Secret Super (Book 1)

42. Killer

The vents were hot. Stiflingly hot. The air pressed down on Kara heavier than a force-field, and beads of sweat trickled down her back.

To make things worse, there was barely any room to move. As she crawled through the vents on hands and knees, her limbs kept knocking against the metal.

Her chest and left arm were still numb from being shot with a stun gun, but at least the feeling was starting to return to her other limbs with a weird tingling. The pains in her foot and nose had been reduced to dull aches.

She heard screams below her. She kept trudging forward, trying not to think about how the whole place was collapsing down around her-- a feat made harder by the groaning sounds emanating from around the vent as she heaved herself forward.

Kara kept crawling. She reached the bend that Mira had said would lead her to Xavier. She scrabbled at the grate, pulling it aside with a screeching noise that made her cringe.

She almost laughed. In all her daydreams, she'd faced a supervillain arch-nemesis many times, but never unarmed, injured, with no feeling in half her body, and with no plan.

Now or never. Her heart pounded.

Feet first, she dropped down through the ceiling.

Xavier stood in the center of the room. He had his back turned to her, typing away at a console.

In her daydreams, the supervillain never ignored her, either.

"Am I interrupting?" 

Xavier turned around. "Not at all," he said. He wasn't smiling.

Kara looked around.

The room was circular, the ceiling so low it seemed to be pressing down on them, but it extended so far the far side of the wall just faded into darkness. Lining half the wall, cryo-tanks were lined up in halls, about twenty rows extending back as far as she could see, what had to be hundreds of tanks. Kara's breath hitched. Each tank held a superhero suspended in the cool blue liquid, frozen in place.

At the forefront of the rows . . .

"Harrison!" Kara started running.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Xavier said mildly.

Kara stopped and turned around. Xavier was tapping his fingers against the console. She looked back at Harrison, hanging in the cryo-tank, expression frozen into wide-eyed shock, vines curled around his fingers, hair sticking up wildly.

She scanned the rest of the row. She let out a gasp when she saw Kian and Ezra, side by side, in two tanks, a snarl frozen on Kian's face. Ezra, for once, was completely solid, which was a disconcerting sight, and with none of his illusions Kara finally saw just how massive he was crammed into that tank, shoulders that pressed against either side of the tank, head scraping the top. His eyes were closed. He could've been sleeping.

She ran to Harrison's tank and placed a hand against the surface. The glass was cool to the touch. She spun around. "What did you do to them?" she demanded.

"Hmm?" Xavier turned back to the console. "They are alive. Merely, shall we say, resting."

Kara smashed her fist against the glass. It hurt her fists but not the glass. She hurled herself at the tank, which didn't move.

"Yes, you will notice I did not make the tanks from paper," Xavier said with a glance up, lips curling up with disdain. His eyes were bloodshot.

"Shut up! What did you do?" Kara said wildly. She tore her gaze from Harrison and stalked to the console.