by Stan Lee
The pain from the bars seemed to surge, growing even stronger. Steven gasped silently, knowing he had to remain quiet. Nicky and Josie were still distracting the guards, but sooner or later all eyes would turn to Steven. If that happened too soon, his escape plan would be ruined.
Zodiac images seemed to flash and flicker before Steven’s eyes. A bright red rooster, trumpeting the arrival of day. A fierce ox, head lowered to charge. A flash of searing dragon breath.
Steven concentrated, using Jasmine’s meditation techniques to block out the pain. Again he sought out his grandfather, using the old man’s calm face as an anchor. Together they sank down again, retreating deep inside Steven’s mind, seeking refuge from the searing agony.
I can’t do it, Steven thought. It’s too much pain. I can’t pull this off.
An image of the Zodiac’s rabbit flashed before his eyes.
Kim, he thought. I’ve got to do this for her. If I don’t stop Maxwell—she’ll be—
The Tiger roared.
Zodiac energy flared up around Steven. He reared his head back and let out a scream, long and deep and primal. All the pain, all the rage and regret and loneliness inside him, seemed to erupt, expelled from him in one explosive moment.
When he shook his head and returned to his senses, he was standing outside the bars.
The guards whirled around to look at him. For a moment, everyone stopped. The guards blinked, stunned.
That moment was all Steven needed. He launched himself into the air and kicked out, striking the first guard a fierce blow on the neck. The guard lost his footing and stumbled into the energy bars leading to Josie’s cage. He screamed.
Josie reached between the bars and grabbed the guard’s collar. She pulled him close, jamming his head against the electrically charged bars. The guard let out a series of sharp gasping noises.
The other guard drew his weapon, advancing slowly. Steven could feel the Tiger energy fading; he wouldn’t be able to hold it for long. He dropped to all fours and loped over to the startled guard. He swept out one hand like a paw, knocking the energy weapon out of the guard’s hand. Then he clenched his other hand into a fist and slammed it into the man’s stomach.
The guard dropped to the ground—and the Tiger winked off, as if a switch had been thrown. Steven staggered backward.
He shook his head, trying to clear it. The energy was gone; no trace of it remained. He felt exhausted, spent, more tired than he could ever remember being in his life.
Josie’s voice cut through his mental fog, rousing him. “Well?” she said. “Let us out!”
Steven looked over at her. The first guard, the one she’d pulled against the bars, lay unconscious on the floor. Steven ran to him and pulled an electronic control key off of the guard’s belt, then aimed it at Josie’s bars.
A doorway-size gap appeared in the energy. Josie stepped out, took a long look at Steven, and smiled. She gave him a friendly punch on the arm, which hurt more than it should have.
“Hey,” Nicky called. “Over here?”
Steven crossed to his cell, with Josie just behind. Nicky lay on the floor, grinning.
“I’m not really sick!” Nicky said. “Good acting, huh?”
Josie rolled her eyes. Steven shrugged and pointed the remote control at the cell, deactivating the bars.
“I’ll alert the Golden Globes,” Josie said dryly. “Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
“SO,” ROXANNE SAID. “That’s it.”
Next to her, Liam let out a long sigh. “Aye,” he said.
“This is a very poor idea,” Duane said.
The three of them stood shoulder to shoulder in the war room, staring up at the big screen. It showed an aerial view of Maxwell’s compound in the desolate Australian outback. The compound’s large central building, white and featureless, squatted on the red sand. Similar smaller buildings, all of them round or oval, fanned out around it in a regular pattern. Two access roads curved in from opposite sides, breaking through patches of sparse scrub and leafless trees.
“And Jasmine wants us to attack that?” Liam asked.
“In less than twenty-four hours,” Roxanne replied.
“I love a good brawl, but we’re shorthanded.” Liam turned to Duane. “Any word from Steven?”
Duane shook his head.
Roxanne frowned. Steven had been missing for more than a day—which wasn’t like him at all. And it leaves us with a big hole in the team, she thought. If we’re really planning to assault our worst enemy in his home…
“Dafari,” she said, turning to the console where the computer expert sat. “Can you zoom in on the complex?”
