Red and Black

by Nancy O'Toole Meservier

  And then the tram must have hit a turn, because my captor and I were sliding across the floor, colliding with the guy I had kicked in the face a few minutes back. Taking advantage of the moment of distraction, I yanked the arms around my neck off me (yay for super-strength!). I felt bones crush beneath my fingers and realized I had broken something in my haste.

  Whoops.

  Bang! Bang!

  I heard Amanda’s gun go off two times. Strangely, this was echoed by another bang, only this one came from the back of the tram and didn’t sound much like a gun.

  I stood tall and turned to the back door of the tram. It was mostly made of glass, giving me a clear view of Faultline on the other side, standing between the second and third car of the tram. His fists were raised in the air as he delivered another blow to the connecting device between the two.

  You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand his goal. Break the back car off the tram, cleanly separating myself and Detective Bronson from the hostages. It didn’t matter that we were winning our two-women-vs.-many-thugs fight. Faultline would still get away with Dana and the rest of the hostages.

  I ran to the back of the second car and wedged my fingers in the tiny gap between the doors. I yanked them open, snapping the locks in the process, then threw myself at Faultline.

  He must have expected it, because he pulled back into the car. As a result, I landed not on the sturdy solid form of a henchman, but on the small connector between the two cars. I stumbled, arms windmilling, desperate to find purchase.

  And of course, this was where the tram decided to take another turn.

  My body lurched to the side, and for a moment I saw nothing but the ground below me, and, let’s be clear, it was now faaaar below. The tram had long since exited its underground hidey-hole and was now teetering a good ten stories above the streets as it made its way west toward the river.

  It was a fall I knew I could survive, but given that I wasn’t really looking forward to that experience, I was glad when my next fall forward landed me not off the edge, but just into the third car.

  God, Spiderman didn’t know how good he had it, being able to latch onto things like he did. For a few terrifying seconds, I struggled to find a grip and then, in a manner neither elegant nor heroic, I clumsily pulled myself into the car, landing in a heap on the floor.

  I tilted my head back to see five more guys (well, five upside-down guys, thanks to my unique vantage point), forming a human shield between me and the hostages. And Faultline…where was Faultline?

  I watched as a pair of large, black, slightly shiny boots disappeared into a hatch on the top of the train, close to where the hostages lay. Shit, what was he trying to do up there? He was too dangerous to be let out of my sight! I pulled myself to my feet and barreled through the thugs like we were in some sort of weird-ass human bowling match. Ignoring their cries of protest, I moved beneath the hatch door and jumped upward and out. It was a move that was, given that we were on a moving tram car, all kinds of crazy. My boots hit the slick top of the car, and for a terrifying moment, I skidded in place. I fell into a half-crouched position, then found my balance.

  “I knew it.”

  I snapped my head up at Faultline’s voice as he shouted over the whistling wind.

  “You followed me before in the alley, and I knew you would follow me up here,” he said, voice heavy with anger. “You’re so predictable.”

  Well, shit if he wasn’t right…

  “God, you’re still doing it, aren’t you?” I said with a groan. “Seriously, no one liked the Bale Batman voice. You’re really just robbing yourself of any kind of intimidation you’re trying to set up here.”

  “Quiet,” he said, his voice pretty much a growl.

  “Well, now that I know it bothers you so much…”

  But instead of talking, I launched myself at him, using my super-jump to increase the intensity of the blow. Unfortunately, he had seen me coming and taken multiple steps backward. My fist continued on its ongoing arc, landing right where Faultline had once stood, going right through the roof of the tram beneath us. Whoops. Needed to be careful. Sure, he was wearing body armor, but it wasn’t like I wanted to kill the guy—

  I looked up just in time to see Faultline barrel down on me with a punishing double-fisted blow. The move was almost comically slow-motion, like out of an action scene from The Matrix. His destination was clear—the top of my skull.

  And the next few seconds…well, let’s just say they were a complete blank in my mind.

