by Dee J. Stone
“Is it a long ride?” I ask.
“Not sure. I guess?”
That sucks. I slide down to the ground and cross my legs. Kale joins me while X stands near us, leaning his right shoulder against the wall. This place is really dirty and it stinks, but whatever. We’ve got bigger issues.
I can’t believe this is happening, Kale says in my mind. He stares at the space in front of him. The Keepers of Justice are done. And for no damn reason. My parents didn’t kill anyone. Who the hell were those people dressed up as them?
Blades? I ask.
Who knows? X says. Whoever they were, they have the same abilities as Samson and Cindy. Someone desperately wants to take the League down.
So it was the Blades, I say.
X shakes his head. The Blades aren’t the only villains who want the League destroyed.
He’s got a good point. It could be anyone.
Kale looks around. We need to talk verbally, guys. Some people are watching us.
We do, talking about actresses we think are hot, games we love. After a bit, the people turn around. We continue talking and fake-laughing until the subway comes. We board it and stand, since it’s packed.
Kale, X says. Do you sense anyone else here? League mates?
No.
I’m holding on to the bar and squeeze it to prevent my hand from trembling. Kale smiles and starts discussing the latest movie we watched. I glance around. No one seems to be paying attention to us, but many keep checking the time. Some twiddle their fingers and shake their legs. They must be terrified about what’s going on. Probably want to get off this subway and go home to their families.
A group of businessmen and women are talking about the attack. The guys and I pretend to not be interested, when really our ears are perked.
“I just won’t believe this,” one man says. “The Keepers of Justice have been my idols ever since I was a little kid. I can’t accept what they’re saying about them.”
“Josh,” a woman says. “We all saw it on the news.”
He sighs, shaking his head.
That’s how the rest of the ride is, with people trying to understand what happened. X’s hands curl into fists, and Kale yells telepathically for him to quit it. I rest my forehead against the metal bar and close my eyes. Maybe when I wake up, all of this will be over.
Chapter Four
We’re off the subway. Hardly any people are around, which makes the place very dark and spooky. Especially since most houses have their lights off.
“The safe house is far from here,” Kale says. “Stretch’s mom said we need to take a bus.” He looks up at the sign near us. “This should be the right bus number.”
X nods. “One’s a few blocks down, heading this way. We need a metro card.” He motions toward the subway station. “You can’t control the bus driver’s mind to let us on for free because the passengers will see we didn’t pay.”
“Yeah. I’ll just go down to the subway station and ask the guy for a metro card. Be right back.”
He runs down the stairs. I look at X. He looks at me. I force a smile. “Maybe the news got it wrong and no one was captured.”
He shuts his eyes, then opens them. “I saw some League mates get captured.”
I saw it, too. “Yeah.” My shoulders droop.
“Not to mention what Kale saw in Freeze’s mind.”
My shoulders droop more. “Yeah.”
Kale’s head pops up from the station. The rest of his body follows as he climbs up the steps. He holds out the metro card. “They’re going to shut off the MTA soon. Buses and subways won’t run.” He scans the streets. “This might be the last bus.”
Two other people join us at the bus stop. One is a middle-aged woman holding shopping bags. Her hand trembles and her eyebrows are knitted. The other is a man who stands tall like he’s readying himself to protect us, if needed.
Kale’s got a sad and scared expression on his face. X keeps his gaze on the ground. I crack my knuckles, which makes loud popping noises.
Quit it, Kale hisses.
I drop my hands. Like X, I lower my head toward the ground.
The bus pulls up to the curb and we climb on. The driver points his thumb toward the back, not bothering to make us pay. The bus is empty except for six others and us. We take seats all the way in the back. We don’t say a word to each other, just sit solemnly. X stares out the window. Kale seems to be scanning everyone’s thoughts. I play with my fingers, making sure not to accidentally twist or elongate them.
Everyone’s conflicted, Kale says. No one knows what to believe.
Does it matter? X grumbles. We were still attacked and we’re being hunted like criminals when all we’ve done is protect and watch over the humans.
Let’s just focus on getting to the safe house and meeting up with the others, Kale says.
Ten minutes later, we climb off the bus and Kale leads us toward the house. As we inch closer, X stops suddenly. I crash into his back. Hard. Rubbing my head, I try to ease the pain. He’s as strong as a tree.
“What is it?” Kale asks.
X’s eyes are wider than bowling balls. He steps back, knocking into me and causing me to stumble.
“Oh, crap,” Kale breathes, his eyes almost as wide as X’s.
X grabs us by the corners of our shirts and hauls us behind a building. Covering his face, Kale slinks down the wall. He mutters stuff I can’t hear. X rams his fist into the wall, cursing under his breath.
Sweat gathers on my forehead. “G-guys. W-what’s going on?”
Kale sends images from what X saw to me. I see a house, probably the safe house. It’s small, ordinary-looking. Tiny, compared to the League Tower. Guys dressed in armor swarm inside and outside. They’re taking people, but I can’t see who. The images stop, like X couldn’t handle seeing more.
The military got to the safe house, too. We’re screwed.
“Guys,” I squeak. “W-what do we do?”
