Silhouette

by Robin Hale

  SILHOUETTE

  ROBIN HALE

  Copyright © 2018 by Robin Hale

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover by Natasha Snow Designs

  Created with Vellum

  CONTENTS

  1.

  Molly

  2.

  Lana

  3.

  Molly

  4.

  Lana

  5.

  Molly

  6.

  Lana

  7.

  Molly

  8.

  Lana

  9.

  Molly

  10.

  Lana

  11.

  Molly

  12.

  Lana

  13.

  Molly

  14.

  Lana

  15.

  Molly

  16.

  Lana

  17.

  Molly

  18.

  Lana

  19.

  Molly

  20.

  Lana

  21.

  Molly

  22.

  Lana

  23.

  Molly

  24.

  Lana

  25.

  Molly

  26.

  Lana

  27.

  Molly

  28.

  Lana

  29.

  Molly

  30.

  Lana

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  1

  MOLLY

  “Captain, there are at least three of them moving toward you on this floor.”

  The light from my tablet was harsh in the otherwise dark office, and I squinted as I compared security camera angles with the blueprints the university had registered with Opal City City Hall.

  “Any enhanced humans?” Captain Colossal’s voice was tinny and small in my earpiece, nothing like the booming baritone of the hero’s voice when he was in the room with me.

  “Negative. At least, not so far. We’ve seen guns, a couple of knives, and some strange-looking smoke canisters, but no powers so far.” I swiped through the status screens on the university’s maintenance grid, looking for the telltale signs of some other method of interference – something other than brute force.

  I sighed and rubbed at my eyes behind my large glasses, urging them to focus despite the late hour. It was supposed to be the end of the day. I had given the same lecture six times, starting with the overachievers in the department head’s earliest seminar, all the way through to the non-traditional students who took their chemical engineering classes after their first workday was over.

  It was supposed to be over.

  Instead, masked men had broken through the chemistry department’s front doors, spraying bullets and shattered glass like all they cared about was causing chaos. Maybe they did. Nothing would surprise me anymore — not since superhuman powers started showing up in Opal City and the local criminal element had decided it was time to come out and play.

  But I hadn’t run. No, that wasn’t my life anymore.

  Of course, I also didn’t confront the intruders. That would never be my life.

  I had nipped back into the office I’d been using as a home base while giving guest lectures — and wouldn’t that serve me right for trying to do a favor for my alma mater? — and had called the lab. Called the Captain.

  Because there was trouble in Opal City and that meant it was a job for Captain Colossal.

  “The lecture hall here is cleared out, but there are still students sheltering in some of the other classrooms. These guys are pretty trigger happy. Watch out for ricochets.” I cycled through the noise-activated microphones in the security cameras, making sure that they were sound-adjusted to respond to lower decibel ranges than usual. This wasn’t my first time on the comms, and I wouldn’t make the mistake of assuming the intruders were all in one big, happy clump just because they seemed like amateurs.

  “Never thought I’d miss days like this, Fawn!” Colossal boomed on a jovial laugh. “Armed intruders, rather than death cults? Simpler times!”

  I fought back a smile and sent up a silent prayer of thanks that the Gravedigger was safely ensconced in Vernal Ward. The Captain was right. It had been before I’d taken my place in his ear, but I’d still pick armed robbers over death cultists any day.

  A flash of light out of the corner of my eye jerked my attention away from my tablet and its array of indicators displaying a carefully calibrated set of readings. My eyes landed on my phone, lighting up with the smiling face and block letter ID of my mother.

  I let out a groan before I could stop myself.

  “What’s that?” The Captain asked.

  My face went hot immediately. “Nothing, Captain! Just my phone. My mom. I’ll call her back later. You know, when we aren’t dealing with armed intruders, yeah?” I tried to laugh, tried to cover the awkwardness of my embarrassment with my trademark bright smiles and positive outlook, but it didn’t feel very convincing.

  I’d been dodging mom’s calls for weeks.

  “You’ve been dodging your mother’s calls for weeks. Go ahead and take it, I’ll be fine without you for a few minutes.”

  I blinked. I hadn’t realized that the Captain had noticed, well, anything at all about my phone habits or my relationship with my mother. Something warm uncurled in my chest even as I felt the sting of annoyance at the idea that Colossal didn’t actually need me in his ear walking him through the encounter. It was silly to be bothered by that. Vain.

  “Go on, I’ll cut back in if things go sideways,” the Captain wheedled.

  “Well,” I began doubtfully. “I guess if you say so.”

  I swept a fingertip over the mute switch on my earpiece and picked up the phone, steeling myself like I was about to march out of that office and stare down an armed thug alongside Captain Colossal. It was fine. I could do this. It was just mom.

