Prentkos raised an eyebrow, “What is this fixation on kidneys?”

Taking my eyes off the tower, I replied, “I’ve been told they’re an efficient way to kill people.”

Ray nodded. “Unless your skin’s too tough to get through, you’ll bleed out pretty quickly to a well placed knife wound. It’s efficient and it works about as well on supers as the rest of us. Even most regenerators take time to come back from that and you can do a lot in that time.” Continue reading Singularity: Part 8 →

Ray didn’t need to shout at first. He’d pointed the tower out. All I had to do was aim toward it and dodge the perspective-wrenching sections of building that jutted out, made a twist, and seemed to be either on the ground or in the sky or, more often than not, both at once.

I flew toward a distant walkway only to find out that it was close and below me, flew under a bridge over a lake that was also a walkway over a castle, and found myself at the foot of the tower. Continue reading Singularity: Part 7 →

“Technically,” I added, “it’s less his than Colette’s or whatever Dominator he’s using, but he’s behind it.”

Ray dropped his hands to his sides, but continued to take slow breaths. “Magnus tried to teach me something like that. He powered me up somehow and said that learning how to control energy would help.”

He turned away from me, eyes flicking around, probably to check for threats. “You said it can help me survive. What do the two of you know that I don’t?”

“The three of us,” Prentkos said. Continue reading Singularity: Part 6 →

I couldn’t argue with him, but if I had to bet what Ray’s orders were, I’d have bet that they were to kill or delay us. That meant that we needed to take him down.

The problem would be coordinating with Prentkos. If Ray had Izzy’s hearing, he’d hear everything and Prentkos didn’t have a League communicator.

Then another thought struck me. What if absorbing energy worked on Ray the same way it worked on Prentkos? Spark had said that everyone Magnus brought through here was descended strongly enough from Artificers that they could develop into them given time.

If I taught Ray how to remove Magnus’ commands, I might be able to trust him to a degree. Continue reading Singularity: Part 5 →

Ray didn’t land close to us. He gave himself 20 feet—which meant that that was as much as he thought he needed. It had been years since he’d died, but I still remembered him.

As the leader of the Executioners, he’d excelled in planning on how to take down superheroes and their families—families first to increase the stress and emotional pain.

He hadn’t, as I remembered it, been quite so effective when he’d gained powers himself. It’s one thing to carry out a plan you’ve trained for and still another to copy someone else’s powers and use them as effectively as the original person when you haven’t trained to use them.

I wondered when this version of him was from and whose powers he’d copied. My first guess would have been Power Burst, but that meant we’d be fighting Izzy for all practical purposes. Continue reading Singularity: Part 4 →