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Riley Davis had three treasures, three possessions she prized above all others. Her life, won through blood, sweat, and tears, and preserved for twenty long years after the end of the world. Her anonymity, the once scarcely tolerated necessity that had long since blossomed into a beloved, if fragile, veil. And her brain, or less the chunk of it she had cut out.
She could never have expected to lose all three the same day.
That morning was exceedingly normal. Suspiciously so, Riley might have thought, had she examined it with a critical eye, but she had long ago given it up (as well as its pair, her trusty poisonous cloud spitting eye, and her backup weight lifting eye, which had really been more of a side project slash curiosity she had toyed with during the long hours alone in the pocket dimension with only vats for company). And so, deprived of her critical eye and its multitude of sensors and quantum processor powered learning algorithm, she had instead proceeded blithely through her typical morning routine. She woke when the sun had finally risen enough for its beams to slip past the unadorned white cloth framing her windows and shine directly into her non-critical, non-poisonous, and most certainly non-buff eyes. She had then grumbled and mumbled and otherwise expressed a healthy amount of disdain regarding how goddamn awful mornings were. This sentiment continued in a similar vein as she dragged herself out of her bedroom into the somewhat spacious combination kitchen living room to supplicate herself before her rather cantankerous stove and gently coax it into heating water enough to boil that she might make coffee and brave facing another day in her 30s.
It was at that moment that, had Riley been better ocularly equipped, that she might have noticed the first red flag that her morning was on the path to being perfectly average. If one were to have kept a history of her morning prostration before her most persnickety appliance (and rest assured, her critical eye would most certainly have maintained such a record), then it would have been a simple matter to derive the average time she spent bringing water to a boil each morning, the scope of which extended from a lively 184.3 seconds all the way down to the zombie adjacent shamble of 540 seconds on the nose (and not a nose with geiger counter and lie detection modules either). As it happened, Riley had neither an accumulated sample for statistical analysis nor an eye interested in performing such a task for her, so she therefore failed to notice her water boiling run that morning had clocked in at a balmy 331.02 seconds, which anyone with eyes to see, normal or otherwise, would recognize as the precise average of water boiling time on her crabby, cruddy stove.
Alas, Riley’s brain had needed coffee to fuel it ever since she carved it up, and that morning was no different. The coffee making process had continued without neither pondering pause nor inquisitive interruption, and by the time her brain was sufficiently sated on surprisingly satisfactory water flavored with ground up beans, neither the water boiling time nor even the middling coffee flavor that followed had properly registered as noteworthy in their non-noteworthiness. Her first proper chance to notice something was amiss that morning was when she had her daily bowl of oatmeal and water, which was udderly unexceptional in every possible way. But really, no one could blame her for missing that particular signpost—who gives a shit about oatmeal? Certainly not Riley, who partook of it every morning not out of love for the flavor, texture, or even nutritional value. As the old saying goes: when in Rome, eat whatever roams. And on Dalet, that meant oats and goats. Also plums, but prunes were for prunes—she was 34, not 64!
Of course, Dalet had more going for it than oats, goats, and prunes. Those were simply the most plentiful resources and therefore the cheapest ones. If Riley wanted to afford something more luxurious to spice up her day of thus far overlooked perfect mediocrity—and she was quite interested in picking up a box of oatmeal cinnamon cookies from Daniels & Daughter that evening—then she needed to get out of the kitchen and get to work. She rinsed and washed her dishes, did the same for herself, then plunked down the stairs after pulling on some fresh clothes to face the day. Having safely navigated the task of descending from her quarters to the downstairs hallway, she took stock. Out the window facing her plain, wooden stairs, the oat field was swaying and sashaying to the beat of the passing wind, and her goats were grazing in the fields beyond their fence. Out there with them, Angela and Jonas were still making the rounds milking. Later than Riley would have liked, given the how high the sun had managed to drag itself along its daily excursion through the sky, but she would take their slow plodding over forcing herself up out of her bed’s embrace early enough to manhandle her goats’ moneymakers herself. Her office was securely locked as it ought to have been, and the adjacent storeroom likewise contained no unexpected surprises, only excess soaps and the lye and oil she needed to make them.
Things only went off script when she stepped out into the storefront. Vivian was behind the counter, as well she should have been, given the shop had opened 21 minutes ago according to the clock running 9 minutes slow hung on the far wall that she had still not gotten around to fixing. Little Bradley was also skulking around in the corner, taking in the scents pervading the air as he did every morning until Riley came down because Vivian was too kind-hearted (or perhaps just lazy) to usher him out if he wasn’t going to actually pay for anything. Both of them were expected morning fixtures in The Soap Shop (Vivian, and even Angela and Jonas, made daily recommendations for new, flashier names, all of which she summarily rejected on the disclosed basis of valuing simplicity and on the un disclosed basis of valuing her anonymity too much to draw attention, much less brazenly hang her surname over the door like Daniels & Daughter).
“Riley Davis?”
What was unexpected that morning in her shop was the presence of one Faultline and some of her misfits.
