There were things to be learned about this power and how to exploit it. For example, she understood now that she could be effectively invisible, somewhat like an airplane propeller: an observer would feel the wind, hear the sound, and see something, but that something would be at most a blur. And the human brain had certain weaknesses that could be exploited, like persistence of vision, the human tendency to go on seeing what they’ve already seen; and confirmation bias, the human tendency to see only what they expected to see. People could be amazingly blind to what was right in front of their faces.
&n
bsp; Ten miles. It passed in forty-five seconds. She decelerated for the last half mile, tapped the county line sign, turned around, and raced back.
“One hundred and seven seconds,” Cruz said, holding up the phone as proof.
Shade said something in her hyper-speed buzz, then de-morphed and repeated it. “About eight hundred miles an hour. Give or take. Faster in a straight line where I don’t have to turn around.”
“I suppose you’ve noticed you’re about half naked,” Cruz said.
“Yeah.” Shade tugged at her jeans. The waist was broken at the back seam, the knees were gone, the cuffs were shredded. About all that was left intact of her T-shirt was the banded neck. “I need to find something stretchable enough to handle the morph but strong enough and tight-fitting enough to do distances at speed. Plus, I had to run part of the way with my hand on my head to hold on to the camera, so I need better straps. And probably boots, not sneakers.” Her sneakers were in tatters as well.
“Look on Amazon under ‘superhero clothing,’” Cruz said, the closest she’d come to a joke in days.
“I broke the sound barrier,” Shade said. “It was weird. I found out something about the body, though: the morph, it adjusts automatically. I could feel that I was losing contact with the ground, and then the shape of my body changed. Like a spoiler on a race car. The faster I went, the more down-pressure.”
“Swell,” Cruz said. “So?”
Shade flopped down beside Cruz on the steps. “So, I don’t know. I guess I thought it might clear my head.” She sighed. “The thing is, Cruz, we have no way to win. No matter how clever we are, sooner or later the government will get us. They can make lots of mistakes and still be the government. One mistake and we’re done.”
“Is that really our number-one enemy now, the government?”
“The others like us, the mutants, the Rockborn, they aren’t after us, not unless they work for the government. That starfish kid has no idea where we are and no interest in us.”
“So, what, we’re going to overthrow the government?” Cruz asked archly, obviously assuming it was snark. When Shade did not immediately shoot it down, Cruz’s expression darkened.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“The world is changing, Cruz. Has changed. Too much of the rock is out there, not just here, but around the world. The creeps in Washington will decide the only safe thing to do is kill us all.”
“Shade, we have laws, you know. The Constitution? All that stuff?”
“Do we?” Shade wondered aloud. She shook her head. “If you go about two hundred miles north from here you get to Manzanar, which is where the government locked up American citizens who happened to be of Japanese ancestry during World War II. The Constitution got over that, but lately it’s been pretty tattered and beat up. No, the government will start killing us off unless we join them. They have to.”
Cruz shifted uncomfortably, as the concrete had numbed her behind. Then she stood up, feeling the need to move. “So maybe we join up?”
“Do you really think the government won’t start using the Rockborn against regular people? You would make an amazing spy, for example. I could blow through someone’s house and pick up evidence—or plant phony evidence. Or kill someone, for that matter. The possibilities are endless. And they’d only accept us if they could control us, make slaves of us.”
“Okay, so we run off to some tropical island where no one has ever heard of the Rockborn.”
“Cruz, there is no place on earth where people haven’t heard of us. Certainly no place the CIA or whoever can’t follow us.”
Cruz walked away for a few steps, turned, and came back. “So? So we just hide until they catch us and kill us?”
“No. We need the public. People. We need the people to back us; that will make it harder for the government to just murder us.”
“And?”
Shade shrugged. “We need to do something big, something that will show that we can’t be screwed with, and it has to be something good and righteous that will make people . . .” She petered out.
“Love us?” Cruz said wryly. “Love a white girl who can go eight hundred miles an hour, a trans Latina who can turn invisible or appear as anyone, and a black boy who can send out blasts of unbearable pain? We’re not exactly the Avengers, here, Shade. So, unless you’re planning on curing cancer in your spare time, I’m not seeing this.”
But Shade wasn’t listening; she was thinking out loud. “If we could take down and deliver Tom Peaks, or better yet, that starfish kid. Or if we could pull off some huge rescue, which, yeah, isn’t so easy unless there just happens to be some big fire, earthquake, whatever, conveniently happening right where we are. Or . . .”
One of the depressing lessons they had learned was that life was not like comic books, where it seemed there was always some emergency requiring a superhero. When some extreme emergency occurred it was never near enough for them to do anything about it. Spider-Man could web-sling around Manhattan and always happen across some sort of crime being committed, but Malik—being Malik—had run the numbers, and it seemed statistically that Shade could race around any given city for a week and not happen to arrive just as a crime was about to start.
Malik’s conclusion had been grim. “The fact is that superheroes are only really useful if there are supervillains. The whole super thing is a net loss for the human race. Basically Magneto had it right—humans will always hate and fear mutants with powers, and for good reason.”