Kitabı oku: «Scarred»

~ 2 ~

Whizz! So far, so good, right?

Wrong. A little Verity-fact that just loomed kind of large: I can't fly.

I'm called the Seeker. I'm telekinetic, which might sound like some kind of psychic horror-film ooga-booga, but forcebending augments like mine are more physics than magic. Sure, I can fling myself through windows, but to do that, I rely on boring everyday things like inertia and centripetal force and the difference between up and down. When falling time comes? All I can do is hold on, and hope.

On the way up, I pulled my pistol—d'you think I blunder around unarmed? I'm augmented, not stupid—and put two quick shots into the giant clerestory window. Crack-crack! Twin starbursts erupted in the glass. I barely had time to stuff the weapon back under my coat before I smashed in, shoulder first.

Boom! The damaged glass shattered. Splinters stung my face, clinging to my hair and all over my clothes. And I hurtled out into the chilly October night.

Skyscrapers, traffic lights, virtual advertising flashing amid swirling searchlights and smoke. Sirens wailed, and distant weapons cracked, a spurt of gunfire. Just another night in Sapphire City: choose your weapon, watch your back, and check your civil rights at the door. That's what you get for electing Razorfire to City Hall. Yeah. Nice one. Hooray for democracy.

I grabbed an exposed metal strut with my power, and pulled. My elastic grip stretched, and contracted like an angry bungee cord, and slammed me sideways into the outside wall.

My breath crushed to a whimper, and for a moment I dangled there, gasping, sixty feet above nothing.

Gradually, I found my breath. Climbed down, hand over hand, along rain gutters and metal joints. Jumped the last twenty feet, landed on my own invisible bouncy castle of force and hop-skip-stumbled to the ground.

Paved garden courtyard, prissy fountain bubbling in the center, iron fence at the far end, and beyond it, the street. Inside, alarms still shrieked, but this part of the wall was opaque. The goons couldn't see me. Heh. Catch ya later, goons. Nice messing with you.

I dusted rueful hands on my swallow-tailed coat. Well, that was a bust. Villains: 1, Verity: nil.

But my nerves tingled eagerly, and my muscles hurt with that pleasant ache you get after some tough exercise, or really great sex. I wriggled my thighs, ready for another round. Damn, it felt amazing to use my power again. Adonis didn't let me out alone much anymore, and since that little fiasco a few months back atop the old FortuneCorp skyscraper, Adonis's word was law. I didn't get a say in it. Boy, was he gonna tear strips off me when I got home.

I shuddered. I'm not afraid of Adonis. Not exactly. Too much fond sibling contempt between us for that. Doesn't mean his furious ice-emperor act is something I look forward to.

A homeless guy in an old Nazi trench coat squatted by the fountain on a cardboard sheet. Pigeons pecked for crumbs on the paving around him. He peered at me, scratching his greasy head. "Fuck was that? You a goddamn alien?"

I flipped him a live-long-and-prosper salute. "I come in peace, earthling! You seen my spaceship? Thought I parked it around here someplace."

The old dude shook his head sagely. "Nuh-uh. Prob'ly they towed it. Goddamn penny-pinching assholes."

"Too right," I said, but he'd already fallen asleep.

I wiped blood from my chin, spat out a shard of broken tooth, and sucked on my injured tongue. Ouch. Those two mouthy tweens would pay for this.

If I ever saw them again, that was. If I could even figure out who Blue Dreads and Guyliner were. These days, new villains sprouted all over Sapphire City like warts, egged on or chased from hiding or just plain pissed off by our esteemed new mayor's crackdown on the augmented. Insects, most of 'em. Vermin, not worth breaking a sweat over. But these grungy kids with their oddly identical powers bothered me. They drifted in my head, the ghostly remnants of a bad dream.

Especially the girl. Those hollow cheekbones and bruised zombie eyes. Something about her felt wrong.

I spared a brief thought for Sparkly, probably cuffed in talent-draining augmentium alloy with blood running from his ears right now. I'd appreciated his talent, his hubris, his glitter-quick reflexes. Our side could've used more guys like him. I even felt a twinge of shame that I'd abandoned a fellow augment to face the heat, even if he was Gallery. Like me, he was just making a living.

But inwardly, I shrugged, his defeat both salty and sweet in my mouth. Shared adversity doesn't make us pals. You make your bed, you die in it, you black-hearted Gallery shitweed.

I peeled off my black leather mask and stowed it in my trouser pocket. Dipped my hands in the fountain, splashed my bloodied face clean. Shook the drips back into my ponytailed hair, and strolled out onto the street.

Cool nighttime air refreshed me. It was late, but traffic still streaked by: silent yellow electric cabs, smart cars, SUVs, a golden stretch Humvee. A kid whistled past me on a scooter. A trolley car rattled along its tracks, lights flickering over the few passengers inside. Late-working office jockeys strode the sidewalk, briefcases and tablets tucked under their arms. A homeless guy wearing a tattered football jersey rattled a paper cup for change beside pasted bills for theatre shows and “occupy” demonstrations and a splurt of all-too-familiar crimson spray-painted graffiti.

BURN IT ALL

Dizziness waltzed in my skull, the giddy specter of half-forgotten fever. Razorfire's catchphrase. What would he think of me now? I'd screwed up the simplest job, been taken unawares by a pair of joy-riding boy- band fans. I cringed. Jeez, how humiliating…

Mentally, I smacked myself upside the head. Verity, the only thing he'd care about is that you attacked one of his crew. He's your enemy. He will peel your skin off. Forget him.

Forget him.

Right.

