Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins (37 page)

“Because you just ratted out your boss, and something tells me he’s not a forgiving kind of guy.”

Cane’s sudden pallor stands as a silent confirmation of that hunch.

Stuart leads the charge, plunging headlong through the sealed doors to Archimedes’ chamber. Six men and women leap from their chairs and cower behind their terminals, but not the man in black, who points a damning finger at the Squad. “MATTHEW STEIGER!”

They freeze. Archimedes, his forehead shiny with flop-sweat, rolls out of his seat and takes his place behind the Foreman.

“Sara Danvers. Melissa Hamill. Stuart Lumley.” As he says their name in turn, the wall of monitors conjures images of their student IDs, their Facebook pages, their parents’ drivers’ licenses. Tax records, mortgage documents, bank statements, phone bills, electric bills, gas bills, water bills—their entire lives and the lives of their families literally flash before their eyes.

“We know everything about you,” the Foreman says, gesturing in presentation like a game show hostess showing off a grand prize sports car. “Here’s what’s going to happen, kids. You’re going to get out of our way and let us leave, or Archimedes will erase
everything
. Your lives, your parents’ lives, gone. In this day and age, that’s as good as a death sentence.”

Matt swallows air; his mouth has gone desert
dry. “No way.”

“Don’t screw with us,
Matt
,” Archimedes taunts. “You make one wrong move and all that? I make it all go away before you can blink. You think you can move faster than the speed of thought?”

Archimedes corkscrews through the air, his data cable ripping free of his interface crown and swinging back to slap the Foreman in the mask.

“I can,” Sara says.

“
Hmph
. Right. Contingency plan, then,” the unflappable Foreman says. He raises a hand, which cradles a small black box. “This is a dead man’s switch. If I release this switch, it instantly detonates the C-4 laced throughout this building’s infrastructure.”

“Now we know you’re bluffing,” Matt says. “You blow the building, you’ll die too.”

“I’m prepared to make that sacrifice,” the Foreman says. “Your friends in the Protectorate would no doubt find a lot of very interesting things here. I’m not about to let any of it fall into their hands—and a good captain always goes down with the ship.”

“And you expect us to let you go?”

“I do. And once I’m well clear I will detonate the C-4. That should take about ten minutes.”

“How do we know you won’t set it off early?”

The Foreman shrugs. “You don’t. But you don’t have much of a choice now, do you?”

Sara
, Matt says,
is he for real?

I can’t tell
, Sara says.
His mind’s shielded somehow; I can’t read him at all.

The switch thing, can you, I don’t know, keep his hand closed?

I don’t have that kind of control,
Sara says, cursing
herself.
More likely I’d knock it out of his hand.

Matt sidesteps away from the exit, cueing the others to do the same. The techs shove each other out of the way for the right to leave first.

The Foreman, in a final show of his power, of his contempt, strolls out, waving goodbye with his free hand.

“Enjoy the win while you can. As they say, this is only the battle,” he says. “We still have a whole war ahead of us.”

As I climb I catch sight of two dots in the distance skirting the cloud cover. One of them hurls thunder, the other trails lightning in its wake. I close in. My hands itch. My head throbs. I’m pushing too hard too soon. I keep pushing.

Concorde shoots me a look. I await his standard scornful greeting.

“Help me take this bastard down,” he says.

“Absolutely.”

We split off, swoop around until we’re flanking Manticore and then let him have it, sound and fury from the left, light and rage from the right. We bank hard, trading positions, strafing Manticore as we pass. His wings fold back and he not so much dodges as plummets out of the way. Concorde and I swing around, shadowing him, trying to dismantle him in a lethal crossfire, but
damn
is he slick. We can’t touch him.

Manticore soars low over the ocean, weaving and bobbing around our joint assault, then power-climbs. Concorde drops an F-bomb in my ear. “He’s heading toward the city!”

“So? He can’t lose us in the—”

“He’s not trying to lose us! We have to stop him, now!”

Something bad’s happening. This isn’t a grudge match anymore. Concorde fires recklessly, desperately.

