the fact that this jackasses brought guns onto school grounds did make me want to introduce all three of their rifles to their crotches repeatedly. For now though, all either of us could do was hit the emergency button on our cell phones that would alert the PRT.

Aisha, for her part, didn't seem scared. "Shit." She muttered in annoyance before mimicking the deep voice of someone older and male, 'You have to go to Arcadia, Eesh, it's the safe school.' Fuck you, bro, fuck you."

More gunmen were herding the rest of the students into the cafeteria as well, along with the staff. They were moving quickly and efficiently, and I could count at least twenty of them, all heavily armed.

Across the room, I could see Lily alongside Amy. Cassie and Theo were a little bit further back.

The crowd of scared, confused students and teachers were herded into the middle of the cafeteria, forced to bunch up together since the place wasn't meant to hold everyone in school at once. I kept watching for warning lines, but so far no one appeared to be in immediate physical danger.

Once everyone had been gathered, I found myself pressed tight against Chris and Aisha while we waited for someone to make another move. I tried to think. If need be, since we were all here and there was no way to tell who was doing it, could I rip everyone's guns out of their hands? It would need to be fast, at least ten at a time without any pause in between to give them any chance to react. And even then, could I manage it? And if I did, they might have other weapons.

I was still considering it, when another voice spoke up. "You will all be silent!"

The voices of confusion and worry stopped abruptly, and everyone turned toward the front of the cafeteria where Lung stood, flanked by Impasse, Oni Lee, and Feast.

My heart sank at that sight. This just kept getting worse. What the hell was Lung doing here?

Once he had everyone's attention, the man stepped up onto a table so that we could all see him. "Some of my people believe that we should not be in this town, that the heroes here are too strong.

"Today, we will prove them wrong. They are frightened of the Wards, but we will show them that there is nothing to fear. We will show them that the Wards are only people, only children.

"The Wards will show themselves. They will come forward now and let all see that they are only children. They will do so within five minutes.

"If they refuse, ten children will die for every minute that they are late."

21.02

Needless to say, the threat made more than a few of the students start to freak out, forcing the various gunmen around the room to resort to shouted orders and threats to get things back under control. The teachers and other faculty seemed divided between calming students and trying to reason with the psychopaths that had taken over the school.

In the meantime, Lily caught my eye from across the room. Lifting one hand to scratch her cheek, she used the other to tap her wrist before subtly and briefly pointing toward me with her scratching finger.

Slowly, I lifted my hand to wipe across my face, displaying Jalopy for her. We'd had a chat about the little robot after Mika had seen him in action.

Nodding, Lily took another moment before pointedly looking up and away toward the top left corner. I followed her gaze and found the speaker for the intercom system above and to the left of the kitchen entrance where a couple of guards stood. Frowning, I looked back to Lily uncertainly. She paused as though considering how to explain what she wanted, then tapped her wrist again and made a few motions with her fingers like they were legs that were dancing.

That time I got it. Nodding, I glanced to Chris, who was tense as he looked at me. I couldn't imagine how helpless it must feel to be a tinker and not have any equipment with you in a situation like this. He also couldn't exactly talk to me, since Aisha was still right there. I mouthed, 'cover me' to him and nodded toward his lab partner.

Turning so that his body shielded my actions, Chris pitched his voice upward to be worried as he faced Aisha. "You don't really think they'd kill anybody here, do you? I mean, they're not stupid enough to bring that kind of heat down on them, right?"

While Aisha responded to that, I lifted my hands to cover my face like I was terrified, while whispering under my breath to Jalopy. "Okay, buddy. I need you to sneak out of here, get to the main office, and play some really distracting music over the loud speaker. Can you do that?" He gave a brief vibration of confirmation, and I lowered my hands, linking them behind my back while looking around. As I watched the guards restoring order, Jalopy's form shifted on my wrist before he jumped down.

I still felt nervous letting my tiny bodyguard run off without me. Even with all that he had done to help and how tough he was, I cared about the little guy too much to not worry about sending him out alone.

Still, at the moment all I could do was wait. He disappeared from my sight almost immediately, moving through the sea of terrified teenagers, some of whom were openly calling out for the Wards to just go ahead and show themselves. Which must have been why Lung didn't seem too concerned about quieting the students down. He wanted us to hear their fear and the condemnation in their voices.

Exposing ourselves wouldn't solve the problem. It would remove our ability to act in this situation, limit our ability to act in future situations, and put even more people in danger. There was absolutely no guarantee, or even reasonable belief, that they would spare people once they had us under control. So as tempting as it was to believe that letting them see who we were would make things better, it was only an illusion of safety, a trap that would make the larger situation much worse.

"Four minutes more!" Lung announced. "We know that you are here, Wards. You will show yourselves and we will fight you. Or you will not show yourselves, and we will kill others. You are deciding this."

For the moment, all we could do was stand and wait for Jalopy to follow through on his part. If he helped us pull this off, I was seriously considering having him instated as an official team member.

Cassie and Theo caught my attention, the former mouthing an exaggerated 'Well?' as she lifted her hands apart in a questioning gesture. Obviously she wanted to know what the hell we were doing.

I made a calming motion with a hand and then looked toward Lily. The other girl was still standing near Amy even as a small group of upset students tried to argue with the healer that, as the only cape they knew about, she should do something to fix this entire situation. The look on Lily's face made it clear that she wanted to make the crowd shut up and leave Amy alone, but she couldn't do so without drawing far too much attention to herself.

When she found me looking at her, Lily tapped her ear and nodded toward the loudspeaker. Then she nodded toward me and scratched at her cheek, using the motion to point at the ceiling before making a yanking motion with her hand as she pulled it away from her face.

That one took me a second, and I looked up at the ceiling uncomprehendingly for a moment before my eyes settled on the lights. Turning back to the other girl, I mouthed, 'Lights?' before closing my eyes pointedly. She nodded once my eyes were open again, and I understood. She wanted me to make sure the lights went out when the time came.

Theo and Chris also seemed to be communicating silently, subtly gesturing back and forth to each other. I wasn't sure what they were up to, but Theo was doing something with the watch on his wrist. Every once in a while, Chris would communicate something to Lily, whom Theo couldn't see from where he was standing. We were doing the best we could to communicate in this environment.

When we got out of this, I was so going to demand that we be given the ability to bypass the cell phone blocking. Being able to text each other would have made this so much easier.

Lung had just announced the three minute warning when the speaker system crackled, drawing everyone's attention. There was another crackle, and Lung started to say something to Oni Lee, before the speaker suddenly came alive, blaring 'Takin' Care Of Business' by Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

The second that the music started and everyone jumped, I focused on the panel near the door, attaching three tiny lines between each of the switches there and the floor beneath the panel. A mild yank later and the cafeteria was plunged into darkness.

In the ensuing confusion, Chris grabbed my wrist and pulled me backwards. I moved with him, while bodies rushed all around us. As dark as it was, the masked gunmen couldn't risk pulling their triggers without hitting one of their partners, and Lung's groupies didn't know where to direct their powers.

I realized belatedly where Chris was pulling me: the kitchen that connected to the cafeteria. The doors were open and the room in there was dark as well. The couple of gunmen that had been blocking the entrance had stepped toward the loudspeaker when the music started, which gave us just enough room to slip past them in the dark, while the noise of both the song and the people shouting covered the sound of our movements.

We reached the kitchen, passing the doorway and managing to get in and out of sight a bare handful of seconds before one of the gang members out there found the switch and the lights came back on.

We'd all made it. Lily, Cassie, and Theo were there, along with Amy. Before any of us could speak, there was a heart-stopping gunshot from the cafeteria. I hadn't seen any kind of warning line when the lights came back a second earlier, but still...

My eyes widened and I started to rise, but Theo waved me down, his eyes on his watch as he whispered, "Warning shot." When I peered closer, I could see that he had tapped into the security camera feed and was watching what was happening out there on the tiny screen of his watch.

Lung's voice bellowed from outside, saying that he was tired of games and that if we didn't show ourselves in two minutes, he was going to have twenty students killed instead. Then he ordered some of his men to go and stop the music that was playing.

"Two minutes, what are we doing?" I asked, looking toward Lily.

"Costumes and equipment so we can deal with these jackasses." She announced. "But first we need a way to get more time before he starts shooting."

"I'll get you the time you need." Amy promised. "I can stall them, trust me. Just don't take too long."

Lily hesitated, but finally nodded. "Be careful. If anyone finds out I told you to take a stupid risk..."

"You didn't tell me to do anything." Amy informed her. "I'm not a delicate flower that everyone has to shield and protect. They know my face, so I'm the one that can talk to them. Do you have a way out?"

"Over here." Chris whispered from a corner where he was opened the door of a tall cabinet. Reaching inside, he pushed against the inside wall and slid it aside to reveal a hidden room beyond.

"Okay," Cassie demanded. "When were you guys planning to tell me about the secret exits? Because that seems like it should've been relevant information before something like this happened."

"Oops. Just come on." Chris beckoned with a hand. "There's a few spots like this around school. They all lead down to where the extra equipment is."

