Shades of Gray (36 page)

“Iri!”

A hand pulled her to her feet. Small and cold. Not Bruce.

“Iri, wake up!”

Her eyes flew open to blackness, blackness that retreated like the sun rising through the cold of space.

Jet let go of her and cocked her head. “Are you with us?”

Iridium tried to answer but her teeth were chattering. “What … what …”

“Hypnotic,” Jet said. “He got you. I had to blanket you in Shadow just to make you stop strobing me. You were screaming something about hostages.”

“Oh, Christo …” Iridium clapped her hands over her mouth. “Jet, I couldn’t fight it … he made me see what I really wanted …”

From somewhere, she heard shouting.

“Later,” Jet said. “We can apologize later. Steele and Taser are getting the others. We have to go.”

“No,” Iridium said, her eyes wide and shocked. “My dad …”

“Callie,” Jet said, gripping her shoulder. “Your dad is being rescued.”

The building shuddered, and a strobe sailed past Jet, splashing burns on the wall behind Iridium’s head.

Lester stood behind her, strobes ready in both hands. His eyes were white, vacant.

Enslaved.

Iridium’s heart fluttered with panic. “My dad is right behind you.”

CHAPTER 50

IRIDIUM AND JET

I never wanted to hurt them. But it was the only way to save the rest of us.

—Matthew Icarus, internal report filed
with Executive Committee regarding radical lobotomy
of Subject 7789, code name “Dreamer”

Executive Committee gave Therapy stamp of approval. They had to. Kane and the others know what happens when Squadron members reach their “extracritical” points. Now we don’t need to decommission them—just erase the bad, emphasize the good, and force them to obey. Everyone wins. Except the Squadron, I suppose. But they’re only extrahuman.

—From the journal of Martin Moore, entry #65

IRIDIUM

Jet whirled, throwing Shadows. Iridium saw her father dodge, his hands glowing.

“Go!” Iridium shouted, hurling a strobe at Lester, arcing just over his face. “Get Hypnotic! I’ll take care of Arclight!”

“Don’t get killed.” Then Jet was gone, swallowed in Shadow.

Iridium strobed again, fast and furious, then dove behind the lobby’s abandoned security desk, trusting that between her power and the sounds of battle erupting around them, her father couldn’t pinpoint where she’d gone off to.

“You can’t beat me, girl.” Lester’s voice was low, snarling, foreign to Iridium’s ears. Crouched as she was behind the ancient desk, she concentrated on keeping herself in as small a ball as possible.

Her father couldn’t strobe what he couldn’t see.

At least, she hoped not.

“Give up, Callie!” Lester shouted. Another strobe rocked her cover. “I don’t want to hurt you. I love you—you know that!”

“You’re not my father!” Iridium screamed. If he just got close enough, she could knock him out without hurting him. “Let go of him and face me yourself, you pissant coward!”

She thought she could knock Lester out. Probably. Maybe.

“You’re fighting the wrong man, Calista.” The strobes were definitely closer. “You should be fighting our common enemy. Who is really the one who caused this?”

Iridium knew the answer.
Corp.

“Give it up, Hypnotic!” she called. “You’re not any more interested in stopping Corp than you are in taking up ballet!” Keep him talking, that was the trick. Jet said Steele and Taser were getting the others out. She had to keep Lester focused on her to keep the others safe.

Iridium risked peering around the side of the desk, saw Lester advancing on her with strobes and those cold, dead eyes.

“You’d leave your own father to rot in jail and the men who put him there walking free?” Another strobe. “I should have had a son.
He’d
do what was needed.”

Iridium flinched at that. Lester had always treated her like a tomboy, but she’d never imagined he’d really wanted a
son
…

Stop that.
Her mind was still cloudy from Hypnotic’s influence. The words spouting out of Lester’s mouth were just lies, designed by the mind-reading madman himself to throw her off-balance.

“If you wanted a son so bad, I guess you were lying all of those times you said you were proud of me! That you loved me and Mom!” she called, scrambling to the other side.

“I was.”

The quiet in Lester’s tone was what stunned Iridium. He wasn’t ranting any longer. He was standing there, surrounded by a constellation of strobes, his face harder than tilithium. Gone was every trace of her father’s warmth. There was no Lester.

