Fall of Heroes

by Jeramey Kraatz

  The man looked confused, but nodded hurriedly.

  “Good,” Alex said. “When you talk to Shade, tell her that her son is coming for her.”

  “We should get out of here,” Kirbie said.

  “Yeah, let’s—”

  A pounding from inside the paddy wagon interrupted him. He and Kirbie looked at each other, then hurried to the big black vehicle, flanking either side of the back. Kirbie nodded to Alex, who wrenched open the doors with his thoughts.

  There was a series of gasps. Alex looked inside to find a dozen sets of eyes looking at him, maybe more—it was difficult to tell in the darkness. The captives stared back at them, unsure of what to do.

  “This is crazy,” Kirbie whispered.

  “They’re not just building a new police force,” Alex said. “They’re drafting an army.”

  14

  FLIGHT PRACTICE

  It was late by the time they finally got back to Carla’s house and landed in the backyard. They briefed everyone who was still awake. Lux and a few others were waiting for them downstairs, candles providing flickering light in the living room. Lone Star and Carla had apparently already gone to bed, which was just as well for Alex—he didn’t want to have to endure a lecture. Alex doubted any of them would sleep well knowing that there was an Umbra Gun out there but once again no way into the Gloom. On the plus side, their encounter with the Deputies had gained them four laser pistols.

  Lux frowned at Kirbie and pulled her to the stairs.

  “I know we shouldn’t have—,” Kirbie started.

  “I trained you better than this,” Lux said. “I know you were listening in on us talking. I don’t blame you for trying to figure out a way to help the situation. For wanting to fight. But what would we have done if you hadn’t come back? What if . . .”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “I’m sorry,” Kirbie said.

  “Don’t pull anything like that again,” Lux said. Her words were harsh, but her tone was softer than before. “Ever.”

  Kirbie nodded, and they climbed the stairs.

  Alex stayed in the living room, tossing himself onto one of the couches. Amp was on the one beside him. As they lay awake, Amp spoke.

  “It kills me that I’m not out there right now, knowing what the Deputies are doing.”

  “That’s probably what Cloak was hoping for,” Alex said. “Draw us out, then attack us. We lucked out with the ones we ran across. They didn’t get a chance to call for backup.”

  “You’re probably right. Half of us would end up in the Gloom by dawn.”

  “If the Guild of Daggers created a new Umbra Gun, Gage can probably turn it into a new Gloom Key,” Alex said. He was thinking of Amp’s parents, and what the loss of the device meant for their future. “I mean, that’s what he did with the last one. It doesn’t mean we’re locked out of the Gloom forever.”

  “Yeah,” Amp said quietly. “But I’m not getting my hopes up.”

  Neither of them spoke for a minute.

  “Thanks, though,” Amp said. “For thinking about it.”

  “Yeah, man. Of course.” He was glad to envision a family reunion that turned out happy for a change.

  A chiming clock woke Alex in the middle of the night, and he lay awake, trying unsuccessfully to go back to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, all he could see was the surprise on Phantom’s face before she melted into the shadows, and the hatred in his mother’s eyes once she’d disappeared. He tossed and turned, and then just lay there, staring at the ceiling, trying not to have a single thought and hoping that sleep would sneak up on him.

  There was a thump somewhere outside. Alex was off the couch in a flash, at the window, ready to raise an alarm and wake everyone else if necessary. He was just about to yell at Amp when he realized that the man in front of the backyard garage was Lone Star, dressed in dark clothes. Alex watched as he climbed up the side of the garage with impressive agility, then stood on the edge, eyes closed. He took a deep breath and leaped, falling to the ground below and landing like a gymnast completing a dismount. He stayed like that a few moments before jumping to his feet and making his way back to the top of the garage. Again, he stepped off the edge, only this time he held his arms out at his sides. He fell as if he were going to belly flop into a pool, his body scrunching together and bracing itself for impact against the ground at the last possible second.