The others moved for the cabinet, while I hesitated, looking at Amy. "Any idea where Pandora is?"

"Waiting for me across the street, the last I knew." Amy admitted. "I don't know if she knows anything's wrong yet. She wanted to be in the school, but I pointed out that they keep careful tabs on attendance here and some random person just showing up and sitting in on classes wouldn't work."

I made her promise to be careful once more before moving to join the others. The hole in the back of the cabinet led to a fairly cramped tunnel that made me feel bad for how tiny it had to feel to someone like Theo, who was crammed in just ahead of me.

Nonetheless, we squeezed our way through, and I noticed that the space we were in had to be between the exterior wall and the inner hallway. I wondered briefly how they managed to do that without making even that much difference in size obvious, before realizing how unlikely it was that any high school student would pay that much attention.

A few steps in, I heard Amy's voice coming from Theo's watch, broadcast by the security system. I leaned in closer, and he held it up for me to see while we continued to edge our way through the cramped tunnel, only able to move so quickly.

"Lung!" Amy had her hand on the neck of one of the masked guards. "You're not killing anyone."

The tiny image of Feast on the screen looked like he wanted to eat Amy then and there, but Lung stopped him with a hand before inclining his head. "Daughter of Marquis. I would leave you unharmed. Do not make me change this decision."

"Anyone fires so much as a bullet," Amy informed him. "And I'll change Buddy here so that his lungs convert air into poison gas before he exhales it. You'll all be dead inside of thirty seconds."

Another few steps brought us to the hidden room that I'd already known about, the one containing our costumes. I slipped out behind Theo, then moved to the locker where my equipment was and started to change. By that point, none of us paid attention to the privacy curtain that was supposed to separate the males changing from the females. There wasn't time, and frankly we were all too busy listening to the sounds coming from Theo's watch to worry about modesty.

There was a tinny noise that I recognized a moment later as Lung chuckling. "You are not capable. You are healer, not killer, not warrior."

Amy's voice was hard. "Lately I've found myself being open to new and exciting experiences. Yesterday I tried moussaka for the first time. Last week I went skydiving. That was an adventure. This week, hmm, maybe I'll try making a bunch of wannabe child-killers puke their lungs up into their hands and see how I like it."

"You would kill others." Lung pointed out. "Many more than only us in this room."

"So maybe I'll fix it so the gas is benign unless it's filtered through those stupid black ski masks your thugs all seem to like so much."

Lung snorted with disbelief then. "You make believe that you are capable of so much control."

By that time, we had finished changing. I pulled the mask on last before looking toward Flechette. "Now what? Amy can't stall for much longer."

Lily answered by activating her comm. "Control? There's a hostage situation at the school."

"We know." The voice that came back was terse and harried. "Sorry, Wards, you're on your own for the moment."

"What do you mean we're on our own?" Lily demanded. "Lung's here with all his men. There's teenagers here, innocent kids."

"Sorry." The agent on control duty repeated. "But Bakuda showed up and she's got bombs all over the place out there. She says she'll set them off if anyone interferes. They evacuated everywhere within a four block radius. No one's allowed in, not even Protectorate. They're trying to track down Bakuda now and put a stop to it, but for the time being, you're all we've got in there."

Obviously flinching, Lily disconnected and then looked back to the rest of us. "Come on, I have an idea."

Amy was still stalling as we quietly exited the closet area and emerged into the hallway. At the end of the corridor, I saw another of the masked men standing at the base of a flight of stairs, watching the street outside through the window there. Before he could notice us and raise an alarm, I pulled his gun out of his hand, then attached a line from the man's crotch to the railing of the stairs that he was near and proceeded to yank on that line, forcing him into the worst hip thrust of his life.

A moment later, Lily led us to the main office. The two thugs that Lung had sent to check on the music were lying unmoving on the ground, while Jalopy perched on the back of one of them, poking the back of his head as if prodding him to stop being a wuss and keep fighting. When he saw us, the little robot quickly scrambled toward me and hopped up to take his spot on my wrist once more.

"Okay that thing?" Chris was nodding toward it. "That's freaking awesome."

"I'm telling you, honorary Ward." I smiled and gave my little bot a pat before looking to Lily. "Amy's running out of things to say."

"I know." She turned away from us, picking up the microphone for the intercom system. She flicked the line to the cafeteria on and then cleared her throat before speaking. "Coward."

Theo pressed a button on his mace, and one of his drones displayed a holographic image of the security camera feed. Lung was focused on the speaker. "You will fight, or they will-"

"We're not in there, idiot." Flechette interrupted. "You want to fight us, then come get us. Or you can stay in there with your hostages so that everyone knows that the great, powerful Lung is a lie, and that you're really a wimp who hides behind hostages and innocents so that the teenagers don't hurt you. You're not a warrior, Lung. You're a child-killing coward."

Lung was beyond rational thought at that point, bellowing about how he was going to rip us apart as he moved for the exit, accompanied by some (but not all) of his men.

"Well we got their attention, boss." Reach acknowledged. "Now what?"

Flechette checked her sword before nodding to the door. "Move. Spread out, keep them occupied, pick off everyone we can. Until the Protectorate clears Bakuda's bombs, we're on our own.

"Let's make Lung's people realize that they're the ones that are trapped in here with us."

21.03

Reach and I stayed together as we ran up the stairs to the second floor, where the science wing was. The rest of the team had spread out elsewhere, but thanks to our comms, we could actually stay in contact this time. No more elaborate pantomime needed.

The basic plan was that we would pick off Lung's lieutenants and his soldiers one by one, while not actually engaging with the man himself. Hit and run tactics, avoiding a direct fight with Lung himself until we dealt with all of the minions. We were trying not to have an actual fight with him until or unless we had to, so he'd have less opportunity to get amped up. Which also meant that we didn't want to have a long, drawn out or obvious fight with his men either, and risk drawing him to where it was happening. So we needed to choose our battles, hit his men when we could take out a couple and then get away before Lung had a chance to show up. And most of all, we needed to draw as much of their attention as possible away from the cafeteria and the civilians.

Once we reached the top of the stairs, I caught Reach by the arm and attached lines to haul the two of us up to the ceiling, similar to what I had done when we were running from the guys in the Birdcage. Some of them were same guys that we were avoiding now, actually.

We both flattened our backs against the ceiling just above the stairway and listened to the stampeding boots as a rush of men approached from below. There was a pause at the foot of the stairs, and I heard a gruff voice order some of the men to go upstairs while the rest would come with him to clear the lower halls. In the distance, Lung bellowed something about what he was going to do to us, but I ignored it to focus on the immediately relevant threat.

Three men with guns and a parahuman that I didn't recognize came tromping up the stairs, passing beneath us. The cape was some new thug that had obviously joined up with Lung recently. His armor was some kind of snake motif, with green chain-mail that emulated shiny scales over a black body suit, while the helmet looked like a cobra's head rearing to strike with the flared hood.

We waited until they were right under us before dropping. Reach and I each collided with one of the armed men, knocking both to the ground. I brought my gauntlet back and then punched down at the back of my guy's head to put him down, before lifting my gaze in time to see the third gunman spinning around with his gun raised. Quickly, I attached a line between the barrel and the leg of the parahuman just before the trigger was pulled. The snake-man stumbled from the gunshot, but it didn't look like the bullet was able to penetrate through the armor. Which meant my knock out darts wouldn't either. Great.

In the meantime, Reach sent the downed body of her thug flying into the face of the third man to knock him backwards. I used that opening to roll forward and then spun to kick the stumbling man's leg out from under him so that he fell heavily with his unconscious companion lying on top of him. His head turned toward me as he tried to heave the other thug off himself, and I used a line-enhanced kick from my boots to put him down for good.

By that point, the snake-themed cape had recovered from his stumble. His gaze was locked on me as he made a sound as if hocking up a loogie. I froze for just a second, thinking, ewwww, before coming back to my senses in time to dive out of the way just before the mouth part of the man's helmet slid aside long enough for him to spit a softball sized wad of greenish... stuff that melted right through the nearest wall with a sizzle.

Acid spit, fantastic. At least we knew what he was capable of now. I came up on my knees and wagged my finger at him. "Hey! Don't you know there's no spitballs allowed in school? You keep pushing your luck, young man, and you're going straight to the principal's office."

Before he could respond to that, I looked toward Reach. "Ready?" At her short nod, I attached lines to her feet and gave her a firm shove up and forward just as she pushed off. The momentum threw the other girl into a long dive that sent her sailing and and over the man's shoulder while he recoiled in surprise before she landed behind him.

The man looked back and forth between the two of us on either side of him. Then he chose me and sent another spray of acid in my direction. It was all I could do to drop and roll beneath it while the acid spit went through another wall. "You got it, Reach?"

She gave me a thumbs up. "Yup." The man pivoted to look at her, just as she made a dismissive waving motion with her hand. Instantly, the snake-boy was thrown sideways into the nearby wall, then thrown back the opposite way to the other wall, then bounced off the ceiling before hitting the floor with a weak groan. As planned, Reach had managed to tag the guy's costume when I threw her past him.

