by Drew Hayes
In ten more years, Roy could only imagine what the blond young man would be capable of. It was bad enough having to face him now. Roy just hoped the inter-Super competition would slow down once they hit the Hero world. That thought triggered an unexpected memory, and suddenly, Roy had something on his mind besides the next exercise in his workout routine.
“Hey, Chad,” Roy said, walking over to the other part of the gym. “Do you have a minute?”
“If you require a spot, I’m afraid your lifting strength has reached a level where I am unable to assist you.” Chad kept on moving the weights as he spoke, never losing his tempo.
“No, it’s not about the weights. I actually wanted to ask you if you’ve ever heard of Intramurals.”
“Certainly. It is when two academic institutions compete against one another in a predetermined event; usually sports, though there are more salacious versions that center around drinking games.” He paused his lifting for just a moment to look over at Roy. “Angela informed me about the latter type. She wishes to participate in something called ‘The Beer Olympics.’”
“First off, tell your girlfriend she’s a douche for not asking me to be on that team,” Roy said. “But secondly, I actually meant Intramurals specific to the HCP. Someone over break mentioned them, but then refused to explain. I was thinking maybe you knew what they were.”
Chad shook his head. “My apologies, but the word holds no specific meaning for me. It is certainly possible that the HCP programs have some sort of competition between them; however, I have no information about it.”
“No big deal, just thought I’d ask,” Roy said. “Thanks anyway.” He turned toward the free weights, ready to get in some nice shoulder work, when Chad spoke up again.
“Of course, we could always ask Shane what he knows about it.”
“Why would Shane know more than us?” Roy turned back to Chad, who wore a semi-confused expression.
“Haven’t you put it together yet?”
“Put what together?” Roy asked.
“Shane’s comments and knowledge during the dean’s class freshman year, the manifestation of both his and Angela’s abilities . . . forgive me; I assumed it was obvious to everyone by this point.”
The part about Angela tickled something in Roy’s brain. That power of hers had looked familiar, so close to something he could almost place. It was like hearing the theme song from a cartoon he’d watched in his childhood; he knew that he knew it, even if he couldn’t seem to put a finger on where it was from.
“Her power, she calls it Sunlight Steel,” Roy recalled, “and has the ability to turn any kind of light into a super-hard metal only she can control. I’ll be honest, I feel like I know what you’re getting at, but I can’t remember anyone else using that name for their abilities.”
“That’s because the original wielder of didn’t call it Sunlight Steel,” Chad said. “He referred to it as Starlight Steel.”
And just like that, all the tumblers fell into place in Roy’s brain. It was history, one of Roy’s worst subjects, which was why it had taken him so long to realize what was right in front of his face. Crafting objects out of light, while manipulating shadows to his will . . . the man who’d had complete control of light and dark; the man who had made the world face the existence of Supers. The first Hero to ever wear the title: Captain Starlight.
“Sweet tap-dancing Jesus.” Roy sucked in a breath between his teeth and tried to avoid reeling. No wonder Angela was such a monster. If she’d gotten training along with her power, she was working with decades of battle-tested knowledge on how to best use her abilities. It explained so much about her, and, at the same time, made Roy dozens of degrees more curious about Shane. To have the weight of that legacy on his shoulders, to have inherited an incredible power and been schooled on how to use it; to carry the weight of all that expectation . . . only to come up second to Chad time after time. Roy suddenly felt a kinship with Shane DeSoto, despite having rarely traded more than a few words with him.
“I think that’s a good idea,” Roy said at last. “Let’s go ask Shane what he knows.” Roy had many, many questions for his fellow student, but something like this had to be approached delicately. For now, Intramurals would be a good starting point.
But only for now.
163.
“. . . and lastly, this conversation will not be recorded. There will be no records of it in any capacity, save only for the memories we retain, and even those may need to be removed or altered at a later date. By sitting here, by joining this effort, everyone, myself included, recognizes these terms and consents to them. Does anyone disagree?”
Dean Blaine’s eyes swept the table, not expecting any objection, but prepared for one regardless. When things got serious, when people truly reached the point of no return, it was impossible to be certain how someone would react. In this case, he was fortunate: no one broke rank. With a small, almost imperceptible sigh of relief, he continued.
“Then the first order of business is to debrief Nick Campbell.”
Nick was sitting across the table from Dean Blaine, in between Mr. Transport and Professor Pendleton. The soft glow of fluorescent lighting reflected off the sunglasses set in front of him. Though he’d worn them in, this underground base was too dim for him to navigate properly with them on. It would take weeks of practice before he was able to deal with low-light environments while wearing them once more.
“I’m going to take a guess, and say you mean that I should spill my big secret. The one that I thought was too dangerous to be found in my head. That’s the one you want to me just spit out, right here, exposing everyone to it.”
“Everyone here is trained, competent, and abreast of the risks,” Dean Blaine replied.
