by J. A. Dauber
NOW. SATURDAY. 5:21 P.M.
So now here I am, sitting on my bed. In my room. Waiting.
He’ll come in. We’ll hug. We’ll take the picture right away, and—
I just realized something. No one told me what to do with the picture once I take it.
I mean, it’s not like I have Mr. Jones’s e-mail address…and I’ve never been able to text him. I can’t text to a number with no area code. It’s always been one-way.
Was he assuming that since he has access to my phone he’ll just find the photo there?
Or did he never intend to show it to her?
But he has to, right? I mean, that’s the whole proof part of proof of life.
I just had another thought. This one’s worse.
Mr. Jones is an evil mastermind. It wouldn’t be too hard for him to make a fake photo or video, would it? I mean, people on YouTube do it all the time. And if he did that…then he wouldn’t have to let my dad go in the first place.
And when you think about it: Why would he? My dad may not be a genius supervillain like my mom—at least, I don’t think he is—but he’s dangerous for Mr. Jones to have walking around. I mean, my dad knows who he is. He’s seen his face.
And so have I.
And I don’t have the Mayhem suit anymore.
Listen to me, talking to myself like this. I’m freaking myself out here. It’s Dad at the door. It’s got to be. It’s not going to be, I don’t know, Assassin and two of his Bloody Front buddies looking for revenge. Right?
More knocking.
Maybe Dad’s just trying to be sensitive. He knows this is going to be tough. He’s not going to burst in on me. He’ll let me come to the door. Take my own time.
The problem is that I have no idea if that’s the kind of thing Dad would do. It’s been a long time.
The knocking’s stopped. I wonder if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Who’s there?
NOW. SATURDAY. 10:14 P.M.
Yes!
Yes yes yes yes yes yes!
I can’t believe that worked!!!!
So. Here’s the first thing. I was right.
Mr. Jones was not, in fact, planning to arrange a happy—okay, semi-happy, given the circumstances—reunion. He was planning a double-cross the entire time. I bet he was on the phone to Assassin the minute my mom took off, giving him my home address.
It’s just that by the time they got to my house, I wasn’t there.
I was approximately one thousand feet away.
Which is not a lot, it’s true.
It just seems like more when the distance is vertical.
Maybe I should explain. Now that we’re back home.
I thought maybe the Bloody Front would have planted a bomb or poison gas when it made a big mess of the place looking for me. But as soon as we got in, Mom swept it with every piece of technology she has. She swears it’s clean. So I have a little more time now.
As soon as I’m done with this, we’re going to sit down and have dinner.
All three of us.
And Mr. Jones, if you’re listening in, you might enjoy hearing the story of how you got absolutely, positively hosed.
What do I mean, saying if. I know you’re listening.
In fact, we were counting on it.
THIS AFTERNOON
TAKE TWO
Mom had figured it out right away. The double-cross. I mean, even I’d suspected it, and I’m not 1 percent the genius she is. But she didn’t say anything about it. Not until we were alone. Not until she had shot out the computers and, along with them, your method of spying on us, Mr. Jones.
I imagine that to you it looked like she had lost it. Let me tell you something, Leonard. Mom never loses control. Mom is in charge.
I thought I’d understood that. But until I saw her lower the guns, still smoking, bullet casings clattering on the floor, and then heard her say, “Come on, Bailey, we have a lot to do,” I don’t think I had any idea.
You see, Mr. Jones, you did her a bit of a favor, arranging your final battle—what you thought was your final battle—in Computer Hacker Central. Mom knows electronics inside and out. She built the Mayhem suit, after all. And now she was surrounded by them. Some of it blown up and shot to pieces, yeah, but there was enough in working order—she had kept enough in working order; she’d aimed very carefully—for her to do what she needed to do.
You’ve probably figured out what that was by now, wherever you’re hiding. I wonder where that could be. A supersecret invisible submarine? A private island? I don’t care, really. As long as you stay there…
Three things she needed to do.
One: Fix my phone.
Maybe you thought there was only five minutes’ worth of conversation in almost an hour because we spent the rest of the time crying and comforting each other. That’s what it sounded like, right?
Well, we did do that. For about thirty seconds. And then Mom chopped and looped and slowed the digital stream so that those thirty seconds took up about forty-five minutes. If you were listening in—and we knew you were—you thought you were eavesdropping on what was going on.
But you weren’t. Leonard.
Time elapsed for number one: about, I don’t know, three or four minutes. Mom was working fast.
Two: She’d already messed with time. Now it was space’s turn. You’re not the only person who can play with GPS results, it turns out. The phone showed us spending most of the hour in the ravine near our house. But we were not. We were in the May-cave, working hard.
You were on the lookout for us to mess with our phones, see. But you didn’t expect us to mess with the local cell towers. The ones that report phones’ locations. The ones that Mom had hacked a month ago. And hadn’t done anything with until now.
Time elapsed for number two: less than a minute.
Most of our time was spent on thing number three.
