Before they’d parted, he had asked her about her plans to finish her own device with that specific purpose. She had mentioned she was working on it, but hadn’t answered his question. Typical.
“I guess we’re a ways away from finishing this,” Brendan said. “I’m thinking we should take it apart.”
“Changing the subject on me, I see.” The large boy made a show of pouting.
Brendan hadn’t decided to what extent Vlad could be trusted after his falling under Lucille’s spell. He seemed to be acting normally, had even acknowledged what she had done and had apologized. But Tina had lost faith in him.
Brendan tapped his fingers on the counter. “We’re going over tonight.”
“Going over where?”
“Not-Earth. We found a gate. It’s different than the one the headmaster made with his machine. It’s fixed and open like the one in the pool. We’re going to look for Brian and Paul and try to bring them back.”
“I haven’t talked to the new Poser much, but if we can send him home, the sooner the better. Even with the nurse’s help he seemed depressed. And with the nurse gone, I really worry about him.”
“Me too. And who knows what our Brian is going through. Being on an upstream Earth is physically taxing. If you’re not prepared, it makes you feel weak.”
“I have a hard enough time with that here and this is my Earth. Let me know what I can do.”
Brendan nodded. “If we need you, I’ll text. Tina’s still pissed. Give it time. Hopefully we’ll find Poser and Paul and be done with this.”
Vlad put on a magnifier and unrolled a set of small screwdrivers. “So are we building or dismantling that thing?”
***
Brendan texted Tina to meet for dinner. There was no knowing how long the night’s adventure might take. He and Vlad met Tina in the restaurant. He had sent Soren an obligatory text but wasn’t surprised when he didn’t answer. He loaded his plate with stuffed manicotti, garlic bread, and Caesar salad. Tina had a double portion of everything stacked up on top of slabs of braised eggplant and bean salad.
When she sat she glared at Vlad, but he didn’t make eye contact. She ate while reading her tablet.
“Supers news?” Brendan asked.
“Spanish homework,” Tina said. “You’re not the only one behind on their assignments.”
A nearby table was being extra loud. Brendan heard Lucille’s laugh before he saw her. She sat in the middle of a group of students. Sitting beside her was Tyler. A pair of crutches leaned against the table and he wore a bright blue cast over his leg. The warlord Torben had broken it and Tyler had barely escaped with his life. In the crazy events of the past few days, Brendan had no idea what kind of a story covered the injury.
Paul’s double from upstream Earth had been murdered by Torben. Lucille claimed he had died in a fall while hiking, even though his body had never been found. Perhaps her gift, enhanced by the upstream food, had contributed to the authorities believing her. Brendan’s own broken wrist had been blamed on a skateboarding accident.
Dutchman Springs Academy was becoming a hazardous place to find an education.
Brendan rose from the table and went over to Tyler. They hadn’t spoken since returning. When Tyler didn’t notice Brendan standing behind him, he nudged him.
“How are you feeling?”
“Well, if it isn’t Cesar Garza.”
The rest of his table got quiet. Soren wasn’t there, which made Brendan wonder where the boy fit into Lucille’s court. She leaned back and pushed her blonde locks from her face. The other students at the table all had barely concealed grins. Brendan knew it was a mistake coming to the table.
Tyler swung out his broken leg and turned to face him. “Come to gloat?”
“No. I just wanted make sure you’re okay after what happened.”
“Well, unless you’re going to accept responsibility for this, there’s not much we have to say to one another.”
Brendan was about to back away but stopped. “What do you mean?”
“Knocking me down in front of a moving car and then running off. I could have been killed. And that’s a felony. Right up your alley, isn’t it?”
“What are you talking about? I didn’t do anything to you.”
“Easy to say because there’s no proof. It’s just your word against mine. If a passerby hadn’t heard me calling for help, I might still be in that gutter.”
He knew he shouldn’t say anything. This was all Lucille. Either Tyler was in on the lie or she had flummoxed him sufficiently and could get him to believe anything. “Tyler, I didn’t do anything to you. I don’t know what story you’re telling people, but this is stupid. We’re on the same side.”
“You’re not on any side. You’re just like your father.”
Here it comes. Brendan was amazed the whole school hadn’t yet heard his father was Drone King.
But Tyler stopped speaking. Perhaps he found his payoff in Brendan’s obvious distress. The rest of the table was staring murder at him. It was an easy enough lie to believe, pushed along by Lucille’s charm. She wasn’t letting the dust settle.
Tina came to Brendan’s side and pulled him back to their table. He plopped down in front of his tray of food. Suddenly none of it looked good anymore.
***
Charlotte met Brendan and Tina out by the parking garage. She had her pack on and a five-step ladder on one arm. She also wore a blue ball cap with no logo. It made her look wannabe thuggish or like someone in a heist movie.
She handed a bottle of water to Brendan. “Drink up.”
Brendan popped back the cap and took a sniff. “Is this what I think it is?”
“We need to be prepared. This will be our second advantage. Hopefully we can get done what we need to do without having to fight anyone.”
