^^Chapter title credit: Song by Aztec Camera, above.^^

{Geoffrey}

Stupid super-sense. Just when I thought I'd have a relaxing night and get to know Raina a little more, it had to act up. Once I'm in my suit, I hover in the air above the city, trying to feel out the threat. Among all my newfound powers, that turned out to be the hardest thing to perfect. Sometimes it was clear, like a compass pointing me in a certain direction. But other times, like this, it was just a headache and then a feeling that something was wrong.

It takes a a good twenty minutes before I finally feel it: a tug in my stomach, like a rope attached to my spine. I sink down towards the waterfront, and it gets stronger as I get lower. Then it changes, pulling me towards the opposite bank. There's an abandoned factory there, and as I finally land on the roof, I know this is where the threat is. It's rumbling under my feet.

I creep to the edge, where part of it's crumbled away, and I can peek inside. I see a lone figure, standing in the middle of the floor, while a dark shadow spreads from the corner. No, not a shadow. A black ooze, with tentacles.

"So you came when I called this time," says the figure, through a voice moderator.

"You think I wouldn't?" answers the ooze. It's grating and raspy, exactly what I expected ooze to sound like.

"Well, you didn't seem like you wanted to last time."

"I had other things to do," says the ooze. "You think I'm always at your beck and call?"

"If you want to work with me, then yeah." The figure crosses his arms. That gesture seems awfully familiar, but right this second I can't place where I've seen it before.

"Is there a problem here?" says a voice above me, startling me so much I nearly tumble off the roof.

When I recover, hovering in midair, I'm surprised to see another super there, in a stretchy shiny suit, a bright blue color. His mask covers everything but his mouth and part of his jaw, but just by that, I can't tell who he is.

"You nearly gave me a heart attack!" I hiss, because I know most supers have highly enhanced hearing, and I don't want the two inside to know we're here.

"Sorry." He shrugs. "I'm Sky Scraper, by the way."

"I'm the Red Knight," I reply, resigned. I can't get rid of him, at least not right now. Who knows, maybe I'll need backup.

"Funny, you don't look like a knight," he says, crossing his arms.

"Well, you don't look like a skyscraper, but I wasn't going to say anything." I mimic his motion. I don't tell him that I wasn't creative enough to come up with my own super name, and adopted the one that the media gave me. Maybe it was because of my suit — plates that fit together like armor — or because of what knights did — saved people and everything. Either way, that was how it happened.

He grins. "You've got a sense of humor. I like that."

"But to answer your original question, there's a problem in there." I nod towards the hole in the roof. "Looks like we have a meeting of the two evils."

He kneels down and sticks his head through the hole. I wait until he's pulled it back out, his mouth turned down at one corner. "Well, I proclaim us in some deep sh*t, man."

I roll my eyes, glad he can't see my face. "No kidding."

After that, we both drop off the edge of the roof and instead keep our heads poking just above the rim of the hole. The ooze spread while we were talking, now a roughly circular patch on the floor in front of the other super. Tentacles flick out of it, and now I can see the top half of a human body poking up out of the center.

"Gross," Sky Scraper says. "I'm glad I don't look like that in my super suit."

"Yeah. That one can wear it better."

He kicks me, but ends up hurting his own foot. "Dude, what is that suit made out of?"

I don't get time to answer. The fully human super whips around to face us. "Who's there?" he barks.

We duck out of sight just in time.

"What'll we do?" I see his eyes, a bright blue like his suit, darting towards the hole.

"How good are you at creating distractions?"

He grins. "I'm glad you asked."

We have to improvise something quickly — he's going to distract the ooze while I have a talk with the other super. I have a feeling things'll get bad pretty fast, but maybe talking about it might make it less bad. As if.

I stay outside while Sky Scraper creeps around to the other side. I'm supposed to wait until he's got the ooze out of the building, but after five minutes, I wonder why he's taking so long.

"Hey, dipstick!" I hear his voice, from one of the broken windows on the opposite side. Both the ooze and the other super turn. "Yeah, you. The Blob. C'mere."

The ooze hisses something and begins to creep towards him, leaving behind a trail of slime like a snail. Once it's far enough away, I slide in through the hole and lower myself to the floor.

