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 in 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.

Did I kill him?

After another moment of breathing and fighting down the nausea, Wisp rolled to the side and pushed against the heavy weight on her back until it became lopsided and the pressure on her lessened. She crawled out from underneath it, sliding away from the edge of the roof on her hands and knees.

Having freed herself, she stared at the limp, man-sized shape while her vision recovered and the white specks faded away. The villain lay sprawled on his side, draped across the bloodstained roofing like a broken mannequin. The right rear portion of his head was missing and a dark puddle had formed around it.

I did it.

There should have been relief, a burst of elation – a sense of accomplishment at least. Instead, Wisp felt absolutely nothing. It was as if a door had opened up inside of her, showing her the horrors of a near-death experience, and then slammed shut so tight nothing could penetrate the cracks. Instead, she had a nagging feeling she was forgetting something important.

How far will you go to protect what you hold dear?

No, not that. But the villain wasn’t going away. He swam around inside her head, displacing other thoughts as he moved. Snickering his approval at what she’d done.

Will you kill, and kill again once you discover the efficacy of death?

Go away, go away, go away

I’m forgetting something.

Murder weapon.

Her gun?

She located the gun near the body and picked it up. But why were there fist-sized rocks strewn about the roof, all of them clustered near her and the dead villain? The vague sense of forgetting something important became a nagging impulse and the memory snapped back into her consciousness.

Thud. Something had distracted Smoker, enabling her to get the upper-hand in a critical moment. The rocks? Had someone thrown them?

Wisp glanced around the rooftop before shifting her attention to other nearby buildings. She located the escape beacon she had positioned on top of the residential building across the street, a small apricot star now shifting back toward crimson. Spirals of Smog wafted around it. An impossibility, considering that the other building was as tall as the one she was standing on. She traced the outline of the Smog-shrouded roof to a human figure, dressed in a taped together suit like hers and waving his arms in what looked like a desperate attempt to catch her attention.

What the … Luca?

Confusion crashed over her like a bucket of ice-cold water. She waved back, calling out to him as loudly as her bruised throat allowed. The roar of Cathedral bells booming in her ears drowned out everything else. And as if the situation wasn’t bewildering enough, the gas mask covering Luca’s face made it impossible to read his expression.

His gesticulation shifted from waving his hands over his head to firmly pointing at the sky. When she looked up in the indicated direction, she blinked, hard.

A floating man hung in the air above the dead villain, a myriad of silver ribbons flowing out from behind him on a current of air that defied physics and formed a semblance of wings. A skintight black costume covered the man’s athletic body, and small adornments in the shape of angel wings framed the Venetian mask that concealed the upper half of his face. He was looking at her and his lips were moving, shaping words she couldn’t hear or understand. When he finished talking, his mouth set in a hard, angry line.

She saw herself the way he must have seen her right then: a girl on a rooftop, clad in the torn, bloodstained remains of a cheap and poorly designed villain costume. A gun in her hand and the corpse of an unarmed man without costume at her feet. She would have looked suspicious in anyone’s eyes. Except this wasn’t just anyone.

The distinctive black and silver outfit identified the new arrival as the Dark Angel Samael, the air-based Evoker who had been Radiant’s rival among the Covenant heroes.

The one hero who, according to headlines and Evolved analysts, enjoyed killing the bad guys a little too much.

As Wisp stood there staring at the floating hero, a knot untied itself inside her chest and the fear she thought she’d defeated came flooding back, filling the void of numbness she’d been carrying inside of her for the past few minutes. An image of the gun in her hand popped into her frozen mind, spurring her into reflex action. She dropped the weapon for the second time, desperate to show her harmless and perfectly good intentions, and even managed to raise her hands part way.

Too late.

A split second before the gun hit the roof, the air burst in a silent thunderclap of violent energy, knocking her backward with tremendous force. The city lights tilted around her and the air whipped past her body. The world unraveled as if in slow motion, the purplish-black sky reeling and crimson lights whirling around her. A strange lightness settled in her stomach and she held on to her fear, using it to sharpen her mental focus.

She was dropping. She had dropped before. She knew how to drop.

The instant she felt herself tumbling downward instead of in reverse, Wisp shifted her weight so she was facing down, a river of Smog raging below. The toxic vapors rushed toward her as much as she dropped toward them, curling upward as if to extend a welcome. She was falling. The firefly swarm ahead of her as she fell, cutting a passage through the Smog right before she traversed it.

Then, a split second before she hit the ground, she swapped herself with one of her lights, breaking the momentum of her fall. Softening it. She failed to land on her feet, but instead of slamming into the pavement with the force of a hurled projectile, she dropped three meters before landing on her hands and knees.

It still wasn’t pretty. The impact rattled her through and through, triggering a stab of agony so intense she cried out. The pain raced through every bone in her body, and her already injured ankle twisted, unable to withstand the weight of her body. Tears welled up in her eyes and her vision blurred yet again.

Somehow, she managed to roll onto her back, easing the strain on her knees and ankle. The rough pavement bit through the tattered remains of her Smog suit. The stabbing pain made it difficult to pay attention to anything else.

Smog billowed around her, barely restrained by the myriad of floating lights that were keeping her company. It appeared so close she thought she could touch it with her outstretched hand. She felt it bite into her exposed skin, corroding her flesh at a snail’s pace because the presence of her lights made direct contact impossible. Without direct contact the process could take hours, or so the experts on the radio claimed.

She couldn’t get up. She tried, but every time she put any weight on her ankle, the pain became unbearable and her body refused to heave itself off the ground, sagging back down.

Not that it mattered. Samael was nearby, and given the number of glowing orbs surrounding her, he’d likely locate her without too much trouble. Grant her a quick death if she was lucky and leave her to decompose in the Smog.

Her mind drifted back to Luca. Had he lied about going to collect some things from home so he could come after and support her? It seemed exactly like the kind of irrational, selfless, completely crazy thing he’d do. Thinking of him warmed her from the inside out, then settled a calmness over her, and reduced her pain to bearable levels. She tried not to breathe because the Smog-induced dizziness made it hard to think. Keep thinking. Of him, of the others. Keep her consciousness from slipping away.

Now that she had stopped trying to get up, the Smog came alive and began to move. Formed the shapes she had seen down in the warehouse basement, and more. They kept their distance except for the one that rose up right in front of her, stocky and broad-shouldered, the vapors shaping its body so thick it almost seemed solid. The face, a blur of indistinct features. Then she recognized the bonnet on his head and a new surge of nausea swept over her.

This isn’t possible. She had to be hallucinating. Wishful thinking on the brink of death.

“Dad?” she said.

The smoky figure shuddered in response. The yellow-orange vapors that made up its torso dissolved and flowed upward, forming the likeness of an arm and a hand being raised in a military salute. Wisp spent a long, otherworldly moment staring at the Dad-like apparition, overwhelmed with a torrent of emotions that hit her like an electrical charge. She wanted to laugh at the mad absurdity of it all. Cry in despair and relief because after a year of uncertainty and doubt, she had finally found her answer.

Her father was here. He had been here this whole time, and now he was free to leave.

She raised her own hand to return the salute and held it. It might have been a figment of her imagination or an echo of brainwaves that had been extinguished long ago, but the gesture meant the world to her. It legitimized everything she’d done for the past year and gave her a sense of accomplishment that had been missing until now.

Thanks, Dad. Goodbye.

She had almost forgotten about the superhero when a strong wind blew from the sky above, rising with a gust so powerful it knocked her flat on the ground and whipped her hair around her face. She held her breath, flinging both arms over her face to protect it from the avalanche of Smog that rushed past her, its intense stench stinging her nostrils and making her eyes water. In her mind, she created a sanctuary containing everyone she cared about, the dead and the living alike. A treasury of affection to keep her company in the afterlife. She awaited the end with the stoic fatalism of a soldier trapped in a foxhole far behind enemy lines.

Except the end didn’t come.

The wind subsided, and after a few moments, she lifted her arms from her face to see the superhero, Samael, floating in front of her. The many wing-like ribbons fanning out behind him streamed in a steady current, shimmering like silver in the pale moonlight even though the air was perfectly still. The eyes behind his wing-framed mask considered her coolly and without anger. He was holding her gun in one hand, but kept it pointed at the ground.

The firefly spheres encased her body as a compact, a spinning swarm of thumbnail-sized lights. They shone a pallid shade of green with only the slightest hint of yellow. Wisp blinked the tears from her eyes, trying and failing to remember the last time they had shown her any semblance of green.

None of it made any sense. This time, she had to be hallucinating for real. The hero had knocked her off the roof of a five-story building, and she didn’t think he had expected her to survive the drop. He must’ve come to finish her off.

Luca stepped into her field of vision, still wrapped in his makeshift Smog suit without the gas mask to conceal his face, and everything fell into place.

He was looking at her and his lips were moving, making her wish that she could hear his voice. He rushed to her side and fell to his knees. His gloved fingers interlocked with hers, and she tried on a smile for his sake. He didn’t smile back. He kept talking and talking in what appeared to be fast, frenetic phrases, but the words were directed at the superhero, not at her.

She didn’t need to understand him to know what he was doing. He held on to her hand and caressed her fingers, his expression soft, and his eyes gentle. Letting her know without words that he was defending her. Explaining the situation and answering the questions she could not.

She struggled to sit up, choking down the pain that raged through her body, and gaped at the floating hero. “I can explain everything,” she said. “I just can’t hear very well right now.”

Samael acknowledged her with a nod. He said something to Luca before launching himself back into the night sky, silver ribbons trailing behind his sleek receding form. He must be scouting the vicinity before he went to investigate the warehouse.

I’ve done my part, it’s up to the Covenant now.

Relief enveloped Wisp like a warm blanket. The pent-up adrenaline left her body and she shook, fatigue seeping through every bone and muscle that wasn’t hurting like hell. The air smelled wonderful and she drank it in in long, satisfying gulps. There wasn’t a trace of Smog in it.

Luca brushed the hair from her face and leaned in close. His breath tickled her cheek. “It’s all right now. The Covenant got the pictures you took with the drone camera.” From this close up, the low rumble of his voice barely penetrated the cacophony in her skull.

“I think my hearing is coming back,” she said. “I don’t think I can walk, though.”

He lifted her onto his back, giving her a moment to find the least painful position and she wrapped her arms around his neck. Feeling him this close was new. Even though the pressure of being held so tight sent a jagged jolt through her knees and ankle, it drove home the understanding that she had survived. They had survived.

She relaxed against him, all the accumulated tension from the past two days rushing out of her in an instant. The fatigue that came afterward left her dazed with a sense of falling down an endless black well. She barely registered Luca’s movement as he staggered to his feet, lifting her up with him. The well’s darkness pricked at the edges of the consciousness. The stabbing ache in her body kept her from hitting the bottom and passing out.

“I saw my dad,” she mumbled against Luca’s neck.

He said something, the words drowned out by the bells inside her head. His fingers found a spot on her thigh that didn’t hurt and squeezed it gently.

“Thanks,” she said through the tightness in her throat. “For coming after I told you not to.”

Step by step they swayed through the darkness together, a friend unit that felt complete without the need to communicate. Wisp kept her eyes shut so she couldn’t accidentally look at herself. Her Smog suit was coming apart, revealing more of herself than she wanted to see. Her skin appeared red and swollen and the skin around her ankle had been corroded to the bone.

Instead, she directed her thoughts forward. Her future was a big blank, with many uncertainties and pitfalls. She had not only crossed the world’s most powerful group of supervillains, but also robbed a bank, resisted arrest by sanctioned heroes and shot a man in the head. Questions would be asked and investigations made. Even if she explained everything, there was no guarantee the UNEOA wasn’t going to slap her with the villain label and issue an execution order. Villains were on the rise and the world was falling into chaos. She didn’t expect leniency from anyone out there.

Especially not from the Conglomerate. Something told her that the villains would be on her track, and probably her doorstep not long after.

That was okay, because she was no longer afraid. The curse of uncertainty had been lifted from her shoulders, and the memory of her father’s final salute burned bright in her soul. She was ready to move on to wherever her life took her next.

With luck, she might figure out her place in the world after all.

EPILOGUE

“Wisp has her kiddie gang. The Sun King has his court. You fly around and tell people to work together, and in return they all gather around you. Moths to a flame and all that. It’s like you’re a beacon or something.”

Mascot, to Radiant

The Dead City gate, a tall arch made of stainless steel, painted red and yellow and decorated with string lights that glowed a pale gold in the predawn gloom, loomed ahead. Beyond it, almost within earshot but still out of sight, was a police-controlled checkpoint guarding access to the traffic artery that used to connect the city of Berlin to its southern suburbs. Wisp didn’t need to approach the checkpoint to know it was there. A barrage of radio broadcasts and air-dropped flyers pointed to its location.

And for those who had somehow missed the evacuation order and the instructions, large neon-colored signs and posters had been put up on the walls and lampposts approaching the gate. A medley of smiling faces and catchy slogans that promised a better future to any would-be evacuees.

“So it’s back to the other world,” Hannah said through a wistful smile. She was leaning on Luca for support, one arm draped over his shoulders while holding on to a lamppost with her other hand.

“Yeah, I guess,” Wisp said.

From her vantage point on Max’s back, the gate lights appeared as a luminescent haze of colors, a beautiful aurora borealis beckoning her to come closer. Unfortunately, she was in no condition to walk, and while the painkillers helped, they dulled her senses to a soft blur. The ringing in her ears had lessened to a low buzz that might never go away completely.

“How do you feel about going back?” Luca asked with a mellowness that made her wish he was carrying her instead. He had offered it, too, but she’d been too ashamed of her own weakness to accept.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Thanks for coming along, though. You didn’t have to. I mean, Samael only ordered me to report to the gate post.”

Sara, flanking Max as always, set her bag of portable belongings down on the pavement to give a double thumbs up. “Survivors forever,” she declared.

Back to the other world. It’s weird, but it had to happen someday.

To Wisp, the lights ahead meant a chance to rest. To eat her first cheeseburger in more than a year, watch some television, and then curl up somewhere quiet to catch up on mourning her dad. A prison cell would be fine. And she was going to enjoy the heck out of that cheeseburger.

As for this city, it no longer felt like home or even a place to return to. Her only wish was that the others could come along.

On the other side of the gate, police with armored vehicles and an entire contingent of disaster relief personnel would be awaiting her. Government officials who would ask her name and perhaps have her arrested on the spot. As of right now, she couldn’t see them and they couldn’t see her, but if she went any closer, her entire group would be questioned and photographed and dragged back into the real world.

There was no need for her friends to endure the spotlight. They’d be able to slip away and start a new life without making headlines and, more importantly, without becoming targets for villain retaliation.

“Anyway,” Wisp gave Max a weak pat on the head, “this is far enough. You can put me down here.”

“I’m not just going to leave you on the street,” he said, gently pushing her hand away. “You’re hurt, so we’re taking you to the gate. They’ve got a doctor over there.”

“But–” Wisp said.

“I’m coming with you,” Luca said, causing her heart to skip a beat and sink with worry at the same time.

“I’m coming, too,” Hannah declared with a cheeky grin. “Got some pretty damn good reasons, too.”

“Wait, stop.” Wisp made a cutting motion with her hand, and winced at the pain she was causing herself. “Aren’t you wanted by the police, Hannah? Because of all that stuff you pulled a while back?”

“I don’t think that old stuff matters anymore,” Sara said.

“It probably does.” Hannah rubbed her nose and squinted. “Thing is, I helped a superheroine liberate the city and get rid of the stinky shit. Something none of the big damn heroes managed to do. That should amount to something like a pardon, especially after the headlines start popping up and the interview requests come rolling in.”

“Except no one is going to tell the story that way,” Wisp said. “We’re just a bunch of kids who finally decided to leave the city after the Covenant came in for cleanup.”

Hannah shrugged. “Says who? We’re the only witnesses who know what actually happened. Samael lit a fire under Constantine’s ass, I bet, but he didn’t see shit.”

“She has a point,” Luca said. “The news folks are always hungry for a story. We just have to be the first ones who tell it.”

