by Ross, R. J.
“But we do not! What happens if ALL of the supers suddenly decide that they don’t like play acting and want to take over the planet?” the second counters.
“And this is just another step in making sure we’re capable of dealing with that situation,” the third man says, coldly. “She’s young, but you’ve seen what she can do. If we can prove that we can keep her contained, we’ll prove that we can contain any of them.”
Rochester stands slowly, his fingers lingering on the ground for a second as he tries to control his anger. He hadn’t expected this when he first came here. He’d sort of wondered if they were recording her, or something, but this…
If he was a different cape, he would be tempted to topple this place to the ground. He can’t, and not just because of strength. If a super abruptly destroys a science lab that supposedly has good relationships with the Hall, things will not look good for the supers. No, he needs to find out everything about what they did to Skye, report it to Nico, and then wait for the Hall to deal with this problem. Of course it happened a long time ago, and the guy that did it doesn’t work here, any longer… that could make it a little more difficult.
He starts walking through the dusty basement, pausing to touch a wall here, a floor there, slowly making his way to the holding cell where they had kept Skye captive. He stops at the door, examining it for a moment. “How did they hold her in with this?” he asks, startled into speaking out loud. It looks like glass. He knows what Skye can do. Concrete is no big deal for her powers, in fact, he’s pretty sure she can go through lead, so why would glass be able to hold her in? Of course, she might not have been that strong over fifteen years ago, but it had sounded as if she had powers already.
He steps into the room, looking at the shattered remains of furniture that litter the floor. He almost hesitates to look, but he does, crouching down and pressing his hand to the floor.
***
*The Past*
“So… you’re my new Dad?” a much younger Skye says as she follows a tall man into the room. She lands on the ground as they step in, looking around curiously. “I mean, I knew they were trying to get me adopted, but… um… I thought I’d be staying in a house, maybe an apartment, or I’d even be okay with a trailer, you know? But this is sort of… weird.”
“I know, Skye, we just need to bear with it until I can make enough money to move into a trailer,” the man says, earnestly. He reaches out, placing his hands on her shoulders. “You can wait that long, right?”
Skye looks at him, hesitating before she nods slightly. “Um… do I get a mom?”
“Not yet,” the scientist says. “I’m afraid I’m so busy working that I can’t seem to find a wife. But that just means I have more time to spend with you, right?”
“Um, okay,” she says, turning and looking around the room. There’s a bed in the corner, a dresser, even a little bathroom behind a screen. “Couldn’t I just use the bathroom that we passed on the way here?” she asks, pointing to the door.
“We wouldn’t want you getting lost in the middle of the night. This is better,” he says. “Now why don’t you make yourself at home while I go get my own room ready?”
She nods, looking around again with a worried expression, but the scientist doesn’t even seem to notice. He races out the door and hits a button, closing the glass door behind him. A fine mist fills the glass room that Skye’s still in, and she starts to choke, falling to her knees with her hand over her mouth.
“Prepare the needles,” the man snaps. “Soon we should be able to draw her blood.”
Rochester, who’s watching all of this, steps forward, his hand reaching for the fallen girl and sliding through her. Very rarely does he forget that he’s just watching a memory, but he has, now. It costs him.
The same door that closed on Skye closes behind him and a fine mist fills the room, making him choke.
***
Thelma watches him through the glass, a bit worried that the gas might have lost its power over the last fifteen years. If it has, he’s going to kill her. She heads to the machine next to the window, turning it on. All of this is in the research she’d dug up on Skye. In fact, this is the place where she’d found it. She hasn’t told anyone about this place yet. She’s extremely happy about that fact, right now.
“What… are you…” Rochester gasps for breath. He’s on his hands and knees in the room, and she’s a bit worried that the gas didn’t work the way it was supposed to.
“This, well, you have to understand,” she says, tapping on the keyboard. It clacks with each tap. “I’ve never heard of you, before, and yet all of a sudden you’re best friends with Skystep? You’re not even on the Hall docket, you know? And here you are, breaking into a building that’s closely associated with the Hall. So… how am I to believe you’re really Hall? Who are you, mister? What are your powers?”
She’s growing frustrated, though, because the computer is so slow, compared to hers. It’s amazing that Penski could even get information on Skystep with it before rage-quitting. “Come on, come on, I know there’s a scanning system in here, somewhere—“
The hand that slaps against the glass makes her jump a foot in the air. She sees Rochester’s hand against the glass. “Don’t try to escape! That gas prohibits you from using your powers!” she says, but her voice trembles slightly. It had seemed like such a good idea, before this. No, she tells herself, grabbing the mouse and clicking on things randomly, this is still a good idea. He hasn’t escaped yet, right?
