Silhouette

by Robin Hale

  “I dropped by the office yesterday, and Kevin told me that you were out sick.” Jade’s eyes held mine steadily, unblinkingly. “I was worried when I didn’t see you for lunch.”

  Oh no. I groaned and scrubbed a hand down my face. “Oh, I’m sorry Jade. I completely forgot about lunch yesterday. I should’ve texted you at least.”

  Jade’s stare didn’t shift a millimeter. “Yes, you should have, but I wasn’t too concerned about that lapse in etiquette, especially since I dropped by your apartment with takeout from the pho place — and you didn’t answer the door.”

  Those carefully manicured nails drummed on the arm of her chair, letting the silence stretch between us. She’d always been that way, sure of herself and already putting a puzzle together when you’d been sure she didn’t have all the pieces. Couldn’t have had even half of the pieces. She’d used that special skill to find me after my first heartbreak, to bolster my confidence when I wasn’t sure about applying to med school, to keep me from making any number of horrible mistakes over the years. If there was a story, Jade Jones would find it.

  “I didn’t mean to make you worry,” I said after a long moment of silence. I should’ve been more aware of what I was doing. I should’ve texted her, should’ve remembered our lunch plans. I shouldn’t have made her worry about me.

  The dismissive wave of Jade’s hand was surprising. “I didn’t think anything terrible had happened if you’d been in touch with your lab so recently.” An amused twist colored the smile on her face. “Of course, that was just at first. By last night I was starting to think that old jewel thief had taken you hostage again.” She laughed, and it was clear that I was being invited to laugh with her.

  My hesitation was just a heartbeat too long, and the humor fled from Jade’s face, her expression turning murderous. “She didn’t,” Jade said flatly. “I’ll claw her damn eyes out!”

  “No!” I broke in. “No, she didn’t…take me hostage or anything.” God help me if I managed to settle that thought in Jade’s head. A decade of judo and she was quite keen to take on all enemies, real or imagined.

  Her eyes narrowed again. “But that is who you were with.” There was another pause, less fragile, less fraught as she reconsidered the pieces in front of her. Then her eyes softened. “Oh, Moll. The news footage. You wanted to go look after her.”

  There was something insulting in how sympathetic she sounded, but I brushed it away. “She’d been shot.” The words were more defensive than I had intended. I knew it had been a stupid thing to do. “I couldn’t just leave her alone like that.”

  “How did you even find her? Did she tell you her name?” Jade asked, genuine curiosity in her eyes.

  Jade was more than a little familiar with my ability to keep secrets, even if the only ones I kept from her belonged to other people. She knew that I knew who was behind Captain Colossal’s mask and, aside from one drunken night when I’d first started working with him, she hadn’t pushed. I wondered if she’d have the same restraint for a thief as she’d shown about a hero.

  “I sort of…worked it out.” I gestured vaguely at the cork board still standing in the corner, covered in even more crimes, names, and places as I’d developed the wild theories that connected the Silhouette to all manner of crime in the city. Or rather, didn’t quite connect her. She was around it. Aware of it. Definitely on the periphery of every major event in the city in the past decade, as far as I could tell. But she had a direct hand in only the crimes I thought of as her wheelhouse: theft of massively insured, wildly expensive objects owned by the obscenely wealthy.

  “You’re definitely not going to tell me what it is, are you?” Jade asked, wearing an expression like a preemptive pout.

  I laughed and felt the tension drain from my shoulders. “No,” I admitted. “I’m not. But she’s, you know, someone I’m...dating and I…it felt good to look after her. Although I think she might’ve done more looking after me than the reverse.”

  “Oh?” Jade’s eyebrows climbed her forehead. “Don’t tell me she swept you off your feet, Moll.”

  “Not exactly.” I winced. “Hard to do that when you’ve been shot in the hip.”

  “Ouch.” Jade considered me carefully across the desk, looking like she was weighing something only she could see. “You being careful, Moll?” The question was gentle, and it was that more than the words that got beneath the meager defenses I’d managed to erect.