  Lone Star stayed crouched low to the earth. He pounded a fist on the grass.

  Alex was furious. First Lone Star had cut them out of his planning, and now the man was outside doing some weird training regimen and risking being seen by someone overhead or passing by. And what if the Ranger sprained an ankle, or broke a rib? Alex quietly slipped out the back door.

  Lone Star noticed him approaching just as he started to climb up the side of the garage again.

  “I didn’t set off an alarm or something, did I?” he asked.

  “No,” Alex said. “I heard you . . . hitting the ground.”

  Lone Star shook his head as he flung himself over onto the roof of the garage. That was when Alex realized what the man was doing.

  “You’re trying to fly, aren’t you?”

  Lone Star didn’t respond but looked up at the sky, staring at something in the distance.

  “There’s Pegasus,” he said, pointing to a clump of stars. “The flying horse.”

  “Next to Andromeda,” Alex said. “But she’s behind the clouds.”

  “You know the constellations?”

  “I spent a lot of time up on the roof when I could get out of the underground base. Staring at the sky. It was a lot easier to find things at the drive-in, though. No houses or trees.”

  “Amp told me,” Lone Star said. His lips curved up just a bit in a small, sad smile. “Of all the places I imagined the Cloak Society hiding, I have to say I never expected it to be beneath an old drive-in theater.”

  “That was kind of the point,” Alex said.

  Lone Star nodded. “I used to sit in the dome at the top of Justice Tower and look at the sky. That’s how I know the stars so well.”

  “You shouldn’t be out here.” Alex suddenly felt strange telling Lone Star what he should and shouldn’t have been doing. Even if he had taken over and ignored Alex and the others, he was still a legend. “I mean, you know . . . Someone could see you.”

  “I’m keeping my eyes open. No paddy wagons have been by. No sign of Cloak.”

  “You heard what Kirbie and I saw, I guess.”

  “The house has thin walls,” the Ranger said.

  “Aren’t you going to yell at us for leaving?” Alex asked.

  “And risk waking half the block? You’re not stupid, Alex. You know how risky that was. And you’re probably smart enough to know that running off like that put not only yourself but all of us in danger. Your friends could have gotten seriously hurt if you were tracked back here.”

  Alex shrugged. He hadn’t really thought about those things. When Kirbie asked him to go, he’d just known that he wanted to do something, anything to help out.

  Lone Star’s posture straightened, as if he were about to perform a perfect dive into an unseen pool.

  “Don’t worry about the ground,” Alex said. “I’ll catch you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “If you don’t trust me, you’d better regain your powers quick or you’ll end up with a face full of dirt.”

  Lone Star smiled wider this time. He leaped from the rooftop with his eyes closed. His trajectory was high and far, his body curving gracefully. Alex could tell he’d trained in acrobatics, like the other Rangers—his form was flawless. For a moment, he seemed to hover in the air, and Alex believed that maybe he had suddenly regained his powers. But then he began to fall, plummeting toward the grass and dirt below. He flashed in Alex’s mind. Blue energy sparked and caught the man a foot from the earth.

  Lone Star opened his eyes. They lit up, until he realized that it wasn’t his own power that was ke
eping him afloat.

  “You’re good.”

  “Thanks,” Alex said, waving his hand and twisting Lone Star’s body until the man was standing in front of him. “I’ve had to get much better in the last month, but I’ve still got a ways to go in terms of control and strength. I’ve learned a lot from the Junior Rangers, though.”

  “I imagine they’ve learned just as much from you. I can tell by the way they move and strategize now. Amp came out to talk to me earlier, and I didn’t know he was there until he was beside me—didn’t make a single sound when he approached. That must be something they picked up from you and your team.”

  “We helped each other out,” Alex said. “We did the best we could.”

