One (One Universe)

the other to Nora.
    Nora fixes her eyes on Fisk, who struggles and gasps. She wedges the gun against the inside of his jaw and takes another hard look back at Elias. “This won’t buy you much time.”
    “But —” Elias sputters.
    Nora shakes her head hard and steps back to brandish her gun at the rest of security as Lia rips through the air again to take down the guard calling for reinforcements at the main door.
    In an instant, the room fills with 30 Fisks, all grinning maniacally, all dangling vials of the serum he knows I want.
    “What the…”
    “He can make duplicates,” gasps Daniel. “With kinetic energy?”
    “Yeah, but they’re not that strong. They can barely think for themselves,” says Lia. “And he forgets that girls who see through matter can tell which of these ugly assholes is the real Fisk. I mean, he’s practically a One himself.”
    “You can tell?” the Fisks all sputter at once, and panic runs wild in their eyes.
    Nora laughs. “Yes. Half-assed duplicated matter looks different than the real thing. Idiot. Couldn’t one of these fancy electrodes show you that?”
    She looks at me as she steps back from of a crowd of 10 Fisks, then trains her gun on one, nodding her head upward once.
    “This one, Merrin,” she says.
    Fisk gives an anguished shout and yells, “Take them all down!”
    His duplicates swarm toward Leni and Daniel, who squeeze hands and send streams of flame in their faces. Mr. Hoffman dashes in, yelling, and grabs for one of the vials of serum a dupe is holding. A strangled sob escapes my throat as the white-hot fire devours his clothing and blackens his skin before my eyes.
    Nora and Lia each pick a crowd of dupes and start firing. I grab Elias around the waist and yank him off his hospital bed with all my strength, ducking for cover. I pull off his sweatshirt that I wore over here and tug it down over his head. He still shivers beneath it.
    As the duplicates’ bodies hit the ground, they dissolve into shimmering nothingness, and Fisk screams and drops to his knees.
    Nora presses her gun to his temple. “Just try to muster up some more kinetic now, you sorry excuse for a human being. I dare you.” She looks at Elias. “We can take care of ourselves,” she says, her voice stronger than I would expect for having been in disuse. “You just take care of the lab.”
    “There’s no way you two can — ” Elias says, just as Lia draws back and delivers a roundhouse kick to one hulking security guard, sending him skidding halfway across the arena and leaving him unconscious on the floor.
    “We. Can take care. Of ourselves.”
    Still holding the gun to Fisk’s temple, Nora inclines her head to read the label on the vial he still clutches in his hand. “Merrin,” she says without looking away. “I think that President Son of a Bitch here was about to hand this over to you.”
    Without even thinking, I drop Elias’s hand and stride over, grab it, and tuck it greedily into my bag, inside the sleeve of the shirt I stuffed in there, then hurry back to him.
    Nora speaks to Fisk again, her voice getting louder and steadier each time. “Now. You’re going to let my baby brother and his friends out of here. And you know how they’re going to leave. So you might as well call all your goddamned security off the roof.”
    Fisk groans.
    “Fisk,” she growls. “don’t make this harder on yourself than it has to be.”
    “Guards,” he croaks. “Call off the missile surveillance.”
    Lia shouts a warning from where she stands, 20 feet away. “You can quit playing these games, you asshole.”
    “I don’t know what you’re — ”
    Nora delivers a swift elbow to the side of his head, knocking him flat on the ground. She digs her heel into his collarbone, edging it against his esophagus, and trains the gun between his eyes.
    “You know damn well what I’m talking about! The lasers! The lasers, too!” Lia shrieks, her eyes growing fiercer by the second. “I’ll be damned if my baby brother’s getting sliced to ribbons after all this!”
    “Lia,” Nora says, much more quietly, shaking her head once.
    “And the lasers,” Fisk moans.
    Nora looks back at us one more time, her eyes darting between Elias and me, who nods curtly, his eyes glistening.
    Elias swings his legs down from the bed. “Get ready, you guys,” he chokes to me, Leni and Daniel. Leni whimpers. The smell of melting plastic and smoldering cloth fills the air. They’ve got to be exhausted