The Unforgettable Logan Foster and the Shadow of Doubt

Prologue

Hello. My name is Logan Foster. I am a twelve-year-old orphan living on the Westside of Los Angeles. Even though I am extremely small for my age and should be in seventh grade, I’m almost halfway through my freshman year in high school. That’s because I have an eidetic memory. I’ve retained every word, sound, and image that I’ve seen or heard since I was three (which is when I was abandoned in Los Angeles International Airport and became an orphan).

Also, I am your big brother. That is a fact.

If you already know these facts because you read the last letter I sent you after I pretty much saved the world about three weeks ago, you should feel free to skip the next two hundred words.

If you do not know any of this, it means you did not read what I wrote previously, possibly for one of the following reasons:

I sent a printed version of my first letter, but it got lost in the mail. In 2014 alone, more than 85 million pieces of mail were deemed undeliverable.

I sent an email to you, but it ended up in your spam folder. According to Statistica.com, there are over 107 billion spam emails sent every day.

My first letter got to you either via snail mail or email, but it was written in English, and you are one of the nearly 6.5 billion people on Earth who do not speak that language. Of course, that also means you cannot read this either.

You are not my sibling and have no idea what I’m talking about.

If option four is the case, a mistake has been made. I have noticed this happens frequently.

It seems everyone makes mistakes.

But assuming you are who I think you are and have read what I wrote to you last time, I hope you will continue reading this now.

I’ll give you a moment to decide.

Okay, if you’re still reading this, I am going to assume you read my last letter . . . at least the important parts.

I had thought that after being fostered by Gil and Margie and discovering that they were actual superheroes called Ultra-Quantum and Quicksilver Siren, and then outsmarting an immortal villainess named Necros, life might get kinda normal. I assumed I’d get to slow down, hang out with my best-friend-slash-neighbor Elena (who also has superpowers), and just deal with everyday kid stuff instead of being hunted by supervillains and secret organizations.

Instead, life has gotten even stranger, because right when I should’ve been getting closer to my new foster family, I discovered something that just might lead to finding our parents, and maybe you too.

So now I’m writing this all down to tell you exactly what happened, because I don’t want to keep any secrets from you.

Secrets may make you feel like you have control, but they’re almost always the reasons things get out of control.

5:50 P.M.

Sunday, October 31

"We aren’t going to make it in time. That is a fact!"

That was me, sitting in the middle rear seat of Gil and Margie’s minivan as we raced westward down the Marina Freeway, weaving through traffic like an Olympic slalom skier.

I’m aware of the situation, Logan. Margie exhaled, her knuckles glimmering silver as she gripped the wheel, passing cars on both sides. We need a bit less critique and more ideas of what we can do about it! There’s no telling how bad the damage will be. Gil, what if you go ahead?

From the passenger seat, Gil swallowed hard, which is odd because he doesn’t have actual saliva. As you probably remember, Gil was a MASC scientist when an experiment went wrong and transformed him into a mass of dark-matter-infused atoms held together by his leftover human consciousness.

Alone? I can’t! I mean . . . you know . . . if it’s just me it won’t . . .

Margie shook her head, and I’m pretty sure I heard the steering wheel bending in her hands.

Ahead, the freeway ended, gently narrowing and descending to surface streets on the eastern edge of Marina del Rey. According to Google Maps on my new iPhone, we were still twelve minutes from our destination with traffic.

We’re still twelve minutes from our destination with traffic.

Margie’s shoulders rose up next to her ears, but then she forced them back down. There has to be a way to shave off time. Even one minute could make a difference. A shortcut or something!

That’s when I got an idea.

"I have an idea. According to a New York Times article I read when I was researching the safest bike routes to school, there are forty-five hundred intersections with traffic lights in Los Angeles. Six of them are between us and where we’re going. That is a fact. The traffic lights are synchronized—"

Could you skip to the idea part, Logan? Margie asked like she was trying to be patient. She didn’t sound at all patient.

If we get all green lights, we can reduce our travel time by fifteen percent. Possibly more. But if we hit even one red, we will encounter several more.

Margie glanced over to Gil. Can you get us all greens?

Gil nodded. "You red my mind."

No one said anything. It was the only sensible response.

Okay. I’m gonna go . . . do the thing.

