THE METAHUMAN TRANSFIGURATION
Description: The gang gets superpowers. It's not as cool as some of them always thought. Alternate Season 9 premiere.
Notes: As before, the violence in this chapter may be verging on the edge of M rating, so those with sensitive stomachs are hereby cautioned. Everybody else, well, I'm sure you're all getting sick of the sorry-I'm-late-with-the-update apologies, so I'll skip them and just say I sincerely hope not to go so long between updates next time. Thanks to everyone for bearing with my urge to digress into Lenny smut.
Disclaimer: The author does not own THE BIG BANG THEORY or any of the characters.
- 14 -
GRAND CAMELOT HOTEL, LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2015, 10:05 P.M.
To Raj's empathic perceptions, the psychic shape of the hotel had changed entirely. When he'd been searching floor by floor for Leonard, it had felt like sifting through a columnar cloud of fireflies, the minds densest at the bottom (near the exhibit hall) and the top (the rooftop dance floor) but distributed more or less evenly throughout, except for the empty floors Howard had spotted. Then the gunfire from Rozokov's men, and the fear it had set off, had swept the building like a tidal wave of freezing grey seawater and emptied it out. What remained felt, to Raj, like the hollow remains of a broken hourglass, with only occasional stragglers trickling their way down the staircases. He and Lucy were alone in the silent corridors as they ran down one, and then another, past empty offices and abandoned work areas, his mind stabbing out in every direction and finding nothing like what he was searching for.
Tiny spots of force remained here and there. In the offices near the Camelot's central atrium, Howard, Amy and Leonard were three brilliant dots of heat in Raj's mind. In the cavernous space he knew to be the exhibit hall, he could feel the anger, fear and adrenaline of ongoing battle, and the bursts of pain as blows were exchanged and bodies flew back and forth. One mind in that mêlée he recognized as Penny's, the bright clear crackle of her anger and determination as pure as everything else about her spirit. It occurred to him, briefly, that while he had never wondered why Leonard loved her, now he knew why, in a way maybe even Leonard himself might not ever grasp.
He usually took his faith's metaphysical doctrines with a grain of salt—and certainly Hinduism had no absolute dogmas about whether two souls could, in fact, be bound in some karmic way—but standing next to Penny holding Leonard in the elevator, he had felt their minds fitting together like two halves of a broken whole, the connections between them forged at a level so deep and strong his own empathic powers could achieve only a shadow of it. Only the fear and tension of the moment had kept him from misting up at its beauty.
And that, Raj realized, might be the key. He held up a hand, waving Lucy to a stop. "Hold on, hold on," he gasped. "Let's stop for a moment. I want to try something."
"Okay," said Lucy, looking relieved herself for the pause. "What's up?"
"I think I've been going about this all wrong," said Raj. "Something I noticed in the elevator between Leonard and Penny: People who've shaped themselves to fit another person, they create connections to that person. And if what I sense has any kind of objective reality, those connections go beyond simply the mental experience. The two most important people in Sheldon's and Bernadette's life are Amy and Howard—and I know where Amy and Howard are. Maybe, if I start from them, I can follow those connections to find our friends. Does that make sense?"
Lucy shrugged helplessly. "About as much as anything else that's happened. Which to me means, not a lot. But don't let that stop you."
Raj frowned. "Well, I would have liked more enthusiastic support, but you did in fact just save my life so I won't carp. The upshot is, I may have to seriously zone out here. Can I get you to watch over me?"
Lucy nodded, looking earnest. "Oh sure. Don't worry, Raj. I got your back. Believe me." She paused a beat, then added in a deadpan so innocent it took him a moment to catch it, "If I ever want to enjoy your backside, I'd better make sure I do cover your back." She gave the tiniest smirk.
Raj's face went hot. He coughed in surprise and cleared his throat furiously. "Well, um, yes, I, ah, hm. Well. Let's table that topic for later. But, uh . . . thank you." He knelt down and sat on the linoleum tile of the floor, trying to find the position that would be most comfortable, and after a moment stretched out lying completely flat on his back, hands folded together on his stomach. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and cleared his mind with the meditation techniques he'd tried once to teach Sheldon; it had been long ago enough now that he could remember the resulting fiasco with rueful laughter.
Imagine a night sky above an empty plain, with only the stars to light the emptiness. See the patterns and the names: Orion, Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Ursa Major and Minor, Draco and Pavo. Listen to the silence of the infinite spaces between them. And then, when your mind is silent and empty but for starlight, allow the answer you seek to take shape beneath that starlight.
Counterpoint to the stars above, the minds he sensed blossomed into clarity, orbs of fire burning with a hundred hues of light, hot and cold, smooth and jagged, fierce and faltering. Lucy's mind loomed above him, its dominant hue still fear's cold blue-grey, but taking on more complex shades and streaks by the hour. Beyond the building, he could feel the waves of a thousand minds gathering to watch: the curiosity of rubberneckers, the panic and confusion of those who'd fled and now waited for resolution, the grim resolve of the police, the worry and determination of paramedics and rescue workers. And moving through the offices where he'd left them, he found Howard and Amy once more, Leonard at their side. Focusing in on them, by some intuitive means he couldn't have explained if he tried, he let their sense expand to fill his consciousness, staring at the light of their souls like a moth hypnotized by a flame.
