“Ma’am,” he says.
Sharona doesn’t respond. She moves to the side of the Foreman’s convalescent bed, her face betraying no emotion.
“One of our operatives within the state police alerted us,” Geist says. “As far as the police know or care, he was injured after losing control of his car on the highway. We transferred him from Mass General, which, to their credit —”
“I know all that,” Sharona says. “I was briefed.”
Geist bows his head. “Yes, ma’am.”
“How bad is he?”
Geist weighs his choices: sugarcoat the news and risk later accusations of deceit or tell it like it is and pray his mistress is not the type to kill the messenger for the unwanted message.
“Several broken ribs,” he begins. “Hairline fracture of the frontal process of the zygomatic bone near the left eye. Dislocated jaw, which I had to wire shut. The right knee is torn up badly and there’s some swelling around the base of the spinal column, which is more consistent with a bad fall than —”
“Enough,” Sharona says. “How soon will he recover?”
“Recover? Ohh, ma’am, I —” She fixes Geist with a glare. “Optimistically, several months. He’ll need extensive surgery to repair the worst of the damage, physical therapy for...well, the rest of his life, perhaps.”
“No less than I deserve,” the Foreman mumbles, pushing through a dense fog of painkillers.
“Don’t speak,” Sharona says. “Rest.”
“He saw my face. He knows who I am. Shouldn’t have gone myself.”
“I told you to take care of it.”
“Not your fault. Mine. My fault. My...”
The Foreman slips back into unconsciousness.
“Tablet,” Sharona demands. Geist produces one from his lab coat pocket. She pokes at it, accessing a certain file on her personal secure server. It’s been years since she had cause to look at it. She’d almost forgotten about it.
She hands the tablet back to Geist. His brow knits in equal parts fascination and bewilderment. “I don’t understand. What am I looking at?”
Sharona tells him. “You’re to oversee its construction,” she says. “Clear a room in the med lab, I don’t care where. I’ll send those specs to the tech team. Work will begin in the morning.”
“Yes, ma’am. Of course. Anything else, ma’am?”
“Keep him comfortable. And inform me immediately if his condition changes, for good or ill.”
“I will.”
She nods, the closest thing to a proper expression of gratitude she deigns to extend to an underling, then heads back to her office to think, to brood, to plan in solitude.
It’s taken her so long to get this far — years to build her resources; years of subtly exerting her influence, of methodically moving her pawns into those places where they’d be of greatest value; years to assemble her forces and find operatives willing and able to carry out her grand scheme. Years of work — all of it compromised by a series of damaging blows dealt within the scant space of four weeks. One critical operative dead, another nearly so, exposure the likes of which her organization has never seen. The temptation to lay waste to those who have done the most harm, the Protectorate and their allies, is very great indeed.
But no. Now is not the time for rash action. The details will change; the timeline will continue at its accelerated pace — adaptation is necessary for survival, in all contexts — but the master plan must stand strong.
But when the time comes to strike? The Protectorate will be the first to fall.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I spend a miserable Tuesday evening spreading the bad news. I call Stuart and Missy first, and naturally, they’re upset and worried, but they take it in stride — as does Meg, Dr. Quentin, Natalie, Astrid, Bart...
I save what I know will be the worst call for last. I tell Zina what happened, and she absolutely loses it. I spend half the call listening to her cry and the other half reassuring her Matt will come through this fine. I hang up, and then it’s my turn to cry. I know this is part of the job. I know Matt will be okay, and before long he’ll be on his feet and itching to jump back into action. He’s tough. He’s stubborn.
And he’s lying in a hospital bed under heavy sedation so he won’t scream in agony.
To her credit, Christina dutifully plays the role of a parent comforting her distraught child and not once does she throw an I told you so at me or renew her efforts to talk me into an early retirement. The irony is if there was a perfect time for a plea like that to work it would be now.
Note that I said if.
Stuart, Missy, and I meet at school early Wednesday to commiserate over an appropriately depressing school breakfast of dry pastries, tepid sausage that glistens with grease, and coffee that simultaneously tastes watery and burnt. That takes talent.
