I was vaguely aware of everyone in the room, even the sixth-grade gym coach, saying “Oooh.” I hit the floor hard, and for a moment, I didn’t hear, see, or feel anything.
Then it all came rushing back, and I saw her on top of me. Her glasses slightly askew. Still smiling.
“I guess I’m out,” she said.
I tried to breathe.
She stood and offered me her hand. I let her pull me up, which she did without the slightest strain. There was a hornets’ nest buzzing in my ears and I was still having trouble focusing, but I could see a look of worry on her face as she pointed.
“You’re bleeding a little,” she said.
I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “No biggie,” I said, sniffing.
“Sorry about that. You should have thrown it.”
“You would still have been out,” I said.
She shook her head. “You would have missed.” I believed her. Jenna bit her lip and scrunched her nose and smiled, and I forgot the blood, and the sweat, and the hornets.
It was like she knew me already.
A month later I found out that, had she wanted to, Jenna Jaden could have kicked the ball so hard that it exploded. She could have rounded the bases and been sitting back on the bleachers before it even came down. She could have hit me hard enough to send me to the emergency room with a blood clot in my brain.
But that’s not Jenna. That’s the Silver Lynx.
The Silver Lynx is the only one of us who has seen any real action, unless you count last Tuesday, which I’m trying hard not to think about. Of course the others have trained with their Supers. Cryos and Eric spend every third Saturday in his secret cavern working through combat scenarios. Supposedly Hotshot took Gavin out one Friday night to help foil a suspected robbery of dangerous chemicals at the university science lab, though it turned out to be a gang of student activists looking to free the lab mice. And Mike and the Rocket were almost spotted flying over the Justicia football stadium during halftime last year. But for the most part, Jenna’s the only one of us who really knows what it’s like to be out there, on the streets, in the shadows. She’s the only one whose Super trusts her enough to let her help, who’s close to being able to do the whole superhero thing on her own.
The Silver Lynx is a hunter. Fierce. Determined. Nearly unstoppable.
But Jenna’s different.
The day she bloodied my nose, Jenna asked if we could be friends.
And she promised she would never hurt me again.
12
UNLIKELY HEROES
It’s Saturday. Saturday night, actually. Somewhere out there, a gang of immaculately dressed criminals sharing the same name, and their back-from-the-dead leader, are probably planning to take over the world. Nobody really knows. There have been no grand announcements. No interrupted broadcasts. Though the Dealer’s face gets plenty of airtime regardless. The Jacks’ escape from prison is the leading news story for the twenty-four hours, and every station dredges up footage of their past crimes. It’s all rehashed, especially the climactic final battle between the Suits and the Legion of Justice, showing the smoking remains of the Dealer’s headquarters and the Legion in front of it—one of the last pictures taken of all five of them together.
It seems like every time I pass the television I see him—not the sad sack jockeying a bar stool on Thirty-fourth Street, but the real Titan, leading the Legion into battle, duking it out with the Dealer, and generally looking all heroic and stuff. When I see him like that, I can’t help myself. I just stand and stare, breathless and confused, wondering if he’s watching himself too. If he sees what I see.
He has to know. But that doesn’t mean he has to care. He made that clear enough last time. So I just stand and stare until my mother notices me, catches something in the look on my face, and asks me if I’m all right. Then I have to turn it off and pretend I don’t care.
So it’s Saturday. And if my Super was half the man he once was, he would be pounding the streets looking for the Dealer and his three remaining Suits, and I might very well be beside him on ready reserve status, mask and belt on, nose to the ground. But he’s not. So I’m not.
Instead I’m going to the mall with Mike to spy on girls. It’s a favorite pastime of his, and he deserves it, his first day back in the world, considering what he’s been through.
I met Mike my first day at H.E.R.O., when he shook my hand and made my hair stand up. Aside from Jenna, Mike is my best friend. He’s the only other member of H.E.R.O. that I hang with outside of school. Nikki has her revolving boyfriends and Eric is involved in, like, thirty clubs. And Gavin—I’m not sure who he hangs out with. Maybe kids from football. Or maybe he has groupies who follow him around. Or maybe he spends his weekends flexing in front of the bathroom mirror. I don’t really care.
