Max glanced over his shoulder. His mom was in the basement workshop, but the last thing he needed was for her to come up for coffee and see him colluding with the enemy. He stepped forward, brushing Crush’s chest as he moved past him onto the porch. The door clicked shut behind him, and now Max was alone with the enemy, out of shouting distance from his mother, in a neighborhood that only existed peacefully because of everyone’s commitment to keeping their heads down and not witnessing the odd assignation, explosion, or aerial vehicle deployment.
“No guard?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest. “What’d Daddy have to say about that?”
Crush scowled. “I make my own decisions.”
“I don’t believe you,” Max snapped, “or you wouldn’t be doing what you are!”
Crush grabbed Max’s arm, rooting him in place. “Doing what?” he snapped. “Hiding a known criminal’s identity? Saving you from prison? Lying to my father?”
Max yanked his arm free, too furious to care that Crush had decided to let him do it. “You’re hired muscle for the city government. I thought you were better than that!”
“I…!” Crush threw his hands up. “I’m a
superhero
! I’m the good guys!”
“No, you don’t—
ugh
.” Max grabbed Crush around the waist, ignoring Crush’s stuttered “Whoa, what—” as he launched them into the air.
He swooped up to the roof and dropped Crush unceremoniously onto the shingles. He pulled out a set of lock picks and had the window cracked before Crush caught his balance.
Max yanked Crush into his bedroom and pulled the shade behind them.
“Wow, this is—creepy.”
“I think you mean thorough,” Max corrected, turning to the conspiracy map.
It covered the south wall of his bedroom, photos, documents, and color-coded markers plastered from floor to ceiling, yarn and tacks connecting people who’d never been seen in the same room together.
He’d been building it for three years.
“This map is the city’s skeleton. You think it’s the economy, keeping everything moving where it’s supposed to go, but it’s this—transactions made under the table, from one leader to the next, never ever reaching the public eye. This is the mayor. The police chief. Congressmen. Business owners. Journalists. The head of the PTA. And this,” Max said, running his finger under the green yarn, “is the money trail.”
Crush was silent for a moment. “It… touches everyone.”
“There isn’t a single person running this city who hasn’t brokered a dirty deal or turned a blind eye while someone else did. And you’ve glad-handed every one of them.”
Crush’s hands were clenched in his lap. “How do you even know any of this is true?”
Max spread his hands, because—
seriously
? “I grew up with a supervillain’s lab in my basement. I didn’t have daycare, I had a robot nanny. We know how to hack bank records.”
“But that’s illegal,” Crush muttered a little dumbly.
Max glared at him.
“Look,” Crush rallied, “whatever these guys do or don’t do—I’m here to protect the people.”
“No,
I’m
here to protect the people!” Max snapped. “You can save a few babies from traffic accidents, and that’s cool, but when I tried to take down Governor Michaels last year, you dumped me in the harbor, secured his illegally imported assets for him, and gave his PR team all the video clips they needed to piggyback on your reputation for his reelection campaign. You know what he’s done since then? Bankrolled some cocaine trafficking, overlooked some safety violations in pharmaceutical drug trials, and cut funding for school lunches. Your city thanks you,” he mocked.
Crush scrubbed his hands over his face. “I… I have to go.”
Max bit his tongue on every other example of corruption Crush had personally facilitated and watched as the superhero slowly climbed to his feet and squeezed through Max’s window.
Crush didn’t look back.
TEN HOURS
later, Max’s mom burst through his door and dragged him off his bed. She had him out in the hallway before he fumbled enough to get his feet under him.
“Mom! What are you doing?” he demanded, scrambling to keep up with her. He reached up to scrub the sleep from his eyes and accidentally poked himself in the nostril.
“Decay set off the emergency alarms on the device,” she told him, her face grim. “The good news is I can use the frequency to triangulate his location.” Their shop robots buzzed awake as she entered the access codes and the door hissed open.
“What’s the bad news?”
“Suit up and check your weapons,” Catalyst commanded as she swept Max into the workshop. He stumbled over to the storage cabinets as she strode to the control console.
