Hero (Gone 9)

Dekka poured. Dekka drank.

“Holy Communion in the Church of Caffeine?” Cruz teased.

Dekka nodded. “Damn right.” There was an expectant air that made Dekka frown. “What? What are you two waiting for?”

“We’re kind of . . .” Cruz tilted her head, hearing something, and held up a hand. “Never mind, you’ll see.”

Shade Darby, a white girl with blunt-cut dark hair—she’d hacked away at it herself—and the kind of eyes that drilled holes into you, opened the door to her bedroom, stepped through wearing a Caesars bathrobe, closed the door casually behind her, and said, “Any coffee left?”

“See, Dekka, what we’re doing,” Cruz said as though continuing a conversation, “is waiting to see how much time Shade and Malik have decided to allow before he comes out.”

“Out?” Dekka looked at Armo, who shrugged, causing his cream cheese to tumble down his chest.

Cruz answered with a significant nod toward the door Shade had just closed.

“Huh? Oh. Ahhh,” Dekka said. “I assumed you and Shade would share a room.”

“She got a better offer,” Cruz said.

“No, no, no. Just stop, right now,” Shade warned.

Dekka was not a jovial person, not much given to banter or teasing, but this was too easy to pass up. In a mock-severe voice she said, “You know, Cruz, just because Shade and Malik shared a room, that doesn’t mean anything, you know . . . happened. You shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

“Well, something happened,” Armo said. “I know Malik’s power is causing people pain, but the noises I heard last night didn’t sound like pain.”

“Oh it’s going to be like this, is it?” Shade said, shaking her head. “You realize if I morph I’m fast enough to smack the shit out of all four of you, right?”

At which point Malik came out of the bedroom and Cruz said, “Hah! Three minutes on the dot.”

“Good morning,” Malik said. Malik was African American, a college freshman with adorable ringleted hair, sleepy eyes, and a scary IQ. He and Shade had dated long ago, and broken up because . . . well, because by Shade’s own account she had been obsessive and driven and not above manipulating friends.

Or as Dekka put it: a ruthless bitch.

The person Dekka and the others now spoke to was in some ways not Malik. It was Malik’s morph of himself. The real Malik, the Malik who would emerge if he ever left morph, was a boy who’d been burned so badly doctors had been about to put him in a medically induced coma and allow him to die. The rock had saved him, but at a terrible price. Each of them—with the fascinating exception of Francis—felt the intrusive, overbearing presence of the unseen Dark Watchers whenever they were in morph. Malik lived with that twenty-four/seven so long as he was in morph—and leaving morph would mean an excruciating death.

But at the moment, Malik looked unusually cheerful. So uncharacteristically, stupidly happy that Cruz giggled out loud and the others could not help but grin. It wasn’t prurient leering, Dekka told herself . . . well, okay, in part maybe it was . . . but each of them liked Malik, admired him, and each of them knew that of them all, he was the one who had suffered the most terrible harm. Seeing Malik smile was . . .

Like watching the sun rise.

Malik made a point of saying “Good morning” to Shade in an overly formal way, as though they hadn’t seen each other since yesterday.

“Plausible,” Cruz commented, dryly. “Totally plausible. I know I believed it.”

Dekka drank her coffee and went to the floor-to-ceiling window to look out, and to hide the sadness that had welled up inside her. She was nothing but pleased to see Malik happy, and frankly she enjoyed seeing the eternally cool and self-possessed Shade looking abashed and embarrassed. Served her right. But it inevitably brought personal memories to the surface, memories of her own doomed, lost, one-way love for a girl named Brianna. The Breeze, she’d called herself. Crazy, fearless, reckless Breeze.

Crazy, fearless, and reckless one too many times, my love. One too many times.

Cruz, the girl whose rescue of a baby had become the iconic photo of #ArmageddonVegas, had spent the night alone because the alternative would have been sharing with Armo, and that was not on the agenda, though Dekka had spotted more than one longing look from Cruz directed at the boy who could pass as the fourth Hemsworth brother.

It made Dekka sad seeing Cruz crushing on Armo. Dekka had detected no nastiness or hate in Armo, but that did not mean he would fall for a six-foot-tall transgender Latina. Dekka’s own life had been shadowed by lost love, and she didn’t wish that ache on anyone.

Francis came in, hair wet and face alight with wonder. “There’s like . . . like . . . in the shower,” she began.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s nice,” Dekka muttered.

But Francis was not put off by Dekka’s puritanical gloom in the face of luxury. “Ther

e’s, like, six showerheads! Six! There’s this big wide one in the ceiling and then there are . . .”