Dark Skies

EARLIER

"Still nothing?" I asked Lucas as the combat suit powered up.

My earpiece transmitted his grunt of frustration. "Gordon's not on campus, and Church won't pick up."

"Cryo and Fer?"

"They're legging, but not fast enough. Boss, why not just send the Droids? The armour–"

"You checked it, right?"

Lucas swallowed. "Yes."

"And it works?"

"Yes."

"You trust Pink?"

He hesitated, then tiredly said, "Yes."

"Then we have nothing to worry about. Keep the Sheath running. It's up to you."

I muted my comm and glanced out the side of the Dragonfly. At our current speed, it wouldn't take long to reach the Academy. I took the reprieve to assess just what the hell was going on. Jason and the lookalike had torn up most of the southern suburbia and landed downtown. Angela and her team were also in the process of taking down Floodgates and Plague, something I had every confidence she could accomplish.

I wish I could’ve said the same for myself.

The attack on LA just seemed too random. Too brazen. There had to be something we were missing, which was why I had an algorithm pick through our servers and ping back anything that didn’t march to its typical beat. Lo and behold, a panic alarm in Syracuse triggered for six seconds before being cut off.

Thanks to the panic, no one noticed.

I barely reacted until I saw footage from the cloud and watched the two-second clip of an unidentified Alpha splitting himself in four to pull open a reinforced door.

There were six dormant Death Droids lined up beside me. They were the last of our stock, the rest having been preemptively deployed and destroyed in LA. Elite, multi-million-dollar war machines. Had the poly been my only concern, I’d still be snuggled up in my office.

I snorted. If only.

Through frames fifteen to twenty-one of second two on the recording, something appeared outside the door. Something large enough to cast a twenty-foot shadow. To blot out the sun and muffle the rain.

As if he would miss this.

Find his target , I admonished myself as the pilot announced we’d reached our drop zone. Get the kids clear and hold for reinforcements.

My faceplate clapped shut, and the suit’s HUD lit up the cargo hold.

"Five seconds to light!" called the pilot.

"Active!" I barked.

The Droids shuddered awake and formed up at my rear, right as the jump light went green. I hit the big red button on my left, and the cargo doors dropped with a slow, eerie groan.

Almost like it knew I was jumping to my death.

"Tail!" I shouted as I leapt off the edge. The Droids dove off behind me in perfect unison, and together we plummeted through the dark, pregnant clouds hanging over rural New York.

My screen fizzed when lightning flashed. The joints rattled when thunder roared. I ignored it all and instead had the lenses push forward to map the terrain.

There lay the first signs of trouble.

The school was, well, a school. Which meant there should be children present, especially in a situation of crisis.

There was nothing. The field was empty.

Scowling, I synced my systems with the school's mainframe, then deployed the suit's flight systems. The Droids followed my lead as we touched down at the back end of the complex, near the open-air training grounds.

I would need the sensors packed beneath the testing fields.

The Droids formed a defensive perimeter to guard me while I worked. Data dissection in the middle of a potential warzone was never ideal, but today it was necessary.

I used my override to comb through access sensor scans from the last hour and found concerning results. Dozens of students marched across this field, and from the contact patterns, they did so in an orderly line. Slowly.

Kids didn't walk in lines when under attack.

Unless they weren't trying to get away.

The Academy itself was basically a giant square, though with the proportions of an iceberg. Everything looked relatively normal from the outside. Dorms near the east wing of the facility, along with a few supply sheds, and a huge central structure for teaching.

Inside, the above-ground rooms and tech were what one would expect of a high-end private school: classes, laboratories, a small gym, a cafeteria and staff rooms.

The basement, though, was where you found the good stuff. Highly advanced technology and infrastructure not only allowed our instructors to get the best out of students intellectually, but physically as well. Syracuse held over sixty different conditioning rooms, combat theatres, simulation projectors and workout blocks.

