The Atomic Question -

Click.

Dawson opened her eyes, slowly. The woman holding the Beretta 201T was holding it in both hands. Her left thumb had put the safety back on.

Impulse whispered, "You have to make it right." A demand. A plea. Words heavy with a lifetime of wishing she could somehow be redeemed.

The woman shook her head, meeting Dawson's eyes. As the gun shakily lowered she whispered back, "Vengeance doesn't heal our world."

Vic had said something similar once, in the sixth month of the sixth year. You're never gonna bring someone back to life with a bullet, kid. He meant it, just as this woman now meant it. And they were both right. The only one wrong was Dawson, who lacked the courage to hold anything other than a gun. Who had stolen all hope of ever changing from five-hundred and thirty-nine people and played a part in stealing it from many more. Who had taken, because all life had ever done was take from her and it felt like justice to take in turn.

"I deserve to die," Dawson shuddered.

Behind the woman her brother arrived, placing a hand over the gun. He looked at Dawson, eyes trembling with recognition and understanding both.

The sister bit back a sob. "You don't get off that easy," she said, tears gathered at the corners of her eyes. "No."

She let her brother take the gun and she threw her arms around Dawson's chest.

"You have to live," came her words. "Because we forgive you."

The brother unloaded the Beretta, pulled the slide back to eject the round from the chamber and then set it on the ground. A moment later his arms were around her shoulders.

Footsteps up the walkway preceded Instinct's shouting.

"Stop! Please! Don't hurt her!"

She arrived behind Dawson and set trembling hands to the trio to force them apart. Then she saw what they were doing.

"The hurting is over," the brother said. "Now begins the healing."

Dawson felt herself lowering to her knees. The first time she'd cried was when she'd found her uncle dead. There had been brief, hot tears at Vic's funeral and she'd wept the night Templeton had been killed. The gun had been on the table then and she'd gotten as close to putting it in her mouth as she ever would, saved only by the burning desire to see his killers brought to justice. Dawson hadn't cried again until Instinct had seen into her and began untangling the pain at her core. Now the tears flowed freely, wrung free from her heart like a thunderstorm.

= = =

Click.

The display screen flickered to life with a small shower of sparks from the jerry-rigged cables hooked into the side. It would be an easy fix for Adam if he cared to--doing that kind of thing for free made him feel useful, and it also usually netted him free drinks--but he didn't feel inclined to this time purely because of what the news was talking about.

A camera drone hovering from a polite distance caught the smug, gleaming smile on the elf's face. Neck-length silver hair matched finely groomed brows and a clean-shaven face, suggesting youth and discipline.

The bartender was a burly troll with a fu manchu style beard and horns curled back along his head. As he returned the screen's remote to its spot below the bar, the broadcast overlay provided a name and a headline over the footage of the fellow being led down courthouse steps in handcuffs that looked awfully loose considering the circumstances.

Aztechnology junior executive pleads guilty to thirty-one counts of murder: Julius Megiddo given LIFE SENTENCE.

Adam grunted. What was a hundred years to an elf? News drones hovered around the scene as he was escorted politely by Corporate Court lackeys to the mid-priced luxury car that would take him to his home for the next century. As Adam nursed his drink he wondered if thirty-one was even accurate. That was probably just the SINners, the people that the system acknowledged as existing. How many without names or numbers had the rotten bastard put in a shallow grave? Had shot and deposited into an alley for Lone Star to find, or betrayed and left to die a slow and torturous death in some run-down apartment building where their only mourners would be junkies who would steal their shoes.

The door shut and the headline changed to read:

ILLEGAL ORICHALCUM REMAINS UNACCOUNTED FOR - ESTIMATED VALUE: 12 BILLION NUYEN.

That made Adam set his drink down. Twelve billion... More money than any one person could ever spend. His last heist had been just over a year ago, netting him enough nuyen to waste the rest of his life drinking in low-class bars like the one he was now in. He could enjoy the atmosphere of narcotic smoke, liquor fumes and furtive whispers which were the only soundtrack to the noiseless news broadcasts talking about how fucked up the sixth world was.

"Thacker!"

