by R. J. Ross
I hear the snap of a flash and get blinded for a second as someone takes a photo of us. Crap. What I wouldn’t give for a technopath right now, I think as Carla and I are dragged through the crowd and out of the sports field. We make it a few miles down the street before slowing down. I hear sirens heading for the stadium and catch sight of a few riot control vehicles race past.
Not to mention our clothing is in tatters, I think dryly, looking us all over. “We look like we just went through a war in fast-forward,” I point out.
“You sure know how to show girls a good time,” Skye says cheerfully.
“Was that a date?” Carla asks a bit blankly. “Because next time I want to pick where we go, okay?” she adds, poking at a hole in her special-made frictionless clothing. “This was my favorite shirt—I think one of the dinos did it.”
I groan, running a hand over my face. “I don’t feel like finding a place to cook. Let’s just go somewhere to eat,” I say, turning and heading for the nearest hole-in-the-wall diner. “No, you can NOT stick them up, Skye,” I say before she even gets it out of her mouth. “And leave the masks on—we can claim to be lackeys for Max, if they ask.”
We head into the restaurant.
***
*Washington D.C.*
“Where have you been?” Herold asks as his assistant leaves the room and Shadowman steps out of the shadows.
“Just doing a bit of research, boss,” Shadowman says. “How are things going on the campaign side?”
“Annoyingly. Everyone and their sister wants to be president,” Herold says, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his temple. “Politics is no place for people without thick hides. It’s a wonder there aren’t more supers in the business.”
“We tend to avoid the really dirty work,” Shadowman says.
“You’re a professional kidnapper.”
“Exactly, that’s clear cut,” Shadowman says, dropping down in the chair in front of Herold’s desk. “You politicians, on the other hand, have to explain to the world WHY the kidnapping was actually helping the world,” he drawls. “And you have to do it with the right air of sympathy. Seriously, you won’t find a super villain in the Cape Cells THAT devious. We pride ourselves on being more straight-forward.”
Herold just stares at him with a bland expression. “Do you have to practice in a mirror to do that?” Shadowman asks almost cheerfully.
“Have you found out anything about Technico’s whereabouts?”
“Not a thing,” Shadowman lies blatantly. “But I’ll keep looking. I’m sure that he’ll lower his guard sooner or later.”
“You told me you could find any super on the planet,” Herold says.
“In theory,” Shadowman corrects him. “In theory I can find any super on the planet—but you’re underestimating Technico. He and I have known each other for a very long time, boss. If anyone can figure out how to mask their presence from me, it’d be him.” That one’s true. “But shouldn’t you wait until you’ve won the White House to go up against him? You’re going to need an army behind you.”
“Why would I need an army? We’re both technopaths.”
“Absolutely true,” Shadowman says. He wants to point out things, but he’s not stupid. The less that Herold realizes the better off.
“I got an interesting email just a few moments ago,” Herold says, turning the screen of his computer towards Shadowman. “It seems one of the little rallies was interrupted by a boy with… strangely familiar powers,” he says, showing Shadowman a picture.
Shadowman barely manages to keep from cursing as he sees his kid, his niece, and Carla in the image. Sure they’re wearing masks, but those only work on people that don’t know them already. He hides his expression—at least he hopes he hid it. There’s a flash of something in Herold’s eyes that makes him wonder if he did it soon enough.
“I want that boy,” Herold says. “If he can do what you do, he’ll be perfect for the overall plan.”
“I really doubt he can—I would never be so stupid as to shadow walk into a sports field full of A—er, your Anti-Super Society members.”
“I have him walking out of the shadows on recording, Shadowman,” Herold says, waving a hand at the computer and bringing up a video of the assembly.
“Maybe you just can’t see the door,” Shadowman says, mimicking the bland expression Herold used earlier.
“Find him and bring him here,” Herold says coldly. “I want to see for myself.”
