by Lexie Dunne
Was that better or worse than being given powers to act as a pawn in a sociopath’s chess game? I couldn’t tell.
Eddie put his hand on the statue’s shoulder. “It was actually because of him that my father set up Davenport the way he did. He saw what a toll being a hero took on Nigel, and how he could never hold down work because of it. Nigel was only twenty-four when my mother . . .” Eddie trailed off. The Cheetah’s death at the hands of Fearless had been the inspiration for paintings and countless conspiracy theories for decades. The first of the Feared Five to die—and the only one at Rita’s hand.
“Just a kid who had the bad luck of delivering a pizza to the wrong place.” Eddie shook his head and removed his hand from the stone Nigel’s shoulder. I didn’t know much about sculpting, but I could recognize a maestro in the making. Nigel Calibrese had had some raw talent in him, which made his dying so young seem even more tragic. I could see Kurt Davenport’s seriousness in his statue, and make out the camera-ready smile on Gail Garson. She hadn’t had a superhero name; in fact she’d been one of the first celebrities to be open about both sides of her identity, though she’d refused to give up her teammates’ identities, even to Congress.
Eddie put his hands in his pockets. “And now it’s time to retire the Feared Five. All of them.”
Hold up. “Retire? Even the Raptor? That’s not your call to make. Jessie—”
“Is upstairs unconscious and she’s never had a good perspective about the damn suit to start. She’s not powered, she should have stuck to her place in the company rather than chasing our father’s ridiculous pipe dreams. She would have been safe.”
Familiar feelings of rage and exasperation, put on hold due to Eddie’s unexpected moment of actual humanity, returned. “She wasn’t shot because she was the Raptor.”
“No, she wasn’t. But even so, she had a chance to retire the suit. Taking on an apprentice? A terrible idea. We have programs in Davenport specifically to train our frontline fighters. There was no reason for her to choose you specifically to take over and prolong this farce.”
My hands tightened into fists. “That’s her choice,” I said. “I don’t think you actually get a say.”
Eddie turned on me, his eyes blazing with annoyance. “It affects everything I do and everything this company does, so yes, Miss Godwin, I do get a say.”
“The Raptor is completely separate from the Davenport hierarchy—”
“This isn’t about hierarchy.” Eddie pulled out his phone and turned the screen toward me. Of course it showed that infamous shot of me falling flat on my ass at the gala. “What do you see?”
I bristled. “I misjudged a landing and tripped. It’s not the end of the world.”
“Not that. Look closely. Here I am—”
“Vain much?”
“And my niece and nephew, and Kiki. And Jessie.”
It still made my stomach clench to see her on the floor surrounded by her own blood. It had to be worse for her two children, of course. I pushed that thought aside. “So?” I asked Eddie.
“My sister never told you why our mother agreed to stay in a prison that obviously couldn’t hold her, did she?” Eddie’s eyes went flinty blue in the low light from his phone screen. “She could fight her husband all she liked. She saw him, and especially his company, as the downfall of civilization, something to save the world from. But it turns out Rita Detmer has a soft spot.”
A creeping sense of horror began to crawl up the back of my neck.
“Family, Miss Godwin,” Eddie went on. “Specifically her children and grandchildren. She considered the Raptor her greatest enemy, but as long as the Raptor was a member of her family, she’d stay in prison. Look at the picture again. What do you see?”
I saw myself in the Raptor uniform—with every single blood relation of Rita Detmer on prominent display behind me. In a picture that had played on probably every news channel in the world. Including ones that reached Detmer Prison.
Rita knew there was a new Raptor.
“Thanks to you, Rita Detmer is no longer in prison.” Eddie’s eyes gleamed with fury. “So yes, it is very much time to retire the Raptor.”
Well, shit.
I’d tried to do one heroic thing, and I’d unleashed the world’s worst supervillain. One who was apparently so frightening that no prison could realistically hold her except for the worst power of all: maternal guilt.
