Hero

by Robert J. Crane

  “Not you, dude,” I said.

  “I’m the only one here, though.”

  “Hardly,” came a voice from around the corner, and ArcheGrey came strolling around a moment later, her overcoat baggy at her arms. Her stormy eyes fell on me. “Was that you?”

  “Because I have heretofore undisclosed talents for hacking security systems and televisions?” I said, and she scaled back the hate glare a degree or two. “No, it wasn’t me. But it was aimed at me.”

  “It wasn’t Jamal’s signature,” Arche seemed to decide right there, lowering her head to bathe in thought. “And he couldn’t find us in any case …” Her head snapped up. “Cassidy Ellis?”

  “Nailed it,” I said. “She’s still a little peeved about that Chesapeake Bay Bridge thing where you guys loosed the nutbag that killed her boyfriend.”

  “We didn’t loose a ‘nutbag,’” she said, shaking her head. “Stepane loosed himself.”

  “The point remains,” I said with a shrug, “he killed her boyfriend, and she’s not the forgiving type, so …” I shrugged again. “Might want to batten down the e-hatches, Arche. I have a feeling there’s a storm brewing.”

  “I am so lost right now,” Aleksy said. “I should have gone left at the last turn on my patrol. It was up to my discretion. Why did I go this way?”

  “Because it’s fate, Aleksy,” I said, turning on him. “You know that latitude you mentioned?” He nodded. “Howzabout using it to tour me around the castle?”

  “I need to report this intrusion to Hades,” Arche said, fiddling with a tablet she pulled out of her coat. “Do you have anything else you’d like to tell us?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “you look like a flasher in that outfit.” I gave Arche a thumbs up, and she blinked at me, looking away from her tablet for a second. “I’m going for a look around. Come on, Aleksy. Show me the sights.” I snapped my fingers.

  “Now I’m a tour guide.” Aleksy shook his head. “This … this is not what I signed up for.”

  “You jonesing to be part of a battle?” I asked, as Aleksy hurried to catch up with me. I stalked past him, leaving Arche back at the intersection, glaring at me as she held her finger to the tablet’s socket. Communing with the e-world, even as she glared, no doubt. “Stick with me, bud. Because trouble always seems to be coming my way.” I narrowed my eyes as I walked down the corridor. “Whether I like it or not.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “… And these are the dungeons,” Aleksy said, waving his hands expressively. What was he expressing? A clear desire to be anywhere else so long as it involved not being near me, or in charge of me, or in my presence, at all. We stood in a hallway under the castle’s rock, five levels down from where we’d started, the only light coming from the dim overhead bulbs.

  He was officially the worst tour guide ever.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” I said, looking around at the dull stone walls with a sigh. He’d taken me past the kitchens, given me a very perfunctory tour of the guard barracks, which was inhabited by a lot of guys who looked kinda like Aleksy himself, down to the long-tailed-cat-in-a-room-full-of-rocking-chairs look on their faces. The armory was locked, of course, the gym was filled to the brimming with army guys using metahuman weights, the kitchens were surprisingly quiet (probably because of the hour), and now …

  Now we were in Dracula’s dungeons. Where there was no screaming, no wailing.

  “Do you guys have any prisoners down here?” I asked. I doubted he’d tell me the truth.

  “No!” Aleksy said, looking all offended I’d asked. “This is vestigial, from the days when this was the governmental center. The justice bureau handles prisoners, and they are down in Bredoccia. This is … uhm … how you say it? Historical site, now. Nothing down here except empty cells.”

  “Oh?” I brushed past him and threw one open. Sure enough, it was empty, didn’t look like anyone had been down here in a while. There was no bedding, no toilet facilities, just some boxes piled in the corner. “Huh. Guess it’s a storage room now.” I walked over to one of the crates and popped it open. There was a stack of plastic cafeteria chairs inside, never unboxed, the kind you might find in a corporate lunchroom. “Well, that’s … kinda dull.”

  “It takes a lot of logistics to run a castle, you know,” Aleksy said. “It’s not all dungeons and torture chambers. There’s probably a storage room around here just for stewed beets.” He rubbed his stomach. “Best meal the cafeteria makes.”

