෴Hex෴

෴Midnight෴

෴෴෴ ෴෴෴ ෴෴෴

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෴෴෴ ෴෴෴ ෴෴෴

Hex appeared in a sheltered thicket in Central Park, Manhattan. She was standing on a blanket, her boot a few inches from the faces of a partially dressed young couple making out in what had been a private spot. They had a blanket and picnic spread out, with a radio playing a song she didn’t recognize. By the looks of it, they’d finished eating and moved onto more entertaining activities some time ago. Her utility boots had landed on a paper plate covered with stripped corn cobs, and a paper bowl containing half a stick of butter. She slipped on the butter and corn cobs and awkwardly fell to one knee. Her knee splatted into a half-eaten bowl of coleslaw. In her attempt to avoid falling across the rest of the forgotten meal, she wheeled her arms and her gloved hand struck the radio. The small radio flipped end over end, coming to rest at the couple’s feet. Somewhere along the way it jumped to another preset.

“—e want to reiterate that anyone in the immediate vicinity of the building should stay safely indoors, away from windows and metal plumbing. The mayor’s office confirmed that an evacuation order is being considered, but has not yet been issued. Now, back to Terry with the weather.”

The couple had stopped what they were doing and looked at her with wide eyes. The sudden appearance of a heavily armed woman in combat gear caused them to both let out small surprised squeaks and roll away from her onto the grass. Hex relaxed, let the rifle fall onto the sling, and took a step back from the picnic blanket. The fear and hostility slowly morphed into a triple detente as the two looked at her with worried but puzzled expressions.

Uncaring of all this, the radio played on. A new voice cut in. “Hah. Thanks Pat, yeah. Let’s talk about the weather. It’s a beautiful summer day here in the Big Apple. We’ve got clear skies, mostly sunny, low humidity, 72 degrees, and oh yeah, a 100% chance of massive lightning storms in midtown. They’re calling this an ‘Arcstorm’ as though putting a name on it makes it better. If you’re in the area, stay indoors or get far away. If you’re somewhere else, stay out of the area. Next up, we’ve got Chris with sports, but not to worry listeners, we’ll keep you up to date on any changes.”

“So, this is awkward. I’ll just be going now. Um, carry on guys.” She glanced up and spotted a building peaking above the surrounding tree line. Just as the two were about to respond, she vanished.

She reappeared in a crouch on the edge of a building a few blocks away. Without warning, she felt a phantom force strike the back of her head and neck harder than she’d ever been hit before. As soon as the shocking pain arrived, it was gone, and so was the ‘dead’ aspect.

Far away, the Serena aspect tied on an apron as she gathered her energy. With a small effort, she reached out to the ‘Nona’ aspect to remake her. Instead of the familiar feeling of an aspect safely tucked in stasis, there was nothing. Like trying to lean on a wall that wasn’t there, it filled her with a sick, unfamiliar uncertainty and knocked her off balance.

On the edge of the building next to Central Part, the Sia aspect spent the better part of a minute crouched there, clutching at the roof masonry beneath her feet, trying to regain control of her suddenly fast and shallow breathing. A sudden intense awareness of her own mortality had coalesced in her, in a way she hadn’t felt in years. When her minor panic had mostly receded, she kept one hand tightly gripping the bricks and keyed her mic with a shaking hand.

“Hey, are you in range?” her tone was shaky and uncertain.

“Three minutes out. I’ll do a passive ballistic drop-in to avoid detection.” His transmission crackled. “Whoa, change of—” A burst of white noise cut him off.

She looked at her radio, shook her head in disappointment, and carefully turned around on the ledge to get her bearings. What she saw surprised her enough that she relaxed her grip and nearly fell off the edge.

Less than a mile away toward midtown was a middling high-rise tower with a pulsing column of persistent lightning crackling from the sky in a way that looked like the blinding arc from an unimaginably vast taser. Suddenly the snippet of a radio broadcast she’d heard at the interrupted picnic made so much more sense. She keyed her throat mic on.

“Midnight, I’m just outside Central Park, and something weird is happening in New York. It’s even on the local radio. Be careful.”

His response was nearly immediate, heavily broken up by EMF interference.

“—bound now. Had to rerou—” a long burst of static interrupted the transmission. “—minutes out.”

She tapped at the radio on her chest rig with a sigh. The map destination blip on her GPS pointed her onward toward midtown. She shook her head with a wry, resigned expression. She knew the interference would only get worse the closer she got to the building.

She started making line of sight teleports toward the building. When she got closer, she looked at her GPS and sighed. “Of course.”

