In even the heart of the most chaotic battlefield, a lull must come in the fighting by and by. All over Brockton Bay, the villains were being routed. The last of Spree’s monstrous mutated clones fell and moved no more; the few remaining Teeth fled, retreating from the streets and alleyways. Report of the demise of Shatterbird, Crawler, Mannequin, Chuckles and Hatchet-Face and the Siberian had raced through the city like lightning, almost faster than breathless newscasters could broadcast it. The news of the decimation of the Cape leadership of the Teeth and the Empire 88 went even faster. For a miracle the remains of the E88 and the ABB remained hunkered down wherever they were, wisely staying out of the streets where heroes, PRT forces, the police and no few armed and motivated citizens, envigorated by righteous anger and that rarest of commodities in Brockton bay, hope, waited to bring the hammer down on them.

  But now a hush-- no, a lull, a pause, a breathless air of fear and anticipation had fallen over the battered city. The last and arguably deadliest of the SlaughterTeeth—Bonesaw, the Butcher, and terrible Jack Slash-- along with the scattered remnant of their footsoldiers, had retreated and bunkered up in the local television station, along with a score of hostages they had taken in capturing the building. The forces of the Protectorate, the PRT, and (so the gossip ran) the Rogue capes of the redoubtable Alliance had united, and were closing in on the building from all sides in a vise. The city held its collective breath; the people of Brockton Bay knew almost by instinct when a cape war was brewing, and everything in their bones and blood told them that this time, all that had come before was merely a prologue.

  So the city rumbled to itself, and hunkered down, and prepared for the storm, even as PRT uniforms filled the streets and rooftops and black feathered wings filled the yellowing sky.

  The VTOL touched down on a rooftop just a few streets over from the TV station. Bayleaf and the others spilled out, feet crunching on the gravel roof. The VTOL lifted off immediately; there were far more urgent resources to move into place than there were ways to move it. Several PRT uniforms came up at a trot. To the Warcrafteds’ surprise, Piggot was among them. She was trimmed down to a lean, muscular figure, and she looked at least two decades younger. She was kitted out in a PRT uniform and full gear, complete with a rifle across her back and a pistol at her hip.

  Bayleaf couldn’t help grinning. “Cashed in your gift certificate, did you?”

  The head of the PRT ENE huffed. “Days ago. My skull’s thick but it’s not solid bone all the way through.” She met Bayleaf’s eye. “The rest of your team moving in?”

  “They should be here soon,” Bayleaf said. As if in answer, a crimson streak appeared in the street below, raced up the side of the building, and across the rooftop. When it stopped it resolved itself into the Protectorate speedster and a rather windblown looking Hemlokk, carried bridal fashion. “Whoof,” she said, dropping down to the rooftop on shaky paws. “No offense, Velocity, but never again.”

  Even as she tottered over to stand by Bayleaf’s side a flying carpet (Piggot blinked multiple times, but there it was still) rose up to the rooftop and deposited two passengers, a blonde elf in wizard’s robes and a female cape carrying a massive crossbow strapped to her back-- Piggot immediately placed her as one of the New York wards, Flechette. What the devil was she doing here? “Flechette is cooperating with us on a… particular project, Director Piggot,” Bayleaf said, answering her question before she spoke it.

  “And the nature of this project?” she asked testily.

  “Will be revealed soon enough at the think tank Dragon is hosting,” he said. “But for now, it’s in a very hypothetical phase and has to stay undercover.” He gave her a doggy grin, and gave a nod in the direction of the TV station. “One windmill at a time, Director.”

  She harrumphed. “We’ve already been told, but I’d like eyewitness confirmation,” she said to one of the PRT troopers who’d dismounted with the rogue. “Crawler, Mannequin--”

  He nodded. “Feral, Hemmorhadgia, Chuckles, whatever was left of Hatchet Face--”

  Whatever was left? Piggot decided against asking.

  “Don’t forget the Siberian!” a black girl with two enormous crows perched on her shoulders shouted. “PRT better be ready to break off a li’l sumpin’ for THAT!”

  “So what’s the layout?” Hemlokk said suddenly. She was staring over at the TV station building, her eyes intense.

  Armsmaster stepped over and held up his hand. A wire-frame model of the building appeared. “We don’t have any visual on the inside,” he said, lips pursed. “The first thing they did was splash paint on all the windows.” At least we HOPE it was paint, he thought. “We do know they have hostages-- the remains of the staff and the cast and crew, though we’re uncertain where they’re holding them.

  “We have cordoned off the streets one block out all the way around. We’re working on cutting off his broadcasts but of course the station has an emergency generator and battery backup that will keep them going for days. We also flooded the sewer and maintenance tunnels with containment foam--”

  “Hold that thought.” The Alliance members huddled up and started pulling out… their cell phones? After a few moment’s muttering Skinwalker turned back around. “Can you take an email, Armsmaster? Got a map you need to see.”

  Puzzled, Armsmaster nodded. The wolfman hit ‘send,’ a moment later a 3d digital file popped up in Armsmaster’s HUD. “Overlay that on the map you have… okay, good,” Skinwalker said, as a new wireframe of lines appeared slightly below the hologram of the building. It was a second set of tunnels, only three or four, with erratic direction and elevation as if they had been hand dug--

  “Smuggler’s tunnels,” Skinwalker said. “Some of them dating back to the founding of the city. Everything from booze to bibles to gunpowder has been run through those tunnels.”

  “So that’s the way you’ve been getting around my city so quickly,” Piggot said.

  “One of them, yes.” His infuriating doggy grin didn’t change.

  Piggot harrumphed. “We’ll block off the entrances here, here, here and here-- we still might use them to storm the building from below.” She brooded, rubbing her chin. “Is your Thinker here? Any kind of read we can get on this--”

  “She’s securing the base with the pandas,” Skinwalker said. “Armsmaster, I’m going to broadcast footage of your hologram to our team Thinker...” he held up his cellphone-- an off-brand or possibly a pirated model, Armsmaster deduced immediately-- and filmed several seconds of the holographic simulation. He hit a snag though when he attempted to send. He frowned and jabbed at the screen with his thumb, then with a stylus. “I’ve got zero bars…”

  “That explains some things,” a voice came from overhead. Everyone looked up; descending from above was a very bedraggled New Wave. They were carrying an equally bedraggled pair of prisoners; a male dressed in the ragged remains of a Teeth uniform, and a hogtied female who was swearing a blue streak through her gas mask. “One Spree and one Bakuda, delivered to your door,” Shielder said as they dropped the two.

  “We’re sorry we’re late,” Lady Photon said, dropping a ball of light which transformed into Brandish. “We’ve been chasing those damned monster Spree clones all over Brockton Bay.”

  “They and the Teeth footsoldiers looked like they were smashing up everything they could reach,” Flashbang said. “Took us a bit to notice they were smashing up broadcast towers.”

  “Cell towers, radio towers, TV antennae, satellite… everything,” Shielder threw in. “They tore down some telephone poles and power lines too.”

  Skinwalker swore. “That means we can’t contact the Workshop,” he said. “I knew we needed a better communication system--”

  The PRT had a plethora of gear out on the roof, large portions of it pointed at the TV station. One of the monitors crackled. “Good evening, Brockton Bay! This is your host, dear old uncle Jack Slash, saying hello--”

  “And he’s still broadcasting,” Fennek said in disgust. “The only voice in the city right now, probably.”

  “You’ve got that right,” the tech at the monitor said. “His is the only TV station coming in five-by-five. Even the radio channels are out.”

  “How?” Piggot demanded.

  “By the simple expedient of being on the only station with good reception in the tri-state area,” Armsmaster said, his goatee bristling in irritation. “And having the Teeth vandalize any alternatives.”

  “You want me to shut him up?” Grue said suddenly. Everyone looked at him. “I can do it,” he said, letting some of his darkness leak out of his hand. “My darkness blocks everything, including radio and TV signals.”

  “But we need to hear what he’s going to do--” someone protested.

  “You mean the lies he’ll tell us?” Hemlokk said, a trifle sharply. “Like Vindicator said, anything he says, any deal he offers, any ‘game’ he proposes, it’s 100% that he’ll change the rules and screw everyone over anyway, just to twist the thumbscrews that much more. He only talks to us playthings to ramp up our fear and despair. If he can whip the people of Brockton Bay into a frenzy, all the better for him and all the worse for us.” She glowered at the building. “The Devil has nothing to say that we need to hear.”

  Piggot regarded the wolf girl for a long second. “All right, do it,” she said. “But only drop your, your darkness over the broadcasting tower. You blot out the whole building, and we won’t be able to see through it...”

  “I can,” the girl with the crows interrupted. “Or my birds can, anyway.” Grue looked at her in surprise. “Hey, it’s a new thing for me too, okay? Anyway, don’t worry about any of them turkeys trying to sneak out under the cover of dark. I got eyes in the sky, all the way ‘round.” Corvids rose from every roof, power line and treetop, and began circling the television station, peering intently down at the blocked roads below, crowing and cawing.

  “Can you pay attention to all that?” Skinwalker asked her.

  “Yeah. I can, I know I shouldn’t be able to, but I can,” she said. Several of the birds began flying loop the loops and fancy patterns, while others landed and began doing an odd shuffling dance on the ledge of the building. “I can control all of them individually at the same time, I can see and hear through all of them at once… it’s really freaky. But I got it covered. Ain’t nobody getting in or out without us knowing about it.”

