by Pab Sungenis
“How do you know that? News reports?”
“Nah, the web. There are whole websites dedicated to tracking hero sightings. It’s a hobby for some people.” He went to the PC over on the other desk and typed in a web address. To my astonishment, the site was exactly what he’d said it was: a list of sightings of all the heroes in the Justice Federation, along with a few blurry photographs taken of us zooming by. There were only two reports of me flying over the City during the past week, which was understandable since I’d only really gone outside to clear my head. Oddly enough, there were a couple of sightings of Mr. Zip in the days immediately following the Professor’s death. “I made those,” Rick bragged. “To help cover it up.”
“Clever. If I’d known about that, or the other heroes had known about that, then there wouldn’t have been a need for me to step in as the Knight.”
One of those awkward silences that were starting to follow me around, like a puppy following a guy holding a steak, descended upon the four of us. Apparently, I’d hit a nerve. “Did Prism speak with any of you?”
“We talked for a little while.” Tommy’s face looked like it was going to slip right off his skull. “She said she was going to suggest I not get promoted until this killer was tracked down, and even though I understand, it still hurts. It’s like I’m being told I’m not good enough.”
“That’s not the case. She thinks you’re all good enough to be alongside the rest of us. And once this is settled, she and I will both push to get you all promoted in your own right, not just as replacements, like what happened with me. You all deserve to be at the big table, but it’s not right to put the three of you in harm’s way unnecessarily.”
“Bullshit!” Sarah shouted, which was uncharacteristic for her. “We’re in harm’s way every single day. We were all practically born in harm’s way. What right do the heroes have to worry about us being in danger now, when they’re the ones who brought us up to be their human shields and cannon fodder?”
“You don’t really feel that way, do you, Sarah?”
I couldn’t believe what she was saying. Okay, partially true. I believed what she was saying since I’d felt the same way on more than one occasion, but I couldn’t believe she was the one saying it. Rick had always been the rebellious one of our bunch and the kind to express those feelings. I rebelled in my heart sometimes but toed the line. Sarah was the good girl who did whatever she was told. And Tommy? Tommy just enjoyed himself way too much to care.
“You don’t have to tell me that.” I restrained myself from shouting. “I feel the same way. Frankly, I think this whole ‘sidekick’ thing was a mistake from the get-go, only redeemed by the fact that it made the three of you the great heroes you’ve become. It’s not right to put a kid into a costume and throw him at a super-villain. It’s not right to take a kid and turn him into a weapon.” I kicked the workbench. “It’s just not right.”
Another awkward silence snuck up on us, and we stared at each other for a while. When Tommy started fidgeting, which happens a lot when you’re as fast as he is, I knew it was time to change the subject and try to rescue the mood. I grabbed a couple of boxes I’d stacked in the corner of the bench and tossed them to the boys. “I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to get one of these made for you, Sarah, but I’ll work on something similar.”
Rick tore open the box and removed the contents: a white tank-top undershirt. “A wife-beater. How thoughtful.”
“You know I hate that term. Anyway, it’s not just any ‘wife-beater.’ It’s made out of the same metallic fabric as my costume, so it’s bulletproof.”
“Whoa!” Tommy opened his package, or at least I assumed that was what happened since he moved so quickly it looked like the package was tied up one moment and miraculously open the next. “That’s so cool. Where did you get them?”
“I have a blacksmith friend who found the material fairly easy to work with. Well, once he figured out he needed welding tools instead of a needle to put them together, he found it easy. He seems to like challenges, so I gave him one.”
“Why would you guys need those?” Sarah asked. “Aren’t all your costumes already bulletproof?”
“Yeah, our costumes are, but we’re not always in costume. When I got caught flat-footed that day at the blacksmith’s, I realized we’re not always going to have time to change into costume. We need some protection when we’re in civvies, too.”
“Maybe, but are any of us targets when we’re not in costume?”
“My Uncle Seth was.” Tommy’s voice croaked as he forced the words out.
“And … ” I considered my words carefully. I hadn’t shared Mr. Zip’s observations about the tape with them, and I couldn’t be certain whether any of the other heroes had. The fact the killer recognized me was pretty highly classified information, from what I gathered. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized the other sidekicks needed to be ready to protect themselves as much as the other heroes. “We have reason to believe the killer knows at least a couple of our identities.”
“What?” Tommy sounded shocked.
“Are you sure?” Sarah sounded more confused.
“How do you know this?” Rick sounded cynical, as usual. That was one of the things I liked about him.
“It’s only a theory. The point is we all need to watch our backs. And every little bit of protection helps.”
“You got that right.” Rick examined the undershirt again admiringly. Then the look on his face shifted, and he started to ask me a question. “Uh, dude, could you … ”
“I’m shocked you’re so worried about getting shot there, and even more worried that I expected you to mention this, but yes, the boxer shorts are on order.”
I spent the next hour playing the good host and catching up on their lives. When the topic of me came up, I pointed at the disassembled pieces of Professor Smith’s computer, which I’d thrown into a corner of the room days ago out of sheer frustration, and explained my attempts to find and/or recover the surveillance footage. “I searched through every directory on the hard drive, and when I couldn’t find it anywhere, I pulled every hacker trick I knew. I even ran it through Miracle Max, but—”
“Wait,” Sarah interrupted. “You ran it through what?”
