The Superhero's Son (Book 8): The Superhero's Prison Read online

  Triplet glanced over my shoulder, no doubt taking note of the two guards standing behind me. He probably didn’t want them overhearing it, but I sincerely doubted that the guards would let us talk in private.

  “Do you remember a few months back, when I was investigating the Savannah Jones case?” said Triplet.

  I nodded. “Yes. You ended up tracing her soul back to my grandparents.”

  “Right,” said Triplet. “Remember when we defeated your grandparents, how Mecha Knight gave me a case for the NHA?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But neither you nor Mecha Knight told me what it was about.”

  “Because it is supposed to be secret,” said Triplet. “But, since the evidence suggests that you are involved somehow, I’ve decided to reveal it to you. But you shouldn’t tell anyone else about this.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What about Blizzard, though?”

  “She can know about it,” said Triplet, glancing at her, “since I can’t just ask her to leave the room. Plus, if you trust her, then I trust her, too.”

  Blizzard looked a little sheepish at that, but I said, “Fine. What is it?”

  Triplet again glanced over my shoulder at the guards before looking at me again. “Have you heard of the supervillain Mastermind?”

  I shook my head. “No, I haven’t. Who is he?”

  “Exactly,” said Triplet. “I don’t know, either.”

  “Huh?” I said. “Then why did you ask me?”

  “Just to get your attention,” said Triplet. “Because I am investigating this supervillain’s plans.”

  “I’m confused,” I said, sharing a glance with an equally confused-looking Blizzard.

  “Let me start from the beginning,” said Triplet. He readjusted his coat before continuing. “After your grandparents were defeated, Mecha Knight gave me the job of investigating a brand new supervillain who appeared on the scene: Someone named Mastermind, who, as far as I can tell, is a highly intelligent criminal, well, mastermind who is behind a lot of recent crimes, including some with which you are involved.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Apparently, he supplied Maria Candle with the giant lizard that attacked the Neohero Alliance Museum on Hero Island during this year’s Neohero Summit,” said Triplet, “and he gave your grandfather the soul-stealing device that he used to steal Savannah Jones’s soul. He’s helped other supervillains, too, but these are the two cases that brought Mastermind to the attention of the Neohero Alliance.”

  “How long has he been active?” I said.

  “That’s just the thing,” said Triplet. “Until recently, no one even knew he existed. He’s incredibly secretive. He wipes all evidence of his involvement in most crimes, even going as far as to kill those who know anything about him or simply making them disappear. It reminds me of the case with the Visionary, except worse, because Mastermind is far more dangerous than Sagan ever was.”

  “Why doesn’t the NHA track him down themselves?” I said.

  “Because no one in the NHA is any good at tracking down people who don’t want to be found,” said Triplet. “I, on the other hand, specialize in tracking down people—supervillains or otherwise—who like their privacy. But Mastermind has been very difficult so far, because he’s at least twenty steps ahead of everyone and sometimes backtracks just to confuse me.”

  Triplet said that in admiration, like he was talking about a fellow artist. Then again, Triplet seemed to like his detective work, so maybe he just saw Mastermind as an interesting challenge against which to test his wits.

  “What do I have to do with him?” I said. “I didn’t even know this guy existed until five minutes ago.”

  “Because of your doppelganger that attacked the White House yesterday,” said Triplet. “You saw the footage, yes?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Do you know who he is?”

  “Nope,” said Triplet, shaking his head. “But I suspect that your doppelganger is working for Mastermind. My working theory is that Mastermind made a clone of you by taking some of your DNA, so I came to ask you if you were aware of anyone taking DNA from you recently.”

  I thought about that for a moment and then shook my head. “No. As far as I know, no one’s ever taken a sample of my DNA away from me.”

  “Are you sure?” said Triplet. “I know that Ultimate Max takes DNA samples of every prisoner in the place; that way, they have a means of quickly identifying escapees who are caught again. Are you sure they didn’t take a sample of your DNA when you were imprisoned?”

  “I’m sure they didn’t,” I said. I rubbed the back of my neck. “Then again, I wasn’t conscious when I was brought here. Maybe they took a sample from me when I was unconscious. It would have been easy to do.”

  “Very easy,” said Triplet. “And if they did, Mastermind might have taken it to use to create your clone.”

  “Does Mastermind work at Ultimate Max?” I said with a gulp.

  “I doubt it,” said Triplet, “but he’s already shown himself to be a man with access to resources that most people don’t have. I imagine that, if he wanted it, he could get it.”

  I didn’t like the idea of some supervillain out there having access to my own DNA and using it to create an evil clone of me. “But why would he do that? Why would he create a clone of me? What’s his goal?”

  “That, I do not know,” said Triplet, “but supervillains often do have extremely convoluted goals and plans anyway. And it’s up to me to unravel them before they get too far.”

  “Well, I hope you do find him,” I said, thinking of what Grandfather had just told me earlier about the angels, “because I doubt that Mastermind’s plan, whatever it is, is going to be very good for any of us.”

