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M’gann woke up screaming.
It had become frequent—two or three sleep cycles out of every seven, and the terror came at random times: after two hours, or five, or three. Everyone knew about it, because when M’gann woke up screaming, she did it in her head, and in the heads of everyone still hiding in the caves; but no one knew what she said when she cried out, because she still dreamed in Martian, and M’gann had been so delighted about coming to Earth that she’d never bothered teaching her teammates any words in her native language.
By now, they’d grown use to her voice in their heads, shocking them awake, and no one came running. M’gann crawled out of her blankets and pressed herself against the cave wall, wishing she could pass through it and move about in the world aboveground; she only knew what it must look like from Red Arrow, who went out every few days and came back again a little later than the time before, the expression on his face daring any of them to comment. He still hadn’t seen anyone stirring in the wreckage of the city, but M’gann hadn’t told him where to look.
Through the walls, she could hear someone talking; probably only Conner could hear it too. M’gann extended her mind until it flowed all around the mountain and the caverns beneath, and found the source of her nightmare: someone was at the entrance one of the tunnels, trying to dig their way in.
She listened to the digger’s mind for a long moment before she pulled the rocks down on his head, burying him.
She wouldn’t feel guilty about this. His coming wouldn’t have brought anything good.
*
There was very little color left in the soil or the trees since the League of Shadows had set off the bombs—not that M’gann would have even been able to see the world aboveground, because the dust cloud had blotted out the sun back in July, and the team had retreated to the underground caves of Mount Justice before even that. In many ways, they pretended it was a reprieve: Robin took constant radiation measurements, as if by consulting his home-made computer and Wally's jury-rigged Geiger counter, the world outside would revert back to what had once been normal, or the Justice League might magically break radio silence and let M’gann and her teammates know that everything was going to be all right.
Of course this didn’t happen, and the best way to gauge the passage of time was still by tracking Artemis and Wally’s arguments. Even that calendar was failing; the two fought only intermittently now, instead of every hour, with far less venom than they once had; M'gann thought it might be nostalgia that kept them at it at all, because half of the insults had something to do with their respective faces (she’d heard the phrase, “weird mouth” used more than once), and Wally had gone blind months ago.
Even Kaldur had given up trying to settle them. Once, privately, he’d told M'gann that their arguments were the only thing that still made sense.
“I know you are not human, any more than I am,” he’d said. “But their refusal to accept even this defeat is admirable, and gives us hope. We should follow their example, M’gann.”
Hope was a thing with feathers, Robin had told her. M’gann wondered if hope could swim, too, and knew Kaldur.
*
"It's kind of funny," M'gann told Conner, who still listened, even of he hadn't said a word since Superman had gone off grid, "but I haven't been homesick in months." She swallowed and concentrated; the radiation seeping in from outside was mild, but she still had to adjust her body's tolerance from time to time. "Earth's a lot like Mars, now. It's almost as cold, and, you know, we lived in the caves, and that was just home. It's different, too," she hurried to clarify, "Hello, Megan! I'm not saying that nuclear winter is no big deal! —But it's more like what I grew up with."
Conner still didn't say anything, but M'gann was almost sure that he would have if Red Arrow—Roy, she thought; he hadn't said it was okay to call him that, but there was absolutely no point in having a secret identity anymore—hadn't sulked in through one of the smaller tunnel entrances.
"You shouldn't be this far out of the tunnels," he said, and, like every thought that bled out of his skull, the words were inexplicably angry. M'gann knew better than to take it personally, but Conner still glared at Roy, and she patted his arm softly till he stepped back.
"We were checking the bioship," she offered. "She's still sealing off the main tunnels, but her reservoirs are damaged. We're going to have to find a better solution, or she'll die."
"We'll all die if you can't keep your ship where we need it," Roy snapped back, and M'gann felt her face flush with anger and shame. Conner made a sudden, abortive movement, and it was only the arrival of Wally and Artemis that diverted another fight that wouldn’t solve anyone’s problems.
"C'mon, Red Arrow," Wally called out, "if the ship dies, we'll have even less of a chance than we do now. And besides," he added, "It could hurt M'gann."
It was hurting her now—a low, whining ache in her bones, and she always felt a little sick to her stomach—but all M'gann said was, "the ship and I are linked.”
"She's not going to die, asshole," Artemis said, biting as ever. It was oddly comforting. "And we'll figure something out, if Kid Genius here can give coherent directions for once in his life." That was unfair—of everyone, Wally was perhaps the most precise when giving directions, and had only become more so since he'd gone blind—but M'gann knew what Artemis meant (that Wally did as well went without saying).