  Alex

  Something happened after I hit her. Her body went fuzzy, like an image out of focus. I paused at the sight.

  Then the tram took a turn. I fumbled backward multiple steps, then fell outright. I landed in a crablike position, my hands going for the dual ridges that went down the center of the car. I could hear my pulse thundering in my head as the tram straightened. What the hell had I been thinking, jumping on the roof of a speeding train? Bringing her up here, away from the hostages, had seemed like a good plan. The drones could only take so much punishment, after all.

  I heard a gunshot from below and swore.

  Time to take out this costumed obstacle. Calypso wanted her? Well, she was going to get her.

  I took in a deep breath and reached for that pocket of rage I buried beneath seemingly easy smiles and games of Battleship with my sister. Everything I had tucked deep inside of me. The memory of my mother in that hospital bed. The last sight of my father as he walked out the door. My sister telling me she was going to get expelled because she stood up to her best friend’s abuser. I reached for that and I pulled…

  And the world around me flared to life in a way that was much more vibrant, much more obvious than the flickers that came out when my temper slipped. I could see not only where fault lines were, but where they could be if I pushed them in the right way.

  I took that rage and I pointed it toward Red and Black, who was so fucking good at showing up at just the right moment. So fucking clever. Ruining all our plans every single…

  I paused when I saw the fault lines, strong ones, that existed in her body. It was mostly in her skull, near shattered from the force of my blow. While I watched, those lines faded as her body began to heal itself.

  Well goddamn it, how was that fair? Did it really matter how many blows I managed to land if she could just piece herself back together like that?

  Then again, the weird way her body had changed after the blow. That blurring…

  No time to waste. She healed fast? Well, I would have to be fast, too. I made my way forward, my body crouched to help keep my balance, stepping over the hole she had made with her fist. The Red and Black Woman was on her feet again, fast recovering from a blow that would have knocked out a grown man.

  I reared back and swung. I saw the moment she realized what was going to happen, the way her eyes went huge and she scurried backward. The blow missed, and we both struggled for a moment to regain our footing on top of the tram.

  The next swing came from her. I blocked and redirected with my forearm, but goddamn if it didn’t feel like getting hit by a car. And that crunching noise from my body armor was not encouraging.

  I had to end this, quick.

  Ready for her next punch, I dodged it and delivered two of my own, one low and one high. I hit her square in the chin and her head snapped back. I saw her body blur again. For a second, she looked smaller. And had her hair changed color?

  “Damn, you hit hard,” she said, breathless. “Wouldn’t it be so much easier if we just put our differences aside and worked together? Could do a lot of good.”

  Damn, why did she always do that? Ruin my concentration with words. The fault lines dimmed, then flared outward with my temper.

  “Stop talking,” I growled.

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “The bad guys always get to use that line in the big climactic fight scene. Join me, and together—”

  I swung, aiming for that chin again,
only to have her drop down. Then, before I knew it, her leg was sweeping outward in that low roundabout kick I had seen her use in the alleyway weeks before. And my footing up here was not great.

  I fell hard, hitting the top of the tram. Then I started to slide.

  Panic cut through my rage like cold water. My arms scrambled for a grip as I slipped off the side of the car. For a moment, my eyes went downward, and I saw that not only were we above ground, but we were in the high-rise area, at least twenty stories up, a few blocks from the Grand Bailey. The ground lurched toward me and—

  I felt a viselike grip latch around my wrist, and I jerked to a halt.

  I looked up, blinking in surprise to see Red and Black, saving me. Her other hand was out of sight, probably gripping onto the hole she made in the roof of the car to give her more stability.

  Why? Why had she saved me?

  My sense of self-preservation won out over shock. I reached up with my spare hand to help her yank me up and onto the roof. She pulled me up as if I weighed nothing more than a child. For a few seconds, I lay on my back, looking up at her as she crouched over me, hands resting on her knees.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked.

  “You wouldn’t have survived that one,” she said, mouth spreading into that ridiculous grin again. “And it’s not like I want to kill you, dummy.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, only to be cut off by the crack of a gunshot.

