It wasn’t anything that would kill him, but the hit was nasty and Royal knows in a vague way that broken ribs can be dangerous for all the soft stuff they usually protect. As Royal kneels beside him Ray coughs, sucking in the air that had been knocked out of him. Incredibly, he tries to get back on his feet.
“Lemme go,” Ray spits, pawing at the hand keeping him pressed to the dirt.
“This is no good,” Royal hisses, desperate to get through to his friend. “This is no good, dude. I think she’s a commander, there’s no version of this where we win.”
Finally, when Ray looks up into his face Royal can see light in his eyes, like getting through to a sleepwalker. But he doesn’t find anything encouraging.
“Not done already are y’all!”
Something in the commander’s voice shivers up his neck like hearing a wolf howl in the distance, lights up every nerve and muscle with the instinct to get the hell away. His stomach sinks when he sees an opposite reaction in Ray, her taunt vibrating through him enough for him to shake off Royal’s grip and stagger to his feet.
There isn’t time for this; Ray’s dusty back is getting further away, picking up speed as he hurtles towards the daylight. His gun is still in the dirt near Royal’s knee.
“Stop laughin’ at me,” Ray snarls, reaching for the pocket where he keeps his switchblade. “Stop laughin’!”
In one last bid to get all of them out of this intact, Royal looks to Eisse for help. She hasn’t moved an inch, still leaning coolly against a boarded-up display window and watching the fight through her visor.
“Can’t you do something?” Royal demands. “She’s gonna kill him.”
Eisse’s eyes flicker over him for a second, like she’s working out what to say, then Ray screams as he lunges at the girl with the knife Royal knows he never learned to swing. Eisse settles back into observing again, already finished with the conversation they didn’t start.
Alright.
None of Ray’s furious, clumsy slashes are landing, but the commander is making the effort to dodge them. Not completely impervious then, that’s good. Royal doesn’t have anything sharp but what he’s got will have to work. They don’t need to win, he just needs to get this stopped so he can get Ray out of here.
As he gets to his feet he reaches into the subspace attached to the bandanna around his bicep and feels for the handle of his weapon.
Phineas feels like she’s dancing with a little kid. This is a training exercise more than a real fight, Ray has no idea what he’s doing. It’s not nothing, there are a few near misses that get her blood moving, but she’d really been hoping for…
For what? What is she doing here?
Backup is coming on fast, the bigger man is drawing an old baseball bat from a subspace pocket sewn into some fabric around his arm. He drops into a sprint to close the distance and Phineas readies herself. Maybe this will make things more interesting.
Something glints in the corner of her vision, a burst of mirrorshine from the balcony— the moon catching some broken glass? Something about it holds her attention enough that she stares too long, loses her rhythm and Ray lands a deep cut across her ribs, tearing through her shirt.
Ray shrieks, delirious with the single win he’s clawed together tonight, and when he makes the odd decision to ditch the knife and reach for her shoulders Phineas realizes too late she doesn’t know where the bigger guy got to. Caught off-guard in Ray’s grip, she feels someone else looming behind her, and her vision explodes with stars.
The bat connects with the side of her head and finishes its arc too easily, like swinging through smoke, but somehow the impact rattles all the way to Royal’s shoulder. It’s like her weight is sitting in the wrong places, how does a person weigh wrong?!
The commander’s body makes a blur perfectly parallel to the ground and crashes through the crumbling outer wall of the hardware store, pocked with hubcaps and old mason jar lids that rattle down behind her. Royal watches the pitch-black opening she made, like a mouth rimmed with broken teeth, waiting for something to happen as the dust settles.
Ray crows, “Fuck yeah dude!!”
He slaps Royal on the shoulder and screams wordlessly up into the air, but the instant he stops there’s a thump, then another, the debris in the wall beating out like a heart, then-
Royal just gets his hands on Ray’s chest to shove him out of her way, he feels the commander’s coat scrape across his knuckles as her blinding form soars through the space between them. Royal reels back, his vision all spots.
“What-!”
