Superheroes Anonymous (Book 2): Supervillains Anonymous

by Dunne, Lexie

  “Did you guys already take your trackers out?” I asked, looking from one face to the other.

  Rita snorted. “Razor? Fifteen seconds.”

  “Got it.” Raze patted me on the bad shoulder, and I winced, sucking air through my teeth. “I may be helping you now, but remember me when you get out. Best enemies forever, right?”

  And she pulled out the ray-gun-looking thing with one hand and the shower-nozzle gun with the other and nodded to Rita. The older woman grabbed my shirtfront again, bunching it in her fist.

  “Hold on, Girlie,” she said. She grabbed the push bar on the door in front of her, crumpling it with her free hand. “Go!”

  Like a shot, she took off, knocking the door off its hinges. Raze rolled through at the same time. We’d broken into some kind of break room, from what I could see, with a table full of guards sitting in the middle. In an instant, the air was full of smoke and beams of red light from Raze. I was too busy flying after Rita, gripping her wrist in a death grip and trying not to scream.

  We broke out of that room in a shower of glass and concrete, and a second later, night air, warm and humid, hit my face. We appeared to be flying through what looked like some kind of Japanese garden. Well-manicured lawns whipped by, silvery in the light from the streetlamps overhead. It was the first time I had been outside since they’d hauled me out of the transport van and through the front doors. If it weren’t for the actual terror clogging my throat, my spirits would probably have been lifting. Ever since I’d been dosed with Mobium, outdoors had been a thing other people experienced, not me.

  And Detmer looked beautiful from the air. We jetted by a beautiful fountain that could have come straight out of Rome itself, a fountain that I imagined would flare up with gold in the middle of the day. It was almost far more expansive than even I had suspected, given how fast we were rocketing through the air. A fence, at least five stories high, rose in the distance. With my enhanced sight, I could see every glint on every barb in the wire atop it.

  We were aiming straight at those, actually.

  That was not good.

  “Rita!” I said, tugging as best I could on her wrist. “Rita, there’s a—Rita, fence! Fence, Rita!”

  “I see it.”

  She didn’t actually do anything about it, though. The fence zoomed closer and closer to us, and I pictured us being cut to bloody ribbons straight through that barbed wire. Or just me, actually, because I suspected Rita would probably just laugh off being sliced to death.

  I really, really did not want to die at the hand of lunatic, I thought, squeezing my eyes shut.

  But the razory death never came. Instead, Rita jerked to a stop once more, and I felt myself swing around. She’d stopped in midair and was dangling me a bare six inches from the sharp blades of the fence.

  It took me a second to catch my breath, looking at those blades.

  “So,” she said, “this is as far as I take you, Girlie-Girl.”

  “What?” I snapped my gaze back to her. “You’re not coming with me?”

  “You think I want to extend my sentence by breaking free of this place?” She scoffed. “I’ve got better things to do. You, on the other hand, have a job, and I expect you to do it the same way you do everything else. Try not to screw it up too badly, though. I have people depending on you.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said, and it wasn’t a revelation or anything, but it certainly felt more pressing when she was holding me up by the shirt fifty feet in the air. “You’re absolutely nuts.”

  “Obviously.” She jerked her head. “City’s that way. You don’t have much time.”

  “What do you even want me to do? And why me?” I asked, struggling to get out of her grip. But say what you will about Detmer prison, their clothing manufacturing was top-notch. The shirt was easily supporting my extra-dense weight, and Rita had a steely grip.

  Rita’s face briefly took on a faraway look, but she was completely there, evil and beady, when she looked at me again. “I may be a villain,” she said, “but I’ve got a family, too. Ciao, Hostage Girl. Good luck figuring it all out.”

  “Wait,” I tried to say.

  Rita, however, wasn’t in the mood to listen. She grabbed the back of my shirt with her other hand, spun sharply in midair, and flung me like a fish at Pike Market. My stomach in my throat, I flew right over the fence, missing the barbed wire by a millimeter—thanks, Rita—and hurtling into the free space beyond the prison fence. For a second, there was nothing but weightlessness as I flew.