“Maybe so, but I’m not sure it needs to be shared,” Nick said. “This whole secret taskforce is about Globe, the coaches, and the mole in the HCP, right? My secret doesn’t directly pertain to any of that. I’ve never been worried about Globe. What I know could piss off a totally different, far more dangerous enemy.”
Dean Blaine would have loved to have glanced at Professor Stone to see what she was reading from Nick’s mind, but his neutralizing field encompassed everyone in the room. While it meant they were safe from abilities that might overhear them, it also meant things like telepathy were off the table. He tried to think of how best to phrase the counter-argument, but Professor Pendleton beat him to it.
“Right now, we’ve got nothing but disparate data, little events and pieces of knowledge that don’t fit together. You might be right, your thing might be completely unrelated, but it might also tie together other pieces we know in unexpected ways. We’re currently in the dark, and that means we have to grab on to every tidbit of information we can get. So talk.”
“If that’s really what you want.” Nick drummed his hands on the wooden table, carefully looking over the few faces in the room with him. They were people proven trustworthy, presumably, but once upon a time, the same might have been said about George or Persephone. Still, sooner or later, he would have to speak up. If these were the people who composed the inner circle, then he would just have to make do with it.
“I first realized something was wrong when I was breaking down our team dynamics last year. When stepping back and independently assessing each member of every team, my own included, I noticed a variable that didn’t make sense. One of my team wasn’t the same as the others. She wasn’t on the same scale of power, not by a long shot.”
“You’re talking about Mary,” Professor Fletcher surmised.
“Wrong direction,” Nick said. “Alice. Alice was a four on my scale, plus, she had no other discernible skills or talents. That made her the weakest member of the entire HCP class, and without much room for growth.”
“The current scores would disagree with you,” Mr. Numbers pointed out.
“Yes, thank you, Captain Obvious. I know that Alice is incredibly powerful now, but we aren’t talking about now,
we’re talking about then. And back then, Alice was so weak that I had to really ask myself how she’d even gotten into the HCP in the first place.”
“Fliers have demonstrated great usefulness before,” Dean Blaine said. “Though, admittedly, most of them got through in the Subtlety category.”
“Look, you’re all missing the point.” Nick picked up the sunglasses and began absent-mindedly fiddling with them. “Whether Alice would be a good Hero doesn’t matter, not as far as this discussion goes. My point is that, so far as anyone could possibly know, she was too weak to ever be a serious danger to others. Add in that she grew up in a house with every manner of protection, and that makes her an anomaly.”
“I see. You aren’t talking about the Hero class,” Dean Blaine said.
“Exactly. She’s the oddball among us test subjects, the former Powereds. Vince is a walking natural disaster, Mary was in so much hell from voices that she lived in the woods, Hershel was losing his mind, Roy was heading toward jail, at best, and my own prodigious abilities have caused countless dollars in damage throughout the years. We were all trouble, for ourselves, others, or both. Alice was just a girl who floated when she got too happy. She clearly didn’t make the test group on the same criteria we did. Having met her father, I’m guessing he used his money and power to force her through.”
“Spot on,” Mr. Transport confirmed. “Charles Adair decided she would be in the program, and he wields enough clout that Mr. Numbers and I had to go along with it.”
“You can hardly blame the man. He saw a solution to his daughter’s problems and wanted to help her,” Professor Stone said.
“See, I’d agree with you there, but it ignores one major issue: we’re the beta group. Maybe the alpha, I don’t know for sure,” Nick admitted. “What I do know is we’re the first successful batch. I’ve scoured every source of information I’ve got, and if there were any other converts before us, then they must have held that test in the arctic and killed every survivor. Now, I’m no expert on biology, but I did read the fine print on the releases we signed, and it strikes me as very odd that a man with that much power would demand that his daughter be in a highly experimental and dangerous first trial. Not just demand it, but use his resources to force her in. Why not wait and make sure it was safe first?”
“Charles Adair is highly influential; it’s possible he got his hands on the research and believed it would work,” Mr. Numbers pointed out.
“It’s possible, but going all-in with the only family he’s got left?” Nick set the sunglasses back on the table. “I’m a crazy gambler with the power of luck, and not even I’d take that chance.”
“Nick,” Dean Blaine said, his tone steady as he stared at the cunning young man spinning his web of words. “Please move on so that we can see the point you’re drawing toward.”
Nick nodded. “Like I said, I noticed this early in our sophomore year. Then Alice had her Halloween incident, when a head-walker named Abridail said her mom was alive. We all discounted it as a weird dream, because most of us have lost people we love and understood how the subconscious would do that. Of course, when Vince’s Big Papa went and confirmed the guy’s existence, that changed everything. It meant that her mother might really be out there, and that caused me to reexamine the facts as I knew them.”
“Why would Shelby being alive change what Charles did?” Professor Pendleton was damn good at hiding his feelings, but even he could scarcely contain his anxiousness to see what Nick would say about his little sister.
