Another Way

Part Twenty-Nine: The Game is Afoot

[A/N 1: This chapter commissioned by GW_Yoda and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

[A/N 2: Ugh. This chapter fought me tooth and nail. Enjoy.]

Taylor

"Are you sure they're okay?" The patterned concrete of the Barnes household driveway may as well have been red hot, from the way Taylor was dancing around on it. "Both of them?"

"Yes, I'm sure. That's what Marquis said on the phone." Danny looked fondly down at her. "You know, we could wait inside like everyone else. Standing outside in the cold like this isn't going to make them show up any sooner."

"But they might miss the house or something." Taylor searched up and down the road, eyes wide behind her glasses. "What if whoever he sends to drive them here has never been to Emma's house before?"

He chuckled and ruffled her hair. "Do you honestly think Emma wouldn't remember the way here? Or that Alan and Zoe have been any less worried than you?"

"Well …" She wanted to say yes! though she knew it wasn't really true. While Emma was her sister in all but name, she was Mr and Mrs Barnes' daughter, and Anne's actual sister. Taylor didn't know Sophia nearly as well as she did Emma or even Claire, but she liked her a lot too.

A car came rolling down the street. It was an older model sedan with faded paintwork, but the more Taylor looked at it, the more convinced she was that whoever was driving really didn't know their way around the neighbourhood. Then the driver must have seen the police cruiser parked at the curb—the officers were inside, interviewing Mr and Mrs Barnes—because the car slowed even more, and pulled over behind it. Wordlessly, Taylor pointed.

"Huh," mused Danny with a slight frown. "That's not the kind of car I'd expect Marquis to deliver someone home in."

Taylor had to agree. She'd only seen Marquis' personal choice of transport once, but it was sleek and black and (most importantly) didn't have a license plate. It also looked like it could be used to drive Presidents around in. This car fit neither of those criteria.

The front doors opened, and two people got out. The driver was a black woman who looked like she could be Sophia's mom, while the passenger was a teenage boy, about sixteen or seventeen. "Uh, hello?" called out the woman. "I'm looking for Alan Barnes?"

"He's just inside." Danny gestured to the house. "I'm Danny Hebert, and this is my daughter Taylor. I'm guessing you're Sophia's folks?"

Relief spread across the woman's features as they approached, but it was the boy who spoke first. "Wait, I know you. You're that girl from the track meet. I've never seen anyone beat Sophia off the mark like you did." He came up to Taylor and offered his hand. "Hi, I'm Terry."

"Hi." Taylor shook his hand. "Yeah, that's me. But she cleaned my clock on the four hundred. I just couldn't keep up the pace." She knew talking about something totally different might have come across as insensitive, but it was a good way to keep her mind from spiralling into what-might-have-beens.

"So, can you tell me what's going on?" Sophia's mom asked. "Mr Barnes just called me before and told me that Sophia had been rescued, and that she's on the way here. Is she here yet? I didn't even know she'd been abducted!"

"No, we're just waiting ourselves." Danny frowned. "The police didn't contact you at all? We thought you would've known by now."

"No, they didn't. Who kidnapped my daughter? How do you know she's safe now? Who got her back? Why don't the police know anything?" It was an emotional spill of words, one that Taylor understood quite well.

"We don't know who took Sophia and Emma," Danny said soothingly, "but we know the girls are safe because Marquis said so. It's his people who got them back."

"And that's why the cops don't know anything about it," Taylor couldn't resist adding.

"Whoa." Terry's eyes widened. "Marquis got Sophia back from whoever took her? How'd you pull that off?"

Taylor shrugged, trying to look nonchalant. "We've got a protection plan with him, and when Emma and Sophia went missing, we went and found some Mercia. Dad paid a bit extra to put them on the plan, and the Mercia went hunting. It turns out that when Marquis says he'll offer protection, he really means it. We just got the good news ourselves a little while ago."

"And if I'm not much mistaken, that's them coming now." Danny pointed, then raised his voice. "Alan! Zoe! They're here!"

Taylor turned and looked; sure enough, a familiar black car had just turned the corner and was approaching the driveway.

Sophia

"I believe this is your house, Ms Barnes?" The partition between the front and back seats meant that all communication with the driver came via an intercom, but Sophia didn't care. It had been the smoothest, most luxurious ride of her life, so much so that she was almost sad it was over.

