The Phobia of Renegade X

by Chelsea M. Campbell

  I have no idea what it is.

  I pick it up anyway, even though I have enough experience almost getting killed by Sarah’s inventions that I should know better.

  “Damien, wait!” Kat shouts, but it’s too late, because I’ve already grabbed it.

  It doesn’t kill me. It doesn’t even threaten to explode. But as soon as it’s off the pedestal, there’s this far-off clicking sound, and then the walls start to rumble.

  “Oops.” I set the weapon back in its place, but the rumbling doesn’t stop.

  There’s a hissing noise, too, and a bad smell that makes us all start coughing.

  Riley starts to shout, “We have to get—” but then there’s a clanging sound, and a loud crash as something falls from the ceiling, and he screams.

  “Perkins!” My blood runs cold as I turn around. In my mind I hear him screaming at the gala again. I feel the same fear I felt then.

  There’s a gash on his forehead and a metal vent lying on the floor that must have been what fell. Riley’s shaking all over, and blood pours down his face. “I’m okay,” he says, but he sounds like a robot, like he’s not okay at all.

  “Come on!” Kat cries. “It’s a trap! We have to go!”

  The doors are closing. Solid steel doors are sliding over the entryways, trying to trap us here, because I am the biggest idiot in the world.

  Someone sticks a metal bar in one of the doorways to keep it open—the same doorway we came in through. I think for just a second that someone saw us come down here and is going to rescue us. But the woman who ducks under the metal bar and waltzes into the room is carrying a raygun. And pointing it at us. And grinning.

  “Nobody move! And no lightning—this whole room is filling with gas, and one spark will blow us all up!”

  I lower my hand. I hadn’t even realized I was getting ready to blast her. Tristan must have been doing the same thing, because out of the corner of my eye I see him put his hands down, too.

  The other door to the room, the one without the metal bar holding it open, slams shut.

  “Who are you?” Kat says. “And what the hell are you doing here?”

  The woman looks like she’s in her mid-twenties. She has strawberry-blond hair pulled into a ponytail, and I think she might be chewing gum. “The name’s Frank.”

  “Yeah, right,” Tristan says. “You’re not Frank.”

  She blows a bubble with her gum and snaps it. “I think I know my own name.”

  “But Frank’s a dude. He’s, like, some middle-aged gangster.”

  She laughs. “Says who?”

  Tristan starts to argue again, then doesn’t. Kat’s face falls.

  We couldn’t find any real info about Frank. So we just assumed. Though, to be fair, she doesn’t look old enough to have been the same Frank from ten years ago.

  She makes a hmph noise. “You’re thinking of my father. Guess you weren’t as good as I thought. I knew you were onto me when I saw you at the gallery the other night. I was so surprised, because after that performance at the train station, well, I thought you were total amateurs. ‘Long track record’ my ass.” She shakes her head at me and Riley. “But maybe your friends here did all the work. Too bad you couldn’t have recruited them to get my ring back.”

  “What?” Maybe it’s the gas filling the room, or maybe it’s how frazzled my nerves are right now, but I don’t know what she’s talking about.

  “Well, I shouldn’t say my ring—it’s my sister’s, but our grandmother left it to both of us. I hired your little group to get it back from her dirtbag ex-husband.”

  “You hired us. That was you?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Oh, my God, yes! Only you two botched it up. And I thought, ‘Oh, well, that’s what I get for trying to go cheap.’ But then I saw you at the gallery. You thought you were being so sneaky. Well. I knew I must have underestimated you. You were onto me—”

  “We weren’t onto you! We were investigating that painting you stole from the museum!”

  “What?” She blinks. “Why?”

  “For school! It was just an assignment!” Electricity starts to burn beneath my skin. I take a deep breath. I can’t let it spark, or we’re all dead.