  Alex had all but forgotten how angry he’d been when he started outside. He realized this was his first time alone talking to the leader of the Rangers of Justice. It was different from when there was a group. Lone Star didn’t have to keep control of the room or show his authority. And it was far different from the brash, egotistical man that the High Council had spoken of—the one who’d destroyed half of Cloak, including Alex’s grandfather, in a ball of light and fire a decade ago. He was just a guy, talking.

  “I’ve had my powers since I was about your age,” Lone Star said. “I haven’t felt so chained to the ground in almost two decades.”

  “I bet it’s hard.”

  “What about you?” Lone Star asked, leaning against the side of the garage. “The Junior Rangers trust you. You’ve helped save them more than once. But at great cost. I know a little bit about what it’s like to have to turn your back on your family, but nothing like what you must have gone through. How are you faring now that you’re fighting on the other side of things?”

  Alex was quiet, thinking this over and wondering how best to answer the question.

  “My mother used to always talk about how the Rangers had it so easy. The people followed you blindly, showering you with praise. She said you made them weak with your help. They depended on you too much. And the reasons we would be called supervillains and bad guys was because we’d make them see that. But eventually they’d serve us out of respect for our power, or out of fear. I guess I always thought it would just be a lot simpler to be a Ranger than a member of Cloak. But I don’t think that’s really the case. I mean, I know these are really extreme circumstances, but still.”

  “What I do—what we do—sounds easy,” Lone Star said. “Stop the bad guys. Keep the people safe. Make sure life can progress without someone threatening to turn half the city into a frozen wasteland. But it’s more complicated than that. When people imagine what the Rangers of Justice are like, they believe us to be these saint-like figures incapable of doing evil. They think our superpowers also grant us the ability to know the difference between right and wrong so well that there’s never a question in our minds as to what choice or decision we should make. But that’s not how it works. We’re only human. We’re as confused as the rest of the world.”

  Alex couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Here was Lone Star, model of all that was good, admitting that he made mistakes. That sometimes he didn’t know what the right thing to do was, or if there even was a right thing to begin with. Alex felt somehow relieved.

  “How do you do it, then?” Alex asked. “How do you figure out the best thing to do when someone’s going to get hurt no matter what you choose? Even if they are the bad guys.”

  Lone Star smiled a bit.

  “You don’t ever figure it out. Not really. You’ll always wonder if you should have done things differently. But you know this already. You made a choice to turn your back on Cloak.”

  “I don’t regret that,” Alex said.

  “Then you’re thinking about today. About what happened to Phantom.”

  Alex nodded. Phantom, and the future.

  “Alex, if anyone is to blame for that incident, it’s me. That was an accident.”

  “I guess a part of me is afraid it wasn’t.”

  Lone Star’s face hardened. When he spoke again, his words were chosen very carefully, his voice a level deeper than it had been before.

  “I want you to listen to me carefully, Alex. To do something like that—to take the life of another person—is a conscious thing. I know. Ten years ago in Victory Park I made that decision. Even if it was fueled by rage and grief and fear, it was the choice I made. They called me the hero of that battle, but I felt like I had become what I hated. I’d turned my back on everything I held close. It’s something I’ve had to live with every day since then.”

  “But what you did at Victory Park . . . you saved the city. Not to mention Lux and Photon. If Cloak had managed to defeat all of you, who knows if anyone could have stopped them? You were the hero that day.”

  “So does that make it right?”

  Alex didn’t have an answer. On one hand he knew the fate that Sterling City had been saved from, but he also knew the anguish of living through it in the underground base. The orphaned Omegas. The death of Julie and Titan’s mother. His own parents’ desire to have him as prepared as possible for any situation.

  “Exactly,” Lone Star said in response to Alex’s silence.

  “We’ll face Cloak again,” Alex said. “Soon. What am I supposed to do if I can save a bunch of people but have to hurt some of my former teammates to do so? Or my parents? How would I live with myself afterward?”

  Lone Star placed a hand on Alex’s shoulder and stared down at him intently.

  “It’s my goal that you’ll never have to make that choice. Any of you.”