  Chapter Six

  Our conversation pretty much ended there, since Triplet had asked me everything he’d needed to ask. Triplet told me that he would come back to me if he had any other questions, while Blizzard promised to stay in touch and let everyone else know how I was doing. We couldn’t hug or kiss goodbye; all we could do was press our hands against the glass. I felt Blizzard’s cold energy flowing through her hands onto the glass, but that was as close to actually feeling Blizzard as I was going to get for a long while.

  Once Triplet and Blizzard left, the guards escorted me back to my cell, though they told me they’d be back with lunch later.

  Ivan was awake when I got back, still lying in his bunk, occasionally flipping through the pages of Cat Weekly. It was still bizarre how the first and most vicious supervillain of all time was a fan of a magazine about cats, but in comparison to all of the other stuff I had to worry about right now, I decided it wasn’t a problem.

  “Ah, you are back,” said Ivan, without looking away from his magazine, “how did it go?”

  “Fine,” I said. “They didn’t know why I was in here, though, so I’m back to square one.”

  “Indeed,” said Ivan. “I am sorry to hear that. The truth will be found sooner or later, I suppose.”

  I nodded, but then a thought occurred to me. “Ivan, do you know who Mastermind is?”

  Ivan, again, did not take his eyes away from his magazine. “No, I do not.”

  “Oh,” I said, my shoulders slumping. “I thought you might know, since he’s a supervillain and you’re a supervillain and all.”

  “Understandable, but I’ve been in Ultimate Max for thirty years,” said Ivan. “In fact, the thirtieth anniversary of my imprisonment is coming up next week. I’ve been trying to think of a way to celebrate it, but unfortunately, the guards will probably not give me a cake.”

  “Thirty years …” I shook my head. “I can’t imagine being in prison for that long.”

  “Of course you can’t,” said Ivan. “You aren’t even twenty. Sometimes, I miss my twenties. Life was more exciting back then, that’s for sure, but there is something to be said about enjoying the simplicities of life, such as magazines about cats.”

  “Um, I guess so,” I said.

  “A
nd look on the bright side,” said Ivan. “You at least have friends on the outside who come to visit you. Most of the other prisoners do not.”

  “Including you?” I said.

  “Yes,” said Ivan. His voice became slightly tighter. “I have not had a visitor in thirty years, mostly due to my reputation. No one wants to be associated with the first supervillain.”

  “So you don’t have anyone on the outside at all?” I said. “Not a wife or children or parents or anything?”

  Ivan lowered his magazine, but still did not look at me. “When I first came to America so long ago, I did have a wife … but she died. I have not visited her grave in thirty years.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s nothing,” said Ivan. “And I do not want to talk about it. One must never be anchored down by the past. Always look forward, I say. It is what Anna, my wife, would have wanted.”

  I could tell that Ivan hadn’t gotten over Anna’s death entirely, despite what he said. His words trembled, just slightly, and he was deliberately looking away from me. I thought I even saw him hold back tears. It made me feel sorry for him, because despite knowing who he was, I had a hard time thinking of him as a vicious supervillain instead of as one of my only friends and allies in this place.

  “Besides, you have many problems of your own right now,” said Ivan. He raised the magazine back over his face. “You do not need to carry my burden on your shoulders as well.”

  “Okay,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

  I climbed up onto my bunk on the top and lay down on it. I was thinking about this Mastermind character. He was yet another piece in the puzzle of my imprisonment. I wondered if he was related to the G-Men or not. I wish I knew for sure, but as long as I was stuck in jail, I could only hope that Triplet would figure out the truth, because if I knew anything for sure, it was that the truth would set me free.

  -

  Over the next couple of weeks, I didn’t do much except wake up, eat, work out in the prison yard, and go back to sleep, only to repeat the process again the next day. Mimic and my other former enemies still wanted to kill me, but since I hung out with Ivan and Rime all the time, they never got a chance to even touch me. All they could do was glare at me from across the prison yard or mutter among themselves about what they’d like to do to me if they could get their hands on me, but honestly I wasn’t terribly afraid of them. They were afraid of a guy who read cat magazines, for Pete’s sake, though I guess it helped that Ivan could give them radiation sickness if he wanted.

  But I did keep a very close eye on the TV, at least whenever the news was on. It seemed like every time the news stations began to focus on other topics, my doppelganger—who the Internet had dubbed ‘White Lightning,’ a term which had caught on with the general population and which the news stations were begrudgingly using—would attack somewhere and cause lots of death and property damage. His attack patterns were random; sometimes he would attack a major city like Houston or Los Angeles, but other times he would strike terror in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Cadmus Smith was on TV often, saying that the G-Men were working hard day and night to catch White Lightning and that the American people didn’t have anything to fear. Considering how the G-Men were always late to every White Lightning attack, however, I wondered how many people actually believed Cadmus’s reassurances and how many saw it as what it was: Government lies meant to make people think everything was okay when it really was not.

  And, of course, there was lots of speculation about White Lightning’s identity. In the early days, the talking heads were sure that it was me, but when it was revealed that I was in prison and had not left Ultimate Max since being interned, the speculation turned to focus on various supervillains, even though White Lightning looked like no known supervillain and no one claimed him as their own. There was also the occasional conspiracy theorist who would appear in the news and blame White Lightning on the government, but without any evidence to back that up, I didn’t consider it very likely.

