The teller looked over the note without bothering to pick it up. Wisp wasn’t sure he had read it at all.
“I understand,” the man replied mechanically and with small crinkled eyebrows. “If you hand me the bag, I’ll need a few minutes to fill it.” When he extended a hand to lift the rucksack off the counter, the movement seemed timed and controlled, like a part rehearsed for an amateur play. Wisp held the rucksack open for him without handing it over.
At least read the second note, Wisp implored him in her head as she retrieved the notepaper from her other pocket and placed it on top of the first. Her fingers quivered against the edge of the desk so she quickly withdrew her hand and pushed the sunglasses back over her glowing eyes. As much as she wanted to tell him to read the mosh-diddling note, she couldn’t. If she survived this, any recordings of her voice would count as evidence against her and contribute to getting her killed later.
I’m proving you wrong, Luca. Wisp clenched her teeth, steeling herself for her next steps. I’m pulling through.
She lowered the rucksack onto the counter and held it open for the teller but didn’t let go. He wasn’t looking at it. Instead, his eyes settled on something behind her, something that made the hairs on the back of her neck tingle. She resisted the urge to spin around and face whatever it was. She hadn’t heard anyone enter the lobby, so whatever had drawn the man’s attention must be still lurking beyond the entry door. The trap hadn’t been sprung yet. Her time window for cheating death was still open.
She cleared her throat to get the man’s attention. Still far too collected to be mistaken for a bank employee, he gave her a nod and shuffled around the bank’s back area, collecting stacks of bills from locked compartments. Back there, a long line of wooden desks and teller lockers led up to a stainless-steel vault and two office doors, one of which had been left half open. No sound or movement came through the doorway. Only the soft rustle of paper money filled the lobby.
But why did he look if there’s nothing behind me?
Now that the teller had turned his back to her, Wisp dared a peek at the glass sliding door she had passed on the way in. To her surprise, no police detachment had taken position outside. A long, faint trail of blue luminescence hung in the air right outside the building, fading as she watched but still plainly visible. When she had entered the bank minutes before, there hadn’t been anything supernatural outside. No spooky light effects apart from her own.
Wisp felt her throat go dry. Another Evolved had done this, someone who was about to invite themselves to the party.
Who could it be? The question churned in her gut as she turned in a slow circle, scanning the city cutouts behind the windows for possible threats and attackers. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a flash of movement. By the time her brain was able to pinpoint a direction, the source of the movement had vanished and the window revealed nothing.
“They’re already here,” the teller said without looking at her. He was standing behind the counter, hands thrust out and filled with money. “One of your friends sold you out.”
Her first thought was that her friends had nothing to do with this, but then her mind raced ahead, forming new connections and possibilities based on little things she had picked up along the way but failed to process. Things like the lone patron who had been reading in the cafeteria across the street from the bank. Five minutes ago, she had been too single-minded to sense the air of familiarity about him. His was a face that occasionally appeared in local newspapers, printed across the upper half of the first page in bold colors.
Rune. Leader of the European hero team. A wildcard Evolved who fit into none of the UNEOA’s power categories, capable of evoking a variety of unpleasant effects from mystic symbols drawn on objects or on the ground. For short-term results, even a large rune could be drawn in minutes. The trail of luminescence she had seen through the window had to indicate a runic circle around the building. A circle that was about to close and unleash a nasty surprise on anyone trapped within. According to the bank employee, ‘they’ were already in position, meaning that Rune hadn’t come alone. Chances were he had brought his team.
Rune isn’t going to kill me, not with a normal person standing right next to me. The thought wasn’t as reassuring as it should have been. The person pulling the trigger? That’s going to be someone else.
Part of her toyed with the idea of rushing outside to meet the heroes head on, to explain herself and the situation she had gotten entangled in. To request help from the people most capable of helping her out. Given the chance, it was exactly what she’d do, meaning that she couldn’t actually do it. The danger beacons in her eyes didn’t let her forget that acting like herself was just going to get her killed. Fortunately, she had the freedom to make irrational decisions.
Bringing back proof of a mission accomplished wasn’t an option. So instead of making a mad dash for the entrance door, Wisp grabbed a fistful of the bank notes the teller had already stacked on top of the counter, shoved them into her rucksack, and grabbed a bunch more.
She managed to get the rucksack half-filled before the flow of time skipped a beat and reality condensed around her like a physical thing, capturing her in mid-motion and holding her tight. Her breath stopped with a clipped gasp, her chest weighed down by an invisible force that washed over her and everything around her, whipping displaced bills through the room. The bank employee was still standing behind the counter with his hands arrested, as frozen in the moment as she was.
For one terrible moment, she thought she was going to drop right there, choked to death by a hero who hadn’t even stepped forward to challenge her face to face. But then she realized that heroes didn’t kill like this. Not without warning and not with innocents standing by.
The thought cleared the haze of death from her mind, infusing it with the desperate will to breathe. She sucked in a mouthful of air and was amazed to discover that it went all the way to her lungs. Her chest still refused to heave, but she discovered that she was able to suck in small, shallow breaths. Her tongue clacked against her teeth when she willed it to move. Her limbs remained locked in place, fingers knotted around the half-filled rucksack’s strap.
