Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins (12 page)

Still, he provided Missy with the distraction she needed to clamber up onto the robot’s back. It doesn’t seem to notice her as she clings to one of the pods, looking for some kind of weak spot to exploit. From below, Matt swings for the bleachers with a sledgehammer, trying to smash its knees, but nothing’s working. This thing is literally a walking tank.

Sara, who’s been doing her best to stay out of the robot’s sight, looks at me for direction, but I don’t know what the heck to do. None of us do, and it dawns on me: that’s our problem. We’re fumbling around blindly, with no game plan. We’re not a team, we’re five stupid targets whose luck can’t last forever.

Sara! Can you connect me to the others?

What, like a group mind-link?
she thinks back at me.
I can try.

She squints in concentration and I feel it happen: I can sense, through her, Matt and Stuart and Missy. Private mental chat room.

Guys, listen! We need a plan to take this thing out!
I say as the robot catches site of Concorde on the ground, helpless, and moves in to finish what it started.

Sara! Concorde!
Sara, God bless her, she doesn’t need me to tell her what to do. The ‘bot opens fire and she’s there with a telekinetic shield, but the strain on her face tells me she’s not going to hold out for long. She doesn’t need to. I tell Matt and Missy to clear out and they do, no questions asked. The ‘bot is now a sitting duck for Stuart, who uses the length of Main Street to get a hell of a running start. He nails the robot from behind, taking its legs out. It crashes onto its back. It’s as vulnerable as it’s ever going to be.

Stuart, quick! While it’s down!

Open up its chest,
Matt adds,
that’s the heaviest armor, that’s where the central computer would be!

Stuart goes for the big dramatic finish. He jumps and comes down on its chest, driving his fist into but not through the chassis. He curses and tries again, and again, and again, and the dent gets deeper and deeper but the thing won’t crack.

“Lightstorm!” Matt shouts. “You try! Hit it, full blast!”

Who?

“Yes, you!”

“Lightstorm?”

“I came up with it the other night, will you just frickin’ zap the thing?!”

I channel my inner Death Star and cut loose like I never have before. The air itself sizzles as I punch a hole through the chest, through whatever circuits and wires make up its guts, through the back, and (oops) through the asphalt below to expose a sewer line. Thank God I didn’t hit a gas main. That would have completely ruined the moment, and yeah, this is a moment, because the robot isn’t moving. It’s smoking, it’s making crackly noises, it smells like an electrical fire and (ick) poo, but the thing is totally out of action.

“Dude,” Stuart says. “Dead robot.”

“We did it,” Sara says in an awestruck whisper.

“Hell yeah we did. We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!” Matt crows, and someone cheers in return.

We turn around and people are emerging from hiding, from their cars and from stores and from their apartment buildings, and they’re cheering and applauding. They’re cheering and applauding us.

They’re cheering and applauding
us.

“Good job,” someone says in a snarl that doesn’t match the sentiment. It’s Concorde, serious pain in his voice—serious pain and serious anger.

Why do I feel like we’re in big trouble?

“You’re coming with me,” Concorde says. “Now.”

We’re on a rooftop of an apartment building looking down on what I can only describe as a battlefield. Demolished cars spew fluids onto the ground; a moonscape of mini-craters pits the street and the surrounding buildings, the result of a million flying bullets; a team of paramedics tend to dozens of (thankfully) minor injuries; and what might well be every cop in
town check in on the shell-shocked and the traumatized, scribbling notes that they’ll turn into reports that will be turned into insurance claims. From up here, it doesn’t feel like much of a victory. And, surprise surprise, Concorde isn’t discouraging that feeling.

“You idiotic children,” he spits at us. He sounds rough. I can’t imagine how telling us how bad we suck is so much more important than getting to a hospital, but I guess it is. “You have no idea what you’ve done, do you?”

“My guess is we took down the robot that took you down and saved the town,” Matt says.

“Boosh!” Stuart crows.

“And caused a lot of collateral property damage,” Sara adds sheepishly.

“Boosh,” Stuart says, less enthusiastically this time.

“
We
didn’t cause that damage,” Matt says.

“You’re just as responsible,” Concorde says, “because you were sloppy and reckless and I don’t know why I’m wasting my breath on you because nothing I say is going to get through your thick, stubborn skulls, is it?”

