The dead were everywhere. Karma hadn't meant for this to happen. Not the horde, not this street, and certainly not him. The probability field crackled around his hands like a live wire with a grudge, sparking sick-red at the edges, warping the air in ways that made his eyes water if he looked directly at it. It wasn't steady anymore, either. His miracle kept hitching unpredictably, surging harder than he wanted and then slipping sideways out of his grip entirely. Every use felt like trying to steer a car on black ice with one hand on the wheel.
He was tired. Bone-deep, concentration-shot, vision-blurring exhausted. Sweat stung his eyes. His head pounded. Every zombie that came at him felt like another weight hanging off his focus, and the more strained he got, the less precise his miracle became. He directed a car to roll backwards to shield him and caught a clear second to breathe. Just one. He took it greedily, shoulders heaving, fingers trembling with the effort of keeping the field stable. He could feel it trying to slip every second his attention wavered, eager to lash out at random, eager to turn coincidence lethal. He was barely keeping ahead of it. And in that one second, through the smoke and the rot-stench and the distant sound of something exploding three blocks over, he saw him.
Ji Hao.
Karma's stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with the apocalypse. He'd been running the memory for two weeks now. The memorial, the crowded hallway, the way he'd reacted toward Ji Hao when all he had done was help him. Karma, in his brilliance, in his infinite social grace, had ripped into the older hero before he'd even processed how it had come off. Had walked off before the weight of his reaction could fully land. Had only realized, that night, exactly what he'd done. To who he'd done it to. He had not gone back to apologize.
He was thinking about that, specifically, when a zombie charged him from the right and he threw his hand out in reflex. Probability screamed through the air. Not metaphorically. A sharp metallic whine tore through the block as the field spasmed out wider than he intended, red static crackling across the streetlight above Ji Hao before it exploded in a shower of sparks and glass. Karma's whole body went cold. "THAT WASN'T ON PURPOSE!" His control slipped again with the panic. Somewhere behind him a car window detonated outward for no reason at all. He was already moving, cutting through the horde with bad luck blooming off him like heat — a zombie tripping over its own legs, another one's jaw unhinging mid-lunge so it missed by a foot and a half. The miracle didn't care about aim. It cared about chaos, and chaos was what it made.
Another zombie lunged toward Ji Hao before Karma jerked the field sideways at the last second. A sedan slammed into it and narrowly missed Bloodborn. "Shit!" His teeth gritted hard enough his jaw hurt. He turned. Breathed. Tried very hard not to black out for a second. Said, because apparently today was the day for terrible decisions: "H-hey. So. The memorial." He threw a hex sideways without looking — something shrieked and fell. "I shouldn't have reacted that way and I know the timing on this is…" A zombie grabbed for his shoulder and he glared at it, probability curling off his fingers, and its head was impaled by a stop sign. "…not ideal. But I've been thinking about it. And I'm sorry. I was an asshole."
He looked at Ji Hao. The horde groaned around them. Somewhere to the left, another fire escape fell. "The muffin basket… did you... get it?" Karma swayed slightly where he stood before forcing himself upright again. "I'm also trying," he added, voice rough around the edges from exhaustion, hands lit up like warning signals as his miracle bucked violently against his grip, "really hard not to accidentally hex you. So if you could just… don't move fast toward me without warning. Please. The powers are…" He made a gesture that communicated actively trying to ruin my life. "They do that."
The bats came first, a shrieking, black curtain of them that blotted out what was left of the evening sky. Then the smell hit him. Then the moaning, shrieking, gut-wrenching grotesque sounds. Karma stood at the edge of the street with his hood half-pulled over his face, hands shoved into his jacket pockets, staring at the shambling tide of rotting bodies spilling out from between the buildings like something had cracked the city open and let the worst of hell itself bleed out. He didn't scream. He didn't run. He didn't do much of anything for a long, moment except stand there with that familiar static crawling up the back of his neck, the feeling Lalo always said was his instincts talking. Right now, his instincts were screaming. He just didn't know what they were screaming at yet, and that was somehow worse.
