Edison groaned as she laid eyes upon Isaac’s prone form and slack, doped-up features. “Great, they knocked him out. He must have spazzed when Satya tuned in. Looks like you’re carrying him the rest of the way, Kerm.”
“What?” Satya stammered. “I—I don’t understand…” She had almond brown skin with raven hair she wore in an elaborate double-helix braid over her right shoulder, features that set her well apart from the rest of her lily white crew.
“Ooph,” Kermit huffed. With Edison’s help, he hoisted Isaac’s limp body in a makeshift fireman’s carry. The siblings were strikingly similar, with roughly the same build, height, even facial construction. The one apparent concession to genetic variation, other than gender, was in their chins. Hers was more pointedly feminine where his was squared off with a dramatic cleft. “Damn stringbean’s heavier than he looks. What did you say to him, anyway, Satya? I’m getting a weird vibe off him.”
Clearly nonplused, it took Satya a moment to register Kermit’s question for what it was. “I… all I said was, ‘Do not be frightened, we are coming for you.’”
Edison snorted. “Oh, well, that was brilliant! You crawl all up in someone’s head who thinks he’s hearing imaginary voices and tell him, ‘Don’t be frightened, we’re coming for you?’ Of course he’s going to freak out! That’s like telling someone don’t look down, or not to forget the condom.”
“Ew,” Kermit said, touching his brow affectedly with his free hand. “TMI.”
Satya glared at Edison, her dark brown eyes bristling with clouds of coppery shrapnel. “Fine, next time you can make first contact,” she snapped. “Oh, that’s right. You can’t. You’re less tuned than a divining rod.”
Edison was just about to snipe back at Satya when Sam interrupted. “Can we debate this back at the Farm, please?” He was nervously checking the hall, waiting for some sign of institutional resistance to their presence. So far they had been remarkably lucky. “We have to go now if we’re going to make the rendezvous.”
“Samuel is right. We’ll continue this later.” Spinning on her heel, Satya joined him in the hall, the two of them taking point back to the courtyard.
“God, she can be such a bitch sometimes,” Edison muttered as they filed out of Isaac’s cell. They rounded a corner to find Satya and Sam in a tense standoff with an orderly blocking access to the courtyard. The man was brandishing a ballistic Taser. No doubt it was among the hardware reserved for the most persistently and violently troubled patients.
Their luck had officially run out.
“Stop where you are! All of you!”
Edison just smirked. “Pal, you don’t even know the kind of fire you’re playing with right now—”
“Edison…”
“—hang on, Satya, I got this—”
“I said, stop where you are!” the orderly repeated.
“True, you did say that. The problem is, I don’t think you really meant it. It’s all in the body language, see. You’re sweating like crazy, you have this sort of panicky look, your hands are shaking something fierce… Have you ever even really used one of those, tough guy? Outside target practice, I mean? What is that, anyway, the X26c? Now that is a quality Taser. Fierce looking, too, right? Like some kind of crazy Star Trek shit.” She took a ginger step toward the man, then another, testing his limits. “Why don’t you let me come over there and show you how to—”
A loud snap perforated the air. Two barbed probes pierced Edison’s top just above the swell of her breasts. Convulsing in place as the charge coursed through her body, she lifted her head, all frizzy-haired and wild-eyed, to reveal an almost orgasmic grin. “Well. I stand corrected. Not bad at all, Deadeye. Looks like now I have to show you mine.”
“EDISON! “
Too late. She’d already sent a surge of concentrated electricity spiking through the wires so intimately connecting her and the orderly. Before he could react, the overcharged device exploded within his hands. The bulky young man crumpled to the floor with a caterwauling wail, beholding his scorched hands and gnarled digits with what little consciousness he had left before slipping into shock. If anything, Edison seemed only to grin wider with the outcome.
“Hey, can’t say I didn’t warn him,” she reminded the others as a macabre silence settled over the hall. The air smelled of cooked flesh and burnt ozone. “Now, are we just going to stand around or are we going to get the hell out of here already? C’mon, chop-chop, people!”
No one followed as she bolted out the doors and into the courtyard. They stood rooted to the spot, trading looks ranging from concern to outright disbelief. Sam went to check on the orderly but there was nothing to be done, at least by him. “Maybe if Amelia was here,” he told the others. Hopefully someone would be along to save the young man’s hands shortly.
Finally, Kermit just shrugged. “I’ll talk to her when we get back,” he declared before joining his sister in the courtyard.
“See that you do,” Satya said through clenched teeth as she and Sam brought up the rear of their motley extraction team. They hustled down the center walkway, past impressively manicured green spaces lined with ornamental grasses, past horseshoe pits and the cement chess table where Isaac had honed his game against Dr. Svendsen, making a beeline all the while for the basketball hoops at the back of the yard where he’d practiced his jump shot with other residents and celebrated the day of his birth in better days. Edison reached the closest hoop first, gesturing for the others to hurry up. As if they weren’t already coming in at full tilt. One by one they came to a skidding stop, making contact with the pole.
