by Matt Carter
I win my bet.
“Do tell,” he says.
“Rousseau theorized that The Prince was supposed to be a joke. It might have been like Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal for its time.”
Huh. I must’ve been paying more attention that semester than I thought.
Good for me.
“Really?” says Uncle Ethan, delighted. “That’s fascinating. Look at us, discussing sixteenth century political philosophy over a family lunch. I feel so continental!”
Uncle Ethan has simple enough tastes, but I’ve never yet discovered the lure powerful enough to distract Mom from asking follow up questions about my day.
“Seriously though, sweetie, he’s just a person, right? Mayor Card, I mean?” she squeezes my elbow across the table.
Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.
“Has his good points and his bad points like everyone else?” she pushes. “I mean, no one could ever be that character we see in his speeches.”
The urge to tell someone about what happened in Card’s office surfaces again, and maybe someday I’ll indulge it—with a therapist sworn to secrecy, perhaps—but it won’t help anything here and now.
I’m not sure which would be worse, watching my mother and uncle imagining their little Kimmy in that position, knowing that they can’t do anything about it, or having them try to do something about it.
The image of my famous namesake uncle, or worse, my mother, going to ask Pinnacle to transfer me to an assignment better suited to my fragile little feelings gives me worse shudders than the thought of doing it myself.
It’d be freshman year all over again.
Anyway, Card hasn’t tried to put his hands on me again after that first time. I’ve got that part of my problem handled, all by myself.
“I guess so,” I tell Mom.
This doesn’t wholly assure her, so she tries another angle.
“Well, I’m sure he’s very busy,” she says. “You probably don’t have to see much of him?”
“No, not that much.”
“Have you made any friends working there?”
“Well, his son owns the Silver Cowl, so the kids go there a lot when I’m guarding them,” I say. “Some of the servers there are pretty cool.”
“Oh, honey,” Mom puts her hand over her mouth as if that’s the saddest thing she’s ever heard. “Is the whole family really that awful?”
“Yesterday, Anastasia—that’s his wife, she’s about my age—she asked me to help her process a shipment of Gucci shoes to a westside shelter. She said if the homeless had some pretty things of their own, maybe they’d stop breaking windows downtown. She’s the nice one.”
Mom keeps a hand over her mouth, now to stifle laughter.
“Did you do it for her?”
“I may have made a teeny-weeny counter-suggestion that the same donation to the Julian Foundation would translate to roughly a bajillion blankets or a half bajillion hours of free legal counsel, but she made it very clear that it was her dime. Then she called in her social media consultant to take stills of us packing the boxes. Did I mention she’s the nice one?”
Mom waits for the giggles to subside so she can employ a bit of sympathy when she answers.
“I’m sure they don’t make it easy on you. But don’t take this wrong now, maybe that’s for the best.”
I raise an eyebrow.
Mom raises her hands as if she’s backing off, but she’s not. “I only mean, getting along with people has always come so easily to you. It might be good for you to have to work for it a bit, just this once.”
“It’s not easy getting along with them, because I don’t want to get along with them.”
“Well, maybe there’s a lesson in that, too,” she says. “Getting along with people when you’d rather not is a valuable skill. No matter how you feel about them, there’ll rarely be a time when you’ll be sorry you gave someone good feelings about you. Especially someone in a position with as much sway as the mayoral family.”
“The Card family,” I repeat. “Why don’t I just stick a Jovium needle in my eye?”
“Consider it the ultimate challenge for your considerable charms?” Uncle Ethan proposes lightly.
I put my fork down.
My throat is stinging and tightening, and I don’t want it to. I don’t want to dissolve into a sulky mess like Diamond Card when she’s told she can’t go shopping today, not when my family’s just trying to be optimistic for me.
My fragile little feelings in action.
But I’m tired and frustrated and off-camera for the first time in what feels like ever, and if we have to spend my break talking about this, can’t they at least be on my side about it?
“You’re making it sound like I’m not trying.”
“Of course you’re trying!” Mom backtracks.
“I’m sure you’ve been an angel of patience,” says Uncle Ethan. “I only meant to—”
My phone alarm spares them the effort of coddling me.
God, what now?
At double speed, I check the Card security app that should theoretically eliminate the need for me to patrol the mansion at all, given how quickly I can respond to any problem by air—try telling Card that—and find a red alert.
“Gotta go, there’s been a breach.”
I don’t wait to explain more, and Mom and Uncle Ethan don’t expect me to. Even though Dad wasn’t super and Mom’s never put on a cape of her own, we’re still a superhero family. We all know how it goes.
Sergei’s already jogging out to the gate to meet me when I get there, suited up, inside of twenty seconds. He’s followed at some distance by Jacob and a full camera team.
“Have you seen anything?” I ask Sergei as soon as we’re within shouting distance. “Is everyone accounted for?”
“No, and no,” says Sergei, disgruntled, releasing the gate lock for me. “It seems Mr. Card the younger may have tripped the alarm on his way out. We currently have no eyes on him.” He looks at Jacob as though this is his fault.
“Ace ran away?” I ask, landing between the two of them.
