Authors: Colleen Vanderlinden
And then, despite seeming to improve, he’d died. I didn’t mourn him at all, but his death changed my life nonetheless.
I’d killed someone.
I’d done the thing that separated the heroes like StrikeForce and the other super hero teams from the villains. I’d taken that last step over the line, and it had changed everything. Non-powered people feared us more. The Tribunal wanted to lock me up — with Eve, Killjoy’s maybe-girlfriend, leading the call. The media was calling for me to turn myself over. The many hate groups who had sprung up in the wake of people gaining powers had all seemed to unite in a gleeful hatred of one powered person in particular: me.
Portia was getting destroyed in the media for her refusal to turn me over or lock me up, and the rest of the team was getting badmouthed as well.
And I had new nightmares to add to the never-ending playlist that started the second I fell asleep. Sometimes, I was forced to watch Render trying to kill Ryan all over again, in agonizing detail, except this time, I wasn’t quick enough to save him, and Ryan died.
And sometimes, the dream played out exactly as things had that day, with Render alive, and then dying later on.
Of the two, reality was the less terrifying one. I knew despite everything that I would’t have changed a single thing I’d done that day.
“You’re doing it again,” Jenson said, interrupting my thoughts.
“Doing what?”
“Obsessing. Overthinking everything.”
“Honestly, we both know I probably don’t think enough,” I said. “If I did, we would’t be in many of the messes we’ve found ourselves in.”
Jenson sighed. “You’re not going to be perfect. Not ever. The only ones who are perfect are those who never actually act, because the decision not to act means that by default, they’ll never make a mistake. We’re not mind readers. We’re not perfect. We are going to fuck up sometimes. That’s life. It’s just that when we mess up, it’s magnified and dissected and discussed at length.”
I didn’t answer.
“And despite what you think, you’re not a bad person,” she added.
We’d had that discussion, over and over again since Render’s death. I’d killed someone. There was no way “good person” and “murderer” went together. And you could spin it any way you wanted, that I’d been defending my teammate, that I was defending myself… whatever. I knew better. Sparing Render’s life hadn’t even entered my mind in that moment.
What the hell did that say about me?
And I was dragging everyone around me into this weird gray area as well. StrikeForce was supposed to be super-powered law enforcement. My teammates were covering for me, defending me, defying the orders of what was supposed to be the central enforcement body of the super powered community.
So it was a mess, and I couldn’t even beat the shit out of anybody to make myself feel better, because I was supposed to be keeping a low profile, and when I was out and about, I was supposed to be trying to be “good” and “heroic.”
Ugh.
Nothing was simple anymore. Of course, maybe it never had been.
Jenson and I sat watching a few of the local feeds for a while, the lab silent other than the occasional sound from where David was working.
“Did you two hear about Jarvis from Equipment?” David asked after a while. Jenson nodded.
“No. What about her?” I remembered Jarvis well. She’d been the one to design and fit me for my original StrikeForce uniform, and she was still the one we went to when we needed to tweak the uniform to add some of David’s tech. Jenson had also gone to her to make the all-black uniform I wore when I’d gone out on stealth missions.
“She’s missing,” Jenson said quietly.
I froze. “What? For how long?”
“We’re not sure yet. She and her daughters went on vacation. Chicago, I think, and then they were supposed to come back here because her husband was speaking at some conference or something downtown. We can’t tell yet if they ever made it back here or not. At least a few days, though.”
“Shit. Her daughters?”
“No powers,” David said, knowing I was already wondering if our mysterious woman in blue, the one who’d been abducting super powered kids worldwide, was involved. “And the one taking the kids has never taken a parent before. I think this is something different.”
“So what are we doing about it?”
“Portia just found out today. She has David and me scanning the region.”
“I have the drones out. Really, I need to make more of them. All of the stuff we’re trying to find, I don’t have enough drones. I never thought it would get this nuts,” he said, shaking his head.
“Jesus. Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” I said, rubbing my face. “She’s amazing, and she’s sweet, once you get past that whole dry sense of humor she’s got going. Damn it.”
