The Love Interest, page 24
‘No,’ Mum echoes quietly. ‘We don’t kill people, Emily. You know that.’ She’s staring at me. She heard my voice. She heard Blaze say my name. She knows who I am. ‘We need to move.’
It’s strangely peaceful in the seconds it takes for Emily to float me over the wall. This must be what an out-of-body experience feels like. You drift above all your problems. Mum knows who I am. Blaze knows who I am. Everything I dreaded has happened. What else is left for me to fear?
As I land between the industrial bins, the sound of shouting back in the courtyard and arguing in front of me switch back on. The alarm from the museum and sirens from everywhere else are bouncing off the thin alley and for a moment my brain can’t figure out what happens next.
‘Come on.’ Mum grabs my arm and drags me along with the other Villains until I shake her off.
‘I don’t need your help,’ I snap.
Femi and Emily reach the van first and jump into the front, so me and Mum hurl ourselves into the back. Their helmets are passed back and I expect Femi to speed away from the scene, but instead he backs out of the alley slowly and sets off at a steady pace towards the Safe Road.
Mum sits across from me. She opens and closes her mouth a couple of times and then holds up a finger.
‘My youngest daughter is sitting across from me, isn’t she?’
None of us answer her.
‘OK then.’ Her voice is terrifyingly calm. ‘I’ve got something to do now, quickly, because I think I’m about to have a meltdown. This is a battery.’ She holds up the metallic-blue box. ‘It can store a person’s power.’
‘What?!’ Emily twists to look.
‘These things have a story so strong I could almost hear it from my cell.’ Mum’s eyes are closed. ‘Tell me your story, little battery.’ Her fingertips shimmer where they touch the battery. This is it. This is her power. Does she listen to objects? ‘It was created with hundreds of others and handled by people with ambition. They’re connected somehow. They’ll focus the pull and then be filled, soon. All of them. All at once.’
‘The HPA have a way to steal people’s powers,’ Emily says. ‘That’s what happened to Pari.’
‘It’s for a person.’ Mum’s voice sounds like it’s getting further away. ‘Someone who moves power from one place to another.’
‘Ron,’ I say. ‘That’s what he does. That’s all he does. He’s a conduit.’
‘Sima, come back,’ Emily calls from the front.
‘It’s like a web. All connected.’ Mum’s words are even fainter. ‘Made by the EV. Protected by the EV. The power understands. All of them will contain the EV. All of them will be filled at once.’
‘Sima!’ Emily shouts.
‘What’s happening?’ I scramble over to Mum.
‘Wake her up. Now.’ For the first time, Emily sounds terrified. ‘It’s her power; she can read the history of an object, and of the objects that make up that object. If she uses her power for too long her mind can get stuck in all the stories that the thing contains.’
I grab the battery, but Mum is holding it fast. ‘Wake up!’ Her face stays peacefully blank. ‘Come on!’ Did I come all this way to lose my mum to a battery? ‘Mum!’ I yell.
Her eyes snap open and she drops the battery like it’s burning her.
‘Mum, are you all right?’ I reach up to take my helmet off.
‘Wait,’ she says urgently. ‘Wait. I can’t see you yet. We need to figure this out before I can get emotional. OK.’ She rubs her fingers. ‘OK. We think Ron is going to use these batteries to steal powers?’
‘They must help him target powers and then, of course, they’ll help him store them.’ Femi is surprisingly excited for someone suggesting something so terrible. A battery that seeks out and stores people’s powers. The thought makes my stomach churn.
‘But he doesn’t have anyone else to drain,’ Emily says. ‘Sima was the only prisoner and she’s legged it.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Mum glances at the battery. ‘He doesn’t need to know who the powered person is, he could just go to a crowded place. What’s the percentage of powered people now?’
‘0.001 per cent of the population.’ Femi clicks on the indicator. ‘It was always that, although it could be more now. Everything else influenced by the EV has increased.’
‘One in a thousand?’ I ask.
