Lunch on Sunday found Armsmaster in his lab — or what passed for his temporary lab, right now. The important things had been salvaged from the Protectorate base, the ones likely to explode or irradiate or otherwise respond poorly to unskilled handling; the rest of the building still lay where it had been cast up on the beach.
There were more urgent problems.
There was never enough time to get everything done, but he couldn't drop any of his projects, either. Another week, even, and the nano-thorn cutting edge might have been able to handle an extended fight — right now, it just took too much energy, but it looked like there was a way to make it more efficient. Baking the air intakes at 505 degrees centigrade might be enough to clear out the accumulations, and if that worked then he could remove the current workaround, and with the space and energy saved there, he could extend usable life by a factor of five while reducing footprint.
Still not small enough; still not efficient enough... but then, he had some ideas about slowing the extrusion of the nano-wires by maybe 2.5 seconds, from the present .6: what it cost in initial deployment might be well worth it in terms of service life. And, whether or not that worked, there were other ideas to try, and by the time he emptied this list more would have come. It would take time, but he might be able to fit this functionality into his standard halberd.
He'd managed it for almost everything else so far.
Still, the five minutes it would take to bake the air intakes left him free to think while he ingested nutrient paste of his own design through a tube. Not quite as nice as an actual meal, but it saved precious time.
The fight with Leviathan, all things considered, had gone quite well. 42% fatalities among the defenders; civilian casualties still uncertain, but into six figures; property damage uncertain, but immense. Still, a good day in the fight against the Endbringers.
He'd seen much worse.
The flow of emergency supplies wasn't without hitches; there was never enough coming quickly enough, and the Empire under Hookwolf — now calling himself Fenrir, after the wolf who bit off the hand of a god — had already picked off one of the shipments for themselves, distributing it to their supporters. And, for the moment, there was nothing to do but let the offense pass: there was far too much disaster relief work that simply couldn't wait. Lives lost now couldn't be saved later, and any other order of priorities... would be inefficient.
Hookwolf would be there next month.
It was vexing, having to wait. Having to watch idiots swarm to follow him, made worse by the fact that without Hookwolf's last-minute heroics, the city might have been lost and Armsmaster himself would likely have died. Having to have him healed, and thank him, and let him loose, and watch as he went right back to villainy with a bigger and undeserved reputation than ever was worse still.
The man was only middling as an offensive threat, and only hard to kill if one took a crude, brute-force approach. Armsmaster spent half his time in fights making sure he didn't kill the villains he was fighting — bad PR, and against protocol. Still frustrating.
Inefficient.
At least when it came time to confront the villain, well... the Brockton Bay Protectorate had survived in excellent shape, considering the challenge they'd had to face. Very, very, few could conceivably engage an Endbringer with fewer than a dozen capes at their back and live to tell the tale; fewer still could say they'd done so without some form of invulnerability protecting them.
Every one of his surviving subordinates was now among that elite few. (Miss Militia's membership in this particular club, along with his own, had come against Behemoth, in Lyon — the second time. Eight years ago. That had been one of the bad days.)
Faced with the need to distract Leviathan, he'd ordered a course of action that his models predicted would minimize civilian casualties... and leave his command with two survivors — one of whom would have been Miss Militia, who wasn't directly engaged in battle. His team hadn't quailed or questioned, they'd simply stood up and done their duty. They'd performed efficiently, following the directions of his combat prediction program with adequate precision, and they'd lived.
His right hand clenched, and then released.
Most of them.
Dwelling on that was... unproductive.
Armsmaster finished the allotted paste for this meal and checked the clock on his HUD: two minutes left to go.
Time enough for one of his set of strength and flexibility exercises.
He started his suit in motion, letting it guide him and then pushing against the resistance it presented with the familiarity of long practice, the movements unconscious enough that he could continue thinking.
He selected one of the unsolved puzzles currently troubling him.
Endbringers were, often, drawn to chaos. And Brockton Bay had, in the space of a few weeks, gone from a tense simmer to... chaos.
How?
The start of it was clear: Lung's capture, Bakuda's shocking lack of judgment, Tailor's unexpectedly effective response.
Still a shame that she hadn't joined; even though she'd chosen a quiet retirement, she had gone right into the heat of battle when Leviathan showed. There were never enough who would.
