by Lexie Dunne
I looked over in confusion. Guy was holding the gun Raze had given me earlier, its tip smoking.
“You were armed the whole time,” he said when I just gave him a baffled look. “Why didn’t you use this? I know you think guns are cheating, but so are villains.”
“I . . .” I stared at the gun. I’d completely forgotten it was tucked in my waistband.
Just like I’d forgotten the little pouch of goodies at my hip, too.
“I really need something to eat,” I said, and took the gun from Guy.
He nodded tightly. “Let’s get out of here.”
CHAPTER 16
Before we reached Davenport, they bundled Guy onto a stretcher, even though he insisted he could walk. I followed behind him on foot, limping into Medical, and Kiki jerked her head at the chair. I collapsed onto it and leaned forward, resting my forehead in my hands.
A silver-wrapped package was shoved in front of my face and I wanted to cry. “Can’t I just eat a whole chicken or something?” I asked.
“Let’s trade taste for efficiency for now.” The voice belonged not to Kiki but to Angélica. Who I hadn’t even noticed, which told me I was more out of it than I thought. She only continued to hold out the nutrition bar at me, expression unchanging.
With a sigh, I took it. Inside was a lumpy brown horrible imitation of food. There was an official name for these nutritional bars, but mostly we called them crap-cakes. So called because they tasted like crap. Probably worse, actually.
I chewed, even though my jaw hurt. When I’d swallowed, Angélica handed over a bottle of water.
“Forcing crap-cakes and water down my throat, it’s just like the old days,” I said, my voice weak.
She gave me a small smile. Across the room, Kiki examined the wound on Guy’s forehead.
“Feel up to walking me through what happened?” Angélica asked.
“The short version is Tamara Diesel has Elwin Lucas and Brook has the Demobilizer, and it’ll be a while before I go to a bar in Chicago again.” I chugged water, stopping when it hit my stomach only to be met with an overpowering wave of nausea. I breathed through my nose. Originally, I’d been told that if I didn’t keep an equilibrium with feeding myself in order to heal, I would make myself deathly ill. That turned out not to be true, but the moments waiting for the healing to complete were deeply unpleasant.
“Wow,” Angélica said, raising her eyebrows. “You’re going to need to tell me more than that, though.”
I nodded and closed my eyes for a second. “Give me a minute?”
“Dizzy?”
“Sick.”
“You mind if I . . . ?” She gestured at me vaguely and I shook my head. Angélica had been my trainer at Davenport and now we were roommates. Any reservations about being touched or having any sense of modesty around each other had long flown out the window. She put two fingers over my pulse point and listened intently. Then she placed a hand on my midriff. “Deep breath.”
I obeyed, trying not to wince.
“What caused this, specifically?”
“I tried to phase and ran out of energy, which meant I took the brunt of a fall off the top level. Getting hit by a car after I landed didn’t help.”
“No, I can imagine it didn’t.” Angélica probed gently at my sides and front, her frown deepening. She stepped over to a drawer—I glanced at Guy, who was being handed a glass of orange juice—and returned. I groaned at the second crap-cake.
“Your body will thank me,” Angélica said.
“My body hates everything on this planet, including you. There won’t be any thanking anytime soon.”
Angélica held out the crap-cake and stared.
Twenty-three seconds later, I gave in with a sigh. It tasted even worse than the first one.
“Where’s Mobius?” I asked. “Please tell me somewhere damp and dank and preferably cold. I need at least one thing to go right for me today.”
Angélica rolled her eyes. “Down the hall. We think you may have dislocated his hip.”
I felt a spurt of annoyance that puzzled me, as I wasn’t particularly annoyed myself. It was callous and rude, but Dr. Mobius had to be in his eighties. I’d rescued him. No reason to be annoyed.
“I got him back alive,” I said. “Pretty much the only thing I did right today, if you think about it. You’ll be waiting awhile if you expect me to apologize for his hip.”
Angélica’s lips pursed, but she didn’t push. Instead, she held up Raze’s gun, which had mercifully stopped smoking. “What’s this?”
“Gift from a friend,” I said, turning toward Guy. He sipped juice as Kiki ran some kind of scanning wand over his torso, and it made my entire body ache to see him hurting like that. At least it looked like the painkillers were starting to kick in.
Angélica set the gun down. “R&D’ll want to see it.”
“I’d rather they didn’t.”
Angélica’s look told me exactly how ridiculous I was being. “Fine,” I said. “But I need a phone. I need to text somebody.”
“What happened to yours?”
I pulled the pieces of it out of my pocket.
“Of course,” Angélica said with a sigh. “Just use mine. And take me through everything from the beginning.”
By the time I’d finished breaking down my awful day for Angélica, Raze answered my text and assured me that though she might need a couple of days, she would be in fighting form for our epic showdown. Guy’s forehead had been stitched, yellow smeared all around the wound. He needed rest and fluids, Kiki said, but she didn’t think he’d been permanently damaged by either Tamara’s attacks or my manhandling.
“Unlike my grandfather,” she said, turned away from me.
“I didn’t have to save Mobius, you know,” I said.
