Victor and Dante burst onto the fourth level to shouts and pulses of light, nobody in sight. "Ms. Marvel!" Victor shouted.

"What?" came an echoing reply, definitely not Ms. Marvel. Shadows danced where the hall turned out of sight.

"Squirrel Girl?" Victor called, leaping over prone kree soldiers, reptilian guards, inhumans in colorful costumes...how were they supposed to tell who was on whose side?

"Was this the plan?" Dante huffed.

"The plan was to free everyone, and go to the command deck and overwhelm Hala, then crash the ship on earth."

"Looks like you're stuck on step one and a half," Dante said. An explosion rocked the metallic walls.

Victor wordlessly darted around the corner, skidding to a halt and narrowly avoiding Squirrel Girl's elbow poking from an open doorway. "What's going on?" he winced at a flash of neon light, pressing into the door behind her.

She briefly glanced at him, stepping out of the training room doorway and taking aim with a ray gun. Static-y orbs fizzled down the hall. "We nearly quelled the resistant inhumans, and Ka--Ms. Marvel gave a rousing speech about how we need to work together to defeat the one responsible for all of this. Except--woah, who's this guy?" she squinted suspiciously at Dante. "Matchstick?"

"It's Dante," Dante told her.

"You were saying?" Victor prompted.

"Right," Squirrel Girl took aim at someone in a red and white suit, skin crackling with electricity. Her static-y red bolts fizzled against the electricity, and the red and white figure didn't even glance toward them. "Except then a group of kree soldiers jumped out of an elevator--you didn't tell us this ship had an elevator!--and shot Ms. Marvel down and all madness broke loose.

"I can't tell who's fighting who anymore, so I'm just shooting at whoever looks dangerous!" she released a scattering of ray bolts into the hall. A bear-like inhuman took notice, turning and growling. Victor dragged them around the corner, Squirrel Girl still zapping the air with buzzing ray blasts. "Oh, and I found this nifty 'stun' setting on this," she held up the gun sideways, flicking a tiny gray switch. "Nothing dangerous here."

Victor peered around the corner. "Where's Ms. Marvel?"

"Somewhere unconscious on the ground!"

"What does she look like?" Dante asked, hands warping with heat.

"Blue costume. Red leggings, stretchy powers. Why?"

Dante stepped around the corner, throwing his hands forward. A wall of heat sprouted from his fingertips, taking over the hall.

"What are you doing!?" Squirrel Girl yelled. "You'll burn everyone alive--including Ms. Marvel!"

Victor grabbed her arm and pointed, quieting her. Fire shot from Dante's palms, but only scoured the ceiling and anything higher than his hands.

"Aaah," Squirrel Girl lowered her ray gun.

Dante grimaced, teeth clenched, then his fire sputtered out. "Quit fighting!" he called. "The real enemy isn't here!"

Silence. Victor shut his eyes and sighed. Until Dante screamed and thudded into Victor, sending all three of them sprawling. "Run!" Dante yelled, pink lightning bolts crackling through the air, ricocheting off the walls and flickering the lights. A blast of green energy zapped the space where Dante had just been standing.

Victor scrambled to his feet, steps behind Squirrel Girl, hurrying for the stairs. "Why'd you build your spaceship out of metal!" Squirrel Girl exclaimed. The lights buzzed out and blackness descended. The crackling lightning dissipated.

Victor slowed to a halt, grin flickering at the burnt out lights. "Wait here," he told them. "I can get Ms. Marvel."

"What where? I can't even see you," Squirrel Girl hissed. A small puff of fire flickered to life, illuminating Dante's hand and Squirrel Girl's face.

"Oh. Hi."

"Actually, better idea. Get back to the hallway upstairs." Victor let his spear clatter to the floor and ran off, summoning a shield from the shadows.

"Or bye, I guess," Squirrel Girl whispered.

Victor charged around the corner, forming a sword in his other hand. By the light of electric flickers and pulsing green energy, Victor hammered through the inhumans brawling in the hallways. He swung his dull-edged sword, bruising arms, legs, backs, anything exposed. When a pink lightning bolt zapped against his shield--electrifying Victor's arm and locking it in place--he merely dissipated it. The electricity slipped harmlessly into the wall and Victor formed a narrower shield from the shadows. He took the white and red suited inhuman in the back of the skull with his sword, sending her sprawling.

