The Last Hero (Book 2): Rise of the Ultras (13 page)

I
looked
at myself in the mirror.

The sun was rising outside. The snow was falling heavily again. I could hear the first signs of life awakening on the street. Builders whistling as they made their way to construction sites. Horns honking. The constantly audible buzz of Manhattan island just miles across the water.

As I looked into my eyes, I didn’t see Kyle Peters anymore. Well, I did, obviously. I’d not had some kind of face transplant, or pulled one of those transformations that Angel did when she’d confronted me in the Pazza Notte restrooms. I wished I could, but the truth was, I couldn’t.

But the fact was, I didn’t see Kyle Peters anymore staring back at me in that mirror, because instead, I saw Glacies.

In the corner of my eye, I saw the flicker of my television. The news of an escalation of ULTRAbots. More conflicts and showdowns around the world. Two days remained of Mr. Parsons’ promise to capture or destroy every single ULTRA in existence, whether the government knew about them or not. They were cutting it close. To be honest, I didn’t have a clue how many ULTRAs were still left out there. I didn’t know how many ULTRAs there even were in the first place. I’d gone from thinking I was the only one with these crazy abilities to a whole confusing world opening up before my eyes.

It was scary. It was terrifying.

But in a way, it was reassuring to know I wasn’t alone.

Not only was I not alone, but Orion still walked among us.

I walked over to the cabinet where I kept my Glacies gear. A cabinet that I always got a knot in my stomach when I approached. I crouched down. Battled through the many lock and tightenings I put this thing in to make it inaccessible to anyone. My heart pulsed the closer I got to Glacies’ gear. Because I knew what wearing it meant, this time. I knew what it made me. I knew what decision it meant.

A storm was coming. And I couldn’t just stand by and watch it happen.

I opened up the last lock on the cabinet. The ULTRA I’d fought at the scrapyard filled my mind with dread.

“You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into!” he’d laughed. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know what was coming.

But I knew that Orion was right.

If I didn’t fight, I was going to die.

If I didn’t fight, everyone I cared about would die.

If I fought… sure, I could die too. But at least I’d be trying. It’s not like I had a choice anymore.

I held up the Glacies outfit in front of me. Rubbed my hand against its smooth surface, feeling more and more sick as the moments progressed.

I had to do this. I had to be brave. I had to be strong.

I slipped into the gear. And as I put it on, I kept my eyes in the mirror, at my dark hair, the bags under my eyes. At my skinny frame. Because I knew I wouldn’t be taking this outfit off again. This outfit was becoming my skin. This outfit was becoming who I was.

I was Glacies now.

Maybe one day I’d be able to lead a double life again. Maybe there’d be a time where the world would be safe enough for me to live as Kyle Peters. To have friends. To have family. To have a girlfriend. I hoped it would be because I wanted that world. It was the world I’d craved my entire life, and I felt bitter that I’d only had six short months to truly live it in a way close to how I’d dreamed it.

But right now, I had something else I needed to do.

I looked into the mirror. Looked at myself. I wasn’t Kyle Peters in a Glacies outfit; I wasn’t a person with ULTRA abilities.

I was Glacies.

I closed my eyes. Held my breath. Counted down from three, then remembered where Orion told me to meet him at seven a.m. if I really wanted to go ahead with this.

I saw my mom in my mind. I saw Damon. Avi. Ellicia. I saw everyone I cared about.

I’d be back for them. I was doing this
for
them.

“I love you,” I whispered under my breath, tears marking the edges of my mask.

And then I slammed my hands together and disappeared to where Orion wanted me to go.

To my new life.

To Glacies.

M
ight be
something to do with me being an extremely dangerous non-person with terrifying abilities, but wherever I went, I couldn’t help the feeling I was being watched.

The alleyway where Orion told me to meet him at seven a.m. when we parted last night was still dark, but signs of light were emerging in the sky. The alleyway was hardly the kind of place I imagined Orion, the most renowned ULTRA of all time, hanging around. It smelled like stale pee. There were trash cans overflowing with rubbish. I swore I saw rats creeping along underneath them, reminding me of the scrapyard I’d fought off the rival ULTRA just hours ago.

I walked further down the alleyway. Even though I was wearing my Glacies gear and even though I was camouflaged, I still felt exposed. The ULTRAbots had changed the meaning of being camouflaged. They’d made it into something else entirely—something without guarantee. I had to be on guard at all times.

I walked further down the alleyway. Looked at the note Orion had slipped into my hand before he’d vanished hours ago.
Down side of Benash.
I looked up at the diner on my right, the Wellington hotel across 7th Avenue, as Manhattan braced for another busy, snowy day. Definitely Benash. Definitely an alleyway.

So where was Orion?

