Chapter 159: What was that

Leon did not answer.

"Is she someone you would be sad to lose?"

Leon did not answer.

"That is a pity. I would have hated to be the reason she was hurt."

A cold feeling settled in Leon’s stomach, and it was not fear. It was something heavier and older, and he knew it well. He had felt it once before, on the day his own family had decided that he was not worth keeping.

His hands curled into fists at his sides.

The pavement under his boots gave a faint crack.

’Easy,’ Medusa said, and for once, there was no teasing in her voice. ’You are leaking, Leon.’

’I know.’

’If you let it out here, they will all see it.’

’I know.’

’And they will all see her standing right in front of you.’

He drew a breath through his nose and let it out slowly. The Mask held his face in place, calm and mild and a little worried, but underneath it, something was rising like water behind a dam. Each word Batnac spoke made the dam a little thinner.

This man had come to his street. He had broken the sky over a quiet neighborhood and frightened its people half to death, and now he was pointing a claw at the one person in this city who had been kind to him for no reason at all.

"You have gone quiet again," Batnac said. "Does that mean you will not tell me the truth?"

"I told you my name," Leon said. His voice was very low.

"Then I am afraid we have a problem."

"There is no problem. Go home."

"Ah." Batnac sighed, almost sadly. "I had hoped you would say that. It is so much easier when I have a reason."

He raised his right arm, and the hand at the end of it twisted with a sharp click.

The wrist came apart.

The claw detached from the arm in a burst of steam and shot forward with a high mechanical whine.

It crossed the road before anyone could shout, a blur of dark steel, and it stopped a hand’s width from Iris’s throat with its fingers spread wide.

Tiny blue lights glowed in each of the knuckles. A thin cable trailed back through the air to the stump of the wrist, and it hummed softly.

Iris did not scream. She had stopped breathing.

"Do not move, miss," Batnac said pleasantly. "These fingers are very sensitive."

"Let her go," Leon said.

"No, I don’t think I will." The giant’s smile stretched wide.

"Here is the arrangement, little Leon. You will tell me the truth right now, in front of all these good people."

"If you do, your girlfriend walks home with her hair untouched. If you do not, she will suffer for every second that you stay silent, and I will make sure you watch every one of them."

The fingers of the hand closed a little.

"Count of three," Batnac said. "One."

"Two," Batnac said.

The hand did not move, but the blue lights in its knuckles brightened, and Iris made a thin, broken sound in her throat.

Her whole body had gone stiff. She was staring at the steel fingers in front of her face as if they were a snake about to bite.

"Batnac..." she whispered. "Damn you...."

It was the first time that day she had sounded truly afraid.

Leon heard it, and something inside him went quiet.

It was not the quiet of calm. It was the quiet that came right before a storm broke, when the wind stopped and the birds went silent and everything held its breath.

The anger that had been rising in him all morning did not explode. It simply went still, and it turned into one clear thought.

"Three," Batnac said cheerfully, and the fingers began to close.

However, they suddenly broke apart, falling to the ground in pieces.

Iris gasped, and the sound seemed very loud in the silence.

She stumbled back a step, and she looked down at the pieces scattered around her shoes, and then she looked up at the empty air where the hand had been, as if she expected it to come back. 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

Nobody on the street said a word.

Every face along the road wore the same blank, stunned look, the look of people who had just watched a coin vanish from someone’s palm.

Nobody had seen it. Not the neighbors, not the woman with the child, and not the old man on the doorstep.

Not even Batnac.

He stared at his own wrist. A thin wisp of smoke curled up out of the severed joint, and his mouth had fallen open, and for the first time since he had arrived, the smile was gone from his face.

He flexed the claws of his other hands one after another, as if to make sure that they were still his, and every one of them answered him.

"What was that?" he said.

Nobody answered him.

"Service unit." His voice had gone flat and hard. "Replay the last five seconds at one-hundredth speed."

"Replaying, master." The voice from his wrist sounded uncertain.

"Master, I regret to report that the footage shows nothing. At the moment of destruction, the target’s position did not change."

"The hand was intact in frame four thousand and eleven. It was in pieces in frame four thousand and twelve."

"That is impossible."

"Yes, master. I agree."

"My drones have a frame rate of ten thousand per second."

"Yes, master. I have checked it three times."

Batnac lifted his head slowly. His eyes, which had been wide with surprise a moment earlier, were narrowing now, and the shock in them was turning into something else.

He looked at Leon the way a man looks at a lock that has just opened without a key.

"You," he said softly.

Leon said nothing, and remained standing where he was, with his hands loose at his sides.

His eyes were on Iris, who had turned to face him with her lips parted and her eyes wide, and he saw in them what he had been dreading.