Rise of the Robot Army Page 3

  It was just after nine o’clock, and morning rush hour would be at full volume right now. Chances were there was something Miles could help with. Should he check? That was supposed to be Henry’s job, but who was to say he hadn’t missed something? Nobody is perfect.

  Just one quick pass through the apps on his phone. What could it hurt?

  Miles opened the first app, a live stream of a local TV station with a traffic correspondent named Steve Voyeur. An Atlanta celebrity, he was known for giving play-by-plays of traffic jams with all the zeal of a home-team announcer calling game seven of the World Series.

  “I-285 is a bramble this morning, drivers! Tell the boss you’ll be late to work because the highway gods have graced us with a five-car collision blocking two westbound lanes. It’ll be at least an hour before emergency services can untangle this one. A few bumps and bruises but no thankfully serious injuries.”

  A fender bender where the worst pain anyone suffers is the cost of having to fix their car. Not a crisis so much as an inconvenience. Just the sort of incident Miles had promised his dad he’d leave to the cops and firefighters.

  Miles wanted to help, though. More important, he had the power to help. Was he supposed to ignore that? Of course he wasn’t. Heroes didn’t ignore people in need.

  If he was being honest with himself, there was more to it than that. Miles had been Gilded only last night, but he missed it already: the sensation of being a superhero, the joy on the faces of others when he arrived to lend a hand. The feeling of being . . . better.

  Miles strode quickly through the bus corral, moving with purpose toward the Dumpster outside the cafeteria. He glanced once over each shoulder to make sure no one was watching him, then hurried out of sight.

  Behind the Dumpster, Miles knelt, shrugged off his backpack, and unzipped the pocket. The cape’s dazzling, golden light spilled out, bathing him in its glow. No matter how often or for how long he gazed at the cape—and he’d gazed at it plenty—the look of it never grew tiresome. The cape was the most amazing thing in the world—maybe the entire universe—and it was his.

  Time to prove he deserved it.

  Miles pulled out the cape and dropped it over his shoulders, holding it by the two halves of its clasp. Soft vibrations traveled through his body, making his hair stand on end. The fabric cascaded to the ground, pooling around his feet. The asphalt was filthy and stained, but that didn’t matter. The cape was incapable of getting dirty. It couldn’t get wet or torn or burned. It couldn’t be anything other than flawless.

  God, he loved wearing it.

  For a split second the cape flickered like a lamp with a faulty power cord.

  Miles focused. He imagined all the people who might be stuck in the traffic jam right now, needing Gilded’s help.

  A young woman wanting desperately not to be late for the first day at her new job, a job she needed and that took her six months to find.

  The cape hummed back to life.

  A grandfather excited about taking his young grandchildren to see the whale sharks and penguins at Georgia Aquarium, but now his car was overheating far from home.

  The humming grew stronger.

  A couple—pregnant wife in labor, husband clutching the steering wheel—as they inched far too slowly toward the exit that would take them to the hospital at last.

  The humming reached a crescendo. Miles brought the halves of the clasp closer, feeling them pull at each other. They wanted to touch. They wanted to be whole. They wanted to unleash the incredible power of the golden cape and transform Miles into—

  Miles was crouched with the cape in his hands. He really hoped changing behind Dumpsters wasn’t becoming a thing.

  On second thought, he didn’t care. It was worth it to wear the cape and get away from Chapman and the Jammer and every other thing that was crummy about being a kid instead of a superhero.

  What about the people he’d spotted in the trees, though? That was weird. The press usually ran straight at him, waving their arms and shouting for him to pose for a photo, or give them an interview, or autograph their forehead. (No joke. A blogger had asked him to do that once.) Since when did they hide?

  Rrriiinnng!

  The first-period bell! Miles was late. If Mr. Essaye gave him after-school detention, his dad would be sure to figure out why.

  Miles stuffed the cape inside his backpack and sprinted for the building.

  CHAPTER

  4

  “YOU’RE LATE.”

  Turned out, it wasn’t Mr. Essaye who Miles should have been worried about. It was Henry.

