Goliath closed his eyes. For a moment, everything was peaceful. The wind filled his ear fins, brushed through his brow ridge and hair, glided over his wing membranes, and lifted his body like… well, like wind. It was impossible to compare the sensation to a bed, a sail, to water, or to anything else in the world. The gentleness of the breeze buoyed him higher, finest instincts adjusting the shift and feel of the scales of his wings and the point of his tail with not even the faintest conscious thought.

It filled his soul. It whistled around him. It whispered to him.

But try as he might, he could never quite rebuild the memory of the sound of the dozens upon dozens of wings in the air. He found himself struggling with the posture of this air current, cold and more humid in a way that left him feeling heavier in the air, when he had once flown like gossamer thread. He was so used to flying with his brothers and sisters. He was used to riding the upwash of their wings, leaning with them and watching their drift and swoop to read the wind conditions ahead.

He wasn't used to flying alone. He wasn't sure if he'd ever be used to it.

"Goliath?"

He blinked his eyes open, the beast still squirming in his arms. He muttered an apology to him, adjusting his arms again. The old one drifted closer, beard lashed by the wind. "You've something on your mind, lad?"

"Just dreaming old dreams." Goliath muttered. The stone wall around his heart crumbled just a little more.

"Best leave dreaming to the day." The old one's eyes, drooping with their age, grew concerned and sympathetic. "Our friend here seems to need to take a breather, before he squirms right out of your arms."

As if to answer, their beast whimpered pitiably, hind legs kicking in the air. His eyes drooped. Down, please. They seemed to beg. Of course, Goliath had to answer. He couldn't say no to puppy eyes.

They circled, finding a suitably tall building within their needs. A brownstone apartment complex, with bicycles, potted plants, and fairy lights hanging off of balconies. Each one marked a tiny boxed-in home, each one of what may have been dozens of families within. Goliath set the beast down, and immediately the creature arched its back, rump high in the air and paws reaching far out away from him. Claws broke stone as the beast stretched, jaw creaking wide. Briefly, Goliath thought of what might happen if a cantaloupe were placed between his massive, hand-length fangs at that instant. The splatter would have been incredible.

Goliath tried to cling to this humorous image rather than what had been occupying his mind for the better part of the night.

A month. It had been a thousand years for them, but for him it had only been a month. He closed his eyes, and still the bodies of his friends, his family, his brothers and sister were fresh in his mind. Images of shattered faces, expressions of fierceness engraved there for eternity. Had they known? That the sunset would have been their last?

He found himself wondering, and not for the first time, if his family had felt any pain when they were shattered.

The old one spoke again. "Leader." He said, urgent.

Goliath rubbed his eyes. "I'm sorry." He murmured. "I am still… adjusting."

That one single sightless eye certainly drew attention. Over the years, Goliath had gotten used to it, learning to read his mentor's expression on only one half of his face. But even so, the way his old clay-brown skin and his pale eyes fell, it was not hard to see it. He missed them too.

The mentor drew a deep breath, closing his eyes. "I know." He said softly. "A wind ceremony with no bodies to give to the wind. It certainly does nothing to fill the hollow hole they left in our lives."

"It was a beautiful ceremony, my mentor." Goliath could not help but try to put a comforting hand on his elder's shoulder.

"It was less than what they deserved." He shook his head, beard making a soft rustle over his breastplate and folded arms. "But that has nothing to do with the lack of dust to commit to the sky. It has everything to do with how we haven't moved on, taken their memories with us. We've been given a great gift, all of us. It is not often that a gargoyle dies, and returns to life."

"You consider our sleep as such?"

"Aye, I do." He said. "It was not by natural means that we were committed to it, and it was not by natural means that we were awakened from it. The dreams we dreamed for a thousand years were not the dreams of those still living."