The argument died, and Roy shrugged his shoulders as though he didn't care what happened to them, he just couldn't stand their stupidity. He'd done that a lot since he'd lost his arm, as if his already limited patience had also been a casualty. It might have been; the stump still looked ugly and fascinating, and M’gann tried not to stare at it.
They filed out of the perimeter caves, Artemis leading Wally, who led everyone else. M’gann lingered at the mouth of the tunnel that would take them all deeper, and reached out until she could imagine the dusky texture of the rocks aboveground; she wrapped her mind around them and tugged until she’d triggered a landslide, one that everyone underground could probably feel. She kept her face carefully blank when Conner looked back at her, pretending she was as stunned by the rock fall as anyone else.
The team didn’t need to know about the echoes she heard at night, and M’gann didn’t want them to worry. She honestly didn’t know how Kaldur had managed keeping secrets, before. The knowledge twisted itself up in her skull and sat on the tip of her tongue all the time, until it took real effort not to say the words, to relieve the pressure.
*
Winter had fallen at least eight months ago, but it could have been longer; with the sun gone, time had become abstract. M'gann and her teammates had stopped fighting back and started fighting for their lives. Food was scarce and contaminated, no one was ever warm enough, and, as Wally had discovered, going outside without eye protection was at best a gamble. They'd gone through whole storage cabinets full of canned goods before Robin had uncovered the secondary food storage, and even then, there were rations. M'gann felt sorry for Wally, because even though he couldn't run the way he once had, he still needed to eat more than the rest of them; but there wasn't a fair way to calculate anything, and Wally rarely complained (privately, M'gann thought that was the saddest consequence of the war: no one laughed anymore, as if by pretending that nothing was funny, nothing was sad, either).
Everyone had had radiation sickness at least once, and Kaldur said that if it happened again, there wasn’t enough clean blood in the medical bay to make a full transfusion. To make matters worse, the generators Wally and Robin had souped up in the first months underground were starting to fail, and there was no way to fix them; in a few more weeks, the power would go out, maybe for good.
*
Sometimes, Artemis bunked with M'gann and they talked about the world before; Artemis was strongly pragmatic, but even she had regrets and dreams. M'gann looked forward to the overflow she sensed off her Earth-sister, as if the raw and hungry edges of the other girl's mind could touch every empty space; but Artemis spent most of her time with Robin or with Wally, leaning on one and leading the other. M'gann, daunted by Kaldur's confusing optimism and Conner's odd distance, spent too much time listening to the bioship and calculating how long the rest of them had before even the caves were a casualty of war. Sometimes she went to Roy, if he wasn't on a suicide mission above ground; he hated himself enough that he'd at least pick a fight, lash out, and touch her, and M'gann was lonelier that she'd ever been, even lonelier than her first few months away from Mars, so lonely that hand-to-hand practice with a one-armed archer felt intimate and safe.
She could have beaten him, but more often than not, M’gann let Roy pin her, or at least hit her hard enough to bruise. No one commented; they all had different ways of coping, and Conner didn’t have to watch if it really upset him.
*
"Remember when everyone wanted privacy?" M’gann asked Conner one night, so grateful that he’d followed her to her room that she couldn’t stop talking. "I couldn't get out of your head fast enough, and no one would let me use the computer at the same time or explain corset tops (they still doesn't make sense)."
Conner nodded once, twice, like a weight was around his neck. M'gann's chest ached so hard that she became, like Robin, chalant, slithering out from her bedding and clambering up into his lap. It was the closest anyone had gotten to Conner in months, and he went still under her weight, because he had forgotten how to be gentle. So had everyone, M'gann thought.
"I knew about the bombs," she said. "I knew what Batman wanted to do, and I know what the league was thinking when they went above ground. I wasn't supposed to listen, I know, and it wasn't even an emergency yet, but I knew, and I think the league knew too."
Conner slid his hands up over her spayed knees and pressed his palms hard against her waist, like maybe he was trying to hold the words inside of her; M'gann knew she was babbling, but kept talking anyway. "They went off in stages, all over Earth. I think Captain Atom was stopping them for a while, but there were a lot and even the League of Shadows was caught in the last blast, I don’t know if they wanted to get away or if they just wanted to ruin everything forever.
“I never told Robin that. I was patched in through Uncle J'onn and he was still in range and I could hear them. I'd never heard Black Canary scream before, had you? She screamed so loud and Uncle J'onn tried to block me out. Batman was crying."
Conner was crying now, she realized; M'gann quieted and pressed herself close against him, memorizing the sensation of his sobs, the way his chest jumped and twitched under her hands. She'd never been so close to any grief save her own.
