Isaac regarded the lights shining through the thick canopy of the jungle with more than a little relief. The glowing haze at the center of the world had started to dim toward night, or what passed for it in the Deep Kingdoms, and he really didn’t want to try camping out overnight. They were all tired, thirsty, hungry, and sore from a day of riding. Even Shay was complaining, mostly through the link, though the crystaltech augmentations made the raptors a lot tougher than their riders.

  Savage probably had it the worst, with fins on his back radiating palpable heat from prolonged use of his cybernetics, but then again he didn’t have to worry about the occasional rogue insect that had raised more than a few welts on both Isaac’s and Sarah’s arms. Fortunately, their trek through the jungle seemed to be over. All that remained was the tricky business of negotiating with the ikiski and hoping nobody was too put out by their little group.

  Reaching the walls of the settlement Lia had found over several hours of on-and-off scrying, they circled at a healthy distance until they stumbled across an actual road and the accompanying gate. The road itself wasn’t paved like it would be in Star City, but rather a grassy swath bracketed by waist-high obelisks. Something that only made sense given their choice of transportation, but given that teleportation was a technology the ikiski had, he doubted that such roads were the only option for moving from place to place.

  “Unless you’re a lot better at the ikiski language than the rest of us, might be time to get rid of the disguises,” Sarah said, aimed mostly at Lia. His girlfriend was clearly no better off than the rest of them as, even with the benefit of Isaac’s power, holding the smoke illusions for hours on end had done a number on her. She slumped in Astoria’s saddle, even her robes wilted after so much time in the hot and humid jungle.

  “Yeah,” Isaac agreed, reaching out to dial back on the ontological inertia he had invested in their disguises. Before he could get too far, Sarah’s smoke vanished, pulled back into her, and their lizardfolk illusions dispersed along with anything his power could grapple. Lia guided her riding raptor up to join them, and Savage sagged, the ticking sound of cooling metal audible from several feet away. Something that Isaac had only seen during a particularly long day after Gloryfall. For his own part, Isaac leaned forward to pat Shay’s neck and urged her toward the town’s gate, a solid stone slab rising at least twenty feet from the ground.

  Surprisingly, it opened of its own accord as they approached. It took a moment for him to understand that there was some sense of connection relayed through the psionic bracelet that bound him to Shay. It seemed that crystaltech served as some kind of doorbell, though he was sure it was more complex than that. He wasn’t about to object to being let in, though, and nudged Shay into the scant traffic at the edge of the town.

  Unsurprisingly, they attracted attention. In fact, they caused a minor traffic jam as a small group of the smaller ikiski pulled their mounts up short, blocking the road and causing others to divert onto sidewalks with some unhappy warbles and chirps. Isaac almost forged ahead regardless, but Lia directed her comparatively larger raptor ahead of them and deflected the momentum of his thought. He had to purposely focus on stopping himself for a brief moment, and tired as he was still made sure he wasn’t operating on any self-directed inertia.

  “We are travelers from Borealis,” Lia said, simple and straightforward, the translation spell turning it into clicks and chirps. As the physically largest of their group, she had to be the spokesman – or spokesmoonie – to the ikiski. “Looking to rest and recover, and then journey to Australis.”

  Isaac hoped what he’d done would keep too many things from impeding them on their path to Australis, but he was well aware that resistance to change wasn’t the same thing as immunity. At the same time, he was well aware that his actions seemed to have far larger and wider-ranging consequences than intended. Gloryfall and everything that had fallen from it seemed to be a result of that kind of inertial amplification, and there was no telling where it stopped.

  As it was, he didn’t see loudly proclaiming their intentions to be a very good idea, but given their obvious outsider status there wasn’t much else to be done. Relying on the good will of others wasn’t the best idea even in Star City, let alone in an alien place, but the little he’d seen of the ikiski made him think that their group could genuinely bull their way through with enough chutzpah. The upside of casual violence was that there was far less dissembling, though most people – including himself – wouldn’t really consider it a worthwhile tradeoff.

