#Herofail

by Lexie Dunne

  “Doing things the smart way is not in the Gail Godwin playbook.” I allowed a cough I’d been holding in out of a sense of pride. The headache began to fade. “What was she doing here?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I guess even supervillains have families.” It slipped out before I could think about it. I deserved the unimpressed eye roll from Kiki over that. “Right. My bad.”

  “You can’t pick the family you’re born with. Trust me, I’m aware.” Apparently satisfied that my wound was superficial, Kiki stepped away from me to check on Jessie.

  “Hey, they don’t have to be supervillains to be awful,” I said. I hadn’t talked to my own mother since my eighteenth birthday, and the only member of Guy’s family that I’d met was his brother, Sam. “But sorry about the dig.”

  “Speaking of family, I need to tell Eddie she was here,” Kiki said.

  “Maybe hold off on that.” The words came out before I could stop them. Kiki tilted her head in confusion, and I winced. “It’s only—you were here with Rita. By yourself. That won’t look great to all the people who think you helped orchestrate her escape.”

  Like Wilbur Scott and Sharkbait.

  “It’ll be worse if they find out and I didn’t tell them,” Kiki said.

  “Tell them later. When we’ve got things under control. They don’t need extra kindling for this ridiculous witch hunt.”

  Kiki rubbed her temple again. “Ridiculous is right,” she said. “I didn’t want any of this. I just wanted to stay back and run Medical. What a giant mess.”

  I squeezed her shoulder. “I’m sorry. Stay here.”

  “Wait, what? Are you going somewhere?”

  “Rita had to get in here somehow. I doubt it was through the front door.” I peeked into the hallway. Had I given her enough of a head start? I didn’t want a repeat of being picked up by the throat again. When I looked back, Kiki’s eyes had widened almost comically in alarm. “I’m not going to go fight her or anything. I only want to know how she got in.”

  “Right.” Her throat worked. “If you’re not back in ten minutes, I’m sending Angélica after you. Be careful.”

  I couldn’t actually make that promise, so I shrugged. For four years, I’d tried to be careful. Supervillains had still found me. But I could be extra cautious when following the world’s most terrifying woman, I supposed. With that horrible thought in mind, I crept down the hallway, following the very faint scent of Rita’s grandmotherly perfume.

  Chapter 14

  The perfume trail led me straight to a wall. Since the wall lacked any supervillain-shaped holes, that meant only one thing: a hidden door. Jessie hadn’t mentioned any to me, but the woman took paranoid to the next level. I applied my detective skills to look for a catch. When those proved absolutely worthless, I used my actual skills.

  Or rather: I punched a hole in the wall.

  Unsurprisingly, it led me to a secret tunnel on the other side of the hallway. Great. A secret lair. As a principle, I hated secret lairs. They’d been the bane of my existence for four years: a villain tying me up on the top of the Wrigley Building? Fine. That was public, I could expect a reasonably quick rescue. But secret lairs gummed up the works with unnecessary time constraints and extra stress. The necessity of having my own secret base bothered me, but I accepted it as a necessary evil. Discovering that it went one level deeper only made me grumpier as I stuck my whole arm through the wall and ripped downward.

  Mercifully, my height or lack thereof meant I didn’t need too big of a hole. I doubled back to collect my armor from the kitchen and squeezed through. I landed in an awkward pile on steps that smelled of musty wood and dust.

  They creaked under my weight. Not so great for stealth, unfortunately.

  Still following Rita’s perfume, I crept down, on alert for any traps. Nothing tried to electrocute me, so I counted that as a win in my favor. My heart hammered hard in my chest. Actively tracking Rita on my own went beyond stupid, straight into the suicidal.

  The stairs took me down several flights. I felt nearby subway trains rumble past, the vibrations traveling through the soles in my boots. My face mask scanned my surroundings for structural weak points and traps. The sensors detected nothing, though a change in the ambient sound ahead told me that I was approaching a large, open area. I could hear people inside.

