The Loop

“Wait a minute,” I said to Mr. X, suddenly realizing something I'd overlooked in the madness that had been pretty much non-stop since we'd arrived. “Didn't you get shot earlier? Like when we were fighting out here before?”

Shannon glanced curiously over at him, then cast her eyes downward. It had been her bullets that had taken him in the shoulder and kneecap. She probably didn't feel great about that now, although he was clearly no worse for wear. Somehow.

“We've got pretty advanced armor under these suits,” he said. “Benefits of working with a lot of very powerful Hypes with engineering experience. It did hurt like a bitch though.”

Now that I really looked at him, he was limping a bit.

“So all the guards I shot?” asked Shannon hopefully.

“Yeah, no. They're going to be off work for a while. The armor is in pretty short supply, and they weren't really ever expected to see the kind of action we saw today.”

“That seems shortsighted,” said Adam.

“Also a little fucked up,” I said, “to only give the good armor to the Hypes and let the regular humans get bullet holes in them.”

Mr. X and Ms. Y shrugged in unison.

“Can we have this conversation some other time?” asked Peregrine, half-heartedly dodging some sort of shadowy blades that the dark projection nearest to her was generating and throwing with incredible speed. She still had my power, but it was fading quickly and she didn't want to risk getting hit and not being able to absorb the impact when it expired.

“Fair point,” I said, diving in front of two more of the blades and absorbing the energy as they struck my chest.

The projection had the appearance of a short woman with long hair that fell to her waist and some sort of flowing robe over most of her body. Finer details were obscured by the fact that every part of her and her clothing were made of the same shifting black vapor. It looked insubstantial from a distance, but the blades—and the thing throwing them—were solid enough to hurt.

“I think that's Bladesmith,” said Ms. Y. “She was being held in a cell close enough to Pitch that he could have absorbed her.” She was huddled just inside the entrance to a shipping container, catching her breath after being chased by one of the projections who evidently hadn't been dissuaded by her fear aura.

The reason I felt so open about having a casual discussion in the midst of the battle was because, well … it wasn't much of a battle. The projections Pitch had thrown at us so far were relatively weak, uncoordinated, and easy to dispatch. Adam and I alone probably could have taken them all on while keeping the others safe, but with the added help of Quintain, Flare, Peregrine, and Mr. X, I almost had time to stand around and relax.

Adam didn't see it that way, of course. He wasn't capable of it. He wouldn’t allow himself to believe that things weren’t as bad as he’d imagined. Still, it wouldn’t be wise to underestimate Pitch.

Don't you find this somehow even more ominous? His voice came into my mind in a way that was becoming strangely familiar, but it still surprised me.

Jesus, I thought, my hand jumping a little as I took aim with a blast of light at another projection. You almost made me miss my shot. And no, not really.

Adam was hovering around a cluster of five shipping containers that formed a sort of walled-off area with only two narrow entrances into the middle. Mounted to the side of one of the containers within this makeshift courtyard area was a small terminal, hidden from sight of anyone passing through the area. A lot of the veneer of this base was like that, I was finding, just present enough to fool anyone who didn’t dig too deep, but thin enough that you could see the real base underneath if you knew where to look.

Lincoln was standing at the terminal, the screen and his eyes flashing rapidly, and the others—the ones who couldn't fight—were huddled around inside, protected by the walls of the containers and by Adam floating above. Lincoln was feeding a steady stream of verbal information to Cerebro, who was probably collating it somehow in his brain or … well, I didn’t really get what his power even was, but I was sure it was useful.

Luisa and Angie stood nearby, talking in low, nervous voices and glancing around anxiously, as if certain that something sinister would jump into their midst at any moment. Their fear was a reminder to me of what we were fighting for—what I was fighting for. I had the power to protect those who couldn't protect themselves. I didn’t like thinking of them as powerless, didn’t like taking their agency away like that, but really, what could they do against what we were facing? I reminded myself not to get complacent or careless, no matter how much of a cakewalk the “battle” currently was.

I left them, trusting Adam to look after them, and moved on to be within earshot of Mr. X and Ms. Y.

“X and Y,” I said, charging the woman they’d identified as Bladesmith and catching her by surprise, bowling into her with my own momentum plus a substantial burst of light and kinetic energy, causing her form to fall over, break apart, and finally dissipate completely. “What’s your best guess as to who would be the most dangerous Hypes he might have hidden in there?”

“Well,” said Mr. X, running around the back of another projection, trying to stay out of sight. This projection’s power appeared to give him insanely enhanced reflexes, stamina, and agility. Mr. X got behind cover and continued, “I assume he absorbed every one of those Hypes we brought in from Manhattan yesterday. Adversary, Gethsemane, and all the rest. Also relatively nearby were Carnal: big albino guy with horns who can induce primal desires in people; Berserker, who spreads fire around him and can teleport to anywhere his flames are; Tiamat, Chrysalis … hmmm, Cygnus, maybe? Thorn and Bramble, Rock and Hard Place—those are partners, of course. A few others. Let me think— ”

“—Don’t get him started talking about Hype shit,” said Ms. Y. “Especially not now.”

