Epilogue I
GraftingBuddha
Retired Pooh-Bah
Epilogue I
Crystal stared out dumbly, gnawing on a ration bar that had been miraculously spared. Unsurprising. It was remarkably tasteless, even the Fallen would struggle to get much fun out of it. Not unless it turned out you could make amazing edibles out of PRT MREs. Which she doubted.
Above her, a red moon glittered in the sky. She was trying her best not to look up at that. Felt wise to keep her eyes away from that, and she felt like being wise was probably the wisest thing a wise person could be, and she felt like being a wise person was the wisest thing to be in the wisest of all possible worlds. In short, she didn't look up. Because that red moon scared the shit out of her. Everything did, right now. Madison was a ghost town, she had no powers, her cousin was gone again, everything had gone to hell, and all the radios stopped working. For days she'd sat here. Didn't dare go beyond the base, no telling what was still out there, what mines were active, what drones were operational. No-one came. And no-one left. For days and days she sat in this base, queen of rats and dead grass, surrounded by the corpses of the Fallen. So contaminated by their own brand of narcotics that the flies wouldn't even touch them, all of them were surrounded by black outlines, like the chalk they used to draw around dead bodies. Difference being that these were made from rotting insects that had tried to have a nibble. She chewed morosely. Staring.
Sophia was in her customary position.
Sitting. Staring. Hands on her knees, knees tucked up close to her chest, looking like a small gargoyle. She hadn't relaxed the muscles in her back in days. Refused to.
Sometimes she seemed to stop blinking for hours at a time.
Crystal understood. Wished she'd talk more.
She was going a little mad out here.
All the radios, dead. No idea what was going on in the outside world. Closest thing to a sane person around here was absolutely silent. The refugee camps were... they were dead. Gone. Wiped out by Monitor, most likely, cannibalised and turned into breeding hives for her insects. They found the cocoons where people had been wrapped up in spider thread, found the carcasses filled with honeycombs and writhing with left-behind grubs. They didn't go inside Madison, not now. Too many webs. Too much uncertainty. Madison was... a place that deserved to be dead, fulfilled all its purposes and was no longer necessary. Let it be quiet and still and forgotten. Crystal was certainly trying to accomplish that last part. Another glance at Sophia... silence and tension. Watching the wasteland for any sign of change.
"...and thus the red moon rises, but not the correct one, no, no, the signs are wrong, the moon is too still, the tides have not come, this has not been enumerated in any single prediction, and... oh, Crystal darling, cousin-sister to divinities, would you possibly mind looking for something for me? Something I can poke into my veins and depress? I can feel my blood aching for it, I need something to really get my predictions going, I can't... they're not coming, nothing is coming, surely you must understand that when a young lady has her knees broken she needs to have a crutch? Won't you give me a lovely chemical crutch? Please..."
Wished someone else would join Sophia in her wasteland-gazing.
Sarah was... the fucking worst. Kept her in the ruined brig, same place Crystal had escaped from. Mechanisms were all broken, had to give her a broken cell with a door they had to drill into place to seal up. Literally held the thing together with duct tape in some places, the door had been... slightly shattered when they found it.
But boy oh boy, Sarah found a way to still annoy them from captivity.
"No. Nothing."
A pause.
"You're smart, right? Got a power? Use that. Don't ask me for heroin, I'm not going you heroin."
Sarah's voice wheedled a little more.
"Not heroin, you orangutan, I want something else, we have stronger things, do wonderful things to your body. Krokodil, if you wouldn't mind, they keep it in those syringes with Russian writing..."
"Use your power. Leave me alone."
"Can't..."
Sophia twitched, glaring at her.
"Why?"
Sarah sniffed messily - given she had a scab instead of a nose, this was uglier than was reasonable to describe.
"Can't. Won't happen. This was prophesied, Mama Mathers said that all the faithful would be harvested, and let it not be forgotten that Christ was harvested in pieces, they took his body, they took his dignity, they took many things and in time they may have taken his faith. Martyrdom is a process with steps, she says. And she's right. Always right. So... maybe some of us would lose our powers, signal of the end times."
Sophia snorted.
"Fuck off. You didn't even have powers, that's my guess. Just drugged up and full of whatever shit you people play with. Now you're all cut off..."
Sarah spat.
"Heathen acts superior and doesn't even know why the witch-moon has risen. You don't know, and you wish I'd tell you. Signs aren't right, the moon ought to be the end, been around for a few days, should not be around. Should've broken the world by now, there should be tides of starlight washing over us, there should be choirs of Blasphemies riding the Worm-waves to bring us to our final reward in the Conjoined Heavens, there's rites and everything. Taylor Hebert, my beloved goddess, was meant to be among those choirs, she was meant to help raise the moon into the sky, but... no, no, that's it, she's still on her pilgrimage, still figuring it all out, that's the solution, she's just waiting to really get it all going. Test of faith, make us think it's failed, then..."
She trailed off, whispering madly in her cramped, dusty cell. Crystal ignored her. Tried to. Witch-moon... still no idea. No idea whatsoever. Didn't know why the weather had been so weird, too many storms. Didn't know what that... that moment had been. Few days ago. Hard to describe, but it was... she felt like the world had just, for a second, flickered. And then stabilised. Sea-sickness in a landlocked state. Sophia had noticed it, Crystal had noticed it, Sarah had had a fucking fit of religious ecstasy, but that was it. Nothing afterwards but a new moon. Rising a little before the first one. The city had been quiet after that, no humming, no singing, nothing. Like the whole place had just emptied out, like something had shifted, and she didn't know what. No more hums from the glass men, no more shrieks from the grey men, no more anything. Sophia had glanced inside, said the kudzu wasn't spreading like it usually did, looked lank. Something drained from it, some vital essence.
Something had changed, and no-one knew what.
So they sat.
And watched the wasteland.
And waited amidst fields of bodies that refused to rot, but grew shrivelled in the cold, lips pulling back from teeth and flesh discolouring, until it seemed like they were in a graveyard of purple-skinned, rabid mutants. More extradimensionals dumped on their doorstep, dead on arrival.
All they could do was hope that the radios would start working before the MREs ran out and they had to make the trek to the ice lakes, to see if they could grab some fish.
Crystal stared...
And heard the faintest sound of footsteps behind them.
She twitched. Downright flailed as she struggled to find her gun, stolen from the armoury. Sophia was faster, better reflexes, her tension snapping like a steel wire. Both of them ignored the panicked, mad gibberings of Sarah, her lunatic prophecies which even she admitted weren't coming true, and moved. Footsteps. No-one walked here. Something was coming, and...
A lone shape walked out of the shadow of the walls.
A woman. Tall. Rake-thin. Weather-beaten.
Stumbling uncertainly over the rocks towards the bodies, staring ahead. Eyes grey as the clouds above their heads. A face like... it reminded her of that picture, the famous one, from the Great Depression. Florence Owens Thompson, the Migrant Mother. Hard-worn face, lined with care, hair stianed with dust and trailing down her back from an unkempt bun. Eyes that had a narrowness to them which spoke of intelligence, but... no thoughts behind them, too burned out. Like pilot lights that needed replacing. And a downward cast to her lips which gave her gravity. Ageless face, no idea how old she was.
But she was coming out of Madison. No-one did that.
That city was dead. Let it stay that way.
Crystal yelled at her, and even years later couldn't quite remember what she said. An animal yelp of someone driven a little peculiar by the uncertainty and the loneliness.
The woman turned and stared at her from between two bodies, like a ship passing between Scylla and Charybdis. One body, thin and lanky and riddled with the sores junkies opened to deliver drugs using eye droppers, and the other, fat and bloated, with a massive set of medical staples holding the stomach together, slowly coming unstuck. Like the stomach wanted to flower, and the metal was holding it back.
She stared at Crystal.
Silent.
Wearing a clearly plundered coat, and a clearly plundered set of boots. Nothing else. And none of it fit.
Her lips curved further downwards.
Crystal licked her lips, and Sophia took over.
"Identify yourself. Now."
Spoke like a professional, even while they were both going 72 hours without sleep at this point, teeth turned mud-brown by MREs and instant coffee, clothes caked with the dead, charred, pesticide-laden grass from the wastelands, and eyes verging on feral. Sarah laughed madly behind them, voice turned tinny by the door to her cell.
The woman spoke softly.
"I know you, Sophia. You whisper the names of your siblings when you sleep."
Sophia flinched backwards like she'd been struck.
"I know you, Crystal. Not so well. But I felt you. I know what you sacrificed."
Crystal winced, feeling the phantom pain shooting up her stump. The woman's lip suddenly quivered, and her eyes gleamed with tears... before vanishing just as quickly.
"It's over."
Crystal's voice was dry as dust.
"What is?"
"Everything. Nothing will be the same again, now. She's taken it all."
Slowly crouched down, almost disappearing behind the bodies that flanked her.
"She did what we could not. She did what we could not."
"Taylor?"
"Her. Her. And..."
She sighed.
"And others."
"You... hold on, you're..."
Sophia snarled at her.
"You're the ghost. Aren't you. No fucking way you know that about me, how did-"
"It's over."
Another sigh.
"The magic's gone away."
Her voice rose suddenly.
"Blonde prophetess. It's over. Your goddess is not yours. Your mother is human. Your great mother is gone. Nothing else remains."
A low rasp from the cell. 'Liar', it said. 'Testing faith', it continued, and lapsed into repetitive mantras. Crystal coughed.
"You mean... hold on, you've... do you still have powers?"
"No."
A pause.
"And no-one else does, either. It's all over."