Wisp took a moment to process the thought, trying on the idea and testing it for flaws. There would be headlines, yes, she just wasn’t convinced they’d be favorable and flattering. Mass media had a habit of choosing whichever viewpoint resonated with their audience. Playing the superhero card was a coin toss at best.

“You can be my official sidekick if that’s what you really want,” Wisp said. “The thing is, we don’t know if anyone at all is going to see me as a heroine, and Gentleman basically threatened to do horrible things to everyone close to me. I don’t want to drag you guys down with me.”

Hannah gave a snort. “This isn’t just about you or any of us, it’s about Constantine. So the hero said he’d have C arrested, but then what? Let’s face it, I’m in the best position to get him convicted for the shit he’s pulled, and I’m not about to let the bastard walk away from this.”

“Point taken,” Wisp said. “I’d like to see him put on trial, too.”

But is witness protection going to keep the villains from hunting us down? Wisp bit her lip and lowered her eyes. The turtle charm felt warm against her skin, a reminder of a promise not yet fulfilled. The house of cards she had built as a home for the others had collapsed. Making herself a target of villain retaliation put them in danger just for sticking with her.

If I was an actual heroine…  

Luca flicked a finger at himself. “Guess who’s in the best position to convince the folks out there you’re an actual heroine? I’ve seen your fight with Smoker, and I know the bullet was self-defense. I’m not going to let you walk the plank on your own.”

Wisp peered at her best friend over the top of Max’s head. The sharpness of his features had softened and he smiled at her, seeming more at ease than she had seen him in years.

Looks like I’ve exorcized both our ghosts. She grinned at him, glad for the chance to keep him in her life and maybe find a future they’d both end up in together. Their ghosts and their grief had prevented them from committing to anything but day-to-day needs. With both gone, maybe something good would grow in their place.

Fingers crossed.

“Thanks, Luca,” she said in a soft voice. “Aren’t you afraid of being forced to live with your mother and stepfather?”

He shrugged, averting her eyes. “I’m turning eighteen in October. Guess I’ll just have to request witness protection from the police.”

Hannah glanced between Luca and Wisp, rubbing her hands together with a knowing grin on her face.

“It’s decided then,” Max said. “We’re going. All of us.”

He pushed forward, Sara falling into step so seamlessly she had to be in on whatever the two of them were planning.

“Whoa, Max, hold on! What about Sara’s legal guardians?” Wisp punched his shoulder without slowing him down. Behind her, Luca and Hannah limped along at a slower pace, but they were definitely coming.

“Headlines,” Max said without slowing down.

The steel arch of Dead City’s gate fast approached, and a group of staff in uniforms – medical services, police and the army – appeared behind it, bathed in the soft glow of its golden chain lights. The only media in sight were equipped with cameras. Two men and a woman in Bundeswehr army uniforms split off from the main group and passed the gate, approaching the Survivors.

“What headlines?” Wisp deflated in an attempt to provide less of a target for the cameras.

“Publicity.” Max gave a curt nod. “People are going to ask why a thirteen-year-old girl would rather stay in that place than return to her family. I’m planning to tell them all about it.”

“If that doesn’t work out,” Sara added while ambling along, “then that witness protection thing sounds pretty good to me, too.”

A uniformed woman stepped in front of Max and Wisp. She wore no weapons and her gray jacket sported the insignia of an officer.

“Nicoletta Gehring?” the woman asked.

The blood drained from Wisp’s face. The sound of her own name rang false to her, and the ringing in her ears rose to a crescendo that drowned out all other sounds. Then a friendly hand clasped her own, and her identity came rushing back with the force of a freight train. She was surrounded by four people who believed in her, and she could think of one more person who’d most likely do the same.

“I’m the superheroine Wisp,” she declared with all the dignity she could muster, “and I’d like to request access to a phone.”

The officer gave a decisive nod. “Would you like to call your family?”

Call what family? They’re right here with me.

“No,” Wisp said, her voice growing louder and more clear. “The Covenant heroine, Athena. She’s expecting my call.”

The End
  
  

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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 sad 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.”
  
  

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Wisp kept her eyes behind the gas mask’s lenses locked on his, hoping that he wouldn’t ask too many questions about the backpack, the massive firefly swarm or the gun she wasn’t even trying to keep concealed anymore. He glanced at the holster with fleeting interest. Still not taking her seriously, she supposed.

“Why do you need a backpack?” he asked, lifting a suspicious finger at it.

She managed a wicked little grin and a shrug. “The bank money is in there. Didn’t want to leave it with the other guys; they could try to return it or something.”

He paused, studying her expression before nodding. “You better hope it’s airtight, then.”

Smoker didn’t expect her to be carrying grenades. Of course he didn’t. Had she not known better, she wouldn’t have expected a teenage girl to have access to live explosives and knowledge on how to handle them, either.

“I put the bills into plastic bags,” she said in a decidedly neutral tone. “Can we go, then? I’m tired and would really like to get some sleep afterward.”

“Sure.” He strode off at a brisk pace, as if challenging her to keep up in her restrictive suit.

It wasn’t much of a challenge. Whenever she started to lag behind, she sent one of her firefly’s ahead and swapped positions with it, placing herself a few steps ahead of Smoker until he passed her again. Their walking together was a formality. They both knew where to go and would have gotten there faster if they’d used their powers. Wisp didn’t ask why the villain insisted on doing the fifteen-minute journey on foot. Maybe he had been instructed to keep her under constant surveillance until they finished their business at the warehouse, or he simply enjoyed making her hop along.

She didn’t care either way. All that mattered to her was to debunk the mystery of the Smog’s source and eliminate it, if possible. Finding a way to deal with Smoker without getting herself killed or any more of her friends hurt, or to get the heroes involved if her efforts turned out to be a belly flop.

But as she moved deeper into the northeastern reaches of Dead City, closer to where she had first encountered Smoker and Hannah had been spooked by ghostly apparitions, she found herself thinking less about the challenges ahead and more about Hannah’s ghosts. The longer she considered the idea of supernatural entities whose emergence was linked to the Smog, the more plausible it became. Because when Smoker had her trapped within his deadly circle of Smog, she had seen something in the twisting vapors. Something or someone had reached out toward her as if to communicate. And if the villain hadn’t created the spooky ghost train effect to mess with Wisp, as she’d first suspected, then… who had?

Each and every possible solution sent a shiver down her spine.

Smoker provided no answers to any of her pondering. The next time he spoke up, they were within a stone’s throw from the warehouse Wisp had tried to investigate the night before. Like then, thick drifts of shadowy Smog swirled behind the office windows but did not spill out onto the gloomy street. It appeared strangely agitated. The way it twisted and writhed reminded Wisp of an animal trapped behind a glass case.

“Follow right behind me and don’t wander off,” Smoker said as he marched toward the main entrance. “It’ll be perfectly safe if you stay close.”

I wouldn’t be wearing a full-body raincoat if it were safe. She hugged the small nylon backpack to her chest. After a deep breath filtered through her gas mask, she loosened her grip on the explosive cargo and trotted behind Smoker. Upon his approach, the Smog rolled away from his slender shape as if he emanated an unseen force.

By the time Wisp stepped through the door the villain had opened for her, the lobby was already completely free of Smog, though she didn’t feel safe enough to lift the gas mask from her face. Her bustling firefly swarm illuminated a lavish faux wood reception desk set with several model cars, the only elements still hinting at the former installation. The remainder of the room was piled with plastic crates and metal barrels Wisp assumed to contain supplies Constantine had no urgent need of.

Smoker moved straight toward an open passage leading to the adjoining hallway, kicking up pieces of Smog-corroded carpet with every stride. Wisp followed close behind. They made their way past rows of decommissioned vehicles, stacked jerry cans and what appeared to be ammunition crates, a conglomeration of potential explosives waiting for ignition. Wisp hoped with all her heart that she’d no longer be present when and if the place blew up; the sight of all that dangerous cargo made her uncomfortably aware of the pair of grenades she was carrying in her backpack.

Her destination was made clear when Smoker headed downstairs. Thin drifts of Smog slithered their way up from the bottom of the staircase, unable or unwilling to withdraw deeper into the bowels of the building. Her light swarm dispersed the ones that got too close. The change in Smog density told her something she hadn’t yet considered.

“Wait,” she told the villain as she clamored down the stairs after him. “Is the basement connected to the sewers?”

“It wasn’t initially. We poked some holes in the walls.” Smoker stopped at the bottom of the stairs and pulled on a heavy-looking door that was already cracked open, a dense curtain of Smog visible behind the crack.

Why? Wisp almost asked, but then the door swung the rest of the way open and the question clogged in her throat. Because she was seeing ghosts. Right beyond the doorstep. A myriad of volatile, shifting shapes, composed of Smog but distinctly humanoid. Their features – faces, hair, the appropriation of clothing – formed and dissipated in the blink of an eye, but the overall body shapes remained persistent enough to identify them as male or female. There were children among them. Two or three at least, their smaller forms sprinkled in among the others.

The sheer impossibility of the situation made Wisp’s head spin. Dizziness tugged at her equilibrium and her mouth fell open, belatedly remembering to suck air through the gas mask filter. Sure, she had seen – or believed to have seen – shapes in the Smog before, but not ones like these. The apparitions in front of her resembled actual people. She could have sworn that one or two were staring back at her.

“This isn’t real,” she croaked. “You’re messing with me.”

Smoker gave a throaty, annoyingly satisfied chuckle. “You wish. If I leave the door open too long, a few of them always slip out and head upstairs. They don’t hold their shapes if they stray too far from him, though, and eventually they dissolve and reappear back here.”

“Too far from him? Who–” Wisp began, then stopped. A wave of hot and cold dizziness engulfed her. “No,” she mouthed, her gloved fingers pressing against the sides of her mask. “No, no, no.”

In her mind’s eye, the headline barrage after the first Deadening flashed past. Dangerous energy-absorbing villain executed and thousands still missing without trace came first and foremost, overwhelming her memory with grief.

Luca’s little brother was never found.

Just like my dad.

“Finally figured it out, huh?” Smoker turned to the open doorway. “You wanted to see him. It’s too late to be shitting your plastic diapers anyway.”

He stepped through the open door, and the ghostly armada shied away from him as the Smog had. Human shapes dissolved and melted back into the orange-colored haze all around him. Wisp followed him in a daze, barely aware of the need to stay within the bubble of survivability his presence created for her.

Her light spheres had never had an effect on mist or smoke. They repelled Smog the way some powers averted other powers, and she wanted to slap herself for not figuring this out sooner. Smog was essentially someone’s Evolved power given physical form.

Furthermore, power effects ended with the life of those who had created them. The Deadenings had broken the rule by manifesting after Osmotic’s death. Except … the rule hadn’t been broken. Not really.

Because Osmotic wasn’t dead.

“They’re not … aware, are they?” she asked as they made their way through a large basement room and toward another open doorway. The chubby, smoke-like shape of what might have been a preteen boy was watching her from the other side of it.

“I don’t think so. I don’t believe in souls or anything like that, but what he absorbed was raw energy. He had no control over people. I think of these guys as imprints or maybe echoes of whatever juice makes human brains tick. Sometimes it seems like they’re aware of something you said, but it’s just patterns firing without a brain. Programmed behavior.”

Is it really, though? Wisp approached the smaller chamber, shuffling her way past the volatile shapes that lingered as far away from herself and Smoker as the basement allowed. Seen from the corner of her eye, one of them bore an uncanny resemblance to her dad, but when she turned around to get a better look, it dissolved into amorphous vapors.

Her imagination raced with alarming possibilities. What if her dad or some small part of him still lingered here, held in place by the very calamity that had cost him his life? She still refused to accept the existence of ghosts in her reality, but she knew all too well what powers could do, especially when two opposing forces – as Radiant and Osmotic had a little more than a year ago – clashed in unpredictable and unexplored ways. Now, more than ever, she needed to investigate the source. The answers it held might crush her soul, but she had to understand. Had to know.

Her mind raced back to her first meeting with Smoker, to the ring of Smog surrounding her and the volatile, barely humanoid shapes that had emerged from it. Their forms hadn’t been as well-defined, but she must have been a good hundred meters away from the warehouse at the time. The apparitions had manifested before Smoker did. A reaction to her attempts to communicate? Had they tried to reach out to her because they heard her voice, perhaps even recognized it?

She almost didn’t want to know the answer.

The interior of the chamber Smoker led her to was so thick with Smog that even the villain’s presence only pushed it back by three or four meters. Wisp caught a whiff of its pungent stench even through the filter of her gas mask, and gaseous shapes crowded the walls in clusters so thick they made it impossible to determine the size of the room. A roughly man-high tunnel with jagged edges breached one of the walls, apparently serving as a venting duct for the steady stream of Smog that originated from the center of the chamber.

There was something there, splayed out on the dirty concrete floor like an abandoned, grotesquely misshapen rag doll. Not a person, no. People didn’t look like this. Not even Evolved. It was as black as coal and looked just as brittle, though the thick cloud of Smog wafting from it made it hard to make out the details. There was no sign of life. No movement and no response to their presence. The body on the basement floor had been burned to the bone.

Yet the villain who had triggered an air raid alarm little more a year ago was somehow still alive. After multiple reported hits by Radiant’s thousand-degree hot lasers and camera snapshots showing him on fire, burned to a crisp in the blink of an eye.

“This is insane,” Wisp mumbled inside her gas mask. Her voice was small and shaky, the words far apart as if dredged up from a horrendous pit. “He should be dead. He looks dead to me.” She pressed a hand to the filter covering her mouth, the pungent stench of chemicals suddenly overwhelming. A nasty taste like ash and rancid lard oozed up her throat.

Smoker glanced at the body and the curtain of Smog parted to reveal the full extent of damage done by the superhero’s lasers. Once Wisp identified a large clump of charred flesh as the head, it became easier for her to register the position of the skeletal limbs where the skin was burned away to the bone. The torso was in better condition but gave no indication of breathing. The mouth hole gaped wide open, making no sound.

Worst of all, the corpse’s hands and feet were missing, chopped off by what appeared to be clean, even cuts. Precise and measured. Something told her the missing appendages were no longer in the warehouse. Or if they were, they had been sealed and packaged, prepared for shipping and experimentation.

“The instant he died,” Smoker said while Wisp fought to keep the nasty taste down, “Osmotic was drawing energy from every source in his range, and you’ll remember that his reach was quite impressive for someone who’d supposedly never experienced a power surge.”

“Supposedly.” Wisp chewed on the word. It felt unpleasant in her mouth. “And why didn’t the heroes, or the police, or anyone find him before you did? The news said he was incinerated and the ashes blew away.”

“The way I remember it, the initial cataclysm triggered by his almost-death lasted for weeks and no one could approach the explosion crater for months, not even with suits. None of the available heroes were immune to the effects. Samael went and messed with the Smog without going near it, but that made the situation worse and the top dogs called him off. By the time the smoke cleared, the city had already been sealed off and no one who mattered gave a shit anymore. Besides, the initial blast buried the body under ten feet of earth and rubble.”

“No one really understood what was happening and why,” Wisp muttered.

“Right. I don’t think the UNEOA ever realized Osmotic didn’t just warp absorbed energy and re-release it in different forms, he was literally feeding on it. He’s still feeding on it now. Might be snacking on you this very instant.” He tossed her a mischievous grin, his tone light and non-threatening.

Wisp wasn’t buying it. Her danger beacons were shifting more toward a red alert level by the second, debunking the threat beneath the pleasantries. She forced herself to keep talking. To pretend she hadn’t noticed and drown out the drumming of her heart. “So the Smog is energy he absorbed back then, except it’s a different form now. However much he needs to feed on, he pulls back into himself.” She fought to keep her dad from riding along on this particular train of thought. If she let him, she’d most likely lose her capacity for thinking at all.

“It’s a possibility,” Smoker said. “And since he was cooked alive while triggering one of the most catastrophic cataclysms ever observed by the public eye, the flow of energy is still influenced by temperature. Or it was, until I came along.”

Wisp gave him a blank stare. “You’re creating more Smog.”

