The waters beneath the port of Seattle are different to those that surround the rest of the city. This section of the city was – and still is – protected from Leviathan’s rampage by immense sea walls that withstood its destructive forces without breaking. Beyond those immense bastions, the depths of Puget Sound are filled with the flotsam and jetsam of that distant battlefield; sunken ships, hulking wall segments, cars, trucks, planes and more bodies than I can ever hope to count, dragged beneath the waves and slowly decomposing beneath the silt. Each plays host to an ecosystem of plants and fish; new life growing among the ruins of the old.

In the harbour, there’s none of that. The silt beneath the water is flat and empty, home to few plants and fewer fish. The occasional rusted boat breaks up the expanse, but none of the same debris. The battle never reached here.

The titans of this place sit on the water, not below it. I can see them above me; placid creatures resting against the edge of the port, each one of them easily over a thousand feet long. There are three of them tied up against the harbour, and another one is passing overhead as it makes its way out of the city.

It’s cloudy enough that the water is pitch black, but I have always been able to see differing shades in the darkness. Not colours in the way most others understand them – the way I somehow know colours should be seen – but different shades of darkness that are every bit as distinct. So when the ship passes overhead, I can see its silhouette blocking out the surface of the water, banishing the dim glow of the harbour’s lights beneath its massive bulk.

It feels like it takes an eternity for the ship to drift over me, carrying thousands of containers to who knows where, but eventually I can see the end of the ship. Its propellers are churning the water into a frenzy as they push the ship forwards, sticking out from near the back on long drive shafts.

I simply watch, awestruck by the sight, as it drifts towards the gate in the harbour walls, disappearing from view as it emerges into the lanes of flashing buoys that’ll guide it through the debris field and out into the open ocean.

When it’s gone, I turn my attention back to the waiting ships and drift freely through the inky-black water, an immaterial form among titans.

The Taiko Maru is waiting for me, as still and silent as the other ships even though I know that’s merely an illusory tranquillity. I saw it from the shoreline, before I slipped into the water. The lights are on in the bridge, and there are men patrolling the deck. Not enough to rouse the suspicion of the port authority, but enough to keep an eye out. Inevitably, there will be more below decks.

That’s okay. We’ve brought more of our own. They’re waiting just outside the harbour, in vans and cars. Jaeger and his commandoes, Huntsman and his dog, Cinderblock and the other members of his gang. Ember.

And those are just the ones I know. There are others, too. People who were there at the meeting, but who I’ve never met before. There’s an eighteen-wheeler that contains a mobile hospital, part of a small fleet of medical assets the Elite apparently maintains in Seattle.

Something else is happening, besides this operation. I don’t know what, exactly, but Jaeger was making a lot of very long phone calls before we got here, and I got the impression that more pieces were in play than just the forces waiting to attack the ship. Something to grab people’s attention and create a window for us.

Part of me is curious about it, but it’s a small part. Mostly, I just want this to be over with. I want to see the kidnap victims safe, and I want things to go back to the way they were before. I want to go back to the Red Light district with Ember, to go to sleep in my own bed in the home we share. I want to do this right, because so many people are relying on me.

I push myself upwards, soaring through the water at a truly immense speed as I approach the surface. I’m aiming for the right side of the ship, away from the harbour and its lights. I hit the surface of the water without even noticing, immediately moving into the shadowed side of the ship. There’s a hole near the front, a little less than two thirds up the side. Apparently it’s for the ship’s anchor, but it’ll serve me just as well.

As I expected, the room is unlit and unguarded. I don’t think the Triad even knows I exist, so I gambled on them relying on their lookouts on the deck to keep the ship secure. Seems like I guessed right. The anchor chains are curled up around immense wheels and pulleys, disappearing up into the ceiling and stretched across the floor, and the space around them is littered with pallets, crates and other debris. The metal deck might once have been coated with resplendent red paint, but age and time have started to take their toll, and the paint beneath the chains has been stripped bare and rusted by the waterlogged motion of decades of operation.

