by Dunne, Lexie
“I don’t know. I guess I understand her a little better now, though.” After all, how would I have reacted if instead of Davenport, I’d ended up in a cage? “Though I have to wonder at her priorities. I’d rather take out the bad guys than the ex. Of course, maybe she shares Kiki’s school of thought, where Cooper and Lodi are too powerful to even consider, so hit what you can.”
“Or she snapped, and now she’s crazy,” Naomi said. “I mean, that’s an option.”
“A depressing one.”
When Guy came in to deliver the broom, he was shaking his head. “We’re one wrong word away from Vicki burning the house down,” he said as he started to sweep. “Just so you all know.”
“I still can’t believe Victoria Burroughs is Plain Jane.” Naomi shook her head like she was trying to get water out of her ears. “That’s . . . I still don’t know what that is.”
“She’s a character, all right.” Guy’s gaze lingered on Angélica for a second before he turned a determinedly cheerful expression toward us. “How are you two holding up? We’re not going to have a repeat of the Kiki vs. Vicki situation, are we?”
“We’re friends now,” I said.
“We are?” Naomi immediately perked up. “So I can ask what the deal with you two is?” She looked hopefully between Guy and me.
“No. We’re not that good of friends,” I said, and Naomi snapped her fingers.
Guy swept the little pile of dirt and glass into the dustpan. “Got a minute?” he asked me.
Since Naomi offered to sit with Angélica, I followed Guy downstairs. I was still having a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that I’d been held captive in this house for over two weeks. It felt so suburban. And really kind of cozy, when you looked at it. I wondered if the house next door, the decoy house that the Lodi Corporation thought was Mobius’s real laboratory, had the same decorations.
Shouting from the kitchen made Guy pull up short. “Why don’t we talk in here, instead?” he said, and ducked through the doorway to his left. I followed and immediately had to stomp down hard on the desire to run away. The dark pink carpet and pink wallpaper were as familiar to me as my own bedroom in my abandoned apartment though in reality I’d spent less than twelve hours in this room when Dr. Mobius had held me there.
I looked automatically at the window. The last time I’d been in here, I’d been zapped trying to escape through the window. It had been boarded up then, but now the curtains were just drawn closed.
“Kiki says she disabled everything,” Guy said, understanding right away. “She shocked herself pretty good doing it. This is her old bedroom, apparently.” Guy took a seat in the desk chair. “She said you were kept in here?”
“Not for long, but long enough.” The book I’d been reading during my captivity was still on the nightstand, which did unpleasant things to my stomach. I sat on the edge of the bed. “What did you want to talk about?”
Guy sighed. “I need to get out of here, and I don’t want to leave you behind. But this is the safest place for you right now.”
“I want to stay wherever Angélica is,” I said. “If she’s like me now . . .”
“I understand. She’s going to be pissed about that, you realize.”
“At the moment, I’m not happy about it myself. Where do you need to go?”
“Sam.”
“Ah,” I said. I could see the lines on Guy’s face. The knowledge that Brook was alive and had been through hell for years would probably eat at him for a long time. And Sam definitely needed to know that his ex-girlfriend was both alive and at large.
“It’s not exactly news you deliver over the phone. But he needs to know, and we need to figure out what to do about her.”
“I understand,” I said. “I’d do the same thing if I were in your shoes.”
“It shouldn’t take me long,” Guy said. “I’m just going to talk to him, then I’ll come right back. We’ll come up with a plan to deal with Cooper and the Lodi Corporation.”
Something crashed loudly from the direction of the kitchen, and raised voices let us know that Vicki was now in the dish-throwing portion of tonight’s entertainment.
“Right. A plan. On a scale of one to ten, just how terrifying is Cooper? Theoretically,” I said.
Guy’s troubled look returned. He took a long time to answer, which I knew was him considering his words before speaking. Unlike me, he actually took the time to debate his options, whereas I tended to blurt out the first thing that could get me in trouble.
“When you came to Davenport,” he said, “you had Cooper and Kiki doing all of your physical testing, right?”
“Yes,” I said, and tried not to think about how much that made me want to shudder now. “Why do you ask?”
“They had me with another physician to do the physical when I first arrived at Davenport. Cooper came in to do the punch test. They do that to you?”
I nodded. One of the first things Davenport had asked me to do was to punch Cooper as hard as I could. He’d been wearing monitoring equipment, and I’d worried about breaking him with my newfound strength. I could only imagine how that must have gone for Guy, who was a lot stronger than me and likely had an even harder time hitting an opponent who hadn’t hit first.
“It didn’t even hurt him,” Guy said. “I mean, I knocked him off his feet, but he didn’t even flinch.”
I gawked. Guy had once punched through reinforced steel doors since I’d been trapped on the other side of them.
“So, theoretically? It’s not good,” Guy said.
“How do you beat somebody like that?” I asked, feeling even smaller than usual.
“We’ll find a way. We’ve faced longer odds, believe it or not.”
“I don’t believe it, but if you do, that’s fine with me.”
