by Dunne, Lexie
“I would never do that, Jeremy,” I said, my voice rising. Chelsea had been unconscious on the floor when Blaze had left the fight to get Naomi to safety. I’d run off to help Angélica fight the last of Chelsea’s little group of misfit thugs. I have no idea when we could have been working together at all, given that the building had been falling down around all of us. “I wouldn’t, okay! I just—that’s not me, I didn’t do any of that—”
“Gail, calm down.” Jeremy cast a nervous look over his shoulder at the guards. “Please, calm down before they start something. We’re going to get you out of here. We are. We’re going to get to the bottom of this and find out who’s setting you up, and I promise you, there’s a redhead in our life who will probably pulverize whoever it is.”
“None of it makes any sense,” I said. “The only one who hates me that much is—well, there are a lot of people who hate me that much, but they’re all in here with me. Is it Chelsea? Is Chelsea setting me up? And why?”
“I don’t know. But you’re not going to be in here long, okay? And you’re not alone. The others wanted me to tell you that.”
But I was alone. They could offer their emotional support through the conduit of my ex-boyfriend all they liked, but at the end of the day, I was the one Eddie Davenport and that weird council of old men had decided to screw over. I was the one wearing a prison uniform and handcuffs.
I wanted to put my head down and cry. I bit my lower lip hard enough to draw blood, but it forced the tears and the panic back.
“Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Jane,” Jeremy said, and I realized he was talking about Guy and Vicki Burroughs, our friends, “they think it’s Chelsea, and you know them. They’re on the case, and they’re invested. They won’t let anything get in their way. So it’s going to be okay.”
I forced a nod and swallowed hard. “Thanks, Jer. And thanks for being here.”
“I know you wish it was somebody else,” he said, giving me a hesitant smile.
“Yes,” I said, “but you’re not terrible.”
“Such high words of praise.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry I don’t have more to tell you. We’re still working out the details, and it’s all happened so fast. But the minute I know more, I’ll come back.”
I could only nod at that.
“So.” He folded his arms over the table and leaned in. “How’s the food in there?”
“I can’t talk about it.” Though my stomach was rumbling, the croissant a distant memory. “I’m sorry. I don’t want either of us to get tackled by any of these guards.”
“We could take ’em,” Jeremy said.
I wanted to smile at that. At times, his confidence could be weirdly like Guy’s whenever Guy wore the Blaze mask. It was also incredibly familiar, and—
Blaze.
“Oh god,” I said, breathing the words out. “I completely forgot.”
“Forgot what?”
“Naomi. Is she okay?” The last time I’d seen my reporter acquaintance, Guy had been carting her off to the hospital. “Chelsea didn’t kill her, did she? She’s not hurt?”
“We don’t know.” Jeremy crushed the empty styrofoam cup, refusing to meet my eye.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? Wasn’t she with Gu—with you?” After all, I’d talked to Guy on the phone right before the crap had hit the fan with Angélica and Eddie Davenport at the hospital. Naomi had been hit by one of Chelsea’s sting-ray blasts, but she’d been breathing.
“That’s the other thing. Davenport took her.”
“What do you mean took her?”
“We have no idea where she is, and they’re not telling us a damn thing, that’s what I mean. How is she even connected? What did Chelsea want with her?”
“She wanted to know how to hurt Blaze and War Hammer,” I said.
Jeremy snorted, spinning the pieces of the cup on the table with his good thumb. “Good luck with that. They’re pretty indestructible.”
“I’m worried she may have found something. Please, warn th—please be careful.” I grabbed Jeremy’s wrist, trying to communicate with a significant look that he should let Sam and Guy know immediately that Chelsea was after them in particular.
“Okay,” Jeremy said. He looked around the visitor’s room again, his eyes stopping to rest on my prison tunic. They cut down to the giant GODWIN stamped on the hem. In my prison shoes and my uniform, sans makeup and with my hair barely brushed, I must have looked every inch a prisoner. “How the hell did this happen? How did it get this bad? You’re in prison.”
