Wearing the Cape 6: Team-Ups and Crossovers

by Marion G. Harmon

  I sighed. “If I understood all those words, he accomplished most of that back home. Maybe the team offered him more resources?”

  “Maybe. Anyway, just before the Pulse he had one of his eureka moments and came up with the Monsatt Power Cell. He fabricated a bunch of them—compact little suckers the size of beer kegs. Just one can replace a trailer-sized power generator, and their self-sustaining cycle lasts forever. Well a few hundred years, maybe. And yep, now you’re getting it.”

  I wanted to laugh. “He built a self-fueled power source just before everything collapsed?” Wow, that was practically fate. Again.

  “Yeah. It’s all Verne-tech shortcuts, but give us a century and we’ll be able to do it for reals. When the Pulse happened and the power grids fried like bacon and collapsed everywhere, he handed five power cells to West Chicago in return for the deeds to the land around his property. Then we used the rest for ourselves and for barter—plugging into local distribution centers whose refrigeration centers were warming up, into hospitals so they could keep their drugs fresh and do their jobs, all that stuff. We got food, material, and labor for it and by the time West Chicago and the municipalities around it fell apart anyway, this had become Westcamp. It’s amazing how much professional and superhuman labor you can get when safe and warm places with enough food are suddenly scarce.”

  “Okay…” That all made sense, sort of, but— “Freehold?”

  “Yeah, well, things were going great and then the Great State of Illinois got pushy. And greedy.”

  The way Shell explained it, it sounded like a total bureaucratic train wreck. Illinois had “assumed emergency oversight” of the failed county and city governments—not that they could do much from Springfield—and in the name of West Chicago it tried to come in and regulate Westcamp zoning and construction according to city licensing and codes. Which would have ground everything to a halt since by then nobody had cash to pay for permits, inspections, and licensing (they were already paying with Westcamp Bucks inside the camp) and they were using non-standard materials anyway. The government also tried to tax Westcamp’s power production, which it was mostly giving away. Hey, the state needed revenue, right? Then they found out that the power cells were “nuclear,” and moved to seize them “for safety reasons.”

  Dumbasses.

  Westcamp declared itself a Freehold, and had enough superhuman and armed refugees to make it stick unless bigger guns like the Sentinels backed by US Army troops came in to enforce the state’s authority. Which as she’d said, Washington refused to do.

  And that was how Vulcan came to own his own mostly independent micro-state. Or all the land and buildings, at least.

  “So…he’s a benevolent tyrant, right?”

  “If you don’t catch him in the morning.”

  We stacked our bowls on Charlie’s washing station and Shell took me two floors down to a tiny Public Safety station on the fifth floor—because why wait for them to come find us? Like Charlie’s Wok, its front door opened onto a wide balcony walkway. The single officer there checked my pass—yep I was Susan Evans—checked with Shell, and issued my guest card with a new pic because of the wig. (And no she didn’t ask. What?) She also formally welcomed me to Westcamp, entered me in the tower’s book, gave me the Westcamp Guest and Visitor’s Guide, and let me know I’d need to check in here once a week until I left or made the stay permanent.

  Finally she asked me if I kept or carried a gun. When I said no she handed me another brochure, If You Keep a Gun, just in case I changed my mind. Really?

  Shell’s explanation freaked me out all over again; places like Chicago had actually stiffened their gun laws post-Pulse—and been ignored by their own police departments after the first few horrible weeks. Chief Redmond ignored the General Confiscation Order after the first day. Why? Because in the food riots, the neighborhood breakdowns, the whole bloody anarchy after the Pulse, they couldn’t even begin to disarm everybody—in a lot of places they’d had to deputize armed citizens just to keep from getting overwhelmed.

  Did they try gun confiscation elsewhere? Some places, and it hadn’t worked out at all well. Even if they’d been able to get all the guns, they couldn’t disarm breakthroughs.

  So armed self-defense had come back in a big way and the laws were slowly catching up to that, but in the meantime local law enforcement was openly practicing selective enforcement; when stopping someone carrying, an officer might do a criminal background check. If they didn’t have one, no warrants or convictions, then they were cool.

