Firestorm (Complete)

[Aidan Fox]

The anger of a good man is not a problem. A good man has too many rules.

Good men don't need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many of them.

Madam Kovarian and the Doctor

As a rule, Los Angeles had mild summers, a pocket of perfect weather between the Pacific Ocean and the mountains of the California Coast Range. But on the inland flats where Los Santos stood, a boil of hot air had gathered under a cloudless, shiftless sky. It had stayed there for the past week, shimmering and searing during the day, heavy and suffocating during the night, until the grass shriveled up, the gutters filled with dust and dead pine needles, and the parks that usually swarmed with children were all but deserted.

The unrelenting heat had left Redención House quiet. It was early evening, despite the white-hot western sky, and Anna was attending some kind of community charity meeting, Tess was at work, and a handful of kids were melting over the family room furniture watching a Dodgers game. Aidan paused in the hallway to the kitchen, wondering whether he should just slip out unnoticed. But he thought better of it.

"Hey, guys," he said, "I'm heading out. I probably won't be back until after dark. Anna should be back in another hour, and Jake's upstairs if you need anything."

Ronnie tilted his head back over the top of the couch. "Sure. Where you headed?"

Aidan indicated vaguely with a tilt of his head. "Just over toward Compton. I've got a buddy who needs me to look at his engine. Could be a while. Enjoy the..."

The Dodgers' relief pitcher watched his fastball sail into the nearly empty right field bleachers, extending the visitors' lead to double digits.

"...game."

Aidan turned back toward the kitchen, snagged a loaded backpack from the floor, and disappeared out the back door to wheel his motorcycle out of the garage.

[Aimee Connors]

Aimee watched Aidan roll his motorcycle out of the garage from where she was perched on a bit of roof. Heading out to places unknown at night... again. Not that Aidan was always skulking off - sometimes it was Jake. Occasionally it was both of them.

She'd only recently started noticing their nocturnal activities, mostly because her own nighttime trysts had increased. But Cameron was busy tonight, and she was bored. Aimee crawled down from the roof, down the side of the house, and decided she needed a car if she was going to follow him. Ducking into the kitchen she ran into Jim as Aidan started up his motorcycle just outside.

[Jim Lewinski]

Jim was inspecting a large sheet of paper full of sketches and hastily-scratched notes. It was angled towards the window, catching the last golden shards of light, one corner clamped between his shoulder and chin, the other held at length in his free hand. Pilfered blue coveralls hung loosely from his limbs and an impressive length of PVC tubing coiled around his arm; evidence of his latest industrious endevour, prompted by the news that the Dodgers game was about to begin. The convoluted diagrams spoke of magic and romance, a tale as old as time, featuring the love between one boy and his toolbox, and the old radiator from a Honda Civic destined to become an air conditioner.

When he lowered his schematic he greeted Aimee, and her unexpected appearance, with a startled shriek. The apple which fell from his mouth was caught without a second glance and large banana-coloured headphones were peeled away from his ears, spewing frantic electronica.

"A-Aimee!" he spluttered, clapping his work into untidy folds, "Wouldja not do that, p-p-please! What if I'd have been carryin' summin' hot or heavy or sharp, huh? Someone could get really hurt!"

[Aimee Connors]

"Sorry," she said, and then she lit up and grabbed Jim's arm. "Omigaw, you've got to help me. I want to find out where Aidan is going but..." outside the Harley revved up and then began to pull out of the driveway. "I don't have a car. Can you - do you think - could we? Please!?"

Aimee pulled Jim halfway out the back door by his arm before he could protest. "Maybe Ronnie's bike? Y'know you can do it! And aren't you curious about where Aidan's been running off to at night for the last few months? Please please please pretty please?"

[Jim Lewinski]

The bombardment of erratic disjointed dialogue fell upon Jim's ears like a Shakespearean sonnet. He followed Aimee's words to their logical conclusion and hesitated at the door, a glance over his shoulder, his thoughts dwelled on the old radiator, alone in the garage. Then he considered Aimee. Normally, Jim jumped at an opportunity to do something - anything - to pass the time, but the thought of abandoning his work to spy on Aidan raised red flags in the conscience and self-preservation departments. Another impatient tug at his sleeve. The deep chug of the Harley turned into a steady rumble. A sudden epiphany lit up his face like Christmas.

"I'll do it!" he declared, and with a knowing waggle of the eyebrows, added: "Provided you, uh- make it worth my while..."

[Aimee Connors]

"Argh, fine, yes, take apart my laptop, whatever you want." They were standing in the driveway now, and she turned to face him. "Uh, so, how does this work? Hanging on isn't a problem..." Aimee flexed her hands a little and slipped out of her sandals, tucking them into the waistband of her jeans.

"Bike? Piggy-back?" The latter was said a little hesitantly, and then she giggled. "Both?"

[Jim Lewinski]

"This is new territory for me too," said Jim, with a shrug.

He vanished, a blur of blue, and reappeared seconds later with a helmet and a pair of knee and elbow pads. Gone were the coveralls and obnoxious headphones, his trademark beanie had made a return, streamlining stubborn ears and unruly hair. He presented Aimee with the protective gear, all of it a magnificent electric green, and intercepted the inevitable protest with a strern raised finger.

"Safety first, Aimee! Don't worry - Aidan's not gettin' away!"

Righting the bike, he threw a leg over the cross bar, and waited for Aimee to take a seat.

[Aimee Connors]

"Oh, God." Aimee hesitated only a moment, and then strapped on the hideous safety gear. She hopped on the back of the bike, gripping with her feet on the frame as she half crouched behind Jim.

"Don't kill me," she muttered, throwing her slim arms around him.

[Jim Lewinski]

"Just hang on... tight."

The bike crawled down the driveway, burdened by the extra weight, but once they rolled onto Banyon Street it picked up speed. Steady at first, Jim allowed Aimee to get comfortable and secure herself against him. Then, as the distant Harley turned out of sight, his legs fired like hydraulic pistons. The acceleration was dramatic, turning the whipping wind into a turbulent roar, houses ticked by like seconds and soon enough, they were trailing their quarry.

[Aidan Fox]

As evening stretched the shadows of Los Santos from west to east, Aidan's Harley Sportster rumbled to a halt in a cul-de-sac bounded to one side by an ailing storage rental business and the other two by chain link fences and a rocky gorge that spilled down to a curved concrete sound barrier and the 101 freeway. Despite the wall, the din of traffic was as constant as the sky - hissing cars, screaming trucks and buses, the occasional whoop of a police siren. Everyone on the highway had better places to go than here.

Aidan put down the kickstand, dismounted, and felt for the pack of cigarettes in his back pocket, but he left it there and turned around to scope out the scenery. Behind him was one of the few dusty promontories in Los Santos that could justly be called a hill, with long rows of storage sheds and poorly kept parking lots lying crookedly on its haunches. Further up was a power substation and a cell phone tower blinking red against the pale sky.

"Okay," Aidan announced to the storage sheds, "I'm here."

A patch of shadow that was a little too deep for waning light slid out into the open street, then boiled into the hazy air like liquid nitrogen. Where the darkness had been stood two men, one of them lank and shifty like the shadows themselves, the other dark-skinned and so big it was a wonder that anything could have kept him hidden.

"What's up, hermano," said the first man, and he grabbed Aidan's hand in what wasn't so much a handshake as a test of strength. Aidan returned the favor, then nodded to the big man, who flashed him a huge, crooked-toothed grin.

"Hey, Shadow. Slim." Aidan looked from one to the other. "How's life treating you?"

"Like kings, man, like kings," Slim said through his huge smile. "Hey, I heard you and your girl were one the wrong side of the action in West Adams a while back. Hope it wasn't nothin' serious?"

"We made it out all right," Aidan replied. "No thanks to that Black Smoke mutant. You guys ever find anything out about him?"

Shadow shook his head. "No idea where the Onces dug up that crazy fucker. Nothin' stops him. Bullets, knives, cars, he just turns to smoke and it goes right through."

"Asshole gassed Trick last week, damn near killed him," Slim said. "Every time he shows up, we have to bag it. You gotta do something about him, man."

"Me?"

"You're the only one who can fight him one-on-one," Shadow replied. "Pedro, he can go stone and the guy can't touch him, but Pedro can't stop him, either. Either we take him out, or he's gonna take us out, one by one."

Aidan felt for his smokes again. "I'm no hitman," he said. "But I'll see what I can do."

[Aimee Connors]

They finally skidded to a halt, back end of the bicycle fishtailing in a bit of gravel as Jim slowed down to normal speed and then stopped abruptly. Aimee bit back a yelp, and hopped off the back of the bike immediately, her hands sticking a bit to his shirt before she could fully disentangle herself. "Oh wow, that was..."

Words failed her, and she staggered a bit, pulling her sandals free and hopping on one foot at a time to put them back on. From the looks of the area broken glass on the ground was likely. "Where is he at?" She'd had her eyes closed tightly after the first few exhilarating moments of super speed travel.

[Jim Lewinski]

"Keep it down, will ya?" Jim hissed, there was a note of anxiety in his voice, "We're close. Follow me."

He skulked away, wincing at the soft crunch of gravel underfoot, despite his exaggerated stealthy strides. They came flush with one of storage sheds, Jim sidled cautiously to the edge and peered around the corner. There was Aidan, shaking hands with a couple of strangers who both fell perfectly into Jim's definition of an unsavoury character, their voices were a low murmur against the ceaseless din of traffic.

"This ain't right. Don't look like no buddy with an engine problem, Aimee. Aimee?"

Jim glanced back to find his purple-skinned friend halfway up the side of the storage shed. He choked back a cover-blowing outburst, instead he grabbed her by the ankles and looked up with wide, pleading eyes.

"Whatcha doin'!? Are you nuts!? You're gonna get us... oh, freakin' hell, they might have guns! They look like they might have guns! I think- oh, shh-shh-shh- Aimee-get-your-purple-ass-down-here-right-now!"

[Aimee Connors]

Her eyes glowed as she looked down at Jim, hanging onto her ankles desperately, and she whispered, "Oh my God, Jim, I'm not stupid, they're not going to see me."

Aimee still climbed back down, relenting if only to spare Jim the aneurism that was about to explode in his brain from his panic. "You're the one who practically glows in the dark you're so white," she murmured once she was back on the ground, elbowing him a bit, and then following him back to the corner of the shed so they could peek and see what Aidan was doing.

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan fished a cigarette out of his pack and lit it with a tiny spike of blue flame. Shadow eyed it hungrily. "Hey, ese, hook me up."

Aidan raised an eyebrow at him through a puff of white smoke. "These things'll kill you, you know."

The skinny mutant laughed and showed a yellowing smile. "Yeah, and no smoking, no drinking, and no sex will make you a miserable old man."

Aidan shrugged and pulled out another cigarette. "So, any more news on the factory in West Carson?"

"We been staking it out all week," Slim replied. "There's vans in and out of that place every night, and there's always Tres Onces watching the fences. They're armed for a goddamn war. Ain't just guns, they got assault rifles, and the whole place is covered like fucking Alcatraz. When the hell did they get that kind of firepower, anyway?"

"Same place they're getting the nectar, I'd guess," Aidan replied. "The Tres Onces are just the middleman. We've got to bring that place down."

"And how're we gonna do that?" Shadow said. "You're the idea man, I'd just love to hear a suggestion."

Before Aidan could answer, the cell phone on Slim's pocket started thumping with a Latin beat. He fished it out, dwarfing it in his massive hand, and hit "receive."

"Hey, Marano. What, you serious?" Stonefaced, he put a hand over the phone's mouthpiece and said to his companions, "We were tailed, Onces are on their way."

"Shit, how much time we have?" Shadow said.

"Marano says--"

He was cut off by a jet of black smoke that blasted down from the sky overhead and erupted into a huge, choking cloud that covered the street. Blinded and suffocated, the three men bent double trying to find any untainted air, and they nearly succumbed before Aidan sent up a plume of blue flame that cleared a small pocket of air around them. "Get to cover!" he shouted, and they all stumbled through the fog into the cover of the storage sheds.

[Jim Lewinski]

Jim watched with equal parts fascination and horror as the cloud took shape. It spiralled on the air, condensed, and fashioned a man out of smoke. His first step trailing a wisp of inky vapor as he stalked his prey, wearing a smile like a razor's edge. Jim squirmed to catch a glimpse of Aidan and his friends, wild eyes tracing the ricochet of a thousand thoughts inside his head. An anxious murmur surfaced in the back of his throat.

"Oh, shit. Morpheus looks like he means business, Aimee. Whadda we do!?"

It was a conundrum. No matter the course of action: every road led to trouble. Jim had calculated as much and it looked like the shadowy menace had no intention of leaving room for consideration. He exploded in a tangle of black tentacles which billowed forth, consuming the trio of men. A burst of blue flame, and another, the smoke weaved and expanded as if it were something living, breathing, and snapped together, thick like tar, with a swipe of a shimmering knife. Over the roar of fire Aidan's voice rang out, it was strained, pulled tight with desperation... fear... rage? Jim wheeled around on Aimee.

"We-we-we-we we can't just stand here! Aimee, I- I'm goin' in!" he declared, a quick glance over his shoulder, "I think I'm goin'- I'm goin'..."

His train of thought was catastrophically derailed as a couple of familiar lowriders lurched into view, banking violently around the hill-hugging dirt track, and with a scream of engines, the Tres Onces entered the fray. Adrenaline struck Jim like a bolt of lightning, he darted for the bike, and called out to Aimee. Just as his fingers wrapped around the handlebar there was a sharp crack and a small geyser of dirt grazed his cheek. He dropped the bike with a terrified shriek and scrambled back to the cover of the storage shed as a second glancing bullet cratered the ground.

