Archvillain (12 page)

Kyle finally managed to catch his breath. “So. What do you think of
that
plan, Erasmus?”

“Honestly? I think you need some sort of therapy. Talking therapy, maybe. Or —”

“Shut up.”

“— maybe adjunct therapy. You know, learn an instrument. Paint a sunset.”

“Erasmus.”

“Or maybe just plain old electroconvulsive therapy. It’s amazing how relaxing eight hundred milliamps of electricity can be when applied properly —”

“I hate you.”

“You based me on yourself, Kyle. Which means that you hate yourself. Exactly the sort of thing a good therapist would —”

“Gah!”
He reached for the off switch.

“No, wait!” Erasmus said. “Don’t turn me off again. Really. Let me help you. That’s why you made me.”

Kyle sighed. That was true. He closed Lefty’s cage and dropped in a yogurt treat. “Okay. So help.”

“You have to drop the cat thing. Really. Think about it. First of all, where would you get the cat? A pet store? Then you’re stuck with a pet cat that you don’t want. And Lefty doesn’t like cats.”

This, too, was true. Lefty had been known to attack cats. He was an unusually aggressive and brave rabbit.

“I don’t really need the whole cat. Just some DNA to clone it from. I could just go get some fur from —”

“Fine. Assume you get the cat DNA. What then? The biochemical forge isn’t ready yet — you still need some perchloroethylene and dihydrogen monoxide. At the very least.
And
you have to get the nuclear reactor running in order to power it.”

All true.

“I have an idea, though,” Erasmus said. “It’s very sneaky. You’ll like it.”

Kyle leaned closer to Lefty’s cage, watching the rabbit’s nose twitch as he chomped his way through the yogurt treat. As Erasmus explained his plan, Kyle smiled a slow, deliberate smile.

Mairi called him a few moments later. “Aren’t you picking me up?” she asked.

“Picking you up?” Kyle asked.

“Did you forget?”

“Of course not,” Kyle lied, then covered the phone with one hand. “What did I forget?” he asked Erasmus.

“Astronomy Club,” Erasmus reminded him.

“Right.” He uncovered the phone. “I totally did not forget about Astronomy Club. I was just leaving now.”

“Okay.”

He hung up. He
had
forgotten about Astronomy Club. But this was actually a good opportunity for him. After all, Mighty Mike patrolled the skies every night at this time, often ranging far beyond Bouring to lend a hand in neighboring towns. This meant that Kyle would get some time alone with Mairi, time to see if he couldn’t coax her into seeing Mike for what he truly was.

“Don’t forget the costume,” Erasmus reminded him.

The costume. Right. That was part of the plan. Erasmus’s genius plan. (Which meant it was really Kyle’s genius plan, since Erasmus
was
Kyle, in a manner of speaking.)

The plan was utterly simple and completely flawless, like all good plans.

Basically, Kyle needed to become a hero.

It was simple. He would dress as the Azure Avenger and do some sort of good deed. People would begin to admire him. Then, it would be a simple matter to goad Mighty Mike into attacking him. After all, Mike had viciously attacked him on Mighty Mike Day, when Kyle was just trying to shut down the Pants Laser. It would be easy to make Mike attack him.

And when people saw Mike attack their beloved Azure Avenger, they would turn on him.

Simple.

So Kyle tossed his costume into his backpack, along with some snacks. At the last minute, he decided to take his MiMiRDAA with him, too. (It needed a shorter name, he decided. From now on, he would just call it MiMi.)

He slung the backpack over one shoulder and walked down the street to Mairi’s house. The night was cool and crisp — a perfect fall evening. The sky was cloudless. It would be a great night for stargazing.

Mairi’s house was only a couple of blocks away, on the way to school. Kyle knocked at the front door. As always, he was amused by the sign out front that read,
VISIT THE HISTORIC BOURING LIGHTHOUSE!
and had directions and information about visiting hours. Mairi’s mom just wouldn’t give up on that lighthouse.

Mairi opened the door. “I’m glad you didn’t forget,” she said as they walked toward school.

“How could I forget this?”

“Can you take your earbuds out? It’s rude to listen to music while we’re talking.”

Kyle took out Erasmus’s buds and tucked him away in his backpack. “Sorry.”

