Chapter 15

  I woke up in the middle of the night.

  I had fallen asleep in the van. That probably wasn’t a good sign.

  Maybe I needed to start taking multivitamins.

  I came fully awake when I tried to move. The skin across my chest and especially my back, felt like it was being stretched too tight.

  I bumped my hand on the door as I climbed out, and the blister there flared in sharp reminder that it hadn’t magically disappeared.

  I started to make a comment at my own expense, but it died on my lips.

  I groaned and stumbled, my sore, stiff body rebelling at every movement. How long had I slept in there?

  The clock showed 4:14, which would have meant more if I had any idea what time I’d gotten back.

  Then I did something I hadn’t done since my first day out. I left the suit in the van and went to get ready for bed.

  Taking off the underlayer was a painful ordeal. It had melted in places, and my burned skin did not appreciate moving in any direction.

  I was close to cutting the clothes off before I finally managed to peel them free.

  I looked at the burned, acrid-smelling fabric for a moment before dropping it into the trash.

  As I caught my breath I saw the man in the mirror. Tired, old. Stupid.

  Then I stepped into the hot water of the shower.

  That was also a fun experience. My chest, back, and hand suddenly bloomed with pain. It went from throbbing in the water to pins and needles out of it.

  Ow.

  I took a shuddering breath and ran my hands over my face.

  Wait.

  I looked down at my black metal hand and let out another groan. I’d forgotten to remove my prosthetic.

  It should have been waterproof, but still. I fumbled with it, my back pulling tight as I tried to disconnect it. My wet fingers slipped on the slick latches, turning the whole thing into a slow, painful mess.

  With a sharp pop, it came free, slid through my sore hand, and clattered onto the bathroom floor outside the shower.

  “Whatever.” I swallowed the more explosive word that wanted to come out.

  “Close enough.”

  Out of the shower, I stood in front of the mirror and wiped it clear of fog. The burn on my chest ran from just over my heart up to my neck, an ugly stretch of red, blistered skin that looked too tight for the body underneath.

  I turned, trying to get a better look at my back.

  It was just as bad, longer. A raw stripe running from my shoulder down to my lower back.

  I didn’t want to imagine what would have happened if those attacks had hit me unarmored.

  I wouldn’t be complaining about them. That's for sure.

  I woke up sometime in the afternoon.

  I moved slowly to the kitchen, poured coffee, and scraped whatever cereal I had left into a bowl.

  If anything, it hurt more, but most of the pain had settled into a deep, stubborn stiffness.

  I sat at my desk and woke the computer. The news began playing the moment the screen lit up.

  I ate and watched, feeling almost nervous about what I was about to hear.

  “…the whole thing left a nasty taste in our poor pup’s mouth,” the anchor concluded, wrapping up whatever story she’d been on. A golden retriever filled the screen, chasing a ball in slow motion.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  I washed the last of my painkillers down with coffee and tossed the empty bottle toward the garbage, not caring whether it made it.

  I felt lopsided without my arm.

  “Recapping our major story today: the rogue known as Grey Knight engaged in a destructive confrontation with the villainess Electrocoil last night in an industrial area near the Newhook residential district.”

  “I’m a rogue now, am I?” I muttered around a mouthful of cereal.

  “The fighting caused extensive property damage, most notably the massive power outage that affected over two hundred thousand people.” The screen shifted to a map of Ravenport, entire districts glowing red.

  “This was most problematic for Newhook Hospital, which lost power and suffered a failure in its backup generators, leaving many patients without critical systems.”

  The footage changed again. Three nurses sat on concrete steps outside the building, leaning into each other. Their uniforms are disheveled and dirty. Their faces looked hollow with exhaustion. One of them had her head buried in her hands. I couldn’t tell if she was crying.

  The guilt dropped into my stomach like a stone.

  My jaw tightened as the possible death tolls ran through my head.

  “Currently no deaths have been reported, but staff were forced to manually assist patients’ breathing when life-support equipment went offline.”

  I set the bowl down.

  I wasn’t hungry anymore.

  I hadn’t meant for the fight to end in a substation.

  “But that wasn’t all. A fire broke out and spread rapidly before it could be contained. The destroyed industrial block was, thankfully, already slated for decommission, so little infrastructure was lost. However, experts are concerned about what harmful materials may have been released into the air.”

  Thankfully.

  I stood anyway. My heart had climbed into my throat.

  The screen cut to footage of younger heroes helping elderly residents out of a building and onto buses.

  “The blaze spread far enough that part of the residential area was placed under a late-night evacuation order, including the Happy Valley Retirement Home, where junior heroes were called in to assist.”

  I turned the TV off. I couldn’t hear any more.

  I stood there, breathing hard, leaning on the back of my chair.

  How did it get this bad?

  All that damage. All that potential death.

  I just wanted to make things better. Safer.

  And here I was, doing the exact kind of collateral damage I hated the heroes for.

  The exact same.

  I don’t have the output for this kind of destruction. I specifically avoided that kind of equipment.

  The collateral damage was the whole reason I started this.

  And I did it anyway.

  How did it get this bad?

  What’s the point of pushing on if I’m doing as much damage as the heroes?

  The only difference is my hands are bloody now.

  Pfft. Hand.

  I paced the room, the urge to move warring with the knowledge I had nowhere to go.

  I let out a shaky breath. I needed to.

  I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.

  I finally collapsed into my chair, head in my hand.

  I don’t know.

