A bit of moonlight came in through the far window, allowing me to see inside the room. There was no one there except for Clara, who lay in bed on her side. The sound I had heard was coming from her. She was sobbing and rocking back and forth slightly. Her back was to me.
I wanted to crawl into bed with her to hold and comfort her, but that seemed wildly inappropriate. So instead I pulled up a chair until it was next to her bed. I put the gun down on the floor between my legs. I reached out my hand to touch Clara’s shoulder. She stiffened and turned her head. Wetness shone on her face in the dim light. She relaxed when she saw it was me. She grabbed my hand and clutched it with both of hers tightly. She closed her eyes. Tears rolled out of them. Clara emitted low sobs which racked her body and pierced my heart. She sounded like a wounded animal. I had not shed a tear since my parents had died when I was not too much older than Clara. However, I remembered what the pain and loss and loneliness that caused such sobbing felt like. It was hard to forget.
I sat there, with my hand clutched by hers, until Clara’s sobs subsided. Finally, after a long while, they stopped. Her breathing eventually became regular and even. She was asleep. I tried to pull my hand away, but Clara stirred. I did not want to wake or leave her. So, I left my hand where it was.
I watched and watched over Clara the rest of the night. My extended arm fell asleep after a while, but I did not.
CHAPTER 25
Days became weeks. Time marched on as it always did, but more pleasantly for me than usual. Shadow, Clara, and I soon settled into a routine. Shadow and I did the cooking. Clara did the cleaning. She did all of it at her insistence. I think it made her feel useful.
Shadow or I would occasionally go into town for supplies. Clara always stayed at the cabin. We did not know how far the tentacles of the MLF’s organization extended. We did not want to take any chances.
Shadow and I never left Clara by herself, partly because we wanted to make sure she was protected, and partly because she would not let us out of her sight. We were the first Metas she had spent time around who were not trying to exploit her. Also, we accepted her for who she was, powers and all, unlike her parents. Clara followed Shadow and I around like a puppy. If I did not have a reputation to maintain as a hard-edged, hard-nosed, hard-boiled private eye, I would have said I liked it. It gave me a small taste of what fatherhood must be like.
Shadow had a very large and eclectic book collection, and we all spent a lot of time reading, especially since there was no television or Internet access at the cabin. In an abundance of caution, both Shadow and I shut off our cell phones to keep them from being traced. If we needed to make a call, we drove to town to do so even though Shadow kept a couple of prepaid burner phones at the cabin for emergency purposes.
One day it occurred to me the three of us were like a small, superpowered family.
“Do you think Clara is the Beaver or Wally?” I asked Shadow.
“Neither,” she said. “If she was, that would imply you are Ward Cleaver, I’m June Cleaver, and that we are married.” Shadow sniffed disdainfully. “You should be so lucky. Besides, how am I supposed to kick people’s asses in pearls, a skirt, and heels?”
“That is the kind of question that keeps me up nights,” I said.
“Who is Beaver?” Clara interjected. “And, what the heck is a ‘Wally’?”
Shadow and I looked at each other.
“I feel old,” I said.
“I feel old, too,” Shadow said. “I don’t look it, though. Not like you, paleface. Black don’t crack.”
“Paleface?” I said. “I’m pretty sure that’s a racial epithet. My sensitive ethnic sensibilities are offended.”
“You are right—it is a racial epithet. And I don’t care,” Shadow said.
Clara just listened to our banter. She had a slight smile on her face. By then, she was used to how Shadow and I interacted with each other. I knew she preferred our banter over the yelling that passed for communication in the Barton household.
Shadow and I worked out every day. Not only were we accustomed to exercising every day, it helped us kill time. In addition to us hiking and running through the woods, Shadow set up weights right outside the cabin and hung a heavy bag from the limb of a tree. Clara would often watch us.
About a week or so after we first came to the cabin, Shadow was holding the heavy bag as I punched it. I was practicing combinations on it. Clara was lying in a lounge chair on the back balcony of the cabin, alternating between watching us and reading Don Quixote.
