Revolution

- 24 -

Brandon flips between pages of notes, adding a few notes in blue pen between the margins. I don't know how he reads anything he's written with such atrocious handwriting, but I watch, my curiosity mildly piqued. He flips to an article and scans through with a finger. The title mentions something about benzodiazepines, and next to that, he's written memory loss in snails?

I've never been one for chemical sciences; that was Elliot's field of interest. Of course the kid with superhuman smarts would be obsessed with a field no one else could pronounce. The topic bores me, but I'm stuck here watching Brandon search feverishly through the binder in search of something I can't place. I take a sip of my water, ice clinking in the glass. I know it's just a distraction for him, but I've been sitting in this almost empty café for twenty minutes and he said no more than four words to me the entire time.

"Brandon. Drink your coffee."

He glances up for a moment. "I will, I will, gimme a second. I think I just found something."

"Brandon..."

"Hold on."

I push his mug a few inches closer and send him a glare over the top of my glasses wordlessly. He tried to match my gaze, pen hovering above the paper, but finally he cracks and his face splits into a grin. "Fine." He takes a sip, and I nod approvingly.

"Okay, tell me what you think about this," he starts, capping his pen and tapping the paper with it. "The United States has a department for health and human services, right? So they do stuff like encourage healthcare laws and basically provide general welfare for U.S. citizens. But they've got some pretty rich employees in the Cabinet, in Congress, all the big government places to be." He flips a few pages back, to a green chart with a circled section near the top. "So, because Dynagenesis is operational under this department and works primarily in the United States, they're subject to the same laws, regulations, and checks.

"At the same time, though, they're literally making superhumans who therefore have no birth record and in a technical sense, don't exist. If we ignore that part, they're still one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the West and drag in tens of billions of dollars annually, so my question is, how are they operating under the radar? Well, some of the richest U.S. lawmakers make their money by investing in the biggest companies in the stock market, and I've narrowed down about a dozen names that I think have big shares of Dynagenesis. I'm beginning to suspect it's more of a give-and-take relationship, where the more money Dynagenesis gives to these lawmakers, the more likely the lawmakers are to cover up what they know and maybe make loopholes to exploit. I don't know all the laws, but what they're doing is definitely illegal, no matter how many loopholes they make." Brandon rubs his face with his hands. "Does that make any sense?"

"No." He groans, and I smirk. "I'm kidding. I don't know much about your government, but from what I've gathered, Dynagenesis is paying lawmakers to cover up the fact that they were making superhumans illegally and avoid leaking that information to the general public."

Brandon laughs. "Yeah, that's probably an easier way to put it."

"So, what do we do about that?"

"That's the hard part. Nobody is gonna believe it." His eyes drift away from me and up over my head to the far wall, and his expression falls from excited realization to concern. He gestured at the wall. "Case in point."

I turn in my seat to find a moving screen not unlike Brandon's phone, but this time, the images flashing across it have a caption I don't like.

Supervillains: Real or Fake?

"Fuck," I whisper quietly to myself, staring at the images on the screen. The video itself is blurry and the image wobbles as though the person taking it is running away, but I'd know those figures anywhere. A short figure stands in the middle, white tips protruding from her fingers. No doubt that's Sarah, and I feel a bit of relief that she's alive. Next to her stands who I assume to be Clarissa, the sharpshooter with telesthesia. She's holding a gun out in front of her. Last in the group of three stands who I assume to be Liam, but his normally carefully styled hair is sticking up in odd places and his skin flickers from shade to shade. He's injured, or something is interfering with his ability to change form. There are dark bruises on one side of his face, but he holds his hands up in a solid fighting stance.