Hearts of Darkness

by Andrea Speed

  But Kaede had the news report playing on the kitchen wall, and it drew Ash’s attention. “So he just did it to be an asshole?”

  Kaede shrugged. That was as good an interpretation as any. “Pretty much.”

  “Why haven’t any of the superheroes in this town taken him out? They can’t all have a no-kill policy.”

  “I think he’s just flummoxing them. He has so many followers, so much money, and yet they don’t know who he is, or where he is.” Kaede frowned as he flipped the crepe and wondered how it could be possible that Black Hand could be extorting everyone, have a cult of endless minions, and yet not be caught by anyone. He had to have some connections. Someone had to be protecting him, or he had built up a really good method of defense. Hmm.

  “How is that possible?” Ash asked. “A big elephant leaves a big trail.”

  Kaede turned to look at him. “What?”

  “It’s a saying. We used it a lot in Karna.” He frowned. “Maybe it doesn’t translate well.”

  “No, it translates fine,” Kaede said, removing the crepe from the pan and then sliding it to a plate before it burned. “He must have a superhero helping him.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “He’s leaving a trail—he must be—but someone who knows what the heroes will be looking for is cleaning up after him.”

  “But why would they do that?”

  A good question, and his sticking point. “He’s extorting others, right? So maybe he’s extorting our hero to help him.”

  “For such a long time?”

  “It’s not a perfect theory,” Kaede admitted, handing Ash his plate of crepes. “But we’re still missing some information. I think we’re close to solving it.”

  “We?” Ash asked, taking a seat at the kitchen table. “I haven’t done anything.”

  “Not true. You’re my muse.”

  Ash smiled faintly but looked puzzled. Which was probably his normal reaction to Kaede, if Kaede was honest with himself at all. Humanity was a puzzle to Ash, and he was just starting to grasp it at the edges.

  They went in to work, and Kaede had Trevor drive them by the Moreau Building, although it turned out that part of the street was still closed. Kaede could see over the police barricades, the bigger pieces of the building making a crumbling blockade. It looked like the foundation was still smoking.

  Once they arrived at Kamani, Jasmine met them at his office, as she had some news on one of the development projects she was working on. After the disappointment with the “dead” nanobots—if only she knew the truth—she’d started rebuilding some from experimental schematics, and she believed she might have discovered a functional prototype. She wanted him to okay diverting funds from a stalled bio-energy project, and he had no problem with that since he was thinking of axing it anyway. There were cleaner, cheaper methods for energy. After all, this entire building ran on solar power. They were villains, sure, but they weren’t idiots.

  Oliver, the receptionist, came over the intercom and said hesitantly, “Um, sir, Dark Justice is here to see you.”

  Jasmine raised her eyebrows as she stood. “I’m beginning to think he has a crush on you.”

  Kaede shrugged. “I’m beginning to think so too.”

  She left and DJ came stalking in not a minute later, although he was slightly less huffy than on his previous appearances. However, that wasn’t saying much. “So you survived,” he said. He didn’t sound surprised.

  “As did you. Sorry about your building.”

  DJ crossed his arms over his chest, but Kaede could see it behind the cowl—DJ wasn’t up to a pissing contest today. He seemed almost defeated, which was a shame because Kaede hadn’t been the one to do it. “I don’t suppose you knew what was going to happen.”

  “Who is idiotic enough to be in a building they plan to blow up? Oh, and a follow-up. Who is stupid enough to work with the big bag of dicks that is Black Hand?”

  DJ smirked briefly but quickly smothered it. Couldn’t seem human now, could he? “I didn’t think so.”

  “Then why come here?” Ash asked, surprising them both. He’d turned away from the window but was still standing in front of it, arms crossed in a mimic of DJ’s gesture, but while DJ radiated tension, Ash was his eerily calm self. His expression was blank.

  “You’re alive too. How did that happen?”

  “I could ask the same of you,” Kaede replied. “How did you escape the conflagration? The Black Veil seemed to be in full kamikaze mode.”

