They arrive just after school. Harper's late, on account of her release time, but it's at least time for us to devise plans. At least, that's what we're doing in theory. Somehow, having Serena to keep us concentrated makes it harder for us to get anything done. Serena sits across from the three of us, who are currently in our Evan-centric formation. He's twitching like mad, and the sound of his metal spikes on my metal outfit is excruciating.

"Stop that," I say.

"It's not voluntary," he says. He starts tapping his foot instead.

Megan is looking wistfully out at the exit. Stuck between them, with Serena's leering eyes upon me, not to mention Anthem's neverending, crystalline glare, I begin to feel like I'm needed to do something.

Harper enters, at last. She looks disheveled underneath her cloak, like she's been sleeping in it all day. The plumes that usually compose her mask tremble like candles as she approaches us. "We're really going to miss Halloween?"

"Depends on how quickly this goes down," I say with the first smidgen of authority I've mustered all night.

"Who cares? I don't have plans," Evan says. "We're all in high school or almost in high school. It's a holiday for kids."

Megan stands up, her arms crossed.

"Missing a Naval Brigade something-or-other again?" I ask.

She looks at me like my brother does, like it's on me to know better.

"Course. Sorry," I say. I fold my arms over my knees. The whole group's attention is on me again. Anthem's streetlight eyes and blank stare penetrate my soul. "So. If we want to get out of here, we should all run over the plans first. The whole building's ventilated, but shittily so. We could, say, use one of Harper's shadows to enlarge one of the vents, although that's going to drain her, so then it's on the rest of us as we travel down the elevator shaft and to wherever the meeting is happening tonight. We're going in blind, so our primary operative is to not die. Obviously getting trapped underground would suck, and Anthem can't portal us in or out that close to the Diosite." Not for the first time, I wish we'd received slightly different, more relevant powers. "Anyways, they haven't suspected we might utilize the vents, yet, so this might be our only chance to exploit the security breaches I'm seeing right now. They're not really kid-sized, so expect this to suck, but we'll pull through. Kapeesh?"

"Adam," says Evan, urgently. "It's 2016. You're not allowed to say kapeesh."

"Kapeesh?" I ask the group.

"Kapeesh," Serena says.

Megan shoots me a thumbs up. Harper's smiling, as forced as that looks.

Anthem nods. The door behind us goes black, pulling back out of reality and into a sinister, seething pool of darkness. It's a good way to start our missions: when you've already made the leap of faith, everything else is simple consequence. I go from the barren wood of the library to the decorated reds and golds of the forest, where fall is at its peak. There's a bitter wind sweeping through the area, but the mask and outfit leave me completely numb to the outside world. The group materializes behind me, and I realize, finally, that they're not staring at me.

"Chief?" asks Serena.

I nod. "Straight ahead, if anyone's there, we wait for them to go in. We're hoping to arrive between 'recruits', so we have time to dig our tunnel out in silence. There'll probably be cameras or robots, but if we really need to get down there, I guess we can slide down the elevator shaft or something. Lady, that's on you."

"Lady?" asks Harper. "There are three women here."
I smile. "Meet Lady Generator," I gesture to Serena, who materializes a pole, clutching it close to her as possible.

"Okay, we're not going with 'Lady'. Gen makes more sense," Evan says.

"No one asked you," Serena retaliates, coolly.

Evan continues, "You know, if we wanted to be more honest, we could just call you 'Lady of the Big, Generic Pole'. Miss 'Can't Use Her Powers Because She Doesn't Try, But It's Okay, Because She's An Honors Student Who Is Going To Get A Nice Nine-to-Five Job When She Grows Up.""

"That's... Evan, on so many levels, that has to be the worst thing I've ever heard."

Foliage crackles around us. I can see the outline of a car passing between dozens of trees, its dark metal carapace slicing up the natural visage. I prickle underneath the armor with mild irritation.

"I like Gen," Megan says. "It's kind of nice. If we go with that, can we cut the squabbling out?"

Serena sighs. "I suppose it's not the worst way to butcher my name."

"Then you should have picked a shorter one. We're going to be yelling these down long, desolate hallways, possibly in worst-case scenarios where someone gets caught or is about to die--" Evan begins.

"You're not helping," I say.

"Evan, cut it out," Megan says, almost simultaneously.

That's enough to get him to back down. "Alright."

