Got To Be A Hero

by Paul Duffau

  Kenzie welcomed the form drills. The shake in her hands lessened with the ritualistic activity. She concentrated on perfecting each action, her heavy pants popping on each kick. Her sick-to-the-stomach reaction to her destruction of the heavy bag faded.

  She had one what the hell happened thought, and skittered away from it, afraid of the answer. It came back and demanded attention.

  Magic had to be summoned, it didn’t just show up and infect inanimate equipment, but her experience had seemed wholly real. Her arm hurt where the knave blocked her backfist. Surreptitiously, she looked. No bruise.

  Jules worked with Kenzie, who was the only red belt in the class, and picked on her smallest flaws. Kenzie sought to meet the exacting instructions down to the nearest millimeter in targeting, and a fraction of a second in timing.

  Jules, finally showing a hint of satisfaction, nodded.

  “Good,” she said, though her voice held a guarded quality that was unfamiliar to Kenzie. “Take over the yellows and run them through the first form. We’ll break in about ten minutes for the end of class.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” replied Kenzie.

  The class finished on schedule, and Kenzie bowed off the floor after the mad rush of the youngsters. Jackson handed her the gear bag, and with a quick thanks, she slipped the strap over her shoulder.

  “Kenzie,” Jules said.

  Kenzie stopped at the door, stepped aside to let Sophie hurtle past, and glanced at Jules.

  That expression was back.

  Kenzie’s stomach fluttered. “I was doing what you told me to do.”

  With a wag of her head, Jules said, “I know. It’s equipment, and you were not abusing it.”

  Kenzie stood without speaking, dreading whatever Jules would say next. She gripped the strap on the gear bag until her knuckles went white.

  The soundless moment grew, and Kenzie’s vision narrowed to Jules’s face. Finally, the older woman spoke, keeping her voice low, but touched with bewilderment.

  “Did you know you were fighting with your eyes closed?”

  Chapter 26

  Mitch stared at the screen of his phone, and specifically at the time, which still showed thirteen minutes to eight. Finally, the digit changed, and the next eternity of a minute began.

  Kenzie had texted him after the yogurt date. It had been short, and sharp, like she was mad at him. After that, twenty-four hours of nothing.

  He had clocked the drive to the meet-up spot after school. Eighteen minutes, and they were supposed to meet at nine. Per the text, she’d meet him at the road that overlooked her home. He’d walked to the meeting spot, dropping down the winding roads from the top of the ridge. The houses got fancier and more expensive with every hairpin, and they aligned themselves with the lake, large windows or decks facing Lake Washington. He found the spot right where Kenzie said it would be, a small gray-graveled turnout. He didn’t stay long, and remained hidden by flowering rhododendrons, careful to make sure the Jackson dude didn’t spot him. Then, reconnoiter completed and the route memorized, he had headed home.

  Now Mitch shook his shoulders, loosening them, releasing the memory to worry about the moment.

  He sent a text message, letting Kenzie know that he’d be there, nine sharp. He almost asked what was wrong, thinking there was a reason her message had been abrupt. Thought about it, but didn’t.

  Hated, hated, hated feeling needy, but no word, nothing, all day.

  Did she change her mind?

  What would her father do if she told him about Mitch?

  He worried over that for five more minutes, before reaching the unsettling conclusion that no one had tried to wipe his memory—or run him over in a fake hit-and-run.

  Needing another thing to fret over, or distract him from his impending date with Kenzie, he let his thoughts shift to Hunter. Now that he’d confided in his friend, the dude was on his ass with a thousand questions. Bonus points for the ones Mitch hadn’t already thought of.

  He still kept a close watch on Hunter’s hands.

  What the hell had he been thinking, asking her out?

  Cute girl, kissable lips, the honest but inconvenient voice in his head said in answer.

  Leave early, he decided, and leave the voices, second guesses, behind.

  He hoisted himself off his bed, eased open the door, and peered down the hallway.

