The Secret War

by Matt Myklusch

  “Okay, that was weird,” Allegra said after the doors closed.

  “I know,” Skerren agreed. “Midknight seemed … tense. That’s not like him.”

  “What do you think he’s working on?” Jack asked. “I mean, what angle of this case doesn’t involve Obscuro, Glave, or the virus?”

  “I don’t know.” Skerren shrugged. “But Midknight connects dots other people don’t even see. That’s what makes him so good. I’ve spent enough time as his sidekick to learn not to doubt him.”

  “Still,” Jack said. “I wonder who he’s meeting with.”

  As the elevator car raced toward the ground, another one flew up in the opposite direction alongside it, and Jack got his answer. Jack’s head spun toward the wall, and then turned up toward the ceiling, following the path of an elevator car no one else even knew was there.

  “What is it?” Allegra asked Jack.

  “I just saw him,” Jack said. “Through the security camera in the elevator car next to ours. He’s going up there now. It’s Clarkston Noteworthy.”

  “Noteworthy?” Skerren and Allegra both blurted out.

  “What’s he doing meeting with Noteworthy?” Skerren asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. He raised a hand and stopped the elevator in place. Then he motioned up toward the ceiling, bringing the elevator back up until it reached the level marked FACILITIES. Jack spread his hands apart, and the doors opened. “Let’s go find out.”

  Jack led the others past the building’s furnaces and boilers to the emergency stairwell. If he’d thought something weird was going on with Midknight before, he was sure of it now. He didn’t know what to make of this secret meeting between old political rivals. Jack dug into his bag at the foot of the staircase as Skerren came through the door behind him. He looked up at the stairs. They snaked up around the walls, going up level after level.

  “Jack, what are we doing in the staircase?” Skerren asked. “The penthouse is a hundred floors up. They’re going to be done talking before we get halfway there.”

  Jack found what he was looking for in his bag. “Not if we use this,” he said, pulling out an electronic device with a round lens on the front.

  “A camera?” Allegra asked.

  “No,” Jack said. “It’s something else I’ve been working on. We’re going to do a Laserline jump.”

  “A what?” Skerren asked.

  Jack clipped the device to his belt buckle and switched it on. The lens on the front turned red. “Quick, Allegra, wrap us up,” he said, motioning for them to grab on to him. The three children huddled close together, and Allegra wrapped her silvery arms around everyone several times. Jack hit another button, and a red light shot out of the contraption on his belt, firing a laser beam all the way up to the ceiling. The Laserline beam was solid, another Hard-Light Holo. It hooked into the ceiling and retracted. Jack, Skerren, and Allegra zipped up through the vertical corridor, the floors racing by them as they flew up the shaft. It was like bungee jumping in reverse. The line pulled Jack and the others up to the ceiling, where they stopped just short of crashing into it. A computerized voice on Jack’s belt said, “Laserline jump complete.” But it wasn’t quite complete. Jack and his friends were still dangling from the ceiling a hundred floors up.

  “Now what?” Skerren asked.

  Jack looked below him. It was a long way down. “Now … Allegra pulls us over to the stairs and I turn this thing off,” he said.

  Allegra grumbled and stretched out an arm. She pulled the three of them over the railing of the steps to the top floor. Jack turned off the Laserline, and they dropped down onto the landing. Jack rolled down a few steps before catching on to the banister. Once he stopped moving, he took the Laserline projector off his belt and looked at it. “Wow, that thing really worked.”

  “A little warning next time would be nice,” Allegra said. “If I’d gotten scared and liquefied, I could have dropped you both.”

  “I never doubted you for a second.” Jack smiled. “Besides, the Laserline was attached to my belt. You would have only dropped Skerren,” he added with a wink. Allegra laughed.

  “Ha-ha-ha,” Skerren said from the penthouse’s stairway door. “Midknight’s door is locked,” he said, trying the knob unsuccessfully. “I don’t think I should be cutting through it. I shouldn’t even be out here like this. I’m his sidekick.”

  Jack’s head shot up like he’d just heard a noise. “We don’t have to go in,” he said. “The Knightwing’s engine just turned on. They’re on the roof.”