  “That makes me so sad for you.” I rolled my eyes and opened another crate. Styrofoam cups waited within. “Yeah, these dungeons have seen better days.”

  “If you’ll excuse me, miss,” Aleksy said, “you seem almost disappointed that are no prisoners.”

  I was almost disappointed. Because I’d come to Revelen expecting a fight, and great evil—the country was run by Dracula, for crying out loud.

  Instead I’d found my long-lost grandmother and great-grandfather. Talk about defying expectations. I tapped my fingers on the wooden crate. “Well, balls.”

  “Miss?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m totally not disappointed.”

  Aleksy made a face. “You know we have sarcasm in this country, yes?”

  “Don’t be a pain in my ass, Aleksy.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I slapped the box tops back on the crates and walked out of the storage room, leaving the door open. Looking down the hall to my left, I saw more of the same, as the corridor wended out of sight. “Let’s go this way.”

  “Oh—okay,” he said, hurrying to catch up with me. “I … I am so going to get busted down to private for this.”

  “Like that’s a big deal,” I said, walking down the corridor, my crisp steps echoing against the stone.

  “It’s a big deal to me!” he said. “I’ve worked my whole life to become an officer, a lieutenant.” His face was red, worry lines creasing around his eyes.

  “Look, Aleksy, I’m tightly related to the big boss here. Don’t sweat it, man. I’ll make sure you’re not busted down to butt sergeant or whatever.”

  “What is a butt sergeant?” Aleksy asked.

  “Hell if I know, I just made it up,” I said. “Come on, this way.”

  I led him, still fretting, around the curve of the corridor and stopped as the end came into view.

  “Oh, no,” he said under his breath.

  Oh no, indeed. Ahead was a giant double door, taking up the whole wall of a chamber. “Well, what do we have here?” I asked, stifling a grin.

  “I don’t know, but I have a feeling it’s not good,” Aleksy said. “I mean, it looks like it dropped out of one of your American horror movies.”

  “You’re not wrong, Aleksy,” I said and walked across the chamber. It was about thirty feet or so in length and width, and the ceiling lifted about the same, a cube of stone with gothic arches lining the sides. This door was almost twice the height of any of the others along the corridor, and also doubly wide, since it was two doors. The grandiosity of the architecture compared to the blandness of the rest of the dungeon could not be overstated. It was way, way out of place.

  “This is not on my patrol route,” Aleksy said. “I am very out of area, and very uncomfortable.”

  “That makes two of us,” I said, “but I have a feeling I’m about to get to the heart of my troubles here.” Because I had some serious troubles in mind. There was just too much going on here that I hadn’t expected, and this—this foreboding door—this felt like the key to getting back on smashy, face-punching track. I reached out for the handle, sure that I was just seconds away from discovering Vlad’s darkest secret, the one he totally was going to tell me about anyway, for sure, for sure, except not really.

  I grasped onto the door handle, felt my thumb slip onto the push tab, smiled as I realized—yes, this had to be it. Whatever he was hiding, it was in here. With slow pressure, I pushed to open it—

  And it clicked. Didn’t move.

  Locked.<
br />
  “Well, damn,” I said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Reed

  “Revelen,” I muttered under my breath. We’d gone through the full boat of info, the profile of the country, a brief recap of all the hell that had flowed out of there toward us in the last year—I’d forgotten about the guy Sienna had called the Predator, who had wrecked every one of our asses in Minneapolis only earlier this year—and now there was silence in the bullpen.

  “You want to go,” Isabella whispered, still by my side. She hadn’t left during the whole group chat session. “To charge into danger, all … how do we say it? Willy nilly?”

  “Nobody says that,” I said.

  “I always do my danger charging willy nilly,” Friday said. “With my willy, especially.”

  “Okay, because he says it, no one else should,” I said. “And I don’t want to charge into certain danger without knowing for sure that Sienna is there. Let’s face it—we’d be flying over most of Europe to get there, and they’ve got that whole meta ban thing that, uh … someone caused.”

