"They're working out a difference of opinion," Doc said.
"Should we stop them?" he asked.
"No way," Emily said. "How else we gonna know who's stronger?"
Doc shook his head. "It's a long standing tradition among heroes. Fight first, work out the aggression, talk about it afterward," he said.
"You gonna let them destroy the training room?" Titus said.
A bolt of Billy's concussive light blasts bounced off the observation deck window and scattered like broken glass.
Titus jumped.
Emily pressed her nose to the window.
"The room was built for this sort of thing," Doc said. "They'll be fine."
"Fine?" Titus asked.
Another loud bang echoed when Jane bounced Billy off the ceiling. Rather than falling, he flew straight back down, fist cocked and ready to throw a punch.
"They'll also be easier to talk down after they've worked out some aggression. Let it pass. How did your fight go by the way?" Doc said.
"You look like someone worked your face over with a tennis racket," Emily said.
"I'll get better," Titus said. "We have a . . . We have a prisoner? I guess? We brought him in, didn't know what else to do with him."
"Good," Doc said. "We'll call someone in to help us. The Tower isn't the place for keeping super-powered beings who've been captured."
Billy and Jane, now tangled up, and throwing weak punches at each other, crashed into the window again, and fell arm in arm to the floor.
"We could just lock him in there," Emily said.
Doc pointed at Emily as if to say something, shook his head, and turned to leave. "Don't let them kill each other," he said, over his shoulder. "Titus, come with me. There's someone you should meet."
"You were going to kill her!" Jane said, punctuating her lines with her fists.
She struck him in the face, sending him sprawling across the training room and leaving a Billy-shaped dent in the wall. Billy-shaped dents littered the room now; although his force fields kept her punches from really doing much damage, he could not, in any way, stop himself from being tossed around like a kitten.
"I didn't know she was going to do that!" Billy said.
Jane moved in to thump him again and he shoved her back with a double-handed light blast.
Why won't you tell her? Dude said.
Billy dodged another punch from Jane which left a fist-sized hole in the wall.
Tell her what?
That the blast you had built up would not have been enough to kill her.
Billy caught Jane's next blow with his hand, but while his protective field could keep her from breaking his fingers, he didn't match her strength, physically, and the shock thrust him flat on his back.
Because I didn't know it wasn't strong enough to kill her, Billy said. He wiggled his way out from a swinging kick from Jane.
Yes you did.
I swear. Thought I'd kill her with it.
Billy, I am inside your mind. You know you could not do it. It is admirable. Tell her.
"Jane," Billy said, interrupted by another smack to the mouth.
"We don't do stuff like that. We can't go around . . . killing people because we don't think we can help them!" she said.
He tried to lean back against the nearest wall, missing entirely, and flopped down on his backside. Billy scooted back so he could rest his shoulder against one of the dented areas his own body had damaged.
"You're right," Billy said.
"What?"
"You're right. She thought I was going to kill her, and that's why she did what she did," Billy said. "And I . . . didn't want to, but how else were we going to save the people in that neighborhood she was heading for?"
"We would have figured something out."
"Then talk to me, Jane," Billy said.
"About what?"
"What should we have done?"
Jane's nose wrinkled and her eyebrows drew together; Billy couldn't tell if she was furious or about to cry. Instead, she sat down across from him and anxiously pulled her hair back and away from her face.
"I have no idea," she said.
"Me either."
"She was like us. Just one of us without anyone to help her though."
"I know."
"And someone used her. Those people in the helicopter. Used her like a weapon. That could have been any of us. Could have been Emily or me or you — just as easily as that poor girl."
"We'll get them, Jane," Billy said.
She looked at her feet for a few seconds, lost in thought.
"We never even knew her name," she said.
They stared at each other a long moment, the weight of what happened sinking in.
Guilt gnawed in Billy's stomach.
"You're a mess," he said, trying to break the mood.
"So are you."
"Let's not fight anymore," Billy said.
Jane laughed, the sad, choking, self-conscious type of laugh that you hear at funerals. A pair of exhausted tears left lean streaks in the soot on her face.
"But punching you was the only thing making me feel better," she said.
Billy dragged himself to his feet and almost tipped over when he stretched to full height. He offered a hand to Jane to help her up. She stood with less trouble than he had.
"Let's talk to Doc," Billy said. "We can find out if there's someone else you can knock around instead."
Chapter 40:
Tested
The mountainside base rumbled with movement as personnel began clearing equipment for transport. Agent Black observed the activity from a window in the conference room above the main atrium. He marveled at how much work had gone into making this underground base habitable, to make it almost corporate, only to be abandoned because of paranoia. They received orders that morning to move on to a secondary location and to leave no trace of their activities.
Meanwhile, Rose retrieved the surveillance results of their two-pronged provocation of these new metahumans. She seemed appalled at how poorly events had gone; Black was relieved they hadn't thrown a full-fledged attack at them before testing their behaviors in the field.
