“Don’t you dare!”
She rolled her eyes. “Duh — we’re not in middle school anymore. But I’m not letting you do this again, so one of us is going to pin him to a wall and ask what his intentions are.” She slid off the bed.
“Wait!”
“One week,” she agreed with a laugh and a wink. “Then if you haven’t, I will. Study if you can...” She was out the door and on her way to her next scene of mischief before I could think of anything that didn’t involve threats of dismemberment. My head hit the headboard again. Thunk, thunk, thunk.
Vulcan could always put her back together, anyway.
Geez, what had I done?
C’mon Hope. You fight godzillas, intercept nuclear missiles, give safety lectures to six year-olds. You literally threw yourself at Atlas. How can you be so scared?
It didn’t even occur to me to wonder where she was off to.
Megaton
Seven showed me my rooms, like he was staff and not Seven. He hadn’t talked much while my parents were here and we listened to Legal Eagle explain everything. Astra hadn’t been lying — nobody was saying what happened had been my fault, thanks to school security cameras that caught the whole thing. But the superhero-lawyer explained what had to happen, now that I was a “known risk.” I had to get trained, and if I couldn’t control my gift, I had to cooperate in finding ways to mitigate it or “go where I wasn’t a danger to anybody.”
I was all for that; Mom couldn’t stop crying and Dad would barely look at me. They signed a bunch of papers turning me over to the state, then they were gone.
“Mal,” Seven repeated.
“What? Sorry.” The guy had been freakishly cool about me all day; everyone else except Astra — who hadn’t come back — had been careful around me. Not that I blamed them. Now he leaned against “my” computer desk, watching me look at my room. Rooms.
He grinned. “Astra told me it’s the nicest jail she’s ever seen.”
It took me a moment to catch what he was getting at. “This happened to her?”
An easy shrug. “In a way. Ask her about the downside of super strength some time.” Tapping the narrow brim of his fedora, he straightened up and headed for the door. “Night, sport. Big day tomorrow.”
“Say hi to Sammy and Dean for me.” I didn’t know why I said it — sure he’d been watching me like entertainment the whole time, but he’d been friendly about it. He just laughed.
“I will.” And he was gone.
“Don’t rob any casinos,” I said to the door. Yeah, that would secure my geek-cred.
I looked around. Damn but Seven wasn’t lying, either. Entertainment room and kitchen combo, bedroom, bathroom and walk-in closet. The place was a five-star hotel suite, not what the wrestling team got when we traveled for matches. The bag Mom had packed sat on the bed with my plastic-wrapped varsity jacket. Somebody’d stitched and dry cleaned it.
Kill somebody and you got service.
I was getting warm. Shit.
Someone “knocked” on the door, which meant they touched the screen outside and the door gave a musical two-note bell chime. Seven? Astra? That Willis guy? The main room was big as our living room back home, and they had chimed twice by the time I got there.
Not Astra. “Hey there!” A redheaded girl pushed her way in, followed by a black kid less certain of his welcome. They looked close to my age, and I tried to guess who they were in costume. The black kid had to be Crash, but the girl I had no idea.
“’Sup?” He bumped my fist while the girl claimed the center of the room and spun around to check everything out. She wore a baggy off-the-shoulder t-shirt that said I died origin chasing and all I got was an extended warranty.
What?
“It needs posters, but it’ll do,” she said. “And we’ve got to upgrade the game system.”
What?
Crash put his hoodie down to look around, shrugged. “Go with it, dude. It’s easier if you don’t fight her.” He stuck out his hand. “Guess we ought to, you know, introduce. Jamal. This one’s Shelly, or as I like to call her, The Ghost in the Machine.”
“Hey!”
Jamal ignored her.
Okay... We shook. “Mal,” I said. “Where’s the machine?”
He grinned like I’d passed a test. “You’re looking at her. Cutting-edge autonomous transformable gynoid unit — the best Vulcan can make. I’ve got a bet with Astra over how long it takes her to break this one.”
