“And he doesn’t even show up for days on end!” Blast Fist complained, thumping the table with a fist.

  “You think Buzz was wrong? That he’s part of the another gang after all?” Black Banshee only half-asked, sounding more like she was sharing a statement of fact, getting nods from the men at her table. “I bet he doesn’t care about the Iron Nails at all.”

  Sarah Miller, aka Smokeshow, sneered at them all from behind her conjured cigarette. Of course Chains didn’t care about the Iron Nails! He wasn’t some dumbass ganger with no plans or prospects other than blowing his dough on drugs and skirts, he was a man who had grabbed the reins of his life and held it in a firm hand.

  “Acts like he’s better than us,” muttered Hard Edge, distracting Sarah from her thoughts about firm hands with that horrible scraping noise he made every time he rubbed his forearm blades.

  Smokeshow wanted to snap at Hard Edge. Chains was better than them, better than any of the loser, violent, petty gangers that hung around hoping her dad would somehow make them superior specimens. But she’d seen the other gangs, and the higher ups. She’d met Blacktime, inasmuch as anyone could meet a super who kept himself shrouded in perfect darkness. No matter how high you went, there were the people who knew what they were doing, and then there were the hangers-on. The leeches, the orbiters.

  But she couldn’t bring herself to speak up. Dealing with people was always hard, especially the coarse and crude cretins that made up most of the meta gang. Issuing orders on behalf of Dad was easy enough, but trying to navigate all the stress and mess that people like Black Banshee threw out was too much. Which meant that everyone looked to BB and left her out on the edges.

  BB’s little group continued criticizing Chains, but Smokeshow was fed up. Annoyed by the waste of words, spent without thought or consideration, she decided she was done. Disgusted, disgruntled, and distressed, enough that she could no longer stand the chattering presence of her theoretical peers. She sent a tendril of her smoke under the door, then moved herself along it, vanishing from inside of Lovely’s bar and reappearing out on the street.

  Her smoke was a bit of herself, something that could never be truly divorced from her. Anywhere it was, she could see and hear and be. Anywhere it was, she could also pretend was something else; everything came down to smoke and mirrors. Including herself. She couldn’t just be regular ol’ Sarah Miller, a girl living her life. No, she was the daughter of a supervillain.

  She was all too aware of how much her dad doted on her, how much he expected from her in turn. How he had hopes for her, shown in how he had set her up within his gang. Given her the chance to be an aspiring supervillain and all-around boss bitch, the de-facto second-in-command of the Iron Nails.

  Most of the time, Sarah would rather go to the park and write poetry. She’d die if anyone actually read it, but it gave her something different from the pressure of having to be Smokeshow all the time. Truth was, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be Smokeshow at all.

  Sarah meandered down the street, invisible to others as her smoke cloaked her. She wasn’t even going back to her normal room, since they had to move the base. Again. It happened once a year or so, whenever someone got a lead on where Crash was staying and attacked. Sometimes it was fine, but on occasion there was real danger and they had to relocate. She’d ended up moving all over, never settling down, never able to make that decision on her own.

  Maybe that was why Chains was so appealing. He was so very in charge of his own self. Didn’t fall into BB’s orbit like everyone else, didn’t slink in and latch on. He was there to be useful and to learn, and very clearly was a man who was going somewhere. Moving toward better things; something beyond just doing gang work forever. Just like she needed to find something beyond being Smokeshow forever.

  She slipped past the front of the laundromat and into the newly-renovated section, up a flight and past her dad’s room. Crash’s room. It’d been a long time since he’d been just Mr. Miller, and she didn’t want to fall into that. Just being the super all the time. When he was just dad he’d had time for her; as Crash he was busy all the time and out of the city more often than not. Especially now, since with all the secrets being spilled out all over the papers he had to move and convert holdings all over the Five City Alliance.

  It was even worse with Plasmaster being captured by Glorybeam. Not that Sarah personally cared about the jerk, but he knew a lot about a lot so even more things had to be changed. Stuff that had already been altered after the first news stories came out, driving everyone into a tizzy that required Crash’s constant attention. It was stuff she didn’t want to deal with at all.