Gil disappeared from the front seat in a flash, streaking ahead of us to the next traffic light a hundred yards away. It was just turning yellow as the cars around us began to slow, but Margie accelerated instead. My hands squeezed the armrest and I involuntarily started listing all the ingredients in a Twinkie.

Enriched bleached wheat flour, water, sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup . . .

Before I could even get to polysorbate 60, Gil appeared next to the intersection’s controller box and his hand vanished inside it. There was a small spark and suddenly, the light changed to green.

Several cars on the cross street had to slam on their brakes, but before they could identify what happened, Gil had flashed off to the next intersection.

Margie just kept her foot on the gas, and Gil’s timing got better as he went. There was a lot less sudden braking, and the air wasn’t quite as full of the sound of skidding tires—other than ours as we took turns at high speed.

On the sidewalks, I noticed kids dressed up for Halloween, dragging their feet like zombies or prancing around like cartoon unicorns. But there were plenty of comic book costumes too. And every one of those kids was totally unaware that real-life superheroes were blasting down the street in a month-old minivan that they leased after their last vehicle was crushed by an earthquake-making supervillain named Seismyxer.

Margie made a careening left onto Via Marina, leaving a twenty-foot arc of rubber in the intersection, drawing head turns from the trick-or-treaters. Meanwhile, I was starting to feel a bit nauseated, but I wasn’t sure if it was motion sickness or just me worrying about the fact that we were probably already too late.

With all the traffic lights behind us, Gil reappeared in the passenger seat, panting.

Will it be enough?

I don’t know. I just don’t know.

Margie’s face hardened as she took one last turn, cutting the wheel hard and power sliding back to the right into a parking spot across from a dock that stretched out into the marina.

And then we were out of the car, running down the ramp toward an unassuming houseboat that loomed over the small sailboats and pleasure crafts around it. We paused for a moment at the gangplank.

Listen, Margie warned. We don’t know what’s waiting in there, but we have to assume the worst. There’s no one else to clean this up. It’s just us. Understood?

I did understand, so I nodded. Gil did too, though I think he looked a lot less confident.

After one deep breath, we boarded the houseboat, threw open the door to the main cabin, and saw it.

Oh no, Gil whispered. We’re too late.

He was right.

In the middle of the floor sat a three-month-old, black-and-white-spotted Great Dane puppy, sitting at attention, surrounded by several torn-up couch cushions and a still-growing puddle of pee that was slowly spreading with the gentle rocking of the boat.

No matter how fast or powerful they may be, superheroes can’t be everywhere at once. That is a fact.

6:41 P.M.

Sunday, October 31

Do you have a favorite Halloween costume genre, like old-school horror monsters, superheroes, or sports stars? Growing up at the El Segundo Transitional Orphanage—aka ESTO—we didn’t exactly have a lot of options, but some of the boys got pretty inventive. They’d take a few rolls of toilet paper and turn themselves into mummies or cut up old sheets to be ghosts. One boy named Oded stuck Cheerios all over his face, covered his hands with red paint, and called himself Cereal Killer. I thought it was a pretty good joke, but I’m pretty sure he scared off more than a few PPs—prospective parents—when they asked what he’d been for Halloween.

This year, after helping Gil and Margie mop up an impressive amount of puppy pee, I got dressed in my first-ever commercially produced costume. It was a replica of the suit and mask worn by TideStrider.

I think I got it for free because, technically, I saved TideStrider’s life when I came up with the plan that freed him, my foster parents, and some other heroes from Necros. Free costumes were an unexpected perk from MASC, the Multinational Authority for Superhuman Control. They are the ones who boss around all the heroes and also make all the superhero merchandise and movies in the world. They gave me the eighteen-dollar costume as a thank-you.

MASC gave me something else for free that I liked a lot less. It was a watch with a GPS tracker and panic button that I was required to wear at all times, since I’d accidentally memorized their entire supersecret database and Colonel Gdula thought my brain was now pretty much a threat to all civilization. If I pressed the panic button three times, it would summon a commando rescue team. The watch was Gdula’s way of making sure I wouldn’t get abducted and tortured for the information I had in my brain, but mostly, I just used it to tell time.

Anyway, when I came out of my bedroom on the houseboat dressed in an aquamarine bodysuit and sleek mask, Margie was putting a leash on our dog, Bohr, while the puppy stared at Gil intently, barking every few seconds.

