Chris heard
his mother singing. “. . .Sweet the first rain’s fall/Sunlit from Heaven. . . “
He pushed his head into the pillow, knowing that only for as long as his eyes
were closed, he was back in the trailer, and that his Mom was waking him up for
school. But there was no school for another three days, he thought next, and, far
off in the darkness a crow called, and his mother’s voice faded away.
Chris’s eyes
snapped open, and he actually heard the sounds that woke him up. The Rugrats
were tumbling out into the backyard below the open window at the other end of
the bedroom, talking loudly about the dance that night, about the first day of
school, even about the Lunar New Year, still weeks ago. Chris, wise to their
tricks, knew that the loud talk covered quieter discussion about their super-secret
plan to bug one of Doctor Destroyer’s agents during a meeting downtown later in
the morning.
Chris got
up, nearly stumbling over his shoes in the pitch-darkness of the January morning.
He went over to the window and closed it, then dialled the heat up in the room
for Charlotte. Thinking of Charlotte reminded him that he probably shouldn’t be
singing along to the voice in his head, and that Stevie Wonder songs were probably
completely lame in 2011 –2012, now, he corrected himself.
The curtain
behind him slid back. “I take it back. Chris, you should sleep in as long as
you want every day.”
“But I want to be up. I feel …good.”
“I hear
that. You’ve got the lyrics wrong, by the way. It’s “Praise for the morning,”
not “Praise the morning’s glory.” Your version doesn’t even work.” His little
sister looked at Chris sharply, her curiosity obvious even in the pre-dawn
gloom, and Chris felt himself reddening.
“Looking
forward to the dance?” Chris asked.
“Yeah. Rose
and Dora are coming over after breakfast. What are you doing?”
“Meeting
Billy, Tyrell, Babs, Savannah, Eve and Corey at the mall. We’re going to have a
meeting to talk through our case, like on Law
and Order when they try to figure out if they can get a search warrant.”
“To search
Dr. Konoye’s lab?”
“Yeah. The
Mechanic would have to go to the RCMP for us, but we can at least put a
briefing thingie together.”
“Corey
doesn’t hang out with you guys much, does he?”
“Of course
not. He’s totally gay for me. It’d be like me hanging out with some hot chick
and just talking about stuff.”
“You’re
kidding, right? About Corey liking you.”
“Yes,” Chris
smiled. “My point still stands.”
“It totally
does not. Guys and girls can be friends without it being, like, physical and
stuff.”
“Fourteen
year-olds know everything.”
“At least
I’m more mature than you, you big old bucket of KFB!”
“Is that
supposed to be your big comeback?”
“That’s
supposed to be me reminding you how you’re totally crushing on the supervillain
you’re supposed to be fighting.”
“Says the
girl with the giant Justin Bieber poster. You just don’t like Morning Glory!”
“Bieber is
so awesome.” Charlote’s voice broke on ‘awesome.’ There was a moment’s pause in
the rush of words. “Actually, I like
Morning Glory.”
“Then why
did you call her a sl-?”
Charlotte
interrupted her brother. “I did not.”
“Because you
were interrupted. Like you just did me.”
“Anyway,”
Charlotte continued, talking louder over her brother in the tone that made the
word a substitute for ‘La-la-la-la I can’t hear you,’ “That was then.”
“Then what?”
“Before I
realised that Morning Glory was a science nerd pretending to be a bad girl
‘cuz she was wearing a costume.”
“Where did
you get that, Short Stuff? Just because she’s Asian?”
“No, because
it’s who she is. Just ‘cuz I’m two years younger than you doesn’t mean I can’t
read people. She even said she was always trying to be the smartest person in
the room.”
Chris
smiled. She did say that, in that cute way that she had. Her words echoed in
his brain for a second in that thrilling contralto.
“God. You’re
a puppy, Chris!”
“Bieber
Bieber Bieber. Bieber Fever!”
