The vids whirled.
“Along with extrahumans,” she said, “many humans have been hurt by Doctor Hypnotic. We’ve been told that these victims of the so-called zombie plague are starting to wake up from their trances. Confused, to be certain, but healthy.”
She was interrupted by massive applause, and was only just able to hear Meteorite say, “Man, Lee is pissed you scooped him on that. Heh.”
Jet smiled broadly. “The doctors and nurses and paramedics who have been working nonstop to help these victims are also heroes, and we are grateful to them all.”
More cheers, well deserved.
Okay, she thought. This is it. “Mr. Mayor, you introduced me as the Hero of New Chicago. But that title truly belongs to everyone who’s been fighting to keep the people of this amazing city safe, both human and extrahuman. And this is why we are no longer a Squadron of extrahuman soldiers, working with a corporation to be textbook heroes.”
Utter silence.
“We are human and extrahuman,” she said, and both Iridium and Commissioner Wagner stepped forward on cue. “The police and the Squadron from this moment on will work together as the Protectors of New Chicago, and of the United and Canadian States of America.”
Now the crowd was ecstatic, the roars of approval deafening.
“We will no longer be bound to corporate sponsorships,” she shouted over their cheers. “We stand before you today, human and extrahuman Protectors, to promise you all that your safety, our citizens’ safety, will be first and foremost of our priorities. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you, New Chicago.”
Thunderous applause.
The mayor, looking shell-shocked, shook Jet’s hand again. Based on the crowd, it would be a while before he came down on extrahumans again. Can’t go on the record being opposed to something the constituents love—not with elections right around the corner.
“This,” Iri said, waving, “is really freaking cool.”
And it was.
Jet, smiling, also waved—and way in the back, on the tail end of the crowd, she thought she saw a tall boy, his Earth-power physique all too clear, his light hair shining as brightly as his smile.
Samson smiled, his eyes full of love and pride.
Tears stung her eyes, but her optiframes masked them. She blew a kiss to the ghost of her love. That night, the media would tear itself into a frenzy over who the intended recipient of that kiss was.
Jet, doomed to go insane, allowed herself to put aside her fear of the Dark and simply enjoy the moment.
At least, for a little while.
And in the End …
Julie McFarlane opens her eyes for the first time since falling victim to the zombie plague, and Garth is right by her side. His smile is blinding, and tears of relief slide down beneath his sunglasses.
When they kiss, she accidentally blinks off the hospital room’s overhead lights. Neither Garth nor Julie notices.
EPILOGUE
ONE MONTH LATER
This time, when Jet and Iri visited Hornblower in rehab, he didn’t toss them out right away. He let them stay long enough to tell him how the move to the new building was progressing before he threatened to blow them out the window.
“Well,” Iri said, “that could have been worse. At least he didn’t throw anything this time.”
Jet was depressed, so Iridium insisted on Mexican.
The quesadillas were sinfully good. Jet took another bite and sighed blissfully as her taste buds cheered.
“My goodness, I think Jettikins just had a minor orgasm.”
Jet laughed, and quesadilla nearly ran down her chin. “I don’t know how I’m going to survive having the Plaza across the street from the best Mexican restaurant in the city.”
“In the country,” Iri insisted. “Yeah. We’ll get fat as whales. Good thing we’ve also got the best training wing since the Academy.”
Jet nodded, swallowed. “Can you believe the size of the pool?”
“Pool, nothing. Can you believe the size of the hot tub?” Iridium punctuated that with a bite of taco.
“Almost too good to be true.”
The two shared a sober look, then tucked into their meal.
Corp-Co’s donating Protector Plaza to them wasn’t the weirdest thing that had happened since Iridium and Taser had taken down Ops almost three months ago and had inadvertently started an extrahuman revolution. But it was weird enough that Jet, Iri, Frostbite, Taser, and Commissioner Wagner—the unofficial executive branch of the Protectors—had hired a lawyer to review the contract.
