Mechanical-Arm Spider #83
Jake didn't move.
The stone in Lobo's hand threw red across the debris field. Oliver's arrow sat nocked, the draw held steady at his jaw despite everything the night had put through his body. And Canary --
Canary was already moving.
She'd pushed off Oliver's grip the same second Lobo raised the stone, one arm yanking free while the other came up to her throat, the reflex deeper than thought, and the Cry that came out wasn't a weapon. It was a broken thing. A sound that started clean and tore apart before it could build -- her voice cracking at the register that mattered, the resonance collapsing under its own weight, and what hit the air was half a frequency and a lot of pain.
It still rattled the glass in the storefronts behind Jake.
She didn't stop. Her shoulder dipped low and she came on with the Cry still trying and failing, two steps across rubble and a third before Oliver's arm caught her around the waist and the two of them staggered together, her legs still churning, her free hand clawing at his forearm.
"Canary--"
She wasn't listening. Her eyes were on Jake and there was nothing in them that was the morning's chemical warmth, nothing left of the softness the pheromones had built -- just the face of someone who has been taken from and wants the thing back and cannot get to it, and the wanting is so big it is running her body without her permission.
"GIVE IT BACK." Her voice was ruined on the volume, the Cry and the exhaustion pulling the words apart. "GIVE IT BACK, YOU GIVE IT BACK--"
Oliver had both arms around her now, feet planted, and she was fighting him with everything she had left which was more than she should have had left. Her elbow caught his ribs. Her heel came down on the instep of his boot. He held on.
"Canary. Canary, stop--"
"HE HAS IT, OLIVER, HE HAS THE RECORD, HE HAS--"
Lobo's expression had gone flat.
He looked from Canary to Oliver to Canary again with the look of a man working out whether this was a threat he needed to remove or a distraction he needed to step around, and the math came down fast. His hand opened at his side. The chain was on the ground next to the Space Hog -- he'd set it down when he pulled the stone -- and he didn't reach for it.
"Lady," he said, "you are about two seconds from being a problem I solve."
The Cry came out again. Weaker. Less than the last one, the frequency dissolving into the open air before it reached him, and Lobo looked at it like a man looking at rain that hasn't reached his side of the street yet.
"One," he said.
Oliver looked up at him from over Canary's shoulder, one arm still hooked around her chest, and his voice when it came was quiet enough that it crossed the street without rising. "Back off."
"Two."
The Cry came again -- Canary's third attempt, her fourth, and this one had something behind it, not power but fury, and it hit Lobo's jacket and moved the lapel and that was all it did. He looked down at the jacket. Then at her.
Jake had arrived at a decision.
The stone was the problem he couldn't name yet -- red light and Lobo's confidence and Death's name, and whatever it was built to do he knew it wasn't built to make his situation better. Lobo was the ceiling, immovable, something to work around rather than through. Oliver was numbers and calculation, the most dangerous kind of steady. And Canary --
Canary's thread was still live. Pulled tight and fraying and live.
He opened his mouth.
And words came out in a familiar rhythm.
He finished the first line. Then the second.
The street went quiet around it in the way streets went quiet around things that had no business happening.
Canary stopped moving.
Jake's voice was flat and late on the rhythm, but it didn't matter. She could recognize her mother's lyrics anywhere.
And the melody was there. The shape of it. The song her mother's hands had found on a piano in a room he'd never see, rendered badly by someone who had no right to it.
She started shaking.
Not because the sound was beautiful. Because it wasn't. Because it was wrong in every technical sense and still recognizably hers, the melody of the thing she'd never left behind in twenty years of leaving things behind, coming out of the mouth of the person who'd taken it from her.
The shaking stopped. Her hands went slack on Oliver's arm.
Then they tightened again, so hard he felt it, and the sound that came out of her throat wasn't a Cry at all.
She tore free.
Oliver grabbed for her and caught sleeve and then nothing, and she was already crossing the rubble, one foot wrong on a chunk of concrete and catching herself and coming anyway, her hair across her face and her jaw set and her eyes running wet and still fixed on Jake, not slowing, not stopping, and Oliver was already moving after her but he was a step behind and the step mattered.
Lobo stepped into her path.
One movement -- a shift of weight that put six feet of Czarnian between her and Jake, casual as a door closing -- and Canary hit the wall of his arm at full speed and went sideways.
She flew twelve feet and came down on the hood of a parked car and the metal buckled and she rolled to the street and stopped and stayed down.
Oliver's arrow was already in the air.
