Shades of Gray

by Jackie Kessler; Caitlin Kittredge

  The thing in the shadow challenged them with a roar. Iridium was momentarily rooted to the spot.

  The man—it had to be a man—was enormous, all vein and muscle, with a deformed face and hands the size of meat platters. He had jagged teeth and a mightily pissed-off expression in his eyes.

  “I might be wrong,” Taser said quietly, “but I think that dude wants to kill us.”

  “He came up out of the ground,” Iridium marveled, her voice steady even though inside she was screaming. “Tore that shop right off its foundations.”

  “Callie.” Taser gripped her arm as the thing roared again. “Run.”

  Iridium spun, only to see at least a dozen more enormous, bloated, twisted figures appearing out of the dust. They circled her and Taser. Some giggled, or smacked their lips.

  “Either this is a bad trip from breathing in all of that asbestos,” Taser said, “or we’re in serious trouble.”

  The lead creature roared, and the others returned it. Thirteen pairs of eyes focused on Iridium.

  “We’re in trouble,” she decided.

  CHAPTER 29

  JET

  Phase 1 of Project Sunstroke has begun. Thirteen volunteers eager to become as powerful as the Squadron. We’ll put the extrahumans down like the rabid dogs they are.

  —From the journal of Martin Moore, entry #294

  I’ll do a sweep over Grids 3 through 6,” Jet said as she strapped on her cloak. She kept the cowl off, though. Instead, she’d braided her long hair and wrapped it in a bun at the nape of her neck. Not too heavy, and the lack of cowl made it easier for her to turn her head.

  Meteorite handed her another protein bar, which Jet took gratefully. “Curfew’s about to go into effect,” said the Ops controller, “so at least that’ll get most of the civvies out of harm’s way.”

  “Small favors.” Jet tore open the wrapper and all but inhaled the pseudochocolate bar. It wasn’t grilled chicken, let alone a beef taco, but it would do. Chewing, she glanced at Meteorite’s list of Who’s Left To Capture. Out of the 412 active Squadron members who’d gone rogue or rabid across the Americas, 27 had been incarcerated, and almost 30 were being pursued—they hadn’t converted from rogue yet, but at least they’d stopped breaking things.

  They were finally making a dent at home. Maybe in a few days, they could spread out, chase down rabids in other cities, and leave the normal criminals to the cops and the soldiers.

  “I’ll check in with you every thirty,” Jet said, “unless something comes up. And you’ll keep me posted?”

  “Of course.”

  Jet summoned a Shadow floater, and was vaguely pleased at how the voices didn’t whisper—how the power didn’t try to either fight her or seduce her. While creating floaters had never been hard, this was the first time that it was … easy. She stepped onto the black disc. “I’ll start with Grid 6, maybe see if I can pick up Colossal Man’s trail.”

  Grid 6: the Old Chicago district.

  Oh cipio.

  Jet paused on the Shadow floater, remembering a teenage girl standing outside of Everyman headquarters, shouting at her to go save the world somewhere else. But before the shouting, the girl had pressed something into Jet’s hand, and she’d whispered …

  Not “oh cipio,” Jet realized with a start. O.C.P.O. The Old Chicago Post Office, in Grid 6.

  That was when the pinging sounded—a distress call. Jet hovered in the air as Meteorite grabbed headphones. “Triangulating location,” the Ops controller said, sliding the headset in place. “Speakers on. Ops. Go.”

  Over a burst of static, Iridium’s voice, high-pitched, on the verge of panic. “Hey, heroes,” Iri shouted, “we’re in a situation here. We need backup, like, right now!”

  “Iridium,” Jet said, “stay calm. What’s happening?”

  “Hey, Jettikins is awake!” Iri let out a strained laugh. “You remember the thing you fought in the sewer? Well, apparently a dozen of its closest friends and family have all gone the sewer-mutant route, because they’re right here!”

  Jet’s stomach knotted as she remembered the feeling of Lynda Kidder’s malformed fist slamming into her, how the monstrous creature had nearly killed her … and how she’d accidentally killed Kidder in self-defense.

  And that had been one mutant. Now Iri was facing a dozen of them? She shouted, “Retreat! Callie, get out of there!”