Riley had already known a bit about Faultline’s Crew, as they had called themselves in the early days, from her time in Brockton Bay. She’d later learned about their integral role in the development of the portal network during her infrequent trips out of the pocket dimension before Gold Morning. Beyond that, she only knew they had rebranded as Palanquin and little else. Riley had steadfastly kept her nose out of the world of parahuman affairs, only hearing about the odd bits of news that trickled through her little corner of Dalet like a dead fish’s corpse floating downstream until one creature or another took advantage of the free meal. Not one of those biographical tidbits explained why Faultline and the four cronies she had with her were in town, much less in her shop.
The answer, beyond a shadow of a doubt or even a shadow cast by a framed picture of doubt, was they were here for Riley. Or rather, for the person she had once been until she skipped town during the chaos of Gold Morning. Fortuitously, Riley had prepared for just such an eventuality by keeping a bugout bag in her office, stocked with essentials like a flashlight and batteries, a compass and map to the closest portal, a wad of cash that was slim from years of abusing diet pills, and a towel. She just needed to convince the scary woman in a welder’s mask that she was not Riley Davis for long enough to—
“I’m so sorry, Ms. Davis,” Vivian said, interrupting Riley’s thoughts with eerily convenient comedic timing. “I tried askin’m to leave ‘n’ come back later, but they insisted on waitin’ for you. Said it was awful urgent.”
This put rather a damper on Riley’s nascent plan to sow confusion then cheese it. The second hand of the clock on the wall snapped right two times and was poised to make another, veritably quivering with anticipation when she finally managed to regain her bearings. How thoroughly she had actually recovered, however, was as debatable as she was tall. Which was to say, not very, because although she had undone the adjustments that kept her physically 12 in perpetuity, her genetics had ordained she would never grow taller than five foot nothing.
Little Riley Davis, all sixty inches of her, looked Faultline right in the eyeslit and said, “Vivian, Angela and Jonas oughta be just about done milkin’. Show little Bradley out, then go help’em out with them orders we got goin’ out to Gimmel t’morrow.”
“Ms. D—?”
“Flip the sign closed on yer way out, ‘n’ don’t none’a y’all come snoopin’. I imagine our guests here wouldn’t take too kindly to it.” Vivian looked as unsure of Riley’s orders as Faultline’s two non-masked associates were of Riley’s accent. When Vivian hesitated, shooting the five parahumans a questioning look, Riley tacked on, “Go on, now, git.”
It took nearly a minute for the young woman to shoo the only (kind of) patron out the front door, flip the sign, then scurry out—54 ticks of the clock over the door, to be precise—but eventually Riley was left alone in her storefront with five exceedingly dangerous individuals. Truthfully, she only recognized four of her uninvited guests, but Riley imagined the woman with regularly spaced bands of golden fur, an extra set of eyes, and twin, lashing tails, was more than capable enough of murdering her in some horrific way. Riley didn’t know what lout with more money than sense had gone to the trouble of hiring mercenaries to make her head roll, but what she did know was what she planned to do about it.
“Y’all are welcome to a free bar’a soap each.”
The sheer generosity of this offer clearly caught the assembled parahumans off guard. It was, after all, not every day that one was offered a free bar of soap with no strings attached. And really, after the no doubt strenuous work they had put into tracing a two decades old cold trail, how could any reasonable person even consider offering less to dissuade them? ‘Clearly,’ they must have been thinking, ‘this woman knows a thing or two about bribery.’
Faultline, however, was clearly not one to be swayed by a little palm sudsing. “We aren’t here to buy soap.”
“I did say ‘free,’” Riley quite reasonably pointed out.
“We aren’t interested in soap, free or otherwise.”
“I don’ believe that for a second,” was Riley’s, again, quite reasonable reply. “E’rybody needs soap. ‘Less one’a y’all’s power is makin’ soap, which don’ make no sense. Ain’t no passenger work like that.” And then, because Riley could only imagine Faultline had been making an attempt to negotiate vis a vis whether Riley got to keep her head attached to her neck, she added, “Nine bars’a soap total, final offer.”
Riley suspected an astute individual like Faultline would no doubt notice that nine bars of soap did not divide cleanly between five individuals. One might then wonder whether it was the correct course of action for Riley to append four bars of soap to her original, more easily split offer of five bars. Little Bradley would doubtlessly have inquired as such, had he still been lurking in the shop, but Riley’s gamble was a maneuver too advanced for a boy the tender age of six-years-and-three-months (or so he claimed, though he was actually six-years-and- two -months old because, unlike Faultline, he was not astute enough to correctly determine April was only two months rather than three after February).
Why, then, had Riley amended her bribe to nine bars of soap to be divided between five mercenaries? Two reasons, as it happened: First, Riley rather hoped the uneven spoils might incite an argument between the mercenaries over how to correctly apportion the bubbly bounty. If, for example, the rather sweaty Newter decided his body odor necessitated a minimum of two whole bars of soap, he might attempt to knock his comrades unconscious with a quick swipe of his tail, creating a chance for Riley to make like a tree. And if by chance he succeeded, then Riley would have four fewer issues to worry about.
The second reason was Riley couldn’t afford to be giving away free bars of soap left and right. She did have a business to run, after all, assuming she made it out of this alive.
As it turned out, Riley didn’t need to worry about her stock’s integrity, as negotiations took a somewhat unexpected turn when the already unexpected Faultline doubled-down with another wrinkle to Riley’s morning that not even her long missing critical eye could have foreseen.
