Chapter 25: Line
Tempestuous
Words are wind, so I write.
- Location
- CA
Chapter 25: Line
"They're probably going to show up, this time," Tattletale warned me.
"The Teeth?"
"Yeah."
We were on the roof of a building downtown, a few hours before Thursday, waiting for the rest of our team. Our objective this time was a bit different; Tattletale had determined the Teeth were moving something into a rented office building nearby, and we were going to find out what it was.
The plan had originally been to conduct a set of raids every night, but the unexpected success of our first outing had put the 'Alliance'—as I thought of it—into a bit of disarray. Apparently, whatever Coil-Empire-ABB cabal was running the show hadn't planned for the event where all five teams accomplished their entire list of objectives. We'd taken Tuesday night off to reorganize.
I suspected Coil had orchestrated the delay. Backstabbing bastard wanted to give the Teeth a chance to bleed the other gangs, after all.
"So, what do you think?" I asked. "Drugs?"
"Almost certainly. They're trying to hide their product before we wreck it again. And they are definitely going to defend it."
I grunted, kicking my legs as I sat on the lip of the roof. Tattletale had, perhaps wisely, elected not to join me on my perch. "Who are they missing, anyway?"
"What?"
"The Teeth. Who was the other cape Shinigami offed?"
"Spree," she said. "One of their front line fighters; he must have let that go to his head." I groaned. "Sorry, that wasn't intentional. Honest. You ready for this?"
"Yeah." I'd gone looking for something I could use in place of healing potions and found a couple of nano-medkits—large, high-tech brick-shaped applicators I'd tucked away in pockets they really shouldn't fit in. They weren't fiat-backed either, but they were more or less tinkertech, so they'd work on anyone in the setting. To be honest, I wasn't too worried. We were professionals. Hopefully. "Any idea who we're working with, tonight?"
"Hmm." She walked over and leaned against the chest-high barrier I was sitting on. "We don't want to make too much of a mess, so we're not going to be working with the Travelers again. Their powers cause too much collateral damage. Maybe some of Faultline's crew? Yeah, I'm thinking… Newter and Faultline, plus Circus. From the Empire…I'm not sure. Maybe Victor and Othala? Could be Kaiser himself. Hard to say."
"Coil's men?"
"Not coming. Battlefield isn't right for them, and we're expecting significantly less unpowered resistance here. They're trying to use secrecy as their first line of defense." She put on a cocky grin. "Not a great choice against us, right?"
"Hmph." I got up and started pacing back and back on the edge of the roof—the vertical edge, I mean. I was bored. "Are we early or are they late?"
"We're early," Tattletale said.
"That was a rhetorical question."
I'd taken to walking laps around the outside of the building by the time our allies finally showed up. "There," Tattletale said, pointing to a cab that had just pulled up to the curb below her. The doors opened, and Faultline and Newter stepped out before the cabbie sped off like a bat out of hell. I held out a hand to Tattletale and got her situated on the side of the building with me, and we walked down the wall to greet them.
Newter was the one who spotted us first, when we were about thirty feet up. He nudged Faultline and pointed upwards; she followed his finger to us, then hung her head in resignation. At least he was amused; he took our arrival as an excuse to leap upwards and crawl up the wall like a gecko. "Hi, guys!" Newter said cheerfully as we walked past.
"Hi, Newter!" I said. "I didn't get a chance to see you when I was at the club."
"Oh yeah, heard about that. You made a pretty good impression on the boss lady, sounded like. How'd you end up with her?" He used his tail to poke Tattletale on the shoulder, since his hands were occupied adhering him to the wall. I grabbed it before he could withdraw it and shifted his gravity to match ours. "Hey, don't—! …woah. Nifty." He stood up and joined us. "Still, hands off the tail, capiche?"
"To answer your question," I said, ignoring his complaint, "we ran into each other during a cape fight, and they made me an offer." We had gotten close enough to Faultline for conversation, by now, so I called out a greeting to her.
"Flux. Tattletale." She didn't seem happy to see us. "Who else are we waiting for?"
"Circus, and the Empire." Tattletale said. "According to my power, at least."
"We'll see," was her response.
