Stronger: A Super Human Clash, page 21
I was kneeling in front of his cell now, unable to take my eyes off him.
“All of us have these abilities for a reason, Brawn. Even you.”
“Why am I like this? Why did this happen to me?”
“Oh, I’m not going to tell you that. Not yet. Max doubtless has this place wired up with dozens of hidden cameras, and he doesn’t need to know everything. But where was I? Yes, our superhuman brethren … I know you can’t see the blue lights. Very few of us can. But they’re there, spheres of energy floating around, fading into and out of existence. They make us what we are. They provide us with our abilities. I know how to temporarily nullify those abilities, as Abigail, Thunder, and Max discovered in Pittsburgh.”
“What are the lights? Where do they come from?”
He shook his head. “That’s for another time, Brawn. Like I said, Max is recording. Now, I’ve got two more superhumans to tell you about…. Terrain. I know you’ve heard of him, and you’ve seen what he can do. Telekinetic control over inanimate matter. If he weren’t such an idiot, he’d really be dangerous. Landslides, earthquakes, volcanoes … He could be their master. And then, finally, there’s Quantum. The fastest human who ever lived. After Georgina Bergeron’s little stunt in Windfield, Quantum took the cure for her plague to every person on the planet. Now, by anyone’s standards that’s impressive. Pity about what it did to him, though. Quantum was already on the edge of sanity and the strain of visiting almost seven billion people in a little over a day, well—”
“Wait, who’s Georgina Bergeron?”
“The old woman who was in charge of The Helotry of the Fifth King. Krodin’s followers. You didn’t know her name?”
“No one ever said.”
“Well, if you ever get the chance to meet her again, ask her about her life. It’s as fascinating as it is disturbing. But we’re getting away from the point.”
“And what is the point?”
“The five superhumans I mentioned. Terrain, Thunder, Energy, Loligo, and Quantum. Each one with potentially complete control over the five elements … earth, air, fire, and water.”
“That’s four elements. What about Quantum?”
His chains clinking, Casey walked backward to his seat and sat down. “Quantum’s power is speed. But what is speed?”
I shrugged. “You tell me. I didn’t have a lot of schooling, remember?”
“Quantum’s ability makes him the most powerful of all superhumans, and therefore the most dangerous. Speed is nothing more than distance over time. Just as Thunder controls not sound but the air in which sound is carried, Quantum has the ability to manipulate not speed but time itself.” He smiled. “The Helotry were fools to worship Krodin as a god. If any of us deserve such a lofty title, it’s Quantum. The god of time.”
CHAPTER 30
THE FOLLOWING EVENING I talked to Max about Casey. “He hasn’t done anything wrong. You have to let him go.”
“If you knew what I know about him…,” Max said.
“Then why don’t you tell me? What has he done?”
We were in the sectioned-off corner of the warehouse that Max used as his office. Max was behind his desk, sipping coffee as he read something on his computer screen, while I sat on the floor.
“Brawn, let it go. You talked to him for hours last night, right? He got to you. That’s what he does. He can be very persuasive.”
“Yeah, but what has he done that’s a crime?”
“For a start, he built a robot that could have killed you and Abby. It’s a brilliant piece of work, by the way. I’ve shipped the wreckage to Cord. Be interesting to see what he makes of it.”
“Building the robot wasn’t against the law. Max, you can’t lock someone up just because he might do something bad. That’s like arresting anyone who owns a kitchen knife because they might use that knife to murder someone.”
Max finally looked away from his computer. “The fact that he wants to rule the world doesn’t bother you?”
“It does, but wanting to rule the world isn’t a crime. What you’re doing is much worse than anything Casey has done. You’re keeping a man prisoner on nothing more substantial than fear of crimes he might commit in the future.”
“So suppose we let him go, and somewhere down the line he ends up killing a hundred people. We would be responsible for those deaths. How are you going to feel then?”
I countered that with, “Suppose we let him go and he saves a hundred people?”
“We could argue about this all day,” Max said, “but deep down you know I’m right.”
That annoyed me. “No, you’re not!”
“He told you that his purpose was to manipulate me into capturing him and seizing the assets of the Ragnarök organization. Yes, I was recording everything last night. Casey has some bigger game going on here, and I want to know what it is. If that means playing along for now, then that’s what I’ll do. He wanted to be captured, so why are you so intent on letting him go?”
“If you’re so certain he’s a bad guy, why are you doing what he wants? And if …” I stopped myself. “No, I’m not getting drawn into this!” I crawled back out through the doorway, and stood up.
Lance was waiting outside. “I was listening to that.”
“And?”
“And I think you’re right.”
From his office Max shouted, “No, he’s not!”
Lance raised his eyes, and—unnecessarily loudly—said, “We can talk about this later when a certain person isn’t here to read our minds!”
We walked over to the gymnasium. I sat on the vaulting horse while Lance attempted to climb one of the ropes suspended from the ceiling. He wasn’t able to get very high.
“Never been able to do this,” he said, his voice strained.
“You need more upper-body strength.”