"Hey there," I say, to get his attention.

He whirls, and I get a better view of him. There's a big white H glowing on his chest, and even in the dim light from the windows, I see the material of his suit shifting. Rippling, almost.

"Who are you?" he says, and I see his eyes, behind his mask, narrow.

"Maybe you've heard of me. I'm the Red Knight." I got pretty good media coverage, especially when some guy planted a bomb on an oil tanker on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario and sent it across to Rochester. I intercepted it right as it crossed the border, finding the bomb and throwing it overboard with two seconds to spare. It still exploded, but at least we didn't have gallons of oil in the lake for months. "The Lake Ontario incident?"

Recognition crosses his face, but he doesn't comment on that. Instead he scowls. "So another hero, huh? What do you want?"

I shrug. "What makes you think I want anything? I just knew something was wrong and it turned out it was you."

"What, so you're gonna turn me in to the police now? Isn't that what always happens with you good guys and us bad guys?"

"I mean, I won't, if you haven't done anything bad." He was being difficult, but not anything I couldn't handle. "Now let me ask you: who are you? What's that H mean?"

"Haven't heard of me? I'm Hammerhead." He seems smug, but I don't know why.

"That's a new name to me."

"Too bad. Because when we leave here, everybody will. Because they won't have their famous Red Knight." He makes a pulling motion from the floor, and I feel it rumbling.

Then, with a hissing noise, a geyser explodes right in front of me. It blows me off my feet, sending me tumbling backwards. Before I can recover, another one punches me right in the stomach, sending me flying up towards the ceiling. I grab onto one of the metal girders, and it bends under my weight. He sends it higher, and I feel it pulling on my foot now, trying to yank me down.

It turns out to be too strong. I let go, and as the floor races towards me, I aim both my lasers towards him. He leaps out of the way at the last second, and instead they blow a hole in the wall. Then I slam into the floor, my vision rattling. I roll over just in time to see him descending on me. So I curl a fist and whack him a good one in the face. He veers off course, rolling away from me.

I leap up, preparing to zap him for real this time, when Sky Scraper yells at me from behind.

"Red Knight! Look out!"

I whirl on my heel, just in time to see the ooze toss him aside and come straight for me, a lot faster than I thought it could. When it gets close, Hammerhead jumps on my back, knocking me forward and straight into it. The ooze engulfs me, and I feel its tentacles sucking at me. I can't see, let alone turn over, and Hammerhead seems to be pushing my face right down into it.

Then his weight lifts off, and I surface long enough to see Sky Scraper's grabbed him and tossed him away. He turns back to me, and before I realize what's happening, he's pulling me free. His grip is surprisingly strong, but it doesn't surprise me with his size and his muscles. I kick the ooze in its human face, and it hisses and makes a grab for me. Sky Scraper tries to pull me out of reach, but the ooze catches my foot. For the second time that evening, I'm pulled in two directions. Then Sky Scraper makes a gagging noise and his grasp on me loosens. The ooze wins, yanking me towards it and wrapping its arms around me in a death squeeze.

I concentrate, even though my head's spinning and I can't really breathe, shooting both my lasers into the ooze's human solar plexus. It screams, making my ears ring, and releases me. I shoot it with my lasers again, higher. It screeches again, and from behind I hear a thud. It's either dropped Sky Scraper or Hammerhead's back.

"No!" Hammerhead shouts, and out of the corner of my eye, I see him running towards us. I throw my hand out in his direction, catching him with a laser beam and he goes flying backward, crashing through a window. Sky Scraper, newly recovered, goes after him.

I drive the ooze back, but each time I shoot it, I feel my energy drain. That's why I try to use my lasers sparingly, because it's what takes the most power. Eventually though, it curls in on itself and melts through a crack in the floor. I lower myself to the ground, right as I hear a thud from outside and Sky Scraper's head appears in the window.

"I knocked him out, but we should go, dude. He's gonna be pissed when he wakes up."

≈

I wake up the next morning with my head pounding. It feels like it weighs a million pounds. I always likened the way I felt the day after a fight like that to a hangover. When I roll over, I see Matt's still conked out. One of his hands, hanging off the edge of his bed, is bruised over his knuckles. And then it hits me, all at once. The way he called me "dude", when he said "deep sh*t", and his eyes.

