At first, nothing happened.
The others stared, watching for some telltale shift in the color or texture of Grunge’s skin that would signal the process beginning.
His fingertips started to shine. The room’s fluorescent light glinted off his fingers as they began to take on a smooth, reflective veneer. Grunge’s fingers began to narrow ...
... and he lost it.
The moment was broken. Grunge panted for breath as his hand instantly reverted to its normal form.
Grunge shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “I tried. But it’s just too much. I can’t...”
“You have to,” Lynch said. The tone of his voice left no room for question or debate.
Grunge glanced over into Lynch’s cold, unflinching stare, then sheepishly looked away. He looked around toward his friends for support, but found only their pleading eyes.
Bobby spoke quietly from beside him. “Listen, Gee,” Bobby said, “you’ve gotta do this. You’re our only shot at getting out of here. Without you, we’re toast.”
“Dude,” Grunge replied, without looking at him, “I tried. I don’t wanna let you guys down. But what can I do? It’s impossible.”
“Nah,” Bobby said, in a tone that was lighter than his actual mood, “it’s not impossible. It’s really, really hard, that’s all. But it’s not impossible. The Grunge-man can do it. You’re not gonna let Ivana’s toys stop you. You da man, right? You can do this. Hey, after all...
“... all it takes is will power.”
Will power.
Grunge’s mind flashed back to the scene outside the movie theater. Had it really been only yesterday? It seemed like a lifetime ago when they were playfully bickering and making bets. I’m all about will power, Grunge had proclaimed. I’m the very model of will power!
I’m the mack daddy of will power!
Well, now it was time to prove it.
Grunge puffed up his massive chest. “All right,” he said. “Stand back! I’m going in!”
Once again, Grunge closed his eyes. But it was different this time. Every bit of body language showed it.
Grunge relaxed his neck, letting his head tip forward until his chin was resting on his chest. It had been a long time since Grunge actively studied martial arts, and
Bobby had been right about his ultimately getting kicked out of the dojo for lack of discipline. But the thing that his sensei never understood was that Grunge’s lack of discipline was just his nature. It didn’t mean he hadn’t been paying attention.
Grunge called upon that training now, as he drew upon the hidden reservoirs of energy that lay deep within. Grunge breathed deeply and focused his thoughts. He visualized the energy flowing up and through his body.
Roxy watched him with an expression that showed both hope and concern. With all her heart, she wished there was some way to make this easier for him. To lend him strength.
Under her breath, Roxy began to chant: “Go, Grunge. Go, Grunge. Go, Grunge. Go, Grunge.”
Bobby looked over at Roxy. The chant took him by surprise at first, but then he grinned. He quietly joined in with her: “Go, Grunge. Go, Grunge.”
Before long, the entire team had taken up the chant, encouraging Grunge and cheering him on: “Go, Grunge. Go, Grunge. Go, Grunge. Go, Grunge.”
Grunge smiled, but kept his eyes closed. He couldn’t afford to let himself get distracted. In his mind’s eye, Grunge could see the power now and channel it as he wished. He drew it from throughout his body and focused it like a laser, feeding it all into the index and middle fingers of his left hand.
Grunge’s hand began to change.
Once again, his fingers took on the reflective sheen of his manacles. But this time, it wasn’t a fleeting glimpse. This time, it stayed.
As the change became apparent, the chant grew faster: “Go, Grunge. Go, Grunge. Go, Grunge. Go, Grunge.” Now for the hard part. Grunge thought.
Grunge had made the change, all right. But his fingers were still only inches long. Kat was several feet away.
Grunge’s jaw tightened. He felt the pressure in his forehead build. But he had found his inner well of power
now—he had found his chi—and he was in the zone.
Slowly, Grunge’s fingers started to narrow. They started to grow.
“Go, Grunge. Go, Grange. Go, Grange. Go, Grange.” By the time Grunge’s fingers reached Lynch, they were half their normal width. Grange’s entire body glistened with a thin film of sweat. He concentrated still harder, trying to keep the process going without pushing so hard or fast that he’d choke and lose it.
