Action Figures - Issue Three: Pasts Imperfect (15 page)

“No we haven’t.”

“Yes we have. I visited you
soon after you were interred at Byrne, posing as a public defender. We spoke at
length about your abilities, your potential, your plans should you ever find
yourself, as the saying goes, back on the outside. I told you if you ever
managed to extricate yourself from Byrne’s custody and you wanted a chance to
prove yourself to us, come to this abandoned restaurant within twenty-hours of
becoming a fugitive.”

“What? You hypnotized me?”
Joy says, advancing on the man.

“Hardly. I presented you
with an option and let it remain in your subconscious, a memory without origin
or context. You chose whether to act on the impulse — which, obviously, you
did, because here you are, ready to talk business.”

The man folds his hands on
the counter and waits, waits for Buzzkill Joy to process all that she has been
told thus far, waits for her to decide whether to hear him out or slice his
throat open...or to make the attempt, anyway.

Joy eases around the counter
and sits. The knife remains at the ready. “Tell me what you’re selling,” she
says. “We’ll see if I’m buying.”

The man nods. “My name is
John Nemo. I represent an organization with a keen interest in people like
you.”

“People like me.”

“People possessed of
remarkable abilities and a certain disposition. We’ve had you on our radar ever
since your impressive rampage at Roxbury High.”

“Uh-huh,” Joy says. “So that
breakout this morning, you staged that to get me out?”

“I played a small role in
planning the operation, but you were not our primary target. Our goal was to
liberate one of your fellow prisoners.”

“The big idiot?” Joy says,
which draws a snort of laughter from her mysterious host (whose name, she now
realizes, completely escapes her).

“No, no, the other fellow,
Archimedes. He has considerable strategic value to us, but after today’s
unfortunate debacle, we won’t be making another play for him for some time.
We’ll have to content ourselves with our consolation prize,” he says, gesturing
at Joy. “We, like you, are opportunists.”

Joy gestures back, rudely.

“Now, while we recognize
your potential, we also know that you are a proverbial loose cannon. We want to
see how well you take orders, how well you handle yourself in the field, et
cetera.”

“Like an audition?”

“More like an assessment of
your capabilities under practical, real-life conditions. Succeed and you’ll
reap great rewards. People in our organization work hard, but are compensated
more than appropriately.”

“And if I don’t?”

“We cut you loose and let
you fend for yourself. Good luck with that.”

“...What do you want me to
do?”

Slowly, Nemo reaches for a
briefcase sitting at his feet. He produces a file folder, holds it up. “This is
a product of Archimedes’, as you put it, audition,” he says. “We had him
perform some random data mining, a series of hit-and-run hacks on everything
from personal blogs to military defense systems. Ninety percent of what he
pulled up was useless to us, but the rest? Here. I’ll let you see for
yourself.”

Joy accepts the file, opens
it, and scowls at what she reads on the top page. “What the hell is this?” she
demands.

“Read on.”

She does, but her confusion
only grows.

“Raises a great many
questions, doesn’t it?” Nemo says. “We want you to find the answers.”

“I’m not a hacker, man,” Joy
says.

“No, but we had one of our
top hackers attempt to re-access this data, and she couldn’t find it. That
suggests this file exists only on an external memory device — a USB drive or an
external hard drive — and Archimedes’ discovery was a matter of pure
happenstance. That means we need to apply a personal touch.”

“Is this the part where you
finally tell me what you want from me?”

“You may have noticed, this
file is incomplete,” Nemo says, tapping the folder. “We also believe it is not
unique. Since you’re familiar with the name of the doctor attached to that
particular file, you should have little difficulty in making contact with him.
Do so,
discreetly
, and convince him to relinquish all data on this
project to you.”

Joy smirks. “Convince him?”

“We leave the method to your
discretion — and I’d again stress that you exercise a little discretion if you
wish to avoid drawing any further attention to yourself. You already have the
police and the Protectorate searching for you...”

“Yeah yeah, low profile, I
get it.”

“Then we have a deal?”

“What the hell? Got nothing
better to do.”