  The house smelled of burned dinner, and sounded like the gunfight at O.K. Corral. Nobody’d even know he was gone. Maybe. Until he fired up the Camaro. It was parked up on the street and down one house. His uncle’s total lack of curiosity, or hell, basic intelligence, was not his problem.

  He meandered past the entrance to the living room like he was headed to the fridge, then kept going into the garage. Four seconds later, and cursing vehemently with a skinned shin because he forgot about the forty-ton car jack in the middle of the concrete floor, he exited out the pedestrian door to the side yard.

  The Camaro was conveniently close to this side of the house, and he sprinted for it, leaping over the crappy-looking shrubs that the neighbors planted a couple of years ago, and crossing their yard in a flash.

  On the other side of his house, Muffles sounded the alert that all was not well.

  Stupid dog can’t even see me.

  A stray thought crossed his mind on who was smarter, his uncle or Muffles. He smirked in the almost-twilight. His uncle, but only by a whisker.

  Mitch went around the rear of the car and opened the driver’s door, dropping into the seat in a rush. A metallic smell permeated the air, with fresh Bondo dominating. He gave the interior a fast once-over. The seats were freshly cleaned, and the floor was swept out. It would do.

  He pumped the throttle twice and squinted as he turned the key. The engine came to life with an agreeable, if too loud, rumble. With a twist in his gut, he shifted into first, eased out the clutch, and glided away from the curb and onward, toward Kenzie.

  From the rear, Mitch looked down on the two-story Tudor, weathered brown timber beams crisscrossing with stucco that looked like buckskin stretched on the wood. Moss grew on the weathered cedar shakes on the roof, with the mottled sea-green surface of Lake Washington for a backdrop. A flat black asphalt driveway to the left snaked past the iron gate that he’d entered by when he’d returned Kenzie’s permit. It followed the running ivy on the red brick of the perimeter wall and wrapped around to the back. Past the unruliness of the ivy, the landscaping gave way to precisely trimmed lawn, the kind he assumed all rich folks had because they never had to mow and rake it. The flagstone path pulled extra color from the setting sun. It disappeared at a gazebo dripping in purplish wisteria blossoms.

  An attached garage extended to the rear of the compound. It bore an anachronistically modern look and felt like an afterthought to the rest of the home. Probably was, thought Mitch, guessing that the house might have predated the advent of automobiles.

  A trio of towering old red cedars stood sentry at the back wall beside the garage and obscured his view to the remainder of the yard, so Mitch turned his attention to the upper story of Kenzie’s mini-mansion.

  On the rear gable, a pair of large windows, the frame and purlins stark white against the rustic wood trim, straddled the peak of the garage, situated like eyes over a downturned mouth.

  He wondered how Kenzie planned on leaving the property undetected; the brick wall securing the perimeter of the compound stood tall and uninterrupted along the back.

  Mitch hunkered down to wait. Burnt reds of the fading sun reflected in the glazing, lending the profile a steady and demonic glower. He shivered under that gaze but told himself it was excitement.

  Chapter 27

  If he didn’t stop checking out her chest, she was going to stab him with her fork, Kenzie decided. Across from her sat Aric, a twenty-something engineer. She slid sideways to hide behind the centerpiece, red and pink dahlias in a clear vase set in the middle of the white tablecloth. Aric ate in jerky twitches and, with his dark eyes and nar
row face, reminded her of a ferret.

  “No, I think we have the worst of the problems resolved,” he said, talking shop with her mother, who sat to Kenzie’s right at the head of the table. His voice grated, unctuous and arrogant at the same time.

  She could see him smile like he was humble. It came across as condescending. “The mathematics is pretty intense stuff, even for me.”

  He’s bragging that he’s good at math? thought Kenzie. She stopped her eyes from rolling with a determined effort.

