How to Save the World

 

DEDICATION

For the girls who were stuck playing Lois Lane and April O'Neil (awesome though they are). You've always been a superhero.

 

THE FEARED FIVE (WORLD'S FIRST SUPERHEROES):

Raptor (Kurt Davenport, Entrepreneur)

Phantom Fuel (Sarah Mann, Engineer)

Invisible Victor (Victor Singh, Metaphysicist)

The Cheetah (Nigel Calibrese, Pizza Delivery)

Gail Garson (News reporter)

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
hey say it takes a village to raise a child, and the same holds true for writing a book. I tried to get the village to actually write the book for me, but no luck. There are several ­people without whom this book would not be complete, my family first among them. Thank you to my parents for being loving and supportive, to my siblings—­especially Hannah, forced to listen to every plot point in nauseating detail—­for the ride-­or-­die attitude that's propelled us this far in life.

To my cheerleading squad Jennifer Shew, Marian McGraw, Erica Lilly, Camille Schlesinger, Islay Bell-­Webb, Maximus “C.C.” Powers, and Ayefah: you lifted me up through writing, editing, and the panic attacks, so thank you. To the other Impulse authors: you've been a rock in the storm of anxiety, and you're lovely. Thank you, Rosalyn Foster and Samantha Brody, for beta reading and talking plot with me, you wonderful dames. Thanks also to my new editor, Anna Will, who came in at the last moment and patiently guided us through the growing pains.

Most of all, thank you to Team Rebecca (i.e. Rebecca Strauss and Rebecca Lucash) for being the engine that started and keeps this world going. Every day I count myself lucky to know you and to work with you.

Finally, to all of my internet friends: I love you all, you remarkable weirdos.

 

CONTENTS

 

CHAPTER 1

H
alfway to the Chinese place, something grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and sent me flying. It was a toss-­up over which hurt worse: the landing, or my pride. I hadn't even heard her coming.

“Seriously?” is probably not the correct response to seeing a supervillain standing over you in an alleyway. Most ­people might scream or run. I chose to glare, even though the woman standing in front of me was armed to the teeth—­which she'd recently had capped, apparently. They were a great deal less pointy than the last time I'd seen them. I brushed snow off of the knees of my jeans. “What was that for?”

Razor X, one of Chicago's up-­and-­coming supervillains, probably glared right back at me. It was a hard to see her eyebrows under the visor on her bulbous helmet. Her half cape fluttered in the icy wind. “I called you three times last week!”

“I've been busy. And dodging a phone call is no reason to pick me up and throw me.”

She raised the ray gun at her side and I saw her arm shake a little. The idiot wasn't even wearing her winter suit. “I had to get your attention somehow. You weren't going to call me back, were you?”

“I totally was,” I said.

“Liar.”

“Raze, I'm trying to get dinner.”

“When you agree to a public battle, it makes me look really stupid when I put it out on the network and I'm the only one that shows up.” Raze stomped her foot.

“Raze,” I said again. “I've got a job now, and you know there are complications with the—­”

Her voice took on a whining edge. “You need to get a uniform and a proper hero name. What does it say about me as a villain if my nemesis is named
Hostage
Girl? Huh? Like, that name alone does all the work for me. And come to think of it, girl is really a demeaning term when you're—­you're what? Thirty?”

“Twenty-­seven.” I folded my arms over my lightweight jacket. Though I considered myself a native—­five years in the city officially as of last week—­to most Chicagoans I looked like an idiot, braving snow-­piled November streets without a parka. But I wasn't exactly a normal Chicagoan anymore. Or, hell, even a normal human anymore, which was why flying freaks in masks and capes thought tossing me into an alley was a situational appropriate greeting. “And I will make it to a battle, I will, when I have an actual identity set up, but you know how the last few months have been.”

“I got out of Detmer so we could be enemies, Gail. I did that for us.” Raze's lip quivered. She flipped her visor up to give me a pitiful look.

­People made of sterner stuff than me would have crumpled under the pressure of those puppy-­dog eyes, even though the woman in the alley had personally put me in the hospital seventeen times. I reached out and gripped her shoulder, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “I know, and I'm sorry. Do you want to come over? I'm picking up Chinese.”

She brightened temporarily. “Can I poison it? I've got this new formula I'm working on, almost worked out the bugs with the projectile v—­”

“Absolutely not,” I said.

“Hard pass, then,” she said. “Answer a text every once in a while, Gail. Show an enemy some love for once.”

“Fine, fine,” I said. “You wouldn't want to give me a lift, would you?”

“As heavy as you are? No.” She took off with a whir of her rocket boots and a blast of exhaust that made me cough and wave at the air in front of my face.

