“Heeeey Mom, this is my hourly check-in to prove I didn’t get kidnapped again. The password is ocelot. Or wait, was that yesterday? No. No, I swear, this isn’t a cry for help. No, no one’s making me say that. I swear, I thought the password was ocelot. What–ostrich! We should’ve gone with ocelot, they’re cooler. No, Mom, still not a secret code for you to call the police.”
Throughout her conversation with her mother, Peyton Favors strolled through one of Detroit’s outdoor shopping malls, idly checking storefronts to see if anything looked good enough to step inside. The fifteen-year-old redhead checked her own image in the reflection of one window, turning her head this way and that as she studiously watched for any zits that might’ve snuck their way in. Her hands were full of shopping bags, the entire conversation being had through a bluetooth earpiece. Her eyes rolled exaggeratedly at her own reflection as she carefully replied, “Mom, I need you to listen very carefully to the words that are coming out of my mouth. No secret codes, no one has a gun to my head. I have not been kidnapped. Mitchell is gone, the creep got what he deserved. Yes, I know Paintball can’t be around to save me all the time. Believe me, I’m just trying to find something cute for Tanya’s party this weekend. And maybe a couple other things.” She glanced down at the full bags in her hands and made a face at her reflection. “No one is bothering me. I promise, I am absolutely and completely safe. I love you. You’re even more paranoid than Grandma, which is saying something, but I still love you. Bye!”
Reaching up to hit the button, disconnecting the call, Peyton took the earpiece out and put it in her pocket with a shake of her head. “Urgh, you’d think she was the one thrown into the back of a car by a fucking pedo piece of–” She shook that off abruptly. Dr. Corners, the therapist she’d already seen a couple times since that whole thing went down, had said something about how her mother was overcompensating for not being able to help at all during the kidnapping itself by trying way too hard now. The whole calling in every hour, checking everything she did, using codewords to say whether someone was holding her against her will, it was crazy. Peyton wasn’t sure how much longer she could deal with it. Half the time she was afraid that she would say the wrong thing on a call and her mother would end up sending a SWAT team after her.
Hell, there’d already been that one bit a few days earlier when Peyton had been at the theater. She’d made the mistake of hissing into the phone that she ‘couldn’t talk now’ before turning it off. They’d only been fifteen minutes into the show when security came barging in and the house lights came on. That had been just about one of the most mortifying moments of her life. Especially considering she’d been that close to telling Sarah Conrad that she thought she was cute. Now that was definitely ruined, after those guards had made it clear whose mother called them in.
Sigh. Being into both guys and girls was supposed to make it easier to find someone to date. But between the guy she had liked online turning out to be some much older creepy kidnapping pedo loser, and looking like a fucking paranoid freak family in front of Sarah, maybe she was just doomed from the get-go. Byron was ace and he didn’t seem to have any problems with his own relationships. Or maybe he was just a lot better at hiding it and looking like they were fine.
“I don’t care what Mom says,” Peyton informed her own reflection in the window, “it is not easier being a fifteen-year-old. And you know, it’s kinda fucked up that she says that practically in the same breath as the one she uses to give me all these rules because she’s so paranoid that I’m going to somehow magically end up in danger again. Like, we live in Detroit, not the middle of–”
In mid-sentence, Peyton was abruptly interrupted by the sound of a roaring engine, followed by a loud crash. Spinning that way with a yelp, she stared, mouth agape.
The outdoor shopping center she had been meandering through was shaped like a large U, with the doors into various shops spaced all along both sides of the curved shape. The middle of the U was essentially a large patio full of stands to buy snacks, sunglasses, cell phones, or even get massages. There was a fountain toward the front of the shopping area, with a statue of some old man holding an umbrella just beside it.
That statue was the source of the loud crash. Or rather, the enormous pick-up truck that had just slammed into said statue, knocking it over. And it wasn’t alone. Three more huge trucks had come roaring up to block basically the whole road along the front of the shopping center. The backs of all four vehicles were full of thugs wearing a lot of leather and chains, holding bats, pipes, knives, and a few guns. All were hollering and whooping as they leapt from the trucks, landing right in front of dozens of shoppers paralyzed by surprise and confusion.
