“Use your environment,” Chi said, floating gracefully through the trees. “Adapt. Machine powers are not your only talents. The human body and mind are powerful machines in their own right. If your powers desert you, you still have yourself to rely on.”
Jack nodded again and went to work putting Chi’s advice into action. He thought of the dragons as part of the environment and grabbed one by the tail as it rushed past him. He held on tight as it pulled him through the air and then whipped around suddenly to shake him loose. Jack let go, and the dragon sent him flying straight at Allegra. She stretched her liquid metal skin to avoid him, but he was going too fast. Jack shot right through her, splitting her in half at the waist. Little mercury-like droplets of Allegra’s midsection floated through the air like bubbles.
“Allegra is out!” Hovarth said.
“That was fast,” Skerren said.
“What can I say?” Jack asked, smiling as he coasted through the air. “I am the great Jack Blank.” Allegra shot him a fierce look. “Kidding!” he added, putting up his hands.
“Ha-ha-ha …,” Allegra replied as she pulled herself back into one piece. “Don’t get cocky. You haven’t won anything yet.”
Jack drifted into a defensive position, guarding the tree with the arrow. Allegra was right, winning this game was not going to be easy. Skerren, Trea, and Zhi could all use their powers up in the trees, and what’s more, they outnumbered him. Still, Jack had one advantage. His opponents weren’t working together. Only the first person to reach the tree would win the game, so they had no incentive to help one another. Jack could use that against them and pick them off one by one. He smiled to himself. There was no doubt about it, classes in the School of Thought were fun. It was just what he needed to get his mind off things.
Jack went after Zhi next. Chi’s young protégé was good, but Jack had a full year of training over him. Zhi was young and inexperienced, and what’s more, he idolized Jack. He kept sending his dragons after Jack like he was trying to prove himself by beating him physically, when he should have just flown down to the arrow on the dragon he was riding.
Jack leaped from his tree branch out toward a flying dragon and used it as a springboard to jump to another branch that was higher up and had been out of reach. He grabbed hold of that branch and swung around like a gymnast on parallel bars to land right on the back of Zhi’s dragon, mere feet away from the young dragon rider. Zhi took the beast down in a nosedive trying to shake Jack off, but it was too late. Jack was already upon him.
“Zhi is out!” Hovarth said as Jack tagged Zhi and jumped off the dragon. He got off just before it turned around to fly back up, keeping his strategic position between Skerren and Trea and Chi’s arrow. So far he was following Chi’s instructions about using the environment to his advantage very well. The value of that strategy was not lost on Skerren. Using his swords, he chopped off tree branches and threw them down at Jack, trying to knock him out of the way and clear a path to the arrow.
“Is that all you’ve got?” Jack said, needling Skerren as he dodged branch after branch. “Don’t tell me that’s the hardest you can throw!”
Jack knew that Skerren would normally be able to throw the tree limbs much harder, but the zero-gravity effects in the grove were slowing them down and bringing them back up before they could come close to hitting him. Skerren angrily chopped a big, heavy branch off and put all his weight behind thrusting it down at Jack. It came crashing through the trees like a falling piano, breaking off dozens of little branches along the way.
“Is that hard enough for you?” Skerren yelled as Jack jumped out of the way, just barely avoiding the branch. The branch would have knocked Jack out if it had connected, but instead it turned out to be just what Jack needed. When the branch changed directions to float back up, Jack saw it was big enough to hide behind. He rode the branch up, concealed beneath it, and jumped out at Trea, surprising her as he passed her by. She had just enough time to use her powers and split into three identical versions of herself before Jack tagged her out.
“Trea is … one-third out,” Hovarth said after some deliberation.
The Trea that had gotten tagged kicked the large severed branch in frustration, hard enough to crack it in two. Judging from the damage her foot had done to the massive tree branch, Jack knew he had tagged out T2, her strong version. That meant that the supersmart and wild-card sides of Trea were still left. He wondered who the wild card was going to be this time.
