Where There's Fire (Panopolis Book 2) Read Online Free PDF

the marketing campaigns going on now: Be Your Own Hero. Ostensibly those ads and television spots are meant to sell Hero merchandise, and it’s working: that shit is flying off the shelves. It’s also emboldening our rank and file. Civilian altercations with Villains are on the rise. You know what happens when someone with no superpower confronts someone with a superpower?
    They get crushed.

    We rode separately to downtown Panopolis, me on my scooter and Raul on his motorcycle. It made sense to have different methods of escape available, but I still felt better when we met up again at the rendezvous point four blocks down from my target. I’d watched my old bank from a distance for two weeks, getting a handle on who would be arriving when and how much time I could count on having with the manager before I had to deal with the customers. I got a new suit, the sort of blandly innocuous dark blue that so many professionals in Panopolis defaulted to, and practiced my new face in the mirror for weeks before dubbing it good enough to do a decent job of disguising me.
    The face change was Raul’s idea. He was an expert at it, tightening a muscle here and relaxing one there and somehow giving himself an entirely new appearance. He could go from the strong, handsome features I was used to, to squinty eyes, a pinched, a tired mouth, and an oversized nose in seconds, and that was only one of his variations. The first time he tried to teach me, I’d spent half an hour looking angrily constipated and had given myself a headache from glaring at my own reflection.
    “Why not use makeup?” I’d demanded at last. “Prosthetics? It’s got to be easier than this.”
    Raul had shrugged a shoulder. “It might be easier, but you can’t assume that such things will always be at hand when you need to disappear into a crowd. What if a prosthetic falls off, what if your fake nose catches on fire? Better to learn to do it by yourself, and hold the rest in reserve.”
    In the end we’d compromised. I’d tucked my hair up underneath a hat, a rather ridiculous fedora that was, for some reason, coming back into fashion, then thickened my eyebrows with a little mascara. When I dropped my lower jaw down and back I almost eradicated my chin, and had painted a thin layer of latex around my eyes to add spidery wrinkles to my face. Finally I’d let my eyelids sag a bit, hunched my shoulders slightly, and topped it all off with a battered briefcase in one hand, a cane in the other. Canes were a surprisingly common accessory in Panopolis, a fact that only made sense once you considered the numerous people who got caught between the crosshairs during a Super fight.
    My cane had a number of special modifications, courtesy of Raul, though I hoped I wouldn’t have to use any of them. The briefcase, complete with a subtle biometric lock, would hold whatever I managed to get out of the bank, as well as my tube of slow-burning fire. Hopefully I’d make good use of all that empty space. That was the part of the prep work that had bothered me most when we were planning the job.
    “What do you mean, I pick them randomly?” I’d asked incredulously.
    “It’s better that way,” Raul had insisted. “You make the manager open completely random boxes for you. His master key should be capable of that, and then you’ll have the advantage of inscrutability. If you start to get a reputation as wanting one particular thing—diamonds, say—then the police force can use it as bait. Better not to present them with any weaknesses to be exploited.”
    “Oh.” I could see his point: the Sapphire Sultana, whose weakness had been—you guess it, sapphires—had been nabbed by Mr. Fabulous not long ago when the Museum of Nature and Science put on a special display of her favorite stones. “But what if I don’t get anything worthwhile?”
    “No one puts things that aren’t worthwhile inside a safe-deposit box. Besides, this is only your first job. Worry about