My armband flashed yellow, and I heard both it and my three passengers all sound the alarm.

  Wave inbound. ETA 60 seconds. Seek shelter immediately.

  For the past several minutes, my ragtag band of heroes had been harassing Leviathan from low above the city. Flechette had landed some good shots on him, nailing him straight through the head, a shoulder, and a knee. His mobility had been impacted by the hit to the leg. The shoulder hit wasn’t stopping him from using the arm, but I thought maybe his range of motion wasn’t as good, or his hits were not quite as strong. It was hard to tell. The headshot didn’t seem to do a damn thing other than annoy him and get a shot of water across our bow.

  I was far out enough that dodging it wasn’t an issue, and Narwhal was able to deflect parts of it with angled shields.

  Myrrdin and Eidolon were strafing the bay a few hundred meters out, freezing the ocean and building up taller ice formations with the seawater to act as a breakwall for the tsunami. Blue energy beams were lancing out of Eidolon’s hands, and Myrrdin looked to be blowing fog out of his mouth. We were still waiting on Alexandria. What I wouldn’t give for a PRT headset right at the moment.

  “I’m almost out of ammo!” Flechette called out.

  Fuck.

  “Save what you have left,” I yelled back to her. “Shit! Hang on!”

  Leviathan had a free moment to whip around and strike part of a building with his tail, and we had incoming. I wasn’t going to be able to dodge in time; there was a wide shotgun-like spread of bricks, hunks of rebar, and concrete ranging from fist-sized to torso-sized. I squeezed the three on my back and rotated them away. I could take the hit, but even the small debris hitting them would be lethal.

  Agony tore through me as I took the shot to my underside. Two of my wings snapped off, and two or three more were heavily compromised with rips, tears, and holes punched through them. The sudden imbalance in the weight distribution and thrust caused me to roll and spin. I was careening straight at a downtown tower. Flapping like mad, I did everything I could to burn off speed before impacting the building, but stressing my already damaged wings was tearing them further. No choice. If I hit full force, chances were I’d wind up killing my passengers.

  I spread my arms, legs, and tail and tried to catch the building to further lessen the impact. I crashed into the side of the building more or less perpendicular as I’d wanted to. The glass face of the building exploded when I hit it. I stabbed my tail into the heart of the building and curled it around anything I could find. I caught a staircase or elevator shaft with it, I wasn’t sure. I’d rolled my left ankle when I’d hit the building, still spinning some. It was burning like hell, but I added it to the growing list of shit I needed to check out when the opportunity presented itself.

  Right now, I had to worry about getting the four of us down from thirty stories up in the air in one piece. I coughed and could taste the bitter, biting flavor of my thick blood.

  “Status?” I asked while trying to reorient myself for the climb down.

  “Alive… somehow,” Flechette said.

  Narwhal called out to me. “Same, I’ve got Tattletale, trying to rouse her. She blacked out during the spin.”

  “Is she okay?” I asked, urgency in my voice.

  “Should be. Just the gees. Give her a minute, she should come back around.”

  How the fuck is Narwhal so calm right now?

  I rotated us around and started climbing down the side of the building.

  I hacked up a gob of blood and froze in place when something caught on the side of the building and sent a blade of white-hot pain through my chest.

  “Guh!” Using my lower left arm, I felt around my left side. “Ah, fuck.” My hand closed around a hunk of rebar sticking out of my chest.

  “What’s wrong, Apex?” Narwhal asked me.

  “Have a chunk of steel through my chest. I’m going to pull it out.”

  “That… doesn’t sound like a good idea,” Flechette said.

  “Fucking- don’t have a choice at the moment, I can’t climb down with it sticking out!”

  I dug into the side of the building as tremors started to shake everything.

  “AHH! FUCK!” Tattletale came back to consciousness, screaming, apparently having seen that we were a few hundred feet up in the air, clinging to the side of a building.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” I wheezed.

  The building shook again, much harder this time, and it started… tipping? Yes, it was leaning away from us.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I croaked. It was tipped over maybe fifteen degrees, which was giving me a better foothold on the side.

  I really didn’t want to do what I was about to do.

  I wrapped my hand around the chunk of rebar sticking out of my chest and pulled it out slowly. Gritting my teeth and grunting, I extracted it. One, two, three feet of textured steel. I held it up in front of my face to get a look at it, make sure I wasn’t trailing chunks of guts out of it. Nope. Just coated in a thick layer of black blood.

  I moved to huck it over my shoulder when Flechette yelled: “Wait! I can use it!”

