#Herofail

by Lexie Dunne

  I whimpered.

  “Oh, thank god,” he said. “You’re alive.”

  “Rita,” I tried to say. I felt wind buffet my face and body, exacerbating every one of my injuries and making me groan. The world faded in and out like a broken signal. Hallways, rooms, everything flew by in a blur.

  And underneath it all, I heard Guy’s apologetic, “Sorry. I’m so sorry. It’ll be over soon, just hold on. I’m taking you to the Nest.”

  We hit open air, and everything became too bright and too real, making me whimper.

  “That’s good,” I said. “Wake me up when we get there.”

  And then I passed out.

  When I woke to the hum of machines and the sound of a heart rate monitor, for a second I forgot everything. I was back in Chicago in my days as Hostage Girl, groggily waiting for the pain to kick in so I could open my eyes and be informed by my doctor which supervillain had attacked me today. There was even a chance I’d open my eyes and see Jeremy sitting at my bedside.

  Reality and memory filtered in. For one thing, I could hear the machines more clearly than I ever had in my old life. But when I did open my eyes, Jeremy was there.

  He was also bright green.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” he said in a voice that sounded like his own, run through an electronic filter. “Did you have a good nap?”

  “How long was I out?” I said in a rusty voice.

  “Three months.”

  “Three m-months?” My eyes flew open. I tried to sit up, but my torso throbbed, and I sagged into the mattress with a groan. “I’ve been unconscious for three months?”

  “Nah,” Jeremy said.

  “Jeremy, I swear to god, I will kick your green ass—”

  “It was two weeks,” Jeremy said. “I said three months so you’d get the panicking out of the way.”

  “I hate you,” I said without any rancor. “Why are you green? Where’s everybody else?”

  “I already sent a message to the others to let them know you’re awake. I’m just the watchdog since it’s three o’clock in the morning.” Jeremy propped his feet up on my hospital bed and leaned back. The humming, I realized, wasn’t entirely the machines. “And to answer your question: yes, I am now made out of nanobots. I’m state-of-the-art now. No longer a fleshbag. Speaking of which, how is your fleshbag body feeling?”

  “Not great, and describing it that way makes it sound really gross.”

  “That was the point.”

  I closed my eyes, as the lights felt a little too harsh against my corneas. Following Jessie’s training, I breathed deeply, gathering my senses. Two weeks in a coma. Not my longest stint by far, but incredibly inconvenient. An onslaught of memories hit at the same time. Rita’s terrifying face as she tossed me about like a rag doll. Phasing through the wall. The underwater tunnels. The Provenance. The way the world had turned black-and-white and narrowed impossibly as I’d phased.

  The absolute agony of unleashing all of that force and the way I’d felt it rip at my body. The Provenance growing in size, threatening to explode.

  The horror of knowing my actions had caused that.

  “Gail?” Jeremy asked, as I’d gone silent.

  I shook my head and opened my eyes, able to handle the light again. “How bad was it?”

  “Well, you need some serious reconstructive surgery, even with the Mobium, so—”

  “Not me.” Though that really didn’t sound great. Was my face okay? Did I look different? “Chicago. How bad was the explosion?”

  “Well, it didn’t hit Chicago—it was fifty miles out,” Jeremy said. “I won’t lie: it wasn’t great. Setting off a bomb in the middle of Lake Michigan’s kind of bad for the ecosystem, but nobody was killed on Navy Pier. You saved all of us.”

  I hadn’t. I’d put all of us in danger.

  “And nobody’s seen Rita since, so congratulations on finally ending that collective nightmare for the nation,” Jeremy said. “It—”

  He broke off as the door slid open and Guy hurtled through. He practically flew to the bedside, dropping to his knees and grabbing my hand. His skin felt icy. “You’re awake. Thank god.”

  “Kind of regretting it because of how much everything hurts, if I’m honest,” I said, but I wanted to lean in to the touch and purr when he stroked my hair. “Jeremy says I’ve been out for two weeks?”

