The Loop

How did this motherfucking priest even know what my sister had looked like? He must have been pulling the images out of my head somehow, and projecting them into reality. He did the same with images of Marco Davis, the man who had tortured, raped, and killed her.

They were memories I didn't want to confront, faces I didn't want to see. Gethsemane forced them upon me, and that, more than the physical assault from his Hype recruits or from Adversary, was the thing that was wearing me out.

“Where are you, you bastard?” I said, blasting a nearby Marco out of my way with a shove that was charged with the kinetic force of a speeding car. Of course, he wasn't real, and I hadn't actually hit anything. Gethsemane’s power worked in real-time to convince my mind that I really was hitting things and fighting people.

It wasn't perfect, though. The auditory and visual aspects of the hallucinations were indistinguishable from real life, but the tactile parts felt wrong somehow, like the people I was hitting had too much give, like they were made of pillows rather than flesh. Either that was a hard limitation of his power, or it was something he was still working on. Either way, I tried to focus on it to keep myself grounded, to keep myself from slipping into madness.

I could no longer see any of my allies in the fray. For all I knew, they were inches away from me, battling their own demons and as unable to see or hear me as I was them.

From time to time, something real would intrude on the endless copies of my sister and her killer and hit me with a tangible attack. This told me that none of the people we were fighting—none of the Soldiers of Calamity—knew much about us or our powers. If they had, they’d have known that any physical attack would be absorbed by my power and that their best strategy would be to just let Gethsemane’s hallucinations wear me down.

Instead, these real attacks presented a sort of respite, and a chance to refill my internal battery.

There was a break in the tide of unreal assailants through which a woman with metal arms and legs came rushing in, her left arm melting and reforming into a bladed weapon as she dove toward me. She swung in a wide arc and hit me with a great deal of force. The attack had no effect on me, and the woman came to a dead stop, her arm bouncing back as if she’d just struck a boulder rather than a one-hundred and twenty-five pound woman.

She had just enough time for a look of surprise to pass across her face before I hit her midsection with a blast of heat hot enough to set her blouse on fire. She retreated, shrieking and patting madly at her chest with clumsy, metal hands.

New impossible faces were cropping up in the crowd around me. Adam, my parents, Pitch—a multitude of each was apparently present and intent on assaulting me. I hadn’t been foolish enough to use all the energy I’d gotten from the woman’s attack on her, so now I pushed out with a wave of air in a semicircle around me, causing any real Hypes obscured amongst the illusions to be blown back, making it impossible for them to remain hidden.

“Ow!” said a familiar voice. “What the hell did you do that for?” It was Ingress, who had been knocked over by my blast. I looked for her but couldn’t see her amidst the crush of bodies real and imagined.

Still, it was good to know that my friends and allies were still around me, even if the illusion was keeping them out of sight. And the fact that I’d been able to hear her gave me an idea. Gethsemane must have been nearby, I thought. And my power must have tripped him up for a second, causing him to lose his grip on the illusion.

If I could just keep concentrating my attacks on the same area, using the reaction of the environment around me to narrow my search, maybe I could find him and stop him.

There were others to be worried about, of course. Who knew what Adversary was doing right then, for example. But for now my priority was stopping Gethsemane’s illusions, making the battle clear to those fighting it.

I had to use non-lethal force because I couldn’t be sure which of my friends might get caught in a blast, but that was okay; I wasn’t trying to kill Gethsemane, only interrupt his concentration and cut through his power.

Another Hype rushed me, flying suddenly over the heads of the illusory assailants and drawing his fist back as if to punch me. Do these idiots not learn? I thought. But at the last moment, he feinted to the right and instead kicked me with a foot that had a sort of white aura around it. The kick connected with my hip and I actually felt something. It wasn’t the full pain that a kick with that much momentum behind it should have inflicted, but that anything at all got past my power was a shock to me.