Razorfire's gorgeous scent dizzies me, mint and fire and dark delight, and I can't help but inhale. Swallow, gulp for more, my body yearning to drink him in. His flame licks my bruised cheek, both threat and promise. I flush, mortified. I don't deserve this. I don't deserve him…

Fiercely, I blinked, and the memory splintered and whirled away, leaving only fresh-sliced pain in my temples. Fuck it. The flashbacks of my evil ex-lover—yeah, long and gruesome story—were growing less frequent, easier to banish. But the guilty twist in my guts didn't ease.

Wanna know a secret? It never does. Not for one goddamn second.

Sure, Razorfire tricked me, playing twisted psychological games until my mind snapped. That didn't excuse how I'd acted, or the suffering my twisted infatuation had caused. Adonis had tried to have me treated and it badly backfired. My father and sister were dead, my family in hiding. I had a lot to make up for.

I glanced about for Sentinels, those sneaky augment-detecting gadgets that were bolted to every lamp post in the city these days, or so it seemed. Razorfire's plan since he'd been elected mayor had been inscrutable, to say the least.

In his public persona, he was all keep the streets safe and prosecute to the full extent of the law and no tolerance for violent criminals. Yet every once in a while, he'd climb into his crimson silk archvillain suit and mask, and burn some neighborhood to a smoking ruin. Post threatening videos on the internet. Ratchet the tension higher, let the police department and the district attorney's office take the heat (heh) and generally stir up a furious hornet's nest of violence and fear.

Look, there was a Sentinel: a smug silvery cylinder mounted ten feet up on a building's corner, silently blinking its incriminating red light at me. I flipped it the bird. Detect this, you metal moron.

Across the sidewalk, an office worker in a slim-cut suit did a double-take, and made a move inside his jacket. Sigh. Seriously: a gun? Are they arming metrosexuals now? Stop, or I'll order decaf!

I didn't pause. I just pointed into his face as I walked by, and gave him my best Dirty Harry impression. "You really wanna test me, punk?"

He scuttled backwards, dropping his computer case, hands raised in peace. Heh. Must have my angry face on today.

In my pocket, my phone's message tone chimed. Whatever. Probably Adonis wondering where the hell I was. Or Glimmer, texting me a dose of the guilts because he imagined I was drinking myself horny in some seedy Castro Street bar, and of course he'd never do anything so grotesquely banal and ordinary as get drunk and laid, because he was Glimmer and he was too damn perfect and jeez, when did I turn into such a jealous little worm?

I sighed, rubbing the dented scar on my cheekbone. A headache swelled like a tumor deep in my skull, threatening murder. Hell, I wanted a drink and a cigarette, even though I'd never been much of a drinker and I didn't like the smell of tobacco smoke. What I needed was food and sleep. I should go home, as far as “home” went these days, now that FortuneCorp were in hiding and Glimmer's secret techno-lair was a crispy barbecue and Sentinels mined half the city's streets into a no-hero zone.

But I needed to salvage something from tonight. Prove I hadn't simply screwed up, hadn't let those villains escape out of carelessness, that my power was reliable and strong. Or hell, I might as well rock on down to Castro Street right now and order a triple brainfuck with a twist of sordid.

Belligerent, I squared my shoulders. I didn't give a moldy fart for Sentinels or cops or vigilante office boys. What were they gonna do, shoot me? I'd survived that before. Anyway, my altercation with Sparkly and the twin tweens had set off every alarm in that building. The entire world already knew I was here.

So I strolled across the courtyard to the museum's main entrance, and kicked the door in.

Crash! Boot mixed with mindmuscle, unstoppable. The revolving door buckled like a crushed beer can. I cracked my neck, satisfied. Damn. Someone fetch me that cigarette.

I hurled the wreckage aside and strode into the tiled lobby, where a weird marble statue resembling a gigantic pink horse turd squatted on a pillar.

A black-uniformed security guard challenged me. I flung up one hand and hurled him against the wall, pinning him under the chin with an invisible grip. His handgun clattered to the tiles. The mega-turd teetered and crashed to the floor, a clatter of broken marble. Oops. Performance art.

"Where's the CCTV, idiot?" Blood pounded in my temples, nearly drowning out the sound of my voice. I was in the clear, unmasked. I didn't care. Let the world look at my scars. Let them see me as I truly am.

Glimmer once told me his mask was his true face. That it wasn't a disguise, but a confession. For me, it's the other way around. My mask is unsullied, fit for public consumption. The face underneath… on my bad days? Not so much. And the physical scars—my souvenir of that hellhole of an asylum, courtesy of my well-meaning asshole of a brother—are the pretty part.

The security guy wasn't dumb enough to play the hero. He jerked his head towards a locked door, his throat bobbing as he tried to swallow.

I let him fall undamaged and stepped over him as he gurgled for breath. Heh. Dumb enough to play the hero. There's a lesson we could all learn.

I smashed the security office door open. Old-school video screens, surveillance-camera footage of darkened museum rooms and corridors. In the room where I'd fought the tweens, a battalion of guards and cops and rented heavies were arresting Sparkly and reading him what was left of his rights. From the black-and-bloodied look of his face, they'd left out the “we can't beat the snot out of you while you're restrained” part.

I leveled my pistol at the only guard inside the CCTV room. Chesty young blond, biceps like turnips stuffed up his shirtsleeves. His sidearm lay on the bench. Bad choice, Turnip Man.

His ice-chip eyes widened, and one hand strayed to the can of pepper spray at his belt.

I thumbed the safety off, pulling three pounds on a four-pound trigger. My hands were shaking as badly as my voice. I was weary, hungry, pissed off. "Just try me, moron. See what happened to that window? Imagine what I can do to your skull. We understand each other?"