At the exchange-program handover, Rose Absolute presented Highguard with a pink folder, a silver bell, and a warning about anything that offered to make him happy forever.
“Don't answer it,” she said.
“Even to refuse?”
“Especially if you think you've found a clever way to refuse.”
Highguard put the bell in a compartment of his navy suit. He was a broad man with a gold shield on his chest and a white streak in his beard. Rose had seen him hold a falling office block together until the last window cleaner climbed down. He received the pink folder as seriously as he received everything else.
His own briefing came on three encrypted tablets.
“Don't destroy a vehicle just because the driver has escaped,” he told her. “And keep prisoners' hands where you can see them.”
“We can do ribbons,” said Rose.
Blue Vow demonstrated. A blue loop tied itself around a luggage trolley. She considered it, then added a bow.
Relay, the woman in the gray coat beside Highguard, leaned down to examine it. Her orange instrument case gave a pleased little chirp.
“Does that collect fingerprints?”
“Why would it?” said Blue.
They all laughed, although not at precisely the same thing.
It had taken six months to arrange the exchange. Bellflower's council had worried about insurance. Steelfall's council had wanted to know whether transformation sequences counted as duty time. Now there were two welcome receptions, a week of unfamiliar beds, and an express shuttle reserved for emergency recall. Thirty minutes between cities. A sensible precaution which everyone expected someone else to need.
Rose was looking forward to opponents with addresses. You couldn't interview the All-Consuming Night's neighbors.
Highguard, watching Starling Smile's yellow feathered cape lift in a breeze, was looking forward to a threat that announced itself by turning the sky purple. Last month he had spent eleven nights determining which of four identical shell companies owned a murderous satellite.
“Anything we haven't covered?” he asked.
Rose thought of the darkness pressing its face against her bedroom window when she was seventeen. She thought of Blue holding her hand under a desk, neither of them able to sleep. It seemed too large a thing to put into the remaining minute before a train.
“Call us,” she said. “You don't have to wait.”
Highguard nodded. He meant it.
They exchanged folders, shook hands for the photograph, and took trains in opposite directions.
At noon on the first day, a mechanical crab tore the front off Steelfall's Merchant Bank.
Rose arrived in a sweep of scarlet ribbons. Blue Vow's clear blue shields caught a shower of masonry before it reached the pavement. Starling Smile swooped through the bank's broken windows and came out carrying a cashier under each arm.
It was an excellent beginning.
The crab stood three stories high, its brass claws snapping above a crowd trapped behind an overturned bus. Rose landed on the bus's roof, planted her white boots, and lifted her heart-shaped wand.
“Those who prey upon the hopes of others—”
The crab shot her off the bus.
Blue caught her in a shield six inches above the road.
“I was speaking!” Rose shouted.
A loudspeaker crackled. “I could hear you.”
Rose got up. The crab was turning toward a woman trying to free a pushchair from the crowd. She forgot the speech, drove a ribbon through the joint of its forward claw, and pulled. Blue braced the ribbon; Starling flew it around the crab's legs. Together they dropped the machine onto its side, where it kicked holes in the street with furious, diminishing taps.
Its hatch opened. A man in green spectacles and an immaculate pinstripe coat climbed out with his hands up.
“Overdraft,” said Blue, checking a tablet. “Number seven.”
“I've had a difficult year.” He looked from one of them to the next. “I surrender.”
Rose could feel the people watching. The torn bank, the overturned bus, the man standing alone beside the thing he had made: here was the part where they gave someone back to himself.
She offered him her hand.
“Whatever has hold of you,” she said, “you don't have to carry it anymore.”
“That sounds lovely.”
Blue and Starling took their places. Scarlet, blue, and gold light gathered around the three girls. This time Blue's shields intercepted the crab's last indignant shot.
“Morning Comes for Everyone!”
The light passed through Overdraft. His coat fluttered. A paper receipt drifted out of his pocket.
Nothing black rose from him. Nothing screamed.
He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.
