Baxter watched the whole thing from the rooftop of a building three blocks from the plaza.
He enhanced his eyes with mahna. He'd considered getting closer, finding a spot in the crowd, being there when Reid's world came apart the way Reid had been there when his did. But the smarter part of his brain, the part that had kept him alive in that shack for over a year, won out. An entire city's worth of Peacekeepers were looking for his face. Showing it in a crowd full of them would be the stupidest thing he'd ever done, and Baxter had done some phenomenally stupid things in his life.
So he watched from a distance. Saw the barriers shatter. Saw the panda hit the stage like a falling star. Saw Reid's body crumple under her. Saw the A-Grades go down. Saw the B-Grades go down. Saw the Peacekeepers charge and fall one after another.
He cried.
Just tears, running down his cheeks as he laughed air out of his lungs. It was the strangest feeling. Like something that had been wound tight inside his chest for over a year was finally loosening, thread by thread, with each blow that landed on Reid Calloway's body.
It wasn't enough. It would never be enough. But it was something. And something was more than he'd had yesterday.
They met at the meetup point an hour later. An abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of the magji district, far enough from the chaos that the sirens were just a distant hum. Baxter was already inside when Zoey and Tiffany arrived. He'd packed a small bag. Clean clothes, what little money he had, a few magji tools. Everything a man needed to disappear and start over somewhere far away.
Zoey pulled off her panda mask as she walked in. Her face was sweaty and cut in several places from Maren's metal storms. Her body ached from the Overdraft strain. But she was standing, and the job was done.
"He's alive?" Baxter asked.
"Alive. Broken. Hospitalized for a long time probably." Zoey set the mask on a crate.
"Good." Baxter's voice was quiet. Not gleeful like it had been after Sable and the hospital. "Good."
He reached into his bag and pulled out a wooden box, roughly the size of a shoebox, sealed with a mahna lock that responded to his touch. The lock clicked open and Baxter lifted the lid.
The Rebirth Fetus sat inside on a bed of dark cloth.
It was exactly as disgusting as Kali had described. A blood-red shape that was disturbingly realistic in its resemblance to an actual human fetus. About the size of Zoey's fist, glistening faintly, with a warmth that radiated through the box. It pulsed as if it had a heartbeat also breathing.
Tiffany leaned over to look and immediately leaned back. "Nope. Nope nope nope."
"It's a daemonic object," Baxter said, closing the box and holding it out to Zoey. "Treat it carefully. Don't expose it to direct sunlight for extended periods and don't let anyone with active mahna touch it besides the person it's meant for. When you place it on whoever, it'll do the rest."
Zoey took the box. It was warm in her hands. She could feel the faint pulse through the wood, like holding a sleeping animal.
"Thank you." She said it and meant it, which surprised her.
Baxter nodded. "We're even. You did your job. I paid you." He slung his bag over his shoulder. "I'm heading west. There's an OM branch on the coast that doesn't know my face or my name. I'll register fresh, take cases to make a living and keep my head down."
"And your mouth shut?" Zoey raised an eyebrow.
Baxter laughed. "I'll work on it."
He walked toward the warehouse door, paused, and turned back.
"For what it's worth, whoever you are under that mask, you're the scariest person I've ever met. And I grew up with Reid Calloway."
He left.
Tiffany watched him go with her arms crossed. "Think he'll be okay?"
"Don't know. Don't care." Zoey was staring at the box. Her mom was in a clinic breathing through a tube. The thing that could fix her was in her hands. Right now. Right here.
She had to get home. Now.
"Tiffany."
"Yeah?"
"I'm sorry."
Tiffany's expression shifted from casual to confused. "Sorry for wha..."
Zoey unlocked the eighth gate.
The warehouse shook. The air around Zoey's body erupted with mahna so dense that the walls cracked and the ceiling groaned. Her muscles swelled beyond Overdraft's limits, her veins turning white-hot, her bones screaming as forces they were never meant to contain tore through them. The pain was immediate and terrible and she withstood it.
Cody and Max howled.
