“And what are the blue lights?” Danny asked.
“Yeah, well, I’ve never seen them myself, so you’ve got me there. Your dad talked about them—your real dad, I mean—but I don’t know if he really saw them, or if he just, you know, imagined that they were there.”
“Colin can see them too.”
Warren nodded. “So he says. I mean, I believe he thinks he sees them, but Mina sees auras and there’s absolutely no evidence that any such thing exists. People see weird stuff all the time. Doesn’t make it real. Remember that soldier in London a few months after the war, the one who turned out to be working for Torture? He was convinced that he had the ghost of a teenager haunting him.” Warren’s phone buzzed in his jacket pocket. He pulled it out and glanced at it. “They’re here.”
They left the bar and crossed the lobby, out to the mostly-empty parking lot at the rear of the hotel.
It was a warm night, but overcast, and looking up Danny could see only clouds tinted orange by the city lights.
Directly overhead a faint white glow appeared in the clouds. It broke up into eight bright discs, then the outline of the New Heroes’ troop-carrier was clear against the sky, silently but rapidly dropping toward them.
The craft was the size of a school bus, but curved and elegant, only slightly wider than it was tall, its profile almost rectangular. The only noticeable features from this angle were the prototype gravity-nullifying engines that showed up as the glowing discs. The engineers at Sakkara, filled with pride at their ground-breaking creation, had voted to name it The ChampionShip. It annoyed them that Razor, who had designed the craft, insisted on calling it “The Big Fish.”
Behind Danny, the hotel’s lobby door opened again and some of the other hotel guests emerged, muttering to each other as they stared up at the craft.
It slowed to a hover at six feet off the ground in front of Warren and Danny, and its near side split open with a horizontal gash, the top half of the wide door raising to become a narrow canopy, the lower half unfolding itself as it dropped to form steps.
The wide doors on either side of the hull had been designed to allow the troops to disembark easily and quickly. Now, the three members of Team Paragon descended the steps in unison, though Danny knew that this time it was more for show than rapid deployment.
They were followed by another figure, a girl Danny hadn’t seen before. Her face, neck and arms were covered with white scar tissue. The moment her feet touched the ground, the troop-carrier began to rise with much greater speed than its descent. In seconds, it was gone.
Warren said, “Let’s go. I’ve reserved the hotel’s conference room. We can talk there without all the lookie-loos getting an earful. Kenya, right?”
The scarred girl nodded, looking around. “I’ve never been to Europe before.”
“Unfortunately you won’t have time for sight-seeing. Dan? You’ve got ten minutes.”
Danny and Renata held back while Warren led the others through the still-growing crowd. They stood side-by-side and watched as the hotel guests and staff reached out to touch the warriors’ armor.
Some of the people followed them inside, but a few others remained, watching Renata and Danny.
“This isn’t a good place to talk,” Renata said. “Hold tight.”
Danny put his arm around her shoulders and she activated her jetpack as she put her own right arm around his waist.
She carried him up onto the hotel’s roof, and they sat side-by-side on the low wall as she removed her helmet and gloves. “I talked to Col. He’s… Well, he’s trying to be calm but he’s freaking out a bit.”
“I don’t blame him,” Danny said. “How’s Brawn?”
“He’s recovering. His arm’s in a cast and he’s in a lot of pain, but you know him—he’s not complaining.”
Danny shuffled closer to Renata. “Missed you.”
She smiled. “Missed you more.”
They were in the middle of a kiss when a voice said, “Knock it off, you two.”
Warren was walking toward them, the roof door swinging closed behind him.
“That was never ten minutes,” Danny said.
Warren stopped in front of them. “Just got a call from Stephanie. She’s back in Sakkara.”
Renata said, “So now you’re going to tell us what her secret mission was all about?”
Warren placed his palms on the wall and peered down at the street below. “It’s something we’ve been talking about for a while…”
“When you say ‘we’ you mean you and Caroline and Façade and Impervia, right? The grown-ups.”
