City Without Heroes

by Tanya Lisle

  Indira did nothing to settle those fears he was having – she would be a lot happier if he had some impression that she wasn’t to be trifled with – but kept looking at him evenly. She didn’t smile, instead taking another drink from her cappuccino. “I’m going to need to know what happened,” Indira said. “I know Penny’s already planning to go back and try to fix this, but I get the feeling your track record has been pretty bad so far. Something about reversing time over and over again?”

  “Wha- How did you-”

  Indira held up a hand to stop him. “You’re being more careful this time, but it’s not really enough,” she told him. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have needed the save. So you’re going to tell me exactly what you’re doing so I can make sure this time around, you don’t go messing this up.”

  Matt said nothing, staring at her. He tried to look around, to see if the café was about to crumble around him again, but didn’t want to look away from Indira for too long. He was ready to run as soon as he got the chance, but it was dawning on him that there was nowhere for him to go.

  “A base,” she said. She smiled apologetically at the interruption. “Ms. Richards asked a question,” she told him. “But class is starting to wind down a little. You might want to hurry up and tell me what I want to know or I might just leave you in here.”

  Matt wasn’t sure if she was joking or not, but after her outburst, he was clearly not inclined to take her lightly. As he relaxed, Indira gave him the benefit of a small space on the table for his memories of the night to play out between them.

  “We made it to the tower,” he said, as it came into view. It was paved and there wasn’t much around for cover, but that was apparently why they had Alan with them. They were cloaked in nothing, but somehow their presence became very fuzzy and they moved quickly across the field. Esther was there with them as well, knife already in hand. “Nothing was wrong. There wasn’t anything strange about it, but Penny and I, we’ve done this before. We knew it was something more than what it seemed.”

  He shook his head and considered taking a drink before putting it back down and putting both of his hands on the table. “None of the lights were on and we didn’t see any people around there at all. It was just us there and nothing else. And so we got a little closer and while Penny started working on the tower, I started working the lock to the trap door.”

  Where Alan was nearly incorporeal and able to move like a ghost through everything, including the small watchtower, Indira could see that Esther had been trained in very different ways. She started to climb up the tower to get a height advantage in case anything should come.

  Meanwhile, Matt started working with Penny pushing things back and forth and doing things that Indira could never quite grasp. She never knew what was happening when she looked at magic, but Matt and Penny seemed to know exactly what they were doing as they unsurfaced the first set of doors from the ground and punched in a code to open them.

  Above them, Esther smacked one of the beams loudly, earning her a glare from the magicians down below. She shook her head, but as Matt looked back at what he was doing, Indira never got to see what her following expression was. Instead, she started tapping on the beams in a pattern that Indira recognized, but could not understand. She was definitely trained in something, though Indira had no idea what.

  “It’s not even one of the main towers,” he insisted. “It should have been abandoned for the night. But we made it as far as the first layer of locks on the door. “It’s not a lot of magic, really, but it does involve a bit of delicate work, and knowing what numbers to press in the right sequence. But as soon as we got that first door out, it started going very wrong. I don’t know how they did it, but they killed something in all of us.”

  Alan became very corporeal all of a sudden and both Penny and Matt were very confused. Whatever magic they had access to fell away and they were both looking wildly around at their hands and at each other, silently wondering if there was something that they were missing.

  And then there was a shot. The scream from Alan rang through the night as he fell to the ground. They were already looking around for whatever it was that had taken him out. Matt ran fast to get Alan out of the way of whatever was hitting him, but there were figures that melted in from somewhere in the night.

  “Except Esther, looks like,” Indira noted. Up from her high point, she was already at work, glints of metal flying through the air. She shook her head wildly, looking like she wanted to start yelling at them despite the fact that they were surrounded and she didn’t want to give away her position.

  Despite the knives hitting their targets, she didn’t manage to make anyone go down. Instead, many of the knives bounced harmlessly off of them and she was soon out of ammunition as the dark shapes came into the light of the tower and they could see what they were. There were men in hazmat suits coming towards Matt and Penny, armed and with their weapons raised.

  “It was a mess,” Matt said, shaking his head as he watched the memory play out. “We were completely surrounded and we really had no chance. We thought it was going to be simple. There was never anyone at this one!”

  Alan threw himself up to pull Matt down with him and out of the line of fire. Esther dropped on Penny, pushing her against side of the door and yelling at her to get out of there. Esther moved like a snake through the air, rushing at the first group and weaving her way between them. There was no super speed in her movements and no sign that she had any abilities whatsoever except a great deal of training.

  “And then your uncle showed up.”

  Uncle Ness was there as Quantum, dressed in full costume and a thick coat that he tended to only bring out when he was expecting to get shot at. He went for Penny first, waving his hand and Penny disappeared. It had been a while since she saw Uncle Ness in action, but he was efficient. He always said that was why he never got famous.

