Amped: A Kid Sensation Companion Novel (10 page)

Esper was waiting for me when I got home, sitting on the living room sofa, reading a book.

“Finally,” she said as I walked in. “I thought you’d never get here.”

“What?” I asked, trying to walk without revealing the pain in my side. “Is something wrong?”

She shook her head. “No, I was just hoping we could talk.”

“About what?”

“Anything. You’ve just been on the go so much these past few days that I barely see you. It’s starting to feel like I live with a ghost – albeit one that only leaves dirty dishes in the sink.”

I laughed. “Sorry. I guess I have been distracted lately and slacking off on chores.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “So what’s going on?”

Mentally I let out a frustrated breath. Every now and then – particularly if she felt I was being distant – Esper would decide to have one of these little fireside chats. I understood what she was doing and most times I appreciated her efforts to keep our bond strong, but it really had been a long day.

Still, I knew Esper would be like a dog with a bone and wouldn’t let go until we had discussed something “meaningful.” That being the case, I told her, truthfully, that I missed my boyfriend terribly.

“I understand that,” she said. “But separation from someone you love – whether by distance, time, or some other factor – doesn’t have to be completely wretched or agonizing. You can use that separation as a time to find unique and special ways to nurture and grow your affection, so that when you and that person are reunited it’s as though you’ve never been apart.”

I stared at Esper in surprise. Her advice was far more profound than I had anticipated, and I said as much.

“What did you think?” she asked in response, laughing. “That you’re the only person who’s ever been young and in love?”

“No, not the only one,” I said. “I just never thought you were a member of the club.”

She laughed again, and a few seconds later, I started giggling as well.

We chatted for perhaps another half hour – right up until a shrill beeping noise sounded from Esper’s League communicator, cutting her off in mid-sentence. I knew what that meant: emergency mission. I gave her a quick hug and told her goodnight. I then went up to my room and, after a hasty shower, crawled into bed and was asleep within minutes.

*****

I woke up the next morning feeling significantly better than I had when I’d gone to bed. My side was still tender and there was a wicked bruise where Whipcord had lashed me. However, he hadn’t broken the skin, so I suspected I’d heal without a scar.

I raced through my regular morning routine, got dressed, and then gave Li a call. After I had shared with him and Smokey the details of my conversation with Mrs. Gutierrez, Li had promised to put some time into investigating the tattoo Mary Jones purportedly had on her wrist. I crossed my fingers for luck as he answered the phone.

“Unfortunately,” Li began, after we exchanged pleasantries, “I was unable to make much headway. Serpents in general are a very popular motif amongst tattoo artists and patrons – even more so among the criminal element, although I do not mean to imply that Mary Jones was such.”

“It’s okay,” I told him. “So what else were you able to find?”

“Nothing quite along the lines of what you described. Even in the League databases, I could find no instances of a serpent encircling a mere ball.”

I let out a groan of frustration. This was looking like another dead end.

“However,” Li continued, “bearing in mind the propensity for human error and faulty memory, I decided to substitute a different but similar object in place of the ‘ball’ Mrs. Gutierrez recalled seeing: the Earth.”

I nodded to myself, thinking that made sense. “And?”

“This led to my search results being populated with quite a few images. Thus, the obvious conclusion is that the tattoo actually contained a likeness of the planet.”

“That sounds reasonable to me.”

“To me as well. Sadly, based on the information you provided, I lacked the ability to refine this particular search any further. There are simply too many variables.”

“So that’s it? Our last lead is a dead end?”

“The last lead
you
provided is a dead end. Fortunately for you, I was able to procure one which is not.”

I frowned, not quite sure I was hearing him right. “Li, are you saying you picked up some additional info?”

“Yes.”

“Where?” I asked excitedly. “How?”

“During my encounter with Smiley, the sleeve of his garment slid up his arm at one point, revealing a tattoo on his wrist.”

“Was it a snake? A snake wrapped around the Earth?”

“No, it was a cephalopod.”

I frowned, mentally stumbling over the term Li had used. “You mean an octopus?” I asked. (Thank heavens for tenth grade Biology!)

“A squid, to be precise – with its tentacles encircling the planet.”

