Secret Super (Book 1)

2. Aftermath

Kara woke up with a sharp pain in her head and a dry cottony taste in her mouth.

She looked up, blinking. Her back felt stiff and she was surrounded by pillowy white sheets. When she looked around, there were beds all around her, some of them with curtains drawn. The boy next to her, someone recognized from her underwater training class- Matthew, maybe?- had a hissing snake coiled around his arm, two missing fingers, and a grim expression on his face.

Kara groaned. It looked like she was in the hospital. Again.

Suddenly everything came crashing down on her. The robbers, the cameras, the supers, her force-field, being slammed against the concrete— and then, nothing.

Her heart dropped. She shot up out of the bed. Immediately a sharp pain flashed through her head and vision blacked out. But she waited a few seconds, gulped down the water at her bedside, and got out of the bed anyway. She stood up— only to almost crash into someone appearing next to the bed.

"Jace?" Kara narrowed her eyes, leaning against the bedpost to steady herself. "Wh-what happened?"

"Oh, hi, Kara." Jace flushed, her cheeks turning splotchy red. She shuffled her feet at the foot of the bed. "Um, the Council told me to check on you. Did you just wake up?"

Kara frowned. She remembered drifting in and out of consciousness a few times, surrounded by harsh lights and blurry faces hovering above her, but that was all. Then she remembered the fight on the rooftop and suddenly couldn't care less about anything else. "Yeah, whatever— J, how long was I out? What the galaxies happened?"

Jace was playing with one of her bouncy orange curls, twisting it around her finger. "Maybe a day or two," she said, shrugging. "You were- I mean, we were rescued," she said quickly. "When you were knocked out I used my emergency contact button and called someone from the Academy."

She said all this completely matter-of-factly. Like Kara hadn't just suffered the biggest humiliation of her life. Like she hadn't just found out that she hadn't only spectacularly failed her first mission with a sidekick and lost a fight with a supervillain she'd never even heard of, but also that she'd had to be rescued. As if she was some kind of damsel-in-distress.

Kara swallowed, her pride stinging.

Apparently, Jace took her momentary silence as a great opportunity to add more salt in the wound, because she added, "I told you we should have called for backup. I knew something was off when I saw they weren't scared of us."

"Are you saying this is my fault?"  Kara glared, crossing her arms. Just then a wave of dizziness washed over her and she stumbled and clutched the bedside.

Jace eyed her warily. "You look a little . . . um, green."

Kara glared.

"I'm just saying that we should follow protocol more closely next time," Jace hurried to say. Before Kara even had time to roll her eyes exaggeratedly, she said, "Anyway, I'm supposed to tell you to go see your handler as soon as you can."

Harrison. Kara's heart sank. How the hell was she supposed to tell him about this new disaster?

*     *     *     *     *

Turned out, he already knew.

The Super HQ was practically right next to the hospital, but it took her a while anyway because she took the long way over, lingering in front of the marble steps.

Everyone seemed to be staring at her. A group of supers from one of her training classes giggled in her general direction, and her face burned. Yeah, she wasn't actually sure if anyone was looking at or talking about her, but why wouldn't they be? Between all the cameras and the fight having been projected on the newsboards, her face was probably all over the super news-sites. . . . It wasn't often that supers lost fights with villains.