I looked down and saw a ghostly white glow around where his foot had made contact and realized with horror that the kick had gone straight through me. The area that had been hit was glowing and translucent now, and shifting my hips caused a sort of disorienting disconnected feeling to pass through me. I could see glowing white muscle and bones and blood vessels all the way through my hip.

I adjusted my footing, trying to ignore the strange sensation that the movement caused, and locked eyes with the Hype as he came around for another pass, both his hands glowing with the white aura now. I dropped down to my knees, fighting off a wave of nausea caused by the sensation that a part of me was missing, and watched as his hands made contact with the spot where my head had been a moment before. I swung upward with a fist and made contact with his crotch, using my power to triple the kinetic energy of the hit.

The man reeled back and went to his knees. I hit him again in the face, knocking him out. As soon as he lost consciousness, I felt the parts of me that had been affected by his power return to normal.

I felt a boost in energy, though, so however his power worked, my own power must have been able to absorb some of the energy of his attack.

I lashed out in a slightly narrower arc than last time, swinging my arm and sending a blast of warm air to fly out in front of me. Nothing.

I adjusted my position and swung again.

“Fuck! Is that you, Chr— I mean Dynamo?” Harper’s voice. Another interruption in the illusion.

It might have been my imagination, but I thought that the many copies of my friends, my dead sister, her killer, briefly went blurry around the edges. For a moment they almost looked like watercolor paintings before they started closing in around me again.

Their attacks, if they could be called that, consisted of surrounding me and closing off my retreat, boxing me in. They couldn't actually hurt me physically, but it was easy to forget that amidst dozens of swinging arms and snapping jaws.

But they also spoke, and that was harder.

“Join us, Chris. We can be together again. I don't have to be dead. We can build the Kingdom of God. We can be a family.” My sister's voice was like heaven and hell. I hadn't thought I remembered her voice that clearly.

“Even sinners like me can be redeemed by His grace,” said Marco. The sick truth was that his face and voice had been clearer in my memory before today. I'd spent more time hating him than on loving my sister's memory.

I forced myself to ignore their voices, their words. A single tear rolled down my cheek. Sorry, sis, I thought. You're dead and not coming back.

I launched another wave of heat and force in a yet smaller arc, certain now that I had found Gethsemane’s location. I put a little more force behind it. And it finally happened, if only for a moment: the false images around me faltered, faded, blinked out and I saw reality behind them. I saw Gethsemane stumble back

“You little lost soul,” he said, looking straight at me. “Why do you fight me?”

As he regained his composure and his illusions started to take shape around me again, I saw him start moving to the other end of the room. I couldn't let him get away.

I started walking in the direction I'd seen him go, no longer able to see him through the hallucinations. A figure draped in a black cloak and hood stepped out from the crowd and the specters around me moved back to form a loose circle around us.

“Adversary,” I said.

He didn't reply. Not with words, anyway. I saw the light in the room seem to twist and knot itself together into a single strand and launch toward me. That strand of light was all I could see as the rest of the universe was plunged into blackness.

The beam struck me, concentrated at the point of contact to a needle point. No, smaller. Much smaller.

My power started to absorb it, but then something unexpected happened. I started to feel a swelling, a tension. The fine hairs on my neck stood up, my skin prickled, and my eyes bulged. How much light was he concentrating at me? How much energy did that contain?

I was getting close to my limit, and I panicked. I released heat and kinetic blasts from my fingertips, aimed in the direction I thought Adversary was attacking from. But blind as I was, I knew he could have been anywhere. I was just trying to shed energy faster than my body absorbed it. No part of me wanted to find out what would happen if I hit the ceiling of what I was able to absorb.

In my panic, I was having trouble thinking straight. I thought I heard a skittering, clicking noise; thought I felt fingertips tracing along my skin. I tried to calm myself down, to focus. What tools did I have available to me? What was my most pressing problem?

I can't fight blind, I thought. But that was something I could solve.

Usually I released the energy my body had saved through my hands, because it was easier to aim that way. But I could release it from any part of my body.

