Page 98 of Lovesick Titan

“The belt on the suit. Saw it whether he was looking like you or not, actually. Didn’t think the suit had a belt before.”

“It doesn’t. The suit doesn’t have a belt. Ludgate was wearing a…” Danny trailed, the sudden quiet tense around them until he bolted up into a sitting position. “A belt! He was wearing a belt! It’s the belt!”

Sitting up after Danny, the same truth dawned on Mal too. The belt hadn’t been as noticeable when they were looking at Ludgate in his own costume, but Mal remembered now that it was the same belt—on Ludgate’s suit, on the other Danny, and on The Invisible Man.

“He’s been using tech to travel through mirrors. Then what are his powers?”

“I have a theory,” Danny said, “and Metal makes much more sense for it to work. But even more important, if we know what tech he’s using to enter the mirror world…”

“Then we can disrupt it.”

“ThenIcan disrupt it with my lightning. We have to tell everyone!” Danny jumped to his feet.

“Danny!” Mal caught his wrist. “It’s the middle of the night and you’re stark naked.Sleep. We can tell the others in the morning.”

“Right. You’re right.” Danny looked lost in thought, distracted by plans and calculations as Mal tugged him back to the mattress. Finally, he met Mal’s gaze with a bright smile as he slipped under the covers again. “Thank you.”

“Great minds think better together,” Mal said. “And come to think of it, Priestly said something to me once that makes me think you might have one more trump card up your sleeve.”

R

“Ludgate’s a human GPS?” Andre said. “I told you Metal people have a good sense of direction!”

Danny grinned in his excitement. Everyone but Carla and the kids was gathered in the main room of the morgue. “We know he was at the circus fun house when the power station blew. We know he had a wayintothe mirror world before then but wouldn’t risk going through it and getting hopelessly lost. So what if he had the belt then, just to do experiments, wasn’t planning on actually going inside yet, but when the blast hit the circus, he got thrown into it. He was screwed, no way to know which mirror was the one he’d entered from…until he realized he already knew! Because he Awakened as an Elemental, giving him exactly what he needed to know where he was at any given time in relation to everything around him.”

“Metal—magnetic,” Priestly picked up on what Danny was saying. “Like how a compass always points north. So once he could safely experiment in the mirror world, it was easy to tweak his technology to let him in and out of any mirrors at will.”

“He still has an advantage by knowing which reflections to find us in—” Mal began.

“But if we can disrupt the belt, it won’t matter,” Danny said, restless to finally see this through, even as he was about to admit one of the last secrets he had left. “And the biggest breakthrough of all, the reason Ludgate hates me so much…is because I killed his father.”

Several shocked faces turned to Danny as he pulled up the results of the DNA test he’d run the moment he woke up, displaying it on the computer screen comparing Ludgate to the samples from Thanatos. As Danny expected, it wasn’t the villain’s lineage that made everyone pause but that most of them hadn’t known the truth of what happened the night Thanatos disappeared.

“His shadow has followed me ever since that night, not because I ran him out of town, but because, after he killed all those people at the power station, after he killed mymother, I killed him. Brutally. AndI’ve never gotten over it. Obviously, neither has Ludgate. How can I blame him? Despite everything Thanatos did, that didn’t give me the right to kill him.”

It was difficult to look at any of them, even those who’d already known the truth, but Danny couldn’t run from this any more than he could run from any of his problems.

“If you need to arrest me when all this is over,” he glanced at Captain Shan, “you know I was already prepared to pay for my crimes.”

“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that.” Shan glared at him. “Now, what’s the play? We know all this about Ludgate. How do we catch him?”

Danny knew Shan changing the subject didn’t absolve him of what he’d done, but as he looked around at the others, not even Joey faltered.

“The trap’s still perfect,” Joey said. “Ludgate won’t pass up a display of mirrors like that.”

“And the important thing,” Mal added, “is we no longer have to lure him out. We can give him exactly what he wants.”

“We go into the mirror world with him,” Danny said, “let him think he’ll win, think he has the advantage, then sever his connection by shorting out the belt.”

“Didn’t you say that was dangerous?” Stella asked. “You can’t use the Miasma Maker in the mirror world because it could seal you in there.”

“This is different,” Priestly said. “The mirror world existed before Ludgate found a way inside, so him losing his ability to get there shouldn’t affect them.”

“But you’ll still need a way out.” Lucy frowned, arms crossed stiffly over her chest. “Won’t you get lost?”

“Danny found his way out before,” Lynn said.

“That took hours,” Danny countered. “We don’t want to stumble around blind. But we won’t have to. Because if all we do is disrupt Ludgate’s belt, he’ll still have his internal GPS. Normal people can move in and out of the mirror world as long as they return through the reflection they entered.He’lllead us to the mirror that brings us home. He’ll have no choice.”

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