“Jerk,” I said under my breath, though she had a point. I might be barely taller than five feet and lean with muscle, but I weighed six times what I looked like I should weigh. Just one of the side effects of no longer being carbon-­based.

With my enemy off to sulk in her lair, I stepped back onto the street, hoping that nobody had seen me get grabbed. When you earn the moniker Hostage Girl because villains can't seem to keep their hands off of you, a witnessed kidnapping could lead to an article on the Domino at the very least. And I was doing my best to keep my face off of the internet these days. I didn't want ­people looking too closely at Gail Godwin, Hostage Girl, because they might start to question a few things. Like the new physique, the fact that I no longer had to wear winter coats, or the man I had been spending a great deal of time with lately.

Of course, with my luck, the minute I stepped clear of the alley, my ears picked up the whir-­click of a hoverboard. My shoulders sagged. “I just want to get food, whoever you are,” I said without looking behind me. “Leave me alone.”

“Hostage Girl.”

I turned to look: a man in red-­and-­blue interlocking armor with a robotic face mask. A giant crack that I happened to know had been caused by War Hammer bisected the helmet. Yellow circles glowed where the man's eyes should have been. I watched the backdraft from his hoverboard send ripples in a puddle of dirty sludge.

“Captain Cracked,” I said. “It's been a while. What do you want? If you're here to kidnap me, it won't go well.”

For him at least. Maybe he was one of the villains who hadn't entirely gotten the memo yet.

“There are rumors,” he said, the voice modulator making his words sound twice as sinister. I wondered idly what his villain name had been before Sam punched the giant crack in his mask. “About you.”

“Buzz off,” I said, as those rumors were kind of a sore subject.

­“People think you're not Class D anymore.” He raised his ray gun, which was not nearly as elegant as Raze's. “State your class rating.”

I eyed the muzzle, debated if I wanted to run a zigzag pattern and get my boots wet in the slush, and decided against it. I ran full tilt at him and hit him like a linebacker instead. My shoulder drove into the midsection of his armor with enough force that I heard the
crack
of something in his armor breaking. With a shout and a whoosh, we flew backward. His weird computerized voice sounded even stranger when it was screaming curse words as he struggled to dislodge me.

I, on the other hand, was trying to reach the control panel between his shoulder blades. I'd seen it when he'd first held me hostage years ago, and thanks to my enhanced hearing now, I could hear it purring softly. No doubt it held his processor. I scrabbled with my fingernails, trying to wedge my fingers in and pull the wiring out.

He panicked and took off, leaving me with no choice but to hold on.

The hoverboard protested under all of the extra weight. With me clinging to him, Captain Cracked couldn't use the zappers in his hands without shocking himself, too, so he flailed his arms and tried to dislodge me. My grip was too strong for him to knock me off, so we swung wildly through the air. At one point, it would have made me dizzy; now I just tried harder for the panel.

“Everything is not proceeding as I have foreseen,” Captain Cracked said. Panic sounded incredibly strange through the voice modulator.

I finally got my fingers around the panel and he let out an electronically flattened shout. He pitched forward so suddenly that it knocked my equilibrium off enough to send us both careening onto a fourth-­story rooftop. We landed in a dirty puddle—­so much for my boots—­and the force of our impact sent me rolling.

I sprang right back to my feet and squared off against him. It was a point of some pride when he skittered back on his rocket sledge in obvious shock. “The rumors are true. You're no longer Class D,” he said.

“Gee, you think?” I said, and he shot at me.

I jumped in time, landing on the other side of the now-­smoking hole in the roof. I charged at him once more, ducked under a second blast, and skidded on the ice for the last ­couple of feet, body-­checking him hard. He tumbled backward and I drove my fist straight into his helmet. The crack in his mask made a crunching noise as it expanded.

“What I am is none of your business. All you need to know is Hostage Girl hits back now,” I said, and tried to punch him again.

He dodged this time, shoving me off of him. While I scrambled to my feet, ready to deliver more pain, he took off into the sky, fleeing in terror. I considered jumping after him, but my stomach growled. I watched the man who usually terrorized Lincoln Park fly away into the slate-­gray clouds and shook my head.

The supervillains needed a better communication network. When were they going to understand that Hostage Girl was no longer defenseless?

With Captain Cracked gone, I looked around to take stock of my situation. He'd dropped me on a roof close to the Chinese food place, so that was nice, but I was also on the fourth floor and I couldn't see any rooftop access anywhere. And when I peered into the still-­smoking hole left by the ray gun, a very annoyed family stared back at me. “Sorry about that,” I called. “Any chance of—­no? I can't use your door? Okay.”

