Chapter 23
"Yo, what's up, Waterboy!" Among all the voices greeting me, the most beloved colleague's stood out the most. "You heard the news? They want to kick Invidiva out of the program."
The moment I walked into the break room, Flambé caught me. Cheerful and pleased with himself, he tried to shoulder past me while simultaneously shoving me out of the way.
The problem being that our builds were considerably different, despite receiving roughly equivalent physical enhancement from our powers. A couple of seconds later our flaming friend was rubbing his shoulder with an irritated expression while I watched him go with mild confusion.
"What's that about?"
"Ignore him," Prizm answered from the couch, eyes on her phone, vaping indoors as usual, spreading a cloying cloud of forest berries through the entire room. "He's a tsundere. Acts out because he cares."
"What about Invidiva?" I greeted the others silently and sat across from our pop star — I used to sit beside her reflexively, but after a couple of incidents involving fingers and proximity to things I'd prefer to keep uncontested — no. Strictly across from now. "Are they actually firing her?"
"Well, you know—" She was drawing it out, blowing sweet vapor directly at my face, patting the cushion beside her in a pointed invitation. Information for proximity. Absolutely not. I would genuinely rather help Golem wash again.
Yes, the massive mud pile from the junkyard has hygiene standards. He visits car washes with some frequency. Assisting him feels like a cop hosing down Rambo.
Getting no reaction, she clicked her tongue, crossed one leg over the other in a way that did nothing to help anyone's focus, and quickly lost interest.
"The invisible bitch is getting cut if she doesn't perform today." Another cloud toward the ceiling, dangerously close to the smoke detector. "And she just walked off. As usual."
"I think he wanted to help her today," Sonar said, settling beside me. He was holding a steel thermos, which was suspicious precisely because it looked so ordinary. "Normal thing to do. At Harvard we had student societies, and it was considered shameful if someone from your group got expelled or removed."
He took a loud pull from the thermos and belched contentedly. The smell hit a moment later — animal decay, fruit juice, and vodka in some nightmarish combination — cutting through even the vape cloud and making my head swim.
"Oh my God." Prizm was immediately on her feet. "You were literally just told to stop drinking that! The moment your babysitter leaves—"
"Babysitter? Like for children?" Victor murmured, slightly unfocused, and took another sip, producing a full-body shudder from me. "Shouldn't there be a bottle—"
"Ginger, tell your autistic friend he's being disgusting!"
"Why is this my problem?" I genuinely wanted to slip out — I desperately needed the bathroom, and delaying that particular matter with my specific power set carried real consequences. "You started it, you sort it out."
"Absolutely not, I don't do those." Arms crossed, hip cocked, left hand raised chest-high for maximum finger-wagging effect. "That's your prison wife's problem. Or you're his. Figure it out."
"I'm *what?* There's no prison wife—"
"Indeed." Sonar swept me with an evaluating look, burped again, and continued at his own pace. "He's not my type anyway. We're both independent by nature, comfortable with open arrangements. Marriage — even prison marriage — isn't for me."
"You didn't help!" My nervy outburst landed on my friend, who raised one eyebrow and returned his attention to the thermos.
"Having no prospects and being a lone wolf are different concepts," Prizm observed, apparently in a truly unpleasant mood for reasons that probably had a biological explanation. "Lone wolves. Sure. You'd have been found by someone ages ago if you stopped being difficult."
Sonar's next noisy sip cut off whatever I was going to say. He was practically consuming the flask in one continuous motion.
"Phew." He wiped his mouth on his hand, spreading the smell further, then clamped his other hand on my shoulder in a firm, friendly grip. "Don't listen to her, Waterboy. She's just jealous. You and I don't need permanent arrangements."
"I wasn't — no, I—"
"Which is exactly what I'm talking about." Prizm was cooling down already. "You two look like an old married couple sometimes. Already hard enough to find a decent man—"
"We're friends. Best friends." The slightly intoxicated werebat made this declaration with complete conviction, and I'd briefly hoped the conversation was winding down. "Both of us used to have voids of loneliness in our lives. Now we fill each other's voids."
I had nothing. Neither did Prizm. She rolled her eyes and dropped back onto the couch, immediately absorbed in her phone. I brought my palm firmly to my face and held it there.
