Black and White Read Free

her, his mouth working as if it dearly wanted to keep speaking, his eyes betraying his irritation. The audience hushed, waited in rapt attention as their savior stood on the Mount.
    She smiled at the people of New Chicago, and this time,it felt right on her face. “And thank you all. Your support means more than I could ever say.” Flicking her wrist, she summoned a floater of Shadow. “But now I must go.”
    “But …” The mayor spluttered, caught between indignation and professional courtesy. “We haven’t even given you the award yet!”
    “I’m sorry, sir, but duty calls. A villain is at large, and I must rein her in.” Stepping onto the smoky black circle, she commanded it to rise. Her cape billowed around her as she hovered over the crowd, giving them one last look. The vids clicked and whirred, and the spectators cheered as Jet waved.
    “Enough posing,” Ops said. “Time to go kick some rabid ass.”
    “Oh, yeah,” Jet said, and her smile pulled into something feral. “She’ll never know what hit her.”
    And Jet rocketed away.

CHAPTER 3
IRIDIUM
    Other than the occasional deviation, the extrahumans are all sworn to serve and protect, far more diligently and thoroughly than the standard officer on a police force.
    Stan Kane, Chairman of Corp-Co, to Corp-Co Shareholders at the 110th Annual Meeting of Corp-Co Investors, January 31, 2112
    D own the numberless alleyways that crossed Wreck City like burst capillaries, Iridium stopped walking and turned around. “You can come out, you know. That Shadow-walking trick hasn’t fooled me since we were fourteen years old.”
    Iridium waited, patiently.
She
was so goddamn paranoid. Probably expected a lasgrid cage, or a net with pointy sticks attached. “Anytime now,” Iridium coaxed.
    Yet the bricks behind her, bars and brights of light and dark, stayed quiet, still, and empty.
    Iridium set down the metal case of digichips and rolled her eyes. “For Christo’s sake, Jet. Get your ass out here. I read
Art of War
in the same unit you did. This is not dampeningmy morale, or whatever it is you’re hoping to accomplish with the big, scary Shadow puppet routine.”
    “You cheated in that unit,” Jet said, finally letting herself separate from the shadow of a computerized Dumpster that bore the grinning face of Green Thumb, supershill for Chicago Consolidated Hauling. The fact that a plant-controller was posing for a major polluter made Iridium smile.
    “Honey, I cheated at a lot of things,” she told Jet. “Sun Tzu doesn’t actually have a problem with cheating.”
    Jet flexed her hands so the night-colored leather gauntlets casing them creaked. “I do.”
    “Jehovah,” Iridium muttered. “Is that some elective I missed out on? ‘How to Sound Like a Cheesy Action Vid’?”
    “I didn’t come here to talk.”
    Iridium felt a pang in the air, like a stray draft of cold wind had come off Lake Michigan. Just a moment before they wrapped around her ankles, she saw the shadows running off Jet’s form, crawling toward her feet. Creepers, manifestations of Jet’s power. Alive.
    “Imagine that,” said Iridium, creating a strobe that hung in the air above the pair, arcing and spitting. Jet hissed as her goggles irised from the sudden burst of light. With her cowl, skinsuit, and leather belt and gauntlets, she looked more like a nightmare than anything Iridium saw when she shut her eyes.
    Seeing the shadows crawl back to their mistress, Iridium pushed the strobe closer. “Any other day, I’d love to stay and continue our witty repartee, but right now I’ve got places to go and corporate slimewads to rob, so I’ll be jetting. No pun intended.”
    “You stay where you are!” Jet shouted. “You can’t get past me, Iridium, no matter how much your ego likes to think so!”
    “Christo,
shut up!”
Jet couldn’t just speak; it was alwaysa Superman with her. A platitude, pat and rehearsed. She might as well have been one of the ’bots the Academy kept