With zero hesitation, the girl scowled. “Of course not. What a stupid question.”
Chase blinked, amused and insulted in equal measure. “Okay.”
“I’m eleven. I remember being a little kid. Like, really little, when you got hugs from your mom and dad or like when you had a fever and your mom climbed into bed with you or like when dad made Mickey Mouse pancakes on Sunday mornings. I’m not little anymore, obviously, but I remember that stuff.”
She crossed her arms, and for a moment she didn’t look like a big kid at all. “I really wish I didn’t. Remembering that stuff sucks.” Molly’s eyes darkened and she lifted her chin defiantly. “But at least I’m strong enough to pound anyone who gives me trouble.”
“I’m sure that helps,” Chase allowed.
“Why did you ask me if I was okay? It’s a really dumb question, Chase. None of us are okay.”
“Well…Gert and I were talking.”
Molly held up a hand. “Oh, no! I know what this is about! Do not even think about it, mister.”
Prowling around the cavern, sniffing stalagmites, Old Lace looked up at the brusque tone in Molly’s voice and growled in concern.
“So Gert already told you—”
“Yes! She’s a traitor, and so are you. We’re all supposed to be in this together.”
“I’m eighteen,” Chase reminded her. “The other girls aren’t far behind. But you’re only—”
“I know how old I am, Chase.”
“We just think it’d be nice for you to have something normal in your life.”
Molly glared at him. She pointed a finger in his direction and jabbed the air, as if to remind him that she might be ninety-seven pounds and an inch shy of five feet, but she could smash his ribs with one finger.
“You listen to me, Chase Stein,” Molly declared. “I don’t care what you and Gert think. I am not going to school.”
He wanted to keep going, to explain that she needed to study math and grammar at least, but Molly turned her back and walked over to Old Lace, as if she felt like the dinosaur must be on her side.
As Chase debated continuing the conversation, his cell phone began to buzz in his pocket. When he answered, he couldn’t get out more than a word or two in the midst of the rapid-fire string of information coming from Gert on the other end of the line.
“On my way,” he said, when she seemed to have finished.
The line went dead. Chase stared at the phone in his hand for a second, and then he hurried toward the Leapfrog.
“Molly! Grab Old Lace and climb aboard.”
“Where are we going?” she sulkily demanded.
Chase didn’t look back. “I think the girls have found you someone to punch.”
If Gert hadn’t been holding the broken phone and staring at the red dot on its screen, she’d never have given the hidden door a second look. It had a metal accordion grate across the front and a thick padlock on a chain. A generation of graffiti and grit coated both grate and door. Stuck between two buildings—one an apartment complex and the other a 1940s department store that had been gentrified into a trendy gym—the door seemed to exist almost by itself. It was slightly recessed. Not hidden, exactly, but that was how Gert immediately thought of it. For a gleaming, modern city, Los Angeles had plenty of forgotten corners and hidden doors.
“You’re sure about this?” Gert asked.
Nico and Karolina both glanced around. An old man had passed them a block east, walking his dog, but as they spotted him again he turned a corner. Half a block to the west was a fenced-in vacant lot with a faded sign promising an office tower that seemed unlikely to come to fruition. A homeless man in filthy layers of clothing pushed a shopping cart past that empty lot. He seemed to be talking to himself, or maybe singing, if the melodic sway of his words was any evidence.
“This is the spot,” Nico said. “Unless there’s some other magic screwing up my spell, that GPS is accurate. The girl’s behind that door somewhere.”
Gert glanced around again. “Okay. I guess it’s as clear as it’s going to get.”
Karolina removed her bracelet and ignited her finger with colorful lights, almost pastel-soft.
Nico might have been their de facto leader—although Gert sometimes wondered why—but Karolina didn’t need anyone to give the order. She shot a pulse of light from her left hand and laser-cut the chain, which clanked to the sidewalk. The smell of hot metal filled the air as Gert grabbed the grate and tried to slide it aside. Rust had built up over the years and frozen it in place, but then Nico gave her a hand and they managed to drag it open.
