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The light shines brightest in those it consumes. - Unknown
Masa-22 arrives late to the Tower.
She brings a burner Titan in as their sixth man.
She did not mention that he was a burner, of course, because Masa isn’t the sort of Warlock who shares the vital truths she can burn from the guts of the universe, so she’s certainly not going to volunteer the medical afflictions of her largish protégé.She neither introduces him nor herself to the rest of the fireteam, electing instead to hunker down with Jed Tekka, the fireteam leader, and discuss departure times over a map. Jed gives her a look appropriate for that kind of behavior, but listens as she speaks.
The rest of the team carefully pretends the burner isn’t there.
The new Titan, seeing this, radiates immediate low-grade anxiety and the barometric pressure shifts ever so slightly around him. He glances toward Masa, then at the collection of older Guardians who studiously ignore him. Two Defender-class Titans, fixed points of impossible density lounging near base of the tree, are engaged in a game of rock-paper-scissors and cannot be roused to care about his awkward loitering. Their Hunter is playing Solitaire in the grass to their left. Unlike everyone else, the newbie in full armor already but none of the veterans present for a moment suspect it’s his nerves that’s got the new Guardian tooled up before departure. No one with a Helm, they suppose, wears it for nerves.
It actually is his nerves.
Masa pretends to ignore him across the lawn, but feels him as a frission of heat and static, his mind bright and noisy. Jed’s been looking too. He is not a Sunsinger but Masa was a Voidwalker like him before she stepped into the sun so she know what it means when Jed glances over his shoulder, then looks at her, like he’s cast a line and pulled something up out of the abyss. She wonders what he’s seeing through that darker, finer lens.
“Kid’s twitchy.”
“He’s fine.”
“He’s symptomatic.”
Masa doesn’t look up from the map, the soft pink pulse of her throat-lights carefully even. Masa’s immobile Exo features are unreadable as ever under the hot pink smear of the war paint, but Jed’s got enough photo-lingual under his belt that he probably sees the controlled calm for what it is. Luckily, he’s a Warlock and he’s willing to hear her out her argument.
Masa looks up. “You’ve never worked with a symptomatic burner before, have you?”
No. they had never worked with a symptomatic burner.
Nico is sloppy with the Fist of Havoc. He strikes like a Defender – hesitant, un-aggressive, no instinct, prone to dropping too quick into kill zones not yet combatant-dense. He wastes the Light in a deadly cluster-fuck of ionic fire, glassing dunes molten into the fused skeletons of Cabal Legionaries. As the team moves through the sand-ground streets of east Freehold, Masa watches him muck it up all over the battlefield. By their fifth Cabal scouting party (all sought and destroyed), he kicks his way out of another steaming depression. Impatient, he stumbles briefly as the thin layer of glass splinters and sucks his boot unto the sand beneath.
Distant flares of amusement off the other Guardians, like flashlights coming on and off in the dark. They’re already moving ahead so it’s Masa who catches his balance for him.
She wrist flicks, Light unfurling along a mental path from her fingertip. A full meter out, Nico catches his footing like her hand is on his shoulder. She knows from experience he’ll feel it like warm push and he nods to her, tiredly, in thanks.
Jed’s team is green enough not to fully comprehend what’s happening, but Jed himself keeps giving her looks. His mood glows bright in her mind – a slow-burn, like a coal in a hearth, controlled and hot among the erratic Light of his squad. He gives off low waves tolerance bordering on annoyance. Veteran enough, Masa knows, to recognize that she is clearly test-running a Defender as a Striker on his mission. She ignores his mental telegraphing. She ignores it because – despite everything, despite his placement, timing, dispersion – Nico is more than getting the job done. He’s making this deployment a cake walk. Until he’s not, Jed can deal with it.
“I feel like an idiot,” Nico mutters, out of earshot from the rest.
“You should.” She doesn’t look at him while she talks. She doesn’t have to – the small flicker of hurt pops like a bubble in the seething current of his Light. That she also ignores, checking her rifle’s magazine while she goes on. “You almost knocker Harper on his ass with that last placement. Save it for Crucible and watch your goddamn timing.”
