He takes a step forward when I lift the black semi-automatic pistol in both hands, line up with his chest, and pull the trigger. The noise is deafening. I can’t help but blink as I fire several times.
His body falls to the ground, I turn on his groaning companion and fire again. The bullet shatters the downed man’s kneecap, putting him out of the fight. The car is a dozen feet away, if I can make it to the hood, maybe I can help Kate. With a deep breath, I leap forward clawing across the hard ground on my elbows. It only takes a few seconds, but it feels like forever. The car is short enough I can pull myself up without too much trouble.
I hear a grunt just as I come over the hood. Five men are on the ground, none of them are moving. Black ink litters the area… but it isn’t ink.
Kate spins, bringing her booted foot up to catch one man in the jaw. His body spins more times than I can count. In a blur, she reverses and hits him the other way. He flies through the air to crash against the car and slide unconscious to the ground.
The last man standing looks to his handler, who seems torn between releasing Tia and capturing Kate. She yells something and the man pulls out his gun, pointing it at Tia’s head. Kate freezes. I know she doesn’t want the policewoman to die, I don’t either. This would be easy if she could teleport. Or if she had a gun.
“Kate,” I yell as I toss the pistol at her. She leaps, spinning a hundred and eighty degrees around, grabs the gun with her left hand, falls against the ground, turns and fires one shot. The man with the gun jerks back as the bullet hits him square between the eyes.
I blink several times. My brain doesn’t quite register what just happened. The woman screams something angry. She kicks Tia in the back, steps back and starts waving her hands frantically through the air. Kate lines up her shot and pulls the trigger. The gun barks. Black smoke explodes from where she stood, shooting out lightning bolts around the area. When it clears, she’s gone.
“Did you get her?” I whisper.
“I don’t think so,” she answers back.
Tia rolls over, moaning and holding her head. “Que diabos?” she mutters in Portuguese.
Kate stands up, slipping the gun into the belt at the small of her back. She moves from one man to the next, relieving them of their ammo, a knife, local cash, and all their IDs. “You okay, Tia?” she asks our guide.
“Si. Just a headache. I… I went to speak to a patrol officer I recognized and as soon as he saw me, she materialized behind me. I didn’t have time to— then— then I’m here. I have a vague idea of what happened, but I couldn’t fight it. What did she do?”
Kate holds her hand out to Tia, helping the woman up and handing her a gun. “I know you have powers, but as a backup.” Tia nods, checks the weapon for ammo before sliding it into her belt.
Kate continues. “She has some kind of mind control, obviously, but not like anything I’ve ever seen. Amelia?”
“We need to move. If they have the Freeway blocked off we need to take surface streets and we need to go now,” I tell my two companions.
“Si, let’s move,” Tia says as she heads for the car.
Kate comes to my side and lifts me off the car. I grimace as she grabs my wrist. My forearms are torn up and bleeding. “Can you not hurt yourself for one damn minute?” she teases me.
“It’s my superpower.”
Lucky for us, Tia knows these streets like the back of her hand. She launches into a tense version of a tour guide as she drives us west, away from the city center and hopefully, to freedom.
“Do you know why this man wants to kill you?” she asks as we pass a closed McDonald's. My stomach growls, reminding me I haven’t eaten for a dozen hours.
“A couple of years ago I stopped a madman from trying to take over the world. He’d been working on his plan since the first world war.”
“No way,” she says.
“When Amelia first joined the Diamondbacks, she was all of twenty-years-old and convinced of this huge conspiracy to steal her armor. Of course, I believe her immediately,” Kate says.
I give her a raised eyebrow. “Sure, you did. Anyway, he could body swap. Whenever he died he would inhabit the closest body, killing the host and taking control. He’d gotten into the habit of controlling powerful telepaths. I figured out how to block telepathy, and his ability to transfer. I left him to die on a satellite speeding toward the sun. He should be long dead by now,” I whisper the last part. Him living is the stuff of my nightmares.