We look ahead to the woods. I can feel the forest opening up for us. It's so close I can hear cars rolling to a stop on the asphalt, not far from here. The sound makes me viscerally sick, deep in my stomach. I'm imagining Megan crushed to death in an elevator shaft, or Evan charging into a battle he can't win. My heart pulses a little faster, but under the fear is something sharper, the thing that had me smashing the facsimile into shards. They should be afraid of you, says a voice that might be Anthem, but it also might just be Chief.

It's not wrong. I lead us through the trees and to the brink of sunlight, which is just beginning to pale in the reddening sky. Bodes well for us, really does. I have some people to get to Halloween parties, as much as that makes me sound like a soccer mom. All the cars lie dormant in the parking lot, all twelve of them... the sword lies heavy on my back, so I pull it out of the scabbard. I'm a little faster every time I do it. It begs for me to slash tires, which would be all too easy, but instead I just heat the blade. The place where the cars got in through the usually full barbed wire is still wide open. I think it's one of our holes. Guess they figured they'd utilize it, but I doubt the woman told everyone where it came from.

I want to tell Onyx to burn our symbol on the ground. I want to make it indisputable that we've been there. I want to spit directly in their face.

"First Walker on our left," Onyx warns me. Sure enough, the little metal dog is ambling over, equipped with a red eye.

"Siren. Shoot the eye," I say. "Onyx, the rest is yours."

Siren misses her first shot of pressurized water, which is large around as a golf ball. This sounds good, but the smaller, the more pressure she can utilize. We've worked on that. Onyx needs to work on next to nothing. The man just brutalizes the Walker, which burns beneath his hands. He puts his leg through the molten carriage. For a second, I want to yell that he doesn't have any kind of heat resistance in the pants, but then, we find out the hard way that he does. He looks back up, manic grin tracing his face.

More Walkers encroach out from the sides of the building, like deer wandering towards a highway. I don't want to expend that much energy, frankly, but having them follow us into the building is going to be a pain.

"Should I be fighting?" asks Umbra.

"They're going to know we're here," Siren warns me, as she gets one perfect shot straight through a Walker's eye. "Are you going to bust the door down?"

"No and give me a second," I respond. The door is impenetrable as ever. A little pad around eye level probably records identities of members of the Sanguine Delegation (great name, I hate it) and opens the thing up. The trail of dead bodies should tip anyone off to a security breach, but I'd still prefer to avoid combat for as long as possible.

"We're going around to the side," I decide on impulse. "Onyx, give us some cover?"

"What do you think I've been doing?" asks Onyx, thrilled. "Siren, you wouldn't mind assisting, would you?"
Siren smirks. She and Onyx are ill-matched in terms of technique, a dancer and whatever kind of brutal street fighter Evan thinks he is, but somehow they flow into each other. Onyx can finish off whatever Siren can hold up, or fuse together the molten gears of whatever he burns. It's a game to them, one they're relentlessly good at. I feel an old envy prickle as I approach the wall on the side, to the tune of a dozen dead robots. I slice through the side and find that we've just entered the side of one of the warehouses, the same one we would have entered through. Elevator door's shut. Passage isn't.

"Umbra," I say, bending down to cut open the shaft for her. The grate clatters to the floor.

"Right," she says, as we enter the white passage. "Right. Right." Her shadows begin to cut through the ventilation shafts, which are close enough to the ground that their accessibility is solid. They're large already, useful for cooling down heavy machinery, I suppose, but her shadows move their way in there and she hits them against the sides, trying to get give on any side. Each violent upwards movement of her hand seems to be another exhausting attack, but inside all I can hear is a slight crackle and a dusting of white. She has to lean on me just to remain standing. The next slice is even weaker. Crack. I don't know how much she can reasonably do. Crick.

I hate the shoulderpads on my uniform, but when I test it out, even they slide through, given the few extra inches she's given us on any side. It's enough for a crawlspace. I rise back up, my hair covered in plaster, and ask, "Siren, could you clean that out?"

Siren washes the passage out, looking sideways at Harper the whole time. "Are you certain you're alright to continue?" she asks. "I could get you back to the portal."

Umbra flashes her back her own thumbs up, slightly wary, not entirely convinced, good enough. "You know we don't really have a choice."

There's a distant hum as the front doors move open. Voices echo through the halls, "--and they've been around a while, vandalizing property, being a general nuisance."

