Dude powered up Billy's protective shielding and the male agent's punch slammed against a glowing field of defense, but it still knocked Billy off his feet. He blasted the agent in the knee and again in the mask, hoping whatever modifications they had made to Distribution's armor protected the user's head better than the original. Billy wanted to win, but he didn't want to kill the guy.
He looked up to see Jane grappling with her agent, a shockingly even test of strength. Whatever juice Emily's ill-advised body slam had provided looked to be enough to put the agent on par with Jane's physical power.
I have an idea, Dude, Billy thought.
Escape is advisable,
Dude said.
They have done an excellent job of hiding the suits' power source. I do not believe we can use the same trick as we did before.
"Then it's time for another tactic," Billy said. "Emily!"
"I'm busy!"
"Emily, listen — bubble of float them both — if they can't touch anything they can't build up any kinetic energy. They'll be inert!"
"You are so close to not being the dumbest Indestructible!"
"I heard that!" Jane said.
"No offense," said Emily.
"I mean I heard it! Billy — now!" Jane said, and let go of her opponent, kicking her in the chest to create a few feet of space between them. Billy made a similar move, stepping away to escape the range of Emily's bubble, and both agents found themselves floating harmlessly ten feet off the ground.
"Do your suits prevent air sickness?" Emily said.
The armored agents started floating slowly in circles, arms and legs flailing and kicking.
"I can't believe that worked," Billy said.
It was a good plan, Billy Case,
Dude said.
"Thanks, Dude."
And then Billy felt the worst pain in his life.
A blast not unlike his own slammed into him, darker, red-yellow instead of blue-white. It was a full-body sensation, a pulling, tearing feeling so powerful it knocked him to the ground. Everything went white for a moment, and then he was looking at himself — a mirror image, but pure white light, reaching out to him, a look of terror on the face looking back at him. Billy, prone and looking up, reached back toward his shadow self, but his hand passed right through the light. Then the shape started to look less and less like him, more amorphous, more alien.
And then it bolted away, faster than anything Billy had ever seen, skimming out across the water and out of sight.
He tried to stand back up, but everything hurt, his legs, his skin. He started to shake.
"Dude? What the hell was that?"
There was no answer.
"Dude? Talk to me. Talk to me!"
Billy felt strong hands on him, then saw Jane, her eyes wide with terror. He looked from her to where Emily stood, still holding both agents in the air but with jaw wide, her entire body completely still. And there was Prevention, holding a massive rifle that was unlike any earthly weapon he'd ever seen.
"Dude, what is that. Dude. Dude!"
Billy held out a hand to try to blast the rifle with his own powers, but nothing happened. He didn't feel the familiar surge of energy he always felt build up in his hands. He didn't experience the comforting hum of power his protective shields gave off.
Worst of all, he didn't hear Dude's voice in his head. In its place, there was only silence, a raw, deafening emptiness.
Dude was gone. For the first time in years, Billy Case was alone in his own head.
He started to convulse.
Jane's arms wrapped around him, that supernatural warmth she radiated sinking into his muscles, but it wasn't enough to stop the shakes. He managed to get to his knees but no further. Billy looked at his hands, empty and dark.
"What did you do!" Jane said.
She stormed toward Prevention, and Billy thought, truly believed, Jane was about to murder the older woman. But Prevention dropped the rifle and pulled out a small handgun, which she pointed not at Jane but at Billy.
"This weapon temporarily disrupts the connection between a Luminae and its host," Prevention said. "Right now your friend is completely defenseless. So if you don't want me to put a bullet in him, you're going to have your psychotic little sidekick put my agents down and all three of you are coming inside. Peacefully. Now."
Jane looked at Billy.
He shook his head.
"Run. I'll be okay. Just go. Both of you."
Emily made the decision for both of them. The agents slammed to the ground as she released her bubbles of float. One of the agents stood up to cuff her, but she shoved him away again and headed toward Billy.
Billy dropped to the ground, all strength gone from his body. It felt like every injury he'd experienced while being Straylight was suddenly real, every bruise, every punch. Despite this, he knew there was one thing he could do. He whispered, hoping the tiny microphones they all wore to communicate in battle still worked.
"Dancer," he said, as softly as he could. "They've got us. Run."