  The stairs ended in a small hallway. To one side, I found an alcove: a coat closet, complete with a few moth-eaten garments. I slipped inside to silence my cell phone, not wanting a repeat of my attempt to sneak up on Chessmeister that one time. Satisfied it wouldn’t give me away, I continued to slink along. The hallway led to a giant cavern. A small set of steps at the end of the hall finished out the path into the cavern, which was set a few feet below the hallway. I crept to the opening and peeked inside.

  The 1960s stared back at me.

  Gigantic computer server banks filled the center of the warehouse-like space, neatly regimented into rows like obedient soldiers. Fluorescent lights flickered in their enormous ballasts, washing everything in a horrific office building glow. The wall directly across from me, all the way on the other side of the room, was covered in CRT monitors.

  This must be the Raptor’s original secret base, I realized. In one corner was a little lounge and kitchen area. On the opposite side, to my right, a yawning entrance wide enough for a car to fit led off into the darkness.

  And right there, along the wall of monitors, Rita’s merry band of evildoers ripped through the filing cabinets. Wrestling Maniac, whom I recognized by the spangliness of his unitard, gripped a dented metal filing cabinet in both hands and tore it in two, sending up a fountain of manila folders and dot matrix paper into the air. The nerdy-looking woman on his left gave him a disgusted look, likely for causing her more work.

  Rita stood in conference a few feet away with her other minions. None of them were looking in my direction, so I dropped into the base and darted into the grid of computer servers. I didn’t dare get too close, though I did sneak far enough to pick up some of what they were saying, even with Wrestling Maniac giggling like a toddler with a new toy.

  Rita turned to address Wrestling Maniac’s long-suffering partner, and I caught her words: “—truly no sign of it?”

  “No, Fearless. I believe—”

  Wrestling Maniac tore apart another filing cabinet. “Kurt wouldn’t have been so banal as to hide its location in a cabinet,” Rita said. “This base is a dead end, as I feared. Calvin, it’s time to go.”

  I chanced a peek as a man in a gold mask stepped over to Rita. Tall, wide-shouldered, with golden epaulets and buttons on his military-style jacket. I recognized him as the leader from Rita’s ransacking of the seventh floor of Davenport Tower. My suit spat a list of helpful details across my eye monitor, informing me that he went by the name Mr. Midas—fitting, as his powers apparently included conjuring gold. I goggled a bit. This dude could literally create gold with his own hands. Why did his arrest record list several banks that he’d knocked over?

  Villains. Ugh.

  “I’ll gather the crew,” Mr. Midas said, turning to wave at the others. “I believe—”

  A cell phone began playing its default ringtone. Juxtaposed against the 1960s décor, it felt more than a little out of place. Who the hell had left their ringtone on?

  And then it clicked.

  “Shit!” My fingers fumbled for my pocket. The ringtone blared on.

  The villains all swiveled as one in my direction. My stomach dropped as I ducked out of sight. I yanked out my phone to shut it up. The screen flashed with digitally pixelated hieroglyphs like something out of a bad alien movie. “What the . . .”

  “Deal with that,” Rita said to one of her minions.

  My head snapped up.

  Since the phone wouldn’t stop screaming, I turned and chucked it back into the hallway I’d come in through. It skittered as it landed, but I was too busy sprinting silently to the corner of the room.

 
; I pulled my stun gun out, held my breath, and waited.

  To my surprise, no stampede followed. Instead, I heard the telltale scrape of boots that meant someone had either jumped or taken flight. And nothing else.

  One? That was all I merited?

  The minion landed—a jumper, like me—right outside the stairwell opening, stepping in toward the phone. The phone continued to scream, wavering in and out like its energy was beginning to fade. I knew for sure I’d silenced it. Had being buried in rubble earlier damaged it? Trust my luck that it would self-destruct now.

  I didn’t have time to worry about that, for right as Mr. Midas stepped into the hallway, my data feed in my suit began to flash hieroglyphics at me. I grimaced, closing my eyes against the onslaught. Static began to buzz in my ears, so loud that I closed my eyes and found myself back in that awful torture chamber in Detmer Prison. I blinked and my galloping heart told me I was hiding in the Raptor’s old lair while Rita sent Mr. Midas to take care of me. And my suit was flashing and buzzing so loud that it was going to give me away.