  “Thirteen days, six hours, and three minutes,” Guy said, which explained the dark circles under his eyes and the scruff on his chin. His cheekbones seemed even more prominent than usual. Angélica and the others clearly hadn’t nagged him to eat enough. “You scared us all a lot.”

  “And that’s my cue to go,” Jeremy said. “Kiki says she’s on her way.”

  “Thanks, Pulse,” Guy said without looking at him, but Jeremy shot a pleased glance over his shoulder as he left, his stride just off enough to be unsettling.

  “Pulse?” I asked.

  “You’ve missed a lot.” Guy kept searching my face like he’d forgotten what I looked like. “So much has happened. And you slept right through it.”

  A weak attempt at humor, but I’d take it. “I needed a nap.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Though I way overdid it.”

  “Maybe we should change your name from Raptor to Overkill,” Guy said, grinning before he kissed my knuckles.

  “After all the work she’s put into me? Jessie would be so offended. Wait—Jessie—”

  “She’s fine,” Guy said. “They’re not letting her out of bed yet, so she’s actually down the hall. I think she was more worried about you than herself.”

  Why? She’d been the one to get shot, and she didn’t even have powers.

  “We’ve all been worried about you,” Guy said in a quiet voice.

  “It was my fault,” I said.

  Guy blinked, leaning his head back in confusion. “What was your fault?”

  “The Provenance.” I struggled to sit up, but my ribs ached too much. Frustrated, I fell back against the mattress and gritted my teeth. “Rita tricked me into hitting her hard enough that I broke the force field generator. I’m the one who unleashed it all.”

  “Gail,” was all Guy had the chance to say before the door opened again, this time bringing Kiki and Angélica into the room. Both of them wore pajamas and looked as sleep-rumpled as Guy.

  Still, Kiki descended on me, clipboard in hand. I’d been through enough hospital visits that I knew her entire checklist by heart, but I gamely let her ask the questions, answering them as honestly as I could. With our mental bond, I worried she might sense a lie.

  “Why does it still hurt?” I asked when she reached the end of the checklist. “Shouldn’t the Mobium have done its thing by this point?”

  Kiki unloaded a full syringe of clear liquid into the feeder by the IV bag. Almost instantly, cool relief began to spread through my body. “Do you know what you did to your body?”

  I shook my head.

  “You practically liquefied half of your rib cage, Gail. It’s a miracle you even survived it. Even the Mobium needs time to heal a massive trauma like that.”

  To prove it, she held up an X-ray against the overhead light and I felt my soul try to leave my body. “I did that to myself?”

  “You’re lucky you body-slammed her. Kicking or punching with that much energy would’ve cost you a limb,” Angélica said. “How about you never try that particular trick again?”

  She phrased it like a question but she spoke it like an order.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “In fact, it would have been nice to know you could do that in the first place,” Angélica went on. “We found a deconstructed car outside of the Nest in New York. Your work?”

  I winced, and nodded.

  “You can scold her when she’s feeling better,” Kiki said.

  Angélica glared at the both of us, then abruptly turned and left.

  “She was worried about you,” Kiki said. “It’s bound to make her
cranky for a couple of days. But I’m glad you’re all right.”

  “When can I go home?” I asked.

  “We’ll discuss it later,” Kiki said, which told me all I needed to know: it would be a long time. Kiki touched my arm, and I felt the slightest mental push against my psychic barriers. My eyelids felt mysteriously heavy. “Try to get more sleep. Guy?”

  “I’ll stay with her,” he said. The last thing I felt before I succumbed to Kiki’s suggestion and fell asleep was him picking up my hand and lacing our fingers together.

  The hospital remained as boring as it had been in my Hostage Girl days. The main difference now was that I had visitors. Every time I woke up, a new person sat in the chair, willing to talk and catch me up until the drugs pushed me back under. Because of that, I caught my news in discombobulated bits and pieces that made it difficult to join all the facts together in my head.

