Superheroes Anonymous (Book 2): Supervillains Anonymous

by Dunne, Lexie

  “What do you mean?” I asked, but Kiki was already racing for the door. Guy and I followed her. I had the impressions of a pleasant house, one with pictures on the wall and a lived-in feel, as I rushed after Kiki up the stairs.

  Naomi stood on the landing, tugging so hard at a locked door that it thudded repeatedly against the door frame. “Get away from there!” Kiki’s voice had risen to a screech.

  “What’s behind this door? Why is it locked?” Naomi tugged harder.

  Kiki darted forward and hauled Naomi back. “Get away!”

  I exchanged a look with Guy. “No,” he said slowly, speaking for both of us. “I’m with Naomi on this. What’s behind this door?”

  “I promise, I will tell you, but you have to let me explain first.”

  “Nope.” I was officially done with secrets. I stepped forward, kicked the door in, and, ignoring Kiki’s whimper, stepped into what looked like an attic. Unlike the basement, though, there were no grimy boxes or appliances or cobwebs to be found. It was a room with sloped walls that rose to a peak in the ceilings, and everything smelled of antiseptic so strongly that I expected to see fluorescent lights overhead. But there was nothing but a skylight that dropped a square of sunshine right over a gigantic container in the middle of the room. It was about the same height as a deep freezer, but longer and wider. Medical equipment clustered around it.

  I heard the beep . . . beep . . . beep of a heart monitor. There was something alive in there. Somebody with a beating heart.

  My own heart in my throat, I crossed the room and looked through the glass lid.

  My entire body went numb. “What the fuck?”

  “What is it?” Guy asked, hurrying up. A second later, he gasped.

  In the box, eyes closed and face pale, lay my trainer, Angélica Rocha.

  And she was very much alive.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  All I could do was stare. Angélica was right there. Angélica was alive. Her chest was moving. She lay on her back, eyes closed, floating in the middle of the chamber. I couldn’t see anything holding her up, but she seemed to drift a little up and down in suspended animation, arms and legs limp and loose.

  It was such a far cry from the vital, always-moving woman I remembered.

  I blinked, and Guy was no longer beside me. He had Kiki by the upper arms. “What have you done?”

  “Guy!” The last time I’d heard him that angry, it had been after Shock Value had nearly killed me. “Guy, don’t.”

  They both ignored me. Kiki gave him a level look. “Hands off.”

  Guy only stepped in, so they were eye to eye. I could see him actively vibrating with rage, but Kiki didn’t even flinch. “You’ve known all along she wasn’t dead. Gail went to prison, and this entire time, you could have said something!”

  “Both Angélica and Gail would be dead if I had. Let me just explain—”

  “You can explain in prison,” Guy said. “I think I’m done with you screwing my girlfriend over.”

  Kiki narrowed her eyes, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise. A second later, Guy gritted his teeth. He dropped Kiki’s arms and grabbed his skull.

  “Hey!” I started for Kiki, but Naomi stepped into my path.

  “Here’s an idea,” she said. “Why don’t the three of you calm the fuck down and tell me why there’s a dead woman pulling a Snow White in this creepy casket thing of yours? Why don’t we do that? Because if you keep trying to fight each other, this building’s gonna get destroyed real quick, and I’m pretty sure that’ll be a dead giveaway to those scary dudes who think the real base of operations is next door.”

  Guy, breathing hard, turned his glare on Naomi.

  “I’m just saying,” she said, folding her arms over her chest.

  I took a deep breath. “Her name’s Angélica,” I said. “She’s not dead, which is a surprise since I was sent to prison for killing her.”

  “What?” Naomi said.

  “I can explain,” Kiki said.

  “You’d better,” I said. I looked at the medical equipment around Angélica’s container, trying to make heads or tails of it. The machine monitoring her vitals, that was easy to pick out, but there were other screens and readouts I didn’t understand. How did I get her out of there? I went still, though, when I saw the IV bag.

  “Why don’t you start with that?” I asked, pointing at it.

  “What is that?” Naomi asked. Her fingers twitched, like she was itching for her notepad.

