Stronger: A Super Human Clash (27 page)

“I wanted to be the world’s greatest con man,” Lance said, and then he smiled. “I wanted to be so good that no one would ever know about me. You read about con men getting found out after years of tricking people out of their money, but if they got caught, they can’t have been that good at it. I bet there are lots of guys out there ripping people off and no one will ever know.”

“So you wanted to be a villain.”

Lance lay down on top of a pile of rubber mats. “Ah, now you’re sounding like Thunder. What if I was the sort of con man who stole only from bad guys and then donated the money to charity?”

“The Robin Hood trick. Stealing from the rich to give to the poor. Yeah, it’s still wrong.”

Lance shrugged and said, “Meh. It’s not as wrong as ripping off little old ladies. And at the risk of annoying Max, who’s probably listening in right now, it’s not as wrong as using the ability to read minds so that you can make a fortune in the stock market. Or however he did it. There’s only so much money in the world, so every time some guy makes it rich, you could say that he’s stealing from everyone else.” Lance frowned for a second. “And here’s another one … The world’s population is growing all the time, but the amount of money stays the same. So with every new birth the average person gets poorer. Babies are stealing from us.”

I laughed. “Man, you really need to find yourself a hobby! This is the sort of thing you think about all the time?”

“Sometimes. What about you? What sort of madness occupies
your
enormous brain?”

“I want to be human,” I said, and it struck me that this was probably the first time I’d said that aloud. But I couldn’t stop myself. “I want to be average sized, and not blue. I’d like to be able to walk through a crowd and not have anyone notice me.”

“Do you think that’s even possible?”

“Casey seems to think it might be, someday.”

Lance nodded slowly. “Ah … Yeah, he tried the same thing on me. Didn’t work, though. I could see what he was up to. It’s an old con-man trick. You want someone to believe something, you say just enough so that the mark fills in the rest for himself. That way he doesn’t think he’s being manipulated. All you really need to con someone is to know what they want most in life. Usually money. But you have to make it credible. You don’t tell someone that if they invest a thousand dollars
in your scheme, they can make a million. You tell them they can make fifteen hundred. Much more realistic. If you do it the first way, then when it doesn’t work, he thinks that he’s lost a million bucks. The second way he thinks that he’s lost only fifteen hundred.”

“But you can’t lose what you never had,” I said.

“True, but that’s not the way people think. And then you can go back to the mark and extract more money out of him. You know what a Ponzi scheme is? That’s where you set up a bogus investment company. You get people to invest a hundred bucks and tell them that they can earn twice that in six months. So six months later, you send them a letter saying that their money has doubled. You tell them they can have the two hundred bucks if they want it, or they can leave it with you and in another six months it’ll be worth
four
hundred. See how it works? Almost no one ever takes out their money. And if they do decide they want it, then you just pay them out of all the money other people have invested. In the meantime, all the money is sitting in your bank account earning
real
interest. See, Casey could have told you that he can
definitely
change you back to human. That’s what you want, so there’d be a part of you that thinks it’s too good to be true. But instead he told you that it
might
be possible …”

“Which I’m much more inclined to believe.”

“Right. Your trust is the investment in Casey’s scheme, and he can keep stringing you along for years with the promise that the payoff will be you becoming human, but the truth is, all he’ll be doing is using you.”

“Wow. Yeah, you could be right.” I allowed myself to topple
back off the vaulting horse onto the floor. “Remember when the only thing we had to worry about was homework? I miss that.”

“Homework
and
girls,” Lance said.

“Not me. I was only twelve when I changed. Girls still had cooties back then.”

Lance laughed. “You know, you’d think with all the advances in medicine that someone would have found a cure for cooties by now!”

From the doorway, Roz Dalton said, “They’ve cured girl cooties but not boy cooties.” She walked into the room. “What have you guys been doing all day?”

“As little as possible,” Lance said.

“Well, Abby and Thunder are on the way. Max said we need to start training together. You included,” Roz said to Lance. She grabbed one of the ropes and climbed up, hand over hand, without using her legs, then called down, “Your turn, Lance.”

