The Ables (47 page)

“You might as well go on home and get some rest,” I said. He looked up at me with a hint of optimism on his face. It didn’t last long, as I continued, “Kill me first, though. ‘Cause I’ll die a thousand painful deaths before I join you for anything other than a fistfight.”

His expression flashed with anger, and his face became a few shades darker. “You know, Phillip,” he stammered, holding back the brunt of his rage, “I always pegged you for a smart kid. Bright … intelligent … intuitive. It’s in your blood. But now I see how wrong I really was.” He started walking toward me again, this time more briskly.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I was smart enough to figure out your little game with Chad over a month ago. Which means I was smart enough to make you believe my only plan here tonight was to say a woman’s name into a radio.”

Finch stopped walking and looked up at me.

Oh God,
I said in thought,
please let this work.

Amen,
Henry silently finished my prayer for me.

“Now!” I shouted.

The truth is, we’d been onto Chad for a while. In the end, it was his own thoughts that truly did him in, but not before other signs had begun to spring up.

Even though I’d defended him to the rest of the group when he’d first reappeared, I never quite bought it completely. Sure, I basically bought it—fell for it—but a few strings of lingering doubt had always remained. After all, how do a couple months in boot camp change a bully into a hero? It doesn’t seem possible. In the end, it was the arm—or lack of one—that made the story believable to me. It was a powerful piece of evidence to support his story: that he’d experienced the same world of disability as the ones he once tormented.

But at the time, I think I wanted to believe him. I wanted his conversion to be true and his intentions pure. So I believed him, defended him, and befriended him. For a while.

The first embers of suspicion stirred during second the SuperSim, when he’d so strangely disappeared right when we needed him most and ended up decimated by a two hundred mile-per-hour Donnie. And then, somewhat conveniently, he couldn’t remember a thing about any of it. It was subconscious, but I think that’s when the sheen started to wear off on Chad, and I began to wonder if he was what he appeared to be.

But I still carried that hope. Optimism is a funny thing, and I may never understand how it so easily trumps reason.

Then came the extracurricular activity I’d gotten us involved in on the sly, our own real-world SuperSim—a Super Not-Sim, if you will—where we actually discovered, chased, and apprehended real- life criminals in and around Central Park.

The very first guy we caught was the purse snatcher. During that encounter, things moved from subconscious to conscious, and a light bulb went off as Chad went to his invisible knees to trip the fleeing robber. It was like déjà vu. I didn’t even realize what it meant until the next day, but I felt very strongly that I had almost lived through that moment before.

Of course, I had. Chad had tripped Donnie that night during the SuperSim. He tripped him on purpose, causing himself terrible injuries in the process, and then lied about it afterward.

A week or two after the tripping capture in the park, Henry came to Bentley and me one day after school to share a concern.

“He’s just acting strangely, is all,” Henry said.

“Like, what do you mean?” I didn’t really do well with vague concepts. I needed specifics. What, exactly, was strange?

“It’s hard to describe. But he’s not telling the truth, I can promise you that,” he explained.

“About what?” This time it was Bentley’s turn to ask a fair question.

“I have no idea.”

Both Bentley and I looked at Henry, cocked our heads, and then looked at each other. We were lost.

Henry tried again. “You know how you’ll be talking to him about a mission or whatever, and he’ll reply to you?”

“That’s … called having a conversation.” I was beyond confused and not entirely sure Henry should have bothered interrupting us to mention whatever vague thing he was trying to say.

“Right, but his thoughts don’t match all the time.”

“How so?” Bentley asked.

“Like, sometimes he’ll be talking about a one thing or another, but his thoughts are about unrelated things like homework. Sometimes there aren’t thoughts at all while he’s talking.”

“Are there usually thoughts at the same time a person is talking?” This was news to me; it was actually pretty interesting.

“Sure, but they always match the physical words being said. It’s sort of like the brain acting like one of those teleprompter things the president uses. Unless the person is lying, and then the thoughts are usually the opposite of what’s being said. But in Chad’s case, sometimes there aren’t any thoughts at all. Almost like he’s somehow blocking them from me or something. I know that sounds crazy.”

