Miles held his backpack forward. “What do I do with this? If I leave it here, somebody might swipe it. I already can’t afford to replace the books I lost at the construction site. Besides, it has my homework for next period. And if I give my backpack to you, I won’t have anywhere to stash the cape when I get back.”
Henry folded his hands behind his back, analyzing their predicament. “Try wearing it. Wherever your clothes disappear to when you put on the cape, maybe your backpack will go to the same place.”
Miles slid his backpack on. “All right. Here goes.” He dropped the cape over his shoulders and touched the clasp halves under his chin.
Sure enough, Miles’s backpack was on his back, just as it’d been before he put on the cape. So whatever he had on him at the moment he changed into Gilded would still be there when he changed back. Good to know.
Miles stowed the cape and took out the pad of hall passes. He wrote down the time—less than twenty minutes had passed since he flew off to fight the fire—and made up an excuse for his tardiness: “Counseling.” That sounded personal enough to not invite prying from Mr. Newton, his fifth-period physical science teacher. Armed with an alibi, he headed off to class.
All eyes were on Miles when he walked through the door. All except Mr. Newton’s. He was so wrapped up in his lecture on the laws of motion, he didn’t look up from the stack of notes on his lectern.
Miles handed Mr. Newton the hall pass, trying to play it cool, but the paper quivered just enough to betray his nervousness. Not that Mr. Newton noticed. He took the slip from Miles and dropped it onto his desk without so much as giving it a glance.
Miles collapsed into his seat and breathed easy. That hadn’t been so bad. Sure, the fire hadn’t been put out without a few hiccups, but all things considered, it was a successful mission. The houses were safe. No one had been hurt. Maybe he was putting too much pressure on himself. Maybe looking after the city wouldn’t be so tough after all.
vrrrrrrr
Already? Miles’s heart jumped into his throat. He’d just gotten himself excused into class. How was he supposed to excuse himself out again?
Thankfully, Henry was only checking in.
Meet me after school.
• • •
Henry was waiting for Miles at the bus corral. The remainder of the day had been uneventful, with Henry not even bothering to send any of his test texts. Maybe he’d finally accepted that the phones worked inside the school. That would be a true breakthrough.
Miles strutted over. “So, how about the way I doused that fire? Pretty good, right?” He was intentionally downplaying the event to avoid sounding conceited, but the more he dwelled on his heroics, the more pleased he was with his performance. After all, he’d proven himself to be a one-man fire crew. Not bad for a day’s work.
“Mm-hmm,” Henry said, his fingers dancing across his smartphone. “I was afraid this might happen.” His expression soured, and he slipped the phone back into his bag.
“What’s wrong?”
“The town of Braselton doesn’t have any water pressure. People can’t take showers or flush their toilets.”
“Tell them to call the water department. If that’s the big crisis of the moment, then I’d say we’re sitting pretty.”
“Actually, we’re to blame. And by ‘we,’ I mean ‘you.’ ”
Miles was confused. How was it his problem if someone’s indoor plumbing wasn’t working? In all those back issues of Gilded Age, he seriously doubted there were any adventures where Gilded had to don coveralls and play plumber. “How so?”
“Do you know what the purpose of a water tower is?”
Miles had never really thought about it. “To hold water?” He shrugged.
“Not just hold it,” Henry admonished. “Hold it at elevation.” He raised one hand to eye level and lowered the other one down by his waist. “A water tower is higher than the buildings it services. Gravity causes the water in the tower to push downward, building up hydrostatic pressure in the system.” He lowered his raised hand slowly, pressing down on some invisible force. “When someone opens a faucet, the pressure releases, and the water flows out through the pipes. No water tower, no flow.”
Miles leaned against the wall, his shoulders slumped dejectedly. He knew how he’d feel if his apartment suddenly had no running water: not clean. “How mad is everybody?”
“They aren’t happy, but they’re happier than they’d be if their houses had burned down.” Henry waved a hand, brushing the issue away. “Don’t worry about it. Once the city gets the pumps up and running, they’ll be fine. You, um, might want to help them build a new water tower, though. The old one was a local landmark.”