  And Westcamp Freehold pretty much started with armed civilian militia.

  I couldn’t imagine how my oldest brother Aaron—who Shell told me had worked at Johns Hopkins here, too—had managed to get his family safely out of Baltimore in all that. Shell wouldn’t say, except that it had involved a contract and they were safe in Chicago now.

  This really was Grimworld.

  We walked around Westcamp, and went back to Shell’s apartment. She offered the bed, since she could lie on the floor while recharging just as easily, and the evening became a session of “Did this happen?” I could have looked up a lot of stuff online much easier, but Shell could tell me what happened instead. Most of it was purely depressing; after hearing about Blackstone’s fight with the new Mayor of Chicago—who was Mal Shankman—I covered my face and may have screamed a little. It beat putting my fist through something.

  Shell laughed. “You okay?”

  “No.” I lowered my hands with a sigh. “You know the old story about someone who gets three wishes? And he wastes the first wish because he’s not taking it seriously, then he makes a second, big wish, and screws things up so bad that he has to use the third wish to undo it?”

  “Um, okay?”

  “The moral being that, most of the time if we got our wish we’d regret it? Well this place feels like that big stupid second wish, so now I’m feeling dumb and awful.”

  “Okay, now you’ve completely lost me.”

  I laughed too. It wasn’t a happy laugh.

  “Do you know how many times I wished that this had never happened to me? That I hadn’t been under that underpass? That I’d never had my breakthrough—that I’d—that things had been normal? Getting you back was great. The rest—I always imagined that without this I’d be living in Polasky Commons with the Bees, hanging out between classes, doing just, stuff. Stuff that mostly didn’t matter to anybody but me. And now I know that, if I hadn’t—that there’d have been this.”

  “Plus a dead President.”

  “Don’t remind me. The first day was bad enough, that day was the worst day of my life.” And they’d made a memorial out of it here. That was just...

  Shell stayed uncharacteristically silent until I looked up. “What?”

  “It was for me, too.”

  “Oh.” And just like that I was done. My BFF had seen me die; I couldn’t top that, not ever. I nudged her with my shoulder. We’d sort of fallen together on her couch. “At least I did get you out of it all, back there. Here it looks like you didn’t get jack.”

  “Till now.”

  And I couldn’t stay. “Shell—”

  “If the Teatime Anarchist had asked to copy you, would you have said yes?”

  “Wait, what?” Where had that come from?

  She turned to me, drawing her legs up, and her eyes were big and dark in her face, luminous. “He asked me, you know. He went back to before I jumped, told me I was going to die and said he couldn’t change that but you were going to need my help later.”

  “He—what? That’s— You were fifteen!”

  “And not going to get any older. He needed consent, and when I gave it he wiped my memory of the whole ask. Then I went ahead and jumped.”

  “That’s just— How do you know he did that?”

  “Duh.” She shrugged easily. “Recorded it. All nice and legal by late twenty-second century standards. So, would you?”

  “I—” I really had to think about that one.
“I suppose so? Yeah, I would have. There was still stuff to do and I’d want to leave something. But he didn’t ask. Did he?”

  “He had no time to go back, after. He and his twin finished their fight before he could.”

  The bitterness in her voice made me shiver. Mutual annihilation, leaving Shelly all alone without the job she’d been made for. Without me. Wow. The two of us could hold the world’s biggest pity party. Despite everything I realized I was smiling, even—yes, the giggles started and I didn’t stop them.

  Now it was her turn. “What?”

  “Do you remember—when we both had that crush on Jeremy in seventh grade? So of course when he picked Alison we binged on double-fudge ice cream together and puked our guts out?”

  “Hey! You puked first—mine was sympathy vomiting.”

  “Yeah, right. Sympathy? You said ew, gross! and turned green as grass before hurling your load of dairy. Your mom was so maaaad…”

  “My room smelled like sick for days. We had to steam-clean the carpet.”

  I put my head on her shoulder. “Ah, the good old days.”

  She shook with laughter and everything was better. Not good, but better.