“We need you to save Newter’s life.”
One rather important factoid Riley had forgotten about Faultline’s operation is that they brought in the big bucks, not just as mercenaries but as one of the few sources for creating portals between dimensions.
“A million dollars,” Riley repeated, not certain she’d heard right. If she had, then it was no wonder her bribe had landed flat. Seven digits could buy quite a lot of bars of soap. Riley would know; she sold soap for a living.
“I think there’s an echo in here,” Newter, Riley’s prospective patient remarked, his reedy words full of desperation masquerading as indifference. She was an old hand at recognizing concealed desperation from bartering with penny-pinching patrons in desperate need of a good scrub.
One million dollars was a very enticing offer. In addition to its capacity to pay for heaps of soap, that much money meant Riley would never need to work again. Her days could be filled with frivolous things like painting goats for fun and all the oatmeal cinnamon cookies she could eat. She could even buy a better stove ! The prospect of coffee without needing to appeal to the whims of her capricious stove was even more intoxicating than the cookies she could gorge on without concern for cost.
Yes, one million dollars was a very enticing offer. Which was why it wounded Riley to tell them, “No deal.”
The perk of wearing full-face coverage like Spitfire’s gas mask was it nearly prevented anyone without eyes crammed full of tinkertech (or else the piece of an alien that amounted to the same) from seeing any pesky slip-ups in facial expression while trying to maintain the hardened veneer of a mercenary. This advantage unfortunately provided little protection against the wearer blurting, “What,” in a deadpan tone that would have felt equally at home as a response to Faultline announcing she secretly had never known what she was doing and had been bullshiting everyone into thinking otherwise. Which was not true, so far as Riley knew, though she was forced to admit that would rather be the point if such an incongruous statement were true of the consummate professional. And how delicious the scandal would be, if it were!
As if she were aware of the unflattering turn in Riley’s thoughts, Faultline chose that moment to remind everyone present that whatever it was she did—be that genuine expertise or long-con bullshiting of a caliber fit for ripping a tank a new hole—she was actually rather good at it. “Concerned people will ask questions about where the money came from?”
“Naturally.” Riley gestured at Newter, as if all the answers were contained in his orange skin and his stained, obviously purposefully ripped, and too damn tight jeans. “I fix him, and y’all’s problems are solved. Roll on outta town, ‘n’ that’s that. Me, I got y’all’s money, sure, but my whole situation’s been knocked topsy turvy.”
“I’m sorry,” Spitfire said, cutting in once more. Once interrupted, twice not so shy, it seemed. “You realize you can drop the accent, right? We already know who you are. You aren’t fooling anybody.”
“You do realize I’ve lived here for near two-thirds’a my life, right?” Riley remarked with the sort of unimpressed drawl she typically reserved for patrons who tried to haggle prices with her. And also little Bradley. Especially Bradley.
It may have been that Spitfire had more to say on the topic of regional accents in a post-apocalyptic world, but fortunately for everyone uninterested in linguistic osmosis by proximity, Newter’s body chose that particular moment to express its displeasure with what Riley later learned was the hyper aggressive cancer riddling the better parts of his body (and therefore neither his spleen nor taint, which no one would ever refer to as ‘better’). He started to hack and cough and wheeze and every manner of expelling gas short of fart or sneeze, which wasn’t exactly great when touching his bodily fluids would cause one to hold onto the floor to avoid falling into the sky for the all of one second it took to succumb to a completely insensate stupor for the better part of a day.
Which is why Riley was more than a little surprised when the unknown lady with tails caught the orange skinned living proximity high as he doubled over and nearly collapsed to the floor. She touched his bare arm. She touched the skin exposed by his objectively too tight shirt riding up. She even rubbed his scalp through his hair with not just one but both of her tails, which elongated enough to reach his head as she murmured assurances so sweet that Danika Daniels herself would be sorely tempted to incorporate them into a recipe. “I’ve got you, baby. Don’t worry, we’ll convince her to take care of you. You’ll be eating junk food and clinging to the ceiling soon, Newtles.” But what surprised Riley was not the physical affection, nor the whispered promises, nor even the use of the pet name ‘Newtles’ (though, while not surprising, was most certainly cringe inducing).
The tailed lady didn’t collapse.
“Riley,” Faultline said, and if Riley didn’t know Faultline’s reputation better, she’d have thought the cold-blooded mercenary sounded concerned. No, she must have been mishearing. “I’m laying all my cards on the table.” Aha! Riley thought. Faultline was most definitely upset, but over the orange walking diorama of metastasis letting the cat out of the bag and ruining their bargaining position. “Newter’s condition is beyond the care of a normal doctor. He needs you . I am prepared to double that offer, provide you a new identity, and cover the costs of selling your business and moving to Gimel, where you may enjoy your life and wealth in anonymity.” Yes, Riley thought, clearly upset. Clearly. Upset about... “Is that acceptable? Will you save him?”
A feeling began to settle in Riley’s gut. A feeling like eating the last oatmeal cinnamon cookie in the box. But only like it. Adjacent, perpendicular—not the same.
“Please,” the tailed lady begged as she cradled her ‘Newtles’ like a porcelain sculpture, precious and breakable. And orange. “Please, Ms. Davis, please!”
