“You don’t need to worry,” the woman coos. “I haven’t slipped past your security system. You’ve actually slipped past mine.”
“And how is that?” Paul snaps.
“Come on up here and I’ll show you.”
Nova’s internal emotions go into Red Alert mode. I wish there was a way I could turn off our mental connection because I don’t need a second reminder that we should be more than a little concerned right now.
Paul’s neck cranes forward but it’s obvious that with the tunnel’s roughly carved walls, he can’t see what she’s talking about without walking the fifty yards to where she stands, hands on her hips. He glances back at me, not for advice or help, but to glare at me as if he thinks I’m going to make a run for it the first chance I get.
In his defense, that’s exactly what I plan to do.
“Did she break out of a dungeon holding cell or something?” I ask. My dumb question must be all the motivation he needs because he rolls his eyes at me and walks toward the woman. I glance at Nova. Her eyes are wide and frightened.
“What is it?” I whisper.
“No talking!” Paul yells back. Ugh. If he were a human, he wouldn’t have been able to hear that. Nova grabs my arm, digging her fingernails into my skin. I mouth the word what? She shakes her head, looking from the woman to me. Her eyes go wide again. I shake my head back at her because I can’t read her mind. She closes her eyes and an explosion of power crushes into me. Bad, angry, scared.
I move my lips without talking. Do you know her?
Before she can answer, Paul’s shocked gasp catches my attention. “How did this happen? This is a secure location!” He’s staring at something in the side of the wall, past the ridged surface that can’t be seen from here. I don’t see the woman anymore. It’s like a hole appeared in the wall. Paul reaches for his MOD.
Then I do see the woman. She’s a blur, moving faster than my eyes can keep focus, shoving Paul backwards until his body cracks against the back wall. Ouch. That’s twice tonight. Her hand holds him up by the neck, closing his airways so he can barely breathe. I can hear his gasps.
Okay. If anyone is going to throw Paul around, it’ll be me. Not some mysterious biker chick who appeared out of thin air. “Cover me,” I tell Nova. She nods. We run to save Paul but he passes out, his body going limp just moments before we get there. A pile of rocks and dust are on the floor just past the ridged bump in the wall. The woman broke in here from another hallway.
“I am Hero Maci Might,” I hiss. The woman is much older than she looked from farther away. She’s probably close to three hundred which would make her look like a sixty-year-old human. At my introduction, she drops Paul, turning quickly on her heel to watch me.
“Maci Might?” She says, cocking her head to the side just like Chewy does when he doesn’t understand you. Only she understands. Her eyes narrow, forming deep crow’s feet wrinkles. “And this must be...Nova.”
Nova folds her arms across her chest, making her completely vulnerable to an attack. But the stance only makes her look like more of an immovable force. Like she’s not afraid of this woman. “You need to crawl back into whatever hole you came out of,” Nova says, nodding to the crumbled rocks in the side of the wall that opens into what looks like a small cave. This woman must have been digging around underground and happened into this hallway at the right time. “You’re on enemy ground.”
She laughs. “You are too cute! I heard you went on a little rampage back at the King City headquarters. Killed a few of your allies, hmm?” Her eyebrows draw together. “That’s not a very nice way to honor Aurora’s memory.”
If I knew how to operate the depowering machine, I’d throw this lady onto it in a heartbeat. She’s obviously hanging out with the villains. Paul is still unconscious. I lift my left wrist and swipe my BEEPR screen. “I’d shut up if I were you,” I tell her. “Although you’ve already incriminated yourself, so.” My lips slide to the side of my face. “It’ll be fun arresting you.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” the woman says. I look up, preparing to hit her with a retriever hook if she plans on running back through the hole which brought her here. She does move. But not toward the hole. She grabs my wrist with her left hand. I twist my hand up onto her arm, shoving down on her elbow with my right hand. The hyperextension of her elbow drops her to the ground. But it’s too late. The hiss-pop of broken electronics makes me jerk away. Whatever is inside her rubbery glove just fried my BEEPR.