Crystal and Sophia stared, and Sarah began to laugh in a high, thin voice, tinged with desperation. The woman stared sullenly ahead into the wasteland, black hair blowing across her face as the sound of rotors filled the air. A lone machine, navigating over the blasted heath. Like a buzzard come to feed on the inedible dead. No, too... strange, it was like... like the last pterosaur. The last lizard-winged creature in the days when everything had ended, and all that remained was it, sliding over dead breezes tinged with the stink of decay, watching as bodies sank into prehistoric mud and hunger grew in a belly empty as a wineskin. Hoarsely croaking through a toothed beak, crying for a mate, for company, for anyone, as meteoric-ash clouds filled the horizon like a field of anvils.
Crystal shivered.
She felt like she was seeing the last helicopter out of Saigon.
***
The days to come would be defined by lack.
Lack of a name.
And lack of numbers.
In the days to come, people had no name for the incident. It was always referred to in euphemisms. People were worried that it would... come back if it was properly named, superstition filling the gaps left by knowledge. No-one had even understood it, so how could they possibly categorise it? Endbringers, over a dozen of them, operating over the world, all at once. The devastation was... substantial, even now there was no good estimate at the death toll. Bodies had been pulverised, disintegrated, in some cases were simply unrecoverable, and in China, whole human hives had vanished without anyone understanding why, finding it hard to remember if anyone had lived there to begin with. No-one would ever know the death toll. Statisticians quietly said that they might have to work on population growth - wait for the next census, then compare what the population was to what it should be, and hope that in the difference there lay some estimation of casualties. But it was unreliable. And into that gap, names fell. Even Biblical comparisons felt inaccurate. It had all the trappings of an apocalypse, but the signs were wrong, the ending was wrong, it was the event without the cultural framework.
But as days turned to months, months turned to many months, even breaching the arena of years...
People would start to call it the Fall.
It was the word most commonly used, after all.
A fall in the human population.
A fall in governments.
A fall in living standards.
A fall in Endbringer activity.
And... a fall in the number of parahumans.
They just... stopped. Every parahuman. It took hours, sometimes, but never longer than a day. Running through their last reserves, the last traces of strength. Then... then they were nothing. No powers. They simply failed. People joked about the death tolls caused by capes falling out of the sky and turning into thin red pancakes, but... the reality was, most of them had landed by then. Parahumans never talked about it. The feeling of something snapping, something severing. A network tearing out of their minds, but before it did, communicating. Land, if you flew. Transform back, if you could. Run away, if your power was keeping you alive in an environment not fit for humans. Orders, blared with the certainty of a divine trumpet. To those who didn't know, it was a glimpse of the great intelligence behind all parahumans, a glimpse of God, a glimpse of how clever and independent their own powers had been. To those who did... it came without any surprise. The Grid, after all, loathed resource loss. In its last moments, it had done... so very much, to keep humans alive.
More than most would ever know.
But even so. The full death toll would never be known.
Parahumans reacted differently to losing their powers.
Alexandria, it was said, simply stared at the battlefield for a moment with her empty sockets... then snapped her fingers and asked for dressings. Her sockets had started to bleed. She heard the silence. And knew where the chips had fallen.
The magic had gone away. Rebecca Costa-Brown was just a stern woman with thoughts that ran the same as everyone else.
Legend, supposedly, landed in the middle of a ruin, and started to try and claw people out of the rubble with his bare hands. Damaged them so much he had to ask someone else to dial his husband's number, hours later.
Of the Birdcage resident's reactions, no-one knew. When the place was opened, they found nothing inside. Everyone gone away. And some said they saw the trails of immense worms in the inch-thick dust. But no-one believed those reports.
In a solitary tube in a crisis centre, the patients were startled by the sound of rapid, panicked banging against the interior, as Panacea rediscovered a long-buried sense of claustrophobia, and rather disliked the idea of being trapped in this thing a moment longer. After extracting her, the troopers nearby wondered why on earth she'd put up with this dank little thing, as cold preservative fluid pooled around their boots.
Miss Militia held a gun in her hands, and stared at it with narrowed eyes. But nothing happened.
Buddy, Maximum Leader of the Khans, and his main squeeze Thunder-Rod, née Squealer, didn't notice any change. They were in the depths of an apocalyptic ether binge, and Buddy had his power ramped up, cancelling everything around them. He didn't notice for days that his power was off, and would remain off forever. That could, possibly, be blamed on the ether. To him, sanity had finally been restored. Thunder-Rod, notably, didn't much mind the loss. The itching in her fingers was gone, and she could sleep without waking up every few hours to get back to work.
Natalia Dabrowksi, known to the world as Mouse Protector, found herself sitting down on an eerily cold and termite-gnawed porch when her power vanished. She didn't notice much of a chance, not for a while. But when Turk came out to join her... she didn't try and start a conversation, and felt no urge to probe him on the status of his marriage. In fact, for one of the first times in her life, Natalia Dabrowski sat in silence, and felt content.
Astrid Wigazdottir noticed her powers were gone when her coffee machine produced inedible sludge instead of the delicately embossed foam she was used to. And what a frightful moment that was. But in the end... her power had killed her sister. Her power had come from the worst time in her life. Her power had made her more of a freak than she already thought she was. So she shrugged and reached for some spare tools. Always a jolt, going from automatic to manual.
Ellen Chua poked at the pile of scrap metal in front of her, and hissed as one of them cut her finger slightly. And she wondered... how long had her shirt been this filthy? How long had her fingernails become, and why were they so matted with engine oil and grease? And her hair, the less said about that the better to be perfectly blunt, the less said about that the better. She felt like something had been dragged out of her, and... it was like something had stopped poking her, repeatedly, in the back of her head. Anger was still there, but the frothing need to express it was gone. She was disgusting, she was filthy. How had she ever lived like this? Her stomach churned as she realised what she'd been living on. She felt weak. She felt thin. She felt like she'd been burned up.
And in a loud, sharp voice, she started shrieking:
"Arch? Arch? Someone?"
People were slow to respond. She yelled often, and loudly. But practically the whole safehouse came crashing down when she yelled again, and her voice was filled with emotions she almost never expressed.
"Please, I can't see, there's no lights, someone help me, please, the lights are gone."
And that, it could be generally agreed, was not a very Ellen thing to say.
More examples. Some reacted with shock and horror, some with anger, one or two with absolute relief... a few sorry souls simply fell over, dead as could be. Tinkers whose equipment was failing at a rapid rate. Changers or Breakers who hadn't heeded the advice they were given. Beings who were so reliant on their powers that life without them was... completely impossible. The Case 53s... the few ones left, didn't last long. Almost none. The lucky ones came out of it with deformities or permanent, life-changing conditions. The unlucky ones died.
More bodies for the death toll. More convolutions. Every case was unique, no-one was standard. To chart each and every one would fill up library upon library, and some people did try, interviewing ex-parahumans, but... the ultimate distinction was between looking forward or looking back. Some did the latter, and obsessed over what they'd once been. Never lost their taste for significance. Became bitter and twisted things, staring backwards as they ran towards the edges of a cliff. And some did the former. Tried to move on with their lives. Heroes tried to help as much as they could, or sagged as responsibility drained from their shoulders. Villains tried to start again as best they could, ran to countries where no cop knew their faces, or... simply found more mundane expressions of their malice.
Ultimately, that was the division.
All the above managed to move on.
Many didn't. And never would. More bodies for the pile.
The magic had gone away, and some people had overindulged in it, becoming allergic to conditions of reality. The party was over, and to most, the best and most dignified thing to do was quietly retire back into the dark. Came into parahumanity in a state of terrified ignorance, and left in a similar state, terrified, ignorant, and helpless before the will of a greater entity. Not all, though. Some knew. Some knew what had happened, knew what had done it. But only a handful knew who. Could put a name to the catastrophe. They kept their mouths shut and moved on, shuffling wearily into the next phase of their lives, in a world where everything had, abruptly, become much, much calmer.
Not one.
One, at least, continued.
One ex-parahuman continued to wear vestiges of significance around her.
And wasn't quite ready to give them up.
***
Crystal grimaced...
And pushed her wheelchair forwards.
Her frown slowly vanished as she looked at the tiny marking she'd made on the side. Just a tiny scribble with permanent marker.
Hot Rims.
Missing a leg, wheelchair-bound, and she was still a cool-ass motherfucker. Her rims were lubed, her rims were shiny, her rims were the best that a very limited budget could afford, and she liked to think that the loss of a leg had increased the value of the remaining one. Having two great legs was impressive, but, y'know, there were two, halving the value of each. But now she had a little reminder to the world - beauty was fleeting, legs could be taken, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, banging thighs to stumpy sighs. Didn't... quite make sense, but, hey, look the bright side. Point was, her legs were now very limited edition, that probably meant something good.
And she hadn't had a drink of alcohol in weeks.
Vicky wouldn't want her to.
Airport. Filled with military, checking over more evacuation flights. They said Los Angeles had just been... changed, turned into a festering ruin. Had to evacuate downright everyone from that place. No parahumans to help out, and it lent the entire operation an air of... reality. The comedians had all gone home, and now the drab-clothed cleaners were tidying up the stage. She felt like a kid at a grown-up party. She could offer nothing to them now, her training had been fine, but... she wasn't a soldier. Not with her leg the way it was, not with her the way she was. They said parahumans were just being politely told to fuck off back home, unless they had something to offer. Some were able to plug into the military, and some just retired in painful silence. A patrol of regular infantrymen slogged through the terminal gates, uniforms stained with unnameable fluids. Nilbog clean-up. Going through Ellisburg and dumping the corpses of his mutants into massive pyres. With their king gone, Nilbog's bunch had just... fallen. Tumbled over and died. The soldiers looked young. Very young. Sent to the shittiest duties so the big boys could handle the rest. She gave them a sympathetic smile as they walked past, and one of them flashed her a small, shy grin.
