“You didn’t think he was going to be facing dickheads like you all alone, right?” I called out, laughing myself. “Plus, this way, if I die, your whole ‘take over the world’ plan dies with me.”
“We just want you.” Amanda’s eyes were on Amber, not me, as she spoke. “Leave her out of this.”
“No.” Amber kept her eyes forward as I watched her. “I brought her for a reason. She stays.”
“And besides.” I shrugged and turned back at Amanda, even as we stopped ten feet from the four of them. “You really think you’re going to be able to tell me what to do?”
Jake nodded, though he looked a little confused as he stepped away from the rest of us. We watched in silence as he sat down on the ground and leaned against an abandoned filing cabinet with his eyes staring, unfocused, at the far wall.
“You’re telling me I marry that dweeb?” I cocked my head over to Amber, who despite the danger of the moment, couldn’t help but return my gaze.
“Hey.” She grinned. “You’re talking to ‘that dweeb.’”
“Enough of this.” Amanda strode forward and grabbed Amber by the arm and pulled her away. She held a pistol in her other hand. “You’re going to take us to Princeton in 1938.” She gestured at the two other men. “Jake and Amber stay here. You do any tricks, like last time, and they both die.”
“Okay.” Amber held up her hands. “How do I know, though, that you aren’t just going to have your goons kill Jake the moment we leave?”
“They’re going to.” She smiled. “Unless we come back when we’re done to this exact place and time. Think you can manage that?”
“I don’t see much alternative.”
Amber glanced at me as Jake slumped to the side, asleep. My eyes went wide at the buzzing that filled my ears. I tapped into my powers at the precise moment Amanda twisted around to face me with her mouth in a snarl. A lot of things happened within the next few seconds.
The sound of shrieking metal filled the air as Amber’s car careened into the front of the warehouse. I had sensed it barreling toward the warehouse seconds before, so I was prepared for the cacophony of sound that accosted us, though it looked like no one else around me, not even Amber, had anticipated the noise, as they all jumped.
The man nearest me reached his hand out and the room went momentarily dark as a silvery material seemed to coalesce in his hand to form a javelin. The other man threw his hand toward the noise, and I sensed a wave of destructive energy roll from him toward the front of the warehouse. My eyes followed the energy, and I found myself looking at Nicole, who was slumped over the steering wheel of the car that was now crumpled around one of the sides of the warehouse door. What remained of one of the rogues was sandwiched between the car and the steel I-beam of the doorframe. Regardless of his powerset, I didn’t think he was going to be walking away from that.
I threw my hand up in the microsecond before the invisible energy would have hit the car and warped spacetime, hoping desperately that, like Sophie’s lightning, a high enough curve to spacetime could alter the energy’s course. Amazingly, it worked. The energy bunched together where it encountered my field and diverted itself, careening instead up to the catwalk above the door to the warehouse, where I had sensed someone else hiding.
I dove to the side as I sensed the silvery javelin arc toward me, then rolled to a stop facing the man who had thrown it even as the diverted energy from the other man exploded onto the catwalk in an orange fireball and a guttural howl of pain filled the air. The javelin splintered away into nothing in a wave of heat a second after it embedded itself into the cement floor, and the man formed another javelin in his hand as soon as the first was gone.
The buzzing that had been growing in my ears cut out, and my eyes tracked Amanda as she was slammed into the wall a dozen feet away from Jake’s prone form, shoved by a wave of gravity from Amber.
I dodged to the side as another javelin nearly impaled me, and my attention was forced back to the man who had thrown it. As our eyes met, the entire warehouse went pitch black. Using my grav-sense, I noticed that energy-wave man was summoning another wave of destructive energy, even as I sensed the first man conjure yet another javelin.
I grit my teeth at sensing Nicole begin to stir and someone else moving toward her behind me. Under normal circumstances, I would have prioritized the destructive energy over whatever that silvery javelin substance was, but I had to be able to see what was happening with Nicole. As I sensed the man hurl his javelin toward me, I knocked it back with a contained field of hyper-curved spacetime, which caused it to stop in midair and slam back into the man who had created it.
