The Glass Knight

Chapter 24 - Damien



"You sure you'll be fine?" Florence asked, hanging onto Damien's fingertips as if the boy would go flying away if he let their connection sever.

"I'm sure," Damien said, struggling to keep the bitterness from his words. It left a foul taste on his tongue, lingering there like a sip of something sour he couldn't get rid of. As much as Damien hated this whole system and everything that had landed him here, Florence didn't deserve his hatred. The pyrokinetic was kind and understanding and generally fun to be around, even if Damien just wanted to tell him to fuck off at the moment.

It felt like rubbing in. It wasn't, but that was how it felt. Watching all these heroes in training interact with their parents, or grandparents, or whoever. They all had someone to come and visit them, to check in and see how they were doing in the program. All except for Damien.

He pulled his hand back and stepped back from Florence, struggling to put a smile on his face as he looked at the boy. Getting involved with him had been a bad idea, worse now as everything smarted, like his hand had been severed anew. A scream welled up in the back of his throat, cut off as he swallowed hard. "Have fun."

Florence's eyebrows knit together with an emotion that Damien hated: pity. "Damien—"

"I told you it's fine!" he snapped, unable to hold it together any longer. He didn't need anyone's pity that he was alone, not when they were just going to leave him and spend time with families like they were rubbing it in.

Not rubbing it in, he reminded himself forcefully, screwing his eyes shut. He reached up absentmindedly, rubbing across his eyelids until lights appeared.

Arms prickling with warmth wrapped around him, enveloping him in a hug he didn't want.

He grunted and pushed Florence off of him. "Your parents are probably waiting on you," he said, unable to meet his eyes. "Don't want to keep the busy parents waiting."

Florence lingered for another moment, silence stretching between them before he finally nodded and turned on his heel, jogging across the campus to meet up with his parents.

A sigh rattled free as Damien watched him go, then slid his gaze across the campus's main thoroughfare. All throughout, his fellow students were uniting with their families, acting like it had been years, not merely a few weeks.

He couldn't, or shouldn't, blame them. If he had a chance to reunite with his family…

Well, it was stupid to think about, and he forced himself to push the idea from his mind. His parents were gone. Dead. At the hands of heroes.

Shoving his hands into his pockets, he forced himself to walk, unsure where he was going. Death by hero didn't happen all that often, but accidents happened, or so they said. A threat so big heroes stopped caring about the little people, only caring about saving the world, or whatever.

Philosophy of Heroes had yet to talk about it. He was waiting. Waiting to see what Artemis would say. When was it acceptable to let people die so you could save the world? Or in his case, a city.

His collarbone ached. An old injury, healed years ago, from being pinned beneath rubble after a hero in a fight, either careless or desperate, had caused the collapse of the apartment building his family lived in. Damien had been watching the fight from his window, despite his parents warnings, until the moment the building came down.

He barely remembered the rest, just flashed, between moments of darkness. Pain. A suffocating weight across his body. Blood, and a lot of it, coming from his partially severed hand. His parents, no longer scolding him for being too close to the window.

Months in the hospital.

A woman in a dark dress suit, walking through the hospital, stopping at his bedside and telling him she could fix his hand.

A woman who, until Vivainne had gone and ruined all of her hard work, had cared for him and made him important. Someone who would help her change the world.

It was time he helped her complete her goal. He'd bided his time enough around here; it was time to free Vora.

He turned on his heel to march back toward the tower in time to catch a glimpse of Vivainne. She looked every bit like her mother, with hair as dark as night and reaching nearly to the small of her back, walking beside a man in a nearly maroon business suit.

He ground his teeth together, barely fighting back the outrage welling in his soul. She'd betrayed her mother and abandoned her for a new family, a new life, and hadn't even looked back.

Vora deserved better.

He marched away from Vivainne, ignoring the passing students and their families as he approached the tower. Reaching the elevator, he lifted his arm, bringing the black key-bracelet to the scanner beside the door. He half expected for the tower to reject him, refuse him entry, but the door opened without protest.

Good. It would only draw attention if he had to hack into the elevator first.

Damien stepped inside, scanning the buttons along the inside wall. They were labeled, but only by floor number. Whatever they held, or the clearance level he needed, he didn't know.

Ground floor it was, then.

He pressed the middle button labeled 0 and began to tap his foot against the floor as the elevator doors closed. The movement was so smooth he hardly noticed they were moving, except for his technopathy letting him know something had changed within the elevator.

It wasn't always the most useful power. He wasn't a tech genius, like Recompense, though he was smart. He could sense the technology around him, and control it, to an extent. What came in more useful were the cores Vora had carefully installed in his prosthetic hand, all currently unactivated.

