#Herofail

by Lexie Dunne

  He had the grace to wince a little. “Sorry about the timing.”

  “If it weren’t for bad timing, we’d have nothing at all.” I handed him half of the papers. “See if you can’t make sense of that? Naomi pulled all of this out of Tamara Diesel’s place and I think it might have some answers as to how she got her hands on Davenport tech.”

  “She what?”

  “The nanobots,” I said. “Jeremy says they’re Davenport tech, and out of everybody, I think he’d know best. If he—”

  “Um, Gail,” Guy said.

  It very belatedly occurred to me that it hadn’t been Guy’s voice asking me about the tech. Which explained why Jessie’s eyes were open and focused on me.

  Several emotions flooded through me. Shock was quickly chased by sheer relief, a brief surge of happiness, and finally suspicion.

  “How long have you been awake?” I asked.

  “Never mind that.” Jessie groaned and tried to sit up, only to grow even paler. She gritted her teeth and stayed on the mattress. Sweat gathered at her hairline. “You said this is Davenport tech? From R & D?”

  “Probably. Seriously, how long have you been awake?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  So she’d been eavesdropping the whole time. I reached over to press the button for assistance.

  She glowered. “The nurse will only insist I get some rest.”

  “That’s because you should,” I said.

  “It’s not the first time I’ve been shot. Raise the bed, will you?”

  “You know,” I said as Guy watched us both with his eyes almost comically wide, “I’m starting to believe you’re going to be a bad patient.”

  A glance at the machines told me that nothing seemed abnormal. Of course Jessie would wake up without giving anything away or letting anybody know. She might not have superpowers, but she’d honed herself into the most disciplined person I’d ever met. Her self-control was scarily off the charts. So I did as she said, locating the button to raise the bed so that she sat at an incline. Then I handed her a cup of pills that had been left on the nightstand. Almost as if Audra and the nurse expected Jessie to wake up and not ask for assistance.

  She took all but two of the pills, and set them aside. “Where are the kids?” she asked.

  “School, I think,” I said, as I had no idea what day it was, or really where Jessie’s children were at all. Things had been so chaotic with two major supervillains rampaging and gathering allies at the same time. “They weren’t hurt. They’re okay.”

  Jessie sagged in relief and winced as that apparently exacerbated her injury. “What day is it? How long was I under? And what’s happened?”

  “Do you want the long or the short version?”

  “Give me the short version first.”

  “Tamara Diesel gassed everybody at the gala with nanobots for your pretty average blackmail scheme. I fought her at the gala, but wound up all over the news in the Raptor suit with all known Davenports in the background. As you can imagine, Rita saw it and Detmer is now toast. A bomb went off in Davenport Tower, but as far as we can tell the only one it’s killed is Jeremy and that’s only kind of. We’ve got supervillains launching full-scale attacks on all major cities, so Eddie and the rest of the HEX network are using the Nest as a base. Jeremy got the nanobots under control and we’re going to bring everybody that was gassed into the base to be de-nanobotted, if that’s even a word. But yeah, long story short: your mom’s out of prison and she’s tearing everything apart looking for something. We have no idea what. Surprise?”

  Jessie stared at me for a long, humming moment, her face a blank mask.

  Then she let out the most vicious string of swearing I’d ever heard in my life.

  “That about sums it up,” I said.

  “You’re bringing people into the Nest? We have rules for a reason—”

  “Jeremy needs your obstacle course to safely remove the nanobots from all infected parties. Which, by the way, includes you,” I said. “And that’s what you’re focusing on? Not, you know, Rita Detmer breaking out of prison for the first time in decades, or what she might be looking for?”

  “I know what she’s looking for. Where is she?”

  I shook my head. “Last I saw her, she was downstairs. In the secret base you neglected to tell me about. I’ll pay for the wall, by the way.”

  Jessie squinted. Her skin remained pale and washed out, but I knew better. If she could get out of that bed, she would already be in armor. “The w . . . oh, you couldn’t find the trapdoor mechanism.”

  “Improvisation was involved.”