  Don’t let appearances fool you. Henry Matte was barely five feet tall, and his bulky glasses were way too large for his head. But when it came to disapproving glares like the one he was giving Miles now, he was a giant among eighth graders.

  “How do you miss the bell on your first day?”

  Miles was bent over in the hallway, hands on his knees as he caught his breath. Putting in daily workouts as a superhero didn’t do much to bolster his own physical conditioning. Inhaling the fumes from Chapman Middle’s harsh floor disinfectant didn’t help much, either.

  “Henry.” He wheezed. “Glad you’re here. I don’t have any hall passes. Can you doctor one up to get me into first period?”

  Henry raised an eyebrow. “We need to be careful how often you use those. I go into Mr. Harangue’s desk for them too often, he’s going to notice.”

  Henry was head of new student orientation, which offered him even more access to Mr. Harangue’s office. It also allowed him to roam the halls, whether he was on official business or not. Teachers took it on faith that he had permission to be wherever he was. Why wouldn’t they? He looked about as nefarious as a chipmunk. A baby chipmunk. With thick-framed glasses.

  “I know,” Miles said sheepishly. “But I’m in a tight spot. Help me out.”

  Henry narrowed his eyes and scanned the hallway. “Not here.”

  Miles followed Henry into a nearby bathroom. It was a wise choice of venue for a clandestine meeting. No one ever entered a middle-school bathroom unless they absolutely had to.

  Henry checked the stalls to make sure they were alone. Then he reached into his shoulder bag. “Here,” he said, passing Miles a handful of hall passes. “But you have to make these last a while. You really need to concentrate on being at school.”

  Miles slipped the hall passes into his back pocket. “You sound like my dad.”

  “We can’t afford to waste a hall pass because you’re sulking about a run-in with Craig. They’re for Gilded missions only.”

  Miles was offended. He and Henry had been a team for almost a year, and he still acted as though Miles couldn’t be responsible. “I was on a Gilded mission,” he groused.

  Henry snatched his smartphone from its holster and cycled through the phone’s news apps. “I didn’t hear about any priority-one incidents this morning.”

  On Henry’s self-devised threat-level scale, priority one was reserved only for the stuff that required immediate super-heroing. Shoot-outs, runaway trains, and alien invasions all warranted priority one. The scale went all the way to priority five, which was for things like relocating stray, trash-can-raiding bears to the Appalachian Mountains (yes, Miles had actually done that once). Henry had created the system for when there was more than one incident to deal with at the same time, which happened a lot when you were the only superhero in town.

  Henry studied the last of the apps. “Nothing. So what mission did you . . . ?” Henry’s voice trailed off. Then he scowled at his phone. “No you did not!” He turned the phone around, showing the screen to Miles. “Care to explain this?”

  The screen showed the feed from the Gilded Group, a news aggregator for all things Gilded. In the Gilded Group, users shared stories, listed sightings, and otherwise kept tabs on the hero. It was the single most useful tool in Henry’s information arsenal. Currently, the lead story was about Gilded clearing a car wreck during the morning rush hour.
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br />   Busted.

  Miles shrugged. “I figured I’d help.”

  Henry frowned. “Miles, we’ve been over this a zillion times. Information processing and dispatch is my responsibility.” Henry came up with titles for everything. “Information processing and dispatch” was his way of making “surfing the Internet” and “checking social media sites” sound technical.

  “I heard about the accident and decided to fix it,” Miles said. “What’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal is that because you intervened, you’re late to your first class on your first day of school. That draws attention to you, and attention is bad. Plus, if I hadn’t been waiting to bail you out, you might’ve wound up in detention. Imagine if a priority-one incident happened while you were stuck in there. Short of puking on Coach Lineman’s stopwatch, there’d be absolutely zero chance of you getting excused. Might be a little awkward if you had to turn into a superhero right in front of him, don’t you think?”

  Miles wondered how many push-ups an in-detention superhero transformation would earn him. Coach Lineman assessed everything in terms of push-ups. It was the only currency he dealt in.

