The Strike Trilogy (66 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

I
n Boston Common, Keplar and Orion dashed across the park, avoiding the fire Rigel was raining down from the sky. They dove behind a smoking stonewall and rested there.

“We’ve lost all the rebels, O,” Keplar said. “All of them. They’ve either been captured or taken out. It’s just us now.”

“And what about the heroes? Who’s left?”

“You’re looking at it. I evacuated everyone out, including the level nines. Even they weren’t making a dent. Where the hell is Tobin? Where’d he go?”

“I don’t know,” Orion replied. “The heroes that were watching him face Rigel said he was here, and then he was just gone. I don’t know—”

Lightning streaked across the dark sky, lighting up the night. A thunderbolt cracked, ripping apart the silence. Startled, Orion and Keplar looked up.

“Krandor,” the dog said. “About time. Where the hell has he been?”

Above them, floating down through a swirling storm cloud, Tobin appeared, surrounded by snapping, blue electricity. Just as when he left, he was wearing his blue mask across his face and his cape was rippling behind his back, but when his boots hit the ground, Keplar and Orion saw that his fists were glowing bright blue, and his eyes were sparking with white electricity. He appeared oddly emotionless, his face blank.

“Are you all right, Tobin?” Orion asked. “Where’d you go?”

“You guys are gonna havta leave now,” Tobin said. “It’s just him and me. It has to be.”

Keplar shook his head. “We’re not letting you face him alone, Tobin. You’re gonna need—”

Tobin extended his finger and pointed at Keplar and Orion. Suddenly, the dog and the old man saw a blue flash, and when they reopened their eyes, they saw that they were now in an empty, dark restaurant.

“Um,” Keplar said, looking at the tables around him. “Where the hell are we?”

Orion pressed the button on his earpiece. “Tobin, how did you do that? What happened?”

“It’s a new trick I just learned,” Tobin said. “Don’t worry, you’re still in Boston. You’re just far enough away so I can do what I need to do.”

“Tobin, you can’t face him alone,” Orion said. “Bring us back there. Wait for us.”

“Sorry, O. I’ll see you in a bit.”

Tobin turned off his communicator. He looked up.

Rigel was hovering over him, floating in the blue flames.

“So,” the red giant said. “You’re back. I thought you had run away.”

“Never,” Tobin replied. He pointed to the skyscraper with his thumb. “Your friend, the Daybreaker? He took me for a little joyride. He’s gone now, by the way. Back to his own timeline. You can’t use him anymore.”

Rigel grinned and shook his head. “No matter. I don’t need him. I never did, once I took his power. The people of Rytonia will follow me now. They will see that I am the true Daybreaker. Just as Vincent always wanted it to be.”

Tobin chuckled, holding up his hands and tilting his head to one side. “Actually, no, I’m sorry. I was just hanging with the true Daybreaker—we were just chilling in my room back in Bridgton. He’s not too bad of a guy, once you get past the murdery-ness and the spikes on his armor.”

Rigel smirked. “Joking to the end. I would have it no other way.”

Extending both of his arms in front of him, Rigel blasted his electricity-entwined, blue fire down at Tobin, but the boy dodged the flames, springing off his feet and leaping to his right. Still airborne, the boy held out his bo-staff and fired a searing lightning bolt at Rigel, but the red giant avoided it in the air, simply shifting his body to one side. Floating downward and landing with his heavy feet on the earth, his body still encased in blue fire, Rigel stomped toward Tobin.

“Do you remember?” the red giant asked. “Do you remember when we first faced each other, in Bridgton? I was like a child then. And you?”

Rigel held out his hand and opened his palm. An axe made out of blue fire formed from thin air, and he gripped the handle with his fingers.

“You’re exactly the same,” Rigel finished. “Nothing has changed. You’re still a silly, wisecracking superhero-in-training, held back from true greatness by Orion.”

With a grunt, Rigel swung his axe forward and Tobin had to quickly raise his bo-staff in front of himself to block the blow. The boy tried to go on the offensive, spinning his wrists and swinging his staff at Rigel in a series of lightning-fast, acrobatic strikes, but Rigel deflected all of his blows with his flaming forearms.   Sensing an opening, Rigel butted Tobin in the stomach with the handle of his axe, and the boy bent over forward, with the wind knocked out of him. Before he could recover, Rigel raised his leg and kicked the boy, sending him flying backward.

