Daniel scrambled to keep up with the older boy. Theo’s long arms and legs made it an easy thing for him to swing over the side and climb down the scaffolding supports. Daniel was used to climbing up from the creek, and he found doing it in reverse both tricky and a bit scary. He wondered what would happen if he fell. Would it be the long drop to the water below, or would he fly?
“Watch yourself,” Theo said as Daniel’s foot slipped on the scaffolding. “Here, take my hand.”
Daniel did as he was told and proceeded cautiously until he found himself safely perched near the diving point, in the same place he’d been when he’d watched Theo’s car careen over the edge.
“So this is your gang’s hidden swimming hole, huh?” As Theo talked, he leaned as far as could out over the creek—one hand on the scaffolding and the other stretched out in midair, like he was trying to touch the distant shore.
“Well, yeah.”
“But I guess it’s not so hidden anymore. With all those fire trucks that showed up after my accident, I guess the secret’s blown, huh?” Theo looked over his shoulder at him, and as the two boys made eye contact, Daniel had a worrying realization.
Watching Theo dangle over that deep creek brought Daniel back to that afternoon a few days ago, when he’d watched the car plummet off the bridge only to be caught midfall by Eric. One moment in free fall, the next perfectly still, floating in space. It had lasted only a second, but it had been long enough for Daniel to lock eyes with Theo Plunkett and to recognize something in the boy’s face. Theo had known in that moment that something impossible was happening to him. He couldn’t see Eric, and in his state of shock he probably hadn’t been able to process much, but Theo had understood that he should have been falling and he wasn’t. He knew that much, at least. And that much was dangerous.
Daniel cursed himself for not thinking of it sooner. Of course Theo wanted to spend time with him, of course he’d brought him here, to where it had all happened. Daniel had been so caught up in his own extraordinary experiences of the past two days that he hadn’t seen what was really going on.
He wasn’t investigating Theo Plunkett. Theo Plunkett was investigating him.
“How’s your friend Eric?” asked Theo. “He back up and swimming?”
“Sure,” said Daniel, trying to sound unconcerned. “He’s fine. I think I told you that yesterday—”
“I’d like to see him,” interrupted Theo. “And that other kid, the Indian one.”
“Rohan.”
“Right. I’ve got a few questions about that day, you know? Keep playing it over and over again in my head. And there are parts I just can’t figure out.”
Theo was watching for a reaction, Daniel could tell. But Daniel had matched wits with another Plunkett a lot more wily than this spoiled rich kid. If he could handle Herman, he could handle anyone.
“What are you confused about?” asked Daniel. “I was here—I saw the whole thing.”
“Well, that wave, for one thing,” said Theo. “Where did that water come from? Certainly none of you could have made that splash from the creek thirty feet down.”
“There was a spot shower. We get those sometimes up here; they blow in off the mountain, but I wouldn’t call it a wave.”
Theo didn’t answer right away. But he smiled unconvincingly.
“That must be it. Still, I’d like to meet your friends. It’s hard being new and all, you know?”
“Sure. Of course. They’d love to meet you too.”
“Great,” said Theo. “That’s settled then. Tell you what—my dad’s going out of town in a couple of days, and though he won’t want me leaving the house, I can probably have people over. Why don’t you all come over to our place? We’ll order pizza. You do have pizza delivery in this town, right?”
“Of course we do.”
“Awesome!” And with that Theo began pulling his shirt up over his head.
“What are you doing?”
“It looks like it’s going to be another hot day. Don’t know how many more of those we’ll have, so I’m not going to waste it!”
Theo dove, with perfect form, into Tangle Creek, leaving Daniel by himself at the top. He hadn’t invited him in, but then Theo seemed the sort who was used to doing things alone.
Which was just fine with Daniel. The last thing he wanted to do was jump. He’d had enough of this creek to last him for good.
Daniel had told Eric that Theo wasn’t a problem. He now knew that he’d been very, very wrong.