“You wear them all the time now. What’s so amazing that you’re listening to it so much?”

“Uh … It’s an audiobook about Cagliostro. He was this trickster in the —”

“You and your pranks.” She sighed, her breath a tiny plume on the night air. “When are you going to give up that stuff?”

Kyle bristled. Mairi understood how important his pranks were to him. “I don’t do them for
me,
you know. I do them to —”

“— to show the world how silly it is so that people will shape up. I know. I just wonder … Isn’t there another way to do that?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Lead by example, maybe?”

Kyle stiffened. “Like Mighty Mike, you mean?”

Mairi shrugged. “Why are you so jealous of him?”

“I’m not.”

“I can totally hear it in your voice.”

“Can not.”

“Can so.”

They walked in silence for a few moments.

“Maybe a tiny bit jealous,” Kyle admitted, for reasons he didn’t quite understand.

“You don’t have to be, Kyle. No one expects you to be Mighty Mike. You’re you. That’s what matters.”

It was the sort of thing a parent or a teacher would say, but for some reason, when Mairi said it, Kyle
didn’t
want to throw up.

At the school, they went around back to the football field, which was bordered on one side by a massive cornfield that stretched as far as the eye could see. A chill ran through Kyle. He hadn’t been here since the night of the plasma storm. And now here he was with ten other kids and two teachers, gazing up at the stars….

Which one did Mighty Mike hail from?
Kyle wondered. Of the millions of stars in the universe, around which one spun the planet Mike called home? What were the people like there? Why had they sent Mighty Mike here? What was his real mission? What was he up to on Earth?

He shivered and tossed his backpack on the ground next to Mairi, who was already lying on her back, looking up into the sky. Kyle sat cross-legged next to her and craned his neck. He tuned out Miss Schwartz, who was pointing out Ursa Major and Mars and Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper. Kyle knew the stars very well already.

“Where’s Pegasus?” Mairi whispered.

Kyle pointed. “There.”

“I don’t see it.”

Kyle lay back and took her hand. “Here. I’ll show you.” He pointed her finger. “That’s called Markab. It’s the alpha star in Pegasus. They call it Alpha Peg. Then you trace down to this one here — Scheat. It’s the Beta Peg. And you go this way and you see the wings, see?”

Mairi smiled. “I see it now. Thanks.”

He let go of her hand.

“I love the story of Pegasus,” she said. “I like that even though Bellerophon did something wrong and was punished, Zeus didn’t punish his horse. And Pegasus got a job as Zeus’s horse, which is cool.”

Kyle snorted. “Bellerophon was just trying to put Zeus in his place. Zeus overreacted.”

“You
would
think that.”

Kyle sat up. Miss Schwartz was blathering about Mars, getting most of her information wrong. Kyle wished he had brought some glowing putty. He’d whipped up a batch the
other night. It would have been fun to spread the stuff around and have Miss Schwartz try to explain what it was.

“Are we going to get hit by meteors?” asked a little kid. Some Astronomy Club members had brought younger brothers and sisters.

“No, that’s over with,” Miss Schwartz said.

And they weren’t meteors anyway,
Kyle thought.
Plasma curtain, people! Plasma!
Yeah, the glowing putty would have been perfect….

“Did you bring anything to eat?” Mairi asked. “You said you would.”

“Yep,” Kyle said absently, still imagining what he could do with the glowing putty. “In my backpack.”

Mairi rolled over and grabbed Kyle’s backpack, dragging it over to her. She unzipped the big pouch.

Kyle spun around at superspeed, not even aware he was doing it. If anyone had been watching him in that moment, they would have seen only a vaguely Kyle-shaped and Kyle-colored blur in the air.

“No!” he shouted to Mairi. “Don’t!”

He was so loud that everyone turned to look. “Kyle, please keep it down for those students who
do
want to hear what I have to say!” said Miss Schwartz.

Kyle didn’t care about Miss Schwartz and her lecture or the other students. He didn’t care about anything right now except for the fact that Mairi was about to look inside his backpack.

Where he’d stuffed his Azure Avenger costume.

“Don’t go in my backpack,” Kyle told her.

Mairi was frozen, the backpack open in her lap, one hand poised to peel back the flap. “What is
with
you, Kyle?”

