It took Satya a moment after the blinding flash of light to regain her bearings. She was leaning against the pillar, clutching onto its misshapen bricks for stability after the trembling explosions had sent her careening off balance. People – men, women, children, Los Muertos – were running, stumbling, making sense of the situation like frantic ants. The girl under the rubble was still struggling, crying something Satya could not hear. The deafening static in her communications earpiece had isolated her from the sounds of the chaos.
She ripped off her headpiece to hear the girl's cries. "¡Ayuda! ¡Mi pierna está quebrada!"
"Ah, amiga," a new voice entered her right ear. Still dizzy from the blurring crowd, Satya whisked around to the voice, finding a young woman staring down at her with curious eyes.
The woman continued, cool and collected somehow among the commotion. "I would say I've been looking everywhere for you, but let's be honest, your turrets led me straight here. And I cannot tell you how laughable Vishkar's communications transmission security is. You should really tell Sanjay to take a look at that."
The woman's aesthetic only confused Satya further. The asymmetry of it all: a half-shaved head that gave way to a side of cascading ombre hair, the wide askew collar that framed her head and continued down into a flaring coat hem, the leggings that transformed from lavender to cyan, and the patterns and lines that crossed and tangled. It was too much to take in.
"H… H-How…"
"Aww, what's the matter? Cat got your tongue?" The woman kneeled to Satya's level. "Understandable. We made quite the entrance, didn't we?"
"Y-you're with Los Muertos?" Satya managed to ask.
"I used to be with Los Muertos. I've moved on to bigger and better things, but they're always useful for some muscle when we find ourselves with similar interests."
"And your interest here is?" Satya's composure recovered now that she was given a target to focus her attention on. Still, she glanced past the woman, monitoring the little girl with her peripherals.
"Why, my interest here is you Satya, or should I call you Symmetra? And Los Muertos' interest is him," the woman said pointedly, jabbing a thumb to motion towards the direction of the stage. The thief was skating nimbly along the walls with his Vishkar-enabled hard light blades, dodging the grabbing and shooting hands of Los Muertos. Curses were thrown at him as often as bullets. He was like a baited bobble, teasing the mouths of ravenous sharks.
Satya wondered how she would have ever managed to pull off his assassination anyway.
"What a coincidence you two were in the same place at the same time, and in my hometown even," the woman said, turning back to her. "Though, I'm inclined not to call it a coincidence at all."
"What do you mean?"
"Ah, ah, ah," she replied, wagging her finger. Satya noticed the long nails like claws, connected to wires running down her hand. "You can't expect me to give all the juicy details away that easy. I'm not here to explain this all to you. I'm here to make you a deal."
"A deal? I do not even know who you are."
The woman's eyes narrowed. "As it should be. Listen, we can do this the easy way or the hard way, and for both our sakes, I prefer to do this the easy way."
She formed her claws into a square, and then expanded the frame outwards to reveal a picture within a floating screen. It was the explosion of the Calado building in Rio's favela.
The picture prompted Satya to glance back at the girl. She was no longer screaming but instead sitting in tearful silence with her legs trapped under the piles of crumbled brick and mortar. The thief was still riding along the walls ascending towards the ceiling, pushing away the attackers with bursts of audio waves from the stolen sonic amplifier. The venue was nearly cleared of the initial audience. By her count, it was now only the woman, the thief, an intimidating band of Los Muertos, the injured girl, and herself in the gaping tunnel. It would be so easy to make an escape. The teleporter she had laid down was immediately behind her crutch of a pillar, just outside of the mystery woman's sight. In two steps she could be done with it. But the little girl remained, and so would she.
"Focus, amiga," the woman took her chin into her claws and pulled her face towards the picture. Satya tensed at the physical contact, eagerly retreating from her grip. "The people you work for are powerful, you must know this."
"We establish order."
"Order, clearly. What about the chaos, destruction, exploitation, and misery the Vishkar Corporation leaves behind in its wake?"
Before Satya could protest, the woman swiped her hand across the air, revealing several more floating screens. More incarceration. More sabotage. More death. Most reports she had never seen until now. A few screens featured a passing glimpse of Vishkar's weapon, Symmetra herself.
"W-we establish order. What Vishkar does is for the greater good. We are making the world a better place."