Maybe it was the offer of money and the means to enjoy it. Or perhaps Riley was off balance from seeing a woman known only as a cold, calculating mercenary concerned for her underling. It was most certainly not any organ in her body increasing threefold in size at the wavering hope in Newter’s eyes as he looked at Riley. Certainly not that.
It helped that none of them had used the name she’d left behind along with the rest of Bet. Riley didn’t think ‘Riley Davis’ could survive dredging up her yard and that name.
“Fine.” Riley turned and took a step towards the door to the hallway and out back. Just one. Then she needed to take a moment because she felt a smidge unsteady. She wasn’t feeling overcome or anything. She was 99.99% certain she wasn’t, which was quite certain indeed. “One mil, but one of y’all is diggin’ it up. I hate diggin’.” Riley took another wobbly, tottering step. She was fine. Fine . 99.99 9 percent certain.
“Digging what up...?”
Riley had to swallow thickly before she could answer. Twice.
“My third most prized possession.”
As it turned out, displacing dirt from the base of an old oak tree was not the secret cure to cancer. If it were, someone would most certainly have discovered it long before that particularly sweltering afternoon in Riley’s grazing fields. No, there were several more tasks that needed accomplishing, and Riley was all too happy to delegate them to Shamrock, Spitfire, and Schrodinger, which Riley had come to learn was the name of the tailed lady who was apparently immune to Newter’s debilitating power. She set Faultline and Schrodinger to excavating the canister she had buried there herself under cover of darkness the first night after staking her claim to the land. Shamrock and Spitfire, meanwhile, were to start conveying several heavy pieces of equipment from their normal resting place in the somewhat cramped, dirt-floored workshop nearby to the storeroom in the main building, so that Vivian, Angela, and Jonas could continue handling outstanding orders where they couldn’t be prying eyes or ears.
Faultline promptly vetoed Riley’s plan upon learning she and Schrodinger were going to be unearthing something integral to saving Newter. Riley, who may have been a tiny bit too accustomed to being the head honcho of her farm, most certainly did not pout at this rejection of her authority.
“But you can—” Riley argued, wiggling her fingers then pantomiming a tiny explosion complete with a ‘pwooosh!’ of imaginary dirt being blasted to smithereens. More compelling sound effects—and also logic, yes, that too!—one would be hard pressed to produce.
And yet Faultline managed just that. Minus the sound effects. “Riley,” she began, with the sort of weariness only a true professional being forced to dumb down her explanation to her client’s level could muster, “my power could damage the canister.”
“It’s hermetically sealed! With tinkertech!”
“Is it made from organic components?”
“Uh...”
“Nothing non-organic whatsoever? Nothing my power would have even the slightest chance of breaking down on an atomic level ?”
“Well when you put it that way —”
And so, Faultline redelegated the task of digging to Shamrock, whose power of manipulating probability would “maximize the efficacy and safety of digging up the canister” (Faultline’s words), and instead put Schrodinger and Spitfire on the “grunt work” (Riley’s words). This conveniently left Faultline without an immediate task, an observation that left Riley begrudgingly impressed until it became apparent the mercenary intended to use that ostensibly free time to interrogate her like a cat that tangled itself in Christmas lights then proceeded to worsen its predicament to the point of nearly cleaving itself in half from sheer constriction. Which was to say, Faultline was both horrified by what Riley had done to herself and yet simultaneously (and extremely begrudgingly) impressed by the magnitude of the dubious accomplishment.
“You cut out your Gemma,” Faultline flatly repeated, each word slowly enunciated with excruciating clarity as if unsure she had heard Riley correctly, her tone paradoxically dulled by shock and sharp enough that each syllable cut the presently non- parahuman Riley. Even the sidelined for infirmity Newter was so astonished he overlooked the perfect opportunity to sneak in a, ‘Is there an echo in here?’
“That’s what I said,” Riley did not reply. Instead, she settled on the marginally more diplomatic to the point of pedantry, “That’s an oversimplification.”
“Could you provide a more advanced one as you are?” Faultline fired right back.
“Not really!” At her admission, Newter gave Riley a wide, bleary-eyed look of panic that rather effectively conveyed ‘Oh shit am I going to die?’ with nary a sound made other than a faint gurgle that may or may not have been his stomach beginning to digest his heart after it fell in mortal terror. “Oh, don’t worry your pretty lil’ head about it, Newtles ! Ain’t nuthin’ permanent!”
He managed to focus his gaze long enough to fix her with a glower that could have curdled milk, but thankfully the morning’s harvested goat milk was already on its way to the store room. “Only Schro can use that name.”
There are situations in life when understanding transcended words so completely and thoroughly that two people who did not have an intimate knowledge and understanding of one another ordinarily required to speak without words could nevertheless convey their exact thoughts with a simple, shared glance. This universal truth neatly explains how Riley and Faultline looked to one another and, despite neither having seen the other in 22 years and the slit of Faultline’s visor presenting a rather difficult impediment to share a simple glance through, they both still immediately understood what the other was thinking and unequivocally agreed with each other that no one ought to use the name ‘Newtles,’ except to belittle those that did, under pain of excruciatingly gruesome death.
This proximately telepathic moment having passed, Riley returned her attention to Newter, whose groggy gaze was shifting between them both, having apparently deduced something had just happened but not having grasped the nature of it. “I built a failsafe, n‘case I needed it again.”
