“Red, look out!” Somehow, I’d forgotten Jaws’ wife. Maybe I’d discounted her because she wasn’t a Power. Maybe I’d gotten that tunnel vision Nikolai had always warned us about. It was a rookie mistake, the sort of thing the Academy trained us to avoid.
She screamed her warning and Red was already ducking aside as I finished pulling the trigger.
I guess it’s a good thing the Pyro hadn’t been my target.
Across the room, Firewall stiffened as my round struck him. I’d been aiming center mass, as Jessica taught, but an almost supernatural lack of recoil and my own unfamiliarity with the weapon meant I’d shot him in the right hip instead.
It didn’t matter.
Something spread outward from the point of impact like a ripple on a pond, something recognizable only by the carnage it left behind. It chewed through the Technomancer’s jumpsuit, skin and bones, consuming as it spread. He was dead long before that ripple reached his heart, but it kept on going anyway, even as the last few bits of him crumbled to the floor. In less than a second, there was nothing left to suggest a man had ever stood there.
I’d asked Her Majesty for a guaranteed kill, and I’d sure as fuck gotten it.
The Stalwart used my distraction to get back to his feet. The right side of his face and body was a mass of blood and burns, but he loped forward like a savage on the hunt. First one step, then another, dodging Red’s increasingly panicked blasts.
That should’ve been the end of it. In Cape vids, that would’ve been the end of it, a reformed Black Hat finding his way to the light, finding redemption even as he stopped a jail break before it could truly start. One more example of truth and justice triumphing even over the darkness of one man’s heart.
Problem is, this wasn’t a Cape vid.
Three tables away from me, one of the remaining inmates raised his still-shackled hands. Darkness pooled in his open eyes.
The Stalwart’s own shadow reached up and wrapped itself around him, pinning him to the nearby wall.
Red stopped on a dime and reversed course. His good hand extended in front of him like he was pushing a wall, and fire poured into the Stalwart’s struggling body. When the Pyro’s flames finally cut off, there was nothing left behind but scorch marks on the wall, and a blackened, shriveled corpse that fell to the floor and exploded into fragments of ash.
I recognized the sound that came out of the Stalwart’s father’s throat. I’d made a sound just like it when I was five.
Red spared a moment to spit in the direction of the Stalwart’s ashes and then turned to me, his expression ugly. “If you’d shot me instead of Firewall, you might have had a chance.” Flames gathered again around his open hand.
“Probably should have,” I admitted. What I really should have done was ask Her Majesty for a gun with more than one round. The weapon had gone cold and lifeless the moment I fired it, as if whatever powered it had left with the bullet. I tossed the gun aside and reached for my power instead. “But he was the one controlling the cameras.”
Lights above both elevators went from green to red. Somewhere above us, an alarm began to sound.
CHAPTER 72
I had a split-second to appreciate—even enjoy—the look of shock on the Pyro’s face, and then fire was coming at me like hell’s own fury. There was no dodging that, not entirely, but with the cold emptiness of my power filling my body, I rolled away from the worst of it, taking cover behind a metal interview table that went red, then white, then melted into slag, leaving two half-torched table legs behind. I scooped up one of those legs, ignoring the hot metal that seared my flesh, and dodged from table to table. All the while, I was expecting the Shadecaster to pin me like he had the Stalwart, but the expected attack never came. One quick peek showed me why; the Power was slumped down in his chair, smoke coming out of empty, sightless eyes, as if Red’s flames had burned him through the shadow he’d controlled.
Two down and only Red to go… assuming none of the other inmates were in on the jailbreak… assuming all of them stayed put.
I might actually have a chance.
If you’re ever a Cape—hell, even if you come back as a normal, and go through life never facing danger at all—do me a favor; don’t even think those words.
It’s just asking to be fucked.
The doors to the cell block elevator exploded outward in a cloud of steel shrapnel. More bodies hit the floor, but I can’t tell you if they were inmates or civilians. I can’t even tell you how many people died in that one instant.