I heard the explosion, but still couldn’t see anything, as I lifted myself off of my feet and soared back toward the entrance to the warehouse, where I knew Nicole had just gotten out of the car. A second later, the light in the warehouse rippled back into existence, and I looked back for a fraction of a second. The first man lay on the ground in a pool of growing blood, his gut ripped open by a now-exploded javelin. We had three more rogues to neutralize.
I had the wind knocked out of me as something dense slammed into my solar plexus. I dropped to the ground, clutching my ribs. As I fell, I looked up to see the man composed half-way out of steel standing over me with a slight smirk on his face. I heard another explosion behind me, but I had to trust that Amber could handle herself against these rogues.
I pulled myself a few feet to the side as a heavy foot slammed into the concrete where I had landed. My eyes stayed trained on his foot as it shimmered and changed from the metallic silver it had been to a faded white. It was the same color and texture as the cement floor of the warehouse.
I glanced back up at the man as he glared at me, though my eyes were drawn to a point forty feet behind him, where I saw a singed and still-smoking bear-wolf creature push itself to its feet with an outraged snarl. Of course it had been the morpher who I had hit with the explosive energy up on the catwalk. Of everyone in the group, she was likely the only one to be able to shake off that kind of damage and only be angered by it.
I raised my hand to block the man’s cement foot as he stomped down on me, and a field of densely curved spacetime fractions of an inch from my skin kept his foot from connecting with my hand with any amount of energy. Pulverized cement dusted down on me as the man, unbalanced, fell backwards from me shoving his foot up. Fighting the urge to sneeze from the powder settling on my face, I looked up and sent the metal-and-concrete rogue in front of me dropping up into the rafters of the warehouse, propelled by a field of inverted gravity. An awful series of loud bangs and clanging metal echoed down through the warehouse as the man punched an impressive hole through the metal struts and tin shingles of the roof, his speed ever increasing as he fell further and further into the atmosphere. I kept the inverted field around him, even as I focused the remainder of my attention on the morpher, who was barreling toward me.
“Not this time,” I said through gritted teeth. I pulled myself well clear of her jumping range, even as I clamped an intense field of strongly curved spacetime around the center of her mass.
She crumpled to the ground, her hands gripping her stomach. As she rolled onto her back, I saw the effect of my field. I had effectively disemboweled her. Regenerative powers or not, I doubted she would be able to recover from that. For good measure, I brought my hand down to pull several of the struts from the ceiling free and sent them slamming down into her, impaling her with several sections of steel bars. Bile filled my mouth as the metallic smell of blood perforated the air and she groaned in pain, but with a flash of phantom pain in my side at the memory of my last run-in with her, I turned back to the morpher to make sure she was out of the fight. I couldn’t let Nicole or Amber be hurt or killed because I didn’t have the stomach to see a horrifying task completed.
I bolted off to the side a second later as another ear-splitting impact like cymbals out of hell met my ears and the metallic rogue fell through the roof for a second time,
crashing into the floor of the warehouse with enough of an impact that the ground shook and a deep set of cracks fanned out from his body. Incredibly, even after those three impacts, I watched as he reached out a shaking hand to pull himself to his feet.
I glanced at Amber, who had neutralized the other rogue and had turned her attention to Jake, who was still lying on the ground by the side wall.
“Stay down,” I warned the man, even as he moved to put his other hand down and push himself up. The effort to even just move his arms, though, seemed almost too much for him. “I don’t want to kill you, but at this point, if you keep fighting, I will have no choice.”
He slumped to the ground and dropped his arms back down as he rolled his head to the side. He shivered as his body lost its metallic and concrete appearance.
“Are you okay?” I called to Amber as I jogged over to her.
“I’m fine.” She looked past me, at the two bodies lying on the ground around her totaled sedan. “Are they both dead?”
“One is. The other’s just incapacitated. I think we’ll let the arbiters take care of him.”