"Project Tinder was a complete loss," Rose began, projecting footage on screen of the raging forest fire the test subject had started. "Her potential as a superweapon was enormous. I'm not pleased we weren't able to salvage anything from her."
"There's no shortage of pyrokinetics out there," the Lady said. She wore high heels, was dressed in an elegant tuxedo-styled shirt and skirt, and her hair was pinned back away from her face. If not for the streams of fire drifting out of her eyes, she'd have looked like she was perfectly suited to sit in a boardroom and conduct a project deconstruction. Black wondered if the Lady was mocking them.
"If we'd been able to use Tinder, she could have been another option for controlling natural disasters," Rose said.
"Trust me, there's firestarters everywhere, darling," the Lady said. "You'll find another one."
"She destroyed herself, right? Am I reading these scans correctly?" Black said.
The death reflected on the screen bothered him. Not softhearted by any stretch, but he would feel better about the whole experiment if they were using older test subjects. Something about these throwaway kids troubled him. Admit it, Black, you were a throwaway test subject once upon a time yourself. Stop empathizing.
"She overloaded herself. Went supernova," Rose said. "What I'm curious about is this though." She tapped a few keys and cut to footage of the kid in blue and white — the one with the laser-like blast powers — who seemed to be prepping for a massive strike only to be stopped by his partner, the girl dressed in red and gold.
"Looks like a killing strike to me," Black said.
"Possibly," said Rose. "Which tells me either he's one to look out for in the future because he's not afraid to pull that trigger, or . . . "
"Or you might bring him in yourselves," the Lady said. "Don't bother."
Rose quirk
ed an eyebrow at her.
"Why not?"
"Petal, I've made a career out of reading bluffs," the Lady said. "That boy could have killed our girl at any point. He was procrastinating. Waiting for someone or something else to take the decision out of his hands. That's what you want to know about him, not if he's a killer."
"So he's a weak link?" Rose said. "Funny, from what we've seen he's second only to the girl next to him in terms of power scale."
"I wouldn't call him weak. I'd say he lacks confidence," the Lady said. "The girl does too, but she deals with it better. Watch her movements. She's cautious but doesn't hesitate to take act."
"Didn't really work for her here," Black said.
Rose allowed the video footage to play out. "And I wouldn't want to pose as junior psychologist, but she left her boy here behind after they failed to stop Tinder. Perhaps some infighting?"
"They're kids," the Lady said. "Adults have infighting. Kids have spats."
"Don't you think you're underestimating them?" Black said.
The Lady smiled broadly.
"I wouldn't undervalue what they're capable of. Just saying their brains aren't fully formed yet. Don't let them fool you into thinking they're more experienced at this sort of thing than they really are."
Rose switched over to the footage from the Hyde experiment. The showdown in the street between Hyde and the werewolf played out on screen in silence. Rose's body language altered completely; she was now tense and attentive.
"Relax, Rose. This one is yours," Black said. "Nobody's going to take your werewolf away from you."
"It's not that," she said. "It's that he's evolving. At the lab he acted completely out of control. Here he's more rational. Still fighting like a berserker, but you can see it from the way he moves, even the transition from human to werewolf — he's getting better at it."
"What does that mean?" Black said.
"I don't know."
"What about the footage from the drones that pursued our lost tech?" he said.
"That's interesting," Rose said, tension easing slightly from her voice.
Lighter topic. Get her away from her beef with werewolves, Black thought. "They were older models, cheap hunter killers never meant to take out metahumans, but we've got something."
Rose called up the grainy eye-camera footage from their robotic drones as they fought the two girls in the apartment hallway. The drones were defeated easily, but as Rose noted, they were really meant to eliminate civilians, not legitimate threats, and anyway, they'd been sitting dormant for so long they were significantly outdated models.
"This girl," Rose said, tapping the screen as the masked fighter appeared. "She's good."
"Any indication of what she's got up her sleeves in terms of augmentations?" Black said.
"Nothing so far," Rose said. "But watch these moves. The other girl has some level of invulnerability so she over-relies on it. She has no reason to develop into a skilled fighter because she's stronger and more indestructible than pretty much anything that comes her way."
Black watched the footage again and paused the screen.
"This girl on the other hand, has been training in legitimate fighting styles for years," he said. "I recognize at least a half-dozen schools of martial arts in just these few minutes of footage, and she fights mean. Look at her."
"You sound as if you like her," Rose said.
"So do you. We're able to appreciate a cutthroat fighter when we see one, I guess."
"Maybe she's a mundane," the Lady said. "Every so often a mundane puts on a mask and holds his or her own with the monsters and aliens."
"You might be right," Rose said. "But what makes me more curious is why all of the drones' surveillance cameras shut off simultaneously when the fight moved outside the building."
"Some elements of that response were magic-based," the Lady said. "Someone on site employed a very simple spellcasting technique to tinker with the footage. But there's another thing entirely at work, too."
"You mean technological?" Black asked.
"Not my field. I'm the magical consultant, you're the cyborg."
"Well, this is all we have," Rose said.
"No it's not," the Lady said.
"How so?" Rose said.
