Jacob Cross

The walls are plastered with posters for monster movies and cartoons, tilted at odd angles. The comforter on the bed is dark blue, covered in blocky grey robots with wide eyes and pincer hands.

Hurricane is lying on top of it, flat on his back and staring up at the ceiling. His curtains are pulled closed, and the afternoon sun drifts in underneath them, catching dust motes in swirls and eddies.

For a long time, the scene doesn’t change; the ceiling stays the same, for maybe an hour, or two, or four.

A couple of times, he opens his mouth, like he means to say something – closes it again, and doesn’t, in the end.

The little beam of light has disappeared by the time he finally props himself up on one elbow and turns toward the door.

“Ma?” he calls, voice raised so that it will carry down the hall. It’s a much younger voice; it belongs to a child of about ten years. “You awake?”

There’s no answer.
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It's 1 am, and they've got to be up for training at 5, so Hurricane doesn't expect to find anyone in the gym.

He's usually got the place to himself this late – an hour or two to run through some routines on the balance beam and the parallel bars, without anyone around to remind him of combat maneuvers for a change.

It helps him clear his head. If he stays in motion long enough, sometimes his brain will shut up and turn off for a while, until all that's left is the thrill of motion and the static buzz of exhaustion behind his eyes. And most days? Most days that's better.

When he pushes open the door today, though, the light's already on, and there's Sasha sprawled out on the weight bench. He's not lifting anything, though; he's still and he's quiet, eyes closed and face locked in a grimace.

Hurricane's calling out before he can think better of it: "Dude, you okay?"

Sasha's eyes come open. He sits up, and then winces. "Is nothing," he says.

"Kinda looks like something," says Hurricane, crossing the gym to stand beside him. It's weird, looking down at Sasha; usually the other boy towers over him, but he doesn't rise from where he's seated, this time, and Hurricane gives him a quick once-over to check for injuries. "What's up? You drop a free weight on your head?"
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When he opens his eyes, the world is upside-down.

The city is laid out far below him, a perfect miniature, and down there in the streets, something's on fire. There are still people running for cover, but from this height they look no bigger than ants.

Hurricane licks at his lips – tastes blood.

"Pull it together," he mutters to himself, even though he's not sure what he's meant to be pulling it together from. He remembers deploying to Nagasaki. He remembers the trip out, and Nemesis next to him in the back of the supply truck, stealing his Pretz right out of the box. He remembers suiting up in an unfamiliar hangar, Yoshioka's habitual presence nothing but a voice on a radio, this time.

And then… nothing. He doesn't remember anything at all until just now, when he opened his eyes.

Probably a concussion, if the throbbing in his head is any indication.

"Hey, guys?" he says, into the comms.

There's no response – just a harsh burst of feedback and then static.
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It shouldn't be hard.

The ingredients are spread out on the counter in front of him: flour, milk, eggs, strawberries, and vanilla frosting.

His mother doesn't eat a lot of cake, but Hurricane knows she likes vanilla and strawberries. It's what Michaela always made for her birthday – only now Michaela's three hundred miles away, living in an apartment by her university, and here's Hurricane, with a mixing bowl and birthday candles and two hours until his mother gets home from work.

It shouldn't be hard.

He watched Michaela make the one for last year. He helped stir, even.

So he preheats the oven. He measures out the ingredients like he's doing a science experiment. When he realizes he didn't buy baking powder, he climbs up on the counter to look for it, a skinny nine-year-old boy in his bare feet, holding onto the lip of the cabinet so he doesn't tip over backward.

The baking powder's in the back corner, behind the peanut butter.

He measures it out, too, and he mixes everything together, and he sticks it in the pan in the oven.

When he's done, he starts on dinner – and this, at least, is genuinely easy. He's helped his sister make dinner way more than he's helped her make cake.
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The apartment's dark when Hurricane gets home.

That's not surprising; it's past nine by now, the sun long since set, but usually there's a light from the hallway at least, creeping out from under the door to his mother's room.

Hurricane kicks off his shoes there in the entryway, a gangly boy of eleven in a too-big t-shirt and a battered hoodie. He drops his backpack on the floor and locks the door behind him.

"Ma?" she says. "You around?"

He wanders barefoot into the main room – gropes for the light switch on the wall and flicks it, already turning toward the fridge to see about making himself some dinner.

As soon as light floods the room, he flinches at the sight it puts on display.

The schematics that have taken up permanent residence on the table are gone now; they've been swept off onto the floor, stretching all the way from the kitchen counter to the living room couch, a space of perhaps five feet. Three of them have been ripped in two; half a dozen more are crumpled into balls.

On the table, all that remains is a bottle of gin, mostly empty; a tumbler, half full; and a small orange bottle with a childproof cap.

Hurricane's mother is sitting at the table. She's slumped over like her strings have been cut, and for a single heart-stopping second, Hurricane thinks that she's not breathing.

Then she takes a slow, shaky breath in, and he remembers to breathe again, too.
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Black Whisper’s only two blocks over, and that’s the saving grace.

Hurricane catches sight of her suit right before it flickers into cloaking mode again, and he taps the wrist control to lock on just as it slips from view.

Target: acquired, his HUD reads, white crosshairs on what looks like empty space, but Hurricane knows better. When the crosshairs lift up into the air to relocate, Hurricane angles up to follow – and when a flash of light splashes his way, and then another, he darts first to the left and then to the right. The shots miss him by a hand’s breadth, no more, and he just has time to think how hard it is to dodge something you can’t see when he slams right into her.

