The Rise of Renegade X Read online

  Big surprise, some villain scientists got together and retaliated, making a second strain that affects heroes, giving them an H. They also started Vilmore way back in the day, to support the education of the best and brightest villains, so we could always fight back against crap like that. Mom says we’re related to one of them, and that’s why she became a scientist, but I have yet to ask my grandparents to confirm this.

  There’s one other letter possibility, if the two virus strains mix, but heroes and villains don’t exactly hook up a lot, so it’s only happened a couple times. If those stories about kids getting “the third letter” are even true and not urban legends. It’s always supposedly happened to someone’s cousin’s friend or whatever. Not to anybody anyone actually knows.

  And then, of course, there are also plenty of ordinary citizens in Golden City, and they get squat for their sixteenth birthdays and can only hope to get invited to a really cool party like this one.

  But as I said, my thumbprint changing into a V tonight isn’t destiny, it’s the result of Marianna Locke losing her cool for some guy sixteen years and nine months ago. It’s not even a marker of how great a villain I’ll be, or that I’ll be able to make a career out of it. I’m going to have to work hard to do well at Vilmore and turn myself into a successful, front-page-worthy villain.

  “Can I hear a ‘happy birthday’?” I ask the crowd.

  They scream it back at me in a wide range of accents. A clock appears on the big screens. 11:59. Tick, tick, tick, it counts down the seconds. This beats New Year’s any day. My heart pounds. My whole body’s going to explode. The cameras zoom in on my thumb.

  The clock changes to 12:00. I feel a wave of relief—this is it—and watch as my thumbprint changes … not into a V. I blink, hoping my eyes aren’t working right under the stage lights. But no. My stomach churns with horror. There’s a letter on my thumb all right, but it’s not a V. It’s not an H, either—it’s something even worse. I quickly hide my thumb in my fist. My nerves tingle. This can’t be happening. This doesn’t happen to real people. The lights pouring down on me suddenly feel really hot. I sweat underneath my costume, and it starts to itch.

  The audience is still waiting for their moment, the people in the front rows looking at me, everyone else staring up at the screens, wondering why I’m not giving them the show they paid for. A murmur runs through the crowd as I pretend to be sick, stumbling off backstage behind the curtains. It’s not hard to fake. Maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me, since I was so nervous. I double over in case anyone’s watching and try to work up the courage to examine my hand.

  Kat’s the first one to run after me. She skids to a stop, misjudging the distance between us, and practically falls over on top of me. “Damien, what happened? You okay?”

  “No,” I say, clutching my stomach. “I shouldn’t have eaten the shrimp.” I fake gag to prove my point. My stomach really is a mess, though, and if I pretend much more, it’s going to turn into the real thing.

  Kat steps back.

  If I’m right about what I saw, I can’t go back out there. I promised these people a show, and they’re going to get pretty pissed if they paid ten bucks for nothing. My mind races, wondering what the hell I’m going to do, when I remember Kat’s a shapeshifter.

  “You have to be me,” I croak.

  She nods and works her magic. That’s one of the great things about Kat—she doesn’t ask questions when I’m in trouble, she just helps out and gets things done. There’s a shimmer, and then it’s me nodding. Well, almost me.

  “Your … nose is …” I fake another heave. “Crooked.”

  But she doesn’t listen. She straightens her new insect goggles and hurries back onstage. I hear the crowd liven up, and by the extra loud applause and cheering, I take it Kat’s given them the show they wanted. She can change her looks at will, so no one has to know her thumb transformed four months ago—she could make a living off of stupid tourists with that trick.

  I relax as much as I can in this situation. My hands tremble. I feel dizzy, like I’m looking out the window from a ten-story building. I hold my thumb out, willing it to have changed into a V. It hasn’t. On my thumb is an X. A big fat stupid X! I feel the vomit rising in my throat as that sinks in. I’m shaking all over and I think my heart is going to stop. And that’s when I know I’m tainted. The third letter isn’t just an urban legend. I have both strains of the virus, and there’s only one way that could have happened.