It just kept getting weirder. She stuck out her tongue at him. “Says someone named Crash. In public I’m Galatea, and lots shinier. Did they stock your fridge? Woohoo!” She double-fisted some soda bottles by their necks, tossed a Dew to Jamal, a Coke to me, and hopped onto the couch to land cross-legged.
“So.” She popped the top of her Coke. “Do we get to keep you?”
Jamal dropped to the floor. The kid was track-and-field lean, even his tight cornrows streamlined front to back, but compared to the hyper redhead he moved like he had all day to get anywhere.
“What the girl is trying to say is, are you going to train here? Or are you going to the Academy?” He said it like there was only one.
And there really was, at least for me now. Legal Eagle had dropped the news on me; the Illinois Legislature had just passed the School Safety Bill, which meant that known breakthroughs couldn’t stay in the public school system — they were too scared someone like me might go nuts and start popping bully’s heads off or something. Even if I hadn’t blown up a bus driver, for me it was Hillwood Academy, the boarding school that took in the juvenile breakthroughs for half the Midwestern states.
After all that work to get on the wrestling team...
I thought about how weird it had been to walk into the Sentinels’ Assembly Room today. How would it feel to go to Hillwood? Hillwood the show was in its fifth season, the student council had saved the world twice, and a secret society of student-villains was plotting to take over the school.
And then there were the news exposés that said it was really half boarding school and half military academy, that really half the student body had serious breakthrough-related trauma and mental problems.
I couldn’t taste my Coke. “Maybe I belong there. I kill people.”
Shelly blew a raspberry. “You killed one person, by accident. Sucks, but that’s like... I don’t know what that’s like, but you make it sound like a lifestyle choice! Do you want to run out and kill everyone now?”
“No!”
“There you go. Besides if you’d, you know, really had it in for that bus driver, you wouldn’t go to Hillwood — you’d go straight to the juvie breakthrough wing of Detroit Supermax.”
Suddenly I was burning inside-out.
“Hey! Breathe! Breathe!” Shelly gasped, wide-eyed and flapping her hands like she was trying to put out a fire. Jamal rose into a crouch. I stared at the carpet, focused on the bottle in my hand, and the heat dropped until I didn’t feel like I was shining through my skin.
Okay, okay, no bang, all good. “How could you tell?” I asked finally. It wasn’t like it showed.
“Vulcan made my eyes to spec, duh.” She dropped her hands. “Might as well get them in infrared, match Ho — Astra on something.”
I gripped the bottle, put it to my forehead for the chill. “Are you guys testing me again?”
She looked away. “No. Well, giving you practice, really. We think you need to, you know, learn how not to sneeze. Crash could have got us both out of here before you went off, and we can always repaint.”
“You’re all freaking crazy.”
The insane robot girl actually looked hurt. Jamal put his bottle down and stood up. “Hey, you walk by falling.”
“And what is that?”
“Sifu stuff. Like, if a mighty pine falls in the forest we can’t see for the trees, does it hit the bear crapping in the woods? Later. C’mon Shell.”
She shot me a look promising this was so not over, and marched out with what sh
e probably thought was dignity. Crash gave me a shrug that could have meant anything and closed the door behind them. I resisted the urge to kick the half-empty Dew he’d left. I’d probably blow it up.
Shit.
Chapter Five: Astra
“Traffic remains blocked along Dundee Road between South Milwaukee Avenue and the Tri-State Tollway. Despite protests from the Sierra Club, which is attempting to get the new old-growth forest declared a national park, the city has directed The Crew to clear the growth from the connecting roads so that repairs may begin.
“The Green Man has released a second Internet video, demanding the city close its nuclear power stations and tax private vehicles to build a larger public transportation system. The Office of Emergency Management recommends citizens keep evacuation packs handy and be ready to relocate to a temporary living situation; for most Chicagoans, such arrangements are typically reciprocal guest-agreements with family or acquaintances living in different parts of the city.”
