Hearts of Darkness

by Andrea Speed

  “Fine, whatever, new guy. Whatcha got for me?”

  Kaede touched a button on what looked like a watch, but as a hologram sprang to life above it, clearly it wasn’t. More of his dad’s tech. It showed the levels of the warehouse—although from the outside it didn’t look like it had levels—and some of the physical traps were painted in ghostly outlines.

  “Okay,” Kaede said. “I can kill the traps on the first floor, save for a pressure-sensitive one in the back room, a microwave room in the basement level, and a poison-gas room in the subbasement. We’ll have to take those out manually.”

  “Holy shit,” Nighthawk exclaimed. “How do we do that?”

  “With great care. I can tell you how to defuse each one.”

  The look Nighthawk gave him could probably be described as uncharitable at best. “Oh really? How do you defuse the pressure room?”

  “You can’t step on the floor at all. Any weight registered on the floor is gonna cause the poisoned springs to shoot up. Synthetic curare on Teflon-coated titanium spikes. You’ll be dead from even a graze in less than a minute.”

  Nighthawk made a kind of squeaking noise. “Motherfucker. Who is that paranoid?”

  “My dad and the Owl, obviously.”

  “But how do you not step on the floor?”

  “You climb up the wall. There is a kill switch for this, but it’s in a hidden panel on the ceiling, just three paces to the left of the light fixture.”

  Nighthawk’s jaw unhinged. “You’ve got to be shitting me. Do I look like a wall crawler, bud?”

  “You don’t have a grappling hook or suction cups?”

  He scoffed. “I haven’t tested them on these walls. I’m not trusting my life to them without a test run.”

  Kaede sighed impatiently and fixed him with a dark glare. For a master thief, he was a real wimp. “Fine, I’ll do this one. How about the microwave room? Want to take that?”

  Nighthawk was starting to look worried. “What is that one?”

  “Any movement in the room sets off microwaves in the wall and floor. It cooks a person from the inside out. Your organs will be roasted before you even realize you’re hot.”

  His eyes bulged. “Are you shitting me? How the hell do you get through that?”

  “Use your goggles before you enter the room. You should be able to see a cold spot adjacent to the door on the opposite side of the room. That’s the kill switch. You have to hit it with a heavy thrown object. Metal wouldn’t be melted by microwaves, although it would spark like crazy.”

  Nighthawk looked supremely constipated. “You know this is crazy, right? How will I even know that the microwaves are even off?”

  “Throw something else in the room, something meltable or brownable. If it cooks, you missed.” Kaede used a fingertip in the air to spin the hologram, so now they were focused in closer on the subbasement. “Okay, poison-gas room. This will be the trickiest.”

  Nighthawk scoffed. “Are you kidding me? We just wear gas masks. That’s the easiest.”

  Kaede glared at him like he was a moron. Which he was. “Have you not been paying attention? My dad was pretty much the basis for all those traps in the Saw movies. This gas is not just poisonous, it’s corrosive. It will eat away plastic, flesh, metal, cotton, or any type of cloth on contact. If you have a high pain tolerance, you might get halfway through the room before you drop dead. A lot of it depends on when the gas mask is eaten away.”

  “Your father is a fuckin’ nutball.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir there,” Kaede said, shutting off the hologram. “I have some liquid armor I thought I’d spray on us before we entered the room. It should be protective enough to get us across the room and to the kill switch.”

  “Liquid armor?”

  “A prototype my dad’s been hiding. It’s got stronger nonstick properties than Teflon, and creates a substance stronger than Kevlar and more reflective than a mirror on a molecular level. The gas will be unable to eat through it, at least right away. The problem is, it’s as subject to drying and evaporation as any liquid, so we can’t dawdle. I’ll spray us down, we get in, we get the hell out. We clear?”

  “Yeah. The stuff work?”

  “One of my lab technicians sprayed his arm with it and reached into lava. He was perfectly fine. So yeah, I think it’ll be good for us.”

  Nighthawk just stared at him in disbelief. “Lava? How the hell did you get him to do that?”

