Shades of Gray (24 page)

“
You’re
the cavalry?” Iri barked out a laugh. “And here I thought they’d be sending the entire Mod Squad.”

“We did,” Jet murmured, silently counting the monsters far below. Thirteen. Light, thirteen of those … things. “The others are on their way.”

“Great. Get Firebug to charbroil them,” Iri said, shaking out her hands and wincing.

“Can’t do that,” Jet said, tapping her comlink. “They’re civilians.”

“Those are
civvies
?” Behind his black mask, Taser’s mouth pulled into a surprised O. “Remind me never to egg their houses on Halloween …”

Jet tuned him out. “Jet, Ops.”

Meteorite’s voice in her ear: “Oh good, you’re not dead.”

“Iridium, Taser, and I are clear for the moment, but we have to restrain the mutants without harming them.”

“And you’ll do that how?”

“Working on it,” Jet said tersely. “ETA of the others?”

A pause, during which Iri and Taser exchanged heated words—and unless Jet was wrong, threw each other a few meaningful looks. If Jet had been less stressed, it would have bothered her more. Then Meteorite said, “Hornblower due to arrive in three minutes. Steele and Firebug are a little farther behind. And—”

“Wa-
hoo
!” Iri shouted. “
Now
the cavalry’s showing!”

Jet looked up to see Frostbite approaching fast on an expanding bridge of ice. But this wasn’t the man who’d been hollowed out in Therapy as a boy, then shoved behind a desk in Ops for years. This Frostbite, with his clean Ops gray unisuit and thick-soled boots and a wicked grin on his lined face, was a teenager again, his spiky blue hair gusting in the wind as he landed roofside.

This Frostbite was a hero.

“Look at you,” Iri said, rushing over to him and greeting him with a hug. “Getting all superhero on us.”

“Derek,” Jet said carefully, “are you sure you want to be here?” He’d been out of the field … well, since forever. The last mission he’d run had been during a Third Year exercise under strict Academy supervision.

But that didn’t mean he’d never been tested. Light knew, he’d been tested. And blooded. And he’d survived … at least, until the Therapists had taken him.

Frostbite disentangled himself from Iri’s embrace, shooting Jet a glare that should have made her hair catch fire. “From what I heard, you told Meteorite to pull everyone out,
Joan
. I’m part of everyone.” The look in his eye dared Jet to argue with him.

A smile flitted across her lips. “Welcome back, Frostbite.”

“Yeah, we’ll get cozy over a latte later. What’s the situation?”

“A rough dozen sewer mutants tried to eat me and Taser,” Iri said, pointing to the street below. “Now they’re bashing each other’s brains in.”

“Fabulous,” said Taser. “Problem solved. Who’s buying?”

“They’re not sewer mutants,” Jet said, casting Iridium a long look.

Iri blinked at her. “What? I’ve seen it on
Mysterious Chicago.
”

“They’re normals,” Jet stressed, looking at the others one by one.

“Those are the least normal normals I’ve ever seen,” Frostbite said, staring down at the street. “Moore’s sludge at work?”

“I’m positive,” Jet said.

“What sludge?” Iridium looked from Frostbite to Jet. “Who’s Moore? And don’t give me that ‘person of interest’ cowcrap, Jet,” she added when Jet opened her mouth.

“Hey, those quote-unquote normals almost crushed me,” Taser said. “I’m definitely a person of interest.”

Jet walked over to the edge of the roof and looked down. In the street, the monsters danced with fists and fury. At least the citizens here had abided by curfew.
Small favors,
Jet told herself again. “You remember when we met in the Rat Network?” Jet said, not looking back at Taser or Iri.

“You mean when you broke my nose?” Iri said sweetly.

“When I’d gone up against one of them.” Jet’s throat tightened, and she swallowed thickly, remembering the overwhelming stench of her own sweat and fear, her rising panic of the Dark and of the thing that had loomed over her, wearing a string of pearls and a look of pure madness. “That creature had been the reporter, Lynda Kidder. She’d been injected with a serum created by a man named Martin Moore.”

She remembered the sound of Lynda Kidder howling in rage as a blanket of Shadow covered her. Squeezed her.

Killed her.

“He’s working with Everyman, or a fringe group connected with Everyman. So was C—” Jet’s words ended on a choked gasp as a knife sliced through her brain.

