by Peter Moore
“Let me explain something to you. To all of you. Those spandex-clad morons on the Justice Force, and all of their kind, are my enemies. The public may think what they will, but to me, these so-called heroes are nothing better than savages, unscrupulous executioners, and I will not be their prey. My forces are weakening. Just in the past month, two Phaetons turned themselves in for euthanization. They were tired of fighting. They had given up. I knew both of them. Now, I don’t expect you, or anyone like you, to shed a tear for us. But I do think you should understand my resolve.”
Mutagion leaned forward. His head began to twitch rhythmically. He waved to me to come closer.
I took a step, but Layla grabbed the back of my jacket and held on. I waved my hand, letting her know it was okay. I took two more steps. I was maybe one yard away from Mutagion.
It smelled like a swamp when he spoke. “We believe the Justice Force has planned a major attack against us. And if that’s true, your brother knows about it. You’re going to find out and you’re going to report to me. Cross me, and I’ll have each one of you killed. If you think I can’t reach you, or I don’t have the stomach to kill teenagers, just try me. You wanted to be villains? This is how we play. For keeps.”
He took in a deep breath and his shoulders shook with the effort to keep from hacking that awful cough.
I glanced at Javier. He was looking down at the ground. I turned back to Mutagion. “Just so I’m clear,” I began, “what you’re asking—”
“No, my boy, I’m not asking. I’m telling. I have no time or use for sentimentality, and I care not a whit for your allegiance to your brother and his friends.”
“With all due respect, sir, you have no idea about my allegiances.”
He cocked his head. “Is that so?”
“My allegiances are my own business. But I can assure you of one thing.” I thought of the argument I’d had with Blake before I left home. He found the idea that I would not want to be like him incomprehensible. That arrogance and egotism, his deeply held belief that his way was the right and only way—all that only strengthened my intentions.
“Despite what you think,” I said, “I have no allegiance to my brother. No allegiance to him at all.”
Perhaps the most ruthless and cunning of Phaetons currently at large is the one known as Mutagion. He is the alleged mastermind behind various acts of destruction, treason, attempted government coups, and, not least, murderer of countless innocent children and women, in addition to men. An avowed enemy of all heroes, Mutagion remains one of the most wanted villains both in the United States and abroad.
From the introduction of
M Is for Monster, M Is for Mutagion
by K. J. BAKER
Hyperion Press, 2014
Linked
Peanut drove and Javier stared (or, more likely, glared) out the passenger window. I didn’t have to read him to know what he was thinking. He was pissed that Mutagion’s attention had shifted from him over to me. Back by the loading dock at the shipyard, Mutagion had pointed at me and said, “So I’m gonna tell you how to reach me.”
Javier had cleared his throat and taken a step forward. “Actually, I handle all communications. I am sort of the…point person, yes?”
Mutagion didn’t even turn his head toward Javier. “No. I’ll decide who I will talk to, and right now, it’s him,” he said, pointing that long, crooked finger at my chest. “You are going to contact Caliban. He’ll give you the number, and when you need to make contact, you text him the number where he should reach you.”
So it seemed that, like it or not, I was going to be the point person. Javier was welcome to the attention; I wasn’t looking for it. Once again, Blake had attracted the spotlight, even when he hadn’t been actively seeking it.
I had called home to say that I was sleeping over at a friend’s house, maybe for the weekend. I was going to stay at the lair. I didn’t want to be around Blake after our argument. Not for a while, anyway.
Layla walked upstairs with me.
We had outfitted the place with serious stealth equipment, courtesy of our ATM withdrawals and the know-how of our technically gifted Hellion members.69 We sat on the couch.
“Are you sure you’re okay going up against your brother?” Layla asked.
“You met him.”
“Yeah.”
“So, if you were me…”
She nodded. “I get it. Okay.”
“Javier’s pissed.”
“He’ll have to get over it. He’ll have to come to terms with the idea that wanting to be in charge doesn’t mean you are in charge.”
“It looks like Mutagion elected me to be in charge.”
“Well, if you think about it honestly, who do you think will make the better decisions for the group: Javier or you?”
Javier was reckless and vain. Given the stakes involved, cooler heads and smarter minds could be the difference between our being successful and our being incarcerated…or killed.
Exactly, Layla thought to me. I knew you’d come around. Then, out loud, “Anyway, it’s time Javier understood that this isn’t just some exciting adventure. Believe me: if push came to shove, I’m sure he wouldn’t want to change positions with you. He’s already probably thinking he got in way over his head.”
“If I had any brains, I’d probably be wondering the same thing myself.”
She nodded a few times. “If you had any brains, yeah.”
Layla took my hand and we stared at the blank TV screen across from the couch.
“You want company tonight?” she asked.
Really? What’ll you tell your parents?
Are you kidding me? They don’t even notice whether I’m there or not.