I leaned against the wall to my right. Watched as the first signs of life started to creep past the alleyway, a day at work starting for everyone here. None of them looked down the alleyway towards me. But all of them had this weird look of fear on their faces. I knew why. It was two days until Mr. Parsons’ deadline. Two days until the ULTRA threat was abolished forever.

I knew things weren’t gonna be that easy. I’d spent long enough in this suit now to know when something was off. And something most definitely was off.

But what could I do? All I could do was wait for Orion. Wait for him to show his face.

Wherever he was.

I saw people in their windows above. Snow came down on me, cold and lumpy. And the longer I waited, as seven a.m. stretched into eight, as the streets got even busier, I grew more and more worried that something had gone wrong. Orion didn’t seem like the kind to stitch me up. He had opportunities to get me out of the way if he’d wanted to. So where was he?

I walked away from the wall. Paced down the alleyway. Looked for a loose flag or some secret kind of basement entrance that I’d been missing all along.

I didn’t find anything. Not a thing.

I started to worry then that something had happened. Orion seemed worried when I met him. Maybe that was just his way, but it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that the ULTRAbots had caught on to him. I wondered if he’d be able to fight them off. He was still strong, but his power had weakened. He wasn’t what he used to be but he was still
who
he used to be. I couldn’t think of a greater loss to the world than the loss of Orion, so I couldn’t think about it too much.

Then, I started to worry that maybe I had been stitched up all along. What if that guy
wasn’t
really Orion? What if he wasn’t even Orion at all, but someone else? Someone imitating him? It didn’t make total sense. If he wanted me out of the way, he could’ve done it in that container, or left the electricity-firing ULTRA to finish me off.

He hadn’t.

But then, where was he?

I waited a little while longer, the nerves in full flow. And the longer I waited, the more uncertain I grew of coming here at all. I was stupid. Sure, I’d chosen to be Glacies, but not like this. This wasn’t what I had in mind when I agreed to give Orion a chance in his Resistance, whatever the hell that was. This wasn’t the tightly oiled army I imagined.

I went to walk away, to give up, when I saw something standing at the end of the alleyway.

I froze. Froze, from head to toe, as I tried to comprehend what it was I was looking at.

There was something at the end of the alleyway.

A large man. Seven-foot, at least. Dressed in a suit. Wearing a bowler hat. Long arms, right down past his knees. A completely pale face.

A blank face with no expressions, with nothing, other than some long, sharp teeth.

He was coming toward me.

I
’d seen
a lot of scary shit in the last few days, but this creepy, long-armed, pale-faced guy with sharp teeth in his boiled egg face? Yeah. He definitely topped it.

He walked towards me quickly, and getting quicker by the second. He was dressed in a black suit, and his long arms swayed by his sides. The hair on my arms stood on end. I tasted bitterness in my mouth. For some reason, this guy reminded me of someone I’d seen in my nightmares. A video game I’d played one night at Avi’s that gave me the creeps for months and years to come.

And here he was.

I stepped back. I wanted to fight, but weirdly, 7th Avenue at the end of the alleyway was blurred like it wasn’t even there at all. All sounds around me were muffled, like I was trapped in a bubble that I couldn’t get out of. Suddenly, I became aware that I could only do one thing right now.

Get the hell out of this alleyway.

I turned around to run when I saw another of these men walking down the other side of the alleyway.

He was just the same as the man on the other side. Suited. At least seven feet tall. Long arms dangling by his side, almost trailing along the ground. A pale face with no eyes, just a mouth full of dagger-like teeth, some of them etched with blood.

My breathing grew tensed and forced. My heart raced faster than I thought it’d ever done before.

I needed to get away. Quick.

I closed my eyes and tried to teleport.

A splitting headache tore through my body.

I gasped. Fell to the ground. My vision became blurred. The sounds around me went even more muffled. In my mouth, I tasted blood.

I looked up at the approaching men. They were so close now. They were shifting, glitching, like they
were
a computer game. Their teeth rattled together, click click clicking as they got closer.

I didn’t want to go towards any of them but I couldn’t teleport away. It hurt too much. So I was going to have to face up to one of them. Fly at them. I didn’t exactly have a choice.

I held my breath.

And then I flew in the direction of the man on the right.

I threw all my force at him. Suddenly, I felt myself shaking off the pain that’d split through my skull just moments ago. I was Glacies. I was strong enough to handle these people, or whatever they were. I was strong enough to…

I fell to the ground, mid-flight.

I fell to the ground because of what I saw.

The man with the sharp teeth wasn’t a man with sharp teeth anymore.

He was my sister, Cassie.

She stood there looking at me, tears pouring down her face. Behind her, the ground lifted into the sky, as a huge white light approached.

“Go, Kyle!” she screamed. “Get away!”

I wanted to help her. I knew it wasn’t rational and knew something was wrong because Cassie was dead, but I wanted to help her, I wanted to help her so bad because she was my sister and I couldn’t just leave her.