"Guns! They... they-they-they shot at me!" he whimpered, practically colliding with Aimee in the dark, "We gotta get outta here!"

[Aimee Connors]

Well, she thought, This isn't car trouble.

Aimee felt strangely detached from what was going on around her as Jim came dashing back to the relative safety of the shadows. "Three Elevens," she whispered, letting him pull her backwards and farther away from the commotion. After a moment she turned and ran with him, the pair of teens darting between storage sheds and trying to put distance between them and any flying bullets.

Collapsing on the ground with her back to a shed Aimee nervously pulled her fingers through her ponytail. "We should call the police or something. Or..." She looked back the way they'd come, just a few yards and flimsy buildings between them and where Aidan was presumably fighting for his life. "Fuck! I feel so useless!"

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan and the pair of La Raza mutants scrambled into an alley between two long rows of sheds as gunfire peppered the hillside. Shadow pulled a knife and disappeared into a veil of darkness while Slim pressed himself against an aluminum door and drew a pistol from his waistband. Aidan found himself scanning the ground in vain. It was all gravel with a few pathetic sprigs of dry grass shooting up here and there, not much fuel for him to burn. He dug in his pocket for the nylon pouch full of match heads. It would be enough for some defensive fireworks, but not enough to fight off the Smoke Man.

The plume of smoke arced overhead, rippling like a Chinese dragon, and plunged down into the gravel alleyway, billowing up into a roughly human-shaped column. Slim lifted his piece and fired two shots through the still-congealing head, but the ghostly face simply leered and filled in the bullet holes. He moved toward Slim like a wraith, and the big La Raza mutant stumbled backwards against the nearest shed.

Aidan squeezed the pouch full of match heads and burned almost half of them, and with his free hand he sent a gout of blue flame at the Smoke Man's feet, dispelling him like a bad dream, but the smoke swirled back together and reformed just a few yards away. Aidan torched him again, and he retreated another twenty feet and solidified, a tall, black man in a duster with a long, straight-edged knife.

Aidan and Slim both squared on the Smoke Man, Slim with his pistol, Aidan with a tongue of blue fire in his hand. "We need to get out of here," Aidan said. "He's just going to hold us here until the Onces surround us."

"No shit we need to get out of here," Slim panted. "You got any bright ideas?"

"The fastest way out is straight through. I'll keep him from staying solid, you and Shadow get to your car, and I'll deal with him myself."

"Hey, I ain't gonna argue," Slim said, "but I'd like to know what the hell the Onces are shootin' at."

Another shot rang out and pinged through an aluminum shed door somewhere in the next row. Aidan threw a harried glance behind him. There were no Onces in sight.

"I... I dunno," he murmured, and he felt a sickening pit open up in his gut. Every instinct he had told him something was horribly wrong.

"Shit, heads up!" Slim shouted, and Aidan snapped his head back to see the Smoke Man barreling toward them with his spectral knife swinging.

[Jim Lewinski]

"Fuck! I feel so useless!"

"Ya think!?" Jim snapped an incredulous gaze in Aimee's direction, "Whatcha think ya gonna do, freakin' cling em to death?"

For emphasis, his hands groped at thin air, until a sharp ping of metal had him ducking for cover again. Behind them, the garage door trembled and rang as another gunshot spoke out, scorching long menacing shadows into the hillside. Over the din, a cold voice barked orders, and the hapless teens scurried desperately out of sight, pursued by the bloodthirsty howls of gangbangers.

"Look!" Jim was pointing at a tall chain link fence visible through a break in the ranks of old storage shacks, beyond which the valley was illuminated by the strobed glare of headlights, "The freeway. It's a steep drop but you can make it! There ain't jack we can do here now- we- we gotta make a break for it!"

[Aimee Connors]

"I'll cling you to death," Aimee muttered, but she looked where he pointed. The concrete valley on the other side of the fence was full of scrub brush, and probably broken glass and bums. Not to mention the freeway. A zillion pounds of metal slinging around a ten lane track, with seventy-five percent of the drivers texting. She wouldn't last as long as Frogger.

She hesitated. "Are you going to run? Will you be okay?"

Jim nodded impatiently, giving her a little push toward the fence. Aimee took a step, and then they both ducked again, bullets smacking against the metal shed above their heads. The voices were much louder. "Now or never," she breathed, and started running.

[The Tres Onces]

On the far side of the 101 was another ridge that supported a couple sagging apartment complexes behind chain link fences. The parking lot was mostly empty, but parked on the edge facing the freeway was a sleek, black Mercedes sedan surrounded by four men who invited unfavorable comparisons to a pack of pit bulls. They wore suit coats and buttoned shirts, but they were baggy and loose so as not to impede movement. Two of them held rifles. One had a stockless shotgun.

The fourth man wore a tailored gray suit with the cuffs undone and the shirt collar hanging open to show off several loops of gold chains. As he watched the melee on the other hillside through a pair of binoculars, he curled his scarred lip.

"The fuck's goin' on over there..."

Julio scanned over the complex of storage sheds from the clash between blue jets of flame and black plumes of smoke and down the slope to the two shapes loping awkwardly toward the sound baffle over the highway. They were kids, scrawny and unremarkable, except for the fact that one of them was undeniably purple.

Julio put down the binoculars and dug a cell phone out of his coat pocket. "Check your fire, Nico. Those kids ain't La Raza, they're two of Fernandez's freaks. Change of plans. I think it's time to buy ourselves some insurance."

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan lanced the air with jets of blue flame, but it was like trying to shoot down a raincloud. He wasn't sure the Smoke Man could even be harmed in his gaseous state; the best he could do was keep the bastard spread out so he couldn't materialize and bring his knife to bear.

"Go!" Aidan shouted at Slim. "You can't help me with a Glock!"

Slim backpedaled, swore, and then started lumbering through the sheds toward his car. "Shadow!" he yelled. "The hell are you, man, let's bail!"

Aidan wasn't so lucky - running for his bike would mean heading straight into the teeth of the Elevens, and he was already almost out of matchheads. He started working his way further up the hill toward the cell tower. There would be cover there, and if worse came to worst, he could wait until the Elevens had dispersed and come back for his Harley later. Anyway, it sounded like their attention had diverted elsewhere.

With a grimace, he burned up the last of his fuel and sent up a dome of fire like a shield. He could see a ghostly face pressing against it through the smoke, its twisted jaw open and howling, and he sent the fiery shield bursting outward like a nova, scattering the Smoke Man through the stagnant summer air.

A patch of darkness he hadn't noticed melted away, and Shadow stood there, eyes wide and shining. "Holy hell, ese, did that do it? Did you glass the fucker?"

Aidan stumbled and nearly fell on the slippery gravel. "I wish we were so lucky," he panted. "He'll pull himself back together, you and Slim need to get out of here before..."

He'd turned and glanced down the hill where several of the Elevens were running now. The gunfire had stopped, but one hulking gangbanger in a black bandanna was packing something that looked like a grenade launcher. He followed the weapon's line of sight down toward the freeway, where two small figures were running for the sound baffle. He didn't know what he was looking at until he saw a flash of purple skin and black hair.

"Oh, no. No, no, no, fuck, no!"

[Jim Lewinski]

They skidded to a halt, trailing a plume of dust down the length of the decline, and despite the life-or-death nature of their predicament, Jim still winced at the sound of his scraping sneakers. Behind them, the pack were closing, and had mercifully exchanged bullets for taunts. Once over the fence, Aimee only had to spiderman down the sound barrier, and she'd be safely out of sight. And the sooner Aimee was safe, the sooner he could get out of dodge, which was why he'd taken it upon himself to assist Aimee in scaling the wire mesh with an undignified shove to the butt.

"Come on, Aimee, they almost on top of us!" he shrieked, "Follow the traffic to the first rest area and that's where we'll-"

From somewhere on the hillside sounded a deep thum, Jim turned in time to catch a glimpse of an object arcing against the night sky like a shimmering comet. It struck the ground and tumbled towards them, spiralling smoke in its wake, until it lodged itself against his foot. It was a small metal cyllinder and it vomitted its contents in thick golden clouds.

"Gas!" he gasped, and stumbled away, "Aimee, don't breath it, it's- it's- it's..."

Jim squinted, his nose twitched and he reared back as if about to sneeze, then he took off like a rocket up the hillside.

[Aimee Connors]

When one holds one's breath, usually a deep inhalation is taken in order to avoid breathing for as long as possible. Unfortunately, that one breath was one too many. Aimee spluttered as the yellowish gas made her face itch and eyes water, and found herself stuck to the fence as surely as if she'd been superglued to it.

She shrieked as her skin prickled all over with sandpaper-like nodules, miniscule 'hooks' that would adhere to anything. Her hair stuck to her face. Her clothes looked like she'd been attacked by the worst case of static cling known to man. In her panic Aimee pushed against the fence with her forehead, trying to leverage her right hand off from it, but then she couldn't take her face away from the fence again.

She screamed again, certain she was going to get shot in the back, and dissolved into choking sobs. The entire fence rattled back and forth as she as she still struggled with the chain link, her skin painful as she tried to rip away from where she was stuck.

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan sprinted through the sheds toward the fence, hardly even registering the jarring impacts of running downhill on slippery gravel, or the warning in the back of his head that if he got into the expanding cloud of aerosolized Nectar (http://www.sw-fans.net/wiki/index.php?title=The_Jericho_Foundation#Technology) , the hillside might resemble a hot day in Pompeii. Jim was already gone and out of sight, and he could only hope the speedster could find his way to safety, but Aimee's screams cut through him like razor wire and left his gut empty and quivering. He would have run straight in front of half a dozen Tres Once guns had the Smoke Man not ghosted straight into his path.

Aidan took in a sprinter's breath of the corrosive smoke, and his lungs spasmed, throwing him off-balance and pitching him to the gravel parking lot. He tumbled over and over, taking patches of skin off his forehead and off the palms of his hands, and he curled up choking and wheezing out ribbons of black smoke. Through tear-blurred eyes, he looked down the hill to see the Onces closing toward Aimee's pinioned body.

Boots crunched on the gravel behind him. Aidan scrambled unsteadily to his feet and wheeled around as the Smoke Man's knife came whizzing past his ear. He stumbled backwards and ducked another strike, and then he was on a patch of sad, sun-parched grass, the kind that lit like flash paper. Still coughing, Aidan swung back at the Smoke Man, shooting an arc of blue flame from the dry grass, and another, and another, leaving scars of white ash in the ground. His head pounded and his chest burned. He didn't have the oxygen to continue the fight.

And then the Smoke Man, the storage sheds, and the hillside disappeared, and for a moment Aidan thought he'd blacked out, but he still felt his feet beneath him, and he could hear the Elevens shouting near the fence below. He scrambled blindly to his left and into the fading evening light, just outside a patch localized darkness as thick as the LA River.

"Smoke this, pendejo!"

It was Shadow's voice from inside the darkness. Aidan heard a scuffle, a collision of bodies, and then the wet thud of a knife splitting flesh.

The darkness blew away like fog before the sunrise. Shadow stood in the center of it with a look of angered bewilderment on his face. The Smoke Man's knife was buried in his chest. Not stabbed, but embedded. The point of the blade split through his sternum, and the pommel of the handle had broken his spine. Shadow crumpled to the ground, and smoke poured from his nose and mouth.

[The Tres Onces]

"Chavala got herself caught like rat. Like a cockroach!"

"You do any other colors? Green? Red? Give us a show, little girl."

The Tres Onces fanned out around the fence where Aimee was trapped like a bug on flypaper. One of them kicked away the Nectar grenade as it gasped out a few more puffs of yellow aerosol; the gas didn't seem to affect them at all.

One of the Elevens grabbed Aimee roughly around the waist and pulled, but she didn't budge. Another tried to pull her by the arms, but his hands stuck to her skin, and he swore loudly as he tried in vain to yank free, setting the whole fence rattling.

"Relax, moron!" The leader of the group, the big gangbanger carrying the grenade launcher came lumbering down the hillside. "The Nectar'll wear off in a minute, and then her powers disappear. She'll come off of there easy enough. Won't you, chola?"

He grinned at Aimee, flashing a mouth full of tooth rot. "They gonna have fun cuttin' you apart in Jericho."

[Aimee Connors]

She couldn't see very well, her face stuck fast to the chain link, but the voices around her made her quake in fear. Aidan was around somewhere... and Jim was probably halfway to New York by now. "He-help!" she tried, her voice too breathy to carry.

The gang members laughed, and one of them tossed a handful of gravel at her. The rocks clung to her skin, but some bounced off her clothes to rattle to the dirt. Aimee wanted off the fence, wanted the guy off her arm... He was hurting her, pulling despite being warned just to wait. Her whole skin felt like it was on fire.

After a moment her eyes rolled up in her head and she fell bonelessly off the fence.

[Aidan Fox]

There wasn't time to grieve, wasn't time to rest, wasn't time to register the horror of what he'd just witnessed. There wasn't time for Aidan to deal with the searing pain of lactic acid in his oxygen-starved muscles, and there certainly wasn't time for them to seize up and send him lurching to the ground. The Elevens were already hauling Aimee away, and the Smoke Man was taking shape again over Shadow's twisted body. The assassin bent down and pulled the knife from the dead mutant's curled fingers.

Aidan scrambled backwards despite the spasming protests in his legs as the man prowled toward him. He may not have had the strength to stand, but now he was surrounded by the dry grass.

Sorry about this, Shadow. You deserve better.

