There and Back Again

He was starting to worry. No about himself, or the situation, but instead about Blade. She was... silent. Unusually silent.

"If you go straight down that way," Angelo said, "towards the center of the city, that's where we'll want to be. Look for... well, an extra-large pile of rubble."

The tower wasn't standing. His once-upon-a-time-home wasn't standing. For that matter, his childhood home wasn't standing either, but that had been gone even before Halcyon was.

"I guess this isn't a usual trip?" He said, searching for a place on the robot to store the briefcase before climbing on himself. "Probably more... touristy, normally."

Angelo's stomach dropped the moment Apri changed course. Sending something. That was bad. Angelo had already decided it was bad, and that was before he even knew what it was. He tried to orient himself. Warehouse on the east side, they were heading west, they were correcting north-west...

Where was the Birdcage?

He hadn't had a perfect memory back when he'd lived in Halcyon, and it took him a bit of thinking to take his best guess. South. South west, but south. So whatever the signal was, it wasn't coming from the Birdcage.

Thank god. The last thing he wanted was to go anywhere near it.

"Go slow," Angelo said, the nerves obvious in his voice. "And keep us updated."

At least Blade looked awake.

Both he and Blade had, once upon a time, been superheroes. Not just teenage superheroes, but actual professionals. They'd had uniforms and training, and when Apri said to spread out, the part of his brain that had gotten all that training shoved the thinky-feely-concerned-for-Blade part of his brain into the closet.

One minute Angelo's hands were empty. The next, he had an M4 carbine held against his body that hadn't been there before. He was ready. In that moment, he probably looked more like a soldier than the goodie two shoes student council president.

"What kind of a signal is this? What are we looking at?"

It was a secret base, wasn't it? This was a city of superheroes and supervillains, and a hidden passage with a mysterious signal leading under a building was... was a base.

Maybe one of his fathers, for all he knew, but the location--as best he could tell--wasn't one he knew.

That didn't mean it wasn't though, and he made a mental note of the location to ask his dad anyway.

Consistent signal. Or consistent reading? Either way, he let the one with a literal robotic, replaceable body go first. His suit would help him against a bullet, an-

Why was Blade going in front of him? He scowled a bit and then resigned himself to bringing up the rear, glancing around before going down after them.

It was a lab. Angelo knew it the moment the light flipped on, knew it the moment his eyes adjusted to the light. The whole thing was bright, and for the most part looked intact. In one corner, part of the ceiling had started to cave in, but on the whole the room was largely intact.

And almost immediately Angelo's eyes fell to the most obvious thing in the room.

Against the far wall were two large, bigger-than-human sized tanks. Inside each was a single figure, curled into a fetal position and seemingly unmoving, floating in some kind of a liquid. Even if the details might not have been clear to others, Angelo's eyes were far better than most, and he picked out a multitude of details all at once, forcing a quick exhale.

The room was still operating. It still had power - from some kind of backup supply? Geothermal? Something like that, but there was no easy way of telling, and they were on a time limit, and...

"Clones," he said, his brain registering. "They were cloning someone."

Who and why? All of a sudden he'd gone from focusing on reality to everything is a fucking mess and I have a million questions, and he paused for a moment, turning to Apri.

At least he was good at this. At staying focused in a crisis situation. About finding what he could do and working with it.

"Could we move them?" Was there space? Was it even plausible? The tanks were... well, too large and clunky to carry.