The four in red killed the guards so easily, so readily, it made me sick. One of the guards fell off the wall, landing fifty or so feet away from me down the street and laid completely motionless, his blood seeping into a pool around him.

I had thought the colosseum was bad, what the fuck was this?

Hardly stopping to think, I took careful aim and threw a big, football-sized wad of lightning right in the middle of them, dropping two of them. At my side, Karu was already launching herself in the air. The other two turned to face us, seemingly hesitant, but they paused long enough to let the rest of the XPCA on the wall retreat.

I heard a slam behind me and saw Trish was gone. Went to save herself, I imagine, with no interest in getting involved with either side. Lovely piece of work she was. I had to wonder how one could become so self-interested when living in a federal facility where everything you needed was provided for you.

But not wonder very long, as the resistance started pursuit of the XPCA again. Karu was between the two groups now, and while I knew she was a capable fighter, I didn't think defending another was exactly her forte. If she engaged fully, she'd just try to kill them, which I didn't like. So I had to find a way up the wall before she was pushed to that point.

In a way, I thought while I ran, it reminded me of babysitting Saga. She'd always just kill civilians as the simplest solution. Here, things were backwards. Exhumans were the 'civilians', but Karu still had no problem with offing them as imperious blasphemers of darkness or whatever. Funny reversal...but not really that funny.

I got to the wall and found it...a wall. Most walls were designed for keeping things from passing, and this one was no exception. There weren't any convenient doors or ladders or anything for me to work with here to get up top. My mind raced as I stared at the huge slab of concrete in front of me which occasionally trembled as some gout of fire or explosion went off atop it.

There was a tower on the wall, a large concrete round thing, and a lot of barbed wire...maybe I could do something with magnets to bring the wire down like a rope? And then what, climb barbed wire with my bare hands? There really wasn't much else here to work with...just this big freaking concrete wall.

I realized over the din of the fight that someone was speaking. It was distant and echoing, but it was a familiar voice. I paused and listened, and realized it was coming out of PA speakers over the city...but not this part of the city. A woman's voice ordering all Exhumans to stay indoors, that the XPCA were deploying and any found outside would be assumed complicit with the resistance.

So Trish was telling the truth about that. But why was the resistance attacking? And why wasn't the broadcast being played over here? I looked and saw a tower with speakers on it, not too far from here, dead silent. Looked like a regular scaffolding type of tower, not too exciting, not visibly damaged, about half the height of the wall…

And it'd do. I ran over to it, covering the distance in a good fifteen second run or so. It was skinny, narrower than I was, but pretty easily climbable. And giving it a shake, seemed light, but sturdy. Perfect.

I jammed swords into each of the bolts holding the thing to the ground, and after seven or eight seconds, they were glowing white hot. Hoping I wasn't doing something incredibly stupid, I gave the tower a kick, and it wobbled. I put my foot on it and pushed, and it leaned sideways, the white metal stretching like dough. I pushed it further and further until it was almost parallel to the ground, its last points of contact with the ground twisted and warped.

One more good kick and it snapped off, crashing to the street. I gave a glance up and saw fire and plasma in the sky over the wall, before grabbing the pole and dragging it back up the street, banging obnoxiously behind me the whole way.

A few moments later found me climbing the thing precariously leaned against the wall with the plastic lid of a trash can hanging off the back of my head, climbing towards the explosions.

It wasn't a great plan, but I was kind of out of jetpacks, and the Exhuman power lottery had not seen fit to grant me flight, so here I was. My backup plan, in the event this one failed was to try not to land on my head.

I got to the top of the tower easily enough, took one step past the probable safe limits of being on-balance, and whipped out a sword. I held the plastic trash can lid to the wall and jammed my sword into both, off to the side and above my head.

Yeah, this was a bad plan.

It smelled horrible. Like...burning acid. I tried not to breathe, because I wasn't sure I'd be able to stay balanced if I began coughing. Much of the plastic just melted and dripped down the wall like black candle wax, but some I got just warm enough to melt and stay relatively in place. The wall didn't seem to care too much about my heating it, which was good. I'd heard that concrete could sometimes explode, and that wasn't what I wanted in my life right now.

When I'd gotten through as much of the lid as I could without burning my hands, I threw the rest and looked at my crappy handiwork. A black plastic blister, hanging off the wall, only a couple inches deep. I waited, still trying to hold my breath, and when I couldn't, breathed slowly through my mouth and kept a tight rein on my choking. Eventually, I thought, it was as cool as it was going to be, and I gingerly stepped off of my makeshift ladder onto my even more makeshift platform.

I admit, I was a little surprised when it didn't immediately fall off the wall. I was more surprised but relieved when I got my weight on it and after several seconds, it still hadn't dropped me. I had seriously hoped it would be able to hold...the wall had many narrow holes and lines in it as part of the pouring process, and so the plastic had something to drip into and dry around. It was just a tiny ledge, but it was enough.