  One of the smaller ikiski chattered at them, and the translation spell conveyed the general idea of the words even if it wasn’t a strict one-to-one translation. A location in the city – apparently there was some equivalent of a hotel – and a person in the city. It seemed the impulse to hand off problems to someone with more authority held true over different species.

  “This feels wrong,” Sarah muttered to him, slumped in her saddle. “Maybe I’ve just been doing supervillain stuff for too long, but who just goes and asks for help?”

  “I guess someone who’s used to operating with Star Central,” Isaac replied, feeling like Sarah looked, her normal illusionary touch-up a little bit flat and askew from her obvious exhaustion, like a cardboard mask rather than a real face. “I guess the question is what’s the worst that could happen?”

  “Even I know not to ask that question,” Sarah said with almost a laugh, pointing at him. “You’d better take that back.”

  “Alright, alright, forget I said anything,” Isaac said, lifting his hands in surrender as Lia tried to get directions. The settlement was a miniature version of Borealis, with a radial spread of conical buildings, so there was a certain band that catered to people of their size. Paying for accommodations might be tricky, but Isaac wasn’t going to borrow trouble.

  He rubbed at his back while Lia spoke with the locals, and then turned Shay to follow the moonie as she beckoned for them to follow. They stopped holding everything up, sliding into the flow of traffic and riding parallel to the outer wall until they reached what, now that he was looking for it, was an obvious hotel. Iconographic signs for riding dinosaurs and an array of differently-sized doors made its function clear.

  Isaac guided Shay into a basement-stable, noting that there was nothing obviously securing the various stalls – which had food, drink, and a resting area with crystaltech amenities – but he had to assume there was a reason nobody stole dinosaurs or tried to freeload. Probably because trying to steal a dino would end up with the would-be thief getting bitten or worse.

  “Time for a rest, Shay,” Isaac said, sliding off the saddle with a groan. He waved at a free stall and Shay padded into it, sending back contentment as she flopped down by the water trough and took a drink. Sarah and Lia took up two other stalls, but Savage tapped his claws against the stone floor in displeasure.

  “I’m coming up to the room,” the cyber-raptor declared, and Isaac nodded, refraining from pointing out that nobody had suggested otherwise. They trooped up to the actual check-in, which was oddly quite similar to places Isaac had been in Star City, but with the major difference that the big ikiski there wasn’t a dour, world-weary proprietor.

  “Have them bill the surface embassy,” Sarah said, not even bothering to hear what the lizardman wanted. Surprisingly, that seemed to work, and the fifteen-foot lizard-man rumbled something that the translation spell indicated was acknowledgement before placing three small ruby disks on the low counter for them.

  Finally, after near-unilateral agreement that he’d share a room with Sarah and the other two would get their own, he had the chance to step into something air-conditioned, and with a proper sink and shower. He let Sarah hit the showers first, collapsing on one of the sinfully comfortable sort-of beds; more of a padded nest than anything, but soft enough after the day’s exertions. After a bit she wandered out in towels, a sight he could only appreciate intellectually because he was so tired and sore. She gave him a wink before dropping down into her own nest-bed, and he took his own turn cleaning up. There was a laundry slot, which was nice but only made him realize how ill-prepared he was with just the one change of clothing.

  He didn’t like having to do everything spur of the moment. Back in Star City, he had been in control, with the ability to plan ahead and knowledge he could rely on in case of surprises. Running headlong through a foreign land was not his speed, but he had to admit that it had forced him to apply his power in unexpected ways. Though it was all ad-hoc, not the systemic approach he had used with the physical inertia, where he’d treated it like an exercise routine.

  A shower made him feel somewhat more human, and he grabbed the remaining towel for himself before crashing in one of the pseudo-beds. While he thought of himself as mostly in shape, especially after all the work for Justice for Hire, riding all day through a hot, dense jungle had worn him out in ways that he’d never imagined. Part of him figured that it must be nice to have a physical mutation or superpower, but he’d also seen the extremes to which such people pushed themselves, so it probably wouldn’t help much in the end.