“It’s what I’m paid to do. Don’t forget you already picked your side of the fence, it’s far too late to complain about the job now.”

“Right.” Wisp put her hands over her eye holes, rubbing them as though she was crying. “My dad died that day. Could you give me a few minutes alone here? I think maybe I could see him again. Even if it’s just for a second.” She turned her backpack away from him as she spoke, acutely aware of the camera and the explosives within.

Smoker returned an incredulous look. “Were you listening when I said these are just patterns and echoes? Your dad isn’t down here, kid. He’s gone wherever dead people go.” He said it casually, making a whisking motion with his fingers.

“How would you know?” she snapped, then cringed. She had to keep playing the mournful little girl card and hope he’d consider her harmless and vulnerable enough to grant her a minute or two of alone time with the living corpse.

He airily fobbed her off with “Common sense.”

“I guess.” The sniffle she produced for Smoker felt real enough to make her heart crack with pain. “I have to try or I’ll keep beating myself up over it. Just for a few minutes. Please?”

After a long moment of giving her the evil eye, he shrugged. “Fine, whatever. I’ll be by the stairs, so don’t try anything stupid.” With that, he waltzed out into the larger room and out of sight. From her position by the living corpse, the vacant doorway between the two basement blocks showed her a corner of the adjoining room, but not the way up to the first floor.

She listened to the rhythm of Smoker’s ambling steps until it stopped. Slender puffs of Smog crept through the doorway, filling the void of space where he’d been. This, more than anything else, told her he had indeed taken his leave and wasn’t about to peer over her shoulder in ghost mode. But there was no way for her to relax. Her danger beacons, she realized with a start, had now shifted toward the end of the orange-red spectrum.

Time to get a move on before things went terribly wrong.

Grasping the opportunity, she separated one of her thumbnail-sized lights from the swarm surrounding her makeshift environmental suit and dispatched it through the doorway, ordering it to stay low to the ground. It hovered a scant inch above the basement floor, six meters from her position and as far from the doorway as her field of vision allowed. Something told her to stay ready for an emergency takeoff in the not too distant future.

With this accomplished, she took off her backpack and set it on the floor near the charred body. “Hey, Dad. I know you probably aren’t here, but I just want to be sure. If some tiny part of you is still haunting around and causing trouble, do whatever you can to let me know.”

The words were meant to be theatrics, a part she had to play in order to keep Smoker off her back. But as she undid the backpack straps to retrieve the drone camera, she caught herself looking around the room, scanning the transient figures in the swirling haze for a reaction. Her throat tightened in anticipation of the impossible, of disproving her own denial of ghosts.

Nothing happened.

Even in the face of all logic and despite her best intent to expect nothing, disappointment still gnawed at her gut. Now that Smoker had stepped out, the living corpse emitted a thick screen of Smog and more and more dismayingly humanlike shapes crowded the edges of the chamber. None of them resembled her dad, though, and none made obvious attempts to communicate.

Wisp inwardly counted to ten before sucking a deep, plastic, and chemical-scented breath through the gas mask filter and aiming the small cubical camera gadget at the supervillain’s sad charred remains. A glance at the doorway confirmed Smoker hadn’t returned.

Wisp swallowed the lump in her throat and raised her voice, drowning out the click of the device as she pressed the button on top. “This isn’t hide and seek, Dad. You can come out and say hello.” She took another picture as she spoke and adjusted the angle while picking out more words to say. “You’ve left me some pretty big boots to fill. Sometimes I wish you could let me know if I’m doing okay.” Hearing herself say the words created the illusion of him actually being there, aware and listening from the shadows.

Three more pictures, now aimed at the ghostly shapes. If these didn’t get the heroes onto the scene, assuming that the device worked as expected, she wasn’t sure what would.

When she glanced at her spheres, they had shifted another shade toward crimson but Smoker had not yet returned, leaving the reason behind the danger level increase a mystery. Wisp wasn’t willing to throw in the towel now that she had come so close to solving the problem on her own. She promised herself to be extra careful as she executed the next steps.

The two sources of Smog – the undead as well as the living one in the adjoining room – had to bite the dust for real. Wisp considered multiple options involving her gun and grenades, discarding all but one. Having settled on a strategy, she set the camera device on the floor, instead retrieving both of the grenades from her pack.

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.
  
  

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CHAPTER 10

  
 
“You could take a John Doe with no acting experience, and if you gave them the perfect role, the audience would weep like it had never wept before. That’s perfection on stage, you see. The real challenge lies in the potential, in knowing the one role that will bring out the best in whoever fate sets up to walk on the stage. Now that is the divinity of directing.”

-Scott de Luca, later known as Gentleman, in a television interview (2011)

After her ‘meeting’ with Gentleman, Wisp rushed outside to push the tablet into Smoker’s hands and be rid of it. Part of her would have given anything to try and eavesdrop on his conversation with the villain leader, but the bigger part just wanted to head back and fill in the others while the creepy incorporeal villain was too distracted to stalk and spy on her. Even a short window to safely discuss their plans would be invaluable.

Because they had details to go over and preparations to make. Regardless of how the night went, the coming hours would conclude the gang’s story as Dead City survivors. They had held out long enough.

Somewhere deep inside, Wisp still clung to the hope that the heroes were going to stop by the bell tower, claim the rucksack with the money and fly off to do their thing within the northern half of Dead City, laser shows and explosives included. After more than a year of neglect by government authorities, it would have been nice to rely on adults for once. Go back to being just a kid and enjoy the small luxuries that most kids her age considered everyday necessities. Working smartphones. Internet access. Her own room.

By the time she got back to the bell tower, the others had all gathered on the belfry and formed a protective hedge around Hannah, who was now sitting up with a large foam pillow to brace her. Luca crouched beside her, helping her with a big plastic bottle of water and a smaller one containing the gang’s supply of painkillers. Unlike the last time Wisp had seen him, he appeared calm and fairly relaxed, the vengeful fury from earlier evaporated or drawn back beneath the surface. Wisp couldn’t bring herself to meet his dark gaze. There were too many uncomfortable truths hidden in there, and the wall between them was a tower of regret.

Max and Sara sat to Hannah’s right and busied themselves with the pile of clothes from Wisp’s duffel bag. Working on the Smog suits, it looked like. One looked about half complete, the other still consisted of a pair of rain boots and several pieces of plastic tarp that had been cut into shape. The rucksack with the money still sat on the floor among scattered supplies and equipment, eliminating the need to ask if any heroes had shown up to claim it.

“I’m going to need one of those Smog suits tonight,” Wisp said before anyone got the chance to ask the questions she read on their faces. “I’m not sure how things went, but we need to be on the move. How are you guys holding up?”

Hannah grimaced, her lips curling up in pain. “Getting better at resisting the urge to pass back out. Don’t know about fighting or running away from the bad guys.”

“Do we have to run away?” Sara sounded worried.

“Yes,” Wisp said. After a long look at the cityscape beyond the northern ledge, she added, “We’re moving out of this tower right away, so start packing. This is no joke. They’ve got stinger rockets pointed our way.”

Everyone started talking at once, so Wisp took a moment to provide a brief summary of her chat with the villain leader, downplaying the situation as much as she reasonably could. Sara in particular would hold everyone up if she turned into a panicking one-girl stampede. Besides, Wisp knew that the ‘deal’ she’d made with Gentleman was her burden and responsibility. A tightening of the cord around her neck in exchange for a chance to investigate the source of the calamity, and eliminate it.

I’m going to take care of everything. Promise.

“Thing is, we can’t let them know where you guys are,” she said. “If we can take Hannah half a block closer to the evacuation point before midnight, it should be enough. Luca, can you carry her?”

Luca broke through the tower of regret with a wan smile, and the sight of him – his unscathed face, his smiling mouth – filled her with hope. “For a shorter distance, sure,” he said. “Max is stronger, though, and has experience lugging Sara around.”

“Hey!” the blonde girl protested. “Only once, and only because I was really tired!”

Max waved a hand in the air. “Yeah, yeah. Lugging girls to places is in my unofficial job description. Besides, Hannah is like a big, cuddly backpack, except softer and more–”

“Asshole,” Hannah said, grinning. Max grinned back.

Yeah, keep cracking jokes. I hope you guys get to go on a real date sometime soon. The banter pulled on Wisp’s heart strings, driving home the responsibility she carried. Whichever way things went tonight was on her.

“Before we start packing,” Wisp said, “I have to tell you guys what I’m planning to do tonight. I wasn’t able to take any meaningful pictures yet, but Smoker is going to show me the source of the Smog and if this isn’t some big fat bluff, evidence of it will call the heroes to the scene for sure. They can’t ignore something that can be moved around and causes Smog.”

“Can be moved around?” Max echoed, frowning. “Did Smoker tell you this?”

“Not exactly. Gentleman did. If he was full of snot and none of this is actually true, I’m gonna find out in about…” she checked her wristwatch, “five hours.”

Max’s shoulders sagged. “Well, shit. If the Smog, or the source, can actually get out of the city…”

“Yeah, that’s seriously messed up,” Hannah agreed. “How fast can you run with my dead weight clinging to you?”

“Fast enough.” Max’s voice dropped to a near whisper. “I hope.”

“I hope it isn’t true,” Sara said. When everyone looked at her, she added, “The thing about the source, I mean. Because if it’s not, we can just leave and find us a cozy new home without Wisp chasing after any more bad guys.”

“We’re leaving,” Wisp repeated. “Tonight. I’m a little scared, too, but I can handle this. We just can’t stay here in the tower. If things go the way I want them to, everyone up north is going to be pretty darn unhappy with me.” She considered telling them about her plans to deal with Smoker in a permanent fashion but decided against it. They already had plenty to worry about at that moment. It seemed smarter and more considerate to share the story after it became good news.

Threat eliminated, she’d say while striking a superhero pose with her hands on her hips and a puffed-up chest. Breathe easy, everyone! That villain isn’t going to Smog up the rest of the world anymore.

Except she wasn’t a superheroine and no one would ever see her that way. The mental image cracked her up for a minute until the mortification of having accomplished nothing settled in. Hannah had survived for now, but no one in this room was safe just yet. Far from it.

“We’ll make things go our way,” Luca muttered. “You doubt, you lose.”

The words warmed Wisp’s heart. So you trust me after all. Thanks, Luca. Considering how hardheaded he tended to be, she suspected that the others must have talked sense into him during her absence.

“Give me two more hours, and I’ll have both of Max’s hazmat suits ready,” Max said. “We can decide later if we use the second one, and who we are going to use it on.”

Wisp smiled at him. “Sounds good. Thanks so much, Gearhead, and for the camera, too. I’ll go grab more stuff from Dad’s stash while you guys start packing. If the source turns out to be both real and something I can blow up, I’m going to need Dad’s grenades.”

***

Once the Smog receded, the Survivors relocated themselves and their essential belongings to their temporary hideout, the top floor of an unobtrusive residential building. They hunkered down in the living room with comfortable furnishings, and enough space to stash their supplies. Their bags and backpacks filled with mementos from their past lives, spare clothing, non-perishable food and beverages as well as some money they had scrounged together from their scavenging runs.

They didn’t unpack it. Max had chosen this apartment because it featured an easily accessible exit to an open terrace with an actual fire escape leading to ground level. The money from the bank robbery stayed up in the belfry, along with a big cardboard sign that said ‘heroes please pick up, nothing taken.’ Wisp had made a promise in the note she had handed to the bank employee, and she was going to keep it. Rune’s team could still stop by to pick up the booty if they wanted. The fact that no one would be there to greet them made no difference.

Hannah was stretched out on the couch. A small light sphere hovered beside her head, glowing the same blazing shade of orange-yellow as the two beacons Wisp had assigned to Max and Sara. In contrast, her own light shone ginger. Not at all surprising considering her plans for the night.

What really unsettled her was the fact that the color of Luca’s sphere matched her own. It shouldn’t have. Luca was supposed to stay here with the others, keep a low profile, and wait for the signal to head towards the evacuation gate.

“Remember,” she said, facing the others, “if I’m not back by three in the morning, don’t wait a minute longer. Grab your stuff, grab Hannah, and get out. Don’t look back. I’ll catch up.”

“That’s a bad line and you know it,” Max muttered. “One that belongs in shitty stories with crappy endings.”

Luca raised his gaze from Hannah to Max, the shadow on his face making him appear older than he was. “This one hasn’t ended yet. We’re free to make our own choices, after all.”

“Speaking of choices, Luca … what are your plans for tonight?” Wisp asked. “Because the glowy little friend that’s sticking to your head tells me you’re up to something.”

“I’m going to grab a few of my things from home, too. Shouldn’t take too long and I doubt any of Constantine’s goons even know about my old place.”

“Do you actually mean your brother’s things? Because you already grabbed your stuff long ago,” Wisp said.

He turned away and shrugged stiffly. Luciano was a touchy subject she’d learned to avoid unless Luca himself brought it up. She could relate to how he felt about abandoning his childhood home. It had been a haunted place for him, but it was also the last thing on earth with physical and perceptible ties to the brother he’d loved more than anyone else in the world.

“It’s fine,” she said. “We still have over forty minutes to go until midnight. Just make sure you’re back here on time, okay? Keep an eye on your light and turn right back around if the color changes.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s a wasted effort. You’re going to be plenty busy looking after yourself tonight. Oh, and I’m going to borrow the other Smog suit.”

“You’re WHAT?” Wisp and Max asked in unison.

Luca grabbed a nylon sports bag and opened it, turning his back to the others. “Try and stop me,” he said. It sounded like a challenge even though his voice was perfectly calm.

“You can’t–”

Wisp’s protest was cut off by Max, who grabbed her arm and made a shushing noise. “Let him.”

“He shouldn’t even go near the Smog,” Wisp said, putting her hands on her hips. “He’s going to try something stupid, I just know it.”

“Wisp, let him.” Max squeezed her wrist a little.

“It’s just a precaution.” Luca picked up one of the taped together Smog suits and folded it. “In case the city fills with nighttime Smog. If you’re heading back there, the weather could change.”

Wisp puffed up her cheeks and then exhaled, deflating them. “It’s not like I can stop you. Just stay the hell away from the university and the warehouses. When are you leaving?”

“Now,” Luca said. “I’ll take the suit and put it on later. I can run faster without it.”

“Put it on at midnight,” Wisp reminded him. “If there is going to be trouble, it’ll start happening five minutes past midnight or so.”

“I’m aware.” Luca filled his bag with quick, precise movements.

“Sara, can you help me with my suit?” Wisp asked.

“Already?” Sara sounded alarmed. “It’s not even half past eleven yet.”

“I have to go grab Dad’s stuff in case there actually is something in those warehouses that needs to be blown up.”

“Take my gun holster,” Max said. “It’s made from Kydex. Your leather one wouldn’t last a minute in dense Smog.”

“Good thinking.” Wisp accepted the holster from him. “Thanks. I’m going to need the small nylon backpack, too. Let’s hope Smoker doesn’t insist on peeking at what’s inside. Fingers crossed.”

Wisp eased herself into the makeshift hazmat suit Sara held out to her. At a glance, it was obvious Max had put a lot of thought and effort into it and even though he hadn’t known her exact measurements, the two-piece ensemble fit her surprisingly well. The outfit consisted of Gore-Tex leggings, ankle rain boots, and a skintight long-sleeved nylon shirt – complemented with gloves and a tight-fitting hooded nylon jacket – as well as one of the gas masks she had brought from home. None of the clothing had been cut into shape or resized, but Max had used a large roll of duct tape and numerous pieces of plastic tarp to seal the gaps that people who took strolls in the rain didn’t usually care about.

It took nearly ten minutes for Wisp to put on the entire suit properly, and another five for Max to ensure that not even a millimeter of skin was left exposed. He applied more duct tape where necessary and tested the suit’s sealing performance by blowing air over it. Luca left while Max wrapped up his safety investigation.

“I kind of have to go, you know.” The heavy gas mask on her face distorted her voice.

“One moment.” Max grabbed another thin nylon jacket, a leftover from the pile of clothes Wisp had brought back from home and tied it around her waist. “Wear the gun holster underneath it,” he said.