And . . . there; yes. From all three of them, the energies of their deepest passions reached beyond their own mortal shells—spun out like the finest of silken fibers into an invisibly thin but steel-strong cord. Were they made of Sheldon's oneirion particles, or only channels for them in some even deeper structure of the universe? From Leonard, the cord ran back towards the hotel's main atrium and the exhibit hall adjoining, where Penny and Sammy were still locked in battle. But from Howard and Amy, the cords ran in tandem through the building, past Raj and Lucy towards the south side of the office complex. Raj let all else fade from his senses until those two cords were the only thing burning there. He opened his eyes.
And before him, seemingly visible like the fading purple aftertrack of twin sparklers slashed across his vision, the cords stretched out through the wall. Mouth agape despite himself, Raj scrambled to his feet. "Sacred Krishna, I think I've found them," he said. "Or at least I found the way to find them!" He ran to the wall and pounded on it in frustration. "I can see the connection, but it goes straight through here, probably directly through the building's structure—damn it, now we need to find our way around to see where this comes out—"
"Uh—Raj," said Lucy, tapping him on the shoulder. He rounded on her, almost angrily, but she only raised her eyebrows . . . and stuck one hand straight through the wall. She held out the other to him. "Well?"
"Okay, I'd just like to remind you that three days ago having superpowers was still just a comic book trope," said Raj defensively. He grabbed her hand and grimaced. "Oh, boy, this part isn't going to be fun, is it?"
"Oh, suck it up, you big baby," said Lucy with a nervous grin, and pulled him headfirst into the wall.
It was like getting struck by waves of carbonated, mildly electrified water: they passed through plaster, load-bearing steel beams, layers of insulation and webs of pipe and cabling, gasping for breath whenever they could. Each separate substance felt different in its spiky tingling, but all were equally unpleasant, to Raj at least. Following the invisible, glowing tracks of energy, Raj guided Lucy through the hotel's structure by pressure and gesture, their speech as occluded as their breathing. It took Raj only a few seconds to realize the psychic conduits were sliding downwards, pointing towards the south side of the hotel; as they broke into an open corridor whose windows opened on the street, the conduits disappeared into the floor. Raj held up one hand, waving Lucy to a stop, and then put his finger to his lips in the universal Shhhhh! sign. Lucy nodded, wide-eyed.
Just above where the conduits met the floor, a plain door marked with the simple sign FILING hung open, just a crack. Raj eased it open and slipped in, Lucy following. When he flipped on the light, the room proved to be full of metal storage shelves, each shelf filled with thick binders dated by month and year. They hurried up and down each aisle, finding nothing. Raj ground his teeth and looked at Lucy. "Whatever the conduits led to, it should be under here, but I don't see any exits . . . ."
Lucy frowned, looking around. "I could try dropping through the floors, I guess, but if there's no empty space under here I might go too far down." At his puzzled look, she explained, "I don't know if you noticed, Raj, but you can't breathe when you're inside something. If I went too far down and couldn't get back into empty space before my breath gave out . . . ." She took a deep breath and turned away, dust gritting beneath her feet.
Raj nodded, feeling cold. "Okay, right, important safety tip. Good to know." He put his hand to his chin, trying to think. He'd missed something important. Maybe if he let the conduits go and switched back to trying a general, all-round sense? He might not be able to find them again if he did. But somebody, this Rozokov or somebody else, had clearly brought Sheldon and Bernadette this way, and they couldn't ghost out: there had to be some way to get down where those conduits ran, some hidden entrance or—
Silver agony sliced across his throat, shattering his sense of the conduits like a katana swung through glass. He screamed aloud, stumbled backwards and collapsed, the anguish and terror roaring through him like a cataract. With it came an unmistakeable truth: the identity of the sufferer. "Bernadette!" he howled. He clutched at his throat, somehow simultaneously feeling both the solid dry flesh of his own neck and a horrid, pulsing gush of wet heat flooding out from a sickening rupture where no rupture should be. "Bernadette! No! No!"
"Raj, where?!" Lucy shrieked at him, and when he pointed desperately straight at the pain—down at an angle through the floor—Lucy nodded, stepped back, took a few running steps and dove straight into the floor as if it was a swimming pool, vanishing completely. The dust and grit on the floor splashed out to either side like ripples on water . . . and realization slapped Raj hard upside the head, even as the horrible pain in his throat began to fade.
They'd been so hung up on using their powers to search, it hadn't even occurred to either of them to do something as simple as look for footprints in the dust! And there they were, going straight in Lucy's direction to a corner of the room, a combination of stumbling steps and the straight lines of someone being dragged. The trail disappeared beneath one of the shelves. Raj ran to it, hurled every book on the shelf off it and fumbled around. Within a minute he found a catch at the back under the top shelf. The shelf swung out on hidden hinges. Behind it, a staircase descended into the ground. Raj flung himself down it.
10:07 P.M.
It really was remarkably like swimming, although Lucy made one mistake: she had been pushing so fast through the floor that when she broke out into the ceiling of the room below, she moved too far and fell out. She landed badly on her arms, and a sickening crack cut through the splash she made as she thudded down onto her back; a white-hot bolt of pain transfixed her left wrist and the breath left her lungs. For a moment, winded and hurting, she didn't realize she'd landed in a pool of something hot and red. Then it hit her. She whipped her head over, saw Bernadette's limp body lying face down in the blood, and threw herself backwards with a shriek. Staring in horror, she covered her mouth with her good hand, barely aware of the coppery moisture she'd smeared over her face. The sticky, damp warmth of her clothes made her stomach turn over.
"Oh no," she moaned, "oh no no no, oh, God, no, please, no . . . ." The moan trailed away to a shuddering, gasping husk of breath, the only sound in the room.
