#Herofail

by Lexie Dunne

  I shook my head and held on, only now realizing that I was trembling slightly. “Tamara Diesel developed a gas to take out the Raptor. Or something. I don’t know. It didn’t work.”

  Guy drew back in confusion. “You were in the Raptor armor? I thought Jessie wanted you to wait on that.”

  “Kiki thought the situation called for it,” I said. I grabbed his hands. “Guy, it’s bad. Tamara Diesel shot Jessie—she’s in surgery now, and we’re still waiting on news.”

  The color drained from Guy’s face. He’d known Jessie a lot longer than I had; she’d been the one to recruit him to Davenport, back when he was running around in colored sweats. They might not have seemed close, but I knew he’d gone to her for advice more than once.

  “Right.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he composed himself. “Right. Well. She’s strong. Healthy. And when you think about it, she’s the second most stubborn woman on the planet, really.”

  “Hey,” Angélica said.

  “Third most stubborn, my bad,” Guy said with a weak smile. This time I could feel the tremors in his hands. I squeezed them, and he straightened up. “What’s this about a gas? Please tell me it’s just garden-variety toxins.”

  “No can do,” Zack said, and a note in his voice made me turn. He swiveled the screen so that we could all see. It took me a minute to realize why the image of what looked like a bug with tiny legs and obviously fabricated parts on the screen felt familiar: I’d seen it before. But it had been in an obstacle course user manual, not my friend’s bloodstream.

  “Nanobots,” I said. “They were dosing everybody with nanobots.”

  “Holy shit,” Naomi said. Her face twisted, unable to settle on an expression between freaked out and curious. “There are tiny robots inside of me?”

  “Inside all of you. But they’re only active in you.” Zack typed rapidly. “I’ve never seen any this complex before, or this small. They’re not moving in the other samples.”

  “Could they start moving?” I asked, unnerved. My body could rebel against me at any second, which wigged me out. Picking up new powers was bad enough. Nanobots? No thanks.

  “I don’t know.” Zack’s voice remained distracted. “Maybe it’s a binary—attack people with powers, or without. Not sure why they’re set up this way.”

  “Because they thought Raptor had no powers, probably.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much,” Zack said, but his voice was distracted as he typed. “The Mobium will probably expel them on its own.”

  “Robots. Little tiny robots in the bloodstream capable of triggering pain at any time, and there’s a supervillain running around spraying people willy-nilly.” I leaned against Guy. “I need to go back to the Nest and look for whoever built these things.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Angélica said. She pressed her palm against the wall. A shelf opened and she pulled out several bottles of water. “Until we know more, everybody stay hydrated.”

  Since “more water” was pretty much her response to everything, and her evening had been just as terrible as mine, I didn’t point out that drinking water would hardly flush the potentially deadly nanobots from our systems. Instead, I turned to Naomi. “Do me a favor? Please do what Zack tells you and don’t go running off.”

  She looked as though she were about to protest. “At least let me make calls.”

  “Sure, that’s fine.”

  “He took my phone.” She pointed at Zack.

  He cleared his throat. “Company policy—”

  Angélica tapped the wall again and another panel opened, dropping Naomi’s phone into her hand. “It’s easier this way,” she said to him as she tossed the phone to Naomi. “Keep her here.”

  Zack looked a trifle shell-shocked as we left. I didn’t blame him.

  At the Nest, I changed out of the scrubs and into my normal under-armor gear. Guy poked his head in as I was pulling on shoes. “Is the kitchen stocked?”

  “Angélica went shopping Thursday,” I said.

  “Excellent. I’ll throw something together. It’s going to be a long night.”

  I wasn’t hungry, but I knew cooking relaxed Guy, so I smiled and thanked him, and joined Angélica in the HEX room.

  I waved my hand over the scanner by the door to activate my holofield. Two stations of holographic monitors spanned the room, each six feet tall and encircling a small platform with a hip-height podium. Each monitor could split into smaller sectors as needed. It made for an excellent way to see the bigger picture and how pieces might connect. Angélica typically used the room as a command center, as the cameras in the suit’s mask allowed her to serve as a second pair of eyes. “Where should we start?” I asked.