“If ya let me out,” he says through the glass, “I won’t hurt you. I won’t even tell people ya kidnapped an’ gassed me.”
“If I keep you in, you won’t get the opportunity to try,” she says, working as fast as she possibly can.
“So ya knew they kept Skye in here?” he asks, his hand still pressed to the glass. “Ya knew, and you didn’t tell anyone?”
“If I were to tell people, they would take the research I searched so hard for away from me. This information might save my job! I NEED my job, mister,” she tells him, finally finding something worth looking into on the computer. “This might be it. Now hold still and let me scan you!” she orders him.
“Who did it?” he asks. “Who trapped Skye in this room? What’s his name?”
“Huh?” she says, looking over. “Why do you need to know?”
“Tell me what his name is,” he says, his anger leaking into his voice. For the first time, she realizes that his eyes are glowing. He has his powers. She’s going to die.
“HEY!” someone yells, making them both look over. With a mixed feeling of relief and worry, Thelma sees a security guard race into the basement. “This area is off limits! What are you doing down here?” he demands.
“He—he broke in,” Thelma says, weakly. “I didn’t know what else to do—I knew we had a way to restrain his type down here—“
“His type?” the security guard asks, looking into the glass room for the first time. “A janitor?”
“She’s gotten some crazy idea that I’m a super,” Rochester says, snorting. “So she trapped me in here and used this weird—“ he coughs, a bit dramatically, “gas on me. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to do. Is she tryin’ t’ kill me? Am I gonna get cancer? You gotta get me out of here, man! I was just tryin’ t’ do my job!”
“His eyes were GLOWING!” Thelma protests. “He’s got to be a super! He knows the Deadly Darlin’s!”
“Miss… I think I need to call the boss,” the security officer says, looking from her to Rochester and back again. “This is above my pay grade,” he mutters as he turns away from them both, pulling out his phone.
This is the time that Rochester could escape, or call someone higher up than him to clean this up. He knows that. He could easily break through the glass wall and run for it, but he won’t. Instead he drops down to the ground that’s still littered with broken furniture, and waits.
He might not get his degree from this, since he was caught, but he
doesn’t care. He wants to see this boss of theirs with his own eyes, and find out if the man knew what his company had done to Skye. This is personal.
***
Thirty minutes pass with Rochester just sitting on the floor. Well, he did get up for a moment, searching through the broken pieces and finding one thing that hadn’t been busted, a cheap little ukulele. Now he’s leaning against the wall, watching for the boss and strumming out a song on the toy. This ukulele had been the only thing that Skye had liked about being stuck in this prison. He could see her memories through the toy. She’d never had toys before this. Now, sure, he’s heard that Century keeps her and the girls well stocked with video games, but back then…
“What is this all about?” a man demands as he steps into the basement. “I was in the middle of a fundraiser!”
“Ms. Farkinkle seems to think that the janitor is a super, sir,” the security guard says, looking nervous. “I’m not sure how you want to handle this, since, well, if she had come to me instead of locking him up, I would have known what to do, but she… well… you can see for yourself.”
Rochester stops playing, places the toy on the ground almost reverentially, and stands. “Sir,” he says, walking up to the glass.
“Get him out of there,” the man says.
“Mr. Cage, he’s a super,” Thelma says quickly. “If you let him out, he might hurt someone!”
“You’re a super?” Mr. Cage asks, looking at Rochester.
“I’m not required t’ answer that question, sir. Everyone knows that ya can’t discriminate against D-class capes in the workforce.”
“D-class,” Mr. Cage repeats. “I see. And you’re a janitor?”
Rochester doesn’t smile, although his bait has been grabbed most beautifully. “Yessir,” he says, touching his hat brim. “But I wasn’t informed that this place was anti-super.”
“We are exactly the opposite,” Mr. Cage says, looking honestly surprised. “We work quite closely with the supers, we always have.”
“Then why d’ya have this place?” Rochester asks. “Someone was kept here, an’ from what Thelma there said, it’s a good chance that it was South Branch’s Skystep.”