Something in his expression made her pause.
"...Crystal, honey? Something wrong?"
Her mom had her hands on her chair. Liked to be helpful. Even when it wasn't necessary.
"Just... nothing. Come on."
Something in his eyes. She saw it more and more now. This fundamental shift. Parahumans were gone. All of them. Lost their powers and became like everyone else, almost. Some had lingering use, bodies which retained strength or minds which retained knowledge, but not her. Not Crystal. Humans had gone from roles of... basic insignificance to their old position. Everyone could feel it, humans were back. Parahumans had been dragged back down to a normal level, everyone was equal beneath the witch-moon. There was to be no explanation for it, no official one, and that equalised the world a little. The parahuman elite and the human underclass were unified in their confusion. Soldiers were doing their jobs with more confidence, aware that they weren't going to be inflicted with fates worse than death. Politicians were operating with louder voices as they realised the world was actually listening to them again, they'd stopped being a sideshow. She'd honestly forgotten the vice-president's name, but now he was everywhere, giving talks, rallying the troops, doing all the things people used to do before evolution had pushed them into irrelevancy. And she'd seen some guy, the old anchor for parahuman affairs on a local network, just... sitting around with a lost expression on his face, unsure of what he was meant to do now.
Let it be said, though, he didn't look overly sad.
The Fall had been frightening, but... no more Endbringers. No more villains. No-one had heard from the Slaughterhouse Nine, the Blasphemies were silent, the Ash Beast had stopped.
"Is... Amy coming along?"
Her mom's lips twisted uncomfortably.
"No, not today. She's... having a hard time. On some good courses, the government's being very nice, given her past service and all, but... she needs time to get used to people again. They're working upwards from singular people she trusts, an airport would be too much."
"Yeah. Yeah."
Last she'd seen her, Amy had been sitting, hollow-eyed, in a white waiting room wearing a hospital gown. First time she'd been in a hospital in years as something other than a healer. Plug sockets everywhere, skin pale from being in a tube all the time, shivering and twitching whenever someone came too close, and according to the doctors, very much at risk of developing some nasty chemical dependencies. Too used to using inhibitors to keep herself steady, had to make sure she didn't hook herself on something as a replacement. None of the adults looked comfortable around her, nor her around them. Knew why.
It was so... infuriating, she was back into the old family dramas, and the world was changing. She had no idea what was happening outside of America, nothing but scraps. Everything was so uncertain, there was a new moon, and... and she knew nothing.
She knew nothing.
Maybe that'd change today.
A thin stream of travellers poured into the terminal. Beyond them, on the battered landing strip, there was a single, small plane. Absolutely filthy, no-one had cleaned the thing in months, just whirling around from airport to airport constantly. Everything felt a little grimier now. A post-party floor, stained with booze and vomit, seen in the cold light of day as... well, a filthy floor. The dark and the heat and the thrill had faded. The travellers who came off were uniformly haggard and jet-lagged. Businessmen and women, largely. These people were hashing out the new world order, one agreement at a time. Behind closed doors, no-one allowed inside, and working with contracts that altered a single thousandth of a percent of the new world, so tiny that it was meaningless, but with thousands made every day...
The new world was being made one percent at a time by people like this.
And as she heard a few talking to each other in Russian...
She knew she had the right plane.
Knew it when a flash of blonde hair was sighted.
Her mom yelled after her as she drove her wheelchair forwards - this was why she had lubed rims - and practically bowled businessmen aside as she charged for Vicky. Who cared if she was haggard, who cared if she had an expression of absolute grief, who cared if she looked slightly different and had a body again and that body was sort of the wrong shape and her eyes were mismatched with one normal and the other darker and who cared.
She slammed her wheelchair's brakes...
And catapulted herself from it.
Been practising this little number for ages.
Vicky didn't flinch as Crystal absolutely tackled her, wrapping her up in the tightest possible hug she could manage.
And hesitantly, Vicky returned the hug. No more Butcher. No more New Wave. No more Amy in a tube. No more powers.
Just two humans in an airport terminal.
Crystal couldn't be happier.
***
"...you wouldn't believe it, but there was this judgement in... Tallahassee, court of appeals, someone actually managed to plead parahuman. Not insanity, parahuman. They said they used to be a parahuman, so they weren't in a sound state of mind during the time of their crimes, was a different person altogether, and so get all the benefits of pleading insanity... while not actually having to go to a mental hospital. Total get out of jail free card, and the judge bought it. Apparently there's already been a mess of prisoners who are claiming the same thing."
"Think it'll work?"
"I think it'll keep going until someone goes too far, it gets bumped up to the top of the judicial radar, legislative radar, someone starts passing laws, someone challenges those laws, I don't know. I don't know where it stops, honestly, but it's going to be messy."
Carol sighed.
"Honestly, shame I only do divorce law, you know Sally? Over from Madsen and Gatsby? Yeah, she's apparently already started making deposits on a new TV, thinks she's going to be hot-footing it from court to court for years now."
Crystal hummed politely, nodded when she should, incapable of really sustaining a normal conversation, not like the adults could. Ate her slightly gummy meatloaf like a normal human, though, normal as hell while she did that.
Flexed her new leg and suppressed a smile.
Technically she didn't have a new leg, of course. Technically her injuries had been misreported, not as severe as they were meant to be, and this was always her leg. Ignore the photos of her in a wheelchair, they were doctored and probably planted by Communists to suppress the Yankee fighting spirit. Vicky had friends, apparently. High-placed friends with tip-ex and access to the right filing cabinets.
The leg was a good distraction from the dinner.
And from Vicky.
A few months. Weird to think about.
No college. Colleges were fucked, some were just gone after an Endbringer looked at them funny, some had collapsed once the economy went to some very interesting places, one or two had vanished now that the object of their study (i.e parahumans) had ceased to exist. Her own college had lost a bunch of students, too many. Some dead, some run off to get real jobs, some incapable of imagining just getting back to normal. Couldn't fill the roster, couldn't pay its professors, had to close its doors. Going to try and apply elsewhere, but... honestly, she couldn't be bothered. College felt so small. And she was... alright, it was nerve-wracking being in public without powers. Made her think of... when she triggered. Not like many people recognised her, but whenever someone did, she felt this chill of fear run down her spine and wondered if this was the day when it happened again. It never did. But she always thought it might.
Considering going into the army instead. PRT was gone. Army felt honest. Army felt useful. Army, somehow, felt safe.
...but not yet.
Not while Vicky was like this.
Her cousin was staring at her meal dully, eating with mechanical repetition. Looked... she didn't look like she was here. Not always. She was tidy, clean, polite, but all of it was strained. Talked with her parents, but was clearly working on a different wavelength, found it hard to connect, even if she was clearly still affectionate towards them. Affection without connection, interaction without engagement. Her hair was clean, but wasn't glossy, wasn't cared for in the way she used to. She wore too much denim, even now, liked wearing ratty clothing instead of the fashionable stuff she'd always preferred when she was... when she was normal. She ate, but she wasn't tasting anything. She talked, but didn't say a damn word. Her parents kept looking at her nervously. They remembered her as the Butcher. Crystal did too, but she also remembered her as Viktoriya, and as... well, as a hero. Doing what she'd always done. Killing the Butcher permanently. Her parents lacked the luxury. Only knew her as the Butcher, then this silent, strange woman who didn't quite seem to live in the world she inhabited. Disconnected.
She wandered around, did all the things humans ought to, but every so often... ah, here, she was doing it now.
Her eyes would widen - one a little darker than the other for reasons she didn't address - and she'd seem to stir from a deep sleep... and wake up into another dream, one she didn't enjoy being in. And then her fork would freeze in mid-air, her fingers would shake very slightly, and she'd stare from person to person, not seeming to quite recognise them. Her parents noticed it when the look came upon her, and they'd shrink slightly, their conversation dying for a second. Crystal saw it directed at herself, once or twice. Even Amy, when Vicky was able to visit her in hospital, inspired the look.
Vicky only wavered between dreams now. Two dreams. One pleasant-but-dead, and one awful-but-alive.
In all her time back, she hadn't really woken up once.
She vanished sometimes. Left at odd hours. Didn't come back for days on a few occasions. Met with peculiar people. Bikers. Weird academics. Homeless people with wild eyes. Crystal had seen her down at the library, staying there from the second it opened to the second it closed. Her notes were always written in other languages, usually something that seemed almost German, almost French, and yet neither. Once, though, it was in Japanese. Crystal remembered the title, had plugged it into a computer to translate it. Took longer than it should, internet was spottier now, had blackouts that lasted for days upon days. Five Letters on Revolution. Which sounded ominous, and possibly illegal. Vicky barely slept, her bed hadn't needed to be made in days, she didn't use it enough. Didn't talk about jobs, or college, or the future. Only seemed to have one friend besides Crystal. Strange, dark-haired woman. No idea of her name, where she was from, how Vicky knew her...
And no idea what Taylor had done.
What had happened to her.
Vicky didn't talk about it. Didn't want to. Gave hints, but... didn't provide the full story.
Too painful, maybe. Too sensitive. Said Taylor had saved her life, and that was it. The fact that she'd burst out of Madison when everything went to hell, then vanished when it went back from hell into the arena of normality was a complete coincidence. Vicky returned to her meal in silence, nodding faintly when people addressed her, humming at the right times... doing nothing besides. Meal, admittedly, wasn't great. Everyone was hungry these days, ingredients were scarce, and she didn't want to say anything, but she was keenly aware that the nearest butcher had started selling cheaper meat right around when the stray dog problem quietened down. But... food was food. Food was food. Better than most people had it. Weather had been weird ever since... everything.