Kale’s shoulders quake. I don’t get it. How did they find the safe house?
We don’t answer, because we can’t. X pulls Kale behind a dumpster. He does the same to me, except my legs decide to freeze in place. He only manages to pull the top half of my body.
“Help,” I croak.
X grabs my legs and gently shoves them behind the dumpster. They won’t return to my body and lie folded on my lap. “Sorry for having such a screwed-up body.”
X waves his hand.
Kale’s quiet. Spaced out. I pat his shoulder. “Dude, you okay?”
He blinks. “I’m trying to read their minds.” He nods toward those soldiers. “To find out who they captured and stuff.” He narrows his eyes, then swallows. “We were right. Freeze was taken. So was Accelerator.”
No! I don’t want to hear it. It can’t be true. I close my eyes and try to think of good things, but all I see before me is the League getting attacked. Those men dressed in armor. I open my eyes. The looks of dread on X and Kale’s faces make me realize that no matter how many times I shut my eyes and pretend it didn’t happen, it did.
Freeze, Samson and Cindy’s second in command, was captured. So was another Elite, Accelerator. I can’t take this.
“And my folks?” I ask.
“I don’t…no, I don’t think…” Kale’s voice trails off. His gaze slowly meets mine. “Your mom was saving more kids when she was…” He stops.
“Was what?” I ask.
“She was shot down.”
No!
“The triplets were taken, too,” he continues. “So were Prizm, most kids, and some Elites.” He buries his face in his hands. “I don’t know where your dad is, Stretch. Or my parents.”
What about Furball? Was she taken, too? And what happened to Lindsay?
“I don’t know,” Kale answers, reading my mind.
I’m just sitting here, too stunned and shocked to move. No. Mom wasn’t shot down. She’s not…she can’t be dead…
Tears enter Kale’s eyes. H
e swats them away. “What the hell is this crap? Who the hell is behind all of this? I’ll kill them!”
X rests his hand on Kale’s arm. “We need to move. Staying here will put us in even more danger. We need to find a safe place.”
I push my knees to my chest and lower my chin on them. Closing my eyes again, I rock back and forth, telling myself this isn’t happening. Mom and Dad are safe. They’re at home. I’ll open my eyes and walk through the Tower doors, and there they’ll be, smiling and waiting for me.
But when I open my eyes for real, all I see and smell is the dumpster and the black sky above. A chill passes over me.
“The sewers?” X asks. “Maybe we can stay there.”
“How long before Scar kicks us out?” Kale asks. “We need a shelter. A house or something.”
“The Decoy House?” I ask. It’s a house owned by the League that looks like any other house in Brooklyn. It’s attached to the Tower via some sort of teleportation powers. Kale used it when he went undercover as a regular public school kid to stop Lindsay from blowing up the world.
Kale shakes his head. “It’s tied to the League. I’m pretty sure the government knows about it now.”
I knock my forehead into my knees. What are we supposed to do?
“We need a place with no connection to the League. Like maybe members’ private old houses. You know, before they joined the League they had to live somewhere. Maybe they still own them.”
My head snaps up. “I know a place. After my death, when my parents left the League, they stayed in their old home.”
“Do you know where it is?” Kale asks.
“Queens. It’s far, but we can take a cab. Let’s go!”
Chapter Five
We’re standing outside the house, pondering how to get in. I’ve only been here once, but I know it like it’s my own. It’s real small, practically invisible.
“Is it safe?” Kale asks X. Narrowing his eyes, X checks it out. After a few seconds, he nods.
“Are my parents inside?” I ask. Guess I still hope Kale read those soldiers’ minds wrong and my parents are alive.
X shakes his head. “It’s empty.”
I exhale slowly, feeling all the energy leave my body. I don’t know what I’d do if they were…if they’re…
Kale squeezes my shoulder. “Don’t think like that. We need to get to safety and try to contact my parents again.”
“But it’s not safe to contact them!”
“I’ll make sure to be extra careful and avoid detection,” Kale says.
“But how are we sure Samson and Cindy are alive?” I say. “What if all our League mates died or were captured except for us?”
“We need to think positively,” X says, though his eyes betray that. I don’t think any of us can think positively right now.
“I’ll try to keep reaching out to my parents. Hopefully, they’ll answer at some point. For now, let’s get inside.”
I breathe in and out, trying to calm myself. Once my pounding heart relaxes a bit, I hold up my long finger. “I can use this.” With all the spying on Lightning, the Blade who was undercover in our League four months ago, I’ve become a pro at picking locks.
“Do it,” X says.
All I gotta do is stick my finger in the slot, mold it into the right shape, and unlock the door. It takes two tries until the lock clicks. I throw the door open. It’s got two bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen. It looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in days. I don’t know how often my parents come here, or if they have someone taking care of it.
X runs into the living room and turns on the TV. Sure enough, every channel is broadcasting the news. The footage from the park camera is shown over and over. “As you can see,” the reporter says. “Samson and Cindy made no effort to mask their identities. They wanted to be seen. Government officials have confirmed, after questioning the captured Keepers, that those two are in fact Samson and Cindy Zenith.”
