Knowing that he was strong, and guessing he might be able to rip my armor off, I gave the rockets some fuel, and shot into the air, hovering forty feet above the ground.

The light behind the barn left half the crowd in shadow, but I could see enough. Jaclyn, Marcus, and Cassie were doing well.

A blur of hands and feet, Jaclyn had taken over my position as well as her own. More than twenty people lay in a half circle around her. Marcus and Cassie hadn’t taken down as many, but they were close. Marcus had morphed into a form that reminded me of an armored bear. Cassie whipped her staff around, hitting one man in the stomach hard enough that he fell to the ground, and getting enough of an upswing on another guy that he actually flew over the person behind him, convulsing the whole way.

Both ends of her staff glowed with electricity. I’d upgraded it during a break from working on my armor.

I couldn’t see it well, but from the movement and the shouting, I could tell that Lee (or Gaius, whatever…) was still fighting.

Below me, the man had stopped trying to hit Rachel, and crouched as if he were about to… jump.

And then he did, shooting straight up at me.

I couldn’t think for a second. Think at Daniel for help? Except that wouldn’t work because Prime’s people always set up telepathy blockers, and even if they didn’t, just being near Lee was like standing in the middle of a psychic thunderstorm. Call Vaughn over the communicator? Start flying in a new direction?

It ultimately didn’t matter.

Even as I began to give the rockets juice, the man’s massive body shot sideways, much like it would have if it had been hit by a giant, invisible, baseball bat.

His body arced upward, sailing over the crowd, landing on the roof of the barn, and crashing through.

Over the communicator, I heard Daniel’s voice say, “Got one. You okay?”

“Fine. Weren’t you supposed to wait longer?”

“Not if you needed help, and you can’t tell me you didn’t.”

“Cool. Think you guys could make it easier to get through to Lee?”

“On it. Storm King?”

I felt the change in the wind immediately.

It didn’t hit me directly, but I felt it tugging at my feet, and I heard the roar.

It reminded me of what a giant leaf blower might sound like if there weren’t any motor, just wind, and if there weren’t any leaves, just people falling over each other, rolling, shouting, trying uselessly to grab at weeds and rocks, and finally smacking into the side of the barn.

The boards cracked, and broke as person after person piled up.

And it wasn’t as if Prime’s people stood and dared Vaughn to knock them over too. No, they ran.

The professionals ran away from the wind, some standing off to the side of the Lee vs. Prime fight. With a few exceptions, the gang members ran away entirely. Sensible ones ran to their cars. Less sensible ones ran out into the fields.

Between wind and irrational panic, Vaughn had cleared a path through to Lee in less than five seconds.

Jaclyn shouted something to Marcus and Cassie, and they ran toward where Lee stood, except it wasn’t really Lee. He still looked like Gaius.

He’d done better without us that I would have done alone.

Of the people Prime had broken out of prison, only the guy whose leg Cassie had cut off still stood. His new leg didn’t seem quite as muscular as the old one, but it probably would in time.

Assuming Cassie didn’t need to cut it off again.

He and Prime both held swords, circling around Lee, and jumping in to attack only to find Lee had moved.

Despite his freakish ability to avoid swords, Lee didn’t look good.

He’d told stories about being burned at the stake and walking away as a skeleton after the ropes burned away. I’d always wondered if he was exaggerating, but now I believed it.

He’d been cut to the bone on his right cheek, the inside of his right arm, and the hole from Prime’s sword still hadn’t healed up. He’d taken it out though.

His left arm had been charred to a point that I didn’t want to look at it.

Strangely, none of it slowed him down. He moved as quickly as he had at the beginning of the fight.

Jaclyn, Cassie and Marcus made it to the edge of the fight, and stopped. I flew down to join them.

“Nice of you to drop in,” Jaclyn said. “We’re trying to decide whether we should help ‘Gaius’ or go after them.” She nodded toward the other side of the fight where the professionals stood.

“I don’t think Gaius wants or needs the help,” Cassie said.

“I think we’d better decide now. Look!” Marcus pointed at Prime’s men. Some of them were sneaking into the darkness.

“My bet is that they’re coming for us,” Marcus said.

Cassie watched them go. “Could we have scared them off?”

Our communicators beeped. “Bad news,” Daniel said. “Storm King and I aren’t the only ones in the air.”

Well, if I could call them Prime’s people.

Some of them looked professional — black (probably bulletproof) vests, belts with pouches, knives, and guns. The rest looked like they’d been pulled from local (and not so local) street gangs.

They had guns too — not submachine guns like the professionals, mostly handguns.

One of them began to pull a pistol out of his pocket when one of the professionals shouted, “No, idiot!”

He pointed past us where Prime’s people rushed us from the other side.

After that, it got too busy for me to be amused by their tactical errors. An overweight guy in running shorts who had a swastika tattoo on his forehead jumped over the front line.

He hit me five times before I got the chance to punch him back. He dodged  easily.

I hit him with the sonics, and he put his hands to his ears. As I drew my hand back, Marcus stretched his arm a good seven feet, hitting the guy in the side of the head.

Swastika guy fell over.

In the meantime, some guy with at least five piercings in his lower lip had grabbed my right arm. Blue electricity crackled around his hands, and he held on strongly enough that I couldn’t pull my arm away.

The electricity never made it past the armor.

I kneed him in the groin, and punched him in the face as he bent over.

He fell to the ground, unconscious.

With a nanosecond of a breather, I took sidelong glances at Marcus and Jaclyn. Marcus had formed his arms into shapes reminiscent of baseball bats, and his skin had turned grayish.

A gang member breathed fire at him for barely a second before one bat hit the guy’s stomach, and another knocked his feet out from under him.

Jaclyn, meanwhile, had knocked out three more people.

I hoped Cassie and Rachel were doing as well, but I didn’t have time to turn completely around to check on Cassie. And Rachel probably wasn’t visible anyway.

As it turned out, I didn’t really have time to check on Marcus (to my left and back) and Jaclyn (to my right).

One of the professionals, a guy with missing teeth, and a puckered, circular scar on his cheek started firing his submachine gun at me.

He never missed.

Whether it came from freakishly good aim, or a perception of time that allowed him to fire an automatic like a sniper rifle didn’t matter.

If he had special bullets or managed to find a weak spot in my armor, I could die.

He stood a few feet out of reach, so I fired the sonics at him. He didn’t flinch — though people on either side of him put their hands to their ears.

He’d worn earplugs.

He fired more bullets only the new ones exploded, knocking me backward.

I barely managed to keep standing, but I managed. He didn’t stop firing at me though, and I couldn’t see a thing through all the blasts.

I could have started the rocketpack, flown upward, and dived at him except that Cassie stood kitty corner from me in formation. Even with her ability to regenerate, an exploding bullet to the back of the head would not be good.

I ran straight forward into his line of fire, smashing into him before I saw him, and knocking him onto his back. Leaning over, I grabbed the submachine gun even as he fired a couple more shots into my chest.

Then I broke the gun in two, and that was great except for one thing.

I’d left formation.

As I broke the gun, people rushed around me toward the group, and I felt hands grab each of my arms solidly.

Below me, the guy whose gun I’d broken started opening one of the pouches on his belt.

I decided I didn’t want to find out what happened if he got that pouch open, so I lifted my leg and drove his bicep into the ground — hard — maybe harder than I meant to.

He screamed — an understandable response given that his arm now bent in two spots.

A solid jerk backward reminded me that people were holding both of my arms. I stepped back, staying upright more by luck than any plan.

The guy holding my left arm stood nearly seven feet tall, but was so thin I wouldn’t have expected him to be strong enough to hold me. He wore jeans, and black White Sox jacket.

