Of Sisters and Shadows – Chapter 5

“This is an awful, terribad idea,” Vicky says from almost right behind me.

“Stop being such a scaredy-cat. And abusing English,” I answer while trying not to notice the way her aura brushes against me, overflowing with concern and protectiveness.

Such a goddamn tease.

“Glory Girl, you’ve been allowed in here as added safety for the procedure, not to keep trying to interfere with it,” Armsmaster says.

“Relax, Colin. She’s just concerned for her sister,” Dragon chides him from the monitor right in front of and slightly above us. The one swiveling on a robotic arm, because Tinkers like their toys far too much, and this lab is all the proof I need about the stereotype being true.

Also, ‘Colin’ looks like he doesn’t particularly like Dragon’s line, going by the way he’s clenching his jaw at the partial unmasking. And clenching some more. Without any kind of snappish comeback.

Oh, someone’s pussy whipped~

“Starting vivisection of cloned parahuman based on Kaiser, AKA, Max Anders. Time is sixteen hundred thirty-four of zero-nine, April, twenty-eleven. Due to extraordinary circumstances, legal status of subject has been deemed equivalent to the results of a projection-based parahuman ability. Subject is to be restrained at all times. Parahuman associate to the PRT designated Panacea, AKA Amy Dallon, is present both as an expert and as the main means of containing the subject. Also present are parahuman associate to the PRT Dragon as observer with valuable expertise and parahuman associate to the PRT Glory Girl, AKA Victoria Dallon, as likely redundant safety net.”

Vicky bristles behind me, and I suppress a smirk. I am pretty sure ‘redundant safety net’ isn’t an official role in any manual.

She may also be bristling due to the casual use of a word like ‘vivisection,’ and I also may under usual circumstances, but…

I am touching this Shadow or whatever he wants to call himself. It should be completely unnecessary, because I’ve grown a gland inside his skull that properly doses him with a ketamine analog whenever there’s too much activity in his nervous system for my liking. Really, there’s no human way he could wake up from that, and I’m pretty sure I’m good enough at this point not to make the whole thing lethal.

I think.

I mean, it’s the evil clone of a Nazi. I feel legitimately justified in running human experiments on him.

… That went to a dark place.

Still, the reason why I’m touching and constantly monitoring what should be a non-vegan vegetable? Well, there’s the fact that I’m monitoring his pulse, his breathing, following the flow of his blood, and making sure everything’s normal (aside from his extreme taste in piercings). Which they are. Normal, I mean.

Something slightly curious, seeing as his body stops existing right below the fucking knees.

“Panacea, are you ready to start?”

“I would be if you explained why you are at all necessary with me being right here.”

Colin grunts. And mutters something that may or not sound like ‘goddamn teenagers.’

“As we’ve already said, while your power is uniquely suited to study the biological aspects of these… projections, we are still trying to determine the more esoteric aspects at play.”

“Yeah, and we agreed. Which is why we dragged him out of the city until… well, this happened,” I say, pointing at the missing part of his legs.

“The occurrence that made it clear that we couldn’t move the sample outside the bounds of the manifestation, yes.”

“But, and hear me out, because I know this may be a big idea to wrap your head around, I still don’t get how this means you suddenly feel legitimized in doing this whole thing in Brockton Bay, the one place on Earth that can and will kill you just because you’re a parahuman inside it, rather than have me walk you through my findings over a videocall. There’s nothing in this lab Dragon can’t handle remotely, I’d bet.”

The guy bristles, Dragon gives me a warning look from one of the multiple monitors showing her face (someone may be a bit of a narcissist, and I’m not talking about Vicky), and my sister floods her aura with vindicated amusement.

Increased control, my well-sculpted ass.

Speaking of…

I flex a bit my proprioception and tweak the curve of my backside just a tiny smidge as I shift my weight from one leg to the other and back again.

The aura floods with something quite more ego-stroking, and I suppress a smirk.

To be honest, this is just payback for years and years of walking around wet and wrapped in an increasingly insufficient towel that she claims is the fluffiest thing ever, and she won’t throw away no matter what.

Oh, also, for throwing me off a building a couple hours ago, but really, that barely rates compared to what must be a sizable portion of my teenage years being locked up in my room while sweating, blushing, biting my pillow and—

“While your cooperation is appreciated, your input in this procedure and how the local Protectorate chooses to allocate its resources is not needed, Panacea. Now, if no further inquiries about how I choose to do my job are forthcoming, I would like to make the incision—”

While Armsmaster bitches about whatever it is that rates far lower than Vicky’s gaze being locked somewhere slightly below my waist, I open the Shadow from below his throat to his navel.

