November arrived, and the air circulation system in the underground lab seemed to have developed a fault.
The air it blew out always carried a faint trace of machine oil.
Leon hadn’t brought a storybook today.
Instead, he pulled a colorful little cube out of the pocket of his lab coat.
A Rubik’s Cube.
In the eighties this thing was a massive hit out there.
Leon had only managed to sneak one in thanks to that new purchasing clerk in the logistics department.
John sat on the cushion, holding the scrambled cube in both hands, his eyebrows knotted into a little frown.
“The rule for this thing is to turn every face into the same color.” Leon held a stainless steel thermos with goji berries and black tea steeping inside, leaning comfortably against the bulletproof glass.
“No melting it down with heat vision and reshaping it, and no brute-forcing it apart and putting it back together.
You can only turn it.”
“Solve it, and I’ll give you a little present.”
John didn’t say anything.
His pale, soft fingers began working the plastic blocks.
At first he turned them slowly and patiently, but a few minutes later, when he realized that a face he’d nearly completed had gotten scrambled again by turning the other faces, the little boy’s breathing grew noticeably heavier.
Outside the glass wall, Mike, on security duty, came strolling over with his baton in hand.
Mike was a gray-haired veteran who’d worked at Vought for almost twenty years and had seen every kind of dirty business there was.
His greatest wish was to coast safely through to next month, collect his pension, and go back to his hometown to fish.
“Leon, you messing with that little terror again?” Mike rapped on the glass, his voice coming through the intercom.
“I just went to the infirmary for stomach pills, and Dr.
Sarah says you’re getting bolder and bolder, hauling all kinds of junk into the sterile room.”
“Mike, this is called intellectual development.” Leon took a sip of his goji tea.
“We can’t have him doing nothing but sleeping and staring into space all day, can we?
If he goes out one day and can’t even work a Rubik’s Cube, people will laugh at Vought for being uncultured.”
Mike shook his head, his gaze settling on the little boy who was glaring at the cube and grinding his teeth.
Last week, the company’s leadership had sent someone down to run a strength test, and Little John had only given a light push before that hydraulic testing rig, which cost over a million to build, fell apart.
“I’m serious, Leon.” Mike lowered his voice, looking through the glass at the inside.
“The brass have been busy lately.
I hear Black Noir went back to headquarters a few days ago, his uniform covered in blood, scared the cleaning crew half to death.
Things out there are getting more and more chaotic.
Those wizards and onmyoji are causing too much trouble, and the way the higher-ups look at this little guy, it’s like they’re looking at their last straw to grab onto.”
“I know.” Leon turned his head and glanced at Mike, his tone easy.
“That’s exactly why we have to teach him well.
Oh, right, Mike, you retire next month, don’t you?
Have you bought your fishing rod for back home yet?”
The moment fishing came up, Mike’s wrinkled face broke into a wide smile.
“Got my eye on a carbon-fiber one ages ago, cost me the better part of half a month’s pay.
Once I’m gone, I’m done with all the mess in this basement for good.”
The two of them were chatting when a crisp cracking sound suddenly came from inside the sterile room.
Leon turned his head and found that the cube in John’s hands had already deformed.
Not deformed from turning, but crushed inward by sheer force.
A dangerous red glow rose at the bottom of John’s eyes, the warning sign of heat vision about to fire.
He felt this plastic cube was deliberately provoking him, and these unreasonable, complicated rules made him irritable.
“Stop.” Leon set down his thermos, walked quickly over to John, and clamped a hand down on the crushed cube.
The red glow in his eyes faded little by little.
John looked up, his blue eyes full of grievance and frustration.
“It won’t behave.” John said indignantly.
“I already turned the red over, but then the blue ran off again.
It’s a bad thing.”
“A lot of things in this world are like that, John.” Leon wasn’t angry.
He just took the wretched-looking cube.
Breaking the rules is easy, but going along with the rules and working it out, that’s the patience a hero should have.”
John watched Leon skillfully start twisting the slightly deformed cube.
With the clicking and clacking of plastic rubbing together, the chaotic colors began to fall into order.
But Leon’s technique was clumsy too, and after twisting away for a long while he’d only solved one and a half faces.
“See, I can’t solve it either.” Leon handed the cube back without embarrassment.
“But that doesn’t stop us from trying again and again.
You can think of it as a little trial.
The cunning bad people out in the world are a lot harder to deal with than this little cube.
If you don’t even have the patience to solve it, how are you going to bring justice to those troublemakers hiding in the shadows later on?”
John took the cube back, half understanding, his fingers lightly stroking the different colors on it.
“Patience…” the little boy murmured to himself.
Watching all this from outside, Mike couldn’t help but smack his lips.
In the whole lab, Leon was probably the only one who could talk to this ultimate weapon in the tone of a teacher scolding some little brat at home.
“All right, you two practice your patience nice and slow.
I’m off on patrol.
These old bones of mine, here’s hoping I don’t run into another burst water pipe today.”
Mike waved his baton and strolled off into the distance.
Leon sat back down on the cushion, picked up his thermos, and blew at the steam rising off it.
John, meanwhile, had quieted down and went on working the cube.
His movements were still a bit clumsy, but the irritable mood from before was clearly gone.
This kid was actually easy to understand.
As long as you guided him along his own logic and wrapped every little everyday thing in the shell of a hero’s code of conduct, he’d obediently do as told.
Time slipped by minute by minute, and the lights in the lab stayed steady and pale.
When lunchtime was almost here, John suddenly held up the cube in his hand, a brilliant smile breaking across his face.
“Leon, look.”
It still wasn’t fully solved, but one whole face of the cube had turned pure red, and the edges of the plastic blocks hadn’t been crushed again.