“Should be? But you don’t know?” Tia asks.
“It’s the way his power works. Heck, I’m not even sure, to be honest. Can he transfer into aliens? Will his consciousness float around in space until he finds someone? I don’t know. I hope he’s dead. He was an evil son of a bitch.” I look away. Even the memory of him, of what he stole from me, pisses me off. “Anyway, Rafael seems to think I’m him. That somehow, Ericsson transferred into me. Believe me, that is a nightmare I live with. He promised me, he told me, ‘One day I’ll be there, and you’ll be trapped in your chair. And then I will be you.’ Bastard,” I spit out. Thinking of him brings the worst out in me. An entire lifetime of pent-up aggression, in fact.
“So, he did all this, to stop you?” Tia asks.
Kate shakes her head. “No, she is just part of his excuse. He’s a maniac. From what I could tell when we met him, he has serious problems with people who have more power than him. He did all this to rid the world of alien tech. If I had to guess, he controls The Armory and is probably planning on using them to wipe out supers around the globe. He may even be doing that right now, I don’t know.”
That revelation hits me like a bucket of water. Those five armored clowns were tough, tougher than my most advanced armor at the time. The only reason I didn’t die was that Carlos showed up. They probably weren’t ready for him. But with how easy they took me down… I can’t think of anyone else that would present much of a threat. Certainly not the vast majority of superheroes who are barely F3’s. The higher the rating the fewer there are. I don’t even know of another Physical F5 who was as tough as Behemoth, other than Carlos.
“All the more reason we have to— what is that?”
We’re driving down a long, straight road lined by old properties. A mix of business’ and homes. An older section of the city for sure, before these things, were strictly segregated. Five hundred feet from us a car is parked in the middle of the road. I should say, half a car. Beyond it I can see the other half, a good hundred feet farther down, or at least what is left of it.
Tia slows us down to a stop next to the back half. Her door opens with a click. Kate follows, leaving me in the backseat. The back half of the car looks like it hit something after the front half was already detached. But how? The engine compartment is a burned-out wreck from where it caught on fire. I activate my computer and do some quick math, estimated the weight and mass of the car. For the front end to continue like that it would have had to be going at least sixty miles an hour.
I glance up as Kate moves toward the front of the car. Then my eyes catch something. A glimmer, like a ripple in a pond. “Kate, freeze!”
Too late.
Her animetal arm brushes a nearly invisible barrier. There’s a sound like a giant rubber band snapping. Kate flies through the air, careens off the BMW and rolls to a stop twenty feet behind the car. I push open the door and lunge out. I don’t care if I have to crawl to her.
Tia is there in a second, running by me to slide on the ground next to my friend. She puts a finger on her neck and sighs. “She’s alive. Just stunned.”
I’m next to her a few seconds later, panting with the effort. I use my wrist computer to scan her vitals. Everything is high, but it returns to normal as I watch. There’s a wicked burn mark on her new arm.
“Is her arm… is it fake?” Tia asks. “Sorry, I don’t know the English word,” she adds.
“Not fake, just not biological. She lost it fighting the Th’un. This is their metal, I shaped it to replace h
er arm. Watch,” I tell her. As she does the arm’s internal computers kick in, healing the wound and returning it to normal.
“Wow. Could you do that for everyone who’s lost a limb?” she asks.
“I could have if the UN hadn’t taken all the Th’un tech and handed it to a madman.”
Kate’s eyes flutter open. A few blinks later she focuses on me and smiles. “What happened?”
“Some kind of forcefield. Looking at that car,” I say, nodding toward the chopped in half vehicle. “I’d say it came down suddenly and with a lot of force.”
Tia helped her up. Kate wobbled a bit as she took her feet, stretching her cybernetic arm to make sure it still worked. “So, we’re stuck?” she asked.
I pushed myself up to an awkward sitting position. “Actually,” I say while looking around. “This is good, as bad news goes.”