  He and Sarah just drowsed in silence for a while, flat out in their respective beds, hands extended to just barely touch. He almost could have just fallen asleep right there, but there was too much on his mind. His body was wiped out, but his brain still worked.

  “You know, I think today was better for my power than any of the exercises,” Sarah said, breaking the silence. “Not back to how I was, but maybe I can do even more now. Being depowered made me think about how I should really be using my power, and what I’d do differently if I got it back. So I’ve been working on that.”

  “Yeah?” Isaac answered, rolling his head to peer over in her direction. “I haven’t had the chance to talk powers much with anyone other than my brother Cayleb. Have to admit that I’ve been pushed to do new stuff too, but I really would have preferred to do it under more controlled circumstances.” He sighed, rubbing his forehead and wincing as somehow his arm was sore. He didn’t even know how that happened.

  “Yeah,” Sarah responded, tapping her fingers against his, tracing over his fingertips. “I was thinking about how I was just stuck in sort of support for ages, and I guess I was doing that too, but you know that I can take my clothes and personal effects with me when I go full smoke. That got me thinking, can I take more? Other people, maybe?” She half-heartedly lifted her hand to gesture vaguely before letting it drop again and toying with hand again, her nails occasionally catching on scars and calluses. “So in that light, I don’t see why not, but I’ve also never tried. And after you made it easier for me, even if I couldn’t do it normally, maybe you could push it over the line?”

  “Huh, I probably could,” Isaac said, considering while he grabbed onto Sarah’s hand to stop her from poking him constantly. Altering the resistance to change covered a wide scope, and Sarah’s comment prompted all kinds of ideas. He could be incredibly valuable in a support role, just shifting objects or talents so they worked better or – in some cases – were harder to perform. The problem with that was it made him valuable to other people, rather than doing much to keep himself independent. It only added to the fear he’d had for a very long time, that larger forces would want to lock him down and restrict him to what was essentially servitude.

  Part of him wished he hadn’t figured out the other aspects to his power. One thing he’d genuinely liked about being a janitor is that it had nothing to do with being a meta, and so long as his powers were small and unimportant he could do that kind of thing. Now, he had to be more deliberate about how he approached life.

  “I suppose I’ve been pushing the same way,” he continued, shifting his head on the long sort-of-pillow that lined one edge of the sort-of-bed. “Been trying to put inertia into our goal, going to the south pole. Make it harder for things to stop or deflect us. But it worries me a bit, because everything I read about manipulating fate and chance basically said just don’t. The consequences aren’t worth it.”

  “Are you, though?” Sarah yawned, pulling on his arm as she shimmied a bit closer before letting her head fall to the side. “Seems a pretty vague thing to me, but I don’t think you’re working any prophecies or the like, are you?”

  “I don’t really know!” Isaac sighed. “I really need to get a handle on it sooner than later, though. So far I haven’t been able to change the fact that everything I do is permanent, which means even superficial metaphysical adjustments could have lingering effects. What if I accidentally set up something that sits around poisoning people for years?”

  “Eh,” Sarah said. “That kind of thinking won’t get you anywhere. Even non-metas do things that have long term effects. I’m a bit biased because I’m used to Blacktime and not Star Central, but I’m pretty sure even for them they say not to worry about it too much. The world’s a big place and it’s survived so far.”

  “That’s one way to think about it,” Isaac admitted. “On the other hand, if I’d been more careful, Greg never would have managed to make a depower ray, and all that mess never would have happened.”

  “He was a tinker; he would have found something, especially with Mechaniacal’s tech,” Sarah disagreed. “Besides, worrying about using your power is how you get stuck. I was only using it for dad’s stuff, and really couldn’t otherwise since I was Smokeshow, so I didn’t experiment as much as I should have.”

