Alice’s face was calm, though still infused with violet light. I couldn’t believe the serenity there, if she really meant what she’d just said.
“You know where they are?” I asked her.
“I think,” she said. “My tracking spell returned, and it brought back a result.
“And …” Derek prodded her. “Where are they?”
“At The Well,” she replied. “They’re at The Well.”
The Well was the Light Brigade’s – for lack of a better word – secret headquarters, an underground bunker built in the 50’s as a supply depot for a series of defensive tunnels running through the mountain, sort of Nova City’s answer to the Maginot line. Those tunnels, however, had never been built, and the well had been decommissioned. Derek had helped to engineer its “loss” to the military and subsequent gift to the Light Brigade.
“That’s impossible,” Derek said. “I checked The Well, no one was there.”
“Did you actually go inside and look with your eyes?” She said. I was beginning to understand what she was getting at.
“You think … what? Someone is there, sending a false feed through the monitors?” Derek challenged her.
“No … yes. I don’t know. I only know what my working has told me. Jenn is at The Well. Or, at least she was there a few minutes ago when this was bounced back.
“What did you do, like, ping her or something?” The look on her face told me that was exactly what she’d done, or the magical equivilant thereof. Also, I was an idiot.
“That means I need to get over there,” Derek said.
“We’re coming too,” said Mchael. He had one hand on Alice’s shoulder, which was making me uncomfortable for some reason I didn’t understand. I mean, I knew what “partner” meant.
“No, you three are going back to your homes. Wes, go take care of Laura and the baby. I’ll be in touch with all of you when I know something.”
I had to admit, the thought of a hot shower and a change of clothes, and sleep, was really appealing. Even if I would be sleeping on Dan and Laura’s couch. But I was still in agreement with Alice when she said, “There’s no way we’re going to sit around and wait for a phone call. We’re going with you. Michael and I will ride Pegasus if you won’t take us.”
“And you’ll get in, how? You have the access code?”
“Of course I have the access code. I’m also allowed in by ret-scan.”
“You … that’s a major breach of the security protocol.”
“I’m Mysteria’s apprentice.”
It actually kind of hurt my feelings. I didn’t have anything like that kind of access. Maybe I wasn’t the mascot I thought I was.
Alice turned to Michael and gave him a curt little victory nod, which he returned with a worried grimace that was probably an attempt at a congratulatory smile.
“You people are officially up my ass, you know that?”
“I had a feeling,” Alice said.
Derek spoke into his lapel again, and told us to step to the curb. The gateway-monster’s legs were almost through dissolving into a pulpy black much that smelled like smoldering, fleshy, rot.
I felt the wind pushing down on me from above and then four lights descended from the sky, blinding me for a second or two.
Derek ushered us into the helicopter when it landed. Michael hung back and said he’d follow us on Peg. Alice offered to go with him, but he said it would be easier on the horse to carry fewer people. I didn’t care what happened as long as I didn’t have to get on it.
Derek faced Alice and me, who were strapped into the back next to a rifle-wielding XDF agent. Derek didn’t look at either of us, but leaned back to talk to the pilot of our craft.
I felt a little thrilling lurch in my stomach and all around us, through the open door and windows, darkness slid back to reveal thousands of scattered blobs of light below.
The city smoldered and smoked, and was cut with wide swaths of darkness. Some of this was along a zigzag path cut by the monster, who’d caused power outages wherever he’d knocked over buildings and smashed down power lines. The center of town still glowed orange and red and black in the place where the hospital had been. I wondered how many zombie thralls has risen and been brainsplattered this evening. God, what a night.
I wanted to talk about it with Dan. Where was he? What condition would he have had to be in to let this happen? He had to be alive, he just had to. I could deal with all of this as long as he was alive. That’s all I needed. Not even well, just alive. I’d help take care of Laura and Chloe. I didn’t care if he couldn’t walk, or go hiking with me, or hero around, or help me move when I got kicked out of my apartment. I just needed him to be around for me to talk to. Or at least to communicate through some eyelid-pop code that like diving butterfly guy.
He had to be alive. Unhurt would be great, but all I was asking for was alive.
Beside me, Alice wasn’t looking outside. She was sitting with her head bowed, chanting something softly to herself. At first I though she was praying, afraid of flying or something, but it was too rhythmic for that.
A bright white spot filled the space outside. Michael waved to us from his place atop Pegasus. Stupid horse. I rubbed at my hand when I looked at him. It’s possible I am a big baby when it comes to pain. Maybe. I wished I had some aspirin.
