Many thanks to BeaconHill and GlassGirlCeci for betareading.

Radiant 13.5

Once the Wards had all awoken, I assembled them in the common room. It was late in the morning, getting towards lunchtime. In each face I saw mirrored the same anticipation, the same eagerness. Tonight, we'd finish the Empire for good.

"All right, everyone," I said. "Dragon's been working around the clock to find outexactly where Kaiser's going to be and what he's going to be doing. But that's not all we're doing tonight. If even one of the Empire's capes escapes, the remains of the organization will rally around them. We could mop them up, but I don't want any loose ends. So Dragon has also tracked down all of the other remaining Empire capes. A lot of them are going to be with Kaiser tonight—but not all of them. So we're going to have to split ourselves, and the Protectorate, into teams for this operation."

"Question," Amy said, an odd, conflicted note in her voice. "Is New Wave going to be working with us on this one?"

I smiled at her. "They are," I confirmed. "New Wave wanted to work together, since they're best acquainted with one another's powersets. They'll be going after one of the three target groups—Krieg and Cricket. If you want—and only if you want, Amy—you can deploy with them."

Amy hesitated. "Can I think about it?" she asked.

"Of course." I looked around at the others. "That leaves two targets for the rest of us. One of those is Kaiser—and with him, most of the Empire's remaining capes. We expect to see Purity, Fenja, Rune, Oracle, and Alabaster with him."

Vista let out a low whistle. "That's going to be one hell of a fight."

I grinned at her, baring teeth. "Yes. For them."

"That means the last target is Othala and Victor?" Carlos asked.

I nodded. "Apparently, they're married," I said. "They're trying to flee the city—without Kaiser's knowledge, as far as we can tell. They're the most vulnerable group, since they'll be without any Empire support. Krieg is Kaiser's attempt to maintain some command structure if he's captured—if Kaiser is lost, Krieg is set to take control of the Empire. I don't intend to let that happen."

"Where are those the groups going to be?" Sophia had a laptop with her in the squishy armchair, and seemed to be intent upon the screen, which I couldn't see from where I stood. Dennis and Dean were looking at it over her shoulder. She looked up and gave me a quick, intense look as she asked the question.

"Is that a map?" I asked, gesturing at her laptop.

"Yeah. Want me to put it up on the TV?"

I nodded, stepping aside so she could fiddle with the TV cables. After a moment, the image appeared, and she stepped back. "Victor and Othala will be here," I said, pointing at the highway leaving the city to the south. "We think they're trying to get out of the northeastern seaboard entirely, heading for the Bible Belt. Our ambush is going to be here." I pointed at the place where the highway passed a small lake. "The road will hopefully not be too busy, and since we have a big numbers advantage, they'll hopefully surrender without a fight. But the worst case is a cape fight on a major roadway with civilians in the area. So be careful.

"New Wave will engage Krieg and Cricket around here." I pointed at a neighborhood on the delta in the north of the Bay. "They're holed up in a bar whose owner is an Empire member. There may or may not be civilians at the establishment during the fight. There will be support from the Empire's general members there, but with all of New Wave on the assault I predict it'll go well. Just in case, though, we're leaving a small force on the Rig, ready to deploy at a moment's notice if any of the teams run into any unexpected trouble.

"That leaves Kaiser." I pointed at a spot downtown. "He and his guard are going to be holed up in the upper floors of the Medhall building with, we expect, a helicopter on the roof. It'll be after hours, but Medhall is known to ask for overtime from its employees on occasion, so we can't assume that there will be no civilians. But we know that most of the loyal people Kaiser has left, cape and otherwise, will be there with him. I predict they'll empty the building of civilians and set up defenses around the entire block, but I'm not sure. Kaiser's desperate, and I'm not sure what he'll do when he's desperate."

"Do we know why Kaiser's using the Medhall building?" Dennis asked. "It's one of the most high-profile buildings in the city."

"Yes," I said, smiling grimly. "We found Kaiser's secret identity. He's Max Anders, the CEO of Medhall."

At that moment, my phone chimed. I held up a hand to quiet the burst of incredulity from my Wards as I reached into my pocket. It was a text from Piggot. Need you in the interrogation room on floor 3. Now.

I frowned. "No details?" I muttered as I typed out a reply. Be there soon. What's going on? Then I looked back at the other Wards. "Think about which assault you want to go on, each of you," I said. "I can't promise everyone will get their first choice of assignment, and some of you will have to stay behind for the support team. But Piggot, Dragon, Armsmaster, and I will be assembling the teams this afternoon, and I want your thoughts. For now, though, I have to run."

"Who was it?" Sophia asked.

