CHAPTER 26
IRIDIUM
What do villains do when they’re not trying to take over the world? Do they ever get a chance to relax? Or are they constantly looking for a new opportunity to get rich, or to seize power, or to make a statement?
Lynda Kidder, “Flight of the Blackbird,” New Chicago Tribune, July 2, 2112
Iridium waved her wristlet at the warehouse’s big doors and they rolled back, silent in their tracks. Taser followed her in, close but not too close—arm’s length, the distance it would take to reach out and snap her neck. “Who trained you?” she asked.
Taser faltered and cocked his head. “Nobody trained me. I’m a one-man show.”
“You move like military,” said Iridium as the lights flickered on. “Or maybe cop. You an ex-cop with a beef, Taser? Trying to reprogram the system?” There were other, less savory possibilities, of course—the explanation of how he’d evaded Corp long enough to grow to adulthood couldn’t be all rainbows and roses. There were rumors of gene therapy to keep you off the scanners, back-alley surgeries in places like Bangkok 10, removal of the portion of the brain that gave extrahumans that extra.
Taser laughed. “You’re adorable when you’re interrogating someone.”
Iridium took off her wristlet and rubbed the joint underneath. Her comm followed, her belt with its old-fashioned picklocks, cash, credits, and fake ID, and the steel baton she kept strapped to her leg under the unikilt.
Taser whistled. “For a renegade antihero, you sure pack a lot of crap.”
“At least I didn’t steal my crap from Corp,” said Iridium with a pointed look at Taser’s armor.
“This?” He tapped his breastplate. “Fell off a truck. I bought it in the gray market. Got the bill of sale right here.” He started to unstrap the armor but she held up her hand.
“Never mind.” She mounted the rickety metal stairs to the enclosed second floor.
Taser sauntered around the workshop, stopping by the large table near the back. He picked up the neural inhibitor lying there and turned it over in his hands. “These things are illegal.”
“Yeah, and so is dressing up like a ninja and playing hero, but you don’t see me complaining.” Iridium turned back at the door of her bedroom. “Make yourself at home, as long as it doesn’t involve touching my things.”
She slid the opaque glass door to and watched Taser’s shadow move away to explore the rest of the workshop.
Iridium took her time undoing her unikilt and sliding it off, courteously ignoring the shuffling and muffled thud as Taser searched her hideout.
She’d do the same, in his position.
Iridium pushed Light into the bioluminescent gel on the walls, causing it to glow with green undertones and illuminate her bedroom in soft contrast to the tube lighting in the warehouse.
In her plain white underwear, Iridium unpinned her hair and let the black waves fall and brush her shoulder blades. Her curls were sticky with sweat and pollution. Staring at herself in the mirror over her dresser, she touched her fingertips to the two-inch puckered scar on her breastbone. Corp had offered to remove it when she came of age and went on active duty; scarred female heroes didn’t brand well.
She’d told them exactly where they could stick their removal surgery. She had other scars, too—a Talon cutter in her lower back when a motorcycle chieftain in Little Shinjuku took exception to a rabid on his turf; the pale line across her knuckles where she’d fallen off a hover and dragged her hand along the pavement back when she was six.
Her memory flashed to that day—her father had carried her into the house, and while her mother chewed on her lip and worried about the carpet, he’d slapped a cauterizer patch on her hand and held her close when she screamed. The bandages were usually worse than the cuts themselves, but it had healed almost completely.
Taser rapped on the glass. “You alive in there?”
Iridium grabbed a T-shirt and cotton pants from a drawer and slipped them on. “You finished searching my place?”
Taser slid the door open. “No booby traps. I’m disappointed, darlin’.”
“I’ll have the gas-deploying wall sconces and the pit of live tigers up and running next time you visit me, I promise.”
“So, I’ve been wondering,” Taser said, following Iridium into the small square of mats that served as her practice area. “What exactly are we planning?”
Iridium shrugged as she took a practice swing at the heavy bag. “I’m not sure yet. But big. It will be big. Public. And embarrassing.”
Taser stopped the bag with one arm. “Do you ever relax?”
Iridium glared at him. “Having a masked vigilante trailing after me isn’t very conducive.”
“What do you do for fun?” he asked. “Do you have any?”
She imagined that if she could see Taser’s face, it would have one of those smarmy smiles that heroes like Lady Killer made sure to flash in the cameras anytime press got close.
“Are you here to help me, Taser, or hit on me?”
“Is there some law against both?” His mask crinkled along his smile lines.
She regarded him for a moment before she spoke. “I spend most of my waking hours looking over my shoulder for heroes desperate to drag me in for fame and a fifteen-second sound bite on the evening news. I spend the rest keeping Wreck City from turning into another slum like the rest of the flood grids. I keep the gangs from burning Wreck City down and I keep the cops from bleeding it dry, which is more than I can say for the rest of the grids. Everything I take, after expenses, is either funneled back into Wreck City or goes to bribing the administration at Blackbird to keep them from overdrugging and torturing my father.” She strobed the bag and it sprouted a singed hole, sand running out. “So no, Taser, my life is not all rooftop escapades and an adrenaline rush from dressing up and running around under Corp’s nose. My life is hard. It’s too hard. Corp made it that way, and it’s time they paid.”
Taser held up his hands. “Iri, I didn’t mean—”
“I told you not to call me that.”
“Iridium.” He said it very quietly, the word muffled by his costume.
She turned away from him, pushed past him. Taser came after her as she walked to the industrial kitchen and got a glass of water.
“When I was seven years old,” he said, “my mother and I were living in this shitty block housing in the Manhattan Quarantine—you know, before they firebombed and started over.” He blinked, his goggles irising. “This rabid came in, one of the Mental ones, and he took my entire block hostage … made us see things. Terrifying things.”
“Doctor Hypnotic,” said Iridium. The Siege of Manhattan was a standard in tactics training for Corp.
“Anyway, that’s not the point.” Taser sighed. “After five days, the heroes broke through Hypnotic’s henchmen. When they caught him, he was on top of our block.”
Iridium remembered the plain photographs on her datascreen—no 3-D printing back when she’d been a student. Ruined, burned, twisted metal. Screaming civilians. Chaos.
“They fought,” Taser said softly. “They destroyed our block. My mother and a few of my friends were crushed in the wreckage from the fight between Hypnotic and some musclehead extrahuman. Corp didn’t let in rescue workers, regular cops. Three months later, I got an apology and a check for e3,000 from the New York Squadron branch.” He laughed once, bitterly. “And that was it.”
“They took something from both of us, then,” said Iridium. “I’m taking it back.”
Taser nodded slowly. “And I’m right there with you.”