I helped Tattletale and Newter get situated on the sidewalk, but beyond that, there was nothing to do but wait. It was an awkward minute or two before someone broke the silence.
"Circus is here." Tattletale pointed down the block to where the thief had just emerged from an alley. Tonight, she was wearing a dark red wig and black-and-purple motley with an excessive number of belts. "Called it."
"And the Empire is late again," I grumbled.
"Give 'em a break," Newter said. "They're stuck in 1940."
Three minutes past the scheduled time, Tattletale's phone rang. "Tattletale. What? Seriously? Okay. Will do." She hung up and sighed as she stuck the phone back in her pocket. "Apparently, we were supposed to be getting Kaiser and the valk-bunnies, but they're busy elsewhere. For some reason. We're going in without them. Faultline—"
"I know how to do my job," the other woman snapped. "Let's go." She walked off without another word. Newter shrugged and followed her. Tattletale scowled, but kept her mouth shut as we joined them moving down the block.
We were on the edge of Downtown proper, in a no-man's-land between the Empire and Protectorate territories, as such things were determined. The buildings had large glass windows unobstructed by bars or other defenses, and there were even trees along the edge of the sidewalk. It was a hell of a lot nicer than the Docks, almost as nice as the area around the Bank; the kind of place that doesn't have you looking over your shoulder every twenty feet. Except I was, because we were a very conspicuous group of supervillains in a part of town where the police response time was measured in single digits. There were no other people in sight; even without a curfew, people were staying inside once the sun went down. Things went bang bang bang in the night.
"So, what were you trying to say?" I asked Tattletale.
"Just that she needed to be ready to make us an escape route if the Butcher comes by. We're playing keep-away, sorta."
"With us as the ball," I grumbled. We turned the corner and headed down the block towards the actual target: a slightly less modern-looking building that otherwise didn't stand out much against the general backdrop of the area.
"Exactly."
Faultline was waiting for us on one side of the office building, leaning against the brick facade. As we approached, she shoved the wall beside her, pushing a large, doorway-sized chunk into the building. As the brute, I entered first into a large office space stocked with cubicles, one of which had just been crushed by the falling masonry.
Everything was quiet for a moment; then a head poked over one of the cubicles, wearing one of the Teeth's favorite bone-spike-adorned bandanas. "Shit! Capes!" He fired a pistol at me one-handed, missed horribly, then vaulted the cubicle and ran towards a door on the other side of the room. I followed, plowing through cubicles rather than going around them, clearing a path for the rest of the group.
Someone else shot me from the side, and I diverted, scattering more of the crappy foam walls as I responded to the new shooter. I didn't have to worry about the guns, but everyone behind me did, and I wasn't going to let anyone get shot if I could help it. This guy had his bandana covering his hair, rather than his face, which gave me a great look at his expression when I cleared the distance in a quarter of the time he'd expected and broke his gun arm like a toothpick.
Another gun fired at someone else, and I spun around looking for the threat, but Newter had already dealt with it. The shooter was probably going to be missing teeth when he woke up—there was definitely a pun there, but I didn't have time to dwell on it.
The door the first man had fled through opened again, and two more Teeth ran in, carrying rifles. Gunshots rang out from behind me, and the two men dropped to the ground as bullets slammed into the wall above them. That gave me plenty of time to cross the gap and stomp both guns into pancakes. I tossed the disarmed men towards Newter as Faultline moved up to the door, sliding another magazine into her gun.
"You flush, I shoot," she barked.
"Non-lethal?"
"Fuckers don't wanna get shot, they shouldn't play with guns."
That didn't sit well with me, but I didn't have a good rebuttal; being bulletproof probably warped my perspective a bit. I stepped into the hallway and immediately took a burst of rifle rounds to the gut. "Target in the doorway, left! Far left!" I heard Faultline shoot from behind me, driving the gangster back into his cover. He reappeared a moment later; this time he was aiming around me, trying to hit Faultline.
"Charge him!" Faultline yelled.
"On it!" I ran towards the gunman, but made a sharp right turn straight through the wall a few strides away, sending drywall everywhere. The shooter yelped in surprise as he fell over backwards, almost dropping his gun. I kicked it out of his hand, probably breaking a few of his fingers in the process, and then took a hit I hadn't seen coming that sent me flying back through another section of wall.
