by Dunne, Lexie
DEDICATION
To those who screamed, tweeted, or hit me upside the head
with the book after that cliffhanger (hi, Mom!):
Sorry not sorry.
Hugs and kisses,
Lexie
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Shout-out to my personal superheroes:
First off, thank you to Tyler and Ariel Henderson and DJ Elson, for being my fight coordinators and ensuring I could beat Gail up real good. Erica Lilly and daroos, you are the best designated drinkers a writer could hope for, and I owe you so much for that motivation. My sanity crew, who listened to me whine for hours, are some of the loveliest people I know: Kathleen Kayembe, Sharon, and my sister. Grace Viray, Karen Valenzuela, Samantha Brody, and Miriam Weiss: I could not have asked for better cheerleaders. And, as always, Maximus “C. C.” Powers—I was not kidding when I said couldn’t have written this book without you. Or at least it wouldn’t have nearly so many Vicki scenes, so truly, you are a gift to the world.
To all of my internet friends: you’re weird. And I love you. Yes, even you.
My deepest gratitude goes out to the Rebeccas: my agent, Rebecca Strauss, who knew just when to send the “Um, are you okay?” e-mails, and my editor, Rebecca Lucash, who cheerfully researched robotic sharks and rabbit punches.
And finally, to Mom and Dad: thanks for not putting me up for adoption after I almost accidentally burned down the house. Just think how much egg there would be on your face if this book goes on to win a Nobel Prize. Just kidding, I love you both.
CONTENTS
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Epilogue
About the Author
By Lexie Dunne
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
When the person throwing the book at you has superpowers, the book moves supernaturally fast. I learned this when, less than a day after I’d been unceremoniously accused of being an accessory to murder, I stood in court, officially charged with the crime.
Actually, stood was a bit of a stretch. Swayed was a little closer to the truth. I was fortunate to be upright at all, thanks to a recent three-story drop headfirst into a mall fountain. A normal human wouldn’t have survived. I was a little luckier due to some enhancements that had made me more than human, but even then, the drop had been a bit much for me. Everything hurt: my ribs, my throat, my head, even the backs of my knees.
None of that changed the fact that I was chained up in the middle of a secret underground courtroom facing a panel of men, and they’d just declared me guilty of helping kill the closest thing I’d ever had to a best friend.
Who hadn’t even been dead a day.
There were five of them—or six. Possibly seven. Definitely not more than eight. My vision swam in and out, so details were a little difficult. Five or six men, each face grayer than the last, each haircut worse than the next, all of them sitting at a table at the head of the wood-paneled chamber. They were lit from above by yellow spotlights that cast their ghoulish features into deep shadow. They’d been speaking for either one minute or ten, but their words had floated in the air, incomprehensible.
One word punched through the haze of agony now: “Guilty.”
I tried to look up. It upset my balance, so I tipped forward instead, and the guard who’d been pulling me around all—what was it? Morning? Evening?—day jerked me back upright.
I tried not to throw up on his shoes.
As I stared at the floor, words cut through the dizziness, clear as a bell rung right by my head. “Gail Godwin, for the crime of accessory to the murder of Class B Hero Angélica Rocha by the Class B Supervillain Chelsea So-Called, you are hereby sentenced to serve thirty years in Detmer Maximum Security Prison.”
I forced my aching head up and looked at the man at the end of the table, the only one I recognized. I knew him. We’d only met formally once, but it had left an impression. The second time I’d seen him, he’d arrested me. And now he had convicted me of murder. I looked up in the blue eyes of Eddie Davenport, CEO of the largest company in the world. The light fell in a perfect halo over his blond hair. I squinted at him, and I said, “What the hell?”
Or at least I tried to. What came out was, “I don’t like these potatoes. Can I have them scrambled instead?”
And I passed out cold.
Overall, not very inspiring last words. Luckily, they turned out not to be my last.
I’d heard of Detmer Maximum Security Prison.
Even if I hadn’t been Hostage Girl, I would have. It was the place they threw all the supervillains who had committed terrible crimes against society. The woman who tried to take over New York City with radioactive gerbils, the idiot in San Jose who had tried to boil the Pacific. They all ended up in Detmer. And usually, they ended up breaking out of Detmer.
Unfortunately for me, I was usually the villains’ first stop after they escaped. It’s a little difficult being in the Guinness Book of World Records under “Kidnapped Most Frequently,” but for four years, that had been my life. Some of it had to do with proximity, I figured, since Detmer wasn’t that far from Chicago. Simple, really. Escape prison, kidnap Hostage Girl, get your name on the news and a quick fight with Blaze. I’d even made it convenient for them by never trying to fight it.
I never thought I would actually end up in Detmer, though.
Detmer was for supervillains.
I’m many things, but I’m not a villain.
