I inhale sharply and push off from the wall. I take the seat next to her.
“Open faceplate.”
The shield slides up, revealing my face. I know what she sees; an ordinary girl with brown eyes and the slightly dark skin from her Hispanic mother.
“You’re… just a kid?” she asks, eyes wide from shock.
“Close faceplate.”
It slams shut. I don’t know why my heart suddenly hurts, but it does. I see her face fall as she realizes. She’s an empath after all.
“I’m in my twenties, hardly a child.”
I slide up and head for the door. This was a mistake. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“Wait, wait. I’m sorry, I just—you weren’t what I expected.”
She’s up across the room with a hand on my shoulder.
“Please, stay and talk?” she asks.
I look down at the floor for a moment. My whole life, since the day of the accident, even when I was recovering in the hospital and they told me I would never walk again, I had one goal. One purpose. Find out the truth. My Uncle never believed me and everyone else thought I was delusional. Carlos never really knew me then. Being alone is who I am. If I could have my parents back all would be right. In the meantime, it would be nice to have someone else.
But not today.
“Maybe some other time.”
As I walk toward the skylight Epic wirelessly signals it to open. I hit the thrusters and in seconds I’m sailing away into the air. Flying always clears my head. With the sun going down I have about two hours of sustained flight time. I angle up and slow down to half speed.
The altimeter rolls past ten thousand feet and I try to switch to hover. It isn’t easy. I let the calm of the air and the quiet of the altitude settle my mind. I am focused. I’ve worked hard to find the truth. Every piece of evidence has led me to this moment. It also has left me alone. For the first time in years, my heart aches for something I haven’t ever had. I do need to be careful, but it sure would be nice to have a girl for a friend.
I wish I could trust all of them. The ECM master alarm tells me I can’t. They’re still trying to track me home. Well, time to show them a little something I’ve been working on.
“Epic, stealth mode.”
The HUD changes color from green to a soft blue. The internal lights dim and the sound bafflers kick in. I’m limited to a hundred miles an hour in this mode. I also can’t keep it on forever; I have heat collectors obscuring my trail and at some point I need to dump all the heat. The coup de grâce is my kinetic shields. I’ve tinkered with the frequency, and for a short time, and at a tremendous energy cost, I can project kinetic energy into a wedge, which deflects the radar waves around me and not back to the source.
I head home.
The window to my workshop is open when I arrive, a sure sign Carlos has been there. If it were anyone else my security alarms would have triggered an alert. I manage to glide through the window and plant my feet on the floor. The reinforced boards hold. I’m tired, my arms hurt and I’m so ready for bed. The pull bar I have in the center of the room is perfectly angled with the suit’s storage vault.
I reach up and grasp the bar. The magnetic field in the vault overrides the suit’s and as one piece it flings itself at the wall. My chair drives itself over and I lower myself down. It feels good to sit in the flesh, even if it means I can’t walk.
A light breeze blows through my room and clears out some of the hot Phoenix air.
“Oh crap,” Kate says. I spin around and she’s standing three feet from me with a pizza in one hand a six-pack in the other.
“Well, this is a little awkward,” she whispers.
11
“I’m really sorry,” Kate says for the umpteenth time of the evening. I roll over to the window and slide it shut. As soon as it’s sealed the AC kicks in and the room drops ten degrees in a few seconds.
“Wow, great AC,” she says.
“I pipe it up from the supercooling I use on my computers.”
I still don’t know what to think. I knew she could teleport, but I thought she had to be able to see where she was going.
“I just, I didn’t know, I thought I would surprise you with pizza and beer as an apology.”
She holds them up.
“It’s okay, really. I didn’t want to come clean just yet, but I would have to sooner or later anyway. Are you going to stand there or serve up the pie?”
It was odd to see her put out. She was obviously upset. It isn’t anything new to me. I don’t meet a lot of people because of my obsession with my work. When I do they act awkward and strange because what do you say to the girl who can’t walk? ‘Hey, sorry you’re stuck in a chair’. I often find myself having to get the ball rolling and tonight seemed no different.
I run my hands over my custom wheels and send my chair rolling down the ramp to my living room. The house isn’t huge. The kitchen and laundry room are downstairs along with a garage I don’t use other than to house all my computers and machines. Upstairs is my workshop, bedroom, and bathroom. I order in most nights. I rarely even go downstairs except to do laundry. Considering I spend most of my time in my synthsuit and the rest in pajamas or sweats, I don’t have a lot of that to do either.
The workshop is slightly higher than my room. It sits on top of the garage. I knocked down the walls of the second floor to make it easier to get around. A ramp leads the way to where I sleep. I also have a couch, a recliner and an even bigger TV than the one Carlos and I play games on. This is my ‘movie watching’ TV.
I can hear her follow me down. How much should I share with her? Can I trust her? I wish I knew. She sets the pizza down on the low coffee table and takes the chair for herself. I see her mouth open and I hold up my hand.
“If you apologize one more time I’m kicking you out. Kate, I’m in a wheelchair, I’m not dying. Understand?”
She shakes her head and smiles, “Right, of course, I’m acting like an idiot. Here,” she opens the pie.