  In that moment, Alex could see why the Junior Rangers spoke of Lone Star with such high regard, as if he had every answer to every problem in the world. And Alex, for the first time all day, felt hopeful.

  15

  SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

  By early afternoon the next day, lights were coming on across the city. Cell towers and phone lines were strangely affected by the loss of power, however. The city’s communication was temporarily cut off.

  The Cloak Society was tightening its reins.

  “There’s a storm coming,” Alex said. He stood at the windows, looking out onto Carla’s backyard.

  “Normally I’d say you were being a little dramatic, but under the present circumstances I would have to agree,” Gage said.

  “No, I mean literally. It looks like it’s about to pour.”

  The sun was hiding behind dark, heavy clouds. Most of the team was sitting around downstairs. Lone Star was napping in one of the bedrooms. He’d been up most of the night keeping watch over the house and trying to jump-start his powers in some way, to no avail.

  “How can they get away with this?” Kyle asked. “I mean, if they were dragging people out of their homes all night . . .”

  “They run the media, and they’ve cut off the only forms of communication most people know about,” Amp said. “People probably think they’re isolated incidents.”

  “Or they don’t care,” Alex said. “I’m guessing the New Rangers can get away with most things if people think it’s for the greater good.”

  “Besides, it’s martial law now. Everything they do is technically legal.”

  “We’re boxed in. Misty’s now our only reliably stealth transportation.”

  “I am not just some kind of human escape vehicle,” Misty said. “Even if I am good at it. Besides, I’ve been stretching my powers with the eight of us. I don’t know if I could handle Lone Star and Lux as well. I know he’s not as powerful as he was before he went into the Gloom, but the dude is still, like, five times my size.”

  “Lone Star acts like he’s completely lost hope,” Kyle said quietly, running a hand through his blond hair.

  “He’ll be okay,” Alex said. And he believed it.

  “So our choices now are basically face the Cloak Society head on or let the city—and then the country—fall, right?” Amp asked. “That’s a real question, because the way I see it, things are looking pretty crappy for
us.”

  “We can’t even worry about the rest of the country right now, I don’t think,” Mallory said. “We just have to focus on stopping Cloak here.”

  “We’re sailing between Scylla and Charybdis,” Gage said.

  “Who and what?” Kyle asked.

  “They’re from Greek mythology,” Gage answered. “Two sea monsters on either side of a narrow channel of water. In The Odyssey, Odysseus has to steer his ship between them, knowing that no matter which side he gets closer to, death awaits. They’re really more metaphors than anything else. Odysseus is one of the first epic heroes of literature. I figured that would have been Ranger 101.”

  “So what happens?” Kyle asked. He seemed genuinely interested, as if Odysseus’s decision might offer a solution for all of them. “Which way does he choose to go?”

  “He sails closer to Scylla, since the other path was so dangerous that his entire ship would definitely have been destroyed.”

  “He makes it out?”

  “Yes. But he still loses half a dozen of his men to the monster.”

  “The lesser of two evils,” Bug chimed in as he rubbed the back of a finger over Zip, who perched on his knee.

  “That probably would have been a simpler idiom to use, yes,” Gage said. “Sorry to spoil it for you, but the entire crew except for Odysseus ends up dying pretty soon after that anyway, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in that as an example.”

  “It’s an apt comparison,” Lux said, coming in from the hallway.

  “We were just discussing our options,” Kirbie said. Misty sat beside her on the couch, braiding her blond locks.

  “Or lack thereof,” Gage murmured.

  “Keep going.” Lux leaned on the back of the couch.

  “What do you mean?” Kyle asked.

  “The eight of you got more done in the last month working together than seems possible,” Lux said. “Seeing all of you fight together yesterday—if I didn’t know better, I’d swear you’d been training as a team your whole lives.” She turned her eyes to Alex. “You said they’d be expecting us. We didn’t listen. And I don’t know what we should do now. So I want to know what you all think we should do. Because you made it this far together. Actually, hold on.”