"Piggot," I said, slipping my phone back into my pocket and picking up my helmet from where it sat on the table. "She wants me in the interrogation rooms. Don't know more yet, tell you later."

"Mind if I tag along, actually?" Sophia asked, standing up and picking up her mask. "Nothing to do down here."

I shrugged. "Sure."

As the elevator hummed around us Sophia glanced at me sidelong. "I'm coming on the main assault," she said.

I nodded. "I assumed you'd want to."

"I know you said we might not get our first choice, but so help me, if you put me on the backup team—"

"I'm not going to," I said as I turned to face her fully, my voice firm. "I want you there when we face Kaiser. And Oracle."

Sophia breathed in sharply. Then her eyes hardened and she nodded. "Okay," she said. "Time to face up to it."

The door opened before I could reply. Dragon was sitting in a chair in the corridor, the legs of her humanlike form crossed demurely. Her luminous electric-blue eyes glanced between us. "Taylor, Sophia," she said. "Sorry about the sudden alert."

"What's going on?" I asked.

"We've had an Empire cape turn herself in," said Dragon. "I figured you'd want to talk to her, see if you could figure out what her game was."

Her. A strange mixture of hope and tension ballooned in my chest. Could it be? "Who?"

"Purity," said Dragon. She nodded at the doorway. "Piggot's just down the hall outside her room, along with a few troopers."

I bit down on the bizarre mixture of relief and disappointment. Sophia was less subtle when she slumped slightly beside me. "All right," I said. "I'll go talk to her. Sophia, you listen in—I might want your opinion."

"Me?" she asked, blinking. "Why? You're the one with the social thinker powers."

"You made conclusions about Auxiliary I hadn't seen, yesterday," I said. "Accurate ones. You're not half bad at this yourself." And I want someone second-guessing me, I didn't say. I want someone who will temper me—and even if you don't give a damn what happens to a Nazi, I know you do give a damn what happens to me.

She looked away, her mask obscuring her face. "Sure," she said. "I'll be outside with Piggot."

"I'll be listening, too," Dragon said with a wink. "But, then, I always am."

I grinned at her and then headed down the hall. "Mairë," Piggot greeted when she saw me. "Dragon caught you up?"

I nodded, coming to stand beside her. She was looking into the interrogation room through the one-way glass. I followed her gaze.

Purity sat there, in full costume. The brilliant white fabric looked uncomfortably out of place in the dingy cream paint of the room. She wore only a simple, store-bought domino mask. But what drew my eye, and what made Sophia gasp beside me, was the small, sleeping infant bundled in her arms.

I narrowed my eyes. "Dragon…" I growled.

"I thought you ought to see for yourself," Dragon's voice emerged from the radio on Piggot's belt, sounding amused.

I sighed and turned to Piggot. "It's hers?" I asked.

Piggot nodded. "And Kaiser's."

I raised a hand to rub my temples. "Well, that complicates things. Dragon—check on Kaiser, make sure he's not changing his plans after this."

"Already on it. He doesn't seem to know yet, but he will soon, and once he does I'll keep you posted."

I nodded. "All right. I'll talk to her."

The door creaked as it opened it. Purity's head darted up at me. I carefully shut it, making as little noise as possible. "Mairë," Purity murmured.

I smiled at her, my face displaying a warmth I didn't feel as I sat down across from her. "Purity," I said quietly. "Let's try to keep this quiet, so we don't wake the baby."

Her lips twitched into a smile as she looked down at the child. "I appreciate it." Her voice, I noticed, bore none of the unnatural affects other members of the Empire seemed to favor—none of Kaiser's English lilt or Krieg's thick faux-German. The only accent I could detect in her was the faint remnant of Boston roughness, which she had likely trained out of herself. She looked back up at me after a moment. "I've come to turn myself in," she said. "I don't believe the Empire can stand against you, and I need to think of my daughter."

"I appreciate you doing so," I said. "Let me explain exactly what that means. Because you came of your own accord, we'll do what we can to be lenient. You'll be funneled through the secret courts to preserve your civilian identity, and whatever sentence you receive for your crimes is likely to be far less severe than it would have been had you stayed and fought tonight."

She bit her lip. "But I'll still go to prison."

"I'm no judge, but probably," I said. "Your daughter will have to go to a foster family, in that case, but I'd say you're much more likely to get visitation rights than you would if you had stayed and fought. Just by coming here, you've already improved your situation a lot."

Her brow furrowed. "…Already?"

I smiled thinly. "Yes. Now we come to the meat of this conversation." I leaned in slightly. "I believe in redemption," I said, quiet but hard. "I believe that it is possible to come back from the pit. I must, or else I am lost. Do you believe the same, Purity?"

