Everyone in the room… the Undersiders, the Warcrafted... looked at him. He stood there, his head hanging, his claws digging into the wood of his chair. He drew a breath and looked up. Taylor felt a chill; she’d never seen his eyes looking so serious, so-- afraid. “Go there, or stay here,” he said. “I’m going, but I’m not going to force anyone to come along. But make your minds up quickly, we haven’t much--”

  “I’m in,” Greg said. His apron was wadded in his fists. He’d never looked so… so much like a scared teenage kid. “I can work search and rescue, if nothing else… And healing...”

  “I’m in too.” Shen didn’t say anything more.

  “I’m there,” Sparky said. No… it was clear in his eyes, in his stance. He was Shar’Din now.

  “Same here,” Fennek said, astonishing everyone.

  “Fennek, Fidget and Gidget just came out of the vat,” Adrian said. “You’re nowhere near--”

  “I was a Hunter before I had them,” he snapped back. “I can do search and rescue better than anyone in the Protectorate. And hell, maybe I can ANNOY the bitch to death.” He pulled his bow from his haversack and nocked an arrow by way of demonstration.

  “It’s a moot point, honey,” Taylor said. She stood taller, her eyes grew more piercing. Adrian could almost see her slipping into her own skin as Hemlokk as she spoke. “Every one of us can heal, do search and rescue, or help out in a dozen other ways. It’d be…wicked for us to back out now, ready or not.”

  Adrian closed his eyes and turned his face to the ceiling. “Somehow I knew we’d have no choice...”

  Taylor looked over at Lisa and Grue. “I won’t speak for the Undersiders--” she faltered.

  “There ain’t no undersiders,” Brian said. “Just the Alliance now.”

  “We’re in,” Lisa said.

  “Damn straight,” Aisha said.

  “Like heck you are,” Brian said to her. “You’re staying here!”

  “But I’m Crow’s Nest!”

  “And you ain’t got no POWERS,” Grue emphasized. “You’re staying here!”

  “We need her,” Lisa interrupted. Grue gaped at her in betrayed confusion. “The comm system the Protectorate uses is crap.”

  “She’s right,” Bayleaf growled, running his fingers through his scalp. “All it does is tell everybody who just died. It’s next to useless on a battlefield, designed by idiots. She’ll be miles back from the frontline but we need her on our comm-links if we want a chance to survive.”

  Brian fumed, but gave in. He slammed on his helmet and pointed at Bayleaf. “Miles from the frontline, you swear it.” Bayleaf held up his hand, scout’s honor. “Dammit,” Brian growled. Aisha and Lisa began grabbing whatever portable gear they could.

  “Okay, let’s do this,” Bayleaf said. “Everyone gear up. Shar’Din, take that carpet and get to the jumpoff point for the PRT. Give ‘em a breakdown on what we have, what we’re bringing. Let them know we’re coming!” Shar’Din nodded, regal as a king, and rose out of the open skylight. “Lei Ling, Hemlokk, grab every potion, scroll, and piece of extra jewelry we got. Same with you Fennek… We’re gonna be handing those things out like candy on Trick or Treat. Shen, Vindicator-- dress for a fight, but don’t be surprised if they push you in the healing tent. Panacea, you need a lift?”

  Before she could answer, A familiar golden-haired figure dropped down through the skylight. “Amy, we gotta go--”

  Amy didn’t say a word; she just threw her arms around her sister’s neck. “Well, don’t spare the horses, sis,” she said. She looked at the others. “We’ll see you there. I hope...” With that they shot through the skylight.

  “Okay, that’s taken care of. Lok’Tara, bring your dogs, Truck too if you think he’s ready, you’ll probably be on Search and Rescue before any of us. I’m afraid Sky will have to look after himself for a while. The ferrets too.”

  “Everybody, we got--” he looked at the information scrolling onscreen. “crap, unless Shar’Din can get them to hold a teleporter, we got fifteen minutes tops. Grab what you can and load it in the bus, we are out of here in five!”

  Everyone scrambled.

  Quality transportation was still way down on the team to-do list. So many of them had flight, or teleportation, or some other means of getting about that it had been put on the back burner over and over. The best that could be said was that they did have SOME form of transportation. Brian had gone out with Adrian on a vehicle hunting trip… and they had ended up securing an old school bus in a used-vehicle lot. They had gotten as far as tearing out the back five rows of seats for cargo space, but beyond changing the oil and filling the gas tank nothing had been done to beef it up.

  It wasn’t the Avengers quinjet, but it was going to have to do. Crates of scrolls and potions, bags of bandages and boxes full of stat-boosting jewelry were tossed in the back. A squad of tinkerbots-- fire fighters, alarmbots and other multi-use handibots-- were loaded in as well, tossed in the with the cargo they were loading. Everyone piled aboard, still donning their costumes and armor.

  Bayleaf jumped into the driver’s seat. The engine cranked, stalled out, cranked again. An absolutely breathtaking profusion of profanity rose to the roof of the vehicle for several seconds, then the engine caught. They roared out of the dilapidated garage at the end of the Warehouse row, barely missing the door as it scrolled upward.

  The bus fell silent. There weren’t a lot of words to say at the moment. There were plenty of scared faces to be seen, what wasn’t covered by helmets or masks.

  Grue and Vindicator sat side by side, their still, helmeted forms giving an illusion of stoicism.

  Lok’Tara, if anything, was scowling even more than usual, her tusks gleaming.

  Fennek grumbled and whined to himself, fussing over his bow and his quiver, checking for the hundredth time to make sure the nigh-bottomless quiver was packed full. He was gonna put one arrow in that feathered bimbo’s eye, he swore it.

  Shen tried to meditate, the way he’d learned in the garden. He breathed in, breathed out, his hands resting on his knees… suddenly felt another hand, clawed, furry, and clammy with fear, press into his own. Surprised he looked over. Lei Ling was sitting next to him in her chain armor, staring straight ahead. He felt her hand squeeze his, trembling.

  He squeezed it back.

  They soon slowed as traffic thickened. Bayleaf pounded the steering wheel in frustration, resisting the urge to lean out the window and scream epithets at the unfeeling masses. Suddenly Obie and two of the other alarm-bots came running up from the back. Using their magnetic feet and hands they climbed up the inside of the bus, out the window, and up onto the roof. They started their lights and sirens up, piercing the air even over the Endbringer siren. Slowly but with increasing speed the traffic parted in front of them. Bayleaf whooped and pounded the steering wheel. “Obie you little genius!” he shouted. “Good work! Lisa, you got an update?”

  Lisa and Aisha were two seats back, fussing over a laptop and a pile of wires and waving around a wifi boosting antenna. They were trying to rig up a portable comm board for the headsets everyone was wearing. Lisa grumped and checked the news feed she’d Googled. “They’re doing pickup at the PRT base,” she said. “Capes are pouring in-- crap, Uber and L33t are there?-- and… wait, something’s wrong--”

  Without warning, the already congested traffic ground to a halt. They were close enough to see the PRT building; capes and cape vehicles were hovering around the helipad on the roof, as if something had happened and they were confused as to what to do next. What Lisa saw next on the laptop made her start swearing fit to make even a Dockworker blush. “It’s the Simurgh!” she shouted over the ruckus of car horns and Endbringer sirens.

  “What about the Simurgh?” Bayleaf shouted over his shoulder.

  “She’s interdicted us!” Lisa shouted back. “The instant the first batch of capes came through from Brockton Bay, some sort of force-bubble popped up over Canberra!” She rattled away at the keyboard. “It’s cutting of everything-- all broadcasts from inside have been cut off… and noone can portal or teleport in or out!” She cursed and spat. “The only reason we know that much is this blogger is just outside the field!”

  Bayleaf gave up and jammed the bus into park. He got up and came back to see what Lisa and Aisha were watching. Everyone else on the bus left their seats. The view was split between some field reporter a mile outside the city, and the cam-view from the luckless blogger still in the outer boroughs of Canberra. Capes, the early arrivals, could be seen swarming around the Endbringer, lashing fruitlessly out at her with their powers, her orbiting corona of machinery catching it all. The shaky web-cam zoomed in; for a heartstopping moment the Simurgh turned and looked into the camera. She gave the viewers a smile… not one of her usual, enigmatic, emotionless ones, which adorned her face in and out of season, but one of malicious glee and triumph.

  Then the feed went dark. Lisa and Aisha BOTH swore aloud and started clattering away at their keyboards, Lisa at her laptop, Aisha at her phone. “No good,” Lisa said after a perfunctory search. The Simurgh just put the kibosh on anything in or around Canberra, no feed, no internet, no radio… and no teleporters.” She dove back into the Net momentarily, then resurfaced. “What I suspected,” she said with a snarl. “The PRT is trying to port heroes in at a distance… they might as well not waste their time: that force field wall is immutable. Nothing’s getting through until the Simurgh drops it. If she ever does.”

  “Has she ever done this before?” Bayleaf asked.

  Lisa threw herself back in her seat, arms crossed under her chest, fuming. “No.” Her expression suddenly shifted from fuming to disturbed. “Because… because for the first time, there was something she did not want getting there. Something in Brockton Bay.”

  Everyone in the bus looked at each other. “Us?”

  Lisa pulled at her lip. “The Thinkers have been saying that, for some reason--” she gave Bayleaf a knowing look-- “the Precog and Thinker view of Brockton Bay has been like Swiss Cheese for months, and getting more full of holes by the day. If Miss Christmas Tree Topper is having the same problem...”

  “She decided to play it safe,” Bayleaf said grimly. “And cut Brockton Bay off from Canberra, early in the game.” He snarled silently. “My little blind spots spooked her, and now thousands of people--” He turned away and staggered to the front of the bus, ears flat, shoulders tight as knotted rope. He sat in the driver’s seat, cradling his head in his hands.

  There was a knock on the windshield. Shar’Din was hovering outside on his flying carpet. He waved to Bayleaf, then gestured in front of the bus. A shimmering portal appeared. They couldn’t have broken through to Canberra already, could they? Bayleaf threw the bus into gear and slowly drove through the shimmering circle of air.

  When they came out the other side, they were parked back in the garage. Bayleaf switched the motor off and slumped in the driver’s seat. The quiet was stifling. Sparky floated up next to the driver’s window. “I’m sorry, man,” he said. “The PRT was already turning Capes back. The last three teleporters or space jumpers or whatever who tried to get through… didn’t come back in one piece.”

  “How many capes got through before the field went up?” Bayleaf said quietly.

  “The newsfeeds say about half,” Lisa piped up from behind him. “The local Protectorate got through, but the Ward’s didn’t. Aegis lost a leg, the field came down so fast. It says New Wave got through earlier...” she didn’t say more. All of them were picturing two sisters, one blonde and bubbleheaded and take-charge, the other curly haired and broody.

  “Should we… should we unload?” Greg said.

  “No, just.. just leave it,” Bayleaf said. “It’ll keep-- “Silently the others filed off the bus. Lisa and Aisha went back to the Comms. Fennek retreated to his game room. Lok’Tara went to her menagerie, to the enthusiastic welcome of Sky and Truck. They all retreated back into the Lost Workshop, disappearing into their quarters and their workshops and their game rooms. The sound of work or play wasn’t taken up by anyone though. It was terribly still.