I stifled a laugh. “Sorry, private joke. Uncle Jack had developed this really cool program that could recover just about any lost or deleted file you could throw at it. He called it ‘Miracle Max’ because no matter how well you think you’ve deleted a file, it is still only mostly dead, and Max can bring it back.”
Tommy and Sarah laughed at the reference. Rick stared at us as if we were insane, and I resolved to make him watch more movies.
“So no luck recovering the footage then?” Tommy asked, trying to veer the discussion back on topic.
“None. I have to wonder if it was ever on this computer to begin with. As you can see by the state of its component parts, and the component parts of those component parts, it proved to be a frustrating exercise. Piled on top of all the rest of the crap in my life, and our collective lives, it just got to be too much.”
“Understandable,” Sarah said. “But that still doesn’t tell us what else you’ve been up to. I doubt it took you a full week to smash that computer.”
“Well, after I realized there was no hope of getting that footage back, and after being forced out of school, I desperately needed to do something constructive. Anything, really. It started with getting those bulletproof undershirts made for the boys, and it sort of took off from there. I found myself digging through all of Uncle Jack’s old files, his notes on his old inventions, and his works-in-progress, and I decided to get my hands dirty. For example, get a load of this.”
I lifted myself a few feet off the floor. Not enough to be flying, but enough to attract their attention. Their eyes shot toward my feet, and the way their jaws dropped when they saw I wasn’t wearing the anti-grav boots was almost priceless.
“Dude!” Rick was too
stunned to say much, so he broke out into laughter. “Where are the boots?”
“I decided to do without them. They’re such bulky things that they’re only really good for costume duty and too unwieldy to wear for everyday use. Like I said, I wanted to get more protection while in civvies, so I retrofitted some anti-gravs into this old pair of high-top sneakers. I’m putting some in my dress shoes next.”
“Wow. What a great idea.” Tommy was suitably impressed, which showed me I was on the right track.
“Yep. This way, I can have the speed and agility boosts I get from the anti-gravs while wearing shoes no one would suspect had anything special about them. They’re not quite perfect. Uncle Jack built a control system into the helmet that lets the wearer control the anti-gravs, instead of only using the toe buttons. Haven’t linked the sneakers into the controls yet, but that shouldn’t take me too long. I’m going to try and string a series of anti-gravs into a belt and link them up, so I don’t even have to worry about what I’ve got on my feet when the time comes that I need the boost the anti-gravs give me. I’ll just have to be careful not to go into full-bore flight when the wrong people are looking.”
“Dude! I so need a pair of those. You have to make one for me.”
“Me, too, Bobby! Me too!”
Sarah scoffed. “I don’t see what’s so important about them.”
“That’s because you can fly already,” Rick retorted. “For us earthbound types, it’s right up our alley.”
“Why would you need them? You’ve never been able to fly. Your fighting styles were designed to be done on the ground, and you wouldn’t know the first thing about fighting in mid-air.”
“She’s right, guys,” I butted in. “It took me a while to really adapt my fighting style to be done off the ground. You two wouldn’t know how to take on an opponent without winding up with your ass in the air and your face on the pavement.” They looked half-offended and half-upset, so I drifted back down. “So, I guess I’m just going to have to train you two in aerial combat.”
The look on their faces made Sarah laugh hysterically and even made me crack a smile. It was one for the books. It was so nice watching someone go from a look of envy and dejection to disbelief, then elation. “But I thought the Scarlet Knight, I mean the old Scarlet Knight,” Tommy corrected himself, “never shared his anti-grav units with anyone but you.”
“He’s not the Knight anymore. I’m the Scarlet Knight now. And I don’t plan to run things the way he used to.” The words that had been spoken so earnestly a little more than a week before in the Professor’s office still resonated with me: we needed to trust one another. And as far as I was concerned, that meant trusting the other sidekicks. I might not technically be one any longer, but I still felt more like one of them than I did one of the big guns, and their lives were as much on the line as the other heroes’ were.
“Oh, before I forget, we also come bearing gifts.”
“Really, guys.” I indicated the Styrofoam boxes Sarah had brought in with her. “I don’t know that fifty medium from Pesci’s is that much of a gift. Especially because you three are bound to eat more than I am.”
“Not what I’m talking about. The wings are just a snack. These,” Rick reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out a couple of manila envelopes, “are gifts.” He handed them to me. I ripped the first one open with all the gusto of a kid launching a frontal assault on the big box under the Christmas tree. I was pleasantly surprised to discover I hadn’t damaged the contents of the envelope in my dismembering of it. At least, until I realized what those contents were.
Then I wanted to damage Rick instead.
Gratitude
“It’s a high school diploma.”
“Bingo!” Rick looked even happier than he had when I’d told him I was going to give him and Tommy the anti-gravs they had been drooling over ever since they’d first watched me take off ages before. “Courtesy of Mystery. I spoke with him a couple of days ago about the shit you’ve been through, and how it was wrong, and how it had you down in the dumps, and how you deserved better. So he called in a few favors—”
“He got me a high school diploma as a ‘cheer up’ gift?”
