“Thank heavens that’s over,” Skye groans, slumping into the backseat of Kit’s truck. “If I never have to sign and initial another form in my life, it’ll be too soon.”

“I hear that,” Alice adds as she climbs into the shotgun seat. “They tried to make us identify ourselves as your legal guardians, if you can believe that.”

Kit laughs over the sound of the engine turning over. “You’re leaving out the part where they succeeded, too. In the eyes of the law, I’m your mom now. Congratulations.”

“Forgive me for not buying that,” Skye snorts. “I might have been out of commission for a week, but I certainly wasn’t born yesterday.” Settling her weight on her shoulder, she looks out the window to watch the scenery. “Anyhow, now that we’re finally out of the hospital, my request for silence is satisfied. If you have anything you want to say, be my guest.”

“I do. Have something I want to say, I mean.” Alice turns around in her seat, trying to look Skye in the eyes. “I really am sorry for blowing up at you like that on Friday, I was way out of line. Same for not telling you about leaking the suit’s design.” Her hands work through her favorite scarf as she talks. “You have every right to hate me, just… I wanted to say none of it was your fault.”

For a few moments, the car is silent, save for the faint tones of the radio, playing classic rock at a near-muted volume.

Finally, Skye sighs. “Apology accepted. I am still more than a bit angry with you, make no mistake…”

“And that’s totally fair,” Alice interjects quickly.

“But I appreciate the gesture, and in turn apologize for keeping my knowledge of your activities to myself.” Realizing she’s talking too formally, Skye checks herself. “I can’t pretend this hasn’t put a wedge between us, and I know it’ll take time to build trust again, but I promise, I do still want to try and stay friends.”

At that, Alice seems to deflate, relief palpable on her face as the tension flows out of her shoulders and jaw. “Right. I – right. I do too.” She breaks eye contact quickly, staring out the window. “Thanks.”

“See?” Kit slugs her playfully in the shoulder. “Told you she wouldn’t hate you.”

“Butt out, Kit,” Alice and Skye say in shaky harmony.

“Yeah, yeah, alright. My turn for a question, then.” Unable to take their eyes off the road, Kit waves their beslinged arm in Skye’s general direction. “What was the deal with your whole zoned-out thing while you were in the recovery bed? Did you get words of wisdom from your dead dad or something?”

“Nothing quite so dramatic,” Skye responds with a roll of her eyes. “I just had a truly rotten day, and… I suppose I ended up retreating into my own head to unpack things for a while.”

“Don’t blame you, there,” Kit says, swigging their drink and carefully putting it back into the cupholder before merging, all surprisingly deftly for only having one good arm. “Every day since, I’ve regretted not popping Marco for the way he was talking to me – I don’t even wanna know the kind of dick moves he pulled out on you.”

“Ugh. If anything, I think it would have been easier had he just been openly hurtful.” Skye slips her hands into her pockets, clenching and unclenching her fists. “As it is, he kept throwing sophistry at me to try and win me over, and claiming to understand my position – if he’d called me a slur outright, at least then my brain would have been able to categorize him as the jerk he is, rather than getting stuck on ‘what if I’m the problem’ for days on end.”

Alice looks up. “You know you’re not the problem, I hope.”

Skye nods. “I do now, after having a long, hard talk with myself.”

“Well,” Kit chortles, “would it make you feel better to know that your good buddy Kit spent the last week rinsing him for every cent I could get?” After exiting a roundabout, they pull a bill out of their pocket with a flourish, handing it back to Skye.

“Let me see here… Thirty-five thousand dollars?! For a four day stay?!” Skye looks up incredulously to see Kit cackling madly in the rearview mirror. “Is that why you insisted on every bonus amenity you could possibly think of?”

“And a couple I couldn’t think of! Louis was a huge help.” Kit’s grin is all but infectious, and within moments Skye finds herself smiling back. “I managed to snipe a year’s worth of meds for Ravi, too. All courtesy of Omni Tech’s funds.”

“Good grief.” Skye stares down at the receipt in her hands. “Thirty-five thousand dollars. I feel as though I should feel slimy for such a fleecing, and yet…” That anger towards Marco is still there, though no longer the vicious hatred Skye felt in the heat of the moment. It’s not quite something she can put into words just yet, but at the very least it doesn’t hurt anymore. “Thank you.”

“Please. Thank you for not flying into a lecture on how unproductive pettiness is.” Kit honks the horn gently. “Light’s green, buddy! We can keep moving, now!” Road rage contained, they clear their throat. “Anyway, were you awake when we started putting on the movies?”

For the fourth time in a row, Bianca rewinds to the start of the footage, hunching yet further over her laptop. The recording opens on a first-person view of Sky Horizon squaring off, capturing the instant that Marco finishes his transformation. With a sip of coffee, Bianca hits the play button.

Again and again now, she’s watched this fight play out, taking notes on the boss’s form so she could know why he succeeded and she failed. Again and again she’s forced herself to listen to the boss’s stupid excuses for one-liners, again and again she’s noticed him fall for feints that she surely would have caught if she were the one there. Bianca growls to herself, grinding her foot back and forth in her stupid pinching work heels.

