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He points to the rusty old KAPOW pod still parked in a visitor’s slot from when I arrived. “KAPOW doesn’t work during lockdown. You want to explain that, Miss I Know Everything?”
He offers me a hand to stand back up and although I’d rather swat it away and tell him to go get run over by the KAPOW, I don’t need to be making any more enemies. So I take his hand and stand. I sure hope my Hero suit isn’t dry clean only.
“Pepper is dead, Evan.” He doesn’t so much as flinch at this news. That’s what several years of Hero training will do to a man. If I had half as much discipline as him, I wouldn’t have tears in the corners of my eyes. “He’s dead and I saw him murdered and the entire time this was happening, the damn sirens were going off over and over and over again, saying we were in lockdown.” Still no reaction from Evan, other than a slight furrowed brow. “So if that isn’t good enough for you to believe me, then I’m sorry I even showed up here.”
“Who murdered Pepper?”
“Aurora. The suit designer who trained him before she retired.”
He contemplates this and then a burst of power hits me as his eyes go wide. His words send a chill down my spine, “That pod is hijacked.”
I follow him to the pod, watching as he rips off a piece of the outer wall, revealing the circuit boards and high-tech guts of the system. Expertise makes his fingers move quickly, and soon he’s removed a silver box from inside the KAPOW pod. A blue LED blinks on the box, that is until Evan crushes it in his palm. He tosses the broken bits into the ocean.
“You could have been tracked,” he says by way of explanation. With more configuring of the circuit boards, he closes the metal latch back into place and sends the pod back into the underwater tunnel.
“We have to get inside. Activate Lockdown mode. If she had time to track you, then she could send an army here.” He gnaws on his lower lip. I sneak a glance toward the tunnel, half expecting to see her thin profile standing in the distance. Evan’s wave of power recedes into his body. “We’re just two people.”
Despite the potential impending doom heading our way and the fact that he barely even knows me, Evan reaches for my hand. And despite my tenacious desire to fight my battles alone, I let him take it.
“I think we’re done,” Evan says with an exhausted si
gh. I watch the last digital bar on the wall screen turn from red to green, signaling the completion of the research building’s extensive lockdown procedure.
It turns out the building isn’t made of concrete as it looked from the outside. It’s actually a one-way glass where you can’t see in, but no matter where you are inside the building, (including the bathroom), you can see out into the vast ocean surrounding the place. It’s awesome. Everything about Research is awesome.
I follow Evan from the lobby of the building on the first floor up to the living quarters in the penthouse. Well, he calls it the penthouse at least, with a stupid little flourish of his hand. But if I know Research scientist nerds, it’s probably more like a university dorm room up there. We step into a glass elevator in the center of the first floor lobby and Evan presses the button for the top floor. We ascend slowly, which is so not normal to the Super world, but it’s probably a feature that allows Evan to check on all his projects as he rides up the elevator. It takes everything I can do not to press my grubby fingers and forehead to the glass and coo over my surroundings like a five-year-old.
There are computers, glass vials, and big metal objects that could be torture chambers but probably aren’t. There are glass wall screens that spend all day computing some sort of equation, or various forms of it, or maybe nothing at all like that—I have no idea what I’m looking at. Everything is shiny, clean, and beautiful.
We step off the elevator and into a kitchen. Although it’s not like any kitchen I’ve ever seen. The technology here makes the high-tech gizmos at Central look like antiques. So much for my dorm room analogy.
“Why don’t we have any of this stuff?” I ask, running my fingers over the kitchen countertop, which is basically a plasma screen running a program that looks like an aquarium. The realistic-looking digital flounder beneath my finger scurries away, swishing its tail quickly as if I had actually touched it.
Evan opens a silver refrigerator door and grabs two Gatorades from a shelf that is all Gatorade, all lemon-lime flavor. He takes a seat across from me at the bar/faux aquarium and slides me a Gatorade. The fake water ripples as the bottle moves across the smooth surface.
I crack open the lid and take a sip. “Why are they all lemon lime?”
The intensity of his stare could border on rude. “That’s the best flavor.”
He drinks, and I drink again, and this goes on for a while. Him sitting there staring at me, drinking his best flavor of Gatorade and me returning the stare, drinking mine and thinking that orange is actually the best flavor of Gatorade. But now isn’t the time to bring that up.
Eventually the bottles are empty and the fish find them fascinating on the countertop, and I can’t keep up the staring thing any longer. I glance down at my hands. “So, what happens now?”
“Hell if I know.” Evan inhales a deep breath and slowly lets it out. “We haven’t been alive during any other lockdowns.” I don’t look up for his reply. Instead, I stare at the chips in my nail polish. My subconscious nags me in the back of my mind. Nail polish is the last thing that should concern me. But I want to think about nail polish. It’s easy to think about nail polish.
The nag grows stronger as I stare at my cuticles. The question on my mind blurts out of me, causing the room to echo with my sudden outburst of sound. “Why aren’t you asking more questions? Don’t you want to know more details?”
Evan’s elbows rest on the counter as he peels at the label on his bottle. His eyes fill with apprehension. With deliberate slowness, he says, “I’m not sure what to ask. Of course I want to know. But I’m not asking because I don’t want to see that look on your face again.”
“What look?”
He sweeps golden hair from his eyes, pushing it behind his ears. His attention focuses back on the plastic wrapper. “The look you had when you said Pepper was dead.”
He watches me in silence and for a moment I think I might tell him, in detail, everything that’s haunting me. But I can’t relive Pepper’s death. I can’t tell Evan that the murdering psychopath Aurora is looking for me.
I drop my forehead into my hands and wriggle my fingers through my hair. “I feel like I’m about to lose my mind.”
“That’s good news.” Evan’s hand touches my arm. Goosebumps prickle my skin. “If you only feel like it, then you haven’t lost your mind yet.”
