Captain Marvel

by Tess Sharpe

“After I ripped out my implant, I dragged him to the emergency hatch and tossed him out. I was up in the air before his guards even noticed. I didn’t think it through—just reacted. And as soon as I was onboard, all I knew for sure was I couldn’t get us all free by myself—I had to get help. Just trying to land and take off again would have been the end of it, whether they shot me down or I crashed on my own, like I did in your river…”

  “Well, you were right.” Carol still marveled at the girl’s astonishing courage and skill to have pulled off this solo escape. “And now you have all of us. And we’re ready for them.”

  “What if we can’t get Zeke out with the rest?” Rhi asked. “He’s in prison for sure, maybe even already sentenced to death…”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Carol soothed. “You’re not going to lose anyone else, Rhi. Especially not your brother. I know what that’s like, and I won’t see it again.”

  “You lost your brother?” Rhi whispered, eyes wide.

  Carol flushed, realizing she’d overshared. Outside of her family, she didn’t often talk about Stevie. It had been a long time now.

  But despite her silence, she thought of him every day. Her big brother, the golden boy. He’d always believed in her. And what an incorrigible joker he was… You’re smarter than me by miles, Carol. But I’m definitely prettier.

  He’d left this world too soon. War had robbed her of him, teaching her a harsh lesson about loss and battle and soldiering. Sometimes, on days his absence felt especially raw, she wondered what he’d think of who—and what—she had become. How he’d feel about his little sister, spinning across multiple galaxies, altering interplanetary history, transformed into a super hero, all because of two battles—the one he’d lost, and the one she’d won.

  “It was one of my brothers,” she said. “He was a soldier. He didn’t make it home.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Carol inclined her head in thanks. “Zeke’s going to come home,” she said firmly. “He taught you to fly. He’ll be here to see that… to see his and Alestra’s baby grow up free. And after all, it’s not like they can hide him from you.”

  Something sparked in Rhi’s eyes at Carol’s last words. “No, they can’t.”

  “President Ansel will be sorry he ever messed with your people,” Carol said, and it sounded like a vow.

  When she got back to her room, she looked at the pile of documents on Damarian oppression stacked on her desk, a tightness growing in her belly at the thought of how scared Rhi’s friends must be, locked in that Maiden House, not knowing if she’d made it out. The Keepers had likely lied to them and told them she’d crashed or died already.

  Carol rifled through the stack on the desk until she pulled out what she’d been looking for—a screencap printout of a news bulletin on the construction of a new Maiden House.

  In the photo, the building looked like a prison. Slivers of windows were set high in brick as rusty brown as day-old blood— for ventilation only, not to be looked through. She traced her finger along the edge of the roof, the jagged spikes set along the gutters to… what—discourage birds from landing?

  Or girls from throwing themselves off?

  Carol’s fist clenched, and she tossed the page back on the desk, feeling even more restless. She’d shown an optimistic front for Rhi, but she knew this mission was tough—very tough. There was no quiet way to infiltrate a building like that unless she sent in only Scott as Ant-Man, and that would never work. Not that he wasn’t capable, but because the Inhuman girls had no reason to trust him. And if she and Amadeus started smashing in their own special ways, the guards would come running.

  She needed to find another angle. Another way in.

  She needed discretion. Wiles. Experience.

  A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as a thought struck her. She crossed the room, grabbing her worn canvas go-bag from the back of the closet where she had tucked it. In a hidden pocket at the very bottom, she pulled out a small rectangular comm and flipped it on. She tapped in the coordinates to Damaria, sent them, and then switched the device to record.

  “Hey, it’s me,” she said. “I could use your help. And you do owe me that favor, remember? I sent you coordinates. Let me know if you’re in the neighborhood.”

  She sent the message and tucked the comm back into its secret pocket before settling on the bed. And as she finally drifted off, she didn’t hear the muffled ping of a response.