“What?” Guy said. All three of them were looking at me strangely, which was a bit unfair. They knew how much everything about Dr. Mobius messed with my head.
“Never mind,” I said. Guy seemed content with that; he closed his eyes and leaned back, holding an ice pack to his head. Angélica had her eyes narrowed and Kiki tilted her head at me. “Other than the hip, is he okay?”
“Eddie and all of his lawyers are talking to him now,” Kiki said, her voice tight. “They want to know if he can fix Guy’s and Vicki’s powers.”
Guy’s smile was strained at the edges. “Focus on Vicki,” he said. “I’m fine like this.”
Both Angélica and Vicki turned surprised expressions his way, and I supposed they had a point. He looked wrecked in a way I hadn’t seen since Brook—acting as Chelsea—had nearly killed him. She’d used Naomi’s research to commission a device that would force Guy into his vulnerable state and the resulting mess had not been pretty. His injury today was a sight better, but it was still vaguely wrong to see him hurt when one time I’d seen him bring a knife down on his own hand. The knife had broken. Guy’s hand had been unmarked.
“I mean it,” he said. He grimaced. “Headache aside, that is. Where’s Vicki?”
Kiki paused significantly at the computer. “Where else? With Jeremy. Again.”
“Maybe while she’s there, she can shake him awake. He’s missing all the fun stuff,” I said.
Again, all three of them turned to look at me. What I’d said wasn’t that sarcastic or awful, so I frowned back. But I still felt a spurt of puzzlement nonetheless.
Angélica opened her mouth, but Kiki touched her arm. “Let’s give these two a minute,” she said, nodding at Guy and at me.
Angélica’s squint at me as she left the room was decidedly suspicious.
“Vicki’s with Jeremy?” Guy asked, leaning back against the wall. I could feel my strength returning, though my midsection burned with fire. I crawled onto the cot next to him.
“Yeah,” I said, picking up his hand and
lacing my fingers through it. I needed to take advantage of Medical’s showers and get some new clothes, as every movement sent little wafts of plaster and concrete dust floating into the air. “How is Vicki doing? Is she okay with it like you?”
“Not exactly. Vicki actually likes having powers.”
I swiveled to look at him in surprise. “And you don’t?”
He was silent for a long moment. Then he shook his head. “I mean, there are upsides, of course. I can fly and not everybody can say that.”
“Yeah,” I said with a little more rancor than I meant to.
He squeezed my hand, one side of his mouth curling up just the slightest bit. “I’m aware that I’m privileged, Gail.”
“In more ways than one, rich boy.”
The lip curl became a full-blown smile. “Your disdain for my wealth will never fail to amuse me, Miss Public Transportation.”
“Hey, not all of us can fly.”
“Neither of us can now. I never had a choice, you know. Not where my powers are concerned.”
He’d been a teenager when an explosion had blown up the cement factory he’d been exploring with his siblings, granting all of them powers. Though it had taken him a while to join Davenport, he’d been flying around as a hero the whole time. Had he ever tried to be normal? I wondered now. Of course, given that I had only been trying to be a normal human for three months and I was already the Raptor’s special project and helping Davenport out with hostage situations in my spare time, I couldn’t exactly judge. Maybe it had been the same way for Guy. He’d never complained. I knew parts of the lifestyle bothered him—the villains’ relentless pursuit of me, for one thing—but I’d always gotten a sense of contentment from him.
“On either side,” he said, going on. “Dad wanted Sam to follow him in business, but Sam bounced hard off that after Petra disappeared, so it fell on me. And I am—was—strong and pretty indestructible, so it just made sense to suit up and save the day. And then you came along and you were . . .”
“Always in trouble,” I said, prompting him with a smile.
He smiled back. “Somebody had to save you. I didn’t mind so much. I didn’t hate having powers and constantly stepping up, and I wouldn’t have chosen to lose them. But . . . if it happened by accident? I’m not heartbroken.”
“How long have you felt this way?”
“A long time,” he said. “Since the move to Miami was seen as a success at least. Probably before.”
In his Blaze days, he’d put a stop to my kidnappings by removing himself from the picture and moving to Miami. The logic had been that if he wasn’t there to tempt the villains into kidnapping me, they’d lose interest. And for ten months, he’d been right. Unfortunately, Dr. Mobius had ruined my kidnapping-free streak. It had never occurred to me that Guy might have been unhappy in Miami.
“How come you never told me any of this?” I asked.
“What was I supposed to say? ‘I have amazing powers and I’d be super relieved if I didn’t’?”
“Sure,” I said. “Or anything you want, really. We’re at each other’s places two or three nights a week, which I’m told means we’re in some kind of serious committed relationship and that’s the kind of thing you share.”
“It wouldn’t have changed anything.”
“Still,” I said.
Guy shook his head.
“What do you think you’d be?” I asked. “If you hadn’t become Blaze?”
“I’d still work for Dad, probably. Actually, you know what? Petra would be working for Dad. She always had the head for business.”
“You’d be a chef,” I said, since I’d known the answer before I had asked.
