“What the FUCK!” Warhawk shouted, leaping to her feet, eyes unsure which piece of paper to track as the remains of her teammate fell to the floor.

  Cait had always been slow to wake, and after swearing off sleep, was even worse. Her brain caught up to the situation.

  “WHAT THE FUCK!” she echoed, scrambling to her feet as she assumed a fighting stance. Her eyes swept everyone present, a sudden distrust and fear blossoming in her chest. The trio of words appeared to be the order of the day, each mouth repeating them as the teams looked distrustfully at one another.

  “What?” said Dreamboat, the last to shake himself out of the Dreamscape. “What happened?”

  “That monster killed my boyfriend!” shrieked Bri, stalking towards Breastman.

  WHAT

  N-

  The O in NO was partially formed on his hat as he froze, slumping like he was asleep. Bri grabbed a gun out of Warhawk’s harness as she walked past, levelling it at the helpless monster.

  Cait’s fist slammed into her jaw. No explosive power, but Cait hit like a heavyweight without it, and Bri dropped like her strings were cut. Breastman came to, tentacles waving in anxiety.

  NO

  ….

  WHAT?

  “God fucking DAMN IT,” roared Warhawk, catching Bri before she hit the ground. The third member of their team, Bullrush, hadn’t even risen. His jaw hung slack in shock, still locked on the pile of pages that had been Fingerguns.

  “Everybody stay where you fucking are,” commanded Kennedy, dismissing her comm. “Mom’s on her way. We have to figure out if anyone else has been replaced.”

  Cait felt her cycling links through everyone else in the room, one by one. She kept theirs up, and Cait was happy for it. That bastard had been right, trying to kill her had been a waste of a pawn. He probably wouldn’t pick such a poor target again. They both sighed in relief when everyone in the room proved to at least seem like themselves.

  A tense moment later, Director Swan swept into the room.

  “Tell me exactly what happened,” she demanded.

  It turned out Bullrush had noticed Fingerguns hadn’t been pulled into the Dreamscape with them. Dreamboat also volunteered, eyes locked on the Director’s tits, that his link to Fingerguns had felt far too distant.

  “Did you actually pull him in? Pull someone in?” she asked.

  “Think so, toots. Tough to be sure in the transition. The ‘Catcher linked up to something.”

  The Director nodded, then grimaced with a curse.

  “I need you to remember exactly how that felt,” she commanded. “No one else here was like that?”

  “Nope, all normal.”

  “Okay, as of now this is the only way we have to identify Bookkeeper’s Characters,” she stated. She put a hand to her ear as she spoke into her comm, “Dispatch, call everyone back, and open up an AEGIS wide channel. Everyone, that is everyone, is to report to the Coliseum immediately. Refusal will be met with expulsion from Campus, maybe worse.”

  Everyone present heard an emergency tone from their comms, followed by a message repeating the Director’s words.

  “Bookkeeper?” Cait asked.

  “I recognize these pages,” said the Director by way of explanation. She didn’t elaborate.

  Lira burst through the door to the back room, immediately raising her hands when Warhawk levelled both guns at her face.

  “Whoa! Hey, what the hell is going on?” she asked. Kennedy walked over to Warhawk, gently lowering her arms. Cait could feel Lira’s emotions, roiling, panicked, but distinctly her.

  “Its okay, Sandra, it’s her,” Kennedy said softly. “If that wrinkly old fuck is good enough of an actor to fake what I’m feeling from her we’re all boned anyway.”

  “I’d like to confirm nonetheless,” Director Swan said. “Dreamboat, please.”

  A blue line shot from his dreamcatcher to Lira’s forehead, and she slumped into Kennedy’s arms. Without being asked, another shot out to Director Swan, who Cait caught. It cut a second later, and Dreamboat nodded.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “Yeah, they’re both good,” he reported. Lira hadn’t risen, but she did start to shake her face, which had found itself between Kennedy’s boobs.

  “I can confirm,” Cait said, grinning, “that’s my girl.”

  “Enough, Lira,” The Director scolded, rising herself, but not without the ghost of a smirk on her face. “Thank you for being thorough, Dreamboat. Lira, we just found out Fingerguns had been replaced with one of the Characters from last nights attack. He tried to kill Cait when she was down in the Dreamscape. We are very lucky he picked her, as that would have worked on anyone else I can think of. Probably why he risked it in the first place. I’m familiar with Cait’s abilities and even I would have been curious if that might kill her.”

  “Fuuuuuuuuuck,” Lira said, drawing the word out as she removed her face from Kennedy’s chest. She looked down at where Bri was slumped against Warhawk, just starting to wake.

  “Oh, fuck,” she repeated, more softly. She knelt, taking Bri’s hand in her own and meeting her eyes as she opened them. Her big brown eyes took a second to focus. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out but a pitiful squeak. Then she was weeping, and Lira wrapped her up tight.

  Director Swan oscillated between sympathetic and annoyed. Making eye contact with the rest of the room, she jerked her head towards the main gym.

