Justice by Jeffrey Salane Page B

tortured by hearing a new secret about her father from strangers. It’s not like she’d never met her dad, but she’d known him as the person who stumbled heroically into her room at night to calm her down after a nightmare, not as an art thief who also invented high-tech magnetized weaponry. And why would he invent something like this for the Fulbrights if he wasn’t really on their side? Maybe he was on their side after all. Maybe he had been, until something changed his mind.
    ‘My father invented a lot of things,’ said M. ‘Fromfabricated stories to this weird new device. But that doesn’t mean he taught me how to use them.’
    ‘Are you sure?’ asked Keyshawn. ‘Because you did escape the Maze in no time flat.’
    ‘The Maze? My father did that?’
    ‘None of this is more important than our current experiment,’ said Ben. ‘Freeman and Fence. Fight.’
    M faced Cal. ‘Looks like it’s you and me.’
    As her back met his, she realized how tall Cal had grown. He must be almost a foot taller than her now. Their steps began, but M was lost in thoughts about her father. His calmness, his dopiness, his knack for always making people laugh, even at his own expense … those details didn’t match up with this mad-scientist criminal-cum-Fulbright who was quickly overshadowing the father she once knew. A jolt coursed over her skin as her feelings flared. She was angry about the mysteries hidden under the mysteries in her life, and the suit channeled that anger. She felt it tingling through every bone as she pivoted on her heel and released a powerful Magblast at Cal, which looped like a crushing tornado. But at the same moment, Cal fired a cometlike blast and the two attacks tussled and held in midair, pushing and pulling against each other. M held her ground, digging her heels in as her outstretched hands shook and her legs trembled. Where the attacks converged, the friction of the pulses caused actual sparks to pop in the turbulent air. The smell of burning filled the room.
    Cal closed his eyes, and M thought for sure that he was about to give up. Then a final thrust burst forth from him, blowing her tornado apart. A flowing pulse descended onher, thudding against her chest. It felt like her legs and arms were being pulled apart.
    Collapsing on the floor, M tried to catch her breath, but the blast had knocked the wind right out of her. The room blurred. Even through her mask, with its magic corrective lenses, the world looked like a loose watercolor painting: Everything poured into everything else. M felt someone lift her head and heard a distant sound that could have been a voice or merely the ocean crashing on the shore. When at last she regained focus, she realized that Jules was cupping her head and yelling at someone. She rolled her head to the right to see Keyshawn running out of the room. Then she picked her head up just in time to see Cal Magblast Ben with an attack that was ten times more forceful than what she had experienced. Ben crumpled and the audio finally broke through to M’s ears. It was Cal.
    ‘I don’t know about you guys, but I’m getting out of here.’
    He bolted for the door, and something inside M clicked into place.
    It was panic. It was a vision of Cal captured and never released. But more than that, it was the notion that she needed Cal to help find her mother, to help find the moon rock, and to help stop whatever their parents had set in motion. And that wasn’t going to happen if he set one foot out of that door.
    M jumped up and screamed, ‘Don’t run!’
    Then, effortlessly, she fired a throbbing pulse that not only cut off Cal’s escape route, but tossed him clear across the room, creating a large dent in the wall where he impacted. He lay helpless, like a bird stunned by a window in its flight path.
    As quickly as the energy had surged into her, it flushed out, leaving M shaking and feeling hollow. Something horrible had happened. But what horrified her wasn’t the