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IT TOOK A FEW TOO MANY seconds for the automated scream of Hiro’s system alert to make it through to his big brain. With Michaela snuggled up against him, working on unbuttoning his pants, his little brain seemed to have temporarily blocked his ears.
The echoing boom which accompanied the floor shivering under his feet—that he noticed.
Hiro froze, arms around Michaela, head tilted. What the fuck?
Proximity alarms. All of them went off at once and he couldn’t pinpoint the origin. Earthquake? Battle? Captain Champion? No, he doesn’t know where my lair is.
Michaela stepped back, and with a touch of resentment, he released her.
Faint shouting from outside.
The words weren’t clear through reinforced walls and Titanglass windows, but he could definitely hear a voice. They were twenty stories up inside his suite and all the alarms were going. He shouldn’t have been able to hear anything.
“What in the powerless abyss of hells?” he wondered aloud.
“I don’t know.” Michaela rammed her shirt back over her head.
He considered picking up his Bane cloak, but opted to run shirtless for the walnut paneled wardrobe dominating the wall at the foot of his bed. After throwing the doors open, he tugged out the monitor screens. Precious seconds slipped by as he swiped through the menus and brought up his exterior video feeds.
The sudden silence made his ears throb when he dismissed the alarms. But he couldn’t see anything on his monitors.
“What were the alarms for?” Michaela asked, leaning around him to look. She sounded calm but her shoulders made a tense curve, poised for battle.
A quick stab of regret caught him right in the guts and he winced. She should be relaxed and enjoying herself in bed right now. With him. Not facing a surprise attack on his lair in the middle of the night.
Maybe Michaela had given up more than he wanted to admit when she walked through the front door of E.B. Industries at his side.
“Intrusion alert. Someone was trying to get into the tower. I don’t know...where...yet.” He tapped, swiped, tapped. “There. Wait. What?” His cameras were working perfectly, but what they told him was perfectly impossible.
“Here.” Michaela’s hand flattened against his bare shoulder, and abruptly his confusion was gone, replaced by focus. He felt her own tension, smothered by the determination she was sending him. I freaking love how she can do that.
He turned his head to press a quick thank-you kiss to the tips of her fingers.
“Someone tried to enter through the roof,” he said. “Does Captain Champion have a hoverboard I don’t know about? And how did he find my lair so fast? I sent that video like ten minutes ago.”
The roof. All Powers, anything but the roof. He’d been on top of his building—once, and only once—when it was first finished. Even the meter-thick, waist-high parapet he’d ordered built around the entire edge hadn’t been enough to get him to step past the threshold of the roof access door. Some deep, instinctive part of him was sure the wind up there would grip him around the ankles with sly, airy fingers, drag him over, and toss him off the edge. Six years later the feeling still left echoes crawling down his spinal column.
He swallowed against the tightening of his throat.
Nope. No, I fucking thank you not. He’d custom-built a bot for the single purpose of installing the security cameras up there and avoided even thinking about it ever since.
“I don’t think it’s Captain Champion,” Michaela said. “Pretty sure it’s not.”
“Why not?” He narrowed the feeds down to just the upper story and finally had a 360-degree view around his tower. Still nothing. Just a wash of black with pinpricks, rivers, and smears of green night-vision-tinted lights. Smallcity, looking normal at night—
“BANE!”
They both jumped. The cameras had teeny microphone apertures to catch sounds, but that sound hadn’t been tiny. No wonder he’d heard it through the walls before the video feeds were open.
“Evil Bane! Release her!” The floor shivered again. Dust sparkled against the black background of the sky in a trailing curtain, past one of the window feeds from the nineteenth floor.
“Oh, fuck, he’ll break your whole tower soon,” Michaela said in a dismayed whisper.
“What? Who will? Who’s he?”
Release her the mystery attacker had shouted. Her. Not him. Not Veloxity. Couldn’t have been Captain Champion, then, but who...
“How do we get to the roof?”
Hiro twisted to stare at Michaela in horror. “Why should we go to the roof? I have a jetcar in the basement, we can be there in a few seconds. We’ll get out, get clear, regroup. I don’t know who’s out there, or what they want.” Well. He had an idea of what they wanted, but they were never going to get it.
Release her!
He’d lose his powers before he’d send Michaela out to some unknown entity who shouted threats.
