by Dunne, Lexie
“No, it’s food. Theoretically.” I held up a bag Kiki had left behind, full of little silver wrappers. “Aren’t you excited?”
She groaned and sat up with some difficulty, arms shaky as she pushed herself up. “This is revenge, isn’t it?”
“It’s a dish best served cold.” I unwrapped a crap-cake and held it out. Naomi, who’d nibbled on one, immediately wrinkled her nose, and I didn’t blame her. There was no proper way to describe the taste of crap-cakes, which would keep a person with an average metabolism full for an entire day. I preferred to think of them as utterly disgusting and leave it at that. After all, the only thing worse than the taste of a crap-cake was the aftertaste.
Angélica sighed and ate the whole thing. She frowned. “I’m still hungry.”
I handed her a second, unwrapped crap-cake. “It’ll be like that for a while. You’re still getting used to the Mobium Kiki gave you to save your life. Or possibly bring you back from the dead. That part of the story’s not clear.”
My trainer blinked both eyes open and gave me a look. “Mobium,” she said, flatly.
“It’s the miracle drug.”
Naomi, on the other hand, leaned her head back all the way, looking up at the ceiling in exasperation. “Houston,” she said, “we are go for explanation round three.”
Angélica ate three more crap-cakes in the time it took Naomi and I to explain why we were playing card games in the attic of a house in the suburbs. She took the news that she’d died remarkably well. Just some quiet, vociferous cursing in Portuguese, followed by some louder swearing in English. By the end, she shook so badly that Naomi and I shared a silent fearful look. She didn’t pass out. She took deep breaths and finally nodded.
“Cooper,” she said when we finished relating that part of the tale. “Cooper poisoned me?”
“You didn’t take anything from him, did you? Right before we went to the mall?”
“He gave me a stick of chewing gum when I stopped by to talk to him.” Angélica groaned and pushed the side of her fist into her forehead. “It all makes sense. He told me I was seeing things, but I saw you phase, I know I did. And you were strange afterward. Weaker. I got in an easy hit, bruised your cheek up pretty bad. Do you remember that?”
That had been the day I’d gone to the Annals, I realized. I’d had a nasty bruise that had unfortunately hit every color of the ugly rainbow as it had healed.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I remember that. Would’ve been nice to know about that before I started—” Wait. Weaker. I didn’t remember being fatigued after that hit from Angélica, but I remembered a sudden dizzying migraine while fighting the Raptor.
She’d said I’d ’ported. I’d assumed she just hadn’t seen me climb the stairs or had underestimated how fast I could be. But I remembered the rooftop, her fist coming right at my nose, too fast for me to dodge, and then I’d just been somewhere else.
“Holy shit,” I said.
Both of my companions looked panicked. “What?”
“I can ’port! I did it once when I was—no, I’ve done it twice.” That was how I’d reached Guy in time when he had fallen, after Brook had nearly killed him. “I can ’port. Oh, god.”
Angélica closed her eyes and lay back down. “Of course you can,” she said. “Of course that would be the power you pick up almost right away.”
She had a point. ’Porting, they’d told me when we had visited the way station in New York to travel to Chicago, took years and years to master, which was why so few people could do it. It was difficult to control and probably fatal if you screwed it up. I had no idea what the principles were behind it, but each time I’d ’ported, it had been short distances, and I’d felt like death afterward.
Great. I’d gained the coolest power, with apparently no way to control, and no time to learn how to control it.
That was just helpful, that was.
“Gail, and I mean this with love, but you are shaping up to be the most problematic trainee I’ve ever had,” Angélica said.
“You mean, they haven’t killed you over your other trainees? Gee, I’m shocked.”
Angélica managed a smile. She reached out and squeezed my shoulder, but it lacked her regular strength. “I think I need to sleep some more,” she said, her voice growing slurred. “Once I’m up, I’m reporting in to headquarters, and I’m going to kick Cooper’s ass myself.”
