by Barry Lyga
“I hope this works better than the Pants Laser,” Erasmus said.
For once, Kyle agreed with Erasmus.
He punched in another series of numbers on the keypad and MiMi began to hum.
“Is it working?” Erasmus asked.
“I don’t know. Too soon to tell. MiMi’s dampening antenna should be causing the radiation to decouple from —”
“I know how she works. I designed her.”
“You helped.”
“I did all the hard work.”
“Oh, yeah? How did you put her together without any hands, you hunk of electro —”
He broke off as MiMi’s screen scrolled data. It was working!
As he watched, the alien radiation in the ground below him was slowly dissipating, thanks to MiMi’s dampening antenna. Kyle held her steady, aiming her at the spot with the greatest concentration of radiation.
“Connect me to her data port,” Erasmus said. “I can monitor the radiation directly.”
Kyle fumbled for a cable. Erasmus was wireless, but he hadn’t had time to install Wi-Fi in MiMi’s rickety old shell.
Once Erasmus was plugged in, it got easier. Kyle could focus on keeping MiMi aimed steadily at the right spot while Erasmus fed him a stream of information and adjustments. MiMi started to buck in Kyle’s hands and he struggled to hold her still.
“He’s winning!” someone shouted.
Kyle looked around, but he was still alone. What —?
“Go, Mighty Mike! Kick its butt!”
The crowd down the hill started chanting its hero’s name.
“As you weaken the source of the radiation, it’s weakening all over,” Erasmus said. “So —”
“The dirt monster is getting its butt handed to it by Mighty Mike. Yeah, thanks, I figured that part out.”
“MiMi’s shielding is breaking down!” Erasmus was starting to sound panicked. “She can’t keep this up much longer.”
Kyle gritted his teeth. “Come on, baby. Hold together.”
“Kyle! You need to adjust the resequencing engine or —”
“I got it!” Kyle tapped at the keypad with his thumbs, texting the codes that would save the world.
MiMi adjusted her dampeners.
“The radiation level here is almost back to normal! It’s almost —”
A cheer exploded from down the hill. Kyle spared a glance in that direction. The dirt monster collapsed in a shower of soil and rocks as Mighty Mike delivered a massive, powerful blow to the heart of the creature.
“You’ve decontaminated the area. Now the radiation that spread down the hill is being sucked up.”
“Yeah. No kidding.” He watched as Mairi dropped out of the sky. Every fiber of his being wanted to swoop in and catch her, but all he could do was watch as Mike — to more cheers — plucked her safely out of the air.
“Kyle! Kyle!” Erasmus, sounding even more panicked now. “MiMi can’t take the strain! You have to do something! ”
Kyle swept his glance over the screen. The radiation was practically gone now. “Another minute,” he said.
“In another minute, she’ll blow up!”
Kyle held her steady. “Good girl,” he said. “Good girl.”
Sweat dripped into his eyes under his mask. He blinked rapidly to clear his vision, staring at the screen. Just another ten seconds. Nine. Eight.
“Kyle!”
The radiation was gone. Completely gone.
Kyle unplugged Erasmus and hurled MiMi into the sky as hard and as fast as he could. The explosion was minor. If you weren’t looking for it, you never would have noticed, so only Kyle and Erasmus watched as MiMi died to save the world.
For once, neither of them had anything to say. They hung in the air, silent, hovering.
And then Kyle heard Sheriff Monroe over a police bullhorn: “Spread out! The Blue Freak is believed to be in the area still! His monster has been stopped, but he’s still on the loose!”
“My monster? My monster? That imbecilic, micro-brained —”
“Also,” the bullhorn went on, “a student is missing. Please be on the lookout for Kyle Camden, who may have been injured by the monster….”
Kyle stopped listening. He was missing! And conveniently, the Blue Freak (Azure Avenger! Azure Avenger! Grr — now they had him doing it!) had appeared. He had to get back quickly before anyone became suspicious. Or found his backpack in the cornfield.