  It wasn’t that hard to fill in between the lines. Knowing that Aric was a wizard, even if a lame one, and an engineer, she figured that they were talking about the amplifier for magic. She turned her wrist just enough to check the time. Thirty minutes until she was supposed to meet Mitch.

  Move it along, people.

  The idea of increasing her power with an amplifier left her scary-excited, though, and she had to know more.

  Her heart thumped against her chest, and she ducked her head for a moment, unsure whether Mitch, the idea of sneaking out, or the invention was responsible. All three, maybe.

  The mock battle at the studio weighed on her. She’d had no idea what to tell Jules at the studio and had mumbled something about using her imagination, but the tightness in her gut questioned that. She had never heard of magic bleeding over unbidden, but two weeks ago, mechanical magic would have been incomprehensible. Consequently, she paid close attention to Aric, which had the unfortunate side effect of making him think she was interested.

  Kenzie fake-smiled to keep him talking and sliced off a bite-size piece of the T-bone lamb chop. The smell of the garlic rub added to the taste as she put the piece into her mouth and chewed. Her Brussels sprouts sat untouched and unloved on the side of her plate closest to Aric.

  The smile worked at getting him talking again, mostly to the other adults. That didn’t stop the man from sliming her with his eyes as he periodically glanced at her.

  “I don’t want to make this too technical, but the essential bottleneck entailed designing the nanoelectronics, mostly quantum dots, to handle the random inputs and simultaneously store energy. The theoretical underpinnings have been known for quite some time. French physicist Olivier Costa de Beauregard suggested the possibilities back in the seventies, but trying to translate the base theory into an operable piece of equipment has been difficult, to say the least. Since our abilities derive from innate qualities permitting us to directly manage quanta, what the less educated call magic—”

  Kenzie saw the fast wrinkle form and disappear on her father’s forehead at the implication that using the term “magic” was for rubes. Her father had been quiet during dinner, setting a steady and uncompromising gaze on the engineer.

  Aric plowed on, oblivious.

  “—what we had to do was create an electronics device that could not only detect energy at that level, but act on it. Events at the level of quanta are subject to probabilistic outcomes, and the more closely we tried to control one aspect of the quanta, say spin, the more the others would diverge. The randomness made designing anything tricky.”

  “But you have a working model now?” asked her father, interjecting himself into the conversation for the first time.

  “A prototype, yes. We’ve been able to increase the input by over fifty-two percent, but we’ve encountered some scattering issues. Until the lab gets better shields, we don’t dare try to move forward.”

  “The repairs should be complete this week,” said Sasha.

  Aric nodded and shoveled a forkful of potatoes into his mouth. His eyes wandered again while he chewed. Always in the same direction. Gross. Kenzie gripped her fork tighter and slouched behind the flower arrangement.

  Her father put his fork down in a deliberate fashion and placed both palms on the tablecloth. The expression on his face put Kenzie on alert.

  “Why don’t you dare to move forward, as you put it?” asked Raymond Graham. His tone was detached, and though the question was directed at Aric, the cop coldly evaluated his wife.

  “Stray energy,” said Aric, with a breezy wave of his right hand. “There is a certain amount of background energy, ‘noise’ if you will. Think of MAGE, that’s what we called the amplification hardware, think of it like a laser, highly concentrated energy. You get normal background interference, and it creates a speckle pattern, degradation of the beam. Same thing happens with mag— with our manipulation of energy, except our speckle pattern causes unpredictable changes.”

  “It’s really quite under control, dear,” said Sasha, exasperation written on her face. “The extra shielding will mitigate the problem. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Her father drummed the table with his fingers like he was preoccupied with another thought. He seemed to make an internal decision, and fixed his gaze on Aric.

  “How did you discover the problem with the background radiation?”

  “It’s not really radiation—”

  Raymond interrupted, with words that had zero warmth. “The problem.”

  Kenzie recognized the tone: cop voice, master inquisitor. Uh-oh.

  Aric sat taller in his straight-backed chair.