“Yeah, trust me, didn’t miss that memo. We need to get Chelsea. And by which I mean, you need to get Chelsea.” I let my head fall forward from exhaustion. “I don’t think I’m getting out of here anytime soon. Detmer’s really bizarre, and I’ve been dealing with—”
“Inmate Godwin!” My guard from outside snapped into action, striding toward us. “Do I need to remind you of the rules?”
“Hey, man,” Jeremy said, pushing himself halfway up from the table, “we’re not breaking your stupid rules, so back o—”
The guard hit him with the nightstick. Or at least I thought it was a nightstick until Jeremy’s eyes rolled back into his head. He convulsed, fingers wrapped around the edge of the table. For one horrifying second, I wasn’t in the visitor’s area, but in a hospital room miles away, watching Angélica’s eyes roll as she seized.
Jeremy cried out and snapped me back to reality. I lunged forward and hooked a foot behind the guard’s knee. A single jerk sent him toppling.
Jeremy curled in around the table with a gasp at the same time the guard hit the ground. I backed away, senses kicking into the hyperactive mode that brought every detail of the room into painful clarity. The whir of the fan blades overhead echoed like an approaching locomotive. The dust spread by those same blades seemed to hang impossibly on the air for an eternity of a second. At the same time, I noticed every bead of sweat on the foreheads of the three guards all racing toward me at once.
“Whoa!” Time slowed back to normal as I dropped to my knees, holding my hands up with my palms out. “Sorry! Reflex, I swear. I didn’t mean to.”
“This visit’s over.” My guard climbed to his feet and hauled me to mine. He waved irritably at the coughing Jeremy. “Get him out of here. You were warned, Godwin.”
“It was an accident,” I said, straining to look over my shoulder at Jeremy as they hauled us in opposite directions. He looked dazed, his eyes glassy. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Wave bye to your boyfriend.”
“Gail!” Jeremy, at the visitor’s entrance, turned and tried to run my way though I had no idea why. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, okay?”
The guard shoving me forward scoffed under his breath. “Wouldn’t bet on it,” he said to his buddy.
I got one last look at Jeremy’s pained face as he was shoved unceremoniously through the visitor’s door. The guard holding me by my wrists leaned around me to tap three times on the riveted metal door leading back into Detmer. As it opened, I cast one final look at the visitor’s room.
Right as Kiki stepped in from the opposite door.
I stumbled. Had she come with Jeremy? She’d been the last person I had seen before Eddie and his goons had dragged me off to my tribunal, and she was a close friend of Angélica’s.
Kiki met my eye across the room. For a second, there was a brief flare of recognition. She backed up into the hallway behind her.
“Huh?” I asked.
“Keep walking, Godwin,” the guard said, and slammed the door shut behind us.
I looked back at the door. “I think I have another visitor. My friend—”
“Nice try. She’s your problem now,” the guard said, addressing Perky Tabitha, who’d appeared like a giddy phantom. “Visiting privileges revoked for a week.”
“Hey!” I sa
id.
“Wanna make it two?”
I bit my lip again hard, before I said something about his mustache that I would later regret. When he took off the handcuffs, my shoulders relaxed. I followed Tabitha, letting her lead me back to the offices. So Kiki hadn’t come to see me. But what was she doing here? Who would she possibly be meeting at Detmer? Maybe she had another patient who had crossed the evil line. After all, if she was there to see me, she probably would have brought her boyfriend and my other doctor, Lemuel Cooper, along.
Either way, I had bigger things to worry about. I was being framed. Somebody had gone so far as to plant evidence. Text messages between Chelsea and me, set in the weeks of my life I couldn’t remember and therefore couldn’t completely refute.
For a sick moment, I wondered.
Had I been working with Chelsea? Was it some subliminal thing? What if a psychic had managed to break my natural mental shield, and I really had somehow set Angélica in Chelsea’s path? When I considered how crazy the rest of my life could be, it didn’t sound that far-fetched.
