by Peter Moore
“Blake,” Mom said, “what’s the matter with you? Have you lost your mind? That’s Brad! You fix him right now.”
“Can’t do that, Mom. Believe me, he’s gotten real fiery lately, and we can’t take a chance of him sabotaging this battle. This is going to make history, and I can’t let him wreck it. I promise, I’ll make him good as new when I get back.”
“You probably won’t come back,” I said.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because, you idiot, you’re likely to get smashed up or killed.”
This time, he just laughed out loud. “That’s not going to happen.”
“You’re being stupid. You told me your ear is messed up and you can’t fly right. You have all those joint injuries. You could get killed.”
“Well, I won’t. Sorry to disappoint you. Oh, I almost forgot.” He walked back so he was standing above me. He held a manila envelope over my face so I could see it. “I figure you might be concerned about this falling into the wrong hands. Don’t worry. I got it.”
He tucked the envelope with the information I had printed for Mutagion into his back pocket. That was the envelope I’d handed Caliban, probably only minutes before Blake killed him. Blake wouldn’t have found him if he hadn’t been following me.
Everything was going wrong. It was all backward and upside down. And me, I couldn’t even move a single muscle to set things right.
UNITED STATES, EURASIAN ALLIANCE, UNIFIED AFRICAN NATIONS, ET AL. V. DEFENDANT #5958375-ER/00-M
People’s exhibit 211-15e
Decoded text; excerpt; nonredacted as per Court Ruling 349284; reconstructed for court
Heroine
Are they gone?” I asked.
“I don’t know what to do,” Mom said.
“Go get Layla from the other room.”
“Brad, don’t talk. Just let me think.”
Just go get her.
She left the study. I stared at the ceiling. I knew what I needed to do, but I couldn’t do anything at all. It was looking as if Blake had beaten me. Maybe he’d been right when he said I had gotten in way over my head. Now I couldn’t even move my head. But I wasn’t out for the count—not yet.
“That Justice Force bitch was trying to scare me into giving her info about us,” Layla said. “And your mother said something happened with your brother. Why are you lying there—”
“Layla, please, just listen to me. Blake disconnected pieces of the metal appliance in my neck.”
“Let’s get an ambulance.”
“I can’t travel anywhere like this. Not in an ambulance, not in a medevac helicopter. No. One bump and it would be over. So just listen to me.”
“I’m listening.”
“You’re going to put me back together.”
“I am? Are you out of your mind? I’m not a neurosurgeon!”
“No, you’re better. You have biomech-merge abilities. You can put this together without even making an incision.”
“You’re crazy. I don’t even know what that hardware in your neck should look like when it’s connected.”
“That doesn’t matter. You know it doesn’t. The hardware is loaded with smart nanotechnology. Do a biotech merge. You can fix it.”
“I’ve never done that.”
“You’ve done enough things like this for me to have total confidence that you’ll be able to do it now.”
She looked at Mom, who shook her head.
Layla said, “Look. If I screw this up, it could paralyze you.”
“Not going to happen. I trust you.”
She bit her lip. “No. I’m not doing it unless we have a Vitakinetic here to heal any damage to your spinal cord if I—”
“We don’t know any Vitakinetics, and we don’t have time for that even if we did. And like I said, I totally trust you. Just please do it.”
Layla got down on her knees next to the couch. She reached toward me, then pulled her hands back and rubbed them together.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“My hands are cold. If I touch you with them and you jump, game over.”
“See? That’s why I trust you.”
“Well, it’s good one of us does.”
“And anyway, I can’t jump, so you don’t have to worry about that.”
“Wow. Big relief. Okay. Hang on. Here we go.”
She put her hands on both sides of my neck, her fingers moving slowly. I could feel her fingertips, centimeters apart, at the back of my neck.
“So?” I said.
“Shh. Let me see what’s going on in there.” She closed her eyes. Her eyelids fluttered slightly as she concentrated. “I think I see it,” she said.
Do it, then.
Are you sure?
I’m sure. Do it.
Okay, I could be wrong, but it’s my best guess that nobody in the history of the world has ever written about what it feels like when pieces of metal are moving around under the skin, just barely brushing the spinal cord. I doubt anyone has ever described what it’s like to keep from moving or shouting or passing out while this is happening. I’m pretty sure of this because it’s unlikely anyone has ever gone through it before.
And I really had no great desire to be a pioneer in experiencing it. But I didn’t have much choice.
Layla’s hands got noticeably warmer as I felt the whole mess in the back of my neck tighten and settle.
A tingling pins-and-needles sensation started at my neck and extended out toward my arms and legs. There’s no other way to describe the rest of it except to say that it felt right.
“I think I got it,” Layla said.
“You did.” I didn’t warn her or Mom, because I didn’t want a big argument. But I slowly, slowly moved my head to the side, just a tiny bit.
It felt fine.
I moved it a little more. No problem.
No point in waiting. I sat up and I was totally okay.
Layla let out a long, ragged breath, followed by a nervous release of laughter. I pulled her down and kissed her.
