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Maybe that’s why that poem that I memorized in, like, fifth grade suddenly came back to me. Because it’s not just my own candle that will not last the night.
CHAPTER 34
Speed, Nothing but Speed
IT WAS LUCK. Luck and Sam’s instincts.
“I don’t like that he hasn’t come after us,” Sam said, speaking privately to Dekka. They were in the backyard of their temporary headquarters. Sam had not wanted to say anything challenging in front of the others, anything that might shift focus to himself. This was Dekka’s command, not his, and he was happy to have it stay that way.
But there was a nagging voice in the back of his head, and even though he was in morph, it was not the Watchers this time.
“What are you thinking?” Dekka asked.
Sam shrugged. “From all you say, this Markovic character is smart and experienced. So he’s not like Knightmare or even the Charmer. He’s not just some thug; he’s a smart thug.”
Dekka nodded. “You think he’s up to something?”
Sam nodded. “Smart guys think. He’s got to know that the government will be sending in tanks at the least, and possibly something much worse for him. He won’t just wait around. So, I ask myself: WWCD?”
“WWCD?”
“What would Caine do? He was a smart thug, too. He wouldn’t have waited for me to come after him again. He’d attack in some new direction, somewhere I wasn’t looking.”
“It’s been bugging me too,” Dekka admitted. “No pun intended. He laid a trap for us, but it ended in a draw. So what’s he doing? Trying to rerun the earlier game, hoping to win this time? Shade says he hasn’t added recruits. It’s him and that fish girl and Mirror and a few hangers-on.”
“Maybe have Shade take another look? Once more before we go in and set off explosions?”
Dekka led the way back inside the house. Shade was talking to Cruz about something in clipped, high-speed, barely comprehensible speech.
“Shade. How would you feel about taking another run through Grand Central?”
“Bzzt,” Shade replied, and was gone. A door slammed.
“Good timing,” Cruz snarked. “We were talking about emotional things earlier, and you know Shade.”
Shade, for her part, was not happy hearing about Cruz’s encounter with Armo. Not because she wasn’t happy for Cruz, but because she still did not think it would work out in the end, and she couldn’t bear to see Cruz have her heart broken on top of everything else.
She’d suggested to Cruz that maybe this was not the time to consider romantic entanglements.
To which Cruz had replied, “Like you and Malik?”
That had just forced Shade to start really thinking about what exactly she was doing with Malik. Was it pity, was that why she had gone to him? That didn’t feel quite right. No, if she was honest with herself—and she tried to be—she had needed him. She had felt afraid and isolated, and maybe that’s what it took to get her to admit she needed someone.
Now she was relieved to be out the door and racing down the avenues toward Grand Central. The last time she’d passed through she’d seen a pair of Vector’s human minions, looking haunted and terrified, perhaps afraid of Vector, or just as likely, nowhere near getting over the shattering experience of Malik’s blast. The two of them were trying to string wire across the doorways, driving nails into marble with difficulty. And all of it pointless—with her momentum and chitin covering, she could blow right through wires.
It was a run of only a few seconds, so Shade took a few extra seconds to play a game of Mach-1 parkour, leaping from car roof to car roof, bouncing off walls, swinging around light poles, and her favorite new pastime: going around and around in revolving doorways until the bearings smoked and the glass started to crack.
I’m entitled to have a little fun, aren’t I?
At the station, she found the wires had not been successfully strung, and she had no difficulty blowing in past . . . past no one. Vector had posted no guards.
She ran at half speed, which was still twice as fast as a race car, around the main concourse, running up walls and over ticket booths. Grand Central was empty. No Vector. No flying-fish girl. No Mirror in or out of morph.
Suspecting a trick, she blew down through the dining level, raced through kitchens, ran through the subway station; in all, she spent an interminable five minutes carefully searching the place at hyperspeed.
Of course, it’s easy to hide bugs. Just because you don’t see them . . .
She ran back to the main concourse and saw that there was only one living thing left behind. She dashed back to the dining level, retrieved a twelve-inch chef’s knife to cut through duct tape, returned, and leaped the dozen feet to land atop the information booth.
