His skin was red, and the pulse in his neck beat frantically.
“He won’t be able to hold this much longer,” Leo ducked his head down, whispering in my ear. “Lightning makes him tachycardiac. We have to watch his output before he has a heart attack.”
Joon had his eyes set on Reed—fixated,interested.
His type.
“I have an idea.” I pulled back stray hairs that had fallen from my ponytail, took a deep breath, and straightened my shoulders. “I need a snack, a shit ton of water, and then we’re going back in.”
“We?” Leo’s brows pinched.
I nodded. “Yep,allof us. Joon is still in there; we just have to sneak him back out before he realizes it.”
“Updates?”I leaned over Dahlia’s shoulder, four laptops set up in front of her.
A croissant was stuffed in my mouth, muffling my voice. We decided to break for an hour—enough to regain some of our sanity, but not enough to lose whatever progress I’d made with Joon.
She typed frantically, bouncing from screen to screen, her glasses reflecting red and green bars. “Here, you see this dip?”
I frowned, inspecting the giant bar of red she’d pointed to. “Sure.”
“That’s June, three years ago. The moment wethoughtthat Hopper had died. Those straight points across, the flatline? No activity. The VIA doesn’t track people we think aredead,sothen we missed this point here. Still in the red, but do you see that bump?”
Dates lined the bottom of her graph, and on the one-year anniversary of his death, the small dots turned into a minor spike. It was miniscule, and wouldn’t have registered in my mind until she pointed it out.
“Six months later, and there was another one,” she started scrolling through the months, now, “Every six months for two years, and in the past year? Six turned into four, then three, two, one. They’ve spiked every week for the past eight weeks. They grew every single time—we just weren’t paying attention.”
With every blip on his graph came an immediate return to that dotted line, the one that was supposed to mean death. But our chips monitored our abilities and output—Variants had a constant flow of power, there was always a trend line to follow, and the spikes signaled when we usedit. Joon had nothing between those rises, no baseline flow to show he was alive.
“They were running tests,” I breathed. “Keep him under somehow, just at the limit before it would register on the database. Then wake him up when they wanted to try again.”
Leo leaned in next to me, his hair damp from a shower in the locker room. He’d spent a half hour in there, attempting to freeze himself beneath the cold water.
“Why wait so long between testing?” he asked.
Dahlia turned to another screen, where she’d layered charts on top of each other. When she put Joon’s beside them, a pattern was formed.
“When we looked into Heroes that had been labeled MIA in the past ten years, we foundtwentyin our system with this same pattern. Twelve of them lasted only two cycles, and then fouryears ago, two more went dark after a four-cycle run. I don’t think they’remissinganymore. The most they seemed to last was two years until Hopper. He’s survived three, and after him, the trend skyrocketed. AngelDust, too. She’s popped up every seven months; the latest was this February.” Dahlia ripped off her glasses, her frustration permeating.
Leo went rigid beside me. Joon wasn’t the only one who had an empty box buried in his honor. My eyes cast across the screens, memorizing the names, dates, and where they were last seen. I thought of my time across seas, all the times I’d helped dismantle organizations like Splinter. They never got a chance to grow as big as this—they slipped up, and we would pounce.
They have resources.
“He’s the only first class Hero among them,” Dahlia sighed. “The VIA tracks first class Heroes more closely; they started with third, then second.”
They knew who was expendable.
“Joon is their pilot,” I said. “The first functional prototype—he’s just the start. They must have found something about him that changed how they did things and applied it to the Heroes they took after him. ”
They’d been building up to this, experimenting, seeing how far they could go with him. But it was only in the past year that his data sped up; a year was still fresh. We weren’t as far behind as I’d thought; we still had a chance to save him.
“Daydream,” Dahlia looked at me, her eyes weary, exhausted. “This needs to work.”
I nodded. “I know.”
Her frown deepened, and she turned back to her computers, clicking on one last graph. It was a world map, and thousands of small pins had been dropped on top. Thousands of dots flooded the map, a sea of red, but nearly twenty percent of the markers were green.
“No, you don’t,” she sighed. “I checked across seas, too, like you suggested. Every marker is a Hero that’s gone missing. The green? Those are the ones who show these same patterns.”