We named the dog after Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1922 for his model of atomic structure. Gil came up with the name, which was both nerdy and a pun, because he said he was sure the puppy would be a Great Dane just like the scientist. Margie liked the name more than the joke so we agreed to it, but the dog was not as accepting. He had barked at Gil ever since we brought him home.

"This dog has a bone to pick with me."

The dog growled at Gil while Margie groaned at the pun.

He can tell you’re nervous, Margie offered as she stood up, leash in hand. Dogs can smell fear.

They can smell a lot more than fear, I added. "According to a Science magazine article from February 2020, not only are dogs’ noses a hundred million times more sensitive than humans’, they can even sense low levels of radioactive energy. You have no scent at all, but you’re radiating more energy than almost any creature on this planet. So, that combination may be very confusing to Bohr."

These facts did not appear to make Gil feel any better, which was surprising. Like me, Gil usually appreciates facts.

Who’s ready for some dockside trick-or-treating?

That was Margie as she led Bohr out across the gangplank, with Gil and me following behind. Gil and Margie were both dressed as regular humans, even though neither are. It was the one night a year when they could have worn their superhero costumes without being noticed. But they made it clear Halloween is for kids, and though I’m a little old for trick-or-treating, it was my first Halloween with Gil and Margie and they really wanted to take me. I wasn’t going to turn down free candy, especially since Margie’s ability to cook food that tastes good to human tongues instead of her alien taste buds had not improved in the past month.

However, their plan had some holes in it. It turns out that people who live on boats don’t expect a lot of trick-or-treaters. For over an hour, we strolled up and down the docks of the marina, searching for other boats that were decorated with pumpkins or spooky lights. In all, we only found about a dozen. I ended up with seven candy bars, two bags of Smartfood, a clementine, and several fishing lures as my treats. I almost certainly would have gotten a bigger haul if we still lived on Kittyhawk Circle, but I was not allowed to go back there.

Even if you don’t have an eidetic memory like mine, you probably remember there were good reasons to think Necros might come looking for me at my last known address. So, as soon as MASC set up a temporary West Coast HQ in one of their hidden storage facilities under Venice Beach, they activated the Page One Protocol for Gil, Margie, and me. That’s what MASC calls it when they give a superhero a completely new secret identity. Colonel Gdula wanted to reassign Gil and Margie north of San Francisco and send me to a different country altogether. He mentioned Uzbekistan. But Gil and Margie refused to leave the area or let me get deported, which I appreciated. I did some research and Uzbekistan is the only country that borders five other nations with names than end in stan, which is interesting. But I didn’t want to leave Gil and Margie, who I actually like living with. I also refused to move too far from Elena Arguello, who is my best friend.

So, our Page One Protocol meant that Marjorie Morrow and Gilbert Grant became Margaret Matthews and Guillermo Grover. That allows them to still go by Margie and Gil, which is good, because it’s very suspicious if someone calls you by your new first name and you don’t respond.

I’m now Logan Lewis according to my new school registration. MASC has a thing about alliteration and names: Peter Parker, Lois Lane, Reed Richards. I asked Colonel Gdula why and was told it was classified.

So instead of going to San Francisco and Tashkent—the capital city of Uzbekistan—we moved from our old house in Westchester to a houseboat in Marina del Rey. It’s only five miles from Kittyhawk Circle, but it’s a different zip code, has different schools, and the boat can actually move to different places, which may help us stay off the grid. Gil had to leave his day job working for a cable company, and Margie couldn’t be a substitute teacher anymore. So now, Gil is the overnight IT specialist at a reality TV production company in Culver City, and Margie is a part-time personal trainer at a gym in Venice. And me? Well, I’m just the newest, youngest, weirdest freshman at a different school, Marina High, so my identity hasn’t really changed all that much. Just my location.

After trick-or-treating, Margie went back outside with Bohr to play fetch in the parking lot, while Gil waited inside for me to get out of my costume.

Do you have a lot of homework this weekend, Logan?

I did it on the bus ride home.

Gil got excited as he asked, "Did you wear those new noise-canceling headphones I got you? They’re bass-ically the best on the market."

I ignored the pun and answered truthfully. They are excellent at blocking out the sounds, but they also feel strange on my ears.

