(THE BLUE BEETLE OF BROCKTON BAY) CHAPTER TWELVE
Jaime slept for fourteen hours after the Merchant raid.
Khaji-Da informed him of that the moment he woke up, which felt unnecessary considering the light creeping through the apartment blinds already looked closer to evening than morning.
“Your body required recovery,” the scarab said as blue text appeared briefly across the corner of his vision. “Sleep quality was suboptimal due to elevated neural activity.”
Jaime dragged a pillow over his face.
“Please tell me you didn’t spend the whole night psychoanalyzing me.”
“I also reviewed local infrastructure deficiencies.”
Jaime groaned louder.
He stayed there for another minute anyway, staring up at the ceiling once he finally pushed the pillow aside. The apartment remained quiet around him, though Khaji-Da still fed him the distant gurgle of plumbing in the walls, footsteps from another floor, and a muffled television somewhere nearby.
His thoughts drifted back toward the warehouse despite himself, to the desperate crowd, and the moment… no, the ease with which the idea had settled into his head.
He exhaled sharply through his nose and sat up before the thought could root itself too deeply again.
Dwelling on things had never really been his style. Reflection helped sometimes. Past a certain point, though, you were just sitting there replaying mistakes instead of doing anything useful. And Brockton Bay already had enough people standing around helplessly staring at problems.
The city still looked like a warzone. Entire blocks downtown remained dark after sunset, power lines hanging dead across flooded streets while emergency generators strained under loads they clearly were not designed to handle. Water access was inconsistent depending on the district, and from what Khaji-Da had gathered by secretly listening to unsecured municipal channels, the repair backlog was becoming impossible to manage.
There were simply too many things broken at once, which meant Jaime had work to do.
By late afternoon, he was flying above downtown with the armor partially retracted around his face, cool wind cutting across his skin as he looked down over the city below. Days after the battle, entire neighborhoods looked abandoned except for the occasional movement of relief workers, PRT patrols, or survivors.
Khaji-Da projected a wireframe overlay across his vision.
“Current district power availability: thirty-one percent,” it reported. “Water purification functionality remains critically limited.”
“Any good news?”
“Crime-related homicide rates have plateaued.”
“Jesus Christ, this city.”
His gaze moved toward a cluster of temporary floodlights illuminating part of downtown near the Boardwalk district. Several heavy-duty cables ran outward from the center point like veins, feeding nearby tents and emergency stations.
A strange energy signature stood out near the Boardwalk district.
“Is that Armsmaster’s doing?”
“Affirmative.”
Jaime angled downward.
The device occupied what had probably once been a parking structure before the upper levels collapsed inward during the flooding. Now the remaining concrete foundation housed an ugly collection of industrial equipment surrounding a central tower of metallic coils and rotating components that hummed with enough power to vibrate through the ground itself, small, autonomous drones moving around it constantly.
“Yeah,” Jaime muttered as he landed atop a nearby support beam. “That‘s definitely slapdashed.”
Khaji-Da remained silent for a moment.
Then:
“The technology is unusually resistant to querying.”
“What?”
Normally, adapting and deconstructing technology was effortless for the scarab. Cars, phones, satellites, military systems, alien computers, future tech from timelines that should not logically exist, none of it really slowed Khaji-Da down for more than a few seconds. It simply… understood things. Broke them apart in order to adapt to it.
This time, though, the scarab failed.
“By all laws of physics, this device should violently detonate. Yet, it operates at peak efficiency,” Khaji-Da said slowly. “And the reason why appears to be intentionally obfuscated.”
Jaime stared down at the generator again. “You’re telling me Armsmaster blackboxed this thing?”
Below him, a pair of drones adjusted one of the outer relay systems while another monitored a holographic display projected from an underside hatch.
“Conclusion remains inconclusive. However, I am detecting anomalous energy signatures similar to those of parahumans, though more concentrated.”
Jaime frowned.
He had noticed it before, a little. The tech level in this world felt inconsistent in ways he still didn’t fully understand. Most civilians used 90s era phones and post-modern computers, but then someone like Armsmaster walked around with a combat predictor, a lie detector, and a nano-thorn disintegration field like that was somehow operating on the same curve.
Even the PRT’s containment foam felt weirdly advanced compared to everything around it.
And then there were the powers.
Parahumans bent rules constantly. Some of the files Khaji-Da had shown him still sounded completely ridiculous even by superhero standards.
The scarab spoke again.
“Recommendation: acquire broader understanding of local systems before attempting large-scale technological integration.”
Jaime snorted quietly.
“Yeah, I figured that one out already.”
The more time he spent here, the harder it became to ignore.
He did not actually understand this world very well.
He knew the gangs already. Knew enough about the heroes to avoid stepping on landmines, too. But this world still felt off in ways he couldn’t pin down, and the fact that Khaji-Da was struggling with it too wasn’t helping.
Below, the lights flashed once as the generator adjusted output again, bathing part of downtown in pale artificial gold.
Jaime watched the city for a long moment after that, thoughtful and strangely uneasy beneath the armor. Then he pushed off the beam and disappeared back into the sky.