It hit Lobo in the neck and Lobo pulled it out and looked at it and dropped it and turned, and his expression had moved somewhere past irritation into a territory that didn't have a name for the emotion because the emotion was just mass, just force, just the Main Man deciding that patience was a resource he'd finished spending.
Oliver was already loose -- moving, low, the quiver cycling to the next shaft without him looking down, his eyes steady and very cold. He put two more into Lobo's chest before the big man took a step. He put a fourth into the shoulder joint, angled up, the reinforced tip driving deep.
Lobo walked through all of it.
"You," he said to Oliver, "are now also a problem."
The chain. Jake had seen Lobo set it down when he pulled the stone, and the stone was in Lobo's left hand and the chain was on the ground to the right of the Space Hog, six feet back, and Lobo's full attention was on Oliver. He went for it low, under the angle Lobo would look if he turned, and his hand found the first link and he pulled and the chain came with him, heavy and cold and long.
He swung it.
He got it moving -- three rotations, the spike end rising with the weight of it -- and released. The chain went high, past Lobo's shoulder, the spike end catching the corner of the building above him and wrapping twice before going taut. Lobo tracked it up and Jake was already pulling the other end down, the chain crossing behind the big man's shoulders at chest height, and Lobo got one hand on it and planted his feet and the tension went out of the line immediately.
Jake held on anyway and swung.
His feet came off the ground and he went up and around Lobo's right side, using the man's own planted weight as the anchor point the way he'd use a rooftop, and came down on the far side with the chain still in both hands -- mechanical arm on the slack, right hand on the loaded end -- and pulled in opposite directions.
The links went taut across Lobo's chest.
Lobo laughed.
It wasn't the laugh from the fight in the sub-level -- that one had been genuine, surprised. This was something lower, something that came up from the chest with the ease of something that had decided it was done making allowances.
He reached back. His fingers found Jake through the chain and closed on the front of the Carnage suit and pulled, and Jake came over his shoulder in a single arc and went into the street hard enough to leave an impression in the asphalt.
He bounced up.
He was on his feet before the dust settled and the chain was still in his hand and the mechanical arm still had two links wrapped around the elbow joint.
Lobo had let go of his end.
He was looking at his own open hand with an expression Jake hadn't seen on him yet.
Oliver's arrows were still coming. He caught the next three in the chain by feel, snapping the line tight in the arrow's path, and sent two back in the direction they'd come from -- not aimed at Oliver, just in the general space, enough to make him move. Oliver moved. He always moved.
"You two done playin'?" Lobo said.
His voice had changed register. Not loud. That was the wrong direction -- loudness was still performance, still something you did for someone else's benefit. What came out of him now was below performance. It had no audience in mind.
He reached up and took hold of the chain.
Not grabbing it -- just finding it, the way your hand finds a tool you've used long enough that the grip happens without looking. He pulled once. The links snapped taut out of Jake's mechanical arm with a sound like a rifle shot and the force spun him ninety degrees and he had to fire a web to a third-floor window ledge to stay upright.
The chain came home.
Lobo coiled it once around his forearm, slowly, the links catching the day's light. Above them the sky had gone the wrong color -- not storm, nothing that organized, just a yellow-grey pressing down across the east end of downtown where the smoke and the altitude and something less definable had found each other. The temperature had dropped four degrees since Jake's feet last touched the ground long enough to feel it.
A piece of facade broke free from the building above and fell past them and hit the street and nobody looked at it.
Oliver had an arrow ready and his eyes moved between Jake and Lobo and the calculation in them was visible from across the street -- two threats, limited shafts, the question of priority resolving in real time. He'd caught on somewhere in the chain exchange, Jake had felt the shift, the moment Oliver stopped treating Jake as the primary problem and started treating the street itself as the problem. Smart. Too late to change the shape of what was happening but smart.
Jake's mechanical arm was still warm from the chain. He felt the discharge port cycle -- the blue charge building at the palm.
He looked at Lobo across the street.
Lobo looked back at him.
The stone was still in his left hand. The chain was coiled on his right forearm. He wasn't smiling anymore. He wasn't doing anything readable at all -- just standing in the street with the wrong sky above him and the chain loose on his arm, and the sheer weight of what he was about to do was coming off him the way heat came off pavement in summer.
Jake's mouth pulled at one corner.
The Carnage suit ran red at the edges of his vision, the symbiote reading the moment the same way he was reading it and arriving at the same conclusion -- that what was coming was large and close and would require everything, and that everything was exactly the amount he had. The arm was up. The web was ready.
And his blood was running fast enough to feel in his ears.
~MimicLord
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