It's not hard to infer who they might be talking about. I gesture my team into the grate as in the distance, I can practically feel feet clicking across the warehouse floor. Something about this place sends all my senses haywire. Here, in the tunnel, I can feel the resounding pulse of my teammates hearts in front of me. It's awkward to have to pass through practically on your belly, and we're slow. Harper holes up at the end. There's a mumbled mess of voices.

"What's going on?" I ask Siren, in front of me. She's hidden from me by at least a dozen layers of fabric, which if you really need to know, cover just fine. She twists so that she's almost sitting, although the low clearance prevents that. She's now covered in wet plaster as opposed to dry plaster, but it's barely visible in the dark.

"We're going to have to wait for the elevator to drop," she whispers.

The elevator drops almost on command. The people must be getting through. We can all feel it, and in the distance, I hear a skittering and a distant, faint clatter. Gen pauses ahead of us, but after some mumbling, she's down, and Siren falls right into one of Umbra's shaking shadows. I look down the shaft, to my teammates, a red-handed Evan included (as in his hands are on fire, making him the only thing I can really see), and I try to unsheathe my sword. There's no way I can get it off my back on an angle like this.

"Just jump," Megan yells. "We've got you."

Like I said. Everything else is an afterthought.

There's no way Umbra can catch me, which only occurs to me in the few perfect seconds of descent, until Evan hits me, and then the wall hits me, because Evan falls right over. I appreciate the gesture, but the clanging of metal, both from elevator shaft and my armor, is concerning to say the least. Evan, sprawled out on the floor, yells, "Elevator's going to come back up. I can hear it."

"Someone open it?" Megan yells back, startled. "Are you two okay?"

The elevator jolts beneath us, preparing for a rapid climb back up, but just as it throws itself upwards a pole clicks into both sides of the wall, and the elevator instead makes a rough chuffing noise and stays still. A counterweight dangles meaninglessly in the air like a hanged man, somewhere, and the box remains dead still. Serena's eyes, illuminated by Evan's glowing hands, are full of a frantic energy. "There we go," she whispers.

All of us stand for a second in shocked silence.

"We're not dead," Umbra says.

"Positive thinking. I like it," I agree.

Gen grunts from her corner. "I can only hold this for so long," she yells. "If you want to get a move on?"

Evan's hands brighten. "With pleasure," he says.

"Not all of us are immune to lava, Onyx, so I think I'll handle it," I say, cutting tactfully around the chain that's holding the elevator up. A large chunk of elevator falls to the floor, and I hop through. The elevator doors are closed, leaving me to work on those next while the group files in. "You all ready?"

"No choice," reiterates Siren. "This is our best shot to see what's down here."

"Next time, we bust in. Doesn't matter how many people we make uncomfortable. We bust in," Onyx mutters to himself. "No vents ever again."

"I hate to agree with you, but I agree," Gen says, withdrawing her pole. She's the last one down, and by the time she's done so, I've cut open the elevator door. Sword's flickering out. The energy has to come from me. I don't know how many more chances I get to light it up, but they're not going to know that.

As I kick over the metal cut-out, I see distant red hallways in what looks for all the world like some kind of bunker. There are occasional slabs of white, as if someone's in the process of affixing skin to the bones of the building, but it's slow going. Thankfully, at least no one appears to be there.

"Sign it," I command to Onyx.

He traces our little alpha on one of the nice, white tabs, and smirks at me. I grin back. If anyone can look like they're having a good time in a dark, confined hallway lit only by ominous red lights, it would be Evan, which is at least one good reason to keep him around. Megan brushes past us in the single-file hallway and down into the dark, just ahead of the group.

"Do we even know where the meeting is?" asks Harper, leaning on Gen.

"It doesn't look like there are many branch-offs," Siren muses, up ahead. Water sparkles in the air around her, and her dress ruffles in a wind that isn't there, possibly caused by the shifting mist that's beginning to form around her. "It's got to be straight ahead."

Onyx steals the lead back. I'm hustling to catch up with them both, but Serena's behind with Harper, and I have a migraine. "Come on, we're supposed to be operating as a... unit..."

Siren turns the corner and we approach a door. It's closed by one of those big handles you'd see on a pipe valve, a massive, turnable wheel. Onyx looks back at Siren and I for confirmation. I can't hear from behind the door, but the whole area rumbles with inimical heat. Both their faces shudder in the darkness.

Onyx puts his hands on the wheel. "We're going to be fine," he promises.

