Not Your Villain (Sidekick Squad #2)(11)

Classes are a rigorous blend of physical training, sparring tournaments, meta-human history, hero-skill workshops, and power development sessions. The training is challenging, but this year the intensity of the classes is matched by the difficulty of dealing with his fear of heights. In class, he walks the line between wanting to show off all he can do and trying to stay in disguise.

Bells spends as much time as he can working out at the gym. His power isn’t physical, but being a hero requires being fit. If he’s going to take on supervillains with only the ability to shapeshift, he’s got to be strong. He logs countless hours on the treadmill and picks up where he left off with his weight trainer, Barbara, who oversees physical training for all the meta-humans.

“Come on, three more reps; you’ve got this!” Coach Barbara shouts.

A bead of sweat drips off his brow as Bells pushes up the barbell. The muscles in his arms strain, screaming for him to stop. His whole body aches, but he’s got to finish this. “One more. Come on, Barry!”

Bells almost loses concentration as he struggles to lift the weight, and he can’t lose the shift. He grits his teeth, pushes the bar higher, and sets it in the rack. Chest heaving, he flops back on the bench.

“There you go! That’s a new record for you; you’ve gotten so much stronger!”

Bells takes the water bottle Barbara offers him as she continues prattling. Her short ponytail bounces as she talks with her hands. He sits up, catches his breath, and spots his reflection in the mirror. It’s still Barry’s face, he notes proudly.

It’s amazing, how far he’s come. The first year at the training center, it was all he could do to stay as Barry for a whole class, and then he had to run back to his dorm room, let go of the shift, and hide until he had enough energy to shift into the disguise again.

It was easier the second year. He’d had more practice shifting, since he would try to go half the school day without a binder and change at lunch. He worked up to going a whole school day using his powers, and it’s really paid off.

This year he can do the extra physical training he’s always wanted to do because he can hold the shift for so long. He can attend the day’s classes and then relax as Barry too. Being able to walk around after class and spend time with some of his classmates is much more fun than hiding in his room to recover from using his power. Mostly, though, Bells keeps to himself and ignores the hushed whispers that follow him.

Bells has no idea why people think the League has handpicked him already. He’s not the most impressive. The twins, with their teleportation skills, have the coolest powers in Bells’ opinion, but apparently their power class rating is low. But that’s hard to tell because they use their powers together. Sasha can summon anything that she’s touched to her side, and Tanya can teleport anything she’s touched to anywhere she’s been.

Ricky can be invisible, but he’s also rated low. Bells has only seen him use his power on purpose to pull the most obvious pranks—stealing Sasha’s hat and putting it on Tanya or putting on Christine’s sweater and following her, pretending to be a ghost, but Ricky often struggles during class with using his powers deliberately.

Aside from Bells, there are fifteen meta-humans in the training program this year, all rated C-class or lower. Power ratings are supposed to be hush-hush, but the students constantly gossip about their abilities and who’s likely to get in the League.

“Maybe I’ll just join the United Villain’s Guild,” Ricky says one afternoon after another unsuccessful attempt at control, earning him a few scattered laughs and more than a few nervous glances. No one talks about villains here.

“Well, they do seem really incompetent; you’d fit right in,” Tanya says. “I mean, they all seem to be ending up in Corrections.”

A chorus of giggles follows, and Bells tilts his head to listen to the gossip from his classmates from all over the country. Apparently Tree Frog and Plasmaman have recently been captured as well. It’s a bit strange, Bells muses, since he’s never believed the heroes in those towns to be very competent. It does seem there are more heroes than villains now, and he taps his fingers on his desk while wondering how long this is going to last and whether it’s a sign of something worse to come.

*

Sitting in his History of Superpowers class, Bells almost nods off. He tries to focus on the dancing rays of sunlight making patterns on Sasha’s face, but Harris is droning on and on about the history of the meta-human gene and X29: how the magnitude of the solar flare caused nuclear reactors all around the world to fail, which resulted in the Disasters and the world war. The same flare catalyzed the latent gene that would manifest in different abilities. Lieutenant Orion discovered his powers and founded the Heroes’ League of Heroes. Bells has to sit through it, though, and there are too few students in the class to get away with messaging any of his friends, as he does at school.

“But what about mutants?” Tanya asks.

Bells rubs at his eyes, then sits up. No one’s brought up mutations of the meta-gene before.

Harris rolls his eyes. “Well, I suppose it is possible for a person to develop meta-abilities without previous expression of the gene in their family. The right mutation to the X29 gene could happen on its own in the parents’ reproductive cells, giving their children powers. But it would be extremely rare. I haven’t heard of such a case, and there is no instance registered with the Department of Meta-Human Regulations. There may be exceptions, I suppose, since the Registry doesn’t take into account people who don’t know their family history, such as immigrants to the Collective.”