  Piggot looked over at Grue. “I don’t like it, but I like Jack Slash having the eyes and ears of the people even less,” she said. “Do it.”

  Grue nodded and reached out a hand to the TV station. Inky blackness began pouring off his arm. It didn’t spread like smoke, nor did it billow through the air like clouds of ink underwater, as it used to. This darkness moved like a living thing, writhing and coiling through the air across the divide between the rooftops till it reached the broadcast tower atop the station. It began coiling up the tower like an enormous black python, even as other rivulets split off and spread across the roof. “Just blanket the outside,” Piggot said. “Deny them any light.” Grue nodded again, and the darkness rolled down the sides of the building.

  “We won’t be able to get any visual on the interior,” Armsmaster reminded her.

  “We had none anyway. They boarded up or painted over all the windows from the inside.”

  “Wait. Wait wait wait!” Hemlokk said. “I have an idea on how we can get eyeballs inside. Is the internet still up?” she asked one of the techs, even as she pushed him aside to get at an available laptop.

  “Y-yeah, but we had to plug into a cable, wifi is...hey… what are you--?”

  “Figures. Jack Slash is pretty old internet wise… he’d think of cutting off the radio and TV but the internet’s a little newfangled for him,” she muttered. “Okay, About a year ago Uber and Leet did a livestream where they pranked the TV station with holographic ghosts and zombies out of some horror survival game,” she said, typing furiously. “They had little web cameras spliced into the system all over the place to film the action, from what I heard the studio never found them all.”

  “Oh yeah, I remember that episode,” Fennek said. He snickered. “It was some seriously funny stuff. Their anchorman screams like a japanese schoolgirl.”

  “What do you intend to accomplish?” Piggot demanded.

  “I intend to have a little chat with someone and see if I can’t wheedle the secret to tapping into those cameras out of them,” she said. The others clustered around her as she worked.

  FoxyWolf>: HELLO UB3R & L33t RU THER

  Bayleaf gave her a look. “You know how to reach their IRC channel?” he said.

  She gave him a coy look right back. “And you don’t?”

  After what seemed like a small eternity, new words scrolled onscreen:

  UB3R>: This is Ub3r. Sup?

  Hemlokk let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

  FoxyWolf>: This is your partner in trade, remember me? We need some help.

  UB3R>: Oh, hey! Definitely remember U guys. L33t is over the moon thanks to you guys. So what can we do you for?

  FoxyWolf>: Remember the Halloween prank you pulled on that TV station about a year ago? Can u still access the webcams u hid there?Super Urgent

  UB3R>: I refuse to answer on grounds it may incriminate me. ;) but if there happened to be a webcam system paralleled to the building security, and you wanted to access it, here’s what you’d do…

  The information was swiftly devoured and swiftly applied. Restrained cheers went up as dozens of windows popped up onscreen, each with a different live view of the building’s interior. Armsmaster was already sliding in next to her and plugging his suit into a USB port, downloading the data into his suit computer and translating it (most likely) into something more efficient.

  FoxyWolf>: Thanx. We owe U big time

  UB3R>: glad to help. Remember that when we show up and shamelessly exploit your wealth. >;)

  Despite herself Hemlokk snickered at the Muppet Movie quote as she signed off.

  Armsmaster held out his hand. A frame drawing of the building appeared over his hand, this one with labeled icons moving about inside. “So far as our spotters can determine, Jack Slash, Bonesaw, and the Butcher are all clustered together on Sound Stage one, on the first floor,” He said. “There’s a kitchen next door to the sound stage, Bonesaw is moving back and forth between the two rooms-- I don’t have to tell you what we think she’s up to in there.” Several present shuddered. “They’ve got hostages; the cast and crew and staff of the building, those that have survived anyway.” The last was given in a grim tone. “They’ve barricaded the roads around the building and the main entrance with overturned vehicles, and blocked off the windows with office furniture. “Jack Slash or the Butcher, whichever one is in charge, has the remainder of the Teeth patrolling the floors or standing guard over the hostages, with Bonesaw’s brain-spiders tagging along for support.” Several moving icons were highlighted; one was enlarged, showing a human-shaped stick figure shuffling oddly along, a second, sixlegged icon riding its shoulder. Elsewhere in the building groups of two or three were sitting back to back, armed figures standing guard over them with brain-spiders scuttling up and down the armed men’s backs and around their feet. The hostages are scattered up and down the floors in groups of three or four, sitting on the floor back-to-back.

  Piggot rubbed her chin, mulling over the information she had. “We need to take out the guards--- no, not the guards. We need to take those brain-spiders and whatever nasty load-outs those things are carrying. Or better yet just get the hostages away from them…”

  “I can be in and out with the hostages before Jack can even blink,” Velocity said.

  The knight in armor, Vindicator was his name? Suddenly spoke up. “But wait. Where’s the twist?” The others looked at him. He deflated a bit but pressed on. “This is Jack Slash, guys, come on. He’s a sick twisted freak and he always has some horrible twist to the stuff he does. So where is it?”

  “He’s right,” Hemlokk said suddenly. “Something’s really, really wrong here, I can’t quite put my finger on it… it’s almost familiar---”

  “The situation is a textbook supervillain hostage scenario,” Armsmaster protested… then he realized what he was saying. “Which is precisely what Jack Slash wants us to think it is. And the longer we wait, the more ghastly the big reveal will be.”

  “Can we get visual in that kitchen Bonesaw’s mucking around in?” Skinwalker said soberly.

  Hemlokk looked up from her seat at the computer and shook her head. “There’s a camera there but it’s broadcasting nothing but static,” she said. She opened a popup window; it was full of snow through which shapes could be seen moving from time to time.

  “Guy’s a skeazy two-bit Joker wannabe,” Shar’Din sneered. “Thinks he’s the Lord High God of Nihilism--”

  “Joker?” Hemlokk said, staring intently first at the wireframe hologram, then at the screen in front of her. “Wait, that’s it.”

  “What’s it?”

  Hemlokk pointed excitedly at one corner of the screen; a window was open showing a couple of Teeth shuffling past, a rectangular brain-spider close at heel. One of the Teeth sidled off slightly; the spider moved to cut them off till they were shoulder-to-shoulder with the other again. “It’s not following them; it’s herding them,” she said.

  Skinwalker gawked at the monitor, then barked out a humorless laugh. “That two-bit plaigarizing hack,” he said. Several of the capes and PRT made puzzled noises. “Jack Slash has switched the mooks and the hostages,” Skinwalker said. “He made them swap clothes, and has the spiders riding herd on them to force them to stand guard and to stay in line while the mooks sit around playing hostage!”

  “So if a SWAT team or sniper tried to take out the guards, they’d take out the hostages instead. Clever bastard,” Piggot snarled. “He thinks. Is there any way to confirm?”

  “I can,” Hemlokk said, standing. She took a deep breath.

  Skinwalker’s ears laid back. “What? No! It’s too dangerous--”

  “Any place twenty miles downwind of Bonesaw is too dangerous,” Hemlokk said.

  “We can send a drone, or one of the tinkerbots--”

  Hemlokk laughed, “Really, Bayleaf? Your tinkerbots are clever but they’re about as subtle as a circus calliope.”

  Bayleaf let out a whuff of frustration and defeat. It was true; at the moment he was fresh out of the tiny bots he had used for the hospital job all those weeks ago. All he had left were ones like Obie--- not exactly suited for stealth or recon. He looked over at the others, looking for someone to offer a suggestion…

  Hemlokk stepped over and laid a grey-furred hand on his chest. She looked up at him. “Bayleaf, it’s okay. I want to do this. I’m literally made for this. I have the skills--- I have the powers--- exactly for this sort of thing. I promise you I will be careful.”

  He took a deep breath, then nodded. Hemlokk looked over at Piggot. “Once I get inside, I’ll find one of the webcams and send a message back,” she said. “It’ll be the only way to get anything in and out through Grue’s fog.”

  Piggot looked her over. “You’ve got ten minutes, make them count. If we don’t hear from you, we’re going in through the roof and up through the basement with everything we’ve go, and devil take the hindmost. We cannot let Bonesaw, Butcher or Jack Slash get away… regardless of the cost.”

  Hemlokk shivered. “I understand.” She did… any remnant of the Slaughterhouse Nine was a holocaust waiting to happen. They’d each killed dozens of heroes far more experienced and powerful than Hemlokk or any of those present for that matter. It had to stop here and now.

  She stepped to the edge of the roof, flared her cape, and glided through the air into the wall of darkness.

  The dark only blocked her view for a moment, then she was rolling across the rooftop, fading into invisibility even before she stopped. She started to blindly crawl her way across the rooftop to where she remembered the access door was when the dark lifted a few scant feet, letting her see clearly. Thank you Grue, she thought silently. She scurried to the door, picked the lock and stealthed her way down the stairs as the darkness fell like a veil behind her.

  The dregs of the Slaughterhouse Nine weren’t oblivious to what was going on outside. Bonesaw came running into the soundstage and announced “they’ve got some sort of dark cloud stuff blocking out everything outside!”

  Jack Slash was lounging in one of the newscaster’s seats, idly peeling an apple. He looked up at the roof. “Ah, they seemed to have recruited that Grue fellow,” he said, utterly unsurprised. He did make a point of reading up on the capes in any new territory long before they arrived. It was astonishing how much information could be gleaned even from the random meanderings on the internet and ParaHumansOnline. “They must not like my little fireside chats.” He indicated the camera still pointed at him.

