Super Powereds: Year 3 (76 page)

                “No, he wouldn’t, but he’s not here to make that choice. We can’t do anything to help him, and they can. Besides, I’m good at reading people, and these four would sooner cut a leg off than intentionally harm their friend.”

                “I’d say a foot,” Roy countered. “We were close, but not 
that 
close.”

                “Does this seem like a time for joking?” Jerome asked.

                “No, but Nick’s not here, so someone had to do it,” Roy said.

                Jerome scoffed. “Nicholas Campbell isn’t the sort of man who jokes around.”

                “That might be, but
Nick
Campbell is,” Alice snapped. “And we’re going to go get him back.”

                Eliza left them to snipe at one another, heading into the bedroom, where the doctor was pulling a thermometer from Nicholas’s mouth. He glanced up at her as she entered, blinking the weariness from his eyes.

                “He’s holding stable.”

                “Good. Listen, we have some new people coming in, specialized consultants. I thought you might want to head out the back before they entered.”

                “We’re on the second floor of an apartment building, what ‘back’ are you referring to?”

                “Our profession sometimes calls for rapid evacuation, so we had a few alterations made to the apartment,” Eliza explained.

                “Good enough for me.” The doctor began putting his things into a bag, the sound of tinkling glass filling the air. He only spoke again once he was done. “Listen, I know the deal on these jobs: I’m not supposed to ask too many questions beyond what I need to know for treatment. But I was doing a test earlier, and noticed something odd; the sort of thing I wouldn’t feel right not passing on. At the same time, I don’t want you to think I was snooping. I’m aware of how that’s viewed.”

                “So long as it’s possible, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt,” Eliza said.

                “Guess that’s the best I can hope for. I was checking his eyes for signs of dilation, and when I pulled back the lids, I found something very out of the ordinary: his irises are glowing with a yellow-gold color they weren’t before. I don’t know if it’s a symptom or something else, and I don’t want to know. Just making you aware.”

                Eliza smiled, a very soft, small expression on her otherwise stoic face, and her eyes darted back toward the living room. Even trapped in his own mind, Nicholas had managed to summon a cavalry.

142.

“Everyone hold tight. I’ve never tried anything like this before, and the ride will probably be bumpy.”

                “You know, I think that’s the exact speech I gave to a girl a few nights—”

                “Roy, not the time.”

                “Sorry, just trying to lighten the mood.”

*             *             *

                Nicholas had finally given up his pointless tugging on the chain, and Nick’s resolve was wearing thin as the small headache turned into a pair of knives stabbing him in the brain. The ice had grown at the same relentless pace, and now it rose over them in full majesty. There was still a sizable space near the top that was uncovered, but most of their view was sheer ice now.

                “I wonder what it will feel like,” Nicholas said, pulling himself up from the ground. “Being wiped out, I mean.”

                “Beats me. When I was stuck in here, it was like drifting through darkness, being stuck in the space right between dreams and waking. Time meant nothing, and I wasn’t particularly inconvenienced, so it probably won’t be so bad.”

                “What you experienced wasn’t a true purge, though. She’s made that abundantly clear.” Nicholas gestured to the spot where Professor Stone’s image had previously appeared to deliver her verdict.

                “Yeah, that’s why I said ‘beats me’ when you asked. Probably, we’ll feel nothing, or we’ll just be stuck in this dome forever. Pre-Lander us will get control and everything will be like it was before.” Nick was surprised by the sadness in his voice. It had been so long since he’d accidentally showed genuine emotion that he wasn’t prepared for it.

                “Here’s hoping we’re just destroyed then,” Nicholas said. “I do not take much shine to the idea of being stuck here until our body dies.”

                “At least the company is amiable.”

                “No offense, but there are a lot of other people I’d prefer to be stuck with.”

                “Ditto,” Nick agreed.

                “Since we’re here though, I do have a question for you,” Nicholas said, turning to look at the man who was so identical and yet so different from him. “Before the chains popped out, you said you weren’t conflicted about who we are, about what we’ve done. How? I’ve read the files, and I’ve met your friends, and nothing I’ve seen would indicate something that would provide such a serious personal shift. We’ve always been devoted to the work of the Family, but it weighs on us just a bit. Why do you seem so much lighter?”

                “Several reasons,” Nick replied. “Personal growth certainly helped, as did getting a little perspective outside of our Vegas life. Not to mention, surviving the HCP meant I didn’t have a lot of time for inner dilemmas. But really, I think it was realizing that I have a place in the world.”

                “I’m going to need a little more than that.”

                “You read the file about when George kidnapped Mary and Hershel, and saw the memory of us fighting him. What I didn’t put in there is that I originally decided not to go. I was going to sit it out, run back to Vegas, and never set foot on Lander’s campus again. Then, when I was sitting in my room, go-bag in my hands, I realized two things: the first was that I didn’t want to leave the people I cared about behind, which was a shocker in itself. The other was the bigger revelation, though. I realized that they needed me. In order to pull off that crazy escape attempt, they needed my brain, my trickery, and my talents. Powerful people, aspiring Heroes, and my criminal skills would be what pulled them from the fire.”

                “That doesn’t sound so surprising to me,” Nicholas remarked.