Five minutes later, dressed in the War Hammer costume again, Guy carefully checked the street and flew off through Kiki’s window, while I watched from deep inside the room, out of view in case there were any random passersby at three in the morning. After he left, I hurried out of the room as fast as I could. I didn’t want to spend a minute longer in there than I had to. Since Kiki and Vicki still both sounded aggravated when I passed the kitchen, I went back to the attic.
“Any change?” I asked Naomi.
“She mumbled something a couple minutes ago, but other than that? No. It’s a little weird hanging out with a coma patient when you know she’s got superpowers, I won’t lie.” Naomi flattened her hair a little bit, but it sprang right back up. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.” I sat on the floor, resting back against the empty chamber again.
“So somehow you’re the key to get us out of this.”
“Yeah.” I snorted. “Because I’ve totally got the resources to take out what’s probably a multimillion-dollar company and its spy, who can incidentally withstand a punch from my incredibly strong boyfriend without flinching. Yeah, that’s me in a nutshell.”
Naomi raised her eyebrows. “So do you have a plan?”
“I never have a plan.”
“Want me to come up with one?” Naomi asked. When I squinted at her, she shrugged. “Just trying to help. I’ve never been on this side of the superhero line.”
“It’s not that great, honestly,” I said, closing my eyes.
“Gotta be better than getting kidnapped all the time, though.”
I thought about it, about all of the terror and anger and frustration I’d lived through since that fight with Brook and her cronies in the mall. “It’s not really that different,” I said. “Just more work expected of me, in the end.”
Naomi laughed. “Anybody ever tell you you’re a bit of a downer?”
Guy had told me I always found the silver lining. I wasn’t sure which perception of me unnerved me more, so I smiled at Naomi and shook my head. “Wel
come to my world.”
“I was serious about coming up with a plan,” Naomi said. “I might not have powers, but I graduated top of my class.”
“From where? The School of Hard Knocks?”
“Harvard, you idiot.”
“You went to Harvard, and you run a superhero gossip blog?”
“A well-respected superhero gossip blog. But you can see why my parents are harping at me to get a real job.” Naomi brushed the knees of her jeans off. “I’m going to talk to Kiki. Hopefully, Superhero’s Next Top Model down there has stopped throwing things.”
“Doubt it,” said a rusty voice from the couch.
I sat bolt upright. “Angélica!”
Her eyes were open though they were mere slits as she took in the room and me, and Naomi. Her skin had gone even waxier, but she apparently had the energy to lift her head an inch. “That’s me,” she said. “Somebody mind telling me where I am?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Everything descended into brief, loud chaos. I nearly burst into tears, Vicki and Kiki pounded up the stairs together, and Naomi scrambled to get out of the way before she could get stepped on. For a second, I couldn’t hear a thing, as we were all trying to talk at once.
“Hey,” said a voice from the couch, and Angélica gave us a malevolent look. “Anybody ever teach you idiots how to act around sick people? Vicki, go away.”
“But—”
“Go make tea or something. Gail looks like death. Who let my trainee almost die?”
“If you want to get technical? Cooper.” But Vicki listened to her and stomped off, which was almost as amazing as Angélica’s waking up at all. After a second, Naomi glanced at me and decided to follow after her.
I crouched by Angélica. “I don’t feel as bad as I suspect I look.”
“Liar.” She coughed weakly. “Where am I?”
“Long story. You’re safe.”
“From what?”
“Never mind that.” Kiki nudged me to the side and began checking her pulse. “How do you feel?”
“You don’t want me to answer that.” She coughed again. “Why aren’t we at Davenport?”
“Because the world thinks you’re dead,” I said.
Angélica’s eyes cut to me. “What?”
“Gail, don’t get her excited at this stage, she’s likely to—and there she goes.” Kiki sighed and rested back on her haunches as Angélica’s eyes rolled back into her head. Kiki bit off a curse. “In this state, when the Mobium is first dealing with full consciousness, any excitement will take the patient back under. My grandfather’s journals were clear about that when that happened with you.”
“Excitement? You mean him letting me believe I was a robot? Yeah, no wonder I passed out.” Warily, I brushed a little of Angélica’s hair back. “How long will she be out?”
“Probably an hour or two. I take it you want to stay with her?”
“Yeah.”
Kiki moved over to the Mobium chamber and picked up her clipboard from where it hung on a little peg. As she scribbled something onto the chart, she made a noise in the back of her throat. “Did Guy take off?”
“He wanted to talk to his brother. He should be back soon.”
“Hopefully, he comes back before daybreak. I don’t want to draw too much attention to this place.”
“He’ll be discreet.”
When she left me alone, I reclaimed the seat I’d taken before Angélica’s brief spell of consciousness, my heart hammering with the leftover adrenaline. Angélica was okay. Seeing her alive had been one thing, but she’d woken up, and she’d been so her that it made my chest constrict a little.
“You shouldn’t die ever again,” I said as I put my head back and felt my eyes drift closed. “It’s really exhausting, okay? So after this, if we get through this, no more dying.”
Angélica made a noise in her sleep that I took for assent. I let myself doze. Not full sleep, as I was too keyed up for that, but a twilight doze where I could keep an eye on her.
