Crawling From the Wreckage Read online

  I don’t recognize the woman in, of all things, a hot pink track suit, but she makes her power set clear right away. She gestures, and white-hot fire explodes in my head — a psychic attack. I haven’t had a lot of training in warding off a telepathic invasion, but I know how to keep her from tearing my mind apart long enough to take her down. A blast to the gut drops her.

  Vendetta comes at me from literally every direction. I zap anything that moves, driving them back and clearing a path to Skyblazer. If anyone thinks to grab him as a hostage, I am well and truly screwed, so my priority now is to get him clear.

  A focused gravity pulse drives Steampunk Leviathan to his knees. Critical throws a pulsing red orb my way. It explodes on contact. I feel the shockwave through my force field. A machine gun spray of energy sends Redcap and Libby Tee running for cover. MTX darts around the rooftop almost faster than I can track him, trying to draw my fire. I splatter Viscous across the roof with a wide concussion burst. I help Skyblazer up so we can get the hell out of here.

  And then he tags me with a close-range concussion blast.

  I stagger back, more from shock than from the impact. The chaos around me screeches to a dead stop, and we all gawk at Skyblazer.

  “Dennis?” I squeak.

  “Run,” he says. His weapons systems hum dangerously. “Run, or I can’t be held responsible for what happens.”

  “Dennis, please, this isn’t you. This isn’t you. You aren’t like them. You don’t want to do this.”

  “You had your chance, Carrie. You promised me you’d find the people who killed my friends and you haven’t. Time to try something new.”

  “Something new? This isn’t trying something new, this is giving up! This is —”

  I hesitate. I have one last card to play, but it’s the most desperate of desperation moves. This will either pull him back from the edge or send him right over it — but what other choice do I have?

  “This is what Kyle would do,” I say. “You said you never wanted to become like him, but giving into your anger is exactly what your brother would do.”

  “My brother?” Skyblazer says, boiling over. “My brother would still be alive if you’d had the guts to put Manticore down for good when you had the chance! But you didn’t! You let him go three times — three times!” he roars, advancing on me. “Kyle’s dead because of you!”

  Skyblazer brings his hand up level with my head. I can feel the power building in his gauntlet, causing the air to vibrate. Vendetta closes in around me, waiting to strike.

  “Dennis...”

  “I said run,” he says. “Or you’re going to die.”

  I blast off at Mach one. The shockwave flattens Vendetta and knocks La Rabia out of the sky. I’ll be long gone by the time they recover — but that means Vendetta will be long gone by the time I can round up reinforcements.

  Vendetta and their newest recruit: Dennis Antar, alias Skyblazer.

  ***

  I call Edison as soon as I enter Massachusetts airspace. He tells me to meet him at his home. Minutes later, I touch down on the back deck of his luxury beachside mini-mansion, a secluded, ultra-modern deal that overlooks the Atlantic. Under the circumstances, I’m unable to appreciate either the house or the view.

  Edison ushers me inside. “Tell me what happened,” he says.

  He guides me into a kitchen as large as the entire first floor of my house, and we sit at a small breakfast bar. I tell him everything, sparing none of the painful details. He listens, utterly expressionless the whole time.

  “What do we do?” I say.

  “I don’t know.” He lets out a long hiss of a sigh. “I don’t know. This is — this is a mess. I need time to think.” He musters a smile for me. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure this out. For now, let’s just be thankful you’re okay.”

  Something inside me collapses, and weeks of repressed anger, frustration, grief, and guilt erupt in a hot, ugly explosion.

  “But I’m not,” I sob. “I’m not okay.”

  I slip off my stool and onto the floor, wailing like an infant. Edison kneels down, and I fall weeping into his arms. He holds me as everything I experienced out in space, all the death and destruction I witnessed, every terrible black memory I’ve tried so hard to ignore comes pouring out of me. I cry until my voice is a brittle croak, until I have no more tears left, until I feel completely hollow inside, until I’m spent in body and soul.

