Soon I Will Be Invincible (19 page)

Elphin, coming down out of the storm. A laser beam shatters off her spear point; then she hefts it to jab. The spear rings off my Power Staff with a bell-like clang. I hit her with the pocket sonic disruptor and she staggers.

Glancing around, I see the storefront is in ruins. When did that happen? A boom rattles windows up and down the street. The sky above us is darkening, thunderheads looming over Manhattan. My staff unfolds like a conjurer’s trick and begins to glow. Bolts of power form a cage around me.

It’s raining. Traffic has stopped for blocks everywhere. The force field is fading, raindrops sizzling off of it. Damsel is back, and blue fire blooms around us as we grapple, fingers intertwined. I can’t keep this up much longer. Feral has a car up over his head, arms straight, the thing balanced on the midpoint, a pretty nice sedan. The thing creaks, and something in the trunk shifts, but he keeps it there long enough to brace for a throw. There’re too many of them. The light around Elphin’s spear point is getting brighter, and I back up. Even I can feel that heat.

The battle comes to a halt momentarily, like the instant of silence in a crowded bar. Elphin raises her spear as high as she can over her head. Then a blinding flash. Lightning strikes once, twice. Rain smell, steam, the summertime reek of hot asphalt. My Power Staff absorbs the charge, but the noise and shock are shattering. The sidewalk underneath me cracks, blackened.

Time to stop thinking about a clean win. There’s a submarine waiting for me in the Hudson River. If I can make it a few blocks along Eighty-third, this will all be behind me.

I glare back at my assembled foes; then my staff belches a concealing smoke. Stooping, I heave a manhole cover out of the street, then drop down into the sewers. A beam from my Power Staff welds it shut above me. That will hold them a moment. The staff’s charge is almost down to nothing.

My eyes adjust, and I can make out the ancient tile on the floor and ceiling. I’ve been down here before. It’s startlingly quiet, and you get used to the smell. You wouldn’t think it could be so quiet in Manhattan. There’s an inch or two of water in here, but mercifully it’s fairly clean. A few blocks away I’ll find daylight, and freedom.

“What happened to CoreFire?” Blackwolf’s quiet voice carries through the tunnels. Of course it’s him—I’d missed him in the fight overhead. Who else would have charted the battle ahead of time, known the sewer map, come straight here, and waited? He steps into view, cracking his knuckles theatrically.

“Jesus, Blackwolf, I didn’t do it! You’ve got the wrong guy.” I wish I hadn’t blown up his ex-wife just now.

One of his knives ricochets off the tile, right into my head. I aim the staff and try to blast him, but he saw it coming a second ago. He’s already in the air, swinging off a ceiling pipe, covering the ground between us much too fast. The kick takes me in the chest.

I know he doesn’t have any powers, but he’s scary as hell, so graceful that even now it’s hard not to stop and watch. I wonder what makes him this way, what primal, originary scene branded him with an obsession that makes him dress like an animal, and helps him fight. Who does he see when he looks at me?

I try to stand again. My legs don’t feel all that firm, but he gives me time. He’s just standing there waiting for me.

“How’d you do it?” he demands. “How did you kill him?”

He hits me twice before I can answer, or even move again. I’m supposed to be fast, but the man’s like a demon. It’s just the two of us in the sewers, no TV cameras, and he isn’t going to hold back. He’s one of the ones who enjoy this.

“Was it the iridium?” he snarls.

“I don’t know! It wasn’t me!”

I lunge for him, but it’s as if he’s seen this movie before. His hands close on my wrist and he swings me around into the wall.

“Was it a black hole? Was it magic?” He kicks me in the head again, and I flop over into the muck.

Another kick, this time in the stomach, and pocket change fountains from my trousers. He can spot any move before I do it. I need to throw him off his game, if that’s possible.

“Ask your wife.” It comes out in a gut-punched voice, but he hears me.

“What?” He freezes a moment, graceless for once. I kick the legs out from under him, then grab an ankle and twist. Desperate, I’m strong enough to lift him, spin, and smack him into the wall. I think he’s stunned.

I stagger on, splashing through garbage, hoping to God he doesn’t get up and run after me, but too tired to do anything about it if he does.

This is why I’m not ready. This is the part I always forget about until it’s too late, the flaw in the plan, the part where they hit you again and again. A less reflective man might have missed the point but, as I keep telling you, I’m a genius.

