Wordsworth – Chapter 31 – Colors 11

Gallant blasts my back.

The boom makes me fly over the roof’s edge.

And euphoria takes over.

I’m covered in Amber, the world slowing down as I take everything in. As I note each of Crusader’s ghosts’ positions around Lung, Kaiser throwing a wedge of steel down the street, angled just so Hookwolf can take refuge from the latest beam of blinding fire coming from between Lung’s claws.

I bring my arms close to my body, Armsmaster’s halberd aligned with my height, and I corkscrew.

Then I extend my leg, kicking off the lance of one of the floating ghosts, the sole of my boot ignoring its presence as my heel impacts the shaft, the wood quivering beneath me when I use the hit to bleed off momentum and redirect my fall.

Just slightly.

Just a bit.

Just enough.

I lash out with my borrowed weapon, the axe-head digging into Lung’s nape as he starts to turn toward me, flames pooling in his mouth, tendrils of his own radiant amber escaping between misshapen teeth, his eyes molten, glowing steel.

Another explosion on my back.

And I’m Blue.

I fall straight down, the fire sailing over me, heat passing right where my head was fractions of a second ago, when I still sailed toward the monster in front of me.

But the weight of Blue saves me.

And it tears the halberd down.

“Graaaaahhh!”

Lung’s scream is deafening, but I don’t care as I dwell on the image of Anne’s face, on how she’ll look if I’m not fast enough to—

Another blast tries to rock my body, but Blue holds me in place.

Until it’s washed out by Red.

All still part of the plan. Everything according to what Tattletale, the fucking bitch—

I focus past and through Red, and do precisely what’s expected of me:

I explode.

My aura abruptly expands with as much hate as I can pour into it. With all the rage that dwarfs that of an annoying Thinker teasing me. My family being taken hostage. A hat in a crowd. Gallant striking me down.

Me being me.

And I join Lung’s roar.

My eyes hurt with the intensity of his flames, the tornado of fire swirling around him, going from amber to blue, and then just blinding me, just hurting me.

Just making me angrier.

My Red doesn’t swirl, doesn’t spin around.

It just grows. And grows.

“Now!” Tattletale’s voice yells in my ear, adding just a tiny bit more to the anger.

And I do explode.

My aura blows away from me with all the heat of my rage, the boom deafening me as I’m held in place by the pressure I’m expelling, by all the burning air surrounding my body.

I pour it all.

All the frustration of being me. All the hatred for the pathetic little worm who needed to feel strong so badly that it tore its heart off. To prove that it could. That it could be what the strong person said it could be.

Images flash through my mind of what I could do with my fury. Of Sophia screaming as her skin and flesh turned to ash so quickly that only white bone remained after the burn.

Of Emma Barnes.

Of Iridescent.

I keep going for what feels like hours. Maybe years. Through an entire life of rage and revulsion at the cruel, vile thing that I became, the unworthy—

“Emma! Emma, move!”

I don’t want to.

I want to stay here and scream until my throat bleeds. I want to take anything that Lung can throw at me and laugh in his face as I answer with my own fire that isn’t, with just the burning heat of the fury I can so easily slide into.

I want to.

But.

Plan.

Taylor.

I leap away, the strength of Red lending me a speed near that of Amber, and I finally focus back on what’s right in front of me, even as I fly away from it.

Lung’s missing the entire front of his body, his ribs exposed like Sophia’s were in my mind, but he still stands, his lower jaw gone even as fire keeps leaking out of his open throat.

What we’re looking for isn’t there.

I narrow my eyes, throwing my hand in front of me, thinking about what I once pulled, the trick with a blast of aura heated enough to make the innards of the monster explode—

“Gallant! Switch to Amber!”

Fuck.

I shield my head with my arms just before the bolt hits me, deep rage still holding on, aided by thoughts and memories too ingrained to easily let go of them. For a moment, despite Gallant’s power, despite the ease of the emotion he slides into my heart, Red battles Amber in my aura.

Then, I submerge myself in the thrill of motion. Of being in the air twice in a row, sailing under my own power, and I reorient my senses as I delve deeper into the exhilarating sense of speed, of wind rushing past me not because of burning rage creating its own convection currents.

I’m tumbling through the air, my trajectory altered by a blast I barely noticed while so deep in my fury.

I’m already bruising.

But it doesn’t matter. Not when I can feel free. When I can let go of everything tying me down and turn this clumsy tumble into a graceful pirouette, when I can lash out with Colin’s halberd and catch the tip on a pile of rubble strewn across the street, taking it out when I spin around, parallel to the road, accelerating by pulling it closer to me and then driving it down, the blade effortlessly sinking into tarmac, standing straight as I switch my grip on it and twirl around the shaft until I stand in front of the weapon, my hands behind me and over my head, already pulling it out to swing it in front of me.

That’s when Vicky impales Lung with a lamppost.

The steel cylinder quivers for a moment, the street sounding like a giant diapason just got hit.

And then it melts away.