  I brought my arm around and behind my back, handing it off to her. She stuck it in her quiver.

  Another violent shake threatened to knock me loose from the side of the building, and I could feel the entire tower sway under me. The motion was causing all the windows in the building to blow out as they buckled. Sheets of glass shards were raining down onto the streets far below. I hoped that there wasn’t anyone down there.

  “We have to get down before this thing comes toppling down around us! Here we go!”

  I did some little hops, like I was rappelling down the side of the building. The lean was working heavily in my favor in aiding us in getting back down. Two more earth-shaking rattles shook the building as we climbed down, but being lower down greatly lessened the ability of the quakes to shake me loose from the side of the building. We finally hit street level, my ankle singing a chorus of stabbing pains when I landed on it.

  I checked my armband. Alexandria looked to be approaching at a moderate clip.

  “I need–a minute,” I rasped. I half-sat, half-fell on my ass. I unbound my passengers and helped them slide off my back before sitting more upright. Lisa was staggering around bowlegged, her legs shaking. She sat down in a foot of water and leaned back against a streetlight post.

  I focused and activated my power to try and repair my destroyed wings. I didn’t know if that was going to be possible or not. I had two destroyed on my left side, one on my right side. The topmost stump on my left side started burning, and I craned my neck back to look at it. Those red, threadlike tendrils were growing out of the ragged end of the spar, knitting and weaving together, forming a matrix for new tissue to grow in on. It was going at a decent clip, but only on one wing. I’d take what I could get right now. One more was better than zero more.

  “Tattletale, are you okay?” I asked her.

  “I think everything from my neck down is one giant bruise, Apex. Not that I don’t appreciate the safety on your back, but…”

  I nodded at her. I knew that all three of them had taken a hell of a beating riding on me.

  I sent Vivian to work on my chest puncture wound. She was plumbing my depths with tendrils through the hole in my hide.

  “Alexandria is heading this way. I hope she has Eclipse. I don’t know how much gas I have left in my tank,” I told the trio of capes. Vivian finished up what she was doing inside my chest. It felt marginally better. Her stapling my chest closed didn’t feel so great. As much as I wanted her to handle some of my other multitudinous wounds, if we were going to pull this off, we needed mobility. I could still walk, but running was for suckers when you had wings.

  So I set her to work sewing, gluing, and reattaching chunks of my wing membranes back together on my non-destroyed wings.

  My body from the waist down still looked like hamburger from the beating I took from Leviathan’s water echoes earlier. Most of the wounds had clotted, but the activity just now had caused a number of them to start bleeding once again. There wasn’t much I could do about it at the moment. Other things took priority.

  Narwhal walked to the side and was talking quietly into her armband and on her earpiece.

  “You look worse than I feel right now,” Lisa said.

  I coughed. “Bitch, please. I look fabulous.”

  “You look like you’re about to keel over and die,” Flechette said.

  They say humor is the best medicine, right?

  “If I look bad, it’s only to highlight how good my teammates look. I’d like to point out that I’ve got the hottest Canadian in the world on my roster.”

  Narwhal turned and looked at me. I thought the blood would freeze in my veins.

  Okay, never mind!

  “You’re not too shabby yourself, Flechette, for a New Yorker,” I teased, sticking my tongue out afterwards.

  She tilted her head.

  I looked over at Lisa and didn’t say anything. She smirked at me.

  “Fine, fine. You get four point five out of five know-it-alls,” I told her.

  “How can you be joking around right now?” Flechette asked me.

  I swapped wings after finishing up on fixing the one I’d been working on, then looked over at Flechette.

  “Everyone knows how bad shit is right now. I’ve done everything I can to save lives and keep people alive whenever I’ve been able. We’re waiting for the big boss lady to get here.” I shrugged my upper shoulders. That was a mistake. “Morale matters. Keeping your people from doom-spiralling.”

  “You sound like my Wards team leader, back in New York,” Flechette said.

  I coughed again, leaned over, and spit out a mouthful of blood and whatever that goopy foam Vivian made was.

  “I could have been the team leader of the Wards here if I had only been less of a useless fuck-up with my power. Coulda, woulda, shoulda, yadda, yadda,” I motioned with one big hand.

  “You were a Ward? Here in Brockton Bay?” Flechette was incredulous.

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, until she got canned.” Tattletale chuckled.

  I flipped her off with one stubby, big middle finger. She just grinned.

  Flechette went to speak, and was interrupted by Alexandria dropping down out of the air and landing gently with my sister in her arms. She had a bandage wrapped around her head, and her right forearm was wrapped in a metal quick-splint. Those things were awesome.

