Super Bad (a Superlovin' novella) (9 page)

“Maybe Area Nine is the
best place for me. At least there we know I won’t do anything else to bring
about some unspecified apocalypse.”

“Hell fucking no,”
Lucien snarled. “You are not going back there. There are no appeals for people
held in Area Nine, Belle. Once you’re in, you’re in for good. I can’t be sure I
would be able to break you out again. If they’ve upgraded their security…”

“I hate to say it, but
your brother is right,” Julian agreed reluctantly. “You need help to figure
this out—and yeah, some bars to keep you contained while we do that wouldn’t
hurt, but no one has ever been released from Area Nine. We can’t risk sending
you there.” But she couldn’t go with Lucien. Her brother was too easily tricked
by her illusions. That left… “I’ll take you. I know a safe house we can use.” When
Lucien started to protest, Julian tugged his gaze away from Mirage’s wide eyes
and met the force of her brother’s without flinching. “I’ll keep her safe. We
both know you can’t contain her, but I can. And I think I can help her get back
under control.”

“That wasn’t how it
looked when she was tossing you across the room with her mind.”

“I didn’t say it would
be easy. Wroth, we both know I’m the only one she can’t escape from. This is
our only play.”

Lucien’s black
expression hardened. “What do you need?”

Julian blinked, a bit
startled by the sudden capitulation. He was used to dealing with heroes who
dithered and wrangled to the bitter end in power plays and politics. It was
oddly refreshing to deal with the snap decisions of the villain class. “Can you
get me her complete file? Everything you know about her activities in the last
year?”

Lucien nodded sharply. “I’ll
meet you at the east side door in three minutes.” He was gone almost before the
last word hit Julian’s ears, his superspeed leaving a breeze in the room.

Julian turned to
Mirage. “Ready?”

“You don’t have to—”

“You can question my
sudden lack of legal obedience later. I certainly plan to. But right now we
have to get you the hell out of here or we lose all options that don’t end in
Area Nine.”

“Okay,” she agreed, but
her eyes still held doubts. He couldn’t blame her. He had doubts of his own. Foremost
among them the concern that he was about to take the first step toward losing
his place as the Defender of Justice. But, like he’d told her, he could worry
about the ethics later. Right now, they didn’t have time for morality debates.

“I need you to turn off
the cameras and cloak us.”

Mirage’s eyes widened,
her mouth dropping open. “You want me to pull an illusion on purpose?”

Her shock struck him
and Julian realized he must be the first person to ask her to
use
her
powers, rather than suppress them, in months. All these weeks, everyone trying
to help her, trying to heal her, and they’d been doing everything they could to
contain her, shove her abilities in a box. Her power capacity had been growing
and she’d had no outlet for it. No wonder the dam kept bursting and she went
into frenzies of uncontrolled use. They’d practically forced her to it.

“Can you do it?” It was
possible she didn’t have the focus for the controlled use of her powers when
she wasn’t under compulsion. In which case, they were pretty much fucked.

But Mirage’s shock
cleared and she smiled—a fierce, feral, wickedly joyful smile. “Oh yeah. I can
do it all right.”

He felt it, the moment
she let her powers off the leash. Nothing changed to his eyes, but the hairs on
his arms lifted as that invisible wave of psychic energy rolled past him.

“Cameras down.” Her
words were sharp, precise and businesslike. There was a minute pause, then,
“And we don’t exist. How does it feel to be invisible, Justice?”

It felt exactly the
same, but then, she wasn’t bending him. Just everyone else in range. She
couldn’t bend him.

At least, in theory,
she couldn’t. Though that brush of power had been huge, a behemoth of energy. He
had to wonder, if she put her mind to it, if she could roll him. She was a tiny
package, but
damn
did she ever pack a wallop. “Let’s go.”

She flashed that
fierce, feral grin and grabbed the hand he held out to her, her grip firm and
confident. She felt
alive
when she was using her powers. He knew that
feeling. Knew how good it could feel to stretch that particular muscle, to push
your own limits. Mirabelle had been denied that for months—at least denied it
when she was in her own mind. No wonder her psyche had stayed broken—it was the
only way her powers could be whole.

They ran down the
corridors, Mirage navigating them through the maze of halls toward the east
door. When the door came into view at the end of a long hall, they saw Lucien
already standing there, rocking on the balls of his feet, with a thick manila
folder in one hand and a chunky black phone in the other.

“Took you long enough,”
Lucien growled, slapping the file into Julian’s hand.  “Eisenmann is
distracting the cops as long as he can, but they’re already in the building.
The doc said to give you this.” He held up the ugly blob of a phone. “It’s a
prototype they’ve been working on. Should be untraceable, but if the line
you’re calling is unsecured, someone might be able to listen in so be careful
what you say. Eisenmann’s numbers were already in there and I programmed mine
in while I was waiting for you. Anyone monitoring our phones will be listening
for Mirabelle’s name, so when you call, she’s Kim, okay?”

Julian nodded, took the
phone and turned, unzipping the duffle still on Mirage’s shoulder and stuffing
the file and the phone on top of the clothes and weapons he saw inside before
zipping it shut again.

He lifted the duffle
off her shoulder, hooking it over his own—it was almost as big as she was and
he didn’t have superstrength for nothing—but he couldn’t miss the hungry look
she shot at the zipper that concealed her file. She wanted to know where she’d
been, what she’d done. And who could blame her?

Maybe he could use her
to solve her own problems. They’d been keeping things from her—that much he was
sure of—but maybe it was time to be honest with Mirage. Stop protecting her and
let her face her own demons. Eisenmann had tried the techniques that worked
with other Mind Bender victims, but now it was time for the Justice method, and
that meant honesty. With that file, he could give her all the information
they’d managed to gather about where she went and what she did when she had her
blackouts. Maybe if she could see it, it would trigger something. Maybe she
would be able to fill in the blanks.

