Superheroes Anonymous by Lexie Dunne Page B

clothing didn’t smell exactly fresh or anything, but it had the advantage of being clean. I finger-­combed my hair, pulled it back into a wet knot, and for a moment, just enjoyed the rare feeling of being human.
    For all of two seconds.
    Mobius had been waiting for me to emerge; he grabbed me by the arm, yanked me out of the lair, up a staircase, and down a brief hallway with bare walls and no defining features. Summarily, he shoved me in a closet and locked the door.
    Habit from dozens of other kidnappings made me explore the walls and corners with my hands, searching for any trapdoors (it’s amazing how many villains forget to hostage-­proof their lairs), but the storage room was all it appeared to be: a dark, empty hole. Thanks to the corduroy and flannel, I started to warm up almost immediately, but other than that, it didn’t have much to offer me.
    Leaning against the wall, I dozed off—­maybe I did have narcolepsy—­and when I woke up, my hair was drier. Thumping repeatedly on the door raised no response from Dr. Mobius, so I leaned back and finally took some time to do a mental inventory. By my calculations, I’d spent the past two weeks asleep, or close enough to it. Dr. Mobius had said I’d been awake for part of it, so why was everything during that time blank?
    Focusing as hard as I could produce nothing but a vague, blurry memory of watching a giant needle being shoved into my arm, and an accompanying dizzy spell. The entire room seemed to shake, so I fell forward, hugging the ground until the vertigo had passed. It took me nearly a minute of lying on the floor to convince myself that it was all in my head.
    I pushed myself back up. Belatedly, I froze. That push-­up had been really easy.
    Shouldn’t I be as weak as a baby kitten? I didn’t know how long it took muscular atrophy to set in, but I was pretty sure two weeks on a table wasn’t exactly healthy. Testing, I propped myself up on my hands and my feet and did a push-­up. And then I did another.
    I began to count in my head. One. Two. Five. Ten. Thirteen, fourteen. Fifteen.
    I wasn’t even tired yet.
    Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty.
    My arms felt fine. In fact, they felt better than they had in a long time. I kept going.
    Twenty-­nine, thirty.
    Forty. Fifty.
    Sixty.
    Nothing burned. I was doing full, military-­style push-­ups, my palms biting into the ground right below my shoulders.
    Seventy.
    I hadn’t even broken a sweat.
    By the time I reached ninety without any signs of fatigue, I began to panic. When I passed a hundred, my hands began to shake. It wasn’t exhaustion. I’d just done a hundred push-­ups when twenty usually did me in. Breath scraping against the insides of my lungs in terror, I dropped to the ground and looked around, like the empty walls surrounding me would have an answer.
    There was nothing but silence in reply.
    What the hell was happened to me? What had Dr. Mobius done to me?
    Slowly, hand shaking, I felt my upper arm, where the flab normally had a lot of give. It was like pushing against steel. I yanked off the flannel shirt—­the white shirt beneath was old to the point of see-­through. In the flickering light, every muscle was defined in perfect, video game lines.
    â€œUh,” was all I could say to that.
    Dr. Mobius might have turned me into an addict who would die without her fix, but he’d also apparently given me muscles.
    A part of me had to marvel. Not at the fact that my arms had become streamlined ropes of wiry muscle and sinew, not that I had washboard abs better than my ex-­boyfriend’s (and he’d worked several hours a week on those abs). No, I marveled that I’d somehow missed out on all of this during my shower.
    You’d think it would have been obvious.
    A BOUT TWENTY MINU TES after my bout with the push-­ups, hunger began to gnaw away at my stomach. By the time Dr. Mobius opened the door twenty