Not Your Villain

by C. B. Lee

  Brendan is silent, looking at his feet. “But you… you encrypt all your messages,” he protests. “You must be the Resistance, the amount of trouble you take to cover your tracks.”

  Thomas laughs. “Well, we are participating in some highly illegal activity, you know. And having meetings like this is a huge risk, especially with the Authorities constantly sniffing around for contraband.”

  “Wait,” Kyle says. “You mean you’re looking for actual people who want to… overthrow the Collective?”

  “Yes!” Emma says. “Do you know them?”

  Thomas looks at Kyle, who shrugs. “We resist the law that says all pre-Collective media must be turned in for inspection and official approval. We are all things subversive, we are—”

  “A bunch of nerds.”

  * * *

  Bells doesn’t say anything; he can see how dejected everyone is on the way back to the car. The secret-movie-watching club might have been fun, and Cal and everyone seemed friendly. But they came all the way out here and spent so much time decoding those messages, which did turn out to be Thomas and Kyle’s flirtations after all. They didn’t find the Resistance.

  “We also need to get out of this canyon,” Jess says. “Flash floods.”

  “It took us two hours to hike in here!” Bells protests.

  They find the trail easily enough, but the clouds get heavier and heavier overhead. The birds grow ominously silent, and then it begins to rain. At first it’s pleasant, a welcome relief from the usual heat, but the droplets keep falling, falling, and then the rain turns from a light drizzle to a downpour. Bells’ clothes stick to his skin, and he hears the not-so-far-off rumble of thunder.

  “Lightning will be coming soon,” Jess mutters. “We’re hiking in the middle of a wash. We don’t want to be here when all the water gets going.”

  Bells tries to remember if their trail takes them higher on the way back to the car. No, they stayed pretty low to the ground the entire time.

  Another rumble. The rain falls harder. Jess is counting beneath her breath. “It’s getting close.”

  The reddish-brown dirt seems to slick up and close off to the rain. Water rolls right off, forming puddles and rivulets, heading down, down, down. The earth smells rich and wet, but Bells can’t appreciate it because they’re here, hours away from the car, with no shelter from the storm.

  Emma shivers.

  Lightning flashes, lighting up the sky in the distance, and then thunder rolls; thick and heavy. He curses. “How far was that?”

  “Twelve miles,” Jess says. “Look, I see a cave. If we can get there, we’ll be out of the rain and we won’t be the tallest things out here. I don’t think I’d survive getting hit with lightning again, the real kind this time.”

  Bells shivers, looking at the faint outline of Jess’ scar traveling down her neck. The strange pattern makes him think of branches, or veins.

  “Come on,” Abby urges. “Off the trail.”

  “Hell yeah to high and dry,” Emma says, taking the lead.

  It’s almost like they’re in a movie. Bells can picture it: the dramatic red-gold landscape, the rain relentlessly pouring down, all of them miserably hiking, and a narrator bemusedly describing the events… And so our stalwart heroes ventured on in the rain…

  “Are you kidding me, Jess? This is, like, almost vertical!” Emma snaps.

  “It’s not bad,” Jess says. “Look, there’s a handhold there, and a foothold over there. I’ll go first. Just watch me.”

  Scrabbling for footholds, Jess nimbly scampers up the rocks. They’re large boulders, not exactly vertical as Emma had complained, but, yeah, there’s no way Bells is doing that.

  Jess stops, turns around and stands her ground, holding out her hand. “Look, just go quickly and don’t think about it, Bells. We’re actually close to the cave.”

  Emma nudges Bells. “Here, you can go first. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Bells nods and takes a deep breath. He doesn’t look down, just concentrates on Jess in front of him pointing out where to hold and step. Some of the rocks are slippery because of the rain, and a few times scattering loose pieces make him nervous, but he can scramble up to where Jess is as long as he doesn’t think about heights.

  Emma follows without too much trouble and squeezes his shoulder. “Good job.”