Meanwhile, Skerren was making his way down to the arrow. Jack grabbed one of the severed branches and threw it at Skerren, which sent him floating back up the tree. Jack scampered down the tree trunk he was closest to and reclaimed the low ground, guarding the tree with the arrow. “You’re gonna have to do better than that,” he told the other students.
“We have to work together,” one of the Treas, presumably the smart one, told Skerren.
“Only one of us can win,” Skerren replied.
T1 shook her head back at Skerren. “Oaf,” she muttered. She looked over at her other self. “T3,” she called out. “We’re awfully high up, don’t you think? I’d hate to think what would happen if for some reason gravity suddenly came back and we all fell….”
A look of intense fear came over the wild-card Trea’s face. “Could that happen?” she asked.
“Anything’s possible,” the supersmart Trea replied. “In fact, I heard that one time up here …” T1 leaned over and started whispering into the ear of her wild-card self. A look of pure terror came over T3’s face as T1 recounted what Jack assumed was some horror story about falling from the trees and dying.
It was all T3 needed to hear. She started rushing down the tree, not caring about the arrow, not caring about getting tagged out by Jack … not caring about anything but getting down. It appeared that T3’s most prominent personality trait this time was fear. Perhaps an extreme fear of heights. She rushed down recklessly, slamming right into Jack and knocking him off balance. She was tagged out, but Trea was still only two-thirds out of the game by Hovarth’s count. It was a good move by Trea, sacrificing part of herself to take Jack out.
Jack floated up helplessly until he could grab hold of another tree branch. Meanwhile, T1 and Skerren used the opportunity to head for the arrow. They were both well past Jack by the time he regained his footing. Trea had the lead on Skerren. She was about to grab the arrow when the wind blew the ribbon tied to its end up toward Jack. He grabbed hold of the ribbon and ripped the arrow out of the tree, pulling it skyward. Allegra and Zhi cheered from the sidelines as Jack grasped the arrow and stabbed it into the tree behind him. “Hey!” Trea shouted. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not?” Jack asked. “Chi said the tree with the arrow represents safety. He didn’t say it had to be that tree.”
Skerren and Trea were speechless.
“Very good, Jack,” Chi said. “Very good indeed. Skerren! Trea! If neither of you can reach safety, Jack wins the day. Do you concede defeat?”
Skerren straightened up. “Never,” he said. “Never in my life.”
He and Trea were both down below Jack, who floated in front of the arrow. Once again they had to come through him, but it looked like this time they were going to try something different. Trea pulled Skerren close and talked quietly, covering her mouth so Jack couldn’t hear. Skerren appeared to hesitate, then nodded, agreeing to follow her plan.
Skerren and Trea came up at Jack together, but from opposite sides of the grove. “Some fights you can’t win, Jack,” Trea said. “This is one of them.” It didn’t take Jack long to realize what she was talking about. He was going to have to choose between them. Guarding the tree in the center, he would eventually have to commit to either going right or going left. Whomever he went after, the other one would easily reach the arrow. He couldn’t win. The only question was, which one of them did he want to beat? Jack had to hand it to Trea—that T1 side of her was every bit as sharp as Skerren’s swords. He wanted to win, but if
he could beat only one of them, he wanted to beat her. The upperclassman. It didn’t happen that way, though. On the way up Skerren slipped while jumping off a branch and got turned around, completely missing the next branch he reached for. He sailed upward, out of control.
Jack couldn’t believe it. Skerren? Slipping? He was like a monkey in those trees and as agile as a cat everywhere else. Before Jack even had a chance to react, Skerren was all over him, coming in on his right. Jack grabbed him. “I got you, Skerren,” he said, steadying his friend. It was just the opening Trea needed to come in from the left and touch the arrow tree. Game over.
“We have a victor!” Hovarth said, clapping. “Trea! Trea wins!”
“Of course I did,” Trea said, clutching the arrow like a trophy. “I’m older.”
Skerren frowned. “By a year.”
“That year made the difference,” Trea replied.
“Right,” Jack said. “That and the fact that Skerren slipped.”
