Gift of Light_A Powered Destinies stand-alone novel Page 18

  She dispatched both of her coin-sized spheres in that direction, watching anxiously as they crossed the space between the two buildings, a pair of yellow stars trailing high up in the air. The firefly spark she maintained inches from her face and slightly off to the side, was where she could keep steady watch on it and the danger level it displayed.

  The heroes had fallen suspiciously silent by now. Suspecting that they were up to no good, Wisp swapped herself for one of the twin spheres and felt her boots ease into a soft, nearly silent landing on the apartment building’s roof.

  Once her footing was secure she chose the next destination – an aged stone building with a walkable, ornately decorated overhang – and sent her remaining twin sphere there, recalling the other one at the same time. She didn’t pause to look at the street below.

  Right when she turned toward the distant wall, scanning the city line for her next stop, the teleporter called out from below in French-accented English. “Smoke bomb on the right side of the bank! No visible target. Will relocate.”

  “What?” Wisp faltered mid-movement, her attention snapping back to the scene she’d meant to escape from. She turned to see a ring of thick black smoke envelop the streets below, manifesting at ground level from no visible source and expanding rapidly. It wasn’t a smoke bomb. It looked like Smoker having fun at her expense. Wisp wished she could provoke him into showing himself, give the heroes something worth attacking.

  The heroes will be fine. She faced the light sphere she’d parked on top of the ornate stone overhang. The only thing left for her to do was to reach the other side of the wall. Present her half-filled rucksack to Constantine and demand he let her keep it.

  So she swapped positions yet again, the city twisting and jogging around her as her perspective shifted. The question popped up the instant she found her footing on the narrow stone ledge and fought to maintain her balance.

  Wait. Smoker actually creates smoke from thin air.

  The realization hit her like a rubber band snapping. The firefly beacon still holding its position inches from her face turned a darker shade of gold, but she paid it no mind. The train of thought racing through her head was too terrifying not to follow it to the end. Because if the villain had the power to create smoke from nothing, chances were he conjured up other volatile substances, too.

  Toxic gas. Gasoline vapors.

  Smog.

  Coldness spread throughout her core. The dark fumes expanded beyond the vicinity of the bank, branching out to nearby streets and alleys to lay down a carpet of thick black smoke. In her mind’s eye, Wisp painted it as a surging tsunami of orange-hued Smog come to suffocate the wrong half of her city. She picked up a phantom scent of pungent toxicity, accompanied by a chorus of phantom screams on the wind.

  Her mask slipped and the make-believe courage evaporated with it. The idea of Smog emerging anytime, anywhere at a supervillain’s behest, scared the bejeebers out of her.

  What the hell is Smoker planning? The thought was quickly replaced by another. He’s too dangerous. I have to kill him.

  She bit her lip so hard it hurt, and the pain helped her get back on track. Smoker wasn’t going to show himself to her. Not now, and not here. Fortified by this conclusion, she peeled her attention from the smoke-filled street, forcing herself to focus on her escape. The next waypoint was a nearby low-rise apartment building. She picked a spot on the roof and dispatched both of her twin spheres there, seeing them shift toward fiery tangerine.

  Not good.

  Her salvation was in sight: the wall loomed about a hundred meters ahead. Close enough to be reached with three or four more rooftop leaps. She put a hand on the heavy gun beneath her shirt and watched her twin spheres zip the rest of the way to their destination. The instant they reached solid ground, she swapped positions.

  The instant her feet hit the flat asphalt roof, a harsh and uncomfortably familiar man’s voice cut through the air. “You, kid. Don’t move and don’t try anything funny with your powers. I don’t want to kill you.”

  Rune. He sounded close. He approached so suddenly that the teleporter must have been involved. Wisp stood no chance to outrun that guy, and she knew it.

  Her first instinct was to hide, but since she had already been spotted, her second instinct was to conceal her little helpers instead. The hood and sunglasses still covered her hair and eyes, but nothing would reveal her identity faster than eyewitness reports or pictures taken of her surrounded by her spheres. For that reason, she commanded the remaining twin beacon to dive into the space between her feet and refrained from recalling the other. The firefly spark she pulled toward her right eye, tucking it away behind one darkly tinted lens.