The room is sealed, of course, and it takes me a moment to figure out how to work the wheeled handle of the bulkhead door. It opens up onto a narrow gangway that runs the length of the ship; dark, unlit, and open to the elements on the right side. Above my head, the ‘ceiling’ is formed from a long line of containers, no doubt stretching three or four high.

Anyone else might feel claustrophobic beneath all that, but they cast such a wonderful shadow.

It’s certainly enough to hide me as I close the bulkhead door, spinning the wheel to make sure nothing’s out of place. I can see a man down at the far end of the walkway, his head turned to look out into the city as he patrols along at a leisurely walk. He’s unarmed, but I’m not foolish enough to think they’ll all be like that. The coast guard might take offence to armed men strolling along the deck of a ship, but there’s more than enough space below decks.

The city itself seems strangely calm, and from my elevated position I can see across the tops of the first rows of warehouses on the other side of the channel, taking in the yellow-lit streets and the distant sound of traffic. Occasional cars pass along the shoreline, their headlights flashes of white among a sea of yellow. In the distance, I can hear a crackling sound, and a faint patch of red and blue flashes appears on a distant intersection.

The crackling intensifies, but not from the city in front of me. It’s carried over the water, past the length of the ship and across the bay to the north of Seattle. It’s gunfire, I realise with a start, and the guard at the other end of the ship has clearly heard it as well.

He leans over the railing, over the water below, as he tries to peer through the darkness and see the noise’s cause. It’s a pointless effort – the shots are faint enough that I know they’d be out of sight even for me – and the guard realises it a moment later as he leans back in, speaking into a radio with comparatively little urgency.

To the left of the warehouses, past block after block of yellow light, the city centre rises out of the sprawl like a mountain of brilliant and terrible white spires. I don’t like looking at it much, but I find my eyes drawn to one tower among many as an aircraft suddenly emerges from the roof of the building.

It looks like a plane, but it hovers and moves erratically as it dances between the buildings, heading for the north of the city. To Triad territory.

This must be the distraction. The Elite are hitting the Triad on their own turf, to turn their eyes away from the ship. The conflict itself will draw the Protectorate and the Round Table away from the docks, leaving me free to slip in, find the right containers, and tell the strike team where they are.

It’s nothing I haven’t done dozens of times before, but now people are throwing themselves into danger to buy me time. I need to make sure it isn’t wasted.

I fly along the shadowed walkway, momentarily dropping beneath a shipping container as the guard checks his phone. The moment the light is gone I slip past him, curving around his feet as an immaterial spectre and leaving him none the wiser. Periodically, I’ll pass passages in the walls of shipping containers that run from one side of the ship to the other, with hatches in the centre that allow access to the hold.

Technically speaking, any one of them could lead to the repurposed containers, but it would take a very long time for the Triad’s medical people to walk from one end of the ship to the other, and the charts said the sedated victims need hourly check-ups. That means they’ll be closer to the ship’s tower, with its crew quarters and creature comforts. The world might be strange and full of terrors, but people are so wonderfully predictable.

I find what I’m looking for on the second row from the tower; the hatch in the middle of the walkway is open. After all, they’re big and heavy. Why keep closing it if you’re just going to have to open it again in an hour?

The problem, from my perspective, is that light is considered another creature comfort. I can get close to the hatch, even drop down the short ladder into the enclosed passage below, but beyond the narrow space directly beneath the hatch the corridor’s lights have been turned on.

They aren’t powerful by any standard, and the exposed girders and corrugated containers that make up the walls of the corridor cast deep shadows, but it means that I can’t move freely. If I want to push on, I have to do it in the flesh.

Gingerly, I move my forelimbs out of the shadows and into the light, with the rest of my body following as I force myself to move forwards. The one saving grace is that my footfalls are completely silent on the metal floor, with the only sound being the indistinctive noise of the ship creaking in place.

