"Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a sixpence in her shoe" Unknown
The Chicago traffic was doing the thing Chicago traffic did in the late morning — slow-moving but not stopped, the kind of driving that wasn't hard but wasn't easy either, that asked just enough of your attention to keep you from doing anything useful with the rest of it, so you spent forty minutes at the wheel with your hands doing one thing and your mind doing another and neither of them talking to each other.
Debbie Grayson drove.
The car was still Nolan's. The steering wheel had the small worn patch at ten o'clock where his hand had rested for two decades. The seat had a memory setting she'd never used because she had never sat in the driver's side, before. She had adjusted it a dozen times since October and it still wasn't quite right for her.
She merged onto Wacker and thought about nothing in particular.
Or rather — she thought about everything in general, which was a different thing. She thought about the fact that she had not gone grocery shopping in nine days. She thought about the light bulb in the hallway that had burned out on Tuesday and that she had not yet replaced because it required getting out the stepladder and she had not been able to make herself get out the stepladder. She thought about the book on her bedside table that she had been reading fifty pages into for four weeks. She thought about the fact that she had cried in her kitchen this morning after Mark left, and that Art had come downstairs at some point during it and had made her a second cup of coffee without saying anything and had sat with her at the table and read the newspaper on his phone, and she thought about how grateful she was for Art, and she thought about how she was not entirely sure that Art was going to be enough forever, and she thought about how she was thirty-nine years old and she had woken up this morning not knowing what she was supposed to do with the rest of her life and she had gotten dressed anyway, because that was what you did.
She thought about the check she was here to pick up.
Debbie's hand tightened on the wheel.
She let it loosen. The light ahead of her turned green. She rolled forward.
The building she was heading to was a tall glass thing on Michigan, the kind of building that had a doorman and a fountain in the lobby and a private elevator system with different floors requiring different key cards. She had never been inside it. Nolan's publisher had moved offices three times in the twenty years he'd been writing for them, and the last move had happened while he was — while things were happening — and she had never seen the new place. She parked in the underground lot. The attendant was polite. The ticket machine spat out a stub that told her she had four hours of validated parking.
She rode the elevator up to the lobby. The elevator had a chandelier in it. It was a very small chandelier, and it was the least practical thing she had ever seen in an elevator, and she thought about it the whole ride up.
The lobby was a lot of marble and glass and quiet. There was a fountain — she'd been right — and there was a security desk with two men in navy blazers and there was a young woman at a reception desk with her hair in a low bun and a headset on and a look of practiced pleasantness.
"Good morning," Debbie said. "I have an appointment with Claire Bono."
"Do you have your ID, ma'am?"
Debbie handed over her driver's license. The woman typed something. Looked at a screen. Typed something else.
"Debbie Grayson."
"Yes."
"You're on the calendar. Ms. Bono is on the top floor. Elevator's on the right, take the one marked Executive, you'll need this card." She slid a small white plastic key across the desk. "Just tap it against the reader inside the car. Have a nice meeting."
"Thank you."
The executive elevator was mercifully chandelier-free. It moved fast. The car was mirrored on all four walls, and Debbie caught sight of herself standing there in the outfit she had put on this morning — the good navy blouse, the black slacks, the pearl earrings Nolan had given her for their tenth anniversary, her hair pulled back into a neat low knot, her face done in the minimum makeup she'd learned to apply on autopilot — and she thought you look tired and then she thought stop it and then the doors opened.
The top floor was more of the same, but nicer. Ivory carpet. Original art on the walls, the kind of original art that had little brass plaques underneath. A view of Lake Michigan through the far wall of windows that was, honestly, a little breathtaking.
A woman was walking toward her.
"Debbie? Debbie Grayson?"
"Yes."
"Claire Bono. So lovely to meet you in person."
Claire Bono was, Debbie's brain registered instantly, a beautiful woman. Not in a threatening way. In the specific way of women whose job required them to walk into rooms and be taken seriously by rich men — professionally beautiful, deliberately beautiful, the kind of beautiful that was itself a form of competence. Blonde hair cut to the shoulder. White silk blouse buttoned high. Blue pencil skirt, cut just below the knee. Two gold rings on her right hand. A single gold ring, wedding band and small solitaire, on her left. Heels that clicked pleasantly against the marble of the floor before her steps landed on the carpet.
She extended a hand. Debbie shook it. The handshake was warm and firm and did not linger.
"Come with me, we're just down the hall. Can I get you anything? Water, coffee?"
"I'm fine, thank you."
"Sure? The coffee here is embarrassingly good. It's the one perk of the office I actually endorse."
"Maybe just water, then."
"Water it is."
Claire's office was a corner. Of course it was a corner. The two window walls looked out on the lake and on the north side of the city, and the desk was one of those enormous minimalist things that made the room feel bigger than it was, and there was a low couch and two armchairs arranged around a coffee table with a very expensive-looking succulent on it, and Debbie realized she had never in her life been in a room that had cost this much to decorate.
"Sit, please. Anywhere is fine."