  13

  NEVER IN a million years did Rhi think she’d end up here, sitting in the mess of President Ansel’s patched-together ship with a crew of people who had the kind of powers that would make him shake in his boots. Every time she wondered how terrified he’d be if Amadeus transformed in front of him—or if Carol sprang into flight—something grew inside her, something that felt a little like strength.

  “Did they inject these into your arms, or did they surgically insert them?” Amadeus asked, peeking out from beneath the giant magnifying glass he had pointed at Rhi’s implant.

  For the past few hours, he’d been messing with the implant she gave him. They were on the third day of their journey—just one more day, then it’s you against Ansel, her mind whispered— and Amadeus had been making progress, but she could tell he wasn’t satisfied. After just a few days spent with the genius, she was starting to understand that he liked things done quickly and perfectly—the first time. And as smart as he was, he usually succeeded at that. But she didn’t.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “That first year, they sedated us a lot. One day, the second or third week we were in the Maiden House, when we woke up, everyone’s arms were bandaged.”

  “Do the implants hurt when you try to use your powers? Or keep you from using them?”

  “Both.”

  He poked it with a pair of long tweezers. The implant looked like a bullet, something shiny and unnaturally destructive. Ready to rip flesh and mind apart.

  “So how do they turn them off when they want to use your powers?”

  “The Keepers have implants, too,” Rhi explained. “You must be side by side, like this…” She got up and circled around the table to stand next to him. Grasping his right arm with her left hand, she clasped his hand, the inside of their arms in line with each other. “And then the Keeper guides the girl. Physically and mentally. His implant gives him complete control. He can use her power even if she’s resisting it, as long as he’s touching her.”

  Amadeus stared down. “So they’re touch-activated.”

  “I guess,” Rhi said, letting go of his arm. “But I don’t know how they work.”

  “Lucky for you, that’s my job,” he said cheerfully, pressing the tip of his tweezers into the end of the implant. It started blinking red. “Huh, that’s new.”

  “I wish I could help more.”

  “You can,” he said. “I want to know more about your friends and what they can do. We’ve got Alestra, right? The mama-to-be.”

  “The Damarian generals want her,” Rhi said. “Because her voice… she can make your head explode with a few notes. Or make you fall asleep with her lullabies. Or convince you to walk into a lake and drown yourself with a ballad.”

  Amadeus pondered the last sentence and shook his head. “People get cool powers like that, and here I am, can’t even carry a tune,” he joked, twisting the implant’s blinking lower panel and pulling it off, exposing the wires and microchip inside. “Was this attached to any wires when you pulled it out?”

  She shook her head.

  “And how deep was it in your arm?”

  She blinked, and for a moment, she was back in Ansel’s ship office, frantically rifling through his desk, looking for something sharp to get the implant out. Hurry, hurry, before he wakes, before they realize.

  She’d dug it out of her arm with his letter opener, then stood looking down at his prone body, the crimson dripping off her arm and staining his white shirt. She wanted nothing more than to sink that dull, bloody blade into hi
s back. She hoped that when he woke and saw the stain, he would understand what she was willing to do to beat him.

  “It was deep, at least a half-inch,” she said, realizing that Amadeus was still looking at her expectantly.

  “Wonder why they didn’t put it closer to the brain,” he murmured to himself, poking at the device. “So who else is there, friend-wise?”

  “Mazz is the youngest. She’s only thirteen.”

  And Rhi didn’t know what to do about that. Didn’t know how to begin to give Mazz back the childhood that was stolen from her.

  “Mazz is… she’s very shy. Her parents refused to hand her over to the Keepers, just like mine.” And they were murdered, just like Rhi’s. But she couldn’t bring herself to say it. “So she doesn’t have anyone but us now. We tried our best, but it’s different for her, because she was so young. Most of us were old enough to remember Attilan and a life where we weren’t in the Maiden House. But all Mazz has is our stories.”

  “Stories are powerful,” Amadeus said. “That’s why they tried to keep you from reading them.”

  She smiled, a brief, crooked glimpse. “That’s true.”

