And we move.
Dead Drop's chains launch first - four metal serpents streaking across the rooftop through the driving snow, aiming to tangle Maya's legs before she can react. I'm half a second behind them, which in my world means I get to watch them fly in slow motion while I close the distance.
Maya turns.
Not startled. Not surprised. Just... turns, like she heard us coming despite the howling wind, despite the noise, despite everything. Her eyes meet mine for a split second and there's nothing in them. No fear, no anger, no oh shit I've been caught. Just acknowledgment.
Then she moves.
Not toward the roof edge. Not away from us, either. She moves towards us. No, I trace her arc through the air in my head. She's moving towards the door?
Oh, I think, that's inconvenient.
Dead Drop's chains reach her first. One snags her ankle, another wraps around her left wrist, and for a second I think we've got her - she stumbles, loses her balance, goes down to one knee on the icy rooftop.
I'm on her a heartbeat later, grabbing a fistful of her heavy winter coat, hauling her back and down. "Going somewhere, Councilwoman?"
She doesn't answer. Doesn't banter. Just drives her elbow back into my ribs hard enough to make me grunt, then twists in my grip with a technical efficiency that surprises me. Not trained, exactly - she's not doing any martial arts I recognize - but she's been in fights before. She knows how bodies work.
I keep my grip on the coat. She keeps twisting. Dead Drop is reeling in her chains, trying to drag Maya back from the door, but Maya's fighting toward it with everything she's got, using my grip on her as leverage to pull herself forward.
"Little help here," I call out, adjusting my stance, trying to get her into something resembling a proper hold. She's stronger than she looks, or maybe just more desperate.
Dead Drop sends two more chains - one at Maya's other leg, one reaching for her throat. Maya sees them coming and does something I don't expect: she stops fighting me and drops, dead weight, pulling me off-balance and down with her.
We hit the rooftop in a tangle. One of Dead Drop's chains sails over us, missing by inches. The other catches Maya across the shoulder but doesn't get a grip. She slips out of her winter clothes - no, that's not right. All her clothes are buttoned. She snaps out of them, wiggling free like when you bite on a pea and the skin sort of comes loose from the pea goo. And I'm left holding the skin.
Maya's already moving, scrambling on hands and knees toward the door. I grab her boot. She kicks back, catches me in the jaw - ow, fuck - and keeps crawling.
"She's getting away," Dead Drop shouts, which, yeah, I noticed, thanks.
I blur. It's not a long distance, but I go from on-my-ass to between-Maya-and-the-door in the time it takes a snowflake to fall six inches. She's still on her knees when I plant myself in front of the door, arms spread.
"Nice try," I say, grinning despite the ache in my jaw. "But you're not getting past--"
She stands up.
And okay, that's not scary by itself. She's a woman in her late thirties, breathing hard, snow in her hair, one wrist still trailing Dead Drop's chain. She should look desperate. Cornered.
She doesn't.
"Move," she says. First word she's spoken. Her voice is calm, controlled, almost bored.
"Hard pass."
Dead Drop's chains are closing in again, four of them now, coming from different angles. Maya doesn't even look at them. She's looking at me. Through me.
"Last chance," she says.
"Lady, you're outnumbered, outpowered, and about ten seconds from being gift-wrapped for--"
She moves. She rams into me, and then, while I'm busy trying to bear hug her to death, I feel the glorious electric fire of a taser hit exposed skin, her hands snaking up my jacket so that the world can see just how Irishly pale I am. I feel... Bad! I feel my teeth clenching as she rolls over me, scooping a can of mace or something from her jacket and spraying a thick, dense cloud into the air, swirling out through the pressure difference between the door and us.
I am too busy trying not to cramp myself in half, though. It's so prickly, it makes my entire body itch, my vision whiting out for a moment while I lose control of my eyelids. I'm trying to cover my face, but gravity and wind whip whatever spicy self-defense concoction she's put in my breathable air right down into my throat. It mostly misses, splaying around me like I've got a barrier, but I can hear Dead Drop's wheezing, the whish-whish-whish of her chains turning into an impromptu fan to get the chemicals away.
I'd kick myself if my body wasn't seizing. Okay, that's done with. Get up, Dean. God. Sore! Sore! Door!
It's a heavy door, a fire door, and it swings inward on industrial hinges. I'm trying to get my bearings, trying to understand what just happened, when I turn around, watching Maya skid through and try to slam it shut on us.
No way, man. One way or another, you're coming with us.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Dead Drop's chains come screaming through the gap while I lurch forward, not even bothering to care about the ice. My body just adjusts. I drop into a Megaman-esque slide, awesome, and cram my ankle through the door, while Dead Drop's chains force it open. There's a struggle for a split second, before Maya gives up the ghost and just starts booking it down the stairs.
Haha. Awesome! I love a good chase scene. Dead Drop props the door open and I pull myself back up to my feet, dusting snow off my hips. Maya makes it exactly one level down and then just... stops, turning around to look at me.
The door slams shut.
CHUNK. "One last chance to come quietly, Zenith. Stairs are easy for me. And Dead Drop is gonna meet you at the first floor. We'll hit the bottom before you do. And there's no windows," is what I say, adjusting my glasses.
The magnetic lock engages. The emergency lighting flickers on, dim red, painting everything the color of old blood.
"Mrs," Maya corrects. "I know there's no windows, dipshit."
And the air changes.
It's not a sound. It's not a temperature shift. It's pressure - I feel it in my sinuses first, then my ears, then my whole skull. Like descending too fast in an airplane, except we're not descending, we're standing still in a stairwell and the atmosphere just turned hostile.