I might not have the control over light that Adversary and Flare had, but I did have the ability to generate light. True, I thought, as soon as I create it, he'll probably just draw it into his concentrated beam. But maybe a burst of light would let me see the room around me for long enough to figure out where my enemy was.

The good news was, although I was becoming overcharged, that meant at least I had enough energy stored to do whatever I wanted with it. I released a quick burst of light out of my forehead, and it was like hitting a light switch for a second in a pitch black room. I saw the world around me clearly. Since Adversary had been using his power to render me effectively blind, Gethsemane hadn't been bothering sending me any visual hallucinations. In the brief moment before Adversary grabbed the light I'd generated and drew it into his ongoing assault, I saw both of them.

Before they had a chance to move or react, I adjusted my positioning, aiming my index fingers at each of them, and sent two thin beams of heat and kinetic force barreling at them.

“Bang, bang,” I muttered, feeling for once the full awesomeness of being a Hype. The vigilante work in Dallas had never filled me with this much of a rush. Taking on petty criminals was too easy; the wins felt cheap.

All at once, I could see again. I watched as both of them staggered backward, clutching their chests. Gethsemane hit a wall and collapsed. Adversary opened a portal behind himself and was about to step through it when Shannon ran up to him and hit him with a series of kicks and punches that moved him away from the portal.

I saw the light in the room start to warp and distort again and realized that Adversary was about to attempt the same attack he'd used against me on Shannon.

“Oh, no you don't, asshole,” said Flare. He reached his hands out in two directions and pushed the light back where it belonged. I could see the frustrated concentration on Adversary’s face as he struggled to fight against it, but it was useless. As Cerebro had explained, he had each of their powers, but he wasn't as strong with any single one of them as they were.

He tried to open another portal, to flee, but this time Ingress stepped forward and closed it the moment it was opened. He tried again and again she stopped it before it was even fully formed.

He screamed with frustration.

Gethsemane started to get to his feet, and I started to see his illusions forming around me again. Two knives flew out of nowhere and pierced both his shoulders, pinning him to the wall. The illusions faded again.

“I wouldn't,” said Quinatin. She held two more knives in her hands. Gethsemane slumped back.

“That's better,” she said as Cerebro circled around behind him holding handcuffs.

Most of the other Soldiers of Calamity Hypes had been dealt with by our teams, but Moe was still engaging the metal-limbed woman in a fierce battle on the second floor. She shot blasts of different colored fire from her torch, and each color seemed to have a subtly different effect. The metal woman kept turning her arms into shields and deflecting the blasts, but Moe was pushing the offensive relentlessly and the woman was getting pushed back into a corner, the fight slowly draining from her exhausted face.

Brigadier lay in a corner, unconscious and bleeding, but still breathing. Around him were at least a dozen of the unpowered Soldiers of Calamity, all badly beaten and bleeding or clutching broken limbs. Ahmed was among them, holding one broken hand in the other and rocking back and forth, uttering an endless string of curses in a foreign language. My respect for Brigadier grew. Lincoln was hunched over him, checking his pulse with one hand while his other touched Brigadier's phone and his eyes lit up with his power use.

“The real cops are on their way,” he said. “Brand new State task force to deal with Hype criminals. Hard to get a hold of, but I found them.”

In a different corner, there was a confusing scene where it looked like another group of unpowered Soldiers of Calamity had fallen to infighting. The ones who were still conscious were looking around them, confused and scared, as if expecting their fellows to start attacking again at any moment. Only one of them was still standing, a tall, muscular girl with dark skin. As I watched, her features shifted, her skin lightened, and she shrank down by an inch or so. She winked at me as her face turned back into the one I recognized as Harper's ‘mask’. Clever girl, I thought.

The world around me was vibrating slightly, and I was mentally preparing myself to deal with some new threat—perhaps a Hype with the ability to cause seismic disruptions—when I realized that I was the one shaking.

