Refraction Read online

  Across the courtyard Decay shouted, “Curse you all! You’ll regret this!” He screamed furiously as the police chief shoved him into the back of a cruiser.

  “That man has no style,” Catalyst sighed.

  “Seriously, bring the device in and muscle it to the platform? Completely uninspired. This was the perfect opportunity for the pianist and the hot air balloon,” Max agreed. “He didn’t even bring in acrobats.”

  Crush laughed. His face was streaked with dirt, and he had the beginnings of a black eye. “Lucky for us, even the least flashy villain can still be counted on to talk himself into defeat.”

  Wait a minute. Max turned to Crush suspiciously. “Are you saying you set us up to monologue at each other long enough for you to quietly take down the security team and then Decay while he was still explaining his master plan to us?”

  Crush spread his hands. “You’re welcome.” He winked.

  Max sputtered helplessly. Unbelievable! The attitude!

  Mr. Magnificent crossed his arms proudly. “Well, that’s a job well done, team,” he announced.

  Catalyst leaned against the helibot as it loaded the doomsday device into its bay. “And he didn’t even find the internal anterior emergency switch.”

  Mr. Magnificent blinked. “You built an emergency switch?”

  “Just in case things got serious!” she protested.

  Crush laughed nervously. “Well, you built a kill switch too, right?”

  Catalyst coughed and Max cringed. “That was on our next round of design improvements.”

  That definitely was not something they had done. It’s not like they thought he’d ever actually get through the initialization sequence in the first place to need one!

  “We should head home,” Catalyst said. “The police are happy to leave us alone for now, but I wouldn’t count on that for long. You two would be smart to do the same. You heroes might not seem quite as heroic as before.” She eyed the news helicopters overhead pointedly.

  Mr. Magnificent nodded and grasped Crush’s shoulder. “We stand by our decision and our convictions. We hope the public will understand our actions.”

  Doubtful. Max tugged at his belt nervously. “Hey, Mom, maybe we could give them a ride home. Just this once. Because, you know… traffic. Lots of law enforcement. And we have a helicopter. We shouldn’t take any chances, is all I’m saying.”

  His mom looked around. The police holding crowds of bystanders behind tape, the wail of sirens approaching—the nervous glances everyone was shooting at them. All four of them.

  “All right,” she said. “Just this once. Into the back with you. Head and hands stay inside the vehicle, and don’t touch any buttons.”

  MONDAYS GOT a bad rap sometimes. The death of a weekend, the onset of tedium and monotony. A no-good, very bad day waiting to happen. Napoleon’s squire once cost the French army five hundred men when he let half the army’s horses escape the night before the Russians attacked (on a Monday).

  Max’s was going pretty well, though.

  He kicked his ankles idly against the side of the building he was perched on, his bag of chips crinkling as he fished through the broken bits. The sun blazed down on him, warming his shoulders beneath the crisp breeze you could never escape at the top of an office building.

  “Chip?” He held the bag out to Crush, who grabbed it and upended the remains into his mouth with an obnoxious grin.

  “Thanks,” Crush said, spitting crumbs everywhere like a heathen and ignoring Max’s groan.

  “Why am I even here?” Max complained. “The company is atrocious.”

  Crush leaned over, pressing his shoulder to Max’s. “The view is pretty good, though.”

  “I—uh—” Max sputtered, his face heating as Crush started to laugh.

  “I meant that,” he said, gesturing at the street, where twenty stories below them CEO Wayne Sheffield was being taken into federal custody pending an investigation of his company records. Max had read he was facing charges of fraud, conspiracy to commit murder, and treason. If they were lucky, he’d face the UN for biological warfare.

  “I mean….” Crush said, leaning in again, “I meant both. But right then—look, look, they knocked his head on the car door!” He laughed again, jostling Max as he pointed.

  Max sighed happily, watching the police cruiser take off with Sheffield slumped in the backseat—no doubt weighed down by defeat, regret, and the judgment of an entire metropolis.

  “I, um, I feel kind of weird about luring you to the dark side,” Max said after a moment. “Are you doing okay with that?”

  Crush shrugged, smiling. “It’s cool.” At Max’s skeptical face, he continued. “It’s like that thing in physics last week. Where light bends if you change the environment it’s in. Refraction. You just… altered my environment, and I moved where it made the most sense to be.”

