#Herofail

by Lexie Dunne

  “What can I do? If we find your body, maybe we can revive you—”

  “I think it’s too late for that.”

  “You don’t know that. Maybe you’re just unconscious.”

  He scoffed. “Gail. C’mon.”

  “Dammit.” Dead, my brain repeated. He’d been in a coma for months last year, and I’d lived with the sword of Damocles hanging over my head, wondering if that was the morning I would awake to news that one of my only friends had slipped away in the night.

  And now, he had.

  “I don’t know how much longer I can hold this,” Jeremy said, his face locking up. The words skipped like a record player.

  “I don’t know anything about this room, but I can go, I can get someone—”

  Jeremy’s entire body seemed to explode outward, like something had detonated in his chest. I shrieked and jumped back to avoid being splashed by some of the gel. In a blink, Jeremy reformed. He groaned. “Jessie had to have given you override access!”

  Real horror punched through. “I don’t know how,” I said.

  Jeremy gave me a you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me look as a wave of gel undulated down his form.

  “I don’t! Jessie doesn’t tell me this kind of stuff—I’m just her apprentice.” And as the last couple of days had proved, a lousy one at that. I’d taken over for the boss and everything had gone to hell in a handbasket. I felt my throat actively begin to close up. “I don’t know anything!”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I don’t know! Why does she do anything, Jeremy? It’s not like I can understand Davenports on a good day.” And this was going in my top ten worst days when I wrote my inevitable memoir. “She’s still in a coma, but—Angélica! She’ll know what to do, I’ll go get—”

  Right on cue, footsteps sounded from the hallway, and Angélica burst through the door with Kiki on her heels. “What the . . . Jeremy? Why are you purple?”

  Jeremy opened his mouth to explain, but he exploded again. Kiki shrieked and jumped backward as gel splattered everywhere. When Jeremy reformed, his features were blurry and indistinct.

  “His body,” I said, not even sure what I was saying, “he’s using the nanobots as a host because—”

  “I’m dead,” Jeremy said, though the gel version of him didn’t move. His disembodied voice echoed around us. “The system is locking me out—not strong enough to overcome it—”

  “I don’t know how to override it,” I said, grabbing Angélica’s arm.

  She gave me a baffled look and stepped over to the access panel by the door, where she tapped in a sequence. When a beep sounded, she said, “Allow Jeremy Collins access to obstacle course systems, authorization: Angel.”

  Instantly, Jeremy’s skin stopped twitching. He dropped to a knee, chest working as he gasped. His features crystalized into perfect clarity.

  “You have access to everything here,” Angélica said to me. “Did Jessie never go over that with you?”

  “Obviously not.” Heart still pounding, I turned to Jeremy. Being a gel avatar meant he lacked any signs of physical distress beyond gasping. “Stupid question, but are you okay?”

  “It’s complicated,” he said. He turned his head to meet my gaze, face blank. “This isn’t a permanent solution. These nanobots aren’t meant to hold something like me long-term.”

  I refrained from pointing out that there really wasn’t anything else on the planet like him, so the nanobot gel couldn’t have been designed with him in mind in the first place. But that seemed like splitting hairs. Solve one problem, Jessie’s training reminded me, then the next. That had to be finding a more permanent solution for Jeremy.

  Actually, scratch that. The next problem came galloping in right on the heels of my adrenaline fading. With Jeremy temporarily safe, my heart rate slowed and brought with it a truly sharp and painful reminder that I’d smashed the hell out of my own body. I looked down, only now remembering that my right arm dangled uselessly. Bright bolts of pain shot up my elbow to my shoulder, making me whimper.

  “What is it?” In an instant, Kiki and Angélica flanked me on either side. “What’s happened?”

  “I may have run into something really, really hard,” I said between gritted teeth.

  Kiki moved to pick up my arm and I hissed, stepping back. “Oh, Gail,” she said, eyeing my arm. “This is going to hurt.”

  “Going to?” I said.

