School for Sidekicks (10 page)

He laughed again, and suddenly he was sitting on the other top bunk, halfway across the room. “You'd never connect, you're not fast enough. I can tell because your pupils don't follow me. Besides, almost no one here has that kind of major power.”

“No one at
Hero High
has major superpowers?” I raised an eyebrow skeptically.

“I didn't say nobody.” He blurred off the other bunk and down to the main door—bouncing off it with a slight
thunk,
before assuming a casual pose as he leaned against it. The look on his face reminded me of a cat that had just fallen off a couch and was now pretending it meant to do that. “I said
almost
nobody. I also said we didn't call this place Hero High, though you might have missed that bit since you were sulking at the time.”

“No, I heard you. I just kind of forgot about it till now.” I didn't argue about the sulking bit, since there was no way to do so without sounding sulky or starting a fight, and I wanted more information. And a friend. I
really
wanted a friend. “So, what
do
you call this place? AMO seems like kind of a mouthful.”

“School for Sidekicks, mostly. Nobody gets to be a Mask right out of the gate anymore. It's all training wheels, like five years of school, and age limits, and placement tests. Not to mention the internships.”

“Wait, internships?”

“Uh-huh. Two evenings a week and weekends to start. More as you get older.”

“That's ridiculous! You make it sound like we aren't even here to learn how to be heroes.”

Jeda shrugged. “It's not so bad—once you get used to the idea.” For the first time he sounded less than cheery and self-confident. “It kind of even makes sense.”

“But how does that even work? Being a Mask isn't exactly like plumbing or teaching or some regular job.” I saw Jeda's expression go a little sour and added, “Or is it?

“It's complicated. OSIRIS has gotten really powerful in the years since M-Day and the Hero Bomb. Especially after the Franklin Act, which gave them legal authority to do pretty much whatever they wanted with us.” He blurred back up onto the bed with me, moving more jerkily this time, like his powers were cutting in and out. “These days, they're really hard-nosed about letting new metas out on their own. If you try to hero it up without OSIRIS approval, they treat you like a Hood and take you down fast. Think instant stint in a metamax facility.”

“So, what then? You're saying you need to intern with a full-on Mask before they let you do the hero thing?”

“If you don't want to get locked up, yeah, pretty much. Where else did you think teen sidekicks came from? Nobody
wants
to be Kid-Not-as-Awesome-as-His-Mentor.” He blurred the words together so that they came out almost as one continuous name.

“I guess I really hadn't thought about it.” Captain Commanding had never had a sidekick, and most of the Masks that did always struck me as second-stringers like Hotflash or Mixmax. “So, how do you get assigned to a Mask?”

“I know that look. You're thinking you want to sign up with one of the rock stars of the Mask world. Forget that.”

“Why?” If I had to be a sidekick, maybe I could be the Captain's first. That'd be pretty cool actually—hanging out with Captain Commanding in his secret lair. I
had
saved his life. That had to count for something.

“Because the really big names either don't bother with sidekicks, or they already have giant waiting lists. Unless you're extra-major-super you're out of luck. Whoever OSIRIS finds for you, you'll take.”

“We'll see about that.” I had a plan again and that felt good.

Jeda shrugged. “If it makes you feel better, who am I to argue?”

I didn't like the sound of that, but I put it aside for the moment. “What else don't I know?” I figured I might as well get the bad news all out there at once. “What kind of school is this, if it's not one where we learn how to use our powers?”

“Well … most of us aren't all that super.” Jeda rolled backward off the bunk, landing neatly on his feet—an effect made somewhat less awesome when they skidded out from under him and he had to do a sort of high-speed jig to stay upright. “Kind of like that.” He laughed. “Not yet anyway. Since the Hero Bomb, new powers have gotten a lot weaker and more erratic. Sometimes they fade out completely. Sometimes they change or get stronger. You know about all that, right?”

I nodded. “Sure, some. They talk about that stuff in the magazines and vid programs, but not as much as they do the big-name Masks—it's not as interesting, I guess.”

