Gift of Light_A Powered Destinies stand-alone novel Read online

  His body already survived lasers and combustion, weighing the stunning power of concussive trauma against the fragmentation grenade’s flesh-shredding potential. Maybe an explosion into ashes and charred fragments would keep the corpse from sucking on energy it no longer had any right to control. On the other hand, stunning weapons often had the side effect of suppressing superpowers for a time. The concussion grenade might be able to sever Osmotic’s connection to the Smog that kept him anchored in this world.

  Wisp had a decision to make, and fast. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed since the last time she’d pretended to talk to her dad, but the watchdog outside wasn’t likely to keep waiting much longer. The need to act fast while choosing the correct option made her head spin. Use and save the other, or time both for a simultaneous detonation? After a slight hesitation, she pulled the safety pin on both grenades. She was about to place them next to the corpse when a familiar-sounding click came from behind her.

  She whirled to find herself facing Smoker, holding the camera device she had set down a moment ago. Pointing it at her as she stood there, one grenade in each hand and a supervillain’s living corpse at her feet, he pressed the shutter button again. Click. He had a perplexed look on his face, but then his gaze dropped to her hands and his face twisted into a snarl that made her insides lurch.

  While she stood frozen in terror, her thoughts flashed like lightning. The absence of movement meant he must have ghosted back in. She didn’t bother trying to talk her way out of it. The one light she had dispatched glowed faintly beyond the doorway, an eye of fiery crimson in the swirling haze of the main basement room.

  Not allowing herself time to think, Wisp dropped the two grenades on the spot and swapped positions with her beacon, her vision momentarily distorted by the shift in perspective. Her awareness of her surroundings narrowed to a laser-like focus, one she trained on the exit stairway the instant her boots hit the ground and she was able to move. The stairs were on the other side of the room. To her strained senses, they might as well have been a mile away.

  Two grenades were about to explode right behind her.

  CHAPTER 11

  Samael was listed as the second most dangerous Evolved after the Sleepwalker for good reason. His control over air involved the ability to create vacuums over large areas and enabled him to crush bones with increased air pressure.

  Powered Destinies: Superluminary

  Wisp put her head down and started running at full speed. Her body flew forward in what seemed like slow motion, like fighting her way through the thick, sticky cobwebs of a nightmare world. She parted the Smog as she ran, the shapeless drifts and swirls dispersed by the microcosm of airborne lights surrounding her.

  The first explosion boomed right before she reached the stairs, many steps and several meters of height difference from relative safety. It sounded like a thunderclap or a shot fired by heavy artillery, and the shock wave was palpable as a jab against her back, throwing off her balance.

  The second explosion followed immediately afterward, just as loud, and she fell up the stairs, landing with a thud. Wisp barely registered the pain. She felt a seam of duct tape rip above her ankle and struggled to her feet, climbing the steps in a frenzied daze.

  But when she was halfway up the final set of stars leading to the ground floor, another wave of heat and pressure rushed over her, knocking her onto her hands and knees and rattling her bones. No explosion.

  The absence of sound seemed absolute, creating the illusion of a vesicle in time where all the threads ran together and every possible outcome was frozen in place, not yet manifested in reality.

  The Smog came to life with the low roaring sound of a rolling locust swarm. It rushed over and past her as a unified, chaotic, seemingly endless mass of yellow-orange fumes, pouring out from the basement. The warehouse windows shattered in a cacophony of breaking glass, giving way to the onslaught of energy. The Smog was seeking a way out by any means possible.

  Immeasurable amounts of Smog poured past her. Within seconds, the air became so foul that it stung Wisp’s nostrils even through the gas mask’s filter. Her breaths came in short, strained puffs as she heaved herself up to the ground floor. Visibility reduced. The crimson spheres surrounding her created a small bubble of survivability, but beyond was only persimmon-colored death.

  This is the final discharge. Wisp swayed on her feet. I did it. I destroyed the body. A different concern remained. Is Smoker actually dead?