“This is not the time for that, Renata. But Impervia wasn’t involved. This is something that came from Brawn… When he was in Lieberstan he was visited by Victor Cross. That was three years ago. Around the time Cross started working for Max.”
“So?” Danny asked. “Cross is dead.”
“Brawn doesn’t believe that. Cross out-smarted every one of us—why wouldn’t he be able to fake his own death?”
“They found his body,” Danny said, “in the plane wreckage.”
“They found a body. Badly burned, and in pieces.”
“With Cross’s DNA.”
“Could have been a few lumps of flesh cloned from his own cells.” Warren’s eyes narrowed. “Brawn put it very simply. He said, ‘Let’s assume he’s still alive. Let’s assume that everything that happened—even the war—is part of some grand scheme.’”
“Mister Wagner, do you believe that’s true?” Renata asked.
“Before we sent Stephanie to Puerto Rico, I was maybe half-convinced. Now I’m one hundred per cent sure.”
“Why? What happened with Stephanie?”
“It wasn’t that. When Cross ordered Dioxin’s men to raid Sakkara they stole every single byte of data we’d taken from Ragnarök. That included all of his notes on the experiment that created Yvonne and Mina from his own cells. Now I’m thinking that’s exactly what Cross was looking for. He’s alive, and he’s created a clone of Colin. Probably more than one. I pray that I’m wrong about that, because if I’m not, we’re in more trouble than we have ever faced before.”
In an annex of the hotel’s conference room, Kenya watched as Alia and Grant helped each other out of their armor.
Clearly, there was a spark between the two, the way they were able to work together without needing to talk about it, but instead chat about something completely unrelated.
Not for the first time, Kenya wondered what she was getting into. In Africa, she knew how things worked. America would be very different. Renata had assured her that she was making the right decision: “You can do a lot more good with us than on your own. You don’t have to suffer in silence. If you feel it’s not working out, you can always go home again.”
But Kenya knew that part wasn’t true. She could never go home again. Home was a memory of her parents and her brother, of her friends and neighbors. All of that was gone forever. Almost every person she knew before the Trutopian war was now dead.
Alia looked up at her and asked, “You all right?”
Kenya nodded.
“OK. If you need anything, just let us know. I know you’ve been through a lot and, well, whatever we can do to help, all right?”
Kenya said, “Sorry, but you don’t know what I’ve been through.”
Grant said, “Hey, she was just saying—”
Alia put her hand on his arm. “No, Kenya’s right. We don’t know.” To Kenya, she added, “And you don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to. But we’re going to do what we can to make things easier for you, because, well, that’s what we do.”
Kenya nodded, and smiled. “OK. Thank you, I do appreciate that.” And then she realized that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled.
“There’s a question about Colin Wagner that has never been answered.”
Evan Laurie put down his half-eaten toasted sandwich and looked at the teenage boy standing in the doorway. “And
what is that, Nathan?”
Laurie was, as always, bundled up in a thick parka, with a hot-water bottle tucked inside his shirt. He’d removed his insulated gloves to eat, and already his fingers were pink from the cold.
He hated this place, with its artificial light and unappetizing food, and the sharp pain in his chest every time he took a deep breath of the freezing air. At night he dreamed of warm, earthy forests, and plush hotel rooms.
The boy pulled a chair over to Laurie’s desk and sat down. He was wearing a t-shirt and a pair of shorts. His bare feet rested on the icy floor. “The others don’t think this is important, but I do.”
“Go on,” Laurie said. He liked Nathan. The boy was smart and he asked a lot of questions. Sometimes those questions couldn’t easily be answered, but that was OK with Laurie. An inquisitive mind was always more interesting than a blindly-accepting one.
Shadow, on the other hand, was a monster. The oldest of the nine surviving clones, Shadow was cruel and smug, and despite his intelligence he always followed Victor’s orders to the letter. So far. But now that Shadow had made his first kill, Laurie feared that there would be no stopping him.
