The Omega Superhero (Book 2): Trials Page 9

  Isaac looked me in the eye. His face shone with sincerity.

  “Anyway, I was one hundred percent in the wrong. I was an idiot for yelling at you and then not speaking to you. I was being childish. I’m sorry, and I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  It felt like a weight was lifting off my chest. Isaac and Neha were the best friends I ever had. One of them not speaking to me had bothered me more than I cared to admit, even to myself.

  “I really appreciate you saying that. I forgive you.” I stood up. I hesitated, embarrassed. “Should we hug now? It kinda feels like we should hug now.”

  Isaac grinned. “As long as you don’t cop a feel.”

  “I can’t make any promises.”

  We hugged awkwardly. After a few seconds, I pushed off of him.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” I said. I wasn’t big on male-on-male displays of affection. It was probably the way I was raised. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d hugged my Dad before he died. “I’m forgiving you, not marrying you.”

  “Ha! You should be so lucky.”

  We both plopped down on the bed. It was the only place to sit in the tiny space other than the floor.

  “All right, now that we’re speaking again, what’s the deal between you and Hitler’s Youth?”

  “Who?” Isaac looked puzzled.

  “I mean Elemental Man. Hitler’s Youth is what I call him.”

  Isaac barked out a harsh laugh. “He really does look like Hitler’s wet dreams come to life, doesn’t he? Hitler’s Youth. That’s the perfect name for him. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself.”

  “So what’s the story?” I pressed. “He said something about your dead sister. I didn’t even know you had a sister.”

  Isaac looked incredibly uncomfortable, an expression I was not used to seeing on his face. The only other times I could remember him looking this way were when Neha and I asked him why he decided to try to become a Hero. Despite us broaching the subject from time to time, Isaac had never told us. He had always immediately changed the subject, usually by making a joke.

  “Look, I realize we just kissed and made up, but I really don’t want to talk about Elemental Man—I mean Hitler’s Youth. Instead, tell me what’s the deal with those black things that attacked you.”

  I knew he was avoiding the subject, but I let him. I was just happy to be talking to him again. So, I told him about my conversation with Pitbull and Brown Recluse about the nanites and Overlord.

  “Overlord attacked you?” he said incredulously, twisting around to look at Overlord’s access panel on the wall. He eyed it with suspicion, as if a monster would spring out of it at any second.

  “Not Overlord exactly. More like something someone planted in Overlord.”

  “Any idea who do it?”

  “No. You?”

  “No idea.”

  “Then what good are you?”

  “For one thing, I give really good bro hugs.” He grinned, then immediately sobered. “Theo, be careful and keep your eyes peeled. This is the second time since you put Iceburn away that someone’s tried to kill you. I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you. You’re like the brother I never had.” He shook his head. “It’s a damned shame what happened to Hammer. I really liked that guy.”

  “Me too.” I paused. “What we’re doing, becoming a Hero? It’s even more dangerous than I thought it would be.”

  “You can say that again. That’s why we have to look out for each other.” Isaac stood. “Speaking of braving danger, I need to go apologize to Neha too.” He made a face. “What do you suppose the chances are that she’ll go easy on me?”

  “Dude, you called her a whore. The chances aren’t good.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  That reminded me. “Why in the world didn’t you say something before about me and Neha?”

  He shrugged. “I figured it was none of my business. And, that if you guys wanted to tell me, you’d tell me.” He hesitated. “So are you dating her?”

  “No. I’d like to, but she said we needed to focus on our studies. She said we shouldn’t even think of being in a relationship—with each other or anyone else—until we got our licenses behind us. She said to do otherwise would distract us too much.” I let out a long breath. “And though I didn’t like it at the time, I have to say I think she was right. We have to keep our eyes on the prize.” I thought of Prism and Hammer lying in their coffins. “It’s too dangerous not to.”

  There was a weird look on Isaac’s face while I spoke of Neha. It puzzled me until an explanation for the look hit me like a thunderbolt.

  “Isaac, do you have feelings for Neha?”

  The half-guilty, half-defensive look now on his face answered my question before he did.

  “No. Yes. Maybe. God, I don’t know,” he said, suddenly and uncharacteristically flustered. “I toyed with the idea of asking her out until I realized you were sleeping with her. Once I did realize that, I tried to put her out of my mind as anything other than a friend.” Isaac let out a long breath. “I’ve got to admit I’ve had a hard time doing that. If I were being completely honest, I’m a teensy bit jealous of you two.”

  “Don’t be. We’re just having sex.” My good Catholic father would be shocked at how cavalierly I was talking about having sex with someone. He’d be doubly shocked that I was actually having sex with someone I wasn’t married to. Honestly, the altar boy that still lived inside me was a little shocked by it too. I told him to close his eyes when I did the deed. I suspected he peeked. I knew I would.

  Isaac let out a bitter laugh.

  “‘Just sex’ is more than I’m getting from her,” he said.

  “Have you said anything to Neha about all this? If there’s one thing we’ve learned lately, it’s that life is short.”

