The green didn’t fade.
It stayed, deep and vivid and alive, filling every crack and hollow in the rubble around me like it had always been there and was only now remembering to show itself.
I could feel it in my hand, in my arm, in my chest, radiating outward from the ring the way heat radiated off a bonfire.
Then the power hit.
It wasn’t gradual.
There was no warmup, no ramp, no moment where my body had time to prepare itself for what was coming.
One second I was a man pinned under a collapsed parking structure with cracked ribs and a leg that had gone numb and lungs full of pulverized concrete dust.
The next second I was something else entirely.
It came up through the ring and through my hand and through every nerve I had like current through a wire, and the word that kept surfacing in my head was will because that was exactly what it felt like, pure and distilled and ancient, the accumulated weight of every being that had ever faced adversity and continued on anyway.
It poured into me and I felt every cracked and hollow place fill with it, felt the exhaustion in my muscles dissolve, felt the pain in my ribs become information rather than experience, present but no longer in charge.
My vision went fully green for three seconds.
Then it resolved, as a voice echoed in my head.
[Ring charge: 100%]
[Bearer confirmed: Ezekiel Bastien Ross. Sector ####.]
[Error logged network to central battery database severed]
[Initiating Emergency Corps War protocols.]
The voice wasn’t a sound exactly.
It landed in my head the way a thought did but with the texture of something that hadn’t originated there.
Above me the slab shifted.
Paulie made a sound through his teeth that was not a word, his arms shaking badly now, the concrete beneath his hands cracking further under the redistributed weight.
I didn’t think about it.
I just looked at the slab and felt the ring respond to what I needed, a broad flat shelf of hard green light materializing between the slab and Paulie’s braced arms and taking the weight in one clean transfer.
Paulie’s arms buckled immediately, the strength going out of them all at once, and he dropped to his hands and knees in the rubble and just breathed.
The slab held.
I stared at the green light holding up several tons of collapsed concrete like it weighed nothing.
“Okay,” I said quietly.
“Okay.” I pulled my leg free.
Got upright.
Stood in the small green-lit cavity the ring had made for us and took stock.
Paulie looked up at me from the floor.
His face was grey with dust and exertion, arms still trembling faintly.
He looked at the ring.
At the light spreading from it across the rubble.
At me.
Then his eyes went wide.
Because the suit was forming.
I hadn’t told it to.
The ring just did it, responding to something I hadn’t consciously articulated, green light spreading from the ring up my arm and across my chest and down my legs, solidifying as it went, and I watched it happen with the specific detached fascination of a man whose brain had already processed too many impossible things today to have a strong reaction to one more.
It wasn’t heavy.
It didn’t feel like armor exactly, more like a second skin that happened to be made of concentrated will and green light, fitted perfectly, moving when I moved like it had always been there.
A symbol formed on my chest.
A circle that I knew from another life, a life that seemed less like a dream now that this ring was here; symbolized a lantern
Paulie stared at me for a long moment.
“Yo man, you alright?” he asked.
“Yeah…legs still busted, but…I’m good.”
“You’re…glowing Zeke, that things got you fuckin glowin.”
“I noticed.”
“You’re glowing green.”
“Paulie…”
“Where the fuck you even get them tights from Zeke? And this fucking wall that popped outta no where?”
“Look,” I said, pointing into the darkness.
“As much as I’d love to sit here and unpack whatever the hell this is, we got people buried in this rubble.”
The humor disappeared from both our faces.
I nodded toward him.
“You good to move?”
Paulie looked at his arms.
Flexed his hands once.
Rolled his shoulders.
Then nodded.
“Yeah, haven’t gotten a scratch since puberty, a building falling on me isn’t about to change that?”
“You sure?”
He snorted.
“Yeah, I’m good.”
“Good.”
I turned toward the darkness beyond the green light.
“Then let’s go find our people.”
[Bearer. Twenty one life signs detected within the structure. Twelve in immediate danger from structural instability. Nine unable to self-extract.]
Twenty one.
We’d had closer to forty on that rooftop.
I put that behind the locked door and kept moving.
