by Robin Hale
She was in every jab, every kick that I landed. She was in the graceful arc of my flips and rolls. She was in the breath that I sucked into my burning lungs. And she was in the man that fought beside me.
I caught the barrel of a gun that appeared in Colossal’s blind spot and twisted, wrenching the thug’s arms away from taking a shot at the Captain’s neck. The gun clattered against the wall when I took the man who held it to the ground and kept myself from finding out whether or not a point-blank round would kill Opal City’s favorite hero.
Fawn needed him. And I needed her.
29
MOLLY
My heart pounded in my throat as I waited in the conference room. I sat there, frozen in place and pretending that my ankles and wrists were still tied, and strained desperately to hear what was happening outside the door. Were they all still waiting? If I opened the door would I be met with the sneering faces of the men who had kidnapped me? Or had they all moved on to other parts of their plan?
I had talked myself into and out of opening the door a hundred times by the time I heard it.
“We’ve got intruders!” The shout carried through the sheetrock walls like they were made of card stock. Footsteps thudded over the carpeted floor away from the room where I waited, and I was suddenly quite relieved that I hadn’t tried to open the door.
It had to be Captain Colossal. Had to be. I blinked back the sudden threat of tears in my eyes, relief and affection flooding me so thoroughly that my body wanted to cry it out. If he was taking care of the men with guns, then it was up to me to make sure that they couldn’t trigger the weapon early.
I eased from my seat as silently as I could manage and crept to the door, pausing once more to listen. There was only silence on the other side. Screwing my courage to the sticking place, I turned the doorknob and held my breath as I slipped from the conference room.
Nothing. The hallway was empty, as well as the next room of the penthouse floor, obviously vacated in response to the call for assistance on the lower levels. I let out the breath I’d been holding and tried to ignore the fluttering of panic in my chest as I tried to determine where the weapon was located.
The atomizer ought to be on the roof. It needed access to the open air and an unobstructed view on all sides for the most effective dispersion rate. But the roof wasn’t flat, there wasn’t any position for the atomizer up there that would provide ideal conditions. Was there anywhere on the penthouse floor that had multi-directional access to windows? I tried to remember the layout of the building as I’d seen it from outside, all those days I’d walked by without thinking of it. It was just another building downtown, it hadn’t mattered. I had never really paid attention to what its penthouse floor might look like.
Damn it, Fawn, think! The fate of the entire city might depend on it!
I turned in a tight circle as I surveyed the halls around me. There just wasn’t anywhere inside the penthouse to pull it off. Not if they didn’t want to flood the building with brachnine where we all stood. No, they’d want to be as far from the dispersion as possible —
That was it.
The penthouse floor wasn’t where the Gravedigger’s son and his goon squad were planning to engage the atomizer — it was where they were hiding from it.
It wasn’t a bad plan, the weight of the binding agent and the brachnine would be unlikely to travel upward from the ground far enough that it would constitute a threat from this position, and the high ground made for a reasonably defensible stronghold. At least, if I were sending a team of police inside I would certainly worry for them.
If the Silhouette had managed to get the Captain I wouldn’t worry about him at all.
I hoped that she had found him.
The slow, steadying feeling of solving the puzzle in front of me cleared some of the panic from my mind and helped me to focus on the next problem. There had to be an access point. A controller. Some way that they could trigger the atomizer remotely. It seemed unlikely that they would leave the atomizer hidden someplace without access to it until they were ready to make good on their threats.
I needed maps of the city’s infrastructure. I needed my tablet. I scowled as I thought of my bag, tossed aside and abandoned in my lab. It had my small toolkit, my tablet, and an assortment of other things that had proven useful in the unpredictable situations that cropped up in my role as Captain Colossal’s handler.
Well, there wasn’t any use crying over what I didn’t have at hand. All I could do was look for something that would serve the purpose. I rubbed the toe of one boot against the ankle of the one where Lana had tucked her tools, feeling the edges of them like a talisman, just as much a mark of her affection and confidence as the sapphire that laid against my skin.
The sounds of the penthouse were subtle, nearly entirely silent as I padded quietly down the hallway toward another of the outer doors. The delicate hum of the climate control system was muted, practically silent, and it left me with only echoes of sounds that might have been coming from the stairwells that led upward to the penthouse, but I couldn’t be sure. I was hiding from ghosts, from nightmares. Imagined threats lurked around every door that I checked, but so far I hadn’t run into any of the men who had abducted me from the lab.
The thought brought me up short. That was strange, wasn’t it? Why had they grabbed me at all, if they were just going to stash me in an empty conference room? The intruders had been a surprise, I’d grant them that, but surely there had to have been some plan in place?
If they were trying to motivate Captain Colossal, I would’ve expected to find myself tied to the atomizer. It was a crude solution, sure, but exactly the thinking I’d come to expect from the villains of Opal City. And I should’ve been somewhere beneath the building in that case. Somewhere damp and hot and stifling.
Unless I was wrong about why they’d taken the penthouse, but I didn’t think that I was.