“I wonder if Clara knows she is reading your biography,” Shadow said. I did not have to ask her what she meant. Shadow thought I was too idealistic. Because of my inherent and deep sense of Heroic dignity, I did not respond. Also, I was tired from punching the heavy bag. If I had tried to speak, I would have panted. Shadow never panted when she hit the heavy bag. It was not good to be shown up by one’s potential sidekick.
“Speaking of tilting at windmills, come up with any brilliant ideas as to what we are going to do with Clara?” Shadow asked.
“Not yet,” I said. If I had said more, it would have come out as a gasp. A Hero must maintain an unruffled air. If I kept up the pace and the force with which I was punching the bag, I would be maintaining my unruffled air unconscious on the ground.
“You need to think faster,” she said. “We can’t stay holed up here forever. At some point, we have to break up this little happy family we’ve formed. You are not Ozzie and I am most definitely not Harriet. Plus, we have about as much legal right to keep Clara as the Pied Piper did.”
“The difference is Clara is with us voluntarily.”
“I’ll be sure to explain to the judge when I get arrested for kidnapping that this minor child came with me voluntarily,” she said.
Shadow was right. I did not have a solution yet though. All I had was the bag in front of me, so I continued to tackle that problem instead. One thing at a time.
“Instead of hiding out, we could always take the fight directly to the MLF,” Shadow said. “The expression the best defense is a good offense is a cliché for a reason. From everything we’ve learned, the Pied Piper is the brains of the outfit. If we kill him, the organization will fold in on itself like a house of cards. We would not have to worry about them taking Clara again.”
I stopped hitting the bag. The bag had had enough. I had beaten it to within an inch of its life. Plus, it would be embarrassing to pass out in exhaustion.
“We’re not killing the Pied Piper,” I said. I was breathing hard. “You know that’s not how I operate.”
“You don’t have to kill him. I’ll do it.” Shadow sounded eager.
“No,” I said. I had to see it to believe it, but Shadow’s lower lip stuck out a little like a pouting child who had been told she could not have a cookie. I would have laughed at her, but she might have attacked me. I was too tired to properly defend myself.
“Why do you two exercise so much?” Clara asked us that night over dinner.
I shrugged.
“Why does anyone exercise?” I said. “To stay in shape, get stronger, and be healthy.”
“But you’re already strong. You have powers,” she said.
“There’s more to being strong than having powers,” Shadow said. “Even if you ignore the health benefits of exercise, regular exercise builds discipline and mental toughness. If Truman lost his powers and had to go up against the entire MLF without them, my money would still be on Truman coming out on top.”
I looked at Shadow.
“That sounded suspiciously like a compliment,” I said to her.
“It was,” Shadow said. “Don’t get used to it.”
I winked at Clara.
“I think Shadow is falling in love with me. I suspected this would happen. It was only a matter of time,” I said.
“How old is the universe supposed to be? Around fourteen billion years old?” Shadow asked. She shook her head. “That’s still not enough time.”
The next day Clara asked to work out with me and Shadow. We, of course, let her. Clara was as weak as a kitten, but nobody starts off as Arnold Schwarzenegger. Other than a barbell stripped of plates, Shadow did not have much in the way of weights that were light enough for Clara. But, we worked with what we had. Plus, Shadow and I taught Clara a bunch of body weight exercises. She soaked up what we taught her like a sponge. Her form was perfect, and, if truth be told, better than mine.
Since Clara also said she wanted to learn to throw a punch, I taught her that as well. One day I had Clara hit the heavy bag while I held it. She could not hit it hard enough to get it to move, so me holding on to it was not necessary. But, I wanted to be in front of her so I could see what she was doing.