If only because so few survived doing it the first time.
After that, things grew less clear. Lung and Kaiser fought, something they'd managed to avoid doing for years. Why then? The destruction of the ABB hadn't materially affected Lung's threat level, and Kaiser should have known that. Hard intelligence on why was difficult with so many who might have known dead, and the rest not talking... but some of the rumors blamed it on a new Case 53 Changer who'd been at Faultline's immediately before the mercenary had taken her people and departed.
Faultline's employer? Faultline's employee? A third party delivering news, or a threat? No way to know right now, but something to ask about if their paths crossed again.
Then there was the curious case of Thomas Calvert. Knowing that there had been a traitor, well connected and highly competent, with Thinker powers to boot, went a long way to explaining why the last few years had been so difficult. And yet... and yet, Thomas Calvert was able, and he'd warned the PRT of a major Thinker operating in the area just before he was exposed and died.
His record of service to the PRT would have ensured that warning was explored. His now-disclosed Thinker abilities would have underlined it — Thinkers often interfered with each other's abilities. His clear and strong motivation to avoid pointing any PRT investigation in the direction of shadowy Thinkers in Brockton Bay made the warning stand out in letters of fire.
Who had he felt at work? And what had they sought to accomplish?
Brandish had spoken of no Thinker, but instead of a 'friendly Stranger' who was successfully acting against Calvert (no small feat — the man had written half the Master-Stranger protocols) and whose identity she had refused to disclose until the PRT had cleaned house.
She'd died before that could happen.
Was it coincidence that the assault on New Wave had killed her and only her, cleanly cutting that link away?
New capes almost universally lacked subtlety or discretion, a sense of the consequences of their actions. Existing capes tended to form habits, patterns of action, styles of attack — none of which were precise matches to known threats, though neither could it be ruled out entirely.
The idea of three new capes, all of them of this strength and unnoticed was... implausible.
No, Occam's razor suggested...
His door hissed open.
Armsmaster stood and turned. Not many would interrupt him in his lab, and any real emergency would have come over the comms. Which meant...
Director Piggot.
She stood the doorway, squat and blocky, in a cleanly pressed suit despite the devastation outside.
"Director."
She nodded. "I thought we might go to Triumph's funeral together."
He checked the time on his HUD reflexively.
"You're half an hour early for that."
"There was some news I thought you'd want to hear personally, and then discuss."
He took the halberd out of the oven, checking the air intakes.
Clean.
Excellent.
Attaching it to his back beside his workhorse halberd, he moved through the door and into the corridor.
The Director kept pace, two of her strides to each of his.
"The news?"
"No-showing an attack on his own city, after burning much of it down, was enough to sway some of the other Directors, the ones who kept pushing for recruitment instead."
He stopped, turning to see her smile a bulldog's smile, all jowl and teeth.
"It's been approved. There's a kill order on Lung."
Well. Not having to fight to capture anymore... that would change things.
They walked down the corridor together in silence, and then out into the sunshine.
The ride over was short, filled with tactical discussions of how to corner Lung and what to do about Hookwolf; what the implications of the Chief Director's leave of absence were and how to integrate the new Ward recruit.
Rebuilding would be necessary, including transfers. The casualties they'd taken had been brutal. And yet, in his analysis as well as Dragon's, Flechette's presence had been the deciding factor. Legend had been right to ask her to come; Miss Militia had been right to order her to engage; her team had been right to sacrifice themselves to get her clear.
Despite the costs.
Never mentioned by either was the question of whether the city would be rebuilt... or condemned. New York had been rebuilt, but it was New York... and that happened in the early days, when people still believed that the Endbringers might be beaten back. When 'Endbringers' wasn't even a word, because Behemoth stood alone against the world.
The PRT van arrived at the cemetery — cleaner than most parts of the city, though official efforts were focused on infrastructure and survival right now. Enough people were gathered to explain it: some sentimental attachment to those beyond such things.
Armsmaster stepped out, and took his place among the other members of the Brockton Bay Protectorate in the front row of the mourners.
As the speeches began, he locked the joints of his armor and brought up intelligence appraisals on his HUD.
No point wasting time when he could be working.
···---···
Mark looked at Armsmaster's unusually rigid posture, and wondered what the man was feeling.