  “Yeah, that was you,” Augustus said. “Way to go. If not for that, we could slip into Germany and hang out drinking the best beers of Oktoberfest while we wait for confirmation Sienna’s actually there, then saddle up and roll in.”

  “It’s June, not October,” Friday said.

  “What? It wasn’t me,” June Randall said, looking like she just snapped out of sleep.

  “It wasn’t only me that caused that,” I said. “And that’s not something we should be focused on right now.” I looked around for J.J. or Jamal or Abby, and found J.J. first. “Okay, we’re up to date with the threads that tie Sienna—and us—to Revelen. What’s the current status there? Diplomatically, militarily … Can we waltz right into the country if we decided we wanted to take a flight?”

  “I think commercial flights are still going there, no problem,” J.J. said. Abby tapped him on the shoulder and tossed something over to his monitor like she was flicking it. That was a neat trick, not something I could do with my PC. “Oh. Oh, wait. No. Okay, this is weird. It looks the State Department is preparing to issue an advisory on Revelen, but the text is not up yet.”

  “Which is especially strange since there’s literally no news out of the country,” Abby said. “Not a peep.”

  “Well, I doubt there’s a lot of embedded reporters from western agencies in Eastern Europe right now,” Chase said, stepping over to look at their screens. “It’s not a high priority area for them, what with the Middle East in perpetual chaos. If they want to capture American viewers’ attention with war photos, there’s that whole Saudi/Yemen conflict going on that’s probably much sexier. And which they’re mostly ignoring anyway.”

  “I bet if word got out Sienna could be in Revelen, you’d see some reporters hopping a flight pretty quick,” Scott said.

  “I think we’re about to find out,” Abby said, and suddenly the TV switched on in the corner, and the inputs were adjusted. “Check this out. Boom.”

  A webpage loaded on the flatscreen, huge, with a glaring headline:

  SIENNA NEALON ESCAPES TO REVELEN

  “Whoa,” Scott said. “When did that go up?”

  “Twenty minutes ago,” Abby said. “On flashforce.net. It’s already going viral.”

  “What the hell is flashforce.net?” Olivia asked.

  “Sounds like one of those dance mob sites,” Friday said. “Dangerous.”

  “Flash mobs are dangerous?” Jamal asked.

  “You never know when they’re going to appear, and you just get sucked up in the dancing and completely forget yourself,” Friday said. “Flash mobs are the single greatest threat to humanity. Other than Vlad.”

  “It’s not about dancing,” Veronika said. “Other than maybe dancing on graves. It’s a news site, putatively. And not to go all old on you, but in my day, this crap was tabloids. Flashforce makes the Weekly World News look credible. The sheer volume of their retractions makes me a little ill to my stomach.”

  “Were you a journalist at some point?” Scott asked.

  Veronika rolled her eyes. “Yeah, briefly. Back when standards were a thing, and the different outlets weren’t in such a knife fight for clicks and eyeballs and ad revenue rather than, y’know, correctly sourcing a story and getting the details right rather than rushing to publish now and having to stealth edit it later to hide your embarrassing screw-ups.”

  “Someone feels strongly about this,” Scott said.

  “Shh,” I said as I read the text of the article. Abby slowly scrolled it down the TV screen, but it was extremely light on confirmed facts. “‘Anonymous Gondry administration sources say’ …” I sighed. “Doesn’t anybody go on the record anymore?”

  “Probably not when you’re leaking classified information,” Augustus said. “Tends to be a little detrimental to one’s career advancement, unless it’s okayed by higher ups. Which I doubt this is.”

  “Still, if this can be believed—” Jamal said.

  “Questionable,” Veronika said.

  “—then the government has confirmed that Sienna’s in Revelen,” Jamal said. “Which they should have been able to do, really.”

  “Okay,” Scott said, folding his arms over his chest. He’d shed the suit jacket at some point in the last few hours, and his sleeves were rolled up to show his arms. “Let’s say that’s all true, that Sienna is in Revelen. Under the control of Vlad the Terrifying—”

  “I hope she brought a change of pants,” Friday muttered under his breath.

  “—then … where does that put us?” Scott asked.

  “Not flying commercial,” I said, and looked to Isabella. “You’re right. I do want to charge in, all willy nilly.”