All tailored for superhuman development, all linked through a central mainframe.

And somehow, all of them were down.

I cursed, then turned to the Droids. "Alpha and Bravo, find a nest for ranged support. Charlie, bottleneck the rear exit. Delta, eyes on the gate. Echo and Fox on me."

Time to face the music.

I turned and sprinted across the field. Three times my normal speed, too, thanks to the suit. It was an incredible feeling to not only move faster, but think as well. I formed six attack strategies during my run. It felt wrong.

For what wouldn't be the first or last time, I fought off envy.

Alphas are lucky pricks, I grumbled, and even that barely took a second.

I touched the locked side door, rolling an invisible sonic pulse through the walls. Pink, because mediocrity was an insult in itself, had managed to integrate echolocation.

Why make a normal battle suit, right?

The picture came back as an empty hallway, so I activated the suit’s wrist-mounted energy shield and rammed my way inside. The Droids, as per their programming, had cannons out upon breach.

There was no target, obviously, but I wasn’t going to waste time lecturing robots.

"Soundless," I commanded.

Our flight tech was designed to have both a propulsion and anti-gravity system. The propulsion in our shoulder plates were inspired by energy thrusters. The hover boots, on the other hand, mimicked Slick's ability to bypass friction, as well as Terry Church's gravitational repulsion.

Echo, Fox and I activated our hover boots to glide through the halls, silently scanning for hostiles.

Nothing. I had to make a conscious effort to dismiss my anger. No kids, no teachers. We hadn't even been contacted, so there was a good chance they could all either be dead or captured.

I remembered my old investigation courses, pre-appointment.

Speculation sans proof is nothing more than probable fantasy.

We reached a split in the corridor. According to blueprints, turning left would take us to the labs, while going right led to classes and stairs.

I motioned the Droids left, then prowled right. I echoed each class, focused on stealth over speed. If they did have children as hostages, we couldn’t afford to be seen.

But where? I asked myself. Above ground wouldn’t make sense. Drone sweep and they’re made. What about below? And if so, what room?

The floor was too thick to echo through. I was stuck up here unless I found a strong enough sonic pulse or went down there myself. Two options. Different strengths, different weaknesses.

Clearly, if anyone was still here, they'd be in the basement. The only signs of intrusion were the torn doors at the back, though how–

BOOOOM!

"On me!" I yelled through the comm while toggling my thrusters.

The Droids abandoned their sweep and rushed after me as I kicked through the stairwell door. I hit the second sublevel landing. My shock absorbers dissolved the impact. The next door popped out of its hinges against my shield, and we were flying.

Funnily enough, explosions had both good and bad consequences, thanks to my suit. The bad, of course, was that it was an explosion and killed people. The good, though, was that it generated soundwaves far more powerful than anything my suit could muster.

For a moment, two seconds after the facility shook, my systems had a full map of the entire complex. Even the field outside.

And it was somehow even worse than I'd pictured.

"Fox, fill your beam and target red tag. Echo, retrieve and protect blue," I ordered, tapping my leg, which responded by producing a thick metal disk blinking green.

We turned three more corners before reaching the Obstacle Course 2-1, the second largest at the school. Normally, dozens of alternating, transforming irregular shapes would occupy the main floor. It was designed to train physical-type Alphas on agility and problem-solving.

Now, there was a crater in the far wall from someone having blown through the side door.

As we crashed through cracked upper windows, I assigned a blue tag to the dirty, panicked boy trying to drag a small, bleeding girl across the room, away from the wave of copies surging toward them.

My disk landed right in the heart of the horde. The explosion blew their bodies to smithereens, though interestingly enough, there was no blood. They disintegrated like paper in a bonfire.

The force knocked the kids airborne. The boy spun into Echo's arms, while I snatched the girl before she crashed into a rotating lozenge. We glided across the maze to take cover near the back of the room while Foxtrot dropped onto a triangle and continued to build an energy blast in his arm cannon.