  Whether it was because they’d been together for more than a year or that they’d been coworkers for years before that, I didn’t know. But somehow without me noticing, Angélica and Kiki moved perfectly in sync. Angélica wrapped her arms around me from behind, immovable steel bands that I couldn’t fight, and Kiki popped my arm back into place.

  I didn’t scream, though I came close. Jeremy, on the other hand, literally fell to pieces. His eyes rolled back into his head and the gel crashed down into a puddle on the floor. All three of us stared at it, Angélica now holding me up because my knees had buckled.

  “Did he . . . did he pass out?” I asked.

  Kiki gave the two of us an alarmed look. “I think so. I don’t know what to do. I don’t think throwing water on him is a good idea.”

  “Probably not,” Angélica said. She turned her attention back to me. “Easy now, let’s sit for a moment.”

  “You could’ve warned me,” I said as I was lowered to the floor.

  “And make you more tense?” Angélica shook her head. “This way was more fun.”

  “Sadists.” I tucked my arm against my stomach and gritted my teeth as Kiki probed my shoulder. Trying to get a handle on the agony suffusing my right side was pure misery. To distract myself, I eyed the puddle of goo that had been Jeremy.

  Jeremy, who was dead, but not gone.

  And frankly, this was Davenport’s world. I’d seen stranger powers. Hell, the first time I’d seen Jeremy actively use his powers, he’d exploded out of my phone. And it had been ages since I’d actually been in the same place as his real body. Maybe he’d been headed this way after all, and the explosion at Davenport had only sped things up. Or maybe he would have eventually learned to balance his physical and digital lives. Either way, it didn’t look like he had much of a choice now.

  “What even happened?” Angélica said, drawing my attention to her face. She crouched in front of me, brows drawn together. “You were sleeping peacefully last I checked.”

  Kiki and I exchanged a look. “Rita Detmer was in the base,” I said, as she turned her focus back to probing my right side, probably to make sure I hadn’t broken any more ribs. “More specifically, she was in the family suite.”

  Angélica’s lips thinned. “How did she get in?”

  “You know the Raptor. Secrets on top of secrets. Or I should say in this case, a secret base on top of a secret base.” Keeping an eye on the gel puddle—was it starting to twitch?—I filled her and Kiki in on what had happened in the base. Now that my shoulder joint had been pushed back into place, soreness rather than actual biting pain flooded my side. It locked my neck and shoulder up something fierce. I wished knockout drugs would actually work on me so that I could sleep through this annoying recovery.

  “Mr. Midas did this to you?” Angélica asked. “I thought he was a minor villain.”

  “I did more of this than he did.”

  “How?”

  “I turned in the middle of phasing.”

  Angélica drew back on her heels, head tilting. “I’ve never been able to do that.”

  “Yeah, until today I wasn’t able to either. And even then—” I gestured ruefully at my throbbing arm “—not very well.”

  “You were able to keep the momentum and everything?” Angélica asked.

  Before I could answer, the gel on the floor reformed into Jeremy’s body, sprawled on the ground like he’d actually passed out. He sat up and looked around. Spotting the three of us watching him with raised eyebrows, he sighed. “What can I offer you not to tell Vicki about this?” he asked
.

  “It happens more than you think,” Kiki said, far more kindly than I would have.

  For a second, the gel avatar grinned, and it was like having actual Jeremy in the room with us. The grin dropped away to a suspicious look. His eyes flitted from me to Angélica and finally landed on Kiki. He studied her with a tilted head, his eyes narrowed, like she had become a puzzle.

  “Uh, Jer, I know you’re digital now, but staring is still rude,” I said when the staring went on for far too long.

  Jeremy pointed at Kiki. “Something’s off about you.”

  Her shoulders sagged as though the tension holding them up had been snapped like a string. “Not you, too,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Don’t I get enough of that from everyone else?”

  Jeremy reared back in surprise. “What? No, I mean—”

  But Kiki, in a rare display of temper, was already stomping out the door. Angélica gave him a great move, asshole glare as she trotted out after him. Helpless, Jeremy turned toward me.

  “It’s been a long day,” I said.

  “I know! I was there. I died!”

