Amusement Quay had not always been a haunted old ruin. As a kid I’d even gone there a few times with my parents, only once with my dad after mom passed. But when Bonfire Night happened a slew of debris had gone high through the air and rained down on it like a meteor shower.

  The place had been struggling financially before that point. Afterwards? Nobody wanted to go near it, and the remaining attractions and games went under. They had sat on the boardwalk ever since, tents and wooden shacks left to gather filth and decay.

  The only folks who went to Amusement Quay these days were drug addicts and the homeless. And us, it seemed.We had arrived in costume, walking along the creaking old boards. Gulls squawked and wheeled overhead, while ships in the bay glided along the calm waves. I couldn’t help but look at every shack we passed, unable to stop the pangs of nostalgia.

  There was the shooting gallery where Dad had won a stuffed Bearman plush for me. Now all the shelves were rotten or collapsed, the floor a sea of needles and scorched spoons. Then we passed the puppet show theater, the walls coated from end to end in graffiti.

  The house of mirrors had been a central attraction, and I remembered all the fun I’d had in it. How Mom had laughed until it hurt. The entryway had been designed to look like the yawning mouth of a clown. But over time the clown’s eyes had been blackened, the top row of his teeth either yellowed or shattered.

  Why did this... make me so mad? It was stupid, I told myself. It was just a funfair, and urban decay was just a fact of life. So why was I grinding my teeth?

  “Toymaker? You good?”

  I blinked, glancing over at Cheshire. “I’m... okay,” I said.

  “You don’t seem fine. You’re like a coiled spring.”

  “I... don’t blame her,” Sam uttered, pressing his fists together. “This place gives me the creeps.”

  We were being watched, that much was obvious. The locals of Amusement Quay lingered in the shadows and vacant archways, moving deeper into the dark whenever one of us would glance their way.

  “We only fought STING a couple weeks back. Come on, dude, what’s the big deal?” Cheshire asked.

  “It’s just the vibes, Chesh. It’s creepy,” he replied.

  Stretch grimaced, her fingers hooked together behind her head. “They’ve got a point, Chesh. Wouldn’t exactly rush to come out here on my free time.”

  One man leered up at us from a yawning doorway, gaunt-faced with ragged clothing. “Got any change?” he asked, holding a hand out to us.

  “Fuck off,” I replied.

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  “Shit, girl. Who pissed in your cereal?”

  “You’ll be pissing blood if you talk to me again,” I said, lifting the recently-finished raygun from my hip holster. That was enough to make him scurry off, and I grunted as I slotted my raygun back in the holster.

  Foresight chuckled. “Shit. You are on a damn tear today,” he said.

  We pressed on, making for a building at the rear of the pier that had once been a ticket office for the ferry. Wares cut a distinct figure. A lanky and skinny man in dark jeans and a grubby green raincoat, his face concealed by a black metal mask that had a luminous blue square carved into it. At the sight of us he suddenly stood rigid in the doorway. “Shit,” he hissed, voice distorted by something in his mask.

  “Wares!” Cheshire shouted cheerily. “Been way too long buddy!”

  “Oh no not you fuckers,” he huffed, taking an awkward step to the side of the door.

  “Hey come on now, no need to be like that. And hey the only reason we roughed you up before is because you chose to be difficult. So who’s really at fault there, huh?” Cheshire chuckled. “Speaking of which... we need some information from you.”

  “We’ve heard someone’s running Apex fights in the city,” Greg said, his visor giving a small flash of light. “And you’re gonna tell us where to find them.”

  “I... I have confidentiality when it comes to my clients!” he shouted, taking another step back.

  Cheshire grunted, lifting one of her batons and aiming it his way. “Bullshit, Wares. You’re as confidential as a nudist beach. Now tell us what we wanna know, or history’s gonna repeat itself.”

  “N-not this time,” Wares huffed. “You think you can push me around, you little cunt?! No way, no way in hell! Bunker, get out here! We got some unruly fucking customers!”

  We heard him before we saw him, felt the boardwalk creak and heave in protest. The side of the hut exploded in a cloud of splinters, and from that cavernous opening emerged a gorilla-sized man with stony grey skin, his shoulders and knuckles studded with iron spikes. His eyes burned like coals, his jutting jaw shifting as if he were chewing something. His clothing consisted of a sleeveless jacket and dark shorts. I spied two horns of metal poking from his brow.

  “You didn’t fucking tell me he had a bodyguard!” I shouted, giving Cheshire a manic look.

  “Uh... He didn’t last time,” she murmured.

  Stretch threw herself at the giant as he lunged toward us, her body expanding like an airbag. She grunted, taking the worst of the impact, but the jolting shock of it still sent the rest of us tumbling away.

  In the chaos, Wares broke into a sprint and quickly wound his way through the different stands that dotted Amusement Quay. “Shit,” Cheshire said, scrambling to her feet. “Take the big bastard down, I’ll catch Wares.” And then she vanished in a swirl of purple smoke.

  Bunker raised a rocky fist toward me, his face set in a sculpted gargoyle-like glower. “Shit, shit,” I huffed, scrambling away as the spikes on his knuckles began to shudder. They shot forward like a salvo of bullets, and I rolled to the side as the shots punched clean through the old wood of the boardwalk. More spikes had already grown to replace those he had shot.

  I snapped my raygun up and squeezed the trigger, wishing I’d taken more damn time to troubleshoot the thing. Red and orange light, near blinding in its intensity, shot forth and struck Bunker in the shoulder. He yowled and recoiled, a patch of his shoulder smoking and glowing red hot before the beam sputtered out.

  I gave the trigger another squeeze. Only a few sparks fizzled out. “Motherfuck-”

  I leaped away as he swung at me, his massive hand striking the rusted hull of a hot dog cart. I barely glimpsed it in motion as it went cartwheeling into the distance, all the way into the waters of Argent Bay.

  The stony giant took another step, backhanding Stretch to the far end of the boardwalk. She yelped like a cartoon character, whipping her arms out and latching onto the railing in a bid to halt her momentum.

  “You wanna fuck with Wares?” he asked, his voice like stone grinding on stone. “You’re gonna get crushed for the attempt, little bastards.”

  Foresight lit up the area with a great flash of light, a focused beam of garnet energy slamming into Bunker and sending him skidding across the debris-strewn walkway. It gave Dynamo enough time to scramble up and punch his fists together, the familiar explosion of sunlight replacing his scrawny body with the looming amazon of his quantum body.

  I took a step behind her, popping the raygun open so I could fiddle with it.

  “Is that so?” Dynamo asked, cracking her knuckles. In that form she spoke with confidence and power, so unlike how Sam usually was. Lightning danced along her shoulders, the sight of it making Bunker tense a bit. “Let’s put that to the test then, shall we?”