Mike and I have a lot in common. We both are slightly worse than mediocre at sports and both like pineapple on our pizza. We both enjoy watching B-grade horror movies when our parents aren’t looking and despise sitcoms. We both think girls are cuter when they don’t wear makeup, and we are both afraid to take our shirts off at the pool when the high school kids are around. We both grew up worshipping the same Supers.
And we’ve both been let down.
Literally. Though my Super never broke my arm.
Mike got out of the hospital on Wednesday, and he’s spent the last three days holed up in his room, calling me this morning to say that if he didn’t get out of the house, he was going to electrocute himself.
It was possible. With Mike, self-electrocution is never entirely out of the question. He’s an energy manipulator, high voltage class, which is a fancy way of saying he can create balls of electricity by summoning the natural charges in his own body. I told him I’d not only hang out with him, I’d sleep over at his house and catch him up on all the latest gossip. After all, my parents are growing fidgety, constantly checking in on me no matter what I’m doing. Even though the breakout happened hundreds of miles from here and nobody has heard a peep from the Suits since, I can sense the apprehension bubbling. My mother’s furtive glances. The way my father mumbles to himself. So the mall sounded like a great idea.
I meet Mike outside the bookstore. It’s the first time I’ve seen him since the accident, and he looks mostly back to normal. His frizzy blond hair still sticks out all over the place (worse when he’s walking on carpet), and he looks like maybe he lost a few pounds. The cuts and bruises have healed, but he’s got a cast on his right arm that reaches from wrist to shoulder. He already told me it took several metal pins screwed directly into the bone to get his arm straightened out. The doctors told him he shouldn’t even think about skateboarding for several months—and he should never skate down the bleachers at the football field again.
That was the story. That Mike Vanderbolt was stupid enough to surf down the handrails of the metal bleachers before slipping and smashing his arm on the stone sidewalk below. I guess it was the best Mr. Masters could come up with when he took Mike to the emergency room after a frantic call from the Rocket. After all, he couldn’t really say that Mike was a superhero sidekick and was dropped out of the sky a full forty feet by a grown man with a jet pack strapped to his chest on what was supposed to be a routine training exercise. Mr. Masters was ticked. It wasn’t the first off-duty accident in H.E.R.O. history—apparently Cryos once accidentally froze Eric to the ceiling during one of their training sessions, giving him a mild case of frostbite—but it was bad enough that Mr. Masters spent a full thirty minutes lecturing to the rest of us about following proper procedures when engaging in extracurricular training with our Supers.
Not that I had to worry about it. But I still had to sit and listen to it.
“We weren’t using the safety harness,” Mike explains as we head toward Mr. Twist’s for the first half of our traditional mall dinner of soft pretzels and jelly beans. “It was my idea. I thought we were ready. I didn’t think he would drop me.”
You never do, I almost say.
“Have you heard from him? The Rocket, I mean?”
Mike shakes his head. “Not for a few days. He took it pretty hard.”
“I think you took it harder,” I say, pointing at the cast.
Mike shrugs. “Mr. Masters told me that he won’t even come out of his house. He won’t return anyone’s calls. Hasn’t been on patrol. Even with all the recent craziness. I kind of feel bad for him,” Mike adds. “Dropping your partner out of the sky probably doesn’t look so good on the superhero resume.”
“Yeah, probably violates the no-almost-killing-your-sidekick rule,” I say, wondering if there even was such a rule. I don’t know the Supers’ code, though Mr. Masters says it’s pretty similar to ours. You don’t learn it until you decide to become one and take the oath. “He’s going to come back, though, right? I mean, he’s still your Super.”
“Not sure. I hope so,” Mike says, then holds up his cast. “Not that I’d be much help to him now anyway.” We pass by a group of teenagers huddled together. One of them asks me what I’m looking at. I just smile and wave, eager to avoid confrontation.