“How much time do you spend concentrating on listening to Chad’s thoughts?” Bentley asked, sounding a little like a disapproving teacher.

“More than I should, probably,” Henry said. “But someone has to stay wary of that guy.”

“Do you … spend a lot of time listening to my thoughts?” I asked, suddenly embarrassed at the thought of what he might have heard throughout the months.

“Not really, no. I try to be respectful of other people’s minds as much as possible, especially my friends.”

“Except for Chad,” I muttered.

“Yes, except for Chad,” Henry fired back with snappy sarcasm.

“I wonder what it means that you can’t hear his thoughts?” Bentley asked. “That’s really interesting.”

“You know as well as I do that I can only really hear the complete thoughts … like sentences in the brain when a person is actively thinking through something like dialogue. It’s the way most people think, by default. But maybe he’s just concentrating really hard on
not
thinking that way.”

“Interesting,” Bentley repeated.

“The real question you need to be asking, though … is why would he do that unless he had something to hide, huh?”

From that point on, all three of us had a healthy skepticism regarding Chad.

Henry decided to keep eavesdropping on Chad’s thoughts to try and discover more evidence. Bentley, meanwhile, went to work on the technical side of things. His first step was to create a simple tracking device. He didn’t even need to order anything because he had all the spare parts he needed to build it in his workshop. But because it was built by Bentley, it was deluxe. It didn’t look pretty, but it didn’t have to. It carried powerful GPS technology to allow us to easily track Chad’s movements from anywhere in the world.

Planting the device was easy enough. We had numerous practice sessions as a team, and then there were the “field trips” to Central Park. All I had to do was wait for a good moment when Chad and I could “accidentally” bump into each other. It was simple.

What was difficult was deciphering his movements once we started tracking them. Within just the first few days of having the tag in place, Chad’s travels proved to be much wider than we ever guessed. He went to Goodspeed three times, LA, Canada, and the Bleeding Grounds twice. The Bleeding Grounds was the place where the original Ables fought their battle with the Halladites, a miles-wide stretch of barren land with a huge rock in the center. We learned about it in class, though none of us had ever been except Chad, obviously.

It didn’t take someone with Bentley’s super brain to see that the first obvious conclusion was that Chad was leading a secret life. The second conclusion, which was a hard pill to swallow, was that he was likely working for Finch.

It made perfect sense, actually. If Chad was a spy, he had to be a spy
for
someone. And I only had a small number of enemies at twelve years old: one. Well, two, I suppose, if you’re counting Steve, but honestly no one was counting Steve as an enemy at this point in the game. There was no one else Chad could be working for other than Finch.

Somewhere in the midst of monitoring Chad’s movements, Bentley hit upon a scary notion: if we can use technology to help learn more about Chad, Chad could be doing the same thing.

It was a shiver-inducing thought, and Bentley, Henry, and I frantically checked ourselves for homing devices or bugs. Thankfully, we found none. But Bentley wasn’t satisfied yet.

So he set up a scanning device—he called it a “digital net”—in the cornfield and monitored an entire practice session. That’s how we found out Chad was bugged. There was a small device somewhere on him, probably very well concealed, recording audio of everything that went on in our practices, conversations, and adventures and uploading it all to a private server.

The final straw? That first night in Central Park when Chad instinctively turned himself invisible and knelt in the criminal’s path in order to trip him. Something triggered in me when that had happened, a déjà vu sort of feeling. A few days later, the lightbulb went off, and I realized he’d done the same thing to Donnie during the second SuperSim.

That was the domino that set the whole plan in motion. The plan to use Finch’s spy against him by pretending not to know he was a spy.

We obviously fed Chad—and, by extension, Finch—a phony plan. Never in my wildest dreams did I intend for the “Chelsey” gimmick to work. I just wanted them to believe that I thought it would.

