Action Figures - Issue Three: Pasts Imperfect Read online

  I want to laugh in his face. The feds are going to put me in Byrne? Yeah, right, they throw kids in supermax prisons all the time.

  Then I flash back to Buzzkill Joy in her orange jumpsuit, marching to the hearse in her shackles.

  “I can’t believe you’re threatening me,” I manage.

  “I’m not threatening you, Carrie, I’m warning you what will happen if you go up without my authorization,” Concorde says. “The feds can overlook a new flyer going up once or twice, excuse it as ignorance, but you’ve been in the game. You don’t get leniency, you get arrested for willfully violating US airspace. Whether that happens is your choice.”

  “My choice?” I say, seething. “I don’t have a choice anymore.”

  I wait for a retort, but all I get is Concorde turning his back on me and walking away.

  I return to the Pelican and tell the others what happened. Even Nina is stunned that Concorde would go so far as to slap my name on a government watch list.

  We sit there stewing for a good hour while Concorde and Mindforce finish up in the courthouse. Mindforce returns, alone, to inform Nina that Concorde will be accompanying Minotaur and Archimedes back to Byrne, and she’s to remain at the scene and assist with the manhunt for Buzzkill Joy.

  As she’s shutting the bay door on us, I say, “Natalie? What do we do?”

  She sighs. “There’s a time to push Concorde, and there’s a time to back off and give him space. This is a time to give him space. Let him cool off, let Mindforce talk to him,” she says, nodding toward the cockpit, where Mindforce is running a preflight check. “For what it’s worth? I’m on your side.”

  That helps. Not a lot, but it helps.

  Once we’re in the air, I step into the cockpit. Before I can speak, Mindforce says, “I’ll talk to him,” but the way he says it doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

  “Will it do any good?”

  “All I can do is try.”

  “But you’re not promising anything.” He says nothing. “What did we do? We’ve all been hurt before and it’s never set Concorde off like this. He didn’t freak out this badly when Manticore...you know...and he freaked out a lot.”

  “I know, but this is...it’s complicated.”

  Yeah, I know what that means. When adults tell kids “it’s complicated,” what they’re really saying is “I don’t want to explain it to you” — but getting into another fight isn’t going to advance our cause any, so I withdraw back to the passenger bay.

  “Well?” Matt says.

  “He said he’ll talk to Concorde,” I say, “but I don’t think we should hold our breaths.”

  “This is such bull, man,” Stuart says. “Concorde gave us this mission. Where does he get off dumping on us because things went south? Wasn’t our fault.”

  “I don’t think it has anything to do with the mission,” Matt says. “This is my fault.”

  Matt has a tendency to make things about himself, but in this case he’s not wrong. Since we became super-heroes, I’ve been maimed by Manticore and nearly blown up by a nuke, Sara’s suffered serious psychic backlash containing an exploding oil tanker, Stuart’s been scorched by magical hellfire, and Missy got possessed by a demon. Matt — who, somehow, has escaped the last six months relatively unscathed — takes a machine-gun full of nonlethal hornet rounds to the back, and all of a sudden our safety is such an issue Concorde threatens to have me chucked into prison to keep us in line.

  Matt and Concorde have always had a contentious relationship. When Archimedes first started causing problems in Kingsport, Matt intervened. Concorde responded to his act of civic-mindedness by chewing him out. In public. Concorde has yet to cut Matt a single break or offer the faintest praise when he does something right, yet he’s managed a few kind words for the rest of the team, and he positively dotes on me.

  He used to, anyway.

  “What do we do?” Missy asks.

  “What Natalie said: We back off, leave Concorde alone, and let Mindforce handle this,” I say. “We know he’ll go to bat for us. He always has. Natalie too.”

  “But what if something bad happens? If someone’s in trouble we can’t stand around and do nothing, but if we do something you could get thrown in jail.”

  “Let’s not worry about what-ifs, Muppet. One problem at a time,” I say, mostly because I don’t have a good answer. She’s right: If someone causes trouble and the Hero Squad is in a position to act, do we stand on the sidelines, which could result in people getting hurt or killed, or do we do the right thing, which could result in feds knocking at my door to haul me away to Byrne?