  Even the Endbringer sirens had fallen silent.

  After several long minutes, Taylor took Adrian by the arm. Gently she pulled him to his feet and led him away from the bus, back into the Lost Workshop, where his alien plants still glowed and the enchanter’s ingredients still glimmered on his workbench and the air was filled with the tick-whirr-click of his tinkerbots laboring away. She pulled him into the biggest of the Comfy Chairs and curled up in it next to him. For the next hour they did nothing but sit there and hold onto one another.

  ***

  The sober peace was interrupted the next morning

  “Guys,” Lisa yelled. “Guys, guys GUYS, EVERYBODY GET YOUR ASSES IN HERE!!”

  “OmiGAIIEAEEK!” Aisha shrieked.

  Teenagers poured in from every direction, more than a few with weapons at the ready.“What, what is it??” Greg said, his hammer in one fist, his sword in the other.

  For a wonder, the two girls were speechless. Aisha was standing there, her knuckles pressed to her mouth, rigid as a board. Lisa was so agitated she was bouncing in her office chair. Lisa pointed to the main screen on the Comms. The interdiction field had apparently fallen, and news was flowing out of Canberra again-- and the talking heads were climbing the walls over it. Everyone there could see what was happening but the newscasters felt obligated to tell-- no, to scream-- what was going on. Adrian had seen sportscasters at the Superbowl get less agitated than these people. What was happening was visible on the screen, as clear as it was unbelievable. “What the hell is happening?” Grue said.

  “It’s footage from last night,” Lisa babbled. “The bubble came down before it was all over, and this has been playing over and over on every news channel--”

  Fennek’s eyes were round, he was practically hyperventilating. For a moment Adrian feared the unfamiliar rush of adrenaline and intense excitement might make the poor vulperan keel over. “They’re fighting the Simurgh,” he said. “They’re fighting the Simurgh and they are KICKING HER ASS!!”

  Whatever had happened during the blackout, it had clearly gone very badly for the Simurgh. Both her legs were gone, one shattered above, the other below the knee. Half her wings were in a similar state, blasted and charred to stumps. Cracks and score marks criscrossed her body and what could be seen of her face. She was half-flying, half crawling across the skyline, her cloud of levitated tinkertech struggling, and failing, to keep off the swarm of Capes that pursued her. A literal rain of exotic powers and energies beat down on her as the heroes and villains of humanity took long-awaited revenge for humanity’s suffering.

  “It can’t be,” Adrian heard himself say. “She’s still sandbagging.”

  Lisa shook her head emphatically, then winced and clutched her temple. “No,” she said. “No, I’ve been using my Power for the last five minutes-- she’s actually running scared! The only reason she hasn’t fled to orbit is some Tinker has hit her with some weird gravity-acceleration-curving something-or-other…”

  The Warcrafted watched in silent awe as the battle unfolded. Triumvirate were all but hammering the Endbringer into the ground, alternating between blasts of energy and Alexandria’s punches without letup. Every other cape was chipping in, letting loose with everything they had, pinning the Simurgh to the ground, decimating her once-invincible gauntlet of orbiting tinkertech… In desperation the Simurgh reassembled her tinkertech cloud into an enormous ring in front of her. The center shimmered, turned opaque; the void of the stars appeared inside it…

  “Portal,” Sparky said. “She can’t fly to space so she’s takin’ a shortcut!”

  ...and the Endbringer all but flung herself through it. There was an eruption of light and she vanished. The floating ring went dark and fell to the earth, shattering in pieces. Capes swooped down on the wreckage, as the camera cut to another on-the-spot newscaster, standing in the middle of a mob of emergency workers, capes, PRT soldiers and refugees. She had her hand pressed to her ear and was shouting above the commotion into her microphone. “...And we can confirm it-- Yes, the Simurgh has fled-- Canberra has been saved! They will not be walling the city in, there is no quarantine-- Canberra has been spared and the Simurgh has been beaten!”

  The crowd around her exploded. A roar of victory went up from all those present. Lisa had to turn the sound down to save the speakers from bursting.

  “We won. We WON against an ENDBRINGER!”

  Everyone lost their minds.

  Even as everyone began jumping around and screaming like lunatics, the battle came to its conclusion onscreen and the camera began flipping between newscasters, government officials, and wildly celebrating capes and even more wildly celebrating citizens.

  “How did this happen?” Taylor said. “What changed??”

  Lisa struggled to say something. “It’s almost on the tip of my tongue-- argh!” She pointed at the screen where they were showing instant replays-- random cellphone footage, webcams-- of the most brutal moments of the fight. “Look at her it’s like she was blind-fighting or-- ” She rubbed her scalp in pain, but her eyes gleamed with excitement. She began speaking faster and faster, almost babbling. “That’s it, she WAS fighting blind. She’s a precog and a postcog, the most powerful in existence… she depends on those powers like we depend on sight. But something’s been buggering that up--” she looked at Adrian. Everyone looked at Adrian.

  “Your Azeroth tinker tech,” Tattletale said, her classic smug grin fixed in place. “You gave a ton of it to The Brockton Bay Protectorate last Christmas. I’d bet my left tit Armsmaster reverse-engineered it and handed it out to everyone he could!”

  “Yeah but nothing that would account for--” Adrian paused, his jaw dropping. “No. Wait. Not the Protectorate or the Wards… New Wave. One particular member of New Wave--”

  “With us now is the leader of the Protectorate of Brockton Bay in the United States,” the reporter onscreen was saying. Standing next to her was Armsmaster. He was battered, his armor cracked, dented, and even scorched in places, but his posture radiated triumph too clearly not to be seen. “Armsmaster, can you explain to us what changed everything? What made this possible?”

  Armsmaster visibly swelled with satisfaction. “An extraordinary breakthrough, Miss Winters,” he said. “Some time ago we were made aware of a discovery by a… Tinker in Brockton Bay, who shall for security reasons go unnamed for now… who had invented a device that could block the Simurgh’s song. We owe this tinker greatly--”

  There was a whoosh and a boom and a blonde, caped figure landed next to him, hard enough that her dainty feet cracked the pavement. “Got that right! The guy’s a miracle worker. I was the first one to get one,” Glory Girl said, tapping her tiara. “It was for… er, something else entirely… but Gallant figured out it could be even bigger than it looked!”

  “Gallant secured one of the prototypes for us,” Armsmaster butted back in to confirm, looking a bit disgruntled at Glory Girl hogging his spotlight. “We managed to reverse engineer it and build the circuitry into the standard arm-bands we distribute.” Vicky held up her arm and tapped the heavy mechanical bracelet, grinning cheekily. “Within seconds of arriving at Canberra we confirmed that it was effective; noone wearing the device could even hear the Simurgh’s song.

  “But what about the city?” Miss Winters said.

  Armsmaster pointed behind them. The camera panned and refocused, revealing what looked like a rectangular radar dish mounted on a six-wheeled ATV. “Once we confirmed the technology worked, we deployed these,” Armsmaster could be heard saying. “Just three of them were enough to provide a blanket field that nullified the Simurgh’s song over the Canberra region. It’s a brute force approach,” One could almost hear him silently screaming and horribly inefficient-- “ but it was the difference between walling up the city and saving it, so I’ll take it.”

  The now beaming reporter turned to a beaming Glory Girl. “So the Simurgh has been driven off in the greatest defeat for the Endbringers ever, and Canberra has been saved. Tell us, Glory Girl, how are you feeling?”

  “Feeling? We beat the Endbringer, saved the day, and I even got to punch the Simurgh in the FACE! I am ready to Par-TAY!!” She began doing a ridiculous victory dance there on the spot. “Punched-- an end-bring-ah- in-- the face-- I--”

  “There is still a lot of cleanup work to be done,” Armsmaster said over top of Glory Girl’s impromptu victory song. “And a lot of casualties. No battle like this is without cost--” he glared at Vicky, clearly displeased at her euphoria.

  “Crap, he’s right,” Bayleaf said suddenly. “The fight isn’t over. There’s still wounded, and missing and people trapped in rubble. Saddle up people, they still need our help!”

  They had been ready to go last time in less than five minutes. This time they were all loaded in the bus in less than three.

  Bayleaf started the engine, picked up the garage door opener-- and paused. He facepalmed. “Shar’Din?” he said. “Would you mind opening a portal to the PRT jumpoff point for Canberra?”

  The elf mage grinned and waved his hand. A shimmering circle appeared in the air, between the bus’ front bumper and the garage door. “Thank you,” Bayleaf said. He shifted into gear and drove forward…

  ...And out onto the helipad on the roof of the PRT building. Adrian stood on the brakes; the bus shuddered to a halt. “Sparky!!”

  “Hey, this is where they sent everyone who showed-- me included.”

  Surprisingly few people reacted with alarm at the arrival of a school bus out of nowhere… Most seemed too busy, hustling back and forth with equipment and guiding vehicles and groups of people one way or the other.

  Out of the milling confusion came Director Piggot. She’d caught sight of the schoolbus and came on the run, a couple of PRT squaddies hustling to keep up. Bayleaf decided to play it nonchalant. He leaned out the driver’s window and addressed the Director. “We got a busload of Capes and Tinker gear for Canberra,” he said, giving the side of the bus a slap. “Where do we put it?”

  True to form, Piggot didn’t turn a hair. “Just drive it that way,” she said, pointing. “Stop and put it in park when you’re inside the tape outline.” She looked around “STRIDER! Busload of gear for Canberra!” A lanky-limbed cape dressed in a blue and black uniform, goggles and what looked like a chauffer’s cap came at a lope. “Armsmaster will meet you on the other side,” she said to Bayleaf. “I’ll call ahead and warn him-- maybe he won’t shoot first and ask questions later if I do,” she couldn’t help snarking.

  “Thank you, Director,” Bayleaf said. He shifted the bus into first and sent it puttering to the port-out zone at a slow crawl.

  The teleporter cape came walking up as they eased into the drop zone. He gave them the twice-over and smirked a bit. “This your team vehicle?” he said in disbelief.

  Bayleaf flattened his ears and gave him a deadpan look. “Nah, nah, we’re on a school field trip,” he drawled. “Professor X wanted to broaden the kids’ horizons.” He threw it in park; the flashing stop sign swung out and hit Strider in the forehead with a dull kong.

  “Ow!” Strider said, stepping back and rubbing his head. “All right, all right, no need to get tetchy,” he said. “Okay, get ready, it’s a couple of hops--”

  There was a flash, then another, then another. The city skyline was replaced with searing desert, then with what looked like an open field in a forest, then another desert… then with a thump they were in what had to be the Canberra airport terminal. Since his arrival in Brockton Bay Bayleaf had spent many hours in grim preparation, browsing images of the battle locations he recalled from the story, familiarizing himself with the landmarks. He recognized the terminal almost immediately.

  Things were still hectic, nearly a day after the Simurgh’s attack. PRT troopers came on the hop, got their information (such as it was) and-- after a bit of debate over commlinks with persons unseen-- sent them to the field hospital. It had been set up here at the airport in expectation of thousands of injured, cape and civilian alike. Happily, it was under-utilized; The miraculous early defeat of the Simurgh had left the hospitals in Canberra standing, and the majority of the civilian injured were being sent there instead. The field hospital was still in use for the capes, though, and there were plenty enough injured civilians to be getting on with.

