I collapsed into the kitchen chair, glad to get off my feet. My bookbag was still at the kitchen table so I pulled it out, looking over my homework. There was a particularly nasty math problem that was giving me fits, so I started talking it out lout into the empty kitchen. I crumpled up my hat, wringing it around as I talked. Something made a crinkling sound; I reached inside my hat and pulled out a piece of paper. Donny’s handwriting… Peach must have put it in my hat when we collided. Just something the fellows would do. The outside of the note had the same words as the note from earlier: Reckoning Blue. I opened the note.

  “Excuse me.”

  I looked up. The man from earlier, Dr. Tellivar, was hanging onto the kitchen door. He looked very sick, pale faced and breathing hard, his hair limp and no longer neatly styled. I stood up and rushed to him. “Can I help you?”

  “Yes… I need a phone. Please, young lady.”

  “Are you ill?” I slipped my arm underneath him and almost crumpled with his weight. I leaned against the wall, sliding my shoulder against it as we slowly made our way down the hall. I thought of going to Stenway’s study; hopefully it was unlocked. Almost there, just across the hall.

  “I need… a phone.” With that, the doctor totally collapsed. I didn’t exactly drop him, but he ended up on the ground pretty fast. I knelt next to him, checking his pulse. It was super weak, but it was still there.

  “Tyler?” Mr. Left bustled down the hall towards me.

  “Oh thank God. Mr. Left, he just collapsed on me. He said he needed a phone and then he just passed out.”

  “Is he breathing?” Mr. Left bent over him.

  “His pulse is still going. What do we do?”

  “I’ll take care of this.”

  “Shall I phone a doctor?”

  Mr. Left barely glanced up at me as he lifted the man off of the ground, carrying him against his chest like a small child. “Thank you, I’ll take care of it. Make sure the party continues smoothly, will you? That’s the best thing you can do for me right now. Thank you, Miss Kelly.”

  I nodded, shaken. Slowly I made my way back to the kitchen. I hoped that man was okay, and whatever he needed the phone for wasn’t too important, nothing a little unconscious spell would ruin. Mr. Left seemed like he had it all under control. I pushed open the kitchen door and froze.

  Stenway glared up at me from the kitchen table. He held up the little note that Donny had written. “What is this?”

  “Personal property.”

  “That really doesn’t mean much to you, though, does it? Tyler, where did you get this?”

  “One of the fellows wrote it.”

  “Your little band of detectives? How on earth…”

  “What is the big deal, Stenway? I’m not even sure what it means yet.” I held my hand out. Stenway looked down at me. “Come on, Stenway, it’s mine. You can’t just keep it from me.” I glared at him, but he looked more confused than aggressive.

  Stenway closed his eyes, frowning. “Have you seen Dr. Tellivar lately? He looked a little green at dinner.”

  I stared at him. “Yeah, he got worse. He came in here looking for the phone, passed out, and Mr. Left is taking care of him.”

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  Stenway’s eyes snapped open. “Which way did they go?”

  “Back up that hallway. Stenway, can I please have my note?”

  “We need to find them. Help me.”

  “I need to stay here and help keep this party in line. Ms. Higley said she’d take care of dessert and I should take care of the tea.”

  Stenway looked down at me. “I picked up the cakes this morning. Already cut and plated.”

  “Plated?” Slowly I looked from the note into Stenway’s eyes.

  We spoke at the same time.

  “Give me my note.”

  “We need to find them.” Stenway handed me the note and pushed me out the kitchen door. “Come on.” He grabbed my elbow and pulled me after him. I read as I went, trying not to trip over my feet or Stenway’s.

  “This says that Project Reckoning Blue is ‘some sort of government project, used to contact Supers by some sort of biotechnology.’ Wow that’s vague.”

  “But incredibly impressive. The amount of digging it takes to uncover that project is colossal. Or serendipitous. Either way, your fellows are way more right than they know.” We came to the main hallway and Stenway turned me down it, back towards Mr. Left’s staircase.

  “This sounds like the project that Mr. Left was working on. Was he perfecting the technology?”

  “Something like that.” Stenway grabbed the door and swung it open. Quietly we took the steps up to the study entrance. I still got that eerie feeling, every time I looked down. When we reached the top, Stenway took the handle. “Locked.” He dug through his pockets for his keys, then looked up, horror growing across his face. “Mr. Left had to borrow them.”

  “Break it down.” I had no idea what was going on, but I’d always wanted to say that.

  “No, wait.” Stenway bent next to the keyhole, and gestured for me to do the same. My nose was practically in his hair… it smelled like skin and vanilla. “Nothing. There’s nobody in there. Then, where did they go?”

  Something flashed back to my mind… a missing cat, gone for three days, turned up in the fireplace. “Have you seen the blueprints for this place?”

  Stenway was obviously following my train of thought, because he took up the thread right away. “There’s a passage from Mr. Left’s private room down to my study, and one from the lounge to the kitchen. That’s more in the vein of a dumbwaiter, though.”

  “What about this tower?”

  “It's not in the original blueprints… All right, Miss Detective, shall we go up?”

  “Down. Definitely.”

  He looked at me. “That's not an option.”

  “We’re going down. We have to.” I ran back down the stairs, then imitated my fall from the last time. “This just feels different. Have you ever gotten the sense here that you could just keep going down?” Stenway just looked at me. “Everyone knows that Batman’s lair is underground.” I knelt on the floor, feeling around the grooves of the hardwood floor.

  Stenway thudded down the steps, grumbling. “Back on the Super hero thing, now. Let me know how…” He broke off as I lifted a slat of wood. It slid upward smoothly on a metal piston. I pulled. Nothing. Then, as I twisted it to the right, I heard a smooth hiss and the portion of the floor opposite the door slowly lifted. Stenway took over, swiftly cranking the slat until a square, just large enough for a person to fit through, showed.

  Like a wave, all of my suspicions and crazy dreams about Supers came rushing back. This was it. I was finally going to uncover one. My head felt like a balloon, lifting off my shoulders and out of control, except I was going down instead of up. I was through the hole and down a full flight of stairs before Stenway caught up to me, yanking me off my feet and setting me firmly on the landing. He looked at me seriously. “You need to be careful.”

  “I’m going to catch a Super. I mean, not catch, just uncover, and no-one will have to know except me, and of course the fellows, because of all the work they did, but they understand the need for privacy and they would never tell anyone…”

  Stenway ripped my note away from me. “You understand what this is, right? With the correct technology, a Super could be summoned to anywhere, from anywhere.”

  “Which is good because you can use it to kind of specialize in strange situations, like if you need a water Super, or a clairvoyant.”

  “Exactly. But in the wrong hands…”

  “The villains could…” My eyes widened as I thought of the consequences. “We need to get down there and stop what’s going on.”

  Stenway nodded. “You need to be aware of the risks.”

  “Well if we’re going to be involved in an archenemy showdown, we aren’t well prepared.”

  “You may not be.” He pulled a tiny pistol out of the pocket of his suitcoat. “Let me go first.”