Nemo quirks a disapproving
eyebrow; she’s not exactly an eager team player, but sometimes rogues make the
best operatives — and almost always the best patsies.

“Here,” Nemo says, reaching
into his briefcase once again. “Smartphone, untraceable by anyone but us. ATM
card, also untraceable, tied to a shadow account, PIN is zero-zero-zero-zero.”
He pauses before handing the card over. “Necessary expenses only.”

Joy tucks the gifts into her
pocket. “Anything else?”

“No. The ball is in your
court now. For what it’s worth, we want you to succeed.”

“Right,” Joy says, sliding
off her stool. “My teachers used to tell me that, too. Didn’t believe them
either.”

One of the cardinal rules of
his unique profession is to never let business get personal, always keep a
level of detachment, but in this case? He can’t help himself.

“Ms. Morana? Satisfy my
curiosity,” Nemo says. “Why did you kill all those people?”

Buzzkill Joy shrugs. “They
needed killing.”

I reach the edge of the
center of town before I finally start to burn off the metric ton of anger
sitting in my belly, and let me tell you, adrenaline crashes are no fun. You
get light-headed and nauseated, you have trouble breathing, you shake all
over...it’s miserable.

One end of my street comes
out directly across from a fast food place. I go inside and order a hot
chocolate and a box of bland little graham cracker cookies, which is all my
stomach can handle right now (although, even if I were hungry, I wouldn’t eat
the quote-unquote food they sell here. I’m convinced their burgers have never
been an actual animal). The sugar helps de-jangle my nerves, but not by much.
Nothing short of a horse tranquilizer will completely defuse me.

That, or a quick supersonic
flight up and down the eastern seaboard, but that’s not a viable option either,
so cocoa and cookies it is. It’s a poor substitute.

I sit in my booth long after
killing off my drink, until the girl working the counter informs me the dining
room is closing soon. I check my phone to find I’ve been sitting there for
close to three hours.

Hm. Time has flown, but I
sure don’t remember having any fun.

I plod home like I’m walking
down Death Row; I don’t want to go home, but I don’t have anywhere else to go.
I briefly entertain the notion of going to Sara’s place and hiding out there
overnight, but considering her dad’s recently developed case of the surly, that
might not win her any points with that particular parental unit.

All right, music, here I
come to face you. Be gentle, that’s all I ask.

I arrive home and, thank
God, Ben’s car is gone, and Granddad’s car sits in its place in the driveway.
That makes one person in the house who won’t be pissed at me. I hope.

Mom’s voice carries through
the front door. I pause before entering, long enough to catch the phrase
“disrespectful brat.” Oh, this is going to be a blast.

Her tirade stops dead as I
step inside, and she shoots me a look that could peel the paint off a
battleship.
     “Carrie, I want to talk to you. Sit down,” Granddad
says. Mom and I take opposite ends of the couch. Granddad plops into his easy
chair and sighs. “Christina, tell me again what happened tonight. Don’t worry,
Carrie, you’ll get your chance.”

Mom recounts our dinner
accurately enough. My version isn’t all that dissimilar. Granddad hears us both
out, hands folded in his lap, occasionally nodding and grunting noncommittally.

“Carrie,” he says after a minute
or two of deliberation, “stop using your phone at the table. You get a call or
a text, excuse yourself from the table and take it in the living room.”

“Yes sir.”

“And you are going to
apologize to Ben next time you see him.”

“What?”

“You did not handle the
situation like an adult. You have a problem with someone, especially someone
who is a guest in this house, you deal with it calmly, civilly, and
respectfully,” Granddad says, leading by example. “You had every right to be
upset with him, but that’s —”

“
Excuse
me?” Mom
says. “She had
no
right to be upset with Ben.”

“Oh, yes she did,” Granddad
says, turning to Mom. “Christina, I like Ben, and I’m happy you’re getting on
with your life, but he overstepped himself. You’ve been dating all of a month,
so as far as I’m concerned, he has no business acting like a parent toward
Carrie — and he definitely has no business offering his opinions on what she
gets to do with her father on her birthday.”

