Hero

by Michael Grant

  Not for the first time, a part of Dekka’s mind marveled at just how weird her life was.

  I’m walking down a subway tunnel with a bear creature and a flying blue girl on my way to kill a bug man.

  Sure. Because that’s my life.

  They had to stay in morph from here on in—despite the infuriating, distracting, will-sapping presence of the Watchers—in case Malik had to emit one of his blasts of pain.

  “Expensive rents and a lot of rich assholes who don’t care,” Dekka said, then realized this might seem like a diss when addressing a girl whose father, while a vicious villain, was also very rich.

  But Simone readily agreed. “Yes, rich assholes who don’t care. Like my father. Like Vector.” She nodded emphatically to herself on the word “Vector.” Like she was reminding herself not to forget it.

  The tunnel was oppressive in the extreme, with long gaps between inadequate lights. It stank of waste oil and urine. The walls were black with layers of grime. A rat ran past and Armo yelped.

  “Really, dude?” Dekka teased. “You’re like nine feet tall and weigh the same as a Prius.”

  “I do not like rats,” Armo muttered. “Especially huge rats.”

  “You thought that was a huge rat?” Simone mocked. “I’ve seen rats that rat could saddle up and ride. I heard there was a mounted cop who rode a rat for a week before he realized it wasn’t a horse.”

  “So not interested in talking about rats,” Armo said, while Dekka and Simone shared a shaky laugh.

  “The homeless camp is just ahead. See where the wall opens up?”

  “I doubt they’ll be happy to see a giant bear and a giant kitty and the world’s biggest and bluest bumblebee,” Dekka said. She raised her voice. “Hey, up there in the tunnel. Don’t be afraid, we’re coming your way, and we’re . . .” She stopped, baffled as to how exactly to explain just what they were.

  Simone said, “You guys know about the Rockborn Gang?”

  No answer from the darkness ahead. Then a child’s voice said, “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, we are Berserker Bear, Lesbokitty, and, um, Bluebee.”

  “Lesbokitty,” Dekka muttered. “You too?”

  Simone said, “You don’t like the name? I hadn’t even heard it till Cruz mentioned it. Then I assumed you were representing. I could try Lesbee but I don’t think it quite works.”

  Dekka took two more steps then stopped. “You’re gay?”

  “Yep.”

  “Huh.” Dekka was pretty sure she should say something else, but what? Lesbians rule? Yay, us? Sisterhood is powerful? #Resist?

  The first of the homeless people leaned into view, a girl of maybe twelve, standing on an inset of the concrete shelf, blinking in the beam of Dekka’s flashlight.

  “Are you really Lesbokitty?” the girl asked.

  Dekka repressed a sigh and said, “That’s me. Lesbokitty. Who else would I be? You see a lot of chicks covered in cat fur and snake-dreads down here?”

  The girl made a face that eloquently conveyed the fact that she’d seen quite a few strange things down here.

  They came to the little encampment. It was on two levels, below and above a concrete support that formed a horizontal shelf four feet up and a dozen feet deep. The residents had erected tents, some actual tents, others homemade from blankets and cardboard boxes. There were wooden crates, clothing hung from a wash line, a plastic five-gallon jug of water, mostly empty. Dekka saw three men, two women, and standing behind the girl who’d spoken, a boy of about the same age.

  “Are you guys going after the Bug Man?” the boy asked.

  “Yeah,” Dekka said. “Do you know anything about him?”

  One of the men, surprisingly well-dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and a yellow down vest, climbed down from the shelf and stood up, knees cracking audibly. He crossed his arms over his chest and said, “We don’t need trouble with that dude.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s trouble whether you want it or not,” Dekka said. She stuck out her, well, paw, and the man took it like it was a hand. “Dekka Talent. These are Armo and Simone.”

  “I’m Jason. I’m more or less in charge.”

  “Less!” came a sardonic shout from the darkness.

  “True enough,” Jason said, unbothered. He seemed, remarkably, not to be surprised or upset on seeing three monsters emerging from the darkness. “Listen, all we ask is don’t bring the trouble back here.”