“You broke my elbow!” She cries, lifting her arm up as she watches it dangle the wrong way. She’ll have to pull her arm back into place before the bones begin to heal.
“You broke my BEEPR!” I yell. I turn around to Nova, whose horrified expression is a mirror of my own. We’re stuck underground with secured doors we can’t open, with a villain, and no way to call for help. Nova rushes to Paul, grabbing for his wrist MOD.
“It’s broken, too,” she says.
“Let’s take her down,” I say. I do not whisper. I want this villain to know we aren’t scared of her and we’re not deterred. “Then we’ll figure out what to do from there.” I nod toward the next barricaded wall. “If we input the wrong password enough times, it should call security on us. Someone will come.”
“It’ll be too late by then,” the woman says. She puts a cell phone to her ear. “I found the machine. I also found the Might twins.” Her eyes light up at whatever the person on the other side of the phone says. I nod to Nova and she slowly walks toward the woman, making the perfect distraction. My fingers grip the retriever hooks in my sleeve, sliding them out soundlessly. “I’ll bring them,” the woman says into the phone. “It does appear that the rumors are true. The little brat has sided with the Heroes. I wonder what they promised her.”
I flick the first hook toward her, quickly followed by the second. My satisfied smile comes too soon, because instead of dropping to the ground in agonizing pain, the woman just rolls her eyes as the hooks meet their target--her jacket--and bounce right off, landing on the ground.
Something tells me that’s not just a leather jacket.
“We could kill them,” she says into her phone. Nova looks at me, waiting for a signal to attack. But I hold back. Her hook-proof outfit and electronic-frying glove makes me wary to touch her. We don’t know what she’s capable of. The woman laughs at whatever the person says into her phone. Her eyes narrow on mine. “You’re right, Felix. We shouldn’t kill them. We need all the power we can get.”
I have many regrets in life. My list of regrets is so long that if I were to summarize them, I’d have to break it down into days and hours and minutes. For example, I have three regrets in the past hour alone.
One: I should have told someone where I was going when I fake turned in Nova.
Two: I should have had a backup plan. Heroes always have a backup plan.
Three: Those mind communication rings Evan invented? It would have been a great idea to bring them with me today.
The woman’s foot kicks at my feet. “Go.” She points toward the hole in the wall. I don’t have much of a choice but to duck under the broken limestone opening and step into the crudely excavated room that awaits on the other side. Nova follows shortly after. I’ll need to stay positive if I’m going to get us out of this. We now know that the woman is working with Felix and presumably that she’s bringing us to him. This could still end up as a solved Hero mission. All I need to do is steal her phone, make a call, and save the day.
I grab Nova’s arm as we walk through the narrow tunnel heading in the opposite direction of the depowering machine, the dungeon, and all the corridors that lead to Central. The light quickly diminishes into a faint glow the farther we get from the hole. This tunnel is definitely off the map, unknown and dangerous. I wonder how long villains have been working underground, so close to Central but still undetected.
Nova’s power closes into her body and I do the same with mine. If we appear weak and scared, we’ll have an adv
antage. Minutes turn into an hour. We’re still walking slowly down a darkened path, Nova and I sticking close together while the footsteps behind us are an ever present reminder that although we’re being followed, we’re actually being led right into an unknown danger.
The path gets colder, narrower and darker. I squeeze Nova’s arm with one hand and hold the other out to the side, feeling along the wall so I can have some sense of direction. “I don’t see anything,” Nova says.
“Keep going,” the woman barks.
We shuffle along the darkened path for another ten minutes. We’re descending and the floor is slippery. Nova comes to an abrupt halt. “I think I’m at a door.” I feel it too--smooth cold metal. A light turns on and I jump. The old woman is an inch away from my face. She points the light on her phone past us, lighting up a metal hatch that’s barely taller than Nova and me. There is no lock on this door, just a simple handle. “Go inside.”