"They're just people," agrees Siren. "People with homes, families, maybe even kids. We're just a bunch of vandal teenagers. At worst, we're an impediment. We're not worth killing. It's not like it would be worth it to kill us."

The door opens too easily. Inside is an entirely plated white room, the contrast of color bright enough to burn my eyes. The only evidence of perspective is where the feet of one woman touches the ground. It's the lady from before, decked out in her Diosite-empowered attire, and as we move into the room a window becomes visible on the right wall, previously hidden by some trick of perspective.

"What are you doing down here?" asks Megan.

"Helping people," she says. "You've eavesdropped on enough of my conversations to figure that out."

Onyx rushes at her. The floor slams upwards and hits him in the face.

Anthem strangles me before I can scream his name. As he skids back across the floor, unmoving, Megan runs to his side and puts her hands against him. "E-- Onyx. Onyx, you have to wake up-- oh god oh god oh god oh god."

"Almost said your real name, didn't you? You don't want to do that," warns the woman, over Megan's continued cries. I stand defensively in front of Harper and Serena, sword bared, even knowing I don't have half the guts to do anything more than parry her blows. "Don't look so cross. You know he would have tried to kill me or torture information out of me. You're the people who came onto our territory and tried to destroy my robots in my own home. You're the ones busting into elevator shafts, hurting civilians, breaking things for the sake of breaking them and tagging them because it adds to the rush. Do you think those are the actions of heroes, or have you been taught that anything you do, by virtue of your position as the young, vibrant youth, is the correct thing? Is there no action beneath you?"

"Stop monologuing," croaks a voice from the ground. "You fucking creep."

The woman's eyes tilt down, revealing the extent of her dark, stark eyeliner.

"How the hell do you believe you're helping people?" snaps Evan, from the ground. He staggers up onto his feet, fingers crackling with light. "What's wrong with you?"

"The modern world is a plague and we're curing it," she says, as he charges at her. This time, the room lies dormant, but I can feel it humming and buzzing beneath us, waiting for a command. "I take people in who are on the edge and the stone fixes them. You have to realize the kind of potency this... this has. Possibly the ability to change the world, to create a system where people are no longer stuck doing slavish labor at the whims of higher powers who don't care about them. It's an escape. A way out. I'm just opening my hands to the sky and asking for help, and if I want to get close enough for someone to notice, I'm going to need a lot of people lifting me up."

Evan staggers closer. "Everything out of your mouth sounds crazy."

"Says the man dressed like a dragon, meandering on the grounds of a nuclear power plant at the whims of his friends," she warns. Megan swings a blast of water around to her side, possibly hoping she would be distracted enough not to notice the assault, but it is fully deflected by another wall as a pillar of white stone rises up from the ground. Her gaze, wild, roves over all of us. Onyx throws himself out her, and she raises her hand. From the ceiling, a pillar shoots down, and a mechanical arm comes from it and fixes itself around Evan's neck.

"I have powers, too," she says, standing just out of his grip as he writhes against her. "Powers that are far less inconsequential than yours. I will recreate whatever you destroy. Now, to the rest of you. Go ahead. Try something. I don't have to let him go if you don't want to play nice."

Evan doesn't respond because he's choking. The fire on his fingers flares out.

"Don't do anything," Megan says. She raises her hands. "Just drop him. Please."

The woman seems to consider it. Evan's breath grows harsher. I should be doing something. I could be doing something. He can't die on my watch. He can't die. I need a fighter. I need him for some other reason. I just don't want a person to die in front of me. I just don't want a person to die. My entire body is numb and cold, struggling for a solution that doesn't exist. I can feel something inside of my throat, and I beg Anthem for words I don't have.

"Maybe we just don't understand," Siren says. "Let us surrender, at least. He's not going to do anything else. We can do diplomacy. Stand down."

Evan is dropped to the ground, still clutching his neck. I can hear Siren gulp back a sob. I'm still holding my sword, locked in position like it's going to do anything, and the woman says, "If you really want to be educated, stay here. I will be back for you, and then we'll discuss your identities... your parents... we'll get this all sorted out, and discuss what you will and won't say if you want to go home tomorrow."

A door on the other side of the room opens in front of her, and she blends into the whiteness of the room so perfectly that when she eclipses the exit, it looks like she's an organically shaped piece of the wall. When it closes, nothing was ever there.

I drop to my knees. It's basically impossible to do with armor, so I end up almost on my side. "We can't be there when she gets back."