Then I notice it’s Bianco’s.
“It’s a Friday night… how did you get this?”
Bianco’s is like eating perfection. It’s my absolute favorite pizza in the whole world and unless I order a week in advance I never eat any. The smell of the pepperoni and cheese fill the room and my mouth instantly waters. Not having eaten all day may have something to do with it.
“I can teleport, I’m a local celebrity, and the night manager is crushing on me hard,” she answers.
I wolf down a slice for starters then pull myself up and out of my chair to sit on the couch. It’s more comfortable and I can spread out a little. I yawn as I talk to her. She holds out a beer to me and I take it without thinking.
“You know I’m only twenty. I can’t legally drink this yet,” I inform her.
“Okay, I know I came here unannounced—”
“—and uninvited,” I add.
“—and uninvited, but girl, you have got to spill. You have a twenty-million-dollar suit of armor in an attic made of wood. You literally invented something to make you walk, run, fly, and shoot.”
“I don’t think it’s worth twenty-mill—”
“Mayhew put it at twenty-one point four to be exact and he was just talking about the armor. He’s frothing at the mouth to find out the process by which you made it. He’s convinced it would be worth hundreds of millions,” Kate says.
I guess it would be, but I am never going to reveal how I do it, not to anyone. I don’t have a lot of faith in human nature.
“I guess you’re right,” I say around a bite, “What’s your point?”
“Why are you doing this? Being a super-hero, I mean. Surely you could make a fortune as an engineer. You built all of this, you’re smart, you could work for anyone.” Maybe she can see the hesitance on my face, or maybe it’s her empathic abilities. I wish Epic could tell me if she’s using her pheromones. I don’t feel especially warm toward her, which might mean she’s not.
&nb
sp; “I make enough for a decent living and more on the side for the extra stuff, but this… Amelia if I had your brains I would be living on an island sipping margaritas.”
“How many degrees do you have?” I ask her.
“One, a bachelor's in marketing. With my powers, it seemed like a good idea, you?”
“None.”
I don’t think this woman is stunned often, and here I’ve done it twice in one night. I can’t help but smile. Another slice of pizza is on deck but by the time I’m done with half of it I can’t eat anymore. I love it, but a slice and a half is my limit.
“You have to have something?”
“The great thing about being disabled, besides parking, are all the school programs people will let you do from home. Being a tad anti-social, I applied for all of them. I just wanted to read the books. I read them, learned them, and moved on.”
“When did you finish?”
“Learning or reading?” I ask.
“Is there a difference?” she replies.
“I stopped reading the college books when I was eleven. At fourteen I was writing papers under a pseudonym. At sixteen I sold a piece of tech to Lockheed-Martin that will soon be in every airplane for the next hundred years. I finished the suit last year, but I’ve been working on it since I was seven years old.”
I’m enjoying the shocked look on her face entirely too much. I don’t tell this story often, and it’s always fun to let people know exactly how smart I am. Not in a patronizing, ‘I’m better than you’ way, but in the, ‘this is who I am. A moment of regret washes over me. I have sacrificed everything for this. What if they’re gone? No, I can’t think like that. I saw what I saw.
“If you had degrees, how many would you have?” she asks.
“It’s hard to say, four, maybe five if you count chemistry.”
“Four bachelors? I could hardly stand one.”
I cough out beer through my nose. I grab a napkin and wipe my face. It burns my nose, but the taste is pleasant enough.
“Doctorates, Kate. Metallurgy, physics, quantum mechanics, engineering, and chemistry. Plus a handful of other lesser degrees. I spend a lot of time reading.”
I nibble at my last slice as I wait for her to absorb it all. I glance over at the monitor above the suit to see the recharge progress and if Epic needs any help with the firmware update. I sketched out a program for him to allow me better access in the future if for some reason he can’t assist me.
“Oh, I forgot Computer Science. Whoops. So, six.” I say.
“Okay, I’m officially impressed. You did all this, and you have no superpowers?”
I shake my head, “Nada.”
“Have you had the test?”
“I don’t need it. I’m telling you, Kate, I don’t have them. I’m just dedicated and driven.”
“No one’s this driven.” She’s finally starting to relax. It feels good to open up to someone. I make the call. If I tell her now, on my terms, then I can control how things go from here.
“I can tell you want to say something. What?”
“When I was six years old my family was on a trip to southern California. I don’t remember a whole lot about it. My dad loved road trips. He said it calmed him. Him and mom would talk for hours. In this instance, I was falling asleep off and on. I think we were on our way to San Diego. The plan was to go to Sea World.”
I stop to take a pull from the beer. Everyone else I have ever told the whole story to has thought I was delusional at best, a liar at worst. I don’t know if I can take it if she thinks I’m crazy.
“You can trust me, Amelia, I promise,” she says.
Her green eyes bore into mine and I believe her. I nod,
“My mom screamed suddenly, and we plunged off a cliff.”
I close my eyes, the memories I keep hidden boiling to the surface.
“The car rolled. I was flung against my seatbelt then the door came off and back in and crushed me against the seat. I don’t know what happened next, but I woke up and I was upside down. I was crying and calling for my dad. He was there, Kate. He was holding my hand and telling me it would be okay. I could hear mom, too, she was on the phone.”
