Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women (12 page)

“Okay...”

“But you have generated heat with your blasts before.”

I never thought about it before, but, “Yeah, the very first time I used them. I accidentally melted a plastic garbage can with them.”

“How did that happen? What made you shoot to kill at a garbage can?”

“Ummm...I don’t know, honestly. I was dragging the can out to the curb, it was really heavy, I got frustrated, next thing I know, zap, all melty. But that was the only time I’ve ever done that, as far as I can remember.”

“Not quite,” Natalie says with a gesture of presentation that directs my attention toward (oh, wow) the Thrasher armor the Squad trashed during our very first outing as a team. The Protectorate confiscated the battlesuit so Concorde could examine it inside and out, and he obviously took that job seriously: the suit is spread out all over the floor, and I do mean spread out; he’s almost completely dismantled the thing, to the point it’s unrecognizable as the massive armored humanoid we took down. It’s like one of those 3-D jigsaw puzzles, fresh out of the box.

“Concorde’s getting a lot of mileage out of this thing, isn’t he?” I say.

“I don’t see the guy smile often, but he’s like a kid at Christmas playing with this bad boy — which, I’d like you to note, went down because you did
that
to it.”

Natalie points at the chassis, the only piece of the suit still in one piece (more or less), but she wants me to see something specific.

“What am I looking at?”

“This.” Natalie kneels down, and runs a finger along the edge of the hole I put in the chassis. It takes a minute for me to catch on: the edge is smooth, and there are no signs of cratering. A force blast would have left the hole rough and jagged, but this...I didn’t punch through —

“I melted through,” I say. “How did I do that?”

“That’s what we’re going to figure out,” Natalie says.

Mindforce takes Sara not to the medical bay, not to the interview room, but to the common room, where he invites her to sit at the table in the kitchenette.

“Soda?”

“No thanks, but I’ll take some Gatorade, if you have it,” she says.

He smiles, and brings her a bottle from the fridge. “Sounds like you’ve developed some good habits.”

“I am trying to live the life of a good little psionic,” Sara says. “Lots of iron-rich foods, supplements if I need them, I keep an eye on my electrolytes...”

“It shows,” Mindforce says, taking a seat across from Sara. “Your color is looking better.”

“Yeah, I’ve upgraded from deathly pale to pasty.”

“Sleeping better?”

“Much.”

“Have you been practicing?”

“I have. Carrie’s been a huge help.”

“Good. Good.”

Sara presses her fingers to her temple, and squints at her mentor. “I’m sensing...I’m sensing a ‘but’...”

Mindforce laughs. “A small one. You’re doing well on the basics, but I think it’s time to start pushing you a little. Based on your performance at the Quantum Compound, it’s clear that your control over your telekinesis —”

“Sucks.”

“Needs work. We’ve been focusing on your telepathy out of necessity, and I don’t want you to neglect your exercises, but I believe you’re ready for the next level.”

With a thought, Mindforce pulls Sara’s drink across the table. It slides toward him, like a hockey puck gliding across ice, and comes to a smooth, gentle stop.

“Take it back,” he says.

She does, but much less gracefully; the bottle lurches across the table, topples. She falls out of her chair avoiding the wave of red liquid that splashes at her.

“Nuts.”

“It’s okay,” Mindforce says. He gestures with a finger, as though bidding Sara to stand, but it’s the bottle that rises, righting itself. A second motion, a twirling of his spread fingers, gathers the spilt liquid into a quivering sphere that, with a third gesture, morphs into a twisting column, which arcs in mid-air and returns to its container. Mindforce mimes grasping the cap. It rises, flips, and spins onto the mouth of the bottle.

“Showoff,” Sara says in an awestruck hush.

“Maybe a little,” Mindforce concedes, “but it was more of a demonstration. Did you notice what I did?”

“Uh, yeah, hard not to.”

“I mean this part,” he says, recreating his various hand motions.

“I thought you were being dramatic.”

“Not at all. Do you remember the trick I taught you to shield your mind from outside thoughts?”

“Yeah. You told me to imagine I was building a wall around me.”

“Visualization. That’s all this is,” Mindforce says, extending a hand and closing his fingers around an imaginary bottle, causing the real one to rise from the table and hover before Sara. “Looks silly, yes, but it’s effective.”

Sara thinks back to the team’s encounter with Stacy Hellfire, to the oil tanker, to the explosion she contained by force of will alone — a force she shaped with outstretched hands.

“Yeah,” she says, “I guess it is.”

“Not that I mind,” I say, “but why am I with you today instead of Mindforce?”

“He thought it would be good for you to do something a little more active,” Natalie says as she leads me into an unfamiliar section of HQ. “Sometimes, you can only go so far talking it out, so he asked me to do a little training with you.”

“Again, not that I mind, but why you? Why isn’t Mindforce doing this?” Or, God forbid, Concorde the control freak.

“Couple reasons. Our powers aren’t exactly in the same ballpark, but they’re close enough that I could help you work through things better than the guys.”

“And the other reason?”

“Sorry?”

“You said there were a couple of reasons. What’s the other one?”

Natalie’s hand hovers over a keypad next to a sturdy steel door. She glances at me, then punches in the code that opens the door.

She leads me into a massive room, not unlike Doc Quantum’s test lab: the Protectorate’s training room, she explains. “We’re well underground, and the walls are military bunker quality, so you’re safe to cut loose.”

“Cool.”

Natalie plays with her tablet. A panel in the far wall slides open to reveal a target, about the size of a garbage can lid, mounted on a steel-frame rig. The target glides out onto the floor. Best guess, there’s a hundred feet between me and it. Oh, I hope she’s not going to test my aim.

“Give it a zap,” Natalie says. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“From here?”