“Good idea. No need to let Smoker see I’m coming to our meeting armed. Seriously, though, I have to go.”

The mask itched and gave off an overpowering plastic smell that, combined with the flutter of anxiety in her stomach, was beginning to make her feel nauseous and desperate to get started. She felt like someone who’d been wrapped into a gigantic garbage bag and sealed in with a drinking straw to breathe through. Movement in this outfit was going to be harder than she had anticipated; running was out of the question.

The goodbye was a simple, almost wordless affair. It seemed as if no one wanted to jinx it by saying the wrong thing.

After swapping her gun from Dad’s leather holster to the Kydex one, Wisp grabbed a small nylon backpack and, lacking other options for storage, put the drone camera in it. She collected all of the unassigned spheres she’d managed to create before sundown and split them up into a sizeable swarm of fireflies, a mobile microcosm of Smog-repelling stars that trailed after her as she stepped out of the apartment and onto the terrace. Better two layers of safety than one. Because even if the layers of nylon, PVC and plastic did a decent enough job of protecting her skin, the swarm of light should hopefully keep the Smog from assaulting her with full force.

To Wisp’s relief, the heavy rainfall from earlier in the evening had let up, and the moon was peeking through the clouds, augmenting her night vision. As she made her way across the rooftops and back toward her home, the city spread out around her with a quiet, almost peaceful stillness that reminded her of the weeks and months she had managed to feel at home here. Once upon a time she had felt safe in Dead City – despite everything, despite the Smog and the near constant disagreements with the Shadows up north. The thought of leaving it all behind pierced her heart like a dagger.

The sight of her family home, appearing forlorn and shrouded in shadows drove the point home and the knife deeper. Goodbye, Marguerite Survivors. Wisp gazed at the windowsill outside Grandma’s bedroom. Goodbye, Tapsy Turtle. I’d love to take you with me, but we don’t have any spare suits. I hope you can forgive me.

Wisp wasn’t sure how long she’d stood there on the withered front lawn, fighting the urge to go inside one last time. To meander through every one of the cozy, beautifully preserved rooms and pick out a handful of the umpteen memorabilia she’d never be able to replace. But then she checked her wristwatch, where it was a quarter to midnight and her good sense kicked her straight back to reality.

The one where she was a soldier with a patriotic duty. The last girl standing in a war zone the world had forgotten about, filling a void her father had left behind.

So she tore herself from the mesmerizing sight of the house and made her way back to the basement. The chest of explosives was exactly as she had left it, containing two fragmentation grenades and one concussion grenade. She had never handled live explosives but enjoyed a thorough tutorial courtesy of her dad. Enough know-how to pull the pin and get away from the blast without hurting herself.

After stashing one fragmentation as well as the concussion grenade away in her backpack, she forced her attention away from the house and made her way towards the university, hoping with all her heart that Luca wasn’t going to run into trouble during his outing. That at some point in the future, they’d figure out a way to be friends again, and maybe more. Because the nervous twitching in her belly made it painfully clear she had never stopped wishing for more. Of the handful of people who had steadily accompanied her since her childhood years, he was the only one who was still around. The only one left.

I need to focus on myself right now. The university complex peeled out of the darkness ahead of her, growing bigger with each light-empowered leap she took. It’s what he’d want me to do.

When she arrived at the main entrance, Smoker wasn’t there, or anyone else. Three of the windows that lined the length of the first floor were illuminated, but there was no movement behind them and no sounds disturbed the night. She took it as a good sign. If Gentleman or Constantine had intended to stab her in the back, they would have been more openly welcoming. Then again, she had arrived early. Her wristwatch showed five minutes to midnight.

While she waited, Wisp scouted the campus and its surrounding rooftops for skulking observers or gang members with sniper rifles, finding none. The firefly swarm danced around her, maintaining a constant orbit of a half meter around the tightly sealed nylon and plastic suit. Wisp observed its gyration with tense anticipation, chewing on her lip as she waited for the other shoe to drop and her spheres to adapt a more reddish tint. The events of the past weeks had taught her not to take the word of self-proclaimed villain leaders for anything. Gentleman wouldn’t be in charge of the Conglomerate if he was stupid, and chances were he at least suspected her of flipping allegiances.

“That’s the ugliest costume I’ve ever seen,” Smoker said in his casual, fluent English.

Wisp whirled around to see the villain standing behind her, wearing the same outfit from earlier in the day and no visible weapons. He was peering at her gas mask from beneath raised eyebrows, fingers laced together at the nape of his neck. An epitome of relaxed arrogance.

“Oh, I see,” he said, chuckling. “This isn’t a costume, it’s for protection. You think I’m going to attack you?”

“No,” she said, forcing the words from her mouth. “It’s just that we’re going to a place that’s full of the stinky stuff.”

“Oh, that.” His eyebrows took a downward turn. “It’s going to be perfectly fine. I control this shit, remember? Besides, Gentleman ordered me to keep you safe.”

You can’t control it if you’re dead.
  
  

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“While we are having this cozy little chat,” Gentleman went on, pleasant and chipper, “four modified Stinger rockets – courtesy of Data – are lifting their noses,” he tapped his nose suggestively, “sniffing out the direction of your ivory tower. I wonder if your gang mates are home?”

Wisp jerked in her seat as if he had just fired a bullet through her. Of all the buttons he could have pushed, he’d found the one that set her nerves on fire in a roaring blaze.

“A simple precaution,” he went on while she fought for composure, “to ensure your full attention. Do I have your attention?”

She wanted to ask him to please leave her gang out of this and reconsidered. Better to just play along. So she simply nodded.

“Excellent.” He gracefully flexed his fingers and picked a bit of fuzz off his crisp, pristine white dress shirt. “Please do remember that I could have all of you killed in a matter of minutes, regardless of how boring that would be.” He made the threat sound playful and genuine. “Worry not, my anxious friend. They’ll be safe for the duration of this game we are playing together.”

Is this really just a game to him? What does he even want?

“Your men already hurt my friend,” Wisp said. “She’s a good person like my dad. Was that part of your research, too?”

“An unfortunate accident.” Gentleman lifted his hands in a mollifying gesture. “My men were under clear orders not to harm the girl, but your neighbor to the north gave less concise instructions, it seems. Would you like it if I arranged for the responsible parties to be punished?” His best-buddy smile cracked into something feral and far more disturbing, revealing a glimpse of the true villain underneath.

Wisp picked out words that held an edge while keeping her voice calm and polite. “How can I believe you? Constantine was never all that interested in me. You are. Your men were the ones asking the questions.”

“Ah.” Gentleman’s face fell. “There must have been a misunderstanding. My men did ask questions, yes, but by then, your friend had already been mistreated by the other party. We did our best to treat her wounds after the fact.”

Wisp hesitated, chewing on his words and testing them for lies or contradictions. Was there a chance he was actually being honest with her? She had a vague recollection of Constantine, sitting high on his horse of malignity and complacency, goading her with a not-so-casual remark about how his men were blowing off steam. The memory churned a fire in her gut, and for the fraction of a second she longed for that fire to strike back at everyone who’d done her wrong. No more groveling, no more compromise.

“Yes,” she said with a steely curtness. “I want those men punished. All of them.” It felt wrong to say it, but also so, so good.

“It shall be done.” Gentleman cooed. “In fact, allow me to offer compensation for the unfortunate accident. If you could ask one favor of me, what would it be?”

“Uh.” Wisp gripped the tablet tighter, a hurricane of conflicting thoughts and emotions spinning around her head. “What?”

The man on the screen tapped his fingertips together and repeated the question in softly spoken German, flaunting gentleness and patience.

“I got it,” she replied in the same language, shaking her head. “Why the special treatment? Why do you want us to be on the same side?”

“Because, my ignorant young friend…” Gentleman expelled a dramatic sigh. “We are on the same side. If my memory serves me well, you robbed a bank today. Not exactly a minor offence in the eyes of the law.”

Right, there was that. Wisp wriggled about on her chair. I had perfectly good reasons. It’s just that no one else understands them.

“Would you like some time to consider the matter?” Gentleman cocked his head in a birdlike manner.

“No, not really,” Wisp said. “There is one thing I’d like more than anything else. If you could tell Constantine to let me see–”

“Done,” Gentleman cut in before she could finish.

“Just like that? You don’t even know what I was going to say…”

“The request was easy enough to deduce.” The villain flashed a feral smile. “You wish to investigate the source of the vapors, correct?”

“There’s a source?”

“But of course. If you think about it for a moment, I am quite certain that you can pinpoint its location.”

“The warehouses. But up until a few days ago, there was no Smog in there.”

“Correct.” Gentleman gave a nod. “The source was moved to a new home shortly after Smoker located it. I’m sure you will find it as fascinating as I did.”

After a moment of trying and failing to imagine what – or who – could possibly have been spawning enormous clouds of toxic gas from thin air for so long, Wisp took the opportunity to address her secondary objective.

“Sounds interesting, but … would it be possible for Smoker to show me whatever the source is? I’m trying to get to know him and maybe get along better.”

“Are you, now?” The villain’s birdlike gaze turned sharp, but his uncanny smile didn’t falter.

“Yes, we both have powers and we might work together more in the future, right? I thought it would make sense for us to be friendly with each other.”

“It would,” Gentleman agreed, but the wry twist of his mouth said he wasn’t buying her reasoning. “Very well, then. He is the one most suited to the task, after all. I’ll leave word that he is to meet you at the university at midnight.”

He doesn’t believe me, but isn’t going to stop me? Wisp pondered this for a second. If she had to guess, the villain didn’t expect her to overpower Smoker or cause any trouble. No one would. She was the jamboree magic girl, after all, and a firecracker to boot. Unlike her, Smoker was more than adequately equipped for self-defense. Which worried her more than just a little.

On the other hand, midnight was a good time for her to set the final wheels in motion. If Smoker didn’t mess with it, the Smog was bound to creep back into the underground by ten, giving the Survivors a two-hour buffer to move out of their headquarters and to wherever they wouldn’t be found if things started blowing up. Literally or figuratively.

“What I still don’t understand,” Wisp went on, “is why you’re interested in me in the first place, and why you’re even taking the time to talk to me. My powers aren’t all that interesting and I haven’t done anything to write home about.”

“An excellent question.” Gentleman joined his hands and settled his chin on the knuckles. “Do you know the one trait all Lightshapers have in common? Something not related to their powers. A quality so mundane no one speaks of it.”

“None of them ever became villains?” Wisp ventured, biting her lip the next second.

The villain’s index finger flicked up. “An astute observation, and quite correct. But no, I was referring to something else.”

“Um, I don’t know.”

“It’s quite all right, dear. You are living under a proverbial rock after all.” He inserted a dramatic pause. “Truth is, all Gifted of your kind are leaders, activists prone to guiding others in certain directions. Look at you – you are sixteen, yes? A shy, quiet, and thoughtful girl ended up in charge of a group that numbered more than twenty members at one time. Does this surprise you at all?”

“No, because I know how it happened, and why. There was nothing weird or supernatural about it.”

He wiggled his fingers dismissively. “Of course. There was no voice in your head and no helpful little angel whispering from your shoulder. Still, Lightshapers are among the more common categories of Gifted, and every single one of them turned out to be a mover and shaker. Coincidence? Most certainly not.”

Wisp pursued his line of thinking, unnerved by where it was headed. “So basically, you believe I could lead a group of people from your organization?”

“It seems that we understand each other.” The villain’s smile widened until it was almost manic, distorting the image of his face.

“But Constantine is running things in this city. You don’t need me.” She hid her distaste by smiling back.

The villain’s grin faded into a strangely childish pout. “Constantine is an awfully inflexible man, and boring to boot. He does play his role, but never improvises. He does not move the audience or make them weep.”

“Improvise?” She wasn’t sure what he meant. All of it was a madman’s ramblings to her ears.

Holding a slender finger to his lips, Gentleman rolled his eyes upward, ignoring the question. “You, on the other hand … squirming, transforming. Reinventing yourself. A Guardian with Lightshaper powers … ah, I suppose you never realized. How far will you go to protect what you hold dear? Will you kill, and kill again once you discover the efficacy of death? Sacrifice many for the sake of a select few? Destroy with the intent to preserve?”

“What are you getting at?” she asked. Whatever it is, it doesn’t apply to me.

He leaned forward in his chair, his sickeningly pleasant smile filling the small tablet screen.  “A simple truth, dear. The most powerful and dedicated villains are those motivated with the strongest desire. It matters not what they wish for. Only that they want it very, very much.”

Wisp slumped back in her chair, pinching her cheek in an attempt to wrap her head around the revelation he’d just thrown at her. Yes, this explained his persistent interest in her, she supposed. The fact that his assumptions about her were wrong didn’t change a thing. On the other hand, she had to admit that she might be in deeper in the snot than anticipated. Neck deep at least. She had no intention of getting even more entangled with organized crime – and supervillains – than she already was, but something told her the villain wasn’t going to take ‘no’ for an answer.

Gentleman must have sensed something, because he cut through her thoughts with an alarmingly honeyed voice. “You look distressed. Speak your mind freely so that I may alleviate your fears.”

“I’m worried about the heroes,” Wisp lied. “What if they get permission to enter the Dead Zone and come after me?”

“Pish-posh. The heroes are preoccupied with more pressing concerns, dear, and continue to be severely understaffed for the number of doohickeys that have befallen the world.” The villain snickered, splaying long fingers against a pale cheek. “I wonder where Athena has gone. As of today, no one can locate her … how deliciously mysterious.”

Wait. He can’t know we’ve been trying to contact Athena. No way in hell.

Wisp froze and assumed a blank expression. “But the other Covenant members are still active, aren’t they? They still have Paladin and Samael.”

Inwardly, she clung to the hope that the villain was bluffing, that someone – hopefully Athena herself – was going to receive the drone-transmitted pictures and send help. Because if not, she’d have to fall back on her not-plan B, which was more a set of possible disaster response operations than a contingency plan.

“Do not worry your little head about it.” The villain clicked his tongue dismissively. “All you need to do is to play your part. Should you betray my expectations and forget your lines, however…”

She more or less knew what he was going to say, but not how. Once again his image shifted and blurred, taking on a new shape, a new face. Only this time, it was so battered and bruised and broken she mistook it for someone else’s. Until his bloodied, shredded mouth fell open and she heard his voice. Luca’s voice.

“…I am not going to kill them. No, it will be far more interesting to watch you do it.” He grinned at her, flashing jagged shards of shattered teeth. “To observe the anguish of a fallen Guardian, wishing she were allowed to die as she destroys everything she holds dear.”

Cold dread twisted through her gut, strangling her breath out of her. His eyes. His beautiful dark eyes. A pair of pus-filled black pits had taken their place, gaping at her in a horrendous mockery of Luca’s characteristic faraway look.

The tablet slipped from her hands. Without conscious thought – her mind was a black void – she dropped the device onto the desk she’d been sitting at and jumped from the chair, knocking it over. Luca – no, Gentleman – droned on through the speakers.

“I granted your wish, you pay the price. We will speak again at another time. Would you do me the favor and hand the device to Smoker, dear? I need to have a word with my loyal minion.”

With that, the young man’s horribly disfigured image winked out of existence and the symbol-strewn desktop reappeared.

Wisp stared at it for a long, chilling moment, fighting to get her breath under control and convince her limbs to stop shaking. No doubt this was exactly what the villain had wanted from her: her fear. Her weakness. A spineless lump of clay to be molded as he pleased.

You’ve gotten what you wanted, her dad said from the memory place she had carved out for him in her subconscious. Now wear your fear as a mask and charge the bastard with everything you’ve got.

Memory-Dad was right, and the more she thought about it, the more she felt herself slip back into the role she had chosen for herself: the lone soldier with a duty. The last key elements to her plan that wasn’t really a plan – Smoker and the mystery of the warehouses – were falling into place. But at what price? Did she even stand a chance of saving the city and her friends without destroying it at the same time, as Gentleman had predicted?

Because from here on out, failure meant more than the death of one person. It meant the death of everyone she’d sworn to protect. And if Smoker survived … Deadenings were bound to happen anytime, anywhere in the world.