“What are you trying to say?” Skerren snapped at Jack.
“Uh … nothing,” Jack replied. “I was going to tag her out until you got in the way. That’s all.”
“Don’t feel bad, Skerren,” Chi said, joining the students in midair. “Sometimes a sacrifice is the only move one can make. In chess, pieces are regularly surrendered so that others might advance. It’s simply good strategy.”
“Right, pawns are sacrificed for queens,” Trea said with a smirk.
Chi looked at Trea, lecturing her with a stare. “Trea,” he said after a moment. “Clearly you still need to work on balancing your multiple personalities. Otherwise you wouldn’t be lording your victory over someone who helped you win.”
Trea’s smile vanished. “Yes, Master Chi,” she said, looking down.
Skerren looked back and forth between Trea and Chi. “I didn’t help her win,” he said. “I slipped.”
“Of course you did, lad,” Hovarth said, patting Skerren on the shoulder. “That’s not important. The important thing is you had a common goal and worked together. I’m proud of you.”
“I’m serious,” Skerren protested. “I slipped!”
Jack couldn’t help but smile. As much as Skerren had loosened up around him in the last year, he remained as competitive as ever. Especially when it came to Trea. Jack was about to tease him about it a little more when his powers picked up on an airship approaching from the west in the skies over Winterwind Way. “Guys, we’re about to have company,” he said as the ship flew into place, hovering above the grove. Jack watched as a small door on the bottom of the ship opened and a lone figure jumped out … without a parachute. Seconds later Blue’s massive frame came crashing through the treetops, breaking branches left and right.
“Look out below!” Blue shouted on his way in.
Jack and the other students scattered out of the way as Blue came busting into their outdoor classroom. He barreled down through the trees like a truck that had driven off a cliff, but the antigravity field caught him in its invisible net. Seconds later he was drifting up through the featherwisps, lighter than air.
“Sorry to drop in on your class like this,” Blue said to Hovarth and Chi. “I didn’t mean to distur—ah, who’m I kiddin’? I love this antigrav stuff. Couldn’t help myself.”
“Blue, are you crazy?” Jack said. “You could’ve gotten killed jumping out like that for no reason.”
“It wasn’t for no reason,” Blue said, looking around for his sunglasses and finding them floating in the air next to him. “It was for fun. Besides, this forest has been fighting gravity as long as I can remember. It ain’t giving up on my account.” Blue smiled and put his sunglasses back on. Both lenses were cracked. “Oh, man,” he said, taking them back off and examining the damage.
Hovarth cleared his throat loudly, impatient for Blue to explain the meaning of his interruption.
“Right,” Blue said, turning his attention back to the two Circlemen. “Like I said, sorry to just barge in on you guys, but I need to borrow Jack, Skerren, and Allegra. If you’re all through here, that is.”
“What’s going on?” Jack asked Blue.
“We got trouble in the Real World, kiddo,” Blue replied, jerking a thumb up toward the airship. “Gotta fly.”
CHAPTER
2
Sidekicks
The ship Blue had jumped out of belonged to a veteran superhero called Midknight. He was a well-known vigilante detective who had operated out of Hightown for years and was a major player in the greater Empire City crime-fighting scene. His ship was called the Knightwing. It was jet-black with a silver bottom and shaped like a boomerang with a pod-like bulge at the center. Jack thought it looked like a sleek, futuristic stealth bomber. Seated inside the Knightwing, Jack looked out the window as the aircraft raced through the sky at supersonic speeds.
Only Jack, Skerren, and Allegra had followed Blue into the ship. They took most of their classes with Zhi and Trea, but this was something different. Jack and his classmates were participating in a kind of work-study program for second-year School of Thought students, “sidekicking” for established superheroes that the Inner Circle thought they could learn from. Skerren was assigned to Midknight, Allegra got Ricochet, a British heroine with energy rebound powers who often worked with Midknight, and Jack was partnered up with Blue, who had recently quit the police force after finally getting fed up with all the paperwork.