  Guy made a strangled noise. “Mobium,” he said. “It’s Mobium.”

  Horror grew. I had to swallow hard several times just to keep calm. The ringing in my ears that had nothing to do with one of Raptor’s flashbangs. “What have you done?” I asked Kiki.

  “I saved her life. That’s the transition chamber—you were in there before, when my grandfather gave you the Mobium. He only put you on the table downstairs after you already had the Mobium, for show. I didn’t want to do this to her, but I didn’t have a choice. It was the only way to save her life after Chelsea killed her.”

  I sank to my knees, next to the Mobium coffin. “Explain. Start from the beginning.”

  Kiki’s story wasn’t easy to unpack. First, there was the problem that Guy, Naomi, and I all had varying levels of knowledge about Davenport. We kept having to stop and explain basic things to Naomi (“No, when you’re introduced to Davenport and until your powers settle in, they keep you underground. It’s nice, except for the lack of sunlight. There’s a lot of food.”). I stayed where I was, one hand braced against the chamber, as Kiki told her tale.

  She started not with Dr. Mobius but with Lemuel Cooper.

  “He came to Davenport about three years ago,” she said. “He’s the most invulnerable man I’ve ever seen, pretty much impossible to kill.”

  “Nobody’s impossible to kill,” Naomi said. “All of you have some Achilles heel.”

  Since she’d been hired to discover Guy’s weakness, I gave her an unimpressed look.

  Kiki wrapped her arms around her knees. “I never found his weak spot. And I never even suspected that he might be involved with anything nefarious. Not until after I started sleeping with him. Little things didn’t match up about him. Probably because he’s a spy.”

  “A spy for what?”

  “The Lodi Corporation. They’re another company trying to shoehorn their way into the hero game. My grandfather—Kurt, this time—he didn’t intend for Davenport Industries to be the be-all and end-all for superheroes. He really did just start it with the idea in mind of helping, which is why we never charge the powered people that want protection. And why we’re supposed to protect them. Lodi’s not like that.” Kiki rested her forehead on her knee. “They want to create superheroes. Which is why Mobium exists at all. My grandfather invented it years ago. Lodi must have discovered it because they kidnapped him. I thought he was dead, I really did.”

  People really did have a habit of coming back from the dead today, I thought.

  “And I didn’t know they had him until Cooper”—Kiki shook her head—“he had a dream about Mobius. Sometimes when people aren’t as on guard, I can see their dreams when I sleep.”

  “How do you know it was his dream and not yours?” Naomi asked. Her fingers were really moving now, still itching for her notepad. This entire day would be like a jackpot to a reporter covering the superpowered beat. “How can you tell the difference?”

  “When I see other people’s dreams, they’re clear. Like a movie. And Cooper dreamed about my grandfather so clearly when I knew they’d never met.”

  “Okay, obvious question,” I said, “but if Cooper is as dangerous as you say he is, why not tell somebody?”

  “I tried to. I tried to tell Uncle Eddie.” Kiki closed her eyes. “He told me that I was just having weird psychic fits again, like I used to have when
I was a kid.”

  “You know, for a guy who’s in charge of the company that oversees pretty much everything having to do with superpowers, Eddie Davenport sure is a dick to people with them,” I said, and Guy nodded. “So you went to Eddie, and he didn’t believe you? What does this have to do with Angélica being in there?” I jerked my thumb behind me.

  “I’m getting to that. Eddie didn’t believe me. If Cooper figures out that I know what he’s doing, he’ll kill me. I’ll disappear without a trace, and even worse, everybody will say, oh, that was bound to happen, she’s Rita’s grandkid.” Kiki shuddered. “Ironically, Rita was the only one who ever believed me.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “He’s the golden boy,” Kiki said, her voice turning bitter. “He’s brought so many advances to Davenport, in how we work with new heroes. But I—I know him. I’ve seen his dreams. He’s a remorseless killer and stronger than any of us.”

  I scratched the back of my head. The man she was describing sounded nothing like the friendly doctor who had greeted me on my first day at Davenport. But then, Shock Value looked like an accountant. So it fit.

