Scarred

BURN IT ALL

Dizziness waltzed in my skull, the giddy specter of half-forgotten fever. Razorfire's catchphrase. What would he think of me now? I'd screwed up the simplest job, been taken unawares by a pair of joy-riding boy- band fans. I cringed. Jeez, how humiliating…

Mentally, I smacked myself upside the head. Verity, the only thing he'd care about is that you attacked one of his crew. He's your enemy. He will peel your skin off. Forget him.

Forget him.

Right.

Razorfire's gorgeous scent dizzies me, mint and fire and dark delight, and I can't help but inhale. Swallow, gulp for more, my body yearning to drink him in. His flame licks my bruised cheek, both threat and promise. I flush, mortified. I don't deserve this. I don't deserve him…

Fiercely, I blinked, and the memory splintered and whirled away, leaving only fresh-sliced pain in my temples. Fuck it. The flashbacks of my evil ex-lover—yeah, long and gruesome story—were growing less frequent, easier to banish. But the guilty twist in my guts didn't ease.

Wanna know a secret? It never does. Not for one goddamn second.

Sure, Razorfire tricked me, playing twisted psychological games until my mind snapped. That didn't excuse how I'd acted, or the suffering my twisted infatuation had caused. Adonis had tried to have me treated and it badly backfired. My father and sister were dead, my family in hiding. I had a lot to make up for.

I glanced about for Sentinels, those sneaky augment-detecting gadgets that were bolted to every lamp post in the city these days, or so it seemed. Razorfire's plan since he'd been elected mayor had been inscrutable, to say the least.

In his public persona, he was all keep the streets safe and prosecute to the full extent of the law and no tolerance for violent criminals. Yet every once in a while, he'd climb into his crimson silk archvillain suit and mask, and burn some neighborhood to a smoking ruin. Post threatening videos on the internet. Ratchet the tension higher, let the police department and the district attorney's office take the heat (heh) and generally stir up a furious hornet's nest of violence and fear.

Look, there was a Sentinel: a smug silvery cylinder mounted ten feet up on a building's corner, silently blinking its incriminating red light at me. I flipped it the bird. Detect this, you metal moron.

Across the sidewalk, an office worker in a slim-cut suit did a double-take, and made a move inside his jacket. Sigh. Seriously: a gun? Are they arming metrosexuals now? Stop, or I'll order decaf!

I didn't pause. I just pointed into his face as I walked by, and gave him my best Dirty Harry impression. "You really wanna test me, punk?"

He scuttled backwards, dropping his computer case, hands raised in peace. Heh. Must have my angry face on today.

In my pocket, my phone's message tone chimed. Whatever. Probably Adonis wondering where the hell I was. Or Glimmer, texting me a dose of the guilts because he imagined I was drinking myself horny in some seedy Castro Street bar, and of course he'd never do anything so grotesquely banal and ordinary as get drunk and laid, because he was Glimmer and he was too damn perfect and jeez, when did I turn into such a jealous little worm?

I sighed, rubbing the dented scar on my cheekbone. A headache swelled like a tumor deep in my skull, threatening murder. Hell, I wanted a drink and a cigarette, even though I'd never been much of a drinker and I didn't like the smell of tobacco smoke. What I needed was food and sleep. I should go home, as far as “home” went these days, now that FortuneCorp were in hiding and Glimmer's secret techno-lair was a crispy barbecue and Sentinels mined half the city's streets into a no-hero zone.

But I needed to salvage something from tonight. Prove I hadn't simply screwed up, hadn't let those villains escape out of carelessness, that my power was reliable and strong. Or hell, I might as well rock on down to Castro Street right now and order a triple brainfuck with a twist of sordid.

Belligerent, I squared my shoulders. I didn't give a moldy fart for Sentinels or cops or vigilante office boys. What were they gonna do, shoot me? I'd survived that before. Anyway, my altercation with Sparkly and the twin tweens had set off every alarm in that building. The entire world already knew I was here.

So I strolled across the courtyard to the museum's main entrance, and kicked the door in.

Crash! Boot mixed with mindmuscle, unstoppable. The revolving door buckled like a crushed beer can. I cracked my neck, satisfied. Damn. Someone fetch me that cigarette.

I hurled the wreckage aside and strode into the tiled lobby, where a weird marble statue resembling a gigantic pink horse turd squatted on a pillar.