So the plan we spoke of aloud in the park was just a show. We’d hashed out the real plan silently, using Henry’s abilities to ferry messages back and forth between Bentley’s mind and mine.

In reality, I didn’t know who Chelsey was or if there was even a real person by that name controlling the school’s NPZ. But I’d seen enough heroes with that power disappear over the past year to know that Finch would know who it was and would probably already have kidnapped or killed them.

It’s apparently easy to believe that a kid my age would think that plan would work, because both Chad and Finch played right into my hand.

No, there was only one hero with the NPZ ability that I was pretty darn confident would not have been kidnapped. Unfortunately, he was also the least likely person on the planet to help me. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try.

So when Henry, James, and I did our “sweep of the cornfield,” with Chad and everyone else back in Central Park getting arrested, we actually went to pay a visit to Mr. Charles. I had maybe said fifty words to him in my entire life, and now he was my only hope.

I’d known him to be exceptionally quiet, sometimes short and cranky and generally mean-spirited, so I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. He’d left us on our own to die in a fire in his own backyard, so he wasn’t exactly the volunteering type.

“We need your help,” I finally said once we were standing in Mr. Charles’ living room. He sat in a rocking chair that did very little rocking, from the sound of it.

He said nothing in response to my statement.

“Did you hear me, Mr. Charles? We need your help. I need your help … my dad needs your help!”

“Heck,” James chimed in, “the whole city of Freepoint needs your help.”

We waited a few seconds again, wondering if this we going to be the shortest and most one-sided conversation ever, when suddenly, the old man spoke.

“No.”

It was a fairly simple statement, just the one word and all, and its meaning seemed pretty straightforward. And yet, I could not help myself. “What do you mean ‘no’? Like, ‘No, the whole city of Freepoint doesn’t need your help?’ … or ‘No, I won’t help you?’ Which one is it?”

“Both of them,” his crackling voice replied. Everything about this man was old. His house, his face, and even his voice. I wondered if I might not even see dust come out of his mouth with every word if I hadn’t lost my ability to see as soon as we’d walked in the door. Yes, this was clearly the man we needed because he definitely had NPZ powers, and they were still functioning just fine—and finely tuned enough to encompass just the interior of the house and nothing else.

“You won’t help us?” I asked, sounding deflated.

“No. I can’t.”

“You can’t, or you won’t?” Henry had very little patience on an average day and even less in a crisis. He’d been brought along to talk to Mr. Charles for precisely that reason.

“Does it really matter?”

“Yes,” Henry shot back defiantly.

“Fine, then. Won’t.” Mr. Charles was a man who didn’t like to waste any words.

“Why not?” I asked, taking on more of Henry’s tone than I really intended to.

“I made an oath. I don’t expect you kids to understand. But I … have made decisions in my past that I’m not proud of.”

“We know all about that, old man. You killed Phillip’s grandfather, your partner, in cold blood. We got it. Whoop-dee-doo. We heard it in school, and then we got the unabridged version from Mr. Sallinger. So quit wasting our time.” Henry was on fire.

Mr. Charles seemed legitimately surprised, maybe even stunned, but only for a flash. “You may know the facts, young man, but God willing, you will never know the pain.”

“Pain?” Henry asked.

“The pain of living with your own selfish, evil choices. Now, leave me alone.”

I finally started to get it. “That’s why you live out here alone, and you never do anything or talk to anyone.” I felt James and Henry turn and look at me, no doubt anticipating my conclusion. “It’s your penance, isn’t it? This farm … this town … it’s like an extended prison to you, right? You’re just riding out the rest of your life trying not to do any more harm.”

I could tell he was nodding as he began to respond because his voice slowly raised and lowered through his first several words. “On the day I betrayed your grandfather, I felt instant regret for my actions. Split seconds after I’d completed them, I wanted to take them back, but I couldn’t. It was too late. After a lifetime as a hero, I’d cast myself in the history books as a villain forever. I used my powers to neutralize Artimus and threw him off the roof. I swore then and there that I would never use my powers again for evil or for good. And that, children, is why I can’t help you.”