  And then I dropped.

  Angélica had taught me how to fall during one of our very first lessons together. Muscle memory snapped into place. I saw the ground speeding toward me in crystal-clear detail, the individual blades of grass, the pinpoint dewdrops on each. My muscles relaxed. I swung my legs around so that I was feet-first rather than headfirst. When I hit the ground, I landed easily on the balls of my feet, redirecting the momentum so that I rolled forward into a crouch.

  I immediately sprang to my feet and whipped around, looking for Rita.

  She was gone.

  I looked around, expecting her to be standing somewhere just behind me so she could attack me. But I saw nothing but the forest clearing around me, full of trees and birdsong. I was completely alone.

  From the prison, invisible thanks to the distance, my hearing picked up warning klaxons and I realized that I was standing outside the prison fence. Entirely without my consent, I had just broken out of prison. All I had was the clothes on my back, some superpowers that weren’t actually that impressive in the grand scheme of things, and the radio my psycho roommate had put on my collar.

  My psychotic roommate who seemed to have some kind of plan for me in mind.

  Oh, god. If I was caught, Rita wasn’t going to be happy. And I’d seen what happened to people who’d displeased Rita. With that in mind, I started to run.

  I’d been a hostage over fifty times. Time to become a fugitive instead.

  I knew where Detmer was only because we’d passed it on a school trip in the sixth grade. Thanks to the Mobium, my memory had become a strange beast, able to guide me through any place as long as I’d been there at least once. I sprinted through the forest. The first time the radio on my shoulder chirped, I jumped so high I accidentally clipped a branch with the top of my head, knocking me completely off step. It wasn’t Raze or Rita, though, but the guards.

  They were doing a bed check, I realized. In the actual chaos, they had no idea yet if anybody had broken out.

  I ran on.

  I had been running for nearly half an hour—something I could only tell because I’d taken up distance running at Davenport and had learned to judge distances by how hungry I felt—when they first said my name. “Anybody seen Godwin?” came over the radio, and the negatives started flowing in.

  “Tracker puts her inside, but bed’s empty.”

  “Somebody make sure Fearless hasn’t killed her, will ya?”

  I didn’t have a plan. But that wasn’t unusual, really. Plans were generally things that happened to other people. Better, more prepared people. I needed to get on pavement soon, though, as they could easily track me with all of the scent and footsteps I was leaving.

  I veered left when I heard the sound of cars. The forest turned into a residential area, so I slowed my run to a jog, trying to look like I was out for a leisurely run at three in the morning. Every car that passed made me tense, but for the most part, people seemed completely uninterested in the woman running alone through a town right next to the most dangerous prison on earth. Granted, it probably took a special kind of person to live in this town in the first place, really, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  I made it to the highway and stared in dismay at the very first sign I saw.

  DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS.

  THEY ARE VILLAINS AND VERY EVIL.


  “Of course,” I said, slinking back into the brush. “Of course it would be that sign.”

  I jogged on, keeping the highway in sight as best I could. This route would eventually take me up to Chicago though what I would do once I arrived, I had no idea. Chicago was familiar, though. Chicago was home.

  For once, luck seemed to be on my side. About ten miles north of the prison, I stumbled onto a train yard, nearly tripping over the tracks. The scream of a freight-train horn made me look up and over to realize that one was just beginning its slumberous journey north to Chicago. I didn’t think: I ran as hard as I could, launching myself at the side of the car and gripping the railing along the top. I hauled myself over, dropped into the rusty divot made by time and weather, and lay flat on my stomach. For several seconds, I waited for the train to stop, for somebody to shout that they had a stowaway.

  The train chugged on. Relieved, I let my forehead rest against the disgusting, dirty metal for a second.

  What was I possibly going to do now?

