“What can I do for you, boss man?”
He smiles at my cheeky remark. I know he doesn’t like it, but maybe he’s come to tolerate it from me. Since the other day, I’ve felt a tad bit awkward around him. Kate assures me it’s perfectly normal to be awkward around a person you like, especially if they like you back. I told her she’s out of her mind.
“What are you working on?” he asks, deftly avoiding my question.
Of course, he knows I can’t resist talking about my projects. I give him my best wry grin.
“You certainly know how to play me. I can’t resist, though!”
I rub my hands together with glee. It’s good timing on his part because it’s about done.
“I didn’t make the armor in my backyard. I had to go somewhere specialized to do it.”
“Where?”
“It’s not important. What is, is that I can’t go back, not with Cat-7 watching me. Even though the armor is theoretically indestructible it is entirely possible I might have to fabricate a new part. When I first purchased the raw materials—”
“Wait, you bought titanium?”
“Military grade titanium, it ain’t cheap. Same thing with the tungsten carbide, and I needed a lot too. It’s not like the suit is a single piece of—why are you looking at me like that?”
His mouth is open, and his eyes are wide. He shakes his head for a second and runs his hands through his buzz cut. He always does that when he’s thinking.
“Would you mind if I came in and sat down?”
“Be my guest.”
He closes the door behind him and to my surprise, sits on the floor in front of me. Luke is tall enough even when he’s sitting. It’s an odd experience for me. He’s 6’4” when we’re not fighting and with him sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of me he has to look up at me while I’m in my chair. I don’t think he could have done something more respectful and nice if he had tried.
“Thanks, now, go on?”
“Where was I?”
Damn, I lost my train of thought. I seriously need to stop staring at his eyes—
“You were talking about buying military grade alloys.”
“Right, I needed a lot. My calculations were perfect, but the actual practical application of the process could need refinement. In other words, I had to try a few times to get it right. Also, I couldn’t be sure of the availability of it in the future. I bought—enough. Thankfully, I haven’t needed to make any new parts. After our fight with the Psychotic Six, I started thinking maybe I didn’t have all my bases covered when it came to weapons.”
I had also needed a tiny amount to reinforce my chest piece after Blade nearly penetrated it.
He chuckles.
“Your name is Arsenal. Making new weapons seems like the thing you would do.”
I can barely keep myself contained as I spin the chair around to look at the readouts. I only need a few more minutes.
“Yeah, but I want to show you, not tell you.”
“Fair enough. Mind if I ask a question?”
“Shoot.”
I’m fiddling with a dial when he asks. I know the pressure is right, but it helps my nerves to double check.
“How much are you worth?” he asks.
I freeze. I really should learn to keep my big mouth shut. It isn’t like it needs to be a secret, but the more people know about me, the more I know about them, and then what if they’re somehow involved?
“Would you let it go if I said, a lot?”
I hunch my shoulders hoping he can read my body language.
“Of course. I was just curious because you’ve never requested any parts or equipment with your per diem. Kate paid for all of the computers in here with our discretionary fund. Except for Epic of course.”
I roll back over to him, a little closer than is strictly necessary. His eyes light up as I lean in, “I invented a little device which will help jets become much sturdier during high-g turns. Lockheed bought it from me for a tidy sum and Epic has been playing the stock market with what was left after I bought everything I needed.”
“So,” he says with a smile, “you’re a genius, you’re rich, and you’re beautiful? How are you not married?”
I laugh; of course he’s joking. What guy in their right mind would want a small-chested paralyzed girl who may not even be able to have children? No one, that’s who—he’s not joking. I’m laughing and he’s not. He’s serious. Suddenly the temperature in the room is far too much for me. My stomach clenches and my mouth has turned into the Sahara.
“Well, uh, that is—um.”
Super genius with science, super idiot with words. We’re still close together and he leans forward. His head tilts to the side and—oh God he’s trying to kiss me. I don’t know what to do.
“This is the part where you lean forward—or slap me in the face. It could go either way,” he says with his sly grin.
I laugh nervously and decide to lean forward. Our lips meet and electricity leaps between us. An emotional wall I’ve been holding back my whole life cracks. I put my hand on the back of his neck and I push hard against him. Our mouths open and for the first time in my adult life, a man is kissing me.
It’s incredible. My heart is beating so fast it feels like a rabbit is kicking me from the inside. I’m warm and cold at the same time. Things stir below my stomach I never expected to feel. Things I didn’t know I could feel.
Distantly, I’m aware of an alarm clock going off. Why would I set an alarm—oh, it’s ready. Reluctantly, I break the kiss in a way that isn’t sudden or off-putting. I lean my forehead against his and our eyes are mere centimeters apart.
“Wow,” he says, “I was worried you were going to go with the slap.”
I try to play coy, but it comes out as sarcasm.
“I still might.”
Thankfully, he laughs. I want to kiss him again. In fact, I think I want to do more than kiss him. Oh, my alarm. Right.
“Okay.” I push myself away and wheel over to the computer.
My ears are warm and my stomach won’t stop moving around. It was just a kiss… what a kiss!
“Are you ready?”