Zoey cradled the box against her chest with one arm, crouched, and launched herself upward. The warehouse roof disintegrated above her as she punched through it and into the sky. The sonic boom that followed blew out every window in a two-block radius and knocked Tiffany flat on her back.
Tiffany lay on the warehouse floor, staring up at the hole in the ceiling and the fading trail of white light that marked Zoey's trajectory across the sky.
"She said sorry to me," Tiffany whispered to herself, a dazed smile spreading across her face. "That's basically I love you."
…
Zoey crossed the distance between Brimton and Krey in a series of leaps that would have been visible to anyone looking at the sky at the right moment. A streak of white light arcing over highways, farmland, forests, and cities. Each landing cratered whatever surface she hit, a field, a hillside, a stretch of empty road, before she launched again. The eighth gate made her body something inhuman. Speed, power, durability, all of it pushed past every limit she'd ever tested.
It was also destroying her from the inside.
She could feel the bones in her legs fracturing with each landing. Her organs were bruising from the repeated impacts of acceleration and deceleration. Her mahna pathways were burning, literally burning, the channels that carried mahna through her body overloading from the output of eight open gates. Blood was filling her mouth. She swallowed it and kept going.
'We are gonna be so fucked after this,' Inner Zoey warned.
'We'll be fine.'
'We're going to die.'
'No we're not. Endurance saved us from falling from space. It'll save us from this.'
The skyline of Krey appeared on the horizon. Zoey angled her final leap toward the outskirts of the city, aiming for a stretch of park she vaguely recognized from morning jogs. She needed to land somewhere that wasn't a building or a highway or a crowd of people.
She hit the park at an angle that carved a trench thirty feet long through the grass and dirt. Trees bent away from the impact. Car alarms went off in the parking lot nearby. A flock of birds erupted from the treeline in a panicked cloud.
Zoey locked the gates. All eight. Slammed them shut one by one as she lay in the trench her body had made, the box still cradled against her chest.
The pain arrived all at once. Every fracture, every bruised organ, every burned mahna pathway, every piece of damage she'd been ignoring since the first leap hit her simultaneously. Her body seized. Blood poured from her nose and mouth, pooling in the dirt beneath her. She couldn't see straight. She couldn't breathe without something inside her shifting in a way that made her want to scream.
She let out a single scream because screaming hurt worse than not screaming.
Zoey rolled onto her hands and knees. The box was still intact. The Rebirth Fetus still pulsed inside it, warm and steady. She pressed it against her chest and forced herself to stand.
Her legs buckled. She caught herself on a park bench that she must have landed near and held on until the world stopped spinning. Blood dripped from her chin onto the bench's wooden surface. Her braids hung around her face, loose and tangled and caked with dirt.
"Oh my God! Are you okay?!"
A guy's voice. Coming from the parking lot. Zoey squinted through the blood and the blurred vision and saw a guy in his early twenties jogging toward her with his phone in one hand and his car keys in the other. He was wearing a t-shirt with a logo she couldn't make out.
He reached her and his eyes went wide. Not at the blood. Not at the injuries. At her face.
"Holy shit. You're... you're the Devil. Oh my God."
Zoey tried to straighten up. Failed. Leaned harder on the bench.
"Do you need me to call an ambulance?!" He was already pulling up his phone.
"No." Zoey shook her head. The motion made something in her neck grind. "I need to get home."
The fan looked at her. Covered in blood, barely standing. His eyes drifted down to the box she was clutching against her chest. The lid had cracked open during the landing, and through the gap, the blood-red shape of the Rebirth Fetus was visible. Glistening. Pulsing. Disturbingly, unmistakably shaped like a tiny human body.
His face went pale.
"Oh. Oh God. Is that... did you..." He lowered his voice to a whisper. "Did you have a... I mean, was it a..."
Zoey followed his eyes to the box. To the fetus-shaped thing peeking through the cracked lid. To the blood all over her body. She looked back at him.
She was too broken and too exhausted to correct him. Her brain was running on fumes and pain, and constructing a plausible explanation for why a famous female boxer was standing in a crater in a public park covered in blood and holding what appeared to be a dead baby was beyond her current capabilities.
