After a brief pit stop to nab Raz from his hiding spot, Ethan and Raz stepped through the portal into Apex's laboratory with Rainey in tow. She walked behind them, slowly and cautiously, as if she expected to be snatched the second she stepped foot onto the premises. All was quiet until they stepped into the light underneath the observation deck when Rainey was suddenly accosted verbally, venom dripping in Quinn's voice from above.
"You," Quinn spat, anger flashing across her face hotter than Ethan had ever seen, jaw set and ready for battle. She threw a clipboard down on her desk, leaving Derrick behind in the middle of a conversation. Despite very nearly being killed by Rainey just a moment ago, he felt a fear for Rainey greater than anything he had felt for himself. Quinn took off down the stairs and the mighty Slate took a tentative step back, guilty eyes pleading to Ethan.
"I thought you said she'd forgive me," Rainey whispered to Ethan.
"Eventually, maybe," he shrugged.
Quinn walked right up to Rainey and came nose to nose with her. "Monster," she growled again. Rainey's shoulders dropped, eyes low. "How can you live with yourself?"
"I was trying to protect you," Rainey offered weakly.
"Protect me? By destroying the city I live in? By nearly killing the most powerful Protector this city has? You've done nothing for me, all of this has been for you!"
"Easy," Ethan worked his way in between them. Rainey skulked off to the opposite side of the lab facing the shielding. "We need her."
"For what? She caused this problem!"
"I know, and she's going to help fix it."
Quinn scoffed. "How can you trust her to do anything after what she did to Alex? After what she did to you? Look at your face!"
Now that Quinn mentioned it, Ethan did feel a bruise forming on his left cheek, but acknowledging that wasn't going to help his point.
"Listen," Ethan said quietly, "I tried to stop her, and technically I did succeed, but it was too late and the Surge is coming anyway. It's flowing this way right now and this is our only chance to save Ascension."
"We have better shielding now," Kingston gestured to the Junction. "I've been, uh, working on it all evening."
Ethan did have to admire the amount of progress Kingston and Quinn had made in a short amount of time: he had patched every single little crack break in the metal to create a solid, nearly unblemished piece of metal blocking the Surge from the lab. It would've been great for preventing small amounts of Surge energy from bursting through and eating everything alive.
It was a shame Ethan had to rip it all out.
"See? We've got this covered ourselves. What good is she?" Quinn gestured to Rainey.
"We can't rely on that shield. I have a different plan, but you're not going to like it."
"I'm sure you're aware of this, but I do need to remind you that you're not supposed to be here, and she's a wanted Altered," Amory pointed out, leaning over the railing. "However, it's a bit late for technicalities, and given Quinn's readings, we appear to be completely out of time. What is your plan?"
"Glad we're on the same page." He pointed to the Junction. "Rainey, can you get the alloy out of the way?"
"Yes, but then the Surge is going to blast you straight in the face."
"Glad you're concerned about that now," Ethan muttered. Rainey huffed her disapproval. "Can you move it?"
Rainey shrugged. "Easy enough." She took an athletic stance and faced the shielding. Ethan had seen her lift massive boulders seemingly with ease, but the iridium vibrated slightly, but didn't move.
"Not as strong as you thought?" Quinn mocked her.
Rainey cleared her throat. "Must be tired from the fight."
"Which you lost," Ethan pointed out, smiling. Raz cackled from the corner.
"It's not purely stone," Kingston told her. "Can you…move metal?"
"With my hands, sure…"
"Well, you stabbed the only person alive who was able to bend our shielding, so either you find a way to move it, or get lost."
Rainey glared at Kingston, who didn't back down. Rainey grunted quietly, then reassessed. Behind the shielding was a concrete wall, which gave Rainey an idea: she ripped the concrete wall, collapsing the shielding onto the ground.
"There you go, one Surge blast coming right up."
"No going back now," Ethan sighed. He took his position dead center in front of the now-collapsed shielding, with nothing standing in the way of him and total obliteration aside from a hastily put together plan.
"This is your idea?" Quinn asked, incredulously, looking at the gaping dark hole Rainey had formed. "Kill us all quickly?"
"The Surge is coming and, like you said, it's following a predetermined path. If we left the shielding it would've splintered into a million dangerous, superheated pieces that would've ripped through us. Now we can see it coming and I can redirect it."
Quinn stared at him, baffled. "You're going to stand here and try to take the entirety of the blast head on? That's your good idea?"
"That's the plan, though I never said it was a good one…"
"How wide can you even make a portal?"
"I never had to make one wider than I needed to jump through, but that doesn't necessarily mean I can't."
"Lovely," Rainey shook her head.
