In other words, God helped those who helped themselves. That was something my Dad had told me so many times he had sounded like a broken record. If Catholics and Muslims agreed on something, it had to be true.
It’s funny what goes through your mind when something is crawling up your arms like a swarm of army ants made of napalm. But, though the Arab proverb might have seemed like useless trivia, it was true: I had to save myself. I couldn’t rely on others to do it for me. Besides, maybe this was some sort of weird-ass Trials test. I didn’t see anybody else’s arms looking like something out of a horror movie, though. Then again, I didn’t look hard. I was too busy being in horrific pain and trying to not freak out.
The swarm was now at my shoulders, making it look like I was wearing weird epaulets under my costume. My arms and shoulders were so intensely and painfully hot, it felt like they would melt right off my body.
I had to do something, and I had to do it now.
I shoved the pain out of the forefront of my mind, though it was like trying to move a heavy sofa with one arm tied behind my back. I also shut out from my mind the increasing cries of the people around me. I needed to concentrate totally on what I was doing as I had never done anything like it before.
I triggered my powers, fixating on my body. I knew what my body was supposed to feel like. I walked around in it twenty-four hours a day, after all. I concentrated on what it normally felt like, focusing on that thought like a sailor focusing on a lighthouse in a storm. Then, I tried to latch onto with my powers everything that was in my body that was normally not there, namely the black objects advancing on my head like an invading army.
At first, it was like trying to grab a handful of water. The objects moved like liquid around and out of the grasp of my powers, still getting closer to my brain.
As I intensified my efforts, it then became like grabbing sand. I could hold onto some of the objects and halt their advance. Still, many of them slipped out of my grasp just like grains of sand. They reached my neck, swirling under my skin like whirlpools. I began to hear faint but ominous rustling, like thousands of dry sticks being rubbed together.
With a herculean mental effort, I imagined the grains of sand eluding my grasp were solidifying into concrete, into something hard I could get a complete grip on.
Slowly but inexorably, I felt my powers latch onto the last of the moving objects in my body. I stopped them from moving further up my neck. They came to a halt right under my chin. I could feel them resisting me. It was like holding onto the tail feathers of countless birds that were trying to take flight.
My chest heaved with effort. My cheeks were wet with tears of pain. But I couldn’t stop to catch my breath. I had to get these things—whatever they were—out of me before the agonizing pain they caused made me lose my grip on them.
I started pushing the objects back down the same paths they had traveled up my body. It was like trying to push the frozen plunger of a hypodermic needle down to force its contents out.
Unfortunately, forcing the objects back down my body caused just as much pain as I had felt when they had traveled up my body. By the time I had forced all the objects back into my fingertips, I was literally screaming with agony. My throat felt raw.
I lifted my arms. The black objects came back out of my fingertips in a thick black spray, like oil skeeting out of a garden hose. I did not release my hold on the objects as I feared that would mean they would just attack me again. Instead, I forced them into a spherical, air impermeable force field I created overhead.
Once all the objects were inside, I sealed the force field. I released my grip on the objects. Once free of my powers, the objects began bouncing off the walls of my force field like a swarm of trapped bees bouncing off a giant glass jar. In my mind, I felt them thudding up against my force field like balls thrown at a window. Though I could not hear the objects with my ears—I wasn’t even letting sound waves penetrate the force field as I didn’t dare risk those painful little suckers escaping—I could hear them in my mind. The dry rustling sound I had heard before was now an angry, frustrated buzz, like the sound of thousands of trapped flies.
My chest heaved with exertion. The tips of my fingers were bloody. I wanted to collapse on the floor in exhaustion and pain and fear, but I was too afraid I’d lose my concentration and set the black objects free again. I wasn’t too tired to notice that both Isaac and Neha were next to me now. Isaac had apparently come up from the front of the classroom while I had been busy wrestling with the—well, whatever in the heck they were.
Brown Recluse came to stand underneath my force field. To anyone other than me, my fields were invisible. Brown Recluse looked up calmly, examining the ball of buzzing tiny objects like he was an entomologist studying a new species of butterflies.
“Hmmm,” he said thoughtfully. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything like these things before.” He glanced over at me. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on, Kinetic?”
Based on his question, obviously this little incident was not a part of the Trials. Panting, I told him what happened.
“I see,” Brown Recluse said after I finished talking. “Are you finished with your exam?”
“Huh?” How could he think I cared about my exam at a time like this? My arms, neck, and shoulders felt like they had been stung from the inside by a huge nest of wasps. I needed a doctor, a painkiller, a nap, and maybe an exorcist, not a fool question about whether I had finished my exam.
But instead of saying all that, I wisely just said, “No sir.”
“Can you hold these . . . these whatever they are, in your force field until you finish?”
Oh, hell no. Fuck no. Shit no, I thought.
“I can try sir,” I said instead.
Brown Recluse frowned slightly. “There is no try. Either you can do it, or you can’t,” he said. Dad, Amazing Man, and Athena, the chief instructor at the Hero Academy, all used to say something similar. Apparently all three of them had graduated with Brown Recluse from the School of Positive Thinking, located in the great state of Yes I Can.