Dafari nodded and typed in a few commands. Up on the big wall screen, the strange dome-like buildings grew larger. They looked like plastic toys, meticulously arranged along the sandy red plain.
“What about Ox?” she asked, turning to Liam. “You really think we can trust him?”
“I’m gettin’ tired of answering that question,” Liam said. “I like the bloke, but I’m not his brother and I’m not his sponsor. Like I said, the only way to know is to test him in battle.”
Just then, Ox walked in. His face was grim. Roxanne couldn’t tell whether he’d heard them talking about him.
“A meeting?” Ox said. “I must have missed the e-mail.”
Duane glared at him. “Perhaps there was no e-mail.”
“You’re here now,” Liam said.
Ox looked around. “Where’s Steven, anyway?”
“Steven? He’s in Berlin.” Billy, the new quartermaster, had just entered the room. He looked around nervously as everyone turned to stare at him at once. “Something wrong?”
“Berlin?” Roxanne asked. “Steven told you he was going there?”
“He followed the Tiger energy!” Duane said.
Liam marched up to Billy and pointed a finger in his face. “Why didn’t you mention this before, mate?”
“H-he told me not to?” Billy said.
Duane frowned. “We told him to wait. For more data—”
“It is gone,” Dafari said.
They all walked over to Dafari’s station. His screen showed a map of Berlin, with no overlays or winking lights.
“He’s right,” Duane said. “The Tiger energy I located…there is no trace of it now.”
Liam frowned. “Is the word trap popping into anyone else’s mind?”
Duane leaned down to tap on Dafari’s keyboard. “If Steven were there,” he said, “he’d be shining like a bright light on this board. B-but there’s no sign of him, either.”
“Maybe he has his wave blocker on?” Roxanne asked.
“That’d block him from Maxwell’s tracking devices but not ours. I’m not getting a ping from his phone, either.”
“We should do a wide-range search,” Dafari said. “I am setting the scanners specifically to detect Tiger energy.”
Duane sat down next to him. “It’ll take a few minutes to cover the—oh, wow. That was fast.”
Roxanne leaned down to look over their shoulders. The computer screen showed a flashing tiger icon.
“Is that Steven?” she asked. “Where is he?”
Duane pointed up at the wall screen. The image of Maxwell’s Australian headquarters, white buildings against red soil, was still displayed. In between two of the buildings, a tiger icon flashed.
Roxanne let out a long sigh. “Guess we better tell Jasmine.”
“Jasmine? She’s gone, too.”
Again, they all turned to look at Billy.
“Billy, mate,” Liam said, “you have got to start leading with the important stuff!”
“Sh-she asked for a basic field supply kit and took off.” Billy swallowed nervously as Roxanne and Liam closed in on him. “I think she said something about moving up the timetable.”
Roxanne gestured up at the screen. “She’s already on her way. Without us.”
“Are ye surprised?” Liam asked. “Jasmine’s barely said three
words in the past month. She doesn’t think she needs us anymore.”
Billy shook his head. “I shouldn’t have let her go. I shouldn’t have let either of them go.”
Roxanne smiled at him. “You’re a hell of a quartermaster, Billy. But I don’t think you could have stopped the Tiger.”
“Much less the Dragon, mate!” Liam said.
A movement up on the screen caught Roxanne’s attention. “Steven’s icon is moving,” she said, crossing back over to Duane’s station. “Are they transporting him somewhere?”
“I—I don’t like this,” Duane said. His eyes flashed from screen to screen, his fingers flying across his keyboard and then Dafari’s. “Maxwell can screen Zodiac signatures from our scans, can’t he?”
“Yes,” Ox said. “If he didn’t want you to know Steven was there, we wouldn’t be seeing this.”
“Again,” Liam said, “that word trap.”
“Yeah, but we can’t just leave him there.” Roxanne sucked in a deep breath. “Now we have to go.”