A hand on her shoulder. She looked up, blinking away tears, to see Iri frowning at her. “Joannie,” she said softly. “You okay?”

“No.” Jet shrugged off Iri’s hand, grimacing through the echoes of pain. “Whatever their brainwashing was, it …” She took a shuddering breath. “I can’t say their name, not if I’m speaking against them.”

Iri stared at her, her gaze unreadable. “You have to tell the world the truth.”

“Amen,” said Frostbite.

“Don’t you get it? I
can’t.
I literally can’t say anything about it!” She clenched her fist, and Shadows seeped between her fingers.

“Why not?” Frostbite asked. “I can, and they screwed with my mind more than anyone’s.” He shouted, “Corp sucks ass! Corp can blow me! Fuck Corp!” Then he grinned at Jet. “See?”

Iridium said, “Maybe it has to do with your Shadow power?”

“This is pointless,” Jet snarled. “So what that I can’t say the name? You know who I mean. Moore was a mole. Night had leaked code-black files to Moore for Light only knows how long, and Moore took that information and went to Everyman.”

“Hey,” Taser said. He was looking down at the street below.

Jet ignored him. “And with Everyman, Moore helped develop or maybe even created this serum that he believes will level the field between human and extrahuman. He hates us. He thinks we’re all time bombs set to explode.”

“He might’ve been right about that,” Iri said. When Jet glared at her, she shrugged. “Maybe he was right, and we’re just damaged goods.”

“Hey,” Taser said again.

“No,” Jet growled. “I refuse to believe that all extrahumans are just wired wrong.” She knew she was doomed to go insane, but the others? No.
No.
She couldn’t believe that.

Iridium said, “You notice what’s been happening with extrahumans lately?”

“That’s because after years, decades, of brainwashing, we were finally free!” Realizing she was shouting, Jet forced herself to take a breath and lower her voice. “It’s finding out you’ve been a slave only after the collar’s come off. This madness will die down,” she said firmly.

“Joannie,” Iri said slowly, “have you stopped to think about why Corp bothered with the brainwashing in the first place?”

That hit Jet like a punch to the gut.

Frostbite rolled his eyes. “You mean other than them being evil overlords?”

Iridium kept looking at Jet, riddling her with that ice-blue gaze. “Maybe Corp knew we were all screwed up, so they made sure that we’d never turn on them.”

“That backs my evil-overlord theory,” Frostbite said.

Jet barely heard him. In her mind, Martin Moore was whispering to her.

You’re ticking time bombs
.
The lot of you. Some are just wired to blow before others.

She remembered Dawnlighter during Second Year at the Academy, her eyes and ears leaking blood as she tried to destroy Jet and anyone else in her way.

She thought of Slider, of Nocturne and the other Squadron soldiers who’d gone rabid within hours of Corp’s conditioning shutting down.

Some are wired to blow—

Suddenly cold, Jet rubbed her arms. Martin Moore had been given access to code-black Corp files, to records that had been expunged. He’d leaked a portion of those files to Kidder, and after her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Origins” series on extrahumans had concluded, he’d expressed his gratitude by having her kidnapped and used as a guinea pig for the Everyman serum.

wired to—

What else had been in those files? What had caused him to say that the extrahumans were time bombs?

Jet thought of an article she’d found hidden in Lynda Kidder’s apartment—a file that the reporter had never published in the
New Chicago Tribune,
even though it was marked as the last in her series. The article tenuously linked Corp-Co to the Icarus fertility clinic in the late 1980s, as well as to disease-control facilities in Hong Kong and Mumbai. In her last article, Kidder suggested that Corp hadn’t merely bought Icarus Biological at the turn of the twenty-first century, but instead had played a larger role.

Martin Moore’s warbling old man’s voice:
It’s reasonable to assume that Corp-Co sponsored the fertility project
…

Just how much did Corp have to do with extrahuman origins?

What did Corp know about the extrahumans that they themselves did not?

She remembered the teenage girl outside of Everyman headquarters, shoving a key into her hand, telling her to go save the world somewhere else …

“Hey!”

Jet blinked, looked over at Taser, who was pointing to the street.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but the rest of the cavalry’s arrived. And they’re going after the sewer-mutant norms.”

Jet raced over to the edge and looked down. Sure enough, there was Hornblower, peeling off a sonic blast that leveled two of the creatures. Firebug’s flaming shield had some of them flinching back, protecting their eyes. Steele took the direct approach: She pummeled any mutant that got in her path.