“Well, speak up, the exam clock is still ticking,” Brown Recluse said impatiently when I hesitated.
“I can do it, sir,” I said.
“Then everyone get back to your seats and finish your exams. You all have less than three hours left to complete them.”
Isaac started to walk back down to his seat without saying anything to me. I didn’t know whether I wanted to hug him for coming to check on me, or stick my tongue out at him. Neha patted me on the shoulder before she sat back down in front of her computer. Her touch set off new explosions of pain right behind my eyes. In her defense, there was no way she could have known that.
Hammer pulled a couple of handkerchiefs out of hammerspace and gave them to me.
“Dude, that was the weirdest, grossest, scariest, and coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” he whispered eagerly with shining eyes. Though Hammer was around my age, the excitement on his face suddenly made him seem much younger. I got a glimpse of what he must have looked like as a kid, breathlessly reading the pages of a comic book late at night by flashlight under the covers of his bed.
Hammer sat back down. I used his handkerchiefs to wipe the blood off my hands and to wipe my face which was wet with sweat and tears of pain.
I poked cautiously at my keyboard, halfway expecting to be attacked again. After a few minutes of remaining unmolested, I relaxed a little and started writing faster with painfully throbbing fingers.
I did not relax entirely, though. In addition to feverishly trying to finish my exam answers, part of my mind was occupied with maintaining the force field containing the buzzing tiny black objects. Maybe it was my imagination, but they seemed to glare down balefully at me, like the eye of a giant monster whose most fervent wish was to chomp you to death.
Another part of my mind thought about what in the hell had just happened, and why. I couldn’t help but think about Iceburn trying to kill me an
d that blonde girl who had planted that explosive in my pocket. Unless I was the biggest magnet for deadly coincidences that ever donned a cape, someone was clearly still out to get me.
A third part of my mind spoke to me mockingly in Brown Recluse’s voice.
Good job Kinetic! he could have said to me instead of seeming unimpressed. That was astonishing, how you improvised using your powers in a new way to save yourself. I couldn’t have done a better job myself. Don’t worry about finishing your exam or the rest of the Trials—clearly you deserve a white Hero’s cape right this second. In fact, why don’t you take over as exam proctor? The other candidates have an awful lot to learn from you.
You don’t get a cookie for doing what you’re supposed to do, countered someone else’s voice. I couldn’t tell if it was Athena, Amazing Man, or my Dad. They each had said something similar at one time or another.
There was no doubt about it:
They all must have studied the same clichés in the same school.
8
“They were nanites,” said Pitbull, the chief proctor for the Trials. His eyes were so dark, they were almost black. He wore a form-fitting, dark brown costume. He was a short man with big arms and a thick chest. His hands looked like they had been sculpted by someone who liked veins and admired strength. Pitbull radiated competence the way Athena and the Old Man did. I wondered if they issued that air of competence along with the white Hero’s cape. If so, I wanted to be first in line for some.
“Nanites?” I said.
“Yes. Do you know what those are?
“I think so. Aren’t nanites microscopic, self-replicating machines?” I didn’t know that because of my Heroic training. Rather, I knew that because of my avid Star Trek watching. There had been several episodes where nanites had been discussed. It seemed less than Heroic to admit the source of my knowledge, so I didn’t. “But those things weren’t microscopic. They were big enough for me to feel and see.”
“Like your body is made up of microscopic cells, those devices’ component parts are microscopic,” Brown Recluse said. “Or at least that’s what the technicians who examined them tell me. I wouldn’t know a nanite from a nanny. Apparently, these little buggers were programmed to spread throughout Overlord’s system until they came into contact with their target. You apparently, in this case. Once they found their target, they were programmed to go on the attack, self-replicating all the while until their mass was big enough to see and to do damage.”
“What would have happened had I let them reach my head?” I asked, though in my heart I already knew the answer.
“If you hadn’t acted as you did, I’m told you would not be alive to have this conversation,” Pitbull said. To drive the point home, Brown Recluse held his hands up and pantomimed his head exploding.
Yikes! My heart never seemed to be wrong when I wanted it to be.
The three of us were in the tiny room that had been assigned to me for my duration at the Trials in the Guild complex on Earth Sigma. It was the day after I had been attacked. Other than a small, uncomfortable bed and my clothes, the only thing in the room was an Overlord access pad that was mounted on the wall. The pad was removable in case a Hero candidate wanted to read in bed or perhaps, in my case, curl up with a swarm of deadly nanites.
Pitbull must have seen me eyeing the Overlord access pad uncomfortably.
“Rest assured we have scrubbed Overlord of any trace of the nanites,” he said. “Once we knew they were there, it was not hard finding the rest of them. We also checked to make sure there were no other hidden threats to you or the other Hero candidates while we were at it. There weren’t. Overlord is perfectly safe for you to use now.” That was easy for him to say. I’d bet he never had a swarm of microscopic machine assassins try to make his head explode. If he had, perhaps he’d be less blasé about the whole thing.
