The Kid Sensation Series Box Set

by Kevin Hardman

  “Don’t you have a boyfriend?” I asked. “Herc?”

  “Please,” she said dismissively. “He’s a mobile slab of rock. I’ve known amoebas with more brain cells. Getting him to have an original thought is like trying to nail Jell-o to a tree.

  “Besides,” she continued, trying to close the distance between us, “you didn’t seem to have a problem with it a minute ago.”

  I took a step back. “Well, I came to my senses.”

  Her eyes suddenly narrowed. “This isn’t about Herc. It’s about Little Miss Live Wire. Electra. You really like her.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Interesting,” she said, staring at me as if some new thought had struck her out of the blue. “Anyway, just think about what I said.”

  “What part?”

  “All of it,” she said with a wink. Then her body became liquefied and arced towards the sink as if from a spout. The robe dropped to the floor, empty.

  Chapter 17

  I lay in bed for a while after Aqua left, trying to go to sleep. I was worn out, but sleep wouldn’t come. Something about my conversation with her kept nagging at me. After about an hour, I gave up on getting any sleep and tossed on a pair of cargo pants and a polo shirt. I phased, then flew outside the window and up to the roof.

  Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I like to gaze up at the stars. Maybe it’s the fact that part of my heritage is alien, or maybe it’s just knowing that I’ve got family out there, but being up in the air and looking at the nighttime sky just seems to put me at ease. There’s something about the vastness of space, the immensity of it, that makes any problem you have pale in comparison.

  The roof of Alpha League’s HQ was actually a multi-level affair that served a couple of purposes. There was a recreational area that consisted of a pool and a couple of cabanas. On the more functional side (which actually sat about two stories higher), there was a utility shed, a retractable dome that housed a helicopter landing pad, and a few more structures whose use I wasn’t sure of.

  I was so lost in my own thoughts that I didn’t see him at first. I had actually thought I was alone. The first inkling I had of anyone else being around was the slight ripple of his cape in the nighttime breeze. I was floating on the recreational side of the building at the time, and the sound – coming from above me – made me look up to the helipad area. I couldn’t actually see him at that point, just the end of his cape fluttering.

  I flew up and peeked over the edge. It was him. He was just floating there, looking up at the sky as I had been a few moments ago. His back was to me, but I’d known who it was before I looked: Alpha Prime.

  I turned away, ready to fly back down when I heard him call out.

  “It’s okay,” he said, glancing back at me. “You don’t have to leave.”

  I hadn’t even realized he knew I was there. I seesawed back and forth in my mind for a second, then came to a decision. I flew over next to him.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize anyone else was up here. I just…the stars just help me clear my head.”

  He smiled and nodded. “I know the feeling.”

  We floated in silence for a few minutes, right next to each other but at the same time in our own separate worlds. I was probably in one of the most enviable positions on the planet. Most kids dream about getting to meet the world’s greatest superhero, and at one time I had been just like them - but I had grown up since then. Still, after a while, I couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking and feeling. Gently, I reached out empathically.

  He was a swirl of emotions: pride, satisfaction, contentment, and a sense of purpose. However, there was only measured happiness and limited joy, and underpinning it all was a sadness and longing so deep and aching that it was tangible.

  Maybe he felt my probe, because suddenly he spoke.

  “I’m not from here, you know,” he said, as if revealing some great secret. “This world.”

  I nodded, saying nothing. Everyone knew his story, but it seemed important to let him tell it.

  “I certainly never should have ended up here, or ended up as what I am. Back where I came from, I wasn’t anybody important.” He laughed. “I wasn’t even important enough to be a nobody.”

  “My brother and I, we were janitors,” he went on. “We were part of the nighttime cleaning crew at an advanced research lab. One night, we’re cleaning up, and we notice that one of the doors that should have been locked - and off-limits - wasn’t.

  “At the time, the rule was to clean any and every room that we had access to. That being the case, we went in. Long story short, they were experimenting with some kind of interdimensional device and my idiotic brother accidentally turned it on. It landed us here.”

  I ventured to ask a question. “So, if you were a nobody on your own world, does that mean that most people there are more powerful than you?”

  “They wish,” he said, laughing out loud. “No, people on my world don’t have powers. It’s a rather humdrum existence compared to what goes on in this place.”

  “How did you get your powers then?”

  He shrugged. “No one really seems to know, but the prevailing theory among most scientists is that it happened when we made the trip over. It only seemed like a second to us, but it’s possible we were in some kind of interdimensional void for a lot longer. Moreover, there are a lot of forces in those regions that nobody understands. Long story short, I was probably exposed to something there which gave me my powers.

  “Furthermore, some of that force or energy seems to have leaked into this world with us, because the advent of supers on this planet coincided with our arrival. Nobody had super powers prior to that. Hell, I was actually here a decade before I figured out that I had any.”

  “What about your brother?” I asked.

  I must have hit upon an uncomfortable subject, because suddenly his face soured.