“However they got the girl in here,” Karolina said, “it wasn’t this way.”
The door behind the grate proved less of a challenge. They’d agreed to be quiet, to avoid warning the girl’s abductors that they were coming, but when Nico grabbed the doorknob and gave it a firm twist, the long-since-rotted frame crumbled around the lock. A small cloud of dust puffed up, and then they were inside.
Gert glanced around again. There were cars coming from either direction, headlights dim but getting brighter. They seemed to have managed to be fairly stealthy.
“Let’s go,” Nico whispered. There in the shadows, her slim body clad in silk, lace, and cotton—but all in black—she seemed to have been born to the darkness.
Confidence, Gert thought. That was why Nico was the leader. She’d see the thing that needed to be done, and she’d do it, every time.
They slipped inside and Gert pulled the door shut behind them. With its broken lock and crumbled frame, it didn’t close all the way. It would’ve been better to close the grate, to cut down on the chance that someone passing by would notice, but Gert had left the grate open in case they had to make a quick retreat.
Nico put a finger to her lips, reminding them to be quiet from this point forward—they didn’t know who might be down here, so stealth was their best friend. Colorful ribbons of light swirled hypnotically around her hand as she led the way down the darkened corridor. The room they were in had been a kind of foyer, once upon a time, but it wasn’t until they had followed a set of marble steps down two narrow flights and through a metal turnstile that Gert realized where they were.
“The subway,” she whispered, earning a frown from Nico for breaking the silence.
Karolina moved closer to her. “There’s no subway station here.”
“Not anymore, there isn’t,” Gert replied.
Nico shot them both a withering glance and Gert nodded. She’d been quiet the entire way down. Instead of talking, she focused on the walls and the stairs, on the old signs tiled onto the walls. Whatever entrance this might be, she felt sure they had found their way into what remained of the old Hollywood Subway. During her freshman year, she’d done a research project on public transportation in L.A., a topic that bored her numb until she’d stumbled on information about the city’s abandoned subway stations, these relics of an earlier age—a golden age, many thought. The Pacific Electric Railway Interurban line had been built in the 1920s. Most of her research had vanished from her brain, but she remembered that much. Abandoned places had always appealed to her, and the idea that some of these stations had been sealed up just as they were, like dusty time capsules of a bygone era, had a romanticism that appealed to her.
They descended further, following a wrought-iron spiral staircase that led to a metal gate. Rust had ruined it, and the gate hung open slightly, no barrier at all. Beyond it was the platform. Thin shafts of light came down from far overhead, metal plates in the street or vents behind buildings, just enough so that even without Karolina’s colorful illumination it wouldn’t have been pitch-black down there.
Gert looked at the phone. The blinking blue dot that represented them had come to rest right on top of the red dot. Confused, she set out across the platform, glancing both ways but seeing no sign of anyone. The place seemed to exhale as she moved through it, like the breath of a newly unsealed tomb.
Shut up, Gertrude, s
he thought. Too many old monster movies for you.
Her brain wanted to leap from thoughts of monster movies to thoughts of needing to curl up with Chase to watch those movies someday, but she pushed the distraction away. The tunnel to her left went on about fifty yards before it struck a wall. On the right the tunnel went a bit deeper before hitting a matching barrier. Whatever remained of this station, it was just a sliver of what it once had been. At the edge of the platform, she looked down and saw that the track was still there. But no train would be arriving here. Not ever.
Nico and Karolina had hung back, poking around in search of any clues. Gert realized she’d left the safe, comforting circle of Karolina’s illumination, and she started back toward them.
The missing girl’s phone buzzed in her hand, and she stopped short and stared at the shattered screen. The blue dot had stopped blinking. It still covered up most of the red dot, but they were both solid now, one on top of the other.
I don’t get it, she thought. Nico wanted them to be quiet, but there was nobody here.
“This makes no sense,” Gert whispered, walking toward Nico and Karolina. The moment she took a step, the phone buzzed in her hand again and the blue dot began to blink anew.
