Hero

by Michael Grant

  The little girl has big powers.

  Markovic did not like making mistakes. Mistakes rattled his self-confidence. He knew, deep down in his bones—well, his figurative bones—that he should attack now and take out the Rockborn Gang. But unless they were damned fools, they’d have relocated, and he didn’t yet know where they were.

  Worst of all, Markovic had one great mystery hanging over him like his own personal sword of Damocles: he did not know where he was, him, the mind, the thinking part, the identity. Was he equally present in each of his thousands of parts? Would the gang have to kill all of his insect cells in order to kill him? Or was there some critical number beyond which he would not survive?

  “We’re not going after them?” The middle-aged black man who called himself Mirror was now Markovic’s most powerful remaining ally. But he, too, had a problem: he could only become—mirror—a mutant when in their physical presence. He’d gotten lucky being able to morph Shade Darby, but she would be unlikely to give him a second chance to catch her moving slowly enough.

  “Don’t like it here?” Markovic asked in his sinister, reedy voice.

  “I don’t like waiting for them to come back,” Mirror, whose real name was Frank Poole, said. He was standing on the top level of the balcony beside Vector. He assumed he had a right to that position, and the truth was that Markovic couldn’t afford to alienate him—he was a bit short of effective allies. Flying Fish might be of some use if she’d carry a gun, but she had refused thus far. Which left Batwing, who, as far as Markovic could tell, was capable of nothing but growing awkwardly large wings.

  My gang sucks.

  “I like it just fine,” Mirror said. “But I want more opportunities. I want to morph Lesbokitty. I want to see what that’s like.”

  “Yes, well, I have greater ambitions,” Markovic said, unable or unwilling to disguise his condescension. “Do something useful: go out in the streets and find me hostages.”

  “How am I going to do that?”

  “I don’t give a damn!” Markovic snapped. “Just get me some warm bodies. Children, if you can find any.”

  With Mirror gone, Markovic returned to his thoughts. This was just like any business expansion. He had to think it through to understand the perils and the possibilities. He owned New York City, aside from the Rockborn Gang. He could consolidate his control here and then move against nearby targets—New Jersey, Philadelphia. But that was a mere geographical proximity model. The real target, if he wanted to really take control, had to be Washington, DC.

  “Problem,” he muttered, thinking aloud. “How far does my reach extend? Can I have parts of me at long distances?” He had sent small swarms around the immediate vicinity and had maintained contact, seeing through their eyes, hearing what their antennae picked up. Had it been a degraded signal, though? He searched his memory and said, “How about you, Watchers? Any suggestions, oh silent ones?”

  But of course the Watchers offered nothing. He’d not quite gotten used to these unseen and maybe unreal observers constantly looking over his shoulder, but he had experience being watched: government regulators from Washington and Albany had been in his face for a long time. Then, too, local media every now and then got the clever idea of attacking him, and he’d heard through the grapevine that 60 Minutes was preparing a piece on Markovic’s Money Machine. He was used to being watched.

  Still, damned if they weren’t distracting. And worse, they were vaguely humiliating. He wasn’t some plaything; he was Vector. Vector, Ruler of the Big Apple.

  There will be a reckoning with you, too, Watchers. Mark my word.

  Had there been a signal loss when his parts were farther away or not? He wasn’t sure. Even a small degradation would mean that he had geographical limits, and that made the prospect of aiming for Washington problematic. Expanding too quickly was a common mistake of businesses. He knew this from personal experience. When he’d tried to expand Markovic’s Money Machine into California, state regulators had made life impossible, and he’d had to retrench, losing half a billion dollars in the process and watching his stock price drop 8 percent.

  And yet, if he didn’t take Washington, some politician or general was sure to get the bright idea to nuke New York. They’d be nowhere near such a drastic move, not yet, not while they still had the Rockborn Gang.