"Fucking bitch!" I mumbled as I hopped back to my feet. Finally, the capes come out of the woodwork.
"Fuck you!" Hemorrhagia screamed as she stepped through the hole I'd left in the drywall. She was already covered in a great deal of her own blood, wearing it like armor. "I just wanted a quiet fucking night!" She waved her scab-covered stump at me. "As if this shit wasn't bad enough, now I have to deal with you—oh for fuck's sake!" She formed a shield of blood in front of her, blocking four more bullets from Faultline, which gave me a perfect opportunity to leg sweep her.
I tried to get my hands on her, but she slipped away, sliding down the hallway on her back on a goddamn blood sled and hiding in another office. I gave chase, only to find myself launched through another wall. Fuck she hit hard; she was still throwing around someone the bulk of a couple football linebackers when she hit me like that.
I wasn't eager to get sucker punched a third time, so I fell back to where Faultline and Tattletale were crouched in opposite doorways, guns drawn. "Hemorrhagia hits like a truck," I complained.
"She's abusing surprise and range," Tattletale said. "Go down the main hallway and get past her. Faultline, cut through the wall and have Newter push her towards Flux. Striker versus striker, she'll have to retreat. Pincer her and take her down."
To my amazement, Faultline didn't protest. "Newter! You heard the lady, let's go!" She darted across the hallway, past Tattletale and into the opposite room, and Newter followed a moment later.
"Where's Circus?" I asked.
"Chasing down a couple runners. Get going!" Against my better judgment, I went down the hallway again, only for a fucking blood tentacle to punch through the wall to my left and try to impale me. It didn't have any luck, and I reflexively tried to grab the thing, but it was still blood and flowed through my hands like the liquid it was.
My instinct was to bust through the wall and try to catch her, but I followed Tattletale's instructions and headed further down the hallway before entering the next set of doors. I headed over to the connecting door between the two sections and waited.
Sure enough, Hemorrhagia came running through, fleeing Newter this time, and ran right into my waiting arms. I knocked her to the floor and grappled her hard, twisting her good arm into a joint lock. "Yield!" I yelled, pressing her face into the tiles.
"Fuck you!" A dozen blood blades branching off her armor scraped ineffectively at me, so I bounced her head off the linoleum.
"Yield!" I yelled again, banging her head into the floor again, "Fucking—" and again, "—yield!"
"Aagh! Fine!" The blood jabbing at me flowed back onto her stump, forming the large scab structure I remembered seeing before. "Stop fucking hitting me, you bitch! Fucking hell! You're gonna give me a concussion!"
"Serves you right," Faultline said. "Newter?"
Newter stepped forward and rubbed a sweaty hand across the exposed part of her face, and she went limp. The most combat-oriented part of Newter's weird, power-induced biology: all his bodily fluids—sweat, spit, blood, those sorts of things—contained an extremely potent and fast-acting psychedelic drug that would be absorbed through contact with bare skin. Its most miraculous property was probably that the only thing that scaled with dosage was the duration of the effect; it was impossible to overdose on, although a big hit like he'd just given Hemorrhagia should put her down for a couple hours. Interestingly, her blood constructs remained 'solid'; another example of powers acting on their own, I supposed.
Once she'd stopped twitching, I dropped her and stood up, breathing hard. As far as I could tell, my standard 'bend physics' power didn't have a fatigue cost, but whatever secondary power kept my body working 'normally' while I was heavy or plastic or whatnot did, and those were things I used reflexively to shrug off incoming attacks. I might be functionally invincible, but absorbing that many hits so quickly left me feeling like I been running sprints. Forget the health kits, I should have grabbed myself a stamina potion.
I looked over my teammates while I caught my breath. Faultline was almost as winded, having had to sprint cover to cover in her ballistic armor. Newter was in slightly better shape—possibly because he was traveling light, possibly due to some aspect of his power—but even he seemed to appreciate the break while we waited for the others to join us.