“How long?” I ask, pointing to the cast.
“At least ten weeks.” Mike looks at his broken arm like it’s not even a part of him, just some strange plaster appendage hanging from his shoulder. “I asked Mr. Masters if we could just chop it off and get me one of those cybernetic jobs, you know, like the kind Eric’s Super has?”
I nod appreciatively. Cryos is a cyborg—a product of American military spending, German engineering, Chinese-manufactured parts, and way too many science-fiction movies. He has this killer cybernetic arm, which not only fires these cool freeze rays but also has, like, more apps than an iPhone. I’ve only met him a few times—at those special H.E.R.O. training sessions that my own Super never bothered to show up to—but each time he let me touch his arm. It was pretty awesome. If Mike got one of those, I’d catapult myself down the stairs until my own arm broke. But I know Mr. Masters would never go for it. “We are given the gifts we’re given,” he’d say, “and our job is to make the most of them.”
“I’m guessing he said no.”
Mike shakes his head. “Not even a flamethrower.”
“But can you still . . . you know?” I make a motion with my hands, pretending that I’m summoning currents of electricity, thinking it’s funny how we all imitate each other. Like how Jenna looks like a zombie when she’s imitating Nikki walking through walls. Or how Eric looks like he’s constipated when he imitates me looking at something far away. I’ve seen Mike generate lightning a hundred times, but the motions just look silly when I make them.
“Yeah, I can,” he says, “but I still don’t really have any control where it goes.”
“Oh,” I say. “That’s really not good.” It really isn’t.
Mike doesn’t argue. The ability to launch electricity from your fingertips is one of those signature powers—the kind that you can really design a persona and a costume around. Unfortunately Mike, aka Kid Shock, has terrible aim. In the two years we’ve known each other, his spastic use of his power has led to a few incidents. And while I fondly remember him accidentally blowing the school’s generator, resulting in me, thankfully, missing a Spanish quiz, I try not to recall what he did to his neighbor’s cat.
“In that case, you should try to keep it to yourself,” I say.
We order three packs of cinnamon sugar twists to split and two blueberry slushies, then head toward the fountain at the center of the mall to feast. Sitting on the bench, licking the sugar from my fingers, I fill him in on what he’s missed, from the whole bee incident to the jail bust, though he’s seen more news than I have and knows most of it already. I leave out the part about Jenna’s new body spray—he would only roll his eyes—but I mention what Mr. Masters said on the phone yesterday about identities compromised and being watched.
“You think he meant me?”
“Maybe.” Mike shrugs. “Or maybe there’s something else going on. You said the Killer Bee might have set you and Jenna up in order to get to the Fox. Maybe someone out there is spilling secrets to the other side.”
I think about it. It’s possible, I guess. It seems Mr. Masters suspected as much. Though selling secret identities is tantamount to treason. It’d be like tearing the Code into a hundred little pieces, gluing them back together all wrong, setting the whole mess on fire, and then peeing on it to put out the flames.
And yet Mr. Masters has been looking at me a lot lately. Surely he doesn’t think . . . he couldn’t, could he? After all, I was the one dangling from the hook last week. Why would I leak my own secret identity to somebody who would try to kill me?
“It’s not one of us,” I say emphatically.
“Not one of us,” Mike says, pointing to the two of us. “But I wouldn’t rule Gavin out.”
That’s another thing Mike and I have in common. Though I think Mike doesn’t like him only because I don’t, which makes me feel guilty for not liking him, but not guilty enough to stop. Especially not after yesterday. If I try hard enough, I can still smell it.
“But it might be best if you didn’t eavesdrop on Mr. Masters’s telephone calls anymore,” Mike says. Then suddenly his eyes light up. “Speaking of which,” he says, “six o’clock. Brunette. Green top. Group of three.” I finish my last pretzel and then look for this girl in green. I spot her and her two friends standing outside the Abercrombie, laughing. She’s cute. And old.
“Dude, she’s like, seventeen, at least.”
