Getting away from Erinye was surprisingly easy. She didn't send any capes after us, or if she did they weren't fast enough to keep up. The sounds of the battle slowly fade with distance, first loud enough to spur one last surge of adrenaline, then muted enough that some caution works its way into my pillars, until only the loudest sounds carry all the way to us. My passengers seem to relax with me, at first straining against their harnesses, then bracing within them, then hanging limp within the near-cocoons of bone around them.

When a full minute goes by without an audible expression of powers, I feel something taut go loose in my shoulders.

I turn around a corner and come out onto a ruined park, the greenery torn and scattered and the play structures crushed against the ground, but it's the marvel in the distance that makes me pause. A twist in space, long and dense in a way that reminds me of a docking rope Dad showed me at the Docks, one big knot made of smaller fibers, except this one is a vision of a landscape so twisted that M.C. Escher would say that it's a little much. It stretches out into the distance well beyond the horizon.

"Hey, less gapin' and more gallopin'!" Snow says, wriggling inside his harness. "We ain't clear yet!"

I resist the urge to put a nub of bone somewhere unfortunate and return to the odd stilting that's become my go-to movement mode when I'm carrying passengers. Despite his foul tongue Snow has been a fairly tolerable passenger, and Analog has been silent save for the odd clip of TV. I don't know what's up with her, but Snow seems pretty touchy about it and I don't feel like kicking that particular hornet's nest.

"How far are we?" a voice says, tentatively hopeful. I gauge the remaining distance between us and the twist of space with a now-practiced eye.

"Not five minutes," I assure Bloody Mary. "We're almost there."

Soon enough we're at the entrance to the tunnel. It's guarded by one cape, a stocky woman in an unattractive jumpsuit decorated with crystals. She holds up her hand palm out and I slow to a halt just outside what I think is a safe distance.

"Names, last responsibility, and Master/Stranger passwords if you have them," she says harshly, the other hand coming up to point at us. I stay very, very still as I answer.

"White Rose, Snow, Analog, and Bloody Mary. We were hunting clones until Erinye got trapped. Then Leviathan showed up…" I trail off.

"Bloody Mary. Echo Mike One One Eight Seven," Bloody Mary shouts. The guard cape's hand goes to her ear and I can make out a pink bracelet on her wrist. After a moment she nods and motions at the tunnel.

"They're ready to receive you," she says. "Good to have you back." With that she promptly stops paying attention to us, switching her gaze back to the cityscape. I move past her, look into the tunnel and shake my head in wonder. I'm not alone.

"Fuckin' hell," Snow whispers. In front of us is the medical tent. As in, right in front of us. I take three steps forward and suddenly I'm miles away from Brockton Bay. Vista is there, sitting in a folding chair surrounded by a squad of PRT troopers. She flashes me a quick smile before turning her attention back to the tunnel. I slowly walk past her, taking in the sight.

If she wasn't a Ward, she could make a fortune in transportation.

"Okay, we're outta danger. Let the fuck go," Snow says, slapping the bone around his chest twice. I do so, sending him sprawling to the ground with a series of squawks and curses. I smirk behind my mask as I set the other two capes down more gently. Analog promptly walks over to Snow and starts helping him up while Bloody Mary moves closer to me.

"Could you give me a mask?" she whispers quietly. I look her up and down, then kick myself. Of course the naked cape wants something to cover up her identity. I make a domino mask, then hesitate.

"Do you want some clothes?" I ask. I don't think I can do cloth, but blocks of bone would probably be better than nothing. Bloody Mary just shakes her head, plucking the mask from my fingers and turning towards the troopers.

"I need to see someone," she mutters as she walks away, practically wilting in the rain. I look towards Snow and Analog, but they're both already talking to a PRT agent. My eyes fall to a tent with a pictogram of two stick figures throwing a third into a pool, with red paint filling in the trough.

No prizes for guessing who that is.

Isidis turns around when I walk through the flaps, elbow deep in gore and still wearing the flower I gave her. It's dyed red now, bright and fresh, and I can see Dorian looking up from where he's crouched under a PRT trooper with an axe.

