Scarred

Right.

Razorfire's gorgeous scent dizzies me, mint and fire and dark delight, and I can't help but inhale. Swallow, gulp for more, my body yearning to drink him in. His flame licks my bruised cheek, both threat and promise. I flush, mortified. I don't deserve this. I don't deserve him…

Fiercely, I blinked, and the memory splintered and whirled away, leaving only fresh-sliced pain in my temples. Fuck it. The flashbacks of my evil ex-lover—yeah, long and gruesome story—were growing less frequent, easier to banish. But the guilty twist in my guts didn't ease.

Wanna know a secret? It never does. Not for one goddamn second.

Sure, Razorfire tricked me, playing twisted psychological games until my mind snapped. That didn't excuse how I'd acted, or the suffering my twisted infatuation had caused. Adonis had tried to have me treated and it badly backfired. My father and sister were dead, my family in hiding. I had a lot to make up for.

I glanced about for Sentinels, those sneaky augment-detecting gadgets that were bolted to every lamp post in the city these days, or so it seemed. Razorfire's plan since he'd been elected mayor had been inscrutable, to say the least.

In his public persona, he was all keep the streets safe and prosecute to the full extent of the law and no tolerance for violent criminals. Yet every once in a while, he'd climb into his crimson silk archvillain suit and mask, and burn some neighborhood to a smoking ruin. Post threatening videos on the internet. Ratchet the tension higher, let the police department and the district attorney's office take the heat (heh) and generally stir up a furious hornet's nest of violence and fear.

Look, there was a Sentinel: a smug silvery cylinder mounted ten feet up on a building's corner, silently blinking its incriminating red light at me. I flipped it the bird. Detect this, you metal moron.

Across the sidewalk, an office worker in a slim-cut suit did a double-take, and made a move inside his jacket. Sigh. Seriously: a gun? Are they arming metrosexuals now? Stop, or I'll order decaf!

I didn't pause. I just pointed into his face as I walked by, and gave him my best Dirty Harry impression. "You really wanna test me, punk?"

He scuttled backwards, dropping his computer case, hands raised in peace. Heh. Must have my angry face on today.

In my pocket, my phone's message tone chimed. Whatever. Probably Adonis wondering where the hell I was. Or Glimmer, texting me a dose of the guilts because he imagined I was drinking myself horny in some seedy Castro Street bar, and of course he'd never do anything so grotesquely banal and ordinary as get drunk and laid, because he was Glimmer and he was too damn perfect and jeez, when did I turn into such a jealous little worm?

I sighed, rubbing the dented scar on my cheekbone. A headache swelled like a tumor deep in my skull, threatening murder. Hell, I wanted a drink and a cigarette, even though I'd never been much of a drinker and I didn't like the smell of tobacco smoke. What I needed was food and sleep. I should go home, as far as “home” went these days, now that FortuneCorp were in hiding and Glimmer's secret techno-lair was a crispy barbecue and Sentinels mined half the city's streets into a no-hero zone.

But I needed to salvage something from tonight. Prove I hadn't simply screwed up, hadn't let those villains escape out of carelessness, that my power was reliable and strong. Or hell, I might as well rock on down to Castro Street right now and order a triple brainfuck with a twist of sordid.

Belligerent, I squared my shoulders. I didn't give a moldy fart for Sentinels or cops or vigilante office boys. What were they gonna do, shoot me? I'd survived that before. Anyway, my altercation with Sparkly and the twin tweens had set off every alarm in that building. The entire world already knew I was here.

So I strolled across the courtyard to the museum's main entrance, and kicked the door in.

Crash! Boot mixed with mindmuscle, unstoppable. The revolving door buckled like a crushed beer can. I cracked my neck, satisfied. Damn. Someone fetch me that cigarette.

I hurled the wreckage aside and strode into the tiled lobby, where a weird marble statue resembling a gigantic pink horse turd squatted on a pillar.

A black-uniformed security guard challenged me. I flung up one hand and hurled him against the wall, pinning him under the chin with an invisible grip. His handgun clattered to the tiles. The mega-turd teetered and crashed to the floor, a clatter of broken marble. Oops. Performance art.

"Where's the CCTV, idiot?" Blood pounded in my temples, nearly drowning out the sound of my voice. I was in the clear, unmasked. I didn't care. Let the world look at my scars. Let them see me as I truly am.

Glimmer once told me his mask was his true face. That it wasn't a disguise, but a confession. For me, it's the other way around. My mask is unsullied, fit for public consumption. The face underneath… on my bad days? Not so much. And the physical scars—my souvenir of that hellhole of an asylum, courtesy of my well-meaning asshole of a brother—are the pretty part.

The security guy wasn't dumb enough to play the hero. He jerked his head towards a locked door, his throat bobbing as he tried to swallow.

I let him fall undamaged and stepped over him as he gurgled for breath. Heh. Dumb enough to play the hero. There's a lesson we could all learn.

I smashed the security office door open. Old-school video screens, surveillance-camera footage of darkened museum rooms and corridors. In the room where I'd fought the tweens, a battalion of guards and cops and rented heavies were arresting Sparkly and reading him what was left of his rights. From the black-and-bloodied look of his face, they'd left out the “we can't beat the snot out of you while you're restrained” part.