Tattletale didn't take long to catch up, but Circus took a few minutes to return. She seemed to be favoring her left side, but she didn't complain, and no one commented on it. "Where to now?" I asked once the five of us were together again.
"Basement," Tattletale said. "Stairway is… not far. There, through that wall." We headed in the direction she pointed, weaving between cubicles now that we weren't in a fight. Faultline put a hole in the wall Tattletale had indicated, giving us unconventional access to the stairwell. "There's only one basement level, because of the aquifer," Tattletale said as we descended.
"Save the trivia," Faultline grumbled. I guess teamwork can only last so long.
I pushed open the stairway door into the basement level and was immediately shot again, this time in the face. "Do you mind?" I snapped as I brushed flattened buckshot off of my visor and chin.
"Sorry?" the man said, still pointing the shotgun at my head. He wasn't wearing the normal Teeth gear: not a single bone or spike on his person. Which isn't to say he looked like the sort of person who belonged in a building like this, but he certainly wasn't a dedicated member; perhaps one of the 'fair-weather' types Tattletale had mentioned. He licked his lips nervously. "Uh, I don't suppose you'd just… leave?"
"No," I said. He was talking rather than continuing to shoot, so I took a moment to look around. The basement was obvious a storage area; one massive room with a double-height ceiling, lit by three lines of stark halogen bulbs. The crates we were after were at the far end of the room. There were two other men crouched behind various languishing bits of furniture—mostly office desks tipped on their sides and rolls of soulless, vomit-colored office carpeting—both pointing guns at the door. "Are you going to make me hurt you, or are you going to put the guns down?"
"Look, we don't want trouble," shotgun guy said. "Lady said all we had to do is make sure no one messes with the stuff they brought, that's all. 'Kay?"
"And all we want to do is mess with that stuff," I said. "That 'lady' is currently unconscious on the ground floor, and no, your guns won't work any better on me the second time, or the hundredth, so you're shit outta luck there. Are we going to do this the easy way or the hard way?"
He glanced over his shoulder. "Give us a moment?"
"They're stalling!" Tattletale yelled from behind the cover of the doorway. "Break the fucking guns, Flux!"
The man shot me again. I reached forward, grabbed his gun, and squeezed, crumpling the barrel in my fingers and pulling it out of his hands. He scurried backwards to avoid the hail of gunfire his friends directed at me, fishing a pistol out of his waistband. Dozens more bullets bounced off me as I walked menacingly into the center of the room, the gangsters retreating before me. Then, one after the other, they dropped.
"Nice one," I said as Newter descended from the ceiling. "Gross, though."
"Did you get to choose your powers?" he asked in good humor before hawking another gob of spit onto a man who was still twitching. "'Cause I didn't." I didn't answer, focusing on rendering the rest of the guns into scrap; I'd be lying if I said 'no'.
"Focus, Newter," Faultline chided him. "You can banter when we're done. Flux, check the crates."
"Flux, open the crates," Tattletale repeated, just for the sake of being the one to give the order. I rolled my eyes and walked past the unconscious gangsters towards the other side of the large open area, where three heavy wooden crates of the same sort we'd seen yesterday were lined up against the wall. What's in the box? This was an odd place to store something they intended to use, so it probably wasn't food or ammo. Something longer term, maybe—
My power gives me a lot of information, letting me know exactly which forces are affecting me at any time, even through my costume. That meant that I noticed when I interrupted an unusual beam of low-energy photons a step away from actually touching a crate. I had just enough time to realize how much this was going to suck before all three crates exploded, sending a hundred thousand pieces of steel shrapnel thundering into us as everything vanished in a cloud of smoke and noise.
"…!" I shouted, deaf and blind. "…? …!" Only two or three lightbulbs had survived the explosions and the storm of projectiles they'd unleashed, and dust from smashed wood, concrete, and drywall filled the air, reducing visibility to only a few feet. My goggles had vision modes to handle smoke and dust, but the explosion had managed to crack them despite my power's protection, ruining the tech and leaving them less conducive to clear vision than not having eyewear at all.
I had to wait for the ringing in my ears to die down before trying again. "Is everyone all right?" I yelled, my voice sounding strangely far away. It was lucky my power protected my eardrums, or it wouldn't have come back that fast… or maybe at all, how close I'd been to the trap.
