Hero Stalker

Part Eleven

" . . . no way in hell am I taking her on! What's Bayton need with a chick who passes out all the time?"

"You're three years from retirement and we'll need another combat operative to replace you. We have quotas to fill. You have the responsibility to train a replacement—"

"Of my choosing. Yeah, that's right. I read the damn handbook."

My eyelids fluttered open. Peregrine sat beside me. "How are you feeling?" she said, not unfriendly, and passed me a glass of water.

Like someone had opened a shook-up bottle of Coke in my brain. "Is this really happening to me?" The top floor of the Tower was a lot bigger than I'd first thought—the part I'd seen before had been partitioned off by the wall of memorabilia. I lay on a gym mat that took up a quarter the floor. An enormous bank of servers, cables, and screens towered up towards the roof. The floor in front of me seemed empty save for a grid of thick, shining blue lines. Windows covered the walls and everywhere you looked, you saw the water and sky.

"Let's find out." She got to her feet and stuck out a red-gloved hand. I took it. My hand shook as I stood. Part of me expected Peregrine's glove to feel like the heavy latex ones Valerie made me use to wash industrial-grade cooking equipment, but the fabric felt thin, like it had been vacuum-sealed to her skin. My memory flashed to a certain weird theory that kept popping up on The Worldley Fewe about the Centurions all being aliens whose costumes were just weirdly shaped skin. But that was silly, they couldn't be, because I wasn't an alien and I was . . .

Oh, God.

Peregrine pulled a ball covered in mesh wire out of her utility belt. "Catch," she said, and flung it at the wall.

I ran for it, knowing I wouldn't get there in time—but then a switch flipped in my head and the room blew past me. My feet spun me around. My hands reached for the ball, which popped open into a giant net as it fell. It crashed down on my head and pinned my arms to my side.

I slammed into the wall.

"Watch the windows!" Femme shouted. Cypher, who was sitting in front of the tower of computers, spun in his chair and laughed. Slasher looked like someone had thrown up on his shoes.

"Re-do!" Pulse shouted. The teenage telekinetic sat atop the wall of memorabilia, holding up his phone. "I wasn't filming that time!"

"Femme, do you know how rare an anomaly is?" Cypher ran his hands over the keyboards. "Psi-positives who don't arise via germ-line mutation comprise less than five percent of the known population. And they're mostly evil."

"That's only the known population. I met at least three at the last convention. And they do have a tendency to be mad scientists, yes, but I've known some amiable mad scientists in my time."

"But a duplicate? How does she have Slasher's exact signature. Did she get bitten by a radioactive asshole?"

Peregrine kicked off the ground, hovered in midair, and flew to my side. She pulled a switchblade knife from her belt and knelt down. "Don't move," she said, grinning. "I'll get you out."

In the blink of an eye, Slasher stood next to us. "Make her do it herself."

"Slasher, you'd think you belonged to an organization that helped people." Peregrine put her knife away. "Sorry," she told me. "Not my call."

The last two joints of his fingers and toes turned into foot-long dull black blades. Curved and blunt on top, straight and sharp on bottom. They could slice through anything. "Cut yourself free, girl."

"I'm twenty-two years old!"

He squatted down next to me. His thick jaw had been knocked inward on the left side of his face. His skin looked like old faded leather. "My mistake. Cut yourself free, bitch."

I found another mental switch and flipped it. The top joints of my fingers stiffened, immobilized. I wiggled them and felt a wire break.                                       

"Don't be so gentle with it." Slasher folded his arms and drummed his blades on his biceps. "It's your psi-energy. It can't hurt you."

I pushed against the wire as hard as I could and tried to rip through. It took me three minutes to make a hole big enough to climb out. By then, every Centurion in the Tower had come over to watch me struggle.

That didn't matter. Entranced, I wiggled my fingers, watching the blades move up and down. They came just up to my knuckles. Since they were made of psi-energy, they didn't feel heavy, but they were certainly solid. Certainly real.

"This is great." Peregrine said. "We worried last night that we didn't have the manpower to investigate Harpy."

"No, you tried to kiss-up and volunteered to take over the whole investigation yourself. 'Dearest Femme,'" Cypher said in a high pitched voice. "'Don't trouble yourself with this extra work. I'll do it. Can I get you some coffee—'"

"Which one of us failed to decrypt the computer system on that superweapon Femme and Slasher captured last Friday?" Peregrine asked.

"Wasn't my fault half the circuits had melted together when it malfunctioned."

"Was it also not your fault that Harpy's sensors picked up your tracking chip and he dumped it in the harbor?"

My heart raced. I stood in the same room as my idols. And I was . . . I couldn't even let myself think it. What was I supposed to say next? I'm so honored that this freak accident happened to me? I'm ecstatic I got kidnapped? I'm so happy to have superpowers?

A hysterical, thin, high-pitched laugh bubbled out of my throat.

"What is she doing here?" Pulse pointed at me. "She's not in costume. I get shit all the time about not being in costume."

"She doesn't have a costume yet," Femme said.

A costume. My thoughts went off into the hours and hours I'd spent thinking about this. Black with blue lightning bolts, neon green zebra prints, funky orange—

"No way. She doesn't have the right instincts. Watch," Slasher said.

And then he punched me in the my stomach.