Pitbull said, “Fortunately you were able to neutralize the threat before irreparable damage was done. The doctor who examined you tells me that, other than some residual pain, you suffered no lasting injury.” If by that he meant my arms and neck still felt like they were under a blowtorch, then yes, I suffered some “residual pain.” The doctor said the feeling would fade as my body healed itself from the nanites’ invasion. He had offered me some painkillers in the meantime, but I had refused them. I remembered how being on those painkillers in the Old Man’s infirmary had made me so loopy. I didn’t want my mind clouded during the Trials. Besides, as much as my body still hurt, it didn’t hold a candle to the torture I had experienced when the nanites had actually been inside of me.
“So we know what happened, and how it happened. What remains is the who and the why. Other than the presence of the nanites, we’ve found no evidence of Overlord having been tampered with. Can you shed some light on those questions, Kinetic?” Pitbull asked.
I began to tell him about Iceburn and the blonde girl who had left an explosive in my pocket. Pitbull cut me off, waving at me dismissively.
“Yes, yes, I know all about that. I read your application.” Hero candidates had been required to state if we had any known enemies on our applications. I had enemies, all right, but unfortunately I still didn’t know who they were or why I had them. The Old Man thought it was because I was one of the handful of living Omegas, but he had no proof of that. I could only assume he was right. I could think of no other reason why someone would go to such lengths to hurt me. Before I developed my powers, I was a big fat nobody. In my heart, I still felt mostly like a nobody. But now, I was a telekinetic nobody.
“Do you have any reason to believe that whoever hired this Iceburn fellow or the blonde woman you described is somehow related to this nanite incident?”
“No sir. But I have to assume they are. Three instances where someone’s tried to kill me?” I shook my head. “That’s way too much of a coincidence for them to be unrelated. My Hero sponsor used to say a coincidence was just a pattern you didn’t understand yet.”
“Your sponsor is a wise man,” Pitbull said. “Alright, let’s operate for now under the assumption that the nanite attack is merely a continuation of someone’s effort to kill you. We have no reason to believe he will stop now. The Trials are difficult enough without you having to worry about someone trying to assassinate you on top of everything else you will have to deal with. If you want, you can leave now to deal with this matter. You can return some other year when your situation is resolved.”
If there was one thing I had learned from developing powers and Dad’s death, it was that you couldn’t deal with problems by running from them. Besides, whoever was messing with me was really pissing me off. Maybe they were coming after me to stop me from becoming a Hero. If so, then there was nothing I wanted to do more than to spite them and get my license. And when I did, I’d find them and kick their asses from here to Pluto.
Besides, the Old Man suspected I wasn’t tough enough to be a Hero. If I left now, I’d be proving him right.
All that went through my mind in flash.
“No,” I said firmly. “The only way I’m leaving here is on a stretcher.” Or in a coffin, my mind added unhelpfully. Apparently my mind hadn’t gone to the same School of Positive Thinking Dad and the Old Man had gone to.
Pitbull smiled at me. He had big teeth and prominent canines. It was like being smiled at by the dog he took his name from.
“‘No’ is the right answer,” he said. “If you had said anything else, I might have thrown you out.”
9
“Congratulations on passing the first phase of the Trials,” Pitbull said. He stood behind a lectern in the auditorium all thirty-one of us remaining Hero candidates were assembled in. Six people had flunked the written phase. Fortunately, Neha, Hammer, and I were not one of them. Despite the fact Isaac was still not speaking to me and Neha, I was glad to see him in the auditorium. He obviously had passed as well.
The other six proctors, including Brown Recluse, were on the dais with Pitbull, sitting in chairs. All
of us Hero candidates sat in front of the dais.
Pitbull said, “If you’re feeling cocky because you’ve gotten this far, don’t. The written phase of the Trials is the easiest. Any reasonably intelligent graduate of the Academy who crams hard enough can stuff enough information in his head to pass it. Historically speaking, the written phase has a very high passage rate. I can’t say the same about the scenarios phase, the phase you will be undertaking shortly. The scenarios phase is where we separate the pretenders from the real deal, the people who merely look good in tights from the people who have what it takes to be a Hero. In the unlikely event you are able to successfully complete the scenarios phase, you will have earned your Hero’s license.
“Now for a few words of explanation. Everyone must pass five separate tests, all on a pass-fail basis. If you pass, you will proceed to the next test. If you fail any test, you’re out of the Trials. If you quit any test, you’re out of the Trials. Quitters are forever barred from reapplying for the Trials and forever barred from becoming a Hero. The Hero community has no room for quitters.
“The vast majority of the tests will be judged by Overlord. Some tests you will take individually and will be unique to you; others you will take alongside one or more other Hero candidates. The locale and nature of the tests will vary. Some will test you mostly mentally, others mostly physically. Some will take place in a holographic locale; others in other dimensions or on other planets.” There was a small murmur among the Hero candidates at that last part. Pitbull smiled wryly. “You’re all sitting in a room on another dimension. The fact you might go to other planets or be tested in a holographic locale shouldn’t surprise you.”
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