"Flux!" Tattletale yelled. "Are you okay? Those were fucking claymores!" She started coughing, which let me locate her through the smoke and dust. She'd been directly behind me; now, she was the only one except me still standing, isolated in a me-shaped silhouette of less-damaged floor. Not that she'd escaped unscathed; she was bleeding from half a dozen cuts, but the ricochets were far less lethal after having traveled the whole room twice over. "Fucking hell! Fuck! I can't hear!" She took half a step forward, stumbled, and fell, her sense of balance ruined.
"Where the fuck is everyone?" I yelled pointlessly. The furniture had been reduced to rubble and the carpet rolls shredded and scattered, making it hard to tell which shapes were scrap and which were bodies. The first person I found was a Teeth member, dead from half a dozen small steel balls that had found their way into his chest and neck. I stumbled onward and nearly tripped over Faultline as she tried to sit up. "Fuck! Faultline! Are you okay?"
"What?" she yelled. "I can't fucking hear!" Goddamn it, were we all deaf? She was coughing as well, flecks of blood making it past her mask. Everyone was coughing, at least those of us who were still alive. "Fuck! My arm!" She grabbed at my jacket with one hand, then set about trying to remove her belt. "Tourniquet, now!"
Holy shit, her left side was mangled. I ignored her struggles and instead pulled out the medkit and sprayed it on her arm and side, using most of the bottle. She kicked and swore as the medicine did its work, but kept her arm steady. The bleeding stopped almost immediately. "Thanks!" she yelled, still trying to be heard over her own deafness. "Is Newter okay?"
"I don't know! I'm still looking!"
"What?" Right, talking didn't work.
I walked back to where Tattletale lay and hosed her down with the dregs; she screamed as the topical spray hit her exposed cuts. "Where's Newter?" I yelled. She was still deaf, so I grabbed her, made sure she was looked at my face, and repeated, "Tats! Where is Newter?"
She looked around the room and pointed to a shape I could barely see through the haze. I hurried over to the lump and pulled a large piece of carpet off him. He was almost certainly dead, but I spent nearly the entire other bottle of topical healing spray on him just in case. "Tattletale! Can you hear yet?"
"What?" Good, her hearing was coming back.
"Where's Circus?"
"Uh… there!"
That didn't help. "I can't see you!"
"Your left, about twenty feet!" I hurried over to find that Circus had already tourniqueted both her legs, which ended not far past the knee. She'd dived for cover behind one of the carpet rolls, but not all of her had made it before the shrapnel hit. The dispenser only had a single puff of medicine left, but it was probably better than nothing, and I let her have it before shoving the brick back in my pocket. It was enough to stop the bleeding, at least. "We need to leave!" Tattletale yelled from elsewhere in the room, deaf to her own volume.
"No shit!" I yelled.
"Too late, fuckers!" someone called from behind the curtain of dust. I'd become turned around in the chaos, but now I knew where the stairwell was, so I ran towards the voice, feeling a hundred tiny knives brush against me as I powered through the smoke. "None of you fuckers are leaving here al—" The low visibility left Vex just enough time to realize how fucked he was before I body-checked him across the stairwell. He bounced off the opposite wall with a grunt of "Motherfucker!"
"Fucking bitch!" Hemorrhagia screamed, charging down the stairs above us. She formed her simple severed-arm scab into a whip made of her own blood, which she used to slap me back out of the stairway. That was how she'd managed to sucker punch me so hard before; I hadn't gotten a good look at the process. I kicked up yet more concrete dust as I skipped and bounced across the badly abused floor. Goddamnit, how was she back on her feet so fast?
I rolled to my feet and ran back towards the stairs as Hemorrhagia stepped out into the ruined basement, protecting her recovering teammate. We only had two ways out: either up the stairs, or through a wall into another basement. Either way, I needed to buy time for the team to recover enough to move.
I ignored the thorny sensation of Vex's forcefields and threw a punch at Hemorrhagia as hard as I could, fulling willing to kill her, but she turned her whip tendril into a shield of blood that stopped me cold. It shattered with a boom of thunder and a spray of white-hot sparks, the blood flashing to steam as I channeled lightning from my bangles, forcing her to pull more blood from her whip to block my next hit, and my next.