  “They’re getting ready to bust in,” Butcher said, getting to her feet and hefting her gun.

  Jack Slash held up a finger as if testing the breeze. “Not… yet,” he said. “A probing attack, maybe. Or perhaps a reconnaisance probing of some sort. Mixed with a bit of oh-so-classic psy-ops,” he sneered a bit. “Trying to agitate us, make us nervous and more prone to error.” His curled lip told everyone what he thought of that.

  “So what do we do, Uncle Jack?” Bonesaw said. She was idly cleaning a butcher knife on her already crusted-red apron.

  Jack looked under the newsdesk and smiled. He reached underneath and pulled out a landline phone. “Now, it’s standard procedure for the powers that be to not cut the phone lines in these situation, just in case someone wants to speak to a negotiator...” he swiftly dialed a number he’d memorized just for the amusement factor. He sat back, the receiver nestled to his ear. “Hello, PRT Help Desk? This is Jack Slash. Could you please forward me to Director Piggot…?”

  A PRT agent came running up to director Piggot, holding an old fashioned landline phone in one hand, wire trailing behind him. “Director!… it’s Jack Slash.”

  Piggot took the phone and stared at it a moment. “The hell?”

  “We spliced into the building phone lines in case they tried to call out,” the agent said. “Sorry about the phone, we had to get a bit… old school.”

  Piggot rolled her eyes and took the phone. She cleared her throat. “Piggot speaking.”

  “Director Piggot!” Jack Slash’s cultivated voice came across the receiver. He almost sounded jolly. “Now, really, Ma’am, cutting off our broadcast like that?” He tsked. “That was naughty of you--”

  Piggot cut him off. “This IS Jack Slash, of the Slaughterhouse Nine?”

  “Of course, Director, you--”

  “In the WNET channel 5 building?”

  “Er, yes,” he said. “Now I--”

  “Good.” And she hung up.

  Jack Slash pulled away the droning receiver from his ear and stared at it like it had sprouted legs and arms and asked to speak to his leader. “What happened?” Butcher asked.

  “She hung up on me,” Jack said in wonderment.

  Butcher snorted. “You’re kidding.”

  Jack sat silently for a minute. With an enigmatic expression on his face he dialed again. The phone rang twice. “Hello? Is this you again Jack?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes it--”

  CLICK.

  Everyone on the rooftop was gawping at Piggot like she’d donned a tutu and started performing Swan Lake. Piggot took a moment to enjoy it. I’m starting to understand how Skinwalker feels, she thought. Well, just a bit. The phone rang again; she picked it up.

  “You’re playing a dangerous game, Director,” Jack Slash said, his voice ominous.

  “And you’re playing an old tired one, Slash,” she retorted curtly. “Do you have ANYTHING worth my time to say?”

  She could almost hear teeth grinding. “We’re going to play a little game, Director,” Jack said in an overly calm voice. “And just for that little insult, the stakes are going up severely--”

  She snorted. “What next, are you going to paint spirals on your cheeks and ride out on a tricycle to announce your dastardly plan?”

  She heard the creaking of plastic; he must have a whiteknuckle grip on his own receiver. “You’d best hang on every word I say, Director--”

  “Why?” She said, calm as oceans. “In all sincerity, really. What’s the point? Listening to you is just a distraction. We ignore you, you commit an atrocity. We listen to you, do everything you say, you commit an atrocity anyway, all the while spouting the exact same drivel every badly written comic-book villain spouts. Nothing you could possibly say would make any difference, so we might as well focus on exterminating you. Congratulations, Jack Slash, you’ve proven that there’s one thing in the universe that’s meaningless: YOU.” And she hung up again.

  The sound stage was deathly quiet. Jack Slash sat there, the receiver cracking in his grip. He was doing something Burnscar/Butcher and Bonesaw had never seen; he was literally shaking in rage. Butcher was sitting very still, not wanting to draw attention to herself, and Bonesaw had actually backed away from the news desk several steps in naked fear.

  “Pet,” he said quietly. “How close are you to finishing?”

  “J-just two more in the kitchen to sew up,” she said, her voice unnaturally whispery and high.

  “Then you’d best finish up, hadn’t you?” he said softly. Bonesaw backed out of the room.

  Piggot hung up the receiver. She felt a little sweat trickle down the middle of her back. “Here’s hoping that was enough of a distraction for our infiltrator,” she said sotto voce. “Get those teams in position, five minutes till we go in.”

  Hemlokk descended through the building, cloaked in silence and invisibility. She could feel her heart practically hammering back and forth between her breastbone and her spine. In the short time since becoming a Cape she had faced junkies, gang members, ultraviolent capes, knives and bullets blood and violence… but now she was facing something that could have come out of folklore, the collective human hindbrain of her society. Time and culture and fear had transformed the Slaughterhouse Nine from a mere grab bag of random evil mortals into something almost out of mythology.

  All thanks to the manipulations of Cauldron. Taylor cursed the members of the conspiracy anew even as her heart pounded: thanks to the bastards’ protective hand on them, a bunch of worthless murderhobos had taken on the seeming of godlike, unkillable evils out of Lovecraft or Stephen King… and for someone born and raised under that pall of evil, even being aware of it was not enough to strip the false veneer away. And here she was, a teenage girl who’d been raised on nightmare-fuel stories of these unkillable demons, descending right into their lair…

  If this were a horror movie I’d be throwing popcorn at the TV and calling the heroine a brain-dead idiot, she thought. Right before trying to hide under the sofa cushions.

  It was effortless, gliding down the stairwells and passing within mere feet of the shuffling patrols and the roomfuls of ‘hostages.’ She didn’t have to get close to see that the ‘guards’ had their wrists and hands duct-taped to their guns and other weapons, or to smell the stink of fear sweating from their pores. She saw one of the brain-spiders administer a shock to the calf of one guard who moved a bit too slow; they hastily picked up the pace and caught up with the others. Confirmed; the armed guards were actually hostages.

  It only cranked her scary-movie paranoia that much higher. Something was really, seriously off about this whole scenario. It wasn’t until she got to the cafeteria and sneaked her way through the center of the ‘hostages’ sitting on the floor that it clicked. She smelled just as much fear coming off them as the hostages disguised as guards.

  It was then that she noticed the sutures on the back of their necks… both the hostages and the guards. Her skin chilled. Bonesaw had been at these people-- ALL of them! What game was Jack playing at??

  Almost as an afterthought, she activated her cartography. All the Warcrafted had the ability: a form of thaumatic sense that, depending on their class and skills and training, let them pick out plants, animals, people, at deposits of ores and gems in a mental map around them-- even to distinguish betweeen hostile, friendly and neutral targets. They had been laboriously teaching each other how to cross the ‘specialty’ line, and use the abilities of the others’ classes-- it was just too useful a power.

  Taylor hadn’t reached the level that Fennek or Lok’tara had; they could distinguish animals by species. But she had at least reached the point where she could detect human life, and determine whether they were hostile or not.

  She shrank her range to the size of the building, small enough that she could distinguish each person from their neighbor-- she could distinguish the brain-spiders from their ‘keepers’ now…..

  Other than three very specific dots, and the brain-spiders, they were all registering as neutral. And, in serious distress. They were ALL hostages.

  The stink of blood and offal and astringent sanitizers filled her nostrils suddenly, making her eyes water. She barely resisted the urge to sneeze. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Bonesaw scurrying to the kitchen at the end of the cafeteria. The gory little girl had an atypically frightened look on her face…

  Keeping tight hold of her stealth, Hemlokk slinked along the wall and entered the swinging kitchen door right behind the murderous little biotinker. The scene behind the swinging door nearly made her lose her stealth, and then her lunch.

  The kitchen area with its stainless steel surfaces and gleaming cutlery had been turned into a cross between a battlefield operating room and an abbatoir. Two figures (a middle aged man with graying hair, half-dressed in bits of a Teeth biker’s gear, and a young woman with dark hair) were laid out face down on the central island and tied down immobile. The backs of their heads and necks were cut and pinned open. Horribly, they were wide awake and it was quite obvious by the sounds they made through their duct tape gags that Bonesaw didn’t believe in anaesthetic. She had just finished sewing up the back of the first one’s skull and was proceeding to install an implant, one with bits of metal and wiring and ominous bits and gobbets of something organic, into the gaping hole on the woman’s neck.

  The woman sobbed as Bonesaw worked.

  “There, there,” Bonesaw said as she worked, in a mockery of a mother’s comforting voice. “We’re almost done. Aaaaaand… there!” She set down her bloody tools and picked up a needle and thread. “I betcha you’re both wondering why you had to be awake through that whole thing,” she said conversationally as she sewed the woman’s head and neck closed. “It’s cause it takes WAY too long for people to wake up and be fully lucid after general anaesthesia, and there are some REALLY important things you need to know about the thing I put in your necks.” She peeled the tape off their mouths with exaggerated care, untied them and turned her back on them, bending over to scoop something off the floor. When she turned back around she was holding a brain-spider in her arms-- a rectangular metal box with half a dozen vicious looking jointed metal legs, a “head” filled with razor sharp probes and tools, and a glass-topped torso full of wet pink mass. It had a number 23 painted crudely on the side.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Her two victims hadn’t even lifted their upper bodies off the blood-slick tabletop with their forearms. She held out the cyborg spider as if it were a puppy. “This is your new friend, number 23! you go with him everywhere now, an’ do whatever he tells you-- ‘course, it’s just a speaker inside that Uncle Jack uses to talk to you, but that’s a secret,” she said in a theatrical stage whisper.