Maya straightens up slowly. She's got a red mark on her arm where I was grabbing her, and there's snow melting in her dark hair, and she looks... different. Not physically different - she's still the same woman, still the city councilwoman I've seen in photographs and surveillance footage - but something behind her eyes has shifted.
Dead Drop is trying to work the magnetic lock, but she's working blind. Slowly, her chains start disassembling themselves into individual links, and then loudly creak as each link peels itself into a straight rod. She starts forcing them upwards, trying to jam them into the bar of the door.
It occurs to me, leaning on the railing, that maybe I should prop the door open. The pressure is building - I can feel it now, a weight on my chest, a thickness in my throat. My ears pop. Pop again. I try to move but my entire body is stuck. My aerokinesis is whirring around me like a jet engine, trying to fight the entire atmosphere at once.
"Maya," I reply, trying to keep my voice light. "Love what you've done with the weather. Very dramatic. Very seasonal."
She doesn't smile. Doesn't react at all.
"I'm going to give you thirty seconds," she says. "You can still turn around, go back to Camden, and we pretend this never happened."
The words are reasonable. The tone is not. The tone is a coroner reading cause of death.
"That's generous," I say, "but I think we'll take our chances with--"
"That wasn't an offer."
She takes a step toward me and I feel it like radio static on my skin. She raises a hand and snaps her fingers. Suddenly, the direction of the air is down. High above, low below. Or, rather, catastrophic above my head, and limb-breaking at my feet. My knees buckle.
"That was me being polite," she continues, taking another step. "I do not have a permit or registration to use my powers to control the weather. However, my license is up to date, and no court would convict me for using them in self defense."
"Drop! Don't worry about me! Get to the first floor!" I yell, not even sure if my voice is carrying.
Dead Drop's chains float up into the air, one by one. My ankles start screaming at me. The air itself is hazy. It's just like that fucking anime about the orange haired dude with the big sword. She's not even doing anything.
I hear Dead Drop's voice, just barely muffled. "Fire!"
I let myself flatten to the ground, and each link of the chain shoots out like a bullet. Several of them carve through the air, whistling, shrieking, a couple of them spinning for gyroscopic stabilization. A swarm of angry, metal bees. I watch with grim satisfaction as several red new lines explode open on Maya's face, body, her hips, her arms. But the blood never comes out. It beads up against her body, and then stays flat to her skin.
A final chain link shoots straight for Maya's forehead, and for a split second, I can breathe again. The link screams toward her and then just... dies. Not a bounce, not a block - its speed vanishes as it crosses into the pressure around her, and it drops uselessly to the floor at her feet.
What the fuck is this woman made of?
"Time's up," she says.
And she hits me with the air.
It's not a punch. Her fist doesn't connect with anything. She just pushes her palm toward me, almost lazy, like she's shooing away a fly-
And I go backwards.
Not stumbling-backwards. Not pushed-backwards. I go airborne, hit the concrete wall behind me hard enough to definitely crack something in my bones, and the only reason it's not turning me into paste is my own aerokinesis. I can tell, it's howling around me like a pack of angry dogs, and I can feel the strain in my brain and my gut as my body tries to compensate. The pressure gradient's vector is different again. The wall of high pressure is in front of me. The low pressure area is behind me. And she's squeezing me like a lemon.
"Wait," I manage. "Wait, we can--"
The second hit catches me before I can finish the sentence. She's grinding me up against the concrete wall, forcing the door shut while Dead Drop tries to force it open from the other side. She steps forward and I feel something pop in my nostrils. The entire stairwell is creaking and groaning. Concrete dust is swirling into a small little dust devil.
One step. Two steps. Calm and measured, like she's walking to a meeting.
Dead Drop snarls something wordless on the other side of the door, and the metal answers. The frame shrieks as if it’s being twisted by a giant wrench. The magnetic lock doesn’t fail cleanly - it loses alignment. The armature plate peels a few millimeters off true, the seal along the door’s edge buckles, and suddenly the stairwell isn’t a box anymore. Air finds the gap and screams. Concrete dust and grit tear sideways in a single direction, the neat little vortex ripping apart into a white ribbon that hammers toward the door.
The pressure lets go like a snapped tendon. The door slams open against its closer, rebounds, then wrenches hard enough to tear a hinge half out of the concrete. The crushing weight on my chest collapses into motion - violent, chaotic flow that howls through the stairwell like a jet in a pipe. I slide down the wall, gasping, as the space goes from hydraulic press to storm drain in the span of a heartbeat.
There’s a metallic scream as Dead Drop commits. Not tearing - shearing. The hinges don’t fail all at once; they give in sequence, pins ripping free of their anchors as she forces the load sideways instead of letting it rocket straight through her. The door lurches, weightless for a fraction of a second, then the pressure catches it. She snaps the slab hard to her left with a twist of ferrokinesis, flattening it, keeping it broadside so it can’t scythe or tumble. It misses her by inches, close enough that the air it drags along slaps her coat against her ribs.
The stairwell exhales through the door-shaped hole like a wounded animal. Dust, grit, and loose debris roar past her as the pressure collapses, the jet tearing down the corridor beyond. The door itself vanishes out of her immediate concern - hammering away somewhere out of sight - because the dangerous part is already over. The space stops trying to kill her and starts behaving like normal atmosphere again, violent and chaotic but no longer crushing. Dead Drop plants her feet, chains rattling as they find purchase, and looks back through the opening she’s made.
The box is broken.
"That was awesome," I pant, turning around to look for Maya now that my eyes aren't being squished into jello.
Annoyingly, I only manage to catch her big updo fucking falling down the center of the stairwell. "Are you fucking serious?" Dead Drop shrieks, while blood starts spraying out of my nose.
