Playing For Keeps

by Mur Lafferty

  Keepsie faced her, trying to form her features into stone. “That is not my problem.”

  Timson’s face lost all pretense of friendly overtures. “It doesn’t have to be this way, Keepsie. You are putting the city in danger by keeping that device. And we can do more to you than close your bar and take your best friend.”

  The rage pushed the words out before Keepsie could stop them. “I thought we were going to deal, Timson, and yet all you can do is threaten me. You don’t seem to understand. I can keep this device safer than anyone else in the world. Safer than you; you let Doodad steal it.”

  “Doodad invented it,” Timson said, and Keepsie thought she looked sad. “He knew exactly how to steal it. Machines are like his children. He knows exactly how the device works.”

  Keepsie laughed. “So it belongs to him? Doesn’t that make you the thief?”

  “Don’t talk about things that you don’t understand,” Timson said. “Give me the device, Keepsie.”

  “No.”

  She turned and walked back to her apartment. Timson did not follow.

  Clever Jack was sitting on her doorstep.

  He stood up in one easy movement when he saw her. He wore a battered denim jacket, a blue sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. Had she and Timson passed him on the street? Keepsie couldn’t remember.

  He smiled at her. “You’re late.”

  “I was distracted,” Keepsie said, and opened the door to her apartment.

  “Keepsie, what—” Samantha asked, but stopped when she saw Clever Jack.

  Keepsie placed her hand on his shoulder. “This is Clever Jack.”

  The room was silent as her friends stared at the villain. They had all seen pictures of him, heard about him on the news, but this was the real thing.

  “Pull up some floor, Clever Jack. We want to talk,” Keepsie said.

  A smile flitted across Clever Jack’s face, and he sank into a cross-legged position and looked up at Keepsie, who perched on a stool. She propped her elbow on the bar between the kitchen and living room. Pulling the small ball from her pocket, she peered at it.

  “You know, I don’t even know what this does,” Keepsie said. “And I wonder if my decision would be made easier if I did.”

  Clever Jack said nothing.

  “But as it stands, I have no desire to help any of you. Throwing it away won’t work though. So I obviously have to choose.

  “If I give it to the Academy, I could get my bar back. I could also get Ian released. But I know that wouldn’t be the end of it— they’d probably lean on me even harder since I stood up to them. They might even start sending heroes into my bar to drink, driving away customers.” She slipped the ball back into her pocket.

  “What can you give me?” she asked Clever Jack.

  He was silent for a moment. “I don’t think we can give you your bar back.”

  “Oh, I know that,” Keepsie said, smiling. “We want you to get us Ian.”

  Clever Jack stood up. “Done.”

  “Wait,” Keepsie said. “That’s it?”

  Clever Jack paused with his hand on the door. “You wanted something else?”

  “Files. Files on our parents, and files on us. We want to know what the Academy knows about us.”

  “That will be more difficult,” he said.

  Keepsie waited.

  Clever Jack sighed. “But we can do it.”

  “Great. We’ll help.” Keepsie stood, and her friends joined her.

  “What?” They had finally thrown Clever Jack off guard. It felt good.

  “We’re going to help. You don’t think we trust you, do you?” she said, pulling on her jacket.

  “I can’t be responsible for you all. You’re on your own.”

  “Ah, but we’re not. We’re in this together,” Peter said. The others nodded, although some looked scared, others resolute. Samantha looked positively elated.

  They followed Clever Jack out the door.

  “Keepsie, can I make a quick call before this descent into madness?” Samantha asked.

  Keepsie nodded. Her heart hammered. What have I gotten us into?

  * * * * *

  Samantha caught up with them outside on the street. She linked arms with Peter, who looked startled. “This is very exciting. Forming a vigilante group, working with a villain to infiltrating the Academy and remove a known criminal. What good ideas you have!

  “And, you’re all under arrest,” Samantha said, pulling an Academy badge out of her purse.

  The Third Wavers stared at her. Clever Jack ran.

