by Lexie Dunne
For one heart-pounding second, nothing moved. Had Jeremy passed into the digital ether? Had the room overtaken him and he wasn’t able to communicate? I set Naomi on the ground, grabbing my injured arm as I looked for any sign of movement in the obstacle course gel.
Jeremy blinked into existence in front of me, so fast that I took a swing at him. My hand passed right through his incorporeal avatar. “What’s happened?” he asked.
I pointed at Naomi. “You need to fix her.”
“Shouldn’t that be Kiki’s job?”
“Nanobots,” I said, and Jeremy’s gaze sharpened.
He tilted his head, listening to something I couldn’t determine. “Put her in the gel.”
He’d gathered a great deal of the stuff right in the center of the obstacle course and as I approached, it rose up. It felt a little like placing my friend on some kind of sacrificial altar. “If this is some kind of nanobot horror movie and you’re really just going to drown her, I’m going to hit you so hard it animates your corpse, and then I will kick that corpse’s ass,” I said.
“Relax. She’s my friend, too.”
I fought off the heebie-jeebies as the gel swirled up, molding over the insensible Naomi’s body like a sarcophagus. The last thing I saw was one hand twitching, falling still as the gel covered her. Silence kicked in, broken only by the harsh sound of my breathing, the hum of the lights overhead, and Naomi’s racing heartbeat. What was supposed to happen? Had I gotten her there in time? Had I made the right gamble coming to Jeremy? Could he actually do anything?
I sat down and clutched my wrist to my chest, feeling absolutely useless.
It could have been mere seconds or it could have been days later when I heard the gasp from under the gel-casket. Naomi’s arms burst out. Gel spattered everywhere, hitting me in the face and chest, before slithering back to join its mates. Naomi sat up, sucking in a large gulp of air as the gel dribbled off her.
“G-Gail? Where am I?”
“I brought you back to the Nest.” I didn’t get up. “You had a nanobot fit. How do you feel?”
“I . . .” She peered about, baffled, until she seemed to remember something. Frantically she patted down her jacket, and breathed a sigh of relief when she pulled out her notebook.
That sigh turned into a shriek when a column of gel shot up to her right, forming into Jeremy.
He grinned from ear to ear. “Now that was a kick.”
“Jeremy? What are you—what is this stuff?” Naomi got creakily to her feet.
“Jessie uses it for obstacle courses,” I said. “Jeremy’s borrowing it while we puzzle out what to do about his missing body. Seriously, Naomi, are you okay? I thought I was going to lose you.”
“Please. I’m harder to kill than that.” She pushed herself to her feet, scoffing, and nudged the gel with a toe. “I’m fine. I’m guessing Jeremy has something to do with that.”
In response, I turned to look at Jeremy, too.
He shoved his hands through his hair, more humanlike than I’d seen him. “She’s officially nanobot-free,” he told me. “And boy, those things are beautiful.”
“Did you absorb them?” Naomi asked as I said, “Ew.”
“Don’t knock it,” Jeremy told me. “You’re made of, like, radioactive shit.”
Point. “Can you tell me anything about what you did? And what the nanobots are?”
“They’re sweet.” For a second, I worried he meant that literally, like he’d literally crunched them up like candy, but Jeremy rocked back on his haunches, still beaming. “They’re sophisticated. How’d you wind up with such high-level Davenport tech inside you? I’ve been trying to unlock those systems since I lost my body.”
Naomi and I exchanged a look. “Davenport tech?” I asked.
“What else would it be? Nobody else could afford something this complex.” Jeremy didn’t seem to notice the silent conversation Naomi and I held with our eyes. His gel avatar moved around almost manically now, like a kid on a sugar high. “Do you know what I could do with tech like this?”
“No idea,” I said.
“These nanobots are faster than the ones in the obstacle course,” Jeremy said. “They’re self-sustaining.”
The words finally hit home. “Self-sustaining?” I asked, swiveling to face him. “As in—”
“I could survive in these.” Jeremy actually bounced in place.