  I don’t want to go to prison.

  Okay, Carrie, take a breath, and take your own advice. No sense in getting wound up over possibilities.

  The rest of the flight passes in silence (aside from the occasional grunt of pain from Matt and Missy). Once we reach Protectorate HQ, Mindforce attends to Missy’s wounds more properly, swabbing the area with an antibacterial and slopping over the punctures some gunk that smells like super-glue and looks like pink latex paint. Mindforce tells her not to engage in any strenuous physical activity or she could re-open the wounds.

  Mindforce drops Missy’s tunic into a bucket marked with a biohazard symbol and labeled MEDICAL WASTE. It lands in the bucket with a wet splat.

  After we change back into civilian clothes, Mindforce asks us if we can get home all right. We say yes automatically, but truthfully, Matt and Missy are in no condition to walk home.

  As we ride the Wonkavator back to the Protectorate’s Main Street office, Sara suggests we hit up Matt’s dad for a ride. “His office is only a block away,” she says, “and he owns the business. It’s not like anyone can tell him he can’t leave.”

  “We can’t tell him we need a ride because we got smacked around by a super-villain,” Matt says.

  “So tell him you don’t feel well and aren’t up for walking home,” I say. “It’s technically the truth.”

  As we pass through the office, Catherine gives us a sad, sympathetic smile.

  The walk to the offices of Steiger and Associates Financial Services would normally take us two minutes from the Protectorate’s public office, three minutes tops. We let Matt and Missy set the pace, so the trip stretches out to a leisurely ten minutes. We arrive to find a sign reading OUT TO LUNCH – BACK AT ONE hanging inside the glass door.

  “Aw, great,” Matt says, pulling at the handle, expecting to find the door locked. It almost smacks him in the face as it swings open. “Hm. That figures. He forgets to lock up the house all the time, too.”

  “Why don’t we wait inside?” Sara says.

  “Yeah,” Matt says, and we head in.

  As it turns out, Mr. Steiger isn’t out to lunch, but he still should have locked the door. It would have kept us from walking into the main foyer to find him...um...entangled with a woman who is most definitely not Mrs. Steiger.

  The world freeze-frames and all the sound is sucked out of the room. We gawk at Mr. Steiger and he gawks back, his expression of slack-jawed shock just short of comical thanks to the hot pink lipstick smeared across his mouth. No one speaks or moves for what feels like an eternity, and then Mr. Steiger and the woman break free of one another and retreat to opposite sides of the foyer.

  “Matt,” Mr. Steiger says, but Matt isn’t sticking around to listen to whatever feeble excuse his dad has to offer. He blows past me and kicks the door open, the safety glass spiderwebbing from the impact. Mr. Steiger runs to the door and calls after Matt, begging him to come back, please, he can explain.

  No. He can’t.

  TWELVE

  A ride home obviously isn’t going to happen, so Stuart takes Missy home — cradled in his arms, which she objects to as a matter of pride, but she’s in no condition to make the journey on her own steam. Sara and I retreat to my house to process what has been, so far, the crappiest day of our lives (which is saying something).

  Whenever I’m this stressed I tend to indul
ge in some nervous snacking, but the house is sadly lacking in sweet treats, so I decide to whip something up. After flying, reading, and eating, baking is a great way to decompress. Sara opts to sit back and watch the magic happen.

  “I’m a disaster in the kitchen,” she says. “I can’t handle anything more challenging than ‘microwave on high for two minutes.’”

  “We’ll fix that. You’re helping me,” I say. I put on a pot of coffee and hand one of my mother’s many cookbooks to Sara. “See what looks good.”

  Sara flips through the book. “Ooooh, maple bars,” she coos. “Oh yes. We are making these. Maple is the best flavor ever.”

  “No, mocha is the best flavor ever,” I say, “but maple is in the top five.”

  “Maple is the top five.” Sara shoves the cookbook at me. “Tell me what to do.”

