Driving with the brace makes Cynthia nervous. Despite having practically perfect awareness of the space around her leg, she worries it may catch on something at the wrong moment. She’d avoided driving until a month ago, when she’d driven Alyssa’s truck during her week-long visit. And as much as the brace made her anxious, the alternative would’ve been letting Alyssa drive.

She turns onto an old, slightly overgrown road barred by a security gate, sturdy enough to hold back most vehicles. Atop it sits a camera, lens given an orange-yellow glow in the evening sun.

Cynthia toggles the high beams of her car: short, long, long, then short.

The gate doesn’t budge.

She tries again, this time with long, short, long, short, followed by short, long, short.

Still nothing.

That’s weird.

She spends a minute or so waiting, then pulls forward to a lone post by the roadside topped with a black box. She holds her phone up against it, reaching into the scanner with her field, toggling a series of switches.

The gate emits a few rhythmic clicks as electromagnets hum, linear motors pulling it open against built-in springs.

Right as Cynthia’s car clears the gate it snaps shut only to be dampened in the last inch of travel, latching softly. Beyond the fenceline the road transitions from aged asphalt to gravel. Acorns, sticks, and leaves mingle with the weathered stones; dirt shows in spots and patches.

The surrounding forest gives way to an overgrown field, littered with scrap and debris. Old cars and concrete mostly, or what was left of them, with frames mangled and chunks missing. A rusted flagpole marks the center of a clearing in the growth, warped and discolored. Behind it sits a barn.

It doesn’t look like much, with its moss-stricken shingles and sun-bleached siding atop a weathered stone foundation. But despite all appearance, that barn and the field around it had become… if not a home, then something close. A place where she can be true to herself, without fear.

Now, it’s time to say goodbye.

Cynthia parks at the end of the driveway and gets out of her car. She pulls a plastic bin out of the back seat—several more nested within—and hands it off to her power, binding it to float behind her.

She enters the barn through a side door. The inside presents a stark contrast to the worn-down exterior: timber framing that seems freshly cut, walls with smooth wooden paneling, and a polished hardwood floor. In the center hardwood gives way to rubberized flooring, and on the left a series of former stalls house pieces of gym equipment. Staircases on each side of the barn lead up to a loft-style second floor.

Scuffles, scrapes, and a few grunts come from above as she reaches the center. Looking up she sees a teenage girl adorned in gadgets, struggling against the ceiling. Not who she expected, especially on a Sunday.

“Hi, Janey.”

“Hello?” The girl rolls over and looks down. “Oh, Cynthia, hi. I’d come down there, but I’m a bit busy.”

“Aren’t you off for the school year?”

“Yeah, but my parents are away for the week, didn’t want me to stay home alone. I’d rather be here working on tech than at my aunt’s, anyway.”

“You need any help?”

“I’m good, I just—” She pushes against the ceiling, managing to reach a standing position, her arms out for balance. “Just need to calibrate some new pieces.”

Janey takes a few careful steps forward only to lose her balance, falling up, arms out.

“Are you sure?”

“I meant to do that,” Janey insists as she stands up again. “What’s with the totes?”

“Moved out this weekend. I thought it’d be a good time to get my things, while I’m still unpacking.”

“Oh… Right.”

Janey reaches for a gadget on her belt. A bulky, cylindrical, pistol-looking thing, clad in smooth ivory panels. She points it toward Cynthia.

“How much do those weigh? I’ll bring them up for you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Come on, I need the practice.”

Eh, it can’t hurt.

“Alright. Fifteen pounds. Just, try not to crush them?”

The pistol emits a purple flash and a ripple moves through the air. Cynthia lets the bins go as they’re pulled up and away. The distortion feels strange where it intersects her field, as if the space inside it had been run through a blender. Almost nauseating.

“Is Aaron up there? I wanted to talk to him, before I got to packing.”

“He’s in the basement. Want me to text him that you’re here?”

Odd. He should already know.

“Nah, I’ll find him.”

Janey nods, and Cynthia starts walking away.

“Hey, Cynthia, wait up.”

She stops, looking back.

“I, uh—If I’m not here when you come back, I just wanted to say thank you. Good luck out there.”

“You too, Janey.”