Aunt Carol looked up suddenly, narrowing her eyes.
"That's the alarm for... dust storm, right?"
Crystal grunted and stood, starting to move for the windows.
Arizona loomed before her. Eerily cold for this time of year. Shouldn't be this way, and the dust storms shouldn't be happening, but... nothing was quite right at the moment. Explanations were still forthcoming - maybe the witch's moon had done it, maybe the Endbringers had left some nasty surprises. She'd arrived in Phoenix airport to head out to their new house, and had found it snowing. Phoenix had snow now. She started fastening the windows closed, ignoring the rows of dead cacti which surrounded the house like tombstones. A Gila monster stared at her, eerily thin and eerily pale, eyes wide with hunger. It ran a black tongue over pale white lips, and watched the house for any signs of openings.
Vicky was next to her. Hadn't even seen her move.
Already dipping her hands into a clay jar they used for keeping the dried protein grubs. Using those things was like putting sawdust into a rice krispie cake, just a matter of finding the right percentage to sneak into the food before people noticed.
Once upon a time, only the poor ate these things.
Nowadays, felt like everyone did.
Vicky threw a handful of the bodies out, and the Gila monster lunged for them, snapping them up eagerly and scuttling back to a rock before anything could come and compete.
"They'll just keep coming back, you know, if you keep feeding them."
Crystal kept her voice low. Knew her aunt and uncle weren't... fond of the wildlife around here. Rattlesnakes became a lot spookier when you couldn't vaporise them on sight.
"I'm aware."
"...still doing it, though?"
"Yep."
"Like them?"
"Not particularly. Just feel responsible."
Responsible for what? The climate changing?
She'd drop hints like that every so often. Responsible for things. She looked guilty when the news came on and some new crisis was addressed. Crisis in Peru as massive landslides from the Andes wiped out a few towns, courtesy of that... smoke-Endbringer, the one Vicky had called 'Ophion' when questioned. Reports from Los Angeles of scavengers being hired to pick through the enormous death-maze to look for people's valuables that'd been left behind. Reports from Florida of alligators shambling out of the ruins of Miami, population explosion as they fed on corpses left in the water. Crisis in China that no-one knew anything about. Crisis in Washington as multiple senators and congressmen turned out to be involved with parahuman criminals, or mysteriously, spontaneously lost enormous sources of funding that was never quite explained. Crisis in Russia as Red Gauntlet was starting to get taken apart, records released to the public showing lengthy campaigns of assassinations and blackmail to make sure that Russia stayed nicely divided. Keeping Red Gauntlet at the top of the pile, the only universally recognised police and defence force. No more. Reports of black-blooded corpses washing up on the shores of Lake Erie. More stuff on refugee resettlement, from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Florida, everywhere.
She looked guilty at all of them.
Looked guilty whenever she saw the Robertson family. Lost their father and two children to the Twins attack on Los Angeles.
The adults started moving to clear things up, had a talent for acting normal in the face of complete insanity. Locked up one daughter in a tube, left the other one to the Butcher, and possibly were all screwing each other in different combinations. Yeah, hard to... really engage with them after that, not in the unashamed way they'd used to. The adults had work, and that was enough. Had to buckle down for another storm.
And the two were left alone.
"I'm leaving soon."
Crystal smiled faintly.
"You think I didn't know that?"
"...really?"
"You barely sleep, you barely do anything but go to the library, talk to weird people... you're not happy, that's obvious."
A soft red glow started to spill under the blinds. Witch's moon rising. Vicky shivered at the sight of it, reaching up to scratch the flesh around her slightly darker eye she refused to explain.
"Thanks for telling me, though. Wouldn't enjoy waking up with you just gone. Where are you heading?"
"No idea, depends."
"On?"
"On where I need to go."
"...you're not going bounty hunting or something?"
"No, no, just... need to ask some questions."
A pause.
"I need to find some closure. That's it. Once I'm done, I'll come back, think about the future. Tried to do that before now, just... couldn't. I need to-"
"Find Taylor?"
She froze.
"It's obvious you miss her. You never talk about her. What happened out there? What did you-"
"I'll explain when I get back."
The red glow intensified. Moonrise was always eerie, everything in her mind screaming that she shouldn't be seeing that light. Once it was up it was fine, but that initial glow... those first few rays, it was like seeing it come up into the sky for the first time. When she thought that a new Endbringer had shown up, bigger and nastier than all the others, that the apocalypse was really happening. Coyotes howled mournfully in the desert, disliking the light. Nothing felt quite... right under the witch's moon. Nothing. Her skin itched, her leg definitely itched, and she felt like... like she was remembering something. How much things had changed, not just in terms of climate or politics, but something invisible. Like... she'd missed the change the first time, and now she got a taste of what it used to be like beforehand, and realised just how... odd it had been. How strange the world had really felt. She found herself thinking about that gleaming razor Vicky had owned, or the yellow fire she'd seen in that hospital in Brockton Bay, or everything. The ozone-scented roars of the Butcher.
For a second, it was like the world had gone back.
And she realised just how frightening things had been.
"...you could explain now."
"Can't. Leaving tonight. Tell my parents I love them and I'll... be back soon."
"Money?"
"I'm fine on that front. Might drop off the... grid for a bit, but I'll be around. No need to worry if I'll be safe."
Crystal grimaced.
"Knew this was going to happen. Still not enjoying it."
"Anticipation makes it worse?"
"Probably. You sure you'll be safe? You're not invulnerable any more."
Vicky smiled sadly.
"I don't think I need to be. The things that made it worth being invulnerable, they're... not exactly around now. Apologise to them for me, please. I don't want to face them at the moment."
"You're already packed?"
"Left my bag with a friend. Was ready to go a few days ago."
"Where to first, then?"
"San Francisco."
"Going to say why?"
"Best not to."
Crystal pulled her into a small hug, letting her go a moment later. Anything longer would feel like a proper goodbye, like she was resigning herself to losing her all over again. Vicky patted her shoulder a second later. And without further ceremony... she was gone. Moving to the door with a stride that grew more certain with each repetition, each step jerking her awake a little more until... until she seemed to wake up for the first time in months. First time since she'd come home. Her shoulders hunched, she pulled a battered coat from a peg in the hall, kicked the dust from a pair of old boots... she'd really been ready, even had a shoehorn in her pocket, just to make things easier. Crystal watched her prepare to go, saw the light returning to her eyes...
She reached out automatically to open the front door.
Someone was already waiting. The odd, dark-haired woman, slim to the point of emaciation, with a face that hovered between consciously stoic and intensely sad. Her hair was slicked back over her head, too much product, holding it into a kind of swimmer's cap. Left her features with a bird-like arch to them, made her nose seem unpleasantly beak-like. Nothing she wore fit quite well, and her dark coat hung around her like a cassock. Nothing seemed designed to flatter, everything was angled towards concealment, self-consciousness visible in every baggy fold or additional layer.
Her voice was small and accented.
"Ready?"
"Yeah. Ready."
Crystal was already there with them, at the door. Moved before she really thought about it. She poked the bird-like woman in the chest, sending her back a step.
"Take care of her, or I'll hit you with a lead pipe."
A few twitchy nods.
"Of course. I intend to."
A small, small smile.
"There are others interested in her remaining intact, you may have to join a queue if-"
Vicky grunted, tying her boots properly. Interrupting all proceedings by standing up, heels clicking against the hardwood floor like judge's gavels. Dim voices from inside - parents talking, would be coming out soon. By all rights should talk to them, warn them, do whatever. But... Crystal thought she understood how Vicky felt. The same distance. Disconnection. They wouldn't understand, because they hadn't been there, hadn't seen it. Some things, they... you needed to be there. None of their parents had been there. But they had. And with that presence came a certain elevation. Crystal smiled, in a small, reluctant way, understanding fully but still sad to see her cousin go.
"You should get moving. Don't want to get caught by them."
"Right. See you soon, Crystal."
"Promise?"
"Promise. Don't think it'll take another four years."
"I'll hold you to that. Can't shoot lasers, but I can still kick your ass."
No more ceremony.
Any more ceremony and it'd feel too final. She watched sadly as Vicky walked away over the desert dust, heading for a battered small car, years out of date and rattling alarmingly. Knew Vicky wanted to get a motorcycle, had seen her trying to budget it out, see how she would finagle getting a chopper back. No luck thus far, and the car reflected that. Cheap, ugly, and clearly temporary. A brief exchange - Vicky calling to the odd woman.
"You look good. The coat suits you."
The odd woman preened, strangely peacock-like.
"Yes. I do."
"Where'd you get it?"
"Orvis. Suits you."
"Said that twice. Entirely correct on both occasions. It does suit me."
"Yep."
"I look fashionable."
"You look fine, don't overplay yourself."
A sniff of derision. The odd woman lingered behind for a moment, letting Vicky walk ahead...
"Hey, one more thing."
The woman twitched at Crystal's half-shout, quiet enough not to be heard by sensitive ears.
"Yes?"
"Who are you? You feel familiar."
A tiny smile.
"Yes, I suppose I would. It's nice to see you, though. Glad you're doing well."
Crystal shot her a stern look.
"Take care of her. And bring her back."
"I'm... going to do my best.
Crystal smiled faintly.
"Is 'Going To Do My Best' your name? Can I call you Going?"
A faint smile in return.
"No, I have a name."
"Mind telling me?"
The woman started walking towards the car. Called over her shoulder, voice half-stolen by the rising dust storm.