Then Bernadette jackknifed upright with a sudden deafening gasp, so sharp and loud that Lucy screamed again and actually dropped halfway into the floor before catching herself. As she watched, eyes bulging, the horrid gaping gash in Bernadette's throat sealed over, shrinking inwards from both ends, the flesh rippling and smoothing together like plasticine molded skilfully by invisible fingers. The deathly pallor in Bernadette's skin flushed away in healthy pinkness. Bernadette coughed, spat out a mouthful of blood, and shook her head, blinking. "Uh!" she gasped. "Oh, sweet suffering Christ, that hurt! Oh, my God, I—" She frowned suddenly. "Lucy?"
"B-B-Bernadette?" Lucy stuttered. She pushed herself up out of the floor, staring. "Are—are you—?"
Bernadette nodded, the relief on her face too intense for anything like a grin. Without warning she threw herself at the other girl, hugging her tightly. To her own shock Lucy found herself returning the embrace with her good arm, laughing wildly, in a sound that wobbled on the edge of weeping. Then she made the mistake of trying to bring her other arm into it and yelled in pain. Bernadette broke away. "Oh, God, Lucy, I'm sorry! Did I hurt you?"
"No, no, no," Lucy said hurriedly. "My fault, totally my fault. Raj led us here but we couldn't find a way down, so I went through the floor and, uh, kinda fell." She looked at her wrist and felt ill again. Already it had swollen and turned an ugly shade of puce. "Oh, God, that isn't just a sprain is it?"
"No," said Bernadette, taking Lucy's arm carefully in her small hands. Her fingers moved delicately over the skin, their touch so light that it actually felt oddly soothing. "Been a while since basic anatomy, but I'm pretty sure that's a break. Bad one, too . . . actually, I . . . ." She trailed off. Her eyes widened, staring at the injury, and her face lost all expression, as if her mind had gone elsewhere. Then she closed her eyes and drew in a slow, silent breath.
Lucy frowned. "Bernadette? Bernadette, are you all—" It was her turn to cut herself off with a shocked gasp. Around Bernadette's fingers, where they rested on Lucy's forearm, a faint, glowing shimmer gathered like water condensing on glass. Cool, sparkling tingles surged throughout the limb, the pain seeming to dissolve into those tingles the way an Alka-Seltzer tablet fizzed and dissolved in water. The swelling in her arm subsided before her eyes. All of it happened faster than Lucy quite grasped; before she realized it, she had jerked her arm out of Bernadette's grasp and held it up, gaping at it. It was completely, perfectly healed.
Bernadette was staring too, with what looked like almost equal astonishment. "I . . . I could feel the break," she whispered. "Like I can feel anything that's wrong in my own system. And I could feel how to fix it, too . . . my God. Oh, my God." She crossed herself, the movement slow and deliberate; Lucy could see her hand shaking as it moved.
One of the room's two doors burst open; Raj stumbled in, gasping, and skidded to a stop as he saw the girls kneeling together in the blood. He spat something horrified-sounding in Hindi and covered his mouth, then fumbled in his pocket. "Don't move, either of you! I'm calling 9-1-1—oh, khotey ki aulad, I never did get a new iPhone, dammit!" He brought his wrist-mike to his mouth. "Hold on, I'll radio Leonard, they might—"
"Raj! Raj!" Bernadette shouted. She scrambled to her feet, slipped in the blood and went down again, and only then seemed to realize the mess she'd made. "Euuuuchhhh," she moaned, whipping her hands away from her and scattering drops of blood everywhere. "Oh, my God, this is so gross!" She collected herself and waved her arms at Raj. "Look, Raj, I'm fine! I healed! We're both fine!"
"You—you what? You're fine?" Raj blinked. "Oh. Oh, that's right, you can heal, can't you? Oh my God." He suddenly slumped and covered his chest with one hand. "Oh, my God, thank Krishna, thank Vishnu and Brahma and all the boddhisattvas . . . ." He trailed off and frowned at her. "Bernadette—what happened to your blouse? For that matter, what happened to you and Sheldon?"
"Two security guys caught us by surprise," said Bernadette. She tried more slowly to get up again, and this time succeeded. Lucy joined her. "They Tased Sheldon and held a knife on me until we got down here, and then they sedated us both—it wore off for me inside a minute, but Sheldon's probably still out. Then a couple of minutes ago this little balding guy rushes in and tells us we all have to run, and then one of the security guys said, well, they really only needed Sheldon, right? And then he—" She stopped, blinking, as if she suddenly wasn't sure how to go on. "Then he . . . he . . . ."
She looked down at herself, as if only just realizing that her blouse was in tatters around her waist, her bra clearly exposed and her body smeared head to foot with blood. The colour drained out of her face again; she swayed on her feet and fell against Lucy, who just managed to hold her up. Her skin felt ice-cold. Lucy gaped at her. "Bernadette? Are you okay? Are you—" She turned to Raj, and broke off. Raj's jaw hung open, his eyes wide and wet in aghast horror as he stared at Bernadette. He looked as if he'd just received the worst news one could imagine—the death of a child, maybe, or hearing that one's whole family had been wiped out in a disaster . . . .
Oh, shit. Whatever Bernadette was feeling, Raj was feeling it too. Shock must have blunted the trauma until now, but the experience was obviously coming back afresh . . . just in time to hit Raj as well. Lucy wondered frantically what to do. She wasn't sure she could handle one person breaking down, let alone two.