Which was why he had to die.

Tonight.
 
 

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CHAPTER 9

“I don’t think so, Gentleman. You have a history of killing anyone who gets in your way.

That’s my definition of a murderer.”

-Radiant, to Gentleman
 
  
Having tucked the drone part into her pocket, Wisp said a silent thank you to Max for his tireless work before turning back to the university building. She could have waltzed through the main entrance and didn’t think anyone would have stopped her, but now that she had left her friends at home, the windows looked far more inviting. Less predictable and a smaller chance of encountering a trap that way. Hannah’s warning still echoed in her head.

She remembered the location of Constantine’s reception room well enough to pinpoint one of the second-floor windows that had to be close to it. After another short leap to a nearby auxiliary building, she sent her smallest sphere through the window and, after a glance at her other lights to make certain their color hadn’t changed, swapped places to relocate herself into the building.

Her vision refocused and narrowed to the long, dusty corridor she had walked the night before, lined by identical classroom doors. The one closest to her was open. No guards loitered outside and no voices came from the room beyond. The triangle of light spheres surrounding her still glowed golden amber.

Wisp stared at the all too inviting door for a moment, trying and failing to conjure up her other self and get herself fired up for another confrontation with Big C. She just wasn’t angry enough for the mask to slip into place. He had fulfilled his end of the agreement by returning Hannah, after all, and no one else had gotten hurt since. So she squeezed the rucksack he’d given her, felt the tightly packed wads of bank notes inside, and stepped through the door. No masks, no pretense. Just the conclusion of an uncomfortable deal.

Constantine’s reception room looked different. Lavishly decorated and filled with classy furniture, but instead of flickering candles, pale daylight illuminated it through the windows. A tablet computer sat on the tablecloth in front of the Shadow’s gang leader. Its screen was dark and facing upward.

The big boss sat alone. He occupied the same chair at the center of the table, facing the open door and Wisp with the large classroom windows at his back. As large and imposing as ever, he still wore the same high-collared red trench coat and thick silver rings from an hour before. His pale eyes shifted to her and she stopped, struggling to deflect the potency of his gaze and not let it congeal what remained of her courage. She didn’t flinch, but she really missed her mask.

This was it. The next part of her plan that wasn’t really a plan, the last chance to take her destiny into her own hands against all odds.

Or to get tossed into the ditch alongside all the other dead bodies.

“Hey boss,” she said in a faked cheerful voice. “I’m back, and I brought the money. I’d really like to keep it. Had to fend off some over-motivated heroes to get it.” She shuffled closer to the table and set her bounty on the scarlet tablecloth, stealing a glance at the computer. Nothing about it revealed why it was there.

Constantine glanced down at it and then back up at her, eyebrows rising slowly. “Heroes,” he echoed in a tone that was equal parts unsurprised and unperturbed.

“That’s right,” she said. “I got them off my tail. So … can I join the gang now? I mean, I pulled off the job the way you asked. You can’t not let me join.” She punctuated her pretend enthusiasm with a smile.

He leaned back in his chair, his expression unmoving. “Tell me again. Why, exactly, do you want to join?” He didn’t look inside the rucksack.

Of course it wasn’t going to be this easy. Wisp took a mental stock of the situation and her available options. Constantine wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t going to buy her motivation if she hammed it up too much. Moving this stubborn mountain of a man meant to play to the expectations he had of her and of Evolved in general.

“Well,” she said in a considerate tone, “I got powers, but yesterday I realized something; that I never really did anything with them. Our gang was fun and all, but most of what we’ve been doing is child’s play. Not something you could compare to robbing a bank. Or working alongside another Evolved like Smoker.” Her own saccharine smile made her want to puke.

“You worked with Smoker?” Constantine’s eyebrows raised a fraction.

“Kind of! I mean, he really helped me out when those heroes were after me. I don’t think I would have gotten away without the smoke cover he conjured up.”

The man at the table kept staring at her, his jaw working in silent contemplation. Wisp sealed her emotions behind an arduously maintained smile. Her fingers felt cold and a deluge of sweat dampened her back. Seconds stretched out into what seemed like minutes.

After an indeterminable amount of time, Constantine cut through the silence with a commanding sweep of a hand, switching from German to English. “Smoker. Show yourself.”

The air stirred and color drained away from one corner of the room, slowly coalescing into a slender, black-haired shape that stood near Constantine’s chair. Smoker’s distinctive features manifested gradually, blurry sections filling out as the Evolved diverted substance and solidity from the air around him. He clasped his hands behind his back and bowed his head toward the villain leader, doing a decent job at feigned subservience.

Wisp didn’t buy it. She had realized something. No petty gang lord would ever admit or acknowledge that regardless of their status and resources, the Evolved would always look down on them. The bad guys in particular had superiority complexes of their own.

“You asked for me,” Smoker said in English.

“I have a question for you,” Constantine replied without sparing him a glance. “Or rather, I need your honest opinion. Is the flat-chested kid playing us for suckers? Because I believe she is, and you know me, I like to take out the trash before it stinks.”

Wisp felt her smile crumble along with her school English as she grasped for the words. “Come on, I could have sold you out to the heroes, but I didn’t as much as talk to them.” Then she switched back to German, addressing Constantine. “I brought you the money, which means I’m a criminal now. What more do you want from me?”

“She didn’t talk to them.” Smoker lifted his impassive gaze to her face. “Didn’t fight them, but maybe that would’ve been too much to ask. The greenhorns are always cowards. They grow up or they get killed trying to prove themselves.”

Does that include you? Wisp kept her mouth shut. As the Conglomerate’s liaison, Smoker’s opinion of her weighed more than Constantine’s, and the villain group obviously had an interest in her. As of right now, that interest was her life insurance.

Her danger beacons still glowed amber. For now.

“Do you want to prove yourself?” Constantine asked in German.

“I thought I already did. I know the Conglomerate’s interested in me. Why don’t you let me talk to them and let their leader decide?”

Her suggestion was an attempt to get a reaction out of Constantine more than anything else, but surprisingly wasn’t shot down. Smoker crossed his arms with a dismissive snort. Constantine continued to stare at her for another moment before picking up the computer from the table.

“You can,” he said with a gravity that seemed deliberate, “but it isn’t going to do you any favors. He has an even lower bullshit tolerance than I do.” His meaty, ring-adorned hand reached across the table, offering the device to her.

Was he already planning for this? That I was going to ask for a chat with a supervillain? She extended her hand but hesitated, unsure what to make of the inexplicably generous offer, sensing a trap but unable to see it clearly. Her spheres showed no reaction, however. Their color stayed the same.

The temptation was too strong to resist. Wisp accepted the tablet and glanced down at it, finding a dim reflection of herself in the smooth black screen. The mirror-like glass made her appear more shadowy somehow, a darker reflection or perhaps an evil twin of herself. She held the device away from her face.

“So how do I talk to him?” she asked.

“Swipe the screen,” Constantine said.

“Don’t waste his time,” Smoker added in English. “He doesn’t appreciate it.”

“Okay.” Wisp rubbed her knuckles against her forehead. “Can I talk to him alone? And, uh, can I keep the money? My folks back at the tower could use food and–”

“Yes and yes.” Constantine cut her off with an impatient gesture. “Head into the next room and close the door behind you.”

She almost said thank you like the well-behaved girl Grandma Rosie had tried to turn her into. The two men in this room had played a part in Hannah’s kidnapping and pitted her against a team of heroes, accepting the possibility of her death if things went wrong. Besides, this all seemed too easy somehow. The Conglomerate leader must have expressed an interest in talking to her before she’d asked. Which couldn’t mean anything good, so she was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Wisp glanced at Smoker. “Hey, Smoker. I was hoping we could have a chat too, just you and me after I’m done with this.”

He tipped his head to the side, a strand of long, black hair falling over his cheek. “Why?”

“Because we’re the only two Evolved in this city,” she said. “I know almost nothing about you and if we’re going to keep working together, maybe we should do something about that.”

There was a subtle change in his expression like ripples running across a calm watery surface. Wisp knew that look. It was the look of someone who desperately wanted to connect with others who were like him, people who understood the challenges and realities of being one of only four hundred in the world. Of being different. The rookie supervillain had no reason to trust her, but if he was anything like her, chances were that somewhere deep inside, he wanted to. At least a little. Wisp suspected that up on that rooftop with Rune and Checkmate, she had worn the exact same expression he did now.

“Maybe,” he replied. “I’m busy, as you know.”

She clutched the rucksack to her chest but held the tablet at arm’s length. “So, uh, I’m going. Until later, maybe.”

She marched out the door, wondering with each step what she was going to do if Smoker actually agreed to hang out with her. The first time you kill someone, it changes you forever, Dad had told her when she was a preteen who’d shown a little too much interest in his job. She hadn’t truly understood what he meant and if she was being honest with herself. She was afraid of finding out. So she abandoned the train of thought in favor of a more pressing concern: trying to survive a casual conversation with the world-renowned leader of an Evolved crime ring.

With clammy hands, she opened the door leading to the next room, making sure to pull it closed behind her. This classroom was large, airy, and dimly lit by fading cloud-scattered sunlight. Heavy drops of rain splashed against the large windows with the ferocity of gunfire. Wisp shuffled to the nearest seat and dropped onto it, placing the tablet on the desk. The mirror-like black screen stared back at her and the drone camera made a rather noticeable bulge in her pocket.

If this is an actual video chat, it’s going to work both ways. He isn’t just going to let me take a picture of him on-screen.

“So much for that,” she muttered, swiping the screen.

It came to life with the usual manufacturer’s logo and jingle, but by the time the desktop screen had initialized, there was nothing usual about it at all. Because there was nothing on it. No icons for apps or folders, not even a web browser. Just a blank surface set against a background of complex, interlocking symbols that meant nothing to Wisp. She picked out one that looked like a mirrored C letter. The Conglomerate logo, perhaps?

While she was still staring at the screen and trying to make sense of it, something too fast to track or identify popped up from the mass of background symbols and extended itself to an image that filled up the entirety of the screen. The instant the appearance of the person displayed came together in Wisp’s mind, she jerked in her seat and nearly dropped the tablet, one hand flying to her mouth. Because the man on the screen wasn’t a supervillain.

He was her father.

The visual details snapped together with startling clarity, chilling her from the inside. The shape of his jaw. The outline of his lips and the chestnut hue of his buzz-cut hair. Everything about him felt so familiar it hurt. When his eyes turned to her and he opened his mouth to speak, the classroom around her faded away to nothing.

“Hello there, little brat,” Dad said with a slight smile in flawless German, using a voice that sounded so much like him that she choked up for a second. “Did you miss me?”

Then he smiled wider, and something about it felt wrong. She adjusted the angle of the tablet to see more clearly, but the sense of wrongness persisted. Her dad had pulled his lips all the way back and was flashing his teeth in what looked like a snarl. It put her on edge instead of making her feel at home.

“Is that really you, Dad?” she asked in a tiny voice.

The man on the screen raised his short, bushy brows. “Who else would I be?”

My dad never looked at me like that. Not even when I was being stubborn and stupid.

Now that the doubts set in, she detected other spots where the illusion was wearing thin. The front of his gray officer’s uniform showed the wrong number of buttons. He clasped his strong hands over his knees, a mannerism so unlike him it felt unreal. And the way he was looking at her now … taxing and curious, his usually warm eyes devoid of affection. Like a mischievous crow searching a way through the kitchen window to steal Grandma’s hot apple fritters.

Wisp wiped at her tears again, and her growing anger made them dry up in an instant. “I don’t know who you are, but you aren’t my dad.” She forced the words through her teeth.

Not-Dad clacked his tongue and shifted to an American English as flawless as his German had been. “Impressive, especially for one as young as you are. I expected the little orphan to cling to her daddy for another minute.”

She had to stop herself from throwing the tablet at the nearest wall to shut up the almost childlike mischief in the villain’s voice. A voice that should have been gentle and reassuring because it belonged to her father. Chances were he anticipated a kneejerk reaction, though, and was provoking her on purpose. Whatever his intention, she wasn’t going to do him the favor.

Wisp shaped her anger into a shield and a mask. “What do you actually want from me?” she asked the man with the borrowed face.

He gave her a level stare. “Straight to the point. How very boring.” To her surprise, his frowning lips curled upward almost immediately, assuming the shape of a playful grin. “How very much like her. Ah, forgive my manners. I suppose it would be considerate of me to introduce myself.”

After a moment of tense silence, her father’s image dissolved and changed, his solid, stocky physique transforming into a taller and far more slender build. The ripple of transformation ran across the entirety of his body, reshaping and recoloring everything from his previously short-cropped hair to the fabric and cut of his outfit. The military uniform became a navy suit with a crisp dress shirt and a gray tie. His face now appeared slender and angular, though the upper half of it was hidden behind a silver-hued Victorian masquerade mask, mischievous hazel eyes laughing at her from behind vine-embellished eyeholes. Straight, long brown hair tied into a ponytail brushed against his left shoulder. The masked man steepled fingers in front of a beardless chin, somehow managing to give off an air of complacent benevolence she assumed to be as false as everything else about him.

This isn’t Data. It actually made sense, because Data – the Conglomerate’s last known leader – was an exceptionally skilled Technician without shapeshifting or illusion-based powers. This guy didn’t look like the kind of Evolved who tinkered with machinery and electronics. In fact, she couldn’t place him at all.

Then again, most of the supervillains who had stuck in anyone’s memory were dead.

“Who are you?” she asked once the transformation was complete.

He bobbed his head in a mock bow and offered a flourish of a suit sleeve. “The general public, which is regrettably forgetful, once knew me as Gentleman. I must assume that the news of my prosperity and freedom has not trickled down to your little corner of the world.”

Now that he had changed appearances, his voice no longer sounded like her dad’s. It had the cadence of a younger, gallant, and refined man, and she wanted to smack herself for not guessing his identity sooner. According to the rumors, the man projected deceptively real illusions and imitated the voices of people he had studied. It was how he had managed to vanish off the face of Earth and evade capture many months ago.

Regardless, the man remained a puzzle she had to solve.

What’s up with his weird way of speaking? Wisp blinked at the screen in confusion. And why the buddy act? If he put on a show to mess with her and challenge her expectations, it was working. She couldn’t find the right English words to throw back at him. Even her anger was beginning to evaporate, perhaps seeping through the cracks that the villain’s shift in tone and mood had left in her defenses.

Gentleman leaned into the camera and threw her a conciliatory look. “Please accept my sincere apologies for the dreadful first impression. Your father was a great and noble man, and I assure you that we were not in any way involved in what happened that day. If there is anything we can do to help you find closure, we will.”

“You knew my father?” Wisp blurted. An eerie, almost electric sense of danger tingled in the air around her. The questions of why and how lurked in the villain’s soft-spoken statement, shaking her to the core.

“Unfortunately, no.” Gentleman mocked her with a theatric sniffle. “I did do my research when I learned of you, however, and I’ve always had a fondness for strong and compelling personalities.”

But the voice? Wisp was still stumped. The next question slipped out unbidden. “Did you hack into our military systems to dig up audio files or something? That shouldn’t be possible.”

“Child,” the villain said through a tight smile that left his eyes cold, “you do know the Conglomerate controls a substantial portion of the world’s resources? I bought this city, and everyone in it, as a diversion. A passing intermezzo to set the stage for coming events.”

So you’re going to destroy it in the long run. If even half the rumors about the Conglomerate are true, you totally can. Wisp caught herself rubbing her knuckles against her forehead. And there probably isn’t much I can do about it.
  
  

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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.

The sphere she had placed on the west-side balcony as an emergency escape plan wasn’t anywhere in sight, and the neighborhood with its tightly packed 19th century terraced houses didn’t look familiar to her. The old man’s car had taken her too far off course to retrace her steps. Wisp spent a minute following the curve of the wall, looking out for citizens who showed too much interest in a girl with a rain jacket. Curious glances from passing citizens followed in her wake.

