Read The Indestructibles (Book 2): Breakout for Free Online

Watching those two walk away, looking like kids in their street clothes, not like the heroes who'd stopped a sentient hurricane a year ago, instilled a great deal of hope, yet they made his age all the more apparent. He felt like he'd never been that young. Emily turned back and blew him an exaggerated kiss, and Sam, always the old gentleman, tipped his fedora and smiled.
          He wished Doc Silence hadn't done whatever he'd done to help with the victory over the storm last year. The kids were self-sufficient enough, but they had no institutional memory, they had no history, they had no contacts. Sam was doing all he could to help, but Sam had never been a superhuman. Just a guy in a suit and tie on the sidelines, a third base coach cheering on a team of heroes.
          I can't keep these kids safe, Sam thought. But then again that wasn't his job.
          Over coffee he and Billy and Emily had talked mostly about their most recent public fight, but Sam had pressed them a little about how Kate was doing. It was funny how they'd given up on Sam's old rule about not knowing anyone's real name. The Indestructibles found it almost impossible to not call each other by their first names around him, and after he learned Billy's name and Jane's by accident, everyone simply let it go. Sam used to say this was to keep himself apart, to keep secret identities safe, but the fact is, he'd been at this a long time, and heroes ultimately die. They die all the time. It's easier if you know them as Solar and Straylight instead of Jane and Billy.
          Kate surrendered her real name least willingly, but in quiet moments she sought him out more often than any of the others, to talk about heroes long gone, villains locked away, the way things used to be. Kate wanted the institutional knowledge. She needed a sense of history and her place in it.
          As a result, she was Sam's best student.
          Lately, though, everyone had witnessed her withdrawing. At first they joked that she was just angry that Titus had left town, but five minutes with Kate told you she wasn't the type to give a boy that much influence over her. Sam could see the real culprit of her angst, because he knew how it felt himself.
          She felt vulnerable. She, like Sam, was a mortal among gods. And Kate knew she had to be better than all of them to survive.
          Sam noticed the man tailing him almost immediately. The guy was good, but Sam had been tailing people for almost fifty years. He knew all the tricks. So Sam let him follow him for a while, until he saw the second tail join him, across the street, casually maneuvering through the ebb and flow of the foot traffic that made up the City's blood flow.
          Then he saw the car turn the corner. There was no reason to know it was coming for him, but something about it, the smoothness of the right-hand turn, the gleam of its surface, marked it as something different.
          His tails herded him toward the car. Sam stopped at the curb and waited for the car to pull up. A window rolled down, and a woman, with dark, utilitarian hair and hard eyes, spoke.
          "Sam Barren," the woman said.
          "The one and only."
          The door opened. Sam looked at the two men who had been tailing him — big guys, no one who would give you pause walking past them in the street, but more than he wanted to try his luck against. He slid inside. One of the men closed the door behind him.
          "I was wondering when you people would come around," Sam said as the car pulled away from the curb.
          "You've gone off the reservation, Sam."
          "The Department was shut down years ago. There's no such thing as going off the reservation if it no longer exists."
          "Well we're bringing it back online," the woman said.
          "Good. The kids can use the support."
          "That's why we're bringing you in from the cold, Sam. We're going to rein