I was too busy staring at the fragment of steel embedded in my chest.
•—•—•
It didn’t hit my heart.
You hear that sort of shit on vids sometimes, as if the heart is the only organ that matters in the body. But in the real world, when a twisted metal shard flies across the room and drives itself into your chest, it doesn’t matter if it hit your heart or not. Fact of the matter is, you’re still beyond screwed.
I watched blood well up around the steel shard, watched as it started to soak through the front of my one and only suit. I watched smoke drift from the arm and hip that hadn’t escaped Red’s initial blast, looked down at the hand I couldn’t feel, the hand that was practically welded to the table leg I’d hoped to use as a weapon.
Twenty seconds in, and I was already a wreck.
Jaws stepped through the remains of the elevator doors, back in human form, and calling out even as he came through the smoke. “What the hell’s going on, Firewall? The elevator locked down almost a hundred feet below. If we’d been any further down, the gas would have—” He stopped and looked around, mouth falling open. “What the fuck happened here?”
I couldn’t see Red from where I was slumped on the ground, but I could hear him well enough. “Had ourselves a couple of would-be heroes, Jaws. They took out Firewall, but I put them both down.”
“And now the entire facility knows what is going on.” There was no humanity in the whisper that slithered from the depths of the elevator.
“Not to worry,” said Red, his voice going wobbly. “We still got this—”
I barely saw the sliver of shadow that shot from the elevator like a spear, but I heard Red’s voice cut off, mid-sentence, followed by a body hitting the floor in several pieces.
“We’re going to have a fight on our hands, getting out of here.” Jaw’s voice was oddly diffident. “We could’ve used him.”
“Incompetence is a cancer,” answered the cold voice. “It must be excised lest the entire organism be compromised.” The speaker stepped from the darkness of the elevator’s interior, followed closely by two others.
I knew all three of them, even out of costume.
The owner of that terrifying voice, a whip-thin man with black hair to his waist, was Fallout, a Mid-Four Shadecaster who had assassinated one President, two senators, and more than a dozen Capes.
Behind him was Tremor—squat, hunchbacked and grotesquely muscular—a Low-Four Earthshaker and the villain who had sank Santa Barbara into the Pacific.
Last but not least was Maul, larger even than Nikolai, leathery brown skin so covered in tattoos that his features were almost impossible to discern. A High-Three Titan, he was infamous for eating the people he killed. His favorite entrée: elementary school children.
They were three of the four founding members of the Legion of Blood, three of the worst Black Hats taken alive in the past decade.
And they were all free.
•—•—•
Almost free.
A loud noise sounded from the elevator to the surface, and the light above its door—which had previously switched from green to red—went out entirely.
“Shit,” said Jaws. “They must have just collapsed the shaft.”
“And flooded it with gas,” agreed Tremor. “Nice fucking escape plan, Shifter.”
“It’s not my plan,” protested Jaws. “If you want to take it up with the big man, that’s your call.”
“I ain’t afraid of Carnage,” growled Maul.
“That’s because you’re an idiot, dear boy,” whispered Fallout. “Carnage would tear you into pieces the size of your shrunken testicles. Besides, as I have informed you on multiple occasions, our former leader no longer sits at the top of this villainous pyramid.” The Shadecaster turned back to Jaws. “There were three individuals of note specified in this allotment of civilians. Your oh-so-lovely wife—shockingly still with us, I see—Firewall’s brother, dearly departed, much like the Technomancer himself, and one other.”
“Yeah.” Jaws cleared his throat. “Looks like she died in the initial attack.”
“She?” Fallout hissed. “I don’t care about an unpowered gutter trash civilian. That’s one less fool we will have to reward or dispose of. I care only about her specific relation, the reason she was selected to be part of this group!”
“Oh. Right.” Jaws raised his voice. “You still with us, Pusher?”
