Cassie hurried into her bedroom, threw open her closet and pulled from it the big flat box that Golden Gary had given her in Vegas two years previously.
On the smart speaker, the newsreader said, ‘With Cobalt Gold dead, authorities are wondering what the Fury will do. He appears to be heading west toward Los Angeles.’
Cassie stared at the box.
Then she opened it, revealing the suit.
Her suit.
Minutes later, she was wearing it.
White leather, blue racing stripes, form fitted.
Holding her white helmet under her arm, Cassie went into the kitchen and to the fridge, to the set of coloured Sharpies dangling off it.
She grabbed the green Sharpie and made a mark with it on the back of her helmet.
Cobalt Green’s voice echoed in her mind:
‘The best place to fight a battle is on home turf.’
Then she made a red mark. Red’s voice:
‘To know you can take a punch and keep going.’
A purple mark. Purple:
‘You work hard, Cassie. You stick at things.’
White’s voice:
‘And you’re so clever.’
Silver’s voice:
‘You have two things Black doesn’t. Imagination and the humility to listen to other people’s ideas. If anyone can figure the Fury out, it’s you.’
Her dad’s voice:
‘Crazy can win against the odds . . . I played crazy.’
Lastly, Cassie slashed a yellow mark on her helmet as she heard Golden Gary’s voice:
‘You’re a hero . . . If you ever want to be her, you’re Cobalt Blue.’
When she was done, Cassie had made a row of coloured marks on her white helmet, marks that represented everyone she loved, her father and all her siblings.
She was, she now realised, the combination of them all.
Then in her mind she heard one final voice.
That of her mother, Christine Cobalt.
‘It’ll all come down to you.’
Cassie put on her helmet.
And her game face.
THE SUIT
Cassie jumped into her car. Trey was already at the wheel.
‘Nice outfit. Where to, superhero?’
Cassie stared straight ahead, her eyes focused.
‘Home turf.’
Forty minutes later, Trey dropped Cassie off at SpaceX headquarters near Long Beach.
The huge warehouses of the famed rocket company stood alongside the broad concrete trench that is the Los Angeles River.
Cassie got out.
‘Go,’ she said. ‘I’ll meet you at the Seventh Street Bridge.’
‘Seventh Street Bridge, got it,’ Trey said. ‘You sure about this?’
Cassie nodded. ‘I have to draw them to me. I have to be the bait.’
‘This is crazy, you know,’ Trey said.
‘I know,’ Cassie said. ‘But that’s how you beat a guy like him.’
Trey sped away from Long Beach, heading north parallel to the concrete river, back toward downtown. It was a quick drive since the roads were largely empty.
Just as he arrived at his destination and pulled to a stop, a red human-shaped figure appeared above the mountains to the east of L.A. and streaked across the sky, zooming like a laser toward the skyscrapers of downtown.
The Fury of Russia had arrived in Los Angeles.
Minutes later, high above the towers of L.A., the Fury was met by his eldest son, the Fury of Moscow, and then by two other flying red streaks that came in from the west, from over the Pacific Ocean: his other two sons, the Furies of Stalingrad and Leningrad.
Floating above the skyscrapers, above the limitless sprawl of L.A., the four superpowered Russians scanned the city in every direction.
Then they heard it.
Distantly at first.
Beats of music. Iconic beats. 1980s beats.
The Baywatch theme song.
The Fury listened, his super-sensitive ears zeroing in on the source of the song.
Long Beach.
And a warehouse there, on the roof of which he saw a figure dressed in white and blue.
Cassie.
She was staring right back at him.
He and his three sons flew toward her.
Cassie hurried inside.
Not long after, the four Russian supermen landed on all four sides of the main SpaceX warehouse, surrounding it.
They went in, searching, hunting.
The Fury himself entered via the main reception area, his eyes scanning left and right.
The Fury of Stalingrad advanced down a hallway.
The Fury of Moscow peered into an office.
The Fury of Leningrad stepped into a darkened lab.
He was crossing the wide dark room when a woman’s voice spoke from the darkness: ‘Looking for me?’
He spun... and saw her...on the other side of the gloom, took a step that way—
Gloop.
—and dropped knee-deep into a thick, white and extremely cold liquid of some sort.
‘Ah!’ Leningrad shouted.
He looked down.
He was standing in a vat of some kind, filled with supercooled liquid nitrogen that gripped his legs tightly.
Then he looked up to see . . .
. . . Cassie, barely ten yards away, her eyes level with his.
Oddly, her legs were bent, so that she was in a kneeling position.
The thing was: she wasn’t kneeling on the ground.
She was hovering.
In the air, a couple of inches above the pool of liquid nitrogen.
With her legs bent, it had appeared that she was standing on solid ground, and in this way, she’d lured the Fury of Leningrad to step forward into the vat.
‘Welcome to America,’ she said, hitting a switch beside her.
Something whirred in the darkness, powering up.
Then a sequence of green LEDs sprang to life like runway lights . . .
. . . and in their soft glow Leningrad saw a set of electromagnetic rail tracks aimed right at him . . .
. . . just as Cassie placed a metal bolt on those tracks and released it.
The bolt whizzed down the electromagnetic rail, shockingly fast, and slammed into Leningrad’s chest.
His eyes sprang wide.
There was now a small hole through his body. The bolt—travelling at almost the fastest speed man was capable of generating—had penetrated his superskin and gone right through his heart.
He was dead, but he was still standing up.
Only then did the Fury of Leningrad collapse into the liquid nitrogen, face-down. Dead.
A door banged open on the other side of the broad room.
