by Mike Chen
This looked like an alert.
“Zoe!” he yelled. “It’s a goddamn alarm! Wake up!”
“Hey,” she said, her eyes gradually opening. “What’s with the shouting?”
Relief washed over him, though panic quickly shoved it out of the way. “Look,” he said, pointing at the alarm signal above, “they’re on to us.”
“Who are you?” Her eyes stared blankly upward. “Who am I? Where are we?”
No. Not again.
Chills rippled throughout Jamie’s body and his chest tightened, panic ramping up into something far worse. He forced himself to do a countdown and exhale on each beat.
One, then breathe in and out.
Two, then breathe in and out.
Three, then—
Suddenly, Zoe burst out laughing. “You totally fell for it, didn’t you,” she said, sitting up.
Damn it.
His shoulders and posture collapsed, and though he wanted to yell at her for doing that, or about their dire circumstances, or for making contact with the blue thing, his instinct pulled him another direction.
He threw his arms around her and hugged his friend.
But when he pulled back, glistening patches of fresh blood transferred to his Mind Robber hoodie, matching the gunshot wounds on either side of her body. They both looked at the stains, though Zoe simply waved them away. “It’s fine. I can feel my powers coming back. The healing will come back with it.”
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Oh yeah, it fucking hurts. But we’ve got bigger things to deal with.” She stood up, then pulled him along with enough ease to prove that her powers did indeed return. “Waris.”
“Yeah. We have to stop him.”
“No. I know everything. We don’t need to stop him.” Her eyes were clear and soft lines of compassion framed her face. “We have to help him.”
* * *
“So let me get this straight,” Jamie said. His fingers danced in front of him, though rather than brain-stunning or diving into a mind, it was simply a physical gesture to help him process the massive info dump Zoe just gave him in a rapid-fire speech. “The blue thing is Waris. He can project his consciousness into electricity. He’s been trying to warn us the whole time about Kaftan. And he’s trapped in Project Electron and wants to die. But Kaftan thinks that your latest serum is working so she’s trying to execute her plan tonight.”
“Yeah. And they put in a fail-safe by mixing the reverse serum into it and...” Zoe’s face scrunched up as she bit into her lip. “Okay, he said ‘it triggers when your integrated powers demonstrate both sustained usage and...’ Oh, shit, I dunno. It was technical. But whatever, that’s why I’m losing my powers.”
“Jeez.” Jamie shook his head. Who knew that all they had to do was talk to a being made out of electricity to fill in all the gaps? “Anything else?”
“Yeah, he’s kind of funny when he connects to you telepathically. Seems like a nice guy.”
He did seem like a nice guy. And a noble guy. At least from the secondhand memories Jamie absorbed from Zoe, a shorthand version of images and audio direct from Waris. Including one fateful night, about fifteen years ago, when newlyweds Waris and Sasha sat out on a dusty plain in northwestern Kenya, watching the landscape catch fire from an electrical storm, burning crops withering away the hopes of a drought-riddled populace. They’d come as volunteers to provide humanitarian aid in the form of medical treatments and equipment repair, yet without sustainable food, their efforts wouldn’t have a long-term impact. As they pondered the chaos in front of them, Waris turned to Sasha and said, “Everything here is beautiful. And brutal. Everything lost to that brutality. If only nature’s brutality could make crops instead of destroying them.”
But it was Sasha who said, “Maybe there’s something to that.”
Project Electron. Its birth was now a part of Jamie’s memories, but the experience belonged solely to her. He’d received the abridged version.
“Well, tell him next time he tries to talk to us that the blue thing is scary, especially when it screams.”
“I don’t think he wants there to be a next time.” Zoe’s eyes fell to the floor, and of all the reactions to extreme situations he’d seen her in—panic, rage, triumph, fear and all the other big ones—he couldn’t recall the look on her face right now. Her brow crinkled, her eyes were soft, and her lips formed a thin line. Whatever Waris had told her had tilted the axis of her world. “She was right, you know. This whole project was to do the right thing. And maybe someone will take the foundation of it and complete it. But not him. Right now, he’s in this limbo state. Not alive. Not dead. Just there. With this power to travel through electricity that he doesn’t understand.” Her black hair swished back and forth as she shook her head, her gaze intensifying. “What he does understand, though, is how to shut this off.”
They stood amid the blinking panel lights and hum of machines, their natural frequencies counting off units of time in their own way. Zoe straightened up and nodded. “We need to shut off the life support to his physical body. And then we go to the Electron core in the basement and shut that off. That’ll make it all go away.” Her gaze pulled away from him and lingered on the glowing cube. “Even that.”
That being the thing that seemingly restored layers of Zoe’s previous lives.
Her past or the city’s future.
The burden of such a choice unfairly fell on her bullet-wounded shoulders, no matter how strong her extraordinary abilities made them. “Hey,” Jamie said, a hand on her shoulder. “We can still find out who you are. Just not this way.”
Zoe blinked, eyes darting between the remaining puffs of smoke where the Electron being stood, Waris’s physical mutilated body and the device that could grant her everything she wanted. “I just...it’s right there. Who I really am.”