The basement door seems a touch out of place. Heavy metal construction, with a simple pull handle on the front, next to a scanner pad. Cynthia places her hand on the scanner. Like the one at the gate it has its own group of hidden switches, ones that only her power can reach. Between that passcode and her handprint the door unlocks, several mechanisms coming undone in sequence.

It closes and locks behind her automatically as she descends a stark concrete stairwell, a second door at the bottom. This one is similar, though the passcode is different.

Beyond is a roughly pentagonal room, three square walls and two angled ones, their apex opposite the door. To the right and left are things of utility: storage lockers, a bench, a medical station. The two angled walls have alcoves cut into them, six in total. The corner itself forms a seventh, mirrored alcove around a stepped dias.

The leftmost alcove is unclaimed, a few boxes on the ground inside it. Conduit’s costume takes the center alcove of the left wall, helmet and a few plates missing. The next one is unlit and closed off, a semicircular glass pane taking the place of the usual roll-out privacy screen. A feminine mannequin is within, wearing a dark gray spandex jumpsuit decorated with blue magnetic lines. Bulky equipment adorns the mannequin’s hands, feet, and chest. A domed, blue face shield completes the costume.

Janey’s costume, or what remains of it, is strewn about the rightmost alcove, decorative ivory panels left in piles around a white helm with a purple visor that doesn’t quite seem to offer enough in the way of facial concealment.

Next is Alyssa’s, or at least her fanciest one. She had always been upfront and stubborn, and Mitosis was no different. It had lent her costumes a fleeting nature, whether by enemy action, or for simply getting in the way of her latest idea for a new limb. This one is for show, a light cream jumpsuit decorated with pink and purple DNA strands splitting and weaving together across its surface. The chest is dominated by Mitosis’ emblem of two cells in the act, a whole strand of DNA shared between them. Her usual costumes follow the same color scheme, opting for lesser details, the emblem smaller. One is hanging behind the show costume for ease of access, with spares crammed into the cabinets built into the alcove’s walls.

Cynthia avoids glancing into her alcove as she walks past it, stepping in front of the mirrors. She’d worn khakis, one of her few tight-fit pairs, since they wouldn’t bunch up under her brace. It’d been a warm September, so she’d paired it with a white-and-blue striped crop top.

Her arms have tanned over the summer, taking on a bronzed tone speckled with little white scars, lines that mark where her armor almost failed, where plates cut through her bodysuit. Her midriff is pale in comparison, having spent the summer covered up. Most scars here aren’t immediately obvious, to her relief, but she can still pick them out.

The largest are most recent, pale lines crossing her abdomen. Buried under hundreds of tons of debris, her armor’s midsection had collapsed, pinching the skin beneath as she’d struggled to free herself.

Two gunshots from last year. One is a roughly star-shaped patch of white, the other, a streak of reddish skin.

A few old stab wounds—cleaner, shallow, barely noticeable.

She glances at her armor, and can’t pull her eyes off it. Every scar evokes a memory of damage and the work done to repair it, to prevent failure from happening again. Tighter plates after being stabbed. A rebuild with armor-grade steel and surface hardening after being shot. And now…

Now, she’s healing and walking on her own again—a recovery her armor doesn’t reflect. Where she has scars, it’s still wounded, neglected, with half-washed dirt stuck in odd places. Looking closer she can see speckled blood peeking out from joints and crevices, where red rivulets had once flown forth. Her leg tenses up at the sight, and for a moment she can almost feel her bones break.

Much of the paint is damaged: the white stripe that dominates her cuirass is marred by scrapes and gouges, its blue trim barely visible. Her emblem, a pair of opposing blue vectors surrounded by a matching circle, hasn’t fared much better. The cuirass’ pike nose is blunted, there are gashes at the edges of the angled breastplate, and the interlocking plates below are warped and buckled. She steps closer to the alcove, placing her hand on the breastplate’s left side and over the emblem, the metal cool against her skin.

She closes her eyes, focusing on where her field permeates the armor. It feels so familiar, and yet she can’t imagine wearing it again, not now; perhaps never.

Cynthia backs away from the alcove and turns back towards the main door. Two regular doors flank it, nestled into the room’s corners. On her left is one that leads to a storage and testing area, and on her right is the workshop.

Workshop is the better bet, given the state of Aaron’s costume. She opens the door and finds him at a workbench, silhouetted by the desk light, pressing copper inlays into an armguard’s skeletal frame. He’s wearing his costume’s undersuit, a dark gray garment with gold brackets.