She looked around the room. Liam was right: they were shorthanded. Duane was already absorbing data, planning the attack, but his powers weren’t suited to a head-on assault. Liam would fight until he dropped, but his abilities were mostly defensive. Roxanne herself could break through force fields and walls, but she was no match for an army.
So that leaves…
“Malik,” Roxanne said. “You in?”
Ox smiled and cracked his knuckles. “About time,” he said. “I won’t let you down.”
“We should get moving, like, yesterday,” Liam said. “Jasmine’s already got a big head start—”
A sharp beeping noise rose up from the console in front of Duane. Everyone froze. Duane looked at the screen, swept his hand across it, then turned sharply to stare at Ox.
Ox cocked his head and stared back.
Duane reached out and, in a quick motion, snatched up a handheld analyzer from its cradle. He held it up, listening as the piercing beep-beep-beep continued.
“What is it?” Roxanne asked.
“The Zodiac power scan,” Duane said. “It’s focused on Australia. But something is…”
He stood up and waved the analyzer in the air. He moved it toward the wall screen and the beeping noise softened. Then he held it up to Ox and the beeping grew louder—almost deafening.
Ox just stared at him. Everyone else gathered around Duane, watching.
“In his forehead,” Duane said, waving the analyzer around Ox’s head. “Just beneath the skin. Something’s transmitting a signal.”
“A signal?” Roxanne asked. “A signal to where?”
“To the same point in Australia.”
Liam stared in disbelief. “Maxwell’s headquarters?”
“Within a kilometer, anyway.”
Roxanne felt her Zodiac power flaring. “What kind of signal is it?”
“I can answer that,” Dafari said.
They all turned toward him. Still seated at his console, he punched a few buttons and then gestured up at the wall screen.
The view of Maxwell’s headquarters was gone from the screen. In its place was a washed-out real-time image of the Zodiac team: Roxanne, Liam, and Duane, with Billy standing just behind them. Their necks were craned around, and they were looking away.
That’s us, Roxanne realized. It’s the view from Ox’s forehead!
“It is a camera,” Dafari said.
One by one, the team turned back toward Ox. Up on the screen, their images mirrored their movements, staring straight out at the room.
“Well,” Ox said, his face stony, “I guess that’s that.”
In a dark cave on the other side of the world, the same image shone out of an old CRT screen. The monitor was recessed into a stone wall, as if some deranged interior decorator had installed it in the rock wall.
A small man raised his eyebrows and reached out a sharp finger, pointing in turn at each Zodiac member. Rooster. Ram. Pig.
The man smiled. “Looks like our little game may be up,” he said.
Other small men gathered around him. They lurked in the shadows, waiting for his instructions.
An alarm rang out.
“Ah! We have places to be,” the man said. “Let’s move.”
He cast one last look at the Zodiacs staring out of his video screen. Then, with a crook of his finger, he led the others down the hole and away.
WITH JOSIE’S HELP, Steven managed to unlock the elevator in the center of the prison chamber, using the unconscious guard’s palm to unlock the mechanism. There were buttons indicating the ground floor and an intermediate security level. Steven reached for the ground-floor button, but Josie stopped him.
“Better idea,” she said.
She reached down and pressed an unmarked button underneath all the others. The elevator lurched and started to move—not up but down.
“There’s a level below this one?” Steven asked.
“This facility dates back to World War Two,” Josie explained. “Our best escape route is the old evacuation tunnels beneath the holding cells.”
“I didn’t know about that,” Nicky said.
“You might try reading the mission briefs.”
“We’re in the middle of the desert,” Steven said. “Where do the tunnels go?”
“Not far—just out to the checkpoint on the access road, at the entrance to the compound. We’ll either have to fight our way out from there or slip past the guards. But at least we’ll have a head start.”
“What do we do then?” Nicky asked. “We don’t have our powers. How are we gonna survive in the desert?”
Josie grimaced. “One problem at a time.”
The elevator door opened. Steven stepped out and sucked in a breath of stale air.