I knew her well enough to understand that there was absolutely not an ounce of self-pity or sympathy-seeking there. She was just stating a fact.
“Aren’t the others waiting for you downstairs in the car?”
“They left right after they dropped us off.”
“Hm. Sounds like you planned to stay.”
She shrugged. “Hey, if you’d rather be alone…”
No, no. Not at all.
Good.
Code
Iguess it’s hard to get more intimate than being in someone’s mind. But what happened that night—well, let’s just say it was a close second.
Tired as I was, I didn’t sleep well. Layla was out like a light, but I had too much going on in my mind. Mutagion wanted to do business primarily with me, and I didn’t think it was just because of my connection to Blake. Clearly, Mutagion just took me more seriously than he did the rest of the Hellions.
That was part of what kept me up. Mutagion was known the world over as being a freak, a morally corrupt, ruthless villain. Heartless and vile.
But he didn’t come off that way to me. I just had this gut feeling that there was more going on with him than the heroes or newspapers had led us to believe.
In fact, though I had little doubt that the Phaetons in Mutagion’s crew would have blasted us to bits with no more than a nod from him, they, too, left me with the sense that they were…well, maybe not victims, exactly, but not quite the aggressive offenders everyone believed them to be.
If for no other reason than they just seemed too sad.
I watched the sun come up at dawn and I watched Layla sleep. I waited until eight o’clock before waking her.
She was not too pleased. “Are you kidding me? It’s Saturday. Let me sleep.”
“Call Boots for me.”
She rolled my way, squinting against the light. “Why?” she asked.
“Because I want to see if she can get us into the GenLab databanks.”
“Oh, come on. You woke me up for that? Seriously. You’re not going to figure out the secrets of
genetics this morning. That can wait till the afternoon. I’m going back to sleep,” she said, and she rolled away from me.
I’ll go in there and mess with your dreams. Come on. Get up and give her a call.
You are such a jerk, she thought to me, just before she sat up in bed.
“What’s the big rush?” Boots asked me when she got to the lair. She was dressed more sloppily than usual—way more—and she had on glasses. “It is Saturday, you know.”
“I need your help.”
“And it has to be this minute?”
“Pretty much.”
Even with her keyloggers and some kind of digital decoding system, it took her twenty-three minutes to hack into the GenLab system. Layla watched from the couch, a blanket wrapped around her.
Boots shook her head. “I’m trying to get to those DNA profiles, but I keep bumping into these top secret walls about some ‘Phaeton Reversion Project’ and ‘Phaeton Disposition’ something-or-other.”
“Why would that come up when you’re looking for DNA analysis of Blake and me?”
“Not sure. Maybe because they’re both in high-security areas of the database, and the lockout is somehow connected? Could just be a glitch, but when it tries to bump me from my DNA search, this Phaeton stuff also comes up as blocked, even though I wasn’t actually looking to get into it.”
I couldn’t imagine that they were linked in any significant way, but it did get me thinking. “So what’s the story? Do you think you can still get into these places?”
“I thought I could. I mean, your mom got us through and I recorded everything, but I just can’t slip into the DNA profile area. I’m thinking it might have something to do with the retinal scan that I have being taped instead of real time. Some systems can detect that.”
“Great,” I said. “All right, see what you can do with that Phaeton section.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s something I want to check.”
“I thought you wanted that DNA stuff,” Layla said.
“Yeah, I do. But if she can’t get in, she can’t get in. I’ll have to get my mom to open it up again.”
It took a little while, but Boots was able to work her way into the Phaeton section of the database.
“Got it,” Boots said. Layla stood up, still wrapped in the blanket, to see what we had found.
The only problem was that the text looked something like this:
“What the hell is that?” Layla asked.
“It’s encrypted,” I said. I turned to Boots. “You have decryption software, I assume?”
She nodded and ran a program. She ran another. And another. “That’s pretty weird. I’ve never seen that.”
Layla said, “Seen what?”
“This site is basically bouncing my decryption software right off. I can’t decode it. You want me to back out of this section?”
“No, wait a minute,” I said. I stared at the characters on the screen, looking for patterns. I found a few, but not ones that would help to decrypt the code. “Does staying on this screen for a while open us up to a greater chance of getting caught?”
“By about five hundred percent, yeah,” Boots said.
“I figured. If you can get me screenshots of every page in this section, that would be great.”
She did, then settled down on the couch to watch some movie on TV.
“You can read code,” I said to Layla.
“Yeah, sure, but that’s not computer code.”
“It’s close enough. I have an idea.”
I asked Layla to look at the printouts, to scan them over and over again, and not to worry about trying to make sense of them. While she did that, I started to read her, trying to combine her code-reading abilities with my limited knowledge of cryptography.70
Six hours later, I was typing a text to Caliban through the scrambler Boots had set up. I just sent my phone number. Mutagion had explained to me, quietly, that Caliban couldn’t read.