Debbie sat in one of the armchairs. Claire went to a small credenza in the corner and poured a glass of water from a chilled pitcher and brought it over on a coaster and set the coaster on the coffee table in front of Debbie. Then she sat in the other armchair, crossed her legs at the ankle, and pulled a folder from the low shelf under the coffee table.
"Let's get you situated and get you out of here. I know you have a lot on your plate."
"Thank you."
Claire opened the folder. She had the professional's way of not looking directly at Debbie's face for the first minute of a meeting — of giving the other person a moment to compose themselves, to find their bearings, to be looked at only obliquely while she oriented herself to the paperwork.
"I'm so sorry about your loss, Miss Grayson." She said it without looking up, which was the kindest way she could have said it. "I heard about what happened — the gas leak. That was — that was awful. In this world we live in, with the superheroes and the — the everything, I sometimes forget that the ordinary awful things still happen. That people still die from — from things like that."
"Thank you."
Debbie's face did the smile. It was small and closed-mouthed and tired-around-the-eyes, and it did the thing it was supposed to do, which was signal I acknowledge your kindness and I do not want to talk about it further, and it always worked, because most people didn't want to talk about it either.
"Please call me Claire."
"Claire. Thank you."
"Let's get through this and get you home."
The paperwork took twelve minutes. It was a stack of signatures and initials, and Claire walked her through it with the practiced ease of someone who did this a great deal for a great many people. Royalties from the Space Racer series to be transferred into Debbie's name in perpetuity, with the executor's discretion for foreign rights and film adaptations to be shared jointly between Debbie and the publisher for the duration of the contract. Any and all posthumous work — of which, Claire noted delicately, there was some, three unfinished manuscripts in various stages that Nolan's editor was still cataloguing — would fall under a separate contract to be negotiated later, at Debbie's convenience and readiness.
The word readiness was doing a lot of work in that sentence. Claire had said it the way you said it when you meant there is no rush and no one will judge you.
Debbie signed. Debbie initialed. Debbie signed again.
"All the paperwork is in order," Claire said, closing the folder. "All royalties will now be sent to you, in your name. You should be getting a substantial first check within about six weeks — the accounting cycle here is a little glacial, I apologize in advance. And — I have to say — his books have been selling like crazy since — since he passed. There's been a big spike. Bookstores can't keep them on the shelves." She caught herself. Her face did a small, professionally chagrined thing. "I'm — I'm terribly sorry for your loss. Again."
"Thank you. I'm just glad it's all —"
Debbie stopped speaking.
Because behind Claire's head, upside down against the window, hanging from what appeared to be a single cybernetic arm anchored to something on the roof of the building, a man was looking into the office.
The man was enormous. Six-foot-something. Broad in a way that read as reinforced rather than merely muscular. His hair was pure white, the kind of pure white that didn't age so much as it was the aftermath of whatever had happened to the parts of him that were no longer entirely biological, and his eyes were the small, faintly-glowing cybernetic kind that you saw on the news in disaster-zone footage. He was wearing a costume. The costume was — and Debbie's brain had a hard time processing this while the man was upside down — patriotic. Red stripes. White field. Blue with stars. Something across his upper chest that looked like a stylized flag, worn like a sash. A mask that incorporated the flag motif in a way that a graphic designer had presumably been paid a great deal of money to make work.
Debbie's hand went to her purse.
Inside the purse was the small watch-face Mark had given her four months ago. Circular. Titanium. If she pressed the crown three times in quick succession, it would send a distress signal directly to Mark's suit — no matter where he was, no matter what he was doing, ARIA would route it to him with the highest possible priority and Mark would be at her location in under a minute. She had never used it. She had not been sure, some days, whether she was more afraid of using it or of not being able to.
Her thumb found the crown.
"Is that a robot," she said, very calmly, because Debbie Grayson had spent twenty years being married to a Viltrumite and had learned to speak calmly when large armored figures appeared in windows.
Claire, at the desk, glanced over her shoulder. Her face did a thing that was, remarkably, more exasperated than alarmed.
"Oh my God." She stood up. "I'm so sorry — Debbie, this is my husband. It'll only take a minute."
She walked to the window, unlatched the top sash, and slid it open.
Cold October air came in.
"Can I help you, sweetie."
"Oh, hey, hon —" The man's voice was surprisingly friendly, and surprisingly hoarse — a bass rumble with a synthetic edge that reminded Debbie of the voice-modulator effect used in television dramas about federal witnesses. He was, in fact, hanging upside down. His cybernetic arm was hooked over the top of the window frame in a grip Debbie could hear the metal of the building groan under. "I didn't know you were in a meeting. I can come back."
"Can you just use the elevator, like a normal person."
"You know security always hassles me at the metal detector."
"You have a badge. You have a specifically-cleared building-access badge for this exact reason."
"The guys at the metal detector don't care about the badge, sweetheart. They care about the wand. And the wand goes off, and then the guys have to fill out an incident report, and I'm standing there for thirty minutes while the shift supervisor comes down —"
"You're supposed to go around the metal detector. That's what the badge is for."