  Her thrumming heart noted that the danger level had shifted another notch toward red.

  As she stood there, staring wistfully at the wall that seemed so close and yet so far away, something – no, someone – popped into the center of her field of vision. Two figures appeared side by side on the roof, taking shape in the blink of an eye.

  One of them was Rune, looking stern-faced and imposing, dressed in casual street wear. Unlike when she had seen him earlier in the café, his strong hands now gripped the long wooden shaft of the famous ax whose blade glowed a dull red, powered by a fist-sized sample of one of the hero’s trademark runes.

  To his right stood a brown-skinned male teenager that Wisp didn’t recognize. He wore a black and white costume consisting of baggy pants, a simple white half-mask, and a long-sleeved black shirt with a white rook sewn on the front. To her relief, he wasn’t armed and flaunted no visible power effects. She quickly concluded that this had to be the new guy on the team. The teleporter. Both of the heroes wore headset microphones, but Crashbang was nowhere in sight.

  “We’ve caught up to the target,” the teleporter reported through his headset, his English softened by a French accent. “Stay put until further notice, okay?”

  If there was a response, Wisp couldn’t hear it. She appreciated the absence of the other team members. These two guys right in front of her she could maybe deal with, she just didn’t know how. Her fear-frosted brain synapses refused to produce any good ideas.

  Rune was staring at her, sizing her up.

  The teleporter glanced at his team leader. “Should I bring the backup?”

  No, Wisp wanted to respond, but didn’t. The firefly spark in her eye continued to get redder and redder. Her instincts advised her to keep her mouth shut until she saw an opportunity to escape. Again.

  “Not yet,” Rune replied. “I need you here right now.” His thick brown eyebrows furrowed at Wisp. “Cat got your tongue? This is going to be needlessly difficult if you won’t talk to us. Let’s start with a name.”

  They still don’t know who I am.

  Wisp forced herself to meet the hero’s scrutinizing gaze, feeling her legs tremble beneath her. As long as he kept his attention on her sunglass-covered face, he wasn’t looking down, which was a good thing. Because she didn’t want to dismiss the small light that sat concealed between her boots. Something told her she was going to need it.

  “My name’s Checkmate.” The teleporter’s smile flashed teeth that were very white against the warm brown of his face. “You probably already know Rune.”

  Wisp caught herself nodding at the question. The urge to confide in these guys crept back, clawing at the back of her throat. They seemed nice. They were the good guys, and she should have been on their side.

  They didn’t know about the supervillain who was going to kill her for talking to them.

  Checkmate’s smile deepened. “So you understand what we’re saying. That’s a start.”

  “You left a power signature outside the bank,” Rune interjected with a perfect ‘bad cop’ routine. “Why? If you didn’t mean to use it as a weapon, don’t go playing the bad guy. That’s how shit goes sideways and people get hurt. Hand us the money and everyone will breathe easier.”

  “If the cutlery scares you,” Checkmate indic
ated the huge glowing ax with his thumb, “you can hand the rucksack to me. Prove to everyone you’re not dangerous and willing to cooperate.”

  I’d be happy to, Wisp thought bitterly, the rucksack a dead weight that stuck in her hand like a ball and chain. She wanted to drop the damned thing right then and there. But then her foray into villainy would have been for nothing. Read the note I left with the fake employee, she implored in her head. Read it and come meet us at our base. Pretty please.

  Her lack of reaction or response seemed to provoke Rune. The line of his mouth tightened until it formed a harsh line across his hard, masculine features and his cold blue eyes snapped back to Checkmate. “The kid’s not going to cooperate. You know what this means.”

  The teleporter deflated, the enthusiasm draining from his posture. He said nothing. He simply vanished, there one second and gone the next. Rune, on the other hand, gripped his ax tighter. His attention never wavered from Wisp.