Triumph had taken his lethal injuries under his command, after all.
The thought of facing that guilt was one of the reasons he'd never taken tactical command.
He helped Neil with planning, certainly, and Sarah with public events. But the thing into which he'd poured himself had been fatherhood.
Mark sighed, feeling his daughters at his elbows, using him as the buffer.
They still weren't talking to each other, and they were barely talking to him.
He'd hoped, once, that having a child to love would be enough, would be a strong enough reason to push past the grey bleak pointlessness of it all, that it would be something around which he and Carol could center their lives, and build something better.
Instead, he'd just found a new way to fail.
And he knew that was the depression talking, but that wasn't enough — his life would have gone a lot smoother if the thought 'that's the depression talking' led to 'so it's wrong' instead of 'and it's about right, as usual.'
Which was also the depression talking, and so on recursively.
There were days he didn't want to get out of bed.
Fighting was easier.
Bouncing his globes of light around, predicting enemy movements so that when they dodged this one they met that one — it was like a game. Fun, even. More fun if they had superspeed, or teleportation, or invulnerability, or any one of the other obvious counters to his power: solving puzzles like that was when he felt most alive.
When he felt most effective.
Days like today were pretty much the opposite.
All of New Wave was here, and a surprising amount of the city, considering how much wreckage remained to clear.
It wasn't normal for capes who died in Endbringer fights to have state funerals — too many fights in the past over how or whether to honor villains, for whom nothing in their lives became them like their leaving it. A simple cenotaph, usually a pillar or obelisk inscribed with the names of all who fought and fell, was usually what made it through the committees.
Then again, this was ostensibly a private funeral. Triumph's father just happened to be the mayor, and Triumph himself a well-beloved hometown boy who'd died a hero and martyr both, and in death been unmasked as a semi-public figure, the mayor's son and a popular high-school and college baseball star whose retirement from the sport was now explained by his call to greater things. For all of those reasons, the turnout for this 'private event' just happened to be... large.
And to include the media.
There was even a blimp, circling overhead, interrupting its footage of the disaster to show aerial scenes of the crowds gathered.
Everyone had lost someone, in the attack. Triumph — Rory — had just been in the right place to stand for them all.
Mark wondered if the mayor would use this loss to launch his campaign for governor in the next election. And then he wondered if the man had had that thought already when he'd given his permission to remove the ventilator so it could be used to save another patient with a real chance of recovery.
He looked at the mayor's family, lined up behind him on stage, his wife and two twin daughters, pulling together in the face of their loss.
As family should.
What did it say that his own family was splintering under the loss of Carol? Was he a worse father than a man who killed his own son for political advantage?
After that, Mark hated himself a little for seeing the worst in people, and then hated the way he hated himself.
The speech ended. It hadn't been a bad one, Mark thought, from what little attention he'd paid. There'd be copies in the newspapers tomorrow, in other cities where the newspapers were still being delivered anyway.
He turned to Amy, but she was already moving back toward the ambulance waiting to take her back to the hospital. She was sleeping there, these days. Doing good work, yes... but also pointedly not coming home.
The Pelhams spoke brief farewells — Sarah and Crystal with hugs, Neil with a handshake, and Eric with a wave — and they too departed.
He turned to talk to Victoria after, but she vanished upwards, flying away.
She wasn't staying at home anymore either.
Maybe with Gallant.
Mark looked again at Armsmaster as he strode away, his head high and his walk purposeful.
Any of the Wards who had made it out alive had done so due to him, some directly and others indirectly.
The bare-bones powersuit that Gallant had purchased with extra duty shifts and a staggering sum from his trust fund had had an integral oxygen reserve, solely because Armsmaster was too much of a perfectionist to make something purely cosmetic, even when asked. He still remembered the boy wondering aloud if he would ever use half the things it could do, and whether he shouldn't have simply spray-painted some PRT chain mesh instead and donated the money to a worthier cause.
Cheap at the price.
Was that how Armsmaster slept at night? Did he measure the lives saved against those lost? Did he dwell on those he had saved to blot out the memories of those like Clockblocker? Like Aegis?