“Oh, hey!” The sound of someone’s voice suddenly behind Bianca makes her jump. “That’s the big fight from the boss, right?” Biting back a string of invective, she spins her office chair to see that one senior IT worker – Lucas, she’s pretty sure.

“Yeah, it is. I wanted to watch it during my lunch break. Alone.” Bianca’s no dummy, she knows she should probably be playing nice as the new girl on the team, but she’s hardly in any mood to humor this interruption.

“Oh, for sure!” Lucas gets the message and takes a step back. “I’ll leave you alone, sorry. I just…” He leans against Bianca’s cubicle. “It’s incredible, right? Watching just how crazy strong Marco is? I mean, maybe not the same for you, because you already got to fight Sky Horizon, just…” His eyes flick down to Bianca’s hands crushing her disposable coffee cup. “Uh, anyways enjoy your lunch, bye!”

Bianca hardly notices him leaving, already turned back to the recording. “Crazy strong,” Lucas called the boss, and Marco certainly seemed proud of himself swaggering into the morning meeting, but that’s not the story Bianca is seeing. Even with all of the boss’s tune-ups and custom gear, it took him ages to actually put the IP thief down.

Meanwhile, Sky Horizon was clearly off her game too – she didn’t pull out any of the tricks or contingency plans that she used against Bianca. Instead, she took blow after blow, staying standing well past what Bianca could have expected. Bianca's gut instinct was right, the boss is way weaker and Sky Horizon way stronger than she thought.

…If that’s true, what was even the point of all this?

An office down the hallway from Bianca suddenly erupts in shouting. “She breaks an innocent’s arm, she turns that jammer on me, and you say I’m in the wrong for rocking the boat?” The door swings open, revealing Constantine striding out of the room. “If you and Pamela can’t see what you’re becoming, no way am I going to be able to convince you.”

Marco chases him out of the office, hands raised in supplication. “Blue, please, wait! I know you and Pink have your differences, but we’re so close to the finish line. Can’t you just try to get along for two more weeks?”

Constantine just shakes his head, walking away and sitting down heavily in the nearest cubicle – placing him across from Bianca. He sobers up a bit when he notices her. “Ah. Sorry, did you… see all that?”

Bianca nods slowly, watching him carefully.

“Right.” Constantine runs a hand through his hair. “Right. I’m sorry you had to see that, I really am. I’m just so… frustrated with how little self-awareness he and Pamela have. I just found out that they doxxed Sky Horizon, did you know about that?”

“No.” Bianca’s surprised to find herself actually angry on that pest’s behalf. “I didn’t know that.”

“Pamela was about to spread her info publicly, and I just now talked Marco down from letting her. It’s absurd to me, how even when he holds all the cards, he insists on being so…”

“Cowardly?” Bianca finishes for him.

“Yeah.”

“Mm.” Bianca polishes off her coffee. “I’m actually right with you there. I had expected this to be a team with some actual direction behind its force, and I’m starting to realize it never was.”

Constantine muses to himself as he gets his breathing under control. After a few moments, he rises back to his feet. “Do you want to come with me?”

Bianca is taken aback. “What? Where?”

“I don’t know,” Constantine shrugs. “Anywhere, really, so long as it’s not working for Omni.”

Bianca scoffs. “You’re saying we should run away? Follow Nigel’s lead and quit? I’m not that spineless.”

“I think you’re wrong.” Constantine is suddenly totally serious. “I think it takes more guts to leave than to stay.”

Bianca is quiet for a moment, before starting to pack up her laptop.

“Going against the grain and quitting takes real strength. Not throwing your weight around to – oh.” Constantine starts as Bianca rises to her feet and starts walking away. “Where are you…”

“We’re leaving, aren’t we?” Bianca asks over her shoulder, not breaking stride. “I’m pretty sure you’re right.”

“Oh, well… thanks.” Constantine smiles for half a second before shock takes over. “Wait, right this second? What about handing in our resignation?”

Bianca laughs openly at that. “Please. If they don’t care about what happens to us, I don’t care what happens to them.” With a careful toss, she sinks her coffee cup in the trash as she strides by. “Simplest thing in the world.”

Skye hadn’t realized just how much she missed her apartment until the moment of her return. The old posters Alice had insisted on putting up on the walls, the air mattress shoved into the corner until the evening comes, the TV propped up on an old metal tray Kit rescued from their forge’s incinerator… not all of it was hers anymore, but it was all her home.

“Alright,” Alice calls as she steps down the hallway, “First dibs on the bathroom. Have fun unpacking your stuff, Skye.”

“Oh, I will,” Skye retorts, pushing open the door to her bedroom. Her newest clothes at the forefront of the closet, her reusable water bottle propped beside her bed…

And the mangled halves of the Skyline, sitting plaintively atop her work desk.

Quietly, as if in a trance, Skye drops her bag, stepping forward and cradling the crushed machinery within her hands.

“Oh, no,” Kit breathes from behind her. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have left those out, I know it’s probably bringing up bad memories-”

Skye turns around, eyes dry and smiling faintly. “Not at all. I think… I already knew that I was going to see this. It doesn’t hurt as much as I was expecting it to, I promise.”