‘One in a hundred thousand people, or more.’ Mum is still not looking at me. The reason Mum left is playing out before my eyes. She put her work with the Villains above her family. ‘Ron could go to a big football match and find at least one of us. After they took me at BLAZECON, he came to see me in the cells. That man sensed I had a power immediately. Didn’t remember me from six years of work in his organisation, but knew I had a power. I hadn’t realised how lucky I was that he never bothered to acknowledge the female engineers.’
There was cell after cell full of these blue boxes. ‘It would take him years to fill all those batteries,’ I say. ‘Did you say they would all get filled at once?’
‘Jenna is right.’ Femi slows the van to a crawl and I pop my head up to see we’re in a dark car park. ‘He’s the only conduit and there’s a limit on what one person can do.’
‘Unless he has access to more energy,’ Mum adds.
‘You think Ron has found a way to supercharge his conduit power?’ Femi backs into a space and kills the engine. ‘If he’s powerful enough, he won’t need to know where people like us are – he can just stand in a room and pull, and their powers will come to him.’
‘Like a psychotic hoover.’ Emily leans over the headrest. ‘How could he amplify himself?’
‘I’ve heard of people using residual EV energy to boost their powers,’ Mum says.
Femi twists to face us. ‘The EV gave us powers, so energy left over from an EV event can boost them.’
I look between them and my stomach twists again. My mum, Emily and the Controller, bouncing ideas off each other whilst I sit here in my helmet. My jealousy feels like it could take over and shut off my ability to think, so I try to shake it off. Right now, I need to be more like Mum. There’s something big and bad coming, and the Villains are trying to stop it.
‘This power grab would take an intense amount of concentrated energy,’ Femi murmurs.
The burned Culture Complex, covered in signs, flashes through my mind.
‘Would an EV lightning bolt leave residual energy?’ I am ignored.
‘Even energy from the EV might not be enough. Do we have time to do the maths?’ Mum looks between them. ‘We don’t have time to do the maths. But Ron can pull energy from anywhere, so if there was a peak in natural energy, he could use that too. Let’s do the maths.’ Mum grabs a marker and scrawls on the dim wall of the van.
Residual EV energy + Natural energy = X (available energy) X = Battery operation + Ron’s potential reach
Femi slams his hand off the steering wheel. ‘I’ve told him so many times that the EV cannot be abused. His whole approach is wrong. It has its own defence system. It is its own defence system. People with powers, we’re all linked to the EV, an attack on them will have consequences. If he manages this, the EV response at the scene could be catastrophic, the place he operates from could be completely destroyed.’
Mum rubs out an old plan to write:
X = Power of EV response?
She pauses, her marker still on the side of the van. ‘Femi, do you think this could be what the Nine Trees prophecy was referring to? The Sharp Blue Heat of Truth. Could the Diviner be telling us it’s finally our chance to expose Ron?’
Femi is almost vibrating in the front seat. ‘You’re right, this could be it. The EV has given us a warning through the Diviner; we can stop this!’
‘So that’s an A for enthusiasm.’ Emily places her hand on Femi’s arm. ‘What’s the next step?’
‘Maths.’ Mum circles Ron’s Potential Reach. ‘These batteries won’t take a huge amount of energy to operate, and we already know that Ron can move power from place to place using his own energy, which is—’
‘Humans produce around a hundred watts,’ Femi supplies.
‘So, we need to get an idea of X.’ Mum draws a neat square around X. ‘We need to know how much energy Ron has to draw on, so we know how far he’ll be able to draw powers from, and what the force of the EV reaction could be.’
‘How much energy could be left by a bolt of EV lightning?’ I try again.
‘A typical bolt could be over a gigawatt, that’s a billion watts.’ Femi answers without hesitating. How many numbers does he have in his head? ‘So, an EV bolt will be, ah, much more. The amount of energy left behind would be enormous.’
‘And a storm could be another energy source?’ I bite my lip, dreading the answer. This is all leading to Nine Trees being in mortal peril, again.
‘Oh yes, definitely, most storms have a massive amount of electrical potential, and then there’s the kinetic energy of the wind …’ Femi trails off and all three Villains turn to stare at me.
‘Why did you ask that?’ Mum’s voice is careful.
