by Lexie Dunne
I opened my mouth to make a joke and stopped abruptly as something niggled in the back of my mind. “I think I might be,” I said instead.
The amusement dropped away from Guy’s face. “What do you mean?”
“Stretchy McGee. Whoever she is, the one you shot with Raze’s gun. I had that gun the whole time,” I said. I looked down at the scars on Guy’s chest and shook my head as a thought tried to surface and disappeared just as quickly. “It was tucked into my belt. I could feel it, but I just wasn’t thinking about it. The Mobium ensures I’m going to use every advantage I possibly can. So why didn’t I use it? Why didn’t it even occur to me?”
“You were a little stressed at the time,” Guy said. “I think that’s forgivable.”
“Yeah, and if it had been an isolated incident, that’d be one thing.”
“There’ve been other incidents?” Guy tasted the sauce and added a pinch of salt. He finished basting the roast and pushed it back into the oven.
“Naomi visited me at work to talk about Mobius and not twenty minutes later we watched a ransom video with the same guy. And my brain didn’t think, ‘That can’t be a coincidence.’ Yesterday morning, way after my morning coffee, I wondered why I hadn’t talked to Jeremy in a while. It took me a full three minutes to remember that he’s in a coma.”
“Again, you were stressed,” Guy said, but he was frowning deeply. “I didn’t know him nearly as long and sometimes I wonder if Jeremy’s going to wander in and insult me.”
“I wish he would. Wander in, not insult you. God, he could be such an asshole. Can be,” I said, shaking my head. “But I think it’s more than that. I mean, we don’t know that much about the Mobium, and the man who could tell us anything about it is a) not willing to work with us unless it benefits Kiki, and b) more than a few coconuts short of a cream pie, you know?”
“You think the Mobium is breaking down? That’s jumping to extremes right away, I think,” Guy said. “Maybe talk to Kiki about it before you freak out.”
I was worried he was going to say that. Kiki had enough on her mind with Dr. Mobius’s horrible life choices pressing in on her, but she was also the closest thing Davenport had to a willing expert about my powers. “I’ll let Kiki worry about all of these questions tomorrow. Right now, though, you should probably put on a shirt.”
Guy grinned. “Is that what you really want me to do?”
“No, of course not, but I don’t think you really want to entertain Naomi while shirtless and she’ll be here in three . . . two . . .”
On cue, the doorbell rang.
“You know, powers or not, it’s creepy when you do things like that,” Guy said, and went to go put on a shirt as I headed to answer the front door.
As it happened, Kiki reached out to me first. I saw her text message after I’d stepped out of the shower, leaving Guy to finish scrubbing his back. Got time today? It’s not about Mobius.
I texted back that I needed to talk to her, too, and went on about my day since she apparently had a full morning. Instead, I stopped by Naomi’s new office to bring her the leftovers she’d left behind the night before. Like Guy and me, Naomi was being kept at Davenport, but at least they had work for her. She’d been granted full access to everything we’d found in the lair where Elwin had been keeping Mobius. While it was intriguing and she loved poking through everything, she’d expressed more than a little aggravation over dinner.
“All of this really deeply fascinating information and I’m not allowed to share any of it,” she’d said, glumly poking at the baked Alaska Guy had prepared for dessert. “Do you know how much that hurts my little journalistic heart?”
I’d patted her on the shoulder. “If you need a distraction, Portia has texted me seventeen questions about Outlook today. It would cheer her up to hear from you instead.”
“Oh, I bet it would,” Naomi had said, rolling her eyes. My coworker had come on a little strong about how cute she found Naomi. “But in this case, I’ll have to pass. Are you still working there? How come you haven’t quit yet?”
“Because I’m starting to get the impression it’s there or Davenport, and I really don’t want to have to work anywhere near Eddie Davenport. The man is a raging prick.”
