Chapter Four #2
Ari ghosted through the crowd, seeing Xavier’s faint heat signature flicker beside her even when no one else could. Their bond allowed one simple, unbeatable advantage: they could see each other when invisible.
Rain slicked the streets of Seattle with a sheen that reflected every neon sign and shattered storefront lamp, turning the city into a fractured prism of light.
A scream echoed from between two buildings.
It was a sharp, splintering sound that chilled her despite the humid air.
The Dioscuri variant was striking at random, unseen by the crowd stumbling through the storm.
People tripped over discarded umbrellas and broken glass, never seeing the blow until it landed.
“There,” Ari whispered, reappearing long enough to point.
The Dioscuri variant moved quickly, almost flickering with each shift in position. His invisibility wasn’t clean; it wavered like heat on asphalt, revealing a silhouette just long enough for Ari to track him.
She leaped.
Her hands struck solid flesh, and the sudden collision knocked both of them to the ground.
The variant’s invisibility fizzled as he hit the pavement, revealing a man with wild eyes.
He snarled and lashed out, but Ari was already moving.
She dodged the blow, spun behind him, and locked her arm around his throat.
“Stay still,” she hissed.
The variant didn’t listen. Sweat and rain drip-traced down his face as he bucked hard enough to slam her into a dumpster, but Ari gritted her teeth and held on.
Her muscles screamed. Her shoulder burned.
But she kept him pinned long enough for Xavier to flash into visibility and deliver a strike to the variant’s ribs—hard, but not lethal.
A vehicle screeched to a stop at the alley mouth.
“Backup,” the variant chuckled weakly.
“Not a chance,” Xavier said and vanished.
Seconds later, the van exploded from the grenade Xavier planted before sprinting free.
The Dioscuri variant convulsed suddenly beneath her grip.
“No,” Ari tightened her hold, trying to keep him conscious. “Don’t you dare.”
Foam bubbled at his lips. And he went still. She closed her eyes for one brief beat as rain washed over both of them. Xavier’s hand landed gently on her back.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
And they did.
***
PISC
Underwater, the world was a darkly muted dream.
It was cold and full of blood. He stood at the edge of the collapsed seawall, tasting the current with the back of his tongue.
Beneath the brine, beneath the churned sand and gasoline oil slicks, a deep, thrumming vibration vibrated through his gills. Protogenus had released a sea monster.
Ichth surfaced beside him, water streaming from the ridges of his dorsal crest. His black eyes narrowed as another tremor rippled through the waves, closer now. The lights along Miami Beach flickered with each impact.
“Do you smell it?” Ichth rasped.
Pisc bared serrated teeth in a grin. “Aggression. The perfect prey.”
Ichth’s gills flared in anticipation. “We hunt.”
They dove as one.
The instant the water closed over Pisc’s head, the world snapped into crystalline clarity. Every movement became effortless, every sound sharper. His body elongated, muscles expanding as the embedded Mercury modifications throbbed to life. The transformation was not pretty. It was not meant to be.
Pisc and Ichth were built to kill.
Dark water swallowed them both as they pursued the vibrations reverberating along the ocean floor.
The sea monster moved erratically, its bioluminescent veins pulsing like a panicked heartbeat.
It was just another Discouri variant. Protogenus had engineered it for speed and violence, but not strategy.
Not like Pisc.
He sliced through a school of scattering fish, and collided with the variant in a tangle of limbs and teeth. The creature shrieked underwater. It was an awful, distorted sound that vibrated in the marrow.
Ichth appeared an instant later, latching onto the variant’s leg with enough force to crack bone. Blood clouded the water in thick spirals. Pisc inhaled through his gills, savoring the copper tang. His instincts sharpened to a razor edge.
They were not here to rescue humans on the beach.
They were here to eliminate a threat.
Above them, shadows moved along the shoreline. Gemini Initiative divers were ushering civilians away from the waterline. The closer the humans were, the harder Pisc and Ichth would have to restrain themselves not to attack whatever was in range.
The Dioscuri variant struck Pisc across the jaw with enough force to spin him backward. Bone cracked. Pisc roared underwater, jaws gaping unnaturally wide as he lunged, clamping onto the variant’s shoulder and dragging him into the deep.
Ichth followed, claws raking down the variant’s spine, oblivious to the blood billowing in clouds around them.
For a moment, the ocean was only violence.