Physics was never my strong point and Mum’s maths is making my head hurt, but even I understand the more energy Ron has access to, the more dangerous his conduit power and those batteries will be. ‘The HPA have cordoned off the Culture Complex, where the EV lightning bolt struck, because of residual energy, and there’s a storm forecast to hit Nine Trees tomorrow.’
There’s silence as they digest my words, then Emily tuts loudly, ‘Guess we don’t need a calculation to know that Nine Trees is screwed.’
‘He could drain every powered person in the country, us included,’ Femi says.
I barely hear them. Mum has made her way back to me and is kneeling next to me. ‘Take it off.’
I want to refuse, but this moment is inevitable. I pull the helmet off and shake my Afro free. Now I understand why Mum needed me to keep the helmet on. Removing the barrier and seeing her older, heart-achingly familiar face reignites all my emotions. Before I can decide whether I’m going to scream at her or burst into tears, her arms are around me.
‘Brilliant.’ Her voice shudders. She’s crying and holding me tight. I can’t stop myself, I hold her back. ‘My brilliant daughter.’
There’s love in my chest. Love and rage and sadness. ‘I don’t forgive you for leaving us,’ I say into her shoulder. The tears are rolling down my face now too.
‘I wouldn’t expect you to,’ she replies, holding me like she used to all those years ago. I could stay in her arms forever, but too soon she draws back. ‘OK, now how do we deal with Ron?’
We jump apart as a loudspeaker squeals, ‘THIS IS THE HPA. YOU ARE SURROUNDED. EXIT YOUR VEHICLE WITH YOUR HANDS UP.’
CHAPTER 28
‘Nope!’ Femi yells, and the engine is back on an instant later.
‘WE REPEAT,’ the loudspeaker booms, ‘YOU ARE SURROUNDED.’
‘Pass us those helmets, will you? And stick yours back on.’ Emily is incredibly calm – no, not just calm, she’s smiling. What’s the name for someone who enjoys being in mortal peril?
We sling them their helmets and Mum picks up mine. She blinks rapidly as she holds it and then sticks it on to my head.
‘Got anything for this, F?’ Mum yanks another helmet out of a drawer and pulls it on. It looks odd above her grey HPA tracksuit.
‘I might,’ Femi responds cheekily. He presses a button on his console and, a moment later, screams and explosions echo from around the van. ‘Let’s go then.’
He puts his foot down and we hurtle past men leaping out of a burning HPA jeep and screech out of the car park. Me and Mum hang on to the headrests of the front seats, watching as Femi swerves down an empty residential road.
‘Anyone on our tail?’ Emily asks.
‘No,’ Femi says. ‘How did they find us?’
‘We need to check for trackers.’ Mum digs into another drawer and pulls out a scanner.
‘Check the Love Interest,’ Emily calls back.
‘Me?’ I stay as still as I can as Mum runs the scanner over me.
‘We need to talk about this whole Love Interest thing too,’ she says.
The brakes squeal and we stagger against the side of the van as Femi hurtles round a corner and on to a road lined with warehouses.
‘Yes, now seems like the perfect time for that conversation,’ I say.
The scanner beeps as Mum holds it up to my shoulder, to the spot where Blaze touched me when he was lying on the ground outside the museum. ‘Found it.’
It turns out Blaze is just as deceitful as I am.
‘Feck,’ I mutter.
‘FECK!’ Femi cries.
The Secret Ninja is in the middle of the road in front of us.
‘FECK!’ Emily screams.
We hit him.
We hit the Secret Ninja and I can almost feel the front of the van crunching. Femi is still swearing, but he doesn’t stop the van.
‘Did you kill him?’ I lean into the front.
‘No!’ Mum yells.
The sound of tearing metal fills the air and the Secret Ninja’s hand appears through the van’s floor. It grabs Mum’s ankle.
‘Oh!’ Her eyes immediately close and the skin on her ankle shimmers. Have her powers activated?
‘Emily!’ I yell.
‘Off you go!’ Emily reaches out and each of the Ninja’s fingers bend back.
As soon as she’s released, Mum’s eyes snap open and she kicks the Ninja’s hand back through the hole in the van’s floor. There’s a thud from below. I wobble over to Mum and look down. There’s no sign of the Ninja. He can’t possibly have survived that fall after being hit by a speeding van. Relief surges through me, followed closely by horror. A man just died.
