SRFMAW: Chapter One

Chapter One 

tick-tock.

tick-tock.

3:47 PM said the small table clock. The phone on her desk buzzed once. 

Not her civilian line, not Alexandria’s, but the secure one, the one that meant the call was neither optional nor convenient. Rebecca closed the file she had been pursuing, laid her pen down and picked up the device. Sighing, she pressed the receiver to her ear.

“Doctor,” she said.

“Good afternoon, Rebecca.” Calm, clipped. Doctor Mother’s voice always sounded like someone had sanded the edges off. “In thirty-eight minutes, you will receive a call to your civilian line. Federal early-warning would soon pick up a transient anomalous mass at the edge of low orbit. No prior track, no launch signature.”

Rebecca’s gaze flickered to the clock on her table. Thirty-eight minutes. Not thirty-seven. Not forty.

“And?” she asked.

“Contessa advises you should be first on scene. Non-hostile posture. You will receive coordinates and an ETA. Vermont. Small town, light industrial. She says to emphasise the non-hostile.”

"Understood. Reasons for my involvement specifically?"

"Path directive."

“Additional details?”

A pause. Paper shifting, maybe. The faintest hush that meant the woman had turned her head, listening to someone Rebecca couldn’t hear. “None,” Doctor Mother said, “this is a hinge.”

Right. A Path with too many branches to hand over the explanation. Rebecca filed the word and didn’t press. If Contessa could have handed her details without collapsing the outcome, she would have. The absence of justification was the justification. She knew the shape of those limits by now.

“Coordinates?” Rebecca asked.

A light chime from her terminal. A string of numbers appeared, annotated with a circular radius, speed and angle of descent, projected impact ellipse. The ellipse resolved into a parking lot just off a state highway.

“Understood,” Rebecca said. “Anything else?”

“No.”

The call ended. The table clock went on ticking.

Rebecca turned, moving through a space designed to look lived-in, human. The framed degrees. The bookshelf she’d memorised down to the micro-creases in the spines. Makeup case on the credenza: a promise to the mirror that the Chief Director aged. A suit jacket cut a little too broad in the shoulders, softened with a silk scarf. Every piece curated as camouflage.

She stepped into the private side room, closed the door with a soft hydraulic sigh. The costume waited on its hanger: black and slate grey, the stylised obelisk over her sternum. The cape fell past her feet when she held it up, heavy enough to tug at wrists that were otherwise immune to strain. She removed the jacket, the blouse, the tailored pants. Wiped concealer from the corners of her eyes, smudged a decade of pretended fatigue off her cheekbones with a single swipe of a cotton pad. Hair tie, skirt. The helmet came last, cold steel settling over her features like a second skin.

The elevator to the roof access seemed to take an eternity, though her internal chronometer informed her it was operating at standard speed. Fifty-four minutes until impact. Flight time to Vermont would push the margins, but it was doable. 

Ocean air and heat shimmer. Los Angeles baked under a veneer of smog. The skyline was a cluster of teeth behind her. Rebecca had exited into the maintenance area, a space carefully designed to be invisible from ground level and satellite observation alike. Privacy was a luxury that came with being one of the most recognisable capes in North America. And here, twenty-seven stories up, even the constant city noise was now a distant hum.

Closing the door behind her with a soft click, Rebecca stepped off the roof and dropped.

Wind hammered her cape flat along her calves, then fluttered as she corrected to level. She pushed speed. Supersonic, then more. The city smeared into a stitched grey rectangle, and then there was only air.

Fifty-three minutes.

She calculated the arc before the thought finished forming, adjusting by millimetres of movement in glove and boot. She watched Idaho slide by, then northern New York as data points in a moving grid: air density, thermals, the odd updraft tumbling off a tall cloud she skimmed through, adding the scent of ice to smog and ocean salt. At this altitude, she could leave a sonic signature that would hit the ground like a handful of firecrackers. She angled higher, less noise. Less drag. Less attention.