---
"God, why is this my life."
"Stop whining, Ginger." Prizm blew a bubble, popped it at maximum volume. "You heard our little teamwork enthusiast."
I gathered the water that had spread across the middle of the street and drained it into the nearest manhole, clearing the blockage in the process.
We'd found Invidiva after lunch. I still didn't know what Robert had said to her, but she'd come back and was actually working — more than usual, which was completely unlike her.
*Our new dispatcher has a genuinely terrifying way with words.*
I'd thought it many times, and never more clearly than during this shift with Invidiva. She was difficult on an ordinary day, but today—
"Robert asked me to help you get up the board. Not to clean up after every job—"
"I still have no idea why he sent you to me!" the invisible girl muttered to herself, unable to quite settle. Were all the women around me synchronizing into grumpy-grandmother mode today? I'd heard that groups of women working together eventually sync up, but this quickly? "Teamwork. First I thought that was a euphemism for something else."
"Like I'm supposed to warm you up for Robert or something?"
"Yeah, something like that." She looked up at me, cigarette out, slow smile forming. "You've got soft lips. Wide tongue. You'd manage, Ginger."
"Stop—"
"Are you two aware you're on the shared channel?" Robert's exhausted voice dropped in, immediately taking the wind out of Invidiva's sails. The girl took on an expression I wasn't entirely sure I'd seen before — something resembling embarrassment, though I could be wrong, given her general relationship with neutral-positive emotions. "Stop flirting with Waterboy. His posterior is under prior lease to Lucifer."
"Heh." She snickered at my expression and the slight tremor working through me as I shook water off my palms. "So would you want to trade places? Help me move up the board and I'll teach you some grown-up things—"
"You dress like a rebellious teenager who barely affords secondhand shops. Exactly what kind of grown-up things are we discussing?" Robert's timing was sharp. He'd already queued up the next target. "Enough talk. Move."
"Fine."
Invidiva muttered, checked her communicator, and walked off without waiting for me.
I turned to face the nearest camera and spread my hands in a gesture of philosophical resignation. Robert answered with a quiet sigh that contained significant shared sympathy.
"Just bear with it a little longer — please." The switch to private channel wasn't a surprise. "Almost there. The other pairs have already finished. It's just you two left."
"How many more points to a hundred?" I was crossing a large intersection, catching the fading figure of the invisible girl at the edge of my vision, not rushing to catch up. I wanted two minutes of walking without someone's concentrated negativity washing over me. "Day's almost done."
"Twenty-three," Robert said, actively typing. "I'll try to find something meaningful. Just don't let her bail or self-sabotage at the last second."
"I'll handle the first part." She was waiting at the pedestrian crossing, watching the traffic. Cars moved in both lanes at speed, and she was actually waiting for the light — which meant I could see, from ten meters away, the atmosphere around her getting denser by the second. "The second part I can't promise."
Her mood was genuinely terrible today, and there were reasons for it. Under ordinary circumstances I'd have given up hours ago and gone about my own day, but—
Robert's oblique mention of whatever he'd negotiated from Blond Blazer — some arrangement where the stragglers from Team Z might avoid expulsion if they put in the effort today.
And I actually felt sorry for Invidiva, even when I wanted to hand her a mythical father's belt and apply it to her personality until some of the nonsense shook loose. She was clearly anxious. But the amount of deliberately awful behavior she'd packed into one shift exceeded what the rest of the team managed in two months combined.
I endured. More stoically than any space marine had ever endured anything. Flat expression, not showing my real feelings. She'd found a way to take issue with that too, but — patience was a virtue.
"Waterboy, Invidiva — drop that call and head east." Robert's voice came through suddenly, tight and urgent, cutting through the background noise. "Building collapse, three blocks. Golem and Flambé are chasing a target, no time for civilians. That's you."
I was already running. Invidiva was somehow already slightly ahead of me, hitting her inhaler mid-sprint. We cleared cars, hydrants, postboxes in stride, and the scene didn't keep us waiting long.
The moment we reached it, we split without discussing it. I started attacking the fire that had consumed the lower floors and was climbing toward the upper ones, cutting off exit routes. Invidiva went straight through the passage I cleared with water, moving fast to the top floors, working her way down.