My eyebrows went up in surprise. Li may have found her memory faulty, but Mrs. Gutierrez had actually come pretty close to hitting the mark, in my opinion.

“Moreover,” Li continued, “when I ran a search on that symbol through various databases, including that of the Alpha League, I came up with nine matches.”

“Nine? That’s great!”

“I thought so, too, initially. However, the nine matches are over a four-decade period, with the last coming seven years ago.”

“So, is there any way we can talk to these people? Where are they now?”

Li was silent for a moment. “This is probably a good juncture for you to note – and recognize how unlikely it is to be a coincidence – that all nine were criminals. The tattoos were documented when they were arrested for various crimes.”

“I understand. You’re worried that I might put myself in harm’s way by trying to talk to them.”

“The odds of that are minuscule, since most of them are deceased.”

My eyes bulged as Li’s words sank in. “What?!”

“Two of the nine were actually broken out of jail mere hours after their arrests. The other seven all died within a week of being arrested and while still in custody.”

“How did they die?”

“Freak accidents,” Li said matter-of-factly.

“What – all of them?”

“Yes. One drowned in the toilet in his cell.”

Eww
, I thought.

“Another was killed when a security camera fell from its wall mounting and struck him in the head. A third died after being struck by a meteorite fragment while being transpor–”

“Enough,” I said, cutting him off. “There’s no way all of those were accidents.”

“The odds of them all being so are astronomical. Thus, you are probably correct.”

I let out a frustrated grunt. Every time a door seemed to open for us, two more would shut.

“So what now?” I asked. “What are our options?”

“As difficult as it is to believe,” Li replied, “I have exhausted all options at my disposal. I have explored all relevant databases, data storage banks, and information repositories. Technologically, there are no alternative paths for us to pursue.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, thinking. “Hmmm. Maybe there are no
technological
options…”

An idea was starting to form in my mind. I asked Li to text me a picture of the tattoo with the squid, then I hung up and headed for school.

Esper would have flipped her lid about me using my cell phone while driving, but I called Smokey while en route to my school anyway. He was behind the wheel as well when he answered, causing me to snicker.

“Any idea how your friends found us last night?” he asked after I stopped giggling.

“No idea,” I answered. “There’s no way they followed me the other day, so I’m at a loss. Anyway, how are the hands?”

“I’ve got some nasty welts,” he said, “but they’ll heal. The main thing is, I can still drive.”

“Yes, it would be awful if your mom had to take you to school.”

We both laughed at that, and then I spent thirty seconds bringing him up to speed on what Li had found out.

“It sounds like we’ve reached an impasse for now,” he said when I finished. “So, since it appears that there’s nothing on deck for this evening, I may skip our daily brainstorming session.”

I raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Oh?”

“Yeah. Sarah’s been screaming that she hasn’t seen me lately, so I have to put in an appearance.”

“Right,” I said sarcastically. “Like you guys aren’t video conferencing every night on the computer, on the phone, your tablets…”

“It’s not the same. She wants face time, and so do I.”

I let out a deep breath. I had a tendency to forget that not everyone’s significant other was on the other side of the universe. There were couples with less distance between them who wanted (and needed) to make time for each other.

“That’s fine,” I said. “I can handle tonight’s agenda on my own.”

“Hmmm,” Smokey murmured, sounding concerned. “I’m almost afraid to ask, but what’s on the itinerary for tonight?”

“Well,” I began, “Li mentioned that he had exhausted all
technological
options. Being a machine, I guess he overlooked the possibility of biological alternatives.”

“Biological? You mean people?”

“Unless you know of a way to get animals, insects, and trees to talk.”

“So you want to find someone to talk to about that squid tattoo? You do realize that the people sporting those tattoos were all criminals, right? That means the only people who are going to know anything about it are probably criminals as well.”

“I got that part.”

“So what are you going to do – go down to a couple of dive bars where a bunch of lowlifes hang out and start asking questions?”

I sat there quietly, unsure of how to respond.

“Oh, come on!” Smokey screamed through the phone. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

“I’m not. And I’m too close to finding something out to quit now.”

“Let’s think about this for a second. That guy who had that tattoo last night – Smiley – was a super. A super
villain
, to be precise. That probably means you’ll have to go to one of the places that caters to that ilk.”