  He disappeared into the dark faster than he should have been able to. But then again, he had superpowers, while they had next-to-nothing.

  “Run!” cried Michelle, and they scattered. Peter wrenched free of Samantha’s arm and grabbed Keepsie’s hand.

  “You bitch,” Keepsie managed to say before Peter pulled her down the road.

  Her friends did not disappear under the streetlights as well as Clever Jack had. Keepsie and Peter ran in the direction of her bar, dashing past startled people on the street. Keepsie heard a rumble of thunder and swore.

  White Lightning and the Crane flew over an apartment building and right toward them. Having been plucked off the street once that week, Keepsie had the mindset to duck as they came close. The Crane swept Peter up in his arms, but White Lightning missed, passing close enough that his cape stung her face.

  Keepsie had never seen so many heroes working together at once. The heavily muscled and tattooed hero who went by the questionable name Tattoo Devil pulled up on his motorcycle and hopped off, his sidekick, Cage, climbing out of the sidecar. Heretic, the powerful hero with fire elemental powers, flew high above them, pitching fireballs in front of fleeing Third Wavers, herding them. She laughed as she did so, and Keepsie realized why she wasn’t used for crime fighting that often—she was batshit insane.

  Her friends screamed around her, and Samantha shouted loudly for the heroes to round up the vigilante group. Otherwise it looks like the heroes are attacking innocent folks, Keepsie realized. Michelle struggled inside a cage of glowing ropes, to little effect, and Barry hopped on one of his legs, leaving Tattoo Devil holding the other one with a bemused look on his face. He tossed it aside and tackled the older man. Barry’s head hit the sidewalk with a smack.

  Keepsie struggled to her feet and tried to find Peter in the sky. White Lightning hovered a few feet above her and she readied herself for another attack. But he didn’t swoop down on her again. He raised his arms to the sky and she felt her skin prickle.

  “I bet your power doesn’t work so well when you’re dead,” he said. “I don’t know why they didn’t let me just do this before.”

  Keepsie ran for it, even though she knew she couldn’t win. The flash lit up the street around her, but Keepsie never heard the thunder.

  9

  Peter had heard Keepsie’s story of her abduction, and had, at the time, admired her wisdom in not struggling against Doodad as she soared above the city. Now that he was in a similar situation, he felt no such peace of mind. He batted at the Crane’s arms, knowing it would do no good—and if it did do any good, he’d fall to serious injury or death. The Crane wrapped his extended arms around Peter like ropes.

  “Stop that, you don’t want me to drop you, do you? Cause I can. I can let you fall and fall and then catch you at the last minute,” The Crane whispered into his ear. Peter turned his head and recoiled at the sight of The Crane’s lips elongating to meet his ear. They smiled at him and then snapped back into place.

  Peter forced himself to be calm. He looked down. Previously, he hadn’t had a fear of heights, but there was something about putting his trust completely in a stranger who wished him harm— or at least incarceration—that made him suddenly fear the street below. His friends struggled with heroes, most of them being pacified almost immediately. Clever Jack had gotten away, he was sure of it. That’s what Clever Jack did. Used his unbelievable luck to simply slip away when the
heroes came around, and anyone with him got caught.

  When Peter’s eardrums bulged with the deafening crack of thunder, he whipped his head around in time to see Keepsie crumple to the pavement.

  His struggles began again with renewed strength. “No, no, let me go, take me back.”

  “She should have given it to us,” The Crane said, flying farther and farther away from Keepsie’s body.

  “You’re a murderer,” Peter said. The Crane’s right ear had stretched to his mouth to hear him.

  “That device is more important than any one life. If we have to kill one Third Waver to save the population of Seventh City, we will. She was breaking the law by forming an illegal vigilante group and she avoided capture, we followed the proper procedure.”

  “Deadly force on an escaping Third Waver is proper procedure?”

  The Crane withdrew his ear. His hold on Peter tightened. “I would recommend coming quietly; you saw what happened to your friend.”

  Peter subsided. The Academy loomed in front of him, and it felt as if The Crane picked up speed as they approached the starchy white building.