He flew back to the cornfield as quickly as he could, staying low to the ground to take advantage of the ground cover. In moments, he’d recovered his backpack. He whipped off his costume at superspeed, then dressed just as fast. Finally, he stumbled out of the cornfield, directly into the brightness of a police officer’s flashlight.
“I found him!” the cop yelled.
Kyle allowed the cop to walk him over to an ambulance, where an EMT looked him over before pronouncing him fine. Kyle barely heard the guy. He was busy looking at the ambulance next to his, where Mairi sat on a stretcher, bundled up in a blanket. Her hair and face were filthy and she had three EMTs huddled around her.
He waved to her.
She coughed and nodded to him.
And then — to make the night perfect — Mighty Mike walked up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder.
And Mairi smiled.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
By the time school started on Monday, the story had spread to everyone, and Mairi had a new nickname: “Mighty Mike’s Girlfriend.”
“I am so totally not his girlfriend,” Mairi explained for the thousandth time on the bus that morning. “He saved my life from the Blue Freak’s monster and then he just stuck around to make sure I was okay.”
“I heard he flew you home,” said a kid.
Kyle — sitting next to Mairi, his arms crossed tightly over his chest — fired a beam of pure mental hatred at the kid. If beams of pure mental hatred actually existed, that kid would have been in a world of hurt. Kyle decided to work on pure mental hatred beams. They would be useful.
“Well, yes. He flew me home.”
“And I heard your parents made him stay for pie.”
Mairi sighed and slouched in the seat. “There was pie.”
“There was pie!” someone shouted to the rest of the bus. It passed along the bus like a wave: There was pie! There was pie! Pie! Pie!
“What was it like to fly with him?” a kid asked.
“What do his muscles feel like?”
“What does he look like up close?”
“Are his eyes as blue as they look from far away?”
“Did he kiss you good night?”
I’m going to hurt someone, Kyle thought. It’s inevitable.
“Did he —”
“SHUT UP ALREADY!”
Kyle glowered at everyone. Why were they all staring at him?
Oh, right — he was the one who bellowed for everyone to shut up. That’s why.
“I, uh, I have a headache,” he said, and slumped a bit more in the seat.
“Enough questions,” Mairi said. “Leave me alone, okay?”
Between her polite request and Kyle’s outburst, the message somehow got through. Kids turned back to their own seats.
“Sorry,” Kyle mumbled. “I’m just —”
“— tired of hearing about it. I know. I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault they’re all idiots. Just because he flew you home, they think he’s your boyfriend.” He spat out the last word like it was horse dung coated in battery acid.
Mairi shrugged. “That’s not what bothers me.”
Kyle vomited in his imagination. How could that not bother her?
“What bothers me,” she went on, “is that they all treat him like a celebrity or something. He’s very lonely. He’s just a kid, like us. He just wants friends. He was so happy just to sit in my kitchen and eat pie. You know?”
He’s an alien invader who wants to eat our brains. Kyle hoped that was true.
; “Yeah. I guess,” he said.
“And now that that horrible Blue Freak is around, it’s more important than ever that we have Mighty Mike!”
Kyle ground his back teeth. “You know, there’s no proof that the Blue Freak made the ground come alive. Maybe he —”
“Kyle! Whether he did it or not doesn’t matter. He was there and then he left. He left me to die! If not for Mike, who knows what would have happened?”
Kyle yearned to tell her the truth. He even opened his mouth and had the first sentence ready to roll right off his tongue.
But then he imagined government scientists strapping him down to a table. Studying him. Examining him. Maybe even dissecting him. Who knew?
He was the only person in the world who knew the truth — the truth about Mighty Mike, the truth about the Blue Freak. The truth about the dirt monster and the way the world had almost ended.
He knew. But there was absolutely nothing he could do with that knowledge. The only one he could tell was Erasmus … and Erasmus already knew and didn’t care.
Kyle shook his head and closed his mouth and said nothing for the rest of the bus ride.
