The Rise of Renegade X (23 page)

“No bells are going off. Honestly. But since you brought it up, I’ve been doing a little Internet research. Dr. Kink is a biologist, not a … hypno-device maker. I think your problem with him is you might have gotten confused. It was probably a different Dr. Kink who wrote those articles and made the prototype.”

“We found it in his house.”

“Probably his cousin or a sibling, then. Or someone could have stashed it to make it look like it was his. Either way, I think you’ve got the wrong guy.”

Mom sighs. “You know, that’s very astute of you. Taylor and I, we were starting to think the same thing.”

Gordon’s phone rings. I hear him answer it in the kitchen with a groggy, “Hello?”

“So you’re going to let him go, right?”

“Damien, he’s not a lab rat. We can’t go around letting
everyone
go.”

“But, Mom, he’s not the right guy. He has a life to live, biology students to teach. Maybe he can still go back to that, if you didn’t mess him up too much.”

“I don’t know, Damien. His daughter knows where we kept him. It could be a liability.”

“But it’s already a liability then, so letting him go doesn’t change anything. Plus, what’s she going to do, go to the police? You can cover it up. Dr. Kink’s still a brilliant scientist. You wouldn’t want to kill off someone in the profession, would you?”

“Well …” I think I have her. “We’ll see.” Typical Mom answer. “You really don’t know this Sarah Kink girl?”

“Never heard of her.” I’m totally not on a two-month plan for getting into her pants. A plan she came up with, not me. I said I was going to choose the experiments, but that one can definitely stay.

“Are you sure? Because, if it was you last night—”

“It wasn’t! I was singing folk songs with my new family after eating dinner together, and then we all hugged for an hour. I was way too busy to break into Vilmore to find some guy I’ve never met with a girl I don’t even know.”

“Good, sweetie, because I remember the lab-rat incident, and I wouldn’t want to repeat it. Behavior like that isn’t conducive to making the history books as a first-rate supervillain, and it’s
not
going to turn your
X
into a V. Taylor and I have put a lot of work into this project, and if this girl is part of the puzzle—”

I miss what Mom says next because Gordon suddenly shouts from the kitchen, “What?! Dear God! No, I was about to go to work, but of course it can wait. This is serious.” He hangs up, runs his hands through his hair, and then marches up to me at the dining table.

“What was that, Mom? I couldn’t hear you. Someone wasn’t respecting my personal audio bubble—”

“Hang up,” Gordon says.

“Hold on,” I tell him.

“Damien, hang up the phone
now.”

“Is that man telling you what to do?” Mom says. “Because you tell him from me that he’s not going to order my son around!”

Gordon reaches over and rips my phone out of my hand and flips it shut. “Come on—let’s go.”

He tries to grab my wrist, but I pull away from him. “Oh no. Last time I went anywhere with you, you pushed me off a building. I’m staying put.”

“It’s an emergency.” Gordon motions for me to get out of the chair. “We need everyone we can get, even you.”

“Wow, even
me?
I’m so honored.” For the record, emergencies aren’t my thing. It was poor word choice on Gordon’s part, because he could have told me he wanted to take me out for ice cream or to get me my own puppy. Something he might imagine was pleasant and that I might conceivably go for. Dragging me out of the house at six in the morning to go to some emergency that I presume has nothing to do with me or anyone I care about? Try again.

“I’m not giving you a choice,” Gordon says. “I hate to do this the hard way, but we don’t have time to argue.” He lifts the back two legs of my chair off the ground and tilts it to one side, so I slide off. He grabs my arm so I don’t fall and drags me out to the car. “Come on, son—it’s time you found out what superheroes are really like.”

This big superhero emergency Gordon’s dragged me to at almost the crack of dawn is a burning apartment building. Four stories of spewing flames light up the dark morning. Clouds of black smoke fill the sky. Bystanders gather around the scene, sipping their lattes and pointing up at the building. The police motion for them to keep back, while the fire department and a couple of superheroes fight to stop the flames.