Her blue eyes seemed transfixed by mine. "I… I don't know," she admitted. "I've tried, but…"

My eyebrows rose. "Oh, you have?" I sat back. "Tell me about it."

She licked her lips. "I was a member of the Empire for nearly eleven years," she said. "In the last year, I married Kaiser. It was that marriage which finally let me peek behind the curtain. It took me almost a year to realize who I had married, and by then I had already had my daughter. I divorced him and left the Empire. I tried to be a hero. For months I fought the ABB, tried to shut down their operations. But I made no headway. Kaiser offered me help if I rejoined the Empire as his second-in-command, and I thought I could temper his worse impulses if I took him up on it. He even agreed to step down and let me take over, if I wasn't satisfied with his methods in a year's time." The words were heartfelt, yet strangely smooth. Practiced. She wasn't lying, but she had thought about this speech of hers, about how to sell her good intentions. It made me wonder what she had chosen to polish away. "I was trying to do better. I was fighting villains, and when I rejoined the Empire it was only to try and get them out from under Kaiser's thumb."

I considered her, searching her eyes for the flickerings of redemption that I had once found in Sophia. "We didn't notice your attempt at heroism," I said, carefully keeping the disdain out of my voice. "It was before my time, for the most part, but from what I've gathered all the PRT could see was that you'd had a falling out with Kaiser specifically. We weren't even sure you had left the Empire. Do you know why that might be?"

Purity winced. "I never fought against them," she whispered. "I—I couldn't. I knew those people. They were my friends, many of them."

So you didn't have the strength to stand against them, even when you knew they were wrong. "You said you fought the ABB," I said. "Did you ever fight anyone else?"

"The Merchants, once or twice," Purity answered. "Maybe a random mugger or independent villain, a few times. Why?"

I nodded. "And of the villains and criminals you fought as a hero," I said, "how many were white?"

Her face twitched.

"You needn't answer," I said with a sigh. "It's more than not fighting the Empire, Purity. It's that. From our perspective, there was basically no difference between your behavior and the Empire's, except that you weren't on the roster when they fought with us or when they intimidated civilians."

"But those are the bad things the Empire does," Purity protested. "I stopped doing those. Even now that I'm back in the organization, I'm trying to cut down on them!"

"Do you really think that's all it takes?" I asked, and was surprised at how tired my voice sounded. "Do you think redemption is just a matter of saying, 'I'll just stop these things and everything will be fine'? After diving into the abyss, do you really think you'll ever see the sunlight again if you just start treading water?" I tried to keep my guilt out of my voice. I had a long way to go to live up to my own words. But Purity was far behind even me.

She swallowed. "What was I supposed to do, then?" she asked, and her voice came out harsh. The infant in her arms shifted and all the anger flooded out of her eyes as she cradled her daughter, quietly shushing it.

I shrugged. "It depends on what you think good is," I said. "On what you think a better world would look like. I'm not denying that the people you were fighting were doing bad things, Purity. I'm not even denying that they were bad people. But I'll tell you what I once told a very close friend of mine: Being a hero isn't about beating up bad guys. It's about making the world a better place."

"But I was doing that," Purity said, a note of desperation in her voice. "The people I stopped wouldn't hurt anyone anymore! Surely that's better!"

"All the while making the Empire stronger in the balance of power in this city," I said. There was a glass of water in front of her—I reached for it, and brought it across the table in front of me. "And can you say in confidence that every criminal you stopped was a bad person? How many were just desperate, or hungry? I don't know. Maybe none. But maybe not." I reached a finger into the glass and let just the tip of my gauntlet touch the surface, so that the surface tension pulled the water up into it. "Our actions mean more than just the things we do," I said, pulling my finger away. The ripples that spread out in the clear glass were perfectly centered in the water. "They spread outward in the people whose lives we touch, and in the people they touch, onward and outward forever. The good you do today will still be felt in a million tiny ways a hundred years from now. So will your evil." I put down the glass and looked up at her. "Are you a religious woman, Purity?"

She blinked, a wariness passing across her face. "I… I was raised Catholic," she said. "I never went to church as often as I should."

I nodded. "Then imagine," I said. "Your life in the Empire, I hope you agree, was one tainted by sin. When you left the Empire, it was like going to confessional. You admitted your sin, and begged to be forgiven. But you are missing a part of the sacrament. There are three acts required of the penitent, in the Catholic faith—contrition, confession, and penance. What penance have you made, Purity? In the depths of your regret and shame, what have you done to amend for the evil you have done?"

Her breathing was shallow as she stared at me. "I…" She whispered, but her voice failed her.

I sighed. "It's never too late to try. I have to believe that, too. If you truly feel that what you did under the Empire was wrong, that the person you were then was a lesser and a worse person… then answer me this." I looked up into her blue eyes. "What is Kaiser's civilian name?"

