9.
Jamie Barton
New York City
Night had fallen on the city early, winter lowering its darkness on the canyons and towers. Jamie Barton was slipping through the night, reeling herself across the harbor on a gravity channel that anchored her to Freedom Tower on one end and the Statue of Liberty’s torch at the other. She slipped over the water, watching it wash beneath her, half-asleep.
Her new cowl was a little itchy; it was mostly for effect at this point, since everyone in New York knew she was the superhero known as Gravity. She’d designed it herself. That was her job—her day job, after all, designing clothing, and boy, had that business taken off since her secret identity had come out. She was a top clothing manufacturer in New York at this point, her superhero-themed outfits selling like wildfire, as her friend Clarice would say.
Yeah … Jamie had it pretty good at this point, she had to concede, the wind whipping her hair behind her. If she was fortunate, online orders would spike again tomorrow. Because tonight she’d been photographed at the scene of a particularly large bank robbery, foiling the perps just as things were getting intense. She’d just split them up like badly behaving kids at a party, yanking them apart with simple gravity channels. Easy enough.
The Staten Island Ferry’s horn bellowed beneath her, and Jamie smiled, waving down. There were a couple people shadowed on the deck as she slid over them in rough approximation of flight. It wouldn’t do for Staten Island’s own superhero not to wave at the ferry, after all. She reached her apogee, only a few hundred feet from the Statue of Liberty’s torch, and started to adjust. She’d need to throw her next gravity channel down on the island, probably somewhere near—
A bright flame lit in the night, just above the torch, as though someone had set it on fire. Jamie paused her ascent, stopping in the middle of the gravity channel, hanging in midair. She peered into the dark and realized—
There was someone just … floating there.
And they had fire coming out of their hands.
Her first thought was, “Sienna?” but she stifled it. She’d seen Sienna just a few months ago, during that rescue mission in Scotland, and … she didn’t have fire powers anymore.
No, this was someone else.
She could see the hints of his profile in the dark, even at this distance. His face was grim under the flames, mouth a flat line. With a jerk, he floated toward her, not too quickly, and stopped fifty feet or so away, just hovering.
“Who are you?” she asked, a little tentative. She wrapped a couple gravity channels around his feet, snugging him to the ground very lightly, preparing to activate them full bore should he go from looming to …
Well, threatening.
“Who I am is not important,” he said, voice echoing in the cold air. His accent was Eastern European, reminding her of a Polish man who sold her cloth.
“What do you want?” Jamie asked.
“It is not about ‘want.’” His voice was clear, and he just hovered there, almost blocking her. She could adjust course, dip lower, or set up a channel straight to Staten Island—and might, if he proved intransigent, but …
So far he wasn’t being threatening. He was just hanging there. Like he wanted to talk.
“Then why are you here?” Jamie asked. She peered at him. Hadn’t she read something on her phone earlier? Something about a meta who attacked a bridge after that carrier disaster down in Virginia? A man who—
Wreathed himself in flames? Was that it? Jamie couldn’t remember. She’d been rushing around New York most of the day, dealing with one police scanner call after another. You’d think criminals would get it through their heads that Gravity was on the scene and call it a day, but no …
“I have to be here,” he said, crisply. His hands still glowed, or else he’d be barely visible, a shadow in the night in this place.
This was the most frustrating conversation Jamie could recall having since … well, probably this morning, when she’d last talked to her teenage daughter. “Oooookay,” Jamie finally said, wanting to give up and shrug, just walk away like she had with Kyra. But it wasn’t entirely wise to leave a man with flaming hands and flight powers at your back while you were riding a gravity channel home. “Well … unless you have some other need of me, I’d like to call it a night—”
“There is need,” he said. “You … have power.”
Jamie just hung there, waiting for more. “… Yes?”
“I have power,” he said, and the flames grew brighter. “We must … test powers, one against another.” His English broke a little in the middle.
“I’m not looking for a fight,” Jamie said, preparing to scoot back on the Freedom Tower channel and laying out a few more delicate ones from herself to other points that she could throw the switch on in case of emergency. Two at different spots on Liberty Island, one attached to the statue’s waist, and a final one onto the Staten Island Ferry some two miles out by now.
The man just hung there, fire burning at his fingertips, and then suddenly … it started to glow brighter. “I am.”
His attack was dramatic, fire flaring at her in an orange glow, bulbs of it streaking toward her in the night. Jamie yanked herself down on one of the gravity channels, the one planted at the edge of the island below her. It pulled her back and down, and at the same time, a second later, she activated the two she’d subtly attached to his feet, and his glowing hands were yanked in the other direction.
Have to avoid the flames, Jamie thought, tempted to slap herself for thinking the obvious. Of course she had to avoid the flames. Who would want to jump through them willingly—
Oh. Right. Sienna Nealon.
But Jamie wasn’t crazy like that, so she just bent and let the next gravity channel whip her around the base of the statue as the ones she’d left on the man did the work of pulling him down. She’d slide around the base of the statue as her channels worked, and she’d catch him near the ground and set up a flux around him, a field that even fire couldn’t escape. Once that was done, she’d—
A roar reached her ears just before a power burst of water came ripping out of the harbor and engulfed her. The freezing wash soaked through her costume in a bracing shock. Her skin went numb, her breath left her in a single, urgent exhalation, and she halted in place.
Her mouth opened of its own accord, to let the air out in a rush, and she blasted out the other side of the sudden wash, trying to wrap her analytical mind around what had just happened.