“It’s always something,” Jenson said. I kept thinking about Jarvis as the other two went back to work testing the monitoring devices.
A while later, one of the guards from the prison facility popped her head into David’s lab.
“Daystar?”
I stood up and went to her. Daisy, I think. Super speed, which, along with starting fires, was one of the more common powers. Now that I was spending more time at Command, I was getting better at actually learning people’s names. Mostly because I was bored out of my mind.
“What’s up?” I asked her when I stepped out into the corridor.
She looked concerned for a moment, then she straightened her shoulders. “Crystal asked me to ask you if you’d come talk to her sometime.”
“Crystal.”
Daisy nodded.
“Did she say why?”
“She didn’t say. She just asked me to ask you to stop by when you had a chance.”
I studied Daisy for a moment. Crystal was Alpha’s girlfriend, part of his little crew who’d worked along with Killjoy to keep StrikeForce ineffective and useless. Alpha had also given Killjoy samples of blood and DNA from everyone on the team to help Dr. Death prefect the cocktail Killjoy had taken to get more powerful.
I had no love at all for Alpha and his people.
And I had a strong feeling we didn’t have all of them in custody. We knew we had a mole. We knew that others in SF had gone along with what Alpha was doing, even if they hadn’t known why.
We also knew that I was one of those issues that seemed to divide people. One of my charms, I guess.
I wondered how close Daisy was to Crystal. She fidgeted a little under my gaze.
“Well. That was it. Whenever you feel like it, or not,” she said quietly.
I glanced back at Jenson, who just shrugged. “Want me to come with you?”
I shook my head. “I’ll see you guys later. Don’t have too much fun without me.”
I caught a slight blush from David and laughed as I walked away. They were still tiptoeing around what pretty much everyone knew they both wanted. Of course, it probably didn’t help that Jenson’s ex, James, was still with us. He’d gone straight to Eve and the rest of the Tribunal with news about Render’s death, despite giving Jenson and me this whole load of shit about how he was on our side and he wanted to help us. He still held to that, that if he hadn’t gone to them, if they’d found out about it and thought that maybe he’d been hiding things from them, they would have replaced him with someone less friendly toward us. I didn’t like the guy. Didn’t trust him. But it made a certain kind of sense.
I thought about James and Jenson as I made my way over to the prison wing. The tension whenever the two of them had to work together was ridiculous, and it wasn’t the good, sexy kind of tension, either. It was the kind of tension that made you want to hit something. Preferably James. Jenson was an absolute professional, and she did her job despite clearly wishing she was just about anywhere else when James was around. For his part, he kept quiet, did the duties Portia assigned to him, and seemed to watch every damn thing we did. I was tempted to toss him in one of the cells in the prison wing just on principle, but I figured that was one of those things that would just result in Portia having to clean up a mess later.
I arrived at the prison wing and stopped to check on Daemon before heading to the women’s section. As usual, his ex-girlfriend, Deena, and his daughter were with him. He was playing Candyland with the kid while Deena, who was maybe starting to seem like less of an ex the longer they were with us, read a book. He gave me a wave when he saw me walk past, and I waved back.
Another murderer. Daemon had never actually stooped so low as to get his hands dirty himself, but he used his powers of mental manipulation to make at least seven people kill themselves. The only thing going for him, I guess, was that they weren’t exactly good people. Four had been Mafia, rivals of his own family, and he’d killed them at his uncle’s behest. Two had been people Killjoy had wanted culled from his own ranks. Sal had said that Killjoy thought they were going to betray him, so he had Sal convince them to off themselves. According to Sal, Killjoy had watched the whole thing. And laughed.
The last one had been someone who’d pissed Sal off. I didn’t know the whole story on that, and he had refused to say more than that. The only thing I knew for sure was that that last murder had been all on Sal.
And yet… I didn’t hate him. Wasn’t I supposed to hate him? Or at least be disgusted by him? Everyone else did their best to avoid him, even though he’d helped us.
It was just one more small way I was starting to feel like the odd man out on StrikeForce.