  “I’d say you risked an awful lot for very little results,” Henry finished.

  “The people caught in that traffic jam sure seemed happy with the results. Like this couple rushing to get to the hospital to deliver their first baby, and . . .” Miles trailed off. No, he’d dreamed that up as an excuse to go to the wreck. But it certainly could’ve been true, right?

  Henry raised an eyebrow. “And . . . ?”

  “Nothing. I’m just saying people were glad to see me.”

  “I’m sure they were. Your arrival was super-convenient for them.” Henry smirked, a sign that his play on words had been intentional and he was proud of it. “But Gilded shouldn’t be a convenience. He has to be a necessity.”

  Then Henry grew serious—wordplay time was over. “Look, Miles. You may be a superhero, but you have to live by the rules. Over the summer you could deal with every little thing that came up. But now that we’re in school, we have to be more careful.” Henry placed a reassuring hand on Miles’s shoulder. “I’m just looking out for you. We’re a team, remember?”

  “I remember,” Miles said. And he did. Yet as much as he and Henry were a team, only one of them understood what it meant to wear the cape.

  Henry nodded. “Good. From here on out, keep in mind the reason we set you up with a phone is so it’d be easy for me to reach you. We didn’t do it so you could look for reasons to go off on your own.”

  “Got it.”

  “If you’re going to have a smartphone, be smart about it.”

  “I said I got it!” Henry sure did know how to belabor a point.

  “All right, all right.” Henry slid his phone back into its holster. “No emergencies right now, so we can both go to class. See you at lunch.”

  “Right. Thanks for the passes.” Miles turned and walked off.

  “Wait!” Henry called out.

  Miles turned back to see Henry trotting toward him.

  “Almost forgot.” Henry reached into his shoulder bag. “I got you a present.”

  “A present?” Miles’s interest was piqued.

  “Yep. A good one.” Henry searched through the bag’s contents, frowning. “I know it’s in here somewhere. . . .” A gum wrapper and a torn-off movie theater stub fell to the floor. “Got it!” he exclaimed triumphantly. He pulled out a comic book and smoothed it against his chest. Then he handed it to Miles. “Sorry. It’s a little bent.”

  It was a copy of Gilded Age, the monthly series that chronicled Gilded’s many fantastic feats. The series had been in print since the late 1950s, when Gilded had first appeared on the scene. Original copies of the early issues were difficult to come by and just as difficult to afford. Not even Henry had them all, much to his undying chagrin.

  The comic book Henry handed to Miles wasn’t worth much at all, though. On account of the creases and other damage—was that a smear of caramel sauce or rubber cement on the cover?—it wasn’t even worth the newsstand cover price. But to Miles it was more precious than every other issue of Gilded Age combined. Because the story in Gilded Age number 687 was about him.

  “Your first time in print,” Henry said, grinning. “Congratulations.”

  Miles gazed at the cover, an artist’s rendition of Gilded—Miles—battling Lord Commander Calamity. The artist must’ve used photo reference because the Lord Commander looked strikingly, frighteningly real. He was targeting Miles—Gilded—with his weapon, a cross between a battle-ax and a spear that had the added pleasure of firing death-ray blasts (because apparently regular battle-axes and spears weren’t deadly enough for the Lord Commander). Miles massaged his chest, remembering the searing, red-hot agony he’d felt when one of the blasts had burned into him. Not even the cape had been able to insulate him from that pain.

  The cover copy read ATTACK OF THE ALIEN HORDE! A SPECIAL DOUBLE-SIZED COMMEMORATIVE ISSUE!

  Miles was dumbstruck. Holding the comic was nothing short of surreal. “When . . . ?”

  “It should be in stores later this week,” Henry said. “I’m a subscriber, so my copy was mailed to me early. Honestly, I expected them to release the story a long time ago. I mean, it’s been almost a year since it happened, right? Turns out the government tried banning the publisher from printing it because they said it contained classified information. The publisher filed a lawsuit in defense of their First Amendment right to freedom of the press. And now there you are.”

