Heavens 12.2

I was about to leave back through the portal when I saw our reinforcements. Quick, to get here in what must’ve been half the estimated time. Damsel was wearing her black dress and a black coat that buckled at the neck, lace up to the underside of the jaw. She had black eyeliner around her eyes and eyeshadow smeared around eyes without pupils or irises. Her blades gleamed on her left hand. On the right, the shine was dulled by streaked blood. It looked like she had tried to wipe it off and had only dragged it along the length of the blade.

Two people accompanied her. The reinforcements from Citrine, I was assuming. After she got new information or had second thoughts about how fucking useless she was being, she’d volunteered two of her contacts.

The two contacts matched, boys shorter than Rain, both wearing peacoats and wearing hard white masks like hockey masks, that were cut out to trace the edges of thick-rimmed glasses. Another hard mask segment covered the foreheads, cut to fit to the top of the glasses, and each of the upper-face sections had a number stamped on it. One and Two. Hair was parted and combed back with some gel that made hair look both perpetually wet and rigid.

“Damsel, thank you for coming,” I said, glancing over the crowd of people we’d leveled earlier. “Thing One, Thing Two, I presume?”

“That works,” one of the boys said.

“Password?”

“Pilum,” he said.

“We’re good, then. Let’s go. They’ll close the door after us.”

We turned to go, the boys falling into step on either side of me. Something was eerie about the way they moved. That Damsel had a regal glide as she walked behind me almost seemed to accentuate it.

I turned my eyes forward.

“You’ve heard?” Thing One asked.

“Pretty sure,” I said. “Brockton Bay? Unless there’s other bad news warranting a question as ominous as ‘you’ve heard’.”

“Yes. Brockton Bay.”

“Please tell me the situation hasn’t gotten worse in the last few minutes.”

“It’s worse,” Thing Two said. “But not exponentially worse.”

“A derivative kind of worse,” Thing One said. “If you bomb a city, the fires that follow are derivative of the bomb. Worse, but not in the way you mean.”

“Good,” I said. “Let’s hope this stays on the borderline side of catastrophic.”

“It’s not,” Thing One said, quiet.

My heart sank. “Past borderline?”

The two boys nodded in unison.

The sensation of gut sinking joined the feeling at the center of my chest, and swept through my entire body. That down feeling, the sick drop that was associated with the moments before disaster struck.

We passed through the portal.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“My brothers,” Damsel said. “After a fashion.”