Michael Grant - Hero

First published in Great Britain in 2019

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York, USA

Text copyright © 2019 Michael Grant

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2019

ISBN 978 1 4052 94669

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 17687

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

To my two Katherines

I lose sleep at night wondering whether we are intelligent enough to figure out the universe.

I don’t know.

—Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“The justifications of men who kill should always be heard with skepticism,” said the monster.

—Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

Cover

Title Page

Copyright First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York, USA Text copyright © 2019 Michael Grant The moral rights of the author have been asserted First e-book edition 2019 ISBN 978 1 4052 94669 Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 17687 www.egmont.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

Dedication To my two Katherines

Epigraph I lose sleep at night wondering whether we are intelligent enough to figure out the universe. I don’t know. —Neil DeGrasse Tyson “The justifications of men who kill should always be heard with skepticism,” said the monster. —Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

ASO-7

1 SEX, PASTRIES, AND THE LAWS OF PHYSICS

2 MANHATTAN MAYHEM

3 BOLDLY GOING WHERE NO 3-D PERSON HAS GONE BEFORE

4 PSYCHOPATH ROLL CALL

5 HOW DO YOU GET TO CARNEGIE HALL?

6 INSIDE THE KALEIDOSCOPE

7 MALMEDY IN THE PINE BARRENS

8 UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU

9 DOWN AND DIRTY

10 NEW YORK, NEW YORK

11 KILL US

12 RARE MOMENTS OF PEACE

13 PARENTING FAILS

14 ASTRID DOES AMAZON

15 OVER THERE

16 SUPERHERO CHORES, PART 1

17 SUPERHERO CHORES, PART 2

18 BUG FIGHTERS

19 LOSING BATTLES

20 THE BROWNSTONE DECLARATION

21 THE DESK CLERK

22 NORMAL IS NO LONGER WITH US

23 PROBLEMS AT HOME

24 COUP

25 OF COURSE IT’S A TRAP

26 HELLO THERE, DRAKE

27 LESBOKITTY REPRESENTS

28 NO BATTLE PLAN . . .

29 . . . EVER SURVIVES CONTACT WITH . . .

30 . . . THE ENEMY

31 RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!

32 DOMES

33 PLANS AND PLOTS AND STOLEN KISSES

34 SPEED, NOTHING BUT SPEED

35 STOP THAT TRAIN! I WANT TO GET ON

36 TOO LATE FOR FLYING LESSONS

37 JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE(S)

38 MOMENTUM

39 GAS WILL EXPAND TO FILL AVAILABLE SPACE

40 A LAIR OF THEIR OWN

41 MEET YOUR MAKER

42 TO BE OR NOT TO BE

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Back series promotional page

ANOMALOUS SPACE OBJECT Seven was being carefully tracked by Professor Martin Darby of Northwestern University, father of the famous and/or infamous Shade Darby. Shade’s father had had his security clearance reinstated, despite the fact that his daughter had used his data to locate and steal one of the earlier ASOs and had then used the rock—its universal shorthand name—to become Rockborn, a mutant with a power—the power, in Shade’s case, to move at speeds just over Mach 1.

ASO-7 had passed the orbit of the moon and was now spinning around the Earth in a decaying elliptical, an orbit that Professor Darby and counterparts at universities all over the world had calculated and recalculated with growing alarm.

ASO-7 was a large piece, roughly eighteen meters (fifty-nine feet) long and sixteen meters (fifty-two feet) wide. Estimated mass, assuming the composition matched earlier ASOs, was 1600 tons, about the weight of 550 Toyota Land Cruisers.

The size of the rock and the fact that it seemed to be moving erratically had left Professor Darby able to calculate only probabilities. He’d turned those probabilities into a simplified map, which he’d forwarded along with his calculations, to Homeland Security, NASA, and the Department of Defense.

The map showed the likely strike zone as a pink crosshatched area. That pink cross-hatching extended from just north of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to the Long Island Sound around Bayville.

But it was what occupied the middle of that strike zone that had sent alarm bells ringing throughout the US government. Because in the middle of that zone stood New York City.

The odds of a relatively safe splashdown in the water of Long Island Sound were 40 percent, which left smaller likelihoods of strikes near Elizabeth, or in Manhattan proper, which had only a 20 percent likelihood of being the bull’s-eye.

But that was a one-in-five chance of utterly annihilating the greatest of American cities, because this much was certain: if ASO-7 hit land, it would release energy equivalent to thirty-five kilotons. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was fifteen kilotons. If ASO-7 was intact and hit, say, Rockefeller Center, it would obliterate sixty square blocks, and severely damage buildings and toss cars and buses around from Thirty-Ninth Street to Fifty-Seventh Street, and from Ninth Avenue almost to Lexington Avenue. If it landed on a weekday, the estimates were that it would kill as many as a million people instantly and another quarter million from fires and related injuries.

ASO-7 had the potential to be the greatest disaster ever to strike the United States.

Department of Homeland Security

Memo: 19-00475

Top Secret (HSTF-66)