A homing device. Putting that together with stuff liberated from Kaz’s computers was pretty straightforward. For my mom, I mean, not for me. The hard part was the plastic coating.
Plastic coating, of course, so that she could swallow it.
The only way to make sure she could get it into your secret hideout undiscovered.
I can’t believe I’m using those words unironically, but that’s what it is, right? You hid out for years there, in secret…so secret hideout it is.
Well, was, anyway. Now it’s charcoal.
Back to my tale of triumph.
Before we wrapped up, we checked, double-checked, and triple-checked that the device signal was working. It showed up loud and clear on my receiver.
The one inside the second suit of armor.
* * *
I know, right? Whaaat? I mean, second suit of armor, what’s that about?
Sorry…I’m a little punchy. Kicking some major Mr. Jones butt tends to do that to you.
The point is—Leonard—you didn’t know about the second Mayhem suit. To be fair, I didn’t know about the second Mayhem suit. But I should have realized a lot earlier that the I’m-just-working-my-contacts business Mom was giving me after I found out she was Mayhem was too…passive for someone like her.
I mean, this is someone who used to rob banks with you. She doesn’t twiddle her thumbs.
She was building another Mayhem suit. And as soon as she was finished with it, she was going to use it. On you.
But things were more difficult the second time around since she knew you were watching her every move. She assumed you had her credit cards monitored, her movements tracked. She was being constantly watched by covert drones. It wasn’t like she could go out and buy thousands of dollars’ worth of electronics equipment to build Mayhem Jr.
Which means it took forever.
Even now, after everything t
hat’s happened, I’m only beginning to understand what you put her through. I knew she was depressed after the disappearance. But now I don’t know how she avoided going insane.
Somehow she stayed sane, and she built the suit. Day by day, week by week, month by month, she did a thousand little bits of soldering and programming. And under cover of darkness, she built it. She persisted, that’s how the saying goes, right? She definitely did. And she built it.
At least, mostly. I mean, you’ve seen it close up, Leonard. I wouldn’t exactly call it a finished product. In our Shakespeare unit this year we read Hamlet, and there’s this description that stuck with me where Hamlet calls his uncle a king of shreds and patches. And that’s what this second suit is. A thing of shreds and patches.
It looks like it was put together inside a junkyard. There are pieces that stick out, and I’m not going to lie, it’s a pain to put on. It’s not made of whatever the real Mayhem suit is, so it doesn’t armorize. You have to climb into it. And when I did, there are these snaggy pieces that gave me scratches up and down my left calf, and I think the way the missile strut supports are uneven has given me a neck crick that might have me needing a chiropractor.
But you have to admit, it got the job done.
My mom had had no intention of letting me know about it. Two Mayhem suits meant two Mayhems, and as far as she was concerned that was one Mayhem too many. She had been walking on knives, last night, trying to decide if she should use the suit to rescue me. Knowing that if she had to, she would, but that it would mean I would insist on using it myself. And so that was how it was going to stay—her in Mayhem Classic, the second suit in mothballs, and me packed off to some black-hat babysitting service—until you made that impossible, with what you did to Kaz, and with your so-called deal.
Ironically, this plan let me be the one to beat you in the end. I almost feel grateful. Almost.
But, you may ask, why didn’t I find the suit before? All that time I spent in the May-cave? Well, it wasn’t in the May-cave, at least not after my first visit—and I was, um, kind of distracted that first time. Mom moved it after she knew I’d found the lab. To a perfect hiding place, the one area of our house she knew no teenage boy would ever go of his own free will.
The laundry room.
It wasn’t even hidden that well. Or maybe a better way to put it is that it was hidden really well, but in plain sight. It was camouflaged as piled-up junk in the back corner. I had seen it, in fact, when I’d searched the house, but figured it was some rusty junk from the garage. And it had a unique repeller field on it. Not a high-tech one: I’d just been afraid that if I asked about it, Mom would assign me some chore like taking it to the recycling center. So I paid as little attention to it as possible, which was, of course, exactly Mom’s plan.
It’s sad when you think you’re so clever, but it turns out other people can read you like a book.
Maybe you know what I mean.
Anyway, when Mom shook the suit out, and the magnetic fields locked on, and the pieces came flying and clacking together—not quite as cool as armorizing, but pretty freaking incredible—I told her I was ready for anything. Any plan. Any mission.
And I could see from the look on her face that she wasn’t entirely sure that was true.
She saw me seeing her, and tried something like, It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s the armor I’m worried about, but she could tell I wasn’t buying it, and she changed tack.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that…you’re my little boy, you know? And no matter what, I’m always going to see you that way…. Sometimes that means I don’t give you enough credit for what you’ve accomplished.”
I knew that with seventeen minutes left before our deadline, it wasn’t the time or place for family therapy, but I have to confess: It did feel good to hear that. I could have done with a bit more—there had been a few years without much in the way of positive reinforcement—but General Mom, having seen she’d rallied her troops, moved on.
She told me you were coming for me. Not in person, since you’d be too busy gloating and celebrating your triumph, or, maybe, practicing your explanation to Mom about how Dad had suffered a tragic accident on his way home. You’d send someone. Within a few minutes of her taking flight.