“Good.” She sighed, relief evident on her face as she pointed back over at the man with the destructive energy power. “I was able to knock him out, though we should get him checked out soon. He probably has some subdural bleeding into his brain. I had to give him a pretty good knock on the head before he would go down.”
“Is he doing okay?” I panted, my eyes on the still form of Jake next to her.
“His breathing’s steady.” Amber’s eyes went to Jake as well. “Looks like the mind smith just put him to sleep. Should I wake him up?”
“There might be residual effects from her hold on him.” I grimaced and put my hand on my rib, which still ached from where the rogue had hit me. “Best to let him sleep until the arbiters get here.”
“Well.” Amber let out a short breath, still studying teenage-me. “At least you’re cute.”
“Why is it always cute? Why can’t anyone ever say I look hot? I’d even take handsome, even though it’s dorky. I never had any problem saying you were hot as hell.” I stood up and peered back toward the car. Where had Nicole gone? “Have you...”
“What’s wrong?” Amber’s voice was distant, almost imperceptible, as a familiar static filled my entire body. I looked past Amber, whose lips were still moving, though if she were saying something, I didn’t notice or care. Instead, my eyes focused on Amanda. She was sitting, propped up against the wall and watching me. I nodded at what she spoke into my mind and turned my attention back to Amber.
“Jake, what—” Her words were cut short as I held a hand out and gripped her in a field of gravity. She lifted off the ground a few feet from my field as I squeezed my hand into a fist.
Unchecked hatred boiled through my mind as I watched her struggle to free herself from my field, her eyes flaring purple as she tapped into her powers, but she couldn’t break free. Her abilities, while strong, were dwarfed by my own. I pulled her close and cancelled out her feeble attempts to use her powers to wrestle free.
“You’re a traitor to your kind,” I spat, my voice just above a whisper.
She cried out as I slung her away, my attention already turned to the teenage boy lying on the ground a few feet away. He was the problem. Everything had been going the way it was supposed to until he showed up. Doctor Quantum’s plan—his noble vision to bring about true equality for primes, not their veiled subjugation at the hands of humanity, the left-behinds of evolution—would have been realized if not for that pathetic little creature. I knew what I had to do. But before I could act, I heard a booming voice behind me.
“Halt!”
I turned around to see six arbiters, bright primary-colored outfits and all, striding into the warehouse. I had a suspicion I knew who had called them.
“I thought we weren’t going to involve arbiters, Nicole!” I shouted, my voice echoing around the warehouse as my gaze swept over the whole area.
I couldn’t sense where she was. If she had been moving, I would have been able to pin her down in an instant, but either by luck or some sense of the limits of my powers, she was staying still. There were too many objects in the warehouse close to her density. But no matter. I snorted. She was nothing.
“Stop, right there!” the arbiter in front, a man in a red cloak, shouted.
He studied me carefully as he held out a hand, then glanced at the man standing to his right, the one dressed in a blue jumpsuit. The second man frowned as he met my gaze.
“I can’t reach her.” Blue-Jumpsuit looked back at Red-Cloak, then pointed over to Amanda, who hadn’t moved from her spot propped against the wall. “Looks like we have a mind smith, who’s controlling this one.” His finger moved over to me.
“Powerset?” Red-Cloak was once again studying me. I stared at him, not even trying to hide the fury burning behind my eyes.
“Can’t tell.” Blue-Jumpsuit sighed. “Not without access to her thoughts.”
“And the other one?”
“Redhead has gravity manipulation. Blazing strong, too. But she’s non-hostile. Blondie’s a civie...” His eyes went wide as they flickered from where I had thrown Amber back to me. “Oh, this is not good.”
With a lazy wave of my hand, I sent out a minor ripple of spacetime, just a few times the force of earth’s gravity, toward the arbiters. Three of them were thrown backwards, though the woman in the yellow bodysuit leapt off to the side to avoid most of the wave of distorted spacetime. She rolled easily to her feet, then jumped off a workbench bolted to the ground. She stretched out her hands as she sailed through the air toward me.