I sat down, hard. A solution. Not even a temporary one either. The amount of nanobots in Naomi’s blood had been minuscule, but . . . “Let’s say we could get you access to others infected with these nanobots,” I said. “Could you take them out the way you just did now?”
“Sure. There’s more?”
He’d been fighting for his life since the explosion, but he had to have heard at least a little bit about the gala. “A whole party full of people,” I said, and watched the realization dawn. “Yeah, this is the nasty bug Tamara Diesel used on everybody. If I got you the locations of the party guests, could you remove their nanobots, too?”
He thought it over. “I need this room. The gel acts as a conduit. It gets into places and makes things easier.”
“Gross,” Naomi said, cleaning out her ear with her pinkie.
I’d been afraid of that. The obstacle course was great because it was so versatile, but I knew that outside of the room, the gel wouldn’t work. So much for hoping that Jeremy could simply zap to gala attendees and science the nanobots right out of them.
But it was a solution—two solutions, actually—and it brought the first sense of real hope I’d felt since Jessie had been shot.
Still, I met Naomi’s eyes. “You get along pretty well with Eddie. Maybe you should tell him.”
“Sorry, toots, I’m just the press. My job is to ask questions and write pretty.”
“Ugh,” I said, rising to my feet since she had a point. My wrist throbbed as I massaged it with my fingers. Even with accelerated healing, injuring myself was getting old really fast. “Fill Jeremy in on everything that’s going on, will you? I’ll talk to Eddie and see what I can set up.”
Teeth gritted, wrist stinging, I went to find Eddie to inform him that I indeed had a way to solve the gala crisis—and that he really, really was not going to like it.
“You want me to bring civilians into the heart of the Raptor’s secret base,” Eddie said, staring at me as though I’d suggested everybody should switch to speaking only Dutch.
“It’s either that or let them keep being blackmail targets for Tamara Diesel.”
“And how do you propose I get them here without the fact that it is, and I cannot stress this enough, a secret base for the world’s most mysterious superhero?” Eddie’s voice dripped both aggravation and disdain.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Blindfold them?”
Eddie only looked quietly at me, nostrils flaring and jaw tight.
“Drug them if you have to?” I asked.
“You are suggesting that I chloroform the city’s finest, bring them to a secret base, allow a man who is not even technically living to perform an operation on them, and simply return them to their lives?” Eddie spoke every syllable with careful precision.
It was almost mean to shrug. “That sums it up, yes. Though I would’ve used fewer words. Jeremy says he can get the nanobots out, but he needs that room to do it. You got any better ideas?”
Since I was determined to be the bigger person, I didn’t point out that gentler alternatives to chloroform existed. Eddie’s staff could figure everything out. He owned the biggest company on the planet, surely he kept at least one mastermind or three on staff. While he fumed, I ducked out, determined to see how Angélica had fared after getting stabbed in the leg with a sword cane. And I wanted Kiki to take a look at my wrist. Would I injure myself that way every time I tried to phase long distances, turning like that?
I found Kiki and Angélica locked in a staring contest in the hospital suite.
“Angélica, get on the table and let you
r girlfriend do her job,” I said, stepping around Kiki and the little tray of surgical tools she’d set up. I knelt to collect a crap-cake and made a big show of sighing at it.
“It’ll heal fine on its own,” Angélica said to Kiki, not even glancing my way.
“It’ll heal better if you let me help,” Kiki said.
“I’m not going under.”
“And I’m not going to use the skin fuser while you’re conscious.”
“Fine. Don’t use it. My leg will heal on its own and—ooh.” Angélica’s eyes rolled back in her head.
I set the syringe I’d palmed back on the table and opened the crap-cake. After I took a bite, I said, “That stuff only works for like ten minutes on her, so you might want to hurry.”
Kiki, evidently not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, snatched up her tools. “Hold her down just in case. And be ready to duck when she wakes up. She’s going to be very put out with you.”
In my opinion, turnabout was more than fair play here, as Angélica had done the same thing to me, like, fifty times.