  By the time Wisp had located the warehouse exit in the opaque haze, her skin was tingling, and the duct tape on her ankle had ripped and stung. She felt like she was about to die. She stumbled out into the street and trudged through a river of Smog before running into the wide alley, never looking back. If she listened to her instincts, she was going to die. If she acted like herself, she was going to die. Her plan to escape with her friends hadn’t changed, and she clung to it like a lifeline, a trailing string to help her find a way back to them afterward.

  I hope Luca made it back in time. The thought floated to the forefront of her consciousness, charged with worry. She longed to go check on him, a wish so powerful it infused her with a new surge of energy.

  Wisp pushed down the nausea and hobbled off in a random direction. She gritted her teeth against the pain in her ankle and kept going. Five steps, ten, twenty. Sometime after she had counted to fifty, the firefly spheres orbiting her face revealed a concrete wall. She discovered an intact window and sent one of her spheres through before swapping positions with it.

  The instant she appeared on the other side, her trailing lights turned a fiery shade of orange-red, which still wasn’t great, but a slight improvement.

  On the other side was the dark and dusty corridor of an abandoned apartment building. While she had never been inside it before, she recognized the residential design with its elevator shaft and the evenly spaced apartment doors surrounding it. Usually, this type of apartment block was at least five stories tall and featured a large attic. A rooftop terrace if she was lucky.

  First, though, she had to check on her suit and injury. The Gore-Tex leggings covering her from hip to ankle still appeared intact, but the duct tape sealing the gap between leggings and boots had torn away and now refused to stick. Underneath, the flesh was raw and swollen, the uppermost layer of skin corroded by the Smog. Looking at it made it hurt more. Wisp clenched her teeth and rolled the pant leg down as far as possible, wishing she’d had the presence of mind to bring a spare roll of duct tape.

  Then again, her nylon backpack was gone – torn apart up by the grenades she had dropped before escaping from the basement. As was the drone camera, unless Smoker had taken it with him. After taking stock of her feelings and reaching the conclusion that she didn’t care, Wisp blanked out the pain as best as she could and shuffled onward, determined to climb above the Smog and stay there.

  Naturally, the elevator was out of order, but the door leading to the stairwell wasn’t locked. As she climbed it, her mind snapped back to Smoker and the very real possibility that he was still alive. It had taken a few seconds for her grenades to go off. From what she had observed about Smoker, he turned incorporeal almost instantly. To him, ‘a few seconds’ was plenty of time to escape a pair of grenades even with surprise taken into account.

  Wisp drew the Desert Eagle from its holster, checked the magazine, hit the slide release lever, and racked the slide forward. She had to be on the fourth or fifth story now; the top of the stairway loomed two meters above her, motes of dust drifting lazily in the shaft of light that penetrated it from above.

  Before climbing it the rest of the way, she gripped the gun the way Max had shown her: the web of her right hand wrapped tight around the pistol grip and the fingers of her support hand pushing back against it, thumbs joining for stability. For a fleeting moment she wondered what Dad would say if he saw her like this. If he’d be proud or worried or both.

  Or neither the one nor the other. Maybe he’d just be sa
d about the way everything had gone down and wish for nothing more but the goodbye hug they had both missed out on.

  A tear blurred Wisp’s vision and she blinked it away, sealing her heart away for a time when she could afford it. Before climbing the final steps to the top floor, she repositioned her firefly army, directing a good third of them to her hands and the gun they were holding. Their combined brightness didn’t conceal the fact that she was gripping something with both hands, but with any luck Smoker wouldn’t be able to tell what it was. At least not right away.

  Thus equipped she climbed the remaining steps and found herself on the top floor, which looked the same as all the others had. There was no attic. However, the corridor led to a large balcony with a sliding glass door. Beyond it lay other rooftops and not even a puff of Smog.

  After swapping herself through it, Wisp set her sights on the flat rooftop of another five-story apartment building across the street and relocated there.