The privacy that this gave them, along with the tinted windows, had allowed them both to let their emotions go. Sophia considered herself reasonably tough, but when Emma started crying into her shoulder, she'd let go a few tears of her own. It had been so damn terrifying, for both Emma's sake and her own.

Even when she'd gotten her powers, she hadn't been master of the situation. The asshole with the knife would've held Emma hostage until his buddy got up if Legionnaire hadn't grabbed him from behind. All she'd wanted to do was protect Emma—that was what strong people did, they protected others—and she'd never felt so helpless as in that moment.

So damn glad Marquis was there.

"Uh, yeah. Thanks again for the lift." Emma was sounding less shaky than she'd been earlier, though she probably still had a bit more to work through. Sophia definitely did.

"All part of the service, ladies. Have a pleasant evening." She recognised her mom's piece-of-shit car as they passed by it and a parked police cruiser, before they pulled into the driveway.

Emma opened the door and scrambled out, with Sophia following behind. She saw her mother and Terry, and in that moment everything else went out of her mind. Pushing the car door shut behind her, she made a beeline for her mom, wrapping her up in a hug and being wrapped up in turn. She was vaguely aware of Terry holding her as well, and freed up an arm to hug him too. Annoying big brother he might be, but he was her annoying big brother.

"Are you alright?" Her mother was still holding her tightly, though her momma-bear instincts had kicked in enough to ask questions. "Did they hurt you? Who did it?"

"I'm fine, mom, really." And physically, she was. Emotionally was another story, but that was for later, behind closed doors. "Marchioness checked us both over before we got in the car. Totally healthy. Fit as a fiddle."

"I still can't believe that Marquis saved you." That was Terry. "I thought he was a villain."

"Sure, but he's a different type." Sophia had been doing some thinking about this. "There's the ones who just like hurting people, and then there's the ones who've got an image. I mean, the guys who kidnapped us, he's not gonna hand 'em over to the PRT or the cops. They're just gonna be dead. I'd be surprised if anyone even finds the bodies."

Her mom shuddered. "You shouldn't be talking like that, about dying and death. We have laws for a reason."

"The law didn't save us this time." Sophia pulled back a bit, and looked her in the eye. "Marquis did. If he hadn't come looking for us, Emma and me would be dead. We'd still be walking around, but we wouldn't be us inside. That's what the blond one said. They were gonna turn us into robot slave dolls. And they've done it before, to a lot of people." She bared her teeth. "Whatever Marquis does to 'em before they die, they're getting off easy."

A new pair of arms slid around her waist from behind. "I am so glad you're okay," Taylor said. "Emma told us what happened. Marchioness is pretty cool, isn't she?" From what she said—or rather, from what she hadn't said—Sophia figured that Emma was keeping the news about her powers on the down-low for now, which was good.

"Yeah, she fixed me as good as new just by walking past." Sophia hadn't taken Taylor for a huggy type—she wasn't much for it herself—but right at that moment she was just fine with getting all the emotional support she could get. "What I don't know is how Marquis knew to even come looking for us. It's not like either of us managed to call the cops."

"Yeah, that was Claire." Taylor leaned against Sophia from behind. "When I showed her the text messages they sent from Emma's phone, she figured out straight away that you'd been kidnapped. We—my family and me—we're all under a protection plan, so Dad contacted Marquis and had you two put on it. I showed them that photo of you and Emma goofing around that time, and that was it. Dunno how they found you so fast, but I'm glad they did."

Sophia nodded. "Yeah, rich girl like her, I figure she'd have to learn about stuff like that. Still, next time I see her, I'm gonna give her the biggest hug." She paused, thinking about the rest of what Taylor had said. "Wow. So, he came and saved us because your dad asked him to? How much did it cost?" Whatever the price had been, she decided then and there that she was going to save up her allowance and pay back Taylor's dad every penny.

"I was a little curious about that myself," her mother admitted. "That money saved your life, Sophia."

"Twenty bucks for both of you together," Taylor confided. "Apparently it's how he does business."

Tw-twenty? Twenty bucks? Sophia's brain stuttered to a halt. The sheer audacity of the figure locked up all her mental processes. A powerful supervillain had stepped up to save her life and Emma's—and almost certainly killed two men—because he'd been paid twenty bucks. She didn't know whether to be grateful or insulted that the figure was so low.

Emma

"Sophia?" Emma wasn't sure what the frozen look on Sophia's face was all about, but she was sure she'd find out sooner or later. "I'd like you to meet my dad."