"I know. I forgot. Anyway." The man beamed. His teeth were very white and very human. "I just wanted to let you know — I picked up the movies for tonight. You gonna grab dinner on the way home, or should I?"
"I can grab dinner. What do you want?"
"Thai?"
"Sure. The place on Randolph?"
"Yeah, the drunken noodle."
"Extra basil?"
"You know it."
"Okay. You okay?"
"I'm fine, Claire. I'm fine. See you tonight."
"See you tonight."
"Love you."
"Love you too."
And the man — the enormous cybernetic patriotic upside-down man hanging off the window of the fifty-first floor of an office building in downtown Chicago — released his grip on the window frame, dropped past the glass in a controlled fall, ignited some kind of jet mechanism in his boots halfway down that Debbie couldn't quite see from the angle, and vectored away between two other buildings with the routine unhurried competence of a man on his lunch break.
Claire closed the window.
She turned back to Debbie.
"You would not believe," she said, with a warmth in her voice that had not been there a minute earlier, "what a pain in the ass it is to be married to a superhero."
Debbie made a sound. She had intended to laugh. What came out was somewhere between a laugh and something else, and she covered her mouth with her hand and looked down at her lap because if she didn't she was going to cry in Claire Bono's very expensive corner office and she was not going to do that.
She sat there with her hand over her mouth for what felt like a very long time.
Claire sat back down in the armchair across from her. Didn't reach out. Didn't say anything. Just sat, and let the moment be a moment, in the specific way that some people knew how to do and most people did not.
"I'm sorry," Debbie said eventually. Her voice was steady. Her hand came away from her mouth. "I'm sorry. That was —" She swallowed. "That was a lovely moment, actually. That was —"
"You okay?"
"Yeah."
"Take your time."
Debbie took her time. She took a breath. She unclenched her thumb from the crown of the watch inside her purse, aware for the first time that she had been white-knuckling it. She looked up. Claire's face was open. Not pitying. Open.
"Claire," Debbie said, "I know this is — I know this isn't why you're here today, and I know we don't know each other, and this is — this is completely inappropriate and I'm sorry, but — would you — would you have coffee with me later today? I would really like to talk to you."
Claire's face did a small surprised thing. Her professional composure had been unbroken up to this point, but Debbie caught the flicker underneath it, the moment when she was recalculating what kind of meeting this had become.
"I mean — of course, but — if there's something in the contract we forgot to go over, we can just —"
"It's not about the contract."
"Okay."
"It's about — my husband. I —" Debbie stopped. Started again. Stopped again. Her hands were doing something complicated in her lap that she wasn't controlling. "I don't have anyone to talk to right now. Not anyone who — not anyone I can — I have a friend, an old friend of my husband's, and he's wonderful, but he was more Nolan's friend than mine, and everything I say to him about — about all of this — feels like it lands on him differently than I need it to. And you just — you just closed a window on your husband hanging upside down off a fifty-first-floor office building, and I —" She stopped. Her face did a thing. "Never mind. I'm sorry. This is stupid. This is —"
"It's not stupid."
Debbie looked up.
Claire's face was different. The professional planes of it had softened. She was looking at Debbie directly now, and she was leaning slightly forward, and the two gold rings on her right hand were clicking softly against each other as she folded her fingers together.
"It's not stupid," she said again. "I understand."
"I —"
"I lost my father a few years ago. Sudden. It was — nothing like what you're going through, I don't want to pretend it was, but I know a little bit about what it is to lose someone and not have — not have the right person to say the things to." She smiled. It was a small smile, and it was tired, and it was real. "There's a coffee shop on the first floor of this building. It's actually not embarrassing. I have a meeting starting in about ten minutes, but I can wrap it up in an hour. Would that work for you?"
"Yes."
"An hour, then. First floor."
"An hour."
Claire reached across the low coffee table and took Debbie's hands in both of hers.
Her hands were warm. Debbie's had gone cold.
"I'll see you down there, Debbie."
"Thank you. Thank you."
Debbie stood. Her knees did a small unreliable thing. She steadied herself on the arm of the chair, thanked Claire again, walked out of the office with her purse tucked under her arm, and rode the executive elevator down to the lobby with her reflection multiplied around her on the four mirrored walls. In each of the reflections, she watched her own face slowly go from held together to not held together, the four Debbies all doing it in unison, and by the time the doors opened on the ground floor she was crying quietly, the way she cried in public — no sound, no obvious motion, just water on her face that she wiped away with the back of her hand as she walked to the coffee shop and ordered a decaf latte and sat at a small round table by the window and stared out at Michigan Avenue and waited.
THE ROOFTOP
An hour later, on the rooftop of the same building — because Claire had suggested it, because Claire had said the coffee shop was fine but crowded and she knew a way to the roof and the view was worth it, and because Debbie had said sure with the mild interior surprise of a woman who had never been offered a rooftop by a stranger before — they were walking along the perimeter with paper cups in their hands and the wind pulling at Claire's blonde hair and the whole of Lake Michigan spread out to the east in a color that was not quite blue and not quite gray.
