The Plumbers radio was an old thing. Battered black box bolted under the dashboard of the Rustbucket, so old and worn that Ben had assumed for three days it was a broken CB radio from sometime in the previous century. It had no screen, no display, just a speaker grille and two dials and a small green light that stayed off most of the time.
It came on just after noon.
Not loud. Just a low steady tone followed by a voice, flat, clipped, the kind of voice that had learned to say a lot with very few words. Coordinates. A town name. The words civilian situation and unregistered tech and multiple hostiles in that order.
Max's hand moved to the dial before the message finished.
Ben leaned forward from the back seat. "What was that?"
"Sit back," Max said. He was already checking the mirror, already looking for the next exit.
"Was that the Plumbers?"
"Sit back, Ben."
Ben sat back. He looked at Gwen. Gwen looked at him. They both looked at the back of Max's head.
The Rustbucket took the next exit.
The town was called Hartwell. Small, quiet, the kind of place with one main street and everyone knowing everyone and nothing much happening on a Tuesday afternoon in July.
Except today something was happening.
Max parked the Rustbucket one block from the main street and cut the engine and sat for a second looking through the windshield at the thin column of smoke rising two streets over. Not fire. Not yet. Just the kind of smoke that came from something electrical being pushed past what it was built for.
"There are three of them," Max said. He had his old Plumbers scanner out, a small flat device that looked like a thick playing card, showing heat signatures through walls. "Armed. Alien tech, but they don't know how to use it properly. Which makes them more dangerous, not less." He looked at Ben and Gwen in the mirror. "You two stay here."
"We can help," Ben said.
"You can stay here," Max said. Same tone. Final. "Lock the doors. Don't move. I'll be back in ten minutes."
He got out. Checked his jacket once. Walked toward the main street without looking back.
The doors locked with a click.
Gwen opened her book.
Ben watched Max disappear around the corner. He counted to thirty. Then he looked at the smoke rising over the rooftops. Then he looked at the scanner Max had left on the passenger seat, three heat signatures on the screen, clustered in what looked like a building with a lot of people inside.
A lot of people.
He looked at Gwen.
She turned a page without looking up. "Don't," she said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You have your thinking face on."
"I don't have a thinking face."
"Ben."
He looked at the scanner again. The heat signatures hadn't moved. The people inside the building were still there. Still with three armed men who didn't know how to use what they were holding.
He undid his seatbelt.
"Ben—"
"I'll be careful."
"That is not what careful looks like—"
But he was already out the door.
He came around the corner at a jog and stopped.
The building was a bank. Of course it was a bank. The front door was hanging open, one of the windows spiderwebbed from something hitting it hard on the inside. Two people were crouched behind a car in the parking lot, they'd gotten out somehow, eyes wide, one of them on a phone.
Ben slipped past them and got close to the broken window and looked through.
Three men inside. The weapons were like nothing he'd seen, long barreled things that glowed faint orange at the tip, clearly not built for human hands, slightly too big, slightly the wrong shape. The men were holding them the way people hold things they're not sure about, tight and nervous, which was exactly the wrong way to hold something that could probably level a building.
Seven people on the floor. Hands up. Scared.
Ben looked at the scene for about four seconds.
Then he pressed his hand to the Omnitrix on his chest.
The green light burst from his chest and the transformation hit him like a wall.
His knees buckled first. The bones in his legs surging and reshaping, dragging a sharp sound out of him that he bit down on hard. His skin darkened and cracked along his arms, the heat building from the inside out like something turning on inside a furnace that had never been lit before. He grabbed the wall beside him to stay upright as his height climbed, as his frame pushed outward, as the body rebuilt itself into something that ran on fire instead of blood.
He stayed on one knee for a second after it finished. Head down. Breathing through it.
Then he stood up.
Heatblast stepped into the middle of the street in front of the bank with all the subtlety of a small explosion. The two people behind the car screamed and ran. The heat rolled off him in waves, instantly turning the air above the asphalt into a shimmer.
