The Undead Spider #87.
She counted them as they came.
The numbers arrived whole and certain, pressed into her awareness before the last charge had finished echoing off what used to be the east side. Two thousand, three hundred and forty-five. She held it the way you held something heavy that you'd been handed without warning, without time to shift your grip.
The souls themselves were easier. The situation wasn't.
What she stood in -- an apocalyptic black vehicle, something that sat low and wide and looked like it had been built for the end of things, which was appropriate -- had drawn to a stop at the edge of the radius where the air still tasted of heat and displaced matter.
She stepped out. The dress she wore was darker than she normally wore it; she'd been moving through three other catastrophes when the call came and hadn't had the chance to change, and the dark had accumulated the way dark did when there was too much work and not enough hours, even for someone for whom hours were a formality.
She walked into the radius and began.
A woman named Priya Chaudhari had been on her way to a job interview. Second round. She'd been rehearsing answers in her head -- not the real answers, the shaped ones, the ones that took what was actually true and arranged it to fit what someone else needed to hear. She'd been thinking about how to phrase "I left because the environment was toxic" in a way that didn't sound like a complaint. She'd had coffee in her left hand and her phone in her right and she'd been three blocks from the building when the sound came.
Death held the shape of her life for a moment.
Then she let it go, and guided it forward.
Two thousand, three hundred and forty-four.
She moved through the radius and the souls came to her and she received with full attention, one at a time, because that was what it meant to do this right. Each one had been somewhere. Each one had been in the middle of something. That was the part that didn't get easier no matter how long she did this, not because the mathematics of tragedy wore on her but because she refused to let it not matter. The moment she stopped noticing was the moment she became something other than what she was.
This one. An older man who'd come down from his apartment because he'd run out of the specific brand of crackers he liked. This one. A teenager who'd stayed out past curfew and had been on his way home and had been calculating exactly how much trouble he was in. This one. A woman who'd worked the overnight shift at a shipping depot and had stepped outside for air and had been standing with her face turned up because it had started to rain and she'd liked rain.
Death received them all.
When the last one arrived and she released it forward, she was left with the count and the quiet and the thing she'd been pushing to the side while she worked.
Two thousand, three hundred and forty-five accounted for.
One unaccounted for.
She stood in the remains of what had been a city block and thought about what that meant. The Spider's soul wasn't in her register. It wasn't in any register she could reach. Either he was alive, or he was somewhere she couldn't see, or the hunter had succeeded and the Dreamstone had done what it was built to do.
She thought about the Dreamstone.
Her brother had made it from the substance of his own realm, which meant it was more than an artifact -- it was a piece of something that didn't have many pieces to spare. She'd borrowed it because the situation had called for it. Because the Spider was stealing from her in a way she hadn't encountered before and couldn't address directly without the kind of intervention she generally avoided.
And now the radius told its own story about where the Dreamstone probably was.
She stood with that.
The logic she'd used when she sent Lobo was still sound. The Spider had been routing souls to fates she couldn't track or correct, and if that continued it would compound in ways that made two thousand, three hundred and forty-five look manageable. She'd acted. She'd made a judgment.
She looked at the gaps in the skyline.
The logic was still sound. It didn't feel like anything in particular. Logic rarely did.
What she could do -- what she was choosing to do, right now, in this radius -- was make a promise. Not the abstract, cosmic administrative kind. One that required her to stay engaged beyond the moment of release. Each of the two thousand, three hundred and forty-five would move forward. She would personally ensure it. Whatever the accounting looked like on her end, whatever the intervention cost her in the terms that Endless paid for involvement, she would see them through.
She owed them that much.
But first she had to find out if the hunter had earned his contract.
She turned the vehicle around and went to find Lobo.
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
The Space Hog had come down on the northern edge of the radius.
The explosion had gone up before it went out, which meant the bike had caught the upward force first and cleared the worst of it -- singed, dented along the undercarriage, one of the repulsor housings cracked open and leaking something that smelled like burned circuitry. The display was dead. The controls were dark. But it was in one piece, sitting in the rubble at the radius's edge with the same stubborn indestructibility that it always had, because it was Lobo's and Lobo built things to survive being owned by him.
He found it by smell. Which told him something about the state of his nose, which had finished regenerating twenty minutes ago and was still calibrating.
"Fraggin'--" He stopped. Looked at the repulsor housing. "You cracked. You actually cracked."
The bike didn't respond, because it was a bike.