  “Okay, point. Tempers are a little high right now with everything being as messy as it is, and we’re all crammed into this base,” I said. “Eddie in particular has been on the warpath. I’d let it go. She’s just stressed.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Jeremy said, but he was frowning. “How’s your arm? That looked bad.”

  “It hurts,” I said. “But as I did most of this to myself because I didn’t think things through, maybe I should consider it a lesson.”

  Speaking of not thinking things through, it occurred to me that I’d dumped a known villain on a Davenport worker and raced off without an explanation. Sure, the villain had been unconscious, but that sort of thing led to questions. And Eddie Davenport, as much as he disliked me and sometimes actively looked for ways to find fault, should have stormed in by this point, demanding answers.

  So why hadn’t he?

  “Eddie’s not yelling at me. Something must be going on,” I said, pushing myself to my feet with the arm that didn’t hurt.

  “Something’s wrong because the CEO of a major company isn’t here to chew you out?” Jeremy raised both eyebrows. “Conceited much?”

  “Guy says the same thing. But I’m usually right.” I waved at him to stay put—if he needed to get in touch, he’d probably just do something weird to my phone again—and stepped out into the hallway. It occurred to me on my way to the main hub that I hadn’t asked him what felt off about Kiki. I’d get to it later.

  I stepped into the main hub and into chaos. The Davenport workers had been pretty active earlier, even for it being four in the morning, but that had nothing on this. Everybody was on a cell phone and also typing into a tablet. People ran from table to table with sheets of paper, looking stricken. And in the middle of the furor, Eddie barked orders, looking pissed off.

  I found out why when Angélica appeared at my shoulder like she’d ʼported out of thin air. “Tamara Diesel’s struck,” she said. “And it’s bad.”

  Chapter 16

  It seemed absurd that there would be organized supervillainy outside of Rita Detmer’s prison escape and reign of chaos. After all, it was a once-in-a-lifetime event. She’d been the main nemesis of the Feared Five. When she did something, the world was supposed to stop and quake in terror over it.

  But Tamara Diesel and her crew of supervillain miscreants had gone after the mayor.

  While I’d been downstairs fighting supervillainy’s golden boy, one of New York’s most prominent city council members had been visited by a minion of Tamara Diesel—the giant dogs in the story made me suspect Lady Danger—with a ransom notice. The mayor and her husband had been taken to Singh Memorial hospital in the middle of the night, nearly unresponsive. Another nanobot attack had left them all but dead.

  Twenty million, or half the city council would receive a jolt from the nanobots, and it might not be so polite as the mayor’s had been.

  So all along, the plan had been simple blackmail. And it looked like Tamara Diesel was going for it, come Rita or high water.

  Angélica ushered me back to the family suite, pointing out that I was too injured to do anything. I had no choice but to sit quietly by Jessie’s bedside, holding her hand the way Rita had. There were a thousand things to do: Jeremy had said existing in the obstacle course was only a temporary solution; I could be out assisting some of the HEX members on duty; or I could even track down Kiki to make sure she was okay. But my head felt like it might overflow if I tilted it wrong. Whenever I’d needed to think while Jeremy was comatose, I’d sat by his bedside. As awful as it was to have my mentor lying diminished in her sickbed, I still found a certain kind of peace sitting beside her. Once I figured out how to ignore the throbbing in my side.

  I’d officially done more damage to myself than Mr. Midas had. Maybe I was lucky everybody else was so busy with the world on fire around us, as that would surely reduce the teasing.

  Curiosity about that made me put Jessie’s hand down and rise to my feet. The hole I’d ripped in the wall was still there, made a little bigger by my return trip carrying Mr. Midas. I trotted down the stairs to the old hideout.

  Now that I wasn’t laser focused on spying, I drank in details that I’d missed before, like the subtle patterning on the avocado-green fridge in the kitchen section, and the shag carpeting. I winced to myself as I walked past the server I’d nearly demolished. What had Rita been looking for? This old base had to predate Jessie’s tenure as the Raptor, which meant it went all the way back to Kurt’s days in the suit. And—I opened the cabinets to count the cups—the rest of the Feared Five, too, it looked like.