She spotted the light she had left on the other side of the wall and relocated to the sixth story balcony she had left it on. The change in altitude had her already hurting head reeling. The sky, the wall and the sprawl of the city swirled around her in a mad gyration, coalescing in a blend of gray, blue, and red. She gripped the cast iron railing and lurched against it until the dizziness passed.

When her vision cleared and the world stopped spinning, she took a moment to let the relief wash over her and steady her frantic heartbeat. It was over. She was back on the appropriate side, her side of the wall, alive and clutching a rucksack half filled with bank notes. As far as she knew, no one had gotten hurt and the heroes hadn’t identified her. At least not yet.

They might catch the drift once they analyze the surveillance camera streams.

The thought burned like a slow-acting poison, so Wisp pushed it away before it corroded her newfound peace of mind. This one time, she wanted Luca to be wrong about his forecasts for her future. She wasn’t a villain and no one was going to push her down that path. End of story.

She recalled her dislocated sphere, and as it zipped across the sky and back to her side, something caught her attention on the other side of the wall. A lone figure on a rooftop a hundred meters away, clad in an asymmetric costume of black and white. He was looking at her and she was looking at him. She couldn’t read his expression, but his hanging shoulders and lowered head told her more than she wanted to know. Sadness. Disappointment. As if he had invited her to trust him, and she’d shot him down, which actually wasn’t too far from the truth.

We might get another chance some other time. Wisp directed her sphere down to ground level. I really hope we do.

For now, her duty was with her friends. She dreaded the moment of facing Luca, of looking him in the eye as she admitted the success of her mission and her own potential downfall. But the anticipation of seeing the others alive drove her back into the toxic nether land. According to everything she knew about Constantine, he usually kept his word, so Hannah should be safe by now. If she was awake … if she was able to speak, to get up and return to her former self, then all of this would have been worth it.

Even the risk of public exposure as a villain. Which was something that was probably going to happen, but the threat of it felt distant and nebulous compared to the reality of the moment. The idea of self-sacrifice for the greater good was tempting in its own way.

It was what her dad had done in his final moments. By following in his footsteps, Wisp would know she’d done the right thing by her friends and honor the tradition of her turtle charm. She would no longer have to lie awake at night and wonder if her dad would approve of the decisions she’d made.

No one ever doubted the honor of dead soldiers, after all…

Wisp made the twenty-minute trip back to the bell tower with the expectation that Smoker would reveal himself any minute and harass her with his usual gloating. Or, alternately, try to kill her. Instead he did neither, not showing himself at all, so she was caught in a state of permanent tension. Unsure whether she had succeeded in her mission or not.

A burning need to see Hannah and the others alive and well drove her to make the trip back to the tower as quickly as possible. She moved at a soldier’s brisk jog, sending the light ahead to teleport across straight road sections wherever possible. For the first three minutes, the air was clear enough for her to follow streets and landmarks she recognized. The farther west she got, the higher the palls of Smog rose. Before long she found herself picking her way across rooftops and tall city structures as usual.

The Smog drifted along its reversed distribution pattern as expected, and the air was still, undisturbed by any semblance of superpowers. Even the breeze had given way to sweltering heat. If the villain was still hot on her heels, he must have had a reason for not revealing himself. To lull her into a false sense of security, perhaps. Or to peep behind the curtains of her home and spy on the reunion with her friends. Either way, his mysterious nonattendance creeped her out more than the stunt he had pulled on the other side.

Then again, his absence meant she didn’t have to confront the part of herself that felt desperate and threatened to the point of wanting to kill another person. At least not yet.

Had she been less anxious and jittery, she might have appreciated the irony of Smoker coming to her rescue without meaning to. She suspected he had smoked out East Berlin in order to pile the EU hero team’s collective attention onto her. Yet, as it turned out, the smokescreen – courtesy of the villain, accidental or not – had allowed her to shake off the hero pursuit in the first place. She wouldn’t have completed her mission otherwise.

Which was a good thing or a bad thing depending on how she wanted to look at it. Preferably not at all.

By the time the bell tower’s dilapidated silhouette came into sight, its surrounding square now abandoned and completely immersed in Smog, her thoughts had flown up to the belfry and refused to consider anything else.

“Hey, guys, I’m back!” she yelled, still racing along the top of the nearby church dome and bringing her sphere into position for the final leap. The rucksack dangled from her fingers and bounced along with every step.

Max yelled back at her. “Come over–”

She was already caught in the tide of her power, crossing the distance between them in the blink of an eye. Wisp appeared inches away from him on the belfry platform, overturning one of the crate seats as she popped into previously vacant space.

“…quick, she’s awake!” Max finished, only dropping the volume at the last instant.

For the first time in what felt like weeks, he had a grin on his face. Sara sat on the floor near his feet, her attention fully absorbed by the prone and bruised body of Hannah, who was sprawled out on a mat. The two girls held each other’s hands in a tight almost desperate grip, with their fingers trembling where they locked together. Hannah’s eyes were open and fixed on Wisp.

Luca wasn’t there.

“Hey,” Hannah said in a feeble voice.

The sound reduced the world around Wisp to shapes and dashes of color. Nothing mattered except the girl on the insulation mat. Max was saying something else but she wasn’t paying enough attention to know what it was.

“Hey,” Wisp echoed, sitting on the floor opposite Sara to tuck their wounded friend between the two of them. She took Hannah’s hand and held it in her own, constructing a smile that felt real but didn’t want to come. Luca’s absence tugged on her soul and demanded an explanation. Reassurance. Evidence that her turtle’s shell hadn’t cracked and the world within – her new family, her home – had survived the confrontation with Constantine.

“Where’s Luca?” she blurted.

“Downstairs. Taking a nap, I guess.” Max chewed on his lip and averted his eyes.

So Constantine didn’t kill him. Thank you, God, if you’re there.

“Okay.” Wisp swallowed the lump in her throat. She wanted to say more, but nothing came out.

If he isn’t here now, he’s fighting his inner demons all on his own. Which most likely meant that their friendship was in tatters. The realization didn’t hit her as hard as it would have, given different circumstances. He was alive. They still had the chance to patch things up.

Maybe.

Sara broke the lapse in conversation. She talked with her hands, her expression bright and animated. “They let her go half an hour after you left, and she woke up when Max was carrying her upstairs. She has, um, some bad wounds but it looks like someone already treated the worst of them, so she’s going to be okay. No infections or anything like that.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” Wisp whispered, suppressing a whimper. The turtle charm beneath her shirt felt warm against her skin.

Hannah stroked the back of her hand with a thumb. “Chin up, girl. Looks like things worked out the way you wanted.” When Wisp didn’t respond she added, “The others told me you went to the warehouse?”

Wisp nodded, glad for the change of subject. “I did. Was it full of Smog when you went, too?”

“Full as a pot whistling steam.” Hannah sniffed as though she smelled something disagreeable. “That’s kind of what I think it is. They’re cooking something in there, and I’ll bet my left nipple it isn’t tea. Or drugs. Or anything … normal.”

“Why did you go there without telling us first?” Wisp gently touched an unbruised section of Hannah’s cheek, showing that there was no reproach in her question.

Hannah forced a tight smile. “I’m a cat. You know the saying about cats.”

“Curiosity? But you’re always so careful. The last time you crossed over to Northside, you spent days preparing for the trip.”

“Three days at least,” Max chimed in.

“Four,” Sara corrected.

“Yeah, about that.” Hannah let go of Wisp’s hand and wiped a sweaty strand of red hair off her forehead. “I was just going to dig for treasure in the usual place, but then I caught two of C’s goons snooping around on our turf. Didn’t see me, but I heard them. They were cracking jokes about a mummy and the curse it cast over the city. But somehow it didn’t sound like they were joking at all.” She grimaced. “Figured I’d never get the joke if I didn’t tail them to the source, and a nagging little voice inside told me it was too big to ignore.”

“A mummy?” Wisp stared blankly at her friend, struggling to fit Hannah’s report into her accumulated understanding of how Dead City had changed over the past few weeks. No matter how hard she twisted and squeezed, this one piece just didn’t fit. There was no such thing as mummies. Even in this post-Pulse age of superpowers, the idea of a walking dead wrapped in bandages still sounded as ridiculous as it had in the last millennium.

“They were talking about Constantine, I think.” Sara tapped a finger to her nose. “He’s old and ugly and no one likes him.”

“It’s probably some sort of code,” Max said. “A metaphor for something they didn’t understand or couldn’t talk about.”

Wisp considered the idea before shaking her head. “Thinking too hard about it isn’t going to get us anywhere. Oh, and Smoker might still be hanging around, listening in. Don’t panic and be careful what you say.” Easier said than done. She caught herself constantly looking over her shoulder and glaring into seemingly empty corners.

Sara blinked repeatedly at her. “I understand.”

Max squinted at the sliver of the afternoon sky that was visible behind the window arches. “I’d still like to know what’s going on.”

“I kind of completed Constantine’s mission.” Wisp patted the rucksack on her lap. “I should probably be going, but I had to see Hannah first.”

“How did it go?” Max asked.

“Pretty well, I think.” Wisp touched her index and middle finger to her chin, signaling to the others that her own report was going to include critical details she couldn’t discuss under the current circumstances. All three of them nodded.

Wisp sat up straighter. “One more thing before I go. I know this is going to be hard for you to talk about, but…”

“Almost all the questions they asked me were about you,” Hannah said. “If you’re planning to go Northside without backup, you’d better watch your skinny ass.” There wasn’t a shred of emotion to Hannah’s statement. If she felt any anger toward her captors for the treatment she had suffered, she was keeping it locked away inside, away from her friends.

Wisp nodded. “What kinds of questions did they ask?”

“I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count. Their German was shit, and I’d never seen any of them before yesterday.”

“My powers then.” Wisp squinted at the firefly spark that hovered inches from her face, rendering her features in a reddish tinge of gold. “This was about me from the start, wasn’t it? They probably used you as a means to get at me.” She rubbed her eyes and her gang mates blurred a little. “I’m sorry, Hannah. I really am.”

“I know,” Hannah replied in a husky whisper. Her face turned pale. “You’re going to have a hard time believing this, but hear me out. That warehouse is fucking haunted. I’ve seen apparitions right outside the place, and yeah, this was before I tripped over C’s men and hit my head a few times.”

“Apparitions?” Wisp asked. “Like ghostly people?”

Hannah gave a grim nod. “Like that, yeah. Saw them with my own eyes. They were fickle. There one second and gone the next.”

“Ghosts don’t exist,” Sara said firmly. Max patted her arm, his expression focused and attentive.

“I’ve seen something similar,” Wisp admitted. “When Smoker trapped me near the warehouse. I thought he was messing with me. Trying to scare me before he showed himself.”

Hannah clacked her tongue. “It’s possible. Seems stupid to play ghost-train tricks in that situation. The Smog was freaky enough.”

“Pretty stupid, yeah,” Max said.

“Let’s just pack up and get out of this hellhole,” Hannah said with a weary finality. “I know a few low-key places in Leipzig that don’t smell too bad.”

Sara perked up again. “Are we leaving?”

“Soon,” Wisp said. “I just have to report back to Constantine and take care of a few things first. You guys start packing and stay safe, all right?” What she didn’t say was, I have to go figure out a way to kill Smoker and kick C where it hurts. Because the villain really might have been listening in.

“You got it, boss.” Max rummaged through the plastic bag that sat next to him on the floor. He pulled a fist-sized bundle wrapped in linen rags from it, which he solemnly passed to Wisp. “The Smog detector you wanted. I finished tinkering with it a half hour ago. It’s got a charged battery and everything.”

Smog detector? The bundle was round and compact, and felt heavy in her hands. The drone camera. Max had finished working on it and wanted her to have it in case she got the opportunity to take snapshots of a potential villain lair. She just couldn’t let anyone see or know about it. Especially not Smoker, which was why it was better to pretend it was something else.

“Thanks, Max,” she said. “What about the new clothes?”

He rubbed his chin. “Should be done by nightfall. Both sets.”

“Remember to watch your skinny ass over there,” Hannah added. “I’m serious. They asked me if you’re immune to anything, and how fast you can run.”

Max muttered a string of curses, but Wisp kept quiet. She didn’t need to know how much, if anything, Hannah had revealed to her captors. It didn’t matter. Smoker had seen her in action and Hannah knew nothing about her powers that hadn’t already been an open secret for the past year.

After giving Hannah’s hand a final squeeze, Wisp shoved the camera bundle into her shirt pocket and stood, hugging the rucksack to her chest like a shield.

“I have to go,” she said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. If, um … we get any unexpected visitors while I’m gone, offer them some lemonade and cookies to pass the time, all right?”

She tried to make it sound like a joke even though it wasn’t. She sincerely hoped the heroes had read or were about to read her note. Whether or not they’d get permission from their UNEOA superiors to enter Dead City was a different matter entirely.

“Visitors?” Max and Sara asked at the same time.

Wisp had already turned her attention northward and stepped up to the ledge. This wasn’t something she could explain. Not until she knew for sure there was no invisible spy listening in.

Her path was clear across the large hotel complexes followed by the long rectangle of the University of Arts, which would take her close to the campus and the city area where the Smog reached only one to two meters high. Constantine wasn’t going to fuss over her entering through one of the windows. He was expecting her, after all.

As she directed her remaining twin sphere to the flat-topped church, her first stop along the chosen route, she paused.

“Good luck. I hope you don’t need it,” Hannah said.

Her power pulled her across the Smog-filled space between buildings, displacing her with her sphere.

If this is going to be about luck, I’m kind of screwed.

Before she went on to the first hotel along her path, Wisp invested a moment in weaving three more fist-sized spheres from the soft late-afternoon light. When they had taken shape, she arranged them to float around her in a triangle. One of them hovered above her head while the others flanked her on either side. No one was going to be impressed by her personal light show unless she made a statement by blinding someone, but the presence of her beacons calmed and reassured her. This amount of potential firepower should last a good long while. Even after sundown.

Having re-armed herself, Wisp continued along the strip of tall hotel blocks that stretched deep into Shadow territory. The Smog had calmed by now, rippling in lazy, shallow waves a good ten or more meters beneath the raised walkways and terraces she used as anchor points for her leaps. Up above, the weather was taking a turn for the worse. The bank of thick gray clouds had swept in across Berlin, devouring what remained of the summer sky.

The first raindrops fell as Wisp reached the venerable, double-winged white stone building that had once belonged to the University of Arts. From there, the Technical University appeared as a squat, many-windowed monstrosity already cast in shadows and fading pale-orange light. The city surrounding the campus was shrouded in Smog except the park and university’s main entrance were left untouched by the deadly haze. No guards in sight. It looked as if Constantine’s entourage had withdrawn into the headquarters and other nearby buildings.

The absence of Smog left the impression that Smoker was already back here and had been for some time. Convinced that he was most likely not watching her this very moment, Wisp pulled the small camera bundle from her pocket and unwrapped it, revealing the cubical gadget Max had prepared for her. It looked smaller without the cloth wrapping. Slightly shorter than her little finger and about as wide, with a thumbnail-sized, dark-tinted camera lens at the front and a simple yellow button on top. The right size to sit comfortably in her hand and be concealed by her clothing.

Finding the right angle for a picture without getting caught was going to be the hard part.
  
  

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“Backup, GO!” the raspy male voice barked across the lobby.

Someone – one of the younger heroes, she assumed – shouted back. Three or four words that sounded like a confirmation, too muffled and distant to identify them as English.

The firefly beacon, now hovering as far to Wisp’s right as she could squint, changed its color from bloody crimson to a fiery yellow. She wasn’t going to die in the next few minutes after all. Had the situation been any different, she might have whooped and pumped her fist to celebrate her escape from the death train. She changed places with her floating light again, this time moving inches instead of meters.

But the repositioning had turned her around. A tall window stood in front of her, blessing her with an unobstructed view of the parking lot behind the bank. Wisp recalled her sphere to her position, shoved it out through the window, and jumped after it by switching places one more time. The next thing she knew, her boots kissed the hot sunlit asphalt, and she was outside. The voices of her pursuers sounded farther away but were still coming closer. They would catch the drift and round the building before long.

