Quick as a snake the other headmaster clamped a hand on Brendan’s ankle. Pain shot up his leg, the vice grip impossibly strong, the bones threatening to break. Brendan screamed.
“Give the ring back to me, girl,” the headmaster said. “Or I rip his foot off.”
Tina took a step back.
The headmaster got up. With his other hand, he grabbed Brendan’s arm and twisted. Brendan couldn’t move, a fresh white agony coursing through his shoulder as the man threatened to pull the limb from its socket.
“Don’t…” Brendan gasped. “Don’t give it to him.”
“No need for theatrics, Sperry,” Myron said. “Put him down.”
Brendan’s arm turned further. He gasped, unable to catch his breath. But his father’s attention wasn’t on him—it was also on the ring. His father held his hand out to Tina. Why would his father want the ring? It didn’t make sense.
“Let me handle this,” Myron said to Tina.
Tina was about to give the ring over when Brendan managed to say, “Don’t!”
An odd smile crossed his father’s face. He said, “Hand it over. There’s no point in anyone getting hurt. Give it here and we can end this mess.”
But Tina was turning away from him to run. In one quick motion, Myron reached into his sleeve and flicked two small objects into the air. Two tiny drones spread their wings, hovering for a moment, until he pointed at Tina. They shot forward. She had made it to the office’s balcony doors, but as she pushed at the curtains one of the drones struck her neck. She screamed, swatting at the thing, and managed to pull it off and throw it to the ground. The second one stopped in midair, hovering near her face.
“What…was that?” Tina asked. She hung on to the curtains and fell to her knees.
“A get-out-of-jail card I was saving for later in case Sperry and I didn’t come to an agreement. Just relax and go to sleep.”
Tina slumped to the carpet. Myron took the ring from her, the other drone hovering silently next to him.
“Bring it here,” the headmaster said.
Brendan’s arm was going numb. The pain was overwhelming.
“Oh, do let him go, Sperry,” Myron said. “The kid was just concerned about his daddy is all.”
The headmaster considered Brendan. His expression was one Brendan had seen before, like a kid about to stomp on a bug. “So, he’s nothing to you?”
Myron shrugged. “Maybe to the other me. But as far as I’m concerned, he’s just some snot-nosed kid.”
Brendan looked at his father with disbelief.
The headmaster smiled. “Then there’s no reason to play nice, is there?”
But then his smile faded.
“Hello, Father,” Charlotte said. She stepped in from the balcony. Her hoodie was tied around her waist, and the curtain fluttered behind her.
The headmaster put Brendan down. His face visibly softened. “Charlotte. Oh, my dear. It’s been so long.”
Brendan pushed the headmaster’s hand off him. His arm tingled as pins and needles fired off from fingertips to shoulder. He stepped away, but the headmaster wasn’t paying any attention to him, his focus completely on Charlotte.
Charlotte stiffened. “You’ve been looking for me. Here I am.”
“I’ve been searching for so long but couldn’t find you.”
“You’ve been sending your men out. You never came yourself. Too busy working on improving your gateway.”
“Staying too long in this world is difficult for me. I had to send others to bring you back. I’ve never stopped looking. For two years…”
“But why? You only wanted me back so I could perfect your machine. When you couldn’t find me, you recruited more help, and kidnapped how many? Have you stopped to consider the damage you’ve done? Have you thought about how many people died in the disaster?”
“Of course. I’m not a monster. It was a terrible accident. But I had the machine locked down. I knew there were bugs. When the accident happened, and you vanished, I did everything in my power to bring you back. I wanted to be sure that it could never happen again.”
She raised a hand for the headmaster to stop talking. To Brendan’s surprise, he did.
“But it can happen again, Father. If not here, then on another world as you keep trying to punch holes through the multiverse. You opened a door and kept it open with your machine once I was gone. Did you even recalculate your figures from the first experiment?”
He waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I did. And the first experiment went off too soon.”
“Experiments in things that should be off-limits for a responsible scientist. Your machine shouldn’t have been built and should never have gone off at all.”
“But it did, Charlotte. You saw the problem in my equations and fixed them. You never could keep yourself away from my lab all those years, despite my admonitions.”
She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “Thousands dead. I know it’s partially my fault. I did it, and there’s no way to take it back. But what I can do is make sure nothing like that happens again.”
Myron looked at the headmaster and said, “Looks like you’re losing control here, bud. Why don’t you let me handle her?”
“Just hold on,” the headmaster said, clearly irritated. “Charlotte, you can’t be so hard on yourself. With your help, I won’t repeat my mistakes. We can make sure we do the science right. Together.”
Brendan saw she had her glove on and was holding down a button on one of the knuckles. She approached her father as if to embrace him.
“Sperry, she’s up to something,” Myron said. He moved to grab her. Brendan stepped in his way to block him and Myron pushed him aside.
