Chapter Fifteen

Luke falls into his chair in Wire’s office heavily. He reaches up to run his hand over his face, realizes he still has his mask on, and peels it off, dropping it onto the desk in front of him.

Wire enters not long after, sitting in his chair with only slightly more grace. His mask, too, lands on the desk, and the two of them exist in silence for a few moments.

“You’re right, she is going to be the biggest problem,” Luke admits, sighing heavily and reaching over to grab his phone out of the basket on Wire’s desk where he’d stuck it before the meeting.

Nodding instead of saying anything along the lines of “told you so”, Wire leans back in his seat, one hand propped up on the arm of his chair. “Followed closely by Abyss.”

Luke looks to Wire, startled. The other man rests his chin on his hand. “She does not like something about Mirror being with us, and I don’t know what or why. She clammed up the second she got the Director’s orders, and she’s been stiff around me since. She had a problem during our initial meeting when I mentioned Predator and Mirror, couldn’t take her eyes off of Mirror during the meeting, and shot right out of the room as soon as I ended it today.”

Not having noticed that, Luke frowns. He’d actually gotten through her file the other night, and nothing in it pointed toward her having any problems with probationary members. She’s been with the PLE longer than he has, and never in that time had she worked with a probationary member that she’d had problems with, or against someone who later become one. She hadn’t been one herself, and there was nothing about her having parahuman friends outside of the PLE. He knows the files don’t have absolutely everything about an Agent, but they usually pointed the way toward answers.

“She’s worked with shifters before,” Luke says, trying to work out the problem out loud, “with blinkers with a much bigger range and less limitations than Mirror. Shield was an independent long before he was PLE, and those two have worked together before.” His mind shifts gears a little. “The Director is black and she’s worked directly alongside him before. One of her teammates from PLE New York is openly gay and there’s never been any problems between them.”

Wire lets Luke speak, pulling his laptop into his lap and opening it.

“They haven’t exchanged two words, and it’s not like Mirror has a Name that implies she’d care that Abyss contracts things called demons,” Luke finishes, thoroughly baffled. “You think maybe she’s just against lying to someone with us?”

“I don’t think that’s entirely it, but yes,” Wire answers, eyes on the screen as he taps at the keyboard. “It seemed to bother her when I said we’d be aiming to arrest, or at least detain, Predator, but she didn’t start getting really…” he winces at the pun, “…wired until she got her orders.”

“What did the Director order her to do, anyway?” Luke asks, leaning forward.

“I don’t know,” Wire admits, “he just said Abyss would be handling it, and that she should have some space in her duties to do it.”

Luke lets that sit for a few seconds, then changes the subject to something more productive. “Mirror can’t copy tattoos.”

That gets an upward glance out of Wire. “That’s a really weird limitation. Did she say why?”

Luke exhales, shaking his head. “She said she doesn’t make the rules, she just works with what she’s given.”

Wire stares at him. “What.”

“That’s what she said. Swear to God.”

Wire reaches up to bury his face in his hands. “So no one’s told her about hard limits versus soft limits.”

“Apparently not.” Luke scrubs at one eye with the side of his hand. “I don’t know if the independents don’t know about it, or if it’s just her and hers.”

“If the locals think their powers are hard-wired, that’s a huge advantage to us.” Wire drops his hands, looks back down to his laptop. He resumes typing, this time faster. “It does bring up the question of how and when we tell Agent Mirror, though.”

Luke thinks on that. They can’t not tell her and expect her to be a productive Agent. They can’t really trust her right now, though. As much as he wants to trust her, he wouldn’t blame her at all for pulling a runner if Predator showed back up, and it’s a hell of an advantage to lose to the independents.

“We can let the Doctor tell her,” Luke suggests finally, “he probably would anyway.”

Wire nods. “Sounds good.”

They discuss the business end of running a PLE team for a while, finalize plans for what to do for the building, and both men leave feeling exhausted but accomplished.

[*]

Luke throws himself forward. He feels a brief displacement in the air, and hits a solid barrier between him and his target. He floods himself forward, spreading out over the barrier. It’s a dome, and he sends himself over it in roiling waves. The dome extends all the way to the floor– with a small gap just big enough for his smoke-form to get through.

He gathers himself at the edges – sending little bits of himself in as they find gaps might tip off the person inside – and flows in all at once. The target is inside, and Luke surrounds him, pulling himself together in a submission hold.

“Bang.” Luke says, two fingers held in a ‘gun’ position against Shield’s head.

Shield grumbles, shrugging Luke off and stepping forward. He jumps, grabbing the straps of his shield and releasing it back into shield-form, out of dome-form.