I tagged the brute the instant he stepped into sight. Foxtrot nailed him with a pulse ray, flinging him into the hallway. I used his impact against a wall to map the room. I regretted that decision immediately, as it revealed not one, but two horrors.

The brute hadn't even fallen over. He just bounced and caught himself in a crouch.

And worse? This was no brute. No, like Ergo and his mysterious new brother Magne, along with the newcomer in LA, he was another silver-skinned, seven-foot-tall, metallic-eyed super Alpha.

Ergo and Magne weren't twins. They weren't even fucking triplets with the powerhouse on the beach.

There were four of these accursed things. At least.

Who knows? With my luck, twenty more could be waiting outside.

"LET US GO!" shrieked Jasper, coating his arm in diamonds to try and slug Echo with a sucker punch.

I smacked it aside and recalled my helmet. His jaw dropped. "Bernard?"

My faceplate snapped back down, allowing me to watch our serial killer shake himself off. "Quiet! We're going to get you guys out of here, but you have to listen."

I bridged comms with Foxtrot and Echo. "Draw them out, then smoke the room."

Echo scampered through obstacles and joined its brother by peppering the brute with their pulse weapons. I turned to Jasper and the girl my system identified as a ‘Lydia Holder’.

"What happened?" I asked them. "Where is everyone?"

Jasper took a second to catch his breath, then whispered urgently, "The bad guys took them! They used a weird... uh, I can't remember the shape."

"Cylinder," Lydia provided helpfully.

"Yeah! They used a cyringer–"

"Cylinder," Lydia corrected sternly.

I waved her off. "I get the idea."

Jasper continued, "It popped and shut off all the lights, but Mr. Wang did a cool thing with his hands, and the school turned back for a second."

Ernie Wang, history instructor. Electric-based powers, I remembered. He must've momentarily restored the power before running out of juice. Well done, Wang. You got us that security footage.

"Then what?"

"They took everyone!" he exclaimed. "Dunno where, but they said we had to be quiet and listen. Then they treated Lydia weird and that big weird guy walked over and told her to come with him. I told him to go away because he was weird and fat, but then..."

He trailed off with sudden, confusing sadness. I cocked my head. "What?"

Lydia spoke in his stead. "He turned his hand to metal and asked if it looked familiar."

It hit me like bricks. No, not even bricks. That didn't do it justice. Like Jason sailing in at Mach 50 and blowing my brains out with a flying punch.

He’s not just taking away powers, he’s absorbing them for himself.

"He killed Sarah," Jasper snarled, graphite beginning to rim his eye sockets. "I’m going-"

"To escape,” I interrupted, “because neither of us can kill him right now."

I faced the battle. It wasn't going well.

More copies were rolling in, doing tons to occupy my Droids while the brute surveyed the room, waiting for us to emerge.

"Alright, follow my lead. Jasper, keep Sarah safe."

Jasper nodded and punched his fists together, shifting them to angry gray titanium. "Sure! I've only been to a few fight classes, though, and Mr. Blevins said my kick form doesn’t follow through enough."

"Then focus on punching," I told him with a sigh.

This will not be fun, I groaned internally, priming my pulse cannon.

I broke cover and fired a salvo into the multi crowd. They went flying into walls and dissolved. The brute snapped his head in my direction and observed me trash his allies curiously.

I bowled a copy into three others with a push kick, then called up energy swords from the suit's forearms to hack my way through more. The brute did not react to our evisceration of his minions. He just wanted to watch.

Because he thought things were under his control.

What he didn't know, though, was the reason I would kick a copy every three kills instead of just cutting them open was to have them smack against a shape, make noise, and update my suit’s map of the combat theatre.

"Find the progenitor!" I ordered my Droids.