  Her new room had most everything in about the same places as the last, wire-rack shelves holding her memorabilia and merchandise set in the same place by Crash’s movers. She took a moment to quietly glee over her newest addition, the record signed by all of Moon Prism, which wasn’t something she’d ever thought she’d get. Even with all the power people like her dad or Blacktime wielded, actually getting tickets to shows or little things like autographs just wasn’t in the cards.

  Since she didn’t feel like going back out, and wasn’t needed for any official business, she wandered to her bathroom and washed off the makeup she used. Some of her Smokeshow guise was illusion, but small details like lipstick and eye shadow actually worked better with some reference to work from — at which point it was easier to just use normal cosmetics. Without them, though, the face that looked back at her from the mirror seemed wan and ordinary. Sometimes she wanted ordinary, but the reality of it felt so lacking.

  She turned away and sighed, dropping onto her bed and reaching for the notebook she always kept there. Her hand worked of its own accord, sketching out couplets and stanzas as she wondered if Chains would actually care about ordinary ol’ Sarah. Or for that matter, who exactly he was behind the meta name. Dad had done a little bit of digging – because he couldn’t let her have anything to herself – and Chains didn’t match any of the normal froth of dreg- and common-class metas that washed up at the shore of the ganger lifestyle. But he definitely wasn’t a super, either, so maybe just a newly-awakened meta, someone who had done something substantive before finding out they had powers.

  Maybe she’d ask.

  Though she wasn’t sure she could quite work up the nerve, even if it was clear he liked her back. Actually talking to her, offering thoughtful, conscientiously chosen words, instead of just giving her the same monosyllabic grunts he gave everyone else. Plus inviting her out on a not-actually-a-date-but-kinda. It was probably the first time someone had tried that and it wasn’t about getting a leg up in the gang, or getting at Dad.

  It was that kind of thought that swirled ‘round and ‘round in her head, keeping her hands busy as she hid away in her bedroom. Though she couldn’t completely hide — with Dad gone, it was just her and her cousin Chester – Columbuzz – holding down the fort, so she had to keep an eye out for things. Easier to do with wisps of smoke outside the building and in the hastily-built security center in the basement. It would have been a lot simpler to use the surveillance stuff they’d nicked from the truck. The new equipment. ‘Cept Blacktime had that locked down because he thought that was how the leaks happened.

  Sarah was still scratching away at her notebook when she caught the very object of her thoughts approaching along the sidewalk, dressed in something more like mercenary chic than the Iron Nails style. He always walked which, considering the make of car he admitted to having, was probably for the best. Old Odelles were little bubble cars, nothing worth bragging about, and sure wouldn’t help his image.

  That got her off the bed, but then she froze she when saw what was in the sky behind him, something he hadn’t noticed yet. A big metal sphere emerging from the air as it decloaked, flanked by a pair of smaller spheres a moment later. They were high in the sky, still far away, but close enough to put a hollow pit into her belly.

  She remembered the horrible lack from the last time she encountered one of those. The crushing nothingness of her power being suppressed, almost crowding out the weird pain of having her illusions broken. Like losing her name, or the ability to speak. At the same time, she didn’t want to abandon Chains — especially not a second time. She still felt the guilt from seeing Chains coming up to the car, obviously injured after she’d left him behind at MetaFiCon like a jerk. Another second passed, and she made up her mind, flowing along her smoke to the outside of the building, manifesting herself and waving at Chains, then pointing.

  “Look out!” She shouted, and Chains whirled around, spotting the drone and instantly pulling on the weapons wrapped around his arms. The chains that gave him his name dropped into his hands and he started swinging them in preparation as Smokeshow sent plumes of smoke out to cover him, making him invisible but duplicating his likeness nearby. Given what happened last time, trying to blind the drone was useless, but she could make it look like Chains was somewhere else.

  The smaller drones swooped down, energy blasts cutting through the air and scorching the concrete — enough to do some real damage to a normal person, though most supers would have some way to deal with it. They weren’t the real threat anyway, since it was the bigger drone that had the suppressor, but they still focused their fire on Chains, or at least, where she had put one of the false images.