"Those were my bombs." He crouched next to the housing and looked at the damage with the expression of someone totaling up grievances they intended to collect on. "Mine. The Hog's payload. Three hundred years of custom ordinance and some spandex-wearing bastich used it to blow up a city." He stood. "MY city. MY bombs. MY operation."
He kicked a piece of debris. It sailed four hundred feet and went through a wall.
"And where is he?" He turned to the radius and addressed it directly. "Nowhere. Gone. Because that's what happens, ya fraggin' coward -- ya blow up half a city and then ya blow ya self up and leave the Main Man standing in the rubble with a cracked repulsor and no arm!"
He held up his left arm. The new one. It had come in smooth, the skin still carrying that newborn quality he hated -- pale and unblemished, none of the accumulated damage that gave the old one its character.
"Do you know what it costs to regrow an arm in my biological system? Do you know how itchy that is?"
He looked at the arm. Looked at the radius.
The apocalyptic vehicle rolled up behind him and stopped, and he didn't turn around because he'd felt her before he heard the engine.
"Ya got bad timing," he said.
"I have only one kind of timing." Death stepped out. She was darker than he'd seen her in a long time -- not just the dress, which was a shade beyond black that didn't have a name in most color systems, but something underneath it too, the quality of someone who'd been carrying a very large number for the last hour. "Hello, Lobo."
"Babe." He turned. "Lovely day for it."
She looked at the radius. Then at him. "The Dreamstone."
He opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again. "Right. So. About that."
"Lobo."
"The thing about the Dreamstone is--" He stopped. Ran a hand over his jaw. "You ever have one of those hunts where everything goes exactly like it should, ya get yer hands on the target, and then the target goes and does something that no sane entity in any universe would do, and then there's a chain reaction, and it's not strictly anyone's fault, but--"
"Where is it."
He gestured at the radius.
The silence that followed was the kind that had mass.
"In there," she said. Flat.
"In there." He paused. "Or, more precisely. Distributed throughout there. In a largely molecular capacity." Another pause. "Those were big explosions. The Hog's doomsday payload. Not my doing. The Spider found the panel."
Death looked at the radius for a long time. He watched her face do something he couldn't fully read, which was unusual -- he'd known her longer than most things that were still alive, and he knew her expressions the way you knew the expressions of someone you'd been negotiating with across centuries. This one was new. Or rather, it was old -- old enough that she kept it below the surface most of the time.
That was her brother's stone. He'd made it from the Dreaming itself.
"Well," she said.
"Yeah."
She was quiet for another moment. Then: "The Spider. Where is he."
"That's the thing." Lobo crossed his arms. "He should be with you. I had him. I had the stone on his chest, it was pulling, and then his hands were on the chain, and then we were in the air, and then--" He looked at the radius. "He shouldn't have survived that. I didn't survive that, and I regenerate."
"He isn't with me."
"Yeah, I gathered, since you're asking." His jaw worked. "Means either the Dreamstone did something before it went, or he's -- somewhere." He looked at her. "You checked the usual places?"
"He isn't in any of them." Something moved across her face. It wasn't quite worry. It was what worry looked like on someone who'd been doing this long enough that the emotion had shed its urgency without shedding its weight. "Which means he's alive, or he's somewhere outside my reach, or both."
Lobo stood with that.
"Both," he said. "It's both, isn't it."
"Possibly."
"Right." He turned back to the bike and crouched next to the repulsor housing again, not because there was anything useful to do with it right now, but because he needed something to look at that wasn't her expression. "So the stone's dust, the spider's somewhere, and you're here asking me questions."
"I'm here renegotiating."
He straightened slowly.
"The original terms," Death said, "assumed the Dreamstone would be intact. It was the whole point of sending you specifically rather than handling this another way. Without it, the contract's foundation has changed." She looked at him steadily. "One million credits. That stands. The resurrection guarantee and the collection selection don't."
He stared at her.
"That's the Dreamstone's cost, Lobo. It was my brother's. There are consequences to that."
He opened his mouth and she held up a hand.
"You can say no. You can walk away from the contract right now and we call it even."
The silence stretched.
"Lady," Lobo said, "I was going to keep going anyway." He looked at what was left of the east side, then back at her, and his voice dropped into something quieter and considerably more dangerous. "He cut off my arm. He stole my bike. He blew up my bombs on a city that didn't even rate as a career accomplishment." His jaw was tight. "At this point I'd do it for free. But the Hog still needs fuel, so one million stands, and we're done talking about the stone."
