Kingdom of Heroes (16 page)

“Ice? She’s down the hall. Couldn’t she just walk down here and tell us?”

“Just read it,” she said, the frown returning to her face.

He looked at the screen and read the message: “Emily, Fire is out of surgery, and the doctor said she is going to be fine. Thank God. 616, by the time I send this, I’ll already be gone. I’m heading upstate to where Psychosis lives. I know it’s where this bastard is going. I’m going to meet him there, and I’m going to kill him. Don’t follow me. I want you to take my car and leave. Go home to Canada, go to Mexico, find a boat to Europe. I don’t care, just get the hell out of the country as fast as you can. Leave, and don’t look back. I’m only telling you this because, for some stupid reason, I like you, and I owe you for what you’ve done for both me and Fire. The assault team, the one The Agent is sending, is for you in case you decided to run. They’re not coming for the fucker in Barren’s armor. And it won’t be long before they find you there. I wish I could explain, but there isn’t time. Just know, I’m sorry. -Ice”

The Detective handed Emily’s phone back. “Well,” he said, not sure whether to find the whole thing amusing or be pissed off. “Isn’t that just a kick in the ass.”

“If I was you,” she said, “I’d go with pissed off. But that’s just me.”

“You really have to stop doing that.”

“Habit. Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” he said as he smiled at her. “I guess I have to go now.” He held his hand out to shake hers. “It’s been a pleasure.”

She bypassed his hand and gripped him in a tight hug. He assumed it was a family tradition. “Please take care of yourself. Whether you know it or not, you are a good man. I can feel it from you. And there’s just not enough of your kind left in the world.”

“There’s Adam,” he said as he let her go, and she stepped back.

She looked up at him and smiled her sweet delicate smile. The scent of honey flooded his senses. “Yeah,” she said softly, “there’s always Adam.”

And he knew without actually knowing it, that at some point in their close proximity, he had given away the truth about her best friend. He leaned over and planted a small kiss on her forehead. “I’m sorry, beautiful. It wasn’t mine to tell.” He bent down to retrieve his hat and coat from the back of the chair. “I really have to go. Just take care of yourself and those babies.” And without looking back, he walked as fast as he could towards the nearest exit, trying his best to not draw any unwarranted attention to himself.

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Emily watched The Detective walked in a hurried pace down the hallway. She actually found that she couldn’t take her eyes off of him; he was handsome; he was nice; he had called her beautiful. He was also a felon that Ice had taken out of The Hole, but these day, such things didn’t really matter. Not everyone in prison was there because they had done something wrong. Most were there simply because they had pissed The Agent off.

“What the hell was that?” she asked herself out loud as The Detective turned the corner and faded from her view. So much had happened over the past few hours; her sister, Adam, some asshole in The Iron Knight suit trying to kill The Seven, it was almost too much to take in. Her thoughts shifted to Adam, and she did her best to block them out. She had loved him like the brother she’d never had, and she knew he had felt the same about her. They had been best friends since they’d met all those years ago.

He had been the kid from the war, the orphan The Agent had taken in and adopted as his own. Adam had never really talked to her about his parents or how they had died, and she had never pried, never really wanting to bring it up. She knew it was a painful topic, something he didn’t want to discuss, so she left it at that.

She remembered the first time she’d met him. He seemed shell-shocked, just removed from his participation in the war, too skinny, somewhat broken from everything he had just seen. Her sister had brought him over every day for a month, using the opportunity to feed him, to try and repair some of the damage he had incurred. And for the most part, it had worked. He gained weight; he talked and laughed; he shared his secrets, telling her about every little crush he developed over the years.

Over the years, it seemed as if most of the damage had been wiped away, or at least, she thought most of it had been. She knew the nightmares had remained, occurring almost every night. They were always the same, not that she could get him to talk about them, and she would have never used her powers to see what he had woken up screaming about. But as was prone to happen when she was in close proximity to someone, bits and pieces were bound to leak through, and she had unfortunately seen enough of his nightmares to know how bad they were.

She looked down at the babies, so precious, so sweet, each of them completely clueless as to how close they were to being motherless. She thought about Adam; she thought about her sister, and she thought about the bastard in Barren’s damn suit. She felt like she should have been surprised that all of this was happening, but in actuality, she wasn’t. She knew how many sins The Seven had committed to achieve their version of peace, and she knew eventually all of those wrongs would have to be paid for. And people like Adam, like the babies, even herself to a certain degree, innocents when it was all said and done, would probably be the ones having to pay for the crimes of their elders.

She looked up at the corner of the waiting room, directly into the camera that sat there, occasionally swaying back and forth, panning across the room. She wondered if The Agent was watching her right now; she doubted it; after all, who was she? But she had this feeling, this suspicion, this ounce of paranoia that someone was on the other end of the camera watching her every move. She thought about making an obscene gesture in the camera’s general direction, but she didn’t think it would go over too well.

She looked away from the camera as a doctor in a white coat walked into the room. He held a clipboard in his hand and glanced down at it before he spoke.

“Are you Mrs. Blaze’s sister?” he asked.

“Yes, doctor. How is she?”

“Your sister is going to be fine. The bullet managed to miss all of the major organs and arteries. She was very lucky. It’s as if the shooter intentionally wanted her to live.”