Before the man could recover from being thrown around so violently, I reached his prone, groaning form and knelt down while slipping one of my knock-out darts from where the extras were stored. Grabbing his helmet, I shoved it up enough to expose the man's neck and then jammed the dart there. He stopped moving within a couple seconds, slumping down.

The fight had taken too long, and there were already footsteps rushing our way from downstairs. I straightened from the man and started to jog along with Reach, the two of us sprinting down the hallway before ducking into one of the classrooms.

We had entered the back of a long science lab. The room was lined with heavy metal tables covered in microscopes and more equipment, as well as all the backpacks and books that had been left behind when the gunmen had stormed through while forcing everyone to the cafeteria.

Separating as soon as we went through the door, the two of us flattened ourselves onto either side of it. I stripped one of the darts and underhand tossed it to Reach, before grabbing one of my own. A few seconds later, two more gunmen came through. The second their guns came into view, I attached lines from both barrels to the opposite wall and yanked them out of their grasps. Both were met with a dart to the neck from either of us, collapsing to the floor before they could shout a warning.

Panting a little, I looked toward Cassie. "You good?"

She nodded, stretching out and cracking her neck from one side to the other. "Tell you one thing, this new costume's a lot easier to move in than the robe was."

"Should it really be considered new still?" I asked, while poking my head out the doorway to make sure the hall was clear. There were voices, but they were still further back. "You've been wearing it for over a month now."

"I wore the other one for years," she pointed out before giving me a little push. "Come on, let's go. Bad guys ain't gonna beat the shit out of themselves." My mouth opened, but she interrupted with an idle wave of her hand. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can make sure they do."

"Reach, Tether, how are you guys doing up there?" Flechette sounded like she was out of breath. She had gone off by herself, leaving our two tinkers to work together.

"Six down," I replied. "Five thugs and one snake-boy with acid spit."

"Cobra." Flechette confirmed. "Good. Think you guys can work your way back around to the lower halls and get to the cafeteria? I'm not sure how long Panacea can keep everyone safe in there. Sooner we secure the hostages, sooner we can get this over with."

Looking to Reach, I waited for her to nod before confirming, "You got it. On our way."

Unfortunately, we had barely stepped into the hall once more before a line attached itself to Cassie. I quickly dove into her, knocking both of us sprawling just as a crack of gunfire filled the air. Several bullets punched more holes through the wall where we had been, and I rolled quickly to the side and through the doorway on the opposite side of the hall before the gunman could adjust his aim.

Two more gunshots came before I heard a sharp cry from down the hall. When I poked my head out again, I saw Reach with her hand outstretched, summoning one of her metal balls back to her. A quick glance toward where the bullets had been coming from revealed a man lying in a pool of blood from where the ball had gone straight through him. He wasn't dead, but he was definitely in bad shape.

Grimacing, I took a step that way, but Cassie caught my arm. "More guys that way, Tether. Come on, the back stairs." When I still hesitated, glancing back toward the bleeding man, she shook her head. "Look, he's not some innocent guy. The son of a bitch was here to kill kids. He was shooting at us. Besides, you go down there and you're wasting time that we could use to help the people downstairs. Remember them? The civilians, they're the ones that didn't do anything to deserve this. They're the ones that need help, not that piece of shit. So let's help them."

I took a breath before letting it out as I turned to run with her. "The civilians didn't do anything to deserve this? You've... grown up a lot since you joined the team."

Her blush wasn't visible, but I knew it was there as she muttered, "Oh shut up."

The good news was that we reached the back stairwell. The bad news was that it was already occupied. I'd barely had a chance to come around the corner of the doorway and onto the landing, having gotten there just ahead of Reach, before a figure crashed into me. Even in spite of my padded costume, the air was still knocked out of me as I was sent sprawling back out into the hall with a cry.

Training with Grace had helped, and I managed to roll with the fall even after the unexpected blow that had stolen most of my air. I came back up onto my hands and knees before lifting my head to see Reach as she was casually flung through the doorway and down the stairs.

It was another of Lung's capes that I didn't recognize. His skin was a dark bronze color, almost metallic. My best guess from the way that he had hit me was that he was a brute of some kind.

Obviously, the metal skin might mean I could likely attach lines to him. Unfortunately, he didn't give me the chance. He might have been metal, but he was also fast. Before I could react, he came in fast enough to grab my arm and nearly yanked it out of socket as he hauled me up. I found myself spun through the air as the man tried to slam me sideways into the wall with enough force that, had I hit face-first the way that he wanted me to, probably would have snapped my neck.

Months ago, I would have frozen in terror at that point. Now, the memory of Ethan swinging me around in jest came back to me and I remembered what I had done then. Grunting, I twisted my body enough that my feet hit the wall first, the impact gel inside reducing the force so much that I barely felt it. Then I attached a line between my boots and the wall, using them to push off the wall and out of the man's grasp as I went over his shoulder. As soon as I hit the ground, I threw myself up once more, using one line on my foot to propel myself higher before using another line between my glove and the ceiling to hold myself up there for a couple seconds longer than what should have been possible.

The man spun around below me, reaching for where I should have been. Instead, I gave myself a heave and dropped behind him. As I fell, I flipped around, attaching lines between both feet and his back before using them to nail him with all the force I could muster. I was yanked from a fall into a sort of sideways flying kick that would have looked right at home with any wire-fu martial arts film.

Even with his enhanced strength, the line-enhanced blow still knocked the man into a forward stumble, and gave me time to get back to my feet before he could recover.

The man started to turn back to me, but I quickly attached a pair of lines between his shoulders and the floor beneath him, giving a heave that yanked even his powerful form down. He struggled, but I used another pair of lines to yank his arms to the floor, and yet another pair to hold his legs down.

"What the fuck!?" The bronze man yanked at the invisible lines that held him, but couldn't budge. "Let me out of this, you stupid, worthless little cunt! I was just gonna break your face, but now you pissed me off, so I'll really fucking hurt you!"

"Well somebody's got a real potty mouth." I chastised while dropping down to perch on top of the struggling man's chest. He struggled uselessly, my lines continuing to hold him in place. "See, usually, I can't do this to brutes, cuz you'll just tear your way out of the clothes that I pin to the floor."

"I'll tear you! If you don't lemme up, I'm gonna make you wish you never put on that god damn costume!" The man continued on with some other threats that I mostly ignored, though I was still really glad that he was relatively helpless at the moment. He was not a nice man, to say the least.

Honestly, it was hard to hold that many lines for so long, but I didn't let him know that. Instead, I tapped his chest and spoke over his threats. "But you came with your own handy-dandy metal skin, which means I can hold you down as long as I want to. So thanks for that, it was super-considerate."

He started to say something else, but I quickly covered his mouth and nose with both of my hands. "No no, don't speak. You'll ruin this moment that I'm sure we'll both treasure forever."

The man's eyes widened when my hands didn't move, and he started to struggle even more furiously. But I kept focusing on my lines, holding them in place while keeping my hands over his mouth and nose to cut off his air supply. After longer than I thought it would take, the man finally stopped struggling and slumped. Just to be sure, I held on for another few seconds before releasing him.

When I looked up, Cassie was there in the doorway. There was blood on her costume, and I started a little. "Reach?"

"Not mine." She assured me before turning back to the stairs. "There were a couple more piss-sticks down there I had to deal with. That's what took me so long to get back. Ready?"

I looked back to the downed man, pausing briefly before nodding. "Yeah, let's go."

This time, we made it down the stairs without being interrupted, passing a couple of unmoving forms in the corner of the bottom stairwell on the way out.

We emerged into the corridor at the back end of the school, about as far from the cafeteria as possible. "Hurry," I urged quietly, starting to jog while trying not to attract attention. "We need to get to Panacea."

A new voice interrupted before we had gone more than a few steps. "Aww, running away to the healer?" The albino, Feast, emerged from a nearby classroom where he had obviously been lurking, putting himself in our path. "The healer can't help you if there isn't anything left to touch." He showed his full mouth of sharp canine teeth. "How will you taste, hmm?"

Reach sent two metal balls zinging his way, which I followed up with a dart from my gauntlet. Before they could hit the cannibal, his hand came up. I caught a brief glance of some kind of vial before he poured the contents down his throat. The instant that he did, his skin turned wispy and indistinct, darkening slightly into a pale yellowish cloud while his clothes fell away. The dart and the two balls went right through his form.

Somehow, he could still talk. I wasn't sure how that worked. "Drugged gas. You'll inhale it, be paralyzed, and then we can have some real fun."

Cursing under my breath, I took a step back. "Hey, everyone has a gas problem sometimes. But they've got plenty of medicine to deal with that sort of thing. You have nothing to be embarrassed about." I was yammering, stalling for a chance to think of a way to stop the man. I could use lines to get past him, but all that would do was drag the paralytic cloud all the way back with us to where all the civilians were. Not exactly a win.

For his part, the man just chuckled before starting to sweep forward toward us. Then, in mid-motion, the cloud suddenly stopped short while he made a muffled noise of confusion.

"Err..." I looked at Reach briefly, but she just shrugged back at me.