  “Thanks,” Bells says. “And you too, I mean, you’re kind of at a disadvantage.”

  “Hey,” Emma says, but there’s no heat in it, just a soft, pleased smile.

  Bells grins at her and rests his elbow on top of her head. Emma huffs, but she scoots closer to Bells and wraps her arms around his waist when Jess motions for them to make room for Abby and Brendan.

  Abby scrambles onto the ledge, and then they’re all there. It’s not really deep enough to be a cave, but it’s dry. They breathe in the scent of one another, sweat and dirt and relief, as the storm rages around them.

  “Ten miles,” Jess mutters.

  “Stop with the countdown, Jess,” Bells says. “You’re making Emma nervous.” She’s making him really nervous too, but he won’t admit it.

  “Just giving you guys a heads up.”

  Bells see the lightning hit a pinyon pine not too far away; it sparks up, blazing hot for a moment until it’s quenched by the rain.

  “You guys…” Emma mutters.

  Bells wraps his arm around Emma’s shoulders, after using his power to shift so he’s Emma’s height. “It’s gonna be fine. We can ride out the storm here.”

  A deafening roar sounds right in front of them as lightning strikes the wash, and the rushing water flashes with blinding light. There’s another loud rumble, but this time it’s not thunder.

  “Flash flood,” Jess mutters. “We made it out just in time.”

  The storm seems to last forever as they huddle on that little ledge. Attempts at conversation wither; they just hold each other and wait for it to be over. On Abby’s DED display, Bells can see time slowly ticking by, but each minute seems to take an hour.

  Finally the rain relents to a light drizzle and the thunder retreats a reasonable distance away and the flood drains into the sand, leaving a rivulet in the center of the wash. Wet and miserable, they trudge silently back to the car.

  Bells watches the rain, each drop sliding down the glass, and wonders where they go from here. What if the Resistance doesn’t exist?

  Emma yawns as she pulls into the driveway of the Robledo-Gutierrez home. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I must have automatically…”

  “It’s fine; my car is still here,” Abby says. “I can take everyone else home.”

  “Good, because I don’t remember how to get to your hideout house,” Emma says, rubbing at her eyes.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Bells says. “Go inside and get some rest.”

  Emma waves as she runs inside. The rain is picking up again.

  Abby waves at her car, then grimaces and rummages in her pocket for her keycard and pulls it out, waving it in the direction of the car. “Habit,” she says. “I retrofitted this car so I could control it with my powers.”

  The car’s headlights come on.

  “Huh,” Abby says, narrowing her eyes.

  “Don’t push it,” Jess says. “Remember what happened…”

  What follows is a silent, intimate conversation with soft gazes and eyebrow tilts, and Bells is grateful it’s only a few more minutes to his home.

  Once there, he waves goodbye to Jess and Abby and pauses on the boulder disguising the front porch to think. This is another one of those unnatural storms when sometimes thunder cracks before lightning lights up the sky. Coldfront’s doing, for sure.

  But why? Bells has his suspicions about Coldfront—he was in the Villain’s Guild, but what’s to stop the League from using the villains to do their bidding? Why is Coldfront
making storms like this? He must be around here somewhere very high up, controlling the storm. What was his range? A few miles? And the storm’s only been going on for a few hours, so if Coldfront was at full power, he could keep this up for a while.

  Bells eyes the front door and then his motorcycle. It doesn’t take long to decide. He turns it on, noting the limited charge; that’s fine, he just wants to get close to the Unmaintained zone where Coldfront must be hiding.

  Riding is difficult in the rain; the roads are slick and slippery. It occurs to Bells he should have told someone where he was going. But maybe he imagined the wrong order… After all, they couldn’t always see the lightning.

  Jess would be helpful right now, Bells thinks as he drives off into the desert. He takes the main road and then eyes the mountain peaks in the distance. There are abandoned radio towers up there; it’d make a good place for someone to hide and throw storms at Andover.