  “What did you do to us?” the woman whimpered, refusing to look up.

  “I was getting to that part,” Bonesaw pouted. She set the brain-spider down on the island. The two victims shrank back as the spider scuttled forward, turned around and crouched down between them. “Now, it isn’t anything really fancy or special,” Bonesaw went on. She got up on a step stool and fished through a cooler sitting on one of the bloody work counters, pulling out another of the implants. “In fact they’re really really boring. But it’s what Uncle Jack wanted.” She sighed and shrugged. “Now each of you has one of these dinguses,” she waggled the implant, “in your head. And, well, if you don’t do what Uncle Jack says… or you get too far away from your new friend number 23… or anything happens to number 23...” She opened one of the bottom cupboards and rolled out, of all things, a pumpkin. With some difficulty she rolled it into a corner. A quick slash with a butcher knife and the top was lopped off. She jammed the implant down inside the pumpkin, stuck the cap back on at a jaunty angle, and trotted over to the far side of the kitchen. “Well-- THIS happens.”

  She pulled what looked like a universal remote out of her apron pocket and pressed a pair of buttons. There was a wet BANG, and the pumpkin was splattered over the walls, floor and ceiling.

  “Oh God, oh God help us,” the woman cried out.

  “Jesus,” the man rasped.

  Something utterly ugly crossed Bonesaw’s face. She got up in both their faces. “He’s not listening,” she sneered, her voice dripping venom. “And if he ever did, he never cared.” She slapped fresh tape over their mouths, then put manacles-- the kind they used for prison transport-- on their ankles and wrists. “When you can walk, follow your Brain-Spider where you’re supposed to go.” She pulled a cheap plastic mask-- a skull, like most of the low-ranking Teeth wore-- down over the man’s sweating face. “Oh, and if I were you,” she said as she duct-taped a gun into his hands, “if anybody tries to shoot your little spider friend-- I’d shoot them first. Unless you wanna be a pumpkin.” The man’s hands shook. But he didn’t point the gun at her. He obviously wasn’t stupid; he’d realized she’d never give them a weapon that could even hurt her.

  “Now that you’ve seen everything,” Bonesaw said, her tone perky again. She suddenly turned and looked Hemlokk right in the eye. The brain-spider, in creepy synchronicity did the same, it’s headlamp eyes lighting up and shining beams of red light on her as it made an ominous chitter-beeping noise.

  Hemlokk froze in a crouch as she felt her stealth aura collapse. “How--”

  Bonesaw rolled her baby-blue eyes. “ Ker duh. All my little brain bot buddies have infrared cameras, and I’ve had thermal imaging myself for years.” She let out a high pitched giggle and hopped up on a stool. “So, whaddya think?” She waved her hands around like a stage presentator. “Pretty clever, huh?”

  Taylor’s stomach roiled with sick fear. Hemlokk snarled, baring her fangs. “Oh, clever. If the heroes and the SWAT teams try to take out the guards, they kill the hostages. If they take out the brain-spiders first, or try to get the hostages to safety… they kill the hostages. And if all the ‘armed guards’ don’t want to die, they’ll be forced to shoot at the Capes and the SWAT teams to protect your nasty little robots… the Capes and the SWAT teams retaliate… and the hostages die. Classic Jack Slash: a no win situation that leaves everyone in despair.”

  “Innit though?” Bonesaw said cheerily. Her two victims had managed to slide off the kitchen island and totter to their feet. They were standing huddled together at one end of the kitchen, too scared to move. The spider hadn’t move, its red headlights still fixed on Hemlokk and its mouthful of dissecting tools whirring and gnashing.

  “One question,” Hemlokk said. “What happened to the rest of the Teeth?”

  “Where do you think I got so many new brain-spiders?” Bonesaw chirped. “Uncle Jack said they couldn’t be trusted. He was right,” she sighed. “Always disobeying orders, or trying to shoot us in the back, or trying to run away and escape-- he said I could make them into something more useful.” She gestured to Number 23. “So I did.”

  She looked Hemlokk out of the corner of her eye with a sly smirk. “Boy it must suck to be you right now. A big, brave, bad hero, and you can’t do anything.”

  “I can stop you,” Hemlokk said. Taylor didn’t know where the words came from.

  Bonesaw laughed and made a rude noise. “How?” She nodded at the two hostages, bloody and frozen in fear. “What are you gonna do about them?”

  “This.” Hemlokk vanished. In almost the same instant shining razor sharp blades sprouted from the mouths of the two hostages. They stood stock-still for a brief second, eyes and mouths wide, then slumped bonelessly to the floor. Hemlokk was standing behind them; she pulled her blades out of the backs of their heads with a shing as they dropped.

  The implants, their inorganic circuitry slashed in half, didn’t explode.

  The shock on Bonesaw’s face was so artlessly childlike it nearly made Hemlokk laugh. Her eyes and mouth were wide open and round as saucers. She looked like a portrait of a little girl who’d discovered there was no Santa Claus. “You KILLED them?!” she shrieked in disbelief.

  “S’matter, not part of the plan?” Hemlokk said-- or she would have, if she’d had the time. But the moment the man and woman she’d stabbed dropped, the brain-spider turned and leaped at her, blade-tipped legs outstretched. Hemlokk was faster. Her ghostblades flashed, the spider let out an unnatural squeal and hit the floor in three pieces.

  Taylor didn’t let herself think. She flashstepped to Bonesaw and began slashing like a madwoman. The monster disguised as a little girl twitched and spasmed as the blades left criss-crossing glowing lines over every place on her body. Hemlokk could feel when the blades cut something nonliving as they ghosted through the girl; probably the dozens of implants and surgical improvements’ Bonesaw had made on herself…

  After a terrified whirlwind of slashes and stabs, Taylor finally let herself stop. Bonesaw slid off her stool and to the floor, her eyes wide and unseeing, her mouth hanging open. Her blood-stained apron and frilly little-girl dress hung off her in strips and rags. Hemlokk cringed as she saw the biotinker’s skin start to discolor. She knew she’d felt the blades cutting through things inside of her… what if she’d opened some doomsday plague canister or something?

  Thinking quickly, she grabbed Bonesaw by her armpits and dragged her to the walk-in freezer. It was fortunately unlocked. She popped the door open and gagged. Bonesaw had been telling the truth about the last of the Teeth. A couple dozen corpses were stacked inside like cordwood, the tops of their heads sawed off and their brains missing. She threw the murder-tot on top of the pile and ran out the door, slamming it behind her and locking it. Then she turned the thermostat on the freezer down as low as it would go. Hopefully turning Bonesaw into a totsicle would keep her more horrible implants and weapons on ice as well.

  She stood in the middle of the gore-strewn kitchen, gasping, the reek of blood and worse things flooding her oversensitive nose. “Got to alert the others,” she said. Where was the nearest one of Ub3r and L33t’s hidden webcams--?

  There was a low, deep CRUMP sort of noise. The whole building shook faintly. Hemlokk expanded her Cartography out, taking in the building and the surrounding streets. A very large number of ‘green’ dots, allies, were appearing en masse on the rooftop above, and coming up through the basement below.

  She was too late.

  If she didn’t move dozens of innocent people were going to die--

  She whirled and dashed out into the cafeteria, landing in the middle of the hostages, the unwilling guards, and the obviously agitated brain-spiders clacking and chittering and tracking her-- dammit the dead one must have signaled the others--

  “Help us,” one of the hostages pleaded.

  Two clusters of hostages seated on the floor, two guards for appearances, four brain-spiders--

  Shades of night swirled around her. She turned to face the nearest group of hostages and lunged, blades flashing--

  “Team Alpha will come up through the basement,” Piggot said. “I want Adamant and Armsmaster to take point with that, let Adamant handle any enemy fire and Armsmaster take out those spiders, let the PRT team behind you handle the hostages.”

  “I tank, he DPSes, let the rest of the team handle the NPCs, got it,” Adamant said, banging his steel-plated knuckles together. Piggot rolled her eyes but held her tongue. Whatever lingo got the point across.

  “Team Beta, Gamma, Delta will land on the roof. Grue will clear out the Dark the moment you have boots down. There are four floors, you will rappel down the side of the building and perform a dynamic entry through the windows here, here, here, here, and here.” She jabbed a finger at the appropriate windows. Blast those spiders to kibble, then dart and or foam anything that moves. Assault and Battery will be leading Team Epsilon down from the roof through the building. Same story as Alpha; provide cover for the PRT troops, squash those bugs, and drop any of those ‘hostages’ who remember they’re actually Teeth and get frisky.”

  “And the rest of us?” Dauntless said.

  “Us included,” Lady Photon and Skinwalker said at the same time.

  “You, Velocity, Miss Militia… Any of you with solid ranged attacks, go join the PRT snipers,” Piggot said. “Everyone else, join the cordon at street level. Nobody’s getting out of that building without our say-so.” She looked around. “Well what are you waiting for, an engraved invitation?”

  People hustled. Everyone was in position within minutes. The capes had scattered to the streets and rooftops surrounding the TV station, ready to lay a hurt on anything that stuck its nose out a door or window. Of the Alliance, Skinwalker, Vindicator, Lok’Tara, Grue and ‘Mama Crow’ were the only ones remaining. The rest had joined the other ranged blasters on the surrounding rooftops. Panacea had remained as well.