  “My father has ways of making people obey his wishes.” For blunt force, he used blackmail, but most of the time he used posthypnotic suggestion, designer drugs, or both. Money had its uses, but his father was quick to point out that a person who was willing to be bought could be bought by someone else at any time. So he preferred to train people for loyalty (whether they knew it or not), or just let it be widely known that disloyalty was repaid with a gruesome death. You could inspire an awful lot of loyalty simply by having a staggering body count.

  Nighthawk looked at the warehouse, but before he turned away, Kaede saw the slightest sneer on his face. “Yeah, that’s why I usually steer clear of mad scientists.”

  He barely constrained his contempt. It was aimed at his father, but Kaede imagined Nighthawk didn’t like him any better. It must have killed the guy to work with him. Kaede wondered how many ideas Nighthawk had gone through before coming to the inescapable conclusion he had to work with Kaede.

  The first lock panel was the obvious giveaway. Not only did it require a code, but Kaede had to briefly take off a glove and put his fingertip against a depression, which sampled his blood. To perfect these locks, the override had to be triggered with a sample of living Hayashi blood. No fingerprints, no retinal scans, nothing that could be replicated or chopped off and used. How exactly the machine knew it was living blood was kind of a mystery to him, but according to his father, it wouldn’t work with a vial of blood. Kaede took him at his word.

  The machine bleeped, and a hidden panel suddenly revealed itself, allowing him to punch in the kill code. There was a deep hum and rumble inside the building, which made Nighthawk glance at him nervously. But in spite of trying to devise ways to beat it, this moron honestly had no idea what he was dealing with.

  The door slid open with a pneumatic sound, and Nighthawk peered in nervously. Kaede rolled his eyes and walked into the dark alcove. “Lights on,” he said, and the computer caretaker of the place lit it up. It didn’t look like the entrance of a warehouse. It looked like the foyer of a business, with white paint splashed over the walls and fluorescents overhead. It was only missing the waiting room chairs and the overworked secretary. The trap in this room was a simple electrocution-based one, as his father liked to open small before building to the real big kills.

  Nighthawk finally joined him, and as soon as he was in, the door slid shut. “Hey, whoa, was that supposed to happen?”

  “Yes. This place is designed to hold its contents securely. Even if a Hayashi visits them.” There were hidden scanners near each door, which read his DNA and opened for him. The rooms were all white and fluorescent, revealing the plainest decorating scheme imaginable. Was there a minimalist style of decorating where everything was deliberately boring and uninviting? Because this was their Mecca.

  The watch alerted Kaede when they came to the pressure room, and he slipped the knapsack off his back and dug out the compact grappling hook. Nighthawk watched him with his arms crossed over his chest. In this bland setting, he and his hawk-themed uniform looked even more ridiculous. “You know, if you fuck this up, we’re dead.”

  “No, I’m dead. I’m sure the computer will let you leave,” Kaede lied. The synthetic poison on the spikes? He was immune. The spikes would still hurt, though.

  He put his hand on the door, and it opened on what appeared to be just another minimalist room in this place. Kaede fired the grappling hook up into the ceiling, and as soon as it set and fixed, he put on the lightweight harness. Nighthawk didn’t offer to help, and Kaede didn�
�t expect him to. As soon as he was ready, braced at the doorjamb, he hit the release, and the grappling hook cord yanked him into the room above the floor and lifted him to the ceiling. He didn’t touch the floor, but the air was displaced enough that the spikes sprung up anyway, and Nighthawk let out a slight yelp and jumped back.

  Kaede snickered as he found the hidden panel on the ceiling and killed the trap so the spikes disappeared beneath the floor. Kaede began lowering himself down and said, “It’s safe now.” But Nighthawk clearly didn’t trust him, as he waited until Kaede was on the floor before taking a step inside.

  Nighthawk kept staring down at the floor, though, like he expected the spikes to show up again. “How does this work? The floor doesn’t even look punctured. I’m not sure I understand the physics of such a thing.”

  “He’s a mad scientist. You’re gonna see a lot of shit that doesn’t make sense. Just roll with it.” Kaede retracted the hook, wrapped it up with the harness, and shoved it all back in the knapsack.

  The way down to the next level wasn’t a staircase or a lift, as this place was genuinely too small for it. Instead, behind a hidden panel was a shaft. More than wide enough for a human body, it allowed you to simply slid down it to the next floor. It was like a dumbwaiter without the waiter, and that description did not escape his notice for its general comedy. If you were anywhere in here, you were probably dumb.

