ALL NOVEL Issue 7 – Seeking Somewhere Scarce
The telepath was taller, heavier, and much more muscular than I was. Her shoes were a couple sizes too big.
I could stick the clothes to my skin so they didn’t flop around and look ill-fitting. A couple precise folds, and the dark undersuit and pastel scrub top actually looked like they fit.
As I stripped her and donned my new duds, my eyes fell on the supplies and drugs around me. Many of the letters and characters on the bottles and boxes ran together in front of me, familiar but totally unintelligible, as if I could recognize them individually, but together they just formed random nonsense with no affiliation in my head.
Are those in English? Assign bonus language, English!, I said to myself, and with a blink of my eyes, the letters and numbers around me suddenly made sense.
Well, shit. Aelryinth had used Polyglot to learn pretty much all the old languages of the world, mainly as a way to try and preserve some of the records and culture therefrom after Human rose to be the one uniting language of the planet, AND the United States had used English for its native language, as well. Naturally it was among the things in the shadows of my replicated memory that I could unlock.
Totally useful and abusable. I was not too proud to abuse it.
A mix of Human and English, and even some other languages on the stuff. The rest would just have to wait...
From then, I just waited in the dark for the sound of an authoritative voice talking to various people by various means, and for the accompanying footsteps to move away from what I remembered was line of sight before the horde of security from other floors could arrive, and I exited the supply room in careful silence. I just followed the red arrows and signs to the nearest emergency exit and the stairs with darting speed that could get around corners faster than he could possibly watch them all.
Now, I could have knocked out a window in a room, but I didn’t want to leave a trail like that. So, I hit the stairs and went up, not down. I wasn’t worried about cameras seeing me for the moment, so I tested my legs, taking the steps three at a time weightlessly, ignoring the stomach that was starting to grumble at me loudly, bouncing from landing to landing as I headed up towards the roof.
Yes, it was locked. One pulse of tight Repulsion, the locking bar pulled back, and I was outside.
I didn’t have full Devasight or Devilsight, so my night vision was quite impeded for the moment, but I didn’t see anything up top here flying around and watching. I was in the black tacwear, so they’d best have good eyes if they were and wanted to see me.
Swearing to myself, the pastel scrubs blew loosely as I hopped over the edge of the building.
I was instinctively used to being able to fly, and had to actually fight down the impulse and trust I had that a fall from any height was of no danger to me whatsoever. Instead, I slapped a hand on the side of the building, turning the jump into more of a spin as I adhered to the façade and my jump became an arc, spinning to impact the side of the building with my feet.
This wasn’t much different from a Spider Climb spell, just requiring some focus. Move, stick, move, release, move, stick, move, release, move...
My Might was more than enough to handle my scrawny body weight with just my arms. I just needed to find a rhythm as I stuck-fell down the opposite side of the building, away from where all the action had taken place.
There were twenty floors to the place, and I’d been on the tenth or something. It wasn’t like walking, as I had to stay very focused on what I was doing. It would have been smarter to be able to do this with just my feet and my hands as controllers, but my knees got in the way of the mess, and in any event, it became something of a test for how fast I could move my hands as I slid down the facing, making sure nothing was looking up at me from below.
No Red Eyes came out, staring at the danger. Seemed fine...
It was late at night, but the sight still made me pause mentally as I regarded it.
Damn. That was a fully intact pre-Fall city. With lights and skyline and cars moving on roads and buildings and light obstruction in the sky and everything.
I think I even saw the blinking lights of passenger jets in the sky over there. Aaaaand something smaller flying and coming this way?
I could also vaguely hear the sound of police sirens in the distance, converging this way.
Well, if you don’t want to be found, the first and best thing to do is to grab some distance. Every mile traveled squares itself in the total area that needs to be searched, so I had to get out of here quickly.
There were a lot of buildings around. If I was able to fly, I could have gotten out of line of sight of this place quickly. I was struck by a silly urge to go lineslinging and somersaulting between them, and almost cuffed myself.
Still, when the guy in the white and gold winged uniform came swooping in towards the hospital, I could only raise an eyebrow.
Was that... a superhero outfit?
I averted my eyes and adopted the pace of someone tired from a long night as I headed down the road away from the place, not drawing any attention to myself. I even looked both ways before crossing the street at the intersection, and headed into the residential area nearby, not far ahead of the incoming police.
Just another nurse working late, going home... and as soon as I was out of sight of the hospital and there was no traffic, I began to run.
------
“Sniper is dead. Good shot, Hawk,” Angel said, entering through the open window the man had been using. He didn’t disturb the scene, other than rapidly moving to make sure the rest of the room was clear. “No sign of anyone else here. Shooter is black, and the gun looks like a Kushite model.”