“I don’t run Striker. I told you –”
“You ran it long enough to get torched.” Her throat-light pulse hot, flashing bright then slow fade. “And I can tell you’re still torched. You’re static in my head. Go find something to kill.” When he blinks at her, a purely aesthetic display of incomprehension, she points after the fire team and enunciates. “Get. Moving. Guardian.”
Once he’s jogged on, Ghost spins up from somewhere behind her shoulder. “Think you’re being too harsh?”
“He either switches sub-classes or he dies.” She side-eyes her partner. “They don’t give out those helmets unless you’re fucked. It’s my job to make sure he’s not fucked and dead.”
“I’m just saying, his Ghost has… commented.”
“It can comment all it wants. Not my fault it rezzed a burner.” Her Ghost is a candle-flame of mild interest on her shoulder. “Go away, lightbulb.”
“Be nicer.”
“Go. Away.”
The flicker of Ghost’s demat signals their departure, but she can still feel them in her head, inscrutable and watching. She can’t get a good read off a Ghost. Ghosts don’t ping back to her like the minds of other sentient things. They do not burn and glow, don’t writhe heat and blue like Arc-users, don’t steam cold like Voidwalkers in heat of her awareness. Their thoughts come faint as distant starlight. A fraction of their true intensity.
“You’re looking again.”
“Shut up.”
Nico-19 went symptomatic two months after he was assigned to Masa-22 as a second.
It took Ikora five years to talk her into the mentorship pool. Five years to convince her a new Guardian would benefit from her experience, her spare equipment, a handful of Glimmer, literally anything short of kicking the rook out an airlock into the goddamn Hellmouth. Basically, five years to get sick of Masa’s shit and inform her that her Tower privileges would be revoked if she didn’t put her name into the mentor pool and suck it up like everyone else. So, really, five years to plug her with a pre-Wipe baby Exo Titan who tried to run Striker for a bit, then promptly burst into Arc-flame.
Ultimately it was Cayde-6, not Ikora, not even Zavala who said, “What are the odds?”
They make camp in the basement of a warehouse and Masa takes first watch. Warlocks generally take first watch and she want for the quiet that comes with it, sitting awake with the wide net of her mind hung open. The Light is in everything except where it isn’t. In the Darkness her Light is a strobe in the abyss, a vibration shivering outward, blind, until something living shivers back. Her fellow Guardians are beacons, warm and constant, individual and currently unconscious behind her
Except for one.
“Come to complain?”
Nico moves to join her near the entrance to their hideout. He’s a larger model of Exo. Masculine by standard human sexual dimorphism, but none of his photo-lingual cues signal hard toward either end of the spectrum. Or any spectrum really. He’s a ‘him’ mostly by ambivalence. Ambivalent is Nico in a word. He glances sidelong at her. His face shield is still polarized gold, so she can’t see his face. She knows it though: neon green battle paint, smeared like hers (mimicked her) across the face. Green to match the bio-lights in both his eyes and throat. When he crouches next to her, his shadow eclipses hers entirely
“No,” he says eventually.
“You should be charging.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Yes you are.”
“Stop looking.”
She whirrs – a purely Exo sound of annoyance. “I don’t need second sight to see you’re tired, stupid. You were fritzed the last mile in.” Quiet for a moment. Then: “You know why they call it ‘erratic immolation?”
Nico stares at her. Masa looks at him, not at his face but at the top of his helmet. The headpiece is shattered in two places at the crown, paired holes punched through the gold plasteel shielding. Dimly, from inside the holes, a low blue glow as from a weak Bunsen burner. Ghost, watching from somewhere within, quietly acknowledges that the battlefield combat is doing the work she intended.
“Why,” says Nico, “do they call it that?”
“They could have called it spontaneous Light-based combustion. Involuntary emission. Literally anything else but they called it ‘erratic immolation’. They did that because it sounds better.”