Then everything in Raj's face seemed to close, as if something inside him had just gone away, or shut down. He blinked, took a deep breath, and looked at the other door. "They went that way," he said to Bernadette, his voice flat as paper. "Yes?" When Bernadette nodded, he looked at Lucy, and it was as if she was a complete stranger. "Lucy, if you take Bernadette up the stairs the way I came in, you'll be at ground level, near the wall. Please take her through the outer wall and out of here, where she'll be safe. And—" For a moment his breath, and his voice, trembled; he paused, then went on. "And I would get her to a hospital, so they can make sure her child is all right."
The last words were like a kick in Lucy's gut, silencing the furious disagreement she'd been about to spit at him—how dare he leave them behind? But he was right. There was a baby involved here. Instead she only nodded. Raj didn't even nod back. He only spun and dashed out the door Bernadette had indicated. Bernadette stared after him.
Lucy tried to tug her gently towards the stairs. "Bernadette, come on. You know he's right. We have to check on the—"
"Raj, wait!" Bernadette screamed, and tore free of Lucy's arms to sprint down the corridor after Raj.
Lucy blinked after her. Then she did something she hadn't done since, as far as she could remember, she'd been a child; maybe not ever. She raised her arms to the ceiling and shrieked aloud at it in wordless frustration. When she finished, she paused a moment, panting. Damn. She'd had no idea how good that sort of thing felt. Maybe that primal-scream therapist had been onto something after all.
She skittered around the puddle of blood and burst into a run, bolting down the corridor after her friends. Friends, she marveled, even as she ran.
10:09 P.M.
The twenty-foot-high video screen display came crashing down on Penny in a cacophony of shattering plastic and clanging metal. Penny flung one arm across her eyes and hunched down, taking the impacts with grunts and gasps of pain; by the time everything had finished and the last shards had tinkled to the ground, she was buried in the wreckage, and a little dizzy with the blows she hadn't quite kept off her head. She let herself rest a moment, sucking in dust-filled gasps, trying to get her equilibrium back. Damn, she thought. He's getting smarter.
She could hear the rasping sounds of Sammy's breathing some few yards away, fast and heavy. Good; this was taking a toll on him too. Beyond that, the hall had gone strangely quiet. After Anderson and the cops had proven one last time the uselessness of bullets against Sammy, Anderson had started shepherding the wounded out of the hall, calling in paramedics to help; Penny had done her best to keep Sammy distracted, hurling chairs, tables, punches and kicks at him as she jinked back and forth just beyond his reach. He had managed to score solid hits on her once or twice, both times sending her hurtling back through rows of pop-up booths, shelves, banner displays and adult products, but so far she'd been able to recover and take to the air before he could close for a followup strike. He had finally clued into that tactic, it seemed. This time, rather than finishing his charge, he'd skewed abruptly to one side, grabbed the massive four-sided video display tower and flung the whole thing at her, catching her by surprise. That it seemed to have worked might have caught him by surprise, too, she thought.
"Ms. Carmichaels?!" She recognized the yell as Anderson's; she was genuinely surprised by the real fear and worry she could hear in it. "Penny?! Are you all right?!" Then there came a sudden guttural snarl, and Anderson's yell choked off. Penny thought she might have heard the smallest whisper of, "Oh, shit." She sighed. Well, that narrowed her options.
She hunched down, gathered her strength, and burst explosively up and out of the wreckage pile in a single leap, stopping just short of the exhibit hall's ceiling. Sammy, who had turned towards Anderson and begun stalking in his direction, whipped back to glare at her with another snarl. He had absorbed more and more of the material thrown at him, and now looked like nothing human at all, a monstrosity of spikes and metal-plastic scales nearly eight feet high with unevenly sized limbs; only the hobbling gait imposed by his asymmetrical legs had let Penny dodge some of his punches. Between the two of them—as well as the useless gunfire of the SWAT officers, before they'd given it up as a bad job and pulled back to close the hall off—most of the exhibition had been reduced to piles of wreckage, with flattened booths, shredded signs and banners, burst packages of paraphilic paraphernalia, and broken chairs and tables scattered in all directions. Looking around at it, Penny found herself letting out a flummoxed breath. Man, she wouldn't want to sit in on the meeting for this insurance claim.
"Jesus . . . frigging . . . Christ," Sammy growled up at her, sounding almost more exhausted than pissed off. "What's it take to kill you, bitch?!"
Penny smiled grimly at him. "More than you got, Sammy." Without giving him any more warning than that, she flipped into a dive, shot straight down at him, then pulled herself up and around with a backwards somersault and caught him right under the chin with a solid kick. The blow lifted him up—though not as much as a previous strike had; either he was getting heavier or she was getting tired—and flung him backwards into one of the few displays still standing, an array of leather and rubber BDSM fetish gear. As she thudded down on the carpet with a three-point landing, Sammy's weight brought the display down with a crash—
—and he screamed aloud, a sound of shock and agony that punctured Penny's gleeful triumph like a pin in a balloon. He writhed a moment in the wreckage, then collapsed, limp.
