Building a Hero: The Complete Trilogy

by Tasha Black

  “You’ll be more effective if the low-lifes can put a name to their fear,” she would say, practically rolling her eyes from the repetition of their daily conversation on the matter. “And if you don’t claim a title soon, they’ll just stick you with something stupid like, The Vigilante, or The Mask!”

  West wasn’t sure he was ready to take that step. Giving himself a name would make it all official. Next thing he knew, he’d have a costume, and some sort of lair, probably one with padded walls and nice men in white coats.

  The elevator doors opened into the lab. The sterile tent was set up again.

  This time Mallory was the only one there. She looked tired, even her spiky hair was drooping a little. However, its buttercup yellow color was still cheerful.

  “Are you sure about this?” she asked, without even greeting him. “You’re still not a hundred percent with the focus issues on your current setup.”

  “Very sure,” he said.

  “Okay then,” she said, pointing him to a chair inside the tent.

  He seated himself, and she wheeled over a table with some instruments.

  West busied himself wondering if she were overworked and whether he ought to reward her with a bonus and some time off. He wanted to ask what was wrong but she didn’t seem to be feeling chatty tonight.

  “Thinking about a second career as a Michael Jackson impersonator?” she asked tartly. “I don’t think you’ve got the pipes. But I can probably program your legs to moonwalk if you want me to.”

  “Huh?” he asked in complete confusion.

  “What’s with the glove?” she asked, pointing to his covered right hand.

  Shit.

  “Oh. It’s nothing,” he said lightly.

  “Let me see,” she said, her expression reminded him of his old elementary school principal’s when she was at the end of her rope with little Westley.

  West let out a sigh, and then peeled off the leather glove to reveal the charred artificial skin beneath.

  Mallory hissed in a breath, as if her own hand were injured.

  “What did you do?” she asked plaintively, already examining it.

  “It was a cooking accident,” he lied.

  “Like you accidentally tried to cook your hand?” she raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Just an accident. I was being careless. I didn’t want to bother you about it, since it seems to still work fine,” he hedged.

  “Do you still have feeling in the skin?” Mallory demanded.

  “No,” he admitted.

  “Then it is not working fine.” Her voice was crisp now. “Did it hurt?”

  “Yeah,” he told her honestly, “a lot.”

  “Good.”

  “Pardon?” he asked.

  “Good,” she repeated. “That’s what pain is for. It acts as a warning, and a deterrent. When a kid touches fire, and gets burned, they don’t touch the fire again. I hoped it would have the same effect on you, but you seem a little harder to convince.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, knowing full well what she meant.

  “Bullet holes, stab wounds, slashes, dog bites, now burns. You seem very accident prone, is all.”

  “Just unlucky, I guess…” he trailed off.

  “I’m surprised you manage to find so much trouble, now that your neighborhood is so safe,” she said in an over-innocent tone.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, his pulse quickening.

  “Haven’t you seen the news?” she asked lightly. “Some kind of masked vigilante has been busy taking down criminals in your neck of the woods lately.”

  “I haven’t seen that,” he replied. “I don’t really watch the news,”

  “I’m surprised you’ve never run into him in person. I know how you like to take those late night walks. And the vigilante seems to be operating entirely within a five mile radius of Cordelia’s place.”

  She looked straight into his eyes.

  “That’s odd,” he said, breaking their eye contact.

  “It really is.”

  “What are you suggesting?” he asked.

  “Just making an observation,” she said, examining the damage to his hand. “Just something that I noticed. Me. Someone without a background in police work, and no interest in apprehending said vigilante.”

  “Well…good,” West said, unsure of what was happening but grateful that she didn’t sound quite as angry.

  “And hoping that now that your neighborhood is so safe, maybe you will have an easier time staying in one piece,” she said, flipping the hand over to study the other side. “You’re going through my materials as fast as I can make them.”

  “So that’s what you’re worried about?” he demanded, latching onto something he could be indignant about, and hoping to put an end to the conversation. “You’re worried that I might be endangering your precious tech? I think you need to remember who keeps the lights on around here. This technology belongs to me. And I will use it as I see fit.”

  “Slow down there, cowboy. You might be able to afford a Van Gogh—”

  “—I’ve got one,” he interrupted.

  “Right. And after you’ve paid for it, and you bring it home to hang over your solid gold toilet or whatever, it’s still a Van Gogh, not a Worthington. His signature is right there,” she said with satisfaction.

  “So?” West asked, though he was pretty sure he knew where this was going.

  “So,” she said, color rising in her normally pale cheeks, “this piece of technology that I am about to stick in you is a goddamn work of art. I made this, and it has my name, my influence, written on every curve, every connection, every nanometer of its being. I signed it with every drop of sweat and blood I put into it, from every all-nighter I pulled to make something that only existed in my mind into a reality. So you’ll have to forgive me for feeling a little pride of ownership.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I’m not done. Second, what I’m suggesting is actually the opposite,” she said unexpectedly. “I’d love a chance to test this stuff under real world, high stress conditions. Instead of on someone who spends his entire day in a board room. How’s that working out, by the way?”