“Well, it's much more complicated than they say in public. We take classes on Mask history and biology here. Whatever is causing new metahuman activations is very different from the Hero Bomb. It's weaker and a lot gentler. Almost nobody dies anymore, but”—he paused and looked around like he wanted to make sure no one was listening—“look, some of this is stuff we get from other students or listening between the lines in lectures, so don't take it as gospel.”

“All right.”

“It seems like the new version partially activates a lot of people who would have died right away if they got hit by something like the Hero Bomb. They get really weak powers like changing the color of their eyes, or their powers come in okay but then fade out after a few weeks.”

“So I might not have powers next week?” Wouldn't my fight with my parents look stupid then.

Jeda smiled again. “Don't worry about that. They wouldn't have sent you here if they didn't think it would take, or if you were too weak to make it as a Mask. All of the kids here at the AMO have at least some real powers. I'm fast, Erik goes transparent, Melody breaks things with her voice. It's just that almost none of us are in a class with someone like Captain Commanding or Sprintcess Speed or even Flareup. Add in that OSIRIS insists we all serve internships on top of our class time, and it gets kind of hard to think of ourselves as real Masks. You know?”

I could see that. Still, I had powers, I was at Mask school. Now I just had to get a good internship. Well, that and figure out a new school. I hadn't changed schools since I started junior high. At any other time I probably would have panicked about that, but when you compared it to nearly getting killed by Spartanicus and suddenly having superpowers, it didn't seem like that big a deal. I was finally on my way!

“Thanks, for being nice to the new kid,” I said.

“No problemo. I—wait a second.” He pulled his cell out and glanced at the screen. “Is that the time? Gottagobye!”

There was a blur and a bang as the door slammed shut, and then Jeda was gone. I smiled and shook my head. I liked him, but in some ways it was a relief to have him gone again. The talk with my parents had really knocked the wind out of me. Add in all the stuff Jeda had just told me, and … well, I definitely needed some time to think about what I wanted to do next. Well, besides asking Mike if he could set me up to intern with Captain Commanding, of course. I settled back on my bunk and tried to put together a good argument. That's where my mother said you should always start if you were going to be dealing with any kind of school administration.

*   *   *

Professor Matheny's office was pretty big, and it had a couch, but aside from that it looked like every other professor's office I'd ever been in. The furniture was covered in that gray institutional fabric you only see when you get dragged along on some errand by your parents, and the rest of the room matched the couch—a saggy chair in that same gray, a big metal desk. The only things that gave the room any character at all were the Minute Man pictures and clippings and a number of instruments, including a fancy-looking guitar hanging on the wall right behind his chair.

It framed his face as he shook his head, now. “No, son, I'm afraid not. Even if it weren't awfully early for you to be looking at finding a Mask to intern with, there's simply no chance.”

“But I've only just mentioned it to you,” I told him. “How can you know the Captain will turn me down without actually asking him. I saved his life!”

“And that'd be enough all on its own,” he replied wryly.

“What do you mean?” I demanded. Nobody disses the Captain when I'm around.

“Captain Commanding doesn't work with
anybody
. Not since the Foxman days.” Matheny rubbed his forehead. “He … well, I've read your file. I know what Captain Commanding means to you, so let me put this as gently as possible. Our good Captain has a bit of an ego problem. He doesn't like to be upstaged. Heck, he doesn't even like to be downstaged. Or sidestaged. He really doesn't want anyone else on the stage with him at all.”

“The Captain is a great man!”
How could he talk about Captain Commanding like that?

“He is. One of the greatest. It's…” He sighed. “No. There's no way to sugarcoat this. Captain Commanding is a very great man, but he's not a
good
man.”

“What?! How can you say that?”

“Because I know him, Evan—have for years.” He held up a hand. “Hang on. I saved something because I thought we might be having this conversation at some point, though not quite so soon.” He lifted the lid of the laptop on his desk and flipped through the tabs on his browser, stopping at one that showed me hanging from Spartanicus's fist at the museum. “Watch.”