“Midnight, the lightning is probably not a coincidence, repeat, not a coincidence. The lightning is striking the building we’re here to see.”

“—ger th—” His reply continued but was completely washed out by static and bursts of sharp noise.

She couldn't see any reason or cause for the crackling barrage of lightning, so when it suddenly slowed, then stopped, she didn’t see a reason for that either. She kept reaching for the Nona aspect, only to find the inner equivalent of a raw, gaping wound. Like probing the socket of a pulled tooth, or a phantom itch of a missing limb, she couldn’t seem to stop doing it.

The snapping static in the radio earpiece faded, leaving behind a low humming noise that reminded her of standing under large power lines.

“Say again,” She sent as she hopped to the next rooftop closer to the lightning-scarred high rise.

"I said, Roger that. I’m almost there. I rerouted low to avoid getting caught up in whatever is happening with all that lightning." His radio response was clear if still noisy.

“Did you catch that the lightning is all hitting the building we’re here to check out?”

His answering sigh was loud enough to activate the VOX on his radio. “No, I didn’t catch that. Why am I not surprised? What’s your assessment? This a tech thing, or something else? We got any intel on a lightning wielder or any related work they’re doing?”

She teleported to the next rooftop. “Nothing I recall. I’ll check with Wraith. He’s digging into the Martine Industries' private cloud files right now.”

Switching to another device, she sent a short, coded text inquiry to Wraith. His reply was nearly instant.

She popped onto the next rooftop and read his reply to Midnight. “Uh, he says there is one in a recent inquiry from Martine Industries for an expert on a rush job on an advanced high energy experimental containment chamber. The build description mentions it needs to be high voltage and lightning proof. Looks like they completed and certified it a couple of days ago.”

“Send me your location,” was his only reply.

Shaking her head, she suppressed her irritation, jumped to the next building, and sent her location to him.

“I’ll be there in a moment, standby and we’ll talk then,” his tone sounded somewhat distracted.

A few minutes later Midnight came into view, flying fast and low, hugging the city rooftops. He came to a stop, floating a few inches above the roof next to her. His armor flowed away from his head like a living obsidian black liquid.

“Not exactly the kind of intel I expected, but that tells us that whatever they have going on inside, it’s gotten out of their control,” he glanced at her, then back to the scarred building. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea to get much closer. If there’s anything my armor wouldn’t help much against, it’s that.”

Eyebrows furrowed, she looked conflicted between intense need to investigate, and concern for the danger. “But it’s stopped now. How long do you want to—”

An impossibly thick column of lightning struck the top of the building, sizzled and burned there, then punched through the roof. From where they stood, they were able to watch the progress as the lightning persisted far longer than it should have, carving and blasting its way through floor after floor, lighting up the mostly dark building with arc-light brilliance until the column penetrated as far down as they could see. Previously dark fluorescent and LED lights lit up around the path of the arc from ambient electricity in the air, forming a soft halo of light around the hard-edged blinding stream of energy.

“Or not.” She finished.

The shimmering edge of lightning shifted, cutting and burning a whole new path through the building.

“That’s—that’s not right at all. Lightning doesn’t work like that. Electricity doesn’t move like that!” He muttered in disbelief.

The skyscraper began to play an ominous song of overstrained steel alternately stretching and failing along tensile lines in one place and crumpling or buckling in another. Halfway up the glass-clad tower, a row of plate-glass windows began to spontaneously shatter one after another in their warping frames.

A series of bright flashes lit up the ground floor just before the first two floors of the building’s outer glass skin exploded outward in a dazzling blast of light and force. Large shards of glass rained down on the empty street below. A police cordon was already in place, directing pedestrians away from the ongoing event.

“Should we get down there?” She wondered aloud.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Whatever is happening down there, I don’t think it’s good to get involved. You don’t have a mask, and just being linked to an event like this would be bad for either of us. You’re not bulletproof, and they’re getting pretty quick on the triggers where suspected ability users are concerned.”

She shook her head, her face betraying reluctance. “I do have a mask.” An aspect popped in and handed off a ballistic mask before vanishing again.

He nodded, “Good. Cameras everywhere these days.”

She waved that off as if it didn’t matter, with a confidence she didn’t feel. “If we don’t go help, then what do we do here? Why are we here if no...” she trailed off at the new action unfolding.

Below, a man dressed all in red emerged from the building at a dead run, carrying someone cradled in his arms. The body being carried was limp and flopped like a rag doll.

Through the megaphone, the police on the ground issued commands to stop and put down the hostage.

