I groaned, a sound that was less an expression of pain and more the creaking protest of a rusted-out engine that had just been asked to climb a mountain. Twisting inside the little broom closet—my personal VIP changing room, complete with the lingering scent of industrial-grade bleach and shattered dreams—I peeled off my armor.
Shredded bits of ice were embedded in my skin and muscle like an acupuncture treatment gone horribly, violently wrong. The universe’s way of saying, ‘You missed a spot.’ Fortunately, the only piece of supertech I’d ever been able to afford—my image-altering goggles, a marvel of optical obfuscation bought second-hand from a retiring villain who’d lost his stomach for the game—could survive a hell of a lot more abuse than a Class Four alpha could dish out. They were the one thing in my life that hadn’t yet failed me. A low bar, but I’d take it.
Technically, I was leaving behind a cornucopia of evidence: blood, skin cells, shredded bits of DNA. Even pieces of my costume might lead back to me if some super-sleuth with a god complex and a generous grant took on the case, but I was far enough from the crime scene that it was almost irrelevant.
My hope, as always, was to be a statistical blip, a rounding error in the city's daily chaos. Unless one of the big-ticket boys got involved. Those guys had more important and profitable things to do than waste time chasing down a thwarted—albeit stylish and fashionable, if I did say so myself—supervillain like me. They were busy fighting interdimensional wars and posing for magazine covers. I was just a small business owner, and my business was getting my ass kicked.
Teleportation sucked.
Okay, maybe it didn’t suck for the alphas who could just imagine a destination and pop there, arriving smelling of ozone and entitlement. For a guy like me, who had to carefully disconnect every single atom with the focus of a bomb squad tech defusing a nuke, shift them to a new location through a dimension that felt like swimming through frozen razor blades, and consciously reassemble them while avoiding quantum entanglement or losing a vital part of the dispersion—like, say, my left kidney—every part of teleportation sucked. It was the universe’s most stressful commute.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Once I’d stuffed all my bloody Kevlar and polymer plates into the deep maintenance sink—a tomb for yet another failed venture—I carefully dispersed their molecular structure. It was like watching a sandcastle dissolve in the tide, if the sandcastle was a month’s rent and the tide was my own pathetic inability to dodge an ice shard. Turning on the sink, I washed the resulting slurry of polymer glop and my own organic disappointments down the drain. It was thinned enough that it shouldn’t clog the pipes. Glacier Girl’s ice would melt and disperse on its own like all summoned constructs, leaving behind only a damp spot and a lingering sense of cold justice.
In the end, yeah, they’d find my genetics if they really hunted for them with the fervor of a bloodhound that had just discovered forensic science. Just like they’d find traces of every maintenance worker who had ever used this room before the plant closed, a symphony of forgotten blue-collar DNA. My personal signature would be one of millions in a place like this. Because of the old electronics plant’s long history, even the minor quantum radiation I’d leave behind would be buried beneath forty years of old CRT television radiation scattered throughout the facility. I was hiding a single new needle in a haystack of antiquated, probably carcinogenic needles.
As a surface structure, there was no way the industrial park would ever be inhabited again. It was too dangerous for too little gain. So our destructive little battle hadn’t really cost anyone anything. We were just two performers putting on a show for an audience of ghosts and asbestos, and for the owner to claim on his insurance. I knew, I made sure I cleared it with him first, and he was almost ecstatic to get it off his books. I’d worked with him before, and he was the ideal combination of trustworthy but greedy I preferred working with.
Unlike many other alphas, my magic didn’t yank matter imbued with my personal energy signature from the ether. That meant the last part of any job—clean-up—was what I did best. I had no illusions that if they pulled out all the stops, the Bureau of Strategic Anomalies (BSA) wouldn’t be able to track me. But I made damned sure it would be a difficult and expensive proposition, one that wouldn’t be worth their time on a whim. I was the bureaucratic equivalent of a knot too annoying to untie; they’d just find a way to cut me loose.
