The Accidental Hero

by Matt Myklusch

  “They turned before the boy’s very eyes,” Hovarth said. “It took only seconds. Taken over by Rüstov parasites, his parents tried to kill him. He had to fight them off, his own parents, just to stay alive. He couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old at the time. Just a boy. Skerren doesn’t hate you, Jack. He hates what is in you. He hates the Rüstov, and with good reason. You think him a bully or a mean child, but in many ways he is not a child at all. He survived his parents, but his childhood died years ago. Since then, he has focused only on his training. And his anger.”

  Jack and Allegra were quiet.

  “Did you know any of that?” Jack asked Allegra.

  “No,” Allegra said mournfully.

  Jack didn’t know what to say. Skerren’s story was horrible. Really, it was much worse than his own. Life at St. Barnaby’s was nothing compared to what Skerren had gone through. Jack always thought Skerren was a jerk, but nothing was ever as simple as it seemed. Skerren wasn’t bad—he just had had to grow up too fast. Jack, like most orphans, knew exactly what that was like.

  “I’m afraid this is by no means a unique tale,” Hovarth said. “Nearly everyone in Empire City has a story like this to tell, some dating back to the invasion, and others, like Skerren’s, that are more recent. Everyone here has a bad memory about the Rüstov, and that’s all they can think of when they see you. They ask why you live with the infection when their loved ones died. Why is your life spared when theirs were lost? Sheds some light on why people look at you the way they do, eh? What they see is their pain. No doubt, Skerren sees his parents.”

  Suddenly, Jack saw both Skerren and Hovarth in a whole new light. “Do you see that too?” he asked Hovarth. “Skerren’s parents, I mean? Your best friends?”

  “They were already lost, Jack,” Hovarth replied. “Once the Rüstov take root in someone, that person is gone.” He reflected on that a moment, then added, “Except for you, it seems. When I voted against you in the sphere and said that sooner or later you would turn, I meant it. However, when I became Circleman of Varagog, like my father before me, I gave my word to uphold the will of the Inner Circle. It was the will of the Circle that you be tested for the School of Thought, so I gave you a chance. I gave you a chance because of Stendeval. I may not always agree with him, but I do respect him. Jonas Smart might be the smartest man in Empire City, but Stendeval is the wisest.”

  “What happened to Skerren’s parents?” Allegra asked. “Did Skerren have to kill them to get away?”

  “No,” Hovarth said gravely. “I’m afraid that burden fell to me.”

  For the first time, Jack saw himself through everyone else’s eyes. He began to realize just how badly everyone was wronged by the Rüstov. Suddenly, the harm that the Rüstov had done to the people of Empire City had a real face on it. Oddly enough, that face was Skerren’s.

  When Jack got back to the Ivory Tower, the evening took yet another unexpected turn. He and Jazen came home to find that while they were out, their apartment had been broken into and ransacked. Inside, the place was a wreck. Someone had turned the furniture over, rifled through the drawers, and kicked in the bedroom doors. A strong wind blew in from a window that had been smashed, and Anti-Gravity platforms hung down at uneven angles, blowing back and forth in the breeze. Jazen scanned the apartment for intruders before he let Jack follow him in. Once they were both inside, they sifted through the mess in stunned silence.

  “I guess now I’m glad you snuck out tonight,” Jazen finally said to Jack, trying to make light of the situation.

  Jack wasn’t laughing. He was well aware of what the break-in meant for him. “The Rüstov…,” he said, thinking back to what he had heard on the rooftops, just hours before. “Jazen, the Rüstov said I wasn’t where their agent said I would be tonight. I was supposed to be here!”

  “I know,” Jazen admitted. “That crossed my mind, too.”

  “You don’t think…,” Jack began, puzzling over a scary thought. “Jazen, what if this whole thing with Cyberai tonight was all just to get you out of the apartment?”

  “No,” Jazen said, shaking his head. “I only left the apartment because of Blue. That’s a coincidence. No way it’s more than that.”

  “Who else knows I live here?” Jack asked.