"No shit," coughs Evan, from his corner. He gasps again, spewing profanity just under audibility from where I'm standing. He manages to pull himself up using Megan, which for some reason causes me to slide in there with them, even though a look from Megan-- Siren-- I'm tired of doing this, and my brain is bouncing back and forth like a small child on caffeine-- assures me that she has him. Evan slides himself between us anyways. "So. What's the plan?"
"How about you don't get yourself almost killed by the Big Bad next time?" asks Gen. She slams one hand against the door. "I hate this. I hate this, I hate this, we have no idea how to get back up, we're stuck in a nuclear bunker, I hate this, I hate this--"

"Noted," Onyx says. "You shut people like that up by punching them in the face. It doesn't matter what they're saying, because it's just them trying to excuse things they already intended to do. Most of what people say is."

"Where'd you learn that from?" Gen asks.

Onyx coughs again. This time I think it might be deliberate. "Eight years of being bullied?"

"Can we at least figure out where we are?" asks Umbra, meekly.

The screen before us leads to a blue-tinted place covered in wires and control panels which have been long-since overridden with new, more frantic assemblies of technology, new nodes and switches and machinery like tumors over the old monitor screens. In the center of the room is just a capsule, large enough to fit a person, but there's no cover on the front. Instead, it is an open ribcage, and it beckons a surgeon.

A dark sihlouette slides across the screen. No. Not a screen. First of all, an observation window. Second of all, someone else is in there.

"That's what she meant by education. We're going to watch someone else get screwed by whatever she does to people and then, for all we know, she might just change her mind and do the same to us," I say. None of the leaderly authority is there-- no shit! I sound like I'm eight. No, worse, I sound like Will. Even imagining him down here, trembling, makes me sick.

This is around the time I realize I know who the person is, even in the diluted, watery light. I recognize the sweep of stubble. It's someone who works at my dad's company, someone who's been over to our house on Sunday nights for beer and football on numerous occasions. Mr. Gray steps through the hallways of my living nightmare, and I convulse, hand rising to my mouth as I keep the other on my shaking sword. All of us stand still as death.

Mr. Gray says something behind the one-way glass. "So you... and... my kids, I don't want ... if it'll make them happy." Through the worried mumble of a motive, I catch his eyes, the resigned glint of light, and see him adjust his glasses. "If it'll make me happy again. It's been too long."

I can feel the room pulsing, the whirring contraptions behind the walls all thrumming with a beat like a human heart. Maybe it's a constant whine. Maybe I'm projecting. There's no doubt this place wants to kill us, but I don't know if I'm attributing an animate passion to it that it doesn't have. Maybe it's unfair to say the building is evil when the people are, when whoever is coercing the man into the open ribcage because he's hurting, that's evil.

Full disclaimer, I am not a selfless person. I just can't stand it for a second longer, and with a searing sunbeam of moral clarity drives my sword through the glass. Mr. Gray's eyes turn my way, and I think he might recognize me. For all I know, maybe he thinks I'm here to hurt him. I'm not. I'm really not. "You have to get out of there. Whatever's wrong, it's not going to fix it," I say, and through the broken glass, I extend a hand. "Call me the Chief. Come on. I can get you out of here safely."

The remaining glass begins to vibrate. I can hear a slight noise, like bells, and then the open air begins to sing out of the ribcage. It is the worst, loudest, longest sound I have ever heard, a pitch that never ends, that knows you, knows me, I can feel it in my skull, and as I'm falling back against the ground I can feel my body lift out of my body, so I'm not myself but pulling towards something else, and in my head I can sense someone else speaking, whispering in a half-formed voice.

It cuts off.

Siren stands before us, beside me, spreading her arms as wide as they can go. The noise is still a ringing hiss, and behind it, through a wall of water, I can see Mr. Gray go stock still. Blurry machinery is placing a mask over his head, and I wouldn't be able to tear my eyes away if I wasn't listening to the far more distressing noise of Siren crying out in pain.

Her skin is sickly in the light. "There's ... not enough water...in the air..." she says. "We have to go."

Umbra's still recovering from a shit call on my part. Onyx rushed in and I didn't stop him. Siren's out on my account. Gen... oh, the number of things I could have done there. It shouldn't fall back to me, logically, but something has been clicking together this whole time. I'm a lousy fighter. I could be a great something else. Light empowers my sword, and I cut through the opposite wall. "Everyone through," I demand, "Siren, when you're out, we cut it. Ready?"

