Just as I hoped it would, the machine grabbed onto my hand. I continued pushing, and it continued struggling against me.

  I jerked my still-trapped right arm back, and it shifted its weight to compensate.

  I pushed my right arm forward and pulled the left back. Again, the machine had to readjust to match my movements. Then I squeezed my left hand into a fist and pulled my arm down toward my side, stretching the machine’s arms to their limits.

  There was a sharp ping as something else inside it snapped, and then the fingers of my right hand touched the ground.

  I shifted my own weight onto my right hand, and the machine began to tip over. It reacted by letting go of my legs.

  I kicked down, hard against the floor, flipping over so that I landed on my back with the machine above me. I was hoping that this angle would give me an advantage.

  But the damage it had sustained wasn’t enough to slow it down. Now it was slamming its legs over and over into my head, chest, and stomach.

  Two of the legs locked onto my head as the third rose, then came down hard, striking me in the forehead and sending a shock wave of pain through my skull. Dazed, my vision blurring, I saw it coming again, and couldn’t even flinch as it struck the same spot.

  When it pulled back this time, the sharp, heavy edge was smeared with blood.

  Then the leg shifted and its internal mechanisms readjusted, forming the end into a narrow point like the tip of a pickax.

  I closed my eyes as it streaked down toward my face.

  There was a swish of something moving fast through the air, a sharp clash, but nothing hit me.

  I heard something heavy and metal crashing to the floor beside me, and opened my eyes to see the sparking stump of the leg flailing.

  There was a blur of glistening metal and another sharp clash, and one of the limbs holding my head in place suddenly went limp.

  Abby’s sword sliced through the cable around my waist, and I pushed up against the machine, forcing it to my left as I rolled to the right.

  I got up onto my knees and looked at the jumble of twitching, sparking metal, and at Abby, now casually poking at it with her sword.

  “I think it’s dead,” she said. “You OK?”

  “I will be.” I wiped the blood away from my eyes, then felt something rise in my throat.

  Abby made a face. “Oh man, you’re not going to throw up, are you?”

  I pitched forward onto my hands, and felt myself retch and gag. Five of the segments from the cable clattered wetly onto the ground. “I don’t think that’s all of them….” Another cramp from my stomach. “Nope, here comes the last one….”

  My stomach heaved and fresh bile burned my throat as the last of the segments was forced up and into my mouth. I coughed as it passed my tongue, then barfed the bile onto the ground.

  “Ew, gross!” Abby said.

  I started to speak, but my lower lip felt numb.

  Abby made a face. “Uh, Brawn … It’s still there. It’s hanging onto your lip.”

  I pulled the tiny machine free and held it between my thumb and forefinger as it waved its tiny claws uselessly in the air. “Nasty little fellas, aren’t they?” I closed my fist around it and crushed it.

  But Abby wasn’t listening. She had rushed over to Thunder and was moving him into the recovery position.

  “What happened here?” I asked. “And where’s Max?”

  “They were waiting for us,” Abby said. “Like they knew we were coming. They hit Max and Thunder with something.” She pointed to a cluster of small darts that protruded from the left side of Thunder’s neck and face. “They fired at me too, but I saw the darts coming.”

  “What about Max?”

  “They took him. Five guys, maybe six. I was busying fighting Frankenstein’s Erector Set over there.”

  “This doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Max should have read their minds, and Thunder should have been able to hear them.”

  “I know. I’m guessing that they had one of those portable power-damping machines that Casey invented in Krodin’s world.” She held up her two-way radio. “This thing’s dead too. Yours?”

  “Uh, I think I left mine in the helicopter. So what do we do?”

  Before Abby could answer, there was a blur to my left, and Quantum was suddenly crouched next to Thunder, checking his pulse. “Seems OK, just unconscious. No other obvious injuries. Brawn, pick him up. We’re out of here.”

  “They took Max,” Abby said.

  “I know—Titan and Energy are following them.”

