The Rise of Renegade X (2 page)

“Oh, good, I’m glad you feel that way, because there was never anything between me and Kat. Not
really
. We were just friends, and now I’m seeing this new girl, Vanessa, and she’s great. Not that Kat isn’t, you know, great, ’cause she is. It’s too bad you and me, all three of us, couldn’t still be friends, you know?”

“Yes, it is.” I take out a long, thin piece of paper, the kind you might put a grocery list on, that I’d rolled up into a little tube and stuffed under the band of my goggles. I unroll it and hold it out to him. “You know what this is?”

He squints at it. It’s hard to read in the dark party hall, and the disco ball only makes it worse.

“This is my list, Pete.” My list of people who need “dealing with,” to put it lightly. Nobody messes with me and gets away with it. Well, except maybe Kat. Not talking to her for months was getting off easy. I was going to put her name on my list, I really was, but at first I was too depressed to bother. Then I kept putting it off, and then we were talking again, and then … we were friends, and I didn’t have the heart. It just worked out that way. It’s not like I’m a sucker for her or anything.

I point to the name at the top of the list, where it says
Pete Heath
. “And here’s you.”

Pete knows all about my list, and his eyes go wide behind his glasses. “Damien, I told you, I’m sorry.”

“It’s too late.”

“It’s never too late—”

“No, really, it is.” I sigh. “I laced your invitation with a little something Mom concocted.”

“What, moonshine?”

“No.”
I roll up the list and stuff it back under the band of my goggles. “I hope you washed your hands after you touched it. I hope you didn’t, say, go to the bathroom or anything. Or eat. That would be just awful.”

“What?!” Pete bites his nails, a nervous habit, then pulls his hands away from his mouth like they’re diseased.

I take my cell phone out of my pocket—I hate keeping anything in my pockets in this skintight supervillain costume; it’s revealing enough as it is without any extra bulges—and check the time. Fifteen minutes till midnight. “Let’s see, you probably picked up your mail about noon … and you knew it was my birthday, and you knew the invitation was from me. So … quarter after twelve? That accounts for enough time for you to stew over what happened last year before deciding to open it.” I tap my fingers against the side of the phone. “I’d say you’ve got half an hour to get home before the ugliest, itchiest rash you’ll ever have bursts to life on your skin.” I wiggle my fingers at him for emphasis. “Lots of pustules. It should last about two weeks.” I grin as pure terror spreads across his face. “Oh, and Pete? I’d bind my hands if I were you. To keep from scratching, especially
down there.”
I nod toward his crotch. “You wouldn’t want to scar or get infected.”

Pete gapes again. He looks at his arms like he’s got bugs crawling all over him. I see him scratch, but it’s only because I’ve creeped him out. I know it doesn’t itch yet. Mom’s good at what she does. If her concoctions are known for anything, it’s for being consistent and precise: same results every time.

Pete swears at me, tells me to do something with my mother that I most certainly will
not
be doing, then storms off, flailing and cursing. “Bye,” I call after him, giving him a little wave. “So glad you could make it.”

I check the time on my phone again before stuffing it in my pocket. I look down at the embarrassing bulge it leaves on my hip, like I have a weird growth or something. I need to get one of those gadget belts, so I can put my high-tech supervillain gizmos in it. You know, like my cell phone.

Kat creeps back after Pete leaves. “What’d you say to him?”

“Nothing.”

She bites her lip. “Damien, I’m
so
sorry … about last year and … everything.” She leans in close. She looks up at me, and there’s a moment where we gaze at each other, like in the movies. I’m considering kissing her for the first time in a year, even though I know it’s a bad idea, when she pokes at my eye through the goggles and says, “What the hell’s wrong with you? You look like an insect.”

“All the cool kids are wearing them.” I back away, so I’m not standing within lip-touching range. “I guess you’re not cool.”

I hold out my wrist and check the watch I’m not wearing and head for the stage. “Time for the Midnight Marvel.”

Kat grabs my arm. She pulls me back to her. “Damien, wait … I—”

I push up the goggles, so we’re actually looking in each other’s eyes this time.

Her forehead wrinkles, and her bottom lip trembles, and she looks like she wants to say something serious. Then she sighs and says, “I wanted to wish you happy birthday.”

Before I can respond, sparkling lights shimmer to life onstage. Mist pours out across it, and the loudest version of “Happy Birthday” I’ve ever heard blares through the room. I shove my goggles back into place. I take my cell phone out and give it to Kat to hold. No embarrassing bulges for the camera. These people have paid to see a show, but not enough for
that
kind of show. I stand up straight and salute her before heading backstage.

To get on the stage, you have to go up a set of stairs. There are only about ten steps, but it’s enough to send my stomach lurching and my heart pounding. I might not know what my superpower is yet, but I certainly have my weakness down. I hate heights, and anything that takes me off solid ground.

I tell myself it’s only a couple of steps, it’s not worth freaking out over, and especially not when I’m expected onstage to live out one of the most important moments in my entire
life
. I sweat on my way up, but my internal pep talk works, and before I know it I’m safe on the back side of the stage and my heart rate returns to normal. Thankfully there are curtains separating me from the audience, so no one but me had to witness my struggle.

