Nathan shook his head. “No magic has that kind of reach,” he said. “Even unclassified types have limits. If you felt the need to be honest, it was your own.” Nathan gave me a look like he couldn’t imagine what I had to lie about.

  Reading between the lines—like you did when Nathan was speaking—there was no magic that messed with people’s thoughts or emotions. What I had felt the other night had not been magic.

  It didn’t matter, I told myself, and shrugged at Nathan, letting him know I was dropping the subject entirely. I wasn’t planning on spending much more time with the rebels. I didn’t need to. Now that Tia was back with the heroes, I would have my nights pretty filled. I knew my friend was intending to talk to me at every interval about the pieces she was planning to make and test out.

  For once, I was looking forward to the Tia rants about different machinery and parts. This time, she would talk about the tech she was using to help the heroes. I nodded goodbye to Nathan and left the tackle shop through the front door, watching Tia finish up her weekly transaction with Pete.

  The old man gave me a look over and then a nod of welcome, dismissing me quickly. Like everyone else, he was only interested in Tia, but I wasn’t taking offense to it today, too glad that soon, we would be a team again. People would notice both of us.

  Chapter 14

  We entered the heroes meeting a few minutes late. I wasn’t sure whether it was because of Tia’s hesitation or her flair for the dramatic. Either way, walking into the harbor street where she’d once declared she was a technopath, I could see the moment Dennovan realized she was back.

  He had been leaning against the wall, probably attempting to think up insults to hurl at me for the night—because you know an idiot like Dennovan doesn’t think them up on the spot—when his head moved to take us in. The moment he saw there were two of us walking forward, and not one, he straightened, coming off the wall.

  “You’re back,” he said, ignoring me for Tia.

  She’d promised me she would come and be a hero, but I was still a little concerned about her thoughts. Would she take this opportunity to prove how little she actually wanted to be a hero? Would she insult the hoverboard idiot? I hoped the second.

  But Tia was less committal than that. “Looks like,” she said, her voice coming out robotic and deep, like my own. Originally, she’d done it because of the 'no girls' rule the heroes adopted, but Angel knew that secret already. Since she told me she didn't mind—being a technopath was more of a problem than being a girl—I wondered what her reasons were for keeping our allies in the dark.

  My reasoning for keeping my voice changed was simple: I could only imagine Dennovan’s mocking would increase if he knew I was female. He seemed like a guy to take offense to the fact I could shoot better than him as a sixteen-year-old girl.

  I shot a glare he couldn’t see through my visor, which only deepened when he said, “Good. You can take over holding things still for Trueshot. He can’t seem to shoot straight when I do it.”

  “Maybe he’s aiming for you and not the demon,” Tia said. Through the voice changer, you couldn’t hear the sarcasm I knew Tia put into the words, meaning they came out blunt and monotone, but my snort of laughter had to tell him it was a joke. If not, the wave Tia gave was a good sign. When Angel turned his hood in her direction, she looked up at him. “You were thinking it, too,” she told the flying hero.

  “I was,” Angel responded.

  What? Come on, man, some back-up any prior night would have been helpful. Now it was Angel I glared at, and though he could not have seen it, he must have felt my annoyance, because he turned his hood to me. As always with Angel, it hung far enough over his face that you had to wonder whether he could see at all, or if he just used the way things felt on the wind to ‘see.’

  But he said nothing, which was too like Angel to take offense. At least now with Tia, I would not be alone in dealing with Dennovan’s taunts. She would either be mocked, too, or help me sling them back. And unlike Tia as herself, I had confidence in Tia as Blackout throwing insults back at him.

  That was what she’d agreed to be called. Blackout. I’d told her my many ideas, and they had gotten the sarcastic sighs or glares I had expected, depending on the idea. But whatever concern Tia had felt for the name when we were at the Lookout, she didn’t feel now. It fit the hero she wanted to be. She’d caused the blackout of the Upper City, and now she was going to own it.

  “There’s a reason they fear technopaths,” she’d said. “And if the only way I can stay safe is by reminding them of that, then that’s what I’ll do.”

  I’d looked at my friend and wondered who the hell she was. She’d been pulling on her hero suit and was touching each piece fondly, like she was remembering the things we did together while she wore it. No longer was she the Tia who ran and hid. It was like fighting back was giving her a new personality, and for the first time, I’d wondered how her fear shaped the way she dealt with things.

  It had been a different fear, before the Upper City technopath knew who she was, but it had been fear, nonetheless. Fear that I would find out she was the daughter of the infamous Mitchells. There was the fear that the heroes would find her. Or the fear that Upper City would find her.

  She’d been dealing with fear ever since I’d known her.

  Now, the worst had happened. Upper City knew exactly where she was and how to get to her. She’d cowered, but now we had a plan for them. I wondered whether I would start seeing confident Tia. The one who didn’t hide.

  But if this was confident Tia, then even confident Tia was afraid of demons. When we hit the first pack, I felt her freeze up beside me. Fortunately, they were lower-level demons, so dealt with easily, but the fact she’d froze up didn’t elude Dennovan.

