How to Save the World (18 page)

“I'm sorry I haven't been to see you before now,” I said.

“You've been trying to save the day. I can get behind that. It shows good character.”

“I have a good mentor.”

Vicki laid her cheek atop her knee, some of her hair slipping out of its bun. Even though she wasn't at a photo shoot or getting ready to walk a runway, she still looked amazing. Losing her powers couldn't rob her of the things that made her Victoria Dawn Burroughs. It would be a matter of time if the same thing was true for Vicki Burroughs, Plain Jane.

“Have you been to see Jeremy?” I asked.

She nodded. “No change.”

“He's stubborn. He'll wake up when he's good and ready and not a second before.”

“Jeremy? Stubborn? I'd never have guessed.” Vicki left her cheek resting on her knee. “Losing the power sucks, don't get me wrong. And I have done plenty of bitching about that—­”

“Maybe I'm lucky I was so busy,” I said.

She bumped her shoulder against mine, a gentle scold tempered by a smile. “Thanks, you. Anyway, as much as I want to bitch about this damn Demobilizer, I can't help but think that it would help Jeremy.”

“Maybe. The powers might be the only thing keeping him alive,” I said. The doctors had no idea what was going on with Jeremy, why he hadn't woken up. And nobody knew exactly how the little flickers of static discharge in the webbing between his fingers would manifest into actual powers when he was conscious.

“If Kiki's grandfather is as smart as she claims, he could probably figure it out.”

“He's self-­serving. Mad scientists tend to be like that.”

“Maybe you
should
punch him.”

“Not without pissing Kiki off,” I said, shaking my head. “It also probably wouldn't help much, but it sure as hell would make me feel better.”

Vicki cuffed me on the arm. “That's the spirit.”

 

CHAPTER 18

I
hated waiting.

I especially hated waiting while stuck in a facility that held the dubious honor of also storing the man who had turned me into what I was. After I had been let out of Jessie's supervision and had subsequently gone on a trouble-­streak that had ended with Brook absconding with the Demobilizer and Tamara likewise taking off with Elwin, Eddie wouldn't let me crash at the Nest again. So for three days, I stayed in Guy's apartment and dodged increasingly irate phone calls from my coworkers.

That wasn't much of a surprise. I was one of the few ­people in that office who could find the shortcut for Excel on her desktop, after all.

Of course, as much as I hated waiting, I also excelled at it. And I'd rarely had to wait on my own. Supervillains could be oddly good at small talk as we waited for Blaze to arrive and for the battle to start. Though she'd once turned me green in a move that later proved to be oddly supportive of my romantic choices, Venus von Trapp had given me tips to help me save an ailing African violet I'd kept (it had later been smashed by Captain Cracked, but before its untimely demise, I'd managed to nurse it back to health). So I was used to having all manner of strange ­people waiting with me.

Having friends instead of villains was even better. Guy still had his apartment in Davenport Tower, so I wasn't in a cell. And I really wasn't going to complain if Guy cooked shirtless because neither of us had anywhere to go. Though that only happened when he wasn't using hot oil.

I had to look away from the TV to check my text messages. “Vicki says she's not coming over for dinner because she's got a thing with . . .” I blinked at my screen. “Yeah, that actress is incredibly famous and also I'm afraid saying her name out loud will somehow summon her here. So just assume famous and go with that.”

“Sounds like Vicki.” Guy pulled the duck á l'orange out of the oven, making careful use of the oven mitts. He'd forgotten them the day before and now he had bandages wrapped around his left hand. Medical had said it would probably leave a scar; Guy had ruefully noted that maybe it was for the best, since now he would remember not to simply grab hot cookware.

Angélica and Kiki had shown up armed with a full set of oven mitts when they'd dropped by for dinner the night before. It had been a strange meal. Angélica wasn't any happier about being quarantined than I was, not with her gym having to be shut down. And Kiki had been slanting me curious looks all night, like I might know something more than I was telling. Since Brook hadn't emerged from the woodwork, and I'd been the last one to see her, that was probably fair. At least no other heroes had been attacked with the Demobilizer. So maybe she hadn't handed it over to Tamara Diesel and Elwin hadn't been able to replicate Mobius's results.

Every day that passed without news became more unnerving.

I turned my attention back to Guy since I didn't want to think about that. The duck smelled sinfully delicious. He'd tripled the recipe and had chattered on about different alterations he'd made to each batch. Luckily, he didn't seem to mind that half of my focus was clearly elsewhere. I eyed his chest and shoulders, sculpted from his weight-­lifting regimen. I could map out all of the raised, horizontal scars, old scrapes that started at one shoulder and spread all the way across his chest. Most of them, he'd told me, had come from the explosion where he'd gained his powers, but there were fainter burn marks on his skin that had been a gift from Brook trying to destroy him in a rage.

