The first thing Emmett was aware of was the quiet beeping of medical equipment.

  No… That wasn’t right. He’d seen system notifications pop up, too. Someone had been SKIPPING through his memories.

  And he had heard voices while he was under.

  One that might’ve been Bastion—the AI.

  The other was Midas.

  Someone in the room shuffled idly side-to-side. Emmett heard it, but the sound was faint and muffled.

  Emmett was… hanging. For a moment, it almost felt like the sensation of being in a submersion tank. But he wasn’t floating. He was hanging. By his arms? Maybe he was shackled…

  It took a while to process the sensation, because his entire body was either numb or almost numb.

  “He should be coming to now,” Ava Savanus said.

  Emmett’s eyes fluttered open. The world erupted in a haze. The overhead lights were so bright it felt like he was outside under the midday sun. It was a long time before Emmett’s eyes adjusted.

  As they did, Emmett had to force himself to stay calm.

  He was definitely in the b. One of the medbays. Even though his eyes were still adjusting and this medbay looked slightly different, Emmett recognized the general yout and structure from Venture’s b. He was indeed hanging, looking down on a lone medical gurney, screens, and the piping that lined the walls. Operating arms hung from the ceiling—Emmett was eye level with them.

  He remembered the first time TINA had operated on him with arms like those. He thought they looked like a spider. They looked just as unsettling now.

  There were two figures standing in the room—Midas and Ava Savanus—but Emmett barely noticed them.

  There was… blood.

  The spider-like arms and the gurney were coated in a deep red, so thick in some pces that it looked scabbed over. There were parts in the back of the room—limbs and organs of biomechs. At least, he thought so. His eyes still weren’t working right.

  Emmett had never seen so much gore—not even in the aftermath of fighting the Deep Ones. His stomach turned. If he didn’t feel so weak, maybe he could’ve held it back. He retched, but nothing came up.

  His head sagged toward the floor, and at the same time, his eyes went wide.

  His legs were gone.

  His lower legs and most of his thighs were prosthetic—a mix of circuitry and flesh. His thigh bones—like the rest of his skeleton—were wrapped with metal ttice.

  But it was all gone.

  There were two protrusions coming out of his hips, but they were short and purple with scar tissue, like they’d been hacked away.

  Emmett’s breath was ragged and on the edge of panic.

  “My legs—my fucking legs!”

  “Your arms too,” Midas replied.

  Midas’s gaze was cold and inhuman. He looked up at Emmett like he was an insect, like a child pinning a still-living butterfly to his kill box.

  Emmett stared back at him in numb disbelief.

  Finally, Emmett craned his neck to look upward. His shoulders ached, and he could feel every individual fiber strain as he moved.

  His left arm was gone—

  Lopped off at the shoulder.

  That wasn’t all. He was hanging from chains. They were dozens of them holding him to the ceiling and the walls like a spider’s web. And hooks were embedded in his back like a circus sideshow.

  Out of reflex, Emmett tried looking up and to the right, but he couldn’t see far enough in that direction.

  Then he realized that they’d taken his prosthetic eye too. That’s why his vision was blurry—not even normal. They’d taken that too.

  All his prosthetics. Ripped out.

  Emmett twisted and writhed. Even though there wasn’t much of him left, his muscles still superhuman. The heavy chains rattled, and Emmett could feel the tug of the hooks criss-crossing his back. They weren’t just hooked into his skin, but buried deep in the muscle.

  Even if Emmett managed to tear himself free, he wasn’t going anywhere. He’d probably bleed out on the goddamn floor.

  The fight went out of him, and with it, the rest of Emmett’s strength. What was left of his body sagged. He stared at the dried puddles of blood on the floor.

  “See, I told you,” Midas said to Ava. “He won’t struggle for long. Maybe he’ll even cooperate.”

  Disbelief had been boiling in Emmett’s gut. Until a few moments ago, they’d nearly boiled over and left him in shock. But Midas had pushed him in the other direction.

  All other emotions had been forgotten—fsh-fried by white-hot anger.

  Midas had taken everything from him: Venture, the b, the Summit… He’d butchered Emmett and strung him up like a pig.

  Emmett had never felt anger—incoherent, seething rage—like that before. And in that moment, he had no other thoughts except killing Midas.

  Emmett reached deep inside himself, looking for a power source. Even if there was a fraction of power left in his fusion canister, it would be enough to bring down the entire fucking building.

  Cra… It would be nice to feel her one st time. It was her power, after all. Emmett kept pieces of her within him—bottled in fusion cells and in the canister.

  But it was gone. There wasn’t any power inside of him. The entire fusion canister was gone. Emmett gnced at his torso. His vision had finally cleared enough to see the surgical scars.

  Emmett tried to find the nanite canister, but it was gone too.

  In one final act of defiance, he turned his thoughts toward TINA. He nearly called out for her, but kept silent. Even if he didn’t make it, TINA needed to survive. The Brotherhood couldn’t know about her.

  If TINA was still there in his head, then he should be able to feel her. Even when TINA hid from everyone else, she could never hide from Emmett completely. They had a connection.

  Emmett could still feel his brain impnt—they hadn’t removed that yet. But TINA didn’t answer. And Emmett couldn’t feel her.

  She’d made it out.

  Emmett sagged in his chains. At least she made it out.

  “What did you do to me?” The words tumbled from Emmett’s lips.

  Midas stepped forward, not caring where he stepped. Not caring about the dried blood sticking to his shoes. Emmett was just one of the many that Midas had stepped on or over to get to where he was.

  A smug smile crept across Midas’s face. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the hope go out of someone.”

  A tiny spark rekindled in Emmett. It might’ve been spite, but he clung to it like a life raft.

  “What do you want, Midas?”

  The technopath scoffed. “I have everything I want. I have the Summit and the Allied States eating out of my hands. I have drones in every major city. Biomechs too. We are the future. Superheroes are obsolete.”

  Midas chuckled to himself. “Superheroes are a joke, and so are the people who believe in them. There aren’t any heroes in this world.

  “You have nothing to offer me, Emmett. The only reason you’re still alive is because Savanus wants a few more pieces of you.”

  Midas turned to leave. “He’s all yours, Savanus. I mean that in every sense of the world. Do whatever you want with him.”

  The medbay door hissed open, and Midas paused. “Thank you, Emmett. I thought killing Venture’s protégé would be fun, but taking away everything that made you special has been even better. I’ll be sure to show Venture the tapes when we wake him up.”

  Midas walked out, and the doors hissed shut behind him.

  Emmett hung from chains, utterly powerless—alone in the room with the one person he’d desperately been avoiding.

  ~ ~ ~