Mateo and Henrik walked through the hollow silence of the Administrative Offices, their footsteps echoing off cracked tiles. The air hung thick with the scent of old paperwork and lingering ash. Meanwhile, Alex and Akira had taken position downstairs, their footsteps fading as they descended into the depths of the building.
Mateo checked the watch he'd detached from his wrist earlier—the durable band would have torn during any rough maneuver, so he'd stored it in his hero suit's utility compartment. 8:00 PM sharp.
Reeves had ordered lights out at 2100 hours. They had just under an hour left before the building went dark.
"I'll be right back," Mateo muttered, spotting the door labeled "Washroom." He slipped inside, immediately hit by the staleness—smoke, dust, and the subtle stench of human waste. The bathrooms had been stripped down that morning since there was no water supply to power the plumbing. Now, five-gallon buckets sat inside wooden frames in each stall, with salvaged toilet seats mounted on top. A schedule was posted outside each door: thirty-minute slots, carefully spaced for hygiene and privacy.
He stepped into his designated stall, locked the door behind him, and handled his business. It was awkward and disgusting, but strangely grounding—another reminder that he wasn't a civilian anymore. Just a kid forced to live like a soldier.
Afterward, he moved to the makeshift wash area where plastic tubs had been rigged where sinks used to be. A curtain of draped blankets provided some privacy. A metal pot sat steaming on a nearby camp stove, the water freshly heated. He measured exactly one liter into the basin. Four cups—that's all anyone got per day.
He dipped a washcloth into the warm water and scrubbed the grime from his arms and neck. Peeling off his mask, he wiped the sweat-slicked skin underneath. The smoky air seemed to cling to everything, and he could feel soot in his nose, dust lining the corners of his eyes.
Despite the crude setup, the warmth of the water soothed his frayed nerves. Every motion felt deliberate—one cup to wipe down his chest, another to scrub under his arms. There wasn't a single second wasted or motion repeated. Rationing had become an art form.
As he dried off, he caught his reflection in the cracked mirror someone had mounted to the wall. His face looked sharper than it used to—less boyish. Tired eyes stared back at him, sunken cheeks, ash clinging to his dark hair. But beneath the exhaustion, something harder remained. Determination. Or maybe just stubbornness. Maybe there wasn't a difference anymore.
When he emerged, the others were already arranging themselves for the night. Sleeping mats were spread across the floor in a loose semicircle. Henrik sat near the window, methodically checking the perimeter. Switch was already lying down, hands behind his head, looking like he'd rather be anywhere else. Maya leaned against the wall with her eyes half-lidded, still alert but fighting fatigue. Amara sat cross-legged, brushing her golden hair and humming softly under her breath.
"Took your sweet time," Switch mumbled without opening his eyes.
"Enjoy your bucket session?" Amara added with a smirk, not looking up from her hair.
"Five-star experience," Mateo shot back, settling onto his mat. "Even got hot water."
Amara chuckled. "You didn't spill your ration, did you? Because I'm not sharing mine if you did."
"I'm a professional now. I could win a gold medal in rationed bathing."
They all chuckled softly, but the weight of their situation pressed down on them like a physical thing. One wrong move, one missed shadow, and everything could go wrong.
Soon the lights went out, plunging them into near-total darkness. Mateo and Henrik took first watch while Switch, Amara, and Maya settled onto their mats, their breathing gradually evening out into the rhythm of sleep.
The view through the barricaded windows was monotonous—nothing but empty streets, drifting dust, and smoke that moved like lazy phantoms in the wind. Occasionally, a piece of trash would skitter across the pavement, pulled along by the breeze. Apart from that, the night was still as death.
Above them, dark clouds moved quickly across the sky like enormous whales swimming through an ocean of stars. The moon was full and brilliant, so bright that Mateo could almost make out the individual craters on its surface before the occasional cloud blocked his view.
The moonlight cast an eerie glow over the ruined city, making buildings throw long shadows that sometimes seemed to move on their own. The effect was unsettling, but Mateo had learned to ignore such tricks of light and shadow.
"This is boring as hell," Mateo whispered, checking his watch again. 9:20 PM. They still had a hundred minutes to go.