“Watch out!” Blue-Jumpsuit shouted, but it was too late.
I lifted a hand, narrowing my eyes as I snapped a field around her that stopped her in midair.
“You don’t know who you’re dealing with.” I glared at her, my eye twitching. “Leave now, or die.”
Without looking, I flicked my other hand toward the man who had been sprinting toward me, and he was flung backwards. He slammed into the side of Amber’s car and crumpled in the already-dented door.
Turning my back on the other four arbiters, I gave Amber a dangerous look. She had been creeping up behind me, but she froze when I looked her way. I could see fear etched in her eyes. She tried to craft a distortion of spacetime around Amanda, but I cancelled it out with little more than a passing thought. Her eyes went wide as they went back to their normal color.
“Jake,” she whispered. “Please, don’t do this.”
I slammed an elbow behind me, connecting with the gut of the man who had been trying to sneak up on me. He looked to be a mattermancer of metal, judging by the dense steel that covered every inch of his body. But steel couldn’t stop me, even with its strength amplified orders of magnitude beyond its normal limits by his powers. The metal shattered under the immense gravity extending inches from my skin, and he cried out as my field brushed against his skin and shredded it apart. I looked down at his foot and created a field that caved in the metal while also breaking the bones in his foot, then tossed him aside with another field of gravity. He groaned as he fell to the ground, his metal clanging loudly on the cement floor as he fell.
My eyes returned to Amber. I dragged the woman suspended in my field to a point behind my back, right in the path of some energy that had just been lobbied toward me. She screamed a second later as the energy connected. Even as Amber watched in wide-eyed disbelief, I threw the woman toward the source of the energy, then turned my attention back to Jake.
As I lifted my hand, I was knocked over by a field Amber had summoned in the span of my momentary distraction. Catching myself on a pocket of gravity, I lifted both myself and Amber into the air. Again she struggled to break free, but I nullified the rippling spacetime roiling off her. I itched to end her—the hatred driving me mad was so strong—but I knew that was the one thing I couldn’t do. Everything depended on her survival.
Instead, I twisted ar
ound and studied the six arbiters spread out in front of me. The metal mattermancer was still on the floor, clutching his bloodied gut. I wrote him out of my mind. Even if he weren’t incapacitated, he would pose no threat to me whatsoever. The woman with heightened reflexes, the agile, was pushing herself to her feet, though she looked ragged from the energy hit she had taken. Red-Cloak, who she had landed on, was still sprawled on the ground. I wasn’t surprised. Energy casters, for having such potentially strong powers, were at their core weak. Blue-Jumpsuit was a non-threat. He couldn’t break into my mind in the state I was in, and it seemed he knew that. That only left the woman who still hadn’t moved, who was watching me warily, and the bruiser standing next to her. He looked no worse for having been smashed into a car after flying fifty feet through the air. I sighed. This was going to be a disappointing fight.
The woman who had been watching me opened her mouth and screamed. My stomach dropped as her shriek filled the air, and I fell to the ground. I doubled over in an attempt at keeping myself from throwing up. I registered, barely, that I had let go of Amber and that she was scrambling to her feet, but she wasn’t my focus. I could sense if she used her powers. She was no threat to me.
A wave of spacetime distortion rippled out from me that sent out a shockwave that flung everything not bolted to the ground dozens of feet away. Luckily, that also included the woman, who fell backwards and knocked her head into the side of an abandoned foundry machine as she rolled end over end. Her scream stopped, even as the walls and ceiling rattled from the gravity wave. A few loose steel beams rattled free from the ceiling, and they came crashing into the ground in a thunderous clatter.
For just a moment, my head lost some of the static that had been consuming it, and I put my hand on my stomach. A shiver worked its way up my spine. That distortion of spacetime hadn’t come from me. But... it was impossible. The earliest primes ever manifested their powers was when they turned perhaps three or four years old. I was barely twelve weeks pregnant. The growing fetus inside me was just starting to flex its fingers and toes. What did it mean that it already had access to its powers?
Prime Identity Page 33