Enough for the craziest part of this plan. I held my breath and picked up the tower, happy to find it was so light. I continued to not fall to my death, despite breathing a couple of times. Slowly, the the tower elevated in my hands, like the ladder was climbing me, until it was near the top. Gently, carefully, I pushed the speakers of the tower up and over the mass of barbed wire and let it drop.

It hung there, ominously, swaying slightly from the barbed wire. Carefully, I put one foot onto it, and pulled myself up.

And then I was off my ledge and climbing the ladder again. Except now, swinging in the air, and aware that the struts holding up the barbed wire probably weren't graded for holding up an entire person. Or maybe they were. Maybe the XPCA was a big fan of people being able to fall off the wall into barbed wire and only being maimed.

I didn't know. I didn't care, all that mattered was, after an agonizing, stressful climb almost thirty feet in the air, I was over the barbed wire and onto the wall and thanking all kinds of deities for seeing me safely over.

Over.

Into.

I looked up and remembered that...yeah, I was entering a fight, wasn't I? I'd gotten so focused on my stupid plan and small success that I'd sort of mentally misplaced the Exhumans.

The Exhumans. Who were...where, exactly? I saw two of them down on the ground, not sure if they were the ones I took out earlier or if Karu had but uh. There wasn't much on this wall, nowhere exactly for them to hide.

Karu flew up from the side and hailed me. "I was not expecting to find you up here," she said. "Resourceful."

"Uh, yeah, thought you might need a hand."

She cocked her head. "Me?"

"Yeah," I said stupidly. "I mean. No, just...well, there were four of them…"

She snorted. "They were not trying very hard. Once they realized I was not going to let them pass, they gave up and re-entered the city. I believe they were merely acting as opportunistic combatants, not willing to engage with a real opponent." She sounded almost disappointed. "I let them go because you had disappeared somewhere, but I see it was just to…" She gave my crude contraption a concerned look. "...discover new ways of hurting yourself, perhaps?"

"I did it to help you. And it worked, didn't it?"

"I suppose so, though I am reluctant to commend such recklessness. It would--"

She stopped and held up an arm in a military gesture I recognized as 'hold on, yo.' A moment later, there was a loud metallic bang, and then another. I turned and located the source of the noise as the metal security door at the base of the round guard tower only moments before there was another bang and the door crashed open.

A dozen exosuits rolled out, weapons trained at the ready, glinting XPCA black in the last rays of sunset. They moved into a formation and pointed their guns at me, and at Karu, who landed at my side.

"CEASE HOSTILITIES, DISSIDENTS," said one from somewhere in the middle, his voice transformed by the exosuit's synthesizers into that of a machine's.

"We're not dissidents and we're not hostility-ing," I said, taking a step toward them. As one, the dozen flinched and grabbed their weapons even tighter, pointed them even harder at me.

So maybe don't step towards them. I raised my palms slowly to show I was no threat.

"We are not with the resistance. We defeated two of them," Karu said, pointing at the bodies near us. I hadn't had time to check before, but looking at them now, saw they were both burned, blistered, covered in sweat, but breathing. That was a relief.

"THIS IS A LOCKDOWN SITUATION. THIS IS A MILITARY MATTER. YOU TWO WILL BE DETAINED FOR QUESTIONING, AND IF FOUND SUSPECT, WILL BE TAKEN IN FOR REDEVELOPMENT."

I looked at Karu. "Redevelopment?"

"Though he may not look it, the boy is XPCA. I am a licensed hunter. We saw humans being slaughtered by Exhumans and moved to act. We have documentation to corroborate these claims."

There was a moment's hesitation while it seemed the gentleman (or lady? Who could say, with the voice synths.) presumably conferred with someone over comms, before he stepped out of formation and approached us. S/he demanded our papers in the same booming voice, looked over our IDs, and then we waited for a few minutes.

XPCA did love their paperwork.

After another minute, a soldier emerged from the tower not in an exosuit and handed me a comms. I clipped it on, and realized why I recognized the woman's voice over the PA system earlier.

"Chariot, you lecherous, juvenile, insubordinate, cock-sure, dumb-assed, swill-brained asshole."

"Uh--"

"I wasn't finished. You are stupid, volatile, dangerous to yourself and everyone around you. You take an ordinary situation and ruin everything about it. I should not be surprised that, here we are, halfway across the world, and yet you are still proving yourself a nuisance and making a disaster of everything you conceivably could be. Reckless endangerment, destruction of XPCA apparatus, illegal entry of secure XPCA holdings, engaging an Exhuman without an officer's consent--"

"They were killing people--"

"--they could have been in their window. Did you even try a teaser? Do you even know what the manual says about this kind of situation? Or...don't tell me, you still haven't read the manual?"

"Targa, are you done?" I asked.

"It's CAPTAIN Targa. Is that so hard? Disrespecting a superior officer. I'll add that to the list as well. Are you just here to get me in trouble again? Haven't I suffered you enough?"

"Who is it? Are we in trouble?" Karu whispered.

"It's...some blowhard I went on an op under once. And I think I might be in trouble, but not you."