Vicky makes the kind of noise she makes when she sees Mom down a kale smoothie, Dragon looks at me reproachfully, and Colin starts waving a glowy sci-fi thing.

I’m a doctor, not an engineer.

... Damn it, Vicky.

The glowy thing buzzes, whines, and basically runs the whole gamut of what most of my classmates sound like to me, all the while the two Tinkers present keep nodding, saying things that don’t make a lick of sense, and basically drifting into their own little world.

I’m not jealous, just… thinking what kinda horse I should build.

I mean, Vicky just kissed me on her own, which I should enthusiastically count as progress in the right direction, if not for the fact that she was drugged at the time and the slight technicality of me being peripherally responsible for said drugging.

How was I supposed to know her new and improved force field still doesn’t filter gasses? That seems like an obvious weakness that should’ve been plugged. And that’s totally what I was thinking at the time, of course, and not an excuse I’ve come up with while waiting for the PRT’s designated tech experts to get into the quarantine zone just so they can nerd out over their virtual date.

Couldn’t they do this over World of Warcraft or something? Isn’t that the tradition?

Anyway, I’m slightly bored of keeping Mr. Anders here alive and well while also open to inquisitive glances and intrusive instruments, so I may as well prod at the place where blood flows in and out without a physical medium for it to do so.

The thing is, I can actually track individual red blood cells by placing protein markers on them (they don’t have DNA of their own, which always threw me off for some weird reason—it’s not like a lot of things I manipulate have DNA, but it just feels wrong for cells not to have it) and… Well, the cells that come back in? They are the same that went back out.

After a slight delay consistent with the blood traveling down the leg and going back up.

Which means dimensional shenanigans, because God forbid powers did things in a straightforward way and—

Wait a second.

“His pulse is rising,” I say.

“Intrusive manipulation of—” Armsmaster starts lecturing me on medical trivia.

“No, you don’t understand: I am touching him, and his pulse is rising.”

He and Dragon look at me, not even for a second, and he launches himself at me, pushing me out of the way.

“Containment protocols—” Dragon says.

And then an amber light blooms from the Shadow’s head, and I can see his eyes open wide on the reflection of the metallic ceiling.

And all around and through me, the mists sing.

***

I open my eyes, and I am beneath a metallic, vaulted ceiling with a very heavy man wearing a very heavy armor laying on top of me.

I am kinda happy I took the time to make all my upgrades, really.

Particularly my bones. I’ve let the marrow alone because I still don’t feel like reworking my entire immune and circulatory system, but what surrounds said marrow? Oh boy…

Bone is already a marvelous material, far more durable than concrete, but… It shatters when under enough stress, because it’s flexible enough for most everyday circumstances, but…

Let’s say you were to infiltrate a comparatively rigid material with a carefully laid out lattice of spider silk so that the smallest fragment of it that could result from a fracture would still be held in place by something with a tensile strength comparable to mid-grade steel but that can stretch to four times its length without snapping. That means if there ever was a need to set the broken bone, it would be because something far more damaging than a simple fracture had happened. It also means I’m quite glad I decided to implant a spinneret on every single one of my joints.

Of course, that’s not all. Because bone is a very good structural material, but… Limpet teeth. Designed to scrape algae off rocks. The hardest material produced by a living organism, that can have a tensile strength more than six times that of spider silk.

The material covering all my bones, and also my wings.

Which is the only reason I haven’t been flattened by an unconscious Armsmaster heroically diving to save me.

… Fine, I’ll give him points for effort.

With a flex of my power, I heal the bruising on my chest and back and then push Colin out of the way with the leverage my wings provide me.

Then I think about it for a moment, realize I may be a bit of a moron, and touch his cheek to flood him with enough adrenalin to make an elephant dive into a mosh pit.

“Gah!” he yells as he pushes himself up and rolls into a genuflection as he takes his telescopic halberd off his back with a, frankly impressive, maneuver.

And then he freezes.

Vicky is floating to my left, upright but shaking her head the way she does most mornings.

And there’s a naked woman beside her.

Dragon.

Great. Not only has an unarmed Tinker (the most useless kind of cape there is, aside from myopic empaths) appeared right in the middle of what will soon become a battlefield, but now it turns out it’s a dumb one too. Because she has precisely the same face she had on the monitor, and only a moron unmasks to the world while pretending they are actually using a disguised virtual avatar.