“He can’t,” I said. “He tried earlier.”

Lance gave me a look that said, “Don’t tell her that!”

“Hit the weights, then,” Roz called down. She was holding on to the rope with one hand, and concentrating hard. “Brawn … Drag those mats over, will you? Just in case I can’t do it.”

“What are you
trying
to do?” Lance asked as I pulled the pile of rubber mats over to Roz and dumped them on the floor beneath her.

“This.” Roz let go of the rope, and for a second she remained in place, then wavered and dropped.

I caught her and lowered her to the mats.

“Thanks. Lance, the weights. I’m serious. You need to work out.”

Lance grumbled. “But they’re too heavy!”

“Start with the lightest and work your way up,” I said. I walked over to the large rack of weights and bars and picked the whole thing up. “Where do you want them?”

“Show-off!”

I managed to persuade Lance to try the weights by betting he couldn’t even lift
any
of them, and when Thunder and Abby arrived, he was lying on the bench grunting his way through a twenty-rep set. Max followed them into the gym.

“OK,” Max said. “What did we learn on yesterday’s mission? We learned that we need to keep in top physical condition in case someone else finds a way to nullify our powers. So when the Rangers get back tomorrow, they’ll build a personalized training plan for each of you. In the meantime, Roz will keep you on your toes.”

“What about you?” Lance asked. “Don’t you have to train too?”

“I already
have
a personal trainer.” Max looked at his watch. “It’s almost seven now. I’ll check in on you at nine. No slacking off.”

When the doors closed behind him, Lance said, “If we had a TV in here, we could watch movies while we worked out.”

“How’d you persuade your mom to let you go?” I asked Abby.

“Max gave me a code phrase to use on her. He said it’s like hypnosis. This evening when Ox turned up at the door, all I
had to do was say the code phrase to Mom and tell her I’d be away for a few days.”

“Same here,” Thunder said. “Used it on Rufus and he was all, OK, sure, whatever you say. Man, I wish I’d always had that.”

“Rufus?” Lance asked. “It’s always weird when people call their parents by their first names.”

Thunder didn’t look happy at that. “He’s
not
my dad. He’s my stepdad. You want to know what happened this morning? I was out for a few hours, and when I was on the way back, I could hear Shiho—my little sister—playing in the driveway. She’s seven, small for her age. I could tell from the sound of her breathing that she’d been crying, so I ran the rest of the way. I saw her sitting on the gravel beside Rufus’s car. She had a plastic beaker of water beside her, and she was dipping an old toothbrush into it and using it to scrub the car’s tires. As soon as she saw me, she burst into tears again and said, ‘It was my own fault—don’t be mad!’”

Abby said, “I
knew
there was something bothering you. What happened?”

“She was playing in the drive, you know, running around like kids do, and she skidded to a stop next to the car and some of the gravel sprayed up and hit the car’s fender.”

“Wait,” I said. “He was punishing her for that by making her wash the tires with a
toothbrush
?”

“Not just the tires. The whole car.”

“I see. You’re gonna have to introduce me to him someday.”

“Thanks, but it’s sorted out now.”

“What did you do?” Abby asked.

“Picked her up, carried her inside, and told her to go wash up, and that I’d take her to the park. Of course she panicked because she knew Rufus would go mad.” Thunder shrugged, then smiled. “He won’t be punishing her like that again.”

“
What
did you do?” Abby repeated.

“I told him what I thought of him. First time I ever spoke out to him. He swung a punch at me.”

I said, “Well, I hope you hit him back.”

“No, but I ducked and his fist hit the corner of the kitchen cabinet.”

The rest of us went “Ouch!” at the same time.

“Never thought a white guy could go pale so quickly. He was practically
green
. My mom had to take him to the ER.” Thunder took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Man, he’s
not
gonna be happy next time he tries to start his car and finds out what I did to it.”

“What did you do?” Lance asked. “Glue the wipers to the windshield? Hide a dead fish under the seat? I know, you put a bunch of stink bombs into the air vents, right?”

