School for Sidekicks (24 page)

Love,

Dad

I typed my answer immediately.

I'll check in with my mentor and get back to you ASAP.

Love,

Evan.

Then I sent a quick note to Foxman asking when would be good. So, there we were. Things were in motion and I would finally get this situation resolved with my parents. I ought to have felt great. Instead, I closed the laptop and started gently banging my head on my desk. Not entirely sure why it seemed like a good idea just then, but, hey, the banging seemed to help.

“You okay, Evan?” As usual, Jeda started speaking before I had the chance to register that he'd arrived, superspeed being what it is—even erratic not-so-superspeed.

“My parents want to have dinner with me and Foxman at the Den.”

“The parents who completely lost it over you becoming a Mask?” asked Jeda. “That's going to end well.”

“Thanks for your support. I really appreciate it.”

He grinned. “Hey, man, I'm happy to be there for you. Do you think we'll be able to see the fireworks from here on Deimos?”

“Probably.”

Someone knocked on our door.

“Come on in,” said Jeda.

It was NightHowl. “Heard you were back, Evan. You got a minute?”

“Sure, why not.” It wasn't like pounding my head on the desk was going to put off the impending disaster of my parents meeting Foxman.

She closed the door behind her. “Blindmark and Emberdown and I have been asking around real quiet like about those laser fitting-rooms and the booth at Camp Commanding. About half the kids here didn't go through either one.”

She held up a hand to stop me before I could say anything, and continued. “But most of those who didn't reported similar itchy feelings after going through one of those fancy new airport scanners or an oversize ‘metal detector' at school. We only found five students who didn't have an experience like that between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, or at least didn't remember one. Two of
those
didn't get their powers until seventeen. I think you're right about the hero beam and about needing to learn more. But where do we start?”

I thought about what I'd learned in Foxman's files. “I have some ideas.”

 

18

Lasagna at Ten Paces

“Boom, baby. Boom!” NightHowl sounded more than a little maniacal as she pointed a finger at the big steel vault door in the depths of the AMO—the one that led to Backflash's lab and … Well, not knowing what all it led to was
why
we wanted to get the door open. “That's the way to open it up. Boooooom!”

Emberdown shook her head at her roommate. “Even if any of us had that kind of power, it'd be foolish to use it that way. We need to do this quietly.”

“She's right,” agreed Blurshift. “We have to be subtle if we don't want to end up as premature entries on all those Hood wanted lists.”

“I know.” NightHowl sighed. “But a girl can dream, can't she?”

I couldn't really blame her. The vault door was going to be a big problem, but it was one we had to solve if we wanted to get anywhere. The OSIRIS facility on Deimos was huge, and the School for Sidekicks only made up a tiny portion of the whole if our calculations were right. Even when you counted in all the battle-simulation rooms and power-testing studios, there was an awful lot of the volume in the eight-mile sphere that was simply inaccessible to students.

How much of that lay inside the core vault where Backflash worked and how much lay beyond it in the main OSIRIS labs was anybody's guess. We'd never even have figured out how much was on
our
side without the inertial mapping device I borrowed from the electronics lab in the Den and Speedslick's footwork.

That level-two clearance Foxman had given me was coming in very handy. I wouldn't have known inertial navigation from black magic without Denmother's advice on how to map out the school. It also meant that I'd been allowed to bring a bunch of toys home from the Den after my most recent visit, including a remote link to the monitoring system and another to Denmother herself.

Now we had a rough map of the AMO portion of Deimos. It showed that all the wandering I'd done the day I found out what a giant turd Captain Commanding was had taken me through less than ten percent of the small moon. How much of the rest was hollowed out was an open question, but one we couldn't answer without finding some way around the vault door that led to the core and Backflash's lab.

“Blindmark?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing. I can't sense a single set of eyes beyond the door. Of course, that's not a huge surprise. There's something about the walls here on Deimos that blocks my powers where normal stone doesn't. Could be that door is more than plain old steel, or there might just be a sharp bend in the passage on the other side, or maybe no one's in range.”