“No thanks to that idiot Pyro.” The twitching inmate with the enormous nose staggered into view. “First I have to augment his power just so he can take care of one dumbass Stalwart… then he nearly kills me taking out a teenager.” He stopped and eyed Fallout. “As for my sister, I’m more than happy to accept the reward on her behalf. Cash is preferable.”
I didn’t have the oxygen to curse out loud, but I was doing plenty of it in my head right then.
Pusher wasn’t a Telekinetic like I’d assumed.
Pusher was a Switch.
Three insanely powerful Black Hats, and they had an Amplifier.
•—•—•
“You’ll have your reward, as well as your freedom,” said Fallout.
“In that case, what do you need me to do, boss?” asked Pusher, rubbing his still-dripping nose with the back of one hand.
“The warden has deprived us of one elevator,” said Fallout. “Tremor will provide us with another.” He scanned the room. “I’d say twenty or so feet in diameter should suffice.”
“You sure?” asked Tremor. The Earthshaker didn’t have much of a neck, but his head sort of wobbled. “Ceilings above us are titanium, Fallout. That’s gonna take a lot of power, even with Pusher here. Do we really need to bring so much shit up with us?”
“Six remaining civilians, not counting Mr. Jaws’ doe-eyed darling. That’s six hostages should we need them… and six distractions if we do not.”
“And the unaligned inmates?”
“They had their opportunity to help, yet did nothing. Given the loathsome nature of the Pyro in question, their cowardice would be forgivable,” Fallout spread his hands out, palms upward, “were I in a forgiving mood.”
Spears of shadow streaked from his spread fingers, every one of them striking a target.
I was a long way from being able to stand up, but turning my head was feasible, if barely. I looked behind me, already suspecting what I’d find.
The route I’d taken trying to evade Red’s attacks was a mess of melted tables, scorched walls and toppled chairs, but in the middle of all that destruction, one chair had somehow remained unscathed, not just whole, but pristine. My father sat upon that chair, hands resting on a table that didn’t exist anymore, the biggest smile I’d ever seen spread across his face.
Above that smile was the long, crooked nose we shared, but above that was nothing but empty space, a gaping hole that had been drilled straight through the back of his skull, a hole that dripped shadow instead of blood.
The ground began to shake as Tremor summoned his power. Without a sound, without fanfare or ceremony, my father’s corpse sagged to one side, then slipped out of the chair and onto the floor.
•—•—•
I don’t know what to feel sometimes. Some nights, I set my power loose just to avoid feeling anything at all.
Truth is, my father deserved to die for what he did, deserved to die for the murder of an innocent woman, for blood spread all over a white-tiled kitchen. If fate hadn’t put me in that particular visitor group, if Firewall’s brother had swapped places with me instead of the anonymous old woman… I’m pretty sure I would have killed him down there in the Hole. I’d have reached the trigger’s point of resistance and kept on squeezing, would have gone to my grave feeling justified, if not proud.
But truth doesn’t always tell the whole story. Sometimes, there isn’t just one story to tell. My father was a murderer, but he was also a victim, a victim of whatever had been done to him before he met Mom, and whatever had been said to him on the day he killed her. He was a pawn in a game I didn’t know anything about, a game whose players included Sally Cemetery and this still-mysterious he.
Maybe one day I’ll learn to pity my father as much as I hate him. Maybe one day I’ll even learn to forgive him.
But I wouldn’t hold your fucking breath.
Even if you are already dead.
CHAPTER 73
There was a brief time when Evan Earthquake was every bit as popular a vid star as Paladin and Tempest. He was a little shrimp of a guy, lacking the usual Earthshaker build, and known as much for his coke-bottle spectacles as the three-piece suit he called a costume. His time at the top of the charts lasted less than a year. Three episodes and a shitty catchphrase that never caught on, and then just like that, he was gone from the vids like he’d never existed.
