by Logan Jacobs
“Hey,” I said to the security guard.
“Uh, yeah?” he asked.
“How much do you know about the prison breakout?” I asked.
“The breakout?” He blinked at me a few times. “Uh, I don’t really know much about it, honestly.”
“Tell me what you do know,” I said. “It’ll help me figure out what kind of extra upgrades I need to make.”
“Uh, well, it was kinda weird,” he said as he scratched the back of his neck. “Some guys who claimed to be with Slade Technologies came in and said they were gonna make some upgrades like you’re doing. They knew all the access codes and stuff so we just kinda let them, and--”
“You did what?” I couldn’t believe that the Shadow Knight hadn’t told me that. “Did you cross check that with Slade Technologies?”
“We told them, for sure,” he said. “They didn’t, uh, seem too happy, but then Dan Slade himself came down and checked over everything, and he said it was fine.”
That was definitely news to me.
That meant that the Shadow Knight knew that the prison’s security system had been sabotaged, but he hadn’t done anything to prevent it. Maybe it had been some kind of hidden virus that was released on a timer, and he hadn’t been able to find it.
I thought that was bizarre in its own way, because why wouldn’t that have been the first thing he checked for? Whoever had sabotaged his systems must have known exactly how Dan Slade worked, and that meant they’d known exactly how to hide something in his own technology.
It was the kind of thing that I would never let happen because I would never let myself be as predictable as the Shadow Knight.
I also wondered why Slade hadn’t told me that it had been his own lapse in security that had caused the outbreak of prisoners. I guessed if I really thought about it, we’d been so preoccupied with figuring out a plan to recapture the supervillains that I hadn’t even asked Slade about how the outbreak happened in the first place. I’d honestly assumed that it was a pretty normal occurrence in Grayville.
But what if this one wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill prison break? What if it was a targeted breakout?
The mastermind behind it had to be someone whose name Slade wanted to keep quiet, and I could think of only one supervillain in Grayville that the Shadow Knight respected enough to keep his identity hidden from me, and it was also the only supervillain I could think of with enough devious intelligence to pull off something like this: the Maniac.
That name had started to crop up a lot lately.
“Moving to the fourth,” Norma informed me.
“Okay, thanks,” I replied to both Norma’s voice and to the security guard.
“No problem,” he replied, and then he turned away from me to watch the surveillance screens again.
Part of me wanted to confront the Shadow Knight for keeping such a vital piece of information hidden from me, but I knew I didn’t need to do that just yet. It was probably better if he didn’t know how much I knew, but this game he played with the Maniac was really getting on my nerves. It was like the two of them were constantly fighting to protect each other, instead of actually acting like enemies.
I could feel a confrontation looming on the horizon, and I wasn’t sure if it was between me and the Shadow Knight, or between me and the Maniac.
It was probably both.
Since Norma was nearly done installing the bombs, I scrolled casually through the rest of the prison’s security system, but the more I searched through it, the more boring it became. I felt my eyes start to glaze over as I waited for my mousy assistant to finish with the bombs, but mostly, I just found myself lost in my thoughts about the Shadow Knight and his archnemesis. It felt weirdly like some kind of betrayal, even though I’d never really trusted Dan Slade in the first place.
I guessed it was mostly because the idea that he would protect one of his enemies just felt like a betrayal of everything he stood for.
“Fourth one planted,” Norma whispered through my earpiece. “Headed back to the lobby now.”
“Alright, we’re good here,” I told the guard.
I closed out of Slade’s system, retrieved my flash drive, and made sure everything was back the way that it had been before I’d arrived. I knew we wouldn’t have to wait long before the fireworks, but I didn’t want Slade to feel like he needed to investigate anything before then too deeply.
Besides, I didn’t figure that he would have much time to inspect the security system since he was probably still trying to catch his next supervillain target, anyway. After all, Aileen would have alerted me if he was on his way back to the mansion.
“Is, uh, that girl going to meet us here?” the guard asked.
“Sure, she can meet us here instead of in the lobby,” I replied so that Norma would hear me through her earpiece.
“You got it,” she chirped in my ear.
Now that she’d planted four bombs in a high-security prison without even raising an eyebrow, maybe Norma would start to see the appeal behind her superpower. Somehow, I doubted that she even understood half of what she was capable of, but there would be time for all that later. It had still been quite a successful trip to the prison.
The door to the security room opened slowly, and Norma’s head peeked inside.
“Can I come in?” she murmured.
“You can, but there’s no need,” I said. “I’m finished here, so we can leave, as long as you’re done with your inspections.”
“I am,” Norma replied.
“Great,” I said, and then glanced toward the security guard. “Do you need to escort us out, or are we free to go?”
He looked away from the screens and back to me again and seemed to internally debate something, and I really had to wonder just how he kept his job if he was this absent-minded. After a moment’s hesitation, he shook his head.
“Uh, no, I’m gonna call someone over and they can escort you back out,” he told us.