  Piggot found herself standing next to Skinwalker. He was staring at the holo-projector Armsmaster had detached from his armor and left behind. “Any word from her yet?” he said. He couldn’t quite disguise the anxious tone in his voice. “Where is she? She moved down into the cafeteria on the first floor and then--- her icon vanished. I know there’s a blind spot there but--”

  Piggot stared at the monitors and the wireframe hologram and shook her head. “I gave her five minutes extra,” she said. “Something went wrong. We have to go now.”

  The twin VTOLS carrying the rooftop raid teams dropped down till they were hovering inches over Grue’s intractable fog of darkness. “Director, we are in position,” crackled over the comms. “Beta Gamma and Delta, in position.”

  “Alpha, in position.”

  “Epsilon, in position.”

  “Sniper and mop-up teams, in position.” The last was in Miss Militia’s voice. Skinwalker could see her on a distant parapet, taking unwavering aim with a sniper rifle as huge as it was deadly looking.

  Piggot took a deep breath. “On my mark. All teams GO!”

  Grue raised his hand; the black fog lifted. PRT troopers poured out of the VTOLs, Assault and Battery leading the way. They charged through the door. Other troopers lined up on the roof and began rappelling down. Moments later there was a loud CRUMP; on the wireframe Bayleaf could see team Alpha pouring up into the building’s basement through a brand new hole.

  Bayleaf leaned in, for a particular wireframe figure in the upturned anthill that the station building had become….

  The tech running the jury-rigged surveillance system squawked. He pointed to one of the open cameras on the screens, then pointed at the hologram. “Ma’am, agent Hemlokk is on the move-- and she’s gone nuts!”

  “What?” Piggot glared at the hologram. Everyone else crowded in. She watched with widened eyes as the action on the hologram synced up with the hidden cam footage. “She’s attacking everyone… even the hostages! What the hell, Skinwalker?”

  Skinwalker watched the camera feed, his nose a hair from the screen. Hemlokk was tearing through the cafeteria, a whirling dervish, slashing and stabbing, appearing behind one wildly flailing and firing guard or screaming hostage to stab them through the back of the neck only to leap to another.

  It was then that he saw it; one of her ‘kills’ was mere feet from the hidden camcorder’s POV. He saw a tiny spark, a wisp of smoke rising from the victim’s neck as he fell--- “Ghost blades don’t do that,” he growled. “Not unless they’re cutting a...”

  “That’s it!” He said, standing up. “She’s not killing them, Director-- she’s saving them. The hostages have some sort of implant in the base of their skulls.” They all watched as she made a slash that should have decapitated one of the hostages; it only left a thin glowing streak across his throat, but the spurt of smoke from the sutures on the back of his neck--

  “Jack Slash, you-- they’re ALL hostages,” Piggot spat. “He double-faked, no, triple-faked us out!”

  “But why the hell isn’t she taking out the spiders?” the tech said, mystified. It was true; the she-wolf was doing an incredibly deadly dance, doing everything in her power to dodge both the random gunfire and the far deadlier attacks by the cyborg spiders.

  Aisha’s observation cut through the confusion like a razor. “’Cause doin’ that would mean something bad,” she said succinctly.

  “That’s good enough for me,” Piggot said fervently. She went on the comm. “Attention all troops, do not, I repeat, do NOT destroy the brain-spiders, over! Restrain, do not deactivate or destroy!”

  “Repeat, over?” Came back the confused reply.

  “I repeat, DO NOT DESTROY THE SPIDERS! We have reason to believe they’re wired with some sort of dead-man switch--” all she got back was static. Her oath would have blistered paint. “Get the comm link back,” she snarled at the luckless technicians. “Warn them not to touch those spiders until they get the message!” The tech nodded and began frantically making arcane adjustments to the equipment.

  “She just offed the spiders in the cafeteria,” Mama Crow said. “It must be--”

  What it must be, nobody got to hear. That precise moment multiple explosions ripped across the rooftop, throwing equipment, capes and agents in every direction.

  Taylor raced up the stairs to the second floor, flashstepping to the trio of faux-Teeth shuffling down the hallway and dropping them with three rapid stabs, then pinning their spider to the floor with both her blades. Then she was ricocheting back down the hall, kicking open doors, looking for hidden hostages-- she found two or three more, propped up to look like they were lurking in ambush, all the better to provoke any SWAT or PRT to shoot first and ask questions later. She dropped them with enchanted blackjack strikes, pierced their implants, then slashed the spider with them to pieces… noone’s skull had exploded yet--

  at least a dozen more spiders, which means at least as many hostages

  There was no time to feel fear or panic or anything but the breath burning in her lungs, the heft of the blades in her hands, the seconds ticking by--

  She drew out her Cartography, fitting the whole building into her mind, tracking every yellow mark, seeing the swarm of green dots flooding their way down the building---

  She heard windows shatter. Suddenly the next floor up had a half dozen more people…

  I can’t teleport blind, a voice of self-preservation cried out in panic in the back of her head.

  No choice. She closed her eyes and flash-stepped… straight up.

  She appeared on the next floor in a burst of indigo and black. It was an open-office floor plan; just a single room filled with workspaces and half-dividers. The hostages were gathered in the center of the room, the brain-spiders encircling them and crawling over them. The troopers had rappelled down and smashed in through the windows on either side, and were raising their guns and sprayers and shouting for everyone to get down, to drop their weapons-- her entrance had startled them; every gun and sprayer was tracking towards her...

  Taylor was already moving. The barrels of their guns and the nozzles of their sprayers sprouted shuriken even as she hit the furthest trooper with a flying kick to the chest. He fell backwards as she ricocheted the other way, slashing out with blade strikes at the necks of two hostages as she flipped past.

  Then she was among the troopers. They were vicious fighters, trained in hand-to-hand, and they were not going to go down easy. But she was a worgen, far stronger and faster than any baseline human, with the skills and powers of an Azeroth rogue running through her body. It was no contest.

  They may as well have been moving in slow motion. Already they’d abandoned their jammed guns and gone for batons and in one case a hunter’s knife as long as her arm. By the time they’d gone for that she’d dropped one with a spinning kick, taken out the man next to him with a magic-infused blackjack to the back of the neck, and rebounded into the one with the knife, disarming him and shoving him into a fourth with an arm bar. They and their friends tripped over each other, and she immobilized them all with a containment foam grenade she’d pickpocketed off the first.

  The hostages had gotten to their feet, standing in a loose circle in the center of the room, herded in place by chittering brain-spiders as chaos exploded around them. The next instant Hemlokk was in the center of the circle. She lashed out, spine twisting as her blades flashed in a double crescent around her. Slowly, then like a circle of dominoes, they toppled to the floor, smoke seeping from the crude sutures on the backs of their heads and necks.

  Leaving her alone with her powers on cooldown and surrounded by four agitated brain-spiders. “Oh boy--” she said, then they leaped.

  Just before they reached her she felt something collide with her back. Then a forcefield of glowing hexagons formed around her, cutting the spiders off. They bounced off it and were still in midair when a hail of gunfire tore them into scraps of gore and metal and plastic.

  “Clear! Hold your fire, hold your fire!” someone shouted. The forcefield flickered away, and Taylor found herself in an awkward hug-from-behind with Battery. “Uh, hey,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Battery said. She stepped back, a wry smile on her lips.

  The troops that had just poured in from the roof scattered across the floor. Assault was there. “You okay, pup?” he asked Battery. On her affirmative he turned his attention to the people laid out on the floor. “Okay, who’re the real hostages?”

  “All of them,” Taylor said grimly, slipping back into the role of Hemlokk like a silk glove. “explosive implants in the backs of their heads. Deadman switches in the spiders.” She pointed to the name of one victim’s neck with the tip of her dagger. “I neutralized this batch, but if you meet any more-- don’t separate them from their spiders and don’t kill the spiders first. If you do, head go boom.”

  Assault looked at her. “Important safety tip, thanks Egon,” he quipped. “So how many--”

  “Bonesaw made 23 spiders just for this,” Hemlokk said. She counted on her fingers. “I’ve cleared the floors up to here-- we’re missing at least… six?” She was having trouble focusing. All the adrenaline… she wiped at her forehead, her hand came away red. Some shrapnel must have caught her.

  “Hemlokk you’re bleeding,” Battery said, worried. “Are you--”

  The whole building shook, and slumped sideways. Nearly everyone, Hemlokk included, lost their footing. Hemlokk threw open her senses; few figures had moved, but now there was a large cluster of green marks crowded at one end of the basement. As she watched several marks were snuffed out…

  “They collapsed the building!” she said aloud. “Jack blew the tunnels under the basement, dropped the whole freaking building down, trapped the other team in the basement with a horde of brain-spiders!”

  Assault swore. “That bastard--” There was a sound of an explosion from a floor below and a smell of smoke and flame. There was a telltale whine of a chain gun revving up, and a hail of bullets exploded up through the floor. “Shit, Butcher’s in play!” he hit his earpiece. “Velocity, full evac now! Got a pile of unconscious civvies on floors one through three--”

  Battery planted her hands on the floor; her forcefield reappeared, spreading across the floor like a hexagonal carpet, protecting the downed troopers and civilians from the bullets tearing through the floor. All Hemlokk could do was lay prone on the floor and pray Battery’s tinker-made shield didn’t give out before the new Butcher got tired of spraying the ceiling with ammo.

