Strike 3: The Returning Sunrise (33 page)

When the blue flash reappeared in his vision, Tobin opened his eyes and gasped for air. He found that he was now on his hands and knees in his bedroom in Bridgton, looking down at the carpet, with his lungs empty of oxygen. Snapping his head up and to his right, he saw the Daybreaker, who was standing with his arms crossed near the window.

“What the hell?” Tobin said, his voice hoarse as his throat filled with air. “Where are we?”

“We’re in your bedroom,” the Daybreaker said, completely unaffected. “I brought us here.”

Tobin got to his feet, his arms and legs wobbly. He shook his head, trying to clear the electric humming in his ears. “How did—how did you do that?”

“There’s lots of things I can do,” the Daybreaker said. “You can do them, too. We don’t just control electricity—we control all energy. Kinetic, gravitational, even temporal. Your powers—our powers—are limitless. I guess you haven’t learned that yet.”

Tobin looked across the room at the Daybreaker. “But why did you bring us here?” He walked to the window and looked out at his mom’s car, parked in the driveway. “What if someone sees us? Is my mom home?”

“Don’t worry, she’s downstairs,” the Daybreaker said. “She’s watching an Oprah special about the dome. She won’t bother us. She doesn’t know we’re here.”

The Daybreaker limped around the room, inspecting the movie posters on the walls, the empty cups and dirty plates on Tobin’s nightstand, and the video game systems hooked up to the flat-screen TV across the room. It was as if the Daybreaker was looking at—and remembering—a different life.

“Jennifer,” the Daybreaker began, “the Jennifer from this timeline—she told me what happened. How I’m not from this timeline.”

Tobin stared at him. “She did? Jennifer? When?”

The Daybreaker motioned with his head toward the window. “A few minutes ago, in the skyscraper. She came to see me. I think your robot friend brought her.”

“He did?” Tobin asked. He shook his head. That would have to wait for another time. He looked at the Daybreaker, squinting, as the Daybreaker walked around the room. “And do you believe her?”

The Daybreaker picked up a video game from Tobin’s shelf. It was a war game, showing a man in black fatigues wearing glowing, green, night-vision goggles. “I’m not sure yet,” the Daybreaker said, looking at the video game case. “But she knew things only she could know. And she showed me pictures. And if what she’s saying is true...”

The Daybreaker picked up a framed picture of his mother.

“I have to go back where I belong.”

Tobin stepped forward, eagerly taking advantage of the opportunity. “Yes, you do. And I can help you with that, actually.”

Tobin reached for the Chrono-Key stuck into the middle of his bo-staff. He popped the blue, translucent pocket watch out of the weapon and held it in front of him, showing it to the Daybreaker.

“This is what this whole thing has been about,” Tobin said. “This is what Rigel used to bring you here from the past. We were hoping by coming to Boston we could draw you out, so I could then somehow use this to send you back.”

The Daybreaker nodded. “I figured as much.” He took the Chrono-Key from Tobin. “This will send me back? This will work?”

“Yes,” Tobin said urgently. “And you need to go back right now. You’ve been gone from your timeline for two months, and in your timeline, Vincent Harris is still alive. You weren’t there to stop him. That’s what I was trying to tell you back in Boston. Who knows what Vincent has done to Earth since you’ve been gone.”

Holding the Chrono-Key in his hand, the Daybreaker gripped it tight and walked to a beanbag chair in the corner of the room, near the TV.  He smiled, but with sadness.

“Do you remember when Mom used to sit there with us in the rocking chair after kindergarten and read us stories?” The Daybreaker stared at the beanbag. “Things were better then. Everything was better then.”

Tobin stepped forward, surprised by the comment. “I know...I know that might seem true—and maybe it is true—but things change. They have to. They can’t stay the same forever. That’s just what happens. And they can’t go back to how they used to be. They have to change. That much I know for sure.”

The Daybreaker looked at the beanbag chair, then walked to the window and looked out the blinds, prying them open with his finger.

“When you came to the skyscraper a few nights ago with your friends, the night of the party, you discovered two parts of our next phase. One of them was the trigulsaurs. Did you ever find out what the next part of the plan was?”

Tobin shook his head. “No. We found some maps of the stars and things like that, but that’s it. We couldn’t figure it out.”

