Aaliyah grumbled as she stretched her body out carefully, trying to ease her sore muscles into a state of calm comfort.

They were stubborn, however, deciding instead to send tight pain arcing across her back and sides as she continued with her stretching, in the vain hope that it might help the more she did it. Aaliyah slumped back into the semi comfortable position that she’d found, lying in bed, and using her laptop as she slowly recovered from the day’s intense training.

There weren’t any real blemishes on her skin, other than the dots of colour that appeared and disappeared like they normally did when she let her mind be at ease. Solid colours were harder to manufacture, outside of moments where she genuinely felt the emotion, but smatterings of colours were easy, even if they had no discernible effect on herself or those around her.

Thankfully, she’d escaped injury with her impressive toughness and healing rate. Aaliyah’s training partner was a monster in combat, far better than she was technically in almost every way, and able to match up with Aaliyah’s own physical power pretty well, though she didn’t have the healing rate that Aaliyah boasted, especially not if she was able to manufacture happiness, however rare an emotion it was for her.

Aaliyah had a slight edge on the other girl in pure brawn and could increase that gap at the cost of stability if she absolutely had to, but Aaliyah quite liked staying in control. All of this told Aaliyah one, particularly important, thing.

She wasn’t that good in a fight.

She had the brawn, the brains, the healing, and a little assortment of other emotions she could try and use to aide her, but she couldn’t match the other girl. Not even close.

Jamie King, the full name that Aaliyah had figured out after some research, was the daughter to a fairly wealthy businessman with less than moral implications. He’d been imprisoned sometime around Jamie’s mid teenage years and died a few years later in prison to inmate conflict, supposedly. His rap sheet was a mile long, with anything from sexual harassment, to aiding in a kidnapping, to far, far worse. Aaliyah was smart enough to see what’s made the girl Awaken from a mile away, having met her in person as well.

Damaged as she might be, though only as much as the next Linked, Jamie King was good in a fight.

Aaliyah couldn’t be sure if it was a natural inclination, or a part of her link itself, but the girl was scary to go up against. She was strong, but also precise; she was fast, but also flexible; she had long reach, and she knew how to use it. She was everything Aaliyah was and more, at least in the physical realm.

Aaliyah could let go of her inhibitions, let go of the trust that she used to counteract her anger, let herself fall into that anger, and then rage, and become a raving beast that would crush the other girl in the blink of an eye.

But that wasn’t really winning. There was no thought or control, no effort on her part. It was a cheat code, one that ended with Aaliyah turning into snowball of rage rolling down a mountain at a hundred clicks an hour. She was more than sure that Willem could stop her, the man hiding more than a little strength, and Osmium could stop her as well. Hell, even Ajax might be able to stop her if his axe wanted to play ball, but it didn’t change the reality of the control she’d be giving up.

I was tempting, sometimes. Anger was like that, only breading more of itself until you really go haywire, but Aaliyah didn’t have that luxury. She couldn’t let herself go out of control every time she needed some extra power to defeat an enemy. It was a great way to go truly berserk, and, well…

It wasn’t very ‘heroic’ either.

Aaliyah scowled at her own thoughts, trying to push the stupid line from her mind. Her? A capital ‘H’ Hero? It was just about as dumb an idea as she could think up, what with her past of very un-heroic actions. She was getting caught up in the atmosphere that was building around the team, and she couldn’t even deny that it was happening.

They were all working towards a goal, joining together in a single-minded focus. Sure, they all had their own reasons for doing so, and some of those reasons aren’t as pure as you’d like, but they were all on the same page. It was almost mystical to Aaliyah, how it’d happened before her eyes and how she’d missed it.

Mirah. It was Mirah all along.

They all had their roles in the team, and they were becoming more defined as they actually began to work together. No role was set in stone, of course, but there was an underlying, almost spiritual, aspect to it that made the team actually stick in Aaliyah’s mind as something more than a steppingstone.

Ajax was the head of the dragon. He was their leader, the man who pointed in a direction, and they walked in it to follow. Aaliyah wanted so desperately to be in that position herself, to hold that power, but she knew that if she did that, it would only devolve into a system created to benefit her. She didn’t trust herself with the power that Ajax was sometimes able to command over others, or the confidence that he garnered by his actions.

Walter, well, he was the mind of it. Walter was a whole lot smarter than the team had been giving him credit for so far. It was a quiet intelligence, something that really only stood out when he was confident enough to blather on about what he was interested in. But after a good handful of lectures with Tracker, learning about the links and all their strange caveats, Aaliyah had realised that Walter was quickly becoming a human encyclopedia of Linked knowledge. Sure, he was idealistic to a definite fault, but he was smart, and Aaliyah could sometimes swear that the boy was gaining information on Linked at a rate that she couldn’t match.

As for herself, Aaliyah wasn’t totally sure. Sometimes it just took an outside eye to really nail down exactly where you stood within a group, but Aaliyah was fairly sure she knew what was up.

Aaliyah was the skin and bones of the dragon. The head had direction, the mind had its thoughts and motives, but the skin was what protected it from the journey it embarked on, the bones granting it stability on unstable surfaces. Aaliyah wasn’t so arrogant as to really believe that she was the protector of the team, but she did protect them in a different way. Maybe you could even say that she was the skull, protecting the mind from damage.

