Refraction Page 2

  “I believe we have one more battle report to discuss, don’t we, Catalyst?” He smiled.

  Max groaned silently and resisted the urge to put his head down on the table. He still had homework to do tonight.

  His mother stood.

  “Indeed,” she said, her voice smooth. “There was a tussle yesterday afternoon against Mr. Magnificent and the Crush. Thank you very much for bringing this important event to the attention of the League, Doctor.”

  She sat down.

  “Oh, please, you’re too modest,” Decay exclaimed over Alarum’s attempts at closing remarks. Max watched her sigh as she set her gavel down. “I’d say it was quite a significant battle, wouldn’t you?”

  “Our property damage fell into the lowest echelon of the League’s metrics,” Catalyst replied evenly, “so… no.”

  Max tensed, just slightly. His mom’s tone was never even when she was happy. She clearly didn’t want to explain their fight, and Decay was pushing her for a reason. Suddenly Max was grateful he hadn’t had time to talk to anyone and accidentally spill what his mom clearly felt was confidential.

  Decay somehow managed to smarm at them without moving a muscle. “You wouldn’t say you suffered any particular losses, for example?”

  Catalyst bared her teeth at him in a parody of a smile. “Mr. Magnificent… acquired the most recent iteration of our doomsday device.”

  Max glared as Decay smiled and hushed murmurs swept the room. The Verminator elbowed him in the ribs and chuckled as if they were in on some joke. Max swept his crumbs into the guy’s lap.

  “The League thanks you for your candor, Catalyst,” Decay said.

  Max rolled his eyes. That guy was such a dick.

  MAX’S MOTHER adjusted her binoculars with one hand, bracing herself against the tree trunk with the other. Max crouched in front of her on the sturdiest branch the bank parking lot had to offer.

  “Once we release the hounds,” she told him, “we’ll have about three minutes of confusion to unlock the main door. You hold the guards off outside while I unlock the vault elevator, hack the vault lock, and reclaim the doomsday device.”

  Max wobbled as his mom shifted. “What if there are guards at the vault doors?”

  “I’ll disable them, darling.”

  “But how are you going to get the doomsday device out of the vault?”

  Max’s mom sighed impatiently. “With the elevator, of course, dear.”

  “But—okay,” Max said, because sometimes you just didn’t have any options.

  “Oh… look, darling, don’t be nervous. You’ll do a great job with the guards up here. The hounds are top notch mechanical marvels.”

  “You built them this morning. In the kitchen.”

  “Exactly. Made with a mother’s love.” She sounded too satisfied for Max’s liking. “Now let’s go, chop-chop. And when the Goodmans get here… you know what to do,” she told him, her voice dark.

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Release the hounds!” she bellowed.

  She vaulted from the tree, leaving Max to scramble for the remote before it bounced to the ground. He jabbed the large red (and only) button on the box, clinging to the branch as his mother’s pack of oversized robot dogs stampeded toward the bank underneath him. Their large metal paws hit the asphalt in a cacophony of clangs, drowning out his mother’s battle cry. She met the first guard at the door with a flying roundhouse and grabbed the other in a chokehold on her landing.

  Max launched himself into the air as the hounds hit the next wave of guards. He looped above the melee a few times, waiting for Catalyst to slip through the bank doors before diving into the fray.

  He zipped between guards, distracting and disorienting where he could to let the hounds incapacitate them. His mother had been on a bit of a bender, he thought as he watched one dog spew a sticky net out of its mouth, catching an unsuspecting guard around the knees. Max swooped forward as he pitched toward the ground, snatching the rifle from the guard’s hands before it could clatter away. It definitely wouldn’t do for an armed gun to hit the ground and misfire into a crowd. Max and Catalyst were after a certain amount of publicity, it was true, but murder rarely generated the kind of attention that helped.

  Max dismantled the gun and tossed the pieces at a nearby hound, which chomped them from the air. The hound next to it had a guard pinned under one large paw and was drooling buckets of a sticky, clear gel onto his legs, effectively gluing him to the ground.