  This was it. The moment she had waited for. The teleporter might only be gone for an instant, and she’d be toast if he invited Crashbang to the party. Before she knew what she was doing, Wisp whirled around and started running, pulling both of her twin spheres along as her boots flew across the asphalt. Ahead of her was the edge of the roof and then nothing.

  Rune barked a single word that sounded like an order, its meaning drowned out by the thundering of her heart in her ears. She got a sense of movement other than her own. A man-sized blur crossed the edge of her vision, hurtling itself toward her. But the reaction came too late. She cut across the three meters that separated her from the edge of the roof and jumped. Her world tilted once again, only this time, her powers had nothing to do with it. Her stomach lurched. She was falling.

  Below her was a river of smoke, thick, black, and uninviting. The twin sphere that had waited at her feet fell faster than she did because she was pushing it. The instant it reached the uppermost layer of smoke, she touched it through her power, and swapped positions, lessening the two-story drop by a few meters.

  Then she dove feet first into the swirling black mass and her field of vision disappeared, eclipsed by the smoke. Her boots hit the pavement a split second later and the impact vibrated through her bones, though the landing was gentle enough that she felt no pain.

  The smoke was worse. The tarry, acrid fumes bit into her eyes and nostrils and she held her breath, overwhelmed by a sense of suffocating. Panic prickled her skin. But her instincts were still functioning and screamed at her to get moving.

  She pushed herself forward with one hand pressed to her mouth and nose, following the direction the street ran. In the other hand, she clutched the rucksack, holding it as a buffer against lampposts and vehicles hidden in the smoke. Somewhere above her Rune was shouting something. The anger in his voice made her want to move faster. She could only hold her breath for so long.

  Her twin spheres quickly caught up and floated in front of her, driving back the vapors within arm’s length of her face and torso. The window they cleared for her was large enough to make out stationary vehicles and the walls of buildings if she passed directly in front of them. But since she needed the upper layers of smoke to remain intact and cover her, she couldn’t clear sufficient airspace to breathe. Her lungs burned.

  She reached the entryway of an apartment complex and pulled on the handle, but the door didn’t open. Her fingers grazed the cold glass of an abandoned shoe store window. She didn’t try the door.

  Instead she pushed one of her spheres through the glass and into the shop’s main room, swapping positions the instant it reached the other side. There she staggered, gasping for breath and savoring each sweet, intoxicating breath. The air smelled faintly of smoke but the vapors hadn’t gotten past the door and windows in full force.

  Wisp glanced at her sphere. It hadn’t fully reverted to yellow, but it didn’t give the impression that she was going to be incinerated any second, either. She recalled her light and turned to face the interior of the small shop, where long wooden racks displayed an array of sneakers, boots, and heels. There were no windows at the back of the room, but an unobtrusive door labelled ‘staff only’ and the entrance to what appeared to be a storeroom behind the sales counter.

  Please have a window. Wisp hustled past the shoe racks to try her luck with the staff door. She vaguely remembered reading about a girl with locator powers who was part of the EU team. Even if the heroes decided not to chase her through the smoke, they might very well track her down before she reached the wall. Hiding here wasn’t an option. She had to get a move on.

  When the door swung open, she sighed with relief. Beyond it was a small, overstuffed office with a desk and tall stacks of shoe cartons. The afternoon sun filtered through the only window at the back, untainted by smoke.

  The view outside was clear. No heroes awaited her at the back of the building, so she checked the color of her firefly beacon – which still glowed yellow, for the most part – and swapped herself onto the deserted, garbage-littered backyard beyond the window. Her twin spheres floated along, taking position on either side of her.

  “Smoker. You there?”

  The subtle sounds of a still-living city welled up around her, muffled and distant. The hum of a car engine. An angry dog’s bark, overlaid with an equally heated teenage boy’s voice. The boy sounded closer than the dog. Much closer.

  The heroes were catching up.

  It’s fine. Wisp oriented herself, fixing the direction of the wall in her mind. They can’t see me right now. I’m going to zip past them like a blur of light, gone in an instant. She pictured herself as a spark of fire floating on the wind, too hot to touch and too small to see. The vision gave her the courage to step away from the wall at her back and to the enclosed backyard’s only exit, a narrow, dumpster-lined passage between buildings. Beyond it was another of the well-maintained one-lane streets that reached into every corner of the northeastern city. People walked on it but didn’t look in her direction.

