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Shade had left that “or” dangling. Cruz almost didn’t want to ask, but with a sigh said, “Or?”
“Or,” Shade said, her lip curling, “we hit them so hard they’re scared to come after us. And we expose them.” She tapped the camera in her hand.
Cruz met Shade’s angry, intense stare. “We’re back to Malik’s system: hero, villain, monster. Let’s face it, we’re all monsters—mutants, Rockborn, CORs, whatever name we come up with—we’re monsters playing hero or playing villain.” Then, as if worried that Shade might be taking the villain option seriously, Cruz added, “By the way, I vote for hero.”
Shade nodded slowly. “The thing is, Malik’s right; it’s a symbiosis. If you asked regular people if they want superpowered creatures running around, they’d say no, kill them all, exterminate them. The only way they come to love us is if we’re the only ones standing between them and something worse.”
Then Cruz, words coming reluctantly, said, “I think . . . I think maybe you’re right. Maybe all the comic books have it wrong with all that secret identity stuff. I mean, if you’re just some freak in a mask, people don’t see you as a human being, and why would any normal support a masked, unknown freak with superpowers?”
“We need an enemy, and what we have is HSTF-66, the government. And we need to give people a reason to support us, not them.”
“So . . . ?”
“So, the Ranch,” Shade said at last. “The place Dekka told us about, up north. We could break in, record everything, and upload it.”
Cruz shook her head. “Why would that work?”
“Because what they’re doing there is illegal and unconstitutional and wrong.” Shade stood up, and her sidelong glance at Cruz was through shark’s eyes. “Better yet, it’s creepy and disturbing, and no one likes creepy.”
And because we would create chaos, and in times of chaos, people look for heroes, Shade thought.
Cruz said nothing, just exhaled a long, slow breath. “It’s all bad, isn’t it? It’s all bad choices. I just want to . . .” She made a frustrated gesture with her hands, like someone wrestling a glitchy Rubik’s Cube. “I just want to roll time back.”
“Back to before you met me.” It wasn’t a question, and Cruz didn’t answer it.
Shade nodded, accepting Cruz’s anger and frustration. “I’m going to find us something fast to drive,” Shade said. “I don’t want to run all that way, and anyway, I need you both with me. We’ll leave in an hour. Tell Malik.”
Shade walked away, shifting as she moved, then blurred and disappeared.
Cruz had her orders. And for the first time they had been just that: orders. Orders Shade had given; orders she knew Cruz would obey because she had no idea what else to do.
Nothing for her to do but help me dig the hole deeper still.
And be buried in it with me.
CHAPTER 9
Take Over the What?
“WELL, WELL, THIS is my lucky day!”
Dillon Poe came from a wealthy family. They had a five-bedroom, five-bath, swimming-pool, hot-tub, four-car-garage house in the Las Vegas gated community called the Promontory. Dillon had never been denied anything (legal) by his parents, and he’d certainly never worried about money.
Still, he had never before had a million dollars, and it was an interesting experience. The million was in stacks of chips formed into unstable towers between himself and the roulette board with its numbers from 0 and 00 to 36.
The croupier waved his hand over the rows of numbers and said, “No more bets.”
Dillon had ten thousand dollars on number 32—his lucky number—despite the fact that there was a thousand-dollar limit on bets. He was at the Venetian, one of the gaudier casinos, lurid and loud and presumably geared to impress aging rustics, three of whom were at the roulette table beside him. The three tourists as well as the croupier and the nearest pit boss had all been “spoken to” by Dillon and saw nothing unusual about the fact that the number 32 came up every time . . . despite not actually having come up even once.
The eye in the sky, the constant video surveillance that makes any casino a sort of semi-benign authoritarian state, should have alerted casino security, but Dillon had looked up at the glass hemisphere that concealed the nearest camera and said, “You up there. You see none of this.” He’d been lucky: seeing him looking up, they had activated the microphone. And then they, too, saw nothing at all wrong with Dillon’s impossible winning streak, or his decidedly reptilian face.
No one did. It wasn’t that they didn’t see what he was; it was that it did not bother them. Men looked at him and did an unconscious nod of acceptance. Women and some men did a bit more. They found him alluring, which struck Dillon as wonderfully funny. He liked snakes himself and had a two-hour-a-week school-mandated “volunteer” gig with Reptile Rescue. He’d actually gone a few times because the place had been featured on TV shows. But the point was, he’d seen very few women who liked reptiles.
With the possible exception of Miley Cyrus fans. Which had the makings of a joke, but needed work.
The croupier turned the wheel, which rotated as smoothly as if it were levitating, and spun the ball. Dillon enjoyed the sound of the little white ball screeing around in its channel before falling, clattering, to bounce and jump merrily, finally settling in on number 4.
“I won,” Dillon said, and the croupier began pushing more chips to him. “You know,” Dillon said, “I’m not supposed to be here. Too young. It’s tough being young in Las Vegas. I’m not allowed on the casino floor. I’m not twenty-one.” He fell into the rhythm of a comedian. “I can walk around the casino floor. I can follow certain passageways through the casino floor. But I cannot touch a card or a pair of dice. See, it’s all about protecting our innocence. After all, in Las Vegas, innocence has a cash value. Out at Shari’s legal brothel, innocence goes for five hundred bucks a pop.” The croupier smiled, but an old woman at the end of the table gave up an actual guffaw.