Kit frowns. “That implies it still hurts, though.”

Skye laughs gently, her breath catching. “It does, of course – it’d be strange if it didn’t. Sky Horizon was a part of me for an incredibly long time, even if she was ultimately a prototype for Skye Campbell.” 

Alice creeps out of the bathroom, listening as Skye continues.

“When I was designing all this, I was so sure that it’d make me invincible, a perfect shell to protect me from pain. Playing with an action figure to proxy the life I wanted for myself. That… didn’t happen.”

Skye sits down heavily on the box of metal that makes up her suit, running a hand over the corner. “My mask turned out to show more of me than it hid, and my armor couldn’t protect me from the things that hurt the most. I ended up metaphorically exposed all the same, and now I have nothing left to hide from myself. I miss it, I wish I could have gone out on a better note, and I’m sad things turned out this way, but…” Skye shrugs, faintly smiling. “I don’t think being a superhero is something I need in my life anymore.”

Alice kneels down and hugs Skye as she finishes talking, wiping gently at her eyes. Had she started crying at some point during that speech? Apparently so.

Kit, meanwhile, looks a bit guilty. “Man. That was really beautiful. I kind of feel bad about the surprise we had, now.”

Skye looks over, still leaning into Alice’s hug. “Surprise? What, did you build another suit in your forge?”

“Not exactly.” Kit holds out their hand, opening it to reveal a smooth coin of metal. “Happy early birthday, I guess?” The metal catches the light and glints faintly blue – Quorium.

Skye’s jaw goes slack, slipping out Alice’s arms. “What? Where did you – How did you find this?” Her hands tremble as she accepts the gift, feeling its warmth as she clutches it close.

Kit offers a guilty grin. “So, you know when Pamela used the jammer and I got the jump on her? I wasn’t able to find the jammer, so I just popped out the Quorium instead. I meant to use it to upgrade my suit, but…” They gesture to their arm, still in a sling for another week or two. “I figured you could use it better than me, but then you went and gave that whole spiel about not wanting to be a superhero anymore, so… yeah.”

Skye laughs warmly, pulling both Kit and Alice into another embrace. “To be fair, my exact words were that I didn’t need to be Sky Horizon. I still very much want to be – maybe now more than ever, now that I can treat it as a passion rather than as a crutch. Besides, I’d really enjoy a second chance to deal with Omni on my own terms.”

Alice exhales from her nose softly. “For the sake of the common good, and all that jazz?”

“That too.” Skye breaks the hug, leaning on her bed. “But to be perfectly honest, I want to do this for my own satisfaction. Marco cut me deeply – literally – and I’d quite like a chance to even the score.”

Kit whistles, eyebrows raised. “Whoa. Who are you and what have you done with Skye?”

Skye shrugs, still staring at the Quorium in her hands. “I want to be someone who can take care of myself more, and in this case I think I’m entitled to being a little selfish.”

“No, I dig it, I’m into it!” Kit laughs, clapping softly. “Didn’t really think you had it in you.”

“So, let me see if I understand the genre convention,” Alice muses half-theatrically, tapping a finger to her chin. “This is the part where you synthesize everything you learned into the ultimate form of your superhero suit?”

“I might like that,” Skye murmurs, “If I have the time for it.” At that, she seems to realize something, snapping bolt upright. “Wait, how long do we have before Omni finishes their legal case? I saw I had a court summons in my emails.”

“Uh,” Alice grunts, scrolling through her phone, “Let me check. Okay, so you’re not going to need to make your appearances in court for a full week, but Marco’s going to start showing up innn… four days.”

“Four days? Oh, boy.” Skye’s buoying excitement vanishes, the wind drained out of her sails immediately. Going quiet, she paces back and forth along the length of the room.

Alice and Kit obligingly take a step back, giving Skye more room to walk.

After about ten seconds, Skye stops, slouching back onto the bed. “It doesn’t look good. Working myself to the bone, I’d be lucky to have the Skyline functional in four days, never mind any upgrades.”

Kit sucks in air through their teeth. “So it’s over after all?”

Skye drums her fingers on the bed. “Not necessarily. I want – There’s…” She fumbles the words, hanging her head and sighing deeply. “This is harder than I expected.  Please don’t judge me.”

“Of course not.” Alice tilts her head. “Judge you for what?”

“I… I’m clumsy at knowing my limits, clumsier at asking for help, and clumsier still at sharing my hobbies, but I want to get better, and…” Skye looks up, breathing in firmly as she fixes Alice and Kit with a look. “You two are a brilliant coder and a stellar metalworker. I know it’s for settling my own dispute, and I’m still kind of frustrated with Alice, but… would you be willing to join me in working on the Skyline?”

“Aw, Skye.”

“We thought you would never ask.” Kit flinches as Alice fixes them with a look. “What? We literally did, she-”

They’re cut off by Skye, doubled over, laughing and laughing and laughing until her eyes well up again. “Alright – oh, okay. Alright. Let’s get to work, then, team.”

Spoiler

Sophibeans

Next time, the first two chapters of the three-part finale. I hope you're as excited as I am!

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