“Oh, that is pleasant. Can you do migraines?”
Rose stared. Beneath her magic he felt perfectly whole: frightened, excited, greedy, alive.
“You wanted to rob the bank?”
“Very much.”
An enormous grinding noise came from behind it.
Starling rose above the roofline. “There's another crab.”
“Naturally,” said Overdraft.
Rose snapped a ribbon around his wrists. Too late, she noticed two small steel hands slipping back beneath the tails of his coat. The second crab backed out through the bank's rear wall carrying a steel vault between its claws.
Then the overturned bus began to slide.
Rose could have held the prisoner or caught the bus. She caught the bus. By the time the people beneath it were safe, Overdraft was a dwindling green flare above the rooftops, and the second crab had vanished down a freight ramp.
The police inspector who arrived was grateful for the saved lives. She said so twice.
She also said that four bank employees had taken shelter in the stolen vault.
Rose's ribbons went slack.
Bellflower gave Highguard a quiet first day. Quickstep rescued a cat, then had to rescue it again because it wanted to be on that roof. Relay examined the city's silver warning bells and could find no circuitry to improve.
At a quarter past five the following afternoon, an object like a black glass chrysalis appeared above the shopping square.
It was wider than the bandstand. People stopped beneath it with their parcels in their hands. Its shadow fell toward the sun.
Highguard was already running when the first support of the bandstand snapped.
He made a shield beneath the descending thing and drove it upward. The chrysalis hit the unyielding gold surface. A crack crossed it from end to end.
For an instant he saw something inside, folded into too many layers.
Then it broke.
Black splinters rang against the paving. The silver bell in Highguard's belt began to ring.
“Clear the square,” he said.
Quickstep became a blue blur. Relay unfolded her scanner.
Each splinter cast a different shadow. They stretched across the stones, met, and continued to stretch.
Highguard caught a fragment in a shield, holding it above the pavement. The blackness remained on the ground.
“Gas?” he asked.
“No.” Relay turned a dial. “Radiation, no. Nanomachines, no. I'll keep going.”
The bandstand creaked. He caught that too.
Of course they had brought the wrong team. These people had trusted him, and he had broken the thing above their heads.
He could still protect them.
That was his own thought. There was nothing strange about it.
“I can protect them,” he said.
“Yes,” said Relay, studying her scanner. “You are.”
He could protect them from the falling bandstand, and the splinters, and the traffic rushing toward the square. Beyond that were burning houses, armed men, bad doctors, staircases, years. Every person Quickstep carried away was being delivered to a place where Highguard could not keep them safe.
He looked at a child in a red hat riding on Quickstep's shoulders. She had dropped her toy. Quickstep was bringing her back for it.
There was so much time in which she could be hurt.
Highguard spread his hands.
A golden dome closed over the shopping square.
Quickstep struck it at speed and rolled across the stones, clutching the child against his chest.
Highguard went to him at once. There was blood on the speedster's lip.
“You have to be more careful,” Highguard said.
Rose had spent the night learning that four people could be missing without anyone knowing where to look.
In Bellflower, the darkness left traces: milk souring in shut bottles, clocks repeating a minute, a bruised color beneath someone's shadow. She and Blue could follow those things. In Steelfall there were tire marks, seventeen contradictory eyewitness accounts, and a man who swore that the second crab had been a lobster.
The inspector had officers checking freight routes. Rose asked to help.
“If anybody contacts you, tell us before you meet them,” the inspector said.
“Of course.”
They spent the morning taking descriptions. Starling drew the stolen machine on a whiteboard, adding a labeled arrow: NOT THIS ONE, THE OTHER ONE.
At half past five, Highguard called.
“Settling in?” he asked.
Behind him someone was saying, “Let us out.”
“We've met one of your local villains,” Rose said. “Bit of a learning curve.”
“Same here.”
“Anything we can help with?”
“No, no. I've got everybody safe.”
The call ended. Blue looked at Rose.
“Everybody?”