Gert took a step backward and the blinking stopped. Her eyes went wide. She held the phone to one side and stared at the concrete between her feet, then hurried to rejoin Karolina and Nico, ignoring the way the phone buzzed in her hand again.
“What?” Karolina whispered, seeing the look on her face. “What are you—?”
Nico shushed her, but Gert ignored them both. She studied the gate through which they’d entered, and then she saw the shadowy recession off to the right, toward the wall where the platform ended. She strode to that recessed area of the wall, knowing before she reached it that her hunch had proven correct. More stairs. They’d found the station, but there was at least one level below this one. A chain had been hung across the stairs with a metal sign reading warning: do not enter, but Gert stepped over it, careful to hold the handrail, and then she was moving downward. A new urgency filled her as she thought of that red dot on the phone.
Karolina kept her light dim as she followed. Nico seemed to be trying to get Gert’s attention, maybe to tell her to slow down, but as they rounded a second turn in the stairs, there was no way Gert was going to listen. If anything, she wanted to move faster, but their shoes were already making a soft scuff and so she didn’t risk it.
On the next landing she slowed, listening to the darkness as it breathed, almost as if this space was adjusting to people after so long without them.
A hand touched her shoulder. Gert jumped, hissing between her teeth to avoid cursing loudly. She spun around to see Nico tapping at her ear and cocking her head, silently instructing Gert to listen. The three of them froze on the stairs, and after a moment Gert realized that she could hear voices chanting not far below. Not only could she hear them, but she thought she had actually been hearing them for a while without recognizing the sound.
Chanting voices were always a bad sign.
At the bottom of the stairs they found a very narrow corridor that ended in a metal door that had rusted halfway open. Gert had a little trouble squeezing through, but they all managed it, only to find themselves in another tiled corridor.
What they’d found were not the stairs most passengers would have used, but some kind of maintenance access. Following the corridor, they emerged in a dark corner of another platform, and here the tunnel and the tracks were not blocked at either end. The subway no longer ran, but they were deep enough that nobody had bothered to close up the tunnel. There would be a million rats down here, she was sure, but nothing scurried toward them. Not that Gert was worried about rats at the moment.
Karolina had snuffed her own light. The illumination down here came from lights that had been set up on the platform across the tracks. The gap between the two sides of the station remained dark, for the light could not fully reach the tracks, but half a dozen lights had been erected on the other side. Gert had lived her life in Los Angeles and had seen her share of movie sets where the crew would cluster around weirdly lit spaces and watch actors walk and talk and fight. For a few seconds, she felt certain they had walked in on a movie set, so familiar were those lighting setups.
But the chanting rose in volume and she heard the girl cry out, and she knew this was no movie. Nine people had gathered in a circle around a red-haired teenage girl who’d been handcuffed against a pillar on the platform. Gagged, the girl kept whipping her head around and staring imploringly at the figures surrounding her, all of whom wore wine-red cloaks.
Gert’s horror and anger remained, but she packed them away in that place in her mind where all hesitation had to go, so that she could act. Old Lace wasn’t here. Chase wasn’t here. Molly wouldn’t be punching anyone. It was just her and Karolina and Nico, and Gert herself had no powers except for her psychic bond to her pet. But she wasn’t about to let this girl die.
One of the hooded figures stepped toward the pillar, brandishing a knife. A second moved toward the girl and for the first time, Gert noticed the glinting metal object in his hands, some kind of mechanism.
Her breath caught in her throat, because that mechanism looked familiar.
A third hooded figure stepped forward and the chanting died down. The woman—for her voice identified her as female—began some kind of enchantment, and to Gert’s horror, she recognized this, too.
“Antin krek varin,” it began. “Vriik hr nisanti. Nisanti hr kariin.”
The man holding the tech turned it on and it began to hum. “It better work this time.”
“The Rite of Blood works every time,” said the one with the knife. “It’s the Rite of Thunder we need to perfect. But if it doesn’t work tonight, there are always other street kids.”