“Are you sure you’ve got time for that?” Shadowman asks. “Look—he’s with Skystep. THAT’S how they got into the building, not the kid. Now do you really want to mess with Skystep again? We already know she managed to throw off your mom’s brainwashing, right?”
“You’re right,” he says, thoughtfully. “And there was some sort of relationship with the man Mom swore was Superior, wasn’t there?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Then bring me the boy and we’ll use him as bait to get Skystep to come to us.”
***
*Kansas City*
I’ve never been so happy to see the school campus before, I think as we reach home. “Man, that mission sucked,” I say, yawning. “And I still have to deal with that guy.” I hesitate, glancing over at Carla. “I’m sorry… you know, that we have to work with him.” What else can I say? I mean, he DESERVES to be in the Cape Cells for all he did to her and her group. “You don’t! I mean, I can handle that job. I’ll make sure you never see the guy again. That none of you ever see him again. Once we take care of Herold I’ll make sure he winds up in the Cape Cells, where he belongs. I promise.”
She looks down at her hands rather than looking at me, and I can practically see her mind racing. “I—” she starts out, only to stop. “Yeah, that’s good, gotta go,” she says, placing her hand on the panel and heading inside. Skye drapes an arm over my shoulders as we watch her go.
“Sooooo,” Skye says, “that was fun!”
“We were attacked by shadow dinos and haters, Skye,” I say dryly.
“Family bonding!” she explains cheerfully. “You’ll be the PERFECT getaway driver!”
“But—” I say, only to stop as she kisses me on the cheek and heads in, as well. I stand there for a moment, looking around curiously. What will happen after this? It’s pretty obvious that Nico’s upgrading me to a working cape. I’ve only been in this school for a few months, but I’m getting thrown into the game. I guess it comes with being one of the older students, or maybe it’s just because my powers are so… shifty.
“Are you going in?” I hear Nico ask from behind me.
“Is he right?” I ask, not turning to look at him yet.
“About what?”
“Are you just going to make me your dog? Send me out to fetch people?” I ask, finally looking at him. “Like a pair of slippers?”
“Take a walk with me, Rocco,” Nico says, motioning me to follow. “We’ll go get you some claw proof clothes from Kim, while we’re at it.”
“And teeth,” I say. “Carla has this big issue with killing them, so… I think I’ll be stuck dealing with getting chewed on.”
Nico nods and we start walking. By the way he’s walking, I can only assume he has something important to go over. “Do you know what Max, Jack and Ace are really training to do?” he asks after a long moment.
“Be super villains?”
“Well, that, yeah, but I’m going to tell you a trade secret—one that we don’t want getting out to the norms.” He nods at a house we pass by. “Max and Trent rebuilt that a while back, using my tech to replace the heater, air conditioning, all of it. They didn’t even have to report it to their insurance company. They’ve got a daughter with leukemia in the hospital right now.”
“Wait, what?”
“Astonishingly, everything in the kid’s room didn’t get hurt. Amazing, don’t you think?” Nico says with a little smirk on his lips.
“How did you know about the kid?” I ask.
<
br /> “Ace has a habit of visiting children’s wards in hospitals. He puts on a little show to make them laugh.” Nico keeps walking. “Aubrey plans on stopping by, soon, as well—with her little class of healers. If I didn’t have my villains, do you really think we could pull something off like that with such precision?” he asks.
“So…”
“When we have things that don’t look good on the surface, but need to be done,” Nico goes on, “I use my villains. I need those ‘Dogs’ like you call them. They’re as important as Trent is to this game. And I’ll admit, I didn’t really care when I first started out, but I’m not the one that’s going to be running it. Zoe has big plans to make the world a better place. When you’re all grown, she’ll be the one calling you up when something needs done.”
“So… you want me to be a good villain,” I say.
“I do. But do you?”
“I don’t want to be like my father.”
