CHAPTER 31

The rain-slick pavement made Alex's footing treacherous, and the Sin thugs had enough backup that they figured they could be reckless. It was the kind of conditions where even the smallest error could become a fatal miscalculation, and more than ever, Alex was aware of the limits of his own mortality.

Fortunately, he wasn't without a few advantages of his own.

An over-aggressive Floatzel was flung back into its trainer with a psychokinetic pulse, and the next thug in line was picked up by an invisible force and tossed out of the alley like a ragdoll. Archangel dropped down next to Alex, pushing his hair back off his forehead. "The good news," the esper said, "is that with them focusing on us, the civilians have all cleared out. The bad news…"

"Is now they're all focusing on us, and we backed ourselves into a corner," Alex said. "Yeah, I noticed." Hierro darted past Alex, delivering a quick one-two punch to a Fraxure to stun the dragon type long enough for Alex to dispatch it with a hard whack from his stun baton. "Seven thugs left, nine pokemon between 'em. What's the over-under on us fighting through?"

An enforcer charged in with a wordless battle cry, only to fall on his backside as his forehead impacted with an invisible wall. Newton snapped his fingers and dispelled the barrier before twirling his spoon between his fingers, hurling the Floatzel back again with a psychic shove.

"Not the worst odds we've faced," Archangel said. "But this rain isn't making it easy. Watch yourself out there, Hawlucha Man."

"So long as you got my back?" Alex flashed the esper a grin, and Archangel returned it with a smile that stretched all the way to his eyeteeth. "I've got nothing to worry about."

Alex charged into the fray, his batons held out at his sides. He and Hierro crashed into the enemy mob, spinning and kicking and throwing up spray from every puddle they landed in to disorient their opponents. An Arbok lunged, and Alex dropped to a crouch as the serpentine pokemon sailed over his head and caught an uppercut on the chin from Hierro for its trouble. Alex slammed his baton into the poison type's coils and it dropped with a hissing shriek of pain. An enforcer came at Hierro with a machete, and Alex was at his partner's side, catching the blade on his baton and knocking the enforcer's legs out from under her to knock her flat on her back. Two touches from his batons put her out of the fight, and then Hierro was leaping over his back to slam into a pair of Mightyena with a roundhouse kick and a full body tackle. Bodies flew through the air as Archangel picked off targets beyond Alex's reach, and brittle translucent barriers appeared in the air around Alex and Hierro to cover their blind spots, shattering into tiny iridescent shards when hit, but giving Alex and his partner the time they needed to react and handle the incoming threat.

Alex grunted as an Accelgor slammed into his flank, nearly throwing him to the ground. The bug type unleashed a series of lightning-fast strikes to Alex's abdomen, driving the air from his lungs. Hierro lashed out at the Accelgor, but the insect danced back too quickly for the Hawlucha to get in a clean hit. Hierro raced after it, his claws skittering across the concrete. Alex sucked in a breath and tried to call out a warning, but he was too late.

The Accelgor's body began to glow, and an explosion of light and force burst from the bug type's exoskeleton. The full force of the Final Gambit struck Hierro full in the chest, and the Hawlucha tumbled head-over-tail feathers across the pavement. The bug type's trainer drew his sidearm and took aim at the injured Hawlucha. Alex sprinted down the alley, his blood pounding in his ears. He slid across the wet concrete, skidding to a stop just in front of the man and slamming his elbow against the man's forearm. The enforcer's shot went wide, but Alex lost his balance and stumbled to his knees. He had just enough time to think Oh crap before the man recovered and leveled his gun at Alex's forehead.

At this range, there was nothing Alex could do to stop the shot, and the man wasn't going to miss a target right in front of him. His instincts screamed at him to run, but his muscles were frozen in place.

"Don't!" Archangel screamed. The man's eyes flicked up at the esper, and Archangel raised his hand in a placating gesture. "Don't shoot him! If you do…"

"You'll what?"

"You'll serious piss me off."

"I'll take my chances," the man said with a smirk. Alex saw his finger twitch on the trigger. He squeezed his eyes shut to brace himself for the sudden explosion of pain, and then whatever came next.

The pain didn't come.

After a few heartbeats, Alex slowly opened his eyes and saw the bullet hanging suspended in the air, barely a centimeter from his forehead. The enforcer's eyes were wide with panic, and Alex could see the man's frenzied breathing as he struggled to move. His eyes darted back and forth, and Alex realized that once he filtered out his heart pounding in his ears and the man's labored breathing, the night was eerily quiet.

Then he noticed that the rain had stopped.