Allegra was sitting in the chair next to Jack, looking uncomfortable as she did her best to sleep through the flight. She morphed her body to fit the contours of the chair and started to doze off. Skerren was sitting silently in the captain’s chair, with the Knightwing flying on autopilot. No one was talking. This was a big step for all of them. It was their first mission to the outside world. Jack knew it was the first time Skerren and Allegra would be setting foot outside the Imagine Nation, period. People from the Imagine Nation called it “the Real World.” Jack used to call it home. It was a place he hadn’t seen since coming to the Imagine Nation a year ago.
Jack had some knots in his stomach, but he told himself he’d be fine. This might have been his first mission outside Empire City, but it was far from his first mission. He had been sidekicking with Blue a few months now, and it wasn’t like he was lacking in combat experience. Last year he’d been a key player in the biggest battle since the Rüstov invasion, when he’d killed Revile, the unstoppable Rüstov supersoldier and possible future version of himself. Jack pushed that last part out of his mind, as always. If he could deal with that battle, he could deal with this mission, whatever it was. He was a student in the School of Thought. He was supposed to be able to take it.
The Knightwing had been flying for a couple of hours, long enough to cross several time zones on its way out of the Imagine Nation. It had been light out when they’d left Empire City, but the sky was pitch black wherever they were now. A quick conversation with the ship’s navigation system told Jack they were flying somewhere over the American Southwest. The local time was 11:58 p.m. Jack could have gotten exact coordinates from the ship’s nav-computer, but he was less interested in those details than he was in how being back home made him feel. He was thousands of miles away from where he had once lived in New Jersey, but it was still his home. Jack might have been born in the Imagine Nation, but this was where he came from. This was his country too, and it was a part of him. If there was trouble here, Jack was glad that he’d be here to do something about it.
Miles away, he felt a train approaching in the desert below. It was still too far out of range for the Knightwing’s detection systems to pick it up, but with nothing else around for miles in any direction, Jack couldn’t miss it.
He got up from his seat. Allegra was now sleeping comfortably on the chair next to him, but Skerren was still up, keeping watch at the helm. Jack walked over to him. “They’re out there,” he said. “We’re about to get a ping on the radar.”
Skerren gave Jack a surprised but not entirely skeptical look.
He leaned forward toward the windshield, ignoring the radar screen on the dashboard. “Are you sure? I don’t see anything.”
“I’m sure,” Jack said. “I can hear it coming.”
Sure enough, a red blip appeared on the radar screen a moment later, drawing the attention of the ship’s owner.
“What have we got?” Midknight asked the two boys. His voice commanded instant respect. It was as if every word he spoke was infused with a lifetime of crime-fighting experience, which wasn’t too far from the truth. Midknight wore a black mask that covered most of his face, but the character lines around his mouth told Jack there was at least a fifty-year-old man underneath it. That was the only giveaway. In his dark bulletproof supersuit and silver body armor, Midknight looked every bit as strong and fit as any young superhero Jack had ever met. Jack had seen Midknight fight, too. The old man hadn’t lost a single step to the passage of time.
The red blip pinged on the radar again, and Skerren turned his eyes to the dashboard. “Supervillains, sir. Dead ahead,” he said, tapping the radar.
“Yup,” Blue said, leaning into the conversation, his massive bulk crowding Skerren as he looked out the forward windshield. “There they are. Right on schedule.”
Way out on the horizon, a speeding bullet train came into view, winding its way through red-rock canyons in the barren landscape down at ground level. It was late at night, but the moon was bright enough to reveal a few shady-looking passengers on the roof of the train.
“Looks like your source’s information was spot-on,” Ricochet told Midknight. “Again,” she added. Jack turned to see the stylish Englishwoman patting Midknight on the shoulder.
“Looks that way,” Midknight agreed.
“We’re going to have to meet him someday,” Ricochet said.
Midknight rotated his head slowly. “He’s shy,” the professional hero replied.
“What’s the deal here?” Jack asked, indicating the speeding train down below. “We got a train to catch?”