The Last Hero (Book 2): Rise of the Ultras Read Online Free Page A

the car. Turned the key. Went to sit down, then stopped. “Actually, why don’t you try starting her up?”
    I gulped. “Me?”
    “Well, you might as well seeing as she’s about to be yours.”
    I stumbled when Dad said those words. Wasn’t sure how to take them at first. “It’s… it’s mine?”
    Dad smiled. He wiped his hands again, then patted me on the shoulder. “As soon as I get her fixed up completely, she’s all yours. You’re my boy, Kyle. And I’m proud of you. Way, way more than you realize.”
    He squeezed my shoulder, and I felt warmth fill my body as he looked me right in my eyes.
    “You too, Dad,” I said, a lump forming in my throat. “You too.”
    “Anyway, enough of the sappiness.”
    “Yeah. Sure.” I stumbled into the car. Almost banged my head climbing in, which was a good start.
    “She comfy?”
    “She’s… a car.”
    “Go on then. Start her up.”
    I turned the key and held my breath. And as I sat there in the car, beside my smiling, relatively healthy looking dad, it started to dawn on me that he was recovering. Finally, after over eight years of grief and pain, he was recovering from Cassie’s death. He was returning to normality.
    If my dad could go back to life how it was, if he could snap out of his sadness, then I knew I could be a normal seventeen-year-old.
    With a healthy dose of sneaky Glacies related activities on the side, of course. Just not too many that they attract any attention.
    I remembered the words of the Figure in Black. That mysterious figure who’d stepped into my bedroom out of nowhere, taken me away, given me a pep talk then vanished.
    “You need to let Kyle die. You need to become somebody else entirely.”
    He’d made sense about some things. The things about believing in myself.
    But I didn’t believe him when he told me I had to kill one of my identities. I had to be careful, sure. I had to make sure I stayed on a low profile.
    But I wasn’t turning my back on anything in my life.
    Because I was happy.
    “Go on then!” Dad shouted.
    I took in a deep breath.
    Turned the key.
    The car spluttered to life.
    And as Dad and I celebrated, as the pair of us laughed and cheered together as my cool classic car came back to life, I had no idea that far, far away, something radical was happening.
    Something that was going to change my life all over again.
    Forever.

5
    M r. Parsons looked around the emptied prison cells and felt sickness fill his body from head to toe.
    This place was massive. But it was usually so full of life, even if that life was trapped behind the strongest metal doors. It housed some of the most dangerous ULTRAs the government had been able to track down over the years. After all, they couldn’t just kill the ULTRAs they’d created. They had to use them. Use them for research. Try and find ways to retrain them so that they worked consistently in humanity’s favor, and not against it.
    But right now, every single cell door in Area 64 was open.
    The ULTRAs were gone.
    “What do you think we should do about it, sir?”
    Mr. Parsons walked along the metal corridor past the open cell doors. Every single footstep echoed down through this vast chamber that usually housed so much power. The air was rich with the smell of burned metal. He wondered how this had happened—who had instigated the breakout. He had an idea, but that wasn’t something he could worry about right now.
    All he could worry about was how he was going to get the ULTRAs back.
    How he was going to avert a national—international—crisis.
    “I mean, one hundred and forty-four of them,” Idris said in that pitiful little British accent of his. He was a short man with extremely round glasses perched on the end of his big, chunky nose. He never looked comfortable at the best of times, so you could imagine how he looked right now.
    “I just don’t understand how a thing like this can happen,” Mr. Parsons said. He stopped by an open cell door. Looked inside it. He