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Maybe it’s because I’m a probationary Hero. Smiling, I mosey over to my brother and sit delicately on the couch’s armrest. “Max,” I say sweetly, folding my hands in my lap like a lady. He gives me a sarcastic look but I keep up the charade anyway. You catch more flies with sugar and all that. “Could you please please please ask your BEEPR to locate it? Maybe it’ll work for you since you aren’t probationary.”
“Do you think I haven’t tried that already?” he asks.
“Did you?”
His shoulders fall. “No.”
I hover over him as he makes the same command to his BEEPR and I let out a curse when he’s met with the same response.
The doorbell rings and the house MOD screen shows Nyx Nightly standing just outside our door, holding a box of donuts. I let him inside and steal a few pastries before he makes it to the kitchen. He acts like the same old Nyx when he sees me, so I’m guessing he doesn’t know that I heard him with Nova last night.
He drops a holo-disk on the coffee table and it shoots out a wide display into the air. It’s the data we’ve been collecting about the missing Supers. I try to talk but he holds up a hand to stop me. “Last night I got this anonymous message and I haven’t been able to trace it anywhere.”
“What do you mean?” Max asks between bites of donut.
Nyx breathes and his energy is worried, nervous. Which is weird for a Hero. “It said they know I’ve been looking for the missing Supers and they might be able to help me. But they don’t want me to tell anyone. They said they’d only work with me.”
“Then why are you telling us?” The voice comes from the hallway. We all spin around and find Nova, dressed in a pair of my old cutoff jean shorts and an oversized King City T-shirt.
Nyx’s heartbeat races. “I tell Max everything,” he says. Max slides over and offers a seat on the couch to our sister. “We’re Heroes,” Max explains. “We don’t keep secrets. We’re completely transparent. We’ll lie to villains but not each other.”
She nods, lo
oking as if she doesn’t quite accept that way of thinking. Nyx continues. “So I replied and acted like I would comply with their request. I asked who they were and where I could find them.”
“And?” Max and I ask in unison. Nyx holds up his palms. “No reply yet.”
A feeling of alarm pulses through Nova’s body. The weird thing is, as I look around the room, I think I’m the only person who can sense it. “What?” I whisper to her. Unfortunately, everyone else hears my question and they all turn to look at us. Nova gnaws on her bottom lip. “Shouldn’t we tell someone? Like, maybe put some kind of protection around Nyx so nothing happens to him? He was basically threatened by someone we don’t know.”
Nyx laughs. “I’m not worried. I can take care of myself.”
Max throws an arm around Nova’s shoulders and pulls her in for a mighty Hero squeeze. “You’re so sweet and considerate, Sis.”
I choose this moment to butt in. “Do you know where I can find the depowering machine? They’ve hidden it. Our GPS won’t find it and neither does the KAPOW.”
His brows draw together as he thinks. “Did you ask your dad?”
“Not yet but I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
“I don’t know,” Nyx says. “I’ve never needed to find it before. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
I feel Nova’s newfound energy the moment she speaks. “The machine is used to depower villains, right? So if you were to capture one right now, they’d be sent to be depowered, right?”
“Yeah,” Max says. “But we haven’t had a villain in a while.”
“If you had one, where would you take them? Can’t you just do that and find the machine?”
Max shrugs. “We don’t do anything. The Retrievers handle it.”
The energy in the room bursts to life as if a collective light bulb just turned on above everyone’s head. “Perfect!” Max beams.
“Why are you always coming up with the great ideas?” I snap. “You’re not even a Hero.” Nova’s smile falters. All of her happy energy melts away.
“Hey now,” Nyx says, holding up a donut. “Rude.”
I grit my teeth and walk to the front door, saying the only thing I can think of. “Whatever.”
Jake is a Retriever about my age who rescued me when I was thrown from a ledge of the Grand Canyon a few months ago. I haven’t been a Hero long enough to work with many Retrievers and I’ve never been particularly chummy with any of the older ones my dad knows. I don’t want anyone to know what I’m up to, so I pull up Jake’s name in the Retriever directory.