He nods. I hit the button lowering the kinetic field within the grey-silver box. It’s made out of a grade of titanium that is extremely pressure-resistant. Not the same stuff I use on my armor, but close. The box opens down the top and folds to reveal my brand new, four-foot long sword. The blade is black with the gray of the carbide on it. The cutting edge sparkles from the crushed diamond coating.
“Holy crap, that is the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen!”
Oh good, he likes it. I haven’t fastened on the hilt yet; the blade just ends in the tang.
“The core of the blade is titanium, of course, which I’ve bonded tungsten carbide too. It’s as strong and as hard as my suit. The blade…” he reaches out to touch it and I lurch forward, “Don’t!” He freezes.
“Uhm, the blade is coated with diamond powder which has been compacted to a monocrystalline form,” I explain hurriedly.
“Uh, Amelia, I don’t know what any of that means.”
“The edge is one molecule of diamond crystalline thick. It literally can cut through anything, except itself.”
His jaw drops and he looks at me. The admiration I see in his eyes makes all of this worth it.
“I think this deserves another kiss,” he says. I can’t say I disagree with him.
28
The hilt of the sword had been a little trickier than I originally thought it would be. I didn’t account for the amount of force I would be swinging it with. On my first practice, it shattered. Which is bad considering what’s in it. It got me thinking, which is why I’m up at seven in the morning with my magic box.
The kinetic field emitters inside the apparatus are busy compressing the handle around a small tube of carbon steel. I don’t need a lot of room, enough for a micro-kinetic field generator and a teensy-tiny Zero-point field module. Enough
to power the kinetic field for a few hundred years. I need the kinetic field generator to give it weight. Titanium is incredibly light, even when bonded with tungsten carbide. With the kinetic field generator, I can have it hit like a hundred-pound weight. This is not a weapon I screw around with. Like my particle beam, it’s lethal.
Kate is asking permission to teleport in. I had to ditch Epic’s voice synthesizing. I love it, but I was having problems focusing on what he was saying. If something exploded at the moment he spoke he would have to say it again or put it on my HUD anyway. I decided to stick with silent Epic. He could beep at me and get my attention if he needed to. Since I’m wearing the glasses I designed to hack with he can just scroll messages across my field of view.
“Uhm I’m not really—”
Pop.
“I brought you breakfast. I know you’ve been up all night and I thought you could use some food—wow, cool sword!”
I’m dead. Dead, dead, dead. She’s an empath, it is going to take her exactly—
“Amelia…” she says in a naughty voice.
—that long to figure it out.
“What did you do?” she asks.
My face is flaming red, my ears are burning, and I want to die. I spin my chair around and hide behind my computer pretending to go over the specs of the hilt.
“Spill girl, did you two—you know?”
Oh God, this couldn’t be any worse.
“No, no we did not. Thank you very much,” I say.
“You did something, it’s like an emotional high in here.”
“We kissed,” I squeak out, “and there was some snuggling.”
“Aren’t you the cutest,” she squeals.
Kate is like this perfect woman. Pin-up model beautiful, eloquent, smart, and an empath. She can have any guy eating out of her palm. Literally and metaphorically. How she could possibly be excited about me having kissed someone is beyond me.
“You could knock me over with a feather,” she says.
Please leave, please! She isn’t.
“Well, I’m tired. I think I’ll just go to bed,” I say, knowing it won’t work.
“Uh huh, come on Amelia, we’re friends, a little girl talk won’t kill you. Here, have a bacon, egg and cheese bagel from Ollie Vaughn's, they’re to die for.”
I numbly take the sandwich knowing any second she is—
Her eyes light up and color rushes to her cheeks. She leans against my workbench for a second before she looks up at me.
“Why didn’t you tell me he is still here? He’s dreaming about you, want to know what?”
I carefully open my bagel and nibble at it. She isn’t wrong; it’s the most delicious bagel I’ve ever tasted. I focus really hard on it while I bite at it in small parts. I know ignoring her won’t make her go away, but I’m trying real hard.
“Oh fine, let me put up a wall for a second, his dreams are—intense.”
Please stop talking! I take another nibble. After a moment she takes a deep breath and lets it out. She walks around to sit on my guest chair and takes out her own bagel.
After a few minutes of silence, I feel like I can talk again. Maybe if I just completely ignore the fact Luke is sleeping in my bed she will too. It’s not like we did anything wrong. It’s just…
“I have walls against his emotions, not yours. Come on, Amelia, spill, you’ll feel better,” she says with a smile.
“Fine, we were kissing and then snuggling, and I told him I like to watch Star Trek before bed, and he actually said, ‘Is that the one with Darth Vader?’ I had to educate him. It’s not my fault we fell asleep, fully clothed I might add, watching the second episode. I woke up a few hours ago to do some work on the sword. It isn’t like I sleep a lot anyway.”
“See, was that so hard?” she asks.
“Yes. Yes, it was. Would you like to see my sword?”
“I would love to.”
I pop the last bit of buttery goodness in my mouth and click a few keys on the keyboard. The kinetic shield emitter I installed in the lab powers down enough for the sword to rest lightly on its display.