Angélica was going to be like me when she woke up. How would she feel about the ability to gain new powers? How did I feel about it, come to think of it? I’d processed the news when Kiki had dropped that particular bomb because I needed to. But I hadn’t really thought about what it meant. How did the Mobium really work? Was the substance making up a large part of my body simply observant enough to look at the powers around me, say “I want that,” and begin to use that power? Or did I need to be exposed to it through bodily fluids somehow?
Wow, that was kind of gross. Had I absorbed Angélica’s powers because we’d sweated on each other during our sparring matches? I gagged a little at the thought.
And I’d kissed Guy several times. Did that mean I was going to get his ability to fly? Or his strength or imperviousness to pain? His ability to turn into a green fireball? God, there was so much about me that I didn’t know. I needed get my hands on Mobius’s notebooks, I realized. Those could be very valuable reading material.
I opened my eyes when Vicki came in with two cups of tea. “I can take a shift if you want to go shower or something,” she said.
“Is that your way of telling me I smell?” I asked as I took the tea from her.
“Yeah, actually.” She dropped down next to me. Given that she was over a foot taller than me, it was a much longer drop, and she had to fold herself over to fit between the couch and the chamber. “Hygiene is important, my mentee.”
“I’m kind of nose-blind to it,” I said.
“Trust me, the rest of us aren’t.”
“So mean.” I nudged her with my shoulder.
“I nag because I care.” She sipped from the tea, wrinkled her nose, and set it off to the side. Her sigh was gusty and seemed to go on for nearly a minute. “She’s alive. Isn’t that a kick in the ass? Makes more sense than her being taken out by one of those piddly little sting rays of Chelsea’s.”
“Brook,” I said. Vicki’s chin had a red mark in the spot Brook had hit during the battle earlier, but I wasn’t going to point that out. “Apparently her name is Brook.”
“I’m still wrapping my head around that. My archnemesis is the ex of the man I’m sleeping with. I don’t like that.”
“That she slept with Sam? They were together for a long time,” I said.
But Vicki shook her head. “Oh, that, I don’t care about that. I just don’t like the cattiness of it all. You know?”
“If it makes you feel better, your rivalry was there before we knew her identity.”
“That does make me feel better, actually.” Vicki tried her tea again, wrinkled her nose even harder, and set it aside once more. “Never was a tea drinker. I don’t understand you people that are. What’s wrong with coffee?”
“I find it relaxing, myself.” I picked up her tea and poured it into my cup. No use letting it go to waste. “I’m surprised you didn’t bring Jeremy with you.”
“He’s back at headquarters still, looking into the Lodi Corporation.”
I felt a spurt of alarm. Jeremy didn’t have any powers to defend himself if Cooper found out the truth. “Is that safe?”
“I mean, Cooper doesn’t know we know, so if Jer can pretend everything is normal, it should all be okay. Though Kiki can’t stay here much longer without blowing her own cover.” Vicki reached forward and brushed Angélica’s hair away from her face the same way I had earlier. “I can’t stay here either. Jer needs some backup, and if we all drop off the grid, it looks suspicious. They already think I’m helping you.”
“But you are helping me.”
“Yeah, but they don’t need to know that.” Vicki scooped up her mask and pulled it on. “I’ll go out the same way Guy did, I think. Stay here, and stay safe.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Vicki made it almost all the way to the door befo
re she turned around. “Hey, is there something wrong with your reporter friend? She keeps giving me the weirdest looks. It’s a little freaky.”
“I think she’s working on reconciling Victoria Burroughs and Vicki the Plain Jane,” I said, laughing.
“Oh, right. Sometimes I forget.” With a cheery little wave, she headed off.
Angélica woke up three more times, a little longer each time. Naomi and I rotated shifts, so Kiki could get some sleep. I took a shower—this time not in the chemical shower closet in the basement—and changed into some of Kiki’s spare clothes, as Vicki had a point about my starting to smell.
And then there was nothing to do but wait.
“Look at us,” Naomi said as I pulled a card from the deck. Kiki had taken off an hour before since the sun would be up soon. “Couple of fugitives, doing very important things. Got any twos?”
“Go fish,” I said.
Naomi picked up a card. “Damn it,” she said. “The good news is that I talked to Kiki about a plan.”
“And the bad news? Any fours?”
She handed over a card. “Bad news is that you guys weren’t kidding. This guy is built like a fortress. Taking him down is nigh impossible. No wonder he’s gotten away with so much for so long.”
“How about sixes?” I asked.
“Go fish. How do you deal with it? I mean, you’re collecting powers like baseball cards, but you’re not that strong yet. How do you deal with knowing that everybody around you is stronger?”
“You be better.” Angélica’s voice was once again rusty as she spoke. She stirred and stretched, yawning widely. “If they’re stronger, you’re faster. If they’re faster, you’re smarter. It’s just how it goes. Good morning. Why . . . am I so damn hungry right now?”
“Long story,” I said far too brightly. “But I have something to fix that!”
She squinted at me like a woman with a hangover. “There’s a catch here somewhere,” she said.