  Mulling that over, I eyed the couch again, noting the way the cushions sagged. Had Nigel Calibrese plopped down on that sofa to relax between shifts delivering pizza at the speed of sound and battling bad guys? I could picture Phantom Fuel working diligently at one of the terminals not far away, the light of the ancient monitor probably glowing green on the lenses of her thick glasses. They’d been the first hero teams and remained to this day one of the longest running teams, so it wasn’t a stretch to imagining them hanging out in their downtime, enjoying a beer the way Angélica and I did every so often.

  A little cheered by that image, I wandered on and poked through a few of the filing cabinets. Wrestling Maniac had made an absolute mess, so my feet crunched over striped printer paper and file folders. I made a note to dig through all of that later and explored further, trotting down the roadway opening, where I found the vehicle bay. The lighting was even faultier here, making me squint. It was mostly empty, dusty and cobwebby in a way that made me sneeze, though one vehicle remained underneath an oiled drop cloth. Curious, I yanked that off.

  “Oh, that’s where it went,” I said, marveling at what had to be the Raptor’s first motorcycle. It even had the old logo of talons spread out, descending on prey. My ninth grade history book had dedicated a whole chapter to its disappearance from the Smithsonian. And here it turned out I’d been working right on top of it for over a year.

  “Godwin!”

  I whipped around as I recognized Eddie’s voice coming from inside the base. Had he known about it before or had he followed me?

  “In the garage,” I shouted back.

  I heard him grumbling as he approached. “Why the hell aren’t you in your mask?” he asked as he rounded the corner.

  “I’m the only one here,” I said. The armor was still in the corner. It probably worked fine now, but I hadn’t stepped back into it.

  Eddie pinched the bridge of his nose, evidently deciding to deal with that later. “I saw your handiwork upstairs,” he said instead.

  “I couldn’t find the latch.”

  “Yes, I suppose you would have had difficulty reaching it,” Eddie said, and I glared at him. He sighed and put up his hands for peace, startling me. “Sorry. That was uncalled for.”

  The novelty of an actual Eddie Dav
enport apology made me actively stutter for a second. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation or the pain from my earlier hit playing tricks on my mind. I shook my head. “Kiki told you Rita got in?”

  “I suspected it might be a possibility that she would.” Eddie surprised me again by reaching out and running a hand over the tank of the Raptor motorcycle, a faraway look on his face. Without speaking, he stepped around it and walked into the darkness.

  “Um,” I said. Did he expect me to follow him? He didn’t seem overly surprised that this place existed, and he knew where the latch was. That was Davenports for you. They were like the Russian nesting dolls of secrets.

  In the end, curiosity won and I followed the beam of his phone flashlight into the darkness. If nothing else, I’d discover new rooms in the base. The smell of dust grew. In the distance, I could hear the rumble of city traffic. I wondered where the secret base would exit.

  We turned the corner and my breath caught in my throat. For an absurd second, I thought they were actually standing there, the Feared Five in all of their glory. But no, the shapes in the dark lacked color and movement. I stood down, fists unclenching, and studied the statues of the first superheroes. Everybody wore their uniforms, even Gail Garson, but unlike other displays in museums, these statues lacked masks. I could make out everybody’s face in perfect detail.

  “Kurt Davenport let a sculptor in here to see their faces?” I asked before it occurred to me that this might be a reverent moment for Eddie.

  I thought at first he would ignore me, but he cleared his throat. “Nigel Calibrese was a sculptor. He only delivered pizzas to pay the bills.” Eddie moved to stand in front of Nigel’s statue, towering over it. Apparently the Cheetah and I had lack of height in common. Also: previous thankless jobs. “He was on-site delivering a large sausage-and-peppers when Dr. Singh and Dr. Mann’s experiment exploded.”

  I tilted my head. Angélica had told me that the Feared Five—and Rita—had gained their superpowers in an explosion at a Davenport facility. Kurt Davenport had been thrown clear, but he hadn’t let his lack of powers stop him from fighting crime, and eventually fighting his wife. But I hadn’t known that Nigel Calibrese had simply been in the wrong spot at the wrong time.