Then I heard that familiar cackle, and finally remembered where I'd heard it before. Sure enough, Aisha, or rather, Freezetag popped her head out from behind the frozen cloud, withdrawing her hand and shaking it off.

"What do you know?" She sounded more than a little impressed with herself, still snickering a little. "It does freeze intangible people." Looking up at the two of us then, she raised both hands in an impatient gesture. "Well? Are you going to stand there like a couple dumbasses all day, or are you gonna go do your hero thing?"

21.04

For a second, I just stared at the girl. She stood unmasked, not even really seeming to care that she had revealed her identity by doing what she did. If anything, she seemed to be some odd mixture of amused by our surprise, and yet also annoyed that we hadn't moved on already.

It was the thought of the other students and the faculty that snapped me out of my shock, and I grabbed hold of Reach before managing to give Aisha a weak, "Hide in a classroom and stay out of sight." Then I used a line to yank Cassie and myself all the way to the end of the hall, making up for time that had been lost while we dealt with both the bronze-skinned man and Feast.

There wasn't enough time to even begin reacting to the revelation that Chris's lab partner was not only a cape, but one of the Undersiders. Did she know my identity, the way that Tattletale had? Was that why she found the whole autographed poster thing so amusing, and why she'd wanted my opinion?

Whatever the case, there were far more important things to worry about. Namely, all the hostages in the cafeteria. Not to mention the remaining murderous thugs that were still running around. Like Lung. Yeah, him in particular. I hadn't forgotten how pissed off at me he had to be.

Tempting as it was to just release Jalopy and see how Lung liked round two, I didn't think it was a good idea. Jalopy was a little badass, for sure. But a lot of his strength came from the fact that no one expected the little guy to be a threat. He took people by surprise. That wouldn't happen with Lung again, and if anything happened to my robot buddy, I'd never forgive myself. Plus if I let him become too well known, his spot on my wrist would make him a target for any enemy that picked a fight. No, Jalopy needed to be an emergency measure, when the enemy wasn't expecting a threat. His job worked best when he stayed as much of a secret as possible.

It took two more line-enhanced lunges to haul myself and Reach through the school. I could hear the sound of fighting going on elsewhere, and winced at the thought that one of the others might be in trouble. But as much as I wanted to help my team, we needed to make sure the hostages were safe first.

When we finally reached the cafeteria entrance, there were two armed guards standing out in front of the closed doors. Both looked up at our arrival, lifting their rifles. Unfortunately for them, we weren't in the mood to play around. I yanked both guns out of the men's hands and into Reach's waiting ones. Then a dart from each of us found the two men's arms, and they went down for the count.

"You good?" I asked Reach while putting a hand out toward the door.

"One sec." Kneeling, Cassie set a gun down long enough to tap one of the unconscious men's pants and shirt. Then she picked up the gun and straightened while the body was lifted off the ground to float in front of her like a shield. Finally, my teammate looked at the assault rifles that she held in either hand and then nodded. "Now I'm good, let's do this."

Attaching a line between my gauntlet and the door, I gave a yank to rip the door off its hinges and tossed it away before stepping back to let my companion go in first.

Reach went through the doorway, lifting both rifles to point in either direction. She was obviously using her power more than her own strength to do so, holding them up with her telekinesis.

Her entrance was met with silence for a few moments before she called back, her voice tinted with confusion, "Clear, I guess?"

Frowning, I walked through the doorway and stared at the sight of a cafeteria full of unmoving bodies lying around everywhere. Student, teacher, and gunman alike, they were all down. For a second, I just looked around the room in confusion and disbelief before spotting Amy lying around the middle of the room. Instantly, I ran that way and dropped down to check her.

"She's breathing. They're all breathing." I realized with relief a second later. "They're all just sleeping."

Standing next to me, Reach realized, "Must've been her. Bet she used her power like she said she would, only she made it a knock-out gas and just put everyone to sleep." She shrugged then. "Made the room easier to secure anyway."

Even as she said that, I caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye. Twisting around, I was just in time to spot two of the masked men coming through the entrance with their weapons drawn. Before they could fire, I attached lines between their masks and the back of the guns, giving a yank so that they smacked themselves in the faces hard enough to make them stumble back before the guns were thrown far away from them.

While the pair were recovering, Reach brought her own two guns up and unloaded several shots into each of them. The rifles bucked a little, but not nearly as much as they should have. She was using her power to not only hold the weapons up and on target, but also to reduce the recoil so much that they might as well have been mounted, rather than each held in one slender fifteen year old girl's hand.

Once the men were down, I looked toward my gun-toting teammate. "I'll see if I can wake up Amy and let Flechette know what's going on. Think you can cover the entrance?"

In answer, Reach let go of the rifles so that they floated in the air, maneuvering them to hover over either shoulder. Then she reached down and picked up the two discarded guns that I had yanked away from the newcomers before rising. "On it." She announced before jogging over to the doorway with her small arsenal of four assault rifles all either held or floating along with her.

Activating my comm, I tried shaking Amy's shoulder. "Flechette, we've got the cafeteria. Everyone's unconscious. We think Panacea knocked them all out with that power she was talking about. Room's clear for now, but what are we gonna do with all of them?"

It took a moment for the other girl to get back to me, and she sounded distracted. "They'd just get in the way if they were conscious. Bakuda's bombs are still active out there, so we couldn't let them go anyway. Just keep the—hold-" She went off the comm for about ten tense seconds before coming back. "Hold the room if you can. We'll meet you there. Aid's got—hold-" She was gone again, this time for almost thirty seconds before her voice returned. "Aid's got one of his drones leading Lung on a wild goose chase, mimicking our voices to lure him away. Calling everyone in to meet you. We'll put ourselves between the civilians and anyone else that's left."

By the time that I'd finished with the comm, Amy still hadn't woken up. I didn't want to try too hard, because I had no idea what sort of gas she'd used to knock everybody out.

Giving up on waking her, I rose and jogged over to where Cassie was. Her guns barked loudly just before I arrived, and she glanced over her shoulder at me. "One guy out by the senior lockers. He decided to go the other way."

"Aid's keeping Lung busy with a drone." I let her know. "Everyone's heading here to play Alamo against whoever's left."

Her head turned to look at me, and I sensed her squint. "You know the people in the Alamo lost, right?"

I gave her a thumbs up. "Sure, but we've got something they didn't have."

"Super powers?" She guessed. "A badass robot spider? Radios? An unconscious healer?"

My head shook at all of that. "Nope, we've got snazzy, colorful costumes." I waved a hand down between us demonstratively. "Did they have snazzy, colorful costumes? I didn't think so."

Before Reach could even start to respond to that, movement in the hall caught our attention. Fortunately, it was Kid Win, who recoiled at the sight of the four different rifles pointed his way. "Whoa, hey! I come in peace." He joined us and bent over to catch his breath, panting hard. "Whatever you do, don't let anyone go outside. I ummm..." He trailed off briefly before straightening. "One of the those new capes, some guy with electric hands or something, he went for the exit. He ummm, he only got about six steps before something went off and he was... errr... frozen in ice. Then he shattered."

I winced at that. "Bakuda plays for keeps. We've gotta keep everyone in until the PRT clears the place."

"Where's Aid?" Reach demanded then. "You guys were together, weren't you?"

"We got separated." Kid admitted. "He had to reprogram his drone to keep Lung busy while I kept electro-boy and his groupies off him."

Poor Cassie looked like the news that Theo had been left alone made her want to point those guns back at Chris again. Fortunately, she restrained herself, activating her comm instead. "Aid, are you good?"

"I'm okay." The answer came not through the comm, but from just down the hall as Theo himself came around the corner and into view. He looked disheveled and some of his armor was singed or even broken in places. He was also dragging something along behind him.

"Th-Aid!" Cassie lowered the guns as soon as she saw who it was.

"What are you...?" I started to ask what he had with him, before blinking as the other boy reached us and dropped the load he had been dragging. For a second, all of us stared at the familiar mask of the man that was bound and obviously unconscious.

"Is that Oni Lee?" Kid Win asked in disbelief. "You took down Oni Lee by yourself?"

Theo just shrugged self-consciously and slumped against the nearby wall to rest for a second. "Just got lucky." He mumbled under his breath.

Looking from the downed and secured teleporting assassin to Theo and back again, I shook my head. "At some point, it stops being luck and starts being skill." Pointing to a discarded sweatshirt hanging off a nearby locker, I added, "Kid, hand me that jacket?" When he passed it to me, I used it to wrap around the still unconscious and bound Oni Lee's mask and tied it in place, blocking his vision in case he woke up. That way he couldn't see to teleport anywhere.

"Speaking of Aid's skill, can any of your drones rouse people that have been drugged?" I explained what Amy had apparently done. "We should probably try to wake at least her up, if we can."

Aid looked hesitant, but nodded and pushed off the wall. "I umm... think I've got something for that." He moved into the room, and I left Kid Win and Reach to cover the exit while I went in to help.

