Black and White

by Jackie Kessler

  With a shudder, Jet collapsed against her, sobbed against the front of her unikilt.

  “Joan …” Taser said again.

  Iridium raised her free hand, a miniature sun twisting and forming on her palm. “Fuck off, Taser or Bruce or whatever the hell your real name is. We don’t need your help.”

  He glanced at her. “You do, if you want to get out of here.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Fine,” Taser shrugged. “Have the conquering hero there call in the cavalry. Oh, right.” He snapped his fingers, making sparks fly. “Ops is out of commission and every first-string hero in this city is trapped in the Rat Network. Besides, without the Happy Thought Machine whispering in their ear, I doubt any extrahumans in the greater New Chicago precinct are going to feel much like rescuing anyone’s asses but their own.”

  He was right, damn it.

  Iridium growled, “I assume you have a grand plan.”

  “Might have one rattling around the old head.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Call the cops,” said Taser. “Nice, simple solution. No superpowers involved.” He stuck a commercial comm in his ear and tapped a police frequency.

  As she held Jet, Iridium realized that this was going to get press coverage. There wouldn’t be any way to keep the media in the dark, not about Night. One of Corp’s shining examples was about to get ousted, forcefully.

  She smiled. Her father would be proud.

  “I suggest you two ladies vamoose,” Taser said, “unless you want to explain to New Chicago’s Finest exactly how you had nothing to do with Night’s insidious plot, bwaha-haha.”

  “Come on, hero,” Iridium said to Jet. “Let’s move.”

  “Yes,” Taser was saying behind them, “I need to report a 19-37 in progress at the Corp Academy. Me? Bruce Hunter, Mercenary Worker ID 42785.”

  “What happens now?” Jet asked Iridium as they slowly walked through corridors blurred by emergency lights and through an evacuation door with a crowd of other injured heroes.

  “I don’t know about you,” Iridium said as the steel sky of New Chicago rolled out before them, “but I could use a cocktail.”

  EPILOGUE

  Sometimes, I wish I, too, could be a little extra. But mostly, I’m deeply satisfied with who I am. I wonder if the same could be said for our small gods, our extrahuman protectors. Our heroes.

  Lynda Kidder, “Origins: Conclusion,” New Chicago Tribune, June 18, 2112

  IRIDIUM

  Boxer put down the greasy bag of takeout at Iridium’s elbow. “Two extralarge beef tacos and a cheese quesadilla. No guacamole, no pico. Just how you like it.”

  “Thanks,” Iridium murmured. Her bandages were starting to itch. The synthesized skin around the edges pinked as it melted into her own skin. Soon it would be like all the cuts and scrapes had never happened.

  Even the wound Taser’s blow had caused was gone.

  “Want to hear something weird?” Boxer said. “I got a call earlier from my nephew—the one you were in school with. He wants to ‘talk.’ He was yammering on about making amends, how you never turn your back on family. Think he’s finally lost his nut?”

  “No,” she said, taking a taco out of the bag. “Just the opposite. You should talk to him.”

  Boxer lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Never had much use for the kid, but I guess it couldn’t hurt.”

  The door chime sounded at the front of the warehouse, and Boxer’s pistol appeared in his hand. “Stay put,” he ordered Iridium.

  “Christo, Boxer,” Iridium said, pulling her weary body to her feet. “Like that thing is going to put a dent in anyone who comes to my door.”

  The taillights of a Package Express hover pulled away as Iridium rolled the door back. A small metal box covered in shipping stamps sat at her feet.

  “Think it’s a bomb?” Boxer asked.

  “I think that right now, we’re the safest we’ve probably ever been,” Iridium said. She looked toward downtown, where smoke and emergency hovers were still flitting through the spotlit night sky underneath the pollution layer.

  She picked up the box and unlatched the lid. Boxer whistled as the small silver object inside gleamed under the streetlights. “Is that your neural inhibitor?”

  Iridium felt cold, then her cheeks flushed. “That cocky bastard,” she muttered, fishing out the card at the bottom.