That is, until I hear the sharp sound of a bulkhead door moving ahead of me. I leap into the shadows of a rusted metal girder, hiding myself in the tiny space as another sailor walks past, dressed in utilitarian blue coveralls with shiny white bands on the arms and ankles, catching the overhead lights of the corridor as he passes me by.

Unlike the one on deck, this sailor is armed with a long-barrelled rifle, with a belt of ammunition held beneath the weapon in a simple metal drum. The weapon looks cruder than the angular metal shapes used by Jaeger’s commandoes, with wooden fittings rather than plastic, but it’s still dangerous, even to my inexperienced eyes.

Still, it’s another sign that I’m going the right way.

I don’t even wait for the guard to reach the end of the corridor before slipping out of the shadows, trusting my soundless strides to keep me hidden even as I sprint to the next ladder down, dropping to the next deck in a single leap. To my left and right, I’m pressed in by yet more containers, but they aren’t level with the floor. The ones on the lowest deck will be, and that’s where I’ll find what I’m looking for.

Shouts echo around me – clipped words in a language I don’t understand – and I wheel around to see a crewman looking at me, a boxy rifle held at his hip, its barrel spinning around to face me. Ice-cold terror grips me like a vice as I take in his eyes, locked with my own.

Instinctively, I leap to the side, pressing myself against a rusted pillar and folding myself into the shadows cast by its H shaped structure. Not a second later, shots ring out in a deafening cacophony – amplified by the tight confines of the corridor – and the walls are faintly lit by flashes from the rifle’s muzzle. Sparks rise up from where the bullets strike the walkway and the ceiling, and the container-formed walls shriek in protest as the shots carve deep slashes down their sides.

If I had ears right now – or at all – the noise of the shots would have been overwhelming as the tight corridor amplified them. As it stands, I can hear scratched and panicked shouts coming from the radio strapped to the sailor’s boiler suit, and an equally panicked response from the sailor himself. A short, frantic, argument happens in a language I don’t understand, before I begin to hear the sounds of boots on metal as the sailor gingerly advances down the walkway.

One of the lights must have been damaged in his gunfire – or perhaps the wires powering it – as it’s flickering intermittently overhead. Normally, it might provide a means of escape, but in this case it just results in the sailor lighting up the corridor with a handheld torch. His grip is shaky and unsteady, but the light is wide enough to make no difference. Suddenly, I’m pushed back into my little nook of shadow, with only a narrow angle to work with. An angle that grows smaller every second, as the sailor draws closer.

Every instinct in me is screaming for escape, and I find myself flitting around my increasingly-small domain as I look for a way out. Salvation comes in the form of a neat bullet hole put clean through a container door, barely small enough to fit a pinkie finger through but more than large enough to work.

I slip through it just in time, shifting aside as the flashlight sends a narrow beam of light down through the hole. On the other side, I can hear the sailor’s breath hitch as he notes the distinct absence of any Parahuman, before he starts frantically talking into his radio again.

I can hear feet pounding on the deck above me, but all I can judge of their numbers is that there’s more than one. I know they’ll be cutting off my escape routes, which means I need to move faster.

The bullet travelled through the boxes that fill the container, making a neat hole on the other side. It gets me out and into the incredibly narrow gap between this container and the next, into a channel that’ll take me past this row and into the one beyond. With a little luck, they won’t have sealed that one yet.

I emerge into the light, becoming solid as I slip out of the gap between two containers. A quick glance to my left and right reveals a figure at the end of the corridor, dressed in the same overalls as all the other crew I’ve seen. He’s not carrying a weapon, but that doesn’t matter when his hands are wreathed in a strange glow.

He raises a fist, pointing it directly at me, but I’m already leaping for the wall on the other side of the narrow passage. My fingers scrabble uselessly against another gap for a brief instant before I manage to get my pinkie finger deep enough to pull the rest of me into the shadows. This should be the last row of containers before the ship’s tower, which means I’m out of room.