  Jack, Skerren, and Allegra ran up one more flight of stairs and out onto the roof of Midknight’s building. The Knightwing was parked nearby with its entrance ramp lowered. Midknight and Noteworthy were standing in front of it arguing. They were such an unlikely duo. Jack and his friends crept quietly toward them, taking refuge behind power generators, air-conditioning units, and other equipment on the roof as they went.

  “And you’re certain this is the only way left for us to proceed?” Jack heard Noteworthy say to Midknight once he got close enough to hear.

  “Relax, Clarkston,” Midknight replied. “Last time I checked, I was the one taking all the risks here. You don’t have to worry about anything.”

  “Don’t I?” Noteworthy asked. “If you get caught, people are going to want to know who helped you. I can’t afford that kind of exposure with Smart stirring people up again. You’ve seen it out there—paranoia is the order of the day.” Noteworthy shook his head. “It’s amazing what that ignorant rabble will swallow. After everything that’s happened, they still don’t know anything.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” Midknight said. “They voted for you, didn’t they? You’re right, though…. They don’t know anything, and they won’t even know that much until it’s too late. That’s why we’re here now.”

  Noteworthy grumbled something Jack couldn’t make out, so he inched closer to hear what was being said. Jack put his weight on the generator in front of him as he leaned in to eavesdrop. It creaked under the strain, and Noteworthy jumped when he heard the noise. His hand lit up with energy. “Who’s there?” he demanded. “Show yourselves!”

  Jack recoiled from the generator. “Let’s get out of here!” he whispered to Skerren and Allegra. They all broke for the door to the stairs, running as fast as they could. Jack could hear Noteworthy running across the roof behind him, but he didn’t dare look back. He was the last one to the door and was almost through it when a flash of light whizzed by his face and dug into the door frame. He paused to look at the blazing disklike blade that was jammed into the wood. It had three sharp, slender protrusions that flared out like tongues of green electric fire. Skerren’s face appeared in the doorway to check it out. The two boys marveled in silence at the energy weapon in silence as Noteworthy’s footsteps grew louder.

  “What are you two doing?” Allegra said. “He’s coming!” She grabbed both of them and held on tight. “Hope you guys are up for another HALO jump.” She didn’t wait for an answer. She just stepped up onto the railing and leaped over the side. Seconds later the three children were all down on the ground and running out the front door of Midknight’s lobby. They ran for several blocks before they finally felt like they were in the clear. They sat down on the curb and took a minute to catch their breath.

  “I don’t believe it,” Skerren said, breathing heavily. “Do you realize what we just saw?”

  “I don’t know what we just saw,” Allegra admitted. “What part of it are you talking about?”

  “Noteworthy’s powers,” Skerren clarified.

  “Yeah, the energy blade,” Jack said, panting. “Pretty cool. I thought he was just superrich.”

  “You don’t understand,” Skerren said. “I recognized Noteworthy’s weapon. I’ve seen them in Varagog.”

  “So?” Jack asked. “What’s so important about Note-worthy’s weapon?”

  “Everything,” Skerren said. “It’s an old-style blade, but it has a name you kno
w. A name everybody knows.” Skerren gulped. He looked like even he couldn’t believe the words he was about to say. “It’s called a glave.”

  CHAPTER

  17

  Midknight Marauders

  “No way,” Jack said. “You don’t think … Noteworthy is Glave?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Skerren said. “You heard them up there. Tell me that didn’t sound suspicious.”

  Jack and Allegra looked at each other, then back at Skerren. Jack couldn’t deny that Midknight and Note-worthy’s conversation had sounded fishy, but no way had he expected Skerren to suggest what he was suggesting.

  “You’re serious about this,” Jack said. “You really think Noteworthy and Midknight might be Glave and Khalix?”

  “There’s gotta be some other explanation,” Allegra said. “What kind of spy uses a code name that’s the exact same thing as his powers? Isn’t that a little obvious?”

  “Maybe that’s the point,” Skerren replied. “It’s so obvious that people dismiss it as too obvious. Obscuro did say Glave was a master spy.”