“Go, Grunge. Go, Grunge. Go, Grange. Go, Grange.” Grunge’s body trembled with the effort. The tremors made the winged skull tattooed on his chest look like it would take flight at any moment. But despite the strain of the herculean effort, Grange was past the wall now. There was no way that anything was going to stop him. “Go, Grange! Go, Grunge! Go, Grange! Go, Grange!” “Good!” Lynch said, tersely. “That’s it! Hold it there!” Grunge’s fingers had become a pair of five-foot-long wires. They retained the same tensile strength as the metal in the manacles he had mimicked. However, stretching them out so far had made Grange’s fingers as thin as two pieces of string, bobbing gently under their own weight.
Grunge kept his eyes closed, laboring to keep his fingers in their current shape and form. With so much of his strength drained by the restraints, the slightest break in his concentration would snap them back to normal in an instant.
Now, it was Lynch’s turn.
Lynch strained forward to grab the pair of wires in his hands. He instructed Kat to extend her own hands as far toward him as possible. She responded immediately. But even so, there was still a gap of a couple of feet between her wrists and Lynch’s hands.
Trying to pick the locks on Kat’s manacles at this distance was going to be like trying to pick up a grain of rice with two pool cues as chopsticks. Still, as Lynch had told his charges, there was no choice here. Lynch couldn’t just try. He had to do it. And he had to do it fast.
It took several attempts—and precious time—just to guide the pair of wires into the small keyhole on the side of Kat’s right-hand manacle. Once he’d gotten that far, Lynch used the wires to probe around the inside of the lock, feeling his way around the tumblers. If the mechanism was as simple as the lock on a pair of handcuffs, he could manage it relatively quickly and easily; in that case, he could probably pick the lock with just one wire. However, if it was anything more complex—even something like what might be found inside a simple padlock—he’d need them both.
Unfortunately, a few seconds was enough to tell him that it would take both.
“Keep your hand still,” he told Kat.
Lynch set to work. No one who knew John Lynch would have described him as a gentle man. Nevertheless, he manipulated his tools with a delicacy and fine touch that impressed his young proteges and always took them a little by surprise when such opportunities arose.
One of the first things that any observer would have noticed was that, oddly, Lynch appeared to be staring blankly off into space instead of looking at what he was doing. However, the reality was very much to the contrary. At this distance, Lynch wasn’t able to see inside the lock, so he needed to work by touch. Looking at the lock would only have provided useless sensory information that would have distracted him more than it would have helped.
Time and again, Lynch gingerly pressed down on the individual tumblers inside the lock. He raised and lowered them by fractions of millimeters as he experimented with different combinations of arrangements, until, finally, he felt something give.
Kat’s manacle popped open, sending her off-balance. She swung awkwardly down and around to the left, now suspended by only three restraints, until she caught her balance. She grabbed the left-hand chain with her free hand, and used the strength of both hands to force the
left-hand manacle as close to Lynch as possible.
Once again, there was a chorus of h
oots and cheers. “All right!” “Way to go, Mister L!” “Woof! Woof! Woof!”
Now, Lynch had to do it again for Kat’s other hand.
The process went more quickly the second time around. Lynch knew how the locks worked now, and as he had hoped, the same key appeared to work for both manacles. That meant far less experimenting, which, in turn, meant far less time.
Before long, Kat’s second manacle sprang open as well. This time, though, she was ready for it. Clinging to the left-hand chain with her right hand helped her to keep from losing her balance again and landing on her face on the floor.
“Cool!” Roxy said. Her face looked as enchanted as if Lynch had just pulled a rabbit out of an empty top hat. “Now do her feet!”
“No need,” Lynch replied. “The dampeners are only wired to the wrist restraints.”
Kat glanced down and quickly confirmed Lynch’s words. It was true. The thin cables that wove through the wrist chains weren’t there for the restraints that bound her ankles.
