He waved all that away. “Whatever, that’s up to you. I don’t tell anyone what to do.”
“But what if you could?” Cruz blurted. “I mean, if somehow it was up to you?”
“Up to me?” He scooped up what was left of the cake—no one else was getting any part of it—and thought about it. “Look, you’re Cruz. Right? I mean, that’s who I know, I don’t know some other person you might be, or I don’t know . . . it’s all confusing.”
Cruz grinned. “Yeah, I know. It’s confusing for me too.”
They fell silent for a while as Armo licked up icing. Then he said, “We could try.”
“Try what?”
“There are no Bug Man bugs here. We could stop being Berserker Bear and Transit. Just for a minute, but you can’t tell Dekka because she’d give me that look of hers.”
“You want to de-morph.”
“For a minute.” And already Cruz saw the changes begin. The face that had been an uneasy melding of the huma
n and the ursine became more human. The fur that covered him seemed to be sucked into him like a million strands of spaghetti. He shrank from absurdly large to merely very large.
And then, there he was. And there she was, still hiding behind her false face.
This could go so wrong.
Yes, it could. But we could both be dead an hour from now. What the hell are you scared of?
She dropped the mask, resuming her normal appearance. “So,” she said with forced nonchalance, “are we going to do this kiss thing?”
They were.
And nothing went wrong.
Many blocks south, Markovic waited and expanded. He had no way of counting his individual parts, but he definitely felt the damage the Rockborn Gang had done. He’d played it cool and confident, but the truth was their attack had shocked him.
He’d overlooked the fact that all his human supporters would be knocked out of the action right from the start by Malik. He hadn’t imagined the gang would have flamethrowers. He’d underestimated just how hard it was to cope with Shade Darby’s speed. In fact he was fairly sure the speed demon had been in and out of Grand Central at least once more and no one had even seen her, let alone been able to stop her.
And the skinny little girl, the one who looked like she was twelve, what she had done to one of Markovic’s few useful mutant recruits, the guy who’d called himself Bengal Tiger, had been scary. Tiger had not returned, and Vector had no idea what she had done with him. Another of his recruits, Knightmare, had gone to the bathroom just before the battle and had not returned, and Markovic suspected that little girl had somehow taken him out of the game, just as she’d done with Tiger.
What was it she was doing? She’d grabbed a handful of Tiger’s fur and he’d disappeared. A second later the girl was back. And nothing more was seen or heard of Tiger or Knightmare.
The little girl has big powers.
Markovic did not like making mistakes. Mistakes rattled his self-confidence. He knew, deep down in his bones—well, his figurative bones—that he should attack now and take out the Rockborn Gang. But unless they were damned fools, they’d have relocated, and he didn’t yet know where they were.
Worst of all, Markovic had one great mystery hanging over him like his own personal sword of Damocles: he did not know where he was, him, the mind, the thinking part, the identity. Was he equally present in each of his thousands of parts? Would the gang have to kill all of his insect cells in order to kill him? Or was there some critical number beyond which he would not survive?
“We’re not going after them?” The middle-aged black man who called himself Mirror was now Markovic’s most powerful remaining ally. But he, too, had a problem: he could only become—mirror—a mutant when in their physical presence. He’d gotten lucky being able to morph Shade Darby, but she would be unlikely to give him a second chance to catch her moving slowly enough.
“Don’t like it here?” Markovic asked in his sinister, reedy voice.
“I don’t like waiting for them to come back,” Mirror, whose real name was Frank Poole, said. He was standing on the top level of the balcony beside Vector. He assumed he had a right to that position, and the truth was that Markovic couldn’t afford to alienate him—he was a bit short of effective allies. Flying Fish might be of some use if she’d carry a gun, but she had refused thus far. Which left Batwing, who, as far as Markovic could tell, was capable of nothing but growing awkwardly large wings.
My gang sucks.
“I like it just fine,” Mirror said. “But I want more opportunities. I want to morph Lesbokitty. I want to see what that’s like.”
“Yes, well, I have greater ambitions,” Markovic said, unable or unwilling to disguise his condescension. “Do something useful: go out in the streets and find me hostages.”
“How am I going to do that?”