Someone to take care of loose ends.
“I hate putting you in this position,” she said. “All I want to do is keep you safe. But we’re beyond that now. This is the only way to be safe. For you, first and foremost, and for all of us.”
You know, thinking about it now, it’s not clear that that was true. Wouldn’t it have been safer for me if Mom had told you to go pound sand? It would have sacrificed Dad, but she would have been around to protect me…. I mean, it worked out—obviously—but it wasn’t what you’d call the safe play.
Or was there no safe play? If she had done that, wouldn’t we have spent our lives looking over our shoulders, waiting for the next time you came back? I don’t know. All I know for sure is that Mom isn’t the type of parent I grew up thinking she was. Safe, regular.
I guess I know one other thing. None of that matters. Because there was absolutely no way I was not doing this. To save my dad, and now, my mom. But it was more than that. It was for Caroline, and what you did to her.
And for me. For the lying, and the manipulation. For what you did to me.
* * *
I was not to engage.
That’s what Mom said. No matter what.
Yes, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for me to put on the suit—well, not the easiest, because like I said that thing scratched like you wouldn’t believe—and to blast whatever welcoming party you were sending me into the stratosphere. Since Mom had designed this suit on her own, there was no back door, no remote control. Neither you, nor anyone you sent, had any idea this was coming.
A point which I think has been made more than clear by now.
But there was a chance that at least one of your henchmen would report it before I took them out. I mean, there was no guarantee you wouldn’t be watching the whole operation on helmet cameras. And that would have ruined the big show.
So it had to look like I was just a kid on the run. Like I had gotten spooked, and bolted, and they had just missed me.
They went into the ravine, didn’t they, Leonard? I bet that’s what they did. They figured I’d slipped into the May-cave, then went out the back. That was what we thought might happen. Hoped, anyway. It’s a long ravine, with lots of places for a person my size to hide. Even with thermal sensors and night-vision binoculars and whatever other gadgets they were packing, it probably would’ve taken them fifteen, twenty minutes—after they finished searching the house—to check and clear it. I was long gone.
By the way, the next time you talk to them, tell them I don’t appreciate what they did to my room.
Or maybe I’ll get the chance to tell them myself.
The hardest part of the plan—at least for me—was the lying.
It’s true. I’d gotten better at lying over the past few months. Not as good as you, of course. I’d lied to my mom, to Rebecca, to—to Caroline, and, let’s not forget, to myself. But most of those lies were…natural is the best word I can think of. They spilled out, one after another, and they sort of…gained momentum.
Doing it intentionally—recording the story we’d rehearsed about how I was sitting at home waiting for Dad—that was harder. In reality, I was strapping on the backplates, configuring the visor settings, adjusting the boot jets. Thinking of everything. Remembering the order Mom and I had agreed on. Keeping my breath steady and even, trying not to repeat my takeoff checklist under my breath.
You didn’t notice, did you, Mr. Jones? I’ll take that as a compliment.
You know what? I wonder whether you even listened at all, once Mom was on her way. You probably just…turned me off, stopped li
stening, since I didn’t matter anymore.
Well, I bet you’re listening now.
It took forever to do all that. Mom had gone through it with me half a dozen times. When I told her I’d gotten it, she made me tell her how to do it backward, then every second step, then every fourth. I actually thought at one point that if this did end up being our last hour together, my last memories of her would be really annoying.
But it worked. Even while I was fake pouring out my heart on the recording—and, yeah, once or twice, having some genuine emotional moments—even while I was keeping an eye on the video feeds Mom had installed on our front door, I was assembling, checking, and rechecking the suit, making sure it was ready to go.
And that it was fully armed.
So the moment the screens showed a gas and electricity truck driving up to our house, and the monitor’s magnification control spotted the scars running down one of the workmen’s cheeks, I was out of there.
All that I think I hear a knock and Wouldn’t Dad still have his own key? routine was delivered straight to you from high in the sky. I mean, I had cloud cover by the time they hit our living room.
And I was on the hunt, following Mom’s homing device to wherever you were taking her.
Our big X-factor—the variables in the plan we had no way of accounting for—were speed and distance. The device was telling me that you were flying Mom somewhere at approximately two hundred miles an hour. Not even close to the real Mayhem suit’s top speed. But still too fast. Mom was basically encased inside a fighter jet. And I very much wasn’t.
The suit gave me some protection, but I could feel the wind punching me, smacking me around, threatening to tear my head right off my neck. At least that’s what it felt like. I couldn’t go half as fast as she was going, plus she had had a massive head start.
Luckily, you didn’t take her very far.
* * *
I guess it’s not shocking that you wanted to be near us—near her, I mean. It’s the one thing that’s kept you going all these years, right, Leonard? And distances are tricky things. It’s like when someone you know from camp lives twenty miles away and goes to a different school, and you never see him during the school year. You could have been thirty miles away from our town and we’d still never have run into you.