I was forcing her back, but following her into the stairwell let Vex break my pattern with a slide-tackle that took my feet out from under me, and I had to roll away from an overhead strike that shattered concrete, tucking and rolling back through the door into the cloud-filled room. "Get some, bitch!" she screamed. "Come on, motherfucker!"
The combination of the dust from the explosives and the dust kicked up by the last hit gave them pause; Hemorrhagia wasn't willing to charge blindly into the room, so I was able to get back on my feet on my own terms. I slid under a whipfist attack as I closed back into melee range, reaching out to grab her. She interposed another shield, but that didn't matter, because I'd switched from fighting like a brute to fighting like a shaker-striker.
She fell backward through the stairwell door, literally, slamming into the wall above Vex headfirst and rolling up it to a stop. If I'd been lucky, she'd have broken her neck, but she was tougher than that, and was already getting back up. Vex positioned himself to block me, so I stopped just long enough to kick him in the head on my way up the wall. The prickling vanished as he dropped like a rock, but Hemorrhagia was still back on her feet before I could catch up. Seeing her teammate go down got a reaction. "I'm gonna fucking kill you for that!"
"You're welcome to try, bitch!" I danced around her, moving my 'ground' from wall to wall in the narrow stairwell. Hemorrhagia was smarter than she looked; she didn't know how long my striker effect would last, so she made sure she wasn't more than a few feet off the stairs at any given time. She was also pulling her hits, threatening to slam me and then pulling the whip back as the last second, lest I mess with her gravity again in the brief moment of contact. A quick glance at Vex showed that he was still down, so I focused on Hermorrhagia, keeping the pressure on and praying that the others would find a way out of this mess.
Just as we drew near the first floor landing, she suddenly turned and fled farther up the stairwell. I had half a second to wonder why before a wave of sound slammed into me and I dropped like a rock.
I hit the railing with my back, which flipped me around to hit the next one with my chest. It was probably thanks to my armor that the impacts only cracked my ribs rather than shattering them, white-hot pain cutting through the ringing in my ears as I fell another four feet to the ground. I landed on my face, kicking up more concrete dust from the already badly abused floor, and that's when I realized I couldn't breathe.
I'd—fuck—I'd been breathing in dust and smoke without a care, subconsciously using my power to ignore it building up in my lungs rather than taking time to address the problem, and now I couldn't. I gasped for air I couldn't use, drowning in dust. Fuck. Fuck! I was hacking, coughing hard enough that I risked breaking one of the injured ribs, and it wasn't fucking helping. I still couldn't breathe! Time was slowing down, my vision beginning to swim. I threw up, coughing pathetically, each spasm feeling like another knife to the chest, then finally hacked up a wad of crap that at least partially restored my ability to breathe. I pulled myself up on my elbows, breathing short, shallow gasps as I tried not to further aggravate my ribs while I enjoyed having access to air again.
Access I immediately lost again when Hemorrhagia kicked me onto my back and put her knee on my chest. "Not so tough now, are you, fuckhead?" she snarled. "Turn off your powers and you're just another fucking wannabe." She pressed harder, one knee pinning my left hand, the other pressing down on my lungs and turning my ribs into agony. I brought my right hand up, but she caught it in her left and covered my nose and mouth with a sheet of blood anchored to her other arm, cutting off my choked attempts at breathing. "I told you I was going to kill you! So die, bitch!"
I kicked and thrashed, trying to throw her off, but she had leverage and I was already halfway to unconsciousness from lack of oxygen. No, no! I was the only thing standing between her and four badly injured capes—assuming Newter wasn't dead already. If I died here, so did they. Have to get free. I tried to use my power, tried to make her light, tried to make myself massive, tried to change gravity. It wasn't there. Explosions were going off in my head, and Hemorrhagia toppled off me, giving me a much-needed breath of air. Explosions?
"Come on!" Faultline barked. I stared vacantly up at her; her left side was still a bloody mess, but her right hand was holding a smoking gun. She'd discarded her mangled welding mask, revealing a smaller domino mask beneath it. "Get up, you idiot!" Up. I can do up.