Aidan seized a clump of brittle grass in each hand and set it alight, and blue tongues of flame spread hungrily all around him, eating up nearly a quarter acre, including Shadow's body. The Smoke Man vanished into a cloud to escape the brush fire, and he plunged toward Aidan, intending to kill him from the inside out like he had Shadow.

With a hoarse cry, Aidan twisted the flames together into spinning vortex, catching the column of smoke in the middle. He spun the vortex faster and faster until it became a twisting cyclone that reached high into the air, scattering the Smoke Man across the pale summer sky.

And then the grass was exhausted, and so was Aidan. His head flopped back against the ground in the center of a broad circle of smoking cinders.

[The Tres Onces]

"We got the purple one, Julio. Cruz says they found the skinny white kid over the hill. Ran himself into the side of a garage and just passed out."

"Good work, Nico. Pack 'em up and meet us back at the plant."

Julio pushed his phone back into a jacket pocket and lifted the binoculars to his face again. He found Shadow and Aidan crumpled in the middle of a smoldering gash across the hillside.

"Today's a good day, boys," he said. "It's the day we're finally going to take back our town and put those bastardos mutantes in their place."

And then he saw movement. Aidan stirred, and then he rolled over onto his hands and knees and coughed into the cinders. Julio shook his head. "Un-fuckin-believable."

"We could send Nico back in," one of his lieutenants said. "Finish him off for good."

"No," Julio replied. "He might still have fuel to burn. Besides, I'm not done watchin' him suffer."

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan staggered to his feet. He'd managed to expel the last of the Smoke Man from his lungs, but he was still lightheaded and sore all over, and the air on the hillside felt uncomfortably thick and close. Aimee and the Elevens were gone. He didn't have the faintest idea where Jim was. He felt like the ground had been pulled out from under him, and he was staring down at an abyss so deep he didn't know if there was a bottom to hit.

He limped on past Shadow and dug in his pocket for his cell phone. Miraculously it was still in one piece. Without a moment's hesitation, he speed-dialed Jake's number.

[Jacob Foley]

By the time Jake had returned home with Anna, they were just in time to witness the closing seconds of the Dodgers game and the consequent exodus of dejected teenagers from the family room. The air in the house was stifling and thick with the smell of stale popcorn and sweaty feet. Jake grimaced. The speakers at the community meeting, of whom his sister was one, failed to mention that the first casualty of charity was the nose.

There were other smells coming from the kitchen as Anna emptied the contents of take-out cartons onto dinner plates, it was enough to rouse the spirits of even the most crestfallen of Dodgers fans as they assembled around the table, such is the power of good food.

"Aimee! Jim!" Jamie called from the foot of the stairs, "Dinner's ready!"

"Hey, has anyone seen-"

Jake was cut off by the vibrating in his pocket, he fished it out his cellphone and after giving it a glance, retreated into hallway. Once out of earshot, he answered the call:

"What's up, man? You're late for dinner."

[Aidan Fox]

A quick glance around the storage complex told Aidan the coast was clear. He didn't see Slim anywhere, but he'd heard a roar of engines and squeal of tires further down the hill, which could only be the Elevens speeding away with their prize in tow.

"Jake," Aidan said, and there was no disguising the hollowness in his voice. "Are you alone? Really alone?"

Once he got an affirmative, he plowed on. "The meeting with Slim and Shadow went bad. Really bad. The Elevens were all over us. Shadow's dead."

[Jacob Foley]

The short burst of bad news struck Jake like a blow to the gut, knocking the air from his lungs, and with a knotted stomach he retreated immediately for the garage. When he spoke, his throat felt dry and contricted.

"I'm on my way."

On the other end of the line he heard the trauma in Aidan's voice and the fatigue in his ragged breaths, and it took some considerable effort to not pair up a mental image with such an eerie soundtrack. He climbed into the truck, its engine still ticking from the trip home, and turned the key in the ignition.

"Lie low, Aidan. I'll be there in no time."

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan crested the rise to the gravel parking lot. Miraculously, his Harley was still standing there untouched. He started limping faster.

"That's not all," he said. "The Elevens are gone, but..."

He spotted Ronnie's bike lying crookedly against the office and a couple discarded bike helmets in the dirt nearby.

"Aimee and Jim followed me. They must've been watching when the Elevens showed up. Jim took off, and I don't see him, but..."

For the third time that evening, he felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. "Jake, they have Aimee. They took her away."

[Jacob Foley]

At that, a creeping cold climbed his spine, freezing him to the spot. Their greatest fear had at last been realised: one of the very kids they sought to protect had been caught in the crossfire of their dirty dealings. It made him sick to his stomach and it was another moment before he could speak.

"Okay. Okay. We're gonna make this right. I'll call Calaveras. Just hang tight."

[Aidan Fox]

"Don't come here, they might still be watching."

Aidan threw a leg over his Harley and shot a glance across the highway at the apartment complex on the far side. He saw a pair of headlights go on and start pulling out of the parking lot.

"You call Calaveras and have him meet us at the City Walk Arcade. We'll work it out then."

No sooner had Aidan snapped his cell phone shut than it rang in with another call. It was a number he didn't recognize. He considered letting it go to voicemail, but, with that sickening feeling still gnawing at his stomach, he flipped his phone back open and answered in the most natural voice he could manage.

"Hello?"

"I found something of yours. You should be more careful with your things, mutie."

Aidan tasted bile at the back of his throat. "Julio."

[The Tres Onces]

"Ah, good. You already know your daddy's name. Because from this day, I own you, bitch. Just like I own the two little freaks who were followin' you around."

"What do you want?"

Julio grinned and leaned his head back against the plush leather headrest in the backseat of the Merc. "Now, see, that's what I like to hear," he said. "You knowin' your place. Which is on your knees in front of the real rulers of this town. I have had enough of you and your band of fucking gene-freak sideshow rejects. I don't want anything from you, mutie. I want you out of my town. Every last stinking one of you."

[Aidan Fox]

"And how is holding two kids hostage gonna do that for you?" Aidan fired back. "Come on, Julio, they're not the ones you want. They've got nothing to do with you and me."

"Who said anything about hostages? I get paid for the freaks I bring in. Hey, maybe I don't even bring these two in. Maybe I keep them for myself. I could have a lot of fun doing my own science project. Maybe I find what part of 'em makes 'em into freaks. Maybe I cut it out of them and see if it makes 'em normal again."

"They're not. The ones. You want."

Aidan slipped the key into his ignition and put up his kickstand. He needed this conversation to end so he could get back to Jake and Pedro and plan some way out of this nightmare.

"And what is it I want, genius? Tell me. I'm just dyin' to hear the story."

"You want the one who cost you Los Santos. Come on, you had La Raza on the run before I showed up. I know that's why you sent your lackeys after me tonight."

[The Tres Onces]

"You flatter yourself," Julio sneered back. "You're just another mutie to me. There's a bullet with your name on it, and there's a bullet for every other freak in that sorry-ass reject outfit you call a gang."

"Then why'd you pull your boys off us and leave us to your pet smoke monster? I'm the one you want. Snatching two kids doesn't get you a thing unless you get me. So..."

There was a pause. Julio savored it like choice wine.

"You win, Julio. Let the kids go, and I'll surrender myself to you. Like you said. The town's yours."

"No," Julio replied, "I don't think so. Two-for-one isn't such a good exchange from my end, you feel me? Anyway, you're not tellin' the story right. It wasn't just you who stirred up La Raza. It was you and that pothead friend of yours."

Julio took a deep breath of fresh, smog-laced Angelino air and let it out nice and slow.

"Bring him along. You and Foley. Do that, and I just might be willing to deal."

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan sat motionless on his bike, swaying as if he'd just taken a body blow. His free hand curled around the rubber handlebar grip so hard his fingers throbbed.

"When and where?" he said.

"Yeah. That's what I thought. You know the old factory on Francisco, right? Meet me there, nine o'clock. You and Foley better be the only ones I see, or I paint the floor with their mutated brains."

The connection ended. Aidan stared numbly at the cell phone screen, then slapped it shut and shoved it back into his pocket. He fired up the ignition, lifted his feet off the ground, and sped off into the gathering night.

[The Tres Onces]

The factory on Francisco street was a relic from a 1960s industrial boom that had since fled the south end of LA, leaving blocks and blocks of abandoned industrial parkland littering the town in patches like brushfire scars in a thriving forest. In the neighborhoods that had money, they were torn down and replaced - with housing, with businesses, with shopping centers. Others, like the end of the row in West Carson, lingered on and became the places even the LAPD took detours around. They bred trouble the way dumpsters bred roaches.

A convoy of lowriders, followed by the sleek, black Mercedes, rolled through the front gate in a chain link fence topped by spools of barbed wire, waved on by men holding AR-15s and wearing flak vests under their clothes. The cars rumbled over the cracked pavement onto a parking lot that was more gravel than asphalt now, past a row of trailers where a few more men stood around smoking blunts and shooting the breeze. When the convoy ground to a stop, Julio stepped out of the Mercedes and gave a signal. The layabouts sprang into action and popped open the trunks of the two lowriders, where Jim and Aimee had been thrown carelessly like lost luggage on the world's worst airline. A pair grabbed Aimee's wrists and ankles between them, and another pair seized Jim, and they swung the two mutant teens into the main building through a set of sliding garage doors.

When the kids came to, they were sitting back-to-back on the concrete floor of a cavernous room, surrounded by corrugated steel walls, acres of filthy glass, and a jagged aluminum ceiling six stories up. They were handcuffed, and a loop of heavy chain ran through the cuffs and through a steel bracket sunk deep into the floor. Every door in every wall was attended by at least one armed guard, and nearby was a folding card table where six more men gambled over a pile of bills and a jug of cheap liquor. On the other side of the floor from the sliding doors they'd entered through was a complex of scaffolding, balconies, and office windows, as if the factory had swallowed half of an oil rig. Julio stood on one of the balconies with one hand on the rusty railing and the other gently tumbling a glass of tequila. The king was back in his castle, and soon all would be right with his domain once more.

[Aimee Connors]

The first thing she became aware of was her headache. Aimee scrunched her eyes closed a half second after opening them, the light sending a spike of pain into her brain. Eyes closed, she heard male voices arguing in Spanish and English, and then she remembered what had happened and her eyes snapped open, headache be dammed. She couldn't bear another second in the dark, not knowing what was going on around her.

She took in the enormous building, it's run down appearance, and the Three Elevens scattered throughout. In front of her were some big garage doors, and behind her was...

Aimee tugged at the handcuffs on her wrists while pushing against the warm back behind her. Twisting her head around she looked through her disheveled hair and realized it was Jim. Tears sprang to her eyes and she whispered, "Jim. Jim. Wake up, please..." Her voice cracked and she became certain he was dead and it was all her fault.

[Jim Lewinski]

Jim sat crumpled on the floor like a long-neglected ragdoll, his jeans were caked in dust, a savage spattering of blood decorated his shirt, and where his face was once pale blossomed a band of sickly bruises. He rocked heavily against Aimee as she tried to wake him, then suddenly snapped upright with a start:

"-obly eargas o-skind-o weaponised-hallucinogen- oh!" he blurted in surprise, rubbernecking left and right, "I was unconscious- never been unconscious before- that was boring- ow, my freakin' head!"

[Aimee Connors]

Aimee sagged with relief as Jim's motor mouth took over. "Ohmigod, Jim, I thought you were dead." She sniffed hard, their chain rattling as she tugged at her hands.

[Jim Lewinski]

"Not-dead-just-bait- straight into the garage door- can you believe that?"

He muttered to himself in disbelief, replaying his final moments before the blackout, and it took a considerable effort to ignore the sharp throbbing pain in his head threatening to push his eyes out of their sockets. Pressing his face against the cold metal cuffs, he sighed.

"You okay, purple?"

[Aimee Connors]

"No." Aimee sniffed again, glad that the Tres Onces around them seemed to be totally ignoring them. "I mean, yeah, I'm okay. B- but not really.

"Do... d'ya think that Aidan is okay?" She pulled her hands out in front of her, trying to see how much slack there was in the chain. Jim squeaked as her action pulled on his own wrists, the chain attached to them both and then to the ground. "Sorry."

[Jim Lewinski]

"If, by okay, you mean not chained to the spot in a heavily fortified warehouse and su-surrounded by legions of gun-totin' lunatics then-n-n... yeah, I reckon you'll find he's tip-motherfuckin'-top!"

Against his back, he felt Aimee heave another quiet sob. Instinctively, he moved and faltered to the sound of scraping chains. Being helpless was one thing, but the inability to comfort a friend in need was torturous, and yet strangely, it kept him strong. Alert eyes pinged around the room, soaking in their surroundings, despite the sad state of the battered glasses sitting skewed on the tip of his nose. Aimee was too quiet, he twisted enough to catch a glimpse a shimmering cheek, and softly amended his words:

"What I mean, Aimee, is... it's Aidan. He's tough. And I'm sure he'll figure something out."

[Aidan Fox]

Sunset was over an hour ago, but it had done nothing to ease the heat. The hot, sticky evening had become a hot, sticky night with no promise of relief in the smoke-brown sky.

Aidan glanced down at his open cell phone as he paced around the stacks of cheap beer and shelves full of junk food that stuffed the back aisles of the little convenience store attached to the Francisco Street BP station. The clock said 8:41 PM, which meant he had time to kill. At the bottom of the little screen, a couple status messages flashed urgently: 4 missed calls. 11 text messages. Two of the calls were from Anna; the rest was all Tess. He hadn't read them. Even now, he didn't have the stomach.

He thumbed through his contacts to Tess's number for the fifth time to punch in a message. Just like the other four, he found himself hovering over the 'send' button.

