Chapter 519 | Make It Weird [GT BONUS]

Chapter 519: 519 | Make It Weird [GT BONUS]

The northwest wall came apart in a spray of masonry and superheated dust, and through the gap came the single most terrifying thing I had ever been genuinely happy to see.

Sloane hit the plaza at a dead sprint with amber cracking off her knuckles in strobing pulses, her pink hair torn loose from its tie and plastered flat to one side of her face, her hero suit scorched through at the left hip where something had gotten close enough to try. Behind her, Felicity slid down a section of collapsed ramp on the side of one platform boot with the poise of a person who had practiced falling as a fashion statement. Camille came off the ramp differently, both palms already burning that hot construction-cone orange, dropping the last eight feet and landing in a crouch that put four hairline fractures in the tile.

And under Sloane’s right arm, tucked against her ribs like a duffel bag she had decided was hers, was a middle-aged man in a soaked facilities polo who had absolutely no business being anywhere near this fight.

She had carried him. Out of a room filling with smoke, up two levels, through a hole she made herself, she had carried the man who sold all forty of our names to the people currently trying to kill us, because leaving him would have meant letting him die and she had apparently decided that wasn’t happening today.

I love her. That’s the whole thought. There’s nothing clever underneath it.

Sloane set Wes Prentiss down against a support column with a shove that was gentler than her face suggested, and then she looked up and found me on the floor with twelve feet of white wrongness standing over my skull.

The Bond Resonance detonated inside my chest.

It came through in one continuous wave that had no words in it, only pressure, and the pressure said mine and hurt and no in a register that made my ribs ache worse than the actual broken ribs. She felt every part of my condition in real time. Four percent stamina, separated shoulder, blood in my mouth, the specific mathematical certainty that I had nine minutes left and no way to fill them. She got all of it at once, the entire inventory, and she did not stop moving for even a fraction of a second.

She didn’t scream my name either. That’s the part people always get wrong about Sloane Fitzgerald. When she’s loud she’s fine. When she goes silent, somebody’s about to have a very bad afternoon.

She closed the distance in five strides and put a fully charged Detonation into Nexo’s flank.

BWOOM.

The sound was physical. It slapped across the plaza and came back off the dome ceiling and the pressure wave rolled over me where I lay, and Nexo staggered. Two steps. Sideways.

Not hurt. Moved. Which was two steps more than Steele had managed with three full charges, and I lay there on the broken tile doing math with a concussion and arrived at a number I liked.

Sloane didn’t admire her own work. She was already chaining into the second strike, same spot, same angle, driving her palm into the identical seam of black banding on the creature’s flank with her shoulder behind it. BWOOM. Third. BWOOM. Fourth, and this one came in low with her whole body rotating through the hips the way Diane’s coaches had spent nine years and a small fortune teaching her, and the tile under her boots cratered from the reaction force.

Her ceiling was six detonations. Six, hard stop, since she was fifteen, verified, tested, documented in three separate prep-program assessments.

She was on nine and her hands were getting brighter.

I felt her notice it through the bond, the surprise landing under the fury without slowing it, and I made a mental note that when we got out of here there was going to be a conversation about the Claimed buff and permanent output ceilings and my ongoing failure to mention certain mechanics, and that she was going to be correct in that conversation, and that I was going to lose it badly.

Nexo’s longer arm came around in a horizontal sweep aimed at the space where Sloane’s spine was.

She wasn’t in that space. She’d left it before the windup finished, sliding low under the arc with one hand skimming the tile for balance, and she came up on the creature’s inside line and put detonation number ten into the underside of its jaw.

Then she planted her feet between Nexo and me and she stopped moving anywhere else.

"Get up," she said, and her voice was absolutely level. "You don’t get to lie down in front of me."

"Working on it." Blood bubbled when I said it. Attractive. "Give me a minute."

"You don’t have a minute."

"Then give me forty seconds and a compliment."

The gold at her knuckles flared and she went back in, and behind her the plaza started to come apart in a different direction entirely.

Felicity had reached the mezzanine steps and stopped there, which was the smartest thing anyone had done in the last ten minutes, because Felicity Hardy had exactly forty-two points of Strength and a body designed by whoever handles that department for maximum distraction and minimum load-bearing capacity, and she knew with total clarity that walking toward Nexo would accomplish nothing except adding a name to the casualty list.

So she did the thing she’d been doing since she was fourteen, which was make reality less trustworthy for everyone who wasn’t her.

Gold light bloomed across the plaza in sheets.

Not one Felicity. Not a decoy. Forty students appeared across the floor at once, and they were all of us, every single person from both cohorts, rendered in that dreamlike warmth her constructs always carried at the edges. Theo charging from the east with his fists cocked. Percy sprinting along a service catwalk with his notebook flapping. Koda vaulting a chunk of fallen ceiling with her fists cherry-red. Camille in six places at once, firing from six angles. Me, three separate versions of me, all of them upright and none of them bleeding, which felt like editorializing.

They moved in every direction simultaneously. They made noise. They cast shadows that fell in the wrong directions and landed with footsteps that hit the tile a half beat off from where the light said they should, and the whole plaza went from a fight to a static field.

Thatch’s head snapped around. His hands came up with black fire crawling to his wrists and he tracked the nearest running shape, and then the second, and then the fourth, and his fingers started tapping against his thigh at double the rate they’d been going.

Tap-tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap-tap.

He couldn’t sort it. I watched it happen from the floor with a front-row seat and a punctured lung, and it was beautiful. His whole thing was a beam of directional annihilation that needed a target, and Felicity had just handed him four hundred targets in a room with no natural light and told him to pick. Every second he spent resolving signal out of static was a second his fire stayed in his hands instead of going into the north corridor where Maribelle and Eden and Nyx were holding a doorway with a support beam and a lot of misplaced optimism.

"Bestie," Felicity said into the comm, warm and bright and pitched for the whole channel, "make it weird."