  “Everybody,” Jazen said. “Everybody knows, thanks to Smart’s NewsNets.”

  “Smart,” Jack said, putting up a finger, telling Jazen to hold that thought. He looked around the apartment. The mention of Smart’s name triggered something in the room. Something connected to Smart that was trying to get Jack’s attention. It was weird, but he could feel it there, just beyond his reach. Jack rushed into his room and began searching through the debris.

  “What are you looking for?” Jazen asked.

  Jack didn’t answer him. He didn’t know the answer, and he was too worked up to focus properly. After several moments Jack cleared his mind and really concentrated. When he was completely calm, the signal came in clearly. The noise came from something speaking to him, something that he hadn’t looked at since his first night in Empire City. Jack walked over to the table next to his bed and picked up his birth certificate.

  Jack held up the SmartPaper file. Its letters were scrambled into gibberish. Smart had said it was because the file was infected by the Rüstov virus. That was what had caused him to sever the file from his mainframe. Now that Jack knew how to talk to the file, he got a different story. When he closed his mind and looked into the file, he found no trace of the Rüstov virus whatsoever. Jack’s birth certificate wasn’t corrupted. It was encrypted.

  The file had been permanently sealed by Jonas Smart.

  CHAPTER

  14

  The Enemy Within

  Jack stomped around, muttered to himself, and waved his hands in the air like a nut. After several moments of watching the apartment lights surge on and off and listening to a great deal of words not regularly found in his vocabulary, Jazen finally got Jack to settle down and tell him what was going on.

  “He’s been lying to me since day one!” Jack yelled. “From the second I got here! I don’t believe this!”

  “What? Who has?”

  “Well, maybe I do believe it, but still… it’s not infected, Jazen!” Jack said, holding up his birth certificate. “Smart lied to me! My file’s not infected!”

  “Not infected?” Jazen repeated. “Let me see that.”

  Jack handed Jazen the SmartPaper file. Jazen examined it, trying to see what Jack saw. “It certainly looks infected,” Jazen said. “It looks like the data on it was broken and fried by the Rüstov virus, like Smart said.”

  “It’s not infected!” Jack said. “There’s a voice coming from the file—I can hear it!” Jack told Jazen what the file had told him. Jack swore he had heard a weak voice, faintly crying out in a barely audible tone. It was being muted by an encryption code that kept repeating the same message over and over:

  Confidential. Eyes only, Jonas Smart.

  “He knows who I am!” Jack said. “This whole time, he’s known all about me. My real name, my family… they might still be out there!” Jack looked outside at the SmartCams. They were tapping at the Ivory Tower loft’s window, just as they did every night. “All this time he knew I wasn’t some Rüstov spy, and he still had his SmartCams follow me around like I was some kind of criminal. He ran all those stupid tests, freezing me, shocking me… he even wanted to have me dissected! The whole time, he knew that everything he was saying about me was a lie.”

  “Jack, are you sure about this?” Jazen asked. “You have to be sure.”

  “Absolutely,” Jack said. “One hundred percent.”

  Jazen gripped the SmartPaper tightly. “That dirty son of a…” Jack could literally see the wheels turning inside Jazen’s head. “He’s been playing us this whole time,” Jazen said. Jazen couldn’t talk to the file the way Jack could, but he didn’t need to. He put his hand to his forehead. He looked upset with himself. “How could
I have missed this?” he said.

  Jack didn’t understand him yet. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Missed what?”

  “I don’t believe it,” Jazen said, still running with his same train of thought. “I thought bringing you here would loosen Smart’s grip on this city, but he’s been working this from the very beginning.” Jazen paused, still thinking. “He gets so much power by keeping people afraid… I just gave him everything he needed to stir up everybody’s fears again.” Jazen looked to Jack like he had finally put the last piece of a puzzle in its place. “I never did believe Silico did it,” he said.

  “Silico?” Jack squinted at Jazen. “What are you saying?”

  Jazen’s face turned deadly serious. “I’m saying, Jack, I think Silico was framed. I think Jonas Smart is the Great Collaborator.”