Eddie’s revelation hit like a bombshell to my psyche. I had unintentionally kicked a precarious stack of dominoes leading to Rita breaking free. Now the entire world was paying for it as supervillains across the country wreaked havoc as a way to cover Rita’s search for . . . whatever it was she was looking for.
It was a terrifying concept, that Rita had some kind of plan. Not that Rita improvising was any less alarming, come to think of it.
Even scarier, Tamara Diesel’s challenge to the city council had come with messy strings that I hadn’t fully considered. Eddie and all the other nonpowered people might be able to withstand another jolt from the nanobots. Jessie, in a coma and fighting for her life, wouldn’t. In a fit of either irony or tragedy, they’d created nanobots because they’d suspected the Raptor was a nonpowered individual, and through complete coincidence, they’d taken her out and might still kill her.
I brooded over it on the flight home. Eddie had ordered Angélica and me to return to Chicago. She wasn’t happy at being sent away from Kiki, but we needed to find Elwin Lucas, who had probably helped Tamara Diesel, and if possible, beat out of him how to stop the nanobots from hurting more people. I especially looked forward to that. He’d once depowered me and held me hostage and he’d tried to kill Vicki. I had a few scores to settle.
Naomi tagged along, freed from quarantine on Eddie’s orders. We’d need her nose for trouble to find Elwin Lucas, we figured. We slipped back into Chicago in the hour or two before dawn that felt truly and oppressively dark. Even Angélica yawned as she expertly piloted the jet into the vehicle bay of the Chicago Nest. “Go home, get a couple hours’ sleep in our own beds, and meet here for late breakfast so we can get a head start on finding this bastard?” she said.
“Fine by me.”
Since it wasn’t smart to put Naomi behind the wheel when she might have a nanobot fit, Angélica drove her home and I finally, finally went home to Guy. My body ached, though my arm and shoulder had healed considerably faster than expected. It wasn’t so much physical exhaustion as sheer, skull-deep mental weariness that lay over me as I stepped through the door.
“Hello?” I paused inside the foyer, frowning at the beam of light across the floor from the kitchen. Guy worked terrible hours but he usually wasn’t up at 4 a.m. “Are you actually awake?”
“Hi,” Guy said, appearing in the doorway in socks, pajama pants, and a White Sox shirt he wore to annoy everybody in our neighborhood.
Without a word, I stepped forward and let myself be folded into a hug. I pressed my face into his chest and breathed.
He let out a weak laugh. “Long day, huh?”
I grumbled and didn’t move.
“Want to talk about it?”
“What’s there to talk about? Jeremy probably dying if we can’t figure out a way to get him out of an obstacle course? New York City’s governing body being subject to the whims of a supervillain? That everybody thinks Kiki set her grandmother free, when it was really my actions that led to Fearless looking back on decades of contented imprisonment and saying ‘Nah’?” My voice rose in pitch, and I felt like laughter might erupt from me at any second. I had to laugh. Otherwise I’d cry.
I hated crying.
I hadn’t picked my head up, so the words were mumbled against Guy’s shirt. It was a toss-up about how much he understood, though he did tighten his grip.
“Days like today really make me think you had the right idea, leaving it all behind,” I said.
Guy stayed quiet.
“Anyway.” I shook my head and stepped around Guy into the kitchen
, where I made a beeline for the pantry. I had really not missed the days of carb-loading that would make Olympic athletes jealous. “That’s my last thirty-six hours. I hope yours has been better. Are your coworkers all okay after the restaurant holdup yesterday?”
Guy scratched the back of his neck, looking toward the living room before answering me. “Well, Lowry is spitting mad.”
“When is he not?” I asked, as Guy’s boss delighted in the stereotype of the tempestuous head chef.
“Point.”
I bit my tongue so I wouldn’t mention that he needed another job yet again. Instead, I stuffed a granola bar into my mouth. “You’re being very quiet. I didn’t wake you, did I?” I said around a mouthful.
“No.” Guy finally moved away from the doorway and reached over my head to pull down a tin of homemade crackers. I dove in with abandon. “I’m just debating something. You’ve got a lot on your mind right now. I don’t want to add to it.”