  Max swallowed and ducked his chin. “Well, I’m still sorry you had to drop out of high school,” he said. He watched the last police car pull away, turning off its lights with one final, triumphant blip.

  Crush nodded. “The public can’t decide whether they want to knight us or burn us at the stake. I never thought about what you had to deal with.”

  Max snorted. “Well, they pretty much just want to burn us at the stake, so it’s much more straightforward.”

  “But you fight for them anyway.” Crush turned toward Max, swinging a leg over to straddle the ledge. He scooted forward until his knees brushed Max’s hip. “Even though they don’t understand.”

  Max looked down at his hands and did not move his legs at all. “Somebody’s got to do it, and I have an awesome robot lab in my basement.” He shrugged. “And now you can help.”

  Crush nodded, then looked out over the city. “Dad won’t sign on with the Injustice League. And I don’t think I want him to.”

  “No,” Max agreed. “I see you as more freelance.”

  “Vigilantes?”

  “Less paperwork,” Max offered.

  “Decay is still in the containment center in Antarctica, right?”

  Max nodded. Even the Injustice League had to manage its bad press somehow, and, really, they had standards to uphold. “He’s stuck there until he finds a way to mobilize the penguins and escape.”

  Crush laughed. “So, forever, then.”

  “At least a year and a half,” Max conceded. Birds were notoriously hard to unite, especially in the southern hemisphere.

  “Um.” Crush was looking at him oddly. “Are you ser—never mind.” He laughed again, shaking his head. “We should probably get home. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of homework for me to catch up on, even though I’m not a student anymore.”

  “A supervill—vigilante is always a student,” Max insisted, “forever bettering your m—no hey wait, um, wait.” He grabbed Crush’s arm, pulling him back down on the ledge when he tried to get up. “I just, um, I wanted to say thank you. For believing me. You didn’t have to. Most people wouldn’t have.”

  Max reached out and, totally failing to work up the courage to grab Crush’s hand, wrapped his fingers in his sleeve instead. “I just think—no, no, shh!” he insisted when Crush opened his mouth. “Just—shush. At first I thought you were a boring, blond automaton, and then I thought maybe you were smart enough to be friends with—ssh!—and then I thought you were an automaton again, and I was really upset about it, but I was wrong. You might be blond and a little too sun-kissed for me to believe it’s natural, but I’ve never had someone overturn their entire socio-political worldview for me, and I just wanted to say I really appreciate it. So… thank you.”

  Crush was smiling at him and it was embarrassing, and frankly Max had just worked too hard on that to get derailed by stupid feelings, so Max tugged Crush’s sleeve and pressed their lips together—softly, because Max was nervous, but he wasn’t a total wreck.

  Stupid Crush was still smiling, but Max kissed him again, and a third time, and then he was in the game, smiles gone an
d his hand coming up to rest on Max’s jaw.

  He brushed their lips together over and over, and Max boggled at how he could feel everything everywhere even though they were only actually touching in three places. He caught his breath when Crush pulled back slowly.

  Crush blinked at him, a smile spreading across his face. “Thank you.”

  Max felt a grin burst out on his face. “This was great. We should go home, though!”

  “Okay, just let me grab my—Max!” screamed Crush as Max pushed him off the building.

  “Don’t worry,” Max shouted, “I’ll catch you!” and dived off the roof after him.

  HAYDEN SCOTT grew up, very reluctantly, on a farm in the middle of nowhere. She spent her time climbing trees and playing in the dirt until the day she discovered books, at which point she holed up inside her imagination and never came out again. She prefers to believe the whole phrase is “Jack of all trades, master of none, certainly better than master of one,” because it makes her feel better about being interested in almost everything. She would definitely have time to study all those things if only she didn’t need to sleep.

  Hayden likes magic, adventure, romance, and puns. She has no idea where she is going but hopes that writing stories will make the journey more interesting.

  Website: www.haydenscottbooks.com

  Twitter: @haydensuch

  Tumblr: www.tumblr.com/haydensuch

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  Harmony Ink Press

  5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886 USA

  [email protected] • harmonyinkpress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Refraction

  © 2016 Hayden Scott.

  Cover Art

  © 2016 Stef Masciandaro.

  http://www.stefmasc.com/

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Harmony Ink Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or [email protected].

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-63476-388-2

  First Edition March 2016

  Printed in the United States of America

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