Rose called back. There was no answer. Relay's number failed too. So did Quickstep's.
She called Bellflower's emergency dispatcher while Blue rang the shuttle driver. The dispatcher could confirm a gold barrier around the shopping square, no serious injuries reported, and no contact with the heroes.
“Get Relay onto a wired phone,” Rose said. “Keep everyone else away from the square.”
The driver would have their recall car waiting. Rose was still talking to the dispatcher when, five minutes later, a boy in a courier's yellow jacket came to the police command post. He had a split shoe and a phone full of photographs of a freight depot.
“My brother works there,” he told Rose. “I saw the crab go in. They're unloading money. I didn't know who else to tell.”
The stolen crab filled one photograph, the bank's name still visible on the vault between its claws. Rose ended her call and sent the photographs and address to the inspector, who was at the bank overseeing the search of the wrecked first machine. Then she looked at the boy.
No darkness. No foreign will curled about his heart. He was afraid of her, and eager for her to believe him. She knew the shape of that eagerness: people often wanted a rescuer to stop asking questions and come.
“When did you see it?” Blue asked.
“Just now.”
The train was waiting. So were four people in a steel box, at the first address anyone had been able to give her.
“Get them out,” Rose told Blue and Starling. “Then straight to the station.”
At the depot, the boy pointed them toward a long building with roof windows. Then he said he had to warn his brother and ran around the corner.
Starling started after him.
The doors opened. Beyond them stood the second crab, its claws folded around the vault. From a square cabin on its back, Overdraft waved.
Rose's phone rang in her belt. A Bellflower number.
She answered before the next ring.
“Relay?”
“Rose,” said Relay. “I need you to tell me what the darkness sounds like.”
Relay had taken apart her own headset, Quickstep's earpieces, and the portable neural shield that had once stopped an entire telepathic orchestra. They lay on the floor of a confectioner's shop in a neat gray semicircle.
None of them had detected an intruder. Highguard could still name the members of his first team, subtract sevens, recognize faces, and explain very reasonably why the child in the red hat must never leave the square again.
He had stopped radio signals crossing his dome. Relay was calling from the confectioner's old wired telephone, with its receiver wedged between her cheek and shoulder.
“It doesn't sound like anything,” Highguard said. “I'm not hearing voices.”
Outside the window, people crowded against the gold wall. Quickstep was carrying an old man to the shade. He stopped, looked at the man, and went very still.
“Put him down,” Relay said sharply.
Quickstep obeyed. His hands shook as he backed away.
Through the receiver came a crash, then Rose saying, “Blue, left! Sorry. Is he thinking something he normally thinks?”
“I am normally concerned for public safety,” Highguard said.
“It makes your best reason the only reason. Anything against it starts to feel wicked. What do you want him to do?”
“Open the shield.”
Highguard looked at Relay with such sudden disgust that she took a step back.
Rose heard his silence.
“Oh,” she said, much more quietly. “You're going to need us.”
“Are you taking another booking?” Overdraft asked.
Rose tucked the phone into a loop of ribbon at her shoulder. “Where are the people?”
“Safe, if you cooperate. Now, as you can see, I have fortified my position.”
The crab's claws came up. Something unfolded along its back. Red lights woke along the depot's walls.
Blue's first shield rang like a struck glass. Starling pulled her clear as the floor beneath her gave way.
Rose leaped onto the crab's forward claw. A second claw swept her off it. The three girls regrouped beside a stack of empty freight containers, Blue holding a curved shield against the gunfire while Rose tested the stolen vault with a ribbon.
Empty.
She felt the open door inside, and nothing else.
“Show us the people!”
“Absolutely. Just lower that shield so we can have a proper conversation.”
Starling glanced at Rose. Her mouth made a small, disbelieving O.
“He's still not possessed?”
“No.”
“Horrible man.”
Blue leaned toward the phone. “Relay? Overdraft's got the four bank staff. He's talking from the cabin on his crab. Any suggestions?”
“Don't believe a word he says.”
