by Lexie Dunne
Given that her hunt for answers had dragged me into trouble before, though, I didn’t feel like the caution on my part was overrated.
“All right, all right, fine,” I said.
Naomi grinned. “You cave too easily.”
“Shut up. What’s so important that you had to blow up my phone and then race over, anyway? And, ugh, get this thing out of my face. I hate that guy.” I turned the page with Mobius’s face on it over. I’d spent long enough staring at his ugly mug when he’d strapped me to a table and dosed me with his serum. “Where’s the fire, anyway? And is it literal?”
“Not literal. This—” Naomi tapped a page “—is where the fire is.”
I picked up the page and skimmed the page. “Lodi’s lab results for Mobium? Davenport will want that.”
“They can get it the same place I did, if they really want it. But here, take a look at this one, and this one.” She shoved two more pages over, and I read those just as quickly. “Chels—Brook’s lab work. Some of it.”
“This means nothing to me,” I said, frowning. “Lodi was experimenting on her for years. So there are test results, so what?”
“Look at the notes section at the bottom of the page.”
“What about it?”
Naomi reached into her messenger bag and pulled out a little leather-bound notebook. Somebody’s personal journal, I realized, and then the smell of it hit my nostrils. Mobius’s personal journal. “Add the notes to this,” Naomi said, waving the journal at me, “and it says some things.”
I took it warily. “Where did you get this?”
Naomi waved a hand. That was fine; I hadn’t actually expected her to tell me.
I flipped through the journal. Mobius’s handwriting wasn’t easy to read: spiky and cramped like he’d been thinking faster than he could write, it filled every page to the very edge. “Do you want me to read all of this?” I asked, feeling a little sick. Apparently my issues over what he’d done to me hadn’t vanished. Oh, joy. “Is there a CliffsNotes or something?”
“Once you get through the science and ravings about the Bears, it boils down to him ranting about the thing he hated.”
“Lodi?” I asked, since they’d kind of kept him captive and used him for his giant brain.
Naomi shook her head. “Superheroes.”
I scrunched my nose up. “What?”
“I know, I thought it was strange, too. If the man hated superheroes so much, why make more?”
“Lodi made him do it?”
“I don’t think even Lodi could get past this level of mania, Gail.” Naomi took the journal and flipped through the pages, a frown etched into her features. “He really hated you supertypes. On a deep, visceral level.”
“And yet he created a serum that’s added three of us to the population,” I said. “I still say Lodi made him do it.”
Naomi groaned. “You’d think you of all people would embrace conspiracy theories.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Did you somehow miss the part where I was kidnapped over and over again for four years and never really wondered why?”
Naomi paused. “Okay, point. But something’s hinky.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed. I’d done my time—literally—and even if I had doubts about what I was now, life had reached at least a minor equilibrium. I didn’t want to poke at the Jenga pieces and send the tower toppling over. Not for a man who was definitely dead. “Where’d you get all of this stuff, anyway?”
“That’s not important.”
“Oh, but I bet it is.”
Naomi’s smile showed most of her teeth. “Not revealing my sources. I feel like this is significant. Mobius gave you your powers for a reason, right?”
“Right,” I said. The reason I’d ended up with superpowers was so convoluted that some days I didn’t even understand it myself, not even with the enhanced intellect. I’d become the very important but powerless piece in a large game of chess, meant to get Mobius’s granddaughter, my friend Kiki, away from a Lodi spy within Davenport. We’d been successful in the end, but it gave me a headache to think about how it had all panned out. Jeremy had been the one to pay the biggest price. “Mobius did it so I’d help save Kiki, sort of. I still don’t see why it’s significant.”
“I just think it is, that’s all. I made copies for you.”
“Really? You aren’t worried I’ll take them straight to Davenport?”
Naomi just gave me a long look.
“Point,” I said, and took the sheaf of papers she passed over. “I’ll look over these. If nothing else, maybe they’ll answer questions about the Mobium.”
“Started growing a tail yet?”
“Ha, ha,” I said.
“I’m just saying, it could happen any day now.”
“You suck.” My phone screen lit up with a call from Guy, which was surprising. He rarely called during office hours. “Hold on a sec.” I picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Gail. Hey. Are you busy? Like, is there anything you can’t miss?”
“Uh, not particularly, why?”
“How soon can you get to Davenport Tower?”
I blinked. Davenport Tower was in New York City. “With or without a ’porter? Because I’m not exactly cleared for that.”
“I’ll get you cleared.”
“Guy, what’s wrong?”
“It’ll be easier to explain when you get here,” Guy said, sounding frustrated. “Hurry, though. Nobody’s hurt, exactly. Just—yeah, hurry. See you soon.”
And I was left with a dead call.
“Cryptic,” I said, shoving the phone in my pocket. “I have to go.”
“Is it trouble?” Naomi was already gathering her papers and shoving them back into the file folder. “Superhero trouble? Can I come?”
“Yeah, Davenport would take one look at your credentials and laugh.”
“Their loss. I’ll walk you out.”
