Unheroic Life of a Certain Cape-Chapter 84 Thread and Trigger

Chapter 8
4
Thread and Trigger
I lay Bunny, George down on the cold concrete like I was tucking a child into bed. The machines hissed, and the smell of antiseptic and chemical bleach filled the air; the vats on the far wall pulsed with sickly light. He was still breathing, shallow, ragged, and miraculous in a way that made me want to smash something beautiful just to keep it honest.
White’s eyes rolled up to mine, green flecks of terror and calculation fighting for space. “W-what are you doing!?” he croaked.
My hand closed around his collar and hooked him up to one of the salvage chains from the rigging. He tried to pull away; his legs trembled, useless from what I did to him. I let the hook bite into his jacket and flesh. I watched the sulky, curated confidence drain out of him like wax.
He started to cry, real, wet, human sobs that sounded ridiculous in his tux. “P-please… don’t do this to me… You’ll let me live, right? T-the poison—” His voice was thin as thread.
I cut him off. I didn’t want to be the kind of man who offered mercy as a negotiation. “I don’t want to,” I said flatly. If I am going to give something, I would give it freely.
“Th-the morphine… at least give me some—” he begged.
I fished in my jacket and produced the small ampule, the only vial of morphine I had left. He lurched forward, like the sight of it had already done something to his soul. Hope made his face younger and more pathetic, a child who’d been promised toys that would never arrive.
“This is the only one I have,” I said, letting the words land heavy.
His eyes glittered with a stupid, grateful light. He reached for me instinctively; his fingers brushed my knuckles and then fell back.
I jabbed the morphine into Bunny’s arm with the tiny syringe.
White’s protest rose to a thin shriek. “N-no! No! Why?! He’s gonna die anyway!”
Silver snorted beside me, tone clipped. “He’s so loud.”
Onyx, exuberant as ever, whispered, “Don’t kill him yet. He has to suffer.”
They were always worse in a crowd, my private tribunal that never left me alone. I tuned them out when it mattered and listened when it was useful.
Bunny stirred, letting out the first coherent breath he’d taken since I’d arrived. His eyes opened slowly, the whites rimmed red, and he focused on White with a heat I’d not seen in a long time. It was the look of someone who’d been on the receiving end of life’s worst mistakes and decided it was time to repay them in full.
I drew my handgun and laid it across his shaking hand. The metal was cool and paternal in my palm. “Do you want revenge?” I asked softly. There was no theatrics in how I asked, only a sparse, honest question. He lifted his head enough to fix me with a stare.
“Blink once if you want revenge,” I said. “Blink twice, if you don’t.”
He blinked once, deliberate and motionless.
I set the gun between his fingers and hovered a palm over the trigger. His breathing hitched, the machines around us keeping time with a rhythm not his own. He clenched his jaw; the muscles in his arm strained like fresh rope.
I leaned in close to White. He was still strapped to the floor, though now the morphine made his complaints softer and more useless. His face had an ugly sheen and a wetness at the eyes.
“Steady… steady… there,” I murmured, like a bored instructor. My forearm pressed down on his hand, lending him a fraction of strength; it was a small thing, but I’d learned strength was often a matter of will and leverage, not just muscle. On the second count I added my weight, a little more pressure so the finger’s line bent and the pin broke.
“Pull.”
White screamed like a man whose world had finally realized it could end, a child throwing staccato curses at the sky. “Please—no, no! I want to live! I’ll—” His pleas thinned into static.
BANG.
The crack of the gun filled the room and for a second everything else stopped. The machines coughed. Onyx swore softly and then laughed; Silver pressed a hand to her mouth and made a wet, small sound that might have been horror. White’s eyes went wide as his scalp split under the bullet. His body gave one half-hearted convulsion and then was inert, the life leaking into the cold floor. Blood painted the concrete in a harsh, practical arc, and his polished shoes stuck in a wet dark that looked like nothing so much as truth.
The hook clanged where White’s hand had been, metal and blood and the small dignity of finality. He lay there, finished and limp, a tuxedoed man reduced to a mannequin in the dust.
Bunny’s hands went slack around the gun. He sagged, the morphine pulling him somewhere warm and dark, or maybe the edge of unconsciousness. His eyes closed and opened, a lazy, satisfied flutter like a man who’d finally put his teeth into something bitter and found it sweet.
I let the gun fall from his numb fingers and clicked it empty against my boot.
“Rest well, Bunny… you deserve it…”
I carried Bunny up the concrete stairs, step by step, careful not to jostle him too much. His body was feather-light, the kind of weight you only see on people who’d been stripped down to skin and bone by cruelty. His head lolled against my shoulder, strands of his dark hair brushing my jacket. He breathed, but it was shallow and ragged, like someone trying to sip water through a cracked straw.
The topmost floor had long lost its roof, but the view was still there. And what a view it was.
The sprawl of the Lawless stretched in every direction, endless asphalt veins cracked and dry, patches of skeletal trees and ruined shells of towns dotting the horizon. The railway cut across it all, bold and arrogant, twin silver lines that stretched to infinity. Far ahead, through the heat-haze, the outline of the nearest City-State shimmered, barely visible, like some mirage too proud to vanish.
I propped Bunny against a wall where the breeze could hit his face. His eyes fluttered, half-closed but still conscious. I hooked up the small oxygen tank I’d salvaged and set it beside him. The hiss of the valve filled the silence as he breathed through the mask.
I sat down next to him. For a long moment we just breathed together… Silver and Onyx didn’t intrude. They’d melted away, leaving only me and Bunny. Sometimes, even hallucinations had the sense to keep their mouths shut.