  “He’s still around, but we’re estranged at the moment.” He looked wistful for a second. “Most people don’t even know that I have a brother. They know my story, but not many know that I didn’t come here alone. But that crisis we had today – dealing with that interdimensional headache – it kind of brought everything back. Every now and then one of the missions will do that to me, and when it does, I come up here.

  “According to the scientists, what I described as another dimension - my home dimension - is technically the same world, just a different reality. One where history somehow deviated from the past as known here. I can’t see alternate realities, though, so I like to look at the sky sometimes and assume my world is out there.”

  I didn’t say anything, so I think he probably took my silence for boredom. (In actuality, I was reflecting back on Mouse’s brief lecture on dimensions earlier and wishing I’d paid more attention.)

  “Anyway,” he said, “I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than listen to me reminisce. What about you; what’s your family like?”

  It was a question that I, naturally, wanted to avoid. So I sidestepped it, giving vague responses about living with my mother and grandfather.

  “And what about your dad?” he asked.

  I shrugged and tried to look unfazed, but the question was like a punch in the gut. “He’s never really been around.” Then I looked him in the eye. “In fact, I don’t think he’d recognize me if I were standing right in front of him.”

  He nodded sagely, but didn’t say anything. I turned and started to leave, but I’d barely moved before he spoke again.

  “Hey, Kid,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “I don’t know if anyone’s done it yet, but on behalf of the entire Alpha League I want to apologize to you for what happened two years ago. Things never should have gotten out of hand like that.”

  I looked at him and tried to speak but nothing would come out. It’s as if there were some kind of short-circuit between my brain and my mouth. I felt my eyes suddenly becoming irritated in a maddening way, so I nodded once and then telepo
rted to my room.

  Chapter 18

  I had thought I’d felt tears coming on when I left the roof, but that didn’t happen. Nevertheless, my eyes still felt a little odd, so I left my room and went next door to ask Smokescreen if he had any eyedrops. He answered on the first knock.

  “Hey, man,” he said. “Come on in.”

  I found myself entering a dimly lit apartment that, for all intents and purposes, appeared to be a duplicate of my own.

  After learning what I needed, Smokescreen disappeared and came back a few minutes later with a small bottle of eyedrops.

  “Here you go,” he said. “Sorry about the lack of lights, but I’m in the middle of developing.”

  “No problem. Thanks for the drops.”

  “Hey!” he said with sudden enthusiasm. “Would you like to see them?”

  In all honesty, I didn’t. It had been a long and tiresome day, and I really just wanted a chance to recharge my batteries. However, he was a nice guy and was probably my only friend here at the moment.

  “Sure,” I lied as I put a few drops in my eyes.

  I followed him into his bedroom and then into his closet, where he had his darkroom set up. It appeared to be a little more spacious than mine, but I didn’t know if that was because it actually was larger or because he’d moved all articles of clothing out of it.

  The room was aptly named, because the only light came from some type of low-wattage, red bulb that Smokescreen called a “safelight.” I admittedly didn’t know very much about film developing (apparently it’s a dying art in the digital age), but Smokey – as he liked to be called – did a great job of explaining everything and actually making it sound interesting. Before long, he had me engrossed in the entire process, from the importance of cleaning your development tank to presoaking your film.

  Initially, it was a struggle not to switch my vision over to infrared or one of the other light spectrums. It would certainly have made it a lot easier to see everything. However, I’d learned long ago that the best way to understand some things was to experience them, so I kept my eyesight normal.

  After a quick overview of how everything worked, he showed me some of his finished products. I had to admit that Smokey was either a pretty good photographer or a pretty good developer; some of the finished photos that he let me see were world-class, in my opinion.

  “What’s this?” I asked, indicating a film negative that he had sitting to the side. The reddish-brown piece of film showed two faces. Like most images of people on negatives, both visages were void of pigmentation, but you could still make out certain details. There was a girl in the foreground, but then – immediately over the girl’s right shoulder and a little farther back – another girl. Both faces appeared to be identical.

  Smokey glanced at it before responding. “Oh yeah, this is the picture I took of Aqua in front of the nullifier cell with the girl who was captured. I’m not sure what’s going on. It looks like Aqua’s face maybe got superimposed on this other girl–”

  “Incendia,” I interjected.

  “Yeah, that’s her: Incendia,” he said. “Anyway, I was going to look at it later. Maybe it’s some kind of double-negative, or the film got damaged. Who knows?”

  I was only half paying attention to him at this point. My mind was racing, trying to form a coherent gestalt from bits and pieces of scattered information at my disposal.

  When it finally hit me, I realized that I had practically been in a trance, and Smokey was snapping his fingers in front of my face.

  I turned to him and said, “It’s not a double-negative.”

  Chapter 19

  We let Mouse into Smokey’s quarters, now with all the lights on, almost immediately after he knocked. He came in without waiting for an invite as soon as the door opened.

  “Jeez, Kid,” he said, looking at me, “you ought to come with a warning label. Almost every emergency call I’ve had in the past twenty-four hours has related to you in some way.” He flopped down on Smokey’s couch, slightly irritated. “Now what’s this all about?”