And then Emily and Jane helped him to his feet, and they all but carried him into the Labyrinth.
Chapter 20:
Mouse trap
Perfectionists and failure do not mix.
Kate knew the mixture of dread and self-loathing she'd been feeling lately was all self-inflicted. Yes, she'd experienced some failures — the lingering doubts that she had made the wrong decision on the oil rig, the gun-running bust not ending the way she wanted it to, even her ridiculous mistake at the hospital — but each mistake was couched in a legitimate success. They had derailed the plans of the Children of the Elder Star and destroyed their experiment. She had removed thousands of guns from the streets of the city in one night's work, even if the gunrunners themselves had been eventually released. She found evidence about who was making everyone sick at the hospital, even if she needed a rescue from Jane in order to escape.
But I really must be better than this, she thought, hanging out like a night owl on a rooftop, overlooking her city. Things were quiet tonight, but they'd been quiet for a while now, with every associate of LaCoste on their best behavior as he waited for a court date in which a corrupt judge and a corrupt jury would let him go free. It was a matter of putting on a good face in town for now, so things had been safer in town, even if there were a hundred thugs looking to put a bullet in her for what she did to LaCoste and his men.
Kate heard the men before she saw them, approaching on foot with a unified precision that told her they were not criminals but some sort of organized military unit. Too much in synch, too precise to be a couple of gangsters hoping to score points with LaCoste. She was well out of site when the first rubber bullet ricocheted off the rooftop ledge where she'd just been.
Then the neighborhood turned into a warzone.
A tactical team in body armor moved out, trying to box her in. Their uniforms were unmarked but Kate could see the practiced precision in their movements, some sort of police unit, highly trained.
But since they were coming for her, she did not feel obligated to play politely. Kate returned their rubber bullets with a smoke canister and dropped into the middle of the group, throwing kicks at nerve packets unprotected by body armor, crooks of knees, bends of elbows, exposed tracheas, nothing fatal, everything painful. She fired her grappling hook and yanked herself out of harm's way while they broke formation and watched with bitter amusement as one of their own men took three rubber bullets to the chest armor at almost point blank range.
Then the second team spotted her, a brand new pack of troopers on the rooftops. They silently pursued her, firing rubber bullets from guns with long, threatening silencers mounted to their muzzles. The entire confrontation was eerily quiet, and as Kate launched another smoke canister — this one with an eye and throat irritant built in, nothing deadly but certainly enough to make it difficult to shoot at her — the night became a creepy collection of drifting gray-black smog and bouncing riot control bullets.
She jumped to street level and started running through an alley, only to have a black van cut her off at the end. She chucked one of her few remaining gas canisters directly into the open van door, but a third assault team still piled out. Frustrated, Kate dove headlong into them, spinning her most vicious kicks, the metal caps on her toes and heels cracking protective goggles and breaking fingers and noses. She put her foot on one of the soldier's heads and used his body as a stepping stone to get up and over the van and landed on the other side. She broke into a run, mentally calculating the fastest way back to where she'd left her hoverbike and how many more teams of mystery soldiers she'd have to fight her way through to get there.
Something thumped against the body armor protecting her left shoulder, too hard to be a rubber bullet. The armor held, but her whole arm went numb with the impact. They were shooting to kill now. She must have reached the limits of their acceptable losses to bring her in alive. She ducked and ran faster, hoping she could at least avoid getting shot in the leg or head.
A yellow cab squealed to a stop right in front of her, the door swinging open as it arrived.
"Get in," a familiar scarred face said.
She never thought she'd be this relieved to see Alley Hawk's ugly mug unexpectedly. Too winded to speak, she dove into the back seat and let the door slam shut behind her as the car peeled away. Bullets thudded against the door, breaking the windows. Alley Hawk cursed when a bullet whipped past his face and spider-webbed the driver's side window. They tore through the City's streets, another black van in pursuit.
"How long can you hold your breath?" Alley Hawk asked.
"Three and a half minutes," Kate said.
Nonchalantly, Alley Hawk tossed a small breathing device over his shoulder to her.
"Take that."
She was about to ask why she could possibly need to breathe underwater when Neal's voice chimed into her earpiece.
"Message for Designation: Dancer," the computer said.
"Neal! I'm under attack. Get Solar on the line."