A black-uniformed security guard challenged me. I flung up one hand and hurled him against the wall, pinning him under the chin with an invisible grip. His handgun clattered to the tiles. The mega-turd teetered and crashed to the floor, a clatter of broken marble. Oops. Performance art.

"Where's the CCTV, idiot?" Blood pounded in my temples, nearly drowning out the sound of my voice. I was in the clear, unmasked. I didn't care. Let the world look at my scars. Let them see me as I truly am.

Glimmer once told me his mask was his true face. That it wasn't a disguise, but a confession. For me, it's the other way around. My mask is unsullied, fit for public consumption. The face underneath… on my bad days? Not so much. And the physical scars—my souvenir of that hellhole of an asylum, courtesy of my well-meaning asshole of a brother—are the pretty part.

The security guy wasn't dumb enough to play the hero. He jerked his head towards a locked door, his throat bobbing as he tried to swallow.

I let him fall undamaged and stepped over him as he gurgled for breath. Heh. Dumb enough to play the hero. There's a lesson we could all learn.

I smashed the security office door open. Old-school video screens, surveillance-camera footage of darkened museum rooms and corridors. In the room where I'd fought the tweens, a battalion of guards and cops and rented heavies were arresting Sparkly and reading him what was left of his rights. From the black-and-bloodied look of his face, they'd left out the “we can't beat the snot out of you while you're restrained” part.

I leveled my pistol at the only guard inside the CCTV room. Chesty young blond, biceps like turnips stuffed up his shirtsleeves. His sidearm lay on the bench. Bad choice, Turnip Man.

His ice-chip eyes widened, and one hand strayed to the can of pepper spray at his belt.

I thumbed the safety off, pulling three pounds on a four-pound trigger. My hands were shaking as badly as my voice. I was weary, hungry, pissed off. "Just try me, moron. See what happened to that window? Imagine what I can do to your skull. We understand each other?"

Turnip Man nodded, otherwise perfectly still, fingers splayed to show he'd surrendered. They weren't paying him enough to die. Sweat trickled down his neatly shaven cheek, and in that moment I hated him utterly.

For being young, ordinary, carefree. For having a regular job, where you went home after work, dumb and happy with your sixteen twenty-five an hour in your pocket, and thought about something else.

For living such a goddamn simple life.

"Good. Then you know what I want." I jerked my bruised chin towards the bank of screens and digital recording equipment. "So get on with it."

Forty seconds later, I was gone.

~ 3 ~

By the time I reached the new FortuneCorp HQ, I was wet, sore and angry, and I reeked of shit.

Sentinels, see. The old ones you could fool with augmentium, the alloy that's resistant to augmented powers. Razorfire strutted around in public for weeks wearing a wristwatch forged from the stuff and no one was the wiser. These improved models? Nuh-uh. At least, not for us. His Archvillain-ness is still getting away with it. Somehow. Fuck him.

Hmm. Right. Moving on from that thought…

Since that night a few months ago, when we lost out to Razorfire big time—he sabotaged his own superweapon, became the city's hero, got himself elected mayor and declared us Fortunes public enemies; if that isn't irony, can me up and call me a sardine—we don't want him knowing where we're holing up. We need to move about out of sight, and a lot of the time that means underground. Sapphire City's sewers date from before the fire at the turn of last century, and they smell like it: greasy brick tunnels, calf-deep in foul flushwater, floating with fat globules and dead rats and discarded baby wipes, and crusted with decades of slimy dripping God-knows-what.

I carried my coat rolled up under one arm, and let my boots take the brunt of it, but by the time I levered up the rusted grate and climbed blinking like a mole into the deserted parking lot by the waterworks, it was two in the morning, I stank like a mediaeval train toilet and my mood didn't smell much better.

Times like this, I wished I could fly. Or turn invisible. Or make decent coffee. Or do anything, pretty much, that was useful to anyone anymore.

I slipped unseen into the forest surrounding the parking lot. Fog curled among the tall eucalypts, luminous in the moonlight, wreathing smelly old me with the leaves' disinfectant scent. The city noise faded to a cool murmur. I squeezed stinking water from my trouser cuffs and strode up the hill into the dark. Leaves and soil crunched under my boots. Somewhere a wildcat yowled. A few charred tree trunks lay in my path, black shapes darker than the shadows, and I hopped wearily over them.