Jacob’s attending cameraman zooms in on me, and I can already hear my words being edited into the teaser for next week’s episode.
“Does anyone have any guesses where?” I ask.
“Not yet,” says Jacob, thoroughly enthused by this turn of events. “But all we have to do is watch his film crew’s cloud uploads, and we’ll know in a few minutes.”
“So he didn’t leave the perimeter alone?” I ask, relieved. I’m not messing up the easy, keep-everyone-alive part of this mission.
“He didn’t bring a security escort,” says Sergei, crossing his arms.
“Meaning he gave your team the slip,” says Jacob, almost proudly. “But every member of the Card family has their own mini film crew on their personal payroll. That way, no matter what any of them does, they never have to hide it from the cameras, because the crews are always on their side. And every one of those crews freelances for me.”
I’ve already learned better than to try to get Jacob to give his stupid show a rest for five minutes and think about a little thing like security.
“Fine,” I say. “We check your cloud. Well, what are you waiting for?”
Jacob leads us to his office in the mansion’s backhouse, claiming we’ll get faster access from his desktop than his tablet.
The chair he offers me is in front of one of the same red curtains as the mansion’s confessional stalls, and as soon as he’s shown me the cloud folder and its lack of recent uploads from Ace’s team, he signals his own trailing cameraman over to me.
“Nothing yet,” he says, “but it won’t be long. Would you like to share some of what you’re feeling while we wait?”
“No.”
“Would you say that you and Ace have formed a connection in the short time you’ve spent together?”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Would you say that you feel a certain prof
essional responsibility for him?”
“Of course I do. It’s my job.”
“That’s good! Good, but remember, contextualize your own remarks. The audience won’t hear my voice, so try it again, and this time start with, ‘I feel a certain professional responsibility for Ace.’”
“Click the refresh button, Jake.”
“Or in your own words—”
“Click it.”
Sergei stands in the corner looking so amused with Jacob’s frustration that for a moment I forget him standing there in Card’s office on my first day, with the cameras off, doing nothing, and doing nothing, and then pulling his gun on me.
But only for a moment.
When Jacob finally refreshes the folder, it’s there, a new upload from Ace’s team.
Sergei pushes Jacob aside to play the clip before I can do the same.
Ace’s perpetual smirk dominates the screen.
“This is the best paintball rifle money can buy,” he says, holding up said paintball gun to the camera. “These,” he opens his hand, “are ball bearings. And that,” he points over his shoulder at the building ledge behind him, “is what ‘asking for it’ looks like.”
At his direction, his cameraman focuses on the park beyond the ledge, and the demonstrators gathered in it.
Jobs, not cages, says the first picket sign that comes into view.
Humanoid rights.
REGISTRATION = SUBJUGATION
Stop killing our children.
“Damnit, Ace!” Jacob yells at the screen in exasperation. “You know your dad’s not gonna let us show you doing that!”
I’m already on my phone, checking the location of the rally.
“Go on,” Jacob sighs, waving me off. “Bring him home.”
“I didn’t ask your permission. Send a car,” I tell Sergei, jotting down the address. “I’ll meet you there.”
Judging by the level of chaos at the rally, I’m guessing there’s about a minute’s delay on the cloud uploads.
I can’t see Ace yet, but he’s not the only one here to cause trouble. Another group in Card for Senate hats has converged on the planned rally crowd and is throwing trash and rocks, trying to break up their ranks.
The rally crowd is refusing to disperse, but they’re holding up their signs like shields, standing shoulder to shoulder in a mass and chanting with increased ferocity.
“We won’t be put down! We won’t be put down!”
Most of them are gene-jobs, but not all. I spot some Grays, some Lemurians, a few of what look like unaltered humans, and a little girl who seems to be manipulating the earth to raise a crude shelter around a woman with compound eyes, who’s bleeding from a welt on her cheek.
A steel ball pings off a park bench at the front of the mass, and it’s not hard to trace where it came from.
The next shot bounces harmlessly off my sternum when I hover level with Ace Card, perched on the roof of an adjacent hotel.
Surprise, surprise, it’s a Royal Flush Inn. Card property. The staff probably gave him the run of the place as soon as he dropped his dad’s name.
“Give me the gun, Ace.”
“Oh, come on, sunshine,” says Ace, with the not-quite-sheepish grin he gets when he’s caught. “It’s not even a real gun. It’s a toy, see? I was just playing with—”
I snatch it out of his hands when he holds it up to show me its orange-tipped barrel, and turn it around to aim at his chest.
He cowers sensibly.
“You’re right! This is fun!” I give him my sweetest in-lieu-of-spitting smile. “How do I unload it?”
With a breath of relief, he points. “You just slide the—”
I send a crackle of energy through the whole frame of the gun, shattering it in my hands.
“The fuck!” protests Ace.
“Oops.” I shrug.
“You know what? This is bullshit!” he exclaims, cheating his face toward the rolling cameras as he points his finger at me. “I’m a grown-ass man and I don’t need some Mary Poppins wannabe telling me what to do with my life!”