Across the Common, Tobin lay on the ground, grimacing and holding his arm weakly across his side. Rigel marched toward him.

“Just as he did with me, Orion has taught you nothing. He has engrained in you cowardly and evasive maneuvers, but he has not let your true powers shine. He does not allow you to do what you can do. I got out from under his watch because I knew I was capable of so much more. He would not let me take my rightful place in the universe, and now I can see that he will be the death of you. Perhaps if he had showed you what you could do, you would have survived this. But he held you back. He never let you see what you could really be.”

After playing possum a moment, Tobin jumped to his feet, reared his arm back, and cracked Rigel across the jaw with his gloved, glowing fist. Attempting to distract the giant, he then flipped backwards away from him, cartwheeling across the Common and even swinging around a tree branch, but none of it slowed Rigel down. The red giant simply strolled across the park and plucked Tobin from the air, grabbing his leg and whipping him down into the ground.

Rigel stopped the charade. His face grew serious, and he stopped talking. Raising his axe into the air, he brought it down, smashing the energized weapon across Tobin’s ribs. Tobin screamed, in agony, but this only increased Rigel’s onslaught. Again and again, he raised the axe up, holding it above his head a moment, before hammering it down, as if he was a lumberjack cutting apart a tree stump. With every blow, Tobin yelled out and curled his body into a ball, trying to avoid the devastating attack.

Finally, Rigel reached down and grabbed Tobin by his neck. With a casual flick of his wrist, the red giant tossed the boy’s broken body to his right, sending him crashing through a metal railing around the park and into the plate glass window of a bookstore, shattering it. Lying on the sidewalk, Tobin arched his back and bellowed, his eyes closed, his head flung back to the sky.

Rigel hovered over to the bloodied hero. Leaning down, he grabbed Tobin by the collar of his costume and lifted him up to his face.

“Vincent has won, Tobin. This is it. Even though he is gone, Vincent has won. Everything you fought for, all Orion fought for—it was for nothing. All those that died—Titan, your father—they should have known Vincent’s vision for this world would become a reality. Earth’s fate has been written in the stars since the dawn of time. If they had listened, so many lives could have been saved. Including yours.”

Rigel flung Tobin up into the air, toward the Common. As the boy fell down toward the ground, Rigel opened his palm and blasted him with one last, long, scorching stream of blue fire. Even after the boy hit the earth, Rigel held the flames on him, blasting his body with the unrelenting energy for over fifteen seconds. Tobin could only scream, and writhe his contorted body on the green ground, waiting for the pain to end.

Finally, Rigel hovered up into the air. Far above the red giant, the domed ceiling of the Dark Nebula slowly began to open, allowing the night sky of Boston to be seen for the first time in months, through a hole not much bigger than Rigel.

“I’m going now, Tobin,” Rigel said. “To spread my new world across this one. Boston was only the beginning—with the power I have now, I can level mountains with the blink of an eye. I can rebuild cities, from the ground up, with a simple wish. I no longer need the Dark Nebula to hide behind. Your world cannot contain me. They cannot stop me.” The giant looked up at the ceiling of the Dark Nebula, then down again at Tobin. “I am the Daybreaker.”

Rolling over, Tobin looked up, his vision blurry. Far above him, thousands of feet away, he could see the hole in the Dark Nebula’s ceiling that Rigel was floating toward. Soon, Rigel would be out in the open world.

“First the United States,” Rigel said. “Then Europe. Then Asia. Then it all. The past glory of Capricious will be remade. What was gone will return. Long live Vincent Harris. Long live New Capricious.”

From the ground, Tobin watched as Rigel rose up and through the hole in the Dark Nebula, out into the stars above. From that height, Tobin knew, the red giant would be able to see all of the areas surrounding the city spread out before him. The giant was now free to bring his destruction and fire across the rest of the Earth.

With his chest rising up and down, and his breath wheezing, Tobin tried to roll over but found that he could not. He stayed lying on his back, looking up at the stars through the hole in the black-and-purple dome. Even with the new powers revealed to him by the Daybreaker, Tobin could barely move. His arms only trembled when he begged them to reach for his staff, and his legs wouldn’t answer him at all, his cries for them to stand going unheeded. Behind his mask, the boy could feel blood running down out of his mouth, and the vision in one of his eyes was completely gone from Rigel’s attacks. Looking down at his body with his one good eye, Tobin saw that Rigel’s axe had cut a massive gash through his pant leg. Through the gash, Tobin could see a flash of white bone.

