Refraction (2 page)

“I’m helping,” Crush told him. “To be nice. Aren’t you ever nice to anyone?”

“Not intentionally.” Max sniffed.

Crush laughed, like this was a charming thing to say and not vaguely sociopathic. He hefted the jugs again, settling their weight in his arms.

“Well,” said Crush, grinning, “aren’t you coming?”

“I… yes,” Max said with great dignity, because if Crush was luring him to his death in the equipment room, he was going to go
with great dignity
.

“So, that calculus project, huh?” Crush commented. He strode easily along the field beside Max, his gait deceptively jaunty for someone about to commit homicidal violence.

“Yes, we have a calculus project,” Max agreed, because it was best not to argue with the unstable.

“Pretty tricky so far, don’t you think?”

“No,” Max said. He could only compromise his dignity so much. The project was not that hard, and Crush couldn’t make him say it was! What if someone overheard? Max would be the laughingstock of AP Prep.

Crush dropped the barrels on the ground in front of the equipment shed door, rolling them down his biceps with disgusting ease.

“Maybe we could compare notes,” he suggested, dusting his hands off on his pants and smiling like a ray of sunshine.

“Uh, no,” Max snapped, outraged. Was that Crush’s end goal? Hold Max’s identity over his head and blackmail him into cheating? Superheroes were despicable.

“Okay. Maybe next time,” Crush agreed easily, unaware of Max’s seething turmoil. With a friendly wave, he waltzed off back to the locker room like he hadn’t just given Max the scare of his life.

The nerve
.

MAX WASN’T
late to the meeting that night, but only just. He darted into the conference room to the sound of the gavel calling the room to order and cut through the crowd shuffling toward their seats. He hit the refreshments table and slid into the empty seat beside his mother with a stack of doughnuts on a napkin and a Styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee.

Conversations still buzzed around him as attendees made their way to their chairs. Boring stuff, mostly—the weather, last month’s PTA meeting, and the new infrared security sensors at the prison. Max kept his head down and avoided eye contact with Nematoad, who always wanted to talk about the mating habits of amphibians. Plus, his skin was always coated in some kind of… secretion. A worm secretion. Or maybe a frog secretion. Either way, Max preferred to keep his distance.

The Injustice League met on the third Thursday of every month, in rotating locations depending on which supervillain had signed up to host. This month they were in the C-Suite of Alarum’s corporate headquarters, normally the working home of senior executives and investors. Next month was scheduled for Doctor Decay’s volcano lair, which Max thought was a little melodramatic, but nobody asked him about these things.

Next to him, his mother’s argument with the Verminator about the rising price of non-GMO produce cut short as Alarum banged the gavel again.

“And so I call to order the current convening of the League and its esteemed members,” she intoned. “Maria, please begin with a summary of last month’s minutes.”

Rattlesnake cleared her throat and shuffled a stack of paper. “On Thursday the eighteenth, the League commenced with a summary of the previous month’s minutes, followed by a detailed progress report of the budget restructure, effective at the beginning of the fiscal year. Topics raised were….”

And they were off. Max focused his attention on his doughnuts and let the murmur of the meeting roll over him. Being a supervillain came with a dreary amount of red tape, from patent disputes to territory claims to the ever-present debate on whether to unionize. As long as he tuned out the budget discussions and the occasional burst of maniacal laughter, it wasn’t the worst way to spend an evening. Hardly anybody ever got transmaterialized to a different dimension, for example.

He tuned in and out as the group moved through the upcoming event schedule (European weapons trade show next month, a panel at SXSW—“Villains in Media: Monetizing Your Online Platform”), intel reports (recruitment was down 2 percent this quarter, and the prime minister of Russia was moving a 20,000 pound shipment of potatoes across country next week), and recent battle reports (Nematoad still hadn’t made any progress infiltrating the local zoo, which nobody but he was particularly upset about). They’d reached the long pause portion of the meeting where Alarum would ask if there was any other business to bring to the table, nobody would say anything, and Max would finally be free to go home.

He was happily dusting his crumbs into his napkin when Doctor Decay, the absolute ruiner, cleared his throat.