Gordon parks the car, badly, on the far side of the street and tears his seat belt off. I’m tempted to stay right here. What the hell is he thinking, bringing me to a dangerous scene like this? I’m all ready with my spiel about staying in the car, instead of getting within burning-to-death-range, but Gordon doesn’t say anything to me. He brought me here to help, or so he said, but he flings open the door and jumps out without closing it. He leaves the keys in the ignition. I’m surprised he turned the car off.

“I’m just going to stay here,” I mutter to no one. “No, it’s okay, you go ahead. I’ll watch.”

Gordon runs across the street
—not
looking both ways first, like he teaches kids on TV—and gets to work, only pausing to check with one of the firefighters. There’s a superhero with freeze breath using his power on the ground floor, but that doesn’t do anything for the upper stories. The firefighters hurry to get a ladder up, while Gordon takes to the air and zooms up the side of the building and into a fourth-story window. Another hero with super strength helps the firefighters with the hose. I watch as a couple others catch Gordon’s insanity and run inside the burning building.

If Gordon really wanted me to help, why’d he ditch me? Maybe when he got here, he decided I was a useless supervillain and the best thing to do was to get going before I could ask questions and get in the way.

Flames shoot out of the same window Gordon flew through only half a minute ago. My heart stops. I’ve only known the guy a couple weeks, and I
don’t
care that he’s technically my dad, but cold fear runs up and down my spine anyway and leaves me shaking. I fumble to get my seat belt off and think about how mad I am at my father. Who might be dead now. Thanks a lot, Gordon. You not only push me off a building, but you bring me to this gigantic bonfire so you can get yourself killed. Great. I suppose he expects me to deliver the news to his now-fatherless family, since I was a witness and everything.

I get out of the car and stumble across the street, dazed and silently cursing Gordon for getting me into this mess. I feel the heat from the fire, making me sweat as I get closer. He’d better not be dead. I haven’t paid him back enough for the whole flying-lesson thing. It’s only been a couple days—he hasn’t even discovered the worms in his shampoo yet.

I push my way to the front of the crowd. I try to move past, but a policeman holds his hand up, signaling for me not to come any closer. “Sorry, kid. You’d better stay back.”

“I’m with the Crimson Flash.” The words fall out of my mouth before I have time to remember I’m ashamed to be associated with him. “He’s my dad.”

The policeman looks me over. I can tell he’s about to say no anyway, when Gordon bursts out of a
third-story
window, carrying two small children. His face is smudged with ash and his cape’s a little tattered, but he’s alive. He sets the kids down, and a couple of paramedics rush to their aid. I picture what it would be like to be trapped high up in a fire, with no way to get down, and nothing to do but wait for the flames to kill you. My palms clam up and an overwhelming burst of terror jolts me into action. I push past the policeman and make a run for it. He moves to come after me, but Gordon motions that it’s okay.

The guy with the freeze breath is up on the ladder now, blowing ice into the second-story windows. He looks dizzy, like he’s been taking too many deep breaths. As I’m thinking that, he loses his balance and topples to the ground. He lands with a heavy thud. I imagine falling and feel like I’m going to throw up.

“Okay,” I tell Gordon, “I’m here.” He should be happy I got out of the car, and he didn’t even have to nag me about it. I’m doing what he brought me here for, unasked. “What do you want me to—”

He doesn’t stick around to tell me what to do, or even to say, “Oops, sorry I scared you, son, what with rushing into that burning building and all.”

As Gordon flies back into the building, I feel abandoned and alone. I’m standing in the middle of a bunch of commotion, because the Crimson Flash told a police officer it was okay for me to be past the line of ordinary citizens. He shouldn’t have done that. He shouldn’t have brought me here to help and then run off without telling me what to do. I stand here, getting in the way, utterly useless and totally overwhelmed by all of this. The flames crackle, and the crowd makes “ooh” and “aah” noises every time a superhero uses their power or drags a victim out of the burning building.

The freeze guy gets off the ground and climbs back up the ladder. One of his arms is bleeding and is bent funny. He doesn’t look any steadier than he did before, but that’s not stopping him.