Soon, the lights outside faded and the dark mountains rose around us. We could have used the secret tunnel that ran from the end of East End park, but I guess this was a more direct route.
The copter landed on top of a flat space I would not have been able to see if I had not been looking for it. We set down with a gentle thud.
Derek nodded at me, and then leapt down, onto the packed earth. I unstrapped my harness and followed him. There was no obvious indication in the space around us that we were near an entrance to any kind of structure, let alone a super-hero HQ. I myself had only been through this way once, when I was flown here by Dan, and that time I’d been too out-of-it to pay much attention to where I was going.
Derek used a little flashlight to find the black steel panel set into a recessed groove cut into one of the boulders. The helicopter powered down as Michael soothed Pegasus.
The panel had a series of black-light glowing squares, five of them, that Derek placed his fingers upon. The stone in front of us gave way and another black panel, this one stamped with the TrenTech Security logo, emerged in front of us.
TrenTech. That’s a connection I hadn’t thought about in a while. I wondered how long it had been since Derek had spoken to his own brother.
Without any other work on our part, the door opened. It was, remarkably, large enough to allow Pegasus entry, which thrilled me, of course, and the five of us, plus the XDF rifleman, entered the elevator.
And we all fit, remarkably. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. The entire Light Brigade, plus Pegasus, with all their gear, had to take up more space than we did.
We all fell to silence in the elevator. What was there to say, really? I’m not even sure what we were expecting to find. If the Light Brigade were just hanging out at the Well – well, why had they let the city burn? Were some of them – maybe even just Mysteria, since she could have teleported herself anywhere – lying here, wounded? What were we going to do for them?
The elevator doors opened on the main lobby. It wasn’t empty.
Two women sat on the concrete floor outside the blue steel doors that led to the main chamber. One of them was older, Hispanic, with bushy steel-grey hair and a blowsy, white-flowered shirt. The other was, well, I could only describe her as the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
She had long dark hair, with a little curl to it, dusky skin and eyes that glowed like polished onyx. She wore a little black dress beneath a man’s open white oxford that was several sizes too big for her and hung on her like an overcoat. It did nothing to hide her figure.
“Juanita? Mari?” Derek said. “When I couldn’t get a hold of you, I had no idea …”
“Our building was trashed,” the older one said. “My son said to come here if something like that ever happened … so we did.”
“He said to come here?” Derek’s hand wiped sweat from his brow, then fell to his side. “I suppose he gave you the code too.”
“He gave us both of them,” the younger woman said. “But this one isn’t working.”
“It’s not working. Maybe you have the wrong one.”
I had never met these two before, and from the looks on their faces, neither had Alice or Michael. But from the way Derek was talking to them, they had to be Scorpyon’s family.
Which meant this girl must be his sister. We’d have a lot to talk about, including, apparently, the fact that I was already completely in love with her.
“Alice, Wes, Michael,” Derek said, an acquiescent tone in his voice. “Meet Juanita Cisneros and Marisol Reyes. Juanita is Scorpyon’s mother. Mari is his fiancée.”
Crap. Why hadn’t I checked the ring finger before getting all excited? “Nice to meet you,” I said out loud, though the phrase seemed weirdly formal, under the circumstances.
Derek went to a small doorside panel and punched in an eleven digit code.
That’s when the alarms went off.
Red lights flashed all around us in the concrete antechamber, throwing crimson glare-spots on the walls and staining everyone’s skin a weird orange color. Pegasus reared, and Michael pushed Alice up against the wall to keep her from being trampled. But no one thought about me, and I got knocked off my feet to land on my face against the hard floor. I looked back up at the horse, who did not seem the least apologetic.
Derek frantically coded numbers into the keypad, but nothing had an effect. If anything, the alarm noises were getting louder, the lights more severe.
“Derek, what are you doing?!” Alice shouted at him.
“Here, you enter the code, then. Maybe you have a different one.” Derek said, and stepped to the side to make way for her.
Alice approached him, shrugged, and admitted, “I don’t actually know the code. I just said that so you’d bring us with you.”
“That’s what I thought.” He returned his attention to the keypad again.
I got to my feet with the help of Marisol, who was the only one who seemed to care that I was still on the floor. “Will someone shut off the noise?!” I shouted at Derek. It was all I could do not to scream as the sound grew louder until it was all I could hear; the volume caused physical pain.