  Iridium, desperate: “Sort of surrounded here. Taser’s and my light show’s holding them back, sort of, but I don’t know how long!”

  “Can you get in the air? Get out of range?”

  “His hover’s on the other side of the mutants, and last I checked, neither of us can fly!”

  “Got them,” Meteorite said, and gave Jet the coordinates. Barely five minutes as the crow flew. Jet would be there in two. Already soaring toward the door, she shouted, “On my way!”

  “Bring the fucking cavalry with you!” There might have been more, but Jet was already out of hearing range.

  Zooming over old Wrigley Field, Jet tapped on her earpiece for Ops. “Call in everyone. We need all of us on this.”

  “But Hornblower’s taking down Jezebel, and Steele’s—”

  “Meteorite,” Jet snapped, “pull them out! This is bigger than chasing after rogues and rabids.”

  “But—”

  “Sheila,” Jet said over the rush of wind, “they’re civilians. They’ve been injected with Moore’s Everyman serum, probably under duress. We need everyone on this. Now.”

  Meteorite cursed, colorfully and loudly. Then she said, “On it. Go.”

  Jet went.

  Air stung Jet as she flew faster than ever before. Her face was raw from windburn as she crouched on her floater, practically hugging the Shadow to lower wind resistance. She had to get to Iri and Taser, fast.

  Before the dying started.

  She heard the shouting before she saw Iri. The other woman’s clear voice was raised in a defiant battle cry that would have impressed Screamer. But the Lighter herself was lost amid a closing circle of hulking monstrosities—vaguely humanoid creatures stuffed into tattered business suits and jeans and the remnants of shirts and jackets, all of the monsters reaching out with massive hands.

  In the center, Iridium and Taser stood back-to-back, their hands alight—hers with Light strobes, his with electricity. Iri launched more strobes, hitting three creatures square in their chests … but all that did was make the things stagger back. It didn’t burn them, didn’t seem to even hurt them. Ditto Taser’s electric blasts. He hammered two more mutants, but if getting shocked did anything more than push them back a pace or two, it was impossible to tell.

  Jet zoomed down, her arms extended. Concentrating furiously, she sent a portion of her power under the rogue’s and merc’s feet, pooling beneath them to form a new floater. “Iridium, Taser! Hold on to each other!”

  “Fuck, that’s cold!” Iridium sent out a flurry of strobes, then extinguished the light over her hands and grabbed onto Taser’s waist. He let loose a burst of power, illuminating the air in front of him with white-blue light and heat as he planted his feet wide and bent his knees for balance.

  Bracing herself against her own floater, Jet called the other Shadow disc to her. It trembled, then with a mighty heave it launched upward. Iri and Taser scrambled to keep their footing as Jet lifted them out of reach of the mutants. Once the three of them were on the roof, she released the Shadow, calling it back inside herself. She didn’t feel its cold touch as it seeped beneath her skin—she was too busy taking stock of the situation streetside. The creatures, cheated of their prey, were attacking one another. Maybe they’d catch a break and they’d all beat themselves senseless …

  “You’re the cavalry?” Iri barked out a laugh. “And here I thought they’d be sending the entire Mod Squad.”

  “We did,” Jet murmured, silently counting the monsters far below. Thirteen. Light, thirteen of those … things. “The others are on their way.”

  “Great. Get
Firebug to charbroil them,” Iri said, shaking out her hands and wincing.

  “Can’t do that,” Jet said, tapping her comlink. “They’re civilians.”

  “Those are civvies?” Behind his black mask, Taser’s mouth pulled into a surprised O. “Remind me never to egg their houses on Halloween …”

  Jet tuned him out. “Jet, Ops.”

  Meteorite’s voice in her ear: “Oh good, you’re not dead.”

  “Iridium, Taser, and I are clear for the moment, but we have to restrain the mutants without harming them.”

  “And you’ll do that how?”

  “Working on it,” Jet said tersely. “ETA of the others?”

  A pause, during which Iri and Taser exchanged heated words—and unless Jet was wrong, threw each other a few meaningful looks. If Jet had been less stressed, it would have bothered her more. Then Meteorite said, “Hornblower due to arrive in three minutes. Steele and Firebug are a little farther behind. And—”

  “Wa-hoo!” Iri shouted. “Now the cavalry’s showing!”