“You know the drill, boys!” The voice came from the direction of the truck that had knocked over the statue, as the passenger door opened and a heavyset figure emerged. He was a large black man, standing about six and a half feet tall and very wide. His only concessions to a ‘costume’ of any kind were the sleek-looking blue metal helmet he wore, and a pair of matching metal gauntlets. Beyond that he wore simple street clothes.
Juice. It was Juice, one of the lieutenants of the Easy Eights. Which were who all these other guys were. The guys who were already spreading out, grabbing people who started trying to run. As the screaming started, the man called over it, “Gather ‘em and shut ‘em up! Torch every building in this fucking lot!” To punctuate his words, the man extended his hands out to both sides and sent a blinding blast of electricity in either direction to slam into a couple storefronts with a loud, terrifying bang. “I want the whole fucking place burned to the ground! Move!”
Almost as if he had been speaking directly to her, Peyton reacted to that last word. The bags dropped from her hands, even as one of the Easy Eight soldiers approached with his baseball bat raised threateningly. He was saying something, but Peyton didn’t hear. She was too busy pivoting. A scream tore its way from her own throat as she ran, sprinting away from that spot, away from the man who had approached her, away from the Fell-Touched Juice. Away from all of it, screaming the entire time. She ran, not even knowing where she was going. No plan, nothing.
The sound of a loud curse from the man who had been approaching spurred Peyton to run even faster. She heard other people shouting, heard a couple terrifyingly loud bangs. Gunshots? She didn’t know, she didn’t know! Just run, that was all she could do. Just run.
Racing past several stores, the girl glanced to the side. In the reflection of the windows, she saw herself. But she also saw the man behind her. He was so close! Oh God, oh god, he was so–he was lunging!
Seeing the man make that leap, Peyton threw herself to the right, through the open doorway of a storefront. She landed hard on the floor, even as the man who had been chasing her landed on his stomach right where she would have been. His gaze snapped toward her as she lay on her side, and the man snarled while raising that bat. Reflexively, Peyton kicked out, hitting the door where it was propped open and sending it slamming closed just as the hurled bat crashed into the wood with a terrifying bang.
Laying there on her side, Peyton hyperventilated as she stared at the door. It was only for a second, but that single second felt like an eternity. She heard the man cursing, could see through the window in the door as he started picking himself up. Up. He was getting up.
Get the fuck up!
Grabbing the side of the nearby counter, Peyton used it to haul herself up. She could see the man running toward her, toward the door. He was right there, right there. But just beside the door was a bookshelf stuffed with magazines. Even as a surge of terror raced through her, the fifteen-year-old lunged that way, shoving it hard. The shelf fell about halfway over before hitting the opposite wall of the doorway, wedging itself in tight just as the man kicked the door. But the bookshelf held, for the moment at least.
A screamed threat from the guy as he hit the door again reminded Peyton that she couldn’t just stand there. The shelf was already starting to move under the repeated furious blows. Any second, the man with the bat was going to break in, and she was pretty sure he wasn’t happy with her. He would–he would–he had the bat–he was–
She ran. Pivoting away, Peyton fled through the shop, tears of terror almost blinding her, to the point that she tripped over the edge of another counter, landing hard on her stomach with a yelp. Behind her, she heard a loud crash as the bookshelf was nearly knocked clear out of the doorway. From the sound of multiple voices, he had been joined by more people, all of them working together to shove the door open. There were a couple shouted threats about what they would do if she didn’t stop, punctuated by the sound of a metal pipe hitting the wall.
Fueled entirely by panic, the girl scrambled back to her feet and kept going. She didn’t dare look back, instead practically diving to the left where, thanks to hours spent wandering through these stores, she knew there was a set of stairs just beside the employee counter.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
The stairs were narrow and steep, but Peyton hardly noticed. Hearing the sound of the men behind her finally managing to breach the shop, their angry shouts growing even louder only spurred her to get up the steps faster. Taking them several at a time, using the railing and wall to boost herself, she struggled not to sob. Crying wasn’t going to do anything. Paintball wouldn’t sit there and cry about it. Sure, he had superpowers and all, but still. He’d actually do something, and he was like… a little kid. Okay, maybe just a couple years younger than Peyton, yet the point remained. He threw himself into life-threatening danger all the time. He’d done so to save her. If he could do that, she could keep running instead of cowering on the stairs blubbering. She wasn’t going to reward Paintball taking the effort to save her from that fucking creep by letting herself be… be whatever these creeps were planning, especially now that they were pissed off. He’d saved her before, but he wasn’t here now. She had to save herself. Somehow.