“Get in line,” I said, thinking of Vicki.
Since she was actually sleeping this time rather than passed out, Naomi and I gathered up the cards and carried them to the kitchen. I didn’t feel like cooking, so I bit the bullet and swallowed a crap-cake whole. I stuck a second one in my pocket, just in case. As much as I complained about them, the little bars were actually incredibly handy to have around.
“I still can’t believe you can eat those,” Naomi said, wrinkling her nose as she poured herself a glass of water.
“Just part of my life now. Do you want—”
The house shook. This time, it had nothing to do with Vicki.
Something boomed from outside, rattling the whole house. I tackled Naomi to the floor. From the direction of the front door, my ears picked up the sound of glass breaking. And then a hissing noise that filled me with dread.
“Gas!” I shoved Naomi to her feet. “Go out the back!”
She started coughing, so I yanked off the flannel overshirt I wore over my tank top and shoved that at her. Then I pushed her until she complied, racing for the back door. I turned and sprinted instead for the stairs. Angélica was too weak to get herself out of there. She had to be my priority.
How had Cooper found us? What had given us away?
There was a second thunk, followed by a hiss. I cursed under my breath. At least it was the same stuff Rita had ensured wouldn’t bother me. It irritated my eyes and throat as I ran, but I didn’t care.
A third window shattered right as I reached the stairs. Instinctively, I ducked forward. Something whipped over my head. When I looked up, I was eyeball to eyeball with a bird logo on a throwing disc sticking out of the wall. It was nice that she believed in putting her logo on everything, but—“Oh, hell.”
Not again. How had Raptor even found us?
I tried to keep running for the stairs, but a second disc sliced into the wall, blocking my route. She’d effectively cut me out. I spun and ran the other way. I’d have to scale the outside of the place.
The net whooshed as it flew behind me. I dropped into a roll, flinched when a piece of glass bit into the bottom of my bare foot, and leapt straight through one of the windows in the living room. It exploded outward in a shower of glass. I hit the flowerbed and landed on all fours, immediately springing to a crouch as I looked around. She had to be near, if she was throwing all of those toys at me.
I didn’t see anything in the front yard. Not even the Raptorcycle.
This had to be a trap.
Trap or not, I needed to get to Angélica. I raced for the drainpipe on the corner of the house and started to climb. It was out in the open, leaving me vulnerable, but I didn’t have a choice. At least it was still dark, and the windows in the neighboring houses hadn’t lit up.
How had she found us? Was our cover blown? Were the others okay?
I climbed, pushed up with my feet, and grabbed the overhanging eave on the second floor with both hands. When I moved to pull myself over, a thwipp noise filled the air, and I felt a rope snap my ankles together. I cried out, nearly losing my grip, and tried to pull myself up anyway. It was all for naught: something sticky hit the center of my back. One sharp tug, and I fell backward. Oh, god, this was going to hurt—
I hit some kind of cushiony surface with an “Oof!” A gel, I realized as my body began to sink. A bright pink gel, which only made it worse. In less than a second, I was completely trapped in the gel from my shoulders down. My body was im
mobilized; I tried to call up as much of my strength as possible, but all it did was nudge the rapidly hardening gel a tiny centimeter.
“Don’t waste your energy.” Raptor’s modified voice emerged from the shadows. She followed a second later. The light from a nearby streetlamp cast her face in deep shadow.
“What do you even want with me?” I asked, panting.
She crouched next to the giant glob of Gail-filled tactical jello. “You have the worst survival instincts of anybody I’ve ever met,” she said with a frown. “You keep going up. You could have gotten away just now, and you went up.”
“My friend—she’s in the attic—”
“The gas won’t kill anybody. I don’t use lethal tools.” She shrugged to herself. “You’ve got a prison to go back to, young lady.”
“Young Lady” only felt mildly less insulting from a woman my mother’s age than it did from a man, I discovered in that moment.
