The answer to the question of how pissed Pittman was, as it turned out, was very. Apparently it wasn’t that hard for the man to put together that we were the ones behind this sudden revelation in the news (more confirmation that he had contact with the outside world that he shouldn’t have had). He spent a good minute ranting to me about what was going to happen to the two Star-Touched on that island now that we had fucked him over. Nor was he particularly happy when I let him know that we were already aware that he didn’t have them anyway, so his threats were meaningless.
But you know what probably pissed him off the most? The fact that, while he was gearing up for another rant about how we could have worked together and made everyone happy, I disconnected. And boy was that a satisfying click. Putting the phone away, I looked up to Paige, Sierra, Murphy, Roald, Fred, and Wren staring at me. Their looks made me shrug. “The dude already plotted my death for years from inside the most secure prison on the planet. What else is he gonna do, exactly, if I annoy him as Paintball too? He can go suck an egg.” Pausing briefly, I added, “Whatever that means. Seriously, what kind of egg–never mind. The point is, he’s already pissed off and I didn’t particularly feel like standing there and letting him yell at me all day.”
“I wish I could’ve hung up on him like that,” Paige murmured before shaking that off. “Anyway, we’ve got the list of equipment he wanted us to put together, and we still have the address in Utah to check out at some point. Some of us, anyway. Maybe some of that’ll help figure out his backup plans. But either way, those government groups better motivate the hell out of Breakwater to cough up Irelyn and the others.”
“Yeah,” Sierra agreed while hopping up to perch on the counter next to Wren. “Cuz if government agencies wagging their fingers at you isn’t good motivation to do what they say, what is?”
“It’s more than that,” I pointed out, dragging a stool around so I could drop myself onto it. “They’ve got official eyes on them now, and if I know anything about ordinary prisons from the stuff I’ve read, they don’t really like that. I’d bet a place like Breakwater is even more averse to it. They’re gonna want to make the public and government people happy as fast as they can. Which means playing along with our little story.”
“Are you sure they won’t just say, ‘nope, never heard of those people, that’s totally made up?’” Murphy put in, before grimacing. “I mean, sorry to be the Debbie Downer.”
Roald, standing beside her, shrugged. “It’s possible, isn’t it? They could just pretend this whole thing is a prank or something and ride it out.” Glancing to his friend, he added, “I guess we can be Debbie Downers together. Or, wait, is it Debbies Downer? That always confuses me.”
It was Fred who addressed the actual point, still sitting on his normal seat behind the register. “The ball’s already rolling. The public thinks it’s true, and you can’t put a genie back in the bottle that easily. If they try to say it’s all a lie, they’ll still have a bunch of those people sniffing around. Hell, it’ll probably threaten their budget. That’s the real way to get those types to piss their pants. Easier for them all around if they just play along, hand the three of them over, and act like it was all part of the plan. Still makes them look a little bad considering a random civilian accidentally ended up on their prison island and then try to keep it secret, but it’s better than the alternative.”
“Uh, yeah, what he said,” I agreed with a gesture that way. “This was our best chance to pull that off anyway. And I don’t exactly feel bad about putting that sort of pressure on them, since I refuse to believe they didn’t know those guys were on the island. They were willing to just leave them there to protect their precious reputation, so we took that option away from them.”
Paige straightened up, moving to pluck a random piece of a vacuum off one of the shelves. “It was the best move. The only move. No way would our dad actually keep his end of that deal and help get them off the island. And even if he did, getting him off wouldn’t be worth it. He’s too dangerous. Look at what he’s been able to do while he’s in there. Giving him free rein to go anywhere in the world and get all the resources he could–” Cutting herself off, she sighed. “That can’t happen.”
“It won’t!” That was Wren, looking up from some weird machine she was putting together in the corner. I had no idea if it was something special, or just the girl randomly tinkering with nothing in particular in mind. The way she worked, it could go either way. Maybe it was a sandwich baggie dispenser. It kind of looked like one of those. “They’re gonna let all three of them off that jail place.” Before we could say anything to that, she added, “And I’m not just being a dumb kid who doesn’t know how the world works or anything. Things are really scary around here right now, cuz of the gang war, and the stupid people trying out for the Scions, and… and all sorts of stuff. But the Ministry wants to keep things in control, right? They need superheroes here for that. So they’ll put all the power and like, uh, resources and stuff they’ve got into making the jail people play nice.”
“Kid’s got a point,” Sierra muttered, sounding grudgingly admiring. “But now there’s nothing else we can do except wait and see what happens.”