  “It really feels like I’ve been an idiot if I didn’t know this about my own power for so long,” Isaac said by way of tangential agreement. “Not like I was doing anything but the bit of inertial investment and divestment for a long time, either. Couldn’t experiment because I didn’t want to leave anything permanent.”

  “We should test out some stuff tomorrow,” Sarah said with a yawn. “I dunno about you, but I don’t really trust everyone to just ship us off to the south pole, and even then I don’t know who controls that. Gratin wouldn’t have sent us there if it was too terribly dangerous, but I’d rather have the option of standing up to whatever they might bring to bear. Dad always said that if you can’t use brute force to solve a problem, you just don’t have enough of it.”

  “Ha!” Isaac snorted, staring mostly at the ceiling, even if he did sneak glances across at Sarah’s towel-wrapped form, where an edge had come loose. “I’d rather not bull through everything. I’d be happy living my life away from all the superpower fighting.”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “Well, Mom says that if you don’t have a plan for your future, someone else will,” Sarah said idly. “So if you want to live away from the fighting, you have to figure out how to get there.”

  “That’s a good point,” he admitted, though his brain steadfastly refused to conjure a simple answer to the question. Dolores had made it a point to give a lot of advice, but that particular phrasing hadn’t been in it. Although telling a bunch of foster kids such things would probably have led to more of them ending up in gangs. “What’d you come up with?”

  “I was going to try and go into writing when I was still depowered,” Sarah told him while launching a not-so-subtle campaign to steal his blanket. “Now? I’m not sure. I still could, probably should, but I also kind of want to use my powers, you know? Trying to put that all together seems weird, though.”

  “You don’t have to just be one thing,” Isaac suggested, defending his territory by rolling over slightly and trapping both her hand and his blanket. “Not even just one meta. You’ve got your writing, which is one identity. Then you can be some kind of illusionist, and that’s another, but if you can transport people through smoke that could be a third thing. And I bet you could mimic being a magical girl, too, if you really wanted.”

  “Ha!” Sarah laughed, rolling a bit closer herself, flexing the fingers of her trapped hand with a mischievous smile and bringing her nails to bear. “That does sound kinda fun. But I’m not you, being six people at once. I can barely be me some days.”

  “You do just fine,” he assured her, bringing their joined hands up and pressing a quick kiss to her knuckles before letting go. He had admit it didn’t really occur to him that other people might not be so comfortable switching personas. Maybe it was just his theatre kid background, but it might be something to do with his power, too.

  Isaac had always thought of his inertial control as being something separate from his everyday life, an impression he had formed early and had never really shaken off. Being a dreg was not something to really be proud of, and while he clearly had improved himself, he’d spent most of his life with that mindset. It was only some severe events that had changed it, but now that he knew more he couldn’t help but suspect everything in his life had been shaped by what he could do.

  If all his characters had been given a little bit of inertia, to make them stick as characters, then it only made sense how he had no trouble hopping from one to another. His power make them discrete, rather than an undifferentiated spectrum or collection of thoughts. In fact, they might have made his acting seem better than it was, depending on how ontological inertia worked. Which was a bit of a blow to the ego, upon reflection.

  He probably had years of catching up to do to explore what his power really did and how it affected his every day life. His ability to ignore physical inertia had taken time to learn and while it might extend to more exotic applications with some practice, he sure hadn’t been doing so for the past twenty-odd years. It was a frustratingly useless bit of reflection, and Dolores had always told them that they couldn’t reinvent the past, so he shook his head and threw out all the second-guessing he was doing.

  “We might have to hide out for a little bit to avoid Mechaniacal,” Isaac said at length, his mind returning to the topic in a roundabout fashion. Sarah stirred, from where she’d clearly been drifting off, but didn’t respond. He stretched out to pull her blanket over her, covering her up so she wouldn’t catch a chill overnight. “I assume he’s after me, anyway. Considering all the evidence I left at his old lab.” He didn’t know what connection Greg had to Mechaniacal, but that might be a problem too. If Isaac had been involved in taking down Mechaniacal’s son or something, he didn’t look forward to resolving the issue.

