Chapter 5: Discord
The late afternoon sun laid long gold shadows across Metro City, and under the ordinary noise of the evening rush - horns, footsteps, a busker mangling something by the trains - something else was moving. Alex felt it before he understood it: a wrongness in the air, the way you feel a storm arriving before the first cloud shows.
He found Mira on the roof of the Halloran annexe, eyes shut, dark hair pulled sideways by the wind, one hand flat against her sternum. She had a way of going very still when she was listening to something no one else could hear.
He landed without a sound. "Do you sense it too?"
She opened her eyes - vivid green, the kind of green that looked chosen rather than grown - and it was a moment before she answered.
"There's a wave moving through the city. Fear, anger, despair, stacked on top of each other. It isn't natural, Alex. It's amplified."
"Any idea who's behind it?"
"Someone's pushing people towards the worst version of themselves. On purpose. We need to find the source before it spreads any further."
"Then let's go."
They moved fast - Alex crossing the rooftops in long arcs, Mira weaving through the streets below - and within a few blocks they found what she'd felt coming. A shove outside a coffee shop turned into a fistfight. Two drivers abandoned their cars mid-junction to trade blows over nothing at all. The evening crowd, usually just bored and hurrying home, had gone jagged at the edges.
Mira pressed two fingers to her temple and pushed calm out into the crowd in slow waves. For a few seconds it worked, confusion replacing fury on strangers' faces, then the anger came surging back, worse than before.
"It's a bandage on a bullet wound," she said, when Alex dropped beside her. "Whoever's doing this is strong. He's feeding on it."
"Leads?"
She closed her eyes again. This time, when she opened them, there was something like a direction behind them. "Central Plaza. There's a focal point. It's getting worse by the second."
"Hold on." He gathered her up before she could argue, and the street dropped away.
"Just don't drop me," she said into his shoulder.
"Never have."
Central Plaza was already lost to it. Crowds had packed in from every side street, their voices layering into something that wasn't quite a chant and wasn't quite a scream. At the centre, on a platform built out of stacked packing crates, stood a man calling himself Discord.
He wasn't hard to find. The air around him had a pressure to it, the way a room changes before the first crack of thunder, and Mira felt him before she saw him clearly: something old and raw, coiled tight inside a man who couldn't have been much older than Alex.
"Citizens!" His voice carried unnaturally far, bouncing off glass and stone. "For too long you've swallowed your anger, smiled through it, called it manners! Tonight you don't have to!"
The crowd roared back at him, and something in Discord's face eased - the particular pleasure of a man watching a fire he'd lit catch properly.
"He's not just provoking them," Mira said, low. "He's living off it. Every spike feeds him."
"Can you counter it?"
"Not at this range, not on this scale. If I get close I might break his hold - but he's strong, Alex. Stronger than anyone we've dealt with."
"I'll clear a path."
He moved before she could argue, easing through the crowd rather than through it, a hand here, a shoulder turned there. These were people, not obstacles, and he wanted none of them hurt on his account.
Discord clocked him at thirty feet and smiled. "The city's own heroes. Here to spoil my fun?"
"Your manipulation ends now."
"Ends?" Discord laughed, and there was nothing warm in it. "Their rage is mine, Superman. You can't talk a man out of a hurricane."
He opened both hands, and something came off him like heat off tarmac - not visible, but Alex felt it hit, a wave of despair with his own face somehow folded into it. Every failure he'd half-forgotten stood up at once. The building he hadn't reached in time. The people he couldn't save fast enough. His knees went loose.
"What—" He shook his head, trying to clear it, and it didn't clear. "I can't focus."
"Alex!" Mira was at his side. "He's got you too."
Discord's grin widened, delighted. "Superman. You know what you really are under the cape, don't you. A man playing dress-up in someone else's hope."
Mira took his hand - not a gesture, a channel - and pushed everything she had down it: not words exactly, more the shape of them. Remember why. Remember who. He felt it arrive like sun through cloud, thin at first and then whole.
The doubt didn't vanish. It just stopped being the only thing in the room.
He breathed once, properly. "Thank you."
"Always," she said, and didn't let go until his footing was steady again.
He faced Discord a second time, jaw set. "That won't work twice."
"Impossible." For the first time something like doubt crossed Discord's face. "You're one man."
"He's not alone," Mira said, stepping up beside him, her calm a wall he could feel at his back.
Discord's composure cracked, and instead of arguing he turned back to the crowd, feeding them another jolt of rage, hoping sheer numbers would do what his words hadn't. A hundred strangers surged forward at once, with no memory of why.
Alex couldn't get through them without hurting someone, so he didn't try. He hovered out of reach while Mira worked the crowd the way she'd worked it before, slower this time, patient, coaxing rage back down into confusion, then into the small, human shame of realising you'd been shouting at nothing.
"What's happening?" a man asked, blinking, as if he'd surfaced from underwater.
"Why was I so angry?" a woman said, pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes.
With the plaza quieting behind him, Alex came down in front of the platform. "It's over."
Discord's bravado had nowhere left to feed. Up close, the fear in his face was harder to miss than the malice had been - a man who'd built himself a weapon out of everyone else's worst feelings and had nothing left when it stopped working. His hands weren't steady.
"I won't be beaten by you," he said, and his voice cracked on beaten.
Mira didn't reach for a weapon or a restraint. She reached the way she had for Alex. "We're not here to beat you. We're here because you're hurting, and you've been hurting people to make it stop, and neither of those things is working."
"What do you know about it."
"Enough to know it doesn't end like this."
Discord's jaw worked. He looked out at the plaza, at people rubbing their eyes and staring at their own hands as if they belonged to someone else, and something in him seemed to run out of road. He didn't collapse. He just stopped - shoulders dropping an inch, the performance going out of him all at once, leaving a tired man standing on a stack of crates in the wreckage of an evening.
"I didn't know what else to do," he said, so quiet Alex almost missed it.
"I know," Mira said. "Come down from there."
He came down.
The police took him without incident, though it took two officers to keep him walking in a straight line, the fight gone out of his legs along with everything else. Alex crossed to the nearest one before they loaded him into the car.
"He needs a psychiatrist, not a cell block. Whatever he did tonight, it came from somewhere."
The officer studied Discord through the window, then nodded slowly. "We'll get him evaluated. I'll make sure of it."
Dawn found them on a bench at the plaza's edge, the crates still scattered where the crowd had left them, the light coming up grey then gold over the rooftops.
"You all right?" Mira asked.
"Better than an hour ago." He turned his hands over, looking at them the way he sometimes did after a bad night, checking they still worked. "I didn't expect him to get to me like that."
"Everyone has doubts. Even you."
"Good to know I'm not special." He managed something close to a laugh. "Thank you. For pulling me back."
"Good teamwork," she said. "I couldn't have got through that crowd without you clearing it. And you couldn't have shaken him off without me."
She was quiet for a moment, watching a street cleaner start on the mess below. "It's strange, isn't it. His power was just his pain, turned outward and made bigger. Mine is empathy. Yours is strength. I keep wondering what that says about what the meteor actually found in each of us."
"Maybe it didn't find anything new. Maybe it just turned the volume up on what was already there."
"That's not entirely comforting." She said it lightly, but her eyes stayed on the street cleaner a beat too long. "I don't love the idea that some rock decided who I get to be."
"It didn't decide anything. You're still you, Mira. Louder, maybe. Not different."
She didn't argue, but she didn't quite let it go either, filing it away the way she filed most things, behind a smile that gave nothing back.
They sat there until the street cleaner had finished his round and the plaza looked, almost, like nowhere anything had happened.