  And that realization was the deciding reason for his hesitation: as long as the gang was in business, the government had hope. If he destroyed the gang, he might be looking at a mushroom cloud sooner rather than later. The thing was, New York was paralyzed. He could slip out of town, make his way to Washington, and take the national government down. He could infest every congressperson, every senator, the president and his cabinet. But he would keep enough alive and well to be useful hostages.

  And then?

  The “and then” part had him baffled. He had never played this game before, and he wasn’t entirely sure what a victory would look like.

  “I’ll figure it out. I always do.”

  In the meantime, he needed transportation, and in a small irony he was actually in a train station that had no trains running. The Acela Express that ran from Boston to Washington no longer stopped in New York. It was running from Stamford, Connecticut, to Boston, and from Newark south to Washington. The middle of the route—New York—had been cut off, isolated.

  Rather like the PBA, the so-called FAYZ that had isolated the far smaller Perdido Beach. But unlike the prisoners in that dome, there was nothing stopping Vector. Newark was just over the river.

  Yes, he decided, that was the plan. Attack, but not where the enemy expected it. His numbers were vast. His power terrible. The fear he represented broke even the strongest wills.

  This expansion would not be shut down.

  From the Purple Moleskine

  My candle burns at both ends;

  It will not last the night;

  But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

  It gives a lovely light!

  That’s from Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote it in 1922 if you believe the internet. That was during the Roaring Twenties, America’s wild spring break party when everything was new: jazz and radio and planes. All the roaring stopped when the stock market fell and the Great Depression came.

  Did Edna sense that the big party was coming to an end in less than a decade? Do people have that power, some at least, to sense the temporary nature of their reality? I don’t know, and honestly it’s not something I’ve ever thought about much. Until now.

  There are lots of things I think about now that I never had to think about before. Like the fact that I sense candles going out and darkness ahead.

  Hope tortures you. And suddenly, lately, I’ve had this pathetic hope that Armo actually liked me. And the thing is, he does. Shouldn’t that make me happy? But when you feed hope, it grows and demands more—like a child, I suppose. That he wasn’t repulsed by me, that he actually likes me just makes me wish he loved me. I know how pathetic and needy I must seem. How pathetic and needy I am. It’s just that growing up, I was loved, at least a little, and then, when I revealed who I am, that love stopped. Probably it would have been better if the whole “L” thing was unknown, something I had never experienced, then I wouldn’t miss it. I think a person blind from birth doesn’t miss color like a person who goes blind later.

  I see the way Shade and Dekka both look at me. They think I don’t notice, but I do, and I know they see how pathetic—there’s that word again—I am. They want to warn me off. They want to say, “Cruz, don’t get yourself turned inside out over some guy.” I know because that’s what I would say to me, what I do say.

  Everything is coming apart. What am I supposed to do, tell myself he’s not the only guy, there are lots of fish in the sea? But time is short for all of us. I can feel it. My candle is burning at both ends, but night is coming, and sooner not later, my little candle will be snuffed out.

  I’m not strong like Dekka, or brilliant and strong like Shade and
Malik. I don’t want to be some superhero. I want to go to college, or maybe have a nice job that I don’t hate. Some day I may want to adopt kids. And I want to do all those boring, safe things with a big, sweet, impossible-to-push-around white boy with a silly name.

  Is that asking too much? Of course it is. Because the big, sweet white boy sometimes turns into a bear and I sometimes turn into Beyoncé, and the whole world is teetering on the edge of a cliff and even if we somehow survive, the world I know will never return.

  Maybe that’s why that poem that I memorized in, like, fifth grade suddenly came back to me. Because it’s not just my own candle that will not last the night.

  CHAPTER 34

  Speed, Nothing but Speed

  IT WAS LUCK. Luck and Sam’s instincts.

  “I don’t like that he hasn’t come after us,” Sam said, speaking privately to Dekka. They were in the backyard of their temporary headquarters. Sam had not wanted to say anything challenging in front of the others, anything that might shift focus to himself. This was Dekka’s command, not his, and he was happy to have it stay that way.

  But there was a nagging voice in the back of his head, and even though he was in morph, it was not the Watchers this time.