We were fast. The building was faster. But—
It worked. There's no point dramatizing the part where water was coming out of me at a rate that suggested structural compromise to my own internal systems, or cataloguing the volume I put out trying to contain what Flambé had apparently managed to start. There's also no point performing gratitude toward Invidiva, who handled the evacuation with a solid five out of five — extracting people who couldn't move, or who'd frozen in panic—
Her methods were not exactly gentle. But she got them out. That was the thing.
"Well done." I kept my eyes off the pile of neatly stacked, freshly unconscious evacuees. "I'll drop the building so the fire doesn't spread—"
"Sure. Do what you want."
"What's wrong with you now?" I noticed too late that her mood had plummeted again, mostly because I'd been focused on my own work. "We did well. People got out—"
"Yeah, yeah." She waved and sat on the hood of a nearby car, smoking and staring at nothing. "Wrap it up and let's go back—"
"Could you help? There's still a lot to do. We need to wait for police, sort the injured. And I should bring the building down—"
"Not my war." She stubbed the cigarette against the car, dusted her jacket, stood, threw her hands behind her head. "You can stay if you want. I'm going—"
"What are you sulking about now?" For the first time I actually looked at her face, while I was already working on the support columns. I saw a combination of expressions that only women could produce.
"I'm not *sulking*, I'm not twelve!" She came close — not touching me, understanding I was balancing something critical — and let it out. "I'm *angry* — the building is going to take you five minutes and I'm already—" A breath. "Whatever. Fine. You handle it."
"Maybe you're hungry? I've heard women sometimes think they're angry when they're actually hungry—" Her expression froze for exactly two seconds. My smile went somewhere else. "Yeah. I shouldn't have said that."
"Ha. Great. There's no point to any of this." Middle finger. She reached for the inhaler, apparently about to vanish — and I spoke first.
I'm not proud of what came out. I was just genuinely exhausted from a full day of managing this.
"What is actually wrong with you?" My words hit her back — she'd already turned away, and now she went still, shoulders tightening. "People are trying to help you. Why do you keep hissing at everyone like a cat in heat? You can't even say thank you? Neither I nor Robert asked to follow you around with a mop. If the Phoenix Program doesn't matter to you, why did you sign up? Just to boost your ego? Entertainment?"
She turned back slowly, worked her mouth for a moment, then unloaded. Not answering the actual question — but it was the first time all day she'd attempted anything resembling real dialogue about what was bothering her.
"Look at that. Little Herman found the courage to talk to a girl—"
"I don't see how that's relevant." I put more pressure into the palm, and the concrete beam cracked on pure emotional momentum alone, beginning the controlled collapse of the building inward. "Act like that and maybe I'll stutter a few times for your benefit, keep your ego fed—"
"Oh, sorry I don't remind you of your big muscular mommy figure so your little thing gets all worked up—" She stepped closer, jabbing a finger at my chest. "You want to know why I'm angry? They want to throw me out. My whole life people have defaulted to assuming I'm a villain because of my power. And I am so *tired* of hearing from everyone that I do everything wrong, while Robertson and Blazer and that ancient Einstein keep telling me how *good* you are, how I should *be like you*. Waterboy this, Waterboy that, follow his example, work with him, he'll help you— I'm *sick of it*. I was managing fine, just not as perfectly as our golden boy—"
"Golden boy? You're the one constantly getting rescued by Blond Blazer." She tried to cut in — I put water under her feet and made her step back, and stepped forward. The building was settling around us. "If it wasn't for her covering you, you'd have been kicked out after the grandfather incident — probably before that. So show some actual respect back, and use your apparently non-flat backside to stay in the team—"
We stared at each other in furious silence until she reached for the inhaler. Slowly, deliberately, right in front of me, she took a breath. Her gaze dropped to the ground, then moved to the slightly stunned people watching our argument from the side.
"Thank you." She practically spat it and kept her last word — then vanished, but I stayed alert, knowing my colleagues' love of ambushes. Invidiva had a particular reputation for them, as Robert could confirm. "And my ass isn't flat, gay boy!"
"Ouf—"
The kick came from behind. She'd circled. Nevistervah delivered it directly to the relevant location, sending me immediately to the ground.
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