The last phase of my plan is coming, the one I haven’t figured out yet. I need to be invincible, and soon. By the time the moon comes into position.

I spot a set of rungs set in the wall, scrabble up them and out into the fresh air, gasping on my hands and knees on the sidewalk. Only two blocks left. Pedestrians stream around me, like they don’t even know I’m in a fight. Then they all look up.

My feet leave the ground, and the breath goes out of me. Damsel has me this time, clutching my lapels in her fists, dragging me up. We climb, story after story, out of the chasm of Broadway. I can feel the warmth of her breath on my forehead as we shoot up past the highest rooftops, and for a moment I hang above the city grid, bathed in the midafter-noon sun, bright as any hero ever born.

Then the shock of it wears off, and I realize my hands are free. There is a capsule on the inside of my mouth, containing a tiny sample of gas I bought from an alien visitor, the atmosphere of an ocean planet forty light-years away.

I grab her fists in mine, bite down hard, and nerve myself to kiss her on the lips. The last trick, one I’ve held in reserve for years. She’s astonished, openmouthed, and my poison breath passes into her.

She falls away, fainting, and I hover on the Power Staff’s diminishing charge. In ten minutes, she’ll have recovered, but I’ll be miles away. Lazily, lucky for once, I drift, and the breeze takes me west and down over the rooftops of Columbia students, over the trees of Riverside Park, and into the Hudson River.

I sink toward the dark water as my submarine surfaces underneath me, and I’m already charting my next destination. Next time, it won’t be so easy. I take one last look at Manhattan, sketch a bow, and descend.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

AT LAST WE MEET

         Lily and I have been up for hours, combing through the debris of yesterday’s fight for clues about where Doctor Impossible came from, or what he’s going to do.

I’m up here as penance for having missed the event while running down a false lead in Monongahela, Pennsylvania. Lily managed to miss it, too—vacation day supposedly—and no one knows where Mister Mystic was. Damsel’s in a foul mood. Everyone has been, since the funeral.

It would help if the rest of the team would talk about what happened yesterday. Most of what I know, I got from newspapers. As far as I can tell, Blackwolf bumped into an out-of-uniform Doctor Impossible and called the alert. Ritual banter followed, after which Doctor Impossible proceeded to thrash the lot of them on national television and escape via means unknown. Blackwolf got bested in single combat, and Damsel, our resident powerhouse, went down on some vulnerability that’s not even listed in the central computer. Feral’s going to be in the hospital for weeks. They’re killing us in the press.

With the rest of the team licking their wounds back at HQ, Lily and I do a slow walk-through of the rubble. Neither of us has done this before.

I try to start us off. “They sure managed to break a lot of windows.”

“That’s what I got, too.”

“I feel stupid for hanging around here. We should go to the zoo or something.” Yesterday’s freak storm has passed and I’m starting to overheat.

The whole block is cordoned off with yellow police tape, and the police are watching me closely as I walk around in the middle of the street. They must be wondering why the Champions wrecked this block, let Doctor Impossible slip away, then sent a notorious villain and somebody they’ve never heard of to figure out what happened.

I cycle viewing modes in the hopes something exciting will come up to justify holding back the cleanup crews this long.

I give it another try. “So. Blackwolf bumps into Doctor Impossible. Calls the Champs…”

“Except the ones who are out of town, and it’s totally not their fault,” Lily adds.

“Where were you?”

“Robbing a bank, thanks.”

“So…” For all I know, this is a test, and Blackwolf’s watching us from somewhere. In the coffee shop, Rainbow Triumph’s pointed girl-size shoe prints square off against the marks of the supercriminal’s loafers.

“He leaves the Starbucks…” Lily prompts. Residual trace of some zeta energy leading out the front window.

“What’s he doing in a coffee shop?”

“Genius is mysterious.”

“And there’s a…fight.” I gesture uncertainly.

Outside, the pavement has buckled and heaved under blows of incalculable force. The energy traces here are more distinct: Damsel’s slashing track through the air; yellow-green where Elphin managed one of her weather tricks; Doctor Impossible’s staff leaving a riot of colors and shapes.

“A big fight. Five against one.” Lily can’t see the energy traces, but it’s pretty obvious what was going on. The Champions’ collective energies focused on one man who wouldn’t go down.