Faultline grunted, a wondrous sort of sound that conveyed entire worlds of emotion. Mostly disbelief, in this situation. “That you didn’t kill yourself is already a miracle.” Left unspoken but heard all the same by Riley, ‘Even you cannot reverse that.’
It was at that moment that Riley felt something very strange that she had not felt in 22 years, a sensation that slithered up her spine and took her by the short hairs. Her heart rate accelerated, shaken into a steady gallop of th-thumps not unlike the tracks as a train roared past overhead. Her palms slicked over with a sheen of sweat, fingers twitching with the urge to act. Her lips curled back, baring a smile that straddled the thin line between mania and exuberance. Newter flinched away from the visage before him, and though Faultline did not retreat, Riley didn’t need her critical eye to see how the woman nearly thrummed with restraint.
“A miracle. Yeah, that sounds ‘bout right.” Riley looked to Newter, then Faultline, then returned to her patient-to-be. “Sounds like y’all could use one’a them right now, don’tcha think?”
Newter gulped, his throat visibly bobbing in time with a bead of sweat trailing down his throat. “Y-Yeah. Yes. Please .”
Good. She needed him a bit scared. Blacksmiths worked with steel. A... sawbones like herself needed material more pliable than that.
Especially when she wasn’t so sharp herself anymore.
Newter excused himself when the time came to break the seal, a hand to his mouth to hold back the threat of bile. Riley couldn’t blame him—she wouldn’t want to see someone else get cut open right before she was scheduled to be either. Spitfire and Schrodinger had also retreated behind the improvised curtain made from Riley’s old sheets and some clotheslines, ostensibly to double-check Riley’s work area was ready for her. A nice gesture, nothing more. Not even Riley herself knew exactly what she needed to be ready.
She would once it was back in.
Shamrock stood at the ready, canister in hand. On this plan, Faultline had firmly agreed with Riley. Although Riley had designed the mechanism contained within to be fully operable by herself, there was simply no reason to not have the precog be the person in charge of triggering the reintegration process. Riley looked to Faultline, who looked to Shamrock, who looked to Riley, who looked to Shamrock. Yes, there was quite a substantial amount of looking all around, as each of them silently verified with the other two that it was time to begin. The looks all around having thus concluded, and with the squeamish safely out of sight, it was indeed time to begin.
Riley pressed her thumbs to twin, inlaid pads on the seal then leaned forward with her non critical, poison spitting, or weight lifting eye held wide open for the third biometric scan. The seal reviewed these checks against its stored records and, having concluded it was at least 60% certain it was Riley Davis attempting to open it (It was 80.01% percent certain, as it happened, with the lingering 19.99% accounted for by the human body changing over time and that time Riley nearly removed half her thumb after not following proper safety protocols while harvesting oats once back in 2023), it unlocked. The seal slid aside, and the masterpiece Riley had expected to be her last act as a Tinker quietly rose from within.
The design was deceptive, equal parts simple and complicated and entirely built out of pure junk. A rod of cloudy glass that didn’t look the slightest bit sanitary, its contents a mass of grayish flesh not unlike a hocked up loogie mixed with days old lasagna, light on the sauce. Spindly, segmented shards of slightly rusted steel surrounded the rod like a spider’s legs with just enough allowance at the apex of the rod for a limited grip of fraying, stained twine. Any reasonable person would first double-check whether they were up-to-date on their tetanus shot before handling such a thing, and despite being forewarned by Riley, Shamrock wavered, her hand hesitant to take hold of the grip. Faultline shifted, poised to step forward and take the risk instead, but before her toe could so much as lift, Shamrock pulled the device free.
The truth was, Riley had not ‘cut out’ her Gemma. She had certainly removed a portion of her Corona Pollentia, that much was true, but to describe that as removal of the Gemma was not dissimilar to saying she had designed an eye that spit poisonous gas. Accurate enough, but not correct . A flamethrower doesn’t throw flames; it throws gas , and when that gas hits the pilot light—presto!—flames. Her poison cloud spitting eye actually synthesized and stored a perfectly safe compound out of aqueous humor and light. It was only once said compound was exposed to the nitrogen in the air that it became dangerous. Riley had triggered very early in life, and any neurosurgeon worth their salt knew there was a direct correlation between young triggers and pronounced, dimpled Corona Pollentia. Not only that, they’d know that crippling the Gemma doesn’t make the Corona Pollentia—doesn’t make powers —stop working. Instinctive and uncontrollable, certainly, but still there.
Riley Davis had powers. She had broken that connection, completely, and she was about to reforge it anew—by proxy.
Shamrock raised the rod to Riley’s head and set it in place, the tips of its spidery limbs sinking into Riley’s scalp and autonomously orienting itself. The glass container lowered itself as still more of the arms cut and rolled away the flesh. She ought to have been bleeding like a stuck pig, and had she been asked at that moment, she couldn’t have explained why she wasn’t beyond, “Tinker stuff.” Instead, neat bundles of flesh left her skull exposed, stark white and disintegrating into particulate that rose against gravity, up around and past the descending wad of not-a-loogie-no-matter-what-it-looks-like flesh that had been stored in the rod. Like a video of a bullet rocketing through a skull played in reverse and slowed to a crawl, Riley’s precious brain fragment slipped inside the open hole in her skull as powderized bone clumped and settled and reconstituted into a smooth white dome for her skin rolls to settle over and seal.