  A crimson streak appeared; the unconscious hostages, then the troopers, began to disappear one-by-one. Taylor almost sobbed a gasp of relief: She was going to kiss Bayleaf till he passed out for giving the speedster those strength-enhancing gauntlets.

  The room erupted in flame, scattering everyone remaining. Hemlokk tumbled halfway across the room trying to evade the blast. She landed poorly, and she felt one of her ribs snap.

  She came to a halt against the base of the wall and looked up, snarling through the pain of her burns and her rib. Standing in the middle of where the inferno had burst was a twentysomething girl with messy, short-hacked brown hair and what looked like rows of cigarette burn scars up each cheek. She was wearing what the Teeth considered ‘biker gear’; leather pants and a halter top adorned with bones, skulls, and metal spikes. She had a minigun resting on her hip that was nearly as big as she was, yet she carried it effortlessly. And she had a manic smirk that stretched between her scarred cheeks like a Glasgow grin.

  “I thought the Butcher carried a giant bow,” Taylor blurted out.

  “Eh, that was the last one,” Burnscar/Butcher said. “Me, I’m more a bullets and explosions kind of girl. You know.” She hefted the minigun and aimed it at Taylor.

  Before she could pull the trigger, there was a feral roar. An enormous dark blue-gray sabertooth with a woman slung across its back appeared from nowhere and pounced on the pyrokinetic madwoman. Bursts of flame and gunfire went everywhere as they tumbled across the floor.

  “Bayleaf--” Hemlokk blurted.

  The tiger pinned the girl to the floor and looked back at Taylor. “Getouttahere!” he roared. She hesitated for a split second, in part from the surprise that he could speak in that form. Then she learned why he wanted her to leave, because a man strapped with weapons and what had to be a million grenades wearing an oriental demon mask appeared out of thin air in the middle of the room.

  She had just enough time to see him draw a sword in one hand and a machine gun in the other before survival instinct kicked in and she teleported blind, straight down.

  Why the hell was Oni Lee in the middle of everything now??

  The smoke cleared from the rooftop. Bayleaf managed to rattle the marbles in his skull back in place just in time to see a man wearing an oriental demon-head mask and a metric buttload of weapons and explosives striding across the body-strewn roof.

  He was headed for Bakuda, Bayleaf realized. They’d left her and Spree sitting handcuffed to one of the pipes running across the rooftop. From the look of it they hadn’t fared well; Spree was stone dead, a chunk of debris from the blast sticking out of his head. Bakuda at least was at least breathing.

  Oni Lee’s disposition had been preying on Bayleaf’s mind. He knew-- from his previous life-- that the serial suicide bomber was deadly, ruthless, unremittingly violent and fanatically loyal to Lung, who was still imprisoned aboard the Rig.

  He also knew that Oni Lee’s power had a lethal flaw. The serial bomber’s power was teleportation: every time he teleported he left behind a clone that continued acting independently for a short before exploding into dust. The problem was, his teleportation was imperfect… glitched. Every time he teleported it “lost” a little bit of his memory, his personality, his self-awareness… by this point he was little more than an automaton, retaining only his most deeply ingrained instincts and trained responses--- such as his skill as a killer, and his obedience to Lung.

  He was clearly here on Lung’s last orders: to secure the bomb tinker for Lung. He had been instructed by his master and he would follow that last set of instructions come hell or high water.

  Bayleaf could not. BeLIEVE. His luck.

  Now, to get the mad bombmaker away from the mad suicide bomber….

  Oni Lee pulled out a pair of bolt cutters and knelt down to separate Bakuda’s shackles from Spree’s corpse. She stirred as his shadow passed over her, then jolted in alarm as she woke fully. “Aww @#$%@# not YOU again!” she squawked.

  Oni Lee started to say something as he snapped the manacles, but he suddenly looked away… just as a pistol cracked and his head exploded into ash and dust. Across the roof, lying where the explosion had thrown her, Piggot glared down the iron sights on her field pistol, sweeping the roof looking for Oni Lee to reappear. She blinked blood out of her eye and shot another clone off the roof before he could pull the pin on his grenade belt.

  “Nice shot,” Bayleaf shouted.

  “Just get that prisoner out of here,” she shouted back, firing off two more shots that left mounds of dust.

  Bayleaf was already moving. He scooped the bomb tinker under one arm and fired a grappling hook as he leapt off the roof. He ignored the screaming and cursing from his cargo.

  Time to play a little keepaway… and get a couple of crazy kids together.

  Taylor knelt on the floor of the half-collapsed hallway. Her first blind jump had been… unpleasant. This one had hurt. Like she had overstrained a muscle she didn’t even know she had. She took a moment to crack open a healing potion and down it. She sighed with relief; it didn’t fix everything, but it helped overall.

  The building trembled. She ignored the danger and let her senses sweep out once more. There was a flickering red speck right about where the walk-in freezer would be. It didn’t look like Bonesaw would wake up from her chilly little nap. As she watched, the spark grew dimmer.

  Taylor found she didn’t have it in her at the moment to care.

  The first PRT team was down in the basement still. She was pleased to see there were a lot less of the red dots for the brain-spiders, almost none in fact. She wasn’t so happy to note that the mob of green dots looked smaller too.

  Jack Slash you bastard…

  Her Cartography swept over the studio. To her surprise it was virtually untouched. There were a handful of red dots moving around in the erratic way she associated with the brain-spiders, and one slightly larger one that was remaining still in the center of the room. In her mind’s eye it seemed to glow an especial, malevolent red.

  The building rumbled again… and kept rumbling. Not good. She ran, chunks of concrete and steel beams began raining down. Something struck her arm a glancing blow; she yelped in agony as she felt her upper arm snap.

  In desperation, beyond what Bayleaf and the Agents had warned her was sane much less safe, she pushed-- and blind-jumped toward the sound stage, the malevolent red dot as her guide.

  With a tearing sensation through her entire body, Hemlokk reappeared in realspace. She tumbled forward across a carpeted surface, snarling and hissing in pain; her Rogue powers did not like it when she forced a teleport. Even before she’d stopped rolling she clawed a flask of healing potion from her utility belt and yanked the cork out with her teeth, greedily downing it in one swallow. The burning pain in her bones and muscles faded. Her Ghost Blades were in her hands even as the bottle bounced across the floor--

  Slow clapping filled the dark. Clapping from behind her. She spun about, cloak flaring away from her to free her arms, her glowing blades at the ready. By the light of the emergency lamps mounted on the wall she could see she was in what looked like a TV sound stage, control room behind her, news desk and green screen in front of her. The walls and ceiling were skewed and cracked, a reminder of the half-collapsed building directly overhead. Both exits were blocked with rubble.

  Seated at the news desk was Jack Slash. He was surrounded by a half dozen or so of Bonesaw’s brain-spiders that scuttled and jittered about. He was seated in the lead reporter’s seat, feet propped up on the desk, and he was applauding. “Dazzling entrance,” he said. “You missed, by the way.”

  Taylor got to her feet, blades loose in her hands but ready. She did not take her eyes off the applauding man for a second.

  Bayleaf… Adrian… had told the rest of the Warcrafted everything he knew, or could remember. On many details he’d been fuzzy-- to his own frustration more than theirs. But he’d recited every detail, chapter and verse, on the leader of the Slaughterhouse Nine. About his ranged cutting power. About his secret, secondary Master ability that let him not only predict other Capes, but pick their psyches apart with a metaphorical scalpel. About how, if he wasn’t stopped… with extreme prejudice… someday he would be given the opportunity to use that power on Scion himself, and set off the apocalypse.

  The end of the world was sitting in front of her, pretending to make small talk.

  Jack smiled to himself as he looked over his… he supposed “guest” was the appropriate term. My, a female werewolf? He’d thought there was only the one. A group Trigger event perhaps? Maybe they were mates? “Ah, charmed, my dear,” he said. “Here to kill me at the last. And here I was expecting your male counterpart...”

  Something was off.

  Something was seriously off. Not that he was afraid, yet. He’d laid too many rumors of what viral or bacterial horrors Bonesaw might have left encapsulated inside him for anyone to just recklessly attack him (false rumors; while he’d let the little moppet augment him in many ways he’d had no desire to have the next bubonic plague hidden inside his kidneys or whatever.)

  Whenever he’d dealt with a Cape before-- hero, villain-- he’d always had that familiar something, that Je ne sais quoi, a sense within the first few words of his verbal dominance in the coming dialogue. His words were like puzzle pieces snapping into place. No matter what the other person said, no matter if they were appeasing or defiant or proudly adamant that they would not listen, the puzzle was his, he could see the picture on the box and the picture was always what he wanted it to be. Even when they were stubbornly silent, he could still sense his words snapping together inside their heads as they fell into their ears.

