Not Your Villain (Sidekick Squad #2)(68)

Abby scrambles onto the ledge, and then they’re all there. It’s not really deep enough to be a cave, but it’s dry. They breathe in the scent of one another, sweat and dirt and relief, as the storm rages around them.

“Ten miles,” Jess mutters.

“Stop with the countdown, Jess,” Bells says. “You’re making Emma nervous.” She’s making him really nervous too, but he won’t admit it.

“Just giving you guys a heads up.”

Bells see the lightning hit a pinyon pine not too far away; it sparks up, blazing hot for a moment until it’s quenched by the rain.

“You guys…” Emma mutters.

Bells wraps his arm around Emma’s shoulders, after using his power to shift so he’s Emma’s height. “It’s gonna be fine. We can ride out the storm here.”

A deafening roar sounds right in front of them as lightning strikes the wash, and the rushing water flashes with blinding light. There’s another loud rumble, but this time it’s not thunder.

“Flash flood,” Jess mutters. “We made it out just in time.”

The storm seems to last forever as they huddle on that little ledge. Attempts at conversation wither; they just hold each other and wait for it to be over. On Abby’s DED display, Bells can see time slowly ticking by, but each minute seems to take an hour.

Finally the rain relents to a light drizzle and the thunder retreats a reasonable distance away and the flood drains into the sand, leaving a rivulet in the center of the wash. Wet and miserable, they trudge silently back to the car.

Bells watches the rain, each drop sliding down the glass, and wonders where they go from here. What if the Resistance doesn’t exist?

Emma yawns as she pulls into the driveway of the Robledo-Gutierrez home. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I must have automatically…”

“It’s fine; my car is still here,” Abby says. “I can take everyone else home.”

“Good, because I don’t remember how to get to your hideout house,” Emma says, rubbing at her eyes.

“Don’t worry about it,” Bells says. “Go inside and get some rest.”

Emma waves as she runs inside. The rain is picking up again.

Abby waves at her car, then grimaces and rummages in her pocket for her keycard and pulls it out, waving it in the direction of the car. “Habit,” she says. “I retrofitted this car so I could control it with my powers.”

The car’s headlights come on.

“Huh,” Abby says, narrowing her eyes.

“Don’t push it,” Jess says. “Remember what happened…”

What follows is a silent, intimate conversation with soft gazes and eyebrow tilts, and Bells is grateful it’s only a few more minutes to his home.

Once there, he waves goodbye to Jess and Abby and pauses on the boulder disguising the front porch to think. This is another one of those unnatural storms when sometimes thunder cracks before lightning lights up the sky. Coldfront’s doing, for sure.

But why? Bells has his suspicions about Coldfront—he was in the Villain’s Guild, but what’s to stop the League from using the villains to do their bidding? Why is Coldfront making storms like this? He must be around here somewhere very high up, controlling the storm. What was his range? A few miles? And the storm’s only been going on for a few hours, so if Coldfront was at full power, he could keep this up for a while.

Bells eyes the front door and then his motorcycle. It doesn’t take long to decide. He turns it on, noting the limited charge; that’s fine, he just wants to get close to the Unmaintained zone where Coldfront must be hiding.

Riding is difficult in the rain; the roads are slick and slippery. It occurs to Bells he should have told someone where he was going. But maybe he imagined the wrong order… After all, they couldn’t always see the lightning.

Jess would be helpful right now, Bells thinks as he drives off into the desert. He takes the main road and then eyes the mountain peaks in the distance. There are abandoned radio towers up there; it’d make a good place for someone to hide and throw storms at Andover.

Bells heads in that direction. Unfortunately, the paved road soon ends, and he has trouble navigating the rocky, narrow trail on his motorcycle, so he dismounts and continues on foot.

Bells knows there’s more information about Coldfront in the history files he used during training. He switches his DED to the citizen ID number for Barry and goes through his League training files and the holobooks on all the villains. Bells is reading when he hears the whirring of a MonRobot.

Out on its own?

Bells turns around.

“Surrender, Chameleon,” the angular robot intones. It’s one of those new models.

He runs.

It isn’t alone, and Bells curses for not thinking before logging into Barry’s account. That must have alerted them to his location.

The rain falls in sheets: hard, angry, and unforgiving. Bells is soaked to the bone; he’s so numb he doesn’t register the cold anymore as he runs. The robots are getting closer. Though he can’t hear their distinctive whirring, he knows they’re still out there, just as relentless as the rain. The cold won’t bother them.

Bells is tired and aching and wants desperately to stop moving, stop running, and just take a breath and think, but he can’t.