  I swore and jumped out of the suit. Outwardly, it didn’t seem like it was freaking the hell out, but that didn’t help me. Not when I was standing in yoga pants and a tank top without even a pair of shoes to help me fight a supervillain.

  Desperate, I grabbed one of the suit’s pouches at random, peeked around the computer bay, and took a deep breath. Mr. Midas stood at the mouth of the hallway, faced away from me. He had my cell phone in his hand, obviously examining it in puzzlement. His shoulders seemed even broader from this close.

  Carefully, I sneaked up behind him and sprang, elbowing him in the back of the head.

  He shouted and tumbled forward down the hall, golden liquid splashing out of his hands. It tripped me up enough that I gawked at the puddles of precious metal dotting the floor. Belatedly, I raised my stun gun and fired at center mass.

  Nothing happened. A single look down at it told me why: the same hieroglyphics flashed across the stun gun’s little screen.

  Mr. Midas seemed to smile underneath the mask, taking me in, in all of my armorless glory. “Bikram Yoga’s not until nine, sweetie,” he said, taking a step forward. He stepped in one of the gold puddles and it seemed to writhe around his boot like a living thing. “Wait—Hostage Girl?”

  “I take Pilates, dumbass,” I said, and threw the inert stun gun at his head.

  He ducked it and aimed a palm at me. I had a glimpse of small, lethally sharp darts made of pure gold hurtling at my face before I ducked and rolled. The darts thudded into one of the server banks. I booked it, and doubled around, pressed my back to the wall next to the hallway entrance, lying in wait.

  When he rushed through, I sprang up, ready to end him with a haymaker. He backpedaled, eyes wide, and threw up a shield of solid gold into the air between us. My fist glanced off it. I didn’t get a chance to puzzle out the versatility—thrown gold darts and crafting shields from nothing?—before metal exploded everywhere, splattering my front and the wall next to me. And unfortunately, Mr. Midas followed it.

  His punch landed hard enough to propel me backward. Pain exploded under my rib cage, knocking all the breath from my lungs. When I hit the server bank ten feet behind me, I felt it crunch all around my body. I groaned.

  And then I scrambled for safety. Golden darts slammed into the space I vacated, close enough that I felt the whoosh of air as I dodged behind the server and deeper into the grid.

  Mr. Midas, apparently content to keep the high ground, climbed back up to the mouth of the hallway. “Everybody told me Hostage Girl didn’t have powers,” he said to the room at large, as I crouched and caught my breath.

  “Shit happens,” I called back, and a new round of darts hit the server bank I was currently using as cover. I checked the pouch I’d grabbed, raising my eyebrows at the three energy discs that fell onto my palm. Apparently they hadn’t suffered the same electronic fit that had rendered my stun gun, suit, and phone useless. Small mercies, I figured, slipping one into my bra and leaving the other two and the pouch at the base of the server. “Hey, question for you,” I shouted over to Mr. Midas.

  “Yeah?” Another round of darts perforated the server bank.

  “How come you rob banks when you can literally create gold?”

  “Do you know how few places take gold these days?” He had a Bronx accent, I realized. It fit. “Besides, it doesn’t last.”

  “Oh,” was all I could think to say to that.

  “Probably for the best. It gets everywhere, you know.”

  I eyed the row of server banks. Phasing required a straight line. I could phase and do a hairpin turn into another phase, as Angélica had been working on teaching me, but I wouldn’t have much momentum built. Or—wait a second, I’d turned midphase while fighting Wrestling Maniac. That had been mostly unintentional, which was depressingly par for the course for me. But maybe if I actually tried to do it on purpose . . .

  “And sure, it fades,” Mr. Midas continued, as I mentally steeled myself, “but some of it sticks around and it’s a giant mess—”

  I phased straight down the line of servers, running parallel to the wall. Right before I drew level with the hallway and Mr. Midas’s higher ground position, I put everything I had into changing my momentum and redirecting the phase.

  I hit a server bank in front of Mr. Midas so hard that I saw not double but actually triple. Pain rang through my side and my head. I’d turned, I thought in a daze. I’d turned, and somehow I’d made myself go even faster.

  And I’d rammed right into the server.