Hex lifted her field binoculars and awkwardly peered through the ballistic mask into the lenses. The man knelt next to the limp figure in khaki and desert camo. The figure looked like it might have been a she, and more importantly, looked like she’d been beaten to death, and then severely beaten again postmortem. Beneath severe bludgeoning injuries, her face was unrecognizable. Hex suddenly realized the naked man wasn’t wearing red after all. From the long mop of wild hair to his bare feet, he was covered in what could only be shiny fresh blood, older drying blood, and meaty chunks of flesh and bone.

The police megaphones continued to call out orders below. The crimson-stained man ignored them.

Police opened fire. The naked man staggered as one or more bullets hit him. He clutched the bundle close and leaped into the air.

She was watching through the binoculars when the flash happened and wished she hadn’t been. The blood-covered man vanished in a blinding flash of lightning that shot straight up toward the sky. She lowered the field glasses and blinked away the sudden stars in her vision.

“Where did he go?” Midnight asked, having missed the moment the bloody man vanished.

She blindly pointed upward.

“I see him. He’s alone now. Pretty high up. Ouch, that really was bright. I think he was struck by lightning up there. Now it looks like he’s falling.” Midnight peered toward the clear blue sky. “Do you think he’s the enemy, or at least the problem?”

She flickered in place and looked around with freshly restored vision. “That was really damn bright.” She hesitantly raised the field glasses, then shrugged and looked through them again. The falling naked man was now completely clean, diving out of the sky toward the street below.

“No way! I think it’s him!”

Midnight squinted. “Him who?”

“It’s him! That’s Raz up there!”

Midnight shook his head in disbelief. “It can’t be. There’s no wa—”

The falling figure radiated another vivid white flash and vanished downward.

Hex swore softly, blinking fast, and immediately flickered in place. “I’m pretty sure that’s him under that mop of hair. If it’s not him, I vote we kill this guy. He got me twice with that damn flash.”

“I’ll go have a look. Keep an eye out around me?” He whispered.

“Yeah, I got your back.” She replied.

“I was talking to the Norns, but that's also good.” He said with an insouciant grin she knew all too well on a younger face.

He flew, low and cautious, in the direction of the flash. She followed, slowed only by taking the time to spot a landing between each jump.

He flew over the next building, then immediately turned about and intercepted Hex.

“Hold up!”

She paused to hear him out. Something new and untrustworthy in his expression put her on alert.

“Uh, hey, So, this is awkward, but you might want to just wait a minute. You’re not going to want to see this. I thin—”

Her expression tightened, and she teleported past him. Atop the next roof, she gasped in dismay.

In a tangled pile of clothing and bedsheets, Raz was thrusting into some blonde woman she’d never seen before.

“Raz?!” She said, her suddenly small voice stained with shock and betrayal.

The blonde under him heard her and turned to look at the new arrival. Then she winked at Hex and gave her a triumphant smirk. Raz didn’t react at all. In the throes of bestial passion, he grunted and rutted more like an animal than a man. His only reaction was to grab the back of the blonde’s hair and force her head to face him.

Hex couldn’t stand to watch. Turning away would be even worse. It was mere minutes later, but felt like hours when he stiffened, grunted still louder, and then rolled off the naked woman. He lay there for a moment then turned and looked at the woman with dazed, unfocused eyes. Suddenly he seemed to become aware of his nakedness and their recent activity. Even as he instinctively raked his gaze over the nude woman next to him, his expression told a story of confusion and regret.

“No! Not you! What happ…” Like a wind-up toy on its last movement, Raz sagged back and rolled over, limp as the dead. He lay there on the asphalt roofing shingles, half on the pile of laundry, and stared at the sky above for a few seconds before his eyes fell shut.

Hex lifted her rifle and aimed it at the other woman. “Who in the hell are you?! Start talking before I start shooting.” Her tortured voice infused with pain and menace.

The sounds from the mutilated building changed. High pitched pinging and popping sounds joined by deep groans of overstressed steel.

Midnight looked at the structure in alarm. “I need to help that thing stay up. Norns, get me public address drones now! Hex, don’t do anything hasty!” he exhorted her and flew off toward the failing structure with a gust of displaced air.

Hex swore and watched him fly off. When she looked back at the woman she was gone.

Eyes widened at the realization of danger, she quickly backpedaled to the half wall at the nearby corner of the roof and planted her back squarely into the walls at the corner. On the way, she dropped her rifle into the sling and drew her sidearm. At the edge of the roof, she crouched low and watched the shingled surface of the roof around her for the slightest movement or change. A moment later she saw the access door at the far end of the roof thrown open, then heard it slam shut.