  Dammit, if that lady cop killed one of the hostages—

  Then I realized where that the shot had come from, directly in front of me.

  I looked up to see the Red and Black Woman, still standing, only this time she looked more red than before. Blood poured from a wound in her side, a wound that had to have gone right through her lung. She reached up with shaking hands and touched it.

  “Damn,” she said. “So that’s what it—”

  And then the tram went around a corner and the Red and Black Woman, distracted by the sight of her own blood, slipped and fell. Her body hit the tram with a sickening slap, then bounced down to the darkness below, leaving nothing but a streak of red behind.

  Several feet behind her, I saw Noel’s head poking up from the top hatch on the next car over, his eyes wide. And while I couldn’t see his hands, I bet they held a gun.

  “Did I get her?” he yelled over the wind.

  Shit. He really had.

  “I can’t believe I hit her,” Noel said, shaking his head.

  His hands gripped the steering wheel of my car as we drove to the area where Red and Black had fallen. It probably wasn’t the best decision to let him drive. He had been on edge before. Shooting Red and Black hadn’t exactly helped with that. Not that I was any better. My anger from the fight still ran through me in waves, bringing flashes up and down the edges of my vision like a goddamn rave night. If this persisted much longer, it was likely to trigger a migraine.

  “Yeah,” I grumbled, rubbing my bare hand against my forehead. “We were on top of a speeding train. You could have just as easily hit me.”

  I watched as Noel’s face fell, and realized that a bruise was already forming on his forehead.

  “Oh,” he said “I’m sorry. Should I have not—”

  “No, you shouldn’t have,” I snapped. “How did you even get that thing, anyway?”

  “It…it was the cop’s. She must have thought Barry was knocked out but he managed to get a jump on her and—”

  “Fine, fine. I get it.” I cut him off with a slice of my hand. “Not like there’s anything we can do about this now.”

  “Oh,” Noel said, then looked back to the road.

  “Pull over here.” I gestured before pulling my glove back on.

  Noel nodded, bringing us into the mouth of an alley. He stopped and turned off the engine, leaving the car in silence.

  “Now…we look?” he asked, his gaze sliding slowly to me.

  “Calypso wants her,” I said. “Gotta finish the job.”

  “Right,” Noel replied, his voice firm. “For the Mistress.”

  Right. For the goddamn Mistress. Skip classes…for the Mistress. Kidnap some fat lawyer…for the Mistress. Shoot a woman…for the Mistress. Was there anything this kid wouldn’t do for her now?

  I shook my head. I needed to calm down. I still had work to do, after all.

  I stepped out of the car, slamming the door behind me as I made my way through the alley. If I had missed the sight of the trash in the dark, the smell wasn’t something I could avoid. I glanced up. The sky was empty above us, save for the silhouettes of the buildings close by, but a little way down I could make out the tram tracks lit up with some sort of electric lights.

  Noel followed me, jogging toward what looked like a cardboard shelter that a homeless person might use. He looked inside and shook his head.

  “Farther down,” I said, my voice still strained. “Toward the tracks.”

  Noel nodded, and walked forward, half-tripping over a beer can. Christ, there was a lot of trash down here. After a minute, I paused and looked back up. The tracks now stood directly above me. It had been here. Right here. I looked to the left and then to right.

  Was that…was that a hand?

  I looked toward a big pile of empty boxes, or at least what had been a pile of empty boxes. Now they had been squished down the middle. And sticking out of it was a single hand and forearm that looked too delicate and clean to belong to some homeless guy.

  I jogged over and started pushing the boxes out of the way. Christ, she’d better be alive. Calypso didn’t want her dead. If I managed to fuck this up—

  I froze, because the person beneath the boxes wasn’t the Red and Black Woman.

  It was Dawn.

  20

  Dawn

  “I thought she could heal herself.”

