Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel

19: The Last Domino

I was on the eighteenth floor, getting dangled out the window by Suicide Prime, and I figured I was a goner. The coppers couldn’t do a damn thing. I was looking down on all the sirens and flashing lights below, and the crowds looked back, trying to get a good view for when I got splattered on the footpath. And then I saw her. Madame Z. Christ, she was a beautiful lass. She came floating up outta nowhere, just floating in thin air. Without breaking a sweat, she blew Suicide Prime away with some kinda psychic blast and magicked me safely back inside. It wasn’t right what everyone said about her when they found out she was a dyke. She can screw the Circuit’s robots for all it matters. She was the best damn hero I ever saw.

—Witness report from the Doom Corps hostage crisis, 1955

***

Niobe woke to the sound of sizzling and a spicy scent filling her nostrils. Her stomach growled and knotted. Bleary-eyed and groggy, she pulled the bowler hat off her face and sat up on the couch, putting a hand against her spine. That had been a bad place for a nap. Her back felt like a sumo wrestler had done a tap dance on it.

She plodded to the kitchen. Gabby?

Her heart sank when she saw Solomon stirring the sizzling vegetables around the pan. Solomon gave her a too-cheerful grin as she sank into a seat at the table and propped her chin up on her hands.

“Why so glum?” he asked.

“Bite me,” she said. “Where’s Gabby?”

Solomon shovelled the vegetables into piles on two plates. “Still in the bedroom.”

Niobe put her face in her hands. Gabby hadn’t so much as looked at them when she came back up from the basement, her clothes streaked with engine grease. She went into the bedroom, shut the door, and then Niobe heard the shower running. That was the last she’d seen of her.

Solomon shoved a plate and a big glass of water in front of her, and forced a fork into her hand. “Eat, kiddo.”

She wasn’t so hungry anymore. She glanced at the bedroom door, but no matter how much she willed it, it didn’t open. She could just go in, but that might cause more problems than it would solve. Or maybe Gabby was in there waiting for her to come apologise. This bloody thing was too complicated.

Solomon sat opposite her, putting his plate down on top of an old police report about Daniel O’Connor’s team taking down some metahuman kidnappers. He chowed into his food immediately, but Niobe poked a piece of broccoli with her fork. “What’s this supposed to be?”

“Stir-fry,” Solomon said with his mouth full. “I thought you were supposed to be Asian.”

“My folks cooked Japanese food, not Chinese. And I spent most of my time at boarding school.” She could barely remember her mum cooking. But the food did smell good. “Aren’t you supposed to have rice or noodles or something with this?”

He shrugged. “Quit your complaining and eat. You can’t go hunting supervillains on an empty stomach.”

Her hunger returned as soon as she started eating. Her stomach rumbled with satisfaction. “What’s the time?”

He checked his watch. “Five in the afternoon.”

Crap. Her nap had gone a few hours longer than she intended. No wonder she was hungry. She drained her glass of water and went back to the food. They’d spent until midday poring over the documents she’d taken from Met Div, trying to piece everything together, find connections. They’d got nowhere. They were working with too few pieces of the puzzle. They needed to work out how everyone fitted together, but more importantly, they needed a location on Quanta. She’d lost count of how many times she’d listened to his smarmy voice on the recording, but the background noises were too distorted to be of any help.