Davenport Industries, which ran most of the world and anything related to superpowered individuals, had not received that memo. I woke up in a prison transport vehicle, my eyes practically crossed from the pain of a metal harness pressing against what had to be at least one broken rib. When I politely tried to scream and let the driver know, a syringe became involved. Which was why I stood now in a line with six other women, hands cuffed in front of me as they marched us down a long hallway that smelled like lemon Pledge, and everything seemed pleasant and disconnected. Just a handy side effect of the fact that I was tripping balls from whatever they’d plunged into my neck.
A chain kept me attached to the woman in front of me. A second chain attached me to the woman behind me, and so it went. Guards in gunmetal gray uniforms walked alongside, fingering the triggers on their stun batons so that sparks rained down onto the tiles.
I frowned at the handcuffs wrapped around my wrists. I didn’t like them. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t like them. I wanted them off.
“Stop fidgeting,” one of the guards told me, sending out a new shower of sparks.
I blinked at him and wondered why my left eye wouldn’t point straight.
After the hallway, we were led into a room with drains set in the floor. Medical equipment, a woman in a white
lab coat, another woman in scrubs, and a new set of guards awaited us.
“Face forward.”
I started to turn the wrong way. The woman next to me rolled her eyes. They moved along the line, undoing the chains and cuffs. When she got to me, the woman in the lab coat—Dr. Kehoe, it said in pretty blue stitching above the pocket—frowned. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Reusabital. Driver says she got a little quippy.”
“That’s probably true,” I said. “I have, like, back-talked pretty much every villain this side of the Mississippi.”
Dr. Kehoe frowned and held her hand out for her tablet. “Godwin,” she said, reading the screen. “Gail Godwin. Look at you. That much Reusabital would turn an elephant into Sleeping Beauty, and you, you’re just a bit drunk.”
“Don’t think I am. Drunk feels nicer than this. Plus, I don’t remember any tequila.”
“Uh-huh.” The assistant undid my handcuffs and moved on to the woman next to me.
“Salud to you, too,” I said, and looked forward again. This time it was my right eye that felt off. That was going to be a problem eventually.
I kept squinting as they ordered us to strip out of the orange jumpsuits. Some of the women hesitated, but I kicked off the clothes easily enough. Modesty was for people who hadn’t been given Mobium and therefore didn’t have my rather amazing muscles. Those were a pretty new addition to my life, which was why I was proud to show them off. I felt a little less proud when I realized how cold the room was, and that the woman next to me had a fantastic tattoo of Edvard Munch’s The Scream across her upper arm, which definitely put my muscles to shame.
Dr. Kehoe and the nurse in scrubs moved up the line of us. It took me a couple of women to realize that they were cataloging birthmarks, scars, and tattoos with the tablet. Dr. Kehoe dictated to her assistant, asking for origins on tattoos and scars. With the first few women, this took a couple of minutes at most. Motorcycle accidents, the occasional knife fight, chemical burns. Easy stuff.
When they reached me, they both stopped and stared.
“Hmm,” Dr. Kehoe said. I tilted my head back to look at her. “We’ll start from the top. This scar on your hairline?”
I rubbed it with my fingers. “Dr. Laboritorium was trying to perform brain-wave experiments on me. The helmet cut into my head, but don’t worry, Blaze saved me and knocked him out.”
“And this scar on your temple?”
“TongueTwister hit me with a rock when he called up a dirt devil. I was in the hospital for like a week.”
“The scar below it?”
“Can’t remember. That might be Queen Bae knocking me out with a Swarovski honeycomb. Diamonds are definitely not Girl’s best friend.” I grinned at my own joke though it had been nearly a year since I’d called myself by my own terrible nickname.
“What else could it be?” Dr. Kehoe asked. Her assistant’s fingers were flying over the tablet as she desperately tried to keep up.
“Might’ve been Lady Danger. She has Great Danes, you know. Big ones. Scary teeth.” I waved my fingers in front of my mouth in approximation of fangs before I touched my forehead again. “Wait, no, this scar? This scar is definitely from that time the Saratoga Kid visited Chicago and wanted a hostage to present to his new bride at Niagara Falls. Sorry. I get them all mixed up.”
Dr. Kehoe sighed. The other women in the line were openly goggling at me now. “Just how many of these scars do you have, Godwin?”
I shrugged. “I lost count years ago. There’ve been a lot of villains. They’re dumb, and they leave marks.” I turned to look at the other women in the line with me. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Scream Tattoo Lady said dryly.
“Why don’t we move her to the end, Dr. Kehoe?” the assistant said. “We have a schedule.”
“Good point.”
So I waited, cooling my heels while Dr. Kehoe and her assistant moved down the line. Each woman was handed a box at the end and they were shuffled together through a door that led into the prison. I didn’t like that door. It did funny things to my stomach.