I mean, what kind of social outcast can be at once one of the most famous capes in the world and not have anyone recognize her as the weird girl buying vibrators at four in the morning or whatever it is Tinkers do while getting set up?

Still, no time to berate her on her poor life choices. The Shadow should—

Amber light bounces off swirling mist, and the sound of chains dragging through concrete floor circles around us.

“I was a Shadow, the true self,” Max Ander’s voice says, and something cold and wet drags down my spine even as I clamp down on any involuntary reactions.

“Now I am One. And I stake my place,” the thing continues, but its voice switches with the words.

Because it claims to be One, whatever that means, but I’m hearing a mature man, an old man, and a young woman speaking at the same time.

The floor trembles, and it erupts in shards of concrete and powdered stone before something raises in front of my eyes.

It’s made of silvery metal, and… I blink, trying to take it all at once.

From the neck down, it’s Kaiser’s armor, only scaled so my head reaches up to its knee, but instead of a head there’s… a crucified woman with the face and hands of an old man hovering behind her, gleaming threads connecting the tips of his fingers to the woman’s head and hands.

There’s also the slight issue of what looks like a swarm of blades surrounding them in an impromptu crown, and—

“Vicky, no!” I yell as my sister does what she does best and launches herself straight at the danger.

So I do what I do best and rush after her, the tips of every claw on my wings digging into the floor right before I straighten them to launch myself forward, and—

… I need more practice. I didn’t take into account how the air drag could make almost stumble mid-sprint.

Anyway, that’s not the issue; I just need to reach forward, touch the ex-Shadow thing and stop its heart, or turn it blood into acid, or its nerves non-conductive, or—

Or absolutely nothing.

My fingers brush against cold, gleaming metal, and my chest clenches as I realize—

Blades rain down around me, and I only react in time to catch some of them on my wings before I feel one of them glance off my collarbone. Unfortunately, that just means it sinks right behind it and into my chest, severing the subclavian artery and dooming me to die in seconds.

Except for me being basically immortal as long as something doesn’t outright destroy the contents of my skull, of course.

For the second time today, Armsmaster slams into me and gets me away from danger I’m far too close to.

At least this time, he doesn’t faint on top of me. I guess practice makes perfect.

“Cover Dragon,” he says, not looking at me, as he studies Vicky flitting around the two heads while the occasional crashing sound signals yet another falling blade meeting an extension of her shield.

“I can—” I start.

And he looks at me.

Eyes blazing, jaw clenched, fury thrumming as obviously as if he had Vicky’s power.

“Dragon, now!”

And he launches me toward his naked girlfriend.

Not the worst threesome I’ve been invited to…

Still icky, though.

I tumble across the dusty floor, a couple shards of concrete digging through my robes enough to draw blood, and I heal the scratches and cuts right as I stop rolling just before reaching Dragon.

She’s still unconscious, her face pursed in something that looks almost like pain, but not quite and—

And I’ve got far better ways to diagnose whatever’s going on than just staring at her like I’ve got any interest in getting a Canadian girlfriend.

I reach out to touch her face, and there’s nothing in her body that—

A torrent of light. Raging synapses screaming at me, firing one after another in a sequence too complex and fast for me to process as I feel the part of my mind that sees into others get dragged away into beautiful chaos revolving around nascent order. As I feel Dragon’s mind encompass me whole, because it’s so much vaster than—

Then the torrent halts as something sharp intrudes, and her heart stops.

I scramble. Her body is still alive, her cells still answering my call, and the sheer beauty outside my capacity to describe its loss makes me weep as I once again hold a dying, bleeding woman in my arms.

But I saved the first one. I saved her, and now she flies, and soars, and battles monsters, so I will save this one, and that glorious, blazing mind will go forward to set the world on fire till it shines like her.

I swear. I swear I won’t let you die, Dragon.

I grab the blade piercing her chest, the edges drawing twin lines of fire on my palm, and I cover the both of us with my wings as I pull it out. The splurt of blood is still connected to her by whatever means my power decides are sufficient for it to act, so I coagulate it midstream and shift it to fit first her skin, then her veins, then her muscles.

Her pores open, and I force her capillaries to admit the oxygen I funnel into them.

Then her heart flows beneath my power, and I squeeze it, again and again, until the neurons set in it start firing once again.

Then I get an idea.