“I believe we have one more battle report to discuss, don’t we, Catalyst?” He smiled.

Max groaned silently and resisted the urge to put his head down on the table. He still had homework to do tonight.

His mother stood.

“Indeed,” she said, her voice smooth. “There was a tussle yesterday afternoon against Mr. Magnificent and the Crush. Thank you very much for bringing this important event to the attention of the League, Doctor.”

She sat down.

“Oh, please, you’re too modest,” Decay exclaimed over Alarum’s attempts at closing remarks. Max watched her sigh as she set her gavel down. “I’d say it was quite a significant battle, wouldn’t you?”

“Our property damage fell into the lowest echelon of the League’s metrics,” Catalyst replied evenly, “so… no.”

Max tensed, just slightly. His mom’s tone was never even when she was happy. She clearly didn’t want to explain their fight, and Decay was pushing her for a reason. Suddenly Max was grateful he hadn’t had time to talk to anyone and accidentally spill what his mom clearly felt was confidential.

Decay somehow managed to smarm at them without moving a muscle. “You wouldn’t say you suffered any particular losses, for example?”

Catalyst bared her teeth at him in a parody of a smile. “Mr. Magnificent… acquired the most recent iteration of our doomsday device.”

Max glared as Decay smiled and hushed murmurs swept the room. The Verminator elbowed him in the ribs and chuckled as if they were in on some joke. Max swept his crumbs into the guy’s lap.

“The League thanks you for your candor, Catalyst,” Decay said.

Max rolled his eyes. That guy was such a dick.

MAX’S MOTHER
adjusted her binoculars with one hand, bracing herself against the tree trunk with the other. Max crouched in front of her on the sturdiest branch the bank parking lot had to offer.

“Once we release the hounds,” she told him, “we’ll have about three minutes of confusion to unlock the main door. You hold the guards off outside while I unlock the vault elevator, hack the vault lock, and reclaim the doomsday device.”

Max wobbled as his mom shifted. “What if there are guards at the vault doors?”

“I’ll disable them, darling.”

“But how are you going to get the doomsday device out of the vault?”

Max’s mom sighed impatiently. “With the elevator, of course, dear.”

“But—okay,” Max said, because sometimes you just didn’t have any options.

“Oh… look, darling, don’t be nervous. You’ll do a great job with the guards up here. The hounds are top notch mechanical marvels.”

“You built them this morning. In the kitchen.”

“Exactly. Made with a mother’s love.” She sounded too satisfied for Max’s liking. “Now let’s go, chop-chop. And when the Goodmans get here… you know what to do,” she told him, her voice dark.

“Yes, Mom.”

“Release the hounds!” she bellowed.

She vaulted from the tree, leaving Max to scramble for the remote before it bounced to the ground. He jabbed the large red (and only) button on the box, clinging to the branch as his mother’s pack of oversized robot dogs stampeded toward the bank underneath him. Their large metal paws hit the asphalt in a cacophony of clangs, drowning out his mother’s battle cry. She met the first guard at the door with a flying roundhouse and grabbed the other in a chokehold on her landing.

Max launched himself into the air as the hounds hit the next wave of guards. He looped above the melee a few times, waiting for Catalyst to slip through the bank doors before diving into the fray.

He zipped between guards, distracting and disorienting where he could to let the hounds incapacitate them. His mother had been on a bit of a bender, he thought as he watched one dog spew a sticky net out of its mouth, catching an unsuspecting guard around the knees. Max swooped forward as he pitched toward the ground, snatching the rifle from the guard’s hands before it could clatter away. It definitely wouldn’t do for an armed gun to hit the ground and misfire into a crowd. Max and Catalyst were after a certain amount of publicity, it was true, but murder rarely generated the kind of attention that helped.

Max dismantled the gun and tossed the pieces at a nearby hound, which chomped them from the air. The hound next to it had a guard pinned under one large paw and was drooling buckets of a sticky, clear gel onto his legs, effectively gluing him to the ground.

Max made a face. His mother had a vivid imagination when left to her own devices.

He was surveying the scene with his hands on his hips, the guards well in hand by the hounds—herding them away from the bank doors, if not completely incapacitating them—when a telltale thrum filled the air.

