Ex-Isle by Peter Clines (electronic reader TXT) 📕

He turned his head and mind back to his destination. He shot higher into the air, looped around in a wide arc, and plummeted back toward the ground. The wind dragged his hair back and his collar snapped like a whip.

A year earlier, a mind-controlling villain had trapped St. George and the other heroes in a sort of group hallucination—a waking nightmare where most of their powers were gone and the Mount had fallen. He hadn’t been able to breathe fire. Or fly.

The not-flying had bothered him the most. To the best of his knowledge, only five or six superheroes in the world had ever been able to fly. Really fly, not just jump or glide.

Somehow, he’d almost been taking it for granted.

In the months since escaping the dream world, St. George found himself enjoying flights much more. Taking joy in the fact he could soar through the air on nothing more than willpower. He did loops and barrel rolls and once or twice used the excuse of maneuvering exercises to pretend he was dodging missiles and streams of bullets.

The children of the Mount loved it.

He looped around the studio water tower, back past the Roddenberry Building, and then dropped to the ground in front of a large building with a hangar-sized door.

For the past few years Danielle Morris had lived and worked here, in what had once been an old scene shop, back when the Mount was in the business of sitcoms and Star Trek shows. She’d blocked off a small section with curtains where she kept what amounted to a sparse studio apartment. The rest of the warehouse-sized space was her workshop, an area devoted to the care and maintenance of her greatest creation, the Cerberus Battle Armor System.

In the months since St. George had been forced to destroy the battlesuit, the workshop had been all about building a new one. Danielle had salvaged motors, wiring, subprocessors, and other components from the original Cerberus battlesuit. What she couldn’t salvage, she’d earmarked for raw materials. She worked all the time and rarely left the workshop. In fact, St. George couldn’t remember seeing her outside since then.

Several tables in the big space had been pushed together. Various parts sat in a rough outline matching the battlesuit. On reflection, he thought it looked like an autopsy in progress.

Danielle hid behind a welding mask and heavy gloves. Sparks cracked and leaped around her hands while she worked on the battlesuit’s torso. The welding torch moved to a new spot, and the sparks began again.

Two tables over, Thomas Gibbs worked on a laptop plugged into one of the huge mechanical hands. His hair had grown out into a mess of brown curls. Gibbs was an Air Force lieutenant who’d trained to pilot the Cerberus armor back when he was at Project Krypton. He’d been helping Danielle with the Mark II suit. His head came up and gave St. George a nod, but their eyes never met. The lieutenant’s knuckles rapped hard on the table three times.

Danielle looked up from her welding, then saw St. George framed in the door. She pushed her mask up and revealed her freckled cheeks and wisps of red hair. “What’s up?”

“Just checking in.”

She gestured at the framework in front of her with a gloved hand. “You want a progress report?”

“No,” he said. “I meant in the sense of just saying hi.”

“Oh.” She looked down at the steel ribs and back up at St. George. Then she reached back and twisted the knobs on the welding tanks. “Hi.”

“Haven’t talked to you in a couple of days.”

She shrugged. “You’ve been busy up at Eden pushing cars around.”

“Yeah, sorry. You doing okay?”

Danielle pulled the welding mask off, and a messy ponytail fell behind her shoulders. “I’ll feel better once it’s together.” She tried to pull her arms across her chest and fumbled with the bulky mask. She shifted it in her hands, then set it down on top of the torso.

They looked at each other.

“So,” said St. George, “what’ve you been up to?”

She waved a hand at the skeletal battlesuit again. “Work.”

“Nothing else?”

“Not really.”

“Seen any movies?”

She shook her head. “No. Barry’s been gone all the time, flying around the world.”

“Ahhhh.” A moment passed between them, and he nodded at the metal ribs. “So, when do you think you’re going to have it up and running?”

Danielle’s shoulders relaxed a bit. “All the core elements are functioning now,” she said, her voice a little bolder. “We assembled the frame and did a test last week. I just walked around the shop. The balance isn’t quite right because there’s nothing on it, but it worked. I’m hoping to have the outer shell and the armor plating done in the next six weeks or so.”

“Sooner the better,” said St. George. “We’re going to have to get Eden up and running a lot sooner than we thought. We’ll need you.”

She frowned. “How much sooner?”

“Two or three days. Friday at the latest.”

Gibbs snorted but still didn’t look up.

Danielle stared at him. Her shoulders hunched back up. “Two or three days? I thought I had another two months.”

“The fire wiped out pretty much all the trees in Larchmont,” he said. “We’ve gone from being really tight on food to officially not having enough food. We need to have people in Eden now.”

She looked at the torso. “Well,” she said, “it all depends on Barry.”

St. George glanced up at the banks of lights, then down at some of the cables stretched across the floor. “You don’t have enough power?”

“Not enough heat. He’s a walking forge when he’s Zzzap. Well, a floating one.”

“Score another point for superpowers,” said St. George. He looked around the workshop. “Speaking of which, where’s Cesar?”

Danielle shrugged. “He’s out at the scavenger warehouse getting us some supplies.”

“And lunch,” said Gibbs without looking up from his computer. “Assuming there’s still food.”

“You might want to savor it when he gets back,” said St. George, “just in case.”

Cesar Mendoza had been a member of the South Seventeens gang who’d