Ice-cold horror clamped up Penny's stomach in a knot of nausea. Oh, God, had she killed him?! She'd never meant to kill anyone! Without meaning to, she scrambled to her feet and ran towards the display, too upset to think of flight. Sammy's body lay absolutely limp amid the ruins of the booth, with masks and whips and cuffs scattered around him like some weird snowfall. Had he fallen on a metal display pin or some sharp fetish tool, maybe managing to find a crack in that warped carapace? Crap on a cracker, it would be just her luck if she got hauled up for manslaughter on top of everything else—
Whhhss-CRACK! She barely saw Sammy's arm move before a lash of fiery pain grabbed her throat and closed it. Suddenly she couldn't breathe. Her eyes bulging, her hands flew to her throat and found a cord wrapped tightly around it, too tight for her to wedge her fingers in. Sammy's head snapped up, and she had just enough time to see him grinning like a fiend before the whip around her neck yanked her off her feet and sent her hurtling through the air like a cannonball. She flew nearly forty yards, crashed into the far wall of the exhibit hall and thudded to the floor, her vision blurry and dim, her whole body numb except for her neck and shoulders, which were on fire. The whip he'd grabbed from the display still in his hand, Sammy clambered to his feet, grin fixed in place. Penny felt the floor vibrate under her, step by step, as he closed in.
"No!" The helpless scream was Anderson's; Penny heard gunshots go off like they were miles away and under water, dull and thick and fuzzy. Sammy's step didn't waver at all. Blinking hazily, Penny tried to remember how to get up, but it seemed to be beyond her. Shadow fell over her. Sammy's blurry form towered up above her in a dark spiky haze.
He tossed away the whip and reached down; his massive hands clamped shut about Penny's throat and hauled her up, slamming her against the wall. Almost buried in the centre of that monstrous face, Sammy's eyes—brown and narrow and bright with pain and fury—met hers, getting fainter and darker by the second. Her lungs wouldn't work, and when she tried to stiffen her neck muscles and open up her throat, Sammy's fingers gripped her with a power easily the equal of her own. She brought her arms up weakly and flailed at him, but the strength was running out of her like blood.
"Yeah," Sammy rumbled. "What I thought. You know how to brawl, bitch, I'll give you that. But you never learned how to put someone down. Did you."
Penny tried to think of an answer for that. But nothing came up through the blackness drowning her brain. And she wouldn't have had the breath to say it anyway. Oh, God, was this it? And she'd told Leonard to take care of himself . . . . Her cheeks felt wet. This wasn't fair. Dammit, this wasn't fair—
"Put the girl down, now." The words were accompanied by the metallic click of a pistol cocking. Anderson had had to reach up between Sammy's arms to do it, but Sammy's distraction with choking Penny had kept him unnoticed as he raced towards them, until he ducked down and came up right between the two, the muzzle of his gun pointed almost directly at Sammy's eye. "Sammy, right? Drop her, Sammy, or we find out if your eye's got the same armour as the rest of you." His voice and face were hard as stone. "One. Two. Thr—"
Sammy yanked Penny backwards, not letting her go, and slammed her against Anderson, crushing the FBI agent's body between Penny's body and his own. Anderson's body armour saved him from being impaled on the spikes protruding from Sammy's carapace, but the sheer force of the impact stunned him and dropped him to the floor, and a kick sent him hurtling away into another pile of wreckage. He didn't get up. The last shreds of her rage stirring, Penny tried her oldest and favourite shot: the groin kick. It only bumped feebly off Sammy's thigh, and then her leg fell dangling.
Sammy made a grumbling sound and smashed Penny against the wall again, this time hard enough to dent it in a webwork of cracks. "Okay, bitch," he rumbled, "I've had enough of this. Closing time." Impossible as she had thought it, his grip tightened further. Penny felt like her head was going to explode. There had to be a way out of this. Had Superman or Supergirl ever been in this situation? Christ, this was the last way she would ever have expected to die: wishing she'd read more of Leonard's comic books . . . .
"HEY! UGLY!"
With a groan of frustration and rage, Sammy looked over his shoulder; his grip relaxed with his distraction, enough that Penny could drag some oxygen into her lungs. Her vision cleared, and she blinked furiously. She was sure she'd recognized that voice. From the way Sammy said, "You," she thought he might have too. The monster made a sound halfway between laughter and a roar. "Wanna play hero, Energizer bunny?"
At the double-door hall entrance, Amy and Leonard gaped around at the wreckage. Hovering a yard above the floor of the exhibit hall, a heavy orange-and-white box clutched under one arm and his force-tube projector in the other, Howard tried to grin. The attempt looked particularly ghastly against the huge bruise on his swollen face. "Not that much, actually," he said. The trembling in his voice undermined his attempted nonchalance. "But I did think of asking you to step outside . . . though on second thought, you know what? Forget asking." He levelled the tube, kicked his skates backward and pressed the button.
A screeching whipcrack split the air; Penny just barely saw the shimmering wave of force flying at them before it hit Sammy and her both with the force of a runaway freight locomotive. The impact smashed them both completely through the wall, bursting metal and concrete like balsa wood, hurling them out into the hotel's parking lot under the night sky. Penny rolled over and over on the asphalt and finally came to a stop, blinking up at the neon-lit air of the Strip, sucking in gasps of air as cries and yells of panic went up everywhere around.
God, she thought dimly, I am never going to make fun of Leonard for his asthma again.
"OW!" Sammy bellowed, clambering to his feet. Concrete and rebar had adhered to him, and already it was melting into his form, further warping it. As Howard, Amy and Leonard appeared in the gaping, ragged hole in the hotel's wall, staring out at them, Sammy lifted his fist and shook it at them. "Ow, you—you—I'm gonna kill you, you little—"
Penny sighed, rolled back upright, picked up one of the concrete car-stops and hit Sammy with it like it was a baseball bat. He flew out of the parking lot and landed on top of a traffic-jammed Buick in the street, crushing the roof in. Penny gulped, then winced; the involuntary movement felt like she'd swallowed razors. "Sorry!" she shouted after the Buick's driver, who was already halfway down the block.