  Jade loved me fiercely. And ‘fiercely’ had always been the operative word for how she interacted with me. She didn’t handle me with kid gloves, she didn’t take care not to upset me. She told me what she thought, she made her feelings known, and she rushed toward me with all of the fervor that she gave everything else.

  So that careful question? That gentle voice? It had the weight of decades behind it, and suddenly I wasn’t sure if I could be trusted to know the answer.

  “I…I think so?” I said.

  “It’s just…you love deeply, honey. And sometimes you do it fast. And I would hate to think that you’re giving your heart away to someone who hasn’t earned it.” Jade’s eyes were kind and her mouth was firm, and I wasn’t sure if my knee-jerk desire to insist that I had everything under control was a fair one.

  “She’s been great to me.” Why was my voice that soft? That quiet? Where was my spine?

  “She’s got you caught up in a whirlwind. Does she ever let you rest?” Jade asked.

  And then the fear fled. Because Lana did let me rest. She calmed me, soothed me, held me in her arms and let me sit in the stillness with her like there was nowhere else she’d rather be.

  “She does, yeah.” A soft smile pulled at my lips.

  “Well, then I won’t claw her eyes out.” Jade winked. “But you should still be careful. She’s a thief. A hot thief, but a thief nonetheless.”

  “A very hot thief.”

  “Yeah, all right, a very hot thief, perv.” Jade laughed and the tension between us disappeared.

  20

  LANA

  I’d never stopped to think about it before, but there was something reassuring about how I had to go out of my way to figure out how one might get their hands on brachnine in Opal City. The city had gone completely batshit since enhanced humans had become part of the daily landscape, but it was nice to know that there were still limits.

  And it was especially nice to know that an extremely torturous method of poisoning someone was broadly considered too dark even for those of us dodging a stay in Vernal Ward. Opal City might be a nice place to throw around some molten rock, summon an unnatural, nightmare-filled fog, or turn the truly terrifying number of rats in the city all against one especially ugly Christmas tree, but by god, we drew the line at brachnine.

  As it was, it took me days to figure out where it might be processed, who in that lab had worked with it, and how the lab’s defenses might be manipulated to allow an outsider to gain access. There were too many vectors. Too many openings. It was stomach-turning, how little skill would be involved in order to get hands on it. Which was why, when my favorite informants brought me the names of the crew who had been tapped for the job, there was nothing to do except show up and keep those amateurs from releasing a wave of chaos and destruction on the city.

  I lingered on the rooftop near Core Labs, the only location in Opal City known to do work with brachnine in any form, and watched as the traffic rolled by. The lab had closed forty-three minutes ago. The staff had all departed, and as far as I was aware, no one had left an outer door unlocked or behaved at all suspiciously on the way out. That was also reassuring. It meant that whatever job was being pulled wasn’t with the assistance of an employee.

  None of the employees of Core Labs were greedy enough to hand a pile of highly toxic poison over to a faceless villain, and that seemed like cause for celebration.

  The bit that thrilled me significantly less was the way I kept seeing the same names cropping up over and over again in seemingly unrelated, one-off theft
s. Never the same full group, never coordinated in exactly the same way, but there were crews being formed up from the same general cohort of Vernal Ward alumni and it was strange enough to catch my attention.

  My carefully crafted information network had brought me bits, just pieces really, of the things that were happening in Opal City’s criminal underground, but at the end of the day, I was the one who had to patch them together into a coherent image. Something with scale, with impact. Something that revealed the board to me even while others tried to obscure it.

  I shifted my weight, checking sightlines along the laboratory and making sure that I was still obscured from casual observation as I settled in for my watch. I likely wouldn’t have been there, I knew, if not for Molly Fawn.

  Oh, I would have been interested in what was going on. I would have gathered the relevant intelligence and kept an eye on the major players. Would’ve even tipped off Captain Colossal or the OCPD, if it looked like more mischief than I was willing to tolerate in my city. But I wouldn’t be out on a desolate rooftop doing recon work with no payoff, no score at the end of it.

