Mateo and I looked at each other. My helt covered my face, but Mateo’s frozen expression hinted at the sa dread I felt.
Not letting Working Man wait, Mateo took the call, “Blue Mask here. Are you okay?”
In a hoarse voice, Working Man said, “We’re alright. What’s your situation?
Taking a breath, Mateo said, “Good. The vampires left in Book Tower are dead including an alien. We didn’t kill them all, though. We’ll have to discuss what’s next there.”
With a tired laugh, Working Man replied, “I’m not worried. We got a lead on the group directing the police and dia and hunted them down. We’d have called you in, but we didn’t know how far their communications expertise extended. V8 couldn’t know for sure that everyone with access to our comms was uncompromised or we’d have brought you in. From what I’ve been seeing since, it looks like Book Tower saw heavy fighting, more than I’d have expected you to handle.”
“We had so help,” Mateo said, his tone calm and even as if he didn’t expect to be read out for it.
“Saw it,” Working Man said without any hint of anger. “The troll and the wizard. I heard one of Unity’s hamsters was with you too. Bring them back to ho base for debriefing. We’ll et you there.”
“Understood,” Mateo said. “We’ll bring everyone over. It’ll be at least 30 minutes.”
The call ended with Working Man saying, “I know it. See you there.”
After the words, “Connection Closed,” appeared on my screen, Mateo said, “I know I skipped a few things. I didn’t want to go into the deal over the comm and I really didn’t want to go into who helped us.”
Amy raised an eyebrow, “You did tell him you had help. I heard that much.”
“He even seed to notice Troll and Red Hex,” I said. “I half-expected him to explode right there.”
This text was taken from . Help the author by reading the original version there.
Mateo shook his head, “He may have seen them, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t recognize them. He’s up on supernatural heroes and villains if they’re a known big threat or if they’ve ever co to Detroit. If they’re not a threat here, he doesn’t pay attention. It’s a blindspot of his and he knows it. I’m the one who’s supposed to keep track of that sort of thing. He knows about Bloodmaiden. Expect the explosion when we get back to base.”
I sighed.
On the one hand, it’s not as if Working Man could punish much. Theoretically, he might assign to clean the base (including bathrooms) for the rest of the internship. Aside from that, it wasn’t as if he could prevent from being part of the Heroes’ League without his approval.
In a worst-case scenario, I might have to do this internship all over again with soone else. No denying that would be annoying. It would set back the titable for finishing my required period of post-Stapledon service by three months.
What we’d done didn’t seem bad enough to repeat an internship, though. Beyond that, Isaac Lim and other higher-ups in the Stapledon program gave more credit than I deserved due to the original League. They might allow it to count anyway.
On the other hand, in a world where supers needed help from other supers more than they needed governnt approval, Working Man’s disapproval would count. If I left him angry, it might an that teams that were friendly to him might not make helping ours a priority.
We wouldn’t have any idea how much that might hurt us until it did. And it did matter. We were already seeing how much the old boys' network hurt Tara by preventing her from finding an internship until the League gave her one.
It didn’t take much to guess that there were already people out there pissed at us because of that. I just didn’t know who or how many.
For that matter, if I really pissed off Working Man, he might fire Mateo. He hadn’t threatened to, but Mateo was the guy most in charge of , which ant that whatever I did was on him.
Co to think of it, if Working Man did get upset about us letting the vampires go, that had been Mateo’s idea.
Oh boy. If it ca to that, maybe I could take the bla.
Amy looked over at , “I don’t know exactly what you’re thinking, but if it involves self-sacrifice, don’t. You don’t know what Working Man’s going to say yet.”
I looked over at her, “How did you co up with that?”
She stared up at , “I’ve known you for a few years now, and I’m more aware than most people of how far you’ll go to help. Plus, rember how I pick up powers from people I stab? I stabbed the xosk, so right now I'm a little telepathic.”
“Okay, then. I guess we’d better go back to base,” I said.
User Comments
0 comments from readers