“I don’t blame you,” Nico says with a snort. “I can honestly swear that if I send you after kids, it’ll be to bring them into Cape High—and they’ll have a choice of whether they come or not. No glass walls, just laser ones. Sure, you could compare the campus to the zoo, but my main goal is to get them out, not keep them in. You’ve been there long enough, do you think it’d be a bad thing?”
“No,” I say while glancing behind us. “So…” I hesitate, looking forward again. I can feel the last of my bruises healing. “We walked into an Anti-Super-Society meeting.”
“The stupidity of that name never fails to boggle me,” Nico says. “Where were they?”
“A baseball field, or maybe football, I didn’t look close enough.”
“How full?”
“Packed.”
“Huh.”
“Skye says it’s Justin’s ex manager that was running it,” I add. “What are we going to do about them?” I ask.
Nico’s silent for a moment, a thoughtful look on his face. “That’s a job for the heroes in the business,” he finally says. “We can’t fight it physically, that just puts them in the right. They are the reason we have guys like America’s Son, and Voltdrain, and all the picture perfect heroes that you will never find dirt on—even if you DO look into their personal lives. We turn the job over to the golden boys, let them do their jobs and a bit of baby kissing or whatever it is they do, and focus on the important parts.”
“They attacked us. They tried to hurt Carla,” I say, my hands clenching for a moment.
“Carla’s tougher than you are.”
“In some ways, yeah,” I say, honestly. “Physically she’s tougher than I am, but mentally she’s more vulnerable. Well… maybe,” I admit, thinking of the fight with the shadow dinos. “She insists that the shadow dinos are just hungry and she’s going to make me take her with me to feed them.”
“Shadow dinos?” he repeats.
“The monsters in the Shadowlands.”
He looks away, his shoulders shaking.
“You can laugh,” I tell him. “I can see the humor in the situation.” He starts laughing loudly. “Personally I think it’s smarter just to toss a few buckets through shadow portals and hope the things don’t figure out how to get out,” I go on.
“So you WILL feed them?” he asks, still amused.
“I promised,” I say. “And maybe if they’re not so hungry I’ll have less trouble,” I add, hopefully. “But I’ve got no clue WHAT to feed them, or how I’ll afford it,” I admit.
“Try the leftovers, maybe it’ll become a good way to get rid of trash,” he says.
“Good idea.” I look around. “Are we really going to walk all the way to the Hall at this pace?” I finally ask.
“Nah, we’ll take the shadows sooner or later. I want to see these shadow dinos of yours. But I have one more question for you,” he says. “Why were you willing to give Shadowman a chance?”
I go silent, staring forward as I shove my hands into my pockets. Why DID I give him a chance? “He seems to actually believe that Herold is out to take out super-kind. That it’s not just a game of heroes versus villains, you know? And Max said he was really old, right? So if he’s that old, and he’s stayed out of the Cape Cells this long, he’s got to have a good feel for how things are going--street sense. I don’t feel any sort of attachment to him, or anything—you know, other than the whole ‘Finally met my dad’ sort of stuff,” I admit, irritated at feeling even that much. “But that doesn’t mean I should underestimate him.”
“You’re right,” Nico says. “He’s definitely not someone that should be underestimated.”
“He wanted me to finish Mother off,” I say slowly. “He seems to think I could.”
“You probably could, in the right circumstances,” Nico says, "especially when you’re older. In an alternate timeline, your father killed my mom.”
“Oh. Wow,” I say. “So he wasn’t joking about finishing Mother off, huh?”
“He seems like a weasel, doesn’t he?” Nico asks with amusement. “He’s the first to abandon ship if things go south. He’s willing to work for some seriously nasty people, if they pay right. All of it makes you think he’s a relatively weak cape, right?”
“He’s not?”
“Not at all. He’s just…” he goes silent, thinking about it for a moment, "Single minded, I'd say,” he decides. "He doesn’t let his ego get in the way of his profit. In a way, I can almost admire his ‘street sense’ as you call it. Dislike it, sure, but there’s something admirable about being so slick in this game.”
