by Jenn Gott
If Allison had a witty retort to this, she held her tongue. She pried an access panel off of the control console, her face twisted up in concentration as she wrenched away rusted metal. The panel clanged to the floor, and Allison began to rip out bundles of cable, searching for something that Jane couldn’t even begin to understand.
Jane shook her head. “Where did you learn all this?”
“That’s classified,” Allison said. At first Jane thought she was joking, but there wasn’t a single hint of sarcasm or mirth upon Allison’s face. Allison spared a fast glance. “Or did you think I live in D.C. because my husband is a lawyer or something?”
Jane flushed. She hadn’t given the matter much conscious thought, but now she realized that’s the exact assumption she’d had.
Allison snorted under her breath. Her attention was fixed on the console again, but she spared enough to mutter “typical” as she stripped a piece of heavy wiring. Several inches of twisted cable were now exposed, and Allison hurriedly worked to unbraid them.
“What can I do?” Jane asked.
Allison brushed the sweat off her forehead. She set the cable down and began to fish around in the guts of the console. “Unless your powers are good at putting out fires? Shut up and let me work.”
Jane bit her lip. Inside the console was a mess of circuit boards and more cabling. As much as she hated it, Allison was right, there was nothing that Jane could do besides shut up. She stood back, trying to give Allison some room. At least the flames hadn’t reached their corner yet, though the room itself was heating up rapidly. Sweat ran rivulets down Jane’s skin.
A dull prickle raised the hairs on the back of Jane’s neck. She looked up. She hadn’t heard anything, but something had caught Jane’s attention. Maybe instinct, or maybe something just on the edge of her hearing—maybe just paranoia, the adrenaline pumping through her veins with no place to go. She blinked, shifting her vision. No heat signatures lurked in the corners, but still Jane’s skin wouldn’t stop crawling. Her eyes swept the entire room, but there was nothing, nothing, nothing—
Something. A blur of movement, and then a Shadow Raptor—cold-blooded, dammit—was leaping from the darkness right above them.
It landed on the console before Jane could react. Metal crunched and sparks flew, and Allison shouted “Jane!” as she ducked, just in time to avoid the Shadow Raptor’s swinging tail.
Panic jumped in Jane’s veins as her powers kicked into gear. She struck the Shadow Raptor with a laser beam, a tightly focused tunnel of light boring straight into the flesh of its leg. The thing howled, whipping its tail as it turned toward Jane.
She ran, and it followed. “Keep working!” Jane called back, hoping that Allison could hear her over the groaning of the pipes, the roar of the flames, the rattle of the grating as the Shadow Raptor barreled after her. “I’ve got this!”
She sure as shit hoped that she’d got this.
The shadow of a Shadow Raptor loomed large on the cement floor in front of Jane. She ducked, and the whistle of talons sliced the air over her head. The talons hit the floor, gouging deep grooves as they scrambled to catch themselves. Jane reached out, firing another laser beam—this time at its toes, hoping to destabilize the creature.
It worked . . . sort of. The Shadow Raptor wailed and leaped aside, and then aside again—it would have been funny, under other circumstances, making this massive beast leap and dance about like a monkey on parade. But then the next leap was straight forward, right at Jane, claws and teeth and daggers all bared in her direction.
Jane flashed a burst of light as she feinted, hoping to disorient the creature. The Shadow Raptor flew past her, and for a split second Jane thought she was safe. But then its tail swung wide, catching Jane in the ribs. She went flying, an action figure hurled across the room in a fit of rage.
She hit a set of pipes with a sickening crunch. Metal clattered to the floor, and steam poured out thickly overhead. Jane wheezed, muttering to herself as she pushed back to her feet. Her boot caught a segment of pipe, nearly tripping her, so she did not see at first that the Shadow Raptor went lunging for Allison.
A crash brought Jane back to reality. The Shadow Raptor had landed back on the console—Allison, mercifully, must have ducked again, as she was now crouched on the ground nearby. The Shadow Raptor’s tail swung repeatedly over her head, keeping her pinned.