  I eventually got up. I had to.

  I had to pee.

  After that, I went through the motions.

  I accomplished nothing important.

  I checked the email Jack had sent and slowly worked through the coding for the parts she’d asked for.

  It was something to do, anything to keep my mind from spiraling.

  The spiral broke with knocking.

  Banging, really.

  Coming from my back door.

  The only person who ever showed up here was Jack, and I’d just confirmed by email that her parts wouldn’t be done until the end of the week.

  So I approached the garage sliding door with a knot of apprehension as another trio of bangs rattled the metal.

  The little windows set into the door were frosted, meant to let in light and nothing else. Tonight, there wasn’t much of that either.

  I hesitated.

  Police?

  Heroes?

  Would they even bother knocking?

  I pushed open the side door beside the sliding one and poked my head out into the dark, rainy night.

  It wasn’t the police.

  It wasn’t a hero.

  It was a woman, brown hair tied in a loose ponytail, tanned skin, dark eyes.

  Completely soaked.

  Most noticeable of all, she was in a wheelchair.

  “Uh… can I help you?” I asked.

  “Oh, thank God.” She came alive at the sound of my voice.

  “Look, I was trying to get out more, and I took a few wrong turns and—” she gestured vaguely at the rain, at herself, at the whole miserable night “—now it’s pouring and I have no idea where the next bus stop is and my phone’s—”

  I held up my hands. It still took a few seconds for the verbal diarrhea to run out of steam.

  “Okay…” I said, trying to untangle everything she’d just dumped on me.

  “You want…?” I prompted.

  “Can I come in and wait for my ride? It’s raining, and everyone else looks like they’ve gone home.”

  I glanced past her at the other units, dark windows, empty lots, not a single sign of life.

  I sighed. “Damn,” I muttered.

  “Yeah. Come on in.”

  I stepped fully out into the rain to hold the door wide enough for her to roll through.

  She wheeled inside and immediately started shaking water from her jacket.

  “Wow, this is a lot of equipment,” she said, already looking around the shop.

  “Yeah. Expensive, too,” I replied, shutting the door behind her.

  My eyes flicked, almost on reflex, to make sure the suit room was closed.

  I stood beside her, awkward.

  “Do you need a phone?” I asked, trying to remember where mine was.

  “No! Thank you—but I do need a charger.”

  She shrugged out of her jacket, shook it once, and draped it over one of the chair handles.

  “Mine died,” she said, holding up her phone. “Stupid thing. I charged it before I left, and I only watched videos for a bit in the park!”

  I caught a glimpse of the screen. Same model as mine.

  “Okay. Give me a minute.”

  I went upstairs to the office to dig out a cable. By the time I came back down, she’d rolled over to the computer and was staring at the running program.

  When she noticed me, she jumped a little—then brightened instantly.

  “Oh—hey! Sorry, this just looks so complicated. How do you even know what all of this means?”

  I held out the cable. “Years in school,” I said, then realized she couldn’t do anything with it by itself.

  I switched hands, using my left, and asked for her phone.

  She dropped it into my palm, then grabbed my wrist.

  “Holy cow! You’ve got a robot arm!”

  She pushed my sleeve up without asking and turned the prosthetic this way and that.

  “Dude, where’d you get this? It’s sick!”

  I tried not to growl while she inspected it.

  “There’s no way this isn’t custom-made!”

  She finally let go.

  “My friend’s missing his arm too.”

  She lifted her own right arm and pointed to the elbow. “Well—he’s still got the elbow.”

  Her finger traced along her forearm like she was mapping it out.

  “Maybe I could get him hooked up with something like this?”

  “I built it myself,” I managed to say. “I used to make them.”

  I cut myself off and turned to plug her phone in before she could pull anything else out of me.

  “Oh, cool! You must be really good with tools.” She smiled up at me.

  “I have to be. It’s how I make a living.”

  “I bet.”

  There were a few seconds of silence as she looked at me, then blinked and her smile came back.

  “Sorry, I just realized I’m interrupting your work!” She pointed at the auto-caster currently making some fitted parts for Jack.

  “What are you making? More robot stuff like your arm?” she asked.

  “No. The arm’s a one-of-a-kind thing… it’s auto parts for a business across the street,” I explained.

  She looked at me, head cocked. “Ah, that must make shipping easy. That van can’t hold too much product.”

  I glanced at the van and nodded. “Yeah. I mostly do small jobs, so I rarely need to move a lot—or anything big.”

  “All this equipment and nothing large?” she asked, smile still in place.

  “I… er… can and have done bigger orders.” My suit filled my mind. “It’s whatever I’m contracted for.”

  “You want something hot to drink?” I said quickly, trying to change the topic. “I have some semi-fresh coffee.”

  “A bit late for coffee, unfortunately…” Her eyes locked onto my neck. “That burn looks painful.”

  My hand went up to cover the skin poking out from under my collar. “Yeah. It wasn’t fun.”

  “How’d someone doing tool and die get a nasty burn like that?”

  “Ah… it happened somewhere else.” I waved the question off.

  “Oh?” Her smile deepened. “Where?”

  “I…” I scrambled for something believable. “Helping a friend with some wiring. Got zapped for my trouble.”

  She just looked at me.

  Her gaze made a slow lap of the workshop, lingering a moment on the closed door before drifting on.

  When she looked back at me the smile was gone, the almost bubbly personality gone with it.

  “So,” she said, “where’s the suit?”