The Daybreaker nodded. “We’re shutting down all travel between Capricious and Earth. Those maps you saw, with the markings? Those are over one thousand satellites, above the world of Capricious, that will prohibit all travel between worlds.”

Tobin stared at him, in shock, with his mouth dropped. “But you can’t...you can’t do that.”

“You won’t find the satellites,” the Daybreaker said. “No one will. They are out of the reach of even the space programs of Capricious. When they are active, no portals of any kind will open between worlds.”

Tobin looked at the ground, his eyes darting around the floor. He grew angry. “You can’t—you can’t do that!” He looked at the Daybreaker and walked toward him. “We—my friends and I—we
have
to be able to travel between worlds! To do what we do, to save people! Since I’ve been going back and forth with Orion and my other friends, look at how much good we have done! How many lives we’ve saved!”

The Daybreaker spun to him. “Really? Have you looked at Boston lately? Is that some of the ‘good’ that’s been done since the heroes and super-villains from Capricious have started traveling through portals to Earth? You think some of the people of Boston would disagree with you?”

Tobin shook his head. “But that’s not us. We do good work. Damn good work. To keep people safe, to keep them protected. I can’t do that without my friends from Capricious. I can’t do that without working with them. Orion and the others. They keep Earth safe.”

“These kinds of heroes and creatures and monsters should never have come here,” the Daybreaker said. “They don’t belong here. Travel between the two worlds should have never happened. Look at everything that’s happened since the first contact between the worlds was made. Earth was better off before all this started. For all the lives you saved, there’s been ten times the destruction.”

Tobin shook his head again. “That’s not true. That’s just not true.”

“It is true. And I’m putting a stop to it. Earth will be left alone, and so will Capricious.”           

“You can’t do this!” Tobin shouted, slamming his fists against his sides. “I won’t let you!”

The Daybreaker walked toward Tobin’s bed. “I already have. The satellites were activated this morning. Five hours from now—at 5 o’clock tomorrow morning—all portals between Earth and Capricious will be shut down. They will be useless. For good. Make sure your friends and anyone else from Capricious knows that.”

Tobin sat down on the bed, overwhelmed, nearly in tears. “You can’t...you can’t do that. Please. Please.” He looked up at the Daybreaker. “You have no idea how much that will hurt Earth.”

“Earth will be better off. And so will you. None of this contact with Capricious should have happened. Your life—and my life—shouldn’t have been affected this way. And when I get back to my timeline, I’m going to shut down the portals there the same way.”

Tobin shook his head, his hands clasped in front of him. “You can’t...my friends. I need their help. Earth needs their help.”

“You’ll see that’s not true. You’ll see that this is for the best.”

The Daybreaker stood against the wall, in between the foot of Tobin’s bed and the door that led to the hallway outside.

“The reason Rigel is as powerful as he is now is because he and Nova were siphoning off my power,” the Daybreaker said. “I know that now. My powers—our powers—are transferable, and Rigel has transferred a great amount of my power into himself. Essentially, he’s as powerful as me. And much more powerful than you.”

The Daybreaker held out his armored hand. Tobin looked at it, then took it, as the Daybreaker helped him stand up. Suddenly, Tobin felt an electric tingling down his arm.

“The only way you’re going to have a chance of defeating Rigel is by fighting as hard as you can to access the deep recesses of your power,” the Daybreaker said. “You might think you’ve reached your limits, but you haven’t. You’ll have to try and access more. You’ll have to fight harder, if you want it. It’s the only chance you’ve got.

“After all that has happened to me, I can’t afford to give you much of my power, but when I helped you stand just now, I transferred some of my power to you—I helped your mind open to the possibilities, just a little bit. That’s all I can tell you. I hope everything works out for you here.”

The Daybreaker stepped back, standing only inches from the wall. He gripped the Chrono-Key in his hand. The outside of the watch began to glow bright blue, and its cogs and levers—visible through its back—began to spin and turn.

“I’m going back now,” the Daybreaker said. “Tell Jennifer I said thank you.”

Tobin nodded. The blue glow around the watch intensified and began to spread over the Daybreaker’s arms. But before he could go, Tobin held out his hand.