  “Your willy is totally nilly compared to mine,” Friday said. “Everyone’s is, actually.”

  “Uh, no,” Augustus said, “and on the matter of us invading Revelen … hell, yeah. This war is going to be lit AF.”

  “War?” Greg Vansen asked, kind of out of nowhere. I wondered if he’d shrunk down for a nap.

  “I think we have to go,” I said, nodding at the circle formed around me. “We can jet over there, and if for some reason she’s not there … we can always come back. At supersonic speed.”

  “Yeah, let’s get within striking distance,” Scott said. “It doesn’t make sense to just sit around here, waiting.”

  “You guys, we’re chasing an unconfirmed, anonymously sourced news story that comes from an internet outlet best known for listicles like ‘The Ten Best Wombat Videos on the Internet Right Now’ and ‘Sienna Nealon Has Just Nuked a Mexican Restaurant in LA, and Six Nutbags on Twitter Think It Confirms She’s Inherently Racist,’” Veronika said. “You want to take us halfway across the world for that?”

  “If I get a vote,” Eilish spoke up, sitting between Andy Custis and June, who was still bound to her chair, “I think we need to address our rapidly increasing number of prisoners, because I’m not sure we want to ride into … whatever … with two unreliable people here.”

  “I can handle your prisoners,” Greg said, walking over to Andy and taking him by the hand. He pulled something out of his pocket and Andy suddenly disappeared, down to the size of a pencil eraser. I watched him squirm, miniaturized, as Greg put him in a little opaque thing the size of a test tube and corked it.

  June watched him disappear and her eyes widened. “Uhm … can I just go back to prison now? Because that was my intention all along. I’m just a messenger telling you what’s up, that’s all. I really don’t need time added onto my sentence for this, and I definitely don’t want to get shrunk.”

  “Abby …” I said.

  “The Cube is still in lockdown,” she said. “Definitely not pacified. It’s questionable whether they’re even going to attempt to go in anytime soon. I can’t see deep into their systems, but—”

  “I can,” Jamal said, closing his eyes. “It’s still chaos in there.”

  I smiled sym
pathetically at June. “Looks like you’re coming with us—for now.”

  “Please don’t shrink me like that,” she said, as Greg took a step toward her. “Please. I don’t want to be miniature—”

  I waved him off. “She’s on her honor. Unchain her.” I nodded at Eilish, who shrugged and fumbled for keys. “As for the rest of us …”

  Isabella touched my arm. “Are you sure?”

  I nodded, and knew that everyone was hearing me. “Saddle up, people. We’re heading for Revelen.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Sienna

  I checked the door again; it didn’t budge. Big and bold and just standing there as tall as the extra-high ceiling, it was solid as if it were built into the wall. The handle was cold to the touch, and I let a finger slide across it, a sniff of oil or something mechanically greasy exuding from beneath it, or from the seemingly impermeable crack down the middle.

  “What is going on here?” came a voice from behind me. Sharp, female, no-bullshit, it made me turn my head immediately, my internal threat radar pinging all to hell.

  “I’m trying to open a door,” I said, rounding on a small-ish European woman. She had the local accent, was shorter than me(!), and wore a uniform like Aleksy, but with a lot more ribbons and decorations… what do the military guys I know call it? Fruit salad? She’d been doing this job a lot longer than Aleksy. “Didn’t happen to bring a key, did you?”

  Her hair was a short, blond bob that tapered off just above her neck, and her face looked like it had been permanently frozen in purest bitchiness, like someone had lit the fuse on her tampon and snapped a picture at the moment when the bomb went off. Now, I assume, her face had frozen like this forever, as a warning to children everywhere that their moms were, indeed, right about that face freezing like that thing. “Step away from the door,” she said. Some people, you hear their voice and you think, Man, that does not match their look. Huge guy, high, squeaky voice? What a mismatch.

  This lady, though, with the Frozen Bitch Face … her voice was like the cracking of a whip across the back of your neck. The hairs raised on mine, which annoyed me to no end. Perfect voice/face match. A cop I’d worked with one time called it, “First Ex-Wife Voice.”