Skye awoke with a pounding headache inside a Faraday cage, suspended over obsidian air.
“Well it’s a good thing I’m not afraid of heights,” he muttered. His fingers clutched the grid of wire floor as he stared between them into the darkness. No ground below the cage. No anything, really.
“No vat of lava,” he said, keeping positive as usual. “I could have been suspended over a vat of lava.”
That’d already happened to him four times this year, in variation: molten iron, toxic waste, bubbling chemicals that’d burned some supervillain’s face and now he wanted revenge...
Totally not trembling at all, Skye tore his eyes away from the abyss to inspect the room around him. The lenses in his mask adjusted to infrared; in the pitch darkness he wouldn’t have seen anything without them. As dorky as mask lenses had sounded to him, Skye had to admit, again— Carl had been right to install them.
There wasn’t much to see, though. More darkness...in the far distance, walls, gears, and dangling chains.
“Holy—!” A hooded figure floated in the darkness just outside the cage, staring in at him.
“Well hello there!” Skye said, totally not freaked out at all, and totally not reconsidering his belief in ghosts. “What’s up?”
“You are.” The figure’s mouth twitched; he smirked. “But what matters more is what’s down.”
“Always nice to meet a kidnapper with a sense of humor,” Skye said, looking down again and pretending not to. “What’s your name, man?” When you’re friendly with your captors, they sometimes start sympathizing with you and mess up—everybody likes to beat down a defiant little snot or a sniveling crybaby, but you feel bad torturing a regular nice guy.
But the hooded man didn’t offer his name. He smiled, and disappeared.
Crap. Skye put two and two together: with the fuzzy infrared he couldn’t see right, but the smooth jazz voice and the disappearing thing—he’d only encountered that once before. And that guy didn’t f ’ around.
That guy was supposed to be dead.
Skye opted not to remember more than that.
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