“Wait,” Tobin said. “I know...I know some terrible things have happened to you. And I can’t apologize for that enough. In some ways, this is all my fault. But don’t let this destroy you. Don’t let the choices of others define your life.”

The Daybreaker stared back at Tobin, then nodded slightly. The two Tobins locked eyes with each other, and stayed there, until the blue glow from the Chrono-Key spread all across the Daybreaker’s body. Finally, with a bright flash that cascaded out over Tobin and the entire room, the Daybreaker was gone.

Tobin stood in the middle of the room, staring at the wall. He looked at the hand the Daybreaker had touched when he helped him up off the bed.

“Tobin?” the boy’s mother called from the bottom of the stairs. “Is that you?”

“Yup,” Tobin called back, surprised, his voice cracking. “I’m just—I just have to head out for a bit.”

In Boston Common, Keplar and Orion dashed across the park, avoiding the fire Rigel was raining down from the sky. They dove behind a smoking stonewall and rested there.

“We’ve lost all the rebels, O,” Keplar said. “All of them. They’ve either been captured or taken out. It’s just us now.”

“And what about the heroes? Who’s left?”

“You’re looking at it. I evacuated everyone out, including the level nines. Even they weren’t making a dent. Where the hell is Tobin? Where’d he go?”

“I don’t know,” Orion replied. “The heroes that were watching him face Rigel said he was here, and then he was just gone. I don’t know—”

Lightning streaked across the dark sky, lighting up the night. A thunderbolt cracked, ripping apart the silence. Startled, Orion and Keplar looked up.

“Krandor,” the dog said. “About time. Where the hell has he been?”

Above them, floating down through a swirling storm cloud, Tobin appeared, surrounded by snapping, blue electricity. Just as when he left, he was wearing his blue mask across his face and his cape was rippling behind his back, but when his boots hit the ground, Keplar and Orion saw that his fists were glowing bright blue, and his eyes were sparking with white electricity. He appeared oddly emotionless, his face blank.

“Are you all right, Tobin?” Orion asked. “Where’d you go?”

“You guys are gonna havta leave now,” Tobin said. “It’s just him and me. It has to be.”

Keplar shook his head. “We’re not letting you face him alone, Tobin. You’re gonna need—”

Tobin extended his finger and pointed at Keplar and Orion. Suddenly, the dog and the old man saw a blue flash, and when they reopened their eyes, they saw that they were now in an empty, dark restaurant.

“Um,” Keplar said, looking at the tables around him. “Where the hell are we?”

Orion pressed the button on his earpiece. “Tobin, how did you do that?  What happened?”

“It’s a new trick I just learned,” Tobin said. “Don’t worry, you’re still in Boston. You’re just far enough away so I can do what I need to do.”

“Tobin, you can’t face him alone,” Orion said. “Bring us back there. Wait for us.”

“Sorry, O. I’ll see you in a bit.”

Tobin turned off his communicator. He looked up.

Rigel was hovering over him, floating in the blue flames.

“So,” the red giant said. “You’re back. I thought you had run away.”

“Never,” Tobin replied. He pointed to the skyscraper with his thumb. “Your friend, the Daybreaker? He took me for a little joyride. He’s gone now, by the way. Back to his own timeline. You can’t use him anymore.”

Rigel grinned and shook his head. “No matter. I don’t need him. I never did, once I took his power. The people of Rytonia will follow me now. They will see that I am the true Daybreaker. Just as Vincent always wanted it to be.”

Tobin chuckled, holding up his hands and tilting his head to one side. “Actually, no, I’m sorry. I was just hanging with the true Daybreaker—we were just chilling in my room back in Bridgton. He’s not too bad of a guy, once you get past the murdery-ness and the spikes on his armor.”

Rigel smirked. “Joking to the end. I would have it no other way.”

Extending both of his arms in front of him, Rigel blasted his electricity-entwined, blue fire down at Tobin, but the boy dodged the flames, springing off his feet and leaping to his right. Still airborne, the boy held out his bo-staff and fired a searing lightning bolt at Rigel, but the red giant avoided it in the air, simply shifting his body to one side. Floating downward and landing with his heavy feet on the earth, his body still encased in blue fire, Rigel stomped toward Tobin.