The evacuation is quick. No one screws around. Siren yanks me through before I can get the ringing stuck in my ears, and shaky as her grip is, she has me. I remember, pressing her fingers through mine, how it felt the first time they met. I look to her face, at the reddish-green and reddish-brown the lights dye her eyes and hair, and feel an instant, deep relief. Everything has to be okay.

Umbra steps out across darkness, towards an elevator that resides at the center of a shaft. Around us, the walls give way to reveal to stark descent on all sides. The place is bigger than we could ever have imagined. The air is rank, smelling of dust and cement and the aftermath of something much more alien, and in the total darkness, we look small as kids. It's not the kind of place that cares if it gets vandalized. No one will find what you put there. It will live forever, testament to human progress, and forget all of us.

I have never hated a place more.

"It goes down..." Umbra says. "It goes down forever."

"Not today it doesn't," I say. "Elevator. Now."

"Do we know it goes up?" asks Gen.

"About to find out," I say. "Shaft goes up and closes at the ceiling, there... so if I had to guess, it goes to the back warehouse. Nice back route."

"You won't let it descend on us?" Umbra says. "The whole building hates us. What if the elevator descends on us?"

"I am not going to let that happen to you," I tell her. "If anything happens, I fight the whole way out."

"You couldn't possibly," says Gen.

Siren puts a hand on my shoulder. "It's not that he can. It's that he will." I can feel electricity flowing back and forth between us, feel all of her faith, and when Onyx puts his hand on the other shoulder, I could kill anyone in this place. I hope the elevator takes me down, for a second, and then I realize that's the adrenaline speaking.

The elevator, which lets us in even though it has a perfectly good ID panel we could have bashed in, does have an up button. I press it. Shockingly, and I'm talking head-into-the-side-of-elevator levels of shock here, it takes us up. My destroyed, anemic team takes the elevator up in silence, staring up and waiting for the cord holding us up to snap. Instead, we're let out in the back warehouse, like I expected. There are dozens of Walkers on either side, no people in sight, but all of the robot dogs lie dead still on either side of us.

"They're letting us leave," I say.

"More trouble than we're worth?" Onyx asks.

My brows knit. "No," I say. "No, this can't be right."

A Walker edges towards me.

"We have to take the opportunity," Siren says. As Gen leaves the elevator, the door snaps shut, and on top of that the warehouse door snaps shut. We walk in a huddle past the Walkers and out the open back door, and the last few beams of sunlight just miss us as they go behind the trees. I can feel the ghost of where they would have been on my face. The outside air, the gently dancing branches on the trees, and the familiar landscape of clouds overhead are all so familiar that they make me want to cry. It feels like I haven't seen them in years.

"There has to be a portal out here," I say. Walkers crowd the doorway, still reluctant to attack. Onyx raises one spiked hand, as if to spark it with a click of his fingers, but the other hand is around his neck, and his eyes are tensed up with concern. We pass the barbed wire on the other side, towards the forest, which is so frayed we don't even have to burn through it, and fade back into the forest. I can feel whatever ridiculous surge of strength I had down in the dark rise off of me like mist, but ahead is the portal, and all I have to do now to lead them is walk a few hundred feet.

We collapse when we hit Anthem's cave. She is unimpressed as she skitters over my armor, just stepping around the place where Evan's head rests under my chin. I haven't tried to move him, because it's a position that hides his neck. I can still hear him gasping for breath, the way his eyes lit up and his hands grabbed for the metal and for the woman, at once, as if he couldn't decide if he wanted to save himself or hurt her.

Megan is just looking at her hands.

"Failure," Anthem says. "By all accounts, a failure. An interesting one, yes, one which gathered a good quality of information I can use to make further predictions. But it would have been one descent to take you down to the depths, where you could have, even with your remaining strength, challenged the motherboard. Yet you did not."

"Lay off of them," I tell Anthem.

"We'll work harder," Evan promises.

"I'm sorry," Megan says. "But it was the only decision we could have made."

Anthem's eyes narrow. "I understand."

Umbra asks, from her corner, "What time is it?"

"Six twenty in this 'time zone', using your human time measurements," Anthem says.

Umbra stands. She fidgets with her hands a little. "I have other plans. Um, I know this is a weird note to end on... um. We did a good job. I am very afraid right now, but I guess, also, I was brave? We were all brave together." She attempts a smile. "We're going to win next time. Promise."