“No, don’t punch with just your arms. Punch with your whole body like I taught you,” I said to her. Clara hit the bag again. “Better,” I said. “As you punch, use the torque from the rotation of your body to put more force into the punch. Again. Again. Come on, I can barely feel you hitting the bag. Again. Harder. My grandmother can hit harder than that, and she’s dead. Again.” Suddenly, there was a deafening blast. I sailed into the air. I landed on the ground on my back, hard. The wind was knocked out of me. The edges of my vision dimmed, and I almost passed out. Almost, but not quite.
After a few seconds, my vision cleared. Shadow and Clara were standing over me, bent over me in concern. Someone was moaning. I realized it was me. I stopped.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Clara said over and over, like it was an incantation. She looked like she was about to cry.
“What happened?” I asked. My voice was shaky. I had never been hit by a truck, but how I felt was how I imagined getting hit by a truck was like.
“You were telling me to hit harder, so I used my powers to make my fist explode when it hit the bag,” Clara said. “I had practiced some in making just parts of my body explode before the MLF took me. It was supposed to just give my punch a little extra kick. I guess the drug the MLF was pumping into me to strengthen my powers worked. I didn’t mean for a blast like that to go off. It’s the first time I’ve used my powers since the MLF took me.” Clara turned pale. “I could have killed you. Just imagine what would happen if I did a full-body, full-strength explosion.”
My head swam. I tried to stand, but couldn’t. That was fine by me. Standing was overrated anyway.
“Are you hurt?” Shadow asked me.
Aside from the world refusing to stand still, I seemed otherwise uninjured.
“I think I’m okay,” I said. I tried to get up again. I was successful this time. I had to lean on Shadow to keep from falling over, though.
“Clara, why don’t you go to the house and get an icepack for Truman,” Shadow said. Her mouth was twitching.
With another stream of apologies, Clara turned and ran towards the house. Her hair streamed out behind her.
Shadow was laughing openly now.
“What’s so funny?” I demanded. I pushed away from her. I was starting to feel better.
Shadow’s smile was brilliantly white in her dark face.
“You got knocked on your ass by a thirteen-year-old girl,” she said. I had never seen her enjoy herself quite so much.
“She’s a Meta,” I said defensively. “It could have happened to anyone.”
“It didn’t happen to anyone. It happened to you,” Shadow said. She was laughing so hard, she clutched her sides. She was as gleeful as a gossip with a secret. “Just wait until we get back to Astor City. I’m going to tell everyone I know that superhero Truman Lord got knocked out by a little girl.”
I felt like sitting down. Only self-respect kept me standing.
CHAPTER 26
The next day, Shadow and I started training with Clara in the use of her powers. Clara’s MLF augmented powers were like having a loaded gun around. If you were going to have a loaded gun, you had better learn how to use it safely.
In training Clara and experimenting with her powers, we learned several things. For one, Clara learned she was exponentially more powerful than she had been before she was taken by the MLF and doused by their drugs. She told me when she had blown up in the Dupont Circle subway at Pied Piper’s command, she had blown up as hard as she could. After blowing up experimentally at a mere fraction of her full capabilities deep in the woods under my guidance, Clara told me she could not imagine the amount of destruction she would now be able to unleash if she really let loose.
Her words reminded me of what the Pied Piper had said to me when he had come to my office. He had said Clara had the capability to exceed the explosive power of Joseph Tilly, the man who set off the nuclear explosions during World War Two. I shuddered at the thought of it. It renewed my resolve to not let Clara fall into the hands of the MLF again.
Additionally, I learned of some of the limits to Clara’s power. If she did a full body explosion, she could control—but only to a certain degree—where she rematerialized post-explosion. The outer limit of her rematerializing radius seemed to be less than one hundred feet.
I had Clara experiment with using her powers in the stream behind Shadow’s place to test how water affected her abilities. Though the flowing water was named Maury River, it was really just a wide but shallow stream. It was a tributary of the much larger James River. Since the portion of the Maury River that flowed by Shadow’s place was quite shallow, Clara could wade into it without fear of drowning. I had her do very low level explosions in the water. We determined water dampened her explosive force. By exactly how much and why, we did not know.