  The normal gym goers were milling about, some still pounding out sets since there, technically, hadn’t been any order not to, and they were still at the Coliseum. Others began to swarm towards the Director, including those who were clearly beginning to filter in from outside.

  “Qi, please,” Swan said calmly.

  A deep breath, then a corona of flames stopped the stampede, leaving a half moon of blackened flooring.

  “Do not pass the scorch mark,” she ordered in a loud, authoritarian tone. “Amaranthine and Draconic will assist you in forming an orderly line.”

  She nodded at the two women, and both of then got to work. To be frank, they were poor choices to organize anything, but they also couldn’t be easily shanked by someone with a pair of scissors.

  “There has been an attack by what we thought was one of our own, replaced by one of the Characters that attacked Camp Dodge last night,” the Director continued, raising her voice so that all present could hear. “We have identified a way to weed these Characters out, and cannot afford to risk there being more among us. You will submit to this test, then be free to go, or assist in the effort. Thank you for your patience.”

  Plenty of voices raised in protest, but they were ignored. The Director was right, this had to be put to bed immediately, or there would simply be no way to trust anyone. Working together, Cait and Draconic did manage to put together a serpentine line of people awaiting screening. They patrolled up and down, constantly scanning the crowd, though neither was certain exactly what for.

  Cait could feel tension and anxiety coming off of Kennedy in waves, and found herself not as capable as she usually was when combating it. She was feeling it too now, after all. It was strange. She’d quietly wondered as well if one of Fingerguns’ thin, endlessly destructive beams could hurt her, if it hit her in a particularly vulnerable area.

  It hadn’t, and that meant she was technically even more invincible than she’d allowed herself to believe. That did nothing to help her protect the people she cared about from a threat she couldn’t see that could come from almost any angle.

  After 15 minutes, the Coliseum was packed to the rafters, but the crowd had fortunately begun to self organize. Emergency or not, everyone present was AEGIS personnel, or at least appeared to be.

  A tsk sounded from beside Cait.

  “Elizabeth must truly be on her back foot if she thought I’d simply allow this,” said a voice Cait didn’t recognize, but with a familiar cadence that made her vision flash red. She whirled, searching the crowd for its source. Her eyes locked onto a humanoid German Shepherd, casually pulling a shocked looking shorter man to her powerful jaws.

  Please don’t just be a weird kiss, she thought, and threw an explosive punch that pulled her fist to and through the dog-woman’s head. It exploded into pages, and Cait sighed in relief. Then the screaming started.

  AEGIS personnel or not, most of these people were support staff or families. The boom from Cait’s punch rattled them, and the spray of blood when a snake-haired man cut the throat of a guy in front of him with a letter-opener set them off. Cait set off for him, quickly pounding him into nothing and looking for the next threat.

  “This shitbird isn’t waiting around to be found out!” Cait yelled over comms. The room had become chaotic enough she had no real way to identify targets. People trampled over one another, surging towards the exits in their terrified efforts to escape the chaos.

  “Get me one of them!” Lira responded. “We need to see if I can tell who they are with Lirapedia!”

  Easier said than fucking done.

  Cait spun, scanning the surging, panicked crowd. She didn’t see any more bad guys, but she did see a purple blur swinging by the rafters overhead. Quick as a blink, a tentacle shot down and wrapped up a struggling man with green skin.

  Nice work buddy, Cait thought, and went back to looking for ways to help. She picked people off the floor, forming a bulwark against the surging mass, helping the weaker folks to get away. There were a few more attacks she had to put down, and even more she didn’t get to in time. Some of the people she ‘rescued’ from the floor turned out to just be bodies.

  Fifteen minutes later, it didn’t look like any more attacks were forthcoming, but they’d done their damage. Between Cait, Qi, and Breastman running defense in the Coliseum, this hadn’t been a massacre, but the people who had fallen probably wouldn’t see it that way. Perhaps the most impactful casualty was the sense of security on the AEGIS campus.

  Cait rushed back to the Dreamlounge, and found Lira quivering as she stood over a pile of pages nano-blade in hand. She noticed Cait come in, and gave her a shaky smile.

  “Good news! I can tell them apart.”

  “What happened?” Cait asked, looking between Lira and Bri, distraught on the floor.

  “B-man dropped that guy off, and Bri locked him up while I read him. Had just long enough to read ‘Henry Kaling- The Bookkeeper’ at the top of his entry before he lunged at me. Whoever this guy in particular was, looks like pyschic attacks didn’t work on him so….” she waved her knife at Cait.

  The Amazon gave her a comforting smile.

  “Damn good thing you insisted on getting protection then, huh?” she said, wrapping the redhead in a hug.

  “One of us has to use protection,” she muttered, dismissing the knife and hugging Cait back, tight.

  Qi came in, holding a snarling man with too many eyes.

  “Got another one, this guy was trying to stay low key,” she explained.

  “Nice!” said Lira, pulling away from Cait. “Hold ‘em still, Bod-zilla, I want to see what I can actually read about this Bookkeeper asshole.”