The unbearable weight of waiting ... - Part 6
Even as Kyle's grapple cord retracted, Caitlyn fired hers. He had brought them back to the roof and now she needed to get them as far from the building as possible. Only, as the grapple caught hold and began retracting, the explosion caught them in its wave of destruction, sending them both tumbling through the air. Caitlyn couldn't keep hold of the young hero.
Sparks fired behind her eyes as she collided with the side of the next building, the cord continuing to retract, dragging her along the surface of the brick work, but she needed to stop it. Kyle had fallen below, into the cloud of dust and dirt thrown up by the collapse of the building they had escaped from. Bracing her feet against the wall, she tried to pull against the retracting cord but whatever powered it was far stronger than her. But not as powerful as her own suit.
It had sat there, beneath her skin, in her blood, recuperating, healing, but she needed it right now. It could heal and feel sorry for itself later. In her mind she screamed at the suit, pleaded with it, begged it, but it remained hidden inside her. Then she remembered she had wanted to get rid of it, to burn it and yet it had still sacrificed itself to save her. A thought crossed her mind.
"I'm sorry. I really am. You saved my life so many times and I just wanted to get rid of you, and that was wrong of me." Her boots scraped against the decades old bricks, sending pieces of it and dust down to mingle with that of the collapsed building. "I should have given you a choice and I give you that now. Help me and you can decide whether you want to leave or stay with me."
She glared down at the still rising cloud. Down there, Kyle could be injured or dead. She had no way of knowing. If she could wrest herself from the retracting grapple cord, she could at least try to find him. Removing the glove would only take away the only thing keeping her aloft, too. She could only allow the grapple to carry her upward, but then it may be too late for Kyle. He could already be dead.
Her upward momentum stopped and she almost began to cry. Not as fast as usual, the suit sloughed over her, covering the clothing Kyle had given to her, the gloves and the boots. Everything. Leaving only Blood Obsidian. With a laugh, she pushed against the wall, the grapple ripping from its anchor point and the cord whipping and disappearing beneath her suit. Her suit. Her legs arced over her head and she began to fall, but that was fine. In this suit, she could survive the fall.
Infrared took over her vision without Caitlyn needing to ask for it and she looked through the fluttering wisp-like cloud of dirt thrown up by the building's collapse. She wished she hadn't. The building used as a base by Fiend had no-one living there, but the brownstones around it did. Fires had broken out, walls crumbling and Caitlyn could see a number of warm bodies needing help.
If Kyle was among them, she would find him, but she needed to help everyone, not only the person she knew. It was the right thing to do.
-+-
High above ...
At this height, few people would bother to look. Only certain supers ever reached up as high as the clouds and, even then, they were almost always on their way from one place to another. They would never see someone hovering amid the clouds, high above the devastation of that collapsed building. A pity, really. Having a lair in the deprived areas of Market Town seemed quite apropos.
The new platform performed as per Fiend's expectations. Vezzpa, or whoever had supplied her, knew what they were doing but lacked vision, focussing far too much upon Vezzpa's gimmick than in taking the technology to its logical outcome. An urban weapons and personnel platform capable of entering the most difficult areas and delivering death-dealing ordnance in practical silence.
Thanks to all the improvements made using Ald-Tech's latest secret innovations, this flight platform would soon play a part in ridding the world of Blood Obsidian. Of removing Caitlyn Carter from a world she did not deserve to live in. Fiend could see her down there, moving from pile of rubble to pile of rubble, pretending she cared. Pretending to be the hero by saving innocents she had put in danger.
Fiend could destroy her, right now, and Caitlyn wouldn't know where the attack had come from. But that wouldn't satisfy Fiend. They needed Caitlyn to know and, one day soon, she would. Police and the fire department had started to arrive and, no matter how much Fiend wanted Caitlyn to pay for what she had done, it would have to wait.
Soon. For now, another lair had to become the primary. More flying platforms created. Better weapons perfected. Then, when Caitlyn Carter least expected it, her doom would come. Fiend laughed as they turned the platform in the air, gripping the fuselage handle, and continued to laugh as they flew away. The laughter comforted them.