Sophia shook herself out of it and turned to look at them, still being hugged by her mother and brother, and by Taylor as well. "Hi, Mr Barnes. Figured we'd meet sooner or later. Didn't think it'd be like this."

He nodded distractedly. "Emma says you broke your wrist trying to get free and help her."

She blinked. "Oh, ah, yeah, but it was only a fracture and Marchioness fixed me right up. See?" She extricated her arms from around her family members and held them out, flexing both wrists. "Good as new."

"Doesn't matter." He took her hand in his, squeezed it once, then let it go. "If you ever need anything, anything at all, just ask. I mean it."

"You don't have to do that," Sophia's mom protested. "Anyone else would've done the same thing."

Alan shook his head. "Maybe, but Sophia was the one who was there. From what Emma says, she fought back and delayed them long enough that Marquis' people were able to get there in time, before anything was done to Emma. I owe her for that. We all do."

"Taylor said Claire Marchant's the one who figured it out." Sophia was clearly embarrassed at being the centre of attention like this. "She's the one we should be thanking."

"And I will be." He nodded firmly. "But you're the one who was there. Whatever you need. Just ask."

"Okay, yeah, maybe I will." Sophia looked around. "Where is Claire, anyway? I wanted to thank her for being on the ball like that."

"Oh, her dad had her picked up," Taylor explained. "I guess this whole kidnap deal spooked him a bit, and he wanted her close by where he could keep an eye on her."

"Trust me," Danny Hebert said fervently, "I can totally understand that."

Alan Barnes curled his arms around Emma and held her close. "Hear, hear."

A Little Earlier

Marchioness

As the car bearing Emma and Sophia drove away, I turned to Dad. "Okay, where did Brent vanish?"

"Not far from here, actually." He took his phone out and showed me the screen. "When I try to ping his GPS, the system says that it's not receiving a signal from him. This is the location of the last tower it connected to."

"Understood. Give me a second." I settled into myself, retrieving the information that had been woven into the seed I'd eaten earlier that evening, courtesy of the city-wide plant-based gestalt hive-mind I'd dubbed Mr Green. Initially, I'd only been interested in the abduction of Emma and Sophia, but now I began to follow other threads of information.

Mr Green stored all the information that his far-flung elements gathered, but there was no filing system and the closest thing to a time-date stamp was 'feels older' or 'feels newer'. This meant that I had to delve and search back and forth for the correct location and the right time. Added to which, the Mercia spent most of the time on the rooftops, where plants connected to the network were few and far between.

The image on Dad's phone gave me Brent's movements, which let me double-check matters. Finally, I saw where a clump of grass straggling up through a crack in a concrete curb had spotted a shadowy figure descending to ground level. Brent had approached a dilapidated warehouse and muscled a side door open, then gone inside. He hadn't emerged again. There'd been no flashes of gunfire or of power use. No other plants near the warehouse had detected him, and the location was comfortably within the overlapping circles of GPS location and tower pings.

On a hunch, I went backward along that particular thread, to see if anyone else had entered the warehouse. Eventually, aware that I'd been staring into space for more than a minute, I got a hit. "Okay …" I said with a frown. "That's weird."

"You're going to have to clarify that, my dear." Dad, as always, was the soul of patience. While we both knew I wasn't the kind of cape who could see back through time, my various resources let me cheat really, really well.

"The last view I have of Brent, he went into a warehouse right around that location, but someone else went in there a few hours earlier. Skinny white girl in a black dress. Long white hair. I didn't get a great look at her, but she didn't look nearly old enough to have hair that white."

"Hmm." He frowned in his turn. "A slender girl in a black dress, with white hair? That doesn't ring a bell. Did she look homeless?"

"Maybe?" I went back over the imagery. "She had a backpack, and she looked skinny enough to have missed a few meals, but her hair and dress were clean. And she didn't have that beaten-down look you get with people living on the streets. I got the impression that she figured she was on the way up, wherever 'up' is for her."

"Interesting. I believe I would like to speak with her. At the very least, she may be able to give us some indication regarding Brent's whereabouts. And if she happens to have had anything to do with his disappearance …" He pressed his lips together. "I will have some stringent questions to ask about her part in all this."

I nodded. "Gotcha. I know exactly where the place is. But what are we going to do with these two?" I gestured to where the kidnappers were being held by the Mercia, their hands enclosed in blocks of bone.