  I squatted down and scooped up Thunder, and lifted him onto my shoulder. As I straightened up, I heard the familiar whine of Paragon’s jetpack approaching from outside.

  Quantum looked around the warehouse. “Nothing here … And by the looks of the dust, there hasn’t been much of anything here for a long time, just that pile of debris.”

  “That pile of debris was a robot,” Abby said. “It nearly killed me and Brawn!”

  “But it didn’t,” Quantum said, still looking around. “So it was a ruse. Max was led to believe that this place was Ragnarök’s main facility….” He turned to me. “Your part is done, Brawn. Take Abby and Thunder back to the copter, and return to Max’s base in New Jersey.”

  We heard the thunk of metal boots on concrete, then Paragon strode through the doorway. “Quantum, you’re needed. Northeast, about twenty-two miles. Look for Energy’s flare.”

  Quantum nodded, and then he was gone.

  “You kids OK?” Paragon asked.

  Abby said, “Yeah, but … That’s it? Our part is over?”

  He nodded. “Sucks, I know. But if Titan and Energy had gotten their way, you wouldn’t have been here at all.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Let’s move. The Rangers are on the way. They’ll pick up the pieces and secure the area.”

  Roz, Thunder, and Abby sat opposite me in the helicopter. Thunder was lying stretched out across the bench with his head resting on Abby’s lap and his legs on Roz’s. He’d told them he was fine, but they’d insisted he take it easy.

  “I can’t believe we just got sidelined like that,” Abby said.

  “I can,” Thunder said. “They’re older than us. They think they know better.”

  I said, “They’re not that much older.”

  “We need our own helicopter,” Abby said. “Roz, are you rich like your brother?”

  “Rich? Not even close. It’s not like Max inherited anything from Mom and Dad. He earned everything himself. Are you saying we should have our own team?”

  “I am,” Abby said. “The four of us, plus Lance.”

  Thunder sat up. “How? We’re all still in school!”

  “I’m not,” I said. “But you’re right. There’s no way we can do anything like that without Max’s help. Besides, if some supervillain went on the rampage and we were somehow able to get to him, I guarantee you we’d find that Titan and his buddies had got there first. And even if we persuaded them to set us up as junior members of their team, we’d end up, like, bringing them coffee or taking their costumes to the cleaners, or some dumb tasks like that. They don’t take us seriously. I mean, Roz, you didn’t even get to leave the chopper this time!”

  “That’s just because Max is so overprotective of me.”

  “Yeah, but the point remains. They don’t think we’re good enough.”

  Abby said, “Well, they’re wrong. We’re just as good as they are. And we’ve got a good balance of skills too. Telekinesis, sound control, weapons, and strength. Plus Thunder can fly!”

  “You can probably fly too,” Thunder said. “We should work on that. In Krodin’s world when we were looking for Brawn and we were flying and you were holding my hand … I let go for a few seconds, just before we found that freeway sign. It didn’t even faze you.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “Well, it’s worth looking into. And you too,” Thunder said to Roz. “If you can raise other objects into the air, then I see no reason you shouldn’t be able to raise yourself.” He smiled, then nodded to me. “If we can figure out a way to get you flying, then we won’t need a helicopter at all.”

  “Ask Paragon to build you a jetpack,” Abby suggested.

  “Yeah, I can’t see that happening,” I said. “The public would love that. They’re already terrified of me as it is. Imagine how much fun I’d have when they started blaming me for interfering with air traffic.”

  Thunder jumped to his feet. “Hold it….” Suddenly the copter was filled with the usual bone-shaking roar of the rotors—he’d had us wrapped in a cocoon of silence so that we could talk. He frowned for a second, listening to something, and then the noise of the copter’s engines was again cut off. “They got him. Roz, your brother’s fine. Energy was able to trace the residual heat from their transport halfway across the state to another base, then the four of them went in. Quantum went first and took out the guards, and then Paragon grabbed Max while Titan and Energy captured Casey Duval.”