  The basement looked exactly like the first floor, down to the same plain white walls and jarring lights. Kaede pretended he hadn’t heard the small noise above, the one that meant Nighthawk had friends coming in behind them. He expected that, which was why Ash was watching and waiting for the high sign. As soon as he got it, you could count the lives of Nighthawk’s deadly friends in seconds.

  For the microwave room, Kaede had decided on a hard rubber ball, which would take a while to bake and would be solid enough to trigger the kill switch. But it turned out Nighthawk had a shitty throwing arm and couldn’t aim for shit either. Kaede was genuinely shocked, as he thought a cat burglar might have perfected a throwing technique. (Then again, grappling hooks did take a lot of precision out of things.) After Nighthawk’s third miss, as the ball’s paint began to bubble and peel (and fill the room with a sickening baking rubber smell), Kaede scooped the ball up as it rolled back and threw it at the panel himself. He nailed it on the first try, and the faint hum of the microwaves stopped, although a little residual heat seemed to linger in the air.

  As soon as Kaede had put the still radiantly warm rubber ball back in his knapsack, Nighthawk said, “Your father is one sick puppy. I honestly thought you were shitting me about a microwave room.”

  Kaede glared at him. “Why would I waste your time and mine like that?” He sighed, trying to keep his temper under control as he shouldered his knapsack. He wondered how stupid Nighthawk actually was. You’d think, as a superthief, he just couldn’t be, but how much had his tech, and the weak Corwyn police department, helped him? Quite a bit, Kaede was beginning to think. Either that, or he was playing dumb, but why would he bother? Unless he was trying to lull Kaede into complacency, so he’d be shocked by Nighthawk’s extremely inevitable double-cross. Just the thought of that made Kaede mad because it meant that Nighthawk thought he was an idiot. Or maybe just naïve. But that was still infuriating.

  Nighthawk shrugged a single shoulder, trying to play it off casually. “I don’t know what mad scientists do for fun.”

  Kaede just decided to let it lie. He had no good response anyway. Except maybe mentioning that his dad’s hobby was thinking up ever more toxic compounds and viruses and then coming up with immunities to said items so he could inflict them on the world at large without worrying about accidentally killing himself. But that seemed too revelatory.

  By the time they got to the poison-gas room, Kaede knew he was going to have to take point. Nighthawk was happy to let him do all the work. Considering his double-cross, this seemed especially aggravating. Couldn’t he even pretend to give a shit? But Kaede made no comment about that as he busted out the spray and doused Nighthawk and himself with it. They put on their dripping breathing apparatus and walked into the foggy room, where the walls were not white but grooved, erose metal, treated to resist the corrosive gas, but not well. Several years in, it would need to be replaced. According to his father’s notes, it was plated with Teflon-coated titanium two feet thick. It still wasn’t strong enough.

  Kaede threw the kill switch and waited a minute or two before slipping off his glove and sticking a bare finger in the hidden hatch. The security system sampled his blood again, and the door to the safe room sprang open with a hiss.

  The safe room was small and the walls covered in stainless steel. There was a waist-high shelf with a metal box upon it at the back of the room. It was about the size of a personal fire safe and was super unimpressive, especially for all the bother.

  “That’s it?” Nighthawk asked, speaking Kaede’s thoughts aloud.

  “You can’t judge a weapon by its size,” Kaede said. He approached the safe, which seemed to be a smooth, unbroken box, and put his ungloved hand on the top, because if it was anything like the rest of these locks, it needed a confirmation of his DNA.

  He felt a hum beneath his fingers, and then the unseen door popped open. Kaede looked inside as Nighthawk came into the room. Inside the safe was a small sealed container, opaque and strangely heavy.

  “What is it?” Nighthawk asked as Kaede popped open the container.

  “I’m not completely sure.” Was it another of his dad’s creations? Inside the box were a couple of hermetically sealed vials of liquid with nothing more than cryptic coding on them. It could have been anything: a special enzyme, a genetically engineered virus, a poison more lethal than ricin. But his dad made thousands of those things—what made this special?