  Clinging to a train in the middle of the night at least gave me time to think as I chugged my way north. No amount of turning Rita’s cryptic remarks over in my head made them make any sense, though. Rita’s two children were Eddie Davenport, the man who had thrown me in prison, and Jessica Davenport. Given that Jessica Davenport had taken up her father’s superhero mantle and nobody on the planet knew that the Raptor was actually a middle-aged woman with two kids, I had a feeling she could take care of herself. So why would Rita think they needed help? And why would she think I would help them after I’d been thrown into prison for a crime I hadn’t committed based on the barest, made-up evidence.

  Maybe it was one of her grandchildren she wanted me to save. But why couldn’t she just have said that?

  And now that I was out of prison, I didn’t want to help Rita. I needed to clear my name and stay out of Detmer forever. Which meant finding Chelsea and getting to the bottom of my own frame-up.

  “Gee,” I said though I was completely alone, pushing my forehead into the cold metal underneath me, “and just when I thought life was getting boring.”

  I stayed vigilant, worrying about tunnels that might cut me in half. More and more, I began to recognize landmarks. We came into Chicago from the south, and it took me a little while to figure out the train was heading farther north, tracking up the west side. When the Lake finally came into sight, near a dirty, run-down part of the city, I readied myself, took a deep breath, and leapt before I could think about it. I landed lightly on the balls of my feet and ducked behind a transformer box to wait for the rest of the train to pass.

  The minute it had trundled out of sight, I peeked out from behind the box and carefully turned the volume down on the radio on my shoulder. It had regularly spit out updates on my manhunt, which had been both unnerving and something of a relief. They were sure I had turned south, possibly going to Miami.

  Blaze’s territory was Miami. It made a certain amount of sense.

  The buildings around me were worn by age and neglect, windows broken and occasionally covered with plywood. I wouldn’t have been surprised to come across at least three drug deals as I trotted along, but I tried not to think about that. Before the Mobium, this area would have scared me. Now, it just made me wary. Guns could still kill me, but any human I came across, I had a chance of being stronger and faster.

  The only problem, really, was that it was dark, and even my night vision sometimes wasn’t enough. As I passed a building where the windows were entirely boarded up, I tripped over a broken bottle and stumbled forward.

  It saved me from a giant headache.

  After all, when somebody behind me tried to punch me in the back of the head, they missed.

  Mostly.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The fist still clipped the top of my head, and I still saw stars.

  Thanks to Rita’s constant ambushes, instinct took over. I kicked backward, my heel driving into something solid right before hands locked around my ankle. At this, I did look back.

  The Raptor and I gazed at each other for a split second. She was probably shocked that I’d dodged the fist to the head in the first place. I was shocked to be facing New York City’s number one superhero. She was the Raptor. Her logo and her silhouette belonged on cereal boxes and soft-drink ads, not on the person holding onto my foot or punching me. But no, that was really her. I was really facing off against the Raptor.

  I looked at her, and I did the only thing available to me: I yelped.

  She twisted my foot. Luckily, I went with it, flipping over easily and yanking free. I scrambled to my feet and ran. No direction, no idea of where to go, just away. The Raptor was the best, and the Raptor was after me. I was not going to survive this. Good god was I not going to survive this.

  I heard a hissing sound. Something skittered across the pavement in front of me. Sparks flew everywhere, crackling like demented toy poppers. I yelped again, swerving to try and avoid them. Another hiss, another set of bright, tiny explosions in my path. My only option was to let the Raptor catch me or duck into the building to my right.

  When I turned to look back, all I saw was the grenade launcher she held.

  “Shit!” I threw myself into the open door, tripping and rolling to my feet. Afterimages from the sparks made it difficult to see, but if the smell was anything to go by, I really didn’t want to see much anyway. I took off down a hallway, looking for an exit.

  A thud made me look up in time to see a black canister go flying past. Over fifty different villains over the years, you can bet your ass I recognized that sucker. I was midshout, an arm flung over my eyes, when the flashbang exploded.