  Nobody had seen Rita since the Provenance had been jettisoned into the lake, Naomi told me. Also the Centennial Wheel was completely fine. So were the politicians that had been strung to it, though she added that bit begrudgingly.

  Vicki filled me in on what had happened to Mind the Boom, or the crater that remained of it, as she ate the pudding off of my dinner tray.

  Jessie told me all about Tamara Diesel’s arrest, how she’d been found out hiding with Rubber Bandit and Letty Danger in Miami. An anonymous tip had been delivered to the HEX network, pinned to a surprisingly resilient I Heart NY T-shirt. I made sure to ascertain that this one had not blown up like the first six.

  Guy repeatedly reminded me that it wasn’t my fault the force field around the Provenance had been destroyed. I’d taken out Rita the only way I possibly could have. I’d done the world a favor, though in the future, I should avoid extreme phasing like that ever again.

  Angélica gave me a more honest version of events. By her estimation, Phantom Fuel and Invisible Victor had built such a solid system that even Rita couldn’t disable it. Fail-safes had likely accounted for use of any explosives, powered or otherwise. Using my phasing ability to break the force field itself had likely been her plan all along. What neither of us could figure out was how Rita knew I had that ability when I hadn’t known myself.

  Kiki brought news that Wilbur Scott, Davenport’s head of R & D, had been arrested.

  “He was the missing link all along,” she told me as I poked at my oatmeal. “He thought he was getting the job Eddie’s grooming me for.”

  “Charming. Why did he work with a supervillain like Tamara Diesel, though?”

  “I think it was the fastest way for him to spread doubt about my true allegiances. See, he gives Tamara Diesel the nanobots, which Davenport created, she pretends we’re buddies in front of everybody, she uses the nanobots. We discover it’s Davenport tech and all signs already point to me. He forged paper trails and everything. Those were supposed to be found in my desk, but then Rita decided to break out of prison and set off a bomb in Davenport Tower.”

  “And we had other things on our minds,” I said, nodding as it all fell into place.

  “The depressing thing was that if Rita hadn’t attacked when she did, his plan might have worked,” Kiki said.

  “Nah,” I said. “No way Angélica and I would have let that happen.”

  She looked a little misty-eyed as she left. Later on, I discovered that the only one in the company who’d apologized for how they treated her had been Rodrigo—my next visitor, as it happened. He told me that our time in the underwater tunnels together made us bros now. And since he sneaked in some coffee for me, I decided to agree with him.

  But Rodrigo wasn’t my most surprising visitor: one morning I rolled over and blinked at seeing Brooklyn Gianelli in the chair glowering at a magazine.

  “Uh,” I said.

  “This garbage quiz says I’m a summer,” she said. “That’s ridiculous. I’m clearly an autumn.”

  “Uh,” I said again.

  Brook folded the magazine in her lap.

  “Who—did you break in? Are you about to attack me?” I asked. I could move a little easier, but I was in absolutely no shape for a battle, especially not against somebody as powerful as Brook.

  Brook rolled her eyes and tapped a visitors badge I’d overlooked. “I’m only here for a brief visit. I wanted to thank you in person for taking care of Rita. Little Bookman says you almost died doing it.”

  “Shark-man was the one who really saved you,” I said. “Sorry you ended up as a hostage again, though.”

  “It is what it is. I’m taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen anymore. I also came to say goodbye.”

  My surprise must have shown on my face, for she scoffed. “Yeah, we’re not friends, I know. But it seemed like the right thing to do. I’ve got a contact that’s going to put me in touch with a new identity and help me get a new life started. I’m done with all of it.”

  “Fair,” I said. I cleared my throat, calling to mind a subject that had been bothering me for weeks now. “Can I ask you something? At Detmer, Rita—she said something about having a room built for you?”

  “Ah yes. The Reset Room. Loud as hell, torture equivalent to the fires of a thousand suns, you wake up and nothing about your powers work?” Brook ticked things off on her fingers. When I nodded emphatically, she sat back. “God, I hate that room.”