  Nighthawk came closer, took off his gas mask, and dropped it on the floor. “There’s no markings? Your dad never told you?”

  “We’re not super close, but I assume your friends in the Dark Legion told you that.”

  Nighthawk chuckled and tried on what Kaede assumed he thought was his most charming smile. “What?”

  “How stupid do you think I am?” Kaede asked. “And please, don’t answer that question, as I think I’ve got it. But how can you be so certain there aren’t traps on the way out? My father’s a well-known asshole. That’s absolutely the type of thing he would do.”

  Nighthawk looked genuinely confused. Kaede had to hand it to the Dark Legion. Master thief or not, Nighthawk was kind of dumb. Maybe he was an idiot savant of thievery. “I don’t understand. There are more traps?”

  Kaede shook his head. “Go find out.”

  Nighthawk still didn’t understand. He took another step toward Kaede and held out his hand. “I’ll take it, if you want to go check for traps.”

  Kaede put the box in his own bag and shook his head. “You’re not getting this at all, are you? Tell me, Nighthawk, do you feel dizzy?”

  “Give me the vials.” Nighthawk took another step forward and then put a hand to his forehead. “Whoa. Why am I dizzy?”

  “Because I sprayed you with a neurotoxin, you blithering idiot. An acid neutralizer wasn’t the only thing in the spray.”

  Now Nighthawk was swaying on his feet. He seemed to be having a hard time standing up. “But… you sprayed yourself—”

  “I’m immune to all my dad’s poisons, you fucking moron. Did you really think I was as stupid as you? You were never getting this.”

  Nighthawk collapsed to his knees, hand to his throat, as he started to wheeze. It would be quick. He might have been very like his father in many respects, but Kaede wasn’t naturally cruel. Perhaps their one point of departure.

  “It was a nice try,” Kaede told him, heading out of the room. He heard the dull thud of Nighthawk’s body hitting the floor, but he didn’t bother to look back.

  In the shaft, using sticky gloves to climb up, he could hear fighting above him. There were shou
ts, the hollow cracks of bullets, and the muffled curses of angry men, but he didn’t hear Ash at all. Which meant he must be doing great.

  As soon as he climbed out of the shaft, Kaede discovered Dagger sprawled faceup on the floor in front of him, one of his own daggers driven to the hilt in his eye socket. Professor Paladin was crumpled up in the corner, looking like a bag of discarded laundry, and steroid monstrosity Crusher was fighting with Ash while Mastermind was running out of the warehouse, shooting behind him as he went. Kaede didn’t see Whiplash, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if Ash had taken care of her outside, where theoretically she had a chance. In close quarters, she’d have had no chance at all to deploy her whips.

  Crusher caught Ash by the leg and pivoted, slamming Ash into the wall with bone-crushing force before tossing him away like an annoying rodent. Crusher then turned his boulder of a head toward Kaede, finally seeing him, and he made a noise like a growl as he moved toward him. Crusher was six foot five and at least three hundred pounds, with muscles like stones beneath his skin, grotesquely exaggerated by the supersteroids, skin stretched taut and covered in ropey veins. He was wearing black spandex too, which just accentuated how lumpy and misshapen he was. It wasn’t a good look for him.

  As he approached menacingly, Kaede pulled the tainted spray out of his bag and said, “You may want to rethink this, Mongo. Mastermind was the smartest among you, and even he knew it was time to run.”

  Crusher gave no sign of hearing him, looming menacingly, but Ash was back on his feet. He broke into a somersault, which struck Kaede as unusually flamboyant, but as Ash came up on his hands, Kaede saw there was a method to his gymnastics. Ash wrapped his feet around Crusher’s thick neck and pulled himself up until he was sitting on the beast’s shoulders. As Crusher grabbed his leg, Ash slammed his hands on Crusher’s ears. Crusher suddenly shot his head back as if he’d just taken a bullet and staggered as he snarled, “Fucking little ninja, I’ma crush you—”

  Kaede didn’t think Ash had accomplished anything, really, but the fact that Crusher was still stumbling around like a drunken sailor finally told him what Ash had done: he had popped both of Crusher’s eardrums. Not only did that have to hurt, but it revealed a nice little weakness in the steroid monster. In all of them? It was a good bet.