“Of course it was.” Miles felt like he’d gone from hero to zero as fast as he could say “flush.”
Henry elbowed Miles reassuringly. “It was your first real shift on the job. You saved the day, and you didn’t expose your secret identity. Those are the most important things. The rest of this stuff, you’ll have to learn as you go. Which means you need to study. A lot.” He dropped a hand on Miles’s shoulder for emphasis. “Skip the bus. My mom won’t be home until five o’clock. Let’s get you some more comics to read.”
CHAPTER
15
MILES SPENT ALL HIS SPARE time buried up to his neck in everything Gilded. When he wasn’t reading back issues of Gilded Age to bone up on the history of the superhero and what he could do, he was racing from here to there and then over there to protect the city from the people and things that could harm it. In the rare moment of calm when he wasn’t doing any of those things, he was busy trying to keep secret the fact that he’d done them. It wasn’t easy to not draw attention from neighbors or teachers—or the Jammer, whose quest to torture Miles never let up.
Not drawing attention from his dad was hardest of all. Miles used every trick he could think of. He ate dinner in his room, saying he had too much homework. He pretended to take a shower, leaving the water running and the bathroom door closed. He acted tired—which wasn’t really an act—and went to bed early. Any excuse to be alone, so he could slip away at a moment’s notice.
Henry was with Miles every step of the way. Sort of. He couldn’t accompany Miles on any of his Gilded missions, but he was just as important to the team. He’d used his access to the computers in school administration to swap out PE for shop on Miles’s class schedule, so there was no longer any reason Miles couldn’t have the cape with him every moment of the day. And Henry was a genius tutor, breaking down class lessons and helping Miles with his homework to keep him from running afoul of his teachers. Or, worse, landing in detention, where he’d be trapped and unable to respond when needed. Henry had a mantra he repeated every chance he got: “Ready for anything.”
And Henry meant it. He was relentless with the texting, sending Miles constant updates about breaking news. Henry supplied the time and place of emergencies, and he even devised a rankings system, with the least worrisome events getting a one and the most severe garnering a five. That way, when two or more crises occurred at the same time—something that happened with alarming regularity in a metropolitan area with a population of more than five million—Miles knew which order to tackle them in.
After each crisis was averted, Miles would return home to find more text messages waiting for him. Henry saw each outing as a learning opportunity, and he never failed to point out what Miles had done well and what he could improve on. He had charts on response times and graphs showing the frequency of incidents according to each hour of the day. He assembled opinion polls, using the feedback posted in message boards and from the Gilded Group to gauge Miles’s job approval rating. It was as though Miles were running for mayor, and Henry was his one-man campaign staff.
And as good as Henry was at gathering and sifting through information, he was even better at spreading disinformation. He’d spent enough time as a Gilded fanatic to know that the real threat to their operation wasn’t the criminals and cata
strophes Miles combatted, but the adoring fans who tracked Gilded’s every move. They might mean well, but their desire to know everything about Gilded was the same impulse that could be their hero’s undoing. Imagine if one of them actually used the record of Gilded appearances and response times to track Miles back to Cedar Lake Apartments, the way Henry had intended. The next day, there’d be a line of news vans and autograph seekers stretched down Jimmy Carter Boulevard. Not good.
For someone who not long ago was just as fervent as the other die-hard Gilded fans, Henry derived an unsettling amount of glee from throwing them off Miles’s trail. He created multiple false online identities for himself and used them to post misleading details about Gilded sightings, even going so far as to say Gilded had gone places where Miles had never gone and been seen doing things Miles had never done. Henry knew from his own efforts to keep tabs on Gilded’s whereabouts that a few false data points would be enough to throw anyone’s tracking efforts into disarray.