Riley saw stars, broken constellations suspended in the sky like graves, and as she plummeted to the Earth and her fragile prison of meat and bone, as she woke to cries of “Riley?!” and Shamrock’s arms around her, she knew it had worked.
“Okay okay okay okay !” Riley wetly forced out from between clenched teeth as she pulled herself upright, brought her hand to her bloody lips, and spat the tip of her tongue into her palm like a wad of gum spent of flavor. She swallowed the blood in her mouth, the taste a letter from an old friend she wanted to forget but had no choice but to meet. “Shamrach, go cush Shibyl’s thro—shee’s the really ol’ goa’ with the chipped horn, can’t missh her—and bring me her body. I need matherials.”
Shamrock rushed out into the fields without complaint, leaving behind the broken pieces of Riley’s device and its container laid on the floor, dropped in her haste to catch Riley before she fell. Ways to reassemble and improve them were already flooding Riley’s mind, overwhelming in their intensity as she staggered towards where Spitfire and Schrodinger had been peeking around the curtain like two children hiding in their overgrown pillow fort. Gas mask and golden fur alike scurried out of her way like spooked cats, and she stumbled her way past to where a large, sturdy wooden table she’d had for nearly as long as her farm was set up with a tarp thrown over it and an old flannel sheet over that.
“Heeey...” Newter said from where he had already flopped back onto the prepped table, eyelids heavy. “Got your head in the game now, huh?”
She did, in fact. And where Riley’s perfectly normal eyes had not liked the symptoms they saw, her once again empowered brain liked them even less, prompting a long, heavy sigh from her. More of a wet gurgle, truthfully, on account of all the blood pooling in her mouth.
First things first, she had to fix her tongue. It was going to be a long, long night, and she needed her blood staying inside of her.
Things went quite well until Newter’s head was blown off.
Using her best kitchen knife and muscle fibers from Sibyl the goat, Riley had fashioned a string durable enough to use together with her old sewing kit to secure her tongue in place long enough for her to mix a non-poisonous polymer out of components better not described in polite company (the sawdust was fine, but the goat blood was dubious, and it only got worse from there) that she had then used like mortar to affix the tip of her tongue. She then used a dash of lye and goat stomach bile together with the entire contents of a bottle of olive oil and a relatively fresh bottle of unpasteurized goat milk to make a paste-like solution that temporarily disabled her taste receptors when slathered over her tongue. Riley did not enjoy the taste of goat muscle and had no interest in it polluting her awareness the entire time she was elbows deep in Newter and cancer.
She had then cannibalized her TV, its remote, and her fridge (Spitfire had complained mightily about hauling that one out to the workshop) to assemble a device half scanner, half 3D printer, half power generator, and half localized sterile field. Spitfire had then made the unfortunate mistake of ‘correcting’ Riley.
“You mean quarter,” Spitfire had interrupted.
“Nah, half,” Riley had firmly corrected.
“Four quarters make a whole,” Spitfire had then added, not taking a hint.
Riley had then begun an impromptu lecture regarding the principles of quantum mechanics and the manipulation of local space-time to compress four halves (and Riley put a great deal of stress on the “halves”) into a compressed superposition of past, present, and future. A lecture that Faultline interrupted with a firm suggestion that everyone focus on the task at hand, which petered off with a final mutter of “I have enough trouble understanding how Schro does stuff like that,” from Spitfire that everyone summarily ignored because Spitfire was really only present to set shit on fire should setting shit on fire prove necessary (and although that had not yet been the case by that time, the night was still young).
Newter’s body had lit up like a Christmas tree when Riley turned the scanner on him (“That’s the cancer, right? That doesn’t look good...” Schrodinger had said, hand over her mouth, to which Newter had replied after a mild hacking fit, “No cancer looks good, Schrö”). Every tool, every chemical, every everything Riley might require for the operation to save Newter’s life had been arrayed nearby, ready for her nurse to hand to Riley. Which just left the question of whom, precisely, would be conscripted for that task.
Schrodinger, of course, would have been the perfect candidate courtesy of her immunity had she been able to stomach seeing her boyfriend’s innards. Faultline wore fingerless gloves, and the area around Shamrock’s mouth and nose were exposed. Easily solvable with carefully applied cling wrap, but the entirety of Riley’s limited supply had been commandeered to secure herself against exposure. This left Spitfire, who had been just as opposed to the assignment as she was to the concept of four halves being equivalent to one whole, but even she hadn’t been able to deny her full body coverage costume chic made her the next most suitable candidate after the too squeamish Schrodinger.
They had everything covered, Riley thought, as she turned away to grab her knife and begin the procedure. It was only natural the sniper would choose that precise moment to pull the trigger and pulverize Newter’s neck and chest.
The sniper had not intended to shoot Newter, not that anyone in the workshop was in a position to muse regarding the target when they were far more occupied with the fallout: namely, the blood, bones, and tissues flung outward when Newter’s torso exploded like the world’s worst grenade. Riley had the good fortune to already be bundled up with enough cling wrap to keep the Titanic afloat like a mummy buried in a haunted pantry, while Schrodinger and Spitfire were respectively immune and protected from splatter (if not from the trauma of it all). Faultline and Shamrock, however? They slumped to the ground to ride the world’s worst timed high until daybreak at minimum.