“That is a remarkably broad instruction.”
“I'm sorry. Our problems aren't usually possessed.”
Overdraft announced that he would begin shooting in five seconds. Blue looked at the marks appearing in her shield.
“What has he been doing up to now?”
Rose knew what to do with a defended center. Blue and Starling knew too. No need to shout it aloud. They shifted their feet, joined hands, and gold feathers spread on one side of her, blue rings on the other. Her wand began to fill with the fierce light they used to break the darkness's shells.
The red lights on the walls shifted with them.
Yesterday he had watched them do this. She had seen the recording on three news feeds.
“Thank you,” Overdraft said.
On his last syllable, the roof windows turned white. Starling jerked upward, dragging the formation with her. A stroke of red light passed through the space where their heads had been.
Rose landed badly. Her ankle folded, and Blue caught her elbow. The gathered dawn blazed between them, ready to be released.
Overdraft's head in the cabin window had not turned to follow their leap.
“That's a picture,” Rose said.
The man in the window waved again. Precisely the same little wave.
She looked below him. Through a narrow strip of glass, almost hidden behind the crab's collar of armor, she saw a hand pressed flat against the window. An ordinary hand, with a plaster around the thumb.
Four frightened people beneath a moving picture of the person she wanted to hit.
The finishing light tugged at her wand. There was enough in it to burn away the whole cabin. Enough to end the machinery and the shooting and the dreadful voice.
“Rose,” Blue said.
“I see them.”
The crab tilted its cabin forward and released its mounting catches. The cabin slid off the machine's back, dragging torn cables behind it. At the same moment, a small craft detached from the crab's far side, below the roofline. Overdraft's escape, already moving.
Rose pointed her wand away from the cabin.
“Let it go,” she said.
Starling and Blue broke the formation. The dawn poured harmlessly upward through the broken roof, and the recoil drove Rose onto one knee. She flung both arms forward. Ribbons streamed from her cuffs and wrapped the falling cabin.
It came down on her like a dropped building.
Blue put a shield beneath it. Starling caught the highest ribbon and flew, her wings beating against air thick with plaster dust.
“We can get them out!” Rose shouted into the phone. “We're going to tear the bottom off!”
“Keep the rest,” said Relay.
“What?” Rose hooked a ribbon beneath the bottom panel and wrenched it clear.
“Controls, recorders, everything. You don't know what matters yet.”
Starling released her end of the sling and dived through the opening. In two trips she carried all four captives to shelter behind the containers.
“All clear!” she called.
A seam opened along Blue's shield. Rose could drop the empty cabin and fly after Overdraft. Perhaps she could still reach him. Perhaps a ribbon around his whole coat this time—
One ribbon slipped through her stinging hands.
“Keep it,” she told Blue. “Keep the whole horrible thing.”
Blue swallowed, nodded, and made another shield.
Highguard could not find a reason to open the dome that did not end with a child dead somewhere beyond it.
Relay was asking him for ten seconds.
He knew her. He had carried her out of a fire with the skin burned off her instrument case. She had spent four months building a device to find a missing man everyone else believed was dead. She was not a wicked person.
Yet here she was, asking him to throw away everything he had done.
The child in the red hat stood against the dome with both palms raised. Her mother was on the other side. Quickstep had brought the little girl back for her toy; he had not yet brought the mother back.
He could open a little door. Let the woman in. That would solve this.
Outside, the mother mouthed something to her daughter. The little girl turned toward Highguard.
“I want to go home.”
He could take their house inside as well.
Relay was watching his face. He tried to explain the house to her and heard himself saying it.
“You don't have to believe me,” she said. “You have to let me do it.”
The silver bell in his belt rang and rang.
Highguard closed his fists. The gold wall thinned.
The world beyond it seemed to tilt away into a pit. He held on. Held his hands shut, held the terrible open space where people could choose to walk away from him.
Quickstep moved.
