Chapter 17
I liked working for the SDS. It wasn't the central branch — not even a major satellite office, not like the one Amanda was currently grinding away at — but still. Things were far from smooth, and right now our little band of disasters had more failed missions than successful ones. It was still great.
The best part was that gradually, with each completed job, I was getting more confident. My control was improving. My speech was improving. Even my relationships with other team members were improving.
Though I'll admit — with certain members of Team Z, things had gotten a little complicated.
"Another glorious day in the annals of the Empire…"
"What kind of garbage are you saying, handsome?" Prizm chewed her gum, leaned against me, took a deep pull from her vape, and exhaled blueberry-scented clouds directly into my face. "Pompous nonsense like that works for huge, tough, wild guys like Phenomenomen. For you, what actually lands is mopey guitar-and-feelings stuff. I sing, by the way. Quite well."
"R-really," I said, doing my best not to look down at the impressively mobile situation happening at chest level, redirecting my gaze sideways and scratching the back of my neck — which was becoming my signature catastrophic nervous gesture. "Just thinking out loud."
It was awkward. Nothing against the girl personally, but her aggressive manner, her style, the whole approach — it threw me off and pushed me back. The first couple of days I had no idea what she actually wanted from me, and it was only after a conversation with Malevola that I understood someone was attempting to access my personal life.
Malevola's own delivery on this topic had been characteristically subtle — she had literally grabbed me by the relevant anatomy, given a demonstration shake, and explained what our colleague the former villainess was after. Her exact metaphor had left me unable to look at certain baked goods without experiencing a confusing combination of emotions.
I wasn't opposed to the general concept. Just to the specific pastry selection on offer, if we were continuing that analogy. But we won't get into that right now.
Currently we were in an alley — technically on stakeout duty — and Prizm had maneuvered me into a corner I couldn't retreat from any further.
"Right, sure," she said, lifting her teal glasses. I only just noticed, by the way, that her entire look was basically a Tron movie cyclist costume. "But you still haven't answered—"
"Can you two just go do it in the alley and get it over with?" Invisible B — sorry, she was called Invidiva now, a name chosen by Blond Blazer herself as part of a complete image overhaul, which you were not allowed to laugh at — muttered with familiar irritation. "Enough flirting. If you're scared he'll make your thighs wet too fast, just take him around the corner and—"
"Excuse me?!" The pleasant predatory smile had vanished, replaced by something significantly more confrontational. Prizm turned away from me entirely. "I'll smash your greasy little face in so hard you won't see past your own nose—"
"At least then I won't have to watch your garbage attempts—"
"My attempts are perfectly fine." Hands on hips. Two women squaring up. "I'll have him in the saddle within a month."
"Hey, I can hear both of you."
"More likely the bat gets there first, or he spends his evenings kneading Golem's clay—" Invidiva smirked, glancing briefly at the other woman's silhouette, then turned half away to scan the dark street. "But we both know the Ginger is a loyal boy. He's not going to abandon his right hand for someone as available as you."
"I'm still *right here.*" Nobody acknowledged this. In principle a man has no business inserting himself into a fight between women — though that principle was written before women existed who could punch through concrete walls. The proverb stands, so I tried a different approach and turned to the only friend in our temporary group of four. "You're hearing this, right?"
"Mm." Victor bit the head off a mouse and continued staring at the wall, his mind apparently on larger things. His tongue, however, operated independently. "If you want I could — you are my friend, after all. I'll warn you that the enthusiasm would be simulated, but—"
"You absolute—" I didn't get to finish that thought. The argument had reached its terminal phase. A flash of light — Prizm's ability was exactly what it sounded like: control over light as a medium. Copies, directed beams, solid constructs, offensive bursts. The whole alley went white.
Invidiva had her eyes shut and her jacket up before the flash. When it cleared she put a kick directly into Prizm's midsection and sent her into the wall. She was already preparing a follow-up when a water bolt passed directly in front of her face and punched a clean hole through the brick beside her.
"Drop it." I said it with enough weight that both of them looked at me. "The target's gone anyway." Sonar nodded beside me. "Come on. We missed the job, let's go eat."