“Cool, huh? It’s from some exclusive boys’ academy down south. He donates assloads of money to them and is a personal friend of the guy who runs it. So congratulations! You officially graduated from there about twelve hours ago.”
“This is … ” How could I put into words exactly what I held in my hands? I’m not the most articulate guy in the world when it comes to saying what I’m feeling, so I was going to have to choose my words carefully to get the full meaning across. But as I opened my mouth to speak as plainly from my heart as I could manage, Rick interrupted.
“Go on. Open the other one before you say anything.”
Grateful for the reprieve of unburdening my soul, I opened the other envelope with a lot more care and less destructive enthusiasm than the first. It was a thick sheaf of papers, all held together by one of those big document clips at the top. I didn’t bother to look at the name on the letterhead before I jumped to the first sentence, since it was perfectly obvious what I was holding in my hand.
“It is my pleasure to inform you that our admissions board has accepted your application for our upcoming fall semester.” I read the words aloud to help restrain the emotional outburst I knew was coming. I looked at the envelope. No address or postmark. Then, I finally looked up at the name of the school. It was not one I had applied to. “I guess making me a high school graduate wasn’t enough. He decided to make me a college freshman?”
“Incoming freshman, at any rate.” Rick looked pleased with himself. “I think he considers it the least he could do. He gives money to colleges, too, and I suppose he figured he didn’t need another building with his name on it, but could do better by—”
“Rick, this is … ” I clamped my jaw shut. This was not a situation where I wanted to use the wrong word. “Was this all your idea? Do I have you to thank as well as Mister Mystery?”
“Well.” I could have sworn he was going to blush. “I told him about your situation, that’s all. I wish I could claim credit, but it was all his idea.”
“Wow.” That made things a lot easier and paved the way for me to say what I was really thinking. “That’s a relief. For a moment I thought I was going to have to kick your ass.”
Rick’s smile disappeared faster than a burger in front of a fat kid. “Huh?”
I stuffed the college admissions documents back into their envelope, followed by the diploma since its envelope was beyond salvage. “You take these back to Mystery.” I threw the envelope at Rick’s chest. “And tell him to shove them up his cowl.”
“What? What are you saying?”
“I’m saying to get the hell out of here and take those ‘gifts’ with you. I’ll have it out with Mystery in my own time, but for right now just get those things out of my sight, along with yourself.”
“Dude! We did you a favor! He handed you your education on a silver freakin’ platter. What’s the matter with you? I would have loved to have this just handed to me.”
I was so angry it felt like my stomach was climbing up my throat with a grappling hook to warn my heart to calm down before it exploded. “Maybe that’s the difference between us. You wouldn’t understand. So please get the hell out of my sight before I get it in my head that all this was really your idea and make you really, really regret it.”
The ice-cold stare confirmed my suspicion. It was all Rick’s idea, and he was being modest for the first time in his miserable life by giving all the credit to Mystery. He threw the envelope across the room, smacking it into the wardrobe doors, and stormed out of the base as fast as a person can go and still let it be obvious that he was storming out on me and not running away. As he reached the door, he called me an asshole just loud enough so I could hear him and just soft enough that I could choose to ignore it. As angry as I was, I figured it wa
s worth ignoring. Hell, he deserved to be able to blow off some steam, too.
Tommy gaped after Rick. He looked so completely confused that I almost took pity on him. “Bobby, why—”
“Get out.” I turned my back on them and went back over to the workbench I’d been puttering away at when they’d arrived. “Both of you. Now.”
“Bobby,” Tommy’s voice told me he was not only confused but hurt, “I swear to you that we didn’t have anything to do with any of this. We didn’t know what Rick was handing you, only—”
“Tommy, I’m not angry at you. I’m not angry with either of you. But I will be if you don’t get the hell out. All I wanted today—hell, all I wanted all week—was to be alone. Please leave me be for a while before I say some things I might really regret.” I didn’t turn around to watch him leave, but by the lack of a gust of wind I could tell he was departing at human speed. Maybe he was hoping he’d be able to think of the right thing to say to fix everything before he left. Maybe he was hoping I’d change my mind. Whatever the reason, a good minute passed before I heard the door slide shut behind him. That left only one, and the look in her eyes as she glared at me told me I wasn’t going to get rid of her as easily as I had the others.
“You too, Sarah. I need to be alone right now.”
“No way. You’ve been alone all week. Now it’s time to rejoin the world. I’m not going.”
Very calculating ploy on her part. She knew I wasn’t going to throw her out, and I wasn’t going to deck her in anger like I had kept myself from doing to Rick and would have done to Tommy if he hadn’t bugged out. For one thing, I had been taught from a very early age not to hit a girl. I also knew she would wipe the floor with me and wring me out if I’d even thought of trying it. The blessings of the ancient gods that gave her boss her powers carried over a bit to Pandora as well, meaning she was stronger and more durable than I was, not to mention a much better fighter. I couldn’t make her leave, and she knew it.