“And I guess he got away here.”

The Doctor’s energy track leads to a manhole cover. Classic—no wonder they’re so upset. Lily lifts it up one-handed.

“Ech. Mister Mystic skipped the fight, too. Why doesn’t he go down there?”

“I’ll go. I can do some spectroscopy on the fight scene.”

“Show-off.”

Street noise cuts off abruptly when I lower myself in. The city’s been through here already to check for structural damage, so the scene is probably worthless, but it’s a relief to be offstage for a minute.

“See anything?” Lily calls from overhead.

“Hang on.”

There’s a lot of cracked tile where Blackwolf and Doctor Impossible met up. The Doctor caught him off guard somehow and threw him into the wall. A chip on the wall shows where Blackwolf threw one of his knives, and I have a lame impulse to find it and hand it back to him, before I remember he’s a millionaire.

“I think your boyfriend beat up my boyfriend,” I call back.

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Fine.”

“And you’re not going out with Blackwolf. He just talked to you.”

“Okay!” I’d told her about it, what Blackwolf said. Who else could I tell?

“Any clues, Madame Detective? Are we done? The police are looking at me.”

“I guess we’re done.”

Just then, my radar pings on another object, small and cool and metallic, just under the water. There’s a handful of loose change, an old-fashioned subway token, and a motel key with a tag that reads
Starlight Motel, Queens, New York.

Cold entrances are dicey when you’re talking about a metahuman living situation. There’s no real way to guess what weirdness you’ll find, anything from genetically enhanced cockroaches up to a pocket black hole. For a second, I think about getting the others.

But it’s worth the risk for the chance of catching Doctor Impossible alone and making that collar. Forget the newspaper headlines—the look on Damsel’s face will be more than worth it.

The key goes in and turns. I open the door as quietly as I can, feeling a little foolish—for all I know, he’s standing right on the other side. What will I say, exactly? But the lights are off and the living room is empty. I wait for a moment in the hall, hoping this isn’t one of my bad decisions. It’s 6:59 p.m.

It’s warm inside, quiet and dark, and I stand in the doorway, letting my organic eye adjust. I can make out shelves and a couch, and garbage on the floor. A white plastic telephone sits on an end table that looks like it was salvaged from the curb outside. It has one drawer, which hangs open, displaying a jumble of circuit boards, slabs of coarse-grained green plastic laced with metal. Loose objects crowd the shelves—a doll’s head, a lumpy piece of pottery, a plastic figurine from a Japanese animated show.

The room is coated with a layer of dust, which has gotten into everything. In the corners, power cables and network cords lie half-covered in it. The walls are painted with the bumpy, gooey white paint endemic to cheap apartments in New York, and it laps onto the edges of doorknobs and light switches and windowpanes. The air smells of sweat and decayed food and a burned odor from the radiator.

I step inside. A plastic bag hangs from the doorknob in lieu of a garbage bag, spilling over with take-out containers and used paper towels, a bare concession to the idea of housekeeping. Someone ate and slept here for a few weeks at least.

To my left, the last of the sunlight filters through dirty windowpanes and onto carpet fragments scattered on the floor and grimy linoleum tile. Ahead of me, a short corridor ends in the half-open door of a bathroom, and what must be a bedroom door on the left. Living room first, I decide. On the carpet, a polished metal tube, outsized, oxidized at one end, as if it had once been part of an immense engine. The surface has a crazed patina that looks superheated. It must have come out of one of the Doctor’s rocket planes.

The couch has a faded plaid upholstery that looks as if it had spent a few weeks outdoors. On the floor, almost buried under cardboard boxes and packing materials, is a robotic hand almost four feet across, three jointed fingers and a thumb, painted a carnival blue and red. Where the wrist should be, it trails long wires, as if torn from its owner with immense force. I touch one broad, cool finger. The door sighs shut behind me and cuts off the street noise outside. Overhead, a neighbor paces around. A toilet flushes elsewhere in the building.

In the sudden quiet, I hear cooling fans, and the whir and the chirp of hard drives read/writing. I follow the sound down the hall, and in the bedroom, green and red LEDs spangle the dusty air like fireflies, next to a futon laid out on the bare floor. I’m conscious of being at the heart of something.

He must have come here as a last resort, when the money for castles and islands ran out, when they found the last of his offshore accounts and buried caches. And he was here not too long ago.