Wisp’s first reflexive thought was to get away. To escape in a direction they didn’t expect her to take. After a quick look around to confirm that she was alone, she shifted her weight and allowed her outstretched arm to answer the call of gravity, amazed to discover it was no longer pinned in place by an invisible force.

Without relaxing her grip on the rucksack, she turned around to face the building. The faint glow of Rune’s circle curved across the asphalt in front of her, inches from the tips of her boots. The rear facade of the blocky bank building loomed three meters ahead. The dislocated sphere hovered beyond the window that was closest to her, rendering the abandoned office in a faint tinge of red-gold. She called it back to her side without conscious thought. The best way to go was up. If the heroes hadn’t yet identified her, they’d expect her to try and escape at ground level. But first…

I have to break the circle.

Wisp extended one shaky leg, reaching out with her foot. They’re so busy looking for me, they probably won’t notice the broken circle right away. She lowered her boot onto the glowing line and rubbed it back and forth across the asphalt, covering a shoe-sized circle section with the dust and filth that was sticking to the soles of her boots. The smudged section extinguished but the remainder of the circle maintained its glow.

Had the effect actually been broken? Hopefully. She had no choice but to find out.

Having accomplished this, Wisp shifted her attention to the Postbank’s asphalt shingle roof and chose a section near the left-hand edge that looked to be walkable. It had to be. The heroes, already alerted by her vanishing act, were going to spot her any second now.

Her only choice was to dispatch her firefly sphere to the angled roof section two stories up. The small light was already drifting there when a staccato of footsteps rushed along the left side of the building, scraping to an abrupt stop before they entered her line of sight.

Wisp grimaced, remembering that she’d forgotten to withdraw her emergency escape beacon from the lobby window, and swapped places with the thumbnail-sized spark on the roof.

Her perspective of the city changed yet again. The white-blue summer sky opened up above her with an abrupt, stomach-lurching shift as if dragging her toward itself. Other buildings around her shrank in size by two stories, and the asphalt shingles that supported her weight seemed more perilous and steeply angled now that she was looking down at them.

So she stopped looking and recalled the firefly sphere to her side. Off to her left and below, a visible section of sidewalk showed her a still-intact part of Rune’s circle, but not the source of the footsteps. If she wanted a better view, she’d have to step closer to the edge of the roof. Make noise and risk blowing her cover.

“There’s something here!” a young male voice called out in English. It rose from down below, right next to the bank building. “Looks like some kind of power effect.”

Wisp squeezed her eyes shut, inhaling a deep breath. Whatever you do, please don’t send your teleporter to the rooftops. Her head filled up with premonitions of her failure, her self-doubt rearing its ugly head again. Her muscles locked up, wanting to stay put, and her overtaxed mind refused to make any more decisions. Moving at the wrong time could get her killed. Moving in the wrong direction could get her killed.

“Where?” a young male voice – the teleporter? – called from the other side of the building.

“It’s right here. Could be a booby trap or a distraction.”

It’s not. Wisp grasped a mental image of her abandoned sphere and forced her thoughts to arrange themselves around it. I just kind of forgot it was there. She concentrated on the sphere in question and extinguished it through sheer willpower. This was something she could do without moving her body after all.

“Now it’s gone!” the young hero reported excitedly.

Wisp wished she were gone, too. Seeing as she lacked the power to make herself vanish into thin air, she had no choice but to move. Escape. Staying here was going to get her killed as much as the wrong decision would.

Willing herself back into action by fixing her mind’s eye on Hannah, she removed the two glowing orbs from her eyes and tossed them into the sky above, hoping that the heroes weren’t going to look up anytime soon. Even though the beacon color hadn’t changed these past few moments, she needed an escape route that wasn’t going to take her on a collision course with the good guys.

Meaning, the rooftops. Rooftops were almost like a second or third home. A terrain she knew how to navigate. She touched the butt of the gun beneath her shirt and pictured herself as a soldier in her father’s unit, drawing strength from his example. Her tension lessened and she felt invigorated, anxiety draining away.

She gingerly inched forward, careful not to put too much weight on any of the shingles, and searched the sprawling city for a visible section of spike-topped wall. The guidepost leading back to her base and to safety. The wall towered over many of the adjoining buildings by its sheer height, making it easy for her to identify. She picked a nearby residential house as her first stop.

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 indicated 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 the 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.”
  
  

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There could be a SWAT team waiting inside the bank, she told herself as she ducked into a covered back alley near the bank building, dismissing the idea almost instantly. No, the police – most likely alerted by an anonymous tip from a ‘concerned citizen’ – would lie in wait to catch her red-handed. She had trouble believing they’d shoot her on sight. Even now, in the day and age of bank robbers who could liquefy bystanders by sneezing at them, the police still issued warnings first.

After making sure no one was paying attention to her, she released two of her three spheres from the rain jacket sleeve, then slid the sunglasses down her nose and beckoned the pair of lights toward her eyes. They drifted closer and closer until they filled her eye sockets completely, giving them a fake demonic glow. The brightness should have blinded her but didn’t. These were her lights. She couldn’t have used them for self-harm even if she’d intended to.

Next, she slid the sunglasses back in place, saving her pretend power for the right moment. With any luck, no one was about to associate glowing red demon eyes with an Evolved girl named Wisp.

The third sphere stayed inside her sleeve as she slipped out of the alley and back onto the street. From where she was standing, the Postbank – a blocky two-story building with dark brown walls – presented a set of small, unadorned windows to her. The one closest to the entrance would be connected to the lobby, the only part of the building she needed to enter. As in every other bank she’d ever been in, the teller booths would be arranged around the lobby, close enough to the windows to allow for a quick getaway from the inside.

For that reason, Wisp split her third sphere into two smaller orbs, one of which she cast toward the nearest window that had a view of the lobby. It zipped in the indicated direction and hovered there, its signal colored glow reflected in the window glass. The other sphere she kept to herself. It was a firefly spark the size of her thumbnail, easy to contain within her sleeve. A portable emergency escape in case the one she’d placed outside the lobby window was out of sight.

“You probably want to keep your distance now,” Wisp said, hoping that Smoker was listening. “So you don’t get caught up in whatever’s triggering the danger alert.”

What she actually meant to say was, don’t make this worse than it already is and please don’t read the written notes when I hand them over.

She walked the rest of the way to the yellow-framed entrance and waited for the door to slide open. When it did, a wash of air-conditioned air flowed through the doorway, sending a chill across the summer sweat on her skin. Her fingers felt clammy and cold and her feet froze in place, refusing to cross over the doorstep.

The lobby opened up before her, its marble floors and pastel-colored rotunda with the curving waiting benches cast in the fiery glare of her eye spheres. There were no clients inside. No one but the only teller, a lanky young man with curly brown hair who sat behind the only counter with an ‘open’ sign.

I’m going to survive this. Wisp repeated the words as a mantra in her head as she made her way past the rotunda, approaching the counter with her rucksack in hand. The teller behind the counter settled his glasses-rimmed gaze on her. There was no surprise in his expression. It remained suspiciously neutral even as she slid the sunglasses down her nose, revealing the false demonic fire in her eyes.

Yes, this guy had clearly received advance warning. Chances were he wasn’t your average bank employee either.

Wisp kept to her role by holding the rucksack up in front of him, fishing the first note from her pocket, and placing the latter on top of the counter in plain view. A nagging feeling told her not to let go of the bag. It was Hannah’s life insurance, after all.

The teller looked over the note without bothering to pick it up. Wisp wasn’t sure he had read it at all.

“I understand,” the man replied mechanically and with small crinkled eyebrows. “If you hand me the bag, I’ll need a few minutes to fill it.” When he extended a hand to lift the rucksack off the counter, the movement seemed timed and controlled, like a part rehearsed for an amateur play. Wisp held the rucksack open for him without handing it over.

At least read the second note, Wisp implored him in her head as she retrieved the notepaper from her other pocket and placed it on top of the first. Her fingers quivered against the edge of the desk so she quickly withdrew her hand and pushed the sunglasses back over her glowing eyes. As much as she wanted to tell him to read the mosh-diddling note, she couldn’t. If she survived this, any recordings of her voice would count as evidence against her and contribute to getting her killed later.

I’m proving you wrong, Luca. Wisp clenched her teeth, steeling herself for her next steps. I’m pulling through.

She lowered the rucksack onto the counter and held it open for the teller but didn’t let go. He wasn’t looking at it. Instead, his eyes settled on something behind her, something that made the hairs on the back of her neck tingle. She resisted the urge to spin around and face whatever it was. She hadn’t heard anyone enter the lobby, so whatever had drawn the man’s attention must be still lurking beyond the entry door. The trap hadn’t been sprung yet. Her time window for cheating death was still open.

She cleared her throat to get the man’s attention. Still far too collected to be mistaken for a bank employee, he gave her a nod and shuffled around the bank’s back area, collecting stacks of bills from locked compartments. Back there, a long line of wooden desks and teller lockers led up to a stainless-steel vault and two office doors, one of which had been left half open. No sound or movement came through the doorway. Only the soft rustle of paper money filled the lobby.

But why did he look if there’s nothing behind me?

Now that the teller had turned his back to her, Wisp dared a peek at the glass sliding door she had passed on the way in. To her surprise, no police detachment had taken position outside. A long, faint trail of blue luminescence hung in the air right outside the building, fading as she watched but still plainly visible. When she had entered the bank minutes before, there hadn’t been anything supernatural outside. No spooky light effects apart from her own.

Wisp felt her throat go dry. Another Evolved had done this, someone who was about to invite themselves to the party.

Who could it be? The question churned in her gut as she turned in a slow circle, scanning the city cutouts behind the windows for possible threats and attackers. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a flash of movement. By the time her brain was able to pinpoint a direction, the source of the movement had vanished and the window revealed nothing.

“They’re already here,” the teller said without looking at her. He was standing behind the counter, hands thrust out and filled with money. “One of your friends sold you out.”

Her first thought was that her friends had nothing to do with this, but then her mind raced ahead, forming new connections and possibilities based on little things she had picked up along the way but failed to process. Things like the lone patron who had been reading in the cafeteria across the street from the bank. Five minutes ago, she had been too single-minded to sense the air of familiarity about him. His was a face that occasionally appeared in local newspapers, printed across the upper half of the first page in bold colors.

Rune. Leader of the European hero team. A wildcard Evolved who fit into none of the UNEOA’s power categories, capable of evoking a variety of unpleasant effects from mystic symbols drawn on objects or on the ground. For short-term results, even a large rune could be drawn in minutes. The trail of luminescence she had seen through the window had to indicate a runic circle around the building. A circle that was about to close and unleash a nasty surprise on anyone trapped within. According to the bank employee, ‘they’ were already in position, meaning that Rune hadn’t come alone. Chances were he had brought his team.

Rune isn’t going to kill me, not with a normal person standing right next to me. The thought wasn’t as reassuring as it should have been. The person pulling the trigger? That’s going to be someone else.

Part of her toyed with the idea of rushing outside to meet the heroes head on, to explain herself and the situation she had gotten entangled in. To request help from the people most capable of helping her out. Given the chance, it was exactly what she’d do, meaning that she couldn’t actually do it. The danger beacons in her eyes didn’t let her forget that acting like herself was just going to get her killed. Fortunately, she had the freedom to make irrational decisions.

Bringing back proof of a mission accomplished wasn’t an option. So instead of making a mad dash for the entrance door, Wisp grabbed a fistful of the bank notes the teller had already stacked on top of the counter, shoved them into her rucksack, and grabbed a bunch more.

She managed to get the rucksack half-filled before the flow of time skipped a beat and reality condensed around her like a physical thing, capturing her in mid-motion and holding her tight. Her breath stopped with a clipped gasp, her chest weighed down by an invisible force that washed over her and everything around her, whipping displaced bills through the room. The bank employee was still standing behind the counter with his hands arrested, as frozen in the moment as she was.

For one terrible moment, she thought she was going to drop right there, choked to death by a hero who hadn’t even stepped forward to challenge her face to face. But then she realized that heroes didn’t kill like this. Not without warning and not with innocents standing by.

The thought cleared the haze of death from her mind, infusing it with the desperate will to breathe. She sucked in a mouthful of air and was amazed to discover that it went all the way to her lungs. Her chest still refused to heave, but she discovered that she was able to suck in small, shallow breaths. Her tongue clacked against her teeth when she willed it to move. Her limbs remained locked in place, fingers knotted around the half-filled rucksack’s strap.

After a few more breaths, her mind came back into focus. I have to get out, Wisp rationalized. If the heroes see me, I’ll have a criminal record for sure. Getting caught on camera was bad enough. Cameras were tricked by bright lights, and she had plastered two of those to her face. Other people standing right next to her wouldn’t be fooled so easily. They’d pull down her hood and sunglasses and confirm her identity as a criminal.

“You okay?” Wisp asked the lanky bank employee.

He stared back at her, the corners of his mouth curling upward ever so slightly. She didn’t need to ask to know he was looking forward to whatever was going to happen next.

She had to get out of there right away. But how? She was facing the counter, so the window with her escape sphere was behind her and to her right, removed from her field of vision unless she found a way to shake off the paralyzing rune effect and turn around. This wasn’t an option right now.

Rune’s effects aren’t permanent. Wisp recalled newspaper and tabloid articles, piecing together bits of Rune-related information. It takes time to draw them and the circles can be broken. If she managed to step outside the circle, the hero would have no more power over her.

She was staring at the windowless core of the bank building, her view of the outside world obstructed by a curving, pastel-colored concrete wall. If she rolled her eyes all the way to the left, a half-open office door appeared at the edge of her field of view, along with a sliver view of the room beyond it.

Over there. The office.

When she dropped her gaze to the rain jacket sleeve with the concealed backup light, three male voices drifted from the direction of the doorway. The closed glass door smothered the words, but two of the voices had the patter of excited youth to them. The third was a sober, raspy baritone she associated with Rune. Heroes.

Of course he had brought his team. The three of them had to be standing outside, most likely waiting for the go-ahead to come inside and deal with the criminal. It was, after all, what heroes did when they were actually trying to be useful to society. The team teleporter recently transitioned had to be one of them. He’d be the reason why the perpetually over-worked EU heroes took a chance on investigating an anonymous tip in the first place.

Why only three voices?

As far as Wisp remembered, Rune’s team included two girls. The other young guy had to be Crashbang, who moved with incredible speed and set off a flashbang grenade effect whenever he punched or crashed into a solid surface.

Releasing the firefly sphere from her sleeve, she tried to dig up a shred of the anger that sustained her in situations like this one and found none. Smoker was no longer there to serve as a hate target, so her anxiety came creeping back to fill the void. For a moment she almost appreciated the muscle-locking power that kept her feeble legs from trembling.

Maintaining her focus, she struggled to locate an inconspicuous path for the light to take, low to the ground and out of the way of the cameras she hadn’t even located. It reached the office door at the same time the main entryway slid open, and then heavy footsteps pounded into the lobby, belonging to only one person. It seemed that the others were staying back for now.

“Keep calm and don’t use your powers,” the adult male voice barked in Scandinavian-accented English. “We’re coming over to you now. Play along and we’re not going to hurt you, all right? We just want to talk. Make sure you’re not going to do anything stupid.”

Wisp wished she could do as he’d said. Wait here, meet his eyes, and see for herself what a hero looked like in real life. Maybe get a taste of what it would be like to follow Athena’s advice and carve out a different path for herself. She wanted to call out, convince him that she wasn’t one of the bad guys. She wanted to meet the team. Her head swam with a myriad of questions she wanted to ask. Part of her was desperate to know whether he had brought along the huge, rune-adorned double ax that was his trademark.

But he had robbed her of the possibility to turn around and face him, and her attention was locked onto the firefly beacon that was hovering in the office doorway. Her faithful ally, a furious spark of crimson to remind her of her own impending death. There was no police present and the heroes weren’t going to kill her.

Which left one option: Smoker.

Wisp knew this with a chill certainty. If she tried to communicate with the heroes at all, she’d fail her trial run and prove herself useless to the Conglomerate, and Smoker would kill her. Which meant no solution to the Smog hazard, and no crime evidence for Athena. The city would most likely go to rack and ruin, become a full-blown villain hideout instead of a home for the homeless.