She looked back at the hotel. "Hey, Howard," she called, waving to him, startled at the hoarseness of her own voice. "I see you found a power-up."
Howard lifted the orange-and-white box with an attempt at a nonchalant shrug, although the box was clearly too heavy for the movement. "Borrowed it from a maintenance cupboard," he called back. "It's for their ceiling-rig electric carts. I just wish this thing came with a shoulder strap." He ducked through the hole in the wall and skated over to her, Leonard and Amy trotting in his wake. As he got close enough to see her better he grimaced. "Ow. You look like you're wearing a bruise-coloured scarf."
Penny touched her throat and immediately hissed in pain. Her neck was ringed in a hot, swollen ache, and as the adrenaline of the fight died down the stabbing pain of breathing and speaking grew more and more acute by the moment. "Ow," she husked. "Yeah. I guess being bulletproof doesn't work against strangling, for whatever fucking reason that might be . . . ." She glared at Leonard as if the whole thing was his fault, which she knew perfectly well was being unreasonable about things even if technically all this was his fault—well, his and Sheldon's—but dammit, she was tired, and pissed off, and in more physical pain than she'd experienced for a long, long time. She felt entitled to be a little unreasonable.
"Actually I think it makes sense," said Leonard. "I think it's about momentum. Your power kicks in by stopping anything coming at you above a certain velocity, or maybe above a certain pressure-distribution footprint, or both, so if somebody got their hands on you slow enough to make contact and was strong enough that your neck muscles couldn't resist it . . . ." He trailed off at Penny's glower. "But we can talk about that sort of thing later," he finished lamely. "We better get somebody from the cops out here to chain Sammy up—" He looked over at the wrecked Buick, then groaned. "Oh no."
Penny spun. Sammy was gone. On the Strip ahead, screeches of brakes, car horns, and screams were filling the air. And as they watched, a sportscar went flying into the air and crashed over to one side. Moments later, further north, another car was hurled sideways. Howard put his hand over his eyes, then looked at Penny. "We can't just leave him to the cops, can we?"
Penny sighed. "Two against—ow." She took a deep breath and tried again in a whisper. "Two against one might make the difference."
"Or three against one?" offered Amy.
Penny knew why Amy had volunteered and loved her for it, but she made herself state the truth, putting her hands on Amy's shoulders in consolation. "Not if you can't see well enough to fight, Ames," she whispered. Amy slumped, her face halfway between bitter disappointment and sullen anger. "Sorry, bestie." She hesitated, glanced at Leonard, then pulled Amy close and directed the next whisper straight into her ear. "But you can do me the biggest favour of all. Look after Leonard for me, okay?"
Amy only nodded. Penny let her go, gave Leonard a quick but intense kiss and lofted into the air. "Howard?"
Howard sighed. "Next time, buddy," he said to Leonard, "we're gonna get Raj to plan your reception. 'Cause even one of his murder mysteries would be more fun than this." He turned, fumbling with his controls, and then shot into the air with a startled yelp as he twisted the power dial. This time, he managed to keep his feet under him. Penny gave him a thumbs up, whirled about in mid-air and shot down the street after Sammy. Howard's skates sliced the air as he hurtled along in her wake.
10:11 P.M.
Sheldon had very few fond memories of his father; they had never understood or liked each other, and Sheldon had long suspected that George Cooper Sr. might have done better as a father to the hooligans and oafs who'd bullied his younger son rather than to that son himself. But he still vividly recalled—even more clearly than he normally recalled everything else—an odd, uncomfortable evening during his ninth year, where his father, sober for once, had come to his room after the latest schoolyard punchup. There's one thing I can tell you, boy, he'd said, awkwardly but seriously. When you get your growth, you'll most like have the Cooper height, and if you put a little work into it, you'll get the Cooper shoulders too. Then ain't nobody gonna give you any trouble you can't give them back. So however bad things are right now, it ain't gonna last forever. Believe me, son. One day you're gonna get your own back.
It had been kindly meant, and Sheldon had already cried himself to near-exhaustion. He had therefore refrained from telling his father how little he thought of physical violence as a solution to anything, how little he looked forward to puberty and all its irrationalities (he'd read up on everything to expect by the time he'd turned seven), and how little of that horrid sweaty physical "work" he ever intended to do. In the end, he'd gotten himself out of Everholt well before adolescence anyway, purely with his brain. Not that there wasn't more bullying at college, but for the most part it had merely been verbal mockery—the jocks minded to do nastier things than catcall usually saw beating up a pre-teen as beneath them—and he could ignore it, as he'd ignored what he could back in Texas. So while he was appreciative of the height, when it finally came—there was nothing like being able to physically look down on someone to make it clear how much you intellectually looked down on them—he'd never had much benefit of it.
Until now. It was not exactly the benefit his father would have expected, but every time the thugs carrying him found his deadweight sliding out of their arms because he was too tall and gangly to manage well, he rejoiced. The more he slowed them down, the more likely it was that somebody would catch them and teach them a lesson.