But I also had a gut feeling that I would somehow know if I’d been working with Chelsea. My brain had never been that subtle.
So. Somebody was setting me up.
Great.
Back in my cubicle, there was a gift basket of freshly baked danishes on my desk. Since Raze was pretending not to notice my every moment, I picked through them until I had found all the thumbtacks. With Raze watching me and sulking, I took a big bite of the first one.
“Spoilsport,” she said, turning back to her monitor in a huff.
At least the danishes made me feel better, or at least less hungry. Everything else, that pretty much sucked. I wanted to put my head down on my desk and stay there until the nightmare was over.
They had text messages. From my phone.
How was that even possible unless . . . had Dr. Mobius set me up? After all, he’d vanished off the face of the earth after I had escaped from his lair in the suburbs. But why would he do that? Was he so angry that I’d escaped that he was getting his revenge by letting me go to prison for the murder of my friend? There were so many more direct ways to get revenge, and, frankly, I hadn’t exactly pictured him as the “thinks ahead” type.
So who was it?
I looked up at the creak of Rita’s crepe-soled shoe. She had a pleasant look on her face, but the skin on the back of my neck began to prickle.
“Let’s take a walk,” she told me.
“I’ve still got some work to do,” I said, though there was no way in hell I was doing any tax forms.
Rita’s hand clamped down on my shoulder. “Wasn’t asking.”
Well, when she put it that way.
We left the offices, heading back into the women’s side of the prison. Through the glass in the parallel hallways, I saw workers looking at us warily, which only made the pit in my stomach grow. Rita’s body language was loose and calm, but there was a tic in her jaw that I didn’t like.
“So you had a visitor,” she said.
“Yes.” We were near the gym now. “My boyfriend.”
She snorted. “The Collins boy.”
Great. The world’s first supervillain knew my ex’s name.
“Last I checked, you weren’t in charge of who’s allowed to see me,” I said, raising my chin.
She made a “hmm” noise. The skin on the back of her hand was wrinkled and liver-spotted, and none of that eased my suspicions as she palmed open the door to the gym and gestured for me to precede her. “Heard you gave the guards some trouble,” she said.
“I’m not fond of watching my friends get tasered. Draw your own conclusions.”
“What did I tell you yesterday?”
“Before or after you hit me with a tic ta—”
Something blurred at the edge of my vision, and I was on the floor, my left arm screaming in pain. I rolled by instinct. Rita’s foot stomped down. The soles of her shoes might be soft, but I doubted that mattered when she was doing her best to break my elbow. I propped myself up on my good arm, trying to pivot my weight so I could sweep Rita’s feet out from under her. If I could knock her to the floor, I’d have a better advantage.
She jumped over me.
I rolled out of the way of a second kick, and rolled again. My back slammed into a wall, giving me a nanosecond to fill a flush of dread. I blocked the next kick with my forearms, curling up to protect my middle. Rita’s hand snaked down and grabbed me by the injured left arm. She wrenched me to my feet and raised an eyebrow when I tried to scratch at her face. In addition to being humiliating, it asked Are you done yet?
I tried to knock her hand away, but it was like trying to fight a wall. “What the hell is your problem?”
“I told you not to embarrass me. Did you think that doesn’t include petty scuffles with guards?” She shook me like a rag doll. My teeth clicked together. “Embarrassing.”
“I was protecting my friend.”
“In here, you represent me.” She cuffed me upside the head.
It wasn’t a hard blow, but I still saw stars. “No, I don’t. I won’t be the center of your sick obsession. You’re insane.”
“Obviously.” She released me with a flick of her fingers, and it still sent me reeling back. I backed up even farther, out of range. “How do you think I got here?”
“Stay the hell away from me,” I said, panting as I braced myself against the wall. “I have enough problems without getting your crazy all over me.”