  I guide Sara through the steps: Preheat the oven; gather the ingredients; collect all the bowls and measuring cups and spoons we’ll need; measure, sift, pour, mix. We succeed in keeping the uncomfortable topic of the day at bay for a good long while, but eventually we crack.

  “Do you think Concorde is serious?” Sara says. “About ending the Squad? About arresting you?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’d like to think we’ve earned better than that...”

  “But?”

  “But Concorde isn’t thinking rationally. He might be dead serious.”

  “So we might never be the Hero Squad again.”

  I shrug. “Would that really be so bad? Disbanding the Hero Squad doesn’t mean we’d all stop being friends. It means we wouldn’t have to worry about getting shot, stabbed, zapped, blasted, possessed...we’d get to worry about normal stuff like test scores, what to wear to the prom, where we’re going to go to college.” I shrug again. “It might be nice.”

  “Well, I’m sold,” Sara says. “How can I argue against such heartfelt and compelling testimony?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I wasn’t buying it either.”

  We pass the afternoon munching on oven-fresh maple bars (which, for the record, came out perfectly), channel-surfing, and generally doing our best to avoid talking about our craptacular day. It works; we completely fool ourselves into thinking everything is cool.

  And then Mom comes home with Ben in tow and, well, there goes my mellow.

  “Hi, honey, hi, Sara,” Mom says.

  “Mom, Ben.” You sure he’s not a serial killer or something? I say to Sara.

  Sorry, he’s clean, Sara says, but maybe he’ll turn out to have a drinking problem?

  One can hope. God, I’m a terrible person.

  “It’s obvious you two are best friends,” Ben says. “I can see you doing that funny psychic thing girlfriends do, talking to each other without talking to each other.”

  “We’re drift compatible,” I say.

  “You’re what?”

  “It’s from some stupid movie Matt inflicted on me. Giant robots punching giant monsters.” Ben furrows his brow at me. “Never mind.”

  “Guess it’s time to head home,” Sara says, peeling herself off the couch. “See you in the morning?”

  “As always. Oh, don’t forget to take your half of the maple bars.”

  “You made maple bars?” Mom says.

  “Sara made maple bars; I mentored. We were bored, and we couldn’t find anyone to sell us illegal drugs, so we baked instead.”

  “Good choice. Sounds like we’ll have a good dessert tonight,” Mom says to Ben. Sure, Mom, go ahead, offer my maple bars to your boyfriend without asking me. I don’t mind.

  I hide out in my bedroom until dinner to avoid awkward chit-chat with Ben, but he dutifully takes the lead on mealtime conversation to make up for it. I keep my answers short and sweet, hoping Ben will lose interest in me because I’m such a crashing bore, but no such luck. The day of eternal suck continues unabated. C’mon, God, throw a girl a cookie here, huh?

  “You okay, honey?” Mom says. “You seem down.”

  “Long day. Tired is all,” I say as the strains of Bruce Springsteen’s Out in the Street drift up from my pocket. I dig my phone out to see a text from Dad reading, simply, TIX SCORED, TUES PM VS MONTREAL.

  A Bruins game? With Dad? On my birthday? And they’re playing the Canadiens? Score!

  And then Ben ruins the moment by saying, “Carrie, you shouldn’t answer your phone at the dinner table.”

  He did not just say that to me.

  “It’s my dad, confirming our plans for my birthday,” I say, my temper simmering.

  “What are you doing with your father?” Mom asks.

  “Bruins game. He got us tickets for next Tuesday’s game.”

  “That sounds like a pretty late night. I don’t know if you should be staying out late on a school night,” Ben says. My hands ball into fists under the table.

  “Hm. Ben might be right, Carrie,” Mom says. “I’ll call your father after dinner and talk to him, see if maybe he can find another game you two can —”

  “Are you telling me I can’t go?” I say. “What kind of crap is that?”

  “Don’t talk to your mother that way, young lady,” Ben says, and that’s when I redline.

  “You stay out of this! You haven’t been around long enough to have an opinion about my life, and you sure as hell haven’t earned reprimand privileges!”

  “Carrie!” Mom snaps.

  “What? Are you seriously telling me he gets to weigh in on what Dad wants to do with me on my birthday? Screw that,” I say, standing so quickly I knock my chair to the floor.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Out!”