  “The painting? I ripped it to shreds and burned it. It had a map to this place on the back. Well, it was rumored to, and I figured if it didn’t, I’d just sell it. But then I couldn’t let it fall into the wrong hands. Just like I couldn’t let you get ahead of me. The map said this room was trapped, but it didn’t say what would happen. So I lured you here with that note, set up a camera out front to alert me when you showed up, and now, voila! Two birds with one stone! You know, I half thought this place would blow up the second you touched anything. Guess not, though. Aren’t you all just so lucky today? Now.” Any trace of a smile disappears from her face. She aims her gun at me. “You see that weapon on that pedestal next to you? Slide that over here or else.”

  “Or else what? You can’t shoot us—this whole place will blow up!”

  The metal bar that’s holding the door open starts to creak.

  Frank clenches her jaw. “Won’t I? You sure about that? You absolutely sure?!” She takes a step forward, looking down the sights of her raygun like she’s going to shoot.

  I swallow. She won’t do it. She can’t.

  “Damien!” Kat cries, and we all hear the fear in her voice.

  The grin returns to Frank’s face. She switches tactics and aims the gun at Kat instead of me. “Weapon. On the floor. Now.” Her finger moves. Just a tiny bit. Not enough to pull the trigger—just enough to scare the hell out of me.

  “Kat!” Electricity runs up my spine.

  “Don’t give it to her!” Kat says.

  But I do what Frank wants. I take the weird raygun-looking thing with the blue tubes sticking out of it from its pedestal again. I think about dropping it on the floor and breaking it, whatever it is, but my hands are shaking, and I’m trying so hard not to drop it, because I’m not certain Frank won’t shoot Kat. I’m not certain she won’t blow us all up, or at least take the risk. I wish I was, but I’m not. And I’m not sure how much longer I can keep my lightning under control, either.

  I slide the weapon over to her.

  Frank grabs it off the floor, still aiming at Kat. “Wish I could stay and chat,” Frank says, heading for the door. “It was nice knowing you, or at least it was when I thought you were a match for me.” She ducks through the door. Once she’s on the other side, she puts her hand on the metal bar, the only thing that’s keeping the door open.

  And before I know what I’m doing, I’m running toward her. Because if she takes that bar, if she lets that door close, we’re dead. And even if I can’t use my lightning right now, I can still stop her from trapping us here.

  Apparently Frank thinks so, too, because she pulls out a knife.

  “Damien, no!” Kat screams.

  It all happens really fast. Kat screaming, her footsteps behind me, and then Frank throwing the knife at my chest without even hesitating.

  I have just enough time to register what’s happening, to put the pieces together and realize I’m about to die.

  And then Kat’s hand is in front of me, and the knife is going through her hand, and she’s screaming again, only this time in pain.

  Frank yanks the metal bar out, and then the steel door slams shut, trapping us anyway.

  Kat pulls the knife out of her hand. It clatters on the floor. She uses her shapeshifting power to heal the wound, though her face is still pale and she’s gritting her teeth.

  “You saved my life,” I tell her, even though she knows that.

  She nods, smiling at me. Then she coughs from the gas that’s filling up the room. “You can thank me later.”

  “X,” Riley says, coming over to us. “We have to get out of here.” His face is still bloody, though he tried to wipe it off on his sleeve.

  I start coughing. Now that the door’s closed, the gas is definitely getting worse. “I…
” I look around. Maybe Kat could shapeshift and squeeze through the vent on the ceiling, but that’s also where the gas is coming from. The doors are shut tight. If I blast through them, the whole room explodes. “I don’t know.”

  “X,” Riley says.

  “Just let me think!”

  “Move,” Tristan yells. “Get back, into the corner.”

  “What?”

  “Now!” He holds up his hands, like he’s going to use his fire power. In a room full of gas.

  “Um—”

  “Just do it!”

  We all back up into the corner, like he says.

  “Be ready.”

  “For what?”

  But he doesn’t say. He steels himself. Then flame bursts from his hands, and he creates a wall of fire around us. The gas at our feet ignites, just for a second, then gets sucked into the wall he’s controlling, while the rest of the room turns into an inferno.