  The other heroes, the ones with travel powers anyway, were arriving at the same time. Michelle and Barry trailed along behind Tattoo Devil and Cage, trapped in a net of the girl’s energy as Peter and The Crane descended. Samantha pulled up at the same time as a silver van. She ran around to the side and began directing Academy stooges to unload the unconscious Tomas. Peter hoped he was unconscious, anyway.

  White Lightning and Timson had not yet arrived. Peter wondered what they were going to do with Keepsie’s body. The realization of the situation hit him, and he shuddered uncontrollably. The Crane deposited him on the front steps of the Academy and he stumbled and fell.

  The concrete bit into his cheek. Hands grabbed his shoulders and forced him to his feet. He looked around him. Michelle bled from a cut on her forehead, and Peter hoped it looked worse than it was. She was crying, and that scared him. This was real.

  Peter’s legs wobbled. Michelle propped her shoulder under his arm and helped him walk as the heroes herded them inside.

  “Keepsie—” Peter choked.

  “I know,” Michelle whispered, squeezing him a little. “She’s gone.”

  They were separated and shuttled into elevators. The Crane pulled Michelle out from under Peter, and when he stumbled again, said, “Come on, be a man,” with a derisive tone. Michelle shot him one final look before entering the elevator with Cage, Barry, and Tattoo Devil.

  Peter leaned against the wall of his elevator and stared at the buttons. The two upper floors that could be seen from the outside were indicated above the Ground Floor button, but the array of buttons indicating floors below the main floor was impressive. There had never been any outward sign that the Academy had floors stretching that deep under Seventh City, and the vastness of the organization frightened him.

  “Samantha,” Peter said, surprising himself. “Where is she?”

  The Crane pushed the button marked B7. “Why, are you going to exact your revenge? You don’t need to know where she is. She’s done her job.”

  “Her job as a hero? Heroic to infiltrate a group of friends and betray them, ending in the death of one?” Peter’s voice failed to carry the anger he felt—it sounded flat and weak.

  The Crane looked at him with obvious distaste. “Ghostheart found a rat’s nest of vigilante wannabes and uncovered it before any innocents got hurt. Yes, she’s a hero.”

  “But Keepsie—”

  The Crane’s arm snaked across the elevator and his hand covered Peter’s mouth. “You don’t get it, do you? You guys aren’t innocents. You’re criminals. You broke the law simply by forming the group. And when we find out what you were planning to do as that vigilante group, I’m sure we’ll be able to accuse you of conspiracy to commit several other crimes. So shut the hell up about Laura Branson. I’m tired of your whining.”

  Peter considered biting his hand, but he had nowhere to run and The Crane had already proven to be more than strong enough to overwhelm him. He inhaled and his head swam with information.

  The Crane sat a desk in what looked to be a windowless schoolroom. He checked the answers on his test and smiled, confident that he had answered all the questions correctly. He put his pen at the top of the page to sign his name when his desk rumbled and tipped. He toppled from his desk and sprawled on the ground, his left wing twisting painfully. He looked up.

  Seismic Stan grinned at him, braces flashing, and said, “Oops, sorry Frank, I burped.”

  The rest of the class, all ten of them, laughed. The Crane flushed and righted his desk, gingerly flexing his wing. He picked up his test paper and saw with horror that his pen had scrawled across the top in an indistinguishable glyph. The perfect white space had been marred and he didn’t have time to redo the test. Stan would make him look bad—look messy—in front of the teacher, and he would get him, he would get all of them who laughed.

  The Crane removed his hand from Peter’s mouth, and Peter returned to reality. “So do you get it?”

  Peter nodded, distracted by the revelation. Clever Jack had been right. The first supervillain, Seismic Stan, had come from inside the Academy, had been trained beside the heroes. Had he really just been a prankster who had gone bad? Or had he been trained to be evil, to give the heroes something to fight against, someone for the city to fear so the heroes would seem more impressive?

  Peter remained silent as The Crane manhandled him down the dark, echoing hallway of the seventh basement floor. None of his friends had arrived on that floor, and he felt very alone.