Crazy night. Srry about dinner. Be back as soon as I can, love you.

Which was more callous - sending a hollow apology like that, or saying nothing at all?

8:47 PM. Time was about to make the decision for him. He shut his phone off, dropped it into his pocket, and grabbed a candy bar off the shelf.

"Just this and the gas," he said.

The girl behind the till gave him a suspicious look and then pecked away at a keypad. "Your total is twenty-five thirteen."

Aidan fished two bills and a quarter onto the counter and glanced out the shopfront window where Jake was attending to the truck, then back to the short, heavy-set girl at the register. She'd had her eyes on him since he stepped inside. He guessed she had a sense for people who brought trouble with them, working nights in a place like this.

"You're working alone tonight?" he asked.

He didn't miss the warning in her face when he drug back into his pocket. But he pulled out three more twenty-dollar bills and dropped them on the counter by the candy bar.

"Why don't you lock up early tonight? You don't want be around here later. Trust me."

She didn't say a word. But she carefully slid the money down off the back of the counter and into her pocket.

Aidan stepped back out into the steamy night to find Jake crawling underneath the truck. "Hey. Ten minutes to showtime. How are we looking?"

[Jacob Foley]

"Stupid thing..." Jake muttered, the muffled fumble resumed and then, "There. Now we're good."

Worming his way out, Jake squinted at the stark light of the gas station, and quickly righted himself. He wiped a slick black trail down the side of his jeans and regarded Aidan where he stood. In the distance, the freeway softly roared to the tune of people going about their daily business, men and women returning home to their families. Further still, there were empty chairs waiting at a dinner table. His gaze flicked casually to the street, which he followed into the distance, hands plunged into his pockets.

"We'll make the trip there well enough," he said, after some consideration, "Twenty-five dollars..."

Time was against them, he could feel its oppressive weight hanging around his neck, pulling them inexorably toward that long and barren road. And it ripped the core out of him. He turned to Aidan again.

"Taped inside my acoustic there's a letter... for Anna... you know, just in case."

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan caugh Jake's eyes. They mirrored what he felt, that grim, too-alert sharpness that came from the other side of fatigue, something they'd shared before on late-night stakeouts and desperate escapes, but there had never been this much at stake before. That letter stuck in Aidan's mind, accusing. He hadn't written one. Until recently, he'd have never considered he had someone to write to.

He pulled half a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and lit the charred end with blue candle flame from his thumb. As he took his first drag, the lights in the convenience store went out, and Aidan craned over his shoulder to see the clerk watching them warily through the front glass.

He blew out a jet of white smoke and slapped Jake on the back. "Let's go."

They piled into the cab, and Aidan started the wheezing Toyota engine and put the truck into gear. "Listen," he said, "if this whole thing goes south, and you see an opportunity to get out with the kids, take it."

[Jacob Foley]

Inside the truck, the air was stale and warm and infected with the the sickly taint of an expired air freshener. It was anything but pine fresh. Jake cranked the window down and eased an elbow outside, intent on enjoying the breeze like a master illusionist. Headlamps chased away the encroaching gloom as they rolled onto the road. There was no music. It was not the time for music. The silence, however, was appalling and for a fleeting instant Jake feared he would drown in it.

Fortunately, Aidan put his fears swiftly to bed when his trademark brand of stoic chivalry made an ugly reappearance. Jake fired up at once:

"Hey, fuck that, man. You're gonna pull that shit on me now? We're in this together, Aidan. Enough with the goddamn hero talk!"

[Aidan Fox]

"You've got a family, Jake. I don't."

For once in his life, Aidan respected speed limits. There was no sense in hurrying. He could already see the factory looming at the end of the street like an old-world colosseum, its haunches illuminated by the unctuous orange glow of sodium streetlights.

"Besides," he said, "if this works at all... I might be more dangerous to you than they are."

He slowed down to a crawl as they approached the front gate, slow enough that the rifle-bearing guards on either side could look in and see their hated enemies behind the windshield. One of them leveled his gun at the mutants while the other walked around the truck and checked the empty bed. He gave a signal to his partner, who waved them on into the parking lot.

The pickup wobbled over the fractured pavement, and Aidan took the shortest possible route to the sidewalk and threw the shifter into park. Then he killed the engine and stepped out onto the asphalt.

"Hey, put that out, mutie!" Aidan was greeted by a Three Eleven waving a rifle barrel in his face. He reached up to hold his cigarette stub and exhaled. For a moment, the burning end glowed blue instead of orange.

"Throw it on the ground, now!" the guard ordered. Aidan took the stub between his thumb and forefinger and flicked it down to the pavement underneath the cooling truck. He glanced over toward Jake, who was also getting prodded with the barrel of a gun.

"Come on, let's not waste any more time," Aidan said. "Take us to Julio."

[The Tres Onces]

The rattle and crash of a sliding garage door split the silence of the factory floor and set the metal rafters ringing, and Aidan and Jake walked in just ahead of the rifle barrels of the thugs behind them. Julio leaned on the railing of an office balcony on the second story like a king waiting to deliver judgment. When he saw the two mutants, his mouth curled in victory.

"Would you look at that," he shouted. "This neighborhood's going straight to hell with garbage like you two walkin' in here."

[Aimee Connors]

Aimee's head jerked up as the doors opened, fear washing over her anew like cold water. When she saw Aidan and Jake she felt a surge of hope...

...Only to despair again at the sight of all the guns pointed at them. The leader guy of the gang shouted from above, and she stared at the two older mutants like a fat kid at a birthday cake.

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan tried not to look the kids' way - tried not to betray how his heart was thundering in his chest and his hands were sweaty at the prospect of finding them imprisoned in a den of slavers and murderers. But he glanced before he could help himself, enough to see the weltering bruises on Jim's face, and the surge and death of hope in Aimee's amber eyes. And then he lifted his face toward Julio.

"We're here," he shouted back. "You've got what you want. Let the kids go."

[The Tres Onces]

Julio strolled to a metal staircase and began descending toward the factory floor. "I said we might deal," he replied. "I never said what the deal would be. Looks to me like you've got nothing left to bargain with, mutie."

The Smoke Man stepped out from the shadows underneath the scaffolding that supported the offices and joined him as he crossed the concrete floor toward Aimee and Jim. He pulled Beretta 9 mm pistol from an underarm holster and stroked Aimee's cheek with the barrel, drawing a trembling whimper from the terrified girl.

"What I want to know is, how much do you have left to lose?"

[Aidan Fox]

Something shrank in Aidan's gut, and his fingers twitched at his side.

"You want to think about what you have to lose, Julio," he said. "Those kids are the only thing keeping you alive right now. If I were you, I'd consider pointing that gun at something that's still a threat."

[The Tres Onces]

Julio scowled like a wolf posturing over fresh meat. Then he pulled back the hammer of his pistol, seized Aimee's hair, and pressed the barrel against her temple.

"Empty your pockets!" he snarled. "Both of you! Throw down everything that's flammable! Jackets off too! You don't keep a goddamn Kleenex, hear me?"

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan shrugged off his leather jacket with a thud, leaving only a T-shirt underneath, tattered and dirty from his tumble down the hill. Then he turned out his pocket, dropping wallet, keys, and a half-empty pack of cigarettes onto the concrete floor. Beside him, Jake did the same. A couple Elevens poked through the contents with their shoes. One of them snagged Aidan's cell phone out of his coat pocket.

[Jacob Foley]

The warehouse stretched every which way, making insects of its inhabitants, and exhaled a long low clammy breath. Cold stretches of light slashed at the great expanse, clawing in futility for the steel-ribbed roof. Laughter rumbled in its darkest corners and warped words echoed and shrank in the vast swell of space. Jake removed his jacket and turned on the spot, glass crunching like fresh snow. He was unarmed. The same could not be said for the gunmen he saw prowling walkways overhead. It was at that moment he understood the staggering scope of the enemy and the threat they posed became painfully clear. A loose perimeter of gangbangers formed around them, snapping sneering taunts like hungry muzzled dogs. Fear made a home in his stomach, then clenched into a first at the sight of his scared young friends. He took a strained breath and met Jim's eyes with fierce intent.

[Jim Lewinski]

On the floor, Jim murmured fearfully as the terrible scene played out. The arrival of Aidan and Jake hadn't been unexpected, given the predicament in which he and Aimee had landed themselves, but at this stage he hadn't predicted the gang leader to renege on the deal. And when he heard the haunting click, and felt Aimee turn rigid against his back, his shriek rent the air. Chains jangled furiously as he wrestled against them. Then, caught in Jake's gaze, he settled, and listened, and understood.

[The Tres Onces]

Julio watched with wild eyes and bared teeth as his boys scattered the the meager piles of debris, none of it remotely threatening, and yet he held his breath, as if half-expecting something to explode, or spit fire, or turn into a blinding cloud of smoke. But nothing did.

He laughed - a low, rasping sound like a man choking on scotch. "Still a threat, huh?"

He released Aimee's hair and carefully brought the hammer back down. Then he stalked toward Aidan and Jake with his gun swinging carelessly at his side. He stepped up to Aidan and struck him across the face with a stinging backhand.

"You're full of mierda. I know you've got nothin' to burn. Still a threat. Huh!"

Julio stepped back and leveled the gun at Aidan's forehead. "Frankly, I'm disappointed. I expected better from you, mutie."

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan tasted blood in his mouth, but he lifted his face and stared calmly back into Julio's eyes.

"Frankly, I wasn't talking about me," he said.

[Jacob Foley]

It was a bad day. It was a bad day for Jim and, certainly, Aimee, and by anyone's standards it was a bad day for Aidan, too. But for Jake, a telepath, his bad days took on a special kind of meaning. It was a time when he was visited by the blackest of human transgressions, and spent haunted days and tortured nights in the company of nightmarish visions, praying for the horror to stop. Then he met Aidan, who showed him how to control his curse and keep the nightmares at bay. And while he slept soundly, he was never truly free of his curse, and the creeping darkness swarmed at the edges of his mind, searching for a crack in the fragile mental dam. It took a monumental effort to hold it all back, especially on bad days, and today, to Jake's recollection, was definately one of the worst...

He closed his eyes and shattered the dam to its foundations. The mutants had arrived at a precipice, and like the black raging waters of chance and misfortune that had sped them towards it, the nightmares surged forth, filling the warehouse with the cries of men.

[Aimee Connors]

Fear had caused Aimee's mind to almost literally short out - when the gun had kissed her head everything had gone blindingly white. As bad as living on the streets in New York had been, no one had ever pointed a gun at her before.

For that matter, no one had ever tied her up, either. As the pressure against her skin had eased she blinked open her eyes, tears falling without her being aware of them. There were loud voices, and she struggled to get ahold of herself, to get it together. This was the rescue party, after all. She and Jim needed to be ready for anything.

Of course, she wasn't ready for that. The screaming and crying of a mother who's son was killed in a drive by. Arrows sprouting out of an Asian man's chest. A child lured into a van expecting a puppy and getting a -

Aimee squeezed her eyes shut and clamped her hands on the sides of her head, rocking back and forth.

[Aidan Fox]

It affected everyone in the factory. Julio and the two guards at the door, the ones closest to the epicenter of Jake's telepathic onslaught, were overcome immediately. Julio bent double, one of the guards slumped to the floor in a seizure, and the other clutched his head and fled out into the open night air. Aidan was nearly overwhelmed as well, and he'd been expecting it. But he forced his mind back into brutal clarity.

Just as Julio was coming back up, Aidan smashed the heel of his hand into the man's face, flattening his nose. Then he seized the wrist of the hand holding the gun and twisted it savagely until the pistol fell from Julio's grasp and clattered to the floor. Aidan gripped Julio in a body lock and singed a handful of hair off his head, enough to conjure a quivering tongue of flame. By the time the mental aftershocks had faded, the battlefield had changed.

"You crazy bastard, you think this wins you anything?" Julio spat. "Nico! Chong! If he doesn't release me in ten seconds, you put these fucking freaks down!"

Aidan tightened his grip, drawing a snarl of pain from his captive. "Don't flatter yourself, Julio. I'm through negotiating."

[The Tres Onces]

Outside the factory floor, the night was quiet, hot, and dull. Most of the guards had been pulled inside to witness the spectacle of Julio meting justice on the pair of gene-freaks who'd violated Tres Once territory, but somebody had to stay outside and watch the fences.

"So who gets the truck when the boss is done with them?"

The big skinhead jabbed his rifle toward the sad, old Toyota sitting parked with its front tires against the sidewalk. His partner, a lank and scrawny specimen, nudged him with his elbow.

"You kiddin' me, man? You ridin' in that piece of trash, you deserve to be ridiculed."

"I dunno, man, I always wanted a pick-up. It's manly."

"It's five seconds from the scrap yard is what it is." He sniffed loudly and pulled a face. "Aw man, it even smells like it's got a gas leak or some shit."

In the gravel underneath the body of the truck, the cigarette stub still glowed with blue embers. But now it bloomed into flame, hot enough to catch the gathering puddle of gasoline beneath the punctured fuel tank. Twenty-five dollars worth of gas had been streaming out of it just minutes ago, but now the flow had stemmed off to a few solitary drops.

But the blue flame was still hungry. It leapt from the puddle to the trail of gasoline that spread out behind the truck, winding through the parking lot and out onto the street like a fuse.

[Aidan Fox]

The factory was filled with screaming and cursing voices. Some of the Elevens were still recovering from Jake's attack. Some of them were still writhing on the floor and clutching their pounding heads. Behind Aimee and Jim, Aidan could see the Smoke Man struggling to his feet and drawing his long knife as his mouth twisted into a predator's snarl.