  They disembarked. Bayleaf saw Armsmaster marching their way. He was looking slightly less battered-- he’d probably had time to hammer some of the dents out of his armor-- and he was moving with the same authoritative air he’d always had. Striding along next to him was a man with an official and bureaucratic air; he and Armsmaster were talking to each other rapidly as they walked. “That must be the local PRT Director,” Grue said, leaning over to Bayleaf.

  “How can you tell?” Bayleaf said, puzzled.

  “He’s wearing a short sleeved shirt, cutoff dress slacks and a tie,” Grue said. “That’s Australian for business formal, thanks to the heat… at least for people with zero you-know-whats to give.” The humor in Brian’s voice was obvious. Adrian took note; the company’s “face” was good at his work.

  The moment the armored cape clapped eyes on them, their team, their bus, et al, but particularly Bayleaf, he all but slammed to a halt. He remained expressionless-- well, what little could be seen of his bearded chin did, anyway-- but after am moment he gathered himself and resumed approaching them. He stopped just out of arm’s reach. “Skinwalker,” he said noncommitally.

  “Armsmaster,” Bayleaf nodded. This was definitely the time to be burying hatchets. “We’re sorry we didn’t get here sooner. We got cut off by the interdiction field...” Armsmaster nodded tersely and made what Bayleaf supposed was a dismissive gesture… probably the closest the man would get to saying ‘it’s okay, no problem.’ Bayleaf pointed to the back of the bus. “We got a busload of Tinker gear to help with the aftermath. We grabbed everything we thought might be of use. Healing potions, accelerated healing bandages, firefighting and--”

  “Understood.” Armsmaster said brusquely. He turned his head to one side. “Agent Jones, do you copy?” He paused, listening. “We have a busload of assorted tinkertech, I need you and your two subordinates to assist unloading and securing it--” he strode off toward the bus, clearly considering the conversation to be at an end. Bayleaf found himself a little miffed. I tell him I bring a busload of miracle fixes and he treats it like a cargo of hazardous ordinance, he thought with annoyed grunt. Typical.

  “A man of the people as always,” the gentleman who had been with him sighed in annoyance. He held out a hand to Bayleaf. “Director Micheal Bays,” he said. “No relation, before you ask. Skinwalker, I believe it was?” His accent was pure Mick Dundee, to Bayleaf’s secret delight.

  Bayleaf engulfed the man’s hand in his own hairy paw. “It’s a, uh, working name,” he said. “My crew, we generally go by ‘the Alliance.’ ...Long story.” He started making introductions. “Ah, this is Hemlokk… Shar’Din...”

  “Bal'a dash, Sinu a'manore.” The blood elf bowed grandly atop his flying carpet.

  “Errr...” Bays held out his hand uncertainly.

  “Vindicator there in the armor… ah, Lok’Tara and Fennek, Lok’Tara’s the green one with the dogs by the way… Grue and Tattletale, formerly of the Undersiders” (Oh crap I shouldn’t have told him that, should I?) “uhh...”

  “So what all are you and your mates bringing to the party?” Bays asked.

  Bayleaf hesitated. “...Something of a grab bag,” Bayleaf said, thinking quickly. Why hadn’t he catalogued all the Alliance’s abilities, or written a list or something. “Trackers, teleporters, uh, some healing...”

  Bays’ face lit up at that. “You’re already sounding right useful,” he said.

  A commotion from the bus distracted them. Armsmaster and the PRT agents seemed to be having trouble with the doors. “What is it?” Bayleaf called.

  “Your security systems are preventing our entry, Skinwalker,” Armsmaster snapped. He was glaring at the bus door.

  Bayleaf blinked. “What security system? It’s a school bus. We didn’t even have time to paint it!”

  “Your… automatons have locked the doors and windows from the inside,” Armsmaster clarified. He looked at the door. “And one of your hazard lights is giving me the finger.”

  “Oh for…Obie!” The alarm-o-bot’s head made an appearance in the window. Bayleaf gestured wildly at the bus while his ‘team’ stood clustered together and snickered. “Obie! Behave yourself!” Obie let out a short siren-squawk that sounded remarkably like an objection. “Unlock the door, Obie, that cargo’s gotta be unloaded!” Obie let out a discontented fweep and complied. “Sorry, Director, Obie is a security bot and he sort of has a mind of his own… where was I?”

  There was a commotion from the bus. Everyone turned to look; Armsmaster came staggering back out of the bus’ emergency exit, flailing wildly. What looked like two giant furry slinkies were climbing all over him, staying just out of his reach. “Agh, GET EM OFF! GET EM OFF!” The two PRT officers were backing up, starting to reach for their guns uncertainly, not sure what to do.

  The Alliance set up a hue and cry. “Stop!” “Don’t hurt them!” “They’re not dangerous!”

  “Fidget! Gidget!!” Fennek said in a panic.

  “It’s okay, they’re with us!” Bayleaf said, throwing out a hand in alarm.

  “I SORT OF FIGURED THAT OUT!”

  “Fennek, go yet your darn ferrets off the Armsmaster!” Bayleaf yelled in exasperation. Fennek scurried to comply, equally anxious to rescue his furry babies.

  “Those are ferrets??” Bays said in disbelief. It was understandable; the things were three feet from nose to tailtip, easily.

  Bayleaf gave him a weak grin, a disturbing thing from a werewolf. “They must’ve sneaked on board--”

  “Hurry up! They’re ACK! Getting into everything!” There were several electronic bleeps and whoops and a disturbingly metallic ping as either Fidget or Gidget found some of the manual controls and access panels.

  “Fidget, Gidget, come down from there!” Fennek was leaping up and down around the gyrating hero; he looked like he was about to climb up Armsmaster’s back after them.

  “They’re… playful… but Fennek is bonded with them, he has them under fairly good control--” Bayleaf went on, digging desperately and only going deeper.

  “--Oh Lord one of them has a screwdriver--!”

  “Would somebody go over there and help??” Bayleaf said, cupping his face in his hand. Several of the Alliance broke loose and ran over. Those that weren’t recording the action on their cellphones, at any rate. He looked over at Taylor for emotional support; she was one of the ones (along with Lei Ling, Aisha and Tattletale) who had her cellphone out, her eyes sparkling with glee, the heartless traitor.

  Bayleaf looked back to the Director apologetically. The man’s face was bright red and he was shaking with suppressed laughter. Well at least he’s amused instead of infuriated, Bayleaf thought.

  There was a loud clearing of a throat behind him. Bayleaf looked over his shoulder; Tattletale had stepped up. She was holding a computer tablet and stylus, clipboard style, and doing very good at looking organized and professional.

  “Like Skinwalker said, Vindicator needs to go with the Healers, and I’m thinking Hemlokk should too; her skills are probably better utilized right now showing your staff how to use all the stuff we brought.” Tattletale pointed over her shoulder at the bus; the ferrets had been retrieved and were getting a half-hearted scolding from Fennek, as the Tinkerbots methodically unloaded and stacked the boxes of Azeroth potions, bandages and stat-boosters.

  “Lok’Tara and her dogs and Fennek and his ferrets need to go on Search and Rescue. Their powerset includes the ability to detect and track any living thing-- even from the air, or underground. Shen Lei Ling and Shen should probably be Search and Rescue too: they have some healing capacity and they may not look it, but they’re pretty solid Brutes, Movers and Masters too.” As she spoke, Lei Ling summoned up one of her rock elementals, which rose up through the tarmac with a rumble of stone (then sheepishly smoothed out the asphalt again with it’s stone feet) and Shen summoned his ghostly white tiger, which prowled around him.

  “If it’s possible, could Shar’Din do a ride-along with Strider? Shar’din is a potential world-class Mover, he can teleport and open portals pretty much anywhere, but he has to have physically been to the location first. One around-the-world with Strider and he’ll be able to open up temporary gateways to anywhere.”

  “That WILL be useful,” Director Bays said enthusiastically. “I’ll buttonhole Strider, get him right on it.”

  “I think Mama Crow and I will be heading to wherever the Think Tank is?” she said. Every Endbringer incident had some sort of setup for Thinkers, Precogs and the like; Canberra would surely be no exception. “We can help coordinate from there. Grue will accompany us for personal security.”

  Bays actually looked impressed. He coughed, and, still grinning, pointed back to the terminal entrance. “Report to the guards in the entrance, they’ll give you your ID bracelet...”

  Thank you, Bayleaf lip-synched to Tattletale. The Thinker girl simply smirked back. Smugly.

  What am I doing here?

  The thought wasn’t a complaint, really. Well, not yet. It was an honest question Fennek, aka Alec, aka Regent was asking himself. This really wasn’t like him. Fair’s fair, going along with the team for the Endbringer fight, that was him-- It was part of his code that he made himself stick to. If you were part of a team, you were loyal, period; if they went in danger’s way so did you. Da Rules, I has them, he thought.

  But this wasn’t an Endbringer fight. This was the aftermath… the slow, messy, painful and unpleasant cleanup that came after Leviathan or Behemoth or the Simurgh went slam-dancing through your neighborhood. Clearing streets. Digging the lucky survivors-- and the not-so-lucky-- out of the rubble. Patching up the wounded. Getting people sorted out, fed and sheltered. Lots of hard, grueling, thankless WORK… the exact sort of thing he (wisely, he believed) shirked at every opportunity, and to heck with team effort.

  So... why was he doing this?

  “These men here are the Search and Rescue team for the wreckage of the Simurgh’s touchdown zone,” Armsmaster was saying. He was addressing a group of men in hard hats and orange vests gathered around a map on a card table. “You’ll be working with them. Micheal Darby is the crew leader--”

  “Call me Mick.”

  “-- Follow his instructions to the letter.” Armsmaster said.

  One of the other crewmembers looked over the members of the Alliance. “Hold on, what’s all this? Did Disneyland send some representatives this time?” He snickered. Several of the others chuckled. “Filming “Robin Hood meets the Kung Fu Panda,” maybe?”

  Fennek laid his ears flat and gave the guy a smile. “Nah, we’re filming a documentary for ‘Wonderful World of Disney,’” he said. “’A Day in the Life of a Bogan.’ You’re from central casting, right?”

  “Ohhhh!”

  The hard-hat just grinned wider, his teeth showing white in his tanned face. “Pissy lil’ ankle-biter, aintcha?” he chuckled.

  “The top of my head just about reaches your belt buckle, Slackadile Dundee. It won’t be your ankles I’ll be biting off.”

  “Ohhh!!” This time the crewman laughed and backed up a step, holding up his hands in surrender.

  “These… individuals,” Armsmaster said, “Are members of an independent cape group called the Alliance. Lok’Tara, Shen, Lei Ling, and Fennek. They have a number of abilities including Master, Brute, Mover, and Thinker that will make them somewhat useful in any search and rescue efforts.” He looked at Mick. “If I may review?”

  Mick nodded and waved towards the table. Armsmaster edged between the men and ran his finger across the map. “The Simurgh first touched down in the Northeast quarter. She tore up a lot of buildings in that area before--”

  “Before everything went tits up for ‘er, ey?” one of the men shouted. That got a lot of rowdy laughs.