A trio of copies leapt to smother me, so I hooked all of them in a flight-assisted roundhouse kick. I flipped over to catch the first as he peeled off the wall, shooting a pulse blast through his legs before beheading him with a sweeping slash. I rammed my sword through the second's chest, then sent him packing with a side kick. I dismembered the third, knocked him into the air, then sent their mutilated bodies flying with a pulse-enhanced ground punch.

It was a ridiculous and over-the-top display. I could've killed them in a fraction of the time. The real goal, though, was to have the brute study me in fascination, which he did, oblivious to Jasper and Lydia sneaking across the adjacent wall.

I cleared my surroundings with a sweeping blast, then faced the murderer. "Let me guess, Alfi?"

He narrowed his eyes, then stepped forward. "Not quite. Evo."

"Right. And you're the... pussy of the family? Your two brothers up north are fighting a war, and the big one is levelling LA alongside my– the world's most powerful Hero as we speak. And you're... what? Engaged in casual child predation?"

His eyes narrowed. "You know not what you speak."

"No?" I replied. A copy tried sneaking up behind me, so I turned and bisected him from crown to crotch. "Because from the way I see it, Mother thinks you're something of a bitch."

Energy flashed up to his arms as the skin shifted to granite. My scanners identified it as gravitational.

He was puppeteering two innocent children's powers.

At this point, I didn't think there was a jail cell he deserved to rot in for the rest of his life.

"That suit gives you power. It is the only reason you are still alive. Do not speak to me on worthlessness when you cannot even fight on your own merits."

I felt the rise in electromagnetic energy and juked clear before the pressure skyrocketed and flattened a chunk of the room.

"Very rich, considering your actions at this exact moment. Must really be getting overshadowed by your siblings, hmm?"

I flicked an electric disk at his shoulder. He sent it right back with gravitational repulsion. I dodged and unloaded a volley of pulse blasts. He ignored them and lunged with a shifted right fist.

Finally! I exclaimed silently, flying over him before triggering the dormant order I'd left Echo and Fox. Smoke disks flew out of their backs and dropped the room in a fog, blinding Evo and the copies. I scooped the kids and shot for the door, right as Evo froze everything with a yell.

Had we not been outside his sphere of attraction, the kids and I would've been flattened in the gravity well he used to pull everything against his now metal body. Fox and Echo were crushed. My thrusters whined as they fought to escape.

"He shouldn't have that!" Jasper hissed furiously, on the verge of madness. "They're not his!"

"I know," I replied, "and he'll pay."

I meant my response, but my mind was elsewhere.

Something wasn't clicking. That well had been all-encompassing. It killed my Droids and the copies. Evo, while emotional, didn't seem like the kind of person to murder his ally for no reason.

Which must then mean–

"DOWN!" I roared, dropping the kids and toggling my shield as a noiseless blur rammed me from the side. "Keep running!"

It was immediately apparent that I was dealing with the progenitor. He was at least three times stronger, twice as fast, and clearly much smarter than any of his duplicates.

We crashed through a wall, triggering a hail of alerts through my HUD. I dismissed them all and rolled out my landing, then used the noise of our impact to find him.

The progenitor rushed me with long, curving daggers. He risked a brazen flying knee, though with his knives out in anticipation of a lateral dodge. I almost went with instinct and dropped before remembering the suit's striking ability. My backhand clubbed into his ribs, one of which I was pretty sure broke.

He flipped twice before crashing into a control panel. It lit up, and the room immediately doused us with chemical gas.

I made a sound of annoyance. He'd taken us into a conditioning room, this one meant to test our physiological aptitude against aerosol agents.

Then my brain started working.

I can use this .

My mask filtered the gas as four copies jumped out of his body. They materialized with a volcanic flash of light, warbling from magma-looking blobs to articulated enemies.

I punched energy into the ground to throw the copies off their feet, then charged the progenitor. His back dented the wall, filling my suit with geographic data. I grinned, twisted, and threw him into the ceiling, right into a tank. The multi was not only hit with a dizzying shower of knockout gas, but also an explosion to the face that sent us all flying into the hallway.