His eyes, as he looked at them, were as cold as I'd ever seen. "They came into my city uninvited and unannounced; that was bad enough. But it's your friends that they would have inflicted a fate far worse than death on. You may choose their fate, my dear Marchioness."

"Thank you." Reminded of what they'd tried to do to Emma and Sophia, I approached the two men, reshaping my arm as I went until it sported battle-claws. "I don't really know who you are, but I know what you've done. You picked the wrong city, and the wrong victims. Any last words?"

The brown-haired man stared at my arm, perhaps in admiration. His companion glared at me defiantly. "We're just the first. More will come, and sooner or later—"

I didn't need to listen to this shit. My arm flicked out, razor claws slicing into his neck. The batrachotoxin entered his bloodstream even as red flooded down his front. He struggled briefly and fruitlessly with the man holding him, then died. "I said last words, not a last speech." Then I turned to the other man. "You?"

"We-we could work together. Your ability—"

That was never going to happen. "Pass." Another slash left him gurgling for breath as the venom flooded through his body. He lasted even less time than his partner.

"Well done," Dad said, stepping up alongside me. "Quick and efficient." He nodded to the men holding the corpses. "Secure the bodies and clear the scene. We'll deal with them later."

Despite my earlier surety, I felt an odd hollowness in my chest as I reverted my arm to the appearance of normality. While I'd killed before, that had been in the heat of action, not as a cold, calculated action afterward.

I moved off down the street with him—Brent's last seen location wasn't that far, even on foot—until we were far enough away from the Mercia that they could plausibly pretend to not be able to hear us, then I turned to look at him. "Does it get any easier?"

He tilted his head slightly. "Killing someone who strongly deserves it? Or killing a helpless prisoner?"

"Both, I guess." I sighed. "I know they were bad people, but we're kind of bad people too." Especially now, my intrusive thoughts insisted on adding.

"There are different types of bad people in the world." His tone was professorial. "The nuances are many, but it boils down to those who try not to harm innocents while committing their crimes, those who don't care, and those who go out of their way to do it. The pair you just executed—Orchard—were specifically making money by reshaping innocents before mindwiping them, usually women and girls, and selling them off as slaves. It's theoretically possible to be more despicable than that, but they would've had to really work at it. If the true extent of their crimes had ever been exposed, they would likely have gained a kill order."

"Still doesn't make it right that I just killed them." I hunched my shoulders as I walked. "We've got laws and stuff for a reason."

"Yes, we do." His voice was serious. "And ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they perform adequately to their function. The criminal is arrested, charged, and tried. Society as a whole feels safer. However, the question you need to ask yourself is this: had they not been Birdcaged or given a kill order, how soon do you think before they would've been out in the world again, unmaking innocents on a daily basis? For heroes and law enforcement, ending people like that is a moral dilemma; for us, a matter of sheer pragmatism. Whether we left them as enemies or prospective allies, we would always be looking over our shoulders."

"So, you would've killed them too?" I was pretty sure I knew the answer to this, but I wanted to hear him say it.

"In a heartbeat," he assured me. "More for the unannounced trespass into my city than the other crimes, but in the end it comes to the same thing."

It was just another reminder that my father's civilised exterior had been deliberately assumed rather than learned from birth. With anyone who didn't know him as well as me, it would've come as a jarring revelation. He didn't think the same way I did, but it was telling that we tended to reach the same conclusions, more often than not.

And that was good enough for me.

Damsel of Distress

The wifi in the area wasn't great, but Ashley had enough cell connectivity to not really worry about it. Lying in the dark, she idly scrolled through the local PHO news; if she was going to become a power in the city, it was probably a smart idea to figure out who she was up against.

Marquis she already knew about, as a big player who'd been in Boston since before she'd gotten her powers, but had recently moved to Brockton Bay. Or was it 'back' to Brockton Bay? There seemed to be some suggestions that he was originally from there.

The Empire Eighty-Eight was gone (though a couple of members had apparently switched allegiance to Marquis) and the ABB was fragmenting since Lung had died facing Marquis. Apart from the two who'd joined him, Marquis had his daughter Marchioness who was some kind of healer, plus a knight with a flaming sword … and a bunch of Mover-Brute types called the Mercia, who got around in long coats and dark clothing.

She sat up on her inflatable mattress, wondering why that sounded way too familiar.