  “My God, Carrie,” Edison says. “I had no idea. I’m so sorry. How you managed to endure all of that...”

  “I don’t know if I did,” I rasp. “I feel so broken. I don’t know how to put myself back together.”

  “If you’re looking to me for advice, don’t. I’m not the best example of how to handle life-altering trauma productively,” he says, referring to his dead son Nick without actually uttering his name — which in and of itself stands as testament to how poorly he’s dealt with that particular loss. “This is what Bart’s for. Do you want me to call him?”

  “No. I can’t do this again. Not tonight.”

  Especially not since I have something else deeply unpleasant and painful to do first.

  ***

  Sara doesn’t look up from her book as I enter. She doesn’t acknowledge me at all, not even when I sit on the couch at her feet.

  Where do I begin?

  “I’m sorry, Sara. I’m sorry for everything,” I say. “For betraying your trust. For all the times I snapped at you. For pushing you away.”

  Her eyes flit my way, briefly, then go back to the book she’s pretending to read. What I say next, however, gets her full attention.

  “The last day of the war, I went into deep space with the Vanguard. We launched a full-scale attack on the Black End. It was an all-or-nothing gambit. We were determined to stop them, no matter what the cost. The cost was more than three hundred lives.”

  I take out my phone and pull up a selfie I haven’t looked at since I returned home. The other person in the photo with me has delicate features that could pass as either male or female, and long, pale blond hair. Erisia’s giving the camera a healthy dose of side-eye as if to say, What are you doing now, you weird Earth girl?

  “This is Erisia. Hye was my best friend in the Vanguard.”

  “Hye?” Sara asks.

  “Gender-neutral pronoun,” I explain. “Erisia saved my — Erisia sacrificed hyerself to save my life. The only reason I made it back is because of hyer.” My throat closes up. My eyes burn, but no tears come. I’m cried out for the rest of the decade.

  I stand up and notice Mom in the entryway between the living room and the dining room. She heard everything; there’s nothing but pity in her eyes.

  “What happened to me out there doesn’t excuse what I said to you — either of you,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  With nothing else to offer — nothing that could begin to repair the catastrophic damage I’ve done to my family, who’ve done nothing but try their damnedest to break through the wall I threw up because I was too gutless and weak to deal with my crap — I trudge upstairs.

  A few minutes later, Sara knocks on my door. She peeks in and, when I don’t send her away, slips into my room. She lies next to me on the bed.

  “Are you in trouble?” I ask.

  “Christina didn’t punish me, if that’s what you mean, but I lost pretty much all her trust. That hurts.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know. And I’m still kind of mad at you. But you weren’t entirely wrong,” Sara admits. “Christina asked me to respect one rule when it came to Meg and me, you know, being together, and I broke it — and on top of that I asked you to help me cover it up. That was a lousy position to put you in.”

  She doesn’t go so far as to apologize, but that’s okay. I haven’t earned it.

  “After you left and Christina calmed down, we talked a little. I think she feels bad too, about...um.”

  “Her active social life?” I suggest.

  “Yeah. Well, not s
o much about having one, but about ignoring how you feel about it. You should probably brace yourself for a profoundly uncomfortable conversation with her about that.”

  “I’m starting to think the rest of my life is going to be nothing but uncomfortable conversations,” I say, and I give Sara a condensed version of what I told Edison about the Black End War. “I’m going to tell Bart everything next time I see him. No more holding back. I want to get through this. I want to get better.”

  Sara takes my hand. “That’s all I want too, and I’ll be with you every step of the way, if you’ll let me.”

  “I’ll let you.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  She smiles. “We will get through this. We just have to focus on getting you well again. One problem at a time, right?”

  “Easier said than done,” I say. “I didn’t tell you what else happened tonight.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The next morning, I call the Squad together for a private meeting at the Protectorate’s Main Street office, marking only the third time since my return we’ve all been in the same room together. That’s depressing — but nowadays, what isn’t?