  The attack came immediately after her boots touched down on the smooth, even rubber surface. The air stirred and the light swarm turned crimson in an instant, giving her a brief instant of advance warning before the Smog flooded her vision, thick and violent and very much out to get her.

  She jerked sideways, expanding her firefly swarm in a frenzy. Two dozen of the tiny spheres scattered in all directions, cutting through the persimmon-colored air and keeping it from enveloping her completely.

  “Let’s talk about this,” she croaked in English, fighting back nausea. She spun around, gun cocked and pointed at the shapeless drifts surrounding her. Her index finger slipped onto the trigger, waiting for any sign of movement in the impervious haze.

  There was a sound of shoes scraping over rubber. All around, nothing moved except the swirling, blinding fumes.

  “You can’t kill me with the Smog,” Wisp lied. “My lights are holding it back. Why don’t we try talking about it?”

  Thick tendrils of Smog stirred and parted to reveal Smoker near the other end of the roof, four or five meters from her current position. He looked unhurt, although his topknot was in disarray, and his sleeveless blue shirt drenched in sweat. The scowl he wore was far more intense than any other expression she had ever seen on him. Murderous. Chilling.

  Too far away. Wisp leveled her gun. The villain’s gaze flicked to her hands. She arranged her fingers the way Max had shown her, weapon hand pushing forward while her support hand pulled back against it. There was no time to line up her sights. The instant Smoker’s attention shifted to the empty holster at her hip, she pulled the trigger.

  The shot tore through the air with a thunderous bang and the kickback slammed the pistol against her hands, making itself felt all the way up her shoulders. The impact hurled Smoker backward through the air and he buckled to the right, a spray of red blossoming behind his shoulder. Then, in the blink of an eye, he was gone. All that remained was a fine mist of blood, the only evidence that she had hit him at all.

  Wisp stood with her gun still leveled at empty space, watching with a trancelike disconnectedness as the fine droplets settled on the ground in front of her. Her sixteen-year-old brain clogged up, hung up on how she had just shot someone with the intent to kill them. She forced herself to focus. Shooting people was what soldiers did in a war, and Nicoletta Gehring had lost her right to a civilian life the day of the Breakdown.

  She lowered the gun. It felt heavier now, a hunk of hot metal sticking to the sweaty palm of her hand.

  Smoker didn’t return to the scene. The consistent crimson glow of her beacons told her that he would. Her task was not yet finished. This guy created Smog from thin air, and no matter how much she dreaded the idea of killing another person, she couldn’t leave him alive.

  Considering how long it took him to manifest physical form, he wasn’t going to surprise her or catch her off guard. All she had to do was to wait and remain vigilant. To stand ready and claim the better position before he finished taking shape. So she hobbled to a corner of the rooftop, held her gun at the ready, and watched her surroundings while dispatching five of her spheres to other nearby rooftops. The pain in her ankle was getting worse but she was getting better at ignoring it. With any luck, she didn’t need to run again tonight. Walking was already bad enough.

  Down below, the Smog still clogged the city streets and alleys as far as the eye could see, but Wisp was relieved to see that its torrent-like flow had come to a standstill. Hopefully this meant that all the energy bound to Osmotic’s living corpse had now been released, along with whatever traces remained of his victims.

  “Goodbye, Dad,” Wisp whispered to the night air. “Goodbye, Luciano. Your brother loves you very much, but he has to move on.”

  She scanned the roof again, half expecting to spot the patch of discolored city architecture that would signal Smoker’s return to a physical form. Finding none, she turned her attention to the surrounding cityscape, searching the buildings and Smog-filled streets for anything that seemed out of place.

  She found nothing. The absence of warning cues made her insides go cold, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Something big and heavy crashed down, knocking her onto her knees and elbows and crushing her in a tangle of limbs. Before she knew what was going on, the attacker hit the back of her neck hard, knocking her masked head against the precipitous edge of the roof so she was lying flat on her stomach. Half her head, right arm and shoulder dangled over the edge, Smog swirling below and angry crimson lights raging around her.