  A single voice poked through my murky thoughts, urging me toward consciousness. It wasn’t that different from first getting up in the morning, in those times that you’re just awake enough to realize that you’re really asleep, but not awake enough to pull yourself out of it.

  “I mean, damn, I could see her body knit itself back together on the tram, but now…”

  Hmm? There was something about that voice. It was masculine and almost familiar, but my mind was too messed up to put the pieces together. A second voice spoke up.

  “Maybe the healing is a conscious thing. When she’s out, she can’t concentrate on it. Or it could be the fact that the poor thing was shot through the chest and thrown off a moving train. All bodies have limits. Hers may be more exceptional than ours, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. You should know that, Faultline.”

  Faultline! My mind sharpened, the events of the evening coming back to me. Detective Bronson and I had found the hostages, a fight had ensued, and then…

  I had been shot.

  And it had sucked

  The question was, where was I now? And who was speaking? One of them was clearly Faultline, but the other…

  Could this be Callie Saunders? Or the Amity that everyone was so afraid of?

  “You recognize her, of course?” the woman asked.

  “I…why would I?”

  “Well, her picture was all over the news. The girl that went missing for weeks. Dawn Takahashi. I’ll never forget that image of her poor mother standing in the doorway of her house, waiting for her baby girl to come home. They played it over and over.”

  Oh, crap.

  Ooooh, crap. If my little stumble off the top of the tram was anything like my less-than-little stumble from the Commerce Center, and if what they were saying was true, then I wasn’t costumed up anymore. That meant…

  My eyes opened. The electric lights above almost forced me to shut them again. I blinked several times, adjusting to the sudden brightness of the room, brightness that came from…was that a chandelier? And what was that awful ache in my side…

  My hand jerked toward my rib cage and came in contact with what felt like a thick layer of banda
ges.

  “Oh! She’s awake.”

  I tried to force myself into a sitting position, but froze when a pain shot through my side from beneath the bandages. My mouth flew open in a surprised “O,” and I inadvertently let out a small cry of pain.

  “Oh, child. Don’t do that. You’ll hurt yourself. Stay down for now; trust me.”

  I swung my head (which took a little more effort than normal; whiplash is such a bitch) toward the calm, concerned voice to see a black woman in her late thirties or forties. Her hair was arranged in long braids, and she was dressed in seafoam-green hospital scrubs. She wore no makeup, but her nails had been recently painted a cranberry red.

  She rested a hand on my shoulder and firmly pushed me down. Not that it took much effort. I was weaker than a newborn kitten with a concussion. I thought back to my fall from the Commerce Center, how I had only made it a few blocks on foot before being forced to call a cab. This was even worse. Sure, I hadn’t fallen as far, but Faultline really knew how to beat the crap out of your friendly neighborhood superhero.

  “When do you think she’ll be able to heal again?”

  I jerked toward the second speaker and jumped back when I saw Faultline standing there, arms folded across his chest, all but his jawline hidden by the dark helmet on his head. Under the bright lights, I noticed that I had been mistaken about his costume. It wasn’t black at all, but dark gray. Now that he saw I was awake, he made more attempts to disguise his voice.

  And I wasn’t the least tempted to tease him about it.

  “Why are you wearing that thing in here? You’re scaring her.” The woman in the hospital scrubs reached out and swatted at his arm.

  Faultline murmured something about the plan “not being done yet” and “always needing to be on guard.” Taking that last point to heart, I began to examine my surroundings. I wasn’t wearing my dress from the benefit, having been redressed in a pair of sweats that were too large for my small frame (hopefully Faultline had not been in the room for that moment!). I looked up at the room, and was immediately filled with a strange sense of déjà vu. For the second time in one night, I was in a ballroom. But while the Tong Building had been polished, this was more than a little run down. The chandelier, which had blinded me initially, was actually missing several bulbs and covered in cobwebs. The ceiling hung high above us, but not so high that I couldn’t make out the peeling paint. Straight ahead of me, I even saw what looked like holes in the walls and—more disturbingly—the floor.