It was time they
stopped treating her like a criminal they were gathering evidence against or an
invalid too fragile to be exposed to her own actions. It was time to trust her
to be able to handle the truth. Trust to earn her trust. So she would let him
in. Let him help her. They were a team now. For better or worse.

He caught her hand,
giving it a quick squeeze, and nodded to Lucien. “We’ll be in touch when we
can. Don’t worry. I’ll guard her with my life.”

Lucien nodded, clasped
him on the shoulder briefly, then wrapped his arms quickly around his sister,
whispering something hurried and low in her ear before releasing her and
stepping back. He opened the door and Julian and Mirage stepped past him into
the night.

And disappeared.

Mirage hadn’t expected
much of Julian’s safe house—which was good, because it wasn’t much. Oh, it
wasn’t a hovel, but it was empty, unlived-in, expressionless, and mildly
depressing because of its oppressively sterile, blank-slate lack of décor. The
apartment filled the second floor above an unused storefront on a street that
looked like it had seen better days. The place itself was nothing special—a box
of space chopped up into rooms. Galley kitchen, dining-slash-living room, and
two small bedrooms with a Jack-and-Jill bath wedged between.
Home sweet
home.

“It’s private,” Justice
commented, as if sensing her lack of enthusiasm about their new digs. “And the
connection to me is so many times removed, it will take weeks before anyone
thinks to look here, if they ever do. We’re safe enough for now.”

He dropped the duffle
on the coffee table. Mirage flopped on the couch and tried to pretend she
wasn’t staring at the bag, wishing she had x-ray vision so she could read her
file.

“Go ahead.”

She whipped her head up
to find Julian watching her watch the duffle. “Sorry?”

“Your file. Go ahead
and take a look. That’s why we brought it.” He unzipped the bag with quick,
efficient movements and flipped the manila folder onto her lap. She slapped her
hands on top of it to keep it from sliding to the floor.

She didn’t look down,
tried not to even feel the worn paper beneath her fingertips. This file had
been her greatest temptation during her moments of clarity these last few
months. She’d thought of stealing a peek a thousand times, but… “Eisenmann said
it could set me back months. That reading about my actions before I could
recall them went against all their protocols—could actually make me fabricate
false memories and confuse things even further.”

“Eisenmann isn’t here
and his methods haven’t done shit for you. I say it’s time we try full
disclosure.”

Julian sat down beside
her on the couch, but she was barely aware of his large, well-muscled body so
close to hers. She couldn’t seem to focus on anything beyond the stack of
papers in her lap. Damn, full disclosure sounded good. She wanted to know what
her life had become, even if she had to read it like a book rather than living
it in memory.

“I could try using some
of my gift,” he suggested, not sounding in the least hesitant, even though the
last time he’d tried, she’d launched him across the room. “Just a little pulse,
like I did at the bank, instead of a full-on attack on the defenses Kevin put
in place. It might be enough to help you sort through what’s true on your own,
rather than trying to force your brain back into shape.”

Mirage pulled her eyes
away from the still-closed file, though her gaze wanted to stick to it like
taffy, stretching but reluctant to release. She studied Julian—the always
virtuous Captain Justice—and though the sight of him was enough to make
something clench eagerly inside her, she couldn’t make sense of the fact that
he was sitting next to her, offering her whatever she needed, whatever it took.

“Why are you doing
this? What do you get out of it?”

Julian’s earnest,
helpful face closed down, his gaze shuttering. “What do you mean?”

“I know you’re a hero
and you’re supposed to just help people out of the goodness of your soul and
all that crap, but why me? Aren’t there other people who need saving more?”

“It’s not about who is
most deserving. It’s about the good we can do.”

“No. No, it isn’t like
that. It’s a choice, who you choose to save and who you leave to the regular
authorities. All supers make choices.”

Her mother had been one
of those choices. Supers had saved hundreds the day of the famous Midtown
Bridge Rescue.
Rescue
—they didn’t even have the decency to call it a
disaster. It was touted as a textbook example of superheroism at its finest,
but her mother had still died. Some hero had screwed up. Made a bad call. Chosen
someone else’s mother, husband, daughter or friend above Amanda Wroth. It was
all choices. Was some other mother dying even now because Justice was here with
her rather than on the streets?

Julian’s eyes held a
caution that said more loudly than words that he knew her mother’s story. It
wasn’t exactly widely publicized—the tragedies that turned villains into
villains rarely were—but Darla had probably told him.

“Everyone deserves to
be saved,” Julian said softly. “But we can’t save everyone. Not even with super
powers. Sometimes… no, not just sometimes. It always has to be about the good
we can do. If you let it be about the people you can’t save, you’ll make
yourself crazy. If you dwell on the failures, the ones who slip through the
cracks… no one is strong enough to bear that weight. Not even with
superstrength.” His words almost seemed to be directed internally rather than
at her, but Mirage felt something deeply buried and darkly bitter begin to
unravel as he went on. “Superstrength without speed or flight or something else
isn’t good for as much as you might think. Sure, I can take a lot of damage and
give a lot back, but how often does a city need a one-man SWAT team when they
have supers like Darla and the Nightwings who can do so much more?”

“The Nightwings don’t
do so much—”

“The Nightwings do a
ton. They just aren’t in the papers as much. I’m the poster boy for heroes,
thanks to Kim. And I was fine being a face the heroes could stand behind, but
my real usefulness isn’t in capturing the bad guys, it’s in convicting,
interrogating. I’m Justice. I find the truth. It isn’t always pretty—in fact,
it’s almost never what we want it to be, but we deserve the truth.
You
deserve
the truth, Mirage. And I’m here because I want to help you find it.”