  “I’ll check in on any recent encounters with Diesel. Who else did you say was there?” Angélica asked. “Lady Danger?”

  “Dog lady from hell, yeah. There were others, but you’ll have to check the surveillance footage for them. I’ll check on Mobius.”

  All had been quiet on the Mobius front lately. “Too quiet” felt cliché, but as supervillains had taught me over the years: clichés existed for a reason. On the surface, Christoph Mobius seemed to be made up of nothing but clichés, too. But one only had to dig a little deeper to discover that his life’s work had a purpose behind it. He’d created the Demobilizer to suppress superpowers because his daughter had been killed by a man with Villain Syndrome. In an ultimate fit of irony, that same research had led to Mobium, which created superheroes wholesale and kept life interesting. But the Demobilizer was why I called up his file now. No way he wasn’t somehow involved.

  Live video showed that he was in a cell buried deep in Davenport’s system, sleeping, which a guard was happy to confirm for me. Logs showed that his only visitor in the past two months had been Kiki. Short, perfunctory visits that felt more dutiful than anything else.

  Neither visit had a transcript. It paid to have the Davenport name, I supposed.

  I checked records of guards who had spent time with him, and found nothing suspicious. Unless Mobius had coerced a guard into doing his dirty work and had kept it a secret, that seemed like a dead end.

  Though—Mobius wasn’t the only one involved in his work. Lodi Corp and one scientist in particular had played a huge part in it as well.

  Davenport had effectively dismantled Lodi Corp—somewhat literally, as Jessie and I had blown up one of Lodi’s research facilities after they’d tortured me. But like all cockroaches, some of the staff had slipped through the cracks. One of those had been both apprentice and jailor to Dr. Mobius, a real milquetoast waste of humanity named Elwin Lucas. He’d attempted to sell the Demobilizer to save his own skin, but thanks to Vicki, that plot had been foiled. He’d been serving time ever since. I pulled up the system to check on that.

  Angélica cleared her throat, drawing my attention. “Maybe we should have suspected an attack from Tamara Diesel tonight,” she said.

  “The algorithms didn’t pick up any warning signs.” I stepped closer to see her screen. “Nothing in New York City, at any rate.”

  “Right. Because she’s been in Naperville.” Angélica pointed at a segment of the monitor that listed suspected travel plans for Tamara Diesel and her cronies. “She’s been traveling back and forth between the two.”

  “So, what, they built the nanobots in Naperville?” I asked.

  Angélica shrugged: probably.

  I returned to my side of the room and my eye caught something on a screen I’d set to the side. I groaned. “Guess who else is in Naperville.”

  “Who?”

  I pointed at Elwin Lucas’s mug shot. “His prison’s in Naperville.”

  “I’ll check to see if he’s still there.” Angélica pulled up the records, and we both stared—until Angélica swore with heartfelt viciousness.

  “Who okayed this? Why weren’t we notified?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t say.”

  Elwin Lucas had been out of prison for two weeks. While I’d been sitting in a HEX
briefing throwing bottle caps at Rodrigo, Elwin had likely been tidying up his little cell or doing whatever prisoners did before they were released.

  “Why would they even do this?” I asked. “Even good behavior wouldn’t justify him being out in less than a year!”

  “No, it wouldn’t.” Angélica didn’t need to say it: life wasn’t fair like that. “I’ll put out a HEX alert on him. Let’s get facial recognition tracking going, too. And—”

  She broke off at a shrill beep.

  “That can’t be good,” I said, needlessly.

  Angélica spared me a brief, grimly amused look as she brought up the alert. Instantly, a picture that froze my blood filled one of the screens. Data began to spit out along the bottom third of the screen.

  Jessie had given me a set of rules on the first day. Mostly they were self-explanatory: the Raptor operated in darkness. The Raptor let nobody know his or her true identity (a rule I’d already broken tonight). The Raptor was fast, merciless, and efficient.

  Pictures of the Raptor did not trend on social media.