Only once the girl reached the top of the stairs (she’d always wondered where they actually went) did she realize the problem. Where the fuck was she supposed to go now? She was standing in some kind of storage area, full of boxes and crates for the books that were actually on display below as well as some promotional material, lines of other shelves, and a few old mannequins for some reason. There were windows, but they were all blocked by metal bars.
She only froze for a brief moment, thoughts of how stupid she was to come up here flooding her mind, before the sound of the men reaching the stairs below spurred Peyton to move. Rushed by blind terror, she fled past the row of mannequins and several stacks of books, throwing herself into one of the corners between two different crates. Huddled there, the girl drew herself back as tight as possible into that small space and prayed something would happen to interrupt the men. Or maybe they’d spread themselves out too much and she could bolt for the stairs to escape? Please, please, she just wanted to go home.
Home. In a rush, she reached for her phone, only to find her pocket empty. A memory flashed through her head of falling flat on her face downstairs. Her phone and the bluetooth had obviously fallen out then, and she’d been in too much of a panic to actually notice. Fuck, fuck!
By that point, the men had reached the top of the stairs. There was a moment of quiet murmuring as they clearly had a brief discussion about what to do, before one of the men called, “Hey kid! Look, no one’s gonna do anything rash, aight? We’re just burning down these shops cuz the Niners make a bunch of money out of ‘em. Ain’t got nothing to do with you. Come out, we’ll take you to the rest of the braindead civvies out there, and you can just sit until the cops show up to hold your hand, take your temperature, and give you a nice cup of hot chocolate. What do you say? Come on out, no hard feelings. But ahh, if we have to come in there and drag you out, I can’t promise nothing.” There was a heavy thump of something like a bat or pipe hitting a nearby crate as though to punctuate his words. “Let’s make this easy.”
It was tempting. Oh God was it ever tempting. But Peyton hesitated. Ducking her head as low as possible, she peeked out and looked, praying that she wasn’t about to be face-to-face with one of the attackers. She saw three men standing right in front of the stairs. The guy who had chased her initially was facing the man who had spoken, hissing something angrily into his ear. That man gave him a short nod, and the guy with the bat started to silently move through the open room, bat raised as he carefully searched.
“We’ll give you thirty seconds to think about it!’ The man who had been talking, still by the stairs with the other guy, called. “Then we’re coming in there and you won’t like it!”
Right, thirty seconds. They were totally giving her time to think about it. That’s why the pissed off guy with the bat was already searching. It was a distraction. They wanted her to think she had time to breathe, while that guy made his way through. And when he found her, he’d–he’d…
For just a moment, Peyton’s eyes closed. A shudder of panic ran through her as the tears came. What was she supposed to do? What could she–
Something was in front of her face. Nearly screaming as she opened her eyes, expecting to find the bat pressed to her nose, Peyton instead found herself staring at a small, glowing orb, about the size of a softball. It was blue, with hypnotically glowing hieroglyphics moving across it randomly.
Oh.
Oh, that was neat.
Completely forgetting her entire situation, the girl slowly reached out. Her hand grasped the ball, and she felt… peaceful. She felt like she was safe.
She wasn’t in the store. She wasn’t… anywhere, really. Peyton stood in some kind of completely empty space. Instead of a floor, there was gray dirt under her feet. It was impossible to make out any details, thanks to the fog that filled the whole area. Not that there seemed to be much to see anyway. It was all just a flat gray wasteland filled with that fog.
Spinning in a circle, she saw images appear in the fog. She saw herself at the computer, flirting with someone she had thought was her own age. She saw her own look of disgust upon realizing the truth, saw the way she’d cut it off with the pedo fuck. She saw the moment she was kidnapped and thrown into the back of that car by Mitchell and his idiot friends, as well as the moment Paintball had saved her. She saw the intervention by those Braintrust people. She saw all of that, before the images shifted to show her today. It showed her shopping, fleeing, running up to this very point with the men chasing her.
Finally, the images in the fog shifted to showing her the orb. The very orb she had touched to find herself here. And as that orb filled her vision, a woman’s voice spoke.
“Summus Proelium.”
Instantly, the vision vanished. Peyton was suddenly back in the shop. The orb had disappeared, but her open hand wasn’t empty. Instead, six small metal marbles filled her palm. They were sleek and featureless, each a different color. Gold, silver, bronze, purple, black, and white. They felt warm to the touch.