  “We’ll do our best,” Simone said.

  “Yeah, okay. You, uh, hungry?” Jason jerked his head back. “We’ve got some stew on the fire.”

  “Thank you, that’s a kind offer,” Simone answered. “But we’re on a schedule.”

  They moved on, but his voice followed them. “I can tell you one thing.”

  They paused and looked back at him.

  “The bug man likes sugar.”

  “Why do you say that?” Dekka asked.

  Jason tilted his head back and forth and stuck his hands in his back pockets. “Well, I know a guy who sometimes gets into a certain bistro kitchen in the terminal after they close. This guy knows the combination to their door lock. He never takes enough to be noticed, just a little of this and a little of that. But this guy I know was in the kitchen when the bug man came in. I, my friend, this guy—”

  “We’re not the cops, Jason,” Dekka interrupted. “We don’t care if you take food.”

  “Well then, I am the guy, of course. I hid, right? Bug Man comes in and there’s an open five-pound bag of sugar on the prep table, and he, you know, the bugs, dude, they went crazy for it.”

  “Interesting. Thanks.”

  “Got any spare change?”

  “No pockets,” Dekka pointed out.

  They walked on, back into deeper, emptier darkness, and now they moved stealthily, saying nothing. Ahead the darkness became gray. Then, after a curve in the tracks they saw a square of light: the end of the tunnel. And on one side of the tunnel someone was smoking.

  “Sentry,” Simone whispered.

  Dekka pointed at herself. Of the three of them she was the one most able to move without making a sound. Even so the sentry spotted her and yelled, “Who is that? Who’s there?”

  Dekka heard the unmistakable metallic sound of a pistol being cocked, and she hesitated. If the man started blasting away down the tunnel he could easily hit one of them. Worse yet, he might hit the tank she was carrying on her back, and that would be very bad. She did not want to hurt him, certainly did not want to kill him, but with the weapons available—her powers, those of Armo and Simone, and the flamethrowers, she had limited options.

  “Come to me,” Dekka said.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Look, man, I don’t want to—”

  BAM! BAM!

  He fired two shots and Dekka reacted instantly. She raised her hands. From deep in her throat came a feline growl ascending to a whine. The man dissolved. Came apart. With a wet sound like a meat cleaver wielded by Shade at top speed, the sentry became chunks of bloody meat, half of which landed on the platform, the rest fell onto the tracks.

  “Goddammit,” Dekka snarled. “Let’s hope Vector didn’t hear the gunshots! Simone, text the group that we’re moving! I’m going in. Count to ten and follow me. That way anyone with guns will have given themselves away.”

  A man lay like so much stew meat. She had done that.

  Not the time.

  As Dekka walked ahead, the tunnel’s acoustics allowed her to overhear Simone saying, “That girl is fierce!”

  And Armo, with a laugh, answered, “Yeah, a little bit, huh?”

  CHAPTER 28

  No Battle Plan . . .

  FRANCIS AND MALIK were near the station, just a block away, lurking in the doorway, waiting for the appointed time. Each was nursing a Starbucks cup and trying to look inconspicuous—not easy on a street with no more than two pedestrians per block. The city was not dead; there were still businesses open, and even the occasional yellow cab.

  “
I was here—in Manhattan, I mean—when I was ten,” Malik said. “My mom had a business thing here. I can’t get over how empty it all seems. This whole area should be jammed with people all rushing one direction or the other. Heading to their car or their train, heading home.”

  “If I lived here, I’d sure get out,” Francis said. Immediately she wished she’d kept quiet. She hadn’t meant to engage Malik in conversation. Malik intimidated her. In the Over There she had seen the true, unmorphed Malik, and it had evoked horror and pity in equal measure. But still more intimidating to Francis was the fact that Malik was supersmart. Or at least that’s how he seemed to her, not that she’d ever had experience dealing with supersmart people. And, too, all the others in the group seemed smart to her: smart and brave and good, none of those being character traits she’d really witnessed in her life before joining the Rockborn Gang.