The crowd cheers when I make my appearance on the stage, my face over three feet tall on the big screens. I raise my arms up, and they cheer even louder. I grab the microphone. My voice echoes through the giant hall. “Hey, Golden City!” That one gets me some whistles. These people are all from out of town, from cities all across the U.S., and maybe even other continents—I think I saw a Japanese tourist or two when I was making my rounds—but they like to feel like they’re part of the
real
Golden City and not just the museums and guided walking tours. “For those of you who’ve never been to one of these, you’re about to witness the most spectacular transformation in your life. At the stroke of midnight, my body will fulfill the role laid out for it by the wonders of genetics, sealing my fate as the Midnight Marvel.”

Except it’s science, not destiny, despite what my cheering audience would like to believe. When the whorls on my thumb rearrange themselves tonight to form a
V
, it’s because way back when, some scientist did experiments on the differences between supervillains and superheroes. It turns out we’re similar in a lot of ways—like, you know, we’re both
super
and everything—but there are also distinct differences in our DNA. Enough so this scientist guy could make a virus that affected only villains. In an effort to “bell the cat,” so to speak, he worked out this genetic alteration for supervillains and spread it amongst the populace, outing anyone with supervillain ancestry.

Big surprise, some villain scientists got together and retaliated, making a second strain that affects heroes, giving them an
H
. They also started Vilmore way back in the day, to support the education of the best and brightest villains, so we could always fight back against crap like that. Mom says we’re related to one of them, and that’s why she became a scientist, but I have yet to ask my grandparents to confirm this.

There’s one other letter possibility, if the two virus strains mix, but heroes and villains don’t exactly hook up a lot, so it’s only happened a couple times.
If
those stories about kids getting “the third letter” are even true and not urban legends. It’s always supposedly happened to someone’s cousin’s friend or whatever. Not to anybody anyone actually
knows
.

And then, of course, there are also plenty of ordinary citizens in Golden City, and they get squat for their sixteenth birthdays and can only hope to get invited to a really cool party like this one.

But as I said, my thumbprint changing into a
V
tonight isn’t destiny, it’s the result of Marianna Locke losing her cool for some guy sixteen years and nine months ago. It’s not even a marker of how great a villain I’ll be, or that I’ll be able to make a career out of it. I’m going to have to work hard to do well at Vilmore and turn myself into a successful, front-page-worthy villain.

“Can I hear a ‘happy birthday’?” I ask the crowd.

They scream it back at me in a wide range of accents. A clock appears on the big screens. 11:59.
Tick, tick, tick
, it counts down the seconds. This beats New Year’s any day. My heart pounds. My whole body’s going to explode. The cameras zoom in on my thumb.

The clock changes to 12:00. I feel a wave of relief—this is it—and watch as my thumbprint changes …
not
into a
V
. I blink, hoping my eyes aren’t working right under the stage lights. But no. My stomach churns with horror. There’s a letter on my thumb all right, but it’s not a
V
. It’s not an H, either—it’s something even worse. I quickly hide my thumb in my fist. My nerves tingle.
This can’t be happening. This doesn’t happen to real people
. The lights pouring down on me suddenly feel really hot. I sweat underneath my costume, and it starts to itch.

The audience is still waiting for their moment, the people in the front rows looking at me, everyone else staring up at the screens, wondering why I’m not giving them the show they paid for. A murmur runs through the crowd as I pretend to be sick, stumbling off backstage behind the curtains. It’s not hard to fake. Maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me, since I was so nervous. I double over in case anyone’s watching and try to work up the courage to examine my hand.

Kat’s the first one to run after me. She skids to a stop, misjudging the distance between us, and practically falls over on top of me. “Damien, what happened? You okay?”

“No,” I say, clutching my stomach. “I shouldn’t have eaten the shrimp.” I fake gag to prove my point. My stomach really is a mess, though, and if I pretend much more, it’s going to turn into the real thing.

Kat steps back.

If I’m right about what I saw, I can’t go back out there. I promised these people a show, and they’re going to get pretty pissed if they paid ten bucks for nothing. My mind races, wondering what the hell I’m going to do, when I remember Kat’s a shapeshifter.

“You have to be me,” I croak.

She nods and works her magic. That’s one of the great things about Kat—she doesn’t ask questions when I’m in trouble, she just helps out and gets things done. There’s a shimmer, and then it’s
me
nodding. Well, almost me.

“Your … nose is …” I fake another heave. “Crooked.”

But she doesn’t listen. She straightens her new insect goggles and hurries back onstage. I hear the crowd liven up, and by the extra loud applause and cheering, I take it Kat’s given them the show they wanted. She can change her looks at will, so no one has to know her thumb transformed four months ago—she could make a living off of stupid tourists with that trick.

I relax as much as I can in this situation. My hands tremble. I feel dizzy, like I’m looking out the window from a ten-story building. I hold my thumb out, willing it to have changed into a
V
. It hasn’t. On my thumb is an
X
. A big fat stupid X! I feel the vomit rising in my throat as that sinks in. I’m shaking all over and I think my heart is going to stop. And that’s when I know I’m tainted. The third letter isn’t just an urban legend. I have
both
strains of the virus, and there’s only one way that could have happened.

Mom, who has a lot of explaining to do, tromps backstage, out of breath. “Damien!” she wheezes. Her high-heeled boots make loud clomping noises on the floor. She puts a hand on my back. “Sweetie, what happened?”

“I don’t know,” I say, glaring at her with my thumb in her face. “You tell me.”