“Easy for you to say. You don’t have to work out.” He gave up and dropped the three feet to the floor. “When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?”
“I don’t think I ever gave it much thought. You?”
“I wanted to be the world’s greatest con man,” Lance said, and then he smiled. “I wanted to be so good that no one would ever know about me. You read about con men getting found out after years of tricking people out of their money, but if they got caught, they can’t have been that good at it. I bet there are lots of guys out there ripping people off and no one will ever know.”
“So you wanted to be a villain.”
Lance lay down on top of a pile of rubber mats. “Ah, now you’re sounding like Thunder. What if I was the sort of con man who stole only from bad guys and then donated the money to charity?”
“The Robin Hood trick. Stealing from the rich to give to the poor. Yeah, it’s still wrong.”
Lance shrugged and said, “Meh. It’s not as wrong as ripping off little old ladies. And at the risk of annoying Max, who’s probably listening in right now, it’s not as wrong as using the ability to read minds so that you can make a fortune in the stock market. Or however he did it. There’s only so much money in the world, so every time some guy makes it rich, you could say that he’s stealing from everyone else.” Lance frowned for a second. “And here’s another one … The world’s population is growing all the time, but the amount of money stays the same. So with every new birth the average person gets poorer. Babies are stealing from us.”
I laughed. “Man, you really need to find yourself a hobby! This is the sort of thing you think about all the time?”
“Sometimes. What about you? What sort of madness occupies your enormous brain?”
“I want to be human,” I said, and it struck me that this was probably the first time I’d said that aloud. But I couldn’t stop myself. “I want to be average sized, and not blue. I’d like to be able to walk through a crowd and not have anyone notice me.”
“Do you think that’s even possible?”
“Casey seems to think it might be, someday.”
Lance nodded slowly. “Ah … Yeah, he tried the same thing on me. Didn’t work, though. I could see what he was up to. It’s an old con-man trick. You want someone to believe something, you say just enough so that the mark fills in the rest for himself. That way he doesn’t think he’s being manipulated. All you really need to con someone is to know what they want most in life. Usually money. But you have to make it credible. You don’t tell someone that if they invest a thousand dollars in your scheme, they can make a million. You tell them they can make fifteen hundred. Much more realistic. If you do it the first way, then when it doesn’t work, he thinks that he’s lost a million bucks. The second way he thinks that he’s lost only fifteen hundred.”
“But you can’t lose what you never had,” I said.
“True, but that’s not the way people think. And then you can go back to the mark and extract more money out of him. You know what a Ponzi scheme is? That’s where you set up a bogus investment company. You get people to invest a hundred bucks and tell them that they can earn twice that in six months. So six months later, you send them a letter saying that their money has doubled. You tell them they can have the two hundred bucks if they want it, or they can leave it with you and in another six months it’ll be worth four hundred. See how it works? Almost no one ever takes out their money. And if they do decide they want it, then you just pay them out of all the money other people have invested. In the meantime, all the money is sitting in your bank account earning real interest. See, Casey could have told you that he can definitely change you back to human. That’s what you want, so there’d be a part of you that thinks it’s too good to be true. But instead he told you that it might be possible …”
“Which I’m much more inclined to believe.”
“Right. Your trust is the investment in Casey’s scheme, and he can keep stringing you along for years with the promise that the payoff will be you becoming human, but the truth is, all he’ll be doing is using you.”
“Wow. Yeah, you could be right.” I allowed myself to topple back off the vaulting horse onto the floor. “Remember when the only thing we had to worry about was homework? I miss that.”
“Homework and girls,” Lance said.
“Not me. I was only twelve when I changed. Girls still had cooties back then.”
Lance laughed. “You know, you’d think with all the advances in medicine that someone would have found a cure for cooties by now!”
From the doorway, Roz Dalton said, “They’ve cured girl cooties but not boy cooties.” She walked into the room. “What have you guys been doing all day?”
“As little as possible,” Lance said.
“Well, Abby and Thunder are on the way. Max said we need to start training together. You included,” Roz said to Lance. She grabbed one of the ropes and climbed up, hand over hand, without using her legs, then called down, “Your turn, Lance.”
“He can’t,” I said. “He tried earlier.”
Lance gave me a look that said, “Don’t tell her that!”
“Hit the weights, then,” Roz called down. She was holding on to the rope with one hand, and concentrating hard. “Brawn … Drag those mats over, will you? Just in case I can’t do it.”
“What are you trying to do?” Lance asked as I pulled the pile of rubber mats over to Roz and dumped them on the floor beneath her.
“This.” Roz let go of the rope, and for a second she remained in place, then wavered and dropped.
I caught her and lowered her to the mats.
“Thanks. Lance, the weights. I’m serious. You need to work out.”
Lance grumbled. “But they’re too heavy!”
“Start with the lightest and work your way up,” I said. I walked over to the large rack of weights and bars and picked the whole thing up. “Where do you want them?”
“Show-off!”
I managed to persuade Lance to try the weights by betting he couldn’t even lift any of them, and when Thunder and Abby arrived, he was lying on the bench grunting his way through a twenty-rep set. Max followed them into the gym.