  “...Exactly. When the tables turned on her, she took off in a more or less straight line, down South and West, ripping up and knocking down everything in her path with that telekinetic vortex of hers. Here..” He jabbed at the bottom of the map, “Is where she made that Tinkertech portal and escaped, abandoning the inactive gate behind her. PRT staff are moving to secure what’s left of it right now.”

  “The place we’ll be diving in first,” ‘Mick’ said, poking the map. “is right here. There was a shopping center right here-- it had underground shelters put in under the stores a couple years ago. Nothing like those Endbringer shelters you Yanks have, but it was a big selling point all the same.” He looked grim. “They didn’t have time to evacuate before that Scrag dropped out of the sky and leveled everything; we figure anyone who was there dived down those bolt-holes. We’ve already got people on site there trying to listen with microphones and what all, trying to find where the survivors are and get down to them. If you got any Cape tricks or Tinker toys that’ll do that...”

  “I think we may be the people to help you,” Shen said, smiling confidently.

  The site was worse than they had described. The shopping center hadn’t just been knocked down, it had collapsed down into its basement levels, leaving an enormous pit filled with rubble and broken slabs of concrete , like a study in the worst possible environment to search for the living.

  They arrived in a PRT personnel carrier, flying in low over the site. The Warcrafted could see hard hatted people picking their precarious way through the rubble. There was a medical tent to one side, and it was getting a good bit of use; next to it was a patch of open parking lot with neat rows of sheet-covered forms, grim reminders that not everyone was getting a happy ending this time.

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  Even before they landed Lok’Tara and Fennek were picking out survivors. Just like Bayleaf had used his treasure-seeking powers to find coins and other valuables buried in the sands of Brockton Bay, the two hunters could pick out people and animals buried under the debris, glowing sparks shining up through the rock and concrete and other rubbish.

  Many of those lights were starting to flicker…

  “Here, hold position here!” Fennek yelled at the pilot. For lack of any contradictory orders, the pilot brought the VTOL in to stationary some hundred feet over the wreckage. Fennek climbed over the others and opened the hatch. “What’re ya doin’, ya drongo?” Mick yelled.

  “Spotting survivors!” Fennek retorted, unlimbering his bow. He leaned out of the open door. The bow flexed and sang; a glowing arrow shot down from the VTOL and embedded itself in the debris. Then another arrow sprouted some fifty feet away. Then another. After placing just under a dozen arrows, Fennek pulled himself back inside. “Tell them to dig there!” he said. “Those are the ones closest to the surface, and they look like they’re doing the worst!”

  Mick hesitated, but he pulled out the radio and proceeded to relay the information to those already on the ground. Mick’s word was obviously law; in moments workers with picks, shovels, jackhammers and more were moving on the spots Fennek had picked out. “Let’s get down there and put our backs to it,” he said. “Looks like we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “There’s more, down deeper,” Lok’Tara informed him. Mick’s face only got grimmer.

  They landed on the edge of the rubble; everyone was out and planting boots on soil almost before the landing gear touched down. Shen headed for the medical tents, Lei Ling in tow. Lok’Tara had Brutus, Judas, and Angelica at her heels; a few murmured commands and they scattered, sniffing their way through the disaster area, looking for people Fennek might have missed… or, more grimly, might have been beyond Fennek or Lok’Tara’s ability to find.

  Fennek was scurrying out into the center of the collapsed mall, Fidget and Gidget bounding at his sides. He arrived just in time to see them pull out the first bloody mess that used to be a human being…

  Why was he doing this?

  Time crawled painfully as they retrieved the living and the dead from the first layer of debris. Fennek was finding himself frustrated. Beyond his spotting ability he was of little use; Lok’Tara was in there, shifting slabs of building of alarming size with her bare hands. But his childlike size meant he could contribute little to the brute effort of shifting concrete and iron and brick. Worse, he could still see those sparks further below… some of them flickering dangerously… as he watched he saw two of them flicker out.

  Then the debris shifted.

  “Everyone get clear!” Mick yelled. Everyone hastily backpedaled, getting off the rubble as it shifted and groaned, plumes of dust rising up. After several seconds the shifting stopped, but Mick swore a blue streak. “Some of it must be unstable below,” he said. “It’s going to be the Devil to move it now without causing a cave-in...”

  “There’s still people down there,” Fennek informed him. He could see one cluster of lights; a family…? They were huddled together so close they overlapped in his senses. “They won’t last long if we don’t get to them.”

  “We don’t dare try to shift it by hand anymore,” Mick said. “We gotta get a crane or something to LIFT it off, piece by piece, like the Devil’s own Jenga game.” He spit. “We go out there we could bring it all down...”

  Fennek heard Fidget and Gidget chirping in his mind. The two ferrets, untrained as they were, were still bonded to him and followed his lead-- they’d been in and out of the debris, trying to help the workers spot the living and the dead.

  Down?

  Down in holes?

  Small holes?

  Gidget dig.

  Fidget dig more!

  Dig dig.

  Squeeze in.

  Fit in.

  Bring out!

  “You’re too heavy,” Fennek said, even as his old self screamed in confusion at him. “I’m not.” He scurried back out on the ruin pile.

  “Boy--!”

  But he was already moving. It had sunk in just a moment ago; one of the skills that had been downloaded into his shiny new brain was mining. What he’d overlooked before was that mining was more than just finding shiny rocks and digging them up. It was working in caves, and in mines. It was subterranean work… knowing how to shore up stone, and spot pockets of poison gas and cave-ins before they could happen. An Azeroth miner had a literally supernatural feel for stone and earth that a Terran miner would have traded his union membership card for. All that knowledge had been filed away in Fennek’s head, just waiting for him to poke at it.

  He could feel the lay of the rubble beneath him, tell which stones and slabs and I-beams were load-bearing, which were precariously balanced, how far apart they were and how they stacked together… there was indeed a room-sized pocket directly below; he could feel there was a passageway down to it as well.

  He sat there, analyzing the stone and dirt and debris, trying to pick out a course of action. Fidget and Gidget took his scrutiny for a command and promptly wriggled their way in. Cursing he pulled out a light, grabbed one of the ropes that were lying about and crawled in after them.

  It wasn’t a tight squeeze, but it was definitely claustrophobic. He heard a muted scream ahead; it occurred to him that the sight of two economy-sized carpet sharks squeezing into one’s space might not be a comforting one. “It’s okay, they’re service animals!” he shouted. There weren’t any further screams, so he assumed he’d been heard.

  He finally made it to the pocket. His head popped out into the open space, and he promptly took a chunk of brick between the eyes. “Owwww!”

  “It’s a dingo!” a little kid’s voice screeched.

  Right. Australia. “I’m not a dingo!” he snapped, rubbing his forehead.

  “I-- I think it’s a Cape, Jamie,” a maternal voice said.

  Fennek opened his eyes. It was what he’d expected, a family of three-- a boy about ten years old, his mother and his father, all huddled in one end of a space maybe four feet high and six feet long that had once been the corner of a room. A pair of crossed I-beams had fallen just right, forming a peaked roof over their little sanctuary. The son looked okay, the mother too… filthy and a bit scraped up but otherwise okay. Dear old Dad was a bit worse for wear, with what looked like a broken arm and leg.

  For some reason the boy looked familiar. “I’m Fennek,” he said. “I’m a hero of the Alliance.”

  He wasn’t sure whether that sounded cool, or retarded, or both.

  “You’re gonna be okay,” he said. “We’re gonna get you out of here.” There was a faint rumble as some of the ruins shifted; dust sifted down.

  What the HELL am I doing here??

  He looked into the boy’s eyes. He was a thin little stick of a kid, with dark curly hair and wide eyes. With a shock Fennek realized why he looked so familiar. it wasn’t just his face, though give or take a bit the kid could have been a ringer for himself just a few years ago…. it was his expression. He’d seen it in the mirror countless times when he was that age, in the rare unguarded moments when nobody else was watching. Fear.

  Alec, nee Jean-Paul Vasil was more than familiar with fear. His father, the villain known has Heartbreaker, had used his Cape powers of emotion manipulation on his children… used fear and terror and despair as a form of punishment, and when those didn’t serve he resorted to more brutish methods. He had never been subtle about it either. Since running away from his father’s little cult compound, Alec hadn’t felt anything to match what his father had inflicted on him--

  Until yesterday, when the Endbringer sirens had gone off. He’d found himself climbing aboard that bus. The entire ride, his heart had been pounding with terror every bit as intense and unrelenting as the artificial agony his father had inflicted on him; fear so bad, so merciless that you wished you could die, just to make the fear stop. It had been an awful epiphany, that ordinary people could feel such horrible, all-consuming terror perfectly naturally all the time. No psycophath psychic Father to flee from; no empowered siblings to resist; no powers-based immunity… or self-destructing, burned out emotional synapses-- to take the edge of the pain.

  He looked in the kid’s eyes and saw himself at six years old; powerless. In terror and misery, trying to hide it and failing. And his only hope was that somehow, someone somewhere would eventually make it stop.

  He knew what he was doing here.

  He reached out and put one fuzzy hand on the kid’s shoulder. “You’ll be okay. I promise.”

  Healing aura flowed through the air, rippling and splashing like water, quenching pain effortlessly. “Thank you,” the aboriginal woman said in relief, relaxing back in her cot for the first time since Lei Ling and Shen had laid eyes on her. The burns on her arms were already on a swift mend.

  When they had first walked in, Shen had taken note that slightly over half the injured had been, to put it cautiously, of native Australian descent. He carefully watched Lei Ling’s reaction; she caught him watching and bristled up. “What?”

  Shen manned up and pulled her aside by the elbow. “This isn’t going to be a problem, is it?” he said, nodding his head in the direction of the patients.

  “Not unless you MAKE it a problem,” she hissed under her breath, jerking her arm out of his grasp. “Ophelia didn’t have any problem healing--” she shot a glance to make sure noone was listening-- “ ‘others.’”

  “Yeah but you aren’t her. So: are all these ‘others’ going to be a problem for you?” He stared her in the eye.

  “No!” she hissed. “Now can we quit jerking around about how the little remedial ex-E88 needs to be babysat around anyone not white and just get to work?” Chastened, Shen backed off and looked to the head nurse.

  They were cautious: neither Shen nor Lei Ling new exactly how their healing powers worked or how they would interact with, for example, sutures or broken bones. They had let the medical people bind up the injuries in the usual fashion, except with the Azeroth bandages. Those alone had produced swift and miraculous results, but if they weren’t enough then they administered the healing potions, followed by the healing and purifying auras (to draw out infection.) Within the first hour they had nearly everyone there either fully mended or on the mend.

  Including the elderly aboriginal lady Lei Ling was tending now. Relieved from the pain of her burns, the woman regarded her with kind if tired eyes. “You seem bit edgy around me and mine,” she noted knowingly.

  Lei Ling didn’t meet her eyes. She focused on sorting the empty potion vials and putting them back in her bottomless belt pouch. “I’m not used to being around, um, people from other countries,” she mumbled.

  “Darkies, you mean.” The old woman laughed at Lei Ling’s jump and twitch. “Go on, I ain’t offended. Got better things to do then spend all my time being offended by silly people.” She harrumphed. “Got a few grand-nephews always complaining about how the British killed us, shot us, the British did this, the British did that-- like they were there a hundred years ago and it happened to them.” She sniffed. “I suppose everybody’s got somebody they hate on, and a pile o’ half-assed excuses for doing it.”