I’d paused there, hand on the doorknob of the last room I’d checked, for too long. If I lingered in the hallway I was definitely going to get caught. Mind whirling, filtering over all the data I had about the situation, fighting down the panic that kept threatening my every breath, I rounded the corner —
And came face to face with Abel Johansson, the Gravedigger’s son. Distant memories of trial photos of Lars Johansson flashed across my mind, and it was like his younger self had appeared in that hallway to steal the breath I’d drawn for a scream.
“Ah, Miss Fawn. Good of you to come find me. I was just about to come looking for you.” His tone was excessively polite and he inclined his head in something resembling a bow as he greeted me.
“Doctor,” I blurted automatically, and the man’s smile widened.
“My apologies, Dr. Fawn. Please, come with me.” His hand wrapped around my wrist with all the tenderness of an iron vise, and he pulled my arm against his side like we were a pair of courting lovers in approximately 1890.
He was handsome. It was an absurd thought, especially given the unyielding grip on my arm that would certainly result in finger-shaped bruises, but it struck me all the same. He was slightly younger than I was, and handsome. Johansson’s hair was like burnished gold and fell in soft waves around his face, igniting the sharp blue of his eyes while it offset the squareness of his jaw. He bore an uncanny resemblance to his father, and if there was anything that benefited a cult leader better than the charm of a handsome and familiar face, I’d never heard of it.
He was taller than I was, but so was everyone. He shared his father’s lean build, with none of the Captain’s bulk in his shoulders and legs, but it wasn’t much of a comfort. I didn’t doubt that he’d have a knife in his hand and pressed to my neck before I could blink.
If I’d managed to convince myself that I had things under control before, that certainty abruptly fled. I followed the pull on my arm, keenly aware that I didn’t have any other options, and searched frantically for a way out of the mess I found myself in.
IT WAS ONLY t
he smallest bit of satisfaction to realize that I had been right, but given the circumstances, I would take it. They had taken the penthouse to be furthest from the dispersion, but that was about the only piece I’d managed to quite figure out.
I stared down at the atomizer where it was strapped onto a platform in the otherwise open elevator shaft. It blinked benignly, as if it weren’t currently hooked up to enough brachnine to devastate the entire inner core of Opal City. There was enough brachnine there to wipe out eighty percent of the city’s population, almost everyone who lived inside the outer belt.
My stomach rolled, rebelled, and I clenched my hands, driving my fingernails into my palm to fight the urge to lose my dinner.
“I regret taking you away from your plans for the evening, Dr. Fawn,” Johansson said calmly, as though he’d asked an old friend for help rather than abducting an ally of the person who had put his father in prison. “But if we can get this in working order I’ve no doubt you’ll be back home, safe and happy, in no time.”
“In working order?” I asked, blurting out the words before my conscious mind had caught up with the idea. It didn’t work? Relief flooded my veins. He didn’t know how to operate it. None of his artless thugs and goons — reasonable enough when what you needed was brute force — had the necessary engineering or even agricultural background to understand how to use the machine. Thank god.
“That’s right.” Johansson leaned against the open doors of the elevator shaft, the car having been sent…somewhere.
A thoroughly miserable glance down the opening between the platform and the wall of the shaft showed no obstruction at all between my position and a flowing stream of water flanked by cement walkways hundreds of feet below. What had they done with the elevator car? When had they opened the bottom of the shaft?
“I’m afraid that none of my father’s old friends, none of the marvelous inventors he worked with are still living.” The shrug that accompanied those words was casual. Almost careless. Almost as if his father hadn’t been the one to end their lives.
A shiver threatened to roll down my spine and I fought against it. The only hope I had was keeping my head.
“You can’t imagine that I’ll help you do this,” I said, staring down at the atomizer, at my beautiful machine that they’d twisted into something dangerous.
“That’s exactly what I imagine, Dr. Fawn,” Johansson said with a pleasant smile.
His calm was like a mirage. There, just beneath the surface, just beneath the placid expression painted by the heat stress of my own mind, would be an endless wasteland. Every moment that passed brought me closer to triggering it. But I needed the facade. I needed him pretending to be polite. I needed to not find out where the knife was, how close he was to slitting my throat.
“Because if you don’t,” he continued. “I’m going to flood this building with brachnine. I don’t need an atomizer to get this much brachnine into a ventilation system.”
“You’ll die,” I said. Could he be so far gone that he hadn’t realized that?
“I know,” he agreed. “But so will your dear Captain Colossal and the Silhouette.”
Lana. My heart lurched in my chest. She was there, then. She’d come back. I wanted to sob, relief and horror fighting for control of my mind, and I settled for staring at the atomizer, willing the solution to present itself to me.
“‘Or die trying’ has always been part of my game plan, Dr. Fawn. But I cannot imagine that the Silhouette has ever even considered that type of failure.” Johansson drummed his fingertips against the metal casing of the elevator doors.
The threat rankled. There was a part of me that had always accepted that I might die for my involvement in Captain Colossal’s work. That I was putting myself in danger because I believed in what we were doing. I didn’t want to die, but it was something that had always been a possibility.
But Lana? The idea that beautiful, clever, wicked Lana might come to harm over this? It made me want to rage and tear Johansson’s throat out with my bare hands. Lana was a thief. She was careful. She’d never even left a trace of herself until she wanted to, and she certainly hadn’t signed on for my level of risk.