A few minutes later, after doing a search of news sites, she had her answer. A picture of the Mercia, wearing their long coats, looking exactly like the asshole who'd pushed his way into her warehouse. These were Marquis' enforcers, the ones who enforced his 'protection' mandate. They were universally noted as being exceedingly tough, having gone through the Endbringer battle in Florida without suffering any casualties.

Huh. Not so tough after all.

Though it had taken her two blasts to kill him, when one usually sufficed.

She lay back on the mattress, turning the phone off to conserve battery, and thought it over. Marquis couldn't have known she was in the warehouse, or he would've sent more of his long-coated goons. None had intruded on her in the hour since she'd disposed of the first one (and she'd set up the door alarm again) so he still had no idea she was carving out her own little slice of his turf.

I'm good. Rolling over, she pulled the thin blanket up to cover her shoulders, and rested her head on the rolled-up backpack that passed for a pillow. She'd go out again tomorrow and recruit a few more of the disaffected youths in town. Soon, she'd be running her own little operations and pulling in enough cash that she could afford to sleep on an actual bed, no matter how many she destroyed by accident in the meantime.

Just as her eyes were drifting shut, a ghost came in through the wall.

She thought for a second that she was already asleep and dreaming, but the discomfort of the mattress and the chill that the blanket wasn't quite managing to dispel proved otherwise. This was real, and the ghost was turning to look at her. Eyes opening wide, she recalled that one of Marquis' allies was the turncoat Crusader from the Empire, now calling himself Legionnaire.

Which meant they knew where she was after all. Fuck!

She was just pushing herself to a sitting position when her power went off unexpectedly. It wrecked her air mattress and threw her into the air, then scorched a trench across the floor and up the wall before it intersected the ghost, which popped. Thrown back against the crates that she'd been sleeping up against, she scrambled to her feet and looked around wildly.

Another ghost came at her, spectral sword gleaming oddly in the light coming in through a grimy pane. She blasted that one, and it popped as readily as the first one had.

Anger flared in her chest. They were attacking her? They had no idea who they were dealing with!

Pointing both hands at the floor and ignoring the fact that she was destroying most of her pitiful belongings, she triggered her power again, blasting herself into the air. It wasn't the easiest or most intuitive way to fly, and in fact she preferred not to do it this way at all. But if Marquis and his merry band of assholes wanted a fight, Damsel of Distress was going to show them a fight!

Marchioness, Outside the Warehouse

As the spine-tingling screeching roar erupted within the building, Justin staggered and gasped. My power showed me the illusory pain flaring through his body; the trouble was, he hadn't been injured in any way. It was like someone with my abilities was plucking at his nerve endings. Another roar came, and he staggered again.

"What's up?" I asked. "Are you okay?"

"She killed them," he said, the words coming as harsh pants. "My ghosts. Killed them."

"Killed them?" Dad sounded like he wanted to ask Justin if he was sure, but he restrained himself. "How? What was that sound?"

A moment later, we all found out as the sound swelled … and a good chunk of the front of the warehouse burst out in all directions. The girl I'd seen came flying out, spiralling and jinking in a way that left me unsure if she was in full control of her movement. Robert had stepped in front of us and raised his shield to ward off what little debris came our way. That might have been a mistake, because it caught her attention.

The thrust she was generating from her left hand—a darkly visible blast of shrieking, howling, fingernails-on-blackboard abomination of noise—left a smoking trench behind her as she came at us. Her other hand pointed in our direction, and the look in her eyes promised that she wasn't coming over to exchange cookie recipes.

Everyone moved at once. Dad shoved me behind him and generated a bone shield that covered from the concrete to well above my head, Robert jumped forward, growing as his sword flared bright with flame, and Jonas came in from the side to add extra protection. Unlike the time he'd been decapitated by the Empire, Dad was already as protected as I could make him, and my battle form had been hiding under the skin of my human façade.

As my mental processing speed accelerated with my proprietary version of adrenaline running through my veins, I figured we were good. Dad was a master with his bone-forming, Robert had literally gone toe-to-toe with Leviathan, and Jonas had once pummelled Hookwolf to a standstill. The trouble was, I hadn't yet connected all the dots to realise exactly how much danger we were in.

The first intimation of just how bad it was going to get came when Robert fell. Ten feet tall, with a sword almost as long, he was still growing when she cut him clear in half, her dark ravening energy burst burning through his shield, armour and flesh alike. Her backsweep sliced through Dad's bone shield like it was nothing and would have killed us both—or rather, killed Dad and injured me massively—if Jonas' enhanced reflexes hadn't been up to the task.