  “Do we have to go through an entire night of you being useless again before we get the Blackout who was good?” he asked. He’d folded his arms across his chest, head tilted, and his expression hidden behind a visor.

  Opening my mouth to tell him where to shove it, I was beaten to the punch by Angel, who called, “Incoming.” His voice had a bit of an edge to it, so instead of giving Dennovan the dressing down he so sorely deserved, I looked up at our hovering friend.

  He turned his head in our direction when I looked, but was flitting between us and the group of demons that were clearly heading our way.

  “We’ll need backup,” he said.

  I blinked, but held up my guns. Backup? Since when had we ever needed backup? We had taken on larger groups of demons before. Sure, that was when Flashfire was with us, but we were better now. This would be no problem.

  About to tell him we would be fine and wave off any attempt to call for backup, Dennovan said, “Go. We’ll hold them and fall back to the tackle shop.”

  Tia was nodding. “I’ve got some things here for bigger groups I have been wanting to try out.” She looked up at Angel. “We’ll be fine.” Her voice, deep and male, made her sound far more confident than I knew she felt. It was the trick with these voice changers. I swore they masked emotion more than they should.

  Angel didn’t waste time and left, his winds taking him down an alley.

  The tackle shop was a meeting point for heroes who needed more assistance in the harbor area. It was a midpoint of sorts, with some of the larger surrounding buildings set as heat sources that the demons would flock to. Because of that, there were usually two or three groups in the area that could hear a call from there.

  Unlike the wooded area outside the city, the Harbour didn’t have as many escape points. So the heroes had devised a way that they could still maintain backup.

  It was things like this that I was learning more of as I worked my way into the hero job. The Heroes of Undercity were actually far more strategically minded than I thought. While most of it was that they had the time to figure it out—it had been fifty years since the demons had first attacked—it was more impressive when you considered that the Upper City continually tried to destroy them.

  “We’ve never needed backup before,” I said, pulling out a second gun.

  “Angel rarely suggests it,” Dennovan said. He mounted his hoverboard, his head moving slightly as he continued watching the area ahead of us. “But I’ve learned that when he does, it’s not a guess.”

  It was the confidence in his allies that had built up over months. Maybe that was what he had been mourning with Rockslide and Flashfire gone. He didn’t know how well to trust us yet since we were new. Could we look at a group of demons and make an accurate assessment of whether we needed backup?

  I considered the thought when I felt the wind shift.

  “Behind us,” I yelled and ducked at the claw headed for my arm.

  Dennovan caught on quickly, which was lucky because another one was on top of him in moments. He slid away from it on his hoverboard, causing the thing to follow his movements with another attempted swipe. Tia, seeing the demon’s attention was on the hoverboard hero, regained the ability to move and swung her bolas, entangling its feet. It fell to the floor hard, and rock enclosed it.

  I barely saw it, dodging down again to escape another claw coming my way. I stepped away, my back up against a wall before I ducked down and shot at the creature. My bullets hit its thigh, doing nothing, as the armor of the demon repelled the bullet.

  Though the demon barely felt the shot, the moment of hesitation gave me the chance to pull away. It was then that I got a good look at the thing.

  Tall as I was, dark, with wicked claws on each hand. Its eyes seemed to eat the darkness. Half hunched over, its nose stretched into a muzzle, giving the demon the look of being half human, half dog. Its skin was more patchwork than the demons I knew, with pieces less dark than others. It regarded me for a moment before attacking again. But while it looked like a simple demon, there was something about its movements I didn’t like.

  Another round of dodging pulled me back, before a right sweep left me ducking again. This time, its claw followed me, digging into the metal at my shoulder and ripping away a part of the armor. It had judged my movement based on what I had done before.

  It was intelligent, and it was resistant to bullets.

  I sent a shot behind me at it, but it missed with no magic behind it. As I moved away, my leg brushed something on the floor. Dennovan took a shot at the demon I was facing, and it turned. With the attention off me—the demon deciding that the hoverboard hero was a better target—I was able to look at what had almost tripped me.

  On the floor was the demon that Tia had caught in the bolas, similar, but smaller than the one I had dodged. It was not struggling wildly against the bonds. It was pulling at them, trying to dislodge the weights holding it in place. It was only because of Tia’s power over metal that the thing had not yet succeeded. Already the claws had made deep grooves in Dennovan’s rock.

  These things were smarter than the average demon, and they were learning while fighting us. I shot at the struggling demon below me, but the bullet glanced away. I shot again, catching it in the eye—which I judged to be the weakest point—but it took another two shots before it was dust. They were more intelligent and resilient than any of the demons I’d ever fought.

  I blinked, glad we had one down before looking up to see another five entering the street.

  Angel was right. We needed backup.

  Now.

  Chapter 15

  “Five more,” I called, reaching down to pick up Tia’s bolas. She had thrown a ground trap to catch the one Dennovan had been dodging and caught it in the cables that came out of the trap. It took three shots through the eye until it was dead. Their weak points were far fewer and more resistant than any demon, and it worried me should anything more get through the Outer Wall. I was almost useless already against these and the other armored types.