  “...Yeah. My ‘Family’ wasn’t exactly too open minded, either,” Lei Ling said.

  “Eh, you’ll grow out of it,” the woman said. “And what you don’t, you’ll learn to live with.”

  Lei Ling gave her a hesitant smile. “...Thanks.”

  There was a rumble; Lei Ling felt the ground tremble under her feet. A great deal of shouting started up outside. “The heck was that?” she exclaimed. She stuffed the last of her vials in her bag and ran for the exit.

  Outside, the workers had all retreated off the dig and were now were clustered on the edges. Lei Ling saw ‘Mick’ and ran up to him, Shen close behind. “What happened?”

  “Everything shifted,” he summarized. “We had to clear out to keep it from caving in further.” And killing the people still trapped beneath, his grim expression said the last silently.

  Lok’Tara was on the far side of the pit, her dogs clustered anxiously around her. Her attention was fixed on the crumbled ruins below. “Mick, where’s Fennek?” Shen asked, his voice full of foreboding.

  “’E said there’s still people alive down there,” Mick said. “Him and those two ferrets o’ his took a line and dove down into it.” Mick’s accent got thicker with worry. “‘E sent word up, ‘e found ‘em, but now we gotta figure out a way to get ‘em all out without crushing ‘em.”

  Lei Ling felt inspiration hit. “No problem, I got it covered,” she said.

  Mick held up a hand. “Whoa now, we’ve all seen your big rocky friend, but ‘e’s a bit too heavy to be climbing down there shifting stuff around.”

  “That’s not what I’m going to do,” she said. She pulled out several vials-- stamina, mana, intellect-- and downed them, then slapped several scrolls on herself to boot. She held up her hands. “Shen, hit me with whatever buffs you have, and keep them coming.” Mana flowed from her hands, down into the dig and into the broken piles of rubble.

  Once upon a time, Mick and his family had gone to a stage performance. Some exotic Cirque du Soleil sort of thing, a gymnastic performance of sorts. The lights would come up on stage, revealing a stand of trees, or a giant lotus blossom, or a human skull. Then as the music started, the performers would start to move and the trees or the skull or the giant lotus blossom would unfold, revealing it was a group of these gymnasts all along, grouped up and balancing on top of one another.

  That was the closest he could come to describing what he saw happen that moment. For a brief heart stopping moment the rubble shifted again-- then it began not to slide and shift but to move, arms and legs and torsos forming out of rock and brick and broken wood and glass, humanoid forms unfolding from one another, standing, stretching and walking, ever so carefully, up out of the pit…

  The red panda girl stood there, hands outstretched, brow furrowed in concentration, tail twitching, arms trembling. The male black-and-white panda planted his hands on her shoulders and bubbles of jade-colored light began pouring from him into her.

  The workers cleared back as the craggy titans climbed up out of the foundations of the collapsed shopping center. Some of them were carrying the tragic remains of the Simurgh’s victims; these the golems set down tenderly with the others, before trudging patiently over to the excavation piles the back hoes and bulldozers had made and tidily crumbling back into the broken rubble from which they had come.

  This eerie parade went on for five minutes, ten, a quarter hour… the strain was showing on the panda girl’s face, her partner was leaning on her as much as holding her up… then finally, the last three of the concrete giants stood up and stepped back, revealing a man, a woman, a little boy, and a fox-man and his two ferrets, alive and well.

  Lei Ling dropped her arms; the golems walked a few more steps back then slumped over. An almighty cheer went up from all those watching, worker and rescuee alike. Lei Ling sagged to the ground with a moan, Shen close behind her.

  “Gonna have to remember that trick,” Shen said. He was aching like the juice had been squeezed out of his tissues.

  “Remember not to ever do it again,” Lei Ling retorted. “I don’t even know the words for the parts of me that hurt...”

  Her tone might have been grumpy, but there was no wiping the smile of satisfaction off her face.

  Greg barely made it to the garbage can. For that matter he barely got his helmet off in time. He bent double over the bin and retched and heaved noisily, his hasty breakfast and even less well thought out lunch coming up in a rush.

  “Are you okay, Vindicator?” Panacea said behind him.

  Greg looked up at her. “I… I’ve never had to do anything like that before,” he said weakly.

  “Not too many people have,” Panacea said, handing him a bottle of water. “Duct-taping someone’s severed leg in place while someone else glues it back together isn’t exactly a common first aid method.”

  Greg took the water gratefully. He rinsed and spit, then gulped down the rest. “And you do this all the time...” he marveled.

  “Hey, don’t feel too bad,” Panacea said. “You got through all those injuries, right up to the severed leg. You held it in till you got the leg in place with those magic bandages of yours, and I got everything spliced back together. You even held out long enough to hit it up with that golden heal-light of yours for good measure. THEN you ran for the chunder bucket.” She grinned at him.

  “So you did better YOUR first time?” he challenged, a little needled.

  Her smile disappeared. “My first time was my Trigger event,” she said. “I was holding Vicky’s guts in place after she took a shotgun to the belly.” She got VERY sober. “It’s how we found out her invulnerability can be knocked out. Blam, no problem. Blam Blam, big problem.”

  Greg cringed. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay… do you need a mask?”

  Greg laughed. “I’m nobody, Panacea. Who’d recognize me?” He donned his helmet again.

  Panacea looked upset at that for some reason. She started to say something when there was a whoosh and Glory Girl landed next to them. “Hey Ames, Vindy,” she said.

  “Please don’t call me Vindy,” Greg muttered in his helmet.

  “Where’ve you been?” Amy said.

  “Helping with cleanup-- clearing blocked streets, mostly,” Vicky said. “Grubby work.” One wouldn’t know it to look at her pristine white uniform, though… one of the advantages of a personal force field, Greg supposed. “Hey, could you guys do me a favor?”

  “Depends. What?” Amy said, hand on her hip.

  “There’s a little girl on the other side of the field hospital,” she said. “Just a few chunks of gravel in her arm; the field meds already cleaned it up and bandaged it buuuuut...” she gave them an impish smile. “I sorta promised her she’d get to meet her favoritest new hero...”

  “Me??” Amy said in surprise.

  “Sorry, sis, not this time.” Amy deflated a bit. Vicky spun about in mid air and booped Greg with a fingertip on his helmet right where his nose would be. “Yyyyyou.”

  Greg felt his jaw working. “Me?? But… I haven’t… really done anything!”

  Vicky rolled her eyes. “Says the guy that smacked Lung in the mush with a sledgehammer,” she said. “She’s apparently gaga over knights and dragons and wizards and stuff. She saw you clanking about when they brought her in and she’s been busting at the seams to meet you.” She cocked an eyebrow. “Well?”

  Greg suddenly felt a twinge of self-consciousness. “If… Panacea, would you mind coming along? I--”

  Amy gave him a wry smile. “Sure, all the heavy work’s done here.” The potions, scrolls and bandages the Warcrafted had contributed had lightened Panacea’s burden considerably. “Wouldn’t hurt my PR to finish up fixing her arm, anyway.”

  Greg sighed and shrugged. “Lead the way, I suppose...”

  Those who had been patched up, but not yet seen Panacea or one of the other Cape healers, had been moved to a row of recovery tents. Vicky led them to the last one in the row and pulled the door flap aside. “May I introduce you to Miss Olivia Walker,” she said with a little flair. “Olivia-- allow me to present my sister, Panacea, and her friend, Vindicator the Paladin.”

  Greg and Amy stepped inside. Inside was a little pigtailed, brown haired girl lying in a medical cot. A woman (Greg guessed it was her mother) was sitting in a folding chair next to her. The little girl had her left arm bandaged from fingertip to shoulder, and was wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon unicorn prancing across it. The moment she saw Greg’s armored form step into the tent, her eyes went round as saucers.

  “Hello, Mrs. Walker I presume?” --Amy was a lifesaver. “We had a spare moment so I thought I’d step in and take a look at Olivia’s arm?”

  “O-of course, yes,” the tired-looking woman said. “Thank you!”

  “It’s no problem.” Panacea knelt down next to Olivia. “Olivia, I’m going to fix up your arm, okay? It may go all numb and tingly for a bit, but it won’t hurt a bit, I promise.” Olivia, still wide eyed and open mouthed and staring at Vindicator, merely nodded. Amy gently pulled the bandage aside and placed her fingertips against the skin underneath. Greg could see her slipping into the state of meditation that she used when she was using her power. He could see Olivia’s arm relax, and her narrow shoulders un-tense-- she must have been in a bit of pain.

  He knelt down on the other side of the cot. “Greetings, Olivia,” he said, slipping into ‘Knight Errant mode.’ “I heard you were wanting to meet me?”

  Olivia nodded so energetically the barettes in her pigtails rattled. “A real live knight, wow,” she breathed. He saw her mother smother a smile behind her hand.

  “Alas, though I am a Paladin, I am yet to be properly knighted,” Greg said. “But I will serve as a Champion all the same if need be.”

  Olivia reached out her free hand to run it over Greg’s gauntlet, fascinated by the gleaming metal. “Why are you in a hospital?” she said. “Shouldn’t you be out battling monsters and stuff?”

  “I can do other things, too,” Greg said. “I can heal, too.” He held out a cupped hand and filled it with Light. Olivia cooed appreciatively. “Though nowhere near as well as good Lady Panacea, here.” Amy said nothing, but he saw a faint smile curl the corners of her mouth. “And I heard there were people hurt here, and so I came here to help.”

  Olivia nodded again seriously. “That makes sense.” She scrutinized his helmeted face. “Have you ever slain a dragon?”

  “Slain a dragon?” Greg blinked at that one. Then he remembered and grinned. “Well, no, not yet. But I did smack one in the face with my warhammer.” He produced the hammer and let her look it over.

  “Cooool.” Olivia traced her finger over her reflection in the metal. “Didja knock his block off?”

  Greg couldn’t help chuckling. It echoed inside his helmet. “No. But my friend the Wizard turned him into a sheep.”

  “Really?” Olivia giggled.

  “Really. You should have seen him-- oh, he was the angriest little sheep in the world. BaaaaAAAaaah!” Olivia pealed with laughter. Even Amy and Olivia’s mother chuckled at that one.

  “Well, that should take care of that,” Panacea said. She pulled a pair of bandage scissors out of her belt and cut the wrapping off of Olivia’s arm, revealing whole, umblemished skin beneath. She tossed the bandages and the severed stitches into the waste bin. “Good as new.”

  Olivia touched her arm, then flexed it. “Thank you,” she said with a gap toothed smile.

  “Yes, thank you so much. I know it was a trivial thing but--”

  “The injuries were easy enough to fix,” Amy said. “No sense in making Olivia go through weeks of discomfort when a moment would heal it up.”

  “Again, thank you.” Olivia’s mother took Amy’s hand and patted it in gratitude. “Are you ready to go home, honey?”

  “Uh huh.” Olivia hopped off the cot and started to follow her mother out of the tent. She stopped, then turned back to Vindicator. Her smile was missing and she was biting her lip worriedly. “Mr. Vindicator?”

  “Yes?” Greg said.

  “If… if the Simurgh comes back...” She almost whispered it, her eyes liquid with fear. “Will you and your friends come back and beat her again?”