We found Alvarez first, buried to the waist under a collapsed section of the second floor ramp, conscious and praying steadily in Spanish when we reached him.
He stopped praying when the glow from my raised fist reached him.
“Who the fuck…” His voice came out in a soft whisper as he focused on the exposed parts of my face.
“Ross… is that you? The hell did you get that get up from? Why are you glowing?”
“Long story. You hurt?”
He looked down at the rubble pinning him.
Then back up at me, at the green light emanating from every inch of my suit.
“I think my ankle is broken. Again, what happened to you?”
“I’ll explain later.” I crouched down and the ring pushed the debris off him cleanly, pieces lifting and moving aside with a precision that felt almost gentle.
“Can you walk?”
“I can hop,” he said.
Then, as I pulled him upright: “Ross. Seriously. What is going on? Could you do this the whole time?”
“I don’t know what to tell you man. A ring landed on my finger and now I can do this.”
He stared at me.
“A ring?”
“A ring.” Another long silence as he processed that standing in the green-lit rubble of a collapsed parking structure.
“Okay,” he finally said.
“Okay sure. Where do you need me.”
We moved through the structure systematically, the ring lighting the path, Paulie clearing debris with his hands while I directed the heavier pieces with the constructs, and we found them one by one. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
The EMT, Rosario, a gash across her forehead but otherwise functional, her first aid kit miraculously still strapped to her back.
Two of the Washington Heights crew, one unconscious but breathing, one upright and uninjured who took one look at me and said absolutely nothing for a full ten seconds.
Three construction workers.
A security guard who started praying in Portuguese when he saw me and didn’t stop for several minutes.
Firestar, who had come down through the collapse at an angle and landed in a pocket between two slabs and who was the only person in the rubble who reacted to my appearance with something other than shock.
She just looked at me with those molten yellow eyes and said “finally” like she’d known I’d come save them.
I didn’t know what to do with that so I kept moving.
By the time I had them all gathered in the largest open cavity I’d been able to clear, there were nineteen of them.
Nineteen out of forty.
I held that number for exactly one second and then I locked it away with everything else because I couldn’t afford it right now.
They looked terrible.
Dust-grey and bleeding and wrung out in the specific way of people who had already given everything they had and had then been buried under a building on top of it.
Several of them were crying quietly, the kind of crying that happened when the adrenaline finally let go and the body needed somewhere to put everything it had been holding.
A woman I recognized from the roof, mid forties, had her face in her hands and her shoulders shaking.
One of the construction workers was staring at the wall with a vacant expression I’d only seen in old war documentaries.
They were all looking at me.
At the green light.
At the symbol on my chest.
At the glowing ring.
“What are you?” somebody asked from the back.
“I’m the guy you all trusted to lead you,” I said.
“Same as I was an hour ago.”
That got some nods, not many but it was something.
“Some good that did us.” The voice came from the back of the group.
Gray, one of the Washington Heights guys, covered in dust and blood that wasn’t all his.
“My boys are dead.” He started of quietly, then louder.
“They’re dead because of you.”
The room went quiet.
Everybody looking at me.
Waiting to see what I’d do, how I would react to a sentiment I am sure more than one of them shared.
I nodded my head once.
“Yeah.” I said.
The guy actually blinked, not expecting him to agree with him.
“Yeah,” I repeated.
“They followed me.”
Silence.
“They trusted me.”
Another beat.
“And some of them died.” Nobody said anything.
“So if you’re looking for somebody to blame, I’m standing right here.” I pointed at myself.
“You wanna hate somebody? Hate me.”
I pointed upward toward the collapsed structure above us.
“But do me a favor and wait ten minutes.”
That got a few confused looks.
“Because right now that ceiling don’t give a shit whose fault any of this is.”
Nobody laughed.
Nobody argued.
They were listening.
“You wanna be angry? Good.” I pointed at the rubble.
“Stay angry. Use it. Use it to dig. Use it to climb. Use it to drag somebody else outta here.”
My gaze swept across the room.
“The dead are already dead.” The words landed hard.