My shoulder plate tore free as a wall fell apart around me. The armour hadn’t caught everything. I could feel my chest protesting from surface-level burns. I ignored them. I had bigger concerns.

I rolled to my feet and located the children, who, funnily enough, had not followed my order to run. They were huddled against the wall, a few feet away.

"You guys all–"

"ANT!" bellowed Evo, and suddenly I was flying backward.

I twisted to see his stony, outstretched hand glowing with energy. If that got around my neck, I was dead. He'd stepped out of the obstacle room, covered in soot from destroyed copies.

He also looked furious.

I curled up tight to streamline myself and accelerate in his pull. Were Angela here, she’d have called me reckless and stupid.

She’d be right. I chuckled to myself.

I'd have to time this perfectly.

His fingers sparked uselessly against my shield, allowing me to twist under his hand, slash the underside of his wrist, then stab hard at his knee. Neither cut more than an inch, though he did yelp with irritation. My hover boots ghosted me clear of his wild backhand, then I punched an uppercut pulse blast into his chin.

Evo's head snapped up, then his whole body jerked back with my two-handed pulse to his torso. I put him in the wall with a shield ram, then tried and failed again to cleave his bald head in half. Frustrated, I slapped a thermal charge to his dome, jumped clear and curled up behind my shield.

The wall fell on him as he let out a gargling bellow of rage. The explosion sent me careening back down the hall, where I twisted to hit the wall shield first. I spun messily to my feet, rebalanced with my hover boots, and raced toward the kids.

Jasper was at the corner, waiting for me with wide eyes and a maniacal, naïve smile.

"That was AWESOME!" he cackled.

"Move!" I barked in reply.

We skidded around the bend, where I pointed them to a stairwell. I heard another explosion as Evo burst from the rubble. My suit said there was gravity magic involved, and it’d cost the obstacle room a doorway.

"Droids!" I yelled into my comm. "Discard previous orders! Neutralize red tag by any means possible!"

I didn't have the time to verify order confirmation, as we were nearly at the door.

Then the stairwell screamed and imploded. I didn't need sensors to figure out how.

As mentioned earlier, pros and cons to explosions.

Con: explosion.

Pro: echo map. And wasn't I grateful, since the five-ton boulder of hallway debris Evo dragged with him from the obstacle room would've killed me on the spot.

I spun and triggered my shield right as the missile hit. Jasper turned his body to diamonds and tackled Lydia away while I was forced out of the air and into the pile of destroyed stairs.

My HUD screamed. My right leg had lost its shin plating. The energy tubes connecting my left arm to the suit's power pad, located at the small of my back, were sixty-three percent compromised. I wouldn't be able to hold constructs for more than four-point-two seconds on that limb. My helmet was cracked in four different places, and the shock absorbers were nearly gone. I really felt it as my head jangled through the mask.

Fuck , I hissed, spitting red onto my faceplate. I have to get them out. Where the fuck are my reinforcements?

"Lydia, do it again!" Jasper was shouting. There was also stomping. My flickering display explained that as Evo charging the kids. "Get us out of here!"

Lydia was shaking with fear. "I can't! I–"

Evo lunged, ignoring Jasper entirely as he closed in on Lydia. He ate hard light instead. I smushed my shield into his face, throwing him off balance and into the hallway wall. Queue building-wide tremors, tumbling rocks, cracks webbing the ground and support structures groaning angrily.

"Go!" I shouted at them, rolling clear of the brute's stomp. "Now!"

Evo sneered and tried to trap me in another gravity spike. I pulsed his face instead, throwing off his aim, then connected a spinning kick to his chest. The suit's force multipliers were shot, so I hit with almost no power.

Fuck.

I saw the swing too late and screamed as his steel fist crushed my armour and dislocated my shoulder. I rebounded off the ceiling and crashed to the floor, where my HUD finally spluttered and died.