  Henry had just invoked the phrases “classified information,” “First Amendment,” and “freedom of the press” in relation to Miles. This was weirder than the first time he’d seen himself as Gilded on the evening news. Then again, that hadn’t involved the freaking Constitution of the United States.

  “Of course, leave it to the press to get the details wrong,” Henry continued, frowning. “Some of your dialogue is off. And look”—he took the comic book back from Miles and flipped through the pages—“they didn’t even bother to show me and your dad helping you.”

  The Lord Commander had felled Miles with a pair of energy blasts and was about to deal the deathblow. Then, out of nowhere, his dad had sped into the fray in his work truck, with Henry riding shotgun. If they hadn’t smacked into the Lord Commander and bought Miles some time, Miles might not have recovered. The battle—and maybe the planet—would’ve been lost.

  “That’s right . . . ,” Miles said. “I forgot about that.”

  Henry shrugged it off. “You were probably dazed from the fight. But what’s the writer’s excuse for leaving us out? Would it have killed him to do a little research? I mean, your dad did interviews about it for a month.”

  Miles remembered that now: the phone in the Taylor household ringing nonstop, reporters from all over the country wanting to talk to his dad.

  “Anyway”—Henry handed the comic book back to Miles—“give it a read. All the time we spend poring through back issues of Gilded Age to learn what your powers are, now you get to read one about yourself. Imagine, someday the next person to don the golden cape will study Gilded Age number six eighty-seven to see what they can learn. And they’ll be learning from you. You’re part of a grand and noble legacy, Miles. A hero’s legacy.”

  The next person to don the golden cape. Miles had never considered that before. But it made sense. The old man had given the Gilded cape to him, and while Miles was only thirteen right now, someday he’d be old, too. Too old to wear the cape. He’d have to find someone to carry on the responsibility. What would become of Miles then? An emptiness crept over him.

  “You all right?” Henry leaned in close, examining Miles. “You’re putting a death grip on that comic book.”

  Miles had nearly crumpled the copy of Gilded Age into a wad. He shoved thoughts of legacies and replacements out of his mind. “I’m okay. I should get to class, though. Don’t want Mr. Essaye asking too many questions about why
I missed roll call. First day of school and all.”

  Henry slapped Miles on the shoulder in agreement. “Good thinking. See you at lunch?”

  “At lunch. And thanks for the present, Henry. For real.”

  “No problem. Just don’t let it go to your head,” Henry said with a wink.

  CHAPTER

  5

  THE BIG BREAKTHROUGH HAD OCCURRED when they discovered the spacecraft buried under the onion patch.

  The unique soil in Vidalia, Georgia, didn’t just make it home to the world-famous Vidalia sweet onion that took its name from the largest city in Toombs County. It also concealed Earth’s first confirmed contact with extraterrestrial life, an event that long predated the attack on Atlanta the previous fall. There were only a select few who knew about the latter factoid, though, General Mortimer George Breckenridge chief among them.

  The discovery had not come easily. First, the General had needed to answer what was, in his mind, the greatest lingering mystery of the alien attack on Atlanta: Who was the old man found dead in the parking garage?

  General Breckenridge could have assumed what the emergency services personnel on the scene did—that the man was just an average Joe who had sadly been in the wrong place at the moment Gilded and the alien had crashed into the garage, bringing a mountain of rubble down on his poor, average-Joe head. It had been a titanic struggle, Gilded wrestling midair with the monstrous beast that even a second lieutenant fresh out of Officer Candidate School would have recognized as a solo scout on a mission of reconnaissance for a larger invading force.

  After the invasion, all attention had been paid to the aliens themselves. But something about Average Joe nagged at the General. How had he happened to be in the garage at that moment? Why had he not been carrying any identification? Why had no one seen him before?

  Even though the General had lately resorted to using operatives from the Central Intelligence Agency to help him build a dossier on Gilded, he had little affinity for spy games. Why lurk in the shadows when you can ride in style in an M1 Abrams tank? Nevertheless, he knew secrecy when he smelled it. And Average Joe reeked of secrecy.