Black Whisper’s cloaking flickers and goes, and for about a second Hurricane has vague recollections of pudgy, bespectacled Dr. Yoshioka nursing a cup of tea and talking about how they really needed to move the circuitry farther away from the surface.

Then Black Whisper tips head over feet in probably the least graceful thing Hurricane’s ever seen, and he’s got the presence of mind to wheel past her and circle back. He gets his arms around her suit as she tries to right herself; those lasers are mounted in the hands, so as long as he can keep them neutralized, everything’s going to be just fine.

Nothing’s ever fine. But if you neutralized her for good, she’d stay down.

He doesn’t want to fight her. But he also definitely doesn’t want to let her go, so that she can fix her cloaking device and slip away again.

So, door number three: he holds on tight while she thrashes, and he angles them down toward the ground.
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Cinderella’s castle stands like something out of a fairy tale, all elegant towers and tapering spires. It’s an improbable shade of pastel, and up above it, in the sky, the clouds have begin to tinge the same impossible cotton candy pink.

All around them, the ground is littered with harbingers, dying or dead.

Hurricane isn’t looking at the clouds. He’s looking at the rest of his team, gathered on the ground beneath a storybook castle. They’re battered and worn; Mayu’s Wildfire looks like it’s listing to one side every time she moves, and acid has eaten straight through the boot of Ryota’s Sentinel. Hurricane can see his foot in there, encased in the plugsuit, but that’s no protection at all.

“We clear?” says Iyawa. She lifts her head; Nova cuts an impressive figure, all hard lines and sharp angles. The face of the suit, indigo and purple, has a scratch straight down the visor.

“Got it, captain,” says Hurricane, and the voices of his team echo the assent over the comms.

“HQ says we’ve got two minutes before the next wave’s incoming, and we’re looking at twice as many. Get in your places, people, and let's be ready for them when they get here.”
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The room’s awash in color, all LED glare and bright neon. The tube lights that rim the ceiling are hot pink and mellow teal, and the screen flashes and shifts with hues designed to catch the eye. Everything smells like old cigarette smoke, and the karage on the table in the center, and the fries that were devoured an hour and a half ago.

Nemesis’s to his left on the padded bench, close enough that their shoulders bump. Sasha's to his right, belting some maudlin song in Russian into the microphone. He can sing, kind of. You'd never think he could – he's like 6 foot whatever and looks like a bruiser in a gangster flick - but he's mostly on tune, and his voice is low and mild and full of feeling.

Across the way, Ryota's passed out on Iyawa's shoulder. Next to them, Mayu's twisting in her seat to answer the phone on the wall. The music's so loud Hurricane didn't even realize it was ringing.

"Last call!" says Mayu, shouting to be heard. "Everyone's getting another drink, so finish your drinks!"

"What?" yells Nemesis.

"DRINKS," says Mayu, and mimes chugging. She says something into the phone and hangs it up again. Then she reaches for her drink, still half-full, and swallows it down.
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The apartment’s a tiny kitchen-living room combo, the only furniture a sleek metal table with two chairs and a cookplate on the kitchen counter. There are schematics spread out over the table, and a pen beside them; a tablet, with the screen dark, rests on the counter.

Hurricane’s standing in the doorway, a plastic bag in one hand. He toes his shoes off and nudges the door closed behind him with a foot.

“Hey, Ma?” he says. He pads into the hallway, passing a cramped closet of a bathroom on the left. In the bathroom mirror, the boy looking back is perhaps eleven years old, in a worn t-shirt, hair disheveled. He passes without stopping – sticks his head into the first room on the right, revealing a cramped bedroom lit only by the flickering of a computer screen.

His mother is elbows-deep in a hollow chest-plate that looks about on par to fit a person. Her hair is longer now, the bun pulled back from her face with a meticulousness that nears severity. She’s wearing a labcoat and has a nametag, but the dim lighting obscures what it says.

“Ma?” says Hurricane. “You eat yet?”

She doesn’t glance up at him – continues tinkering, head bowed and brows furrowed.

He waits in silence for thirty seconds or so, then clears his throat. “I, uh. I swung by distribution. Want me to make dinner?”
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The docks are gone.

Most of them, anyway. There are scraps and blackened husks sticking up out of the water, a skeleton of what used to be here. Out beyond them, a couple of platforms still float, waiting for sea lions that don’t come anymore – dead, probably, like the whole rest of the city.

One of the signs remains, blue on white: PIER 39, it says, in all caps, but only the top left corner is still attached. The sign hangs crooked, the letters mostly obscured by caked-on ash.

The only sound is the seagulls that still cluster in flocks by the waterfront; it's reassuring, somehow, that even the apocalypse couldn't get rid of them.

In the distance, across the bay, a single strut of the Golden Gate Bridge still stands. It’s half hidden in the fog that still hasn’t burned off for the day, but Hurricane keeps glancing up at it. He has pictures of this view, from back when the bridge was still standing. Somewhere, on a phone that won’t turn on anymore, there’s a shot of his sister on this street, holding an ice cream cone and wearing a letterman jacket.

It sweeps over him all at once, the way it does sometimes, still. Hurricane presses his hand to his mouth and closes his eyes for what he means to only be a few seconds – but it stretches longer, and then longer still.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters under his breath, and scrubs at his eyes, hard, with the back of his hand. “Get it together.”

He takes one final breath in and starts to move, slow at first, but gradually more confident. He's steady on the rubble, mostly, despite the new leg; he was clumsy the first couple of weeks, but he picks his way through the wreckage just fine, now.

He's used to it.
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