The Rise of Renegade X (24 page)

I turn down a hallway, hoping this is right. I struggle to find enough breath to call out, “Is anybody here?!”

No one answers, but I hear an explosion of flame, and then a scream down another hallway. I run toward the sound. As soon as I take a step, a beam falls where I was standing. The idea that I narrowly avoided getting crushed and burned to death crosses my mind, and so does the fact that my way out is now blocked, but I make myself focus on getting to whoever’s still in here.

I call out again when I reach the end of the hall. A shrill, little-kid voice screams for help, and I turn to the room on my left. The door’s open, but a hole in the floor separates me from the little girl huddled on the other side of the room. She’s Alex’s age and wearing a pink nightgown, clutching a teddy bear for dear life. I can hardly breathe now from the smoke, and the burning in my lungs is wearing me out.

“I’m coming!” I shout. It takes a lot more effort than it should and starts me coughing. The little girl looks up at me just in time to pass out from lack of oxygen and slump against the wall.

I’m getting really dizzy, and my vision is going dim. There’s a giant, flaming hole in the floor, and there’s no way I can get to her. I wonder why I even came in here. And then I hear Gordon’s voice, shouting, “Damien!” and suddenly he’s grabbing my arm. He tries to pull me away from the scene.

I don’t have a lot of strength left, but I manage to dig my heels into the floor just enough to stop him. “She’s still in there,” I croak.

Without hesitating, Gordon rushes in and flies over the gaping hole. He grabs the girl, limp under one arm, and gets out right as the ceiling collapses and the window bursts. He shouts, “Hold on!” and grabs me around the waist before flying all three of us to safety.

Once we’re outside, he sets me down and hands the little girl to the paramedics. Then he grabs my shoulders and looks like he’s going to yell at me. Instead, he pulls me to him and hugs me. It’s when he lets go that the yelling starts.

“What did you think you were doing?! Damien, you could have been killed! Do you understand me?”

I try to talk but end up coughing instead. When the coughing fit is over, I say, “You weren’t going to save her because she’s a villain. You think she’s better off dead, that society’s better off without people like her. Like me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You went along with it.”

“No. Damien, it wasn’t safe. You proved that. What would I have done if you’d gotten yourself killed?”

“What would you tell Mom, you mean.” I kick at a pebble on the ground. I’m tired of arguing with him. I wander, dazed, across the street and climb into the passenger seat of the car.

Gordon follows me and gets in the driver’s seat. He doesn’t turn the car on. “I’m so mad at you right now,” he says. “You disobeyed me, and you could have gotten seriously hurt, if not worse. But I want you to know, I’m also proud of you. You did what you thought was right.” He puts his hands on the steering wheel, even though he’s not actually driving, and stares out the front window. “I respect that. It’s … more than I would have done at your age. I know that probably doesn’t mean much, coming from a superhero, and … you don’t seem to care at all that I’m your father, other than to ridicule me for it. But I hope, someday, you can get something out of it.”

I remember how useless I felt throughout all of this, and especially standing on the edge of that gaping hole that separated me from that kid. It occurs to me now that I’m even more useless than I thought, because I can
fly
. A lot of good that power does me. Even if I
wanted
to act like some superhero and use it—like to, say, help a little girl from a burning building instead of standing there like an idiot—how useful would it be if I could only get a couple inches off the ground before having a panic attack? But Gordon wasn’t useless. He could have left me there. He could have saved only me and not her, but he came through in the end. I catch myself thinking maybe he’s not so bad, and that I don’t mind him being my dad as much as I thought.

“Well,” I mutter, half hoping he won’t hear me, “it might mean something.”

Making out with Sarah in front of the spandex kids’ lockers during lunch on Wednesday isn’t what I originally had in mind for phase two of my plan, but it seems to be working really well. And not just on the spandex kids—everyone who passes us is grossed out.

“Oh, my God,” I hear Jill mutter when she shows up for lunch, the heels of her shoes clicking on the floor. The spandex kids are too cool to eat in the cafeteria with everyone else. They prefer to sit in the hall near their lockers and make fun of anyone who walks by.

Jill’s and Marty’s lockers are right next to each other. Sarah and I are pressed up against both, so neither of them can get to their stuff. We’re also standing right where they usually sit to eat.

I feel Sarah go a little tense when she hears Jill’s voice, but she doesn’t stop kissing me. She slides her tongue against mine. Her mouth tastes like spearmint gum.

“Ew, gross, it’s the dork brigade,” Marty says. “Get rid of ’em, Wes.”

I hear some mutterings of reluctance and glance over Sarah’s shoulder. Jill and Marty and three other members of their spandex posse are keeping their distance from us while still trying to seem menacing, looks of pure disgust on their faces. They’re all holding lunch trays full of breaded mystery meat and fake mashed potatoes.

I close my eyes and moan a little, pulling Sarah closer to me. I can almost feel the wave of revulsion pass over our audience.

“Isn’t that the kid that got you with the scorpions?” someone, presumably Wes, asks. He doesn’t sound like he’s coming to get rid of us any time soon.

“So?” Marty says. “He’s a loser. Don’t tell me you’re afraid?”

“Like you’re not,” Wes mutters. “I heard he’s, like, an actual supervillain or something.”

“He’s not cool enough to be a supervillain. Plus, I’m not scared even if he is.”

“They’re going to make me vomit, and I haven’t even eaten yet,” Jill says, sounding extra snotty, probably to make up for the fact that she doesn’t want to be the one to try and stop us. “We can’t eat with them here, so somebody get moving.”