“You are so going to get it,” Charlotte cried, tackling Chris around the waist. Chris broke her
grip, but Charlotte made a good countermove and ended up behind him. Chris
slipped under his sister’s shoulder and was ready to throw her when there was a
knock on the door.
Uncle
Henry’s voice came through the door, slightly muffled by the wood. “If there’s
that much energy to spare, perhaps the two of you would like to join me for
some road work.”
Chris
thought about it. Actually, that sounded pretty cool. He nodded to his sister,
affirmation and question at the same time.
“We’re in,
Uncle Henry!” Charlotte trilled.
A minute
later, Chris and Charlotte tumbled downstairs dressed in their new mustard
running togs, complete with the rearing horse on the back of the tunic. Uncle
Henry was waiting by the back door, The Captain barely controlling his excitement,
tail wagging in short but rapid strokes, beside him. Auntie Ma was already
bustling in the kitchen, clearing away after the Rugrats. “Where’s May?”
Charlotte asked, sounding disappointed.
Uncle Henry
smiled. “May and the team are going to be downtown this morning. In case
there’s a completely unexpected emergency related to some juvenile superheroes
and an agent of Doctor Destroyer.”
Chris
digested that as they walked across the snowy back lawn and onto the pavement.
Uncle Henry set out west, predictably, towards the hill that led up to the
McNeely estate and its neighbours. Uncle Henry had walked uphill to school through the snow both ways when he was
a kid, but only because he got to choose his own route.
“Do you have
any idea what’s going on with the Apocalypse Plague, Uncle Henry?” Chris asked.
His uncle,
loping ahead, shrugged his broad shoulders. “Professor Paradigm is crazy, mad
scientists are crazy, but the way I read it, Paradigm is working on his plan to
defeat and replace Istvatha V’han as Empress of all Reality. That would be a
pretty tough thing to do. Istvatha rules all or part of hundreds of thousands
of dimensions, many of them as large as ours. You would need weapons that
adjust to scale, and war plagues are perfect for that. So the takeaway is that
either two Professor Paradigms in two alternate realities have commissioned a
mad scientist to design the Apocalypse Plague to wipe out the Empire in
human-inhabited dimensions. Either it got loose in one, or our Professor
Paradigm tested the plague by setting it loose in Rose’s timeline. Next, he’ll
attack the V’hanian Empire, and V’han will use time travel to prevent that from
happening in the first place.”
“Are you
sure? Then how did Eve end up with a case of the Plague a hundred thousand years
ago?”
His uncle
shrugged again as his lope took the first step on the stair down to the jogging
path through the ravine. “Time travel.”
“Who time
travel?”
His uncle
made that long, gravelly sound that draws out the first words of a sentence to
suggest that it’s all complicated and that you’ll understand when you’re older.
“There are secrets in the world that have nothing to do with supervillains and
the Apocalypse Plague, Chris.”
“But what if
they turn out to?”
“You put
your case to me, and if we need to bring you into this particular secret to
stop the Plague, we will.”
That wasn’t
very satisfying. “Does this have anything to do with my Dad?”
“Eve and
time travel? No.”
That was a
little evasive, but it would have to do.
They ran a
little further on, and then Uncle Henry turned his head over his shoulder for a
second to look at his nephew.
“Are you going to be up this early for school on
Monday?”
“Even
earlier!” Chris said.
“He likes
mornings now. And he’s afraid of missing an ambush,” his sister added.
Uncle Henry
snorted. “A supervillain once ambushed and captured me early in the morning. It
was at a grocery store.”
That sounded
like about half the story to Chris. “How did you get away, sir?”
“I didn’t,”
Uncle Henry said.
“Hunh?”
“He’s
talking about Auntie Ma,” Charlotte said.
“Oh,” Chris
said, as though he understood.
Breakfast
was as good as breakfast can only be when you’ve already run a few miles, with
eggs and bacon and waffles and steamed sticky rice and dates, all washed down
with orange juice and chai. Then Billy and Tyrell came by to pick Chris and Eve
up. The meeting didn’t accomplish much. Uncle Henry’s ideas were basically the
only ones on the table, and Babs and Eve got into a howling argument about
whether it was right to use time travel to change the past. Chris was actually
happy when he got a text from his aunt asking where he was, and didn’t he think
that he should be getting dressed for the dance.