"Who knows," Henrik replied, stifling a yawn. "Maybe when we're not looking, someone will actually run through and give us something to do."
Mateo nodded and turned back to the street. The motion sensors and cameras disguised as garbage were active, and he was certain Anon and Reeves were taking turns monitoring the footage. The security system would alert them if anything significant happened.
There's almost no point in keeping watch, Mateo thought drowsily as his eyelids grew heavy. He shook his head vigorously and gave himself a sharp mental slap, the brief jolt of adrenaline keeping him alert for a few more minutes. Maybe a villain would appear that the computers couldn't detect—something that only human eyes could catch. Maybe the cameras would turn at just the right angle, creating a blind spot for someone to slip through undetected. Mateo had to stay vigilant for such possibilities, or at least that's what he kept telling himself to fight off the creeping exhaustion.
When his 11 PM alarm finally sounded, Mateo almost giddily shook Switch awake. Henrik remained at his post, waiting for his own shift to end so he could wake Maya at 1 AM.
Mateo collapsed onto Switch's mat, still warm from body heat, and was asleep within seconds.
He woke with a violent jolt, sweat running down his spine. His eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness, eventually making out the silhouettes of Switch and Maya at their posts. That meant it was somewhere between 1 and 3 AM. He fumbled for his watch, pressing the light feature. 1:37 AM.
Beside him, Henrik and Amara slept peacefully, like children who'd never known war. Mateo wiped the sweat from his forehead, trying to understand why he'd woken so suddenly. He couldn't remember any nightmares, and there were no apparent threats that would have shocked him to consciousness. So why...
Something brushed against his leg. He jerked back, hand reaching instinctively for his gauntlet before his eyes adjusted properly. It was a cat—small, sleek, with intelligent eyes that seemed too aware for an ordinary feline.
As he watched, the cat began to transform. Its hind limbs elongated and thinned, fur giving way to feathers. The torso shifted upright, and within moments, an owl perched where the cat had been. Even in the dim light, Mateo could make out the creature's large, luminous eyes.
"Akira..." he whispered, recognizing Dong, the manifestation of Akira's Chimera quirk. What was it doing up here? Had it been what woke him? Mateo suspected that wasn't the case—Dong seemed to have simply been present when something else startled him awake.
The owl fixed him with those enormous eyes, and Mateo understood. The shape-shifting familiar couldn't speak, so they communicated through gestures and expressions. The intensity of that stare told him Dong had been sent to watch over them, to catch things human senses might miss.
Mateo settled back into his resting position, finding no immediate threat. He still had no idea what had woken him, but since there was nothing to see, there was no point staying awake. He had the better end of the shift schedule today and wouldn't be on watch until 5 AM when they'd all wake to start another day. He couldn't waste this opportunity for rest.
His eyes drifted closed again. His body felt heavy with exhaustion—echoes of their recent Academy training still left him stiff, the memory of electrical punishment making his muscles ache. All of that could be washed away with a little sleep...
He sat up instantly, head spinning from the sudden movement. It had barely been a minute since he'd closed his eyes, but he was certain he'd heard something. When he woke, though, he couldn't identify what. A shadow moving? The rustle of fabric? Some sound that didn't belong?
He grabbed his flashlight and clicked it on. The bright beam illuminated the room, casting sharp shadows wherever it touched.
"What the hell, Mateo?" Switch groaned, blocking the light with his arm. "Why'd you turn that on?"
"I thought I heard something. Didn't you?" Mateo stood slowly, sweeping the light across their makeshift camp. When the beam touched Henrik, he groaned and curled tighter into a ball. Amara barely reacted, still deep in sleep before her 3 AM shift.
"Mateo, you're being paranoid," Maya said from her position by the window, chin resting on her palm. "If there was something, we'd know. I've been staring at this empty street for hours and nothing's happened. I'd almost welcome something interesting at this point."
"Don't jinx it," Switch growled. "I'll take boring over exciting any day, especially here."
He turned to Mateo with a tired sigh. "Go back to sleep, man. There's nothing happening."