  Francis had nothing in common with Malik. He came from Chicago North Shore money, she came from a biker gang’s desert compound. He was educated, a college freshman, and she . . . well, she’d attended school through most of fifth grade, but for several years since then her mother had insisted she was homeschooling Francis. Of course that was total crap. She hadn’t been taught math or social studies or English. What she’d learned with the gang was that the threat of violence, including rape, was a constant, and that her mother offered only weak protection. Francis was pretty sure that was not on any official school curriculum.

  “Do you miss your mother?” Malik asked suddenly, and Francis started guiltily, as if Malik had read her mind. But of course it was a normal enough question for an older guy to ask a kid.

  Francis shook her head. “Not really. I mean, I’m sorry she died. I’m not sorry the rest of them died, but she was my mom, even though she wasn’t very good at it.”

  Malik nodded. “I miss my family. I miss my room. I miss my guitar collection. I miss going to classes.” He took a sip from his cup, then another. “I miss privacy most of all.”

  “They’re in your head? Those Watcher things?”

  “Always. Always, always, always.” He said it with a sigh and a grim smile. “I am never alone. I would give a lot to get them out of my head.”

  Francis sensed that Malik wasn’t talking to her, so much as just talking to pass the time. And as much as she was intimidated by him, she had deeper worries.

  “What do you think happens to people if they get left in the Over There?” Francis asked.

  Malik met her gaze. “I don’t know. But I do know that when I let go of your hand I was scared. Badly scared. As far as I know, you are the only way in and out of that n-dimensional space.”

  “So maybe they’d just be stuck there forever?”

  “Possibly,” Malik admitted.

  “That’s pretty harsh.”

  “It’s hard to stop evil without doing evil yourself.” His face registered wry disgust, disgust with himself. “Are you religious?”

  She frowned, searching her memory. She’d never been to church, let alone Sunday school. And the only references to the divine she’d ever heard were blasphemous curses. “I don’t think so.”

  “Me neither. It’s almost a pity, because people who believe in God, they have someone to ask forgiveness from. If I do something . . . something evil . . . who do I go to to absolve me?”

  “Yourself, I guess.”

  “Yeah. I wonder when this is all over, if it’s ever all over, I will forgive myself.” Then he seemed to shake off the gloomy mood, and in a harder, more decisive voice, said, “Today, however, Francis, our friends are counting on us. Shade and Armo and Dekka and Cruz may die unless we do our part.”

  “Just . . .”

  “What?”

  “Just don’t let me be like those people the bug man hurt. Don’t let me be like that.”

  Malik stood silent, looking at her until she reluctantly turned to look him in the eye. “Francis,” Malik said in a serious tone, “you need to explain what you mean.”

  “I mean don’t let me live like that. Promise me if that happens you’ll, you know . . .”

  “You’re asking me to kill you?” He said it softly, not as an accusation. “Jesus, Francis.”

  “Promise me or I quit,” she said with sudden vehemence. “I’m not a coward, but . . .”

  “Of course you’re not a coward,” Malik said. “You’re brave as hell.” He was silent then, but she could practically see the wheels turning in his head. At last he said, “All right, I promise.”

  They had another three minutes to wait—their cue was two minutes before everyone else—and passed the time in silence, Francis savoring the fact that Malik thought she was brave. She’d received very few compliments in her life, none in recent years unless you counted leers and vulgar suggestions from the bikers.

  At last Malik said, “Thirty seconds.”

  Francis could not speak past a lump in her throat but held out her hand. Malik took it.

  “Now,” he said.

  The world of right angles and straight lines, the world of up, down, left, right, forward, and back disappeared to be replaced by a lunatic vision of concrete and pipes under the street and gas lines spewing vapor like clouds of red gnats.

  And then, all at once, they were in a brightly lit public restroom. The floor was dark terrazzo, the walls white tile. They were between two rows of stainless-steel sinks crowned by round mirrors. Francis saw a thin, frightened-looking girl in the mirrors, and as she looked at her reflection she imagined her skin turning red and black, pustules, seething masses of creepy-crawlies . . . imagined the unspeakable pain. The despair. Imagined her own voice screaming, begging for death . . .

