School for Sidekicks (18 page)

“What's wrong?” asked Foxman.

“You said your Mask license wasn't
quite
suspended. What did you mean by that?”

“I thought it was pretty obvious, kid.” He pointed at the breathalyzer on the dashboard. “I'm a formerly drunken wreck and not fit to hero in public yet. If you don't believe me, ask Captain-freaking-Commanding.”

It was my turn to raise an eyebrow. “And?”

He sighed. “And OSIRIS would prefer not to have to publicly bust my chops. When I had my little chat with Special Agent Brendan a few years back, she let me know that if I kept my head down,
and
I didn't get caught doing anything OSIRIS would have to take official notice of,
and
I agreed to the breathalyzers for all of my ‘mobile crime-fighting platforms,' then OSIRIS wouldn't pull my license.”

“But aren't you sober now?” I asked.

“Well, my rehabilitation does seem to finally be sticking this time around, thanks to my discovery of the unholy elixir of concentrated caffeine and ridiculous amounts of sugar that comes in a MaskerAde can. But I am still not in good aroma with the powers that be, and I would really prefer not to have Captain Commanding come around to give me another of his lovely lectures on how a True Mask Behaves.”

I could see that, especially now that I knew how Captain Commanding behaved when the cameras weren't running. “But won't the police know who foamed those bad guys?”

Foxman shrugged. “There are a half dozen of us who use something like that goop. As long as I don't give them any reason to actually run lab tests on the stuff, they can officially “assume” that it was Foamaster or the Foaminator, or some other Mask with foam prominently mentioned in their handle. Besides, it's only one incident. Probably, no one will notice.”

“But I want to fight crime!” I said, a little startled by my own anger. “That's the whole
point
of being a Mask. If I'm going to be your sidekick, I am
not
going to sit in the Den and eat pizza and play nice. We are going to get out and do things!”

Foxman looked startled, then bitter. He sneered, “Really? What makes you so sure of that?”

I had a sudden insight. “Because you want this as much as I do.”

He blinked. “How do you figure that?”

“If you didn't, you could have stopped me at any time. You're twice my size and about a hundred times as strong. You didn't have to let me get into the car. And, once we were in the car, you didn't have to let it move. Tell me you couldn't have stopped me at any time.”

Foxman shrugged and looked away. “Believe whatever you want.”

“Then, I
believe
that we're going to fight crime together because that's what Masks and sidekicks do, even washed-up has-been Masks and underage sidekicks with wimpy powers.”

“All right, kid, if that's the way you want it. We'll try it, though I think you're going to be doing most of the driving.” He snorted. “Literally and figuratively.”

“That's fine by me.”

His answering smile was more than a little sad. “You've got a lot of fire in your soul. That's good, but, well, never mind. I'll just say that you remind me of the me I wish I'd been at your age, and leave it at that for the moment. Now, do you want to go eat your pizza? We can work out what it is you're going to actually do around here after that.”

“All right.”

I couldn't believe I'd won the battle that easily. Then I looked at the bitter, poisoned expression on Foxman's face and decided maybe the battle I needed to fight wasn't exactly the battle I'd thought it was.

As soon as we got out of the car, Foxman grabbed another can of MaskerAde. He finished that one as Denmother served up my pizza on the breakfast bar, then started another.

“Why aren't you vibrating your way right though that stool?” I asked around a mouthful of excellent pizza. “Whenever I drink that stuff I get all shaky and then crash like a container of eggs dropped out a second-story window.”

“I was pretty shaky for a while about thirty-five hours ago, but now I'm barely able to keep my eyes open.”

“Wait, how long have you been awake? And how much of that have you had?”

“Maybe two gallons. Denmother, how long have I been awake?”

“Fifty-seven hours, forty-eight minutes, and seventeen seconds, judging by the change in your breathing as you were first waking up, sir.” Again that neutral voice sounded somehow disapproving.

Foxman turned to me. “Fifty-seven hours, forty-eight minutes, and twenty-three seconds as of right now. Which might explain why I feel like I'm about to melt.” He snorted and quirked up the corner of mouth. “Well, that and the fact that these energy drinks have some rather idiosyncratic effects on the metahuman metabolism.”