  Max made a face. His mother had a vivid imagination when left to her own devices.

  He was surveying the scene with his hands on his hips, the guards well in hand by the hounds—herding them away from the bank doors, if not completely incapacitating them—when a telltale thrum filled the air.

  Max turned to the sky, cape whipping behind him as a bright red and blue helicopter rose above the trees lining the parking lot. Even the hounds turned their heads to watch Mr. Magnificent and Crush leap from the helicopter and somersault a few stories to the ground.

  “Cease your dastardly plot, villain!” Mr. Magnificent boomed.

  Crush stood behind Mr. Magnificent, his blond hair glimmering as it waved heroically in the breeze. With the evening sunlight behind him, he seemed to glow like an angelic figure descended from the heavens.

  One of those wrathful, avenging war angels, maybe.

  Max swallowed, resisting the urge to tug at his costume. His skin felt tight, and he took a breath to gather himself. If Crush knew his secret identity, there was no need to keep it to himself. Had he told his father already? Was he going to out him publicly during the battle?

  “I’ll never surrender,” Max said with more conviction than he felt. “Not while you still have what’s ours.”

  He squared his shoulders and heard the hounds line up behind him, the clangclangclang of their support as ominous as it was gratifying.

  “Oh, have we got visitors?”

  Max spun to see his mother emerge from the bank, rolling the doomsday device in front of her like some kind of demonic shopping cart.

  “Catalyst, we meet again.” Crush’s dad sounded menacingly pleased, an odd combination for a superhero.

  “So thoughtful of you to join us. You really shouldn’t have!” she shouted, launching herself over the small cavalry of hounds in a straight shot at Mr. Magnificent.

  He sprinted toward her, charging like a blond, patriotic bull. They met in a crash of blows as the hounds sprang into action around them.

  Max dodged a hound, flipping over a guard who had extricated himself from the sticky mouth-web he’d been tangled in. A shoulder throw knocked the guard down long enough to be pinned again. Max spun back to the helicopter, but Crush was gone.

  The doomsday device! Max spun again to see Crush running toward the device, mere feet away, with Max’s mom too distracted to defend it.

  Max jumped in the air and shot forward, jetting close enough to the action to be clipped a few times by flying limbs and the occasional metal tail. He rolled with the hits, adding an extra burst of speed as Crush reached out to grab the device.

  Max caught him around the middle at full speed, lifting him off the ground with the force of it and shooting them both through the bank doors in a shower of glass shards. They barreled through the lobby, crunching through the glass as they rolled over each other with a series of painful bounces.

  Gritting his teeth, Max reaffixed his grip, knowing he had to get them off the ground again before he lost momentum if he had any hope of keeping Crush out of the fight. He pushed off with his toes and rocketed them through the large glass walls on the other side of the lobby, Crush shouting and covering his head as they broke through.

  God, Crush was heavy. Max practiced flying with sandbags, but Crush had thirty pounds on him at least, and sandbags didn’t try to punch him in the teeth when he carried them through the air. He tossed Crush a bit, grabbing him in a bear hug to cut down on his reach. He swore as Crush kicked him in the shins instea
d.

  “You are such an inconvenience!” Max raged into the wind.

  “I ate icing on a dress!” Crush shouted back, or maybe “I’m placing you under arrest!” It was hard to hear at this speed.

  “Stop kicking!” Max shouted and zipped up above the tree line. Maybe if Crush didn’t want to be dropped three stories, he’d stop trying to disable his pilot.

  Crush shouted incomprehensibly.

  “Ugh, finally,” Max muttered two blocks later. He spun them in several tight spirals, then swung to the right and dumped Crush onto a wide, flat roof.

  He shackled Crush to the brick while the hero was still reeling and dizzy, looping the heavy chains around the above ground stairwell walls several times. Max may have been a supervillain, but he made it a point not to underestimate his opponents.