  DJ glanced away. “It wasn’t easy.” Ooh, had he turned tail and run? Had he left some of his superhero friends or moneymen to die? Again, how human of him. He was starting to slip. When he looked back at Kaede, his mask of steely resolve was back in place. “Something needs to be done about Black Hand. He’s gone too far this time.”

  “Agreed. So why haven’t you done something about him?” Kaede asked.

  Kaede watched the muscles in DJ’s jaw tense. This was a sore subject. “Many have tried. Ultraman and his Ultra Force once found him, and Ultraman was killed. Enough of Ultra Force was hurt that they disbanded entirely. That was the last time anyone was able to pinpoint his location.”

  “Why?”

  DJ shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know how he can have so many followers and yet remain so under the radar. I’ve caught members of the Black Veil before, questioned them, but they never tell me the truth, no matter what I do. And they have a tendency to kill themselves quickly.”

  Kaede nodded. That tracked with what little he’d been able to dig up on them. “What could he possibly do to foster such loyalty amongst his followers?”

  “I’m leaning toward drugs.”

  He almost laughed, but DJ didn’t seem to be joking. Kaede had no proof at all he had anything approaching a sense of humor. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. If he gets them addicted to something, especially something with a hallucinogenic quality, it might explain both their unswerving loyalty and disordered thinking.”

  “Interesting.” It sort of did. Now, Kaede had no idea if Black Hand had ever been into targeted drug compounds, but it was kind of fascinating to contemplate. “Have you ever considered that maybe he has a hero on his payroll?”

  DJ’s eyes lit up briefly, telling Kaede all he needed. DJ replied verbally anyway. “That’s a very real possibility. I thought it might be a hero named Jackpot, but after he skipped town and Black Hand kept on doing what he was doing, I deduced I’d been allowed to discover false information. Whoever is working with him is very good at planting fake clues.”

  Or was very good at planting clues for Dark Justice to find, but Kaede kept that thought to himself. He had briefly considered that maybe DJ was working with Hand, but he wasn’t quite stupid enough to be complicit in blowing up his own building with him in it, and also, it would make DJ too interesting, which wasn’t allowed. “And you have no idea who he really is?”

  DJ shook his head. “I’ve uncovered about a dozen false identities tied to him, but they’re all dead ends. He covers his tracks well.”

  It suddenly occurred to Kaede that possibly the main reason no one had found Black Hand yet was because they were expecting to find a man. It seemed to be a man talking through a voice modulator, but breasts weren’t that hard to hide, and a voice modulator could hide everything. Could it have been so simple? Gender stereotypes hiding Black Hand in plain sight? If so, she was brilliant. Crazy, but brilliant.

  “You still haven’t told us why you’re here,” Ash said.

  Kaede held up a hand. “No, I think he has. I’ll explain it to you later.”

  DJ raised an eyebrow under his cowl but otherwise kept silent. He probably didn’t understand why Ash hadn’t gotten it, but Kaede in no way wanted to enlighten him. “If you could get the word out, I’d be grateful,” DJ said.

  Kaede shrugged. “Everybody likes a bit of gossip. Let’s see where that takes us.”

  DJ accepted that nonanswer as all the answer h
e was going to get and left. As soon as he was gone, Kaede told Ash, “By coming here and telling me of his own investigations into Black Hand, he was tacitly asking me to look into and take care of Black Hand.”

  Ash blinked rapidly at this. “Why didn’t he just say that?”

  “Because if he did, he’d be a bad guy, in his estimation. This way he gets to pretend he didn’t just ask me to kill Black Hand.”

  Ash contemplated that a moment before shaking his head. “Seems overly complicated. And it doesn’t absolve him from guilt.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But heroes are weird.”

  “I’m starting to understand that.”

  It took Kaede the better part of an hour to discover the true identity of Black Hand, and the most likely location of her home base. It was amazing what no gender assumptions and a good grasp of local real estate could do.