Nathan said, “Colin left America because the New Heroes recruited Max Dalton to help them fight Yvonne, right?”
“That’s right.”
“He made it to Europe and crossed it mostly on foot. The Trutopians picked him up in Romania. He’d been heading east for months.”
“Yeah. So?”
“So where was he going?”
“The prison camp in Lieberstan. The platinum mine where the old superhumans were kept.”
“Evan… Colin didn’t know about the mine until Victor told him, and that was after the Trutopians picked him up. So… Where was he going? What was he looking for?”
Chapter 12
In the machine room in Sakkara, Colin leaned over a workbench as Razor pointed to a welded seam on the metal framework between them.
“And that one there,” Razor said. “See? Fractures. You need to do it again.”
“OK.” Colin concentrated on building up the heat in his right index finger, then ran it along the seam. Under the pad of his finger the metal glowed red, then orange, then white. Tear-sized droplets spilled onto the heavily-scorched bench.
“We’re losing too much. Hold on,” Razor said. He picked up a thin titanium spar, and held its tip against the white-hot seam, drawing it slowly back ahead of Colin’s finger. “Cool. That should do it.”
They both stepped back, and looked at their construction. “Nice,” Razor said. “And a lot quicker and neater than using an arc-welder. You could always get a job in the construction industry.”
“How long before it’s done?” Colin asked.
“A few more days.” He picked up a small custom-built circuit board from the bench behind him and tossed it to Colin. “Check the power inputs on that, would you?”
Colin turned the board over in his hands. “What am I looking for?”
“The power’s not getting to the processor—I think one of the tracks is broken, but I can’t see it. Run a current through it, see what’s up. I know the processor itself is intact—I tested each line in and out.”
Colin touched a finger to the power connectors on the circuit board. He knew from the past few weeks working on the machine that he had to be very careful not to release too much electricity into the board. There was a growing pile of burnt-out microprocessors in the recycling bin.
He sent a tiny charge through the power-socket, and sensed rather than saw where the fault lay. “Ah. You can’t find it because the tracks are fine.” He turned the board upside-down and pointed to where the processor’s pins protruded. “This one here’s not supposed to be connected, right? But there’s a tiny drop of solder in the hole. That’s making the connection, and it’s feeding the power in the wrong direction.”
Razor pulled the circuit board from Colin’s hand and peered it at. “Nice one, Col. I’d never have seen that.” Again, he stepped back to examine the machine. “This is my last one, you know.”
“You said that before.”
“Yeah, but this time I mean it. I’m going home. I haven’t seen my mom in, like, forever.” He shrugged. “She always said I had to apply myself if I didn’t want to end up like my dad. I have to show her that she was right. I’m not just a bum. Come on, let’s go see how the big guy’s doing.”
“You almost never talk about your parents,” Colin said as they walked toward the doors.
“There’s not much to tell. Once, when they were fighting, Mom snapped and said he wasn’t my real dad, but she never said anything else about that no matter how many times I asked her. But he’s the only dad I ever knew. He left when I was about four, but he didn’t really leave. He ran off with some woman and they broke up, so he came back. Then he did it again, and again. Eventually mom had had enough and she told him that was it: he was to get out and never come back. So the jerk moved in three houses down from our place. Can you believe that?” Razor entered a code on the keypad next to the doors, and they slid open. Since the attack Sakkara had been in total lock-down: every door was sealed and could only be opened by entering the correct codes.
“Maybe he wanted to be close to you?”
“Me? Nah, he didn’t give a badger’s bushy butt about me. The only advice he ever gave me was, ‘Find something you’re good at and stick with it.’ What he was good at was drinking and getting into trouble. He stayed because he wanted to be near the bar across the street where his pals hung out.” Razor shrugged. “So he was always around to interfere, but never there to help out, you know? I remember one time when the porch light went out and mom asked him to replace the bulb. She couldn’t reach and I was still too small. She could have stood on a chair, but it was kind of a test, to see if he’d do it.”
