“We would have found a way out,” Ozella offered.
“That’s beside the point. How are we supposed to handle this going forward? How are we ever supposed to trust you again?” Helena asked, lowering her finger. “I understand that you don’t like the cards you’ve been dealt. I wouldn’t want…”
“Wouldn’t want what?” Zoe asked, her face hardening.
“I wouldn’t want to be half-transformed either, but there’s not much we can do about it at the moment.”
“Which is why I went to him,” said Zoe. “He promised to cure this.”
“I know, but that still doesn’t excuse what you have done. I don’t want you to be part of this team anymore. I don’t want you to be anywhere near us as we try to pool our powers and do some good in this world. I have enough problems being the chair of the Board of Knight Corp. I’m also aware I’m leading a double life here, which only adds to my problems. My point is we don’t need this kind of shit.”
“So that’s it, you’re casting me out?” Zoe asked, a pained look in her eyes.
“You definitely deserve it, but it’s not up to me. We are a team, and we’re going to take a vote. It’s as simple as that. And I’m voting ‘no.’ No, I don’t want you to remain as part of our group. So I vote ‘no.’” Helena turned to Ozella.
“I vote ‘yes,’” Ozella said, looking to Dinah, the ghostly woman glaring at Zoe. “I should be the angriest out of everyone here, but I…” She cleared her throat. “I’m a big believer in second chances. Stupid, I know, but I don’t think you were actively trying to harm any of us. I think that if things had gone how you planned, you would have had me heal Dr. Hamza, and you would have brought me back here. He would work on the cure in secret, and no one, aside from maybe Dinah, would have known what happened.”
Zoe nodded, more tears coming as she looked away from Helena.
“So I vote ‘yes.’”
“Then there is only one vote left,” Helena said, pretty sure she knew where this was going.
Helena approached Zoe and began untying her bindings. “You are seriously lucky,” she whispered to the tiger girl, who still had her head bent forward, her eyes half closed as guilt washed over her.
Chapter Fifty-One: Taking Stock and Stocking Up
(Sam eats toast twice in this chapter.)
It’s not often that one wakes up to find most of their problems solved, but that’s exactly what happened to Sam Meeko’s lucky ass.
“Come in,” he said after he’d heard a knock at his door. The man with the suped up olfactory senses smiled when he saw the sexy tomboy known as Helena peek her head in, quickly joined by Ozella, who held a tray of breakfast food and a cup of tea.
“Breakfast in bed?” Sam asked, recalling the last time Ozella had brought him food. He could get used to this. Ozella was keenly aware of his dietary needs, his breakfast consisting mostly of bread-based items and a small bowl of freshly cut fruit.
Helena smirked. “Don’t get used to it. Zoe is back in, we had a vote.”
“But I didn’t vote,” he said as he took the tray from Ozella, who sat to the left of him, at the foot of the bed.
“Were you going to vote against her?” Helena asked.
Sam considered his next words carefully. “Fair point. Where is she now?”
“Showering and resting. The dry cleaner has our outfits now, and they should be ready by this afternoon.”
“We’ll need them that quickly?” Sam asked, knowing all too well where Helena was going with this.
“Mister Fist and his crew will assault Fang at the drop-off point tonight; we plan to be there to help out if need be.”
“You’re being serious?” Sam asked, looking to Ozella for any indication this was some sort of elaborate joke.
“I’m completely serious,” Helena said with an affirmative nod. “If they need our help, we’ll help; if not, maybe we can learn something about how they work together.”
“And how do you plan for us to see them? They already told us we can’t come; if they find us at the scene of a crime again, they’ll turn us in.”
“Do you really think I’d come to you without a strategy?”
“No,” Sam admitted, going for a piece of toast.
“Good. Eat your breakfast and meet us in the gym. Come on, Ozella,” Helena said. Once she reached the door, she opened it, allowing Ozella to step out first. “You weren’t planning on sleeping in all day, were you?” Helena asked over her shoulder to Sam.
“Not any longer.”
***
Ozella Rose’s field of vision was cluttered with information. Not able to sleep until late, she had experimented the previous night with writing in her Book of Known Variables, her words and thoughts now floating in the air before her.
She tried writing in other places to see if it would act the same way, but it didn’t seem to work; something about her notebook and the connection she had with it was unlike anything she could replicate with another medium. Ozella supposed it was because of the design of the notebook, a handmade number with thick paper and leather binding, but this also made no sense to her.
Why did it work with just one book?
Waiting for Sam in the gym now, Helena going through her warm-up routine, Ozella erased the information she’d written the previous night as a test. As she did so, the words and phrases (mostly from songs she liked) disappeared from her field of vision.
Ozella knew she was missing something.
It frustrated her to no end that there was some part of her power that she hadn’t figured out yet. And it was on the cusp of her mind too, just waiting for her to pluck the concept, yet she couldn’t reach it.
All she could do was write down information, the words instantly appearing in the air before her. She was also able to make simple queries based on what she wrote, as she had by writing the word “name” with a colon next to it, which was what she wanted to focus on now.
Looking at Helena, Ozella starting jotting down a word she’d tried on herself last night.