“Do you remember?” the red giant asked. “Do you remember when we first faced each other, in Bridgton? I was like a child then. And you?”

Rigel held out his hand and opened his palm. An axe made out of blue fire formed from thin air, and he gripped the handle with his fingers.

“You’re exactly the same,” Rigel finished. “Nothing has changed. You’re still a silly, wisecracking superhero-in-training, held back from true greatness by Orion.”

With a grunt, Rigel swung his axe forward and Tobin had to quickly raise his bo-staff in front of himself to block the blow. The boy tried to go on the offensive, spinning his wrists and swinging his staff at Rigel in a series of lightning-fast, acrobatic strikes, but Rigel deflected all of his blows with his flaming forearms.

Sensing an opening, Rigel butted Tobin in the stomach with the handle of his axe, and the boy bent over forward, with the wind knocked out of him. Before he could recover, Rigel raised his leg and kicked the boy, sending him flying backward.

Across the Common, Tobin lay on the ground, grimacing and holding his arm weakly across his side. Rigel marched toward him.

“Just as he did with me, Orion has taught you nothing. He has engrained in you cowardly and evasive maneuvers, but he has not let your true powers shine. He does not allow you to do what you can do. I got out from under his watch because I knew I was capable of so much more. He would not let me take my rightful place in the universe, and now I can see that he will be the death of you. Perhaps if he had showed you what you could do, you would have survived this. But he held you back. He never let you see what you could really be.”

After playing possum a moment, Tobin jumped to his feet, reared his arm back, and cracked Rigel across the jaw with his gloved, glowing fist. Attempting to distract the giant, he then flipped backwards away from him, cartwheeling across the Common and even swinging around a tree branch, but none of it slowed Rigel down. The red giant simply strolled across the park and plucked Tobin from the air, grabbing his leg and whipping him down into the ground.

Rigel stopped the charade. His face grew serious, and he stopped talking. Raising his axe into the air, he brought it down, smashing the energized weapon across Tobin’s ribs. Tobin screamed, in agony, but this only increased Rigel’s onslaught. Again and again, he raised the axe up, holding it above his head a moment, before hammering it down, as if he was a lumberjack cutting apart a tree stump. With every blow, Tobin yelled out and curled his body into a ball, trying to avoid the devastating attack.

Finally, Rigel reached down and grabbed Tobin by his neck. With a casual flick of his wrist, the red giant tossed the boy’s broken body to his right, sending him crashing through a metal railing around the park and into the plate glass window of a bookstore, shattering it. Lying on the sidewalk, Tobin arched his back and bellowed, his eyes closed, his head flung back to the sky.

Rigel hovered over to the bloodied hero. Leaning down, he grabbed Tobin by the collar of his costume and lifted him up to his face.

“Vincent has won, Tobin. This is it. Even though he is gone, Vincent has won. Everything you fought for, all Orion fought for—it was for nothing. All those that died—Titan, your father—they should have known Vincent’s vision for this world would become a reality. Earth’s fate has been written in the stars since the dawn of time. If they had listened, so many lives could have been saved. Including yours.”

Rigel flung Tobin up into the air, toward the Common. As the boy fell down toward the ground, Rigel opened his palm and blasted him with one last, long, scorching stream of blue fire. Even after the boy hit the earth, Rigel held the flames on him, blasting his body with the unrelenting energy for over fifteen seconds. Tobin could only scream, and writhe his contorted body on the green ground, waiting for the pain to end.

Finally, Rigel hovered up into the air. Far above the red giant, the domed ceiling of the Dark Nebula slowly began to open, allowing the night sky of Boston to be seen for the first time in months, through a hole not much bigger than Rigel.

“I’m going now, Tobin,” Rigel said. “To spread my new world across this one. Boston was only the beginning—with the power I have now, I can level mountains with the blink of an eye. I can rebuild cities, from the ground up, with a simple wish. I no longer need the Dark Nebula to hide behind. Your world cannot contain me. They cannot stop me.” The giant looked up at the ceiling of the Dark Nebula, then down again at Tobin. “I am the Daybreaker.”

Rolling over, Tobin looked up, his vision blurry. Far above him, thousands of feet away, he could see the hole in the Dark Nebula’s ceiling that Rigel was floating toward. Soon, Rigel would be out in the open world.