“Hey!” The furious voice snapped her attention upward, just in time to see the man with the bat standing over her. “I got the bitch! C’mere, you little–”
The silver marble suddenly flew out of her hand, slamming into the man’s chest. There was a sudden shockwave that knocked over the nearby shelves and crates, as the guy was sent flying a good ten feet to crash against a pile of books with a scream.
Scrambling to her feet, Peyton saw the man lying there in a heap, groaning. The other two men had been taken completely by surprise, but were already moving her way with a pair of shouts. One–one had a gun. The guy who had been talking pulled out a gun!
The marbles reacted to her terror immediately. All five that were still in her hand flew out of it. But instead of flying at the men themselves, they surrounded Peyton. The gold and black ones smacked into her chest and began to meld together before expanding. Suddenly, they weren’t marbles anymore. They grew and shaped themselves into a golden chestplate with black highlights, which then expanded down into black armor with gold highlights across her legs and up over her arms.
Meanwhile, the white marble flew up to her face, seeming to stare at her for an instant before it opened up, expanding like a mouth to swallow her as she screamed.
No. It didn’t swallow her. It turned itself into a sleek, pristine white helmet, covering her face and head but leaving her eyes exposed.
All of that happened in the span of a couple seconds. Suddenly, her entire body was encased in armor created by three of the six marbles. The three remaining, purple, silver and bronze, hovered in front of her as though waiting.
The two guys who had been running at her suddenly stopped, stumbling over their own feet as curses of confusion escaped them. Before she could react, the man with the gun fired a shot. Peyton screamed, stumbling backward… even as the bullet ricocheted harmlessly off the armor. It didn’t feel like anything.
For an instant, she stared down at the spot of her chest where the bullet had struck, then her gaze snapped up to the source of it. The remaining marbles reacted to her impulse. The bronze transformed itself into a bat not unlike the one she’d nearly been hit with, flying out to crash into the stomach of the man with the gun, then slammed down into his back to knock him to the floor. Simultaneously, the silver marble transformed into a rope, lashing itself around the other man before hurtling him through the air to slam into the first guy who had been knocked through the air just as he started to get up.
Which left the purple marble. That one transformed into a long, flowing cloth, which lashed out the length of the room to catch all three men in a wide arc, before hurling them bodily into the far wall together with a collection of screams.
The rope shifted slightly to become a whip as it flew into Peyton’s left hand, while the bat found its way into her right. Finally, the purple cloth–cloak, she realized, affixed itself to her shoulders. Peyton was left standing there over the three men as they groaned in pain and confusion, muttering half-conscious curses.
“Oh my God,” she whimpered, standing in the newly formed armor with the two weapons in either hand. “Oh my God, oh fuck, oh god. What do I do now?”
“Well, ain’t this a surprise!” The sudden voice snapped the newly-Touched girl’s gaze toward the stairs, where Juice stood. The huge man could barely fit, but didn’t seem to care about the damage he’d done getting up there. His gaze was centered on her. “Thought this was gonna be a boring cakewalk, but looks like I get to have a little excitement after all.”
“Wait!” the girl found herself blurting in a panic, “I didn’t–”
He didn’t wait. Instead, the man used a blast of lightning that slammed into Peyton. It… it didn’t kill her. It hurt, that was for sure. But not nearly as much as it should have.
Unfortunately, it still served to distract the girl, and before she knew it, the big guy was right in front of her. He hauled her off the ground, snarling. “Pretty tough, eh bitch? Let’s see how tough.” Suddenly, he was spinning, much more graceful than he should have been at his size. Before she knew what was happening, Peyton found herself hurled toward one of the bar-covered windows. She struck it with enough force to break through, flying out into open air.
Then she dropped. With a scream, the girl fell all the way to the ground in the middle of the open shopping center, landing hard on her chest. The bat and whip dropped from her hands, reforming to their normal marble shapes.
A terrifyingly loud crash, followed by a thud made her spin over into a half-sitting position, staring as Juice straightened up from his own landing. There was a hole in the wall where he’d leapt through.
“Still ticking, huh?” A low, dangerous chuckle escaped the man. Electricity played over his fist as he slammed it into his palm. “Good.
“Let’s have some fun.”