“ THERE’S NOWHERE TO RUN, BONESAW!! ” bellowed a voice Riley recognized as the father of little Bradley.
“Knew that lil’ shit was no good,” Riley murmured, her heart not in it as she joined Spitfire in ducking behind the sturdy wooden table. Her brain was whole again, and for what? Money? And now her anonymity was burned to cinders too.
Only her life left.
“Nurse?” Riley asked with a sense of calm born from eight years of living with a wandering band of serial killers and twenty years of managing a goat farm (anyone involved in domestication can tell you just how un domesticated livestock can get when they want to be). She jabbed her thumb over her shoulder towards the opening between the curtains, beyond which laid the open workshop door and fields of goats and oats out further still. Riley knew who was raining hell on her workshop, but more importantly, she knew where they were doing it from. “Set the fields on fire.”
Spitfire hesitated, which Riley hadn’t expected from someone whose name indicated a proclivity for setting shit on fire. “It’d go wild, spread to here and the house.”
Another shot whistled past Riley’s thumb and obliterated the bottom of the drum of olive oil in the corner, very conveniently reminding Spitfire of their present precarity. “I can’t rightly save Newt-boy if I’m busy hidin’ behind’a table.”
“You can save Newter?!” Schrodinger wetly demanded at a volume far too loud for someone standing on the other side of the table, weeping as she used her own body to prevent further damage to Newter’s.
“I can if somebody sets them fields on fire.”
“Okay! Geez!” Spitfire spun around in place on the packed dirt floor of the warehouse, neatly shifting from her back against the table and butt on the ground to crouched at the ready. “Schrö, gimme some cover.”
The two capes leapt into action, each handling the situation with the level of professional quality expected of a famous mercenary company. If music had started out of nowhere with driving, percussive syncopation and swelling, inspiring chords... Well, it would have been weird, but the sort of weird that fits a very weird situation. As for Riley? She reached up to grab Newter’s head by the hair, tucked him under her arm, and jogged over to an exceptionally large pickle jar in the corner as the world outside was set ablaze. She was almost done with fishing out all the pickles when Schrodinger had returned.
“What’re you... Vinegar? You can preserve his head with—?”
“If you want a live boyfriend instead’a a shrunken head,” Riley interjected, “then I suggest you git me one’a Sibyl’s eyes and that container’a lye over there and meet me at your boy’s body.”
“Whose eyes?!”
“The goat . Eye, singular— git .”
To Schrodinger’s credit, she rushed off to retrieve the requested materials without an ounce of hesitation. Riley felt a little bad about lying. The only shrinking vinegar would inflict on Newter’s head was basic shriveling unless one added the correction proportions of flat club soda and crushed cinnamon graham cracker. That and she’d sort of suggested she’d be reattaching Newter’s head.
“Good,” Riley said when Schrodinger had finished. She gestured a bit to the left. “Scooch it on over. Gettin’ me shot ain’t gonna do no one no good.”
Safely out of the line of fire (not to be confused with the more literal line of fire that was the start of the fields outside, which was slowly advancing back towards the workshop), Riley got to work while Spitfire and Schrodinger hurried to tug the fallen Faultline and Shamrock to safety. It didn’t take her long, and it wasn’t until she plonked Newter’s noggin into the solution she had mixed that Spitfire spoke up with an eloquent, “... what.”
“Y’had the right’a it before, Spits,” Riley replied, grim as she faced the wide eyes of Spitfire and Schrodinger. “That fire’s gonna eat this place alive, and that lil’ prick Bradley’s daddy is out there tryin’a turn us inta swiss cheese. So if y’all ain’t gotta better suggestion, then I suggest we haul ass out the back.”
“There’s no back door,” Spitfire pointed out as Schrodinger said, “Who’s carrying who?”
“What’s t’be done ‘bout that, y’reckon?” Riley drawled as she screwed the pickle jar lid over Newter’s head, sealing him in. “I got my guy.”
“Shit, okay.” Spitfire knelt by Shamrock, preparing to fireman carry her. “You get FL and Newts, Schrö.”
“ I’ve got Newter,” Riley stressed, shaking the jar in her hands in a way that most certainly did not make the head inside bounce back and forth against the glass.
“But his body!” Schrodinger cried right as Newter abruptly said, clear as day despite being suspended in a vaguely green tinted liquid and being a head with no lungs to speak of, “Fuck me, what is happening right now?!”
A decapitated head (which is a bit of a misnomer, since one does not decapitate a head but rather the body to which it had, until recently, been attached) being something that does not ordinarily speak, Spitfire rather reasonably fell backwards onto her ass in shock. Schrodinger, somewhat less reasonably, tried to kiss Newter straight through the jar. “Newtles!”
Riley and Spitfire shared a look. It did not matter that Spitfire’s eyes could not be seen through her gas mask. It did not matter that the wildfire outside had reached the door. It did not matter that blood from Newter’s actually decapitated body had begun to slowly drip over the edge of the table after having run out of room to pool. It did not matter that their only chance of survival was to make a run for it through the woods behind the workshop. There could be no impediment capable of stopping either of them from understanding exactly what the other was thinking with a simple, shared glance: ‘Newtles’ was still a name that ought only be used to belittle those that used it non-ironically.
