Super

  Also by Matthew Cody

  Powerless

  The Dead Gentleman

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Matthew Cody

  Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Geoffrey Lorenzen

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,

  an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cody, Matthew.

  Super / Matthew Cody — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In this sequel to POWERLESS, the superpowered kids of Noble’s Green are once again threatened by an unknown force that may be trying to steal their powers.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89979-9

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Superheroes—Fiction. 3. Supervillains—Fiction.

  4. Pennsylvania—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C654Su 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2012008220

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Jack and Stan,

  who filled my childhood

  with dreams of flying.

  And for Alisha and Willem,

  always.

  Acknowledgments

  My wife, Alisha, and my son, Willem, get a special place in the dedication, but they’ve put up with enough to earn an extra thank-you here as well. An extra-big thanks also to my editor, Michele Burke. Super was the first book that we could really roll up our sleeves and work on together, from start to finish, and the experience was a joy. Thanks to my friend and agent, Kate Schafer Testerman, who continues to guide me through the wilds of publishing, and tells me to take a breath every now and then. She’s right, it helps.

  And lastly to all the great teachers, parents, librarians, and young readers I’ve met over the last few years who’ve asked for a sequel to Powerless—I told you it was coming!

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter One: The New Kid

  Chapter Two: Mollie Lee

  Chapter Three: The Plunkett Family Name

  Chapter Four: Clay the Terrible

  Chapter Five: First Flight

  Chapter Six: Superheroing 101

  Chapter Seven: Theo and the Bridge

  Chapter Eight: The Tree Fort of Justice

  Chapter Nine: Safety in Numbers

  Chapter Ten: New Friends and Old Enemies

  Chapter Eleven: Aftershocks

  Chapter Twelve: The Long Way Home

  Chapter Thirteen: Stalled

  Chapter Fourteen: Louisa

  Chapter Fifteen: Halloween

  Chapter Sixteen: Night Battle

  Chapter Seventeen: Recriminations. Confessions.

  Chapter Eighteen: Back to the Old Quarry

  Chapter Nineteen: The Supers of Noble’s Green

  Chapter Twenty: A Late-Night Visit

  Chapter Twenty-one: The Master of the Shades

  Chapter Twenty-two: The Black Ring

  Chapter Twenty-three: Night Terrors

  Chapter Twenty-four: The Ambush

  Chapter Twenty-five: Grounded

  Chapter Twenty-six: The Shroud

  Chapter Twenty-seven: The Ghosts That Haunt Us

  Chapter Twenty-eight: The New World

  Chapter Twenty-nine: The Story of Johnny and Herman

  Prologue

  The night terrors had started a year ago. The doctors said he’d grow out of it, that it was hormonal and normal and nothing to be alarmed about. This is what they told his parents. The doctors never really talked to Michael.

  Night terrors. The name alone was enough to cause nightmares. But these weren’t nightmares. Nightmares were bad, but Michael had never had a nightmare that left him sweaty and shivering at the same time. He’d never had a nightmare that made him scream so loud that his parents had to call 911. Nightmares were for children. They were the stuff of spooky closets and monsters under the bed. Michael’s dreams were haunted by something far, far worse.

  The problem was, he couldn’t remember what. He’d awake in a panic and for a few seconds he would know—he could see it so clearly, it might as well have still been in the room with him. But try as he might, he couldn’t hold on to it. It vanished. The fear was the only thing that stayed behind. He could feel it in his sweat-soaked sheets, he tasted it in his mouth, which had gone dry from the screaming. But he couldn’t give it a name.

  In the sleepless, dead hours of the night, he was thankful that his mom and dad had stopped barging into his room every time it happened. The terrors were bad enough without Michael having to feel guilty about waking the entire house. Of course, they were probably awake anyway—no one could sleep through that kind of screaming—but the doctors had advised them to stop drawing attention to the problem. The doctors couldn’t make the terrors go away, but they could lessen the embarrassment a little, at least.

  Tonight, as on so many nights, Michael found himself sitting upright in bed trying to quiet the sound of his own wildly thumping heart. This time he’d awoken pressed up against the headboard as if he could climb it to safety. It was always something like that. Sometimes he woke up on the floor, sometimes he’d made it as far as the bedroom door, but he always seemed to be trying to get away from the outside. Away from the windows. The source of his fear lay beyond the walls of his house.

  The doctors made a point of correcting him when he said things like that. They reminded him that the source of his terror was his own subconscious, an unfortunate combination of teenage anxiety and a flood of hormones. The doors and windows were just objects that his subconscious had fixated on. If only the doctors would explain that to his subconscious.

  It didn’t happen every night, but when it did, Michael would sit awake in the dark, alone, until dawn. He actually felt safer with the lights off. Flip on a light in a dark room at night, and the window becomes a two-way mirror. You can’t see out, but anyone, or anything, can see in.