Nico ponders that. “’Involuntary immolation’ is more alliterative.”
It takes Masa a second to register he is joking.
“You’re chipper about having a chronic disease.”
“I try. Why do they think ‘immolation’ is a better word?”
“Because,” says Masa, “‘immolation’ doesn’t actually mean ‘to burn up’. Specifically, it means ‘sacrifice’. ‘To sacrifice by fire’.” When Nico doesn’t answer she adds, “More appropriate for the affliction, I think.”
“I’m not a sacrifice.”
Masa doesn’t laugh, mostly because Ghost warns her not to. “Aren’t you?”
Nico leaves her alone after that.
The facts are these: In a small percentage of Striker Titans, something goes wrong.
Clerical Warlocks have yet to put a precise cause behind the effect, but the standing hypothesis is simply that sometimes, for whatever reason, a Titan’s ultra-dense molecular circuit blows. Light for Titans alters the building blocks of their entire physical being, lives in the atomic space between every molecule. The electrical bonds of every day matter pale to the super storm that binds Titans atom to atom and, in turn, the fallout from a Striker Titan short-circuit is proportionally catastrophic.
Nico killed eight Guardians when he went nuclear.
Granted, he killed them for just a few moments, but it’s the principle of the thing. He could have gone super nova in the staff cantina where he likes to hang out off duty. He could have done it inside a dropship during slip-space jump. He could have killed his own fire team in a Dark Zone. Instead, he stood frozen in the Tower Courtyard, electrified and burning, his own Arc Light ripping feedback into his systems while igniting anything in a ten meter radius. He screamed his vocoder to static in the five minutes before Zavala got a Helm from lock up.
In the end, however, he could not be calmed down long enough for someone to give him the headpiece, and a bystander put a bullet through his head to extinguish the Light.
“He’s doing better.”
“He’s shit.”
“Yes,” Jed says patiently, “but he’s doing better. Probably doesn’t need to wear the helmet. Hasn’t been venting blue for the last day or so.”
“He wears the helmet until he can tell when to not wear it.”
“I know a few burners, Masa. I never worked with them in the field, but my understanding is that they only need to wear it when they get and excess of Light in the system. Any rookie Forge known when they’re on the edge like that.”
“When he burns down a civilian dorm, come back and tell me that.”
Jed says nothing because she’s not speaking theoretically. A burner went super nova two years ago and did exactly that. The rest of the team is walking together some fifteen meters in front of them. One of the Defenders is telling a story while the Hunter laughs hysterically, hanging by one hand off Nico’s shoulder armor while he howls. One week into their short deployment, the fireteam is familiar to be handsy.
With Nico, obviously, no one even looks at Masa an iota longer than they have to.
Jed is smoking. He shouldn’t be on account of he should be wearing his helmet at all times in the field, but it’s an hour until their relief team comes in and Jed is a Warlock, so if anyone knows when to take a smoke break, it’s probably him. One day it’s going to get him popped in the head, but that’s his problem, not hers.
“What happens when we run out of those helmets?”
“We won’t. The Warlocks keep making them and the old ones are reusable if they’re recovered.”
“That’s… efficient. Not sure how I’d feel about a used Helm.”
“The same way you’d feel about using a respirator if your lungs stop working.” Masa feels him stop mid-inhale with his smoke. “Just because someone else died using it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t touch it.”
Jed sighs and puts out the cigarette, pulls his helmet back on. “Fuck me, Masa, you’ve certainly got a perspective.”
“Yeah.” She ignores what he’s telegraphing to her, accepts Jed will not call on her again for future field work. “I know that.”
His head is blown open on the courtyard stone, the interior of his brain-case cracked like an egg. The lights are out in his head. Transduction fluid is pooling dark red in the carved words below the steps, shining in the dimming glow of Arc Light. ATRVUM PROPVGNATORVM.
Court of Champions.
His Ghost lingers over the corpse and her Ghost lingers over her.
“You didn’t have to do that, Masa.”
She holsters the handgun.
“Shut up.”