  Tristan pushes the wall forward, just a little bit. Then a little more. His face is red, and he looks like this is taking a lot of energy.

  “What are we supposed to do?!” I have to shout to be heard over the flames.

  “Blast the door!” he says, straining to get the words out. He moves the wall a little farther, pushing the flames back, just past the door.

  I nod, even though he can’t see me. I look at Kat and Riley, and they move back into the corner, giving me some room. I’ve never had to blast through a solid steel door before, with no knob or anything, just a wall. But it only takes one try. I blast the hell out of it, making a hole big enough for us to squeeze through, and then all four of us get out of there as fast as we can.

  Chapter 33

  “WHERE WHERE YOU?!” AMELIA says when she bursts into my room Monday afternoon.

  I’m lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling. I don’t look up when she comes in. “You could have knocked.”

  “You could have been in the parking lot after school! I thought I was supposed to wait for you!” She marches over to the bed, stomping the whole way and making the walls shake.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Uh, because I always do? But you didn’t show up, and you wouldn’t answer your phone, and Hil was going to be late for her piano lesson so she had to call her mom to come get her, and Melissa ended up leaving with her, because she wasn’t sure what was going on. And I hated waiting by myself, but you still didn’t show up, so I called Riley, and he said you went home early and that you decided to drop out of school.”

  I sit up, balling the ends of my sweatshirt sleeves around my hands. “You knew I was going to.” Not that I actually have, not officially as far as the school is concerned, but I don’t see the point in going back. And I thought I could at least stick it out today, but it turns out I couldn’t handle it. Not with the way everyone kept staring at me in horror, like I was a murderer they couldn’t believe was allowed to walk free.

  “No, I didn’t. I knew you were thinking about it, but I didn’t know if you’d really do it or not, or that you’d do it today. Especially since we only have a couple weeks left. And either way, you still could have told me I didn’t need to wait for you!”

  “Okay. I should have told you I wasn’t going to be there. Obviously it won’t be happening again. So, problem solved, you can go now.”

  She doesn’t move to leave. Instead, she bites her lip and sits down on the bed. “But what are you going to do if you don’t go to Heroesworth?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it does. You can’t just quit.”

  I look over at her, raising an eyebrow like she’s insane. “Uh, yeah, I can. The Director of Damage’s fear ray is loose in Golden City because of me. It’s in the hands of some crazed criminal who’s going to do who knows what with it, because of me.” It’s been all over the news ever since we described what we saw to the police on Saturday, after the stash of artifacts and the old Heroes Hideout burnt to the ground. Tristan managed to hold off the flames long enough for us to escape, but he couldn’t actually stop it, and by the time we got out of there and called 911, there was no chance of saving it. Not that anyone was particularly attached to the old Heroes Hideout, but not losing all the Director of Damage’s long-lost gadgets and one-of-a-kind works of art we’d just discovered would have been nice.

  The police matched up the info we gave them with what info they had on the Director of Damage, said it was her infamous fear ray that can terrorize someone into doing pretty much anything the wielder wants, and then they issued a statement to the press so they could warn everyone to be on the lookout.

  They didn’t exactly keep their mouths shut about my involvement, either. Especially when people started asking how this could have happened.

  Damien Locke was involved, that’s how. He teamed up with his girlfriend from Vilmore. He broke the rules, again, and now no one can sleep safely in Golden City anymore.

  “You weren’t the only one there,” Amelia says. “Maybe they’re blaming you on the news, but it wasn’t your fault.”

  “My friends still got hurt because of me, and not for the first time. But that won’t happen again if I quit. And I won’t have to fly ever again, either.” And I can finally stop worrying about whether or not I can survive Heroesworth, since, big surprise, it turns out I can’t.

  “Don’t say that! You learned to fly really fast. You’d never even practiced before, and you’re afraid of heights, but you still learned a lot in only a couple of weeks. If you take the test again next year—”

  “That’s not happening. I’m done with Heroesworth, just like I’m done with flying. I thought… Look, it doesn’t matter what I thought, because I couldn’t do it. I’m not a hero and I never will be.”