  And it was an especially clear night tonight. The moon hung, a half circle, above the branches of the oak outside his bedroom. It was an old tree, old enough to reach up three stories to his window. When he was younger, he used to fantasize about leaping out and climbing the tree to freedom. He’d loved the oak, the open sky beyond, even the dark peak of Mount Noble looming in the distance. For him as a kid, the window had been a part of his recurring dream of flight, and in that nighttime fantasy, he leapt from the tree and kept going straight up into the sky. Even today he could almost feel the tickle of the leaves against his legs as he skimmed the treetops. But the window held no such fascination now. He stared at the branches and shivered. He always stood off to one side, out of sight. It wouldn’t do to stand in full view of the yard beyond. Not at night. Not ever at night.

  His room was stifling, and the humid air clung to his skin like a wet sweater. Despite Pennsylvania’s midsummer swelter, Michael always slept with the window shut. His parents had agreed to run the air conditioner for him, but it was a weak old contr
aption that never managed to cool the upstairs rooms. He longed to throw open the window and let the mountain breeze in. He wanted to smell something other than his own sour sweat.

  What was he afraid of? What did he think was out there?

  Asking that question was like chasing a name on the tip of his tongue. But he was closing in on it. Just a little farther …

  His hands pressed flat against the windowpane without his say-so. It felt good, this sort of numb distance that he was suddenly experiencing. So much better than the cord of fear that had twisted in his gut for so long.

  With just a little effort, he clicked the locks open. First one, then the other. A wind blew through the oak’s branches outside, their tips brushing the window. It had the unnerving effect of sounding like someone tapping on the pane. The fear started to creep back into his stomach. Breathing deep, Michael leaned his forehead against the cool glass and watched as his breath fogged it up. What was he afraid of? He wasn’t asleep anymore. The terror, whatever it was, couldn’t hurt him now.

  The wooden tracks squealed a bit in protest as Michael slid the window open. Mountain air and the musty-dirt smell of cut grass and green leaves washed over him at once. The air tasted so very good, and the night breeze cooled his feverish skin. Smiling, he leaned out the window and tested the nearest tree limb, tracing lines in the bark. The branch was sturdy and surprisingly smooth in places where it felt like it’d actually been rubbed flat, almost polished with use. Here a handhold, there a foothold. For the first time, Michael really examined the windowsill. Even in the dim moonlight he could see the scuff marks where the painted wood had been rubbed thin. Someone had climbed out of this window and into this tree before. And they’d done it many times.

  But who?

  Carefully, Michael put one foot on the windowsill, in the exact spot where the paint was nearly worn bare. His long arms braced against either side for support and balance as he pulled himself up into the open window. It was a dizzying height, a full three-story drop to the yard below, but Michael felt surprisingly sure. He wasn’t scared of heights per se, but he also wasn’t normally adventurous enough to go tree climbing in the dark. And yet his hands knew where to hold on. His other foot had already found a place on the branch where he could pivot away from the window, secure in the knowledge that this was the right one. No, not knowledge. Michael still had no memory of ever actually climbing this tree, but it was like his body knew how. His muscles remembered what his mind had forgotten.

  But how do you remember something you’ve never done?

  Hand over hand he climbed while his feet found other branches that he just knew would support his weight. There were plenty of weak limbs this near the top, but he easily avoided those. Only minutes ago he’d been lying in his bed paralyzed with fear, and now here he was doing daredevil feats in the dark. Although he was sure-footed here up top, the way down was still something of a mystery to him. The leaves were thicker just below; the branches there felt foreign. He had no sense of the path down. So little moonlight made it through the leaves that the space below him was nearly pitch-black. It would be hard to see where he was stepping down there.

  That was an adventure for another day. Perhaps tomorrow, when there was sunlight to see by. For now he’d content himself with sitting at the top of his tree and watching the clouds drift in front of the moon. It was as peaceful as he’d felt in months, just listening to the creaking of branches bending with the breeze, the crickets chirping somewhere nearby. In the daytime such sounds were always interrupted by the gunning of a car engine or the buzz of a neighbor’s lawn mower. It was only at this hour of the night in Noble’s Green that the human sounds disappeared and you could really listen to the subtle sounds of nature, of the mountain itself.

  Which was why the sudden rustle beneath him was so alarming. It was not the sound of windblown leaves. This sounded more like something moving among the branches, moving with a purpose. But it sounded too large to be a squirrel or bird, and yet it didn’t have the weight of a human being stumbling through the foliage. This was a sneakier sound. Almost like slithering. Like fabric being pulled through the leaves. Up the leaves. Climbing the tree.

  The fear came back and wrapped him up like an iron chain, so tight that he couldn’t breathe. Something was coming up the tree for him. Michael tried to make out a shape in the darkness below, but nothing moved, at least nothing that he could see. And the sound was getting louder, getting closer. His open window was still several feet away, the drop to the yard much more than that.