-+-
Caitlyn had no problems breathing, the mask of her suit filtering out all the dust and smoke, but others were not faring as well. She must have carried eight people out of the rapidly deteriorating building next door to the one that had collapsed and still she dived back in, her head whipping one way and the other, looking for those tell-tale colours in the infrared vision that told her where to look for more people.
This was her fault. If she hadn't allowed Kyle to drag her out here to look for Fiend's lair, if she hadn't done whatever it was that had made Fiend so pissed, this would never have happened. Somewhere along the line, in the days since she had started using the suit, she had hurt someone. She had hurt someone so bad that they had turned to villainy. That was Caitlyn's curse and her responsibility.
Just as Kyle was her responsibility. If she had only fought harder to persuade him that she was grounded, maybe neither of them would have come here to set off all those explosions. It was like a house of cards, ready to collapse. Or a line of dominoes, ready to topple, taking the next one with it and the next and the next.
"Blood Obsidian." A hand gripped her shoulder and, as she turned, she saw the outline of someone in the infrared glow. "You got them all. Come on, before the police start asking questions."
"K ... Pho-Boy?" She recognised his voice and trusted his word that she had everyone. "Let me."
Stuttering at first, the suit still needing more repairs, she lifted them both up through the dirt and growing smoke until they floated high above the street. The infrared vision shut off, leaving her to look at him through her normal sight. He looked battered, bruised and had blood flowing from a cut on his head, but he was alive. He was safe.
-+-
She couldn't leave the area until she felt certain the FDNH had the fires under control. Buildings to both sides of the destroyed brownstone had suffered but, as she watched from a roof across the street, it didn't look as though anyone had died. Down there, she could see Chief Watson as he coordinated cops to block off the street. Every so often, his eyes rose to the rooftops, but she hid every time.
"Right. Here we go." Kyle tapped on the screen of his phone, a crack spidered across the glass front, but still working. "The computers back at base have analysed the data and we have ... yes! Proof positive that the video was nothing more than an elaborate deepfake."
"How does that help?" She had allowed her own suit to return to its healing hibernation and had taken off one of the gauntlets, given to her by Kyle, to chew upon her fingernails. "The damage is already done. Alaina's reputation is ruined."
"Well, I'm distributing the revealed fraud now. It'll be everywhere before anyone wakes up in the morning." More tapping on the screen and Caitlyn saw that grin of his reappear. "And a super-secret algorithm of Fear's will have scrubbed the original video entirely. We use it to destroy any evidence of Fear, or me, from the world. He likes to remain mysterious. I'm sure it won't stop some rumours, but that's the best we can do, I'm afraid."
Alaina's reputation, ripped to shreds because she happened to be Caitlyn's friend. Dragged into something that had nothing to do with her and Caitlyn had allowed it. Encouraged it. Perhaps giving up being Blood Obsidian wasn't the way to go? Perhaps, instead, she needed to give up something far more precious?
"I've ruined everything." She slumped down and sat back against the brick parapet. "But, down there, helping those people? That felt right. It felt right stopping Spider Monkey and Vezzpa, even though the Ald-Tech facility was destroyed. She needed stopping. I'm just going to have to get used to being alone."
"You'll never be alone." Kyle crouched, reaching out to touch her hand. "You can still have friends, and allies. I've decided we're going to be friends and, no, you don't have a choice. Go home. Get some rest and I'll see you at school. You can keep the suit, but I'm going to have to get the gauntlets back. Later. You did good tonight. Real good. You are a hero."
-+-
By the time she reached King's Field, the first fingers of dawn had started to tickle the sky. If she was going to keep at this, she would seriously need to learn how to balance being a hero with sleeping. Kyle had shown her where she had gone wrong with the gauntlet and now she could control her descent back down to her window.
Clambering inside, she tossed the gauntlets to the floor beside the bed and fell face first onto the covers. Flattened covers. Covers tidied that she distinctly remembered leaving as a pile on the centre of the bed. She lifted her head in time to see the light flare on and see yet another complication rear up before her.
"I said you were grounded, young lady." Aunt Mary, in gown and slippers, arms crossed, glared at Caitlyn.
She simply wasn't catching a break.