A few steps into the room, something nagged at me and I started to look around a little more. After a couple more steps, I stopped short and put a hand out to block Theo. "Wait." I told him. "Something's different." Slowly, I looked around, trying to place what looked wrong. "I don't think-"

That was as far as I got before a figure that was lying on the floor near Amy suddenly moved. Belatedly, I realized what had been bothering me about the room. Before, there had been only one body lying within arm's reach of Panacea. When we came back into the room, there were two.

Unfortunately, I got it too late. The new figure rolled over, grabbed hold of the unconscious Amy, and rose with his arm around her neck.

"Impasse." I glared at the man while Aid and I stood there, caught flat-footed. "Let her go."

The thin, unimposing looking man just smirked at me while keeping his arm locked tight around Amy's throat to hold her up. His voice sounded rather squeaky, like he'd never quite made it all the way through puberty. "You know, I don't think I will." He stood with Amy held up between us, obviously struggling a bit with her weight. "Don't try any of that throwing me around bullshit either." He lifted his other arm to show a knife briefly before putting it back down against the unconscious girl where I couldn't see to yank it away.

Kid Win had joined us by then, but there was nothing he could do in that moment either. I glanced toward the other boy before turning back to the Bird Cage escapee. "Impasse, put her down." I coached him, looking for something that I could do. "You know how important that girl is? Do you have the slightest idea how much shit you're in already just for threatening her?"

"Shit?" He laughed disbelievingly, an ugly, snorting-hiccup sort of noise. "You think so? What are they gonna do, put a secondkill order out on me? Throw me back in the Birdcage? Oooh, I'm so scared."

Shaking my head, I spoke slowly. "It's not the Protectorate you should be worried about, Impasse. It's Marquis. Do you have any idea what he's gonna do to you if you hurt her?"

That made the man frown slightly, but he shook off that nudging common sense. "You know what? You're gonna shut up now. I'm the one talking, and I say that we're gonna play a game called, 'everyone do whatever the fuck Impasse tells them to' If you win, this bitch gets to stay alive."

Inwardly, I cursed. The guy was too stupid to think about the consequences of his actions. There was no point in threatening him with future retaliation when he refused to even consider them. His shield had protected him from consequences for too long for him to actually think that he could be hurt. Even now, it was protecting him from anything Aid or Kid Win could do, and I couldn't attach lines to him or Amy without giving him time to use that knife before they could do any good.

I briefly considered putting lines past him to yank a chair or something into his back, but all that would do was guarantee that Amy would get that blade in her back. We needed a way to separate them, or at least get that knife back into view so I could pull it away.

"Good." Impasse nodded once it was obvious that we had no immediate moves, still struggling to hold Amy upright. "Now you see who's in charge. We-"

He was interrupted by the sound of Amy groaning a little. "Wha—where..." She stiffened then, apparently feeling the knife against her back.

"Good, you're awake." The man straightened a little, since he didn't have to hold her up anymore. "Now stand up straight. And keep your hands down where you can't touch any skin, or we'll see how good a healer you are with half your guts lying out on the floor. Just don't move."

"Don't worry, Amy." I assured the other girl. "He knows he's trapped. He's not going anywhere."

The man glowered at me, but before he could say anything, there was a noise at the door. We all turned slightly to see Flechette coming in. She paused slightly to take in the sight of what was happening, and Impasse smirked at her, his annoyance at me briefly forgotten. "Hey, hey, hey. Glad you could join us. We were just negotiating terms to keep this little healer alive."

"Negotiating terms?" Lily echoed, starting to walk forward once more as she headed that way.

Impasse nodded shortly. "That's right, terms. You want the bitch alive, you'll negotiate. So first-"

I barely saw Lily's hand move. One second she was walking normally, and the next second, her arm was outstretched. I heard the slightest whistle of something small and fast cutting through the air for a brief instant before the handle of the tiny knife that she'd drawn from her sleeve seemed to just appear in the middle of the man's forehead. It had gone straight through Impasse's forcefield as if it wasn't even there.

Flechette hadn't broken stride. While Impasse dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut, she took three more quick steps and reached out to catch the stumbling Amy with one arm, pulling the other girl out of the way while also supporting her so that she wouldn't fall.

Then Lily looked down at the man, who had been dead the instant her knife struck him, and prompted, "Okay, now let's hear your counter-offer."

21.05

"Holy... shit..." Chris was the first one to find his voice after that, while the rest of us stood and stared. "You just... he's... he's..."

"He's dead." Flechette acknowledged quietly, lowering her head a little to stare at the body on the ground. Her voice was softer now that the adrenaline rush of what she'd had to do eased slightly. The quip itself had obviously been made more in anger at the kind of man that Impasse had been and the situation that he'd forced her into than out of any kind of flippancy about what she had just done.

I had a good idea of how that felt. It wasn't exactly the same, but my own words about giving Teacher 'the finger' just before letting Pandora kill him came to mind. It was easy to say things in the heat of the moment that made it seem like the things you had to do didn't affect you, when you were hyped up and reacting. But that didn't mean you didn't think about the action itself later. It didn't mean that I hadn't gone over and over that bit in my head, wondering if there was anything else I could have done that wouldn't have resulted in the man's death at what was, if not by my hand, at the very least at my request. And like me, Lily would have the same thoughts once the situation was resolved.

It was even somewhat different from the fact that Reach had shot the two men. They had obviously been wearing body armor, and in any case she hadn't aimed for vital places. They weren't necessarily dead. They could still get medical attention if we resolved this quickly enough.

Impasse, like almost any other Birdcage resident, had been a sick and horrible individual. He hadn't been one of the 'normal' Cape villains, who even if they were violent, at least kept to some level of decency. There was villain, and then there was monster. Impasse had been the kind of person who found entertainment in the painful suffering and death of others. One of his favorite activities had been to use his field to block the exits from a building that was on fire and watch the people inside burn.

All of the Birdcage escapees had been given ongoing, constant kill orders. These were bad people. The Protectorate wouldn't blink twice at what Flechette had done. The kill order was active, Impasse had been currently engaged in activity that threatened civilian teenagers in a public setting, including a direct and immediate threat to Panacea. Not to mention the kind of gang-war from Marquis that we would have been dealing with if she'd actually been hurt or even killed. Flechette had killed the man because it was the swiftest, easiest way to defuse the situation.

Again, it was similar to me directing Pandora into killing Teacher. Perhaps a better solution could have been found, one that didn't end in anyone's death. But allowing him to die, directing his death, had been the best option I could see then. And in this case, putting Impasse down like the rabid dog that he was, happened to have been the best solution that Lily had seen. Even if it did feel different emotionally because of the idea that he had been 'negotiating' rather than attacking. I knew the killing was absolutely justified because of the immediate threat to Amy and the kill order.

Logically, I knew all of that. We all knew all of that. But I still had a moment, however brief, where I looked at the girl and wondered how easy it had been for her to make that call. She hadn't hesitated, hadn't tried to talk the man down. She had just acted, and now he was dead. And somehow, killing a man in cold blood, purposefully and without hesitation while he was attempting to negotiate his release (even if he was a monster) seemed different.

It was probably similar to the thoughts that people had about me when they found out that I didn't try harder to stop Pandora from killing the bad guys that she killed.

"Y-you killed him?" Amy's hesitant voice interrupted my thoughts as she stood where Lily had pulled her. "He's really..."

She trailed off, and I took a step that way, finally snapping out of my shock. "Are you okay?"

Amy looked at me, obviously still shaken from what had just happened. That couldn't be a fun way to be woken up and then have to react to. "I'm okay. I mean, I'll... be okay."

I rested a hand on her back before looking toward Lily. Lowering my voice slightly, I asked, "What about you?" There was no answer, and I hesitated before raising a hand to touch the other girl gently.

She jumped when my hand reached her, looking up from the body and physically shaking herself. "I'm... I'm good. Sorry, I just... It just hit me. He's not getting up again. I know I... I did it on purpose, but now, after... I just..." She took in a long breath and let it out. "I have to focus. We're not done yet."

Amy spoke up next to me. "It..." She gazed around the room briefly, obviously trying not to look at the body of the man who had taken her hostage. "It worked. Who's left? Where's Reach?"

"Guarding the hallway." Theo answered for us. He and Chris had finally snapped out of their own shock and approached. Everyone was doing their level best not to look at the body on the floor. Well, almost everyone. Lily couldn't seem to stoplooking at it. He focused on Amy instead. "I want to wake these people up. Err, not the bad guys, but the umm, the rest of them. Can you... uhh, tell me what you used to knock them out?" Even now, even after everything he had done, Theo still sounded nervous while he was trying to talk to Panacea. It still seemed like he didn't think he deserved to be there.

What the hell kind of number had Kaiser done on this boy's confidence and self-worth?

Amy cast one more glance toward Lily and hesitated before holding her hand up toward Theo. "One second." Then she stepped over and poked the other girl, who had seemed to go back into a trance while staring down at the body. "Hey, umm, I know you probably saved my life. And you probably saved a lot of other people too. Everyone... everyone in the future who doesn't die because of what that guy would have done to them has you to thank for it. But they'll never get to thank you because you made it so they'd never experience what they would have if you let him live. So I'll say it for me and for them. Thank you. Thank you for saving me, and for... you know... stopping him." Giving a short, uncertain nod, Amy pivoted then and moved to help Aid start waking people up.