Later that evening,
Chris and the rest of his housemates joined some forty people in the big, musty
old Liberty Legion event room, deep underground. All the kids were there, and
even adults like Tony and Tara McNeely, as well as Uncle Henry and Auntie Ma,
who were chaperoning. Next to Tara stood a young McNeely that Chris didn’t
recognise from Tatammy.
Chris turned
to his sister and pointed to the boy. “Is he at Pemberton?”
Charlotte
looked over at where Chris was pointing. “That’s Bruce McNeely. He’s at
Ravenwood right now, but he’s transferring to Pemberton in January. He did a
school visit in December. He’s so immature.”
At the far
end of the room, empty space suddenly developed a split, through which dusky,
slanting light shone. A tall Black woman stepped through the slit, wearing an
elegant black body suit with a belt of wide links of wrought gold sliding in
curves over each other. It was the Black Rose, leader of the Sentinels
superteam of New York. “Everyone ready?” She asked.
A general
murmur went through the room. “I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’” she said, and
gestured with her hands like a bhangra dancer. The slit opened up into a wide
gate, and the crowd began moving towards it.
Just as with
boarding a school bus, it took forever for Chris to get through the gate and
enter the Evening Land. When he finally did, the first thing Chris noticed was
the horizons. It was lit down and in one corner by the big red ball of a
setting sun that streaked the sky with dampened reds and oranges and even
purples in all directions. Opposite the sun was a huge moon, shedding a light
of yellow ivory, and between them the sky was the darkest of blues, only a few
stars shining through.
Chris looked
down. The light from the Even Sun seemed too weak and dim to fight the shadows
that loomed everywhere, but, somehow, it did. Not so much as to dispel them,
but to let him see deep into what should have been pools of darkness cast by
trees, some of them almost like Dr. Seuss trees with high tufts of foliage at
their crowns, and others with more conventional leaves. Directly ahead of them,
with other kids already streaming in, was a tall, stone building with a broad
door up a flight of steps in the middle and complex arches and windows and
turrets at all levels, and window alcoves that came so low and full to the
ground in the garden beds that they were almost alternate entrances. A more
familiar yellow reading light spilled out of their windows.
“This way,
please,” Tara McNeely called, apparently unimpressed by the exotic
surroundings, like some world traveller who has seen everything at least twice.
The kids surged ahead across the paved courtyard towards the building, up the
stairs, and into the more brightly lit interior. Yet here, where the lights
were bright and normal, the shadows seemed stronger than normal, more able to
resist than “normal” shadows. In one, Chris recognised the Indian substitute
player from their last game. She winked at someone behind Chris as he passed.
Then they
spilled into a hall, and Chris was amazed again. The roof arched so many
stories above them that Chris got dizzy just looking up at it, trying to make
out details of the soaring stonework in the darkness. Dimly visible were lines
of rigging tied off on the buttresses Stained-glass windows with intricate
designs faced in all directions, so that on one side they were lit by the red
light of evening, from the other by the yellow of Lythrum’s moon. Below that,
walls of alternating shining black and white stone led up from intricately
carved footings toward the windows, with silvered windows in golden frames.
Katy Perry was playing on the sound system, and it seemed like the very
stonework was piling onto the song, bringing it out and around to go right to
Chris’s bones. Without even wanting to, he began tapping his feet to the music.
The
crepe-paper chains and ribbons hanging against them looked a little out of
place. The music died away after a moment, and a voice replaced it. “In the
name of the Court of Vespers, Welcome to Lythrum, cricketeers! Rejoice and
live, before night falls.”