Debbie had talked for forty-five minutes.
She had talked about Nolan. She had talked about the eighteen years. She had talked about the small things — the way he'd made pancakes on Sunday mornings, the way he'd worn the same brand of aftershave for two decades, the way he'd read to Mark every night until Mark was almost twelve, long past when boys usually wanted to be read to. She had talked about the way she had loved him, and about the way she had — after — reviewed every one of those twenty years in her head and had tried to figure out which of the things had been real and which of them had been part of the assignment, the mission, the thing he had been sent here to do, and about how she had not been able to figure it out, and about how the not-figuring-out had been almost worse than the losing of him, because the losing of him was at least a thing that had happened once and was over, and the not-figuring-out kept happening every morning when she woke up and every night when she went to bed.
She had talked about the leaked footage. She had talked about how she couldn't stop watching it. She had talked about the specific line — the pet line — and about how she thought if she watched it enough times she might find the frame where he was lying, and about how she had never found that frame, and about how last night she had watched the clip on loop for an hour and had drunk most of a bottle of wine and had cried herself into a state where her son had come home and made her pasta and she had been unable to eat any of it.
She had talked about the son. She had talked about how she had, this morning, told him at breakfast that they had to move on, that they had to accept that the man they'd loved had never existed, and about how she wasn't sure she believed it when she said it, and about how her son had told her — quietly, across the kitchen table, with tears in his eyes — that he thought their father had loved them, really. And about how she didn't know what to do with that.
She had talked about Art. She had talked about the way Art had known Nolan for twenty-five years, and about how Art felt just as betrayed as she did but in a different way, and about how it was hard to be the person Art had to be careful with, and about how she wanted to talk to Art the way Art clearly wanted to talk to her but that neither of them quite knew how to start.
She had talked about the money. She had talked about the fact that the check was going to be substantial and about how she didn't know what to do with it, and about how it was, in a strange and awful way, the last of Nolan she was ever going to receive, and about how it felt like getting paid for his absence, and about how she hated herself a little for even taking it, and about how she was going to take it anyway because she had a mortgage and a son in college and a life to live.
Claire had listened. Claire had listened the whole time. Claire had not offered advice. Claire had not filled the silences. Claire had said, at one point, that sounds impossible, and at another point, I don't know how you get up in the morning, and at a third point, when Debbie had trailed off and looked out at the lake and could not for a moment continue, she had said, simply, take your time.
That had been all.
They had walked around the perimeter of the roof three full times by the end.
"Thanks for letting me get all that out," Debbie said now, on the fourth lap. "I had a lot to get off my chest. It's — it's nice to talk to someone with a fresh perspective."
"I'm sorry I couldn't offer more advice."
"Don't be. Please. Just listening — that was enough. It helps to be able to say these things out loud."
"Anytime."
"I'm going to hold you to that."
"I hope you're prepared to return the favor." Claire smiled at her over the rim of her cup. "Superpatriot — that's my husband, that's his alias — we just got married a year ago. And believe me, there's a learning curve on this stuff. I could use some advice from you, from time to time. From someone who's been through the long haul."
"You've got my number."
"I do."
"I'm going to head home now, I think —"
Debbie stopped talking.
Because on the far horizon, over the west side of the city, a light bloomed silently against the sky. It was a light that was, at first, just a light. Then it was a very bright light. Then it was a light that resolved into a fireball, orange and roiling, that pushed a shockwave outward through the air in a visible ring that Debbie could see distorting the atmosphere as it traveled.
The sound arrived three seconds later.
The rooftop shook. The paper cup in Debbie's hand crumpled slightly. A pigeon on a nearby ledge exploded into the air and vanished. A car alarm on the street below began to whoop, and then another, and then a chorus of them, blocks-deep.
"Oh, shit," Debbie said.
Claire was already moving.
"Miss Debbie — Debbie — follow me, we've got a shelter for this. Come on." Claire had switched, in the space of a second, from the person Debbie had spent an hour crying in front of to a person who did emergency response drills at her office as a matter of routine, and the switch was total. She grabbed Debbie's wrist and pulled her toward the stairwell door at the far end of the roof. Her heels clicked hard on the concrete. Her paper cup dropped and rolled and stopped at the base of a rooftop AC unit. "Just when I thought the last couple of weeks were going to be calm, my God —"
"The Guardians —"
"The Guardians and your — Mark will take care of it. Don't worry."
"Yeah." Debbie's voice was steady, but only just. "Yeah, they will."
They went down the stairwell. Two flights. Three. Four. The building's emergency systems had triggered — a low, insistent klaxon that pulsed through the concrete on a two-second cycle. On the sub-basement level Claire tapped her key card against a heavy steel door and the door swung open into a shelter that looked, honestly, more like a corporate lounge than a bunker — carpeted, lit, with couches and a small kitchen and a set of screens on the wall already displaying local news coverage of the fireball rising over what was reportedly an industrial warehouse complex on the west side, cause of the explosion currently unknown, first responders on scene, no confirmed casualties at this time, if you are in the affected area please shelter in place.