But Aidan was on the road, speeding along the thin river of gasoline they'd dropped behind them on their way to the factory. He devoured the volatile fuel as it led him all the way back to the gas station where he and Jake had filled up, and from the gas station lot he jumped to a fuel pump, then quested his way down the line, blazing past pump motors and safety valves, down into the fifteen thousand gallon holding tank buried beneath the concrete foundation.

The blast lifted the gas station roof off its moorings and shattered windows for blocks around, and an enormous blue fireball went rolling slowly toward the sky, drowning the meager streetlamps in a nova of blue phosphor. And that's where it should have ended - an incandescent mushroom cloud that expanded and faded into acres of greasy brown smoke and precipitating ash, leaving the remaining gas to burn itself out like an oil fire. But the fuel had not been consumed. It had been absorbed.

Julio wrestled free of Aidan's grip and went spilling to the factory floor. The overhead lights still swayed from the blast wave, and the massive windows were awash with blue light. Scrambling over the concrete floor, Julio shouted, to anyone who was still awake to hear, "Shoot 'em! Shoot 'em all!"

Aidan's eyes snapped open. His senses and his powers had expanded, farther than they ever had before, and he could sense every flammable molecule in the building, knew each one's flashpoint, and just how it would burn if he coaxed it to life. He could taste the chemical sharpness of gunpowder, hundreds of tiny reservoirs of it, bursting with kinetic potential, longing to be set free.

He swept his hand over the factory like a prophet parting a sea, and one by one the magazines, clips, and cartridges in every rifle, every pistol, and every shotgun exploded into clouds of plastic and metal shrapnel. Before Aidan reached the far corner of the factory, the Elevens were throwing their weapons to the ground.

Julio turned madly to the Smoke Man with desperation in his eyes. "Do something!"

The Smoke Man regarded Aidan with a mask of silent fury. Then he burst into a jet of black smoke and shot like a rocket into the air and out through a broken windowpane into the firelit sky.

[Jacob Foley]

Bent double, and with a sharp pain rushing from behind his eyes to his ears and neck, Jake struggled against the effects of his exertions. On some level he was aware of a mass clattering of metal and a chorus of panicked cries resounding in the great open space around him. His face turned an angry shade of red as he worked against the pain, shutting it out as one would stem the flow of water from a gushing faucet. When he finally righted himself, it took a moment to swallow whole the awesome spectacle unfolding before his eyes, and he cast Aidan a staggered glance. The ringing in his ears subsided and it was his chance to capitalise on their advantage.

Bloodshot eyes fell upon Julio, who looked deliciously helpless and alone. Behind him there was Aimee and Jim. Jake swept forward and scooped Julio's discarded Beretta from amongst the broken glass. It was still warm and curls of grey smoke oozed from the barrel. The pungent metallic tang of gunpowder coated his tongue like newly-drawn blood. He stalked forward, and as the hellish blaze engulfed the sky, shafts of azure light plunged in through the windows, stretching luminous shadows across the floor. Jake zeroed in on his enemy.

"Give... me... the keys," he growled through clenched teeth.

There was a moment, when their eyes met, in which he recognised a flicker of resistance. The gang leader's face contorted angrily, the bunching of muscles before a blow, but before he could summon the words he found himself facing the barrel of a gun. Jake squeezed the trigger, the spent weapon gave an impotent click, and Julio collapsed, grasping his knee and howling in pain. This time, the weapon was levelled at his head.

"Now."

[The Tres Onces]

"Go fuck yourself," Julio spat through labored gasps of phantom pain. Then the hammer cocked back, and his boys were scrambling all around like a kicked-in anthill. His eyes darted to the steel mesh staircase. "Office, second floor. They're on the desk."

He screamed as Jake lifted him onto his feet and frogmarched him toward the stairs.

[Aidan Fox]

Several more Elevens ran for the exits, but a band of them had regrouped and scurried to gather some improvised weapons - crowbars, a sledgehammer, a few coiled lengths of chain. They charged at Aidan from all quarters, intent on overwhelming him. But Aidan blasted at them with rolling gouts of fire that left burning trails in their wake, like slicks of napalm, until the factory floor was a maze of cerulean flames.

The ground shook as the gas station gave up another few thousand gallons in an explosive burst.

Aidan turned his attention to the walls, spraying the old bricks and dessicated timbers until they also were alight, sending swirling currents of blue sparks and burning dust up into the rafters as the roof guards fled the swaying catwalks like rats jumping a burning ship.

[Jacob Foley]

Jake urged Julio up the stairs with a prod from the business end of his gun. Their ascent was hampered by the gangster's painful protests, heavy clanging footfalls buried under the weight of roaring flames. When they reached the office, Julio led the way while Jake poured all of his attention into maintaining the illusion of pain in his captive's knee, which was why he failed to notice the threat on the other side of the door.

Inside, the office blossomed bright blue and, for a fleeting instant, the shapes of men were fashioned from the dark. Jake's breath caught in his throat. They moved swiftly and in unison, the first of whom found himself greeted by a face full of Julio, and the pair stumbled blindly over a chair. The second performed an agonized pirouette as the beretta cracked his face, falling limp onto the floor. Fingers clamped around the weapon, he bolstered himself with the comforting touch of cold hard steel. Another blistering wave of fire surged past the window, the temperature in the cramped office leapt, and on the table across the room a sharp glimmer caught his attention, a small sliver of metal. But no sooner had Jake advanced than he found himself violently uprooted and pinned between the wall and a faceless gangbanger. Over the manic drumming in his ears he heard the others rousing behind them.

[Jim Lewinski]

In his current predicament, there wasn't an awful lot Jim could do other than sit tight and hope against hope that he nor Aimee drew any unwanted attention. The risk of that was negligible, he considered, given Aidan's outrageous pyrotechnics. Hugging the ground, he found himself transfixed by the awesome spectacle, sandwiched somewhere between terror and awe. Once the men had gathered themselves up from what Jim assumed had been some sort of telepathic assault (but struck him as a rather dreary and inappropriate montage of misery), they regrouped and rounded on the stoic pyromancer. The few smart ones fled. Time and again, their advances were rebuffed by sweeping columns of flame, the air rippled from the searing heat. Aidan remained steadfast. Jake had taken control of the gang leader and embarked on a mission to retrieve the keys, Jim felt he wasn't being too presumptuous in his assumption, to unshackle them.

It all happened so... leisurely. In his head, at least, affording him a comprehensive grasp of events as they unfolded. And while it was fully expected of him to be a scared shrieking wreck in the midst of guns and hostility and a raging inferno, he was not. His life was on the line, rationally he understood that, and he didn't want to die. But his fears were anchored. Because when his life was on the line, and the odds were insurmountable, they came. He saw them stare down the barrel of a gun, the men with whom he ate breakfast and watched TV, and they didn't flinch. It was the kind of courage that had only ever existed in movies. Jim was more afraid than he'd ever been before in his life, but he was resolved, and the world around him could burn; he wouldn't whimper, he wouldn't tremble, he wouldn't flinch.

[The Tres Onces]

Julio lurched over the floor and gripped the edge of the office desk in an attempt to wrestle himself up onto his good leg. But then he realized the shooting pains in his knee were just a memory, and when he carefully pulled his legs underneath him, they could both support his weight. Which either meant he had a better constitution than he'd thought, or he'd just been played for a fool. Again.

He glanced up to where Nico had Jake sandwiched against a wall. Then he tore open a drawer and grabbed one of a half-dozen syringes filled with amber liquid. He pulled the rubber cap off the needle and tossed the syringe to one of his friends, who reached for an exposed span of skin on Jake's neck.

[Jacob Foley]

The needle broke skin and Nico cried out in protest. The crushing weight abated, allowing Jake to work against the dig of elbows in his back, he planted his foot squarely against the wall and pushed. Both he and Nico tumbled backwards in a heap, the gangbanger affording him a comparably softer landing in the process. Above, towering shapes circled. Jake rolled off Nico and pulled him sideways, listless eyes bulged from the thud of hard leather, sending shudders throughout his body. Abandoning his human shield, Jake scrabbled to his feet, sucking through the bite of copper in his mouth, to face Julio and his snarling wingman. The sight of the raised beretta, and the echo of pain in his knee, gave the gang leader pause for thought.

"How's it feel, Julio?" he asked, with a glance at the blaze outside, "Your little empire is burning. Ever get the feeling you picked the wrong fight?"

[The Tres Onces]

"You're fuckin' dead, Foley," Julio spat, "Fuckin' dead!"

It was a stalemate, Jake had the gun, a gun that should've for all intents and purposes been completely useless, and yet by some virtue of genetic abomination, it was not. Nico was leaning limp against the wall, attempting to shake off the nectar's hazy hold, while Julio and Ramirez snapped at Jake, like hounds fighting against a leash. It was only a matter of seconds before the trio returned to full strength, mere seconds before Jake realised his crucial mistake and followed it up with another one, he reached for the key.

Ramirez, the largest of the pair, was on top of him in a heartbeat. His large hand swatted the beretta aside and a thick forearm planted itself violently into the mutant's throat, sending him sprawling into a filing cabinet.

[Jacob Foley]

The hard edge of the the filing cabinet bit into Jake's back, snatching the last wheeze of breath from his lungs. Against the relentless pressure on his throat, he hacked and gagged, swallowing gulps of searing air. In his panic, he swatted feebly at Ramirez with the Beretta, it slapped his ear with a wet thud. Jake couldn't distinguish the sound of the breaking window from the snarls of his attackers, everything was warped and faint like distant underwater ambience, but the bite of glass teeth tearing through his arm was blazing and acute. Outside, the handgun fell to the warehouse floor with a clatter.

"-stabbed me in the neck, motherfu-"

A fist like a boulder buried itself just below his ribs, triggering a chain reaction of sharp crippling explosions from his kidney outwards, his feet gave up but unfriendly hands kept him upright. A nose popped from the impact of his forehead, tears like paper cuts were blinked from his eyes, and a holy terror seized his heart. Nico was approaching from across the room, his knife smiled in the fire light.

"AIDAN!!"

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan stood in the middle of the factory floor, eyes closed, his face calm, almost meditative, in the midst of the swirling blue flames as more Tres Onces scrambled for the doors. Fire climbed the walls like ivy, greedily sucking oxygen in through the shattered windows. It kindled under the joists that held up the offices and metal balconies, worked its way into the drywall, seeking the glue that held down linoleum floors, the cheap particle board in cabinets and desks, stacks of paper, caches of weapons and drugs, anything and everything that would burn. The heat built in Aidan's chest, from a spark to a flame to an inferno, and with every breath he took, the tongues of fire reached a little higher.

And then he heard Jake shout his name, snapping him out of his trance. Some of the flames on the upper stories shifted from blue to yellow, now burning out of his control, but that didn't matter - it was self-sustaining now. Over the stygian roar he could hear the scream of sirens approaching the streets outside.

He sprinted through a wall of blue flame to the base of the office stairs. He could see shadows moving through the smoke, and he saw the gleam of a knife through the office door. He laid his hand on the metal railing, and a line of fire hissed up the stairs like a powder trail and leapt into the office.

[The Tres Onces]

Nico jumped at the sound of gushing flames behind him, and he whirled to see a column of blue fire billowing up from the cheap carpet. The column morphed into the figure of a man, then into a facsimile of Aidan, rendered in shimmering blue incandescence and swirling brown smoke. With a feral roar, Nico slashed with his knife straight through the apparition's throat.

He passed straight through, then crumpled to the floor screaming as he ground his burning sleeve against the floor.

Fiery Aidan raised his eyebrows at Jake, then dissolved into smoke.

[Jacob Foley]

The Elevens were stunned by the sudden appearance of Aidan's hellish doppelganger, affording an equally-surprised Jake the opportunity to capitalise on his friend's timely intervention. He lifted a knee into the groin of Ramirez, who buckled and fell like a great oak. His agonised groan did not go unnoticed. Julio's face was twisted with rage, his comrades were down, and he turned to Jake with black murderous eyes. But it was too late.

Hands clamped down heavily over the gangbanger's ears, foreheads met in a clammy kiss, Julio screamed. Despite the deep ache in his muscles, Jake forcefully manouvered his enemy across the room, and over Nico, towards the doorway. Hoarse anguished cries were silenced with the ring of skull meeting metal, Julio appeared from the office and tumbled limply down the flight of stairs. Jake followed, casting an anxious glance at the shadows stirring behind him.

"Aidan," he called, "I have the keys. Cover me!"

Feet faltered under him, partly due to the crippling pain which accompanied his every step, but mostly as a result of the sight that greeted him in the warehouse proper. The inferno raged, an incendiary web criss-crossing floors and scaling walls, it reached up and peeled away the ceiling in downpours of volcanic ash. But the wild lashing flames didn't concern him, it was the sight of Aidan stood amongst them, and the look of serenity upon his face as he conducted fire and destruction like a maestro from hell. And, despite the unmerciful heat, that chilled him to the core.

"Aimee! Jim!" he said, as he approached the young mutants, key in hand, "Don't worry. We're getting you out of here."

[Aimee Connors]

"Oh thank God," Aimee held her handcuffed wrists up to Jake as he reached them, her yellow eyes wide. He made quick work of the lock, and she struggled to her feet as he unlocked Jim. She could see Aidan just barely through the blue flames, unleashing the most powerful display of mutant ability she'd ever seen.

It was hard to keep her jaw from dropping open. Sure, she knew he was a pyrokinetic, but seeing it like this was something else entirely. Aimee grabbed Jim's hand, who seemed unsteady now that he was slowed down to normal human speed, and looked at Jake. "Where do we go?!" She had to shout over the roar of the flames that never seemed to get too close.