Chris, and
everyone else, looked at the end of the room, where the Black Rose stood up at
a podium. Dr. Cambridge stood beside her with a smile on her face, as though
the dimension of Lythrum was something that she and the Decorating Committee
had whipped up as a party theme. A tall, bare-chested Indian man stood beside her,
with eight arms, just like Hindu gods in religious art. The hero, whom Chris
had heard described as a power in Lythrum, continued. “I’ve placed a simple
spell of understanding on this room, so you’ll all be able to talk tonight.
Anyone who happens to meet someone tonight will have to learn their languages
before their next date, though. Or maybe on
their next date.”
There was a
titter of laughter. “Remember that the chaperones are here to make sure that everything
stays within the Superhero Junior Cricket Association Social Behaviour Code,
which was explained to you earlier in our handout, so I won’t get into it
again. There will be time enough to read the riot act to anyone breaking the
Code later. Mr. Wong.” The Indian man pulled his mouth into an even tighter
grimace while half the room broke out in titters again. Not really
understanding the joke, Chris looked over at his cousin Jason, the most likely
troublemaker, but he was doing his best “Who, me?” expression.
Then the
Black Rose stepped down from the podium, and the unmistakeable shape of her
Sentinels team-mate, Diamond, emerged from the crowd. broke out of the crowd to
take her hand and lead her out onto the dance floor as Shakira started up on
the music system. Oh, well; that’s what you get when you let old people choose
the music, Chris thought.
As couples
and girls headed out onto the dance floor, Chris migrated back towards the wall
to watch the few guys on the floor embarrass themselves, sliding along and
around a few of the other wall-flowers until he was near a door. Half-expected,
he felt a hand on his shoulder. Chris looked over Max Zerstroiten was standing
next to a dark-skinned Indian girl with a short haircut almost like May’s, wearing
a white blouse in multiple drapes coming down over a black skirt and heels, the
former almost as short, the latter almost as high as Eve’s outfit. She had a
discrete Super Division Academy pin in the blouse.
“I have been
asked to make introductions,” Max said, his Bavarian accent coming through the
Spell of Comprehension, perhaps because he was speaking English. “Kiran
Namaste, this is Chris Wong. Chris, this is Kiran.”
“Oh.” Chris
said. This was weird. Then he caught a tinkle in Max’s eye. “Pleased to meet
you, Kiran. Would you like to dance?”
“I thought that
you would never ask,” she replied.
Chris led
Kiran out onto the dance floor. “Why me?” He asked. It sounded like a dumb
question to ask as it came out of his mouth, but he was curious.
“You’re
Jason and May Wong’s cousin, right?” Kiran asked.
Chris shrugged.
What was it about Jason?
“Rashindar
hates them,” Kiran went on, as though that explained everything. She nodded her
neatly pointed chin in the direction of the Indian man who still stood, frozen,
by the podium.
Oh, Chris
thought. Rebellion. Chris understood that. Chris waited made a move that gave
him an excuse to spin Kiran into the kind of whirl that would leave your hair
down over your face, if you happened to have long hair. As she whirled back to
face him, Kiran started to put her hand to her face, then put it out to do
slightly unconvincing hand jive. She wasn’t a very good dancer, Chris noticed.
“You need to
get out more,” Chris said. “All that studying isn’t good for you.” Chris crossed
his fingers for that. The more he knew them, the more he liked smart girls.
“Who told
you that I’m studious?” Kiran asked.
“Oh, no-one
in particular,” Chris said. Over Kiran’s shoulder, he could see that Max and
the Juniors had moved to cover the exit, and that Tara and Tony, followed by
the Seniors, were moving up behind Kiran. To one side, Max’s dancing partner, a
Chinese girl in a red blouse and strategically-torn skinny jeans had collected
men that Chris recognised as Japan’s mighty Tetsuronin, and Uncle Henry’s
friend, Revolutionary III of the Tiger Squad. Chris wondered if the girl would
get into trouble for her jeans. She probably wouldn’t get away with wearing
them at the Tiger Squad compound. Looking the other way, he saw that Charlotte,
Rose, and Dora, had stopped on the dance floor to watch things go down.
“So you just
noticed that yourself?’