Turns out earthquakes only make for great vid until the casualty counts start rolling in.
Anyway, I saw all three Evan Earthquake episodes. Wasn’t my favorite Cape, but what the fuck else was I going to do at Mama Rawlins’ before I met Alicia? I saw every one of his vids and that’s why I can tell you something beyond a shadow of a doubt:
Evan could never have managed the shit Tremor pulled that day.
The edges of the floor curled upward around us like a bowl with a flat center. The ceiling—the titanium ceiling—curled down to meet the floor’s edges, forming a crude sphere of metal and stone that shunted aside dislodged debris from above. Then, we were rocketing upwards, propelled by an unbelievable force, blasting up through a hundred feet of reinforced levels.
After twenty seconds or so, our momentum started to slow, and I had a moment of hope that, even with Pusher’s aid, Tremor had reached his limits. One glance upward killed that dream. The floor of our makeshift elevator had slowed, but the ceiling hadn’t. The sphere separated back out into two hemisphere, with the space between top and bottom halves widening with every passing second. The top half seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second, as it impacted the thickest barrier of all—the bunker that sat just above us—and then it blew the roof off and kept going a hundred feet into the air. It spun a few dozen feet to one side before gravity reasserted itself. When the mass of titanium, steel, and stone came back down, it was a good fifty feet away, striking one of the idle shuttles with the force of a medium-sized bomb.
Pusher collapsed where he stood, blood dripping from his nose and ears, a vein in his head throbbing like he’d just mainlined stim-weed. Even Tremor dropped to one knee, but he had enough juice left that our elevator rose to merge seamlessly with the floor of what had been, moments earlier, a heavily guarded bunker.
In thirty years, the Hole had never suffered a jailbreak. Those sent to the Hole were doomed to die in the dirt, in darkness and despair.
Fallout, Maul, and Tremor stood beneath a sun they were never supposed to see again, and Tempest swooped down to meet them.
•—•—•
Clouds formed out of nowhere above the descending Cape. Wind swept in from the west to swirl around the Black Hats, kicking up a cloud of dust and dirt. This close, I could see the ribbons in Tempest’s hair and even the red bindi between her eyebrows. She hovered, fifty feet up in the air, the winds carrying her voice to everyone below.
“The law requires that I give you this one opportunity to surrender, but I really hope you don’t take it.”
“Surrender?” Fallout’s whisper floated just as easily on the wind. “To you?”
“True enough.” He looked up at the Weather Witch, his long, dark hair whipping about in the manufactured breeze. “Perhaps you should go find reinforcements.”
“Funny you should mention that.” Her smile was hard-edged and mocking. “When the alarms triggered, Lucian flew off to do just that.”
“The Morning Star himself goes to summon aid? Perhaps we should consider surrender.” Fallout cocked his head, considering. “What are your terms?”
Still unseen, tucked in between rubble and the remains of a table, I frowned. Too much had gone into this escape plan for Fallout to just give up. So what the fuck was going on?
“No terms, murderer,” answered Tempest. “You go back to your cells. The individuals who aided in your escape go before a judge and jury. I’m offering you your lives, nothing more.”
“So very tempting,” said Fallout, his whisper oozing contempt, “but perhaps I can make a counter-offer.”
If I hadn’t still been on my back, I would never have seen it. High in the sky, far above the circling Capes, the clouds parted, letting a ray of sunlight slip through.
No, not a ray of sunlight, I realized, as it moved. It was Lucian, the Morning Star, leader of the Emerald Legion. But… hadn’t Tempest said he’d left to get reinforcements?
Without knowing exactly why… without even knowing I was going to do it, I opened my mouth and shouted.
“Tempest, look out above you!”
I don’t know how she heard me. Maybe the wind carried my voice like it had hers and Fallout’s. Even harder to explain was why she acted on my warning, but she did… immediately and without even pausing to see who had said it.
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