“Hey, Aaron?”

He tenses, just a little.

“Pardon?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“It’s no bother,” Aaron says. He relaxes and sets his work on the bench, then pivots to face her. “I take you’re not here to reconsider?”

“No.” Cynthia shakes her head. “I came by to get my things and I thought we could catch up, since I haven’t seen you around campus.”

“Everything’s going well, I hope?”

“Getting there. Got cleared to go back to work on Friday, and my parents helped me move out today. Almost feels like everything’s back to normal, until someone mentions my leg, or assumes I need help. The worst is when they ask what happened. Saying I don’t want to talk about it works for most, but some people—and I can’t understand how—they take that as a challenge. So I’ve settled for telling them I fell down some stairs.”

“Fairly simple, for a cover story.”

“I don’t want to dig a deeper hole. Not if I don’t have to,” Cynthia laments with a sigh, rubbing her forehead. “You know, even though I can’t imagine going back… I’m going to miss this place.”

“This doesn’t have to be a permanent leave, or a leave at all. You don’t have to be on the team in a costumed capacity; we still have need of a machinist, after all, and I can pay much better than that scrapyard you’re interning with.”

“Thanks, but I need to move on. Being on the team was a good outlet for a part of myself I didn’t want to accept. Now I need to start working on the rest.”

“It’s good that you have your priorities in order. However, are you sure you’ll be content to be on the sidelines?”

“I don’t really see it that way.”

“I presume Alyssa, or Alyssa, will be returning to the team, at some point. The last time we had a conversation similar to this one, you couldn’t stand by and watch.”

“I… I don’t know if either of them is coming back to this, Aaron. They’ve got a lot to work through, first. By the time they have, who knows what they’ll want?”

She tries to leave it at that, but by Aaron’s expression, she can tell he’s not buying it.

“Look, back then… Alyssa was in a really bad place. And I realized I had a part in making it that bad. The path she picked wasn’t one that I thought would help, and I didn’t trust her to take care of herself. Maybe I’m still having trouble, trusting them. But she’s come a long way, since then. I mean, do you think she’d have made it through all this, the way she was when she first joined the team?”

Aaron shakes his head, slowly. “No. No, she wouldn’t have.”

“So maybe you’re right. Maybe she comes back, and I am concerned. Or both of them, even. But whatever happens, it’s their decision, and I owe it to them to respect that, and trust them.”

“I understand,” Aaron says, turning back to the bench. “This piece is a bit time sensitive. We can talk while I work, if you don’t mind?”

“That’s fine.”

He nods, slipping the guard over his left forearm, the brackets clicking as it locks in. He picks up a copper rod and holds it against the inlay and the frame.

Cynthia leans back against the doorway, placing Aaron between herself and the bead as an arc lights up the room. She uses her power to take some of the load, for comfort’s sake.

“What makes you think Mitosis won’t come back?” Aaron says between welds.

“I’m worried about Alyssa. The, er, the shorter one. I promised I’d be there for her, and, well, today she’s going home. And I can’t be there.”

“When I spoke with her earlier in the week, she seemed quite excited. So did her sister.”

“I know, and I’m happy for them. But I feel like I should’ve been more careful, more considerate. Like I was in such a rush to get back to my own life that I didn’t notice what was going on with theirs.”

“I doubt they’re going to have any problems today, not beyond the usual road trip issues.”

“I’m not worried about today. It’s just, if I managed to miss this, what about the next time? What if something happens, and I can’t be there?”

“Cynthia, you need to trust that they can handle their own problems.”

“She’s never been good at her own problems.”

“Can’t be any more dangerous than going out in costume alone, can it?”

“That’s different. I—when I said I trusted her with that, I meant that she’d be in a good place, mentally speaking.”

“When was she last in a good state?”

Cynthia opens her mouth to speak, and finds nothing to say. For as long as she’s known Alyssa, there’d been bad times and better times, but never quite a time when she could safely say her friend’s condition was good.

The silence drags on for a few more awkward moments.

“I’m sorry,” Aaron says, finally. “That wasn’t rhetorical. I was genuinely wondering.”

Cynthia simply shakes her head.

“Is she really that, hm, delicate?”