"One true blow," Evo scoffed, striding over to me. "And you are beaten. Disgraceful."

I didn't even need to trigger the locks to peel off my helmet. It practically fell apart.

"Not more disgraceful," I wheezed, "than a complete lack of awareness."

Evo snorted. "You believe I care what you think?"

I shook my head and pointed up. "Literal awareness, you fucking ape."

The ceiling imploded as Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta fell in a hail of mechanical fury. Alpha beamed Evo with a pulse blast, throwing him to his back.

The other three rammed him so hard, the floor caved. Myself, the kids, Evo and the Droids fell from basement sublevel two to three, which was another conditioning room. Luckily, my suit's automatic shielding capacities were still active, so I only began to sweat rivers instead of incinerating in the broil room. I counted two dozen heat lamps rimming the sides of the ceiling.

It was as close as we could get to hell.

The grate floor crumpled around Evo. Jasper shifted to diamond and caught Lydia, then twisted to absorb their landing. Had I not been in mind-boggling pain, I'd have whistled. That boy would become a terrific Hero.

My right, non-dislocated arm was luckily the one that could still generate constructs, and I used a mix of my barely functioning hover boots and shield to not die from the fall.

I still spilled unceremoniously to the floor, where a whole new flurry of aches and pains threatened to put me under.

Get them out, I reminded myself, using the suit’s remaining strength to crawl to my knees. Do not let Evo drain Lydia. Do not let Evo get her.

I damn near split my molars popping my arm back in place. I knew there was a lot more wrong with me, but I didn't have time to care. Evo was trashing my Droids, and once that was done, we'd all be dead.

Without the suit accelerating my thoughts, as the spinal tract was long gone, I felt sluggish. The heat didn’t help. Looking hurt. Breathing hurt. Thinking hurt. It was so bad, even Evo started missing.

I did a double, then triple take. Wait, what?

I watched him whiff a punch by at least a foot, then completely mistime his gravity spike. The determination was still there, but Evo was clearly out of his comfort zone. The room was getting to him.

I reached for the side of my head before remembering my helmet no longer existed. Grumbling, I staggered over to the kids and told them to get to the door.

"Why?" asked Jasper.

I put my hand on his shoulder. "Because you're a great kid who is far too young to die."

"But–" he started.

"Now, Jasper. Take Lydia. I'll take care of this guy."

I couldn't afford to spend more time convincing them, so I turned and ran for the control panel. I felt my reactive shielding waver, and the heat tripled. The lamps seared into my back. My skin started to peel and boil.

Get to the panel, I admonished myself. Get to the panel. Get...

A shockwave plastered me to the hatch. A second later, I spotted Delta’s severed head clattered to the grate. Alpha, Bravo and Charlie weren’t faring much better. Two were missing limbs, and part of Bravo's torso was gone.

Our boiler rooms didn’t just stop at lamps. Sometimes, we really needed to push our students. Hence, the inception of the 'sun-slab', a near-nuclear heater that would turn this room from an unpleasant day on the equator to actual, unfiltered hell.

With any luck, Evo would melt to a puddle. The best part? None of the security measures in place to cap the heat ceiling would hold up against my executive authority. The rules didn’t apply to Directors.

I don’t know how I managed to crawl to my feet. Even my blood tasted dry and ashy. I pulled open the flap and called the room parameters up on the glass. A heat surge struck, wobbling my knees. My bones felt so brittle. If I went down, I wouldn’t be getting up again.

My shielding was almost gone. I had seconds left.

I realized I would not be leaving this room. The time to activate the slab would drain the rest of my shield reserves. I'd be immobilized. The heat would pull any strength left in my useless, blank muscles, and I'd die.

As usual. Powerless.

The console warned me that turning the sun slab up to full power was prohibited. I bypassed it with my override.

The room shook as the floor split. Evo crushed Alpha, my final Droid, underfoot. Then he dropped to a knee. He spotted me and glowered. He was just as paralyzed as I.

