GoldHeart

Chapter 1: Hot Sauce and Potato Chips

VEGAS' POV

I skid backwards on the concrete. My hands fly down to brace my impact and, painfully, I stop myself from sliding farther. But now my palms are bloody, and I'm sure I chipped a nail. The ground finally stops shaking. I stand up straight. Bryony runs out of the ground- yes, literally out of the ground, like she's a ghost running uphill into the sunlight. First her spiky white hair, then her torso, and finally her legs. "Gold, I found him! He's hiding somewhere under the drugstore to your right!" she calls to me.

"Good work. Keep him there until I can break through, okay?"

She nods and runs back into the street, slowly disappearing out of sight as she descends. The concrete is cracked and crumbling from all the earthquakes that happened in the last ten minutes. I'm just glad the police blocked the street off. They're restraining people screaming and cheering for me. "Beat him to a pulp, Gold Heart!" "You can do it!" "Gamma's got him!" "I love you, Gold Heart!"

Honestly. I don't want to be rude, but they get annoying sometimes. I snap my fingers, and time slows down instantly. That's my power- the ability to control time. A bird flying overhead freezes in midair. The roar of the crowd is gone. I've tried going into the future or the past a couple times but it never worked. It sure would be helpful now, though. "So how am I supposed to break through solid ground?" I ask myself, pacing around the street. I'm the only one who can move at normal speed right now. "I need a jackhammer or something, right?" I straighten my mask and peer around for a construction site over the sea of people. Perfect. There's a street where a construction crew was repaving the sidewalk. I jog over, dodging the motionless people, and grab a jackhammer. Ugh, it's heavier than I expected, but it's a good thing that I'm so fit. I hoist it onto my shoulders and carry it over to the store that Bryony indicated. "Okay, there's got to be an on switch," I mutter. "I should know this. Working with cars every day and I can't work a single jackhammer? Maybe this is it." I flip a switch near the handle, holding the handlebars firmly, and it turns on instantly. It chips through the concrete, but not nearly as fast as I was expecting. I push it into the ground as hard as I can. "Come on, come on," I tell it, but I know it's no good. I let go with one hand and tap it to speed it up. Right on cue, the jackhammer whirrs loudly and nearly carries me into the ground. I turn it off when I reach a small cavern. When I land on the stone ground, I unfreeze time. That entire fiasco took only three seconds.

I look around the cave. There is a control center comprised of several screens that have been turned off. A door that probably leads to the drugstore is visible in the back. Wish I had known about that before. The swivel chair in the middle of the control center is empty, since Bryony already has Dr. Seismic tied up. Both of them are in the center of the cave. "Nice timing," she says, brown eyes twinkling.

"It doesn't look I needed to come," I laugh, throwing away the jackhammer.

"You know how to use a jackhammer?"

"I do now." I bend down and glare at Dr. Seismic, a broad-shouldered man with a grey beard and a lab coat. "I guess you can't make any more earthquakes now that Gamma's tied your hands, right? That's too bad."

He scowls at me. "You'll pay for this, Gold Heart!"

"That's what they all say. The police are already outside, Gamma. We should go before they arrive." When she nods, I snap to freeze time once again, grab her by the arm, and run out of the passage through the door. Like I suspected, we end up in the drugstore. I'm inclined to stay, since there are some things I need to pick up, but I decide against it. I drag Bryony out past the police. When we're a few blocks away, I duck into an empty public bathroom and unfreeze time. This smelly, heavily graffitied bathroom with only two stalls is rarely used by anyone. Bryony reaches down into the ground, gropes around for a minute, and pulls out a large backpack with two changes of clothes. We both take off our masks.