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Lab Rat was going to fall into Riley’s mousetrap eventually—there was truly nowhere in the multiverse that he could hide. It seemed that every mountain and every canyon he found on Earth Shin was filled to the tits with her creations, gangling things that spat acid and nets made of intestinal lining at anything that so much as breathed in their vicinity. He hated them with every fiber of his being, and he really hated Bonesaw in particular.
What was a little betrayal between friends, after all? Hadn’t that been what Jessica Yamada and the rest of Breakthrough had told him over and over again: to work on himself first before he dealt with others? They were the ones who had plucked him from his hiding place, forced him to get all mushy-gushy with his feelings once a week, bored ever deeper through his calcified layers of deception, inching closer and closer to some imagined “truth” to his being.
And what had it accomplished, exactly? Victoria had probably gotten the closest of any of them to figuring him out, and that was only by luck and sheer Brutish tenacity. He had to admit that she had outplayed him by showing up at the orphanage. However, she wasn’t willing to push it far enough: pierce through his first blister-bubble of untruth to uncover the next. If she had truly suspected him of being her enemy from the beginning, she would have slammed him into that chain-link fence and beat him within an inch of his life.
That was her strategy with all the rest of Breakthrough’s foes, after all.
But she didn’t, and none of the rest of them had even gotten close. Sveta’s heart of gold prevented her from seeing the obvious, which was why Weld had run laps around her, macking on every plastic bimbo in a ten-thousand mile radius. Rain and Capricorn were too busy navel-gazing about their own issues to really take notice. Damsel didn’t even care enough to try. And poor Kenzie was so easily manipulated that he could have thrown her off his scent for decades without breaking a single sweat.
In retrospect, it was really Yamada who had been his downfall. She was the one who listened too carefully and kept him close enough to see through his deceptions but not close enough for him to get his talons into her. If he still had String Theory’s homework to cheat off of, he would have fired the G Driver cannon at Yamada first, not Scion. She was the scariest of all the foes he had contended with: a human close enough to Parahumans to be accepted as one of their own, while never having a Shard of her own to manipulate.
“One day, Dr. Yamada,” he spoke to Shin’s moonless sky, curled up in his Deep Reflection form, crow wings wrapped around his hard and chitinous body. “I will catch you in my talons and fly you into the upper atmosphere, laughing as you slowly and painfully asphyxiate on your own vomit. I promise…”
“Well, that sounds unpleasant.” Dr. Yamada replied, impossibly. Lab Rat wheeled around to see the petite woman poking the coals with a stick, trying to warm her hands. She smiled up at him, pushing up her glasses to say, “Maybe we can just talk down here instead?”
“How are you here?” Lab Rat mumbled through his sharpened beak, getting prepared to end her with a single flap of his wing. “How did you find me?”
“You weren’t being exactly subtle about where you were going when the Plague started,” Dr. Yamada said casually, as if they were picking up on a conversation they had already started. “It was clever to hide in the ruins of Goddess’ realm. You already knew this place like the back of your hand, and the Wardens were frazzled after the Plague.”
“But you found me anyway,” Lab Rat replied. “With Bonesaw’s help, I presume?”
“That’s confidential information, Chris.” Dr. Yamada said with a wry smile. “You already know that.”
“Why do you insist upon calling me that awful name? I am and always have been Lab Rat,” he said, thinking about his potential means of escape from this cavern. Bonesaw and the Wardens will be shortly behind.
“Do you really believe that?” Dr. Yamada asked. “Or is that just what you tell yourself to cope with the harsh reality of your existence? A clone of a very sick and twisted man?”
Lab Rat blinked underneath the feathers. “That’s unusually direct for you, Doctor. But accurate enough, I suppose.”
“I’m not here as your therapist. I retired from doing that a long time ago,” she replied, pulling out something long from her fanny pack. At first Lab Rat thought it was a weapon, but it turned out to be a vape pen, which she took a long and thoughtful hit from.
When she saw him staring at it, she coughed into her hand—breath smelling like gasoline—and held it out towards him.
“Wanna hit? Riley makes the best carts in the multiverse, I promise you.”
“No thanks,” he said, a little miserably. “I don’t want to know what Bonesaw laces her weed with.”
“Whatever it is, it’s good,” Dr. Yamada laughed, eyes already growing bloodshot. “You’d like her if you got to know her.”
“She reminds me too much of Lookout for me to like her,” Lab Rat said. “A bundle of maladaptive personality traits fit into a girl-shaped package.”
“So, you’re more into a boy-shaped package?” Dr. Yamada said, cartoonishly wiggling her eyebrows. “Don’t lie to me, Lab Rat. I saw how you looked at Rain during our sessions.”
Lab Rat felt a treacherous flush rising in his face and shifted away from where Dr. Yamada could see it.
“You can't get under my skin by bringing up ancient history,” he replied, using his Deep Introspection form to soothe his voice into a flat and emotionless monotone. “Besides, I believe that Rain is spoken for now. I wish him and Chastity the best.”
“Hah!” Dr. Yamada suddenly shouted, waving the vape pen accusatorily at Lab Rat. “So, you admit it. You do care about Breakthrough!”
“Sure,” Lab Rat admitted with a shrug of his many-jointed shoulders. “They were an influence on me at a formative time. They are also trying to hunt me down across the multiverse. Both can be true at once.”
“But you miss them, dontcha?” Dr. Yamada said, smiling broadly at Lab Rat even as her teeth chattered from the cold. “You miss them so much.”
“Perhaps,” he said, finally feeling all the pieces of his plan coming together. “But I don’t miss you, Lookout.”
With a sudden flurry of feathered motion, he leapt at the camera projecting Dr. Yamada onto the cavern, tearing its lenses apart with a single peck of his beak. A crowd of Bonesaw’s creations sprang out from all sides, blocking every exit to the cave.
But they forgot one. He thought to himself slyly, rapidly flapping his wings to shoot through the little crack in the cavern’s roof. It was an impossibly tight fit, but that was why he had made the feathers out of extremely bendable keratin. He soared through the tiny and cramped chute, getting so close to the cold night air that he could taste it on his avian tongue—
Before a gleam of gold stopped him in his tracks.
“On behalf of all of Breakthrough,” Victoria Dallon said, only a hint of gloating in her crisp voice. “Fuck you, Chris!”
And before Lab Rat could reply, a fist in his face sent him careening back to earth—Icarus, grounded.