“Nope.”

Matt, you’re not helping. “Concorde,” I say, “people were in danger. We were trying to help. What were we supposed to do? Run away and let people get hurt? Or killed?”

Concorde’s visor, a piece of smoked material, I assume something similar to what airplanes use for windshields, has a chunk missing from it. An eye peers at me through the hole, glaring and angry. He’s judging me. I choose my next words very carefully.

“I’m not going to say we couldn’t have handled this better, because we could have, but we’re new to this. And believe me, we learned from this experience,” I say, and the others, right on cue, nod solemnly. Yes sir, we learned something today sir, we are taking this seriously, sir. “We’ll do better the next time. I swear.”

Concorde lets out this long, hissing breath that’s not quite a sigh. I said something wrong. I don’t know how I blew it, but I blew it. Maybe I can salvage this.

“Look, you need to get to a hospital. You go take care of yourself, we’ll stay here and help with the cleanup. Okay? Tell us what you want us to do and we’ll take care of it.”

“What I want,” Concorde says slowly, maybe because of the pain he’s in, or because he wants to make bloody well sure we hear every single word. “What I want you to do is go home, burn those costumes, and never, ever again even
think
about playing super-hero. You still have a chance to live a normal life. Don’t throw it away.”

He steps off the edge of the building and rises into the sky with all the grace of a drunken seagull.

“No, hey,” Stuart says, “we were just helping out, you know? No need to thank us for saving your stupid life or anything. Jerk.”

“I feel like we totally screwed up,” Missy says. “What did we do wrong?”

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Matt says. “You know what that was about? He’s embarrassed. He’s embarrassed that big bad mister awesome professional super-hero got royally trashed and needed a bunch of kids to save him and beat the bad guy. Well screw him. I don’t need his approval.”

Boy, that wasn’t a loaded statement or anything.

“Should we go help them?” Sara says, glancing at the activity below. The police, the firefighters, the EMTs (you know, the people who know what they’re doing), they have everything under control. We’d only get in the way.

Stuart is wondering what we should do to celebrate our first official outing as a super-team, but I’m not in the mood to celebrate. I thought our first time would be, I don’t know, more fun? More memorable? More satisfying?

This is starting to feel like an awkward metaphor.

“Come on,” I say. “Let’s get out of here.”

“That was a most fascinating experience,” Archimedes says, jolting Manfred out of his light sleep. Manfred checks his watch and finds nearly an hour has passed since Archimedes last spoke. “We need to leave now.”

“Leave? What do you mean leave?”

“Go pack now. I would strongly recommend you pack several days’ worth of clothing. And some toiletries. And your Kindle, so you have something to do.”

“Archimedes...”

Archimedes sighs impatiently. “The system I broke into? It traced me. I expected it might detect my presence, but so quickly?
That
I did not foresee. That system was far beyond anything I’ve ever encountered,” he says as though Manfred was not in the room. “Impressive. Very impressive...”

“Archimedes?”

“I’m sorry. Yes. Packing. You should be packing.”

“
Who traced you?
”

“People who have the resources to create an incredibly complex computer system that can evade detection and ward off intrusions by any outside system that isn’t me,” Archimedes says. “An organization that secretive won’t take kindly to being hacked and having its property misappropriated. If I were the people behind this organization? I’d be sending someone here right now to take care of us. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Manfred nods, even though he doesn’t.

“Good. Now:
pack a damn bag so we can get the hell out of here.
”

At last Manfred is spurred to action, but Archimedes does not follow. He has nothing to pack and nothing he wants except some time—time to think about his predicament, time to analyze the data and chart a course of action. The game has changed, and not for the better.

A drop of sweat rolls down Archimedes’ face. He becomes aware of his labored breathing, of his pulse thundering in his skull, of the tremor that’s crept into his hands. He’s afraid—no, he’s terrified, for his safety, for his life. He’s terrified of dying.

Archimedes utters a nervous laugh. For the first time, for the very first time, he feels truly alive.

TWELVE

You know that old saying, everyone in the world gets fifteen minutes of fame? Yeah, I think Kingsport’s newest super-team has a store credit.