  Jack mulled that over for a second. “He also said the Rüstov plot goes all the way up to Empire City’s greatest heroes,” Jack said. “I thought he was talking about me and what I knew about the virus, but if Midknight’s involved … that does make more sense.”

  “You think of yourself as one of Empire City’s greatest heroes?” Skerren asked.

  “No, but other people do,” Jack said. “At least they did.”

  “Guys, Noteworthy is in the Inner Circle,” Allegra said. “You don’t really think he could hide out under the Circlemen’s noses and fool them every day, do you?”

  “The Inner Circle!” Jack said, touching a hand to his temple. “I almost forgot.”

  “What?” Skerren asked.

  “When Smart came out with the first Glave transmission, it was Noteworthy who convinced everyone to keep it a secret,” Jack revealed. “It was only when Obscuro started selling secrets that Smart was able to go public with that.”

  Jack watched his friends’ eyes widen as the dreadful realization hit them at the same time.

  “We have to follow them,” Skerren said. “The Knightwing has a cloaking device, Jack. Can you still track it?”

  “Cloaks only work on other machines,” Jack said. “They don’t work on me.”

  Jack, Skerren, and Allegra headed back to Allegra’s AirSkimmer, still perched close to Midknight’s building. Allegra revved up the AirSkimmer. “Let’s go,” she said. They jumped onto Allegra’s ride and struck off after Midknight and Noteworthy. As it turned out, tracking the Knightwing was even easier than Jack had expected. Midknight and Noteworthy hadn’t even left Hightown. They had taken the ship only as far as Empire City’s Securamax Prison, located fifty blocks straight down into the guts of the borough, affectionately known to the locals as Lowtown.

  Securamax was a monolithic structure built at the lowest point in Lowtown. It looked like it had been forged out of a single piece of black iron; a giant domino without any white dots. The prison had no visible doors or windows, and no roads ran into it. MagLev highways curved around and away from the prison as if compelled by some unseen force as they wound their way up toward the more respectable sections of the borough. The chic towers of Hightown obscured Securamax as they reached toward the sky, leaving it behind like something better off forgotten.

  Jack, Skerren, and Allegra came to a halt on a MagLev down ramp overlooking the prison. Midknight and Noteworthy had the Knightwing running silently in the shadows nearby. In its cloaked state the ship was invisible to the Securamax detection sensors, but not to Jack.

  “Securamax,” Skerren said. “Doesn’t Smart run this place?”

  “Smart doesn’t run it,” Jack said. “The Circleman of Hightown does.”

  “Look!” Allegra said, pointing up at the foundation of one of Hightown’s finer towers, where the Knightwing was parked. A lone figure came flying out of the shadows. Only, he wasn’t flying, he was falling … gracefully. It was Midknight. He was holding a miniature glider as he dove toward the prison. When he was halfway there, he released the glider and let the winds carry it up and away as he continued his descent toward the side of the building and a very solid wall.

  “What’s he doing?” Skerren asked. “He’s going to crash.”

  But Midknight didn’t crash. He passed right through the wall as if it were a mirage. Skerren and Allegra were dumbfounded. Only Jack knew what was going on.

  “He had the phase frequency,” Jack said.

  “The what?” Skerren asked.

  “The phase frequency,” Jack repeated. “Securamax doesn’t have any doors in or out. You need to know the frequency it’s vibrating at to get in. If you have the right equipment, you can match the signal and walk right through the walls. Someone fed Midknight the frequency.”

  “Let me guess …,” Allegra said.

  “Noteworthy,” Jack said with a nod.

  “Or should we say Glave?” Skerren added.

  Jack reached out to the prison’s other defense measures with his powers and found that Noteworthy’s assistance didn’t stop at the prison wall. “He’s overriding the system,” Jack said. “He’s running the security cameras from the ship.”

  “Don’t they have people inside watching the monitors?” Allegra asked. “Can’t they tell something’s up?”

  “Noteworthy’s being smart about it,” Jack said, shaking his head in admiration as he looked through the cameras inside the prison. “He’s just tightening up the range of the cameras as they sweep the halls. Midknight’s moving in their blind spots. I can almost see him in the corner of each one, but not quite.”

  “What about the Keepers?” Skerren asked, referring to the Securamax guards.