"Designations Solar, Straylight, and Entropy are offline," Neal said. "I have a recorded message from Designation: Straylight."
"Play it!"
Billy's voice, despondent and quiet, crackled through her receiver.
"Dancer. They got us. Run."
"Hawk, the others are all out of commission!"
The Alley Hawk grunted. Kate looked through the windshield and saw he had them on a collision course with the pier and the City's harbor.
"Roll down your windows, hold your breath, and grab that rebreather," Alley Hawk said.
"You always take me to the best places!"
Without slowing down, the taxi drove off the pier, hanging in mid air for what felt like whole minutes. Kate could see the black van slamming on its breaks and crashing into a streetlight head on in an attempt to avoid flying into the harbor as well.
The taxi hit the water hard enough to make Kate's stomach lurch and began to sink.
Alley Hawk grabbed her arm and gestured for her to wait. Together, they remained perfectly still, the water enveloping them and the car, sinking fast into the black waters of the harbor. Once submerged, they glided out a broken window, the Alley Hawk carefully guiding Kate deeper into the water. She was a strong swimmer, but she could tell he had a plan and didn't want to get turned around in the murky ocean water, and so she let him half guide, half tow her toward whatever destination he had in mind.
Against all logic, they swam deeper, thirty, forty feet or more. Kate thought they were headed under the pier but she couldn't be sure. She took a measured breath through the oxygen mask he'd given her. She could hold her breath longer if she needed to, but she wanted to stay lucid and keep her strength up.
He led her to a large, corroded pipe leading out from the mainland into the harbor. He looked her directly in the eyes, and she could read his question: is this okay? She nodded. Together, they swam into the darkness, using the slick, slimy edges of the pipe to pull themselves along against the water flow. They were in pitch darkness a long time — a hundred feet? Maybe more? Kate couldn't tell, between the alien darkness of the pipe and the cold gloom of the water.
Finally, a glittering light appeared, filtering into the water from above. It looked yellowish green, as if passing through a layer of pond scum. The Alley Hawk helped her the last few meters, not because she was running out of strength but because, she knew, he wanted to make sure she understood this was the place where they could break through to the surface again.
They burst from the water, gasping for air, covered in sea slime. Together, they paddled to the stone landing nearby. Kate took in her surroundings, an archaic brick tunnel that looked more at home in a European graveyard than a modern city's sewer system.
"What is this place?" she said, pulling herself out of the water. Now it was her turn to help the Ally Hawk, whose disguise — street clothes of jacket and jeans and sneakers — weighed him down as he tried to drag himself back onto dry land.
"The whole City is a honeycomb of tunnels," he said. "No one knows where they came from originally. Some have been built into the infrastructure and sewer system, but others . . ."
He gestured around the room.
Kate flexed her fingers, making sure the numbness from the earlier gunshot was fading. She dragged herself to a wall and flopped down.
"They have the others," Kate said. "Whoever they are."
"The Department," Alley Hawk said. "I got wind of it and came looking for you. Thought you might need a hand."
Kate nodded, her strength returning, and with it, her anger. The Department. Their former friends. They had her friends. They tried to kill her.
They had no idea the kind of enemy they just made.
Kate tapped her earpiece, hoping the weird technology it used was waterproof.
"Neal?"
"I read you, Designation: Dancer."
Good. We're in business.
"I need you to find Titus," she said. "Tell him . . . Tell him I need him. Be very specific about that. Tell him I need him to come home."
"I am tracking Designation: Fury's whereabouts. Sensors indicate he is approximately three weeks away by foot and without a vehicle for travel. He must also cross the border to return and may . . ."
"Neal, you're a bloody space ship. Find him, and go fetch him if you have to."
"Yes, Designation: Dancer."
"We're going to need more help," Kate said. "Can't believe I'm going say this, but I want you to try to find Bedlam."
"As you wish, Designation: Dancer."
She gritted her teeth and looked at Alley Hawk.
"You up for lending a hand?"
"Wouldn't be here if I wasn't."
"Good," Kate said. One more thing, then. "Neal, tell me there's a way we can reach Valkyrie. That sentient storm owes us a favor, and I want these people to know if they mess with the Indestructibles, we will drop a hurricane on their heads."