Dupes: Part 7
Pieces of metal dropped out of the air. An engine block landed twenty feet away from me and bounced, smacking into the scrap pile, then bouncing off it and rolling to a stop.
Insulting a guy with magnetic powers in middle of a metal scrap yard might not have been a good idea.
"I think," Sean said. "you can't handle the idea that new people might be coming up. You've been getting the attention, and the money, and you don't want to give it up. Well, all of us using the juice? We're the revolution. We're going to change everything."
Trying to sound as if I didn't think what he'd just said was completely ridiculous, I asked, "How?"
"The juice and the impregnator open powers up to everyone. Powers won't be held by one little group. It's going to be like a democracy."
"Bull. Even if everybody that could use juice did, it would just move the metahuman population from ten thousand to thirty thousand people out of nearly seven billion. That's not much of a difference."
Sean had evidently absorbed the part of Mr. Beacham's lecture where he'd compared supers with inherited powers to feudal lords, but hadn't been reading the newspaper reports about the government's juice research.
"Yeah? It's still more, and there's a lot of us around here. That's what you're afraid of. You're afraid of us being better than you."
"Better?" I paused, trying to figure out where any of this came from. It was all completely irrelevant to the conversation. Why were we even talking about it?
In my mind, Daniel said, "Because it's a big deal to him."
Right.
"This is totally stupid," I said aloud. "If I wanted to hurt you, I wouldn't have said anything, and let you turn yourself into a homicidal manaic. Because if you want everyone to know your name, that's the way to go."
"If you call me stupid again, I am going to kick your ass."
The pieces of metal in the air stopped circling altogether, and hung, motionless, above us.
"I didn't call you stupid," I said, and then I thought about it. I had implied he was stupid -- well, maybe more than implied. It might be closer to say that I'd broadly hinted he was stupid.
"Bullshit. You're nothing without that suit, and you know what it's made of? Metal. And that's my thing."
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Technically, it wasn't all metal. Actually an awful lot of what used to be metal had been replaced with high tech ceramics and plastics. Still, Grandpa and I hadn't gotten rid of all of it.
"I didn't try to call you stupid, but don't you think that beating a guy up because you thought he called you stupid wouldn't be the brightest --"
In retrospect, I probably could have phrased that better.
All the metal hanging above Sean flew toward the scrap piles next to us, some of it landing on the pile, some of it missing, and flying into the main yard.
Then Sean started yanking at the suit with his powers. I knew it for a few different reasons. First of all because I could feel a pull on the suit. Second, because the readouts went out. Grandpa had designed the suit so that it was resistant to electromagnetic fields. He'd also designed it so that if the field was particularly powerful, it would shut down the most vulnerable systems.
That meant that the sonics wouldn't work, and I only had strength and the armor's protection left. I hoped Sean wouldn't think to throw me into the lake.
Sean meanwhile, looked frustrated. Evidently the relatively small amounts metal had made it harder to get a good hold.
That's not to say he wasn't moving me. He was. My feet scraped across the ground for a foot or so as if I were water-skiing in slow motion.
Then Sean fell over.
As he did, the force pulling me forward stopped, and I just barely managed to avoid falling.
Even as I began to balance, I noticed Jody beginning to blur as he ran toward Daniel and I.
The readouts in my helmet had reappeared, and I began to raise my arm to blast him with the sonics, but I didn't have to.
Jody floated upward three feet. His feet moved uselessly for a moment, but then he stopped, and started cursing at us.
I looked to see what Dayton was doing.
He raised his hands to head level, and held them there, palms facing me.
"I'm not going to fight the two of you by myself."
"Sorry," I said. To Daniel, I said, "I guess we should go."