The guy holding my right arm was bald, and massively bulky, but his face somehow reminded me of Prime. Were they relatives?

“Pull,” he said, and began to step back.

Not wanting to find out whether my armor would rip before I would, I sent a full blast of sonics into the White Sox fan’s abdomen. As the sonics found the resonant frequencies for the majority of his digestive system, he looked ill, and –

Well… the less said about that, the better. Let’s just say that he was distracted enough that I could easily pull my arm away.

I’d have done the same with my right arm except the sonics on the right still didn’t work.

The massive guy yanked me toward him, grabbing my left arm, and pointing my hand (and the sonics) away from him.

I tried to pull away, but I couldn’t break his grip.

Even as I ran through options in my mind, a ghostly white form materialized above him.

Touching her white, taser gloves to either side of his head, Rachel turned up the juice.

As we stepped closer to him, he pulled a sword out of his trench coat. Between Lee’s teaching, and Daniel showing me some books on Roman history, I recognized it as a gladius, the Roman legions’ traditional sword.

Behind me, Marcus muttered, “There can be only one.”

In front of me, Lee pulled out his own gladius, apparently from nowhere.

Only Lee wasn’t Lee. I knew him as Gaius Calidius Gallius and I always had. Except I also knew that I knew him as Lee.

Gaius had dark hair, and tanned skin. Even though he wore jeans and a t-shirt instead of a toga or any armor, he somehow reminded me of the film “Gladiator.”

Gaius walked straight toward Prime, both of them shouting at each other — probably in Old Frankish.

We followed him (but not too closely) until they surrounded us.

Oddly enough, this was according to plan.

Once Gaius and Prime stood under the light, and roughly ten feet away from each other, Prime shouted, “Halt.”

Prime’s people stopped, creating a circle around the fight, and two groups within it — Prime, and the people we’d fought earlier on one side, and Gaius (Lee!) with us on the other.

Gaius turned briefly toward us, “We’re going to duel. Remember the plan.”

Once he gave his attention to Prime, they said a few words to each other, and then they attacked.

Lee had taught me the basics of sword fighting, but even the first few seconds of the fight showed me how much better they were than I expected to ever become.

Blades flashed faster than I could follow except in the most general way.

Still, I could see patterns in the way they fought.

Gaius never blocked Prime’s blade in a way that could let it become a contest of strength. He always deflected the blade at a small angle. Sometimes he didn’t block at all, managing not to be where the blow fell.

Not that Prime’s fighting style included a lot of wild swings. It didn’t.

For the most part, Prime didn’t slash, he stabbed, barely missing Gaius again and again.

Gaius showed no hesitation to slash instead of stab, cutting through Prime’s trench coat and shirt, leaving a long, bloody line.

Prime didn’t stop fighting, but his eyes widened as Gaius cut. Prime aimed blow after blow at Gaius even as the skin came together and healed.

Meanwhile Gaius’ strikes and blocks seemed slow, almost lazy, by comparison.

But they worked.

Gaius’ sword slashed Prime’s thigh, cutting a couple inches into it.

Even though the skin came together almost immediately, the blood flew half a foot away.

It struck me as desperation, but might not have been. Still, instead of moving a step or two like he had been doing, Prime rushed forward, running his sword through Gaius’ abdomen.

In anyone else, it would have been fatal, but Gaius barely even showed an awareness of the pain. Another sword appeared in his left hand, and he cut into the bicep of Prime’s sword arm. Then he used the sword in his right hand to cut into Prime’s neck.

The blow wasn’t strong enough to take the head clean off, so even as Gaius pulled his sword back for another shot, I could see Prime’s neck and bicep begin to knit themselves whole.

Unable to pull the sword out quickly enough to avoid Gaius’ blow, Prime let it go, backing away.

Ignoring the sword in his gut, Gaius stepped after him in no particular hurry, one sword in each hand.

If I were a betting man, I would have bet that Prime’s life would end less than ten seconds from that point.

I would have been wrong.

Prime shouted, “Now!”

And they rushed us from all sides.

Crazily, that still fit into the plan. Well, one of them anyway.

I pointed my left arm at the people running at us from that direction, and blasted them with the sonics, wishing I could do the same to the people coming from my right.

Not that it mattered. Jaclyn stood to my right. In a blur of purple, she knocked at least five people backward into the people behind them, giving us the time we needed to get into position.

By the time Prime’s people stopped holding their ears, or began to pull themselves up, I stood back to back with Jaclyn. Marcus stood to my left and back to back with Cassie.

Rachel floated above us, intangible.

Our next step? Fight our way through to Lee, and hope they didn’t take us out through sheer numbers.

I’d called Larry when Lee told us to think about people who might help, and it was lucky I had.

When I told him the time to meet at Man-Machine’s underground factory, he told me, “You saved me from working for the Feds this weeked. Just told them I was busy.”

We were going to do more than talk through ideas.

Hours later, Larry, a big guy even without the Rhino armor, walked down the rows of frames, engines and powered armor parts, staring. Almost every row had three levels. We could outfit a small army.

“Your grandpa and I always suspected Man-machine had to have some place like this. He just had too much stuff, never seemed to run out. Trash his new suit and he’d come back with an improved version the next day.”

Chris smiled nervously at him. “What would you have done if you had known?”

“Blown it to hell probably, but those are the breaks if you choose this lifestyle. I guess it’s good we didn’t.”

“Lifestyle?” Chris stopped smiling. “I haven’t chosen it. It feels like it fell on me.”

Larry shook his head. “You had choices. You didn’t ever have to put on that armor the two of you worked on. Could have stayed home instead of trying to take down the Maniacs. Whatever reasons you had to stay away, you didn’t. You put the armor on, and you’re here now.

“Look at me,” Larry stopped walking. “You know how I got started in this? I found some of your,” he pointed at Chris, “grandfather’s armor after one of his quick getaways, and I fixed it up. I met the Rocket after that. Been at it ever since, one way or another.”

He checked his watch, and looked at the two of us. “Well, if we’re going to get done what we need to, we’d better start welding.”

* * *

In the versions of the old west that I’d seen on television, people handled duels by walking down some dusty Main Street, and pulling out their guns.

If you cared about whether innocent bystanders got hurt, or didn’t want to be interrupted by SWAT teams, you needed to find someplace more private.

Lee and Prime had arranged the time and location between themselves over the week.

That’s how we ended up meeting Prime and his people in the middle of a grassy field twenty miles outside Grand Lake. We stood behind an old barn next to a dirt road that people probably went down sometimes, but I hadn’t seen any cars yet.

Well, other than ours and Prime’s people’s.

If there had ever been a farmhouse to go along with the barn, it had long ago disappeared. All grayish wood with flecks of red, the barn looked like it might fall in soon itself.

It had a working light behind the barn, the sole light I could see besides the stars and moon.

Aside from one cloud, the sky was clear.

Not everyone came with us. On the League’s side, we had Lee, Jaclyn, Cassie, Rachel, Marcus and I.

On Prime’s side stood all the people I remembered from our fight with the Cabal — the big guy, the weirdly thin, long-legged woman, the man with burning hands, and the guy who absorbed energy — plus a whole lot more. Maybe one hundred more.

I lost count after the first fifty.

“When I try to work out how to handle situations like this, I ask myself who’s got common interests? More often than not, I’m not the only one asking the question. For example, the League’s got common interests with Hardwick’s group and Justice Fist. They’re both probably running given what’s happened lately, but you might be able to pull in a few.

“As for Prime and the Executioner’s groups… Prime’s people want you out of the way of threatening their supply of new recruits, and they used to want to kill Red Lightning’s people to keep the juice’s secret safe. Ray’s people want to kill you, Hardwick’s group and all of Justice Fist too. So, there’s synergy there.”