“OK,” Max said. “What did we learn on yesterday’s mission? We learned that we need to keep in top physical condition in case someone else finds a way to nullify our powers. So when the Rangers get back tomorrow, they’ll build a personalized training plan for each of you. In the meantime, Roz will keep you on your toes.”
“What about you?” Lance asked. “Don’t you have to train too?”
“I already have a personal trainer.” Max looked at his watch. “It’s almost seven now. I’ll check in on you at nine. No slacking off.”
When the doors closed behind him, Lance said, “If we had a TV in here, we could watch movies while we worked out.”
“How’d you persuade your mom to let you go?” I asked Abby.
“Max gave me a code phrase to use on her. He said it’s like hypnosis. This evening when Ox turned up at the door, all I had to do was say the code phrase to Mom and tell her I’d be away for a few days.”
“Same here,” Thunder said. “Used it on Rufus and he was all, OK, sure, whatever you say. Man, I wish I’d always had that.”
“Rufus?” Lance asked. “It’s always weird when people call their parents by their first names.”
Thunder didn’t look happy at that. “He’s not my dad. He’s my stepdad. You want to know what happened this morning? I was out for a few hours, and when I was on the way back, I could hear Shiho—my little sister—playing in the driveway. She’s seven, small for her age. I could tell from the sound of her breathing that she’d been crying, so I ran the rest of the way. I saw her sitting on the gravel beside Rufus’s car. She had a plastic beaker of water beside her, and she was dipping an old toothbrush into it and using it to scrub the car’s tires. As soon as she saw me, she burst into tears again and said, ‘It was my own fault—don’t be mad!’”
Abby said, “I knew there was something bothering you. What happened?”
“She was playing in the drive, you know, running around like kids do, and she skidded to a stop next to the car and some of the gravel sprayed up and hit the car’s fender.”
“Wait,” I said. “He was punishing her for that by making her wash the tires with a toothbrush?”
“Not just the tires. The whole car.”
“I see. You’re gonna have to introduce me to him someday.”
“Thanks, but it’s sorted out now.”
“What did you do?” Abby asked.
“Picked her up, carried her inside, and told her to go wash up, and that I’d take her to the park. Of course she panicked because she knew Rufus would go mad.” Thunder shrugged, then smiled. “He won’t be punishing her like that again.”
“What did you do?” Abby repeated.
“I told him what I thought of him. First time I ever spoke out to him. He swung a punch at me.”
I said, “Well, I hope you hit him back.”
“No, but I ducked and his fist hit the corner of the kitchen cabinet.”
The rest of us went “Ouch!” at the same time.
“Never thought a white guy could go pale so quickly. He was practically green. My mom had to take him to the ER.” Thunder took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Man, he’s not gonna be happy next time he tries to start his car and finds out what I did to it.”
“What did you do?” Lance asked. “Glue the wipers to the windshield? Hide a dead fish under the seat? I know, you put a bunch of stink bombs into the air vents, right?”
“No, I put four handfuls of gravel into the gas tank.”
Lance and I thought that was hilarious, but Abby and Roz weren’t so sure. “He’s going to go crazy,” Abby said.
Thunder nodded. “Yep. It’s going to cost him a fortune.”
Eventually, Roz decided that she was in charge, so we had to stop chatting and start working out. Lance and Thunder took turns with the weights, with me spotting them. Even though Thunder was only slightly less skinny than Lance, he could lift almost twice as much, and I could see from his build that he was going to be big.
Roz and Abby thought it would be a good idea to fence. Roz had taken lessons and knew how to use a foil. She showed Abby a few moves, which Abby tried to copy using her own homemade sword. That was cut short when Abby took a playful swing at Roz’s very expensive foil and sliced it in two.
We spent the best part of two hours in the gym, mostly working out but occasionally goofing off.
The dynamic between the other four was fascinating to watch. Thunder seriously had the hots for Abby, but she wasn’t interested. Roz kept asking Thunder to help her with stuff, so I figured that maybe she had a crush on him. Lance also had a thing for Abby, but I could tell he was holding back. At the time, I thought it was because he didn’t think he had a chance against Thunder, and it was years before I realized the truth.
But that was a good evening. When Max finally decided that we could stop, we sent Thunder out for eight pizzas—one each for the others and four for me—and then we spent the rest of the night lying on the mats in the gym and telling jokes.
These guys were my friends. They fully accepted me as one of them even though I was so different. That feeling of belonging was worth more to me than I have ever been able to express.
The only thing that spoils the memory is that other feeling that I tried to keep buried, the ugly sensation that lurked in the pit of my stomach: the knowledge that this would probably be the last time all five of us would be together as friends.
Because I was about to betray them.
CHAPTER 31
THE MINE
THE YIELD FROM THE PLATINUM MINE had been steady for months. This kept Hazlegrove happy, so he left us alone.
I had almost regained my strength—and was back on sixteen-hour days, which at first seemed like a luxury—when I was summoned to the guards’ office. “You get to go outside, Brawn,” DePaiva said. “You’re getting a visitor.”