Nova looks at me. I nod. She pushes the handle as fear lines her face. We step into another dimly lit room. But this one doesn’t compare to the depowering room. The depowering room made an uneasy feeling settle in my stomach.
This room makes me vomit.
The smells, the sounds, the sights. Everything about this room of horrors turns my stomach inside out on the rocky floor. Nova pats my back as I dry heave, my head in between my arms as I hold on to the wall for support. Laughter echoes off the walls. A man’s voice. When I recover enough to stand up straight, I look back again, this time mentally preparing myself for what I’ll find.
It’s like a mad scientist’s torture chamber. The room is no bigger than my living room at home but it’s jam packed with machinery. It hums and clinks and grinds, releasing the scent of burned oil and gas. A grey haze rises to the top of the room but everything is hazy and blurred. Bare light bulbs glow in random places. One hangs right above my head.
But that isn’t what made me throw up.
Nova bursts into tears and runs toward the line of harnesses in the shape of chairs. A dozen of them line the far wall, each one looking like an antique electric chair with a modern twist. The woman had been messing with a computer screen since the moment we walked in the room, but now, as Nova attempts to run past her, she throws out her arm and knocks my sister to the ground. Whatever is in that leather jacket is more powerful than Nova’s natural super human strength.
My back presses against the wall behind me. I am stuck and I am defenseless and I have no idea what to do.
“Nyx,” Nova cries out, scrambling back up to her feet but not daring to go any closer.
Nyx, or a Super who looks like a starved version of my Hero friend, lops his head from one side to the other. His eyelids flutter open. Seeing Nova makes his body convulse in a desperate act of fervor but he’s stuck. Nyx, and the four other kidnapped Supers are stuck.
I squint in the haze, staying close to the wall and as unnoticeable as possible while the woman works on the computer screen. Five of the chairs against the wall contain bodies. Unlike what I thought I had seen when I first walked in the room, the bodies aren’t dead.
Nyx, George, Corey, Li, Mara. Strapped into chairs by their ankles, calves, thighs, arms and wrists. A metallic spider web of machinery clings to their chests, tubes trailing out of it leads to the main machine in the center of the room. Dozens of canisters like the one I found in the basement of the human’s drug bottling house line up on the other side of the room.
These aren’t torture devices.
They’re power taps.
With live donors.
“We have to do something,” Nova says, suddenly right in front of me. Tears pour down her eyes and her power is all frazzled and panicky. “We have to save him.”
“I know,” I whisper through clenched teeth. I can’t tell her that I have no idea what to do. I could stall. I could try to juice up and take down the woman at the computer but what if she’s more powerful than my juice? That’s not a risk I can take.
Nova’s lips press to my ear. In the faintest whisper she breathes the words, “We can take her down. I’ll pull off the jacket, you hook her.”
I glance behind my sister but the woman hasn’t heard us. She frowns at the computer screen, an older model human device with an apple image on the back of it. She types something else, looking expectantly at the screen but by the look on her face, she hasn’t gotten the results she wanted. I shake my head. “Too risky,” I whisper back.
But it’s too late. Nova runs across the room, grabbing the keyboard off the makeshift desk. She swings it like a baseball bat directly at the woman’s neck. It shatters to pieces but not before dazing the woman long enough for Nova to wrap around behind her, grabbing the jacket by the collar. She yanks it backward, simultaneously kicking the woman in the back, dropping her forward to her knees. The jacket comes off in Nova’s hands.
If I didn’t hate my sister so much I would love her.
I scale the room, grab my spare set of hooks from my boots and shove them so far into the woman’s rib cage that my fingers get covered in blood. Her eyes roll back in her head and she goes limp; a common side effect of being hooked twice. She isn’t dead, but she won’t be going anywhere for a while.
“That was ridiculously lucky,” I say to absolutely no one because Nova isn’t near me anymore. She drops to Nyx’s side, her hands hovering over him, too afraid to touch him.