Mum grabs me to steady me as we race round another corner. ‘That was a thing.’ She’s having trouble getting her words out. ‘That wasn’t a person. I helped make it, but after that … Betrayed … Re … Re … Re … Smoothed over.’
‘We’ve got a problem!’ Femi yells. ‘I think the Ninja cut the brake line.’
‘Can’t you fix it?’ Emily shouts.
‘And he’s done something to the steering! Hold on!’ Femi cries.
Mum grabs my hands and moves them so we’re both clutching the straps holding the hoverboards. Emily looks back at us. She raises her hands and holds one towards us and one out the window. ‘Feck!’ she yells as the van hurtles off the road and flies into a wall.
Metal and brick smash together, filling the air with sound and—
Everything stops.
Mum gasps next to me. ‘Are you OK?’
Am I OK? It felt like I should have been flung across the van, but I stayed exactly where I was.
‘I’m OK,’ Femi calls from the front.
‘I’m OK,’ I mumble. ‘Emily?’
It was Emily. She saved me and Mum. She’s still in the front. Her head is down on the dashboard.
‘Emily!’ Mum cries.
I follow as she leaps out of the back doors and runs across the concrete to Emily’s door. The front of the van must have already been damaged by the Ninja, but now it looks like a crumpled crisp packet.
We wrench Emily’s door open.
A thin line of red runs down past her closed eyes. My heart twists. Emily is too powerful and too annoying to die.
‘She’s alive,’ Femi calls across. ‘Knocked out. She tried to absorb the impact and—’ Femi gasps. ‘Also, I’m trapped, and my ribs … I … I’m not going anywhere fast. First thing to do is kill Jenna’s tracker.’
I step back – it’s too late. The HPA will already be on their way here. Emily is out, Femi is trapped, Mum’s power is reading objects, which is awesome, but not hugely helpful in a fight. They’re sitting ducks.
I take another step away from the crash, away from Mum.
‘Go round to Femi, we need to get your tracker disabled,’ she says.
The van crashed in an industrial area – no one will have seen us and it doesn’t sound like any alarms have been triggered. If I give Mum, Femi and Emily some time, they’ll be able to escape. I take another step away.
‘Jenna!’ Mum yells at me like I’m seven years old again. ‘Get here, now!’
‘I’ll distract them. I’m good at that.’ I shrug at her. ‘Maybe that’s my power.’
Adrenalin courses through me as I leap back into the van and grab a hoverboard.
‘Jenna!’ Mum’s scream bounces off the warehouses as I sprint away.
My helmet joggles on my hair, but I don’t have time to stop and take it off. From above I must look ridiculous; a girl in a wobbly helmet struggling to carry a hoverboard that she has no idea how to use. Megan was right; I shouldn’t make the plans.
‘How do you work?’ The board is smooth, with no helpful on switch.
‘Activate hoverboard?’ a small voice says in my ear.
‘What? I mean yes! Yes! Activate hoverboard.’
‘Activating.’
The board vibrates and I skid to a halt as it flies from my hands to in front of my feet. I step gingerly on to it. What am I doing? I can’t even surf. My Villain boots make several clicking sounds and connect to the board, holding me securely in place. I allow myself a small smile. My mum makes pretty incredible tech.
‘Set a course?’ the voice asks as my board rises off the ground.
‘Er, yeah?’
A map appears on the visor in front of me. I’m still close to the museum. Femi must have circled back after we left the car park. The Safe Road is off to the left or, almost directly in front of me, is the Wild Road.
‘HPA vehicles incoming.’
I try to spin and look and almost fall over. There’s no sign of cars yet, but I can’t stay here much longer. ‘Set course for Nine Trees,’ I say hurriedly.
‘Route A?’ A yellow dotted line appears on the map, showing me the way home along the Safe Road. ‘Or Route B?’ The line shifts to head on to the Wild Road, the last place I want to be.