The tunnel was low and narrow. Bare pipes ran along the stone ceiling, dripping water onto the sludgy floor. The air was humid, the desert heat seeping in to merge with the moisture from the pipes.
The passageway curved around; it was hard to see more than a few dozen meters ahead. One wall was piled with old decaying stone blocks. “What are those?” Steven asked.
“Remains of a temple,” Josie replied. “From somewhere in the Middle East, I forget where. Maxwell collects treasures from all the places where Vanguard fights its wars….I guess he piles up the extra inventory down here.”
Steven peered down the passageway. Past the temple blocks, he could see a pile of African masks and what looked like an American Civil War cannon.
“Vanguard gets around,” he murmured.
“Hey,” Nicky growled. “Can we get a move on?”
Josie nodded and started down the tunnel. “Shouldn’t be far to the checkpoint,” she said. “Maybe three-quarters of a mile.”
Steven followed, dodging a puddle on the floor. “So Maxwell just stole your powers?”
“Well, we did run out on him in the middle of a battle,” Nicky said.
Josie turned to glare at him.
“I’m just saying,” Nicky added.
They rounded a bend in the corridor. Steven slowed to look at a life-size statue of a Mayan warrior, in a crouching position on the tunnel floor. It looked as if the Mayan had just settled there, a hundred or a thousand years before, and never bothered to get up.
Steven hurried to catch up with Nicky and Josie. “I guess Ox was right. He said Maxwell would throw anybody under the bus—”
“Ox?” Josie stopped and whirled to face Steven. “Malik? You’ve seen him?”
“Uh, yeah.”
Should I have said that? Steven wondered. But Josie’s face didn’t look angry, just concerned.
“He came to us,” Steven said. “Ox—I mean, Malik. He wanted to join up.”
“Did you say yes?” Josie asked.
“When I left, he was on some kind of probation.” He frowned. “Why? Do you not trust him or something?”
“It’s—” Josie turned away. “Ah, it’s nothing.”
Nicky gr
inned. “Josie likes Malik.”
“No!” she exclaimed. “Not—not like that. It’s just, we were friends. I thought I could rely on him, trust him to have my back. And then, in the middle of the Dragon’s Gate battle, he disappeared.”
“We disappeared, too,” Nicky added. “Again, just saying.”
“I tried to find him,” Josie said. “Put out the usual feelers, contacted everyone we’d worked with together. But he’d just vanished.”
Nicky laughed—a dry angry laugh. “Malik always thought he was better ’n me. Now he’s crawling to our enemies for help.”
Both Josie and Steven turned to glare at him that time. Nicky held up a hand. “I’m just—”
“—just saying,” Steven said. “Got it.”
“Anyway, kid,” Nicky said, “your team doesn’t look like it’s doing much better than ours. We hear you’re losing members.”
“That’s none of your business.”
“No Rabbit anymore,” Nicky continued, “and you might lose your Rooster, too, huh?”
Steven clenched his fists. “Shut up.”
But Nicky kept pushing. “And then there’s Carlos.”
Steven frowned. “What do you know about him?”
Josie’s laugh surprised him. It was sharp, hard, and completely humorless.
“Believe me, kid,” she said, “Carlos is Maxwell’s creature now. Maybe he always was.”
An alarm rang out, filling the tunnel. A series of sharp electronic tones, repeated at regular intervals.
“I think we ought to run,” Josie suggested.
Steven nodded. They took off at a steady pace, fast but not fast enough to tire out. Still, Steven had to strain to keep up. These guys are trained soldiers, he thought. Good thing I’m younger than them!
“Carlos is a brainiac, all right,” Nicky said as they ran. “But it’s that little girl Mince that scares me.”
“Yeah,” Steven said. “Mince. What’s her deal?”
“She’s one of the smartest people in the world,” Josie said. “But she’s also a complete sociopath—it’s in her file. Girl’s got absolutely no concept of right and wrong.”
“Oh yeah?” Steven said. “What’s in your file?”