“All aboard? Kerm, make sure our boy there has a hand on it, too, just in case.” She’d never tried this trick with anyone who wasn’t fully conscious. Better to overcompensate than rely on Isaac’s close proximity and find out too late they’d only gotten him as far as the Institute’s courtyard because of some weird-ass loophole involving direct physical contact. This was a one-shot deal, and they’d barely made the cut as it was. If they screwed up now, there wouldn’t be a second chance—for them or Isaac Winters.
Kermit slapped Isaac’s limp hand to the pole beneath his own. “Good to go!”
“Then get ready to ride the lightning, bitches.”
Kermit sighed and shook his head. “Every damn ti—”
Before he could finish, Edison clapped her hand to the cold steel. With a blinding blue-white flash, the five of them became beings of the purest energy, vanishing into the cloudless sky above without so much as a hint of scorched earth to mark their improbably swift departure.
Note from the Author
I originally wrote this story back in 2011. I had intended it to be the beginning of a much longer story, but like most younger writers, I started far more projects than I finished at that early stage.
Still, when our writers’ group began discussing this anthology, I knew I had to unearth this little gem from the archive. The characters aren’t really heroes in the conventional sense — they’re immature and undisciplined, really just learning to make the most of their powers and their unique connection with each other — but I’ve always enjoyed their dynamic and dialogue.
In a way, it’s a little reflective of our writers’ group. We all live very different lives, and as a consequence, we all bring something different to our collective table. The discussions aren’t always easy, but we always come out a better group for it. This anthology proves it.
FASTER
By Samuel Peralta
IT’S ONLY SEPTEMBER, but the wind is a November wind, crushing against my bare face and arms, whipping my long blonde hair back like a wash of surf. Cold, a permafrost cold.
I could use a jacket right now.
I fold my arms and stumble on, keeping to the darkness of the red oaks lining this back street. A souvenir of the twenty-foot drop from my third-floor window—with every other step, my left ankle flashes pain.
When I take a step, I feel the pressure of my foot on the ground right
away because touch signals travel at 250 feet per second across the nervous system, so the brain registers it almost at once. That’s fast.
Pain travels much slower. Like thunder coming after lightning, the pain doesn’t come for another three seconds, because those impulses move at only two feet per second.
Pain, the senses, it’s all electrochemistry—hooked up from the brain to the spinal cord, and through nerves to everything else—and chemistry is slow.
It doesn’t travel at the speed of light. Not like thought.
So I steel myself at every other step, faster than the pain can register. It helps.
I’ve done this all my life, kept that shield up before the pain can hit. There’s almost nothing left of that now, not my life, not my name. What I have left is me. Well, at least the only part of me I left behind is my molar, gouged out along with its embedded tracking chip. That was a different sort of pain.
There was open country to the south, but I’d headed the other way. Best to stay in the labyrinth of the City, stay away from the open. After about the twenty-seventh turn down the cobblestones, I figure I’m about two miles away from the Institute.
Still, in the distance comes the faint keening of a siren, and I know it’s only a matter of time before someone decides to let the drones start searching, so I have to keep moving. I turn into the laneway between the backs of two buildings –
And then I stop.
At the end of the laneway, there’s a group of men—five of them—under a lighted fountain in a small square. They light up, talking, laughing. Dressed in leathers, a couple of them are still on their rotorcycles, cowboys straddling beasts of gleaming chrome and smoke.
On the rim of the fountain sit their helmets—blue, two black, silver, red.
And a girl.
She must be no more than fifteen. Sitting shivering like me in the wind, her thin legs pale in her ruffled skirt. Her arms are crossed against a thin blouse and the wind roughs up a page-boy haircut. Not laughing, not smiling, just whispering to herself.
Telepathy is like radio. With other espers, when you first tune in, you’re flooded with static, ambient noise, the almost-too-strong blare of someone else’s song. They ignore the static, turn the dial to scan for that frequency that will bring them the swell of strings. With me it’s different, it’s why the Weyman Institute was interested in me: I tune in faster.
Telepathy is like radio, and with the girl it’s amped up by fear. I can hear this so loud it hurts, and I just catch her thinking a name Mary as her amplitude hits
Mother of God, blessed art thou amongst women
but before she can continue the prayer, the man in a red jacket leans in and kisses her roughly on the mouth. She pulls away. He slaps her.
The others laugh. Red stoops down and starts unbuttoning her blouse.
“Hey!”
They look up to see where the voice had come from, and I’m standing there, at the edge of the square, facing them.
Red grins at me, and swings onto his rotorcycle, an Otani Suzume RF11, an armored shell of scarlet and silver. He guns the plasma drive and the bike lifts, the twin inline 500-hp gyroscopic stabilizers, fore and aft, whirling like cyclones.
Still grinning, he revs across the cobblestones, and I can see the silver kanji emblazoned over his chest grow larger as he skims toward me.
He passes me, and as he does he reaches out a hand to brush my hair, swings about just behind me and comes around my other side.
S U Z U M E
is spelled out on his back, a silver curve on red leather. Jacket, bike, he’s a picture of confidence. Arrogance.
He looks back at me, still grinning, then swings to a stop about ten yards in front of me.
Two of the others put on their helmets, all of them get on their rotorbikes. The air is filled with the thrum of the plasma drives.