When the thyroid-eyed maniac in the blue blazer, Sean, had caught up to Rozokov and Pyotr, his blazer had been soaked with blood. Sheldon had no idea what Sean had done to Bernadette, and while he was mostly confident Bernadette's regenerative abilities would let her survive it, he had never liked anything less than 100% certainty. The thought of losing one of his few friends was bad enough; to think of seeing what the loss of his wife and child would do to Howard—or worse, to think of what Sean might have done to Bernadette that wouldn't have killed her, and oh, how he hated the fact that being with Amy had now led his brain even to conceive such things . . . . For the first time he thought he understood why so many people back home had responded so strongly to the wrathful God of the Old Testament.
I should have stuck with Kolinahr, he thought sluggishly to himself. If the only thing that hurt worse than losing loved ones was knowing what it was not to have any, being human sucked.
The gangsters had been running, as best they could while carrying Sheldon, down a concrete-walled corridor lit only by occasional naked bulbs that ran more or less straight west. At last, they fetched up against a grey metal door, the only visible access a single small black hole at waist-height on the right. The short, balding man, Rozokov, fumbled desperately in one pocket, then the other, and then pounded his fists against the door. "Diermo!" he shouted, his accent now audibly thick. "I forgot to bring key!"
"Is okay," said Pyotr. "Is okay! I have idea." He let Sheldon down, took a pistol out of his coat, then looked at the others. "We should back up, and plug ears. Ricochets and noise." The other men nodded. Dragging Sheldon by one arm, the gangsters backed down the corridor, ten yards, fifteen, twenty. As Sean and Rozokov hunched down, plugging their ears, Pyotr took aim, his eyes narrowing.
"You know, I hate it when I forget keys too."
Pyotr whirled, levelling the gun; his finger was tightening on the trigger when Sean grabbed the gun and shoved it upwards. "No!" he hissed. "We'll need every shot we got to break that lock." He turned and pulled his razor from his pocket. "I'll take care of this asshole," he growled, and strode down the corridor towards Raj, who was sauntering towards them at a ridiculously sedate pace.
Sheldon frowned. He had never been good with expressions, but Raj was usually easier to read than most thanks to his typically animated visage. The look he was wearing now, though, was utterly alien. It seemed . . . serene. Almost bored. He held up one hand, palm out. "Something I hate even more, though? Being careless in the kitchen. I burned my hand on a panhandle once that way, really badly." He glanced at his palm, then at Sean, who had stopped and was staring at him with narrow eyes. "To this day, I still remember how it hurt," he said, almost conversationally.
For a heartbeat there was only silence. Then Sean screamed and flung the razor from him, dropping to his knees, clutching his wrist, his hand spasming and shaking. A second later Pyotr dropped his gun with a shout of pain. Rozokov shouted something in Russian; Pyotr took a deep breath and, no coward, dashed straight at Raj with his fists up. Raj pointed at him, narrowing his eyes. In mid-step, Pyotr jerked backwards and up as if electrocuted, screaming in agony, and dropped to the floor where he writhed and bucked, unable to move. Sean stared, then scrabbled backwards and away, but Raj saw the movement and shifted his focus to the other man; within a second, Sean had folded up in spasms of shrieking agony as well.
Rozokov dove, scooped up the gun, pointed it at Raj and fired. His shaking hands betrayed him; the shot whizzed past Raj's ear, struck sparks from the wall and ricocheted on down the corridor—and from farther down the passageway came a feminine yelp of fright. Raj whirled, stiffened, yelled: "Lucy! Bernadette! No! Stay back! Stay—!"
His warning cut off in a grunt of pain as Rozokov's next shot slammed into his body armour, knocking him forward and down and evidently breaking his concentration; Sean and Pyotr both collapsed, falling limp with twin outrushes of breath. Sheldon tried to lift his own hand, fumbling desperately in his mind for the coordinates that normally came so easily, and still could not pull anything coherent together through the drug. Then all hint of even the attempt vanished in blank, aghast shock as the approaching silhouette came into the light.
Bernadette was a nightmare of blood, clad only in a bra and jeans, her shoes lost somewhere between their prison room and here. Sean, slowly getting to his hands and knees, froze as he saw her. She stared back at him. Then, without changing expression, she walked up to him, knelt down and put her hand on his chest. Sean's eyes bulged. He clapped one hand to his chest, over hers, and sucked in one huge, wheezing gasp, then another. Then he collapsed.
Pyotr crab-walked backwards, pushing himself into the wall, but could not find his feet before Bernadette stepped over to him and grabbed his wrist. He wrenched his arm back and was just on the edge of pulling free of her grip when his eyes suddenly glazed, and he slumped, staring. His panicked breath slowed, becoming deep and even; his face went utterly blank and empty, like a hypnosis subject plunging into trance. Bernadette looked down at him. Then she turned to face Rozokov.
Rozokov screamed and opened up with the pistol, pulling the trigger again and again. Bullets slammed into Bernadette's body, driving her backwards, red hole after red hole opening in her flesh, and at last she collapsed on her butt in the hallway next to the dazed Raj just as Rozokov's pistol ran dry and the hammer continued to fall on the empty chamber with a click, click, click. She shook her head, took a deep breath, and got up. As the echoes died away, Sheldon could hear a series of faint metallic clinks; a moment later he understood. The sounds were the bullets, falling to the concrete floor, as Bernadette's power pushed them out of her body and sealed up the wounds.
Sheldon wanted to shudder, or perhaps to vomit, as much out of shame as the horror of the moment. He had spent his life reading about Wolverine, Deadpool, Daken and other such quick-healing heroes with nothing but admiration and awe. Never once had it occurred to him just how horrible it must be to watch, or to imagine when it was happening to someone you . . . you knew—
(Oh, just say the word, Sheldon, said a voice in his mind that sounded remarkably like Amy's.)