  Bells heads in that direction. Unfortunately, the paved road soon ends, and he has trouble navigating the rocky, narrow trail on his motorcycle, so he dismounts and continues on foot.

  Bells knows there’s more information about Coldfront in the history files he used during training. He switches his DED to the citizen ID number for Barry and goes through his League training files and the holobooks on all the villains. Bells is reading when he hears the whirring of a MonRobot.

  Out on its own?

  Bells turns around.

  “Surrender, Chameleon,” the angular robot intones. It’s one of those new models.

  He runs.

  It isn’t alone, and Bells curses for not thinking before logging into Barry’s account. That must have alerted them to his location.

  The rain falls in sheets: hard, angry, and unforgiving. Bells is soaked to the bone; he’s so numb he doesn’t register the cold anymore as he runs. The robots are getting closer. Though he can’t hear their distinctive whirring, he knows they’re still out there, just as relentless as the rain. The cold won’t bother them.

  Bells is tired and aching and wants desperately to stop moving, stop running, and just take a breath and think, but he can’t.

  The desert landscape looks completely different; it rains so rarely he’d almost forgotten what a storm looks like, how the skies go dark and let loose an endless torrent of water. Thick with loose red soil and other debris, rivulets rush through the canyon to form a vicious river that gathers speed as it races ahead. The land is so parched that the rain barely touches the surface before it slimes into a slick pathway.

  Bells is exhausted, but he has to keep running.

  His feet hit the ground with muddy splashes, and he nearly slips. It’s hard going, especially as the gray skies turn an ominous, roiling dark.

  The sun is setting. He’s running out of time.

  Squinting through the darkness, Bells can barely make out the cluster of buildings ahead that marks the outskirts of Andover. He glances back, and that is a mistake because he can see, steadily advancing on him, the chunky steel bodies of the robots with their gleaming mirrored panels.

  “Surrender now,” commands the closest one, its cold electronic voice muffled by the falling rain, as it hovers toward him. It’s barely visible in the dark—just an ominous square shadow lit by a few blinking lights on its panels.

  Bells laughs, thankful that the new robots have hovertech and are much slower than the wheeled models. It’s a small comfort, though. He can’t run forever.

  Through the rain and thick gray clouds, he can barely see the glimmering lights of the only building that has full power in the storm: Andover Memorial Hospital.

  The robots are too close; they’ll catch up to him before he can get to safety. They must be tracking his body heat; there’s no one else out in the storm.

  Bells ducks into a niche in the canyon wall. It’s out of the rain just enough to give him relief from the storm.

  Thunder cracks, followed by a flash of lighting, but it doesn’t seem to come from the sky.

  Another roar of thunder and more lightning… Bells shakes his head.

  Nothing at all natural about this storm.

  Though he’s exhausted from running, he hasn’t shifted much today and he’s got plenty of power left. The expanse of power burns bright within him, but it’s no use. No disguise in the world could fool a robot programmed to detect body heat.

  Body heat.

  Bells eyes the rising water in the gully and looks up at the gleam of the robots close on his heels.

  Cold, cold, cold, it’s going to be cold. Bells jumps in anyway. Mud squelches beneath his feet, and something pokes him in the thigh. In a never-ending swirl of movement, ripples spread, each one barely having time to form a circle before it’s pelted by more rain.

  The water is moving too quickly and some gets in his mouth. He’s dizzy. His head aches with a throbbing pain, and it’s all he can do to stay upright.

  He inhales sharply through his nose and ducks his head under the water.

  Bells loses his balance; the world tilts in a chaos of water and noise. The drumming of the raindrops intensifies.

  He grabs handfuls of mud and coats his body with it. Will it be enough? Will it work? It’s too dark to make out anything above the water, to see if the robots have passed. The current pulls him along until he hits something hard: a pile of rocks trapping mud and sticks and debris, and now one very muddy and miserable Bells Broussard, who can’t hold his breath much longer.