Inside the bank someone shouted.
One of the criminals came to the broken window, saw Heatblast standing in the street, and made a sound that wasn't quite a word.
"Put the weapons down," Ben said. His voice came out deeper in this form, rougher, the heat in it making it sound like something speaking from inside a furnace.
The criminal did not put the weapon down. He pointed it at Heatblast instead.
The pulse blast hit Heatblast square in the chest and bounced off and blew a crater in the road six feet behind him.
Ben looked at the crater. Looked at the man in the window.
"Okay," he said.
He raised one hand and threw a fire blast at the weapon.
He missed.
The fire hit the car parked to the left of the window instead. The car did not appreciate this. It caught immediately, orange flames jumping up the side in seconds, black smoke pouring off the paint.
"That's not—" Ben stared at his hand. "I was aiming at the—"
The criminals came out of the bank. Not surrendering, running, splitting in three directions at once, alien weapons still in hand, because a burning car and a fire alien in the street had apparently crossed some internal threshold for them.
Ben turned in a circle watching all three go different ways.
"Okay," he said again. "Okay."
He picked a direction and ran.
The first one went left down an alley. Ben cut him off by going through the alley, or tried to. The alley was narrow and Heatblast was not narrow and the heat radiating off him caught the wooden fence on the left side and it started smoking immediately. Ben looked at the fence, looked at the criminal who had stopped running and was now pressed against the far wall staring at him.
"The weapon," Ben said. "Put it down."
The man threw it at him and ran back the other way.
Ben caught it. The metal warped in his hand from the heat. He dropped it on the ground where it melted slightly into the asphalt and turned around.
The second criminal had gone right, toward the small grocery store on the corner. Ben came around the building and found him trying to get into a locked car, fumbling with the handle, weapon slung over his shoulder. Ben raised both hands and tried to think about controlled. About small. About a precise stream rather than a wave.
A wave came out.
It hit the side of the grocery store and scorched the wall black and blew the sign off the front and the criminal dropped the weapon and fell sideways away from the heat and Ben immediately pointed both hands at the sky because that was the safest direction and a column of fire went up twenty feet in the air above the street.
He stared at his hands.
"I'm trying," he said to no one. "I'm genuinely trying."
He closed his hands into fists. Felt the fire pulling inward. Found something that felt like the edge of control and held onto it with everything he had.
The heat around him dropped slightly. Not gone. But tighter. More his.
He found the second criminal on the ground where he'd fallen, weapon three feet away, and stood over him.
"Stay," Ben said.
The man stayed.
The third one was the problem.
He'd gone straight, down the main street, pushing past people, running hard. By the time Ben rounded the corner he was forty meters ahead and moving fast, weapon still in hand, heading toward the far end of the street where more people were starting to come out of shops to see what all the noise was about.
Ben ran.
Heatblast running looked different from a person running, heavier, the footsteps cracking the pavement slightly, heat shimmering off the ground in his wake, people scattering left and right as he came through. He was fast though. Faster than the man ahead of him.
He closed the distance to twenty meters. Then ten.
The criminal looked back, saw how close he was, panicked and raised the weapon and fired without aiming.
The pulse blast went wide and hit a fire hydrant.
The hydrant exploded.
Water went everywhere, a full pressurized column shooting straight up, then cascading down in a curtain across the entire street. It hit Heatblast and the sizzle was enormous, steam erupting off him in a cloud that swallowed the whole end of the street in white mist.
Ben stood in the steam and the water and felt the fire in him fighting the cold water and losing ground fast and found it actually clarifying, the heat pulling tight to his core, concentrated, everything external stripped away.
He raised one hand.
A single focused burst came out. Not a wave. Not a wall. A straight precise beam of white-blue plasma fire about the width of his fist.
It hit the alien weapon dead center.
The weapon cracked down the middle and the orange glow in it went out and the pieces fell to the wet street and the criminal stood there soaking wet with two broken halves of a gun in his hands and looked at the fire alien standing in the steam cloud in front of him.