“And did he?”
“No. Kept saying he would, but he never did. It would have taken him all of about ten seconds, but he never found the time.”
Colin considered this as they walked along the silent, empty corridors. “Yeah. Your dad was a jerk.”
“Yep. Last time he actually spoke to me, I was fifteen. Me and Ritchie had got into some trouble. I won’t say what it was. That’s not important.” Razor paused. “All right, we were siphoning gas out of the cars on the next street.”
“What for?”
“To sell. I don’t think we ever figured out how we were going to sell it. We weren’t that smart. Anyway, this guy saw us and called the cops. We tried to run, but the guy also called a bunch of the other neighbors, because we’d been doing it for months. We figured that no one would notice if we only took a few pints at a time. There was a big old oil drum on the vacant lot next to Ritchie’s house—we used to dump the gas in there. So anyway, there’s cops everywhere, and all the neighbors out looking for us. We tried to hide in some other guy’s back yard, but we got caught and dragged back out to the cops. Ritchie was all crying and everything, but I was saying that we’d never done it before and that we’d heard about other guys doing it so we thought it would be a good idea, but we were really sorry and we’d never do it again. And then my dad showed up, and said, ‘That’s my son!’ and I thought, ‘Great, Dad’s going to get me out of this!’ Then he came right up to me and said, ‘Listen, Gar,’—he always called me ‘Gar’ because he didn’t like the name Garland—he said, ‘Listen, Gar, can I borrow ten bucks until tomorrow?’ I told him I didn’t have ten bucks on me, so then he just said, ‘Useless’ and walked away.”
“And that was the last time you saw him?”
“No, but it was the last time we spoke. Last time I saw him was about a year later, outside the bar. He’d tried to rip off these four guys—hustled them in pool or something—and they were beating the snot out of him. Two of them were holding him up while the other two took turns to punch him. They were really laying into him.”
“Did you help?”
“Nah,” Razor said. “I could see that th
e four of them were doing a good job without me.”
Colin laughed. “OK, how much of that is true?”
Razor was grinning. “All but the last part.”
“Butler would have liked that one.”
“Yeah.”
They looked at each other for a few seconds, then Colin said, “Maybe you should go home. You’ll be safer in Florida. If Shadow had wanted to, he could have killed all of us. He’s stronger than I am. And he’s a psychopath.”
They stopped outside the door to the gymnasium, and Colin entered the code.
Inside, Brawn was lying on his bed—three double-mattresses joined side-by-side—with his right arm, shoulder and most of his chest covered in more bandages and plaster than Colin had ever seen in one go.
“Man, that’s gotta hurt,” Razor said.
“This?” Brawn said. “Well, it tickles a bit. How goes the latest invention?”
“It’s getting there.” Razor walked all the way around Brawn. “You’re all blue already so I can’t tell if you’ve got bruises or not.”
“I do, but they don’t show.” Brawn turned to Colin. “You OK?”
Colin shook his head.
“He saved Cassandra,” Brawn said. “Last thing Butler did, he saved her life. She’s in shock, though. Impervia’s taken her away. Wouldn’t say where. So what are we doing? What’s the plan?”
“Brawn, you’re out of action until your arm recovers,” Razor said. He dragged a chair next to the bed and sat down backwards on it, resting his folded arms across the back of the seat. “Renata, Façade and the new girl, Kenya, are coming back here. The others are going to help Danny and Warren look for Mina. Other than that, we don’t really have a plan. We can’t go after the bad guys until we know where they are.”
“What about you?” Brawn asked. “You decided not to evacuate with the civilians. How smart do you think that was, on a scale of one to stupid?”
“Have to finish the machine first. Then I’m outta here. And I’m not coming back. Not for a long time, anyway.”
“I don’t blame you, kid. You’ve done more than your share.”
The New Heroes: Crossfire Page 10