But what could I do?
My heart and soul knew. Even if I didn’t accomplish a thing, I had to try to get free and help those people.
I tried to take a deep breath. Surprisingly, even though my ribs ached something fierce, I managed to get one good breath. I tried to worm my arms closer to my chest, to get in position to try to push off whatever was on top of me. There had to have been a bit of loose fill in this hole with me, because I got my arms loose enough to pull them in, feeling at what was on top of me. Some slab of something, as big as I was, and solid. It had to be thousands of pounds, and right then, I should have given up.
That would have been the smart thing to do. Paragon would be here soon … but he wasn’t here now. My inaction would sign the death warrant for at least one person in this mess. I don’t know how I knew that, but I could feel it, deep down in my gut.
No, no one was going to die.
Shutting my eyes, I pressed my hands against the slab on top of me, pushing as hard as I could. For a moment that seemed like an eternity, nothing happened. As my muscles strained and quivered, I almost gave up, but if I did, someone, maybe even everyone, would die.
“Come on, Christine, you can do this,” I said to myself, the pulse of their fear, their panic throbbing inside me. “You have to do this.” I shoved again at the stone, pressing so hard it hurt.
The slab shifted.
Not a lot, just a hair really, but that was something.
Seizing the crazy bit of hope blooming in my heart, I redoubled my effort, pushing myself on, shoving with all my might as sweat beaded on my brow. Stone ground on steel as ever so slowly, the chunk of concrete and rebar moved upward. A shaft of dim, fiery-red light poked through a crack in the darkness to my right, and I shoved one last time. The wreckage slid to the left, letting in more of that glorious light.
I gave one last shove, moving it only a few centimeters, but that was exactly what I needed. The screech of twisting steel filled my ears as the slab started to slide, slipping down the pile of debris I was buried in. Gravity did the rest, grabbing hold of the slab and sending it tumbling down into the wreckage that filled what had once been Exhibition Hall 3.
“That was lucky,” I whispered to myself, wiping the sweat and grime from my brow. I wasn’t sure how I’d done it, and my arms felt like they were made of soft cheese, but I was free, and that was what mattered.
Grabbing onto both sides of my impromptu tomb, I painfully pulled myself to my feet. Ghostly white powder covered every inch of my skin and tattered clothes. Now that I was free, those wails of agony were louder, as were the pulls of their pain and suffering on my heart.
“Collapse when you’re done, Christine,” I told myself as I tried to get my bearings, sort through the cries, the crackle of flames, and the sirens to find the nearest victim.
Heat washed over me as I realized that the red light filtering through the ghostly clouds of dust wasn’t from the emergency lighting. It came from the raging fire from the Neural Feedback Bonder, fueled by ruptured oxygen and fuel lines. Shattered walls, twisted rubble, and sparking electronics were all around me. There was no longer a ceiling above me, as the second floor, the start of S.O.S.’s extensive labs, had collapsed down onto the first floor.
That was when I realized that there were more voices than just those of the reporters and Dr. Blair. Confusion and fear gnawed at me for a moment as I realized there was a floor’s worth of technicians, scientists, and everyone in between strewn in the rubble. Worse, with so many fearful emotions tearing at me, grasping for help, I almost couldn’t concentrate.
Still, I couldn’t let fear rule me, not when lives were at stake, and there was nothing to be confused about. I would simply go for the nearest voice, save whoever I found, and then go for the next one. And the next one. And the next, until there weren’t any more voices crying for help.
Ignoring the danger encroaching from all sides, I focused on the closest voice, a woman’s cry that mixed fear, pain, and anger in a way that could only have come from Dr. Becca Blair. Stumbling over a half-melted and mangled tangle of chairs, I found her, or at least what I thought was her.
A section of the clean room wall, now warped and clouded from the force and heat of the blast, formed the lid of a coffin while crumbled stone and twisted steel made the walls of it. Underneath, I could see a female silhouette weakly moving beneath the thick piece of plastic. It had to weigh a few hundred pounds itself, and I had no idea how I was going to move it … but I was going to try.