  But… not this time. The cloaked werewolf girl stood on the far side of the buried room, silhouetted by the emergency exit lights, her eyes glowing under her hood. She was so absolutely still, such an absolute blank to his powers, that he might as well have been trying to cold-read a store window mannequin. As he watched the faintly glowing blades in her hands began to bleed black. For the first time in years he felt a stab of genuine fear inside. “Ah, ah,” he said. He gestured to the spider-bots scuttling around him. “You should know beforehand that--”

  He never finished his sentence. Without a word, without a sound the wolf girl lunged. The brain spiders, stupidly loyal as dear little Bonesaw always made them, had gathered in a rough half- arc between him and the girl. The black blades flashed in two arcs and brainspiders went flying in segments, gouting blood and sparks. The last few lunged, the wolfgirl vanished…

  And suddenly he found it very hard to breathe. That might have had something to do with the several inches of razor sharp, glowing black blade rammed up under his ribcage. He tried to protest the circumstances but the second blade rammed up through his lower jaw had pinned his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

  In his shock he struggled to replay what had just happened in his mind. Just as the remaining brainspiders had dogpiled her the wolf girl had teleported from the far side of the news desk. She was now crouched in his lap, clawed feet on his knees, both her blades buried deep in his body. Her snarling muzzle was an inch from his nose. Behind her there was a bright flash and a sharp bang; apparently she’d left a grenade of some sort behind her when she’d ‘ported, thus putting paid to the rest of the brain spiders. To his disbelief she had two of them clinging to her back, viciously stabbing and sawing away, but not quite able to get through her cloak. What was it made of? He’d seen those things slice through kevlar vests, and the acids in those syringes could eat through armor plating in seconds! Her snarling muzzle was an inch from his nose; he could feel her hot breath blowing on his face from between her fangs.

  “No,” she said, her voice a rusty whisper. “You don’t get to talk.”

  It was a miracle he was still alive. Well, not exactly a miracle; Bonesaw’s surgical efforts hadn’t been entirely in vain. She had given herself and the other members of the Nine (those with human anatomy anyway) all sorts of improvements and redundancies. The wolfgirl’s black blades had sliced through the sub-dermal armor in Jack’s throat and abdomen like it was cellophane; his heart was bisected. But the backup cardio pumps on either side of his heart were still going strong, and the tip of the blade through his chin and tongue had come up short against the plating in his palate. But he could feel jagged, icy burning pain-- actual pain; he hadn’t felt it in so long-- spreading out in needles from both wounds, and he realized that the blades were surely poisoned. With what, he couldn’t imagine; Bonesaw’s antitoxin glands and blood scrubbers should have been able to neutralize nearly any attempt to poison him. And yet the burning cold needles spread….

  He tried to gurgle out some comment, some phrase to the girl, tried to communicate to her with his eyes. His augments were buying him precious seconds, he could still talk or at least communicate his way out of this--

  “No, you don’t get to talk,” she said again. She shoved against both knives, he felt the burning ice go deep into his chest, higher into his skull. “This is how it ends, Jack. No word games, no clever quotes, no little memetic bombs to screw with people’s heads after you’re gone.

  “You wasted your life using your power and your words to make other people suffer, spreading your nihilistic bullshit for nothing but shits and giggles. Filling this world, MY world, with PAIN. So you don’t get any last words.” Something numinous and black spread up the handles of the blades she clutched and into his body; his head was a cloud of pain and his chest was a hollowed out chamber of jagged ice. “That’s all they’re going to remember about you, Jack Slash; in the end, you had nothing worthwhile to say.”

  All he could see was fangs and burning eyes. Then the blades inside him wrenched upward and inward, and the universe exploded in darkness.

  The building was burning fiercely now. Smoke and flame boiled out of the shattered windows. It was kind of ironic, Bayleaf thought as he set a healing circle down on the sidewalk around several wounded PRT troopers, that the tension was actually lower than it had been before the blaze. As he watched, Shar’Din and Lei Ling each summoned a water elemental. There was a moment’s alarm among the emergency responders as the two watery titans towered overhead, but it changed to cheers and relief when they obediently began releasing a downpour of water over the burning, half-collapsed office building.

  Piggot came limping up, leaning heavily against another PRT trooper with his arm in a sling. They both paused and straightened as they stepped into the healing ring, muttering oaths of surprise. The sling was discarded, and Piggot began wiping away the trickle of blood on her forehead which was all that was left of the nasty gash that had been over her eye. “Good work, Skinwalker,” she said. “My men will appreciate that.”

  “What’s the word?” Bayleaf said.

  “It’s confirmed: the Butcher, Oni Lee, Bakuda, Crawler… hell with it. All the Capes in the Teeth, the ABB, and the Slaughterhouse Nine have either been confirmed dead or otherwise accounted for, save Jack Slash himself.” Her smile was more of a snarl. Or maybe a grimace at the thought of the size of the bounty now owed to the Alliance and its members. “We’re digging the incursion team out of that damned basement--”

  “Lei Ling just got here, I’ll have her send an earth elemental down to help--” He sent the message out on his phone; a rocky minion was soon rumbling its way into the ruined and smoldering building. His eyes swept over the building; the tiny cluster of green dots was still there. His heart sank as he counted how few of them there were. “We’d better hurry, they’re in a bad way.”

  Bonesaw was still trapped in the freezer, he noted, seeing the flickering red light. He scanned to the right. His eyes widened, then he grinned in relief. There was now only one green dot where Jack Slash’s little swarm of red had been. “And it looks like Jack is accounted for as well. Hemlokk got him.” The surge of pride in his heart warred with a shuddering chill at the thought of Taylor facing that villain by herself. Gods, how did he keep getting separated from her side at times like this--?

  The earth elemental reappeared. Armsmaster appeared from the smoke and rubble, a badly-wounded Adamant leaning on one armored shoulder. They had three PRT troopers with them; that was all. Bayleaf felt sick.

  The earth elemental suddenly became agitated. It began pushing the two capes and the troopers ahead of itself. Lei Ling was watching proceedings from the far side of the street. She began waving her arms. “Get clear, get clear, it’s coming down!!”

  The building shook. Everyone broke into a run. With a roar, the wounded office building gave up the ghost, collapsing inward on itself as clouds of dust and smoke blotted everything out. In horror, Bayleaf realized Taylor was still inside. “TAYLOR!!”

  Everyone hunkered down or dove for cover or simply fell down flat on the ground, covering their heads, as dust choked the air and rubble flew. For several horrible seconds everything was greyed out. Then the dustclouds parted; Lei Ling had summoned an air elemental who was blowing the choking smolder away. Bayleaf got to his feet and staggered toward the ruin, his heart a lump of lead in his chest. “Taylor--!”

  Then there was a burst of indigo smoke and she was there. She was standing in the middle of the street, battered and torn and tottering slightly, Azeroth bandages here and there, her cloak torn and tattered, carrying something wrapped in a red cloth bag. In the next instant he was there and had her wrapped in his arms. The bag hit the street with a thump and she burrowed into his chest like she never intended to come back out. “Taylor, are you--” he croaked through the dust in his throat.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine now,” she said.

  Paramedics and troopers closed in. They waved off the former, but one of the latter pulled open the red cloth bag and stepped back hastily. The red cloth was in fact a tattered shirt stained red by its contents, which consisted of a man’s head. It had been rather roughly severed, and had a look of outraged disbelief frozen on its bloody face. The trooper muttered an oath under his breath and spoke into his helmet mike. “We have a confirmed, Jack Slash is dead,” he said.

  Adrian let the paramedics pull him and Taylor away.

  Things wound down quickly after that. The scene devolved into the all too typical bloody aftermath of a Cape fight; Troopers securing prisoners, investigators taking pictures and taping off areas, paramedics tending to the wounded and coroners to the dead. The Alliance had lingered on, ostensibly to answer questions and help with the cleanup, but largely because they were exhausted and wanted to stay put in one place for just a minute.

  The speed with which the cleanup got underway said a lot about how accustomed to such calamities Brockton Bay was. Work crews (many of them, to Taylor and Adrian’s amusement, from the Dockworkers Union) arrived almost as soon as the dust settled. Trucks and heavy machinery were already at work hauling the rubble and wreckage away. Hell, even now there were news crews (Adrian cracked a joke to Taylor about the gossip he imagined going around the news station water cooler about their competitor’s demise) and even a sizeable number of civilian rubberneckers (idiots) with their cell phones out, recording everything from the far side of the PRT cordon.

  Adrian and Taylor watched the entire proceedings from where they sat on the curb, an EMT blanket thrown over both their shoulders as they huddled together. Everyone else had discreetly kept clear. Taylor had shivered in his arms for a frighteningly long time, but now she sat still, her cheek against his chest as he held her and said inane things to fill the wordless space between them. Even with her warmth against him his heart ached. She’d had to face her world’s worst nightmares. She’d had to kill. She’d need… he didn’t know what she’d need, he only hoped he could provide it.

  Their idyll, such as it was, was suddenly shattered. Workers suddenly began shouting and backing with incredible haste out of the crumbled pit. Bayleaf got to his feet and took a few halting steps, trying to see what it was--

  In the middle of the pit of debris they had unearthed a door. It was heavy stainless steel, scarred and scored by the shattered concrete. Someone had flipped it open…

  Standing in the opening was a tiny, hunched over figure, dressed in the rags of a frilly little girl’s dress, with a tangled mop of blonde ringlets dangling over its face. “Shit,” Adrian hissed. “Bonesaw.” How the hell had they lost track of her in all the chaos?

  Just answered your own question, didn’tcha, his subconscious snarked. The place got flooded with friends, foes, the living and the wounded and the dead, small wonder her little life-dot got lost in your mental map.

  Well, she was certainly on everyone’s map now. She stood awkwardly in the middle of the ruins, her limbs at odd angles as she swayed back and forth. Troopers gathered at the edge of the pit with weapons limbered even as their commanders screamed for them to hold their fire, the heroes of the Protectorate and the Alliance stepping forward even as the workers hastily decamped and the gawking idiots with their cameras and cellphones crowded in. Bayleaf was there among them (the heroes or the fools? His subconscious quipped; he ignored it). He took a place on the edge of the pit and threw down a shimmering healing circle over the biotinker girl, then another.