Nico grabbed Gert’s arm. She spun to see the shock in her friends’ eyes and knew it reflected her own.
The Rite of Blood. The Rite of Thunder. That incantation, and that machine. None of these people were her parents, Gert was pretty sure of that, but this ritual and everything that went along with it…she had seen it before, only with less chanting. She’d seen it in Alex Wilder’s house, on the night they learned their parents were Super Villains…the night they learned their parents were murderers.
Whoever these people were, they wanted to be the Pride.
Posers, Gert thought. Typical L.A. Why be original when you can recycle an old brand?
Gert closed her eyes tightly. She wished Chase were with them. Wished Molly could have been there to hit somebody. More than anything, she wished she had Old Lace, because being away from the dinosaur for too long created a weird, irritating buzz at the base of her skull. She wanted them all together, but at least Nico and Karolina were with her.
She opened her eyes. Nico held up a hand, military-style. The moment she closed it into a fist, they would attack—though it would be mostly Nico and Karolina doing the attacking. It would have taken long, dangerous seconds for Gert to get down onto the tracks and climb up on the other side, so Karolina would probably carry them both—she couldn’t carry them far, but across that twenty-foot gap? No problem.
Nico had the Staff of One in her free hand. She’d made herself bleed again, and Gert knew it was not the only blood that would be shed tonight.
On the other side of the tracks, on that far platform, the man with the knife moved in and the handcuffed girl began to scream and twist, trying to slide around to the other side of the pillar, as if that would keep her safe.
Nico closed her hand. Karolina transformed, her whole body igniting with that sweeping palette of color. Gert started to run toward the edge, toward the gap between platforms.
With a concussive whoomp of displaced air that knocked her back two steps, four people appeared out of nowhere on the other side, amid the Pride wannabes, disrupting their ritual.
“What the hell?” Gert whispered.
Karolina went dark.
Nico opened her hand, held out an arm, and directed them to fall back a few more steps, urgency in her brown eyes. Whatever was happening over there on the other platform, it wasn’t something the people conducting the ritual had planned. Someone screamed. One of the four new arrivals transformed into an enormous tiger, leaped on a hooded woman, and knocked over one of the lighting arrays, which shattered loudly.
Shape-shifter, Gert thought.
“Who are they?” Nico rasped in her ear. “Do you recognize them?”
The simple answer was no. She saw a tall Asian woman with ragged-cut hair raise her hands and cause a gust of wind that blew two hooded Pride members across the platform and into the darkness of the gap. A bespectacled Latino man drew a sword from a scabbard at his belt, stabbed a robed woman in the shoulder, and then vanished with an audible pop before whoomping back into reality a dozen feet away, right behind the captive girl. He raised that anything-but-ordinary sword, but two of the hooded figures tackled him, one of them raising a dagger. Before the dagger could fall, the man in the round little glasses teleported again, reappearing with his sword in the midst of the melee. Gert wondered if he had been going to kill the abducted girl, or if he’d meant to save her.
She wondered because whoever these people were, they weren’t Super Heroes. They all looked middle-aged, and if they were Super Heroes, Gert would certainly have heard of them by now. Even if they were obscure, they’d be in the files Chase had compiled. He had Rocket Racer in there, and heroes didn’t get much more obscure than that. So who the heck were these people?
“We’ve got to go,” she said, the epiphany striking her hard. She spun to the others, thinking she would have to persuade them.
“Agreed,” Nico said. “But not without her. Whoever these people are, the girl’s safer with us.”
“Do it,” Gert replied. “Kay and I will cover you.”
Nico nodded. She raised the Staff of One and said “Special Delivery,” in that creepy voice they all knew very well by now. In the midst of the fight on that lighted platform, the girl’s handcuffs fell away as if they’d been unlocked simultaneously. Before they could even drop to the ground, a swirl of white mist wrapped around her like a cocoon and lifted her, swiftly carried her across the gap, and deposited her beside Nico.
Runaways Page 5
