There were few places I less wanted to go after a trans-Atlantic flight than the Moonshot holding cells in downtown DC. I would rather get myself a greasy cheeseburger. Unpack my bags. Sleep in my own bed. Lose another game of Scrabble to the centuries-old fox spirit who gave me superpowers.

But when I disembarked the plane and almost ran straight into one of the Federal Moonshot Bureau’s interchangeable idiots, I knew immediately that I would be getting none of those things.

Thank goodness they remembered to send a woman this time.

“Alright, fill me in on all the details,” I ordered, unbuckling my seatbelt and reaching behind me into the trunk of the all-black government SUV. The unfastened seatbelt alarm started blaring at us the moment I unfastened myself, but it was largely drowned out by the sirens that helped us push through early morning gridlock.

“Ma’am, please—”

“Eyes on the road,” Gorou ordered, even as the fantastic four-tailed fox wound two tails around the suitcase I needed and pulled it into my waiting grasp.

“But she needs to fasten her seatbelt!” Huh. Had the Federal Moonshot Bureau finally found someone somewhat inured to the weirdness? “Oh my God I’m arguing with a fox what is my life?”

Ah. Never mind.

“Look, one, if something happens, you’re the one we need to worry about,” I informed the normal, relatively average woman behind the wheel. “But two, you’re driving me to court. And I don’t know about you, but I am not about to show up to court in a Hello Kitty tank top and pajama pants!”

Which would explain why I was currently arm-deep in my suitcase to extract my garment bag, some nylons, my battery-powered flat iron, and my backup pair of flats.

“Now come on, agent, I need the details. What was so important that they had you waiting for me out at fucking Dulles?”

No response came. I couldn’t help but quirk an ear in confusion, but finished swapping my tank top out for a decent enough blouse before giving a pointed stare at the agent through the rear-view mirror.

“You think maybe she has someone listening in?” I asked Gorou, switching to Japanese as I did.

“Perhaps,” the fox agreed, staring at the seatback in front of him as though he could see through it. “Do you think that this is a rubber stamping?”

“What else would it be?” I asked, even as I shimmied out of my pajama pants and into a pencil skirt. Once that was on, I hiked it up to start pulling on my nylons (stay-ups; I wouldn’t be paid enough after this to bother negotiating pantyhose in a moving car), sparing an annoyed glance for the rear view mirror. “Oi, Agent whatever, you want to fill me in or not?”

“S-sorry!” Her left hand fell onto the steering wheel, making me realize that yes, she’d been listening to somebody on the other end of her earbud. “Um, at 1500 hours yesterday, an unknown Moonshot attempted a terrorist attack.”

My ears flicked in the agent’s direction, letting her know that she had my attention.

“T-the unknown Moonshot was, um, only neutralized after he had already inflicted multiple casualties and significant property damage.”

“How did he get taken down? And where did this happen?” I asked, frowning. Was neutralized, injuries and property damage with no real extent or scope, deliberately cagey delivery…

Either I was being fed a line of bullshit, or there was something the agent didn’t know how to bring up in a delicate fashion.

“Well, um, we don’t know? H-how he was taken down, I mean!” the agent quickly added when I offered a questioning glance at the rearview mirror. “A-and I wasn’t there, they won’t tell me?”

Which meant it was embarrassing to the people in charge. Either someone on their end had fucked up, or they hadn’t been the ones to actually take the hostile down.

“Okay, you don’t know that, sure,” I agreed. “So now tell me where it happened.”

“It, um…”

“Out with it!” Gorou snarled, his baritone drawing a surprised yelp from our driver.

“Longworth!” she exclaimed. “I-it was at Longworth!”

My ears pulled low in immediate concern, and I shared a wide-eyed look with Gorou. Uh-oh. Oh, I did not like the sinking feeling I was getting.

“… as in Longworth House Office Building?” I asked, unable to disguise the horror in my voice.

“Yes, ma’am.”

I shared a look with Gorou, then grabbed my phone to check the date. Today was May 11.

The Decimation of Dirksen was nine years ago yesterday.