“So you
do
understand.”

“But apparently
you
don’t. No one at those places is going to start answering your questions just because you asked nicely. They don’t know you! That means that if you go down there sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, they’re going to try to cut it off. Remember the last time we did that?”

“Yeah,” I said, reflecting back on a time shortly before my boyfriend had left, when he, Smokey, and I had gone into a supervillain hangout spot called the Doomsday Device in order to get some information. “And if I remember correctly, we came out with the goods.”

“By the skin of our teeth. We stuck out like a belly dancer at a bar mitzvah, which is what will happen if you try it again. You won’t fit in. The only people who hang out at those places are supervillains and their groupies – and maybe some pathetic wannabes.”

“Hmmm,” I said, as Smokey’s words gave me an idea. “Maybe you’ve got a point.”

“Of course I do. You can thank me later for talking you out of doing anything stupid.”

I laughed, told him to tell his girlfriend Sarah “Hi” for me, and hung up.

I was freezing my tush off by the time I stepped inside the Megalo Maniac that evening, even though I had only parked about a block away.

After school I had raced home, and then dug through my closet looking for something that screamed “supervillain groupie.” Tearing a page out of Vestibule’s book, I had ended up settling on a black miniskirt that I’d actually outgrown two years earlier, and a white tube top that had apparently been a boa constrictor in a previous life. Covering it all up was a faux fur jacket that – I later learned – was little more than a sieve in the winter air. Feeling that I now looked the part, I had left home on a mission to find out something about that stupid squid tattoo.

I had decided to make the Meg-Man the first (and hopefully
only
) stop on my little fact-finding mission. It had a well-known reputation as a place where super-powered criminals hung out, so I felt sure someone there would know something about the tattoo – if I could get anyone to talk to me.

Once inside, I had to acknowledge that the place was not as bad as I would have expected. It was relatively clean, fairly neat in appearance, and less boisterous than I’d been led to believe. Then again, it was still somewhat early.

Glancing around, I saw that the vast majority of the patrons were men, most of whom were sitting at either tables or booths. Judging from the few women present (and the clothes they wore), my outfit could practically be considered formal wear.

Not sure where to start (but needing to step away from the entrance before I started drawing attention), I walked towards the back of the room, where the bar was located. I flopped down on an empty stool and tried to plot my next move. However, I’d only been sitting for a second before the bartender – a young woman in her twenties with a blond Mohawk and a nose ring – approached me.

“What’ll you have?” she asked.

I sat pensively for a moment, thinking. I seriously doubted that they had any qualms about serving a minor in this place, and I needed to keep up appearances. At the same time, however, I needed to keep my head on straight.

I was still contemplating what do when the bartender asked her question a second time.

“I’m thinking,” I replied, looking away in case my indecisiveness gave something away.

The bartender laughed. “I get it,” she said. “You’re waiting on one of the guys here to buy you a drink. Well, I wouldn’t worry about it. The way you look, they’ll be offering to buy you the bar before the night’s done.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” said a voice behind me.

I turned and saw a big fellow with a scraggly beard and tobacco-stained teeth standing there. He had a large, bulbous nose and appeared to be in his early forties. A large bangle-like earring dangled from his left lobe, and I noticed that his left eye was green while the right one was brown. He smiled in a way that was probably intended to appear friendly, but instead looked menacing.

“Why don’t you let ole Stan here buy you a drink?” he asked. “Then we can go back to my booth and get to know each other.”

“I’ll give her a drink on your tab,” the bartender said to Stan. “But nobody wants to spend time with a smelly old skunk like you.”

“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” Stan said. “Spending time with me could be” – he looked at me and gave me a wink – “
electrifying
.” With that he turned and, presumably, went back to his booth.

I sat there in stunned silence. Stan’s choice of words couldn’t have been a coincidence. He obviously knew something about me. Curious, I stood up to follow him just as the bartender placed a drink in front of me.

“Take it,” she said. “It’s on Stan’s tab, so you might as well.”

I grabbed the glass and then glanced around the Meg-Man. After a few seconds, I spotted Stan sitting alone in a booth near the rear exit. I went over and sat down across from him, placing my drink on the table.

“About time,” he said. “I was wondering how long it would take you to get the hint, Electra.”