Relentless (The Hero Agenda, #2)
Read Relentless (The Hero Agenda, #2) Online
Authors: Tera Lynn Childs,Tracy Deebs
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Also by Tera Lynn Childs and Tracy Deebs
POWERLESS
Copyright © 2016 by Tera Lynn Childs and Tracy Deebs
Cover and internal design © 2016 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover design by Nicole Komasinski/Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover image © Mark Owen/Arcangel
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.
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For our dads,
who are no longer with us
but remain relentlessly at our sides
every step of the way.
And also for Edward Snowden,
who showed us the dangers
of unchecked power and secrecy
and that privacy is freedom.
“This is Jeremy Abernathy, reporting for Superhero News live from the SHN Power Chopper high above the supervillain trial of the century. Today, Rex Yes-I’m-a-Sadistic-Tool Malone and the entire Yeah-We’re-Even-Bigger-Tools Collective are opening the trial of obvious-threat-to-humanity Draven Can’t-Operate-a-Computer-to-Save-His-Life Cole—”
“Jeremy…”
“Ah, and there’s our intrepid on-the-ground reporter now,” he continues, his voice coming loud and clear through my earbud. “The situation is probably pretty tense down there in the courtroom. Let’s check in with Draven’s ladylove, the incomparable Kenna Who’s-the-Ordinary-Now Swift. Kenna?”
Someone else on our system snickers. Probably Nitro.
I clench my teeth and fight the urge to respond.
“Radio silence,” Riley reminds the group. “Before a big event like this, my dad always scans radio frequencies for chatter in case—”
Riley’s feed cuts out abruptly.
Nobody says anything else, not even Jeremy, and I have to admit I kind of miss his annoying banter. Especially since I know he’s just trying to keep me from freaking out. Not that it’s working—but that’s more me than him.
I’ve never been more freaked out in my life. And after growing up as an ordinary in a world of people with superpowers, that’s saying a lot.
Of course, that was back when I still thought the heroes were the good guys. Back when my life still made some kind of sense.
Back before my mother went missing, my best friend gave herself up to the heroes, and my boyfriend got captured and put on trial for crimes he would never commit.
All of which have led me here to League Headquarters.
Into the lion’s den.
My fake SHN credentials got me into the courtroom where Draven is to be tried, a courtroom currently filled with superheroes who are loyal to the League. Which means I’m surrounded by them, fenced in on all sides as I sit here waiting for the trial to start, terrified with each moment that passes that one of them will recognize me beneath my disguise.
I’m channeling my inner Rebel, taking a page out of my best friend’s book with a platinum-blond wig, hot-pink lipstick, and a blouse unbuttoned just enough to keep security from looking too closely at my face. A face that’s been plastered on wanted posters throughout the superhero and ordinary worlds in the twelve days since we destroyed the secret superhero bunker—which means if anyone recognizes me, I’ll be on trial right next to Draven.
Mr. Malone doesn’t think too highly of villain sympathizers, as he calls us.
And if that isn’t bad enough, me getting caught would be the least of our problems. Because we all know that Draven isn’t about to get a fair trial. No villain would, but especially not Draven. He’s about to become an example. He’s Mr. Malone’s greatest capture to date, and he knows secrets Rex would kill to keep quiet. He
is
a secret Rex would kill to keep quiet. Which means once this farce of a trial is over, Draven’s a dead man.
Unless we break him out of hero custody today. Now. Before this mockery of a trial can even begin.
Which is exactly what we plan to do—as long as I don’t get identified before they bring him into the courtroom.
Just the thought has me slouching in my seat as Rex walks through the door in full superhero regalia—a crisp white jacket with red epaulets, decorated by an array of red, blue, and yellow ribbons over his left pec and a big, gold League badge over his right. As president of the League, he also wears a waist-length royal-blue cape.
It’s the first time I’ve seen him dressed like this in years, and if things weren’t so serious right now, I’d probably laugh. Riley’s Superman pajamas make so much more sense now. Is it any wonder he grew up with a serious hero complex? Or that Rebel has an antihero one?
Shoulders back and head held high, Rex climbs the steps to the raised stage at the front of the room, walking between the long, curved table and the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. He knows everyone in the room is looking at him, and he is totally eating it all up.