"Hey," I say quietly. How should I approach this? "I'm-"

"Gimme a minute here," Isidis interrupts. "I'm nearly done with this guy's stomach." True to her word, a man slowly pushes himself out of the pool, poking at his abdomen, which is remarkably muscled relative to the rest of his body. "You're welcome," Isidis adds, standing up and brushing some giblets off of herself as she steps out of the pool. "Now get dressed and get back out there."

As Isidis walks across the room, misgivings arise. Should I have stayed out longer? She certainly hasn't stopped working. Should I have moved closer first, met her half way? Were words even necessary, and was the correct course of action just to set up another wood chipper and start working on Dorian-

Isidis throws her arms around me and I stop.

"You're back," she whispers. I nod above her head and return the hug. Cautiously. Carefully.

"I'm back," I say.


Time passes slowly.

Sure we healed some people. That didn't actually take a lot of effort though, and I found myself craving intellectual stimulation less than ten minutes into the grind. The three of us tried singing, but that grew old fast without the semi-constant bickering over which song to pick. That, and our hearts weren't really in it.

Alabaster died.

He was abrasive, a pain to work with, and a literal Nazi. If, when, he got caught, he would've been Birdcage bound for sure, and I can't name a single person who would've shed a tear.

Alabaster also apparently pulled Dorian out of the way of a clone's suicide charge, one which took the life of three other capes. He played rearguard against the last wave of clones while everyone was retreating. By all accounts he went out on his own terms, fighting an unambiguous evil. The irony is sickening, in the worst way.

After the battle is over, the government is going to pay for a monument to honor the fallen. His name will be up there, along with all the other people who died during the attack. With a name like his, it'll be near the top of the list.

In between grinding up Dorian and bathroom breaks, I pondered what that might mean. Alabaster wasn't a nationally known cape, not like Kaiser, not like the Triumvirate. Most people who see his name on the monument aren't going to know about the people he's killed. They're not going to see his rap sheet. They won't know about what he believed, about what he did in the name of those beliefs.

All they'll see is his name, carved into stone, recognizing the last act of his life.

I don't know how to feel about that.

"No one's come in for a while. That's a good thing, right?" The question snaps me out of my musings and I turn to look at the source. Dorian is sitting on the edge of the Pit, gently kicking his feet in the pool of gore. Isidis is sitting alongside him, a hospital gown thrown carelessly over her shoulders and stained red at the bottom. She shrugs, adjusting the paper sleeve as it threatens to fall off.

"Eh. Good and bad. Good in that there aren't any wounded, bad in that it could just mean that the S-Class threat is getting better at dealing the final blow," Isidis says, casting a glance towards me. "How bad was it out there?" she asks. I lean back in my seat of bone, still connected to the wood chipper, and shake my head.

"I couldn't tell," I say. "Only one of the twelve people in my group disappeared, but I don't know what the casualty rates for the other groups were." Probably higher, given that they weren't selected for survivability. I shudder to think about what a few Starfishes could do to a group of unprepared Blasters.

"That's good, right?" When Isidis and I both look to Dorian, he shuffles his feet sheepishly. "I mean, Legend said that one in four people die in Leviathan attacks, right? One in twelve is a lot better than that." Isidis keeps looking at him, then shakes her head.

"One in four die," she says quietly, dropping her gaze to the pool of meat. "Casualty rate factors in the people who "just" get injured. That includes lacerations, concussions, broken bones, broken backs, missing limbs, etcetera." Her hands tense on the edge of the pool, knuckles going white. "Casualty rate is pretty close to ninety percent." I process that for a moment as Dorian pales. If people knew that getting injured was a virtual certainty at an Endbringer fight, participation would plummet. Hard. Most people can't afford to spend a few months laid up with a broken leg they can't explain, and I can't imagine that insurance companies would cover people willfully entering a danger zone.

I almost laugh. Reporting the death toll makes charging the sentient, murderous natural disaster more attractive.

"So everyone gets hurt?" Dorian asks quietly. Isidis shrugs, motioning towards Dorian.

"People like you? The really hard to put down Brutes? They make counting it weird. Throw in half a dozen types of healing and people rarely leave an Endbringer fight with lasting damage. But if you remove the people who can shrug off anything short of an exotic power or heavy ordnance from the equation and just look at wounds received rather than the wounds people take home, then yeah, almost everyone gets injured. Back liners like me tend to manage alright, but the Endbringers aren't stupid. They'll set traps, take opportunities. We're safer, but only by degrees."