  Kenzie sneaked another look at her watch. Eighteen minutes.

  She needed to get out of here.

  Aric spoke, trying to match her father’s gravity and failing miserably.

  “We had an accident at the lab, no big deal. All the equipment is replaceable, and one person got hit with some glass, but nobody was seriously hurt.”

  “Raymond, the company and the manner in which it is run are my purview. I think interrogating one of my employees, at a dinner that we invited him to no less, is plainly interfering, and beyond rude.”

  Kenzie glanced from one parent to the other, seeking an opportunity to vanish from the table. Her mother sat stiff with anger, lips pursed. Her father bent his head fractionally to acknowledge her words and then turned to Aric.

  “Flying glass implies an explosion of some sort.”

  “An ‘explosion’ is not accurate.” Aric sounded testy. “It was an energy overload with diffused effects throughout the lab.”

  “The lab was unshielded.”

  “I told you that we’re fixing it.”

  “You have a means of detecting such an overload.”

  “Raymond,” said Sasha, but he froze her with a look and a pointing finger.

  “You should have told me,” he said. She blanched and looked away, putting her hands on her lap.

  Aric shifted in his seat. Kenzie read the confusion in his fidgeting. He turned to Sasha, seeking help, saw her face, and with reluctance turned back to Raymond.

  Her father continued his line of attack.

  Kenzie observed, fascinated even as the time slipped away.

  “Yes or no, you have a means of detecting a release of magic.”

  “Yes.”

  “The means of detection is based on science, not magic.”

  Aric appeared ready to argue the use of the terms, thought better of it, and answered. “That is correct.”

  “Your device is replicable.”

  “Well, only if someone knew what they were looking for. It’s not like—”

  “Yes or no.”

  The harshness in her father’s voice cowed Aric.

  “Yes,” he said, shoulders slumping.

  Her father turned to her mother. “You really should have told me. It would have saved chasing after the ghosts of missing Families.”

  “The incident in the lab had nothing to do with . . .” Her mother didn’t complete the statement.

  Kenzie’s face tightened. She looked back and forth between her parents. With a sudden clarity, she knew that the explosion and the attack on her were somehow related, and that her mother had withheld the information from her father.

  The rattling of her fork against the rim of her plate attracted the attention of the adults. Kenzie stood. Her chair grated against the wood floor as it slid back.

  �
�I can’t believe you lied,” she said, staring hard at her mother. She snorted. “No, wait, I can. I mean, what’s a daughter compared with magic and the chance to increase the fortunes of the Family, right, Mother? The assholes that attacked me were trying to get to you, weren’t they? It was never about me, but I’m the one that gets to get babysat by Jackson forever, and can’t run, or go hang out or anything.”

  A rushing wind filled her ears, and her hands itched to move, but a scrap of memory from the studio intruded.

  Control, gotta get control.

  Kenzie ground her teeth together and gave a hard shake of her head. She spun, banged her knee against her chair, and managed not to curse out loud even as the chair stuttered over the hardwood.

  “McKenzie, your behavior is inexcusable. You will come back to this table and apologize to Aric,” said her mother to her back.

  Kenzie held her course, headed for the stairs. She couldn’t trust her anger not to engulf her.

  Another chair scraped. A moment later tendrils of unseen gossamer touched her skin, almost tickling with their lightness.

  She stopped on the first step and pivoted against the increasing pressure. Before her stood her mother, face like a high priestess betrayed by a novitiate’s apostasy. Her hands wove the Cordaesus spell without the usual grace, the interlocking motion taut with rage. Meanwhile, she muttered the incantation, binding the magic tighter and tighter to Kenzie’s skin until it began to pinch. Surprise overrode anger, and she stood stock-still.

  A detached part of Kenzie’s mind analyzed the spell, and she drew upon the swirling energies around her. It was as though she could visualize the knots; she also saw how to undo them. The glow of the energy shone for her only, faint but definite.