"Chorei."
Crystal stared out dumbly, gnawing on a ration bar that had been miraculously spared. Unsurprising. It was remarkably tasteless, even the Fallen would struggle to get much fun out of it. Not unless it turned out you could make amazing edibles out of PRT MREs. Which she doubted.
Above her, a red moon glittered in the sky. She was trying her best not to look up at that. Felt wise to keep her eyes away from that, and she felt like being wise was probably the wisest thing a wise person could be, and she felt like being a wise person was the wisest thing to be in the wisest of all possible worlds. In short, she didn't look up. Because that red moon scared the shit out of her. Everything did, right now. Madison was a ghost town, she had no powers, her cousin was gone again, everything had gone to hell, and all the radios stopped working. For days she'd sat here. Didn't dare go beyond the base, no telling what was still out there, what mines were active, what drones were operational. No-one came. And no-one left. For days and days she sat in this base, queen of rats and dead grass, surrounded by the corpses of the Fallen. So contaminated by their own brand of narcotics that the flies wouldn't even touch them, all of them were surrounded by black outlines, like the chalk they used to draw around dead bodies. Difference being that these were made from rotting insects that had tried to have a nibble. She chewed morosely. Staring.
Sophia was in her customary position.
Sitting. Staring. Hands on her knees, knees tucked up close to her chest, looking like a small gargoyle. She hadn't relaxed the muscles in her back in days. Refused to.
Sometimes she seemed to stop blinking for hours at a time.
Crystal understood. Wished she'd talk more.
She was going a little mad out here.
All the radios, dead. No idea what was going on in the outside world. Closest thing to a sane person around here was absolutely silent. The refugee camps were... they were dead. Gone. Wiped out by Monitor, most likely, cannibalised and turned into breeding hives for her insects. They found the cocoons where people had been wrapped up in spider thread, found the carcasses filled with honeycombs and writhing with left-behind grubs. They didn't go inside Madison, not now. Too many webs. Too much uncertainty. Madison was... a place that deserved to be dead, fulfilled all its purposes and was no longer necessary. Let it be quiet and still and forgotten. Crystal was certainly trying to accomplish that last part. Another glance at Sophia... silence and tension. Watching the wasteland for any sign of change.
"...and thus the red moon rises, but not the correct one, no, no, the signs are wrong, the moon is too still, the tides have not come, this has not been enumerated in any single prediction, and... oh, Crystal darling, cousin-sister to divinities, would you possibly mind looking for something for me? Something I can poke into my veins and depress? I can feel my blood aching for it, I need something to really get my predictions going, I can't... they're not coming, nothing is coming, surely you must understand that when a young lady has her knees broken she needs to have a crutch? Won't you give me a lovely chemical crutch? Please..."
Wished someone else would join Sophia in her wasteland-gazing.
Sarah was... the fucking worst. Kept her in the ruined brig, same place Crystal had escaped from. Mechanisms were all broken, had to give her a broken cell with a door they had to drill into place to seal up. Literally held the thing together with duct tape in some places, the door had been... slightly shattered when they found it.
But boy oh boy, Sarah found a way to still annoy them from captivity.
"No. Nothing."
A pause.
"You're smart, right? Got a power? Use that. Don't ask me for heroin, I'm not going you heroin."
Sarah's voice wheedled a little more.
"Not heroin, you orangutan, I want something else, we have stronger things, do wonderful things to your body. Krokodil, if you wouldn't mind, they keep it in those syringes with Russian writing..."
"Use your power. Leave me alone."
"Can't..."
Sophia twitched, glaring at her.
"Why?"
Sarah sniffed messily - given she had a scab instead of a nose, this was uglier than was reasonable to describe.
"Can't. Won't happen. This was prophesied, Mama Mathers said that all the faithful would be harvested, and let it not be forgotten that Christ was harvested in pieces, they took his body, they took his dignity, they took many things and in time they may have taken his faith. Martyrdom is a process with steps, she says. And she's right. Always right. So... maybe some of us would lose our powers, signal of the end times."
Sophia snorted.
"Fuck off. You didn't even have powers, that's my guess. Just drugged up and full of whatever shit you people play with. Now you're all cut off..."
Sarah spat.
"Heathen acts superior and doesn't even know why the witch-moon has risen. You don't know, and you wish I'd tell you. Signs aren't right, the moon ought to be the end, been around for a few days, should not be around. Should've broken the world by now, there should be tides of starlight washing over us, there should be choirs of Blasphemies riding the Worm-waves to bring us to our final reward in the Conjoined Heavens, there's rites and everything. Taylor Hebert, my beloved goddess, was meant to be among those choirs, she was meant to help raise the moon into the sky, but... no, no, that's it, she's still on her pilgrimage, still figuring it all out, that's the solution, she's just waiting to really get it all going. Test of faith, make us think it's failed, then..."
She trailed off, whispering madly in her cramped, dusty cell. Crystal ignored her. Tried to. Witch-moon... still no idea. No idea whatsoever. Didn't know why the weather had been so weird, too many storms. Didn't know what that... that moment had been. Few days ago. Hard to describe, but it was... she felt like the world had just, for a second, flickered. And then stabilised. Sea-sickness in a landlocked state. Sophia had noticed it, Crystal had noticed it, Sarah had had a fucking fit of religious ecstasy, but that was it. Nothing afterwards but a new moon. Rising a little before the first one. The city had been quiet after that, no humming, no singing, nothing. Like the whole place had just emptied out, like something had shifted, and she didn't know what. No more hums from the glass men, no more shrieks from the grey men, no more anything. Sophia had glanced inside, said the kudzu wasn't spreading like it usually did, looked lank. Something drained from it, some vital essence.
Something had changed, and no-one knew what.
So they sat.
And watched the wasteland.
And waited amidst fields of bodies that refused to rot, but grew shrivelled in the cold, lips pulling back from teeth and flesh discolouring, until it seemed like they were in a graveyard of purple-skinned, rabid mutants. More extradimensionals dumped on their doorstep, dead on arrival.
All they could do was hope that the radios would start working before the MREs ran out and they had to make the trek to the ice lakes, to see if they could grab some fish.
Crystal stared...
And heard the faintest sound of footsteps behind them.
She twitched. Downright flailed as she struggled to find her gun, stolen from the armoury. Sophia was faster, better reflexes, her tension snapping like a steel wire. Both of them ignored the panicked, mad gibberings of Sarah, her lunatic prophecies which even she admitted weren't coming true, and moved. Footsteps. No-one walked here. Something was coming, and...
A lone shape walked out of the shadow of the walls.
A woman. Tall. Rake-thin. Weather-beaten.
Stumbling uncertainly over the rocks towards the bodies, staring ahead. Eyes grey as the clouds above their heads. A face like... it reminded her of that picture, the famous one, from the Great Depression. Florence Owens Thompson, the Migrant Mother. Hard-worn face, lined with care, hair stianed with dust and trailing down her back from an unkempt bun. Eyes that had a narrowness to them which spoke of intelligence, but... no thoughts behind them, too burned out. Like pilot lights that needed replacing. And a downward cast to her lips which gave her gravity. Ageless face, no idea how old she was.
But she was coming out of Madison. No-one did that.
That city was dead. Let it stay that way.
Crystal yelled at her, and even years later couldn't quite remember what she said. An animal yelp of someone driven a little peculiar by the uncertainty and the loneliness.
The woman turned and stared at her from between two bodies, like a ship passing between Scylla and Charybdis. One body, thin and lanky and riddled with the sores junkies opened to deliver drugs using eye droppers, and the other, fat and bloated, with a massive set of medical staples holding the stomach together, slowly coming unstuck. Like the stomach wanted to flower, and the metal was holding it back.
She stared at Crystal.
Silent.
Wearing a clearly plundered coat, and a clearly plundered set of boots. Nothing else. And none of it fit.
Her lips curved further downwards.
Crystal licked her lips, and Sophia took over.
"Identify yourself. Now."
Spoke like a professional, even while they were both going 72 hours without sleep at this point, teeth turned mud-brown by MREs and instant coffee, clothes caked with the dead, charred, pesticide-laden grass from the wastelands, and eyes verging on feral. Sarah laughed madly behind them, voice turned tinny by the door to her cell.
The woman spoke softly.
"I know you, Sophia. You whisper the names of your siblings when you sleep."
Sophia flinched backwards like she'd been struck.
"I know you, Crystal. Not so well. But I felt you. I know what you sacrificed."
Crystal winced, feeling the phantom pain shooting up her stump. The woman's lip suddenly quivered, and her eyes gleamed with tears... before vanishing just as quickly.
"It's over."
Crystal's voice was dry as dust.
"What is?"
"Everything. Nothing will be the same again, now. She's taken it all."
Slowly crouched down, almost disappearing behind the bodies that flanked her.
"She did what we could not. She did what we could not."
"Taylor?"
"Her. Her. And..."
She sighed.
"And others."
"You... hold on, you're..."
Sophia snarled at her.
"You're the ghost. Aren't you. No fucking way you know that about me, how did-"
"It's over."
Another sigh.
"The magic's gone away."
Her voice rose suddenly.
"Blonde prophetess. It's over. Your goddess is not yours. Your mother is human. Your great mother is gone. Nothing else remains."
A low rasp from the cell. 'Liar', it said. 'Testing faith', it continued, and lapsed into repetitive mantras. Crystal coughed.
"You mean... hold on, you've... do you still have powers?"
"No."
A pause.
"And no-one else does, either. It's all over."