"Oh, pobrecita," the woman said pitifully, "you really have no idea how the world works, do you?"
She collapsed the screens back into the singular picture of the burning favela. "So here's the deal. The people I'm with now are interested in recruiting an agent to disrupt Vishkar from the inside. We want their tech, their database, everything. Sure, I could just hack my way in, but to have a physical agent walk in and take Vishkar down right from under their nose? That would be priceless! Your skillset would surely be useful."
Satya blinked, comprehending the proposal. "Vishkar gave me a life free of chaos and disorder. To betray them would be foolishness."
"I figured you wouldn't take this so well. But trust me amiga, coming with me really is the better deal for you. The people I'm with are not as nice as I am. If you resist they will find you. We've got ears and eyes everywhere in this city, in every city. I've seen what they've done to people who needed a little… convincing, and it's not a pretty sight."
The screen rotated to show a new image, one of a slender, feminine figure on a rooftop flooded with silver moonlight. The woman would have been beautiful, if not for the imposing silhouette of a sniper rifle she clutched in her hands, and the ghastly shade of purple her skin had assumed.
It was the Talon sniper on King's Row.
"You work for Talon, then?"
"'Work for' is such a strong term. I prefer to call it what it is: an alliance. But you must now have an idea of what the hard way will be for you. So what do you say? Clock's ticking, amiga."
Escape would be so easy. Two steps and she could be done with it. "My answer is no."
"You're testing me, you know that? I don't have all day. Let me show you what I mean by the 'hard way.'"
The woman raised her claws again and started to tap the tips of her nails in the air, creating blinking purple shapes of holographic buttons. In an instant, Satya felt her mechanical arm spasm, and the blue light emitting from her palm flickered to the same purple of the woman's claws.
Satya froze, staring wide-eyed as her arm moved without her consent, her input, her control. It convulsed to create unnatural shapes in hard light. They were oblong, obtuse, obscene, conceived in no realm of rhyme, reason, or order. The elbow bent counter to its socket, and Satya writhed with the discomfort. "Stop! Stop!" She demanded with tears welling in the corners of her eyes, but the woman did not heed.
"You know how to stop this," the woman replied simply. Panic rushed through Satya's chest.
From the ceiling of the tunnel, the thief pushed off from his high vantage point into the mob of Los Muertos, shouting as his sonic amplifier pulsated. "Let's break it down!"
This was her chance. Even with his modifications, Satya was familiar enough with the technology to know what the equipment would do once it touched the ground. She stood up, for the moment ignoring her corrupted arm and bracing herself for the impact.
He fell into the middle of the band of Los Muertos. The sound barrier had activated. Like bowling pins, the closest thugs were launched from their feet and onto their backs. More and more of the tattooed men were knocked to the ground with fierce intensity as the radius of the rippling pulse grew outwards. The waves finally approached Satya's feet, and she dug her fingers into the nooks of the pillar, steadying herself against it as the vibrations shook her body from its core. The mystery woman was not so lucky. The sound barrier bucked her from the ground, sending her crashing abruptly into the stone pillar.
Satya regained control of her arm as it returned to its intended blue glow. With her photon projector, she charged a ball of energy at the apex of the weapon's three prongs, aiming it at the woman still recovering from the fall. Upon release, the ball traveled through the woman like a ghost. Satya watched the energy drain from her face as the projectile passed, eventually succumbing to unconsciousness.
Satya stood over her, brushing off the dusty debris from her shoulder. "Know your place."
At the turn of a heel, Satya returned her attention to the girl, who sat in shock after the sound barrier had hit. She rushed to the girl's side, holding up the back of her head. The girl's long dark pigtail braids brushed against her arm. "I am here to help. Are you hurt?"
It took a few blinks of the girl's brown eyes to process what Satya had asked her. "¡Sí! Please help me out of here! I-I think my leg is broken."
Satya gazed down at the rubble that had encased the girl's lower half. It would not be easy to move the mountain of loose bricks, at least not by hand. Luckily she knew of a way around that. The problem would be moving the girl once the rubble had been removed.
"Oh, good! You saw her too! I would have gotten to her sooner if I could." Yet again another voice had snuck up behind her, bristling the hairs on her arm and the back of her neck. She knew who this voice belonged to. The thief crouched beside them, the waft of his mint cologne overwhelming her senses. "Alright, tell me what you need me to do to help."