—someone you loved.
"Bernadette?" Raj had pushed himself into a sitting position, staring at the gangsters. Beside him, Lucy had dashed up, dropping to her knees beside him. "What . . . what did you do?"
"I induced cardiac fibrillation in this one," said Bernadette, jabbing Sean with her toe. "Natural heart attack. I put the other guy's brain into a delta-wave state; he won't wake up until I let him. If I do. And him—" She looked at Rozokov, who blinked back at her, frozen. "I haven't made up my mind yet."
"Bernadette." It took everything Sheldon had to say the name. Raj, Bernadette and Lucy jumped, then gaped at Sheldon as if they'd forgotten he was there. Sheldon blinked heavily, pulled in a deep breath and pushed words out one by one, as if they were leaden ingots. "Don't . . . kill . . . them. It's. Murder."
Bernadette drew herself up, eyes wide, nostrils flaring. "Sheldon," she husked. "Do you know—what this asshole—almost did to me?!" Her voice skirled up into a shriek. "What would have happened to my baby?!" The cry echoed up and down the concrete passageway: Baby . . . baby . . . baby . . . baby . . . .
Of all the times to be too drugged to have access to his usual eloquence! Had he been in full command of his faculties Sheldon could have spun a speech so dazzlingly persuasive they could not have failed to see its good sense. "Bernadette . . . you're not . . . a killer. Don't. Be. Like. Them." But the mutinous look in her eyes hadn't died down. Sheldon pulled in one more breath and played the last card he could think of. "What . . . would . . . Howard say?"
Bernadette stared at him. Then, without warning, she slumped. "Ah, damn," she muttered, knelt, and put her hand on Sean's back. A shimmering glow gathered around her fingers. Sean jerked, spasmed, and coughed out gobs of spit, clutching his chest in relief, but before he could get up Bernadette had put her hand on his forehead. Within seconds he had subsided into the same hypnotic trance as Pyotr. Rozokov twitched as if meaning to run, but Raj snapped his fingers and pointed at him; Rozokov stiffened in terror, and that held him still long enough for Bernadette to put him into trance as well.
Raj came over to Sheldon and put a hand on his shoulder. "How you doing, buddy?"
Sheldon took a breath. "Better," he said. "Heavily . . . sedated. Obviously."
"Oh." Bernadette blinked. "Right, I forgot. Well, hold on, Sheldon." She dropped down, put one hand on Sheldon's forehead and another on his throat.
Sheldon wanted to cringe back from the sticky, flaking blood on her hands, until he felt the tingling warmth surging out from the contact and stiffened in surprise. Like a tropical tide—or at least, like what he assumed a tropical tide felt like, since he had never been swimming in an ocean in his life—the warmth swept over him, receded, and left a refreshing clarity in its wake. Sheldon shook his head, scrambled to his feet, and almost in sheer reflex drew a rectangle on the wall; he was completely unable to stop the exultant "Thank you Jesus!" that burst from his mouth when the contiguity to Unit #4A, 2311 Los Robles Avenue snapped effortlessly into existence. Then he realized what he'd said, and coloured. "As my mother would say," he added sheepishly.
Raj looked at the entranced gangsters. "What about them? How long do you think they'll stay like this, Bernadette?"
Bernadette scowled. "Indefinitely, as long as I'm nearby. Once I leave, natural beta-wave consciousness will probably resume in . . . I don't know, could be minutes, could be hours." She shrugged. "I don't really feel like hanging around to find out."
Sheldon nodded. "Yes, biology is a notably imprecise science. Neurobiology most of all." Not that Amy would like hearing that . . . oh. Right. He'd said he'd think about these things, hadn't he. "But, uh, please don't tell Amy that." He considered the gangsters, ignoring the surprised looks the others were trading, then snapped his fingers. "Ah—I've got it." He snapped his fingers again, folded his arms and nodded in triumph. "There."
Lucy frowned. "There . . . what?"
Sheldon was about to berate her in disgust when it occurred to him that, in fact, they couldn't actually be blamed for not seeing it. He sighed. "Look more closely."
Raj, Lucy and Bernadette peered at the three men. After a moment, Lucy audibly gulped. "Um—maybe this is me, but—are they breathing?"
"Oh, they're breathing." Sheldon remembered the contiguity, closed it with a wave and gestured grandly at the gangsters. "They're simply doing so at an immensely slow pace. I put the end of the corridor into a fractional-tau continuum pocket; time in there is moving as close to zero as is possible in this universe. And the pocket's structured to collapse after exactly seventy-two hours' worth of entropy acting on the outer brane. We can send the police here to get them in three days, and as far as they're concerned they won't have noticed a thing."
Raj nodded slowly, smiling. "Brilliant, Sheldon. Brilliant."
Sheldon shrugged. "Well, of course." He saw the looks the others exchanged, considered the situation, and remembered Amy's words once more. "Oh, before I forget," he said—and let nobody ever accuse him of tactlessness again; it was acute self-humiliation to suggest he even could forget—"thank you for coming to get us, Raj. Lucy."
Bernadette nodded. "Yeah. Yes, thank you, both. So much." She looked at the time-frozen gangsters again and shuddered. "God. You never think people like this could really exist, do you?"
"I don't know," said Lucy. "I mean, in terms of who's scarier . . . well, look at what we can do. Who would ever have imagined us?"
The silence in the wake of that remark stretched out for far longer than Sheldon would have expected.