  Bells bursts out of the muddy stream, gasping for air. The rain pelts him mercilessly as he struggles, swaying in the current, trying to keep from washing away. He’s still covered in mud, but it must not mask his body heat, because the robots are still coming.

  The closest one advances upon him; its square body hovers near. It whirs, intoning, “Surrender now, Chameleon. You must answer to the League for your crimes.” Wicked-looking arms with crackles of electricity sparking at their ends emerge from the robot’s torso.

  Bells shudders.

  The mud isn’t hiding him. His heart is still beating; blood and panic course through his veins. All he can do is shift. But what good is the power of a shapeshifter if he’s going to be caught in any disguise, by his own body heat, since he can only change himself?

  Myself and everything I touch, Bells thinks. The mud is too flimsy, but it doesn’t have to stay mud.

  He thinks about cold and hard and unforgiving steel, strong and protective, like armor, and the mud surrounding him slowly gives way to something new. Come on; you’ve got this potential, Bells coaxes. He feels the metals in the earth, the smatterings of iron, and calls them to become more. He uses every ounce of strength he has left.

  The water rushes past him; he’s solid, anchored to the ground with a pillar of iron wrapped around him.

  The robot stops, whirs; its panel blinks as it processes what’s happening.

  Bells holds his breath.

  The robot flies away. It continues down through the canyon, and the others follow suit. Every minute or so one of them commands, “Surrender now, Chameleon,” but the order fades into faint echoes as the robots go farther and farther into the Unmaintained lands surrounding Andover.

  Bells lets out a sigh of relief. He holds on to the shift. Maybe the robots can detect a heat signature from miles away.

  “And so the amazing Chameleon stands steadfast in his armor, awaiting the right moment to plan his escape,” Bells announces in an overly bright voice. His laugh is cold and bitter.

  Bells groans. His nose itches, and he can’t move to scratch it. His hair is ruined, gone frizzy from the rain, and his clothes and shoes are a mess. In addition to the constant rhythm of the rain, he can hear creatures scuttering around deep in their burrows.

  He can’t enjoy the first time he’s shapeshifted an inanimate object so quickly; he can’t be proud of himself because he’
s so miserable. He doesn’t know how he’s going to get out of this, or whether his friends are okay.

  Worse than anything else, all over the country, every household that has one of the new MonRobots is in danger. How many unsuspecting people have robots just waiting for the chance to attack?

  Bells never imagined when he got his powers that one day he’d be cold and miserable and on the run—the most wanted villain in the country. Everything seemed so different then, so filled with hope. He envisioned a glimmering future where crowds would cheer for him, comic books would be written about him, and he would inspire people to do good. He’d thought he’d be a hero.

  I am a hero. They just don’t know it.

  The rain doesn’t show any sign of letting up; if anything, the storm seems to be getting worse. Thunder roars in the distance, and the water in the streambed is rising. Bells shivers. His stomach growls, and his eyelids are drooping, but he can’t fall asleep. Otherwise, he’ll lose the shift, and the robots will find him.

  It’s going to be a long night.

  He knew Chameleon was wanted. But Bells had never been worried; he’d been safe, safe behind his secrets, his family’s protections. Bells wanted Chameleon to be the hero people thought of when they needed help, someone who could fight for justice. But to hear scores of robots demanding he surrender, saying his name over and over again—his hero name in that cold mechanical tone—it’s not right, it’s not fair—and Bells is tired of it.

  Waiting is the worst part, but finally the last of the MonRobots disappears into the distance. Bells extricates himself from his filthy hideaway and runs back to his motorcycle. If the newly upgraded robots are going rogue, everyone who has one is in danger. Good thing the update isn’t public yet…

  Wait.

  Emma.

  Ch. 13...

  Bells’ motorcycle barely has enough charge to make it back to town, let alone all the way to Emma’s house in Andover Heights. It dies, spluttering and stalling, and Bells scrambles off, then runs the rest of the way.