  “What are you thinking?” Dekka asked.

  Sam shrugged. “From all you say, this Markovic character is smart and experienced. So he’s not like Knightmare or even the Charmer. He’s not just some thug; he’s a smart thug.”

  Dekka nodded. “You think he’s up to something?”

  Sam nodded. “Smart guys think. He’s got to know that the government will be sending in tanks at the least, and possibly something much worse for him. He won’t just wait around. So, I ask myself: WWCD?”

  “WWCD?”

  “What would Caine do? He was a smart thug, too. He wouldn’t have waited for me to come after him again. He’d attack in some new direction, somewhere I wasn’t looking.”

  “It’s been bugging me too,” Dekka admitted. “No pun intended. He laid a trap for us, but it ended in a draw. So what’s he doing? Trying to rerun the earlier game, hoping to win this time? Shade says he hasn’t added recruits. It’s him and that fish girl and Mirror and a few hangers-on.”

  “Maybe have Shade take another look? Once more before we go in and set off explosions?”

  Dekka led the way back inside the house. Shade was talking to Cruz about something in clipped, high-speed, barely comprehensible speech.

  “Shade. How would you feel about taking another run through Grand Central?”

  “Bzzt,” Shade replied, and was gone. A door slammed.

  “Good timing,” Cruz snarked. “We were talking about emotional things earlier, and you know Shade.”

  Shade, for her part, was not happy hearing about Cruz’s encounter with Armo. Not because she wasn’t happy for Cruz, but because she still did not think it would work out in the end, and she couldn’t bear to see Cruz have her heart broken on top of everything else.

  She’d suggested to Cruz that maybe this was not the time to consider romantic entanglements.

  To which Cruz had replied, “Like you and Malik?”

  That had just forced Shade to start really thinking about what exactly she was doing with Malik. Was it pity, was that why she had gone to him? That didn’t feel quite right. No, if she was honest with herself—and she tried to be—she had needed him. She had felt afraid and isolated, and maybe that’s what it took to get her to admit she needed someone.

  Now she was relieved to be out the door and racing down the avenues toward Grand Central. The last time she’d passed through she’d seen a pair of Vector’s human minions, looking haunted and terrified, perhaps afraid of Vector, or just as likely, nowhere near getting over the shattering experience of Malik’s blast. The two of them were trying to string wire across the doorways, driving nails into marble with difficulty. And all of it pointless—with her momentum and chitin covering, she could blow right through wires.

  It was a run of only a few seconds, so Shade took a few extra seconds to play a game of Mach-1 parkour, leaping from car roof to car roof, bouncing off walls, swinging around light poles, and her favorite new pastime: going around and around in revolving doorways until the bearings smoked and the glass started to crack.

  I’m entitled to have a little fun, aren’t I?

  At the station, she found the wires had not been successfully strung, and she had no difficulty blowing in past . . . past no one. Vector had posted no guards.

  She ran at half speed, which was still twice as fast as a race car, around the main concourse, running up walls and over ticket booths. Grand Central was empty. No Vector. No flying-fish girl. No Mirror in or out of morph.

  Suspecting a trick, she blew down through the dining level, raced through kitchens, ran through the subway station; in all, she spent an interminable five minutes carefully searching the place at hyperspeed.

  Of course, it’s easy to hide bugs. Just because you don’t see them . . .

  She ran back to the main concourse and saw that there was only one living thing left behind. She dashed back to the dining level, retrieved a twelve-inch chef’s knife to cut through duct tape, returned, and leaped the dozen feet to land atop the information booth.

  The stink that came from the tortured man was stomach-churning. He was like a corpse exhumed from a grave, his body a breeding ground of diseases known and unknown. One bicep showed bare bone poking through rotting hamburger. His abdomen had been hollowed out, his stomach and intestines gone, and in their place a black pit oozing pus and blood.

  He did not know Shade was there. His face was still covered by the cushion that muffled his screams. Shade dreaded removing the cushion and seeing his face, but this was not about her delicate sensibilities. The man was writhing in hell.

