Day 50 of 100

Volume 2, Chapter 25

MAIN EARTH, THE CITY BENEATH THE BREACH
(ARGUS designation)

Amaya knew why she needed to get back out there as soon as possible, and to some extent she felt a tiny bit selfish for it, even if she was lending her help to the city just as she'd been doing it for going on three days now. But she couldn't just stay back there at headquarters, she needed to do something, and being here allowed her to do just that. The selfish part of it was that she knew that was exactly what Cait wanted, too, even though in her case it wasn't possible.

She felt like she'd failed her friend, her friends… If she'd been smarter about it, maybe they wouldn't have gotten the chance to take Ronnie. Of course it wasn't exactly her who made the call, not at that point. She'd been Killer Frost at the time, and those decisions were hers to make, while Amaya had been lying dormant. She could lay all the blame she wanted at the feet of her alter ego, but deep down it still felt like the both of them were not of so separate a mind that it didn't all balance in the end and she had as much blame for what had happened as Killer Frost did.

So she would go out there again, would find others she might have helped. Jim Olsen, Kendra Saunders, Samantha Arias… They were in the same boat as she was. They had friends presently on Breach, helping through that other situation, they had a friend who'd been kidnapped, too… Zari… She'd met her before, helped her… they'd shared their stories… Amaya really hoped she was alright, too.

She found the trio where Iris had told her they would be, and by the looks of it, not only had Iris told them to expect her, but she hadn't come a minute too soon. From what she could see, some breacher or another had gotten it in their mind that it would be really funny to leave a balcony full of people trapped on a compromised structure. Wild Dog, Artemis, and Ruby's mother, they were working to both find a way to get them down, had managed to commandeer some kind of cherry picker, but it was clear from where she was standing that they might not have enough time to get them all down before it was too late.

The shift happened like a chill running through her spine, and she didn't miss a beat, using jets of ice to stabilize the balcony as best she could.

"It might not hold," she warned the others, who took this turn and moved straight into action. One by one they had helped the trapped people down to the street and away from where the balcony would inevitably collapse when the ice melted.

"We heard what happened, are you okay?" Samantha asked.

"I can heal," was all she could make herself say, and maybe she gave off the impression that she didn't want to talk about it, because they dropped the subject at once.

They moved into the building, seeking out the breachers behind the structure damage, but they were nowhere to be found.

"Think they'll do the same thing somewhere else?" Kendra asked the other three. Jim reached out to ARGUS, and a moment later Iris' voice was in his ear.

"Can you try and find the breachers who hit this building?" he asked her.

"Give me a minute," Iris told him. "Yes, got 'em. They went north, right before your team showed up," she informed him and he groaned.

"We saw them," he turned to Kendra and Samantha, and Amaya guessed they were remembering them now, too. "Get back in the van, I'll follow you guys in that thing, we might need it again," he told them, dashing for the cherry picker. And they were off, Kendra getting behind the wheel of the van, driving up the street as she and Amaya and Samantha kept their eyes on the buildings on either side of them, while they heard Jim following up behind them.

"Is that them?" Amaya pointed, spotting a couple of boys who couldn't have been more than seventeen or eighteen.

"Yes, it is," Kendra sped up, a press in her voice that said 'and they're not getting away this time.'

X

On the first night of this entire crisis, they'd had to deal with that single crossing point and how many breachers it had spewed out, all of them just standing there, protecting that opening, so that more of them could cross, and then… then they'd gone in for the attack, and it had taken so many of them, collectively, before they had managed to get in there and take them down, ensuring that no more would be able to cross there in the process. There had been many more of them on site at the time, still not enough that they weren't outnumbered. They'd gotten through it.

They were still outnumbered here, three or so of the breachers for each of the nine of them. This wasn't about a breach this time though, and they had stood discreetly looking on for several minutes before they were sure enough of what they were seeing.

Down in the middle of a high school's football field, they stood in near perfect rows, they counted twenty-six of them, facing a twenty-seventh who stood before them, talking to them. Those of the Waverider team, with the experience of visiting the various quarters repeatedly in recent years, would tell the Green Arrow and her people how they spotted breachers from a handful of different quarters down there. And the one who was addressing them, like a marching general, they were certain she came from War. More than that, they would say she was aligned to the enemy, going by the prosthetic hand and leg that she wore.