Surging forward, he wrapped his arms around both of us and made a heroic leap, taking us out of the danger zone. 'Heroic' was definitely one way to describe it, because he did it without part of his skull, some of his spine, and a usually-fatal number of his vital organs. The fact that his legs had made the leap without a direct connection to his brain meant that he was either in the process of jumping when he was hit, or the secondary nerve connections that I'd previously given him had proven their worth.

A dozen different emotions tried to overwhelm me at once, but I didn't have time for that. Almost automatically, I tweaked my hormonal balance to get rid of that distraction. I'll deal with it later, not right now.

We hit grimy concrete and rolled over and over. Something had happened to my left leg, but I told my autonomic systems to just deal with it and submit a report when I was less busy, because I was all of a sudden dealing with a lot more problems. Dad's right arm was gone at the shoulder, Jonas was dying before my eyes, I had no idea where Justin had gotten to, and she was still coming.

A length of steel pipe came flying at her javelin style, and she only barely managed to blast it into nothingness; the blast sent her spiralling off-balance, away from us. I was only barely aware of this, and of Abigail throwing more impromptu projectiles and dancing around her blasts, because I was dealing with two of the people who meant the most to me in my life. Dad's shoulder wound closed as soon as I concentrated on it, allowing me to focus on Jonas' horrific injuries.

His lungs and heart were mostly gone, and the secondary heart had been nicked, rendering it virtually useless. Worse, the blast hadn't bothered to cauterise anything, so almost his entire blood supply was now pooling on the cracked concrete around us.

I made my hand into a blade, speared it straight through his subdermal armour, and linked into his axillary artery, near the shoulder. Closing off blood vessels as fast as I could manage (assisted somewhat by the emergency shutoffs I'd installed in case of traumatic amputation), I enlarged my own heart and lungs, and started breathing for two. I was keeping half an eye on the battle in case it came our way, but it seemed Abigail was keeping the girl's attention.

And then, as I started to ruthlessly break down his more damaged tissues and convert them into added blood supply, a blast sent Abigail flying sideways into a wall. They were too far away for me to affect them either way, and Dad was still groggy from his injury. But then Justin's ghosts came at her, while more began to carry Abigail out of the way.

A sweeping blast shredded the attacking ghosts, deleting them from existence in a way I wouldn't have believed possible, and the ones carrying Abigail convulsed and dropped her again. Abigail struggled to get up, but her right leg was gone from the knee down. Even as I dithered between keeping Jonas alive and saving Abigail, the choice was taken from my hands when the sun rose over the rooftops.

Or rather, Kayden. Shining bright, her face obscured by her glow, yet still somehow emanating an air of utter rage. "Get away from her!" Extending her hands, she let out her own blast, spiralling toward the girl in the black dress.

It was immediately obvious who had the advantage in this particular contest. The white-haired girl had only the vaguest control over her flight, and her maximum range was maybe twenty feet. Kayden was good at flying, and she could shoot much farther than that.

Spiralling blast met ravening destruction, and the white-haired girl was blown back into the warehouse. Swooping overhead, Kayden unleashed the full force of her anger on the building and its sole inhabitant, not letting up even after the roof came crashing down. By the time she was finished, the place was a literal crater, without even a fragment of a wall standing.

No blasts came back at her, which I counted as a good sign. Also, Abigail had tightened a strap around her leg as a makeshift tourniquet, and was hopping our way with better balance than I would've managed before I got powers. I finished up closing the worst of Jonas' wounds, including the patch of missing skull, and made sure that his new heart and lungs would keep him alive after I detached from him.

"What the hell was that?" asked Kayden, coming in for a landing. "Who the hell was that? Are you okay?"

"I've been better, but I'm alive." Dad looked down at his shoulder. "I appear to be missing an arm, but Jonas is in rather worse straits. Once Knight Errant gets back up—"

"Robert's dead, and all," Abigail reported as she got to us. "She tracked one of those damned blasts clear over his head. There's nothing left from the chest up." Her Irish accent was the strongest I'd heard it in years. "Did ye kill the poxy geebag, Palatina?"

"I'm hoping I did." Kayden looked down sorrowfully at Robert's scattered, armoured remnants. Raising her eyes, she glowered at the shattered remains of the building. "Is Legion okay?"