  “Oh my god, Morgan!” Melody cried out and ran over to me.

  “Eclipse. Identities,” Alexandria reminded her in a clipped manner.

  “Shit, I’m sorry!” Melody said, wrapping her good arm around my right upper arm.

  “It’s okay. I’m not too worried about it,” I said. I really wasn’t that concerned, but I said it more for Melody’s benefit than anything else.

  Alexandria turned to me and gave me a once-over. “Are you going to be able to continue with the plan?”

  I nodded. “Yes. I’m more concerned about their safety than my own,” I pointed at Narwhal, Flechette, and Tattletale.

  “Alright, let’s go over this, and then we'll go,” Alexandria announced.

  Tattletale got to her feet and hobbled over. Narwhal also joined our huddle. “Okay. Alexandria carries Eclipse. We wait for the chance to get you two right up on him, and then, Eclipse, you freeze him in place. Try and aim for the legs or the head; we need to attack the lower abdomen.”

  “If I’m touching Alexandria, she can still move, but if she’s carrying me, she’s not going to be able to leave my field once I activate it,” Melody informed Tattletale.

  “That’s fine. Try and maintain contact if you can,” Tattletale replied.

  “Immobilizing Leviathan for a kill shot is all that matters. Freeze me in place if you have to,” Alexandria told Eclipse.

  Melody hesitated a moment, then nodded to Alexandria.

  “The three of us,” Lisa indicated herself, Flechette, and Narwhal. “We’re going to catch a ride with Apex. When Leviathan is immobilized, Apex brings us in. Narwhal provides cover and defense against surprises. When we’re in a good position, Flechette will fire at his weak spot. I’ll partner with Narwhal to give you a little marker to aim at, alright?”

  Flechette flexed her jaw and nodded. “I only have four shots, so not much room for error.”

  “There’s not much margin for error anywhere on this plan,” Alexandria said. “Do the best you can. It’s all we can do. Hopefully, Tattletale is correct and we can get a kill shot on him. If not, maybe we drive him off. Either scenario is good for the objective today.”

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

  I coughed again. “I’m the weakest link here. If it comes down to it, I’ll drop you three. All the bleeding and wounds have taken their toll on me; I’m very low on juice.”

  “Do what you have to, Apex,” Alexandria stated, then looked at each of us. “Let’s go. We’re still on a timetable here before the next wave hits. The ice barriers won’t hold against the waves as they grow stronger.”

  I nodded and lay down, helping my riders up. I was hoping with everything I had that this was going to work. I really wasn’t kidding when I said that I was running on empty. Weariness was soaking into me. This fight hadn’t gone on that long, but the sheer intensity of it, the accumulated damage, combined with this larger form, had all been hell on me. I stood up with everyone strapped in and secured.

  The repairs on my damaged wings were complete, and I’d managed to regrow one of my lost wings, which evened me out. Alexandria scooped up my sister, and the six of us took to the air.

  “We don’t have a bead on him currently,” I called out. Alexandria was staying in close formation with me. A massive sinkhole had formed in the downtown area, toppling some buildings, and it was what had caused the tower we’d been on earlier to list to one side. It was very large, and the water was dark, making it hard to tell if it was deep enough for him to be in there. We circled overhead. There was an explosion of dust and activity at a building nearby. A library, I think.

  Leviathan leapt from the cloud of dust and debris and landed in the middle of Lord Street, where it ran through downtown. It was big, four lanes divided down the middle by grassy medians, bus stops, benches, and tables. During the day, when there was nice weather, there would be food trucks and pop-up stands serving all sorts of goodies.

  Right now, it looked like the apocalypse had come to life. Huge chunks of the street, both lengthwise and crosswise, had been torn up, man-sized concrete pipes and boxy concrete channels ripped up from below. Water mains, stormdrains, and sewer systems.

  That must have been what some of the earthquakes had been. Leviathan was using his macro-scale hydrokinesis to tear up the city's infrastructure. A part of me idly wondered if the city would even be habitable after this level of destruction.

  I couldn’t let myself think that way. We’d make it through this. We might not have had it worse before now, but Brocktonites were tough as nails and stubborn as hell. It showed in our sporting events. We could rally from this. Maybe it would even present new opportunities for people in the city.

  Not the time for distractions.

  I was tracking Leviathan, and a pack of massive beasts tore out of the side streets and alleys. Bitch’s dogs, their weird mix of canine, lizard and mutant features. A huge pack of them, more than I’d ever seen. A dozen, maybe. An opening. A distraction. Opportunity. I looked over at Alexandria. We both saw it, nodded to each other.