  Yet there I was on the Domino’s homepage, flat on my ass in full Raptor gear at the Davenport gala while Tamara Diesel flew off like badass. Underneath that, the headline for the superhero gossip site read Raptor’s First #Herofail?

  And of course #Herofail had taken off. Number one trending topic on at least three platforms.

  I put my hand over my face and quietly breathed.

  At this point, Jessie was going to come out of surgery just to kill me.

  Chapter 7

  Of course, to kill me, Jessie would need to survive the night first. And she probably did so out of pure spite, for I woke up the day after the gala to news that Jessie had made it. Still unconscious, still in need of surgery, but a small mercy, and one I had to cling to since it seemed that my pratfall had taken the world by storm.

  To make matters worse, our main lead had completely vanished off the map. Elwin Lucas had been picked up at the prison gates in a black sedan, and he hadn’t been seen since. No matter how I searched for him, I couldn’t find him with any of Davenport’s systems. Tamara Diesel had likewise gone to ground after her attack on the gala, leading to nothing but dead ends.

  Angélica sent me to bed at 3 a.m., pointing out that neither of us would be of any use as frustrated and sleep-deprived as we were.

  Guy, hair sticking up in the back, made French toast as we discussed our options in the Nest the next morning. “I’m sure it’s Elwin,” I said, scrubbing sleep from my eyes.

  “Why?” Angélica gave me an unimpressed look.

  “Because the man is evil.” When both of them raised their eyebrows at me, I wrinkled my nose. “I know, I know. Par for the course with creeps like him. But the fact that the nanobots can target powers or lack thereof, and he just so happened to disappear not long before? I don’t believe in coincidences like that.”

  “But even then, we’ve seen nanobots before,” Guy said. “Are we sure it’s not a repeat offender? The villain community is so insular.”

  “Too complex to be one of the usuals,” Angélica said, not looking up from her phone.

  “Great.” I swallowed a bite of French toast. “So much for hoping this would be easy.”

  Guy politely covered his smile with his hand.

  I squinted back at him. “I know it never happens that way. But let a girl dream, will you?”

  “I’m always in favor of your dreams, whatever they are.”

  “You two are sickening,” Angélica said from the other side of the table. I bit back a retort about her spending all of breakfast texting her girlfriend.

  The HEX alert beep made all three of us jump.

  “What now?” I groaned. “Did somebody else find a way to make me trend online? Because I’m in enough trouble as it is.”

  “You’re not the one in trouble.” Angélica snapped to her feet, eyes on her phone screen. “There’s a riot at Detmer. And they’re calling you in.”

  “I’ll get my armor,” I said, halfway to the door.

  Angélica’s next words stopped me cold. “Not Raptor. You. They’re calling you in, Gail.”

  Oh, hell.

  Wanting Gail Godwin and not the Raptor (or worse, her apprentice) at Detmer made sense. Only a handful of people knew Detmer’s secret, and most of them were evil. I was one of the few on the side of good that knew the truth, having been wrongfully convicted.

  Higher-ups seemed to be of the mindset that if heroes knew how prisoners at Detmer were treated, they’d stop trying to put villains there. They weren’t wrong. Prisoners in Detmer lived in the lap of luxury, waited on hand and foot, their every possible need handled.

  Apart from generally being evil, they had absolutely no reason to riot. Which was why Guy yanked on a ski mask, scooped me up, and gave me a lift to Davenport Tower. At the Chicago way station, we sprinted to the roof and leapt off in tandem. Guy didn’t have superspeed, but skipping Chicago traffic made all the difference as we flew. When I’d escaped—not by choice, Rita had literally thrown me over the fence—I’d hitched a ride atop a train. Flying in my boyfriend’s arms? Much more preferable.

  “I should go in there with you!” he shouted over the wind, sounding torn. He’d given up the Blaze mask, and while he knew I could handle myself, I also knew that he hated not being able to back me up. But if he came back into the game even once, he’d be forced to keep playing.

  “I’ve got this,” I said, though I really wasn’t sure that was the case.