  Greg thought his heart would wrench in half. He did the only thing he could think of. He took her hand in his own metal-clad one and looked her in the eyes through the slit in his helmet.

  “I SWEAR it,” he said fervently. For a brief moment, golden light shone through the seams of his armor.

  “Sydney.”

  Flash.

  “Hong Kong.”

  Flash.

  “Mt. Fuji.”

  Flash.

  “New Delhi.”

  Flash.

  “Rome.”

  Flash.

  “London.”

  Flash.

  “Toronto...”

  This, Strider decided, was BORING. About an hour ago they’d buttonholed him to take this new elf-looking Cape on a literal whirlwind tour of the major stops around the world, so he could “learn” them and be able to open portals to them. And it wasn’t a lightning fast process either. At every stopoff, the kid would go a few steps, pull a chunk of quartz crystal or something out of his belt pouch (dang big belt pouch, considering all it seemed to hold) and do a little song and dance for a few minutes. Then he’d open a quick portal back to Canberra, look through, nod, say “Got it” and hop back next to Strider for the next leg of the trip.

  He wouldn’t have minded the delays… well, not as much… but the weird little ritual at each stopoff was setting off his freak-o-meter something fierce. The robes, the staff (which was kind of cool looking, he had to admit), the whole shtick just screamed of a Cape who thought his powers were ‘magic.’ He’d dealt with Myrddin, the self-proclaimed “wizard” of Boston, more than a few times and the whole superstitious claptrap drove him up a wall. Strider had spent a good bit of time in college earning a liberal arts degree, and he’d studied enough logic and rhetoric that he could make a hobby of listing off the fallacies some of the more egregious “mages” in the Cape community made to justify their thinking. Myrddin, for example, had turned Begging the Question into a veritable art form...

  The fact that complex geometric patterns and formulas in some strange text appeared to hover around the elf-guy’s hands as he worked only made him think the guy was REALLY reaching.

  “Hey, Shar-whatever,” he finally said on their stopover in a corner of Berlin. “So what are you doing here, exactly?”

  Shar’Din didn’t pause, he continued moving the glowing numbers and symbols around in the air. “Calculating,” he said. “planetary signs, lunar cycle, dominant ley lines...”

  “Ley Lines? Lunar cycle? I thought so. This is supposed to be MAGIC, right?” Okay, maybe he was being a bit of an ass, but “sorcerers” got his goat. He couldn’t resist tweaking them.

  The blonde ‘elf’ paused briefly at that. “Well, yeah, some people might call it that… but sufficiently advanced whatever, you know?” He turned back to his work.

  “Astrology isn’t science, sufficiently advanced or otherwise,” Strider snorted.

  “Who said anything about astrology?” Shar’Din said. “Dude, I’m ripping time and space a new one trying to open a stable portal halfway around the world on a MOVING PLANET. Don’t you think knowing the rotational and orbital speed of the earth and the gravitational effect of the sun, moon, and local planets MIGHT be kind of important to the equation?”

  Strider huffed. “I never had to muck around with all that,” he said.

  “Yeah, but your sh-- your power does it all for you,” Shar’Din said. “Some of us don’t get easy short cuts.” He lowered his arms and the equations disappeared into the chunk of quartz at his feet. “I mean sure, over short hops I can fudge most of this, but once you start getting to planetary scale you gotta start dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s. Go from the North Pole to the Equator without making the right adjustments and you splat into a wall at literally a thousand miles an hour.” He shrugged. “Or you get a thousand mile an hour wind blowing in your face out of your portal… and that’s just the easy part of the math.”

  Strider was feeling properly chastened now. “So you don’t really believe all this hocus pocus claptrap,” he said, waving his hand and indicating Shar’Din’s appearance, attire, et al. “You know you’re not really a magical elf--”

  “Uh, no. I’m an elf. A Sindorei, a blood elf. And no, not like a vampire. Long story. And yeah, magic.”

  “There’s no such thing as magic,” Strider sighed, longsuffering. “Or elves for that matter.”

  “You bet that hat on that?” Shar’Din said, grinning. He picked up the quartz-- actually levitated it off the ground-- and stuck it back in his belt pouch. “Fifty years ago there was no such thing as superheros and supervillains except in comic books, and the only giant kaiju running around were rubber suits on movie sets. There was no such thing as alternate worlds either, and now we’ve got trade agreements with another Earth. If there’s another Earth, why not one more, one where there are elves?”

  “That’s pleading from ignorance,” Strider pounced.

  The blonde elf stopped and seemed to square up. “Okay, look dude, I haven’t got a fancy education, so I don’t even know what that means,” he said. “Other than you know a lot of fancy terms and words and like to throw them around to show how smart you are.

  “But that’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? Terms and words and phrases. And they don’t mean nothing. What do you mean by the word ‘magic?’ Do you know how many words in science are just fancy, smart sounding ways to say ‘I don’t know?’

  “You ask them why if like charges repel one another, why all the protons in an atom don’t fly apart. They say ‘the Weak Force.’ Which is just science geek shorthand for “Heck if we know.” They say there’s not enough matter in the universe, you ask them where it is, they say ‘dark matter.’ Which they can’t see or detect or even find. So, guess what, where’s the rest of the universe? “Heck if we know.” You ask ‘what makes everything that goes up, come back down” and they say “gravity” and you ask them what gravity is and they say “the force that makes things fall down.” “Gravity” is just another word for “Heck if we know.” It’s all, all circular reasoning posing as explanations, but because it uses sciencey words everyone thinks it explains everything.

  “You have powers that can do crazy, impossible things whenever you want. Myrddin has powers that let him do crazy, impossible things whenever he wants. Neither of you has a clue how they work or what they are. Myrddin calls his ‘magic,’ you call yours-- well whatever you call yours-- and you might as well both be calling it phlebotinum, or oobleck, or bingo bango bongo boingo, for all the difference it would make. You’re not smarter than him or anybody else for using different words to describe something neither of you really understand.” He pulled his robes around him and stood in place next to Strider. “Next stop?”

  “New York,” Strider muttered. Toronto disappeared in a flash of light and was replaced by the New York skyline.

  Strider’s hobby of needling people didn’t seem quite as much fun as before.

  Hemlokk was feeling about as useful as the “G” in “Lasagna.” She had expected Bayleaf to stay with her, to help with familiarizing the rescue crews with the Warcrafted equipment they had brought. But no, before she could even ask, Bayleaf had been buttonholed by Armsmaster and the local director to come up to the command center that had been set up (how apropos) in the airport traffic control tower. Tattletale, Grue, and Aisha aka “Mama Crow” had trundled off after them, their home-brewed commlink equipment in tow. Now Hemlokk was busy dealing with the crew leaders-- medical, search and rescue, repair and demolition, sanitation, fire and emergency-- explaining, in exhausting and overly picky detail, precisely how the potions, scrolls, stat buffing gems, tinkerbots, gnomish gadgets, azerite first aid bandages, and other gear they had brought along worked and was to be used.

  She was also running up against an unexpected consequence of the unique… style of Azeroth science; arbitrary skepticism. She found herself hard pressed to convince people that yes, little flasks of ruby colored liquid could heal, or that a scroll of inked parchment could boost mental clarity. Even if she’d possessed the language to describe the process whereby the inscriptionist used higher formulae to quantum-entangle the parchment to an energy infused collapsed fractal tessaract, it would have been utter gibberish to the people she was addressing. None of that should have mattered, they’d been SHOWN it worked!

  “I don’t have time for all this crystal waving nonsense,” the doctor she was speaking to was saying for the umpteenth time. “ We’re packed to capacity. And I can’t have my staff walking around wearing ridiculous looking “bling” while doing their work!”

  “Look, it’s just really exotic tinkertech--”

  “New untested ‘tinkertech.’ My confidence soars.”

  Hemlokk finally snapped. “Doctor House, you are chief of staff at one of the biggest hospitals at Canberra. Your staff have been on your feet twenty-four hours, your superiors do NOT want you using stimulants to keep going, and since you refuse to get out of my way and sign off on these potions, scrolls and rings for your staff without PROOF, you’re going to GET it right here and right now.” She held up a ring with a rather large yellow stone in its setting. “Now put this ring on, or God so help me, I’ll give you a Prince Albert and make you wear it THAT way!”

  Dr. House’s eyes went wide. He backed up a step. “Now wait a minute here--”

  Hemlokk pulled out one of her daggers. The razor-sharp tip gleamed in the light. “Your choice, your finger or your dick!” she snarled.

  He quickly took the ring and slid it on his middle finger. He did a double take. “Did it just resize-- HOO!” He blinked and staggered back, catching his balance. He shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “Doctor?” One of the nurses said.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said. He paused. “Actually, I’m better than fine. Sakes alive, that was like forty cups of coffee at once. Hoo!” he shook his head again. “Fine, fine. I’ll run this crate to Calvary Bruce...”

  He left without so much as a thank you.

  Hemlokk sighed and leaned against the stack of crates, her head resting on the top lid. “Tough job?” the lady at the airport counter said.

  “I am spending way too much time convincing people that this stuff actually works,” Hemlokk said. “The doctors, the paramedics, the Capes, the PRT rank and file… every step of the way some bureaucrat nitpicker, skeptic or paranoid is getting in my way, keeping me from just handing this stuff out and getting done with it! We live in an age where teenage girls can levitate buildings with their fingertips and flying men shoot lasers out of their hands. Lasers that turn corners! This is beyond arbitrary skepticism, it’s arbitrary stupidity!”

  The lady at the reception counter came over and looked in the boxes. “Well, it’s probably that it all looks so… video-gamey.” Hemlokk raised her head and looked at her, puzzled. “You know,” the woman went on. “Like something out of a roleplaying game. I mean,” she picked out one of the potion bottles and held it up. “Healing potions? Scrolls? Magic rings and necklaces? The healing potions are even red and in little round flasks. Right out of Final Fantasy, that.” She held the bottle up to the light and swirled it. “Why are healing potions always red?”

  “Dunno, I never thought about it,” Hemlokk confessed, looking into the excelsior-lined box. “The stronger ones use entirely different ingredients, I can tell you that much, so they should be a little different in color at least… hm.”

  Hemlokk’s intercom suddenly buzzed. She tapped her earpiece. “What is it Mama Crow?” she said.

  “Hemlokk, you better get to the air traffic tower ASAP,” Aisha said, her voice low and urgent. “I’m calling in anyone else who can move. Things are about to get hairy.”

  “What is it?” Hemlokk said, her hackles prickling in alarm at Lisa’s tone.

  “Bayleaf’s here with us in the Command Center. And-- take a look out the window and check out who just arrived.” Hemlokk glanced up. Standing in the lobby, she had a clear view out the glass front of the building. Swooping in out of the sky was a very familiar figure.

  “Alexandria,” Taylor whispered. The leader, behind closed doors, of the Triumvirate and of the Protectorate and (illegally) of the PRT. One of the most powerful Capes on earth. A stone-cold killer, And one of the top guns of the secret organization Cauldron… who her boyfriend had all but declared war on by blowing the bejeezus out of their secret base.

  Someone had arranged for Alexandria and Adrian to be in the same room together. Whatever was about to happen was NOT going to be good.