Vista's fate was still uncertain — Amy, for all her gifts, could not heal the brain, or he'd have asked her for help a long time ago. And maybe if she could have helped him, he would have been able to do something, be a better father to them and a better husband to Carol, whom he'd never loved as freely as he'd hoped.
A dark corner of his mind whispered the familiar refrain that that was why she'd chosen him, because she knew he'd fail and she hadn't wanted to let anyone in.
By the time he'd set that thought aside, most of the mourners were beginning to disperse.
For lack of anything better to do, Mark made his way over to Carol's grave — marker, rather, for nothing of her body had survived that miniature sun.
He was surprised when he got there to find two people — father and daughter, by the looks of them — and fresh purple flowers before the stone.
They turned at his approach, the man — dapper and handsome in ways that made Mark feel inadequate — offering his hand and condolences. One of the burdens of unmasking: so many knew him whom he did not know.
"You knew her?"
They glanced at each other.
"A colleague, in a way." The man's voice was smooth, something he could have made a living with.
The girl shook her head. "I'm just a stranger who would have liked to have known her better."
They moved away, arms laden with more flowers, leaving Mark to the contemplation of Carol's empty grave.
···---···
As Quinn Calle walked away, stride long and steps poised, he thought that Mark Dallon must have loved his wife greatly.
In a way, he envied the man despite his obvious aura of crushing loss.
To have loved like that... Quinn had his work, and its challenges, and there had been women over the years whose company he had enjoyed, carnally or innocently, but never something around which he might reshape his life, a white-hot passion that the years did not dim.
Perhaps it was simply that the grass is always greener.
Still, at least his work afforded him interesting opportunities. He'd come here to negotiate a way for two villains to come in from the cold and lead legitimate lives, which made for an interesting and satisfying variation on his typical job of negotiating ways for villains to get out of prison.
Doubly satisfying to have had a hand, however indirect, in bringing them to this resolution. He'd come closer to crossing one of his personal lines than he really liked, very nearly getting involved in a direct confrontation between parahumans... but when faced with Taylor's desperate idealism and the sheer depth of Calvert's treachery, there hadn't really been a choice.
Not one he could have lived with afterward, anyway.
For all that his clients were almost entirely divided among the mad and the bad, Quinn believed in the worth of the system. He believed he was making the world a better place by doing his job, that the advice of counsel was one of the things that kept the republic a republic, where all men were born equal in dignity... though clearly not in power, not since the rise of Scion and the superpowers that followed.
That his work was one of the things that helped maintain a civil world, helped prevent a civil war between parahumans and normals.
Calvert's abuses under color of authority, his efforts to supplant the system and turn it to his ends, were exactly what Quinn Calle was born to fight, and if that made life riskier than he'd prefer... well, why else had he cultivated his skills?
It certainly wasn't just to see the unprovably guilty go free, though he did enough of that that an outside observer could be forgiven for the mistake. But there was no way to legitimately declare guilt or innocence without going through the process, what he did was a necessary part of that, and so he did it with care, skill, and panache.
And, once in a while, a client came along who offered the chance to do good.
Directly.
And, on those occasions, he worked a few more hours and expensed a few less. They were the dangerous cases, really. Losing a case when his client deserved it was painful.
Briefly.
Losing a case when his client was innocent was soul-crushing.
Part of why he took care to lose so few.
He smiled, thin-lipped and self-mocking, looking up at the blue sky and white clouds.
Pride could be useful, pride could be entertaining. It didn't do to show it off, or even to believe your own PR... but it wasn't rightly pride if you really could do it.
Just an accurate self-appraisal.
Their path took them across the cemetery to another marker — fresh cut stone, by the look of it, though the earth seemed undisturbed by anything but the waters.
"James Fliescher? Husband, father; his laughter lightened our lives?" He glanced at the girl in black beside him as she laid a bunch of orange and red flowers, five-petaled, before the stone.
"Friend of yours?"
She shook her head, and turned away.
He took a long look at the stone before following her.
Part of serving clients well was knowing when not to ask questions, and a mysteriously empty grave was not a topic to press on with any of them. Even her.
Especially her?
In time they came to a third cenotaph, next to a grave, and she laid down her last set of flowers, a spray of small blue and white flowers.
They stood there for a long time.
Eventually, she stirred, and he took that as his cue to break the silence.