He flexed the prosthetic as the elevator doors opened into the quiet, closed off lobby, separate from the public floor of the tower. He'd deactivated the cores to prevent detection, but wondered vaguely if he should risk turning them back on while he hacked into the computer.

There were three core slots in his hand, two filled and one empty. He could only use them for short amounts of time without risking burning them out or making his hand explode, something he wasn't eager to do, even if it was a prosthetic.

He shouldn't have had so many cores. It was unnatural and dangerous, but he was careful, and each had been installed for a reason, though he'd needed to empty a slot in accordance with Vora's plan. It would have been less dangerous, if he was like Vanessa, but losing one limb had been enough for him. She could use more powers consistently, because she had more space for them. He'd limited himself because he couldn't bear losing another limb.

A woman walked out of a side room with a cup of coffee in one hand, raising an eyebrow as she spotted Damien. He stopped fidgeting with his prosthetic hand, deciding it wasn't worth activating the cores at the moment, and put on his best apologetic look.

"Was looking for somewhere private to study," he said, letting his shoulder stoop. "It's parents' weekend, and I don't have anyone…"

The woman's face softened in an instant, losing the slight edge of suspicion that had been there a moment before.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"Of course," she said. She placed her mug on the desk before walking over to Damien, laying a hand on his shoulder. He let her, doing his best to keep up the sad orphan routine. People generally didn't know what to do when he brought it up; giving awkward sympathies and too much help, as if that would make up for it. "There's a library right through there. Let me know if you need anything."

"Thank you," Damien said, managing a slight smile. He left the woman in the main room, crossing to the door she'd indicated and letting himself in with his bracelet. A relieved smile broke out across his face as he stepped into the room, sensing the computer immediately.

The heroes were far too trusting.

It worked for him, but also rubbed him the wrong way. The heroes shouldn't be this trusting, it was just asking for trouble. They were supposed to keep the world safe, and how could they do that, if they trusted everyone?

He'd tried to hack into their computers once before, from outside the tower, and gotten caught. What had they done, when he lied and said he was just looking for resources for his power? Gave him a slap on the wrist in the form of community service, and recommended him to the hero training program.

It was all so laughable.

A quick look around the library told him it was empty. He settled at the computer, typing smoothly and looking up a topic that had nothing to do with what he'd be digging into. Ostensibly, he was working on his assignment from Philosophy of Heroes, researching a hero that met his ideal of what a hero was.

If anyone walked into the library, that was what they would see.

The moment that was done, he tapped into his power core. The people here at Unity could talk all they wanted about it not mattering if powers were strong or weak, because they were all useful, but Damien knew he had a weak power. Enough so that the idea of being a hero had been dashed from his mind at an early age, the limits all too obvious. The ability to sense technology, technopathy, wasn't the most applicable power. If he could control technology, it would be different, but he couldn't without the extra power cores in his hand. It was where the copied telepathy came in handy.

Luckily, his power was perfectly suited to this. Diving deep into the Unity systems and reading it like telepaths could read minds, uncovering hidden files like discovering buried memories, cracking them open and discovering the information inside.

He closed his eyes, venturing into the sea that was Unity tech. There was a distinct difference, in his mind's eye, between mundane tech and super born tech. In some ways, it was like how people described synesthesia and seeing colors for different words or numbers. He could taste the difference between them, an almost physical thing, even if he hadn't interacted with much super tech.

Tech geniuses didn't come about, at least in their current form, until what was often referred to as the second wave of supers. Meta geniuses weren't known during the first generation of supers, and once they began popping up, it took some time to begin integrating their technology with the modern age. The difficulty with super tech was it often didn't mesh with mundane technology, and was hard to reverse engineer, often only possible by the one who'd created it. Then there was the small matter that a lot of super tech was only possible with other super made components, materials or supplies created by other supers with specific abilities.

Meaning, most people didn't ever interact with super tech. Damien had, but only from Vora's findings, enlisting supers to either create or retrieve super tech so he could study it.

Her planning paid off now, as he navigated his way through the mix of meta and non meta systems in search of Vora's file. He'd marked it earlier in the week and found it easily now, the taste of it familiar, like his mom's apple pie.

The ache of the memory, hot on his tongue, was nearly enough to pull him from the moment. Shaken, he forced himself to focus, tapping a finger on his prosthetic hand absently against the keyboard as he inspected the file.

It was locked. Locked behind a wall of what might have well been meta steel, so solid there was no way he'd find a crack in it.

What he needed was a power like Vivainne's.

Not that that would work here.