  “What about them?” Jack asked. “This is Midknight we’re talking about.”

  “Jack’s right,” Allegra said. “It’s getting later,” she added, holding up the clock on the comm-bracelet Jack had given her. “Midknight’s getting stronger by the minute. It’s going to take every Keeper in the prison to bring him down.”

  “I don’t get this,” Jack said. “What’s he doing breaking into prison?”

  “The question is, who’s he breaking out?” Skerren asked.

  Jack nodded. That was the real question. He intended to find out the answer. He wondered who it could be. Another Rüstov collaborator? A squad of Left-Behinds? Jack kept a figurative eye on Midknight, tracking him through the prison by following the hijacked cameras. Noteworthy was turning them all away from Midknight as he moved through the prison. He was also feeding Midknight positions of Securamax’s Keepers so he could incapacitate them as necessary, or avoid them altogether. The Circleman of Hightown was clearing a path for his partner straight to the maximum-security level and a single electro-cell. Jack was surprised to find out who it belonged to.

  “I don’t believe it,” Jack said. “It’s Speedrazor. They’re busting Speedrazor loose.”

  “Speedrazor?” Skerren asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “None of this makes any sense,” Jack said.

  “But Midknight helped us put Speedrazor in there,” Skerren replied.

  “Maybe that’s not what that mission was about,” Allegra said. “Don’t forget, we only got Speedrazor because Jack nearly blew him up.”

  “He’s typing in the access code for the cell,” Jack told the others. “He’s almost got it open.”

  “That’s far enough, then,” Skerren said. “I don’t know what they’re doing, but they can explain it to the Keepers. Sound the alarm, Jack.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “This is over. Now.”

  Jack reached out with his powers and tripped the alarm. There was a loud noise like someone had thrown a massive switch, and suddenly the entire prison was awash in light. Sirens wailed at earsplitting volumes, and through the security camera lenses, Jack saw Midknight turn in surprise as two Keepers clad in jet-bla
ck super-suits sprang out of the wall next to Speedrazor’s cell. The bulky Keepers rushed him, and two more followed close behind, gang-tackling Midknight like linebackers on a football field. Outside, searchlights swept the area looking for intruders, and Jack helped them out by deactivating the Knightwing’s cloak and turning the spotlights onto its location. Noteworthy hastily backed up the ship, bumping into the surrounding buildings before turning around and fleeing the scene.

  “Noteworthy’s bugging out,” Skerren said.

  “Some partner,” Allegra noted.

  “There’s nothing he can do for Midknight now,” Jack said. “Securamax is on full lockdown. The phase frequency is set to shift every ten seconds. He can’t get back out through the walls the same way he went in.”

  But when Jack turned his attention back to the interior security cameras, he didn’t see Midknight being taken into custody. Instead he found a mound of unconscious Keepers piled up outside Speedrazor’s cell. Seconds later an explosion blasted through the face of the prison, and Midknight dove out into the night sky. He fired a grappling hook into the bottom of a MagLev highway and swung out into the air.

  “Then again …,” Jack said.

  Midknight sailed away from the prison as no fewer than fifty superhuman Keepers flew through the walls after him. Every one of them had superstrength and flight powers, but if Midknight was concerned about the odds, it was impossible to tell. He released the cable he was swinging on and went right at his pursuers, throwing himself at the nearest Keeper. Midknight latched on to a prison guard in midair and flipped over, using his weight and downward momentum to send the Keeper hurtling back into one of his comrades. Another guard came flying at him head-on, but Midknight got his hands over the Keeper’s shoulders and forced him down. He stepped hard on the back of his assailant’s head to keep him down, and sprang up to deliver a devastating uppercut to another Keeper who was flying in from above.

  “Man, he’s good,” Jack said. He watched Midknight take a punch across the face from one Keeper just as another one lowered his shoulder and rammed into him, knocking him through the air like he’d been shot out of a cannon. The vigilante detective regained his bearings midflight and turned to deliver a flying kick at a guard who was flying in to collect him. As Midknight continued to fall through the air, he looped a line of cable around the leg of yet another Keeper and used him to swing onto a MagLev overpass directly above Jack and his friends.