The rest of the Collective follows behind him, all ten of them walking single file, wearing matching white uniforms and smug expressions. I can almost smell the arrogance rolling off them.
Anger wells within me when I think that these are the men and women who’ve been holding Draven and Rebel for a dozen days, probably the same men and women who’ve been holding my mother for even longer. When I think about what happened to Draven’s cousin Deacon in their hands, when I think about how he still wakes up at night screaming even though he’s safe and free and has begun to heal, it both terrifies me and makes my blood boil with rage.
I’m going to make every single one of them pay. For what they’ve done to my friends. For what I’m afraid they’ve done to my mother. For what they’ve done to too many people. I’m going to make them suffer like they’ve made so many villains suffer in the decades since the Collective came to power.
That’s not something I ever thought I’d say, but I’m not the same Kenna Swift I was three weeks ago. I’m done playing their game, done following the rules that the supposed good guys wrote.
If I have anything to say about it, Rex Malone is
never
going to hurt anyone I care about ever again. And he sure as hell isn’t going to kill Draven. Not today.
Not ever.
Suddenly, the lights in the courtroom flicker.
“Hey, something’s interfering with my feed,” the SHN camera guy next to me complains. He fiddles with his wires like there might be a loose connection.
“Steady,” Jeremy warns softly, and I force myself to take a calming breath to tamp down my power and keep it from leaking out before we need it. Wouldn’t want the superhero world to miss a single second of the coming spectacle.
It took a few days to get past the brain-freezing shock at the very idea of having a power. After a lifetime of feeling powerless, that was hard enough to process. But the realization that followed was even worse. The mark on my neck declares me not only a super, but a
villain
. Mom is an ordinary. Which means my dad, one of the most famous and revered heroes of his time, was actually a villain.
I have so many questions and no one to ask.
Rex stops at the middle of the stage, behind the long, curved table, and pulls out the centermost chair. After he sits, his minions do the same, filling in the seats on either side of him.
I slouch deeper as he braces his hands on the table in front of him and surveys the courtroom. I’m sitting in the very back row, with dozens of spectators between us, so he would need supervision to be able to identify me in this crowd, but I’m not taking any chances. The self-satisfied smirk on his face—an expression that says he is king of this domain and that he likes it that way—sends chills down my spine.
When he’s done looking over all of the reporters, security guards, and special guests, he nods to the back of the courtroom and makes a come-forward gesture.
For a second I think he’s seen me.
Recognized
me.
My heart stutters and I can’t breathe. I feel the walls closing in. My mind starts racing, desperate to figure out how I might get out of this alive, how we can still make the plan work.
Then I sense movement at my side.
Everyone in the courtroom turns to look as Rebel Malone, my best friend and Rex’s black sheep daughter, walks slowly, timidly, toward the front. And if I’m channeling Rebel today, then she’s channeling Lilly Pulitzer. Dressed in a pale-pink floral dress that skims her knees and a white cardigan, with her usually spiky bleached hair dyed brown and swept back from her face by a matching pink headband, she’s as far from the girl I know as Rex is from the hero I once thought he was.
She walks right by me without noticing me. Not that I’m surprised, considering she’d have to look around to see me. And she isn’t. At all. She’s staring straight ahead, almost like she’s hypnotized, following her father’s every direction as she finally makes it to the front of the courtroom and sits down in the empty, reserved first row.
Rex nods in satisfaction, then clears his throat before leaning down to the microphone that sits on the table in front of him.
“First of all, I would like to thank the members of the press corps for being here today,” he says, nodding toward my section.
I pretend to scratch my forehead.
“The Collective and I have always prided ourselves on our openness and transparency, which is why you have all been invited here to report on this very important trial.”
It takes all my self-control not to laugh out loud—or to scream my outrage. Because a month ago I would have been just like everyone else in this courtroom. I would have believed him without a second thought.
But now I know better. Despite Mr. Malone’s insistence that secrets are for villains and that everything he and the hero squad do is aboveboard, the truth is that the superheroes keep deeper, darker secrets than I ever imagined possible.
Their supposed openness and transparency is a joke. Or, more accurately, a travesty.
I wait for him to give his usual song and dance about how evil villains are. But he must be as anxious for this trial to start as I am—though for totally different reasons—because he doesn’t say anything else. Instead, he gestures to the door on the opposite side from where he and the Collective entered.