She was still a hundred feet above the water, and it looked—well, not calm and placid, because it was the harbor, but it was relatively still. How had that water come rushing up to—
Her answer came a moment later when another blast of it shot out of the harbor like an erupting geyser and flew at her. The harbor’s surface below looked like a bank of cannons firing off, pelting frigid water at her. Soaked to the skin, Jamie dodged, even though the blasts were not particularly hard. They didn’t carry the power that, say, Scott Byerly’s attacks did, but they certainly had enough force that she didn’t want to be hit by them—
Just as she was steering her way around the Statue of Liberty, a gust of wind hit her with a fist-like impact. Jamie’s immediate gravity channels released—they were a series she was guiding like spokes off the Statue’s waist—and she dipped before she caught herself on one that was reversing gravity, anchored to the ground, keeping her aloft. She tumbled forward but not down, thankfully, and came around the statue’s waist to find—
The man was just hanging there where she’d anchored him, hands still burning, his back to her, waging his own war against the channels she’d set up against his feet to drag him to the earth. He was moving down, slowly, their drag eventually winning against him, though he seemed to be fighting them with his flight.
Well, let’s speed this up, Jamie thought. She reached out, intending to increase the drag—
The sound of something behind her made her use the statue to set up a repelling channel, and she vaulted away from the statue just as another series of water blasts peppered the surface. They chased her as she dodged them, dipping lower to the ground as she moved away from the most concentrated center of the gravity channel that was holding her aloft. She threw down another at the edge of Liberty Island to keep her from dropping as she moved out from the center of power of the one she’d used before. That was the problem with using gravity channels to keep aloft; once you got too far from them, they weakened in their ability to keep you rising. It was why she always had to use the Statue of Liberty as a guidance point for getting to and from Staten Island.
Jamie anchored to the torch and pulled herself back up in a blindingly fast ascent, riding the channel like she had a bungie cord attached to her belt. She flew up and around as the torch’s surface was blasted with water behind her.
Her mind was racing, the cold seeping in, slowing her reactions. Hypothermia had to be on the way, if it hadn’t settled in already. How would that affect her, as a metahuman, Jamie wondered? Surely she was more resistant to it than a normal person, but the way she felt—soaked, teeth chattering—didn’t seem that terribly different from what a normal person would be experiencing.
She could also feel herself moving just a hair slower.
This man, this meta—he was using fire powers, water powers, and it felt like air powers, in addition to the power of flight. Two of those, Sienna had before … well, Scotland. The others, Reed and Scott had possessed.
But—her mind wrangled with the thought—those powers didn’t come naturally together. They were—
Another blast of wind sent Jamie tumbling sideways. She landed another anchor on the statue’s torch, then started to secure another to the ground, trying to just maintain her altitude. It wouldn’t do to—
Water blasted her, finding her in the air and submerging her, causing Jamie to once again exhale mightily. Darkness squeezed in at the edges of her consciousness, and freezing liquid started to seep up her nose, forcing its way into her mouth.
She gagged, but it only got worse. It forced its way into her sinuses, chilling her as she choked, mightily, the freezing water pushing down her throat and into her belly, seeping cold through her entire being.
The gravity channels she’d laid down—dozens in the last few minutes—started to release, one by one, as the water invaded her, choked her—
Drowned her.
And Jamie Barton started to fall as the light of consciousness began to fade. The man with the flaming hands was in front of her for just a moment, and his face was frozen in brief satisfaction. There for but a flicker and then gone as he was gone, flying upward—
No.
She was tumbling down.
Jamie dropped, one of the channels steering her, almost by accident, to the edge of Liberty Island. It pulled, one of only two she had left, her brain reduced to mere instinct as she warred with the water that threatened to drown her.
She burst free of the liquid entrapping her, but it was within her now, water in her mouth, in her lungs, streaming out of her nose as she plunged toward the surface of the harbor—
Jamie Barton hit the water lightly, the second-to-last gravity channel she’d set up at the edge of the island cushioning her to a drop of a mere six feet; into the frigid harbor she plunged. The gravity tether’s job done, it released.
And left her with only one. Operating on the instinct, grabbing hold of it like a drowning woman—which she was—she activated it.
Darkness followed, and Jamie struggled. She broke the surface seconds later, heaving up water, heaving up liquid, heaving up …
Death.
She was choking, she couldn’t breathe, it was in her and everywhere, like a weight pushing all the air out of her. There was a steady tug, dragging her through the water, waist high, but her head was out, her chest was out of the freezing water, but it was in her, drowning her, and she jerked, furiously, trying to get it out of her, out of—
Voices in the distance. Shouts in the night.
She felt a thump, her shoulders against something. City lights glared, twinkled, in the distance, but Jamie’s mind was panicked, frenzied, only on one thing.
Breathe. Can’t—breathe!
“Hang on, hang on!” someone said, male. Someone grabbed her shoulders, dragging her up.
“Get her out, get her out!” Someone else seized her, pulling her up, up, from where her shoulders rested hard against—
The Staten Island Ferry.
They pulled her out, onto the deck, and water streamed out of Jamie’s mouth. Darkness was pressing in on all sides, panic at a fevered pitch. She was drowning, drowning on the ship’s deck, but—
Water streamed from her mouth, and she took her first hacking, wheezing cough.
“She’s got water in the lungs,” one of the people surrounding her said. His face pushed in, in the haze. “We’re going to get you to Richmond University Medical Center, Jamie. Don’t you worry. We got you, okay? You just relax. You’re—”
Home, Jamie thought, as the darkness swelled around her, swirling, and took her into it, there on the deck of the Staten Island Ferry.