  The line barely rang a single time before my mother’s voice came through the phone like the slide of a well-worn blade. Comfortable, familiar, and likely to turn dangerous if I wasn’t careful.

  “Ah, and there’s my little girl. Too busy for your mom?”

  I gritted my teeth as I tried to keep a smile painted on my face. It was fine, this was fine, everything was fine. “No, mom, just trying to keep things juggled, you know how it is. Everything okay? Is dad all right?” One of the first things I’d learned as a child was to deflect the famous Fawn guilt-wave onto a more sympathetic subject. Dad was usually a good bet.

  “Oh, your father is just fine. He’s back to seeing that idiot endocrinologist again. Can you believe there’s only one specialist in this city who has any expertise in his condition? When we moved here I didn’t think we were moving to some backwater.”

  With relief, my grin turned genuine as I listened to my mom’s huff of annoyance. Mama Fawn might wield guilt with the precision of a scalpel, but she was a fierce advocate for everyone in the family, and it was nice to hear that side of her. I settled back in the ergonomic desk chair — it was quite nice, really, I should put in a request at the lab for one of my own — and prepared to listen to my mother’s righteous indignation over the state of healthcare in Opal City.

  My mother had other ideas. “And this is why it is important to have a solid, dependable partner on your side, my girl.”

  Uh-oh. I sat up sharply, like the shift in conversation was something that I could physically catch and
redirect. The part of my brain that was most comfortable as a tactical controller was firing all its klaxons. Danger, danger!

  “How are things with Jenna, hm? We haven’t seen her around in ages. It’s not good for a woman your age to keep your partners from your family, you know.” The sting of my mother’s disapproval was mostly drowned out by the lingering wave of grief at the sound of that name.

  “Mom, I haven’t been with Jenna for like a year. We broke up. I told you that.” I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to keep my tone light. It was fine, it was fine. It’d been so long, I really shouldn’t have any lingering feelings over the breakup.

  “I thought maybe you had made up.” My mother’s tone implied that I was being purposefully difficult about this.

  Ignore the pout. Ignore it.

  “No, we didn’t make up.” My back was rigid, my shoulders practically pushing into my ears like I could drown out the sound of my own failed relationship. Thanks, mom. Not only had we not made up, but I had needed to block Jenna on every platform I could think of just so I could get through the days after our split without wanting to cry until I threw up. It hadn’t helped in the least that her feed had been full of gorgeous, nameless women just days after she’d dropped the hammer on our time together.

  “That’s a shame. Your father and I liked her.”

  “I know. I know that you liked her. I liked her too! A lot of people like her.” I tried to laugh but the sound stuck in my throat. “Turns out she just…didn’t like me so much.”

  Understatement, apparently. I’d thought I’d gotten past the age where devastating crushes could lay me out flat, but Jenna’s casual dismissal after all the time we’d spent together…it had taken me days before I could face the world again. And I didn’t love having to remember that. I didn’t love being reminded that I was the only one who had been in love. And what had I been thinking, really? That someone as beautiful, as charming as Jenna would really want to tie herself down to someone like me? Someone so…boring?

  The nice word for it was ‘dependable’, but it didn’t take a genius to hear what they were really saying.

  “Well, what about that man you work with? What is his name? Kevin? He seems all right.” My mother breezed past the obstacle of my last failed relationship with a single-minded determination I couldn’t help but admire.

  But Kevin? Kevin was currently bouncing armed intruders off the floor like they were basketballs, and my heart leapt into my throat as I checked my earpiece to make sure that my microphone was muted. The latch was in place. Thank goodness. The last thing I needed was for my mother to alert Captain Colossal to my ill-fated little crush on him.

  “Kevin?” I stalled. “In accounting?”

  It was nothing. Harmless. A pleasant distraction from the disaster my social life had become. And if he ever found out about it I was pretty sure I would crawl into the lab’s sensory deprivation chamber and die.

  “Yes, that was the one. The one you said was dropping by your desk all the time.”

  And well, he had been. Because my desk was where all of the coordinating information for Captain Colossal’s activities could be found. It was where we met to run diagnostics on his enhanced body, to test the limits of his abilities. I felt a sudden, intense spike of resentment for past-Molly using Kevin as an excuse to get off the line with mom. ‘Oops, Kevin’s here, gotta go!’ had seemed like such an innocent excuse at the time.

  Just then, the unmistakable sound of a spray of bullets came crackling through my earpiece. I had never been so relieved to hear gunfire.

  “Oh gosh, mom, looks like the lab is calling me. Must be an emergency!”

  I scanned the tablet’s security feeds, watching as the sound-activated microphones lit up in a vector along one of the upper floors. The Captain needed to get up there and fast.