“Synergy in that they both want to kill the same people, one of whom happens to be me.”

“Right, but that’s not the end of it. Ray’s group is small and understands modern weaponry. Prime’s is large and has a lot of people with powers. If they did get together they’d have a lot to offer each other — and a lot to argue about — which might be a nice lever for us if it comes to that.”

After that, we talked about plans for how to handle meeting Prime’s people next week.

An hour later, he left, and I finally got around to calling Isaac Lim back.

He answered on the first ring, and I put the picture on the big screen.

Isaac wore a helmet, green combat fatigues, and a thick, brown vest with “FBI” on it in big white letters. A sub-machinegun hung from a strap.

I could see trees, a couple trucks painted in camouflage colors, and a tent in the background. In the distance, I thought I heard shouting.

“Glad you called back,” Isaac said. “I’ve got to warn you that I might drop this call at any time.”

“What are you doing?”

“Can’t say, but if you remember another time you called me… Let’s say a ship or two got through and we had some landings. We’re dealing with them right now.”

“Wow.”

“Don’t tell anybody.”

“I won’t. Uh… Why did you call?”

Even through the goggles on his helmet, I could see his eyes narrow. “What the hell do you think you’re doing challenging Prime? His people chewed through us like we were nothing, and I had powered agents in the field.”

“It wasn’t really my idea.”

“Goddamn it, I know. It was Lee’s. I told you not to trust that guy. What’s he trying to do, get you killed?”

“I think he’s trying to do exactly the opposite. I’ve known him all my life, and I think he owes Grandpa somehow.”

Isaac nodded his head. “Don’t assume that’s a good thing. I’ve been reading up on Lee/Gunther/Immortal or whatever we’re calling him today, and he first appeared with your Grandfather after some mission early in the war. Never did explain why. From what I’ve read, he’s known for keeping his deals. The bad news is if he doesn’t like you, he’s been known to keep them to the letter, and that doesn’t necessarily require leaving his clients alive. So, you’d better hope he likes you.”

“I’m pretty sure he does. Well, if that’s all–”

“One more thing, stall. We’ve got regular agents in Grand Lake watching Justice Fist and their families. After what happened to George Drucker, it had to happen. All our powered agents are busy up here and in the other landing spots. We’ve got most of the trustworthy supers in the northern Midwest up here too. Don’t expect much help if you call the Michigan Heroes Alliance. You’ll just get second-raters.”

“Wait, where are you?”

“Michigan’s upper peninsula. Don’t pass it on.”

“Well, I don’t think we can stall. We’re set to meet Prime next week Thursday. Will you be done by then?”

“If I’m lucky, sure, but I could just as easily be up here for a month.”

Isaac took a breath, and frowned. “I might just be getting paranoid, but isn’t it convenient that Prime comes when I’m dealing with one of the biggest incursions in years, guaranteeing you won’t get any help at all?”

“Are you suggesting Prime’s working with aliens?”

Isaac shook his head. “No, but something like it. I –”

A deep booming noise came over the audio. Isaac stumbled, the trees in the background shook, and the picture wobbled.

“Gotta go,” he said. “Good luck.”

The caller ID said the number was “unavailable,” but I’d set the voicemail system to play the voicemail live while I was there.

So… “You’ve reached the Heroes League. Please leave your number after the beep.”

It beeped.

I recognized the voice from the time he’d called to threaten us. The language? That too. He left the message in Old Frankish.

As he talked, I debated breaking in, and seeing if he would use English. We had a plan worked out. If we ended up speaking we were supposed to keep him angry, and push him into arranging a date to fight us soon.

I wasn’t sure if I needed to make him angrier though. He practically shouted into the phone.

As he started to wind down, my urge to do something won out against my urge to not be shouted at.

I picked up the phone. Letting the computer distort my voice into the standard Rocket voice, I said, “Can you say it again in English?”

“Leave this to your betters, boy,” he said, continued on in Old Frankish for a sentence or two, and hung up.

Apparently he didn’t trust anyone under 30.

I recorded it all anyway, so no big deal.

When he hung up on me, I had a brief moment of wondering whether I should call Lee or Isaac Lim back first. I decided on Lee in the next half-second.

“I’ll be over in twenty minutes. Gotta finish off my class and arrange for someone to take my next session.”

Lee came down the elevator fifteen minutes later.

He walked across the main room, passing the cardboard boxes, pausing for a moment to smirk at one of the trophy cases. Between dimness of the lights and the distance, I couldn’t tell which case.

When he finally made it to the main room’s only table where I sat at a computer, he put a black motorcycle helmet next to my monitor, and sat next to it on the table.

“Let’s hear it,” he said.

I replayed the whole conversation including my part in it.

After the recording finished, Lee said, “Not bad. Could be better, but not bad.”

“So, what did he say?”

“Well, first he insulted me for a while, but then he got down to business. We’ll meet with him next week Thursday to set up details for the fight.”

“What kind of fight? Who’s in it?” I thought for a second. “And weren’t you trying to push him into doing something tomorrow?”

“To answer your questions… No I don’t know what kind of fight or who’s in it. That’s for Thursday. As for pushing him, yeah, no question I wanted to move him faster, but it’s not my fault if he’s had 1500 years to get educated. I’m happy it worked as well as it did. He knows it has to be a trick somehow, but he can’t just ignore it. That’s why it pays to know languages. You’ll never be able to hurt anybody as much in their second language as their first.”

Strangely, none of my language teachers had ever used that justification.

“Okay,” I asked, “so who do you want to be in the fight?”

“Doesn’t matter much to me at all. It’s more a question of who I don’t want to be in in the fight — everybody. Here’s how the Cabal works. They’ve been recruiting powers from the lower end of society for years. Now the government’s discovered their breeding villages, and they can’t recruit from the big cities where there a lot of supers without people noticing. Here in Grand Lake you had Red Lightning’s breeding program, and you had the Mayor, and he was probably monitoring the results for the Cabal.

“So,” Lee continued, ”they’ve been going after the gangs around here. I’d bet they’ve taken over half of them by now, and terrified the other half. And that means that if we have a fight that takes out their leadership, good. Then we only have the Executioner and company to worry about after that.

“The idea,” Lee said, “is to take out the Cabal’s people before they notice their best bet is in working with the Executioner.”

I took the call.

“Nick,” Vaughn said, “you’ve gotta take a look at Double V’s forums. Go to the Grand Lake section. It’s totally crazy.”

So I did.

I went up to my room, and with Rachel looking over my shoulder, checked out the forums. In the very few minutes since the interview aired, someone had taken the video, and uploaded it to Youtube. They’d also linked to the page where News 10 mentioned that the full interview would appear on their daytime interview show.

Sometimes I suspected that our fans were more interested in watching us than we were in doing the things they wanted to watch.

That wasn’t the crazy part. I’d visited the forums before, and that was expected.

The crazy part was the 128 post discussion entitled, “What the F@&# is Old Frankish?”

“Did you get to the Old Frankish part yet?” Vaughn asked. I’d put the cell on speakerphone.

“Just now,” I said.

Next to me, Rachel pointed at one of the comments. “I love how the second poster managed to weave my butt into the discussion because that’s got everything to do with Old Frankish.”

“I’m not defending him,” Vaughn said, “but at least he was complimentary.”

“And that makes him not an asshole?”

I lost track of the conversation at that point because I started to read the thread. It was more interesting that I’d thought. Some of the posts were from an actual linguist. It turned out that we didn’t have any examples of Old Frankish. All we had were words from the various languages that descended from it.

