For more than a week now, I’d been racing across the city, putting out fires, sometimes literally. More often, it meant raiding ABB locations, defusing or detonating bombs, rescuing hostages with bombs implanted in them, and taking whatever other jobs I could pick up.

  With Newter severely wounded, Faultline had been down a team member, and I’d filled in for four days while he recovered. Have to give it to him; he wasn’t wrong when he said he was tougher than most. He bounced back fast and was already taking on lighter assignments before a week had passed.

  I’d also picked up several more jobs that were excessively high-risk from Freestyle Logistics, AKA Coil. Jobs where he didn’t want to risk his mercs getting seriously wounded or blown up. Or more realistically, where he didn’t want to lose his investments in their expensive gear, contracts, and at times, tinker-tech weapons. I doubted that he was the type to actually give a shit about their welfare.

  Then again, that was the job in a nutshell.

  In the past week, I’d been shot, beaten, blown up, set on fire multiple times, gassed, and even hit by a truck. The opportunities to work with Faultline’s Crew were invaluable. Teaming up as Apex was challenging. Tattletale’s comment about an organic tank remained as relevant as ever, and while I was bulletproof, I wasn’t invincible. Sometimes, bulldozing solo was easier than working in close quarters with other capes.

  I was getting better at using my weird situational awareness. Since becoming Apex, I just sort of knew everything around me. That, combined with my agility, meant that I wasn’t plowing into people by accident, but it didn’t change the fact that I was just huge. I leaned into it when I could. Blocking and soaking up shots for friendlies like a big, dumb blue brute wall. Playing bulky, slow, dumb, and predictable worked well. It let me conserve energy–until I needed to hit back and blindside someone.

  The constant battles were teaching me a lot about myself. I had a massive gas tank. I still ate a shitload of food–more when I was fighting like this–but I had serious staying power. I could push nearly a full day, just short of running wide open, on a few short breaks. My biggest limitation?

  Heat.

  The more active I was, the harder I went, the hotter I got.

  My wings were, in effect, giant radiators that helped me dump waste heat. They were also incredibly fragile relative to the rest of me. They burned easily, blades, blunt weapons, and were wrecked by gunfire. I had six, so there was redundancy, but as I’d found out, things like pyrokinetics, flamethrowers, or Molotov cocktails were major threats. The fire itself? Not so bad. Flammable stuff slid off me, and my skin insulated well in the short term. It was protecting my wings that made things tricky..

  If they got heavily damaged or incinerated, I could still fight more or less normally, but it put me on a timer. Fighting without my wings meant heat built fast, and once things crossed from uncomfortable to dangerous, I started to flag. I think it was some kind of self-regulation. I could keep my speed, maybe, but I’d lose power. Or I could hold my power, but at the cost of speed. The worst it got, the more it all slipped until I really started to feel my mass.

  I kept experimenting with growing different tools on my lower arms and tail. The quills were almost always a go-to. Knocking someone out and from a decent range, and virtually silently? Damn near priceless.

  I got the chance to use my whip finally. That was… horrifying. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with using it. It came in two flavors. There was a bio-electric version that I could Tase people with. That was fine. I’d hit someone, squeeze a muscle in my arm, and they’d stiffen up and topple over.

  Then there was the venom version. Basically, jellyfish tentacles. If they hit bare flesh, people were instantly out of the fight: pure, incapacitating agony. They didn’t work through any type of clothing, not even thick hair, but if they touched skin? Eesh. The blood-curdling screaming really didn’t sit right with me.

  I’d been testing out different kinds of bio-electrical attacks. With my lower arm, I could get a Taser effect. If I tried the same on my tail, it triggered a massive shift. Something changed from inside my rib cage all the way down my spine to the tip of my tail. I’d used that against an ABB technical, ramming my tail through the hood and discharging it into the engine. Foot-long arcs of electricity exploded from under the hood, and the engine bay instantly burst into a blazing fire.

  The moral of the story? Super dangerous. Not something I’d want to use on a person. Maybe a super-brute, or Squealer tank. I was worried that I’d wind up setting someone on fire, or like, exploding their heart.

  Growing or mutating weapons and tools came at a cost. There was a metabolic cost. Smaller stuff barely registered. I could make quills on my arm a dozen times and barely feel it. But the biggie, flashy stuff? It took a chunk out of my batteries. Pun intended. I also got that familiar pressure in my head, like when I was pushed in my human disguise. The bigger the trick–like the super-juice tail–the more concentration, for lack of a better term.

  I still hadn’t tried strapping stuff to myself, and I wasn’t sure it would work well without a dedicated solution. I worried about putting things that could get caught or used against me. A belt around my neck like a collar? Massive liability. I could maybe carry a med pouch in my hair, but with the kind of punishment I took, I doubted it would survive intact.