After a few more breaths, her mind came back into focus. I have to get out, Wisp rationalized. If the heroes see me, I’ll have a criminal record for sure. Getting caught on camera was bad enough. Cameras were tricked by bright lights, and she had plastered two of those to her face. Other people standing right next to her wouldn’t be fooled so easily. They’d pull down her hood and sunglasses and confirm her identity as a criminal.
“You okay?” Wisp asked the lanky bank employee.
He stared back at her, the corners of his mouth curling upward ever so slightly. She didn’t need to ask to know he was looking forward to whatever was going to happen next.
She had to get out of there right away. But how? She was facing the counter, so the window with her escape sphere was behind her and to her right, removed from her field of vision unless she found a way to shake off the paralyzing rune effect and turn around. This wasn’t an option right now.
Rune’s effects aren’t permanent. Wisp recalled newspaper and tabloid articles, piecing together bits of Rune-related information. It takes time to draw them and the circles can be broken. If she managed to step outside the circle, the hero would have no more power over her.
She was staring at the windowless core of the bank building, her view of the outside world obstructed by a curving, pastel-colored concrete wall. If she rolled her eyes all the way to the left, a half-open office door appeared at the edge of her field of view, along with a sliver view of the room beyond it.
Over there. The office.
When she dropped her gaze to the rain jacket sleeve with the concealed backup light, three male voices drifted from the direction of the doorway. The closed glass door smothered the words, but two of the voices had the patter of excited youth to them. The third was a sober, raspy baritone she associated wi
th Rune. Heroes.
Of course he had brought his team. The three of them had to be standing outside, most likely waiting for the go-ahead to come inside and deal with the criminal. It was, after all, what heroes did when they were actually trying to be useful to society. The team teleporter recently transitioned had to be one of them. He’d be the reason why the perpetually over-worked EU heroes took a chance on investigating an anonymous tip in the first place.
Why only three voices?
As far as Wisp remembered, Rune’s team included two girls. The other young guy had to be Crashbang, who moved with incredible speed and set off a flashbang grenade effect whenever he punched or crashed into a solid surface.
Releasing the firefly sphere from her sleeve, she tried to dig up a shred of the anger that sustained her in situations like this one and found none. Smoker was no longer there to serve as a hate target, so her anxiety came creeping back to fill the void. For a moment she almost appreciated the muscle-locking power that kept her feeble legs from trembling.
Maintaining her focus, she struggled to locate an inconspicuous path for the light to take, low to the ground and out of the way of the cameras she hadn’t even located. It reached the office door at the same time the main entryway slid open, and then heavy footsteps pounded into the lobby, belonging to only one person. It seemed that the others were staying back for now.
“Keep calm and don’t use your powers,” the adult male voice barked in Scandinavian-accented English. “We’re coming over to you now. Play along and we’re not going to hurt you, all right? We just want to talk. Make sure you’re not going to do anything stupid.”
Wisp wished she could do as he’d said. Wait here, meet his eyes, and see for herself what a hero looked like in real life. Maybe get a taste of what it would be like to follow Athena’s advice and carve out a different path for herself. She wanted to call out, convince him that she wasn’t one of the bad guys. She wanted to meet the team. Her head swam with a myriad of questions she wanted to ask. Part of her was desperate to know whether he had brought along the huge, rune-adorned double ax that was his trademark.
But he had robbed her of the possibility to turn around and face him, and her attention was locked onto the firefly beacon that was hovering in the office doorway. Her faithful ally, a furious spark of crimson to remind her of her own impending death. There was no police present and the heroes weren’t going to kill her.
Which left one option: Smoker.
Wisp knew this with a chill certainty. If she tried to communicate with the heroes at all, she’d fail her trial run and prove herself useless to the Conglomerate, and Smoker would kill her. Which meant no solution to the Smog hazard, and no crime evidence for Athena. The city would most likely go to rack and ruin, become a full-blown villain hideout instead of a home for the homeless.
Wisp directed her tiny sphere through the open doorway with one final heart-rending nudge, pushing it as far into the office as she could see. Then she switched positions with it.
Her stomach lurched and the wall panel faded away before her eyes, replaced by a faux wood filing cabinet and a section of whitewashed wall. Her right hand still extended in front of her with the rucksack, crashed into a row of fat blue ring binders, sending them tumbling to the floor. She made a strangled sound, more out of shock than anything else.
What she did register was the approaching hero. Now that there was more distance and another doorway between them, the clacking of his shoes sounded less substantial, fading out like the echo of something long gone. Except he wasn’t.
Not waiting for him to realize why she had disappeared in plain sight, Wisp pulled the dislocated sphere back toward herself, quivering in her struggle to turn a tiny little bit and locate a window. Naturally, her body – still caught within the runic circle’s area of effect – refused to budge. The footsteps in the lobby fell silent, but not for long. Wisp had barely aligned her beacon from the filing cabinet when the shouting began.
“Backup, GO!” the raspy male voice barked across the lobby.
Someone – one of the younger heroes, she assumed – shouted back. Three or four words that sounded like a confirmation, too muffled and distant to identify them as English.