Goliath took a deep breath. His mentor was right, again. How little they spoke of their sleep. How their most powerfully built son shuddered and held his arms and wings close to him when he thought of that sleep. How the son with red hide and white hair had quickly found anything else to speak of, how thoroughly he had enmeshed himself in the world once their eyes opened and their day-skin fell away into the clouds below. The one with webbed wings hardly spoke of it at all. As if the very memory of that thousand-year darkness struck him with a great and paralyzing fear.

He knew that fear. He felt that fear every time the sun came up, wondering if that day would be the day they shattered too, wondering if that awful question would finally be answered for him; whether they felt pain if they were broken in their stone-sleep. That fear colored their dreams, more darkly than it once did. Nearly as frightening was the fear that they would wake up and another decade, century, or millennium had passed.

"Your dreams were not pleasant. I know." Goliath murmured.

"We were frozen in the midst of a field of our enemies, Goliath. Only an hour before, we had beheld the bodies of our family. None of our dreams were pleasant." The old one shook his head.

Deep down, behind that half-expression he knew hid his thoughts so well, his heart was breaking. Old scars reopened that night, and none had healed any better than when those wounds were first inflicted. The mentor was an old, old man. A hundred and ten years was a long time to have learned the lines of those wounds, the strokes of the horror that inflicted them.

He understood how Goliath felt, losing his angel of the night. He'd lost his love once too. Sometimes he looked at the Trio and his surviving eldest son, his heart heavy. He felt their loss so keenly, knowing they'd lost their mothers and fathers and siblings. That he was the only elder they had left.

He wondered often, during those lengthening nights, if this were some cosmic punishment. If he and his elders had done some great wrong, and its debt had come upon the heads of his four sons. Could he have prevented it if he'd just tried harder, done a bit more, back in the years when it had mattered most?

There is no pain, in human or gargoyle, like the pain of a parent outliving their children. The guilt of playing a hand in their deaths, no matter how small, was salt rubbed deep in that wound.

The mentor put his hands on Goliath's shoulders. He squeezed them. Strong, assured. Like Goliath had always known him to be. And still, he felt knotted joints and old calluses, and the faintest tremble that underlied that power. There was no smile in his face, or in his eyes. It was a grim, mournful cast to his countenance that Goliath was sure he reflected.

The elder murmured. "We do not honor them by dwelling on their death. We honor them by carrying their memories with us, like dust is carried by the wind. By carrying on."

It sounded as if he were reminding himself of that fact, just as much as he was reminding Goliath.

Goliath hung his head. The beast pushed his snout up into his palm, rubbing his brow against his fingers. "Arroo?"

"Yes, my friend, I understand." Goliath knelt, giving the beast a more firm scratch behind the ears. The beast's tongue rolled out of his mouth, slurping across Goliath's cheek. The stone shield around Goliath's heart crumbled loose a few stones, the heartbreak eating away at it slowly. He closed his eyes, trying to imagine that cantaloupe again. But all he could see was the fine stone powder of his angel of the night, drifting out to the Scottish sea in the moonlight.

There was a noise. Goliath's head lifted, his mentor's hand to the hilt of his spatha. The beast lowered its head, and growled. They looked in its direction, waiting with trepidation and some small amount of fear.

It sounded like someone screamed.

Elisa's hands felt rough and dry on the leather cover of the steering wheel. She lifted one hand off, rubbing her fingers and muttering under her breath. "Gotta start carrying lotion."

"Hm?" April looked up from the passenger's seat, having been hunched over her phone. She slouched in her seat, with her knees well above her head, feet up on the plastic moulding, head nestled against the armrest. The seatbelt was on, but it wouldn't have done much good if she slid bottom-first into the passenger footwell.

"Lotion." Elisa repeated. "I've been wearing gloves so much lately that my hands are getting dry."

"Gloves?" April asked. She looked confused, but then reason seemed to quietly slide her a note. Understanding without asking any more, April gnawed on her lip and looked back down at her phone.

Elisa stopped herself for a minute. She pursed her lips and shook her head, eyes fixed on the road ahead of her. She inhaled a breath that came out with a line of ragged coughs that jostled her thoughts about in her skull, like loose marbles in a jar.