Mr. X waited until the projection’s focus had shifted to his sister, then he rushed at its back. The projection turned toward him at the last minute and started diving out of the way, turning the dive into a roll. Mr. X’s power must have caught him at the last moment, though, because his graceful dive and roll turned into an embarrassingly incompetent flop on the ground. He hit his head against the pavement and let out an inhuman screech that sounded more like the dying wail of an old dial-up modem than anything a living thing could produce. Like the projection I’d taken out, he dissipated and didn’t put himself back together again.

“So your power works against them, but mine doesn’t?” said Ms. Y. “That hardly seems fair.”

“My power’s … spotty,” he said. “I can normally aim it at Hypes without any problem, but these things are different. Have to focus more.”

“Easy to say,” she replied, “harder to pull off.”

Their powers in tandem would normally make them a force to be reckoned with. Her fear aura that affected every Hype around her, plus selective power immunity—something she’d kept up her sleeve when we’d been fighting her earlier but that she’d finally seen fit to mention as we were making our way out from the lower levels of the base—paired with his ability to selectively block the powers of one opponent at a time would give them a significant leg up in any confrontation. It wouldn't have surprised me to find that most of their confrontations ended with their enemies surrendering immediately.

Still, we’d taken them on fairly successfully, and they’d had the help of two other very powerful Hypes at the time. But we hadn’t been fighting to win, only to get away.

That their powers could work against these projections at all was promising. That they were on our side, at least for right now, was heartening.

Trojan had been unceremoniously laid down in the center of the little courtyard formed by the shipping containers. That he hadn’t woken up yet was concerning, but his power and influence were hardly things I wanted to have to deal with at the moment, so I didn’t give it much thought.

I looked to the outer edge of the dome and saw two more projections emerge: the man Mr. X had just taken down, and Bladesmith. We weren't really defeating them, only the projections of them. It didn't seem like there was a limit to how many Pitch could produce.

It’s a war of attrition, I heard Lincoln’s voice in my mind, channeled through Adam, probably to all of us. He could send in his heavy hitters, or he could just keep making us dispatch the same guys over and over again until we get too tired to keep fighting. I'm getting info from cameras and computers outside of the dome, trying to figure out what his end goal is. I think right now, it's just to keep us distracted, tire us out.

I don’t get tired, I thought. But that wasn’t really true. I didn’t get physically fatigued from exertion, not as long as my body had something it could draw energy from, but I would get mentally exhausted eventually. And if that happened, if I fell asleep …

Any one of us could end up absorbed, end up part of him, thought Adam.

Oh, shit, I thought. I’d managed to escape Pitch’s shadow once, back when we’d fought him in Shannon’s house, but his powers had grown a great deal since then. I didn’t like my chances of pulling it off a second time.

We need to work quickly, thought Adam.

I ran through several rows of shipping containers, hoping to locate Peregrine to ask her how close she was to being able to borrow Oneiros’s power. I plowed through several projections along the way, dispatching them too quickly to even suss out what their powers were, and found her with Flare and Oneiros, pinned down near the ramp to the ferry by a projection who seemed to be able to generate long, black spikes from any part of their body and push them out as far as fifty feet. If Peregrine was ducking and dodging, afraid to get hit by one of the spikes, then that meant my power must have worn off. meaning she was ready to duplicate another.

Flare was drawing light into a fine point and blasting the projection with it, but it wasn’t doing much. There wasn’t much light filtering in through the dome, and what was there seemed somehow gray and tainted, hard for his power to manipulate. I used a good chunk of the energy saved up in my internal battery to generate a burst of unaffected light as I reached their position, which he manipulated into a focused beam, blasting the thing back and causing it to break apart into wisps of vapor, floating away in the breeze.

“Thanks,” he said, breathing hard, “for the assist.”

“No problem,” I said, barely listening to him; I was distracted by Oneiros, who was holding what appeared to be some sort of giant sci-fi gun that required two hands to hold, with the trigger on top.

“You just … find that lying around, or …?”

“Pulled it out of the Dreamworld,” he said. “Still can’t get in, but if I push against the barrier really hard, and concentrate in just the right way, things sort of pop out.”

As if to demonstrate, he screwed up his face with the look of the chronically constipated, and a fissure in reality opened near his head, from which a golden short sword fell out and clattered on the ground. “That’s not going to be much use,” he said, “but I have actually pulled out some cool things.”

“Like the giant gun?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a laser cannon. Dreamed it up myself.”

“That’s all well and good,” I said, “but are the two of you ready to try working in tandem to get us the hell out of here?”