The slab was truly a new sun. It drove us to ground with its power. I'd been burned before, but this was new. This was nothing short of divine punishment.

The temperature must've been something like four hundred degrees and was rapidly rising. Parts of my skin were flaking off. I could actually feel the moisture in my eyes evaporating.

But at least the kids were safe.

I slumped against the wall as my vision began to spot. I could hear my shielding reserves starting to splutter. Soon, I'd have nothing left. But that wasn't enough. I wanted to make sure this fucker paid. For killing Andre and Susan.

And for his brothers' terrorism against the world.

So, with the last of my strength, I raised my arm and discharged a pulse blast. Right into the slab.

Radiation flattened us all. It was like moving with a plane sitting on your chest. I only had seconds of shielding left before my body gave out.

Interestingly enough, my thoughts rolled back to my family. To Jason, and his disapproving expression at my funeral. My mother's indifference. Matthius' boredom.

But the sharpest image was that of Angela. She'd be pissed.

I laughed at that. She'd be a good Director.

Then everything scrambled as Jasper streaked into sight, holding a... glowing Lydia over his shoulder?

What the fuck?

My dry mouth couldn’t have told them to run if I tried. Oddly enough, Jasper looked excited. Almost relieved. My questions disappeared as he dove, grabbed my leg, and everything went white.

My body seemed to fold and twist. I couldn’t describe it. It should’ve killed me. Instead, I ended up on my back, looking up at a dingy concrete ceiling.

Lydia yelped as she smacked into a washing machine.

Washing machine? I repeated to myself, confused.

Why the hell was there a washing machine in the boiler room?

"YES!" Jasper hooted from beside me, recalling his diamonds. "I knew it would–"

THOOM!

"Uh oh," he muttered, looking around. "Wait, are we in the girl's dorm?"

The tremors felt powerful, yet sudden and staggered. They must've come from the slab’s detonation. I knew better than to think Evo was dead, but every man must dream.

Lydia crawled to her feet, looking bashful. "It's the only place I could think of."

Jasper smacked his head. "Lydia, that's gross! I'm not allowed in here! Headmaster Gordon is gonna kill me!"

"Hey, jumping is hard!" she protested. "I'm not that good at it!"

I rolled to my rear. "You're a teleporter?"

She nodded glumly. "And I suck at it."

"Of course," I muttered. "Of course."

Jasper frowned. "I mean, she's not that bad at it."

"What? No, that's not what I meant." I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in so much pain. "It makes sense that he wants your abilities. He has ranged and physical powers. The only thing he's missing is movement."

"Why can’t we just give them to him?” she pouted. “I hate them. None of my old friends talk to me anymore."

I offered her a sympathetic smile. "It’s not that simple, Lydia. He– shit."

Another tremor fissured cracks through the ceiling, though this time, it started to fall.

"Kids, get to the stairs, now." My chest felt like it was full of nails, both organic and artificial. "This place is coming down."

"And leave you? No way!" Jasper held his hand up dutifully. "Mr. Wang said the most important quality in a Hero is selflessness. If he finds out I left you, he'll take away our table's stars for sure, and then Brent will get mad we don't get computer time."

"I promise he won't. You have to go."

I looked at Lydia. She, unlike Jasper, wasn’t having any fun. From their retelling, I figured Evo spooked her when corralling the hostages away, and she’d ported with Jasper. Likely somewhere she was familiar with, like a bathroom or cafeteria. Then, Jasper kept them out of sight until I arrived.

This kid is something else.

I coughed again, this time with blood. "Trust me, you'll be okay. Either way, you can't get in trouble if you're dead."

Jasper paused to think, then shrugged. "I'll carry you. I think I'm strong–"

CRACK!

Something hit the ceiling above us, and it collapsed. We’d have been crushed, had Jasper not lunged forward and caught it in titanium form.