“Idiosyncratic?”

“Weird, bizarre, erratic, varying wildly from meta to meta, freakish—” He tilted suddenly on his chair and started to snore.

Before he could fall off, one of Denmother's food prep arms shot out and caught him by the shoulder.

“Is he going to be all right?” I asked.

“Eventually,” replied Denmother, and I thought I detected a note of long suffering there.

I finished my pizza to the accompaniment of Foxman's snoring. It was the first chance I'd had to think since I ran into Burnish and Backflash in the tunnels of the AMO. And I had a
lot
to think about: There was the fact that the Captain had a daughter who apparently hated me almost as much as her dad did. The mess with my parents, and what they must believe about me after seeing the video that Captain Commanding faked. The weird way Foxman talked about Backflash. The revelation that the uniform-measuring machine at Camp Commanding was really a new version of the Hero Bomb.

It was all way too much to make sense of, and I found the various ideas spinning around in my head and banging together aimlessly like ice swirled in a glass. It made me dizzy.

When I finished my pizza, I turned to my new mentor.
Now what?
I had no idea what my duties were supposed to be or anything. “What
am
I going to do around here?”

Foxman suddenly jerked upright, blinked several times, and started talking in mid-sentence like he'd never fallen asleep, “See also: strange. Some metas even find MaskerAde to be calming. Wait, what was the question?”

“I asked you what I'm going to do around here? Officially, I mean. What are my duties?”

“I really don't know what you're going to do. If I were Captain Commanding, I could always have you polish my ego in between telling me how awesome I was, but well—bastard—him, not you.” His eyelids sagged and he tilted again, but didn't actually start snoring this time.

With an obvious effort, he lifted his chin and forced his eyes to stay open. “Actually, you know what, kid? I think I'm going to send you home now, and we can talk about it later. I really didn't think this through beyond how much it was going to piss off our beloved Captain, and I'm clearly in no state to figure it out now. Why don't we talk about it tomorrow, or Wednesday, or whenever I'm supposed to have you next?”

“But it's not even seven,” I said. “What do I do until then?”

“I'll send you back to the school. I promised I'd do that every night anyway. Well, weeknights, the ones you're with me. That's how it normally works, or so I'm told. You take classes during the day, then come out here and practice your heroing with me several evenings a week and on most weekends. Come on.” He stood up and started walking toward the hangar.

“I didn't expect it to be like this,” I said, more to myself than anything.

But Foxman turned back toward me, and the look on his face was the same unspeakably sad expression he'd worn when talking about his lost company earlier. “No one does, kid. No one does.”

I had already half strapped myself into the passenger seat of the
Flying Fox
, by the time I noticed Foxman wasn't actually settling into the pilot's position. Instead, he'd flipped out a console and started typing something into it while he sat on one armrest.

“What are you doing?”

“Lean forward and look into the screen in front of you,” Foxman said through an enormous yawn.

Something about our most recent exchange had drained me of any will to argue, so I did as I was told. A bright light mounted above the screen flashed on and an electronic voice said, “Commencing facial and retinal scanning, please don't move.” I froze, and a few seconds later the light blinked out. “Biometric data stored under code name ‘Meerkat,' level-three vehicle access granted.”

“There we go. The
Flying Fox
will now take you from the Den to OSIRIS and back anytime you ask her, as well as to other destinations as I designate them. You're good to go.” He closed his eyes for a long moment, and I thought he'd gone to sleep again, but then he blinked and started slowly down the accessway.

“Wait,” I said. “Is there anything I need to do to fly it? And when do I come back? And—”

“Don't worry, kid, she flies herself. But I thought I told you that already. Maybe I didn't? No, I'm sure I did. Either way, now you know. As for the rest, I'll set up a schedule with Minute Man for the days you're here and he'll take care of things on that end.”

