It was a cool autumn night in Seraph City, a sharp wind blowing off the Atlantic giving a hint of the harsh winter that would arrive all too soon.
Illuminated by a hunter’s moon, the lithe, costumed figure of Lucas Moore darted across a rooftop, preparing to leap to the next one.
“Oh, crap,” he muttered beneath his breath, coming to a screeching halt.
“What is it?” Hartwell asked through a tiny receiver built into the black mask Lucas wore.
“Nothing,” Lucas answered.
“You wouldn’t have said ‘oh, crap’ if there wasn’t something.”
“It’s just that … they’re a lot farther apart than I thought,” Lucas admitted, looking from one roof across to the next.
“You shouldn’t have any problem with the jump,” Hartwell said dryly. “Your nanite-enhanced leg strength, plus the augmentation provided by the costume’s exoskeleton, should allow you to make the distance with very little effort.”
“You think?” Lucas asked, still not convinced.
“Lucas, I designed the costume. I know full well what it and the nanites in your blood are capable of. Trust me.”
It had been a month since he’d been given the more sophisticated costume—his “supersuit,” as he liked to call it, much to his father’s distaste. Hartwell didn’t appreciate his calling such a complicated piece of hardware such a cartoonish name.
But Lucas thought it was perfect.
Lucas had gone through another extensive training period so that he could fully appreciate all the capabilities of his new costume. According to his father, this suit had been designed to improve his already-nanite-enhanced body, making him better than perfect. In it he would be unstoppable; at least, that was what his father was telling him.
Lucas had to admit, it was a rush to feel this strong.
He walked away from the building’s edge and turned around. “Probably going to need a running start,” he said to himself, forgetting that the old man could hear.
“Not necessarily,” Hartwell answered in his ear. “But if you think it will help.”
Taking a few quick breaths—the smell of his sweat mixing with the chemical-plastic smell of his mask—he started to run toward the building ledge.
Before reaching the end of the rooftop, he tensed the muscles in his legs, springing off with some pretty incredible results.
Lucas soared through the air on his own power.
Hartwell had brought him to Seraph proper for this exercise in a small helicopter designed for stealth. The craft was much smaller than the average chopper and was equipped with technology that rendered it nearly silent and practically invisible.
From a secret helipad at the back of Hartwell Manor, they had flown to the city, dropping Lucas off atop one of the city’s many tall office buildings. Jumping down from the craft to the roof, Lucas hadn’t even heard the stealth craft leave.
But now he was flying without the help of a high-tech helicopter. This was all him, his strength increased by the exoskeleton built into his costume, of course.
He started to descend, the rooftop of the next building coming up fast, and he braced himself for impact. Barely avoiding an air-conditioning unit on the roof, he landed in a crouch, his momentum causing him to tumble toward the building’s edge.
“And how did we do?” his father asked from his command center back at Hartwell Manor.
“Good,” Lucas answered, not feeling the need to share everything. “It was good.”
He was going to need to work on his landings.
“Excellent,” Hartwell responded in his ear. “I need you to make your way south toward the Kessler Building.”
Lucas placed a hand against the side of his mask and pushed gently. A small computer mapping system was projected in front of his eyes.
“Got it,” he said, leaping from that rooftop down onto another with growing confidence.
He left the mapping system up to help guide him to the Kessler. Seraph was about a hundred times the size of Perdition, and he needed all the help he could get.
Jumping from rooftop to rooftop on nightly patrols, he guessed that eventually he would get to know the place. He couldn’t help being in awe of Seraph. He had never been to any place larger than Phoenix, so this was like visiting another planet.
The buildings grew significantly smaller as he neared the Kessler, in one of the older sections of the city. He’d reached an area bustling with new construction. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a banner hanging from one of the skeletal new buildings bearing the name of one of Hartwell’s many companies.
“Putting up some new buildings?” he asked casually. He jumped down to the shadows, moving across the construction site, practicing not being noticed.
“Yes,” his father answered. “Please proceed to …”
Something caught Lucas’s attention and he stopped to stare.
“What’s this?” he asked aloud.
He was standing before a statue—a monument, really. It was a statue of the Raptor. A statue in honor of his father.
Lucas examined it more closely. He read that it had been erected by the city as thanks for what the Raptor had done to save lives in this very spot over twenty years ago.