  For a second, Mr. Midas gawked at me as I stumbled back from the server with my head spinning. Then he snickered. “You should have stuck to being Hosta—”

  I punched him under the chin using my left arm, as my right arm hung limp at my side. He gasped and stumbled, groping along the wall. A fine layer of gold spread from underneath his collar, covering his neck and his mask. He was encasing himself, forming a shield against me.

  That made things easier. I flicked the energy disc at him.

  His body thumped to the floor as the disc electrocuted him, gold being an excellent conductor. I tensed, waiting for him to spring back up, but he lay silent and still. One problem down. I looked toward the other end of the room, but Rita’s other cronies were long gone, taking with them the secret of whatever they sought. It figured. Pain radiated out of my right side, so intense that I almost didn’t want to look at the carnage that was my dislocated shoulder and arm.

  Something flashed in Mr. Midas’s hand: my cell phone. Numbers and letters in no pattern I could discern still raced across the screen. I crouched to examine it, wondering if I’d dropped it in water.

  No, I realized as it finally hit me. This wasn’t my doing.

  With a curse, I grabbed Mr. Midas—no way was I leaving him alone in this base—and bolted with him over my shoulder. I left my suit and the stun gun behind. If I was right, there simply wasn’t time.

  Kiki scrambled to her feet when I arrived upstairs, her eyes going comically wide at the body slung over my good shoulder. “Gail, what—”

  “No time. Find Angélica and get to the gym.” Without explaining, I sprinted off. Mr. Midas flopped around like deadweight, so I dumped him on the first Davenport tech I saw in the base. I sprinted through the base faster than I ever had, skidding a little and knocking my bad arm with a pained hiss.

  I raced into the dark obstacle course room, blinking as the motion sensors lit up. “Are you here? Please tell me you’re here.”

  From the corner, something began to move. Dark purple nanobot gel that normally formed the obstacle course now gathered up into a pile that slunk toward me. It molded itself first into a column, then a humanoid, and finally into: “Jeremy.”

  “Hey.” He looked plastic and uncanny, matte purple to match the gel, a look of anguish on his face. “So, no big deal, but I think I’m dead.”

  Chapter 15

  “Dead?” I repeated, dumbly
. Maybe it was the aftershocks of the fight, or coming face-to-face with Rita, or seeing Jessie pale and one shaky step away from being a corpse. Maybe it was the forty-eight hours of pure hell I’d been through. The word dead reverberated, echoing off the walls of my brain until it seemed to crescendo. And still it didn’t make any sense. Jeremy stood in front of me in all his monochrome glory. Apart from the purple skin, he appeared to be the very picture of health. “Like—how dead? Stopped breathing? Passed on? That kind of dead?”

  “I can’t get back into my body. I think the explosion killed me.”

  “But how are you here? Are you a ghost?” I’d seen a lot of shit, but my mind stuttered to a sharp halt at the thought of the supernatural.

  “A digital ghost, if anything,” Jeremy said. “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell.”

  “It’s been hours since the explosion. Why the hell didn’t you get in touch before, Jer? I’ve been worried sick.”

  “I couldn’t. It’s fuzzy. There’s . . . time missing. I’m clearer now. Able to communicate, at least. For how long, well . . .” He tilted his head to the side. His gaze, aimed over my head, lacked focus. He spread his hands, a move that was purely Jeremy and also felt eerie in his fake body. “Plus, the room’s fighting me.”

  “Fighting you—fighting you, how?” I asked, swallowing past the sick feeling in my throat.

  “It seems Jessie was a little pissed about my breaking into her precious obstacle course. Or a lot pissed. Ow. Ow.”

  “What—” I started to ask, but Jeremy’s arms began to ripple and twitch. “Can you override that? You’re a genius with tech stuff! Make it stop doing that.”

  My voice began to rise in pitch.

  “I can’t,” Jeremy said. “Her system’s locking me out. I’ve never projected for this long before.” The gel did the spasm-glitch again, this time around his middle. It was like watching a movie projector distortion, but in all three dimensions. Jeremy breathed raggedly. It must have been a reflex; there wasn’t any way he needed oxygen.