A red hat flashed past. An old man with his crutches clutched to his chest. Two shop assistants, still holding opposite ends of a tray of cakes. A woman who would not leave her dog. The dog, in a separate trip, furious about it.
Highguard began to count, but all the numbers were people he might never see again.
“Last one,” said Quickstep, and disappeared with a baby held tight against his collar.
Highguard stumbled into the center of the square, away from the phone, away from Relay. He couldn't keep his fists closed much longer.
“Go.”
She started toward him.
“Relay. If I say I've changed my mind, don't come back.”
She stopped. Then she ran.
A smaller dome returned with a crack that shattered the confectioner's windows. This time there was no one in it but Highguard.
Outside, his shadow went on growing. It passed through the gold wall, climbed the nearest shop, and covered the clock above its door.
Quickstep touched Relay's shoulder.
“I keep thinking I could carry everyone,” he said. “If I didn't stop.”
“Don't finish that thought.”
She picked up the confectioner's phone, its cord still reaching through the broken window. Rose was breathing hard on the other end.
“They're out,” Relay said.
“Ours too.”
By six, the depot was full of police. Blue sat against a container with both hands around a mug she had not drunk from. Starling's yellow feathers were gray with dust.
Rose stood beside the fallen cabin. The man with the plaster on his thumb was crying into a blanket. She couldn't bring herself to leave him until he noticed her looking and reached out.
“Thank you.”
She took his hand. There was grease from Overdraft's machine under both their fingernails.
The inspector approached, carrying a small evidence bag.
“We caught your courier trying to spend his fee,” she said. “His brother works in a restaurant.”
Rose looked at the bag. It held a phone, a key, a few folded notes. Such ordinary things.
“I couldn't feel anything wrong with him.”
The inspector studied her, then put the bag away.
“I can arrange transport back to headquarters. We have people coming to examine the cabin. You can help us identify—”
“We have to go home,” Rose said.
Overdraft was out there. There were ramps and roads and airports, and he could choose any of them. Every minute she stayed might be the minute she found him.
On her phone was a picture from Relay: the familiar square under a gold dome, the clock hidden, a blackness spreading across the roofs beyond it.
“Right now.”
The inspector looked at the picture. “What do you need?”
“Straight to the station.”
The inspector took their account on the walk to her car, handed the cabin over to her officers, and drove the girls straight across Steelfall to the waiting shuttle.
Their chartered shuttle left at half past six. Blue fell asleep before the station disappeared behind them. Starling sat with her head against the window, watching the darkening fields.
Rose opened Highguard's tablet. There were whole pages about witnesses. She read the first paragraph three times and couldn't make it stay in her head.
She put it down and called Relay.
“Half an hour,” she said.
“We'll be here.”
Highguard felt the train arrive. Another dangerous thing moving toward his square, full of people who did not know enough to be afraid.
He knew exactly how to stop it. His shields could reach the station from here.
He knelt on his own hands.
He was still there when the girls came down the shopping street. Three bright figures beneath black windows. Rose leaned on Blue for a step, then straightened and crossed the square alone.
Something inside Highguard recoiled from her wand. His dome brightened until he could scarcely see her through it.
Rose touched its outer surface. A small spark of dawn ran up her fingers and scattered.
“That's impressive,” she said.
“It stops everything.”
“Yes. I noticed.”
She backed away and spoke to Blue and Starling. They spread out, keeping to the edge. Highguard had the unpleasant feeling that they were taking positions around him. Professionals doing a familiar, dangerous job.
He had built something they could not get through.
“I can keep you safe too,” he offered.
Rose looked at him for a long moment. The silver bell went silent in his belt. He could no longer hear the city at all.
“I can't promise to keep you safe,” she said. “I'm coming in with a weapon. It's going to hurt. I need you to let me.”
The blackness inside him rose, giving him a hundred excellent reasons to refuse. She was exhausted. Her hands were shaking. Someone had let this child be responsible for a whole city—
She was twenty-two. She had told him that at the reception. He remembered her laughing over a photograph in the pink folder, Blue beside her in a ridiculous paper crown. He remembered thinking that he would enjoy hearing the story.