“We’re trapped in some kind of impenetrable shield, with a magical maniac trying to kill us and a woman who can control minds… what part of this is good?” Kate asks. She closes her eyes, squeezing them shut while she massages her temples.
“Because,” I say to the two girls while I pull up my wrist computer. “Now I know where they are.”
Magic is a funny thing. The people who can use it, claim it is beyond understanding. But then again, the same thing was said about the atom. Any sufficiently advanced science would appear as magic to a primitive society. Except, magic isn’t science. Superpowers and magic are really the same things, physics from another dimension inhabiting the bodies of humans in our dimension. Which is easy to say, harder to prove.
Mr. Perfect, for example, could create complex shapes and illusions with his magic. However, he didn’t craft arcane formula, enchant weapons, and so forth. Nor could he ever learn to do so.
Rafael is no different. He can conjure things and banish things. I’m pretty sure he conjured this dome. He has a witch who can mind control, which is ironic since he’s accused me of the very same thing. He also has a small army it seems and possibly the armored soldiers we dubbed, ‘The Armory.’ Though, I feel like if he had those, we would have seen them by now. It’s possible they are only tangentially connected.
Maybe.
I’d feel a lot better about it if I could talk to Epic.
I glance up from where I’m laying down in the backseat. The ache in my arms and shoulders is starting to set in for real. Not only am I covered in scrapes and bruises, I’m sore from the exertion. My shoulders just aren’t used to pulling so much weight around. I pause my calculations for a second to rub my aches away.
“Any other direction to go other than thataway,” Tia asks as she negotiates a turn. The sky is fully black now, with only the street lights to provide illumination. No moon, no stars, I can’t even see clouds, just inky blackness. Space wasn’t even this black.
“I’m working on it. Geometry is pretty easy to eyeball, but we’re talking about a large area. I need a little more triangulation to do the math but yeah… we’re close.” For the last half hour, we’ve driven around the perimeter of the dome trying to get an estimate of its curvature. Once I figure out the rate at which it curves, I can find the point of origin. Then Kate and Tia can go destroy it… then the rest is as simple as me calling in the MK VI and the rest of the team to come help.
My computer beeps softly letting me know the next waypoint has arrived. “Stop,” I say. Tia slows the car and pulls off the road. We park next to a Seven-Eleven. We’re almost on the opposite end of the city from where we were when we hit the dome the first time.
The map updated, and I made a few quick calculations. Bright lights flashed by the car as another helicopter flew overhead. I ducked down instinctively, even though it couldn’t possibly make a difference.
“What kind of power source would he need to maintain a dome like this?” Kate asks, turning around to look at me.
“If it didn’t involve magic, he’d need a ZPFM. There isn’t enough power on the whole planet to erect an impenetrable barrier with a diameter of seventy-miles.”
Tia let’s out a whistle. “Seventy miles… that’s like a hundred kilometers? He put a dome over the city, the suburbs, even the airport. How is it the entire world isn’t outside there trying to bust in?” she asks.
I look up blinking several times as I clear my head of geometry that is addling my brain. “That… is a really good question.” I glance at Kate who shrugs.
“Don’t look at me. I know the same information as you do. If I had to guess, I’d say it was because the outside world doesn’t know.”
Tia shakes her head. “Our airport sees a hundred planes a day, we have cruise ships in the harbor… there is no way they don’t know.”
I shrug. “Whatever the reason, it doesn’t help us. If they know and they can’t get in, or they don’t know, the end result is the same— we’re on our own. Now,” I tell them. “Quiet. I’m mathing here.”
I focus back on the numbers. Of course, I’m assuming wherever the center of the dome lays is where the source of it is as well.
“Is she always so—”
“Weird?” Kate finishes for our officer friend.
“Si?”
“Yes. But in a good way.” Kate reaches back and rubs my head, tousling the hair that has gone beyond messy in the last twelve hours. The car goes silent as I work, or maybe I’m just too focused to hear them. Either way, I lose myself in the numbers until…
“Bingo. Got it.” I hit the holoprojector, bringing up a 3D wireframe map of the city. “Can you take us here?”