“Yes,” they both said.

“I’ve got his power, we’re just working out the timing,” said Peregrine. “If we don’t push at the exact same moment, we might as well not be working together at all. It’s like trying to force your hand into a highly pressurized vessel. You can push and push, but what’s pushing back against the opening is stronger than the force of your hand. We need to push together.” She said this last bit to Oneiros, who looked at her with frustrated eyes beneath his golden helmet.

“I’m trying,” he said. “I’ve never had to use it at the same time as someone else. Besides, even if we manage to get ourselves in, there’s no point. We need everyone grouped up relatively close so we can get us all to sleep at the same time and force everyone inside.”

“Okay, so let's do that. But instead you keep screwing around pulling out fancy laser guns.”

“The gun’s not for me,” he said. “It’s for the kid.” With that, he handed it to Flare, who accepted it clumsily, evidently not expecting it.

“You needed light to manipulate, kid, well here it is.”

“Th … thanks,” said Flare. “How do I —” As he spoke, a jet of red light spat out the barrel of the gun with a noise like a jet engine and struck one projection that was moving toward us dead-on, then proceeded to curve in the air and strike another projection farther away, who was just getting to its feet after emerging from the dome’s wall. Both projections collapsed and dissipated. “Never mind,” said Flare. “I’ve got it.”

“We need to go back to where the others are,” I said. “I don't want to risk moving the vulnerable ones.”

The others nodded, moved out from their cover, and got in a loose group behind me as I moved back toward where I'd left Adam and Lincoln and the others.

Shannon, in a show of strength I don't think any of us had expected, was running around tearing through any projections who didn't seem to have long range powers with her fencing sabre , effortlessly dodging and diving around attacks that the rest of us would have had trouble getting clear of. She was on her own, far from any of the rest of us, and she made a noise somewhere between a moan and a growl as she fought. Equal parts rage and pain. The armpits of her dobok were stained dark with sweat and I could imagine she was breathing heavily under her fencing mask, but she showed no signs of slowing down.

Quintain was a little ways off, throwing small objects faster than I could track and hitting projection after projection right through the eyes, destroying them instantly.

“Virtuosa! Quintain!” I shouted as we ran by. “We're grouping up and getting out of here, come on!”

Quintain threw a few more projectiles then ran over to us. Shannon turned toward me, sighed audibly, and then fell into line. “Fuck this guy,” she muttered, just loud enough for me to hear.

And, as if he had heard her too, Pitch started laughing again, his booming, grating voice coming from everywhere at once.

“No, you'll not pass this test so painlessly,” I heard his voice, as much in my mind as echoing in the air around me. The walls of the dome started contracting, moving inward. At the same time, they began to almost bubble as more and more projections formed and fell. I recognized a few of them, or thought I did. I saw one that looked like it was wearing priests’ vestments. And these projections were forming faster, gaining their feet more quickly, moving with more purpose.

We reached the area where our vulnerable members were holed up just in time to hear Lincoln, who was still standing at the computer terminal, say, “oh fuck. I just lost access to twenty cameras. Make that thirty. The outside of the dome is expanding.”

“So is the inside edge,” Adam said. “Let's go.”

We all looked at Oneiros and Peregrine expectantly. The two of them looked at each other. The projections marched nearer. The walls closed in.

“Three,” said Oneiros.

“Two,” said Peregrine.

“One,” they both said in unison.

I felt myself start to slip, glad to release my grip on reality, but before I was over the edge, between my closing eyelids I saw a tendril of darkness shoot down from the sky and spear Oneiros through the chest. My eyes snapped back open in time to see another one hit Peregrine through the top of the head. They stood there, frozen in the moment, as the tendrils seemed to grow, moving in a way that was reminiscent of a throat swallowing or a worm crawling, a wave of expansion and contraction running up through them, like they were sucking something up and out of the two Hypes.

“That's not great,” said Quintain.

I looked around and saw that our number had decreased. Angie, Luisa, Lincoln, and Flare had disappeared. I guessed that they had prioritized the youngest or most vulnerable and managed to get them out before the rest of us. On the ground at my feet, Trojan was waking up.

“Pitch,” he said, getting to his feet, ignoring the rest of us and facing the sky, acting as if he hadn't missed the last hour or so on account of being unconscious. “You don't want to do this. A power like yours, think of the good you could do. You could be so helpful in our efforts. You could be the key, the last piece of the puzzle, the one thing we need to keep everyone sa—”

He was interrupted by another tendril shooting out of the roof of the dome and stabbing him through the heart.

“No. No power, no persuasion. And don't call me Pitch. I'm not him anymore.”

“Well what the fuck do we call you then, asshole?” said Shannon, the only one of us who could find a voice to speak with.

“Pantheon,” came the reply, and the laughter began anew.