  Mom, who has a lot of explaining to do, tromps backstage, out of breath. “Damien!” she wheezes. Her high-heeled boots make loud clomping noises on the floor. She puts a hand on my back. “Sweetie, what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, glaring at her with my thumb in her face. “You tell me.”

  “Mother,” I call out, knocking a couple times as I open her lab door, “do you have a moment?” It’s been three days since the party. I have to admit to spending more of that time than I’d like wallowing in self-pity. But now I have a plan.

  Mom is bent over a microscope, in the middle of rolling up the sleeves of her white lab coat. She clenches her teeth when I come in. “Damien, not now. I’m busy.”

  For the first day or so, she tried to comfort me about my lack of a V. She said at least an X was better than an H, and it wasn’t the end of the world. Conveniently leaving out the part where she could have told me this was going to happen or, you know, why a perfectly respectable villain like her stooped to doing it with a superhero.

  I ignore Mom’s half-hearted attempt to get me to leave and make my way across the lab. The scent of sulfur and cleaning chemicals wafts through the room, along with a slight odor of sweat. One whole wall is shelves filled with everything from harmless stuff like table salt and dried rose petals to more dangerous ingredients like gunpowder and various acids. There’s also half a bowl of SpaghettiOs Mom left on the shelf last week and forgot to clean up. Nothing is in order, and it takes her forever to find something she needs. I told her she should get someone to alphabetize it for her—I even offered to do it myself, at a discounted rate, but she declined. She said that much organization would cramp her style.

  One row of shelving used to be taken up by lab rats, but I freed them a couple years ago when I found out Mom was planning on testing a particularly lethal potion of hers on them. If she didn’t want me doing that, she shouldn’t have encouraged me to play with them and give them names. Looking back, I think that was her way of getting me to feed them and clean their cages for free. And maybe I could have overlooked her testing lethal concoctions on faceless lab rats, but on Mr. Whiskersmith and Twitcherella? That was going too far. So I rescued them by sort of letting them go in the house, and they got into the cupboards and chewed through the walls in the kitchen and the bathroom. They also chewed through the cord of the microwave, and we had to cook our TV dinners in the oven until we got it fixed. Did you know they take, like, an hour? And you have to preheat. It took forever to make our house rat-free, and when we did, Mom vowed never to keep vermin again, even in cages. Not until I move out anyway.

  At the moment, the lab is rat-free, but there is a man chained to the wall above my head. He mouths, Help me, and I reach over and untie his shoes, because I can. I like pulling the shoelace and watching the bow go pop, and then there’s just a pile of string. Something that holds everything together, so easily defeated with a simple tug in the right place.

  “Wow, is this the mayor?” I ask, pointing with my clipboard at the guy on the wall. He struggles to kick off his shoe at me, and I hop out of the way.

  “Flattery will get you nowhere.” Mom doesn’t look up from her microscope, but I still see her glare at me. “You know perfectly well that’s the same intern I captured last fall. Seems the mayor’s office invited him back, even after I twisted all that information out of him. But you’ve seen him before—don’t be rude.” She finishes with her microscope and sighs. “Did you read that article I gave you?”

  I groan
. “I might have glanced at it.” Yesterday, Mom got tired of me moping and looked through all her books until she found an article documenting a case study about kids like me, who got Xs for their sixteenth birthdays. Except there haven’t been a whole lot of them, what with my particular brand of “mixed parentage” being so rare, and the ones the article talked about were all separated by at least five to ten years. Yeah, heroes and villains hooking up isn’t exactly popular.

  Mom looks up at the whiteboard next to her lab table, which right now reads Hypno Formula for use with Dr. Kink’s Device across the top, followed by a bunch of boring math scribbles, and mutters some equations to herself. She adds some more numbers to the board, then pauses her work long enough to smile at me. “If you read the article, then you know your situation isn’t the end of the world, right, Damien? We can fix this.”