"Here!" Justin called out, staggering into view. "I'm here." He was cradling his right arm. "Broken arm, and I've only got two ghosts. The rest got scragged by whoever the fuck that was."

That, at least, I could fix. "Come here," I told him as I detached from Jonas. He was missing both legs and one arm, and a lot of his skin was the fresh pink that showed it had been newly grown, but I'd used the mass to replace all the organs he currently needed to stay alive until I could properly get to work on him. Also, I'd scavenged a little bit to replace my own leg, which had gone missing in action (along with a chunk of my evening gown) at some point.

"Sorry about the arm," Abigail said, still easily balancing on one leg. "I threw you a little hard, so I did." She looked over to me. "Nice trick, acushla. Way to get a leg up in life."

"Oh, ha ha." Sealing over her stump and setting Justin's arm was a lot easier than dealing with the emergency-room nightmare that Jonas had been just seconds ago. "I'll grow it all back for him. We just need a ton of biomass to make that happen."

Dad looked at me searchingly. "Are you okay? You don't seem to be unduly worried by any of this."

"I'm fine. Just turned my emotions off for the moment." I gave him a quick smile to reassure him. "What do we do next?"

"Next, we return home and regroup," he decreed. "We are in no condition for any sort of confrontation at the moment." He pulled out his phone, and made the call to Lee, who'd been sent to drop Emma and Sophia off at Emma's house.

"Think she's dead?" asked Justin quietly. His last two ghosts had re-merged with him, but he still looked gaunt and in pain.

"She'd better be," growled Kayden. Her fists clenched, a glow building around them. "I'm sure I got at least one direct hit in on her."

"I'm not going to believe that until I've seen a body," Dad announced, putting his phone away. "I've been presumed dead more than once, and I refuse to make that mistake myself. However, before we face her again, we need to find out who she is and what her weaknesses are."

I nodded. "Damn right."

Damsel of Distress

The stink of the sewer tunnel was unpleasant, to say the least, but that was the least of Ashley's worries. She was pissed. "Where the fuck did Purity come from?" she growled under her breath. "I had them on the ropes. I beat fucking Marquis! Nobody's ever done that!"

She'd been blown back into the warehouse under the impetus of her own blasts, not from being hit by Purity's hammering energy attack. Her blasts had literally cancelled the attack before it could hit her, but it had also driven her backward, not forward on the offensive, where she'd wanted to be. If she could've gotten within strike range of the flying lightbulb, she could've put that glow out forever.

But the unfair fact of the matter was that Purity was longer-ranged than she was, so she was stuck playing defense until the ex-Empire cape made a mistake and got within her attack range.

Which she hadn't.

Ashley had been on the back foot, bleeding from half a dozen minor wounds caused by flying debris, barely able to hold her footing as the ground itself bucked under her feet and spiralling blasts shredded the warehouse around her. She'd fired back when she could, screaming insults and threats at the top of her lungs, but mainly she'd had to use her powers to stop anything big from hitting her. And then the floor had fallen away, and she'd tumbled cursing down a rough concrete slope, before landing in shallow water.

Well, mainly water.

The assault was still going on above her, Purity still apparently doing her best to vaporise everything within the warehouse, and doing a damn good job of it. As potent as Ashley's blasts were, Purity could fly more effectively and shoot farther. Ashley hated to give ground on anything, but sometimes it was a good idea to back off and attack from a different angle.

As more debris rained down, interspersed with more of Purity's blasts—one of which came altogether too close, spraying her with more shards of concrete—she made her decision and blew away the debris that had been blocking the sewer pipe. Ducking inside, grimacing at the smell and the cramped conditions, she made her way toward a dubious safety.

She wasn't fleeing or retreating, she told herself firmly. She was repositioning.

And she'd blast the guts out of anyone who though they could tell her otherwise.

Marchioness

"Found her," announced Marcus as I finished fixing Abigail's leg. Dad's arm was already complete, and Jonas would be next. We had a bulk store of biomass in the freezer for just such an occasion; all it had required was to thaw it out.

Once we were safely in the car, leaving the scene, I'd allowed my emotions to come back into play. I hadn't wanted to at first, but Dad had insisted. Two seconds later, I fell apart. He held me as I sobbed, all the fear and anger and sorrow over Robert's brutal death coming out at once. Part of it was guilt; if I'd known that she was going to just kill him, maybe I could've given his regeneration a quick boost.