He thought of his father’s story about the explosion that had changed his life. The explosion that had killed one Raptor and allowed another to be born.
“Lucas?” his father called to him.
“I’m looking at a statue of you,” he said.
“Oh, that,” his father said coldly. “A monument to my failure.”
“It’s pretty awesome,” the boy said. The statue was bronze and depicted the Raptor—wearing an older design of his costume—standing with his head bowed. There were bronze representations of a firefighter and a police officer standing on either side of the superhero. The plaque read, IN HONOR OF THOSE WHO RISK THEIR LIVES SO THAT OTHERS MAY SAFELY LIVE.
“Is this where it happened?” Lucas asked, looking around. There was no sign of how it had once been.
“Yes,” his father answered. “Now I think it’s time for you to move along.”
Lucas was about to ask more about that night but decided against it. His father seemed very uncomfortable talking about the incident. Lucas made a mental note to do some research. After all, if he was going to assume the mantle of the Raptor, he would need to know every possible detail.
Lucas left the construction site, climbing the side of a nearby office building to return to the rooftops. He was getting better at leaping, no longer imagining himself splattered on the ground beneath the towering city structures. This was what it was all about, he thought. Little by little, he was learning everything that would allow him to become the kind of hero Seraph needed.
His thoughts flashed back briefly to the night in the War Zone. Later, when Lucas had questioned Hartwell about whether or not he would have killed the Zombie thug, his father had claimed he never would have done such a thing. It had all been part of Lucas’s training, he had told him, to see how he would react in that particular situation.
Lucas wasn’t exactly sure he believed that. What he’d seen that night had scared him a bit, but it had also moved him to make a promise to himself. No matter how hard it got, or how desperate the situation, he would never take a life. He wasn’t sure what had pushed his father so far that night that he had been willing to kill. He chose to believe it was stress, a momentary impulse. He chose to believe his father was a good man.
Crouching on the roof of a hotel, Lucas spotted his destination.
“I see it,” he said.
“Good,” Hartwell answered. “I want you to find your way inside.”
“Are you going to tell me what I’m doing tonight?” Lucas asked, dropping down to an alleyway from the roof of the hotel. He barely felt the impact, his legs and the mechanisms in the suit absorbing the shock with ease.
“Street intel has provided me with information about the current location of the Science Club,” Hartwell explained.
“The Science Club?” Lucas questioned, darting down the alleyway. “They certainly don’t sound like much.”
“The Science Club is a band of renegade scientists responsible for providing high-tech weaponry to criminals around the world,” Hartwell said.
“Interesting,” Lucas muttered as he sprang up from the alley, using the claws built into his gloves to scale the wall like some giant insect. “I always wondered where the super-villains got their stuff.” He clambered over the side of the abandoned office building and onto the roof.
The map in his face mask told him the Kessler Building was right across from his current location. He figured the easiest way inside the old building was through the roof.
He reached up to the other side of his mask and tapped alongside his eyes. Telescopic lenses were activated, giving him a good view of the rooftop. He saw a skylight and figured that would probably be the easiest way to get inside.
“I’m getting ready to jump across,” Lucas said, walking back to get a good running start. “And then I’ll see what I can do about closing down this Science Club for good.”
A thrill of excitement went through him as he crossed the rooftop. This would be his first physical confrontation since the incident in the War Zone.
“Lucas,” his father called, interrupting his thoughts.
He stopped to listen. “I’m here.”
“There’s something more you might want to know about the Science Club.”
“Okay, shoot.”
“I believe they’re the individuals who provided the weaponry and vehicles to the ones who attacked the trailer park,” he said.
Lucas felt a jolt like electricity course through his body, as if he’d accidentally taken hold of a live wire. He remained silent, fixated on the building across from the rooftop.
“Are you still there?” Hartwell asked.
“I am,” he answered coldly.
“The information from the sensors in your suit suggests there might be something wrong.”
“Wrong?” Lucas asked, starting to run across the roof at top speed before leaping out into space. “What could possibly be wrong?”
Lucas touched down silently; he was getting better at this. Scanning the rooftop, he saw nothing out of the ordinary and carefully crossed to the skylight.
“I’m approaching the skylight,” he whispered for only his father to hear.