“Don’t worry,” I shouted above the din. “I’ve got you!”
A muffled cry answered me, and a new feeling joined the jumbled onslaught I sensed from the doctor, a little bit of hope. I latched on to that and, struggling to get another clean breath through the dust and smoke, I knelt down over the warped lid and thrust my fingers into the looser debris around the lip of it.
Though I could feel the rocks and shards of broken plastic scratch and tear at my fingers, I dug them through the debris until I had a solid grip around the melted edge of the wall segment trapping Dr. Blair.
Letting out a short huff, I closed my eyes and pushed up with my legs while pulling with my back and arms. My muscles strained as the thick sheet rose with me.
A cry ripped from my lips as I pushed up to my feet and with one last explosion of effort, flipped the warped hunk of wreckage over like a cheap card table. It hit a jagged steel strut, probably from the collapsed ceiling, and cracked down its length from the force of the flip.
As the dust settled from the crash, I stared in wonder at my scratched-up hands, and the few streaks of red on my fingertips. I didn’t think this was hysterical strength or pure adrenaline, not with the strange, tingling warmth flowing up and down my body. Even though it ached terribly, I could feel this new strength settling in my body.
That moment of introspection was gone in a flash as I turned my eyes to Dr. Blair. Amazingly, she wasn’t horrifically burned or torn apart as I expected would be the case given her proximity to the explosion.
Covered in black soot with a smattering of white dust now falling on her, I could see blood running down her face from a nasty gash in her forehead, as well as a peppering of other little cuts on her face, no doubt from where her now-missing glasses had broken apart. Still, it could have been, should have been a lot worse, since her clothes were burnt and torn.
I wasn’t going to question it. Someone was watching over us that day. I stepped close and knelt next to the doctor as she tried to focus on me.
“Who’s there?” Blair whispered before she descended into a fit of coughing from the smoke and dust. “I can’t see without my glasses.” She tried to move, to reach up to me, but she was weak, shaking from trauma and likely shock. Maybe she was suffering from internal injuries or a concussion.
All the more reason to get her to safety as quickly as I could. I almost blurted out my name in response to her question as I tried to figure out the best way to pick her up, but something instinctual stopped me. There was still so much anger coming off Dr. Blair, an almost physical wave that pierced through her pain, fear, and hope, and a whisper in my heart told me to not entirely trust her. One thing an investigative reporter learns early is to trust her instincts, so I trusted that hunch.
“I’m here to help, doctor,” I told her instead. Though the smoke burned my lungs, I managed to avoid a coughing fit myself as I gently scooped the doctor up, making sure I cradled her head and neck with one hand. Though I figured she had to weigh a solid one-hundred-and-forty pounds, she felt light as a feather to me, even though aches and pains still wracked my body.
Becca winced visibly as I balanced her in my arms, but only for a moment. She looked right up at me, and I swore that her eyes grew clear, a vast difference from the muddy blue I remembered. With that crystal-clear, penetrating gaze on me, she murmured, “My machine … save my machine.”
I turned from those eyes as I kept her cradled close, scanning for a clear exit thro
ugh the wreckage. “It’s gone,” I answered her as I spun around, trying to find an exit that wasn’t covered with wreckage and flames. “Just hold on and worry about yourself. You can always build another.”
I didn’t expect the torturous scream she gave in response to be worse than her cries of pain, but it was. Still, I couldn’t worry about that, not with more pleas for help reaching out. I had to get Dr. Blair to safety before I could help anyone else, so I contemplated trying to bull through the wreckage, trusting in this great strength I seemed to have now.
My gut feeling was that it was a bad call. It would only make things worse for the people still trapped here if I broke down more walls, and there was no guarantee I wouldn’t just trap the doctor or me again. No, I couldn’t just be a bull in a china shop. There had to be another way.
That was when I looked up. The floor was mostly gone from the laboratory above, but what debris the blast had made fell into the exhibition hall. The doors and the walls all looked intact. If only I could get up to one of the barely intact bits of the floor above, I could get through one of the doors, I hoped. Glancing back down at myself, I could feel my thighs and calves tight against what had once been nice, loose slacks.