  “Why the hell are you healing her?” the Trooper next to him snapped, his rifle trained on the little girl’s head.

  “I’m not,” Bayleaf said. He fished for another healing spell and let the aura rain down on the figure below. “I’m trying to neutralize the plagues her body is about to release!” He heard the Trooper choke a little as he reassessed the situation. The girl’s skin was slowly growing discolored, with mottled purple patches and blackish veins darkening and spreading down her limbs.

  Miss Militia stood on the opposite side of the pit. She pulled out a megaphone. “It’s over, Bonesaw,” she said. “Jack Slash is dead. The Slaughterhouse Nine are all dead. Deactivate your bioweapons and surrender.”

  It was eerily silent. “Jack is dead?” Bonesaw’s voice was so faint Bayleaf barely heard it.

  Then she started to laugh. It started out as a high pitched giggle, wavering and uncertain. It soon evolved into full blown spasms of laughter, her shoulders shaking as she shrieked with laughter. She took a deep breath and threw her ratty hair back out of her face. Her eyes were wild and wept black.

  “WHADDAYA WANT, A COOKIE??” she screamed.

  Her laughter turned to heaving, rasping breaths, sucking air into raw lungs. “Where have you been? Where have you been? DAMN YOU ALL, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN??”

  “Where were you five years ago? ten years ago? Where were you when Unca Jack first GOT me?” Her voice was a caustic sneer. “Where were you when him and the others gutted my family? When they made ME fix them? Over and over again, over and over and---” She laughed, choking and spitting up something, the laugh turning into a sob. “An’ I had to be a good girl, I had to be a good girl or they’d do the same to me--!!”

  She sucked in another breath, struggling. She ran blackened fingers through bloody hair. “Years and years, years and years till nothing was left of me…”

  She rallied. “And now, NOW---! How dare you, HOW DARE YOU ACT LIKE YOU DID SOMETHING SPECIAL!!” Her voice went up to a piercing shriek, echoing in the silence.

  Miss Militia tried to assert control. “Bonesaw… Riley… please disarm your bioweapons and surrender. It’s not too late...”

  Bonesaw cackled. “Not too late? Yes it is,” she said. She stopped, jerked and shuddered, continued. “My implants are broken. All the little surprises, the things Unca Jack told me were such a good idea, they’re leaking out. My body’s fighting them, I made myself as immune as possible, but it’s losing.” Her joints in her arms and legs looked swollen and distorted; cysts were swelling under her skin. She cackled again. “This was how it was s’posed to go, anyway--- Unca Jack always called me ‘his little going-away present--’ something he was going to leave the whole world when he finally left it--”

  In a flash of green, Miss Militia’s multiweapon transformed into a flamethrower. “Go ahead, the fire will just spread everything faster,” Bonesaw jeered. She turned in a circle, looking at all the weapons and glowing hands leveled at her. “Go on! Do it! DO IT! DO IT--” The last was half scream, half sob.

  “ALLIANCE! Lay down some heals, NOW !” As one every Warcrafted with a healing power began pouring them down on the dying tyke-bomb. Vindicator’s golden light came down in a surge; Shen and Lei Ling sent spheres and liquid waves of healing chi chasing after it. Shar’Din infused the others with every boost he had, strengthening their efforts.

  It wasn’t enough… Bayleaf reached deep inside himself, pulling up a metamorphosis. His limbs swelled, his skin turned to cracking bark. He transformed into the Giving Tree, then went further, growing larger and stronger still, digging into the energies flowing through the earth. His next healing circle fell bright as shining emerald, surrounding Bonesaw, containing and infusing her, trying to reverse the spread of malignant sickness.

  It was too late. Her body was more disease than little girl now. She fell to her knees, screaming as the healing light made her skin char and the fluids seeping from her bubble. She looked up, her eyes meeting Adrian’s, full of pain.

  Ten years of pain… the guilt, the shame, the pity were like icepicks in his heart.

  “I’m sorry, Riley,” he said. He doubted she heard him. He shifted again, farther still--- He returned to his Worgen shape, his form translucent and filled with stars…

  Turbines roared overhead. Everyone looked up in surprise. Hovering overhead was one of Dragon’s iconic mechas, its jets roaring as it held position. It was a truly enormous mechanical dragon, gleaming gold and silver. A hatch opened in the breastplate and light blazed down, blinding everyone. Adrian could just make out a humanoid form descending from the open door… a winged humanoid form…

  Then singing filled the air.

  Light, golden and pure, cascaded down on Riley’s kneeling form. Vindicator’s healing light had been golden, but it dimmed next to this like a candle in the sun. It shone through the girl’s flesh, through the stones beneath her. She screamed, briefly, as black smoke rose from every pore on her skin, then itself was burned to nothing in the light. Her ragged clothes burned, and her hair turned to ash.

  The winged figure descended, still singing. For a wonder, in a world tormented by the Simurgh, noone opened fire-- but the Simurgh’s asymmetrical winged form was nothing like this one, its singing was discordant noise next to this song. The being flapped slowly down, landing gently within arm’s reach of the slowly immolating girl. Riley looked up at it with blind white eyes, tear-streaks scored down her cheeks where the fluid seeping from her eyes had burned away. She was beyond pain now. The biotinker terror, the tormented child, looked up and smiled. “It’s over?” she said.

  The figure nodded, its voice rising in a crescendo. The light swelled. People looked away, blinded. Adrian refused to. In a flash, Riley’s body was reduced to a cloud of golden sparks, then to ash, then to nothing.

  The singer stopped. The light slowly faded away. The gathered crowd stared, awestruck, at the being before them.

  As the glamour of the light faded, they could see it was not in fact an angel, as some had thought (or feared.) It was tall, with a clearly feminine figure clad in a simple white robe. The wings rising from her back were clad in soft golden feathers that matched the ones on her throat and head. Her eyes were enormous, blue and piercing. Her beak curved at the corners in a sad smile as she looked about, even as one clawed talon clutched anxiously at the front of her robe and the other smoothed it out around her plumed tail.

  “An Arrakoan,” Adrian exclaimed. “And a priestess, if I don’t miss my guess.”

  “A priestess? Of what?” Taylor murmured to him.

  “Of the Light,” he replied. “Not necessarily religious, though, they-- they’re conduits for the Light of the Universe...even more directly than Paladins are. I’ll, uh, try to explain later.”

  To one side the Dragon mecha landed unceremoniously on the ruins. Its loudspeaker clicked. “Before anything goes any further, you should all know that Miss Paige McAbee is now a foreign national, a lawful representative of a nation-state and is under diplomatic immunity… as well as being under my own rather emphatic protection.” The dragonbot flexed its claws against the concrete under its feet meaningfully.

  “Paige McAbee? Wait, what? A… diplomat?” Armsmaster said. “Of where?”

  The amusement in Dragon’s voice was unmistakable. “Would you believe the Canary Islands?” she said. Armsmaster shot her an offended look. “…They declared their independence two weeks ago.” The offended look didn’t change.

  “Uh, hello,” Paige said. She projects her voice very well, Adrian thought. “My name is Paige McAbee. You once knew me as Bad Canary…? Well, I’ve, ah, gone through some changes since you last saw me...”

  Riley opened her eyes.

  But she didn’t have eyes…

  She opened them all the same, and looked around. She sat…? Hovered…? Over a vast featureless plain under an indigo sky, one that gleamed twilight blue at the horizon. Around her was a parliament of glowing lights.

  Hello, Riley, one of the lights said.

  Riley would have swallowed the lump in her throat, if she’d had a throat. “S...so I’m dead now?” she said. “And this is… and I’m going to be sent t-to...”

  No, no, and No, another light said, gently but clearly amused. This place is… ah, describing it would involve explaining a lot of cosmology and using even more math, and I’d still get it wrong explaining it to you. Let’s just say that this is your second chance.

  “A, a second chance?” Shame and guilt, long repressed behind a broken mind, surged to the fore. “I’ve… I’ve been so bad. Done so many bad things...”

  It wasn’t your fault, Riley, a third light said. You were enslaved by that evil man when you were five years old. Your mind was broken, you were tortured physically, mentally and emotionally without letup for ten years. And for what little volition you did have, we are willing to forgive you.

  Riley felt tears filling her eyes. “I… t-thank you,” she sniffled. She wiped the memory of her eyes with the memory of her hands. “Buh, but what will I do? Where will I go?”

  The fourth light sighed. That is part of the price of your second chance, it said. You could never live anywhere in peace on your old world. You are too well known, the evils you are known for too great. And no disguise would protect you from your past.

  You will have to begin your new life, in a new world as well-- as a new person, with a new face. You will lose everything left of your old life, even your reflection.

  “And what’s the other part?” Riley said fearfully. “Of the price, I mean.”

  Where we send you, we will require much of you, a fifth light said. Though we suspect your own guilt and need would drive you regardless. You will spend the rest of your life using your gifts to help others, with as much vigor as you once used to harm them-- as much, and more.

  Riley nodded, wiping ethereal tears from her eyes. “I understand.”

  Good. Then let’s begin.

  The lights began to orbit around her. “Wait. Where will I go?” she asked.

  Oh the options are endless, the third light said with enthusiasm. Worlds of all possible kinds. The spiral began to close, and she found herself drifting along with them over the endless plain.

  Tell us, how do you feel about, oh, ponies?