  “This is it, hold on!” I roared and tucked into a dive.

  I broke from the plan of letting Alexandria engage first. Leviathan was tearing through Bitch’s dogs–literally–and this window wasn’t going to stick around.

  I hit my power.

  Give me everything you can. I have to make it through the next few minutes going all out, so we can end this.

  It responded with resounding affirmation, howling and whipping in a way that made Leviathan’s monsoon look tame. I let it through. I didn’t know that I had much of a choice in the matter, to be entirely honest. It had never hit me this hard before. I might as well have tried to bottle a hurricane.

  Heat bloomed in my chest. I felt organs that had formed with my changes yesterday kick into gear, squeezing and pumping like additional hearts all of a sudden. I felt my balance shifting slightly; it felt like mass was being pumped out of my lower half and tail, of all places. Starting from my heart and spreading through my body in the course of a few beats, it felt like liquid fire was pumping in my veins. Not the heat of my power, this was something different.

  Chemicals, stimulants, some kind of go-juice cocktail. All my aches and pains disappeared, and energy flooded every muscle in my body. My senses sharpened into hyper-awareness. It felt like everything I was doing was suddenly operating at three-quarters speed.

  I felt great. Strong, filled with power and energy, brimming with latent potential.

  No, scratch that.

  I felt fucking amazing. On top of the world. Euphoric.

  I let out a deafening roar as I swooped low. I saw Leviathan’s head turn in slow motion. A huge, deep gash in his throat, spurting out black blood in pressurized jets, one of Flechette’s bolts sticking clear through one eye and out the back of his head. I punched him in the side of the head as I passed, only a few feet over his head.

  A glancing blow, but I’d intended it to be. Just to knock him off-balance for the real attack.

  My tail swung diagonally behind me from the high arch I had wound it up in on approach, and I slapped him square across the upper chest as hard as I could while he was up on one foot.

  It was like a speeding freight train had hit him. The force of the impact hit him like a detonation, and water sprayed everywhere in a huge upward cone as he toppled over and smashed into–and through–the pavement of the street, buried on that side several feet deep.

  I flipped my tail and lower body around, spinning one eighty and landing on the street on all fours, digging in deep to bring myself to a stop quickly. It was harder to maneuver than I’d expected it to be. Oh- that would be why. About the last four or five feet of my tail had snapped off upon hitting Leviathan and smashed into the side of a cargo van.

  That was funny to me. I didn’t feel a thing.

  As I was skidding to a stop, I was already unbinding my passengers, wrapping tentacles around their midsections and dropping them to the street as gently as I could. The second I’d dropped them, I was launching straight back at Leviathan, wings beating air in angled cones to each side of me so I didn’t send my team flying as I rocketed forward.

  I saw Alexandria swoop down and drop my sister off, then move to engage with me. She was so fast I couldn’t track her even with my enhanced senses. One of Leviathan’s arms jerked up. Alexandria was hoisting him up off the ground a couple of feet. I crashed into his front, wrapping three arms around him in a bear hug. I caught one of his arms down against his side.

  “Get his tail!” I roared, and Alexandria moved, letting his arm go. She blurred and smashed into his tail, driving it into the pavement with a super-speed stomp and grappling it with her upper body.

  “Eclipse, now!” Alexandria shouted, and I saw Melody come darting out of cover towards us at a dead sprint before she activated her ability. Her running at us was the longest several seconds of my life. Narwhal had herself, Tattletale, and Flechette riding on three shields like surfboards and speeding towards us. She was sending out more shields to slice into Leviathan and pin him where she could. She sent a couple of shields at his free arm too, to try and deaden his blows and slow his attacks.

  I stuck my face under Leviathan’s head after he tried to head-butt me, biting and tearing into his gushing throat wound. It was like biting a boulder; I could feel teeth shearing off, but I got a grip. Leviathan was using his free arm to absolutely pulverize me across my back and shoulders. My wings were toast on the first two hits. I’d used them defensively to block his fist-slams. I wasn’t sure they made any difference at all..

  Leviathan’s blood tasted revolting. Heavily salty, it tasted like dirty minerals and burned in my mouth. A chemical burning sensation.

  Each of the blows he was landing on my back was followed by crunching and snapping sounds coming from my body. Each blow hit twice, first from his body, and then the echo following and landing a second hit.