After that the conversation dies off, each of us lost in our own thoughts, more somber than ever. Amy seems resigned, if unhappy. Dorian is oddly still, his face slowly falling as grim reality sinks in. I look inwards.

How durable am I, really? I can tank bullets, or at least the ones that came out of the guns the ABB could find. I can fight capes, depending on how they attack me. Both of those are qualified statements though, and when I start thinking about my odds versus a group of well-trained soldiers with heavier guns, ones who know about my powers and have thought about how to counter them, I don't dismiss my death as a possibility.

Then I think about someone like Alexandria coming down to rip my head off and go even quieter.

The world is filled with monsters, and I'm nowhere near the scariest.


A PRT agent walks in, helmet off and an exhausted smile on his face. "It's over."

I wait for the rush of victory. For something like the happiness after I killed Bakuda, the grim satisfaction of taking out an ABB store house. Anything positive, anything light.

Instead what I feel is a tired relief. The end of a shift at the hospital. Making it through a day at school without wanting to go Carrie. It's not a celebratory feeling, just a cessation of stress.

"How, who, and where are the bodies?" Isidis asks, snapping off the questions rapidly. I berate myself for lapsing and shake myself awake. We're healing. The injured aren't going to magically stop existing once the fight is over.

"Levi fucked off near the end, Eidolon disintegrated the other S-Class threat, and there aren't any. Eidolon mass-healed everyone," the agent responds, counting off the answers on one hand while the other runs through his hair. "Brockton is fucked, but the city isn't sunk. They're running rescue on the civilians now." He jerks his chin towards me. "Mass Movers are in high demand and we've got another person to grind-"

"You're alive!" Asher shouts, bursting through the tent flaps, all five foot four and maybe a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet practically jumping into a flying hug at me. I manage to catch her thanks to judicious use of bone supports and extra tendrils around her chest. This doesn't seem to bother her at all. "I was worried when I didn't see you doing your whole 'Rawr, I am murder-blender, hear me stab!' thing near the end but I never doubted you'd make it out for a second! Anyway, I'm here to take over the mincing bits while you try to be less of a murder-blender and more of a stabby-centipede. Is that the guy I'm going to be killing?" she asks, shifting topics as she lets go of me and walks over to Dorian, who nods and begins to stand.

"It's a pleasure-" the rest gets cut off as he slips in the gore and falls forward, only barely catching himself before his spill turns into the face-plant variety. He gets up fast though, only blushing a little. I resist the urge to laugh at him. "I'm Dorian," he says, extending a hand. "It's a pleasure."

"You said that twice and why are you naked?" Asher asks, appraising him shamelessly. Dorian looks down, then quickly attempts to cover himself, blushing furiously.

"Because I don't like trying to pick cloth fibers out of internal organs," Isidis replies, flicking her blood-coated hands at Asher and drawing a squeal. "Now get to chunking him before I have you replaced with an industrial grade paper shredder."

"Meanie!" Asher replies, sticking out her tongue at Isidis. She punctuates the statement by slapping Dorian on the shoulder, through the shoulder, sending a fine mist towards Isidis and drawing a hiss of pain from Dorian.

"Where should I go?" I ask, turning away from the impending gore fight and pulling the wood chipper back into my shell. The agent points to his wrist.

"Your bracelet has a map function. Just tell it how many people you can carry, how fast you can move, and whatever else you think is necessary. They'll assign you a route or a shelter to check, and we'll figure it out from there. Got that?" he finishes. I nod.

"Got it." I head to the door, then pause and turn around.

Isidis, freshly coated in a light misting of pink and giblets, is showing a blood-speckled Asher which parts of Dorian to prioritize and how to shred him in such a way that the bits and pieces actually end up in the pool instead of around it. She catches my eye and smiles.

"Don't slip and break your neck," she says. There's some genuine worry in there, but it's hidden behind her grin.

"I think I can manage," I say lightly. I turn back and step out into the open ground, bringing my bracelet up to my mouth.

"White Rose. I can carry up to four people at thirty miles per hour, and can possibly construct roads to facilitate other Movers. Where am I needed?"


I thought that healing was exhausting. That shifts at the hospital represented the epitome of guilty boredom, of being sick of doing the right thing. I was convinced that nothing could be worse than watching another person come into the hospital and feel just a little less empathy for them than the patient before, of wondering when I'd just stop caring.