Only once several more minutes had passed did she dare relax. “Damn stealth bullshit,” she muttered angrily to herself.

As a final baiting gambit, she nonchalantly turned her back on the roof and watched Midnight zip around the Martine Industries corporate headquarters building performing emergency damage control on the failing structure. All the while ignoring the megaphone commands and gunfire directed at him from below, he worked fast, carefully lowering chunks of fractured ferrocrete to the ground before ripping the rebar right out of the broken concrete and weaving it back into the building’s failing inner structure.

All the while she kept most of her awareness on listening and feeling for the slightest sound or movement behind her, half expecting, almost hoping, for something as definite and concrete as a knife in the back or an abrupt shove off the edge.

At some point, the Norns must have gotten PA drones in range, because Midnight started responding to the police and speaking in a breathless, harried voice that echoed for blocks.

“I can’t stop this building from coming down! Officers on scene, please do the smart thing, the right thing, and prioritize public safety. The neighboring buildings need to be evacuated now!”

The NYPD patrol and SWAT forces on the ground finally got the message when he lifted a few police cruisers into the air and soundlessly exploded them into component parts before forming complicated geodesic triangle-based patch structures with the steel, and thick beams of aluminum that went further inside the crumbling building. The seats, tires, and other nonmetallic components of the vehicles fell to the ground in a scattered pile.

The PA drones began to repeat Midnight’s message. “If you can hear this message, you are in the danger zone. Evacuate away from the Martine Industries tower immediately. Message repeats.”

Hex watched helplessly as the most powerful man on earth fought a doomed battle against the relentless tide of gravity and material failure. He was unwilling, or unable, to stop or give up, spending power he couldn’t afford, to ameliorate or just delay the inevitable disastrous outcome. Like a train wreck, she knew it would end badly, but couldn’t stop watching.

The sounds of structural beams shrieking as they stretched beyond their tensile limits melded with the grinding, crunching percussion of other support members collapsing under unimaginable compressive load, melding into a symphonic cacophony of destruction. Far below Midnight’s increasingly slender armored figure, Hex noticed a lone woman in a pantsuit limp out of the building. She zeroed in on this lone survivor, and in the next few seconds, an aspect dressed in a close approximation of an EMT uniform stepped from behind an abandoned ambulance that a falling slab of concrete had largely crushed. She reached into the partially crushed vehicle and grabbed the first mobile aid kit she could reach and sprinted for the woman.

Hex kept her over-watch position as the aspects on the ground subtly took the injured woman into custody and moved her away from the collapse zone so they could safely render first aid.

She watched one after another of his hastily applied patches snap free or crumple and fail. “Midnight, it’s not working. That tower is coming down soon and I don’t think you can stop it.”

His reply was rushed and breathless, more like a man running full speed than one floating in the air with no visible effort.

“I know. Something’s wrong with the metal in the building. I can barely affect most of it. Something’s happened to it, the superstructure acts like it’s been super-heated, magnetized, weakened, and lost all its heat treatment. It’s resisting my control, slowing me down. I can’t hold this back,” he panted in the mic, “I’m getting low oof—” a sharp grunt punctuated his words as he stretched out his hands and his power to catch another large chunk of the building as it fell toward a neighboring building.

Hex suddenly realized she was a little too close herself, swallowed, and turned back to Raz. She scowled under the ballistic mask and jogged over to him.

“Wake up, you stupid cheating bastard!” she screamed at him and slapped him across the face. Slapping him hurt her hand, and didn’t seem to accomplish anything toward waking him. She checked his pulse, then pulled his eyelid open. His only response was pupil dilation. As far as she could tell he was just sleeping, but she couldn’t wake him up.

She ran the math in her head. Losing the Nona aspect meant she might not be able to move Raz even a short distance. She thought it through once more but felt sure that even if she collapsed down to a singular aspect, it wouldn’t be enough to teleport with him. The feeling of the ‘dead’ aspect, now replaced with a raw inner wound where it had been, nearly sent her into another panic.

“Old fashioned way it is.” She muttered to herself. Another aspect appeared, this one dressed in sneakers and a casual dress with an apron over it. Together, they got under his arms and heaved. With both of them lifting as hard as they could, Raz barely shifted.

They let him back down into the laundry pile and Hex keyed her mic as the other aspect returned to where she’d come from.

“I know you’re working, but when that thing comes down, I’m going to need your help to move him.”

Midnight replied instantly, his words broken by panting grunts of effort. “You’re still here? Get yourself and him out of here! Just bring in more aspects and carry him out if you have to.” His terse message came across as more than a little condescending.