He ducked his head forward and finger-combed his hair on the undamaged side of his forehead with his free hand, one of his bigger tells. “I had about ten brochures for culinary schools in my desk. I was filling out an application to one of them the night before the explosion, believe it or not. It . . . had to be put on hold.”
“You’re still a great cook. I mean, I know I don’t taste half of what I eat, but the half I do taste is spectacular.”
“Thanks.” He laughed a little, though it trailed off to nothing. “If I’d had powers, you wouldn’t have been put into that situation today. Any of those situations, really.”
I studied his face. “And yet you don’t want your powers back.”
He shook his head, looking a little miserable.
“Guy, that’s fine.”
“Is it? You were put into a terrible situation because of me today and I couldn’t do anything.”
I shifted a little to get more comfortable, bracing my back against the wall. I could feel the two crap-cakes doing their work, but I wasn’t comfortable enough to lean against Guy the way I wanted to. So I squeezed his hand a little, careful not to use my full strength. That would take some getting used to. “It’s kind of a taste of my own medicine, if you think about it. How many times was it exactly the same situation with us switching places?”
“Too many times,” Guy said.
I rested the back of my head against the wall and closed my eyes. “Except you never had to make a trade for me.”
“I’m glad about that. It would have been an impossible decision.”
“Are you mad that I did?”
Guy was silent for a long time. “It was the logical choice.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re not mad.”
“What use is being mad? You’re right. They want the scientist alive because he’s valuable even if Brook hands the Demobilizer over. Me, I’m just a useless wannabe chef.”
I opened my eyes and nearly started laughing at that.
“What?” he asked, catching the movement.
“Do you realize how much I consider a wannabe chef the farthest thing from useless? Even without your powers, which I really don’t care about one way or the other, you being ‘a useless wannabe chef’ is still like the most perfect thing to me ever.”
Guy paused for a long moment and unexpectedly began laughing, groaning a little when it obviously hurt his head. “I see where your priorities lie.”
“You, then food, then kicking ass,” I said.
He tugged on my arm to pull me closer so he could kiss me. The angle was a little awkward thanks to the fact that I couldn’t move too much, and he smelled like iodine, but it still felt pretty close to perfect.
Until the door swung open. Right, I thought as we pulled back from each other. We were definitely sort of in public and could be interrupted at any moment by Medical staff. Like Kiki, who shook her head and smiled ruefully at us.
“At least you’re both cute,” she said.
I blinked, wondering if I was more tired than I thought. It had been like watching a badly dubbed foreign film. Her lips didn’t match the words very well.
“What’s the matter?” Guy asked as I pushed myself off of the cot.
“It’s my—it’s Mobius,” Kiki said.
“Is he okay?” I asked, more as a reflex than anything. I had hit him kind of hard, after all.
Another spurt of annoyance, but Kiki nodded. “He’ll heal. There’s just a . . . snag.”
“What kind of snag?” I asked warily.
“He’s able to create an antidote to the Demobilizer,” Kiki said, and my stomach jumped. I looked at Guy, whose face had closed off. “It could fix Guy and Vicki and restore their powers in full.”
I decided to give Guy a moment to process that and turned Kiki’s attention on me instead. “Okay, so what’s the problem?”
Kiki made a face, and I suddenly knew exactly what the problem was. It just figured.
CHAPTER 17
“I won’t do it.”
I made it a policy not to hit the elderly, but right now, looking into Mobius’s horror show of a face, I
really, really wanted to break that policy. And only part of that was anger over the fact that once he’d kidnapped me and turned me superhuman without my consent. Mostly it was because he was a stubborn old goat and it was my friend he was hurting.
“You will do it,” I said, folding my arms gingerly over my chest and giving him my best glare. “You owe me.”
Medical put Mobius in one of the cells since he technically was a mad scientist and that fell on the villain side of the spectrum. Sure, he was the second grandfather to the company founder’s granddaughter, but nepotism only carried you so far. I wanted nothing to do with him whatsoever, but Kiki had pointed out that if he wasn’t going to listen to her, he wouldn’t listen to any Davenport techs. And like it or not, Mobius viewed me as his finest creation. His Frankenstein’s monster, if you will. Which was certainly fitting, as standing before him, I felt made up of a mishmash of anger, resentment, and general frustration.
“My darling Girl,” he said, glaring up at me from under his stringy hair, “I don’t owe you a thing.”
“You ruined my life,” I said.
“You seem to have turned out quite . . . adequate.”
“Adequate? You and Rita Detmer put me in the middle of a giant conspiracy. You owe me. My friend died—” she’d gotten better, but still “—I nearly died, my other friend is still in a coma and may never wake up, and you made a normal life impossible for me. All because you and some crazy supervillain picked me to be your little pawn.”
He sniffed. “Your chess metaphor is badly thought out, dear Girl. A bishop would never apologize to a pawn.”
“This isn’t chess, this is my life,” I said.
“I made you strong.” He eyed me up and down. “You’ve adapted even better to the Mobium than the previous subject.”
“Whose life you also ruined.” We had no idea where Brook was or what she’d done with the Demobilizer. That was a very scary shoe we were waiting to have drop. Probably on top of our heads, with our luck.