  Remembering the general direction of the wall, Wisp dispatched one of her spheres to a balcony on the third story of a residential building, directing it to fly far above the heads of any unsuspecting passersby. Before it had covered half the distance, it turned red. The change was so dramatic that she jumped and yanked the small light back toward herself. As it approached her, its color shifted towards dark amber. Still too high a threat level to ignore.

  A lime green Fiat rolled into her field of view, moving along the road at a leisurely pace, and Wisp reacted on instinct. She pushed her sphere toward the car, commanding it to enter the cabin through the passenger window. Lacking the time to check the driver, she swapped herself onto the back seat, colliding gracelessly with the synthetic leather seat cover. Her body mass failed to catch up with gravity and the car’s movement and she slammed face-first into the seat in front of her, the wind knocked out of her by the impact. The rucksack acted as a buffer for her torso but didn’t soften the blow to her head. Pain jolted through her jaw and neck. She heard a yelp, realizing after a second that she was the source of it.

  The driver gave a startled cry in response and the car swerved to the left before coming to a near stop. “Keep driving,” Wisp said through clenched teeth. “I’m not going to hurt you or anything. Just drive.”

  The skinny man in the driver’s seat had to be in his sixties or early seventies, tufts of unkempt gray hair sticking up from the rim of a black trilby hat. He twisted on his seat to squint at her from watery, confused eyes. “Who are you?” he croaked. His hands remained on the steering wheel but the car rolled along at a snail’s pace.

  Wisp checked the drape of her hood before responding. “I’m running away from a bad guy with superpowers. He’s going to catch up if you don’t pick up the pace.”

  Her danger beacon shifted another nuance toward gold, letting her know she was doing the right thing, choosing a path that wasn’t going to lead to her imminent death.

  The old man licked his lips and gripped t
he steering wheel. “Superpowers? Why are you inside my car?”

  “It’s complicated,” she replied, wearing her best innocent teenager’s smile. “Keep driving and I’ll explain.”

  She slumped down to sit properly, making sure to keep the remaining twin sphere and the firefly beacon behind the seat and out of his sight. The one she’d left behind she extinguished. No need to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for the heroes.

  “Okay.” He turned to face the road and hit the gas pedal. “I don’t pick up hitchhikers, so you owe me an explanation, little missy.”

  Instead of offering an explanation, she let him focus on getting away. The Fiat accelerated with a roar of its engine as the driver steered it back into lane. Except for a few pedestrians and a pair of elementary school kids on bicycles, the street was deserted. Wisp didn’t twist in her seat to check what or who was behind her. Her neck still hurt like hell and as long as her danger beacon maintained its perfectly acceptable gold tint, she didn’t actually want to know.

  “Take the turn-off back to the wall, please,” she said while keeping her fingers crossed.

  The old man gave a contemptuous snort. “It’s not safe over there, little missy. That’s where all the air pollution is coming from. What you need to do is talk to the police. Long as I’m not getting the explanation you promised, that’s where I’m taking you.”

  The car slowed to take a different bend than the one she had hoped for, and the passenger window showed a slow-drifting cutout of the Babylon, a once-popular movie theater that had been closed due to its proximity to the wall. Not taking the time to consider what she was doing, she pushed her remaining sphere through the glass and into a passing alley, swapping positions with it an instant before it was out of sight.

  This time, the landing was less spectacular since it didn’t involve relocating herself into a moving vehicle. She dropped two inches and her boots hit the ground with a thud, startling a nearby cat. The Fiat continued on its way and quickly disappeared from view. Wisp called back her sphere and, after assuring herself that the old man was gone and no one else was paying any attention to her, spun around to race down the shadowy alley. The wall loomed maybe thirty meters ahead of her, its gleaming steel spikes outlined against the darkening sky. A bank of dark gray clouds was beginning to eat away at the summery blueness.