“Heard anything since yesterday?” Stuart asks.
“No, and the Steigers aren’t in a sharing mood,” I say. “I tried calling them this morning and it went right to voicemail. I’m going to head over after school and check in on him myself.”
“I’d go too but I have work today,” Stuart says.
“And I have band practice,” Missy says apologetically. “I should skip it and go with you. I’d be a cruddy friend if I didn’t visit Matt.” She frowns. “But I’d be a cruddy friend if I bailed on the band, too. Nuts. I suck no matter what I do.”
“No, you don’t. You go to band practice. I’ll call you if there’s anything to report,” I say. “If he’s awake, maybe we can all go see him tonight.”
We break and head to our lockers. As other students trickle in, I overhear a few of them talking about Matt. The incident at the courthouse was all over the news, which means Matt’s involvement was all over the news. Not too many of my peers are big news watchers, but those who do pay attention to current events will pass word along to their friends, and soon enough everyone will know.
I don’t know how Gerry Yannick and Amber Sullivan learned about it, but they have. They approach me at my locker, and I have to say I’m a little surprised at how concerned Gerry looks. Back in the day, he was part of our little gang. He started to drift away when his parents split up, and then he got involved with the jock crowd and began treating us like something he stepped in while running across a dog park. Over the last few months, I’ve caught glimpses of the old Gerry, the one I liked, the one who wasn’t a raging asshat, but only glimpses. Amber, for what it’s worth, is as indifferent as ever, so at least someone’s being consistent.
“I heard about Matt,” Gerry says. “How’s he doing?”
He’s giving me the decent human being version of Gerry now, so I respond appropriately. “He’s pretty banged up. He’s going to be in the hospital for a while.”
“Are they letting people in to visit?”
Amber makes a disgusted noise. “Don’t tell me you want to visit that loser in the hospital,” she drawls.
I take a step toward her. She backs away fast, crashing into an open locker door and nearly knocking some poor kid on his butt.
“Amber, I am in a very foul mood today,” I say in a low growl, “so I strongly advise you to keep your stupid mouth shut for once.”
“Or else what?” she says, full of false bravado.
Or else I’ll slap the taste out of your mouth, bitch. Or else I’ll go inside that pile of mush you call a brain and — oh God, stop. Stop it. Stop it. Why did I even think that?
Because I’m more upset than I’m willing to admit is why. Matt nearly died yesterday. It’s bad enough I lost Carrie. The thought of losing Matt too is too much to bear.
“There is no ‘or else.’ I’m not going to do anything to you,” I say. “I don’t have to. Being you is punishment enough.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe you haven’t noticed, Amber, but you’re a terrible person. You’re a terrible, horrible, awful, wretched excuse for a person,” I say, my frustration pouring out
in a very unexpected way. “You enjoy hurting people. You say hateful, malicious things about kids you don’t even know and you get off on it. You enjoy inflicting pain on others.”
I step back and take her in. She looks so pretty on the outside. It’s such a lie. It’s a costume she wears to disguise her true self.
“I’ve encountered some vile people in my life — diseased, damaged, evil people,” I say. “And you know what? You’re as bad as any of them. And you have to live with that.”
Amber doesn’t respond with one of her trademark withering barbs, and it’s worth noting that Gerry doesn’t say a thing in her defense. I expect by the end of the day Amber will have slandered me to the Kingsport High School community in some new and impressively disgusting way, but I don’t give a damn. Let her do her worst.
Despite what I said to her, she has a long way to go before she comes close to being in the same league as Manticore or Buzzkill Joy or the King of Pain. If I can shrug those monsters off, ignoring a gossipy teenage girl should be cake.
***
To my amazement — and in a perverse way, my disappointment — I leave school with my reputation intact. Here I was, braced to be named as the central figure in some incendiary scandal involving drugs, booze, and sexual escapades with multiple partners, but I don’t catch a single whisper with my name attached to it. I doubt I’ve inspired some miraculous personal epiphany in Amber and she’ll never again wag her tongue in the service of evil, but who knows? Far, far stranger things have happened.