The scene played out as I remembered it, right up until Captain Commanding balled up in the air and started whimpering. At that point the audio fuzzed out and the edges of things developed rainbows so that it became very hard to see or understand anything. As the Captain dropped out of frame, it cut off completely and shifted to a shot of the Captain talking to a female reporter in the studio. He was wearing his full uniform, and his hair—he wore a half mask that was open on top and in back—was even more perfectly styled than the reporter's.

“It looked pretty bad for you there for a little while, Captain Commanding.”

The Captain waved his hand dismissively. “Looked worse than it was by far. Much of that video was faked by Mr. Implausible. You know his powers change to fit the plot he's currently involved in, right?”

The reporter nodded vacantly.

“Well, this time his powers included the ability to make cameras see whatever he wanted them to. By running the feed through a power-removal filter, you can see where things departed from his script. That's the point where things went fuzzy on your clip. OSIRIS has taken the liberty of getting Mixmax to use his electromagnetic skills to re-create the real footage, and I've brought it along with me today.”

The screen cut back to the museum. This time, as Captain Commanding burst in through the skylight, a dozen energy beams struck him from various directions. But the only damage they did was to open a couple of rips in his uniform, exposing his right biceps and about a third of his chest.

He laughed then. “Nice try, villains, but hardly enough to stop Captain Commanding! Prepare to be vanquished!”

In the vid my voice cried out, “Oh, Captain Commanding, thank god you've come to rescue me!” Then burst into sobs.

“That's not what happened,” I whispered, but Professor Matheny just pointed at the screen, as if to say, “Keep watching.”

The scene on the laptop showed the camera panning down to focus on Spartanicus as he fired a blast from his forehead. The camera whipped around to show it strike the Captain full in the chest before ricocheting off to blow up the old Commanding Car. As it fell, Mempulse tumbled out of the passenger seat and landed hard.

The Captain smiled, and you could almost see him thinking
Aha!
Another blast hit him, and this time he twisted to direct the ricochet into HeartBurn—standing on the stairs. She went down, too.

Showing no signs of learning, the Spartanicus of the video fired again, and again he took out one of his own henchmen. At that point, the Captain flew down and knocked him out with a single punch. Then he scooped me up and ripped away the imprisoning bag. Underneath I was wearing a Captain Commanding tee so garish and worshipful I'd have been too embarrassed to wear it at nine, much less thirteen.

“Oh, thank you, Captain Commanding!” I chirruped through my continuing tears. “You arrived just in the nick of time.” Then I fainted into his arms.

After stroking my forehead and saying quietly, “Poor lad, the terror was just too much for him,” he gently set me in one of the theater's chairs before moving on to release the other kids—many of whom were also wearing Captain Commanding gear.

“I don't even know what to say,” I whispered. “That's nothing like how it went.”

“No, it's not. But it is the official story as it's being reported now. Thanks to OSIRIS and this video, that's also the version all of the other kids who were there will remember.”

I wanted to throw up. “Professor Matheny?”
How did I even ask this?

“Call me Mike. Really.”

That helped for some reason. “All right, Mike. Shortly after I went into my cocoon I thought I heard a conversation between Captain Commanding and an OSIRIS agent named Brendan. They were talking about altering people's memories. The Captain kind of implied mine should be fixed, too, but Agent Brendan was very firm about it. I thought it was a dream until you said that”—I pointed at the laptop—“was how the other kids would remember things.”

“Now you want to know if OSIRIS is in the business of changing people's memories of metahuman events.”

I nodded, feeling sicker by the moment. “That, and if what I heard could have been real. I was sort of in a coma at the time, so it seems impossible.”

“The answer to the first question is, I am ashamed to say, yes. I wish I could deny it, but I can't. I won't make any defense of the practice because I think it's flat wrong. As for the latter? Who knows? Your cocoon seems to be a defensive measure as well as a healing one. Maybe something in you sensed a danger in that moment and it partially roused you. It's hard to say. People's powers vary wildly and we only ever really understand parts of them.”