“How is this bad, then?” he repeated, stripping quickly and taking a moment to be grateful his mom was too engrossed in hacking satellites to turn around and catch him half-dressed. “Now we know where he is, and Decay has to give the device back to us. I’m pretty sure there’s a subset in the League guidelines about cooperation.”
“And which member of the League do you think is going to enforce those guidelines for us?” Catalyst left the computer running and strode to the armory, yanking down several duffle bags and filling them with weapons. “None of them have the manpower or motivation to oppose him this directly.”
Max zipped up the back of his backup suit, contorting to reach the clasp at the top. “Okay, so we get it back ourselves. It’s not like we don’t know where his lair is.”
His mom zipped the bags and strode back to the computer console. She hissed at the screen in frustration and began typing furiously. “He’s not at his lair. The bad news is he’s going to use the device. Get your hood on and fill up the helibot for me. Five minutes to takeoff.”
“Seriously, Mom? Calm down. It’s not like he’ll actually figure out the extremely complex and illogical detonation process you designed,” Max grumbled. “We’ve got plenty of time.”
“Unless he finds the internal anterior emergency activation switch,” his mom said between clenched teeth.
Max froze, his hood halfway over his head. “Emergency activation?” he demanded. “You mean this entire time I could have just
flicked a switch
?”
He’d attempted that initiation sequence
twenty freaking times
. And there was a quick switch.
“If your goal was to destroy our entire civilization, then yes,” she snapped, “you could have flicked a switch. Is that what you want to do?”
“I… no?” Max said, flummoxed. “What?”
“If we set off that device,” Catalyst said, still typing, “who would be left to lead when we ousted the current tyrannical regime? What would be left to take over? Where would you go to college?”
“Um… nowhere?” Max tried.
She turned on him, her mouth pursed in undisguised disapproval. “Have you never thought about this at all, Max?”
“I just did what you told me to,” Max stammered, cringing under her glare.
“The purpose of the device is to threaten, not to destroy. It’s to get the world’s attention and hold it long enough to make a difference. Our society has been conditioned to believe being tracked and controlled and powerless is normal. We offer more than that,” his mom said. “We offer revolution.”
Max swallowed.
“Now put your hood on,” she told him. “I’ve got a lock on Decay and a fresh batch of C-4 in the helibot.”
MAX WAS
hoping they wouldn’t actually need the C-4, but he wouldn’t put money on Decay doing anything the easy way.
“The device is in motion,” Catalyst reported from the helibot computer terminal. “Moving southwest from Batdorf.”
“Where it crosses the river?” Max maneuvered them around a traffic helicopter, ignoring its startled passengers as he whipped past them. “But none of Decay’s hideouts are up there.”
“It must be his ‘associate,’” his mom agreed, her voice dark even over their slightly staticky headsets.
“What’s he driving? Can we get satellite images?”
Catalyst hummed a negative distractedly. “I’m working on traffic cams. Signal just merged onto I-96,” she added after a moment.
“Straight toward downtown,” Max muttered. “Is he going there because he wants an audience or because he needs victims?”
“
Shit.
Watch your language,” his mom snapped.
“I didn’t—!” Max protested.
“I’ve got a photo,” she said.
Max flipped the helibot on autopilot and tumbled from the cockpit into the back. His mom zoomed in on the license plate and pulled up an ID scan on the federal database.
“The van’s registered to Sheffield Pharmaceuticals,” she said. “It’s got to be Wayne Sheffield—Decay’s associate.”
Max swallowed. “Sheffield’s R&D budget went up $50 million this year,” he said, thinking back to his conspiracy wall. He was apparently missing a green string on Wayne.
“Maybe to design a cure,” his mom added, “or a vaccination.”
Oh boy. “He wants to use the device to release a virus, doesn’t he?” Max asked, pressing his palms to his eyes. “Could he even do that?”
Catalyst’s voice was grim. “It wouldn’t take much to change the flux compression generator into an explosive. The blast would spread an airborne pathogen for miles.”
Seriously, that guy was
such
a prick.
“He’ll be going to City Center Station,” Catalyst said.
Max jumped back into the cockpit and strapped himself in.
“I’ll get us there first.”