  First order of business is to bring Matt, Stuart, and Missy up to speed on everything, and I do mean everything. I’m not sure what upsets Matt more: learning that my time in outer space was not a lighthearted Star Wars-esque romp of an adventure; or hearing that Dennis has switched sides.

  “I don’t believe it,” Stuart says.

  “Dennis attacked me,” I say. “He threatened to kill me.”

  “And it looks like he’s gone into hiding with the rest of Vendetta,” Sara says from her desk. “I pulled up the Manchester PD activity logs for the past twenty-four hours, and the Antars filed a missing person’s report on him a little after midnight.”

  Stuart shakes his head. “No. I don’t buy the swerve.”

  “Swerve?” Missy says.

  “It’s a pro wrestling term for when, like, a babyface turns heel out of the blue — usually for no reason that makes any kind of sense, but it’s pro wrestling, so who cares?”

  “What doesn’t make sense?” Matt fumes. “He lost his brother to Manticore and his friends to Massacre —”

  “Is that their name now?”

  “Unless you want to keep calling them ‘those guys who killed the Wardens.’ Anyway, point is, Dennis lost people he cared about to super-villains who never got their comeuppance, Vendetta comes along and promises to do the job we couldn’t —”

  “Matt,” I begin, ready to dress him down.

  “That’s not a criticism, Carrie, but you have to admit, we’ve been spinning our wheels for a while now. I get why Dennis jumped ship. I don’t approve, obviously, but I understand why he threw in with them.”

  “But Dennis is a good guy,” Stuart insists.

  Matt unceremoniously shoots that argument out of the air. “So was everyone in Vendetta until they decided not to be anymore.”

  “I’m with Stuart,” Sara says. “Dennis is a good person. I’m not giving up on him.”

  “Yeah, good luck with that,” I mutter.

  “Carrie, come on. You know Dennis better than any of us.”

  “I thought I did,” I say to no one in particular.

  “Maybe none of us knew him as well as we thought,” Matt says. “Doesn’t matter. He’s with Vendetta now so we have to treat him accordingly. The best we can hope for is to stop him before he crosses a line he can’t uncross.”

  “Which means finding Vendetta, but that’s easier said than done,” Sara says.

  “Did you try tracking his comm?”

  “First thing I did when I got in this morning. He’s off the grid.”

  “Which shouldn’t come as a surprise,” I say. “If he was able to identify and remove the tracking chip from the Skyblazer suit, taking his comm offline would be cake.”

  “Yeah,” Matt says, thinking.

  “Tell me you have an idea. We need to stop Vendetta before they go after their next target.”

  “Not that we know who that is,” Missy notes.

  “They’re going to go after Massacre,” Matt says.

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s what they promised Dennis,” I say, catching on. “Now they have to make good on that promise or risk losing his loyalty.”

  “Exactly,” Matt says. “Fortunately, Vendetta doesn’t know where Massacre is any more than we do, so at least we’re on an even playing field.”

  “No; we have the advantage.” Matt looks a question at me. “If we go public with the intel we have, we turn them into wanted fugitives, which would limit their ability to move around freely.”

  “And split their focus between hunting Massacre and staying out of our crosshairs,” Matt says, smiling. “Good call.”

  Matt and Sara take a few minutes to update the Protectorate’s file on Vendetta, adding to the roster Faultline Jr., alias Charlie Johnstone, and the other two previously unknown quantities I encountered. Matt identifies Tracksuit Barbie as a psionic named Olive Johnstone, alias Mentallica, alias Faultine’s sister; and the tank as Bret Kovalic, alias the Dallas-based Maxxar — and once he pins down Maxxar’s identity, it’s easy to connect him to the King of Pain’s victims list. Kovalic was friends with a brawler who went by the code name Texas Roundhouse, who ate a shotgun a few weeks after crossing paths with the King of Pain. No surprise, they’re both on Matt’s list of MPIs.