It didn’t matter to me. I shrugged, and Norma smiled again. I loved when she got excited over the potential for blood, since that was something unique that the two of us shared. Elizabeth just didn’t have the same appreciation for violence and destructive security systems that Norma did.
Our escort arrived and took the two of us directly back to the front door. He kept his eyes on me the entire time, and he barely even looked at my mousy little assistant. I wondered if Slade would review the security footage after it was all over, so he would be able to catch a glimpse of her with the bombs. Maybe then he would regret underestimating us, especially Norma.
I certainly hoped so.
After we left the prison, we slid back into the plush seats of our van, I started up the engine, and I drove us out of the prison back toward the mansion.
“Wow,” Norma sighed. “I was really nervous, but I just walked around the whole prison without anybody noticing me! No one looked at me, like not at all.”
“I’m glad it went so well,” I said with a smile.
“I know!” My assistant grinned. “I mean, even when I walked past some of the security guards, they didn’t even look twice at me. I think as long as you act like you’re supposed to be somewhere, no one even questions you!”
“What you can do is very impressive,” I said.
“Oh, anyone could probably do that,” she mumbled as her ears turned dark pink.
“That’s not true,” I replied. “If just anyone could do it, then I wouldn’t need you.”
Norma’s blush spread from her ears down along her cheekbones, but she just kept her head down and tapped away on her tablet to pull up details on the other two teams.
“It, um, looks like the Shadow Knight was successful,” she said. “So he’ll probably be on his way back soon. Good timing.”
“Very,” I laughed.
“Dynamo caught Pirouette, too, so she and Penumbra are already back at the mansion,” Norma continued.
“Good,” I said.
“Mi
les?” she asked.
“Hm?” I had been distracted by what I’d learned about the prison outbreak and hadn’t noticed she’d said anything.
“You’re acting like something’s on your mind,” my assistant said as she pushed her oversized glasses up the bridge of her nose.
“You’re too perceptive for your own good,” I smirked. “But you’re right. I found something while I was going through Slade’s security program.”
“What’d you find?” she asked.
“The prison was sabotaged,” I exhaled. “The prison’s security was tampered with, and that’s how the supervillains were able to escape. There was nothing innately wrong with the system that Slade set up, but the guard told me that it had been sabotaged. He also told me that the prison had informed Slade about it, so he knew.”
“He knew?” she gasped. “But he didn’t tell us?”
“Yup,” I sighed. “He either didn’t say anything to save face, so all the blame wouldn’t fall on him, or he’s protecting whoever sabotaged it.”
“How could he protect the person who sabotaged it?” Norma demanded. “I mean, why would he?”
“I don’t know,” I sighed, “but I’m pretty sure it was the Maniac.”
“The Maniac…” Norma trailed off. “But isn’t he-- well, isn’t he the Shadow Knight’s archenemy?”
“That’s the one,” I said.
“I don’t understand,” she said with a frown. “Maybe we should ask Dynamo more about their relationship. I think there’s a lot we still don’t know about the Shadow Knight.”
“That’s putting it lightly,” I deadpanned. “For now, let’s just deal with the escaped prisoners. And remember, we have our own little surprise prepared for Dan Slade.”
“Yeah.” Norma grinned. “One he’ll never see coming.”
As much as I hated to admit it, I really didn’t know why the Shadow Knight would protect the Maniac. I had some vague ideas about why the Shadow Knight would protect his archenemy, but none of them were good, and I really wanted to find out what else Dynamo knew about the two of them.
Still, in spite of what we’d found out about Slade, I still couldn’t wait to see the Shadow Knight’s face when we blew up the prison, and that thought stayed with me for the rest of the drive back to the mansion.
Chapter 13 - Silver Squire
It had taken us all day to round up most of the escaped supervillains, but we were finally down to the last few. The sun had already risen, and I was pretty exhausted since I’d never actually worked an all-nighter before in my life, but it felt a little fulfilling.
Kind of, anyway.
This was my first real mission as the Shadow Knight’s Silver Squire, and despite the fact that we’d hunted down criminals for the past twenty-four hours straight, I still didn’t feel like I had learned much of anything from him. Instead of teaching me how to do anything heroic, the Shadow Knight had been lost in his thoughts about Miles Nelson to the point that he barely even remembered to tell me his plans half the time.
I wondered if I was just another one of his many apprentices to him, like I wasn’t even worth caring about because my mentor didn’t want to get attached to me.
It felt pretty bad to be so disposable, and despite my attempts to get my mentor to trust me, I knew he never would. He barely even trusted Beacon with anything, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to end up like another one of the Shadow Knight’s ex-apprentices.
Of course, I also didn’t want to die, but I guess that risk kind of came with the territory.
What I really wanted was to be a hero, but all this had shown me was that I didn’t really know what a hero was anymore. Was it someone like my crow-masked mentor with his strict adherence to his code, or was it someone like Miles, who just wanted to kill the bad guys so that they couldn’t hurt anyone else?
Did honor really matter? Or did the results?