  Jet looked up to see Frostbite approaching fast on an expanding bridge of ice. But this wasn’t the man who’d been hollowed out in Therapy as a boy, then shoved behind a desk in Ops for years. This Frostbite, with his clean Ops gray unisuit and thick-soled boots and a wicked grin on his lined face, was a teenager again, his spiky blue hair gusting in the wind as he landed roofside.

  This Frostbite was a hero.

  “Look at you,” Iri said, rushing over to him and greeting him with a hug. “Getting all superhero on us.”

  “Derek,” Jet said carefully, “are you sure you want to be here?” He’d been out of the field … well, since forever. The last mission he’d run had been during a Third Year exercise under strict Academy supervision.

  But that didn’t mean he’d never been tested. Light knew, he’d been tested. And blooded. And he’d survived … at least, until the Therapists had taken him.

  Frostbite disentangled himself from Iri’s embrace, shooting Jet a glare that should have made her hair catch fire. “From what I heard, you told Meteorite to pull everyone out, Joan. I’m part of everyone.” The look in his eye dared Jet to argue with him.

  A smile flitted across her lips. “Welcome back, Frostbite.”

  “Yeah, we’ll get cozy over a latte later. What’s the situation?”

  “A rough dozen sewer mutants tried to eat me and Taser,” Iri said, pointing to the street below. “Now they’re bashing each other’s brains in.”

  “Fabulous,” said Taser. “Problem solved. Who’s buying?”

  “They’re not sewer mutants,” Jet said, casting Iridium a long look.

  Iri blinked at her. “What? I’ve seen it on Mysterious Chicago.”

  “They’re normals,” Jet stressed, looking at the others one by one.

  “Those are the least normal normals I’ve ever seen,” Frostbite said, staring down at the street. “Moore’s sludge at work?”

  “I’m positive,” Jet said.

  “What sludge?” Iridium looked from Frostbite to Jet. “Who’s Moore? And don’t give me that ‘person of interest’ cowcrap, Jet,” she added when Jet opened her mouth.

  “Hey, those quote-unquote normals almost crushed me,” Taser said. “I’m definitely a person of interest.”

  Jet walked over to the edge of the roof and looked down. In the street, the monsters danced with fists and fury. At least the citizens here had abided by curfew. Small favors, Jet told herself again. “You remember when we met in the Rat Network?” Jet said, not looking back at Taser or Iri.

  “You mean when you broke my nose?” Iri said sweetly.

  “When I’d gone up against one of them.” Jet’s throat tightened, and she swallowed thickly, remembering the overwhelming stench of her own sweat and fear, her rising panic of the Dark and of the thing that had loomed over her, wearing a string of pearls and a look of pure madness. “That creature had been the reporter, Lynda Kidder. She’d been injected with a serum created by a man named Martin Moore.”

  She remembered the sound of Lynda Kidder howling in rage as a blanket of Shadow covered her. Squeezed her.

  Killed her.

  “He’s working with Everyman, or a fringe group connected with Everyman. So was C—” Jet’s words ended on a choked gasp as a knife sliced through her brain.

  A hand on her shoulder. She looked up, blinking away tears, to see Iri frowning at her. “Joannie,” she said softly. “You okay?”

  “No.” Jet shrugged off Iri’s hand, grimacing through the echoes of pain. “Whatever their brainwashing was, it …” She took a shuddering breath. “I can’t say their name, not if I’m speaking against them.”

  Iri stared at her, her gaze unreadable. “You have to tell the world the truth.”

  “Amen,” said Frostbite.

  “Don’t you get it? I can’t. I literally can’t say anything about it!” She clenched her fist, and Shadows seeped between her fingers.

  “Why not?” Frostbite asked. “I can, and they screwed with my mind more than anyone’s.” He shouted, “Corp sucks ass! Corp can blow me! Fuck Corp!” Then he grinned at Jet. “See?”

  Iridium said, “Maybe it has to do with your Shadow power?”