She didn’t tell him anything else, even though she wanted to. She wasn’t being fair by telling him all of her secrets, even if knowing what had really happened to the League, and to the surface was a terrible burden. In a way it was all hearsay—Roy kept them mostly updated about the quality if life on the surface, but he was generally closemouthed—and M’gann didn’t want to think about the odd, echoing memories she’d caught hold of through the link with her uncle, the sensation of the fire that had swelled over the earth, and the dust and sickness that had followed it.
Conner’s sobs became audible, and the sound ricocheted off the walls. She hid her face in his throat, and felt the vibrations deep in the bones of her ear; it helped block out the scratching sound in the walls. Someone really was alive outside, and angry; she could feel them trying to get in. It was the most terrible sensation left on Earth.
*
It was a brave new world and no one cared that M'gann was in their heads; the link was static, low and comforting. M'gann thought it was like the radio plays she’d listened to before they got a TV on Mars, layered and full of ripples. At night she could hear bits and pieces of thought from everyone in the cave: Kaldur singing underwater in the retaining pool, Robin counting backwards from a thousand by sevens and not thinking about Batman; Wally and Artemis learning Morse code, Conner going out and leaning against the bioship, even though M'gann had told him she never had the answers. When Roy was in the cave he haunted the old sick bay, pretending his missing limb didn’t hurt, and broadcasting his resentment so loudly—how dare the League send him to baby-sit the junior Justice League—that she didn’t need to be psychic to hear him.
M’gann herself had no routines. She floated from one teammate to another and tried to filter her unquenchable optimism into their skulls until the one time Kaldur woke and caught hold of her. She should have known better, really; her dreams had always been the least like his.
“You cannot make this easier for them.” Kaldur was patient and serene and he made her feel ashamed of everything she was.
“I’m not changing the way they think,” she said defensively. To do so would have been an unspeakable invasion. “I’m just letting them dream about things getting better. It’s not even so bad down here, they don’t understand.”
“M’gann,” Kaldur leaned on the sound of her name, his voice heavy through its syllables, and she quieted. “This is not their home.”
*
By now, all of them knew Robin's name was really Dick, that his eyes were blue, and that Batman was also Bruce Wayne. But they pretended they didn’t, even after Artemis had sat on Robin’s chest and held him down while he’d screamed and sweated out his first fever underground. When he finally stopped raving, he didn’t bother to put his dark glasses on again.
No one ever said anything, at least not aloud, but M’gann felt the quality of mercy thick in the air; it might have been what kept all of them alive.
But M'gann was often confused about the differences between pity and compassion, and this was no exception. Once Artemis left Wally sleeping and curled up in M’gann’s bed for the night, ostensibly to explain.
"Pity means you're sorry, but you're glad it's not your problem," she explained. “It can get kinda ugly, if you ask me. Compassion means we're in this together. I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you, I don't think you've pitied anyone a day in your life."
“Like you and Wally,” M’gann said, grinning.
“Ugh, do not even start with me.”
M’gann at least did not continue, even though it was true: Artemis was the only one who could spend any amount of time with Wally and not feel sorry for him—and tonight excepted, she spent all of her time with him; Robin kept making jokes about service animals.
“I wish we could get out of these fucking caves,” Artemis said, her voice tight. “I can’t take it much longer.”
“What if this is the only safe place left?” M’gann asked. She practiced making her hair another color, first blonde like Artemis, then dark like Conner.
“I’d rather take my chances. The League of Shadows can’t be much better off, right?”
“What if they’re all dead?” Her hair was orange now, for variety. M’gann was pretty sure it looked awful.
“What if you had a little faith, M’gann, God, isn’t that my line?” Artemis rolled onto her stomach and knocked M’gann with one bony elbow. They’d all lost weight. “But we can’t stay here forever. Wally can’t even run down here, Robin’s legit going crazy, Conner’s practicing selective mutism, we’ve had designated tunnels for shit ever since the plumbing backed up—and I’m not saying I was on a schedule before this mess, but between the weird food situation and whatever circadian rhythms you’re following, my period hasn’t been regular for the last three months. The caves aren’t really viable.”
“It’s not that bad—“
“Yes, it is. It was that bad three weeks ago, when Wolf got radiation poisoning so bad Conner had to put him down. You cannot tell me that wasn’t fucking catastrophic.”
M’gann wanted to point out that things could be so much worse, but Artemis was right; mercy-killing Wolf had been awful in every imaginable way, and if Conner had been bad before, he was impossible now. Even though the caves felt reminiscent of life on Mars, M’gann had triggered too many rockslides in the past week to really believe that they were still safe inside the mountain.
“This sucks,” she said instead.
Artemis let out a short, harsh breath and awkwardly wrapped one arm around M’gann’s shoulders.
“We’ll laugh about this someday,” Artemis said, but the words were hollow. M’gann appreciated the sentiment anyhow; Wally always said that being comforting wasn’t in Artemis’ wheelhouse.
