Emma stood at the far end of the alley Atlas was heading toward, lost somewhere deep inside her own thoughts, her eyes fixed on nothing in particular. She was searching for something, though she couldn't have said what, even if her own life had depended on the answer.
She still didn't quite know what to make of him. In the short time they'd spent together, Atlas hadn't let a single real emotion slip through the cracks of that strange, placid mask he wore. And then there had been the lie about the watch, small, almost forgettable, except that Emma had felt it land wrong the instant it left his mouth. Since her own awakening, she could feel things now, vague and rudimentary, barely more than a flicker at the edge of her senses, but real all the same. Things invisible to the naked eye.
She turned to go join him.
That was when she saw the beast.
"ATLAS !!"
The scream tore out of her before she even decided to make it, but it came too late. He never had the chance to react before something monstrous, something she couldn't have described even if she'd had all the time in the world, slammed him into the ground.
And for the first time in her life, Emma didn't freeze.
The fear was still there, she could feel its claws digging in somewhere beneath her ribs, but something colder had risen up underneath it, something that refused, point blank, to be paralyzed by it. She had no idea what had happened to her world, what had happened to her, but she fully intended to seize this second chance with both hands.
Never again. Not like before. Never again.
She broke into a sprint toward him.
She made it three steps.
A hand closed around her arm with a violence that knocked the breath out of her, fingers digging so hard into her flesh she felt it bruise instantly, while another clamped over her mouth before she could even think to bite down. She couldn't see the man behind her, but the sheer size of the grip told her everything she needed to know. A stench of alcohol, thick and overwhelming, flooded her senses, and a wave of crushing weakness rolled through her body a half second later, far too fast, far too convenient, to be a coincidence.
No. Not again.
She refused. She tried to scream into the hand muffling her, tried to thrash, to kick, to do anything at all, but her muscles had already stopped listening. It was like trying to move someone else's limbs from very far away.
"Shhh, little doll." The voice slithered into her ear, far too calm, far too amused. "Don't you worry, everything's going to be just fine. Just don't make too much noise, or daddy's gonna get upset."
Those words were the last thing Emma heard before the dark folded over her completely. Terror swallowed what was left of her resolve whole, and she went limp against the man's chest like a puppet with its strings cut.
The man in black laughed, low and satisfied, and pulled a flask from his coat, one Emma would have recognized instantly by the smell alone, alcohol, the cheap and violent kind. He took a long pull from it without looking away from the far end of the alley, where, as it happened, something far more interesting than the girl in his arms was unfolding.
A young man knelt in the blue snow, his mind visibly tearing itself apart.
Without a first Elevation, this kid doesn't stand a chance against a mutant like that, the man thought, almost idly.
And yet something in his gut, some old, well-worn instinct, told him to wait. To watch. That whatever came next would be worth every second of patience.
It was right.
The frail boy changed in front of his eyes. A rage too immense for that scrawny frame seized him whole, and the stranger, his senses honed far past what any ordinary man could claim, felt it ripple outward, contagious, a thin parasitic thread of fury worming its way toward his own chest before he flicked it away without the slightest effort, the way one might brush a fly off a sleeve.
He watched the boy rise.
The presence radiating off him now was a different animal entirely from the one he'd sensed earlier, spying from the shadows. He watched the strike land, watched a wave of destructive force erupt from the point of impact, something that had absolutely no business existing at this kid's level. For the first time in longer than he cared to admit, the man in black felt something close to genuine interest.
He slid the flask back into his coat, his eyes never leaving the carnage below. He'd come here for the girl. The boy had just rewritten the terms of the deal entirely.
"A baby distortion of that magnitude, without a first Elevation," he murmured, the faintest shadow of doubt crossing his otherwise unbothered eyes. "Well. Looks like I'm getting involved after all."
...
Atlas felt the strength drain out of him all at once, as though someone had simply pulled the plug. The rage receded just as fast as it had arrived, and in its place came the agony rushing back to claim what was owed, along with a blind, suffocating panic. He gasped for air, his legs no longer answering him, his body, already frail since the moment he'd woken into this world, refusing every order he gave it. The exhaustion wasn't only physical. His mind felt scraped hollow. His eyelids, impossibly heavy, fought him every time he tried to keep them open.
The mutant wasn't dead.
It should have been. The blow had been devastating, its torso reduced to a ruin of meat and blood, and for a moment it had simply stood there, stunned by the sheer impossibility of what had just happened to what should have been an easy meal. It had been driven out of its own territory. Food had grown scarce these last weeks, especially now that the Awakened had started moving in packs rather than wandering alone.
Lucky for the creature, the boy looked finished.
Terror had gripped it for a moment, true, despite the ruin of its own chest. But whatever reason still lived somewhere inside that starving shell had abandoned it long ago. Driven by nothing but raw, animal hunger, it dragged itself back upright, a sound tearing out of it that had nothing human left in it at all, something between a growl and a scream that scraped against the eardrums like a blade against stone.
Atlas swayed where he stood.
The other Atlas, the one who'd burned so bright and so total only seconds ago, had simply gone out, like a flame starved of air, leaving behind only the rational, terrified boy who'd never asked for any of this.
He collapsed into the snow, completely spent, with no understanding at all of what had just torn through his own body. He doubted he'd ever get the chance to understand it.
The last thing he saw before the dark took him was the man in black.
Not running. Walking, almost leisurely, across the snow toward him. With nothing more than a flick of his wrist, without so much as glancing at the mutant, the stranger unleashed something invisible into the air. The upper half of the creature simply ceased to exist, erased in a silence so total it felt obscene, leaving nothing behind but its legs, which folded pitifully into the snow a half second later, as though only now catching up to the fact that the rest of their body was gone.
The man in black strolled into the scene with an ease that had no business belonging to anyone, dragging the limp girl behind him by the hair without the slightest concern for how that looked. He glanced down at Atlas's unconscious body and crouched beside it, studying him at his leisure, a slow, predatory smile splitting his face in two.
"A pure distortion, inside the body of a brand new Qualia," he murmured, something almost reverent threading through his fascination. "Old Isaac is going to pay through the nose for an anomaly like you."