“And I wish I could change that, but I can’t, the only thing I can do is get y’all outta here, it ain’t done, I still got work to do.”
“How?” somebody asked.
“The whole structure came down. We’re buried.”
“I know.” I looked around the cavity.
At the fear.
The grief.
The exhaustion.
The anger still hanging in the air like smoke, I sighed.
“Listen… I know what this looks like. I know every single one of you has had the worst day of your life. I know you’re scared. I know you’re hurt. I know some of you are thinking about people you haven’t heard from since this started.”
I paused.
“But you’re still here. Every person in this room is still here.” I swept a hand across the crowd.
“You fought for our home, there are people out there alive because you.” The ring glowed brighter on my hand, as I gestured to the dead bodies we had recovered lined up in the far corner of the space.
“because of them.”
The words landed harder than shouting would have.
“And as long as you’re alive, that sacrifice wasn’t for nothing.” I pointed up at the rubble above us.
“I am getting every single one of you out of this building.”
Not louder.
Just certain.
“That ain’t me trying to make you feel better.” Green light rippled across the concrete overhead.
“That’s me telling you what’s gonna happen.”
I looked around the small green-lit space.
At the rubble pressing in from every direction, the thin grey light filtering down from somewhere above that meant there was still a surface to get to.
And something came up from the back of my memory.
Sharp and specific the way the DMS dreams were sharp and specific, the way things from that other life surfaced sometimes without warning.
Saturday mornings.
A secondhand couch.
A bowl of cereal going soggy while the television ran at a volume low enough not to wake anyone.
Giant mech warriors filling the screen, towering suits of armor moving through cityscapes, each one carrying its pilots through things that would have destroyed them on foot.
I used to watch that with—something snagged.
I reached for the face and got the wrong one.
A different room.
A different city.
Someone who wasn’t Jeff, someone whose name I didn’t know and yet whose presence in the memory felt as familiar as my own hands.
I had never known a William.
And yet.
I put it away.
Later.
There was a city dying above my head and twenty three people buried in the rubble around me and whatever was happening in the back of my skull could wait its turn.
Right now I had the image I needed.
Clear and specific and fully formed.
I closed my eyes.
I held the image until it was completely clear.
Every joint.
Every plate.
The broad cupped hands large enough to carry all nineteen of them at once.
The sealed construction of it, solid and real and built from something that didn’t break.
I closed my fist and pointed it to the sky.
The green poured out of the ring and up through the rubble above us, pushing through concrete and twisted rebar and collapsed flooring with a steady inexorable patience.
I heard it before I saw it, the deep structural groan of the building shifting as the construct formed inside it, finding the spaces between the debris and filling them, pushing outward, making room.
Then the ceiling cracked open and the green light came flooding in from above and the construct rose out of the rubble of the parking structure and stood in the ruined Midtown skyline, sixty feet tall, lit from within, its enormous cupped hands lowering toward us through the gap it had made in the collapsed floors.
The silence in the cavity was absolute.
Then Paulie said, very quietly, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”
“Get on,” I said.
Nobody moved for a second.
They just stared up at the massive green hands descending toward them, at the light pouring off them, at the scale of the thing I had just pulled out of my own head and made real.
“It’s solid,” I said.
“It’ll hold. I promise it’ll hold. Get on.”
Alvarez moved first, hopping on one foot to the edge of the construct’s palm and letting Paulie boost him up.
Then Rosario.
Then the construction workers, one helping the next.
The woman who had been crying climbed up on her own, her jaw set now, the tears still on her face but something else behind her eyes.
One by one.
I stood in the rubble below and I held the construct steady and I watched them climb in, and when the last one was up I looked at Paulie.
“You too,” I said.
“What about you?” He asked.
I looked down at the ring.
At the green light still pouring off it.
At the suit that had formed itself around me without being asked.
[Bearer. Construct integrity stable. Flight capability confirmed. Awaiting instruction.]
“I’ll be right behind you,” I said.
Paulie looked at me for a long moment.
Then he climbed up into the construct’s palm with the others and settled in among them, and I felt all of their weight through the ring, not as a burden, as something else entirely, something I had to protect.
