Powerless by Matthew Cody

Author:Matthew Cody [Cody, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-375-89353-7
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2009-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

The Old Quarry

The trip to the Old Quarry took longer than either of them wanted. Daniel had expected them to fly there, but it turned out that he was a lot heavier than Louisa, and since Mollie wasn’t super-strong like Eric, she didn’t want to risk dropping him along the way. And since Daniel had no wish to be dropped, they decided to bike there instead. By the time they arrived, the sun had already started to set.

Daniel had only ever seen the south face of Mount Noble, and the difference was startling. On the south face, even at night you could still see the signs of civilization—hiking trails, the lights of far-off homes twinkling in the distance. But here, the wilds of nature dominated everything.

Tangled trees reached high into the sky, and the underbrush was thick and nearly impassable. Except for the quarry, there were no signs of humanity’s touch at all. It was obvious to Daniel that for many, many years the north face had been off-limits to not just the Supers but everyone.

“It doesn’t look like anyone’s been here since the quarry closed,” he said.

“No, I doubt that anyone has. The north face has always been an unlucky place. The quarry closed back in the fifties, after a bunch of bad stuff happened there. Some kind of accident or something. The Shawnee tribe had a strange name for this place—they called it Witch Fire Mountain.”

Daniel stared at Mollie. “Who are you and what have you done with the real Mollie Lee?”

She gave him an indignant look. “What? Just because you’re the detective doesn’t mean that I don’t know how to use the Internet, too. I did some research, that’s all.”

Daniel thought back to the first, and only, time that he had seen a picture of Jonathan Noble—not the comic-book character that he had inspired, but the real man.

“Mollie, I saw an old photograph of Jonathan Noble standing with a bunch of children, and there was something about a fire.”

“The St. Alban’s fire,” she said. “Sure, it’s in all the local history books. It’s what made Jonathan Noble so famous. Before that he was just an ordinary fur trader.”

Daniel remembered the look on those kids’ faces—they were scared and tired. Even Noble himself was a mess, covered in dirt and soot. He hadn’t looked much like a hero then: he’d looked like a man who had just been through something terrible. “What happened?”

“St. Alban’s was some kind of orphanage connected to a monastery up here. In the 1930s, the monastery burned down. Everyone was killed, except for the orphans themselves—Jonathan Noble was passing by when he saw the fire, and he risked his own life to save them. He rescued every single child.”

Daniel looked around at the menacing trees and the deep black gorge of the quarry just a few feet away. “Let me guess,” he said. “St. Alban’s was never rebuilt and years later …”

“Yep. A mining company came in and dug a limestone quarry in the very same spot.

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