Adam's attention was drawn to the bartender, who eyed him severely. He realized belatedly that, lost in his thoughts as he'd been, he'd missed his name being called a few times. Behind the bartender the display screen switched from footage of Megiddo's car pulling away to a recording of the detective who had seemingly tracked him down. The headline read Impulse Dawson - Investigative Consultant, and it was a brief ten-second clip of her marching by the lenses of a news drone while a reporter tried to stick a microphone in her face, an unwise thing to do to someone who looked like they bench-pressed trolls in their spare time. The jacket might have fooled most people but Adam could see the way it bulged in the sleeves and shoulders. That woman was tough, the kind of broad that the world ought to be grateful they only had one of to deal with.

"Sun's almost up, Thacker," the barkeep said. "I'm calling yer tab." Behind him on the screen the woman casually took the microphone from the reporter's hand, calmly disassembled it into four separate pieces and then handed them back. She didn't say anything and she didn't slow her pace.

Adam sipped his drink and thought, That woman fucks like a tiger.

Without much coordination he reached into the pocket of his faded red jacket and pulled a credstick out in his closed fist. He dropped it on the counter and the troll grunted before retrieving it and slotting it into the side of the bar's terminal.

Throwing back the plastic glass, Adam swallowed the remainder and after setting it down on the counter let out a slow sigh. He retrieved the credstick that the troll slid back his way, pocketed it and made for the door.

12 billion nuyen. What could he do with cash like that? Could he even find a fence? Maybe if he was smart--sold small amounts of the stuff to talismongers in Berkeley or bio-arcanists in Tir Tairngire. It would take some time to liquidate it all, but it was always in wild demand. Yet what would he do with the money?

As he neared the sliding door, Adam caught a glimpse of his reflection in the faded, dirty glass. He'd need a shave, and probably a haircut. His skin was a little greasy from his diet of mostly brandy and the occasional hit of tempo but nothing that couldn't be cleaned up with the right tools. He'd watch the shadowland communications, analyze the stock market readouts... all the parts to a successful theft.

The cool night air greeted him as he stepped onto the sidewalk in front of the bar, bringing to Adam's awareness the granular sensations of the sixth world. The feel of the old concrete beneath his shoes, the scent of some motor oil pooled beneath a rusted trukk a dozen meters down the street, sounds of modern vehicles whizzing by and power lines buzzing. Chatter from people at a bus stop on the far side of the street: a street samurai with a shoulder holster visible on the inside of his coat telling a joke to a decker with almost as much metal in her lower lip as in the left side of her head. Beside them a SINner in a white shirt and tie furiously spoke into his comm implant, complaining of a broken-down car.

He looked up past the dim San Francisco street lights to peer up. Dull orange-white squares dotted the skyscrapers looming above, their monotony broken up by the occasional neon sign or faintly flickering billboard advertising some distraction or another.

Adam supposed that's what he was doing: distracting himself with the task of theft, leaving the concern of why for a later date. A classmate who had minored in philosophy had asked once, when there are no problems left to solve, no gadgets to fix, no machines to repair, what becomes of the engineer?

Maybe this was Adam Thacker finding out. As he picked at his dry eyebrows and began to head off into the night, Adam supposed that it would be Julius Megiddo and whoever he was in league with would be the ones to pay the bill. If there was anyone watching his life and waiting to judge him at its end that surely had to count for something.

= = =

Click.

The strumming of an acoustic guitar began to spill out of the speaker tack-welded to the top of the wall to his right. Roz always liked a little atmosphere when he worked with things that could kill him.

"Sleek and clean the death machines stand ready on the decks... Inside the men who fight in them, run through their final checks..."

The red and yellow protective suit felt confining to Roz, particularly to his beard. His education insisted it was a necessary precaution--not that it would help him if he ended up making a bomb. The plutonium had been cooperative so far, but he also hadn't yet tried to start the reaction. And if he was going to die today, he wanted to die to something fitting.

"Absorbed in fits the pilots sit, their lives are ruled by hate... For those that fly make others die, and never touch their fates."