As she stood up and shook the doctor’s hand, thanking him for everything he had done for Pammy, a strange sensation flooded her thoughts. Despite everything that had taken place, despite her sister, despite Adam, a momentary sense of happiness flooded over her, and she realized her thoughts had strayed to The Detective. He had been so handsome, so nice, and he had called her beautiful. Like a little girl in the schoolyard, she suddenly realized that she had a crush.

And then, as the doctor handed her various pieces of paper to sign, the happiness she felt turned to a sort of melancholy. Whether he decided to run or The Agent had him killed, she knew The Detective was probably not coming back through those doors, and in that moment, she realized she was most likely never going to see him ever again.

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Ice had betrayed him. He had always been prepared for the eventuality, but he never honestly believed it would happen, not her, not the one who had always been his most faithful. And for him? For the golden retriever with the over sized adrenal gland, the dog who pretended to be a man, she would betray him for that?

It didn’t matter. She would be punished for her betrayal, either by him or through sheer circumstance. It was bound to happen. All that mattered now was making sure the pieces were in place, that all the players in the game were where they should be. And if The Detective did what she had asked him to do, if he did try to escape the country, well things wouldn’t be in place, and he couldn’t have that.

He looked at his wall of monitors, each of which showed him every angle he could possible need. Fire lay unconscious in her hospital bed; her sister sat quietly in the waiting room, rocking Fire’s children back and forth in their stroller; Ice was leaving the hospital on her giant frozen slide, completely unaware that he knew everything she had just done. And a man in a trench coat and a black fedora walked briskly down the hospital’s hallways, trying to make his way to Ice’s car, which was parked on the very top level of the parking lot.

He picked up a phone from a cradle on the button covered console, placing it against his ear.

“Yes, Chancellor,” a man’s voice said through the earpiece.

“Send the assault team, and make sure they have a teleporter, preferably one of the paper pushers. Be sure he is expendable.” He started to return the phone to its resting place before he remembered one last thing. “Have the team pick her up and bring her to me.”

Without another word, he placed the phone on its cradle and returned to his monitors. Everything would fall into position, even if he had to force the pieces into place.

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Journal Entry

[Found on page 61]

Note: The following is a newspaper article published before The Seven assumed control of the mainstream media.

Supreme Chancellor Rogers announced today the reopening of several containment facilities for individuals with superpowers. These centers, located throughout the country and last used prewar by the old government as training/holding units for children with powers, will be converted into prisons for super powered citizens convicted of crimes by the local and national tribunals.

“As much as I would like to say that we have created an utopia for us all,” Chancellor Rogers said during his announcement, “I have to be honest and admit there are still unsavory individuals, both normal and powered, who would see the peace we have attained undone. So with that in mind, I have authorized these containment centers to be reopened. Since they were initially designed to contain people with various abilities and powers, they will give our government the best opportunity to both confine and, hopefully, rehabilitate those contained within.”

The most notorious of these centers, located just outside of Metro City and commonly referred to as “The Hole,” is remembered for the numerous stories of abuse from the old government’s detainees. Several former inmates, all under the age of fifteen during their containment, have described the harsh conditions and abject cruelty from the guards towards the inmates. Numerous stories persist of children being executed on sight for accidentally using their abilities.

Several groups of super powered citizens have cried out against the Chancellor’s decision to reopen these facilities, with many noting that the banning of any containment center designed specifically for those with abilities was one of Chancellor Rogers many promises during the war. “He promised us a country where everyone could live without fear of being persecuted,” said one super powered citizen who asked not be named. “He promised us a country where we would be treated just like everyone else. By reopening ‘The Hole,’ he’s telling us that there’s still a line between us and the normals, and to be honest, by treating us all as two separate set of people, it’s no different than the old government.”

Many of these groups would prefer that normals and those with abilities who have committed crimes be confined within the same facilities, thereby eliminating the need to reopen the containment centers. When confronted with the concerns of these groups, Chancellor Roger’s press representative had no comment.

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OPEN DOCUMENT: PSYCHOSIS/METAL GIRL

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Psychosis: real name Steven Quincy/ Metal Girl: real name Hope Black. Home location: A large mansion in the northern part of the state, isolated, located in a wooded section many miles from the nearest neighbor, they’ve lived there together since the end of the war.

There was a time when Quincy was the scariest thing I had ever met in my life. He was powerful; the things he could do with that mind of his were, at times, unthinkable. He could kill with a thought, change memories, make anyone believe they were something they weren’t. But as powerful as his mind was, his body was as equally frail. An assassin’s bullet proved that point when it separated his spinal cord at the base of his skull, paralyzing him from the neck down.

Since then, Quincy has lived his life in a bed, fed from a tube, covered in bedsores, helpless, physically powerless, but that mind, that mind is just as powerful as ever, maybe even more so considering the fact it is all he has left. But I, always being the cautious type, have spent the past few years developing a filter that can block incoming psychic attacks, preventing anyone with psychic abilities from reading my mind or attacking my thoughts, and I have placed this filter inside the helmets of all my newest armored suits, including this one. So as long as you are in this suit, all you have to do to stop Quincy is get in close enough to wrap your fingers around his throat. But that’s the catch, isn’t it?

Because getting in close will never be as easy as it seems when you remember that Quincy has a live in bodyguard who has devoted the majority of her young life to protecting the man she loves. Hope Black is barely five foot six, but she is a giant when it comes to the amount of power she possesses. With just a thought, she can turn all of the skin on her body into an unbreakable metal alloy, and her strength level increases accordingly, making her into a powerhouse whose strength I can barely match with my most powerful suit (which also just happens to be the one this information resides in).