By writing the word “test” and looking at herself in a mirror, Ozella had been able to get a response instructing her to try the same word on her team members.
So that was what she did. As soon as Ozella finished writing the word “test” and focused on Helena, an answer appeared before her eyes next to the word.
Test: Mirrors
She looked at the floating words that only she could see for a moment, repeating them aloud. “Test, mirrors.”
An idea came to her in that instant, a way to better understand how Helena could use her powers through reflective surfaces.
Bubbling with excitement, Ozella waited for Helena to quit tumbling. As she waited, her mind spinning, Ozella wondered if her odd power simply unlocked subconscious thoughts, the act of writing them bringing the thought to the surface.
“Whew,” Helena said, after she made her landing. She turned to Ozella, an eyebrow rising as she tried to interpret the look on Ozella’s face.
“We need to use your mirrors,” Ozella told her almost frantically.
“My mirrors?”
“Your hypnosis power. Will it work in a mirror? Does the person you’re seeing have to have eye contact with you or do you simply need to see their eyes? We know that your command has to be verbalized, but will it work through reflective surfaces?”
Helena nodded. “That would be something worth testing.”
“Do you have an assistant or someone you can call here who we can test it on?” Ozella asked.
“Bryan is busy with some of the tasks I’ve given him, but I’m sure he can send an intern. What do you think?”
“Sure,” Ozella said. “We’ll need a hand mirror too.”
“I’ll grab the mirror and order the intern over,” Helena said, turning to the gym’s exit. “Hang tight a moment.”
Ozella summoned Dinah as she waited, admiring the bluish nude woman and wondering why there were no stats about her. She’d tried
multiple times to use her “write into reality” technique to get information about Dinah, all to no avail.
“Who are you?” Ozella asked for what had to be the thousandth time.
Dinah offered her a faint smile.
“Why have you been around me all my life?”
As usual, no response.
Ozella had noticed long ago that Dinah looked somewhat like how Ozella would look if she were ten to fifteen pounds lighter. The ghostly woman also aged with Ozella, always appearing to be close to her age.
But that was it.
There was literally nothing else, from birthmarks to any verbal confirmation regarding her identity.
Dinah was an enigma.
Ozella didn’t know how long she stared at Dinah, who floated six inches above the ground at the moment, but she was finally interrupted when Helena re-entered the gym with an intern behind her, a young woman in a pantsuit who had a nervous look on her face.
“How do you want to do this, Ozella?” Helena asked, Dinah fading away.
“The first thing we’ll need to test is eye contact versus no eye contact without a mirror. Let’s start without eye contact.”
Helena smiled at the intern, her eye starting to kaleidoscope but not making actual eye contact. Instead, Helena looked at the intern’s leather heels. “I want you to try to fly.”
The intern scoffed. “Do what?”
“Fly. Try to fly for me.”
“Um…” The female intern looked to Ozella in confusion. The woman in the schoolgirl outfit nodded, noting that, as they had discovered earlier, eye contact needed to be made for Helena’s power to work.
“Look at me,” Helena told the intern, “I want you to fly.”
As soon as the intern locked eyes with Helena she started flapping her arms, and once that didn’t work, she moved to an object to climb to give her some height. She was just about to climb to the top of a piece of exercise equipment when Helena stopped her, instructing the intern to return to her normal self.
“Now,” said Ozella, “let’s try using mirrors. First we’ll start with just one reflection.”
They walked over to one of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors, Helena allowing the intern to step forward.
The intern was nervous, not really understanding why she was standing before a mirror with the CEO of the Knight Corporation off to her left, and a woman wearing a cosplay schoolgirl outfit next to her.
But she also didn’t want to lose her job. Or internship. Or whatever.
“I want you to fly,” Helena told the woman, now making eye contact with her through the mirror’s reflection.
Predictably, the woman started to flap her wings, the look of apprehension leaving her face as Helena’s hypnosis took over. “And stop,” said Helena once she was satisfied the woman was under her control. “Return to normal.”
The intern’s shoulders slouched a bit, worry returning to her face. “What are we doing, Ms. Knight? Is everything okay?”
“Everything is fine,” Helena said as she turned to Ozella. “So mirrors work, but I have to be making eye contact.”
Ozella smiled. “That brings us to our next experiment. Use the hand mirror to look at your hypnotizing eye, aiming the mirror over your shoulder so she can see it.”
“What are you talking about?” the intern asked, looking at them in confusion.
Without an explanation, Helena turned her back to the woman, the hand mirror reflecting her hypnotizing eye. “I want you to fly,” she said, once the intern was in her line of vision and starting to recoil at the weirdness of whatever was being done to her.
As she had before, the woman attempted to fly again, batting her arms, jumping, ruffling up the ends of her pantsuit.
“Stop, and return to normal,” Helena said after turning to the woman.
The intern stopped flapping her arms, immediately noticing she was slightly out of breath. “What’s happening?” she asked again.
“Quiet for a moment,” Helena told her, making eye contact again.