  I needed something for field triage. Something my body could grow, use, and pack away again. When I first started trying to push the idea to my power, I had to try and think of all the potentially fucked-up ways in which it might go about doing something. The thought of accidentally changing or infecting someone else with my cells was nightmare fuel. When I finally had a halfway decent idea cooked up in my head and pushed it through, my power seemed… I don’t know, intrigued?

  I was used to it reacting in different ways. Storms, swells, boiling, resting, or stillness. When I started trying to put the idea for emergency medicine through, it didn’t stir the surface like wind or tide. It moved from below. Circling around me, lapping against me, lightly tugging me like an undertow. It was… very strange.

  What I got was a somewhat bulky, elliptical pod on my forearm, covered in hard armor from elbow to wrist. Thick, bulging veins ran down the back of my hand and down each finger to my nails, which thinned and grew longer, like five scalpel blades. The pod itself had six smaller versions of my eyes strewn across it, though I couldn’t see through them. Its armor was ridged and uneven, with long, narrow bulges running the length, and round nodes scattered across it..

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  I got the chance to test it after taking a gash to my thigh from a huge chunk of what looked like a lawnmower blade embedded in my leg. It, along with a bunch of other crap, had been strapped to a pretty big explosive device that had been left just for me.

  Treating the wound with the pod was an experience. When I went to use it, it just hijacked my arm from the elbow down and did its own thing. I could feel everything, but I wasn’t in control. My fingers moved, slicing and cutting. Holes opened along the pod, and larger versions of those red tendrils I’d seen before slithered out to work inside the wound. The long segments of the pod turned out to be articulated limbs–like mantis claws–that stitched, stapled, glued, and manipulated flesh.

  Long story short? Horrific. But that was just sorta me at this point. Watching it work made me think of a terrible horror movie, Melody and I had watched with the Dallons: Revenge of the Vivisector. I named the pod Vivian in honor of B-horror excess. Vivian was industrious and frighteningly fast. She was also incredibly demanding to grow and maintain. Keeping her around limited my other options, so it was a pick-your-poison situation. Using her felt intimate and invasive in ways I couldn’t explain. Like surgery and possession, all at once. And I wasn’t entirely convinced it couldn’t go wrong in some awful way. I’d need someone like Amy to sit in with a test patient.

  Despite the week and change of constant warfare, things weren’t all bad. The time flew past since my days were spent sleeping, fighting, trying to keep in contact with people through the chaos, and still managing to log time for school. It all sort of blurred together into one big mess in my head.

  I was making absolutely disgusting amounts of money. Like, I had so much money I didn’t even know what to do with it. Several million was sitting in my account. Turns out that hiring me to crash and tear through fortified positions at a couple of hundred grand a pop was cheaper for Coil than mobilizing a whole private army with hazard pay and logistics. Who knew? Once the cash started piling up, I talked to Faultline about fixing the one thing I was really hurting for.

  A real place to operate out of. A base for Apex, somewhere I could call home. I discussed a few ideas with her, but in a surprising turn of events, she’d sent me to Tattletale of all people. It was through clenched teeth, but even though those two hated each other, she still recognized Tattletale for her skills as a thinker.

  Tattletale–Lisa–and I had met at the Undersiders' base one quiet morning when the rest of the crew was passed out or absent, and we started digging through places. I had a weird list of features and requests that I was looking for. First and foremost: I needed a place where my big ass could actually fit, that wouldn’t feel claustrophobic, and that I could get in and out of easily, on foot or by air.

  That narrowed things down fast. It had to be a big commercial space or, more realistically, some kind of industrial building. There were also price concerns. I had disposable money at the moment, but I didn’t want to just piss away hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars away on a place I wouldn’t be able to afford longer-term, or that wasn’t like, really good for what I wanted.

  In the end, it came down to three properties, all in northside Brockton Bay. First was an old, decommissioned municipal water treatment plant. Built like a concrete bunker, it was spacious, and it had large tunnel access to the city’s underground infrastructure. But it was in rough shape. More of a shell of a facility, gutted by scrappers. It had also sat unused for nearly twenty years and needed a significant amount of work. I put it on the back burner.

  Next was a small steel mill. Not far from the docks where ore shipments were taken in from freighters. It looked menacing, big villain energy. The place was the definition of heavy duty. Huge girders, reinforced concrete, steel catwalks. It was cool and checked most boxes, but something about it felt off. Turning it into a livable space would be a nightmare. It was nothing but heavy industrial hookups and infrastructure. Very expensive to power, and since I wasn’t planning on smelting steel with the place, it represented a lot of overhead and way too many questions. I scrapped that idea.

