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I blurt out the first thing I can think of. “So what happens with all the power that’s yanked out?”
The steady hum of the machine grows louder. Paul taps the metal frame. “It’s incinerated instantly.”
“Really?” I choke out. My stomach flip flops. “Nova I think we were wrong.” I can barely hear myself talk over the thumping of my own heart. “I don’t think the Strike was stolen from here.”
She doesn’t answer. Paul cocks an eyebrow. “What the hell is Strike?”
My hands shake. “Does anyone else run this machine since they moved it?”
Paul’s confused expression turns into a smug smile. “Just me. Special clearance and everything.”
“Oh god,” I mutter. I glance around the room, looking for something, anything I may have overlooked that could prove that my theory wasn’t wrong after all. My entire Hero career has been a string of failures and leads that go cold. As I look around the empty room with its extreme lack of villains or clues or bottles of power lying around, I know that I am standing right in the middle of yet another dead end.
Only now, I haven’t just failed a mission.
I’ve failed my sister.
“Nova, now!”
My sister rolls off the depowering machine’s conveyor belt, tucking into a ball. Exactly how I pictured her moving when I yelled her name.
“Hey!” Paul’s face turns white and it isn’t from the glow of the MOD screen.
Juice streams through my veins. I feel it take over my power as I lunge across the room, jumping over Nova one second before Paul gets to her. My bad hand presses her back to hold her out of his way. I whirl my good hand across us, aiming my palm at his chest as he scales the room. “Open the doors,” I say, nodding toward the steel doors.
All the fear falls right off his face. “Why don’t you open it yourself since you seem to have things all figured out.”
This juice really is catered to my body. All I have to do is think about releasing a bolt of energy from my palm and it happens--cascading through the air and slamming into Paul’s smug little face. His body hurls backward. He’s smart enough to wrap his hands around the back of his head just seconds before he crashes into the jagged wall. Many of his fingers break, but they protected his head which is good. Because I still need that.
“What’s going on here?” He spits blood. I lower him to the floor with the power of the juice. He flexes his fingers, wincing when they begin to heal.
“Open the doors or I’ll cut off your hand and open it myself.” He has to know that threat is useless because security measures won’t let you open doors with the fingerprints of dead tissue. But it works. Maybe he thinks I don’t know it. Because he scrambles to his feet, still dazed from getting juiced and unlocks the MOD screen.
As the doors clamber open, I help Nova stand up and keep my palm aimed on Paul. His expression is a mixture of defeat and disgust. “You’ll never get out,” he says. “There’s too many locks.”
I step through the door and back into the hallway. “You’re welcome to come with me.”
Paul’s eyebrows draw together in a huff. He scans the room, and then checks his hands again. With a roll of his eyes, and probably the realization that walking with us out of this room is his only option, lest he be stuck with the depowering machine for hours, he follows. “You’re going to be punished severely for this,” he says. “I’ll probably see both of you right back here tomorrow.”
“You won’t,” I say at the same time Nova mutters, “Probably.”
I glare at her as we walk through the jagged rocky hallway. She shrugs, not meeting my eyes and continues examining the hook still stabbed in her abdomen. “Oh wow, I forgot about that,” I say, stopping her. My eyes practically burst out of my own head. Hooks paralyze most Supers. The strong ones can still move a little bit and maybe even talk, but Nova is walking.
She gives me an incredulous look. “Seriously? You couldn’t feel all the pain I’ve been in for the last ten minutes?”
I guess I did feel her pain--I can feel it now. But I was too preoccupied with keeping her from pain a thousand times worse in that machine to take notice to it. “Wait...you know I can feel your emotions?”
Paul studies us in this casual way that fools no one. Nova nods. “Duh. I can feel your emotions too. It’s obviously a twin thing. I think that’s why our power is so strong when we’re near each other.” She tugs at the hook, wiggling it back and forth which slices into her skin with each wiggle, leaving a gash that heals a few seconds later. Frustrated with the hook, she looks at me. “That’s how I knew this was a set up. I could feel it. Although I could have done without actually being forced on that machine...”
I smile. “So you knew I wasn’t betraying you just now?”
Her mouth falls open. “You meant you weren’t purposely trying to communicate with your emotions so I’d know what was up?”
I bite my lip. “I mean...not really. I was just hoping I’d be able to explain once it was over.”
She punches me in the arm. “Oh my god! You really are the evil twin!”
I laugh as relief floods into me. This is going better than I had thought it would. I couldn’t tell her that I was pretending to turn her in back at home because I feared that she wouldn’t act believably if she went into the dungeon willingly and not as if I was forcing her. I guess her acting skills are better than I’d given her credit for.
