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.”

  Letting his eyes run up the tower, Ray added, “I can’t check this myself, but when I left, Magnus and his people were in the main building up at the top of the tower. There might be people patrolling outside now, but there weren’t when I left. If we go around the tower to the right, though, there’s a dock to the lake. It’s about three quarters of the way up because of this place’s weird perspective thing. We could enter there and go straight into the bottom of the building.”

  Even though I zoomed in, I couldn’t see the other side of the tower. Worse, whatever the strange perspective of this place represented, using my sonics to fill in the gaps didn’t work. I knew that Izzy had stronger sonic abilities than the Rocket suit, but if Ray could use his copy of Power Burst’s powers to do it, her abilities were much stronger than I understood.

  “I guess we’ll have to fly again.” I held out my arms.

  With expressions that showed no enthusiasm, Ray and Prentkos stepped in and we flew upward parallel to the tower, watching as the tower grew wider as we flew higher.

  I couldn’t say with confidence how wide, but hundreds of feet by the time we reached the dock by the lake.

  Looking at the tower from the perspective of standing on the dock, it was less a tower than a castle built on a massive platform made of stone. Though, when you looked off to the side, you saw the mountainside cliff and further away, the void of impenetrable darkness that ran out of sight below and into the sky above.

  Ahead of us, a door stood in the side of the stone platform and we started walking toward it. No other people stood on the dock, but rowboats had been tied to either side of it, all of them painted in bright colors as if people from the castle regularly rowed on the lake.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Thanks to my HUD, I noticed a few boats out on the lake as well. Even though I walked in the opposite direction, I still watched them in case they transformed into monsters and attacked.

  It had been that kind of day. Heck, it had been that kind of month.

  They didn’t, however. Instead, they splashed around on boats and laughed, enjoying the summer day. I could only guess whether they were real or scenery elements that only existed to set a mood.

  I’d have to ask Kee.

  When we reached the door, a gray-haired man in a black and white suit opened it and asked us, “And how was the lake today, gentlemen?”

  Ray ignored him and walked through the door. Prentkos gave him a nod and I followed them in, thanking him for opening the door.

  The man watched us as we walked down the hall toward a staircase. Using my HUD, I watched him too. He might be watching for Magnus.

  On the other hand, he might have been expecting a tip.

  Ray gestured to the twisting, wooden stairway, “This way.”

  Prentkos and I followed him up. Despite my suit’s strength, the stairs didn’t show any hint of strain. I wasn’t trying to hurt them, but I wasn’t being overly careful either.

  Ray didn’t comment on that. He was too busy urging us to follow because the staircase didn’t do the normal tightly controlled turn in the same circle until the top. It turned and kept in going straight, but ever higher between the castle’s stone wall and the inner wooden walls.

  Sometimes we’d pass a door and Ray would shake his head, “Not that one.” Finally, he stopped, though the stairway kept on going. He opened the white painted wooden door, put his fingers to his lips and stepped inside.

  From what I’d seen from the outside, I expected a castle hall, or perhaps a castle ballroom as reinterpreted by Victorian sensibilities.

  I didn’t get either of those things.

  Instead, we stepped into a balcony on the edge of a vast darkened room with hundreds of glowing balls that may have represented suns in the center.

  Near the center stood Magnus surrounded by others, presumably his followers, many of whom were mind-controlled. I recognized a few—Colette, Jody, Power Burst and his gang, a slew of the True with automatic weapons, Cabal soldiers, a few people I recognized from Stapledon, and more.

  It was far too many people for Ray, Prentkos, and I to fight straight up.

  “So,” I said to Ray, “we’re going to talk our way up to Magnus?”

  “Pretty much,” Ray said. “The man loves to hear himself talk. Whatever movie it was that said getting supervillains monologuing was a good idea had never met this guy. You’ll die of boredom first.“

  That’s when I realized that I couldn’t do the rest of this alone. I’d asked Spark to send the rest of the new League to me when they came through. At this point, I had to assume they wouldn’t. If I was going to get any help, it would be from the original Heroes’ League.