Abigail and Kayden had been no less affected by his murder, though Kayden seemed able to hide it better. Dad put on a stoic air, but our proximity allowed me to feel his simmering rage against the girl in the black dress. He seemed to take personal affront at the fact that people under his employ had been killed just because they were there.

Returning to the house with Robert's remains—there was no way in hell that we were just going to leave him on the battlefield, after all he'd gone through for us—had been a sombre affair. He'd stood between us and the danger more than once, not because he was being forced to, but because he wanted to. For all that he'd been created by an enemy to fight us, he'd become one of us.

We'd carefully wrapped his remains in a sheet and placed them in cold storage once we got back to the house. In time, when we were able, there was a shaded plot of land near the house where we could bury him. He'd enjoyed walking among the trees during his early days of his new life with us, and I thought it would be fitting for him as a final resting place.

While I worked on Dad and Abigail, and Justin lay back with a cold compress on his forehead, Marcus had gone online, searching through Dad's contacts for any clues to what had happened. It was virtually beyond belief that someone with that level of power could have flown under the radar long enough to get to Brockton Bay and start raising havoc. Where had she come from, and why hadn't she made her name elsewhere first?

"Well, don't keep us in suspense, lad." Once I'd fixed his arm, Dad had changed his shirt, and now looked as unruffled and imperturbable as ever. "Regale us with her story."

Marcus finished reading the information off the screen, then shook his head. "You're never going to believe this. Boston PRT knows all about her. Her name's Damsel of Distress, and she bases out of a little town called Stafford, New Hampshire. Her power can cut through anything but her control over it's pretty crap. A lot of the time, it'll go off at the wrong moment and wreck stuff she wanted to keep, like food and walls and furniture. Real name Ashley Stillons, age sixteen."

Kayden raised her head. "So, what's she doing here?"

"What else?" asked Justin without opening his eyes or taking the compress off his forehead. "Same as those other two assholes wanted. To carve out a slice of the pie."

"It gets better," reported Marcus. "Director Armstrong's actually got a couple of local capes on babysitting duty. Edict and Licit. Their whole job is to drop off food if it looks like she hasn't been eating recently, and to herd her back to Stafford if she wanders off. Oh, and the PRT pays for the internet and electricity of whatever place she chooses to move into. All in the name of keeping her in one place, where they can keep an eye on her."

"Why doesn't she just, you know, join the Wards?" I asked. "She's got the chops for it. Well, apart from the lack of control. And I'm sure they could figure a way around that."

"That's the saddest bit." Marcus gestured at the screen of the laptop. "According to this … well, you know how some people just jump into the role of being a superhero automatically? Like, say, Legend? You see that guy and you say, 'he's a hero'. Right?"

"Right." I frowned. "You're saying she's not?"

"Not just not a hero, but actually a natural villain. According to the reports, she occasionally does this whole supervillain monologue thing. And on the few times she has left Stafford, she's set out to build her own criminal empire. It's crumbled each time, though, because she's paranoid and short-tempered, plus she's got that lack of control thing going on. Minions don't tend to stick with someone who's likely to blow them to bits either on purpose or by accident, and she tends to do both." He sat back from the laptop. "That's got to suck for her."

"Indeed." I could tell why Dad sounded less than admiring. He had built his career on knowing exactly how to control his power to its best effect. To quote something he'd said more than once, people like that made supervillains look bad. "Claire, this is exactly the sort of situation I was referring to, when we had our little talk earlier. This Damsel of Distress represents a clear and present danger to anyone she encounters, whether it be heroes, villains or innocents. Even her own minions will be in peril from her power going off at the slightest provocation."

I was pretty sure I knew where he was going with this, and I didn't like it. "You're saying we're going to have to hunt her down and kill her, because the PRT won't?" I didn't mind mixing it up with assholes who were more or less mentally healthy, but she didn't sound that way at all. Of course, she was also breathtakingly dangerous at the same time, which didn't help in the slightest.

"Or remove her from the equation in some other way." Dad paused and took a deep breath. "I have predicated a significant portion of my image as one who does not harm women or children, and if anyone has a better idea, I'd like to hear it. However, if we do nothing at all, it will only embolden her. Even if we subtly alert the PRT to her presence here, and Edict and Licit arrive to force her back to Stafford, it will only weaken our image here in Brockton Bay and delay her inevitable return. We must act."

"Aye," agreed Abigail. "But how?"

"That," he said, "is the question."

End of Part Twenty-Nine