  “When you came to Davenport, Gail,” Kiki said, “he covered up the truth about what the Mobium really does. He couldn’t risk Davenport finding out what it was, what it really is. That’s why he told you some bullshit story about leukemia.”

  I jerked back so hard I nearly hit my head on Angélica’s chamber. “I don’t have leukemia?”

  Kiki wordlessly shook her head.

  I looked up at the skylight. I had to. I’d thought I was out of tears to cry, but the edges of my eyelids felt wet again. I didn’t have cancer. It was all a nightmare, and I didn’t have leukemia.

  “It was a story to distract you and keep you from questioning things too deeply. A scare tactic. He’s a bastard. But . . . do you understand what it really is?” Kiki asked.

  I was too busy reeling with the news that I hadn’t been walking around with cancer for the past month. “Huh?” I asked, shaking my head to clear it. “What? Oh, the Mobium. Yeah, it enhances things. It makes me able to heal, keeps me in top shape mentally, or whatever.”

  “Gail, it’s adaptive.”

  “Well, yeah, sure, it made me stronger.”

  “And it’s giving you more powers as it picks them up along the way.”

  “What?” Guy and I asked as one.

  “It’s—I hesitate to call it the next step in evolution, but it’s not just some sort of metabolism enhancer. Look, it’s like this. You need to run somewhere? The Mobium figures out to maximize your performance. If you’re exposed to a gas, the Mobium learns how to counteract it. I could poison you, and you would probably be fine ten minutes later. Have you done anything weird lately?”

  I automatically opened my mouth to say that I hadn’t. But that wasn’t right, was it? “Chelsea’s powers,” I said, looking at Guy. “She opened up, full force, right on my face, and it was like it tickled.”

  “The Mobium had time to learn how to counteract the effects.” Kiki nodded, like she’d expected that. “I wondered when that would happen.”

  I, on the other hand, reeled. “This whole time, Chelsea couldn’t hurt me at all? I could have fought her instead of Guy and Vicki? I could have saved Guy from—well, that?” I gestured toward him, and all the bandages on his torso and head.

  “I think Brook was pretty determined to do this to me either way,” Guy said. “Also, she can fly, and you can’t. Yet. Or can you?”

  I shook my head, bewildered. “If I can, it’s news to me.”

  But Kiki was also shaking her head. “It takes time for the Mobium to really integrate. If you try using too many new abilities too fast, it deteriorates because it’s not exactly . . . stable. Yet. It’s getting there, but yes, that’s why you’ve been feeling sick.”

  “Because I’m using new abilities?”

  “I’m guessing you’ve had migraines, fainting spells, dizziness. I gave you an infusion so you’d have some fresh Mobium. It should help balance you out.” Kiki banged the back of her head against the wall a few times. “You don’t really know when you’re using the new abilities, you just kind of do it. Which Angélica picked up on.”

  I looked over my shoulder though I couldn’t see Angélica from where I was sitting. She was on the other side, inside the Mobium chamber. “She did? She didn’t say anything.”

  “You were altering your velocity the way she does when you were fighting her,” Kiki said. “She brought up her concerns to Cooper.”

  I gawked. I had no memory of doing any of that. I’d sparred with Angélica quite a few times. It had taken me forever to figure out what she was doing, she’d been using her powers so subtly. And in the end, I’d been doing the same thing? It made my stomach twist.

  “Why didn’t she tell me about this? Don’t you think I deserved to know?” I asked.

  “It’s pretty common practice for trainers to talk these things over with Medical before bringing it up with the trainee,” Kiki said. “She was following protocol, but Cooper couldn’t risk anybody’s finding out the truth about what you really could do. He couldn’t outright kill or disappear you yet is my guess, He would’ve had to be careful about it because you have some powerful people on your side. That’s why I pulled some strings, got you mentored with Vicki even though she wasn’t due for a mentee for a long time. Vicki’s not exactly role-model material.”

  “Hey,” Guy and I said at the same time.