She blinked, then licked her lips. "Surely you already know…?"

I shook my head. "He covers his tracks well," I lied. "If we have his identity, it will secure our victory tonight." That much, at least, was true. "So if you truly want to do better, Purity, you will tell us. Who is Kaiser under the mask?"

She swallowed. "And… and what happens if I tell you?"

"I would treat you as I have the other penitent villains who have come under my wing," I said. "As I did Grue and Shadow Stalker. I will do my utmost to give you a chance to become the better person you long to be."

"…And if I don't?"

"Then you will be funneled into the secret courts and tried for your crimes, as I said." I shrugged. "The road to redemption isn't an easy one, take it from me. You will be more comfortable if you take the second route. It will hurt less, even accounting for the separation from your daughter. Those who seek to atone for sins such as ours… the trials we are set are onerous." I remembered green eyes, and a smile on dusky lips. "But I think, in the end, it is worth it."

She swallowed. She opened her mouth a few times, wordlessly. "I…" she tried. "Kaiser is…"

I waited. The silence stretched.

At last she slumped. "I can't do it," she whispered. "I don't even like him, but I loved him once. I can't betray him."

"Then, Kayden Anders," I said, standing up, "we have nothing more to discuss."

Her head snapped up. Her eyes flared—literally, light spilling from them in a subconscious surge of power. "You—you know! You knew this whole time!"

At her furious shout, the baby startled and began to cry. Purity forced her eyes away from me and looked down at the baby. "No, no, shh," she whispered, her voice rough. "I'm sorry, baby, please don't cry…"

I stepped around the table and knelt so that my head was level with the infant's. Her tiny eyes blinked at the reflected light of my armor. "Hush, little Aster," I murmured, and there was the sympathy, the thread of compassion. This little girl didn't deserve to grow up without a mother. But neither did she deserve to be twisted by Purity. "Everything will be all right." I hummed an ancient lullaby, first heard in the days before the elves ever came into the East, and as the haunting melody filled the room, Aster's eyes drooped and closed again.

When her breathing was slow and steady again, I stood up. "I notice you didn't ask," I said quietly to Purity, "but Theo Anders will be taken care of, too. We'll see to it that he and Aster find good homes."

She stared up at me. "I'm sorry," she whispered.

"No, you're not," I said, and though I couldn't find much sympathy in my heart, I did find pity. "That's the problem." I turned and left the room.

Sophia was waiting for me outside, a pensive expression on her face. She hesitated a moment before speaking. "Taylor… are you sure about this?"

I raised an eyebrow. "You think she deserves another chance?"

"I think it's not about deserving," she said. "It wasn't for me. Isn't there a parallel between her situation and mine? If I'd been asked to make a sacrifice that day you turned my life around, I might have chosen differently."

"You did make a sacrifice," I said gently. "Though you were top-full of pride and hubris, you yielded to me. You allowed your carefully constructed world to break as the weak and strong switched places. You bore that, and still faced forward. You are better than her." I sighed. "We can give her another chance, if you think we should. She isn't penitent, Sophia, not really. She's still a criminal even with her conscience—she feels guilty, but not enough to change. She isn't reaching for redemption with both hands. And the people she's hurt deserve justice."

Sophia bit her lip. "I'm not arguing with that," she said hesitantly.

"She'll be tried by a court of law," I said. "For us to stand in the way, Sophia, is to undermine justice. Sometimes I feel we're right to do that, since I can help people the system can't. I don't think this is one of those times. But if you do, I'll trust your judgement."

She bit her lip. "Putting it all on me, huh?" She sighed. "I'm worried about you, Taylor, not her. I remember when you showed me mercy, and when you offered Fume a chance. Are you sure that it's Purity, not you, that's holding you back now? So much has changed."

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, searching deep within myself for the seed of mercy which had allowed me to extend my hand to Sophia and Brian. For a terrible moment, I wasn't sure whether I would find it. But there it was, nestled deep in my heart, yet it did not stir at the thought of Purity facing trial for what she had done. "I'm sure," I told Sophia. "I promise."

"Okay. I trust you. I can't help but see myself in her, a little—but you're right. If you don't think you can redeem her, I'm not going to argue."

I put a hand on her shoulder. "You are better than her," I repeated. "Even at your worst you were better than her, Sophia. Never doubt that."

Her lips twisted. She sighed. Her eyes held mine for a moment, then dropped away. "Thanks, Taylor," she said. "I should go get ready for the assault."

"Me too," I said. "Shall we?"

Together we left the holding cells. As we walked, I cracked my knuckles. Tonight, the Empire would fall.