Chapter Eight
The Tree Fort of Justice
The next day, while Theo sat in his palatial mansion and endured whatever passed for punishment in his family, a new meeting of the Supers was called. Approaching the tree fort by bike was slow going for Daniel, as he had to pedal along an old, rarely used road that eventually wound around the mountain’s north face to the Old Quarry. But long before completing that treacherous route, Daniel veered off on a secret footpath into the thick forest. He was walking his bike along the trail, as he had many times before, when he heard a girl’s voice giggling in his ear. It was a clear, sunny day, and despite the thick foliage there was plenty of light here in the woods. He looked around him, and despite the laughter, Daniel was alone.
No one was there, or at least no one he could see.
“Hi, Rose,” he said.
The giggling stopped and the woods were quiet except for birdsong and a few chirping crickets. Silently, Daniel began counting to himself. He made it to seven before the giggles exploded again into a snorting laugh.
“Oh, how did you know?” asked the girl’s voice.
“There’s only one invisible girl with that laugh, Rose,” Daniel said. Actually, there was only one invisible girl, period. From the sound of it, she was somewhere to his left. Squinting, he could just make out tiny footprints stirring the underbrush, as if someone was rocking back and forth on her feet.
“Aww, I wanted to surprise you!” said the unseen Rose.
“You did surprise me,” answered Daniel. “You did much better this time. You were quiet for almost seven seconds. That’s a new record!”
She giggled again, but this time it was a proud laugh. Though he couldn’t see it, he had the feeling the invisible girl was blushing.
“Where’s your sister, Rose?”
“Louisa’s up the trail a ways. I wandered off again.”
“She’s going to be worried about you. Come on.”
If little Rose was the smallest Super, then her older sister, Louisa, was the most … reluctant. Whereas the other Supers reveled in their abilities, Louisa’s intangibility only served to make her self-conscious. The two sisters’ powers were linked in a way—Rose couldn’t be seen unless she wanted to be, and Louisa couldn’t be touched. But whereas Rose spent most of her time with the Supers totally invisible, Louisa almost never activated her power. Mollie had told Daniel once that she thought Louisa was afraid she’d somehow get stuck that way, unable to touch or feel anything ever again.
Daniel knew it was simpler than that—Louisa just wanted to be normal. Louisa and he were alike in a way: they both pretended to be something they weren’t.
“Hey, Rose, can you do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Can you turn visible now? Now that you’ve surprised me and all, it would be nice to see who I’m talking to.”
“Oh, sure.”
Rose popped into existence next to him, standing in the shade of a small evergreen. Nearly six years old, the youngest Super had her sister’s long black hair and nut-brown eyes.
“Rose! Rose!”
Louisa came out of the woods a little ways ahead of them on the trail. She was obviously relieved to see her missing sister, but not panicked. By now they were all used to Rose disappearing, literally.
“There you are!” Louisa said.
“I surprised Daniel!” said Rose, giving her sister a huge grin. “I went seven seconds without laughing!”
“Good fo
r you,” said Louisa. “Hi, Daniel.”
Whenever Louisa said hi to Daniel, she smiled in a way that made Mollie roll her eyes and Daniel feel sort of queasy. Louisa was pretty, and she treated him a lot better than Mollie did (she had never once punched him in the arm, for starters). But Daniel wasn’t ready for crushes. Fighting super-villains was simple. Crushes were complicated.
“Hey, Louisa,” he said. “Am I the last one here?”
“Yeah, but don’t worry. The fliers only just arrived, and it takes them, what, like two minutes from town?”
Daniel chuckled in agreement, but the picture of Eric and Mollie soaring above the trees soured his mood. Now that he knew what flight really felt like, his jealousy was worse than ever. He didn’t like it, and he certainly wasn’t proud of how he felt, but it was there. A bitter lemon stuck in his throat.