Debbie sat down on one of the couches. She realized her hands were shaking. She set the crumpled cup down on a coffee table and stared at her hands and made them stop.
Please be careful, Mark, she thought.
Please be careful.
UNKNOWN WAREHOUSE-OUTSIDE CHIGAGO
Twelve minutes earlier, the Milano had landed on a rooftop three blocks from the warehouse.
He came down the ramp.
The rooftop was empty. It was the top of an old brick warehouse of the type that had once housed textile manufacturing and now housed loft apartments and a WeWork. The wind up here smelled of the Chicago river, three blocks north, and of asphalt and of the faint chemical tang that all industrial districts had underneath everything else.
Three blocks to the south, a windowless warehouse squatted between a self-storage facility and a defunct rail yard. It was, per Cecil's satellite intel, the source of a power surge that had lit up every GDA sensor grid in the greater Chicago metro area forty-one minutes ago.
Mark took two steps to the edge of the roof and looked at it.
"ARIA. Scan."
"Scanning."
The HUD populated with an overlay of the warehouse — a thermal ghost of the interior, a topological map of the walls and load-bearing structures, a passive scan of the electromagnetic environment inside. The thermal ghost was cold. There were no heat signatures. The electromagnetic environment was equally quiet — no active electronics, no live equipment, no residual power draw of any kind. The building was a shell.
"Looks like the warehouse has been cleared, Mark."
"Yeah. It does."
He stared at it for another half-second.
"ARIA. Second task. Scan the city for any teleportation trace using the GDA's teleportation-frequency reference as your baseline. Cross-reference against the surveillance footage from Machine Head's offices for the last three months. I want to know where he's gone."
"Estimated time to complete: two to three minutes."
"Make it one."
There was a small pause in the helmet. He could hear her, in the pause, reallocating processor budget against a set of parallel operations he did not, in that moment, want to have explained to him.
"Working."
He stepped off the roof.
He crossed the three blocks in a flat glide, close to the rooftops. He came down beside the warehouse's south wall and walked to the loading bay door — a rolling steel thing sixteen feet tall, chained shut on the outside — and did not bother with the chain. He put his palm against the seam and pushed. The door came off its rails with a shriek of metal and folded outward in a crumpled sheet. He stepped through.
The warehouse was empty.
Not just empty — cleared. The floor was clean. There were fresh scrape marks in the concrete where heavy equipment had been recently dragged, and there were still-warm circuit boxes along the north wall where server racks or industrial hardware had been drawing power as recently as an hour ago, and there was the faint chemical smell in the air of solder and hot plastic and the particular ionized ozone that Mark had learned to associate, in the past four months, with the moments before and after a teleportation event.
He walked the perimeter. He looked up.
Twenty feet above the warehouse floor, on the north wall, a glass-walled observation office jutted out on a platform — the kind of overlook that a warehouse foreman would have used in the 1950s to monitor the shop floor. The glass was intact. The overhead lights inside were on. There was, visible through the glass, even from here, a single object sitting on what appeared to be a very expensive desk.
"ARIA. What am I looking at, up there."
"A rectangular object approximately five inches by eight inches. Paper composition. Zero electromagnetic signature."
"A letter."
"An envelope, likely with contents. Yes."
He rose and he flew up to it, hovered a half-second outside, and used the tip of one gauntlet to lever the sliding pane open on its track. He climbed through.
The office had the wrong furniture in it. That was the first thing he noticed. It was too nice for a warehouse. The desk was Italian marble, gleaming, veined in gray on white, sitting in the middle of the room like a fossil from another building entirely. Two leather chairs. A rug that would not have looked out of place in Claire Bono's office fifty-one floors up on Michigan. Machine Head had done what Machine Head always did, which was to install expensive furniture in shitty buildings.
The letter was in the center of the desk.
Cream envelope. Wax seal — actual wax, blood red, embossed with a stylized M that Mark recognized from Machine Head's business documents. His name was written on the front in what appeared to be a fountain-pen calligraphy hand.
INVINCIBLE
He picked it up.
He was about to open it when ARIA said, in his helmet, "Mark. The Guardians have arrived."
He looked out the glass.
Down on the warehouse floor, through the loading bay door he had crumpled open, the team was walking in in loose formation. Immortal in the lead, of course. Blue Rush a step behind and to his left, blue boots scuffing the concrete. Rex on his hover disk, staff in one hand, the disk hovering at about eye-height with the walking members of the team so that Rex looked, like a man who had been raised on chariots. Robot walking beside a bipedal robot— his own drone unit, the one he piloted remotely from inside, the compact organic body he had grown for himself, which he had come to prefer for social contexts and reserved the drone for combat. Bulletproof floating in with his arms crossed. Powerplex flickering with faint yellow-white energy along his forearms. Shrinking Ray full-sized. Duplikate, singular. Shapesmith in his default humanoid shape, hands clasped at his lower back in the vaguely diplomatic posture he'd learned from watching too many earth movies. Black Samson in his suit, the improved bracelets — the ones Mark had recovered from Doc Seismic — glinting on his wrists in the low light. Monster Girl in her normal form, small and unassuming Thunderbolt behind her, arcs of static crackling faintly along her form.