She didn't want to think about Ground Zero right now. Not while she was in front of a civilian, and a kid no less. But still, the dry crack of her knuckles and the rough hoarseness of her throat made it hard to put out of her mind, even if it wasn't her turn to be doing crew work that night. She hadn't had a night off in almost three weeks, and she'd averaged maybe around five hours of sleep per day since. Even those few scant hours were often stolen, with her arms pillowed under her head, facedown at a table in a break room or a trailer.

She didn't want to think about how the air smelled and felt and tasted there. There was only one word to describe it; Hell. It was Hell.

April coughed hard too. It took a minute to register in Elisa's mind. "You got a cough too, huh?"

"Air sucks. It's just sucked more lately." April grumbled.

"Yeah. I know." Elisa muttered. Neither of them wanted to say why out loud.

April looked back down at her phone. "Aw, man." She muttered.

"What, did your grandma-friend's walker get stolen?" Elisa snarked.

"No." She said, perhaps a little too sharply. "My friend Baxter had a robotics competition tonight. I didn't get to watch it."

"Where was it at?"

"MIT. It was showing on cable. He's on the NYU robotics team." She grumbled. "Man, I'm mad now. His Mouser is so freaking cool. It's got these big old chomping teeth, grabs other robots and absolutely mauls them. It's awesome."

Elisa looked over at April like she'd grown a second head. The teenager shrugged and just continued. "People think that robotics competitions are dorky. And they are. But it's more like watching gladiator matches and rodeos, but they're with robots. Baxter's amazing, he's basically an RC gundam pilot."

"High praise. He a good friend of yours?"

"Yeah." April sat up straight in the passenger's seat, tugging her seatbelt so it sat comfortably across her shoulder. "Irma and I have been sitting at the same lunch table with him since fifth grade. He's an absolute weirdo, but that's fine. We are too."

"Why is he weird?"

April gave the detective a distrustful side-eye. But deciding she couldn't dig any deeper a hole for herself–and perhaps deciding to tell the truth to appease her petty spite and desire for shock value–she shrugged. "Because he decided he wanted to be a boy when we were twelve. Nobody took him seriously, but we did. And Irma's a lesbian. And I happen to like girls too."

Elisa's eyebrow raised higher, a face that she probably would have made if April had grown a third head.

" 'Aight."

April blinked her surprise. "What?"

"Nothing." Elisa shrugged. "Your friend builds robot gladiators and competes in nationally ranked robotics competitions? At an Ivy League University? How'd he do that in high school?"

April's face slowly lit up. A moment of realization gradually dawned on her face. She could hardly believe what she was hearing. "Wait, you're cool with that?"

Elisa shook her head with a warm chuckle. Her amusement was genuine. "Look, I said I got my Criminal Justice degree at Columbia. My mother's the professor of African Studies there, you think she'd have let me leave college alive if I didn't take more Sociology classes? My graduating report was on police violence at Greenwich Village during Stonewall. Believe me; my mother passes down the most terrifying grades you've ever seen, and I passed with an A. You're safe in this car, kid."

April could have laughed out loud. The thump in her chest could have either been a nervous and slightly delirious hiccup, or the thump of a bridge being placed between them. "Holy shit, they are never gonna believe me."

"I told you I'm not a bad cop. Being Black and queer isn't a crime, and it never should have been."

Their conversation was cut short by a radio call. Elisa picked up the mouthpiece, answering it briskly. The voice on the other end spoke in static-strangled tones. April's ears practically perked up as she strained to hear the string of numbers and the address given. Both their faces fell when they heard it.

Elisa knew that they couldn't spare any hands for this one. There was no one else anywhere near this neighborhood, they were all at the airport, or other high-risk sites. This call might not be answered for another hour.

April swallowed, her throat dry. "Was that…?"

Elisa grit her teeth. God dammit, why couldn't any night just be simple. "Alright, I don't need to translate that for you. So I'm going to ask you to listen to me very, very carefully. This is now a ride-along. No matter what happens, I need you to stay in the cruiser. Do not open the door. Do not put your head above the door. If I tell you to hide, you do it. If I tell you to run, you run. Is that clear?"