Rachel and Vaughn must have started talking about the discussion at some point because the next I heard her say was, “Not only do we have to fight off the Executioner, and Prime, but we might get invaded by linguists.”

In the phone’s tinny speaker, Vaughn said, “He’s already called us. I didn’t pick up, but no joke. The guy wants to speak to Lee, and he’s not the only one.”

I kept on reading. Somewhere around the sixth post, the topic turned to Lee. It went like this:

Eliminator232: so how do we know that’s really old frankass?
CrusherDood: Because it’s the Immortal talking, moron. The guy’s been kicking around for thousands of years. Look at the Double V db entry…

CrusherDood included links to the db entry, plus “the Immortal’s” usenet group, and the collection of websites devoted to finding records of Lee in history.

One of them claimed he’d killed at least two Roman emperors and partially corroborated his story about becoming emperor for a month. Another claimed to have found Sumerian records that described him. They posted translations along with pictures of the tablets. Not knowing how to read cuneiform, I had no way to verify them.

The translation of a medieval grimoire claimed it was possible to imprison him with the use of “blasphemous, eldritch symbols,” but didn’t say which ones.

Outside of his time as Gunther, I couldn’t find much on him within the past sixty years. They’d missed his attempt to start a cult, but he’d been posing as an enlightened being at the time, and hadn’t killed anybody.

That’s how they usually picked up on him. Given that he could completely become a new identity, his only identifying characteristics were his tendency to not die, and an ability to always have edged weapons available — even if he had to pull them out of thin air.

“I’ve never seen him do that,” Rachel said.

“Right,” Vaughn said. “He’s always got swords and stuff around the studio, but I’ve never seen him get one out of nowhere.”

“Me neither.” I checked over a few more sites, and was relieved not to find any references to his martial arts studio.

“Makes you wonder if any of his enemies will show up, and what they’d be,” Vaughn said.

* * *

I woke up twice on Saturday morning, once to say goodbye to my grandparents who left for the airport at six am, and again at ten.

After breakfast, I walked to HQ. Sitting in front of the computer screen, smelling the bunker’s mustiness, I couldn’t help but think that I was spending way too much time down there.

The voice mail program showed more than one hundred messages.

I deleted anything that came from a newspaper, TV or radio station without listening to it, but most calls came from private numbers. In the end, I deleted calls from a lot of linguists, and cultural anthropologists, plus a pile of calls from people who just wanted to speak with Lee.

By the time I finished, I’d gotten so deeply in the habit of pressing delete that I almost deleted calls from Lee, and Isaac Lim.

I listened to Lee’s voicemail first.

“You didn’t get a call back from Prime yet, I bet. He’s been busy, and he hasn’t been watching TV. Check for Ionia Maximum Security Prison in the news. This is the kind of thing I was hoping to avoid by challenging him, but hell, it’s not the end of the world. It keeps things exciting.”

News 10’s website linked to the breakout directly from their front page. The news footage showed a bulky man breaking down a concrete wall. Bullets didn’t phase him, though sometimes he stopped to throw a chunk of concrete outside the camera’s view.

The newscast segued into a slideshow of the escapees, showing all the people we’d fought at that old house on the north west side of town including the man who’d melted the Rocket suit’s arm, and the guy whose leg Cassie cut off.

Apparently he’d gotten better.

Once all the pictures had flipped past, I decided I could be relieved that Man-machine, Mayor Bouman and the guys we’d fought at the convenience store hadn’t escaped. They were in there too.

I sat back in my chair and closed the browser.

And that’s when Prime called.

“I came in late,” Rachel said. “You’ll have to ask the Rocket.”

Erika turned her attention to me. “So?”

“A few of us got to talking,” I began.

“Us?”

“We’re all connected to the original League one way or another. We got together a few times, and we decided we wanted to bring it back instead of letting it end.”

“And that’s when you decided to take on the Gray Giant?”

“That was a side effect of running into Syndicate L. We discovered they were transporting something and it happened to be him.”

Erika said, “That must have been a big surprise.”

“He was just a normal sized surprise at first, but he grew.”

She laughed. “That’s what he’s famous for.”

After that she asked us questions about the most visible events of the League’s return — mostly incidents that caused property damage — the Mayor, the Maniacs, fighting Man-machine, Prime, the Cabal, the Executioner, and finally Justice Fist.

“So what do you think about Justice Fist? The original Heroes League had the city all to itself, but now you have to share with another team. Do you see them as allies? Rivals?”

Rachel shrugged, “I’ve barely met them.  Rocket?”

I wondered what I should say. Obviously, I wasn’t going to say exactly what I thought of Sean. Everybody knew what had happened to his father, so it wasn’t the time to point out that he was an overconfident bully who thought his powers made him practically godlike.

“They’re okay. They’ve helped us out a couple times. No complaints.”

“What about reports of tension between yourself and the Power? We’ve got a witness who claims that the two of you nearly got into a fight in a junkyard this spring, and others saw you arguing after you fought Jack Maniac.”

I wondered who had told them about the fight in the junkyard. The argument after fighting Jack Maniac was less of a mystery since that took place in the middle of a suburban neighborhood.

“Well, things happen. People get upset. I don’t think we ever punched each other or anything. Besides, it’s not like that with everybody in Justice Fist. Anyway… We got lucky in a couple different ways that they didn’t. The original League arranged a teacher for us, and we’ve got people connected to the original League willing to offer advice when we need it.”

“Oh, really? Who?”

With luck, I’d distracted her from pursuing the whole Justice Fist issue, and put the interview back on track for Lee’s message.

“Well, in Double V’s database you’ll find an entry for a being called the Immortal? His entry suggests that he might be ‘Gunther,’ a German in the French Foreign Legion that operated with the Heroes League during and after World War 2? Well, that’s true. And you know how we were talking about Prime and the Cabal’s army earlier? We’ve got a message from the Immortal to Prime. Here it is…”

I started the recording in my helmet. Lee started talking in some Germanic language that wasn’t German. Not modern German at least. It lasted for maybe a minute.

From her waist up, Erika appeared to be completely patient and interested. I couldn’t help but notice that she tapped her toe during the entire speech.

When Lee finished, and his voice turned into a laugh, she asked “What did that mean?”

“Well, he started by challenging Prime to fight us. Then, he said that if Prime didn’t drop everything to arrange a time now, Prime was some kind of coward, and he finished things off by talking about Prime’s wife back in the first half of the fifth century. He describes a birthmark she had in a very… private place. I don’t know exactly how he knows, but it’s implied, you know?”

Rachel pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to Erika. “It’s in Old Frankish. Here’s a translation. You can run it under the recording.”

* * *

They ran it on the eleven o’clock newscast. They cut a lot, but kept Lee’s message, running the translation as a crawl on the bottom of the screen.

Rachel and I watched it at home. Mom and Dad had gone to bed as had Grandpa and Grandma Klein. They were leaving on Saturday, and needed to be at the airport early.

“That ought to stir up some trouble,” Rachel said as the segment finished.

“Yeah,” I began.

Then my cellphone started ringing.

Rachel let go of my shoulder as I pointed myself upright, stopping the rockets for a moment, but then making the rocketpack start a new burn, slowing my descent.

Below me I could see the parking lot where I’d fought Man-machine — until his heart attack, anyway.

It looked a lot like it had that night, half full of cars, and darkness.

Off to the left stood Lavender West, an old, four story piano factory that had been converted into a store that sold bohemian clothing, pot paraphernalia, skateboarding gear, and had a skate park on the fourth floor.

That’s what I’d heard, anyway. Vaughn would have known for sure — if only because he was into skateboarding.

I landed in the handicapped spot next to the main entrance. Rachel landed next to me.

“I can think of a few other things I’d rather be going on television for,” she said.