Mark descended through the glass overhead, letter still in his hand, and dropped to the warehouse floor beside Immortal.
"Ohhh, spooky warehouse," Rex said, twirling his staff. "Where'd everyone run off to?"
"Invincible." Immortal's voice was low. He'd raised up off the floor by two feet in the last few seconds, closing the height gap between himself and Mark's floating position — the small, unconscious dominance move he made in every debrief. Mark had stopped noticing. "Where are the twins? Where is Machine Head? Cecil briefed us on the way here."
"Not sure. I'm running scans. It looks like Isotope teleported everything out. The only thing left is this."
He held up the letter.
"'Invincible' is right." Robot had moved forward, his organic body clean-shaven and neatly dressed in the tactical gear he'd designed for himself, his wrist scanner projecting a small holographic readout over his forearm. "I'm reading residual teleportation signatures. Recent. Within the last forty minutes."
"They knew we were coming," Thunderbolt said.
"Da," said Blue Rush.
"So what's the letter say?" Bulletproof drifted down beside Mark.
Mark broke the wax seal with his thumb.
The envelope contained one thing: a small silver disk, about the size of a quarter, that dropped out of the paper and hit the marble of the desk with a small clean ting. Above the disk, a holographic figure resolved itself in a shimmer of blue light.
Machine Head.
Same coat. Same brass fittings on the visible parts of his skull. Same rictus half-grin that his lower jaw had been locked into for the last year since the chip in his head had gone bad in whatever specific way it had gone bad. His holographic face turned, slowly, to take in the assembled team as if he could actually see them, which — Mark realized — he probably could, because the disk was almost certainly recording as well as transmitting.
"Hello, Guardians of the fucking Globe!"
The team's postures shifted, in a wave, into readiness. Bulletproof's crossed arms uncrossed. Blue Rush dropped into a crouch. Rex hopped off the hover disk which folded and turned into a disk on his back and and set his stance. Monster Girl's shoulders squared.
"What do you want, Machine Head." Mark stepped forward.
"Ahh, Invincible." The hologram's grin widened. "Son of Omni-Man. Tell me, how does it feel to be the son of a fucking psychopath? I have to say, I'm just delighted you didn't break my fucking desk this time. Sadly, I couldn't grab it in time on the way out. Italian marble. Custom job. Cost me a fortune."
"Italian marble?" Rex whistled. "That's expensive."
The team looked at him.
Rex shrugged. "What? It is."
The hologram laughed. "Finally, someone with fucking taste. I like him. Keep him around."
"Aria," Mark said, subvocalized, under the level no one could hear.
"Already tracing, boss. The transmission is bouncing across seventeen relays in the greater metro area. Estimated time to lock: sixty to ninety seconds."
"What were you doing here, Machine Head." Immortal had stepped up beside Mark. His hands, at his sides, had closed into fists. "Show your face so I can pound you into the ground."
"Ahh, Immortal. America's first fucking superhero. America's eagle in the sky, America's good old boy. Tell me, how does a man live one hundred and fifty years and end up this dumb? You have literally allied yourself with the son of the man who slaughtered your previous team. Explain to me the neural pathways that led you to that decision, please. Explain to me why you think this one" — the hologram gestured at Mark — "isn't cut from exactly the same fucking cloth as his father. It's a psychopathy, Immortal. It's genetic."
"Enough," Black Samson said.
Electricity arced along the frame of his suit. The improved bracelets on his wrists lit up a soft blue-white. He stepped forward. Immortal put a hand on his shoulder without looking at him and Samson stopped.
"This is stupid," Monster Girl said. Her arms were crossed. Her foot was tapping.
"Agreed," said Robot. "You are stalling. You are buying time."
The hologram cackled.
"Of course I am, you fucking nuts and bolts. Speaking of which — ahh, I see. This is what the twins were telling me about. You look much less ugly now. You used to look like a sack of balls had sex with a sack of shit. Very impressive. Congratulations on the — the upgrade."
Robot did not react.
"Buying time for what," Shapesmith said.
"Oh, sweet Shapesmith, you know. You know what I'm buying time for." The hologram's grin cranked one more notch. "For the bomb."
The team froze.
"That's about to go off," Machine Head continued cheerfully, "in — three —"
"Everyone —" Mark said.
"Two —"
"— move —"
"One!"
It happened in the space of one long second.
Shrinking Ray shrank. she went from 5 feet to the size of a ball in the flicker of a nervous system, launched herself off the floor toward Black Samson.
Monster Girl transformed.