Which would only give her a chance to badger me, I knew, but whatever. “Let’s swing by my desk on the way out. I have a feeling I’m going to need better shoes.”
Because Guy had sounded urgent, I skipped the ‘L’ and took a cab. In the Willis Tower—which I still wanted to call the Sears Tower—I took the elevator to the forty-seventh floor and stepped into a lobby I’d once helped decimate with a close enemy and some even closer friends. It said DARTMOOR INCORPORATED on a large sign, but this was a Davenport facility. Everything was laid out exactly the same at each waystation, down to the grumpy guard blocking the way to non-Davenport personnel.
The security guard gave me an uninspired look. “ID?”
“Really, Marsh? We go through this every week.”
“State your business.” He made a come-on motion with his fingers, holding his hand out for my ID, which I passed over with a sigh.
“I’m going to Davenport Tower,” I said. “Do we really have to go through the whole routine? I’m kind of in a hurry.”
Marsh gave me another unimpressed look.
“Fine,” I said. “Not my business if you want to waste time giving Abbott and Costello a run for their money.”
“State your business,” Marsh said again, reaching for the taser on his belt.
“I’m traveling to headquarters,” I said. “I’m on the approved list.”
Marsh handed my ID back and looked at the screen in front of him. “Step up to the scanner.”
I’d already stepped over, which made him glare at me. I held my palm over the scanner and let it prick the side of my finger. GODWIN, GAIL flashed over the little screen, listing my stats. I winced a little at my cholesterol count. The body scan and Marsh poking through my bag took a few seconds longer. I’d already learned to ditch anything he could find remotely suspicious, like the really cool-looking compact mirror I’d bought.
Apparently gold lamé was a terrorist threat these days. Today, he shoved the bag back at me with a dissatisfied look.
“You’re cleared,” Marsh said, looking grumpy about the prospect. He handed over the same flimsy badge I wore every visit. “Go on through.”
“A pleasure as always, Marsh.”
Not even a single grunt from him in reply. Rude.
The ’porter responsible for zapping me from Chicago to New York, at least, was polite. ’Porting over long distances always left me buzzing and gave me a small headache, but I was able to pay attention when the receptionist instructed me to head to Medical. Oh, that was not good.
The first time they’d brought me into Davenport, I’d been taken straight there. My appointment had been with Cooper—a man who, it turned out, was a Lodi Corp spy and was trying to find a way to discreetly kill me the entire time. Which partially explained the reason I always wanted to drag my feet on the way to this department.
The secretaries at the front waved me past. “Kiki said to send you straight in.”
I nodded at them and headed back to Kiki’s office. Seeing no sign of her, I moved on to the examination rooms.
Jackpot.
“Gail, hi.” Guy, who was sitting on the cot with his elbows propped on his knees, looked up to give me a tight smile. He, Angélica, and Kiki were all gathered in the room, looking tense. “You made it.”
“With only minimal harassment from my favorite security guard. What’s going on?”
I looked at Kiki, as her heartbeat had elevated above the others. She wore her typical uniform—the white polo shirt that sneered at wrinkles, the dark blue Davenport pants—but, unusually, her hair was down from its athletic ponytail. It hung over her face now as she sat at the computer, body bowed forward as though somebody had punched her in the stomach. It made me belatedly freeze in my tracks.
“Is Jeremy okay?” I asked. The entire trip over, the only conclusion I had come to was that something must have changed with Jeremy’s situation. Why else would they have called me to Medical?
Kiki raised her head, and the sight of her red-rimmed eyes sent a bolt of fear straight through my gut. “He’s fine. Or there’s been no change, at any rate,” she said, wiping at her eye with a thumb. “This is something else.”
“Has somebody died?” I asked.
Angélica, who was watching Kiki’s face carefully, said, “The opposite, actually.”
Somebody had come back to life? There could only be one culprit, and it sent a curl of fear all the way down to my soles. The instinct to run came on surprisingly strong, considering I was surrounded by multiple people that I would trust to save my life in a heartbeat. “It’s Cooper, isn’t it?” I asked. “He’s back?”
“No,” Kiki said, shaking her head fervently.
I breathed out in relief.
“No, it’s not Cooper,” Angélica said. “But you won’t like—”
She was interrupted by the hiss of the door opening behind me. Already on edge, I whipped about, my fists going up.
“Oh, roomie! You’re here, too.”
I looked up into the face of my mortal enemy as she was dragged into the room by two men in Detmer Prison uniforms. Brooklyn Gianelli—known to the world as the pink-and-white-clad supervillain named Chelsea—looked like the time in prison had actually done her some good, if the smirk and swagger were anything to judge by. She had her hands clasped palm-to-palm, locked in plastic cuffs of some type.
I turned and looked at my supposed friends and significant other. “Explain,” I said.
CHAPTER 3
“Long time, no see.” Brook dropped onto a chair and kicked her feet out. How she managed to look completely nonchalant handcuffed and surrounded by security guards, I had no idea. Brook made seeming casual and bored in the face of danger look like a natural superpower.