  She was dimly aware of Chester calling the emergency line, over in the security room, through the bit of smoke she kept there. But even with the transporter supers that Blacktime kept, it’d take time for Crash to show up — and even he might not be enough against Mechaniacal’s relics. Blacktime himself was wary of the power suppression, since his power was what made him immortal, so he was obviously not going to come anywhere near such a threat. Not cowardice, just prudence.

  Chains flung out a handful of gold-colored links, just barely missing one of the small drones and reaching full extension with a sharp metallic crack. Sarah just kept herself obscured in the background, her power not cut out for direct combat. She was a conductor, directing through misdirection and trickery, shielding and hiding — and she preferred it that way. Her smoke kept billowing outward, covering more and more of the area, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to invest as much as she normally did. Not with that suppressor drawing ever closer.

  More blaster fire peppered the ground, but none of it actually threatened Chains, who whipped his weapons through the air and managed to score a hit. The impact made a terrific din, the namesake weapons staving in the side of the drone and driving it back. It rebounded from a building, wobbling back into the air like a limping thing, listing and limping.

  Another drone made a sharp whining noise, going up in frequency and above anything that she could hear, and suddenly the metal Chains was using seemed to fall apart, the links looking half-melted even if they didn’t glow or smoke with heat. Sarah hissed, seeing that the drones had disarmed the only person who’d managed to affect the drones — and in a single, invisible shot.

  For a moment Chains looked at the ruined weapons, then glanced around, before pulling at his hoodie. The lace that cinched the hood slid out of its pocket, giving him a couple feet of fabric — and used it to lash out at a blaster drone that was going after a mirror image of Chains nearby. The string cut straight through it with a squeal of tortured metal, Sarah gawking at the sight. But of course he hadn’t fully explained his power. Nobody ever did, that was just stupid.

  Then the big drone was there, and she pulled back her smoke hurriedly, not wanting to get caught out by the pulse again. Chains stood there, swinging the lace and clearly gauging how to get at the drone itself. Smokeshow wished she’d gotten one of the big guns from the armory, the kind that some mad tinker had made and could only fire one or two shots, but she couldn’t bear to leave Chains by himself again.

  The air rippled around the large drone, and both she and Chains backpedaled, skipping away from it as it charged up — but it didn’t emit a pulse like last time. Instead there was a low thrumming as the distortions gathered at the front of the drone and suddenly shot forward. It was aimed at one of the illusory versions of Chains, and when it hit her smoke it spent itself in a roil of doom that lashed back toward her at the speed of thought.

  She screamed as the pain hit, not a physical thing but something inside her head as all her extra senses were suddenly severed, the strength draining out of her in an instant. She crumpled to the ground, barely catching herself and scraping her hands on the asphalt, and blearily looked up to see Chains whip his arm forward. The lace flipped through the air, impossibly steady, and hammered into the shell of the offending machine.

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  The metal groaned as the lace punched through the outer shell, the mechanical sphere clicking and whirring as internals failed. It fell to the ground, dropping on the street with a flat clank, and there was silence as Chains hurried over to bend over the machine shell. But her power didn’t come back. The smoke was gone.

  “I got you,” Chains said, having returned without her noticing, and she blinked blearily up at him as he scooped her up. For some reason, she felt oddly light and floaty as he carried her in his arms.

  ***

  Isaac cursed under his breath as he hauled Smokeshow toward the laundromat while she refused to do more than dazedly look around. Not only had he let her get hurt, he’d let Crash’s daughter get hurt, and that was probably not going to end well. He slid to a halt far faster than he should have been able to, automatically manipulating inertia up and down to give himself better cornering ability, and bulled through the front door.

  Part of him was already wondering if he’d lost some precious seconds by taking the time to pull the extra inertia out of the hoodie lace, though he’d also needed to check it was truly dead. He had heard the last dying rattles of the ruined gears, tangled as they were by the inertially-laden lace, and the subsequent silence made its status clear. And thank goodness for that, because the area-effect pulses were bad enough, but targeted, ranged power suppression was an absolute nightmare. If Smokeshow weren’t hurt he’d have stayed to smash it good.

