Chapter 26: Reluctant Vengeance
The single, sharp tap from Chloe hung in the air between them, a beacon in the humiliating pink neon nightmare. Captain Bimbo. The name was a brand seared onto his soul. The tiny silver wings on his boots whirred uselessly.
Amy’s voice was a cleaver in his mind. The assistant lied. That’s your window. Stop wallowing in the spandex and start moving. You think the good Doctor is just going to let his fascinating new toy walk out?
Silas had recovered his probe, his fascination solidifying into something more focused, more predatory. “The ancillary manifestations are delightful, but we must return to the core data stream,” he said, his tone leaving no room for argument. He advanced, the blue-tipped probe aiming not for John’s eye this time, but for the glowing purple gem now nestled in the deep, heart-shaped cleavage of the leotard.
Panic, cold and sharp, sliced through the fog of shame. It wasn’t about the costume anymore. It was about that probe touching the source of all this madness. His mind flashed to database architecture, to null pointers and corrupted files.
But his body, tuned to the frequency of fear, responded differently.
A wave of heat erupted from the gem.
It wasn’t just warmth. It was a current, violent and white-hot, that tore through John’s veins and seized his muscles. He gasped, his back arching against the restraints, the chest strap groaning.
Let me drive, Amy whispered, and her voice wasn’t in his head this time. It was in his joints, in the set of his jaw, in the automatic, precise curl of his fingers.
John’s consciousness was shoved into a backseat passenger. He was watching, feeling, but not controlling.
“Amy, stop—” he tried to say, but his voice was gone. His mouth shaped the words, but the sound that came out was a low, resonant hum that rattled the tools on Silas’s tray.
“Fascinating! Vocal modulation!” Silas leaned in closer, his recorder blinking.
Captain Bimbo’s hand—his hand—shot up. The movement was a fluid, violent jerk that shattered the weakened wrist restraint with a sound like a gunshot. Plastic shards pattered onto the steel floor.
Before Silas could react, before his eyes could even widen fully, the other hand was free. Both glitter-silver fists clenched. John felt a pressure building behind the heart-shaped cutouts on his chest, a throbbing, painful swell.
“What is the biomechanical precursor to—” Silas began, his clinical curiosity overriding his survival instinct.
Captain Bimbo’s stiletto-heeled boot lifted and slammed down. Not on the floor. On Silas’s polished leather shoe.
The tip of the heel, needle-fine and impossibly hard, punched through the leather, through the softer material beneath, and pinned Silas’s foot to the floor. There was a wet, crunching sound, like stepping on a handful of damp twigs.
Silas didn’t scream. He made a short, choked exhalation, all the air leaving his lungs at once. His face drained of color, his glasses sliding down his nose.
From the heart-shaped cutouts on Captain Bimbo’s chest, two searing pink beams of condensed light exploded. They weren’t lasers. They were something cruder, hotter, shaped like wobbly, cartoon hearts. They hit the main observation window—the one Chloe had been watching through—and didn’t shatter it. They melted it. A ten-foot-wide section of reinforced polymer slagged inward with a sickening gloopy sound, dripping onto the floor like hot wax.
The alarms this time were different. Deafening, pulsing bursts of sound accompanied by strobes of crimson light that painted the ruin of the lab in jarring snapshots: Silas sagging against his impaled foot, his mouth a perfect ‘O’ of shock; the molten, smoking hole in the wall; the reflection of a ridiculously proportioned pink figure ripping the last of the restraints from the chair.
John was screaming inside his own skull. Stop it! You’re killing him! You’re destroying everything!
Amy was relentless. He was going to turn you into a permanent science project. The only language these people understand is force. Now stand up.
His body stood. The motion was horrifyingly graceful, a model’s rise from a chair, if the model was built like a bowling pin with the world’s worst center of gravity. The weight on his chest pulled him forward. He fought it, but Amy corrected his balance with a subtle, inhuman shift of his hips.
Captain Bimbo placed a hand on his waist, the other extending towards the ceiling. A victory pose. It happened automatically, a programmed end to the combat sequence. He could feel the leotard straining.
And he could feel something else, too. A deep, traitorous, visceral thrill. The power that had just melted through foot and wall alike was still buzzing in his cells. Amy’s vicious, efficien