  Supervillains did die on occasion. Either by their own hubris or by being too dangerous to let live. It was usually a dramatic and destructive thing all around, and even if a villain wasn’t sovereign, they could wreak untold havoc if they weren’t held back by their own interests, and when someone’s life was on the line they rarely worried about collateral damage. He knew that Teraton had been the one who had beaten Mechaniacal last time – before vanishing into space with his extragalactic bride, anyway – but clearly things had gone only so far.

  The tinker had ended up in a prison on the moon rather than dead, so some degree of restraint was still in play there. Restraint that might no longer matter if Mechaniacal had a personal problem with Isaac, though to be fair Blacktime ought to be first on the villain’s list. Isaac had been instrumental, but Blacktime had dealt the actual killing blow.

  Not that he’d mourn if somehow Blacktime ended up on the wrong side of Mechaniacal. In fact, Isaac would be perfectly happy if the two fought it out, save for the fact that they’d probably be doing so in Star City. And no matter that he was thousands of miles away, he still thought of the place as home.

  ***

  Mark Zamekis, better known as Blacktime, slid back along his own personal timeline, reverting as he usually did to the place and state of relaxing in his private sanctuary. The exhaustion of running flat-out for almost an hour vanished, as did the lingering taste of the soda he’d been drinking, as well as a myriad other factors from the past few hours. He couldn’t time travel, which was a shame, but his talent spread him out along his own personal timeline in such a way that any problems applying to his physical body were easily discarded. Not to mention he could get home with a thought, without needing Nebula.

  Such expendability came in handy when it came to things like probing Mechaniacal’s defenses. He had other people, of course, and he used them, but Blacktime had become the head of organized crime in the Five City Alliance because he had been willing to put in the time himself. When he was capable of working for fifty hours a day or more under accelerated time, it would be remiss of him not to take advantage of that ability.

  He rose from the sinfully comfortable armchair, straightening the cuffs of his three-piece power suit by habit. A glance around the room showed nothing out of place, none of the warning indicators he’d created betraying any infiltration or emergency, so he exited the study and made his way to the security elevator that protected the place, deep underground as it was. Not that it was easy to tell, given the bright sunshine that poured in through the windows. False sunshine, of course, just as the view from the windows was false, a feed from the top of Zamekis Industries headquarters.

  The elevator took his security code and wound itself sideways, running along rails for a few moments before inserting itself into a proper shaft, locking into place with a click and a thump before it began to rise. It wouldn’t do to have Blacktime’s secret base directly under Zamekis Industries, and besides which there were only limited areas of the underground that hadn’t already been claimed and weren’t subject to issues from the depths.

  After humming for a few moments, the elevator dinged respectfully and opened out onto the office suite that took up the second-to-top floor of Zamekis Industries. Here the sunlight was real, the skyscraper looking out over North City and the vast bowl of terrace farms surrounding it. Even further out were the great trees the druids used to mark the edge of their territory, each of them at least the size of the twenty-story building Mark owned.

  “Any news, Gladys?” His secretary looked up from her expansive desk as he crossed the room, adjusting glasses that were at least two inches thick. She might have looked like a bake-sale grandmother, but the information meta was vital for the running of Zamekis Industries. It meant he needed only a few people at the top, rather than layers of bureaucracy, and that made concealing the connections to Blacktime’s operations far easier. It was a shame her granddaughter had ended up at Star Central instead, but on the other hand, Gladys did enough that Vilmonica might have been wasted.

  “Yes, sir. The Blueguard Group will be releasing a new line of excavators; Mayor Lestin in Mountain City is holding a black tie for his re-election campaign; Lieutenant Glowtown entered a fracas with Negaton and has been captured. He intends to turn double agent.” Gladys delivered each point in the exact same dry, disinterested voice, not bothering to differentiate between industrial, personal, and criminal interests. Anyone who didn’t know her would think she disliked Mark, but that was just how she talked.