"I do not need your help," she scoffed, standing up again. "This situation is under my control."
"Are you sure you don't need me to-"
Satya cut him off, firing up her photon projector again. This time she activated the beam, an ethereal range of light that licked any connecting surfaces in search of an energy source to drain. She aimed the edge of the beam's range at the rubble and captured the mass of loose bricks in the beam's powerful hold. With little effort, she lifted the heavy load of debris into the air, and the little girl sighed with relief as she readjusted her weight free from the burden.
With a new awareness of her body, the girl screamed. "Ah! My leg is definitely broken!"
The thief bounced nervously to his feet. "Okay, that was impressive, but I'm sure I could help carry her out."
"No. Do not concern yourself with this. I have her."
Satya reached out for the girl with her free mechanical arm. Before she could touch her, her fingers began to buzz and twitch with the flickering of the arm's light, occasionally flashing purple before returning to blue. She twirled her head to face the pillar where she had left the woman, still lying unconscious on the floor.
"This is not good."
"I don't know what's going on, but it doesn't look too good to me either," the thief commented. "I insist, let me take her."
Satya studied the thief. She had only called him by his true name to identify him properly to Sanjay, otherwise, she would not dignify him with a name other than what he truly was, "thief." This was the closest she had even been in his presence; her general knowledge of his nature and appearance was entirely composed of Vishkar reports and media coverage – both of his uprising in Rio de Janeiro and his highly sought after and perpetually sold-out concerts across the world. She had always imagined cold, dark eyes that thirsted for the sight of revolution and anarchy, buried under an immovable furrowed brow. In life, his likeness did not resemble her concocted visage. His eyes were wide, shining in the light of her beam, sheltered under brows that rose with genuine concern.
"Very well. Take her."
"Thank you."
He gently wrapped his arms around the girl's shoulders and legs, careful to lift her up without jostling the broken bone. Satya slowly placed the rubble back onto the evacuated ground.
"Now we just gotta find a way out of here."
Satya raised her hand in dismissal. "That is not necessary. I have opened a path."
"Okay, cool. Wanna show me where it is – "
A bullet suddenly passed through the air between them, grazing Satya's metal hand. The groans of stirring men rose from the epicenter where the thief had deployed his sound barrier. Some of the more durable thugs had already regained their balance and had taken their aim.
"The ruffians are coming to! We must move, quickly!"
"I've got you covered!" Struggling to free his hands and keep the girl in his arms, he swiped two fingers across the sonic amplifier he detached from his hip, creating a crossfade into a new song with a rapid tempo. Somehow this compelled Satya's legs to move faster, encouraged by the pace of each beat.
"The teleporter is behind the pillar, over there!" Satya pointed while struggling to keep up with the speed of his blades.
"A teleporter? Wait, why do you have a teleporter here?"
"That is not important. Keep moving-"
Pain. Incredible pain. Her head whiplashed backward as the inertia of her body continued forwards, and the brunt of the force screamed through her neck.
"Where do you think you're going, Bonita?" A man's voice started, his plump hand gripping the long strands of her midnight hair, yanking her back with each vigorous tug. Tears involuntarily welled in her eyes once more.
"Help! Please!" She cried.
"Hold on, I got you!" The thief shifted his blades to arc around towards her. Once he took a firm hold of her arm, he aimed the sonic amplifier at the hair-fisted assailant and with a quick press of the trigger sent the man flying back into his fellow thugs. "Push off."
There was no time for gratitude. The thief reassured a vice-like grip on her arm before he forcefully trailed her behind him, leading her along a zig-zagging path to the teleporter in order to avoid the hail of bullets. He swiftly pulled her behind the cover of the pillar with him, and they both stared into the blissful humming oval of the teleporter that greeted them.
"Here is the teleporter!" Satya shouted over the gunfire. "Proceed!"
"Woah, woah, wait! What about her?" The thief pointed to the unconscious woman on the ground, her limbs limp and askew.
"She is with them, Los Muertos! Leave her!"
Satya was not about to have this conversation while Los Muertos were taking potshots at them from behind an architecturally unsound pillar. She placed her palms firmly against the thief's back and hurriedly pushed him and the girl in his arms into the warping teleporter. With a final glance at the mystery woman, she stepped in after them.