He catches the sight of her for a split second, a searing shape crouching against the wall of the drug store, seven feet above the ground. By the time he hears the wall crack under her feet as she leaps she’s getting bigger again, closer-
Instinct isn’t enough to keep his eyes from flinching shut but it gets his bat up in its arc, swinging at the world’s loudest pitch, but at the end of the swing he feels something- clinging? He opens his eyes, the light behind him disorienting-
Behind him?!
Royal whirls, tries to ready his bat and finds it won’t budge, like it’s been nailed down to the thin air over his shoulder. He jerks it in front of him, trying to break her grip on the other end.
There’s no grip to break, the commander didn’t catch it in her hand. She’s standing on it.
She’s weightless, but held straight out in front of him now the bat suddenly feels as if it’s trapped in cement. He’s too shocked to muster any real thought about what he’s seeing, to even move: instinct simply keeps his grip tight around the handle, every batting lesson he’s ever had betraying him. Towering over him, her shining halo consumes the world. All he can see of her face is her grin, her teeth.
“You’re the devil,” Royal breathes. Her knee connects with his chin, and that’s the last thing he knows for a while.
The world is riotous with energetic color, and that isn’t gonna work for this next part, so when Phineas touches back down after kicking the shit out of that guy she breathes out, lets all that leftover energy run through her feet and back into the earth. Everything comes back into focus, just objects in regular space again. One of the objects is trying to-
Person, it’s a person, holding up the gun he’d retrieved from the street and backing away as she calmly approaches. The trigger clicks but nothing happens, he’s out of ammo. He finally just throws it at her and it lands neatly in a tin bucket instead; that would have been an impressive toss if he’d meant to do it.
Ray turns to run as Phineas gets in arm’s reach of him but he trips, his feet sliding in the dry dirt. He still reeks of booze. When she grabs the back of his shirt and hauls him up he swings his fist blindly, which is annoying, so she pinches his ear between her knuckles. He howls like her touch burns him.
“Quit whinin’,” Phineas huffs, dragging him back to the front door of the bar. He stumbles the whole way, like he wants to try and run but keeps bitching out when it hurts too bad. This guy sucks so much.
Phineas gets him in front of the porch steps and shoves him to the ground again, taking advantage of his disorientation to perch on his back.
Living with a doctor hadn’t ended up teaching Phineas much in the way of healing, but Jo had got across the useful stuff like where you could pull or twist or squeeze someone to get what you want with the minimum effort. Her knee in Ray’s back and her other foot rooted to the road, Phineas fists her hand in his nasty hair and grinds his face into the dust, then she bends his wrist back across his shoulderblades and searches with her fingertips for those tendons she still can’t name. Ray makes a panicked noise before she even does anything else, muffled by the ground, but Phineas had felt the fight go out of him as soon as his friend went down. This is just cleaning up.
“Ellie!” Phineas calls brightly. She can see her peeking through one of the big windows of the bar. “It’s done, come out here a minute.”
Only briefly hesitating, Ellie disappears from the window and creaks halfway through the front doors.
“Um,” Ellie says, biting her lip. At the sound of her voice Ray’s weak halo surges with humiliated rage, he tries to buck Phineas off of him but she mashes his nose back down into the dirt like a dog. Holding him there, she smiles up at Ellie.
“Hi,” Phineas says. Ellie raises one arm from where she’s wrapped them around herself and waves awkwardly. Phineas leans down, close to Ray’s ear. The alcohol stench is overwhelming.
“Apologize,” Phineas says.
“Get the fuck off me-”
Now she squeezes, the gristle-crunch of a complicated network of connective meat in his wrist almost nauseating under her fingers. Ray thrashes, wailing panicked nonsense until he manages to shout something approaching an apology in Ellie’s direction.
“Sorry for what?” Phineas asks, loudly enough for Ellie to hear it.
“Enough!” The shrillness in Ellie’s voice snaps Phineas’ attention to her; the horrified look on her face is…not what Phineas wanted at all. She eases up on Ray’s wrist and he goes limp, breathing hard. Ellie exhales slowly, settling. “That’s enough.”