“It works through a mirror, and it also works by simply reflecting your eye onto a mirror and someone looking at the reflection,” Ozella said. “We should probably test two reflections too, you looking at the hand mirror, which is facing the wall mirror, which the intern is also looking at.”
Helena did as instructed, the intern eventually flapping her arms again, jumping, and trying her damndest to become a bird.
“Stop,” Helena said, “return to normal but don’t say anything.”
The intern did as instructed, nervously staring at herself and the two of them in the mirror’s reflection.
“If all it takes is someone seeing your eye, maybe we can work a way to use mirrors in a battle, or for espionage,” Ozella suggested. “I’m not an illusionist, so I don’t know how we’d project your eye at the moment, but something like using the glint of a mirror to catch someone’s attention then quickly making eye contact could really work wonders in the right situation.”
“And there are other reflective surfaces,” Helena added, “not just mirrors. The person or people just need to see my eye, that’s it. Good work. Really. Let’s keep exploring this. In the meantime, it would probably be best to send the intern back.” Helena looked back to the big mirror, smiling at the female intern. “I’m going to order a teleporter for you. I want you to forget everything that has happened over the last ten minutes, and take the rest of the day off. I’ll handle this on the company side so no one will wonder about your absence.”
The intern nodded at Helena’s reflection, a dead look in her eyes.
***
Heroes Anonymous (damn, they needed a new name) wasn’t done taking stock or stocking up.
Sam had since joined Helena and Ozella in the gym, Helena again focusing on Sam’s physical training by changing the direction of his blood flow, having him stay upside down as long as possible, even if it made Sam feel like he was seconds away from passing out.
Writing “test” in Ozella’s notebook returned the word “distance,” which was something they hadn’t tested yet.
Helena’s gym was big. It ran the length of the western side of the home, a space the size of the blocks of rowhouses that usually popped up along the perimeter of richer neighborhoods.
Instructing Sam to stand on the far end, near the entrance, Ozella had him pinch his nose, moving backward at five-foot intervals while she held a recently cut blood orange in one hand, and a cashmere scarf in the other. She would start with the cashmere scarf, the orange behind her back, telling Sam to see if he could discern where it was made.
Treating the object as if it were a target, Sam homed in on the scarf, his nostrils flaring. Sam imagined that he was sniffing only that object, ignoring the exercise equipment and other gear around them.
At five feet it worked, and of course the orange worked. Even Helena could smell that.
At ten feet, Ozella asked him to tell her the last time the scarf was worn.
Ten feet was a little more difficult for Sam. A vein appeared on his head as he kept inhaling, sorting through all the various smells before him, from the tumbling mat to the parallel bars. At five feet, Sam could tell that the scarf was last worn by a woman named Juniper, who was Helena’s oldest friend, but anything past that was fuzzy.
Just as they were about to try again, Zoe Goa Ramone entered the gym, still not making eye contact with anyone as she said, “Hello.”
“Ready to train?” Ozella asked.
“That’s why I’m here,” said Zoe.
“We need something else from you,” Helena said, jumping right into business. “You had those metal tiger claws earlier, before your transformation, and we need other tech like that.”
“You mean illegal tech?” Zoe asked, looking up at Helena, but still not quite making eye contact. She was in her hooded sweater as usual, a pair of tights with her tail sticking out the back, her ears shifting down a little bit every time she looked toward one of them.
“Yes, we need something that prevents telepathy, and not the collars that we already have,” she said, referring to what Dr. Hamza had placed on Ozella and Zoe. “I know bracelet versions exist, I’ve seen them before on security guards.”
Zoe nodded. “They exist.”
“We also need wrist guards, for Ozella and Sam. We can get rid of the one that we took from Dr. Hamza. I want to get really nice ones that also have shields on them. You know what, I should probably have a wrist guard as well, at least with the shield, and mine should be smaller. What about you? What tech would you like? Don’t worry about the cost.”
Zoe considered this for a moment. “I used to use various bombs, mostly just smoke bombs, but having small fragment bombs could be helpful. There are stink bombs as well, but I figure that may send Sam down a dark path.”
“Yes, please, no stink bombs,” said Sam. He had experienced these stink bombs before his heightened olfactory sense kicked in. They were brutal.
“So three wrist guards, anti-telepath tech, bombs for you, what else?” Helena asked.
“A shield could be handy for me as well, but I’m afraid my transformation may shatter it,” said Zoe. “We can see if they have a different type, maybe a necklace, or something that could go on my waist that I could activate by pressing, although that would only be helpful in a ballistic situation. Look, I know a guy. He runs a real shitty bodega, but he has the best tech around.”
“Is it open?” Ozella asked.
“He never really closes,” said Zoe with a shrug. “We can go after training, get some food along the way. Do we have an ETA for when we should be at the drop-off point tonight?” Zoe asked Helena, indicating to Sam that she had been briefed on everything before he was told of their evening plan.
“I would like to be there around three or four; we may have to stick it out for a while. Someone will likely sweep the area, but I don’t think Mister Fist will. I think any sweeping by his group will be done by MindLenz, and of course Fang may do a preliminary check. So let’s shoot for three. I’ll put in a request to expedite our uniforms.”
We Could Be Heroes Page 30