There’s a screech of wheels in the distance. The longer I can stay out of sight, the longer the HPA are going to think I’m in a van full of Villains. The Wild Road is the closest, darkest option. ‘Route B!’ I yell.
It’s strangely peaceful in the seconds it takes for Emily to float me over the wall. This must be what an out-of-body experience feels like. You drift above all your problems. Mum knows who I am. Blaze knows who I am. Everything I dreaded has happened. What else is left for me to fear?
As I land between the industrial bins, the sound of shouting back in the courtyard and arguing in front of me switch back on. The alarm from the museum and sirens from everywhere else are bouncing off the thin alley and for a moment my brain can’t figure out what happens next.
‘Come on.’ Mum grabs my arm and drags me along with the other Villains until I shake her off.
‘I don’t need your help,’ I snap.
Femi and Emily reach the van first and jump into the front, so me and Mum hurl ourselves into the back. Their helmets are passed back and I expect Femi to speed away from the scene, but instead he backs out of the alley slowly and sets off at a steady pace towards the Safe Road.
Mum sits across from me. She opens and closes her mouth a couple of times and then holds up a finger.
‘My youngest daughter is sitting across from me, isn’t she?’
None of us answer her.
‘OK then.’ Her voice is terrifyingly calm. ‘I’ve got something to do now, quickly, because I think I’m about to have a meltdown. This is a battery.’ She holds up the metallic-blue box. ‘It can store a person’s power.’
‘What?!’ Emily twists to look.
‘These things have a story so strong I could almost hear it from my cell.’ Mum’s eyes are closed. ‘Tell me your story, little battery.’ Her fingertips shimmer where they touch the battery. This is it. This is her power. Does she listen to objects? ‘It was created with hundreds of others and handled by people with ambition. They’re connected somehow. They’ll focus the pull and then be filled, soon. All of them. All at once.’
‘The HPA have a way to steal people’s powers,’ Emily says. ‘That’s what happened to Pari.’
‘It’s for a person.’ Mum’s voice sounds like it’s getting further away. ‘Someone who moves power from one place to another.’
‘Ron,’ I say. ‘That’s what he does. That’s all he does. He’s a conduit.’
‘Sima, come back,’ Emily calls from the front.
‘It’s like a web. All connected.’ Mum’s words are even fainter. ‘Made by the EV. Protected by the EV. The power understands. All of them will contain the EV. All of them will be filled at once.’
‘Sima!’ Emily shouts.
‘What’s happening?’ I scramble over to Mum.
‘Wake her up. Now.’ For the first time, Emily sounds terrified. ‘It’s her power; she can read the history of an object, and of the objects that make up that object. If she uses her power for too long her mind can get stuck in all the stories that the thing contains.’
I grab the battery, but Mum is holding it fast. ‘Wake up!’ Her face stays peacefully blank. ‘Come on!’ Did I come all this way to lose my mum to a battery? ‘Mum!’ I yell.
Her eyes snap open and she drops the battery like it’s burning her.
‘Mum, are you all right?’ I reach up to take my helmet off.
‘Wait,’ she says urgently. ‘Wait. I can’t see you yet. We need to figure this out before I can get emotional. OK.’ She rubs her fingers. ‘OK. We think Ron is going to use these batteries to steal powers?’
‘They must help him target powers and then, of course, they’ll help him store them.’ Femi is surprisingly excited for someone suggesting something so terrible. A battery that seeks out and stores people’s powers. The thought makes my stomach churn.
‘But he doesn’t have anyone else to drain,’ Emily says. ‘Sima was the only prisoner and she’s legged it.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Mum glances at the battery. ‘He doesn’t need to know who the powered person is, he could just go to a crowded place. What’s the percentage of powered people now?’
‘0.001 per cent of the population.’ Femi clicks on the indicator. ‘It was always that, although it could be more now. Everything else influenced by the EV has increased.’
‘One in a thousand?’ I ask.
‘One in a hundred thousand people, or more.’ Mum is still not looking at me. The reason Mum left is playing out before my eyes. She put her work with the Villains above her family. ‘Ron could go to a big football match and find at least one of us. After they took me at BLAZECON, he came to see me in the cells. That man sensed I had a power immediately. Didn’t remember me from six years of work in his organisation, but knew I had a power. I hadn’t realised how lucky I was that he never bothered to acknowledge the female engineers.’