  Thought you might want this back. Consider it a souvenir of our time together. See you soon.—T

  “Not if I see you first,” Iridium muttered, tossing the box onto her workbench, then she strode back to eat her dinner.

  “So,” Boxer said, following her and helping himself to half her quesadilla. “You didn’t get the guy, you didn’t get the cash, you didn’t get Corp off your ass—what was the point of this, again?”

  “Saved the world,” Iridium mumbled around her taco.

  “Oh. Right.”

  They ate in silence. It wasn’t until Iridium crumpled up the paper bag and strobed it to ash that Boxer said, “So … is she coming after you still? Jet? You didn’t tell me how things ended there.”

  “They didn’t,” Iridium said. “But no, Boxer—I don’t think we have to jump at shadows.” She laughed. “In fact, give it a few months, and I bet our Joannie will be walking over to the dark side.”

  “I don’t buy it,” said Boxer. “Corp had its hooks into her so deep they came out the other side.”

  “Oh, but that’s the trick,” she said. “They kept her locked down so tight because she was the most dangerous, out of all of us.”

  She smiled at Boxer and pushed back from the table, going over to the windows and watching the burning skyline. “Give it time, Boxer. I promise, sooner or later, Jet will be one of us.”

  JET

  “So that’s everything,” Meteorite said, sipping her latte.

  Jet pursed her lips as she stirred her Earl Grey. “When are you due back?”

  “One more hour.” Meteorite barked out a laugh. “Like that’s enough time for me to catch up on any sleep.”

  When Jet had called her earlier that morning and asked to meet at the mall, the other woman had been harried, shell-shocked, from almost thirty straight hours of damage control. Keeping the media out of the Academy attack and the stranded Squadron members in the tunnels had been a Herculean feat, one that was still ongoing. It had been utter insanity, Meteorite told her; there’d been no time to question anything, like what in the never-ending Darkness had actually happened.

  And that was all before Meteorite had fielded the vidcall from Police Commissioner Wagner, who had a stunned Night on his hands and a licensed merc’s video report about how the Shadow power had tried to destroy the world. “Then,” Meteorite had said, “all hell broke loose.”

  Jet completely understood.

  Meteorite told her that she’d still be chained to her computer even now, if not for Frostbite. He’d worked his own sort of computer magic and gotten her a two-hour break. Told her to get some sleep. Instead, she’d come to see Jet. “Had to know why you’d called on a restricted line to ask for a private meeting in a public spot,” she’d told Jet when she’d arrived.

  So Jet had bought her a cup of coffee, and told her a story about an organization that brainwashed extrahumans into being Academy-approved heroes. She didn’t—couldn’t—use the organization names. But she got the gist across.

  After the weight of her words had sunk in, Meteorite cursed Corp in three languages and a variety of colors.

  And damn it all, Jet had cringed with every profanity, had bitten back on defending the organization that had screwed with her mind for ten years.

  Then, as if to make up to Jet for all the wrongs that Corp had done to her and the others, Meteorite told her what had happened when Ops went down.

  Simply put: chaos.

  “After the Squadron burst out of the tunnels, half of them nearly went full-out rabid right there, and the other half acted like their thumbs
were jammed up their asses. Only three of them still played the hero card without Corp’s lovefest blasting in their brains.” Her voice soured on the last words, understandably.

  Jet stilled, absorbing Meteorite’s words. Out of all the Squadron—out of hundreds of active heroes—only three had remained true.

  Were the others just angry—justifiably angry—at how they’d been manipulated, brainwashed, by Corp all of their lives? Or were the extrahumans being true to a nature that they’d never had a chance to experience before?

  Martin Moore whispered in her mind: How many extrahumans would it take to rule the world? To crush humanity under its feet?

  At the time, Jet had scoffed, saying that the heroes wouldn’t do that.

  Moore’s words, plaintive and terrifying: But if, one day, you decided to do just that—say, that internal wiring of yours melts and leaves you more likely to, shall we say, wreak havoc—what could we humble civilians possibly do against you?

  She took a breath, held it. Wondered if Corp had been doing the right thing all along.