Ben looked at the broken weapon.
Then at his hand.
Then at the weapon again.
"I meant to do that," he said.
He didn't entirely mean to do that.
Three minutes later all three criminals were sitting on the wet pavement of Hartwell's main street. The car was still burning. The grocery store wall was scorched black. The fire hydrant was still going, water running down the gutter in a steady stream. A trash can that hadn't been near anything was also on fire for reasons Ben couldn't fully account for.
Ben stood in the middle of it and looked around at the damage and felt the Omnitrix timing out.
Green flash.
He was standing in the wet street in his regular clothes, ten years old, surrounded by the evidence of approximately eight minutes of good intentions and very poor execution.
A hand grabbed his collar.
Max steered him firmly into the nearest alley without a word. Ben went. He didn't argue. Max's face said everything that words would have taken too long to say.
They stood in the alley and Max looked at him and Ben looked at the ground.
Max opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Looked at the burning car visible from the alley entrance.
Opened his mouth again.
"Grandpa—"
"Not yet," Max said. Quiet and tight. "Not yet, Ben."
Ben closed his mouth.
They stood there until the sound of engines came from the main street, three black vehicles pulling up clean and fast, doors opening, people in dark gear moving with the efficiency of people who did this regularly. Plumbers agents. Six of them, moving through the scene like they'd been briefed on the way in, which they probably had. The criminals were up and cuffed and in vehicles in under four minutes.
One of the agents broke away from the group and walked toward the alley. Late thirties, short, looked like she'd seen considerably stranger things than a scorched small town main street on a Tuesday. She stopped in front of Max and looked at him for a second.
"Tennyson," she said.
"Chen," Max said.
She held out a flat black case. Not big, the size of a shoebox, matte finish, no markings. Max took it. Their eyes held for a second and something passed between them that Ben couldn't read.
"Straight from storage," Chen said. "Figured it was time."
"Yeah," Max said quietly. "Figured the same."
She glanced at Ben once, quick, professional, giving nothing away, and then walked back to the main street without another word.
Ben watched her go. "Who was that?"
"Old colleague," Max said. He looked at the case in his hands for a moment. Then he tucked it under his arm.
"What's in it?"
"Things I put away a long time ago." He looked at Ben. "Things I'm going to need again apparently."
Ben looked at the case. At Max. "Can I see?"
"Later." Max turned toward the street. "Come on."
"Why couldn't we just go with them?" Ben asked, following. "The agents. Why are we still going separately?"
"Because where we're going isn't where they're going," Max said simply. "Different operation. Different facility." He glanced back once. "Different answers."
Ben looked at the departing Plumber vehicles. Then at the scorched wall of the grocery store. Then he followed Max back to the Rustbucket.
Gwen was standing outside it with her arms crossed and an expression that said she had heard everything and was reserving full judgment for later.
"Don't," Ben said.
"I haven't said anything," Gwen said.
"You're saying it with your face."
"My face is just my face, Ben."
They got in the Rustbucket.
Max drove. Nobody said much. The smoke from the car fire was visible in the mirror for a while and then wasn't. Hartwell got smaller and then disappeared and the road opened up again and the afternoon went on around them like nothing had happened.
Ben looked out the window.
The Omnitrix sat quiet and green on his chest.
They drove until evening and stopped at a campsite off the highway, quiet and tree-lined, the kind of place that had no neighbors and no noise except crickets and the occasional car on the distant road.
Max made food. Nobody asked what it was. They ate it. Gwen read. Ben sat on the Rustbucket's step and looked at the trees going dark as the sun finished going down.
At some point Gwen went inside to sleep.
The campsite got quieter.
After a while the door of the Rustbucket opened and Max came and sat on the step beside Ben. He had the black case across his knees. He opened it.
Ben looked.
A badge. Silver, hexagonal, a design Ben didn't recognize but which clearly meant something. And beside it, fitted into foam cutouts, two devices. Compact, alien in their design, nothing like anything sold in any store. One looked like it fired something. The other Ben couldn't identify at all.
