by Logan Jacobs
“You mean we’re going to start a revolution,” Norma said. Her face glowed, and her eyes sparkled, and I didn’t think it was just because of the champagne.
“Exactly,” I said.
“If this thing gets that big… you know where it will eventually lead us, right?” Dynamo asked me.
“No, where?” I asked.
“To a showdown with The Wardens,” she replied.
“If we go back to Pinnacle Ci--”
“But I know you are going to go back,” Elizabeth interrupted.
“Would that be hard for you?” I asked her.
“Well, of course it would,” she said as her turquoise eyes widened. “I mean, not to sound arrogant or anything, but I’m head and shoulders above the other rookies. Better than most of the stars already. Helena might be able to put on a better circus show than I ever could, but if it came to a straight up fight, I’d kick her ass. But there are others that would kick my ass.”
“Like who?” I asked.
“With Maquun, I couldn’t even pull a trigger fast enough to get a shot off before he had already had time to disarm me, and I’d never even know what hit me. And Optimo might be a hateful, self-obsessed, entitled asshole, but I can’t deny that he’s probably the strongest person in existence right now. There are a handful of others with powers that I couldn’t match, too. But even if that weren’t true? Even if I were objectively the strongest Warden of them all? It wouldn’t really matter, because the organization has somewhere around two hundred field agents. And if you’re including all the support and administrative personnel, well, that’s probably about eight hundred Wardens altogether. So… yes… it would be a challenge, to say the least.”
“Er, I meant would it be hard ethically,” I clarified. “Or emotionally.”
“Oh,” Dynamo said. Her plush lips tightened and her angular jaw clenched a little as she thought about it. “Well… I guess it depends on the situation. How it came about that we ended up facing off with them. It’s not something that I would be eager to do. I mean, they were my coworkers. And I still think that a lot of them truly believe in the same things that I believe in. They signed up for the same reasons I did. But the organization does need reform. I don’t mean that we should start slaughtering Wardens. But if they came after us for what we’re doing to supervillains, well, then I guess we’d have to defend ourselves. Sorry, I guess that’s not really a very clear answer, is it?”
“It’s an honest answer, so it’s perfect,” I said.
“There’s one Warden that I’d never touch and I’d never let you harm either,” Dynamo said. “Clifford. He’s just a kid. Like a little brother to me.”
“Clifford, like the big red dog?” Norma asked.
“Yup, that’s his namesake,” Dynamo confirmed. “He’s a shapeshifter.”
“Well, I like dogs, so I guess Clifford can live,” Norma said cheerfully.
“You can’t just decide who lives and who dies based on your personal emotions!” Dynamo exclaimed.
“No, it must be based on reason, and I am the only one of us capable of reasoning without emotion,” Aileen stated. “Creator, if you were to provide me with an objective algorithm to use as the basis for determining--”
“I don’t know, somehow deciding by a computer program seems even worse,” I said.
“That is an intuitive reaction, not a logical objection, and human intuition is far more fallible than my judgment, regardless of how intelligent the human in question may be,” Aileen said serenely.
“Even so, you’re not picking our targets,” Elizabeth said sternly.
“You’ll have a say, just like the rest of us,” I said. “You can give us all the facts available and explain to us when you think we’re making some kind of emotional human error. But we won’t go after any supervillain unless the team is in unanimous agreement about it. Deal?”
“Deal,” Norma said immediately.
“Deal,” Elizabeth agreed. She smiled and prodded my leg with her foot. “So, before it was, you’d pick a target to hunt with or without me, and I’d decide whether to be a part of it… now you’re only going to pursue targets that I accept? Looks like someone has decided that I’m indispensable.”
“Don’t get too cocky,” I warned her. “Plenty of other gorgeous female superheroes would love to be in your shoes right now.”
“You must have decided that I’m indispensable when I shot Mayhem first,” Dynamo said as she ignored my statement completely.
“Actually, I think that particular epiphany occurred during my third climax of the day in the shower just before this,” I replied with a grin.
Elizabeth stuck out her tongue at me.
Norma took a puff of her cigar and blew out a smoke ring, then another, then another, each more beautifully average than the last. We watched them wobble their way shakily into the sunset.
“Guess I’m pretty average at blowing smoke rings,” she chuckled.
“Yes, you are,” I said, but I knew that wasn’t quite the case. Norma was the most powerful superhero on the planet.
She just didn’t know it yet.
Chapter Eighteen - Silver Squire
I felt like I could finally breathe when I got in my own car, my beat up hand-me-down Honda from my older brother who was off at college now. It wasn’t one of the kickass cars that the Shadow Knight lent me, the cars that he tracked, that videotaped everything I did while I was behind the wheel.
I didn’t want him to know what I was up to tonight.
I maneuvered my way carefully and responsibly out of the Shadow Knight’s labyrinthine garage. I drove down his long driveway trying to keep my expression completely neutral and devoid of the joy that I felt on the inside, just in case the Shadow Knight had some kind of camera on me. Maybe a tiny invisible drone. I wouldn’t put it past him.