Finally, Dr. Kehoe approached me with a sigh. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?”
An hour later, my throat was dry and I wasn’t feeling so pleasantly drunk anymore. “Yes,” I said, answering Dr. Kehoe’s question as she looked at the bottom of my foot and the tiny scar that ran along the seam of my instep. “I was dangled over an active volcano by Melodrama Madam. I really don’t like to remember that one.”
“All done,” she said. “You can put your foot down. You can collect your box and your bunk assignment. Where’s she going?” The last was directed at her harried-looking assistant.
“She’s going in with the Villain Syndrome patients,” her assistant said. She paused and looked at the screen again. “Is that right? She’s not tagged for VS herself. Oh, and that’s even stranger. Her doctor from Davenport’s requesting access to her.”
I felt my spirits inexplicably soar. My doctor from Davenport was a woman named Kiki, and while I wasn’t sure she’d be able to help me, as she hadn’t stopped my arrest, I had some questions. Maybe she could answer them.
“That’s certainly not going to fly,” Dr. Kehoe said, looking at the tablet as she crushed all of my hopes. “Send the denial straight to Dr. Cooper. We look after our own in Detmer. Are you ready to go to prison, Godwin?”
“No,” I said.
“Too bad.”
I was handed a box full of clothes and given an opportunity to pull them on: a green tunic-style shirt, black pants, new black shoes that were surprisingly comfortable. Less comfortable was the needle pushed into the part of my shoulder that met my neck. I only protested a little, though it made my entire arm feel sore. I felt a spurt of nerves in my middle as I was escorted to the door that would take me into the confines of Detmer Maximum Security Prison.
I stepped through.
By some counts, I had been kidnapped over two hundred times by more than fifty villains in a four-year period. I had been mentioned by news media so often that I had my own tag on the Domino, nobody remembered what my real name was, and the sight of my face alone had been enough to send people to sidewalks on the other side of the street to avoid being in my potential blast radius. There had been political cartoons, tourist T-shirts, and little plaques around businesses near my apartment talking about various attacks. What I’m saying is I probably clocked in over a thousand hours in the company in supervillains during my tenure as Hostage Girl.
And not a single one of those jerks had seen fit to mention that Detmer Maximum Security Prison was, in essence, a day spa.
Bewildered from the drug and by the bamboo floors, fluting music, and papyrus wall hangings, I followed a guard—“Oh, no, we’re called monitors here! Please, call me Tabitha!”—away from the processing area. Detmer was open and airy. There wasn’t a ninety-degree angle to be found in the entire place. I was shown the recreation areas, a giant cafeteria that looked more like a five-star dining lounge, the most high-class gym I had ever seen (the chrome was blinding), and several lounges that looked like they had sprung fully formed from the pages of a designer magazine.
“Detmer was, of course, designed with the comfort of its guests in mind,” Tabitha said in a bright, plasticky voice as she bustled along. I followed in her wake in a drugged haze. There was a feeling niggling at the back of my mind, like I should protest this, like if only my thoughts would work together I would be angry beyond belief. Mostly I was mystified. Maybe everything had just been one prolonged nightmare. Perhaps I hadn’t seen a shopping mall ripped to shreds by a man with earthquake abilities, and I wasn’t wrongfully in prison for assisting in the murder of my trainer.
Maybe polka-dotted camels would show up and start dancing the marimba around the next corner.
“Guests are free to wander around the complex as they choos
e. There are no mandatory mealtimes or lights out, which you might find in other facilities.” Other prisons, I realized hazily. She was talking about places where people who had committed crimes were held and punished, not other spas.
“And if you ever have any questions, feel free to ask me or one of the other monitors.” Tabitha redefined perky. If she stopped smiling, the Elder Gods would probably descend upon the world and feast on the entrails of the living. “That’s what we’re here for!”
I blinked dumbly at her.
“You must be tired!” Tabitha led me down a new hallway, one lined with glass doors at even intervals. The track lighting along the ceiling made everything appear soothing. “These are the living quarters. You’ve been housed with the Villain Syndrome patients.”
“Huh,” I said now. Did I need to be alarmed about that? Villains with VS were the most terrifying kind: they truly believe they were committing acts of good—usually through colossal destruction and loss of life. Come to think of that, this was probably worrying, yeah. I scratched my nose and nodded. “ ’Kay.”
“Do you have any questions for me?” Tabitha asked.
I thought about that for longer than usual. “When is dinner?”
“Very soon. You’ll find a schedule inside, and it has all of the movies playing in the cinema. We’re very lucky to have the newest releases. Here we are: room 407! That’s you!” She stopped in front of one of the glass doors, identical to the rest. “Only you and your roommate can enter your room—and the monitors, of course, but we hardly count!—so you’ll have all the privacy you need.”
I looked at it. “With a glass door,” I said.