Then she floated through the glass door. I followed her, except I had to open it.

Whoever had done the interior design for News 10 had gone with the “artsy, old building” look — big blown up pictures of local buildings and old versions of the TV studio on the walls, the bottom of the next story’s wooden floor as a ceiling, and white walls.

The station’s waiting area lay just beyond the entrance. It consisted of a few chairs in an alcove and the receptionist’s desk. The desk sat behind a white counter that had been built out from the wall.

A security guard stood next to the desk in a black uniform, his blue and white badge saying “Grand Lake Security.”

His eyes bugged out as Rachel floated in, transparent enough that people could see through her, playing up the Ghost identity.

“You can’t bring that gun in here,” he said.

Her black pistol stood out against a white holster, white utility belt, and white costume.

“If you can grab it, you can have it.” Rachel shot him a smile.

“But seriously, if the Rocket and I decided to cause a problem, this gun would be the least of your worries.”

I’d designed some of the ammunition she would be using. I liked to think the gun would be a big worry.

“The gun’s kind of cool,” I said, “and the ammunition’s extremely cool. Would it help if I assured you that the that chance that she’ll go on a rampage is really, really low? I mean, you can’t put it at zero because it’s a weird universe and all, but there are going to be a lot of zeroes after the decimal point.”

Rachel turned her head to look at me. “You’re not helping.”

“What I’m really trying to say,” I continued, “is that her trustworthiness can be measured with many, many nines.”

“Unless Mr… Allen Carpenter,” Rachel read the plastic ID card hanging on a string around his neck, ”is secretly a robot and cares, you’re still not helping.”

The guard reached for Rachel’s gun. His hand passed through it, Rachel’s utility belt, and her waist.

I caught up with her in a few quick steps, and he backed away, stopping when he hit the side of the receptionist’s desk.

If nothing else, the real Rocket suit was a lot more intimidating than the stealth suit.

The receptionist, a fifty-ish woman in a professional-looking, brown suit took the situation in with a glance, and picked up the phone.

“Erika, the Rocket and Ghost have arrived… Can I send them in? Wonderful.”

She hung up. “Go down the hall, and take the first door to the left.”

We walked down the hall, entering a room with lots of lights hanging from the ceiling, three cameras, and two sets. On the far side of the room stood the news set with its desks, wood paneling, and rows of background TV’s that showed News 10’s logo during the newscast.

The other side had the interview set — a conference table, chairs and lots of bluish background and lighting.

Erika Hernandez (I recognized her from the news) stood next to the interview set. “Come over here and get comfortable. We can start whenever you’re ready.”

She grinned at us, and it seemed like a genuine smile as opposed to a professionally friendly smile.

Of course, faking a genuine smile might be a useful skill for a television reporter.

We sat down in chairs while people fussed around with the lighting. My suit was shinier than they liked, and they spent several minutes working around that. They spent a few more experimenting to find Rachel’s best shade of transparency for the cameras.

“Everybody ready to go?” Erika sat in her chair, facing the two of us. “Rocket, are you comfortable?”

I sat on the edge of my seat with two of the rocketpack’s fins touching the back of the chair.

“Not really, but I can’t imagine what to do about it unless you want me to stand, or unless you’ve got a stool.”

“I’m sorry, we don’t. Can you take it off?”

“Not here.”

“Then we’ll just have to soldier on. I promise it won’t be long.”

Someone standing near the cameras started counting down. “Three… Two… One.”

“We’re here today with the Rocket and Ghost to talk about the New Heroes League. They’ve agreed to share some memories they have of the original League, and talk about their investigation into the murders we’ve seen during the last few weeks. At the end of the broadcast, they’ll have an important message and warning for all of us.”

She’d gotten the last part wrong. It wasn’t a message for everyone. It was a message for Prime from Lee. I made a mental note to tell her that when it came up.

That, and to encourage them to be very clear that the interview was a recording when they aired it. If they didn’t, Prime might show up at the station, and, given what we were about to say, he’d probably be cranky.

He held up his hands. “Everyone please be quiet, and stay where you are. We’ve called an ambulance, and they will need the aisles to be clear.”

Not everybody listened. Sean pushed his way out between the aisles of folding chairs, ran across the field, up one of the short stairways, and into the bleachers, joining his family.

I couldn’t blame him for that.

Andy Timmer’s dad stood near them. If I remembered correctly, Andy’s dad was a doctor, but he didn’t have much to work with here.

The setting sun cast long shadows, but I thought I could see blood on the concrete ledge in front of the bleachers even from where I sat.

My League cell phone vibrated. I pulled it out, unlocked the screen, and found a message from Haley, “Going after them.”

I clicked on the GPS to find her position, and the phone showed a dot superimposed on a picture of the stadium.

Looking upward to my left, I saw a small figure that had to be Haley standing at the top row of the bleachers. A taller woman, probably Rachel, jumped from one row to another, catching up to her.

No one was seated anywhere near them. Almost all the parents sat in the lower rows, and in the part of the stadium nearest to the podium. Even though Central High used it for graduation every year, Grand Lake University’s football stadium could hold three times our crowd.

To my relief, Haley didn’t jump off the back. She used the stairway. Rachel followed her, and they both disappeared from sight.

* * *

I didn’t have much experience to guide me, but the crowd that emerged from the stadium felt quieter than a post graduation crowd should.

After Rachel’s graduation, the senior class had thrown their hats into the air as they exited the stadium, and walked down the steps into the parking lot. Ours walked out, and stood in groups to talk, or went straight to their cars.

Five police cars parked in front of the stadium near the main exits. Policemen stood talking to people, and taking notes near the entrance. The banks of lights hanging in the air made it almost as bright as day.

The parking lot looked darker.

News 10 had parked their truck (complete with satellite uplink) near the police cars. The trucks from other local channels were still setting up, but the News 10 reporter and cameraman were interviewing people.

I avoided them.

Near me, Cassie said, “Nick, over there.”

Rachel and Haley stood on a traffic island across from the exits. We crossed the road, and stood next to them.

Cassie, with Kayla next to her, said, “What did you find out?”

Haley frowned. “I couldn’t catch them. I smelled Ray near the exit. I caught his scent outside, but they must have had someone waiting in a car, and they left before I even got out.”

Rachel glanced toward the police and reporters. “I happened to overhear the police interviewing the people sitting behind Sean’s family. Ray walked up in normal clothes, put a gun to the back of Mr. Drucker’s head, shot and ran away.”

Cassie eyed Rachel. “What about the police? They were all over. Didn’t they try to stop him?”

“One of them did. He got shot. They took him away with Sean’s father.”

“But the policeman wasn’t dead,” Haley said. “I heard him talking to the paramedics.”

A woman’s voice said, “Cassie!”

Mrs. Kowalski stood in a knot of parents, including Kayla’s. She waved Cassie over.

Kayla said, “My parents are waving too.”

Cassie sighed. “Kayla’s parents and my mom were going out for dessert tonight. I’d try to get out of it, but what else can we do here? How about tomorrow?”

We all agreed, and they left.

Rachel flicked her eyes between Haley and I. “I’m sure our parents want to leave too. I can stall them if you want a couple minutes alone.”

“Sure,” I said, though between the reporters, the police, and the people standing in the darkened parking lot this barely qualified as alone.

Rachel stepped off the traffic island and disappeared into the crowd of parents and family.

Neither of us said anything for a little while. Then Haley said, “I won’t be able to make the meeting if you have it during the day. I’ve still got school. I’ve got exams next week. I wonder if I’ll even be able to concentrate on studying?”

“I could help. I don’t have anything going next week. Nothing planned anyway.”

“After tonight, I’ve got a feeling we’ll be busy.”