“Do you honestly think I haven’t tried that? He’s way too heavy for two of me, and I don’t have more to spare! That building is obviously coming down. Just come pick him up on your way out!” she screamed into the mic, then let her finger off the button and roundly cursed Midnight and Raz both.

A few blocks away, the woman who had given her name as Candace, was being led to safety by the two Hex aspects in uniform. With no warning, she abruptly sat down on the curb and started rocking back and forth muttering something unintelligible. One aspect tried to communicate with her, while the other ducked out of sight into a corner for a moment, then emerged with a collapsible stretcher tucked under her arm.

Hex looked through the pile of laundry and quickly realized it was all women’s clothing. She laughed bitterly. “Getting you out of here naked is just asking for trouble. Lucky for you, your benefactor is plus-sized.”

Sparing no effort to be gentle, she dressed him.

As she pulled the dress onto him, she had an epiphany. Punching in numbers as fast as she could, she made an international phone call and put it on speaker.

A woman answered the phone. “Stilt Ivaldison Forge, how can I help you?”

“Hi. It’s me.”

“Who?” Confusion was clear in her voice.

“I got you out of Chad, your husband owes me. I need to get there. I’m near Central Park, New York. Can you tell me where the closest way is?”

The woman sounded pleased to hear from her, “Oh you! We’ve been looking forward to your call. SIF maintains a door in all four boroughs. However, I should qualify that and tell you they all have relatively narrow access windows. There should be one within a few miles of you. I’ll send the locat—”

Hex sent them her current GPS coordinates including elevation, then interrupted Dr. Stilt. “No can do. I cannot get a couple of miles. I’m not positive I can get more than a few feet. I need the door here, with passage for three, and I need it now.”

Dr. Stilt-Ivaldison sounded worried. “Brock is concerned. He says there’s a heavy electrical storm in the area. He says the lightning is a cross-modal primal force, whatever that means. Bottom line is that this particular lightning can interfere with our gates. How soon do you need it?”

Hex looked down at Raz, then up at Midnight amidst his Sisyphean endeavor as he tried to slow the collapse. “Honestly? I need it now. There is no such thing as too soon. If it helps, there’s no storm. There was a lightning event, but it’s over.” Hex hoped that was true.

The line was silent for what felt like far too long.

Hex realized the high-rise was leaning ominously in her direction. “Dr. Stilt-Ivaldison? I reall—”

“Oh please, we owe you far too much to stay formal. Call me Nicolette.”

Hex watched the building lean further in her direction and gritted her teeth as she bit back a scathing retort. “Nicolette, can you get me that door right now? It’s really quite urgent.”

“Oh sure, I should have mentioned that. Brock is powering it up right now.”

Hex hit the mute on her phone and keyed her radio mic. “Uh, Midnight? You know it’s kind of leaning directly my way now right?”

Exhaustion and strain was evident in his reply. “I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize the other side was a hospital! I can see them still evacuating. I’m trying to engineer a straight implosion-style collapse. It’s just–I’m really tired.”

A shimmering rectangle appeared about twelve feet away from where Raz lay passed out.

Hex realized Nicolette was trying to talk to her. “Dear? It should be there in about 30 seconds. I hope that’s soon enough.”

Hex unmuted the phone, then glanced at the building that was all too quickly crumpling over toward her. “Me too! I might need some help bringing Raz through.”

Brock jumped on the line, the urgency of the situation thickening his German accent. “Jah! Get ein hand oder fuß through the door and wir help. Der ereignishorizont—er, event horizon is one way for solid matter.”

Hex swallowed and looked at the high-rise shadow falling over the building. “Midnight! I need you now! Right now! We’ve got a door to Brock’s place but you need to carry Raz through!” She made no effort to hide her growing fear.

“Just a second. Almost there. Just about got it.” The strain in his voice was palpable.

Hex grabbed his arms and tried to drag him toward the door. With every fiber of her strength, she just couldn’t move him. The Serena aspect re-appeared, still wearing the apron, but now covered in white puffs of flour dust. The two aspects dressed as EMTs appeared next to her. Working together the four of them managed to drag him a few inches closer to the portal.

Midnight’s voice came over the radio. “I can’t stop it. I haven’t got the strength. I’m on my way.”

His transmission was punctuated by a series of deep twanging sounds as though many thick cables had suddenly snapped. The building collapsed, mostly downward, but Hex could easily see it was going to crash down on them.

Every aspect she had at her disposal worked as one dragging him along an inch or two at a time. The building groaned and loomed over the gate as a half million tons of steel and concrete fell toward them.