Something shifted in her expression. Not approval exactly -- something more complicated, and quieter.
"How do you intend to find him?" she asked.
"I've tracked things across seventeen galaxies with less to go on than a soul that doesn't register on death's books." He said it the way he said most true things about himself -- without decoration. "And I've got his scent now. Whatever he is, he burns." He tapped his temple. "I don't forget a burn."
She nodded once. Then: "What do you plan to do when you find him?"
"Same as before. Run him down, break what's left of his will, deliver him--" He paused. "Wait. Deliver him how, without the stone?"
"Alive," she said. "However you accomplish that is--"
"I had him alive," Lobo said. "Before the stone. I could've just wrapped him up and brought him directly." His eyes narrowed. "If that's all ya wanted, why didn't ya just say--"
"I needed his soul separated, not his body contained. Those are different problems." She stopped. Her voice had shifted into something that was going to say more, and then it didn't. She looked past him, at a point somewhere slightly above his left shoulder.
"What?" he said.
"Lobo--"
Something hit the ground hard enough to crack the street.
Not the explosive kind of impact. The controlled kind, the kind that said whatever had landed had landed exactly where it meant to. Dust came up. The ground had a new fracture in it running southeast, a six-inch-deep impression in the shape of two feet side by side, perfectly parallel.
Death was no longer there.
Not gone in any dramatic sense. She'd simply stepped out of the visible register the way she did sometimes, folded herself into the space around things rather than the space between them. Lobo had seen her do it before. He'd never figured out how she decided when.
He looked at the impression in the ground.
Then he looked up.
The man standing in it was angry. Lobo had seen angry before, across a lot of worlds and a lot of faces, and he had a working understanding of its spectrum -- from the hot, sloppy kind that made people easy to manipulate, to the cold, settled kind that meant someone had already decided what they were going to do and was just getting to it. This was a third kind he encountered less often. The kind that had moved past both, into something that was almost grief.
He was wearing red and blue. He was holding the chain.
Lobo's chain. The one that had been somewhere in the radius.
"Huh," Lobo said. "That's mine."
The man looked at him. He had the kind of stillness that wasn't calm -- the stillness of something with very high tolerances for force, holding a great deal of it very close to the surface. The chain in his hands could have been evidence or a weapon or both. He was looking at the radius. Then at Lobo. Then at the radius again, doing the math.
"My name is Superman." His voice came out controlled, which was costing him something. "You're going to want to listen to what I say next."
Lobo looked at the cape. At the symbol on the chest. Back at the face.
He had heard of this one.
"Big fan," Lobo said. "Not personally. But the reputation's decent."
"Thousands died in this radius." He said it the way people said things they'd been given by someone else, the weight landing differently in his mouth than it would in a report. "The explosion originated from a vehicle registered to a bounty hunter with Czarnian biology. You." He held up the chain. "This belongs to you."
"It does," Lobo agreed. "Appreciate ya holdin' it."
"Surrender. Now."
Lobo looked at the chain. At the man holding it. At the specific quality of the conviction in his jaw.
"See, here's the thing, pal." He scratched the back of his neck. "I'm familiar with the concept. Surrender. I've read about it. I've seen it happen to other people." He tilted his head. "But I'm the Main Man, and the Main Man's got a prior engagement with a certain spider-themed coward who stole my bike and my bombs and used them to do--" He gestured at the radius. "--all of this. Which means the bounty and the jurisdiction and the general fraggin' situation is mine, not yours. So with respect--"
He grinned.
"--no."
Superman moved.
Not toward him -- that would have been a fight. This was something else: a sweep to Lobo's side, low and fast, the chain already moving in Superman's hands, looping toward the wrists. It was the move of someone who'd been told to bring someone in and meant it, who'd calculated that a fight with a Czarnian in an already-destroyed block would cost more than it was worth and had decided restraint was the mission.
The chain caught.
Lobo felt the links close around both wrists and the strength behind them -- genuine strength. He pushed back. The chain held.
He looked at his wrists. At Superman's grip. At the expression on his face, which had settled into something that wasn't satisfaction, just completion, the look of someone who'd done what they came to do.
"Pal," Lobo said, almost gently.
Superman looked at him.
"Ya just made a really fraggin' terrible decision."
He drove his forehead into Superman's face.
~MimicLord
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