The air shimmered, and Charlotte stepped back away from the headmaster. The eddies vanished as quickly as they appeared, and Brendan thought his eyes were playing a trick on him. He realized that the room was no longer cold. He no longer saw his breath. The alarm had also stopped, his ears ringing in the sudden silence. But it was the desk that caught his attention. The desk in his own world had been dark wood. The one in Charlotte’s had a concrete surface. Now it was made of some blond-colored finish and the lamp was gone. Items on the bookshelf were also different. He saw a bronze statue of a submarine, a pair of decorative anchors framing a picture of a pair of Navy officers, and a bust of a man with a leafy crown.
Both the headmaster and Myron looked about the room as if trying to figure out what just happened.
“What’s going on?” Myron asked. “What did she do?” With a gesture, he motioned as if to activate his drone. But the drone that had been hovering above Tina was gone. So were Tina and Appleton.
“Something’s changed,” the headmaster said. He held his hand out to Myron. “The ring. I need to check the machine.”
Myron put the ring on. “Allow me.” He went to the spot by the bookcase and placed his hand in the air. Nothing happened. He tried a second and third time.
“You’re not doing it right,” the headmaster said. “Hand me the ring.”
Myron continued to push about at the space that should have triggered the gateway.
“Charlotte, what did you do?” the headmaster asked.
Myron stopped batting at the air and approached the girl. “Can we cut to the chase here? She did something and the machine is off. She needs to turn it back on.”
“I’ll deal with this,” the headmaster said. “What is it that you’re wearing? What did you do?”
Charlotte smiled. “I’ve taken you downstream from where your gate opens. This is another Earth, almost identical to ours and Brendan’s. You’ll both be strong here for a little while, but so will we. That will soon fade. You wanted me back, Father. Here I am and this is the only way I can think of to get you to stop.”
Myron’s hand made a quick motion. He had a third folded drone up his sleeve and he deployed it. The tiny machine’s arms and propellers snapped out in one fluid motion. It bobbed in the air next to him. His
fingers went to his wrist with the drone remote controls.
Brendan grabbed Myron’s arm. He clawed at the sleeve with the remote, and a skin-colored plastic film printed with tiny circuitry came off in his hands. The tech was something his father might use, with a similar design, but somehow different. He knew his father’s work. This was more advanced by his estimation, the product of Not-Earth’s version of his father, a man with no son, thus a villain with fewer distractions.
“Give it back!”
Myron grabbed at him. Brendan sidestepped him and pushed a chair in his direction, and then another. The action bought him a moment. He glanced at the flimsy control board. The interface was simple enough. According to a row of LEDs one drone was active. A touch pad was the only input. The microdrone had been hovering around Myron, but now it shifted to Brendan. Clearly it would follow whoever held the controls.
Myron stepped over the chairs. Brendan got the desk between them. His not-father would be on him in seconds, and Brendan had nowhere left to go.
“Kid, final warning. Give that to me.”
Drone King had always favored preprogrammed patterns that could be macroed into a single command. Complex programming on the fly wasn’t practical. Brendan had watched all the video and analysis, and he knew his real father’s every gesture. He swiped the touch pad in Myron’s direction. The tiny drone didn’t hesitate. It raced forward and latched onto Myron’s cheek. The man screamed, slapped the drone, and tumbled to the floor.
The headmaster didn’t miss a beat. He moved towards Myron and the ring on his outstretched hand.
“That won’t help you,” Charlotte said.
Brendan got there first and put his foot down on Myron’s hand. The headmaster changed targets and tackled Brendan. They both crashed to the floor. The man’s strength actually felt greater than before, and Brendan was overpowered. Brendan pushed at the headmaster’s face but couldn’t get leverage. The headmaster was grabbing at Brendan’s throat. Then Brendan drove his knee up.
The headmaster groaned. Charlotte pulled her father off Brendan and shoved him hard against the desk. The force of the shove was startling, jarring both her father and the furniture.
Brendan pulled the ring from Myron’s hand. He examined it for a moment before slipping it onto a finger. Nothing happened, and it was too large even for his middle finger.
“Are you okay?” Charlotte asked.
Brendan was sore in a dozen places. “I’ll live.”
The headmaster was trying to get himself up, but only managed a sitting position as he regained his senses.
Brendan opened Myron’s shirt. There was no bullet wound, no mark whatsoever to indicate this man had been shot just weeks prior. The man had his father’s face, but this wasn’t him. Which meant his real father was somewhere else.
He looked over at the headmaster. “Where’s my dad?”
The headmaster just shook his head.
Brendan grabbed the headmaster and slammed him against the desk. When he tried to push him away, Brendan slapped him, then tightened his grip on the collar and twisted it. Charlotte was calling Brendan’s name, but he ignored her.
“I don’t know where your father is,” the headmaster said. “I’ve never met the man, just this one, the Myron Reece from my Earth. Your father is probably still in some hospital or has crept off to whatever hidey-hole he can find. I awarded you your scholarship because this Myron Reece thought it would be amusing to eventually lure your father here and to swap him out so he could traipse about in your world without the hazard of running into himself. His mechanical aptitude proved useful for what I was doing, but then he became too aggressive. The attack on the school was his idea, so that he could swap out more people from your world with ones from ours. He thought anyone who was brought to your world, who experienced the power, would cooperate and be a useful pawn. He wanted to take even more, maybe even make his own army, and he was so insistent, so I had him subdued and locked him up. When you and my daughter were seen together, I decided to use that to my advantage. Your real father is unharmed, at least by me.”