  “Very well,” he said, not particularly worried about any of those notes. Zamekis Industries had only a minor portion of the market for excavators, and competing against a new Blueguard release wasn’t worth the investment. Better to analyze the designs and sell aftermarket additions or modifications. Lestin was pretty firmly in Mark’s pocket, so the gala was a formality – if one that did require his attendance – and Glowtown—well. He had been disappointing in general. “Thank you, Gladys. Send the particulars to my personal console. Anything on Glorybeam?”

  “No, sir,” Glady said, which was expected but still disappointing. The loss of his opposite number had unbalanced him, and he preferred constants in his life. Star Central was protecting her – or thought they were – but that meant he no longer had Gloria to provide opinions as an equal would. He would correct that in time, but until then he had urgent business to address.

  While Zamekis Industries was doing well enough, Blacktime’s assets had halved in the past few months. The papers had divulged far too many of his interests and companies, resulting in crackdowns and silent divestments from certain partners. It was difficult to run black market operations without the supply chains needed to move products from one point to another, but worse was the way the publications had caused infighting between his subordinates. In some cases, the fallout of such clashes could be worse than anything brought by Star Central or its satellite branches in the Five City Alliance.

  He crossed into his office and sat at his desk, checking the MegaVac computer that was connected to a special radio network that his own tinker, Cracklespeak, had set up long ago. While it probably would have been possible to run extra lines along the train tunnels – Zamekis Industries could secure the maintenance contracts easily enough – that was the kind of thing that was just begging for discovery and monitoring. As much as he disliked it, the superheroes were not entirely incompetent.

  The microfilm he had taken at Mechaniacal’s tower came in through the link, being sent back the long way. Since he couldn’t revert just anything when he returned to prior save points, he had microfilm scanners in many Zamekis Industries branches, and had long ago memorized the sequence necessary to broadcast on the right waveband with the right encoding for his personal receiver. Something very necessary when it came to casing Mechaniacal’s tower.

  A few taps on the heavy keyboard loaded the pictures he’d taken, ones in various spectra and from many angles, he sent them all through the analysis program and extended his temporal powers. One of the main reasons he preferred vacuum tube computers was that, unlike softchips, they played well with the accelerated time he could conjure. All that was needed was an additional module to deal with electrical issues and he could have it run at ten or fifty times normal speed.

  Cracklespeak loved it. Blacktime’s personal tinker did more work for Zamekis Industries than for Blacktime personally, but all the most interesting work was done under the aegis of supervillainy. The three-piece suit power armor was one example, but the massive vacuum-tube supercomputer that occupied several rooms was Cracklespeak’s pride and joy. Unfortunately, all that technology hadn’t kept them from being compromised, but the greatest weakness of an organization was always its people.

  While Cracklespeak’s analysis program worked, he looked into what to do about Glowtown. The electrical super was another in the line of would-be replacements, and like many of those replacements he did not value the virtue of restraint. Blacktime wished he had more people like Crash, whose background was aristocratic, high-class, and cultured. People who understood that the dance they played with the lighter elements of society was exactly that, and there was nothing personal in the clashes between hero and villain. They merely had their respective territories, and most clashes were simply the negotiations on the precise dividing line between the two.

  Blacktime didn’t glory in killing – if nothing else it was bad for business – but it was the practical solution to a certain kind of problem. A problem like Glowtown, who was more of a thug than a proper lieutenant, who didn’t seem to understand that violence was to be employed in moderation, and that you couldn’t extract value from dead or injured people and damaged buildings.

  Unfortunately, Mountain City had very few people to draw from to run Blacktime’s operations. After the leaks, the very carefully curated control structure had been shattered to pieces, if for no other reason than Mourn And Weep had gotten out of the game entirely—and that particular super had been crucial to Blacktime’s operations there. Not that he blamed the woman, especially since she had young children and had been making noises about retiring for a while, but it was quite annoying.

  A push of a button summoned Nebula, who appeared in his office with a flash and a crack of thunder. The woman just adored her drama, but Blacktime took people as they were, not as he wished them to be. A lesson learned long ago.