Also, now that I knew Clara could make only a part of her body explode thanks to the stunt she had pulled on me the day before, there seemed to be some pragmatic problems with her doing so. What if she wanted to put her hand on a door and explode her hand to blow a hole in the door? Sure, it would work, but the shrapnel from the explosion would probably blow a hole in Clara too.
When we took a break from Clara’s training, I explained my concerns to her.
“Should you decide to use your powers on a regular basis when you get older, you might want to consider having a suit made that will protect you from the debris from your blasts,” I said. Her eyes widened.
“You mean I could put on a suit and be a Hero?” she said. “Like you?”
“There’s more to being a Hero than putting a suit on,” I said. “Besides, you don’t have to wear a costume just because you are a Hero. I’m a licensed Hero, and you see I don’t wear one.”
Clara nodded thoughtfully.
“What do you have to do to be a Hero, anyway?” she said.
“Well, you have to pass the Trials. The Trials are a month long series of tests that are designed and conducted by the Heroes' Guild. There’s a physical fitness test, a psychological test, a combat test, a legal knowledge test, a power proficiency test, an ethics test, and a few other tests I’m forgetting about right now,” I said. “Once you successfully pass the Trials, you are officially a licensed Hero and a member of the Heroes' Guild.”
“Wow, that sounds like a lot of work,” Clara said.
I nodded.
“It is. It’s supposed to be. The Trials are designed to weed out the stupid, the weak, the corrupt, and the corruptible. Those of us with powers have the capacity to be very dangerous. That is why the government requires Metahumans to be registered, and for Metahumans who are going to use their powers to be licensed Heroes. Society doesn’t want just any and everybody using their powers. That is why Heroes have to go through so much training and have to pass the Trials to prove they have been properly trained. Licensed Heroes are part-police officers, part peacekeepers, part role models, and part butt-kickers.”
“Not to mention part goody-goodies and part stick-in-the-muds,” Shadow interjected.
“Quiet,” I said to her. “Don’t interrupt while I’m mid-lecture. Besides, you’ll sour Clara on Heroes.”
“Why aren’t you a licensed Hero, Shadow?” Clara ask
ed.
“There are too many rules Heroes have to follow,” she said. “The rules are a little too—how shall I say?—restricting in the kind of work I do.”
“But isn’t using your powers without being a licensed Hero illegal like Truman said?” Clara asked.
Shadow smiled at her.
“It sure is. That’s half the fun,” she said.
“I believe you are doing what the law calls contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” I said to Shadow. She shrugged.
“I have done a heck of a lot worse than that over the years,” she said. “Just add that to the list.”
“So what do you do to train for the Trials?” Clara asked me.
“To even be able to participate in the Trials,” I said, “a potential Hero has to first become the Apprentice to a Sponsor. You have to be at least seventeen to become someone’s Apprentice. A Sponsor is an already licensed Hero who agrees to be responsible for the Apprentice’s training for the Trials. In the past few years, Metahuman schools have been cropping up to train Metas to get ready for Apprenticeships, but there is no requirement that someone goes to such a school before becoming an Apprentice. If you are in Meta school or an Apprentice, you are allowed to use your powers under strict supervision even though you are not yet a licensed Hero.” I had a sudden thought as I spoke. Clara was too young to be someone’s Apprentice, but maybe I could get her enrolled in a Metahuman school. Such schools were protected by the Heroes' Guild, so perhaps Clara would be safe from the MLF there. I made a mental note to discuss the notion with Shadow later.
“How long do you have to be an Apprentice before you can take the Trials?” Clara asked.
“There’s no definite time requirement,” I said. “Whenever an Apprentice and his sponsoring Hero think the Apprentice is ready, he or she can stand for the Trials. Some people are Apprentices for years before they take the Trials. The quickest I’ve ever heard someone going from Apprentice to taking the Trials is a couple of months, but that person was very much the exception to the general rule.”
Superhero Detective Series (Book 2): The Missing Exploding Girl Page 16