Apparently I was stranded on the roof.

I wandered to the edge of the roof and judged the distance to the ground below. If I screwed up, four stories wouldn't kill me, but it would lead to a ­couple of painful days. I wasn't indestructible, not by a long shot, but I could take quite a bit more of a beating than a regular human. It was more that I didn't want to deal with my trainer scolding me.

Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to live a normal life. Not really the time to worry about that, though. My existential crisis could wait until I was on the ground. I took a deep breath, stepped off the roof, and tried to phase down to the ground, altering my momentum to let me land safely. Instead, I hit the dumpster hard enough for the impact to rattle in my bones. My foot went straight through a trash bag and into something sticky, which made me grimace. “Great,” I said, hauling myself out of the dumpster. “Just fabulous.”

I limped the rest of the way. The fact that my knees weren't throbbing told me I'd been a little successful at phasing, which was an ability I could mainly only use subconsciously, so at least there was that.

I stepped inside and ignored my growling stomach when the smell of soy sauce and fried noodles hit. “Mr. Shen,” I said. “It's me, your favorite customer, and I forgot to beg for extra egg rolls, so—­seriously? Is it something in the water?”

The robber and Mr. Shen both blinked at me at the same time. I put it down to startling them and not the fact that I looked and smelled like I'd landed in a dumpster. Or it could have been that I was a tiny woman who'd just walked into a robbery at gunpoint and was more annoyed than freaked out.

“Down on the ground!” the robber said, the gun in his hand twitching wildly. He wore a gray hoodie and a ski mask, and even through the
eau de dumpster
emanating from my shoes, I could smell nervous sweat on him. My ears picked up the rabbit-­pulse of his heartbeat.

“Did you hear me, bitch?” he said, and I nearly rolled my eyes. Why that word? Why always that word? “Get on the ground!”

Mr. Shen gave me a panicked look and gestured frantically. I should have been more afraid, but annoyance won out. Why had this guy picked
my
favorite Chinese food place? The owners were kind, the crab rangoon was to die for, and they'd finally stopped side-­eyeing my orders, which could comfortably feed a family of forty.

“Sorry,” I said, and I took a step closer. “I wasn't listening. You need to speak up.”

Immediately, the gun swung in my direction. Much better, in my opinion.

“You got a death wish or something?”

“No, I can safely say I don't. I mean, you could kill me with that thing, you really could.” Probably. We hadn't exactly tested my healing ability lately. “But you won't.”

I saw the whites of the robber's eyes as he took an involuntary half step back. “Oh, yeah?” he said, clearly faking bravado. “And why is that?”

“Because I'm—­” Like with Captain Cracked, I struck first, launching into a roundhouse kick so fast that I kicked the gun right out of his hand. I landed and knocked him back, pulling my punch in case he was as human as he seemed. “—­going to do that. Stay down!”

I hadn't actually fought a regular-­powered human one-­on-­one before. Contrary to the evidence from the past ten minutes of my life, I hadn't actually fought that many ­people, powered or not. For most of my time in Chicago, I'd been a hostage, not a hero. I cringed when I heard something crack as the man's back hit the floor, and stepped back.

That proved to be a mistake.

He leapt back to his feet. Instead of charging me, he grabbed a bamboo plant and chucked it at my head. I ducked; the next bamboo plant went hurtling toward my favorite provider of delicious crab rangoon, so I tackled Mr. Shen. He grunted as we both landed on the linoleum.

“I just needed the money!” the robber said. “You just had to give me the money, that was it.”

“Oh, sure, he robs the place and he's the wronged party here,” I said. To Mr. Shen, I said, “Stay down. I'll take care of him.”

Mr. Shen looked at me with wide eyes and I wanted to sigh. I'd been hoping to keep him from copping wise to the fact that I didn't play for the regular human team. Not that he would judge me for it, but it was hard enough to find places to eat as Hostage Girl. Hostage Girl plus what I'd become? That was even worse.

“Seriously, stay put,” I said.

When I rose to my feet, the robber caught me in a flying tackle. I tried to stand my ground, but the greasy floor made that impossible. We slid back into the kitchen, a place fraught with danger, open flames, and far too many knives for comfort. I dodged a wild swing toward my face. He ducked the haymaker that would have hopefully knocked him out, and snatched up a knife. It caught the edge of my jacket when he brandished it at me.

In retaliation, I threw a handful of dumplings in his face. I blocked the next strike with an elbow to his wrist, spun, and drove my other elbow under his chin. He staggered back, clearly seeing stars, so I grabbed a cooling pan from the metal countertop and walloped him.