Derek pulled the ret-scanner to his eyes –the alarm shut off. But before I could even start to enjoy the new silence, there was a whirring sound. I looked up to see that in the ceiling a panel had opened, and now descended some weird machine, a bulbous rod with five tendrilous arms, each with four-fingered grips flexing out from the ends.
The hell? I knew TrenTech had developed the security system for this place, but this? Was ridiculous.
One arm shot out to grab Derek from behind. He reached for his sidearm before it yanked him backward and up at the wall near the ceiling, and actually got off a shot at the central control, but all the bullet did was ricochet around the chamber, chipping concrete and sending the rest of us to the ground. It stopped after hitting Pegasus in the wing.
The horse whinnied angrily, and Michael yelled as the hands gripped him and pinned him to the wall opposite Derek. Alice was the next to be taken, then Juanita. Then the arms came for me. I’d seen enough to know to get up and run away from the last remaining arm, and it hit the concrete wall with a brutal clank before attacking me again. I kept moving in a zig-zag pattern, hoping the same rule that applied to outrunning a crocodile would work here. Amazingly enough, it seemed to. But I knew I couldn’t keep outrunning it for long. For one, it was probably smarter than I was. And for another, it wouldn’t get tired. I could, I hoped, keep it away from Marisol long enough for one of us to do something. She was running for the elevator.
Why couldn’t it have gone after stupid Pegasus?
Finally, as I knew I had to eventually, I tripped. The thing grabbed me by the leg and yanked me up, so that my foot was pressed against the ceiling. As it did, I instinctively reached for my watch and banged the heel of my palm against its surface, feeling the familiar click that before had done my no good. I don’t know what I was thinking. In fact, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t thinking anything at all.
The arm stopped suddenly, leaving me suspended there. Something whirred again in the mechanical base in the center of the ceiling, and the defensive arm lowered me gently to the ground. I landed on my face again, but still.
I rolled onto my side to see that everyone else was being lowered down too. They all looked just as confused as I was.
“What did you do?” Derek asked me.
“I … I don’t … all I did was push on the watch. But it’s dead. It shouldn’t have done anything.”
“It obviously sent out some sort of signal,” Derek said. “The system must be programmed to respond to your brother’s tech.”
“Whatever works,” Michael said, and he clapped me on the back. “I’d like to get a look at that watch later.”
“O … K,” I replied. This was the first time that evening that Michael had really given me any sort of acknowledgement.
Derek was already at the door, which had begun to slide open for us. The speed of its movement accelerated as I approached. This was weird. I wasn’t used to my presence actually being helpful. I was the official screw-up, remember? Hadn’t this system gotten the memo?
“My question for you, Miss Nakamura,” Derek grumbled. “Is if Mysteria is actually here, like you said she was, why didn’t she turn off the system? Why was it on in the first place?”
“I only know what my working told me,” Alice repeated.
We entered through the now-open door. Most of us were still breathing heavily, and I think all of us were waiting for some new defensive measure to grab us, so we were happy to let Derek be the first one through. He waved his hand as he entered, and the lights came on.
As did the wall monitors. They popped to life, one of them an aerial view of the city which took up an entire immense wall. It showed a newsfeed on the bottom, aggregated from different sources, and the city itself was a live view, showing the fires and dark patches. If they were here, you couldn’t say they’d ignored us for lack of knowledge. If they weren’t, I guess our next step was to helicopter up to the rock, no matter how dangerous it turned out to be.
But there was someone here. On the table in the center of the room, Bellerophon lay sprawled. Michael saw him and let out a little groan as he looked at his blood-splattered face, pushing past Derek to get to him.
“Peter!” he cried out. He was on top of the table, next to his partner, before any of us noticed that Bellerophon cradled a spherical object in one arm as if it were a football. Or a baby.
The horror hit me as I realized that the spherical object had a face. Open eyes. A bleeding mouth. And it was the source of much of the blood that coated Bellerophon.
Alice saw it too. “Oh … oh, God,” she choked.
I put a hand on her shoulder as Derek got between Alice and the head of her mentor.
But the eyes … they were, somehow alive, and glowing with the same purple Alice had been imbued with for so much of the night. Alice knocked Derek to the side, reached out, and picked up the head.
Mysteria’s eyes locked on her apprentice. She spit out blood as she gasped her last words…
“Be .. betray … betrayed us…”
Her eyes closed, the violet light faded, and blood drained from her mouth and neck.
Alice brought the face to her chest and sobbed.
I thought about Dan, and I cried too.
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