  “Where are we?” Crush muttered, voice muzzy. Max crouched in front of him—several arm’s lengths away—and watched him try to focus his vision.

  “A taquería.”

  “A wha—why?” Crush yanked at his shackles, but the chains held firm (thank God).

  Max pursed his lips, feigning confusion. “I thought you wanted a snack.”

  “Let me out! There’s a battle to fight!”

  “No can do,” Max said. “Orders are orders, even for a supervillain.”

  “In training,” Crush muttered, which frankly was rude and uncalled for.

  “Look, I don’t want to be here anymore than you do,” Max snapped. “You think I don’t have better things to do? Maybe if I were fighting with Mom instead of babysitting your dumb ass we could get our device back and move on with our lives.”

  Crush grinned. “So you don’t think she’ll get it back.”

  “Be real,” Max grumbled. “You’ve kept us from running this city for a decade. There’s no reason to think it’ll change now.”

  “So why do you bother, then?” Crush pushed. “Why fight if you know you’re going to lose?”

  “Because some things are worth fighting for,” Max snapped, springing to his feet. “I’m out of here. Hope the pigeons don’t crap on your head.”

  He threw his cape over his shoulder and vaulted off the roof, leaving Crush yelling behind him.

  MAX WAS a live wire the next day at school. Crush hadn’t mentioned anything about Max’s identity during the battle and subsequent abduction. He hadn’t outed Max, or covertly threatened him, or even looked at him with a knowing gleam in his eye. He hadn’t responded to Max’s opening about having a life, which even an amateur superhero should have jumped on as a prime dialoguing opportunity.

  Max had gone into the battle expecting to have his future destroyed, one way or another, but he’d come out even more off-balance than he’d been before. It just didn’t make sense. Was Crush keeping silent to throw Max off his game, to trip him up? Or was he going to use it as leverage to try to blackmail Max into betraying his mother? Was there some other reason he’d been talking to Max? Max’s mind spun with possibilities.

  Crush cornered him by his locker after second period.

  “I think the only time I’ve ever seen you smile is during physics,” Crush said, which was odd because Max had just come from Brit. lit.

  “I smiled when Hendricks tripped in a hole at practice,” Max heard himself say.

  Crush laughed—a bright, surprising sound. He immediately looked guilty. “Some manager you are. He could have twisted his ankle.”

  Max shrugged. “We have a second string for a reason. As long as the right number of people hit the field on time, my job is done.”

  “I’ll walk you to class.” Crush nudged Max in the right direction, and Max abruptly recalled that he was in school and had things to do other than stand around making inane conversation. And apparently Crush knew he had geography with Blake next. His terror reared its head again—had Crush been spying on him? To what end?—but Crush seemed happy enough to just walk beside him serenely.

  He never had to push anyone when walking with Crush, Max noticed. People just gave them enough space naturally, as though parted by the charisma of Crush’s gleaming hair. What a charmed life heroes must lead.

  “So… do anything interesting last night?” Max asked, because eventually there’s nothing left to do but carpe diem and all that. If Crush was going to arrest him, Max wanted him to just get on with it.

  To his surprise, Crush flushed.

  “I guess you watched the news?” Crush asked.

  Max nodded dumbly, even though he hadn’t. There wasn’t much need to watch the nightly news when you were the nightly news.

  “Just run of the mill business. I’m still not used to it,” Crush confided. “I’ve been working for a few years, and it still feels weird that people know what I’ve been doing outside of school.”

  Max made some kind of assenting noise, torn between outrage at being called “run of the mill” in any context and hilarity at the idea of Crush “working,” as though he were bussing tables instead of battling the most dangerous villains the country had to offer.

  Crush left him at Mr. Blake’s doorway with a slightly chagrinned wave, and Max puzzled over the encounter all the way until lunch, when Crush dropped his tray next to Max’s without warning or invitation.

  “Meatloaf is my favorite,” Crush told him.