“From here.”

Nuts. All right, I can do this. Big target, stationary, I can take my time — easy shot.

And behold, the power of positive thinking! I take aim, fire, and tag it. Not a bull’s-eye, granted, but it was a solid hit.

“Okay. Not bad. Now, how about you stop screwing around and hit it for real?”

“Excuse me?”

“That was pathetic. That blast might have knocked down a five-year-old.
Might
have. Come on, enough with the amateur hour crap. Thrill me.”

What the huh? Where did this come from?

I take aim and let off a second shot. The entire frame rocks from the impact.

“Big whoop,” Natalie says. “Still not impressed.”

“What’s with the attitude?” I say. “I’m trying to hit —”

“You’re Mickey Mouse-ing it is what you’re doing. That sucked. I said to blast that thing, so blast it!” she says, leaning into me, her voice rising to a shout. “Give me a smoking crater or stop wasting my time! Go big or go home, little girl!”

This time, I don’t bother with aiming. Fire three.

The blast obliterates the frame, almost vaporizes it. The room echoes with an earsplitting BOOM and the clang of metal on metal as chunks of debris —
flaming
chunks — ricochet off the walls, the floor, the ceiling.

Uh. Wow.

Natalie whoops like I scored the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl. “YEAH! That’s what I wanted to see!” she cries. “That was
awesome
!”

Yes, it was, but I feel a little stupid for getting played so easily. “You got me riled up on purpose, didn’t you?”

Natalie spreads her hands:
guilty as charged
. “Hated to go R. Lee Ermey on you like that, but after you told me the garbage can story, I thought an agitated emotional state might ramp you up, get you to think less about what you were doing.”

“I guess I can’t argue with the results. R. Lee Ermey?”

“The drill sergeant from
Full Metal Jacket
.” I shrug. “He was in the remake of
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
, and the remake of
Willard
, and
The Frighteners
. Oh, he was one of the toy soldiers in
Toy Story
.”

No wonder I can’t follow her: she’s speaking fluent Matt.

“You’d recognize him if you heard him. Anyway, the point was to get your body familiar with that specific mode of attack,” Natalie says. “Using your powers is like any other learned behavior: you start off fumbling around stupidly, maybe getting it right once or twice on instinct, but with time and repetition, it becomes second nature.”

“Cool. Although I hope screaming in my face isn’t going to be a regular part of the lesson plan.”

“Sorry, kiddo. I’m going to do whatever it takes to get you up to speed,” she says, adding a pat on the shoulder that says
nothing personal
. “If you’re serious about the super-hero gig, you need to be ready for any situation. You need to be ready to handle whatever’s thrown at you, because if you’re not, you —”

She falls silent. Her eyes drop to the floor. Her grip on my shoulder tightens.

“What happened?”

She gives me a thin, pained smile. “I had my ass handed to me.”

She was sixteen when it happened, Natalie tells me, at the very beginning of her career as a super-hero. She chanced across a liquor store robbery in progress, and she figured it would be an easy grab. She had powers, she knew a little taekwondo, there were only two of them, neither of them armed — what could possibly go wrong?

Everything, as it turned out. Natalie took down one guy with a single well-placed sucker-kick to the face, but the other one...the other one was as big and as tough as a Humvee, and he took Natalie’s best shot without blinking an eye.

Then he went to work.

It’s funny how you can see someone several times, stand right next to her, yet completely miss details that, once noticed, can never be un-noticed. Natalie Guerrero is an attractive young woman — pretty enough to turn heads while walking down the street, but approachable. She has dark eyes, black hair she wears in an adorable asymmetrical bob, and whenever she smiles, it’s an impish little smirk that suggests there is a bit of a bad girl hiding in there. Somehow, I never before noticed the little bump high on the bridge of her nose, from where it had been broken and reset. I never noticed the scar, faded over time, forming a pale crescent that brackets her right eye, or the similar line that starts underneath her left nostril, traces the edge of the indentation under her nose, passes over her lips, and ends at the rise of her chin. All these details have been invisible to me until now, until Natalie’s confession.

“I only spent two days in the hospital,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper, “but an experience like that, it stays with you, long after the wounds have healed.”

I swallow hard. “How long?”

By way of an answer, she says, “Don’t tell yourself you can handle this alone, Carrie. You can’t. I couldn’t. I won’t let you repeat my mistakes. Got it?”

Natalie pulls me into a hug and holds me tight for several minutes. I think it’s for her as much as it is for me.

THIRTEEN

I meet Sara back at the Wonkavator. She looks as tired as I feel.

“I am,” she says. “Oh. Sorry. That slipped through. I’m —”

“I’m with you. This was...this was an exhausting day.”

“But a good one.”

“But a good one.”

“Good to hear,” Mindforce says, trading satisfied smiles with Natalie. “And as a reward for your hard work, we will tell Concorde to leave you alone for the weekend. If any crises arise, we’ll handle them.”

“Sounds awesome,” I say.

Let’s not tell Matt
, Sara think-says to me.

Agreed
.

Sorely in need of caffeine, we rush back to Coffee E where, to my surprise, I find the gang sitting with, of all people, my grandfather.

“Oh, hello, honey,” Granddad says. “How did the tutoring go?”

Tutoring? I didn’t — oh. Must be the cover story the guys fed him.

“Went well,” I say. “Not the best way to spend a Friday afternoon...”

“Well, I appreciate the extra work you’re putting in,” he says, standing to kiss me on the forehead, “and so does your mom — who, by the way, is out tonight with her co-workers, but that doesn’t mean your regular weekend curfew isn’t in effect.”

“The movie gets out around eleven, so I should be home by midnight, easy.”

“What are you seeing?”