[Aidan Fox]

"Just follow the sirens."

Aidan stepped through a curtain of flame to find the kids on their feet and rubbing at the raw welts the handcuffs had left on their wrists. Aimee looked like she was in the early stages of shock, while Jim looked eerily serene. Both had seen far more than he'd ever intended for them to see.

He raised an arm like an Old Testament prophet, and the slicks of flame that criss-crossed the floor suddenly parted and lined up into a burning thoroughfare that led straight to the front doors of the factory.

"The streets outside will be full of emergency vehicles," he said. "The Elevens won't touch you. Find some paramedics and get yourselves checked out. They'll help you get back home, okay?"

[Jim Lewinski]

Beneath him, Jim's legs were sluggish and stiff from all the sitting. He was prompted forward by the tug of Aimee's hand, he obliged, taking short cautious steps towards the exit much like a toddler learning to walk. It was a strange sensation, he thought, alternating his curious gaze between his shuffling feet and the approaching door, to be reduced to such a snail's pace. He was tired, too, he could feel it in his limbs like lead. No, he wasn't tired, he was exhausted. Maybe he could get some sleep when he got back to Redención House. That would be something, to sleep- to sleep perchance to dream- to dream about the lovely Madeleine Flores-

There appeared to be nothing hampering the velocity of his thoughts, he noted. If only the rest of him would catch up. When, at long last, they reached the door, Aimee hesitated. Jim glanced over his shoulder and noticed their rescuers hadn't moved from the center of the factory. A sea-sick surge of worry sloshed in his belly. His voice cracked like kindling over the flames.

"G-guys? You comin'?"

[Aimee Connors]

Aimee turned to look at the two guys in the middle of the factory, and recognized the expressions on their faces. She'd seen that look before, on Ginny's face, and on the faces of other street kids. "They can't come, Jim," she said, her voice surprisingly strong. "We have to go..."

They finally exited the warehouse, the roar of the flames just as loud on the outside, but the blue light joined with the flashers of more cop cars than she'd ever seen in one place before. Fire engines had set up shop, and there were so many people running around it made her dizzy.

As the police and emergency workers closed in on the pair of teens, Aimee leaned in close to Jim's ear and said, "We don't tell the cops about them. We can't. Understand?!"

[Jim Lewinski]

"Mhm," he whimpered.

Paramedics swept down upon them, casting blankets around their shoulders, ushering them to an ambulance. The lights were blinding, and the ceaseless drone of voices was punctuated by bursts of radio static. There was the sound of an angry scuffle nearby, a mouthy gangbanger being wrestled into the back of a squad car, but Jim didn't much care. Silent and still, he sat on the back of the ambulance, and watched the burning building with a weight growing heavy in his heart.

[Jacob Foley]

Jake watched the kids as they left, and once he knew they were safe, it felt like every muscle in his body unravelled. A long breath escaped him. In that moment, with the fires bellowing all around, he closed his eyes and thanked God. They did it.

A sudden medley of hacking gasping coughs caught his attention. Beyond a wall of flame, the shimmering shapes of Nico and Ramirez retreated to the back of the factory and disappeared from view. The kids were safe. The Elevens were gone. It was now, impossibly, time to think of their own escape. Jake staggered over to Aidan.

"Come on, man, let's get out of here."

He wouldn't last much longer, of that he was sure. He gulped at the thick sooty air, wincing as it blistered his throat and boiled in his chest. It was like being cooked under his skin. Aidan was silent. Jake clamped a hand on his shoulder and raised his voice over the violent din.

"Aidan, we need to go now!"

[Aidan Fox]

The fire burned in Aidan's chest, warmer every moment, furious and alive, but also hungry. He felt that hunger every time he used his talent, every time he consumed matter into smoke and ash - that urge to grow, to search, to devour, to unlock the incandescent potential hiding in every molecule of fuel. The more he burned, the hungrier he grew. It was intoxicating, more cloying than nicotine, more seductive than speed.

And then Jake's hand shook him out of it, brought him out of the leaping flames and billowing smoke. His friend's face was reddened in the heat and marred with soot, his lips cracked and chapped. Aidan wrestled himself back to the factory floor.

"I can't go yet, Jake," he said. "The job's not done."

He looked down at the chain on the floor where Jim and Aimee had been bound, and the heavy steel ring the chain was looped through. There were other rings in the floor, a dozen at least, and the concrete beneath them was marked with stains even the fire hadn't yet scoured away.

"It's not just the kids. They've been doing this to dozens of mutants. Torturing them. Selling them like animals. It ends now!"

A blue fireball went up from a barrel against the wall and bubbled up into the a bank of florescent lights on the ceiling. They exploded, showering the floor with sparks and molten glass. Aidan followed the sparks with his eyes and saw a figure on the catwalks duck out of their way and then retreat higher into the factory's superstructure. Julio.

"I'm going to finish it, Jake," he said. "I'm going to burn this place to the ground so they can never use it again. This might be your last chance to get out."

[Jacob Foley]

"What- And- And bury yourself under it? No way, man, this is crazy!"

Jake siezed him by the arm and pulled. Aidan was immovable, anchored to the spot with heavy determination. It was in his voice, and resounded in his words, cold hard words of steel. The conviction in his eyes burned brighter than any conjured flame. His anger was infectious, righteous, and everything he said was true. Jake knew it in his heart. It was what he always wanted. Napalm the place, he said that, that's what he told Aidan when they first learned of the factory, and now here they stood with it burning down around them. There was another explosion, a tree of incandescent blue blossomed, rattling sheets of corrugated iron. Jake flinched and shielded his eyes. The factory gave an ominous groan.

He retreated a few tenuous steps, and looked up. The ceiling was charred black and wispy columns of dust trickled to the ground; their time was running out. Options were scarce. Outside, an army of police was gathered, awaiting the appearance of the pyromaniac, and a response from the fire department was surely imminent. Fear pierced his heart like ice, freezing him to the spot halfway between Aidan and the door. He could not go back to prison. Thoughts ran frantically to his family, to Anna, and his brothers, to his mother and father; everything Aidan was without. His friend stood alone amidst the flames. You have a family, Jake. I don't.

"Is that what this is?" Jake shouted hoarsely, and marched back, snatching handfuls of Aidan's shirt, "You looking to make a martyr of yourself, huh? We're in this together, Aidan. I'm going nowhere!"

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan's concentration wavered. The flames chewing their way across the ceiling struts guttered yellow, and a broad span of half-rotted plywood came spinning down to the floor in a shower of embers. Aidan pressed his hand against his temple as if warding off a headache, and the fire flushed blue and clean again.

"This is more power than I've ever had at one time," Aidan said. "I'll be fine, Jake. But I don't know if you will. I don't know if I can keep it under control."

He looked straight into Jake's eyes. Only Aidan's eyes didn't look entirely human anymore. They bounced back the firelight like a coyote's eyes at night, a pale blue glow where his pupils should have been.

"There's a basement back past the trailer docks. All cement. It has a back entrance that opens up a block north of here. That's how we're getting out. Wait for me there, okay? I promise I won't be long."

[Jacob Foley]

Despite Aidan's words, it was difficult to shake off that nagging sense of apprehension, and it was painted clearly on Jake's face between vivid patches of red and black. Confidence and composure rolled off his friend in cool placid waves, rebuffing his own anxious turbulence. One last measured glance passed between them. Aidan was steadfast. Jake steeled himself, took a long bracing breath which descended into a fit of spluttering coughs, and retreated quickly to the cluttered recesses of the factory. There he found a narrow staircase cut into the floor and followed it down to a door which, in his haste he failed to appreciate the irony, turned out to be a fire escape. He crashed against the push bar and it swung open with a deep thud. Behind him, the blaze renewed with a ferocious roar, and the door closed, blinking out its hellish glare. He staggered forward a few steps then folded against the wall, gasping cold air in the dark.

[Shield]

"Oh... my... God..."

It was the sort of spectacle that made you consider just whose name you were taking in vain. Certainly someone had poured out a vial of wrath on a block of industrial West Carson, enough to light up the sky in a hazy incandescent bloom for miles around. When Lorrance Duquesne had crossed the 105 on his way south from the precinct, he'd seen it as a pale blue glow rising from the horizon. When he'd turned onto Browning Street, half a mile away, the blaze was already sharp and bright enough to sting his night-trained eyes. Now he was stepping out of his cruiser into one of Dante's nightmares, a blasted landscape full of jumping shadows punctuated by the strobing lights of emergency vehicles that were scattered in a jagged circle around the hot zone, everything bathed in a Stygian blue glare from a towering inferno that should have been impossible.

Duke stepped past the cordon the LAPD had drawn up to keep out the slack-jawed civilian onlookers and into a hornet's nest of activity. Paramedics doled out burn treatments and oxygen for smoke inhalation while cops interviewed those who were lucid enough to talk. The colors of the Tres Onces were everywhere, green bandanas and black jackets; the LAPD had long identified this neighborhood as a hotbed for the 3-11s syndicate but had deemed it too risky to mount a raid. Now it looked like someone, or something, had done the job for them.

A police sergeant in a yellow visibility jacket came jogging into Duke's path with a haunted look on his sun-weathered face. He had the unmistakeable look of a career man, the kind who had already seen everything. Until today. "Detective!" he gasped. "You're MCU, aren't you? Do you have any idea what we're dealing with here?"

"Not a damned clue," Duke replied. "What do the fire crews have to say? Do they have it contained?"

Further in from the cordon, on the innermost ring surrounding the burning factory was a fleet of florescent yellow fire engines spraying intermittent streams at the blaze, like pissing into a volcano. They weren't attacking the main building, but they were dampening the outskirts of the compound, quickly dousing anything nearby that caught light.

"As far as they can tell," the sergeant said. "But they don't even know how it's burning. That's steel and cinder block, for God's sake. And the color!"

"What do the witnesses have to say?"

"They blame two males, Caucasian, early to mid twenties. Mutants. Say these guys attacked them, lit the place. We've had run-ins with mutant gangs before, but this..."

The heat rolled off the factory in pounding, searing waves, mocking the attempts of the firefighters as ash and embers sprinkled down like snow. There were simply too many unknowns here. Were these flames under a mutant's control, or were they burning on their own? Could they even be put out by water? Duquesne glanced around the perimeter, trying to calculate how many people he could protect with his force fields if those flames decided to jump toward the cordon. All they needed was for the wind to blow the wrong way and carry a tongue of flame onto the roofs across the alley, or into the boarded-up windows of the nearby abandoned workshops whose dried out timbers would go up like kindling. They could drain the LA River and not put a dent in that kind of firestorm.

"I was told there were two mutants pulled out of the fire," Duke said. "A pair of kids."

"Yeah," the sergeant replied. "They claim they were hostages."

"I want to talk to them. See if they know anything about these mutant arsonists."

A brisk walk around roadblocks and rushing cops and paramedics brought them to the back of an ambulance where a reflective awning had been set up to shelter its occupants from the heat and ash. Underneath, huddled under blankets and guarded by officers and EMTs alike, was a pale, mop-headed boy and a purple-skinned girl.

Duquesne approached the pair of mutants and pulled back his jacket to show them the shield hanging on a lanyard around his neck. "I'm Detective Lorrance Duquesne, Mutant Crimes Unit. Can either of you tell me what's going on here?"

[Aimee Connors]

Aimee eyed the badge, and looked up at the detective. "Yeah, the Three Elevens kidnapped us, and then some idiot set their own drug warehouse on fire or something. We escaped because they forgot about us while they were tryin' to save their own fuckin' asses."

She pulled the blanket tighter around her thin shoulders and prayed that Jim wasn't about to say something about please save our friends inside, Aidan and Jake, oh and here are their last names and drivers license numbers! He was pretty smart, but unpredictable. Friends didn't snitch on friends, though, that was like a rule.

[Shield]

Something about a girl with purple skin struck a chord in Duquesne's memory, but he couldn't place her. There was a wariness about her that couldn't quite be explained by the trauma she'd been through - he hadn't missed how her eyes skated over his badge.

A lot of mutants didn't trust the law. It didn't have to mean something. But on days like this you ran on nerve and instinct.

"I know you've been through a lot today," Duke said, softening as much as he could with the fire still roaring a couple hundred yards away. "What's your name?"

[Aimee Connors]

There was a sudden series of loud pops from the direction of the warehouse as something overheated and exploded inside, and Aimee flinched. She rubbed a hand over her face to try to mask her spike of fear, smearing the soot across her cheek.

Normally she would have lied about her name but she was registered under the MRA. Well, maybe he wouldn't check. No, no, this guy totally would check. "Aimee Connors. You're MCU..? So then you're..." Aimee's voice trailed off and she sort of gestured at herself while still clutching the blanket. "Y'know. Like us."

[Shield]

"I am," Duquesne said with an earnest nod, and he crouched down, hands on knees, to put himself on the girl's eye level. "Listen, Aimee. That fire behind you is burning out of control, and as far as we can tell, it is not natural. If we can't contain it, a lot of people will be in danger of losing their homes, or worse. The Three Elevens are telling us a mutant started this fire. Do you know anything about how this fire started?"

[Aimee Connors]

She shook her head, looking up at him seriously, her eyes a touch wider than usual. "No. The leader guy was off arguing with someone and then there was ...smoke and fire everywhere."

Aimee shrugged, "I just thought their drugs exploded or something. Like a meth lab, right?" She rubbed her wrists where she'd been handcuffed. "We were just glad to get out of there."

[Jim Lewinski]

"Would probably explain the colour of the fire," Jim muttered, raising his heavy head to join the conversation, "Y'know... the chemicals and all."