  “Got something for me, handsome?” Nebula purred. Blacktime ignored her flirting. The only woman he had ever been interested in was Gloria. If for no other reason than the simple fact that only one relationship existed between someone with power and someone without it. Master and servant.

  “A gate to Mountain City, central district,” he said, adjusting his cufflinks. The controls for his three-piece were embedded into the ornaments, turning the formal suit into a jogging outfit, styled for Mountain City’s surprisingly pervasive athletics community. “I have some business to attend to.”

  “You can have my gate any time you want,” Nebula said with a grin, but Blacktime didn’t take it personally. She was that way with everyone, though he knew it was only ever words. The woman looked to be made of starstuff, her power permanently mutating her into something slightly sideways from human. That kind of thing left scars.

  Nebula’s hands flashed with light as she tore open a gate in the air, offering passage to a discreet alley in Mountain City. Blacktime stepped through, immediately breaking into a jog and merging into the morning press of people covering the sidewalks. His target was a few blocks away, the safehouse where Gladys had found they were holding Glowtown.

  A gust of wind brought a faint drizzle, but Mountain City had more rainy days than clear ones—which made the prevalence of the jogging culture even more puzzling. Blacktime was almost certain there was a meta of some sort influencing it, but with no candidates it was merely part of the background. One that made it easy to blend in.

  Once he reached the safehouse, one of many people braving the morning wind and rain, he reached out with his power and surrounded the safehouse, including a decent amount of the sidewalk. Then with a flex of will, he froze time.

  The usual blackness descended, a complete and utter darkness that he could nonetheless see though—after all, everything within his power was known to him, and that power gripped half the block. He scuffed the sidewalk to give himself a marker, then surrounded himself with fast-time as he strode into the safehouse. His presence was obvious from the outside, but that was the point. There was little reason to make an example of someone if it wasn’t obvious he was the one making the example.

  Several supers were inside the safehouse, but Blacktime left them alone. He’d never randomly attacked any superhero, and he wasn’t about to start. That wasn’t a war he was prepared to engage in. Dealing with his own people, however, was less of an issue.

  The locks yielded to brute force, one of the reasons he had a power suit, and with the entire building in stasis there were no alarms or defenses. All he had to do was stroll through the building until he came to the room where Glowtown reclined, frozen mid-drink. The electrical super had a flat, gormless face, which really should have been enough to disqualify him, but unfortunately Blacktime needed people who could dominate tactical engagements.

  Blacktime punched open the door, withdrawing a knife from an armpit holster. It was the only weapon he’d managed to get synchronized with his power; a magical artifact that hummed dangerously in his hands, hungry for blood. The frequency rose as he approached Glowtown’s frozen form, the sound mounting to an almost inaudible pitch as he simply poked Glowtown’s forehead with the tip. A drop of blood welled from the skin, despite the time-freeze, and the blade drank it down.

  Instantly Glowtown’s skin wrinkled, all life sucked from the now-husk of a super, the blade pinging and popping excitedly as electricity crackled along the black metal. Rather than listen to its continued joyful song, he slid it back into its sheath and retraced his steps. The blade was nothing more than a tool, despite how powerful it was, designed to prey on emotions Blacktime simply didn’t have.

  He reached his scuffed section of sidewalk and let time resume, continuing the jog as alarms suddenly began to wail. Civilians scattered, and so did Blacktime, following others until he had the chance to turn a corner and revert to his usual point. Easy enough.

  Rising to his feet and adjusting the cuffs of his suit by habit, he headed out of his sanctuary once again to the elevator. Dealing with Glowtown had been simple, but the real issue was Mechaniacal. The analysis ought to be done, and he could send it off to Cracklespeak. They would have to move soon, because Blacktime certainly didn’t want to let the old supervillain have too much time to embed himself in his territory. Nor did he want to allow Mechaniacal to get ahold of the super that had been used to depower Glorybeam.

  No, Blacktime intended to control everything he could.

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