Then green light reflected over the surface of the water.
Even from below, Pisc sensed the sickening thrum of its activation.
The frequency clawed at his nervous system, threatening to unmake the delicate quantum lattice of their power.
Before it could fire, the seabed shifted.
A quake rippled through the sand as Jeminy’s earth-bending ability ruptured the shoreline from above. A cavern yawned open beneath the weapon, swallowing it whole. The green light flickered and vanished.
Pisc didn’t look toward the disturbance. He only sank his teeth deeper, but the sea monster went suddenly still. Its pupils were blown wide and its body was rigid. Suicide.
Pisc snarled with frustration as the creature died in his grip.
“Coward,” Ichth hissed at it.
Pisc released the corpse and let the body drift. The water around them was vibrating with hunger.
“Another hunt ended too soon,” Pisc muttered, his voice a low growl.
Ichth’s dorsal fin sliced the water beside him. “Then, we wait for the next.”
Pisc’s grin returned, slow and predatory.
***
JEM ROCKE
The earth screamed. Jem felt the tremor before she heard the collapse.
Denver’s mile-high air carried vibrations differently. The quake rattled up through the soles of her boots, humming into her bones like a warning. Chris emerged beside her from behind a toppled city bus, eyes narrowing as a column of dust unfurled in the distance.
“That’s him,” Chris said, adjusting the strap across his chest. “Same seismic signature we tracked earlier.”
Jem exhaled slowly, tuning herself to the ground. Beneath the pavement, the city was a layered concrete, clay, fractured bedrock, and the faint fossils of ancient seabeds. She could read each one like lines of a map. Tonight, all of them were being rewritten by a single rampaging source.
The Dioscuri variant.
He wasn’t subtle. Protogenus never designed the earth-based ones with finesse in mind. He tore through roads and foundations with brute geological force, turning Denver streets into unstable fault lines.
Jem brushed dirt between her fingers. “He’s moving fast. Eastbound. Toward the business district.”
Chris nodded. “Then we meet him there.”
They moved out in tandem, leaping over buckled sidewalks and fractures spiderwebbing across the asphalt. Emergency sirens wailed in the distance, echoing off the glass facades of half-evacuated high-rises. Dust clouds turned the twilight air into a hazy blur.
They found him near a demolished parking structure.
The Dioscuri variant stood among the wreckage as if sculpted from the ruin itself.
He was a tall, formidable figure with jagged plates of rock protruding from his forearms and shoulders, veins glowing faintly through stone-like skin.
He turned toward them, lips curling back in a grimace that was half rage, half challenge.
Chris glanced at her. Their bond wasn’t about speed or power amplification. It was about synchronicity. Harmony. The way their earth manipulation wove together seamlessly, like parallel strata that strengthened under shared pressure.
She felt him through the ground before he moved.
The Dioscuri struck first, driving his fists into the pavement and unleashing a shockwave that rippled outward like a localized earthquake. The ground bucked violently beneath them, cracking open with jagged fissures.
Jem countered by dropping to one knee and slamming her palm into the concrete. She pushed her will into the earth, smoothing the tremor’s violent rhythm, redirecting the shockwave upward in a controlled burst of shattered debris.
Chris raised both arms, lifting slabs of broken pavement into a protective barrier around them. Jem stabilized it. Chris shaped it.
The Dioscuri charged through the smoke, roaring.
Chris dodged a razor-edged shale blade. Jem slammed her palms to the pavement. The street buckled, a wall of concrete erupting beneath the Dioscuri.
He countered, shattering it with brute seismic force.
“He’s strong,” Chris said, panting.
“He’s alone,” Jem replied.
Chris met him head-on, stone columns rising to intercept each strike. Jem circled to the flank, her hands sinking into the broken earth as she pulled a wall of shale upward to trap one of the variant’s arms.
He struggled, breaking free with brute strength, but Jem was already forming a second bind, then a third. Chris reinforced them, sealing seams with compressed sediment.
Within moments, they had crafted a stone prison around him. It was layered, reinforced, unbreakable.
The Dioscuri snarled once, a desperate sound. Then he went still. Foam bubbled at his lips. His glowing eyes dimmed. The stone prison held as his body went limp, sinking into stillness.
Chris lowered his arms slowly. “Five cities. Five dead.”
Jem closed her eyes for a moment, pressing her dirt-coated fingers to the earth. “And no answers.”