Several emotions cross Mr. Cage’s face before he quickly hides them all. “I see,” he says. “I had wondered…” he says, almost to himself. “I’m afraid I didn’t know about this study at the time. I didn’t find out that something had happened here until after it was over. I never did find out all the details, or even who, exactly, was involved. My scientists are extremely good at deleting evidence. That’s one of the things that they’re paid to do.”
“J’st call me the janitor,” Rochester says. “I ain’t done anything t’ earn the title Mister.”
“Well, Mr… Janitor,” Mr. Cage says, “there was only this when I found out. I had no proof that they were doing something illegal at the time—“
“Ya could have called the supers in. There’s one that can read minds,” Rochester says. Mr. Cage stares at him, not saying what’s obvious, so Rochester says it for him, “but ya didn’t want t’ lose the contract, did you?”
“There are two ways we can deal with this, Mr. Janitor,” Mr. Cage says rather than answer that. “You can leave, and forget that you saw anything, and we won’t press charges for breaking and entering. Trust me, I can get your fingerprints easily. Or we can do this the hard way.”
“An’ what is the hard way?” Rochester asks.
“We sue you,” Mr. Cage says. “You are not one of our employees, trust me, I would know. You’ve entered this building under false pretenses and are sniffing around in off-limit areas. That’s clearly a crime. So what’s your answer, Mr. Janitor?”
Rochester looks at him. “I guess I have no choice,” he says, lying through his teeth, “I’ll keep what I’ve seen t’ myself.”
“You had better. Let him out,” Mr. Cage says to Thelma.
“But he—“
“I said to LET HIM OUT,” Mr. Cage snarls. “It was bad enough that they did something like this when I didn’t know. There’s no way I’m going to allow it to happen again, right in front of me.”
The door slides open and Rochester tips his cap before walking right past them. They watch him go, silent until he’s long gone.
“I want this place completely cleared out,” Mr. Cage says. “Leave no sign that any of this was ever here, do you understand? And you,” he says, turning on Thelma, “I’ll deal with you, later.”
She nods, swallowing loudly as he storms away. For a moment she’s too shocked to think of anything. Something about that conversation breaks through her numbness.
“I… I never told him my first name,” she says.
***
*Cape High*
“So… yeah,” Rochester says, now sitting on one of the long science lab tables. “I don’t know f’r sure, but he didn’t seem t’ know that it was Skye held captive.” Technically he hadn’t told Nico what had happened. Instead, he’d shown him by using his powers. He still has a headache from that first moment, where Nico’s thoughts had hit him. He reaches up, rubbing his temple and making a face. “I swear you’re worse than ya were last time.”
“You caught me in the middle of something,” Nico says, absently. He’s got a frown on his face. “Did you at least take the ukulele?”
“I figured I’d get her a new one,” Rochester admits. “That one had too many bad memories attached. So… what are you going to do about it?”
“You never found out the name of the man that did it,” Nico says, “so I’ll have to do a bit of digging. From how Cage reacted, well… he’s not going to be my target, just yet. That doesn’t mean I won’t be keeping an eye on him.” He looks at Rochester for a moment. “And what do you want to do about Thelma Farkinkle?”
“Huh?” Rochester says.
“She held you captive and tried to drug you,” Nico says. “Don’t you have a problem with that?”
Rochester hesitates, before shrugging. “I was more irritated ‘cause she wouldn’t tell me the name.”
“I thought that was what you would say,” Nico admits. “We’ll make sure to keep an eye on her, as well. She seemed a little too obsessed with the girls.”
“Did they get a scan of me?” Rochester asks. “You can find out, right?”
“I’ll find out,” Nico says. “Now… since you were captured, you’re going to have to do a few more things before I feel like giving you your degree,” he decides, smirking ever so slightly. Rochester groans, already knowing where this is heading.
“Fine,” he says, “but I’m gonna need one of those illusion watches, this time.”
~About the Author~
R.J. Ross has been writing since junior high, when she discovered that it could help her keep an A in English Class. She lives in Missouri, where she spends all of her time writing. If you would like to see more of her work, you can find several short stories at amazon.com/author/rjross!
Like her on Facebook for bonus material such as character profiles, unpublished information, and status updates at https://www.facebook.com/capehigh! Or check out her blog for free Cape High short stories at https://capehigh.wordpress.com or follow her on twitter @rjrosscapehigh
~~~~~~
~About the Cover Designer~
Artist, designer, programmer - you would think that by growing up near the Gulf Coast Leslie Zielinski would spend more time on the sandy beaches. No, she spends her time in front of a computer screen creating digital art and making it come to life.
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