  The percussive wave hit like Angélica at full velocity: a battering ram intent on liquefying every bone in my spine. I hit the wall with my shoulder blades. Every noise had been replaced by a high-pitched whine. I charged forward, stumbling but mostly in one piece. It scared me not to hear anything that might give me a clue about my environment, but time wasn’t a luxury I had available, and neither was my hearing.

  The old building had several floors, most of the windows were boarded up. It was dark—and currently silent—as a tomb. I hit a dead end and spun on my heel. Something dark crossed my vision. I threw myself to the side. Raptor’s fist breezed past my left ear. I blocked the follow-up punch to the gut with crossed arms.

  The melee that followed was almost too fast to follow. She aimed for every vulnerable area on my body while I did my best to block and dodge. It only took half a second before everything started to feel oddly familiar, like she was an opponent I’d fought before. I never had. I’d met Jessica Davenport once in an elevator, but that didn’t explain that she ducked when I expected her to, returned with the disorienting open-handed strike that I anticipated and dodged. We weren’t evenly matched. She had armor and years of fighting experience, while all I had was blind panic.

  She kicked me, hard, right in the midsection—and vanished as I doubled over.

  A second later, a canister landed at my feet and gas spewed everywhere. I froze up as the smell hit me. Pepper spray again? This was really not my week. I covered my nose and mouth with my hand and raced down the hallway, every muscle tense.

  I had to get away from the gas. Which meant going up.

  I’d seen a horror movie before. I knew this was a bad idea.

  But as I really, really did not want to experience the amount of snot pepper spray produced ever again, I raced for the staircase, taking the steps three at a time. There was a miraculously open window at the top that I could see. A one-story drop? That was nothing. I aimed for it, eyes streaming, ears ringing.

  The floor shook as something hit the wall in front of me. I stumbled to a stop and gawked at the window, now covered by a net. Instinct made me turn and drop into a crouch on the stairs. A second bolt flew over my head, a net exploding all over the
exposed wooden panels behind me.

  Raptor, who had appeared at the bottom of the stairs, raised the net gun again. I leapt up, grabbed the banister, and hauled myself over, landing in the hallway in an uncoordinated pile. I scrambled for the next flight because I could hear her footsteps right behind me. On the next floor, I had to dodge a tranquilizer dart. When I tried to race back down, yet another net blocked my way, covering the opening to the stairs. Taking a chance, I jumped on that both feet first. It bounced me right over the banister and back onto the landing, right into Raptor.

  She blocked my leading strike. I tried for an uppercut and dodged the cross that I somehow knew would follow.

  A bright light like a camera flash seared my corneas. I cried out, my strike going wide, and when I blinked, Raptor had disappeared. I wheeled around. Noises were beginning to break through the ringing in my ears, but I couldn’t hear anything that would tell me where she’d gone. I couldn’t get through the net, the windows were boarded up, and the second I tried a doorway, she’d get the drop on me.

  She’d trapped me yet again. My choices were to go up or to surrender.

  My ears picked up a whip of noise, and something slammed into my shins. I toppled forward, hitting the ground hard with my elbows. A glance down told me there was a rope wrapped tight around my legs, tying them together. Crap. Just how many toys did the woman have? This was beyond ridiculous. I yanked hard at the rope. It cut into my thumbs, but I heard the groan as the rope protested.

  It snapped with a satisfying noise. Unfortunately, the minute I jumped to my feet, I found myself face-to-face with a gun barrel.

  It wasn’t a regular pistol, but it was still gun-shaped, it was still large and threatening, and it was pointed directly between my eyes. My throat dry, chest still heaving from my exposure to the gas, I looked past the muzzle and at Raptor’s mask. Jessica’s chin and mouth were exposed. It swooped over her nose in a beaklike point. The entire ensemble wasn’t black, like I’d always thought, but a dark bronze.