  Isaac looked at me incredulously. “I think those nanites infected your brain. They’ve made you go insane. What would you have me say to her? ‘Hey bestie! I know you’re sleeping with my other bestie, but I just wanted to let you know that I may or may not have feelings for you. I’m not sure—haven’t decided yet. Okay, good chat. Looking forward to you kicking my ass in the gym tomorrow.’”

  “When you put it that way, it does sound silly.”

  “You think?”

  Isaac tapped the access panel to open the door. He paused before stepping out.

  “When exactly did our lives become an episode of The Young and The Restless?” he asked.

  I thought of Prism’s and Hammer’s bodies lying in state. Two people dead, and the second phase of the Trials had barely started.

  “Probably around the same time our lives became an episode of Game of Thrones.”

  Isaac grimaced.

  “I pray the Red Wedding episode isn’t in our future,” he said.

  He left to go face Neha.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Kinetic, report to Portal Five immediately for your next test,” came an insistent voice for the umpteenth time.

  I rolled over in bed. Why in the world was I dreaming about pushy British headmasters dancing in a nightclub?

  “Kinetic, report to Portal Five immediately for your next test,” the voice repeated.

  It finally penetrated my tired brain that Overlord’s was the British voice I heard. Reluctantly, I pried my eyes open. I sat up. Overlord’s access panel was flashing like a strobe light, making my otherwise dark room look like a disco.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Please specify your preferred dimension and time zone,” came Overlord’s voice in reply.

  Ugh! Thanks to being groggy, I had forgotten I was in another dimension.

  “Earth Prime, United States’ Eastern Standard Time.”

  “Two thirty-five a.m.” came the immediate response.

  Double ugh! I had only been asleep a few hours. It was the morning after the memorial service for Prism and Hammer. It seemed like Isaac had left my room mere minutes ago.


  I got up and hastily pulled off my nightclothes and tugged on my costume. I was about to put on my cape as well when Overlord stopped repeating its Portal Five message long enough to tell me to leave it behind. If I ever became a voyeuristic creep who wanted to spy on the female Hero candidates, I’d need to figure out a way to hack into Overlord.

  “Where is Portal Five?” I asked the Overlord access panel. Its strobe flashing stopped. A map of the Guild complex appeared on the screen. A solid white light threaded from my room through the complex to a room labelled “Portal Five.” I was about to also ask what in the heck Portal Five was when Overlord started flashing its strobe light again, blinding me. It’s voice sounded more and more insistent.

  Triple ugh! I’d have to find out what Portal Five was when I got there.

  I left my room and followed the path through the Guild complex Overlord had shown me. The path took me through the main hall where the cape-draped coffins still lay. I felt another sharp stab of grief for Hammer. Not that I needed it, but the coffins were a reminder the Trials weren’t a harmless game of patty-cake.

  I eventually came to a long corridor with cylindrical metallic walls. I stopped there in front of the door that, per Overlord’s map, housed Portal Five.

  The door dilated open. I walked in. Straight ahead of me was a large, thick, silver ring that was much taller than I. It hovered a few inches off the floor like it was a part of a magician’s act. Three steps were in front of it. Inside the ring was what looked like the surface of a lake that was made out of liquid emeralds instead of water. The rich green surface shimmered and rippled like something that was alive.

  “Step through the Portal,” came Overlord’s voice from an access panel like the one in my room.

  Despite Pitbull’s assurance that the nanites had been eliminated from Overlord’s system, I was leery of doing something it told me to do I didn’t understand. Once bitten, twice shy.

  “Why?” I asked. “What is that thing?”

  “Step through the Portal,” Overlord repeated.

  “Not until you tell me what the heck it’s for and what it will do to me.”

  “Refusing to comply will result in you forfeiting this test and your expulsion from the Trials.” Overlord said it matter-of-factly, as if it was merely telling me the time again.

  Well that was plain enough. Still, given my history with Overlord, I was reluctant to leap before I looked. Maybe I was being paranoid, but even paranoids had enemies. A scalded cat didn’t sit on a hot stove twice.

  Since I was fresh out of more clichés to stall with, I mounted the three steps in front of the giant ring containing the rippling field of green. I probed the ever-moving green field with my powers. They were met with a moment’s resistance, like I was poking my mental finger through a thin sheet of paper. And then, I felt absolutely nothing. No nanites, no ticking time bombs, no killer robots, no flesh-eating monster, nothing.

  Encouraged, I extended my hand to tentatively touch the moving field in front of me. There didn’t seem to be anything to touch; my hand met no resistance at all. The field was warm, though it wasn’t at all unpleasant. It was like sticking my hand into a sauna.

  “Step through the Portal.” Maybe it was my imagination, but Overlord sounded slightly impatient this time.

  I took a deep breath.

  I stepped through the Portal and into another world.

  ***

  Suddenly, I was no longer in the Guild complex. Instead, I stood on a flat, rocky plain. There were no trees, no grass, no vegetation at all for as far as the eye could see. The first thing I noticed was that I wasn’t alone. Another Hero candidate was with me. I recognized her. She was the same woman I had seen fighting the robots with me and the rest of the candidates, the one who could get the robots to fight on our side with a simple touch. We each glanced at each other before looking around.