  He waved another hand and three of the people attacking them vanished. Quantum moved as the shots started, yelling at people to clear out, and Esther was quick to do just that. She ran off into the night without so much as a look back as Quantum cut a hole in the ground and dropped three more down it.

  “I didn’t really follow most of what was happening, but he saved us.”

  Quantum dropped the earth he took out of the ground on the people around Matt and Alan, knocking them down and burying them.

  “He told us to get out of there and he was looking kind of tired from all of that,” Matt told her. “We thought it was over, but apparently not so much.”

  Uncle Ness went over to pull Alan and Matt out of there. He did look a little winded, though not enough to be worried. He was probably more tired from trying to track down Penny and Matt than the fight itself.

  Which was probably why he wasn’t paying much attention.

  He looked down at them and offered a smile and a hand up. Alan was hurt pretty badly, so he offered him a quick lift to the hospital. And by a quick lift, he lifted him out of the ground and told Alan that he’d be along in a moment before Alan completely disappeared.

  He offered a hand to Matt, who was wide eyed and full of questions. He took Matt’s hand, asking if Matt could get out of there on his own. When Matt opened his mouth, what came out instead was a warning. There was something moving behind them. Quantum pushed him back down into the hole, but took the shot himself. He yelled and Matt got the hell out of there as the crossfire started.

  Indira did her best to keep herself together as she watched it, but it was hard. Uncle Ness wasn’t even involved in any of this. He was only here because Indira had told him about Whitten. Only because Indira had gone along with the plan to get Matt and Penny out so they could do this in the first place.

  But Uncle Ness wasn’t dead. He was something else. Which meant maybe she could get him back.

  She took a deep breath and tried to keep herself together, though the edges of the cafe started to vibrate and fade. “Okay,” she said evenly. “You have a commu
nication issue. Have you gotten in touch with Esther since this happened? Is she at school again?”

  “I don’t really know,” Matt said. “We tried to get in touch with her, but Penny thinks she probably went out of town to try and get more knives after all of that. She lost a lot of them. I doubt she even knows about what happened.”

  “She knows,” Indira told him. “From the look of it, someone made sure she knew what she was doing. And she was trying to warn you that things were going south well before you even started to see the problem. Looks like Alan was too, since he got shot in the back running toward you.”

  Matt didn’t look up or risk meeting her eyes as he grunted in agreement. He felt bad enough from everything that had happened and he wasn’t ready to listen to someone tell him what they had done wrong. He didn’t really want to be doing this at all right now, but that was too damn bad for him. They had killed her uncle, so now they were going to have to deal with her.

  “When are you going back?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “You’re going to tell me when you’re heading back to try and fix this,” Indira told him. “If you ever want to get out of here again-”

  “You can leave me in here for all I care,” he said, finally looking back up. “You’re not coming with us. There’s already enough people getting tangled up in this. Penny keeps trying to bring more people in. She thinks all we need is the right combination of people and we can just keep trying it again and again.”

  “And you think that if just the two of you go in, you’re going to do any better?” Indira asked. When he shook his head, she continued. “I’m not planning to come with you, Matt. I’m not the punch people in the face sort. I was intentionally cheating the powers test so that no one would try to come and recruit me. But I do want my uncle back and you all are too scared to talk around the specks.”

  “They’re always listening,” he said defensively. “We aren’t sure what sets them off yet, but there’s something that makes them extremely volatile and I’m not sure that they’re not watching us all the time. We’ve had to be so careful.”

  “But I can make it so you guys can communicate,” Indira told him. “So tell me when you’re making the plans and where. I’ll be there and I’ll see for myself if it’s worth helping you, or if I have to keep trying to do this on my own.”

  “How do you know your uncle isn’t dead?”

  Indira shook her head. “I got two people telling me he’s something other than dead so far,” Indira told him. It wasn’t entirely accurate, but she needed to believe it. “Something that neither of them has seen before. So you haven’t killed him yet, but something else happened and I’d really like for him to come back. So when is Penny’s plan to fix it happening?”

  “We put out the call already,” he told her. “Anyone who’s up for it is coming out to the Welcoming Committee meeting this Friday and we’re going to see if we can get a rescue team together.”

  “And you know where you’re even going to find anyone?” Indira asked.

  Matt was quiet. “We’ll figure it out. Alan would have, but…”

  “How bad was it?” Indira asked. Getting shot was not something to be taken lightly.

  Matt shook his head. “He lost a lot of blood. It looked like a pipe went through his shoulder. He ended up saying that he got drunk and fell on one. They have him stable at least. But he’s going to be out of school for a while after that. I don’t know when he’ll be back or if he’s ever going to be the same.”

  “How did you even get him involved in this?” Indira asked. “He doesn’t seem like the ass kicking sort.”

  “His older brother went missing a little while after he moved here,” Matt told her. “When he disappeared, he kept finding these things that told him that he had a brother, but he couldn’t remember him. He ended up going to me because I reached out back in the day and he was scared he was losing his mind. But when we mentioned that we were thinking about finding a way to take this place down, then he was in for anything. But he shouldn’t have been there last night.”

