I canceled my forcefield and renewed it, shielding as many people as I could. My gun fell to the ground behind me.

Simurgh flew skyward, into the hole she’d come through. She was barely through it when one of the Dragon-craft, upstairs, rammed into her, throwing her into the side of the hole.

I caught and blocked as much rubble as I could, as we all shifted focus to backing away from the fallout of the battle above.

“Keep moving if you can!” Defiant called out. “She’s on the back foot! Noncombat capes, get the injured clear!”

Gilpatrick was one of the ‘capes’ to do that.

“Dragon’s back on line!” Defiant called out. “Crystalclear, I need you to get this device to Narwhal. Antares?”

“Yes!” I called out, one hand at my forehead.

“Dinah Alcott is on the seventh floor. Dragon thinks she’s a target. You can take Lab Rat to the labs on the sixth floor as you go. Go!”

I looked around to confirm my team was more or less in fighting shape, nodded, and then led the way.

As it began, younger me, so it continues. A cut on the head, a weird feeling of pride, and a bit of twisted hope.

Last 20.4

The lights shut off throughout the facility, in the same moment Dragon booted up our eye implants. The implants rushed to process what they were seeing, throwing text at me with notifications, updates, tracking for key people and the Simurgh’s estimated location, scribbled out in gold, digital script. I was notified in bold text that hung at the periphery of my vision that there was no ongoing communication. This was just her booting us up and giving us tech as good as we could hope for. Lines spiderwebbed out to outline the hallway, doorways, and provide some limited night vision.

The lights came back on, bright, with a fluorescent whine that became a scream, one sound in a chorus. Human screams came from upstairs, and my eyes strained to adjust and see what might be causing the screaming. Was it someone on our side? Someone hurt? Someone who’d snapped and become hostile?

The Simurgh wasn’t necessarily flipping people to ‘red’ with a new, unprecedented speed. This was part of any fight against the Endbringer. In a given population, there were bound to be people who were on the edge, vulnerable, needing only the right prompt. As she kept screaming, she kept gathering data, and she used that data to find better prompts for more people who were on a ledge, on the cusp of losing their minds.

The very second my vision was clear and focused enough to see the details in the bright white hallway, half the lights went out again.

The danger we were facing, the hazards of this particular battlefield, were those people who had been on the cusp of breaking down and who were now putty in the Simurgh’s hands.