MAX LANDED
the helibot on top of City Center, quietly grateful for the self-absorption of most rush hour pedestrians—none of them even bothered to look up at the noise.
“The device is six blocks north,” his mom said as they clambered out of the bot. “In this traffic that’ll probably give us ten minutes.”
“Do we know if Decay is in the van?” Max asked.
Catalyst shrugged unhappily. “Facial recognition hasn’t picked him up on any of the security cameras around here. We’ll have to assume he’s personally protecting his asset.”
“
Our
asset,” Max muttered, surveying the square below them. It wasn’t packed to capacity yet, but even with the sun just up, there were plenty of people on their way to work.
What was Decay going to do? The device wasn’t small—it was probably five feet tall and a few feet wide in each direction, depending on which way it was turned. There were more levers than probably ever needed to be in that square footage, and they fit together like the worst version of a Rubik’s cube ever invented. Pull one out of sequence or interval, and it would either unhook every lever, dropping them into a useless pile at the base, or it would jam the entire machine. (The design was an accomplishment Max was oddly proud of. It wouldn’t win him any blue ribbons, but, you know—sometimes that wasn’t the point.)
If Max were going to set off a bomb that would infect as many thousands of people as possible with a potentially deadly virus, he’d do it on the main platform of that station where all the tracks lay next to each other, with open air access across all of them. How did Decay think he was going to be able to sneak a Dalek-sized lever machine onto the busiest train platform in the city at rush hour?
“We know what the van looks like,” his mom said, clearly following the same line of thought. “Whatever he’s planning, we need to cut him off before he gets access to an entry.”
“We could call in a fire code. Get the place evacuated and surrounded by emergency vehicles.”
“He’ll get here before emergency services,” she said, “or he’ll choose a different station. Even if we reroute everyone, they’ll still get on the trains somewhere.”
“Roadblock’s a bust, too,” Max muttered. “What if we were able to capture Sheffield and use him as a hostage?”
“That won’t work, either,” a familiar voice said behind them.
Max spun, his heart in his throat.
Crush and Mr. Magnificent stood in front of the helibot, the morning sunlight gleaming off their perfectly oiled hair. It was more majestic than a golden wheat field in an autumn sunset—perfectly disgusting.
“How did you know where we were?” Max demanded.
Crush shrugged. “I planted a tracker on you when I came to your house.”
Max narrowed his eyes. That was oddly sneaky for a superhero.
Crush seemed to read it on his face and shrugged again. “You must be rubbing off on me, I guess.”
Max glanced at his mom quickly, but she ignored the comment, nearly vibrating with tension next to him.
“If you intend to stop us, you’ll fail,” she threatened. It was a bluff, Max knew—they could barely hold off Mr. Magnificent and Crush on their own, let alone with Decay added to the mix. If his mom had a contingency plan in place to actually stop three superhumans, Max knew it wasn’t going to end well for anyone involved.
“We’re not here to stop you,” Crush said. “We’re here to get the device back.”
“I’ll die before I leave the device in your hands,” Catalyst told them.
Max sucked in a breath. This was escalating fast.
“Not back in our hands.” Crush clenched his fists. “Back in yours.”
Mr. Magnificent cleared his throat. “My son brought some facts to my attention. I had them verified.”
Catalyst shifted on her feet, agitated. “You can’t expect me to believe you.”
“Mom, they’re serious,” Max said, locking eyes with Crush. He knew Crush’s expressions, his tells, his personality—and none of them were saying “liar.” He might be sneaky enough for trackers but definitely not for cons.
“Crush is convinced,” Mr. Magnificent said, glancing at Crush, “and I trust my son’s judgment.”
Catalyst stared at them, silent. Slowly, Max reached out and wrapped his fingers around his mom’s.
A moment later she squeezed his hand and took a deep breath.
“You won’t stay the public’s golden boys if you help us,” she warned.
Mr. Magnificent looked tired when he said, “Superheroes do what they know is right, even if the public doesn’t understand it.”
Max snorted. “So do supervillains.”
His mom coughed. Mr. Magnificent looked constipated. Crush grinned like he knew he wasn’t supposed to.