He hammered the bear-like inhuman aside, ignoring the furiously bared teeth, then whacked a kree soldier shoving a young boy into the wall. The soldier collapsed, but the boy glared daggers at Victor and flashed invisible. Victor grimaced, memories stirring up some silent kid far north of Jersey City. Nearly everyone here had some reason to hate him. He shook his head, the dark eyes of the invisible child haunting his periphery.

He spotted Ms. Marvel by a pulse of green energy, face down in the center of the floor. He dispelled his weapons and crouched by her, panting for air. Victor spun open a portal to the void, a violet circle glowing in the metallic floor.

"Exile!" A kree voice shouted. "We need your help, the inhumans have escaped and--"

Victor descended into the void.

He shivered. The kree thought he was just arriving, portaling into this particular random location aboard the ship. But they'd quickly discover Victor was nowhere around. At which point they'd realize Victor had been leaving, and had been there the whole time while inhumans escaped...he shook his head, flowing away. Nearly everyone in that hallway would have a reason to hate him, soon enough. He shuddered.

Victor emerged in the bright hallway outside Dante's quarters, propping Ms. Marvel carefully beside the wall. A gash over her left eyebrow--beneath a dark bruise--trickled blood down her temple. He winced on her behalf.

Pounding footsteps made him rise, hunting amongst the unconscious soldiers littering the silver hall for a weapon. But Squirrel Girl and Dante trotted into view, expressions grim.

"You beat us," Dante panted.

Victor just shrugged. "Portals."

Squirrel Girl dropped to her knees beside Ms. Marvel, setting aside her adopted ray gun. "Ouch," she muttered. "That's nasty. Her mother's gonna be so upset."

"We can take her to the medbay," Victor crossed his arms. "That'll heal her."

"Where's that?"

Victor hesitated. "The very bottom level. We'd have to run down five flights of stairs."

"Can't you just teleport us down there?" Dante asked.

Victor shook his head. "Since we're in space, it's hard to get a pinpoint on where exactly I'll teleport to. Except right here," he tapped his foot.

Dante frowned. Glanced at the door to his quarters and back to Victor's face.

"This didn't go as planned," Victor rushed before Dante could open his mouth. "Do we go after Hala with just the three of us?"

"You're asking me?" Squirrel Girl asked. "You're the only one who knows anything about her."

Victor frowned. "How about, are you up for a fight with one of the kree's most powerful warriors?"

"I'm not," Dante shivered. "I can barely control where my fire goes half the time. I'm not ready to take on the leader of the kree."

"I'd absolutely say yes," Squirrel Girl lifted Ms. Marvel in her arms, "but Ms. Marvel's down. We can't watch her and defeat Hala and safely crash a ship and get to land."

"Then I'll go fight her alone," Victor said. "You two get to the escape pods with Ms. Marvel."

"But what about all the other inhumans?" Squirrel Girl asked. "We only freed one," she pointed with her bushy tail at Dante.

Victor hesitated. "I don't think we can help them anymore. There's too many unconscious or wounded to carry to the escape pods, and the soldiers are on to us."

"So we just leave them?" Squirrel Girl's eyebrows knit together.

"We're not leaving them," Dante balled his hands into fists. "I know what it feels like, and I'm not leaving them." He met Victor's gaze, eyes sparking red. "None of us are."

Silence.

Victor sighed. "Fine."

"Whoo whoo!" Squirrel Girl whisper-cheered. "...how do we do that?"

***

"RAaaaaaaa!" Squirrel Girl roared, leaping around the corner. A flood of red, static ray bolts erupted from her gun and ricocheted out of Victor's sight. She gaped at a few muted thuds. "Well," Squirrel Girl propped the ray gun on her shoulder. "That went well."

Victor peeped around the corner, eyeing a dimly lit hall, emergency lights flickering to reveal unconscious figures, armored or costumed, littering the ground. "Let's go," Squirrel Girl led the way. Dante came last, Ms. Marvel hanging over his shoulder.

"There were only two of them still up and fighting," Squirrel Girl said over her shoulder. "A guy with blue skin and a girl shooting ice."

"Maybe you could've avoided hitting the ice one," Dante muttered. "If she was fighting the kree."

"Too late! She'll wake up eventually," Squirrel Girl crouched to the ground, rolling a kree soldier onto their back. "Okay, where do you want the soldiers?"

Victor pointed to the closest silver-white door. "Let's put kree and the other soldiers in the training room. Gather the inhumans together in a group. Then, we hope I can teleport everybody to earth."

"Right," Squirrel Girl piled two unconscious kree in her arms, kicking the palm-sized panel by the door to slide it open. "Didn't you say you couldn't teleport everyone? That's what the big issue was with landing close to shore somewhere."