  The heavy plates on my back–the new ones I’d just grown yesterday–were doing work. More than earning their keep. Sacrificially soaking up shots, cracking and splintering into jagged fragments. My spine protection was holding, for now. It was the heaviest armor on my body, outside my fists and forearms.

  One of my eyes locked onto Bitch as she pointed and shouted orders to her remaining dogs. They latched onto Leviathan’s legs and tail alongside Alexandria.

  We had this big, ugly water bitch locked up pretty good for the moment, but I knew it wouldn’t last. Every second mattered. The outer reaches of my sister’s Shaker field had enveloped us. She’d been struggling to approach between the ground tremors of us fighting and the constant deluge of water from his echo spraying down and out along the pavement.

  Alexandria, driving his tail into the ground, was helping. It was a relief channel for the water to flow. She was immersed up to her chest as she wrestled Leviathan’s tail. My sister’s field was stilling the water that approached her as well. Part of Leviathan was immobilized by the deeper well of Eclipse’s power, one leg and part of his hip, and the base of his tail.

  Flechette stopped with Tattletale and Narwhal, brought her oversized crossbow up, and fired at where Tattletale was pointing. Nothing. She started reloading.

  “Up a little more, and to the left!” Tattletale shouted. Narwhal deployed a few step-stone staircase shields for my sister to climb up to get closer to Leviathan.

  Leviathan brought his fist up and slammed it on my left shoulder. My armor plates crunched, my shoulder sagged, and I listed to one side as something in my weak ankle broke.

  It was fine, I’d fix that later. I extended my leg a bit more and stood on my shin, bracing that side with my tail. He hit me again, and I felt my hands slipping where I had them locked up behind him.

  “Hurry!” I shouted. “I’m losing my grip!”

  Another shot, and another dud. Flechette started reloading again. Tattletale was arguing with Flechette and Narwhal.

  “I was sure it was that side!” Lisa howled.

  “Two shots and nothing! I only have two left!”

  “Where else could it be?” Narwhal asked Tattletale, her voice sounding tight and strained for the first time so far today.

  “I uh… try the other side! Same spot, but mirrored! He might have been faking us out earlier!”

  Leviathan pounded into my shoulder again, and the bones under my armor shattered. My left arm was going limp, but I held onto my left hand tightly with my right, keeping him locked in the embrace. Even with Eclipse’s field taking the edge off, his blows were devastating. My left leg crumbled a bit more with the impact. Of course, he was hitting my weak side. Why wouldn’t he, the sadistic fuck.

  Flechette shot once more, and Leviathan stiffened up, twitching and shaking like he was having a seizure. Even though he was spazzing out, he was still fighting.

  “Yes! YES! One more! Lower, no- wait! Higher!!” Lisa screamed, her voice ragged, and she pointed urgently.

  That last shot had overpenetrated Leviathan and run me through as well, right through the lower abdomen.

  I’d fix that later, too.

  I looked over at Bitch. She was holding Skitter like a kid would hold a doll, or a dog would hold a puppy, I suppose. She had a bundle of Skitter’s suit between her nape and shoulder blades, wadded up in her fist, and was dragging her along. Skitter–Taylor looked… dead.

  Another shot to my left shoulder, and a bunch of bones crunched and things tore inside. The compression of my torso knocked the wind from my lungs, and I sprayed ichor all over Leviathan’s face. I lost all my ability to move my left arm. It wasn’t painful. I let go of Leviathan’s throat to belt out a laugh at the absurdity, then I hooked my chin around the side and back of Leviathan’s neck like we were wrestling on the mat.

  Flechette shot her last shot, the hunk of rebar. It burrowed into Leviathan, but he didn’t die.

  “No! Fuck! It was the other way around!” Lisa fell down on her shield, nearly toppling off it entirely.

  No big deal, Lisa.

  I let go of my mangled left arm with my right hand, dropped it down to the stub of rebar sticking out of Leviathan’s back, and grabbed it. My hand tingled fiercely when I touched it.

  “What way?” I asked between gasping breaths.

  Lisa’s head shot up. “Lower! Directly below the other shot below it!”

  I pulled it out, slow as molasses from the effect of Melody’s field. I was amazed I could move at all. When it was out, I shifted it down nearly a foot and stabbed it back in. Leviathan desperately clawed at my back, tearing furrows into my soft armor, hooking on my plates, and ripping them out.

  I felt the rod hit something hard. I poked it and shoved at it, but I didn’t have the strength left to drive it home.

  “Alexandria, help! Push!”

  She darted up, grabbed the rod, and shoved it.

  Whatever the rod was up against, it crunched under the force of Alexandria’s thrust.