The Fury and his other two sons burst through it into the Rocket Fuel Facility.
The Fury looked from his dead son in the vat over to Cassie as she flew out the rear door.
‘Get her!’ he yelled.
PURSUIT OVER THE L.A. RIVER
Cassie shot out of SpaceX like a bullet out of a gun, flying fast and low, leaving a blue-edged vapour trail behind her as she banked at speed into the wide concrete trench that was the L.A. River.
She shot north up the river.
Two seconds later, the Fury of Stalingrad and his older brother, the Fury of Moscow, came zooming out of SpaceX after her, also flying superfast, trailing red streaks behind them.
Cassie flew at unbelievable speed, close to three hundred miles per hour.
She rocketed north up the L.A. River, heading toward Downtown, zooming under bridges, banking left, sweeping right, doing rolling loops as the slanted walls of the trench swept by her in blurs on either side.
The two young Furies raced after her, with Stalingrad ahead of Moscow.
The Fury of Russia rose up into the sky behind them, watching the pursuit.
From where he was, he could see the river stretching northward through the industrial neighbourhoods of L.A., with the three tiny figures streaking up it—the blue one chased by the two red ones—bending and weaving under the cross-bridges.
Cassie flew with her face set.
She was flying so damned fast it was almost too much to absorb.
She swept under a bridge, narrowly missing its concrete pillars, with the two Fury boys close behind her.
Banking with the course of the river, under more bridges, rolling left, sweeping right.
The Fury of Stalingrad was close now, about three hundred yards ahead of his brother.
Cassie saw the Seventh Street Bridge up ahead, spotted a small concrete side-tunnel below it to the left—
—and banked that way, whipping into the side tunnel, where she shot into darkness—
—passing Trey who was waiting in there—
—and who immediately ignited two J.P.L. cutting lasers behind her, angling their superthin iridescent red beams diagonally across the width of the tunnel, creating a deadly glowing X.
A second later, Stalingrad roared into the tunnel at phenomenal speed—
—and flew right through the cutting lasers.
The lasers scythed through him, tearing him apart, cutting him in an X lengthways down his body.
The pieces of his corpse slid to fleshy halts on the concrete floor of the tunnel like slabs of meat.
‘Ew,’ Trey said, turning up his nose.
Cassie yanked him away. ‘Go. You can’t stay here.’
She pushed him deeper into the darkness of the tunnel, looking anxiously back at its mouth.
A moment later, the Fury of Moscow and the Fury himself arrived in the mouth of the tunnel . . .
. . . to find the tunnel empty.
No Cassie.
The Fury and his eldest son saw the X-shaped laser and Stalingrad’s dead body.
‘She’s laying traps for us,’ Moscow said.
‘She’s clever,’ the Fury said. ‘Like her mother.’
They stepped under the crisscrossing laser beams, looking down at the split-open corpse of Stalingrad.
Which was why they never saw the figure descending silently and smoothly out of a manhole shaft above them.
It was Cassie. Flying.
Very slowly.
Without a sound.
Head-down, feet in the air, directly over the Fury.
‘I hate clever,’ the Fury said.
Cassie was right over him now and he didn’t know it.
So close. Frighteningly close.
She reached her hands down on either side of his masked face . . . her fingers spreading wide . . . to grab his mask . . .
. . . when the Fury cocked his head, smelling something, sensing something.
His eyes narrowed.
And he spun suddenly and snatched Cassie’s right hand and threw her to the ground.
‘What do you think you’re doing?!’ he roared.
Cassie leapt to her feet as the Fury advanced on her and swung one of his mighty fists.
For Cassie, the world went slow, and as she saw the Fury pull his right fist back, she heard in her mind the voice of her brother, Cobalt Red:
‘Read the punch before it comes.’
The Fury unleashed the punch.
Cassie ducked left. The blow missed.
Then Moscow swung.
Cassie bobbed right then punched him square in the nose. Dropped him.
The Fury attacked her again, a flurry of blows that she managed to avoid.
And then a punch landed.
It was so strong, Cassie’s visor cracked and she recoiled, a shrill ringing filling her head.
She blinked hard, trying to focus.
Red’s voice: ‘If you get hit in a fight, you gotta keep your wits long enough to avoid the killer blow that’s comin’ in next.’
The Fury bellowed with rage as he lunged forward with the killer blow—as Cassie blinked back to her senses and dived desperately out of the way—and the blow missed by millimetres and the Fury overbalanced.
And Cassie sprang up and . . .
. . . yanked his carbon-ceramic facemask off his helmet!
With a loud crack, the facemask came free of the Fury and before he could even react, Cassie flew into a round side pipe in the darkness, superquick and suddenly gone.
The Fury whirled around, roaring with anger.
He touched his exposed face.
‘She thinks she can kill me . . .’ he said slowly.
Then, shouting: ‘DO YOU THINK YOU CAN DO THAT, CHILD? DO YOU HONESTLY BELIEVE YOU CAN KILL ME?!’
Cassie emerged from the maze of sewers about half a mile away, where she found Trey waiting for her as planned.
She climbed out from a manhole and hugged him. She still wore her half-broken helmet and held in one hand the Fury’s facemask.
‘Got it.’
‘Next stop?’ Trey asked.
‘My home turf,’ Cassie said. ‘But we need him to see us go. Hop on.’
Trey jumped onto her back and they flew off.
The Fury and Moscow stepped out into the L.A. River in time to see Cassie and Trey fly off toward some industrial warehouses near Downtown.
The Fury ground his teeth in anger.
Then, with a powerful boom, he shot off into the air after them, his eldest son following close behind.