Crystal and Sophia stared, and Sarah began to laugh in a high, thin voice, tinged with desperation. The woman stared sullenly ahead into the wasteland, black hair blowing across her face as the sound of rotors filled the air. A lone machine, navigating over the blasted heath. Like a buzzard come to feed on the inedible dead. No, too... strange, it was like... like the last pterosaur. The last lizard-winged creature in the days when everything had ended, and all that remained was it, sliding over dead breezes tinged with the stink of decay, watching as bodies sank into prehistoric mud and hunger grew in a belly empty as a wineskin. Hoarsely croaking through a toothed beak, crying for a mate, for company, for anyone, as meteoric-ash clouds filled the horizon like a field of anvils.
Crystal shivered.
She felt like she was seeing the last helicopter out of Saigon.
***
The days to come would be defined by lack.
Lack of a name.
And lack of numbers.
In the days to come, people had no name for the incident. It was always referred to in euphemisms. People were worried that it would... come back if it was properly named, superstition filling the gaps left by knowledge. No-one had even understood it, so how could they possibly categorise it? Endbringers, over a dozen of them, operating over the world, all at once. The devastation was... substantial, even now there was no good estimate at the death toll. Bodies had been pulverised, disintegrated, in some cases were simply unrecoverable, and in China, whole human hives had vanished without anyone understanding why, finding it hard to remember if anyone had lived there to begin with. No-one would ever know the death toll. Statisticians quietly said that they might have to work on population growth - wait for the next census, then compare what the population was to what it should be, and hope that in the difference there lay some estimation of casualties. But it was unreliable. And into that gap, names fell. Even Biblical comparisons felt inaccurate. It had all the trappings of an apocalypse, but the signs were wrong, the ending was wrong, it was the event without the cultural framework.
But as days turned to months, months turned to many months, even breaching the arena of years...
People would start to call it the Fall.
It was the word most commonly used, after all.
A fall in the human population.
A fall in governments.
A fall in living standards.
A fall in Endbringer activity.
And... a fall in the number of parahumans.
They just... stopped. Every parahuman. It took hours, sometimes, but never longer than a day. Running through their last reserves, the last traces of strength. Then... then they were nothing. No powers. They simply failed. People joked about the death tolls caused by capes falling out of the sky and turning into thin red pancakes, but... the reality was, most of them had landed by then. Parahumans never talked about it. The feeling of something snapping, something severing. A network tearing out of their minds, but before it did, communicating. Land, if you flew. Transform back, if you could. Run away, if your power was keeping you alive in an environment not fit for humans. Orders, blared with the certainty of a divine trumpet. To those who didn't know, it was a glimpse of the great intelligence behind all parahumans, a glimpse of God, a glimpse of how clever and independent their own powers had been. To those who did... it came without any surprise. The Grid, after all, loathed resource loss. In its last moments, it had done... so very much, to keep humans alive.
More than most would ever know.
But even so. The full death toll would never be known.
Parahumans reacted differently to losing their powers.
Alexandria, it was said, simply stared at the battlefield for a moment with her empty sockets... then snapped her fingers and asked for dressings. Her sockets had started to bleed. She heard the silence. And knew where the chips had fallen.
The magic had gone away. Rebecca Costa-Brown was just a stern woman with thoughts that ran the same as everyone else.
Legend, supposedly, landed in the middle of a ruin, and started to try and claw people out of the rubble with his bare hands. Damaged them so much he had to ask someone else to dial his husband's number, hours later.
Of the Birdcage resident's reactions, no-one knew. When the place was opened, they found nothing inside. Everyone gone away. And some said they saw the trails of immense worms in the inch-thick dust. But no-one believed those reports.
In a solitary tube in a crisis centre, the patients were startled by the sound of rapid, panicked banging against the interior, as Panacea rediscovered a long-buried sense of claustrophobia, and rather disliked the idea of being trapped in this thing a moment longer. After extracting her, the troopers nearby wondered why on earth she'd put up with this dank little thing, as cold preservative fluid pooled around their boots.
Miss Militia held a gun in her hands, and stared at it with narrowed eyes. But nothing happened.
Buddy, Maximum Leader of the Khans, and his main squeeze Thunder-Rod, née Squealer, didn't notice any change. They were in the depths of an apocalyptic ether binge, and Buddy had his power ramped up, cancelling everything around them. He didn't notice for days that his power was off, and would remain off forever. That could, possibly, be blamed on the ether. To him, sanity had finally been restored. Thunder-Rod, notably, didn't much mind the loss. The itching in her fingers was gone, and she could sleep without waking up every few hours to get back to work.
Natalia Dabrowksi, known to the world as Mouse Protector, found herself sitting down on an eerily cold and termite-gnawed porch when her power vanished. She didn't notice much of a chance, not for a while. But when Turk came out to join her... she didn't try and start a conversation, and felt no urge to probe him on the status of his marriage. In fact, for one of the first times in her life, Natalia Dabrowski sat in silence, and felt content.
Astrid Wigazdottir noticed her powers were gone when her coffee machine produced inedible sludge instead of the delicately embossed foam she was used to. And what a frightful moment that was. But in the end... her power had killed her sister. Her power had come from the worst time in her life. Her power had made her more of a freak than she already thought she was. So she shrugged and reached for some spare tools. Always a jolt, going from automatic to manual.
Ellen Chua poked at the pile of scrap metal in front of her, and hissed as one of them cut her finger slightly. And she wondered... how long had her shirt been this filthy? How long had her fingernails become, and why were they so matted with engine oil and grease? And her hair, the less said about that the better to be perfectly blunt, the less said about that the better. She felt like something had been dragged out of her, and... it was like something had stopped poking her, repeatedly, in the back of her head. Anger was still there, but the frothing need to express it was gone. She was disgusting, she was filthy. How had she ever lived like this? Her stomach churned as she realised what she'd been living on. She felt weak. She felt thin. She felt like she'd been burned up.
And in a loud, sharp voice, she started shrieking:
"Arch? Arch? Someone?"
People were slow to respond. She yelled often, and loudly. But practically the whole safehouse came crashing down when she yelled again, and her voice was filled with emotions she almost never expressed.
"Please, I can't see, there's no lights, someone help me, please, the lights are gone."
And that, it could be generally agreed, was not a very Ellen thing to say.
More examples. Some reacted with shock and horror, some with anger, one or two with absolute relief... a few sorry souls simply fell over, dead as could be. Tinkers whose equipment was failing at a rapid rate. Changers or Breakers who hadn't heeded the advice they were given. Beings who were so reliant on their powers that life without them was... completely impossible. The Case 53s... the few ones left, didn't last long. Almost none. The lucky ones came out of it with deformities or permanent, life-changing conditions. The unlucky ones died.
More bodies for the death toll. More convolutions. Every case was unique, no-one was standard. To chart each and every one would fill up library upon library, and some people did try, interviewing ex-parahumans, but... the ultimate distinction was between looking forward or looking back. Some did the latter, and obsessed over what they'd once been. Never lost their taste for significance. Became bitter and twisted things, staring backwards as they ran towards the edges of a cliff. And some did the former. Tried to move on with their lives. Heroes tried to help as much as they could, or sagged as responsibility drained from their shoulders. Villains tried to start again as best they could, ran to countries where no cop knew their faces, or... simply found more mundane expressions of their malice.
Ultimately, that was the division.
All the above managed to move on.
Many didn't. And never would. More bodies for the pile.
The magic had gone away, and some people had overindulged in it, becoming allergic to conditions of reality. The party was over, and to most, the best and most dignified thing to do was quietly retire back into the dark. Came into parahumanity in a state of terrified ignorance, and left in a similar state, terrified, ignorant, and helpless before the will of a greater entity. Not all, though. Some knew. Some knew what had happened, knew what had done it. But only a handful knew who. Could put a name to the catastrophe. They kept their mouths shut and moved on, shuffling wearily into the next phase of their lives, in a world where everything had, abruptly, become much, much calmer.
Not one.
One, at least, continued.
One ex-parahuman continued to wear vestiges of significance around her.
And wasn't quite ready to give them up.
***
Crystal grimaced...
And pushed her wheelchair forwards.
Her frown slowly vanished as she looked at the tiny marking she'd made on the side. Just a tiny scribble with permanent marker.
Hot Rims.
Missing a leg, wheelchair-bound, and she was still a cool-ass motherfucker. Her rims were lubed, her rims were shiny, her rims were the best that a very limited budget could afford, and she liked to think that the loss of a leg had increased the value of the remaining one. Having two great legs was impressive, but, y'know, there were two, halving the value of each. But now she had a little reminder to the world - beauty was fleeting, legs could be taken, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, banging thighs to stumpy sighs. Didn't... quite make sense, but, hey, look the bright side. Point was, her legs were now very limited edition, that probably meant something good.
And she hadn't had a drink of alcohol in weeks.
Vicky wouldn't want her to.
Airport. Filled with military, checking over more evacuation flights. They said Los Angeles had just been... changed, turned into a festering ruin. Had to evacuate downright everyone from that place. No parahumans to help out, and it lent the entire operation an air of... reality. The comedians had all gone home, and now the drab-clothed cleaners were tidying up the stage. She felt like a kid at a grown-up party. She could offer nothing to them now, her training had been fine, but... she wasn't a soldier. Not with her leg the way it was, not with her the way she was. They said parahumans were just being politely told to fuck off back home, unless they had something to offer. Some were able to plug into the military, and some just retired in painful silence. A patrol of regular infantrymen slogged through the terminal gates, uniforms stained with unnameable fluids. Nilbog clean-up. Going through Ellisburg and dumping the corpses of his mutants into massive pyres. With their king gone, Nilbog's bunch had just... fallen. Tumbled over and died. The soldiers looked young. Very young. Sent to the shittiest duties so the big boys could handle the rest. She gave them a sympathetic smile as they walked past, and one of them flashed her a small, shy grin.