The raindrops were literally frozen in place, as though time in the alley had stopped just as the enforcer had pulled the trigger. "Don't say I didn't warn you," Archangel said. He rose higher into the air, his eyes glowing with a spectral inner light. All of the other enforcers and thugs seemed to be frozen in place, and he stared down at them with naked contempt. "You may want to stand back, Hawlucha Man," the esper said. Alex scrambled to his feet and ran to Hierro's side, bundling the Hawlucha into his arms and retreating deeper into the alley, just to escape the weight of Archangel's gaze.

With a flick of the esper's finger, the bullet meant for Alex dropped to the ground with a ping. As soon as it touched the concrete, the preternatural calm of the alley was shattered as Archangel unleashed his fury. Humans and pokemon alike were hurled in every direction, slammed against the concrete walls of the municipal buildings on either side, tossed through windows in sprays of broken glass, or sent tumbling into the street. One of the thugs struggled to his feet, and Archangel seized a piece of broken masonry in his telekinetic hold, angling it so that a piece of jagged rebar was pointed directly at the man. With a flick of Archangel's wrist, the rebar shot into the man's leg with enough force to break through the stone of the wall behind him. Archangel snapped his fingers, and the rebar twisted to have two ninety-degree bends, making it impossible for the man to free himself.

"I'm tired of playing by the rules," Archangel said. His voice seemed to resonate, echoing in Alex's ears and making the air itself tremble. "Why should I have to handicap myself when vermin like you are running roughshod all over my city?" An enforcer and her Mienshao were hurled against the wall to Archangel's left, and the esper pushed hard enough to crack the stone around them and leave a crater-like indentation. "You humans are only good at breaking things." He closed his hand into a fist, and a wave of force rippled out from him, tearing up the stone of the alley. "But my patience with you and your boss has run out. I'm not going to hold back anymore."

The man with the gun rose up in the air, his limbs outstretched. Archangel folded his arms in front of his chest and the light in his eyes grew brighter. There was a crack as the bones in both of the mans' wrists snapped, and then further cracks and pops as Archangel worked his way through the bones in the man's fingers. The man screamed in pain as Archangel snapped the man's forearm, and Alex saw white bone poking through his skin.

"Joshua," Alex rasped. "This is going too far…"

"I'm done being merciful," Archangel replied. "No more 'be not afraid'." He twisted his wrist, and the frozen raindrops congealed in front of him in a shifting globe of dirty water. "If Dominion wants to grind this city under her boot, then I'm going to push back with everything I've got. I'll give her something to be afraid of." The water in front of him separated into long, thin lances that flashed in the distant glow of the streetlights. Before Alex's eyes, the watery lances froze, becoming jagged spars of ice.

"Calm down," Alex said. "Johannes wouldn't have wanted this!"

"Johannes is gone!"

"And this is how you honor his memory?"

The split-second of hesitation was all Newton needed. The Kadabra appeared in the air beside his human partner, and the air between them rippled. The glow faded from Joshua's eyes, and he slowly descended to the ravaged ground of the alley and sank to his knees. The rain began to fall again.

Newton grabbed Alex's wrist in a three-fingered hand and placed the other on Joshua's shoulder. Alex heard the sound of rushing wind and saw a brilliant flash of light, and then suddenly everything was quiet and still.

Alex fell to his knees, and beneath his hands he felt the worn fibers of an old, threadbare rung. Somewhere in the distance, a Noctowl hooted, and water gurgled as it rolled down a drainpipe. A soft breeze made branches in a nearby tree rustle, and Alex allowed himself a moment to let the calm wash over him as his eyes adjusted to the darkness of his new surroundings.

He felt Newton stumble past him, and then rusty springs in an aging bedframe squealed as the Kadabra settled onto the mattress, wrapping a blanket around his shoulders like a cloak. Alex grunted as he hefted Hierro's weight in his arms and laid his partner down across from the Kadabra. He sat down on the edge of the bed and removed his mask. "Where are we?" he asked, turning to Joshua's indistinct shape on the other side of the small room.

The esper dragged his body into a simple but solid-looking chair beside an equally simple desk. "Home sweet home," he muttered, seeming to fold in on himself. He reached out with one hand, and a lamp jerked across the desk, rocking back and forth on its cord until Joshua managed to push the switch with his telekinesis. The soft amber light revealed a spartan cell barely large enough to hold the bed, desk and small bedside table it contained. A narrow closet full of the starched white collared shirts Joshua preferred stood ajar on the opposite wall.

At Alex's blank look, Joshua stirred himself enough to clarify further. "This is an Arcean monastery just outside the city. When the military cut me loose, the brothers here took me in. The lifestyle helps me keep my powers under control, and being outside the city makes things better for everyone involved." He sighed. "Newton knows this is home base, so he can generally teleport me back here from anywhere in the city, but going such a long distance is tough on him."

"How far out are we?"

Joshua jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "The outskirts of north Clarus are about fifteen miles that way. Brother Gerard is taking the car into the city for groceries tomorrow morning, and he can give you and Hierro a ride at least to the uptown subway. I'll give you some of my clothes so you don't have to ride back to Avenbrooke in costume."