Dropping his head back against the ground, Tobin turned back to the stars, and he saw that the twinkling objects were beginning to fade away. A dark circle all around the boy’s vision was encroaching on him, shrinking what his eyes could see and filling the world with darkness. Everything was fading away, including the sounds of the park—the only noise Tobin could hear was the weak exhalation of his own breath, trembling out of his open mouth and into the air above his face.

Tobin knew this was the end. From the first moment he had decided to give up his old life and become a superhero, he had always known the end could come at any moment, and now it was here. But, as he lay there, on the grass of Boston Common, one sentence kept repeating itself in his mind, over and over: it was worth it.

It had all been worth it.

Looking up at the fading stars, innumerable and faintly shining against the darkness, Tobin began to think of all the people he’d met over the past year.

Orion, at the supermarket where he worked, on that strangely warm October night.

Keplar, in the grassy field on Capricious, only a few feet away from the massive, dead carcass of a red-colored dinosaur.

Scatterbolt, in Orion’s library, where the little robot had excitedly told Tobin all about the history of Capricious.

Thinking about his friends, other memories began to flash in Tobin’s mind, replaying themselves like old home movies:

The first time he used his powers, standing next to Orion in Gallymoora, fighting off the Hoplites.

Laughing with Keplar in the museum’s training room, driving Orion crazy when they were both supposed to be practicing.

Staying up all night with Scatterbolt, as the robot did his best to teach the mathematically challenged Tobin to play 7-Card Stud, right until the early hours of the morning.

The car chase through the streets of Boston back in May, the night of his prom, when he had only just learned to drive the transforming Bolt Racer.

Meeting Adrianna.

Kissing Adrianna, in the hot spring in Zanatopia.

Getting to know Wakefield and Junior, in their repair shop in the Never-World, with all their crazy inventions and robotic machines.

And his father.

My god, his father.

Tobin’s greatest dream since he was five years old, the one that was the most impossible, had come true: he had met his father. And, no matter how brief their time had been together, Tobin cherished those few fleeting moments just as much as any other moment in his life, perhaps even more. As the boy lay there now, with the stars shining above him, he thought about his mom, and how much he wished he could have told her all about that moment—sharing with her what it was like to meet his father for the first time, and telling her everything they had spoke about.

Then, suddenly, the words of Tobin’s father rang through his ears.

“As crazy as it sounds, I grew to love times like that. When life kicks you in the teeth and sends you in a direction you had no idea you were going, and you have no idea how to get out? I love times like that. Because it’s times like that when you find out what human beings are really made of. You find out how strong you can be. Times like those? You find out you are capable of things you never could have imagined.”

Tobin’s eyes flashed open.

No.

He wouldn’t give up.

He couldn’t. Not now. Not ever. He would keep fighting. Like Orion and his father had taught him. He would keep fighting.

Gritting his teeth and groaning, Tobin rolled over onto his stomach. Pushing himself up by his arms, he rested there, with one knee on the ground and both his hands flat and pressed against the dirt.

Tobin had to get higher into the sky. That’s all he told himself, over and over: he had to get higher. He had to follow after Rigel. Even though the red giant was thousands of feet in the air above him, in the sky over Boston, Tobin had to go after him. He had to reach him somehow. He had to chase him. He had to stop him. He had to reach the hole in the Dark Nebula. He had to get higher. That was all he told himself. That was the only thing that mattered.

He had to get higher.

Grimacing and kneeling on the ground, Tobin flung his head back to the sky, letting out a scream and moving his neck from side-to-side, closing his eyes. He could feel it—a burning, starting at his neck and stopping at the top of his back. All of his electrical power was being funneled to that one spot, across the back of his shoulders. The boy could not feel his superpowers in his hands, arms, or legs. The electricity was only in his shoulders.

Then, suddenly, as Tobin grinded his teeth together and closed his eyes, electrical wings sprouted from his back, ripping through his costume and his cape. Extending out from his shoulders, the massive, bright, pulsing wings were snapping with vigorous, twisting, purple electricity. The purple wings looked like the wings of a skeletal bird, as they were not covered in feathers or skin—they were made of only simple bone and snapping, crackling strands of electricity.