Without other options, Damien began the tedious work of breaking down the wall one piece at a time, careful not to set off any alarms. He had no idea what sort of security the tower had around their servers, only that he had no desire to get his brain fried for this.

It took time, but gradually, he began to break through the file. His heart sped up as he began sifting through information, doing his best to stay focused outwardly while his brain picked apart the information before him. It was Vora's whole file, every piece of information the heroes had on her. Detailed reports of her research—he would need to find a way to download it all for her, so she could continue once out—alongside evidence the heroes had gathered or forged. Vivainne's testimony.

He lingered over the document, curiosity buzzing in the back of his mind. What was it, exactly, that Vivainne had said about Vora? What lies had she created?

He resisted. The longer he spent poking around, the more likely he was to get caught. He could come back later for the information, if he had the chance. But for now, all he needed was one piece of information: where was Vora being kept?

He hadn't seen the woman since before the trial. He'd tried to find a way to see her, speak to her with anything beyond the contact link in his mind, but it had been impossible. The heroes had a prison system for dangerous metas, one they kept obfuscated and hidden with superpowers, keeping them locked away for life. If anyone had escaped, Unity had kept it quiet, not letting the information go public.

Damien was half afraid her location wasn't here, that the heroes were smart enough not to write it down, until he stumbled upon it by accident. Tucked away amid lines of information about the woman was a single line of information, and Damien let out a small chuckle of amazement as he committed it to memory.

Of course the heroes would build it so close to home.

He pulled back as quickly as he could and glanced around the room, heart pounding. Still empty.

He shifted in his seat and tapped a button on the side of his hand, opening up the line of communication between himself and Vora.

I found where they're holding you, he typed out, and it's not far.

He sent the message off, waiting eagerly for a response. Just as the red cursor appeared at the corner of his vision, the door to the library opened.

Damien jumped, quickly switching the line off. Vora would understand, and she had all the time in the world, while he was surrounded by heroes at every turn.

Not glancing at the door, he focused on the computer in front of him, clicking on the first article he saw. Recompense wasn't a hero Damien would replicate, if he had the mind or power to do so, but he was a hometown hero and hopefully be a convincing enough choice for the research project.

"There you are," came the ever bright voice of Artemis Carter, head of the New York City hero training program. "Veronica told me you were in the library."

He looked over at the retired hero, doing his best to look surprised but not nervous. It wasn't an expression he had much practice in. "Just working on your assignment," he said, flashing a smile.

What is she doing here? he thought, unable to stop the frantic beating of his heart as the woman approached the table, sitting down in a seat beside him. Did someone alert her I was in here? Did they detect my snooping?

They shouldn't have caught him. He'd been careful this time, working from inside the tower, not being so brazen in his approach. No alarms had gone off, nothing like last time.

She leaned forward, looking at the desktop screen before nodding in approval. "Good pick," she said. "Recompense is a good hero, and a good man."

Damien nodded, finding it difficult to say anything. Maybe if Recompense hadn't been the one to lock Vora up, he'd have something to say now, but even before, Damien had only found him mildly interesting.

He fiddled with the mouse, investigating the keyboard and the worn letters on it before Artemis cleared her throat.

"I know today must be hard for you," she said, and he immediately opened his mouth to cut her off. Before he could protest that he'd heard enough stupid condolences for one day, she held up her hand, continuing to speak. "I'm sure you've heard that plenty, I just wanted to extend an invitation to you for dinner. You're not the only student of mine over the years to not have a parent or family member able to attend, and I always try to make sure they're not neglected."

"Oh, I don't want to be a burden," he said, and knew instantly the words were the wrong ones to say.

"You won't be," Artemis said, reaching out to pat his arm. Then, she added with a wink: "Plus, Florence will be there."

He blinked back, face going red as the mortification set in. How did she know about that?

He opened his mouth to protest, but all that came out with a dull "uhhh."

She pushed back from the table, smoothing out a pink satin skirt as she rose. "Don't you know? I know everything." As she stepped back, Damien thought that was it, until she opened her mouth again. "And when you're done, you can tell me why you were hacking into our computers." She grinned and left the room, but not without telling Damien where and when to meet for dinner as his stomach dropped to the floor.

The moment the door shut, Damien tipped back his head and let out a muffled groan into his hands. How did she know everything? Did she know what files he'd accessed, or just that he'd accessed Unity's systems?

He opened up the line to Vora once more, determined to get the information across to her just in case Artemis Carter was aware of exactly what he'd been doing.

You're beneath the Hudson, he typed out. Right beneath everyone's nose.

Vora's response came immediately. Perfect.


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