At the top of the hill, no lights shone. But I knew the path, and my tongue tingled with the candy-sweet flavor of augment. I picked my way through stumps and fallen branches towards our hideout: the derelict asylum.

I'd spent months trapped in here at Adonis's behest, while doctors tried to “cure” me of my little misdirected affection problem. Naturally, I'd escaped and set the place on fire. The concrete-block building was now partly a blackened ruin, but at one end, roof and walls still stood, two stories high.

Had I freaked out when we first came here? Fuck, yes. I'd stalked around with a loaded fistful of power, unleashing on ghosts, jumping at every noise. I was okay with it now. It no longer looked much like the place where I'd been tortured… but sometimes, in the night, I still woke alone in my cold ex-cell to the phantom smells of stewed apple and puke and singed hair, the bright buzz of electroshock, unseen screams grating in my ears.

And Glimmer wondered why I frequented late bars.

I eased the unlocked basement door open, quiet as I could. Inside, a row of caged light bulbs hung, just one in the middle switched on. The old food hall: a stainless-steel serving hatch, steel tables bolted to the green linoleum floor, barred gates to keep the crazies in. No alarm on the door. Glimmer hadn't gotten around to installing one yet. Too busy hacking our cell phones so they couldn't be tracked (good job) and repairing his surveillance kit (from what was left of it, which was pretty much zilch) and rebuilding the data-mining algorithms he'd lost when Razorfire torched his lair.

But my teenage cousin Ebenezer was on watch. Slouched in a plastic chair, playing a game on his tablet. Lank brown hair in need of a wash, dusty trench coat over safety-pinned jeans. His lame left leg was stretched out, still a mite crooked despite endless iterations of surgery and traction, back when the Fortune family were still respectable and Uncle Mike's money could buy that sort of thing. I think Eb secretly likes it that he limps. All part of the package.

Some defects you just can't fix.

Eb blinked at me, short-sighted. One watery blue eye, one brown. "Well, you look like you just crawled from a sack of hungry rat corpses."

"Thanks, man. No, really."

"Always here to help." A rare grin, inept, like he didn't care to practice it much. On his lopsided face, it had a kind of evil leprechaun charm.

Eb was the weirdest sibling from a branch of the Fortune family that wasn't exactly noted for being normal, and it wasn't just the limp or the oddball eyes. When he unleashed—which he did more often than was strictly necessary or appropriate—people pissed themselves and cowered into gibbering blobs of oh-god-let-me-die.

He'd taken the secret name Bloodshock from a serial-killer character he played on some screwed-up online RPG, and it stuck. He might look like an escapee from the aftermath of the teenage nerd apocalypse, but you do not want to mess with cousin Eb.

I believe that allegiance is nurture, not nature. Good versus evil is a choice we all make. But if anyone on our side was born to be a villain, it's this guy.

"You'll go blind looking at that stuff." I ruffled his hair, dodging a punch. What with my Miss Universe face and bubbly personality—and growing up with Adonis and Chance for brothers—I knew how it felt to be the unpopular one. I'd made an effort with Eb ever since I'd forced us all into this charming little camping vacation, and I sort of like the guy. Even if he sometimes makes me want to brandish a crucifix in his direction. "Get a girlfriend. Oh, wait. That'd involve talking to a real girl."

"This isn't interactive porn," Eb insisted. "I'm honing my reflexes."

"Right. When the big-breasted virgin schoolgirl zombies attack, you'll be the first guy I call. Any dinner left?" On cue, my stomach grumbled. My dead appetite had reanimated, at least in part, since my rat-happy sewer jaunt, and I hadn't consumed anything except high-caffeine cola and a candy bar since this morning.

Yesterday morning, that is. Jeez, what am I, twelve? No wonder I'm such a wreck.

Eb nodded towards the darkened kitchen's serving hatch. "Peggy made lasagna."

I rolled my eyes. Of course she did. Adonis's new lady friend was perky, red-headed, domesticated. "Did she bake cupcakes, too? Wearing a frilly apron?"

"Mee-yeow." Eb mimed a cat scratch. "You'd eat it if a certain person made it."

"Did I say I wouldn't eat it?" But I dragged the tray towards me a little too hard, spilling tomato sauce on the counter. Glimmer baked the best lasagna on the planet, no exceptions. Glimmer did most things better than everyone else. Especially me.