                “Words don’t really do it justice. It was just the moment of understanding that there was a place in the world between outright criminal and saintly Hero. That it was possible to be a bad guy and do good things. In that moment, I realized I could be my own kind of criminal, my own kind of man, and find a place in the moral spectrum where I made the rules.”

                “Sounds like . . . actually, it sounds like the sort of thing Gerry would get behind.”

                “I think he was trying to teach us that for years before we left,” Nick agreed. “Poor guy, he’s going to have to start all over when this is done.”

                They both looked up at the slowly closing gap in the sky. There was no real time here, yet they still realized that they didn’t have much of it left.

                “Since we’re getting wiped anyway, will you tell me the secret you figured out that was so vital it had to be destroyed?” Nicholas asked. “Nathaniel’s presence and your intrusions made getting anywhere in the research damn near impossible.”

                “Tsk tsk, making excuses about failing a mission,” Nick chided.

                “Technically, I still had another semester.”

                “You know as well as I do that Ms. Pips considers dying without finishing the job to be failure.”

                “Says the one who got taken out first.”

                “Ouch, below the belt,” Nick said. “Don’t feel too bad about not figuring things out, though; I doubt you ever could have.”

                Nicholas made a large gesture of rolling his eyes.

                “I’m not being mean. You just don’t have the perspective I do, and without it, you’d never put the pieces together.”

                “I have nearly all the information you possessed.”

                “That might be true, but you’re missing the empathy,” Nick said.

                “Empathy? That’s the trick to figuring out the big secret?”

                “Understanding emotions is. Not just how to manipulate them, but how they actually impact you. You only got a taste of it in the memories; I lived in a cesspool of the stuff for two years. Hate, friendship, jealousy, devotion, a miasma of the gunk coming from all directions. Being infected was ultimately inevitable.”

                “You’re talking in riddles,” Nicholas accused.

                “Sorry, it’s my final moments of consciousness; I’m allowed to wax philosophical a bit. You know my only real regret right now?”

                “Getting us destroyed?”

                “Not in the slightest. No, I wish I’d never pulled you back to college in the first place. I wish I had just left things as they were when I left Lander. It was all nice and sewn up, but now my friends will be stuck with this fresh, painful ending. They don’t even get another round of goodbyes.”

                As Nick spoke, Nicholas noticed a shadow on the ground beneath him, one growing steadily in size. His eyes darted up, expecting to see the dome finally completing itself, but what met his eyes instead was far more bizarre.

                “If you’re still channeling luck, I think you can stop.”

                Nick glanced at Nicholas, who was still staring up, then followed his gaze through the gap in the dome. There, plummeting toward them at high speeds, was a tangle of bodies belonging to Mary, Hershel, Roy, Vince, and Alice. They shot through the gap and slowed just before landing, all setting down with the lightness of a sunbeam. Nick stared at them all, seeing his friends through his own eyes for the first time in over half a year, and spoke before he could stop himself.

                “This service is completely unacceptable. I called for a ride hours ago. Your manager is going to hear about this.”

                That was all he could get out before the others swarmed him in a hug.

143.

               The moment finally passed, and the group released Nick. Alice spoke first, her voice echoing eerily off the icy landscape. “Okay, I’ll be the one who bites: what the hell is all this, anyway?”

                “I’m not totally sure of that myself,” Nick admitted. “A second chance, maybe, or some sort of test of character?”

                “You’ve never been short on character,” Hershel said.

                “No doubt,” Roy agreed.

                It was at this moment that, amidst all the craziness that was his life, Nick Campbell finally got taken completely by surprise. He jumped back a solid foot, nearly yanking his chain taut in the process, and stared dumbfounded at the two people who were supposed to be one.

                “Yeah, that was about how we reacted too,” Alice said. “Our best guess is that since Mary pulls in minds, not bodies, Roy and Hershel both got to come along for the ride.”

                Nick took a minute to compose himself, reasserting his calm demeanor after having effectively shattered it into pieces. He was out of practice dealing with these weirdos, and it showed.

                “Leaving behind the philosophical and pragmatic questions about Roy and Hershel being two separate people—which I promise you we will definitely be circling back to—when did Mary learn to drag others into her coma-walking power?”

                “A few weeks ago,” Mary said. “I’ve also gotten good enough to do it when people are sleeping, not just rendered unconscious by Rich’s ability.”

                “Well . . . duh. Didn’t you see that possibility the moment you first discovered the power?”

                “Remind me why we’re here to save you again.”

                “Because he’s our friend,” Vince said. He’d been studying the chains that bound Nick, and the point where they were shackled to the hunk of ice. It seemed like perfectly normal frozen water, but even he understood that, in a world composed of thought and imagination, there were bound to be some rules that worked differently. “And while we’re on the subject, we should probably get to work. I don’t know how long that hole in the ceiling will last.”

                The others glanced up and noticed that, while there was still ample room left, the place they’d entered through had grown slightly smaller.

                “Roy, can you come hold this for me?” Vince asked. The taller Daniels brother walked dutifully over and scooped the chain up in his hands. Even resting on Roy’s sizable digits, the ice-chain was disproportionately thick. On instinct, he gave one link a careful squeeze, expecting to feel it bend and crack under the pressure of his enhanced grip. Instead, it held completely firm, as though he weren’t crushing it at all.

                “This stuff is strong,” Roy noted, pulling the chain taut, so there was a large section stretched between his hands.