They sniffed in perfect unison, crossed their arms, and walked off in opposite directions, leaving me and Victor in an alley that smelled of several hours' worth of accumulated urban atmosphere.
"We should probably request different partners."
"Are you sure?" Sonar glanced at me, was quiet for a moment, then nodded firmly at his own internal conclusion. "Pity. I like working with you."
"I meant the *girls* should get new partners, not us! God — we need to find you cocaine urgently—" My head was throbbing. I pressed my fingers against my eyelids to the cheerful crunching of bones from whatever rodent Victor was consuming. Colm and Coupé found us there — they'd been stationed at the other end of the building. "Don't say anything. Let's just go."
---
"Relax, kid." We'd ducked into the nearest food establishment — too fancy a name for what it was, a Korean man selling whatever combination of ingredients would satisfy American hunger at any price point — while waiting for the next call. "We'll just ask Miss Blazer to shuffle the team assignments. Simple."
Colm drank a liter of beer in one movement, made himself comfortable in his chair, and repositioned it subtly closer to his primary partner, with whom he handled most of the dangerous assignments.
We'd developed an interesting system, all things considered. As new heroes, we went in groups — backup, rescue, coverage for each other on complex or dangerous jobs, which came up at least twice a day. The system worked.
Sometimes, though, even for simple calls, I'd have traded Invidiva, Prizm, and Sonar for literally anyone with functional judgment. I had nothing against my friend personally, but without personal investment in the task, or in the absence of heavy narcotics, Victor was roughly as useful as a bag with a hole in it.
The day's job had been tracking a teleporter — a guy who could jump forty meters in any direction. Clearly not a solo operation, so all six of us had been deployed.
"I understand. Just, you can't always work with whoever you want." I was making a significant effort not to glance toward Coupé, who still quietly terrified me after two weeks. She had a habit of staring from under her eyebrows and then suddenly producing a knife smile for no apparent reason. I'd once watched her pour her lunch with her own blood. "We should probably get used to working with whoever's available."
"We all know who *you* want to work with," Colm said, shoveling whole walnuts — shells and all — into his mouth and crunching them audibly across the entire bar. "But don't even bother dreaming about it."
"What are you all talking about?" I turned to find Victor's seat empty. He'd drifted away and was now running some kind of scheme on a suspicious-looking girl — exactly the profile of an undercover cop. "Oh, for—"
"I'll handle it, you two talk. Man to man." Coupé had apparently reached the same conclusion simultaneously. She slid out from behind the table, ran a hand along Colm's shoulder in passing, and intercepted our werebat at speed.
No time to waste. I tried to extract information from the one other member of this group capable of coherent conversation — at least compared to Malevola and Golem. Colm sensed my intentions and buried his face in his beer, taking suspicious sips for someone who had previously been inhaling the stuff.
"W-what's the joke? What are you all—"
No luck. Invidiva and Golem arrived and sat down before I could press him, and Colm exhaled with relief. A few minutes later Prizm's voice carried from the far end of the bar, where she'd apparently decided to set a new karaoke record.
"I assume you two talked again," Invidiva said, lighting up one-handed, still wincing from the earlier fight. She caught me watching, pulled out a cigarette, and held the pack toward me. I took the cigarette and put it in her mouth. She made a face. "And I'm guessing it wasn't your finest performance."
"You could say that." She tried to blow smoke in my face and only half managed it.
I looked around the table at the other men, attempting to pass the conversational responsibility to someone else. Then Invidiva laughed.
"Ha — you should see your faces." She stabbed the cigarette out with more force than necessary. "And about me and the big-assed one — we sorted it out. Should've done it ages ago."
"But who actually won?" Golem asked, representing the question on everyone's mind.
"Listen to how she's singing," Invidiva said. I paid attention to Prizm's voice from across the room and did notice, in fact, that her enunciation had acquired a certain new quality. "I knocked out a crown, heh. But don't worry—"
She put her arm around my neck — which required Invidiva to visibly push up from her chair to reach — and delivered a conspiratorial whisper.