To be fair, Peggy did everything she could to help out, despite not really being one of us, and her cooking sure tasted nice. Everything about Peg was nice. Probably what Adonis said after he fucked her. That's nice, dear.

Okay, now I really had no appetite. I pushed the tray away. "Maybe later."

"Whatevs." Eb didn't look up.

I slunk upstairs to the second floor, where our bedrooms—read rusty ex-torture cells, and yay for that—were. On the landing, Uncle Mike's latest stray cat adoptee hissed at me with a suspicious yellow glare. Poor little bugger looked hungry. "Whatevs," I mimicked as I went by. "You wound me with your disdain, kitty. Lasagna's on the table. My treat."

The dim corridor smelled of old smoke and rust. Steel cell doors lined each wall, stretching into the distance, where the roof had collapsed in the fire and damp moonlight misted in. Light wind whistled through the twisted corrugated iron, whoo! whoo!

Electric light leaked from a single door that lay ajar on my right. I tiptoed, trying to creep by unnoticed.

"Where have you been?"

Fail. I stopped, folding my arms on a sigh. "Like you don't know."

Adonis leaned in his doorway. Unshaven, his blue eyes bloodshot. His shirt was creased, formerly an extinction-level event for my big brother, who'd spent his life wearing custom suits and diamond cufflinks, wading through rivers of adoring girls on his way to corporate board meetings and glittering charity balls. They write romance novels about guys like Adonis. He's what ordinary women think of as a hot date, and life has gifted him with what you might call a healthy ego. I wouldn't label him vain, exactly—he's too pragmatic for that—but let's just say his secret name isn't Narcissus without reason.

His blond hair was ragged, in need of a cut. It made him look a little crazy. And the bruises under his eyes shone darker than usual. He'd been losing sleep. We all had.

"Fine." His voice was hoarse, fatigued. "I know where you've been. So what the hell were you doing?"

"Stopping a crime in progress, since you ask. That okay with you?" But my chest hurt inside, and my hostility lost its luster. My brother, questioning my good intentions. My fucking brother.

He just eyed me, glitter-blue. Accusing.

Christ, I'd no energy to fight with him tonight. "I'm tired, Ad. Can we just get some sleep?"

"Vee…" He touched my arm.

I halted again. "What?"

"We've talked about this. You're not well. You shouldn't go off by yourself and—"

"And what? Do my job? We're crime-fighters, aren't we? How about we fight crime?"

My words bounced off the walls. He frowned, a finger to his lips. Of course, my phone pinged again in my pocket, over-loud.

Shit. I fumbled it to silent to make it shut up. "What?" I whispered fiercely. "Am I gonna wake up the Stepford wife?"

"I'm working. Peg's in her own room." A defiant edge. He knew I didn't like Peggy. I'd never liked any of his long-term—read longer than two weeks—girlfriends. None of 'em were worthy of him. It was a brother–sister thing. And ever since I'd murdered our father, and Adonis locked me in the nut house, and I dropped a ceiling on our elder sister, and Adonis shot me and hurled me out a fifty-sixth-story window? Brother–sister things had become a little complicated.

"Sleeping alone? So sad. Does she snore? Or are you just tired of her already?"

"You can talk."

That gloss of disgust took a hacksaw to my nerves. "Screw you, okay? I am so over you judging me. At least I tell mine they're losers as soon as I'm done."

An incredulous laugh. "Jesus, Vee. Last day to cash in this month's bitch credits?"

I swallowed, ashamed. Truth was? Seeing him like this broke my heart. He hadn't asked for what had happened to us, any more than the rest of our family had. None of it was his fault.

No. No, it was mine.

"She cooked a nice dinner," I allowed grudgingly. He didn't need to know I hadn't eaten any. "And hell, she seems to like Oreos and Bruce Lee movies. I guess there's hope for her."

He rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. "She tries, okay? Give her a chance. It's not her fault she's—"

"Adonis? Everything okay?" A sleepy female voice drifted from the half-closed door.

Adonis sighed, resting his head on the doorframe.

I choked. She was in his damn room. He'd lied.

My face burned. Ugly, poison words crawled up my throat. Before I could spit them out, I clamped my teeth and marched away. He didn't call after me. I heard his door click shut. I kept walking, though I itched all over, an army of rabid ants nipping furiously beneath my skin.

