Shades of Gray - By Jackie Kessler & Caitlin Kittredge Page 0,16
would like him even if he weren’t part of the Network. And so what that Jose thinks Garth is a nutter for even suggesting that they try to stop the chaos in the city?
Garth hugs the cup of coffee closer to him. Jose had nuked up a cup of the instant sludge—best he could do in a pinch—by way of thanks for Garth lending his back. Not his blended beans, of course, but it’ll do. As long as it’s liquid caffeine, Julie will be happy. Last night hadn’t gone well, and Garth frowns as he remembers the way Julie’s tears had sparkled like crystalline jewels as she shouted at him for wanting to get involved.
No, last night hadn’t gone well at all. His side of the bed had been cold, and lonely. Well, he thinks now, a woman holds a grudge tighter than a miser holds money. His da had told him that long and long ago, and it was Jehovah’s own truth. Thus the coffee: the morning-after peace offering. Garth picks his way along Obama Road, ignoring the steady itching of his eyes. Barely a block away from his flat, a mighty crash reverberates on the street, making him throw his arms out for balance. Coffee slops over the cup, but he doesn’t feel the hot sting. His attention is riveted on the two figures who’ve tumbled to the ground in a lover’s knot.
One’s a woman—huge and metallic, but clearly feminine, based on the curves. The other’s a wiry sort in black, complete with a death mask over his face. He’s got a noose around the metal woman’s neck, and she’s scrabbling at the rope that’s strangling the life out of her.
Garth recognizes them from the vids. Steele and the Hangman.
He senses other spectators cautiously gathering like him, watching the schoolyard fight of small gods. But Garth assumes that none of the other witnesses are extrahumans. Not that he’s an extrahuman per se. If he had more of that extra, he wouldn’t be living the life of a normal citizen, now, would he?
“We’re not extrahumans,” Terry, the de facto leader of the Latent Network, told Garth just last night. “It’s not our fight. We stay hidden.”
“How can you say that?” The frustration welled up in Garth, tingeing his words with the brogue of his childhood. “The world is falling to shite, and you’re telling me we’re supposed to sit on our arses and do nothing?”
“Just give thanks that you’re not completely wired,” Terry said, “or you’d be out there with the rest of the superfreaks.”
“You have to get the Network involved.”
“No.”
His fist tightens around the coffee cup, as if in counterpoint to the noose tightening around Steele’s throat.
Behind his sunglasses, Garth’s eyes burn. And he thinks, Fuck it.
Garth strides up to the duo and hurls the steaming coffee into the Hangman’s eyes. The man screeches—more surprise than pain, Garth decides; the mask had to have taken the brunt of the heat—and releases a hand to wipe the sludge from his eyes.
Steele places both her hands around the Hangman’s wrist and squeezes. And the Hangman screams.
Yeah, Garth thinks, stepping back. Now that’s a cry of pain.
Not even a minute later, the Hangman is trussed up with one of his own nooses, whimpering like a baby over his crushed wrist, and Steele is looking around for the man who’d stepped in to distract her opponent.
But Garth McFarlane is long gone.
CHAPTER 7
VIXEN
A human being will never be able to walk through walls or levitate above the ground. Not without certain improvements at the genetic level.
—Matthew Icarus, diary entry dated May 11, 1972
Valerie Vincent hated New Chicago. She hated the cold, the rain, and the constant waft of pollution that blocked the sun. She hated the way the cops treated her like she was no better than the criminals she apprehended. Most of all, she hated her teammates.
Squadron: New Chicago was nothing like Squadron: Orlando Basin. In Orlando, she hadn’t had a real family, but she’d at least had friends. Here, she was the new kid.
Valerie hated being the new kid too.
She shivered inside her skinsuit. It was cut to reveal her midriff and a portion of each flank, a nod to growing up in a city where you could still see and feel the sun—a gleaming, glass city built on stilts over mile upon mile of waving green swamp and razor-sharp palmetto, reclaimed from the urban sprawl of Orlando Proper after Hurricane Axel had leveled most of central Florida.