"I told her your ginger flower belongs to someone else." She winked at me, and at the rest of the table, who had all leaned back and were pretending not to listen. "So don't stress. We're all *rooting* for you, Ginger."
"Rooting?"
"Personally I put forty against you, so really step up and disappoint me."
"Seventy against."
"I put a hundred *for* you, so don't let me down." Colm punched me in the shoulder — I almost went sideways off the chair — and ordered two more beers. "Coupé put fifty against, by the way."
A silent shadow materialized over Colm's shoulder. Coupé laid both hands gently on him.
"Did you just tell him?" She smelled of alcohol. Her pupils were slightly wide. I already knew what had happened — I glanced back and saw Sonar surrounded by a circle of people in varying states of intoxication, running some scheme. Coupé answered my unspoken question. "She was real. The new one."
The small dealer they'd been suspicious of earlier was now enthusiastically ordering food and drinks, spending money with cheerful abandon. Victor had apparently bought her entire inventory, and almost certainly overpaid.
"I'm not going to get any sense out of him. Or apparently out of Coupé." Invidiva shrugged, smiling with mischief. Colm was sitting contentedly in his partner's embrace while she played with knives near his throat — which he seemed genuinely unbothered by. "Can someone please just tell me what the joke is? What are these bets about?"
"We had a bet on whether you'd find the courage to tell Blondie how you feel." Invidiva said it easily. "You blush so well every time you talk to her. Absolute middle school energy."
Before she could finish the sentence, something ran lightly down my spine. I was still processing what had been said when Malevola's hand settled on my shoulder and her voice arrived from just behind my ear.
"Don't worry — I could portal you somewhere she can't fly. Though your odds there are still pretty bad." The familiar hum of a portal opening. The red hand with the black nails. The warm scent of— I registered the demoness pressing against my back, and my fingers had already developed small droplets at the tips before I consciously acknowledged anything. She patted my shoulder encouragingly, her breath warm against my ear. "You're not quite strong enough yet."
What I've described probably sounds dramatic. From outside it would have looked like a small startled flinch, nothing more — but anyone paying attention would have spotted the difference immediately.
My reaction to women's attention was still embarrassing — by my own standards, at least, though Amanda claimed my progress was remarkable. Grandma agreed.
It genuinely was much better than the early days in Herman's body. But occasionally, sometimes, rarely — moments like this happened.
Who was I kidding. I wasn't a small child, and I knew perfectly well that most of my reactions to Malevola specifically weren't general social anxiety. They were something considerably simpler.
Invidiva had been watching the whole exchange. Everyone else had moved on to other conversations and stopped paying attention, which I was grateful for.
As my behavior had shifted, the invisible girl's reaction had become increasingly entertaining. Her eyes had gone wide. She was slightly short of breath, looking back and forth between me and Malevola, mouthing silently:
"Holy— *Ginger.*" She hit the inhaler, her voice coming out slightly raspy. "How did none of us see this?"
"Wait." I was pulling myself back toward the original conversation, trying to escape the uncomfortable topic by focusing on the previous one. Looking Invidiva directly in the eye. "Blond Blazer? How does she come into this? She's our boss. She's a superhero. She's practically a childhood idol — like Mecha Man—"
"You're into Mecha Man that way too?" Golem contributed, drawing slightly incorrect conclusions in his clay interior. "Interesting."
"We thought—" Malevola had already moved off, apparently had completed her assignment and was on a victory lap around the bar. Invidiva continued freely. "We thought you had a thing for our cheerleader. That was awkward."
"Yeah. You could say that." I was imagining exactly what would happen when these ridiculous rumors reached my superior. An hour of deeply uncomfortable conversation was virtually guaranteed. Normal interaction with her would be difficult for weeks — and it wasn't exactly easy now, given that Blazer was spectacularly attractive and I hadn't entirely demolished all of my old anxieties. "God, guys—"
"Sorry," said Invidiva, without a trace of guilt, giving my shoulder a pat. "Don't worry though — I won't tell her. And I bet against you tanking things with Blondie anyway, so—"
"Fantastic."
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