Why couldn’t I use this strength to jump up there? I’d seen plenty of super-strong heroes do the same. The Brickyard Battler could leap an apartment building in one bound, after all.
Becca was still moaning about her lost prototype, so I cinched my grip on her. “Really, doctor, hold on.”
She blinked up at me, still not seeming to completely realize who I was or the depth of the danger we were in. “But my machine …?” Still, she weakly clung to my tattered suit jacket.
Tensing up, crouching low to prepare myself, I bit back on the throbbing aches that ate at me and let my muscles uncoil. The sudden force of my leap cracked the stone rubble I had been standing on as we launched through the smoke and fire. For a fraction of a moment, I thought I’d seriously miscalculated, not a surprise with the unknown power at my disposal, but we somehow landed on a half-foot line of intact flooring so lightly we barely disturbed the dust.
There was no time to be in awe of what I’d just done. Time was running out, and there were plenty of anguished sounds below me left. Trusting my instincts, another few pinpoint hops carried Becca and me from perch to perch along the mostly-destroyed floor of the second story lab, until we were at the main door, a steel structure that was more of an airlock than anything else. It made sense, being a laboratory and all, but it made my job no easier.
Of course, with the emergency situation, the thing was locked tighter than a drum.
There wasn’t a single moment of indecision or doubt, not anymore. Whatever power had woken inside me, I was making it my own and trusting it with everyone’s lives. I centered myself, tried to remember what my self-defense coach said about expressing your personal power, and kicked the door with everything I had.
The flat of my bare foot (I couldn’t remember when I’d lost my pump) slammed dead center into the metal, the titanium steel alloy buckling from the force and denting around my heel before the door frame, weaker than the airlock proper, gave way. With the sound of tortured metal and cracking stone, the whole thing flew off into the hall, sailing halfway to the far wall before hitting the floor with a tremendous whump.
The rebound of the kick bruised my heel and sent a shudder up my kicking leg that made the ache in that knee redouble, but I kept the pain out of my mind.
I’ll deal with it later. For now, save them, Christine, save all these people and get out of here.
And I meant the getting out of there part. Both my head and heart agreed on that one. I didn’t want to lose my private life like Paragon had, not yet, so I couldn’t be the one identified as the savior of all these people.
With that in mind, I gently laid Dr. Becca Blair off to one side before rushing back into the fire and smoke to save more lives.
There was no fear anymore, just the thrill of danger, the excitement of the power in my body, and the joy of saving lives.
3
“Wow,” Jackson Cabe, my editor at the New Harbor Sentinel, muttered, shaking his head slowly as I lay out, still half-covered in dust and grit, on the couch of his corner office. There were still some perks of being the editor of a major metropolitan newspaper, and this was one of them. “Now, how exactly do you plan to cover up that you’re the mystery woman responsible for saving ten people from this little lab accident?”
I had been wrong about one thing: I was pretty hyped on adrenaline the whole time after the accident. While it hadn’t been the source of this amazing power that was now in me, it had done a fair job of helping me through the pain. Now, it was coming back in spades, spikes of soreness stabbing at my back as I propped myself on my elbows to better look at him.
“I didn’t quite think that far ahead, boss,” I got out through gritted teeth. Considering I should have been splattered by the falling debris, I realized I was still far tougher than I ever was before. “Once I got everyone free, I knew it was smart if I wasn’t immediately connected to this whole thing. Not that I’m not proud of what I did or not incredibly hyped to be, well, a superhero now but —”
He raised his stubby fingers and pursed his lips. “Hold up, Chris. Let’s not jump with both feet into the deep end of the pool right away.” He was cute when he was digging in his heels like this, rubbing his perpetual five o’clock shadow. I could literally feel the stubbornness wash off of him like his favorite cologne. “I know you may feel like you’re living your dream here. Don’t lie, I’ve seen your apartment.”