"Yes, I did technically say that."

"What about the escape pods?" Dante set Ms. Marvel against the wall and grabbed an orange boot, tugging the unconscious inhuman closer. "You could teleport as many as you can, then Squirrel Girl and I can get everyone else to the escape pods."

"Yeah, um, how many people can you carry?" Squirrel Girl asked Dante. "One?" She tossed armored soldiers into the white-glow of the training room. Paneled with absorbent, metallic squares, the training rooms had been designed to resist nearly any destructive power throughout the galaxy. Acid breath, fire, brute force, ice... Victor didn't envy the soldiers about to get locked inside.

"I can carry at least two," Dante protested.

"Never mind," Squirrel Girl said. "I just came up with a worse problem: if we take the escape pods--which are on the opposite side of the ship, so you'd have to carry your two people that whole way--how do we get back to Jersey? I can barely find it on a map, much less steer an escape pod there from space."

"Then I'll make two trips," Victor set a pair of inhumans beside Ms. Marvel, and paced back down the hall. "You two drag whoever I don't take closer to the stairs, and I'll come back here."

"Fantastic," Squirrel Girl kicked the wall panel and the door slid shut on the soldiers, descending the hallway to sparse gloom. "Superheroes rescuing the innocent, I give us an A plus," she sighed. "If only a real superhero were around to watch how awesome we are."

"After we get everyone to earth, do we go after Hala and crash the spaceship?" Dante whispered.

Victor set another inhuman in the ring of sprawled bodies. "All the teleporting will drain me...I won't fight at my best," he gritted his teeth together. "But she'll chase after us and all these inhumans if we do nothing."

"So we retreat for a little while?" Dante said. "We wait for Ms. Marvel to heal, and for you to regain your strength, and then we strike again."

"I like the sound of that," Squirrel Girl planted her hands on her hips. "We could even lure her to earth to fight on our turf. Let her face the wrath of my squirrel army."

Dante's eyebrows furrowed. "Squirrel army? Would that...really work?"

She scoffed. "Of course it would! Don't you dare insult the squirrels! Not even here, where they can't hear you!"

"Okay," Victor interrupted them. "I'm leaving."

He opened a portal to the void beneath his feet, dropping himself and handfuls of unconscious figures through, including Ms. Marvel. Tethering them to himself in the shrouded void, he flowed across the emptiness of space. The weight of many people dragged him down, but Earth rushed into his awareness, ocean and land and a familiar city.

He picked an empty warehouse beside the docks and floated from the portal, crawling as if through mud to drag the eleven other bodies with him.

He didn't fully emerge, just pushed everyone else out into the empty dark and closed the portal. Then he flowed away from Earth, into space, vision swimming with deep violet light.

Opening the portal outside Dante's quarters made his head pound, and he kept himself from collapsing only by leaning heavily against the wall. Stars flew across his sight. A groan startled him, and his vision cleared on a reptilian soldier's tail twitching. Victor stumbled away, hand pressed to the wall the whole way to the stairwell. Carefully, he crept down the steps, even the softest footsteps making his head pulse.

Squirrel Girl and Dante had dragged the last five inhumans to the base of the stairs outside the training rooms. Victor's head pounded, and he bit back a grimace when Squirrel Girl spoke. "How many of these people do you think will try and attack us when they wake up? My bet's on six of them."

"Only six? What are we betting?" Dante asked.

"Two peanut butter sandwiches. Provided by Ms. Marvel."

"Then I bet seven."

Victor's head pulsed. Wordlessly, he dropped them into the void, flowing back to earth, like a tiny sea creature weighed down by boulders. He nearly missed the warehouse, almost plummeting them into the street or possibly the bay instead, but he latched onto the presence of Ms. Marvel and dragged himself closer.

He heaved through the portal, collapsing to the dirty concrete and dragging everyone else up after him. He shut his eyes and laid there, the portal winking out.

"Where are we?" Squirrel Girl whispered.

A light flickered behind Victor's eyelids. "A...warehouse?" Dante's voice echoed.

"Are we even in Jersey City anymore?"

"Yes," Victor muttered. "By some docks."

Dante grunted, and the light flickered out.

"How am I going to get home?" Squirrel Girl groaned. "My scooter is clear back by our meeting place!"

Victor pushed himself onto his side. "I'm not teleporting you."

"I figured that one out. You practically passed out. But thanks for, well, all that. I was not looking forward to flying an escape pod."