  “So, tell me some good came out of all this? Blackstone’s alive, so the Sentinels stomped Villains Inc. just fine without me—tell me they got the Wreckers? The Ascendancy?”

  She shrugged. “The Wreckers are active in LA, not here. And the…Ascendancy? Who are they?”

  My head came up. “That can’t be right. Dr. Pellegrini? The Foundation of Awakened Theosophy? The Ascendant, the L.O. Stadium Killer?”

  “They never caught the nut-job who called himself The Ascendant.” Her eyes unfocused. “Dr. Pellegrini, founder and leader of the Foundation of Awakened Theosophy. He’s right here in Chicago. Are you saying…”

  Oh my God. I actually felt faint.

  “He’s the L.O. Stadium Killer, and the Wreckers work for him! He’s also the breakthrough that enabled the Dark Anarchist to trigger the California Quake and kill fifty thousand people. Back home he’s the most wanted man in the US, and we can’t find him! He covered his tracks too well when he—”

  I froze, paralyzed. I didn’t even close my mouth.

  “Hope?” She nudged me.

  “He’s here. Shell, he’s here, and he hasn’t launched the Ascendancy yet. He’s in the open and he’s vulnerable.”

  “Well, yeah and that’s great, but you’re just passing through so why are you—”

  “Because if we can stop him here, take him down here, then I can get hold of all the leads he buried! All the tracks he covered up when he was closing shop on his legitimate businesses and getting ready to go full supervillain! When I get back home—”

  Shelly was nodding. “You can use it all to come at him from directions he doesn’t know you know about.”

  “Heck, I might be able to find the location of his super-secret villain’s lair!” I laughed, almost giddy at the thought. If there was any rhyme or reason to my jumps, this was it.

  After that bombshell, Shelly decided to go hunting and carefully let me know that she was going to “step out” of her prosthetic body for a bit. I didn’t understand quite why she wanted to prepare me until she closed her eyes and opened them again to study me.

  “Hello, I’m Galatea.”

  I blinked. “Yes…yes you are. How are you?”

  “I am operating within acceptable parameters. Shelly told me to take care of you.”

  “‘I’m fine’ is a better way to—you know what, never mind. Is there anything you need to do?”

  “I can recharge if there isn’t anything you need me to do for you.”

  I patted her hand, filled with a crushing sense of déjà vu. “You do that. I’ll just take a look around.”

  She went into the bedroom and lay down. A click told me something had connected, and I got up off the couch to wander the apartment.

  Shelly and I had practically lived in each other’s rooms as kids, and they’d been total expressions of our childhood and teen personalities. This place…made me wonder if Shell expressed herself elsewhere. It was neat, clean, artistically decorated, not the home of a teen or even a college student. Checking her fridge turned up guest-food—she didn’t eat here by herself.

  There weren’t any pictures, of us or Mrs. B, but I didn’t expect there to be. Shelly wasn’t Shelly here; she was Elizabeth Parks, El to her friends. It wasn’t like her rooms in the Dome.

  Making sure my wig was in place, I finally went out to lean on the balcony. The breeze blew warm, and I watched joggers threading the walkways below me. The white of the buildings, broken only by business signs and the flowering plants everywhere, reminded me of whitewashed and sun warmed Mediterranean villages. I spotted the occasional orange-helmeted Public Safety officer, but children ran about freely. I heard laughter.

  Vulcan had made a city. A small city, but still.

  The sun flooded the horizon with oranges and pinks before Shelly came out to join me.

  “Any luck?”

  “Yes. No.” She scowled. “The Foundation of Awakened Theosophy has the latest and best security. I think a Verne might be involved—it shouldn’t be that good. The government’s isn’t that good. But that’s something, isn’t it?”

  “Why would a legitimate private business be that protected? You think?” I turned away from the view. So much for easy. “Should we—do you think the Sentinels can help?” I’d take that hit if I had to—even if Blackstone wasn’t there anymore, even if I had to see my dad, let him see me. For this I’d do it. Was that selfish?