“You’re a playful little scamp who doesn’t know any better, or you’re a grown man who doesn’t need a sitter,” I say, putting a finger to my chin in mock confusion. “Hmm. Maybe you should pick one lie and stick to it?”
“You should be thanking me, bitch!” He jabs his finger as close to my chest as he can without falling over the edge. “I just justified your pathetic salary! If I decided to be good all the time, you’d spend all your time sitting on my couch, getting fat. Sorry, fatter.”
“Thank you,” I say, darting forward a few feet onto the rooftop so that he has to scramble back. “Dragging you out of here by the ear like a bad schoolboy is going to be my favorite thing I’ve done all week.”
I don’t even care right now if some neutered version of this footage ends up hitting the air or if it only keeps Jacob up for a few nights, pulling his hair out over not being able to show a good shouting match without incriminating his star.
I point to the roof access doorway. “Downstairs. Now.”
Ace doesn’t move.
“Fine.”
“Hey!” he yelps when I throw him over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes and take to the air.
“You can’t take him out of the shot!” his cameraman objects.
“Eat my sparkles, Tom.”
“Put me down!” Ace writhes and kicks at me for a few seconds, then realizes how high off the ground we are and changes his mind. “Put me down, I’ll walk. I’ll walk!”
“Too late. Hide your face … or don’t.”
I fly us over the rally and, for a moment, I can almost pretend that I’m taking him to the police the way I would have on the Juniors, instead of home to his mansion. I can almost pretend that I’m protecting the chanting demonstrators from him, instead of protecting him from them, from being identified or arrested or, horror of horrors, embarrassed during his dad’s delicate senatorial campaign.
Almost.
I turn back toward the main rally crowd and put my hands over my chest in the shape of a heart, making them glow with purple light.
My heart is with you.
I don’t think they believe me.
CHAPTER 11: THE DETECTIVE
The only supervillain I ever worked for called himself Padre Peligro. If you feel bad for not having heard about him, don’t. Few have. He could generate concussive waves from his hands that could hurt if you stood still, but his ambitions were greater than his powers. He was probably the only person surprised when the PCG finally caught up to him, and he probably wouldn’t have died if he’d just decided to go quietly.
If there’s one thing he was good at, it was networking. He viewed himself as the first major post War on Villainy villain, and knew that it helped to have a good network of loyal lieutenants, henchmen, and minions. Since loyalty didn’t come cheap, and his startup funds were nothing, he took the budget route to loyalty.
He found a bunch of dumb (and powerful) kids who weren’t happy with their home lives and gave them a family they could actually like.
Like me.
I was the fourth of five kids in an almost-but-not-quite-poor family in the Crescent. My folks had jobs with the city, so it’s not like we were ever really left wanting, but being that I wasn’t the oldest, or the youngest, or even the dreaded middle child, my place in the pecking order wasn’t that great. I wasn’t as smart, or strong, or talented, or even as bad as the rest of my brothers and sisters.
I was just … there.
When my powers manifested, I was so excited. I had something that could finally show the rest of ’em that I was different. Better.
But I was afraid of messing the reveal up, so I kept it my own little secret. And then the little secret became a big one the longer I held onto it, and then I was so afraid of being yelled at for holding onto it that I just decided to keep it mine forever.
That’s the problem with secrets, though. They want to be spi
lled.
So I told a couple friends I thought could keep it to themselves, and they were about as good at that as I was. Word traveled, and eventually got to Padre Peligro. When he sought me out, telling me he could offer me everything a fourteen year old could want, like money, girls, drugs, friends, and a place to call home … it was like God himself was speaking to me, and I’d seen the light.
So I was stupid. I was fourteen. Cut me some slack.
If you’ve seen any after-school specials, you know how the rest of this goes.
I used my powers to find things to steal, to get information from people (we never called it an interrogation then, that was more the Army’s word of choice), and even though I knew it was bad, I was never the one who actually had to do the truly bad parts, so I felt pretty clean. I had friends I loved, was earning some money, and life was good.
Until the EPC gig where Bystander and I got caught and Marco got killed.
Then life stopped being good.
Being fifteen sent me to Glamper’s Island Juvenile Detention Facility, a hellhole that’s still a damn sight better than where they send adult supers.
The last time I saw any of my family was Dad visiting a few days after my sentencing, just long enough to tell me I’d been disowned and that if I even tried talking to any of my siblings or mother when I got out, he’d have me arrested.
Nice guy.
There were two ways my life could’ve gone after this.
I could’ve used all the networking and criminal skill-building opportunities available to me at Glamper’s Island to make sure that when I got out, I’d be a way more qualified villain than I was when I went in.
Or, I could’ve taken this as an opportunity to reevaluate my life and work toward getting on the straight and narrow path.
I think you know the direction I chose.
I didn’t find God like a lot of the rest of the straight-and-narrow crowd, but I vowed to become a better person. I’d live a good, crime-free life, and no matter what happened, I’d never let myself be taken in by a charismatic supervillain with a good sales pitch ever again.
I mention this because this experience is going through my head on a constant loop the whole car ride to Milgram’s place.