After we sent my number, I had to wait for Caliban’s call. And after four hours, there was still no response. Boots wanted to leave, so after she showed me how to work the scrambler, I thanked her and let her go.
My lack of sleep started to take its toll on me.
“Are you going to sit there and stare at the phone, waiting?” Layla asked me.
“That’s the plan.”
“You look exhausted. Why don’t you go to sleep for a while?”
“I can’t miss his call.”
“Go to bed. I’ll wake you.”
“I’m okay.”
“Just go. I promise I’ll wake you when he gets back to us.”
I agreed to lie down for a little bit, just to rest my eyes.
It was dark outside when I woke up. My phone was ringing. Layla was in the desk chair, which was tilted way back. She was dead asleep, my ringing phone a foot away from her hand.
I jumped up, snatched the phone off the table, and hit the green “talk” button, hoping I hadn’t missed the call.
“Hello?”
I let out a breath when I heard that gravelly voice. “You got the information?”
“Actually, I have totally different information. Probably even more important.”
“Mutagion asked for something, and that’s what he wants to get.”
“Trust me, he’ll want to know what I found out. I need to give it to him.”
“No. You’re gonna give it to me. Then maybe I’ll give it to him.”
I could have argued, but then it occurred to me: why not give it to Caliban, if that’s what they wanted? It’s not like he would be able to read it, especially in the form I was giving to him. And even if he could, it didn’t seem too likely that he would intentionally do anything that would displease Mutagion.
“Where do you want to meet?” I asked.
A Meeting
Should I call everyone so they can come to this little rendezvous?” Layla asked.
“No, I don’t want to get them involved in all this. They don’t need to know.”
“Mm. Okay. But I get the feeling that there’s another reason you don’t want to tell the others about this meeting.”
“You do.”
“I do,” she said.
“Okay, you’re right. I don’t trust some of them with this information.”
“The stuff we deciphered about the Phaetons.”
“Yes. It’s too big, and it has to be handled the right way. Even more important, I think the people it actually involves should decide how, or if, they want it to go public.”
“Well, I’m going with you. Unless, of course, I’m one of the people in our group who you don’t trust.”
“You know I trust you,” I said.
“I’m not sure what I know anymore.”
In the end, though, it wasn’t about trust. It was about safety. I didn’t want Layla to come with me to meet Caliban, because I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t going to turn into a kidnapping…or worse. But I should have expected that she wasn’t going to sit home watching TV, either. Our compromise: she would drive us there, but she would stay by the car, ready to take off if necessary, while I met with Caliban.
We were waiting by Javier’s (ahem, borrowed) car in the parking lot of a shopping mall that had been closed years ago after the water supply for the area had been poisoned.71 The only light came from the moon and from a factory complex on the other side of the highway.
I didn’t mind it being mostly dark. We had decided to wear our costumes, even though Mutagion seemed to have figured out who we were.
There was a thock-THOCK-thock-THOCK-thock-THOCK sound getting closer and closer from the east end of the parking lot. Layla and I turned to look.
It
was a person with absurdly long legs—at least five feet—loping toward us, fast, in an unbalanced gait. The person came to a swaying stop about forty yards away. The left leg was wobbling at the knee.
“You gotta come here,” Caliban said in his gravelly voice. “I ain’t going over there. And just you, boy. Girlie, you stay right over there.”
Layla looked at me. I shrugged. “If anything goes wrong…” I said.
“Just give him the info and let’s get out of here.”
“That’s the plan. But just in case—”
“I know, I know. Drive away. Just hurry up.”
I walked over to where Caliban stood on his prosthetic legs, altogether well over eight feet tall. He had some kind of homemade pants on, shiny parachute-type material. When the breeze moved it, I could make out the flat, bladed form of the prosthetics. There was a metal creaking sound from what I figured was the left knee joint.
It was weird, craning my neck to look up at a person who I knew was actually only about four feet tall. It was made even weirder by that crazy white mask with the long, pointed birdlike nose.
“Okay, I’m here,” he said. “You got something for Mutagion?”
“Yeah. And it’s important that he get it as soon as possible.”
“Kid, you don’t give me orders. I’ll deliver it when I deliver it.”
“Okay, sure. But I’m just telling you, it’s something he’s going to want to see right away.”
“Yeah, yeah. I heard ya the first time. Give it here.”
I handed him the manila envelope. “Caliban. Listen. It’s really important that nobody else sees this.”
“I’ll look at it if I want.”
“I don’t know if Mutagion would be happy about that, but I guess that’s between you and him. I’m saying, nobody else.”
“Yeah, yeah. I get it. It’s important and top secret. I ain’t a moron, ya know. I can understand a simple conception like that. I’m out.”
He started to turn back toward the direction from where he’d come.