The police detective had an imposing appearance, and a steady penetrating gaze, but his voice rumbled, warm and deep; it was like going to bed with a soul singer in silk pyjamas. Upon which thought Jim considered that maybe he truly was concussed. The paramedic seemed to think so, and it would certainly explain why he wasn't a quavering mess in the presence of police officers and gangbangers and towering infernos. He sipped water from a plastic cup, which was jostled feebly in his grip. Good. That was normal. His throat was none the better for it though, and when he spoke, his voice cracked like ancient timbers.

"That's how they got us. The chemicals. Knocked us clean out. By the time I... I... came around, the place was already going up in flames. Couldn't make out much. Just one big... panic."

[Shield]

Duquesne wasn't satisfied with either answer - they didn't mesh well with the reports he'd heard already. But eyewitness accounts were messy under the best of circumstances. Most of the time you had to piece a coherent story together out of a dozen perspectives, each one with its own contradictions. He didn't have time to do that now.

Duke laid a hand on Jim's narrow shoulder. "Well, you're in safe hands now. Listen, either of you remembers anything that might help us fight this fire, you tell us right away, okay?"

He rocked back onto his feet and turned to the grim-faced sergeant. "Show me which witnesses have been talking."

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan charged up the swaying metal stairs and onto the catwalk that ran the length of the upper offices. The smoke that had gathered in the rafters of the factory was billowing its way down, shrouding the walls in roiling darkness. That was a concern - as long as the fire was under his control it couldn't burn him, but that didn't mean he couldn't suffocate in the smoke. He had to work quickly.

He kicked in a smoldering door, which splintered and torqued off its hinges. There was a kitchen inside that obviously had been repurposed as a lab - hotplates and bottles and rubber tubes littered the countertops, and against the wall there were foam core cooler boxes in stacks marked NEOCORTISINE. Aidan lifted his hand, and the flames that had been nibbling at the corners of the room leapt for the ceiling. Glass vessels exploded like cherry bombs, spitting shards and boiling fluids across the room, while sachets of drugs went up in multicolored sparks. On the far side of the room, the boxes of Nectar began to disintegrate and boil away into nothing.

Aidan moved to the next room - a couple of folding tables stood in the center scattered with paper, with more bursting from the crooked file cabinets against the wall, and posted to a bulletin board hung a street map of Los Angeles skewered with thumbtacks and scribbled over with notes. On another day he could have spent hours in a room like this, memorizing the Tres Onces' plans and engineering the perfect scheme to dismantle every one of them. But today it was just so much kindling.

He'd just turned away from the cerulean blaze in the briefing room when a bullet spanged off the catwalk railing behind him, sending him flat against the wall.

[The Tres Onces]

From his perch on the third-floor catwalk, Julio drew a bead on the mutant and squeezed off two more shots, but the bastard scurried around a corner and out of his line of sight.

Eyes watering in the smoke, Julio crept across the metal grating, which felt sticky under his shoes, sweeping the floors below with the muzzle of his gun. It was one of the special weapons from the clinic, made of plastic for some reason, and loaded with hollowpoint tranq rounds. Less lethal than he would have liked, perhaps, but all he needed was a flesh wound.

"What do you think you've won, mutie?" he snarled into the flames. "What do you think you've won? We can move down the street! What'll you do when we burn your house to the ground?"

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan dove into a stairwell lit from beneath by burning slicks of machine oil and worse, and he charged headlong up the trembling metal stairs. But no sooner had he rounded the bend than a figure stepped into the smoke-filled doorframe on the next floor. He threw himself backward as two more bullets bit into wall behind him. A splinter of lead from the hollowpoints went spinning by his face and left a razor cut across his cheek.

Grimacing, Aidan braced himself against a wall and tugged on the flames guttering three stories below his feet. There wasn't much fuel there, but it was enough to send a couple blue fireballs spinning toward Julio to make him duck his head.

And then something in the drug lab exploded, shaking the whole building. Smoldering debris rained down from the ceiling, and Aidan squeezed himself into a corner of the stairwell with his head covered.

By the time he looked up, Julio was gone from the doorframe, and the whole upper level was filled with smoke.

[The Tres Onces]

Julio leaned against the wall outside the stairwell with his sleeve clamped over his nose and mouth until the ceiling stopped hemorrhaging debris, and then he wheeled around into the doorway and fired another shot into the inky black stairwell. But he couldn't see anything through the gathering smoke, and his eyes began to water. He bit down on a curse and turned to sweep the catwalk. Nothing.

The muzzle of his pistol swung back and forth as he shuffled through the curling smoke that was slowly flooding the factory. His paranoid mind conjured mutants prowling around every corner, under every shadow. Damn that Smoke Man! He'd have felt right at home if he hadn't puffed away like a bad case of gas.

"Fucking mutants!" Julio spat. "You think you're better than us? You think you're something, just 'cause you were born a bunch of freaks? Take away your voodoo powers, and what are you? You're nothing! A fucking waste of humanity!"

He spotted a flicker of blue in the next stairwell, and he stumbled drunkenly toward it, kicked open the doorway, and unloaded another three tranq rounds down the stairs. But there was no sign of his enemy there.

"I ain't afraid of you!" Julio bawled. "You, that pendejo Calaveras, those fucking animals that puta Fernandez keeps in her shithole of a house! I ain't afraid of any of you mutie bastards!"

He wheeled again and fired straight down the catwalk. He stood there brandishing the gun at the empty rafters, chest heaving as he pulled in smoke by the lungful, a quivering mass of nerve and sweat and bile and rage.

He didn't hear the cautious footsteps behind him until it was too late.

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan crashed hard into Julio, shoulder-to-shoulder, and the two of them caromed in into the catwalk railing, which rattled and groaned under their combined weight. Julio twisted his right hand free to bring his gun to bear, but Aidan caught his wrist in midair. The gun went off twice, and Aidan felt the sting of the propellant as the tranq rounds hissed by his ear.

He stared into the face of his enemy, his eyes lit by something other than the fire around them. "Enough."

[The Tres Onces]

Twisting in Aidan's grip, Julio snarled like a rabid beast, teeth bared and eyes red and running from the smoke. He tried to pull away, but the two men spun together in a macabre, brutal waltz, until Aidan slammed him against the railing once more.

The gun went off again, sending a tranq round shattering against the ceiling. Aidan pounded his arm against the railing once, twice, and on the third time Julio's grip broke, and the gun went tumbling into the flames below.

[Aidan Fox]

"I've had enough of you, Julio," Aidan rumbled. "Enough of your hate, enough of your schemes, enough of your gang of murderers and slavers. It ends here."

[The Tres Onces]

Julio struggled and and writhed, but he couldn't shake his captor's hold. So, with a bestial howl, he threw his head forward into Aidan's, and he reeled back down the catwalk. Julio surged after him with a madly swinging fist, and another, and anoth--

[Aidan Fox]

Dazed from the blow, Aidan fell back on his training - rolled inside the arc of Julio's punch, pinned the wrist under his arm, and drove his other elbow straight back into the gangster's face, flattening his nose. Julio rocked back drunkenly, and Aidan wheeled around to follow with a savage fist to the temple, then another to the gut, sending him reeling into the rail.

Something popped free, and the pipe railing sagged under Julio's weight. He shrieked and wrapped both arms around the rail as it bowed over the shimmering blue flames below.

[The Tres Onces]

Julio was nearly unrecognizable, his face caked in ash and ruined with blood and bruises, and all he could see through his rheumy, bloodshot eyes was the shadowy figure of his enemy looming over him in the smoke as hellfire beat against his back.

"You act so righteous, mutie," he rasped. "But you're in the same business we are. Survival of the fittest, and that shit. Your time's comin', same as all of us."

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan reached down and grasped the front of Julio's jacket, lifting him from the sagging rail.

"When it does, at least the world will be short one more psychopath. I don't think history's going to miss you at all, Julio."

[The Tres Onces]

Julio grabbed Aidan's arms around the wrists, and his feet kicked for leverage --

And then he stopped, eyes unfocused and face blank, as his mind had switched off for a second.

"Aidan," he said in a calm voice, "the dragon waits for the mother and child. He's coming."

The moment passed, and Julio started as if coming out of a dream. He gaped at Aidan in terrified incomprehension and, instinctively, shoved himself free of the mutant's grip.

Aidan's hands slipped, and Julio tumbled back over the rail and somersaulted in the air before plunging into the flames and the unyielding concrete below.

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan stumbled back away from the edge and into the opposite rail. Something else blew in the floors below, raining more debris from the ceiling. But the factory wasn't the only thing shaking.

The mother and child.

He might have stayed there frozen forever if biology hadn't intervened. He began coughing, choking on something that stung his lungs like acid - the noxious brown smoke he'd been breathing for the past minutes was catching up with him. He pressed his sleeve across his mouth, still coughing as he rushed down the swaying catwalk to the stairwell. Burning refuse from the ceiling chased him down as he hurtled toward the floor.

His eyes were watering by the time he made it to the ground level, and some of the flames at the perimeter of the factory were fading from blue to orange. He was exhausted, losing control. But as he emerged from the stairwell he paused, looked across the burning floor to see Julio's mangled remains lying like a broken puppet.

He was shimmering.

Aidan blinked. Squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed out the grit. Looked again.

The shimmering had expanded into a circle of grimy concrete around Julio, about ten feet across, rippling like a pond in a windstorm.

"Oh, no. Oh, shit. Shitshitshit."

The rippling circle of concrete began darkening. Only it wasn't really changing color - it was growing less opaque. The darkness was coming from somewhere else.

Aidan stepped toward the circle, then back again, glancing frantically around the burning factory, as if he might spot a box that said Break glass in case of hole in reality. But he was powerless against this.

He stumbled backward, then turned around and ran for the fire escape Jake had taken minutes ago.

[Jacob Foley]

When the heavy door crashed open, Jake started. It was a rare thing for someone to get the jump on him. He was, however, drained from his exertions, and had spent the last few minutes nursing a throbbing headache in the dark. He looked up and winced. Aidan, or at least his shadowy doppleganger, stood framed in the glare of hellfire. His face was hidden from him at first, but as his senses gathered around him once more so did the crashing realisation that something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.

On his feet with a mad scuffle of boot leather, Jake approached, his shielded eyes confirming for him the truth of his fears: for it was the same fear carved into every line on Aidan's face. It was a haunting sight.

"What is it?" he said, feeling the first tickle of smoke from the blaze beyond, "Aidan, what's wrong?"

[Aidan Fox]

Aidan stumbled into the doorway, his eyes owlishly wide in a face marred by soot, and pointed a thumb fecklessly over his shoulder as he tried to conjure an explanation that would make the remotest amount of sense.

"Yeah, I, uh... did something bad. Uh..."

After facing down a horde of murderous thugs with a sort of existential resignation, for the first time since entering the factory Aidan was beating down a rising tide of panic.

"Look, Jake, I've asked a lot of you tonight, and I'm going to need to ask one more thing, but it's important and you've got to trust me. Come on."

He beckoned his friend back onto the smoldering factory floor, where the shimmering pool had become a slowly spinning vortex distorting the air around it with Julio floating in the middle like a macabre centerpiece. Something that was like smoke but was heavier than air was beginning to leak out of the aperture and spread across the floor.

[Jacob Foley]

Sometimes the imagination plays tricks upon the mind; it was possible, Jake had considered in the quiet moments following his escape, that his impression of the factory blaze had been magnified by pure mortal fear. Perhaps it had been to subdue his doubts regarding Aidan's well being. Perhaps it was sheer disbelief at one man's power. But as he stepped back into the inferno, how his illusions were shattered. It took a considerable moment thereafter to shake of the shackles off self-preservation that chained him to the spot.

When he did join his friend upon the devil's dancefloor, Jake froze, wishing wish upon wish that he had indeed fallen victim to his own imagination. There he stood, attempting to parse meaning between what he knew to be possible and the madness unravelling before his very eyes. It was difficult, what with the roar of flames and the guttural groan of metal, but when Jake addressed Aidan from behind the crook of his arm, he made certain he was heard.

"There's a fucking portal on the floor!"

[Aidan Fox]

You certainly couldn't accuse Jake of beating around the bush.

"Yeah," Aidan replied. "Yeah, there is."

With a glance left and right, Aidan pushed the inferno back against the walls of the factory, and air, blessedly cool, relatively fresh air gushed in from the broken windows and blew against their faces. And it kept blowing. Aidan looked up to see a wreath of smoke spiraling downward into the portal, like water down a bathtub drain.

[Jacob Foley]

Once it was safe to lower his arm and abandon whatever minimal protection it had provided from the fumes, Jake's face was revealed in its full incredulous glory. He speared Aidan with a look that suggested the reading on the swearometer was about to climb, sharply.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" he said, then mimicked Aidan's tone of mind-boggling apathy, "'Yeah, there is.' What the fuck does that even mean, Aidan? There's a fucking... hole in the fabric of space-time and you're acting like it's the fucking water bill!"

[Aidan Fox]

Before their eyes, Julio's body began to float on the surface of the portal, bobbing at intervals like a piece of driftwood in a harbor.

"I'm not," Aidan said. "Trust me, Jake, I'm not, I'm just trying to think. This is bad. Really bad. We need to find a way to close this thing before--"

With the speed of a striking snake, a huge, many-jointed arm surged up out of the whirlpool, a towering, writhing thing of sinew and mottled black flesh. Its scythe-blade claws opened like a grapnel and snapped down onto Julio's body, plunging him under the surface into the darkness beyond, leaving only a ripple behind.

[Jacob Foley]

"Jesus Christ!"