  He’d just started to inch his way back when he caught a glimpse of something. It was confusing at first, because he thought he was just spying his own shadow against the thick floor of leaves below, but that was impossible. The moon wasn’t nearly bright enough in the sky to cast shadows at night, especially in the depths of this tree. He was looking at an outline, a form of someone roughly his size and all in black. But the dimensions were all wrong: it stretched and crept along the branches toward him. A form with shape but no mass.

  The shadow looked at Michael and opened its mouth.

  Michael pushed off with all his strength, leaping for the window. Branches slapped him in the face, cutting and scraping against bare skin, but his hands found the window’s ledge. His bare feet tore against the wood, getting bloodied and picking up splinters as he scrambled to find purchase. Up over the windowsill he hauled himself, too terrified to look over his shoulder, and dropped himself onto his bedroom floor.

  In an instant he was back on his feet and slamming the window shut. As he flipped the latches locked, he saw something still moving in the tree, the dark shape crawling among the dark branches where he’d been sitting. He threw the curtains closed and sprinted down the hall to his parents’ bedroom.

  They were waiting for him. They’d heard the crash as he’d come through the window. They wore exhausted, worried expressions as he fell into their arms, crying uncontrollably. But their worry turned to something worse as they spotted his cut and bleeding hands, his torn feet. They sat him down and cleaned his cuts and asked him what had happened this time, how he’d gotten hurt again, but Michael couldn’t answer. He didn’t know.

  Something had happened. He’d seen something terribly wrong and yet terribly familiar, but he couldn’t tell his parents what it was. He’d known just minutes before, but it was gone now.

  The night terror had stolen it away.

  Chapter One

  The New Kid

  “We need a name,” said Eric. “Like a secret society name or something. A league name.”

  “A league?” asked Daniel. “You mean like major league baseball?”

  “Ha. You know what I mean. We need to call ourselves something. I can’t say The Supers of Noble’s Green with a straight face.”

  “But The League of Justice would be different? You want that on a T-shirt?”

  “I don’t want anything on a T-shirt,” said Eric, rolling his eyes.

  “How about The League of Junior Superheroes and Their Friend Who Really Just Wants to Go Swimming? That would strike fear into the hearts of evildoers everywhere.”

  “Okay, okay! Forget I brought it up.”

  The two friends were quiet for a moment, listening to the sounds of summer. The buzz of cicadas rose and fell. Tangle Creek burbled below them. A train whistle blew somewhere in the distance.

  “Did you pick a superhero name?” asked Daniel. “Because I think Compulsive Naming Guy hasn’t been taken yet.”

  Eric groaned, covering his face with his hands.

  “Kid List Maker?”

  “You know, Superman was lucky that all he had to worry about was kryptonite. He didn’t have you.”

  “The Brainstormer? Wait, that almost sounds cool. Scratch that.”

  Eric reached his hands out as if to strangle Daniel.

  “Do you yield before my superior wit?” asked Daniel. “Can we please go swimming now? I’m melting up here in the sun.”

  �
��Fine. Just let me make sure the coast is clear.”

  And with that Eric stepped off their perch on the trellis of the Tangle Creek Bridge, hidden from view beneath the bridge’s roadway but still a full thirty feet above the greenish water below. But he didn’t fall. Eric never fell. He flew.

  Tangle Creek Bridge was notorious. The approaching road, a lonely, poorly maintained stretch of Route 16, veered sharply into a hairpin curve just before narrowing onto the one-lane bridge. While this helped to slow down oncoming traffic, it also meant that drivers had little time to gauge the conditions before they crossed. In the winter if the bridge was icy, or anytime someone was driving carelessly during a rainstorm, the old bridge was a deathtrap.

  But for this, the summer before their eighth-grade year, the little-used bridge had served as Daniel and his friends’ secret swimming hole. The water directly underneath was deep enough to dive into and clear of the jagged rocks and sandbars that were so common along much of the rest of the creek. There was an easy-to-climb trellis that led to a spot halfway up, where you could do a pretty excellent cannonball; or if you were really brave, you could keep climbing to the platform just beneath the very top for a straight cliff-style dive.

  Or, if you were Eric, you could fly.

  Daniel had spent much of the summer watching Mollie and Eric approach the bridge from the north, keeping low and barely skimming the water as they flew, just enough to kick up a spray that would cool you off on a hot summer afternoon. Or if they were looking for a real soak, they’d fly a loop up and over the bridge, then free-fall into the deep green water.

  Though Daniel wasn’t a flier, of course, he did like to hold on to Eric’s arms and tag along as they skimmed the creek—that was better than any water ride in any amusement park in the country. He’d tried it once with Mollie, but she’d dragged him so low that he’d gone face-first into the creek. Daniel had hit so hard that he nearly lost his trunks, and when he’d come up for air, Mollie had been doubled over snorting and laughing herself blue.