“Ops,” Jet shouted, “tell them to stop, that they’re civilians!”

Meteorite’s reply left Jet cold: “I already did.”

“They’re not hurting the mutants,” Iri commented. “Maybe that’s even on purpose.”

“Come on.” Jet grabbed Iri’s wrist as she summoned a Shadow floater. “Frostbite, take Taser down.”

“Plan?” Iri asked as the two of them flew over the roof’s edge.

“Help them push the creatures back,” Jet called over her shoulder. “Knock them out or otherwise restrain them. We’ll figure out the logistics after.” She dropped the floater down in a free fall.

“Brilliant!” shouted Iri, holding on to Jet’s waist for dear life. “Tell the heroes to stop beating up on the innocent, murderous, insanely dangerous sewer-mutant wannabes. I love this plan!”

Frostbite and Taser slid down an ice ramp as Jet and Iri touched down. “Don’t hurt them,” Jet shouted.

“Don’t get killed,” Iri countered before she dove into the thick of it.

Jet rushed forward, slamming the nearest mutant with a Shadow bolt that knocked it off its oversized feet. She turned to the next creature, this one a woman, and hit her just as hard as the first. The woman-thing stumbled backward and into a third, which turned its rage upon her with a vicious blow to the head.

“Herd them!” That was Steele. “Get them contained!”

“Open to suggestions,” Iridium shouted, releasing strobe after strobe. Jet caught it peripherally as she blasted the first mutant again, and a third time. It still came for her, its meaty fists promising to crush her. She stepped back, and back again, and barely spun away from the second creature’s attack.

Someone let out a cry of pain.

Do it,
Jet told herself. It will be different this time.
Blanket him.

But she saw Lynda Kidder’s prone body, a husk discarded by the Shadow. She couldn’t do it. Snarling, she battered the creature again, and again. All it did was hold the man-thing back for the moment.

Fire arced overhead; ice crackled below. Her ears throbbed as Hornblower released his sonic cry, leveling it like a battering ram.

Do it!

She couldn’t.

Now someone was screaming—not fear, not battlelust. Agony—so raw and brutal it turned his voice into a weapon.

Hornblower.

“Oh, Christo, his leg!” Frostbite, in panic. “Callie, oh Christo, Callie you’ve got to cauterize it—”

“On it,” she shouted. “Keep them off me!”

Jet doubled down, slamming the two mutants on her with everything she had, Shadowboxing them until they collapsed like dead trees. She pivoted and saw Iri squatting by Hornblower, clutching his right leg …

… which had been torn off above the knee.

Jet froze, staring at Tyler Taft as blood pooled beneath him and Iridium, watching him convulse with pain and shock.

Iri, stabbed by an Everyman in Third Year.

Sam, slain by an Everyman, shot in the back.

Jet screamed as she let the Shadow fly, blanketing the creatures around her. Two, three, four of the monstrosities, were swathed in Shadow, struggling to free themselves from the deathly cold. Jet squeezed, and in that moment she felt their light, their life, so sweet and thick and good, and she held her arms up, her face tilted to the moonlit sky, basking as she drank them down.

She felt them fall, one by one. And still she squeezed. When all four finally succumbed to the Shadow’s touch, she unwrapped the blanket, let them sprawl on the ground, unconscious but alive.

Energy sang in her, danced along her limbs. With a cry she hurled the Shadow over two more of the warped creatures, wrapping them tight. Squeezing them in the darkest of embraces. They, too, fell before the power of the Dark.

“Jet!”

She turned, smiling to see Taser there—Bruce Hunter, her onetime lover, who was stepping backward, his arms up in surrender. She remembered what it had been like to blanket him in Shadow, to slowly drain the light from his body … remembered how good it had felt …

“Joan,” he said, “whoa there! Good guy, remember?”

She stared at him, at the blank slate of his masked face, his eyes hidden by goggles, his sardonic smile obscured by fabric. And she thought about how easy it would be to kill him.

And then she realized what she was thinking.

Shuddering, she called the Shadow back to her, all of it. Creepers washed over her, tracing her curves in a seductive caress before they melted into her.

“Yeah,” Taser said, “okay, hi there, welcome back from the Land of Crazy.”

Ashamed and angry, she turned away.