In her rearview mirror, the compound of the Mojave Huns exploded in a ball of orange flame. It was not an unexpected end for the gang—cooking meth required knowledge and discipline if you were to avoid blowing things up. But at this hour? Who would have left a fire burning in the “lab” at this hour?
She pulled off onto the shoulder. Less than a mile, a one-minute drive, separated her from the flaming annihilation of the gang . . . and of her own mother. Francis squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to see mental pictures of her mother blown apart, and at the same time desperately fending off a powerful but shameful emotion that swelled within her.
Relief.
She should cry, she thought. But tears did not come, nor did they seem likely to. She had long since given up on fantasies of rescuing her mother. Her mother had ceased to be a mother in any real sense. Francis had been on her own emotionally for years already.
“Bye, Mom,” she whispered. And after some hesitation, added, “Love you.”
I should cry. I should need to cry.
Heart in her throat, shaking with fear and the knowledge that she herself should have died, Francis motored on, passing Russell’s and merging onto the freeway. There was very little traffic and, acutely aware that she had no license, she kept to the speed limit.
But a feeling of being watched nagged at her, and when she looked up, she saw the ghostly gray plane gliding overhead, outlined against the stars. It banked away, and Francis thought she was done with it. But then, in the sky, a flare of flame.
In the time of a single heartbeat, it all came together in Francis’s mind. It was not meth cooking that had blown up the compound, it was the gray ghost in the sky, the gray ghost she’d seen on any number of news broadcasts: a Predator drone.
And it had just fired a second missile.
Francis punched the accelerator, and the bike leaped from sixty miles an hour to a hundred and ten in two blinks of an eye as the highway just a hundred yards back exploded. The blast wave nearly knocked her over, the bike fishtailing madly as she was pelted with gravel and felt the wave of hot air.
She roared on through the night, fear welling inside her alongside hope. The compound had gone up in smoke and flame. Her mother was probably dead, and maybe the day would come when she would mourn that properly, but right now it just meant that in all likelihood no one would be following her.
Except of course for whoever had just used a Predator drone to launch missiles, one of which had, incredibly, just blown a big hole in the westbound I-40. Her first thought after her mind returned to something like normal function was that the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, was getting awfully damn serious about cracking down on drug gangs.
But her second, more dangerous thought was that the Wells Fargo bank’s interior security cameras might still have been working on a Sunday. In which case . . .
It was after me!
She had some cash, a half tank of gas, an open road, and no goal but to somehow join up with that black girl on the Kawasaki.
That, plus a power whose uses she had barely begun to understand.
CHAPTER 8
The Symbiosis of Good and Evil
“ACCORDING TO GOOGLE Maps, it’s 10.3 miles from here to the county line. Round trip just over 20.5 miles.”
“And?” Cruz asked, indifferent.
They were in the backyard of their illegally occupied home, Cruz sitting on concrete steps, Shade pacing back and forth on what might have been a lawn once upon a time but was now a patch of dirt scarcely punctuated by the occasional weed.
“I want you to time me. I want to see how fast I am. And I want to see whether this works.” She held up a tangle of black nylon straps and a tiny black camera.
Cruz shook her head slowly—not negation, disbelief. “That’s what you think is most important? Really? We’re squatting in someone’s empty home, Malik is losing his mind, and—”
Shade gritted her teeth in frustration. “Listen to me, Cruz. Any time you want to take over and figure out our next plan, go for it. All right?” She slapped her chest angrily. “I don’t want the job, okay? I’m in way, way over my head, do you get that, Cruz? Way the hell over my head! I’m doing what I can, trying to at least find out what powers I have.”
Cruz let the anger burn out. “What’s the camera about?”
“I have an idea, probably a stupid one,” Shade said, calming herself. “Look, I think the more secrets the government can keep, the more trouble we’re in. People think Rockborn are the big threat, and the government is the solution. We need them to decide the opposite, at least some of them. We need at least some people out there who don’t think we’re some new kind of cockroach that needs to be stamped out.”
Cruz nodded, her expression cautious.
“I’m going to morph. I’ll strap the camera on as tight as I can, and I’ll take off as fast as I can. As soon as you see me disappear, push the stopwatch on your phone. As soon as I reappear, push it again.”
It was not, in fact, Cruz’s phone; it was a phone belonging to someone named Janice Harms. They had a routine for this kind of thing now, regular patterns of theft. Shade could snatch a dozen phones with a quick run through a mall or a Walmart, and inevitably one would have an easy password. Then they would quickly turn off the find-a-phone feature and use the phone for no more than twenty-four hours before replacing it. A lot of phones were stolen on any given day in the United States; not even HSTF-66 could track them all, let alone send investigators.
Shade turned her mind to the now-easy task of transforming. Strange, she thought, how easy it has become. I radically change my body like some kind of instant puberty, but it has become almost second nature to me. I might even stay in morph, were it not for . . . But that was a bad line of thinking because it led directly to the fact that Malik could not escape the Dark Watchers.
Shade closed her eyes for a moment, centering herself, trying to shut out everything else: Malik, Cruz, her father, all the people whose lives she had ruined. The instant she was morphed, the Dark Watchers were on her, like whispering ghosts.