It struck Jamie, perhaps the way his brain-stuns struck others, that Zoe completely missed the irony in that statement. That the woman about to dash off through a labyrinth of military-trained mercenaries and one pissed-off extraordinary mad scientist to prevent the city from descending into chaos, that she of all people couldn’t see who she was.
As if her actions didn’t speak louder than words. Or memory.
“Who you really are is this. Zoe Wong. Standing right in front of me.” Jamie laughed the smallest laugh, one of disbelief at how obvious it all was, how difficult they made it. “If you touched that, if you filled in all those blanks, would that change a single thing about what you’re about to do? To save the city? To save Waris’s soul? Maybe even Kaftan’s? The good you’ve done this city, the good you’ve done for me, that says way more than whatever burdens your parents drilled into your head, whatever you did or didn’t do growing up. However many speeding tickets you got.”
Zoe’s serious look cracked into a wry smile.
“I know who you really are. You are my friend. You have made me a better person. And someday, I hope to repay you. Somehow.”
Jamie’s heart pounded, not in the way that happened when he started stunning people to rob banks. And not the way it felt when he realized Kaftan had captured him, or even when Zoe had taken him for his first flight. This was different, the littlest flutter of something that took far too long to recognize.
Hope.
“Damn,” she said, her voice dry. “You are good at those Mind Robber speeches.”
“Well.” Jamie matched her wry smirk. “I meant it literally. Because we’re still going to rob a bank together, right?”
“Of course. But first,” she turned to Waris’s capsule, “he deserves peace.”
39
IN THEORY, IT SHOULD have been easy. She had extraordinary strength, after all, so tearing cables—even big heavy cables braided with metal lace—out of their sockets should have been simple. Especially since Waris had shown her which ones specifically
to do: first, the massive cable with a metallic braid connecting Project Electron to the glowing thingy she’d touched earlier. Then two cords that dropped from the ceiling and plugged into the control panel, each about an inch in diameter and in green outer sleeves. Then one about twice that size, except this one bolted to the bottom of Electron with a metal plate. And a final, simple connection, one that ultimately connected to the base of Waris’s skull.
And yet, she’d got only three of the five cables unplugged, in the order specified by Waris, each with a spectacular flurry of sparks. Each of them came secured by multiple bolts and reinforcements, and it took Zoe’s abilities to yank them out quickly and cleanly.
The only problem now stemmed from her strength. Or lack thereof.
“How much time do you think you need?” Jamie asked.
Air became a battle in itself, Zoe panting much harder than she should have been. Pain resumed from each of her gunshot wounds, though thankfully her body retained enough of its healing abilities to keep the bleeding to an annoying trickle. The answer to Jamie’s question, though, remained tricky. “I’m not sure,” she finally said.
“Maybe there’s an easier way to do this. A little bit of finesse.” Jamie knelt down to the fourth cable, one that traversed along the floor to the base of the capsule. “I think,” he said, his fingers exploring around and above and below the connection, “I think this is just a cover plate. The connection must be under it. Maybe you don’t need your full strength to rip the cable out. Help me get this cover off. It might just pop out.”
Zoe filled her lungs, hoping that the simple act of bringing oxygen into her body might restore some of her abilities. She flexed her fingers before kneeling down to see what Jamie was talking about. A metal casing, the kind of thing she could crush as simply as an aluminum can. But as her fingers gripped it, an electronic squawk popped through her headset. She looked at Jamie, who was pressing a finger against the small speaker resting on his ear.
“Domino and Fives, you’ve missed your hourly check-in. What’s your status?”
That voice. It was Kaftan.
Fear laced Jamie’s tone. “Oh shit.” He must have recognized it too.
That fear also spiked Zoe’s adrenaline, enough for her to rip the metallic cover off the fourth cable, leaving only its radius of connecting bolts in place. “Here we go,” she told herself, and she pulled on it with as much strength as she could muster.
Which wasn’t enough.
“Damn it,” she said through gritted teeth. “Come on.” Again. And again. Each time, the impact of her force felt less and less, until her muscles actually ached and the wounds resumed bleeding.
“Stop,” Jamie said in a gentle voice.
The headset came to life again. “Domino, report your position. We have suspected intruders.”
“What do we do?” Zoe asked.
Jamie ran his fingers over the cable, then shot a look over at Waris before eyeing up the massive door at the edge of Project Electron’s observation area. “You keep working on this. I’ll go to the core.”
“What? Jamie, they have guns. You can’t brain-stun a bullet.”
“What’s that?” He pointed to the bloodstained bandage on her arm. “And that?” Then a similarly soaked spot on her opposite shoulder.
“That’s nothing. My abilities will restore, they’ll heal.”
“Right. So you need to get this cable out. I’ll figure out the other part.”
“No, no, no. Damn it, if I can take two bullets, I can take a third. There’s a set of doors here to protect you. You stay here. I’ll go there.”
“Zoe, this is not up for debate,” Jamie said.
“You’re right,” she said with an exasperated sigh.
He knelt back down and returned to the exposed cable, which made him conveniently out of sight when she held her finger up and locked in, just the way Jamie had shown her. It seemed like weeks ago, but only hours had passed since the rooftop training in an attempt to recover her suit. Except unlike with Richard earlier, she used the slightest of taps, barely noticeable.