  “Okay, so—Alestra, the musical one. Mazz, who’s the shy one and the baby. Who else?”

  “There… were Vik and Vale. They were twins, the oldest of all of us. They… they were the first ones to leave the Maiden House. It was just a year after we arrived. The Keepers thought they could control them, that the implants would be enough. But they underestimated the twins. Damarian women don’t have fighting skills, but the twins did. They didn’t need their powers to murder their Keepers—they needed only their bare hands.”

  The Council had killed them. Made an example of them. And when Amadeus asked, she told him so. And then, “They made us watch.” She saw him wince and close his eyes. There was something about Amadeus that made her feel relaxed in a way she’d never experienced from another man except her brother. It was like they could be friends. He listened, he cared, and he showed it. She knew he would understand her mourning for her parents who she never got to grow up with and the girls who became family out of that loss.

  “Fighting to protect yourself and others? That’s a noble end,” he said, the look on his face telling her he knew it wasn’t much to offer.

  “I know,” she said. “But it doesn’t make it less hard.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “My parents…” he stopped. And for the first time since they’d started talking, his hands stilled. “They were murdered, too. The person who killed them… he did it to hurt me. It took me a long time to let go of the guilt.”

  “You blamed yourself.”

  He nodded.

  “I did, too.”

  They sat there, two people connected by the kind of tragedy no one should experience. For a moment they just sat, each breathing, each remembering, because the ones they’d lost could not. And then he smiled, a self-conscious twitch that made her smile in return, and went to work again, as Rhi tucked her feet up on the stool and continued.

  “And there’s Tynise and Tarin. They’re sisters. Tarin is…” she paused. “Tarin hasn’t done well in captivity,” she said finally.

  Kept from nature for so long, Tarin had suffered, her power and its connection to all growing things warping in strange ways from the prolonged confinement. Their exercise yard was gravel, and there were no trees, no plants, nothing green surrounding the Maiden House. They had chosen the most remote outpost, far from their own girls and their own cities, to keep the Inhuman girls.

  A year into their imprisonment, Tarin had a nightmare. The earth rumbled and shook, and when they woke the next morning, a two-hundred-foot oak tree towered over them in the middle of the exercise yard. They had reprogrammed her implant after that and felled the tree. But new growth sprang from the mutilated stump, like a warning that they could not keep Tarin down for long.

  “I don’t think anyone would do well there,” Amadeus said. “So those are the four girls at the Maiden House?”

  She nodded. “Jella’s next,” Rhi said, determined to finish. “She’s been with a Keeper for almost two years now. Everyone wanted her—she can’t go exactly invisible, but she can blend in anywhere, against any surface, so it’s just as good, and so can anyone touching her. And there’s nothing the Keepers love more than spying on each other. I don’t know who the security secretary bribed to get her, but he got her. He’s probably using her to spy on his enemies nonstop.”

  “But at least you know that at the end of the day, she’s got to be somewhere near him, right?” Amadeus asked. “Since her implant can unlock only in the proximity of her Keeper. So once we get there, we’ll be able to track her down.”

  She touched the chain around her neck that carried each girl’s ID tag. “Yes, I can find her.”

  “And then there’s Umbra, the… girlfriend,” Amadeus shot her a smile, and after a brief hesitation she returned it, secretly thrilled to hear it named, even as a joke.

  “It’ll be hard to get to her,” Rhi said, her mood darkening. “President Ansel won’t want to give her up.”

  “Well, too bad for him,” said a voice behind her.

  Rhi turned to find Carol standing in the doorway. “How’s the work on the implant going?” Carol asked.

  “Good,” Amadeus replied. “I should be able to pull all the data from the microchips before dinner, and then I can untangle the code and figure out how they really work. They’ve got to have some sort of failsafe to make them turn off. I figure out what that is, and we won’t have to perform a bunch of mini-surgeries on people while we’re on the run.”

  “Thinking ahead—I like it,” Carol smiled. “Why don’t you two come out on deck? We’ve been breaking down the operation, and I want your thoughts.”