  “I haven’t—” he began.

  “I know, and don’t think the shareholders, or Cordelia, are likely to indulge you much longer.”

  He looked up at her. She was gazing right into his eyes again.

  She was clearly scared to be talking to him this way. But she wasn’t going to compromise.

  Not for the first time, West was very glad he promoted her. He made a mental note to increase her salary. Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough.

  “What are you saying?” he asked.

  “What I’m saying, West, is that you need to be straight with me, or you are screwing up my data. If you tell me that a failure of the material was due to accidentally poking yourself with a hanger when you were looking for your coat, when it was actually caused by a hopped up meth head with a nail gun, that sends me back to the drawing board for all the wrong reasons. And if you are going to tell me you burnt yourself getting cookies out of the oven, when you were actually attacked by a flamethrower—”

  “—Molotov cocktail,” he admitted.

  “What?” she asked.

  “A Molotov cocktail, like when someone sticks a rag in a bottle of booze and lights it,” he explained.

  “I know what a Molotov cocktail is. I just…”

  “Look, Mallory,” he said. “I’m sorry. I just thought the less people that knew about my nighttime hobby, the better. I didn’t think about the headache I was causing you. From now on, I’ll be straight with you. As long as you don’t mind some… off the books modifications.”

  At last he saw her usual exuberant smile. It was as sunny as that crazy hair of hers.

  “I literally could not be more excited about that,” she said, clearly relieved. “So no more secrets, when it comes to your enhancements?”

  “None,” h
e agreed.

  Immediately, he thought of the glitching - those horrible moments when his legs refused to move. Last time, it had gotten him shot. Next time, it could happen during something really important.

  With a pang of horrible guilt, he realized that he wasn’t ready to tell her about that yet. If she could fix it, that would be incredible. But deep down, he couldn’t help wondering what she would do if she couldn’t fix it?

  Worst case, he could lose everything- his new limbs, his new life, Cordelia.

  Best case, it would sideline him for weeks, or months.

  No. He had to at least wait until he had tracked Dalton.

  And that was the whole reason he was here in the first place.

  “So, how about that new eye?” he asked.

  “Let’s get to work,” she said, leaning his chair back.

  When she came into view, she was holding something that looked like a screwdriver with a suction cup on the end.

  “This may be… uncomfortable. But not painful,” she explained. “I hope.”

  He nodded.

  Mallory placed the cup over his artificial eye. West heard a wet click as it locked on, and breathed through a wave of nausea.

  She gave a twist, and a light pull, and the unit came free.

  As soon as it was out, the nausea was gone.

  She placed it carefully into a glass beaker full of liquid.

  “With the base we installed the last time, this really isn’t much more complicated than changing out a light bulb,” she told him, “a very expensive, completely unique, irreplaceable light bulb.”

  She leaned over him, holding the new eye.

  West heard a click as it sunk into place.

  “Should be good to go,” Mallory said enthusiastically, raising his seat to the upright position again. “Let’s go test it out.”

  “Great.”

  He hesitated. After all his struggles to hold on to every last bit of his humanity, he almost couldn’t bring himself to ask.

  “Oh, one more thing, before we do…”

  “Go on,” she prompted him.

  “I love the zoom ability on the eye,” he said. “But it would be great to be able to hear what’s going on from that far away. Is there anything we can do about that?”

  “Your ears didn’t sustain any permanent damage in the fall,” Mallory said with a furrowed brow. “Your hearing is perfectly normal.”

  “That’s the problem,” West replied.

  27

  “Nana-what?” Dalton asked.

  “Nanobots,” Sterling replied.

  They sat together on a bench under a big sycamore at the old pond. The solar fairy lights still winked overhead, reflecting magically on the scummy water.

  Under different circumstances, it could have almost been romantic, but now the conversation had taken an unexpected turn.

  Dalton couldn’t help but notice that the duck paddle boats were still afloat, their heads bobbing slightly in the breeze. They were wearing the same confused expression he suspected was on his face right now.

  “And you found them in me?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, gazing out over the murky pond. “We found the remains of what appears to be some pretty sophisticated nanotechnology in your bloodstream.”

  “That’s a new one,” he shook his head. How far had Alpha gone? What had they actually done to him? It sounded like even Sterling might not know everything.

  “It is. I’m just really curious as to how they got there,” she said with meaning, suddenly fixing him with a look.

  “What do you mean?” Dalton said. “Anything out of the ordinary you find in me, I think we both know how it got there.”

  “That’s the thing,” she told him. “I’ve looked through all the old records personally. I don’t see any lines of experimentation involving nanotech. No one involved in the program at any level, past or present, has any specialization in the field.”