“Careful now,” Hartwell cautioned. “The Science Club is far more dangerous than you could even hope to imagine.”
Lucas reached the skylight and peered down through the bird droppings and thick glass at an elaborate warehouse space below.
“It looks kind of like a factory,” he said, watching as men clad in colorful jumpsuits moved from one machine to another. “These are the guys who made the weapons that killed my mother? They look like a bunch of geeks.”
Lucas heard a scuffling sound on the rooftop behind him and spun around to face it.
“Oh, crap,” he said, not believing his eyes. “Where the hell did that come from?”
“What is it, Lucas?” Hartwell asked.
Lucas was about to tell him that there was a robot with machine guns for arms standing across from him, but he didn’t have the chance.
The robot opened fire. Multiple rounds from both weapons drove Lucas backward toward the skylight. He put up his hands, attempting to block some of the bullets, and silently thanked his father for finding the special bulletproof material his costume was woven from.
Not that he couldn’t feel the shots. They were sort of like hornet stings, only about ten times more painful.
Another robot rose up from a hidden compartment in the rooftop and also began to fire at Lucas.
“Lucas!” Hartwell screamed in his ear. “Report! What is your status?”
Lucas wanted to answer, but it was too much. It was like being caught in a storm of pain. He was driven farther backward until he had nowhere else to go.
The heel of one of his boots struck the frame of the skylight, throwing him off balance. No matter how hard he tried to regain his balance, he couldn’t. He found himself falling backward, the full brunt of his weight landing on the skylight, shattering the thick glass as he fell through to the warehouse space below.
At least I got away from the robots, he thought as he fell, just before hitting a table covered in machine parts that collapsed under his weight.
Stunned by the impact, Lucas managed to push himself up. Alarms began blaring inside the vast space, and the Science Club members ran around wildly.
“Lucas!” Hartwell screamed again, startling him.
“I fell through the skylight,” Lucas said, slipping on the glass beneath his feet.
“You fell?” Hartwell asked.
“I know, I suck, anything else?”
“So they know you’re there?”
He watched the uniformed men scurrying around, many of them with machinery clutched lovingly in their arms.
“Oh yeah,” Lucas said.
“Get out of there … now!” Hartwell ordered.
“What? You don’t want me to do anything?”
“If their security has been breached, they’re going to defend themselves.”
Lucas was about to argue that there didn’t seem to be much going on when the armored security team came around a corner. They were each holding a weapon that looked like a high-tech cannon, and he decided that maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea to be shot with those.
“Halt, or we’ll shoot!” one of the men said in a voice that sounded like he was talking through a speaker at a drive-through.
Lucas scanned the warehouse for an escape route and found a door on the other side of the space. He bolted for it as the armored men continued to order him to stop.
He reached the door and pulled.
Locked! Just his luck; he should have figured.
He was about to flex his muscles and knock it down when he was hit by a bus.
It wasn’t an actual bus, of course, but it felt like one. He was zapped by one of the high-tech cannons the security guys were carrying.
Lucas was thrown into the wall by the intensity of the blast. His father’s plaintive cries were gone from his ear, replaced with a high-pitched squeal, as the communications device built into his headpiece ceased to function.
Through the roar of white noise, he could just about make out the sounds of the Science Club security squad coming closer, their armored boots clicking on the ware-house floor. He struggled to stand but was having a great deal of difficulty. The suit felt heavy, stiff, and he sensed that more than the communications functions had been damaged.
He looked through the cracked lenses of his face mask for a different way out.
Another of the cannons fired and he was lifted off his feet. The blast picked him up, hurling him backward and into the body of a machine that hummed with power. Some sort of generator, Lucas imagined as he was showered in a spray of sparks and fire.
Grabbing on to the burning machine, he fought to stand while a tiny, nagging voice in the back of his head told him over and over again that he wasn’t ready for this.
That he would probably never be ready for something like this.
Because he was going to die.
“No,” he said, dispelling the sudden memory of his mother’s blackened body. After all he had been through, after all he had learned, he wasn’t about to let it end this way.
Exerting every muscle, he climbed to his feet. The nanites in his blood must have been working overtime to keep him alive, because he suddenly felt ravenous. But the four-course meal he craved would have to wait. The Science Clubs’ goons were at him again, and he could just about make out through his damaged mask what it was they were saying.