“The door is definitely more than plain old steel,” a sardonic voice said from above.

It was followed by a flash of purple plasma flowing out of the conduit to form itself into a copper-skinned heap of trouble.

“Burnish.” Emberdown nodded at the other girl warily, while I slid behind Blindmark, hoping the Captain's daughter wouldn't notice me.

“Emberdown.” Burnish inclined her head. “NightHowl. Blindmark. Blurshift. Weasel-bo—no, sorry,
Meerkat.
I keep getting that one mixed up.”

So much for
that
hope. I stepped into the open again.

She continued. “And Speedslick's down around the corner, almost like he's playing lookout. Quite a party you've got going on.” Her voice sounded casual, almost sweet, but her expression was the same angry, thin-lipped glare she always turned my way. “I'm half offended I didn't get an invite.”

“What do you want?” I asked.

“I'm tempted to pretend I don't know what you're on about, Quick. But that would prolong the amount of time I have to spend talking to you, and it's just not worth it. What I want to know is what you've been doing down here this week. First Speedslick started bouncing around the tunnels like a Ping-Pong ball fired out of the Foxblaster. Then you all start skulking around the vault door here every other hour. Makes me wonder what you're up to. Especially after those oh-so-subtle questions you were all asking last week about my daddy's
lovely
amusement park and its uniform machine.”

NightHowl snarled and leaned toward the older girl, but Burnish just laughed. “Oh please. You couldn't take me on your best day, 'Howl. Not even if your little werewolf fantasies were true. The lot of you are a bunch of never-gonna-happens and why-bothers, just like ninety percent of the rest of the losers at this school. I could tear all of you in half without breaking a sweat.”

I stepped between NightHowl and Burnish. “If we're all such losers, why are you here?”

“Because you know something, Quick. About all this.” She threw a gesture that took in the whole facility. “I don't know what it is, but I want to, because the whole system is made of garbage, and I need to know why.”

“Then why don't you ask your daddy?” NightHowl's voice dripped with poison as she slipped past me. “Oh, right, because he doesn't even acknowledge your existence.”

Burnish didn't say a word, just reached over and touched the vault door, shifting from copper to bright steel and balling her fists.

NightHowl spat on the floor in front of Burnish's feet. “Truth hurts, doesn't it?”

“'Howl,” I said quietly, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Stop. She'll beat you to a pulp.” I turned to Burnish. “Then they'll throw
you
in metamax, and everyone loses.”

Burnish took a deep breath but opened her fists. “Don't. Talk. About. My. Family.”

NightHowl's lip twisted into a snarl but she kept her mouth shut and grudgingly backed up. I tried not to melt from relief because we still had a ways to go to keep this from blowing up.

“You want to know what's going on?” I asked. “All right. I'll tell you, but not here. Someplace a bit more private would be much better.”

And that's how I ended up alone with the scariest and prettiest girl I'd ever met, sitting on my bed in the dorm while I showed her what we'd found out so far. When I was finished, she nodded.

“There's a lot there to digest, Quick. Don't do anything stupid for the next couple of days while I think about this, OK? I might have a way to get that door open short of blowing a giant hole in it,
and
I might be willing to give you a hand there. But don't think this makes us friends, even for a second. I'm still going to twist you into a pretzel when I get the chance.”

Then, without another word, she hopped down, crossed to the door and left.

Denmother's voice spoke into the silence Burnish left behind her: “Message from Foxman, Master Quick.” A page of text appeared in the air in front of me, projected by the Foxmail unit on my desk.

Meerkat,

Have blocked out this weekend for dinner with your parents. Make the arrangements and give Denmother a menu.

Foxman out.

The angry centipedes fought another battle in my stomach as I typed a quick message to my parents.