  Mom shouts after me, tells me I’m not going anywhere, tells me to get back to the table and apologize to Ben or there’s going to be trouble. Please. After taking away my birthday outing with Dad, nothing you can possibly do to me could punish me any worse.

  I grab my coat, throw the front door open and storm off, down the walkway, down the street, into the woods near my home so I can take off in private and blow off some steam before my head explodes. Breaking the sound barrier always makes me feel better.

  I jam my hands into my coat pocket, searching for my headset, and that’s when I remember: I don’t have it anymore. Concorde took it from me.

  Concorde took my sky from me.

  Goddammit.

  Buzzkill Joy waits at the crosswalk like a good little pedestrian, hiding in plain sight among a group of teenagers recently ousted from a coffee shop closing up for the night. A police cruiser rolls up to the intersection, slows down. The cop inside glances in her direction. Joy fidgets in her stolen clothes, jeans and a T-shirt filched from a laundromat, and forces herself to smile and nod, as if amused by her friends’ antics. Of course they’re her friends. She’s one of them. She belongs.

  The cop drives off. Joy keeps the cruiser in the corner of her eye as she crosses the street, watching for a sudden U-turn, the flare of red and blue strobes. The teens reach the corner and turn left as a unit. Joy continues on down the block, looking for a specific storefront — a restaurant she’s never heard of, let alone eaten at.

  She finds it quickly enough. A stratum of newspaper, yellowed from the sun, covers the insides of the tall plate glass windows. A “for sale” sign, weather-beaten and faded with age, is taped over the name on the door: JEAN’S CAFÉ. Joy frowns; nothing about the place strikes her as remotely familiar — so why did she feel compelled to come here?

  A narrow alley takes her to the rear of the restaurant. None of the lights back here work, which feels too convenient — as does the unlocked rear entrance.

  Joy glances around, searching for potential witnesses and, seeing none, slips inside.

  Her eyes adjust instantly to the perfect darkness, allowing her to navigate through a haphazard maze of kitchen equipment left behind to rust and rot. She pauses near a wall rack bearing an assortment of butcher’s knives and takes the largest one. True, nature saw fit to provide her with knives in the tips o
f her fingers, but those weapons are too distinct; if someone needs to die tonight, better to let the cops think someone normal did it.

  Joy peeks through the door separating the kitchen and the dining area, expecting armed police officers, maybe the Protectorate. A man in a plain black suit, his face bathed in the low glow of an e-reader, is somehow simultaneously disappointing and shocking.

  “You can relax, Miss Morana,” he says, “there’s no one here but me, and I mean you no harm. Just the opposite, in fact.”

  “Who the hell are —”

  “Who am I, what do I want, what is this place, why did you feel compelled to come here...I’ll answer all your questions in good time.”

  Joy slips out of the kitchen, her knife taking the lead. “What’re you, psychic?”

  “The proper technical term is telepath, and no, my gift is much more unusual. Unique, as far as I know,” he says, laying his e-reader down. “I cannot be remembered by anyone, unless I allow it. For example, we’ve met once before.”

  “No we haven’t.”

  “Yes we have. I visited you soon after you were interred at Byrne, posing as a public defender. We spoke at length about your abilities, your potential, your plans should you ever find yourself, as the saying goes, back on the outside. I told you if you ever managed to extricate yourself from Byrne’s custody and you wanted a chance to prove yourself to us, come to this abandoned restaurant within twenty-hours of becoming a fugitive.”

  “What? You hypnotized me?” Joy says, advancing on the man.

  “Hardly. I presented you with an option and let it remain in your subconscious, a memory without origin or context. You chose whether to act on the impulse — which, obviously, you did, because here you are, ready to talk business.”

  The man folds his hands on the counter and waits, waits for Buzzkill Joy to process all that she has been told thus far, waits for her to decide whether to hear him out or slice his throat open...or to make the attempt, anyway.

  Joy eases around the counter and sits. The knife remains at the ready. “Tell me what you’re selling,” she says. “We’ll see if I’m buying.”