“No, you don’t understand,” I started to say, but Raptor touched a button on her wrist cuff. The gel around me turned a blindingly bright pink for a second.
It tasted inexplicably like cotton candy when it knocked me out.
When I woke up, I was upside down, gagged, and blindfolded.
Sadly, this was not the first time that had happened.
Everything ached. The blood had long ago rushed to my head, so I had a headache on top of everything, but I sorted out as many details as I could. New-car smell and a sensation of movement in my stomach, so I was clearly in somebody’s car. I wasn’t entirely upside down, I realized after a second, since I lay on my stomach. Only my head and shoulders were hanging downward. I could lift my head, which I did.
“Sorry about that,” a voice came from somewhere in front of me. “You fell out of the restraints, and I didn’t have time to get you set to rights. How’s your head?”
I turned my face in the direction of Jessica Davenport’s voice and made a noise through the gag.
“You’re not the first person to tell me that,” she said, understanding my insult perfectly. “Points for creativity, though. Why a goat?”
I made another noise.
“Yeah, I hate all Davenports, too. But you belong in prison. Your ride should be here any second to take you back.”
Wait, my ride?
I realized abruptly where I must be: the Raptor Tank. Jessica Davenport’s tricked-out utility vehicle that they said contained over five hundred weapons and could fly. Of course it would always smell like a new car, since the Davenports were richer than Midas. I’d wanted to see inside it for a long time, and so it just figured I’d be blindfolded now.
I felt the car decelerating, which slid me forward a little so that my neck and shoulders were again over the edge of whatever I was atop. Raptor climbed out of the tank, and I heard her greet somebody else. I tried to wiggle my wrists and see if there was any give in my handcuffs, but no joy there.
From behind me, I heard the creak of a door. Apparently, the Raptor Tank had a back hatch.
“I know it’s unorthodox,” said a new voice. I froze in horror. “I appreciate you letting me transport her back. I’ve been worried about how they’ve been treating her in Detmer. Her cancer isn’t something to be taken lightly.”
“She’s pretty spry for somebody with leukemia,” Raptor said.
I couldn’t move. I’d gone absolutely stiff with fear and cold, and the way Lemuel Cooper laughed now, lighthearted and cheery, only made things worse. “Isn’t she, though,” he said. “Where’d you find her, anyway?”
“Few miles from here.” I felt myself being pulled backward and immediately started struggling. Raptor grunted.
“Here, let me help.”
When I felt a second pair of hands hauling me back, I struggled harder.
“Gail, it’s only me,” Cooper said.
That was the problem.
No matter how much I struggled, though, they were stronger than me. I was pulled out of the Raptor Tank and carried into what I guessed was a second car, buckled in while blindfolded and gagged.
I felt a gloved hand on my shoulder. Raptor. “Straight back to the prison,” she said to Cooper. “This one’s already gotten away from me once. My reputation will be in shreds if she does it again.”
I heard her footsteps walking away and tried to scream through the gag.
“Don’t worry,” Cooper called after her. “I’ll take care of her.”
I was afraid of that.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I was alone in the car with the man who had in the most indirect way possible caused me to fall victim to the machinations of the world’s first supervillain. A man who was stronger and more indestructible than Guy, could punch harder than Vicki, and essentially had no reason to fear anything. A man who, if Kiki was to be believed, had the morals of a rabid weasel and was involved in the testing of a compound designed to turn ordinary people into superpowered freaks of nature. A man who had allegedly been looking for an opportunity to kill me since the first day I had set foot in Davenport Industries.
Not only was I alone in the car with him: I was alone, blindfolded, gagged, and handcuffed.
So that was great.
I flinched in terror when I felt him touch the blindfold. A second later, it was pulled off. I blinked rapidly several times.
“Better?” Cooper asked. He held the blindfold loosely in one hand. I tried to scramble away from him. “Gail! Gail, relax. I’m here to drive you back to Detmer. I wanted to make sure you hadn’t hurt yourself. Your condition is delicate.”