  Fear took over then, like a sudden fever. Her mouth was dry. She needed to go to the bathroom. She needed to vomit.

  With a thought she could be gone. She could be back out on the street, and from there, who knew how far she could go? A long, long way from here. Mountains, maybe. The Rockies she’d seen from the back of a motorcycle with her arms holding on to the fat waist of her mother’s then-lover.

  It was very clean up there in the high passes. Air so fresh and pure, freezing-cold water running in streams, ready to drink. How great were her powers? Could she actually blink out into the Over There and pop up by the side of some road in Wyoming? So very much of her wanted to try. Just an experiment—she would transport herself there and . . .

  And be alone. No family. No friends. Nowhere to go. But also, no Vector. No possibility of being trapped in a living hell of pain.

  Suddenly Francis realized they were not alone. There was a young man just emerging from a toilet stall.

  “What the holy hell?” the man yelped.

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to . . .” Malik started to apologize. Then he and Francis both took a long second look, feeling they’d seen the face somewhere before.

  The young man, a handsome boy, began to back toward the exit, but at the same time he was changing. Thick armor like a lobster’s shell rippled over a body growing swiftly larger. One arm flattened, like it had been run over by a road leveler, and then stretched and extended. The other hand was forming a heavy pincer.

  “Knightmare!” Malik gasped.

  “You can’t hurt Knightmare!” said Justin DeVeere. “I know your pain blasts don’t work against Rockborn.”

  Francis had worried that when something terrible happened she would hesitate or even run away, had in fact been thinking seriously about it just seconds before. And in the old days she might have done either, hesitate or flee. But Francis had survived Las Vegas, she’d come face-to-face with the Charmer, she’d witnessed the horror at the Triunfo, and she was no longer the little mouse she had once been, at least in her own mind.

  “Save me, Knightmare! Malik’s hurting me!” Francis cried. She rushed at Knightmare and before the startled and confused Justin DeVeere could react, she had grabbed his hand.

  Ten seconds later Francis popped back into 3-D reality.

  She and Malik we
re now alone.

  “I guess that works,” she said.

  “I guess it does.”

  Cruz was lurking under the Park Avenue overpass, just opposite one of the entrances to Grand Central, in the form of a homeless woman she’d seen. Nothing was less visible in a city than the homeless, who most people just sort of edited out of what they saw. Cruz had given careful thought to just how she would enter Grand Central. Through the door, obviously, but as whom? Looking like what sort of person? Her repertoire of guises was heavily weighted toward female pop stars, with a few policemen and even a passable version of Tom Peaks as Dragon.

  But would being morphed protect her against Vector’s insect air force? Malik couldn’t cause pain to people in morph, but these new laws of physics were either very complex or just random, and either way, Cruz was not at all certain that she would be safe.

  If she sashayed in as Beyoncé or Adele, Vector would know immediately that she was Rockborn. She needed a morph that would make Vector hesitate before attacking, and it occurred to her that she might just have an idea. She’d met the person in question, but her visual memory lacked detail, so she pulled out her phone and Googled images. Front. Close-up of face. From the side. And yes, in a crowd shot, there was the view from behind.

  Cruz checked the time. She was to enter the station five minutes before H-Hour as they were calling it. Two minutes to morph and another two minutes to figure out how to act the part. Then . . . walk.

  Her job was to move in at two minutes before H-Hour, distract Markovic while the others attacked. Distract for as long as she could. And then?

  And then Bug Man finds you inside your illusion and you scream and scream and never stop . . .

  Cruz bent over suddenly, hands on her knees, feeling as if she’d had the wind knocked out of her. She felt sick with fear. Dying was bad, but she had faced death. What Vector threatened was so much worse. Unendurable.

  Walk in. Just walk right in. Into what they all knew was a trap. Just walk in and . . . distract. Keep Vector busy. Wait for the attack. And then?

  And then run, Cruz, run.

  Run and hide. Get out of the way of the fight that would be won or lost by the others. At least that was some small comfort: she only had to be brave until the fight started. After that she could contribute very little.