"Y-yes, m'am."

Elisa turned on the siren and the lights, flipped a u-turn, and they ran back the way they came. April slowly pulled out her phone, closing her messages with Baxter and thumbs quickly flying over the nine-key pad.

Donnie, we have a mutant sighting.

Get your shells over here NOW!

Also, e-mail Baxter later, he has math questions again.

It was the sound of the chains that probably scared him the most. His heart thudded against his ribs, his pulse leaping in his throat and pounding in his ears. "I told you it was a trap! But did you listen to me? Nooo!" He roared.

Wingnut bared his titanium-alloy wings, long length of rebar in his hands. Screwloose clung to the fur on his head, a tiny passenger on his scalp between his ears. His little clawed hands gathered his friend's hairs in his fists, trying to drag him aside like he was struggling with the reins of a bull. "We can't go through them, you maniac!"

Wingnut looked over at his damaged cybernetic wing, fear flushing cold ice through his chest when he saw the gaping, sparking hole right through his rotor. "Unless you have a better idea than the last one!"

Screwloose's compound eyes couldn't narrow or really emote much. But his proboscis curled against his face, tiny teeth bared in a terrified grimace. His friend was right. No way through but the hard way. Working up his tiny courage, he pulled his head back, proboscis uncurling, and dipped it straight through Wingnut's skin.

Wingnut's eyes flared, mutant adrenaline roaring through his blood, as he tucked his head down and barreled through the wall of his captors. Chains flashed left and right, their ringing jingle whizzing over his pointed ears.

The construction site wasn't the best place to be caught alone by Foot Ninja in the middle of the night. And it certainly didn't answer why they'd been cornered here in the first place, but at the moment it didn't matter. The two of them were absolutely snowed if they went down here. Going back with them wasn't an option on their list, and they both knew they'd rather go down swinging.

With Screwloose's venom-powered bite, Wingnut's sudden surge of speed and strength gave him just enough edge to catch one Foot soldier by surprise with a swipe to the chin. It sent his foe sailing nearly twenty feet away. Wingnut's eyes widened in shock as he heard the sound it made.

" 'Clang?!' " He exclaimed. "Did you say 'clang?!' "

Screwloose lifted off of Wingnut's head, shooting up into the air like a tiny Roman candle. He dove and whizzed around the heads of a pair of Foot Ninja, whirling around their heads like a fighter pilot veering around an enemy tower. He fired eight shots in the two-second span, zipping off as eight balls of violently yellow acid slime ate through the masks of the ninja. They stumbled back, clawing at their faces.

He turned, looking back and trying to find a safe path out for his friend. "This way! C'mon!"

Wingnut looked up, crouching down to take a flying leap over the heads of their adversaries. The turbines in his wings ignited, but the damaged one sparked and crackled! With one motor failing, Wingnut careened off in a spinning circle! Slamming himself into the steel column of the construction yard, there was an awful crack and his head whipped back.

Screwloose screamed. "NATE!" He soared a loop, coming back down towards the ground with reckless speed, desperate to reach his only friend. He braked only in time for his tiny wings to fold back, landing on his tiny feet and using all four of his hands to check him for injuries.

"Nate! Nathaniel, please, c'mon!" He begged, trying to find the injury. His proboscis uncurled, getting ready to deliver life-saving curative venom to the wound when a heavy mesh net came down over his head. With an electronic whine, the net electrified. The tiny mutant shrieked, agony filling his carapace and making his wings and antennae smoke.

Wingnut rolled over, groaning with pain. "S-scott?" He rasped.

"HELP!" Screwloose sobbed, struggling to get through the net and reach him before the charge worked up again. "HELP ME!"

