Shadow Unit 15 by Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear

supervillain chopping the door down is an everyday nuisance.
    Dice's gaze fixes on a chair. Just one of the plastic garden chairs the residents get to use. Not a weapon, which is why they have it. It's close enough to grab and throw—but would it do any good?
    It might buy Eddie a second. It might buy Natalie a second, and Dice can see from the look on her thin pretty face that she's not going to go down without fighting. But she has to get close, and the door is all the way across the room—
    The chopping stops, is replaced by a prying creak and crackle. Then a hesitation. Then a hard, hard thump—the impact of foot on wood. These doors are as old as Idlewood, oak and chestnut, solid core. Cut from trees of a size that haven't been seen on the East Coast in over a century.
    It holds for a second, and buys them all another second of life.
    Dice hears a frustrated, animal sound through the door. He squeaks, like a mouse, and Susanna gives him a comforting little headbutt since she can't squeeze his hand.
    "Don't worry, Dyson," Natalie says. "I've been in worse spots."
    That's when Dice notices that she's taken off her gloves.
    The door crashes open, rebounds, is caught. Dice hopes Eddie blocked it with his Hand rather than taking it in the face, but he doesn't have time to think about it now.
    "Hide-and-seek?" says a shockingly ordinary voice. "That's one of my favorite games."
    Dice jerks himself to his feet, not daring to think. He grabs the featherweight plastic chair and slings it overhand, screaming, then leaps over the table to follow it up with a charge.
    He makes it two steps. And then he stops, not because he runs into some enormous wall of anomalous energy, but because what he sees is Eddie swinging out from behind the broken door and piling into the side of the brown-haired, balding, middle-aged guy who stands there lazily swinging a fire axe. It's the Hand that Eddie hits the other guy with, and the other guy—skinny, unprepossessing—bounces off the doorframe and staggers a step.
    The walls shake. Plaster dust sparkles in the sunlight through the window.
    But the other guy comes back swinging. Definitely a jammer, to take a hit like that. He's got the axe, and he knows how to use it. It loops into the air. Eddie blocks it with the Hand. The axe doesn't rebound; Eddie's grabbed it, grabbed it with thin air. He rips it out of the other guy's hand and swings it around—
    Eddie screams. He clutches his gut, though the other guy hasn't touched him, and doubles over. Blood—so much fucking blood, everywhere, suddenly, pouring from his nose and eyes, soaking his trousers. Dice screams, too, "Leave my brother alone!" and plunges forward again. Eddie's dropped the axe, and Dice is aiming for it. But he skids in the blood, scrabbles, clutches the damned thing's handle and finds himself flailing on his back like a turtle.
    He looks up, and sees the man who has to be Joseph Lawrence Hakes—Bloody Larry, though Dice isn't supposed to know about that—looming over him.
    "You're adorable," Hakes says, and lifts up one hand to make a goddamned finger-gun. A sharp cramp spears Dice's middle.
    The axe is wrenched from his hand and whirls through the air. For a moment, in passing, Dice would swear he felt the brush of his brother's nonexistent fingertips. Hakes ducks; the axe thumps into the doorframe; the seething feeling in Dice's gut eases. He tastes seaweed and copper. He sees Eddie straighten up, ripping the axe free with the Hand.
    Dice hears Hakes' howl of outraged fury, and the slippery horrible thump as Eddie crumples and falls.
    Dice lifts his head. The axe is all the way over there—
    A blur. Red hair, quick hands. Natalie, wielding her bottle of water like a sword. Clear fluid splashes from it, a bright arc, slashing across Hakes' face. Washing into his eyes. His wordless rage turns into a scream of pain; he clutches his face, then casts about blindly.
    Acid, Dice thinks, but some of the fluid splashed him, too,