  Columbuzz appeared as Isaac shoved through the rear door of the laundromat – practically taking it off its hinges – and beckoned for Isaac to follow him. The next door was hidden, flush with the hallway behind the laundromat and opening only because Columbuzz touched some portion of it in a rapid-fire pattern. Isaac wasn’t in any frame of mind to try and memorize it, just pushing through into a clearly more residential part of the building and laying Smokeshow down on the couch.

  “QwikMed?” He asked, though he wasn’t sure if the tinker-made healing patch would do anything. It was also pushing it a bit close, at least according to the QwikMed box. Not that he was one to talk, but generally it was recommended to wait weeks between QwikMed doses, and he didn’t want to somehow make Smokeshow’s problems worse. Nevertheless, Columbuzz threw open a closet and dug out one of the familiar-looking patches. He slapped it on Smokeshow’s arm – without her illusion powers, she was just wearing a short-sleeve tee with Moon Prism’s logo on it – and the two of them waited. She blinked once, twice, and took a long breath.

  “I still can’t feel it,” she said, voice trembling. “My power isn’t back yet.”

  “Oh,” Isaac said, all the normal curses he knew failing in the face of such a thing. There was no way to comfort someone when half their very self had been sealed away. He didn’t know how it worked, but he did remember the terrible feeling of disoriented nothingness from when he’d been hit with the power suppressor. He’d been more worried about being crushed at the time, but every eternal moment of those few seconds would live with him forever.

  “Are you sure it’s destroyed?” Columbuzz asked, in his odd resonant voice.

  “I’ll make sure,” Isaac said grimly. Even if he didn’t want to leave Smokeshow by herself, smashing the drone to pieces would be a good use of his time. At least he wouldn’t feel so useless. Leaving Smokeshow to recover on the couch, he hurried back outside and used one of the other chains he’d put on his costume to batter the drone into pieces. It made a mess of the road, but people would have to cope.

  While he didn’t know what bit specifically was responsible for the power suppression, it only took him a couple minutes of anger-fueled, inertially-amped smashing to scatter it into a number of unmoving, unpowered constituent parts. He hoped that would also keep anyone from reverse-engineering the thing. The last thing anyone needed was more supervillains with power suppressors. One was bad enough.

  He was at the door when a crack of thunder seemed to come from right next to him, and he jerked around to see Crash there with a woman that seemed to be made out of stars and nebulae, shrouded in cloth made of ice and night. Not a meta he recognized, but it didn’t take brains to guess she was one of Blacktime’s transportation supers. Possibly even one that wasn’t even publicly known, given the emergency. One eye, rendered as a blue hypergiant, turned his way and, bizarrely, winked at him before she folded in on herself and was gone again.

  Crash bulled past, literally throwing him from his feet as the supervillain made a blurring beeline for the inside, smashing the door Isaac had already half-broken on his way in. Isaac hit the ground without any real issue, managing to drop his inertia enough to make it a soft landing, then got to his feet and followed. Annoying though it was, he didn’t really blame Crash for his haste. If anyone had been in his way when he’d brought Smokeshow inside, they would have gotten bulled over too.

  By the time he reached the living room with the couch, Crash was already kneeling there, murmuring to Smokeshow, and out of respect Isaac just hovered by the door, his hand flexing as he thought. Whoever was running the drones seemed to have it out for them, specifically. From what he’d heard, none of the other incidents had targeted people, just equipment. The attack had definitely been aimed at him and Smokeshow though, and everyone knew that when a supervillain broke their normal habits it was a very bad thing.

  So someone had a beef with him, Smokeshow, or both. It was exactly the kind of thing he never wanted to get involved with, and he was still feeling a little shaky from the unexpected fight, but he felt the cold fire of anger rising in his chest to match it. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but he was going to do something to whoever shot Smokeshow. Especially since it was all due to her covering him with illusions; the duplicates of himself had been distracting enough that none of the shots actually came near hurting him. He was mulling over the growing fury, letting it stoke in his chest, when Crash rose from the couch and rounded on him, suddenly in front of him with a face like a thundercloud.