I tried to shift but I was stuck. Completely frozen to the spot.

I saw the light right behind Cassie. The light from the Great Blast, only slower than I remembered it.

I tried to drag my right foot along. Tried to yank it up, but it was stuck.

When I looked down, what I saw nearly made me throw up.

Mike Beacon was below me. He reached out for me, clutched at my foot. His face was covered in dust and ash, as well as scratches and cuts. I could tell from the paleness of his skin that he was dead.

But there wasn’t just one Mike Beacon. There were thousands of Mike Beacons, all crowded down there, all reaching up to me, dragging me down.

“You killed me, Kyle,” he shouted; all of them shouted. “You did this to me. You did this to me!”

I heard laughter, then. Looked up and saw Cassie standing there. Her face was covered in blood. Behind her were the two men with the long arms, the sharp teeth. Both of them were waving at me while Cassie danced on the spot, twirling like a ballerina.

“YOU DID THIS TO ME!” Mike Beacon screamed in a high-pitched squeal. “YOU DID THIS YOU DID THIS YOU DID THIS!”

Cassie danced.

The sharp-toothed men waved.

I wanted to fight. I wanted to get away. I wanted to be anywhere but here.

I knew I was strong. I knew I could do this.

But then I looked into Cassie’s eyes, so far away, and I felt my grip slipping.

Mike Beacon dragged me down into the abyss below.

I was surrounded by darkness.

I
felt
my lungs fill with water, but at least I knew I was alive.

I opened my eyes. Tried to gasp for air. Someone was standing over me. Someone tall. A dark figure dressed in black. They were saying something. To me? I wasn’t sure. But it seemed familiar. It seemed like I’d been here before; like I’d felt like this before, a long time ago. I wasn’t sure what it meant. I wasn’t sure why I felt like I did. I just knew I was alive, and that was something.

My eyes adjusted and I saw it was Orion standing over me.

I coughed. Sat upright and spat out stringy phlegm on the concrete flooring beside me.

Orion patted my back, hard. “That’s it. Get it up. Get it all up.”

I threw up on the floor. My head ached like mad. I wasn’t sure what’d happened just before when I’d seen all those horrible things in the alleyway. I wasn’t sure what they meant.

“It’s okay. You’re back with us now.”

I realized Orion’s voice was echoing. When I lifted my head, I saw that I was inside. It was quite a small room, with no windows. Just a flickering light bulb dangling from the ceiling, swaying from side to side.

But I wasn’t alone in this room.

People stood around me. Men. Women. All of them… different, somehow.

As Orion patted my back and helped me get the rest of the phlegm from my chest, I saw what these people were.

“ULTRAs,” I muttered.

“He’s awful weak for someone who’d s’posed to be our savior,” a man said. He was standing in the middle of the crowd. Well built, with a short buzz cut and bigger muscles than I’d ever seen. As I looked at him, I saw his hands turn to stone, then back to flesh again. He must’ve been in his twenties.

“Give him a break,” one of the others said—a woman who shot around the room with radical speed. She had black hair and was dressed in white. She looked around my age. “We were all just scared kids once upon a time.”

“But we didn’t have a planet to save,” another voice said. A guy, with a booming deep voice. He had dark, greasy hair and rounded glasses perched on his protruding bony nose. He looked a little younger than me, but his face looked hard, like he wasn’t a guy to mess with. I saw blades creep out of his skin, like he was some kind of human hedgehog. If I hadn’t already seen some weird shit over the last few months, I’d definitely have passed out right now. He looked familiar, though, and I realized I’d seen him—and the stoney guy—fighting in the sky when I’d been drinking milkshake.

“Give the boy some peace,” Orion said, raising a hand. “He’s been through a lot. I told you to go easy on him with the nightmares, Vortex.”

I saw who Orion was looking at. A rather small, slight girl with long ginger hair and a freckly face. She can’t have been much older than me, but she had a creepy look about her. I knew just from looking at her that she’d been the one to create those awful, nightmarish visions I’d had outside however-long-ago.

“I don’t do easy,” she said. “Just hard. And painful. You were interesting. You have a lot of guilt in you. I can read it like a book.”

She clicked her fingers and I flinched.

“Ignore Vortex,” Orion said. “She can be hard to handle at first.”

I sat back. Leaned against the wall. My head hurt, and I couldn’t shake the taste and smell of sick. “Where… where am I?”

“You’re at our base. Far, far away from the streets of New York.”

“Where, exactly?”

“You don’t have to know that,” Orion said. “Nobody does. Just meet where we met this morning and I will come for you.”

“And if you don’t?”

“Yeah,” the speeding woman said. “We’ve mentioned that to him before too. Never listens.”

“It’s the only way I can guarantee your safety. And even then, it isn’t an absolute guarantee.”