Except the last time she’d been in the room with Guy, she hadn’t looked bored or casual. She’d been doing her best to kill him, since she held a grudge against Guy’s older brother Sam, and she hadn’t been too picky about which Bookman she’d like to kill. I automatically took a step to the right, planting myself between Brook and Guy.
My ex-cellmate smiled at me, tilting her head. “The shrinks cleared that trigger right out of me.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said. I’d been to Detmer Maximum Security Prison, Brook’s current place of residence. Granted, I’d been innocent—it was a long story, but it boiled down to Rita Detmer setting me up to look like a criminal, all so she could beat me up in the name of teaching me how to save Kiki—and Brook definitely wasn’t. Either way, Detmer was more like a day spa than a prison. Not much focus had been placed on actually rehabilitating said supervillains, which was a shame. Brook, who’d spent years in a cage as Lodi Corp’s science experiment, could have used some real therapy. “What is she doing here?” I looked around at the others in the room.
“You’ll see.” Kiki looked unsettled; I could hear her heartbeat speeding up slightly, which did nothing to reassure me. Kiki waved a hand to activate the monitor behind her. “This came in this morning. The techs are working on tracing the source.”
A face filled the screen. Somebody had shoved the camera in close, grossly distorting its proportions, but my stomach still dropped. Dr. Christoph Mobius filled the entire screen, wearing a dirty flannel shirt and holding a newspaper. My breath stuttered to a halt in my chest. I had a copy of the same paper on my desk at work. I’d picked it up outside my ‘L’ stop that morning.
“You told me he was dead,” I said. “You said that when I blew up Lodi—”
“I was wrong,” Kiki said in a strangled voice, which made sense. The man on the screen was her grandfather, after all.
On the screen, a gloved hand reached in and poked Mobius’s shoulder when his eyelids drooped. “Speak,” said a modulated voice, and I frowned.
“To whoever gets this message,” Dr. Mobius said, glaring into the camera and making sweat spring up on the back of my neck, “this is a ransom video. I demand to speak only to the one named—must I really stick to this mundane script?” He looked over the top of the camera and presumably at the person behind it. “Why are there so many words? It’s utterly banal.”
I didn’t flinch when the hand appeared again, striking him across the face, though Kiki did.
“As I was saying,” Mobius said, with a little spittle and blood trickling down his chin, “I will speak only with the one called Chelsea. I believe you can find her in Detmer. Any attempts to contact me made by anybody other than Chelsea will end with me—Dr. Christoph Mobius—losing my life.”
This time, Kiki whimpered. I had to look away and remind myself that the man might be one of the worst people on the planet, but he was also her grandfather.
“I will be in touch within twenty-four hours. If anybody but Chelsea answers, there will be—”
A green-and-yellow blast hit the monitor, splitting it in half. Instantly, everybody in the room was on their feet, fists and other weapons pointed at Brook. She stood by the table, one arm up and extended toward the TV. Her chest heaved. She had gone bone-white and her eyes were suspiciously bright, but I ignored these details to focus on the fact that the whirling vortex in her palm, where her stinging power beams emerged, was wide open.
“Get on the ground!” one of the guards said, surging forward.
I saw Brook begin to turn and dove, tackling the guard to the ground. The beam washed over my back and did nothing but tickle. Of everybody in the room, I was the only one her stinging powers couldn’t hurt.
Brook gasped and jumped back, pointing both hands toward the ceiling. “Davenport told me he was dead,” she said.
I climbed off of the guard and exchanged a look with Guy. Anger was par for the course with Brook, but this was something different. This verged on h
ysteria. If she thought she could get away with it, I imagined, she would be barreling through the wall and flying for shelter.
“Any idea who has him?” I asked.
Kiki shook her head. “All we have is the video.”
Angélica turned to Brook’s guards. “You two wait outside until we’re done. We’ve got one Class B and three Class Cs, we’re more than capable of handling her.”
They argued, which I felt was foolish—Detmer guards, traditionally, didn’t have superpowers at all.
I tuned them out, sitting down so hard that the chair creaked underneath me. So Dr. Mobius was alive. We’d all thought he had been in the Lodi facility I had blown up while escaping from Cooper. The thought of having killed people—I knew I had, since there was no way the building had been completely empty—had given me more than a couple sleepless nights since. Learning that my creator had been among them had been such a mental minefield that I’d been better off suppressing the feelings, and had done so with vigor.
And now that he was alive and apparently being held for ransom, I really didn’t know how to feel. I looked at where Angélica and Kiki were arguing with the guards. Brook stood behind them, breathing hard, rage plainly written on her face as she stared at the shattered remains of the TV.
“Brook’s not taking this well,” I said to Guy. “Not that I would expect her to. Mobius experimented on her for a long time. Somebody at least should have warned her.”
“It’s weird to hear you on Brook’s side,” Guy said.
“Cellmates for life,” I said, though I wasn’t feeling much humor. Purposely creating new superheroes was illegal. Holding people against their will and experimenting on them, as Mobius and Lodi had with Brook, was more than illegal: it was reprehensible. Seeing the last of Lodi hadn’t exactly left me heartbroken.