The next part was the worst and I desperately didn’t want to cry. The tears clouded my eyes and I squeezed them shut.
“I opened my eyes again and they were gone. No bodies, nothing. The next time I woke up I was in the hospital. I couldn’t move my legs and everyone was telling me my parents were dead. They weren’t, I saw them, I know they weren’t.”
Silence fills the room as I finish. I take another drink and rub my eyes with my sleeve.
“What happened?” she asks.
“That is the million-dollar question, isn’t it? My dad worked for Cat-7 and I swear that is who my mom was talking to when I heard her on the phone. Everyone told me I had imagined it, that I’d made it up to avoid seeing their dead bodies in the front seat. I don’t know, maybe I did, but I don’t think so.”
She puts her beer down and leans forward, cocking her head to the side as she examines me.
“You’re not lying. Even if you were lying to yourself, even if you had made up the whole thing, a part of you would know the truth. You can’t hide the truth from an empath.”
A wave of euphoria rolls over me. My whole life I’d carried the burden of not knowing. Had I lied to myself? Now I know. I almost cry.
“Thank you, God, thank you.”
“Now the question is, what are you going to do about it?” she asks.
12
It’s almost normal, flying around Phoenix in a lazy arc as the sun shines down on me. The baffles in my armor keep the majority of the sound out as the wind buffets me and the jets roar. I have to say, I love this city. The food, the entertainment, everything. Especially the food.
A burden has lifted from my shoulders. I don’t know how telling Kate about what happened made me feel so much better, but it did. Maybe with a little help, I can move this much faster. Infiltrate Cat-7 and find out where my parents are and why Cat-7 took them. If they are still alive.
No, I can’t afford to think that way. There would be no reason to kidnap them if they were just going to let them die. After all, they could have just left them to die in the car. They went to a lot of trouble to take them and not let anyone know. They had to be alive.
“Arsenal, this is central. There is a report of a superhuman sighting in Tucson. How quickly can you be there?”
Epic hears everything I hear and before I can even consider it he flashes the time up on my HUD.
“About thirty minutes. You want me to go?”
“Affirmative. The computer says likely targets are a group of banks around Arizona National.”
Epic throws up the map of Tucson for me. Yeah, four banks all within a few blocks of each other. Brilliant.
“Roger, I’ll head there now. Can you notify the team in case I need backup?”
“Will do, Central out.”
I didn’t recognize the voice on the other end, but that wasn’t anything new. They must have a huge rotation of people to be the communications hub for all the state teams. Still, I prefer it when I receive instructions from our own people.
“Epic, let’s lock up the suit and set a ballistic trajectory. I don’t want to be exhausted when we arrive.”
He does all the math for me. I pull up until the lines on my HUD are in sync and then the suit goes rigid. The thrusters roar and I am up in the sky.
I pick up a tailwind on the way down and shave seven minutes off my time. I see Tucson up ahead. Funny, I’ve lived in Arizona for almost fifteen years and I don’t think I’ve ever left Phoenix. Tucson isn’t as big as Phoenix, but it is still a big city. We hit five thousand feet and Epic unlocks me. I take manual control and curl us around to the north.
“Go full active on the sensors. Also tap the local news, Youtube, etc.”
I have done this before.
“Yeah, yeah,” I mutter. I come in a low
arc over the banking complex. People on the ground are waving up at me, snapping pictures. They probably don’t know who I am. Flying heroes are still cool to see. I would wave back but I can’t without changing my flight path.
The white van parked in down the street has a high level of thermal radiation. Not dangerous, but extremely unusual.
“Well, let’s check it out, shall we?”
They’re parked near the intersection, giving them easy access to three places with high-value cash grabs. This doesn’t feel right. I slide down to a hundred feet above the middle of the street. I’m not trying to come right at them, but if I can fly close enough maybe Epic can better scan it.
“Epic, put me through to the HQ. I think I want backup.”
My HUD blinks as if I changed the channel on the TV. it shouldn’t do that.
We’re being—
He doesn’t have time to finish. The van’s back doors fly open and three men in tactical gear with hi-tech looking rifles leap out. The rifles are the source of the heat. They all take a knee as one and open fire on me.
“Whoa,” I shout.
I spin the armor as green bolts of something hot blows by me.
Experimental plasma rifles. Threat level unknown. Assume severe.
I pull a spin to follow their trajectory. They splash into the building behind me and explode inward. Facade and glass shower the streets. Okay, don’t be hit by them. I throw my hands out to halt my forward momentum and crash to the ground twenty feet from them. They’re aiming again. I lunge to the side and the bolts catch a mid-sized sedan behind me. Flames engulf the suit as the car explodes. This is going from bad to worse.
“Epic, I need backup, now!”
It will take me a moment to send a message via the Internet. If he has to use the Internet the radio is being jammed. Awesome. I let off a blast with my IP cannons in their general direction. The van’s windshield shatters as I miss them. Thrusters on. A bolt of green passes through where I was. I hear the explosion behind me. Okay, kid gloves off before someone gets killed.
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