“She’s complicated. It kind of feels like I’m holding a double standard, since everyone has something that would set them off-kilter. It’s just, with Alyssa, the most normal things can cascade into a disaster. You’ve seen it. And with two of her under the same roof…”

“Ah. I believe I understand the issue.”

“Yeah. That’s why I’m worried.”

Another arc flashes, sparking and ticking as little embers of copper fly into the air.

It’s strange, to see Aaron like this. Without the armor plates and impact padding, his physique is plainly visible: that of a thin, lanky young man. As he moves to guide the bead his undersuit appears loose, folding where it should be taught.

The overhead lights flicker on just as the arc dies down. Aaron stands and holds the arm piece up in the fluorescent glow, examining it.

“I’ll have to adjust my plans then. I suppose they were a bit on the optimistic side.”

“Plans?”

“Ah, well, I was hoping at least one Alyssa would be ready to return by November.”

“Have you talked to them about that?”

“I did. Perhaps not in detail, but they seemed to think they’d both be in good shape by the end of fall at the latest.”

“Why do you even need either of them? If everything was normal, Alyssa would be off for college anyway.”

“Maintaining the team in the absence of most of its members has been time consuming, that’s all. It’s meant I’ve had to ration my attention away from side projects to fulfill more important duties.”

“Aaron, have you even been going to class?”

“My professors trust me enough to turn a blind eye to my attendance. Besides, I don’t need to be on campus to study.”

Cynthia blinks. If Aaron had let his classes slide, what else had he put off?

“Please tell me that when you said ‘side projects’ you weren’t talking about our security.”

“The cameras are still recording, don’t worry. It was a minor equipment failure that took down my live alert server and the active monitor.”

“That’s still half the system. How long has it been down?”

“It’s fine. Nothing malicious occurred. Acquiring replacement hardware is something of a process and I simply haven’t had the time yet.”

“How long, Aaron?”

He sighs.

“Five weeks.”

“What the hell have you been doing for five weeks? This is—it’s not like you to let something like this lapse, Aaron.”

“Look, I’ve been managing the team’s major duties by myself. There’s been a few bumps and hiccups. All I need is a bit of time to smooth things out and get it sorted.”

He fiddles with the arm guard for a bit, then looks Cynthia in the eyes.

“I know this is a lot to ask of you, but if you could come back, just for a week, and take the Boston patrol. That’ll give me enough time. It’s exactly as you left it—a few hours in the afternoon, for a single business week.”

“Did you listen to anything I said?”

“It won’t be perman—”

“I’m not going to do it. For your sake, and mine. If work is piling up like this, work that you really can’t afford to put off, then it won’t help. Even if I agreed, what next? Something always goes wrong. You’d either have to ask me to come back again, or you’d struggle to handle it yourself. This is too much, Aaron.”

“I’m not going to abandon the progress I’ve made with the team, even if it’s more of a solo operation at the moment. I agreed to certain responsibilities, and I intend to keep them.”

“It’s irresponsible to try, when you know you can’t sustain this. Look at yourself. Look at your life. You’re burning yourself out.”

Aaron shakes his head, muttering something Cynthia can’t make out.

“Aaron, I know this means a lot to you. And I know that you expected to have a full time partner this year. But I’m not up to that, not anymore. Like I said, I might want to come back someday. Alyssa, or one of them, might too. Janey’s going to be back in the summer. If you work yourself into the ground, we won’t have a team to come back to. You don’t have to give up all that we’ve done, just, stick to something you can handle.”

He closes his eyes and rubs his temple.

“I’ll talk to the state, neighboring teams. Give up some of our jurisdictions. And I’m sorry, for what I said.”

“I’m fine. Just… take care of yourself.”

“No promises,” he says with a smile. 

“I, uh, I guess this is it, huh?”

“I’d like to say my door’s always open, and mean it more than figuratively, but I’m going to need the keys.”

Cynthia nods and pulls her phone out of her pocket. She reaches through it with her power, taking the device apart, extracting its SIM card and a memory card, then drops them in Aaron’s palm. He touches their contacts for a moment, then hands them back.

“Don’t you need the memory card?”

He shrugs. “Keep it. I’ve got a bunch of them.”

Cynthia reassembles her phone, then puts it back in her pants pocket. She holds her hand out, but Aaron waves her away.

“Let me know when you’re packed up. I’ll walk you to the gate, and we can say goodbye then.”

“Sounds good.”