Brendan hesitated, but Tina appeared impatient. Previously, upstream food and water had taken over an hour to have any effect. He took a couple of sips and handed the bottle to her. She gulped some down and handed the bottle back to Charlotte.
“We should talk about this,” Brendan said. “How is it you still have so much of this? How much we should be drinking? Are there side effects?”
“Worrywart,” Tina said. “Just be glad she’s not hogging it all.”
“Fair enough concerns,” Charlotte said. “I’ve had some ever since coming here. I’ve drunk various amounts over the months, especially at first when I was feeling sick. After I acclimatized, I felt I didn’t need it. But when I did use it, it would always supercharge me. I think it boosted my mental facilities a bit, at least enough to finish my gate technology so quickly without anyone’s help. Could I survive without it? Sure. But right now I consider it a necessity. We’re outmatched on so many levels. This will at least give us an edge for where we’re going.”
“At least for your world,” Tina said. “But what about Torben’s? From what Brendan’s told me, it won’t even help us break even. Is there food or water from even further upstream we can access?”
Charlotte shook her head. “Not as far as I know. That’s why we need to be careful. If we have to escape, I’ll have my glove. We find Mimi, and we can get out of there.”
“One thing at a time,” Brendan said. “First we free your father’s two prisoners. And then we look for his vault. Then Torben’s world and the nurse.”
“Simple, right?”
Brendan noticed she had the ring on. Her glove was no doubt in her pack along with the three drones. He was leaving his own partial glove behind. Once again, Charlotte had all the cards. He tried to push the doubt from his mind. If she had wanted him gone, she could have easily abandoned him on Torben’s world.
Tina patted his shoulder. “We got this.”
He nodded and tried his best to show confidence.
3. Home Breakers
Tina volunteered to go through first. Brendan tried to steady the stepladder but had a tricky time keeping himself from sliding down the rocky slope. The la
dder wobbled in his grip as Tina climbed to the second step from the top. Charlotte stood on the opposite side to help if she fell.
“Here goes everything,” she said.
She jumped and didn’t come back down. She was gone.
Brendan fought to keep his balance as the stepladder almost toppled. Several kids around their age were hanging out by the playground. He hoped they would be too busy with their ill-gotten beer to wonder what a trio of kids from the fancy private school was doing on their turf that evening. Brendan set the ladder in place. He hesitated.
“Remember that you’ll be a few feet in the air,” Charlotte said. “Try not to twist your ankle on the landing.”
“I don’t hear Tina screaming. It must be okay.”
“Sound doesn’t carry through.”
“I know. But if she got hurt she just might stick her head back into the gate and let us know.”
He climbed the ladder, and it immediately shifted precariously. Jumping up into the air violated his normal philosophy of keeping both feet planted firmly on the ground. How the supers with gliders and parachutes and swinging ropes attached to homemade grappling hooks ever managed to chance a leap off a building was beyond him.
Charlotte put her hands on the ladder. “Want me to steady you?”
“I got it.” He exhaled hard and jumped. Suddenly there was no ladder beneath him and nothing to grab a hold of. Falling was worse than he’d imagined. His arms windmilled and as he dropped, the tip of one foot caught the rocks. He tumbled forward, his hands out to prevent his face from smashing into the ground. Sharp stones struck his knees and elbows and he bounced. His broken wrist in its cast sent a shot of pain up his arm. He rolled to a stop and paused to catch his breath. Pebbles stuck to his chin. He brushed them off.
When he looked back up the hill he saw neither Charlotte nor the ladder.
He heard a slow clap. “Nice landing,” Tina said as she helped him up. “The crowd groans. The judges give it a piddly one point five.”
They were in the same park with the same features, except there were no kids on the playground. Brendan struggled to his feet. His heart was beating hard. He put his hands on his knees and caught his breath. Tina handed him some water, but he waved it off.
Charlotte appeared midair up the hill. She fared better than Brendan, planting one foot on the slope and springing forward into a run downhill. She slid to a stop next to them.
“The judges give that a begrudging four point seven,” Tina said.
“What?” Charlotte asked.
“You didn’t biff.”
“No, I guess I didn’t.” Charlotte looked around the park. “We should get moving.”
“Hold on,” Brendan said. “Unless you’ve been here recently, we have no idea where to start.”
“My dad’s house. It’s big enough that he could keep Paul and Poser there without much hassle. We can also try the school. Security there is tight, but we can at least recon it.”
“Are you saving the drones for anything?”
“They’ll be invaluable upstream. I didn’t want to risk using them here.”
“It would save us a bunch of time.”
They settled in at the park benches. Charlotte gave her tablet over to Brendan and he opened the program. While Charlotte got the drone case out, he explored the interface. The controls were all as they had been the last time Brendan had used them, with a simple menu and a feature allowing a user to stack commands and assign them priorities. The version number told him the program was relatively young, just past one point one: just beyond a prototype phase and most likely not a commercial item. While he waited, he selected the About tab. He saw a company blurb for Kreuzer, Hagen, and Garza. The three founders of the defense tech company included someone with his father’s name. Charlotte’s tablet wouldn’t connect with the internet here so he couldn’t look it up. But the drones had all come from the downstream Earth.