I push towards the light, only to see it blocked as a figure steps out in front of it. I could easily arrest my movement and look for another way out, but I don’t have time. Like with Bloody Mary, all I can do is act.

Rather than stopping, I throw myself at the gap and come hurtling out as I’m abruptly forced back into physical form. In front of me, the guard with the drum-fed weapon barely has time to widen his eyes in shock before I barrel into him, slamming his head against the bulkhead opposite and knocking the gun clean out of his hands.

He scrabbles for it, his movements slow and sluggish from where his head hit the metal, but I get to it first. I don’t understand guns – they all seem so boxy and unnatural to my eyes – but I know that one hand goes on the handle and the other rests near the barrel.

The moment the guard notices my hands on the weapon, he scrambles back against the wall and curls up with his hands over his head. Idly, I note that he must be terrified of me, but that disconcerting thought quickly takes second place to the footfalls I can hear at the other end of the corridor.

I fumble with the weapon, holding it out in front of me before gingerly pressing the back of it against my shoulder. It’s heavier than it looks, and my arms are shaking a little from the effort of holding it up. Or from something else.

I can’t make sense of the sights, so I just level the barrel at the end of the corridor, at about the height of a man’s torso. All I have to do is wait for them to come and pull the trigger. The gun will do the rest.

I see a booted foot cross into view, and my nerve flees me. At the last second, I pull the barrel back and fire once it’s above head-height, narrowly missing the glowing-handed cape as the kickback of the gun forces the barrel even higher, sending a mismatched line of bullets along the ceiling.

The short burst – with its horrifying light and deafening noise – is still enough to send the cape diving for cover, and I quickly turn and run for the stairs at the end of the hall, still carrying the gun even as I drop down to the next level.

There aren’t any more stairs, and the containers on this deck are level with the floor. The ones I’m looking for will be down here too, but I’m not in a position to find them right now. The decks are no doubt swarming with people, and me being armed won’t hold them off for long. Even if they give up on chasing me and just let me barricade myself away somewhere, that’s still time they can use to call in enough reinforcements to strangle our planned rescue operation in its crypt.

My power might be built for hiding, but right now I need to act. That means thinking.

I’m essentially trapped down here, but unless the sound of those gunshots can carry through solid steel bulkheads nobody beyond the ship actually knows I’m trapped. With my power being what it is, I have no way of signalling for help. It’s useless in this situation.

So what would Jaeger do? How would he outthink this trap?

I lope down the corridor, the unfamiliar weight of the gun doing strange things to my gait. I stumble, resting a hand on the door next to me to steady myself only to feel faint vibrations beneath my palm.

That’s when the idea hits me.

The door is a few feet along. It’s heavy and metal, with a rusted wheel in the middle, but I can still haul it open. Inside is what looks like some sort of storage room, full of shelves and labelled boxes. I can feel the vibrations through the floor now.

I set the gun aside for a moment, pouncing up onto one of the shelves and pulling at it until the flimsy screws holding it to the wall come loose and it topples, perfectly blocking the doorway.

I know it won’t hold for long, so I scoop up the gun and make my way through the next door, stepping out of the storage room and into a truly overwhelming space.

It’s taller than any other room on the ship, and deeper too, stretching down another deck below me and rising up three decks above my head, ringed by walkways and criss-crossed by catwalks. Most of the space is taken up by machinery on a truly staggering scale, all centred around a pair of immense, vaguely cylindrical devices that must be the ship’s engines.

The vibrations are even stronger here, but they’re not coming from the engines. It makes sense; the ship is docked, so there’s no sense in wasting fuel on the main engines when the propellers will be still and inert.