  The article said the one thing all the kids had in common was that their Xs eventually matured into an H or a V. The kids’ actions and choices shaped which letter they got, but the time frame for the change varied from a year to more like five. That doesn’t work for me. I only have six months before Vilmore starts up, and my prospects aren’t looking good. I mean, will they even take me with an X? Especially since it means I’m half hero?

  “At least it’s not an H,” Mom says, like I should be grateful for what I have, instead of getting mad that my life as a villain is essentially over. And maybe an X isn’t better. At least if I had an H, I’d have a real letter, not this “in the middle” crap. With a real letter, you know where you belong, and all you have to do is show the right people your thumb to find acceptance. What’s a stupid X going to do for me? If I show it to people, are they going to laugh and treat me like a joke? Freak out because I’m an urban legend come true? I’ll be shunned for life by everybody—heroes, villains, and even ordinary citizens off the street are going to know there’s something wrong with me. It would have been better if my thumbprint hadn’t changed at all. I’d be a nobody, but at least I’d have other nobodies to hang out with. There are barely enough known cases of Xs to write an article about, let alone to form a support group.

  I ignore Mom’s misguided optimism and step over a puddle of green liquid sliding across the floor. I’m careful not to bump the glass beakers on her lab table as I pick my way over to her. Some of the beakers are full of dangerous chemicals, and some are empty, but she’s in the sort of mood where she won’t care—she’ll get pissed no matter which ones I knock over. On accident, of course.

  “Damien, don’t get too close!” Mom throws out a hand, warding me off from the beaker closest to her, like she’s trying to keep a little kid from touching a hot stove. “This is a very important project Taylor and I are working on.”

  Lately, all Mom’s projects seem to involve her boyfriend, Taylor, and they’re all very important.

  “And if I get it right,” she adds, “this concoction could be very dangerous—I don’t want you breathing it in.”

  “You’re breathing it in.” I set my clipboard down on the edge of the lab table and pick up a palm-sized plastic rectangle. It looks kind of like one of those mini tape recorders, except it doesn’t have anywhere for a tape to go. One half is covered in blue cellophane, the other half in red, like someone made it out of recycled 3D glasses, and there’s a band of duct tape around the middle. It looks more like a crappily made theater prop than something that belongs in Mom’s lab.

  “Well … it’s not harmful to supervillains. Only regular people and …” She can’t bring herself to say “heroes.” Or “half heroes.” Mom scratches the side of her head with a pair of tweezers, her voice constricted with guilt. “I don’t know how it will affect you, that’s all. And please don’t play with that—it’s the only one of its kind.”

  I ignore her and press the on and off switch on the side over and over. If she didn’t want me messing with her stuff, she shouldn’t have hidden the truth from me for sixteen years and let me find out in front of hundreds of people. “Where did you get this, a garage sale? I hope you didn’t pay more than a quarter—I think you got ripped off.”

  “It’s actually quite innovative.” Mom brightens, thinking I’m somehow interested in this piece of junk. Especially when I have more important things to worry about, like how bleak my future looks through X-colored glasses. “It’s a hypnotic device. It alters the mental state and makes the brain susceptible to suggestion. Most use visuals to get the job done, like swirling circles or a swinging pendulum, but what makes Dr. Kink’s invention here so special is that it uses audio signals.”

  Blah, blah, blah. “Sure, Mom. Whatever you say.”

  “It is a tiny bit flawed, in that it’s not strong enough on its own, but that’s where this comes in.” She gestures at the beaker I’m supposed to stay away from. “I believe all I need to do is make the brain more open to the effects of the device, and then my victims won’t know what hit them. Literally.”

  There’s a square plaque on the wall behind her. About twenty keys, all different colors and sizes, dangle from the hooks. The keys are the only thing in here that Mom keeps carefully labeled and organized—when you have that many keys, you don’t want to mix them up, especially when one of your man-eating plant experiments goes wrong and the only thing keeping you from the extra-strength herbicide is a locked cabinet—except the key to this lab, which she keeps on her person at all times. I guess she doesn’t want anyone to get in uninvited, not even a certain beloved son of hers. Luckily, that’s not the one I’m after.

