Mechanical-Arm Spider #79
The hole in the ground was Canary's work.
Oliver knew that the moment he crouched at the foundation's broken edge and read the pattern of the collapse -- the retaining wall separated clean at the seam, stress fractures spreading outward in the radial signature of sonic impact rather than explosives or forced entry. He'd seen her open walls before. He knew the shape the sound left behind.
He dropped into it without spending any more time on the edge.
The utility corridor below was dim and smelled like disturbed earth and broken concrete dust still settling. His landing put him in a crouch and his eyes moved through the space before he straightened -- the blown-open first door to his left, its lock mechanism visible where the frame had separated; the composite paneling on the walls, too clean for a maintenance corridor; the recessed lighting, the epoxy floor, all of it telling him the same thing Felicity's schematics had been trying to tell him for two minutes before he'd pulled the earpiece.
Whatever was down here wasn't on any floor plan Queen Consolidated had ever filed.
He moved south at a pace that didn't cost him silence. His quiver sat across his shoulders with the weight he'd measured out in the armory -- not the light patrol kit, the full array, seventeen shafts left after a night that had used everything else up. The bow was in his left hand, frame resting against his forearm, the worn grip finding the place on his palm it always found. The hairline mark near the lower limb caught the corridor light for a fraction of a second as he passed a recessed fixture -- that old bullet scar from a night in the Glades two years ago, healed wrong by his own hands because there hadn't been time to do it properly. He'd left it that way afterward.
The second door was intact. Closed, camera dome above the frame, the composite panels on both sides bent inward where the pressure wave had reached them. He stood off to the right of the camera's visible arc and listened.
Voices. A woman's, low and focused. An alarm cycling on a pitch that had been going long enough to become background noise. Below both of those, underneath the alarm's repetition, a sound he couldn't immediately place -- a low mechanical fluctuation, almost rhythmic, like something being calibrated under protest.
He didn't knock.
The HEAP shaft was already nocked when he kicked the door's lower left corner, catching the mechanism at the weakest point in the frame. The door swung inward and he came through it fast, keeping left to clear the door's arc, and had the room in three seconds.
Assembly stations lining the walls, screens open, equipment racks and refrigerated carrier units and a dozen people who'd compressed themselves toward the far side of the space. His eyes moved across the room, doing what they did -- threat assessment, object recognition, the unconscious triage that decades had made automatic.
Then they found the table.
The Spider was lying on it -- not restrained, which Oliver registered and filed immediately, because a man who'd spent the better part of the night making himself the most dangerous thing in any room he entered would not accept restraint even for something he wanted, and whatever was happening here was clearly something he wanted.
The mechanical arm was extended, palm up, two assistants working on the elbow joint with instruments Oliver didn't recognize. A woman in a lab coat stood at Jake's left shoulder -- mid-forties, eyes already tracking Oliver with an alertness that didn't have anything frightened in it, just the look of someone adding a new variable to a calculation they were already running.
Jakes white eyes had found him before he finished reading the room.
Oliver raised the bow. Nocked. Drew in a single motion that bypassed deliberation entirely -- this was the part that happened below thought, muscle encoding so deep it had no separate language anymore.
He released.
Jake's right hand came up and caught the shaft out of the air at shoulder height, the grip easy, the motion barely qualifying as a movement. He held it for one second, turning it once, and then hurled it sideways at the floor. The explosive tip detonated against the epoxy and the concussion sent two of the assistants stumbling into a bench. Dr. Chen grabbed the table's edge and held her position.
"Stay still," she said, not to Oliver. "If you move your arm I have to start the positioning sequence again."
"Keep working," Jake said.
Oliver had the second shaft nocked before the first one finished echoing. Cryo tip, designed to slow enhanced physiology -- he'd built them for exactly this kind of target and he aimed low, knee joint, looking to take the mobility rather than the man.
The web caught it mid-flight. Jake had fired the line with his right hand while his left arm stayed flat on the table, and the shaft was yanked sideways and embedded itself in the ceiling panel above the door, the cryo compound discharging harmlessly into the tile. Oliver moved right, bought himself a different angle, and had the third shaft coming before the second landed.