Mom’s eyes narrow and her
lips purse. I know that look: She’s searching for a rebuttal but coming up
empty.

“I suggest you girls go to
bed, sleep on it, and wake up tomorrow determined to find a way to live
together,” Granddad says, his tone hard, “because I’m getting mighty tired of
playing referee. I didn’t take you in so I could listen to you fight all the
time.” He settles back into his chair and flaps a hand at us. “Go on. Bed.”

I guess if there’s any
consolation here, it’s that Granddad made Mom and I feel equally crappy.

THIRTEEN

I spend the night tossing
and turning, and I’m wide awake an hour before my alarm goes off. I take
advantage of it and sneak into the bathroom before Mom wakes up, then slip out
of the house before we can have any awkward encounters.

Looks like I’m not the only
one in a parent-dodging mood: Sara and I run into each other halfway between
our houses.

“Another fight with your
mom?” she says.

“Yep. Your dad go on another
tirade?”

“Yep.” She sighs. “We’re
really going to go to school early, aren’t we?”

“Yep.”

En route to school, we share
our respective tales of woe. Sara tells me she made the mistake of telling her
parents over dinner what happened with Matt’s father, and that sparked a
lengthy speech about “that Steiger boy” and his morally bankrupt family. Sara
spoke in Matt’s defense, which prompted her father to lament what a terrible
influence he’s been on his precious little girl. After that, Sara chugged some
aspirin, hid out in her bedroom, and spent the night IMing with Meg Quentin.

“Meg wants to know if we’d
like to hang out with her Saturday,” Sara says. “I guess she said something to
you about having a girls’ day?”

“Oh, yeah. I’d totally
forgotten about that. I’m all for it, but what about Matt? He might need us —”

“He won’t,” Sara says
decisively. “Trust me, Matt has standard durations of brooding whenever he’s
upset about something. A TV show he likes getting canceled is good for
twenty-hours of moping. When his uncle died last year, he was a hermit for four
or five days.”

“What’s the recovery time
for your one-time idol crushing your lifelong dream, immediately followed by
discovering your father is a cheating asshat?”

“He might show up to accept
his diploma.”

I’ve often heard rumors that
school serves breakfast as well as lunch. After ditching our stuff in our
lockers, Sara and I head downstairs to the cafeteria to see if the rumors are
true. They are, but the availability of breakfast appears to be a well-kept
secret: there are no more than a dozen students in the cafeteria.

Well, a well-kept secret or
the food is even worse than it is at lunch. It can’t be that awful if Mr. Dent
is eating here, right?

“Oh, good morning, girls,”
he says. “What are you doing here so early?”

“We thought we’d change
things up and see what the cafeteria had to offer in the mornings,” I say,
surveying the steamer trays full of...uh, something. “What the heck are those?”

“Breakfast Buffet Pockets,”
says the woman manning the counter. “It has scrambled eggs, diced sausage,
bacon chunks, and hash browns, all stuffed into a pancakey crust and served
with a buttery maple dipping sauce.”

“The teachers call them
‘breakfast slabs,’” Mr. Dent says.

“Carrie, I’m scared,” Sara
says.

“Ha. You should be, totes.”

“
Totes
? Ohh, Mr.
Dent, no,” I say.

“What? Do kids no longer say
that?”

“Totes died out, like,
forever ago,” Sara says.

Mr. Dent shakes his head. “I
should really stick with the classics,” he says, “like
awesome
.
Awesome
never goes out of style.”

“True dat,” I say.

“Word,” Sara says.

Mr. Dent narrows his eyes at
us. He slinks off, presumably to hit Google and learn some trendy new slang
over his breakfast slab.

Sara and I play it safe. We
grab some muffins and coffee so weak I suspect it might be nothing more than
hot water and food coloring (I choke down two swallows before going back for
some tea). After breakfast we head upstairs and loiter by my locker until Missy
and Stuart arrive. They say no news is good news, but Stuart’s lack of news on
the Matt front is bothersome to say the least.

“I tried calling him,
texting him, I haunted Facebook all night in case he popped on,” he says, “but
the dude was totally off the grid.”