  Scott and Mantis were sitting in front of a whiteboard with writing all over it in bright blue marker. Rhi caught sight of her friends’ names, and a sketch of the layout of the Maiden House’s third floor where they slept, with red Xs marking the security posts she’d painstakingly memorized through the years.

  “The plan is simple,” Carol said, once she and Amadeus were seated. “Covert and quick is the name of the game. We land at night, shielded so we don’t show up on their sensors, half a mile outside the Maiden House. We approach on foot. Ant-Man will go in first, to take out the cameras and deactivate the locks. Then Mantis, Rhi, and I are on. We’ll get the girls out, and by the time anybody realizes something’s up, we’ll already be back on board the ship.”

  It sounded simple, but Rhi knew it wouldn’t be. “Miss Egrit sleeps on the same floor as us,” she said. “She’ll hear.”

  “Leave Miss Egrit to me,” Mantis said, and the grim note in her voice gave Rhi a frisson of terrifying anticipation. The empath had another side that she hadn’t imagined… and didn’t want to.

  If there was one person Rhi hated almost as much as Ansel, it was Miss Egrit. The idea of her actually receiving some sort of justice…

  It was dizzying, she wanted it so much.

  “Where do you want me?” Amadeus asked.

  “Outside, waiting to smash if need be,” Carol said. “If something goes wrong… we’re going to need the big guy.”

  “It’s not going to go wrong,” Mantis said immediately, shooting Rhi a gentle smile.

  “It’s a solid plan,” Scott added.

  “Can you really shrink so small they won’t notice you?” she asked.

  He grinned. “I think I’ll pull my suit out for some after-dinner pranks to show you. Trust me, they won’t notice a thing. I’ll get you all inside. Prison is kind of one of my things.”

  Prison. To have the Maiden House acknowledged as one made her stomach lurch in a sick sort of gratitude. Miss Egrit had made them call it home. The Keepers told them it was a palace. A roof over her head, food in her mouth, and the burden of her affliction lifted from her shoulders—what more could a girl ask for?

  Freedom. Equality. Truth. Love. Hope. Power.<
br />
  “What about Umbra and Jella? And Zeke?” Rhi asked. “If we get everyone at the Maiden House out, they’ll be looking all over for us. Security around them will tighten. Whatever prison they’re holding Zeke at will be in lockdown.”

  “You’re right,” Carol said. “Once we take the first four girls, we can’t avoid tipping off the Keepers that we’re there. Same thing if we go after Jella and Umbra first. Or Zeke. Every first move we make lets them know we’re here. It’s unavoidable.

  “We’ll take it one step at a time,” Carol said, and her expression was so sure, so soothing, that Rhi could feel her worries slipping into confidence. “Split up as soon as we have their locations and make a coordinated attack to grab them, so there’s no way the Keepers can warn each other.” She looked over her shoulder. “What do you think, Rhi?”

  Her mouth dry, she looked at the board—at the scribbles and question marks, her friends’ names, the floor plan of the prison she grew up in—and then she looked at the heroes standing in front of it.

  There were so many answers she could give. So much worry and so much hope she was feeling. So many people she was trusting.

  But instead, she said the thing she wanted most to be true:

  “I think we’re going to win.”

  14

  PROXIMITY ALERT! Attention! Proximity alert!

  Carol’s eyes snapped open. She was up and out of her bunk and hurrying down the corridor in less than a second. The ship was still dark, the lights flickering in the hall as she raced to the deck.

  And there it was, in the distance. She passed the control panels and headed right to the window, where she saw the planet Damaria, shrouded in red mist and circled by two suns.

  “A red sky,” said Mantis’s voice behind her. “Isn’t that some sort of sailor’s bad omen?”

  “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning,” Carol recited. “Guess we’re the warning.”

  “The suns are a lot closer to the planet than our sun,” Amadeus said, shuffling onto the deck. “I wonder if the gas around the planet is a protective measure against the radiation or something.”