  Max absorbed this piece of information thoughtfully, as though he could slot it in with all the other facts he knew about Crush and suddenly the hero would make sense. It didn’t work.

  His life didn’t get any less surreal as the day went on. Crush was everywhere, popping up in the corners of his vision, smiling at him in the hallways, waving at him through classroom windows. Was the wave secretly menacing or genuinely friendly? Was the next corner Max turned going to send him straight into the Crush’s fist? Did Crush seriously have no idea who Max was?

  Because, really, Max went to great lengths to conceal his identity, and he’d have to do it until he finished college if he wanted any kind of formal education. His suit was designed to cover him from head to toe—the hood covered his whole head and his eyes were covered by a reflective fiberglass pane. He’d even built in some superfluous shoulder padding to make himself look a little less Max-shaped to anyone watching footage frame by frame.

  Somehow he was still offended that Crush wasn’t even suspicious. Crush and Mr. Magnificent were, unfortunately, the center of Max’s world every moment he wasn’t in school. Was it possible that Max and his mom were such an insignificant blip on Crush’s radar that the heroes had never even bothered trying to track down their identities?

  The thought annoyed Max, even though he should be praying it was true. Of course, he also had to consider the worst—that Crush had figured out who he was last night and was going to use it against Max. He should probably go to his mom, but she had enough on her plate trying to get the device back from Mr. Magnificent. Her life might be easier if Max didn’t have to spend so much time at school instead of helping her do anything useful… the least he could do was figure this part out on his own. All he had to do was let Crush follow him around all day and let him get close enough to catch him in a lie.

  And Max had to remember that Crush was his enemy.

  IT WAS infinitely frustrating fighting against a guy who didn’t know Max was who he was when he was also following him around like a lost puppy at school all day. To be honest it was throwing Max for an emotional loop, and he didn’t think anyone would judge him for being a little short-tempered about it.

  It was just awkward to be showered with attention and smiles for eight hours a day and then turn around and get dangled off the edge of a high-rise by the same person.

  “This is really dumb, you know,” he choked, trying to work his fingers into Crush’s grip around his neck. “I can fly.”

  “Yeah? So fly!” Crush heaved and threw Max at an unassuming pigeon.

  “Ow!” Max tumbled through the air, taking a feathered beating to the face as the bird shrieked and bounced off him. />
  The ground was a blur below him (stories and stories and stories below him) as he flipped himself right side up and spun around in time to see Crush disappear back into the building. Max gritted his teeth and zipped across the patio railing after him.

  It was mayhem inside the forty-third floor—his mother and Mr. Magnificent throwing each other around the room in an all out brawl, as usual. A renegade chair arced through the air, and Max threw himself at the ground, only flinching a little bit when it shattered on the floor behind him.

  Where was—there! Max jumped to his feet and vaulted across the room, out into the hallway after Crush, who was racing toward the emergency exit stairway. Max dashed after him.

  He couldn’t let Crush block the way to the doomsday device. Max could tell his mom was getting desperate—she’d doubled her efforts to track the Goodmans and find out where they’d stashed the device this time. It was like there was some kind of deadline she hadn’t told Max about, and it was making him nervous.

  She’d had a breakthrough yesterday. A little electronic B&E had revealed that after the bank, Mr. Magnificent had moved it to a private security firm—this one. It was much harder to break into than a bank, because while banks catered to many types of people, private security catered only to Very Important People.

  The Goodmans had stalled Max and his mom on the upper levels, and now odds were Crush was going to hook up with the firm’s reinforcements to blockade any routes to the basement.

  Not on Max’s watch, though.

  He reached into his utility belt and pulled out his bola, swinging it quickly to build momentum before letting fly. It spun, whiplike, before catching Crush around the knees. He toppled into the wall in the most satisfying collision Max had ever orchestrated.

  “Wow, you look like a huge dork,” Max commented happily as Crush reached down and ripped his bola apart. That was going to be a little annoying to replace, but getting to watch Crush fall was worth it.