Kat smiled to herself. Although she was free of the power dampeners, it would still take a few minutes for her to regain enough of her strength to tear apart the metal restraints. But pulling them out of the stone wall... well, that was another thing entirely.
Kat switched the chain to her left hand and slipped her right hand under her thigh. She bent her knee and began to pull her leg upward in a smooth motion, as hard as she could. The heavy metal resisted her. But she combined the strength in her arm with the muscle power in her leg, and simultaneously pulled down on the chain with her left hand to increase the leverage.
Under that kind of pressure, it didn’t take long. There was a shrieking sound, like nails on a blackboard, and an explosive, crumbling noise as the stone around the restraint gave way. Her right leg came free.
Kat let go of the wrist chain and dropped down the short distance to the floor. She hopped around to face the restraint that still trapped her left leg. Awkwardly, she crouched down to take the chain in one hand as she pressed the palm of the other hand flat against the wall. With all the strength she could muster, Kat pulled with one hand while pushing with the other.
In seconds, she was free.
Now that she was away from the power dampeners, Kat’s strength was growing closer to normal with every passing moment. It was relatively straightforward for Kat to work her way down the row, tearing open the metal restraints that held each of her fellow prisoners. Not that the tempered steel made it easy, of course. But compared to what she had been through so far, it was a walk in the park.
One by one, Kat’s friends joined her on the floor, stretching the muscles in their aching shoulders and massaging their wrists to restore the circulation.
As Kat moved on to Sarah and Roxy, Bobby walked over to Grunge and gave him a friendly clap on the back. “Yo, Grunge-man.”
“Hey.”
“Nice will-power action back there. You really came through for us, y’know? Tres impressive.”
“Like I said, dude. I am the mack daddy of will power.”
“Yeah. I think you might just be,” Bobby said. “Hey, listen. You know that bet?”
“Yeah?”
Bobby grinned and winked. “Forget it.”
Grunge raised an eyebrow in surprise, then returned the grin. “Thanks, dude.” he said. “Now, about that Michelle Yeoh.. ”
“All right, people, listen up,” said Lynch. Kat had freed Sarah by now, and was just finishing up with Roxy. “If they don’t already know we’re free, they will in a minute. Priority one is stopping that missile, not avenging your bruised egos or trying to prove you can take Gen14 in a fight. Got it?”
The team nodded their assent. Some of them nodded grudgingly, but they nodded nevertheless.
“That said,” Lynch continued, “getting to Ivana is almost certainly going to mean fighting our way past Gen14. Watch yourselves—those kids are more powerful than you are, and probably fresher, too. They haven’t spent the past several hours hanging from a wall.”
“Thanks for the pep talk, Coach,” Grunge muttered under his breath. However, the fact that he was still rubbing his sore muscles was enough to remind him that Lynch was right.
“But there may be a vulnerable point that we can exploit to our advantage,” Lynch said. “Remember, these kids were trained by Ivana. She was the head of sci-tech at I.O., not a combat branch. Tactics and strategy aren’t exactly her field of specialization.”
The words struck home for Kat. During their last battle, it had already begun to dawn on her that Gen14 was using the exact same strategy every time they fought. In each battle, the opposing team had split into pairs or trios to outnumber and attack each member of Gen13 individually. Kat hadn’t caught on immediately, because the pairings varied each time. But it was a recurring trend, with every one of the match-ups hand-picked to counteract the heroes’ individual abilities.
Maybe Lynch was right. Maybe that pattern could be anticipated and exploited somehow .. .
“Okay, we’re on the clock,” Lynch said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Sarah stopped massaging her broken ribs. Hanging from her arms for so long hadn’t done them any good. But there was no time to worry about that now.
Kat reared back to strike the door with a powerful side kick while Roxy negated its weight. The reinforced, three-inch-thick door flew off its tracks and across the hail outside to smash into the opposite wall. It fell flat on the floor with a resounding clang.
Gen13 poured out the door into the hall.
Gen14 was there waiting for them.
“Let’s rock and roll,” said Grunge.