Jackson had seen that and plenty more, that was for certain. He had come into his position young, one of the youngest men to take over as the Sentinel's editor, and he was still handsome in a grizzled way.
I shook my head. “I threw around concrete building blocks, Jack. While being a superhero and saving lives has always been my dream, whatever that Neural Feedback Bonder did to me is reality.” Getting all the way to a seated position, I turned to fully face him from the couch as he ran a hand through his short, stubbly blond hair. “You’re the one that always talks about how New Harbor and the world always needs more heroes. That’s why you brought me up to the city desk, remember? To cover superheroes and give them the positive, truthful coverage the supers beat needs!”
“Oh, you bet I remember,” he chuckled, casting a quick glance at the dust I had left on his couch. “However, let’s emphasize that whole ‘to cover’ part. I wanted you to get the scoop, feed me the news, not become it.” His hazel eyes grew serious, emphasizing the faint crow’s feet ten years of running the Sentinel had earned him. “I just don’t want you earning a plot in Valhalla, Chris, that’s all.”
Valhalla was where pretty much all the heroes who died in New Harbor were buried. The city paid the bill for it all, big funerals, parades, everything. While there were fewer deaths in the line of duty than you might think, the pomp and circumstance with each funeral was enough to remind me that being a hero was dangerous work. It was a sobering thought, but it didn’t do much to sway me.
“You mean a lot to me, both as one of my star reporters and, well, you know.”
We had a policy of never directly talking about our on-and-off, off-the-records relationship at work. I had earned my position before we ever entertained the idea that a few after-hours flings would be fun, and neither of us wanted to endanger our careers with charges of impropriety. Still, like teenagers meeting under the gym bleachers, we hooked up from time to time. Jackson was like the familiar old comforter I had on my couch, full of old scents and comforting warmth that I just couldn’t let go, no matter how much nicer the new blankets I bought were.
A soft smile graced my lips and Jackson almost melted in his chair. What was that about? God, I still looked like an utter mess. Shaking that oddness off, I pushed on. “I know, but … do you think I could live with myself if I didn’t use these powers to help people? You know me, Jackson.
Heck, would you be able to look at me the same way if I tried to ignore this, Mr. Crusading Journalist?”
“Why do you have to make so much sense all the time?” Jackson grumbled, managing to regain his composure, though he was checking me out far more than he usually did, well, while we were at work anyway. I prompted him to continue with a narrowing of my eyes, and he relented. “Fine, you’re absolutely right, Christine. I’d judge you, I couldn’t help it, and you’d be miserable keeping this hidden.”
He arched a bushy eyebrow. “How the hell did you manage to get here without getting on the news yourself?” He gestured in a circle encompassing my whole body. “You know, in that condition.”
I looked down at myself and laughed. “I sort of jumped here? It’s hard to explain because I can’t say I precisely flew either. There was definitely rapid motion through the air in bursts, if that helps any.”
As he gave me a sharp look, I threw up my hands helplessly. “Look, I’m kind of figuring it out myself, though once I got to the Hudson Building, it was easy.” The Sentinel comprised the top five floors of said building, one of the iconic pieces of the Downtown skyline for forty years. “By luck, my ID badge survived the explosion, so I just used it to unlock the roof access. From there, I just sneaked down a flight of stairs and right to your office. I’m not even sure anyone saw me, tucked in their cute little cubicles and all.”
“Well, I’ll have to misplace the security camera footage, and we need a cover story, something to explain why you’re here.” Jackson tapped at the embedded tablet in his black glass desk. “You know I’m going to have to call emergency services any minute. I bet you’ve got S.O.S. security and New Harbor’s finest trying to find you. It’s not like they don’t know you attended the exhibition.”
I took a deep breath and got to my feet. Now that I wasn’t running on the high of the moment, everything looked a bit off, as if the entire world was just a little smaller. Did I get taller? And the way all my clothes felt a hair too tight, right down to my bra … were my breasts bigger too? I tried to shake off the sensation of being an alien in my own skin and focused.
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