When I ran between the sites of Bakuda's bombing, I thought that I had seen devastation. That I could never see more careless destruction, and that nothing could enrage me more.

As I lever another piece of rubble away from the entrance of an Endbringer shelter I shake my head. At least in the hospital things averaged north of break-even. At least with Bakuda I knew, roughly, what could be done to stop future attacks.

Now?

I let a piece of rubble fall, track its descent until it's out of sight, hear the crash of concrete into water, then turn back to the pile of wreckage. This doesn't feel like progress. It doesn't feel like the world is better off with each and every rock moved. It feels Sisyphean, endless and completely devoid of fulfillment. Seeing it fills me with rage, hot and sharp and ready to rend, but there's no possibility of resolution. Leviathan's long gone, Erinye is dead, and even if either of them appeared in front of me, what would I do? Die aggressively at them?

I push another slab of concrete out of the way, bone grinding and breaking as it slides against the rough surface of what used to be a building, a dull burn of almost-road rash. I want to do something else. Fighting would give my blood something to cool on, healing would appease my conscience, even art would feel more fulfilling than this menial labor.

The slab comes to vertical and I stare at it, then give it a tap, watching as it falls off the edge of the building.

The noise it makes when it crashes to the street is deafening.

"That should be deep enough," EKG says. "Step out of the way and I'll give it a look." I obediently step to the side, observing the cape as she peers through the scope on a scary-looking rifle aimed at the ground. She's decked out in a white raincoat decorated with red crosses modified to look like crosshairs. A single-strap backpack is slung across her back, a syringe gun rests at her side, and dull grey needles are strapped to every limb. "Okay, picking up life signs. Lots of healthy, a few that could survive without immediate medical attention, and a few that are going critical. Keep digging."

I slide another wafer of bone in between a pair of rocks, then slowly feed in mass, pushing them apart. This is the third shelter we've been to with living people inside of it, the sixth total. Two of the three empty ones looked like they had been opened from the inside, simply a case of people hearing the all-clear and assuming it was safe to go outside. A fair assumption, if also very wrong. Moving around Brockton Bay right now without a mass-Mover is a dangerous game, and if they had been willing to sit tight they wouldn't have had to navigate a flooded ruin to get to the refugee camp.

There was also one with broken doors that looked like they had been torn off by a bear the size of a house. EKG only scanned that building once, then refused to go any deeper into it. I didn't challenge her on it.

The stone shifts, then falls to the side, shattering against the pile of rubble I've already moved. They built the shelters to last, with multiple different entrances for when the initial one inevitably gets blocked. The one we're on right now has a rooftop access currently covered by no small amount of stone. Less than when I had started though, and as I shift another rock I catch sight of the reinforced steel hatch.

"I have eyes on the entrance," I say, working two pieces of rubble at a time.

"Finally," EKG mutters before stepping forward, slinging the rifle across her back and pulling out the syringe gun. "Alright then, I've stasis shots for the critical cases. Only five left, you can carry four, so I'm going to use three. How long until you have the top clear?" she asks, slipping a trio of vials into the gun, then pulling the top back and letting it snap forward, the tinkertech humming as a green light illuminates on the side.

"A minute," I say, slipping bone underneath the remaining rocks and expanding it into a sphere, brute-forcing away the last of the debris before pulling the bone back in to reveal a battered but still intact door. EKG walks over to the keypad by the door, messes with it for a second, then steps back as the metal creaks open.

"Okay everyone, most severely injured to the front first," EKG shouts as I drop down into the shelter itself. It's utilitarian, all concrete with rounded edges and easily-distinguishable yellow stripes on the walls. "I'm going to shoot them up with drugs that'll keep them alive for a few minutes and White Rose here is going to get them out. Sound good?"

"Ricky, Ariel and Sam!" someone shouts back. "They'll be at the front in a minute!" I wait four agonizing minutes as three people, each bloodied and broken, get carried on stretchers to the front of the crowd. Each gets a dart to the neck not long after being laid down, and once I see them go stiff from whatever cocktail of drugs EKG mixed up I start wrapping them in bone. As I start moving up and out of the shelter, someone throws a black box up at me which I snag smoothly out of the air.