  “It’s destroyed now, if that’s any consolation.”

  “Actually, it is. This stupid . . .” Brook opened her hand, palm upward, and projected a couple globules of her pain ray into the air over her hand. I nearly mentioned that I could sort of do that, too, but she continued on, “God, I hate Mobium. There’s so many little ‘quirks’ that asshole Mobius put inside it. And one of them was a frequency reset. Mobium can’t handle a certain frequency, so you subject us to it and we basically explode. It fucking hurts.”

  “Yeah, it really does,” I said.

  “But hey, we come back stronger. Rita used to love doing it to me.” Brook rolled her head around her neck. “I’m pretty sure she thought she was doing me a favor.”

  “She could be strangely egalitarian in her own way,” I said. “She wanted the Provenance to go off for the sake of everybody.”

  Brook’s words confirmed Angélica’s and my theory. Rita had deliberately optimized my powers. Had I phased at her to deliver a more powerful blow in our fight at the prison? I must have.

  “What a peach. I’m so glad she’s dead,” Brook said, drawing me back to the current moment.

  Something else occurred to me, and I remembered running through Tamara Diesel’s headquarters. “There’s something you should know—Elwin Lucas is dead.”

  Brook sat incredibly still for a long moment.

  “Brook?” I asked.

  “How?” she asked.

  I told her about finding the body and she listened without expression. “That saves me from having to do it myself,” she said. “Nice to know someone else wanted him dead as much as I did, and saved me some work in the process.”

  “Yes,” I said, though a suspicion had begun to take form in the back of my mind. I was almost tempted to dismiss it as paranoia derived from a stir-crazy existence at the hospital, but I couldn’t quite do that.

  “Time for me to go.” Brook held out her hand, formally. “It’s been nice knowing you, Gail.”

  I couldn’t exactly say the same, but I shook her hand. “You’ve kept life interesting. So thanks for that.”

  A tiny smile slipped through before Brook concealed it, falling back on her neutrally annoyed expression. “See you never, I hope,” she said, rising to her feet.

  Before she reached the door, I said, “Your contact—is that for an underground network of superpowered people?”

  The way she tensed briefly was answer enough.

  “You think Petra Bookman’s in that network?” I asked.

  Interestingly, Brook paused in the doorway. “I think maybe you and Little Bookman should talk to the barkeep at Mind the Boom,” she said. �
��You might be surprised by what you find.”

  She left without another word.

  Chapter 26

  Over a month later, when I was finally well enough to begin walking on my own again, Guy brought up the idea of looking for a better job. The Lake Michigan explosion meant a lot of Chicago restaurants would be serving fish for a long time, thanks to the trawlers that had worked to scoop up the legions of dead fish that mercifully weren’t radioactive like me, and Guy didn’t particularly like that style of cooking. He even floated the idea of looking in New York.

  I wanted to stay in Chicago, though. The ʼporter network was already back up and running, and without Rita Detmer on the loose, the supervillains had calmed down a bit. Construction had even begun on Detmer II, the Rita Detmer Memorial Prison for Supervillains. Thanks to my connections to Jessie, I’d seen the plans.

  The supervillains were getting an indoor water park this time. Incredibly unfair.

  Long nights in Medical gave me an opportunity to stop and think over everything that had happened recently. Every part felt like a puzzle with a million different sides, and it took me a long time to see how they interconnected. And in that time, between all of the visitors and the healing, I reached two conclusions that I didn’t think anybody else had realized.

  The minute I was well enough to travel on my own, I slipped out of Medical, stole some clothes from Kiki’s on-site apartment, and made my way up to the way station before I could get caught. Sure, my rib cage burned a little and I felt out of breath by the time I reached the way station, but it felt great to be out and on my own.

  “Omaha,” I said to Jon, who looked none the worse for wear after the Chicago way station had blown up with him inside.

  I worried he might have been given orders by Kiki to keep me in New York, but he only stood and wiped cheese dust off his fingers. “That’s not a usual stop for you.”