  “Great,” Abby said. “So we got nearly killed, and they get all the glory.”

  I started to say something, then cut myself off. A thought had occurred to me, and if I said it out loud, then at some stage Max Dalton would be able to read it from the others’ minds.

  Tremont’s people—or Casey Duval’s people, depending on who you believed was running the organization—had been waiting for us, which obviously meant that they had known we were coming. Their power-damping machine had enabled them to capture Max and take out Thunder. But that machine hadn’t affected me, so clearly it had been gone by the time I’d arrived.

  They had to have taken it with them. If that was the case, then how come it hadn’t affected the powers of Titan and the others?

  There was only one answer that made sense to me: Casey Duval wanted to be captured.

  CHAPTER 29

  “HOW’D YOU LIKE my little toy?” Casey Duval asked me, a sly grin spreading across his lips. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “You mean the pile of scrap back in Pittsburgh? Hope it didn’t cost you too much.”

  It was three in the morning, and in Max’s base in New Jersey only Casey and I were still awake.

  Thunder and Abby had been flown home to Midway, Max and Roz had returned to their Manhattan apartment, and Lance was asleep in his room on the other side of the base.

  Casey had been locked in the cell with wrists and ankles chained. He was tall—about six three—with a slim build, broad shoulders, and a very square jaw. His black hair was tight at the sides and back, a little longer on top.

  “I like working with machines,” Casey said. “People are …” He shrugged. “People are unpredictable. It’s almost like they have minds of their own. There’s an old programming joke I’ve always liked: A computer is a machine that does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do. Doesn’t apply to me, though. I understand how they work. The robot you destroyed … Yes, it cost a lot of money. But mostly what it took was a lot of time and a little ingenuity.”

  “Which you have, I suppose.”

  “No. I have a lot of ingenuity. The robot was a prototype, based on the tech Tremont’s people had been developing. We never got our quantum processor to work, but we did create a lot of very advanced technology along the way, including the self-modifying processor that controlled the robot…. You’ve never seen a machine move and react as fast as that before, have you? When we put it to the test, it was able to analyze every move we made and prepare a counterstrike so quickly, it’s like the robot was seeing into the future….” He sighed. “Just a shame it didn’t quite live up to my expectations. I really thought I had something there. The trouble with self-modifying processors is that all it takes is one glitch and they change a part of themselves that they really shouldn’t change.” He leaned back in the plastic lawn chair and peered at me. “You and I would have met before now, if you’d stayed with Tremont’s people in Texas. Why did you leave?”

  “I didn’t trust him.”

  “Very wise. I’ve never trusted him myself.”

  “Is that why you allowed yourself to be caught? To get away from him?”

  A slight twitch of Casey’s eyebrow was enough to tell me that he hadn’t been expecting that. “You’re smarter than people give you credit for, Brawn.” He leaned forward again, resting his elbows on his knees. “This is how it works…. Dalton captures me and seizes the assets of the entire Ragnarök organization. Legally, of course, the assets should go to the government, but Dalton will use his ability to persuade the people in power to let him have everything. And the reason I want him to have—”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “Seriously. I don’t care about you and Max going back and forth with your stupid power play, each of you manipulating the other, playing some dumb cat-and-mouse game.”

  “Ah, but which of us is the cat and which is—”

  “Not interested in any of that. Just tell me this: What do you want?”

  “Control.”

  “Of?”

  “Same as everyone. I want control of everything. The whole world.”

  I lay back on the floor and tucked my hands behind my head as I stared up at the ceiling. “Why, though? What good will it do you to control the world? With your brains you could make enough money to live in luxury for the rest of your life, and no one would have to get hurt along the way. You don’t have to be a supervillain, you know. No one is forcing you.”

  “Supervillain?” Casey laughed. “What makes you say that?”

  “You’re superhuman, and you’re a villain. It’s not complicated.”

  “Who says I’m a villain? Seriously, Brawn … Which laws have I broken?”