  Her name was Joy Simmonds, unless that was another stolen identity—Kaede had already punched holes in three others, although those were all male names. She’d bought an old water-reclamation plant on the broken-down industrial side of Corwyn, which connected to the sewer lines and would give her and her cult access to most parts of the city without even using streets. Kaede wondered how often DJ had discovered the Simmonds identity and discarded it because it was a woman. You wouldn’t think if he came across it twice he’d discard it, but sexist assumptions being what they were, maybe he would.

  From what little he’d been able to find, Joy would be fifty, but the identity could be borrowed, or she was simply a supervillain who’d monkeyed with her own aging process and looked twenty-seven. Until he laid eyes on her, he wouldn’t know. He assumed she was in the mad-scientist game, since she had her cult. And if they weren’t clones, some kind of specialty drug would be a functional explanation.

  He studied the layouts of the plant that he’d managed to scrape up. Ash insisted on doing some reconnaissance first, since it was impossible to tell what functioned as an entrance or an exit. Considering how badass they were, and all their weaponry, Kaede didn’t think they had to worry about it, but Ash wanted to do this all properly, spoiling his fun. It did allow him to e-mail his dad and ask for any and all information on a Joy Simmonds. Maybe Dr. Terror and his network of evil bastards could pull up more.

  They left work early to go home and get suited up in special stealth-suit versions of the symtech suits, which would not only protect them from bullets but would mask their heat signatures from infrared, night vision, and heat scopes, on the off chance the Veil had those. It was kind of unclear what they had as no one kept good records on them.

  He and Ash spent most of the night on the roof of a closed-down Taco Hut, keeping an eye on the reclamation plant. Despite no one knowing who or where they were, the Veil kept a very low profile, with little overt activity and no lights showing on the outside. Ash was of the opinion they made most of their movements through the sewer, which would be smelly and messy and might bring them into an encounter with a city worker, but was probably great for avoiding the eyes of anyone on the surface, surveillance equipment included.

  Still, Kaede brought along a superpower scanning unit that his dad had invented, which was the size of a hardback book and kind of looked like one too. It seemed to have no buttons, no readouts, nothing, but like most of his father’s devices, it was coded to Hayashi DNA, and as soon as he lifted it and pointed it at the plant, the opaque back side turned into a screen that fed him all sorts of real-time information. He was able to determine that the Veil currently consisted of at least thirty men, give or take one or two, and they were definitely using the sewers. In fact, using the scanner, he was able to determine where there was a blocked-off old sewer pipe never used by the Veil that would be a sneaky way inside their home base. Assuming Kaede and Ash could get through a welded-shut entrance and about two feet of poured cement, but that was silly—of course they could. Everything they needed was back at the penthouse.

  Ash didn’t like the idea of the two of them attacking the place, not with so many members of the Veil and the Hand’s unknown technology. For a little while, this pissed Kaede off a bit. Did Ash really think he couldn’t take care of himself? He’d survived before Ash came along. But then he realized he shouldn’t take it that way, because Ash was genuinely concerned about him. As a person, not as a supervillain’s kid, and that was kind of refreshing. How weird was it to have a boyfriend now? It was maybe the one normal thing he’d ever had, and it was kind of nice. Of course, he was probably the only person in the world dating a part alien(?) supersoldier raised by an Indonesian death cult, but hey, someone had to.

  They went home just before sunup. They did a little planning and then went to bed, snuggled together. He let the AI know it could call work and tell them he was taking a personal day.

  7

  WHEN KAEDE woke up, it was two in the afternoon, and there was an e-mail from his father waiting for him. It turned out to be a bit of an info dump, as he’d found several Joy Simmondses. Their lives vomited from the screen, as Dad’s minions had discovered everything there was to know about all of them. Kaede waded through them until he found the one he had to be looking for and discovered who the superhero traitor had to be. It was weird, because this guy hadn’t even crossed his suspicion radar. But in retrospect, it kind of did make sense.

  Over brunch—it was actually breakfast, but closer to lunchtime—Kaede shared the files with Ash, and they discussed what they should and could do with this damning bit of knowledge. They could cause the downfall of one of Corwyn’s most beloved superheroes. They could turn him over to DJ, and maybe they’d accidentally kill each other. But that seemed like too much to hope for. They had time to consider it, as DJ was on the back burner for the moment.