Stuart, my hero, convinces Malcolm to take a detour on the way to the youth club and give me a lift to the hospital. I spend the ride wondering and worrying what I’ll find when I get there. Obviously, Matt didn’t die during the night; as angry as his parents might be with anyone with the tag “super-hero” attached to their name, they wouldn’t sit on something that big out of spite. However, that doesn’t mean they’d call to report a turn for the worse either — or an improvement, for that matter.
Malcolm drops me off at the main entrance. I promise Stuart I’ll text him with any news and then head inside. The woman at the reception desk asks for my name. She clicks her mouse, pulling up on her screen something I can’t see from my angle, and after a moment clears me to go on up, adding a friendly warning that the patient might be sleeping.
Matt’s in room two thirty-seven. Ha. He’d approve. I slip in quietly, half expecting to see one or both Steigers there. Nope. Matt’s alone. He doesn’t stir as I enter and creep up to his bedside.
“Hey, you,” I say at library volume. “You look like crap.”
No joke; he does. His face is a mass of bruises and cuts. Half his fingers are in splints and his hands are so swollen and red you might think he was wearing boxing gloves. He’s taken his fair share of damage before, but never anything this bad.
“Anyway,” I say, my voice catching. “Sorry. It’s hard seeing you like this. Guess I know now how you felt when I was in the hospital, huh?”
Matt makes a gentle hissing sound, like a harsh breath.
“Matt?” His lips move. Oh my God, he’s trying to say something. I bend over his bed, bringing my ear close to his mouth. “Matt?”
“Rosebud...”
I straighten up. “I swear to God, if you weren’t already half-dead I’d knock you into next week.”
He smiles and cracks an eye. “Sorry,” he says, his voice dry and brittle. “You sounded like you needed cheering up.”
“I’m supposed to be the one doing the cheering. You don’t know how to play this game at all.” I go to take his hand on instinct. I settle on his wrist instead. “How’re you feeling?”
“Hm. Trick question. I hurt like hell all over, but whatever they have me on makes it so I don’t care.”
The doctor told him he’ll be in the hospital for three weeks absolute minimum, probably closer to four, with a strongly recommended stretch of home confinement for up to four weeks after that — at which point he’ll be ready to begin whatever physical therapy he’ll need. It’ll be months before Matt’s a hundred percent again, but the doctor’s optimistic he’ll make a full recovery — the occasional bout of pain and stiffness in his broken fingers notwithstanding. All things considered it could have been a lot worse, but at this moment I’m hard-pressed to imagine how.
“Think you might be up for more visitors later?” I say. “Stuart and Missy would love to see you.”
“The spirit’s willing but the flesh is veeerrrrry weak. And tenderized. And from what my doctor says, it now comes in a dazzling array of rainbow colors.”
“You do look nauseatingly festive. I’ll let them know. Maybe we’ll come by tomorrow.”
He nods. “Cool. Since you’re playing messenger, tell Edison I need to talk to him, ASAP.” I wince. “What?”
“I think your dad may have had Edison declared persona non grata,” I say, recounting their encounter from the day before.
“Screw Dad. I need to tell Edison —” He tries to sit up. His face pinches, and he bites back a grunt of pain as he eases back into his pillows. “Ow.”
“You’re in no condition for a debriefing,” I say. “Nothing’s that important.”
“This is,” Matt says. “I saw the Foreman. I mean I saw his face.”
I gasp. “Oh my God, for real? So, what, do you need Edison to bring in a sketch artist or —?”
“I know who he is.” He swallows, and a sadness settles onto his face, a sadness that is quickly replaced by a low burning anger. “Sara...it was Mr. Dent.”
TWENTY-NINE
Stuart and Missy sit on my bed and gawk at me with matching expressions of wide-eyed, slack-jawed disbelief. I sympathize; I wore that exact same expression only a few hours ago.
