What Heroes Do

“You’re a long way from home, girl,” Tremor said darkly.

I took a moment to check that Cody was okay. He was alive, at least. His breathing was shallow, but he was breathing. I stood up and squared up to Tremor. She had an entire foot of height over me, but I didn’t let that ruffle my feathers.

“I’m right where I need to be, Tremor,” I replied defiantly.

I quickly patted myself down to check nothing was broken. Superspeed was an extremely dangerous ability to possess, but I was learning to manage it. Over the past few months, the team’s resident genius, the hero who called himself Brontobyte, had adapted my father’s original costume into a form-fitting, full-body suit of armour, complete with a helmet and visor.

The armour was equipped with sensors that relayed information back to Brontobyte’s computer as I moved, and the visor was retrofitted with targeting vectors that not only helped me see where i was going, but could factor my speed into calculations that told me where I could strike certain targets to maximise damage. My suit was half the hero.

Cody had once suggested that I take my father’s old nom de plume, and call myself “Tempo”, but I had quickly shot that idea down. I was not my father, I was my own woman. I was not Tempo, I was Swyft.

Tremor was moving, she had begun to circle me in a wide arc. I stood there, on the rooftop, locking eyes with her, trying to figure out what she planned to do. My instinct told me to rush her, but I ignored it. Tremor was dangerous: her powers of Geokinesis allowed her to manipulate geological elements, even trigger seismic shifts in the planet’s crust, if she was p*ssed off enough. My instructions were to apprehend Tremor, but that was going to be tricky. And if it came to it, I knew what I had to do.

Tremor laughed in my face. Her blonde hair was cut short to keep it out of her eyes, and her face was tough like leather, marred with scars and gashes. “This is the first time I’m seeing you so still, Swyft. What’s the matter, need a Red Bull or something?”

“We don’t have to do this, Tremor,” I said seriously. “You almost killed my friend, but I can forget that. Come quietly and I can still take you in.”

“And if I don’t?”

I sucked in a breath inside my helmet. “Then I’ll take you out.”

I was particularly pleased with how that last line came out.

Tremor cocked her head inquisitively. “As much as I’d like to kill you, girl, pushing you to become a killer yourself is quite a delicious prospect.”

“I promise you,” I said coldly. “If you test me, you’ll enjoy it far less than you think.”

“Well, then,” Tremor said in an almost whisper. “Game on.”

My heart sank. This was about to happen. You don’t have a choice, Taylor, I told myself. Whatever happens now, she chose this.

Tremor shouted, and I felt a huge wave of power wash over me. My skin tingled and my ears popped as the roof split with a loud cracking noise. A huge chunk of rubble sprung upward, as if pulled with an invisible cord, and hung in the air for the briefest of moments, like a comet, before it suddenly changed trajectory and veered toward me.

I threw myself to one side to avoid it and landed down hard, but almost immediately, I was back up again and moving. That’s my one weakness - I have superspeed, not super acceleration. And it needs time to build up. By the time Tremor had spun around, however, I was gone.

My helmet sent hyper fast neurosignals into my brain so I could see where I was going. The world around me was a blur. Buildings and streets and cars stretched and melted into pools of hazy colour and mixed together as I clocked Mach 1.

I looped around in a huge, two kilometre arc, and shot back up the side of the building onto the roof. Tremor never saw me coming. I slammed straight into her and felt several thousand joules of kinetic energy break every bone and in her body as she was knocked headlong off of the roof. Whoever said killing wasn’t easy lied. It’s the easiest thing in the world. What’s hard is the part that comes after.

Living with yourself after.