Tia looks at it for a second, her eyes coming to grips with where we are on this unfamiliar map. “Si, I can. It is possibly the richest neighborhood in the entire city. If Rafael is there, it’s likely a mansion.”
“Sally-forth,” I say.
Kate rolls her eyes and groans as she turns around to face the front. “She means let’s go.”
Tia smiles, grinning as she turns. “Si, I have seen Army of Darkness.”
“Ha!” I let out and thump Kate on the shoulder. “Not everyone is as uncultured as you.”
“I’m in hell,” Kate mutters. “Our plane crashed on the way here and I’m in hell. It’s the only explanation.”
“You should be so lucky,” I tell her.
The streets by the seaside are much wider than the city’s internal roads making it easier for Tia to negotiate. We decide to ditch the M3, as nice as it is because it’s likely they are looking for it by now. Tia finds us a suitable alternative in the form of a brand-new Escalade.
“Can you work your computer wizardry on that?” she asks, miming typing while she does so.
I give the Buenos Aires native a nod. She stops the car next to it, long enough for Kate to step out, open my door and heave me out. Tia drives off with the M3 almost before I’m out and is gone around a corner in seconds.
“Come on, we don’t have much time,” Kate says to me as she holds me up against the vehicle.
Without responding I open the scanner, commencing the program that allows me to lock onto the car’s wavelength and… thirty seconds later the engine starts and the doors pop open.
“Remind me to buy an older car,” Kate says as she lifts me into the back. She doesn’t wait for me to click in the seatbelt. She shuts the door and climbs into the passenger seat while we wait for Tia.
“You can always have Epic encrypt it. Besides, I know you want a Lambo.”
“Please, far too flashy for me.”
Car trots around the corner, her head on a swivel as she makes sure no one is following her. She slips in and pulls the seatbelt down around her. “I’ve always wanted to drive one of these.”
The Escalade slips through the night. There are few cars on the road. The occasional police car goes by with its lights on, but beyond that, not a lot of traffic.
“This is unusual. The city has two-million people in it. There should be a lot more traffic on the road than this,” Tia says. She deftly maneuvers the big SUV onto a sid
e road, taking us away from the shore.
“Turn on the radio,” I tell Kate.
This has been an announcement of the emergency population warning. This message will repeat in all languages.
“Dang, we just missed English,” I say.
“No worries, I understand enough of the languages we use in the city to translate.” Tia adjusts the nob as the speaker begins again. If I had to guess, it was Portuguese this time. I understand enough Spanish to know when someone is using the same words but not the syntax or pronunciation.
“They are asking all citizens to stay indoors. A chemical attack has taken place…”
I can’t help but laugh. “No matter where you go, your government lies to you.”
“Amelia, behave,” Kate says with a glare.
“Sorry, Tia.”
She shrugs. “The truth is the truth.” She listens for a few more seconds before continuing. “The city is under emergency quarantine, don’t try to leave or call out. All communications and transport out have been blocked…” She looks back at me alarmed for a moment before continuing. “Be on the lookout for three women who are the terrorists who perpetrated the attack. Their images will be sent to every cell phone and TV. If you see these terrorists do not attempt to speak to them. Call the authorities immediately.”
Tia’s voice trails off. She pulls out her cell phone and activates the display. Sure enough, pictures of the three of us flash on the screen.
“Shut it off and take the battery out. I don’t know if they can track it without the cell provider’s assistance but there’s no point in taking a chance,” Kate tells her. Tia complies, opening the back and removing the battery before dropping the whole thing into the center console.
“Sorry, Tia,” I whisper to her. I place a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
“I hope my mama hasn’t seen that. Her heart isn’t so strong…”
We drive in silence for the next several minutes. Turning down roads, seemingly at random. Tia knows the streets well enough to get us where we’re going without having to pass police barricades.
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