Raz began tapping his fingers on the desk. "You can probably keep the portal open wide enough to funnel the Surge energy through, but you're going to expend a lot of energy. You'll be tired way faster than normal, and if you can't hold it open long enough to redirect the Surge energy, we're going to have a huge problem."
"What do we do if that happens?" Quinn asked. "If Ethan can't hold his portal open the whole time?"
Raz shrugged. "Run?"
"Probably run," Ethan agreed, nodding. "Don't worry, I can do this."
"Is this our best choice?" Rainey asked.
"Yes, Ethan can do this," Quinn said, wrapping her arm over Ethan's shoulders. He smiled, nodding.
"It's also our only choice," Amory told them. "I sent the rest of the Protectors out into the city to assist the populace in the event that we…fail."
"We won't," Ethan said confidently. Quinn gave his shoulder a squeeze. "Rainey, open a hole so I can see the sky. I'll need to redirect this Surge out into the mountains so it avoids decimating Ascension."
Rainey grunted her reply and ripped a piece of the wall off fifty feet above them, no larger than a basketball giving Ethan a porthole to the mountains.
"Perfect," Ethan told her, rocking from foot to foot. With all the setup out of the way, there wasn't anything else to do except wait for the tidal wave to hit their beach and hope he could redirect it out towards the mountains. Part of him wished it happened instantaneously so he wouldn't have to wait, but another part of him was grateful he had more time to spend with Quinn.
At least, that was his plan, but when he looked for her Ethan found her verbally excoriating Rainey loudly from her place in the observation deck.
"You're so lucky you got powers or else I would have absolutely knocked you right on your ass. You know what? I'm going to come down there and put myself right in the Surge so I can get powers that are stronger than yours and beat you up! That'd be the least you deserved for what you did!"
"I don't know if I necessarily need to be here," Rainey said quietly, making her way to the door. Ethan growled and threw up a void, blocking her path.
"Oh, no you don't," he told her. "You started this. You're finishing it."
Rainey sighed quietly and went to say something undoubtedly rude but all of their collective attention was drawn to the sudden alarm blaring overhead. Right on cue, the Junction started to glow dimly in front of them. Rainey drifted down towards Ethan, hanging by his right, unsure of what to do with herself.
"Okay, here we go," Quinn said loudly, returning her attention to the last remaining probe readings just west of the city. "Places, everyone. We only have one shot at this."
Ethan took a deep breath to center himself, then motioned for Rainey to lean in towards him.
"You know why you're really here?"
"To get skewered by my sister?"
"I enjoyed that part, but no. If anything goes wrong, if I can't stop this…escape with Quinn, Raz, and everyone else you can and bring this entire place down. Give the city a chance to move on from what we started."
"It won't come to that," Rainey shook her head, then paused. "However, it's not too late to take everyone and get out of here."
Ethan let out a curt breath as light radiated from the Junction. "You don't fix anything by running. Alex told me that. I let her down. I let Quinn down, and Raz, and I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm fixing this, no matter what it takes."
Rainey nodded slowly, then took her stance next to Ethan, the two figures all alone on the lab floor with everyone else watching through the barricade of desks above.
It started as a trickle. Quiet hisses heralding the impending doom to come, like a tiny snowball belying an avalanche. Then came the noise, a deafening roar funneled through the stone tunnel and directed perfectly at Ethan. The light followed after, shadows dancing in the dark tunnel, heralding the arrival of the Surge. Ethan threw a portal up in front of him and another way out through the hole Rainey made towards the mountains just as he saw the first hint of the multicolored energy rounding the bend and rushing towards him.
The Surge did not flow neatly through into his portal and out into the mountains as he expected. Instead, it spat its way through the Junction in fits and starts, spreading out in the distance between the tunnel and Ethan and slammed against the edges of his portal with the force of Titan's fists, forcing him back. His boots began to slip on the tile and he realized that he was losing ground. If he faltered, the energy would rip through him and everything else behind him.
"Back me up!" he yelled, unable to take his eyes off the Surge. Rainey grimaced and waved a palm upwards and Ethan grunted as a wall of stone sprouted from the floor and slammed into his back, painfully preventing him from sliding any further. With that problem solved Ethan realized they had a new one: the wall to his left sizzled away as the Surge began to eat at the support structure holding up the second floor of the lab, eliciting gasps from above them as the entire floor tilted forward towards the erupting Junction.
Rainey must have seen what Ethan did because she wisely created a few stone columns to help support the weight of the second floor, preventing the whole thing from collapsing on top of them. While she worked to save them from a total collapse, Ethan widened out his portal to catch the stray pulses of Surge energy shooting wildly all over the place. Instantly, he could feel his strength draining away: this portal was three times as large as any other he had created, and he almost never held them open longer than a moment so he or someone else could pass through it.