  The pressure dug into her wounded ankle and she wanted to scream, but the air had already been knocked from her lungs by the weight pinning her down. All that came out was a strangled squeak. Despite her mind running in disorganized snapshots, she maintained a firm grip on her gun, instinctively understanding that her life depended on it.

  The weight on her back shifted and a bloodied hand reached out to pull on her gun. She gripped it harder and squirmed, boots scraping for purchase on the flat rubber plates, but lacked the strength to break free from the body pinning her down.

  Smoker.

  The insight flashed bright as fireworks as she kept struggling, gasping for air. Manifested in midair. Above me. Escape was her only option.

  She didn’t let go of the gun. The struggle ripped her suit more, duct-taped seams coming apart with a wet swishing sound. She lifted her head to get a visual on one of her escape spheres. Smoker’s other hand shot out and pulled hard on the gas mask. His fingers smeared blood all over the lenses, distorting her vision. The dislocated respirator blocked her airways. She wheezed and opened her mouth to plead. What came out was a croaky garble. No words.

  He released a slow, purposeful hiss while closing the fingers of his left hand around her neck. “Gentleman was looking forward to this. The smug piece of shit wouldn’t let me kill you before you made your move.”

  His warm blood dropped onto her neck and arm. His right hand kept pulling on the gun without getting a firm hold. She was painfully aware of the turtle pendant beneath her shirt, its small metal dome cutting into the skin of her chest as she wrenched her body from side to side. Her lungs screamed for air. Flecks of white now joined the red and the darkness that clogged her vision.

  “If you don’t want to choke to death,” he snarled, “let go of the damned gun.”

  Shoot him. Now!

  Gathering what remained of her strength, Wisp pulled on her weapon as hard as she could, which wasn’t very hard at all. She managed to tilt the muzzle part of the way toward her attacker, aiming it back against him and herself both without knowing what she pointed it at. Her index finger scraped against the trigger, trembling too hard and positioned the wrong way to pull it.

  Smoker snarled a curse and his left hand came away from her neck. The number of fingers working to pry the gun from her increased, forcing her to grip it with both hands instead of straightening the dislocated mask. Breathing didn’t become easier. The mask meant to save her life was suffocating her. The white flecks i
n her vision danced faster and harder, telling her that she was going to die, die, die.

  Her strength drained away when a voice shouted something she couldn’t understand, floating toward her not from above but from somewhere far away. Not Smoker. Who, then?

  Her snapshot thoughts whirled in confusion, barely on this side of consciousness. A dull thud sounded nearby. Smoker cursed, then cursed again as the sound repeated itself with extra oomph. Something hard and heavy came crashing down next to Wisp, causing a cascade of vibrations across the plastic roofing.

  “The fuck,” Smoker said, the distraction loosening his grip on the gun.

  Sensing the lapse in concentration, Wisp did the one thing her fading consciousness still clung to: she pulled on the weapon with everything she had and was rewarded with it coming loose from Smoker’s grip. She still couldn’t see a damn thing but his next curse told her where his head was. Not giving him a chance to react, she threw her hand back over her head, aiming in his general direction, and pulled the trigger.

  The bang smacked her eardrums as hard as a jackhammer and the kickback ripped through her already weakened muscles, tearing the gun from her hands. All sound had been sucked out of the world, transformed into a persistent ringing in her ears that brought back the nausea in force.

  She gagged, the taste of vomit filled her mouth, and she fought to keep her stomach down while ripping the gas mask off her face. It came off quite easily, allowing the summer air to flow through her airways and bring her back from the brink of death. The mask dropped at her feet and was forgotten the instant it slipped from her fingers.

  Breathing felt awesome. Every breath she took helped clear her mind of the fog that had clouded it, although her vision remained fuzzy and everything around her was shades of gray, none of them moving. She barely registered that her fireflies, spinning around her in a compact swarm looked a little less red. The ringing in her ears made it hard to form complex thoughts.