It didn’t take long to reach the surface, relatively speaking. Izzy lead us down a hall off of the main room, giving me a chance to look at the dead, frozen bodies of all the people Rook had turned into robots as well as his own transformed body.

Amy shuddered as she passed it, telling me, “The little bit of him that’s left saw his dead body. Even for him, it’s weird and creepy.”

Haley shook her head, saying only, “Yuck.”

From behind us, Cassie’s voice carried over the sound of our boots stepping on the debris. “He deserves some weird and creepy. Between him and Dr. Mind, the Nine were trying to corner the market.”

I wondered if we should be bringing out any of them for burial, but would we bring out everyone? Just Rook? I dismissed it with the thought that the nations of the world had both private and public teams devoted to cleaning up after superhero fights, classifying new technology, and handling the inevitable hazardous waste.

Following Izzy into the corridor, I gave a last look at Rook’s combination of lab and submarine base. Noticing the storage cabinets and partially constructed Rook suits, I wondered if maybe we should be blowing up the entire place. Would the world be better if the world’s governments had the chance to study Rook and Dr. Mind’s technology? What about the Abominator implants and what they’d done to Rook’s followers?

If I felt we had to, we could always sear the place with the jet’s main gun. Reminding myself of that, I walked down the hall. It ended in a gray concrete staircase. Unremarkable in every way, from the steel beams to the blocky steps, it could have been in any factory or office building in the world. 

How many similar staircases hadn’t I walked up over the last few years? It could have been been the staircase I’d fought vampires on in Detroit, one of many in the Nine’s factory near Chicago, the arena on the island where I’d fought the Grey Giant the second time, the Defenders’ HQ in Chicago, or even our own base in Grand Lake. There had to be more. We hadn’t used the staircases much when we’d fought when we’d fought the mushroom zombies in the underground parking lots, but I knew they had to be there.

Even the stairways in Stapledon’s school in Colorado could have passed for it for a second. They might have been carved out of the rock by Earthmover, but the design wasn’t much different.

Who’d guess the life of a superhero involved spending so much time walking and fighting up and down the stairways in the employee only sections of buildings?

At least we weren’t fighting through this one.

Daniel’s voice sounded through our mental link. Blue’s scan can’t detect anyone in the stairway. When I sense our potential futures, the chances that we’re attacked while we’re in it are about the same as when we’re in Grand Lake out of costume, maybe lower.

I thought back, I’m being paranoid.

Daniel’s amusement carried over the link even before he replied, After today or after every day since our senior year of high school, who wouldn’t be?

I laughed and we walked upward. No one attacked us. The stairway didn’t explode. I could tell from watching everyone through my HUD that I wasn’t the only person expecting the worst. 

Everyone from Jaclyn to Vaughn, Marcus, Haley, Rachel… Well, everyone walked carefully, making micro adjustments with their heads that allowed them to keep everything around us in view.

Even Tiger paused to look down the way we’d come every now and then.

If it reminded me of anything, it reminded me of walking down the stairway into Red Lightning’s secret lair. The gas traps had long ago run out of gas, but the machinegun behind the wall had still worked.

We’d destroyed it after it fired on us. It seemed like forever ago.

You could view that whole incident as superhero life in a nutshell. We’d descended into a supervillain’s lair, risking our lives, but discovering information we hadn’t known before. While there, we’d found the remains of a battle and Red Lightning’s attempt to become even more powerful.

If nothing else, it was a reminder that even with time travel not all deaths could be fixed. Changing Red Lightning’s future would have been a major change to our past. I couldn’t even guess at the consequences.

When we reached the top of the stairway, we found that it ended it two, light green metal doors. Izzy and I looked at each other, prepared to rip the doors out of their hinges.

Before we even had time to turn back to (or test)  the doors, Haley had reached out for the door handle, turning it, and pushing it open. 

Nothing exploded. No alarms rang.

We stepped out onto a concrete platform on the side of a hill next to the (inactive?) volcano in the middle of the island. We were about half a mile from the compound we’d attacked. From our current height, we could see the roof of the building we’d landed on along with the other buildings around it.

Dr. Transylvania’s half-dome of a ship floated above everything, shattered walls and all.

I didn’t see any fighting.

The sun hung low in the sky, a glowing ball in a red sky. I wondered how the vampires were doing.