At school, the Great Nemesis greeted Kyle. Just because his day didn’t suck enough already.
“Kyle, if you want to talk about what happened over the weekend …”
Kyle rolled his eyes. Did this woman get paid for every time she got Kyle into her office? “You know, I wasn’t the only one there that night, Great Nemesis.”
“But Mairi is your best friend. I’m sure it was very frightening to see her in danger. You’re a very sensitive child. That’s why you ran away into the cornfield when she was in danger. You couldn’t bear to watch.”
Was that what people were saying? That he’d run away? That he was a coward?
Kyle stood up on his toes so that he could glare into the Great Nemesis’s eyes. “Listen once and understand me: I did not run away. Kyle Camden does not run from anything. Or anyone. Understood?”
The Great Nemesis took a step back and cleared her throat. When she said nothing, Kyle marched off.
“You’re very upset!” she called after him. “I understand. Remember, my office hours are …”
Kyle blocked her out.
It got worse in homeroom.
Once again, the principal handed the morning announcements over to Sheriff Monroe. Kyle sat in a stew of misery and disbelief as he listened to what the sheriff had to say:
“I’m sure you all know about what happened over the weekend. If we thought that the Blue Freak was just here the one time on Mighty Mike Day, well, this weekend proved that’s not the case. He’s here to stay.
“We’ve been studying all the pictures and video of him. The FBI and the military have been helping, too. We’ve come to the conclusion that the Blue Freak may be the same age as Mighty Mike. In other words, he may be a kid, just like all of you.
“In fact, he may even live in Bouring. He may even be a student at this school.”
Kyle put his head down on the desk as everyone looked around the room in a sudden babble of excitement. Miss Moore shushed them.
“So,” Sheriff Monroe went on, “I’m asking all of you to keep your eyes and ears open. Pay attention. If you see something strange, something that doesn’t make sense, maybe someone acting differently … If you see something, say something. Report it to your teacher or the administration. Thanks for your time. Have a good day, kids.”
Kyle looked up. Mairi was beaming.
“They’re finally doing something about him,” she breathed. “Maybe they’ll catch him and stop him for good.”
Kyle put his head down again.
“Kyle? Are you okay? Is it your headache?”
Yeah. He had a headache. And its name was Mighty Mike.
Kyle suffered through school in a daze. As soon as he got home, he headed down to his lab. He still hadn’t cleaned up from the other day, when he had blown in here and modified MiMi in a burst of panicked speed.
He started straightening up, trying to organize things as best he could: Parts for the time machine in one corner. Nuclear reactor components on the bottom shelf. Biochemical forge stuff over by the water heater …
What was he supposed to do now? Everyone was after him. It wasn’t just Mighty Mike and the Great Nemesis and Sheriff Monroe anymore. Now it was the FBI and the army. Heck, the entire United States government!
Then again, the government wasn’t really all that good at getting things done as far as Kyle could tell, so maybe that part wasn’t a big deal. Still, he didn’t like the fact that now every single kid at Bouring Middle School would be watching out for any hint of the Blue Fr — Azure Avenger. He would have to be careful. Very careful.
His dad came home from work and came downstairs. “Hey, there, slugger! How — how’s it going?”
Kyle made a mental note to poke around inside the brain-wave manipulator and see if he could fix that stutter. And Mom’s twitch.
“Fine, Dad.”
Kyle wished he could talk to his dad. Granted, his father was — intellectually — as inferior to Kyle as a toad was to a normal human being, but he was older and had more experience in the world. There was a slight chance that Dad might have some sort of insight or advice that Kyle himself couldn’t generate with pure brainpower alone.
“What are you up to down here?” Dad asked brightly, looking around.
Kyle stared at the circuit board in his hands. It belonged to the control panel for the biochemical forge.
“School project.”
“Great!” Dad said, and slapped Kyle on the shoulder before going back upstairs.
Kyle sighed. He needed to clear his head.