  “You!” Crash boomed, and Isaac winced. The voice was so loud it physically hurt. “Since you got here my daughter’s been attacked twice and we had a lotta secrets leak. Maybe you’re involved, maybe you’re just bad luck.” Crash regarded Isaac coldly, a murderous expression that reminded him that the man was a supervillain, someone who could go toe-to-toe with pretty much anyone short of Glorybeam.

  “Daaaad…” Smokeshow’s faint voice came from the couch and Crash’s face softened for a moment.

  “If my Smokeshow weren’t sweet on you, I’d kill you where you stand,” Crash said, quieter but just as cold. “Instead, I don’t want to see you ever again. If I do, I will bury you.” With the last four words he prodded Isaac in the chest, once for each word. If it weren’t for the inertial investment that simple gesture would have crushed Isaac, and even as it was it shoved him through the drywall of the room like nothing, a wooden stud cracking as Isaac reflexively tried to find some purchase, though the weirdness of the extra inertia meant that he was exceedingly difficult to topple.

  “Understand?” Crash growled, and Isaac lifted his hands, palms out. Angry as he was, he wasn’t about to try and throw down with someone like Crash.

  “Perfectly,” he said, waiting for Crash to turn away before hurrying through the laundromat, rubbing at the quickly-forming bruise on his sternum. Back out on the street, he growled to himself and marched along the sidewalk, heading nowhere in particular. His only thought had been to hide out with the gangers for a while, since he had nowhere else to go, and now that had been denied to him.

  Chains wasn’t an identity he could use anymore, especially since the supers recognized it, so he’d have to be someone else. He wandered out of the slums, realized he was headed toward his old apartment, and changed direction. A few passers-by on the sidewalk circled wide around him, which forced him to realize he was stalking, glowering, and otherwise looking like he was ready to do violence. Which he was, but he had no idea who to actually blame.

  He took a moment out to try and calm down, ducking into an alley and shedding the guise of Chains. He stuffed the jacket into his backpack and peeled off the nose prosthesis, tucking it into a little bag before cramming it in next to the jacket. Ravdia’s armor took up most of the room in the backpack, and in the process of trying to make it all fit he turned up the pamphlet he’d gotten from the mercenary company during the convention.

  Isaac scowled at it, but it seemed a clear sign to him. Shouldering the backpack once again, he turned and started walking. The mercenary office was halfway across the city, and it’d take at least an hour to get there on foot, but he needed to burn energy anyway. A quick change of shirt was all he needed to move away from Chains and start his quick-march across the city.

  In just a tee and jeans, he adopted the persona of David Jeffries, strolling unconcerned along the sidewalk. He wasn’t the arrogant ganger Chains was, but Isaac still fueled that cocksure aggression and anger into the persona, striding with purpose along the sidewalk. David Jeffries didn’t need to jump when a police car abruptly turned on its sirens across the street, accelerating through an intersection and off to wherever dispatch had sent them. Nor did he need to cringe away from Sparkle Motion as she swooped low over the sidewalk, angling off to deal with some distant thumping coming from the industrial sector.

  The low wail of the citywide lockdown alarm sent everyone who was on the streets down into the nearest shelter for a good fifteen minutes, where Isaac waited impatiently, jammed in with everyone else. Normally the people of Star City took such inconveniences with good humor, taking the opportunity to catch a nap or just chat with whoever else had ended up in the shelter, but Isaac was in no mood for it. He just stood and stewed, enough power invested in himself and his clothes that the occasional jostle from the crowd didn’t budge him.

  When he got out, he continued his march toward the address on the mercenary pamphlet, only stopping when he realized he was in the small, upscale meta-oriented section of the city. Stores sold tinkered clothing for people with mutations or powers that would shred anything ordinary, cosmetics for tegument other than skin, ultra-high-calorie snacks, and other sundries that only made sense to – and were affordable by – actual supers or high-performing metas. Those who could use their powers in a commercial setting, and weren’t just grunts like Isaac or most of the rest of the Lost Generation.

  He'd never bothered with the area before, but he didn’t have any special needs and hadn’t the money, besides. Glancing around, he could see at least three people in costumes, one window-shopping and two in actual stores, so Ravdia wouldn’t stand out. The problem was, he didn’t know if he could manage to sustain the perky magical girl identity for more than a few brief encounters.