I’m not sure if she’s talking to us or to her posse.

“I’m not touching them,” Wes says.

“Like they can’t hear us talking about them,” someone else adds.

I slide my hands under Sarah’s shirt, and she reaches for the waist of my jeans.

Various shouts of “Ew!” and phrases such as “Losers shouldn’t breed!” escape the spandex kids.

“My food’s getting cold,” Jill whines, her heels clicking against the floor as she turns to leave.

“Let’s go,” Marty says. He takes a step toward us and adds, “But these freaks better not be here tomorrow if they know what’s good for them!”

I smile as I listen to them leave, waiting until I’m sure they’re gone before breaking away from Sarah. “I’d call that a success, wouldn’t you?”

Her face is flushed and she takes a second to catch up on her breathing. “One hundred percent.”

“I suppose you’ll want to write down all the good data I—”

Sarah reaches up and caresses the side of my face. There’s something sensual about it, and it’s definitely
not
the way you’d touch someone who’s only a “lab partner,” even if you did just make out with them. Then she kisses me, one long, slow lip-lock that says more than a whole notebook full of data.

“What was
that?”
I ask her, taking a step back. I thought Sarah didn’t
like
like me, but that’s not how you kiss someone you don’t care about.

“Just an experiment,” Sarah says, trying to shrug it off. She reaches for me again, and I move away before I have time to think about it. It leaves a weird tension hanging in the air.

We’re silent, my chest tightening with every awkward breath. Then I break the ice. “We should go get lunch, before the bell rings.” Totally smooth. Right.

Sarah shakes her head. “I have to go study for a geography test. You’re still coming over later?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Good,” she says, picking her backpack up off the floor and hoisting it onto her shoulders. “I can’t wait for you to meet Heraldo.”

I go over to Sarah’s house Wednesday afternoon, after school. There are pictures on the wall of a woman I’m guessing is Sarah’s mom, but I don’t see her anywhere, and she isn’t in any pictures where Sarah’s older than ten. Whatever happened to her, I’m guessing she’s not around anymore.

I’m trying to figure out the best way to ask Sarah about it—her mom could be dead, or maybe her dad isn’t the first person in the family to get captured by supervillains, and we are
not
going on any more liberation missions—when Sarah says, “Come on, I’ll show you my room,” and leads me down the hall.

Her room looks like a robot threw up all over it. There are piles of nuts and bolts shoved into the corners. Shoe boxes full of stripped wires and plastic knobs poke out from under the bed. Her bedspread has a real map of the night sky on it, and it looks like it’s got blobs of glow-in-the-dark paint where all the stars are. There’s a bookshelf against one wall, overflowing with nonfiction. There are a couple of romance novels shoved in here and there, wherever there was enough room to cram them in. One of the covers has a superhero with long, wavy hair, making out with some cavegirl. I think she’s a cavegirl—she’s wearing a leopard skin and holding a club, but I could be jumping to conclusions. Sarah probably considers this stuff “research.” Next to the bookshelf is a heap of various gadgets. They look like half-finished projects, but knowing what Sarah’s end products look like, it’s hard to tell.

I dump my backpack on the floor and flop down in her computer chair at her desk. She has a clunky black laptop, covered in superhero stickers. The biggest one is of the Crimson Flash. Wonderful.

“So, this is my room.” Sarah talks too fast, like she’s not used to having people over, and shoves her shoe boxes a little farther under the bed. “What do you think?”

I think your giant Crimson Flash sticker creeps me out, and you might want to cover it up if you want me to hang out with you. “It’s cool. So, um, how’s your dad?”

Sarah smiles. “He came home last night. He said they just … let him go.” She chokes up, just a tiny bit, and her eyes water a little. “I don’t know what happened, but I’m glad I trusted you.”

“Uh-huh.” Is that why she kissed me like that earlier? Or was she lying back at Vilmore when she said she didn’t want me to be her boyfriend? Either way, it sounds like my “you wouldn’t want to kill off a fellow scientist” argument must have gotten to Mom. I just hope she didn’t tell Taylor that letting Dr. Kink go was my idea—I don’t want him adding that to my list of “weaknesses.”

“He’s in the hospital.” Sarah sits down on the edge of her bed. “The doctors say he’ll be okay. He’s got three broken ribs and a mashed-up finger. And a lot of stitches. He gets to come home this weekend, and then you can meet him.”

Meet her dad? Was that in the rulebook?

“Just as my lab partner,” Sarah adds. “He doesn’t need to know what kind of experiments we’re conducting. He’d be way too thrilled if he thought I had a boyfriend.” She rolls her eyes.

“Speaking of experiments …” I get up from the desk and sit next to her on her bed.

She tucks her hands under her legs and stares at her knees. I was going to put my arm around her, but now it feels too awkward with her holding so still and not looking at me. She was all over me at lunch today—why the lack of cooperation now that we’re behind closed doors?

I decide we’re both just nervous. Our lunchtime experiment had a purpose—we were putting on a show to annoy other people. Now that it’s just us, it’s, well, kind of weird. I lean closer to her, but she jumps up from the bed before I can so much as breathe on her. She picks up a gadget from the pile on the floor. “Do you want to see my new inventions?”

“Do any of them explode? Because we should probably go outside for that.”

She laughs. “No. I haven’t done any more work in weaponry. These are all accessories. This one”—she holds up a metal circle, about the size of a saucer, with seat-belt straps hanging off of it—“is a holographic projector.”