None of his camera sensors registered any type of vehicle. Not a helicopter, not a hoverjet, not even an airborne surfboard. His electromagnetic pulse field hadn’t been activated. Therefore there were no electronically driven vehicles nearby to cripple with a pulse.
The only possibility left was someone superpowered who could be up twenty stories without support. Someone who could fly.
“No, Hiro, I’ve got to talk to him. I can get him to stop. He’ll break this whole tower down to the foundation before he figures out we’re gone. Get me to the roof,” she begged.
His mouth dried. He shook his head. “No, no, we’ll run, re-group—”
“Please, Hiro. We can’t haul Chris all the way down to the basement in time. And we can not just leave him here unconscious, he can’t even defend himself!”
“I wasn’t really going to leave him here defenseless.” He might have completely forgotten about the drugged sidekick snoring in his containment room.
“There’s a high chance one or all of us will get hurt if we try to run. And your tower. All your hard work. Your experiments. Your lair. It will be ruined,” she said. “I can fix this. Just get me up there.”
A deep voice thundered through the screens. “Bane! Release her, now! She’d better be unharmed.” This time he caught the hint of a shape, streaking past a camera.
“We don’t have to run. This won’t turn into a battle. I can save your lair, all your things here you’re still working on. I just need to talk to him,” she repeated. Her eyes stayed on his, her gaze steady. She was so calm, and she was asking him to trust her.
Okay. Okay. Get to roof. Stay inside doorway. Shout back at shouting shouter. Come to some sort of verbal arrangement. Never release Michaela. A plan to work off, at least. He walked to where his cloak sat crumpled on the floor and snagged it. As he tugged it over his head, he tested the nano-particle shield with an absent tap. It sparked against his finger. Charged and ready to go. Good.
“Okay. Alright. We’ll try talking.” He gestured towards the doorway. “But if he even looks like he’s considering attacking, we’re getting out of there.”
They darted out and into the hallway together, their footsteps pounding in sync. From his peripheral vision Hiro caught a pinkish-gray streak. Purriarty was getting the hells out. He wasn’t worried, the cat had hiding places everywhere on their floor. He considered the whole thing his territory. And Purriarty was smart enough not to be heading to the roof.
Hiro headed to the left down the hallway, breaking into a jog. Michaela rushed to keep up with him. He glanced over as they ran. “Do you know who this is? Tell me what I’m dealing with.”
“Pretty sure it’s my dad.” Michaela almost sounded ashamed.
Hiro missed his next step and came down hard on the opposite foot. He righted himself, gritted his teeth, and moved faster. “Your dad? The one your mom was going to call? The superhero?”
“Yeah. I think she called him.”
They reached the stairwell door. Hiro thumbed the lock and it slid open. “How’d he find us? How would he know you were here?”
Their hurried steps echoed off the bare cement walls as they bounded up the stairs. After a few steps, Michaela gasped. “Sharon! I thought I saw Sharon out on the street.” She sounded a little breathless, but she kept running at his side. One flight, turn, another flight.
She continued explaining. “When we were coming through the front doors. I just caught a glimpse—the hair,” she panted. “Thought it wasn’t her, but if it was—and she saw me with you, and called my mom—Hiro, I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “It is—what it is,” he puffed. “We just have to calm your dad down.” So, we definitely won’t lead off with the fact that we’ve been seeing each other for weeks. Or that his wife hates me and told me never to see Michaela again. Or that we have lots and lots of the sex.
As if cued, another shout echoed through the closed door at the top of the stairs. Michaela’s dad had a huge, resonant voice. Hiro took a second to pray to any Power listening that the voice didn’t correlate to the man’s size.
This door required a numeric code, verbal permission, and his thumbprint to unlock it. Hiro worked his way through the sequence while his frantic heartbeat ticked away the time. When it clicked open his entire body tensed. A rush of warm, dusty-smelling air blew past them on the stairwell. To Hiro, it smelled like death.
Deliberately, he flexed his fingers to loosen up his hands. “Alright. Okay. Who’s your dad? Who are we calming down before he can attack us?” He reached inside his sleeve and fingered different bot options hidden inside. Tranquilizer? Nerve Taze? Bot Net? What would be fast enough to catch a flier?
His legs tried to talk him out of stepping through that open door. Too high. Very much too high.
“UberMeta Man,” Michaela said.
She’d stepped past him and was out on the roof before he could unlock his frozen muscles.
“What?” he asked the empty black doorway, dazed.