-Wonderful news,- Hawkeye /sent back dryly. -The blues have secured the bodies of the fliers, too. All black, all Askari-type gear.-
“And they were after a white girl?” Angel carefully opened all the doors and cupboards in the place with his wings, the shimmering psi-reinforced feathers more than capable of doing the job... or slicing a man’s arm or head off, if need be, as well as shielding him against gunfire or most small arms.
-A new mutate is worth more than her weight in gold to anyone pursuing the secret to becoming Powered,- Hawkeye /replied, but his voice was grim. -We don’t know if they were opportunists looking to snatch her for research, or the ones at the original discovery site.-
“The Shieldmen these people aren’t,” Angel said softly. “Sorry, Hawk. I know you had some sympathies for them.”
-Yeah, yeah. Just like you white folks do for the Crux and all.- It was more a sour laugh at himself than a put-down. The two different organizations used the same kinds of words to describe themselves and deride their opponents, but they were both racial supremacists underneath.
Nearly getting shot in the head by an Askari was a swift way to lose your respect for them.
-Hold on, there’s some noise from the blues.-
---
Hawkeye moved out of the hospital room with the two attackers he’d dealt with as they came in, and trotted quickly back to the nurse’s station, the door to the hallway wedged open for the moment. The forensic teams weren’t here or at the other site yet, but they were on the way.
“What’s going on?” he called out in a voice very used to being obeyed. The crowd around a door nearby hurriedly backed away, revealing a couple blues cautiously looking over a woman stripped to her underwear on the floor there amid numerous scattered pillboxes and bottles. She was darkly-skinned, in excellent physical condition, and he could smell burned human flesh in the air.
“Cause of death?” he asked shortly, not entering the room as an officer looked over the dead woman with the bloody, staring eyeballs.
“Two burn marks on her temples, charred black. Judging by her eyes and frazzled hair, I’d say someone ran a couple thousand amps through her brain,” the older of the two cops said, shining a light on one quarter-sized charred area of skin, and then carefully turning the head with a gloved hand to point out the other. A couple of the nurses who had worked emergency care piped up in agreement.
“Well, it looks like we found our psion,” Hawkeye muttered to nobody in particular, able to identify the injuries very clearly, even a dozen feet away. He’d been certain she had escaped the building with their target, but it looked like he’d overthought things.
His eyes flickered as he remembered the sight of the girl taking down that unfortunate nurse, and that green-white electrical flash that had cut the puppet strings of the mindbender instantly. If she had bee-lined it here and taken this woman out, then closed the door before he followed... yeah, yeah, she could have swapped clothes fast, and then stolen out of here herself...
But the instant the psi-blocking had gone down, he’d been back on with Fugit, who had already called in to hospital security and had them all on high alert, watching the cameras. They hadn’t reported anyone moving around, let alone a young woman who definitely needed to eat some.
It was why he had thought the psion had nabbed her, and ‘ported out using some dimension-bending hijinks.
So... maybe she had gotten away, or had someone else come in, taken out the psi, and grabbed her?
The cameras weren’t telling them anything.
Angel /sent to him that the blues were in the sniper’s room, and he’d found nothing. The forensic teams would take over soon enough, and the Askari certainly weren’t going to throw more assets at the problem with two Powered on site and so many police. This operation was blown, they knew it, and they’d just hack the police for the details in the future... and keep looking for the girl, no doubt.
The only question was... where was she now?
-------
This is Los Angeles?
I was looking at the Hollywood sign on the side of a hill in the distance, while scarfing down lots of food at a steady pace.
Finding a supermarket had been the hard part. Getting inside without triggering the alarms had been relatively easy. Disable Device and Open Locks, assign three Ranks to each; electrical powers to subvert the alarm circuit, electrical Attract/Repulse powers to get through the locks in no time, and I was inside.
Vampire’s Veil prevented any cameras or motion sensors from registering me, so I had grabbed me a backpack from their stock, loaded it up with meat, cheese, milk, and water bottles, made sure I was near some public bathrooms, and started eating.
I could have ravenously gobbled everything down at great speed, but I paced myself, partially because I wasn’t actually in a hurry, and partially because shoving twenty pounds of ham into my stomach seemed unhealthy.
I didn’t need the food for ‘energy’, in the normal sense, as my Pact was giving me enough to move around on without burning calories. But I was skinny as heck, grossly underweight, and probably had skeletal issues, given how short I was. What I needed was building blocks to make more meat and bone, and gain some actual weight, as I felt like skin and bones.