He's Sky Scraper. Why hadn't I seen it before?

When I get up, my head spins. I stumble against the bed, and barely make it to the bathroom between our rooms before I throw up in the shower, turning the water on to wash it away. Then, while it's running, I duck back in to get a towel. Then I strip off my clothes and step under the water. I notice the bruises over my torso, and I wonder how I'm going to explain this.

Matt's awake when I come back out, my towel wrapped around my waist. He runs his eyes over my bruises, one eyebrow going up. "Gnarly bruises, dude."

"Matt, there's something you should know," I say as I pull a clean pair of boxers on under my towel, and then take it off to rub it over my hair.

"Yeah? What's that?"

"I'm a super."

He blinks in surprise, but recovers pretty quick. "Funny that you say that, 'cause I am too."

"That was you last night, wasn't it? Helping me fight Hammerhead and the ooze?"

"You're the Red Knight?" He grins. "Dude, that's—"

"Keep your voice down." The walls were really thin here, as I found out the first day, when our suite mate next door decided to bring a girl back.

"Sorry." He takes me seriously, fortunately. "So you figured me out?"

I shrug. "Unless you just happened to be punching someone last night at the same time I was."

"Hammerhead." He grins, but it drops immediately. "He seems kinda vicious, man."

"Understatement of the year." I roll my eyes.

"So, question," he says, as I pull out a clean shirt and tug it on. "What'd he want?"

"He just wanted to get rid of me, apparently."

Matt's brow furrows. "He knows about you? Like...I know about you too, but like...with him it seems worse, you know?"

"He's heard about me on the news, yeah."

"I always thought that was a problem with supers, like...I mean, we wanna stay under the radar and everything with our identities, but whatever we do, we get public recognition."

"Yeah." I think of Raina. She'll be wanting an explanation, I'm sure. "That's why whatever we talked about just now stays here, got it?"

He grins. "I'm not an amateur, Geoff. I know how to keep a secret."

≈

Since it's a weekend, I don't know where I'd find Raina. As I walk, I try to think of how to explain this to her without spilling my guts. It's the first week of school, so no clubs are meeting or anything yet. And it was a Friday, which means anything school-related is out.

I don't get time to think of one. I see her, sitting at one of the picnic tables outside the cafeteria, taking notes from our econ textbook. As I get closer, I see her push her hair out of her face and then look up, catching my eye.

"Hey, Raina." I sit down across from her.

"Geoff," she says, her voice remote.

"So...those notes?" I nod towards the book.

"They were our homework, remember? Or are you just so important that you don't have to do them?" Her hand tightens on her pencil, and she keeps writing. I see she's left-handed, and trying really hard to not smudge everything she'd written.

"Raina." That's a little harsh, but I understand why she's mad.

"What, Geoff?" She throws her pencil down angrily, her eyes burning. "You really have a habit of just saying my name over and over when you're around me. What do you want?"

I feel those words like a slap in the face. "Who says I want anything?"

That's the wrong thing, apparently. "So you're just here to bother me, then?"

"No, I didn't want to—"

"Then let me ask you again." Her hands clench, like she wants to ram one into my stomach. Or my face, maybe. "What. Do. You. Want?"

"I'm sorry for just leaving you in the lurch last night. I realized..." Come on, brain. "I forgot to take my medication."

Wow.

"Medication?" She seems skeptical. "For what?"

"My..." I try to think of what I did before I ran off. I did get a headache. "My headaches. I get migraines pretty bad."

"You get headaches?" Her brow furrows.

"Yeah, I..." How was I going to dig myself out of this? "A lot, actually."

"I'm sorry," she says, dropping her eyes and pushing her hair out of her face again. "I really didn't mean to get mad, I just..."

"Hey, it's fine." I shrug. "Maybe you can catch me up on those notes sometime?"

She bites her lip, nodding. "Yeah. I can."

"And if you still want to slap me in the face for being a total hoser to you last night, you can."

"Why would I do that?" A corner of her mouth goes up. "A total hoser wouldn't have even made an effort to explain."

I say nothing to that. Maybe this whole getting-to-know-her thing wouldn't be so bad after all.