“Shit! He’s growing faster than expected!” Tattletale protests.

“Give me Indigo, and I can find the implants,” I say, already running away from my landing spot, vaulting over Kaiser’s barricade with the assistance of the halberd and shearing off the spiked top with its edge before grabbing onto the wall, holding myself over the lip just long enough to see behind it and orient myself toward the Nazi.

“You can’t say that and run into cover!” the blonde in my communicator protests.

And then, right after I drop to the ground, fire washes over the steel barricade, intense enough that the spikes I didn’t clear before my leap turn into glowing droplets of molten metal.

“… Right,” the Thinker, I think, apologizes.

“Get me a corridor past Lung,” I tell Kaiser.

“And why should I—” he starts to say.

Sophia.

I hate her.

Despise her.

I hate who I am when I’m with her. The person I so easily become even after drinking from a vial that should’ve killed me if the world was at all fair.

I loathe me. Us. Her.

But she’s still been my best friend for long enough.

Long enough that Red leaps to the forefront of my mind, Amber easily discarded as I reach with a glowing hand to the barricade by my side, slowly enough that, at first, it’s not obvious what I’m doing. That only a single point of metal shifts in its hue as it’s rapidly heated.

Closer.

The spot becomes a circle, grey turning into a blue prettier than what usually takes over me.

And the circle grows.

I realize my jaw is clenched. My teeth creaking. That I hatethis man.

So I step toward him.

“You could kill me,” I say. “You could easily maim me and leave me to bleed out. But then everyone would hunt you down for murdering the Ward who defeated Lung.

“Me?”

I reach forward, my aura extending from a pointed finger until there’s a blue spot on his breastplate.

“I could cook you alive inside your armor, and I could easily say that I was following orders,” I tell him.

His helmet doesn’t move away from me, and Red distorts the air enough that I don’t think I can recognize his eyes past his visor.

But then he waves his hand, and a wall of steel perpendicular to his barricade extends halfway to where I need to go for Dean to give me Indigo’s insight.

Without another word, I retract my aura and run, resisting the temptation to do anything else while I’m already about to fight one of the city’s most dangerous villains.

The one who may be the key to rescuing Anne.

I bite on the inside of my cheek, focusing on the pain to keep Red going rather than worry, rather than give into Grey and the myriad streams of thought for me to run down at once, none of them useful, none of them even an ounce as helpful as anger, and hatred, and—

And the building with Dean and Colin blows up.

I stop.

My jaw falls open.

And I reach with a tremulous hand as red dissipates entirely from my body, as—

“They are alive! They moved out of the way in time! Emma, don’t—”

I clamp down on blue.

On cerulean blue.

And I fall back to the ground below me.

“Thank you,” I mutter past an aching throat, regretting my past self’s flair for the dramatic.

“Just don’t scare me like that,” she says.

I nod, trusting the camera tucked over my ear to transmit the gesture to Tattletale and whatever she’s using to interface with Colin’s communications, the relief at him being alive just pouring down from me as the mental exhaustion of keeping this level of emotion for so long takes its toll and I slump, finally deciding to drop down on my knees, thankful that whatever it is that my power does doesn’t burn away my kneepads when I’m in the middle of rage.

“What now?” I manage to ask even as my eyes swim.

“Glory Girl is keeping Lung busy with thrown projectiles, but he keeps growing. We’ve already discarded the bombs being implanted in his nape and chest, so that leaves something in his guts that is contributing to his growth, and…”

She stops talking.

Tattletale stops talking.

I know her enough to understand just how bad this could be.

“And?” I ask as I realize that the crash on the other side of Kaiser’s little corridor must be Vicky throwing a car or a piece of a building at the monster I’m supposed to take down.

“Emma… You know why I picked you to go against him, don’t you?” she says.

I massage my throat with one hand, resting the halberd on the floor, resentful of being forced to speak out an entire sentence.

“Because I’m immune to Bakuda’s emotion bombs. Something about my power. Which doesn’t make sense because Gallant—”

“You allow Gallant to influence you.”

“What?”

“It’s… You subconsciously feel like you need someone to guide you. When his power nudges you, you lean into it. You don’t even realize it—”

I remember a press conference.

Falling down.

Smiling a smile that had no emotion behind it. That could hold no emotion at all.

“No.”

“It is what it is, and we don’t have time to argue—”

“No.”

“… Fine. Then… Then I don’t know. You are immune to the bombs because they aren’t his power, just a Tinker’s attempt to replicate it. That okay? That something you can work with?”

I close my eyes.

Nod.

“Fine,” she mutters. “Now… Now, Emma, we could use that Thinker power of yours to locate the emotion bomb driving Lung mad. To make sure that we get it right with your next attack. But we don’t need to.”

Bad news are going to come out next. Nobody rants this much to give an easy solution to a problem.

And Tattletale… She’s nervous.

Anxious.

“It’s in his brain, isn’t it?” I say.

She doesn’t answer.

“I… I’ll have to kill him,” I say. The words that she can’t.