“You’re probably right,” I said.

“And besides, the time we did study together was fun, but we didn’t study very much.”

She had a point.

“I keep on hearing the shot,” Haley said. “It sounded like a gun with silencer. Remember when Lee brought one to practice?”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“You couldn’t have, but that’s not what I was thinking about. I was thinking about Sydney and Sean. When Sean and I were dating, it was so obvious how much better their lives would have been if their father were decent. Or maybe just… gone.”

She pushed her hair back with her hand.

“I don’t think this is going to make things better,” she said.

I thought back to when Vaughn volunteered to tell Sean about Ray and his team. At the time, it seemed like a possible way to get Sean’s cooperation, but he wouldn’t have tried to take Ray down if we hadn’t.

It wasn’t our fault he’d tried, just like it wasn’t our fault Ray had tried to kill his dad. But could we have predicted it?

“Nick, what’s on your mind?”

“I don’t think this is going to make things better either.”

Julie stopped talking to Shannon and Camille, and shouted, “Freeze!”

The sonic blocker I’d designed to stop Julie’s commands, and Syndicate L’s paralysis devices went off, cancelling out the odd tone in her voice, leaving her to sound much like anyone else.

Out on the field, everybody except Julie stopped moving.

“Score one for the Pink Ranger,” Cassie said.

“Looks like it worked,” Vaughn said. “Even the people in the stands are out.”

Vaughn panned the crowd. Most of them stared straight ahead.

Well, except for Ray. He pointed his gun at Julie.

She dove for the ground, shouting, “Unfreeze! Unfreeze!”

Then I heard the sound of screaming, and a small hum from my sonic blocker, but I only saw blurry bleachers, and Vaughn’s jeans (black).

“Change in the bathrooms?” Vaughn asked.

“Where are they?”

“There.”

“By the exit? Vaughn, everybody’s running for the exit. It’ll be over before — God. It is.”

“Hey,” I shouted up at the screen. “What happened?”

“You’re still there, Nick? Look.” Vaughn pointed the phone toward the field. All of Justice Fist lay on the ground unmoving.

Sean’s father ran out across the field with Mr. Sledge.

“Where’s…” I tried to think of a way to refer to Ray that wouldn’t be suspicious if overheard. “Uh…”

“Their teachers left by the exit on the other side of the field,” Cassie said. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

* * *

Vaughn did manage to get into the air afterward, but he didn’t see Ray’s team at all.

I talked to Isaac Lim after I got off the phone. Despite the news reports showing the hotel’s destruction, the evening hadn’t been a total loss. They’d managed to catch a couple of Prime’s people. They weren’t talking yet, but he had hopes.

When I told him about what happened on the field, he asked for details, and then said, “Thanks. Got to go.”

It made the five o’clock news. I caught it in the lab as I tested the right arm’s sonics’ connections. They interviewed Sean. He said nothing about why the fight started.

Had Isaac talked to him?

* * *

Graduation came too soon.

They held the ceremony on the football field, placing the platform on the east side so we wouldn’t have to sit with the sun in our eyes. Given that the sun would set during the ceremony, it was nice to know they’d been thinking ahead.

Graduates sat in the field, all of us in blue and yellow robes. Parents, relatives, and friends sat in the bleachers.

I tried to find my parents, grandparents, and Rachel. Haley had mentioned that she might be sitting with them too.

I couldn’t see any of them.

I noticed Sean’s parents and Sydney sitting in the front row of the bleachers. Sean’s dad didn’t seem to be smiling. As I looked at him, he seemed to be checking out the top rows of the bleachers across from him.

Following his gaze, I didn’t see anything suspicious — just another police officer. I’d seen at least five so far. Someone had arranged more security than I would have expected.

After what had happened at prom, I could imagine their paranoia.

I pulled out my League phone, and texted Rachel.

She sent back, “We’re here. Stop worrying.”

I did, listening while our principal, Dr. Williams introduced the commencement speaker, and proceeded to zone out during the speech.

If possible, I paid even less attention once they started calling names of the graduates, and waited for them to cross the stage. I cheered as Vaughn crossed the stage. A lot of people did, but mostly I sat quietly. With a six hundred person graduating class, it took far too long for them to seriously expect anyone to pay attention the entire time.

I barely noticed when they called my name. I walked, following Kayla just like I had in practice that afternoon, but I didn’t think about it much.

A few people cheered as I crossed the stage — Cassie, for sure. I recognized her voice. She was walking just a couple people behind me.

Once I sat down again, I had no reason at all to pay attention, and didn’t until they got to the “T’s.”

I can’t remember who walked, (John Thompson? Andy Timmer?) but as he did, someone started screaming.

Sean’s mom.

I glanced at Sean’s dad, and turned my head away, trying to convince my stomach to stop heaving.

To judge from his slumped body, and bloody mess of a face, he had to be dead.

I didn’t get back to working on things on Monday night because the whole family got talking. With Grandpa and Grandma Klein visiting from Minnesota, that happened easily. Grandpa had taught cultural anthropology at the University of Minnesota, worked for the U.N. in the 1960’s, and had friends all over the world.

They’d just come back from Spain where he’d presented a paper even though he was mostly retired.

After supper, the whole family went to the beach to take a walk along Lake Michigan, and by the time I had a chance to get away, it was after ten, and I didn’t want to.

Tuesday turned out worse.

I caught up with Vaughn and Cassie on the way out of school. We stood on the lawn in front of the school, talking while kids caught buses or crossed the street to the parking lot for their cars.

“I’m riding with Vaughn because my Mom’s got her car,” Cassie said. “She’s back from D.C.”

I knew better than to ask what she had been doing in Washington.

Turning his head away from “appreciating” some of the girls going past, Vaughn said, “I can drop you off, but we’re going to go watch Sean and Justice Fist practice.”

“Seriously? Why?”

“He asked me, and Cassie decided to come along. Buddy system, you know.”

I did. Lee had been trying to drill that one into our heads. Don’t go into potential danger alone.

“Well, if you can drop me off, that would be great –”

I didn’t get to finish because Sean walked up and told Vaughn, “If anything happens at practice, just run, get into your car, and drive away. Don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine.”

Vaughn tilted his head back to look up at Sean. “What’s going to happen?”

“I’m not going to tell you here, but it’ll be big afterward.”

Next to him, and more bulked up than I remembered, Dayton said, “Just keep your eyes open.”

On Sean’s other side, Jody said, “We’re going to show those cocksuckers how –”

Dayton reached around Sean’s back, and gave Jody a push. “Shut up. Not here.”

Jody said, “You shut up.”

After they left, Vaughn and Cassie dropped me off at HQ, and I went down to work on the Rocket suit.

I didn’t get to.

First, I noticed an email from Isaac Lim that I should call him to talk about what happened on Sunday night. I’d decided to try to leave a voicemail or something, but just as I began to call, Vaughn’s name appeared on the computer screen.

I clicked the mouse, and took the call, sending it to the big screen in the main room because I was there, and I could.

A blurry shot of a football field filled the screen. Past the bleachers on the other side of the field, a old, brick factory stretched to match its size.

I’d never seen the place before.

People stood on the field, but they weren’t wearing football uniforms, of course. They wore Justice Fist uniforms.

I recognized everybody — Sean, Jody, and Dayton, from school, and from our fight. Sydney, Sean’s younger sister, wore a green and white uniform much like his, but stood a little bit back from the group. Shannon, the Solid Grounds’ barista, and her cousin Julie talked with Camille, Sydney’s half-sister.

I wondered if either of them knew it. Probably not. It would be hard to get it from looks alone. Camille had light brown skin and dark hair, both a little lighter than her mom’s.