  “Five?” The demon dead now, Dennovan turned, and I heard his curse when he sighted the things walking from the alley. He raised his gun, but judging his ability to hit from his position to be low, he lowered it and looked at Tia and me.

  I moved to Tia’s side, knowing she’d need me here for the mental support if not the physical. Her head turned slightly, and I knew that the look she was throwing me under her visor was one of thanks. But if me standing here was the cost of my friend being back with the heroes, it was one I would pay gladly.

  Unless, of course, five higher demons were walking toward us, and we were without the person who usually scouted these things. I didn’t have enough wind magic to tell whether there was any more than this, and I cursed Angel’s brevity that he hadn’t thought to tell us how many were coming. “These are the same ones as we had the other night.” I hoped Dennovan would know that meant they were resistant to bullets, because I didn’t have the time to tell him. “We need to retreat or find some way to hold them.”

  When Dennovan aimed his gun and shot the demons, I decided my warning went straight over his head. Until he grunted and said, “They are the armored ones.”

  Right. He’d heard me, he’d understood—he just hadn’t believed me.

  Tia had pulled something from her packs hanging from her waist. Looking very much like the flash bombs she used, I heard her suck in a breath. “I need wind magic keeping this far, far away from us,” she said. I hesitated, not wanting to say mine was useless for something like this, but knowing I needed to anyway. She could not count on me to keep anything away with my wind.

  However, it seemed I was not the only one with wind magic. “I can,” Dennovan said. He moved forward a little, and my hate for him rose one level higher. Of course the guy had good earth magic and better wind magic than I did. That he was a cocky ass just made everything that much worse.

  There was no time to think about how much I hated the hoverboard moron, so instead, I pulled up my gun, pulling the second one from my side. Taking three bullets each, I was going to need more than the four that remained in my one gun. In fact, it was probably going to be a fight where I chose my shots again, and I wasn’t sure whether that was something I wanted to do with things this fast and intelligent. Maybe it was time to invest in a third gun.

  The things were moving at us with both the speed of a small, dexterous demon, and the intelligence that if they came straight at us, they would be shot. So instead, they were moving in a relative zigzag, which made aiming difficult.

  Not for Tia, though. The small metal ball she threw didn’t need the accuracy of bullets. It sailed toward the demons before she pulled on her magic, and it dropped like a stone before them. As it hit the ground, the top half of the tennis ball-sized metal spun, and water came from the top, much like the sprinklers I’d seen in movies.

  Unsure of what that was going to do to help, I almost asked, before screaming roars of pain brought my attention back to the demons twenty yards away. Watching them writhe, I raised my gun and shot while they were not moving. Dennovan, despite being in a similar state of shock, did the same, and between us, we took all five down in seconds. Whatever Tia had sprayed on them with her invention had demolished their armor, reverting them to the one-shot kill grade demons they looked like.

  I looked at the gun in my hand, that seconds ago couldn't land a single shot on the demons, much less kill them all, then to Tia who was surveying her destruction with a nod. My gaze moved to Dennovan, and his visor too was turned to the technopath. I hoped his face behind it was as shocked as mine was.

  We were not the only ones impressed.

  “What the hell was that?” came a voice from behind us.

  I turned to see another group of heroes with Angel trailing behind. As intended, he had brought back heroes, which would have been a godsend had Tia’s strange liquid not brought them to their knees. Now, they looked to have caught the end of the show, leaving them questioning what they were even doing here.

  Tia, completely missing the combined shock of every person present tilted her head. “Sulfuric acid," she said brightly.

  There was a splutter from the hero at the front, as Tia threw a second of the tennis ball shaped devices into the area of the acid. It twisted and rained liquid down on the area, the original acid hissing and spitting on contact.

  “Do I even want to know?” Dennovan asked blandly.

  Tia was still smiling. I could tell behind the visor that she was happy with the results of her field testing. “That was a base.” After a long silence where it became clear not a single person was following, she continued. “Acid plus a base will give an exothermic reaction and neutralize both materials.” She walked forward. “I figured it was better than leaving a liquid that could burn skin off on the streets. And if the first one didn’t work, I was interested to know whether the combination would attract them like fire magic.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That makes sense.” Not. Who thinks of these things?

  Dennovan flashed me a look, but I was already turning to look over the newcomer heroes. I’d spent so long watching the heroes, I’d thought I’d known them all. But like with Dennovan, hearing them speak sometimes crushed my illusions of what the heroes really were.

  Others, like the one time I’d met Slingshot, had reminded me about everything I loved about the heroes. It had always been my dream to work with the all-female group, and speaking with her, I’d felt that desire flare again. You got the feeling with Slingshot that she was a jovial person, completely offsetting her teammate Jackal’s icy attitude.

  But even talking to the Ice Queen herself had been a thrill. Not to mention Archer, who used a literal bow and arrow to shoot demons, and Grim, who spoke as little as Angel. The one time we’d met them, it had been short, but I had to have described the three-minute interaction to Tia at least seven times. It was one of the few things she’d looked at with interest when everything else had been dead to her.

 

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