“Okay, pick it up and be very careful. You’ve seen Star Wars, right?”
“God, Amelia, is everything about you this nerdy?”
I shake my head.
“Geeky. Nerdy is when I start explaining the science behind it. Listen, the blade is what you would call… sharp. I don’t want you lopping your arm off with it by accident.”
She freezes her fingers on the hilt.
“Is it really that sharp?”
I glance around the workshop for my pipe wrench. It’s in the corner and I point.
“Hand that to me, okay?”
She does. I hold it up horizontally with an end in each hand.
“Now, carefully pick up the sword, line up the last few inches and give it a swing.”
I call it a sword because it is nearly four feet of titanium and carbon tungsten, but I decided to avoid the curved end. The blade is square with a thick ridge on top and the diamond coated blade on bottom. I don’t really have a cross-guard—the blade ends and the round hilt begins. It’s slightly larger than a sword would normally be, for me anyway. This way I can comfortably wield it while in my armor. It’s not like I am going to do any fencing from my chair.
“Now would probably be a good time to tell you I am slightly stronger than your average woman,” she says.
“Good, because it weighs about thirty pounds.”
She wraps both her hands around the hilt and lifts the blade straight up.
“Wow, yeah it does. Yet, it feels incredibly agile.”
She swings the sword back and forth a few times.
“Ahem,” I nod to the wrench.
She places the square tip of the edge on top, lifts and comes down. The wrench comes apart like it was made in two pieces. The edges are perfectly smooth.
“Oh my God, you made this?” she asks.
“Yes I did,” I answer with a grin.
“The airport battle got me thinking about how Blade had this melee weapon and I simply could not come near her without getting hit.”
“You didn’t seem to have any problem with Tire-Iron, I noticed. You have to tell me sometime how you stopped a blow from an F5 strong man?”
“Science,” I say to her.
“That’s your answer for everything,” she replies with narrow eyes.
Carefully she puts the sword back on the pedestal. The display is made out of titanium too, but I’m pretty sure given time the sword would cut through it. The kinetic field emitter that makes it seem heavier does the reverse when it is placed on its display. It ends up resting gently, without the blade actually touching the alloy.
“This way I can have something for close combat and I don’t have to go in with my fists. I can temporarily make my suit’s apparent strength extremely high—”
“—How high?”
“—High enough to catch an F5’s fist with my hand,” I say.
My smile threatens to engulf my face when her jaw drops.
“That’s how you stopped Tire-Iron’s fist! How long can you maintain?”
“That level of strength? Only a few seconds. I can mimic F2 strength indefinitely. Which puts me around lifting a couple of tons at most.”
There has been a hole in me since I was a little girl, and suddenly, hardly with me noticing, the hole is filling up. I’ve never had anyone to share this stuff with. Carlos is fun to hang out with, and he keeps me grounded, but it isn’t the same. Kate understands. I have a best friend, I have a boyfriend—maybe—a place I belong. I never imagined this life. I started out wanting to find out about my parents, and now I have all this other stuff.
Before I know it, the sun has been up for hours and Kate and I have been talking the whole time. She knows all the right things to get me to open up.
“You know, when I was twelve my powers expressed. They didn’t have the test for it back then,” she says to me.
“W
hat happened?”
“I was in the seventh grade and one morning I felt everything. Every little piece of emotion everyone else had, but I felt it all, felt it raw. I thought I was going crazy. I literally ran screaming from the school. My parents found me down by the waterfront… I was about to throw myself in when they came. I couldn’t take it anymore. It was like I was everyone else, and my mind was lost in an ocean of other people’s emotions.”
“How did you learn to control it?”
“There are special schools for people, places you can go and be you. Empaths are pretty rare, though, along with telepaths. There were maybe twenty other kids there with similar abilities. However, two years at brain school and I had a handle on it. I can put up shields and blocks, etc. It wasn’t till later that the rest of my, um, powers came in.”
She waves her hand down her side and I realize she’s talking about her looks.
“When that happened… I had to be locked away from everyone for almost a year.”
She gets this far away look in her eyes and I feel like an idiot. Of course, not everyone here had a normal life. When I look at Kate all I see is the supermodel. I can be such a jerk.
“I’m sorry,” I lean over and rest my hand on her knee, “I didn’t know.”
“It’s tough all over, right? I had to spend three years in isolation learning to control my pheromones. A teenage girl with my powers is a disastrous combination. Lucky me, by the time I learned to teleport it was all…”
“Ahem,” Luke’s voice comes from behind me. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to intrude but, uh, I wanted to take a shower and—” he fumbles for words and if I Kate and I weren’t in the middle of a serious conversation, I’d be laughing.
“No, it’s fine Luke,” I say as I spin the chair around.
I manage to wipe my eyes at the same time.
“Um, can I see you later?”
“We do have a team exercise scheduled for today,” he says with his drill sergeant voice. Terror floods me. Did I misread everything? Didn’t he like kissing me? Why wouldn’t he want to see me again?
“Amelia, I’m joking, of course I want to see you again—socially. Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?”
Full Metal Superhero Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 15