“Mr. Dent?” Stuart says. “Our assistant principal Mr. Dent?”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“Mr. Dent the guy who always uses year-old slang trying to sound cool and just sounds like a big dork Mr. Dent?” Missy says.
“No, man, no way,” Stuart says, shaking his head. “Has to be a mistake. I mean, Matt took a bunch of shots to the head, right? Maybe he saw someone who looked like Mr. Dent and —”
“No. He was positive.” Believe me, Stuart, I wish he wasn’t. It kills me to say it. “Mr. Dent is the Foreman.”
“I don’t get it,” Missy says. “Was being the Foreman, like, a side job? Or was being assistant principal the side job?”
“Edison thinks it was his cover. The assistant principal job, I mean.”
“He was spying on us?”
“That’s Edison’s theory, but the timeline doesn’t make any sense. Mr. Dent — the Foreman — whoever — was in place as assistant principal at the start of the previous school year. Matt didn’t make his grand debut as Captain Trenchcoat until a couple weeks later. How could Mr. Dent know about us before we made our first public appearance?”
“Hold on,” Stuart says, holding up a finger, “that actually wasn’t our first public appearance. Remember the runaway Escalade incident?”
I technically don’t because I wasn’t there when it happened; I only heard the story afterwards. Matt and Stuart were in town one day, walking down Main Street, when someone behind the wheel of an Escalade had a seizure or something and lost control of the car. He would have mowed down a woman crossing the street with her kid if Stuart hadn’t dashed out and lifted the thing off its front wheels. He and Matt ran before anyone got a good look at either of them, but there were enough witnesses to corroborate the events as they happened. It made the local papers, which could have been enough to catch the Foreman’s attention. That happened last spring. Mr. Dent was hired over the summer after Mr. Albin, the previous assistant principal, left abruptly to take another job.
As if I needed more evidence, I flash back to the day we sat in Mrs. McGann’s office, when Mr. Dent stood there staring holes through our heads. I couldn’t tell what he was feeling — at all, on any level. He wasn’t in a state of shock; he was on full emotio
nal lockdown. It takes a lot of training to block out an empath — or a telepathic baffler. Like the ones embedded in Damage Inc.’s helmets.
Thanks to Matt we know for certain the Foreman is behind the recent rash of super-villain wannabes, but I have to wonder just how long he’s been outfitting bad guys. We know he has connections to people like Manticore and the Bestiary, and they certainly didn’t buy their high-end tech at Best Buy, but they’ve been around for a few years. If the Foreman’s the source of their gear, that would mean his organization has been in operation for several years. And how much of that time has the Foreman spent keeping tabs on the super-hero community? The Hero Squad can’t be the first superhumans to attract his attention.
Jeez, now I understand how conspiracy theories get started.
“Uhhhh, man,” Stuart groans. “Could our lives possibly get any crazier?”
“You mean now that you’ve said that and jinxed us?” Missy says. “Sara, what do we do now?”
“Why are you asking me?” I say.
“With Carrie gone and Matt out of commission, you’re next in the chain of command,” Stuart says.
I am? Since when?
“Guys, I don’t know what to do. Like, at all. All I can tell you is what Edison told me, and that’s to keep our mouths shut about Mr. Dent. We don’t tell our families, we don’t tell our friends...”
“Back to keeping secrets, huh?” Stuart says with a disapproving frown. “That always works out great.”
“I’m don’t like it either but I think he’s right in this case. Our families have enough to deal with, and if Mrs. McGann finds out her assistant principal was an undercover super-villain sent to spy on us, she might finally have a good reason to kick us out of school.”
“I guess.” He sighs. “Okay. Mouth shut, eyes open.”
“Pretty much,” I say. “Keep calm and carry on.”
***
Word of Mr. Dent’s sudden departure from Kingsport High spreads fast. Someone brings it up at least once per period and always with a wistful note. Mr. Dent was pretty popular for an administrator, especially among the girls; he was the object of many a schoolgirl crush.
Action Figures - Issue Six: Power Play Page 23