“Is that my body up there?!” Newter hollered, disrupting the moment with a shriek that would make a violin weep.
“That’s your corpse up there,” Riley corrected. Two decades of living the one hundred percent normal life of a farmer on an alternate dimension Earth who makes soap from goat milk had not quite managed to temper her bluntness regarding mortality or body parts. She pointed at the drum of olive oil in the corner, which was at that moment sadly leaking the last of its contents on the floor courtesy of an earlier wayward bullet. “I’ve got three minutes tops to save it and ain’t no olive oil to do it with, unless one’a y’all’s playin’ coy with’a bottle?”
“... do I even want to know how you’d solve this situation with olive oil ?”
No, they did not. And no one, as it happened, had a bottle of the precious life juice stashed on their person, not even Faultline in any of her multitudinous pockets. Riley resolved to speak with her about it later, once the mercenary wasn’t drooling.
There was nothing to do but flee through a Schrodinger shaped hole in the back wall into the woods, one decapitated body short and one pickle jar extra than when they’d started.
“Any other miracle fluids I should keep in stock?”
Riley eyed Faultline—Melanie, apparently—unsure if the older woman was being serious, sarcastic, or both. “Goat milk’s gotta lot more uses than ya’d think,” she replied, just to be safe. “And it ain’t no liquid, but y’can do lots’a shit with lye.”
“ You can do,” Melanie corrected, dragging her thumb over the slit of her mask where it rested on her lap. She heaved a sigh. “Not me. You.”
“Well sure. Y’knew what I meant.”
For a moment, neither of them said anything as they both silently regarded the other four members of their group. Shamrock and Spitfire were up in the driver’s seat and shotgun respectively and had also doffed their masks, perhaps in solidarity with Melanie. Though neither had given names to Riley just yet, they also hadn’t been reluctant to show their faces. Schrodinger was predictably cuddling Newter’s jar against her chest as the orange-skinned head finished telling a joke about a Trump, a Master, and a Tinker who walked into a bar that left the twin-tailed woman in stitches. Not like the ones in Newter’s hair, of course; those were almost undetectable after a pit stop for Riley to get some proper medical equipment and a bottle of olive oil to remove the cancer that had still been rattling around in his noggin (as Riley had phrased it).
Schrodinger was due for some soon as well. It would be an understatement in the extreme to say Riley had been surprised to have two capes come to her to ask about being put in the same body.
“It’s a Breaker thing,” Schrodinger had explained when Riley had answered their request with a blank stare. “I can turn it off then back on later. That’s how I got my matching tattoo with Newtles, after all. What happens in between, it sticks around.”
“Mine was on my ass, so I obviously don’t have it anymore,” Newter had added. “But it won’t matter once we’re sharing a body.”
“Y’all... want that?” Riley had asked, befuddled when the punchline never materialized. “I can make a meat suit for Newter to pilot. Or a spider body. Something else .”
Newter and Schrodinger had simply shared a look. The kind that transcended words, when two people knew and understood each other intimately. “As tempting as bringing Toy Story to life would be, we’d rather be together.”
They were just worried about Newter’s mortality, Riley had reasoned. Obviously they’d wanted to move his brain out of his squishy cranium into her functionally immortal body.
Obviously.
Riley broke the silence between her and Melanie with a sigh. “Hadn’t really wanted to leave. Them goats ‘n’ that farm... Well, might seem silly t’you, but they were my whole life, y’know? And now they’re ash ‘n’ bone, and everyone and their auntie knows who I am.” She slumped into her seat in the back of the SUV, cradling her cooling coffee to her chest. “Guess it’s the city for this gal after all...”
Melanie took a sip from her own coffee. “The City isn’t so bad.”
“I ain’t never been apartment huntin’ before. Kinda skipped that stage’a my life.”
“I know a place you can stay.”
Riley nodded, grateful to have that issue off her plate. Then she ran those words back for one more listen. “What. You...? What ?”
A smirk crept over Melanie’s face. Not a grin—not like him . Something softer, something shared, not taken. “You can’t be serious.”
“I can’t?”
“You’re talking about harboring Bonesaw . You saw what those people did! They knew me , and they burned down everything I ever cared about.”
“Not everything. ‘My third most prized possession,’ I believe you called it,” Melanie said with a significant look at where the missing piece of Riley’s brain had been reinstalled.
Ah, Riley thought, was that it then? She just wanted the world’s most skilled surgeon on staff?
“And it wasn’t ‘Bonesaw’ who saved the lives of my team,” Melanie continued, unaware of Riley’s thoughts. “It was Riley Davis, and from where I’m sitting, she seems like a decent person. So excuse yourself, would you?”
Riley grunted, a wondrous sort of sound that conveyed entire worlds of emotion. Mostly doubt and more than a dash of anxiety.
“It’s a long trip from Dalet to Gimmel, so take some time and think about what you want, Riley. Cut your brain open again or leave it in. Stay with us or find yourself a nice apartment. I’m happy to help either way.”
It was a long trip. But Riley found she didn’t mind it too much with good company.