The transformation was not the standard version. The standard version was the eight-foot green form that Mark and half the team had fought alongside for months. The transformation that came out this time was different. It was the version that Robot and Mark had — after weeks of collaborative recalibration of the temporal-differential belt she wore under her costume, the belt that slowed her personal aging by de-syncing her biological clock from local time — made possible three weeks ago. When she committed the belt to accelerated reverse-flow during transformation, her Monster form became younger, denser, larger. Nine feet. Nine and a half. The banded muscle on her arms visibly thickened. Her shoulders spread. She let out a roar that shook debris loose from the warehouse ceiling and lunged for Black Samson and Duplikate in the same motion, wrapping both of them against her chest, curling her back over them, presenting the enormous armored expanse of her shoulders and spine to the room.
Immortal moved.
He crossed the warehouse in a blur, reached Robot's organic body, and — because Rudy had already, in that same second, cannon-balled into the drone chassis via the neural-link he had, and the empty robot body had already swallowed him and collapsed to the concrete and the drone chassis had already curled tight — swept his own body over the drone in a full-flanking curl, back to the blast, arms wrapped around the compacted metal of Robot's shell.
Blue Rush moved.
He grabbed Rex around the waist. He grabbed Thunderbolt by her nape. He hit acceleration in the same motion, and the three of them were a streak that shot through the loading bay door in a blur that vaporized the crumpled steel and left a heat-shimmer in the air behind them.
Mark grabbed Shapesmith by the arm. Shapesmith, in a maneuver they'd drilled for exactly this scenario, folded his body into a dense spherical mass — a solid ball of himself, no protruding limbs, no vulnerable seams — and Mark threw him, hard, on a low arc that punched him through the roof of the warehouse and out into the sky above the loading yard. In the same motion Mark grabbed Monster Girl's ball of shielded teammates around its equator, and threw her, on a matching arc, out the same hole Shapesmith had made.
Then he closed his eyes and put his own body over the disk on the marble desk.
Because the marble desk was where the bomb was, obviously. It had been where the bomb was the whole time. Machine Head's monologue had been the fuse.
"ARIA, shield —"
The suit's dispersion field kicked in in the same nanosecond the bomb went off.
The explosion took the warehouse off the map.
It was, per the seismic readings that would populate every USGS sensor in the Midwest within seven seconds, a shaped charge — deliberately structured to concentrate the blast within a compressed radius rather than spreading it outward across the surrounding infrastructure. The warehouse and its immediate footprint were converted, in the space of half a second, to a smoking crater. The surrounding two-block radius rattled hard. The self-storage facility next door lost its front wall. The rail yard lost some rusted rolling stock that had not moved in twenty years. Windows blew out in a ring for the next mile. The Milano, parked on the rooftop three blocks away, lifted three feet off its landing gear on the pressure wave, settled back, and continued its silent power-cycle without further comment.
Two seconds later, the debris cloud began to clear.
In the crater, Mark stood up.
The dispersion field had absorbed the primary blast and the triangle on his chest was, in the aftermath, a burning white-hot instead of its usual red — banking the enormous energy load the field had swallowed, ARIA already routing it through the storage cells for later use. Two of the hex plates on his left forearm had cracked. The nanites were already reflowing them, red seams knitting shut as the armor repaired itself in front of his eyes. The letter, and the marble desk, and everything else within a hundred meters, were vapor.
Above him, the sky was gray-white with dust.
He rose out of the crater.
Monster Girl was in the air two hundred meters up, her transformed body slowly uncurling as Duplikate and Black Samson and the still-shrunken Shrinking Ray peeled away from her chest as they began to descend. Everyone was moving. Everyone was intact.
Shapesmith was reforming beside her, extending arms and legs back out of his spherical mass as he formed in to parachute to lower their fall.
Immortal was rising from the wreckage on the far edge of the crater with the drone chassis of Robot cradled in his arms, the drone shifting immediately to bipedal deployment and stepping down to the ground on its own two legs.
Blue Rush came back with Rex and Thunderbolt, having covered a full mile and doubled back in the interval.
"Everyone accounted for?" Immortal barked.
"Present," said Robot.
"Aching, but present," said Rex.
"Da," said Blue Rush.
"Present!" Shapesmith called, cheerfully, waving from mid-air.
"good," Mark said, floating up to join the reformed circle. "ARIA, casualty check on the surrounding buildings."
"No civilian casualties. Two minor injuries reported in a delivery driver adjacent to the self-storage lot. First responders are already en route."
"Good." Mark exhaled inside the helmet.
He looked down at his gauntlet. The letter was gone. The disk was gone. The desk was gone. Machine Head had made his point, which was that he had wanted them all here, in this specific building, at this specific time, and had wanted them to survive — because if he'd wanted them dead, he'd have used a bigger bomb — and had wanted them to know he had wanted them to survive.
He was distracting us, Mark thought. From what.
"ARIA," he said aloud. "The trace."
"Signal isolation complete, boss."
"Give me a location."
"The transmission originated from a shielded structure on the north side of the city. Cross-referencing against Machine Head's known asset holdings —" A brief pause. "Match. Property registered to a shell company he controls. It's a decommissioned industrial complex on the north branch of the river."
"How fast can we be there."
"For the team, on the Milano, approximately three minutes. For you, alone, approximately forty-five seconds."
Mark hovered a moment.