I shook the thoughts off as I headed toward the women’s wing. I passed Alpha and Nightbane’s cells on the way there. Alpha sat, as usual, staring at the wall with a blank look on his face. Nightbane, though, just as he did just about every time he saw me, glared out the small window of his cell at me. Sometimes, he yelled shit at me, but today, he settled for just glaring.
The women’s wing was filling up. We still had Raider, of course, plus a few other troublemakers who were serving out the time Amy, our legal/judicial person, had assigned them. Most of them weren’t bad, just careless or confused.
I stopped in front of one of the cells near the end of the corridor. I didn’t look at the end cell. That had been mine. That had been where all of this had started, and I still, even now, wasn’t sure how I felt about all of it. If I’d never showed up at StrikeForce that day, trying to bust my burglary partner out, I wouldn’t be in this situation right now. Mama would still be alive.
If I’d known, would I have done things any differently? If I’d put a little bit of thought into it, would I have done better? I’d probably still be happily robbing houses. Instead, here I was.
Talking to assholes I would have rather been punching.
“You called?” I said. Crystal sat shackled to her chair in the cell. She still looked as perfect and put-together as she had back when she’d been running StrikeForce at Alpha’s side. Her blond hair was still lustrous, and she was as calm as if she was sitting in her living room instead of a jail cell. Though, I guess, after a year, one would get used to it.
“I’m surprised you came,” she said.
“I was bored.”
She smiled. “It must be hard for you, being trapped here. Wonder how that feels.” Her tone was light, but I could hear the bitterness beneath the words.
“Eh. It’s not so bad. At least my ass isn’t shackled to a chair.”
“But maybe it should be. Murder, Daystar? Really?”
“Is there a point to this?”
She sighed. “He’s not going to stop. You know that, right?”
“Who?”
“Killjoy.”
I watched her, and, after a moment, she continued. “You’ve probably figured it out. I know Portia has. He’s working his way through the superhero teams. Destroying those he sees as a threat. He hates the hero teams, and he has for a very, very long time. It drives him.” She paused, then turned her head and finally looked at me. “He’s coming for StrikeForce. But he’ll bide his time. He’ll make sure he’s strong enough to make sure there’s nothing left. He will burn it all down, and dance on the ashes. And you know just as well as I do that when that happens, when he destroys everything this team has worked so hard to accomplish, the people of this city will cheer him on. It must be hard for you, to see the villains adored in ways you never could be.”
“Well, not really. I never asked to be adored.”
“No, you didn’t. You were fine being a two-bit thief.”
“I was a little better than that, but yeah.” And then I laughed. “It must burn your ass that you and Alpha brought me in, and I put you here.”
“If only we’d left you alone, as I recommended. I told him we didn’t need you.”
“Ah, well. Twenty-twenty hindsight and all that.”
“I was the voice of reason, and nobody listened. Killjoy was obsessed with you from during the time you started making a name as a burglar. He suspected, pretty early on, that the burglar and the flying chick who destroyed buildings was the same person.”
“He’s the one who planted that idea with Detroit UnPowered,” I said, that piece of the puzzle finally slipping into place.
“Yeah.”
One more reason for me to want to smack Justin, AKA Detroit UnPowered. Granted, he hadn’t known who’d been using him as his own personal media mouthpiece, but he’d been so driven by the increased following and the money and new video equipment flowing in that he hadn’t really cared to ask.
“He was obsessed with you,” Crystal repeated. “Killjoy.”
“I know.”
“He won’t stop,” she said. “Alpha was happy to work with him, but he always scared the hell out of me. There’s something not right about him. He will not stop. Not until he has what he wants, or one of you is dead. You know that.”
“Well, he seems like he’s not in any hurry to face me,” I said with a shrug.
Crystal laughed. “Do you think he’s as stupid as you are? You think he’s going to bust his way in here to fight you?” She laughed again, shaking her head. “No. When he comes, we are all screwed. You need to stop him. You’ve probably looked all over this area. He won’t be here. If I was the one leading this investigation, I’d start looking in England and Scotland. He has strong ties there. He had bases there.”
“Why are you telling me this? What’s your game? What, is he really actually in Detroit and you’re just trying to waste my time?”