The team couldn’t afford to wade in the dark swamps that she had throughout her life. Walter’s mind would crack as he grappled with the vileness of what lived in the water. Ajax would lose his direction, finding himself submerged in murky water and unable to tell up from down.

Aaliyah, however, had lived in those swamps. She’d thrived in them and was broken because of it. She was the one who could submerge herself into those waters and come back, unscathed, with a ferry to let them stand atop it, rather than risk the depths.

So, that left Mirah.

Who was she to the team? The quiet girl who could sometimes speak so little that Aaliyah would forget that she was there at all. The once malnourished stick of a woman with a scar across her face, to protect herself from those that might prey on her in the dark streets she’d lived within.

Aaliyah had thought the same, thinking her inconsequential to the makeup of it. But when they were as close to falling apart as they had ever been, only days after their first match with Baxter’s team, it was Mirah who brought it all together.

Mirah was the heart. She didn’t beat warmly, or with kindness and compassion—that was more Ajax’s, or even Walter’s, thing. Instead, she beat with an inviolable determination. Maybe it was because she’d never had her expectations of the world be violated, aside from the small part of it that she’d lived in. She’d existed in the dark swamp, observing as many horrors as she could stomach, but now she’d found herself thrust into a different world entirely.

And to her, it didn’t make sense.

Mirah had never vocalised it, but Aaliyah had managed to pick up on it a few times, her confusion with the way that the world worked, or why people thought certain ways. Briefly, Mirah had been wrapped up in how others thought, maybe after she learned of Suicide and the fall of the Enforcers in the States. But she’d washed herself of the generational traumas that she’d been momentarily consumed by, leaving her with something more important than the fear they all held deep inside of themselves, subconsciously.

She’d found hope, or at least a version of it. Maybe it was naive, or self-destructive, or even downright laughable. But it was undeniable. It was not built on morality, or on injustice, or even on revenge for what had once happened to her, something that Ajax had only ever teased information about during training, being too tight lipped with other’s secrets.

It was built on that same sense of wrongness that Mirah found herself embroiled in, each and every day in this new world. And just by being near her, by seeing how she reacted to the world around her, Aaliyah had begun see the world that way as well.

Why does every Linked seem to ally with the known evils, or create their own, even when they have the power to change it? Why do they let the world fall into ruin if there is always a Linked somewhere that can counter another Linked? Why the bureaucracy and the boot licking, when you can find a Linked who would want nothing more than to bring their home peace?

Where did all the Heroes go?

Aaliyah hated it, to have those thoughts pop into her head like they had been lately. She knew that it was the team’s influence, the mere atmosphere itself bringing the questions that a three-year-old might ask their parent to the forefront of her mind.

They kept her awake at night now, swirling around her head as she desperately tried to understand the world she’d found herself in, battling against the deep-seated dread that the barest question brought with it.

Mirah was the heart, and she beat; softly and forever, unyielding and incorruptible. Enough to make the others think, to view the world from a blank page, bereft of the stains that life had covered theirs with.

She was the lynchpin in their minds. The compass and the diviner, all rolled into one. Even Ajax checked to make sure that he himself was pointed in the right direction.

Aaliyah tried to stretch out her muscles again, the pain from her sore flesh zapping across her form as she did so. However, her stretch was interrupted with a soft knock on the door, slightly different from the ones she’d grown to expect.

She lowered herself from her stretch slowly, turning off her laptop and letting it quickly go through it’s cleaning sequence while she rose from the bed and made her way out of her bedroom and towards the door.

The walk to the door wasn’t hesitant, so much as analytical. Aaliyah tried to pull information from anything she could; the shadow underneath the door, the sounds that they made as they shifted in place ever so slightly. Aaliyah approached the door, looking through the small peephole that had come installed in it for whatever reason, seeing an all too familiar face on the other end.

Aaliyah sighed heavily, letting her head droop down to the floor as she could feel the incoming conversation. She opened the door after gathering herself for a moment, beginning to speak before the man had a chance to even open his mouth.

“Guy Baker.” Aaliyah said, announcing that she knew the boy’s name already, “I can’t say that I was expecting you.” The man, standing almost half a foot shorter than herself, swallowed his words and just nodded.

She’d expected him to be more… nervous. She’d managed to contact the primary and high school that he went to before all of this, and his teacher report cards always mentioned him being overly nervous and possibly suffering from anxiety symptoms in the classroom. It wasn’t Aaliyah’s most ethical phone call, when she’d asked for that information as she posed as his mother, but the front desk of both schools had been unusually helpful. At least compared to the more restrictive schools that Baxter and Nguyen had attended, which might as well have been info security iron fortresses.

“I wish I could be anywhere else.” He replied eventually, his blue eyes darting up to meet Aaliyah’s own hazel eyes. Aaliyah had expected him to be at least a little nervous.

But he was cold, his eyes holding little in the way of emotion. It wasn’t the cruel coldness that she’d seen on too many men’s faces, but a level deeper than even that. It was calculating, direct, and far too reminiscent of the far more powerful men that stood behind the cruel idiots.

Aaliyah nodded, guiding the pudgy boy into her living room, and closing the door behind him, letting old skills she’d long since let atrophy come back to the surface. She’d need them, if she was at all right about him from his expression. She knew one thing, though.

She’d missed something when she’d gone through his history. Those eyes and that simple school reports didn’t match up.

She was now playing at a disadvantage, and the match had barely even begun.