  “He was probably a good choice,” Indira told him. “Based on what you were planning, he could have probably gotten through everything if you knew that they could knock powers and magic out. Right up until that point, you were good. But you guys rely on your abilities too much. You’re going to have to learn to use your brains and be ready for things shorting out on you in the future.”

  “How do you know so much about this?”

  “It runs in the family,” Indira said with a small smile. “You grow up around it, you have friends who get into it, you learn a few things about not dying when you’re playing hero. But I’m not in unless I think you’re going to actually not get your asses handed to you this time. And you’re going to strategize in a way so that you aren’t putting everyone else at risk this time. I can see so many things that were wrong with your last plan.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Alan can go through objects. You could have sent him through to open the door from the inside.”

  “We weren’t sure how deep the door was or if it was guarded.”

  “I can read your mind while you’re in here, you know,” she said flatly. “You didn’t think of it. And that’s why you’re going to need some help. If I think you can actually do it. For now, though, class is wrapping up. We need to get out of here.”

  “I’ll let Penny know,” Matt said, finally able to get up from his chair. He stood up as he spoke, looking relieved that Indira wasn’t going to leave him in here.

  “Oh, did you think you were remembering this?” Indira asked. She smiled and the café collapsed into nothing.

  Gently, Indira prodded Matt’s shoulder as he rested slumped over on the desk and breathed evenly out of his mouth. He jolted up, jumping as the people around him in class were starting to pack up and looked around to see what the time was. He drew his phone out of his pocket to double check.

  “Sleep well?” Indira asked, smirking as he ran his hand through his hair to put it back in place. He looked down at his sheet of notes, most of which were simply the word Energy written over and over again.

  “I can’t believe I did that,” he said, looking around and blinking like something was still in his eyes. He wiped them with the back of his hand and Indira laughed as she packed up, good natured and gentle.

  “I’ll let you borrow my notes,” she offered. “You can copy them during lunch if you want.”

  “Thanks Indira,” he said. “You’re a lifesaver.”

  Chapter 17

  Double Booked

  Alan didn’t reappear at school that week and the rumours of him getting drunk and ending up in the hospital started to circulate. It was almost mundane the way they talked about it. Usually when she heard rumours about her hospitalized classmates, there was also mention of property damage or a name drop of some hero or villain. It was also strange how easily everyone seemed to accept that something like this had happened, that no one really thought it was strange that he would fall on a random pipe with no witnesses. No one was even asking where this had happened.

  At least Penny wasn’t so nervous around her now that she stopped asking about Saturday night. She wouldn’t mention Alan, avoiding any conversations around what had happened after he left the party in a drunken stupor, and instead asked her again to come to the Welcoming Committee meeting on Friday. Indira insisted she had a date with the library and that History paper so that she could have a weekend free of obligations.

  Penny continued to ask right up until they parted ways after school on Friday, Indira setting herself up in the library. She tucked herself into a back corner, surrounded by books with her laptop in front of her. True to her word, she started working on her paper, flipping through the pages and taking notes, watching the clock as it slowly crept forward.

  Fifteen minutes later, Indira figured it had been long enough for the meeting to wind down. She let her mind drift away, wanderi
ng down into the classroom where the meeting had largely dispersed, leaving a few familiar faces behind. Esther was there, doing something to the lock on the door. Laura and Brittany were sitting on one side of the room, arms crossed and glaring at everyone. Ronnie was on his own on another side. There were a few people who Indira didn’t recognize, but she had seen Penny talking to in the past. She made a note of their faces as she watched.

  “A pipe through his shoulder?” Brittany demanded. “That’s the best you guys could come up with?”

  “You can leave if you’re not interested,” Penny told her coldly. She looked around and took count. “Last chance to back out before we actually do this.”

  Laura and Brittany stayed quiet as Esther wandered over to sit on one of the desks. “So much concern,” she teased. “Almost like you actually cared about what happened to him. Like you’re not just here to talk everyone else out of anything. Just like every other time you’ve shown up.”

  “I just want to see if the mastermind here has actually worked out that we’re right yet or if she’s going to keep trying to get more people in trouble. I notice she still hasn’t managed to convince the new girl to show up, though. Looks like at least someone is listening to us.”

  “I doubt she can do anything useful anyway.” Something changed on Penny’s face when she said it, her eyes going to everyone else in the room. “I’m not making anyone do anything they don’t want to do. This is purely a voluntary thing. If you want to do this, you can. If not, you’re free to step out the door. No strings attached.”

  “Yeah, you’ve said that,” Laura said. “Now get on with it. What’s going on that you called us and what are you planning to do now?”

  “Last time didn’t go well,” Penny said. “We got bailed out someone else took the fall for us. We have to set that right.”

  “You mean Alan?” Ronnie asked. “How did that even happen with him? I thought he couldn’t… you know, I didn’t think anyone could touch him.”