  The Crane sneered. “Prison level 2. Like it?”

  “Lovely,” said Peter. He went without a fight into the room that The Crane unlocked for him. It was lit by one light bulb sticking out of the wall and furnished with one wooden table and two wooden chairs. The door slammed behind him and Peter collapsed into the nearest chair, relieved to be free of the insufferable hero.

  There was too much to consider. What was going to happen to him? Could he get a lawyer to stand up against the Academy? Or were crimes against the heroes considered above the jurisdiction of the judicial branch? Peter couldn’t remember whether he’d ever heard of a trial for Doodad or any of the other villains. Clever Jack had never been caught, once he had escaped from his assumed imprisonment.

  And then there was Keepsie. Peter’s mind swam with the image of her slight body collapsing, jerking slightly, onto the street. She was their strength. She had been the one who believed that they could use their paltry powers to go against the heroes.

  Peter had stifled his powers since childhood. He hadn’t liked knowing things, secret things, about other people. He had learned through a hug that his father was cheating on his mother. He had learned while doing laundry in the college dorm that his posturing, macho bully of a football player roommate was gay. He felt as if he were an unwilling therapist who received everyone else’s secrets. He kept a polite distance from people. He knew people— especially Ian—thought he was gay since he was never seen with a woman, but he was too afraid of finding out something horrific about someone if he got close enough to smell her.

  Ian. Ian was also held here, they had all assumed. Ian’s power, one of foul violence, had been unable to help them. Peter had never considered his own power to be of any use at all.

  He stared at his hands. Usually they were clean, but now they had blood on them—probably from Michelle’s cut. His throat felt very tight as he swallowed and sniffed gingerly at his palm.

  Darkness and fear. They’d locked her away, then. No pain, though. Peter got up and stood by the door. The hall was silent; he had some time. He closed his eyes and sniffed deeply. The room smelled stale. No one had been in it in some time. The chair he had been sitting in smelled like nothing. Peter walked around the room, breathing deeply until he got lightheaded. He leaned on the table, panting shallowly, when he caught a whiff near the other chair.

  Of c
ourse, Ian would have had the strongest and most lingering scent of anyone, especially after his adventure that afternoon. Peter leaned closer to the chair and closed his eyes.

  Ian was in considerable pain, but he gave them no information. The pain stopped. A tall woman with red hair said to take him to the eighth floor. Two men carried him away.

  That was all. Peter sat down again, exhausted. What good did it do him to know where or how Ian was? It’s not like he could get out of the room to save him or anything.

  He’d had enough. Arrest, betrayal, murder, incarceration. He was sure he’d have enough strength to deal with this if only he could get a little sleep.

  He rested his head on the table and closed his eyes.

  10

  Someone slapped Peter on the back of the head.

  “What?” he said, sitting up with a jolt.

  The Crane sat across the table from him, withdrawing an extended arm. His blonde hair was tousled and he looked annoyed, almost frightened.

  “You’re clearly not too concerned about your situation,” The Crane said.

  “Oh, but I am,” Peter said. “I just needed a rest. It takes a lot out of you, getting abducted and abused by heroes.”

  The Crane slapped him hard, open handed. Peter’s lip split and blood welled up inside his mouth. The harsh copper taste bought him back to reality. This is actually happening.

  “How long have you been a part of an illegal vigilante group?” The Crane asked.

  Peter stared at him. “You are aware of my power, right?”

  “How long have you been a part of an illegal vigilante group?” The Crane’s voice was louder.

  “I’m not part of a group,” Peter said. “I can tell things about people by smelling them. That’s not terribly useful for crime fighting.”

  The Crane slapped him again.

  “Look, what do you want from me?” Peter said, dabbing his lip with the heel of his hand to keep blood from getting on his shirt. “You’re clearly the more powerful person in this room. I could tell you where you’ve been by smelling you. You can fly and stretch your limbs out. The right person is fighting crime here. I can do no more than a mundane police officer.”