"Is it just me or have we returned all of these back to their quarters before?" Ava asked her teammates. "Not in the last few days, I mean before that."

"It's not just you," Leonard replied. He'd been looking at all of those faces, too. He never forgot one, ever, and in all he and his team had been doing, remembering faces was near vital. He looked at those twenty-six breachers and he didn't just know that he'd dealt with them before, he knew where each of them had been returned to, when, and in what circumstances. All of these, they would fall in the category of 'eventual repeaters,' and he had never been so annoyed at his own correctness.

"Is she giving them instructions?" Sara asked, looking to the one standing before the mass of breachers.

"Maybe," her father told her, standing next to her.

"So how are we playing this?" Lucy asked. "Either we wait until they split up and ambush them but run the risk of some of them getting away, or we take them by surprise, here and now, and it's the day before yesterday all over again." Sara's hand moved to rest at her side, the deep slice that still pained her.

"Look at how they're standing," Michael told her, standing behind her. They all looked, and they understood what he was getting at. It was not much of a surprise to find them clustered with those of their own quarters, War here, Mist there, Light, Dark, Haven… The assumption, the hope, was that when they did leave here, they would leave in those same clusters. Then again, they might not, so… what choice would they make?

"We have five quarters in there, not to mention the little general. There are nine of us. If we split up, some of us will have to go alone. So who takes who?" Cisco asked.

"Give me the five from War," Michael declared easily.

"I have those four out of Mist," Leonard followed.

"Ed and I can do the Haven five," Quentin looked to his partner, getting a nod.

"Hey, you, me, those six Dark ones?" Sin held out a fist toward Cisco and he bumped it.

"You two have the six from Light?" Sara asked Ava and Lucy. "I want her," she nodded to the back of the little general.

"Deal," Ava agreed, as Lucy chimed in with a tap to her fellow agent and roommate's shoulder.

"Good, now look alive, we're on," Leonard told them, as the mass of breachers started to loosen up and, as hoped, they kept to their clusters and started in opposite directions. The little general stayed on the field. "Meet back at the jump ship when this is over, keep your channels open and call for help if you need it." And they split off after their targets.

Sara stayed behind, never breaking eye contact with the girl on the field. In time, she suspected the girl had felt her gaze. Still, she stayed right where she was, as though to tell Sara 'if you want to take me on so much, what are you waiting for?' Never to keep a girl waiting, Sara had started silently down from where she stood in hiding and made her way down toward the field, where the one she'd dubbed the little general turned and met her face to face.

The name had been granted by her stature and what little of it there was, but seeing her face now, Sara couldn't say that the girl was any older than… sixteen, seventeen? Yet her eyes felt older, harder. They showed her exactly how all those other breachers, some three times her age and more, would have gathered before her and did as she demanded.

For all of that, Sara still felt just… Not pity, no. She thought back to those days and weeks in Haven, after her money had run out and before Michael had come to her aid, what they had demanded of her to keep going. This girl was from War, she knew, and for what she knew of the place, the road to survival, to thriving, was as treacherous there as it came. If that was what she'd had to make of herself, then that was that. It didn't mean she'd let her do whatever she'd set out to do here.

"Have you come to stop me?" the little general demanded, her voice as hard as her gaze.

"What would I be stopping exactly?" Sara asked, matching strength for strength, starting a dialogue.

"This place, is it your home? Your Earth?" asked the little general.

"Yes."

"I follow the War Maker's path," the girl lifted her chin. "I keep on walking, regardless of obstacles."

"Commendable," Sara told her, and she meant it.

"You have no idea what it even means. Not in a place like this. But I will show you. We will show you."

"And this is where I do the stopping you part," Sara sighed. The little general smiled.

"You're welcome to try."

X

COFFEE SHOP NEAR ARGUS HQ

ONE HOUR LATER

"Did you?" Laurel asked. "Did you stop her?"

"I had her… I was going to bring her back. She didn't want to go back," Sara lowered her head. "I missed it, or I… I never thought she would… She had a blade, hidden in prosthetic hand. She used it on herself." Neither of them spoke now.

After everything today, after this, they'd told her to take the rest of the day. Her father wanted to stay with her. Michael, Sin, Cisco, they all offered it. The Waverider crew… But all she could think about was her big sister, and not even thinking about the day before, she'd called her, asked to meet, and maybe it was there in her voice that something had happened and she wasn't even thinking about the fact that Laurel had been upset with her… that she needed her. And she'd come at once. She'd listened to her story.