Mom, Dad,

Dinner Saturday. Will send a plane to pick you up at six—don't ask. I can't even begin to explain in e-mail.

Love,

Evan

My mom's response a few minutes later was equally terse.

Evan,

We'll be waiting. This better be
some
explanation.

Love you too,

Mom

I spent the next hour trying to imagine ways to get out of the whole dinner thing, but all the convincing ideas involved me ending up dead or in the hospital. I wasn't
quite
that desperate yet.
Give it a couple days
, said a voice deep down in the back of my head.

*   *   *

“Are you ready for this?” Rand slammed back a can of MaskerAde as we watched the empty
Flying Fox
rolling away down the rails that led from its hangar.

“Not even a little bit.”

“Neither am I. You know, it's not too late to grab the Foxmobile and sneak out the back.” He half turned toward the door, then stopped and turned back. “Or, would that be completely irresponsible?” I didn't answer, but he nodded and said, “You're right. You're right. That'd be completely irresponsible, and I'm only semi-irresponsible these days, so no can do.”

I looked at him. “Semi-irresponsible?”

He nodded. “Absolutely. It's part of the deal I agreed to when I talked Minute Man into helping me piss off Captain Commanding by taking you on as my teen sidekick. He tried to sell me on fully-responsible, but I explained that was a non-starter, and countered with almost-entirely-lacking-in-responsibility. We haggled it out from there.”

“That's reassuring.”

“Well,
I
certainly thought so, but I'm not sure Minute Man agrees. You're
sure
we can't just run for it? Of course you are. They're your parents, after all. If they were
my
parents, I'd run for it. Well, if they were my parents, anyone would run for it. My parents are dead, after all, and zombie parents coming after you is all kinds of bad news.”

“I … what?” Trying to follow Foxman was making my head spin.

“Keep up here. Zombie parents equal bad news. Eat your brains and then yell at you for not cleaning your room. Nobody wants to deal with that.”

That's when it hit me. “You're as nervous about this as I am, aren't you?”

“Me? No. Well, yes, actually, I am. Maybe more. I haven't met anyone's parents in ages. Not since I was dating, and that was always a disaster. The meeting-the-parents thing, I mean. The actual dates were fine … usually. Not sure if disaster thing was about me or about the parents of the sort of woman I was dating. I'd like to think it was them, but I was never very good with my parents either. So, that's a tough sell. What do you think?”

“I think this is going to be a disaster.”

“Good, then we're on the same page.” He popped another MaskerAde out of his bandolier. “If we're not going to make a break for it now, we should probably have an escape plan. It works with Hoods, it should work with parents, right? So, when things go completely off the rails, you say, ‘Mars, really? I didn't know they had blizzards this time of year.' Then, I'll signal Denmother to fake a priority Omega alarm—the planet itself is at risk—and we bolt for the Foxmobile. What do you think?”

I thought it was crazy.
Tempting
but crazy. “Uhmm.”

“You're right. The code phrase is way too long and hard to remember. I should have thought of that, myself. Good catch. Let's go with ‘No, no, everything is going great, Mom.'”

I found myself nodding. “That certainly has the benefit of being something I don't expect to say for real.”

“Okay, we'll stick with it.”

“How long do you think it will take for the plane to get back?”

“Hard to say. Half an hour. Maybe more. Depends on how long it takes your parents to get in. I find that's the big factor with the
Flying Fox
and remote pickups. A lot of people don't want to get into a plane with no pilot.”

“I can't imagine why.”

“Was that sarcasm? Because it sounded like sarcasm to me.”

“It was sarcasm.”

“Good, I'd hate to think my filters were that far off.” He knocked back the rest of his MaskerAde. “You're a very sarcastic kid. Did you know that? Probably good in a sidekick, well, unless you wanted to go for the boyish enthusiasm thing. But that'd probably be bad for a man with my ego, so better to go with sarcastic. Feature, not a bug. I like that.”