He slid a couple more feet down the ramp, then stopped and looked back. “Oh, and remember not to tell
anyone
, official or otherwise, about catching those burglars. Seriously. You're not supposed to have any contact with Hoods or other criminals until you get your provisional Mask license or sidekick's permit, or whatever they call it now. And you're not even eligible before you turn fifteen.”

Then he was gone, and the ramp was closing. Two hours later, I was back on Deimos. Time from the Den to OSIRIS: less than ten minutes, counting the tunnel. Time from OSIRIS entrance to the teleport cannon: one-hour forty five, counting the hour and forty minutes I spent detained by the guards and going through all the processing that Foxman was supposed to have taken care of on our way
to
the Den. In the course of which, I got an in-depth tour of the detention facilities at OSIRIS headquarters, and the spaces between there and the Mars cannon. Whee.

*   *   *

“How'd it go, how'd-it-go, how'ditgo!?” Jeda speedslicked around me about a dozen times as I came in the door of our dorm, quite literally bouncing off the walls as he did so, since the room wasn't all that big.

“Whoa, dude, chill.” I waved my arms in a stopping motion. “What are you talking about?”

He stopped running in circles, but continued to bounce back and forth heel-toe-heel-toe. “Your-first-outing-with-Foxman! Duh. What was it like? He used to be such a heavy hitter, and that's cool even if he's past it now. Is he as much of a wreck as they say he is? Come on, spill. Mostly us sidekicks get stuck with second stringers, like Emberdown getting paired up with Watchdude. Or Blindmark and total newb KataKitty—she can't be two years out of her own internship. Talk! Did you catch some bad guys?”

“Give the guy a chance to take his suit off, Jeda.” NightHowl was sitting cross-legged on the upper bunk that was reserved for Blurshift in male mode. “We've waited five hours, we can wait another fifteen minutes.”

Blindmark was lying on the bunk beneath her, reading a book in Braille on his minitab and apparently ignoring the rest of us, though that part could have been entirely pretense and there'd be no way to tell. While Eric couldn't see anything through his own eyes, his powers allowed him to use those that belonged to others whenever he chose.

“But I wanna know what happened now!” Jeda's voice came out just short of a wail. Then he shrugged with that incredibly quick up-down motion of his. “All right, fine, fine, you-can-change. But hurry up about it, all-right.”

I laughed. “All right, I'll hurry.”

I liked Jeda, but patience was not his strong suit, or maybe it was. Maybe he was incredibly patient, but ran through it as quickly as he did everything else. Given the speed he mostly lived at, waiting fifteen minutes might feel like waiting fifteen hours did for the rest of us. It was a weird thing to realize, and it really did make me move faster, scooping up a tee and some sweat pants, before I ducked into our little bathroom to change.

When I came out, NightHowl had been joined on the upper bunk by Emberdown. The older girl frowned. “Why do you always wear your shirts inside out, Evan?”

Jeda spun around so fast that he did three full revolutions before coming to a stop facing Alyssa. “His first day with a real Mask and the thing you want to know is why he's a fashion casualty? Where's your sense of mystery, girl?”

“If his first day with Foxman was anything like mine with Watchdude, there's not much to tell. You fill out a bunch of forms and you get seven different versions of the responsible-use-of-powers lecture. Where's the mystery in that? Right, Eric?”

Blindmark didn't open his eyes or even shift position, but he did say, “Truth, sister.”

“Is that what
you
did?” Jeda asked me. “Because that'd be totally boring, and one thing I can't imagine Foxman being is boring. Guy's supposed to be a train wreck!”

“Well, I did fill out a lot of forms.” I could see Jeda start to deflate, and NightHowl's expression closed up, so I hurried on. “But that wasn't until after I left the Den.”

“You got to go to the Den?” asked NightHowl. “That's pretty cool. Place looks awesome in all the cartoons. Are those anything like the real deal?”

“Kinda, yeah. It's got all the lab stuff and garages and hangars and boat docks they show, but it looks way less high-tech, more like something out of a big Bollywood flick—all bright colors and fancy-schmancy architecture. Place has leather walls and parquet floors. Oh, and robots. Bronze foxes that double as statues in the koi pond.”