Wisp directed her tiny sphere through the open doorway with one final heart-rending nudge, pushing it as far into the office as she could see. Then she switched positions with it.

Her stomach lurched and the wall panel faded away before her eyes, replaced by a faux wood filing cabinet and a section of whitewashed wall. Her right hand still extended in front of her with the rucksack, crashed into a row of fat blue ring binders, sending them tumbling to the floor. She made a strangled sound, more out of shock than anything else.

What she did register was the approaching hero. Now that there was more distance and another doorway between them, the clacking of his shoes sounded less substantial, fading out like the echo of something long gone. Except he wasn’t.

Not waiting for him to realize why she had disappeared in plain sight, Wisp pulled the dislocated sphere back toward herself, quivering in her struggle to turn a tiny little bit and locate a window. Naturally, her body – still caught within the runic circle’s area of effect – refused to budge. The footsteps in the lobby fell silent, but not for long. Wisp had barely aligned her beacon from the filing cabinet when the shouting began.
  
  

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CHAPTER 8

As for all the talk about heroism and fighting for a greater good? Save it for the comic books.

-An insight by Mascot

When Wisp approached the square’s edge, the five-meter Smog walls enclosing it melted away, diminishing and fraying as if dispersed by the wind. The wind had nothing to do with it, however. Long, hazy bands of vapors rolled downward to congeal over sun-warmed pavement, then flowed along nearby streets in river-like rivulets, searching for the nearest grate or manhole to disappear through. To retreat into the city’s underbelly it had supposedly risen from.

When she reached the strolling area outside the Europa Center with its circular fountain seats, Wisp paused to take in this surreal spectacle of daytime Smog banishment.

“So you can’t just summon it at night,” she said to Smoker, who tagged along at her side. “You can get rid of it during the day, too.” His display of control had left an impression on her and she did her best not to let it show.

“Correct,” Smoker said in English, the word loaded in boredom. “Get a move on, kid. We don’t have all day. Keep walking toward the wall, I’ll let you know when you take a wrong turn.”

She tucked the sunglasses into a pocket and tied the rain jacket around her waist. If Smoker had this much power over Smog – and not just a fraction, no, all of the stuff – did this mean he’d experienced one of those surges the pundits kept rambling on about? Because that would be plenty reason for the Covenant to come kill this guy in about five minutes flat. According to the rumors she’d heard about power surged Evolved, anyway.

I’d have to prove it. She rubbed her nose. What if this wasn’t a power surge, but instead a specialization or power synergy that only worked on biomass-melting toxic gas? Wisp’s array of numerous, minor, limited usability tricks was an oddity in the Evolved community. Most powered had five or less different power talents, but executed those with unmatched expertise.

Or maybe Luca was right after all. She disliked the thought but failed to push it away. Maybe Smoker really was here a year ago. Maybe he was behind the Deadenings all along.

At any rate, she had to learn more about the guy before she knew exactly how dangerous he was. Looking around and seeing the Smog retreat and disperse made her think that he was too dangerous to stay alive. Common sense told her that the Conglomerate wouldn’t stink up her home turf without their pet Transmuter to keep the stench in check.

Smoker had to be disposed of. Sure, there was a chance for his powers to re-emerge after his death. With any luck, whoever inherited them wouldn’t turn out to be an arrogant, snot-faced villain.

“You going to stand around there all day?” Smoker tossed a pebble at her. It bounced off her pant leg and she set back into motion, hiding her clenched fists beneath the drape of her rain jacket.

Wisp trudged down the broad expanse of Budapest Street and stepping over streaks of moonlight and shadows cast by twisted, dying trees. In no particular hurry to reach her destination, she maintained a leisurely pace, monitoring her danger beacons as much as her surroundings. The three lights floated alongside her, matching her step. Only a paper-thin sheet of Smog still trailed across the ground. The streets looked safe enough to walk on.

What Wisp wanted the most was a chance to write a couple notes without Smoker reading over her shoulder. She had a feeling he was going to turn incorporeal before entering the bank with her, meaning she wouldn’t be able to tell who or what he was looking at. But he’d definitely be watching. Perhaps wait for her to screw up and find an excuse to kill her if she did.

“It might help if you scout ahead,” she said as she passed the former zoo’s imposing sculpted Elephant Gate. “You know what the color of my lights means, right? The two of us are going for some serious mackerel fishing. I don’t know the reason, but my power thinks there’s a good chance we’ll both end up dead.”

His hesitation lasted long enough to reveal he wasn’t aware of the exact extent of her powers. “The two of us?” he repeated.

“Right. You’re coming along to help me out, so the spheres are attuned to both of us.” The lie came easily.

A moment of silence followed.

“Wait here. Don’t move an inch until I tell you so,” Smoker said.

The air stirred and a sweaty strand of hair tickled her cheek. She held her breath and waited, listening for movement or powers and detected nothing. After another moment of wondering how fast he moved in his incorporeal form, she took the plunge and pulled the pencil and the small notepad from her pants pocket, ripped the top page away, and scribbled down two separate messages on two slips of paper.

The first one read: Fill this rucksack with bank notes. Don’t talk to me and don’t trigger an alarm. No one gets hurt.

She put the paper slip in her pocket and listened for sounds or movement one more time. After convincing herself that Smoker hadn’t returned yet, she scribbled down the second, slightly longer message on the other notepaper.

I’m being forced to do this. Send a hero to the top of the old Emperor Wilhelm bell tower to take the money back. Urgent: Conglomerate villains active in the city.

That was it. She would have liked to add more but couldn’t risk it. What she had would have to do. And if the second note failed to trigger a Covenant investigation of Dead City, the drone camera should do the trick once Max finished repairing it.

Wisp folded the paper before shoving the notepad and pencil back into her pockets. She placed the shorter note on top of her notepad so it was easy to retrieve in a hurry. The other she put into a different pocket.  She adjusted her long shirt that concealed her gun. As much as she appreciated having a memento of her father’s along for the ride, she didn’t want to draw it. Especially not on innocent bank employees.

After two or three minutes of tense anticipation, a subtle change in air pressure revealed Smoker’s return. She did her best to look inconspicuous while he slowly emerged into physical form. The wall was just two kilometers away. If he had gone far enough east to look on the other side of the wall, his incorporeal self could fly much faster than she could run. Good to know.

“Find anything?”

He peered at her from narrowed eyes. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Come on.”

Of course, he hadn’t spotted anything unexpected. The trap was set for only her, and chances were he knew about it. He just didn’t want to get dragged down alongside her.

“Good to know.” She continued down the road, picking up her pace. “This could mean that whatever I’m about to do has dangerous aftereffects. This is my test, so if you want to stay safe, try not to get too involved.” What she actually meant was: stay back and don’t get anyone hurt.

“Wasn’t planning to,” he said. “I’m here to watch, not to save your ass.”

She bit her lip and said nothing. They moved along, Wisp scanning abandoned storefronts and shadowy corners for any signs of danger while Smoker flanked her. Her thoughts kept drifting in one direction: why? Why did she have to undergo this ‘test,’ and who stood to gain anything from it? If she ended up getting shot by the police, what was the point? To throw her powers back into the mysterious pool newly transitioned Evolved got their abilities from?

No, that made even less sense than Hannah’s kidnapping. Compared to the cool, flashy, and useful powers other Evolved flaunted on television screens, hers fell into ‘jamboree with real magic’ territory. She couldn’t think of a single reason why a group of actual supervillains would be interested in returning them to the pool.

Fact was, though, that the Conglomerate had developed some kind of interest in her. Constantine had little to nothing to do with this. He had never felt particularly threatened by her, and judging by his reaction when she put a gun against his neck, the reckless stunt had earned her respect rather than ire. She couldn’t even begin to imagine why he’d want her dead.

Maybe this really is meant to be a trial by fire, she mused. If the Conglomerate had somehow gotten the impression that she could be converted to the dark side, then the ever-elusive Data – its leader – may have an interest in speaking to her. Nothing would get the Covenant heroes on the scene faster than a drone-transmitted picture of that guy.

“Over there,” Smoker said, scattering her thoughts. “Into the parking garage and down the stairs. We’re crossing the wall underground.”

After several minutes of walking, the New Berlin wall now loomed a short distance ahead, a monstrosity of steel and concrete that was both taller and sturdier than the old wall had been back in the early eighties. She remembered a little less than a year ago when the wall had been nothing more than a hastily assembled metal skeleton crowned by jagged spikes, like a steel cage to seal off southwest Berlin. Not long afterward, the government added concrete reinforcements and high-voltage barbwire to keep people from looting Dead City, and prevent the Smog from spilling into other parts of the country. The wall was a testament to Germany’s fear of superpowers gone terribly wrong. Whenever she looked at it, Wisp felt a fragment of this fear pinch her stomach. She was as much German as the people who had built this monstrosity, and she’d had first-hand experience what happened when superpowers did go wrong. The afterimages of the first Deadening had burned themselves into her soul for all eternity.

To her right, the broken glass entryway to an underground parking garage loomed among scattered pieces of vulgar graffiti. Her pulse quickened but she held it under control, held on to the invisible mask that infused her with courage. She was going to do this. She’d outwit her danger beacons and find a way to survive the odds.

“A moment,” she said, not yet passing the doorway.

The wall reached high for her to see and dispatch a light to the other side, but there was a tall apartment building across the street from the parking garage, equipped with long lines of cast stone balconies that faced the New Berlin Wall. She picked the one closest and high enough to be visible from the other side, then dispatched a light to use it for an escape in case of emergency

“Are you done?” Smoker’s voice rasped, far too close for comfort.

She winced and was immediately annoyed at herself for letting him get to her.

“Let’s go.” She stepped through the broken doorway, shards of glass crunching beneath her boots. The stairs down were located next to the inactive elevator and looked reasonably safe. She descended slowly, watching her step. Her two remaining spheres drifted along and lit the way. One story down, only a narrow sliver of daylight broke through the gap between the stairs. The spheres cast a deep shade of mandarin over the blotchy concrete walls and the heavy-looking white paneled door that blocked her view of the parking area. From the color, she determined that she had about fifteen minutes left.

Whatever is going to happen, it’s not happening down here. She put her hand on the door handle and pulled. The bank is the trap.

She strained to hold the heavy door open and slipped through, a whoosh of old, musty air rushing past her into the darkness ahead. A strong smell of neglect and decay assaulted her senses. She moved forward across the dirty asphalt, extending her spheres ahead of herself. Combined with her enhanced vision, they provided enough light to navigate the darkness toward the exit Smoker indicated.

After a walk of a minute, she reached another door that was identical to the one she had passed on her way in. As heavy as the first, but she managed to push it open without difficulty. Beyond it was another dark stairwell and the broken remains of a brick wall that had sealed the parking garage before someone came along and tore it down.

Are the people doing okay over there? Wisp wondered as she stepped through the door. The stairwell leading up to East Berlin loomed ahead of her, filled with dust and silence. Daylight filtered down from the city that waited a few meters above, but no human voices. No sounds. The question she had asked herself flew back at her like a ricochet: the rumors Luca had heard were not wrong. The other half of the city was dying, too.

“Good job, little snail.” There was a thread of mockery to Smoker’s words. “You’ve crawled most of the way, now all you need to do now is go up the stairs. It’s a two-minute crawl to the bank. You’re not planning to get lost on the way there, are you?”

Nope. I have to take a look beyond the wall.

Wisp untied the rain jacket from her waist and slipped into it, then pulled the blue plastic hood over her head and stuffed her hair up underneath it. The less people and security cameras saw of her, the better. If there was anyone left. There had to be. The strip closest to the wall had been abandoned first, she assumed. Who would want to live this close to the Smog?

She didn’t want to think about how much her disguise clashed with the warm weather, or how much she was going to stick out among actual people. But Smoker did.

He snorted a laugh, causing the air to vibrate around him. “Are you going up there like this?”

The question rattled her already fragile confidence. She lacked the anger to pretend she knew what she was doing, and she was painfully aware of how ignorant and under-prepared she was. Her outfit looked ridiculous. People were going to stare, point fingers, and know right away something weird was going on. The more she thought about how much she didn’t fit in, the more impossible her mission seemed.

Still, she had to keep moving forward, charge ahead and keep pretending she had it all planned out. It was the only thing she knew how to do. Offer a reassurance she herself lacked.

“I’m not going to run into any Smog, am I?” Wisp pulled the cheap sunglasses from her pocket and slid them over her eyes, feeling glad to have something to hide behind.

“Are you expecting to?”

Wisp shrugged and turned her attention to the floating spheres. One of them she split into three marble sized orbs and directed those into the cuff of her opaque rain jacket sleeve. In there, hidden from anyone without superhuman perception, they only demanded a little bit of her attention.

“Let’s go.” Wisp grabbed the empty rucksack and climbed the stairs, taking the steps one by one.

The distant sound of a honking car horn drifted from above. Once she climbed high enough to poke her head into the sunlit lobby with its elevator and vending machines, a set of floor-to-ceiling windows revealed a cutout of Berlin as she remembered it: a bicycle shop with clean, shiny windows and a newsstand with a well-stocked display of newspapers and magazines.

The road looked deserted. Her uncertainty grew and she stopped, feet glued to the uppermost stair step. After a small eternity of digging around for her bandana, she managed to tie it over her mouth and nose with sweaty, clumsy hands. Yet another barrier to hide behind.

No one’s going to recognize me like this. The thought gave her the courage to climb the last steps to the lobby. Look, Dad, I’m not giving up. Still moving forward and saving Hannah.

“Should have saved the bandana for later,” Smoker pointed out. “It makes you look like a small-town gangster. People are going to stare.”

“Yeah, whatever. Right or left?” she asked.

“Go right. Can’t miss the bank if you keep following the road.”

She pushed the door open and stepped outside, exposing herself to the sunlight and a summer breeze that smelled cleaner and fresher on this side of the wall, the absence of Smog so exhilarating she wanted to keep standing there and get drunk on the outside world scent. A hint of freshly prepared food wafted past and her mouth watered, remembering the taste of Grandma’s cooking from forever ago.

The sound of the door clicking shut behind her startled her back into action. As expected, Smoker was nowhere to be seen. Shadowing her in ghost mode. She hoped with all her heart he wasn’t going to escalate the bank robbery into a full-on supervillain attack with human casualties.

After giving herself another push forward, she continued down the road leading away from the wall, doing her best to ignore the shop windows and wall posters that were trying to grab her attention. Pushing aside the teasers of a life that was no longer hers. Instead she looked around for people, spotting the occasional passersby in a hurry to get someplace else.

Each person discovered improved her mood a little, made it easier to keep going. The city hadn’t been abandoned yet. People still lived here, meaning the bad guys hadn’t driven out everyone else. Not yet.

No one had more than a glance for the short young woman who hid her face behind sunglasses and a bandana. Most people she passed looked far more interested in the handful of stores that were still open, and even the raised rain hood only earned her a few blank stares.

Wisp hurried along, equal parts relieved and concerned by the absence of police and security forces. This close to the wall, there should have been patrols. She couldn’t help but wonder if the government already had plans to evacuate the northeastern neighborhoods. It would certainly explain why the parking garage breach hadn’t been patched back up.

By the time she spotted the Postbank building on the left side of the street, the spheres inside her sleeve had turned a light shade of crimson and she paused to do another scan of the area.

Fortunately, the area surrounding the bank looked deserted for the most part. A young woman in sports clothes was walking a dog along the right side of the road. A broad-shouldered man with a long brown braid occupied one of the tables outside a small café, an open book in front of him. He appeared to be the only patron. Apart from the obvious lack of city life and traffic, there was nothing unusual about the scenery. No police presence whatsoever. Nothing to indicate a deadly trap.

The false peace made Wisp’s skin crawl. Whatever it was that was going to happen to her, she would have preferred to see it coming, give herself time to consider rather than react on autopilot. If she wanted to survive, she had to ditch the seemingly obvious options and act irrational, doing what she normally wouldn’t do and betray the expectations of her danger beacons.
  
  

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