I answered. “Hey, how’s it going?”
Haley’s voice came over the phone. “He’s moving. He left the house just after you did, but not before we sent in the roachbots.”
The sound of a car’s engine roared in the background, and Haley talked over the noise—but not to me.
“He turned left! Don’t let him go!”
Travis, her older brother said, “I know! Let me drive, dammit.” Continue reading What She Asked For: Part 5
There were other people to ask, or so I learned on Sunday night. Haley wasn’t mad exactly, but she wasn’t happy either.
“There’s me, and Marcus, and Kayla too. She’s staff, but she’s still part of the team.”
We were in League HQ, but not the main room. After getting back around seven, I’d gone to the lab to recheck the modifications I’d made to the main Rocket suit over the summer, and then start looking over our power impregnator.
Someday soon, I’d have to modify the spare suits, but not tonight.
Haley colored. “Sorry. I wasn’t going to take it or anything. I just wanted to look at it. My mom has the same book.”
Jeremy turned out to be a slightly chunky guy in shorts and t-shirt. The t-shirt said “Gevil” (except the “e” was a sigma) in Google’s multi-colored letters. Jeremy himself had a small mustache and five o’clock shadow.
“Does she actually believe it?”
“What? No. I don’t think so. I think she bought it at a garage sale. It was really popular once, and she was curious, so…”
After a pause, she said, “I’m Haley, Nick’s girlfriend.” Continue reading Orientation: Part 3
I almost didn’t answer, but then he’d have to call back.
“Hello?” I could at least pretend I didn’t know who was calling.
“Hi.” Sean sounded tired. “This is Sean.” Pause. “From school.”
Like I had any confusion about which Sean he was.
“I’m calling because… I’d like us to get along better.”
“And then what?” Haley asked.
We were sitting on my bed at home, backs to the wall, our legs next to each other.
“I don’t know. Isaac and Flick took him away. Isaac asked me some questions later, but he already seemed to know what happened.”
“What happened after they left? You said everyone was in the hall.” Continue reading Orientation: Part 1
When I said the League jet appeared, I meant it literally. In one moment I heard an engine’s roar coming closer. In the next, the jet hung above the roof, floating lower until the door opened, and Daniel walked down the ramp.
Then he stared for a second at the hundreds of dead frog-things on the roof.
For Rod, Sam, and the rest, it wasn’t Daniel walking down the ramp. They saw the Mystic, third generation telepath, and a member of one of the most famous telepathic families in the world.
Plus, Daniel was kind of hot even if that wasn’t obvious through the mask.
They came toward me even though the Rocket suit had risen one hundred feet above the ground. Many weren’t more than shapes with legs—squares, triangles, rectangles, but those were some of the smaller creatures. The larger ones shouldn’t have seemed ominous at all, but they were big, and they shouldn’t have been flying.
But I still haven’t said what they were, have I?
I was being attacked by infrastructure—stoplights, telephone poles, city buses, trains, rails, roads, power lines, police cars, firetrucks, and more, some of it mixed together, not all of it from our time. Continue reading Under 30: Part 30
Sunday night, Marcus and I placed roachbots around the city, and sat back to wait for something exciting to happen.
It didn’t. We went home around two in the morning, having discovered that people really did sneak in after the beach officially closed to drink. They also got discovered by rangers, and then ticketed and fined by the police.
It seemed distinctly less fun than the stories I’d heard.
Continue reading Under 30: Part 13
“Yeah. That was in one of their last reports.” Vaughn said. “The one where they finally caught him. So what does ‘spirit of chaos’ mean exactly? Chaos powers? I can cause chaos without powers. Just ask my mom.”
“I don’t know,” Jaclyn said. “Grandpa told me he could make things happen, like just about anything happen, but the more it violated reality, the harder it was.”
“OK,” I said,”so what does he want?” Continue reading Under 30: Part 5
In my head, I tried to reconstruct the crime. Lucas was strong, invulnerable, and shot lightning. He had the exact same powers as his and Vaughn’s grandfather, the original Red Lightning. I couldn’t think of a way for him to steal the ring quietly, and without shattering the glass.
Shannon controlled darkness. Unless her ability to control darkness also allowed her to control light, I couldn’t think of a way for her to get at the ring. If it did, she could have melted the metal, but I doubted she could get past the glass either.
Besides, both Shannon and Lucas were nice. I’d never seen any reason they’d want to steal a magic ring. They’d seemed happy enough to be out of the hero business.
Julie? Even before she’d gotten powers, she’d shared a picture of Haley and I with a lot of people in both of our schools along with snarky commentary. That just made her a jerk, however. On the other hand, her power was to use her voice to command people. In theory, she could have commanded Lucas to pick up the bulletproof glass, and commanded Shannon to melt the metal circle by making a laser.
I wasn’t convinced she could have done it without anyone noticing, but who could know that for sure?
Continue reading Under 30: Part 4