“It doesn’t fit,” I say finally. “Every hero or villain you see in the news has a massive ego—”
“Not all supers show up in the news,” Nico says with a shrug. “Your dad is a prime example. Sure, WE know about him, but the world doesn’t—even after they went searching for him thanks to Mother, they didn’t remember it afterward. They didn’t remember him, either. The ones that are the most dangerous aren’t the ones you see on television, Rocco. They’re the ones working behind the scenes.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I say, giving up. “Has anyone beaten you in the video game yet?”
“No, but Ace and Max working together have gotten the farthest,” Nico says. “I’m just waiting for Zoe to try her hand at it.”
“That’ll be interesting,” I say.
“Yeah, it will.”
***
*Arctic Circle*
“And we will wait for the food to finish cooking!” Tatiana says cheerfully, closing the stove door and looking at Marie with a smile. “You have very much the talent for this.”
“I didn’t when I first showed up,” Marie says, sitting at the table. “I burnt everything. I cheated for years, just changing the food so it was cooked.”
“What changed?” Tatiana asks as she sits down across from her.
“Cinema,” Marie says with a laugh. “Seeing those perfectly dressed women pulling the food out of the oven, it looked so… glamorous. I decided that I’d try again. I even went to a class. I wanted to be the perfect wife and mother.”
“I am not understanding why your son hates you so,” Tatiana says finally, the words she’s been keeping down bursting to the surface. She’s never been good at keeping her nose out of things.
“I…” Marie says slowly, leaning back in her chair. “I didn’t know what to do as Wade started getting older. I manipulated his genetics, making him live longer, but he stopped me after a while. You see… he was already in his fifties when we met. He told me…” she takes a deep, shuddering breath, “when he reached the hundreds, he told me that he was looking forward to… to meeting Jesus. I told him that Jesus could wait—that I needed him here, more, but I think he just got… tired. And I let him die,” she whispers, looking at her hands. “I let him go, like he wanted. But when he was gone, it felt like a massive part of me was gone, as well. I lost my little world, the world I clung to, hiding in while I was supposed to be saving my planet. I… I threw a fit.”
“It
is not easy, losing a loved one,” Tatiana says, reaching across the table and taking Marie’s hand. “My own Clifford, he had a very hard time when he lost me. I have been told he became quite a pain to deal with.”
Marie stares at her for a moment, and when that doesn’t work, she points out, “He’s still a pain, you know.”
“Oh yes!” Tatiana says, laughing. “He is very much a pain to deal with. But the new theater wing is wonderful, do you not think?”
“We were dragging in chairs for an entire day, Tatia,” Marie says. “All for a silly sports game. There are only three of us, do we really need fifty automatic loungers?”
“We are planning for the next World Series,” Tatiana says with a nod. “We are hoping that our home team wins yet again!”
“Russia?”
“Oh, no, Missouri!”
Marie stares at her for a moment before standing. “That’s nice,” she says. “Do you mind if I go freshen up for a moment?”
“No, of course not,” Tatiana says, waving her off.
Marie heads down the hall, going right past the bathroom and to Nico’s massive room of technology. She looks around for a moment, a hint of confusion on her face that disappears when she sees the wall of monitors. She walks over, tapping on the controls. She knows the number by heart—
“Do you really think we’re stupid?” She jerks and turns, looking at Superior. He’s standing in the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest. “Step away from the computer, Marie.”
“You don’t understand,” she starts out.
“You want to call someone, probably your son,” he says, straightening casually. “But your son thinks you’re dead, and we’re going to keep it that way.”
“I just need to see him, to hear his voice—he’s all I have left of Wade,” she says pleadingly.
“While I suppose I can understand that, you still can’t call him,” Superior says. “Why don’t you go back into the kitchen now and we’ll chalk this up to a lapse in judgment? We’ll let you watch the presidential debates later.”