  The sun shining brightly overhead was not the sun I was used to seeing. This sun was much bigger in the sky than the sun I was used to. If the sun I was used to was the size of a dime in the sky, this sun was the size of a half-dollar. It shone more red than orange, making everything around me have a reddish tint.

  The sky was cloudless and bleak, mostly reds lightening to pinks the further you looked from the sun. The air was hot and dry. Though it was breathable, there was a chemical tang in the air that reminded me of bleach.

  Both close by and off in the distance stood tall rocky structures, like the ones you could see in Monument Valley in the southwestern Unites States. About forty feet or so in front of me there was a huge fissure in the ground. It was as if some immense giant had thrust his hands into the ground and then pulled his hands apart, ripping the ground in two like two halves of a grapefruit. The chasm was wide. Not as wide as the Grand Canyon certainly, but still pretty darn big. The huge cleft in the ground extended to my left and to my right for as far as I could see.

  Roughly in the middle of the chasm, hanging like some sort of magical curtain, was a gold-colored energy field. It was translucent, and I could see through it to the other side of the chasm clearly. It extended the length of the chasm, its shape contouring to the chasm, but always staying roughly in the middle of it.

  Directly across from where I stood on the other side of the chasm was a huge box. It was about the size of one of those green electricity transformer boxes. It probably was white, but under the light of this sun, the box looked a pink. The box had a large gold ring emblazoned on its size. The ring was the same color gold as the energy field that hung in the middle of the chasm.

  A little bit behind me and the other Hero candidate was a squat, one-story building that reminded me of the storage sheds I had seen on plenty of people’s property back in South Carolina. This one had walls that were a beat-up, dull-looking metal.

  High overhead, an Overlord node floated against the backdrop of the red-tinged sky.

  “Welcome to the planet Hephaestus,” Overlord boomed down from above. Despite its words, its tone was too flat and too matter-of-fact to be welcoming. “Your task is to cross the chasm in front of you and destroy the machinery housed in the box on the other side of it before it is too late.”

  This test’ll be easy, I thought. I’ll fly right on over there and smash that box to smithereens with a big rock. Or I’ll just squeeze it to a pulp with my powers. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

  As if it could read my mind, Overlord said, “Around your neck you will find devices that suppress your Metahuman abilities.”

  My fingers flew to my throat. Sure enough, I felt a metal band around my neck. I had been so busy soaking in being on a new planet for the first time that I hadn’t even noticed the feel of it against my neck. “On this side of the chasm, your powers will not work. On the other side of the chasm, past the gold-colored energy field that divides the chasm, your powers will work as they normally do. The box with the gold ring on the side of it houses the machinery that both generates the golden energy field and that suppresses your Metahuman abilities. Once that machinery has been destroyed, the Portal that transported you here will re-appear and you can use it to return to Earth Sigma.”

  As soon as Overlord stopped speaking, a light shined out of the bottom of its node. Green numbers formed in the air, like digital numbers on a scoreboard, only without the scoreboard. They read “00:60:60.” As my companion and I watched, the numbers became “00:59:59.” The numbers continued to change as seconds passed. Clearly, this was a one hour countdown. But a countdown to what?

  “Is that how long we have to complete the test?” I shouted up at Overlord.

  There was no response.

  “What did you mean earlier when you said we had to cross the chasm ‘before it’s too late’?” my companion asked Overlord. I was glad she did. “Before it’s too late” was an awfully ominous thing for Overlord to have said.

  Again, there was no response.

  We shouted several more questions up to Overlord, but to no avail. Apparently it had
said all it was going to say. Talking to it was doing as much good as talking to a wall.

  We gave up and turned to regard each other. I stuck my hand out, and my companion shook it.

  “I’m Kinetic.”

  “Hacker,” she said. Just as when I had seen her before fighting the robots, she had on a green and tan costume. It was form-fitting, displaying Hacker’s slim, almost boyish figure. There was a gold band around her neck that hadn’t been there the last time I had seen her. Though I couldn’t see the choker I felt around my neck, I assumed mine was the twin of hers.

  Instead of a mask, Hacker wore black goggles. They looked a bit like the ones welders wore. The rest of her face was bare. Her skin was pale, as if Hacker didn’t spend much time in the sun. Her hair was short, albino white with pink highlights, and in a pixie cut. If I had to guess, I would have said she was older than I, but not by very much.

  Hacker was cute. Then again, having never had a real girlfriend, I thought most girls were cute. Hunger makes almost any food look good. I didn’t like to think of it as desperation; rather, I considered myself open-minded.

  I tried to shove thoughts about Hacker’s cuteness out of my head. This wasn’t the time or place.

  “What do you do?” I asked. I felt like we were at a speed-dating event for Metahumans.

  “If I can get close enough to touch them, I can control computers. Anything sophisticated enough to be able to think—electronically speaking of course—I can command. You?” I would have thought her power wasn’t a terribly useful one for a potential Hero to have, but I had seen how easily Hacker had made the robots that had attacked us fight on our side simply by touching them.

  “I’m a telekinetic. With my telekinesis I can fly and project force fields.”