Everything came back clean: Corp-Co, as a sign of goodwill (at least, publicly), had donated 1600 Obama Avenue to the Protectors, formerly the Squadron, which Corp-Co officially recognized as an independent entity, etc. etc. And Corp didn’t get anything in return, except for a huge tax write-off.
The extrahumans in the Protectors knew this was only part of Corp’s paying them for their ongoing silence about Corp’s involvement in the Icarus Project. None of them said anything about it to Wagner.
The timing of the new headquarters worked out well. The Protectors had needed a place to hang their hats (or capes), and a good chunk of former Squadron soldiers had come to their senses over the past few weeks—nowhere close to the original four-hundred-plus active Squadron members, granted, but enough so that onetime baseball bars were nowhere near large enough to accommodate everyone.
And more than that, they had all the Academy students and staff as well. The day after the first Protectors press conference in front of City Hall, Wagner had gotten a call from Celestina. She and Stretch, another proctor from the Academy, had ushered the students and staff out of the building when all the chaos had ensued and had taken them to Northern Illinois University as part of an “unexpected field trip.” When everything got sewered in New Chicago, the two proctors led the Academy refugees to Lake Wissota State Park, Wisconsin. The students and staff had been roughing it outdoors while Celestina and Stretch kept tabs on the extrahuman situation. The press conference had convinced Celestina and Stretch that it was finally safe for them to bring the students back to New Chicago.
That was another four-hundred-plus people. Including all the Runners and the extrahumans who’d come back to the heroing side of things, that put them just over six hundred people. Corp’s gift had been too good to pass up.
So they’d cautiously accepted the new headquarters, which they had taken to calling Protector Plaza. Cheesy, yes. But it wasn’t like there was a huge P at the top of the building.
Before they signed on the dotted line, they had an engineer come to scour the place and make sure there were no surprises. That scan, too, came back clean. They charged the review to Corp-Co for good measure.
The lawyer who’d overseen everything, a young woman named Jeri Thomas, offered her services as legal counsel to the Protectors. Her great-grandmother’s brother had been Squadron, and her dad was a cop. The Protectors council agreed that it couldn’t hurt to have their own Legal Department.
And they needed to start classes for the students.
And they had to create duty rosters.
And then there was Meteorite pushing for PR control.
And there was Squadron: India, still involved, even though the Protectors’ ranks had filled up. Corp still wanted its spies in place, and the Protectors council wanted their enemy where they could see them. Besides, Iridium was dating Deathdealer.
And Martin Moore was still out there, somewhere, perhaps with more of that serum. The mutated normals were all doing well at ISP, according to Wagner, but they needed to be cured, not contained. If only the Innovator wasn’t still rabid …
Jet sighed. The logistics of actually launching the Protectors was enough to make her head spin. Life had been simpler when she’d been Corp’s puppet and just went out fighting crime and doing photo ops. Maybe Meteorite would be the chief operating officer and oversee all of the day-to-day stuff …
“You’ve got that look,” Iri sa
id.
Jet blinked, looked up at the dark-haired woman. “What look?”
“The business look. Christo, Joannie, let yourself be on break for a day. Hell, an hour.”
“There’s just so much to do …”
“It’ll keep,” Iridium said. “For once, let yourself come first.”
“But—”
“I promise, the city will still need saving, even after you’ve had time off. Waitress, please bring this woman a desperately needed margarita.”
“It’s not even noon,” Jet said, abashed.
Iri winked. “Live a little, Joannie.”
So Jet drank the margarita.
“Where do you want these?”
Jet glanced up from her wristlet. The Runner floor captain was holding a carton labeled BOOKS. Jet motioned to the back corner of her room, near her bed. “The back corner, please. Thanks, Lowell.” She sounded distracted, even to her own ears. But then, she had reason.
Lowell left, and she went back to her black wristlet, a holdover from Academy days. It still served as portable data storage and was the tool of choice when someone wanted to send an untraceable instant message—one way only.
Police Commissioner Wagner had just sent such a message.
HG OUT. QT.
She stared long and hard at the message. Doctor Hypnotic had gotten away, and Wagner was keeping it out of the press.