  But the light in Fawn’s eyes when I told her the atomizer was back in her lab… Well, that had sparked a feeling I was in danger of becoming addicted to.

  I scowled in the darkness, indulging in the theatricality of it. Addiction was precisely the right term. Hell, the sound of her laughter, the sight of her smile in my bed, the feeling of her body quaking around my touch…I’d been chasing pieces of it ever since she left my apartment, sensible caution be damned. Flowers at her apartment, coffee delivered to her office — I hadn’t been able to keep myself away. And that had flowed into feeling my ass go numb on a rooftop while I made sure that someone’s rent-a-crew goon squad didn’t poison us all in our sleep.

  It wasn’t long before the telltale sound of an alarm was ringing in my ears and heavy footsteps followed. I counted out the paces, the cadences. I followed the noises and learned what I could about the routes inside the building, even as my goggles showed me the heat map of the view ahead. It was obscured — laboratories were notoriously bad for reading via heat map. The equipment, the electricity heated circuits and metal panels and distorted my goggles’ readings. But through the mirk, it looked like there were six of them darting through the building.

  On the heels of the alarms came sirens. Sirens, the squeal of rubber tires on damp asphalt, and the rush of wind that meant only one thing: Captain Colossal had arrived.

  I pushed off from my perch, skidding down the side of the building from tiny handhold to tiny handhold until my feet hit the ground and I crouched to absorb the impact. Shadows kept me from view as I lingered in the mouth of the alleyway. The tires that had approached belonged to a van, one of the OCRL vans that heralded the arrival of either lab techs in hazard suits or…

  Her.

  Dr. Molly Fawn, soft, honeysuckle-scented hair swept up into her usual high bun, draped in knitted fabric that clung appealingly to her curves, adjusting the glasses that balanced on the bridge of her adorable nose — had I ever thought of a nose as adorable before that moment? I was sure that I hadn’t — emerged from the OCRL van with a tablet in her hand. She stared down at a digital display of something that I was sure she was parsing faster than lightspeed The light from the streetlamp didn’t suit her softness, her shy smiles, but it did make her stand out among the dark, damp street.

  She looked completely out of place.

  That alleyway was for those of us who hid in the shadows, the things that went bump in the night. It was for the clenched-fist do-gooders who would stalk us even as we stalked them. It wasn’t the place for her soft laugh and her brilliant mind. But I wouldn’t let the opportunity pass me by. How long had it been since I’d had a kiss from those lips? Hours? Days? Too long, whatever the answer was.

  I darted over the asphalt and wrapped my arms around that charming waist, feeling the heat of Fawn’s body pressing all against my front in a soft, intoxicating wave. From there it was nothing to brush my lips against the juncture of her neck and shoulder, tasting the fragrance of her shower gel, the lightest dusting of sweat, and the flavor of her skin that was always just her.

  “Mm, darling,” I chuckled against the shell of her ear. “We simply have to stop meeting like this.”

  Fawn jolted in my embrace, and I spared a moment to feel guilty about surprising her. Despite the careful attention I paid to moving silently, it did often slip my mind that my sudden presence could be disorienting.

  The tablet in her hands bobbled in the air, coming out of her grasp on a startled little ‘Oh!’, and I removed one arm from her waist to pluck the device from its impending fall. I held it out in front of her, and Fawn’s hands wrapped around the tablet like it was a shield.

  “Shh,” I said softly into the scent of her hair. “Sorry to startle you.” The apology was probably inadequate, but sincere for all of that.

  Heat rose in Fawn’s round cheeks and there was nothing in the world that could keep me from pressing a kiss to the corner of her jaw. Nothing, that was, other than Fawn pulling away. Which she did.

  Fawn jerked out of my arms and spun, staggering back a couple of steps. The first tug of her body had my arms falling away. I didn’t try to keep her pressed against me, I didn’t resist her impulse to pull away. The movement was a sharp pain in my chest, a strange ache in the pit of my stomach that I couldn’t identify. I felt shame creeping up the back of my neck. I didn’t like guessing wrong, that was all.