“Oh no you don’t, you fucker,” Allison said. She grabbed the panel that she’d pried off of the console, and before Jane could even think to stop her, she’d leaped up, timed between the swing of the Shadow Raptor’s tail.
Allison drove the corner of the panel into the Shadow Raptor’s flesh.
The Shadow Raptor wailed. The frenzy of its tail increased, and Allison only narrowly avoided being tossed aside like Jane had been.
Jane ran up. The Shadow Raptor was still on top of the console, and Jane took a deep breath. The piece of pipe that had fallen to the floor was tight in her hands, and she pulled it back like a baseball bat.
There was only one thing that Jane missed about the summer she’d spent at the ball field with her dad, the year she’d thought she wanted to be an athlete. Jane didn’t have the best timing, or coordination, and she wasn’t crazy about running—but dammit, she could swing that bat hard, and when it did manage to connect with the ball, it was the best feeling in the world.
A Shadow Raptor was much larger than a baseball, and Jane was a lot stronger than she’d been as a kid. The pipe hit the creature’s side, the force of it nearly knocking Jane back as well. But it was enough. The Shadow Raptor teetered, limbs whirling as it tried to catch its balance.
It never did.
Jane grabbed Allison, both of them ducking for cover as the splash of chemicals crashed up onto the platform, like the front seats at an aquarium show. Steam billowed up around them, heat burning the chemicals off faster than they could eat through the metal. By the time Jane and Allison peeped up a moment later, all that was left of the Shadow Raptor was one last flick of its tail, disappearing beneath the hissing mist of the chemicals.
Allison ran back to the console. “Brace yourself!” she shouted, as she slammed down on a control.
An alarm blared overhead. All around the room, heavy lids crashed down onto open tanks. The spit of some kind of sprinkler system kicked in, and Jane gasped as it soaked her and Allison in something not-quite water.
The whole factory flushed. The gurgle of pipes, the glug of tanks emptying, filled the building. Jane turned, and sure enough, the fires were going out, and the heat of the larger tanks was retreating into evacuation pipes buried in the floor. Jane stared and stared, blinking back the artificial rain.
“What did you do?”
“Exactly what I said I would do,” Allison said, as she approached. “Triggered the factory’s old safety protocols. Saved your sorry ass, and the city.” She glanced over, raising an eyebrow. Hair was plastered to her forehead, droplets careening in rivers past her eyes. “Congratulations, Captain. It’s over.”
A swell of relief bubbled up in Jane’s chest and burst, dying as fast as it began. Her eyes widened. “No, it’s not,” she said, turning toward Allison. “UltraViolet is still out there.”
Jane blinked, as a panel of nothing but Marie’s granite fist swung fast in her direction.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this.
Jane had raced back to headquarters in a fit of panic, barely thinking. Her phone was gone, her civilian clothes were gone, and she couldn’t get a hold of the Heroes. She was already imagining the worst: the building up in flames, an epic battle sprawling across the heart of downtown. UltraViolet on a rampage, bent on destruction. Amy, trapped inside as flames licked up the walls of her rejuve pod. Oh God, if anything had happened, if anything was happening—
But the building was fine. The city was fine. Jane burst in through the doors and there was Marie, perched on a couch with a gadget spread across her lap. She had looked up, quizzical, as Jane rac
ed inside.
“That was fast,” Marie had said.
Jane had stumbled to a halt. The lack of any apparent emergency, combined with Marie’s nonsensical statement, had thrown her for such a loop that Jane couldn’t even think anymore. “Huh?”
This is when Marie’s face had gone stony. She set the gadget down. Stood up, slowly and deliberately.
“You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” Marie asked.
Jane shook her head.
This is when life turned into a comic page, and Jane’s story skipped forward.
Now the world came back to her in bits and pieces. The coppery tang of blood on her tongue. The cold floor beneath her cheek. Words floating through the air, disconnected from time and place and purpose:
“—supposed to do with her?”
“We keep her.”
“What, like she’s just another prisoner? We can’t simply throw her in there, as if she’s—”
“We can, and we will. She made her choice.”
