He reaches for me, but I shrug him off. My heart is beating way too fast. This could go way bad, way quick.
“Please, just listen.” He waits until I’m looking him in the eye before he continues. “You know me,” he says, his voice taking on this weird, hypnotic tone. “We’ve met before.”
His eyes start to burn brighter and brighter. Oh crap. He must be a villain, and one with a psy power. The vilest kind. Fear and anger collide inside me as I wonder what to do about him trying to mess with my head. How to play this? I can’t exactly tell him I’m—
Suddenly, the floor beneath my feet shudders violently, knocking me off balance. I lurch forward into Dark-and-Scowly’s arms. He catches me, grabs my upper arms, just as a concussion wave of air and sound hits us.
That sounded—and felt—like a bomb went off in the lab. If we weren’t a hundred feet underground and shielded by every protection science and superheroes can create, I’d think the supervillain Quake had struck. But that’s impossible.
Then again, impossible doesn’t always apply in the superhero world. After all, impossible didn’t keep Dark-and-Scowly from being where he doesn’t belong.
Suddenly, every alarm in the facility blares. I freak. The lab! All that research—Mom’s and mine—is priceless. The superhero blood samples alone are more valuable than anything else in the building.
Panic overrides judgment and I push away, but his grip only tightens. The jerk. A little super strength would be really useful right now.
“You can’t go in there.”
“Who are you?” I demand, struggling to get out of his grasp. If he really is a villain, I don’t want him near me or this lab. Not with what villains are capable of. “What have you done?”
He doesn’t answer. More pissed than ever, I fake left and pull right. He follows my fake-out, and as his hair swings with the momentum, I see the mark I’d been looking for earlier. Not under his right ear like the superheroes. Under his left.
Shit.
“You’re a villain.” It’s not a question. I struggle harder. “What did you do? Let me go!”
“Don’t!” he shouts above the roaring sirens. “If you go in there, you could get hurt. They’re upset—”
I might not have superpowers, but I know how to knee a guy in the nuts. Before he can finish his sentence, he’s doubled over, gasping for breath. I dash for the corner, but I don’t get two steps before his hand clamps around my elbow.
“No, Kenna, you can’t!” he shouts. “Trust me. If you—”
Anger overwhelms me. I’ve spent my whole life running from villains—from what they’ve done to my family. From what they might do to me. And I’m sick of it. I’m fed up with the whole steer-clear-of-anything-remotely-dangerous thing my mom’s had me doing for so long.
Just because I don’t have a power doesn’t mean I’m powerless.
I turn on him with a furious growl and, using the karate-chop technique Rebel taught me, land a solid hit to the side of his neck. He releases me and I wrench open the door to the janitor’s closet, use my entire body weight to shove him inside, then slam the door in his stunned face.
Holding the door handle with one hand, I use my other to dig out my security badge. I run it over the reader pad until I hear the lock engage. I leave him pounding against the door.
Who’s the helpless ordinary now?
I sprint down the hall and around the corner to find the area outside the lab full of smoke. I hold my arm up to my face, covering my mouth with my sleeve as I look around.
The windows that line the wall between the lab and the hall have shattered, covering the floor with a million shards of safety glass. No ordinary bomb could have done that. Whoever that v-bag in the closet is, he obviously has help. There’s another villain here. One with some kind of explosive power.
For a moment, fear paralyzes me. A villain like that killed my father, used his evil power to blow Dad up right in front of me. That same villain would have killed me if the heroes hadn’t come along and stopped him. I was only four, but I remember watching my dad die. One moment he was yelling for me to run. And the next he was gone, nothing more than scorch marks on the tile.
Rage rips through me at the memory, burning away the last of my fear and sending me careening straight toward the lab. Villains have already taken my father from me. No way are they getting their disgusting paws on my mother’s lab—and my research—too. Between the smoke and the strobe lights from the fire alarms, the lab looks like a better-lit version of the club Rebel always wants to go to. Or a designated disaster area.
Through the haze, I pull open the door. I know every inch of the lab by heart. Even smoke-blind, I can find my way to the emergency ventilation button.