How had he done it? Had one of the guards at Blackbird slipped and forgotten to medicate him one morning? Had it been an inside job?
She remembered how, on the day she and the others had defeated Hypnotic, she had thought there were supposed to be thirteen prisoners, not twelve.
Had Hypnotic even made it into Blackbird in the first place?
Jet rubbed her eyes. The how didn’t matter. Doctor Hypnotic had escaped.
And part of her—the part that listened to the Shadow and basked in the dark—was glad. Before she could fret about her reaction, her comlink chimed softly in her ear. “Excuse me, Ms. Jet?”
She sighed. For the millionth time, she told the Ops trainee: “Please, Tara. Just Jet.”
“Sorry, ma’am. Um, Ms. Iridium says you need to come to Reception. Um, she says, right now. She actually said a curse word in there, too, but I’d rather not repeat that.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Um. Yes?”
There was a vote of confidence. “On my way.”
She got down to Reception, expecting to see Iri and maybe a few others. She hadn’t expected to see roughly fifty people crammed into the waiting area.
“Jet,” Iridium said, grinning hugely, “wait until you hear this. Go ahead, Mr. McFarlane.”
A tall redhead in sunglasses stepped forward, offering his hand. Jet shook it cautiously.
“My name is Garth McFarlane,” he said, the kiss of a brogue in his voice, “and I’m an extrahuman.”
Jet blinked. “Oh?”
“We all are,” he said, motioning to the crowd of people in Reception. “We call ourselves the Latent Network, because our abilities were always small enough to stay off Corp’s radar.”
“Ah,” she said, glancing at Iridium, who was still grinning like a child locked in a candy shop.
“When the Squadron went berserk, we knew we couldn’t stay hidden. We couldn’t help you with Hypnotic, but a group of us did help with those beasties that had been rampaging along Third Street.”
“Really?”
“We took down twenty-six of them,” he said proudly. “Some rabids too. And that’s when we decided that we were joining you.”
“You … what?”
“Voted on it, and everything. It was unanimous.”
“Um. Mr. McFarlane …”
“We know we’ll need training,” he said. “Most of us don’t know the first thing about fighting. And our powers are small. But we’re extrahumans, and we want to help. We’re joining the Protectors. Only sixty-two of us were able to get to New Chicago so far, but we’re all excited about this.”
Only sixty-two? “How many of there are you?”
“One thousand, five hundred and twenty-six.”
Jet’s mouth opened, then closed with a snap.
Next to her, Iridium grinned. “Bet you didn’t see this one coming.”
“Not in a million years,” Jet said, a smile blooming on her face. “I think we need bigger headquarters.”
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JACKIE KESSLER (Jet, Angelica, Night, Garth) learned everything she needed to know about Good versus Evil from reading comic books. When not writing about superheroes and the villains who beat the snot out of them, she likes to write about demons, angels, and the hapless humans caught between them. In addition, she has a pseudosecret identity as a novelist for teens. For more about Jackie, visit her website: www.jackiekessler.com.
CAITLIN KITTREDGE (Iridium, Vixen, Luster/Arclight) is a lifelong lover of superheroes. Growing up homeschooled in a rural area, her best friends were Batman, Spider-Man, and Wolverine. In addition to collaborating on the Icarus Project, she writes two bestselling urban fantasy series, the Nocturne City and Black London novels, as well as steampunk stories for young adults. She lives in Massachusetts with two cats, her Cobra Commander action figures, and more comic books than she can count. For more about Caitlin, visit her website: www.caitlinkittredge.com.
Shades of Gray is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Spectra Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2010 by Jacqueline H. Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spectra, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kessler, Jackie (Jackie H.)
Shades of gray / Jackie Kessler, Caitlin Kittredge.
p. cm. — (Icarus Project ; bk. 2)
eISBN: 978-0-345-52171-2
1. Superheroes—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction.
I. Kittredge, Caitlin. II. Title.
PS3611.E845S53 2009
813′.6—dc22
2010012662
www.ballantinebooks.com
v3.0
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