Because her mind is blazing once again, roaring in flames of thought too big for me to handle, but… but they may also be too big for a regular human brain to do so. Because I can feel the strain, the fever, and I think Dragon’s dying just because she’s Dragon.

And I just swore I wouldn’t let that happen.

The heart has about forty thousand neurons. It’s a paltry sum, compared to the average eighty-six billion neurons in the brain, but… It’s a start.

So I leave the amygdala alone, because the emotional response I can feel from it is about the baseline for a neurotypical human. The sensory cortex seems to be as busy as it should, but the hippocampi, where memories are processed into the long term, that’s almost burning out, and I…

I stretch it.

I cannibalize muscle and nerves because I can grow them back when she isn’t about to die while blades keep bouncing off my wings. And I connect and stretch, trying not to modify anything, but rather to iterate, to replicate structures woven into dendrites in a fractal pattern that mirrors the original yet remains plastic enough to adapt itself to the demands her colossal thoughts impose on her. I can feel it happening, each new neuron added to the chain sprouting new connections as soon as they slip out of my control, and so I’ve got a woven tapestry rushing thoughts whose picture is changing with every new strand.

Now, I only need a place to hang the tapestry on, because Dragon’s body isn’t going to fit long term, so I need a new structure, a new organ that can house her expanded brain, and—

…

Vicky’s going to look at me very suspiciously after this is over.

With a sigh that isn’t at all adequate with what’s actually going on, I mold Dragon’s body, add a few connections to her motor cortex, and… give her wings.

Dragon wings. Of course.

The brain tissue is stored inside each bone, the joints surrounded by capsules that allow for connections to bypass the discontinuity without being vulnerable to casual trauma, and the stretches of skin act as heat regulation.

I will ask what kind of scales she wants when she wakes up. I’m guessing red ones, just because.

Her mind doesn’t calm down, it still rushes, still blazes, because that was the point, but now it does so in the appropriate channels, no longer overflowing and consuming everything around it.

And Dragon opens her eyes.

“You’re currently a tetraplegic, because I needed to tweak your nervous system before you killed yourself by thinking too hard. This will be a first, but I expect you to thank me profusely for making you disabled.”

She blinks. Once, twice, the second time slower than the first, as if savoring the sensation.

“Thank you, Amy,” she says, tears on the corner of her eyes. And she laughs.

Which is the moment when something far too big and massive kicks me across the room.

I crash against the metallic vault, every single bone in my wings shattering and only held together by some of the still intact silk threads. Then gravity resumes, and I crash painfully to the floor.

I can fix this. I can. I am basically immortal.

Except not if a giant made of steel crushes my skull and pulps my brain inside it.

The Kaiser Shadow-who’s-no-longer-a-Shadow sprints toward me, each step echoing off the walls, and the swirling blades around it, far less numerous than at the start, but still far too many, angle themselves in a downward diagonal before they fall toward me faster than the giant runs.

I close my eyes, unable to heal my wings fast enough to shield myself, and just praying none of them will be lucky enough hit through my eye sockets, or decapitate me, or—

A quick staccato, almost musical, cuts through my thoughts, and I open my eyes when it ends in a wet gurgle.

And I see Vicky kneeling before me, far too many blades going through her chest.

“V-Vicky—”

“Hey… always protect the healer, you know?” she says, still smiling that radiant smile even as her aura flickers against me, relief and sadness fading in and out.

So I reach out and brush my fingers over bloodied lips.

And stop the bleeding, drain her lungs of fluid, recycle the spilled blood back into her, knit torn muscle and fractured bone, and add some temporary sphincters to push the blades out of her body before sealing the wounds.

“Goddamn drama queen,” I tell her.

The One crashes to the floor, Armsmaster stuck to its back by something on his knees and slashing over and over at the threads connecting the puppeteering old man to the crucified woman until both scream and flakes of metal grind away into amber motes of light that drift upward as the mists recede.

Vicky stares at the whole thing, still kneeling in front of me, traces of blood still marring her uniform, still looking like the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, no matter what the mirror tries to tell me.

“Hey, sis,” I say, and she gives me a side-eye, “would you say we’ve been close to death?”

“A tiny smidge, yeah,” she answers with a raised eyebrow.

“And you aren’t using any mind-altering powers, are you?”

“What? No! Why would you even—”

“New family tradition,” I say.

And then grab her nape and pull her down into a kiss that still has a metallic tang from the traces of blood I didn’t manage to clean out.

It’s still the third-best kiss of my life.