“First the United States,” Rigel said. “Then Europe. Then Asia. Then it all. The past glory of Capricious will be remade. What was gone will return. Long live Vincent Harris. Long live New Capricious.”

From the ground, Tobin watched as Rigel rose up and through the hole in the Dark Nebula, out into the stars above. From that height, Tobin knew, the red giant would be able to see all of the areas surrounding the city spread out before him. The giant was now free to bring his destruction and fire across the rest of the Earth.

With his chest rising up and down, and his breath wheezing, Tobin tried to roll over but found that he could not. He stayed lying on his back, looking up at the stars through the hole in the black-and-purple dome. Even with the new powers revealed to him by the Daybreaker, Tobin could barely move. His arms only trembled when he begged them to reach for his staff, and his legs wouldn’t answer him at all, his cries for them to stand going unheeded. Behind his mask, the boy could feel blood running down out of his mouth, and the vision in one of his eyes was completely gone from Rigel’s attacks. Looking down at his body with his one good eye, Tobin saw that Rigel’s axe had cut a massive gash through his pant leg. Through the gash, Tobin could see a flash of white bone.

Dropping his head back against the ground, Tobin turned back to the stars, and he saw that the twinkling objects were beginning to fade away. A dark circle all around the boy’s vision was encroaching on him, shrinking what his eyes could see and filling the world with darkness. Everything was fading away, including the sounds of the park—the only noise Tobin could hear was the weak exhalation of his own breath, trembling out of his open mouth and into the air above his face.

Tobin knew this was the end. From the first moment he had decided to give up his old life and become a superhero, he had always known the end could come at any moment, and now it was here. But, as he lay there, on the grass of Boston Common, one sentence kept repeating itself in his mind, over and over: it was worth it.

It had all been worth it.

Looking up at the fading stars, innumerable and faintly shining against the darkness, Tobin began to think of all the people he’d met over the past year.

Orion, at the supermarket where he worked, on that strangely warm October night.

Keplar, in the grassy field on Capricious, only a few feet away from the massive, dead carcass of a red-colored dinosaur.

Scatterbolt, in Orion’s library, where the little robot had excitedly told Tobin all about the history of Capricious.

Thinking about his friends, other memories began to flash in Tobin’s mind, replaying themselves like old home movies:

The first time he used his powers, standing next to Orion in Gallymoora, fighting off the Hoplites.

Laughing with Keplar in the museum’s training room, driving Orion crazy when they were both supposed to be practicing.

Staying up all night with Scatterbolt, as the robot did his best to teach the mathematically challenged Tobin to play 7-Card Stud, right until the early hours of the morning.

The car chase through the streets of Boston back in May, the night of his prom, when he had only just learned to drive the transforming Bolt Racer.

Meeting Adrianna.

Kissing Adrianna, in the hot spring in Zanatopia.

Getting to know Wakefield and Junior, in their repair shop in the Never-World, with all their crazy inventions and robotic machines.

And his father.

My god, his father.

Tobin’s greatest dream since he was five years old, the one that was the most impossible, had come true: he had met his father. And, no matter how brief their time had been together, Tobin cherished those few fleeting moments just as much as any other moment in his life, perhaps even more. As the boy lay there now, with the stars shining above him, he thought about his mom, and how much he wished he could have told her all about that moment—sharing with her what it was like to meet his father for the first time, and telling her everything they had spoke about.

Then, suddenly, the words of Tobin’s father rang through his ears.

“As crazy as it sounds, I grew to love times like that. When life kicks you in the teeth and sends you in a direction you had no idea you were going, and you have no idea how to get out? I love times like that. Because it’s times like that when you find out what human beings are really made of. You find out how strong you can be. Times like those? You find out you are capable of things you never could have imagined.”

Tobin’s eyes flashed open.

No.

He wouldn’t give up.

He couldn’t. Not now. Not ever. He would keep fighting. Like Orion and his father had taught him. He would keep fighting.

Gritting his teeth and groaning, Tobin rolled over onto his stomach. Pushing himself up by his arms, he rested there, with one knee on the ground and both his hands flat and pressed against the dirt.