"He had a kid," Doc said after a few moments passed.
"Apparently."
"We never knew," he said.
Kate studied the picture again.
"You don't usually have families, do you?" she said.
"Superhumans?" Doc said.
"Yeah."
"We really don't," he said, taking one photo of the Shadow and his daughter from the album and tucking it gently, almost reverently, in a coat pocket.
"Because they're at risk?" Kate asked. "They have to be at risk. Of retribution by the people we put away."
"There's that, yes," he said. They both continued searching around the condo for additional clues, but stayed close together enough to speak. "And there's the question of time. When do you meet someone? When do you raise a child? There's always someone who needs saving. Always some other battle to fight."
"Did you ever want a family?" Kate asked.
Doc laughed.
"That's a strangely personal question coming from you," he said.
"It's not personal," Kate said. "I want to know the logistics. Did your life get in the way? I know you've cared about people. That you're too soft on the Lady, so I realize there's something there, and you and Annie look at each other like there could have been something between you."
"Annie's a funny case," Doc said, quietly thumbing through a drawer in the dining room. "All she's ever wanted was a home. But I don't think she wants the things that anchor you to a home. She drifts on the winds of time. She's impossible to hold on to."
"Did you? Want a home?"
Doc bowed his head as if pausing to think before answering.
"The things I've seen in this world, Kate," he said. "If I had a family, if I brought a life into it . . . that's all I'd ever worry about. Every day. Every moment."
"I think there's a part of that in all of us," Kate said.
"Yeah," he said as she retraced his steps into the kitchen. "None of us had families, really. I think we all understood. We could risk our lives easier if we didn't have to worry about coming home."
"Emily's mom was a hero for a little while," Kate said.
"She was. One of the few who got away clean," Doc said. "But she's the exception, and wasn't in our game a long time. I'm happy for her."
Kate opened cabinet doors in the kitchen, thumbed through ancestral silverware adorned with handle designs that appeared to be from the Victorian era.
"Do you know who her father is?" Kate asked.
Doc stared at her.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing," he said. "I have my suspicions. And if I'm right, if her father weren't such a . . . If he'd lived up to his potential, then this world never would had needed to endure what it's been subject to."
"Who do think it is?" Kate said.
"Someone I hope you never meet," Doc said.
A frayed newspaper clipping clinging to the refrigerator door with a magnet from Hawaii caught Kate's eye. She picked it up, studying the text closely.
"Doc?"
He joined Kate in the kitchen.
"I don't know if this helps us, but you're right about one thing," she said, handing it to him.
"It really doesn't give us too many answers, but I'm glad I was right," Doc said. He handed the slip of paper back to her.
The White Shadow's death notice. The obituary never referenced the old man's heroics. Instead, it was a simple note about a simple man dying quietly in his sleep, with a photo that matched the man in the album Kate found alongside it.
"Doc, the time of this notice," Kate said. "The date is just a few days after you found me. The same year. He died in his sleep right around the period you were putting the Indestructibles together."
"We never knew how the White Shadow died," Doc said. "No one ever told us. No one came looking. He just seemed to fade away."
"So what does this mean?"
"It means someone's out there destroying the world while masquerading as my friend," Doc said. "And I've got to know who that person is."
Chapter 36:
Well enough to break it
Entropy Emily and Anachronism Annie drifted out of the sky in a bubble of float, a strange pair of travelers making their way across the night horizon.
Billy insisted on coming as well, but for subtlety and stealth's sake, they hadn't let him fly. Because Emily didn't appreciate his forcing his way onto the "away team," as she called it, she gave him his own bubble of float trailing a hundred meters back. He hung suspended in mid-air, arms folded across his chest, waiting for Emily to place him on the ground.
I could have flown here on my own, Billy thought.
And we would have lit up the sky, Dude said. This way we arrive unnoticed, without commotion.
A girl sporting neon blue hair and another with neon pink hair just flew across ten miles of sky, Dude, Billy thought. I wouldn't exactly call it a ninja maneuver.
Billy fell the last six feet, dropping out of the sky at the same time Emily and Annie landed gently on their feet. Emily looked back and laughed.
"Sorry! Forgot about you back there."
"No you didn't," Billy said.
They checked out the low-rise industrial building standing before them, part of a massive, now abandoned, business park just outside the City. An aging and poorly maintained sign, Futura Industries sprouted from overgrown and yellowed weeds.
"Wonder if Fry worked here?" Emily said.