I was having a hard time figuring that out, and the Shadow Knight’s lack of guidance really wasn’t helping.
“This is our last target, right?” I asked from the passenger seat of the car-tank.
“For now,” the Shadow Knight replied without even a glance in my direction.
It had been so long since he said anything to me that I had started to think that he’d forgotten I was even there. I wasn’t sure that I felt any less anxious now, but at least I had reminded him that he wasn’t alone in his crow-themed, high-tech armored vehicle.
I tried to busy myself by looking over the dossier on Volcan the Pyromaniac, but I was too distracted to really focus on it. I wanted to do more than just read about our target. I really wanted to help, and I definitely didn’t want to be just a glorified sidekick. I wanted the Shadow Knight to trust me enough to share his thoughts, so I could at least understand him better.
Just reading the Shadow Knight Code over again and again wasn’t enough for me.
“So, when you said for now,” I began, “what, uh, exactly did you mean?”
I tried not to sound timid, but it was pretty difficult since my mentor was intimidating as hell. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with what I’d asked, but a few seconds turned into half a minute before I finally got any kind of response.
The Shadow Knight slowly exhaled through his teeth, like he was trying to keep his temper from exploding.
“Um, Shadow Knight?” I asked again.
“There will always be more supervillains to fight,” he growled like I was a kid and not a nineteen-year-old.
“I know that,” I said. “I meant this is our last target for this, uh, mission.”
“If the other teams are successful, yes,” he replied. “If not, then we will have to clean up their messes.”
“But they’ve been pretty successful so far,” I said. “So we probably won’t have to do that, right?”
The Shadow Knight gripped the car-tank’s steering wheel with an audible squeeze of leather that made me wince.
“Right,” he ground out, but he didn’t say anything else or elaborate on his thoughts.
It was hard for me to understand why it upset him so much that the other teams were successful. We were supposed to be working together with them, so their wins were also our wins. I thought maybe the Shadow Knight was in some kind of mental competition with Miles where he wanted to prove that his methods were better, but weren’t we all working for the same cause? Even if he and Miles weren’t on the same page, they’d made a compromise, and for the most part, the other teams had kept their word.
But maybe I just hadn’t been a hero long enough to fully understand what was going through my mentor’s mind, and maybe there was some kind of nuance I was missing.
Since the Shadow Knight refused to tell me anything, I really wouldn’t know, especially since whenever I asked him a question, he just told me to read over his code again.
“So what’s our plan?” I asked. “For Volcan. According to Miles’ AI--”
“I intend to catch up to him before he starts any fires,” the Shadow Knight interrupted me.
I read over the dossier again and scrolled all the way down to the most recent updates.
“Okay, well, he’s currently on his way to an office building, I think,” I said.
I zoomed in on the map that showed Volcan’s most recent movements. It looked like he was heading toward a complex of office buildings that had just opened up for the day’s business, and according to our GPS, we were close enough that when I looked up from the screen, I could see the tops of the tall office buildings up ahead. It was early enough in the morning that they wouldn’t be packed full of workers yet, but it meant there would be at least one civilian trapped for us to rescue.
I looked back and forth between the office buildings up ahead and the tablet in my lap, and every time I glanced down at the screen, I saw that Volcan’s projected movement inched closer and closer to the office complex.
Apparently, Miles’ AI computer could track down the escaped criminals through the secu
rity cameras attached to Grayville’s street lights, and I thought that was pretty damn cool.
I glanced over at the Shadow Knight when he didn’t respond to my update, and I told myself that I should try to be more patient. I just didn’t understand why it seemed to annoy my mentor so much to use anything that Miles sent us, even when it was really useful information.
“I said that I think he’s on his way to--”
“I’m well aware of where he’s going,” the Shadow Knight grunted to cut me off.
“Okay,” I sighed. “Well anyway, we should hurry because according to this, I think he’s almost--”
This time, I was cut off by an explosion in the distance as the windows in one of the upper levels of an office building all shattered in a white-hot eruption of fire. Flames burst out of the windows as glass rained down to the street below, and I knew that not only would anyone on that floor would be toast in seconds, but it was also a huge building, and that meant there were plenty of other floors for the fire to spread to.
“There are people in there!” I cried as I leaned forward in my seat to get a better view. “We need to hurry, Shadow Knight!”
“Don’t state the obvious,” my mentor growled, but he sped up anyway until we were almost flying down the street.
“So what’s the plan when we get there?” I yelled over the roar of the engine as I grabbed onto the door to keep myself in place.
“He moved faster than expected,” the Shadow Knight muttered in a way that felt like it was more to himself than it was for me. “Must have taken some kind of transportation, but why wouldn’t he simply set the streets on fire?”
“Maybe he thought he could do more damage this way?” I suggested.
“Volcan’s mutated flames don’t behave like average flames,” my mentor said as he glared at me.
“I know, it’s in the dossier, so--”
“It will take too long to put out the mutated flames,” Shadow Knight continued like I hadn’t spoken, “so we’ll need to contain them until the fire can burn out on its own.”