She sat up and looked at Mom, who was white as a sheet.
“I’m okay, Mom. Relax.” I looked at Layla. “Do you know where they went?”
“Well, yeah, of course. I did the phone trace. I’m the one who told them where Mutagion was calling from.”
I tilted my head. My neck felt okay. Sore, yes, but stable.
“We can call Mutagion, warn him.”
“He still thinks we set Caliban up. He wouldn’t believe anything we say, even if he would take the call. No. I’m going,” I said.
“Then so am I,” Layla said.
I was about to protest, but I realized there was no point. She wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
“Come on,” I said.
Fireflies
Even if we hadn’t known the destination beforehand, it would have been hard for us to miss the site of the battle. From a mile away, we could see streaks above the river, looking like fireflies flitting and dancing—or dogfighting—in the air around a rowboat.
It was no rowboat, of course; it just looked like that from so far away. It was the half-sunk destroyer USS Montana, the former museum that had been attacked by Phaetons and the Gorgon Corps ten years earlier. And of course, it all made sense. Mutagion had cut a hole in the part of the ship’s hull that was underwater. A hole big enough, I figured, to fit his little submarine through. While every hero team and government law enforcement agency was searching for Mutagion’s hideout from Antarctica to the smallest islands in the Pacific, there he was, hiding in plain sight. His hideout was less than a hundred yards from a major U.S. city.
After we left the car, Layla and I went down the winding scaffold that led to the dock wher
e we had first met Mutagion.72 We were back in costume, figuring we might get seen.
Once we got to the end of the pier and wharves, we found a narrow wooden walkway, clinging precariously to the stone embankment of the river. The walkway shook and rattled with every step we took.
As we got closer, the tilted hull of the ship loomed bigger and bigger, blotting out a large swath of the night sky.
We took cover behind a thick piling by the dock.
I couldn’t tell which Phaetons were which. They were mainly ragged silhouettes of various sizes, battling against the heroes of the Justice Force, the Vindication Squad, and plenty of others.
“What are we doing here?” Layla asked.
“I’m not sure. I was hoping we could help Mutagion. It was my fault that Caliban got killed.”
“How is it your fault?”
“Indirectly, it is. Blake had followed us. Me talking to Caliban put Blake on his tail. I feel responsible. So at the very least, I can try to save Mutagion.”
“He might not even be here. Right? Maybe he left before the battle even started.”
“I don’t think so. I get the feeling that he’s not the kind of guy who would turn tail and run. He thought this was a last stand, a battle of honor. He’s around here somewhere.”
“Now what about the fact that he kind of wants to kill us? Tell me again why we’re here to save him.”
“I don’t really know. All I can tell you is I see probably thirty or forty heroes and maybe fifteen Phaetons and villains combined. This is why we chose the side we did.”
Miss Mistral swooped down in a corkscrew roll, her silver-and-blue costume glowing from air friction. She slashed with her silver cudgel when she went into a straight dive toward a bearlike Phaeton who was standing on the edge of the ship’s deck. At the bottom of her arc, she swung the cudgel at the Phaeton, but he ducked and batted at her legs. A long hook in his hand caught Miss Mistral’s leg, just enough to make her ascent wobbly. She flew out, away from the ship, and over the river. Hovering, she checked her injury.
Flatliner ran up the slanted deck and lunged with a flying leap to drive his head into the bear Phaeton’s chest. A spray of blood arced from the Bear Man’s mouth as he was launched off the side of the boat, falling through open air to hit the surface of the water fifty feet below. Because he’d been hit hard, both by the attack and by the fall, it wasn’t too likely that he would survive.
“Do you see Mutagion?” I asked Layla.
“I can’t tell who’s who. I don’t recognize most of them.”
“There goes Hangman,” I said.
“Where?”
“There, fighting Meganova.”
We watched them fight a prolonged battle, Meganova taking short flights to gain distance, then diving back in. Hangman grabbed on to Meganova, weighing him down. They landed back on the tilted control tower of the ship, where they slugged it out.
There was a metallic clang and I shifted my gaze to see a body plummet into the water with a loud splash.
“That guy just flew right into the side of the boat,” Layla said.
“What?”
“I saw it. He flew headfirst into the metal and then dropped like a stone.”
“What color uniform?”
“Couldn’t tell. It was in the shadow.”
“I bet that’s Blake.”
“Why?”
“Flying problems.” I watched the area where the splash happened. Nothing. After almost two minutes a figure shot up out of the water.
The red, blue, and gold costume was clear in an illumination flare thrown by Fireball of the Justice Force. I was right: it was Blake. He was flying in big loops, then going into a dive, then pulling back up. I figured he was doing it because he couldn’t fly straight, so this was a way to hide his weakness. He had almost paralyzed me and then left to find glory, and now he was doing aerobatics instead of fighting.
Slipknot apparently noticed the same thing. I saw him setting the trap. After watching Blake fly around for several minutes, Slipknot fell to his knees near the edge of the ship’s deck. His head was hanging. He made a perfect, easy target.