  “Just because you didn’t find it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t done,” Dalton pointed out. “Do you really have any idea how many pies Andrews had his fingers in when he was calling the shots?”

  A faraway peal of thunder sounded in the overcast sky, and fragment of memory flashed in the back of his mind like distant lightning.

  A stormy night, Dmitri carrying him to the car and West accompanying him to Med Pros, right after West had busted him out. Back when he was still a wreck.

  It was the old twelfth floor lab, of course, before the fire. And they had set up a bed for him in a storage room connected to the main lab. They’d helped him get himself together over a series of evening visits.

  Dalton wasn’t even a hundred percent sure what they’d done in those visits. He had been half out of his mind.

  Could nanotech have been something Mallory tried in her quest to bring him back?

  He wanted to close his eyes and try to imagine tiny robots in his blood stream.

  But the only thing he knew he could not do was suggest to Sterling that Med Pros was in any way a possible suspect when it came to the tech that was allowing him to live a more or less normal life.

  The last time Alpha Division wanted something West wasn’t willing to give, they had sent someone to take it. And then West was nearly killed, the lab destroyed…

  “Do you really believe Andrews operated with transparency?” he heard himself ask her.

  “That’s true. I even thought it myself. But I checked all the medical records on every subject. There is no trace of anything like this.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Dalton tried to keep his pulse steady. He’d never been good at lying to Sterling. “I know a lot of the early subjects didn’t make it through. Maybe I’m the only one from the nano-whatever group that did.”

  Sterling studied him for a second, her green eyes like hard emeralds.

  A bead of sweat gathered at Dalton’s temple.

  “Maybe,” she finally agreed. “In any case, we think the technology might have something to do with your control over your condition. The samples were too degraded for us to get much info out of them. We’ll need to draw a much fresher sample for it to be of any real use.”

  She smiled at him and he felt relieved that she seemed to believe him until her words hit him.

  “Now?” he asked, a half second too quickly.

  “Not now,” she said, placing her hand on his knee. “We don’t have the right instruments on hand to properly study it anyway. We’re flying in some new gear for the lab, along with a specialist, to help us decipher everything. Probably in another couple of days.”

  His chest flooded with relief. But he would have to make a game plan, and fast.

  Dalton was ready for answers. But he wasn’t sure he was ready to share them. As much as he wished for it to be true, he still had a hard time believing Sterling was one hundred percent on his side.

  “Anyway, it’s getting late today,” Sterling teased, slowly sliding her hand from his knee up toward his thigh.

  Her face was half in shadow, but he could see what was on her mind. Her green eyes twinkled up at him and he felt a pang at holding back from her.

  He had loved her once. She loved him still, it seemed.

  “Ice…” she whispered as she crawled onto his lap and nuzzled his ear.

  The nickname brought back a flood of memories from before her first promotion, when she had been his equal in training. Their partnership had brought him happiness when everything else in the world seemed to be falling away beneath his feet.

  She sank her fingernails into his shoulders, bringing him back to the present in a heartbeat.

  No matter how his head feared her motives, his body always responded to her like a puppy whose owner just came home.

  He held her face in his hands, wishing he could kiss the secrets out of her head.

  She laughed her husky laugh and he took advantage of the moment to cover her mouth with his. He kissed her as if he knew he could trust her, as if she w
ere his partner again and happiness could be found in that one simple gesture.

  28

  Cordelia rushed down the sidewalk past Worthington Enterprises.

  It was only eight, so the crush of pedestrians wasn’t quite as intense as it would be half an hour from now. Mostly it was coffee vendors in shining trailers, and ambitious junior execs rushing toward tall mirrored buildings. The glass reflected more buildings with more glass reflected in them, on into infinity.

  Cordelia loved her city, but she sometimes felt like Alice in Wonderland here, and wished she were back in the peaceful beauty of the zoo.

  Then she thought about the things that were at the zoo the other night and shuddered.

  Taking in a gigantic breath of cold spring air, Cordelia tried to get her head in the game. As it was, she was so torn that she felt physically sick about the meeting she was about to have.

  It had been foolish to schedule it at Kava, the coffee shop close to the Worthing ton building, the one she and West had always frequented. She was heartbroken before she pushed open the door.

  A familiar rush of warm, cinnamon scented air greeted her as she entered. A quick glance showed her that Peter had arrived and was already seated.

  He stood at once to greet her.

  “Cordelia,” he smiled.

  “Hello, Peter,” she said.

  He looked good, really good. He wore a crisp white shirt and a slate grey suit that brought out his blue gray eyes. It reminded her of when West used to dress so beautifully for work.

  He gestured and they sat.

  Cordelia noticed immediately that her back would be to the door. West would never sit with his back to the door when they were still working together. He had taught her so much about how to read the other person in a business meeting, and how to gain the upper hand without them even noticing. Most of West’s meetings were over before they even began.

  Peter had probably spent years on her side of the table.

  Was this a small show of power on his part?

  Or did he even realize he was doing it?