I stopped chewing. Maybe it was the fact that my shoulder and side still hurt, or that I’d had the day from hell, or that supervillains were having a free-for-all all over the continent. Everything suddenly clumped together, weighing on the back of my shoulders like one of the boulders Jessie liked to throw at me in the obstacle course. I slumped. “We’re doing this now?”
“What?” Guy looked mystified.
“Whatever the big secret it is about your job. You want to talk about that now, after I have had a couple days that were both objectively and subjectively the worst? I’ve known something’s up, Guy. Did you forget I’m a walking lie detector test? I can tell when somebody’s not being truthful. But whatever it is, I don’t have time for it. I have so much on my plate right now that—”
“It’s not that,” Guy said, though his eyes had gone wide. “It’s something el—wait, you knew something was up with my job?”
I merely spread my hands wide and gave him an unimpressed look. “Mobium. Upsides and downsides, buddy.”
“Okay, it’s not what you think.” He ran his hand through his hair so that it stuck up in red spikes. “I swear. It really is something else.”
“Guy, just tell me.” I nearly shouted it.
“It’s just a guess,” said a new voice, “but Boy is probably trying to decide if he should tell you I’m here.”
Raze stepped into my kitchen.
“Yeah,” Guy said, rubbing his hand down his face. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
Chapter 17
“Don’t call him Boy,” I said before my brain processed that my best enemy stood in my kitchen, not wearing armor for once. She had her helmet on, the visor guarding her too-large eyes, but instead of the colorful getup and half cape, she wore a crushed velvet leisure suit with RX printed where a logo would be. She even had her hair down. “If you’re here for a fight, Raze, I’m really not in the mood.”
“I’m not here for that.” She put her hands up for peace, and considered. “Sort of.”
“What are you here for?” I asked. “And before you answer, keep it in mind that I am having a supremely terrible day.”
“You and me both. You mind?” She gestured at the refrigerator. Without waiting for me to answer, she pulled out a bottle of soy sauce, uncapped it, and proceeded to guzzle.
Guy and I stared at her. “We’ve got some beer if you’d rather have that,” Guy said.
She lowered the soy sauce, wiped her mouth, and frowned at him. “How can you drink that stuff? It’s nasty.”
“Well, I’m having one,” Guy said, stepping around her. He handed me a bottle.
Even though I was healing up and probably should avoid alcohol, I popped the cap. Arguing with Guy always made my head hurt, and Raze wasn’t helping matters. “This isn’t a social call, is it?” I asked.
“No.” Raze let out a polite burp. “I’m here because I need your help. You got somewhere to sit?”
I led the way over to the dining room table, glancing at Guy, who merely shrugged back. As a precaution, I checked my chair before I sat down. Raze had the juvenile sense of humor that favored whoopee cushions, though hers tended to involve razor blades.
“If you two are having trouble, I can recommend a good relationship counselor,” she said as she sat.
“We’re fine,” Guy and I said at the same time.
“One of my colleagues does counseling on the side when villainy doesn’t pay the bills. He’s pretty good.” Raze apparently did have the ability to read the room, for she closed her mouth with a snap, her pointy teeth clicking together. “Or not. Nothing to do with me, I get it.”
“Raze, for the third time—why are you here?” I asked.
“I told you, I need your help.” Raze wiped soy sauce from her chin with her sleeve. “I don’t know if it’s escaped your notice, but things are terrible lately.”
Guy frowned. “It’s a villain free-for-all out there. That seems like the type of thing you would love.”
“Precisely!” Raze pointed the bottle at him, as though he had made a deeply profound point. “I love a good free-for-all. The chaos. The anarchy. The every villain for herself. The wanton destruction. The—”
“We get the point,” I said.
“But this isn’t a free-for-all.” Raze’s lip curled up with distaste. “It’s organized.”
“It feels pretty chaotic to me.” Guy took a sip of his beer.