  Leviathan went limp, the glow of his eyes dark. Dead.

  I laughed, coughing up gobs of blood.

  “That’ll teach you for fucking around in the bay!” I wheezed.

  Eclipse shut her field off, and Leviathan toppled backward onto the destroyed pavement, and I sprawled right over top of him in a pile of oversized monster.

  And I really didn’t feel like moving at the moment.

  “We won.” Alexandria didn’t sound like she believed it herself.

  She brought her armband up and hit the broadcast button. “We won,” she repeated quietly.

  “Please confirm last message.” Dragon echoed back.

  The first time I’d ever seen her really smile, even on promo material and marketing. Alexandria cracked a huge grin. It was a beautiful smile. I don’t know why she never did.

  She hit the button again and shouted: “We won! Leviathan is dead!”

  She threw a fist up and looked to the sky, water streaming down her lower face and visor. A moment of pure elation and victory.

  The rains were slowing, and the sky started to lighten. It felt like we’d been fighting for two entire days, but it hadn’t been long at all.

  “Copy that. Moving in to provide relief. He might be down, but we have a lot of seriously wounded that need attention.” Dragon’s practicality was a grim reminder of how dearly this victory had cost us. Huge swathes of the city along the coast, especially the north side, were trashed. Entire city blocks of low-rise buildings in the boardwalk and docks were just… gone. Rubble, ruins, or skeletons with their first and second floors all but entirely blown out.

  “Someone, please, please!” my sister sobbed. “Please help her, please help Apex!”

  Alexandria looked over at me, and her smile faded. “Can you move, Apex?” she asked me.

  Panting shallowly and wheezing, I said, “I don’t know. Probably not. My left leg and top arm are cooked. Tail’s broken. Wings are gone.” I coughed several times, wet, gurgling coughs..

  “What can we do to help?” Asked Narwhal.

  I coughed again. Damn, that was irritating.

  “Food. I need fuel before I can do any kind of repairs without being immobilized for hours, or maybe days.”

  “We’ll make it happen, Apex,” Alexandria said.

  “Meat, proteins, raw. Bone, maybe like big carcass pieces if you can find any.”

  I was craving some sweets too, something wicked.

  “And um… Ice cream. A lot of ice cream.”

  “Do you know how disgusting that sounds?” Tattletale teased me.

  “Listen–” I hacked again. “A girl has cravings, okay?”

  Lisa grinned at me.

  Bitch came trudging over, still carrying Taylor with her legs dragging on the ground. She looked like shit, eyes red and swollen. I glanced around. Half her dogs were dead, the other half mostly wounded.

  “She needs help,” Bitch said and gestured at Taylor with her free hand.

  Tattletale rushed over and checked her over. “Narwhal, can you make a shield to carry her, please?”

  The unicorn-lady nodded, her three-foot-long horn tracing a path through the air as she did so. She snapped a shield into existence, the general size and shape of a stretcher.

  “Okay, just–slide it under her, slowly, carefully. Her spine is broken,” Lisa guided in the shield like she was waving in a truck backing into a parking spot.

  Alexandria spoke some orders into her wristband, then turned to Narwhal. “Get them out of here, take them to get medical attention, please. I called ahead, go to the hospital in DG-6.” Narwhal nodded sharply.

  “I’m staying with her,” Melody said.

  “Eclipse. I’m not going to kick the bucket here. Please go to the hospital and get your head and arm looked at,” I told her softly.

  “I don’t want to leave you like this!” She argued back.

  I sighed, wet and raspy. “I know you don’t. But you have a job to do. You’re a hero, and the PRT is going to need you at one hundred percent right away. We might have won here, but the city’s going to get ugly just as soon as people start coming out of the shelters. The place is wrecked. Looting, riots, and people trying to get food and medicine. You have to go. For everyone.”

  Breathing and talking at length was painful, but I had to get the point through to her.

  Alexandria flexed her jaw and nodded at Eclipse. “She’s right. We need every single person we can get who isn’t incapacitated. We’ve got a long road ahead of us.”

  Eclipse brought a gloved hand under her visor and wiped at her eyes before straightening up. “Okay. I’ll go. Be safe.” I stuck my tongue out at her.

  I watched her as she climbed up on a shield along with Tattletale, Flechette, and Narwhal. Taylor’s shield floated up alongside them.

  “Hey, Eclipse?” I called out to her.

  She turned to face me.

  “I love your costume.” She smiled back at me. “It’s very slimming. Makes it so your ass doesn’t look so fat.”