Either way, it was all suitably distracting.

“Gail?” Guy said.

“Huh?” I blinked and looked up to find him smirking at me.

“My eyes are up here,” he said, pointing.

I threw a piece of carrot at him and he laughed. “Want a taste?” he asked.

I had to hop up and lean over the counter to take the proffered sip from the spoon. “Needs more garlic.”

“You think everything needs more garlic.”

“It's good for memory or something. I think.”

Guy obligingly added more garlic, making a noise in the back of his throat. “Having memory troubles, huh?”

I opened my mouth to make a joke and stopped abruptly as something niggled in the back of my mind. “I think I might be,” I said instead.

The amusement dropped away from Guy's face. “What do you mean?”

“Stretchy McGee. Whoever she is, the one you shot with Raze's gun. I had that gun the whole time,” I said. I looked down at the scars on Guy's chest and shook my head as a thought tried to surface and disappeared just as quickly. “It was tucked into my belt. I could feel it, but I just wasn't thinking about it. The Mobium ensures I'm going to use every advantage I possibly can. So why didn't I use it? Why didn't it even occur to me?”

“You were a little stressed at the time,” Guy said. “I think that's forgivable.”

“Yeah, and if it had been an isolated incident, that'd be one thing.”

“There've been other incidents?” Guy tasted the sauce and added a pinch of salt. He finished basting the roast and pushed it back into the oven.

“Naomi visited me at work to talk about Mobius and not twenty minutes later we watched a ransom video with the same guy. And my brain didn't think, ‘That can't be a coincidence.' Yesterday morning, way after my morning coffee, I wondered why I hadn't talked to Jeremy in a while. It took me a full three minutes to remember that he's in a coma.”

“Again, you were stressed,” Guy said, but he was frowning deeply. “I didn't know him nearly as long and sometimes I wonder if Jeremy's going to wander in and insult me.”

“I wish he would. Wander in, not insult you. God, he could be such an asshole. Can be,” I said, shaking my head. “But I think it's more than that. I mean, we don't know
that
much about the Mobium, and the man who could tell us anything about it is a) not willing to work with us unless it benefits Kiki, and b) more than a few coconuts short of a cream pie, you know?”

“You think the Mobium is breaking down? That's jumping to extremes right away, I think,” Guy said. “Maybe talk to Kiki about it before you freak out.”

I was worried he was going to say that. Kiki had enough on her mind with Dr. Mobius's horrible life choices pressing in on her, but she was also the closest thing Davenport had to a willing expert about my powers. “I'll let Kiki worry about all of these questions tomorrow. Right now, though, you should probably put on a shirt.”

Guy grinned. “Is that what you really want me to do?”

“No, of course not, but I don't think you really want to entertain Naomi while shirtless and she'll be here in three . . . two . . .”

On cue, the doorbell rang.

“You know, powers or not, it's creepy when you do things like that,” Guy said, and went to go put on a shirt as I headed to answer the front door.

A
s it happened, Kiki reached out to me first. I saw her text message after I'd stepped out of the shower, leaving Guy to finish scrubbing his back.
Got time today? It's not about Mobius.

I texted back that I needed to talk to her, too, and went on about my day since she apparently had a full morning. Instead, I stopped by Naomi's new office to bring her the leftovers she'd left behind the night before. Like Guy and me, Naomi was being kept at Davenport, but at least they had work for her. She'd been granted full access to everything we'd found in the lair where Elwin had been keeping Mobius. While it was intriguing and she loved poking through everything, she'd expressed more than a little aggravation over dinner.

“All of this really deeply fascinating information and I'm not allowed to share any of it,” she'd said, glumly poking at the baked Alaska Guy had prepared for dessert. “Do you know how much that hurts my little journalistic heart?”

I'd patted her on the shoulder. “If you need a distraction, Portia has texted me seventeen questions about Outlook today. It would cheer her up to hear from you instead.”

“Oh, I bet it would,” Naomi had said, rolling her eyes. My coworker had come on a little strong about how cute she found Naomi. “But in this case, I'll have to pass. Are you still working there? How come you haven't quit yet?”

“Because I'm starting to get the impression it's there or Davenport, and I really don't want to have to work anywhere near Eddie Davenport. The man is a raging prick.”