Castle Island slides past us on our left as we hurtle down the throat of Boston Harbor. Manticore reaches the North End and stays low, skimming the rooftops to rob us of a clear shot. We pass South Station, North Station, the science museum. The skyscrapers fall behind us and we’re over, I don’t know, Cambridge, maybe? The buildings are all much shorter, more historical in appearance.

Manticore dips over a public park, almost kissing the ground, and then rockets away. His tail detaches, pinwheeling through the air.

“NO!”

“Concorde?” Concorde lands, scoops up the tail, blasts off back toward the ocean. “What are you doing? Manticore’s escaping!”

“Doesn’t matter! He’s set the nuclear microcell in his tail to overload!”

“Overload? Like—”

“Like in two minutes everything within a twomile radius gets vaporized!”

Oh my God. “Can you get it out of the city before it blows?”

“...I have to.”

I don’t like that answer. “Will you be able to get clear?” This time there’s no answer. I like that even less.

I can still catch Manticore. Catch him? Hell, without his main weapon he’s easy prey. I can take him down.

Or...

There’s no choice.

I’m moving so fast Concorde is a speck in my proverbial rear-view mirror by the time he realizes I’ve snatched the tail away from him. He orders me to stop, let him take care of it.

“I’m faster than you. I have a better chance of getting it far enough out to sea.” Not that I have unshakable confidence I can get out of the blast zone afterwards, but if either one of us has to make the sacrifice, better me than him.

I’m not trying to be noble, it’s just a fact. Concorde is arrogant, abrasive, patronizing, stubborn, and one of the best super-heroes around. The world needs him a lot more than it needs me.

For the record: this is not my teary farewell speech. I plan to live for a good long time.

“Twenty seconds,” Concorde says. The transmission is weak, cracking with static. There’s nothing around but a churning floor of blue—as far as the eye can see, no hint of land.

I apologize in advance to Greenpeace for what I am about to do.

I let go and pause long enough to watch the tail tumble end over end and drop into the ocean with a faint splash.

Zero to sonic boom in less time than it takes to blink.

“Ten seconds.”

The sky turns retina-scorching white for a heartbeat and, as quickly, fades to a warm gold. A wall of blistering hot air—the shockwave—hits a second later, followed by a high-pitched pop and a rumbling roar
unlike anything I’ve ever heard in my life, like the largest thunderstorm in the history of the world is rising up from the darkest depths of Hell to slap me out of the sky.

Like I need any help there, I’m doing fine on my own; my injuries, the exertion, the stress, the plummeting adrenaline, it all hits me at once and I come dangerously close to passing out mid-flight. I keep it together well enough to avoid hitting the ocean at top speed, so it only hurts like a mother instead of killing me.

The icy water shocks me back to full consciousness. I kick, trusting (hoping) I’m pointing in the right direction. I break the surface and shake a curtain of wet hair out of my face and that’s when I see it, a fiery fist rising up from the horizon into a blackened sky. It’s a stunning, humbling, horrifying sight that sends a chill rippling down my body head-to-toe.

Either that or hypothermia is setting in. It
is
December.

Fortunately, my ride’s here.

“Carrie? Carrie!”

“Hey, Concorde. Give a girl a lift?”

Turns out I wasn’t the only person who got a little too close to an apocalyptic fireworks display. Seconds after I passed Castle Island on my way out, someone triggered a self-destruct sequence that reduced our mysterious facility to a heap of flaming rubble—long after the Squad got out, luckily, dragging along with them none other than Archimedes, plus the schmucks who tried to kill us, and a dozen more assorted people who apparently worked in the building.
We can only guess what they did there seeing as none of them are talking.

Four Boston PD paddy wagons carted them off; they get regular person jail. Archimedes, he gets a special ride directly to Byrne courtesy of Mindforce and Concorde, which means we get to sit tight and enjoy the after-party from a safe distance, huddled among a couple of Red Cross support trucks doling out hot chocolate and sugary snacks (mental note: send generous donation and a nice thank-you card to the Red Cross).

“This?” Sara says, waving her hand at the smoldering debris, which is currently getting doused by (and this is only my best estimate) every last firefighter in the city of Boston. And I thought the post-mayhem scenes we witnessed in Kingsport were intense. “Let’s never do anything like this ever again.”

“Agreed,” I say.

“On the bright side,” Matt says, “we didn’t trash Kingsport for a change.”