“That’s not… You don’t have to. We can… we could…”

I smile.

I smile despite the sob.

“A hero doesn’t kill just because it’s the easy way out,” I say, remembering an argument held in a backyard I knew better than my own. “They… they look for the better way. The right way.”

She knows who I’m quoting.

She knows her better than I do.

So I clench my hand tight on my borrowed weapon and shift it, resting the butt in the middle of a thin crack in the pavement before pushing myself up.

“But I’m not a hero, am I? I never was. Never will be,” I continue, this time using my own words.

Words as true as those of Taylor’s, even if so much… lesser.

“Emma, no. That’s… that’s unhealthy. That’s just not true. That’s a childish view of what a hero is, and you’re a person. You can’t live up to an impossible ideal. Nobody can—”

“She can. She will,” I say.

And…

And cerulean blue frees me.

I float up, as light as I’ve ever been when dwelling, however momentarily, on this sense of relief. Of being able to leave everything behind.

I always shy away from it.

Because of how tempting it is.

Now?

Now I… I don’t pull away.

But I set it aside.

A pulse of rage washes across the right side of my body, and a blast of heat pushes my weightless self up and over the barricade. Then I bring up a memory of running. Of being free and laughing as a towel tied around my neck flared behind me as I and another girl played at being heroes.

I stop being weightless, even if I’m still light, and hit the wall behind me with the halberd in my left hand, knowing that Colin would have some gadget just for this, maybe a way to make the weapon extend, of jets to flare out from its sides, anything at all other than me just using my meager strength supplemented by red losing a battle with every other color washing through me—

“Gold! Emma, use gold!” Tattletale says.

And I almost fall over mid-jump, mid-redirecting me to land on a crouch so I can dive into a roll toward one of the half-molten cars that Vicky has thrown at Lung.

“What?” I say, turning the crouch instead into a running start.

“Gold! It shifts probability, doesn’t it? Use it! Now!”

Lung turns toward me.

Fire gathers in his mouth.

There are no traces of injury, and he stands as tall as what remains of the building behind him. Two pairs of wings spread behind him, and he uses one of them to stop half a bus falling on top of him.

I can hear Vicky curse.

I can hear my heart beating against my chest.

And I’m standing still, in the middle of the broken street, with a wall of steel behind me and a monster in front of me.

“It’s… Gold is…” I stumble on my words as not even yellow rises up.

As I stare at what cerulean blue has been yearning for all along.

“What?! Emma, what do you need for gold?!”

I lick my lips.

Lung grows, tendrils of flame spiraling around each of his sharp, gleaming claws.

“Hope,” I whisper.

There’s a silence.

Then flames roar as they grow, as Lung points at me, as he carelessly bats away with his upper left wing a thrown motorbike.

“She’s going to save them! Taylor is going to save Anne!” she says.

She could be lying.

But, if she had… If Tattletale was lying to manipulate me? I know what she would’ve said. I know what I, what my former self, what the sneering, cruel, spiteful, manipulative Emma Barnes would’ve said.

‘She’s going to save them for you.’

She doesn’t say that.

And so, I can believe her.

The familiar thrum of a vein of gold leaps past my left elbow and to my wrist, and I do everything in my power to imagine Taylor victorious, a known hero, recognized for stopping Bakuda and the worst terror attack we’ve lived through.

I imagine her, smiling that smile she used to smile during our games, when good inevitably triumphed over evil.

When she was a hero.

Gold grows, envelops my whole arm.

“Militia, Danny! Now!” Tattletale says.

And two explosions ring out at once, from two different rooftops.

The top of Lung’s head explodes in a mist of red.

“Emma! Run!” she says.

And I follow.

There’s… There’s not even Amber, but I’m still faster, as if my feet fall on top of pieces of rubble and on the edges of cracked pavement at just the right angles to boost myself forward. To push me into the path I should follow.

Into the path of hope.

I don’t even wait for Tattletale’s order. I just swing the halberd into a one-handed grip, behind my back, and I whip my arm forward just as I stumble, letting go of it before I painfully skid to my knees, once again distractedly grateful for how much armor I still have on them.

And…

And my eyes catch on the glint of light on soaring steel. On the trajectory that golden hope has lent Colin’s weapon.

Its butt sinks into molten, slagged tarmac. Into a black sludge that slows its arcing fall.

That makes it so the edge of the axe-head barely caresses Lung’s exposed brain as something whirs across its shaft, and Colin’s latest adjustments to his countermeasures against Bakuda’s tech automatically activate.

There’s a blue spark. A crackling noise.

The unconscious monster fallen on its knees… twitches.

And I smile.

“Is he…?” I ask, trusting Gold, but still needing to hear it.

“We’re going to have to take the other bomb away. Otherwise, he’ll wake up as amped up as he already is,” she says.

And, for the second time in the fight, all my emotions crash down around me, the colors fading away as exhaustion takes them. As my mental strength gives out and doesn’t let me feel a single thing more.

Nothing more.

Except hope.