Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins (23 page)

He lets the sentence peter out and he gestures to me: proceed.

So I proceed, recalling the entirety of the Hero Squad’s debut adventure, from my first encounter with a renegade prototype military robot on the streets of Kingsport all the way down to the big throw-down with Archimedes and his remote-control battlesuit army on what used to be the front lawn of Kingsport High School.

That was a crazy couple of weeks now that I
think about it. I wonder if super-heroes’ lives are always so nuts?

“How did Archimedes find you?” Concorde says. “How did he know you’d be at the high school?”

“I have no idea. Educated guess?” I say. “I mean, there are only so many places a bunch of teenagers would be in the middle of the day.”

“Let’s backtrack a bit,” Mindforce says. “Exactly what did Archimedes say to you when you first found him? You said he mentioned someone else who was looking for him.”

“Yeah. Ummm...hold on,” I say, trying to envision the scene. The experience is less than a week old but it’s already gotten fuzzy in my memory.

“Close your eyes,” Mindforce says. “Take it a few steps back and walk through it. You and the others arrive at the motel, go inside...”

“We go inside,” I start, picking up on the prompt, “change into our costumes, Matt and Sara get into a stupid argument, we find the room...I tell Stuart not to kick the door open and cause a ruckus. He forces the door. We enter the room.”

My brain relaxes and loosens its grip on the memories. I can envision Archimedes sitting on one bed, Roger Manfred on the other. I can practically smell the funk in the room—that sour odor of old sweat.

“Manfred gets to his feet, starts yelling at us,” I say. “Matt announces us as the Hero Squad, we give him grief for picking such a stupid name, I try to get things back on track and tell them we know they’re responsible for siccing the battlesuit on Main Street, and Archimedes says...”

My eyes snap open.

“He says, ‘You’re not what I was expecting.’ I lie to him, tell him we’re with the Protectorate, figuring that might intimidate him into cooperating with us, and he says, ‘No, that’s not right.’ I tell him I know the Thrasher suit is his and he says, ‘It isn’t. I stole it.’ ”

Mindforce and Concorde lean in, hanging on my every word.

“That’s when Manticore showed up and started blasting the place to pieces,” I say. “I don’t know if he said anything after that. I was too busy trying not to get killed.”

Mindforce and Concorde exchange glances, nod at each other. They must be speaking psychically so I can’t overhear anything they think—correction: that Concorde thinks I shouldn’t. God forbid I prove useful or anything.

“Do you have any idea who Archimedes was talking about?”

“We’re following up some leads,” Concorde says, no doubt expecting that to shut me up.

“Uh-huh. Can’t imagine your list of suspects is all that long,” I say.

“What makes you say that?” Mindforce says.

“For starters, I have to assume hiring Manticore doesn’t come cheap. I’ve been reading up on the guy and he’s not some goon legbreaker for a loan shark, he’s a major-league mercenary. Then there’s the Thrasher suit...”

“What about it?” Concorde presses. Despite himself, he wants to hear what I have to say.

“There are maybe a half-dozen companies in the country experimenting with battlesuit technology,” I say, “and none of them are anywhere close to making
something like the Thrasher, and you’d think any company that has Voltron at its disposal would want to make a huge deal out of it, stir up some interest from the military, maybe.”

(For the record: Matt deserves the credit for digging all that up. I don’t know jack about the technology industry. I also have no idea who Voltron is.)

“That means whoever did make it has access to cutting-edge tech, and that means they have tons of cash to throw around, and they’re doing it on the down-low to avoid catching anyone’s attention. Can’t be too many outfits that fit that description, right?”

Mindforce’s eyebrows vanish beneath the formfitting cowl he wears to hide his identity. He’s impressed, which means I’m on the right track. Go me.

“Why don’t we take five? I could use a cup of tea,” Mindforce says, tapping his tablet screen.

“Before we break,” I say, sliding none too subtly into my next order of business, “I have, well, I guess it’s a favor?”

“What do you need?”

“I, uh, met Colonel Coffin yesterday. She said I need to get a transponder from you,” I say to Concorde. “What do I need to do? Is there an application I have to fill out? Should I be studying for, I don’t know, like, a learner’s permit for flyers?”