There was only Arclight.

JET

“Hypnotic!” Jet called out.

He appeared from nowhere, ducking his head in a mocking bow, then disappeared around a corner.

She followed, leaving the sounds of battle behind her. Her goggles firmly in place over her eyes, she picked up the pace. Up ahead, she heard a door slam.

“Jet,” Meteorite hissed in her ear. “Don’t be an idiot! You’ve got Iridium. Get out of there!”

Jet turned her comlink off.

She navigated another corner and paused to scan ahead. Long, narrow hallway with sickly yellow walls and a thin dark carpet; eight forest-green doors, three on either side and two at the end, facing her.

“No games, Hal,” she shouted.

Nothing.

Fine. The hard way, then.

She approached the first door on the left, placed her ear to it and listened. A muffled scraping from within. Jet turned the handle, and the door swung wide, revealing a small room filled with roses.

“Flowers?” she called out. “Are you asking me out, Hal?” No response. “For the record, I don’t like flowers.”

The next room was filled with dust and nothing else. Cute. “Hal,” she said, her voice low and reasonable. “Come out. Talk to me.”

The third: mirrors. In each mirror, Doctor Hypnotic stood behind Jet.

She whirled around, saw nothing.

From the mirrors: “You want to talk, Joan? Then let’s talk.”

IRIDIUM

“I gave up my whole life for you, so you could do something great with yours. And what do you do? You crawl back to Corp in the end.” Arclight’s tone was sharper than a blade.

Iridium held her head. How she wanted to block him out—but she had to listen, to judge how close he was.

“I gave you a normal life, a life of privilege, and look how you throw it back in my face.” Arclight advanced, throwing a strobe for every sentence that bored into Iridium like a surgical drill. “Expelled from the Academy.”
Flash.
“A fugitive.”
Flash.
“A
weakling.
”

“
A normal life?
” Iridium screamed. She stood up, hurling a strobe of her own at her father. He batted it aside, hissing as it burned his hand.

She could do the same to his strobes. They’d be at this until one of them got tired. Or died.

STOP it!

“You call the life you gave me normal?” she shouted. It was more than distraction, now. What Lester had said was too close to the bone to be only Hypnotic’s doing. “I had a father I never saw, a father who got himself carted away to prison when I was a tiny girl and left me with nothing but the
privilege
of being the daughter of a rabid! You left me
alone,
Dad! You
left
me!”

She flung another strobe, and Lester didn’t bat this one away. He sat down hard, blinking the stars from his eyes.

“Yeah, you gave me everything a daughter could ask for,” Iridium snarled. “Thanks for fucking nothing,
Daddy.
”

Lester could have blocked her final strobe, but he didn’t. He just stared at her, the pain in his face nearly crumbling the wall around Iridium’s heart. For a moment, she thought Hypnotic’s hold had loosened. But then his expression twisted.

“You never did know your place, girl.”

Iridium didn’t reply. She released her strobe, and Arclight fell back, unconscious.

She swiped away her tears before anyone saw, pretended they were only from the unbearable brightness of her power and not for her father, lying cold and still on the floor.

JET

Jet turned again, slowly this time, her hands twitching. From elsewhere in the building, something crashed heavily to the floor. She tensed, debating whether to go back to help the others. In the mirrors, Doctor Hypnotic had put his hands on her shoulders. Jet couldn’t tell if she really felt gentle pressure near her neck, massaging away the tension, or if it was all in her mind.

“Please,” he said. “Come in.”

Lifting her chin, she stepped into the room. As soon as she cleared the door, it shut behind her, locking with a soft
click
. “Nice trick,” she said, keeping her panic at bay. She still didn’t see him.

“Once my power touches you,” he said, “you’re mine anytime I wish it. You’re under my power, Joan. You have been since we first talked all those days ago.”

“That sounds like something out of a cheesy suspense vid.” Iri would have been proud of her quip.

The lighting dimmed so that all she could see were the dozens of mirrors, all of them reflecting her and Hypnotic … whose hands were moving lower on her body.

“Stop that,” Jet said, resisting the urge to slap at her breasts. His hands weren’t really on her. They weren’t.