  “This is pointless,” Jet snarled. “So what that I can’t say the name? You know who I mean. Moore was a mole. Night had leaked code-black files to Moore for Light only knows how long, and Moore took that information and went to Everyman.”

  “Hey,” Taser said. He was looking down at the street below.

  Jet ignored him. “And with Everyman, Moore helped develop or maybe even created this serum that he believes will level the field between human and extrahuman. He hates us. He thinks we’re all time bombs set to explode.”

  “He might’ve been right about that,” Iri said. When Jet glared at her, she shrugged. “Maybe he was right, and we’re just damaged goods.”

  “Hey,” Taser said again.

  “No,” Jet growled. “I refuse to believe that all extrahumans are just wired wrong.” She knew she was doomed to go insane, but the others? No. No. She couldn’t believe that.

  Iridium said, “You notice what’s been happening with extrahumans lately?”

  “That’s because after years, decades, of brainwashing, we were finally free!” Realizing she was shouting, Jet forced herself to take a breath and lower her voice. “It’s finding out you’ve been a slave only after the collar’s come off. This madness will die down,” she said firmly.

  “Joannie,” Iri said slowly, “have you stopped to think about why Corp bothered with the brainwashing in the first place?”

  That hit Jet like a punch to the gut.

  Frostbite rolled his eyes. “You mean other than them being evil overlords?”

  Iridium kept looking at Jet, riddling her with that ice-blue gaze. “Maybe Corp knew we were all screwed up, so they made sure that we’d never turn on them.”

  “That backs my evil-overlord theory,” Frostbite said.

  Jet barely heard him. In her mind, Martin Moore was whispering to her.

  You’re ticking time bombs. The lot of you. Some are just wired to blow before others.

  She remembered Dawnlighter during Second Year at the Academy, her eyes and ears leaking blood as she tried to destroy Jet and anyone else in her way.

  She thought of Slider, of Nocturne and the other Squadron soldiers who’d gone rabid within hours of Corp’s conditioning shutting down.

  Some are wired to blow—

  Suddenly cold, Jet rubbed her arms. Martin Moore had been given access to code-black Corp files, to records that had been expunged. He’d leaked a portion of those files to Kidder, and after her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Origins” series on extrahumans had concluded, he’d expressed his gratitude by having her kidnapped and used as a guinea pig for the Everyman serum.

  wired to—

  What else had been in those files? What had caused him to say that the extrahumans were time bombs?

 
; Jet thought of an article she’d found hidden in Lynda Kidder’s apartment—a file that the reporter had never published in the New Chicago Tribune, even though it was marked as the last in her series. The article tenuously linked Corp-Co to the Icarus fertility clinic in the late 1980s, as well as to disease-control facilities in Hong Kong and Mumbai. In her last article, Kidder suggested that Corp hadn’t merely bought Icarus Biological at the turn of the twenty-first century, but instead had played a larger role.

  Martin Moore’s warbling old man’s voice: It’s reasonable to assume that Corp-Co sponsored the fertility project …

  Just how much did Corp have to do with extrahuman origins?

  What did Corp know about the extrahumans that they themselves did not?

  She remembered the teenage girl outside of Everyman headquarters, shoving a key into her hand, telling her to go save the world somewhere else …

  “Hey!”

  Jet blinked, looked over at Taser, who was pointing to the street.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but the rest of the cavalry’s arrived. And they’re going after the sewer-mutant norms.”

  Jet raced over to the edge and looked down. Sure enough, there was Hornblower, peeling off a sonic blast that leveled two of the creatures. Firebug’s flaming shield had some of them flinching back, protecting their eyes. Steele took the direct approach: She pummeled any mutant that got in her path.

  “Ops,” Jet shouted, “tell them to stop, that they’re civilians!”

  Meteorite’s reply left Jet cold: “I already did.”

  “They’re not hurting the mutants,” Iri commented. “Maybe that’s even on purpose.”

  “Come on.” Jet grabbed Iri’s wrist as she summoned a Shadow floater. “Frostbite, take Taser down.”

  “Plan?” Iri asked as the two of them flew over the roof’s edge.

  “Help them push the creatures back,” Jet called over her shoulder. “Knock them out or otherwise restrain them. We’ll figure out the logistics after.” She dropped the floater down in a free fall.