“Let me save us both the time and trouble,” Concorde says. “The answer’s no.”

“What?!” Why his answer shocks me...

“You heard me: no. You’re not getting a transponder. Consider yourself officially grounded.”

“Officially according to who? You?” I say, putting aside composure and dignity for a good old-
fashioned red-faced tirade. “Who made you boss of the sky?”

“The United States Department of Defense,” Concorde says. “I am authorized by the federal government to police the skies for flyers, and I authorize them to be there, and I am not authorizing you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t think you’re responsible enough or mature enough,” Concorde says, looking down on me, literally and figuratively.

“So if you say I can’t fly, that’s it?”

“Exactly.”

“That is so not fair!” I hate myself for saying it, but I’m so pissed and so completely dumbfounded I have nothing else to throw at him.

“I think you know my response to
that
,” he says as his exit line.

Mindforce has been unusually silent this whole time, and he’s looking at me with disappointment I totally deserve. I could have turned this around. If I’d thought for a minute before opening my big mouth, I could have given Concorde a dozen reasons to give me a chance, to let me prove myself deserving of his trust. Instead, I validated every doubt he has about me. He sees me as nothing more than a child and that’s what I gave him.

Idiot. Stupid stupid idiot.

“I’ll talk to him,” Mindforce says. “I can’t promise anything, but I’ll talk to him.”

I nod. It’s all I can manage. If I try to talk now I might start crying, and as it is I’ve already ruined my reputation with Mindforce (salt, meet wound).

Mindforce opens the door for me. As I trudge
out, he says, “The reason the superhuman community gets as much freedom and autonomy as it does is because we work with the government to police our own. Concorde takes that job seriously, and I can’t fault him for that. We have to consider the bigger picture.”

Tantrum notwithstanding, Mindforce respects me enough to give me a peek behind a very large, very thick curtain, to let me know there’s something at work here beyond Concorde’s open contempt for me and my friends.

It doesn’t make me feel one tiny bit better.

“Let’s go. We’re done,” I say as I return to the Protectorate’s common room. Sara asks me what happened but, thankfully, takes my silence as a hint to back off for a while.

We take the Protectorate’s secret underground subway thingy back to their public office in town, and instead of Coffee E I make a beeline for a bakery a few blocks over. The coffee is some of the most wretched sludge on the planet but their baked goods are top notch, and good God do I need some empty calories, stat. It’s a poor substitute for flying as a means of blowing off steam, but it’ll have to do.

Double-wide slice of mocha cheesecake, you understand me.

“Well?” Matt says expectantly.

“Concorde grounded me,” I say. “As in, officially.”

“He did WHAT?!”

“He didn’t give you a transponder?” Sara asks. “Why not?”

“Concorde said I wasn’t responsible enough or
mature enough,” I say, and Matt flips out again, earning him a dirty look from the woman working the counter. Shut up, would you? I don’t want to get kicked out before I finish stuffing my face.

“That is messed up, man,” Stuart says. “You’re, like, the maturest one on the team.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t do much to prove it,” I say. “He told me no, without even pretending to think about it, and I totally lost it.”

“What did Mindforce say?” Sara says.

“Nothing. He said he’d talk to Concorde, but...I don’t know. I don’t think he has my back on this one.”

“But what are you going to do if you can’t get a transponder?”

“Yeah, the flying thing is kind of your thing,” Missy says. “Not that you can’t do other stuff like the zappy laser thing but the flying thing is, you know, your thing. I’m sorry. I get redundant when I’m upset.”

“I’ll tell you what you should do,” Matt says. “Ignore him. He’s not the boss of the sky.”

A bitter chuckle slips past a mouthful of cheesecake. “That’s what I said. Except he is.”

“Says who?”

“The government. I don’t know what the deal is exactly, but he’s got the Department of Defense on his side.”

“No way,” Stuarts says.

“Big whoop. I still say ignore him,” Matt says.

I admit it’s tempting, and I have thought about it, but I’m betting Concorde slapped my name on some super-hero no-fly list the minute we left Protectorate HQ, and I don’t feel like having the federal government on my case too. Besides...