"You're going to destabilize the interface." Dr. Chen's voice had taken on the particular edge of someone who was watching several months of work develop a fault line in real time. "The sync-bridge is active. Any significant impact to the arm during the calibration window--"
"Then tell your patient to stop moving his arm," Oliver said.
Jake fired two lines simultaneously -- one aimed at Oliver's bow hand, one angled to take him off his feet by the ankles. Oliver split his weight and went right and the ankle web caught the floor two steps behind him, and the bow-hand line grazed his forearm instead of finding the wrist. He rolled, came up against the equipment bench, and felt glass containers rattle behind his back.
The room was chaos in the specific way of a space that was too small for what was happening in it -- alarms still cycling, assistants pressed against the west wall, one of them having produced a keycard that he was eyeing the interior door with. Oliver tracked that, filed it, came back to Jake.
Who was lying on a table, fighting one-handed, while a doctor worked on his other arm -- and still keeping Oliver honest.
He pulled a smoke capsule from his belt and broke it against the floor. Grey-white cloud expanded across the room's center, obscuring Jake's sightline and buying Oliver two seconds of movement. He came around the smoke's left edge, changed his angle entirely, and had the fourth shaft -- high-tensile net, the reinforced variant he'd rebuilt after their first meeting -- already flying before the cloud reached him.
The net caught Jake across the upper torso and he felt the pull, the material looking for purchase, and then Sleeper moved and the net was gone, burned through by the symbiote in the space of a heartbeat, black material flowing up across Jake's chest and shoulders and the white eyes still tracking Oliver through the smoke without any difficulty at all.
"Open the door," Jake said.
Dr. Chen looked at the assistant with the keycard.
Oliver put a shaft through the keycard before the assistant could move, pinning it to the bench behind him. The assistant sat down very suddenly.
"The other one." Jake's right arm came up and a line hit the second assistant and yanked him forward, away from the wall -- not consuming, just moving him like a piece of furniture being repositioned. The assistant went to his knees beside the interior door. "Open it."
Oliver moved. He had the angle -- straight shot from his position to the assistant, clear of Chen and the table -- and he nocked and drew in the time it took to cross six feet of floor.
Something hit his shoulder from behind, spun him, and Canary's elbow was already past where his chin had been.
He hadn't heard her come in.
She was standing between him and the assistant, her stance low, her eyes on him with an expression he couldn't fully read in the room's current state. The alarms. The smoke still dispersing. Jake's voice saying something to the assistant near the door that Oliver couldn't catch.
"Canary." He kept the bow up. "Step aside."
"Don't." Her voice came out a half-register lower than her usual pitch, and something in it made him hold rather than press. "Oliver, don't."
He looked at her. The domino mask still on. A bruise across her left cheek that was several hours old, heading toward purple. The hair fallen across it the way it fell when she'd stopped fixing it, which she only stopped doing when she'd stopped registering her own appearance entirely.
"What has he done to you," Oliver said.
"Nothing." She said it quickly enough that it meant something. "He's done nothing. He's just -- he's shown me who he is."
Behind her, Oliver heard the interior door open. He shifted to bring it into his sightline and Canary shifted with him, staying in the way without appearing to make a decision to do so -- just moving when he moved, the way someone moves when they're following an instinct they can't account for.
"He burned Gotham," Oliver said. "He spent the last twelve hours burning this city."
"He had reasons."
"For all of it? For everything?" He kept his voice even, because she was reading his tone as much as his words and he needed her reading it correctly. "The people he's killed down here, Canary -- what were their reasons?"
Something moved in her expression. A fault line, faint, there and then covered.
"He's doing what he has to do," she said, and even as she said it, he could see from the way her eyes moved briefly sideways -- not toward Jake, toward nothing specific, toward the middle distance -- that she was listening to the sentence after it left her mouth and not quite recognizing it.
"You have one of the strongest minds I've ever seen," Oliver said, quietly enough that it was between the two of them and the alarms. "I have watched you resist things that would have broken other people. You walked into a room in Bludhaven with Joker toxin in the air and you were the last one standing." He held her gaze. "Don't let this be what gets through."