Her civilian phone—stowed within the armour’s backplate, near enough that vibration travelled through her to bone—buzzed. She tapped a contact in her ear and routed it to the mask mic.

“This is Director Costa-Brown.”

“Director,” a voice said, Midwest vowels varnished with training. Department of Defence liaison, one she’d had a meeting with twice but never actually met. “This is Colonel Harlan. We have a NORAD flag. A mass not matching known debris intersected low orbit three minutes ago. We’re pushing preliminary pathing. It may be nothing. It may be a tinker event. We wanted to put you in the loop.”

“Appreciated,” she said, voice steady, unhurried. “Send what you have to the PRT network. Relevant assets will be on alert until we know more.”

“Yes, ma’am. We’ll keep you—”

“I’ll get Command moving. Thank you.” She cut the call smoothly, no room for social grace to become questions. The next motion was muscle memory: she opened a line to the PRT’s duty desk, gave an abbreviated version, and watched the system spin up response trees in her mind’s eye. She parcelled out the work in clean chunks. New Hampshire and Boston: standby. New York: hold Legend and two Triumvirate support teams on a short leash; send someone to coordinate with state police. Brockton Bay: notify local heroes they might be called to consult.

Vermont appeared on the horizon as a quilt of forest and fields, green stitched with two-lane roads and the occasional wound of blacktop big-box construction. Rebecca adjusted her trajectory, following the coordinates Doctor Mother had provided toward what appeared to be a relatively unpopulated area northeast of Montpelier. A low sprawl of single-story buildings and a wide apron of marked asphalt. A grocery store. A gym with blacked-out windows. A local bank. The lot was broad, lines freshly painted, white rectangles awaiting cars.

Good. Collateral damage would be minimal, assuming the local law enforcement had evacuated the place as they had been instructed 

She circled once, confirming the location, then took up a position approximately half a mile away. The sky above her was clear, late afternoon sunlight filtering through sparse clouds. Nothing to indicate that something was about to fall out of orbit.

Then she saw it.

A streak of fire against the blue sky, growing larger by the second. The object—the cape—was coming in at a steep angle, trailing plasma like a comet.

The impact hit like an exclamation point. Asphalt exploded upward, showering pebbles and tar. A shallow crater scooped itself out of the parking lot at a diagonal, trailing a gouge of pulverised aggregate and scorched paint. Steam rose in curtains. The scent was hot rock and something like cooked meat riding behind it.

She hovered above the crater’s lip, her mind cataloguing what she saw within: Male. Caucasian. Advanced age, if the stark white hair was any indication. Musculature was dense. A Brute.

Closer now, the heat was negligible. Her cape hung straight down. The figure at the crater’s heart lay sprawled half on his side, half on his back, one arm severed cleanly at the elbow. But the wound wasn't fresh. It was old, scarred over with thick, keloid tissue. The other arm lay palm-up, hand splayed, knuckles flayed. The kind of injury you get from punching too hard. His right eye was an old puckered, starburst scar. The rest of his face was battered and bore fresher wounds: skin worn away in a torn crescent from cheekbone through lip, teeth showing through the mess. 

The burns he bore were severe; third-degree across his chest, his remaining arm, and his thighs, but they were strangely localised. They seemed incongruous with the uniform, all-encompassing heat of atmospheric entry.

The rest of his body, the parts not covered by the old scars or the recent burns, was pristine. Unmarred. There were no abrasions, no fractures, no signs of the concussive force that had shattered a parking lot. He had fallen from orbit, hit the ground with the force of a tactical missile, and the impact itself had seemingly left him untouched.

The fall hadn’t done this, her mind supplied, cataloguing. Something more dangerous had, elsewhere.

Suddenly, his one good eye, a pale, chilling grey, snapped open. Not panicked. Not confused. Measuring. Certain. He focused, and the world narrowed to the line between the eye and her own, and she felt the moment when she became a variable he could put a name to: enemy, threat, obstacle, tool.

She did nothing.