The Gilded Group was the most difficult to dupe, but whenever they started to suspect one of Henry’s false identities, Henry used one of his other identities to confirm the made-up reports. Just to keep up appearances, once in a while he’d gang up with the other members and blackball one of his identities, but replacements were only a few keystrokes away. With Henry on the job, Miles knew his identity would stay a secret.
Not that Henry was the only one protecting secrets. Even though Henry wasn’t present on any of Miles’s outings, eyewitness accounts and news reporters kept him in the loop on what transpired. What happened after, though . . . only Miles knew about that. And he wanted to keep it that way.
For instance, on Thursday he’d saved a runaway freight train from toppling off a broken track. He pressed the two lengths of the fractured track together so tightly, they fused into a single rail. On the way home, Miles had daydreamed about digging for gold, using his bare hands to press his findings into perfect, glittery bars. The cape had shut down in a blink, and he’d crash-landed through the roof of some poor farmer’s barn. Add that to his ever-growing to-do list of repairs. At least he’d finally gotten Braselton’s water tower back up and running.
Over the weekend, he’d used his supersight to find a five-year-old boy who’d wandered away from his family’s campsite and gotten lost in the Oconee National Forest. When he brought the boy back to his family, Miles couldn’t help but notice how the boy’s fifteen-year-old sister had ogled him. She was no Josie Campobasso, but she was pretty enough to make him consider how easy it’d be to get her phone number. The cape made sure he had plenty of time to ponder the thought, going dormant for two hours and leaving Miles to get lost in the woods himself.
Miles didn’t tell Henry about any of that stuff. He couldn’t stand to hear another one of Henry’s lectures on the true meaning of heroism and that a hero uses his powers only to help others and to do what’s right, blah, blah, blah. Easy for him to say. Henry lived in a mansion. He didn’t have the threat of the Jammer lurking around every corner. He didn’t seem to have any problems at all, really.
More than anything, Miles learned that the hardest part about being a superhero were the cravings. It wasn’t the crooks or the crises or the time crunches. It wasn’t even that he was on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, though he wouldn’t have minded a day off now and then. Resisting the urge to use the cape for things that any normal seventh grader would want to use it for—that was the toughest bit.
Miles didn’t have to actually try to misuse the cape, either—all he had to do was think about it, and the cape would go AWOL. What was that about? He was a kid, for crying out loud. He was supposed to look for shortcuts. It was his job to want everything his way.
Miles wished he could talk to the old man and ask him how he’d managed to do it for so many years. All those decades since Gilded first appeared, and there wasn’t a single photograph of the old man caught with the cape around his neck, not one reel of news footage showing him crashing into a barn.
The only thing Miles could figure was that it had to do with age. Grown-ups didn’t have dreams and desires. They went to work, watched cable news, and were in bed by nine-thirty. If that was all you wanted out of life, you wouldn’t be tempted to misuse the cape. Miles’s problem was that he was still young and full of imagination.
Yeah, that must be it. More grown-up seriousness, less youthful dreaming. That was the key. If Miles couldn’t handle that, then he might as well give up now and turn the cape over to someone more qualified.
But how? How was he supposed to stop himself from thinking?
CHAPTER
16
ONE AFTERNOON, HENRY DISPATCHED Miles to catch a stray black bear that had wandered into a neighborhood subdivision. It was trash day, and with the homeowners’ cans at the curb, the bear had stumbled upon a suburban smorgasbord. An eighty-year-old woman had gone to check her mail and nearly jumped out of her housecoat when she discovered the bear lunching on her garbage bin. She called 911, which tipped off a Gilded fanatic who worked at the police dispatch. The fanatic posted the incident to the Gilded Group, and Henry sent Miles a text with the location of the subdivision and a photo of a black bear, as if Miles wouldn’t know what to look for.
From the moment the elderly woman spotted the bear, it was only eight minutes until Miles was on the scene. Not a moment too soon, either, since the woman’s husband had come outside in his bathrobe and was taking aim at the bear with his duck gun. That would’ve definitely ended badly for someone. Probably not the bear.