“Did my dad start a company?”
Charlotte was setting the drones down in a line on the pavement. She nodded. “That’s who he is downstream. A weapons designer and not a criminal.”
An odd wave of emotion hit Brendan as he went through the app with fresh eyes. This was something his father had made, or at least contributed to. Something legitimate. Sure, it was a weapon system that no doubt could be used by the government to spy or even kill people, but just the fact that the program and drones were legal and perhaps even successful meant his father could have taken a different course in life on his world.
“Did you look up downstream me?”
“I didn’t. It’s probably best to not know ourselves too much. I don’t even know if meeting ourselves is safe. I almost had a heart attack when I saw my dad fight with your world’s headmaster.”
“Ha,” Tina said. “When you sent me downstream and I had nothing to do but wait around, I called home.”
“You what?” Brendan said.
“I called my mom but she wasn’t in. But I answered.”
“You talked to your downstream self?”
“It was cool! I figured I have the capacity for abstract thinking, so I let myself know who I was.”
Charlotte was slowly shaking her head.
“I’m not sure how to ask this,” Brendan said, “but did you believe you?”
“Probably not. But my other me stayed on the phone and humored me. Apparently I’m not attending any special school. Other me goes to public school in Scottsdale and helps my folks take care of one of my brothers. It’s Luke. Downstream he has muscular dystrophy. We’re not as well-off there.” She trailed off. “But I seem happy.”
“It can be overwhelming trying to sort all this out,” Charlotte said. “We have a hard enough time keeping track of one life.”
Tina nodded and wiped her eyes with her shirt. “Let’s fly some drones.”
***
It took longer than Brendan liked to get oriented. The drones weren’t synching with GPS, which made sense, as the software wasn’t designed to work on this Earth. He sent one up. Navigating the drone over Dutchman Springs at night was disorienting, but soon enough he found a few commercial buildings and then the school. The tiny machine flew quickly, and he directed it towards the headmaster’s house. He had the drone circle high above.
“Anyone home?” Tina asked.
There were lights on. The curtains upstairs were drawn. He took manual control and began to drop it down in a slow descent. Then he paused it. The cherry of a cigarette glowed orange in the shadow of the front porch. Brendan enlarged the screen and watched. A stream of exhaled white smoke trickled upward.
“Got infrared?” Tina asked.
Brendan tapped the screen and activated a night vision mode. A large man was leaning on the side of the porch, cigarette in hand. He shifted position and sat down on the step. He then looked straight up at the drone.
He took his fingers away from the touch screen. The drone remained hovering. When the machines hovered they were as close to silent as they could be, but their buzz was unmistakable.
“He’s made you,” Tina said. “Get out of there.”
But the man kept smoking and soon he took a phone out. Switching back to normal view, Brendan could see he was scrolling through images, but he couldn’t make them out.
Brendan had the drone circle around the house. There were no curtains on the downstairs windows. A few amber lights illuminated a large living room with three couches. A baseball game played on a giant screen. One broad-shouldered boy sat on the couch, a bag of chips next to him. A tank top revealed mammoth muscles.
“I found Paul.”
A brilliant white spotlight snapped on from the street that ran past the park, blinding Brendan.
“Cops,” Charlotte said. She grabbed her pack. “Send the drones up into the air.”
Brendan couldn’t see anything, let alone the tablet screen. He shielded his eyes.
“You kids come over here,” an amplified voice said. “The park is
closed.”
The shadows around them had melted. Brendan heard Tina and Charlotte running away.
“Stop!” the voice ordered.
Brendan clung to the tablet. The other two drones were still on the pavement, but he couldn’t see well enough to pick them up. He ran in the opposite direction of the light. The light followed him.
His foot struck the curb demarking the edge of the paved trail. He stumbled but kept his balance. The park extended past the playground, and he could see a tall row of hedges and another entrance. He ran. His eyes were just starting to adjust when he heard an electric car’s engine whine up ahead. A police car pulled in front of him. Someone got out of the car and yelled, “Hold it there.”
The police officer didn’t have a gun out. He was just rousting kids from a park, perhaps responding to a noise complaint. But questions would follow that couldn’t be easily answered. Brendan’s heart pounded in his chest. The air felt thin in his lungs. Just breathing was harder here. He felt disoriented. Charlotte and Tina were nowhere in sight.
The cop rounded the front of his car and beckoned Brendan over. The man made a chopping signal, and the spotlight from the first car across the park cut out.
“Come over here, son,” the cop said. He shined a flashlight at Brendan. “You’re out past curfew.”
Curfew before ten at night? “I know, I’m sorry.” He touched the tablet screen.
“Let’s put that away for now.”
Brendan selected all the drones and had them fly straight up.
The Supervillain High Boxed Set: Books One - Three of the Supervillain High Series Page 45