  “I’m on my way.” She shut off her commlink and disappeared from the lobby in a puff of indigo smoke, reappearing a few hundred feet away behind one of the rescue workers (scaring the pee out of the unlucky fellow) as she began teleporting behind one person after the next, hop-scotching her way to the aircraft control tower.

  Bayleaf looked around the glassed-in room. It was packed full of Capes (well, one assumed from all the spandex) and PRT officers. Most were around computers or communication equipment of one sort or another. Wasn’t that keeping air traffic snarled up? What particular logic led them to conclude taking over an airport’s nerve center for this mission was a good tactical idea, he wondered?

  The belief that the Simurgh would have destroyed Canberra by now and there would be NO air traffic. Right, Bayleaf corrected himself. Probably too late and too much of a logistical nightmare to move the post-op command center somewhere else... “So where’s the rest of you?” he asked Armsmaster idly.

  “The majority of the Brockton Bay Capes returned already,” Armsmaster said. “Endbringer truce or no, it’s inadvisable to leave the city without an organized hero presence.”

  “And the villains and rogues all returned to try and take advantage of your absence, got it,” Bayleaf said dryly.

  “Either that or sleep it off,” Armsmaster said, with an almost-smile-like quirk to his lips. “The Simurgh’s early withdrawal was a cause for a lot of local celebration, and the locals were rather liberal in sharing their alcohol with heroes and villains alike.”

  Bayleaf chuckled as he got the picture. Even in this world Australian beer had a reputation for kicking the arse of the unprepared, and after the wounded Simurgh fled anyone with a cape or mask who walked into an Aussie billabong probably got plied with enough beer to fill a bathtub. The mental image of Kaiser with a XXXX Gold hangover was an amusing one.

  “I am here largely to coordinate the efforts to secure the various tinkertech the Simurgh left behind, particularly the… the techs are referring to it as a ‘Star Gate’,” Armsmaster explained. “As is Dragon. Though she is also lending a great number of her robotic construction vehicles to aid with the cleanup. Most of the Wards are back home as well, with the exception of Clockblocker and Vista. Their powers are already incredibly useful in disaster aftermath work, but those power-projecting ray guns you gave them have made them indispensable. They’re working together in the Northeast quadrant, helping clear debris.”

  Lisa and Aisha in the meanwhile had commandeered a table and chairs for their own setup. Some of the older Thinker capes looked disgruntled at being crowded by a couple of teens (though none looked eager to make much noise, with Grue standing there behind them in his skull-helmeted glory, his thick arms crossed across his chest.) One of them managed to muster a little snark. “A little late to the party, ain’t you kid?”

  Aisha started to make a sarcastic crack but Lisa stopped her. “You’re still here,” she pointed out. “And you’re a little quick to judge what we can contribute, aren’t you?”

  “We’re unraveling the single biggest rout against an Endbringer ever,” another cape said. “So what makes you think you have something to contribute here?”

  Tattletale held up a thumb drive. The smirks she and Aisha were sporting weren’t inhibited by their masks in the least. “Oh, the fact that we’re on the team of the Tinker who created the Simurgh blockers?” she said. She waggled the thumb drive. “And we have all his notes and specs with us?”

  “I have notes?” Bayleaf murmured in surprise

  “You scribble them down everywhere, on dang near anything and everything,” Aisha muttered to him. “Lisa just collects ‘em up. I had to spend an hour helping her computer-scan a stack of takeout napkins.”

  THAT certainly set the cat among the pigeons. “You know the guy who made those??”

  Still smirking smugly, Aisha and Lisa stood on either side of Bayleaf and waved their hands toward him. “Ta freakin’ Dah,” Aisha said.

  Things got very exciting for quite some time after that.

  Bayleaf had expected to drop off the team Thinker and then slip away to see where he could help. Now he was being mobbed by people desperate to shake his hand, to show him the duplicated ‘Simurgh Blocker’ they had attached to their cowls, hoods, masks or helmets, that they wore next to their watches or inside their coats… Dragon-- or at least one of her smaller, remote suits was there. “We know we jumped the gun, producing these without your permission,” she apologized.

  “No, it’s fine, needs be as the devil drives and all that--” Bayleaf stammered, a little dazed.

  “That’s gracious of you,” Dragon said. “But I do want to sit down and hash out an agreement to produce these devices in bulk. I would like to see them in every major city--”

  “How did you figure out how to block the Simurgh’s broadcast?” Armsmaster said. “What was the clue, the data that--”

  “I didn’t!” Bayleaf blurted out. “I wasn’t trying to make a Simurgh-blocker.” The “Whaaaat?” in response was pretty much universal. “It was designed to help a friend of mine who was having trouble controlling her Stranger aura--”

  “You mean Glory Girl?” Armsmaster pressed. Whups. Bayleaf’s ‘guilty puppy’ face gave that one away completely.

  “Wait,” Dragon said. “Are you saying that these devices can block more than just the Simurgh… maybe even all Stranger effects completely?”

  “I don’t know,” Bayleaf confessed. “I didn’t expect them to affect the Simurgh in the first place--” but Dragon’s words had set off an uproar that drowned him out.

  The next couple of hours was spent in a great deal of commotion as handshake agreements were worked out, testing schedules--- for the Simurgh blocker and any other interesting toys that Skinwalker and the other Warcrafted might have-- were tentatively agreed to; schematics and blueprints were passed back and forth, other Tinkers and Thinkers who hadn’t made it to Canberra were contacted by internet…

  It was in the midst of all this that Alexandria arrived. She strode into the room, the crowd parting before her, her black and gray costume and dark half-helmet recognizable to anyone. She ignored the salutations from every quarter, never taking her unsmiling gaze off of the wolf-man in the middle of the room.

  Bayleaf saw her at the same moment she saw him. He went absolutely still, his hackles rising and his muscles swelling as his powers responded to the overwhelming sense of danger, trying to pump up his worgen form even more…. Fruitlessly, the thought crossed his mind. Forget the same league, he wasn’t even in the same zip code as her power level. She was allegedly capable of lifting millions of tons. She could fly multiple times the speed of sound, from a standing start. Till she had been injured by the Siberian it had been believed she was utterly invulnerable. She was also one of Cauldron’s most ruthless agents, and she was here in a closed-in room with him. And the expression on what he could see of her face would have chilled his blood even on a mere mortal.

  My enemy is Silver Age Superman, and he has PMS, Bayleaf thought. “Alexandria,” he said, fiercely struggling to keep his voice pleasant and steady.

  She stopped just out of arm’s reach of him, hands on her hips. “Skinwalker,” she said. “The man of the hour, it seems.” Her voice was calm. Bayleaf wasn’t fooled; he could literally smell the killing rage on her. She had clearly come here hoping to catch a dangerous enemy of Cauldron away from his base of power and deal with him. Perhaps with a skillfully arranged ‘accident’ in one of the Search and Rescue sites…

  But it wasn’t going to happen today. She was, along with all her other ridiculously unfair advantages, a hyper-cognitive Thinker; from the moment she’d walked in the room she’d sized up the lay of the land at the speed of thought, and realized the situation. She had the frustrated air of a cat who had realized the caged canary was truly, inviolably out of its reach.

  “Indeed,” Armsmaster said… though he didn’t sound particularly happy about it. “Skinwalker is the Tinker responsible for inventing the Simurgh blocker.”

  “What’s more, it seems the device may be effective against several forms of Master/Stranger effects… possibly even universally,” Dragon practically gushed.

  Either she feigned it well, or Alexandria was genuinely surprised. “A universal anti-Master/anti-Stranger filter?” she asked.

  “We’ve arranged field tests at one of my laboratories,” Dragon said. “I at the least am hopeful...” she muttered something about ‘that bastard Heartbreaker right in my back yard’ but it was drowned out by

  the clamor of voices.

  “Mass production in the offing..”

  “Every Protectorate and PRT base supplied...”

  “… Hope to improve and perfect those giant field generators...” Armsmaster said.

  Adrian could feel her eyes boring into his own from behind her helmet’s visor. All right lady, your play. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said in a voice that demanded respect. “If I could, I’d like to speak to Skinwalker here for a moment? Privately? There are some ”

  Director Bays nodded. “Certainly, of course-- there’s a room in back--”

  Good play. Bayleaf followed the superheroine into the back-- was it a storeroom of some sort? There were a few metal shelves, but it was empty-- and let the door click behind him. He hadn’t missed Lisa and Aisha frantically fiddle-faddling with their “portable commnet” setup out of the corner of his eye.

  The commlinks the Warcrafted used had more than just earbuds and throat mikes plugged into their ‘cellphones;’ they had audio microphones and discreet, pinhead-sized optical fiber camera lenses. As he turned about to close the door behind him, discreetly as he could he turned the pickupthe mikes as high as it would go. “Well, I’m surprised,” he said casually as he faced her. “You didn’t have Doormaker open a portal under my feet the instant I stepped inside. Out of practice abducting people?”

  Alexandria’s lip curled sourly. “Doormaker refuses to open a portal anywhere within miles of you,” she said. “Something about you, or your tech, scrambles Clairyvoyant’s power, and Doormaker is quite protective of him. I have to go to incredible lengths with detours and workarounds anywhere in the Boston area thanks to you.”

  “Poor thing. Trampling the law underfoot is so demanding, isn’t it Chief Director.” Adrian was angry and he intended to stay angry. Keeping it on a slow simmer was the only way he was going to keep himself from letting his fear show.

  “You’re hardly going to provoke me about breaking the law, Adrian,” she said calmly. Adrian’s hackles prickled; there it was, the casual name drop, just to let him know that they knew. “Not with you being as careless with the law yourself.”

  “Oh I hardly expected to strike a nerve with your law-breaking. That would require you believe in the law. It would require you believe in anything. And you haven’t believed in anything since the day Doctor Mother found you in a children’s hospital and had you trade your chemo in for a magic test-tube. You’ve been providing cover for murderers, rapists, serial killers… hell, you’ve been working alongside them in your super-secret Cauldron base... because Mommy Doctor thought they might be useful.”

  He could see the frisson of suppressed fear that ran through her when he let that little detail of her past slip. Can dish it out but can’t take it, he thought. She doesn’t LIKE being the one having HER secrets pried into. It was smothered out by the spark of anger that came with it. “Everything I have done has been for the good of humanity,” she said, a trifle harshly.

  “...she eateth, and wipeth her mouth, and saith, I have done no wickedness,” Bayleaf quoted, giving her a contemptuous smile.

  She seemed to swell up. “I want answers, Skinwalker,” she said.

  “It’s nice to want things, isn’t it?” he said.

  “How did you find out about Cauldron, Smith?” she said. “How did you track Contessa? How are you blocking our precogs and thinkers?” She glared at him, hands on her hips.

  “Not telling, Didn’t need to, and none of your business, in that order.” He stood with his arms crossed, unsmiling.

  She ground her teeth together hard enough to make diamonds. “You are meddling with things a smart man would leave well enough alone, Smith,” she said, her voice low and dangerous. “You are already on our shit list. You would be SMART to tell me what I want to know or--”

  “Or what?” he said. “You’ll kill me? Maim me? Threaten my loved ones? Kill a few of them and show me the bodies to break me? Hey, you’re already Cauldron’s bitch, might as well go the full Monty, right?” His eyes narrowed. “You’ve killed, kidnapped people and experimented on them, thrown innocents in prison, given aid and comfort to murderers, rapists and molesters… Is there any principle or moral you didn’t whore out on Mommy-Play-Doctor’s orders?”