Miles had swooped down and snatched up the animal, carrying it off to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, where Henry said it’d be free to roam. The bear had squirmed at first, but after realizing it was really, really airborne, it threw its paws around Miles and hung on for dear life. Not for the first time, Miles was relieved the Gilded cape was impervious to dirt. He hoped that protection extended to flea and tick bites, too.
Miles returned home and flew through the bedroom window he’d left open, looking forward to a shower. He’d barely had time to take off the cape and hide it in his backpack when he heard his dad’s key slide into the dead bolt on the front door.
Miles was thankful he’d beaten him home. His dad had grown increasingly inquisitive about Miles’s whereabouts of late, a sure sign he was beginning to detect something strange going on with his son.
“Son? You home?” Mr. Taylor called from the living room. A couple of weeks ago, the question wouldn’t have been asked, since there was nowhere else Miles would’ve been. But then Miles had gone from being a loner to having a seemingly packed social calendar, a meteoric rise for a kid who hadn’t known a single soul on the first day of school.
“I’m in my room!” Miles answered. With the cape safely stowed, he flopped onto his bed and grabbed a back issue of Gilded Age from the stack on his bedside table. He turned to a random page and started reading just as his dad opened the bedroom door.
Miles glanced over the top of the comic casually. “Hey, Dad.”
Mr. Taylor stood in the doorway, holding a bulging manila envelope on one hip. He looked around the room, searching for anything fishy.
“Not studying at Henry’s today?” The way Mr. Taylor said Henry’s name, it sounded like it should have quotation marks around it, as though he was questioning the existence of the kid his son talked about often but he had yet to meet in person.
Miles’s eyes returned to the comic book. “Easy day today. Not much homework.”
“No detention, either. You’ve got a pretty nice streak going, thank the Lord.” Mr. Taylor sat on the edge of the bed. “Reading those comics again? Let’s have a look.”
Before Miles could protest, his dad reached out and plucked the comic book from his hands. Miles sat up quickly. “Be careful with that. It’s Henry’s. I’m only borrowing it.”
Mr. Taylor studied the cover, an artist’s rendering of Gilded standing atop a tall, round skyscraper, his gleaming
cape billowing in the wind. “Really? This issue has to be thirty years old, if it’s a day. I must’ve read it a million times when I was a kid. Where’d he find it?”
“I don’t know. He collects them.” Then Miles did a double take. “Wait. You read Gilded Age?”
“We all did.” Mr. Taylor’s expression lit up. “This is the issue where he stops the crime wave that hit downtown in the eighties. Look here.” He flipped to a full-page image of Gilded setting down a paddy wagon stuffed with criminals in front of the county jail. “ ‘More guests for the gray-bar hotel!’ ” Mr. Taylor said, reading Gilded’s word balloon aloud.
He closed the comic and gazed at the cover in wonder, looking like a kid himself. “See that round building he’s standing on? That’s Peachtree Plaza. Back then, it was the tallest building in the city. There’s a swanky restaurant at the top that turns in a circle, so you can take in all of Atlanta while you eat. At least I hear there is. I’ve never been.”
“Do you still have your old comics?” Miles asked hopefully. Borrowing from Henry was okay, but it’d be better if he had his own library. For one thing, the pages wouldn’t have jelly stains on them.
Mr. Taylor handed the comic book back to Miles. “I wish. You’d have enough reading to last you a lifetime. Your mom tossed them years ago, though.”
Miles frowned. “That’s all right. Henry has plenty.”
“I bet. You should bring him around for dinner sometime. I’d like to meet him. He and me can see who knows more about the Golden Great.”
“Sure, I’ll ask him,” Miles answered, though he had no intention of doing any such thing. Maybe if they still lived at the old house, but Cedar Lake Apartments wasn’t the kind of place you showed off to people. Especially not people you wanted to stay friends with.
“Anyway, I’ve noticed your sudden interest in Gilded, so I got you a little something.” Mr. Taylor handed Miles the envelope.
Attack of the Alien Horde Page 11