He moved one hand from beneath his knee.
A narrow slit opened in the gold wall.
Rose didn't waste it. She struck the opening with her wand, pinned it wide, and shouted. Blue's shields braced its edges. Starling came over her shoulder in a storm of golden feathers.
Highguard tried to close the dome. He tried to hold it open. Both things were happening in him at once, and one was winning.
Rose lost her footing on the cracked paving. Blue caught the back of her dress and hauled. The three girls fell inside just as the opening snapped shut.
They rose together, although Rose had to do it on one knee.
Highguard's hands came up.
Blue thrust a shield between him and Rose. It broke under the first golden stroke. She made another. Starling caught Rose beneath the arms, lifted her clear of the next, and swung her in close.
Above the roofs, the darkness gathered itself. Every splinter Highguard had broken open pulled at him. He saw a city without injury, without loss, without a single door he could not lock.
Rose planted her wand against his chest.
“Blue.”
Blue caught her wrist. Starling caught Blue's.
“Ready,” said Starling.
There was no speech. Rose had no breath left for one. She pushed everything she had through the heart-shaped opening in her wand.
The square filled with morning.
Highguard felt it find the dark, drag it out of every place it had persuaded him to make for it, and burn it clear. It hurt exactly as much as she had said. He cried out. His shields went out. For a moment there was something enormous crying out with him.
Across Bellflower, the shadows came loose from the roofs. They raced backward toward the square, streaming into the light. The clock appeared, its hands still moving. People standing far up the shopping street threw their arms across their eyes.
Then the black glass on the paving turned clear.
Highguard found himself on the ground with his hands open. Rose sat a few feet away, her wand across her lap. One of her white boots had lost its heel.
For a while they listened to Quickstep running toward them.
“The folder,” Highguard said at last.
Rose turned her head.
“I did read it.”
“I know,” she said. “So did I.”
Relay left her ruined neural shield in a Bellflower police locker. At half past seven, the superheroes took the shuttle home.
Before boarding, Highguard asked Rose whether there was any darkness left in him. She checked. Then he asked Blue. He stopped himself before he asked Starling.
In Steelfall, Relay spent nearly an hour extracting the damaged recorder from Overdraft's cabin. She spent another hour getting it to admit that it was a recorder.
At ten, Highguard woke at the laboratory table to find a map under his cheek.
“His escape plan,” said Relay. “Private loading hangar. Midnight freight service. An actual booking, with a deposit. He's paid extra for nobody to ask what's in the crates.”
Quickstep leaned over her shoulder.
“Can we get him?”
“Yes. We have to get warrants first.”
Highguard sat up. He knew how to do this part.
At eleven forty, two small steel hands reached out of a stack of cargo crates to operate a hangar door. Quickstep caught one in a clamp and the other in a second clamp before their owner could draw them back.
Highguard's shield closed around the crates.
Overdraft's loudspeaker offered to negotiate. Relay switched off its power at the wall.
They recovered the vault's contents minus the courier's fee, the freight deposit, and a substantial sum already paid to people whose names Overdraft claimed not to know. The inspector would be looking for them for months.
Rose and the girls returned the next morning to give statements. There were six chairs around the interview table. Nobody had thought to remove the welcome banner.
Highguard was pouring coffee when a long-eared black shape sprang up the frosted glass behind him. He dropped the pot.
On the other side of the glass, Starling lowered a fluffy rabbit backpack.
“Sorry,” she said.
“That's all right.” He looked at it again. “That's yours?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Rose bent to help him pick up the pieces. Before she could, the inspector brought Overdraft past the open door. He was handcuffed to a sturdy officer and carrying his coat in a sealed bag.
“I don't suppose,” he said, spotting her, “you could do something about my back?”
Rose straightened.
“Where are his other hands?”
The inspector held up a second bag. Two steel hands lay inside it.
Rose counted them. Only then did she go back to helping Highguard.