  “Eh,” Jessie said. Even though she was upright and conscious, I could tell it was growing more taxing by the second. That didn’t prevent her from grabbing my wrist. I winced; she’d locked her fingers around the bandage. “Listen, we’ve got twenty seconds before I pass out. Perihelion. Access code is Crawford Heights. Inform Kiki about the Davenport tech and tell my idiot brother to get his damn personnel out of my base and back into the Tower.” She thought for a second. “Also tell my kids I love them.”

  And then she passed out, leaving Guy and me staring in silence.

  The nurse stepped in, took one look at the raised bed and the pills Jessie had neglected to swallow, and sighed. “How long was she awake?”

  “A couple minutes,” I lied. “She passed out on her own.”

  “Because I disguised the sedatives,” the nurse said, fussing with the blankets.

  When the nurse shooed us out, I collected the paperwork from Tamara Diesel’s stronghold, my mind whirling. Perihelion. The access code meant the file was somewhere on Jessie’s systems. And I needed to talk to Kiki about the Davenport tech—Jessie had seemed especially insistent about that point. And kick Eddie out of the base. I kind of looked forward to that bit, actually.

  Guy stopped me in the hallway before we reached the main hub. “I won’t even tell you to be nice,” he said. “But—be careful. When you bring up the fact that the nanobots are Davenport tech, I mean. Tamara Diesel could’ve gotten her hands on all of this by herself, but it’s a stronger bet she might have an insider in the company. And they won’t take too kindly to being outed.”

  “She called them Excalibur,” I said, frowning.

  “Right. So be careful because—”

  Rodrigo burst around the corner, twisting one earbud loose as he gaped at us. He actually wore his uniform, which meant he’d probably come in from a patrol of the Hudson or whatever. “The nanobots are Davenport tech?”

  “And that would be why we should be careful,” Guy said, a sigh evident in his voice. He flexed his shoulders, cracking his neck like he expected trouble.

  “Did I hear that right?” Rodrigo asked him. “The nanobots are Davenport?”

  “Sure, announce it to the entire base, why don’t you?” I stepped around him to check the hallway. When I turned back to him, he was practically vibrating with rage. “What?”

  “You know who’s behind this,” he said.

  I flashed back to the conversation I’d overheard in the closet. “Don’t you dare,” I said. “There’s absolutely no evidence that Kiki is involved.”

  “I don’t need evidence. You think it’s a coincidence that Tamara Diesel attacked at her gala? That right after she finally joins the management team—a position she’s been angling at for years—”

  “Nice revisionist history,” I said, infusing boredom into my voice even though I could feel my blood pressure rising.

  “For years,” Rodrigo insisted. “She finally gets it and, whoops, suddenly everybody’s under attack! Oh, look, there’s grandma, out of prison and—Oof.”

  I’d clenched my fist, ready to punch him, but I never got the chance: when I blinked, Guy had Rodrigo in a headlock. “Shut. Up,” he said.

  Rodrigo struggled. “If you’d stop protecting her for one damn second, you’d see it,” he said, kicking out and trying to break Guy’s hold. “She’s helping Diesel and Rita!”
<
br />   “Tamara Diesel and Rita Detmer aren’t even on the same side,” I said.

  “Maybe she’s hedging her bets!”

  “Or maybe she’s being set up,” I said without thinking.

  “Set up?” Rodrigo scoffed, and gurgled when Guy began to apply actual pressure. “Whose side are you even on?”

  “Hold him still for a minute, will you?” I asked. A thought began to take hold. Guy, whose face had gone stone-like, shrugged to say he was more than willing to do so. I opened up the paperwork and began to scan it page by page, tuning Rodrigo’s increasingly insistent voice out. The papers contained a gold mine of information: emails from dummy accounts, invoices, memos. A dog-feeding schedule that I assumed belonged to Lady Danger, as it included types of food I never wanted to think about ever again. Nanobot design pages listing specs and dimensions, stamped with Davenport’s proprietary level.

  A handwritten note had been scribbled on a page.

  Source says to use this formula for power deviation exponentials—Ex

  “Ex” had to be Excalibur, Tamara Diesel’s inside source. My eyes fell on the proprietary level stamp, which hadn’t been entirely blacked out.