At least he hadn’t seen fit to visit me again. Angélica and Kiki seemed to be the main liaisons I dealt with from Davenport. Maybe Jessie had stepped in on my behalf or something. After the random and deep interest she’d taken in me, it had been a little weird to receive radio silence from her. But then, she was a strange individual altogether. I shouldn’t have been surprised, maybe.
“Do you know your aunt is kind of weird?” I asked as I stepped into Kiki’s office in Medical. Usually I saw her in the exam room, but she had an office full of paperwork and overstuffed bookshelves that I’d only seen once.
She had her back turned toward me, but she’d distractedly called, “Come in!” so she knew I was there.
She didn’t turn toward me. “I’m aware. Has something happened with her?”
“Nothing recent. Just an observation. Also a strange way to start a conversation, now that I think about it,” I said. “Most people would just say hi.”
“Hi,” Kiki said, typing something into her computer.
It was a little odd that she hadn’t looked at me yet, but she had a lot on her plate between Mobius and the Demobilizer and monitoring Vicki and Guy for any signs of trouble. “Am I interrupting? I can come back.”
“No, I’m just checking something. Do me a favor and say, ‘Aardvark.’ ”
“Uh,” I said. That was a strange request. “Aardvark.”
Kiki turned toward me. She pushed her thumb into her cheekbone and dug two fingers into her forehead like she was developing a headache. “I was afraid of this,” she said.
Two things struck me at once. The first was the worry beneath her resigned tone, which was something everybody should be concerned about hearing from their doctor.
And the second was far more important: her lips never moved.
I heard her voice perfectly, but her mouth had stayed completely closed.
“What the hell?” I asked.
She stood and stepped around me to close the door, gesturing for me to sit. Numbly, I dropped into the chair. “Has anything unusual been happening to you lately? Nosebleeds, phantom pains, headaches?”
What was it with everybody’s inability to give me a straight answer lately? And those questions sounded like . . .
I groaned as my rather slow brain finally put it all together. “You’re kidding.”
“I don’t think I am.”
I put my hands over my face and left them there. One of the properties of the Mobium was its ability to absorb powers from other superheroes. Nobody was sure how it worked or how it chose the powers to absorb and adapt. And it usually took something out of me until I learned how to control it. With ’porting, it had been migraines. I’d absorbed powers before. But this? This was a nightmare.
“I cannot have psychic powers.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Gail.”
“Are you vocalizing that or is it in my mind?” I asked.
“I’ll do you a favor and vocalize for now.”
“How did this happen? I haven’t even had that much exposure to you!”
“Yeah, of you and Angélica, you are not the one I would expect to get the psychic abilities. What . . . exactly is the problem with them? You’ve been wary of me from the beginning. I have to figure that’s part of it somehow.”
“Distrust, not dislike,” I said, lowering my hands to rub them against my thighs in agitation. Psychic. It figured. It was true that I’d always been leery of Kiki, though I actually liked her. “The villain that started everything for me, he was psychic. He was controlling some kids on the train tracks, I was brave or stupid depending on who’s telling the
story, and I hit him with a beer bottle. He’s the one that spread it that I must be involved with, you know, Blaze, kicking off the whole Hostage Girl lifestyle.”
Kiki stared at me for a long moment, her mouth partially open in surprise. “That . . .”
“You couldn’t pluck that out of my head? Psychically or whatever?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It doesn’t exactly work like that. Or mine doesn’t, so I’m assuming since I’m the original host, your psychic abilities don’t, either. But I can understand your distrust of me now. Which villain was it?”
“Sykik.”
“Yeah, that guy is trash. We’re not all bad, I promise. Hell, most of us don’t even want to see what people are thinking. It’s . . . inconvenient.”
Right. Inconvenient. Also known as invasive as hell.
“It is, at that,” Kiki said, and I scowled because I hadn’t said that aloud. “Sorry,” she said. “Let’s go into the exam room. I want to run some tests.”
