The Secret War (2) (A Jack Blank Adventure) - Softcover

Myklusch, Matt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 141699565X ISBN 13: 9781416995654

Publisher: Aladdin, 2012

Synopsis

The second installment of the action-packed fantasy thrill ride that began with The Accidental Hero!

Jack and his fellow students are now well into their School of Thought training and are “sidekicking” for official, card-carrying super heroes. But even though Jack feels more at home in the Imagine Nation, he’s still hiding secrets from his friends Skerren and Allegra.
     Jack is busy trying to find out how far the Rüstov sleeper virus has spread, working to find a cure, and striving to avoid the dire future that Revile warned him about. Meanwhile, Jonas Smart is working just as hard to discover what Jack is hiding from everyone. When a rogue Secreteer—the protectors of Imagine Nation citizens’ secrets—starts selling info to the highest bidder, Smart is ready and waiting. If Jack is going to help prevent a second Rüstov invasion, keep Smart from discovering his secrets, and find out what a shadowy, half-mad Secreteer knows about his long-lost father, he’ll need to learn to trust his friends and find the true path toward becoming a hero himself.

 

About this title

About the Author:

Matt Myklusch lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHAPTER
1
Fighting Gravity

Jack hustled through the streets of Empire City with a baseball cap pulled down low on his head, the brim nearly covering his eyes. He was hoping to avoid being recognized, but he didn’t make it five blocks before a woman and her son stopped him on the street.

“Excuse me,” the woman said. “I’m sorry to bother you but ... are you Jack Blank?”

Jack sighed and took off the baseball cap. Some things were no use fighting. “Yep. That’s me,” Jack said with a weary smile.

The woman clapped her fingertips together as she bobbed up and down in a little happy dance. “I knew it!” she said. “I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!” Jack shot nervous glances to his left and right, looking to see if anyone else had noticed her and, by extension, him. The woman seemed to pick up on this and quickly regained her composure. “I’m sorry, I never do this. Ever. But do you think I could trouble you for an autograph?” she asked. “For my son?”

A redheaded boy about Jack’s age, maybe a little younger, smiled eagerly up at Jack and held out a notebook and pen. “Sure,” Jack said, reaching out to take them both. The woman and her son looked slightly familiar to Jack, but he couldn’t quite place them, so he kept the autograph simple and just signed his name. He handed back the notebook and continued on his way, but the celebrity sighting had not gone unnoticed. Jack had to sign a few more autographs and take pictures with another half dozen or so people before he could finally break away, shaking his head in wonder at how much his life had changed in the past year. He had gone from unwanted orphan to suspected alien spy to national treasure. It still amazed Jack how normal it now seemed to live in a city filled with superheroes, ninjas, androids, and aliens. As crazy as it sounded, he’d gotten used to all that fairly quickly. He didn’t think he’d ever get used to fame, though. Especially not his kind of fame, which he considered to be completely undeserved. None of Jack’s fans knew the whole story about him.

Jack was grateful for the friends he’d made since coming to the Imagine Nation—people who didn’t give him any special treatment. The general public might have already considered him a great hero, but Jack knew he still had a lot to learn on that front. His teachers knew it too, which was why he still had to attend regular classes with his friends, or, in the case of the School of Thought, irregular classes.

School of Thought classes didn’t take place in a single building or according to a standard schedule. They were taught by the Inner Circle, the most powerful heroes in Empire City, a group that was also charged with governing and defending the Imagine Nation. Jack’s teachers were the guardians of the secret roaming island where all the fantastic and unbelievable things on Earth originated.

They could hardly be expected to run their school according to some arbitrary schedule. Stendeval, the oldest member of the Inner Circle and the only living person who knew all of Jack’s secrets, always said that life didn’t happen according to a schedule. The world was a classroom. Life was an education. Classes met whenever the Inner Circle called for them, and took place wherever they saw fit to teach. That morning Jack’s lessons were being taught in SeasonStill Park.

SeasonStill was the unique park at the center of Empire City where the winds of all four seasons blew at the same time. Jack broke into a slight jog as he made his way there. The simultaneous convergence of all four seasons produced something exciting and unique, even by Empire City’s standards: Waiting for Jack in the heart of the park was one of the world’s most inviting and alluring wonders—Gravity Grove.

Gravity Grove existed outside of the standard four seasons. The grove was a featherwisp tree orchard surrounded in equal measure by Summershore Stretch, Winterwind Way, Spring Falls, and Fall Springs. The singular temperature created by such a unique enclosure created the one-of-a-kind climate in which a featherwisp tree could grow. Featherwisps were gigantic trees with thick, black trunks curving up into the sky, and long, strong limbs that wove into and around the arms of neighboring trees like fingers in folded hands.