  Kiki hunched her shoulders. “I protected you as best I could, but I couldn’t save Angélica. He poisoned her.”

  “What? No, Chelsea—”

  “Angélica could survive her powers a hundred times over. Or she could, if she hadn’t been poisoned by something that interacted horribly with the stinging ray. I think he must have dosed her food,” Kiki said. She looked troubled.

  “How did he know anything about Brook’s powers?” Guy said. “Nobody knew who she was, or that she was going to be at that mall unless . . .”

  “Unless he tipped her off himself?” Kiki shook her head. “She’s connected to all of this.”

  “How?” I asked. My voice was starting to rise in pitch. When were the hits going to stop coming?

  “Lodi. Where do you think she’s been all these years?”

  Guy, Naomi, and I all stayed quiet as that conversational bomb hit and exploded between all of us.

  “Kiki,” I said slowly. “Chelsea has Mobium, too?” Was that what she was talking about, when she said I was like her?

  “They’ve had her for a long time. When Rita orchestrated my grandfather’s escape from Lodi, he broke Chelsea out, too. I didn’t know about that until I visited Rita at Detmer, and she told me everything that’s really going on.”

  “Brook,” Guy said. He sat across from me, but he didn’t look up. Instead, he was staring very intently at the floor between his feet. “Her name is Brook.”

  “Sorry,” Kiki said.

  “Guy, this isn’t your fault,” I said.

  “Isn’t it?” He never looked up. “They must have had her for years. Doing, what, experiments on her? And we had no idea, this entire time. How is that not my fault?”

  “I prefer to blame the bad guys,” I said, swinging my head to look at Kiki.

  Guy’s jaw flexed.

  The rest of my brain caught up with me. “Rita orchestrated Mobius’s escape from Lodi?”

  “This is my problem, you see,” Kiki said. She banged her head against the wall. As much as I worried about that, I figured somebody with psychic abilities would want to protect her brainpan above all else. So she knew her limits. “If they had just let me handle it, I could have come up with something a lot simpler. But no. My grandmother has to be Fearless. My grandmother has to have the worst case of Villain Syndrome ever. And to save me, my grandmother has to ruin the lives of
at least ten people, all of them innocent. Welcome to my hell, and on behalf of the Detmers, Davenports, and Mobius brigade, I am so sorry for everything.”

  Warily, I pushed myself to my feet and turned so that I was looking down at Angélica’s floating form again. So Cooper had used poison and Brook to kill her and keep the Mobium secret. The poison made sense, as I’d seen Angélica heal from a bloody nose in less than a second. Brook’s powers should never have been able to touch her.

  I rested my hand atop the glass covering her as my brain tried to put it together.

  Rita had orchestrated Mobius’s escape from Lodi. Mobius had tracked me down because I was too well protected to kill. He’d infected me with the same thing that Brook, also on the loose from Lodi, had been dosed with. I’d arrived at Davenport with no idea what was happening to me. They’d assigned Cooper as my doctor, but if Kiki was telling the truth, Cooper knew the most about Mobium except for the doctor himself. To keep Davenport from realizing the truth, he’d had Angélica killed and framed me?

  “There’s something I don’t get,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Why I went to prison. Was it Cooper who sent those texts to Brook?” After all, it was the only evidence they’d needed to throw me behind bars.

  “Rita planned that, too,” Kiki said, her voice hollow. “It was only a matter of time before Cooper would get bolder and try to take you out, so she framed you. She was sitting on the evidence the whole time. And when Angélica was killed, she deployed that particular missile because hey, you were safe in prison. Cooper couldn’t get to you. Davenport and Detmer doctors, they’re not supposed to cross over, ever. It protects all of us in case a villain escapes.”

  Cooper had tried multiple times to get in and see me at Detmer. I thought he’d been on my side, but now my stomach dropped. Rita had broken me out of prison the night before I was supposed to receive a visit from him.

  “Plus,” Kiki said, “I think Rita wanted a chance to work on you herself.”

  I thought of the pepper spray. The constant attacks. The insults. “Work on me. Right. So . . . all of this is her twisted, Machiavellian plan?”