"Scott!" Wingnut tried to crawl to his feet, tears of pain soaking the fur on his cheeks. He stumbled, trying to swipe the rebar. But two ninja easily evaded his drunken swing, each whipping a chain around his arms. Wingnut struggled and strained, but the venom's short burst was already leaving his system.

The ninjas holding the chains were joined by others, yanking him to the ground, pinning him like Gulliver the Giant. The same high-pitched whine came again, much louder and much stronger. Plasma arced over the mutant bat's fur, and he felt wires and synapses pop in the implants in his spine. He arched his back as electricity flooded his body. His lungs seized, no breath to even form a scream.

Dazed, pain making his sensitive ears ring, Wingnut collapsed back to the ground, propped up on an elbow. He could smell fur and plastic burning, the stink singing his nostrils. He looked up at a Foot Ninja, a thin line of yellow acid blots leaving a smear of color across its ink-blot black silhouette.

Wingnut tried to crawl forward, tried desperately to reach his friend, when the ninja's foot came down on his arm, hard. He screamed again, feeling bone crack. There was no warning, no emotion, not even a sound from the ninja. Just a calculated cruelty, as instant and impartial as a sprung mousetrap. Wingnut dragged his arm against his body, baring teeth against the pain. He looked up.

This was it. Their last escape. It was over.

He closed his eyes, and waited for it.

An enormous roar, far more powerful and fearsome than his own had ever been, cracked the sky above his head. What in the world was that?! A dragon?!

The Foot looked up, but were not quick enough to avoid the enormous shape that barrelled through them. The hunched four-legged silhouette veered around, reared back and howled. A dog? But it was the size of a horse!

He sat up, and found a clawed, brown hand reaching down to him. "It's seeming that you could use a hand, lad. Can you stand?"

Wingnut looked up into the face of an old man. A thick white beard that would have put Santa Claus to shame came down past his chest, almost long enough to tuck into his belt. He carried a long spatha in one hand, its sheath tied to his belt. His armor must have been ancient. With his one scarred eye, his pointed, fin-like ears, his powerful wings, and long fangs that curled up from his bottom lip, he looked like a painting straight out of a D&D Monster Manual. He held the long, glinting sword away as he reached down to him.

Wingnut reached up for it, gratefully. "W-who are you?" He was surprised by the strength in the old man's arm as he was lifted as easily as a child.

"We are gargoyles, son. You look like no gargoyle I've ever seen, but you are welcome among us."

"G-gargoyle? Dude, I'm a human. Or, I guess, currently a bat." He pointed up. "Look out!"

The old man, not even turning to look, lifted his arm and the metal sang against the blade of the katana that nearly split his head. With a whip of a tail as mighty as a triceratops', he knocked the Foot ninja away and straight another steel support beam. There was a sputtering shock somewhere inside the Foot ninja's chest, its body split in half and exposing hydraulics, wire, and steel.

"Goliath!" The old one bellowed. "They're hollow knights!"

"Hollow soldiers." A voice growled from high above. There was a clang, a screech of shorn metal, and Wingnut looked up into the darkness. His pulse sped up as he watched two halves of a robotic foot ninja plummet and bounce in the sand at his left and right. "Only a coward leaves his weapons on the battlefield and abandons it for safety."

There was a heavy whumsh , and Goliath landed before him. Massive wings, each as huge as a one-man tent, spread wide to catch the air, forcing the sand to billow around them like an instant dust storm. Wingnut clutched his broken arm, looking up at Goliath in awe.

The beast picked up the net in its jaws, trotting faithfully over to the veritable winged giant that stood before him. With a single swipe of his claws, Screwloose was freed.

The tiny bat-fly hovered in the air, studying the three newcomers. "Whoa…" Screwloose breathed in awe.

"NYPD!" They jumped as they heard the sound of a gun cocking, around fifty feet off to their right. "Drop your weapons!"

Detective Maza stood, bulletproof vest over her blouse and jacket, holding her service sidearm, and pointing it straight at the combined crowd of mutants, gargoyles, and Foot ninja.

Great plan, Elisa. She thought bitterly. Now they're all looking at you.