He pulled his hands free and felt the familiar power gather in his palms, that sick, humming pull of probability twisting sideways, bad luck coiling like smoke between his fingers. "Okay okay okay..." he muttered to himself, the word doing absolutely nothing to make him feel better. He threw the first wave without thinking too hard about the geometry of it, which was exactly the kind of mistake Lalo was always getting on him about, and sure enough it went wide, sending two zombies spinning off-trajectory but also cracking a fire hydrant twenty feet to his left clean off its base. Water erupted in a roaring column. "Great.." He winced. A figure moved through the spray at the edge of his peripheral vision, crossing his line of sight at exactly the wrong moment, and Karma's stomach dropped. He felt the luck snap toward them like a rubber band pulled too far. He threw his hand out hard in the opposite direction, redirecting by pure desperate reflex, and the misfortune skimmed past close enough that he heard the stranger's jacket pull in the backdraft. "Yeah," Karma breathed, heart hammering, "I am going to be a problem tonight."
The ceiling fan clicked on every third rotation. Karma had counted it forty-seven times since they'd stopped talking, which meant either the fan was broken or his brain refused to shut off. Both. Probably. He lay on his back with one arm tucked behind his head, the sheets pulled loose at the foot of the mattress, the city humming its usual indifferent noise through the cracked window. "Honestly?" Murphy tilted his head toward Kayden, voice still carrying that quiet, almost shy tone he used when he wasn't performing anything for anybody. "Pilot. Or... uh no, wait! Musician first. Pilot second." He paused, reconsidering with the gravity of someone settling a very important internal debate. "Maybe both? In that order. Fly cargo routes during the week, play dive bars on the weekend. No press. No team channel notifications at three in the morning." He almost smiled at the picture of it but caught himself. Because the thing about a quiet mind was that it never stayed quiet long enough to actually be useful, and already the edges of the last op were bleeding back in. It was the kind of memory that didn't knock, just slammed straight through the wall like the Kool-aid Man.
The Kickstarters. The fight they hadn't won. Hadn't won was the generous version. He could still see the sequence of it like a film with the audio slightly out of sync. The movement, then impact, then the particular sound of things going wrong in a way that no amount of debrief language could clean up and make reasonable. There was no slapping a bandaid on what had happened. Pain still radiated through his head where he had been rag-dolled and slammed through a wall. Half the time I don't even know what I'm doing out there. He'd said that out loud tonight, somewhere between the second drink he hadn't finished and now. Murphy wondered if Kayden heard it as confession or deflection. He hadn't entirely decided which it was himself. He didn't even recall how they had gotten here. Or who initiated what. Had it been mutual? Was this weird? Was he being weird? Were his hands glowing? Shit... shit! He looked. Okay, okay... not glowing. 'Good. Cool. Cool cool cool...'
As he drew in a breath the picture across the room shifted just a degree or two off-level, some framed print he'd bought because the apartment felt too bare and not lived in. He felt it. Subtle. Then it dropped. The frame hit the hardwood with a crack that was too loud for the size of it, glass skittering across the floor. Simultaneously the overhead light surged. Not a flicker, a surge, the bulb throwing the room into a brief, ugly overexposure before settling back to normal like it was pretending nothing had happened. "Damn it..." His pulse was doing something it shouldn't be. He could feel the particular texture of it in his blood. That low, crawling, wrong energy that meant his control had slipped its leash, even just for a second. Even just enough. He turned to look at Kayden with the specific expression of a man who had no particularly graceful exit from this moment and knew it. His smile sheepish in a way that didn't sit naturally on a face more accustomed to deflecting things with humor, one corner of his mouth pulled somewhere between apology and resignation. "So..." He sighed. "That's... yeah. That's the other thing. Prolly would end up electrocuting someone at a concert or... no plane, obviously." He gestured vaguely at the fallen frame, the light fixture, the general chaos of his own involuntary making. "…Sorry."