That does make me feel a little better.

“How are the hands doing?”

I show Matt my palms. They’re sunburn red and itch like crazy, but they’re whole again. In more ways than one.

“So, raincheck on all the high-fives you deserve?”

“This was a team effort,” I say. “A two-team effort, in fact.”

“That would have ended catastrophically if it weren’t for you,” Sara says.

“Credit where it’s due,” Matt says.

“Back at you, dead-eye,” I say.

Matt shrugs off the compliment. “Nina’s idea,” he says.

“I was kidding about the rocket launcher,” Nina says, “but hey, who am I to complain about total success?”

“I wouldn’t call it total. Manticore and that Foreman guy slipped away scot-free, and I doubt Concorde’s going to learn anything useful from that mess,” I say, nodding at the wreckage of Bad Guy Headquarters.

“Mm, maybe, but you want to know a dirty little secret about the super-hero game?” Nina says. We lean in, our curiosity piqued. “Success is rarely ever total. There’s almost always a loose thread that never gets tied off, or someone slips away in the confusion, or you take a bad beating, or some innocent bystander gets hurt or killed. It happens, so instead of beating yourself up over the ten percent that went wrong, be thankful for the ninety percent you got right and do better next time.”

Next time. I wonder if Concorde will let us have a next time.

THIRTY-EIGHT

“How have you been doing, Carrie?” Mindforce says. “Do you feel you’ve adjusted well?”

“I don’t know how much adjusting I’ve needed to do,” I say. “I mean, everything’s back to normal. What’s to adjust to?”

“Hmm.”

“What
hmm
? Really, everything’s fine. I’m fine.”

“You lost your powers,” Concorde says, conducting his part of the interview from the briefing room corner, arms crossed, visor down.

“And then I got them back,” I say. “And they’ve been functioning properly. Guys, seriously, this isn’t a big deal. I got knocked down, I got up again. All part of the business, right?”

“For a superhuman to lose his or her powers, even briefly, that’s a distressing experience,” Mindforce says. “We want to make sure you’re not experiencing any lingering psychological trauma. Are you eating regularly? Sleeping well?”

I’m fine, okay? My hands have healed up, my powers work, I aced my last math test, and tonight’s Christmas Eve. Everything’s coming up Carrie.

“I’m having nightmares,” I say.

“About what?”

“Manticore. Attacking me. Chopping off my hands.” Hands that shake as I recall the misty memory of a vague dream I’ve had three, four times over the past two weeks. “Same dream, every time. I wake up covered in sweat. Then I sit in bed for an hour staring at my hands to make sure they’re really there.”

Something passes between Concorde and Mindforce. I hate mindspeak when I’m not in on the conversation.

“Would you like to talk about it?” Mindforce says. “Formally, I mean.”

“What, like, with a shrink?”

“The preferred term is psychologist, and yes, I mean with a shrink.”

“With him, specifically,” Concorde says.

“You’re a shri—psychologist?” Mindforce flashes a
guilty as charged
grin. I always wondered what he did for a day job.

“What do you say? You and I, alone, here at HQ, once a week after school.”

“Why?”

“Pardon?”

“Why would you do that for me? Not too long ago I was an annoyance,” I say to Concorde. “Now you want to help me. Why?”

“We have our reasons,” he says. “The offer’s on the table, take it or leave it.”

I take it.

Concorde offers to escort me to the secret subway thingy (I should ask him if it has a real name),
but en route he takes me on an unannounced detour to his workshop. He ducks in and returns with—

“Is that a Christmas present?”

“Yes. For you,” he says, thrusting the gift at me with all the awkwardness of a teenage boy asking a girl for a first dance. “From Mindforce, Nina, and me.”

Now I feel like a total cheapskate. “I didn’t get you anything.”

“I have new toys to play with,” he says, jerking a thumb at his freshly repaired workshop, filled to the brim with Thrasher corpses.

“Do us all a favor? Don’t reattach the heads this time.” I take the package, which has some heft to it. First thing I do, of course, is give it a gentle shake and listen, but I learn nothing. “Should I open it now?”

“No. At home. In private,” he stresses.

Wait
, Sara says.
Concorde.
He
bought you a Christmas present?