She kicked off with a powerful thrust and ran, arms pumping, legs a blur, energy from who knew where. She ran down the highway, easily passing cars and trucks doing seventy, passing them so fast they seemed to be crawling.
Faster and faster until those speeding cars were mere blurs, until the desert landscape was nothing but a tan smear, until the jeans and T-shirt she wore over her angular, insectoid morph shredded, with a piece of it actually burning from the air friction.
The experience of moving at top speed was not like what she’d seen in movies. The passing world could be a blur, but because her perceptions were also accelerated, she could shift focus and see the passing world clearly as a series of still shots, like isolating one frame of a movie.
Sound was distorted, though, and there was no help for that. Her speed was nothing compared to the speed of light, but it was close to and occasionally exceeded the speed of sound. Sounds that were coming toward her from in front, from the direction of travel, arrived at a much higher pitch than normal. Sounds coming from behind were either low and draggy if she was below Mach 1, or fell away completely above that point.
She passed Mach 1, confirmed by the rumble that vibrated through her body, followed by a deepened silence, but as a regular thing breaking the sound barrier was a bad idea—it advertised her presence with a loud crack.
There were things to be learned about this power and how to exploit it. For example, she understood now that she could be effectively invisible, somewhat like an airplane propeller: an observer would feel the wind, hear the sound, and see something, but that something would be at most a blur. And the human brain had certain weaknesses that could be exploited, like persistence of vision, the human tendency to go on seeing what they’ve already seen; and confirmation bias, the human tendency to see only what they expected to see. People could be amazingly blind to what was right in front of their faces.
&n
bsp; Ten miles. It passed in forty-five seconds. She decelerated for the last half mile, tapped the county line sign, turned around, and raced back.
“One hundred and seven seconds,” Cruz said, holding up the phone as proof.
Shade said something in her hyper-speed buzz, then de-morphed and repeated it. “About eight hundred miles an hour. Give or take. Faster in a straight line where I don’t have to turn around.”
“I suppose you’ve noticed you’re about half naked,” Cruz said.
“Yeah.” Shade tugged at her jeans. The waist was broken at the back seam, the knees were gone, the cuffs were shredded. About all that was left intact of her T-shirt was the banded neck. “I need to find something stretchable enough to handle the morph but strong enough and tight-fitting enough to do distances at speed. Plus, I had to run part of the way with my hand on my head to hold on to the camera, so I need better straps. And probably boots, not sneakers.” Her sneakers were in tatters as well.
“Look on Amazon under ‘superhero clothing,’” Cruz said, the closest she’d come to a joke in days.
“I broke the sound barrier,” Shade said. “It was weird. I found out something about the body, though: the morph, it adjusts automatically. I could feel that I was losing contact with the ground, and then the shape of my body changed. Like a spoiler on a race car. The faster I went, the more down-pressure.”
“Swell,” Cruz said. “So?”
Shade flopped down beside Cruz on the steps. “So, I don’t know. I guess I thought it might clear my head.” She sighed. “The thing is, Cruz, we have no way to win. No matter how clever we are, sooner or later the government will get us. They can make lots of mistakes and still be the government. One mistake and we’re done.”
“Is that really our number-one enemy now, the government?”
“The others like us, the mutants, the Rockborn, they aren’t after us, not unless they work for the government. That starfish kid has no idea where we are and no interest in us.”
“So, what, we’re going to overthrow the government?” Cruz asked archly, obviously assuming it was snark. When Shade did not immediately shoot it down, Cruz’s expression darkened.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“The world is changing, Cruz. Has changed. Too much of the rock is out there, not just here, but around the world. The creeps in Washington will decide the only safe thing to do is kill us all.”
“Shade, we have laws, you know. The Constitution? All that stuff?”
“Do we?” Shade wondered aloud. She shook her head. “If you go about two hundred miles north from here you get to Manzanar, which is where the government locked up American citizens who happened to be of Japanese ancestry during World War II. The Constitution got over that, but lately it’s been pretty tattered and beat up. No, the government will start killing us off unless we join them. They have to.”
Cruz shifted uncomfortably, as the concrete had numbed her behind. Then she stood up, feeling the need to move. “So maybe we join up?”
“Do you really think the government won’t start using the Rockborn against regular people? You would make an amazing spy, for example. I could blow through someone’s house and pick up evidence—or plant phony evidence. Or kill someone, for that matter. The possibilities are endless. And they’d only accept us if they could control us, make slaves of us.”
“Okay, so we run off to some tropical island where no one has ever heard of the Rockborn.”
“Cruz, there is no place on earth where people haven’t heard of us. Certainly no place the CIA or whoever can’t follow us.”
Cruz walked away for a few steps, turned, and came back. “So? So we just hide until they catch us and kill us?”
“No. We need the public. People. We need the people to back us; that will make it harder for the government to just murder us.”
“And?”
Shade shrugged. “We need to do something big, something that will show that we can’t be screwed with, and it has to be something good and righteous that will make people . . .” She petered out.
