The Superheroes Union: Dynama

by Ruth Diaz

  “Not happening, Terry. We’re about to take a little trip. Sure you don’t want to let go? Go save your girlfriend, and let me have custody of the kids.” His tone of voice was so reasonable, it was scary. “You know I’ll take care of them. They’re mine—I love them. On the other hand, I can’t promise you won’t end up as a grease spot on the road if you don’t fly away now.”

  TJ’s inner ear told her they were relatively stable, and she opened her eyes to find a vortex of debris and a few unfortunate birds whirling around them. Beyond that, she saw blue sky and the barest hint of ground past her feet. “No sale, Singularity. It doesn’t matter what happens to me, as long as the kids are safe. And as long as they’re with you, they will never be safe.”

  “You never used to call me that,” he said as the winds tightened around them. “I was always Jon to you.”

  “Jon died.” Her words sounded breathy. She spotted the car beneath them, getting farther and farther away, and not because Singularity had changed his mind and put it down. “I used to believe there was something of him left inside you, but he’d never have put our kids in danger this way.” They weren’t high enough in the atmosphere to have difficulty breathing, but the air had begun to feel thin.

  Concern crept over Singularity’s face, and TJ wasn’t stupid enough to think it was because he’d lost her regard. She saw him look around, his eyes lighting on something over her shoulder. She felt his arms move and wondered if the Iron Fist had established hand signals or some other kind of physical code she couldn’t see at this angle. “We can’t breathe, you idiot!” he wheezed.

  The vortex was barely wide enough to contain them now, whipping TJ’s hair up over her head even in their still spot in the center. They’d stopped rising, no longer weightless as Singularity increased their local gravity, but the wind was so strong, they still didn’t seem to be sinking. Her heart sped in her chest. If they didn’t escape the whirlwind before Singularity lost consciousness, his alterations to gravity would blink out of being like someone had popped a soap bubble, and the car would fall.

  He continued to flail. “Updraft. Updraft, can you read me?”

  “He’s not answering?” she gasped.

  He wrapped his hands around his own throat in broad pantomime. “Updraft, enough!” Fear had begun to seep into his voice.

  “You’re a fool, Singularity,” she shouted against the winds. Her chest hurt, and something was wrong with her vision. “He’s doing it on purpose. You did your bit for the Iron Fist, and they don’t want you. Maybe they don’t trust you. They’re getting rid of the evidence.”

  “I can’t keep them up if I can’t breathe!”

  TJ could barely hear his words. She concentrated on the air above them, trying to restrain enough of it to keep them conscious, but it ripped right out of her mental grasp. The inflow below them fed almost entirely into the walls of the whirlwind, but she managed to hijack a tiny portion of it, routing it up and over her face. It cleared her head, but she couldn’t seem to separate it for two people, and when she held her breath and tried to switch it to Singularity so he could catch his, it slipped away from her.

  His eyes filled with panic, and his chest heaved uselessly.

  Refusing to succumb to her own fight-or-flight response, TJ reached down into the inflow again, trying to find them enough air to breathe. If she were a microkinetic, she could build the individual air molecules into a barrier above them, containing her purloined airflow and keeping them both conscious. But that control of bits and pieces too small to see was beyond her. She captured a few breaths, pushed the airflow toward Singularity, and lost it again.

  She wasn’t sure when the winds stopped whistling around them and became a sustained shriek past her ears, but she felt the laxity of his muscles and knew they were falling.

  She might not have any idea which direction they were facing, but “down” was pretty hard to miss. She automatically tried to “touch” the ground to levitate them, but stopped when her eyes fixed on the car, falling at very much the same rate as she was, just like Galileo had said should happen. She strained to reach it, but the distance between them put it out of her range. She was screaming and shaking Singularity, trying to get him to wake up.

  She had seconds.