At least he hadn't seen fit to visit me again. Angélica and Kiki seemed to be the main liaisons I dealt with from Davenport. Maybe Jessie had stepped in on my behalf or something. After the random and deep interest she'd taken in me, it had been a little weird to receive radio silence from her. But then, she was a strange individual altogether. I shouldn't have been surprised, maybe.

“Do you know your aunt is kind of weird?” I asked as I stepped into Kiki's office in Medical. Usually I saw her in the exam room, but she had an office full of paperwork and overstuffed bookshelves that I'd only seen once.

She had her back turned toward me, but she'd distractedly called, “Come in!” so she knew I was there.

She didn't turn toward me. “I'm aware. Has something happened with her?”

“Nothing recent. Just an observation. Also a strange way to start a conversation, now that I think about it,” I said. “Most ­people would just say hi.”

“Hi,” Kiki said, typing something into her computer.

It was a little odd that she hadn't looked at me yet, but she had a lot on her plate between Mobius and the Demobilizer and monitoring Vicki and Guy for any signs of trouble. “Am I interrupting? I can come back.”

“No, I'm just checking something. Do me a favor and say, ‘Aardvark.' ”

“Uh,” I said. That was a strange request. “Aardvark.”

Kiki turned toward me. She pushed her thumb into her cheekbone and dug two fingers into her forehead like she was developing a headache. “I was afraid of this,” she said.

Two things struck me at once. The first was the worry beneath her resigned tone, which was something everybody should be concerned about hearing from their doctor.

And the second was far more important:
her lips never moved
.

I heard her voice perfectly, but her mouth had stayed completely closed.

“What the hell?” I asked.

She stood and stepped around me to close the door, gesturing for me to sit. Numbly, I dropped into the chair. “Has anything unusual been happening to you lately? Nosebleeds, phantom pains, headaches?”

What was it with everybody's inability to give me a straight answer lately? And those questions sounded like . . .

I groaned as my rather slow brain finally put it all together. “You're kidding.”

“I don't think I am.”

I put my hands over my face and left them there. One of the properties of the Mobium was its ability to absorb powers from other superheroes. Nobody was sure how it worked or how it chose the powers to absorb and adapt. And it usually took something out of me until I learned how to control it. With 'porting, it had been migraines. I'd absorbed powers before. But this? This was a nightmare.

“I cannot have psychic powers.”

“I don't know what to tell you, Gail.”

“Are you vocalizing that or is it in my mind?” I asked.

“I'll do you a favor and vocalize for now.”

“How did this happen? I haven't even had that much exposure to you!”

“Yeah, of you and Angélica, you are not the one I would expect to get the psychic abilities. What . . . exactly is the problem with them? You've been wary of me from the beginning. I have to figure that's part of it somehow.”

“Distrust, not dislike,” I said, lowering my hands to rub them against my thighs in agitation. Psychic. It figured. It was true that I'd always been leery of Kiki, though I actually liked her. “The villain that started everything for me, he was psychic. He was controlling some kids on the train tracks, I was brave or stupid depending on who's telling the story, and I hit him with a beer bottle. He's the one that spread it that I must be involved with, you know, Blaze, kicking off the whole Hostage Girl lifestyle.”

Kiki stared at me for a long moment, her mouth partially open in surprise. “That . . .”

“You couldn't pluck that out of my head? Psychically or whatever?” I asked.

She shook her head. “It doesn't exactly work like that. Or mine doesn't, so I'm assuming since I'm the original host, your psychic abilities don't, either. But I can understand your distrust of me now. Which villain was it?”

“Sykik.”

“Yeah, that guy is trash. We're not all bad, I promise. Hell, most of us don't even want to see what ­people are thinking. It's . . . inconvenient.”

Right. Inconvenient. Also known as invasive as hell.

“It is, at that,” Kiki said, and I scowled because I hadn't said that aloud. “Sorry,” she said. “Let's go into the exam room. I want to run some tests.”

“This is a completely surprising twist that I never would have seen coming,” I said dryly, as Kiki's first reaction to everything was to put it under a microscope. It fit with all of those science degrees on her office walls. I trailed after her into the exam room and dropped onto the cot.

“You know,” I said. “I thought my mind was the only thing left.”

“What do you mean?” Kiki was already logging into the computer.

“The villains, Dr. Mobius, whoever, they kidnapped me, they beat me up, hit me with pain toxins, turned me into what I am now. But I always had my brain. Except now I don't, really. Because now my brain's not completely mine, if I'm picking up other thoughts.”

Kiki spared me a look, her eyebrows drawn close together. “Are you going to get philosophical because you can pick up telepathic signals from me?”