  Rather than involve Trevor in any of this, Kaede had one of the company cars delivered to their building, and they loaded it up with the equipment they’d need. Although Ash was not a fan of guns, considering them way too easy to use and cowardly to kill with, he still grudgingly took the gun Kaede gave him. It looked like a standard snub-nosed semiautomatic submachine gun, but it didn’t shoot standard bullets. What it shot were these little pellets invented by Kaede’s dad that were best described as the love child of psilocybin and the hallucinatory compounds put out by certain kinds of frogs. The gun shot the pellet with enough force to penetrate human skin, but once in contact with blood, it exploded into a mixture of pure drugs, with an added amphetamine boost to guarantee they’d work within five minutes of contact. The afflicted didn’t so much trip balls as enter a semicatatonic fugue state. They had absolutely no idea what was going on around them, or in them, for a good two to three hours. They didn’t die, but they were so fucking useless to whatever cause you espoused, they might as well have been dead. In a way, this was much more humiliating than killing a bunch of a bad guy’s minions. Kaede brought the handgun variation of it, as well as some of the toxic spray that had brought down Nighthawk. Not all of this infiltration was going to be nonlethal.

  They headed out before sundown and returned to the closed-down shell of the Taco Hut as the sun was setting. You could see the ocean from where they were, and it actually made a beautiful picture. The sky was a melting sherbet sundae of oranges, pinks, and red, and the water was a perfect mirror of it all, creating an expanded color palette. It was kind of romantic, really, except his boyfriend was currently prying open a cemented-in sewer cover with a crowbar and his inhuman strength. So Kaede took a picture of it with his phone to show him later.

  The crowbar actually bent, but Ash did not, and it only took him a couple of minutes to rip off the manhole cover. He threw it aside like it hardly weighed anything, and it cracked the pavement where it landed. Kaede then lobbed in one of his dad’s sulfuric acid bombs to take care of the cement blocking the tunnel. They gave it a couple of minutes to work; then Ash went down with an acid neutralizer in a fire extinguisher and sprayed the place down so they didn’t accidentally get burned. It was unlikely, but why
risk it?

  As soon as worried boyfriend Ash gave him the high sign, Kaede joined him in the tunnel, flipping on his night-vision goggles. The acid had done quite a number on the place, as it had eaten through everything, not just the cement barricade, but that’s what they’d expected. Acid bombs weren’t used for subtlety.

  It smelled exactly like a sewer, meaning fucking terrible, but if it had smelled different, it would have been suspicious. Kaede let Ash lead the way because he insisted, and Kaede knew it was safer for him anyway.

  They managed to walk into the Veil’s more well-traveled sewer passageways without running into a single person, not until they got to the entrance to the plant, where they ran into two coming down. Ash punched one in the head and dropped him as Kaede shot the other one, who staggered and fell, grabbing his chest where the pellet penetrated his flesh. While Kaede imagined it hurt, it didn’t hurt as much as this guy seemed to be implying. Kaede shot the guy Ash’d dropped with a punch because he deserved to trip balls whenever he became conscious.

  The conscious guy slid down the wall, hand over his chest. “You’ll be destr—”

  “Destroyed,” Kaede interrupted. “Sure we will. Did you know your boss is a woman?”

  “What?”

  It was all there in the genuine confusion in his voice. “Okay, you didn’t. Well, surprise.”

  “Who are you…?” the man asked, and his voice started to go weak at the end. Were the drugs kicking in already?

  Ash patted him on the head. “The people who are burning your kingdom down. Don’t worry about it. Supervillains are always hiring.” He then pushed the man aside and headed up the ladder to the plant. Kaede followed as the henchman slumped over completely, the drugs really kicking in now. Sure, there was a tiny bit of blood leaking from the entrance wound, but even if he went days without medical attention, it wouldn’t be enough to kill him.