Phineas nods brusquely, then sits up to dig through Ray’s pockets. A lighter, some kind of plastic card, a ratty red scrap of fabric like the other guy had around his bicep; she stuffs it all in her coat. She even takes the pack of cigarettes from his sleeve.
“What are you doing?” Ray groans. Phineas gets her hand in his hair and wrenches his head back again, leans in close.
“I’m kinda pissed you’re gettin’ off so easy,” she says, keeping it between the two of them. “You’re lucky I’m taking your smokes and not your teeth. Lucky too that Ellie’s too nice for her own good.” She tightens her fingers against his scalp. “If I hear about you pullin’ shit like this again, I’m gonna make sure we’re alone next time.”
She doesn’t wait for a reply before dropping him and climbing to her feet. He curls onto his side to cradle his arm, but otherwise he doesn’t make any move to get up. Phineas hears a soft scrape somewhere behind her and turns to find the bigger guy coming to, and some ways behind him, still leaning against a wall like she’s waiting in line for coffee, is the glass woman.
As Phineas watches, her halo shimmers into view, the woman intentionally dismissing whatever had been hiding it. It’s minutely defined and rigid, spiking out in freezing crystalline patterns, ticking slowly in a perfect circle around her head like a clock face. If this one wants to fight it would be a lot more than a warm-up.
Phineas feels her stomach growling.
“Hey,” Phineas calls, waving. The woman raises her chin.
“Hm?” Her voice is smooth and pretty, and even that single syllable is bratty as hell. Phineas falls into her slouch.
“Are we fightin’ now? ‘Cause we can, but I ain’t had dinner yet and I’d kinda like to call it here if that’s cool.”
The woman touches her temple and the shiny blue visor across her face vanishes, a shimmer from left to right. When she shakes her head her high ponytail swishes behind it, electric blue bright in the moonlight, reflecting in the purple vinyl of her dress. Phineas remembers Jo telling her about poisonous flowers, that they develop special colors to warn people not to eat them. The glass woman looks across the street at her downed guys. Maybe she’s thinking the same about Phineas.
“Yes,” she makes eye contact again. Her eyes are the same icy blue as her hair. “I think we’re done here.”
Phineas makes a lazy salute.
“Later then,” she says, turning away. She bounds back to the porch and grins at Ellie. Phineas doesn’t get one back. It’s okay, it’s fine, Phineas can salvage this.
“Here, you forgot this,” Phineas holds out the odd marble, Ellie’s lucky charm from earlier. She’d remembered it when she reached into her pockets to stash Ray’s stuff. “We kinda got interrupted before.”
Praises, Ellie does smile now, a dazed little thing but it’s something. She reaches behind her neck and unties her kerchief. Her curls fall gracefully around her face and two long rabbit ears spring up, twitching after being held down all day.
“Why don’t you hang onto it?” Ellie says.
Maybe it’s only because his own hair is disgusting against his neck, another painful casualty of this godforsaken desert, but when the rude girl gets close enough the first detail Ulrich notices is her hair. It seems to constantly defy gravity; he’d assumed it was a temporary side effect of the commanding but it’s still hanging in a cheerful swoop across her face. He is positive this woman doesn’t take the time to style it like that each morning, has likely never even looked at any sort of product, and she’s so dirty there’s no reason it should look so light. Even cut short like it is each curl and wave seems to be lifted by some unseen force to frame her face, bounce with her movement like a cartoon character. Ulrich has never cared for cartoons.
“What’d you say your name was?” the waitress asks her. “Sorry if you gave it already, I-”
“Oh! I’m Phineas.”
The word glints ravenously in Ulrich’s left eye.
“Well, you better come on inside, Phineas.”
Phineas’ answering giggle pinballs across the metal panels of that terrible mechanism Ulrich has inside him instead of bone or muscle, shakes the corrosion from every component it touches and rattles all the way to the foundations like a flare down a well.
This time the spark catches, and the gears shudder to life.