We were all over the news that first night, by which I mean all the stories about the mayhem in town referenced “five young super-heroes” who jumped into action, stopped the robot’s destructive rampage, then disappeared before anyone could thank them—by which I mean, before the reporters could shove microphones in our faces.

One image of us did make the next day’s papers, however: a distant and fuzzy camera-phone picture, taken by a moron who should have run for the hills when the ‘bot went apehouse. That spot in the upper left-hand corner that looks like lens flare? Yep, that’s me. I’m so proud.

On day two we received a passing mention from Mindforce, who was fielding media inquiries about the incident due to Concorde’s “unavailability,” which conjured an image of Concorde strung up in a body cast in some secret hospital for super-heroes. Mindforce couldn’t say who we were but he thanked us sincerely
for our bravery, which is more than Concorde gave us.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t appreciate it, and I couldn’t get excited about the conversations that followed throughout the rest of the week. We relived our grand adventure I don’t know how many times, critiqued our impromptu costumes, spoke ill of Concorde, and brainstormed a hundred possible (and increasingly ridiculous) names for our team: the Young Crusaders, the Mighty Five, iJustice, the Hero Project, the Good Guyz, the Protectorate: the Next Generation, Heroes of Mass Destruction (get it? We’re in Massachusetts?), Evil Busters, The Awesometastics, Crime Punchers, the Young Adult Faction, T.G.I.Super-heroes, and the frontrunner so far, Strikeforce: Kick-Ass. I nodded and grunted at the various suggestions, but the truth of the matter was it didn’t matter to me what we called ourselves. I didn’t care about any of the super-hero talk, at all.

What Concorde said to us, that was part of it, but mostly it was how Mom reacted when she came home that night. She knows I hang out in town after school, so when she heard about the robot she freaked out, and since I forgot to turn my phone back on after the weirdness at school she feared the worst. She hugged me so tight I thought I was going to cough up my liver and babbled about how dangerous Kingsport was and maybe we should have moved somewhere else. It made me wonder what would have happened to her if I’d been killed. I can imagine losing your child is bad enough, but to find out your kid died pretending to be a super-hero?

That’s all we are: pretenders.

Matt sees it differently, of course. He’s focused
on the lives we saved, the additional property damage we prevented, and, yes, how awesome we were for showing up Concorde. I’ll give him points one and two, but it’s not enough for me.

I take back what I said earlier; I’m glad we’ve faded back into obscurity. I’m ready to go back to being a normal teenage girl...who can break the sound barrier.

Today is day three and the novelty has worn off all around. Lunchtime rolls around at not once do we talk about anything remotely super-heroic. Even Matt, king wannabe, has more thrilling news.

“Guess where we’re going after school?” he beams. “The Coffee Expeeeeerrrriiieeeeeeence!”

“Dude,” Stuart says, “Coffee E is still closed for repairs.”

“
Eeennt!
Wrong answer, but thanks for playing! I saw Mr. Dent’s secretary coming back from a coffee run and she was carrying a tray full of Coffee E cups. Ladies and gentlemen, the E is open for business!”

“Booyah! Let the high-octane caffeine flow!”

“I have to pass,” Sara says. “I have a doctor’s appointment after school.”

“Nothing’s wrong, is it?” Matt says in a lowgrade panic.

“No no, nothing’s wrong, it’s...” Sara lowers her voice. “Mindforce asked me to come in so he can see how I’m doing.”

“Seriously?” Matt says, his concern replaced by fanboy glee. “You’re going to Protectorate HQ?”

“No, they have an office in town, he told me to meet him there.”

“Oh.” Matt’s disappointment is brief. “Hey, can
we come with?”

“Come on, Matt,” I say, “don’t hijack her doctor’s appointment so you can—”

“No, it’s cool,” Sara says. “Honestly, I’d rather not go alone.”

“Your parents aren’t taking you?”

She shakes her head. “Mom asked if I wanted her to take me, but she was hoping I’d say no.”

And there’s another reason the super-hero idea has lost its luster with me. Since Monday I’ve been chewing on the idea of coming clean to Mom, letting her know about my powers, telling her that the unknown glowing girl who helped take down the robot was in fact her own daughter. Then I think about Sara’s parents and how wigged out they are over her powers. I only have one readily available parent and I don’t want to drive her away. I don’t want her to be afraid of me.