Mercury Read online

  “Now we wait,” I said.

  There was a long pause, and then Topher began to twiddle his thumbs. “So…I’m Christopher Cannostraci. I grew up in the Finger Lakes camp in New York. Lovely country up there.”

  I let my head fall to the side so he could see my sarcastic “really?” expression. “Now? You want to have a heart-to-heart now?”

  He mirrored my posture. “You got anything better to do?”

  “No.”

  “So, like I was saying, I’m from New York. I guess I pissed off Elder Wiśniewski or something, because I got sent to this armpit city a few years ago. I’m in the game because I have to be. Why the hell are you here?”

  Once again, his casual bluntness was disarming. I tilted my head back and stared at the cracked ceiling. “If by ‘here’ you mean ‘a superhero,’ then I’m here because the night I shot Berenice, I looked at myself in the mirror and had one of those moments where I hated who I saw. I kind of had a breakdown. A few years later I almost let Jillian die after Beau sliced her neck open, and then I really had a breakdown. I ran to a lake and threw in my mask and the rest of my crime crap, and then starting raging against the heavens and all that.”

  He snorted. “Let me guess, ‘I’m evil as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore?’”

  There was a beat, and then we were both cracking up. “Yeah,” I said between laughs. “Dude, that could be the title of my autobiography.” I sighed, happy memories washing over me and easing the ever-present ache in my chest.

  “Berenice has built up your relationship with Jill into some kind of crazy forbidden love saga,” Topher said, tilting his head in curiosity. “Was it like that?”

  “No. I mean, if someone wrote a book about us, the description on the back would probably tout it that way, but in reality we weren’t together until I was a proper superhero. My love for her didn’t sway me onto the side of the angels.”

  I ran a hand through my hair as I sifted through the myriad emotions and recollections of the previous summer. “Now that I think about it, my feelings for her weren’t even why I joined the team. I just wanted to get away from my family. She was just a bonus.” I blinked, taken aback by what I’d just admitted. “Wow. That’s really unromantic, isn’t it?”

  “Meh, the truth’s the truth. You didn’t want to be a supervillain. I’m hardly one to judge.” He jabbed his thumb into his chest. “I’ve never wanted to be a superhero. I don’t want to be a criminal, but if I could walk out that door right-freaking-now, I would.”

  “What would you do?” I drew up my knees and wrapped my arms around them. I struggled to imagine being like Topher, on the cusp of a new life in which superheroes didn’t have a cult over their heads. Why would he leave? What would he do with his incredible powers?

  He shrugged. “I don’t know what I’d do. Sometimes during patrolling I’d ditch my usual beat and just wander around the city, exploring everything. A few times I even snuck into big lecture halls at JHU and listened in. Maybe I’ll explore the planet.” He grinned at me, true happiness in his eyes. “I remember the first time I saw a globe. I had no idea the world was so big.”

  “You could be a travel blog writer. That would be a great angle: ex-superhero goes everywhere and writes about it. You’d have a million readers a day.”

  His face took on a dreamy, far-away expression. “You think?”

  “Heck, yeah. Go to Antarctica first. Being made of metal would make the whole frozen wasteland aspect less burdensome.”

  He sniggered, then stood and stretched his long arms before helping me to my feet. “Let’s do the rounds so we can tell the others we weren’t sitting the whole time.”

  I dusted myself off. A new lightness spread through my body, burning away the fear and horror I’d carried in me for so many hours. I was with someone just like me—born into the wrong family—and we both had futures to fight for. I’d help Topher achieve his pure dream of world travel. He’d help me find my wife. Jillian and I would sit in bed together and read his blog, hand-in-hand.

  I walked up the stairwell, my mind swimming with my thoughts. The assurance I’d felt while I packed for our journey nearly a day ago rushed back, like a flash flood in a desert valley. My hope-parched insides sucked in the confidence.

  We were going to win.

  Jillian was alive. I needed to get to her very soon, of course, but she was alive. Her captors needed her alive. I was a healer, and I could undo any injury they’d inflict. Jillian was a superhero, which meant she had a high pain threshold and a “screw you” attitude that would keep her going when others would’ve caved.