There was cell after cell full of these blue boxes. ‘It would take him years to fill all those batteries,’ I say. ‘Did you say they would all get filled at once?’
‘Jenna is right.’ Femi slows the van to a crawl and I pop my head up to see we’re in a dark car park. ‘He’s the only conduit and there’s a limit on what one person can do.’
‘Unless he has access to more energy,’ Mum adds.
‘You think Ron has found a way to supercharge his conduit power?’ Femi backs into a space and kills the engine. ‘If he’s powerful enough, he won’t need to know where people like us are – he can just stand in a room and pull, and their powers will come to him.’
‘Like a psychotic hoover.’ Emily leans over the headrest. ‘How could he amplify himself?’
‘I’ve heard of people using residual EV energy to boost their powers,’ Mum says.
Femi twists to face us. ‘The EV gave us powers, so energy left over from an EV event can boost them.’
I look between them and my stomach twists again. My mum, Emily and the Controller, bouncing ideas off each other whilst I sit here in my helmet. My jealousy feels like it could take over and shut off my ability to think, so I try to shake it off. Right now, I need to be more like Mum. There’s something big and bad coming, and the Villains are trying to stop it.
‘This power grab would take an intense amount of concentrated energy,’ Femi murmurs.
The burned Culture Complex, covered in signs, flashes through my mind.
‘Would an EV lightning bolt leave residual energy?’ I am ignored.
‘Even energy from the EV might not be enough. Do we have time to do the maths?’ Mum looks between them. ‘We don’t have time to do the maths. But Ron can pull energy from anywhere, so if there was a peak in natural energy, he could use that too. Let’s do the maths.’ Mum grabs a marker and scrawls on the dim wall of the van.
Residual EV energy + Natural energy = X (available energy) X = Battery operation + Ron’s potential reach
Femi slams his hand off the steering wheel. ‘I’ve told him so many times that the EV cannot be abused. His whole approach is wrong. It has its own defence system. It is its own defence system. People with powers, we’re all linked to the EV, an attack on them will have consequences. If he manages this, the EV response at the scene could be catastrophic, the place he operates from could be completely destroyed.’
Mum rubs out an old plan to write:
X = Power of EV response?
She pauses, her marker still on the side of the van. ‘Femi, do you think this could be what the Nine Trees prophecy was referring to? The Sharp Blue Heat of Truth. Could the Diviner be telling us it’s finally our chance to expose Ron?’
Femi is almost vibrating in the front seat. ‘You’re right, this could be it. The EV has given us a warning through the Diviner; we can stop this!’
‘So that’s an A for enthusiasm.’ Emily places her hand on Femi’s arm. ‘What’s the next step?’
‘Maths.’ Mum circles Ron’s Potential Reach. ‘These batteries won’t take a huge amount of energy to operate, and we already know that Ron can move power from place to place using his own energy, which is—’
‘Humans produce around a hundred watts,’ Femi supplies.
‘So, we need to get an idea of X.’ Mum draws a neat square around X. ‘We need to know how much energy Ron has to draw on, so we know how far he’ll be able to draw powers from, and what the force of the EV reaction could be.’
‘How much energy could be left by a bolt of EV lightning?’ I try again.
‘A typical bolt could be over a gigawatt, that’s a billion watts.’ Femi answers without hesitating. How many numbers does he have in his head? ‘So, an EV bolt will be, ah, much more. The amount of energy left behind would be enormous.’
‘And a storm could be another energy source?’ I bite my lip, dreading the answer. This is all leading to Nine Trees being in mortal peril, again.
‘Oh yes, definitely, most storms have a massive amount of electrical potential, and then there’s the kinetic energy of the wind …’ Femi trails off and all three Villains turn to stare at me.
‘Why did you ask that?’ Mum’s voice is careful.
Physics was never my strong point and Mum’s maths is making my head hurt, but even I understand the more energy Ron has access to, the more dangerous his conduit power and those batteries will be. ‘The HPA have cordoned off the Culture Complex, where the EV lightning bolt struck, because of residual energy, and there’s a storm forecast to hit Nine Trees tomorrow.’