  He was wearing the same clothes as earlier, so it looked like he hadn’t been to bed yet. Tracking him down had been fairly easy. Every teen super is given a mentor to work with. When I’d told Smokey that I needed to reach Mouse, he’d called his mentor, Feral, who had then relayed the message. We’d stressed that it was an emergency, but were told that Mouse would come by Smokey’s room as soon as possible. It had actually taken just a little over fifteen minutes, and Smokey had used the intervening time to set up a demonstration on his computer.

  I broke the ice with the simple truth. “I think Aqua’s your mole.”

  All trace of annoyance vanished as he responded. “I’m listening.”

  Smokey flopped down next to Mouse with his laptop as I began by conveying Aqua’s comments from the diner during our triple date. “She mentioned that she had a twin sister. An identical twin sister.”

  Mouse shrugged. “So? There’s nothing special about that.”

  “Except that her twin sister is Incendia, who you’re currently holding in a nullifier cell downstairs.”

  “Is this a joke? I’ve seen her; they look nothing alike.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong.” I passed him the negative. “They look exactly alike. Identical.”

  “I can see a resemblance–” he began.

  I quickly cut him off, turning to Smokey and saying, “Show him.”

  Smokey had scanned the negative images into his laptop. Now he enhanced the size of Incendia’s visage and overlayed it on top of Aqua’s face while Mouse watched. It was a perfect match.

  “Nobody would ever think of them as twins, because one’s White and the other’s Black, but take away pigmentation and their features match. They’re identical.”

  Mouse seemed to be absorbing this, so I went on. “Plus, their abilities are diametrically opposed – fire and water – like a lot of super-powered twins.” It was true; twins with powers often had conflicting abilities, like being able to control warmth and cold.

  “Okay, there’s some merit to what you’re saying,” Mouse admitted, “but it still doesn’t quite add up. For instance, I’ve never taken the transdimensional platform out of my lab, and she’s never been allowed in unsupervised; when would she have seen it? Moreover, the TNIP is a complex piece of machinery to say the least. The schematics, design, and data for it changed almost daily when I was building it. For them to keep up with its construction and stay on pace the way they did, she’d have had to send them updates constantly, and we would have noticed that volume of communication. So how or when could she have told anyone about it?”

  “You do know that Aqua can take on liquid form?” I asked.

  “Yes, I think we’ve all seen it.”

  “Well, she popped up in my room tonight – came through the sink. Said she can go anywhere water does.” As Mouse took a second to absorb this, I went on. “Now, are you trying to tell me that you don’t have a single source of water in your lab? No water line to the refrigerator? No sink in the bathroom? No toilet? Getting in to see it would be a piece of cake for her.”

  With respect to communications, I vaguely referenced a friend who consisted of clones sharing a hive mind.

  “Wait,” said Smokey, speaking for the first time since Mouse arrived. “Are you saying she might be a clone like that? With a hive mind?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. When we were eating dinner, Aqua mentioned that she and her sister don’t speak; then she laughed, saying it was a private joke. I took it to mean that maybe she and her sister were estranged. But now I think that what she actually meant is that she and her sister don’t have to speak to each other. Each already knows what the other knows.”

  Smokey frowned, but Mouse picked up on the idea, saying, “That might actually make sense. Think about it. Identical twins actually start out being the same person. They form from a single egg that splits. Maybe this is an instance where they split i
nto separate people physically, but their minds remained joined.”

  “So what are we talking about here – telepathy?” Smokey asked.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Not telepathy. Each just automatically knows what the other is thinking, feeling, doing, and so on.”

  “Now, just to sum up your theory,” Mouse said, “you think Aqua’s the mole. She’s basically used the water pipes to have free rein of the building, including sneaking into my lab. This joint consciousness she has with her twin allowed her to communicate information about the TNIP to her sister – and thereby to numerous supervillains – such that they could build their own transdimensional device. Sound good so far?”

  I nodded, and he continued. “So that just leaves one question: why haven’t they attacked?”

  “What do you mean?” Smokey asked.

  “Well,” Mouse went on, “if they’ve already compromised Aqua – and who knows how many others – they’ve got a lot of our passwords, entry codes, etc. Why haven’t they stormed this place?”

  I thought about it for a few seconds before responding. “Maybe there’s nobody to give the order.”

  They both looked at me, puzzled, so I explained. “Right now, their leaders are trapped in a pocket dimension. Prior to that happening, there was no need to attack this place; they could have had a bloodless coup by trapping the entire League in the same type of pocket dimension.”

  “So we missed being the site of a pitched battle by default?” Mouse asked, chuckling.

  Smokey, however, seemed less sure. “But what if those guys in the other dimension get out? They could decide to attack then, right?”

  “But they can’t get out,” Mouse said. “They’d need another transdimensional device, and the only other one is–”

  He stopped, and we stared at each other, frozen by the thought that had occurred to both of us simultaneously. Then a wicked series of explosions rocked the entire building.

  Chapter 20