“Don’t,” I say, dropping down to Nyx’s other side. “Can you hear me?” I ask him. His eyes roll slowly from Nova to me, taking a few moments to focus. His skin is pale, minus the dark circles under his chocolate, bloodshot eyes. I repeat the question. He nods. Nova bursts into tears again.
Since Nyx is alive for now, I leave him and check on all of the other harnessed Supers. They’re all able to look at me and nod in the affirmative when I ask them simple questions.
“Are you Mara Moone?”
Nod.
“Are you Li Gou?”
Nod.
“George Goodfellow?”
A nod and a tear.
“Corey?”
He doesn’t nod. Instead he grips the armrests of his chair until his knuckles turn white. His voice is hoarse and barely audible, but he speaks. I think that’s the point he’s trying to make. “I’m Corey. Thank you...for...saving us.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I haven’t saved him. I’m not sure I can save myself. But Hero Rule number three states that Heroes never give up. So I smile and fake like I know what I’m doing. Hopefully I’ll be right.
The hooked woman still lies unconscious on the ground. I’ve been checking up on her every few minutes so that I can be first on the scene when she begins to come to. After searching the room, the machines and the horrendous power-siphoning chairs, Nova and I found a knife in the woman’s fake leather jacket. We cut through the power-restraining braces that held each Super’s arms and legs to the chair.
Then I found her cell phone and came to another dead end. It’s password protected. Li offers to try hacking it, but after several minutes, he’s still unable to break through the lock screen.
“Did she zap your BEEPR?” Nyx asks.
“Yeah.” I motion toward the blackened device still strapped to his wrist. “I’m guessing she got yours too.”
“She got everyone’s,” he mutters. Nova runs her hand through his hair as she perches on the armrest of his chair. He hasn’t been able to stand up yet; none of the Supers have. The devices stuck inside their chest drain almost all of the power from them just as quickly as their body produces it.
I have no idea how to put the thing out. On a closer inspection, Nova and I discover that the metal spider web has dozens of tips that pierce into Nyx’s chest and wrap around his rib cage. He thinks the tips went at least three inches deep--at least that’s what he remembers from right before he passed out from the pain.
We quickly learn that we can’t pull the thing out. Nyx grabbed it the moment we freed his hands and it shocked his hand so bad
ly, his fingers broke out in blisters that still haven’t healed.
The other Supers ask for water and it kills me to deny their request. I still have no idea how I’ll rescue them and get back to safety, but finding a way to get them free from their harnesses are the top priority right now. George inspects the device buried in his chest. His tongue sticks out a bit and his eyebrows furrow together while he messes with each piece of metal. His movements are weak and futile. I lean down to his eye level when he calls me over. “Screw...driver?” His voice is a whisper. Nova suspects their inability to speak well is because the lack of power is hindering their healing ability. I think it’s also because they’ve been days without water.
I head back to the machine with the computer and broken keyboard and look around for a screwdriver or anything that could resemble one. The whole contraption is crudely made from recycled sheet metal and engine pieces, some of which look at least two decades old. I’m about to give up the search when a round knob catches my attention from the bottom of the machine. I pull it, and a rusted drawer slides out. Papers, random tools, a few human cell phones and a black glove roll around inside.
Suddenly I realize how much time we’ve wasted. “Take her glove,” I tell Nova and point toward the woman on the ground. I take the other glove out of the drawer and slip it onto my depowered hand. Nova does the same thing and wears the woman’s other glove. I walk up to Nyx. “Can I?” I lean closer to his ear and whisper, “I’m sorry, it’s just that you’re the Hero and I don’t want to risk hurting a regular Super.”
He nods. “Of course.”
“Be careful!” Nova chides, sliding up next to me. Her power is erratic and protective. I take a deep breath and place my gloved hand over the center of the harness. It doesn’t spark or sizzle when I touch it with the glove. In fact, I don’t feel a thing.
“Do it,” Nyx grunts. His eyes squeeze shut as he braces himself. Nova wraps her arms around his shoulders and presses her face against his neck. “It’ll be okay,” she whispers.
Overpowered (Powered Trilogy #2) Page 16