Something in his expression made her pause.
"...Crystal, honey? Something wrong?"
Her mom had her hands on her chair. Liked to be helpful. Even when it wasn't necessary.
"Just... nothing. Come on."
Something in his eyes. She saw it more and more now. This fundamental shift. Parahumans were gone. All of them. Lost their powers and became like everyone else, almost. Some had lingering use, bodies which retained strength or minds which retained knowledge, but not her. Not Crystal. Humans had gone from roles of... basic insignificance to their old position. Everyone could feel it, humans were back. Parahumans had been dragged back down to a normal level, everyone was equal beneath the witch-moon. There was to be no explanation for it, no official one, and that equalised the world a little. The parahuman elite and the human underclass were unified in their confusion. Soldiers were doing their jobs with more confidence, aware that they weren't going to be inflicted with fates worse than death. Politicians were operating with louder voices as they realised the world was actually listening to them again, they'd stopped being a sideshow. She'd honestly forgotten the vice-president's name, but now he was everywhere, giving talks, rallying the troops, doing all the things people used to do before evolution had pushed them into irrelevancy. And she'd seen some guy, the old anchor for parahuman affairs on a local network, just... sitting around with a lost expression on his face, unsure of what he was meant to do now.
Let it be said, though, he didn't look overly sad.
The Fall had been frightening, but... no more Endbringers. No more villains. No-one had heard from the Slaughterhouse Nine, the Blasphemies were silent, the Ash Beast had stopped.
"Is... Amy coming along?"
Her mom's lips twisted uncomfortably.
"No, not today. She's... having a hard time. On some good courses, the government's being very nice, given her past service and all, but... she needs time to get used to people again. They're working upwards from singular people she trusts, an airport would be too much."
"Yeah. Yeah."
Last she'd seen her, Amy had been sitting, hollow-eyed, in a white waiting room wearing a hospital gown. First time she'd been in a hospital in years as something other than a healer. Plug sockets everywhere, skin pale from being in a tube all the time, shivering and twitching whenever someone came too close, and according to the doctors, very much at risk of developing some nasty chemical dependencies. Too used to using inhibitors to keep herself steady, had to make sure she didn't hook herself on something as a replacement. None of the adults looked comfortable around her, nor her around them. Knew why.
It was so... infuriating, she was back into the old family dramas, and the world was changing. She had no idea what was happening outside of America, nothing but scraps. Everything was so uncertain, there was a new moon, and... and she knew nothing.
She knew nothing.
Maybe that'd change today.
A thin stream of travellers poured into the terminal. Beyond them, on the battered landing strip, there was a single, small plane. Absolutely filthy, no-one had cleaned the thing in months, just whirling around from airport to airport constantly. Everything felt a little grimier now. A post-party floor, stained with booze and vomit, seen in the cold light of day as... well, a filthy floor. The dark and the heat and the thrill had faded. The travellers who came off were uniformly haggard and jet-lagged. Businessmen and women, largely. These people were hashing out the new world order, one agreement at a time. Behind closed doors, no-one allowed inside, and working with contracts that altered a single thousandth of a percent of the new world, so tiny that it was meaningless, but with thousands made every day...
The new world was being made one percent at a time by people like this.
And as she heard a few talking to each other in Russian...
She knew she had the right plane.
Knew it when a flash of blonde hair was sighted.
Her mom yelled after her as she drove her wheelchair forwards - this was why she had lubed rims - and practically bowled businessmen aside as she charged for Vicky. Who cared if she was haggard, who cared if she had an expression of absolute grief, who cared if she looked slightly different and had a body again and that body was sort of the wrong shape and her eyes were mismatched with one normal and the other darker and who cared.
She slammed her wheelchair's brakes...
And catapulted herself from it.
Been practising this little number for ages.
Vicky didn't flinch as Crystal absolutely tackled her, wrapping her up in the tightest possible hug she could manage.
And hesitantly, Vicky returned the hug. No more Butcher. No more New Wave. No more Amy in a tube. No more powers.
Just two humans in an airport terminal.
Crystal couldn't be happier.
***
"...you wouldn't believe it, but there was this judgement in... Tallahassee, court of appeals, someone actually managed to plead parahuman. Not insanity, parahuman. They said they used to be a parahuman, so they weren't in a sound state of mind during the time of their crimes, was a different person altogether, and so get all the benefits of pleading insanity... while not actually having to go to a mental hospital. Total get out of jail free card, and the judge bought it. Apparently there's already been a mess of prisoners who are claiming the same thing."
"Think it'll work?"
"I think it'll keep going until someone goes too far, it gets bumped up to the top of the judicial radar, legislative radar, someone starts passing laws, someone challenges those laws, I don't know. I don't know where it stops, honestly, but it's going to be messy."
Carol sighed.
"Honestly, shame I only do divorce law, you know Sally? Over from Madsen and Gatsby? Yeah, she's apparently already started making deposits on a new TV, thinks she's going to be hot-footing it from court to court for years now."
Crystal hummed politely, nodded when she should, incapable of really sustaining a normal conversation, not like the adults could. Ate her slightly gummy meatloaf like a normal human, though, normal as hell while she did that.
Flexed her new leg and suppressed a smile.
Technically she didn't have a new leg, of course. Technically her injuries had been misreported, not as severe as they were meant to be, and this was always her leg. Ignore the photos of her in a wheelchair, they were doctored and probably planted by Communists to suppress the Yankee fighting spirit. Vicky had friends, apparently. High-placed friends with tip-ex and access to the right filing cabinets.
The leg was a good distraction from the dinner.
And from Vicky.
A few months. Weird to think about.
No college. Colleges were fucked, some were just gone after an Endbringer looked at them funny, some had collapsed once the economy went to some very interesting places, one or two had vanished now that the object of their study (i.e parahumans) had ceased to exist. Her own college had lost a bunch of students, too many. Some dead, some run off to get real jobs, some incapable of imagining just getting back to normal. Couldn't fill the roster, couldn't pay its professors, had to close its doors. Going to try and apply elsewhere, but... honestly, she couldn't be bothered. College felt so small. And she was... alright, it was nerve-wracking being in public without powers. Made her think of... when she triggered. Not like many people recognised her, but whenever someone did, she felt this chill of fear run down her spine and wondered if this was the day when it happened again. It never did. But she always thought it might.
Considering going into the army instead. PRT was gone. Army felt honest. Army felt useful. Army, somehow, felt safe.
...but not yet.
Not while Vicky was like this.
Her cousin was staring at her meal dully, eating with mechanical repetition. Looked... she didn't look like she was here. Not always. She was tidy, clean, polite, but all of it was strained. Talked with her parents, but was clearly working on a different wavelength, found it hard to connect, even if she was clearly still affectionate towards them. Affection without connection, interaction without engagement. Her hair was clean, but wasn't glossy, wasn't cared for in the way she used to. She wore too much denim, even now, liked wearing ratty clothing instead of the fashionable stuff she'd always preferred when she was... when she was normal. She ate, but she wasn't tasting anything. She talked, but didn't say a damn word. Her parents kept looking at her nervously. They remembered her as the Butcher. Crystal did too, but she also remembered her as Viktoriya, and as... well, as a hero. Doing what she'd always done. Killing the Butcher permanently. Her parents lacked the luxury. Only knew her as the Butcher, then this silent, strange woman who didn't quite seem to live in the world she inhabited. Disconnected.
She wandered around, did all the things humans ought to, but every so often... ah, here, she was doing it now.
Her eyes would widen - one a little darker than the other for reasons she didn't address - and she'd seem to stir from a deep sleep... and wake up into another dream, one she didn't enjoy being in. And then her fork would freeze in mid-air, her fingers would shake very slightly, and she'd stare from person to person, not seeming to quite recognise them. Her parents noticed it when the look came upon her, and they'd shrink slightly, their conversation dying for a second. Crystal saw it directed at herself, once or twice. Even Amy, when Vicky was able to visit her in hospital, inspired the look.
Vicky only wavered between dreams now. Two dreams. One pleasant-but-dead, and one awful-but-alive.
In all her time back, she hadn't really woken up once.
She vanished sometimes. Left at odd hours. Didn't come back for days on a few occasions. Met with peculiar people. Bikers. Weird academics. Homeless people with wild eyes. Crystal had seen her down at the library, staying there from the second it opened to the second it closed. Her notes were always written in other languages, usually something that seemed almost German, almost French, and yet neither. Once, though, it was in Japanese. Crystal remembered the title, had plugged it into a computer to translate it. Took longer than it should, internet was spottier now, had blackouts that lasted for days upon days. Five Letters on Revolution. Which sounded ominous, and possibly illegal. Vicky barely slept, her bed hadn't needed to be made in days, she didn't use it enough. Didn't talk about jobs, or college, or the future. Only seemed to have one friend besides Crystal. Strange, dark-haired woman. No idea of her name, where she was from, how Vicky knew her...
And no idea what Taylor had done.
What had happened to her.
Vicky didn't talk about it. Didn't want to. Gave hints, but... didn't provide the full story.
Too painful, maybe. Too sensitive. Said Taylor had saved her life, and that was it. The fact that she'd burst out of Madison when everything went to hell, then vanished when it went back from hell into the arena of normality was a complete coincidence. Vicky returned to her meal in silence, nodding faintly when people addressed her, humming at the right times... doing nothing besides. Meal, admittedly, wasn't great. Everyone was hungry these days, ingredients were scarce, and she didn't want to say anything, but she was keenly aware that the nearest butcher had started selling cheaper meat right around when the stray dog problem quietened down. But... food was food. Food was food. Better than most people had it. Weather had been weird ever since... everything.