“Look, this is what you need to pull off—”
The words stopped abruptly, then she dashed over to see the results of her handiwork. He didn’t collapse, though he seemed more immobilized than anything else. Unlike other brain-stuns, his eyes tracked her.
Guess she perfected the light touch.
“Blink if you can hear me,” she said.
He blinked multiple times, eyes tracking her as she walked over and grabbed the walkie-talkie off his belt clip. “Looks like they’re on channel four. Set ours to, say, nine? It’ll just be us. So here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna get your feeling back and you’re gonna find a way to take out those cables. And I’m gonna leave here and break every door mechanism I find on the way. That’ll buy you time until I shut off the core and come back for you. Got it?” She finished switching the channel and placed it back on his belt clip, then adjusted the small headset hanging off his left ear. “And our policeman friend. You’ve got all the evidence you need here. Make sure those photos get through. That’ll clear both of us.”
Jamie’s eyes widened, his blinking intensifying. His ajar mouth opened farther as if someone turned an inner crank on his jaw muscles. An incomprehensible gurgling noise struggled out, probably his way of saying her name under this level of paralysis.
It didn’t matter. Not this time. “We got this,” she said. And though she couldn’t see herself, the warmth that radiated from her smile went deep into her chest. One more nod and then a thumbs-up, and then it was time to leave. The door to the lab opened, welcoming her into the front observation area. On the other side, she waited until the door slid shut and used what extraordinary strength she had left to smash into the door’s ID reader, then set out to do it again and again on the path to the basement.
The path that Waris showed her in her mind.
40
CLANG.
The noise rattled again, and Jamie dared to look at the thick door, indentations growing larger and larger. Next to it, the window showed Sasha Kaftan, still in her business suit, looking calm and professional.
Except for her repeated punches at the massive security door. About fifteen minutes had passed since Zoe left the room, six or seven since he’d managed to move freely again. And right before his arms and legs regained motion, he’d heard the first clang, not at the immediate door outside but somewhere farther out. Broken locks weren’t going to stop Sasha.
Zoe’s hearing ability wasn’t part of his arsenal of tricks. So the massive thump must have been pretty darn loud to get all the way through to the Project Electron room. He had glanced down at Waris, who remained static. No blue figure materialized to help him out, and instead, he’d willed himself back into movement as the noises got louder and more frequent, eventually leading to Sasha breaking through the hallway leading to the main entrance.
And now she was here, at the massive metal slab of door that protected Project Electron from the observation space.
The reception icon on Jamie’s phone showed a big white X, and the text screen teased him with the endless rotating circle next to the slate of photos that should have theoretically flown through digital space to Chesterton. Mercs with weapons, an animated burnt corpse in a tube, a person made of freakin’ electricity talking with Zoe, that all should have delivered enough to convince the police something in the place was worth investigating, hopefully to spark backup into storming the place.
Getting a phone signal in here sure would have helped.
Clang.
Anything would have helped at this point.
Jamie glanced back at Waris and the massive tangle of cables connecting the Electron casket to power and monitoring systems and other devices. Only one remained, but the skin on his fingers wore down raw as he tried to get the last cable out.
As if she read his mind, Kaftan’s voice projected from beyond the door. “Open the door, Jamie. I know what you’re trying to do. Pull those cables without managing the discharge and you’ll bring this whole place down on us.”
That might be true. It might be a completely empty threat. Jamie turned to Waris, whose eyes suddenly opened. “Three cables isn’t good enough here. A little help?”
Clang. Clang. Clang.
“Okay,” Jamie said, on the off chance that Waris somehow heard. “Here’s what I’m going to do. In the interest of time. I can’t get this fourth one. So I’m just gonna pull the fifth one. Out of order, I know. Sorry if it hurts. Right now, because your well-meaning wife is trying to use her abilities to stop me. So either point me to a toolbox with some screwdrivers or another method, or perhaps both. Alright?”
The words failed to generate any reaction from Waris, but the thrum of fist-hitting-metal increased, both in frequency and intensity. “Jamie?” Zoe’s voice squawked out of the headset.
“Zoe! Where the hell have you been?”
“Losing guards. There aren’t too many of them, but I took a few out. You should have seen it, I ripped this huge machine out of the wall and totally used it as a barricade. Told you it would come back. Hey, when we meet up, you can watch it in my memories.”
“You tore a machine out of the wall?”
“Yeah, came out pretty clean. Except there’s this pipe of green goo leaking now, but whatever, Kaftan’s mercs can do janitorial work. I’m almost at the basement.”
Another clang rattled the room, interrupting the conversation. “Not good, Zoe. Not good at all.”
“What?”
“Before you ask how it’s going. Not good. I still can’t get the bolts out of the fourth cable. I might just pull the fifth one. Or start smashing things.” The constant barrage from Kaftan didn’t help his shaking hands; his nerves probably hadn’t been this frayed since the first time he’d attempted to rob a bank and failed to keep his face hidden from security cameras. “But I’m pretty sure me smashing things isn’t as effective as you smashing things.”