  I’d save her, we’d all beat the bad guys, and then we’d go home and fight crime in the new world that Jillian had forged. Every night, we’d have lots of enthusiastic, fantastic sex. We even had Marco’s permission to do so.

  I turned the doorknob of a small room opposite the master bedroom. The door creaked open, revealing a small home office. The ghostly ambient light from the open window allowed me to see the furnishings. An ancient, scratched mahogany desk bore a laptop, a printer, and photographs of Gabriela’s family. Novels and various religious volumes lined the cheap pressboard bookshelf in the corner. A floor lamp stood behind a squishy armchair.

  The whole room’s cozy civility clashed with the violence of the night. Remembering the rule about open windows, I crossed the small space and hastily jerked the curtain across the rod, plunging myself into almost total darkness. I was halfway to the door when I heard a noise that made me stop mid-step.

  A woman had screamed in the distance.

  I all but flew down the stairs. Topher was in the living room, inspecting the furniture we’d piled in front of the door. “Did you hear that?” I demanded.

  He spun around. “Hear what?”

  “That scream,” I said, trying not to pant. “I couldn’t tell if it was one of our women.”

  He glanced at the top of the front window, the only part visible behind the furniture. “I didn’t hear anything. Let’s keep our guard up, though. And I know you’ll hate this, but we can’t help civilians right now, and it was prob—”

  “Stop talking,” I whispered, holding a hand up. “Listen.”

  I focused on the sounds coming from beyond the walls. Shouting, definitely, though quite distant. Crackling, probably of flames. Rumbles of Reid’s power.

  “What am I supposed to be hearing?” Topher whispered, his face colored with confusion. “I can’t hear anything.”

  “A battle,” I whispered back.

  The high, sharp sound of glass breaking made me spin around. “Upstairs! Someone’s in the house!”

  “What did you hear?” he gasped.

  “Glass! She broke a window!”

  Topher grabbed something from his pocket. In a fraction of a second, he’d become solid metal, his metallic skin glinting ominously in the low light. "Stay behind me.” All vestiges of his optimistic former self gone. This wasn’t Topher, this was Argentine. I fell in step behind him and grabbed a statue of the Madonna and Child from the mantle over the fireplace, raising it up like a club.

  We silently ascended the staircase. When we were nearly at the top, the sound of a single footstep in the small office made me freeze. “She’s in the office,” I whispered. “The door on the right.”

  Topher sprinted the final few steps and burst through the door with a marvelous crash. I dashed in after him, statue raised to bash someone’s brains out.

  Nobody was in the office, though the door had been knocked off its hinges.

  I lowered my statue. “I know I heard glass breaking and footsteps.”

  Topher pulled the curtain back. The glass was intact, as untouched as it had been minutes before. He looked over his shoulder at me, his metal face contorted in confusion. “You sure you heard glass breaking? Not wood splintering or something similar?”

  “I swear it was glass,” I said, holding up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

  Topher shut the
curtain abruptly, then hurried past me into the hall, turning back into flesh and blood as he did so. “Do you smell that?” He lifted his head like a dog trying to get a lock on a scent. “I can smell better in my normal form, by the way. All my senses are better like this.”

  I inhaled deeply and closed my eyes, straining to smell anything than the usual hardwood, dust, and vague “cold” smell of an unheated house. I couldn’t smell anything, but I heard a new noise. It was faint, but constant. Was it water? No…not water. Something else…something…

  Hissing.

  “I know the smell. It smells like the stove at our house,” he said slowly. “Like when it’s turned on but there’s no flame.”

  Hissing.

  “It’s gas!” I shouted. “Get out!”

  We bounded down the stairwell and streaked to the furniture pile. The piano was shoved aside so hard that it fell over with a cacophonous bang. We tossed chairs and end tables across the room, then threw our weight into pushing the couch away from the door. My heart hammered to the tempo my thoughts. We haven’t blown up yet, we’re still alive, we’re still alive, we haven’t blown up yet…

  I reached for the doorknob, then risked an extra second in the house to grab a winter hat from the coat rack by the door.