I wanted to argue, to tell Orion that I thought his methods were shitty, but I didn’t have the strength in me.

“Those things I saw. Why would you do that?”

Vortex smiled, and I saw her yellow teeth. She let out a witchlike chuckle. “Really got to you, huh?”

“We wanted to test your strength,” Orion said. “It’s all good and well having the physical ability, but the ability to face your nightmares, to stick them out and fight them instead of running away? That’s something.”

“I tried to run away. Believe me.”

“But something held you down. A part of your resolve held you down and kept you rooted to the spot. Even if you weren’t aware of it, the very fact that you remained in that alleyway for one reason or other is exactly the sign we were looking for.”

“Mike Beacon’s damned hands held me down in the alleyway. That’s all.”

“Huh?”

I shook my head. “Never mind. Just… It’s not gonna be a regular thing, is it?”

I saw a couple of the other ULTRAs smile.

“Believe me, kid,” the guy with the rock-like hands said. “If it were a regular thing, I’d’ve been outta here a long time ago.”

I saw some of the ULTRAs seemed to be chatting now, like they were accepting my presence. But others—like the man with the bladed hands and another guy with flames across his palms, also around my age—looked at me with disdain. I knew why it was.

“What happened,” I said, clearing my throat. “To Spark. To… to Angel. I’m sorry—”

“Don’t say you’re sorry,” a skinny woman with water dripping from her fingertips said. “You say sorry by action. Not by words.”

“And Glacies being here right now is a start of that process,” Orion said, the impatience clear to hear in his voice.

I looked around at the group. At Vortex. At the guy with the ability to turn his body to stone, the woman bolting around, the woman dripping water from her fingertips, who hadn’t spoken yet. I looked at the man with the blades sprouting from his hands.

“Got something to ask?” the man with the bladed hands said.

“I just…”

“Go on,” he continued. “Spit it out.”

“Well, the Resistance. When Orion—”

“Vesper,” everyone said, simultaneously.

I saw them all glaring at me, and I figured that even though everyone knew who Orion was here, we were all supposed to refer to him by his new name. Nice way to start. Way to go, Kyle.

“When
Vesper
mentioned the Resistance. I just thought there’d be… well, more of you.”

A few chuckles around the room. A few shakes of the head.

“Well there
were
two more,” the flamed-handed person said. I could see flames flickering in his palms, and wondered what destruction he could cause with them. He was young, too, about my age. Dark hair, pretty good looking guy in truth, a lot better built than me. He was wearing a leather jacket and a white T-shirt underneath. “And you kinda let ’em down.”

“There were others,” Orion said. “A long time ago. But this is all that’s left of us now. All that’s left of us to fight the ULTRAbots, as well as stop the rogue ULTRAs in their tracks.”

“Those rogue ULTRAs,” I said, standing now. “What are they all about?”

Orion shrugged. He paced around the room. “We have settled on the theory that many of them are ULTRAs who have been imprisoned in a place called Area 64 for many years. They have escaped, and now they are attacking the very people who put them in there.”

“But that doesn’t make total sense.”

“Right,” Orion said. “There is something amiss. Something wrong. Some of those ULTRAs, I’ve never seen in my life. All I know is they are dangerous, and we have to stop them.”

“I’m about ready to put my damned fist through their faces,” the rock-handed guy said.

“We don’t kill,” Orion corrected him. “We imprison. We interrogate. We do not kill.”

A few grumbles. A few shakes of the head. “About time we changed that rule,” the woman with water dripping from her fingers said.

Orion walked up to me. Stood right opposite. “You have a choice, Glacies. A choice I have told you about many times before, but a choice you’ve held off making for so long.”

“Because he’s a frightened little flower.” Vortex giggled.

“You join our fight. You lead us to battle against the ULTRAbots, who are our most immediate threat. We have been trodden on for a long time. We have been stamped on, attacked. Our numbers are low, but together, we are more powerful than anything they can throw at us because we have the power of decision and thought. We can fight. We can defeat them. But we need you.”

I looked around at the ULTRAs again. This world wasn’t for me. It was surreal. It was scary. It was unlike anything I’d ever had to adjust to.

But if I wanted to survive—if I wanted to save the people I loved—I had a duty. A responsibility.

I had to embrace Glacies.

“What do you say?” Orion asked. “Is your heart in this?”

I swallowed a lump in my throat. Thought about Mom. About Dad. About Damon and Avi and Ellicia and everything I’d fought so hard for.

And then I thought about what happened to Mike Beacon, what happened to Spark, what happened to Angel, and what happened to my sister, Cassie.

What I could do to prevent all those things happening again to other families, tearing more lives apart.

“I’m in,” I said.

For the first time, even though he was behind a dark mask, I got the sense that Orion was smiling.

“Good,” he said. “Then let’s get started.”