"She had put up with so much, gotten through so much. But when it came down to it… she was still a scared, desperate kid."

Her hands were still shaking, and they looked just… raw, like she'd been scrubbing at them very hard. Laurel picked them up, raw hands met with hands still weak, wrapped in bandages. Sara looked up to meet her sister's gaze, and she found compassion in those eyes, found, whether returned to her or merely borrowed for a time, her sister, loving, supporting sister, her Laurel. Her own eyes had been locked in a state of looking as though she was crying without actually shedding a tear, but as she looked at her sister now, the tears did come.

Somewhere under the shock of the end of the encounter she'd had with the girl, she knew… She knew that they were all being manipulated in this, the breachers as much as the rest of them. The breachers were shown the way, told to go, and the rest of them did the only thing they could do, they would send them back the way they'd come. The girl… she couldn't make herself call her the little general anymore… she could have just kept on going, back in War. And even though a part of her tried to say that it would have been better because she'd still be alive, a great part of her knew that would have been disregarding what she was going back to, and how it had just broken through every inch of her bravado in a snap.

Somewhere along whatever chain of command was happening out there, the same people who'd sent that girl to Main had also sent the girls who'd held Laurel's building as they'd done, and as varied as their circumstances were, it still left her to look at all those breachers a little differently, whether they'd come here seeking shelter or seeking mayhem… She didn't even know anymore… It had been too much… It was still too much…

"Sara…" She looked at her sister. "You couldn't have known." Couldn't I? She'd let herself get caught up in the image… maybe because the girl had done the same. She'd been so convinced that she was in control, and she had been… until she wasn't…

Laurel had driven her home. Contrary to popular belief by some – like Sin – she didn't in fact spend every single night in the clock tower. A lot of them, no doubt, but then that was the thing about having the clock tower but also having the apartment. When it got to be too much, and there would be those times when it did, then she would step back, and she would come here, and for as much as the clock tower could make her feel safe and in control, her apartment could do it, too, in a whole other way.

She hadn't been here in days, of course, what with everything that had been happening, and though she knew it wasn't over yet, and somehow she'd be back out there again in the morning, for the moment of what was left of this day she was just Sara Lance, not the Green Arrow. And she had her big sister with her. This had been their apartment, very briefly, before she had disappeared. When she'd returned, she'd eventually discovered that, while Laurel had moved out, she continued to pay rent on the place. She hadn't wanted to let it go, let her go. And then it had become Sara's home all over again.

That day, Laurel had given her sister her marching orders, sent her to shower, fixed her something to eat in the meantime and had it waiting on the table when she came out again. After she'd cleared out her plate, Laurel had checked her bandages, finally able to take in the extent of the cut, along with a number of other scars, healed but very present. Sara didn't say anything when she felt her looking, and Laurel didn't ask.

They'd gone to sit on the couch, turned on the television, not to really watch it with any intent, more to cut the silence. It made it easier, eventually, to speak.

"One thing," Laurel said. "Just one. Why didn't you just come to me first? Tell me what you were going to do?" Sara didn't reply at first, and Laurel knew that she might have waited, that now was really not the…

"If you knew, then you might have been implicated."

"By the police?" Laurel asked, looking at her.

"By your mother," Sara looked back at her. "She got rid of me because I knew her secrets. What would she have done to you if you'd been one of the ones that brought her down? The Green Arrow brought her down, and you… you didn't know. You weren't involved. She couldn't touch you."

They stared at the television. In time they vaguely watched it. And after that Sara fell asleep, her head against her sister's shoulder. She would sleep until morning. Laurel stayed by her side every minute of it.

She looked around the apartment, looked at all the things, the pictures, the objects, all of them, and she thought about her little sister, thought about everything she'd discovered about her in the past two days, the isolation and the mental confusion she'd undergone in Haven, the force that had driven her motivation, her return, all she had become. She looked at the apartment, and the thought back to a moment, trapped in her penthouse, struck with this foolish notion that she had never meant to Sara what Sara had meant to her. She looked at the apartment and she felt loved. She looked at her sister, and she knew peace.

TO BE CONTINUED (tomorrow, in volume 1)