Moments later, he soared over Bouring, staying high enough that anyone looking up would just see a shadow against the night sky. A bird, maybe, or a low-flying plane. He wished he didn’t have to wear a full face mask; it had felt nice to have the wind blowing through his hair. He could never fly like that again.
Of course, he’d probably get a lot of bugs in his teeth if he flew around barefaced like that anyway. He wondered how Mighty Mike avoided that, flying around with that stupid face of his hanging out all the time….
He cruised around Bouring once, pausing for a moment over the town square. The park was cordoned off by police tape, the statue of Micah Bouring still lying on its side where Mighty Mike had set it when Kyle had thrown it at the crowd. It was a crime scene, and half the law enforcement officers in a fifty-mile radius spent the days here going over every grain of dirt, looking for something that would help them identify the Blue — the Azure Avenger.
Kyle scanned the area quickly. It was past quitting time and no one was around.
He swooped down and grabbed the statue, then lifted it back into place on its damaged pedestal. It was a little wobbly, so he scooped up some gravel and forced it into the gap between the pedestal and the statue until Micah Bouring stood tall and proud.
There.
He took off again before anyone could see him and flew to the outskirts of town, where the lighthouse rose against the night sky. Tonight the main light was on, which meant that Mairi’s mom was inside, probably in the cramped office at the top of the lighthouse. Kyle hovered just beyond the railing that ran around the balcony there. He wanted to knock on the door and surprise Mairi’s mom, but he didn’t.
He wondered what the lighthouse was doing here. He had to admit it was a heck of a mystery, one he’d always wanted to solve. His pranks had occupied most of his thinking time, though, so he’d never gotten around to it. But maybe now that he had so much extra brainpower lying around he could —
“I saw what you did,” said a familiar voice.
Kyle spun around.
“To the statue,” Mighty Mike said, standing in the air, his hands on his hips. “Putting it back. That was nice. But you messed with a crime scene.”
Under his mask, Kyle’s cheeks flamed red with embarrassment. He hadn’t wanted to be caught
doing something nice. “I didn’t do it to be nice. I just like imagining the looks on their faces when they come back in the morning and the statue’s back in place.”
Mike sighed and crossed his arms over his chest, looking very adult all of a sudden. He drifted a little closer to Kyle. “It doesn’t have to be like this. Think of all the good we could do together. As partners.”
Kyle laughed. “Are you crazy?”
“I just wish you would use your powers for something productive,” Mike said.
“Making people realize how silly they are is productive.”
“Is that what you think you’re doing?”
“I know exactly what I’m doing,” Kyle said. “What I don’t know is what you’re doing here.”
Mike shrugged. “Helping.”
“Oh, and that’s the only reason you’re here? As if we can’t survive without you? Somehow the town of Bouring managed to get along before you showed up,” Kyle said. “The stalled cars got towed and the kittens got out of trees and the fires got put out and the bad guys got caught. All without you.”
Mike grinned. “But I’m better at it.”
Kyle clenched his fists. He wanted to punch that grin until there was nothing left of it.
“Now, I saw what you did with the statue,” Mike went on. “I know you’re not all bad. I could arrest you right now —”
“You can’t arrest anything. You’re just a kid.”
“Didn’t you hear? I was deputized by Sheriff Monroe today. After school. I guess you didn’t see it on TV.”
Deputized? Oh, great. Just what he needed. Bad enough Mike was a punk and a pain in the butt — now he was a punk and a pain in the butt with a badge.
Mike’s grin widened. “Nothing to say to that? No snappy comeback?”
Kyle wished he’d brought Erasmus with him. Erasmus would have had something to say.
“Just watch yourself,” Mike told him. “I would hate to have to fight you again. Because I won’t hold back next time.”
Kyle seethed. “I saved the entire town the other day. So don’t tell me to behave —”
“I would have taken care of things,” Mike said, his confidence so blinding and burning that it took every last ounce of willpower for Kyle to resist flying over to him and popping him one.