With Sean and Sydney both being blond and light-skinned, even seeing them all together, I didn’t immediately think about the many small resemblances.

Just off to the left of the main group, Lucas stood talking to the four people on the field who weren’t wearing Justice Fist uniforms. They wore bulky black jackets, and pants that could pass for SWAT team uniforms in some places. Unlike most SWAT teams, they wore masks.

I guessed the tallest of them had to be Ray, the woman was Gina (if that was her real name), and I didn’t remember the name of the other guy. I wondered who the fourth person might be. The murderer of the original Power, possibly?

Vaughn’s voice came over the speakers. “Nick, we’re at the practice.”

“You’re on speakerphone,” Cassie said. “So no secrets.”

“I’ll show you around,” Vaughn said, and panned across the field.

They weren’t the only ones there. Groups of students sat together laughing and talking. The view changed, moving from the bleachers to their right, including the field, and then the bleachers to the left. More clumps of students as well as a few grownups. Sean’s dad sat next to Assistant Principal Sledge. Several sheets of metal leaned next to the railing.

“Their practices are open to everybody?”

“I guess,” Vaughn said. “Everybody knows who they are, so why not?”

“I don’t know. Enemies?”

“Whatever,” Cassie said. “It doesn’t hurt us.”

She had a point.

Amid the background talking, Sean’s dad shouted, “Sydney, over here!”

Vaughn pointed the phone’s camera to follow her as she walked to the edge of the field.

“What?”

“Take the metal, or you’re useless to everybody.”

“Useless? Thanks a lot.”

She reached out her hand and the metal disappeared, coating her skin, but not her uniform or hair.

Comparing it to when her father had done the same thing in Vaughn’s uncle’s office, I thought she had manipulated the metal more quickly, and she’d done something new. She’d created metal lenses over her eyes. Had she changed the molecular structure, making the metal transparent, or merely made it thin? I would have had to test it to know, and I doubted anyone would be willing to get me a sample.

“Alright, everybody,” said one of the men in black uniforms, “time to get rolling. We’ve got a lot to cover today.”

Sean turned away from Dayton and Jody, and said, “I don’ t think so. We’re sending you back to jail.”

I called up the GPS. The Baymont Inn wasn’t far away. I decided I could do a flyby without too much trouble. I probably wouldn’t even get seen, which was good, because if I got into a one on one fight with Prime’s people, I might not survive it.

As I altered my course for the southeast corner of Grand Lake, I managed to find a local all news AM station.

They appeared to have someone on the scene. That or they were using one of the reporters from News 10. If I remembered correctly, the same people owned both stations.

“… The Baymont Inn on Jefferson Street has been almost completely destroyed in what appears to be an FBI raid. At 10:15 pm, witnesses reported seeing the police, the FBI, and National Guard troops surrounding the building. At about the same time, the last of the hotel’s guests evacuated as many had been warned to leave during the day.”

Once I flew north past Fillmore, one of Grand Lake’s suburbs, I realized I didn’t need my GPS to find the Baymont at all.

At night, Jefferson was generally brighter than most streets in the city, but despite all the light from the stores, and restaurants, the Baymont Inn still stood out.

It was the flames, mostly.

Even if the Baymont hadn’t been on fire (and it was), the Econolodge and the Denny’s on either side of it were.

And even if nothing had been on fire, I like to think that I would have picked up on the way the police and National Guard had blocked off the roads around the hotel.

Not to mention the burning Hummers.

Over the radio, the announcer continued, “Witnesses claim that the FBI was in contact with the people inside the building by telephone and offered to allow them to surrender, but as they were talking, the people inside allegedly broke through the wall and started the surrounding buildings on fire. They escaped from several powered FBI agents, and are still at large.”

Powered FBI agents? I didn’t see any — unless they were the people being loaded into ambulances.

I saw Lt. Van Kley standing next to her cruiser, talking with men in suits and a few more men in combat fatigues.

I considered flying down to ask them for more information, but I didn’t. I wasn’t supposed to be out in uniform anyway.

Giving the rocketpack some more fuel, I aimed myself upward, hoping Prime’s people didn’t include anyone who could fly, and watching the helmet’s readouts for planes.

At the top of my arc, I could see most of the city. Even this late, light from buildings and streetlights outlined the lake it almost surrounded.

I aimed myself at Veterans Memorial Park and started to descend.

As I did, I realized that the newscast had somehow segued into a talk show.

“This is the Maaaaassive Mike Show on Grand Lake News Radio. Tonight’s topic: The Heroes League. Where are they? We’ve got more superheroes in Grand Lake than ever before, and none of them are doing anything. We had murders of gang members last week. Did we see them? No. Did we see them after someone nailed a guy on the Heroes League’s own building? No. Well, how about tonight? You know, when the FBI completely fails to nail a bunch of powered criminals, and starts half a city block burning? Did we see even a single member of the League? Not a damn soul. They’re teenagers, so we can’t expect them to show up day in, day out like the cops do, but this is a big deal.

“I could say ‘Well, they’re kids. They just don’t pay attention.’ But remember last fall? They weren’t just the first people who knew about the Mayor. They were the only people, so I can’t believe they don’t know about this.

“That’s why I’m asking you to call in, and tell me what you think they’re doing?”

And of course he didn’t stop there. Neither did the callers.

A woman with a gravely voice said. “It’s the week before exams. Maybe they’re studying?”

“Bull. Kids don’t study till the night before. Next caller?”

For half a second, I imagined flying to the studio, explaining what we were up against, and seeing if he had any actual suggestions as opposed to, you know, just carping.

I didn’t, obviously.

I flew back to the forest near the park, changed into civilian clothes, and walked home in the dark.

* * *

I went to school on Monday. I’d checked with people in my classes over the weekend, and it turned out that I hadn’t gotten assigned any homework on Friday. By the end of the day on Monday, I hadn’t gotten assigned any either, and it seemed obvious that we weren’t going to much of anything before graduation on Thursday night.

I’d have a whole week to work out bugs in the Rocket suit’s new arm, and maybe even get ahead somehow.

I made some serious progress on Monday afternoon. I attached it to the suit, and it worked. I could bend the arm, and it had full strength.

The only things wrong with it were a couple error messages, and the sonics. They wouldn’t turn on. They worked on the old arm, but not the new one.

In a worst case scenario, I decided I could live with that for a little while.

It was maddening, but I found it fun at the same time.

On a practical level, what it meant was that I left the arm in pieces when I went home for supper, and I didn’t want to work on it that night. On Saturday, I worked on it for a few more hours, but then I went to Cassie’s graduation open house and when I came home, I found that Grandpa and Grandma Klein had arrived from Minnesota so I couldn’t leave the house on Saturday night. Sunday morning I went to church with everyone else. Sunday afternoon I managed to get to Jaclyn and Daniel’s open houses as well as having my own.

All of which meant I got a lot of time with relatives, friends, and people who knew me from school, but not a lot of time to work. I’d planned on working on things on Sunday night, but I didn’t get to spend as much time as I wanted then either.

The reason why went like this:

Late during my own open house, I went inside to grab more food from the kitchen table (the party was in the back yard). I was putting some kind of wrap on my plate when Chris Cannon came up to me. He looked around, probably making sure that we were the only people in the room, and said, “I’ve got something to show you. We probably ought to do it tonight. When’s the earliest time you can get away?”

“I don’t know. Nine maybe? Ten? My grandparents are here from Minnesota for the open house and graduation.”

“I’ll send you an address via email. Go there tonight, and I’ll let you in. It’s related to… everything going on, you know.”

I wanted to ask for more details, but I didn’t get the chance. One of my uncles stepped in through the screen door, and started asking me what I planned to do next year.