"What's the case? I'd have come for the company, but..." he half-smiled "you never call me just for the company."
"Rebuilding the city." She used the same matter of fact tone he'd heard her use for everything from indicating her preference in eggs to numbering those dead by her actions.
He nodded. She'd never lacked for ambition.
"A lot of that will be politics."
"The mayor will be pushing it — you heard the speech."
He tilted his head.
"Being a viable candidate for governor makes you at least as many enemies as friends."
She shrugged.
"Money can help."
That was inarguably true. It couldn't buy most politicians, but it could make or break campaigns and so often could ensure a moment in which to make a case. Not his specialty, but he knew those who knew how to do this with the best.
"Assume the politicians don't condemn the city; rebuilding it still won't be anything close to cheap. Your assets don't begin to cover it."
She nodded.
"We'll start with Fortress. You can tell them Brandish's knowledge didn't die with her."
A half grin quirked up the left side of his mouth again.
"They like to play hardball."
She glanced at him with that strangely even gaze. "And we can't?"
He wasn't sure if he'd ever seen her flustered, or stressed, or surprised, though there was that one time he'd woken her with a phone call... not that he'd seen her face then, but it was the closest he'd come to seeing her with her guard down.
Actually, he wasn't sure if he'd ever seen an expression on her that wasn't 'grimly determined'.
That was charming when she was ordering pasta, and by turns terrifying and inspiring when she was laying out plans.
His smile widened.
"Not taking this on alone?"
She shook her head. "You, and... some others. We'll see."
"You're taking a broader view of how to change things."
She shrugged.
"Carol made more of a difference than I did in less time, with the right leverage. My own successes have never come without... side effects."
Had one of the parahumans finally figured out that there were other ways to get things done than dressing up and hitting people? And was that good news for the world... or a sign that the End Times were coming, as he'd so often joked it would be?
Say what you will, she wasn't a boring client.
His smile was actually showing teeth now.
"Her successes didn't come without side effects either, you know. And what do you intend to do about your... side effects, past and future?"
She turned back to the stone for a moment, and the silence stretched.
"Live with them. Fix them, if I can. Never give up. What else is there to do?"
He could work with that.
"You're the client."
This was what was best in life: a chance to play the game for the highest stakes, a chance to use his skills to their limit, a chance to make the world better.
Quinn looked up into the deep blue sky, at the blimp circling among the puffy white clouds, and laughed aloud.
···---···
The television screen showed an aerial view of a city in ruins.
Not the usual channel shown on the television behind the counter in this remote roadside diner, but the waitress had been kind enough to hand over the remote to her sole group of customers today.
Cooperation had even bought her another twenty minutes of life.
"So!" The man seated at the center of their gathering glanced around, smiling.
"Doesn't that look good for our next road trip? We need another to round us out."
A teenage girl wearing a bright pink hoodie and sprawled across a corner booth popped her bubble-gum loudly. "Yeah. I've got family there I'd like to see."
A tall woman two booths down looked over her book with disgust. "You choose crudely. But I think this 'Fenrir' has promise: I will not object to the destination."
"MINE." A deep voice rumbled from within the kitchen.
"Now, now, I'm sure we can work something out in case of any double-nominations. Besides, you might prefer the dragon-man, no?" The man's smile never wavered.
"Ooh, ooh, ooh!" A little girl, sitting at the counter before an ice-cream sundae with her legs kicking idly in the air waved her spoon about. "Dibs on Panacea!"
The woman beside her, naked but for the stripes of white and black covering her whole body, smiled and stroked the girl's curly blonde hair.
The dark-haired woman in red with burn scars down her face flicked ash from her cigarette out the window and exhaled smoke. "Sure. There's an old friend out that way."
A single note rang out from behind and beneath the counter as a finger stroked an extended blade.
"Yes, of course: the tinker working on ecosystem issues. We know your preferences... and that makes it unanimous."
Another chime, this one wavering in tone.
"Me? Well, we'll have to see when we get there. But when I look at all this" he gestured at the television "I don't think it's accidental. I think someone arranged things, set the scene. And" his smile grew sharper "I think whoever they are, they're someone we'd very much like to meet."
He stood, and stretched.
"Shall we?" With that, he hit the remote.
The television blinked, and darkened to black.