"Thanks." Alex shifted his weight, making the bed squeak. "Uh, you want to talk about what happened back there?"

Joshua pushed his rain-soaked curls back from his face. "I lost control. I've spent years training to keep my powers in check, but after losing Johannes and seeing that bastard ready to take you and Hierro away too…" He quickly dashed the tears from his eyes. "I wasn't going to let that happen, and I let my anger get the best of me. And I'd do it again too, if it meant keeping the people I care about safe."

Alex inclined his head. "I know how you're feeling right now. After everything that's happened… I can't lose anyone else either."

"This is all because I'm too weak."

"Dude, I just saw you rip through those Sin enforcers with your mind. You can throw eighteen wheelers around like softballs with your mind. You stopped two hyper beams cold… with your mind. You're the strongest esper in the city by, like, a couple orders of magnitude."

"Second strongest."

"You ripped apart Dominion's bunker with a flick of your wrist, and it was all she could do to keep standing. Your telekinesis is miles better than what she can do."

"My telekinesis is stronger than hers, yes. But overall, I'm much weaker." At Alex's blank look, Joshua sighed. "Look, you know how espers are classified, right? Class one, two, and so on? And yes, Dominion and I are both class three espers, but that doesn't mean we're equal. My telekinetic abilities are stronger than any class three on record, but I'm really a one-trick Ponyta. Outside of throwing things around with my mutant brain, I can't do much else. I have some weak telepathy that lets me communicate nonverbally with people I'm close with, so long as they're in the same room, and enough psychic empathy to make being in big crowds uncomfortable." He shrugged. "The empathy thing is probably a blessing though. If it was even a fraction as strong as my telekinesis, being anywhere near a city would be unbearable."

"So effectively, you only have one trick," Alex said. "It's a damn good trick. But Dominion has a few more things in her toolbox?"

"To put it in layman's terms, yes. Her ability to get into minds and twist them around is just as strong as my telekinetic power. From what I gather, she's got the ability to pick up on the thoughts of those around her without even trying, but she's got trouble digging through memories or anything that her subject isn't actively thinking about at the time."

"So when she was in my head, she didn't get my address? My secret identity is safe?"

"If she's left you alone this long, I think that's a safe bet."

Alex sagged back with a sigh of relief. He had been on edge for days, waiting for Dominion's goons to show up at his door and haul him off. "So she's got mind reading and mind control. But Clarus City is a big place, with a lot of people and pokemon, and that means a lot of thoughts buzzing around. Shouldn't that… have some kind of effect?"

"Not really. Both Marinette and I were instructed how to shield our mind from background noise like that when we were in military custody. It was harder for her, but she was ultimately better at it than I was."

Behind Alex, Hierro groaned as he slowly rose to consciousness. The bottom drawer of Joshua's desk slid open, and a bulky white first aid kit floated up into Alex's lap. "I have some Sitrus berry gel in there," the esper said. "If you rub some on Hierro, he should get some of his energy back. And obviously take anything you need for yourself."

While Alex set about patching up Hierro, he found a plastic container of dried Oran berries in the kit and passed them over to Newton to snack on. Alex applied the gel to Hierro's chest, and he felt the Hawlucha's breathing even out beneath his hands. Satisfied his partner was safe, Alex finally stripped off his costume and changed into a pair of athletic shorts and a t-shirt Joshua had found for him. "So the military… you were with them for how long?"

"Eight years, almost nine. When most kids were going out on their pokemon journeys, I got packaged off to a secret facility in the desert to be poked and prodded." Joshua didn't bother to hide the bitterness in his voice. "They were interested in me at first, once I proved I could juggle five fighter jets with my brain. But ultimately, there's nothing I can do that a few powerful psychic types working together can't either. Nah, they were always more interested in Marinette.

"When I first showed up, she wasn't so bad. Nice to me sometimes, even. We knew we were both two test subjects, so there was a kind of solidarity in that." Joshua shrugged. "It's pretty messed up in hindsight. But for years, it was all we knew. She had been there longer than I had, of course. She was more used to the tests, but as we got older, they got more intensive, and more invasive. For me, it was all about pushing my upper limits."

"What about Dominion?" Alex couldn't call her Marinette. It was hard to think of her as an actual person, someone who had shown a younger Joshua kindness and compassion. After she had sifted through his mind and turned him into a puppet under her control, he couldn't conceive of her as anything but a monster.

"We took our tests separately, so I don't know everything. But from what I gathered, the military was always more interested in her. A esper with the kind of powers she had was far easier to control than a psychic pokemon. Even the more intelligent ones have trouble understanding complex orders and abstract concepts, which makes their telepathy unreliable in the field. But a human operative who could control enemy forces for long periods was an invaluable resource." Joshua rummaged in another one of his drawers and pulled out a thick folio of papers. "This is everything about me that got declassified when the military esper program shut down a few years ago. It took a while, but I tracked all of it down and complied it here."