Kyle’s brain could calculate the movement of atoms, the density of alloys, the speed of lava running downhill, and the number of kittens born in a three-mile radius in the past ten minutes (ninety-seven — go figure), but at that moment, his superpowerful brain couldn’t come up with a reason for Mairi
not
to look in his backpack. Other than the truth, of course. Which totally was not an option.

“I — My —” he stammered. Oh, sure —
that
was brilliant.

“You forgot the food, didn’t you?” Mairi said. “I can’t believe it. You said you would bring snacks.”

“Right. I know. I forgot. I screwed up. I’m sorry.” There were six candy bars, a baggie full of peanuts, two small bags of potato chips, a plastic container of carrots, and two yogurt tubes in his backpack, but he wasn’t about to tell
her
that.

Mairi sighed. “Fine. I’ll go see if anyone else has anything.”

She tossed the backpack aside, stood, brushed grass and dirt off her pants, and marched up the hill to where Miss Schwartz and the other students had wandered.

Whew! That was
close
!

Kyle couldn’t believe how he’d almost had his identity exposed! He couldn’t just carry his costume around in his backpack. It was too risky. He would need to come up with a better solution.

He dug into the backpack and pulled out the food, spreading it on the ground in front of him, then zipped up the backpack securely. When Mairi came back, he would say that —
Oops! Dummy me!
— he’d forgotten that he
had
packed food after all.
Sorry about that, Mairi. So silly of me …

A little ways away, Mairi turned back to him and waved, just to show there were no hard feelings.

Kyle waved back and then returned to the food, arranging it on the ground so that it looked like a gourmet spread. He’d done a good job packing, he thought.

“Oh, my God!” Miss Schwartz screamed. At the same time, a chorus of shrieks and cries went up from the other students.

Kyle looked up. A second ago, Mairi had been maybe ten yards away from him, about halfway between him and the group on the hill. Now she was …

She was
gone.

And in her place was a giant sinkhole.

Kyle blinked. What had —

Just then, the sinkhole erupted, a geyser of dirt and
rocks and grass fountaining up into the sky. And in that geyser …

Mairi.

She screamed. Miss Schwartz screamed — again. Everyone, basically, screamed.

Except for Kyle.

Spontaneous earth eruption?
he thought.
That’s impossible!

The geyser twisted and rotated in the air. Mairi struggled, but bands of soil had wrapped around her and now dragged her out of the sky and back underground.

It was alive. The ground was
alive.

Kyle stared, but only for a second. He didn’t have much time. How long could Mairi survive underground, without air?

Not long. He could calculate it exactly. Take her lung capacity, based on her size…. Consider that she had been screaming a moment ago…. Multiply. Divide….

He decided he didn’t want to know. It would be a small number. A small amount of time Mairi had left to live.

He grabbed the backpack. Everyone was busy watching the sinkhole, so no one saw him run at top speed toward the cornfield, where the tall stalks hid him from sight. He switched clothes in less than two seconds, plugging in Erasmus.

“Don’t forget MiMi,” Erasmus said immediately.

Right. MiMi. Of course. This couldn’t be a coincidence. The ground just wouldn’t
happen
to open up and come alive here. This field was where the plasma storm hit. The same radiation that powered Mighty Mike —
the same radiation that powered
Kyle
— had to be causing this. MiMi might be able to help.

Kyle launched himself into the sky, MiMi clutched in one hand. Her screen lit up. Data streamed across it.

Just then, the ground belched again. Mairi hurtled up into the air, almost as high as Kyle, surrounded by tendrils of soil and rock. She screamed again, struggling and writhing against the earthy tentacles that gripped her.

Down below, kids gathered in a group pointed up at him. “Look!” someone shouted. “The Blue Freak!”

“It’s the Azure Avenger,” Kyle muttered under his breath. He clipped MiMi to his belt and dived straight at the heaviest, thickest tendril of dirt.

SMACK!
The tendril undulated, crashing against Kyle. It was like being hit with a brick wall. An angry brick wall.

Kyle shook his head. Other than being punched by Mighty Mike, he hadn’t felt pain since his exposure to the plasma storm. And now.

He decided he didn’t like it.

He marshaled all his strength and flew at the tendril again. It whipped around. Mairi somehow found the breath and the energy to scream once more.