Mateo wanted to listen, to sink back into the warmth of his mat, but he was certain he'd heard something. His instincts had woken him the first time, and they'd done it again. But if the others couldn't see anything wrong, was he just being paranoid?
"I think I'm going to take a walk," Mateo said, moving toward the door. "Maybe check in with the downstairs team for a while. That okay?"
Switch glanced at him sideways before nodding. "Yeah, fine. Just don't wake everyone up when you come back."
As Mateo reached for the door handle, Dong—now in gecko form—scurried down the wall and onto his hand. The little creature's presence reminded him of questions he'd been meaning to ask Akira. How did her quirk work exactly? If she was downstairs, asleep, was she still controlling Dong's movements? Or did the familiar have some kind of independent awareness?
Those questions would have to wait. As Dong settled into his palm, it began moving erratically, tail whipping back and forth in what looked like distress. Or fear.
The same fear that was building in Mateo's chest.
"You feel it too, don't you?" he whispered to the gecko. "Something's not right."
Mateo opened the door and stepped into the corridor. Even now, the shadows seemed to move in ways that unnerved him. They twisted and shifted subtly, despite the fact that everything should have been still. Almost like they were...
As he was about to fully leave the room, something caught his eye. A shadow that didn't belong. He would have missed it entirely if he hadn't been primed for danger, wouldn't have even considered it until it was too late.
"Switch!" The word tore from his throat as a figure rose from the darkness itself. Literally rose—as if crossing from a two-dimensional world into their three-dimensional reality, materializing from the blackness like a nightmare given form. Mateo caught only fragments of details: a black trench coat, a top hat, and the gleam of a revolver. Everything was black, though he couldn't tell if that was the figure's true color or just what he perceived in the dim light.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl. As Mateo rushed back into the room and Switch and Maya became aware of the intruder's presence, the figure moved with inhuman speed, closing the distance between the door and what was clearly his target.
Amara.
The shadow-man leaped over Henrik's body as the boy belatedly woke, reaching within arm's length of Amara while Switch pulled his knife and Maya used her telekinesis to hurl her bat at the intruder's head with devastating force.
Mateo felt his mind racing at lightning speed while his body lagged behind. He shoved his hand into his gauntlet, and without even half a second to create a slime tendril to propel himself, he launched his body at the mystery attacker with pure desperation.
He clenched his fist, and kilograms of slime forced themselves through the gauntlet's cylinders with a violent hiss as pressure built. Mateo was directly above the man when pale hands grabbed hold of Amara.
The ebony-skinned girl with golden hair had been asleep until that moment. As if sensing danger on some primal level, her skin began to glow. Mateo knew her quirk involved absorbing solar energy and creating focused laser beams, but now, disoriented and panicked, she produced something different. Instead of directed energy, an almost blinding light emanated from every part of her body, as if someone had captured the sun and crammed it into their small room.
Even as he fell toward his target, Mateo realized with growing horror that this was exactly the wrong thing to happen. Because light meant—
Shadows. Long, dark shadows appeared everywhere the brilliant illumination touched. The flying bat cast a shadow. Switch cast a shadow. Their bags, their bodies, even Amara herself—everything cast shadows, and Mateo understood, too late, that shadows were their attacker's greatest weapon.
With one arm around Amara's waist, moving too fast for any of them to counter, the figure's feet sank into the nearest shadow. Amara was pulled along, her left arm sliding through the darkness as if it were liquid.
Move, Mateo! he screamed at himself. If he could just move a little faster, close that tiny gap, land one solid hit before the shadow-manipulator vanished...
But none of those desperate possibilities came to pass. In an instant, Amara was completely engulfed in shadow, and the moment she disappeared, her luminescence vanished with her, plunging the room back into absolute darkness.
Switch's knife slashed through empty air. Maya's bat found nothing but wall, exploding against the concrete in a shower of debris. Mateo's hydraulic-powered fist connected with the floor, the gauntlet releasing a devastating punch that sent cracks spider-webbing through the concrete and punched a hole clear through to the first floor below.
But none of it mattered. Amara was gone, swallowed by shadows like she'd never existed at all.
And once again, Mateo had failed when it mattered most.