  I set the garage-sale reject hypno-thingy back on the table and tap my pencil on the clipboard. “I have a few questions for you.” I prefer pen, but pencil puts people at ease, because they think they can change their answers, like doing another take on camera.

  “Damien.” She glares at me, lasers charging in her pupils. Mom’s not always good about keeping her temper, or controlling her power. “If this is about … about … that man again—”

  She can’t even say the word father. “It’s not.”

  The lasers in her eyes dim. She glances back and forth between me and the clipboard, then swallows and reaches up to pull a strand of hair out of her face. “We’ve been over this, Damien. You never showed any signs of caring who he was before. I don’t see why that should change.”

  Before now, there wasn’t an X on my freaking thumb. She’s right, though. I could have cared less who he was. The way she refers to “the incident” that spawned me, I always knew she was ashamed of him. Anytime someone even mentions Father’s Day, she scrunches up her eyebrows, flares her nostrils like she’s training to compete in some sort of Olympic nose gymnastics, and puts her hand to her chest as if she’s going to have a panic attack. Then she changes the subject.

  The only thing I could guess about my father is that he has dark hair, like me, since Mom and my grandparents are all redheads, and that he must really have sucked as a villain for Mom to be so ashamed of him. I had to make up the rest. I always pictured a shabby little man with a drippy nose who still lived with his mother, despite being in his late thirties. I pictured him carrying a sagging briefcase in and out of the house every day to and from work. Probably someone who couldn’t cut it as a villain and became an accountant or an insurance salesman. Someone we’re better off not mentioning, because if Mom had told me I was related to someone like that—that I was probably going to grow up to be someone like that—I wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night. My secret fear was that he had a really crappy power, like being able to command slugs or having a sixth sense about not stepping in gum or dog poop. Something useless that kept him from having an edge as a villain, and that I might inherit it.

  But it turns out, all that was wishful thinking, because in reality, the situation’s even worse than I ever imagined: now I know my father is a superhero.

  “Damn it!” Mom mutters, abandoning the microscope and scratching out some equations on her whiteboard. “Oh, Kat called about a million times, by the way. She has
your phone.” A mischievous smile twists up Mom’s mouth. “If I didn’t know better, Damien, I’d think you were avoiding her.” Mom would love it if Kat and I got back together. She doesn’t know about the cheating, though.

  “She has my phone—how am I supposed to call her?” I raise my eyebrows at Mom like she’s not fit to wear that lab coat with such faulty logic. And of course I’m avoiding Kat—she’s a supervillain, and I’m not. I can never see Kat or any of my other friends again. At least, not until I get a nice pair of gloves, since I can’t afford a fake thumbprint. And okay, maybe that article is right and I can turn this X into a V if I commit enough villainous acts, so possibly I can see Kat again in only a few years instead of never. I press the pencil to the clipboard. “Would you say you’re quick to anger?”

  Mom glares at me.

  “I’ll mark that as ‘yes.’” I scribble on the paper, making a big deal out of writing down one check mark. “Would you call yourself a go-getter? What about team player? Do you find yourself attracted to people who are similar to you, or your opposite?”

  Mom squeezes a drop of purple liquid into a beaker full of something red. The chemicals sizzle as they make contact. “I thought this wasn’t about … him.”

  “It’s not. It’s about you. Would you say you’re prone to one-night stands? What if the guy has a really great sense of humor?”

  “You’d better be starting a dating service.”

  “Then I’ll need a more flattering picture of you than any I have.” I give her the once-over, like I’m deciding if there’s anything I can do with her. “Though I suppose some guys might find the lab coat a turn-on. I’m just worried about the bags under your eyes. Let’s rethink this and change your first answer to ‘no.’ You don’t want to scare anyone away with a bad temper.”