The silo in which he had set up his workshop had great acoustics. If the signs could be believed--the ancient dusty food trash, the dry rotted sleeping bags, the dozens of go-ganger and rebel symbols spray-painted on the walls of corridors and bunk rooms--plenty of other people had come to this place in the past to take advantage of what it had to offer. To plot, to lay low, to fornicate. And surely to play music. The missiles were long gone, wasted to no effect during the awakening, but Roz was bringing a little of the glow back to things. As he set his hands to tools and the tools to the material, he wondered not for the first time if even a little glow was too much.

"He just flies the bomber... He never sees their eyes when the helm comes down!"

"He just flies the bomber ..."

Roz's heavy breathing filtered through the mask on the suit, loud enough to be audible even below the music spilling out of the speakers at the end of the table. With a tap on the console to his left the electron microscope extended on its boom towards him where he took it in one hand and held it to the thick lens over his left eye.

His heart rate quickened as he watched the energy start to cycle, conducted from the marble of fuel at the base of the prototype device and making its way up the orichalcum pathways to the regulator. Roz flinched as he watched the diode on the top of the dome flicker on, a foreboding green that cast its glow over everything else on the table.

The display screen above the console began showing huge spikes of data. Efficiency was admirable--the scientists of the atomic era would have been amazed at the wealth of power being generated. And by what was essentially a homemade fission reactor, grafted together from scavenged parts and circuitry that was closer to art than it was to science. Roz would be proud, if those same scientists hadn't used their own atoms for building bombs.

"Now make the run, so quick it's done and death screams towards the ground... But moving 'fast' is so far passed, they never hear a sound."

Behind the mask, Roz grinned. If his device was going to blow up on its own, it would have done so seconds after he turned it on. If he had made any of the pathways an irregular size, neglected to connect any of the capacitors properly, that would have been it. This silo would have been a glowing crater and he a ghost, a name and face in the memories of only a few others.

But it was on. The technical part was over and all he had to do was build enough to satisfy all the targets he would pick.

"A final turn, as from astern, they watch the mushrooms grow.

Fill the night with deadly light, kill the world below."

Pulling the mask off, Roz took in a deep breath of the Silo's cool and sterile air. He reached out and tapped the console to shut the music off: he wouldn't be dying today. In the same motion he pulled up Jackpoint and accessed the regional news roundup feed that one of its members kept running at all times.

There were plenty of atrocities taking place in the sixth world. No urban area was free of disasters of the metahuman-made variety and from Roz's perspective it was clearly a race to the bottom. All the regular stories: An apartment block collapse in New York. A district-wide magical blaze in Hong Kong. In Berlin Aztechnology experiments in magical monsters had escaped captivity and were preying on SINless at night. To the corporations it was like a game: who would be the first to achieve extinction? Roz was looking for somewhere in so much of a mess that the nuclear fuel he'd be pouring onto the existing fire would barely be a scroll on the bottom of the news trids.

He found what he was looking for when he pulled up the feed for San Francisco, enlarging the footage of an enormous ork with a cybernetic arm fighting against someone in a mechanized suit in a converted sports arena. The footage itself was low-quality but the coverage was suitably vulturous, an overlay reading Neon Justice fights Ivan Ionfist with help from Lone Star detective. Below that was the line Lone Star stock fluctuating wildly in response.

Roz scoffed; three people risking their lives to decide the way the world should work and all that the world could concern itself with was the profit to be made, confident that the house always wins.

His eyes flicked to the device and then back to the screen and its three struggling combatants. He could guess what they were fighting for and he didn't have to guess what enjoyment the world gleaned by watching, and Roz knew his choice was made.

A few minutes later he had the mask back on and a recorder pointed in his direction. He tapped the console to begin the capture, then let all of his rage begin flowing out through the filters.

"People of San Francisco... I am Nuclear Winter."

= = =

The trip back to the west coast felt like a dream to Dawson. The Firebird wouldn't start for any biometric signal but her own which meant Instinct could drive. That left her free to watch the world race by outside the window, a view she had denied herself on the way because she was certain what awaited her at the end was a well deserved death.

The cities of the UCAS were nothing she hadn't seen before. Everywhere her eyes rested she saw the signs of life in the sixth world. Evidence of lives that had been interrupted, sometimes permanently. The materials and the expressions of people on the street, the neon signs and holographic matrix projections all looked the same but Dawson's perspective felt radically new.

