Free Metawars: The Complete Series: Trance, Changeling, Tempest, Chimera by Kelly Meding Page B

say.
    “Wow,” Renee said, her head bobbing up and down as she looked me over. “I mean, Gage said that you’d changed, but wow. You look different, but different in a good way, of course.”
    “You look the same,” I said. “Taller, and your hair’s longer.”
    “Yeah, and look!” She ran her hands over her breasts,neatly protected in black leather cups, and a bit too large for her small frame. “I got them three years ago, aren’t they great? For a minute, I thought they’d go back to normal size when my powers returned, but I got to keep my boob job!”
    I had absolutely nothing to say.
    Gage saved me with “Renee was a dancer in Las Vegas.”
    “Yeah,” she said. “Goodness, but I love dancing. I got into an act with a brilliant manager who had the other girls dress up in blue body paint, so something good came out of being blue back then. I thought about trying out a new act now that I’ve got my powers back, but then William called me, completely out of the blue—no pun—and said we should gather here, so here I came. Have you seen William yet? Doesn’t he look great?”
    Wow, had that been one breath? “Yeah, he, um, really fills out his uniform,” I said.
    “Yes, he does. Oh, you guys need to pick out uniforms, too! They have all of them downstairs, and not first floor downstairs, the basement downstairs. We raided yesterday, but there are still tons left.” She ran her hands up and down her arms, scraping her cobalt fingernails over the material. “Dr. Seward said this one would stretch pretty well, so it’s a good match for my powers, and I love the texture, don’t you?”
    I would never understand how so many words came out of one mouth so quickly. Renee Duvall had the excitability levels of a cocker spaniel puppy and giggled like she had inhaled a helium balloon. If our current situation bothered her at all, she showed no sign—only pure joy at life itself and an eagerness to interact.
    She had not changed a bit since we were children.
    Except for the boob job.
    Renee left us in front of the elevator and bounced back down the hall to her room, yelling over her shoulder about forgetting something. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of wearing a uniform. As children and trainees, we’d worn primary-colored jumpsuits—something I’d learned quickly to despise. Uniforms came after official Corps membership and were often assigned based on powers and mobility needs. Rangers were meant to stand out from the crowd. For the time being, I’d rather run around in my jeans and T-shirt.
    As Hinder, my dad’s uniform had been straightforward and simple, just like him: a black body suit with a graffiti
H
emblazoned across the chest in green. The collar of the suit had covered his neck, stopping at his shorn hairline. He wore a small eye mask for effect, he said, more than for protecting his identity. His identity
was
Hinder.
    “So we just what?” I asked. “Put something together?”
    “Sounds like it,” Gage said. “Any thoughts?”
    “As long as it’s not purple. Might be overkill.”
    He chuckled. “We could put you in orange and make you look like a carrot.”
    “A cute carrot,” I amended.
    “Very cute.”
    Something rubbed against my ankle, which gave me an excuse to look down before I blushed. A black house cat sat by my foot and gazed up at me with big green eyes. For aninstant, I expected it to leap for my throat, hissing and clawing—which was stupid. Specter couldn’t inhabit animals, only human beings. The cat meowed and licked its lips.
    “Hey, Renee?” I shouted as I bent to pick up the slim beast. It didn’t struggle, just sniffed my mouth.
    “Yeah?” Her head appeared in the hallway, stretched from the neck in comical proportions.
    “Do we have a cat?”
    Renee looked at the animal in my arms, then at me, and laughed. Her head disappeared, the laughter going with it.
    “What?” I looked down at the cat, perplexed. It tilted its head, licked my nose, then