  “You self-righteous prick!” she seethed. “We’re trying to save the world from total destruction. Everything we’ve done has been for that! Humanity has to survive!”

  “Humanity has to be worthy of survival,” Skinwalker shot back. “What kind of a world will be left, after you and your lord and masters remake it? After all the billions are dead and the only ones left are the ruthless and brutal and amoral-- like you? How long will that world last before the barbarian remainder falls on one another and humanity finally devours itself?

  “Because that’s just the world Doctor Mother is going to build. A brutish, barbaric world just like the one she lived in before a giant monster from space fell on it.”

  She stepped closer, trying to loom. He was more than a foot taller than her; it didn’t quite work. “Where are you getting all your information?” she snarled. “Who’s feeding you data on our operation?”

  “From sources I’m not going to reveal,” he said calmly. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, and I couldn’t care less if you do.”

  “You are threatening everything we’ve done with your childish games--”

  “Note my tears of remorse.”

  “And I will take care of you… permanently if need be, if you don’t back off.”

  “You’d try.”

  “I could snap your neck with my fingers in the time it takes you to blink, Adrian Smith,” she said icily.

  “You could but you’re not about to,” Bayleaf said.

  “And you know that because?-- urk!” Alexandria’s mouth fell open slackly.

  He glanced down. “Because of the six or so inches of Ghost Iron sticking out just below your sternum,” he said.

  Wisps of indigo smoke drifted around her from behind. “Now, bitch,” a husky female voice purred in Alexandria’s ear. “Let me explain some things to you. I’ve already stabbed you through nerve points in your shoulders and hip joints. That’s what that spreading burning and numbness is. Your arms are paralyzed for the next fifteen minutes or so, your legs locked. One of my blades is now stuck through your torso. I have the tip of another planted at the base of your skull. If you so much as twitch the wrong way, I will drive one into your cerebellum and slice the other up through your heart.” A whiskered muzzle filled with teeth brushed against Alexandria’s cheek. “Do NOT test me.”

  Alexandria rolled her eyes down to look at the blade sticking out of her. “H-how…?”

  “Like I said, Ghost Iron. Or, well, ghost steel azerite alloy, but that doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily. Hello, beautiful. Spectacular timing.”

  “Glad I’m not fashionably late.”

  “Anyway, Ghost Iron has some interesting properties… as you can probably feel. My lovely Hemlokk’s blades can slice through damn near anything-- including your nearly indestructible costume, obviously-- but they do not cut living flesh. Of course they have nasty side effects from passing through… burning pain, followed by numbness and paralysis--- but you knew that.” He smirked at Alexandria; it was all fangs. “So before you get clever and try anything, I want you to think what the effect will be of paralyzing someone’s heart. Or driving a nerve signal disrupting blade into their brain.”

  “Long version short-- don’t,” Hemlokk growled.

  “See, this is your Road to Damascus moment, Chief Director Rebecca Costa-Brown. The moment when you get the fear of Jesus put into you, and you go on your merry way with a whole new message. About exactly what it is I and my friends can do. I’m going to tell you why you and the rest of Cauldron should stay the hell out of our business, and pray to God we don’t decide to get in yours.

  He leaned in. “I know how to kill you.”

  “That’s right,” he said. He wasn’t smiling, he wasn’t even threatening. He was speaking as if he was saddened, as if he had a message to deliver and this was the only way to get it across. “I know how to kill Alexandria. I know how to kill the Slaughterhouse Nine, all of them-- starting with the Siberian. I also know how to kill the Simurgh, and the Leviathan, and the Behemoth, and their seventeen brothers and sisters waiting in the wings. And I’ve got a pretty good lead in on how to kill Scion too.

  “We are going to beat all your little monsters. We are going to root out all your corrupt little conspiracies. We are going to defeat Scion. We are going to save the world, and we’re going to keep our souls while we do it. And we are NOT going to tolerate you and your band of stupid little idiots getting in our way.”

  “Get in our way… try to bully, blackmail, intimidate or terrorize us or ours again… EVER… and we will find you and DESTROY YOU.”

  The Ghost blades were yanked out of her body. She staggered back and found herself leaning against the wall for support, her arms dangling limply and her legs locked, half bent, beneath her. “I suggest you leave,” Bayleaf told her. “ Your arms and legs will work again in a few more minutes, but you should be able to fly without them... We’ll make your apologies to everyone else, tell them there was an emergency that came up.” He held the door open for her. Alexandria looked at him, then with a crack of displaced air she was gone.

  Hemlokk wiped her spotless blades on her cloak and sheathed them, then shuddered all over, involuntarily. Bayleaf stepped forward and gave her an embrace. They held each other for a moment, then both silently turned to the door and headed out to face the people still crowding the command center.

  Bayleaf stepped into the room, Hemlokk at his side. Every eye turned to them. Bayleaf caught Tattletales’ eye and gave her the all-clear sign; he watched as she and Aisha sent out word to the rest of the Alliance that everything was okay. “Dragon?” Bayleaf said to the armored Cape. “Would you happen to have any facilities for a, well a large meeting of the minds that we could rent from you?”

  “You mean for like a forum or a symposium?” Dragon asked.

  “A symposium, yes,” Bayleaf said.

  “I have one or two auditoriums somewhere I think,” she said. “I can set one up for you-- and don’t worry about the cost, free of charge.”

  “Thank you,” Bayleaf said with some relief. “There’s nobody I would trust more to set it up.”

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, I’d like to take the opportunity to announce that, approximately one month from now, the Alliance will be holding a symposium-- with Dragon acting as gracious host--” Dragon waved a gauntlet. “We’d hold it sooner but my friends and I need time to compile all our notes...”

  “Dig them out of the trash, you mean,” Aisha snarked.

  “And copy them off the food wrappers,” Lisa threw in as an added dig. Everyone chuckled at that; many of the Tinkers rather ruefully. When a Tinker fugue set in, any flat surface was fair game to write on.

  “I’m throwing the invitation open to any Tinkers, Thinkers, Precogs… even any baseline scientists and inventors. What we are going to need is ideas to sift through, the more, the better. Heroes, rogues, villains…. Hell, if I can get Uber and L33t to show up I’ll send them an invite. We have data… now we need to put wheels under it and make it into a plan.”

  “What is the subject of the symposium?” Director Bays said.

  Bayleaf took a deep breath. “A possible method to kill the Endbringers,” he said.

  Morning came to Brockton Bay. In the Lost Workshop tinkerbots whirred and clicked and went about their chores, fabber machines cranked out gears, pistons, springs and other more arcane things, a golden eagle snoozed on its perch, sleeping off its breakfast (diced chicken, served by a carefully instructed tinkerbot), and a lonely dog the size of a horse lay with its nose an inch from the garage door.

  Boss go through that door.

  Boss come back soon.

  Boss come back through that door.

  Truck had repeated those thoughts over and over all last night, and all this morning. At long last patience was rewarded. There was a rumble of a motor from behind the door, and the smell of exhaust wafted through the cracks in the jamb. Moments later Boss’ entire pack came staggering through the door, smelling dirty and sweaty and VERY tired. Brutus, Judas, and Delilah came tumbling in, wagging tails and doggy smells and barks hello and THERE WAS BOSS!

  The enormous mastiff all but flung himself into Lok’Tara’s arms. The orc girl was too tired to discipline him for jumping on people; she just laughed and grappled with him. “Hey, someone’s happy to see us,” Bayleaf said, chuckling, as he edged past.

  “Yeah, hurray,” Fennek said. He came dragging in, Fidget and Gidget asleep in a toy wagon he had found somewhere. “Augh, it’s morning? What-- oh yeah. Man, jet lag SUCKS.” He tottered off to his room, wagon squeaking along behind him. “Gonna sleep the whole day, then the whole night, then the next day after that.”

  “Man’s a genius,” Shen grunted. “Come on, Lei Ling, we’re home--” he poked gently at the red panda girl leaning into his side. She grunted and grumbled a bit, but stayed glued to him, her head nestled into his shoulder. Shen sighed. “Which way is her room?” he said.

  Greg pointed. “You gonna put her to bed?” he asked.

  “I intend to push her through the door, close it behind her and run,” Shen said drily. “If she faceplants in the carpet, that’s on her.”

  “Not very chivalrous,” Greg muttered.

  “Back in the day, she had issues about boys,” Shen countered. “She thought every guy was after her panties...she’d tear the head off any guy she even thought looked at her funny. She can tuck herself in; I’m not in the mood to deal with that.”

  Greg shrugged. “I guess.” Shen stumbled off, the still-sleepwalking Lei Ling stumbling along with him. Greg yawned enormously. “I could sleep on my anvil, I’m so pooped...” He roamed off to find something softer.

  Lok’Tara yawned hugely, giving everyone a look at her tusks. She tousled Truck’s ears. “Gonna put these guys in the kennel run, then go to bed,” she said to noone in particular. At the words ‘Kennel Run’ her mob of dogs almost swept her off her feet.

  “Place your bets she just sleeps in the kennel run with the dogs again?” Aisha said as she stacked the computer gear on the Comm table.

  “No bets,” Lisa said.

  Soon everyone had wandered their way off to bed (Shar’Din had to be towed to his room; he had fallen asleep on his flying carpet and left it floating in the middle of the Workshop.) Bayleaf sprawled on the sofa, groaning. Hemlokk sprawled next to him. They lougned there silently, too tired for words, as the minutes ticked by.

  Hemlokk sat up. Slowly, without warning, she started to shake. Alarmed, Bayleaf sat up. “Taylor, what’s wrong--”

  She looked at him, tears in her eyes. “Adrian--” she sobbed, holding her arms out to him.

  He pulled her into a hug, squeezing her fiercely. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he mumbled, babbling the only comforting thing he could think to say.

  “She was going to kill you,” she said. “She was going to KILL you!” She pulled away and looked up at him. “And-- and that was horrible enough, and I would have torn her HEART out for it... but it was her, Adrian, it was Alexandria, I grew up wanting to be her, every little girl did-- Why, Adrian, why?”

  Understanding hit Adrian like a truck. He pulled the sobbing wolfgirl to his chest and wrapped her up in his arms, stricken. It had to be like.. like finding out Superman was a murderer and thief who worked for Lex Luthor. The scope and depth of betrayalthat Taylor had to be feeling right now-- that every man, woman and child who had ever looked up to Alexandria had suffered--

  I’ll eat her HEART for this! The wolf in him howled. But he didn’t move; he just held his girl tighter.

  “I know-- I know all you told us about Cauldron, and the Triumvirate… I knew it-- in my head-- but-- but seeing her, hearing her say those things--” Taylor whimpered.

  “I know, baby, I know,” Adrian murmured.

  She sobbed a bit more, then fell silent. She looked up at him, fur on her cheeks streaked with wet. “What do we do? What can we do?” she asked him. “When all the heroes are gone?”

  He looked down at her. “I guess… I guess we have to be the heroes we’ve been waiting for,” he said finally.

  It was the right thing to say. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulled herself up and kissed him.

  It was odd, kissing when both of them were in their wolfen forms. But somehow, just between them, it felt right.