She had always viewed such people as if from the bottom of a mine shaft, her own personal prison. She could lift them up, boost them, throw them up, by hook or by crook pull them out of the fire or back from the edge. But she was only the step up, the launch pad, the escalator sending them to another chance. They were a tiny payment against the infinite debt of her cruelty and spite. The weight of her remorse had been like a mountain, and that weight, that pressure had made her into something hard and sharp. Something that could meet the knives of the world and turn them from their course. Something that could save people.

Now... Now the weight was all but gone. She still felt she owed something, and more than that she felt it was important she always think of it that way, but the longing to be punished... That was gone. No, better--it had been absolved. She had been--

Dawson hadn't noticed that the Firebird had stopped in a parking lot until she heard the gear selector shift and felt Instinct's hands around her shoulders, turning her towards the driver's seat. Her embrace was sudden and yet felt somehow calculated, as if Instinct has been observing her for some time and deducing her mental state.

"Hey," her creature whispered. "It's okay, now. You don't have to think so much, yeah?" Her head moved out of Dawson's neck and her lips brushed against her cheek. "The world needs your heart now, so open it."

At those words a tension escaped from Dawson's body that she hadn't even been aware she'd been holding.

"You're right," she murmured, shutting her eyes. "How did you get so wise?"

Instinct whispered in reply, "I was made from an angel."

Dawson smirked against Instinct's throat. "Do angels fuck every person in an entire city?"

"Yes," Instinct confirmed. "That is a thing that angels should certainly do."

= = =

When the door opened up, Dawson expected the girls to fall out onto her in a pile. What she felt when this didn't happen was not dismay but rather suspicion: they were plotting something.

Instinct shut the door behind them as Dawson removed her coat and hung it on the hook. From the far side of the corner leading to the living room she heard Vayger's voice.

"She's here. Remember: just like I told you."

The couch had been moved so that it faced where Dawson arrived at the corner, and draped across it with legs spread was Vayger in the least intimidating outfit Dawson had ever seen her wearing. In the old days it had always been the uniform: shielded black helmet, black padded combat armor, rifle either on her back or in her hands. Designated marksman, elf of few words and no past, slowly failing insides desperately in need of replacement. Platinum blonde hair in a tight pixie cut.

This woman across the room from her barely looked like the same person in body. Absent from her lithe form was the spiked leather jacket and chaps, the chains, the motorcycle helmet displaying her moody outbursts. Her neck-length hair was freshly re-dyed, the colors of the rainbow shimmering in the generous light of the apartment Dawson owned and shared with sometimes six, sometimes eight other people. She was clad in simple boxers and a white undershirt--ordinary clothes... Dawson's, actually. A habit doubtless picked up from her go-ganger subordinates.

Before taking anything else in, Dawson met Vayger's eyes. Yes, they were the same as they'd always been: a guarded, brittle hardness that spoke of desperation mixed with too much resentment to ever let anyone see its full extent.

Everyone but her, lately. That Vayger was here, dressed down and cleaned up--by go-ganger standards--was evidence she felt safe in Dawson's company. In her care.

The girls were arranged in front of the couch: Rierra, Shelara, Nyana, Jastira, Avalanche and finally Alenia. The expressions of elation and yearning on their faces were not diminished at all for the fact that none of them were wearing anything below the waist. In Avalanche's case her pantsless status allowed her to demonstrate her sincerity in regards to how happy she was to see Dawson, both her endowments starting to stiffen in anticipation of their reunion. The extent to which her package sagged and the potency of its pulsing testified that from the troll's perspective her yearning had been years long, even though only two weeks had passed since the troll had last been able to express her affections.

Alenia came forward first. The first time she'd commandeered one of Dawson's undershirts it had practically hung from her slender body. Almost three years of proper nutrition, indoor warmth and a surplus of affection and comfort had not made her fit them but had managed to lessen the extent of their oversized nature. The line of teasing Dawson had taken up just before she left was who ever heard of a plump elf? Not that any of them really were... Even though they ate like trash compactors, none of the girls ever seemed to escape the elven silhouette. They'd become visibly bottom-heavy, uncommon for metahumans of their variety but ultimately to their credit. A little fringe benefit of magic in the DNA, perhaps.