"Kid," Flechette found her own voice after staring at Amy for a moment. Her voice was still a little weak. "Can you check on Reach, make sure she's-"

She was interrupted by the sound of gunfire erupting out in the hallway. Reach was already backpedaling into the room. "Shit, fuck, damn piece of dick-nibbling dumpster-"

"Reach!" I shouted over the sound of her oh-so-professional cursing. "Are you okay?"

"Lung!" She shouted back at me. "He's uhhh, on his way, and he is not happy. Might take him a minute because of Aid's drones harassing him, but he is coming."

Flinching, I looked around a bit helplessly at all the still unconscious people. It was going to take time for Aid and Amy to wake them up. And even once they did, then what? With Bakuda's bombs outside, there wasn't a safe place for the civilians to evacuate to.

"It'll be a massacre." Kid Win gave voice to my thoughts. "Fire, Lung stomping around and getting bigger? Even if we stood a chance against him, which we don't, all these people..." He trailed off, not needing to say the words. We knew what would happen. The civilians would be collateral damage.

No. I refused. Looking at the students and teachers whose unconscious, helpless bodies surrounded us, I thought about Taylor. I thought about what I had allowed to happen, what I had helped happen, the life I had helped ruin. The girl who should have been here, who should have been allowed to live.

I thought of Taylor, and I vowed to myself that if it took my last breath, if I had to stand in front of Lung and allow him to kill me to ease his own anger so that the people in this room could live, then I would do just that. Whatever it took, I would save these people.

And in the next moment, I knew what to do.

"Guys," I looked toward Reach, Kid Win, and Flechette. "I've got a plan."

---

By the time that I emerged from the cafeteria, Lung was already too tall to walk normally down the hallway. He had to stoop a bit, his metallic scales gleaming as he used a single clawed hand to bat away the last of Aid's drones that had been stopping him. I had the feeling that his experience with Jalopy had been what made the man take the time to destroy all of them rather than just rushing forward. He didn't want a repeat of the time a robot had kicked his ass.

"Yo!" I shouted to get his attention, and the armored beast of a man turned slowly toward me, fire spiraling around him, impatient to be released so that it could burn and consume. His eyes, still hidden behind the mask, burned an orange-red color similar to molten steel.

When I had first heard of Lung, I'd thought his name was weird. I'd actually asked my dad 'long what?', and he had explained that it was the name of a Chinese dragon. Later I'd learned that it was actually the Chinese word for dragon, though the names did include Lung as the first syllable.

It was just another example of the sort of things that I'd picked up in the past few months.

Another thing that I'd picked up? Lung kind of hated having his worth questioned or insulted.

"Yeah, you!" I pointed at him, trying to stop myself from trembling too much. "Question for you."

"Ooo." He grunted the word, his eyes somehow managing to blaze with even more anger.

"Yup." I pointed to myself. "Me. Like I said, I've got a question for you." He grunted, already walking toward me. I didn't know if the grunt was dismissive or acknowledgment, but I pressed on anyway. "When you were born, did they just go ahead and hand your mom the 'biggest loser in the world' award to give to you later, or was there a whole big ceremony involved when you were old enough?"

Even before I finished talking, I was already turning my head. My hand lifted and I attached a line all the way down the hall before yanking myself that way the very instant that the last word left my mouth. Even then, flames filled the area I had been, singing my boots with enough heat that the lockers on either side of the hall were blackened and partially melted.

Yeah, getting touched by that flame was a bad idea. I could only hope that Aid would be able to put them out once the hallway was clear. Right now, I had bigger worries.

Hitting the floor in a roll, I lifted my head long enough to see the nearby stairs. Another line yanked me that way, mere heartbeats before Lung slammed down where I had rolled, his claws punching through the floor like it was tissue paper.

Okay, getting caught by Lung himself so he could snap my bones between his fingers was probably just as bad of an idea as letting his flames touch me. Good to know.

More lines brought me to the top of the stairs and I emerged onto the second floor of the school once more. Below me, I heard Lung's roar of indignation and used a line to yank myself down the hall.

Unfortunately, right as I was being hauled away, Lung burst up through the floor. There was a shower of debris and flame, and I was caught by one of the chunks of floor. It was a sledgehammer blow that knocked me off course and into the ceiling before I fell haphazardly to the ruined floor, briefly dazed. Pain filled my body and it was all I could do to roll over before Lung brought his claw down where I had just been. He gave a roar of fury, and his flame flooded the hallway once more. I could feel my suit burning while he stabbed for me again, intent on snatching me up.

I'd recovered somewhat by that point though, and was able to throw myself into a backwards roll, narrowly avoiding his grab once again. My chest screamed, and I was fairly sure that the blow that had knocked me into the ceiling had cracked some ribs.

It hurt to breathe, let alone talk. Yet talk I did. "Have you ever thought of investing in some glasses? Because from what I can tell, you couldn't hit—uh oh." Another line yanked me clear of his lunge, and I kept going with the still transforming man rampaging after me.

The door I was looking for wasn't marked, in order to keep kids away from it. But I knew where it was. Plus it was locked up tight, but that didn't matter. As soon as I saw the innocuous looking brown door next to the trophy case, I planted a line between the floor and the door itself, shoving upward and in with enough force to knock it open.

Stairs lay beyond, and I scrambled up them with Lung right on my heels. The air grew so hot as Lung neared me that I could feel it burning through my costume. Still I kept moving, hitting the door at the top of the stairs with my full body before crashing out into the open sunlight.

In the next second, Lung crashed through to join me on the roof. He was too big by that point to fit through the door itself. Instead, he ripped and tore his way through, sending half-melted debris flying while he gave a deafening roar. Flames shot out to either side when he spotted me, while a pair of wings unfurled. With a hard flap that sent a ring of fire off in its wake, the monster launched himself toward me, howling for my blood.

He might have even gotten me, except that the very instant I emerged onto the roof, I inverted myself and slid back beneath Lung's legs and into the relative safety of the stairwell. He passed over my head, and in the next second, I was briefly deafened by the sound of multiple bombs going off. If I hadn't dived back inside, the janitors would have had to scrape me off the roof with a spatula.

They were standard fire-concussive force explosions, so either Bakuda had been getting lazy, or Lung hadn't wanted her to get too creative with the roof bombs. Maybe he didn't give her the time to. I almost felt absurdly bad for her not getting to express the creative urge her power gave her. And I definitely felt bad about the fact that none of the bombs had done much of anything to Lung other than piss him off even more.

Oh well, I definitely had his attention now. Emerging from my relative cover and planting lines between my feet and the roof, I catapulted myself into the air, flying a good twenty feet up off a single push. Turning that momentum into a backwards flip, I twisted so that I could get a look at a building in the distance. A line between it and my gauntlet sent me sailing that way with Lung literally hot on my heels.

Below me, I caught a glimpse of emergency vehicles, PRT response vans, media, and more. But there wasn't time to waste looking for help. Feeling the heat rising, I released the line on the building so that I could start to fall freely through the air, plummeting for a few precious seconds while a massive fireball filled the air above me. Then I stuck my other hand out and attached a line to a different building, jerking myself out of the fall with a speed that would have made my stomach rise into my throat if it wasn't for the breaker powers that kept me from experiencing the crazy whiplash and nausea that I should have from these maneuvers.

Lung was screaming at me, his words entirely unintelligible, though his meaning was clear. This was between me and him, and he wasn't going to let me get away again.

The second line brought me straight to the side of the office building. Inverting in the air, I attached lines between my feet and the wall itself. The lines held me there against the building, giving me a moment to glance back and see Lung readying another fireball as another flap of his enormous wings propelled him straight toward me with the force and determination of an oncoming train. A train that happened to be on fire.

The fireball growing larger. Worse, a handful of black lines appeared, pointing back into the building itself. When I twisted that way, I could see people inside, gawking at me and watching Lung as if they didn't realize they were about to be right in the path of a hurled orb of fire hot enough to melt through steel.

Cursing, I shoved myself off the side of the building and twisted around in the air. Attaching a line from each gauntlet to the building, I yanked myself forward and straight through the window feet first.

The glass shattered around me as I dropped into a roll, and I heard the people who had been gawking a second earlier just now start to cry out as they realized the danger that they were in. Still, I came out of the roll and to my feet with a glance behind me at the incoming ball of flame. Then I focused, attaching lines to all of the people in the path of the fireball before throwing them, and myself, to the side and out of the way.

The fireball slammed into the building, crashing its way through several more windows before shooting across the room and into the opposite wall. The area that the crowd of onlooking office drones had been standing in was briefly engulfed in flame and glass, each of which would have torn through anyone that had been caught in it.

Springing back to my feet, I glanced toward the shaken people while they picked themselves off the floor. "Get the fire department up here to put that out." I pointed to the lingering flames that were starting to take root around what I now saw was a typical cubicle-filled office floor. "Then get out of the building. Go!"