Max turned to the sky, cape whipping behind him as a bright red and blue helicopter rose above the trees lining the parking lot. Even the hounds turned their heads to watch Mr. Magnificent and Crush leap from the helicopter and somersault a few stories to the ground.

“Cease your dastardly plot, villain!” Mr. Magnificent boomed.

Crush stood behind Mr. Magnificent, his blond hair glimmering as it waved heroically in the breeze. With the evening sunlight behind him, he seemed to glow like an angelic figure descended from the heavens.

One of those wrathful, avenging war angels, maybe.

Max swallowed, resisting the urge to tug at his costume. His skin felt tight, and he took a breath to gather himself. If Crush knew his secret identity, there was no need to keep it to himself. Had he told his father already? Was he going to out him publicly during the battle?

“I’ll never surrender,” Max said with more conviction than he felt. “Not while you still have what’s ours.”

He squared his shoulders and heard the hounds line up behind him, the
clangclangclang
of their support as ominous as it was gratifying.

“Oh, have we got visitors?”

Max spun to see his mother emerge from the bank, rolling the doomsday device in front of her like some kind of demonic shopping cart.

“Catalyst, we meet again.” Crush’s dad sounded menacingly pleased, an odd combination for a superhero.

“So thoughtful of you to join us. You really
shouldn’t have
!” she shouted, launching herself over the small cavalry of hounds in a straight shot at Mr. Magnificent.

He sprinted toward her, charging like a blond, patriotic bull. They met in a crash of blows as the hounds sprang into action around them.

Max dodged a hound, flipping over a guard who had extricated himself from the sticky mouth-web he’d been tangled in. A shoulder throw knocked the guard down long enough to be pinned again. Max spun back to the helicopter, but Crush was gone.

The doomsday device! Max spun again to see Crush running toward the device, mere feet away, with Max’s mom too distracted to defend it.

Max jumped in the air and shot forward, jetting close enough to the action to be clipped a few times by flying limbs and the occasional metal tail. He rolled with the hits, adding an extra burst of speed as Crush reached out to grab the device.

Max caught him around the middle at full speed, lifting him off the ground with the force of it and shooting them both through the bank doors in a shower of glass shards. They barreled through the lobby, crunching through the glass as they rolled over each other with a series of painful bounces.

Gritting his teeth, Max reaffixed his grip, knowing he had to get them off the ground again before he lost momentum if he had any hope of keeping Crush out of the fight. He pushed off with his toes and rocketed them through the large glass walls on the other side of the lobby, Crush shouting and covering his head as they broke through.

God
, Crush was heavy. Max practiced flying with sandbags, but Crush had thirty pounds on him at least, and sandbags didn’t try to punch him in the teeth when he carried them through the air. He tossed Crush a bit, grabbing him in a bear hug to cut down on his reach. He swore as Crush kicked him in the shins instead.

“You are such an inconvenience!” Max raged into the wind.

“I ate icing on a dress!” Crush shouted back, or maybe “I’m placing you under arrest!” It was hard to hear at this speed.

“Stop kicking!” Max shouted and zipped up above the tree line. Maybe if Crush didn’t want to be dropped three stories, he’d
stop trying to disable his pilot
.

Crush shouted incomprehensibly.

“Ugh, finally,” Max muttered two blocks later. He spun them in several tight spirals, then swung to the right and dumped Crush onto a wide, flat roof.

He shackled Crush to the brick while the hero was still reeling and dizzy, looping the heavy chains around the above ground stairwell walls several times. Max may have been a supervillain, but he made it a point not to underestimate his opponents.

“Where are we?” Crush muttered, voice muzzy. Max crouched in front of him—several arm’s lengths away—and watched him try to focus his vision.

“A taquería.”

“A wha—
why
?” Crush yanked at his shackles, but the chains held firm (thank God).

Max pursed his lips, feigning confusion. “I thought you wanted a snack.”

“Let me out! There’s a battle to fight!”

“No can do,” Max said. “Orders are orders, even for a supervillain.”

“
In training
,” Crush muttered, which frankly was rude and uncalled for.