Hero (Gone 9)

They paused and looked back at him.

“The bug man likes sugar.”

“Why do you say that?” Dekka asked.

Jason tilted his head back and forth and stuck his hands in his back pockets. “Well, I know a guy who sometimes gets into a certain bistro kitchen in the terminal after they close. This guy knows the combination to their door lock. He never takes enough to be noticed, just a little of this and a little of that. But this guy I know was in the kitchen when the bug man came in. I, my friend, this guy—”

“We’re not the cops, Jason,” Dekka interrupted. “We don’t care if you take food.”

“Well then, I am the guy, of course. I hid, right? Bug Man comes in and there’s an open five-pound bag of sugar on the prep table, and he, you know, the bugs, dude, they went crazy for it.”

“Interesting. Thanks.”

“Got any spare change?”

“No pockets,” Dekka pointed out.

They walked on, back into deeper, emptier darkness, and now they moved stealthily, saying nothing. Ahead the darkness became gray. Then, after a curve in the tracks they saw a square of light: the end of the tunnel. And on one side of the tunnel someone was smoking.

“Sentry,” Simone whispered.

Dekka pointed at herself. Of the three of them she was the one most able to move without making a sound. Even so the sentry spotted her and yelled, “Who is that? Who’s there?”

Dekka heard the unmistakable metallic sound of a pistol being cocked, and she hesitated. If the man started blasting away down the tunnel he could easily hit one of them. Worse yet, he might hit the tank she was carrying on her back, and that would be very bad. She did not want to hurt him, certainly did not want to kill him, but with the weapons available—her powers, those of Armo and Simone, and the flamethrowers, she had limited options.

“Come to me,” Dekka said.

“Yeah, right.”

“Look, man, I don’t want to—”

BAM! BAM!

He fired two shots and Dekka reacted instantly. She raised her hands. From deep in her throat came a feline growl ascending to a whine. The man dissolved. Came apart. With a wet sound like a meat cleaver wielded by Shade at top speed, the sentry became chunks of bloody meat, half of which landed on the platform, the rest fell onto the tracks.

“Goddammit,” Dekka snarled. “Let’s hope Vector didn’t hear the gunshots! Simone, text the group that we’re moving! I’m going in. Count to ten and follow me. That way anyone with guns will have given themselves away.”

A man lay like so much stew meat. She had done that.

Not the time.

As Dekka walked ahead, the tunnel’s acoustics allowed her to overhear Simone saying, “That girl is fierce!”

And Armo, with a laugh, answered, “Yeah, a little bit, huh?”

CHAPTER 28

No Battle Plan . . .

FRANCIS AND MALIK were near the station, just a block away, lurking in the doorway, waiting for the appointed time. Each was nursing a Starbucks cup and trying to look inconspicuous—not easy on a street with no more than two pedestrians per block. The city was not dead; there were still businesses open, and even the occasional yellow cab.

“

I was here—in Manhattan, I mean—when I was ten,” Malik said. “My mom had a business thing here. I can’t get over how empty it all seems. This whole area should be jammed with people all rushing one direction or the other. Heading to their car or their train, heading home.”

“If I lived here, I’d sure get out,” Francis said. Immediately she wished she’d kept quiet. She hadn’t meant to engage Malik in conversation. Malik intimidated her. In the Over There she had seen the true, unmorphed Malik, and it had evoked horror and pity in equal measure. But still more intimidating to Francis was the fact that Malik was supersmart. Or at least that’s how he seemed to her, not that she’d ever had experience dealing with supersmart people. And, too, all the others in the group seemed smart to her: smart and brave and good, none of those being character traits she’d really witnessed in her life before joining the Rockborn Gang.

Francis had nothing in common with Malik. He came from Chicago North Shore money, she came from a biker gang’s desert compound. He was educated, a college freshman, and she . . . well, she’d attended school through most of fifth grade, but for several years since then her mother had insisted she was homeschooling Francis. Of course that was total crap. She hadn’t been taught math or social studies or English. What she’d learned with the gang was that the threat of violence, including rape, was a constant, and that her mother offered only weak protection. Francis was pretty sure that was not on any official school curriculum.