  The streets and houses rushed up to meet them, but the car got there first, the nose plowing straight into the ground as the vehicle deformed before her eyes. She directed herself toward it even as the ground came into range, hoping against hope that the kids were in the back, that maybe they were okay—she’d lost Annmarie, but she couldn’t lose her kids. It just wasn’t possible. A dark stain spread across the pavement beneath the crumpled SUV, as if the car itself could bleed.

  The vehicle tilted, unbalanced, the back end tipping forward to crash to the ground. Then the whole area burst into flames.

  Chapter Ten

  It was Lightning Bug who caught her, but TJ only realized that later, when she realized it couldn’t have been Mad Mulligan—she’d seen his signature brown trench coat streak across her vision. At the time, she only knew she had to get to the car. She had to get them out of that fire, but somebody had her from behind and wouldn’t let her go.

  She reached for it mentally, pushing herself to her limits and past them, her pulse pounding in her ears and a pressure building inside her skull like her head might explode. She gripped the crumpled metal, pushing and pulling at the same time, trying to rip through the steel behind the flames.

  A sudden localized downpour quenched most of the fire, leaving small pools of burning gasoline floating in the local potholes. Mad Mulligan followed that up with a careful landing, letting Gear Girl’s black-clad elegance touch down gently before he released her and ran toward the car. He just beat Vincy, who’d probably left a crater in the road where she landed, since TJ never saw Lightning Bug put her down. The two superstrong heroes searched out or made handholds on both sides of the car’s back end, slowly tearing larger rents into it.

  Tears streamed down TJ’s face while she struggled in Lightning Bug’s grasp, and she was as snotty as Esteban got when his allergies were bad.

  Esteban! Marisol! And Annmarie, whose only fault was being too good, too devoted to the kids and maybe, just maybe starting to fall for a used-up crusader who still wanted to save everybody, who’d been too noble to kill the father of her children, and now she’d let him kill her world instead…

  A violet glow began to penetrate the thick smoke leaching from the tires, but TJ still couldn’t see into the car. She raised an arm, wiping her nose and eyes on her yellow sleeve.

  “No!” Singularity screamed. It was only then that TJ realized she still had an arm around him, levitating them both reflexively. He must just have regained consciousness. “Marisol! Esteban!” He ripped out of her loose physical grip and started to sink.

  She let him go.

  “Put me down,” she said, so quietly she could hardly hear it over her own heartbeat. “It’s not burning anymore.”

  Lightning Bug let go of her, and they both settled to the pavement. Singularity touched down and ran toward the car, where Vincy backhanded him in a way that laid him out on the ground. He was lucky she left his head on his shoulders. Beyond her, no matter how TJ cleared her eyes, the violet glow persisted. She blinked and stared, afraid to hope.

  “Mulligan, tell me that’s not something you’re doing. Dammit, you’d better not be doing that, Mulligan!” She needed to believe it was coming from inside the car.

  If he answered her, she never heard it. At that moment, Vincy finally peeled enough of the rear quarter panel away to access the backseat, violet light spilling from a softly glowing barrier within onto the street. TJ could just make out movement inside. Her heart leapt, the surge of adrenaline pushing the throbbing in her head aside.

  It was a force field.

  On
e of the kids must have gone active, and somebody had a force field up. Somebody was alive in there! TJ ran to the opening and dropped to her knees, pressing her hands and face against the impermeable violet energy barrier.

  It evaporated at her touch and there was screaming—two little voices crying and yelling for their mama. Marisol was closest, hanging upside down from her seatbelt in the very back seat of the SUV. “It’s me, Mari, it’s Mama. I’m gonna get you out of there, just hang on.” TJ got her arms around her daughter and pressed the seatbelt button, passing her back to Vincy. “Everything’s gonna be okay now, just let Tia Vincy hold you, honey. I have to get your brother.”

  When she stuck her head into the car again, it wasn’t Esteban hanging there in need of help, it was Annmarie. “Hi, Dynama,” she said weakly.

  TJ looked past her. Gear Girl, outlined in the ragged gap Mad Mulligan had torn on that side of the car, already had her arms around Esteban. TJ squeezed his hand, letting the other superhero evacuate him out the far side.