Paige, however, shook her head. “Oh yes there is.” Her gaze turned to me, eyes narrowing pointedly in a way that weirdly reminded me of just how horrible she had been to me for so long. It was a thought that I pushed aside as firmly as I could. “You can tell us exactly what you did yesterday with that whole ‘combining paint’ thing. The whole story.
“And this time, you don’t get to blurt a few confusing words and then run off.”
******
So, I spent the next little while getting into all that. Needless to say, Paige and the others were all pretty curious about the whole thing. The options that even just the combined paints I had already figured out opened up were pretty incredible. And who knew what other combinations I could put together?
Unfortunately, it was going to be awhile before we got into that. Paige really wanted me to spend the next couple hours going through all of it, but I had barely finished going through the paints I’d already used when my mother called and asked me to come home early so I could clean up and get dressed to go out. We were having family dinner at a restaurant that night to celebrate the Izzy adoption thing. And apparently Mom wanted to make sure we got through all that and made it back home before, as she put it, those violent psychopaths wake up from their naps and decide to start fighting again.
Part of me wondered briefly what the real reason was for why she wanted to get this dinner done with earlier than usual. Then I realized it almost certainly had to do with the Breakwater thing. That situation was probably moving about as fast as they could manage, but the big stuff wouldn’t happen until later. Mom wanted to keep our normal dinner, especially with Izzy. But things were also probably going to start happening pretty quickly tonight. At least, I hoped that was the reason. I really wanted to see the news report that Flea and Trivial were on a plane back here. I kept glancing at my phone, praying for a social media blow-up about it. Of course there was nothing so far. Stuff didn’t happen that quickly. Even if the Breakwater people had already gotten them off the island, they would be… laying down the strict rules about what they were allowed to say once they were out in public.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Yeah, I had no idea how they were going to enforce that sort of thing. And thinking about it made me nervous, to say the least. But right now all that mattered was getting them off that island and back here. We would deal with anything else when the time came.
So, I had to tell the others that we have to pick this up another time. Promising to keep checking in and that they should tell me if they found out anything else, I headed out. As far as my mother knew, I was practicing some tricks at a smaller, out-of-the-way park that wasn’t currently blanketed with law-enforcement investigation people. Which meant I had a perfect excuse for paint-racing home. Mom expected me to be all sweaty. That’s why she made a point of calling for me to come home early and get cleaned up. Honestly, if I had shown up still all clean and fresh, she would’ve known something was up. Which was why I not only paint-ran most of the way home, but also took care to get myself dirty once I’d gotten close enough to change into my regular clothes. I quite literally rolled myself in the dirt and grass to sell the illusion.
Well, that and also because it was fun. How often do you have a really good excuse to roll in the dirt? Especially in clothes that were bought with supervillain money. I may have gotten just a little too much enjoyment out of that.
Once I made my way inside, suitably dirty and disheveled, along with the skateboard I had hidden on the far side of the wall surrounding our property, Mom took one look at me and made a noise that was part chuckle and part groan. “I see I didn’t make a mistake by pulling you in early.” Her hand reached out to gently brush over the dirt I had painstakingly put on my cheek. “Please tell me you had a good time, at least. Better than yesterday. I know it must have been as disappointing as it was frightening, considering how you feel about that girl.”
I made myself shrug, playing the part of a kid who didn’t want her mother to worry so much. “Sure, it was pretty scary, I guess. But like I said, I didn’t really see that much. I just hid.” With that, I made a point of injecting annoyance and self-recrimination into my voice. If I acted like a terrified child the whole time, Mom would never buy it. But she would believe that I had been scared in the moment but now wanted to move past it and was annoyed at myself for not actually doing anything to help.
It worked. Mom used two fingers to tilt my head up to look at her. “And we are very glad for that. You are not a soldier or a police officer. If you ever see anything like that, hiding is exactly what you should do. It stops the bad guys from hurting you, and keeps you out of the way for the people who are actually trained to help. Hiding under that car was the best thing you could have done, okay?”
Oh boy was there an awful lot I wanted to say to that. But, of course, I kept myself under control and simply offered my mother a small smile. “Sure, I guess. Izzy’s the real superhero around here anyway. Where is she?” Right after saying that, I made a noise of realization. “Ohhh she’s probably doing Minority stuff, huh?”
“She’ll be home soon enough,” Mom assured me with a smile. “For now, perhaps you should go get cleaned up. We’ll be leaving within the hour. Oh, and I do hope you worked up an appetite while you were out.” She winked. “Your father really wants to spoil Izzy tonight, so I have a feeling he’ll be pulling out all the stops to make this a memorable meal.”