“Of course,” he murmured in her ear.

She refused to react to his presumed nearness. Either he was there or he wasn’t. She smelled a whiff of musk and sweat, a completely masculine smell that made her light-headed.

In the mirrors, his hands went back to her shoulders. Possessive. “I love what you’ve done to your hair,” he said, sounding pleased. His reflection stroked the loose tail of her blond hair, his long fingers entwining strands of gold.

Not real,
she told herself. Speaking to the mirror directly before her, she said, “You don’t have to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Entrance innocents, putting them in hospitals.”

“But Joan, that had been your idea.”

The audacity of his words hit her like ice water.

“Don’t you remember? You said I could help make a difference.” His reflection smiled broadly. It was a good smile. “And so I have. I send my power out, and it gives each mind it touches its own version of paradise. Those people aren’t unhappy, Joan. Far from it.”

“No, they’re just stripped of their free will.”

“A small price to pay for paradise.”

She wanted to tell him he was wrong, that the price was much too great. But that wouldn’t reach him. So instead, she fed his ego. “How are you doing it? A device to amplify your ability?”

The smile gave way to bemused laughter. “No, Joan. That’s just me. Oh,” he said, perhaps in answer to Jet’s gasp of surprise, “even I’m not strong enough to broadcast widely for very long. And then it takes me the better part of a day to recharge enough to send out another signal. The mind is willing,” he said, grinning, “but the body is weak. For now. After I rest, my strength will be greater. And then I can travel the Americas, giving everyone, human and extrahuman alike, their own personal utopia. Think of it, Joan!”

She did, and it made her want to vomit.

“But don’t you see?” she said, a note of desperation in her voice. “It’s not utopia. You’re stealing their lives. You’re making it impossible for them to make this world, the real world, a better place.”

“Because they’ve done such a marvelous job of it already,” he said, his mouth twisting into a sneer. “They pollute the sky and land. They attack each other with words and fists. I may be stealing their lives, Joan, but they’ve been stealing from one another for centuries! Money. Power. Love,” he said, his voice breaking. “They steal, and they don’t care who they hurt.”

“That’s not everyone,” she said. “Some, yes. But not all.”

“There are only two kinds of people, Joan. Those who steal from others, and those who’ve had things, people, stolen from them. They stole your mother, Joan.”

In the mirror, Jet and Hypnotic disappeared. In their place was a woman a little smaller than Jet, wearing a sparkling white skinsuit and flowing cape, her sunlit hair playful around her face. She had a breathtaking smile.

Her mother.

No.
Jet’s fists clenched so hard her hands shook.
Not real.

“They stole your love.”

Next to Angelica, Samson appeared, so big and broad and full of life.

Jet squeezed her eyes closed, turned her head away. “Stop it.”

“I didn’t take them from you,” Hypnotic said. “But I can give them back to you. Why wouldn’t you want that?”

Her voice a whisper, she said, “Because it’s not real.”

Hands on her shoulders, turning her around slowly. “Honey,” a silky voice said, one that made her tingle, “I can make it so real that you’d never know there’d been anything else.”

She opened her eyes and saw Bruce Hunter standing before her, hugging her, his bright blue eyes wicked, his sensual lips set in a hungry smile. His hands flowed over her back, pulled her close.

“Holly,” he murmured, leaning down as if to kiss her. “I’ve missed you so.”

No.

Her power sprang to life, flowing through her and around him, wrapping him in a lover’s embrace. She squirmed out of his grip and stepped backward, watching as the Shadow lulled him. She raised a shaking hand to her mouth. Her mother and Sam were dead, and Light, she missed them so. But having Bruce—not Taser with his smug, hidden grins and cocksure attitude, but Bruce Hunter, the man she’d taken to her bed—so close to her had almost been her undoing.

Hormones really were going to be the death of her.

The Shadow-wrapped man collapsed to his knees and slowly fell to the floor. She called her power back, touching one of her belt pouches to take out a pair of stun-cuffs.

As the Shadow seeped into her, she realized that she hadn’t felt Hal’s light—that she’d blanketed him, but she hadn’t sensed the man beneath the Shadow.