Civilians don't spend the entire time during Endbringer fights cowering in fear. Well, some do, but there are other things to fill the painful hours with. One of them is taking a census of who's in the shelter, what injuries they have, what possessions, etcetera. It helps families reconnect, insurance companies figure out who to pay benefits to, and just generally smooths out the aftermath of the battle. Even now, a database is being compiled comparing the number of confirmed dead or confirmed alive to the original population of the Bay.

A pillar of bone crumples a weakened car roof, but I take it in stride, throwing out two more limbs to steady myself. The database is never complete. Some people always decide to stay at home, either by making a rational decision based on the distance to the nearest shelter or simply caving to bullheaded stupidity. Some people get caught up in the press and don't enter in time, victims of bad luck or poor civic planning. Some people just don't get recorded and waste days of some poor bureaucrat's life because they couldn't spend a few seconds to write their name on a sheet of paper in legible text.

I see the twisted tunnel up ahead and pick up the pace. No one has seen any more Erinye clones, but I still move carefully through the city just in case. This close to the camp I feel safer though, and EKG's drugs don't work forever.

As I pass through the tunnel Vista gives me a tired nod, which I return. I don't know how long she's been maintaining the tunnel for, but it hasn't dropped since I first saw it. I shake my head once I'm clear and heading for the medical tents. I never really appreciated what Shaker 9 meant. Now I can't help but think about how easy it would be for her to collapse buildings or destroy delicate machinery. All that power in the hands of a girl who can't be out of middle school yet.

"Delivery," I say, dropping the three stasis'd patients on triage stretchers. A pair of EMT's immediately start diagnosing them, muttering obscure words to one another as they place marked post-it notes on the few bits of dry clothing left. I turn away, a heavy tiredness descending as I lift my bracelet to my mouth.

"White Rose, waiting for a zone," I say dully. A red arrow pops up on my bracelet and I obediently follow it, once more ascending to my stilts.

This? The rescue work? It's not fun. It's doesn't necessarily feel good, either emotionally or intellectually. I'm reminded of one of Mom's lectures on All Quiet on the Western Front. The real hell of the battlefield wasn't the bombing, wasn't the gas, wasn't the dawning realization of the scale of a 'modern' war.

It was the boredom.

Days, weeks of inaction, of wet, muddy, putrid life in the trenches, with terrible food and limited outlets for energy, punctuated by brief bouts of suicidal charges on both sides, artillery shelling, and death that you could never predict, never properly defend against. But before that? Pure banality.

I hate the monotonous searching. I hate the tedious, careful procedure, always trying to ensure that no one gets left behind. I understand it all, but it doesn't change the fact that I don't see any fruit from my labor, that I'm a glorified drone that happens to fall into the nice little box of 'strong and mobile.'

Searching for dying civilians doesn't feel heroic. It doesn't feel like anything. But it needs to be done.

Besides, since when have I gotten what I wanted?


Too many hours later and I have to take a break. I can barely keep my eyes open, even with caffeine, and eventually Isidis throws in the towel after she barely manages to graft some zombie-woman's head back on.

"Okay, I'm going to mess up something important in someone important if I don't get some sleep soon," she says, stepping out of the pool on shaky legs, an uncharacteristic waver in her voice. "Rose, mind helping me get to bed?" Once she's gore-free and dressed, we get guided by a PRT agent to a guarded sleeping tent, mercifully far away from the hives of activity. Inside are curtained-off cots with labels outside that read Hero, Villain, or Independent. Only one bed is open. Isidis sighs, then moves the marker over to Hero.

"Looks we're going to have to double up," she says without the energy for an innuendo. "Don't snore or I'll cut off your head and put it on top of the most rotted corpse I can find." I can't bring myself to bother to reply and simply fall onto the bed, bone pulling under my skin and letting me feel the surprisingly soft sheets. I roll around, gather the covers, and close my eyes. There's a rattle of metal on metal, and a few moments later I feel Amy fall down behind me.

"Fucking blanket hogs," she mutters, but there's no heat to it. "They're going to get us up in six hours if there isn't an emergency," she whispers. "I'm going to conk out, alright?" Nearer to the end of the sentence, her words get lighter, looser, and I can feel her breathing getting deeper.

That's alright though. In between her warmth, the touch of cloth, and the quietness of not-rain, I'm already falling into a peaceful, welcome black.