He began to sweat, his forearms cramping. He felt like he had been pulling apart the very fabric of reality for far too long, and his palms were slick, nearly causing him to lose his grip.
To make matters worse, the stone around the opening had begun to be eaten away, threatening to collapse the entire wall in front of them. Worst of all, the stream of light was growing brighter, signaling a massive bout of energy headed their way. Ethan prayed it would mark the end of the Surge, but he wasn't sure he or the walls could hold out much longer. Things were going downhill, fast, and they were all running out of time to escape.
"It's not working!" Ethan yelled to Rainey. His palm cramped and the left side of the portal collapsed inward, letting more energy avoid the funnel and slam into one of Rainey's support beams, which collapsed into a pile of dust. She quickly raised another, eyes wide, only to find another pillar of stone on the right cut jaggedly in half, collapsing. She was suddenly playing a game of whack a mole, trying to replace her exploding support beams.
Upstairs, the gaps had turned to screams and screeches as the floor nearly collapsed entirely and desks flipped over the edge of the second story railing and were quickly vaporized by the Surge, leaving nothing but wood splinters on the floor in front of them. Raz and Quinn slid to the front and slammed into the railing, barely hanging on above them.
"Hang on!" Quinn yelled to Raz, helping him to his feet.
"You've got to collapse the wall and get everyone out of here! I'll hold the portal as long as I can!"
He expected Rainey to jump at the first chance to leave him, but instead she looked back at Quinn's determined face. Despite everything, Quinn wasn't running. In fact, she glanced down at Ethan, yelling to be heard.
"It's almost over!" She yelled. "Just hang on a little longer!"
The words felt good, but Ethan's forearms didn't get the message. His portal shrank again, letting more energy erode the second story.
"Do it!" He shouted. Instead of running, Rainey shook her head, and he could just barely hear her speak to herself.
"You don't fix anything by running." She glanced over at Ethan's shrinking portal width, then her eyes lit up a deep gray. "Let me try something!"
Rainey took a wide stance to steady herself and then pulled more stone off the wall above them, reinforcing the top of the Junction and funneling more energy through Ethan's shrinking portal. As his portal shrank, she formed the stone to fit his portal, containing the Surge even as Ethan's muscles failed him.
Ethan roared with effort and sank to his knees as his portal collapsed entirely just as the last of the Surge energy snaked its way through the Junction and out into the night sky.
Panting and exhausted, he watched the cloud of energy disperse over the mountains, multicolored flakes mixing in with the dense snowfall. As he watched the energy blanket Stillrock he laughed quietly realizing he had just unleashed Amory's worst nightmare: an entire new region exposed to Surge energy, given the chance to bloom incredible powers of their own.
Maybe the people who walked out of their homes in the middle of the night wondering at the curious mix of precipitation falling on their homes would deserve their powers more than him.
Regardless, that was out of their hands now. He simply had to hope they would.
Before he could reflect any further, he was tackled from behind by Quinn, wrapping her arms around him. Raz wasn't far behind, dogpiling on top of him.
"Gotta hand it to you," Raz told him, "you finally had a good plan."
"Took a long time," he smiled.
"I knew it'd work," Quinn laughed. "You're alive!"
"Barely," he laughed. His eyes went to Rainey's. "All thanks to her."
Quinn turned her attention to Rainey, grimacing. "It's a start."
Rainey breathed out a sigh of relief, then shuffled awkwardly when Amory arrived down on the first floor with Kingston behind her.
"We'll take it from here," she told them. Despite her vitriol for Rainey, Quinn's eyes went wide. She stammered, wanting to intervene but not knowing what to say. Instead, it was Ethan who spoke up.
"Wait," Ethan said, pushing himself to his feet. Amory raised an eyebrow, but held Kingston back.
"I know you want to just bring her in, but the Surge really was an issue that Apex needed to solve. She did not go about it in the right way, not even a little bit, but…it is fixed. However, you have a new problem."
"Is that so?"
He nodded, trying to ignore how tired he was. "You were worried about Protectors and Altered being balanced in Ascension, but we just dropped a new Surge across the entire western slope. With the wind whipping the way it was, who knows how far that energy is going to spread? If you want to contain that many potential Altered, you're going to need a lot of new Protectors."
Amory looked like she wanted to puke, but she held it together. "True. And what is your idea to fix this?"
"Well, there's really no fixing any of it now," he smiled, "but I know a few people who you could start with."
Amory laughed. "And you believe Rainey will listen to you?"
"No," Ethan shook his head. "But I bet you she'll listen to Quinn."
"Be that as it may, I'm not solely in charge of this program."
Ethan frowned. "Meaning?"
"There's someone else you're going to want to speak to."