Alex flipped through the pages of complicated data, squinting to make it out in the low light. "Project Archer?" he asked when he noticed that was printed atop every page in the folio.

"My codename. Sums up what they thought about my powers. Good for throwing things around and not much else." He smiled ruefully. "I changed it to Archangel, because I thought it sounded cooler."

Seeing years of Joshua's life laid out in text before him made Alex feel strange, and he passed the files back to the esper. "Has anything like this been declassified for Dominion?"

"The military is willing to acknowledge that Project Puppeteer existed, but anything more than that is wrapped up in so much red tape. It's impossible to track down anything solid. I've got to assume that Marinette has hunted down and destroyed anything she can find." The esper put his file back in his desk. "That said, I've filled in some of the blanks myself. I know that once they'd established her benchmarks, a lot of her testing focused on multitasking; controlling multiple people at once, reading minds while controlling them, doing all of that with crowds of people, and so on."

"So how good is she?"

"When it comes down to simple commands, she can probably influence a few hundred people in a small area. Anything more complex and she'll run up against some trouble. She's pretty good at filtering through the noise and pulling out what she wants, and she can exert her control over people for a long time. All of this information is a few years old, and it's clear she's only gotten better since the military turned us loose."

For a time, the only sound was the faint pattering of rain against the tiled roof above their heads. Hierro stirred a little, and Alex wrapped the Hawlucha in a spare blanket. The flying type settled and quietly sank into sleep. While Alex ran his fingers through his partner's feathers, Joshua toweled off his sodden hair. "I understand why Marinette ended up like this. She's holding a grudge for all the time she lost in the program. For years, we were hooked up to all kinds of monitors with electrodes and needles, with no freedom or privacy. We were at our handlers' beck and call. When the program shut down and we were let go, I was young enough to look on the bright side and put it all behind me. But she wanted payback.

"All of her handlers are dead now, from what I've heard. I don't know what her end goal is in all of this, but it's a mistake to think that she's this calculating mastermind. This is all just her lashing out with a teenage revenge plot."

Alex remembered Dominion's stunned reaction when he had managed to throw his baton at her. "It's all just a game to her, isn't it? She's making it all up as she goes along. That's why she's so capricious, why there's no pattern. She just moves her pieces around because it's fun for her to make us all dance on her strings."

"And that's why we need to be on our toes," Joshua replied. "She never expected us to punch back like we did. The Redstone break is just the beginning; it's her putting her pieces back on the board. If I know Marinette, she's going to start making riskier plays. With the Sins and the Kuromori under her control, she's got more incentive to go bigger and break more. When we attacked her compound, we spit in her eye, so as far as she's concerned, this is personal now."

"We're going to have to train harder." Alex's hand curled into a fist, bunching the sheets under his hand. "We need to get strong enough to stop her once and for all, now more than ever."

"And the clock is ticking."

"Right." Alex glanced down at Hierro, and then back at Joshua. "When the time comes, are you going to be able to do it? The more I think about it, the more I feel we won't be able to stop Dominion without you. You say she's stronger than you, but…"

"She is stronger than me, and I don't think I can win in a straight up fight on my own." A golden glow sparkled in Joshua's gray eyes, and his hair floated up around his head. "But when the time comes, I'm going to do everything I can to make sure you and the rest of our friends can take her down, even if I have to burn through every bit of power I have."

Alex held out his fist, and Joshua reached across the gap between them to bump it with his own. The brief contact sent a rush of sensation up through Alex's arm and into his chest, and for the briefest moment, he could feel the howling maelstrom of power that Joshua held inside himself, and could only marvel at the intense control the esper must have to exercise at all times to keep it under control.

Joshua flicked his finger, and a dark shape slid out from under his bed. "I think our partners have made themselves comfortable already, so Newton's camp bed is all yours."

Alex sank down onto the thin mattress with a groan. "What about you?"

Joshua sat atop his desk and pulled his knees into the lotus position. "I'll be fine here. A little meditation will do more for me than sleep will at this point." As Alex watched, Joshua's seated form lifted off the desk and rose several inches in the air. As he drifted off to sleep, he heard Joshua chuckle at something.

"What?"

Joshua shook his head, and his golden curls glowed in the faint silver glow of the moonlight coming through the shades. "No, it's… kind of stupid, and a little embarrassing."

"Oh come on." Alex propped himself up on his elbow. "How many times have you watched me get my ass handed to me? You don't get to talk to me about embarrassing."

"Oh, all right," Joshua said. "It's just that this… well, it's kind of the first sleepover I've had in years."

"Dude, we need to get you out more."