Then, finally, I got on the highway, rolled the windows down, and let out a loud whoop. I turned on the radio and started headbanging to rock music. Anyone in passing cars who saw me probably would have thought I was coming back from some kind of sports victory or headed out for a wild night on the town or both, but the truth was that I was just heading back to my parents’ house for the weekend.
My parents only lived six miles away, yet it had been four months since the last time I saw them. The Shadow Knight was always reluctant to give me time off and acted like it was pathetic that I cared about seeing my family. That I cared about anything besides crime fighting. Maybe that was part of the reason he usually preferred to train orphans. They didn’t have any pesky distractions like mothers or fathers to take them from his side. I think the other reason was probably that he preferred for his apprentices to be as emotionally dependent on him as possible. He didn’t want us to have any other sources of authority or mentorship in our lives. But he’d chosen to take me on anyway after I won the essay contest to be his next apprentice.
Honestly, despite how hard things had been in some ways ever since, that had been the best day of my life. I couldn’t believe it when the Shadow Knight called me up himself on my phone and I heard his raspy unmistakable voice on the other end. I thought it must be some kind of prank. Then I couldn’t believe it when he brought me inside his house, which was an enormous mansion, and saw the way the man himself lived, and saw his laboratory, and his cars, and his clothes, and his weapons. All things that no one had ever seen before. Some superheroes were best friends with the press, but not the Shadow Knight. He had more important things to do than give tours and mug for paparazzi. It was probably a full week into my apprenticeship before I could stop myself from breaking into ear-splitting grins pretty much every time the guy talked to me, even though he reprimanded me for it and said it wasn’t dignified.
I did love my job. I did still want to do it, no matter how tough it got sometimes. I did still want to grow up to be like the Shadow Knight, although I promised myself that when I got to a point where I was taking on apprentices of my own, I would be much more patie
nt and understanding than he was with me. I mean, sometimes I hated the guy, but then I had to remind myself of the kind of burden of responsibility that fell on his shoulders. Grayville owed its survival to him. Without him, the supervillains would have overrun all the innocent citizens. With those kind of stakes at hand, it made sense that he lost his temper a lot and couldn’t accept anything less than perfection.
But still. I wouldn’t treat my own apprentices the way he treated me.
That was a long way in the future, though. I still had a million things to learn, as my teacher always kept reminding me. For now, for just forty-eight hours, all I wanted to think about was eating a nice home cooked meal with my parents.
And, possibly, getting the chance to see Anna this weekend. She’d gone to high school with me, but we’d never had any classes together. I’d just seen her in the halls a few times and thought she was pretty. Of course, I thought a lot of girls were pretty in high school. She was just one on a long list.
But then, after we all graduated and Anna went off to college, and I moved into the Shadow Knight’s mansion, we started talking online. She was really impressed by my new gig as a budding superhero. I had to admit that maybe I exaggerated a few things about my new life. The extent of my involvement in some of the Shadow Knight’s most dangerous supervillain encounters, the rigor of the physical training that he put me through, the complexity of the engineering stuff that he made me study too.
And Anna told me about college life. What her classes were like, and what the campus party scene was like, and the clubs she participated in, and the sorority she was hoping to get into for sophomore year. Hearing about it from her made me wonder how different my life would have been without the apprenticeship. If I had just stayed on the same path as all my peers and ended up at some state school. I didn’t regret anything, but still, there was a part of me that felt a little sad that I would never experience being a college kid. But Anna assured me that I was way cooler than her male classmates, that she’d rather date someone like me over any of them.
I messaged her several times a day when it was possible, but I had to make sure the Shadow Knight didn’t catch me. He thought that girlfriends were “too much of a distraction” at my age, which was more than a bit hypocritical of him considering the endless cycle of models and actresses that were always hanging off his arm. But he said that only superheroes were allowed to date and that their apprentices were not and asked if I thought I was ready to graduate from my apprenticeship yet. That was of course a rhetorical question. Probably the most emphatically rhetorical question he’d ever posed to me.
So now, on the rare occasion that I was allowed out from under his watchful eye once every few months, while Anna was home on spring break, I was hoping that she would be able to meet up with me either at my parents’ house or at hers. Later, after our parents went to bed, of course.
When I reached the familiar sight of my childhood home, white with blue trim, two stories, with the basketball hoop above the garage, as typical as a suburban house could be, my chest filled up with warmth.
I parked my car in the garage and knocked on the door.
A minute later, my mom opened the door and grabbed me in a hug. My dad stood behind her with his arms crossed over his chest and grinned at me over her shoulder.
As soon as I brought in my weekend bag, and my dad had shown me the new rock fountain he installed in the backyard, we sat down for a dinner of steak and mashed potatoes with gravy, my favorites.
“So how’s the uh, crow man doing?” my dad asked. “How’s he treating you?”
“Oh, you know, not bad,” I said and shoved a huge scoop of mashed potatoes in my mouth to buy myself time to think of how to describe my working relationship with the Shadow Knight. I didn’t want to tell my parents too much because then they might worry about me, and I didn’t want to get caught up building overly elaborate lies that I would trip up on later.