“Fuck.” I laid back against the seat, transferring my phone over to my right hand so I could bury my fingers into Gorou’s fur. An attempted do-over of Dirksen, likely only stopped by the attacker’s own incompetence? No shit they wanted to bring me in, make sure everything was done by the book.

And more importantly, safely.

“Well, guess I’m taking another dive for the sake of ‘due process,’” I grumbled.

“Y-your country thanks you for your service, and—”

“Shut up and drive.”

Let’s all take a step back.

Some of you might be too young to remember the Decimation. And in fairness, it wasn’t exactly something we had footage of — there was no plane slamming into a building, no boat collapsing a bridge, no train exploding after it derailed.

There was just the slow and steady accumulation of bodies, tossed out of windows that looked into nothing.

The day was Thursday, May 10, 2012. Two unknown Moonshot entered the Dirksen Senate Office Building at three in the afternoon. As far as we knew, the pair probably had synergistic powers — survivors spoke of the windows and doors sealing shut as they approached, of how the pair never took a step because the building itself seemed to be moving for them. But we still don’t know for sure. We still don’t know who they were, what they wanted, why they did it, any of it.

What we do know is that one of the pair controlled the area, and one of them did the killing. We still weren’t sure how — the victims had all just dropped dead with no apparent cause, save that their killer needed to be within three feet and to maintain eye contact for several seconds. And we only know this because there was a survivor among the ones apparently marked for death, a man who was blind in his left eye. Without that, we might not have gotten even that clue.

By the time that Dirksen was accessible again, exactly one tenth of the people inside had been killed, and the attackers were long gone. There was no rhyme or reason to it. No manifesto, no grand statement, no nothing. There wasn’t even a clear motive to be found from the victims’ politics. It was all just… clinical. In, out, leaving corpses in their wake.

It was the single most horrific instance of terrorism our country had ever seen, made all the worse by the questions that we’d never been able to answer.

It was because of those lingering questions that very little actually changed in the Decimation’s wake, though. There were no obvious increases in security screening, because there was no way to tell who was and wasn’t Moonshot, absent specific exceptions like myself. They didn’t station additional police outside government buildings, because that just tended to scare the general public.

No, the change we saw was different. Congress passed laws, changing how government agencies and law enforcement interacted with one another, and assigning new penalties for some instances of Moonshot crime. In concert with that, they reached out to prominent attorneys across the country and set things up such that when a major Moonshot terrorist event occurred, a big, respected name in fairness and the rights of the accused would fall on their sword, to give the illusion of justice being upheld.

This wouldn’t be my first time getting someone to plead guilty in front of the nation. The most recent one was Boarnado, a genuinely unrepentant monster who’d been wreaking havoc across rural areas of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, before finally getting caught when he started looking further south towards Maryland and Virginia. He was currently sitting in a maximum security prison in the middle of the Arizona desert, hundreds of miles from the nearest pig farm or wild boar. This was after I’d presented him with two choices: he pleads guilty? He lives. He doesn’t? He dies.

They all tend to choose life.

Now, this whole system we had going here? This rigmarole of dragging them in front of cameras to plead guilty? This existed because we’d never found the perpetrators of the Decimation. The public knew this. They knew the killers were still out there, which was why the feds put on such a show every time anyone remotely similar got put away: if they got seen putting away enough similar Moonshot terrorists, then maybe, just maybe, the general public would start to think the Decimators had gotten found and locked away too. Most of the time, the sentencing for these proxies didn’t need a whole hullabaloo.

But those other dumbasses didn’t try to reenact the Decimation on its anniversary.

The FMB agent pulled our vehicle up to the DC District Court, whereupon Gorou hopped onto my shoulders as I exited the car.

“Don’t go anywhere,” I ordered. “And if I think for a second that you went through my bags?”

“You will not enjoy the consequences,” Gorou finished, amber eyes flashing an arcane sapphire as he leveled a glare at our driver.

She gulped, her quick nod suggesting that she had no desire to learn what kind of ‘consequences’ Gorou and I had in mind. I turned away upon seeing that, slamming the car door shut with an idle flick of my tail, and ascended the steps towards DC’s trial-level federal courthouse. Security personnel were the only people visible, which should have been odd for a weekday afternoon, but was completely normal under the circumstances.