"They took your Hyde project captive."
"He's a little jerk anyway," Black said. "We should have dumped him at the start of the experiment."
"Not what I meant," the Lady said. "Haven't you placed trackers in all of the test subjects?"
"We have," Rose said.
"And cortex bombs?"
A grin crawled across Rose's face.
"Then darlings," the Lady said. "What you have now are options."
Chapter 41:
Division of What
The Tower, for better or worse, housed an area that amounted to a set of holding cells. When Jane and Billy followed Doc, Emily, and a worse for wear Titus, down into a deeper section none of them had visited before, they found their captive, the kid Titus had fought, in one of the cells.
Kate stood guard outside, cutting a sort of nightmare figure. She selected a place between the overhead lighting to stand in maximum shadows and altered her mask to white out her eyes.
"What's your deal," the kid in the cell said. "Don't talk?"
Kate remained perfectly still, arms crossed.
"The werewolf your boyfriend? I bet he is. Bet you go for the weirdos," the kid said.
Jane waited for Kate to knock his teeth out, but she just stood there, expressionless. Then, when Doc and the crew arrived, she took a few steps away from everyone else, to watch from a distance.
"It's the freak brigade," the kid said. "What happened to you two? Someone set off a bomb in your pants?"
Jane forgot that she and Billy were covered in soot with burns and tears littering their uniforms.
"Can I squish his brain?" Emily asked. "I think I know how to do that now."
She made a fist with her right hand.
"Little bubble. Squish."
"We're waiting for someone," Doc said. "Got a name, kid?"
"I'm Hyde," he said.
"Of course you are," Titus said. "I figured it was either that or Kong."
Doc waved Titus off.
"Who you working with?"
"Don't work for nobody," the kid said.
"Right," Doc said.
At that moment, the door at the end of the cellblock opened, and the skinniest old man Jane had ever seen walked in. He sported an impressive gray moustache, wore a fedora, and the sleeves of his light blue dress shirt were rolled up. His tie was knotted perfectly, but loose around his thin neck. He carried an old military style rucksack over one shoulder.
"Gang, this is Sam Barren. An old friend."
"Pleasure," Sam said. He took off his hat respectfully, revealing a mostly bald head, any hair that remained was predominantly gray.
"Hello, sir," Jane said. "I'm — "
"Just code names, please," Sam said. "It's safer that way."
Doc laughed.
"Sam is the head of the Division," he said. "He's worked with superhumans and heroes for decades. He's got rules."
"Former head," Sam said. "You know they shut us down after all that bad business happened. We weren't needed nearly as much as we were in the beginning, anyway."
"The Division of what?" Billy asked
Sam roared with laughter.
"Did I make a joke?"
"You did, actually," Doc said.
"We were just called the Division, capital D," Sam said. "But everyone always wanted to know what we were the division of, and so it became an in-joke with law enforcement. 'Call in the Division of What, we have a super-powered problem.'"
"I think the Division of What is an awesome name. We should steal it," Emily said.
Sam extended his hand to her.
"And you are?"
"Entropy Emily," she said.
"I'm almost afraid to ask what you do," he said.
"I make things weird," she said, nodding in a self-satisfied way.
The rest of the group introduced themselves easily. When Kate identified herself, Sam pointed at her.
"You, I know about," he said.
"You do?" she asked.
"When you first started up I was still keeping tabs on what was going on out there. Heard we had ourselves a do-gooder in town. I was hoping you'd turn out okay."
Kate nodded, but said nothing.
"And what do we have here," Sam said, walking up to the cell.
"Bite me, old man," Hyde said.
"Heard someone already did that today," he said.
The old man rummaged around his rucksack, then pulled out a blocky device like an oversized remote control.
"What's that?" Hyde asked.
"A neat little contraption I boosted from the Division before they shut us down," Sam said. He winked at Jane. "Always figured I'd need this stuff again. Heard they sold a lot of our gear once we were gone."
Sam held the device in Hyde's direction and tapped a few buttons.
"What. What are you doing? What's happening?"
"Relax, twinkle toes, I'm just scanning you," Sam said.
"How are we looking?" Doc said.
"Without that device strapped to his chest, he's just an ordinary kid," he said. "You probably didn't need to bring me in."
"Why not?" Jane asked.
"The Division was the group that locked up all the super-powered folks when they were caught," Sam said. "Doc here thought he might have one for transport."
"Transport where?" Hyde said.
Jane heard the bravado he'd possessed earlier fading.
"Were thinking we'd throw you in with the other metahumans," Sam said.
"Not crazy about that idea," Doc said. "You're giving the amateur access to the professionals. He goes in, makes a few connections, next thing you know he's in the latest league of evil somewhere."
"Send me there! You can send me there. I'll be fine," the kid said.
"Nah," Sam said. "You're just a regular little guy without your machine. We can hand you over to a standard prison."
"What?" Hyde's voice leapt two octaves.
Billy burst out laughing.
"Did you attack us just to get yourself locked up with other supervillains?" Billy said.
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