Pain in her temple, kicking back to life. Jane groaned, and clutched at her head.
Red leather. She was wearing her uniform. Jane squinted through the crack of her eyelids, staring at the lacing that ran along the arm of her suit. Beyond it was a wash of muddy blue and glowing white, figures shifting in the haze.
Memories slid into place. A terrible, fun-house version of Jane’s own face, done in purple. Shadow Raptor talons cutting next to her head. Allison’s fist, colliding with Jane’s jaw. Marie’s fist, stony as a statue, barreling forward—
“Why does everyone keep punching me in the face today?!”
The question exploded out of Jane as she pushed herself up. She was still holding her head, which spun for a moment as her world swayed like the contents of an unsteady cereal bowl. Bile crept up the back of Jane’s throat, and she swallowed it back down with bitterness.
A bitterness that matched Marie’s tone as she spoke next. “Oh, I don’t know, UltraViolet. Why don’t you tell me?”
Jane looked up. She found herself, quite suddenly, inside one of the cells of the Vault, as if the whole thing had just sprung up around her. She could practically see the scribbles as the last of the guidelines melded into the drawing, colors madly shaded in around her. A panel seemed to trap her in place: the Heroes, gathered just beyond the glass of her cell. They stood with hands on hips, or arms crossed sternly over chests. Their arrangement, the tilt of their bodies, the jut of their chins, was a perfect cover shot for the newest season of a hip superhero show.
All Jane could do was shake her head. “What are you talking about? I’m—”
“Don’t deny it,” Tony said. He was one of the hands-on-hips, and he made one threatening step closer, the better to tower over Jane. “Jane and Cal told us all about how you ambushed them in the factory.”
“How could you?” Keisha asked. Both her voice and her face were twisted up with anguish. “After everything we’ve been through?”
“Does the team mean nothing to you?” Devin added.
Jane groaned, as it suddenly all made sense; UltraViolet must have gotten here first, spun a lie to convince the others. She scrambled to her feet. “No no no, guys, listen: you’re right, your Jane is UltraViolet, and you have every reason to be pissed—but I’m not her, okay? I’m the Jane that you dragged into all this! The Jane that you saw is UltraViolet! She only told you that to keep me from stopping her—to keep you from stopping her!”
Jane saw how this landed, or rather, how it didn’t. Her words bounced off of the Heroes’ righteous faces as if their expressions were steel.
“Nice try,” Marie said. “It’s a clever ploy, I’ll grant you, but you’re forgetting that it’s not just your word against hers. Cal—”
“Is working with her!”
“Oh, please,” Marie said.
“It’s true! I swear it! I just—gah, forget it.” Jane ran her hands over the top of her head, tugging at her ponytail in frustration. She turned away, and then turned back. “Okay, okay, here, wait, you know what? Just go get Amy. Please. One touch from her, and you’ll know I’m telling you the truth. That’s all I’m asking.”
The team looked at each other, considering this. Unspoken arguments played back and forth between their faces.
God, they didn’t have time for this. Jane didn’t care about dignity anymore—she clasped her hands together in front of her, as if in prayer. “Please. You can’t risk me being right about this.”
“It’s not unreasonable . . . ,” Keisha said.
Marie heaved a weary sigh. “Fine,” she said. “Whatever.” She moved over to a screen embedded in the wall, and tapped it to wake it up. Another tap for the command she wanted. “Hey, Amy?”
Silence answered her.
Jane’s stomach tightened. They all waited, seconds piling up with alarming speed. How long would it reasonably take Amy, to hear Marie’s voice and respond?
Marie tapped the screen again. “Amy?”
“Shit,” Devin muttered.
“Check the access logs,” Tony said.
“Yeah, like I didn’t think of that.” She was already moving, swiping and tapping the screen as she brought up a long, scrolling list. Blue light washed Marie’s face as she read, her jaw setting hard as stone.
“Tell me,” Jane said, and when the team stayed silent, reading over Marie’s shoulder, Jane slammed her fist against the glass that separated them. “Tell me!”