  Her cheeks bloomed into color, and she flipped me off quite insistently with her good arm. “At least I don’t break sidewalks!”

  I brought my one good hand up and clutched at my chest, groaning. “Ohh… my pride…”

  She snickered, and the five left.

  Alexandria whispered a few more orders into her armband, then walked over, drew her cape to the side, and sat down on the corpse next to me. It wasn’t a very comfortable perch. The damn thing felt like solid steel.

  Bitch pointed at the corpses of a few of her dogs, which were already mostly shrunken down. Her voice was ragged and hoarse when she told her other dogs. “Get. Come.” Her dogs picked up their fallen, and Bitch and the rest limped off.

  “Bitch,” I called out to her. She stopped, but didn’t turn around. “I’m sorry your…”

  What are her dogs to her? Her kids? No, I don’t think so.

  “I’m sorry you lost family. Thank you–” I coughed and spit up some blood. “–for fighting with us.”

  She didn’t say anything, just clenched her fists. I think her head shifted, maybe in a nod, but I couldn’t tell for sure. Then she left with her pack.

  That left just Alexandria, me, and one dead endbringer. The first dead endbringer ever.

  “You seem familiar with her,” Alexandria noted.

  “We’ve met a few times. I know the Undersiders. They’re… complicated. Not entirely good, not entirely bad, either.”

  Alexandria snorted. “Criminals and murderers.”

  I was entirely way too exhausted to argue with her, and I didn’t really want to, either.

  I took a breath, felt some bubbling in my left side. I’d blown open the treatment from the rebar in the fight. Hadn’t felt it. I set Vivian to fix it, and she opened up to start working on it, but she was lethargic, just like I was. Working slowly. Starved for resources, no doubt.

  After a moment, I said, “I try and see the best in people. Golden rule, you know? If everyone only sees me as a terrible monster, I have to show them a better way. Prove them wrong.”

  Alexandria picked some bits of trash and debris off herself and flicked them into the water, then looked out into the bay, where water was steadily draining from the high ground of the city. There was trash, tons of it. And bodies, too. More than a few. We’d have to go retrieve them so they could be properly taken care of. Probably mostly civilians, and some capes too. It didn’t make a bit of difference. Everyone here today suffered equally.

  “That’s foolish and naive, Apex.” She said after a beat. Then her visor turned to me. “But it makes you a better person than most. Try and hold onto that as long as you can. It’s hard to hold on to, doing what we do.” She turned back to face the sea and the sunrise.

  My chest convulsed a few times as I fought not to cough more while Vivian was working. The numbing, chemical bliss I’d been juiced up on was wearing off quickly, and my mind was starting to get heavily distracted by the initial reports of horrific damage across my entire body.

  “I don’t know, Alexandria.” I raised my battered and ragged right upper arm and pointed towards the sunrise with one broken claw. “You see that? That’s something new, something that’s never happened before.”

  She glanced over at me like maybe I was losing my marbles.

  “That’s the very first sunrise on a world that’s defeated an Endbringer,” I told her. “That means something. Twenty years of the entire globe living under the fear of annihilation changes things; it changes people. Twenty years of creeping despair and uncertainty. But now?”

  I gasped as the pain across my body started to intensify in waves, then let out a pained grunt.

  Vivian finished up with my side, and I went to bring my tail up for her to work on when I spotted movement. A ripple in the water. I turned my head around sharply to focus more eyes on it.

  Great. Is there no bottom to this pit of horrors?

  The chunk of my severed tail was slithering through the water towards me. Like an anaconda, or something. Pulling itself along on little wriggling tentacles it had sprouted along its underside. Red strands sticking out of the severed end, waving in the direction of the end of my tail. Sniffing like bloodhounds. I slid my tail over to it, and matching strands started to grow out of my tail towards their mates. The gap closed, and they made contact, knitting together and tightening, my tail starting to reattach itself seemingly of its own volition.

  I sighed and turned back to Alexandria. The cooking, simmering heat of where my tail was re-kitting together felt… pretty good, actually.

  “...As I was saying, now things are different. We have to get the word out. Give people their chance to hope for a future.”

  Alexandria nodded firmly at that. “You’re right,” she said. “People do need to know about today. We’ll make sure that happens. And who knows, maybe this will give people ideas of how to better formulate a response to them. The information Tattletale already provided is extremely useful. About the layering and density.”

  I lifted my head a little and looked over my backside. Flechette’s arrow was sticking out of my back, six inches or so of shaft extending upwards.

  “Can you please pull that arrow out? I don’t want to risk moving with it still in there.”