  She sliced through the duct tape and tossed the cushion away.

  “Please God, please God, please God!” the man cried, his voice faint and ragged from too many such screams and cries.

  “Listen to me,” Shade said. She squatted on the slanted top of the booth, and looked at the place where his eyes should be, but his eyes were gone, consumed by voracious bacteria and viruses that had eaten so far through his left eye that Shade saw pink brain tissue.

  He should be dead. If there was any pity left in this new world, he would be dead.

  Shade leaped clear of the booth and made it to a place out of sight behind a pillar and vomited. She was back before the tortured man could have noticed her absence. Then again, he hadn’t noticed her presence.

  Shade slowed her voice till to her own ears it sounded like molasses. “I’m here to help you. Where is Vector?”

  “Kill me, please, please, please have mercy!”

  “I need you to answer me! Where is Vector?”

  Shade felt exposed and vulnerable standing still for so long, but the man was in no state to be answering questions, and she had to take her time with him.

  “Vector. Where is he?”

  “He’s everywhere! He’s inside me! Oh, God, help me!”

  Nothing was going to penetrate this brutalized mind. Nothing. With one possible exception.

  Dekka did it when she had to.

  Still, Shade hesitated. It was one thing to be in a fight, and to try to not take a life, but do so nevertheless. This wasn’t a fight.

  No, but it is a war.

  “Answer my questions and I’ll help you.”

  “Kill me, please, please, God, oh please.” The words came so very slowly to Shade, and she could hear desperation in every single syllable. Utter despair.

  “All right,” Shade said. “I’ll end it for you. But you have to tell me: Where is Vector?”

  “I-I-I—don’t lie to me. You have to swear!”

  “I swear.”

  “Washington. I heard him say Washington. Now do it! Please, I’m begging . . .”

  “How would Vector get to Washington?” Shade wondered, picturing a massive insect cloud flying south
.

  “Train. Train in Jersey. Now! Do it now!”

  “Do you want to pray or anything?” Those words coming out my mouth! “Before I . . . do it . . . would you like to say a prayer or something?”

  “Prayer?” He lolled his horrifying face toward her. “Do you think I haven’t prayed? Do you think I haven’t begged God to let me die?” His voice was raw, savage, a voice rising up from the pit.

  Shade tightened her grip on the knife, and with one swift sideways swipe, she cut through his throat till the blade scraped spine. Then she reversed direction, severing the spinal cord completely.

  The man’s head fell, bounced down the slanted roof, hit the marble floor, and rolled once, heavily. It came to rest with its face blessedly pointed away.

  I’ve just killed a man.

  She felt the enormity of her deed gathering force like a tidal wave far out at sea, knowing it was rushing toward her, building size and speed. Sooner or later it would sweep over and through her. Sooner or later there would be a reckoning. But now was not the time.

  Shade raced out of the station, thumbing her phone so fast that the software could not keep up. First to Google Maps to find out where the Newark train station was. Then a text to Dekka.

  D. Vector poss en route DC train out of Newark. OMW.

  With that out of the way, it was time for sheer, unrestricted, all-out speed.

  Forty-Second Street was a half-second’s blur. Left on Park Avenue, a left so sharp that she ran up the side of a building, feet smashing third-floor windows as she executed her turn. Right onto Thirty-Ninth Street, and the world was a blur of banks and sandwich shops and phone stores. Almost instantly she ran into the mass of cars still trying to escape the city. But the sidewalks were clear, and she tore along, leaping piles of bagged trash, running through mostly empty intersections. She was going so much faster than her Google Maps app that she missed a turn and had to skid to a stop and back up.

  Down a winding ramp with concrete walls high on both sides, beneath an overpass, and she took a sudden plunge into the nicotine-tiled Lincoln Tunnel, which was wall-to-wall cars moving at three miles an hour. The walkways that ran along the sides of the claustrophobic tunnel were too narrow for her to stay on them and keep up her speed. She had to slow so much that a man squeezing around cars on a motorcycle actually passed her.