The three of them walked the rest of the way up the trail, and when they finally got to the tree fort, the rest of the Supers were there waiting for them. Tucked away in the woods on the south face of Mount Noble, the Supers’ tree fort was a cross between a hidden base and a makeshift museum. No one really knew how old the fort was. The inside was filled with comics, drawings, and other mementos left by previous generations of superpowered children, and the outside had been added to and repaired so many times over the years that there was probably little of the original structure intact. The newest addition had been a lookout crow’s nest up top, which gave the whole thing a ramshackle, pirate-ship appearance. It was as if Captain Hook’s Jolly Roger had been wrecked upon the branches of two great trees.
Eric and Mollie were perched in the crow’s nest, waving as Daniel approached, and he spotted Rohan in the topmost window, his face in a book. Rohan wasn’t a flier, but he would have been the first to arrive, regardless. He was just like that. His powers meant that he was easily distracted, but though he might not know where he was at any given time, he always got there early.
Once inside, before any official business could be sorted out, each Super had to sit through Rose’s story of how she had surprised Daniel. She told it to everyone, individually, and each time a new detail appeared. By the time she got to Mollie, Rose had Daniel screaming like a girl and running away. While everyone else rolled their eyes at Rose’s little embellishments, Mollie simply nodded, and said, “Yep. Sounds like Daniel.”
The Supers ran their meetings informally, and really only Rohan and Eric still insisted they be called meetings at all. Not too long ago, they had opened each meeting with a reading of the Rules—a set of commandments supposedly handed down from the first superhero, Johnny Noble. But Daniel had discovered that the Rules had actually been planted by the Shroud as a way of controlling the Supers. He’d used fear and a false history to keep the kids in line.
Since that discovery, the Rules had been abandoned, and now each meeting began with a simple hello.
“Hi, everyone,” said Daniel. “Thanks for coming.”
Daniel cleared his throat as he talked. The Supers were spread out before him, sitting on old beanbags, crates, or rugs on the floor. Even speaking in front a group of friends gave him a small case of the jitters. Louisa and Rose were up front, and Louisa’s staring wasn’t making it any easier on Daniel’s nerves. So he chose to focus on Eric in the back, who gave him a supportive thumbs-up. The two hadn’t talked about Daniel’s powers problem since yesterday, and Daniel wasn’t planning on bringing it up here either. He’d called them together for another reason altogether.
“So, uh,” began Daniel, “I guess you already know that we’ve got a new kid in Noble’s Green and that he’s a Plunkett.”
“Plunketts are bad,” said Rose. “They’re scary.”
“Shh,” said Louisa. “Let him finish.”
“That’s okay, Louisa. Yeah, Rose, Herman Plunkett was scary. But this isn’t Herman. It’s his grandnephew, Theo.”
Mollie stuck her tongue out at this and started to say something, but Eric caught the move out of the corner of his eye and kicked the crate she was sitting on. Mollie, faster than lightning, must’ve thumped him, because one minute Eric was grinning and the next he was rubbing his nose, which was already turning an angry red. Eric liked to keep the meetings orderly, but this earned him more than the occasional punch from Mollie.
“We don’t have any reason to believe that Theo is as dangerous as his uncle was,” said Daniel, pausing for effect. “But he is dangerous.”
That got their attention.
“But you were defending him yesterday!” said Eric.
“That was yesterday morning. He stopped by for a visit later that afternoon, and I now think that he could pose a serious problem. He’s onto us. I think it’s only a matter of time before he finds out about the Supers.”
The room was quiet while he told them about their trip back to the Tangle Creek Bridge. As he talked, he knew they were all thinking the same thing, because they all shared the same fear—if their secret got out, there was no telling what might happen. Men in black cars coming to take them away, scientists who would want to study them like lab rats. Daniel had to be careful not to create a panic. He knew he needed to be a bit dramatic, if for no other reason than to get them to be serious for ten seconds, but he also didn’t want this to get out of hand. Theo was a Plunkett, but he wasn’t the Shroud.
Luckily, Rohan followed up with a logical question. “You said he’s asking questions about the accident, but do you think he has any more info?”
Daniel shook his head. “Not yet. All he knows is something strange happened. He knows his car should’ve plummeted into the creek, not floated gently down.”