I follow the vibrations, feeling them growing slowly stronger through the base of my feet. They take me past the immense machines at a jog, up a staircase of grated metal and onto a deck that overlooks the main engine, filled from end to end with four sizable and boxy shapes that only look small in comparison to what lies below. Generators, if I had to guess.

Below, I hear the sound of something exploding and the shriek of metal on metal as the Cape forces his way into the room. I step back, keeping all four generators in sight as I level the barrel of the gun and pull the trigger.

It still kicks like a mule, but this time my grip is firmer, and I’m a little more prepared to deal with it. Still, the gun jerks wildly in my hands, pouring out a stream of spent metal cartridges that clatter against the deck as it spits bullets into the generators.

Showers of sparks burst out from wherever my shots land, as the generators shriek and whine in protest. Red lights start to flash overhead and a wailing alarm blares through unseen speakers before they flicker and die as the power cuts out, plunging the room – and the whole ship – into darkness right as the last bullet fires out and the gun abruptly stops shaking.

I don’t even bother dropping it, letting it clatter to the floor as I shift into the shadows and soar up to the top deck of the engine room, tucking myself on a narrow girder that stretches across the length of the room, far above the floor. I catch a brief glimpse of engineers frantically pouring over workstations, before the red emergency lights switch back on and I’m abruptly forced back into material form.

I scrabble for balance on the girder, barely managing to avoid losing my grip and plunging to the depths below. The engineers are still shouting, moving to an identical set of generators on the other side of the engine room.

Of course they have backups! I just hope my signal was noticed.

I watch helplessly as the cape runs into the engine room, flanked by two armed sailors and with his hands glowing even brighter. One of them is even giving off smoke, from where he’d blasted his way through the door. He’s pulled on a balaclava since I saw him last, probably to mark himself as a Cape rather than to actually hide his identity.

His eyes dart frantically around the room, the sailors beside him doing the same with the barrels of their guns. I try to shrink back on my girder, but without any shadows to hide in it’s a futile effort. I see the Cape’s eyes widen as he spots me, raising an arm as its halo of energy glows brighter and brighter.

There’s a deafening sound and a flash of blinding light, and it takes me half a second to notice I’m not dead.

Something’s blown a hole clean through the side of the ship, the shrapnel from the blast catching one of the gunmen in the chest. The Cape turns away from me – his jumpsuit flapping as the sea air rushes into the room – just in time to see an ashen figure leap through the hole, a spiderweb of cracks across her body glowing with a hidden flame. Eyes like the heart of a furnace fix the Cape with a contemptuous look as she raises her arm.

Her whole forearm suddenly lights up with a burning light before exploding, sending out an incandescent clump of cinders that catches the Cape dead on his chest, knocking him back over the railing and filling the air with the smell of burning flesh as he topples down to the engine below.

Ember is flanked by two of Jaeger’s commandoes, anonymous in their deep green body armour. At the sight of their boxy metal rifles, the second armed sailor lets his gun clatter to the floor. One of them moves up to drive his boot into the back of the sailor’s knee, forcing him down to the ground and grabbing a zip-tie from his belt to secure the man, while the second rushes down a set of stairs to check on the Cape. Neither of them pay any mind to the sailor who was hit by shrapnel.

I leap down from the girder onto the topmost walkway, then down again to land with catlike grace on Ember’s level. Jaeger and Huntsman are clambering through the hole, and I can see more of Jaeger’s commandoes on boats outside, along with men and women in utilitarian blue outfits with balaclavas hiding their faces from view. Probably the medical teams.

Ember turns to look at me, still in her ashen form. Her arm is rapidly growing back, ash sloughing out of her stump to replace the cinderblast she fired into the Cape. It doesn’t take long until she’s left whole and complete again, and I sprint towards her without even thinking about it.

She shifts back, her fire dimming and her ashen skin regaining its colour, just in time for me to pounce on her and wrap two sets of arms around her in a warm embrace. She reciprocates, and I pull back just enough to see a warm smile on her face.

“Did you miss me?”