There was a dangerous supervillain on the premises, and every additional civilian beyond the necessary few would just be another hostage.

“Ma’am.”

A uniformed trooper approached me the moment I entered the building, NMR livery plainly visible on his person. His gear — riot cop crossed with firefighter — immediately clued me in as to why my win/lose ratio was today’s sacrificial lamb.

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“Walk and talk,” I said, and kept going. My ears tilted towards the sound of boots following with no complaint, at which Gorou and I traded a look of slight surprise. That was new. “What am I looking at here?”

“Not a spur-of-the-moment thing, if that’s what you’re asking.” The trooper held out a folder that I hadn’t noticed him holding. I took the folder and flipped it open, glancing down at it when I could spare a moment. “Caucasian male, brown hair, blue eyes, six foot one, two hundred seven pounds. Fingerprints came back as Caleb Holder from Cincinnati, Ohio; twenty-one years old, one prior for underage drinking. Dropped out of college four months ago. Nothing on his socials or from his family to indicate a motive.”

“What’re his powers?” I asked, closing the folder once we’d gotten to the elevators. The trooper pressed the down button before answering me.

“A bit like yours, but weaker.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone, an older model in one of those absurdly rugged cases that the military seemed to prefer. He unlocked the phone and handed it over to me with the screen open to a photo album. I took the phone from him as the elevator dinged, and followed him inside before tapping on the first picture in the album.

“I can see why they’d use me as a point of comparison,” I murmured in Japanese as I swiped through the photos, making sure Gorou could see them too. The interior of Longworth had gotten badly scorched, with some of the flooring having outright melted beneath the heat of the Moonshot’s assault. But there was something curious about it, something in the way the damage seemed to taper off.

“The damage is inconsistent,” Gorou said, his voice mirroring my thoughts. “The further from the entrance, the less the damage.”

“Okay, it’s not just me.” I put the phone to sleep and handed it back to the trooper. “Who was responsible for apprehending the Moonshot? What condition was he in?”

“SWAT found him unconscious on the floor.” The elevator dinged, and the trooper ushered me out into the basement before continuing. “He was cold to the touch. Core temperature suggested hypothermia, but we had to secure him before anybody could treat. By the time we had him in containment, he was already back up to temp and awake.”

The trooper brought us to a stop next to a heavy door. He pulled out a keycard, tapped it against a reader on the wall, then pushed the door open once the panel flashed green. He closed the door behind me, then handed the keycard over and waved me to an identical door halfway down the hall.

“Not allowed to accompany you past this point,” he said as he took an easy, relaxed stance. “You know the drill.”

“Of course.”

I took my purse off, negotiating the strap around Gorou’s position on my shoulders, and set it down next to the trooper. Gorou himself took another nudge to get the hint, but he hopped down to the concrete floor, whereupon he knocked my purse on its side so he could sit on it. I wanted to roll my eyes, but instead only lowered my ears as I stared at the fox in annoyance.

“You’re damn lucky I zipped that up,” I groused, biting back my frustrated growl at Gorou’s vulpine cackling — God help me, I may love that damn fox, but his antics were not helping with my jetlag!

I did my best to ignore the fox, instead offering the trooper a nod. “I’m going in. If it takes more than an hour, fetch help.”

“Copy that,” he said, returning a nod of his own. “Good luck.”

The only response I offered was the flick of an ear and a dismissive sniff. I walked down the hall and tapped the keycard, and pushed past the second heavy door to reveal a small room with nothing in it save for another, identical door in front of me. I closed the first one, waited five seconds for the door to lock behind me, then unlocked the next.

This sealed door opened outward at the corner of a twenty-foot by twenty-foot concrete box. Fluorescent lights lit the place up bright enough to almost hurt the eyes, and there was a particularly sterile scent to the filtered air going in and out of the cell. At the far wall of the cell sat a single stone bunk, with a thin cushion set along the concrete shelf to make it ever so slightly less miserable than sitting on solid rock. A sink and toilet combo sat at the wall directly opposite the door, and unlike the last time I’d had to visit a sacrificial lamb, it wasn’t currently in use, thank God.