*
M’gann wasn’t really surprised when Artemis cottoned on to the cause of all the rockslides, but she had hoped Artemis would understand. Unfortunately, not only did Artemis misunderstand, but the entire team had stormed into her room and started yelling at her like she was some sort of monster. They hadn’t been this hostile since the Red Tornado fiasco, and even that paled in comparison.
“What the fuck, M’gann!” Artemis screamed, held back only by the circle of Wally’s arms. “Someone’s trying to get in—someone’s outside—and all you do is pull rocks down on them?!”
Roy looked almost as angry, and Conner was the only one standing between M’gann and the rest of the team. She pressed her palms, her forehead against his back, hiding a little and collecting her thoughts before she answered.
“Something is outside,” she said, and for the first time in a long time, spoken words were not enough. “It wants to come in. That’s not a good idea.”
“M’gann, choose your words carefully,” Kaldur sounded like her uncle, and a bright quick memory of the fires that had burned him made M’gann fumble even more with the language, with her fears, with the accusations that radiated thick in the room.
“I can hear him,” she said, wildly. “He’s outside trying to get in and he keeps pulling away the rocks and it doesn’t matter how many times I kill him, he gets back up.”
“Are you saying,” Wally asked, “that there is a zombie trying to get into the caves?” He sounded incredibly patient, even as he pulled Artemis close against him. She looked mad enough to bite.
“For God’s sake,” Robin said, “I don’t know what made Miss M think that this was even remotely okay, but zombies? You’re gonna go with that?”
“Everyone, be quiet,” Kaldur said sharply. “We will let her speak. Perhaps there is a reason for M’gann’s behavior; if there is, I would very much like to hear it.”
“I don’t know,” she cried. Conner looked at her awkwardly over his shoulder and she realized that she’d fisted her hands in the thin fabric of his shirt. She loosed her grip and tried to smooth out the cotton, but her nails had gone sharp with stress and torn it. “I don’t know,” she said again, softer this time. She gave up on words and established a link, shoving the memory of the thing’s mind at them, drowning out everything else that was said.
They understood, then; but that didn’t make matters much better.
*
Roy saw the thing—things, there was more than one—the next time he went aboveground, and even he seemed upset by them.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he told Kaldur, who told everyone else. “They’re not undead, exactly, but they don’t seem human and they don’t die easy. No wonder M’gann kept hearing them, even after she brought the mountain down on their heads.” He shook his head and rubbed at the stump of his arm. “Maybe they’re just desperate, but I saw them kill some of their own—children, even. Broke their necks when they couldn’t keep up.”
“What do you think our best course of action is?” Kaldur asked. “Is there any way we can reclaim portions of the town and waterfront?”
Roy shook his head. “I hate to admit defeat, but there’s not way we can hold our own up there, not with the kids in the shape they’re in. The terrain is bad, the sanitation is worse than what you’ve got here. Your Martian might be right—better to stay in the caves, at least for a while longer.”
“This is a troubling development, my friend.”
“Tell me about it.”
*
Roy made one last trip to the surface, and when he didn’t come back, Conner went up to the mouth of the tunnels and punched the walls until the ceiling collapsed; Artemis and Robin met him in the last perimeter cave, where they rigged the cavern with handfuls of explosives. M’gann and Wally sat with their feet in Kaldur’s reservoir, damp cloth over their faces to muffle the dust that choked the caverns until everyone was back within the central tunnels, away from the surface. Even the bioship moved further in, taking on the smallest shape M’gann had seen from her.
“Well, what next?” Artemis asked, shaking debris from her quiver. “We’ve just destroyed a good percentage of our active tunnels, and I don’t know what that’s gonna do to our air filtration.”
“Only about twenty-seven percent,” Robin said. “But I’ve got zero clue about the filtration, we already had to seal a lot off when we moved down here.”
“It is simple,” Kaldur said. “There are tunnels below the reservoir, and there is the whole of the Earth beneath us. We will seek these places out, and remain below ground until the winter passes.”
“When do you think that’ll be?” Wally asked. Artemis reached out and ruffled the dust from his hair, and he leaned into her open palm; M’gann felt oddly jealous. “That’s the problem with nuclear winter—everything we don’t already know is just rampant speculation. You have no way of knowing when surface life will return, let alone an environment suitable for civilization!”
“I’ve told you before,” M’gann said, “I lived my whole life on Mars underground.”
“That was before I thought I was going to have to live the rest of my life underground,” Artemis said. “Give us some time to get used to the idea, then you can indoctrinate me.”
Time was the one thing they had in abundance. M’gann let her feet float off the ground and she hovered in midair, hoping, as her teammates gathered what remained and prepared for the long journey down.