  “I know, but it sucks, that’s all.”

  He dropped me off at the edge of the visitors gate with a “Kick their asses, babe” and flew off. He might not be able to join the fight, but he could get nonflying backup to Detmer faster than most. It fudged the lines of noninvolvement, but I didn’t have time to worry about that.

  I flashed my ID at the freaked-out-looking guard at the front gate. “What’s going on?”

  “They—they all started rioting right in the middle of breakfast-and-news hour.” She’d gone bone white under her riot gear. “I have no idea what set them off. We’re in lockdown, but I don’t know how long that’ll hold. They’ve got guards as hostages. I don’t know how many.”

  “Give me an access badge,” I said. “I’ll help the guards while you wait for backup.”

  She shoved the badge my direction with a shaking hand. “Hurry. Just—please, hurry. We thought they were happy!”

  Supervillains could only be happy for so long. It was kind of why they chose to be supervillains.

  Pocketing the badge, I entered through the visitors center, a squat gray building transplanted from every typical prison on TV. Signs of a prolonged battle greeted me. Two tables had been vaporized into nothing but scorch marks, and broken chairs and handcuffs littered the floor. All the snacks had been stolen from the vending machine.

  They had chilled caviar available on speed dial and they’d chosen to break things and steal processed salt and cheese. Supervillains. Honestly.

  I followed the trail of cheese dust through the visitors center. Past the doors, the world changed. Institutional cinderblock walls and harsh fluorescent lights gave way to bamboo flooring and mood lighting overhead. A small stream trickled soothingly along the side of the hall. Japanese art and calligraphy filled all the frames on the walls. A haven of utter tranquility.

  Or it would’ve been, if there hadn’t been a huge brawl taking place in the middle of it.

  They squared off: three guards, four villains. The guards had cobbled together a barricade from tables and a massage chair, hunkering down and taking potshots at the motley assembly of villains on the other side of the atrium. A freezing blast of blue energy splintered against the wall over the guards’ heads, raining down a hail of ice spikes. Another villain fired a bolt of bright purple-red; it hit the arm of the massage chair, which promptly began to drip to the floor. Two others tried to run at the guards, only to be driven back by the guards’ stun guns.

 
Nobody paid a lick of attention to me, but that would change. I needed to act fast, but there wasn’t enough of a straight shot to gather momentum. The ability to turn midphase would have been so helpful right about now. I’d have to make it work. I backed up as far as possible and shoved off, phasing forward. The force of my fist hitting the melter-villain’s stomach knocked her back several feet. The strike sang up my arm with pain, as I’d released way more energy than my body liked, but it served its purpose: she hit the ground and stayed down, obviously stunned.

  A bolt of ice struck my shoulder and sent me careening sideways. I cried out and ducked the third villain’s punch, training kicking in. The fourth prisoner slammed into me from behind, arms wrapped around my middle.

  “Hold her down!” Ice Lady shouted at her buddies as she swung a palm toward me.

  I shoved my back into my grappler, throwing him off balance. As he stumbled, I twisted and kicked Ice Lady’s wrist. She cried out. I wrenched free of the hold, landed on my knees, and rolled to avoid the third villain’s kick to the head. Rather than get up again, I swept his legs out from under him. His eyes went comically wide as he slammed into the ground.

  Ice Lady blasted a frozen hole in the floor two inches from my hand, so I lunged and drove my shoulder into her midsection, knocking her hands up before she could unleash into me.

  The sound of running boots brought the sweet cadence of backup.

  In a flash, I dodged around Ice Lady, pinned her arms behind her, and spun her around to face the guards.

  She gasped as the guard hit her in the chest with a stun bolt. Two other stun bolts hit her comrades. Carefully, I lowered Ice Lady to the floor.

  The guards turned the stun guns on me. “Who are you?” the leader said.

  I’d just swept up two of their more troublesome inmates and allowed them to take out a third and a fourth. How was that for gratitude? Moving slowly, I tugged my ID badge loose. “I’m with the HEX network,” I said. “The guard at the gate didn’t have many details. What’s going on?”