  “Molly Darwinia Fawn, do not lie to your mo —”

  “Sorry, I really have to go!” The line went dead and I switched my microphone on in a single heartbeat. “Everything okay?”

  Captain Colossal’s end of the line was painted in the sounds of his grunts and the intruders’ gunfire, but nothing sounded out of hand. Not for him, anyway. I was flustered. I shouldn’t let my mom get to me but I couldn’t help it. She’d always been able to sneak past my carefully constructed defenses and get under my skin faster than anyone else on the planet. And it seemed like knowing that she truly only wanted me to be happy just made the matter worse. Who could be mad at someone like that? What kind of daughter was I, really?

  The soft sound of feet on carpet barely registered in the back of my mind, but the cool alto voice that followed had me yelping like a surprised terrier.

  “Why hello there. You weren’t supposed to be here, darling.”

  I spun on the office chair as adrenaline poured through my veins and sent my heart leaping into my mouth. There, standing not three feet away from me, was the most accomplished thief in the history of Opal City: the Silhouette.

  “What am I going to do with you?” She cocked her head to the side, a sly, crimson grin on that perfect face, and dragged her attention down the length of my body in a smooth motion so heavy it was almost a physical caress.

  Oh, I needed help.

  2

  LANA

  The shadows moved around me, cool and soft and comforting like the lapping of water in a lake. No tide, not really, but not still. Almost nothing was still when you got right down to it. Nothing except for me. I’d spent my whole life learning how.

  Twenty-one, twenty, nineteen…

  I counted down the seconds as I listened for the rush of footsteps and the messy wash of gunfire in the otherwise crystalline silence. The boys in ski masks and cargo pants — combat boots tied on in ridiculous knots like they’d come out that night to play soldier rather than thief — stomped a cacophony that echoed through the halls and drew the attention of every hearing person in the building.

  I frowned. I hadn’t actually considered that any of the staff might be deaf. It was an oversight, something I’d have to be sure to rectify in future jobs. A deaf professor might miss the chaos of armed intruders, might come down a hall while I slipped from cover. A deaf student might wander into the line of fire. A deaf custodian might linger where they were not intended to be.

  Twelve seconds. It would take only twelve more seconds for the security guard in the western end of the building to make his way past the alcove where I lingered. Past the screen-covered utility vent toward the sound of mayhem. I matched my breathing to the flow of the air conditioning and listened for sounds that didn’t feel like the natural rhythm of the building. Restlessness itched at the back of my mind, made me want to bounce on my heels, to touch all of the compartments of my suit, my belt like stroking a talisman.

  It was a nervous tic, an old habit I’d long since grown out of. They were there. My tools were there. And any unplanned movement had the potential to ruin the entire enterprise.

  Heavy-gaited footsteps darted down the hallway far more fleetly than I’d given the old security guard credit for, and I silently offered my apologies. He was a full four seconds ahead of schedule. I spared two of those seconds to admire his speed. I did so appreciate competence.

  There were four screws holding the screened cover in place, and it yielded itself effortlessly into my hands. I slipped into the narrow ventilation shaft opening and balanced the cover in place once more. It wouldn’t resist being knocked from the wall by the least bit of force, but it wouldn’t fall on its own.

  Smooth, languid rolls of my shoulders and hips carried me silently through the metal-lined passage. It wasn’t far. Fewer than thirty yards ahead I would be able to open the panel into Professor Robinson’s office, drop into the locked space, and find the safe beneath his desk.

  It would take forty seconds to get in, retrieve the flash drive, and get back out into the hallway. Less than a minute later I would be on the roof, and from there…from there no one could stop me. Not in my city.
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br />   I tried to keep the feeling of satisfaction confined to the corner of my mind where it belonged. The job wasn’t finished, and premature celebration was one of the hallmarks of a shoddy thief. One of the hallmarks of someone who would soon find themselves in the auspicious care of Vernal Ward, Opal City’s infamous prison.

  There were no screws on the panel that led from the ceiling down into the office below, merely tension clips built into the metal frame of the slotted vent. My gloved fingers moved quickly over the latches and I lowered the cover, wincing slightly at the unavoidable whisper of metal against metal.

  I dropped from the ceiling into a crouch and lifted my eyes from the floor to see a woman sitting in the dark in front of Robinson’s desk. Cold shock jolted through my gut at the sight, and I felt my mouth open of its own volition.

  “Why hello, there,” I purred. As automatic responses went, it had been a useful one over the years. “You aren’t supposed to be here, darling.”

  She was not supposed to be there. My mind raced, running at breakneck speed over the plans and blueprints I’d studied before I’d undertaken the job I was in the middle of completing. There was a feeling not entirely unlike a train derailing as I watched the woman sitting in front of me spin in her chair.