Brendan let him go. “And what about all the cyberattacks?”
“I’ve been as inconvenienced by that as you. But my machine has its own fluctuating disruption effect on phone and radio signals. I tried to keep its use limited to after hours, but that hasn’t been possible lately.”
“We have to close the door to his world,” Charlotte said. She gestured with her glove. The air in the doorway to the balcony started to churn. “Come with me.”
“Charlotte, how did we get here? Did you build another machine?”
“I had to. But mine’s safe. I needed it to stop him and to destroy everything he’s working on. Now that we have his ring, we can do that. Come with me.”
“Hold on. You just explained how dangerous this all is. How is what you made any different?”
“Because I’m not careless like my father. I’ve spent months checking and double checking my figures. It’s what needs to be done to prevent a second disaster. I had to risk a mistake on my end to stop him from blundering again. He won’t stop otherwise.”
“But where are we? How did we get here?”
“We’re on a third Earth. I activated a doorway and moved us all through it.”
“You can move your doorway?” Even as he asked, he realized it explained her being able to vanish seemingly at will. He looked back at the headmaster. The man was regaining his strength and watching Charlotte carefully. “What about him?”
“Think of it like an exile,” she said. “His machine’s not here. The Sperry Appleton in this world is just the headmaster of a school and nothing else. Leaving my father here solves the issue of him tampering with technology he doesn’t have the discipline to use properly.”
“And you have this discipline? That sounds crazy. You also can’t do that to the people of this world. You have no idea of what sort of disruption leaving him here might bring. It’s hardly fair. And how long before they collaborate and just build another machine? And what if another you, here in this world, helps them? Have you even thought this through?”
“I have. More than you can imagine. I can’t vouch for the other me here, but I don’t believe they’ll be able to rebuild. I’ve made a lot of changes to the existing machinery that he would never think of. But I also don’t know of anything else we can do with him.”
“Fobbing him off on this world isn’t the answer.”
Her eyes went to his hand where he wore the ring. He thought for a moment that she would try something. Then she nodded.
“That will make things tricky. His people are on both of our Earths.”
“Perhaps I can help.” It was Appleton. He stepped through from the balcony, the swirl of the gate behind him. The office caught his attention and he looked around in wonderment. “Fascinating.”
Charlotte looked startled at his sudden appearance. He walked past her to the edge of the desk and leaned on it for support. He stared down at his twin.
“We return to my world,” Appleton said. “Brendan’s world. Let me call off the guards, and we can talk. You can either send me back to your Earth to destroy the machine, or go yourself. We close off all the machinery and destroy it. I’ll find a place for your father.”
“Oh, for god’s sake, don’t trust him,” the other headmaster said. “We’ve spoken, he and I. He wants what I want and will never relinquish control. Charlotte, with your guidance I can correct the problems with the machine. I see you’ve mastered it. You can help me, even oversee the program. But it’s too important a discovery to just switch off. We can work to correct any wrongs committed. If it turns out we need to dismantle what I’ve made and start anew, I will listen.”
Brendan found this exchange surreal, as both sounded the same, looked the same, and apparently wanted the same thing. Charlotte clenched her jaw.
“Lots to think about,” Brendan said to her. He examined the ring on his finger
�
��You should give it to me,” Charlotte said.
“Maybe. But that will leave you with all the cards. Let’s pass through. Let’s get back to where most of us belong, at least. The longer we stay here, the more complicated this will become.”
“Go on. Check on Tina. I’ll be right behind you.”
He approached the swirl in the air, still uncertain if he was supposed to do anything. He found himself holding his breath as he stepped forward.
***
Brendan had never been on the admin building’s fifth-floor balcony in person before. It wasn’t large and had no furniture or anything else to inform him as to which Earth it belonged to. He looked down and realized that if the gate had opened a few more feet away, the fall would have been fatal. Cold air came from the office, yet hot air blew out from vents he hadn’t seen before.
But he was home. Inside the office, the desk was made of dark wood.
Tina still lay on the floor. He checked on her. She was breathing, her pulse strong. The knockout drug, if it was like anything his real father concocted, would last about an hour. He got both arms under her shoulders and lifted. She was heavier than he expected, but he managed to shuffle towards the outer office and plop her on the couch.
Officer Foster and Officer Glenn, along with a third guard, came in through the door to the hallway.
“There you are,” Foster said.
Brendan was up and backing away into the office. Foster unholstered a pistol. “Brendan Garza. I told you you were on my radar. Now you’re in my sights. I’m sure we can come up with some sort of plausible story to explain your disappearance. Troubled home, troubled life follows youth to prestigious school.”
Officer Glenn was smirking, clearly taking pleasure from the promise of violence. The third officer looked surprised at the gun being drawn but didn’t say anything. Foster wasn’t quite pointing the pistol at Brendan, but it was being waved about in his direction.
Brendan dove for the balcony and the gate. He felt nothing and wasn’t sure he had passed through again until he almost collided with Charlotte on the other side. He pushed her away as Foster and Glenn came stepping though.
Supervillain High Page 21