I could think of a few ways it could be memorable, but I sure as hell wasn’t about to suggest any of them. Instead, I simply promised to be ready soon, before jogging upstairs with my skateboard tucked under one arm. On the way, I passed Simon coming down while talking on the phone with one of his friends. Or maybe it was one of the Ministry people. Or both. Hell, maybe he was talking to a girl. It wasn’t like every last thing he did had to revolve around the Ministry.
Yeah, okay, I’d rather think about my brother plotting mysterious things with a secret criminal underworld than about him being romantic with a girl. Blech. Honestly, there were a lot of things I’d rather think about than that. My brother’s love life wasn’t exactly on my top one thousand list of stuff I had any interest in.
Pushing that thought far, far out of my mind, I grabbed a set of nice clothes (a teal silk shirt and black slacks) from my room before taking a long, hot shower. Partly because it helped me relax a bit, and partly because it took awhile to get clean. Maybe I had overdone the whole rolling in the dirt thing just a little bit. But at least it was sufficiently convincing for my mother so she didn’t ask any uncomfortable questions.
In any case, we had dinner at an out-of-the way restaurant. It was a nice place on the edge of town where they were very discreet. But more than that, their owner and head chef was a genius when it came to food. Seriously, that wasn’t hyperbole. Her name was Nadia Campbell and she was literally a Tech-Touched with a focus on cooking rather than building machines or weapons or whatever.
Technically I wasn’t supposed to know that she was Touched, it wasn’t like she went around advertising it to everyone. But I’d heard my parents talking about her even before I’d found out about the Ministry. Nadia used to be the teacher for our own chef, Claudio. Dad tried to hire her to come to the house, but she didn’t go for it so he hired Claudio, her protege.
If he was good at cooking, Nadia was the master. And she made certain everyone who worked in her kitchen followed her instructions. I had had a meal that was prepared by her personally a couple times before, though it wasn’t a regular occurrence by any means. She didn’t seem to care about my family‘s money, or any money really, aside from what it took to keep her restaurant afloat and allow her to do her work.
No, despite all the money and influence they had, Nadia only agreed to personally cook for my family on very special occasions. The most recent one had been my sweet sixteen, back in January. But apparently she had agreed to this meal after finding out about Izzy agreeing to be adopted. And boy was that ever a good way to make this time memorable.
Izzy, for her part, didn’t really understand what the big deal was. Not at first, anyway. And she was even more confused when there didn’t turn out to be any menus to look at. We just sat down in the private room at the back of the restaurant and one of Nadia’s assistants came out to talk to everyone. It wasn’t her, but that wasn’t surprising either. The small, deceptively young-looking black woman rarely directly spoke to any customers. Or anyone else, as far as I knew. She wasn’t the most sociable person, which was probably another reason why she turned down my family‘s offer.
Instead of menus, Nadia‘s assistant, a man named Tumaini, talked with all of us. Some of it was about what sort of food we liked, but it was also seemingly random conversation. It went on for just a few minutes before the man smiled, thanked us for coming, and went out again.
After he left, Izzy hesitantly asked what that was all about. With a chuckle, Dad replied, “The woman here, Nadia, let’s just say she’s very special. She was listening to all that, and she’ll use the conversation to design a meal for everyone here. It’s what she does, and she’s quite good at it.”
Izzy was able to find out just how good Nadia was pretty soon, as our meals were eventually brought back to the table. My own food was an Italian pasta dish with semi-spicy meatballs and a creamy sauce that made my taste buds want to jump onto the table and start dancing. Izzy, meanwhile, had some sort of salmon dish with fingerling potatoes, which were apparently good enough to leave her completely shocked after just one bite. Though the shock didn’t last long, probably because it would have meant taking longer before actually eating the stuff.
Mom, Dad, and Simon had their own meals that were clearly just as good. We dug into the meals in earnest, while occasionally talking. The main subject was, naturally, Izzy. She blushed a lot and mumbled, apparently not sure how to handle being the center of attention like this. But I could tell she was having a good time regardless. We all were.
Mom insisted we not have phones at the table while we were eating, so despite my anxiousness to know what was happening with the Breakwater thing, I couldn’t keep checking up on it.
When we left the restaurant and all piled into the back of the limousine, however, I immediately dug the phone out of my pocket and checked. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for, and a lot of it. Fourteen messages from Paige and the others, along with nine news alerts, and a couple phone calls. All of which amounted to the same thing.
Flea and Trivial had been found and would be coming home soon.