“She looked right at us, and I’m pretty sure she smiled at me.”
I look at Mike. His face is covered in cinnamon sugar, his hair is sticking straight up, and with the cast on, he looks like he’s just got pummeled by the entire football team. “I don’t think so,” I say.
“Then maybe she smiled at you. You’re good-looking . . . compared to equally nerdy guys in your popularity bracket.”
“Thanks.”
“Just do it, please.”
I groan as a matter of formal objection and wipe my hands on Mike’s shirt. Then I take one last look at the girl in green to get my bearings. This is why we come here. Reconnaissance. I find out what girls are saying about Mike, and he uses that information to decide whether or not to go and talk to them. Of course in about twenty trips to the mall, he has never once spoken to a single girl.
Still, I suppose it’s good practice for me. Trying to pick out one voice, especially a voice you aren’t familiar with, in a crowd of hundreds at a shopping mall takes immense concentration. I sift through the thousands of sounds, the shuffle of feet and the soft Muzak, and narrow in on Greenie and her friends. I look closely to match up what I’m hearing with the movement of her glossy lips.
“I would totally date a werewolf, are you kidding? Drinking blood is not sexy.”
I look over at Mike. He’s a little shaggy, but he’s certainly no werewolf.
“You’re right,” I say. “She just told her friends that she totally digs guys half covered in plaster.”
“Seriously?” Mike looks at me like a puppy begging for scraps.
I give him a what-do-you-think? look. But Mike is undeterred, scanning the crowd, hoping to catch another girl’s eye. Suddenly he leans in and whispers, “Quick, straight ahead, white sweater, short skirt, ponytail.”
I look. The girl in the white sweater is only twenty feet away. She’s at least closer to our age. She’s also standing right beside a guy who looks about a foot taller than me.
“Dude, she’s with somebody.”
“They’re just friends,” Mike says. “It’s purely platonic. He’s gay. Or her brother. I swear. Our eyes met. There was a spark.”
“You just accidentally shocked yourself again, is all.”
“Drew . . .”
“Fine,” I say, “but this is the last one, okay? I’m just not in the mood.” Thanks to Mike, I’ve now got a sinking feeling that Mr. Masters suspects me of being a traitor on top of being a basically hopeless sidekick
.
“I promise,” he says.
I take a sip of slushie and then open up to the static again. It’s a little easier to filter this time, but before I can zero in on what she’s saying, she stops, leans in, and kisses the guy. Rather purposefully. Tongue included.
“Guess it’s not her brother,” Mike says, and I’m just about to shove him off the bench when I catch something else, another voice, a comment that just kind of sticks out, like a wrong note at a piano recital.
“Just take ’em,” the voice says. “Nobody’s looking.”
Mike starts slapping my arm. “Ooh. Ooh. Party of five. Over by the cell phone store. All giggling. I think one of them just pointed at us. Drew? Drew?”
“Hush,” I say, trying to concentrate. I think the voice came from the left. I scan the crowd, listening for it again, hushed, deep, determined, but Mike is still chirping in my ear.
“Just tuck ’em under your jacket and leave.”
That’s it. I trace the sound. It’s definitely coming from our left, maybe fifty yards away.
“I think something’s about to happen,” I whisper, forgetting that I’m the only one with extraordinary senses and that Mike can barely hear me in the crowd. He reaches up and pulls my hand free.
“What do you mean, something’s about to happen?”
“I don’t know exactly. Someone’s going to steal something maybe. Get ready,” I say, trying to stay focused, listening for that voice again.
“What do you mean, get ready?”
Just then, two teenagers in black hoodies appear at the entrance to Sam’s Sportswear. Both have their hands tucked into their jackets—really thick, blocky jackets. The one voice says, “Just be cool. Keep walking.”
Then, from inside the store, I hear somebody say, “Hey, you gotta pay for those.”
The two guys look back once and then take off running.
Somebody, I can only assume the store manager, judging by the bald head, comes tearing out of the store behind them. They are all headed in our direction.
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