  No one ever mentioned Mastermind, but then, if Triplet had been telling the truth, no one outside of the NHA and maybe the G-Men even knew he existed. Triplet didn’t come and tell me about his investigation, but Blizzard visited nearly every day and told me that Triplet had disappeared again, as he usually did whenever he was investigating, but that he was probably okay, because he was in touch with Mecha Knight and Mecha Knight had not said anything to her to indicate that Triplet was in trouble.

  But even though I avidly followed the news every day, I didn’t feel very well informed. There was a cycle to each White Lightning attack: It would happen completely out of nowhere, usually hitting a community center or business or some other building with a lot of people, with White Lightning killing and destroying as much people and property as possible in a short time. Then he’d leave just as quickly as he came, the talking heads on TV would offer their usually uninformed opinions on the matter, there would be a big national debate between people from the two main political parties about what we should do or they would just blame each other for the carnage … and then things would just go back to ‘normal’ until White Lightning attacked again and restarted the whole damn cycle. It got really tiring after the third attack.

  President Plutarch also made regular appearances on TV, promising that the G-Men, under his direction, would capture White Lightning and bring him to justice. While Plutarch always sounded so confident about this, the fact that the G-Men had failed to prevent any of White Lightning’s attacks since his first attack on the White House made his promises sound faker and faker with each passing day. His approval ratings, as a result, were on the decline and some people were even theorizing that he might not be reelected to a second term if White Lightning wasn’t stopped.

  All the while, no one ever got a chance to talk with White Lightning. In fact, all of the footage and eyewitnesses of his attacks said the same thing: He never made a sound. He never laughed. He would strike, kill people and destroy things, and leave. He wouldn’t even mock those few non-supers who tried to fight him; he’d just fry them with a well-placed lightning bolt and then resume his rampage of destruction.

  In fact, White Lightning’s attacks were becoming so frequent that a lot of talking heads were starting to compare him to Nuclear Winter. Apparently, Nuclear Winter had seemed just as unstoppable as White Lightning until he was eventually defeated, but the problem was that the G-Men had been invented precisely in order to nip these kinds of super threats in the bud. That White Lightning had so far evaded capture from the G-Men was starting to make people wonder what good the G-Men were for at all. Some might even be starting to speculate that Cadmus was in league with White Lightning, intentionally allowing my doppelganger to get away with anything for unknown reasons.

  All in all, my doppelganger was causing way more damage than every other supervillain in the country. This was apparently leading to a spike in super crime, because the G-Men, NHA, and INJ were stretched thin trying to find my doppelganger, which left few superheroes available to deal with the other supervillains and criminals still free. It didn’t help that San Francisco was still undergoing reconstruction, though there was plenty of fear that White Lightning might strike there next, since the city was more vulnerable than ever in its reconstruction period.

  As far as I could tell, the only consistent aspect of White Lightning’s attacks was that he always attacked places that lacked superhumans. But the reason why was hardly a mystery; after all, superhumans could potentially stop him, while normal humans were almost entirely useless against his might. More attacks showed that White Lightning’s power set was almost entirely identical with my own, though that didn’t mean he didn’t have more powers that he hadn’t used yet for whatever reason.

  The other prisoners, by the way, loved White Lightning, because they saw him as attacking the society that had harmed them. Yeah, apparently a lot of the ex-supervillains in here thought th
at they were the victims of an unjust society. It was why most of the prisoners considered Ivan—who freely admitted to his own crimes—strange, because he didn’t spend his time railing against an ‘unjust’ society that had the audacity to have laws against insignificant things like murder and rape and to punish those who transgressed said laws.

  In any case, I thought I knew what White Lightning was doing. He was no avenging angel casting judgment on America or striking against unjust institutions, nor was he your typical supervillain trying to become famous or increase his own power. He was trying to draw me out.

  I came to that conclusion because of what Grandfather had told me, about the two ‘gods’ fighting each other over a city. I doubted that White Lightning knew about it, but he was clearly looking for a fight. It would explain why he kept randomly appearing and disappearing; he was trying to provoke me to fight him and he apparently thought that the best way to do that was to go around killing innocents and destroying property.

  And I had to admit, it was working. Every time I saw another news report about yet another White Lightning attack, I wanted to jump off the couch and fly to wherever that bastard was. I wanted to put an end to his reign of terror once and for all.

  But I couldn’t. The guards of Ultimate Max would never let me leave. Master Chaos may have been able to escape on his own, but it was doubtful that I could, because Ultimate Max’s security was some of the best in the country. Even with Rime and Ivan’s help, I didn’t think that I would be able to escape. I would have to wait for the Warden to decide to let me go.

  Speaking of Warden Glass, I saw him for the first time the day after I spoke with Triplet and Blizzard. It had happened during the day, when all of the prisoners had been in the prison yard. As usual, I was with Rime and Ivan, lifting weights with them because I had nothing better to do. Mimic and his gang glared at us from across the yard every now and then, but as usual, the other prisoners gave us a wide berth and there wasn’t too much commotion, all things considered.