And Blake took the bait.
He flew at Slipknot, slowly, but almost straight. Blake put his fists together in front of him, no doubt imagining how great his winning blow would look when they made a blockbuster-movie dramatization of the battle.
What he probably didn’t picture was how it would look when Slipknot dodged to the side and caught Blake’s ankle.
Blake smashed into the deck of the ship so hard I would’ve sworn I felt it in the dock beneath my feet.
He slid down the tilted deck on his back, headfirst. Slipknot ran, downhill you might say, racing to catch up with Blake and do him in.
I couldn’t tell if it was partly by accident (I suspect it was), but Blake reached to his side and somehow caught hold of a chain. He jerked to a stop and Slipknot overran him, and then lost his footing and hit the deck. He continued downward, tumbling head over heels.
Slipknot slammed spikes into the deck, stopping himself.
Blake flew at him.
And I saw Slipknot pull a fire pike from under his cloak. I was sure that Blake couldn’t see it from his angle. That fire pike, I knew, could kill Blake if Slipknot got a solid stab in the vitals.
Fly hard left, I thought to Blake in a clandestine command projection. It wouldn’t work if he still had the inhibitors in his ears.
But he didn’t, and he did what I told him to: he took off away from the deck, well out of Slipknot’s reach.
Come to me, I commanded Blake.
He was flying almost in a zigzag path. He dropped his feet below and ahead of himself to make a landing. But it was sloppy and he had to run when he reached the pier, a clumsy staggering stride. He lost his footing and fell sprawling, face-first.
I’m not going to pretend that I had a deep concern for Blake’s well-being. I like to think it had more to do with wanting to keep Mom from becoming heartbroken at the loss of her older son, but whatever the motivation, I said to him, “You’re done.”
He looked up at me from the deck of the pier. “How…how are you walking around?”
“You need to hang it up. No more fighting.”
“I can’t just sit it out,” he said. “I have a reputation to uphold.”
“Yeah, that’ll do you a lot of good at your funeral. Any single one of the Phaetons could kill you without thinking twice, the shape you’re in.”
“I don’t take orders from you,” he said.
“Actually, yeah. You do,” I said. Sleep.
And he did.
My Brother’s Keeper
It took both of us—Layla and me—to drag Blake’s sleeping body off the dock and stash him behind some bushes near a culvert.
“Your brother needs to lose some weight,” Layla said, out of breath.
“Muscle is heavier than fat. He’s a solid two twenty.”
“Whatever. So why save him, after what he did to you?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
That’s when I heard it. About halfway up the dock, a struggle.
Five heroes in their bright colors, standing in a ring. That was Flatliner, Miss Mistral, G-Force, Mr. Mystic, and Radarette. In the middle was a large, staggering, bloody mess. It took a second or two before I realized it was Mutagion.
His demimask was gone. The blue monocle was nowhere to be seen, and I could see a pale, milky eye blinking against the light from the pier. His coat was half torn off. Along the side of his neck, there were deep slits. They looked like gills to me.
“Okay, tough guy, you got any more fight in ya?” G-Force yelled at him. He kicked Mutagion in the back. Mutagion staggered but didn’t go down.
“Yeah, let’s see it,” Flatliner said. “Show us some of that Phaeton fighting spirit, huh?”
Mutagion tried to break through their ring, but Miss Mistral and Mr. Mystic caught him. G-Force stepped in and hit Mutagion in the face with a downward piledriver punch.
Mutagion slammed onto the pier hard. I wasn’t totally sure he would get up.
I had one shot at this and I had no idea if it would work. But I couldn’t think of any other option.
I projected a suggestion that I was actually Blake. I put out a mental image that I looked and sounded exactly like him. I had never tried to project to more than one person at a time, and I wasn’t exactly sure how to do it. So I just tried.
“Let him go,” I said.
They all looked up.
“Let him go? Are you nuts?” G-Force said.
“Actually, I’m not,” I said, duplicating the pitch of Blake’s voice in my projection.
“Bl…Artillery, man. We’ve been looking to get our hands on him for years,” Mr. Mystic said.
“Like I don’t know that? No, the thing is, he tried to corrupt my brother, so I think I’m entitled to be the one who finishes him off.”
“He’s right,” Miss Mistral said. “Let him do it.”
I stepped in, got him to his feet (not easy: he was huge and I had to do a command for him to get up, barely penetrating his consciousness), and I did my best to make it look like I was actually fighting with him, but mainly, I was trying to hold him up.
If he hadn’t been bent nearly double, I wouldn’t have been able to reach high enough to have had one arm over his neck and the other one driving powder-puff uppercuts into his gut. I thought to him, If I get you into the water, can you get to your sub? I took another baby shot—even by my standards—to his gut. Where is it?
“What are you saying?” he gasped. “Who the hell are you?”
I’m Brad. I mean, Mindfogger. Just think, but don’t answer out loud: is your sub nearby?
It’s right there, just off the dock.
Mutagion was leaning with most of his weight on my shoulders. I struggled to keep both of us upright.