I couldn’t leave when the open house ended either. Relatives from both sides of my family stuck around. Even though my parents had been blocked, I couldn’t assume anyone else had, so I ended up staying until 9:30 pm.

That’s when most people left, allowing me to sneak out.

I grabbed the stealth suit on the way out, putting the helmet, pants and a backup jacket (one of many) in the backpack that hid the rocketpack. Then I strapped the guitar to the side of the backpack. I walked out to Veterans Memorial park, changed in the forest and flew to the address Chris provided me.

It felt good to be in the air again. It felt like it had been a while, and it probably had. We’d stopped patrols after that guy had shot at Haley and I.

On the bright side, the stealth suit was all black, so I wasn’t very visible at night.

The GPS led me to a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. All corrugated metal, it stood next to farmers’ fields, and a two other buildings that looked just like it. The sign next to it said “G’s Auto Parts.”

Chris’ email told me to land at the back door, and I did.

Moments later, he opened it.

“Full uniform? Were you expecting an ambush?”

“Not from you, and honestly, I wish I were in full uniform. That would solve a lot of problems.”

“Yeah, right.” He stepped back, and I walked into the warehouse, shutting the door behind me.

Dim light showed rows of auto parts on wooden pallets, and parked forklifts.

Chris pointed at the freight elevator in the corner. Once we were inside, he tapped out a series of numbers into a keypad and the elevator descended.

“We’re heading to the subbasement,” he said.

“So, what’s there?”

The elevator stopped, and the doors opened.

In a space almost as large as the warehouse above, I saw a place a lot like Man-machine’s lab under his house only bigger. Different types of half-finished powered armor stood next to sheets of metal, coiled cables in different colors, tools, computers, circuit boards, and a variety of machines.

“Wow. What is this?”

Chris looked around the room. “You know how your grandfather was famous for designing gadgets for half the heroes out there? I think my grandfather did something similar only in reverse.”

I remembered that Cannon’s former student had provided powered armor to the Maniacs, and if the paralysis gun in the Ball was any indicator, devices for Ray’s team, and Syndicate L as well.

The guy hadn’t just been learning how to construct devices. He’d been learning how to run an underground manufacturing business.

“How’d you find out about this?”

“I went up for visiting day at Grandpa’s prison, and he asked about you. I mentioned that we were working on a project together, and he said I might want to check out the basement of his warehouse if I needed materials. When I used his passcode for the home lab, I got down here.”

“So he just wants us to use his stuff.”

“I guess. That’s what I’ve been doing. You know how he did things in a standardized way so that parts from one of his suits could be swapped in for another of a similar size? Well, I finished his final design for the Man-machine armor just by swapping in parts he’d put together himself. It was a lot easier than what we did when we put together my armor.”

I looked around, thinking about what I could do with the materials.

We spent the next two hours exploring.

I got back into the air around 11:30 pm. Even though I didn’t plan to do anything about it, I listened to police band radio. Lee and Isaac Lim had both told me not to appear in costume.

Police band turned out to be more interesting than I had expected. I turned it on to hear Lt. Van Kley say, “– yes, they’re gone, but the Baymont’s still burning. Get the fire trucks in, and if the National Guard won’t let them past the perimeter, have them call me. I’ll do it myself if I have to.”

Small flickers of electricity arced between the fingers of his left hand.

Mr. Drucker said, “Yeah? Good, but I wasn’t threatening. I came here to tell you what would happen if you side with these people instead of our kids. I’ll see you at the next meeting.”

He touched his hand back on the beam, and the metal flowed back into position, slightly more shiny in the spots Mr. Drucker had melted.

Then he left.

From behind me, Rachel said, “There’s a couple cases of testosterone poisoning. ‘Don’t side with the Executioner or I’ll show you my shiny hand powers…’ ‘No, I’ll show you my electric hand powers. Are you scared yet?’”

Hearing her voice, I nearly jumped. “Geez. You could have told me you were there.”

Rachel shrugged. “Sorry. Walking everywhere gets boring.”

She floated a couple inches above the lab’s concrete floor.

She’d probably phased through the ground after running an errand outside.

Turning back to the screen, I saw Hardwick sigh. I left the roachbots to record, but cut off my connection.

“I didn’t see all of it,” she said. “Anything interesting?”

“No. Not really. I already knew Sean’s dad didn’t like the idea of working with Ray. I hadn’t known what powers they had, but they aren’t exactly surprising.”

“No. They’re not. I’ll get back to the guitar.”

“Is this what you’ve been doing every day?”

“Now you’re sounding like Mom.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that you’ve practiced guitar for hours already. That’s a really long time.”

“You’ve been working on the arm over there for as long as I’ve been practicing. Besides, I’ve working on my own songs, plus what I’ve been learning from Lee.”

“You’re taking guitar lessons from Lee?”

“He’s been playing music as long as he’s been fighting.”

“I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Haven’t you ever heard him complain that no one ever takes music lessons from him? I took him up on it.”

“So what’s that like?”

“A lot like martial arts practice, but with less bruises.”

“Less bruises?”

She scowled. “You know how he’s be teaching me to become intangible by reflex? At least once during my guitar lesson, he checks to see how well I’m doing.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“Tell me about it.”

The computer beeped. The words Superhuman Affairs Branch ran across the screen.

I took the call.

Isaac Lim sat behind his desk. He’d moved the piles of papers to each side, but it still looked messy. Even the file cabinets had layers of paper on top of them.

“Skipping school, Nick?” Judging from the smile on his face, he found the idea amusing.

His stared at the computer screen on his desk. I guessed that he must be checking out the lab, and I was right, because the next thing he said was, “That looks interesting. Are you working on a new Rocket suit?”

“No. Repairing the old one. And how did you know I was skipping school?”

“We watch for it. Can’t be too careful right now.”

Rachel walked up and stood next to me. “Are you watching me too?”

“It’s harder, but yes. We’re watching all of you.”

“Why?”

“With everything going on? Of course we’re watching. We don’t want you to get killed. Believe me, you’re not the first legacy heroes to show up, and if we’ve learned anything, we’ve learned you need time to develop. You’re not the originals, and we can’t expect you to act as if you were. So, we watch.”

I thought what he’d just said. “So what happened to the other legacies?”

“Depends. A lot of them are still out there. Not all of them are still active, but they seem to be happy enough. A few managed to piss off the wrong people, and they ended up dead.” Isaac held up his hands. “I’m not saying that you will, but right now we don’t want to take chances.

“But enough about that. I’m calling because of Prime. I got the information Travis sent, and we’re going to move in on them soon. I’m not telling you when, but stay away from the Baymont Inn till then. We’ll all be happier. And one more thing? The moment we take out Prime and his people, the whole picture changes for you. Hardwick has Ray and his team in to handle Prime, right? So he won’t need Ray after that, and Ray knows it. Chances are, Ray will go after you since I’m sure that’s the real reason he’s here in the first place. Depending on how things go, he might kill Hardwick and Justice Fist too. We’ll see.”

I stared at the screen. “And what are we going to do then?”

“You’re not going to do anything. We’ll take care of it. If you can find out where he’s staying, that would be great. Don’t go searching for him, though. You know what he’s like.”

I don’t know what our expressions looked like, but Isaac burst out laughing.

“You’re kidding me. You don’t want to go after him yourself, do you?”

“No,” I began. “I –”

Rachel said, “How do you know I don’t?”

“You might get your chance. Knowing what’s going on upstairs, I’ve been expecting people to scrub the mission all week. So far, they haven’t.”

Thinking of the spaceships, I asked, “What is going on upstairs?”

Isaac took a breath and leaned back in his seat. “That’s given out on a ‘need to know’ basis.”