I stormed past more rooms: Jeremiah, Ebenezer, Harriet, Peggy, the rest of the stray augments we'd adopted like some stupid special-needs homeless shelter since we holed up here. Jem was coughing, a horrid throat-savaging beast that no doubt we'd all catch before the week was out. I could hear Uncle Mike snoring. Mike, Dad's kid brother, who'd been as civil to me as was humanly possible, considering I got Dad killed.

They don't forgive you, hissed one of the incarnations of me that rattled around in my skull. Since the asylum, I'm like a range of Barbie dolls in there. This one was Nasty Verity, like the ghost of my dead sister Equity with a double shot of spite. They'll never forgive you. They're just humoring you, until they think of a way to get rid of you quietly, with no fuss. One day, you'll have a tragic accident…

Viciously, I kicked at the dead leaves littering the floor. Shut your face, Nasty. If Adonis was pissed at me for disobeying him? Fine. That was his right. I didn't care. I didn't even care that my precious big brother was sticking his dick in the world's most boring woman and apparently liked it enough to let her sleep in his bed, for fuck's sake.

I cared that he trusted her more than he trusted me.

He'd known Peg a few lousy weeks, and I was the one he lied to.

Fuck.

A silent scream hollowed my chest, and my mindmuscle burned. I felt like tearing down the broken ceiling to crush us all. The fact that I'd earned his mistrust a dozen times over only made it hurt more.

I reached the door to my room—dark, cold, empty—and hesitated, restless. My muscles watered with exhaustion, my eyes smarted with grit. I needed to crash. But my thoughts howled in wild circles, my power pacing like a caged beast in my belly. My senses had graduated from tingling through prickling to a malicious stinging cloud that wouldn't be silent. Sleep seemed about as likely as a lightning strike.

And I still had business tonight. The memory of those teenage hooligans—y'know, the ones with identical, improbable powers who'd whipped my ass?—wouldn't leave me alone. Who were they working for? What was the artifact they'd taken, and why did they want it?

More to the point: had Razorfire really deployed them against his own guy? And why?

Sure, maybe I was paranoid. Seeing archvillain conspiracies lurking under every rock, every breath of wind and rustle of leaves part of an elaborate plot against me.

Wouldn't be the first time it'd turned out to be true.

I crept to the cell next to mine and pushed on the unlocked door. "You awake?" I whispered.

Dim green glow filtered from a computer screen, throwing the tiny cell into shadows. A cursor blinked solemnly from a window brimming with wingdings code. Schematics and circuit diagrams were stuck to the whitewashed walls with tape and gum. The crumpled bed had disappeared under a heap of silicon hardware, cables, parts of phones; more of the same cluttered the desk, next to coffee mugs and empty cola cans and two unwashed dinner plates.

Glimmer lay asleep at his desk, green light rinsing his face. Head pillowed on one arm, dark hair with an albino splash in front tumbling onto the keyboard. His warm vanilla-spice scent drifted, both comfort and accusation. I inhaled more deeply, like I did sometimes when he wasn't watching. Oyy. Even working nineteen hours a day in a grubby cell deep in the ruins of a sadist's hellhole, he managed to smell like this. If Glimmer were a villain—if he'd even a breath of badness in him, which he didn't—you'd flee from that scent alone.

He looked exhausted, dark stubble stark against his too-pale face. Time was, he'd worn his mask twenty-four-seven around me. No longer. He'd nothing to hide, except that he was young and talented and didn't deserve the shitty deal Razorfire had hurled his way.

I bit my lip. Once upon a time, Glimmer had been my friend. God, I longed to talk the way we used to. Trade insults, give him crap about his hair product. Say, dude, you'll never believe what happened to me tonight and have him scoff at me, charm me with his grin and his wise-ass wit. I wanted to be dazzled by his white-knight geekboy brilliance, and hunt criminals together safe in the knowledge that he'd never betray me, never give up. Hell, the jealous part of me wanted to smack his pretty face for being so much better at it all than I.

Compelled, I drifted my palm over his cheek, just a twitch from touching. His breath warmed my hand, and my pulse quickened, shame and loneliness and some deeper compulsion I didn't understand mingling like inks in my blood. I could wake him. Stroke that velvety hair from his eyes, take heart from his sweet, crooked smile…