“Love us?” Cruz said wryly. “Love a white girl who can go eight hundred miles an hour, a trans Latina who can turn invisible or appear as anyone, and a black boy who can send out blasts of unbearable pain? We’re not exactly the Avengers, here, Shade. So, unless you’re planning on curing cancer in your spare time, I’m not seeing this.”
But Shade wasn’t listening; she was thinking out loud. “If we could take down and deliver Tom Peaks, or better yet, that starfish kid. Or if we could pull off some huge rescue, which, yeah, isn’t so easy unless there just happens to be some big fire, earthquake, whatever, conveniently happening right where we are. Or . . .”
One of the depressing lessons they had learned was that life was not like comic books, where it seemed there was always some emergency requiring a superhero. When some extreme emergency occurred it was never near enough for them to do anything about it. Spider-Man could web-sling around Manhattan and always happen across some sort of crime being committed, but Malik—being Malik—had run the numbers, and it seemed statistically that Shade could race around any given city for a week and not happen to arrive just as a crime was about to start.
Malik’s conclusion had been grim. “The fact is that superheroes are only really useful if there are supervillains. The whole super thing is a net loss for the human race. Basically Magneto had it right—humans will always hate and fear mutants with powers, and for good reason.”
Shade had left that “or” dangling. Cruz almost didn’t want to ask, but with a sigh said, “Or?”
“Or,” Shade said, her lip curling, “we hit them so hard they’re scared to come after us. And we expose them.” She tapped the camera in her hand.
Cruz met Shade’s angry, intense stare. “We’re back to Malik’s system: hero, villain, monster. Let’s face it, we’re all monsters—mutants, Rockborn, CORs, whatever name we come up with—we’re monsters playing hero or playing villain.” Then, as if worried that Shade might be taking the villain option seriously, Cruz added, “By the way, I vote for hero.”
Shade nodded slowly. “The thing is, Malik’s right; it’s a symbiosis. If you asked regular people if they want superpowered creatures running around, they’d say no, kill them all, exterminate them. The only way they come to love us is if we’re the only ones standing between them and something worse.”
Then Cruz, words coming reluctantly, said, “I think . . . I think maybe you’re right. Maybe all the comic books have it wrong with all that secret identity stuff. I mean, if you’re just some freak in a mask, people don’t see you as a human being, and why would any normal support a masked, unknown freak with superpowers?”
“We need an enemy, and what we have is HSTF-66, the government. And we need to give people a reason to support us, not them.”
“So . . . ?”
“So, the Ranch,” Shade said at last. “The place Dekka told us about, up north. We could break in, record everything, and upload it.”
Cruz shook her head. “Why would that work?”
“Because what they’re doing there is illegal and unconstitutional and wrong.” Shade stood up, and her sidelong glance at Cruz was through shark’s eyes. “Better yet, it’s creepy and disturbing, and no one likes creepy.”
And because we would create chaos, and in times of chaos, people look for heroes, Shade thought.
Cruz said nothing, just exhaled a long, slow breath. “It’s all bad, isn’t it? It’s all bad choices. I just want to . . .” She made a frustrated gesture with her hands, like someone wrestling a glitchy Rubik’s Cube. “I just want to roll time back.”
“Back to before you met me.” It wasn’t a question, and Cruz didn’t answer it.
Shade nodded, accepting Cruz’s anger and frustration. “I’m going to find us something fast to drive,” Shade said. “I don’t want to run all that way, and anyway, I need you both with me. We’ll leave in an hour. Tell Malik.”
Shade walked away, shifting as she moved, then blurred and disappeared.
Cruz had her orders. And for the first time they had been just that: orders. Orders Shade had given; orders she knew Cruz would obey because she had no idea what else to do.
Nothing for her to do but help me dig the hole deeper still.
And be buried in it with me.
CHAPTER 9
Take Over the What?
“WELL, WELL, THIS is my lucky day!”
Dillon Poe came from a wealthy family. They had a five-bedroom, five-bath, swimming-pool, hot-tub, four-car-garage house in the Las Vegas gated community called the Promontory. Dillon had never been denied anything (legal) by his parents, and he’d certainly never worried about money.
Still, he had never before had a million dollars, and it was an interesting experience. The million was in stacks of chips formed into unstable towers between himself and the roulette board with its numbers from 0 and 00 to 36.
The croupier waved his hand over the rows of numbers and said, “No more bets.”
Dillon had ten thousand dollars on number 32—his lucky number—despite the fact that there was a thousand-dollar limit on bets. He was at the Venetian, one of the gaudier casinos, lurid and loud and presumably geared to impress aging rustics, three of whom were at the roulette table beside him. The three tourists as well as the croupier and the nearest pit boss had all been “spoken to” by Dillon and saw nothing unusual about the fact that the number 32 came up every time . . . despite not actually having come up even once.
The eye in the sky, the constant video surveillance that makes any casino a sort of semi-benign authoritarian state, should have alerted casino security, but Dillon had looked up at the glass hemisphere that concealed the nearest camera and said, “You up there. You see none of this.” He’d been lucky: seeing him looking up, they had activated the microphone. And then they, too, saw nothing at all wrong with Dillon’s impossible winning streak, or his decidedly reptilian face.
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