Below him, the crater smoked. Around him, the team was regrouping, checking each other over, running their own after-action inventories. Immortal was setting Robot back down on the ground. Monster Girl was reverting, her nine-foot form shrinking back down through the eight-foot version toward her human baseline. Powerplex was standing at the edge of the crater with his hands on his hips, looking at the destruction with the particular thousand-yard expression.
"Team," Mark said, on the comm. "Machine Head's calling from a warehouse on the north branch. Robot, get the Milano, she's three blocks southeast on a rooftop, autopilot to the location I'm sending now. I'm going ahead."
"Invincible —" Immortal started.
"I'll scout. I won't engage. three minutes, and you're all there."
"Invincible —"
But Mark had already gone and the immortal followed.
WAREHOUSE ACROSS THE CITY
Across the city, in the offices above the decommissioned industrial complex on the north branch of the river, Machine Head stood at a window overlooking his shop floor and watched the two Battle Beast clones sleep.
Behind him, hunched over a console in the corner of the office, Isotope was breathing hard.
Isotope was breathing hard because Isotope had, in the last forty-one minutes, teleported the entire contents of a large warehouse — machinery, servers, personnel, one enormous fabrication bay, and one Italian marble desk — across the city in a series of consecutive jumps that had drained his reserves down to the marrow. He was sweating through his uniform. His skin had gone the pale gray that meant, from experience, that he was fifteen minutes and one more teleport from unconsciousness. He had propped himself against the console with both hands and was, at the moment, staring at a small tactical readout that was flickering in front of him with intel scraped from the traffic cameras around the west-side warehouse.
"Do — do you think that worked, boss?" Isotope asked.
He turned to look at Machine Head.
Machine Head did not turn to look at him.
"No, you fucking twat," Machine Head said cheerfully, and his voice had gone up an octave into the sing-song register that he had begun to use in the last few months when he was in a particularly good mood, "that just bought us time. Which is what we needed. Which is what we now have. Quickly. Prepare for their arrival. They'll be here in — oh, I don't know — six minutes."
He put his hands behind his back and rocked once on his heels.
Below the window, on the floor of the industrial bay, the Mauler Twins were making final adjustments to two enormous glass-fronted hibernation chambers. The chambers were vertical, coffin-shaped, with heavy support scaffolding and a great many cables snaking out from the bases to a bank of humming power converters along the far wall. Inside each chamber, suspended in the pale blue gel that was, per Robot's original schematics, a proprietary cellular-suspension medium the twins had reverse-engineered, floated the naked forms of two identical creatures.
Battle Beast.
Two of him.
Two seven-foot armored feline-humanoid warriors, sculpted from the ground up out of DNA that Machine Head had procured, a few months ago And to have the control, which was the other new thing. Around each clone's neck, laid across the collarbone and clasped in the back with a small brass ring, was a slim silver collar that the twins had — the twins, the fucking twins, who Machine Head loved in the same way a man loved a particularly effective attack dog — reverse-engineered from a schematic Robot had once, in a moment of great and now-regretted expansiveness, walked them through, back when they had all still been on speaking terms. The collar interfaced with the wearer's primary motor cortex and permitted, at the operator's discretion, either full behavioral autonomy, partial motor override, or complete puppetry. The twins had shown it to him two weeks. The twins had tested it on a stray dog, and the dog had done everything the twins had told it to do, including things the dog had very obviously not wanted to do, and had continued doing them until the twins had removed the collar and the dog had run away.
Machine Head, watching this, had laughed for a full minute.
He was watching now.
The Mauler Twins were working in their usual bicker-heavy rhythm. Standing beside them, in six overlapping versions of himself that were fanned out around the chambers doing simultaneous prep work on the ancillary systems, was Multi-Paul — all six of him wearing the same purple sweatshirt, all six of him arguing with all of the other five about whose task was most important, all six of them working at genuinely impressive speed regardless. Beside the leftmost chamber, on a wheeled equipment rack, sat two matching black tactical suits — sized for the clones, armored across the chest and shoulders in dense polymer plate — and two matching over-sized plasma cannons, each of them the size of a small car, each of them designed to be one-handed by the arm strength of the wearer.
"They will be here soon," Isotope said, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of one gray hand. "The Guardians. The Invincible."
"Yes. They will."
Machine Head hummed. It was a small tuneless hum. He had been humming a lot in the last few weeks. The chip in his head had been doing something new to his brain, something he had not yet decided whether to have looked at, and one of the things it had been doing was making him hum small tuneless songs in the middle of business meetings. He was aware of it. He did not particularly mind it. It seemed, so far, to be improving his mood.
"We are going to show them," he said, mostly to the window, mostly to himself, "one hell of a party."
He hummed a few more bars.
On the shop floor below, in the leftmost chamber, one of the clones opened its eyes.
The eyes were the same shocking pale color of the original. They fixed, immediately and without disorientation, on the observation window fifteen feet above the chamber. On the man at the window.
On Machine Head.
The clone smiled.
A moment later, in the second chamber, the other clone opened its eyes as well.
Machine Head kept humming.