“I wasn’t planning on it,” I said, but she was already gone.
•—•—•
Over the past year, I’d grown used to sunsets in Los Angeles. Grown used to watching the distant ball of fire drop down into the ocean, to twilights that seemed to last as long as the nights themselves. My stay in Ludlow reminded me just how different the desert was. Night came fast and once it did, there was nothing but darkness for miles in every direction, darkness that the two electric lanterns outside Randy’s convenience store did nothing at all to lessen.
The storekeeper had wandered off to his house some hours earlier—muttering something about an early morning and what a pain in the ass it was going to be to have actual customers—but I’d decided to stay out by the store for the night. It was just as well that I did; the ramshackle walls of the old man’s home helped muffle the loud snores emerging from within.
With the sun down, the weather cooled quickly, and I moved from inside the store to its front step, my back resting against the old wooden door. I hadn’t missed Bakersfield often during my time at the Academy, but being in the desert felt a bit like coming home. A year at school had changed me, and the few friends I’d somehow managed to find had changed me even more, but that was another life, another me. For tomorrow’s meeting, for my father, I needed the old me, the one who’d never tricked himself into thinking he could be a Cape, the one who always did what needed to be done because he had no future to worry about.
I looked from Mom’s ghost, barely visible in the middle of the empty road, to the cold stars that littered the desert sky, and I scrubbed at those new parts of me, the places where Alexa and Unicorn, Vibe and Silt, even Stonewall and fucking Paladin had managed to reach me. I scraped it all away until there was nothing left but the raw nerve underneath.
“One more day, Mom.”
I fell asleep with one hand on the moist warmth of my stolen weapon.
CHAPTER 68
Randy was up way too early for comfort. I’d left my Glass back in the dorm room, so I didn’t know what time it was, exactly, but the sun was barely peeking over the eastern horizon when the old man tottered out to the charging station, joints creaking. I sat up and gingerly rolled my head from side to side, feeling every day of my almost-nineteen years. I still didn’t remember much of the brawl at The Liquid Hero, but I must’ve seen some action because I kept finding bruises in interesting places.
This once, it would have been nice if Gladys and the other Healers had brought me up to one-hundred-percent.
Randy was over by the charging station, frowning at a squat grey box partially buried in the dirt next to one of the coils. With a grumble, he hauled back and kicked it, the sole of his shoe flapping in the wind.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yup. This old girl just gets temperamental in the morning.” He grinned, exposing several empty sockets where teeth had once been. “Kind of like my two ex-wives! But she should be warmed up and ready to go by the time the shuttle gets here.”
I took a closer look at the box he’d kicked. “Is that a generator?”
“Nah. We’re on solar out here, but after you store that excess energy, you need to be able to get it back out to actually use it. That’s what this does.” He checked the readings on the nearest charger and nodded in satisfaction before turning back to me. “So why’s a kid like you going to a place like the Hole? And without your pretty friend?”
“Same as everyone else, I guess. I’ve got a relative down there. My father.”
“Sorry to hear that.” He ran one hand through the strands of white hair that were already plastered to his scalp. “Guess the apple fell pretty far from the tree though, you being in the Academy and all.”
“Yeah.” Against my ribs, the Legion tech gun pulsed like a heartbeat. “Guess so.”
•—•—•
Pre-Break buses were weird things. Gas burning, smoke belching, and noisy as fuck, with too many windows, too few wheels, and no armor whatsoever to speak of. No shock that public transportation had died out everywhere but the major cities, I guess. If Aspen had been riding in one of those old school death traps when Major Disaster threw it through a building, the Free States would have been one Cape poorer.
Modern buses still aren’t all that common. I’d never seen one up close, but they’ve made it into enough vids that I knew what to look for; low-to-the-ground, heavily armored, and slow-as-hell.
The shuttle that showed up in Ludlow was all of those things, and yet it still bore almost no resemblance to a bus. If anything, it looked like some sort of wheeled centipede, multiple armored segments attached to each other in a long line that stretched almost seventy feet down the road. There were no windows to speak of and every segment of the centipede sported a round turret on its roof and side walls.
It wasn’t the array of armaments that had my attention though—the security at the Academy put even a shuttle like this to shame, after all—it was the figures soaring overhead.
The shuttle was escorted by Capes.
It made sense, in retrospect. The information on the shuttles had been freely available on the net, as Silt had already demonstrated, which raised the likelihood of Black Hat intervention. The army was all well and good, but where Black Hats were concerned, you needed Capes to fight them. If every shuttle had an escort like this one, it meant a significant number of the Free States’ heroes were working escort duty instead of their usual patrols.
It also meant