“Work on making it air-tight,” Luke advises, as Shield dons his shield.

“I have to breathe,” Shield raises an eyebrow, crossing his arms.

“You’ll be fine with just the air inside for at least a minute, and you can hold your breath for longer than that,” Luke says, “long enough for you to come up with something, or for one of your teammates to get rid of the airbourne threat.”

Shield inclines his head, conceding the point. “Anything else, Captain?”

Luke doesn’t bother hiding the broad grin that results. ‘Captain’ is an unofficial title – officially, every Agent is simply that, with only the Director as anything else – but one he’s wanted every since he first heard it.

“Come back in for team training tomorrow.” Luke dimisses him, and prepares for the next Agent.

[*]

“Again.”

Mend forces his body through the kata once more, his jaw clenched and sweat running down his face. He manages to complete it without a major error this time, though he immediately bends over, hands on his thighs.

“Good,” Luke says encouragingly, nodding. “You’re good for today. We’ll do firearm practice later in the week, and make sure you keep up with your independent cardio.”

He gets a nod in response, a gulped breath, and Mend straightens himself back up forcefully. “Yes, sir.”

Luke rubs the back of his head. “Mend, you don’t need to call me sir. I’m only in charge when we’re out in th field. Just make sure you’re here at five so I can work with Abyss.”

Mend nods again, wheezes out another breath, and starts his cooldown stretches.

[*]

Luke frowns, tilts his head. “What do you do when you’re alone?”

If not for the utter neutrality of her eyes, he would say that her eyebrow lift is amused.”Who says I’m ever alone?”

Before he can respond, her body convulses. In one jerky motion from abdomen up to head, her body rolls, and her hands come up to her mouth. At the top of the wave, her head comes forward, mouth opening wide. A thick, oily stream of black floods out of her mouth, pooling in her cupped hands. She begins to speak to it in a harsh, unfamiliar language full of hisses and tapped consonants. Abyss raises one hand and runs her fingers through the mass, which rolls over her fingers in thick, clumpy blobs that look like they should leave disgusting residue, but her skin is just as clean afterward as it was before.

Luke looks to Mend while Abyss coos at the… demon? The other man has his brows drawn together, lips pressed together in a smile that’s trying harder to be tolerant than it may ever succeed at.

“Does she do this a lot?” Luke asks in an undertone that’s about half-meant to break Abyss out of whatever it is she’s doing.

Mend turns to Luke. He tries to broaden his smile, but only succeeds in grimacing. “This is the tame one. The other one… we all end up hoping she doesn’t have to call the other one.”

He should really ask her to show him one of her other contacts, but in the end, he doesn’t really want to see the rest of them, if they’re anything like this one.

[*]

“Where’s Agent Mirror?”

Luke half-smiles at Abyss’ question, sliding on his mask. “She’s non-combat while she’s on probation.”

There’s a few seconds of silence, then Abyss shrugs. “It’s not like we need another non-frontliner. We’re already Team Bubble.”

Luke opens his mouth to contradict her, but she’s right. Mend is a healer, Shield is a defender, Abyss a projecter. Luke can work as their offense, but he’s little-to-no-use against anyone with a Name that gives them durability, or speed. Abyss’ demons are really their heavy hitters, and if she gets knocked out, they become unreliable.

Team practice goes along those lines: Shield creates a bubble with his shield-dome, Abyss calls out what her demons can and will be doing – she refuses to call on them unless necessary; Luke can’t really blame her, considering the prices some of them exact when used – and Smoke flows around targets and hits them with precision strikes of his body. Mend, of course, stands ready to heal anyone or anything that needs it, and while he spends most of team practice standing in Shield’s dome, they all know he’ll be crucial in the event of a real fight.

“Alright, guys, that’s enough for today. Go settle into your lives and see what you can find out about the local paras. We’ll get back together next week.”

Everyone else files out, but Abyss lingers. Luke turns to her, head tilted.

“Hey, can you… give me Mirror’s address?” Abyss shifts a little, pulls her mask off and lets it hang from the tips of her fingers. “Oh, and I’m going to give her some crap, basically see-through excuse about you guys wanting me to hang out with her. You know, the kind that basically screams ‘I’m your new babysitter because you can’t impersonate me’.”

The whole thing pulls at him – Luke hates lying, hates that they have to do this with Aiyana just to make sure she can be trusted – but he gives her Aiyana’s address, and adds it to the pile of things that make him wonder if Aiyana will hate him when she finds out about them.

Chapter Sixteen

• abyss
• aiyana
• mend
• shield
• smoke
• wire