I could not do up.
Faultline holstered her gun and pulled me to my feet, then onto her shoulder. "I opened up a way out!" she yelled as she dragged me through the smoke. "Come on!" Hemorrhagia watched us go, swearing as she kept pressure on the gutshots she'd just taken. I could feel my power coming back in fits and starts as Animos' scream wore off. Shit, where's Animos?
"What about—" I fell into a coughing fit, every one hurting like a stab to the chest. "Animos?"
"I didn't see him" she said. "If he hit you in the stairwell, he's probably still waiting in ambush up there." A dark shape loomed ahead out of the gloom, and I staggered forward through the hole into an underground car park.
"Where's—" I coughed again, "—fuck! Where's Tattletale?"
"Already out."
"Circus?"
"We weren't in any shape to carry her," Faultline said.
Now that I wasn't half-drowned and powerless, I was. I let go of Faultline and turned around to head back into the cloud of dust, but she caught my arm and said, "We have to go."
"Fuck that!"
"Tattletale's waiting for us. She's hot-wiring a car on the upper level. We have to go."
"Then go!" I yelled. "Vex and Hemorrhagia are down and my power's back. I can get her out!"
"We thought Hemorrhagia was down, earlier," she argued.
"She—fuck! How… she must have done something with her blood." Could she do that? When Faultline still didn't let go, I said, "I thought the rules were you don't leave people to die!"
"We don't set people up to die. We got outplayed. If you go back in, maybe Animos gets you both."
"I'm going back in anyway," I said.
Faultline released my arm and smiled in what might have been approval. "Good luck." She turned away, hesitated, then turned back and offered me her pistol. I took it. "If you kill anyone, I'm not going to judge."
I ran through a quick check of the weapon; the magazine was missing three bullets, one of which was in the chamber. "No promises," I told her. "Get going."
Weapon in hand, I headed back into the basement. I kept my breathing slow and even despite the pain in my sides, making sure I was blowing out the dust that wanted to stick to my lungs. I was not going to let that happen again. That last encounter had put me through the wringer, and I wasn't going to be able to take another fistfight, so I advanced slowly and carefully through the gloom, gun at the ready.
With next to no ventilation, the air was still thick with the dust that continued to stream off the badly damaged ceiling, giving me visibility of only a couple feet, and I had no idea where I'd last seen Circus. I raised one hand to my temple to cycle through the goggles' vision modes, only to be disappointed; they hadn't suddenly become less broken since the initial explosion. Stumbling around blind wasn't helping, so I had to take a risk before we ran out of time. "Circus?" I called. "Circus!" I snapped the gun up when a figure lurched forward out of the dust, and only the silhouette of the prehensile tail behind it stopped me from firing preemptively. "Newter?"
"'Ey," he rasped. "Fuck happened?" I could scarcely believe he was alive, much less up and walking; his chest looked like orange hamburger.
"It was a trap."
"'eally?"
I ignored the sarcasm and pointed back the way I'd just come, helpfully marked by where my bootprints disturbed the still-falling dust. "Way out is that way. Can you walk in a straight line?"
"Pro'lly."
"Then get moving. We're out of time!" He staggered past me as I kept searching, leaving a bright orange trail in his wake. Damnit, that was going to be easy to track. "Circus! Where are you?"
"Here," she called weakly. It was the first time I'd heard her speak; even her voice was androgynous. I zeroed in on the direction of her voice and found her still sitting where I'd first left her. With her help and a reduction in weight from my power, I got her onto my shoulders in a fireman's carry and headed back, ignoring how even the small amount of extra weight jarred my ribs with each step. Thank fucking god I had a pain tolerance perk, or I'd have been worse than useless after my fall.
We were almost back to the hole when Hemorrhagia reentered the fight, stepping in front of the new exit to bar my way. She must have managed to patch herself up with her hemokinesis or something, because she didn't seem injured enough to have just suffered two gutshots without some sort of brute rating. "Not so fast, bi—"
It was instinctive. Chaotic environment, hostage on my shoulders, gun in my hands. She must have been expecting another cape fight, because she didn't react as the reflexes I'd unwittingly developed over weeks of combat sims put a Failure-to-Stop drill into her without conscious thought on my part, the final shot spraying bits of skull and brain into the parking structure. I stepped over her body without looking back. Circus didn't comment; I wasn't sure she was still conscious.