“Some people
try to hide it, but it comes out eventually,” Chris said.
“Sometimes,
people are even smarter than they seem,” Kiran pointed out. She shoved Chris,
hard, just as he was stepping off onto his left foot. He felt the familiar feel
of a root snagging his foot, and was suddenly off his balance.
No biggie,
Chris thought, as he prepared to roll through the trip. That is, until he went
down over someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had time to notice
that the shadow on the floor that he was plunging into was particularly dark
and round before he passed through it.
Suddenly,
Chris was lying flat on a hard stone floor, a ledge cutting into his neck, a
heavy weight on his chest and his hands tightly bound by something. For a moment, he was worried, before he cricked his head
down and saw the dance floor far below, Dr. Cambridge sprawled on the ground in
the middle of a frustrated posse of supertypes, apparently having blundered
right into the middle of the action. Chris felt relief. The Black Rose’s wards
were holding, and they hadn’t teleported out of Lythrum yet. This wasn’t going
to be an all-nighter.
He looked up
at “Kiran Namaste” and watched her Indian features wiggle and blur into Morning
Glory’s. As the illusion vanished, the girl villain put her hands behind her
head and began gathering up her hair into a pony tail again. Beside her stood
Professor Paradigm in his weird, multi-coloured metal armour, the lights cast
by the stems sticking into his face making patches of sickly pastel in
Lythrum’s shade.
Chris spoke.
“You know, I’m ashamed of both of you. Morning Glory, even I know that 'Namaste' isn't a real name, and you were trying to put it by Doctor Destroyer's nephew. Professor Paradigm, you’re trying to
kidnap someone who, I swear, knows nothing about the Apocalypse Plague from the
midst of a superhero party. Do you have any idea how many heroic masterminds
are at this party, I—“
The rope
that Chris had noticed earlier snapped taught as a figure hurtled out of the darkness
on its end to come down on the end of the great stone buttress. He was wearing
an enveloping cloak over a dark tunic and a fedora that shadowed a gas mask
with vaguely monstrous flourishes similar to the Hobgoblin’s famous mask. He
also looked like he was about fourteen, if you could focus on that instead of
the pistols that he was flourishing in both hands.
“I am the
terror that swings in the night. I am—“
“Ripping off
Darkwing Duck? Seriously?” Chris listened,enjoying the way that Morning Glory
said “seriously.” He was almost disappointed when the dark cloaked figure fired
at her. “Herbicide for you, my pretty!’ He flourished his cape as he levelled
the other pistol at Professor Paradigm. “And a dimensional anchor
for—“
The
Professor and Morning Glory vanished from existence in the first flash of
penetrating light that Chris had seen since he’d arrived in Lythrm. Blinking
his dazzled eyes and working his hands free of the binding, Chris spoke to the
figure on the buttress. “I can see why my sister thinks you’re immature,
Bruce.”
“Immature?
Would some kid anticipate the schemes of the nefarious Professor Paradigm?”
“Professor
Paradigm isn’t a schemer. He’s a fruitcake. With extra nuts. In a peanut
butter sandwich with almond milk. And McNeelys are always anticipating schemes and
being prepared. It gets old.”
“You think a
mere normal like me keeping up with you powered types is ‘old?’”
“McNeelys are normal, all right. Just like all the normal people who are the best there
is at everything they do.”
The kid just
looked at Chris, who belatedly considered that he might have hurt young Bruce’s feelings.
“Oh, hey,
kid. Before I forget, thanks for rescuing me. I’m sorry that I mouthed you off,
it’s just that I’m a little frustrated about-“ Chris hesitated and considered
that if he explained that he didn’t really want
to be rescued so quickly, it would probably undermine the compliment that
he started out with. “Stuff.”
“No problem,
Chris. Chris, can you show me that move you used to roll out of that sweep,
later.”
“Charlotte knows it, too,” Chris pointed out,
doing his best to hide a grin. Bruce fell silent again, and this time, Chris
didn’t feel guilty at all.
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