Aunt Carol looked up suddenly, narrowing her eyes.
"That's the alarm for... dust storm, right?"
Crystal grunted and stood, starting to move for the windows.
Arizona loomed before her. Eerily cold for this time of year. Shouldn't be this way, and the dust storms shouldn't be happening, but... nothing was quite right at the moment. Explanations were still forthcoming - maybe the witch's moon had done it, maybe the Endbringers had left some nasty surprises. She'd arrived in Phoenix airport to head out to their new house, and had found it snowing. Phoenix had snow now. She started fastening the windows closed, ignoring the rows of dead cacti which surrounded the house like tombstones. A Gila monster stared at her, eerily thin and eerily pale, eyes wide with hunger. It ran a black tongue over pale white lips, and watched the house for any signs of openings.
Vicky was next to her. Hadn't even seen her move.
Already dipping her hands into a clay jar they used for keeping the dried protein grubs. Using those things was like putting sawdust into a rice krispie cake, just a matter of finding the right percentage to sneak into the food before people noticed.
Once upon a time, only the poor ate these things.
Nowadays, felt like everyone did.
Vicky threw a handful of the bodies out, and the Gila monster lunged for them, snapping them up eagerly and scuttling back to a rock before anything could come and compete.
"They'll just keep coming back, you know, if you keep feeding them."
Crystal kept her voice low. Knew her aunt and uncle weren't... fond of the wildlife around here. Rattlesnakes became a lot spookier when you couldn't vaporise them on sight.
"I'm aware."
"...still doing it, though?"
"Yep."
"Like them?"
"Not particularly. Just feel responsible."
Responsible for what? The climate changing?
She'd drop hints like that every so often. Responsible for things. She looked guilty when the news came on and some new crisis was addressed. Crisis in Peru as massive landslides from the Andes wiped out a few towns, courtesy of that... smoke-Endbringer, the one Vicky had called 'Ophion' when questioned. Reports from Los Angeles of scavengers being hired to pick through the enormous death-maze to look for people's valuables that'd been left behind. Reports from Florida of alligators shambling out of the ruins of Miami, population explosion as they fed on corpses left in the water. Crisis in China that no-one knew anything about. Crisis in Washington as multiple senators and congressmen turned out to be involved with parahuman criminals, or mysteriously, spontaneously lost enormous sources of funding that was never quite explained. Crisis in Russia as Red Gauntlet was starting to get taken apart, records released to the public showing lengthy campaigns of assassinations and blackmail to make sure that Russia stayed nicely divided. Keeping Red Gauntlet at the top of the pile, the only universally recognised police and defence force. No more. Reports of black-blooded corpses washing up on the shores of Lake Erie. More stuff on refugee resettlement, from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Florida, everywhere.
She looked guilty at all of them.
Looked guilty whenever she saw the Robertson family. Lost their father and two children to the Twins attack on Los Angeles.
The adults started moving to clear things up, had a talent for acting normal in the face of complete insanity. Locked up one daughter in a tube, left the other one to the Butcher, and possibly were all screwing each other in different combinations. Yeah, hard to... really engage with them after that, not in the unashamed way they'd used to. The adults had work, and that was enough. Had to buckle down for another storm.
And the two were left alone.
"I'm leaving soon."
Crystal smiled faintly.
"You think I didn't know that?"
"...really?"
"You barely sleep, you barely do anything but go to the library, talk to weird people... you're not happy, that's obvious."
A soft red glow started to spill under the blinds. Witch's moon rising. Vicky shivered at the sight of it, reaching up to scratch the flesh around her slightly darker eye she refused to explain.
"Thanks for telling me, though. Wouldn't enjoy waking up with you just gone. Where are you heading?"
"No idea, depends."
"On?"
"On where I need to go."
"...you're not going bounty hunting or something?"
"No, no, just... need to ask some questions."
A pause.
"I need to find some closure. That's it. Once I'm done, I'll come back, think about the future. Tried to do that before now, just... couldn't. I need to-"
"Find Taylor?"
She froze.
"It's obvious you miss her. You never talk about her. What happened out there? What did you-"
"I'll explain when I get back."
The red glow intensified. Moonrise was always eerie, everything in her mind screaming that she shouldn't be seeing that light. Once it was up it was fine, but that initial glow... those first few rays, it was like seeing it come up into the sky for the first time. When she thought that a new Endbringer had shown up, bigger and nastier than all the others, that the apocalypse was really happening. Coyotes howled mournfully in the desert, disliking the light. Nothing felt quite... right under the witch's moon. Nothing. Her skin itched, her leg definitely itched, and she felt like... like she was remembering something. How much things had changed, not just in terms of climate or politics, but something invisible. Like... she'd missed the change the first time, and now she got a taste of what it used to be like beforehand, and realised just how... odd it had been. How strange the world had really felt. She found herself thinking about that gleaming razor Vicky had owned, or the yellow fire she'd seen in that hospital in Brockton Bay, or everything. The ozone-scented roars of the Butcher.
For a second, it was like the world had gone back.
And she realised just how frightening things had been.
"...you could explain now."
"Can't. Leaving tonight. Tell my parents I love them and I'll... be back soon."
"Money?"
"I'm fine on that front. Might drop off the... grid for a bit, but I'll be around. No need to worry if I'll be safe."
Crystal grimaced.
"Knew this was going to happen. Still not enjoying it."
"Anticipation makes it worse?"
"Probably. You sure you'll be safe? You're not invulnerable any more."
Vicky smiled sadly.
"I don't think I need to be. The things that made it worth being invulnerable, they're... not exactly around now. Apologise to them for me, please. I don't want to face them at the moment."
"You're already packed?"
"Left my bag with a friend. Was ready to go a few days ago."
"Where to first, then?"
"San Francisco."
"Going to say why?"
"Best not to."
Crystal pulled her into a small hug, letting her go a moment later. Anything longer would feel like a proper goodbye, like she was resigning herself to losing her all over again. Vicky patted her shoulder a second later. And without further ceremony... she was gone. Moving to the door with a stride that grew more certain with each repetition, each step jerking her awake a little more until... until she seemed to wake up for the first time in months. First time since she'd come home. Her shoulders hunched, she pulled a battered coat from a peg in the hall, kicked the dust from a pair of old boots... she'd really been ready, even had a shoehorn in her pocket, just to make things easier. Crystal watched her prepare to go, saw the light returning to her eyes...
She reached out automatically to open the front door.
Someone was already waiting. The odd, dark-haired woman, slim to the point of emaciation, with a face that hovered between consciously stoic and intensely sad. Her hair was slicked back over her head, too much product, holding it into a kind of swimmer's cap. Left her features with a bird-like arch to them, made her nose seem unpleasantly beak-like. Nothing she wore fit quite well, and her dark coat hung around her like a cassock. Nothing seemed designed to flatter, everything was angled towards concealment, self-consciousness visible in every baggy fold or additional layer.
Her voice was small and accented.
"Ready?"
"Yeah. Ready."
Crystal was already there with them, at the door. Moved before she really thought about it. She poked the bird-like woman in the chest, sending her back a step.
"Take care of her, or I'll hit you with a lead pipe."
A few twitchy nods.
"Of course. I intend to."
A small, small smile.
"There are others interested in her remaining intact, you may have to join a queue if-"
Vicky grunted, tying her boots properly. Interrupting all proceedings by standing up, heels clicking against the hardwood floor like judge's gavels. Dim voices from inside - parents talking, would be coming out soon. By all rights should talk to them, warn them, do whatever. But... Crystal thought she understood how Vicky felt. The same distance. Disconnection. They wouldn't understand, because they hadn't been there, hadn't seen it. Some things, they... you needed to be there. None of their parents had been there. But they had. And with that presence came a certain elevation. Crystal smiled, in a small, reluctant way, understanding fully but still sad to see her cousin go.
"You should get moving. Don't want to get caught by them."
"Right. See you soon, Crystal."
"Promise?"
"Promise. Don't think it'll take another four years."
"I'll hold you to that. Can't shoot lasers, but I can still kick your ass."
No more ceremony.
Any more ceremony and it'd feel too final. She watched sadly as Vicky walked away over the desert dust, heading for a battered small car, years out of date and rattling alarmingly. Knew Vicky wanted to get a motorcycle, had seen her trying to budget it out, see how she would finagle getting a chopper back. No luck thus far, and the car reflected that. Cheap, ugly, and clearly temporary. A brief exchange - Vicky calling to the odd woman.
"You look good. The coat suits you."
The odd woman preened, strangely peacock-like.
"Yes. I do."
"Where'd you get it?"
"Orvis. Suits you."
"Said that twice. Entirely correct on both occasions. It does suit me."
"Yep."
"I look fashionable."
"You look fine, don't overplay yourself."
A sniff of derision. The odd woman lingered behind for a moment, letting Vicky walk ahead...
"Hey, one more thing."
The woman twitched at Crystal's half-shout, quiet enough not to be heard by sensitive ears.
"Yes?"
"Who are you? You feel familiar."
A tiny smile.
"Yes, I suppose I would. It's nice to see you, though. Glad you're doing well."
Crystal shot her a stern look.
"Take care of her. And bring her back."
"I'm... going to do my best.
Crystal smiled faintly.
"Is 'Going To Do My Best' your name? Can I call you Going?"
A faint smile in return.
"No, I have a name."
"Mind telling me?"
The woman started walking towards the car. Called over her shoulder, voice half-stolen by the rising dust storm.
"Chorei."