Even carrying someone on my back, I easily caught up to Newter as he limped up the ramp to the ground floor. The sound of a car engine had me raising the gun again, but it was only Tattletale in a four-door sedan, coming to save me the trouble of finding her. She swerved, drifting to a stop with the car pointed halfway back up the ramp. "Flux!" she yelled, at the same time Faultline yelled, "Newter!" His teammate hopped out of the passenger seat and ushered him in. "Take the passenger seat, you'll be less likely to bleed on someone!"
"If he knocks me out, we crash!" Tattletale protested.
"Then don't fucking touch him!" Faultline snapped. "He'll knock us all out if we put him in the back!" She only had one functioning arm, but still stopped to open the door for me to slide Circus into the middle seat. I shoved Faultline herself in after her, then jumped over the car and into the other side door.
I would have expected Tattletale to peel out, but she stuck to the speed limit, trying not to draw attention. Unfortunately, the city was working against us here: there was next to no traffic to blend into. Still, as badly as we'd been hurt, we'd left the Teeth in equally rough condition, and no pursuit appeared.
"Fuck," Tattletale muttered. "That was too close. Too fucking close."
"We're not out of it yet," Faultline said. "Keep alert." Tattletale didn't argue, which was as good an indication as any how seriously she was treating the situation. "You okay, Newter?"
"Yeah. Hurts a lot less than it should."
"That's not a good thing."
"Well, I don't mind," he said.
"He'll be okay," Tattletale told her. "Flux hit him with that spray she used on us. Probably the only reason he managed to get up."
"That right?" he asked. "Thanks."
"No pr—I mean, uh, you're welcome." I didn't want to be dismissive.
"Say, Flux," Faultline asked, "you still have my gun?"
"Oh, yeah, here." I handed it over, and she repeated the same check I'd done: safety, magazine, chamber.
"You shoot someone?"
"Hemorrhagia."
"Again?"
"She tried to stop me," I said defensively. "I, uh, just sort of failure drilled her without thinking."
"Failure drilled?"
"Failure to stop. You know…" I tapped my sternum twice and my forehead once.
"No shit? Mozambique?" Faultline gave me a searching look, then gave it up and shrugged her curiosity off. "Meh, good riddance."
We drove in silence for a while. I'd never seen the Bay this empty; there were no pedestrians, no cars, no life. Everyone was huddled in their homes, waiting for the storm to pass. Even when Tattletale pulled onto the freeway leading north out of Downtown, the road remained entirely abandoned.
"Flux?" Circus muttered.
I glanced over at her. "What?"
They didn't respond immediately. "Thanks," she said eventually.
"You're welcome," I repeated.
"From me as well," Faultline said. "Not just for the medicine. If you hadn't gone back in for them, I would have left Newter behind."
"I thought he was dead, too," I admitted.
"You used an entire applicator of healing juice on someone you thought was dead?" Tattletale asked.
"Well…" I said sheepishly, aware that I may not have been thinking clearly when I'd made that decision, "I'd describe it as 'someone I wasn't sure was alive,' but yes."
Faultline chuckled. "We owe you one. More than one."
"You saved my life, too," I pointed out. "Seriously. I thought I was done."
"Still doesn't make us even. I would have been useless if you hadn't patched me up, and you saved Newter twice over. Plus Hemorrhagia." She grinned and reached across Circus to punch me in the arm; it was awkward, because she had to twist around a bit, but she managed. "I don't give a fuck who you team with, you've got friends at the Palanquin. Stop by later and we'll throw you a real party."
I grinned back. "I'm not one to really cut loose, but I wouldn't say no to—"
I'd taken my eyes off the road. It wasn't something one would think would be a problem, since I wasn't driving, but it meant I wasn't able to react to the Butcher teleporting in front of us. We were going close to eighty miles an hour when we hit, and the car lost.
———X==X==X———