“I didn’t realize how little we’d get to see you after you started working with him,” my mom said. “Even right now, all the other parents whose kids are off at college get them back for a whole week and a half! And we only get you for two days.”
“Well, let’s just enjoy the two days then,” my dad said. “And Tim’s building his future right now. He’s got a head start on those other kids who are still in school.”
“Do you think you’ll want to be a superhero on your own after this?” my mom asked me.
“Uh, yeah, I mean, that would be the ultimate goal,” I said through a mouthful of potatoes. “But that’s still a long way in the future.”
“Yes, I think that’s a good idea, to make sure you’re completely ready first,” my mom said. “To make sure you’ve had all the training you can get before you start going up against supervillains on your own. That’s a kind of scary thought, isn’t it? I mean, maybe if you and the Shadow Knight get along really well, you could just keep working together. As partners, you know? Maybe that would be a good idea.”
“That’s not how it works,” I said. “The Shadow Knight operates alone. This apprenticeship is just a temporary thing. I want to be independent someday, too. Do my own thing.”
“Okay, I’m just saying, don’t rush it too much,” my mom said. “How long do the Shadow Knight’s apprentices usually stay with him?”
There was a wide standard deviation there because a fair number of the Shadow Knight’s previous apprentices had been killed by supervillains, and a few others had quit, either by hanging up their supersuits forever to go back to school or get normal jobs, or by rebelling against him to become supervillains. But I wasn’t going to mention that to my mom.
“Uh, a few of them that he’s mentioned graduated after about a year,” I said. Two, I think, had made it that far and gone on to become minor superheroes in their own right. Seven had died, one of them by suicide.
“And it’s been half a year for you now, right?” my mom asked as she started counting the months on her fingers.
“Just about,” I agreed.
“Halfway done then,” my dad said. “Just don’t give up. I know you can do this. You’re going to be a star at this. You could be as big as the Shadow Knight. Bigger.”
“Well, we’re just happy to see you pursuing a career path that you enjoy, that means something to you,” my mom said. “That’s really great. Not everyone gets to do a job that they feel passionate about.”
“Yeah, I always wanted to be a superhero,” I said. “Sometimes it still doesn’t feel real that the dream is really coming true.” Especially since half the time I was scared that the Shadow Knight would get so frustrated with me that he would fire me. And if that happened I would have a hard time building my own identity as a superhero independently, since no one would take me seriously. I would just forever be known as a failure.
“Well, I always knew you could do it,” my mom said with a smile.
“That’s not true, you told me it was too dangerous when I first applied to that essay contest!” I pointed out.
“Well, yes, I’ve always had concerns of course, but if the Shadow Knight is teaching you everything you need to know to stay safe and succeed, then I guess that’s all I can ask for, right?” she replied.
“Yeah, he… teaches me a lot,” I said. It was true. Thanks to him, I now held intermediate qualifications in multiple martial arts disciplines and expert qualifications in over a dozen weapons systems. I was well versed in the basics of wilderness survival and providing emergency medical care. So that was something. But I was equally well trained to brew coffee to the Shadow Knight’s precise specifications and iron his shirts exactly how he liked them and read his various moods from the slightest facial tic. Those kinds of concerns took up probably just as much of my mental energy.
“Like what kind of stuff are you learning?” my dad asked. “Or would you have to kill me if you told me?”
“Ha, I’m training to be a superhero, not a spy,” I said.
“The
re’s a lot of overlap in skill sets though, isn’t there?” my dad asked. “For a tech based superhero like the Shadow Knight, anyway. I guess it would be different for one of the genetically gifted ones.”
“Um,” I said as I tried to think of the most benign, non-worrisome skills the Shadow Knight had taught me. “I know some cryptology fundamentals I guess… ”
“Cryptology?” my mom asked. “Is that like, code breaking?”
Before I could answer her, my phone chimed with a text message. I glanced down at the screen to see the name. Anna Kristoff. I couldn’t help the smile that spread across my face, and I couldn’t stop both my parents from noticing.
“Is it a girl?” my mom inquired immediately, the subject of cryptology forgotten.
“Looks like it’s definitely a girl,” my dad answered for me. “A pretty one.”
“Nah, it’s just a funny message that, ah, Travis sent me,” I lied as I opened the message which was a response to the one I’d sent her earlier informing her that I’d be home for the weekend. It read,
Really?? Well I’m free tonight if you are ;)
“You and Travis still talk a lot?” my mom asked. “Even though you don’t get to see each other much anymore?”
“Uh, sometimes,” I said. “We’re just both busy, you know.”
The truth was that we rarely ever did. Travis had been my best friend throughout most of high school, but after I’d landed my apprenticeship with the Shadow Knight, and he left for college, we had quickly drifted apart. It became hard for us to relate to each other’s experiences anymore. And I think Travis sort of thought that I thought I was too cool for him after becoming a superhero-in-training, especially because I could just never muster the desired level of enthusiasm for his stories of getting blackout drunk and vandalizing school property or falling out of trees.