"Can you drive me home?" Zoey asked instead.
"Yes! Yeah, of course. My car's right there." He pointed to a beat-up sedan in the parking lot. "Can you walk?"
"Probably not."
He hesitated for only a second before stepping forward and carefully putting her arm over his shoulders. He was taller than her, which wasn't saying much, but he adjusted so she could lean on him without having to reach up. He smelled like fast food and laundry detergent.
He helped her into the backseat. She immediately got blood on everything. The seats, the door handle, the seatbelt. She looked at the mess she was making and felt a pang of guilt.
"I'll help you pay for cleaning your car after..."
"N-No worries! Seriously, it's totally fine." He waved his hands as he got into the driver's seat. "I'm, like, a really big fan of you, Ms. Devil. This is, I mean, not the circumstances obviously, but like, meeting you? This is crazy. I dreamed of this moment."
He started the car. His hands were shaking on the steering wheel.
"Where do you live?"
Zoey gave him the address. He typed it into his GPS and pulled out of the parking lot.
"I just want you to know," he started, his voice going a mile a minute, "I'm not going to tell anyone about this. About the, uh, the... your situation. The... yeah." He gestured vaguely toward the backseat without looking. "I'll keep my mouth shut about everything. It's your business and your body and I totally respect that and I just want you to know that whatever happened, it doesn't change anything. Like, for me. As a fan."
"Thank you." Zoey closed her eyes and focused on breathing. She didn't know what the fuck he was going on about.
"I've been watching you since your first fight! The one where you fought that guy with a staff... actually, maybe I shouldn't bring up violence right now. Sorry. But I always buy the streaming pass because the tickets are kind of really expensive, but I always watch live. You have this thing where you like, be totally fucking awesome and entertaining? And we always see it coming but its still always so amazing to watch and I'm kind of obsessed but not in a creepy way I promise."
Zoey let him ramble. His voice was nervous and jumpy and sincere and it filled the car in a way that was oddly comforting.
"And I know people say you're like, a villain or an actual demon or whatever, but I think that's just the character. Like, the Devil thing..." He glanced at the rearview mirror and saw her bleeding in his backseat, holding the cracked box like it was the most precious thing in the world.
He kept going. Stuttering about how he wouldn't mention the clinic or the absent baby daddy. That even if she went through something like this, he hoped she'd take the time to properly recover. That he'd still be waiting for her to continue fighting because no other fighter made him feel the way she did. He always showed up for her fights. He loved watching her fight. Just rambling and rambling and rambling.
Zoey opened her eyes.
"What's your name?" she asked.
"Oh! Uh, Bryan. Bryan Hollis."
"Bryan."
"Yeah?"
"You talk a lot."
"I know. I'm sorry. I do that when I'm nervous. My mom says I could talk the paint off a wall. She also says I..."
"Bryan."
"Yeah?"
"Thank you. Really."
Bryan Hollis shut up for the first time since she'd met him. He drove the rest of the way with a wide smile on his face and his hands steady on the wheel.
They pulled up to the house thirteen minutes later. Bryan helped Zoey out of the backseat, carrying most of her weight as they walked to the front door. She was lighter than he expected.
He knocked on the door with his foot because both of his arms were occupied.
The door opened. Everett Winters stood in the doorway in a t-shirt and sweatpants, the warm light of the house spilling out behind him. His eyes went from Bryan's face to Zoey's face to the blood to the box and back to Zoey's face.
"Hey, Everett." Zoey waved weakly.
"Zoey, what the hell..."
"I-I'm okay, Everett." She wasn't. They both knew it. "We need to come in. It's kind of an emergency."
Everett stepped aside without another word. Bryan helped Zoey through the doorway. Blood was trailing on the hallway floor.
"Take me to my mom." Zoey told Bryan, cradling the cracked box against her chest.
"Uh, sure, where is she?" Bryan didn't know where to go.
Everett's expression shifted. He didn't know what was in the box. He didn't know where she'd been or what she'd done to look like this. But he knew that whatever it was, it was for their mother.
"Follow me," Everett said.