Meta (11 page)

  
"Hrm," Midnight laughs. That's a first. "You're gonna need some kind of symbol."

  
"A what?" I ask.

  
"A symbol. Something to identify you. Something unique so when people see you they know who you are," he says.

  
I concentrate again and a light red circle appears on my chest.

  
"Wow. So much for originality," Midnight says.

  
"Hey, it's the best I could think of right now. It's not like you're exactly Picasso with the crescent moon, buddy," I shoot back. Midnight isn't amused, so I quickly try to change the subject.

  
"Uh, what was that thing back there?" I ask.

  
"I'm not sure. Whatever it was, it wasn't a metahuman," Midnight says.

  
"How do you know?"

  
"Well for starters, it didn't have these things," he says as he taps his finger on the metaband on my right wrist.

  
"But I can make these things basically turn invisible. Maybe 'it' did the same thing?"

  
"No. You can't do it while they're active. It doesn't work that way. If the metabands are powered on, then you can see 'em. That's just how it works. Trust me," Midnight says as he sits down.

  
The chair he sits in is gigantic and swivels in front of an even more gigantic grid of at least a dozen computer monitors. Some of the monitors are displaying news helicopter footage of the battle. Luckily, they didn't get close enough to get a clear shot of my face. Other monitors are displaying indecipherable strings of data that Midnight occasionally glances at.

  
I'm feeling slightly unnecessary.

  
"Anything else you need from me tonight?" I ask.

  
Midnight doesn't turn around. He's entrenched in his work in front of the computer monitors.

  
"Welp, all right then. I guess I'll be going."

  
Still nothing.

  
"Yup. I'm gonna get going now. That's it for me," I say. This finally gets his attention, but he still doesn't turn to look at me.

  
"Here," he says as he writes down a phone number on a piece of paper and hands it to me without looking.

  
"What's this?" I ask.

  
"It's my phone number. In case you need to contact me. No more meeting on roofs," he says.

  
"Phone number? Are you serious? This is how I contact you? There isn't like a spotlight I shoot into the sky, or a flare, or some high tech gadget that gives me a retinal scan before it alerts you of my exact GPS coordinates?" I ask.

  
"What? No. That's stupid. Call me. Or text. Doesn't really matter either way to me," he says, already turning back to his work at the computer station.

  
"This is insane. What if this number fell into the wrong hands!?" I ask.

  
Midnight sighs and slowly turns his chair back to face me.

  
"Then I'll get a new number."

  
"Why did you put that note in my cheeseburger then, if you could have just called me the entire time?"

  
"To show you that I could," he says.

  
There's something vaguely threatening about the way he says this. Maybe it isn't that vague.

  
"Listen kid, this isn't the comic books. Some things are a little bit easier if we don't get too dramatic about them, got it?" he says.

  
"Got it."

  
And with that, I use what is likely alien technology strapped to my wrists to teleport myself to my bedroom.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

When I wake up the next morning, I can hear that Derrick is still home. I look at the clock and it's almost nine a.m. Luckily, that means I'm not late for my first day at the lake (yet) which means this new job is already going better than the last, but it also means that Derrick is probably late for his work.

  
I stumble into the living room and find Derrick hunched over his laptop, unshaven and still in his underwear. He barely notices that I'm there.

  
"What are you still doing home? Shouldn't you be on your way to the office?" I ask.

  
"Huh? Oh. I called out. Working from home again," he says, not bothering to even look up from his laptop.

  
I stare at him, waiting for him to notice. He doesn't.

  
"What are you looking at?" I ask. This finally grabs his attention.

  
"Oh my God. You haven't heard? There was this absolutely insane meta fight last night! The footage is all over the place. The one guy threw another guy right through an entire city block!" he exclaims.

  
I do my best to hide a smirk. It doesn't matter anyway, Derrick is too engrossed in what's on his screen to notice.

  
"Wow. Sounds like this guy's pretty incredible."

  
Okay. Maybe now I'm laying it on a bit too thick and consider pulling back a little bit. Derrick would never, ever suspect me in a million years, but that doesn't mean I should be a cocky idiot about it.

  
"Yeah, he's all right but not really all that interesting," Derrick says.

  
Wow. Okay. Never mind then.

  
"What's really interesting is the thing he was fighting," Derrick says.

  
"Thing?" I ask. "I thought you said it was two metas fighting."

  
"That's the craziest part. This other thing wasn't actually a meta," he says.

  
"How do they know that?" I ask, doing my best to feign ignorance.

  
"Because the meta that made him, uploaded a video about it to ViewNow," Derrick says.

  
"What."

  
I try to process what Derrick has just told me. The old metas could do a lot of incredible things. Some could fly. Others possessed super speed or super strength. There were even some who could teleport or project pure energy in the way of a projectile. But they couldn't ever "make" something. Not something like the thing I saw last night.

  
"Here, watch this," Derrick says while swinging the laptop around so I could see it.

  
He clicks play and the video on screen begins playing. It's a webcam single shot of a person, presumably a meta, wearing a black mask covered by a dark green cross that splits his face into four quadrants. There's nothing discernible about the person himself, and the rest of the room is too dark to actually make anything out. He leans in towards the camera and begins to speak.

  
"What you've witnessed today is only the beginning. Where there is danger, I will create chaos and no one will be safe. I will finish what Jones started."