“What happened?” Kiki asked, focusing on her work. “She wouldn’t say.”
I gave her a brief rundown of our infiltration and fight at Tamara Diesel’s base, leaving out the parts about having hired Raze. That bombshell deserved its own spotlight. “She was protecting me from Lady Danger,” I said, wrinkling my nose as the skin fuser moved over the wound. Human skin should never smell like that. “Angélica’s never faced her before, so I don’t think she knew that was a sword. It looks like your average old lady cane.”
“I hate it when she goes into the field.” Kiki worked steadily despite the note in her voice. “She’s good, but she gets too protective and she always gets hurt.”
I winced. “This one was my fault. I overestimated a new ability and wasn’t much help in a fight.”
“Even so, she knows you’re capable. There. Done.”
The wound laced up the inside of Angélica’s leg, from midcalf to midthigh. It had been bleeding sluggishly, but now there was nothing but a bright, furiously red line from the fusing process. I didn’t know how close she’d come to hitting any arteries, but from the pallor on Kiki’s face, I could guess. Carefully, I lowered Angélica’s upper torso onto the bed and held my wrist out.
Kiki sighed. “What did you do?”
“I’m not sure, actually. I hurt it while phasing, but I didn’t hit anything.” I sucked in my breath and told her more as she probed my wrist. When I finished, she grabbed a handheld scanner. Whatever she saw on the display made her frown.
“I’m going to immobilize your wrist. I won’t waste my breath telling you not to punch things, but at least try to use the other hand.”
“For how long?” I asked, as we were still in the middle of a supervillain crisis.
“Check back in three hours. I’ll have a better idea then.” I must not have hidden my annoyance, for she rolled her eyes at me as she wrapped a splint around my wrist as best she could, since one of her own arms was still immobile from her own injury at Davenport Tower. “It’s not like any of us really understand what’s going on with the Mobium and you lately. So. Three hours. Find me.”
“Yes, okay. Sorry about the—”
“Don’t worry about it, we’re all on edge. Speaking of which, I’m going to go play mediator before Uncle Eddie begins spitting nails.” Kiki ran her hand over Angélica’s hair. “You might want to not be here when she wakes up, just FYI.”
“Yeah, good idea,” I said, following Kiki out of the room.
It was only after I’d split off that I realized I hadn’t told her about Jeremy or his new ability. If she was seeking out Eddie, she would hear the news soon enough. But as I hadn’t told Eddie that the nanobots were Davenport tech, she’d just be in the dark for a while longer. For one, I didn’t trust him, and for another, Eddie and I had been in public. If anybody overheard that there was a traitor in Davenport, all fingers would point to Kiki.
So I would get to the bottom of this on my own. I reached into my shirt and pulled out the notes Naomi had stolen from Tamara Diesel. And then I went to find wherever Guy had disappeared to.
Chapter 20
I found Guy at Jessie’s bedside. He still wore his Blaze duds, though he’d kicked off the boots and he had the mask clenched in one fist. I could smell the dust on them, same as I had Rita’s outfit.
“We should probably get that dry-cleaned,” I said as I sat next to him.
“Yeah, I’ve sneezed half a dozen times already.” He squeezed my hand and kissed the side of my head. “You look like you’re mostly in one piece. How’s Angélica? I ran like a noble coward when it began to look like a lovers’ quarrel.”
“She should be shaking off the effects of the anesthetic any second now. But her leg’s better.” I studied Jessie’s profile. She should look healthy and vibrant, but instead her skin was waxy and her complexion lacked all color. I didn’t take my eyes off her face as I filled Guy in on everything that had happened after he’d flown off with Angélica. Well, mostly everything. I told him about Jeremy, but I didn’t mention the fact that the nanobots had come from Davenport somehow.
It said a lot about our existence that our friend transferring his conscious self to a body made of nanobots was met with a hmm. “Been a hell of a couple of days,” Guy said.
“No kidding.” I pulled the paperwork out from under my arm.
“What’s that?”
