Amazon Arrow: Lullaby (Patreon)

The fourth flash-bang went off at the library steps, and the world turned white. Amazon Arrow came through it at a sprint, ears ringing, clearing several steps with every stride. She had chased the figure in the leather jacket across six blocks of Ellery Falls: over the hardware store roof, down the fire escape on Ninth, through the loading dock behind the dining hall, where a stack of pallets had burst into splinters six inches from her head. Whoever Lullaby was, she had stopped relying on her touch alone. She'd brought toys.

A trash can came hurtling off the walkway. Chryseis ducked it, planted a hand on the grass, and fired from a crouch. The arrow severed a lamppost cable a foot above Lullaby's head and dropped a shower of sparks across her path. Lullaby veered left, skidding on wet leaves, stumbling but still on the move.

"It's over!" Amazon Arrow shouted. Her lungs burned. Her left shoulder throbbed where she'd clipped a gutter two rooftops back.

Lullaby didn't answer. She hurled something small and round. Chryseis shot it out of the air, and it burst into a cloud of pale violet powder that drifted harmlessly across the lawn. The second one she never saw. It cracked against the pavement at her feet, and the smoke rolled up sweet and heavy. Anesthetic.

She held her breath. Twenty seconds, maybe more, stumbling forward while trying to make her way through the dense violet cloud.

Chryseis was almost clear when someone’s fingertips brushed gently against her cheek.

"Shh," said Lullaby’s soft voice. "You've been chasing me for so long, you must be very tired."

The world went soft at the edges. Amazon Arrow’s bow slipped from her fingers and clattered to the pavement. Everything blurred together, and the brick dormitories tilted around her. She tried to say something, anything, but her tongue was heavy as wet sand.

The sidewalk came up to meet her. Concrete, cold, unforgiving. Her dark hair spilled across the pavement as Chryseis managed to roll onto her back. Amazon Arrow looked up to see Lullaby staring down at her. The heroine sighed, her blue eyes rolled back into her head, her eyelids fluttered closed.

Then nothingness.

For years Amazon Arrow had guarded the city of Winter Falls and the university at its heart. She had stopped a chemical tanker from rolling into the river. She had pulled a family out of a burning apartment on Clement Street. She had become, without ever quite meaning to, the thing students pointed at when they wanted to believe the world was a little better than the news said it might be.

Now a dozen of those students stood frozen on the walkway, backpacks still on their shoulders, hands pressed over their mouths. They had come out of an evening seminar to the sounds of battle and arrived just in time to see Amazon Arrow fall.

Silence. It was as if the whole campus was holding its breath. Someone pulled out a cell phone, then everyone in the gathering crowd did the same. Whatever was about to happen, no one wanted to miss it.

The woman who knelt beside the fallen hero wore a battered leather jacket, a plaid skirt, and combat boots scuffed gray at the toes. She did not look like a dangerous supervillain. She looked like any grad student who'd stayed too late in the library.

She smiled down at Amazon Arrow with something that was almost tenderness.

"Look at you," she murmured. "So helpless, and all it took was one little touch."

Lullaby glanced up at the crowd. Her eyes were dark, rimmed in smudged liner, and very calm.

"Don't worry. She's not hurt. I don't hurt people." She tapped two fingers against her palm, and the students flinched as if she'd drawn a weapon. "She just wouldn’t stop chasing me."

The news called her Lullaby. Six weeks ago she had walked through Winter Falls First Federal at noon, brushing her fingertips against shoulders, and every teller, guard, and customer had folded gently to the floor and slept through the whole robbery. Two weeks after that, the city council chambers. Then the hospital's pharmacy wing.

Amazon Arrow had been hunting her ever since.

Now Lullaby smoothed a strand of black hair off the heroine's forehead.

"Sleeping like a baby," she said conversationally. "I wish I could do that. I haven't slept, not for weeks, maybe months. Not sleeping… It makes you a little crazy. Hard to think straight. I can’t sleep, but I can make other people sleep." She laughed softly.

Lullaby looked down again. The smile faded.

"She should have left me alone."

Lullaby turned to see the students gathering with cameras. "Go ahead," she said. "Film it. Amazon Arrow put down by The Lullaby. Let every two-bit crook in the city know that she can be beaten. Nobody in this town will believe in her anymore. No villains will fear her." She shrugged. "That’s her real armor. I'm just taking it off."

The crowd gasped as Lullaby yanked open the red straps of Amazon Arrow’s costume, spilling her soft breasts into view. Everyone seemed to hold their breath. Chryseis remained still, vulnerable, unaware and exposed.

One of the gathered students, Mynka Priam, remembered last spring, when the bridge on Route 9 had iced over and a school bus had slid toward the railing. Amazon Arrow had pinned its rear tire with a grappling line and held it there teetering on the edge of disaster, boots braced against the asphalt, for eleven minutes until the fire trucks came. Mynka's little brother had been on that bus.

She put the phone away.

"No," she said.

Lullaby's eyebrows rose.

Beside Mynka, a tall kid in a dark hoodie, James from her stats section, slowly lowered his hands from his mouth. "Yeah," he said, voice cracking a little. "No."

One by one, the phones went back into pockets. Nobody decided anything together. It just happened.

Then James took a step forward, flexing his fists.

"Careful," Lullaby said, lifting her hand, fingers loose. "I can put all of you down before you reach me."

He took another step anyway. So did Mynka. So did the girl in the gray sweatshirt, and the boy with the backpack, and the rest of them, until a ragged wall of students stood on the walkway.

Lullaby's face grimaced in anger. She started to rise to face the crowd, but black gloved hands suddenly snapped around her wrists. Lullaby gasped and looked down.

Amazon Arrow's eyes were open.

Chryseis maintained her grip and rolled onto her side, slowly, wincing, and pushed herself onto one elbow. Her hair was full of grit. There was a scrape along her cheek. But her gaze was clear, and it was fixed on the woman in the leather jacket.

"Lullaby," she said. "Or should I say Mara McKlain? Winter Falls PD has a file on you three inches thick."

Lullaby stared at her, fear and disbelief visible on her face, knowing that she was finished.

"So what now?" Lullaby's voice had gone thin. "You shoot me? Drag me to the station in front of your adoring public? You might want to put your tits away first."

"I'm going to ask you to come with me," Chryseis said as she adjusted her costume. "Not to the station. To Dr. Okafor at the Winter Falls Medical Center. She runs a program for people with certain gifts, like yourself." 

Chryseis held the other woman's gaze. 

"I read your file, Mara. Dr. Okafor might be able to help you. And if she can’t, then she might be able to train you to help others. I’m offering you a better way. Unless you’d prefer the inside of a prison cell?"

Mara looked at the students in their ragged line. She looked at her own hand, fingers still curled loose and ready. Then she looked at Amazon Arrow: scraped, exhausted, her bow out of reach. Mara was confident that she could overpower the heroine with a sudden move. All it would take is the slightest touch.

Slowly, Mara's hand closed into a fist. Then it opened again, relaxed, empty, and dropped to her side.

"I haven't slept in months," she whispered.

"I know," said Chryseis. "Let's fix that."