There’s silence as they digest my words, then Emily tuts loudly, ‘Guess we don’t need a calculation to know that Nine Trees is screwed.’
‘He could drain every powered person in the country, us included,’ Femi says.
I barely hear them. Mum has made her way back to me and is kneeling next to me. ‘Take it off.’
I want to refuse, but this moment is inevitable. I pull the helmet off and shake my Afro free. Now I understand why Mum needed me to keep the helmet on. Removing the barrier and seeing her older, heart-achingly familiar face reignites all my emotions. Before I can decide whether I’m going to scream at her or burst into tears, her arms are around me.
‘Brilliant.’ Her voice shudders. She’s crying and holding me tight. I can’t stop myself, I hold her back. ‘My brilliant daughter.’
There’s love in my chest. Love and rage and sadness. ‘I don’t forgive you for leaving us,’ I say into her shoulder. The tears are rolling down my face now too.
‘I wouldn’t expect you to,’ she replies, holding me like she used to all those years ago. I could stay in her arms forever, but too soon she draws back. ‘OK, now how do we deal with Ron?’
We jump apart as a loudspeaker squeals, ‘THIS IS THE HPA. YOU ARE SURROUNDED. EXIT YOUR VEHICLE WITH YOUR HANDS UP.’
CHAPTER 28
‘Nope!’ Femi yells, and the engine is back on an instant later.
‘WE REPEAT,’ the loudspeaker booms, ‘YOU ARE SURROUNDED.’
‘Pass us those helmets, will you? And stick yours back on.’ Emily is incredibly calm – no, not just calm, she’s smiling. What’s the name for someone who enjoys being in mortal peril?
We sling them their helmets and Mum picks up mine. She blinks rapidly as she holds it and then sticks it on to my head.
‘Got anything for this, F?’ Mum yanks another helmet out of a drawer and pulls it on. It looks odd above her grey HPA tracksuit.
‘I might,’ Femi responds cheekily. He presses a button on his console and, a moment later, screams and explosions echo from around the van. ‘Let’s go then.’
He puts his foot down and we hurtle past men leaping out of a burning HPA jeep and screech out of the car park. Me and Mum hang on to the headrests of the front seats, watching as Femi swerves down an empty residential road.
‘Anyone on our tail?’ Emily asks.
‘No,’ Femi says. ‘How did they find us?’
‘We need to check for trackers.’ Mum digs into another drawer and pulls out a scanner.
‘Check the Love Interest,’ Emily calls back.
‘Me?’ I stay as still as I can as Mum runs the scanner over me.
‘We need to talk about this whole Love Interest thing too,’ she says.
The brakes squeal and we stagger against the side of the van as Femi hurtles round a corner and on to a road lined with warehouses.
‘Yes, now seems like the perfect time for that conversation,’ I say.
The scanner beeps as Mum holds it up to my shoulder, to the spot where Blaze touched me when he was lying on the ground outside the museum. ‘Found it.’
It turns out Blaze is just as deceitful as I am.
‘Feck,’ I mutter.
‘FECK!’ Femi cries.
The Secret Ninja is in the middle of the road in front of us.
‘FECK!’ Emily screams.
We hit him.
We hit the Secret Ninja and I can almost feel the front of the van crunching. Femi is still swearing, but he doesn’t stop the van.
‘Did you kill him?’ I lean into the front.
‘No!’ Mum yells.
The sound of tearing metal fills the air and the Secret Ninja’s hand appears through the van’s floor. It grabs Mum’s ankle.
‘Oh!’ Her eyes immediately close and the skin on her ankle shimmers. Have her powers activated?
‘Emily!’ I yell.
‘Off you go!’ Emily reaches out and each of the Ninja’s fingers bend back.
As soon as she’s released, Mum’s eyes snap open and she kicks the Ninja’s hand back through the hole in the van’s floor. There’s a thud from below. I wobble over to Mum and look down. There’s no sign of the Ninja. He can’t possibly have survived that fall after being hit by a speeding van. Relief surges through me, followed closely by horror. A man just died.