“This is a completely surprising twist that I never would have seen coming,” I said dryly, as Kiki’s first reaction to everything was to put it under a microscope. It fit with all of those science degrees on her office walls. I trailed after her into the exam room and dropped onto the cot.
“You know,” I said. “I thought my mind was the only thing left.”
“What do you mean?” Kiki was already logging into the computer.
“The villains, Dr. Mobius, whoever, they kidnapped me, they beat me up, hit me with pain toxins, turned me into what I am now. But I always had my brain. Except now I don’t, really. Because now my brain’s not completely mine, if I’m picking up other thoughts.”
Kiki spared me a look, her eyebrows drawn close together. “Are you going to get philosophical because you can pick up telepathic signals from me?”
“It’s either that or whine,” I said. “I can do that, too, if you like.”
Kiki bit her bottom lip and shook her head. This time when I felt a spurt of amusement, I was able to pick it apart from my own aggravation. It didn’t feel intrusive, but it still rang distinctly of Kiki. How long had that been going on? It could have been weeks. Possibly months.
“How did you figure out that I’m . . .”
“ ‘Psychically attuned’ is my hypothesis.” Kiki gestured for me to sit up, so I did. She checked my pulse, keeping her eyes on her watch as she timed it. “And something’s been off, just a funny feeling. And then you started answering my thoughts instead of my words.”
I thought back to our last couple of encounters. Guy, Kiki, and Angélica had given me such baffled looks. In retrospect, that made a lot more sense.
“Why telepathy?” I asked. “The powers I’ve developed are kind of arbitrary. Why this one?”
“They’re not actually that arbitrary.” Kiki wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm.
“Really? Because it feels pretty random to me.”
“Your first developed power, outside of the regular effects of the Mobium, was Angélica’s phasing ability.” Kiki ticked this off on a finger. “At the time, you were being put through a heavy fighting regimen against a superior fighter. No doubt the Mobium adapted in order to level the playing field. It also gave you the advantage of being quicker.”
“Being able to get away quicker,” I said, mostly kidding.
But Kiki pointed at me like I’d stumbled on something important. “Precisely. And your next developed power, ’porting, effectively removes you from danger and places you in a position of safety. As it integrates into the Mobium, you’ve ’ported longer and longer distances.”
“Until I wind up on my couch, yeah.”
“A safe space. Your abilities have been uniquely tailored to—”
“Allow me to run away?” I asked.
Kiki nodded.
“Well, that’s heroic.” When the blood pressure readings popped up, I took the cuff off and held it out to her. “I feel like it’s kind of working at cross-purposes, too. I’ve been fighting more since I got the Mobium. But my powers are developing more for the opposite.”
“You’re a contrary soul, Gail.”
Well, she wasn’t wrong.
Kiki pressed her palm against a panel on the wall and some kind of diagnostic equipment, as blindingly white as the rest of the place, emerged with a small whirring noise. She gestured for me to rest my chin on a little bar at the front of the scanner. Feeling like I’d stumbled into an optometrist appointment, I did so. At least there weren’t those ugly giant glasses attached to the front.
“So how does psychic ability fit in?” I asked.
“It’s probably pretty simple. You keep losing cell phones. How else are you going to get in touch?” Kiki touched a button on the side of the scanner, which circled my head a couple of times. It made an unpleasant vibrating noise echo through the shells of my ears and down into my jaw. I wrinkled my nose. “I’ll have to look at the tests to make sure, but when I said you were psychically attuned, I meant probably just to me. Think of it as a psychic tether.”
I looked sideways around the scanner at her without lifting my chin from the bar. She hadn’t said anything about holding still, but I didn’t want to push it. “Are you saying that the Mobium has enabled you to be my psychic emergency contact?”
“That’s one way to put it. Sit back, I need to put this away.”
“So you think it’s just you and me, right? I can’t go up to Angélica and read her mind?”
“Probably not. She’s got a pretty strong mental shield.”
“Damn.”