  “The kids are safe?” Annmarie asked.

  “Yeah,” TJ breathed, relief flooding her. Mad Mulligan climbed in through the opening Gear Girl had vacated, maneuvering Annmarie gently out of the seatbelt and down to the deformed ceiling of the car, letting her sit on her own and collect her wits.

  “Good,” Annmarie said, and fell over, her eyes open but unseeing.

  “I need a medic here!” TJ shouted, backing out of the car as Mad Mulligan took Annmarie’s limp form out the other side. She got to her feet and pain pulsed in her head as if someone had hit her between the eyes.

  Vincy had both kids in her blue-clad arms, she saw, before her eyes closed.

  * * *

  The Invincible Woman, Lightning Bug, Sean Lowe and even crotchety old Mad Mulligan in his battered blue jeans and trench coat… They were all very nice, but they just didn’t get it. Annmarie had begun to object to their assumptions and their helpful attempts to shanghai her before the EMTs even had her out of the ambulance. An hour after that, she’d had a bag of fluids dripped into her veins, a couple of energy bars Mad Mulligan had forced on her with a nurse’s enthusiastic approval, and two Tylenol for her lingering headache.

  She was about ready to scream.

  Gear Girl, who today wore a black brocade vest with interlocking gears sewn onto it and large, dark-tinted goggles over her eyes, finally stampeded everyone out when the news came that Dynama, while still unconscious, was in a room and could have visitors. “If you’re very quiet,” the Invincible Woman had emphasized to Marisol and Esteban, offering one hand to each twin.

  They’d both turned to Annmarie for permission to go with Tia Vincy. Oddly touched, Annmarie promised she’d be along just as soon as the doctor would let her.

  Gear Girl pulled the curtain across the front of Annmarie’s E.R. niche and sat down in one of the bedside chairs while Annmarie breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you,” she said to the quiet woman.

  “They don’t really know what it’s like.” Gear Girl smiled. “Vincy and Lightning Bug were born with their powers, and Mulligan’s in his fifties,” she said with the disdain of someone who’d recently graduated college. “It’s been a while for him. I don’t think he remembers what it’s like to wake up with a headache in the middle of a crowd of people, all of them trying to change your life for you while you’re still sitting there going ‘I did that?’”

  Annmarie sighed. “I still say there’s some kind of mistake. I don’t have powers. It must have been one of the twins.”

  Gear Girl shrugged. “That’s the nature of the beast. You don’t have powers, right up until the moment that you do.” She crossed her legs—clad in black skinny jeans instead of spandex or the long black skirt she’d been wearing yesterday—and leaned back in her chair, folding her hands in her lap. “What was your last thought when the car started to fall?”

  Annmarie shuddered, feeling that wrenching shift in her stomach as weightlessness had given way to the horrible acceleration of gravity again. “I don’t even want to think about it. I just knew I had to protect the kids.”

  “There you go,” Gear Girl said quietly. “My phone had just gone off with the text that the campus was going into lockdown when some asshole with a shrink ray walked into our engineering lecture. He started monologuing and I sneaked up behind him to see if I could break the stupid thing. By the time it misfired and caught both of us, it had somehow become a freeze ray—annoying, but temporary—and the next thing I knew, I had half the local union telling me that saving the world was way more important than a master’s in engineering.” She shrugged. “Don’t let them tell you what to do. It’s still your life, and you’re the one who gets to decide how to live it.” She grinned suddenly. “No matter what you decide, you’ll always be able to tell your grandkids that today, you were #NewHeroSavesKids—number three on Trade City’s Twitter trending topics.”

  Annmarie summoned up a weak smile. “Do you think they’d let me go see Dynama?”

  Gear Girl chuckled. “They aren’t in charge here. Let me go see if I can’t round up a doctor who thinks it’s a good plan.”

  * * *

  TJ opened her eyes on weak light spilling from around the edges of the vertical blinds. For a split second, she wondered where she was, because she’d put honeycomb shades in all the condo windows, but the faint antiseptic smell quickly gave it away.