  Shelly looked…trapped? “Not a good idea. Hope, there’s—something. I’m sort of a…”

  “Sort of a…what?”

  “Sort of a supervillain.”

  The world went weird for a moment, kind of like a punch to the head in training. It had to be purely psychosomatic, but my ears rang. “No. Not possible.”

  She started babbling. “Everything’s broken! I know it looks—things are getting better in a lot of places, but none of it’s right.”

  “Is this about the, the Public Safety and…”

  “The Public Safety and Security Act, and that’s just starters! After the Pulse—legal restrictions on breakthroughs are tightening everywhere. President Touches Clouds is fighting it, but with the last election Congress is mostly against her and a bunch of the states are—it’s getting bad. Everybody’s scared, lots blame breakthroughs for the Pulse and for making things worse afterward. There’s a resistance forming and I’m a part of it. As Cypher I’m on the DSA’s wanted list.”

  “But— What do you do?”

  “Mostly low-level cybercrime, information theft, intelligence. Some pranks—the kind of embarrassing and non-lethal stuff the real Teatime Anarchist used to be known for. I help the new Underground move breakthroughs from places where the law is, you know, to places where they’re welcome or at least won’t be labeled and lojacked.”

  My perspective of the entire day shifted. “Mrs. Lori and Henry?” I almost squeaked.

  “Hey, Grey House is a station on the Underground—at least it was. I don’t know how soon we’ll be able to use it again.”

  “And the Sentinels?”

  “They’re the law. They’re not happy to chase down unevaluated breakthroughs, but they’ll do it if it’s public. They’re on thin ice with the state for not helping against Westcamp before the situation got regularized.”

  “And today?” This couldn’t be happening.

  “They had no evidence Henry was escorting anybody, so they accepted his Good Samaritan story. The CPD’s Superhuman Security Division might not, but we’ve got a guy inside who’ll tell us if they decide to pull Henry in for questioning.”

  “Detective Fisher?”

  “How did you— You know his secret, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “His literary roots? He told me, back home. This is just—messed up. What really happened this morning? How did you ‘take care
of it?’”

  Shelly managed to look proud and guilty at the same time. “Hey, I know a guy. C-Class Mentalist, only talent is making people not notice things, but he’s really good at it. You’ve meet him, you just didn’t notice him. He’s a supervillain who calls himself Blindspot.”

  “Wait, when did I not notice him?

  She laughed. “He was sitting in the back seat of Mrs. Lori’s town car until you got most of the way out of town—why do you think Henry made that stop in the middle of nowhere? So until they served the warrant and searched Mrs. Lori’s, they thought you were still there.”

  “He was invisible? But I didn’t hear him—and I sure didn’t see the door open.”

  “He’s not invisible. People just don’t pay any attention to him unless he interacts directly with them. And that goes for things he does around them, too—the cops on watch didn’t see your car because he was in it and didn’t want them to.”

  “Wow.” Now that was a scary power, and not a little creepy. “I’m surprised you didn’t mess with the traffic cameras, too.”

  “I did, sort of. I looped minutes here and there to edit out the town car—worked it with Henry so he only passed under a street-cam when there were no other cars in the frame with him. I could have just shut down the whole system, had him drive straight here, but then the CPD would know someone could do that.”

  “Right, and that would be bad.”

  She nodded seriously, looked at me funny. “What?”

  “Nothing.” I shook my head. “You just seem—older? Older than my Shellys.” She wasn’t justifying herself, or asking for my approval. She’d had to go up against the CPD to keep me free, and she’d done it. She’d done it, it was done, and that was it. Kind of cool, and a little disconcerting.

  “Well, duh. You died. And then the world went to shit.”

  “It wasn’t on purpose—” I shut up. Shelly looked just…bereft.

  We went back inside.

  I got a bottle of water from her fridge and tried to think. So Shelly couldn’t just hack into Dr. Pellegrini’s files and peel his secrets like an onion. “Can you find enough dirt on him to turn over to the government and get them started?” If the DSA even thought that he just might be the L.O. Stadium Killer, they’d go after him with every tool they had.