Shades of Gray - By Jackie Kessler & Caitlin Kittredge Page 0,12
serial killer. “You don’t know anything, you Shadow freak.”
“Hey now,” Meteorite said. “No call for getting nasty.”
“I don’t trust her,” Hornblower said, his piercing gaze lancing Jet. “She’s unstable. Always has been. She’ll turn on us faster than Slider can run.”
“Speaking of Slider,” Jet said, casting one last look at Hornblower before pointedly turning away from him, “she’s one of three I took down this morning.”
“Rogue?” Firebug said. “Or rabid?”
It was a fine line between the two. But Jet and the others had agreed that the extrahumans who were merely lashing out at the system were rogues—wannabe anarchists, born-again criminals, petty terrorists who liked the attention. Dangerous, but manageable—possibly even convertible. The rabids, though, were the ones who had lost their minds when their brainwashing stopped. They were the ones Jet and the others had to rein in as quickly as possible.
“Rabid,” Jet said. “Were and White Hot were borderline.”
Frostbite blinked. “You went up against Were?”
She nodded.
He held her gaze for a moment, then said, “I’m sorry.”
A sad smile flitted across her lips. For all that Derek hated her, part of him remembered that at one time, they’d been friends—her and Iri, and Samson and Were, and Frostbite and Red Lotus. “Thanks.”
The others gave their reports, and Meteorite checked off their list of active Squadron members in the Americas. Out of the 412 names, 36 had been marked as either “incarcerated” (for the rabids already delivered to the police) or “pursuing” (for the rogues whom they were trying to talk down from the ledge.) That just left 378 to go. And that didn’t take into account any of the missing Academy extrahumans—the students who hadn’t earned their hero status yet, or any of the Ops staff who still held their powers even though they were off fieldwork. That brought the number over a thousand.
Jet wanted to sob with frustration.
“There’s more bad news,” Meteorite said. “Everyman’s been making the rounds again. Wurtham’s all over the place, and the demonstrations are getting more popular. They’re giving out badges now.” She snorted. “Badges. The world has gone to shit, and Everyman is marketing.”
“Language,” Steele sighed.
“Everyman runs a tight campaign,” Frostbite said. “Always has. Nothing like preaching fear to really capture the minds and hearts of the brainless masses.”
“Everyman is nothing new,” Steele said. “We can ignore them. The larger threat is the rabids. On top of that is how we’re supposed to work with the police and now the National Guard when they don’t trust us as far as they can spit.”
“The Everyman Society is more dangerous than you know,” Jet said tersely. “And that’s because of a man named Martin Moore.”
For the next five minutes, Jet recounted her failed attempt to save New Chicago Tribune reporter Lynda Kidder, and how one of Corp’s techies, Martin Moore, had worked with the humans-first organization initially to kidnap, then inject, Kidder with an experimental serum—one that had mutated her into a monster.
She didn’t mention how she’d killed Kidder in self-defense. That was still too raw.
“We know that our former masters were working with Everyman,” Jet said through clenched teeth, ignoring how her head screamed even at the barest hint of slandering Corp-Co. “Whether they sanctioned Moore’s work with Everyman remains unknown. And we suspect this serum is still out there. If so, it poses a real threat.”
“Even if they spaz out and inject people with that sludge, it’s just normals pretending to be extra.” Hornblower snorted his derision. “What’s the big?”
“The big, Tyler,” Frostbite said, “is that the normals are innocent citizens. If they get juiced with this serum, we have to fight them.”
“We? Oh, that’s good. How long’s it been since you’ve been out of your grays, Tinkerbell?”
“How long’s it been since you actually thought before you opened your mouth, Tyler?”
“I don’t even want to know what you put in your mouth, fairy.”
“Boys,” Firebug hissed. “Come on now. Play nice, or Meteorite will take away our toys.”
Meteorite held up her hands. “Don’t look at me. No way am I getting caught in that pissing contest.”
“We don’t have time for this,” Jet growled. “There’s more than a thousand extrahumans unaccounted for. Let’s finish our business and get back to work.”
She was only a little surprised that both men actually listened to her.
“Just as high a priority as reining in the rabids,” she said, “is finding Martin Moore.”
“Working on it,” Frostbite said. “I still have my personal back door to Corp’s network. Meteorite and I’ve been downloading files.”