I sat down hard on the floor and tried to take some deep breaths, to focus on the fact that it was over, that we'd won. My sister's face kept floating in front of my eyes, shimmering like a mirage. I hadn't wanted to see that face again, didn't think I'd be able to handle it, but some other part of me missed it. Some part of me wanted to ask Gethsemane to bring her back again.

I hadn't thought about how much I missed her in a long time.

The larger part of me wanted to mash Gethsemane's face into a pulp for forcing me to confront that.

I did a quick scan of the room, made sure all of us were accounted for. When I'd satisfied myself that we were, I started looking to the others, to our enemies. All the Hypes I'd seen enter with Gethsemane and Adversary were accounted for, save one; the man with the ghostly aura was nowhere in sight.

I got to my feet and prepared to look around the space more thoroughly.

“Christine,” said Jaleel calmly from the couch where he sat looking wholly uninterested in the scene around him, “count to five and then take a step to your left.” I saw that his eyes were glowing with his power and decided I'd better take him seriously.

I heard a noise behind me as I started counting. I resisted the urge to turn around. When I got to five, I stepped left and watched as the ghost Hype flew past me, his entire body lit up with the white, translucent aura.

Jaleel had stood up now, and he gave Ingress a small tap on the shoulder, pointing to the flying Hype with his other hand. He made a chopping motion in the air.

Whatever he was trying to communicate, she apparently got it, because she opened a portal in front of the flying man, and quickly closed it again, right as his arms passed through it.

He screamed as his body turned normal again and he skidded to a rest on the floor. He stared down at the place where his arms ended in two bloody stumps.

“What the fuck, Foresight?” said Harper. “What the actual fuck?”

“I'm sorry I haven't been very forthcoming with you guys, but I've been using my power for a couple days, looking at this moment and trying to find a win. I kept thinking of different plans, looking ahead, thinking of plans, looking ahead. This was the best I came up with that didn't end in anyone dying.” He shrugged as if taking a man's arms off was just the cost of doing business now.

“If he'd run into me in that state—” I began.

“It would have killed you. You're welcome,” said Jaleel.

“Jesus. Thanks, I guess.”

Moe had finished her battle with the metal woman a few minutes before, and Cerebro and Quintain had just finished handcuffing all the enemy Hypes, with the exception of the man who no longer had hands to cuff.

I wondered where they were getting so many cuffs from, but then I saw Ingress slyly opening small portals for them that must have led to some store room, because they were reaching in and pulling the cuffs out.

“Is it really over?” I finally asked. I thought I probably wasn't the only person with that question on my mind.

“I think so,” said Cerebro.

“What the hell do we do now?” I asked. I knew for Jaleel this whole thing had been about capturing his uncle's killer. For the rest of us, though, the point of it all had been muddied somewhere along the way.

“We get back to Texas,” said Linc. “If Adam doesn't need our help yet, he soon will.”

Adam. I'd barely thought about him since the fight had started in earnest. He would have been a big help in the battle, especially against Gethsemane. But then, if what Lincoln posited was right, it was probably for the best that he was at home, staying out of trouble.

“You guys get going,” said Cerebro. “We can wrap things up here. Go see to your friend.”

“I had … fun working together,” said Flare. His comment was directed to the room in general, but I didn't miss that his face was pointed toward Harper.

“I'm not sure fun is the right word,” she said. “But it's certainly been interesting. See you around.”

“I'm sure this won't be the last time we work together,” said Cerebro.

I hoped it wouldn't. Flare was kind of right. It had been fun. Terrifying, but fun.

“Ingress,” I said. “You mind helping us out?”

“My pleasure,” she said, opening a portal big enough for us to walk through side by side. On the other end of it, I could see a slice of Shannon's backyard, and the red tinge of sky that meant the sun was just setting.

We didn't waste time on any more goodbyes, only stepped up to the portal and glanced quickly at each other before stepping through.

I don't know why, but I had an awful feeling in my gut that whatever we were stepping toward was even scarier than that we were leaving.

Adam, I thought. Please be safe.