“Well, duh,” said Mollie.
“I’d hoped the shock would’ve confused things,” said Rohan. “It was only a few seconds before he fell.”
There was an awkward pause as everyone processed the unspoken part of what Rohan was saying—that Theo fell because Eric dropped him.
“Anyway,” said Daniel, moving on, “Theo knows something’s up, and he wants to talk to us. Specifically, he wants to talk to Eric and Rohan. He’s invited us over to his place for … pizza.”
“Doesn’t exactly sound like the plan of a criminal mastermind,” said Rohan. “A pizza party?”
“I think he’s dangerous; I didn’t say he was evil,” said Daniel. “He’s stumbled onto a mystery, and I think he’s determined to solve it.”
“Just like you were,” said Rohan, smiling.
“Yeah,” answered Daniel. “And you all took a big chance by telling me the truth.”
“So, what do you think we should do?” asked Rohan. “You know him better than any of us—do you think we should tell him?”
“He did save Eric’s life,” said Louisa. “I mean, with Daniel’s help he did. I can’t imagine Herman Plunkett doing something like that.”
Mollie threw up her hands. “I can’t even believe we’re talking about this! No, we are not going to tell him anything! Daniel was different. We can’t compare the two of them.”
“Well, Daniel is special, that’s true,” said Louisa.
“I was going to say that Daniel is totally unthreatening. He was a skinny new kid who was getting picked on by Clay and Bud. He needed our help.”
“Gee, thanks, Mollie,” said Daniel.
“You know what I mean,” said Mollie. “Theo Plunkett has powers we don’t have.”
“Like what exactly?” asked Rohan.
“He’s rich,” answered Daniel, before Mollie could say it. “Mollie’s right. I hate to say it, but she’s right. I was just a kid, but I still could’ve caused trouble. But Theo’s family … if they found out about you guys, who knows what could happen?”
“Are you worried about black helicopters, stuff like that?” asked Rohan.
“I’m trying not to sound that paranoid, Rohan. But though I don’t want to judge Theo by his family, we can’t ignore it either.”
“So what do you suggest we do?” asked Eric.
Daniel scratch
ed his head. Once again here he was acting like the leader of this bunch. And once again he was feeling not quite up to the task, but he hoped it didn’t show. They were looking to him for ideas. “I think we should take him up on his offer. We share a pizza, we hang out, and we convince him that you all are as ordinary as can be. We bore him to death so that he stops snooping around.”
“That won’t be hard for Rohan,” said Mollie.
“Quiet, you,” said Rohan. “But what if that doesn’t work, Daniel? What if he’s as persistent as you were?”
Daniel shrugged. “He can’t do anything on a hunch. He’d need proof.”
“Which is all the more reason to go over there,” added Mollie. “If Herman left anything incriminating lying around in that big old house of his, this could be our best chance to get it.”
“Right,” said Daniel. “Herman had a hidden safe in his study—he showed it to me once. I don’t know the combination, but if someone had the power to get inside that safe without having to open it … What do you think, Louisa? You can make yourself intangible, but if there is anything in the safe, you could phase that out too, right?”
All eyes turned to her. Of all of them, she was the last person to volunteer for a bit of espionage, but she was also the only one with the power to get into that safe, unnoticed.
“Yeah, my powers work on touch,” she said. “I guess so.”
“Great!” said Daniel. “So Rohan, Eric, and I will say yes to the pizza party, and we’ll bring Louisa along too.”
“I wanna go!” whined Rose.
“Sorry, Rose. This is a big-kid thing.”
“It’s always a big-kid thing,” said Rose, folding her arms in front of her chest. She’d pout for a while, but she’d get over it.
“Louisa and I will need to slip away, so we can find the safe while Eric and Rohan convince Theo that we’re a bunch of perfectly normal kids.”
“What’s that?” asked Rohan. “Sorry, I got distracted by a colony of black ants under the fort. Sounds like the queen is getting ready to lay more eggs!”