  Topher unbolted the door and threw it open.

  There was a brief pause while we braced ourselves against the subfreezing wind, and then two knives sliced through the air, sinking hilt-deep into Topher’s eye and neck. He hit the ground with a bone-shuddering thud and didn’t move.

  I slammed the door shut with a kick and bolted the lock, then picked up Topher’s limp hand. I’ve healed two knife wounds already. They need to come up with something better. Come on, man,” I said between pants. “Let’s go. This is it. Let’s kick Daisy’s ass.”

  A second passed, and then another.

  And another.

  There was no rush of healing energy. No sudden gasping for breath and a groan. His large hand lay still in mine.

  Topher was already dead.

  Item Eight

  Text from poster advertising the annual county fair, Charles County, MD, dated circa 1906.

  COME SEE THE BEAUTIFUL RUBBER WOMAN

  SHE CAN FALL THIRTY FEET AND BOUNCE RIGHT BACK UP

  BRICKS CAN’T HURT HER

  STONES ARE AS NOTHING AT ALL

  ADMISSION: ONLY 2 CENTS

  8

  I grabbed the two knives from their grisly sheaths in Topher’s body and staggered backwards into the interior of the living room, away from the corpse and the door.

  My boot caught the edge of an area rug and I crashed to the ground. I scrambled to my feet as my brain tried to supply the necessary steps I had to take to ensure my safety, but the panic made now my racing thoughts trip over each other. Get away…bar the door…call for help…arm yourself…

  A deadly adversary was on the other side of the door. She’d already killed once, and her victim had been a highly competent superhero. I was nothing more than a rangy, unarmed medic with quick feet. What hope did I have? I’d given away my baton. My hand-to-hand skills were, as Marco was fond of pointing out, nonexistent.

  The rushing sound in my ears began to drive out all thoughts. I couldn’t feel my feet as I stumbled into the dark interior of the first floor, down a short hallway.

  Away. I needed to get away. But where? Where could I go that would protect me from an assassin? I groped around, feeling for anything that could help me. All the while, my heart beat so hard that I was half-certain I was about to go into cardiac arrest.

  My hand found a cold door knob. I turned it and rushed down the dark wooden stairwell beyond. The door slammed shut at the top of the stairs, casting perfect darkness over me. I tripped over a solid object, falling again onto the damp concrete floor.

  After a few seconds of hyperventilating and wondering if I’d just broken my elbows, I calmed down enough to pull out my phone and turn on its flashlight. With my arm raised, I slowly stood up and squinted at my surroundings.

  Gabriela’s cramped, grimy basement was stuffed to the brim with odds and ends normally found in garages. A tiny lawnmower sat in the corner next to a gas can. Dusty wooden shelves above it bore supplies for her car, such as motor oil and rags. Another shelf carried extra cleaning supplies for the household, including glass cleaner, alcohol, baking soda, and lavender-scented cleaning solution. In the far corner sat stinking trash bags and a blue recycling bin filled with mostly wine bottles. A squat tabletop grill stood next to a small bag of charcoal briquettes, which had a lighter on top of it. In the wall above the grill, about chest level, was a metal plate with a handle. The final item confused me—was it an old decoration? A leftover piece of machinery?

  I shook my head to clear my thoughts of ridiculous, pointless questions, then turned off my flashlight and took a deep breath. It was time to face reality like a man.

  Chances were, I was going to die in this basement. That was an unavoidable fact. There was an implicit promise woven into the threads and fibers of my tunic: that I would be brave. I was a superhero, if a pathetic one, and superheroes faced their opponents in battle. They did not run and hide in holes. They did not cower in fear. They held their chin up and looked their enemies in the eye before saying, “Come and get me.”

  “Come and get me,” I whispered through stiff lips. I’d dropped one of the knives in my flight to the basement, but I gripped the remaining one so hard my fingers began to ache. Or was it because of the cold?