The firefly beacon, now hovering as far to Wisp’s right as she could squint, changed its color from bloody crimson to a fiery yellow. She wasn’t going to die in the next few minutes after all. Had the situation been any different, she might have whooped and pumped her fist to celebrate her escape from the death train. She changed places with her floating light again, this time moving inches instead of meters.
But the repositioning had turned her around. A tall window stood in front of her, blessing her with an unobstructed view of the parking lot behind the bank. Wisp recalled her sphere to her position, shoved it out through the window, and jumped after it by switching places one more time. The next thing she knew, her boots kissed the hot sunlit asphalt, and she was outside. The voices of her pursuers sounded farther away but were still coming closer. They would catch the drift and round the building before long.
Wisp’s first reflexive thought was to get away. To escape in a direction they didn’t expect her to take. After a quick look around to confirm that she was alone, she shifted her weight and allowed her outstretched arm to answer the call of gravity, amazed to discover it was no longer pinned in place by an invisible force.
Without relaxing her grip on the rucksack, she turned around to face the building. The faint glow of Rune’s circle curved across the asphalt in front of her, inches from the tips of her boots. The rear facade of the blocky bank building loomed three meters ahead. The dislocated sphere hovered beyond the window that was closest to her, rendering the abandoned office in a faint tinge of red-gold. She called it back to her side without conscious thought. The best way to go was up. If the heroes hadn’t yet identified her, they’d expect her to try and escape at ground level. But first…
I have to break the circle.
Wisp extended one shaky leg, reaching out with her foot. They’re so busy looking for me, they probably won’t notice the broken circle right away. She lowered her boot onto the glowing line and rubbed it back and forth across the asphalt, covering a shoe-sized circle section with the dust and filth that was sticking to the soles of her boots. The smudged section extinguished but the remainder of the circle maintained its glow.
Had the effect actually been broken? Hopefully. She had no choice but to find out.
Having accomplished this, Wisp shifted her attention to the Postbank’s asphalt shingle roof and chose a section near the left-hand edge that looked to be walkable. It had to be. The heroes, already alerted by her vanishing act, were going to spot her any second now.
Her only choice was to dispatch her firefly sphere to the angled roof section two stories up. The small light was already drifting there when a staccato of footsteps rushed along the left side of the building, scraping to an abrupt stop before they entered her line of sight.
Wisp grimaced, remembering that she’d forgotten to withdraw her emergency escape beacon from the lobby window, and swapped places with the thumbnail-sized spark on the roof.
Her perspective of the city changed yet again. The white-blue summer sky opened up above her with an abrupt, stomach-lurching shift as if dragging her toward itself. Other buildings around her shrank in size by two stories, and the asphalt shingles that supported her weight seemed more perilous and steeply angled now that she was looking down at them.
So she stopped looking and recalled the firefly sphere to her side. Off to her left and below, a visible section of sidewalk showed her a still-intact part of Rune’s circle, but not the source of the footsteps. If she wanted a better view, she’d have to step closer to the edge of the roof. Make noise and risk blowing her cover.
“There’s something here!” a young male voice called out in English. It rose from down below, right next to the bank building. “Looks like some kind of power effect.”
&nb
sp; Wisp squeezed her eyes shut, inhaling a deep breath. Whatever you do, please don’t send your teleporter to the rooftops. Her head filled up with premonitions of her failure, her self-doubt rearing its ugly head again. Her muscles locked up, wanting to stay put, and her overtaxed mind refused to make any more decisions. Moving at the wrong time could get her killed. Moving in the wrong direction could get her killed.
“Where?” a young male voice – the teleporter? – called from the other side of the building.
“It’s right here. Could be a booby trap or a distraction.”
It’s not. Wisp grasped a mental image of her abandoned sphere and forced her thoughts to arrange themselves around it. I just kind of forgot it was there. She concentrated on the sphere in question and extinguished it through sheer willpower. This was something she could do without moving her body after all.
“Now it’s gone!” the young hero reported excitedly.
Wisp wished she were gone, too. Seeing as she lacked the power to make herself vanish into thin air, she had no choice but to move. Escape. Staying here was going to get her killed as much as the wrong decision would.
Willing herself back into action by fixing her mind’s eye on Hannah, she removed the two glowing orbs from her eyes and tossed them into the sky above, hoping that the heroes weren’t going to look up anytime soon. Even though the beacon color hadn’t changed these past few moments, she needed an escape route that wasn’t going to take her on a collision course with the good guys.
Meaning, the rooftops. Rooftops were almost like a second or third home. A terrain she knew how to navigate. She touched the butt of the gun beneath her shirt and pictured herself as a soldier in her father’s unit, drawing strength from his example. Her tension lessened and she felt invigorated, anxiety draining away.
She gingerly inched forward, careful not to put too much weight on any of the shingles, and searched the sprawling city for a visible section of spike-topped wall. The guidepost leading back to her base and to safety. The wall towered over many of the adjoining buildings by its sheer height, making it easy for her to identify. She picked a nearby residential house as her first stop.
Gift of Light_A Powered Destinies stand-alone novel Page 17