  Jack leaned forward with his mouth agape. He was speechless.

  “It all makes sense,” Jazen said. “You don’t know what it was like here after the invasion, Jack. Suddenly, Jonas Smart was able to get away with anything. As long as he said it was to protect us against the Rüstov, he had free reign. He set up the Peacemakers as his own private army of supers. He set up the SmartCam surveillance program. Fear and paranoia ran rampant, and people stood by while the Peacemakers basically ruled Machina with an iron fist.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “But what does that have to do with me?”

  “Think about it,” Jazen said. “Don’t you think someone as brilliant as Smart, someone who hates the Rüstov as much as he claims to, should be happy to meet someone like you? Someone who is fighting a Rüstov infection and winning?”

  Jack nodded. He had to admit, he’d wondered about that once or twice himself.

  “If the truth about you is something harmless, or maybe even something positive, that’s no good for Smart,” Jazen said. “But as long as you’re a mystery, you’re a potential Rüstov threat. A mysterious infected child talking about Revile coming back from the dead? It’s almost too perfect. He’s the one who benefits from all this. Why else would he be lying about you?”

  “But would he really work with the Rüstov, though?” Jack asked. “Would he actually hand me over to them?”

  “He had all the information he needed,” Jazen said. “He knew where and when you’d be alone on Wrekzaw Isle, he obviously knew where the Left-Behind was being held, and tonight you made his SmartCams think you were here watching TV. If you went missing, he could have spun that any way he wanted. It’d be just like after the invasion.”

  “You really think it was him back then?” Jack asked. “You think he’d help them kick off an entire invasion?”

  “Maybe,” Jazen surmised. “He’s always ten steps ahead. If he liked our odds, or thought it was better for him in the long run, he’d go through with it. Smart wouldn’t look at it the same way we do, Jack. If he calculated all the probabilities with his machines and they thought we would win, he wouldn’t see the invasion as a tragedy at all. He’d see it as an opportunity.”

  “He’d just look at the logic of it all,” Jack said, becoming convinced. “The invasion did happen right after Smart had his heart removed…”

  “And SmartCorp must have acquired half of Empire City since then,” Jazen said. “We have to tell the others. We have to at least look into this. We’ll call for an emergency meeting of the Inner Cir—”

  “No,” Jack interrupted. “We have to do this. Just us. Tonight.”

  Jazen looked at Jack. “Tonight? What are you talking about?”

  “There’s more to this, Jazen. Something between me and the Rüstov. This might be my last chance to find out what that is, and I’m not going to lose this one too,” Jack said. “Every time I think I’m going to get answers about my past, I get nothing. When you brought me here, you said all the answers I wanted were at the Hall of Records. When we got there, they said my file was ruined. When Stendeval came back, he said he knew stuff about me too. Stuff going back to the invasion. Then he wouldn’t say anything either. Have patience, he said! Then the Left-Behind got away from us twice! They’re all dead ends. I’m out of patience. Smart owes me answers and they’re in his computer right now. I’m not accusing him of anything until I have proof.”

  “Jack, the file in your hand is proof.”

  “I can’t read the file,” Jack countered. “I tried, and the encryption code won’t even let me copy it. What’s the Inner Circle going to do, make Smart decode it? He’ll delete it at the first chance he gets and call it a computer glitch or something. He only let me keep this because he didn’t know I’d be able to talk to it. I’m not letting him near this thing.”

  Jazen reluctantly agreed that Jack had a point. If the file wasn’t already severed from Smart’s mainframe, he would have deleted it long before now. Jack was right—they couldn’t risk Smart finding out what they knew. Jazen wanted to talk to Stendeval about this, but they had no way to reach him. Cognito was filled with hideouts, not homes. It wasn’t like they could go knock on Stendeval’s door. His door would have moved at least ten different times since they saw it last.

  “What exactly are you suggesting we do?” Jazen asked. “I know you want answers, but the file’s severed from the mainframe, and Smart’s the only one who has access rights. For you to read it, the file has to think you’re him. You’d have to feed it back into his personal computer.”