“Their telepaths are probing the Keepers’ minds,” Kale says. “That’s what that reporter means by ‘questioning.’ But it wasn’t my parents.”
“No,” X says.
“Then who?” I ask.
“Shapeshifters.”
“Probably,” Kale agrees. “But how likely is it for the shapeshifters to have telepathy and telekinesis?”
X says, “The only thing that makes sense is that the ones on camera were shapeshifters while the ones with telekinesis and telepathy were on the sidelines. They were killing the normies, not the fake Samson and Cindy.”
“But who’s doing it?” I ask.
Kale and X shrug.
“Hey, guys?” I say. “If their telepaths are probing the minds of all the Keepers that were captured, won’t they learn that those aren’t the real Samson and Cindy?”
They’re both quiet for a bit before X says, “Not necessarily. They’d probably assume a Keeper telepath is playing mind games on them. What they know is what they saw. And what they saw was Samson and Cindy killing those people. They don’t care about anything else, only finding the perpetrators.”
“But they’ve got to know it wasn’t Samson and Cindy,” I say. “They’ve trusted them for years.”
“They know about the Weaponry now,” X says. “Probably think the Keepers were planning a war against the humans. Of course they don’t trust us anymore.”
“Won’t they assume we use the weapons to fight villains?”
X shakes his head. “Having all those weapons was illegal. Samson knew the risks, but we needed to have them.”
Quiet.
“I wish we would have fought back,” I say. “We’re superheroes. We should have defended ourselves. Our powers are so much stronger than their weapons. Why did we run?”
“Don’t know,” X says.
Kale’s been quiet. I turn to him. “What’s up? You okay?”
His eyes are hollow as he stares at the TV. “I…I know it’s not them, but seeing my parents do that stuff…and Lindsay…where is she? She ran away right before the League was attacked. I can’t contact her telepathically. You think she’s…involved in this somehow?”
“Lindsay wouldn’t betray us,” X says.
“How do you know?” Kale asks.
X doesn’t answer. I don’t think he’s sure himself.
“I’m with X,” I tell Kale. “Lindsay wouldn’t betray us.”
Kale gets up and paces around. “Then where is she? I can’t sense her. Or my parents. What the hell? My telepathy’s working fine, so what’s going on?”
We’ve got so many questions, but no answers.
“We’ll find her,” X promises. “Her and the others.”
We continue watching the news. The reporters are still talking about what happened, but aren’t updating the public on what’s going on behind government doors. I wonder if they’ll let the rest of the world know what they’re discovering about us.
“General Higgins has assured us that locating Samson and Cindy Zenith is the nation’s top priority,” the news anchor says. “If anyone has any information on this, please contact the number on the screen, or call 911. Officials are unsure what prompted this attack. We ask everyone to stay indoors, if possible. Do not let your children walk freely. Stay tuned for more updates on this horrifying story.”
A commercial break comes on and X mutes the TV. We just stare at each other. X’s lips are pressed in a firm line. Kale sinks down to the carpet.
“It’s good, right?” I let my arms roam around the room. It’s so relaxing to not have to control them all the time and let some of this stress loose. “That they’re still looking for your parents. Means they haven’t been captured.”
Kale twists his mouth. “Guess so…if you look at it that way.” I nod encouragingly, but I know it doesn’t help much. “I’ll try to contact them again,” Kale says.
While he does that, I look around the room. Just so I won’t think about my own parents. They can’t be dead. I can’t imagine li
fe without them.
“No luck,” Kale says after a few minutes. He exhales a long breath he must have been holding. “Why can’t I contact them? If they’re in hiding, why won’t they come get us?”
We don’t answer. None of this makes any sense. Why would someone go through so much trouble to take us down like this? If they’re villains, why not attack us? “Guys?” I say. “What if the government is behind this? They’ve got people with powers working for them. What if they dressed up as Samson and Cindy? What if they want us gone, you know, maybe they feel threatened or something?”
X shakes his head. “All of the sudden? And they wouldn’t kill forty innocent people.”
I rest my palms against my face. “Yeah, you’re right. It must be villains. But why wouldn’t they just try to kill us? They’re so much stronger than the military. Why did they have to kill all those people in the park?”
X shrugs. “There’s a lot we don’t know.”
We sit in silence. Kale tries to reach out to his parents a few more times, but fails. We watch more news, but there aren’t many updates. Experts don’t stop analyzing the story, though.
“What do we do now?” I ask. “Do we search for Samson, Cindy, and the others? Do we try to clear our names?”
“We’re probably not the only ones who know to come here,” X says. “We’ll wait for the others to come.”
I swallow. “I don’t think anyone else, other than my parents, know about this house.”
“They’ll come.”
He doesn’t look confident at all.
Chapter Six
“Great,” Kale mutters as he rummages through the fridge. “Empty.”
My stomach gurgles. I’m craving nachos. It’s been over ten hours since I’ve had any. My hunger won’t let me focus. Like X said earlier, who can think about food right now? But the three of us are starving.
“We need to steal,” X says, pushing off the wall he was leaning on.
“S-steal?” I stammer.
He shrugs. “Unless you want to go through other people’s garbage…trust me, I’ve been there, and you don’t want to do that.”