  “But you are. And I know you’re not okay with just giving up.”

  “Trust me, Amelia, the world is better off without me interfering.”

  “That’s stupid. You’re better than this.”

  “No, I’m not. Whatever I thought—whatever you thought I could be, you were wrong, and you wouldn’t have ever even thought that if you’d known the truth.”

  “What truth? You’re being super dramatic right now. You always think you’re—”

  “The truth about you and Zach.” I press my palms against my knees, bracing myself for this. Some part of me is telling me not to do it, to shut the hell up before it’s too late, but I can’t stop. The whole world hates me right now, and instead of being glad that Amelia doesn’t, it’s like I need her to hate me, too. “I know the real reason you guys broke up. It was because of something I said.”

  “What?” Confusion twists up her face. Confusion and disbelief. “You mean because you gave me bad advice? That was just a misunderstanding.”

  “No, because I gave Zach bad advice. We were talking about… about you and him, and I asked him if he loved you. And he said he didn’t know, and I said…” I trail off, but I know it’s too late.

  “You said what?”

  I shrug, like it’s no big deal, like I don’t even care. “I said he would know if he did. That really liking you and being in love with you weren’t the same things.”

  She’s just staring at me, horrified. “Why were you guys even talking about me?!”

  “I’m the reason he was thinking about whether or not he loved you, okay? And you’d be better off if I’d just kept to myself and didn’t interfere and just left everybody alone. Because if we hadn’t had that conversation, he probably wouldn’t have said all that stuff to you at Prom, about just liking you, and you guys would still be together.”

  “Is that why you came into the bathroom? Is that why you tried to comfort me?!”

  Her eyes are wet. I look away and don’t say anything, letting her think what she wants about me, even if it’s not true.

  “Why? Why would you do that?!”

  “It wasn’t on purpose. It’s just what happens when I get involved in things. I ruin them, and people get hurt.”


  “You could have told me. That was on purpose!” She gasps and puts her hands to her mouth. "Oh, my God, I taught you to fly to distract myself from the breakup!”

  “See, Amelia? It’s like I said. I’m not a hero and I never will be. And everyone, including you, will be way better off if I just give up now and stop trying.”

  There’s a knock on my door later. It’s probably someone coming to tell me it’s time for dinner, since it’s a little after six and since I can smell food cooking, but I ignore them, even though I’m hungry, because there’s no way I’m eating dinner with everybody.

  I imagine Gordon and Helen sharing little looks about me. Maybe concerned looks. Maybe What are we supposed to do with him now? kind of looks. I mean, they don’t seem mad about what happened, but Gordon’s delinquent half-villain son unleashing some super weapon on the unsuspecting citizens of Golden City and then deciding to drop out of his alma mater can’t be making them happy or anything.

  And Amelia’s pissed at me. Or maybe she really hates me now. And Alex is old enough to understand what a fear ray is and why it’s crazy bad news that some criminal is running around with it, but from what he told me yesterday, he doesn’t believe it was my fault. Not because he knows anything about what happened, but because he knows I wouldn’t let that happen. Which is kind of worse than if he just blamed me like everybody else, because then at least I wouldn’t have anything to lose. I haven’t done anything to screw him over like I did Amelia, but I’m sure I’ll still be able to think of something awful to say to make him stop believing in me—like that it really was my fault that weapon got taken—and the thought of that makes me sick.

  Too sick to care about dinner. And it’s not like I ate with them yesterday, and I hadn’t even told them my decision to drop out of school yet then, so I wish they’d just take the hint and leave me alone.

  Jess is the only one in this family I might want to talk to, and only because she’s too young to understand anything about what happened, or about me and my non-existent future. But she’s not the best dinner conversationalist, what with always having some sort of food in her mouth or getting way too focused on eating her peas individually, so I don’t think her presence will, like, save me from dying of awkwardness.