“Finish him off,” one of the security team said.
“Who is he?” asked another.
“Probably just another wannabe,” someone with a bit of an accent contributed.
“We’ll get a bonus for this for sure,” said another.
They all laughed, probably thinking about how they would spend their bonus money.
That made Lucas even madder.
There wasn’t much time for him to waste. He had to do something right away or he was going to end up as a stain on one of the walls. He considered throwing himself at the sentries but decided that feeling the way he did, they probably would kick his butt, then shoot him dead.
That was when he remembered one of his many instruction sessions and one of the emergency functions his father had described.
What was it again?
His father had referred to it as a “last resort.”
An EMP emitter, installed as an emergency deterrent. From what Lucas could understand, a tiny device was built into his weapons system that would allow him to emit a powerful electromagnetic pulse—just like nuclear bombs did—that would shut down most high-tech machinery.
Lucas couldn’t think of a better situation in which to use it.
Swaying unsteadily on his feet, he watched as one of the soldiers aimed his gun.
“Say hello to my little friend,” the guy said, doing one of the worst imitations of Al Pacino in Scarface Lucas had ever heard.
The guy deserved the EMP for that alone.
Just as he was about to be shot, Lucas raised his arm, using his other hand to find the button beneath the heavy fabric of his costume and push it.
At first he thought that it, too, had been broken by the blast from the cannons, but then the emitter came alive with a high-pitched whine and an electromagnetic pulse surged from the tips of his gloved fingers, throwing the security team backward with squawks of surprise.
He wasn’t going to get another opportunity like this, so he put everything he had into a race across the warehouse toward the door that had been locked before. Lucky for him, after he’d been blasted, the cannon fire had also torn the heavy metal door from its hinges, providing him with an escape route.
Climbing over the twisted metal of the door, Lucas was glad he’d paid enough attention during training to remember how to activate the EMP emitter. He hung on to the metal railing and stumbled down the steps. He was having a hard time standing, and the exertion of moving the damaged costume was exhausting.
But what choice did he have?
His thoughts drifted to his father and what he was doing to help him out here. A part of him wondered whether the old man was really doing anything. Lucas imagined Hartwell sitting at the mansion, waiting for him to make it back alive, the whole incident chalked up as an excellent training opportunity.
Lucas made it to the first-floor level and threw himself at a set of chained double doors. At least he had enough left in him to snap the chains, and he spilled out onto the trash-strewn docking area.
Not sure whether or not he was being chased, Lucas forced himself around the corner of the building, out of the yellowish glare of the streetlights. He hoped to use the shadows of the back alleys to make his way someplace safe, where he could catch his breath and figure out what he should do next.
That was when he darted into the street and was suddenly bathed in the headlights of an oncoming van. He was too stunned to react. The van hit him head-on, sending him through the air backward to the street.
And as he lay there fighting to stay awake, his entire body numb, he heard his mother’s voice whispering in his ear.
Always look both ways before crossing the street.
Truer words were never spoken.
Clayton Hartwell again checked the instruments of the control panel to make sure the problem wasn’t on his end.
All he could hear was a grating static hiss.
“Dammit,” he said beneath his breath, stroking his chin and moving the swivel chair nervously from side to side.
It had been close to thirty minutes since he’d lost contact with Lucas.
His eyes darted to the digital clock above the control panel, watching as another minute ticked past. He knew what he should be doing—sitting back patiently, waiting to see how the boy would react—but at this stage he wasn’t even sure the boy was still alive.
The Science Club could be quite deadly, given the opportunity.
Reaching out, he raised the volume on the static, straining to hear if there was anything behind it. But the signal was shot; there was nothing transmitting from the source.
That was when he made up his mind.
Clayton Hartwell rose from his chair, leaving his cane leaning against the side of the control panel. He walked from the communications chamber into a much larger room and approached a metal door with a number pad in its frame.
The older man punched in a code and stood before the door as it slowly opened.
It was a room filled with Raptor costumes, from the prototype of the very first suit to the latest armored and cybernetically enhanced model.
He decided to go with one of the less flashy designs, but one of his personal favorites. It was the one he had been wearing when he revealed his true identity to the boy.
He reached for the costume, ready to suit up.
It was time for the Raptor to get involved.