9.1
The day faded, at last on the brink of twilight.
A twilight in which four individuals would have to hold a tiny basement against the fury of Portland.
The light shining through the hole in the ceiling was still a dim orange color, but its angle did nothing to illuminate the basement's floor–within that darkness, the four rebels looked up and watched.
They watched as a twilight of death came to meet them.
On one side stood Yumi and Sasha, and on the other stood Jelani and Echo.
Jelani looked at the ground, Echo looked through the ceiling into the sky, Yumi looked at Sasha, and Sasha looked at Yumi.
"How are you feeling?" he asked her, fighting to keep his eyes on hers and not on the bloody red hole in her arm.
For some inexplicable reason, the element of healing had done nothing to heal Yumi's wound.
Thanks to Sasha's makeshift tourniquet, her bleeding had stopped, but his panic hadn't.
"It's ok," she told him. "I'm not worried, so you don't have to be."
Sasha's wavering gaze dropped back to her wound, and in response, she walked around from his right side to his left, where he could no longer see her exposed, bloody skin.
From his new point of view, Yumi looked the same as before she'd gotten into that van and fearlessly driven into Portland. She looked the same as when he'd talked with her beside a calming little fire in the woods, and she looked the same as on that fateful day when he walked into a restaurant as a starving man and met her.
From this point of view, he was able to allow his knotted brow and crinkled eyes to soften, and he was able to return her gaze without feeling her pain.
"Aagggh."
Echo groaned, clenching her hand over her face in distress.
"What the hell are we gonna do?"
She had an impossible riddle to solve, and she had no more than minutes left to do it. Yumi and Sasha were useless, so how could two people defend themselves for an entire Portland twilight?
For rogues, the period of twilight in which their activity was massively boosted lasted around forty-five minutes, contained mostly within what was conventionally referred to as nautical twilight.
Forty-five minutes.
To Echo, who knew what each and every one of those 2,700 seconds would be like, the concept was brutal.
Although she was safe and in control for the time being, she knew that her body was about to be pushed to its limits. She would feel pain, but she would be forced to fight regardless.
The thought itself was a heavy burden, but it wasn't the thing that tore at her insides, threatening to steal away even common sense.
It was an anxious anticipation that burned her body, more intolerable than any pain.
The fear was fundamental, but she strived to maintain a clear mind despite it, up until the very last second.
She couldn't break now. Not when the end was so near.
But seven years of yearning wasn't something that could be cast away so easily. It wasn't an emotion she could simply suppress.
Echo slid to the floor, head held in both of her hands.
Strategizing was useless. She couldn't think. There was only one plan left: the plan to rely on her own strength.
But the fear was fundamental, and even her own strength didn't sound like enough.
Echo's odd behavior caught Jelani's eye, and he gazed at her unusually slouched figure in surprise.
"You alright?"
She kept her eyes focused on the ground and muttered a barely audible, "Yeah."
Jelani nodded, running his steel-clad hand through his hair.
"I feel like we should secure this place," he said, looking apprehensively at the gaping hole in the ceiling.
"Yeah," Echo agreed in the same tone as before, but she showed no signs of doing anything.
Jelani stared at the top of her downturned head.
"You can do something with electricity, right Echo? Will it help if we take some of these pipes and stick them into the ceiling?"
He was referring to the few dented, oxidized segments of copper pipes strewn about amidst the ground of rubble. Copper conducted electricity, if he was remembering correctly, and if he was right about Echo's authority involving electricity, there was certainly a connection that could be used to their advantage.
Echo turned her head, raising her eyes to meet Jelani's.
She stood up, staring at the barely visible surface of the floor.
"Good thinking," she said, patting Jelani on the back.
Together, they gathered an armful of the metal tubes and shoved each one of them through the floorboards above, creating a ceiling that was peppered with sharp points of greenish-brown metal.
Then the sun was gone.
The world fell silent.
Echo was calm, and she stood with her feet firmly planted.
"Get down."
She was confident, because she could rely on her own strength.
The years hadn't passed for nothing–the time had come.
What followed was surely the end of the world.
Everything shook, and everything screamed. Gunshots rattled off like thousands of pebbles dropping onto a glass floor.
Echo wrapped a hand around one of the corroded copper pipes. She knew the basement wouldn't remain safe for more than a minute.
The shrieks had seemed distant, but in a single moment, everything changed.
A howl.
A brutal howl from directly above them, so close and so loud that it nearly ruptured their eardrums.
But Echo didn't waver in her response. The basement lit up, and a buzz of electricity erased the piercing shriek.
They were safe. Their lives were permitted to continue for at least another moment in time.
Yumi and Sasha sat at the back wall, and Jelani stood behind Echo. There was nothing the three of them could do, after all.
Their lives all depended on one thing: the barrier between themselves and twilight.
Echo waged a war alone. Every second required her attention. Every single one.
The level of energy she was channeling was unfathomable. To protect the basement's safety, it had to be.
But there was an excruciating cost: the current was easily enough to cook human flesh.
Her hand melted.
With every flash she was forced to produce, her hand holding the metal rod melted.
The copper itself survived, as she was able to mentally adjust its properties, but her own hand was a completely different story. It was meant to be exposed neither to high voltage nor heat, so it melted.
Her flesh burned to the bone, and her nerves screamed as they were severed.
But she was forced to heal them and endure her pleading nerves as they came back to life. Otherwise, she would have lost that hand forever and, more importantly, her output would have been greatly decreased.
Heal. Destroy.
Heal. Destroy.
Heal. Destroy.
Heal. Destroy.
The cycle was agonizing–a pain that should have been beyond bearing–but her goal was clear, and her will was immovable.
Pain didn't matter.
Nothing mattered.
She set even her most powerful emotions aside, allowing the atomic world to captivate her consciousness.
The pile of bodies that had fallen through the hole in the ceiling smoldered; it was a wonder that their tiny black room hadn't become engulfed in flames.
But they could all smell the acrid burn. Who knew how many rogues were roasting on the grill above their heads.
To Jelani, the minutes felt like hours. To Sasha, who crouched closely at Yumi's side, they felt like days.
But to Echo, time wore on her far worse than that.
It was as if her entire life had been spent standing in that basement, hand clutched around the metal rod that was both her hope and her agony.
A life's worth of suffering.
Her mind was bent so powerfully into those metal rods that it was impossible to imagine her ever returning to the material world.
It was impossible to imagine her closed eyes ever opening again.
But no more screams came. No more shots were fired.
The echoes of fury faded away, and Echo fell.