No, the dumb schmuck in question had fallen off of his bunk at the sound of the door unlocking, and by the time I had the door closed, he was still down on one knee. And when he caught sight of me, he froze right there, in that same position.

Now, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: people tend to have one of three reactions when they see me. It’s usually either shocked silence, muted disgust, or audible confusion.

And Mr. Caleb Holder was a clear example of the first one.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Holder,” I began, my voice apparently snapping the young man out of his daze as he pushed himself to his feet. “My name is Naomi Ziegler, and I am—”

I didn’t get to finish what I wanted to say, because the moment the younger Moonshot had his wits about him, he threw a fireball at me. At me! The nerve of it!

I turned to the side to let the fireball fly right past me and splash against the door. The flame had been white-hot, but it was sloppy, shoddy. Thrown together in an instant.

“You wanna let me finish?” I asked, lowering my ears as my tail flicked angrily behind me.

“Fuck you!” the kid yelled, flames bursting to life in his hands — wait, no, that wasn’t right. His hands became the flames, fire fading back into flesh halfway up his forearms. “I’m getting outta here, and you’re gonna help me!”

“Uh-huh,” I demurred, letting an easy, condescending little smile spread across my face as I relaxed my stance.

As expected, the younger Moonshot let my taunting get to him. With a wordless shout, he thrust his hands forward, releasing twin jets of flame straight at me. Or, rather, at where I’d been standing a moment ago.

Because the moment he managed to obscure his own vision with those silly flaming fists of his, my body dissolved into a violet inferno and blinked back into existence mere inches behind young Caleb Holder. But since he seemed not to have realized that I wasn’t in his line of fire, pun intended, I just sat down on the stone bunk, crossed my legs, took a deep breath to try and get my temper back under control, and waited for the kid to run out of steam.

There were two cells meant for Moonshot beneath the D.C. District Court. I was currently seated in the one that saw less use — a blank, featureless room, isolated from the rest of the world by a one-way CCTV camera, complex air and water filtration systems, several feet of reinforced concrete, and a trio of three-inch-thick steel doors. The other one was almost identical, with one key exception: it had a monitor, a camera, a microphone, and speakers.

In the wake of the Decimation, the public had this obnoxious need to see their politicians do something about the tragedy that had just befallen the nation’s capital. But the problem was that there was nothing to do, no policy change or increased security or other silver bullet that could actually stop another Decimation from happening. But just saying ‘there’s nothing we can do’ was insufficient. It did nothing to stop the protests.

So instead, politicians gave the people what they wanted to see. They wanted a bad guy to point at, and they wanted to see the bad guy get punished. What they got was the Congressional Referendum on Extraordinary Crime, Liability Increases, and Prison Sentence Extensions.

Or, as it was more commonly known, the ECLIPSE Act.

As of February 2014, Moonshot were subject to triple the usual mandatory minimum sentences, stricter parole requirements, and automatic treble damages for instances of sole civil liability. Furthermore, there was a presumption against granting bail for Moonshot offenders, and when incarcerated, Moonshot were no longer allowed to remain in the prison’s general population. For origınal chapters go to novel★fire.net

Now, are you seeing the problem here? Because we Moonshot saw it. We saw it very quickly. Here, I’ll even give you a hint: the ECLIPSE Act treated Moonshot as though we were guilty until proven innocent

.

Which was why it wasn’t a surprise when the first Moonshot arrested after the ECLIPSE Act was signed into law, a woman by the name of Paula Wright, took her public defender hostage and used him to break out. And this particular event repeated dozens upon hundreds of times across the country, all the way until the Act was amended to remove the civil damages increase and only apply the increased sentencing guidelines to violent felonies, and the President pardoned every Moonshot who’d received heightened penalties under the removed clauses.

Most of the pardoned Moonshot who’d managed to escape didn’t bother coming back to the United States, but that was neither here nor there.