“No, I put four handfuls of gravel into the gas tank.”

Lance and I thought that was hilarious, but Abby and Roz weren’t so sure. “He’s going to go crazy,” Abby said.

Thunder nodded. “Yep. It’s going to cost him a fortune.”

Eventually, Roz decided that she was in charge, so we had to stop chatting and start working out. Lance and Thunder took turns with the weights, with me spotting them. Even though Thunder was only slightly less skinny than Lance, he could lift almost twice as much, and I could see from his build that he was going to be big.

Roz and Abby thought it would be a good idea to fence. Roz had taken lessons and knew how to use a foil. She showed Abby a few moves, which Abby tried to copy using her own homemade sword. That was cut short when Abby took a playful swing at Roz’s very expensive foil and sliced it in two.

We spent the best part of two hours in the gym, mostly working out but occasionally goofing off.

The dynamic between the other four was fascinating to watch. Thunder seriously had the hots for Abby, but she wasn’t interested. Roz kept asking Thunder to help her with stuff, so I figured that maybe she had a crush on him. Lance also had a thing for Abby, but I could tell he was holding back. At the time, I thought it was because he didn’t think he had a chance against Thunder, and it was years before I realized the truth.

But that was a good evening. When Max finally decided that we could stop, we sent Thunder out for eight pizzas—one each for the others and four for me—and then we spent the rest of the night lying on the mats in the gym and telling jokes.

These guys were my friends. They fully accepted me as one of them even though I was so different. That feeling of belonging was worth more to me than I have ever been able to express.

The only thing that spoils the memory is that other feeling that I tried to keep buried, the ugly sensation that lurked in the pit of my stomach: the knowledge that this would probably be the last time all five of us would be together as friends.

Because I was about to betray them.

THE YIELD FROM THE PLATINUM MINE
had been steady for months. This kept Hazlegrove happy, so he left us alone.

I had almost regained my strength—and was back on sixteen-hour days, which at first seemed like a luxury—when I was summoned to the guards’ office. “You get to go outside, Brawn,” DePaiva said. “You’re getting a visitor.”

“Who?”

“No idea. Hazlegrove is waiting at the helipad. He told me to tell you the usual about not trying to escape.”

The guards at the doors opened them for me, and for a brief moment I felt important. Then I was outside, shielding my eyes against the sun. The mine’s dome had plenty of windows—no glass in them, of course—so I’d seen outside often enough, but this was the first time I’d been out since my stint in the hot box two years earlier.

Hazlegrove was standing with his arms folded on the edge of the helipad. “Someone’s come to pick your brains.”

“Bit rude not making an appointment,” I said.

“Hmph. I don’t know who this man is or what he wants, but someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to get him access to this place.”

A few minutes later we saw it, a black helicopter cruising low over the mountains.

“No markings,” Hazlegrove said. “So it’s not military.”

The copter touched down and its hatch slid open. A young man wearing jeans and a T-shirt jumped out and strode over to us. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen. He had close-cropped blond hair and a slim build. “Thomas Hazlegrove?” he asked.

“That’s me. Who’re you?”

“I’ll just need a few minutes of your prisoner’s time.”

“I
asked
you who you are,” Hazlegrove said.

The young man reeled off a long list of numbers. “Recognize that?”

“Should I?”

“That’s the number of the Swiss bank account where you deposit the money you’ve earned by selling the nickel you’ve stolen from this mine. If you don’t want your warden to know about that, you’ll do yourself a favor and walk away right now.”

Hazlegrove nodded, then turned and left.

The young man looked up at me. “Brawn. Walk with me.” He began to stride toward the north side of the dome. “I need your help with something.”

I walked alongside him. “Yeah? Well, first you have to tell me where we are.”

“You don’t know? We’re in Lieberstan, formerly part of the USSR. Sandwiched between Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, and China. Now, assuming the past nine years in this place haven’t eroded your memory, I need you to tell me everything—”

“Nine years? It’s really been that long?”

“It has. I need to know everything about Ragnarök.”

“And what’ll you do for me?”