  Hospital. Oh God, she was in a hospital, and Annmarie had fainted… She struggled to sit up, her limbs leaden and uncooperative, and finally found the button to automatically adjust the bed. Enough light filtered in from the hallway to show her a clock that read 4:15 and an occupied bed beside hers. She wondered if she could get out of bed without falling over, or if she ought to hit the call button and try to talk sense into whatever beleaguered nursing assistant came to check on her.

  The other patient in the room stirred. “TJ?” a familiar voice whispered muzzily, followed by, “Dynama? Don’t get up, you’ll set off like a hundred alarms.”

  TJ stared. “Annmarie?”

  Annmarie sat up unassisted—so apparently she was doing better than TJ was. A wave of relief swept through TJ, dizzying her enough that she was very glad of the hospital bed’s support.

  “What happened? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. They’re just keeping me for observation. Standard procedure, they said. You’re the one who had a ministroke.” Annmarie slid out of bed while TJ stared, crossing the eight or ten feet of linoleum that separated them. “Apparently, certain psionic types of powers don’t have a hard limit—they have a soft limit you can push past, if you don’t mind the risk of turning into a vegetable.” She leaned forward, resting her forehead against TJ’s.

  TJ wrapped an arm around her waist, the effort less now that she wasn’t trying to move her whole body, and pulled the other woman into a gentle hug.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” Annmarie whispered, ducking her head to steal a quick kiss.

  “Do my best,” TJ replied, wishing she could pursue those lips. “The kids? They were okay, but they had to be scared out of their—”

  “Just fine.” Annmarie perched on the side of her bed. “The hospital called your mother, and she talked with me and the Invincible Woman. ‘Tia Vincy’ took the kids home. She’s staying with them. The union would have sent another babysitter, but the Invincible Woman said there was no way she was leaving the twins alone with a stranger after what they’d been through today.”

  TJ’s heart rate increased, and she looked frantically around for the inevitable monitor. She concentrated on deep, even breaths until the number came back down to something less likely to drag a nurse into their room. “Singularity?”

  “Back in Peacekeeper. With enough new charges against him that he won’t be going anywhere for a very long time.”

  TJ breathed a sigh of
relief.

  “His accomplice got away, though. Gear Girl said he took off just as the other superheroes were showing up.”

  “Probably on purpose—he wasn’t answering Singularity at the end there.” TJ wondered if the Iron Fist had always meant to get rid of Singularity, or if he’d become too big a liability when his inconvenient ex showed up. “I don’t care. I thought I’d lost you, all of you, and you’re okay. Nothing else matters.” She couldn’t sit up to hug Annmarie, but she captured the other woman’s hand in one of her own, drawing it to her lips for a kiss.

  Annmarie ducked her head, but there was enough light TJ could make out the smile on her lips.

  “So how’d you get them to put you in here, anyhow? Usually the doctors are all over that, because they know union rules about secret identities.”

  Annmarie shrugged. “I told them I was your girlfriend. The Invisible Woman backed me up, and I don’t think Mr. Lowe or the doctors wanted to argue with her.”

  TJ was surprised at the way the words made her heart swell. “You are. I mean, if you want to be.”

  Annmarie laced her fingers through TJ’s. “Yeah.”

  TJ beamed, happy to be alive, happy everyone was safe, that the kids were fine and at home… She blinked. The kids were at home. Annmarie was here, still in the hospital, for observation. Standard procedure, but it sure wasn’t standard procedure for fainting. “It was you, wasn’t it? The force field. It wasn’t one of the kids—it was you.”

  Annmarie turned to face her dead on, deep shadows making the unhappiness on her face even more plain. “Don’t start, please. They’re calling it Traumatic Onset Manifestation. I’ve had superheroes and Mr. Lowe falling all over themselves to tell me how wonderful it is that I have powers now. And gosh, it’s so easy to register with the union and get benefits and training. They’d be delighted to have somebody who can contain a villain in a force field until the Peacekeeper van shows up…”