They pass by Red on one side and come down the square at me. In single file they pass me, one, two, three, four—and then they’re circling me, their colors muted in the night, blurred by the wavering air, as Red laughs.
Telepathy is like radio. You don’t stop to think that these thoughts are coming from someone else; not from here, where you stand. You just listen.
With five of them, the triangulation is complex, but as I said, I’m fast. As they circle around me, I vector them, one after the other, and the radar pings stabilize in my mind of where they are, who they are, what they’re thinking.
And they’re thinking, as they’re looking at me, all of them are thinking—
Mine.
A blue-gloved hand reaches out to brush my hair.
Behind Red and the blur of the circling motorcycles, I see the girl running, taking the chance I’ve given her. She disappears between the apartments on the right.
That’s what I’m waiting for.
I hold my breath, tense, then run between the circling bikes, right at Red. He’s taken by surprise as I hurl my entire weight at the bike’s rear rotor-wheel. Man and bike collapse, the big machine trapping one of his legs, as I roll away and head for the fountain.
The others are coming at me now, Blue and one of the Blacks leading the way.
Get her.
Get her!
But I’ve reached the helmets, grabbing two of them by the straps with either hand.
I sidestep the first bike and swing one helmet with all my might into the rider’s elbow. I hear a crack as the joint snaps, and he flips diagonally forward. The cycle pitches right as he fights to balance it, but Black’s lost control, and he skids thirty feet into a tumbling crash.
Black’s radar ping goes out as I snap one helmet chin-strap into the fastener of the other—CLICK!
I swing the two helmets like a bola, and fling them into the front rotor of the second cycle. It chews through one helmet, but chokes on the other and slows down. The rear rotor, still churning, hurls the cycle into a rotating horizontal swing and throws its rider to my feet, who I promptly kick in the head. Blue is out.
“Get her!”
A shout. That’s Red, he’s struggled free of his cycle. Silver and Black, the second Black, have dismounted, and the three of them are running toward me, fast.
I’m faster—they don’t realize yet how fast. I run towards them.
Some kinds of impulses, like the ones that control muscles, speed on pathways at up to 390 feet per second.
Silver’s a big man, and when his brain tells his left hand
Punch
that’s three feet in between, two-thousandths of a second.
When that thought lights up in his brain, before his hand knows what it has to do, I know.
I feint left, and he misses, and I uppercut into his midsection, one-two. As he bends over, my palm slams up into his chin, snapping his head back. Silver’s drawing a gun as Black goes down.
Pull trigger
That ping from Silver, he’s raising his gun, but before his finger pulls I’m down, way below the bullet’s trajectory as it whizzes over me.
Re-aim
Fire
Re-aim
Fire
And he’s confused as he misses by a split-second, every time, as I move where he’s not thinking I’ll move.
Red’s drawn a gun as well, and he’s cursing as I keep moving faster than he can register it, faster than his eyes can tell his brain where I am.
I seize Red’s wrist, misdirect his gun toward his partner, and it fires bang bang bang into Silver’s knees. He screams and goes down.
In a panic, Red pulls away and fires blindly. I twist out of the way, the bullets missing as I reverse into a roundhouse kick, knocking the gun away.
Red begins to say something when my jump kick jams his windpipe, slicing off his words as he falls to his knees.
His last conscious thought, as he topples from his knees to the ground, are the words he was going to say, trapped in his mind—
Who are you?
And then he’s gone too.
There’s silen
ce around me, nothing from the five men sprawled around the square, nothing except—
There, over by the apartment buildings, where the same thought comes at me—
Who are you?
There in the shadows stands the girl, breath held, watching. And suddenly she is me, four years ago, before the men of HR came to take me away from my family, before the probes and the electrodes, before the chemicals and the injections—before all this began.
The girl who was me turns, and she is gone. I don’t feel any pain. Just the cold.
I turn Red over, take one arm of his jacket and tug it, pull the whole jacket off and shrug it on. The leather is warm against my skin, armor against the future.
I don his helmet and right the bike. My ankle is throbbing now, but with the RF11 it doesn’t really matter. I swing onto the seat, zip up the jacket, and see, just under the kanji symbol a streak of blood, like an extra inkstroke.
Suzume. I smile and kick on the rotorcycle’s plasma jets, and they hum a welcome.
Sparrow. I like that name.
And I fly.
Note from the Author
Sparrow’s Journey
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN fascinated by superheroes, and the classic trope of the hero battling great odds for a humanity that doesn’t really appreciate the sacrifice.
When the big story behind Sparrow’s world is finally told, that concept will form a cornerstone of what unfolds.
I also wanted to explore the idea that control of one small power, no matter how minuscule, is enough to provide an overpowering advantage. That’s the core thought behind Faster.
—
Faster is set in a world I think of as the Labyrinth—the same backdrop for my stories Trauma Room, Hereafter, Liberty, and Faith.
This is a world where corporations have expanded beyond governments, where pervasive surveillance by telepaths is a part of life, and where non-human self-awareness has begun to make humanity face difficult questions about itself.
The Powers That Be: A Superhero Collection Page 16
