“Okay,” I intoned. “What was it?”
Mouse appeared to reflect for a moment before speaking. “Since you’ve been with the League’s teen affiliate, you’ve gotten into a couple of scrapes that led to you requiring medical attention. Of course, any medical information about you is confidential, but as leader of the League, I’ve seen it.”
“Okay,” I said with a nod, “but I assume you’ve looked at everybody’s.”
“True, but – as has been stated numerous times – your physiology is unique. That being the case, I noticed from your records that you have several unknown organs, one of which – among other things – seems to store an extra quantity of air aside from your lungs. From all appearances, that organ gets a good workout when you phase, because it can siphon air directly as opposed to you breathing it in.”
“Let me guess,” I chimed in. “You sucker-punched that organ.”
“Technically, I irritated the air going into that organ and it reacted – much like throwing black pepper into someone’s face will make then sneeze.”
“Which is also something you did.”
“That actually wasn’t pepper,” Mouse corrected. “I hit Alpha Prime with something more potent, but yeah – same reaction.”
“Well, the point I was trying to get to was asking whether the League has that weapon, since to effectuate your plan, I have to phase.”
“Absolutely not,” Mouse assured me. “No one has it but me, and I wasn’t even sure it would work.”
“What about when we were in the Vault? I tried using my teleportation power on you but it didn’t work.”
“That’s because you tried to teleport a hologram – a decoy,” Mouse replied. “I was actually on the other side of the wall section, using a device that bent light waves around me.”
“And if you can bend light waves around an object, you effectively make it invisible.”
Mouse smiled. “I’m glad all those physics lessons didn’t go to waste.”
“Again, is that something the League has, or is it Mouse-specific?”
Mouse laughed. “I’m the only one who has it, but that’s immaterial since it never truly affected your teleportation power.”
“Still, I have to ask,” I stated. “The two powers you’re saying I need to use are the very two you’ve seemingly been able to circumvent, so I need to make sure no one else can.”
“Well, just so you know, I wasn’t specifically focused on you,” Mouse said. “I’m pretty isolated here, with limited resources, and I was going up against the entire League every time I showed my face, so I had to have a variety of tools on hand: flash bombs, frictionless grease, dimensional doors on the ground, dimensional doors in the air… I tried to stay unpredictable.”
“And you’ve been doing all this by yourself?”
“It’s not like I had a choice,” Mouse declared. “The Busuigno control almost everybody, and anyone they couldn’t control, they got rid of. Take Li for instance; he’s not human so he’s not susceptible to their control. Plus, he doesn’t see the way we do, which means there’s a possibility he could perceive them in some way. They sent him off on a bogus mission. Same thing with Esper – with her mental powers, she might have realized something was off, so they sent her on a snipe hunt as well. It’s the same with almost everybody else.”
I frowned, concentrating on his words. “You said ‘almost’ everybody else. Who’s left?”
“Vixen, but she’s safe – holed up in another dimensional room like this one. Basically, she’s the back-up plan if we fail.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I remarked sarcastically.
Mouse laughed. “You don’t need a confidence booster. This will be a cakewalk for you.”
“What about this thing attached to me?”
Mouse gave me a curious look. “What about it?”
“Won’t it tell the others what we’re up to?”
“I guess I failed to explain how they communicate,” Mouse said. “In their own space, they can speak mind-to-mind, but when they attach to another being, they can typically only use the methods of communication available to their host.”
“So basically, they can only communicate using speech,” I surmised.
“Correct,” Mouse stated. “But that reminds me: some of them do have a low-level form of telepathy, but it typically requires them to be near one another.”
“Well, how do we know the one attached to me isn’t one of the telepathic ones – even if it is dying?”
“It didn’t warn Electra that you switched plates, did it?”
“No,” I replied. “So I guess we’re safe on that front.”
“Good,” Mouse said. “Now let’s get started locking these yahoos back up.”
Chapter 59
As Mouse had predicted, getting the remaining components was a piece of cake for me and required minimal preparation. First, he showed me images of each so that I wouldn’t have any trouble recognizing them. (They looked like metallic trinkets of various shapes, although each was no more than a few inches in size.) He also gave me a Y-shaped electronic device that was about six inches long and which served as a tracker, among other things. At that juncture, he turned me loose.
Apparently, the Busuigno had garnered an idea of what Mouse was trying to do early on. However, their attempts to move some of the parts he needed by chopper and armored transport had obviously met with failure. Thus, for the last four items, they had resorted to a strategy of simply guarding the components.
Mouse, of course, had already pinpointed their location. Two were still in the Vault, and it was easy enough to show up there, phased, via a dimensional door that my mentor opened, and simply teleport those guarding the components elsewhere. (To be specific, I dumped them – two teams led by Luna and Buzz, respectively – in the marina where Mouse kept his boat.) The tracker, which doubled as a skeleton key of sorts, opened the appropriate Vault sections – one in the floor and one in a wall – and led me to the items we needed.
The third component was deep underground in a subterranean