There’s a loud crash, and then two more superheroes come running out of the apartment building. They’re empty-handed. They stop to catch their breath. Gordon zooms outside again, a cat clinging to his shoulder with all its claws, the end of his cape catching on fire as flames bust out another window. I guess he’s lucky if all he has to worry about is his cape and getting mauled by a housecat. He’s about to go in for more when a fireman stops him. I run over to them and hear something about the structure not being sound and it getting too dangerous. Gordon nods and joins the other superheroes. I trail after him like a lost puppy. I don’t know if he remembers I’m here.

“The kids think there’s one more in there,” a superhero in a bright green spandex outfit says. “Second story, but we couldn’t find them.” The front of his costume proclaims him ACE QUICKSPEED. Guess what his power is.

Gordon bites his lip. “Jeff tells me the building’s not sound. We can’t risk it. Not on a ‘maybe.’ When we get the flames out, we’ll send in a team—”

“So you’re going to let that kid die?!” This is me talking, and not one of the superheroes, like you’d expect.
I’m
a lousy, no-good villain, and I think they should go back in. They’re supposed to be the good guys, and they’re acting like letting some kid burn to death is okay. So much for superheroes being brave and, well,
heroes
.

All three of them stare at me. Like they didn’t notice I existed until this point. Even Gordon looks shocked by my presence. He scratches the side of his head.

“You can’t wait,” I tell him. “That kid’ll be dead by the time you get the fire out. Plus, the structure’s not getting any sounder.”

Gordon puts his hands on my shoulders. “Damien, listen, there’s nothing we can do. We don’t know if anyone’s still in there, the building’s about to collapse, and it’s likely whoever we send in won’t make it back out. If I knew for sure there was someone in there, that would be a different story, but as is …” He shakes his head.

I gape at him in shock. “You’re supposed to be a superhero! You can’t say that!”

“Damien, calm down. Sometimes these things happen.”

“But somebody could be trapped. What if it was ‘maybe’ Jessica in there, or Alex?” Or even Amelia. “Wouldn’t you want someone to save them?”

The three superheroes all share nervous looks.

“Is this what superheroes
really
do?” I ask. “Stand around whining about how dangerous it is?”

Gordon’s eyebrows come together. “I don’t like this part of the job any more than you do, but that’s how it is. Being a hero means having to make hard choices. Sometimes the hardest choices involve letting other people get hurt.”

“Don’t worry,” the other superhero mutters. He’s wearing a blue costume with a picture of a raindrop on the front. “The kid’s from a family of supervillains. Might do everybody more good if we don’t go in.”

I’m seriously the only one who reacts to that. Gordon says, “Damien, he didn’t mean it,” when my eyes go wide and I glare at the guy so hard, I think I might burn a hole through him even without laser eyes. But other than that, nobody says anything because nobody cares.

“That’s why you’re not going in?!” I shout. I might hate superheroes, and I might not be keen on rescue missions, but there’s no way I’m going to stand around not even trying. Gordon’s insanity must be hereditary, because I turn and run toward the burning building. The one that’s about to fall apart and that the superheroes are afraid to go into.

“Damien, no!” Gordon calls after me, but I barely hear him.

A blast of heat hits me in the face when I get close to the building. I ignore it and hurl myself through the open doorway. The heat’s overwhelming and smoke burns my lungs, choking me. I cough, and my eyes water, and it’s hot as hell in here, and I can’t tell where I’m going. Everything’s on fire. Beams from the ceiling have fallen down in places. One of them blocks the end of the hallway, but luckily not the stairs. They said second story. Great.

I gather up all my courage. There’s no time to worry about my phobia. I tell myself I’m probably going to die anyway, so it doesn’t matter. I feel sick all over and lightheaded as I force myself up the stairs. It’s only one set, just up to the second story, and then I’m home free. Still stuck inside a burning deathtrap, but now’s not the time to think about that. My lungs ache and I stop for a coughing fit. The stairs creak, and the boards a couple steps down from where I’m standing crack and fall, succumbing to the flames. It doesn’t take any more motivation than that to get my legs moving. I hurry the rest of the way to the second-story landing, ignoring the searing pain in my lungs.