So you’d think that after having all Friday to work on it, I would have had the arm completely ready to go. Unfortunately projects that are even marginally complicated don’t go like that. What happens is that you put things together, discover a problem, take them apart and put them together again. After that, you attach them to the suit for the first time, discover another thing you’ve done wrong, take it apart, and put it together again.
Hardwick pushed back his chair, and stood up behind the desk. “Don’t threaten me, George. Ray’s got nothing to offer me that I can’t buy.”
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.
The idea of helping me skip school amused Rachel as much as I thought it might.
It amused her enough to wake up at seven instead of nine, and pretend to be Mom. The school bought it. One of the nice things about not being the kind of guy who gets in trouble regularly is that the staff doesn’t recognize your mother’s voice. Continue reading Graduation: Part 19→
After they hung up, I sat back and thought about it. If I were going to skip, when and how would I do it? I wasn’t going to be able to get my parents to write a note. The block only prevented my parents from recognizing what was going on, or stopping me from doing it.
I decided I’d skip tomorrow. Maybe Rachel could call the office and pretend to be Mom? She’d probably get a kick out of it. Continue reading Graduation: Part 18→
“You’re missing something though,” Vaughn said. “You’ve got to remember that Uncle Russ is still Lucas’ dad. They don’t always get along, but I can’t imagine Lucas totally working against him. The guy you’d want for something like that is Sean. He wouldn’t care about going against his parents at all, and with Sean you’d get Dayton and Jody for sure.”
I was about to say something, but Haley spoke first. “But if they do it, Ray and his whole team will kill everybody. That’s what they always do to supers. Everybody knows that.” Continue reading Graduation: Part 17→
“So what do you want to do?” Cassie asked. “Track them down and attack?”
“Nah,” Travis shook his head. “Lee said to feed Prime to the Feds if we could. Once we’ve figured out where they are, we hand it over, and that’s one thing off our plate.”
Which wasn’t a bad idea. If we could arrange it so that we were only dealing with one threat, that would be a massive improvement.
“By the way,” Ray asked, “what did happen to Shirley?”
“Prime’s people got her. We’d been using her to redirect them away from us, and they must have sent over someone who wasn’t vulnerable to vocal suggestion. He slit her throat.”
We agreed to meet again on Monday, and then everybody left.
Well, almost everybody. Haley stayed.
I walked into the lab and started pulling out the parts for the anti-paralysis/mind control devices. Thinking back on it, I don’t remember being in a particularly bad mood, but I wasn’t in a good one. The rest of the afternoon and the evening stretched before me. I had to finish them that night because if something came up tomorrow, one of us might die. Continue reading Graduation: Part 14→
Me: Crap. I thought we might have more time.
Daniel: I don’t know. It seems about right to me.
Me: Do you know where he is?
Daniel: No. It’s hard to get much of anything. I get snippets, but not much more.
Vaughn walked over to us as soon as he saw us. He said something to Sean and the others, and met us just as I’d started to look over Vaughn’s pictures. Fortunately, only the senior pictures had been blown up. Some of them, specifically one where a five year old Vaughn had smeared red jelly over half his face, were mortifying enough at three by five inches.
I made a mental note to ask for veto power over any pictures my parents felt a need to share.