Mum grabs me to steady me as we race round another corner. ‘That was a thing.’ She’s having trouble getting her words out. ‘That wasn’t a person. I helped make it, but after that … Betrayed … Re … Re … Re … Smoothed over.’
‘We’ve got a problem!’ Femi yells. ‘I think the Ninja cut the brake line.’
‘Can’t you fix it?’ Emily shouts.
‘And he’s done something to the steering! Hold on!’ Femi cries.
Mum grabs my hands and moves them so we’re both clutching the straps holding the hoverboards. Emily looks back at us. She raises her hands and holds one towards us and one out the window. ‘Feck!’ she yells as the van hurtles off the road and flies into a wall.
Metal and brick smash together, filling the air with sound and—
Everything stops.
Mum gasps next to me. ‘Are you OK?’
Am I OK? It felt like I should have been flung across the van, but I stayed exactly where I was.
‘I’m OK,’ Femi calls from the front.
‘I’m OK,’ I mumble. ‘Emily?’
It was Emily. She saved me and Mum. She’s still in the front. Her head is down on the dashboard.
‘Emily!’ Mum cries.
I follow as she leaps out of the back doors and runs across the concrete to Emily’s door. The front of the van must have already been damaged by the Ninja, but now it looks like a crumpled crisp packet.
We wrench Emily’s door open.
A thin line of red runs down past her closed eyes. My heart twists. Emily is too powerful and too annoying to die.
‘She’s alive,’ Femi calls across. ‘Knocked out. She tried to absorb the impact and—’ Femi gasps. ‘Also, I’m trapped, and my ribs … I … I’m not going anywhere fast. First thing to do is kill Jenna’s tracker.’
I step back – it’s too late. The HPA will already be on their way here. Emily is out, Femi is trapped, Mum’s power is reading objects, which is awesome, but not hugely helpful in a fight. They’re sitting ducks.
I take another step away from the crash, away from Mum.
‘Go round to Femi, we need to get your tracker disabled,’ she says.
The van crashed in an industrial area – no one will have seen us and it doesn’t sound like any alarms have been triggered. If I give Mum, Femi and Emily some time, they’ll be able to escape. I take another step away.
‘Jenna!’ Mum yells at me like I’m seven years old again. ‘Get here, now!’
‘I’ll distract them. I’m good at that.’ I shrug at her. ‘Maybe that’s my power.’
Adrenalin courses through me as I leap back into the van and grab a hoverboard.
‘Jenna!’ Mum’s scream bounces off the warehouses as I sprint away.
My helmet joggles on my hair, but I don’t have time to stop and take it off. From above I must look ridiculous; a girl in a wobbly helmet struggling to carry a hoverboard that she has no idea how to use. Megan was right; I shouldn’t make the plans.
‘How do you work?’ The board is smooth, with no helpful on switch.
‘Activate hoverboard?’ a small voice says in my ear.
‘What? I mean yes! Yes! Activate hoverboard.’
‘Activating.’
The board vibrates and I skid to a halt as it flies from my hands to in front of my feet. I step gingerly on to it. What am I doing? I can’t even surf. My Villain boots make several clicking sounds and connect to the board, holding me securely in place. I allow myself a small smile. My mum makes pretty incredible tech.
‘Set a course?’ the voice asks as my board rises off the ground.
‘Er, yeah?’
A map appears on the visor in front of me. I’m still close to the museum. Femi must have circled back after we left the car park. The Safe Road is off to the left or, almost directly in front of me, is the Wild Road.
‘HPA vehicles incoming.’
I try to spin and look and almost fall over. There’s no sign of cars yet, but I can’t stay here much longer. ‘Set course for Nine Trees,’ I say hurriedly.
‘Route A?’ A yellow dotted line appears on the map, showing me the way home along the Safe Road. ‘Or Route B?’ The line shifts to head on to the Wild Road, the last place I want to be.
There’s a screech of wheels in the distance. The longer I can stay out of sight, the longer the HPA are going to think I’m in a van full of Villains. The Wild Road is the closest, darkest option. ‘Route B!’ I yell.