  He’d got me there. “Well … you were working with Gordon Tremont and Harmony Yuan.”

  “So were you. They lent you out to the military to take down Norman Misseldine and his band of deluded followers. Do you know why they did that? Did you even ask?”

  “Misseldine was threatening to destroy Washington.”

  “No, that’s why Misseldine had to be stopped. But why did Tremont get involved? It was because he wanted the military to owe him a favor. That favor would have been access to their own research into quantum computing. He used you, just like Max is using you.”

  “Yeah, but the difference is that I know Max is using me.”

  Again, Casey laughed. “No, you don’t know anything of the sort. You know only what he wants you to know. Brawn, Max Dalton is not a particularly smart man, certainly not compared with me, but he’s ambitious, and his power allows him to read other people’s desires and give them what they want. He can even directly control some people by hiding parts of their memory, or implanting suggestions. One of the first things he does when he meets someone new and important is plant the suggestion that they should trust him. He …” Casey stopped himself. “Huh.”

  I sat up again. “What?”

  “Your friends Abigail and Thunder and Lance don’t trust Max, but that’s because he thinks of them as nothing but cannon fodder. When they’re a little older and more experienced, he’ll start to see them as potential allies or adversaries, so that’s when he’ll start directly manipulating their feelings about him. But you … That’s strange. You’re already close to the apex of your powers. Max needs you on his side. You’re potentially stronger than Titan and you’re pretty much invulnerable. Plus you’re a tenacious fighter—you keep going long after anyone else would have quit. So why don’t you like him?”

  “He’s a jerk.”

  Casey raised his eyes. “I know that. What I mean is, why hasn’t he forced you to like him?” Before I could answer, he said, “Oh my. Oh, that is interesting. Max is unable to control you. He can’t read your mind.” Casey’s grin returned. “Until now, I thought that I was one of only two people he couldn’t control, the other one being your old sparring partner Krodin. But now I see that there are three of us.”

  “How do you know about Krodin?”

  “Tremont’s organization is a splinter group from The Helotry. They have quite voluminous files on Krodin. All protected with a bespoke encryption system that’s impossible to break.” He grinned. “Tremont was an idiot…. He put me in charge of their computer division, the primary purpose of which was to crack encrypted files.” He grinned again, a faraway look in his eyes. “Now, that was a good solution. When you enter a password into a computer, the computer checks the characters one by one to see if they’re correct. If they are, it makes a note of that and then checks the next character. I wrote a tiny piece of software that timed the computer’s response for each character. We’re talking nanoseconds here. Correct characters took four-billionths of a second slower to process than incorrect characters. With that, I cracked the encryption on Tremont’s files faster than you can blink. He doesn’t know that, of course. That’s a lesson for you, Brawn: Never show all your cards.”

  Casey got to his feet and shuffled forward until his forehead was resting against the bars of his cell. “Still … If Max can’t access your mind, then I can tell you everything and he won’t be able to pick it out of your brain. You want to know why we’re superhuman? Why only some people have these powers? How’d you like to know exactly why your power has made you four meters tall and blue? And I’m sure you’d love to know how to reverse what happened to you, right?”

  “Is that possible?”

  “I think so. Not with the technology we have today, but maybe in a few years. And that’s why I need a quantum processor.”

  “Go on….”

  “One of my gifts is the ability to see and understand the power in others. Your friend Thunder, for example … He thinks he controls sound, but that’s not quite accurate. What is sound, only vibrations through the air? And there’s a young Italian woman who, like you, has undergone a permanent physical transformation. She calls herself Loligo. She’s a water-breather. I’ve seen film of her swimming…. It’s incredible. She moves through the water just the same way as Thunder flies: She subconsciously commands the water to do whatever she wishes. Let’s look at another young woman, the—let’s be honest here—staggeringly beautiful Energy. You’ve seen her produce lightning, and conduct heat. If she could see what I see in her powers … she’d be terrified, I expect. Energy has the potential to extinguish a star.”

 

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