  Jet exhaled slowly. It didn’t matter. As long as some of them—even if it was only three—still fought the good fight, they had a chance to still do the right thing. To still be heroes.

  “Let me guess,” Jet said, sipping tea. “Steele’s still a card-carrying good guy.”

  “Absolutely. So’s Firebug.”

  “Makes sense.” Partners tended to feel the same way about missions. About everything that mattered. Jet frowned, thought of Iridium.

  “And get this: Hornblower.”

  Jet raised her brows—which felt so strange without her cowl pressing against them. “You’re joking.”

  “Nope. Tyler Taft, hero at large.” Meteorite shook her head. “His uncle would kill him if he did anything otherwise.”

  “Probably. So what’s Corp planning, now that they’ve got the beginnings of an extrahuman revolt on their hands?”

  The other woman stared glumly at her coffee. “Gearing up for war. They’ve already got PR working the press.” Her face paled, and she whispered, “I’ve heard other things, rumors. Stuff that would make you green.”

  “Everyman,” Jet said quietly, thinking of the serum that had warped Lynda Kidder into a monster, remembering Moore shouting that they wouldn’t be easy meat for the ex-trahumans.

  Meteorite blinked. “How did you …”

  “Doesn’t matter.” She blew out a sigh, pushed Lynda Kidder and Martin Moore out of her mind. “This is bad.”

  “Corp did it to themselves,” Meteorite said, her voice a hiss. “Let Corp fix it.”

  They would, Jet knew. Organizations like Corp didn’t take things like all-out revolution lying down. They’d contain it, control it, and dismantle it. And all the while, spin it to the media, and have the civilians eating it up with a spork.

  Unless Everyman struck first.

  Or any of the Squadron truly went rabid.

  “When you get back on duty,” Jet said, rising to her feet, “you get word to Steele. Let her know that I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “You’re going back,” Meteorite said, horrified. “After everything they’ve done to you, you’re going back. For the love of heaven, why?”

  Part of it was because Night made all of this happen, and Jet had played a part in that. Part of it was because Night was right: Even after all this time, Jet was still weak. She had to prove to herself that she could be strong, could stand without anyone supporting her—not Night, not the Academy, or Corp.

  Not Iridium.

  What she said was, “I’m a hero.”

  She turned away and strode out of the coffee shop, then summoned a Shadow floater and sped off into the night.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  JACKIE KESSLER used to run around in Wonder Woman Underoos and watch Challenge of the Super Friends. Now she watches superhero cartoons with her kids. Jackie’s superpower is stamina: She survived pitching one thousand beloved comic books after a battle with a flooded basement. (Comic books, contrary to popular belief, are not waterproof.) When not writing about superheroes and the villains who beat the heroes into a bloody mess, she likes to write about demons. For more about Jackie, visit her website: www.jackiekessler.com.

  CAITLIN KITTREDGE is an avid comic book reader and superhero fan, ever since she picked up a copy of The Dark Knight Returns at age fifteen. She once painted herself blue and went to a Halloween party as the X-Men’s Mystique. She’s worked as a game designer, phone psychic, and hot-dog-on-a-stick girl, and currently writes full-time near Seattle, Washington, surrounded by books, cats, and action figures. Her other novels include the popular Nocturne City and Black London series and the Iron Codex trilogy for young adults. Visit her online at www.caitlinkittredge.com.

  And don’t miss the further adventures

  of Iridium and Jet …

  New Chicago is bursting at the seams, and the violence

  is starting to spread. But it’s

  not just any violence—it’s extrahuman violence: superheroes gone mad, no

  longer brainwashed slaves to Corp-Co.

  And when superheroes are the cause of mayhem,

  it’s up to the forces of chaos to rein them back in.

  For when the answers that were once so

  black and white get blurred, you get …

  SHADES OF GRAY

  by

  Jackie Kessler and

  Caitlin Kittredge

  A Spectra Trade Paperback

  July 2010

  Black and White is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events,

  or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A Spectra Trade Paperback Original

  Copyright © 2009 by Jacqueline H. Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spectra, an imprint of The Random House

  Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-553-90666-0

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  v3.0