“But it’s not.” Raze, for the first time since I’d known her, pulled off her helmet. Her hair stuck up in wild directions, though part of it had been flattened by the helmet. And she wasn’t hiding the giant bald spot that I’d suspected. She pushed a hand through her hair in frustration and jammed the helmet back on. “We don’t organize. We don’t follow rules. There’s a code for a reason.”
“Isn’t a code technically a rule?” I asked.
“Yes, but—” She breathed through her nose. “It’s a necessary evil. You don’t understand.”
Her words took me back and for the briefest of seconds, I found myself standing by Jessie’s sickbed, listening to Rita saying precisely the same thing. Why was this a theme?
“The code allows us freedom to act as we please,” Raze went on. “We do not work together, and we do not answer to other villains. But lately, there’s been a shift, and I don’t like it. Battle lines are being drawn and we’re being forced to pick sides.” She shuddered, as though this was the worst thing she’d ever heard.
“But you already did pick sides. You chose to be evil.”
“Not sides like that! Sides like—we’ve lost our free will to do things. It’s servitude now. Either you answer to Tamara Diesel or you answer to Rita Detmer. If I wanted to obey orders, I’d have been good.” Raze spit on the floor to show us precisely how she felt about this idea.
“You’re cleaning that up,” Guy said.
“Villains do not—”
“You’re a guest first, villain second,” I said.
Raze made a face. “Fine,” she said, drawing the word out like a petulant teenager. She reached into her leisure suit top—I tensed, expecting a ray gun—and pulled out an embroidered handkerchief. With the world’s most put-upon sigh, she stooped and cleaned up her mess. “It’s not right. Everybody’s formed alliances and they expect us all to fall in line. I won’t do it. It’s barbaric and it’s just not done.”
“Barbaric” seemed a bit much from a woman who’d tested at least eight varieties of pain juice on me in my Hostage Girl days.
“This isn’t the dark ages anymore. We don’t have to worry about the Fool Five—”
“The Feared Five,” I said.
“—and we shouldn’t have to worry about alliances.” Raze rose to her feet, fastidiously folding the handkerchief. It seemed like such a strange affectation for her to carry.
The initials LD on the corner of the handkerchief gave me pause. “Where did you get that?”
“Lady Danger. Which is precisely who I came to talk to you about.” Raze scowled and flopped back into her
chair, taking a morose sip of soy sauce. “She came back to town for the afternoon and I had the ‘honor’—” she made air quotes with her fingers “—of being called upon.”
“She gave you a handkerchief?” Guy asked.
“She gave me a threat. I have to choose a side. I’ve got about eight hours remaining before I have to give her an answer in person. She says—” and Raze affected the worst British accent I’d ever heard “—that if I am not with Diesel, I have declared myself to be a member of Rita Detmer’s ‘gang of uncultured hooligans’ and am therefore their enemy. Which is ridiculous. What would I ever have to do with Rita Detmer?”
“Erm, you helped her bust me out of prison,” I said.
“That was one time, for a mutual goal. It should be every villain for herself. We should be fighting the ‘heroes’ and sticking to our territory.”
“What are you going to tell Lady Danger?” I asked.
“Ideally, I would pain ray her in the face and be on my way. But that’s the problem with alliances, isn’t it? They’ve got friends. And people get annoyed when you hurt their friends.”
“That is generally the point of an alliance, yes,” Guy said.
“Well, I don’t want to be their friend. So I need an alliance of my own, even though I hate them. And that’s you.” She pointed at me, seemed to think about it, and tilted her head. “Boy, too.”
“Raze.”
“Fine. Guy, too. He can cook things, I guess.”
“I’m happy to be included. What on earth would you expect this alliance to do?” Guy asked.
“Well, Rita’s scary and doesn’t seem to care as long as you stay out of her way. Tamara Diesel’s the one kicking up a fuss.” Raze tilted her head, staring off into the distance as she apparently gave the matter some thought. “So that’s what we’ll do. We’ll take out Tamara Diesel, and everything will return to normal.”
“Sure,” I said. “Just like that.”