Leaving them to do that, I attached a line to the edge of the hole that had been made in the side of the building and used it to hurl myself back out into the air in front of Lung.

"Have you put any thought into my glasses suggestion? I really think it would do this threatening people thing a lot of good if you could hit the broad side of a barn."

Once again, we were off. Lung screamed his threats, hurling more fire my way while I flung myself from building to building, always only a handful of feet ahead of the flames that would have killed me instantly. I plunged headfirst around glass and brick structures, weaving my way through the city skyline. With each passing second, I used every single trick I could to stay ahead of Lung and away from his fireballs. I alternated between freefall and steep climb, using lines to yank myself violently off-course every few seconds. Yet Lung kept getting closer. Sooner or later, I would mess up, zig when I should have zagged, and it would be over.

Finally, I swung off a line, turning it from a pull into a push at the last second to hurl myself into the open space above the same construction lot where we had fought the Outliars' minions.

Briefly, I set my feet against the side of the massive tower crane on the edge of the lot. "Hey Lung!" I called back to my pursuer. "Let's settle this." Then I used a line to yank myself straight down to the ground.

I landed in the dirt, looking up in time to see Lung come down about fifty feet away from me. He was even larger now, a little over sixteen feet in height. More fire swirled around his impregnably armored body, and he let out a roar of triumph as he stood there, towering over me.

He grunted some sounds that seemed to be a question, and I shook my head. "I'm not running anymore, Lung. And I'm not gonna let you kill anybody else ever again. You're done. But I'm giving you one more chance. Surrender, Lung. I'll make sure you're not killed. I'll get you back to the Birdcage, and you can just... live. Let this go, Lung. There's no walking back from this. Either you surrender and walk back to the PRT with me... or you don't walk away. Please. Please surrender."

The sound that the man made then sounded like a chuckle, and he readied the flame to obliterate me. Before he could release it and do away with me once and for all, I raised both hands above my head. "Fine, one question for you! Do you know where we are?"

The dragon-like figure turned its head a little, obviously suspicious but uncertain. So I continued. "We're three blocks from the school. It's over that way." I pointed with a finger. "We just went in one big circle." At his further noise of confusion, I smiled behind my mask. "Because I needed to give my teammates time to get here first after you so generously cleared the roof of bombs so they could get out. That's the difference between you and me. I trust my team. I trust my friends."

With those words, I looked up and finished attaching the lines from my gauntlets to the middle of the massive, two hundred foot long boom of the crane that towered over us. Then I gave the hardest yank that I could. The boom was ripped off the side of the crane where Kid Win and Reach had weakened it. It came plummeting down toward us while I released those lines and used more to hurl myself backwards and out of the way.

Lung barely had time to look up and make a grunt of confusion before the end of the crane's boom, empowered by Flechette, fell straight through the enormous armored man, shearing him in half.

Interlude 21 – Mnemosyne

November 20th, 2010

It was a little past midnight, and the glow of a nearby neon sign advertising booze was all that illuminated the two figures standing in the doorway of the liquor store. One was hunched over the door itself, while the other kept watch with a bat on one hand.

"Amanda, are you sure you know what you're doing?" The lookout, a tall boy who looked every bit the linebacker that he was, checked over his shoulder to see how things were coming along. "Why isn't it open yet?" His voice was slightly muffled by the ski mask that he wore.

Fifteen-year old Amanda Rhodes turned her head to glare at the slightly older boy. She wore a jean jacket over a ratty old flannel tee-shirt, along with a pair of baggy black jeans. A simple ski mask covered her face as well.

"Why isn't it open?" She echoed. "Because some cock-knob keeps interrupting me, that's why. Now shut the fuck up. And just so you know, one of the rules about doing illegal things is that you don't-" Her voice dropped into an angry hiss. "-fucking announce each other's names while you're doing it. Now shut up and let me focus. I've almost got it."

Carl, the seventeen-year old football player, made a face but didn't say anything else. Amanda shook her head and returned her attention to the lockpicks, carefully twisting and testing for several more moments until the door clicked. The sound made her smile in triumph. Who said she didn't have a future? Her skills were just the kind you didn't put on a resume.

"Okay, got it." The young teenager straightened, putting out a hand to stop Carl from barging straight in. "Wait. Remember, the alarm goes off in thirty seconds if the code isn't put in. Since we don't know the code, the alarm will go off. We don't push further than thirty seconds past that point before we get the hell out of this place before anyone gets here. So sixty seconds. You ready?"

Carl nodded once, lifting the aluminum bat. "Ready."

Grabbing her own bat from where it had been leaning, Amanda shoved the door open and rushed inside. She took three quick steps into the liquor store before swinging the bat as hard as she could. It slammed through several bottles, sending alcohol spraying everywhere with a satisfying crash.

Behind her, Carl went to work smashing everything he could on one of the other shelves on his way back to the coolers. His bat went through the glass there before the boy began to grab as many packs of bottles as he could, throwing them across the room to crash into the far wall.

For thirty seconds, Amanda gloried in the destruction of every bit of product she could reach with her bat. She attacked the alcohol with a purpose, gleefully breaking every last bottle.

With thirty seconds left on her watch, she moved to the wall with the most space and tugged a can of red spray paint out, shaking it up quickly before she began to write on the wall, encouraging her companion. "Keep going. Break everything, all of it."

After a moment, she stepped back to admire her work. The paint on the wall read 'Death Peddler.' She liked the word peddler. It was a funny word that sounded kind of dirty. Peddler.

One more glance at her watch showed that time was up, and Amanda prodded Carl with her bat before heading for the door. "Come on, come on!"

The two teenagers ran for the door, spilling out onto the street before sprinting away. They ran a single block, then turned right down an alley and ran some more before reaching the next street over. Without hesitation, they went straight for the nearby apartment building, cutting across the basketball court to reach the back parking lot. By the time the sound of sirens reached them, the pair were already heading for the back door of the apartment building.

Carl, whose flat, bulldog-like face would never be considered attractive, stripped off his mask and shook his dark hair out to its impressive length before shoving the door open. He held it there in some mockery of chivalry. "After you, milady." His attempt at a posh accent was appalling.

Amanda rolled her eyes and turned to chuck the used spray paint can into the nearby dumpster before stripping off her own ski mask. Beneath that was a face that looked cherubic and innocent, belying the constant and barely suppressed rage she felt pretty much all the time. Her hair, originally blonde but currently dyed a light blue, was cut short so that it fell just barely below her ears.

Shoving the mask into her jacket pocket, she went in and headed up the nearby stairs. Amanda felt hyped up, she felt ready to do anything. The adrenaline rush made her feel alive.

Following her up the stairs, Carl asked, "Hey, what do you think your brother would say if he knew what you were up to?"

Amanda snorted at the question. "Probably try to ground me or something. He thinks he has to act all responsible and shit just because Grandpa's too old to give a shit anymore."

On the third floor, she used her key to unlock the door of the apartment that she shared with her brother and grandfather before looking back at the boy and gracing him with a rare smile. "Thanks, Carl. That prick had it coming, selling that shit."

"Hey, it was fun." Carl shrugged. "I mean, most people don't break into a liquor store to break everything, but you know... I get it, with your folks getting into that accident and all."

"They didn't get into an accident." Amanda snapped at him. "They were minding their own business when the cocksucker that was fucking drunk and high hit them. And that place back there sells both. Booze out the front, drugs out the back. Fucking alcohol. Fucking drugs. I wish I could fucking burn all of it. Just get rid of the shit forever."

"Guess we'll have to go one liquor store at a time instead, huh?" Carl winked at her before sobering. "We uhh, we are gonna get back to doing jobs that actually get some money, right? I'm still trying to get enough for a car. There's this sweet GTO down at Smith's that-"

"Yeah, yeah, Carl." Amanda waved that off. "Normal jobs too. There's this gas station on Forty-Seventh. The new guy keeps leaving the cash in the register instead of the safe when he closes up. We'll hit 'em tomorrow if you're up for it. In and out real quick."

"Hey, sounds good to me." The boy gave her a thumbs up before stepping away from the door.

Amanda watched him go, then stepped into the apartment and closed the door after herself, satisfied, for the moment, with a job well done. Alcohol and drugs had killed her parents. Her brother dealt with that loss in his way, and she dealt with it in hers.

Less than twenty-four hours later, what little remained of Carl's body was found in a ditch.

---

September 10th, 2011 (Three Days Ago)

"You sure this is gonna work?" Amanda spoke the words aloud in a deeper voice than her normal one as she crouched on a rooftop, using a pair of binoculars to watch the pool hall across the street. After a moment, she spoke in her normal voice. "Shut up, Carl."

She had to talk for him now, had to voice the boy's objections, thoughts, and fears. Because he wasn't there to voice them anymore. Because those fucks that worked for the Merchants had killed him.

Apparently the liquor store the two of them had hit was owned by someone who was tight with that gang, and they hadn't taken kindly to the place being trashed. One of their lookouts had jumped Carl on his way out of her building. They'd tortured him first, that much was obvious. But he clearly hadn't told them who his partner had been, because no one had come for her.

