Superhero Effects

16. LET HER BE PURE

After barely falling asleep with the yellow cube in my grasp, I was woken in the worse way possible. With a black cloth bag shoved over my head.

"Why is that necessary?!" I cried minutes later when I was standing inside the iron-domed refuge with the floor of glass. "It's not like I could hop an airwave and fly up here!"

Cooper was not amused. He shook the yellow cube lazily. "Where'd you get this?"

I stretched out my hand, feeling the tops of my ears go hot. "Her and I want her back."

He dropped his arm, his finger around the block tightly. "Your head smacking against the dash didn't teach this lesson thoroughly? Where'd you get the box?"

I crossed my arms tightly. "I don't answer to you."

His eyes were full-on brown. He studied me for a moment before saying, "Is that how it is now? You don't trust me."

"I never did. As you recall, a certain trip to the ground ruined that for you. Don't forget Coop, I wrote you. I know what you're capable of. Dr. Mack isn't a good person, but I'm not sure that vigilante isn't the perfect word to describe you. All of you. You can erase everything I ever think to write, but you can't take away my memories."

He scoffed, turning away from me. "You sound like her. Like she did when he had her brainwashed into thinking we needed to be hunted down and imprisoned. Didn't write that part, didn't you? How your twin isn't innocent in all this. He brainwashed her again, didn't he? That's why she hasn't even tried to contact me, right? We're self-righteous, delusional kids with powers that need to be controlled before the world goes up in flames again to her."

I knew what he was talking about. Actually, I had written Lucinda's horrible little backstory. How her good old uncle trained her, trained her to work alongside Colors, behind her Dad's back at an early age, and trained her to capture Supers. And she was good at it, she was better at it than the Colors, and after she would turn over a Super, she'd refuse to let herself think about what happened to them. She was ruthless, and she completely believed that they needed to be stopped. So ruthless my agent had me cut that out of the first book. "Let your hero be pure, especially in the first book. People need to fall in love with her before you get dirt on her dress," she had emailed me. But Lucinda wasn't pure; she was as good as a murderer. I didn't know what happened to the turned-over Supers because she never bothered to find out; I knew that now.

I was angry with him, with her, with Archer with all of them, but I had a heart which was why I rolled my eyes and said, "She's not brainwashed, okay? She's just pretending to be a normal good teenage daughter. He's watching her all the time. She'd rather stay away than put any of you in jeopardy. And surprise, surprise, she didn't know she had a sister either. None of them did because I'm supposed to be dead." Still, he didn't respond, but I could see his grip on the block; his knuckles were white. "She thought the answer to stopping him lies with Aaron Fletcher. He's..." I stopped myself; maybe I had gone too far. Should I be telling him that Dr. Mack was half magic?

This, he turned at. His eyes were still brown, and he had a death grip on that cube, but his expression held nothing but curiosity. "He's what?"

"Tricky," I said with a shrug. "Now, can you fly me home and give me my cube back?"

Cooper's eyebrows shot up. "Your cube? This is a person, Tristan."

"Yeah, and I'm going to figure out a way to help her. Give her back." I held out my hand expectantly as he shook his head.

"That's noble, but no, you can't help them. The concoction got changed their DNA; they can't go back. And their thirst is too strong."

"How do you know? Have you ever tried to get their DNA changed back? If you've never tried, I don't want to hear it can't be done. She didn't want to be like that; she didn't want to hurt people. She doesn't even remember who she was..."