  Isaac hadn’t really thought through what he was going to do as a merc, not in the way that he had planned out getting the information on Blacktime and Glorybeam, or infiltrating the gang. Trying to actually pass as Ravdia for any length of time was going to stretch his acting skills to their limit, but it wasn’t like he had many choices left. It was this or throw himself on the mercy of Star Central, and after his last encounter with superheroes he wasn’t feeling particularly charitable.

  If he was going to stay, though, he needed something more than just some self-taught vocal skills, and somewhere in the surrounding stores he was sure there’d be a voice modulator. It would probably wipe out the rest of his cash, but he was entirely sunk without it. Keeping the insouciant confidence of David Jeffries, he sauntered into the nearest Component Shack and browsed around until he found what he wanted.

  The little bit of tinker-produced electronics had a throat-mic, which would tape onto his skin just underneath the chin, a wire going to a fist-sized controller with five dials to adjust the output, and a small speaker. He really wished he had his costuming station to make the adjustments, because cramming it into his current costume would be a hell of a bodge, but he didn’t have a choice.

  He paid out the creds, then some more creds for a private room in the back. A service that was very obviously geared toward supers, those who needed to do some alteration or repairs to keep their identity secret. There, he stuffed the voice-changer in, tuning it to something approaching a proper female voice, and donned Ravdia’s costume. The clerk didn’t look twice when he left the store.

  According to the pamphlet, the merc group had housing, so he could stay there, and a license from Star Central to take on tasks and bounties, so they didn’t just rely on private contracts. As a marginally hero-aligned merc group, Justice For Hire wasn’t likely to demand he go be a leg-breaker, though he wasn’t planning to stay long. Just long enough to get back on his feet, and keep out of the view of both Crash and Star Central itself. Not to mention whoever was controlling Mechaniacal’s drones.

  Isaac skated the rest of the way to the mercenary house, the concrete silky-smooth underfoot, reflecting the better part of town. His target was a converted gym, of all things — he could tell by the remnants of the fa?ade, an iconic roof-line drawing odd angles without the dumbbell logo it normally held. Now, it featured the heraldry of a gauntleted fist above a shield, along with a stylized JFH.

  He took a moment to center himself as well as he was able before going through the front door. Unsurprisingly, he could spot defenses similar to the ones he’d seen at Crash’s place, along with heavy armor, despite its position in a relatively commercial, civilian area. Most of the space was blocked off by a wall and a security door, with a small counter. Nobody manned it, but only a few moments after Isaac entered a Lunarian emerged from the security door. He blinked at the silver-skinned moonie from behind the veiled hat, a little surprised to see the alien down on Earth.

  “What do you need?” She asked, in that oddly breathy sort of voice he’d only heard on the radio.

  “Ravdia wishes to join,” Isaac said firmly.

  ***

  Greg scrolled through the take from his surveillance drones, muttering under his breath. He was aware he probably shouldn’t be hunched over his terminal, despite the deeply padded chair he’d gotten, but he just couldn’t help it. When he was focused, he just instinctively got closer, whether it was a gear or a screen.

  “Guy is a damn cockroach,” Greg muttered, not at all pleased that the chain-using meta had ruined yet another of his limited supply of drones. And Greg hadn’t even managed to tag the guy with the power suppressor beam! Of course, that wasn’t Greg’s fault; that damn smoke meta was the problem there.

  At least he’d tagged her with it. He settled his stealth drones in surveillance around the building where she’d been taken. It would take a little bit of time to see how effective the amplified suppression was, but he’d already started making modifications to the chamber. Determining the precise nature of the alteration that had been performed was tricky, and he was still refining the amplifier.

  The fact that he’d lost the scrap of cloth he’d used for the first ray was annoying as well, but there was a reason he’d been careful to use the smallest amount. Still, the loss meant that the next time he spotted that chain super, there’d be no messing about. The bastard had been responsible for the loss of two power suppressor drones, and was just a common-class meta at best.

  Greg would show him who he was messing with. Greg would show them all.

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