London Eye: 1 (Toxic City)(40)

Not monsters, he thought. No more than any other human being that does something inhuman.

So he sat down, making his own choice to not be so entranced that he could not use his own mind. Scryer glanced past Gordon once again, her smile broadening as she looked at Jack, and he felt the stirrings of lust. God, but she was beautiful! Could she enter his mind? Is that how she dragged the truth from him, and others, with every question?

Sparky sat behind him, Jenna and Emily to his left. Emily had to rest the camera on her knees so that it peered above floor level. Jack knew that she would be noticed, eventually, if they had not clocked her already. And he feared for her. But he saw her excitement and delight, and he could share in what she was feeling. Not so Superior, he thought she was thinking. Just people who think they're special enough to bully.

“So you were hounding the Choppers?” Rosemary asked as she worked. Puppeteer looked down in surprise, as if he'd forgotten she was even there.

“Just for fun,” he said.

“You hound them for fun, they come for us Irregulars. We're always easier to catch.”

“Yes, but they only hurt you if we kill some of them.”

“You really believe that?” she said. She stood and looked up into the tall man's face. “They take us and kill us as and when it pleases them. We're part of a research programme for them, right now. But when you and your Superior friends kill some of them, it becomes more than research. It becomes revenge!”

Puppeteer shrugged. He really did not care.

“Your leg's fixed,” Rosemary said.

The tall man looked down at his leg, the gaping bullet wound now little more than a bruised patch on his skin. “Pity you can't fix suits. This one was expensive.”

“You bought it?” Jenna asked. Jack drew in a sharp breath, but he also had to hold back a smile. This man's posturing, his arrogance, his disdain for those he saw as beneath him, all reminded him of a bully they'd once had in school. His name had been Kelly, and he'd delighted in throwing around his superior weight and pet-level intellect to hurt those smaller than him. Trouble was, everyone had been smaller than Kelly. At one time or another, virtually everyone in school had a run-in with him, boy or girl, first-year or sixth-year. He'd punched Jack once as he came down a staircase and Jack was walking up, giving him a swollen black eye and a dented pride. Jack, of course, had not struck back.

But every bully meets his match. Six boys caught Kelly after school one day, held him down, and beat him so hard they say he pissed blood. The violence shocked Jack, but Kelly seemed to shrink after that, though his rapid weight increase led to his nickname being changed to Bloater. Even Jack had called him that, and to his face as well. Small revenge, but sticks and stones…

Puppeteer looked at Jenna for some time, weighing up how, or even whether, to respond. “I'm a new man,” he said at last. “I have no name other than Puppeteer. You can all hold onto the past, if you must. Old names, old values. So no, I did not buy this suit, little girl. I took it from a fine tailor's just off Oxford Street, and the owner was not there to object. If he or she had been, I would have moved them out of the way.”

“Asshole,” Sparky muttered.

Puppeteer lifted his hands then, fingers hanging like the readied legs of two large spiders. “Stop filming me,” he said quietly, and his fingers flexed.

Emily was jerked up from her seat, the camera bouncing from a cushion and hitting the carpeted floor. Jack reached for her instinctively, but just as his hands closed around her ankles he felt a crippling pain in his upper arms, shards of agony thrust in from outside to slice through muscle and grate against bone. He fell back, and then Emily was above him, above all of them, held in mid-air and turning slowly, screaming, waving her arms and legs as she tried to swim back down.

“Jack!” she cried. “I can't…breathe! Can't…”

“Let her go!” Jack shouted, standing and spinning to face Puppeteer.

Rosemary had backed away, Scryer had stood from the big sofa—still smiling, still awfully beautiful—and the others were on their feet now as well, Sparky already trying to circle around past the bed so that he could get behind the tall Superior.

The little finger on Puppeteer's right hand twitched and Sparky cried out, his left leg cramping and folding beneath him. He grabbed his ankle and stared at the man, hate in his eyes.

Jack took one step forward and then Scryer was before him, a few steps away but close enough for him to see her excitement.