Chicago City News
* * *
Blackstone looked up from his desk when I knocked on his open door. Blackstone’s office door was always open; anyone getting past Bob had a right to be there, and an open door said “No secrets in here.”
“I have my choices.”
“Do you, my dear?” No are you sure? or That was quick. His smiling eyes weren’t a mask, really, just the surface of something deeper.
“May I see them?” he invited. He still hadn’t finished his morning coffee. The way I felt, I needed the stuff administered intravenously.
I had stayed up until it was pointless to go to bed, but I was ready with my facts and my arguments, and one tap on my epad sent the file to his mailbox. He opened it to read while I sat and looked around to keep from watching and fidgeting. There was always plenty to look at. Atlas had kept his office nearly featureless (he’d spent as little time there as possible) but bookcases covered Blackstone’s walls. The few open spaces were covered by framed vintage show posters of Blackstone the Magician, his inspiration and namesake. The one exception — obviously Chakra’s touch — was a framed lotus sand-mandala behind his desk. Bright trophies looked back at me from the book-filled shelves, awards from Blackstone’s years as an actual stage magician. A crystal goblet with gold engraving, Best Sleight of Hand Performer, World Magic Awards 1998, held pride of place.
I twitched my cape, settled deeper in my chair, and read the rest of the awards without getting up — super-duper vision was socially useful — then started counting the books whose names I recognized.
Blackstone looked up. “Well, my dear, you have not failed to surprise me.” A touch to his keyboard closed his office door, and he leaned back to stroke his beard. Again, no Are you sure? “Will you explain your choices?”
Okay. Deep breaths.
I opened the first page on my epad, back straight like I was presenting a Foundation event report. The school files didn’t tell everything, of course — only the power descriptions, grades, rankings and psych-profiles available to potential recruiters. Personal information, even legal names in the cases of students who’d managed to keep their breakthroughs secret, had been redacted. The first profile picture showed a boy, fair-skinned and hair black as coal, thick eyebrows over a scowl; he hadn’t been happy getting his picture taken.
“All of my choices are from the senior class, close to their official eighteenth birthdays, and qualified for the internship program. The first is Reese Lasila. He’s an A Class aerokinetic from Saint Paul. His dad is Jetstream, the aerokinetic hero on Saint Paul’s only CAI team, the Saint Paul Protectors. He had his breakthrough three years ago, making him one of the rare family breakthroughs — even rarer since he actually ‘inherited’ his father’s power-set. His aerokinetic power-set is well rounded, giving mobility, offense, nonlethal offense, and of course it’s great for fires and storm rescue. He’s spent the last year at Hillwood, after an incident that got him expelled from public school. Nobody was badly hurt. His chosen codename is ‘Tsuris.’”
“And?”
I looked up from my pad. “The Big Book of Contingent Prophecy has him going full supervillain in eight years as his powers grow. He’ll pull together a team of midflight hijackers and rob a string of planes of their high-value cargo. He gets caught and sent to Detroit Supermax, and the psychiatrists there diagnose him with severe father issues. I think if we give him an early chance to shine at least as bright as his dad, give him mentors, there’s a good chance he’ll stay on the side of the angels.”
Blackstone nodded. “Next?”
A breath and a page-flip brought up Brian, poor kid. “Brian Lucas. A transformed and limited Darwin-type, A Class, he chose the name ‘Grendel.’” He came from a background nearly as privileged as mine, but his picture showed a monster; grey skin, big, low-slung jaw and a mouth full of short, sharp fangs, almost tusks, a nose so flat and broad it practically disappeared into his face, long black hair in dreadlocks he’d tied back.
“In his baseline form, what you see here, Brian is rated as an A Class Ajax-type. His metamorph power allows him to ‘stack’ towards greater strength — then he’s stronger than me — or towards greater toughness. At his toughest, he appears invulnerable to anything short of depleted uranium anti-tank rounds. He may be tougher than that. He can lose nearly a third of his baseline mass, trade some of his strength and toughness for speed — then he’s one of the fastest non-speedsters alive. He can also evolve claws and more exotic ‘natural’ weapons depending on what he’s facing.”