  Alexandria got to her feet and climbed up Leviathan’s corpse to be able to reach the arrow, and she pulled it out through my back. It didn’t come out cleanly. Possibly due to some aspect of Flechette’s power, there were chunks of armor plate, bone, and meat that were fused with the metal rod, and those had to be torn out along with the arrow.

  I swore I saw stars in my vision as it was being pulled out, but luckily, I didn’t scream. More gurgled than anything. I did feel better after it had been pulled out, though, despite it leaving a pretty bad hole in my abdomen.

  I took a deep breath and braced myself for what I was pretty sure was going to be absolute agony. I wasn’t wrong. I curled and twisted around so I could get Vivian within reach of my left ankle. I tried to move as little as possible to be able to reach down.

  Oh man. That’s… oof.

  My left foot was hanging from straps of skin and thick bands of connective tissue and muscle, dangling freely. Part of my shin bone was sticking out of my leg, the bone black as night and having a strange, matte texture to it. I reached my arm out and let her do her work. The fact that she was working at only fractional efficiency made the sensations of having surgery without anesthesia worse.

  I let out a pained croak. I thought I was going to throw up. Throw up or pass out. I tried to distract myself with conversation.

  “Alexandria?”

  She turned to look at me. “Not that I don’t appreciate the company of a world-class super heroine, but… why are you still here?”

  I thought I saw the corners of her mouth turn upwards. “I’m keeping the corpse secure until the retrieval team arrives. They should be here within 20 minutes. Everyone else is occupied; this is a good use of my time.”

  Makes sense.

  Sounding like she was making an offhand comment about the weather, she also said: “And making sure that you remain safe and intact.”

  I chuckled weakly. “You have better things to do than babysit a half-dead monster cape and failed former Ward.”

  She tilted her head at me. “You do realize that you’re going to be one of the most famous capes in the world after today, right?”

  Her accent was pretty, even if her tone and manner were formidable.

  I scoffed. “Nobody is going to care about the bus driver who was present when Leviathan died.”

  She stared at me in silence for long moments. I jerked a little when Vivian hit something that felt like a live wire of electricity and started working on it. I grit my teeth, jaw creaking under the load. I did my best to hold still and not squirm while it felt like someone was jabbing hot coals into my lower leg. My breath came out in hissing pants.

  Finally, she spoke. “I can’t tell if you’re moping, trying to garner pity, or if you’re just clueless.”

  I gulped a lungful of air and wheezed: “Probably the latter. I feel like shit physically, but I’m doing alright mentally. At least now that the drugs or whatever have worn off.”

  She cleared her throat. “I’d estimate you are top percentile of capes in terms of sheer participation time in the fight against him today.” She thumped a fist on the corpse. “And you weren’t just present, you were in the thick of it, trading blows and tanking shots directly. Also providing battlefield support, transport, organizing, and leading the strike team that killed him. He wouldn’t be dead right now without you.” She clenched her jaw and took off her helmet, having to unfasten it in several places.

  She shook her long, thick black hair out and looked down at me. She looked… Barely older than I was as Morgan. She had one scar running down her brow, intersecting her eyebrow, and extending halfway down her cheek.

  She was… gorgeous, even with the scar. Or maybe it added to her look. She frowned at me. “You also personally saved my life earlier. I might be dead right now if not for you.” She seemed to be studying my alien face. “So give yourself the credit you deserve.”

  I grunted as something crunched in my leg. “Guh. And… sorry. I just wish I could have done more, I guess. Saved more people. Distracted him better. This is my first Endbringer fight, and I had to see more people die today than I ever have before in my life.”

  She rubbed her nose with one gloved hand and then parted her hair with one thumb. “Yeah. That happens. Survivor’s guilt and impostor syndrome are a hell of a thing. Gets to the absolute best of us. Some more than others. Don’t let the doubt mire you down. You stepped up today, never hesitated once from what I saw, and there’s no doubt in my mind that you dramatically changed the outcome of this fight to our advantage.”

  Her wristband beeped, and she looked down at it. She rolled her head on her shoulders once in each direction, then pulled her helmet back on and resecured it. “Three minutes until the recovery team arrives. We need to get you moved so they can get the corpse out of here.”

  “Okay.” I coughed a few more times and spat out some Vivian foam. She was still working on my ankle. “Let my arm work on my ankle as long as you can, and hopefully it finishes before then. I don’t suppose you have any giant monster crutches, do you?”

  She chuckled and shook her head.

  I looked back out at the sunrise. Today was the very first page of a whole new history book.