  “Silhouette!” Fawn said, more surprise in her voice than I had expected.

  Of course it was me. Was there another leather-clad thief she expected to call her ‘darling’? I bit back the defensive, venom-edged joke that rose on my tongue. It wasn’t helpful.

  “Molly?” A booming voice broke the strange, tense moment that had grown between Fawn and me, and the bespectacled genius looked guiltily over toward the source. Captain Colossal. Of course. He strode across the oil-slick pavement in his ridiculous suit and domino mask and snarled. “Silhouette! Get away from her! You won’t get away with what you’ve done here!”

  He barreled toward me, feet lifting off the ground and fist outstretched as though I presented an immediate physical threat to Dr. Fawn.

  The sheer idiocy of the statement staggered me for an instant before I recovered and side-stepped his swing. “Are you — are you honestly suggesting that I had something to do with this?” I gestured broadly at the Core Labs building, alarm still screeching into the night, police cars wailing as they drew closer to the area. I needed to leave. I didn’t have much time before the police would arrive and do something inconvenient like blocking my usual exit routes. I danced around Colossal’s flailing fists. “Let me guess, Captain. You were alerted to the problem here by the alarms going off.”

  I wasn’t sure he could hear me, not over the grunts and growls he huffed while he tried to corner me. Idiot.

  “Have you ever known me to set off an alarm accidentally? Have you ever known me to hire the sorts of buffoons who would trip over something so obvious?” The amount of irritation I felt was disproportionate to the slight. I was perfectly aware of Captain Colossal’s inability to appreciate my professional capabilities. Some people just didn’t know art when they saw it.

  But Fawn was watching the exchange, cheeks pink and tablet clutched to her chest like she’d been caught doing something wrong, and it rankled my usual calm something fierce.

  “What will it take to get through to you that there are other players on the board, Captain?” I hissed in Colossal’s ear as I avoided a clumsy left. “What will it take before you realize that if you’re chasing me, you’re missing them?”

  A surprisingly swift jab nearly caught my shoulder as I scrambled to lean out of the way of the blow. Fawn was no longer watching, her face angled carefully away, and the idea that she was ignoring me was the most absurd, most frustrating thing that had happened to me in ages.

  She couldn’t think that the
attack on Core Labs was my doing? But hell, she might. And why not? It wasn’t like breaking into a lab and stealing a piece of tech was somehow out of my wheelhouse. But she would realize, once they rounded up the amateurs and found out what they were trying to snatch...she would realize that I would never do that.

  I just needed to let them get to it. And I needed time to patch together my battered pride.

  “Well, as entertaining as this dance has been, I’m afraid I’ll have to bid you a fond farewell,” I drawled behind Colossal’s left ear. “Dr. Fawn, Captain. Have a lovely evening.” The small dust bomb detonated in Colossal’s face, leaving him squinting and sputtering as I darted off into the alleyway. My hands and feet swiftly found the edges of a drainpipe and launched me back up toward the rooftops where I preferred to make my escape.

  I didn’t think about the fact that Fawn hadn’t watched me go, that the minor explosion — gentle, really, no more than a puff of baby powder — had drawn her wide, worried eyes back to Colossal and had pulled her to his side.

  It was fine. She would figure it out.

  And so would I. If Fawn was concerned that I had something to do with the intrusion at Core Labs, then I would prove her wrong by hunting down all of the pieces of the heist and delivering them to her doorstep.

  There was something happening in Opal City, and I would find out what it was.

  21

  MOLLY

  I’d occasionally thought, over the years, that I had become adequately acquainted with embarrassment. I was practically a connoisseur. There’d been my general inability to talk to people I found attractive as an adolescent, my hatred for public speaking when half of my university career had been dedicated to helping professors with grant committee pitches, and the way that I kept falling for people who simply did not share my level of romantic interest, coupled with my mother’s insistence that I should have brought someone home by now.