He screamed. I didn’t blame him. The ceiling alone was over a thousand pounds, in addition to rubble from the upper floors.

The laundry room would be located beneath an electric room, which meant tons of equipment collapsing over us. Another series of muffled impacts confirmed my fears, and Jasper yelled as the weight tripled.

"Can't... hold!" he cried. His arms shook. The titanium in his arms cracked and dented. "Too... much..."

I forced myself to my knees. "Jasper, listen to me. Your titanium form is slick and streamlined, so it'll be the quickest. Your diamond is the toughest. But graphene has the highest tensile strength, so it'll be the strongest. You need to use it."

He shuddered and sank another inch. "I can't! I c..."

He drifted off into incoherent groans as his arms cracked further. I spun to Lydia. "Start trying to teleport us! Think of home!"

I faced Jasper. "Yes, you can! Think hard, Jasper. About what your sister taught you. What you've learned in school. You saved Lydia and me. You're already a fantastic Hero. You know you're strong. The only thing stopping you from being the strongest is you." I filled my words with bravado. I felt none of it. "Are you built for this or not?"

Jasper's gray eyes faded to black. His teeth clamped, his fingers curled to fists, and his titanium skin was swallowed by midnight. With a shriek, his body mended the fissures, and he shoved the concrete up over his head. He pushed so hard; his hands started to punch through the rubble.

"Yes!" I shouted. "Keep it up, Jasper!" I looked at Lydia, whose eyes were flickering. "Think of home, Lydia."

She shook her head in panic as piping flattened the stairs. "I can't! I don't have energy!"

Jasper started to sink. I wanted to scream myself. All this work. All this effort, and I still couldn't save them. Nothing I did mattered. Not with the Droids, not with the suit, not even getting Jasper to shift.

I was, as usual, just too weak.

Jasper’s knee hit the floor. He looked at me helplessly. I hated that expression. I’d seen it in the mirror so many times. He had nothing left.

For the second time today, I was dead. But this time, I'd dragged children down with me.

I felt a shudder run through the ground, then a whistle. That would knock more debris loose, onto...

"Wait," I muttered as a familiar hum started to build above us.

Lydia looked at me. "What?"

The hum turned to a whine. My eyes went wide. "Lydia, down!"

Jasper finally folded as light exploded above us. It was blinding. Through my pain, I managed to grab Lydia and pull her from the rain of pebbles.

But most importantly, the ceiling didn't fall. Jasper was down on all fours, but none of us were crushed to death. It hung motionlessly over our heads, even without opposing force.

At least not from below.

"Uh..." muttered Jasper. "Did I do that?"

I grimaced. "No, but good job regardless."

The ceiling groaned as it ascended. A massive portion of the upper floor was welded to it. It couldn’t have weighed less than fifty tons.

That didn't bother Matthius in the least. He raised it over his head with a cocky grin, then tossed it aside like a basketball player. Rain soaked his hair flat. I noticed that even drenched, he was smoking. He’d flown straight from LA, then. I tried to do the math, but there weren’t sufficient variables. Mach 10 to 15 felt like a realistic range, though.

Matthius was lucky his suit was still in one piece.

The smoke rolling out of his eyes indicated he'd used heat vision to blow the collapsing dorm apart while fusing the lower floors together. The power didn’t surprise me. The precision, on the other hand, did.

What also surprised me was the sound of his relieved sigh. That was unusual, especially given the fact that he was rescuing me. He noticed the two wide-eyed youths at my side and frowned, then said, "Seriously, Bernard? How many times has Mom told you to use protection?"

I felt my adrenaline start to drop. That wasn't good. "Check for noise in the main building. The hostile was there."

Matthius then noticed my injury-riddled body. "Dude, what the fuck happened? You need a hospital."

"No, get..."

I was going to tell him to get Lydia and Jasper as high and far from here as possible. Instead, my exhaustion finally won out, and I slumped over, surrendering to blissful, painless slumber.