"Plumber gear," Max said.
Ben looked at the badge. "Does this mean you're back?"
"It means I'm prepared," Max said. He closed the case. Set it aside. Looked at the trees.
They sat for a while without talking. The crickets were loud. The night smelled like pine and damp earth and the last of the campfire.
"I was going to help," Ben said eventually.
"I know," Max said.
"Those people were scared. The weapons those guys had could have—"
"I know, Ben."
"So why are you—"
"Because look at what happened," Max said. Not hard. Not angry. Just honest. He looked at Ben sideways. "A burning car. A scorched building. A hydrant that's probably still running. And nobody got hurt, this time. By luck as much as anything else."
Ben looked at the ground.
"You don't know that form yet," Max said. "You don't know any of them yet. And you went in anyway, alone, without a word to me." He paused. "That's not brave, Ben. That's just fast."
Ben was quiet for a bit. "I won't always be able to wait."
"No," Max said. "You won't. I know that." He turned to face him properly. "I'm not asking you to ignore it when people need help. I'm not asking you to stand by and watch someone get hurt because you were told to stay in the truck." He looked at the Omnitrix on Ben's chest. "I'm asking you to think first. One second. Just one second before you hit that thing and ask yourself if you're ready for what comes after."
Ben looked at the Omnitrix. The green glow of it in the dark between them.
"And if I am ready?" Ben said.
"Then you help," Max said simply. "That's what it's for. That's what you're for, maybe." He paused. "But you tell me first when you can. You don't disappear into a situation without anyone knowing where you are. Deal?"
Ben thought about it.
Not long. But genuinely.
"Deal," he said. "But I need you to trust me when I say I have to move. If there's no time—"
"If there's no time I'll trust you," Max said. "I already trust you. That's not the question." He put one hand briefly on the back of Ben's neck the way he had since Ben was small. "The question is whether you trust yourself enough to take one second before you do."
Ben looked at the trees.
"Only to help," he said. "And only when it's necessary."
"That's all I'm asking."
"Okay." Ben looked at him. "Then okay."
Max nodded. Took his hand back. Looked at the campfire going to coals.
They sat outside for a while longer. Not talking. Just sitting in the quiet dark the way people sit when something has been said that needed saying and now the air is cleaner for it.
The Omnitrix glowed steady green between them.
Morning came bright and clear.
Max was already up when Ben and Gwen woke. The campfire was cold. The Rustbucket was packed. And on the small table inside, next to two glasses of orange juice, was a newspaper folded to the front page.
Max handed it to Ben when he sat down.
Ben unfolded it.
The headline read: ALIEN CREATURE TORCHES HARTWELL STREET SAVING CIVILIANS FROM ARMED ROBBERS, HERO OR DANGEROUS THREAT?
Below it, grainy but unmistakable, a photograph. Heatblast standing in the middle of the main street with fire rolling off him and the car burning behind him and smoke rising from the grocery store wall to his left. Looking enormous. Looking chaotic. Looking, if you didn't know better, like something that had caused the problem rather than solved it.
Ben read the article. He read the eyewitness descriptions, the creature seemed unable to control its flames, several bystanders had to flee the heat, significant property damage to at least four locations on the main street. He read the question at the end. Hero or dangerous threat.
He put the paper down.
Max was looking at him from the driver's seat. Not saying anything. Just looking.
Ben looked at the photograph one more time. At Heatblast standing in the middle of the damage with fire going everywhere.
Gwen picked up the paper. Read the headline. Set it back down carefully and picked up her orange juice and said nothing.
"See," Max said quietly. "That's what happens."
Ben looked at the photograph for another second.
Then he pushed the paper to the side and picked up his juice.
He didn't argue.
Because Max was right. And the photograph made that impossible to talk around.
The Rustbucket started up. The campsite fell behind them. The road opened up ahead and the morning was bright and the trees went past on both sides and Ben sat in the back and looked out the window and thought about one second.
Just one second before.