I rose off the ground.
Steady and certain, the ring lifting me the same way it lifted everything else, because it had decided this was what needed to happen and I had decided the same thing and somewhere in the agreement between those two facts the physics just worked itself out.
The construct rose with me, hands cupped around the nineteen people I had promised to get out, and we broke through the surface of the rubble and into the smoke-filled Midtown sky.
Below us the avenue was still burning.
Above us the portal was still open.
The leviathans were still coming through and the skiffs were still running their passes and somewhere in the chaos Iron Man was still fighting a war that hadn’t finished yet.
But nineteen people were breathing open air who had been buried under a building thirty seconds ago.
I looked down at them in the construct’s hands.
At their upturned faces.
At the shock and the relief and the something else that was moving through all of them as they looked back at me standing in the air above them in a suit made of green light.
For about two seconds the city seemed to hold its breath.
Then every skiff and beast in visual range turned toward us simultaneously.
I watched it happen, the formation shift, the slow predatory reorientation of things that had just identified a new priority target, and I understood immediately why.
A sixty foot glowing green construct rising out of a collapsed parking structure in the middle of Midtown was not something that blended into the background.
It was the single most visible thing in the sky outside of the portal itself and we had just announced ourselves to everything within a half mile radius.
The leviathan banked first.
Slow and massive and inevitable, its shadow sweeping across the avenue below as it turned toward us.
Behind it multiple skiffs accelerated into attack formation, energy weapons already charging, the blue-white glow of them visible even at distance.
“Zeke!” Firestar’s voice cut through the noise from somewhere in the construct’s palm, sharp with panic.
“Zeke there’s too many—”
“Don’t worry!” I said.
“Nobody’s hurting you!”
I felt the ring respond before I finished the sentence, the shield forming around the construct’s cupped hand in a smooth unbroken dome of green light, solid and close and airtight around the nineteen people inside it.
I felt them through it the way you felt something you were holding.
Then I reached out with the construct’s other hand and grabbed the leviathan by the tail.
It was massive.
Even through the ring, even with the construct’s scale, the thing’s momentum tried to pull the whole arm sideways and I felt it in my teeth.
I dug in, my ring glowing, the construct’s fingers closing around the leviathan’s armored tail with a grinding screech of hard green light against alien carapace, and I swung.
The leviathan hit the first group of skiffs like a wrecking ball.
The impact was enormous, a deep concussive boom that rolled down the avenue and shook loose glass from the buildings on both sides of the street.
The skiffs disintegrated on contact.
The leviathan itself, stunned and thrashing, plowed through a part of the destroyed parking garage, before I had the mech stomp on it while it was on the ground.
The avenue below erupted in cheering I could hear from sixty feet up.
But the sky was full of them and they were all coming now.
I went up to meet them.
[Bearer. Multiple incoming contacts. Recommend evasive pattern.]
“Nah, I’m going through these reptile fuckers,” I said, and flew straight into the formation.
The first skiff banked hard to avoid me and I let it go, dropping under its trajectory and coming up behind the second one, a construct forming in my hand without me consciously designing it, a tight dense sword of hard green light that punched through the skiff’s hull from below with a sound like a gunshot.
The skiff dropped.
I was already moving, rolling left as the energy discharge from a third skiff tore through the space I’d been occupying half a second before.
The ring was guiding me as I went.
That was the only way I could describe it, information arriving at the exact moment I needed it, not in words, in understanding, the way your body understood how to catch something thrown at it without calculating the trajectory consciously.
I felt the skiffs around me as much as saw them, their positions registering through the ring in a constant low feed of spatial information that made the chaos navigable in a way it hadn’t been on the ground.
I pulled up hard, went vertical, and formed an array of weapon constructs, maybe thirty of them, launching from my outstretched hand in a wide arc that I had held in my head for exactly the time it took to think about it.
They weren’t precise.
They didn’t need to be.
They hit the cluster of skiffs that had been converging on the construct from the north and the detonations overlapped in a chain that shredded the formation and sent three of them spinning off in different directions trailing smoke.