Finally he forced his legs to cooperate. One step, then two, and that was all he could push himself to do. Michaela was already near the center of the roof, head craned so she could survey the dark sky. She turned slowly, pivoting on one heel. Her hair fluttered in the ever-present wind, as dark as the sky spread over them.
“What?” he said, louder.
The edge of the roof loomed bigger and bigger in his vision. A chasm large enough to swallow the entire world, creeping closer and closer. He locked up, unable to move any more, but even the void couldn’t distract him completely from the bombshell she’d just lobbed. “Your dad is UberMeta Man?” he hissed at Michaela. “Are you serious?”
From far, far below he could hear faint banging. Then a metallic, muffled crunching noise. Inside, the alarms started hooting again.
She nodded, looking distracted. “I don’t see him. I think he’s down there breaking things to get in.” Frustration dropped spikes in her tone.
“No one ever sees him! You don’t see UberMeta Man coming! He just super-speeds past and kicks everyone’s ass. Ever powerful damn it, Michaela. I can’t do this. Come back here. It’s so high.” His voice shook. He was too terrified to care.
Immediately she turned and walked back to him, hand outstretched. “I forgot. Here.”
He gripped her extended fingers, tugged her closer, and soaked up the calm she was offering. While she was tucked against his chest he took the chance to kiss her because he might not have the opportunity again for a while.
After she’d held onto him for a few seconds, absorbing his panic, he cooled enough to focus on the security systems on his wrist screen. “Thanks,” he told her. “Much better.” Again, he had to wonder how she could possibly be so calm in this kind of situation. Maybe having UberMeta Man as your dad gave you a high tolerance for emergencies.
He had to let go of her hand so he could tap through and dismiss the alarms again. Instantly, he missed her strengthening presence in his mind. “Looks like he tried to force the back doors.” He pursed his lips, slightly impressed. “It looks like the Titanglass is holding, against UberMeta Man. Unexpected, but wow.”
“Michaela...coming in! You’ll...alright.” More shouting, a bit muffled, floated up from below. UberMeta Man’s promise was followed by more crashing sounds.
Hiro winced. “Can you maybe start yelling for him? Get him up here?” He’d probably attack on sight. Hiro tried to flick through his mental options. Pretty much every single one ended with him grabbing Michaela and ducking, dodging, or hiding. He was so not prepared to take on the strongest superhero in the entire universe. He’d planned on another few years before he even thought about trying.
“I’ve got a way to get him up here, quickly. And it’ll make him stop breaking things. Trust me, okay?” Michaela said.
Something rolling under the surface of her voice made Hiro look up from his screen. “I do, I always–Michaela? Where are you going?” He grabbed for her, but she stepped smoothly out of reach.
“Trust me,” she said again. She looked at him over her shoulder, and the ambient glow from the tower floodlights behind them touched her smile. She turned and continued walking.
“I trust you completely, but, ah, wait, you’re a little close to the edge there. Michaela.” His voice rose higher, sharper with every word. She didn’t stop.
His fingers ached where they were wrapped around the metal doorframe. Every cell in his body screamed at him. She was too close to the blank, hungry nothing which went down twenty stories. Too close, and he couldn’t force his legs to follow.
“Michaela.” Caught in some sort of horrifying dream, Hiro watched her grab the parapet. “Michaela, no!” He tried to shove his legs forward, but his body tried to hold him back. The conflicting urges knocked him to his knees. “Michaela you can shout from over here. Come back.” He reached out for her with both arms, grasping with his power to bring her back to his side.
“UberMeta Man! Get the fuck up here!” he shouted desperately. It was like trying to grip a breeze. His potenkinesis wasn’t strong enough to lift a whole person. His head pounded as he threw everything he had into his power, and it still wasn’t enough.
“I’ve got this. It’s okay,” she said. “I inherited one other power you didn’t know I have, from my dad.” Standing on the parapet, she turned to fully face him.
“It had fucking better be flight!” A hellish glow from the floodlights outlined the entire rooftop, sharpening every awful detail. The electric life pulsing through Smallcity reflected off a thin cloud cover.
Michaela’s feet were centimeters from the edge.
The taste of hot metal burned in his mouth. “No. Please, just, come back.”
“I’m invulnerable, I got it from him. It’s going to be fine, Hiro. See you in a second.” Her smile was calm and unafraid, so sweet; and he would never, ever forget how it felt to watch that smile disappear when she leaned backward gracefully and let gravity eat her.