The tree’s dark black branches were empty save for the bright fuchsia featherwisp blooms. These very special flowers lined the trees’ branches like cherry blossoms, with thick petals that fell up, not down. Featherwisp blooms didn’t care much for the laws of gravity and saw that it was suspended in and around their general vicinity. The presence of so many blossoms in one place created a full-fledged antigravity zone in the center of the park. The flowers were attached to the trees in such great numbers that they would have lifted the entire orchard up into the air if not for each tree’s powerful roots. Complex networks of strong roots dug into the soil like iron claws. Gravity Grove wasn’t going anywhere.

Jack arrived at the center of the park and found the others high up in the trees overhead. He reached up to the lower branches of the closest featherwisp tree. Even the lowest branch was still too high to reach, but the lightest of jumps, just a little flick of his ankles really, was all it took to get up there. Gravity, or a lack thereof, did the rest. At the apex of Jack’s first jump, just at the point where he should’ve started going back down, he kept rising, levitating the rest of the way up to the branch. When he got there, he grabbed the tree’s limb with both hands and pushed down. With a whoosh he soared upward toward the others. Featherwisp blooms drifted up into the sky all around him as he flew up to join his classmates.

On his way up Jack saw that today his class would be taught by Hovarth, the warrior king of Varagog Village, and Chi, the sensei Circleman of Karateka. The two Circlemen couldn’t have looked more different. Hovarth was a burly mountain of a man, covered with furs and chain mail. He carried multiple swords, axes, and knives. In the grove they all floated weightlessly while strapped onto his back and belt. Chi was a slender ninja with a graceful athletic build who wore a simple karate gi and carried no weapons. A master of countless lost styles of martial arts, Chi was a weapon all by himself.

Jack always looked forward to Chi’s and Hovarth’s classes. Their tests were generally the equivalent of a superpowered gym class, stressing physical fitness, endurance, and hand-to-hand combat. It was school, but it was fun, too. That was the Inner Circle’s trick to keeping students thinking about their lessons long after class was over. The School of Thought followed a demanding curriculum that ran students through a grueling mental and physical gauntlet, but Jack had to admit, it was a pretty exciting ride. School of Thought students got to do a lot of cool stuff, the combination of which taught them not just skills, facts, and figures, but a new way of thinking, a philosophy of heroism that Jack and his classmates took with them everywhere they went.

“Jack! Good of you to finally join us,” Hovarth shouted when Jack reached the top of the tree. The Varagog king floated in midair, while Chi and the students all hopped around from branch to branch.

“I’m sorry, Hovarth,” Jack said. “I got stopped like six times for autographs on the way here.”

“No excuses,” Hovarth said. “You should be used to that sort of thing by now. How do you expect to handle yourself battling supervillains if you can’t even handle a crowd of starstruck admirers?”

Jack apologized again and went to join his classmates. There was no arguing with Hovarth. Jack had been stopped for autographs hundreds of times over the last year and could have been on time if he’d simply left for class earlier. The real reason Jack was late had nothing to do with his fans. The truth was, he’d been distracted and rattled ever since he’d connected with his parasite. When it came time for this class, he’d almost forgotten entirely.

“No matter,” Chi said. “You’ve penalized yourself with your lateness. You’re it.”

A huge flying object rushed past Jack, sending him spinning head over heels as if he were strapped into a gyroscope. He reached out wildly, struggling for something to grab hold of. When he finally steadied himself, he saw a giant flying serpent with a long, winding body weaving through the trees. It had wild eyes and flowing whiskers and looked like a paper dragon from a parade come to life. The dragon carried a small Asian boy named Zhi Long, a young student from Karateka who had recently been named to a seat in the School of Thought. Zhi was a year behind Jack’s class and was the only student admitted in his age group. He had the power to summon seven different mystical Chinese dragons into battle.

“Sorry, Jack,” Zhi said, circling back around. “I couldn’t help myself. It’s not every day you get to buzz the great Jack Blank.”

“Hello, Zhi,” Jack grumbled. “I didn’t realize you’d be in our class today.”

“Keep your eyes up, lad!” Hovarth called out from the sidelines. “Always be aware of your surroundings. Don’t think you know the battlefield ... know you know the battlefield!”

Jack nodded and looked around, spotting Allegra, the silver-skinned Valorian girl who was probably his best friend in Empire City, and Skerren, the young swordsman from Varagog Village. He also saw Trea, a School of Thought student who was one year his senior. Just like Zhi, Trea was the only student in her year, but in her case it was because the other student...

About this edition

• Publisher: Aladdin
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 141699565X
• ISBN 13: 9781416995654
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 560