The eyelid drooped, closed. His breath, ragged a moment ago, evened to a slow, stubborn cadence.

A wash of light painted the lot in primary colours. Rebecca didn’t turn her head. Legend settled at the crater’s edge, the air around him shimmering with heat-hazed motes that weren’t heat. White suit unsmudged, cape caught in a breeze. He took in the scene in one glance, then another, slower. His expression stuck between concern and something like disquiet.

“Alexandria.” His gaze flicked to her, then to the body. “What do we have?”

“Unidentified cape,” she said. “Durable. Significant prior trauma: amputation, enucleation, facial degloving. Additional surface burns inconsistent with reentry. Prior conflict. Seasoned combatant.” She kept to facts without extraneous details.

Legend’s brow creased. “Crash didn’t do this?”

“No.” She lowered herself and put a hand to the man’s chest, pushed lightly, as if to confirm a suspicion she’d already confirmed with a dozen tiny inputs: temperature, recoil of muscle, density. Her glove dimpling a surface that felt less like skin over ribs and more like a steel cable under leather. “If he’d been anyone else, we’d be picking up pieces from the treeline.”

Legend’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll call it in.”

“No.”  

His eyebrows rose. “No?”

“Priorities. The cape needs medical attention, but we may not be able to break the skin. A cape, then. I believe we have someone suitable at Brockton Bay. Panacea.”

A flicker of doubt crossed his features, but he didn’t argue.

Rebecca knelt, gathered the stranger in her arms. The flight to Brockton Bay took eighteen minutes. Legend kept pace. They didn't speak during the flight—there was nothing to say that couldn't wait until they had more information.

Brockton Bay General Hospital was expecting them. Rebecca had called ahead using her authority as Chief Director of the PRT, and the staff had cleared a trauma bay specifically for their arrival. Amy Dallon was waiting in the emergency department, her expression shifting from routine concern to shock as she got her first look at their patient.

"What happened to him?" Amy asked, her hands already moving to assess the injuries.

"Unknown," Rebecca said for the third time that day. "Can you help him?"

Panacea touched his sternum, and almost immediately her expression shifted to confusion. "His biology… It’s wrong. It’s not human. Not exactly. I can read it, barely, but it's like nothing I've ever encountered." She frowned, her power delving deeper. "When I try to use my power, to influence the cells, his body actively… resists. It pushes me out. It's like his body is actively resisting external manipulation; resisting change."

"Can you heal him?" Legend asked.

"I don't think so. Not directly." Amy's hands remained on the cape's chest, her power working at the edges of his alien physiology. "But I can tell you that he has an active healing factor. Incredibly powerful. He doesn't need me. All his systems are working to repair the damage. The burns are already receding. It’s slow, given the extent of the damage, but… he'll be fine. 

Rebecca felt something cold settle in her stomach. A healing factor that could recover from this level of trauma, given time. Durability that could survive orbital re-entry. And the kind of battle damage that suggested he had fought something capable of inflicting wounds that could scar tissue that tough.

Where exactly did this cape come from?

"How long until he's conscious?" she asked.

"Hard to say. Hours, maybe days. His brain activity suggests he's in some kind of deep healing state. Natural, not induced." Amy stepped back, her expression furrowed. "I've never seen anything like this. His entire physiology is... I don't even have words for it. It's like someone took human biology and rebuilt it from the ground up to be as efficient as possible."

 Rebecca exchanged a glance with Legend.

"We'll need to keep him under observation," Rebecca decided eventually. "Medical monitoring, but also security. Legend, can you coordinate with PRT ENE for coverage?"

"Already on it." Legend was talking into his communicator, arranging for a rotating schedule of heroes to maintain watch over their mystery patient. Standard procedure for unknown capes, though this situation was anything but standard.

Rebecca found herself staring at the unconscious form on the hospital bed. Why? She wondered. Why had it been so imperative that she be the one to find him? What was it about her, specifically, that the Path to Victory had required for this particular, monstrously powerful pawn?