  Jack nodded slowly at Jazen. “Exactly.”

  Jazen suddenly looked like all the power had drained from his batteries. He peered out the window at the rapier peak of SmartTower. It was shining brightly in the moonlight. “Oh, no,” he said. “Jack, no.”

  “You said sometimes you have to bend the rules,” Jack reminded him.

  “There’s bending the rules and then there’s destroying the rules,” Jazen said. “This isn’t like sneaking out of the apartment, Jack. You’re talking about SmartTower. They’ve got security. Your voiceprint, your fingerprints, and even your retinas. You won’t even get past the front door.”

  “I’m not planning on using the front door,” Jack said. He told Jazen what he had in mind. It was a simple plan. It took guts, superpowers, and a partner in crime who just happened to be an android. Luckily, Jack had all three.

  “If we get caught, it’s going to be bad,” Jazen warned. “Bad for us both. Everyone’s going to say Smart was right about you. We could blow our only chance at this.”

  “Then I guess we better not get caught,” Jack said.

  A short while later, Jazen slid open the window on the 437th floor of the Ivory Tower. Jack felt a rush in every fiber of his being. From here on out, all safeties were off. He had learned a lot studying for the School of Thought, but the time for tests and homework ended at the window’s edge. This time, Jack would be dealing with the real thing.

  Jazen stepped out as far as he could go without jumping. Wind rushed into the loft, but that was all. The Smart-Cams stayed where they were. As far as Smart’s inventions went, the SmartCams really weren’t overly complex. They were just a bunch of flying cameras. Jack thought it was even easier to trick them the second time around. With the SmartCams out of the way, Jack made some final preparations and climbed onto Jazen’s back. “I’m not even sure I can make a jump this far,” Jazen said.

  “The hydraulics in your legs told me you can clear this easy,” Jack said.

  Jazen shrugged. “If you say ‘zzt-zzt-zzt’ so.” He turned around and gave Jack a worried look, a bit surprised that the boy was still causing him to have glitches.

  “Did I do that?” Jack asked, thinking maybe he was a little overexcited.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Jazen asked.

  “I’m ready,” Jack replied, trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince Jazen.

  “If I miss this jump, this is going to be the shortest secret mission ever,” Jazen told him.

  “One second,” Jack told him. He spoke to the SmartTower security cameras, getting everything ready. It was now
or never. “Okay!” Jack yelled before he could change his mind.

  “Hold on!” Jazen yelled.

  With a rush of wind they were hurtling through the air toward SmartTower.

  Jack and Jazen smashed through a window on the 422nd floor with a huge crash. Jazen landed in a solid three-point crouch. Jack was latched on to his back, his arms wrapped around tighter than the sleeves of a straightjacket. He stepped down, relieved to be back on solid ground. Broken glass crunched beneath his sneakers as alarms screamed all around them. Now came the tricky part.

  Although Jack had sent the tower security cameras to static before he and Jazen hit the window, he could do nothing to keep the crash quiet. He figured they had maybe a minute tops before tower security had someone up there to check it out. Turned out it was even less, because the someone who showed up happened to be Speedrazor.

  Jack didn’t even see him coming until he was right on top of them, but Jazen’s mechanized eyes picked up the speedster easily. Jazen turned, stuck his metal arm out in the air, and clotheslined the Peacemaker at a hundred miles per hour. Speedrazor dropped like a stone. Jack thought it was awesome.

  After Speedrazor hit the ground, a radio button on his uniform started squawking. A voice asked for a situation report. Jazen tapped the button to reply and answered the call. “Area secure. Just some collateral damage from a superfight,” Jazen said in a perfect voiceprint match for Speedrazor. “Looks like Laser Girl hit our window again. Send up a maintenance crew to clean up the broken glass. Speedrazor out.”

  Jazen slung the Peacemaker’s unconscious body over his shoulder and Jack gave him a thumbs-up. To avoid being picked up on the radar, Jack sent his thoughts directly to Jazen’s mechanical mind using his powers. Looks like Speedrazor falls into the seventy-two percent of attacks you can handle, Jack thought.