And if I got her killed, if I pulled her out of the shadows and into some idiotic, suicidal brand of heroism — well, if I did that, I might deserve brachnine.
“All right,” I ground out between my teeth, jolting hard at the feeling of Johansson’s hand patting my shoulder. “I’ll get it working.”
“That’s the spirit, Dr. Fawn. After all, if Opal City meets my demands, there’s no reason for concern.”
He was lying. The realization was surprising. I wasn’t, strictly speaking, known for my skill at recognizing deception, but it was clear that he was lying. It was written in his voice. He was going to use the atomizer even if the city paid his ransom. Even if they released his father. Even if they somehow got a helicopter to a building where a helicopter could not land.
The certainty flooded through me like ice water and shorted out my ability to think. What had happened to this kid?
I reached into my boot and retrieved the tools that Lana had given me, mind racing, and nearly dropped them down the open elevator shaft at the sound of Johansson’s laughter.
“Prepared, I see. Very good, Dr. Fawn,” Johansson’s voice was a purr, almost the kind of drawl that sent heat coiling in my belly, but just wrong enough that it made my skin crawl in revulsion.
I gritted my teeth, clenched my jaw, and set about my work. It wasn’t complicated. The atomizer was more than half my own design and it yielded to me easily.
“You know, this was quite the venture to pull off,” Johansson said, confirming my suspicions. He was a monologuer. His exaggerated politeness, his smile…even his handsome features, they were the hallmarks of someone who wanted his accomplishments to be appreciated before he destroyed a city of people.
That was where this son had fallen far from the Gravedigger’s tree. The Gravedigger had been the other kind of villain, the kind who found satisfaction in carrying out his own plans. He needed to be worshipped but he didn’t need to gloat.
“Not just getting all of the necessary materials, although that was its own undertaking all together, if you’ll pardon the phrasing,” Johansson said with a soft chuckle.
Undertaking. Cute. I could practically hear Lana’s sneering retort to that line.
“But figuring out just exactly how to punish Captain Colossal for what he’s taken from me.” Johansson’s voice didn’t move. He didn’t pace, he just stayed posed against the open doors of the elevator like he expected a camera crew to be along any moment and he intended to be artfully displayed. “He doesn’t have a wife, so that was no good.”
My mind, with its carefully indexed organization of all the information I’d ever learned, reminded me that the Gravedigger’s wife had been his first victim.
“And he doesn’t have any children that I could identify, which was something of a problem for me. I would’ve appreciated the symmetry.” I just bet he would have. The Captain was younger than Gravedigger had been when he’d captured the villain. His children would’ve been even smaller than Abel’s own fourteen years at that time. “So that left me with you. His partner. His right hand. The woman behind the man, as it were.”
Electrical connections dissolved and reformed under my careful guidance as I listened to Johansson’s rambling. It was more like I was listening to him listen to himself.
“If there were anything that would drive home just how severely he’d misstepped, it would be to find that his dear Dr. Fawn was as lost to him as my father has been to me all these years,” Johansson’s voice softened into a whisper, and I hesitated, hands coming off the atomizer.
“You’ve been visiting your father in Vernal Ward regularly.” It was a guess, but I felt confident in it.
“A poor substitute for having a father to raise me.”
I couldn’t disagree with that.
“I thought you
said that if Opal City gave you what you wanted, there was nothing to worry about?” I kept my tone light, mild, even as I returned my hands to their work. It wouldn’t be long now.
“If you think that bringing the atomizer online won’t build a prison between you and your dear Captain, I fear you do not know him at all.” Johansson’s voice lost its warmth. It went hard. Angry. If I looked at him then I knew that I would see the expression behind the mirage.
I looked.
“And if you think that I would risk this city, you don’t know me,” I said fiercely and flipped the switch on the atomizer.
I dove out of the way, but the effect was nearly instantaneous. I’d decoupled the binding agent, removed the fluid that would carry the brachnine, and rerouted every heat sink to overpower the central electrical circuit. The explosion was larger than I had expected, even directing it toward Abel rather than an even spread, but the way Abel cried out would be the sound of horror and victory from that day forward. The blast destroyed the platform, incinerated the brachnine, and sent the whole contraption plummeting down to the water below.
As Abel collapsed, my own heart pounding in my chest, I didn’t know how I would live with what I had just done. But I knew one thing: Abel Johansson would never threaten Lana Blake ever again.
30
LANA
The back of my heel connected with a tall, rangy goon’s jaw in a roundhouse kick that would’ve seemed excessive to me just twelve hours before. Fighting with an honest-to-god hero at your back apparently encouraged bad habits. Regardless of the motivation, however, the older man with his ill-advised automatic rifle and his wild right hook went down like a house of cards.
It was satisfying in the way that stealing an entire set of 18th century blown-glass planetary models was satisfying: the Gravedigger’s son’s entire cadre of hired thugs lay strewn about the hallways behind Colossal and me, tidy and waiting to be collected by the Opal City Police Department once we’d gotten Molly and gotten out.