“And?”
“The Big Book has him turning mercenary a few years after graduation. In his worst contingent future, he’s implicated in several warzone massacres and dies before he can be captured and brought to trial. A speculative post-mortem psych evaluation suggests he ‘snapped’ under the stress of not being able to save the civilian communities he was hired to protect from ethnic cleansing.”
“And your final pick?”
I cleared my throat, flipped to the last page, and mentally crossed every finger and toe.
“Ozma. No known legal name.” The girl in the school picture had alabaster skin, eyes that sparkled like diamonds, and unsmiling tourmaline-pink lips. Gold hair tumbled about her shoulders and down her back, and her features were so regular she could have been any age from fourteen to twenty-four — just the way L. Frank Baum described her, aside from age and attitude.
There are moments that make me wonder if the world isn’t what I think it is. Like the time Mr. Swenson, my high school physics teacher, explained that light was both a particle and a wave. Particle: a discrete object of measurable dimension and position, like a marble. Wave: a disturbance propagated through a medium, like water. And whether light acts like a particle or a wave depends on how we observe it. Like it knows we’re looking. It’s moments like that that make me feel like I’m standing on the edge of something dizzyingly deep and fathomless.
Learning the truth about Detective Fisher last spring had been another one of those wobbly moments — after the fighting, anyway, when I had time to think about it. Fisher was real. And he was...fictional? The guy donated blood, but was pretty sure he was the creation of an unsuccessful and now deceased author. Even for the post-Event world, that was messed up, and just thinking about it made me want to look for the Fourth Wall. Madness.
So I didn’t think about it; Fisher was Fisher. But Ozma? She was a whole new bucket of wrong.
When Blackstone didn’t say anything, I pushed on. “Ozma has been at Hillwood for two years, since appearing in the Lucas Oil Stadium Attack, the same incident that generated Brian Lucas’ breakthrough and killed his family.”
“Did any source in your Big Book ever confirm that the attack created her?” Blackstone asked mildly.
I shook my head. Neither of us needed to discuss the particulars — the LO Stadium Attack, the worst tragedy in the history of Indianapolis, was also the worst supervillain attack in post-Event U.S. history until the
Big One topped it. “The Ascendant” had never been identified or caught — he thoughtfully provided the media with his name when he claimed credit by doctored audio-file (lots of them did that). But everyone guessed him to be a Verne-type; he gassed the competitors and crowd in the stadium — there for the Drum Corps International World Championships — with a synthesized psychotropic that turned the attendees into a raving, hallucinating mob.
Nearly eight hundred dead out of a crowd of more than ten thousand, another hundred catatonic or insane, dozens missing, and twenty-four breakthroughs, only eight of them sane and stable. The “missing” died in ways that made identification impossible, and for all the breakthrough survivors, sane was a relative term. The body-count would have been a lot higher if Ozma hadn’t appeared and, among other things, turned several newly transformed and rampaging monsters into hats.
Brian took down five tripped-out monstrous breakthroughs himself — the only upside to his transformation (drug-induced breakthroughs could get really, really weird).
“Ozma is a reality-shaper,” I finished, “rated as an A Class Supernatural breakthrough. Her powers are growing.” In the face of Blackstone’s silence, I stepped on the urge to babble more details. He sighed.
“Astra, she believes she really is Ozma of Oz.”
“She’s perfectly sane otherwise.” And she might really be Ozma, the same way Fisher was Fisher.
“Yes.” He smiled without humor. “And ten years from now she’ll sanely conquer Kansas.”
“Only temporarily!”
“Because she disappears with every living resident of the state and their pets.”
I didn’t have to point out that it might have been — might be — a good thing; when Kansas “disappeared,” the SB Virus would be — would have been? — sweeping through the country and Blackstone knew that as well as I did from his copy of the future files. The removal from production of that much farmland (it took a few years to re-settle) wouldn’t help the situation, but how many Kansans would have died from the virus?
Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) (Volume 3) Page 4