June 11th 2013, 9:28 AM
Jacobin awoke to the ringing of a phone he did not own.
He had slept heavily, his dreams filled with mumbled nightmare-images. He hadn’t been healing as quickly as he was used to, and it was getting harder and harder to tough his way through the pain.
He pulled himself out of sleep, will-first. Was it a trap? How could it be a trap? Anyone who could track him down, break into the disused warehouse where he was staying, and leave a phone could have cut his throat while he slept.
Someone wanted to talk to him. It was the flip-open kind of phone; he’d seen them before, he knew what to do.
It moved to his face.
“Hello?”
The voice was electronically distorted. “I believe you call yourself Jacobin?”
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“Yes. Who are you?”
“The actual revolutionaries.”
“What?”
“The Unified Saint-Andrews Liberation Force. Call me Andrew Moon.” A pause. “You didn’t think you were the only one, did you? No. We have been waiting for a long time. Twenty years ago, our nation fell to Balog’s army. Now Balog is dead; it is time for the republic to rise again. It is a shame that none of our soldiers lived near you while you were growing up; you would have been a much more valuable weapon if your powers were still unknown to our enemies. Fortunately, Luminosa found you to pass the phone on to you.”
“Luminosa is with -”
He stopped. “That’s impossible.” Too much, too fast. All of this was impossible. There was no vast, powerful revolutionary organization - at least, none he had found. And Luminosa would never support it.
“Luminosa is the face of our organization and our contact with the outside superheroes,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “Her self-righteous loyalty to her code limits her practical effectiveness, but it prevents the outside world from thinking of us as terrorists instead of freedom fighters.”
“She didn’t say anything about you.”
“We assumed you were a spy. The vast majority of powered individuals on the island of Saint-Andrews are descended from the Tyrant’s soldiers. We had no reason to trust you. We do now.”
Now when he’d killed Pyre. “What now?”
“Soak your costume in gasoline, then set it on fire from a safe distance. That won’t destroy it, but it will burn off the tracking chemical that you were doused in. After that, call me back.”
The phone clicked off.