Point is, that other cell, the one with the camera and monitor? That was so that these prisoners could actually have an attorney. That was so they could appear in court without putting everybody in danger. And it was usually needed, yes. But while the other cell was safer, we preferred to put Moonshot prisoners pending arraignment or trial into the one I currently sat in, the one where they would actually see their attorney face-to-face. Usually this only happened with the more cooperative Moonshot, or the less dangerous ones. After all, most lawyers were little more than hostages in the face of a hostile Moonshot.

But then again, I wasn’t most lawyers. I was a different beast entirely.

Caleb Holder’s angry yelling petered out the same as his flames did, their color slowly dimming from white-hot, to blue, down to an orange-yellow by the time he pulled his metaphorical foot off the gas. The far wall of the cell was burnt black, scorched concrete outlining the still-pristine door I’d used to come in. The younger Moonshot’s fiery transmutation seemed to have crept back down his arms, all but his fingers having returned to flesh and blood.

“H-huh?” Caleb’s confusion was funny enough that I had to keep myself from giggling, and instead just sat there silently, still directly behind him. His hands came up, the border between flame and flesh creeping back up towards his wrists, and he launched an experimental splash of fire across the other side of the cell, probably thinking I was still there, just invisible.

“Cute.”

The young man jumped at the sound of my voice, throwing another fireball in my relative direction as he spun to face me. Rather than dodge this one, though, I simply fell apart into flame, my ethereal form devouring his weaker fire and making it my own.

“Are you done?” I asked, ears low in annoyance.

“Y-you… you—!”

“As I was saying!” I yelled at the end there, startling the young man enough that his flames went out. “My name is Naomi Ziegler, and to finish what I wanted to say before you tried to wave your dick at me, I. Am. Your. Lawyer.”

The young man’s expression faltered there, the rage giving way to confusion before flowing away to resignation. His shoulders slumped, then he fell on his ass, just sitting there on the floor.

“What’s the fucking point?” he asked, looking at the floor. “Got no fucking hope. Ain’t shit I can do anymore.”

“You’re right,” I said, resting an elbow on my knee and cradling my chin with that hand. “I’m not gonna lie to you, kid. You shit the bed, bad. I mean, just — Jesus fucking Christ!” My voice rose to a yell as I fixed the younger Moonshot with a glare. “There were hundreds, no, thousands of things you could’ve done with your powers! But no! Instead, you decided to fly to the capital and go for Dirksen Two!”

“Thousands of…?” His voice trailed off, only to be replaced by manic laughter. “L-lady, there ain’t shit for people like me! You, you think they want fire? Powers like mine?”

“Yes.” I raised my free hand and conjured a fireball of my own. “From experience.”

“Yeah, cause you’re old!” he spat, pushing himself to his feet so he could loom over me as he spoke. “You think I didn’t try!? I did! They don’t want powers like mine! Not after some crazy bitch burned down a block in Chicago in the nineties!”

… I shouldn’t have. I really shouldn’t have. I usually had a better hold on my temper than this. But the jetlag, the stress, and the sudden more personal annoyance to it all had me seeing red.

I flickered away from my sitting position in a flash of fire and reappeared in front of Caleb Holder, a hand ablaze in violet foxfire hovering at his eyeline. He tried to back up, but I matched him step for step, until he was pressed up against the cell’s wall.

“Let’s get three things very clear,” I told him, foxfire licking hungrily from my other hand every time he tried to produce his own flame. “One, fire is the single most common superpower, so no, I don’t think you didn’t try, I know. Two, that ‘crazy bitch’ you’re talking about was me, back in 2006. And three, shitheads like you don’t get to use my trauma to excuse your shitty life choices.”

I whipped my hand away from his face and bathed the concrete cell’s ceiling in a concentrated stream of foxfire. I let it stop five seconds later, and flickered back over to the stone bunk, where I sat back down and crossed my legs.

Moments later, a few drops of molten stone fell from the ceiling, landing on the cold floor with an angry hiss.

“Now, if you’re done being a petulant child, you have a choice to make.”

The younger Moonshot stared at me for a moment, but then trudged his way over to the bunk and sat down beside me on his bunk.

“What choice?” he asked, voice hollow.

“How much longer you want to live,” I told him. “Thirty-five to life in a cell, or a few months waiting for the lethal injection.”