“Amy left the building,” Keisha said. She paused, just long enough for dread to shoot through Jane’s veins. “With Jane.”
“You idiots!” Jane slammed her fist against the glass again. “I told you! I fucking told you! You have to let me out—she’s up to something terrible, I know it. Come on. Come on!”
“It’s not that simple,” Marie snapped. “Okay? Look, what you’re saying is ridiculous. I mean, Jane being evil is bad enough, but . . . but Cal, too?”
The screen beside them flashed on. “Oh, let’s be honest, that part isn’t hard to accept,” Allison said.
For the first time, a tiny flicker of hope sparked in Jane’s heart. On the screen, Allison’s image was framed by a room crammed with tech, and she looked up beyond the camera with something like awe on her face as she took in her surroundings.
Unfortunately, she and Jane seemed to be the only ones encouraged by this turn of events.
The rest of the team exploded.
“Allison?”
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
“How did you even—?”
“Get out of my tech room!”
“No,” Allison said, answering Marie. She flashed a badge at the camera. “Agent Maxwell, from ARRO. And listen, while the rest of you have been playing Liar Liar, I’ve been taking stock of your supplies. Nice toys, by the way—love the free-range quantum calibrator. But!” She held up a finger, as she lifted whatever tablet or phone was recording her. “According to this, you’re supposed to keep the field destabilizers that you stole off Dark Atom over here, yeah?” She motioned over her shoulder with her thumb.
Marie scowled. “Yeah . . . ?”
Allison swiveled out of the way. The wall behind her was lit up, racks standing empty.
Marie jerked in front of the screen, cutting off Jane’s view. “Where are they, you bitch?”
“Jane already told you,” Allison said, her voice laced with contempt. “My psycho sister and her stooge of a boyfriend have made off with everything they need to build a breach between worlds, and you assholes let them waltz right out the door. So I suggest you stop arguing, let this Jane out, and get your spandexed asses in gear before it’s too late.” She scoffed, the sound of it echoing through the Vault. “I mean, are you people supposed to be Heroes, or what?”
* * *
This time, they took the van.
Jane’s stomach was jittering around as much as her knee, as she sat in the back across from Allison.
Allison ignored her. She’d taken
the time to change while the rest of the Heroes had suited up, and now she looked like something out of a SEAL-team action movie: black outfit loaded down with fully stocked weapon holsters, pockets carrying who knows what kind of tools and additional firepower. Her hair was tied back into a severe bun, her face steady as she studied a blueprint of some type displayed on a tablet resting on her knees.
“Thank you,” Jane said after a few minutes of silence. They were alone in the back of the van. Pixie Beats and Granite Girl, in the cabin, were driving, while Windforce and Rip-Shift scouted up ahead to get some sense of what might be lying in wait for them.
Allison shook her head. “Don’t thank me.”
“But you got them moving.” Jane reached up, pulling the chain with Clair’s wedding band out from beneath her uniform. She held it tight, pressed against her heart. “Time can be crucial, and . . . you got them moving. So thank you.”
Allison glanced up. She studied Jane in silence for a moment—the necklace in her fist, the expression on her face. Jane thought, perhaps, that Allison might say something, but she didn’t. She turned back to the blueprints, as if Jane hadn’t spoken at all.
“Can I ask you something?” Jane said.
Allison shrugged. “If you must.”
“If you’re this much of a badass, why didn’t you just rescue your dad yourself, when he was being held hostage in City Hall? Why wait for us to do it for you?”
“Orders,” Allison said. She tapped something on the tablet, enlarging a portion of the blueprint. “We weren’t allowed to touch him.”
“What, and that stopped you?”
Allison cut a glare at Jane. “Yes, that stopped me. Some of us have responsibilities, Jane. Some of us work for a sanctioned organization, with rules and a strict chain of command. I can’t just go in guns-blazing and expect to show up for work tomorrow as if nothing happened.”
“You could, if you were a Hero.”
Allison snorted softly, as she returned to her work. “Oh, please.”
“I mean it,” Jane said. “You could join us.”
Allison said nothing.