“Naomi found it in the stronghold before we had to skedaddle.” I needed to text Raze, but that could wait. No doubt she would have some kind of diatribe in reply. I pushed my fingertips into my forehead to stave off an impending headache. A thought from the villain headquarters made me give Guy a suspicious look. “Has Lady Danger’s name always been Letty and I’ve been mishearing?”
“You thought her name was Lady Danger?”
“Yes?”
“Why would you think her name is Lady?”
“Because she’s got all that—that affectation! The snooty English aristocrat thing.”
Guy tilted his head. “I can see it,” he said.
“This is why you’re doing the Christmas cards this year,” I said, opening up the papers to study them. The top page was a fax coversheet. I paged through what looked like scores of scientific data, all condensed into graphs. No header or footer on the page identified any author, but one of the pages held a diagram that I recognized from the screens I’d seen in Medical that showed the nanobots in our blood.
“I’m not cheating on you,” Guy said.
I nearly dropped the papers. “What?”
Guy had his forehead resting on his palm, fingers shoved into his hair. “You knew something was up with my job. I didn’t—I don’t want you to think it was something like me cheating on you.”
“It didn’t even occur to me.”
“It didn’t?” He lifted his head. “Seriously?”
“What? No, seriously, of course it didn’t.” I wrinkled my nose at him. “I can read you better than that. I knew you had a secret and Naomi was helping you with it. Cheating? Really?”
“I could’ve been cheating on you with Naomi,” he said.
I squinted at him, tuning out the sounds of Jessie’s life-support machinery. “You’re way too wholesome to be Naomi’s type. And why are you playing devil’s advocate right now?”
“I—” Guy shook his head, looking baffled that this conversation was happening at all. “I don’t know. It seemed right to point out the flaws in your argument. The job thing is a stupid—it’s just—I was looking for Petra.”
The puzzle pieces clicked into place all at once. Of course it was about Petra Bookman. He’d lost his sister years ago. She had the same powers as Guy and Sam, but rather than sticking around on the front lines, she’d vanished. As far as everybody could tell, there hadn’t even been a fight. No villain had ever come forward to take credit for it. She’d simply evaporated.
“What would Petra be doing in
a restaurant kitchen?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It was something you brought up once, a long time ago. You asked me why there wasn’t a third option to Detmer and Davenport.”
I’d asked Angélica the same thing. It was a constant refrain with me, actually.
“And it made me wonder, what if there was a third option? You remember Portia McPeak?” Guy asked.
“She’s pretty hard to forget.” Our old coworker lived the ironic existence of being the most self-obsessed person I knew and also the only one able to turn invisible. As far as I knew, she didn’t have any affiliation with Davenport. “Did you talk to her?”
“Close. I went back to Mind the Boom,” Guy said.
“And you didn’t get kicked out?” The last time we’d been in the supervillain bar, we’d kind of wrecked the place. Sal, the bartender, did not count herself among my fans.
Guy smiled. “I did, actually. Sal’s stronger than we thought. She literally threw me out.”
“Ouch.”
“So I scoped the place out instead. There was this guy I knew, from the restaurant scene. Riley. I saw him go back into the kitchens one time. And he wasn’t anywhere in the Davenport database . . .” Guy waved vaguely in the air, letting the thought trail off.
“So you got a job to spy on him and see if there was a secret underground network of superpowered people,” I said. I chewed on my bottom lip.
“Yes. It was such a long shot that I didn’t want to, I don’t know, burden you with it or have you point out how many points of the plan were silly.” Guy twisted his mask between his hands. “I should’ve probably told you about it.”
“I . . . yeah, that would’ve been nice to know.” But I couldn’t say that I wouldn’t have poked holes in his plan. At least he’d approached Naomi with it. If anybody could get to the bottom of a mystery that bordered on conspiracy theory levels of crazy, it would be her. I didn’t want to fight about Guy’s constant problem of not telling me things—something we’d struggled with long before we’d even begun dating—with so much else on my plate between Rita, Tamara Diesel, and the nanobot problem. So I said, “Thanks for telling me.”
