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Okay. If anyone is going to throw Paul around, it’ll be me. Not some mysterious biker chick who appeared out of thin air. “Cover me,” I tell Nova. She nods. We run to save Paul but he passes out, his body going limp just moments before we get there. A pile of rocks and dust are on the floor just past the ridged bump in the wall. The woman broke in here from another hallway.
“I am Hero Maci Might,” I hiss. The woman is much older than she looked from farther away. She’s probably close to three hundred which would make her look like a sixty-year-old human. At my introduction, she drops Paul, turning quickly on her heel to watch me.
“Maci Might?” She says, cocking her head to the side just like Chewy does when he doesn’t understand you. Only she understands. Her eyes narrow, forming deep crow’s feet wrinkles. “And this must be...Nova.”
Nova folds her arms across her chest, making her completely vulnerable to an attack. But the stance only makes her look like more of an immovable force. Like she’s not afraid of this woman. “You need to crawl back into whatever hole you came out of,” Nova says, nodding to the crumbled rocks in the side of the wall that opens into what looks like a small cave. This woman must have been digging around underground and happened into this hallway at the right time. “You’re on enemy ground.”
She laughs. “You are too cute! I heard you went on a little rampage back at the King City headquarters. Killed a few of your allies, hmm?” Her eyebrows draw together. “That’s not a very nice way to honor Aurora’s memory.”
If I knew how to operate the depowering machine, I’d throw this lady onto it in a heartbeat. She’s obviously hanging out with the villains. Paul is still unconscious. I lift my left wrist and swipe my BEEPR screen. “I’d shut up if I were you,” I tell her. “Although you’ve already incriminated yourself, so.” My lips slide to the side of my face. “It’ll be fun arresting you.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” the woman says. I look up, preparing to hit her with a retriever hook if she plans on running back through the hole which brought her here. She does move. But not toward the hole. She grabs my wrist with her left hand. I twist my hand up onto her arm, shoving down on her elbow with my right hand. The hyperextension of her elbow drops her to the ground. But it’s too late. The hiss-pop of broken electronics makes me jerk away. Whatever is inside her rubbery glove just fried my BEEPR.
“You broke my elbow!” She cries, lifting her arm up as she watches it dangle the wrong way. She’ll have to pull her arm back into place before the bones begin to heal.
“You broke my BEEPR!” I yell. I turn around to Nova, whose horrified expression is a mirror of my own. We’re stuck underground with secured doors we can’t open, with a villain, and no way to call for help. Nova rushes to Paul, grabbing for his wrist MOD.
“It’s broken, too,” she says.
“Let’s take her down,” I say. I do not whisper. I want this villain to know we aren’t scared of her and we’re not deterred. “Then we’ll figure out what to do from there.” I nod toward the next barricaded wall. “If we input the wrong password enough times, it should call security on us. Someone will come.”
“It’ll be too late by then,” the woman says. She puts a cell phone to her ear. “I found the machine. I also found the Might twins.” Her eyes light up at whatever the person on the other side of the phone says. I nod to Nova and she slowly walks toward the woman, making the perfect distraction. My fingers grip the retriever hooks in my sleeve, sliding them out soundlessly. “I’ll bring them,” the woman says into the phone. “It does appear that the rumors are true. The little brat has sided with the Heroes. I wonder what they promised her.”
I flick the first hook toward her, quickly followed by the second. My satisfied smile comes too soon, because instead of dropping to the ground in agonizing pain, the woman just rolls her eyes as the hooks meet their target--her jacket--and bounce right off, landing on the ground.
Something tells me that’s not just a leather jacket.
“We could kill them,” she says into her phone. Nova looks at me, waiting for a signal to attack. But I hold back. Her hook-proof outfit and electronic-frying glove makes me wary to touch her. We don’t know what she’s capable of. The woman laughs at whatever the person says into her phone. Her eyes narrow on mine. “You’re right, Felix. We shouldn’t kill them. We need all the power we can get.”
I have many regrets in life. My list of regrets is so long that if I were to summarize them, I’d have to break it down into days and hours and minutes. For example, I have three regrets in the past hour alone.
One: I should have told someone where I was going when I fake turned in Nova.
Two: I should have had a backup plan. Heroes always have a backup plan.
Three: Those mind communication rings Evan invented? It would have been a great idea to bring them with me today.
The woman’s foot kicks at my feet. “Go.” She points toward the hole in the wall. I don’t have much of a choice but to duck under the broken limestone opening and step into the crudely excavated room that awaits on the other side. Nova follows shortly after. I’ll need to stay positive if I’m going to get us out of this. We now know that the woman is working with Felix and presumably that she’s bringing us to him. This could still end up as a solved Hero mission. All I need to do is steal her phone, make a call, and save the day.
I grab Nova’s arm as we walk through the narrow tunnel heading in the opposite direction of the depowering machine, the dungeon, and all the corridors that lead to Central. The light quickly diminishes into a faint glow the farther we get from the hole. This tunnel is definitely off the map, unknown and dangerous. I wonder how long villains have been working underground, so close to Central but still undetected.
Nova’s power closes into her body and I do the same with mine. If we appear weak and scared, we’ll have an adv
antage. Minutes turn into an hour. We’re still walking slowly down a darkened path, Nova and I sticking close together while the footsteps behind us are an ever present reminder that although we’re being followed, we’re actually being led right into an unknown danger.
The path gets colder, narrower and darker. I squeeze Nova’s arm with one hand and hold the other out to the side, feeling along the wall so I can have some sense of direction. “I don’t see anything,” Nova says.
“Keep going,” the woman barks.
We shuffle along the darkened path for another ten minutes. We’re descending and the floor is slippery. Nova comes to an abrupt halt. “I think I’m at a door.” I feel it too--smooth cold metal. A light turns on and I jump. The old woman is an inch away from my face. She points the light on her phone past us, lighting up a metal hatch that’s barely taller than Nova and me. There is no lock on this door, just a simple handle. “Go inside.”
Nova looks at me. I nod. She pushes the handle as fear lines her face. We step into another dimly lit room. But this one doesn’t compare to the depowering room. The depowering room made an uneasy feeling settle in my stomach.
This room makes me vomit.
The smells, the sounds, the sights. Everything about this room of horrors turns my stomach inside out on the rocky floor. Nova pats my back as I dry heave, my head in between my arms as I hold on to the wall for support. Laughter echoes off the walls. A man’s voice. When I recover enough to stand up straight, I look back again, this time mentally preparing myself for what I’ll find.
It’s like a mad scientist’s torture chamber. The room is no bigger than my living room at home but it’s jam packed with machinery. It hums and clinks and grinds, releasing the scent of burned oil and gas. A grey haze rises to the top of the room but everything is hazy and blurred. Bare light bulbs glow in random places. One hangs right above my head.