The apparition sent Jake back-pedalling. And as suddenly as the ghoulish limb had appeared, it was gone, taking the charred corpse with it. Explanations that bordered on the logical, a Jim Lewinksi regurgitation of black holes and sink holes, were swept away in an instant. Jake clamped his hands upon his head as if to contain his sanity, and, reeling from the shock of this fresh horror, he found himself incapable of looking at anything but the portal in the floor. Nothing happened, it remained silent and still. When he spoke again, his voice quavered with panic.

"Aidan, what the fuck is going on?"

[Aidan Fox]

"It's the Astral Plane!" Aidan shouted back, as if that would explain anything. "It's... look, you remember when Anna showed us the video of that thing she killed in Jamie's room? It's that, only bigger, and there's a lot more of them down there. We have to keep them from coming through!"

A shriek issued from the portal, followed by a slither of enormous, leathery wings.

[Jacob Foley]

There was a question that went unspoken; the loose thread that threatened to unravel everything; snatched from the tip of Jake's tongue by the unearthly sounds which issued forth from the unearthly hole in the ground. Coupled with the memory of those grainy celphone images, Jake's fears crystalised; how quick and ignorant he'd been to dismiss, as a product of her nightmares, the B-movie monster in Jamie's bedroom. Aidan took it much more seriously at the time and, it seemed, with good reason: for even Jamie's imagination had its limits. Trust him, that's what he'd asked, and it was that trust which prevented Jake from running away as far and fast as his legs could carry him. He was clinging to it by his fingernails.

"Okay... okay..." Jake made little noise, as he attempted to rationalise the irrational, "Well, if ice worked last time, maybe fah... fire..."

[Aidan Fox]

"Fire will hold 'em back, but it won't close the door," Aidan said. "That's why I need your help. The Astral Plane is... it's a world made of psychic energy, Jake. You can control it in a way that I can't!"

A black, bat-like wing swung out of the portal and smacked onto the concrete floor at its rim, and six-inch claws dug in as if to pull the rest of the nightmare creature through into the waking world. Aidan pulled a lance of blue flame from the factory walls and hurled it, searing a hole in the leathery wing membrane and sending the monster shrieking back into the portal.

[Jacob Foley]

The question was once again rekindled, but before it could even take shape on his lips it was snuffed out by the sight of the demonic wing. Jake, for all his mustered courage, retreated a step or two at that. Aidan remained steadfast, and bought them a moment with his quick thinking, but for Jake, who had just been informed he was expected to manipulate interdimensional gateways, there was little to be had in the way of relief. The Astral Plane, a world of psychic energy. He was just Jake, from Detroit. Deep breaths, not because he needed them, but because it was a familiar practice prior to trying something dangerous and new - and Jake needed something familiar. When he closed his eyes, the floor seemed to tilt and, his centre of gravity gone, he dropped to one knee.

"Oh, Jesus..." he muttered, "Here we go."

[Aidan Fox]

"You can do this, Jake," Aidan said, hoping desperately that he was telling the truth. "Just... just think of it as a bad day. Try to calm it down!"

Something snarled and muttered from the far side of the portal, and it was answered by a banshee howl. Whatever was down there, there were a lot of them, and it sounded like more were on the way.

[Jacob Foley]

It started off, faint at first, like the quiet murmur of several sentient minds cloistered together in a small group. A low hum, lacking form or structure, the signal called out to him; he approached, his consciousness bobbing tentatively closer, like a fishing boat cresting in the wake of an oil barge. On the rim of the void, he hovered, transfixed. Below him churned a primordial soup of energy, throbbing with the pulse of some titanic beast, and although filled with dread at the sight of such a vertiginous abyss, Jake found himself powerless, and was pulled inside.

The Astral Plane expanded in every direction, all encompasing, like a vast ocean, and Jake had been deposited upon its floor. What had been a distant murmur was at once a wild tumultuous roar; the psychic was paralysed beneath the weight of this remote netherworld, and at the same time found himself swept up in it. Tossing and tumbling like a leaf in the wind, Jake struggled against the current, desperate for escape. All around him, the Astral Plane warped and shifted with such seismic violence that any sense of place was lost, and all that remained was shadow, and shadows within shadows.

They swarmed on the periphery of his vision, and one by one they lashed out with a piercing screech and a seething boil of activity, like bullets zipping through water, before vanishing back into the gloom. Each attack was stronger than the last, and as he was sent spiralling out of control, Jake felt a hot suffocating panic rise up in him - he was going to die. Then, a glimmer, a distant shimmering pin-prick of salvation from deep within the dark. But it was so far away and he was powerless to resist the whims of this nightmare world. And then there was Aidan's voice; it was distant, but not a memory. It was like listening to someone speak underwater. Bad day. Bad day, that's what he said.

That was when the music came; soft, low warbling notes invaded the forbidding place, penetrating hostility and chasing fear with their soothing warmth. Jake relaxed in its familiar presence, and so, it seemed, did the Astral Plane. His moment of opportunity went unwasted, he kicked and fought his way towards the speck of light, tethered to the music in his mind. The circle of light grew, as did the sound of Aidan's voice, within moments he was upon it and he broke the surface. It was with a great choking heave of air that he seemed to suck himself back into his body, he lurched forward, planting a hand on the floor to stop himself falling.

He was exhausted, and surprised to not find himself dripping in some kind of ectoplasmic goo - how real the ordeal had been - but he was sweating and panting nonetheless. The Astral Plane was real, and it was indeed made up of psychic energy, and he, well, perhaps he could...

"A bad day, huh? Aidan, you just won the prize for Understatement of the Year."

Aidan had come to help him to his feet, and Jake took his hand with the hint of a smile, such was the relief of his survival. But the smile quickly faltered. An enormous black shape rose up slowly out of the ground, its scorched flesh glistening like wet leather, it took a long rasping breath and heaved itself aloft with a chalkboard scratch of claws to at last birth itself into the world.

[Aidan Fox]

The monstrosity reared up like a posturing swan and shook the mists of the Astral Plane from its wings, feeling out its newfound corporeality, then crashed back down to the factory floor on its knuckles. It turned its eyeless face toward the two mutants and opened its dripping jaws, and hissed, and whether the word was in the hissing or whether it was pressed forcibly on their minds like a hot iron on flesh, they both heard it:

INTERLOPER.

Aidan pulled another comet of flame from the walls like a Chinese dragon and sent it spiraling into the creature's side. It shrieked and slipped backwards further into the portal, but other than an ember glow around its ribcage there was no sign of injury.

"Keep doing what you're doing, Jake, we've almost got this thing licked!" Aidan said. And then he added, "I hope," as the monster clawed at the fracturing concrete with a bubbling snarl.

[Jacob Foley]

Jake retreated on leaden feet. The fear invoked by the nightmare beast was primal in its nature, harkening back to the dawn of time, when neanderthal men were stalked by fanged predators - indeed, that was the image that sprung to mind when he saw Aidan, dwarfed in the monster's shadow, hurling fireballs like ineffectual rocks. Mankind had evolved, and yet it remained shackled to the instincts of its most far-flung ancestors, driven by the most primitive emotions, like fear, and anger. It was anger that boiled up inside of Jake as he took in the full scope of the creature before him. That such a thing could exist in his world - it was obscene. And, arming himself with the kind of righteous zeal that would make his mother proud, he took a knee and vowed to vanquish the abominable threat.

When he closed his eyes, his awareness of his surroundings magnified dramatically. At the forefront of his perception was the beast, a loud, nebulous jumble of sound, much like radio static. He pushed himself beyond its shadowy presence until he was in position above the void. Again, he had a very distinct impression of a seething, pulsating abyss, which rang with the clarion cries of its demonic inhabitants. Cautiously, he pushed himself closer, seeing without seeing the phantom limbs that rose from the mist and snatched with horny claws, before dispersing once more into vapour. Over the otherworldly din, Jake remembered the music that had so often saved him in his moment of need; it stood to reason that those same comforting notes would make short work of the Astral Plane if they had the power to calm the chaos in his head.

But the music never came. Jake faltered, and plunged into the maw. The Astral Plane closed around him like snapping jaws, ravenous for the morsel that got away. The world moved like wind, and he with it, a lone voice swept away upon a chorus of wild howls. In his panic, he could no longer recall the pensive sounds that transformed chaos into peace; or was it that the music was simply lost to the storm? Or was the storm within him? Above all things, he longed to be rid of it, his torment. He longed for the solitude of his bedroom when the pale morning light started to peak through the treetops into his window. That was when the morning was at its best, sluggish from sleep and draped in silence. On the floors below, beds were full and still, and the house was pregnant with possibilities. Later, there would be voices, and bare feet, and the groaning of chairs and scraping of plates, and the rich smell of coffee that would climb the stairs and slip through the cracks beneath his door to remind him, everyday, that there was an empty chair waiting for him. But before all that, there was that exquisite moment of solitude, teetering on the brink of a new day, and it reminded him of a song.

His newfound serenity crystalised, more tangible than a few placid notes strummed from a guitar; it was something solid, and within his grasp. The Astral Plane moved no more. What once raged like a storm and surged like an ocean was as steadfast as steel. Skywards, or perhaps earthwards, there was a halo of light that shone like the sun from beneath the sea. As Jake sped towards it, he noticed it was starting to fade, and when he was at last upon it, there was little of it left but a pale wreath of smoke to pass through.

Back once again in the warehouse, Jake was tired and quite disoriented. He fell clumsily on his ass and waited for the room to stop spinning. It was an effort not to be sick. When at last his aching eyes were able to make sense of his surroundings, they focused upon the spot of concrete on the ground that was, indeed, a spot of concrete and nothing more.

[Aidan Fox]

"Jake!"

Aidan rushed toward his fallen friend, but rather than helping him to his feet, he seized Jake under the arms and dragged him back several yards as if he'd been in danger of a spreading fire. Aidan stopped when he saw that the concrete had solidified. All it had left behind was a scalded husk of the creature that had been attempting to crawl out, and even that was disintegrating before their eyes, crumbling to dust that scattered on the cool breeze gushing in from the ruined factory window.

The scenery had changed slightly since Jake had plunged back into the Astral Plane. What had been a malignant blaze consuming the walls of the factory had settled down to smoldering patches, and most of them had faded from electric blue to dull yellow, meaning they'd burn themselves out naturally. Here and there in the factory floor were glassy streaks of crystallized concrete that still gave off smoke, evidence of Aidan's battle with the monster while Jake had been fighting his.

Aidan collapsed next to Jake, breathing hard. "You were walking toward it," he said. "I thought I was gonna lose you for a second. Look, it's gone. You did it. It's over."

[Jacob Foley]

"I was walking?" he said, tongue-loose like a woken drunk, "Remind me never to do that- that on a bridge or a... rooftop. Nothing with a steep drop. Okay?"

Jake eased lazily onto his elbows, he might well have been reclining on a poolside sunlounger. His breathing was steady, but deep, in his head it sounded like rowing strokes. The concrete floor was just a concrete floor. The portal and its monsters were gone. They had done it. Tension splintered in every muscle and dispersed until it tingled like sand in his fingertips and toes. His head rolled back with a sigh of release. But the respite was to be short-lived. High above, in the jagged remnants of window panes flashed veins of steely blue light.

"Aidan, we really oughta haul ass."

[Shield]

"Detective! Detective Duquesne! Are you all right?"

His first thought was that he was waking up at home after a brutal ten-hour shift, and he really wished Laura would turn the TV down.

Then he felt the gravel under his back and the crumpled-up jacket he was using for a pillow, and he saw a cluster of worried faces hovering above him, lit in strobing red and blue against a dull brown sky. One was the veteran sergeant he'd met just minutes ago, and the other two were paramedics cradling his head and shoulders from either side.

"Detective, do you know where you are?"

It was like squeezing cement from a sponge to remember, but the flashing lights brought Duke back to reality. "The factory on Francisco Street," he rasped. "What happened?"

"You just had a seizure," one of the paramedics said. "Lasted about two and a half minutes. Sir, do you have any history of epilepsy?"

"What? No. What's our situation--"

Detective Duquesne tried to scramble to his feet, but the paramedics stopped him from getting any farther than sitting up.

"Detective, you need to take it easy."

"Like hell. The fire--"

He squinted into the blast furnace that used to be a factory, only to find it much dimmer than he'd remembered. The flames were orange now instead of blue, and the plumes of water arcing from the hook-and-ladder barricade were finally beating them into submission. But the building, as much as he could see, was a lost cause. The northern wall had collapsed in on itself, bringing half the roof down with it. Ash lay over the whole neighborhood like a fine dusting of snow.

"Fire Chief says they've got it under control now," the sergeant said. "No more survivors have come out in the last ten minutes, but the way that building's falling apart, we can't send anybody inside."

"Let me up," Duke grunted. "I can take in a search party, put up a shield around us."

"Sir, I don't think that's a good idea," the paramedic replied. "We need to keep you under observation. Do you recall anything before the seizure?"

"I was giving orders. Walking the cordon with Sergeant Reyes. There was this..." Duquesne ground the heel of his hand into his temple as a lance of cold, throbbing pain split his head from one side to the other. "This howling sound. Deafening."

The look on Sergeant Reyes's face quite plainly said he hadn't heard it. "Detective, whatever was fueling those flames, it's gone now. You can relax. The worst is over."

Detective Duquesne grit his teeth and stared back into the guttering flames, from whence had come the howling noise, and also a strange and unholy voice, saying something about a dragon, and a mother about to give birth. It was the stuff of ghost stories and superstition, nothing that belonged in a police report, but he couldn't push it out of his mind.

"Are you so sure about that, Sergeant?"