“Why do you say that?” Kiki pulled out the same wand she’d used to check if Guy had a concussion a few days before.
“I’m positive she’s got a stash of those dark chocolate coffee beans, but I have no idea where she’s keeping them. And she’s got some mystery boyfriend she’s hiding. Which is fine, but I’m nosy and—” A tendril of shock shot through my brain, followed by a bunch of emotions I didn’t expect. I broke off with a choking noise and whipped around to face Kiki, who had gone amazingly still and who was definitely not meeting my eye.
“Or not a boyfriend,” I said. She shut down whatever emotions she’d projected at me, but not soon enough. No wonder Angélica had always been so secretive whenever she’d sneaked off to meet up with this mysterious lover of hers. “Um. How long has that been going on?”
“It started after Cooper.”
Cooper had been the almost indestructible spy inside of Davenport that had wanted to kill me and had killed Angélica, however temporary that turned out to be. Kiki had brought Angélica back to life using the Mobium, and I’d thought things were weird between them. Guess I was really wrong about that.
But things about it made me wonder. Angélica had been so adamant about getting Dr. Mobius back in one piece. Given how much he mattered to Kiki, it was only logical. But why had they tried to hide it at all? Angélica always came home from her nights out smelling of the gym showers rather than whoever she’d stayed with.
“It’s new,” Kiki said when I asked that, aloud. “She would have told you eventually. If you hadn’t, you know, decided to mind-link up with me because you keep breaking cell phones and beat her to it.”
Well, when she put it that way. “Oh,” I said. “Okay. Cool. Am I allowed to give her shit for this later? She really had me fooled. I had so many theories. I mean, this is better, don’t get me wrong.”
“You do whatever you need to do.” She cleared her throat and I didn’t need to be psychic—god, that would take some getting used to—to sense discomfort rolling off of her. “Let’s get back to the testing.”
“Sure,” I said.
The tests proved endlessly fascinating to Kiki, but they didn’t tell me much. Our minds were tuned to each other, which apparently meant we were on the same psychic wavele
ngth. Strong emotions could be felt by the other in close proximity, as we’d discovered by accident, and Kiki theorized that they could also be transmitted greater distances, along with mental messages. Standing face-to-face, we could talk either vocally or mentally.
I much preferred the former. The latter creeped me out.
Kiki ran through a series of cognitive tests because I told her about my memory problems, and the results made her frown. “There’s no way to be sure, but I’m not seeing any tumors or lesions on your scans. It’s possibly it could be a sign of something as simple as stress or it might be a side effect of the burgeoning psychic ability. Do you have anywhere to be right now? I’d like to run more tests.”
“No, but . . .”
“I’ll order some food,” she said, and stepped over to the room’s intercom system.
“It’s like you read my mind,” I said, because I really couldn’t help myself.
Kiki’s look told me I only got to make that joke once, and I’d just used my only opportunity.
An hour later, Kiki had reams more data and I had a headache and a couple of sandwiches left. She’d physically tested every inch of me and she had tried every psychic trick she knew. I could block her from my thoughts, we’d discovered, and vice versa. She could put a picture in my mind, though it was blurry and indistinct. I hadn’t been able to return the favor.
When the door slid open, I looked up, hoping that it was somebody coming to rescue me from being mentally and physically probed.
When I saw Angélica standing in the doorway, the smart-ass side of me took over. “Your girlfriend’s here,” I told Kiki, who was still bent over the monitor.
Angélica stopped, her gaze cutting between Kiki and me warily.
“Believe it or not, I didn’t tell her,” Kiki said to her. “Not . . . intentionally.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. Say, are you guys going to be the Rocha-Davenports or the Davenport-Rochas? I need to know what to put on the monogrammed hand towels I’m getting you,” I said, holding out one of the sandwiches to Angélica.
Unsurprisingly, she took it, but she gave me a stern look. “I will deal with you later,” she said. “Ki, there’s trouble.”