CHAPTER 13
Equal numbers of the Gen14 kids had been stationed to either side of the door. The escaped prisoners were surrounded on all sides, with no way out.
“Go,” said Highwire.
Without another word, Gen14 swarmed in to the attack. Thoughts were flying through Fairchild’s mind, making it seem as though time had slowed to a crawl, as her head swiveled back and forth to observe and analyze their offensive. Like a well-oiled machine, the Gen14 kids were once again peeling off into pairs to hit the heroes, two to one. Each pair was comprised of one kid from the left-hand group and one from the right. Every one of them knew his or her individual target and was bearing down for the kill like a pinpoint laser.
In a matter of seconds, Grunge was writhing on the floor under Rave’s sensory assault.
Before Rainmaker could summon up the fury of a rainstorm, Riptide’s watery form was already blasting her off her feet with the force of a tidal wave.
Freefall was clutching her ears, trying in vain to protect herself from the noise. But that didn’t stop her body from spasming violently under Reverb’s vibratory assault.
Under Override’s control, Burnout had taken to the air near the ceiling and was peppering the battlefield with bursts of white-hot plasma. Fairchild saw Lynch leap out of the way of one of his fiery' blasts, scant heartbeats before she leapt for cover herself.
It’s happening again! she thought with alarm. An aw-
ful sense of deja vu crept over her like an icy hand. She could see that this fight was going to end every bit as badly as the ones that had come before. It was the same thing all over again.
The same thing .. .
That’s it! Fairchild thought.
It all came together in a flash. Knowing their opponents’ strategy meant that they could anticipate it, and turn their own tactics against them. All at once, Fairchild knew what they had to do, and how to beat Gen14. It was just like Lynch had said—the key was in Ivana’s training. She’d trained the Gen14 team, but Ivana had never been much of a team player herself. For that matter, neither had her Gen'3 pets, Threshold and Bliss. The exact same blind spot screamed out in the tactics that Ivana had drilled into Gen14.
Sure, the Gen14 kids attacked in pairs. But that didn’t mean they attacked as pairs. If they were truly functioning as a team, they’d be complementing each other’
s strengths and compensating for each other’s weaknesses. But they weren’t. Every time the two generations of gen-actives had met, Gen14 had been fighting tag-team style, as individuals, instead of as a unit.
Not that Gen13 had been doing things much differently. For the most part, they’d been so busy reacting and defending themselves that they’d mostly been fighting as individuals, too ... and getting overwhelmed and outgunned as a result. But every time they did work together—escaping the apartment, the rescue at the interview—they’d always come out on top.
Because if there was one thing Gen13 knew about, it was teamwork.
It wasn’t something they had learned back at I.O., from Ivana and her crew. It came from Lynch’s endless training sessions, from countless battles with enemies far more powerful than themselves, and most of all, from the trust in each other that had grown with their friendship.
The abilities that stemmed from their individual gen-factors made each member of Gen13 formidable. But it was teamwork that made them unbeatable.
“Don’t fight them alone!” Fairchild called to her teammates. “Watch each other’s backs!”
Just as Bogeyman was about to get a lock on Fairchild, she lowered her head, crouched down, and charged to the attack. Bogeyman prepared to duck out of the way of the charge.
But Bogeyman wasn’t the one she was attacking.
Rave was so focused on her mind-bending assault on Grunge that she never even saw Fairchild coming. The three hundred-pound heroine hit with the strength and speed of a runaway freight train. If the impact of the collision didn’t knock Rave out, slamming into the wall surely did.
“Not the most satisfying win of my life,” Fairchild remarked to herself, “but it serves the purpose.”
With Rave unconscious, the world suddenly flooded back to fill Grunge’s senses. He shook his head, his long hair flying, as he took it all in. “Whoa, what a trip,” he muttered, “Speed kills.”
Just then, Grunge spotted Freefall shaking and spasming out of control. “No way,” he growled. Grunge touched his fingers to the thick sole of his high-topped workboot and leaped into the fray with a hearty “HAlIIlHll-YAA!”
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