Spears of shadow streaked from his spread fingers, every one of them striking a target.
I was a long way from being able to stand up, but turning my head was feasible, if barely. I looked behind me, already suspecting what I’d find.
The route I’d taken trying to evade Red’s attacks was a mess of melted tables, scorched walls and toppled chairs, but in the middle of all that destruction, one chair had somehow remained unscathed, not just whole, but pristine. My father sat upon that chair, hands resting on a table that didn’t exist anymore, the biggest smile I’d ever seen spread across his face.
Above that smile was the long, crooked nose we shared, but above that was nothing but empty space, a gaping hole that had been drilled straight through the back of his skull, a hole that dripped shadow instead of blood.
The ground began to shake as Tremor summoned his power. Without a sound, without fanfare or ceremony, my father’s corpse sagged to one side, then slipped out of the chair and onto the floor.
•—•—•
I don’t know what to feel sometimes. Some nights, I set my power loose just to avoid feeling anything at all.
Truth is, my father deserved to die for what he did, deserved to die for the murder of an innocent woman, for blood spread all over a white-tiled kitchen. If fate hadn’t put me in that particular visitor group, if Firewall’s brother had swapped places with me instead of the anonymous old woman… I’m pretty sure I would have killed him down there in the Hole. I’d have reached the trigger’s point of resistance and kept on squeezing, would have gone to my grave feeling justified, if not proud.
But truth doesn’t always tell the whole story. Sometimes, there isn’t just one story to tell. My father was a murderer, but he was also a victim, a victim of whatever had been done to him before he met Mom, and whatever had been said to him on the day he killed her. He was a pawn in a game I didn’t know anything about, a game whose players included Sally Cemetery and this still-mysterious he.
Maybe one day I’ll learn to pity my father as much as I hate him. Maybe one day I’ll even learn to forgive him.
But I wouldn’t hold your fucking breath.
Even if you are already dead.
CHAPTER 73
There was a brief time when Evan Earthquake was every bit as popular a vid star as Paladin and Tempest. He was a little shrimp of a guy, lacking the usual Earthshaker build, and known as much for his coke-bottle spectacles as the three-piece suit he called a costume. His time at the top of the charts lasted less than a year. Three episodes and a shitty catchphrase that never caught on, and then just like that, he was gone from the vids like he’d never existed.
Turns out earthquakes only make for great vid until the casualty counts start rolling in.
Anyway, I saw all three Evan Earthquake episodes. Wasn’t my favorite Cape, but what the fuck else was I going to do at Mama Rawlins’ before I met Alicia? I saw every one of his vids and that’s why I can tell you something beyond a shadow of a doubt:
Evan could never have managed the shit Tremor pulled that day.
The edges of the floor curled upward around us like a bowl with a flat center. The ceiling—the titanium ceiling—curled down to meet the floor’s edges, forming a crude sphere of metal and stone that shunted aside dislodged debris from above. Then, we were rocketing upwards, propelled by an unbelievable force, blasting up through a hundred feet of reinforced levels.
After twenty seconds or so, our momentum started to slow, and I had a moment of hope that, even with Pusher’s aid, Tremor had reached his limits. One glance upward killed that dream. The floor of our makeshift elevator had slowed, but the ceiling hadn’t. The sphere separated back out into two hemisphere, with the space between top and bottom halves widening with every passing second. The top half seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second, as it impacted the thickest barrier of all—the bunker that sat just above us—and then it blew the roof off and kept going a hundred feet into the air. It spun a few dozen feet to one side before gravity reasserted itself. When the mass of titanium, steel, and stone came back down, it was a good fifty feet away, striking one of the idle shuttles with the force of a medium-sized bomb.
Pusher collapsed where he stood, blood dripping from his nose and ears, a vein in his head throbbing like he’d just mainlined stim-weed. Even Tremor dropped to one knee, but he had enough juice left that our elevator rose to merge seamlessly with the floor of what had been, moments earlier, a heavily guarded bunker.
In thirty years, the Hole had never suffered a jailbreak. Those sent to the Hole were doomed to die in the dirt, in darkness and despair.
Fallout, Maul, and Tremor stood beneath a sun they were never supposed to see again, and Tempest swooped down to meet them.
•—•—•
Clouds formed out of nowhere above the descending Cape. Wind swept in from the west to swirl around the Black Hats, kicking up a cloud of dust and dirt. This close, I could see the ribbons in Tempest’s hair and even the red bindi between her eyebrows. She hovered, fifty feet up in the air, the winds carrying her voice to everyone below.
“The law requires that I give you this one opportunity to surrender, but I really hope you don’t take it.”
“Surrender?” Fallout’s whisper floated just as easily on the wind. “To you?”
“To us.” Tempest kept her voice even,