"Yeah, thanks for, uh, coming back," Dante said. "I'm glad I'm not still a prisoner on that spaceship."

Victor slowly nodded. Hala was going to kill him, if she ever found him.

"Guess I better start walking," Squirrel Girl muttered, footsteps pacing away. "And sneaking Ms. Marvel home, somehow. Have fun with your warehouse full of unconscious inhumans who may attack you when they wake up!" her footsteps fell silent. "Where is the door? Hey Dante, want to fire--never mind, I'll get out the window. Don't forget our bet!"

"Of course I won't!" Dante shouted back. Victor winced. Distantly, a window squeaked and Squirrel Girl scrambled through it, presumably carrying Ms. Marvel with her.

"So we just sleep here tonight?" Dante asked, sitting somewhere in front of Victor.

"I think so," Victor muttered, sitting up and rubbing his head. Gray light filtered through grimy windows lining a single wall. "I had an apartment, but that's compromised. Unless you've got somewhere better."

Dante chuckled. "I've been sleeping in alleyways and stranger's barns ever since I ran away from my house. Clear in Illinois. This is perfectly fine."

Victor blinked at the dirty floor, then at the silhouette of Dante's tousled hair and baggy jumpsuit kneeling in front of him. "How did you get from Illinois to here?"

Dante's shoulders shrugged. "Walking, riding bikes. Mostly I took buses, when I had cash for that. I just wanted to get away, you know? Didn't care where, as long as it wasn't there."

Victor nodded slowly, reminded of his own parents. "I sort of get that."

Dante sighed. "A whole lot of good that did me."

Victor frowned. "I am...sorry about abducting you. It...I...now I can tell I shouldn't have done...that."

Dante shook his head. "I wasn't referring to you that time, actually," he sighed again. "Guess we should probably rest, if we still have a spaceship to crash. How soon until you're recovered?"

He rubbed his temples. "I'm not sure. Hopefully by tomorrow night, but..."

"But we're sleeping on a warehouse floor?" Dante's teeth shone through the gray. "Solid concrete, probably bugs, and it's nearly dawn so we'll hardly sleep at all?"

Victor frowned. "Are you sure you're okay with that?"

"Yeah," Dante reached out and took Victor's hand, pulling it away from his throbbing skull. "Are you sure?"

Victor's cheekbones burned, but he let Dante tug his hand down to his knees. "I did say I thought you were beautiful," his eyebrows furrowed. "I mean, trying to sleep in a warehouse, I'm not really, well, the floor's pretty dirty, so..." he gripped Dante's hand in his own and scooted closer, prickles like jellyfish tentacles racing up his wrist. "What were we talking about?"

"I think..." Dante hesitated. "I think you're beautiful too, Victor, even if I have no memory of saying that before," he paused, cautiously touching Victor's other hand. "Would it be...or, can I just, I like the way you apologize. And I want to...I want to kiss you."

Victor blinked. "I've never...I don't know how..."

"I don't either. I mean...was that a no?" Dante's hand slipped back.

"No," his fingers held onto Dante's, not letting them go. "Just...nervous?"

Victor leaned forward, their lips meeting. His lungs pulsed with an emptiness, filling with a bursting light. He pulled away for breath, startled by Dante's glittering orange eyes, and leaned in again. Hala, spaceships, the cold concrete...all of it faded into fuzzy light and warm touch.

The heat off Dante's palms burst into real fire and Victor recoiled, hot pain shooting up his arm. He bit the inside of his cheek to hold back a gasp, half blinded by light.

"I am so sorry," Dante grunted and the fire flickered out. "I didn't mean, I wasn't paying attention and it just happened--"

"Don't worry about it," Victor interrupted, fingers investigating a round blister in the center of his palm. "I'll be fine."

"Did I burn you?"

Victor shook his head.

"I'm sorry, my stupid powers got in the way--"

"Don't worry about it," Victor repeated, scooting away. "We should probably get some sleep anyway."

Dante hesitated. "Right. Yeah. Sleep, of course. Do you think we should keep watch? In case anyone wakes up?"

"Possibly," Victor curled on the ground, rubbing his hand. "My head hurts."

"Okay," Dante's shoes rasped over the floor. "I can take first watch. I haven't been awake very long anyway. When do you think Squirrel Girl will get back? We need supplies to feed everyone, and what do we do about bathroom breaks?"

Victor shut his eyes.

"Sorry," Dante whispered, "I'll be quiet." He paced off, mumbling to himself.

***

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