I look over the tangle of circuitry, careful not to touch. He must have started with five or six off-the-shelf PCs, but none of it looks stock now. Some of the wiring is plainly stuff that’s never been done before, inexplicable but obviously intentional rewirings, chips sawed in half, or soaking in solutions in Burger King glasses. I’m looking at a supercomputer. He probably bought everything at CompUSA and wired it all together himself on his hands and knees. It’s easy to forget how smart he is.

I should have called in by now, but I want to know what he’s doing. I sit down on the futon and look foraportonthebackofoneofthe computers that I can jack into. Even my plug sizes are getting out of date.

The data sheets down across my display in blue-white ASCII, a hugely complex piece of engineering, all shear forces and rotational inertia. Diagrams show the Earth wrapped in an interconnected web of lines of force, thousands of tiny vectors. Something big and complicated is being simulated or controlled from here, but I don’t have the math for it. Most of the minds that can understand this kind of thing are on the wrong side in the first place. Half a dozen lines crisscross and connect at a symbol or diagram sketched in, what looks like a lightning bolt. He’s got a question mark next to it, too—something he’s still working out? The words “More power! Invincible!” appear, underlined.

Pages and pages of orbital schemata, asteroids, planets, comets moving around, columns of figures, stranger things: A fat man? A jewel? Stars and governments, heroes and villains are connected by dotted lines extending through space, time, and other dimensions. This must be how a mastermind sees the world. I see Damsel and Blackwolf, and the others are scattered around. I don’t see myself there, unless I’m the letter
F
? Would he know about me? Do I want him to?

I download it all, always listening for a footstep in the hallway. But I don’t think he’s coming back.

It’s on the way out that I see it. There’s a twin to the enormous robotic hand lying on the kitchen counter, but this one is human-size, intact, with a cunning ball joint where the arm would go. Where my arm would go, actually, because this time I recognize the workmanship.

Back at the Champions’, this time I’m the one standing at the giant screen in the Crisis Room. I lay out what I’ve found—the key, the motel, the diagrams. I throw the Doctor’s calculations up on the big screen, page after page, while they listen to my analysis.

Blackwolf scribbles notes frantically as I talk, but he’s not looking at me. I tell them everything but that last thing.

When I’m finished, Blackwolf and Damsel are talking fast, overlapping each other’s sentences.

“It’s good work, Fatale,” he says, barely glancing up.

“Really good. This is going to do it.” Even Damsel is smiling for once, wickedly. “It’s confirmation. He’s going magical.”

“And he’s desperate. We’ve got a time limit.”

On the screen, spheres rotate around one another, and around the Sun. There’s a critical window of time coming in a few days.

“Fine, but what’s that?” I point to the lightning bolt.

“Whatever it is, we don’t want him to have it.”

Lily asks, “What did it look like? The room.”

I shrug. “I don’t know…evil impoverished grad student?”

She doesn’t look happy. “You’re right that he’s desperate. I think he’s going to try to take over the world.”

Blackwolf stands unnaturally still in his skintight black leather, his lips moving silently every minute or two. I look closer. He’s saying “Doomsday.”

He’s contemplating a white board scribbled nearly solid with overlaying diagrams in red, green, blue, yellow. It’s not all that dissimilar from what Doctor Impossible was working on, and I wonder for a second what Blackwolf would have been like as a villain, and what kept him from going that route. I remember the Doctor’s squalid surroundings, the smell of spoiled food. When Blackwolf speaks, it’s in a grim monotone.

“No villain ever beat CoreFire. But what if a hero could?”

“You know the cataloged powers.” Damsel looks bored. “I could have done it. You could. Who else?”

“Lily.”

“No. I’ll vouch for her.” Damsel sounds sure of herself. I wonder why.

“We need to expand this list.”

Damsel stands. “Say whatever it is you’re saying.”

“What if it’s the Scepter of Elfland?” Blackwolf licks his lips before he says it. I’ve never seen him nervous before. There was a bit of silence after. A taboo subject. Damsel’s expression is, as always, hard to read, but if I had to guess I’d say she’s appalled, and at least two other things. Apprehensive? But maybe a little bit grateful to Blackwolf for coming out and saying it. Maybe she’d like to take a swing at that stepmother after all.

Any mortal foe.