Icarus

Part 13

In that very room, Lyr, her Grandfather, and the few dinner guests who hadn’t gotten bored yet were going over the blueprints for the new brain-mounted Chip. Finally, finally, her grandfather had gotten distracted enough that she’d managed to push the tiny activator button on the bomb and slip it under a stack of mini marshmallow bags. Apparently having candy in your lab was a universal constant. Roger always had some big bars of chocolate at his desk, right near the hottest part of the computers to get it sticky and slightly melted the way he liked it.
The bomb would go off any minute now. Then it would be over for good. No more mind-controlling Chip devices, no more evil Reynold Thaniels, no more her, whoever she even was anymore.
Suddenly, Lyr heard footsteps running in the hall outside. She snuck over to the door, poked her head out, and gasped. The Blackskulls had found her again. But, wait a second. That wasn’t an impassive masked face staring back at her. That was . . . Roger.
She slipped out the door, kicked off her stupid high-heeled shoes, and sped up to a run herself, grabbing her friend’s hand and dragging him towards the elevator.
“Lyr, what? How? You’re not tortured?”
“No time! I just activated my birthday present to blow up some evil people! We gotta go!”
Roger’s eyes bugged out.
“You did what?!!” He yelped. “I told you not to use that thing without a timer!!”
“Scold me later, run now!”
The three of them slammed into the downbound elevator button, dove inside as soon as the doors opened, and hit the button for the first floor. The elevator slowly, slowly, started to rumble downwards.
“Can’t this thing go any faster?” Maysha yelled frantically.
They were going to die. Lyr knew it in her bones. No. No. If she was as powerful as everybody seemed to think she was, powerful enough that Roger had joined up with the Blackskulls to find her, she was powerful enough to save her only real friend.
Lyr pressed her fingertips to the elevator’s metal control panel and took a deep breath, feeling a new kind of awareness start to tingle through her body, spreading out from the base of her skull through her arms and hands and into the building itself. In her minds eye, she saw a glowing web of every wire and computer in the city, floating in darkness, outlining the shape of her home. Her nervous system reached out, and the wiring answered, narrowing her focus to the elevator controls, here and now. She reached into the web of technology and life with her mind, grabbed a handful, and pulled with every ounce of strength she could muster.
Lyr’s eyes opened, and she almost vomited. They were rushing downward so fast that it was more of a controlled fall, everything outside the elevator blurring together until they stopped with a jolt at the ground floor. And not a moment too soon.
Just as they left the elevator, a thundering boom shook the building from spire to foundations, and they could see flaming debris hurtling down outside. Roger high-fived Lyr, breathless.
“That was some rollercoaster ride, Lyr!”
He took a good look at her for the first time and blushed. “That is also one heck of an outfit.”
“Thanks for the compliment.” She said wryly. “You’re welcome to give me more of them, but let’s get out alive first.”
“Good plan.”
They ran outside, dodging falling rubble and clouds of choking smoke, and finally got back to the tunnel entrance. Toral was waiting for them, holding a gun to the Marshal’s head as his mercenaries and the Blackskull Resistance members glared daggers at each other. Her mask had fallen off, and Roger couldn’t help staring. Between the blue hair, high cheekbones, and dangerously pissed-off expression, she looked like an older version of Lyr.
Lyr herself did a lot more than just stare. A high, wailing shriek ripped out of her throat, a sound like a wounded animal. It didn’t sound like words at first, but the second time she screamed, it was clear to everyone what she said.
“MAMA!!!”
Toral’s eyebrows went up.
“Ah, I should have guessed. There’s quite a bit of family resemblance between you two. Now be a good girl and kill these other Blackskulls, or your precious, newly rediscovered mama gets a laser blast through her head.”
“Don’t do it, baby.” Lorani Thaniels, the Marshal, Lyr’s Mama, whispered. “I’m not worth losing your freedom for.”
“Shut it.” Toral snapped.
What happened next, nobody was quite able to describe afterwards. Lyr screamed again, but this time it sounded almost more like a lion’s roar, the raw, triumphant cry of a born killer. And all of a sudden, there was a derailed monorail car, nearly empty at this hour, in the middle of the Towers’ grounds, sliding to a stop over the crushed, oozing pile of gore that a few moments earlier had been Toral Reckenbridge.
Lorani, on the other hand, hadn’t even been grazed. She was, however, completely shocked for the first time in roughly ten years. But she and the other New Resistance troops recovered quickly enough to make short work of the other mercenaries. The last few stragglers turned and ran, completely unashamed of doing so, now that they’d seen what the alternative was.
“Okay.” The Marshal said. “We need to get back underground now, and seal the entrance so they can’t send anything nasty after us. Roger, can you do that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She gave him a gentle smack on the crown of his head.
“Don’t call me ma’am. It makes me feel ancient.”
With that, the attack force scrambled back down the storm drain, Lyr and Lorani leading the way.