“If I’m going to convince Concorde I deserve a transponder, I have to play the game by his rules,” I say, swallowing my pride along with the last of my cheesecake. I hate that someone else has such control over my life, but there it is. “I have to earn his trust and I can’t do that by thumbing my nose at him.”

“He’s never going to give you one,” Matt says. “He’s been looking for a way to shut us down since day one and now he has it. If you let him get away with—”

“I’m not letting him
get away
with anything,” I say, my temper spiking again. “I think this is the best way to handle the situation, and it’s my decision, so—”

“It might be your decision but it affects the rest of us. Did you ever think of that?”

“I’ll work around it.”

“How?”

Sara opens her mouth to intervene but it’s too little, too late. I knock my chair over as I jump to my feet. “I said I’ll work around it so back off!” I say, and I storm out, capping off my repeat performance of my new one-woman show,
Carrie Hauser Flies Off the Handle
.

Forget flying. Forget cheesecake. What I need now is to blast someone into next week, but of course, there’s never a super-villain around when you need one.

Instead of arriving home to yummy kitchen smells, I find Mom sitting on the couch, face buried in a newspaper. An assortment of booklets with colorful covers sits on a messy pile on the coffee table.

“You’re home,” she says as if this was an unexpected development. She checks her watch. “Oh, God,
look at the time. I’m sorry, honey, I completely forgot about dinner. I’ll have something delivered. What are you in the mood for? Pizza or Chinese?”

I pick up one of the booklets. It’s a real estate guide. All the booklets are real estate guides. Mom lays the paper down. Red ink surrounds a half-dozen listings under the header APARTMENTS FOR RENT.

“What is this? What are you doing?”

She hesitates. “I’m looking around to see what’s out there is all.”

“What’s out there why?” I say, then I recall her panic-induced rant of the other day. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m keeping our options open,” she insists.

“Well, you can close them because we’re not moving.”

“Carrie, Kingsport is not the safe little town I thought it was. The weirdness with the robots was one thing, but what happened at school,” Mom says, and her composure disintegrates before my eyes. “I can’t deal with that, Carrie. I can’t stand the idea of watching you leave the house every morning, wondering if you’re coming back alive.”

“Mom, stop, you’re—you're a little freaked out is all,” I say.

“No, Carrie, I am not a
little
freaked out, I am a
lot
freaked out. We never had to deal with this kind of insanity when we lived on the Cape.”

“We don’t live on the Cape anymore, Mom, we live here, and I don’t want to move again,” I say, my agitation rising to meet hers. “I’m finally getting settled, I have friends again, and robot rampages aside, I like it here!”

“This is not up for discussion,” Mom says, her go-to retort when she’s made up her mind about something and doesn’t want to hear any arguments to the contrary. Well tough, because I’m not playing by your rules, not this time.

“It is up for discussion! I have something to say about this and you should at least hear me out!” Mom gives me a frown that could curdle milk and starts up the stairs. “Dammit, Mom, you already screwed up my life once without asking my opinion—!”

That stops her in mid-stride. Before either of us can say anything else, Granddad charges in from the den. “What in the name of God is going on?” he says. Neither of us answers. “Carrie. Why are you yelling at your mother?”

“She wants to move,” I say without taking my eyes off Mom. She looks like she’s ready to jump off the stairs at me like a pro wrestler coming off the top turnbuckle. “She wants to leave town.”

“Christina?” he says evenly. He’s not taking sides, not yet.

“It’s too dangerous here, Dad.” She doesn’t look at Granddad either. “I’m sorry; I can’t bring Carrie up in an environment like this.”

Granddad lets out a soft sigh. “Carrie, honey,” he says gently, “please go up to your room. I’d like to talk to your mother.”

“Dad,” Mom begins.

“Not a request, Christina,” he says, reminding us both where Mom gets her stubbornness from. “Go on,” he says to me.

I pass Mom on the stairs. We shift out of each other’s way, like we’re each expecting the other to
throw a punch.

Once I’m upstairs the adrenaline flushes out of me so quickly I go light-headed. I sprawl out on my bed and close my eyes, seriously expecting to be awake for hours I’m so keyed up. When I open my eyes again, the clock reads 2:07 AM.

Which means my dad went to bed hours ago without ever getting his birthday phone call.