  While Sara works the information up into a press release, Matt calls Edison so he can sign off on our plan. We figure it’s a done deal, but Edison is not on board.

  “We can’t go public with that information,” he says over speakerphone.

  “Why not?” I demand.

  “Because they’re super-heroes.”

  “That’s debatable.”

  “And it would be a debate of semantics. They’re part of the community and that’s enough to present a problem. The reason super-heroes get to operate as freely as we do is because we have the public’s trust, and we keep that trust by policing our own. If the public were to find out that a group of super-heroes went on a murder spree, and that we failed to put a stop to it, we risk compromising that trust.”

  “Seriously?” Matt says. “We risk losing the public’s trust because we haven’t taken Vendetta down, so the best way to maintain that trust is to not take them down?”

  “Dude, that’s stupid,” Stuart says.

  “I didn’t say we won’t stop them,” Edison says, “but we have to do it quietly.”

  “You mean you want us to cover up the truth?” I say. “How does that help anything?”

  “Carrie, you need to look at the big picture.”

  “Don’t give me that big picture crap, Edison! Our priority shouldn’t be preserving our public image; it should be stopping a gang of killers, saving lives, and pulling Dennis out before it’s too late!”

  “I’m sorry, but the answer is no.”

  “Then I’ll release the information myself.”

  Edison is a remarkably talented man. The line goes completely silent, and yet it feels like he’s screaming bloody murder at me.

  “You will do no such thing,” he says, and by God, that’s an order.

  “Edison, these people have literally gotten away with murder for months because they’ve been flying so low under the radar even we didn’t pick up on it. Secrecy is their most valuable weapon. If we take that away, we cripple them. They wouldn’t be able to show their faces without risking exposure, which is the one thing they do not want. Yeah, maybe we’ll have to deal with a PR headache for a while, but what’s the lesser evil here?”

  “I am not debating this with you, Carrie, I made my decision — and if you were thinking straight, you would —”

  “If Carrie’s not thinking straight, then neither am I,” Sara says. “I’m with her. We need to go public with this.”

  “Yeah we do,” Missy says.

  “Hells yeah,�
�� Stuart says.

  “Matt?” Edison says.

  Matt doesn’t even have to think about his answer. “Edison, I’d trust Carrie on her worst day more than I’d trust anyone else on their best. If she thinks we need to take this public, I’m with her, all the way.”

  With an angry snort of a sigh, Edison says, “Let me think about it,” and then hangs up.

  “He’s not going to go for it, is he?” Missy says.

  “He might,” Matt says, totally unconvinced.

  “And if he doesn’t?” Sara asks.

  “We do it anyway.”

  “No. I’ll do it,” I say.

  “We’ll do it.”

  “If we defy Edison’s orders, he’ll go ballistic. Let me take the heat for it. You can say you tried to stop me.”

  “Uh-uh. No way,” Sara says. “We’re not throwing you under the bus like that.”

  “Technically, I’d be throwing myself under the bus.”

  “Stop arguing, Hauser,” Matt says, all leader-like. “Whatever we do, we do it together.”

  Everyone murmurs in agreement. I give my friends a drawn smile. “I missed this so much,” I say. “Us, I mean.”

  “We haven’t really had much together time, have we?”

  “We haven’t for a while,” Sara says. “We all got so busy over the summer with our jobs and our other friends.”

  “Relationships,” Stuart adds.

  “Getting ready to go back to school,” Missy says.

  “Getting ready to apply to colleges,” Sara says.

  “Family stuff,” Stuart says.

  “Well, crap,” Matt huffs. “Guys? I think we’re turning into adults.”

  In almost perfect unison, we throw back our heads and wail, “NOOOOOOOO!” A real hivemind moment, that.

  “We’re too young to be old!” Missy says.

  “This is unacceptable,” Sara says. “We need to put a stop to this, like, yesterday.”