I turn to look just as two massive hero guards enter, then turn back and level nasty-looking weapons at the doorway. From this distance I can’t tell if they’re ordinary guns or special weapons from the hero armory. Freeze rays, maybe, or even disintegration guns.
I wouldn’t put it past them, wouldn’t put
anything
past Mr. Malone.
Then Draven appears and I huff out a relieved sob-laugh. I can’t help myself.
He looks exactly like the last time I saw him, streaming live on an SHN broadcast. He’d already been captured by Mr. Malone, was already a prisoner of the war we’d just begun to fight. He was standing with Rex and this new and unimproved version of Rebel that I don’t recognize, the three of them in front of the mountain Draven’s pal Quake had turned to rubble at his behest while Draven was still inside. All part of a plan the villain boys had cooked up to make sure that Jeremy and I got out safely with the rescued prisoners.
Draven’s wrists and ankles are cuffed and connected by shackles that only a super with laser vision could cut through. He’s wearing a baggy prisoner’s jumpsuit—only instead of bright orange it’s solid black, with the word
VILLAIN
painted in white across the chest. And on his head sits the powers-neutralizing helmet.
The helmet isn’t one of my mom’s inventions, but her research helped them develop the technology that can block a super’s powers by creating some kind of Faraday cage for the brain. It may look like a giant fishbowl with a metal collar, but that’s no ordinary glass. Tempered, shatterproof, bulletproof, and laced with invisible wires that carry a high-frequency signal that inhibits all powers, it’s the perfect villain containment unit.
Draven won’t be messing with anyone’s memories or manipulating anyone at a genetic level—not that anyone in this room knows about his second power—as long as that helmet sits on his head.
But other than that, he looks surprisingly okay. The heroes had Deacon for only a few days, and they nearly destroyed him. In the twelve days since I last saw Draven, my imagination has drummed up all kinds of worst-case scenarios for the state he would be in when he finally got to stand trial.
I let out a tiny sigh of relief that he appears to be unharmed. We’re not any closer to home free, but just seeing him looking…like
him
makes me feel better. Then again, just seeing him makes me feel better. Knowing that it’s only a matter of minutes before I get to hold him, talk to him, make sure he really is all right.
Two more guards trail him into the courtroom and prod him across the room as the first two keep their guns aimed at him. I can’t tear my eyes away. I need to see every move he makes, need to count every breath he takes to reassure myself that he’s really okay.
“Though Draven Cole is only eighteen years old, he is a grave danger to superheroes everywhere,” Mr. Malone proclaims to the rapt audience. “He is the nephew of the notorious Anton Cole, the most dangerous supervillain of our times, whose very existence is a threat to our way of life.”
Ugh. Cue the fear-mongering propaganda. Everyone gasps appropriately.
“And more than that,” Rex continues, “he is responsible for massive destruction at two top secret hero facilities, as well as assaulting numerous SHPD officers and security guards and kidnapping both Rachel and Riley Malone.” Another gasp fills the courtroom at this revelation. “Today he must answer for his crimes.”
I want to stand up and shout that Draven’s only crimes are being born a villain—and having the misfortune of being Rex Malone’s bastard son. Something I’m sure the head of the Superhero Collective doesn’t want the rest of the hero world to know. But doing so would ruin everything, so I force myself to stay silent.
The quartet of guards push Draven up the steps to the raised box at one end of the table. As he climbs the stairs, he looks out over the crowd. He might be Rex’s son, but instead of having the smug look his father wore when he surveyed the room, Draven looks defiant. Scornful. Like he’s daring them to judge him.
His gaze skims over me, past me, and then darts back, the mask he wears faltering for just a moment.
I bite my hot-pink lips to keep from grinning. I want him to know that we have a plan, that we’re getting him out of here, but I can’t risk drawing any attention.
Even from this distance, I can see Draven’s icy blue eyes narrow behind the glass helmet. He shakes his head, a small, barely perceptible movement that only someone who was desperate for any kind of communication would even notice. Still, I get his meaning, loud and clear.
Don’t. Try. Anything.
Too bad. We’re getting him out whether he likes it or not.
I give him a solid nod.