“Can’t blame him,” Sara
says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he ditches school today.”

“What do we do?” Missy says.
“I want to say let’s go to his house after school and make sure he’s okay but I
don’t want to be all, you know, nosy or whatever, and I really don’t want to
see his dad because I want to punch him in the face and that wouldn’t help
anything.”

“Sara thinks we should give
him some time to himself, and I have to agree,” I say. “When my parents told me
they were getting divorced I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I was too angry to
think straight or deal with anyone rationally, and Matt’s probably in the same
headspace.”

He’s angry. Give him some
space. Where have I heard that before?

I hope that advice will be
more successful when applied to Matt, because I’m having serious doubts
Concorde will ever come around.

“Edison? Your noon
appointment is here.”

“Thanks, Trina, send him in,
please,” Edison says without looking up from his laptop. Trina, familiar with
her boss’s bouts of obsessive workaholism, steps aside to allow his guest into
the office, then withdraws to let them speak in private.

“Hope you cleared your
afternoon, Edison,” Bart says, “because this isn’t going to go quickly.”

“Yeah, I know,” Edison
sighs. “Here’s an idea: We suit up, fly to Byrne, you go into the Bestiary’s
brains, get the info we need, then we fly into Boston, hit Uni, and eat
ourselves into sashimi comas.”

“I’d rather hit Mr.
Bartley’s and get burgers, but that’s not going to happen either — not as long
as we have due process of the law.”

“Due process takes time. I’m
not feeling terribly patient nowadays.”

“Still stonewalled on the nuclear
micro-cell thefts, huh?”

“I can’t even say with
absolute certainty a theft actually occurred. This is infuriating,” Edison
says, slapping his laptop closed. “There’s an answer here somewhere, staring me
in the face, but I’m not seeing it.”

“You’ve been looking at the
problem too long. Step away from it for a day or two.”

“I can’t let this sit, Bart.
However long this has been going on, right under my nose, it’s been too long. I
have to clean this mess up, now.”

“No, I understand,” Bart
says. “Guess it’s a good thing you found out about it at all...or, I should
say, it’s a good thing Carrie found out about it.”

“Oh, for — are you going to
start in again?”

“Yes, I am. I understand
you’re upset that Matt got hurt, but grounding Carrie to keep the Squad in line
is a completely unreasonable response.”

“You wouldn’t think so if
the kid was lying dead on a slab in the morgue.”

“But he’s not.”

“But he could have been,”
Edison says, making a display of collecting his jacket from the back of his
chair, “and I will not have that on my conscience.”

“Then don’t alienate them.
They’re not going to quit on your say-so, Edison, and they’re more likely to
get killed without our guidance.”

“And they’re much less
likely to get killed if they’re out of the business entirely. We have to get
going,” Edison says, brushing past Bart. “Pearce is expecting us.”

“You can’t protect them from
themselves,” Bart says, “anymore than you could protect Nick.”

Edison’s hand freezes on the
doorknob. Bart flinches from the sudden surge of rage radiating off his friend
— a friend, he realizes, he may have pushed too hard.

“I’m sorry. I know that
sounded callous,” Bart says gently, “but that’s what this is really all about.
You realize that, don’t you? You’re not trying to protect the Squad; you’re
trying to undo the past. You can’t.”

“What I am trying to do is
prevent history from repeating itself, and I will do whatever it takes to keep
those kids from throwing their lives into an open grave.”

“Even if it means those kids
hate you for the rest of their lives?”

“They’ll be alive to hate
me,” Edison says. “I’m okay with that.”

A chill hangs between the
men throughout the car ride to Protectorate headquarters, while they change
into their work attire, during their respective pre-flight checks, and well
into the trip to Byrne. Somewhere over Worcester, Mindforce dares to break the
silence to talk strategy, and he breathes a quiet sigh of relief when Concorde
responds. It may be boring business talk, Mindforce thinks, but Concorde’s talking
to him again. One step at a time.