Oh, well, you don’t . . . I mean if they don’t . . . we can look for others that feel better. Gil’s smile disappeared as he struggled to complete the thought. I appreciated that he had tried to help me with my ASD-related auditory sensitivity, which can make me feel overwhelmed and unable to focus when there’s lots of noises nearby. But before I could say so, Gil changed the subject back to homework. And did you . . . like we talked about . . . make some mistakes on purpose?

I assured Gil that I had intentionally misspelled one word on each of the worksheets and substituted the sine of 32 degrees (.52992) for the cosine of 32 degrees (.84805) on one of my math problems, guaranteeing I would not get a perfect score.

"That’s smart . . . I mean . . . making one mistake on a math problem isn’t a sine of a bad student. But still, I’m glad you did it. Just in case."

The just in case he was talking about was the possibility of Necros and Dr. Chrysler searching for reports of a new student with my kind of memory. Gil and Margie agreed not to make me redo grades I’d already passed just to blend in better with kids my own age, but they wanted me to stay off Necros’s radar. That was their term for it. The thing is, the way to stay off the radar is to fly low . . . much lower than you usually would. That didn’t feel a hundred percent right to me.

It doesn’t feel a hundred percent right to me, I explained, It’s like I’m hiding who I really am. I’m not a superhero like you. I’m just Logan, and Logan gets facts right. That is a fact, Dad.

I’d promised Gil that I’d try using that term for him to see how it felt, but I couldn’t help noticing that he did a funny little dark-matter scramble whenever I called him Dad. His body literally glitched as if being a father was something his consciousness hadn’t quite adjusted to. So, I watched his molecules rearrange themselves for a millisecond, but when he recovered, he knelt down so we could look eye to eye.

We don’t want you to be anyone except you. But we want you to be safe too. And for the record, I think you’re every bit as much a superhero as I am.

This did not feel like a fact, and I was about to argue the point when Margie walked in the door with Bohr, who immediately let out a piercing bark that startled Gil. He involuntarily vanished in a flash of light and reappeared across the room behind the sofa.

I guess even heroes aren’t heroes all the time.

2:18 P.M.

Thursday, November 4

Apparently, I am now a wizard.

I don’t mean it like, Harry—yer a wizard, which is what Hagrid said in chapter four of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I am only a wizard on Thursdays 2-4:30 p.m., when I’m part of the Marina High Dungeons & Dragons Club.

Since this was my first time having a new identity, I decided to find a hobby where I could get extra practice pretending to be someone else. Also, Gil and Margie told me I needed to join an extracurricular club to start making friends. I originally looked to see if there was a cat-video appreciation club, since they are my absolute favorite types of videos, but there wasn’t. After researching the options that did exist, I realized D&D might put me in touch with other people who enjoy reading super-long books, calculating probabilities, and memorizing charts. So, I gave it a try.

After school on Thursday, I made my way to a history classroom and saw that a large table in the center of the class had been transformed into a miniature castle that was made of something very familiar.

It’s hand-painted Lego. I had mono last year and went kinda nuts with the crafting. Welcome. I’m Chris Gifford, but you can call me Giff. I’m president of Marina High’s D&D Club. I’m also the Dungeon Master.

Very tall and super pale, Giff was a senior who spoke in a reedy voice, except when he was pretending to be a monster or a giant. But since he was talking as himself when we met, he squeaked a little as he introduced me to the other two members: Zach Wong, who was built like a teenage powerlifter, and Nicky Dinh, a sophomore who was almost as short as me.

I assured the group that I already knew how to play, even though I’d never done it before. That’s because I’d read the entire Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual, and several other sourcebooks before I showed up.

Okay, good. Since you’re up to speed on the rules, Giff proceeded, you’ll need to roll a character. Any ideas?

Before I could respond, the door to the classroom opened with a thump and someone walked in.

They had a super-light-brown complexion; short, fringy jet-black hair; a nose ring; and black jeans with seventy-nine different rips in the legs. To be clear, I didn’t immediately know how many rips there were, but I counted them afterward in my memory.

"Is this where a gal can go to get her nerd on?"

Giff looked at Zach and Nicky, but neither spoke. It was like this newcomer had cast Silence on them. It’s a second level spell for