“Because Charles Adair loved her,” Nick said simply. “He loved her so much that he founded the largest Powered charity in the world in her memory, though he likes to hide that fact as much as possible. When I learned about Alice’s home life, when I did that research for you last Christmas, everything I found pointed to a man who dearly, desperately loved his wife. And at the end of sophomore year, I began to realize just what kind of terrible things we can do for the people we love.” Nick didn’t need to mention his own mind-wipe and expulsion, or the level of murderous reaction he’d been able to coax from Vince. Everyone here already knew what he’d done, what he was, and that his ruthlessness was at least part of why they’d brought back him from oblivion.
The room waited silently as Nick took a moment to compose his thoughts. “Some of you may disagree with the theory I reached, I’m the first admit it’s somewhere between shaky and insane. That said, the fact remains that if I am right, even a little bit, it’s dangerous information to have. So, let’s look at the facts we have before us. Here’s what I had strong reason to know: Shelby Adair was a Powered. Shelby Adair was still alive. Charles Adair had the money and influence to fund research on how to turn a Powered into a Super. Alice Adair was crammed into the first trial of the procedure despite the risks involved.” Nick paused for just a second, licking his lips in a rare display of nerves. “And . . . Alice Adair is, genetically speaking, the closest living person to Shelby Adair.”
“No . . . not even Charles would go that far,” Professor Pendleton whispered.
“Say it, Nick. Say what you’re plainly hinting at. If you’re going to make the accusation, then have the courage to speak it out loud,” Dean Blaine said.
“Fine.” Nick let out a small sigh. “None of us—Vince, Mary, Hershel, Roy, or myself—none of us were part of the real experiment. We were a cover, a reason to hide what was truly going on. Patching up Powereds who were dangers to society and themselves, that’s not a hard sell to make. But the truth is that we were just tacked on extras. There was only one real test subject for the procedure; one person that Charles Adair wanted to see the effects on.”
Nick ran his fingers through his sandy hair, and looked at the room of faces once more.
“I believe that the only reason this procedure exists is because Charles Adair wanted to test it on his daughter before using it on his wife.”
164.
“Anything else?” Dr. Moran’s voice wasn’t probing or pleading; she made it clear that this question was up to Vince to answer. If there was another piece of information he wanted to convey, another topic he wished to discuss, she was presenting the opportunity. If not, then they could move on to the next topic.
“No, like I said, it was a pretty normal Christmas break. Mrs. Daniels made us lots of home-cooked food, we hung out with a few of Hershel’s old LARPing friends, and then we trained whenever we could.” Vince leaned back in the chair, far more relaxed than he had been when these sessions first began. Despite his initial skepticism of both Dr. Moran and what she offered, there was no denying that he’d been feeling far more stable and centered since they’d begun actually talking about what was going on inside his head.
“Training over break? Nothing too ostentatious, I hope.”
“Just light sparring in Hershel and Roy’s backyard. Don’t worry, there’s no way I’d risk accidentally burning their house down just to squeeze in a little extra practice,” Vince said.
“And it’s certainly not as though you need it. I heard about the results from the semester exam. It seems you’ve made great strides of improvement. In fact, I was a bit surprised to see how efficiently you went after your targets. In your earlier Close Combat test as well, you had no hesitation in attacking your fellow students. Even the female ones.”
This wasn’t the first time Dr. Moran had tried to broach this topic; she’d been skirting the edges of it since the test had first occurred. The change in Vince’s demeanor seemed to be rooted in what he’d experienced over the summer, and he was exceptionally tight-lipped about that subject. Still, she brought it up when there was occasion, because, as much as it was her job to accept the patient’s wishes, it was also her duty to help them deal with their issues. She wasn’t expecting anything different in terms of results this time, but Vince managed to surprise her.
“That was one of the things I had to learn to get past during . . . when I was fighting Coach George all summer.” Vince’s body language grew mo
re closed off as he drew his limbs to his torso; however, he pressed on. “Up until then, I was always strong enough to hold back, or at least try to, and only got serious when it counted. Fighting George made me hit a lot of my limits; forced me to either grow past them or give up. I had to stop hesitating when I fought him. I had to stop holding everything back, and instead, learn how to control the power I struck with.”
“It must have been terrifying for you,” Dr. Moran observed, more from how he was reacting to the memory than from his actual words.
“At first, it was really scary. Trying to hurt someone, hitting them with all I had . . . I was so afraid I was going to accidentally kill him. But, in a way, I guess it was a good thing. Do you know what happened when I went against George with every ounce of power I could muster?”
“From the story you reported when you first came back, I’d assume it failed to defeat him.”
“Exactly.” Vince nodded, curiously excited about the fact that he’d spent a whole summer losing. “I barely slowed him down, and that was sort of awesome. I know it sounds weird, but I’ve always been scared of my abilities, of what could happen if they went wild. Fighting George showed me, for the first time, that they aren’t unstoppable. I’m not unstoppable.”