  “It wasn’t Kiki,” I said aloud.

  “What?” Rodrigo, mid-rant, turned as best he could to look at me. He’d been trying to gnaw his way through Guy’s arm, and he had far too many teeth.

  “Look at this level.” I pointed at the stamp. “Kiki’s head of Medical, yes, but I know her level’s not that high.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything. She could’ve hacked the system.”

  “Jeremy couldn’t even hack the system, and he’s literally a being of pure computer code. It wasn’t Kiki.” But I had a feeling that somebody—somebody very high up within Davenport indeed—was setting up my friend to be the fall girl.

  And if it was Eddie Davenport himself, I was going to kick his ass.

  “What?” Rodrigo asked. “Who’s Jeremy?”

  Speak of the devil himself, for Jeremy—or at least his digital avatar—popped up in the hallway right next to me. I jumped and narrowly avoided smacking him with the rolled-up paperwork. “Aren’t you supposed to be taking nanobots out of the party guests?” I asked him.

  “There’s a problem,” Jeremy said, turning to look at me. “All of the people who were at the gala have disappeared.”

  Chapter 21

  Jeremy hadn’t exaggerated: everybody dosed with the nanobots had vanished. All of them. The kitchen staff, the waitstaff, the journalists, invited guests, and even the three people who’d crashed the gala—all of them had been quietly and efficiently plucked from their lives. Missing persons reports flooded the Nest’s computer screens as the already overworked Davenport staff absorbed this news. I saw a few puzzled faces mixed among the crowd, but the general feeling seemed to echo my own thoughts: Now what?

  “Perfect,” Eddie said, folding his arms over his chest. “Just . . . perfect. Amazing. Have there been any ransom demands made to any family members, to the press, or even to Davenport?”

  “Nobody’s reporting anything,” a tech said.

  “Somebody wake up the PR director from her nap, tell her we’ve got a Code—I don’t even know what color we’re on anymore,” Eddie said. “Davenport needs to make a statement. Get our most visible heroes out there so the public’s not panicking due to New York City’s local government being kidnapped at once.”

  He glanced over at me, the bearer of the bad news. “And tell them Hostage Girl was kidnapped with everybody else,” he added.

  “What?” I said.

  “What?” Guy said.

  “You were there, it makes sense. Besides, it’s been a couple years since the last Hostage Girl kidnapping,” Eddie said. “It’ll be noteworthy. A great distraction.”

  “You’re not actually planning on me getting abducted, right?” I said. If Eddie truly was the Davenport mole, I wouldn’t put it beyond him.

  “You’re more useful elsewhere. Scamper off and go cause more trouble or whatever the hell it is you do. I’ve got other things to worry about.” And he turned, barking more orders, leaving me with Guy.

  “Great,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. A Hostage Girl kidnapping would only put me right back in the public eye. Increased attention was the last thing the Raptor’s successor needed.

  Rather than scamper off to a dark corner, I stole an abandoned tablet and tugged Guy to the side. The missing persons reports had started coming in while Guy, Angélica, Raze, and I had been breaching Tamara Diesel’s stronghold. Given that Tamara Diesel barely had any allies, there was no way she could have pulled off such a coordinated attack.

  And the timing was . . . incredibly suspicious.

  I showed Guy the tablet. “This isn’t Tamara Diesel. Look at the time stamps.”

  I had to hand it to Guy: his brain worked even faster than mine. His fingers tightened on the tablet hard enough that little spiderweb cracks began to appear around the edges of the screen. “The abductions just so happened to occur at the same time we were fighting her? That can’t be a coincidence. Raze used us.”

  “Serves us right for forgetting she’s a villain, I guess,” I said, pulling out my phone. I texted her, How much of your story was complete bullshit?

  Raze must have been waiting by her phone. The usual amount, she sent back right away. I didn’t really have a choice, if it makes you feel better.

  Who are you working for? I typed back.

  She replied with an emoji of a skull and crossbones, not a proper answer. Going to ground. Fight when this is all over? she texted.