"BLOWHARD? Do you have any idea what your stupid stunt cost me?" Targa screamed in my ear, making me consider very much the option of chucking the comms off the wall. "After that little op, I was deemed 'unsuitable for field command' because I couldn't keep my subordinates...which is to say you in check. I demonstrated 'poor capacity for leadership in a real-time situation' and 'inflexibility to an evolving battlefield situation'."

"You really did demonstrate all those things, though," I said, unable to help myself.

"Or. OR! You could have just listened to me! And so instead of running real ops, I get stuck here, babysitting three hundred pissy Exhumans all day every day."

"Wait," I said, "you run New Eden?"

"Yes. Have you added 'incapable of understanding basic English' to your list of accolades as well?"

"Oh. See, I was just wondering why the whole place seemed like a shithole and all the Exhumans were pissy and ready to kill each other at the drop of a hat. Now I understand!"

"You--"

"Did you try to make every Exhuman here read a dozen service manuals too?"

"They were all provided with a brief seventy-page primer on the rules, and were instructed that...that's not important! That's not why they're all pissy! I mean, angry!"

"I don't know, it worked for me," I said, chuckling. Something about antagonizing Targa really connected with me on a primal level.

"Listen, Chariot. I have my hands full of my own problems right now, so if you could take your...what is she? I mean, other than the victim of your hormones?"

"She's a pro hunter."

"...really? Well, whatever. Take her and get the hell out of my city. You've already caused enough damage."

"Damage?" I scoffed. "We did nothing. We stopped two of these guys from killing a bunch of your guys."

"Oh, and you didn't destroy an expensive wireless PA tower?"

"It was uh...like that when I found it."

"It was hanging from barbed wire when you found it? We have cameras you realize."

"No, it was broken. It wasn't broadcasting when the rest were. At that point, I destroyed a very fancy street decoration."

"Yes, I see. It was also knocked out by the bomb planted by the resistance."

"Bomb?" I stopped antagonizing her for a minute and looked out over the city. "They're bombing people?"

"It just went off minutes ago, were you not aware? A large one, it must have been. An EMP bomb, knocked out all the electronics in this part of the city, prevented us from getting exosuits online and getting troops in to reinforce the garrison. It was only moments after it went off that they seized their advantage and killed most of the men in this sector," she said bitterly.

Oh. Shit.

"Uh, oh that. I uh, didn't know it was a bomb." I reached into my pocket and pulled out my mobile. Completely fried. I was glad Karu's gear was EMP hardened...I hadn't even considered the ramifications of using that attack down there.

"So frustrating, too," she continued. "We monitor everything that goes in or out of the city, nothing seemed to indicate they had the capacity for this kind of thing. I suppose current measures are insufficient and we'll have to step things up even more."

"Meaning…?"

"Meaning, crack down harder. The citizens know about the resistance and their movements, they just won't tell us anything. To think they could assemble a bomb of that power right under our noses. We need to push them into seeing that the existence of the resistance is harming their quality of life," she sighed. "For their own good."

"Look, let's not...get crazy here," I said. "Maybe there was another way they set off an EMP."

"Like what? Adapted normal appliances? Not nearly enough power for that kind of blast. Their powers? There's an electropath or two in there, but none that have shown that kind of potential. It was either a bomb or--"

She stopped and I cringed. The silence dragged on for several more seconds.

"What is the matter with your face?" Karu asked.

"I might have messed up a tiny bit," I said.

"A TINY BIT?" Targa screamed. "DO YOU TYPICALLY GO ABOUT SETTING OFF MILITARY-LEVEL DETONATIONS WHEN VISITING A SECURE FACILITY FOR FUN? OR DID YOU KNOW IT WAS ME WHO WAS IN CHARGE AND JUST WANTED TO TRY TO GET ME DISMISSED FROM SERVICE AGAIN?"

"Targa, I'm sorry!"

"CAPTAIN. TARGA. CAPTAIN. For fuck's sake!"

"Yes. Captain Targa." For some reason I was making placating gestures at my comms. "I am very sorry. We were just here looking for someone, and things got crazy, and...and I used my powers to protect myself from a crazy Exhuman," I half-lied.

"And now a dozen of my men are dead because of you."

She lapsed into a silence which was more painful than any criticism she had carried thus far. I wanted to apologize, to fix things, to do anything, but none of the words in my head sounded like they meant anything compared to what I'd done.

"Just leave, Chariot," she said.

"I...I'm really sorry, but I can't do that," I said. "I'm looking for someone."

"Look somewhere else. You're not welcome here anymore."

"I can't. She's here."

Silence fell again, and Karu gave me a curious look, asking me with her face if I was done. I just turned away and waited for Targa to reply.

Captain Targa. Whose men I'd just killed.

"Fine, Chariot. Stay. Go. Do whatever you want," she said at last, her voice nothing more than a quiet breath. "But hear me when I say this," she said, slightly louder but with more menace than I'd heard from her yet. "You make one mistake, you endanger any more of my men or facilities, you put one lightning-powered pimple out of line, I will fucking end you. That is a promise."

I swallowed heavily. "Yeah. I hear you."

"Good. Now go find your friend so you can get the fuck out of my city."

The comms cut into silence.