I leveled my pistol at the only guard inside the CCTV room. Chesty young blond, biceps like turnips stuffed up his shirtsleeves. His sidearm lay on the bench. Bad choice, Turnip Man.

His ice-chip eyes widened, and one hand strayed to the can of pepper spray at his belt.

I thumbed the safety off, pulling three pounds on a four-pound trigger. My hands were shaking as badly as my voice. I was weary, hungry, pissed off. "Just try me, moron. See what happened to that window? Imagine what I can do to your skull. We understand each other?"

Turnip Man nodded, otherwise perfectly still, fingers splayed to show he'd surrendered. They weren't paying him enough to die. Sweat trickled down his neatly shaven cheek, and in that moment I hated him utterly.

For being young, ordinary, carefree. For having a regular job, where you went home after work, dumb and happy with your sixteen twenty-five an hour in your pocket, and thought about something else.

For living such a goddamn simple life.

"Good. Then you know what I want." I jerked my bruised chin towards the bank of screens and digital recording equipment. "So get on with it."

Forty seconds later, I was gone.

~ 3 ~ (#u63e7c8ce-943b-5dfe-abee-c0561b1a1f92)

By the time I reached the new FortuneCorp HQ, I was wet, sore and angry, and I reeked of shit.

Sentinels, see. The old ones you could fool with augmentium, the alloy that's resistant to augmented powers. Razorfire strutted around in public for weeks wearing a wristwatch forged from the stuff and no one was the wiser. These improved models? Nuh-uh. At least, not for us. His Archvillain-ness is still getting away with it. Somehow. Fuck him.

Hmm. Right. Moving on from that thought…

Since that night a few months ago, when we lost out to Razorfire big time—he sabotaged his own superweapon, became the city's hero, got himself elected mayor and declared us Fortunes public enemies; if that isn't irony, can me up and call me a sardine—we don't want him knowing where we're holing up. We need to move about out of sight, and a lot of the time that means underground. Sapphire City's sewers date from before the fire at the turn of last century, and they smell like it: greasy brick tunnels, calf-deep in foul flushwater, floating with fat globules and dead rats and discarded baby wipes, and crusted with decades of slimy dripping God-knows-what.

I carried my coat rolled up under one arm, and let my boots take the brunt of it, but by the time I levered up the rusted grate and climbed blinking like a mole into the deserted parking lot by the waterworks, it was two in the morning, I stank like a mediaeval train toilet and my mood didn't smell much better.

Times like this, I wished I could fly. Or turn invisible. Or make decent coffee. Or do anything, pretty much, that was useful to anyone anymore.

I slipped unseen into the forest surrounding the parking lot. Fog curled among the tall eucalypts, luminous in the moonlight, wreathing smelly old me with the leaves' disinfectant scent. The city noise faded to a cool murmur. I squeezed stinking water from my trouser cuffs and strode up the hill into the dark. Leaves and soil crunched under my boots. Somewhere a wildcat yowled. A few charred tree trunks lay in my path, black shapes darker than the shadows, and I hopped wearily over them.

At the top of the hill, no lights shone. But I knew the path, and my tongue tingled with the candy-sweet flavor of augment. I picked my way through stumps and fallen branches towards our hideout: the derelict asylum.

I'd spent months trapped in here at Adonis's behest, while doctors tried to “cure” me of my little misdirected affection problem. Naturally, I'd escaped and set the place on fire. The concrete-block building was now partly a blackened ruin, but at one end, roof and walls still stood, two stories high.

Had I freaked out when we first came here? Fuck, yes. I'd stalked around with a loaded fistful of power, unleashing on ghosts, jumping at every noise. I was okay with it now. It no longer looked much like the place where I'd been tortured… but sometimes, in the night, I still woke alone in my cold ex-cell to the phantom smells of stewed apple and puke and singed hair, the bright buzz of electroshock, unseen screams grating in my ears.

And Glimmer wondered why I frequented late bars.

I eased the unlocked basement door open, quiet as I could. Inside, a row of caged light bulbs hung, just one in the middle switched on. The old food hall: a stainless-steel serving hatch, steel tables bolted to the green linoleum floor, barred gates to keep the crazies in. No alarm on the door. Glimmer hadn't gotten around to installing one yet. Too busy hacking our cell phones so they couldn't be tracked (good job) and repairing his surveillance kit (from what was left of it, which was pretty much zilch) and rebuilding the data-mining algorithms he'd lost when Razorfire torched his lair.

But my teenage cousin Ebenezer was on watch. Slouched in a plastic chair, playing a game on his tablet. Lank brown hair in need of a wash, dusty trench coat over safety-pinned jeans. His lame left leg was stretched out, still a mite crooked despite endless iterations of surgery and traction, back when the Fortune family were still respectable and Uncle Mike's money could buy that sort of thing. I think Eb secretly likes it that he limps. All part of the package.

Some defects you just can't fix.

Eb blinked at me, short-sighted. One watery blue eye, one brown. "Well, you look like you just crawled from a sack of hungry rat corpses."

"Thanks, man. No, really."

"Always here to help." A rare grin, inept, like he didn't care to practice it much. On his lopsided face, it had a kind of evil leprechaun charm.