I screamed through the gag and tried harder to get away. The seat belt creaked against my weight.
“Whoa! Whoa, Gail, it’s okay. You’re safe.” He held his hands up. “What’s the matter? You do recognize me, don’t you? It’s Cooper. I’m your doctor, remember? Did you get hit with a memory gas?”
A cold, striking fact broke through the terror.
He had no idea.
He had no idea I knew who he really was. He was operating under the assumption I was just out of my mind with fear rather than specific terror at the sight of him. Which meant that Raptor must not have told him anything about where she’d found me. Otherwise, he would know everything.
“Doing better?” Cooper asked.
I took a deep breath through my nose. If he didn’t know, then I could—what? What, Gail? I was still cuffed and gagged, and he was tremendously strong. What could I possibly do?
First rule of hostage situations: never let your captor know how much you know.
And if Cooper didn’t know I knew about him, there was always a chance I could bide my time and get away.
My last meal fought to make a reappearance, but I battled it down. Could he see that I was shaking? I felt like it was obvious. “Sorry,” I tried to say through the gag.
“Why don’t I take that off?” he asked.
I stayed as still as he peeled the gag away from my face. Raptor might have entrapped me using high-tech gel, but it was kind of nice to see that she sometimes used duct tape like the rest of us plebeians. When it was finally off, I gasped.
“Better?” he asked.
I nodded past the sick feeling in my throat. “M-much.”
“Remember me yet?”
I nodded again. “Been a rough couple of d-days. I haven’t slept much, and Raptor—she came out of nowhere, and I panicked and—”
“It’s okay.” Cooper patted my knee, and I did my best not to flinch away. “I’ve got you now.”
Yeah, that was definitely not as reassuring as he meant it to sound.
“I want to do a physical, to make sure you haven’t sustained any lasting injury from your time on the run,” he said.
“Aren’t the prison doctors going to do that?”
“Humor me.” His smile was probably meant to be
reassuring and helpful, but it only made me tremble harder. Cold sweat coated the back of my neck. He tapped his thumb on the roof of the car in time to the song playing faintly on the radio. “I’m just going to take you to a nearby Davenport facility. I’ll run some tests, let you have a nice meal, and I’ll take you back. I hope you at least had some fun on the run.”
“Oh, yeah, it was a blast,” I said, the sarcasm appearing without prompting.
He shook his head, shut the door, and moved over to the driver’s seat. In that moment, he certainly didn’t look like the evil mastermind who could and would kill me at the drop of a hat. But if there was one thing my multiple kidnappings had taught me, it was that evil came in all shapes and faces.
“I didn’t know Davenport had a facility around here,” I said. I had no idea where we were. The sun was just beginning to rise on my third—or maybe fourth—day of being a fugitive.
Cooper winked at me. “Davenport, home of many secrets.”
He made small talk as he drove, asking me about my adventures over the past few days. I made up a few lies—sleeping behind a dumpster on the Navy Pier might have been overselling it—and tried to pay attention to road signs we passed without seeming obvious.
Less than ten minutes, Cooper pulled into a parking lot. He badged in past the front gate, crossed around the car, and unbuckled me. “Our humble offices,” he said with a grand sweep of his hand. “Not much to look at, I know, but Davenport prefers to put all its goodies inside.”
The building was a flat and square, unobtrusive. It could have passed for a dentist’s office or accounting firm. There wasn’t a single sign anywhere to be found as we walked into the building together. He didn’t grab my elbow as expected, but I didn’t run. There was nowhere I could go.
The security guard at the front desk looked up to smile at both of us. “Hey, Coop. One guest?”
I gave him a smile back that hopefully hid the ill feeling behind my sternum. Where were the signs? They’d been all over the place at Dartmoor Incorporated, to the point of obnoxiousness.