Rita cocked her head, considering. When she nodded, I felt a chill in the air, but she only spun on her heel and started to walk away. “No can do, my young friend. Somebody really needs to teach you how to fight,” she called over her shoulder.
“Somebody already did,” I said, my throat burning. I clutched my left arm, which still throbbed. “She died.”
“They all do, in the end,” Rita said. She gave a flippant wave, like she couldn’t be bothered to deal with it, and left me alone in the gym.
CHAPTER FIVE
Unfortunately, Rita meant every word. Somebody really did need to instruct me in the martial arts, never mind that Angélica already had. And in Rita’s opinion, the best fighter in Detmer was . . . Rita.
Her lessons were nothing like Angélica’s. My trainer had taken time to break down each lesson into fundamental building blocks. Every kick started with core power and balance. Every punch was explained in great detail. She had instructed me patiently, humor lacing her voice as she walked me through every new move.
Rita preferred the Socratic method. And by Socratic method, I mean Rita preferred to beat the hell out of me whenever she felt I wasn’t paying attention. Angélica and Rita were the same size, but Rita was stronger, faster, and she could fly. Angélica’s could alter her velocity, but only when she was in motion. She couldn’t go from standing on one side of me to standing on the other, for example. Rita suffered no such drawbacks.
Rita fought mean. Her lessons weren’t limited to the gym.
Attacks came at any time. During dinner, over steak tartar. On my way to the shower. In the shower (I was a little perturbed that not a single guard came to my rescue after I screamed). At work. At the watercooler. In our cell. Movement in the corner of my eye was the only warning before I usually ended up on the floor in pain. She liked to target my knees and ankles. Her favorite trick involved pepper, my eyes, and if I wasn’t fast enough to block a handful of condiments to the face, several hours of burning red eyes.
I didn’t dare approach a single guard. I could see sympathy in their eyes whenever I walked by, but nobody was going to say a thing. Even the other inmates avoided my eyes. I had to figure they were just grateful Rita’s desire to “help” had been focused on somebody else. The only good side effect of the constant attacks was that they distracted me from driving myself crazy trying to figure out wh
o could have set me up. With no way of contacting anybody outside the prison, no escape plan, and no chances.
Three days after Jeremy’s visit, I ducked a cloud of salt to the face.
Rita kept walking, hands in her pockets.
“Why?” I asked. It had been the third time that day.
Rita just kept walking, hands in her pockets. The guards on the other side of the corridor pretended not to notice. They looked a little frazzled—the veal the night before had been a little gamy, leading me to witness my first supervillain meltdown. Rolexes had been produced to placate the angriest of the offenders, and our time watching C-SPAN had been extended for the evening.
Supervillains apparently love C-SPAN. As Raze helpfully put it, it was the greatest puppet show on earth.
“Are you coming?” Rita asked, turning to look at me over her shoulder.
“Coming where?” I wiped salt off my face.
“Your form offends me. You need work.”
“I don’t have a choice, do I?”
“Girlie, everybody’s got a choice.” Rita considered this for a second, and brightened as much as she ever did. “Yours just happen to suck.”
I saw two options: I could go to the gym and let Rita beat on me until she grew bored, or I could turn her down, and she’d beat on me anyway. With a sigh, I fell into step behind her. How long was this Villain Syndrome fixation going to last?
“You’re like a mystery wrapped in a riddle and smothered with crazy sauce,” I said glumly.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been called a burrito before.” Rita clicked her tongue. “That’s a new one. Creative.”
I absolutely was not going to thank her for a compliment on my insult.
“Makes me almost wish I could keep you,” Rita said.
“What did you just say?”
Instead of answering me, Rita cuffed me upside the head. The blow connected because, in my surprise, I didn’t block in time.
“What did I tell you?” she said as I reeled back, ears ringing like steel bells. “You keep letting me get these easy hits in. It’s pathetic. One confusing statement and bam, you’re down. Amateurish.”