  The last place was one I recognized. Brockton Bay Fire Department, Station North. It shut down when I was in middle school, and it was all over the news at the time. People were pissed, rightfully so. Nobody wants their house to burn to the ground because fire trucks took ten extra minutes to show up.

  The issue was, the north side of the city basically collapsed and economically imploded with the loss of the shipping industry and the ferry. The city kept operating the fire station for years afterward, and every year or two would try and close it because it was a tax-dollar incinerator. People protested, and it’d stay open until the next budget year. Eventually, they shut it down. Or rather, “mothballed” it until economic conditions stabilized.

  Lisa arranged a tour of the place with the city. They were thrilled to offload the place on some idiot private investor. We got in after just a two-day wait. First impression pulling up in our rental SUV and decked out in pantsuits was… not great. The place had 14-foot reinforced concrete walls and heavy steel gates to keep the equipment from being stolen when it was operational. Who knew that fire trucks were worth so much money?

  When the city mothballed it, they added razor wire to the top of the walls to keep people from scaling them. From the outside, it looked like a prison. Every square inch of the outer walls was covered in graffiti. A few people had spray-painted things approaching art. The rest were gang tags. There was a gigantic crude penis on the front gates.

  Inside the gates was a lot nicer. Trash everywhere from people flinging crap over the wall, broken glass scattered across the pavement, but the fire station itself? In pretty good shape. It mainly consisted of two connected buildings: a two-story, four-bay garage with huge, heavy-duty roller doors on the front and back. It was deep, too, able to fit two of the big trucks stacked front-to-back.

  The firehouse building attached to the garage was four stories high. Red brick, lots of windows. They had shutters over them and were intact. The first floor was offices, a training-slash-meeting room, and gear storage. Second floor had the living quarters: kitchen, gym, bathrooms, and a spacious lounge. Third floor had dorms, a shower block, and a small clinic. Fourth floor was operations. City maps, some briefing rooms, radio equipment, and rooftop access.

  There was a basement that had pumping equipment and independent generator systems. It’d been run and tested as of last year. The roof held HVAC systems, a small lookout tower, and a compact water tank. A big steel cylinder on a reinforced platform built into the structure below. Fourteen feet tall, twelve feet wide.

  There was a helipad on the garage roof, meant for cargo choppers, the kind used to drop water on high-rises. A bonus I hadn’t even thought of.

  I liked it. Dusty, dingy in spots, it was going to need a fat stack of cash to get fully functional again. Some parts had been stripped and reused at other fire stations across the city. But it had potential. A lot of potential. It wasn’t subtle, but then again, I wasn’t exactly a subtle cape. It was defensible, off-grid capable, and something like 15,000 square feet of usable space.

  It was a place I could live in, both as Apex and as Morgan. The city wanted seven hundred grand for it. Lisa somehow negotiated that down to four seventy-five, paid upfront from a clean LLC. By the next morning, I had four sets of keys and a whole lot less money in my offshore account. I wired Lisa a thank you for her time and services. Fifty bands. Worth every cent.

  I dumped more money on some reputable contractors that Faultline put me in contact with. The kind with hammers, nails, and spools of cable, not guns. I wanted the property cleaned from the ground up, everything inside the walls restored to good working order. The work order included new furniture, a full kitchen restock with shelf-stable food, and a full resupply of the clinic with medical gear for the whole station. I was considering hiring a small security team to keep an eye on the place, so I wanted it well-equipped. The bill was eye-watering.

  I ordered extra modifications, too. Privacy and security were the priority. Two basic guard posts on opposite corners of the walls. An upgraded gate system. Privacy shutters on every window, even the ones on the garage doors. The firehouse ones had louvers, so it wouldn’t feel like a dungeon inside. I didn’t care as much about lighting in the garage. A full security system for the entire building and property.

  I also finally pulled the trigger on my stupid gigantic custom beanbag bed. I bought two, one for my apartment and one for the fire station garage. With everything tallied up, fuel tanks filled, food stocked, furniture, building supplies, and labor all prepaid for, I came in just under a million dollars.

  I thought spending that much money would stagger me, but honestly? After a certain number of zeroes, it starts to feel abstract. I had some other things I needed to do. Modifications, upgrades, and overhauls for my new base. I had a meeting with Faultline later in the week to talk about staffing. What went into finding people you could trust, and how much that was going to cost. I expected it wasn’t going to be cheap.

  I wanted to help my family out, too. But doing it cleanly and without putting them at risk was going to be tricky. I was still going to try, regardless.

  My phone buzzed. Freestyle Logistics had more packages in need of delivery. I sighed. I was tired, bordering on exhaustion, and running myself ragged. But the end was in sight. The ABB ranks were collapsing in their remaining footholds around the city. The truce had held so far. Faultline and I both thought the war wouldn’t go another full week.

  Time to get back to work. Make more money. I texted back: Confirmed.