Chapter 522 | Six Inches from Forever [GT BONUS]

Chapter 522: 522 | Six Inches from Forever [GT BONUS]

Maribelle already had her palm flat on the chest of a masked man who had made the mistake of standing near her, and whatever she was murmuring, his knees were going out from under him. Her tail was flicking hard enough to count as a threat display. Her gold eyes came up and found me across sixty feet of ruined plaza and she made a face at my shoulder that I did not care for.

"Belmont, your arm is at the wrong angle."

"I’m aware."

"No, I mean it’s giving me a personal problem."

"Kennedy, hold the corridor."

Percy’s voice threaded under all of it on the channel, steady, running numbers, doing the one thing nobody else in this building can do while people are on fire. Six minutes fourteen. Network response confirmed inbound. Rocco Vale relocated to sublevel two. Valentine has flagged down two licensed responders at the perimeter and they are cutting the northwest breach wider.

Six minutes.

That was the entire assignment. Not win. Not kill. Not be spectacular in front of a woman with static in her hair who had told me to save people and let her handle the conversations afterward.

Six minutes of nobody dying.

We were going to make it, and I let myself think that, which was stupid.

Because Thatch stopped being amused.

I saw it happen. Forty feet, Hiro’s light on everything, and I watched the fascination drain out of that boy’s face like water out of a cracked basin, and what filled the space behind it was worse than rage. It was the look of a man who has just remembered why he was sent, and who is not looking forward to what remembering will cost him.

The tapping stopped entirely.

His fire changed register. It had been sprawling before, ropes and gouts and lakes of it, theater for the cameras that the Twilight Society had gone to enormous expense to install. Now it pulled in tight against his forearms and got hotter, the black going somehow blacker, the edges of it going clean and thin and shaped like a decision.

"You’re all doing very well," he said, and his voice had lost the tremor. "I’d like that on the record. Genuinely."

Then he turned toward Sloane.

I understood it instantly, and I hated how good it was.

Nine years. Nine years of somebody building a tactical read into a boy who was never taught to care about the people he was reading. He had watched the five of us for six minutes and he had correctly identified that Hiro’s light could be replaced, that Felicity’s paint could be waited out, that Camille could be outlasted, and that I was already a dead battery propped up by spite.

Sloane was the structure. Sloane was the one who had not moved off my flank once in six minutes, who was managing the creature’s entire pathing with tight bursts into tile, who had blown past her documented six-charge ceiling somewhere around ten and had kept going without slowing down.

Take out the structure and the rest of it collapses in four seconds.

"Sloane," I said.

She was already turning, because she felt it come off me through the bond before the word got out of my mouth, and I felt her feel it, that horrible doubled loop where her fear arrived in my chest at the same instant mine arrived in hers.

He went for her arm.

Not her chest. Not her head. Her right forearm, the one she charges through, the same target he had taken off Steele twenty minutes earlier, and I recognized the trajectory because I had watched what that fire did to skin and I knew exactly what Sloane Fitzgerald would be for the rest of her life if it landed.

She would never charge again. Detonation runs through the arm.

The interface said nothing. No prompt, no probability, no side quest, no notification about the mathematics of what I was about to spend. Whatever was left in my reserves was measured in decimal places and I did not stop to check the balance.

I hit her.

Full body, shoulder first, the ruined one, and I heard something in it give up on the concept of being a joint. Her hero suit was scorched and slick and she was heavier than she looks because eleven years of training packs weight into a frame that reads slight, and I got both arms around her waist and drove her sideways off her feet with the very last thing I had.

She made a sound against my chest that was not a word.

And then the gold came up.

Not Lightning Cloak. I want to be exact about this because I have thought about it every night since. Lightning Cloak feels like current, like voltage crawling the outside of your skin looking for ground, and it announces itself, and I had nothing left to activate it with.

This came from underneath.

It came from somewhere behind my sternum that the interface has never once mentioned, has never assigned a rarity to, has never billed me for. No notification. No name. It rose through my chest and out across my back like something opening, and the light it threw was warmer than anything gold has any right to be.

Then the fire hit it.

Sound is the wrong word for what that was. It arrived in my teeth and my sinuses and the backs of my knees, a shriek of two things touching that should not have been in the same room, black going into gold and the gold refusing to let it through.

The fire broke.

It came apart across my back in every direction at once, sheets of lightless heat peeling off sideways and up, scattering into the plaza and dying against tile that had already melted once today. Six inches from Sloane’s arm. Six inches, and it went nowhere.

I put her down on the ground under me and I felt her hands come up into the front of my suit.

Then it was very quiet in a dome full of screaming.

I was standing. That is the detail I have trouble with. I got up off her and I was standing, upright, both feet under me, and I was not moving at all, and thin grey smoke was coming off me in ropes and rising straight up into Hiro’s light.

The gold went out.

My back had stopped reporting in. Not pain. There is a threshold past which a nerve simply stops filing paperwork, and I had gone through it somewhere in the first quarter second, and what I had instead was the smell of my own jacket and a distant awareness that Diane had picked that jacket specifically because it was hard to photograph.

She was going to be so annoyed.