  Not on your life, I sent back, and locked my phone. And then I began to pace, seething. Raze had fed us a sob story about not wanting there to be factions of supervillains, about wanting to strike out on her own. And it had all been to bring us into Tamara Diesel’s headquarters so we could attack her while this heist was being pulled off.

  I breathed out through my nose. “Angélica is going to say, ‘I told you so’ in so many languages. Raze didn’t say who she’s working for.”

  “Any theories?”

  “An obvious one, but with the day I’m having, I wouldn’t be surprised if a third major villain entered the game.”

  Guy leaned against the wall and watched me pace. I needed to center myself and obtain a clear idea of what was happening. The Raptor worked from up high, Jessie liked to tell me. That made it easier to see the bigger picture. Since I couldn’t literally crawl on the roof and brood, I’d have to make do with taking her words more figuratively.

  “I can see your brain working, trying to figure out what to do next. Delegate. Give me that,” Guy said, pointing at the forgotten paperwork in my hand. “I’ll talk to Kiki about it. You deal with Jessie’s other orders. They seemed important.”

  “Right.” Jessie had said to kick Eddie out of the base, but that would have to wait. Her enigmatic third task seemed more important. “Perihelion. It’s got an access code, so it’s something in the system.”

  “I’ll tell Eddie we don’t think it’s Tamara Diesel behind the disappearances, and find Kiki. You look into whatever this Perihelion thing is.” He squeezed my good wrist, took the paperwork and strode off.

  Marching orders. Right, I could handle that. The obstacle course command center seemed like an ideal place to stay out from underfoot, which was probably why I found both Angélica and Naomi there, the former looking pissed and the latter pacing.

  “Where’d my papers go?” Naomi asked right away.

  “Guy’s taking them to Kiki, if you want to get a look.”

  “I’ll wait my turn,” Naomi said, but there was a disgruntled note in her voice. That was fair: they’d been her find. She sat down on the cot. “So what’s happening?”

  “Yes, Gail,” Angélica said pleasantly. “What’s happening? I feel like I would know more if I hadn’t been knocked unconscious.”

  Yeah, definitely some brutal training sessions in my future. I logged in to
the computer. “Jessie woke up, there’s a mole in Davenport that gave Tamara Diesel the tech to infect all of those people, and oh, yeah, Raze wasn’t acting out of the goodness of her heart when she delivered us to Tamara Diesel’s headquarters. We were a distraction.”

  I ignored the icon saying I had new emails and ran a system-wide search for Perihelion.

  “A distraction for what?” Naomi asked.

  “Somebody’s kidnapped all of the people infected with the nanobots.”

  Angélica rubbed her face. “How long was I out?”

  “Life comes at you fast with supervillains around.” The search had turned up one file.

  “Do they know who did it?” Naomi asked.

  “They’re looking into it.” I double clicked the file.

  The room plunged into darkness, drawing a gasp from Naomi. I jumped, ready for an attack. The red backup lights flared to life. Every single screen in the room and in the obstacle course below flashed with the words Perihelion Protocol.

  “Access code,” the system said. Naomi and Angélica exchanged a look.

  “Crawford Heights,” I said.

  The lights returned to normal, the screens going blank. I looked around in complete confusion. What had Jessie made me do? She hadn’t locked down the Nest somehow, had she? If everybody was trapped inside, Eddie was going to be pissier than usual.

  “What did you just do?” Angélica said.

  “What Jessie told me to. You know her, she only explains things when Venus is in retrograde.” I spotted the light up arrow on the floor, pointing toward the exit. “Coming with?”

  “Hell yeah.” Naomi scrambled after me.

  The arrows led to the family suite, straight to where I’d created a hole in the wall. What even was this protocol?

  “Oh, my god, I love secret lairs,” Naomi said. Angélica patiently pulled her back so I could lead the way.

  The underground base hadn’t changed, except that all the gold spattering the floor and computer servers from my fight with Mr. Midas had evaporated. Angélica raised her eyebrows at the decimated server and then at me. I only shrugged back at her, looking around for a reason why the protocol would lead us here.