I don't need Anthem's foresight to tell me that no one in the room believes it and that it's not true. Regardless, good sentiment. It would be too condescending to comment on her positive attitude again, so I just nod. She nods back, giving me the curtest, quickest dip of the head I've ever seen, and then she rushes off, practically consumed by her own cloak.

Serena bolts up too. "I should also-- I mean-- it may not be a school night, but I do have work to do, at home, and I promised I'd hand out candy. By candy, I mean granola, since we're that family, but well..." She shrugs. "Listen. This is insane. You all know it's insane. You have to consider you might do better without a liability on your shoulders."

"Bullshit," Evan rumbles. I consider pushing him off my chest, but I'm worried he might impale himself on my shoulders. I have no idea how he's managed to worm his way into a position where he's not actively being impaled at all.

Serena's eyes flash with pain, but she just turns, dark ribbon twisting in her tight ponytail.

"Gen," I say. "You did a good job today."

She looks distraught as she looks over her shoulder. "Thank you," she says. "But we both know that's not true." She storms out.

Evan whistles. "Flare for the dramatic, much?"

I knock him on the head. He laughs, and I can feel his chest heaving against the armor. As it devolves into coughing, I end up propping him upright. On our other side, Megan, who has been silent as the Walkers who let us go, looks up, and a faint smile traces her lips. It's all Megan, not a hint of Siren's ethereal grace in it-- just earnest. I reach my hands out and hug them both as close as possible.

"Adam?" asks Megan, putting a hand against my chestplate to push herself off.

"I thought we might lose you guys tonight," I say. "Both of you. To an extent, all of you. I must have made the wrong decision ten times and I almost got us killed--"

Evan laughs again, all snark and teeth as he looks up at me with those bright brown eyes and wide smile. "What? You were the bravest of all of us. We were just running around like headless turkeys, but Adam, you... Adam." He shakes his head. His voice lowering to a rattled whisper, he adds, "I want what you have."

Megan sighs. "He's not wrong. We don't know how it would have gone down if we'd been in the elevator, and then... later, you tried to do the right thing. Do you expect us to be angry about that?"

"I..." I can't refuse a compliment, so I don't. I just wish that my mask could hide the smile. I know that both of them are looking at it, and I consider it a leaderly weakness that I should, in all my apparent wisdom, be able to suppress, but as said leader, I know my authority is bullshit. It falls as quickly as it came, anyways. "There's something else on your mind."
Megan stammers, "N-no."

"There is," Evan agrees.

Megan looks out towards the fire, where Anthem is sleeping. The hearth has died down to embers. "Did you feel that?" she asked. "When we were down there. Did you feel something?"

We both nod.

Megan tilts her head back. "Thank goodness I'm not crazy. I thought the second I came out raring to go for another round, I was losing it."

"Hey," Evan says. "Don't be like that. We could all be nuts together."

Megan leans over me to gently flick Evan's forehead. He shields with his hands before she can do any such thing. "Come on," she says.

"I wouldn't mind that," I say. "I mean, I..."

"Yes?" Megan asks. "If we're all being honest, Adam, that means something has to come from even the depths of your cold, guarded heart."

She's worse than Evan when she wants to be. Rolling my eyes, I admit, "I don't know. I guess something's wrong with me, but when I was down there, I felt like I finally might be making something of myself. Moreover, if I had to do it with anyone... you guys have to be safer on the next mission. We've got to look out for each other. Promise?"

There's a silence that says more than words could. Whatever the language it is they know by heart, I'm in on it.

"So... tonight?" asks Evan.

"I've got somewhere to be," Megan says, wistfully. "If I hurry, I can just pretend I was so scatterbrained I came in late because I was binging some show... this all seems so silly from a distance, once you've been there."

"Maybe because it is," I say. "Anyways, I've got somewhere I'm needed. Evan?"

"Oh, not me." Evan spreads out to take up the whole couch. "Maybe I'll terrorize some neighborhood kids. Do some vigilante teenagering. You know how it is. I'm a busy man," he says, kicking his legs up over the footrest.

Megan shrugs. "See you later, then."

"Of course. See you," I say, watching her disappear, still shimmering.

I can hear Evan's raspy breath through the Veins, the only sound in the dead room, and I can feel his eyes on me. "See you," I echo, and then I disappear.

The world is just as vibrant as upon first exiting the hell that was the underground, the sunset spewing its colors across a quickly darkening horizon, but I feel grayed out.