  There was no light in the basement, so my eyes could not adjust. All I could do was listen for footsteps above me and feel the various sensations around me. The basement smelled of mildew and dust, but not as much as I would’ve guessed. And it was freezing, unusually cold for a room that was technically insulated by the surrounding ground and foundation. It was as if someone had opened a window a few inches, but there was none.

  I inhaled again. The prickly smell of ice and cold tickled my nostrils—the unmistakable mark of fresh winter air.

  There was a connection to the outside somewhere in the basement.

  Why hadn’t I seen it? I turned on my flashlight and held it up as I slowly turned around in a circle, carefully surveying my surroundings. Brick wall, brick wall, brick wall… When my eyes fell on the metal plate in the wall, I froze.

  It wasn’t a plate. It was a coal chute.

  Upstairs, the door crashed to the ground in the living room. Dust fell from the wooden rafters above me and landed on my head and shoulders.

  I yanked the handle of the chute door and pulled with all my might. Rusty, ancient hinges creaked in protest as the door opened. A thin metal mesh grill blocked the entrance, but a few good hits with my phone popped it out of its place. I tossed it aside and gauged whether I could fit into the chute. It would be snug, but I’d be able to climb through. I could see the connection to the outside—the chute was only three feet long or so.

  Floorboards creaked; Daisy was taking her first hesitant steps into the house. I stiffened, temporarily too tense to breathe—would she go into the basement?

  The creaking moved overhead from near the front of the house to where I thought the main stairwell was, then grew fainter. She was walking upstairs.

  I hoisted myself into the chute. My stiff fingers fumbled as I tried to remove the mesh grate on the other end, but it finally fell out. After tossing it aside, I awkwardly maneuvered my body into such a position that I could push on the outside chute door, all the while promising any god that would listen my soul and a great deal more if the second door opened just as easily as the first one.

  I positioned my shoulder and elbow at the edge. With one burst of effort—

  “Yes,” I breathed. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  The metal door pushed aside much of the virgin snow which, while heavy, had yet to become compacted and impassable. I opened the door just enough to squeeze my body through, then wiggled out into the snow. Never had lying in snow in t
he middle of the night felt so good.

  I was in Gabriela’s dark, postage stamp-sized backyard. Snow fell steadily, but the blizzard was over. In the bluish light I could see that it was fenced, with a gate leading to an alley between townhouse blocks. A cement birdbath a few feet away provided the only decoration. Two windows overlooked the space, a barred one upstairs one I thought might be in the master bedroom, and a small window on the kitchen door. Both were curtained.

  For the first time in hours, I was somewhat calm. As I crouched in the corner of the yard, out of sight from either window, I reviewed my options.

  The first was easy: run.

  Before I could stand and make for the gate, Berenice’s sneering summation of my tendency to retreat surfaced in my memories. I know how well you can run. No, I could not leave the house with Daisy still at large. I would not. I would make my team proud or die trying.

  The second option was more complicated: stay and fight.

  But how? What fight could I possibly put up against Daisy? I hadn’t even physically seen her and I was already terrified of her. She was armed, she was clever, and I had a growing suspicion that she could make me hear and smell things that weren’t there. How else could I explain why only I’d heard glass breaking upstairs, a battle, and hissing? Or why Topher had smelled gas, but I hadn’t? I had no idea how her power worked, but I knew that I needed to stay away if I wanted to avoid more sensory manipulation.

  I scanned the dim yard for anything that would help me decide what to do. When I saw nothing, I dashed to the gate and unlatched it, then shut the gate behind me before running down the alley and around the corner, squeezing through the narrow walkway between Gabriela’s house and her neighbor’s.

  If I was going to sit on my hands, I’d sit on my hands in relative safety. From here, I could see the shadowy street, but nobody could see me.

  I crouched at the entrance of the walkway, hidden behind overgrown bushes and several feet of snow. The sleepy quiet of the street confirmed to me that Daisy had somehow made me hear a battle that didn’t exist. There was no glow in the sky indicating fire, no smell of smoke or shrill screams. It had been a ruse to lure us out. When that hadn’t worked, she’d made us think there was a gas leak.