Chapter 498 | When The Powerhouse Shakes [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 498: 498 | When The Powerhouse Shakes [CASTLE BONUS]

Camille’s grin came up slow and infuriating. "Wow, so you can be nice."

"Don’t."

"Fitzgerald just complimented us," Felicity said, and she said it to nobody in particular, and she said it loud, and she was clearly logging it somewhere for future use. "That’s going in the group chat. Not today. But eventually."

"There is no group chat."

"There’s a group chat, bestie."

Sloane dragged a hand down her face and reminded herself that killing your allies during a live incursion looked bad on the record.

"Okay." She jabbed a finger toward the far door. "Substation’s through there. The shutters are on a hard mechanical lockdown, which means somebody’s overriding the release from inside the building. Comms are jammed the same way. Probably the same person doing both. We find them, we unjam the system, the entire California Hero Network shows up in under five minutes, and this stops being our problem."

"And if it’s not the same person?" Camille dropped off the crate and landed easy, orange still flickering at her fingertips like embers refusing to die.

"Then we hit two people instead of one."

"I like her plan," Felicity said, sounding genuinely pleased about it. "It’s very simple. Very direct. It’s giving Sloane."

"I will detonate you."

"You will not, bestie, you literally would never. You’re all bark and we both know it. Lukas told me."

Sloane stopped walking.

The heat that went up the back of her neck was so immediate and so total that her Aspect activated twice at her hip without permission. Tiny amber cracks scorched the floor tile. She felt the residual charge buzz in her thighs and did absolutely nothing productive with the information.

"He did not say that."

"He absolutely said that. Word for word. He was like, she gets loud but she’s—" Felicity’s face did something soft and unbearable and completely genuine. "Anyway. He’s very sweet about you. The way he talks about you is actually kind of unfair. Like he thinks you’re—"

"Shut up."

"Making a note," Camille said, and she said it with the precision of someone logging ammunition for later. "Fitzgerald goes pink at the ears when you say Belmont’s name. Filing that for tactical use."

"Both of you shut up. We are in combat."

She got moving before either of them could see her face properly, which meant she was walking point now, which meant she was walking point in a building full of people who had come here specifically to hurt her friends. She found she was completely fine with that. The part of her that wanted to blow something up had plenty of targets and no confusion about which direction to face.

The corridor past the loading bay opened onto the central span. A long steel gantry ran above the whole sector, and the three of them came up onto it together and stopped.

Below them, past the collapse field and the smoke and the red emergency wash painting everything the wrong color, the floor of the Crucible opened into the central plaza where the four environments met. The structural joints were visible from here. So was the man standing in the middle of it.

He wore a mask. Plain and pale and blank across the front, no features, nothing human about it. His hands were folded behind his back like he was waiting for a train. Twenty feet of open ground around him in every direction. Nothing touching him. No urgency in his posture whatsoever.

He looked like someone who had all the time in the world and knew it.

And next to him.

Sloane’s brain refused it for about a second and a half.

It stood twelve feet, maybe more. The wrong color. A dead white that had nothing to do with skin or light or any living thing. Black lines ran across every inch of it in bands that doubled back and curled into themselves like writing before writing existed, like someone had tried to describe geometry using only nightmares. Horns erupted from its skull in a crown of six, uneven lengths jutting at angles that made her eyes ache to follow. One arm hung longer than the other, fingers dragging close to its knees, and the joints bent in directions that no skeleton she had ever seen accounted for. The proportions were assembled wrong. Not broken. Wrong from the beginning. Like someone had been told what a body was and had built one anyway without checking.

It stood perfectly still.

That was the thing that cracked something behind Sloane’s ribs. It wasn’t pacing. It wasn’t flexing. It wasn’t looking around or tracking movement or giving any indication that it registered the space it occupied or the people staring at it. It stood next to the masked man with the kind of absolute motionlessness that only happened when something had been powered down, switched off at the root, and the entire mass of it communicated a single unambiguous message: this can be turned back on.

Sloane’s brain was still working. Still calculating. Still trying to map the fight, the angles, the charge time she would need to hit something that size hard enough to matter.

Her legs were screaming at her to run.

Not her thoughts. Her body. Her spine, her gut, the base of her skull where fear lived before language had a name for it. The six-year-old who had manifested Detonation in her mother’s kitchen because she got scared and couldn’t hold it in. That part of her went off all at once, louder than it had in years, and told her to turn around, get out of this building, and never think about that shape again.

Her hands were shaking. Sloane Fitzgerald’s hands did not shake.

"Oh," Felicity breathed. All of the brightness had drained out of her voice and what was left was very small and very young. "Oh, no. No, that’s not, that’s not a person, right? Tell me that’s not."

Camille said nothing.

That was worse than anything Camille could have said.

Sloane looked down at that plaza, at the thing with the horns and the black writing on its bones, and every calculation she had ever run about her own ceiling collapsed into a single flat number.

If that turned on, she died.

She hated that thought. She had never had that thought about anything in her life.

The bond gave a small pull in her chest, southeast, three hundred meters, warm and stubborn and still there.

"Comms," she said. Her voice came out steadier than it had any right to. "We fix the comms. Right now. Before that thing wakes up."