His lips trembled before words came out, cracked and broken. “T-Thank… y-you… s-stranger…”
The word scraped out of his throat like rust from an old hinge.
I didn’t answer. My helmet stayed on, visor reflecting the broken skyline. He never knew me like this. To him, he only knew me as Nicholas Caldwell… or Eclipse. Not Courier.
A tear slid from the corner of his eye. Just one. It looked fragile, as if even water was a luxury his body couldn’t spare anymore. Through my threads, I felt him unraveling. Gratitude. Joy. They bloomed faint and pure at the end, and then dimmed. Before that, it had been only pain and fear… an unending throb that left scars no one could see.
His eyes grew distant, glassy as they stared out toward the horizon, where the City-State loomed faint and unreachable.
A part of me, a stupid, wishful part, hoped. Maybe he’d pull. Maybe the trauma would break him open and gift him something… fire, lightning, wings… anything that could keep him here with me. I’d seen worse miracles in worse places.
But nothing came.
He just… stopped.
I sat there with him as the wind whistled through broken glass and twisted rebar. My body was still, but my chest burned. I didn’t close his eyes. I didn’t touch his shoulder. I just sat there, watching the rails stretch on, thinking about how life had a way of laughing in your face.
Unfair didn’t even begin to cover it.
I found a crematorium in the lower guts of the compound, like you find a loose tooth in a junkyard. The machines there were crude and efficient, industrial hunger wrapped in painted steel. I fed Bunny into one of the vats meant for waste that once wore a better name. The flames were clinical, indifferent; they ate what I gave them without ceremony. When the smoke cleared, I sifted through heat-cured ash, boxed it all, and tucked him into a tumbler I’d found bolted in some office: stainless, heavy, with a latch that sealed like a coffin.
He deserved a place that had a view. Maybe Markend. It had been six months since I’d vanished as Eclipse; the city would have softened into new scars and new indifference. Safer to slip him back into the place he’d grown up than hand him to scavengers or the SRC. I wanted him somewhere that would remember him.
I moved through the corridors like a scavenger with a list, and that list ended on a tacky gleam in a back room: a bike that looked like someone had asked a mad architect to design a raven. It leaned on its kickstand, black with a finish that drank light. It wore armor plates where flesh needed to hide and ornamental studs where taste once went to die.
It was mine before I read the paper shoved into the storage hatch. The document said some posh name I didn’t recognize from orders, invoice, a polite signature, and beneath the bureaucratic nonsense someone had scratched “priority client.” The bike was paid for by money that smelled like glass and parlor rooms. I smiled and closed the hatch.
The thing was a poem built for ruin. Twin-mounted rifles hugged the forearms like sleeping dogs; their barrels were sheened chrome, modular, and merciless. The storage compartment was lined with a wafer of tech labeled, in stenciled letters, nullifier housing… anti-sense, anti-phase, whatever the rich called it to sleep easier at night. The dash housed a GPS the size of a palm with routing that patched through the lawless satellite feeds; beneath it, a trio of buttons sat flush and smug: INVISIBILITY, TELEPORT… and a third unlabeled switch whose cap read like arrogance. The power cell was advertised as an “Eclipse-Grade Ionic Core” in the paperwork… some fancy-sounding energy source that promised long rides and loud exits. It hummed quietly, like a sleeping animal.
“How ironic is that? What even is Eclipse-Grade?”
I traced the frame with one hand and felt something close to respect. It was a machine that understood me: black, mean, built to disappear when it needed to and leave a rumor behind when it couldn’t. I sat on it and it fit like an old jacket.
Silver chimed in as she appeared beside me, admiring my mighty steed. “What are we going to call it?”
Onyx didn’t wait. “Onyx. Call it Onyx, so every time you ride it, I can boast how you ride me every day.”
Silver pouted, theatrical as ever. “And pray tell, who are you going to boast it to when it’s just the two of us… oh, shit…”
Onyx preened. “Oh, yes. I am going to boast it to you and it’s great teasing material—”
I cut in because some things needed a foundation. “I’m going to call it the Silverside, my mighty steed.”
Onyx made a noise like an offended cat. “Come on—”
Silver laughed, demure and absurd. “I’d love it if you’d call it Silver, but I might get confused with the bike. It would be tough, you know?”
“Ha ha ha ha,” cackled Onyx louder, the sound thinly human. “It’s not that tough, okay? We are not real, after all!”
Ugh. I muttered something that probably sounded like agreement and dug into the hull for anything else worth carrying. The workshop smelled of oil and the acid tang of experiments gone kindly mad. I found a soft case of firearms, compact, service-grade pistols with extra magazines; a pair of folded rifles that fit a cradle in the fairing; small sticks of plastic explosives wrapped in greaseproof paper; a handful of shaped charges the size of my palm. They fit into my pockets and the bike’s nullified storage like they were made to nest.
I loaded until my jacket sagged and the Silverside hummed like it knew its rider. I felt the tiny pull of something like purpose, or maybe it was just habit dressed as duty. I cinched the tumbler into the bike’s rear and strapped it down.
“I guess, I am coming home… for a short visit…”
Markend waited with its old bones and fresh rot. I kicked the bike, felt the ionic core answer with a low, purring promise, and thought about how much better a path looked when you had a fast machine and a small, hot piece of vengeance in the back.
“Ah, man… This is so awesome…”
The road opened like a wound, and I rode toward Markend with a coffin at my hip.
“I might get used to this.”