Taylor Hebert was a murderer.
The thought came to her while she was holding a little boy in her arms.
She didn’t know his name. Didn’t know how old he was either, though he couldn’t have been much younger than her, maybe twelve or thirteen. His hair floated around his face in loose strands, disturbed by the currents Taylor made whenever she moved, and his eyes were still open.
She closed them. It seemed like the right thing to do.
Taylor rested him beside his mother and stared at the two of them for several seconds, hoping, for no reason she could explain, that there was something she’d missed. Some twitch of a finger. A bubble. Anything that would give her an excuse to pick them up again and keep trying.
There wasn’t.
Her flames still burned beneath the water, weaker than they had been on the surface but stubbornly hot, and somehow, she could breathe. The unfairness of it made her feel sick.
All around her, the remains of buildings rested at the bottom of the ocean, some intact enough that they could almost have been sitting on a city street if she ignored the fish and the drifting clouds of sand. Cars lay scattered between them. A bus had landed on its side a short distance away, its windows dark except where the light from her body reached them.
Taylor resisted the urge to look inside again. There had been twenty-three people. Maybe twenty-four. She had lost count near the back.
Taylor Hebert was a murderer.
Yes, she hadn’t picked these people up and thrown them into the ocean. She hadn’t opened whatever portals had brought them here, and she hadn’t known any of this would happen when she went looking for Leviathan.
That was supposed to matter.
Somewhere, to somebody, it probably did. But Taylor couldn’t make herself care. She had chosen this.
Her dad had asked her not to go. Brandish had sat across from her and told her exactly how badly an Endbringer fight could turn. Piggot had called her overconfident to her face, and Taylor had stood in that office thinking the woman simply didn’t understand.
She had beaten the Simurgh, after all.
Taylor pushed herself through the broken wall of the apartment and out into open water, only to find more people waiting for her.
Most of them were already dead.
Some had made it out of their buildings before drowning. They drifted between the wreckage in clothes they’d probably put on that morning without thinking anything of it. A man was in a suit, someone was wearing pyjamas, and a woman had one shoe.
Taylor flew past them, flames trailing from her form.
She found movement three buildings over, a hand striking weakly against a window. Taylor changed direction so quickly that the water exploded behind her. She crossed the distance in seconds and drove both hands through the wall.
Three people, alive.
Taylor grabbed all of them.
They were injured, and she didn’t know if her tight hold was exacerbating their injuries or not. Pyronite was strong enough to crush concrete, and she had never practised carrying injured people underwater before because why the fuck would she have practised carrying people underwater?
One of them stopped moving.
“No.”
The word came out strangely beneath the water as Taylor kicked upward, weaving around a section of road sinking through the water above her. The woman in her left arm convulsed.
“Come on.”
Taylor forced herself to go faster as the light overhead grew brighter.
“Come on, come on…”
She broke the surface in a burst of steam and threw herself into the air, the three civilians held against her chest as she searched for somewhere to put them.
There. A broken bridge floated above the water several hundred feet away, unlikely to last for long but intact enough that people had crowded together on it while members of New Wave moved back and forth carrying more survivors.
Taylor landed hard enough to make the structure tremble.
“Help.”
Someone rushed forward, then several people did, hands reaching for the three civilians and pulling them from her arms. Taylor stood there while a man she didn’t recognise pressed two fingers against the neck of the person who had stopped moving.
His expression told her before he said anything.
Taylor left before anyone could say anything to her and went back underwater.
Another building. She tore the roof off and found it empty.
The next had four people inside. All dead.
Taylor moved on.
A car. Dead.
Another apartment. Seven people this time, and two were still alive. She carried them to the surface, handed them over, and went straight back down.
Again.
Then again.
And again.
At some point, she stopped thinking about where the buildings had come from. It didn’t matter. She didn’t know these people. She didn’t know their city or their country or even their Earth, though the last possibility hadn’t quite managed to form properly in her head yet.
All that mattered was that they were here because of the fight, and the fight was happening because she had gone looking for Leviathan. Because Lung had been difficult.
Taylor ripped the doors off an elevator.
Six bodies floated inside.
Her hands stopped.
Because Lung had been difficult.
The thought came again, clearer this time.
She had spent less than a day thinking about the ABB before deciding Leviathan was a better problem. Punch monster. Save people.
Taylor stared into the elevator.
One of the bodies was wearing a school uniform. For some reason, that was the one she couldn’t look away from.
She didn’t scream. She couldn’t, or maybe she simply didn’t have enough of herself left to do it. Her fingers tightened around the elevator doors until the metal folded in her hands, and for several seconds she stayed there with her flames boiling the water around her.
She had thought it was simple. That was the worst part. Taylor had sat on her bed and actually smiled when the idea occurred to her.
Fight Leviathan.
Free up shipping.
Help Brockton Bay.
Maybe help the whole world.
She had made it sound so fucking easy.
Her dad had looked at her as though he didn’t know what to say anymore.
You’re really doing this.
Taylor released the doors. They sank slowly into the darkness, and she forced herself to move. There were still people alive, and that became the only thought Taylor allowed herself.
Find them. Get them out.
Find the next ones.
A family trapped inside a stairwell.
An old man pinned beneath a desk.
Two women inside a bathroom where an air pocket had somehow survived.
Taylor found them. Others she found too late. She stopped counting those. The watch didn’t time out, and her Pyronite body didn’t seem capable of exhaustion. Or maybe she simply hadn’t found its limit yet. It was still ironic; the watch gave her a body that could work endlessly while the people around her ran out of air in minutes.
Another joke.
Another thing she’d thought was amazing two days ago.
How strong are these forms actually?
Which ones could survive Leviathan?
She knew the answer now. This one could.
Taylor Hebert could survive Leviathan.
Congratulations.
She tore through another wall.
Bodies.
She turned around immediately.
Somewhere above her, the ocean shook. The force travelled through the water and rattled the buildings around her. Taylor barely noticed. Leviathan was still fighting. The Triumvirate were probably attacking him by now.
Good.
She hoped they killed him.
She hoped they tore him apart.
She hoped it hurt.
The anger lasted until she saw another body drifting past her, and then there was nowhere left for it to go except back at herself.
Leviathan was an Endbringer. He destroyed cities. Everybody knew that, and Taylor had known it too.
The Simurgh destroyed cities too.
Taylor had known that when she stood in Piggot’s office and used her victory as an argument.
I faced the Simurgh.
God.
Her flames surged.
She wanted to tear the watch off.
The thought frightened her enough that her hand actually moved toward it before stopping.
No. There were people alive. She needed it.
Taylor forced herself onward.
She found another building.
Another family.
Another child.
This one was still breathing when she reached the surface.
Taylor watched New Wave take him from her and didn’t leave until she saw him cough water onto a floating building.
Alive.
Something in her chest loosened, just slightly. Then she went back. The ocean welcomed her without resistance as she descended through the darkness, her own fire lighting the way.
Her vision caught movement ahead, and Taylor accelerated in response.
Blue armour came into view.
For one stupid second she thought it was another body, until the figure adjusted his course and came directly toward her.
Armsmaster.
Taylor stopped.
Of course it was him.
The man who had thanked her for saving his life. The man who had sat in a hospital bed and told her, with absolute certainty, that he wouldn’t be alive without her.
She remembered smiling. She remembered nearly crying because Armsmaster had called what she’d done important.
Taylor looked around at the bodies drifting between buildings that should never have been here. Then she looked back at him.
Armsmaster stopped in front of her.