Her jaw tightened. Her hands -- he could see her hands, and her hands were not doing what they should have been doing, which was returning to a fighting position or going for him or any of the calculated things the Canary he knew did in rooms like this. They were loose at her sides, half-open, and one of them had drifted to her own sternum without her appearing to notice.
"He has the record," she said. Her voice dropped at the end of it, the last word arriving softer than the first one, like her own sentence had surprised her.
Oliver went still.
He'd heard something in the two words -- not information, something else, the particular quality of a voice when it is saying the actual thing underneath the thing it has been saying. He looked at her and waited and she stood there with her hand on her own chest and her eyes doing several things at once, and then something cleared in them -- fractional, partial, the way a signal comes through static for one second before the interference returns.
"My mother's," she said. "He has my mother's record. She recorded it before--" She stopped. Her hand pressed harder against her chest. "Why did I give it to him. Why would I -- Oliver, I don't--"
He pushed past her.
She barely resisted -- her body starting to reach for him and then stopping, caught between the instruction the pheromones had built and the confusion underneath it, her hand catching his sleeve and then releasing it. He was already moving, already calculating the room's new geometry, because Jake and Dr. Chen had gone through the interior door while Canary had been blocking him and the assistant was still on his knees beside the frame.
He crossed to the interior door and what he found on the other side of the glass partition was a smaller room -- lower ceiling, different equipment, a fold-out table along the south wall that Jake was sitting against, not lying down anymore. The arm was raised in the room's light and even through the reinforced glass Oliver could see what had changed about it -- the whole assembly reoriented, correctly positioned now, the socket fitted against Jake's left side in a way it hadn't been before. The palm was opening and closing in slow increments, two fingers at a time, careful, like someone reading instructions written on the inside of their own joints.
Dr. Chen was still working at the elbow, her back to Oliver, hands moving fast.
Jake looked up through the glass.
Oliver had the bow up before anything behind his eyes finished the sentence. He read the situation the same way he read every situation, stripping it to its elements -- the glass, its thickness, the most efficient way through it; the distance to Jake after that; the angle required for a clean shot that didn't go through the doctor; what he'd need to stop the arm from being used against him, and whether stopping the arm was even the priority anymore or whether it was something else, something that had to do with the record Canary had just said the word for with her hand on her chest.
Jake's right hand went to the mechanical arm's forearm and held it steady while Chen worked the last connection. His white eyes did not leave Oliver's.
"Have you removed--" Jake started, and his voice came through the glass muffled but audible, and then he got no further.
The entire room moved.
Not violently -- not an impact or explosion. A resonance, working through the walls and the floor and the glass between them in a sustained wave that put hairline cracks in the partition's lower edge and sent loose items off every bench in both rooms simultaneously. Oliver caught himself against the doorframe, weight low, and recognized the frequency in the same part of his body that had learned to recognize it over several years of working alongside the person who produced it.
Through the cracked glass, Jake's grip on Dr. Chen's wrist had tightened -- he could see it from the angle, the mechanical fingers closed, the doctor's face turned sideways with her mouth open. The arm worked. The grip was real.
Oliver turned back to the room.
Canary was standing in the middle of it, her chest still falling from the exhale, her mask slightly askew from the vibration. The assistants were on the floor, hands over their ears. Equipment had come off the benches. The alarm that had been cycling for the past four minutes had gone silent.
She was looking at him with an expression that was doing something he hadn't seen on her face in a very long time -- the displacement of someone who has just heard themselves clearly, who has stopped moving long enough for the ground to show itself, and found it further down than they expected.
He crossed the room to her, stepping over a fallen carrier unit, and held out his hand.
"Are you ready?" he said.
She looked at his hand. Then at the cracked glass partition, where Jake's outline was visible -- still sitting, the arm moving, Chen saying something he couldn't hear. Then back at Oliver, and her eyes had the particular quality of someone who has just remembered something they'd been carrying all morning without knowing they were carrying it.
She took his hand and he pulled her toward him and she pressed the deepest breath he'd ever heard her take, slow, deliberate, her whole chest involved in it.
"Now," he said.
The sound came out of her like something that had been building for three hours, shaped by everything the morning had cost her, and it hit the glass partition with the full weight of what it was.
~MimicLord
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