Yeah, they'd tortured and fucking killed that dork because he helped her trash a god damn liquor store. She'd even gone to the cops, had told them what they did and who they should look at for the murder. And what had the cops done? They threwher into juvie for eight months for what she did to that liquor store. And then proceeded to fucking ignore the information she'd given them. Carl's death had been dismissed as unsolved and they just moved on.

Those eight months in juvie had hardened Amanda even more. Before, she had simply wanted to burn the businesses to the ground. Then they killed her friend, and now she wanted to burn them.

Of course by the time she'd gotten out, the Merchants were pretty much completely finished. Some parahuman saint that deserved a god damn medal had been taking them out, and the gang leadership itself was pretty much finished.

Unfortunately, the actual foot soldiers, the regular gang members that pushed their garbage, were still around. They'd just gravitated to a new gang. Lung's gang, to be precise. They were still peddling (a word that still managed to make her smile sometimes) their shit.

In Amanda's opinion, the only mistake that this so-called 'bug girl' had made was not killing each and every single one of the gang members already.

It was a mistake that she was going to correct. Checking the binoculars once more, she watched as three of Lung's non-powered thugs came staggering out of the pool hall. Slapping each other on the back and laughing uproariously, the trio made their way toward a pick-up truck that was parked in the corner of the lot.

They were so plastered none of them could walk straight, and they were still about to drive off. Remembering her parents, the now sixteen-year old girl growled under her breath before reaching down to pick up the remote to the bomb that she had placed under their truck.

She'd learned how to make them from her cell mate in juvie, who had worked for Uber and Leet for awhile. It wasn't anything special, but it would get the job done.

Waiting until all three men had gotten into the truck and started it up, Amanda smiled grimly and hit the button. She had to look away from the sudden flash of bright light as the truck was incinerated instead of watching it go up the way she'd wanted to, but the job was done. Those three fucks wouldn't be selling their shit to anyone else.

The police sirens had started to blare already by the time the girl picked herself up and turned to abandon her vigil. Turning, she found the way blocked by another figure. Immediately, she grabbed the tiny revolver that she'd hidden in her jacket and lifted the gun. "Who's there?!"

"Easy there." The person took a small step forward to come into the light, revealing a female figure in a light green cloak that covered most of her form, allowing only a glimpse of the black body armor beneath. The dark mask that covered her face was featureless save for the spot where the eyes would have been. In those two spots were the images of a pair of tiny hourglasses that were lit by the glowing gold sand within. The glowing 'sand' within each would fall through the hourglass for about sixty seconds (each thirty seconds off from the other) before flipping over. It was clearly a hologram or something displayed on the otherwise blank metal mask, but it was a very effective one.

Looking the figure up and down, Amanda thought her pistol was probably horribly inadequate. "What do you want? Who the f-fuck are you?"

The figure with the hourglass eyes slowly lifted their hands in a gesture of peace. "Calm down, Amanda. I'm not here to hurt you or fight. I'm here to help."

"Fuck you, how do you know my name?" Amanda spat, the gun shaking a bit in her hand.

"I've been keeping an eye on you for awhile." The figure replied quietly. "Making sure you were the kind of person that I wanted to recruit." She nodded past Amanda toward the burning vehicle below. "Now I have my answer." Slowly, the figure lowered her hands. "You can call me Clepsydra. I think we can help each other."

"Help each other?" Amanda snorted in disbelief, but she did lower the gun after a moment of hesitation. "You got the wrong girl, Chlamydia. I'm not a gang lackey."

"It's Clepsydra." The figure corrected. "And I don't want a lackey. I want someone I can trust. You want to burn Lung's gang to the ground. You hate the cops for throwing you in juvenile detention. You hate an awful lot of people, Amanda. I can help you channel that hate into getting what you want."

"That right?" Amanda lifted her chin. "What's in it for you?"

Clepsydra's voice was casual as she replied, "What's in it for me is a person who can help me accomplish my own goals. I want to take over the underworld of this city, Amanda. And if you help me do that, we can run all the drugs out of town. If you help me, and you want them gone, they'll be gone."

Amanda gave a brief laugh of disbelief. "What makes you think I can help you do that? In case it escaped your notice, I ain't got no powers or nothing. I mean, don't get me wrong, you wanna fuck up Lung's group, all the more power to ya. But I don't see where I come in."

"Where you come in... is this." Clepsydra reached into her cloak slowly, other hand raised placatingly when Amanda stiffened, before pulling out a small vial.

"What's that?" She demanded a little nervously.

"This?" Clepsydra seemed to study the vial she was holding. "... is how you're going to become a cape so that you can help me destroy our competition."

---

September 12th (Yesterday)

"I need to talk to Lung." Amanda announced, standing in front of the heavyset man who was blocking the way into the nightclub that Clepsydra had tracked down as being the Birdcage escapee's current base of operations. It was the middle of the day, so the club was empty. Yet the bouncer still sat there steering people away from the place.

The man gave her a brief, disbelieving glance before shaking his head as his attention turned back to his phone. "Beat it, little bitch. Ain't no one here for you."

Rolling her eyes, Amanda exercised her new power. Her voice took on a slightly echoing tone. "I told you why I wanted to see Lung. You thought it was a very compelling reason, and now you can't wait to take me to meet with him. You think that Lung is going to be really pissed off if you make him wait any longer to talk to me."

A moment after she finished talking, the man, whose eyes had glazed over while she gave her instructions and rewrote his memory with the new story, snapped to attention. Stumbling off his stool, he grabbed the door and wrenched it open before ushering her inside. "C'mon then, stop wasting time. Lung's gotta hear this."

Smirking to herself, Amanda let herself be led across the empty nightclub floor toward a door marked 'manager' in the corner. The bouncer took her up a short flight of stairs and then to an unlabeled door down the hall.

Before he could raise his hand to knock, Amanda spoke up before he could. "You took me in, Lung liked your initiative and then told you to go back to doing your job."

The man blinked a few times, looking around before smiling in satisfaction as he turned and began to return to his post at the front door.

Watching the man leave, Amanda couldn't help but giggle a little to herself before turning to try the door. Finding it unlocked, she pushed it open and stepped into the place that had to be Lung's private office. Or at least the place he was using as an office for the time being. Apparently being an escapee from the Birdcage meant that he had to move around a lot.

The two men inside the office, Lung and Oni Lee, both whirled at the sound of the door opening. They were standing in front of a large tank full of tropical fish, apparently having been deeply engaged in conversation.

"Lee-"

Lung began to give his second-in-command orders about dealing with her, but Amanda spoke up quickly, her voice once again echoing slightly. "Both of you asked me to be here because I'm one of your thugs."

The annoyance in Lung's voice didn't change, though his reasoning did. "You are late."

Stepping fully into the room and closing the door behind her, Amanda crossed to where the two men stood. Oni Lee's eyes were narrowed, his suspicion not entirely averted by her power, even if he didn't know exactly why he was suspicious. At least now he thought of her as a minion that he didn't entirely trust, instead of a complete stranger that he didn't trust.

"What do you have to report?" Lung demanded. Clearly he was trying to remember what he'd sent her out to do.

"Hookay, here goes." Taking in a breath and then letting it out, Amanda ran a hand back through her short, dyed blue hair before getting right to it. It hadn't taken long, once she and Clepsydra realized what power the vial had given her, for them to come up with this plan. It wasn't perfect, but it should get the job done well enough.

Calling on her power, she began to talk."The two of you came up with a great plan to deal with the shame that Lung feels because of the way the Wards keep kicking his ass. You're going to invade Arcadia High School and force them to expose themselves..."

---

September 13th (Present Day)

"I don't believe it." Amanda, who had finally decided on the name Mnemosyne at Clepsydra's suggestion, sat on the living room couch, staring at the television report. "They actually killed him. They killed Lung."

Sitting beside her, costume removed to reveal a dark-haired girl with pale aristocratic features, Clepsydra smiled. "Either way, Lung would have been finished after today. He broke all the rules and attacked the Wards out-of-costume. He attacked a school, a school that Marquis' daughter attends. I admit, I expected him to be caught, either now or later when the wrath of the entire Protectorate descended on him, but death works too."

"So what now?" Amanda asked, smiling as she watched more of the news about how Lung's 'plan' had backfired so tremendously. If only they knew.

"Now," Clepsydra answered, "leadership of Lung's gang will be up for grabs. They've got no direction, no purpose. And I have just the person in mind who can grab it."

"No drugs." Amanda pressed firmly. "Drug pushers get run the hell out of town. Alcohol... fine whatever, people drink, I guess I get it. But no drugs. And anyone that drinks and drives goes down. No warnings. They're done. They wanna drink, they can be responsible about it."

The older girl nodded. "Of course. That was the deal, and I keep my deals. No drugs, responsible drinking. No warnings."

"Good." Smiling a little more satisfaction, Amanda asked, "You really think you can take over the crime in this city?"

Clepsydra leaned back, stretching lazily on the couch. "With your help? Yeah, I think we can." She turned back to the report on the television before adding, "After all, that's one gang down."

"One to go."