  
The video ends and the screen goes blank. This is the second time now that I've thought about Jones in a very long time. This surprises me, considering everything that has been happening. I suppose it's still just too much to handle thinking about; the man who killed my parents. How he used the same type of devices I have invisibly strapped to my wrists right now to do it.

  
"I don't understand," I barely manage to squeak out.

  
"He calls himself The Controller," Derrick begins to explain while pulling up other windows on his laptop screen, "and he's been around for a while."

  
"What? What do you mean he's been around for a while? These new metas are the first ones anyone's seen in like ten years," I say.

  
"He wasn't a meta, but he's been around. Here, look." Derrick says as he shows me an online forum. There's a lot of information on the screen, but from what I can gather, I'm looking at the profile of someone with the screen name 'The Controller' who has posted to this particular forum 14,324 times.

  
"That's a lot of posts," I say.

  
"Hell yeah, that's a lot of posts. You don't understand. This guy, this meta, rather, he's an obsessive," Derrick says.

  
"Aren't you kinda an obsessive about this stuff too though, Derrick?" I ask.

  
"Not like this guy. There's thousands and thousands of pages of these rants. Everyone in the community knows this guy, because he usually winds up getting himself banned sooner or later because of his insane views."

  
"Insane views?"

  
"He's a hardcore Jones supporter. He saw him as a good guy. That 'bringing chaos' to the world 'saved it from self-righteous metahumans who would have eventually enslaved us'. He thinks Jones was saving us from them and ourselves."

  
"That's absolutely insane."

  
"What did I just tell you?"

  
"So this guy has been on this message boards for years defending Jones, the meta who used to just walk up and down city streets killing hundreds indiscriminately. I mean, people with the last name Jones changed it after The Battle just to avoid ever being associated with him," I say.

  
"Yup. This guy, The Controller, thinks Jones was the good guy all along. And now he's got a nice pair of metabands himself somehow and intends to continue what Jones started," Derrick says.

  
"Well this is good then, right, all this online stuff? There must be a way to track him down through here right? Login records, IP addresses, something?" I ask.

  
"Nope. These boards are locked down tighter than most government networks. People on them are paranoid about retaliation from metas whose secrets they expose. Everything is encrypted, and traffic gets routed through a few dozen network connections before it even hits the main message board server. There's no way to find out who this guy is in real life through it," Derrick tells me.

  
This is not good.

  
"I'm guessing Electrotown gave you guys all the day off, considering what happened?" Derrick asks.

  
"Yeah, but I got a new job down at the la-," I begin while taking a look down at my phone to check the time, "shit. I'm late. Gotta go, see you later." Along with being late, I also notice that I've got another missed call from Jim, and about a dozen missed calls from an "Unknown" number that I can only assume is Midnight. Great.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"Where the hell have you been?" Midnight screams into my ear through my cell phone's receiver. I'm driving Derrick's car to the lake to make sure I'm not late. Seems safer than the whole teleportation thing right now.

  
"I was asleep! Maybe you've heard of it? It's that thing that everyone else in the world has to do once a day or else they start going crazy." I say.

  
"Well while you've been sleeping, the rest of the world has been learning all about the new friend that we made last night," Midnight says.

  
"I know. I heard about him this morning from my brother."

  
"Can you trust him?"

  
"The guy who made the thing we battled last night? What are you, crazy?"

  
There's a silence that implies Midnight is barely keeping his composure.

  
"Not The Controller. Your brother," he says.

  
"Oh, yeah. Of course. He's obsessed with meta stuff, but he's got no clue about me. I'm sure of it."

  
"I still don't like it. You shouldn't be engaging in these types of conversations with him. One slip in a conversation and all of a sudden you've turned him into a liability."

  
"He's fine. I'm being careful. Did you find anything out about this Controller guy that the news hasn't already?" I ask.

  
"No. But I'm processing through all available data on him as we speak. I'm not even sure he's on the same continent, let alone city, as us. There's a lot of ranting and raving, but not a whole lot of actual information about who he is, other than a lunatic."

  
"Yeah, I gathered that part. It seems like he's got a grudge now too, which should be extra fun for me."

  
"That's why you need to be especially careful right now. Listen, I need to leave town for a few days to follow up some of these leads."

  
"Where are you going?" I ask.

  
"It's better that you don't know. Honestly, it doesn't even matter, anyway. All you need to know is that if you get yourself into trouble, I'm not going to be close enough to save your ass, so absolutely no powering on your bands while I'm gone. This Controller person is going to be monitoring the police radio, social media, you name it, for any sightings of you. You need to lay low. Got me?" Midnight says.

  
"Yeah. I got it." That's a lot easier said than done. Ever since I got these bands, trouble seems to find me rather than the other way around.

  
"Good. Now get to work. You're going to be late."

  
I pull into the parking lot for the lake with a whole minute to spare. Already, today is going about a million times better than the rest of my week. Since summer is still just starting, the lake isn't open yet, which means today is just orientation for staff. Should be nice and easy. How long can it take them to explain to me how to pick up garbage and throw it in a bin?

  
I lock the car and walk towards the entrance gate when I feel a hand grab my side. This is it. The Controller's found me somehow. I spin around in an instant and already have my arms out ready to summon my metabands.
 

  
"Ahhh!" Sarah screams.