After a brief conference
with Warden Pearce, a conference filled with assurances that they will get to
the bottom of the previous day’s semi-successful jailbreak, Concorde and
Mindforce sit down with Ike Aster, the second man to bear the alias of the
Minotaur. Concorde reasons that Aster, a man with a fairly light criminal
record, might crack easily when faced with the prospect of hard time in a
supermax, but reality does not live up to the theory.

“Look, man, them guys brought
me on, what? A week before the job?” Aster tells them. “They planned this thing
without me. I don’t know jack — and if I did, I’d flip on them in a hot second,
‘cause I don’t owe them guys squat. Ain’t gonna spend my glory days in a
federal pen.”

The guards remove Aster from
the interview room and return with the man known as Hydra. He greets the heroes
with a cordial nod.

“Mindforce. Concorde,” he
says. The young man that accompanies him does not greet the Protectorate,
cordially or otherwise.

“Leonard,” Mindforce says.
“How are you doing?”

Leonard Lerner shrugs. “Been
better. You?”

“Can’t complain.”

“Gentlemen, I’m Mr. Lerner’s
attorney, Drew Coleco,” Leonard’s companion says with an air of authority. He
produces a business card from his tailored suit jacket and slaps it on the
table. “I’ve already advised my client of his rights, and I’ll thank you to
address all your questions to Mr. Lerner through me.”

“He’s court-appointed,”
Leonard smirks. “Can you tell?”

“Mr. Coleco, we’re going to make
this very easy on you and your client,” Mindforce says. “We’re not interested
in you, Leonard.”

“No?”

“We want whoever hired you,”
Concorde says.

“Whoever hired me,” Leonard
parrots.

“Come on, Leonard, don’t
insult us by playing dumb. Last year someone hires Manticore to hunt down
Archimedes,” Concorde says, counting off his points on his fingers. “We get to
him first, then Manticore takes another crack at him, backed up by a bunch of
cutting-edge battlesuits. We take down the battlesuits, then the entire
Bestiary shows up at our headquarters to steal the suits back. We track the lot
of you back to a secret facility outside of Boston, where we find — guess who?
– Archimedes, who’s been sprung from imprisonment again. Yesterday, the
Bestiary shows up to bust out Archimedes
yet again
. Don’t tell me these
dots aren’t connected.”

“We’ve already spoken with
the district attorney. He’s agreed to drop the most serious of the felony
charges you’ve racked up and let you plead out on the rest,” Mindforce says.
“All you have to do is give up your employer.”

“The DA’s put it all down on
paper for you,” Concorde adds.

“I’d like a few minutes to
consult with my client,” Coleco says. “In private.”

“Oh, calm down, mouthpiece,”
Leonard says. “Look, guys, I’d love to take you up on the offer — I mean, for
real, because this place is seriously depressing, but unfortunately for me,
there’s no one to sell out. This was all us.”

“Mr. Lerner —!”

“Hey, pal, this isn’t my
first rodeo. I know when I can weasel out and when I’m screwed. Today, I am
well and truly screwed. If I want to see the outside world again before I’m a
drooling old fart, my best bet is to let it all hang out.”

“You’re not wrong,” Concorde
says.

“I figured. So, I’m formally
waiving my right to remain silent,” Leonard says, prompting his attorney to
throw up his hands in surrender.

“Go ahead,” Mindforce says.

“Here’s the deal: Manticore
cut us loose last year,” Leonard begins. “We lost a lot of points with him
after the raid on your headquarters went sideways, but when Oliver went rogue
and started that brawl with the kid from your Little League team, that was it.
We were no longer reliable subcontractors, he said.

“We thought hey, no big deal,
we had a rep, we had contacts, we didn’t need Manticore’s leftovers — except
when word got out Manticore kicked us to the curb, well, no one wanted us. We
were practically blacklisted.”

“My heart bleeds,” Concorde
says. “Get to the part where you decided to spring Archimedes.”

“Not much to tell there,”
Leonard says. “We were sitting around one night, brainstorming over a case of
tallboys, and we remembered that that Archimedes guy could hack into, like, any
computer in the world with his brain, and figured we could use him to revive
the business...maybe branch out, you know? Blackmail can be real profitable if
you squeeze the right people.”