"Keaton Bohr did," Annie said. "And if we're lucky, we'll be able to find some of his early research."
Annie tried the front door, but it was locked from the inside. Emily took a running start and kicked it.
The door held, knocking Emily onto the ground.
"I'll blast it open," Billy said.
"No," Annie said, pulling a strangely antiquated gun from her hip and firing. Green energy splashed against the lock, and the door creaked open.
"You have a gun?" Billy said.
"More like a . . . blaster," Annie said.
"It looks like something Jack Sparrow would use," Emily said.
"I'll take that as a compliment," Annie said. "C'mon."
The structure inside appeared as if it had been untouched for years. A few tipped over chairs, a ransacked lobby vending machine; otherwise, the building could have been preserved in a time capsule.
The trio ventured deeper into the bowels of the edifice, past an empty reception area. They encountered a few locked doors that were immediately dispatched by Annie's laser gun.
"So I've been meaning to ask," Emily said. They sauntered past offices with ordinary names printed on faux gold plates, past a sad little kitchen with years-old coffee still sitting in the pot resting on a dead burner. "What do all your tattoos mean?"
Annie smirked, then looked down at her bare arms, at the swirling patterns in infinite colors that traced all across her skin. "They mean a little bit of everything," she said.
"Doc has a lot of tattoos, too," Emily said. "But his do things. They're like, spells."
"Yeah, he has a different kind of ink than I do," Annie said.
"He told Jane and me about them once," Emily said. "Like one enables him to become fireproof, another makes sure he never loses his car keys."
"That second one's a lie," Billy said.
"Not really," Annie said. "I know there's one near his neck that's a mark of memory. It might not be for car keys specifically, but it is for memory."
"I could use one of those. I forget my email password three times a week," Billy said.
They reached a stairwell and elevator. Billy pushed the door to the stairs open and they crept down into the darkness.
"I can light this for us," Billy said.
No, Dude said.
"No," Annie said, simultaneously. "Energy signatures. You're here in case we get into a fight. Let's stay mundane if we can."
She pulled a squat flashlight from her belt and held it aloft.
"Is that a future flashlight?"
; "It's a Mag-light," Annie said. "I got it at a department store."
"I was really hoping it was a future flashlight," Billy said.
"To answer your question, no, the tattoos don't signify anything," Annie said. "Or rather, they all mean something to me, but they don't do things like the ones Doc has."
"So they're like your scrapbook or something," Emily said.
Annie smiled. "Sort of," she said. "They do remind me of where I've been and who I am."
"Seems like an awful lot of work to go through when you could just take notes," Emily said.
They arrived at a door labeled "Archives." Annie reached for her laser gun again, but Emily just walked in and Billy followed.
"This isn't intimidating at all," Billy said.
Cardboard boxes lined the rooms. Labeled in red marker, rows and rows of research containers were stacked on retail-style racks.
"We don't have to go through all of it," Emily said, bounding off.
"You really think they'll have anything useful in here?" Billy asked.
Annie shrugged.
"No idea," she said. "But it's worth it, isn't it?"
"Why would they keep hard copies?" Billy said.
"Some of this information is older than you are," Annie said. "Believe it or not, people used to work on paper. They had books, too, made out of dead trees."
"Don't mock," Billy said. "You're from the future. Which means I'm technically older than you are."
Annie chuckled. Her laugh had a familiar mania to it. Something in the back of his mind tickled, as if he'd heard it long before.
"How do you know I'm from the future?" she said. "I could be from the past."
"You have Jem and the Hologram's hair. No way you're from the past," Billy said.
"I could be from the 1980's."
"Whatever," Billy said. "You find anything, Em?"
"It would help if you got up and pushed," she yelled.
"Are you saying you need help?" Billy said.
"Would he be under Keaton, Bohr, or Doctor?" Emily said.
Annie walked between the stacks to find her.
Billy followed grumpily. "I came along as a bodyguard, not to relearn the Dewey Decimal System," he said.
Relearn indicates you actually knew the Dewey Decimal System at some point, Dude said.
"I was speaking in metaphor," Billy said. "Why you gotta give me a hard time about the little things?"
"Found his stuff," Emily said. She was pulling boxes down off the shelves using bubbles of float. "What do you think we're searching for?"
"Whatever looks interesting," Annie said, kneeling down to open one of the crates.
"What was he doing here?" Billy said.
"According to Broadstreet's information, Bohr was a renewable energy expert," Annie said. "It was something he came to later in his career. He started out in robotics."
"Let me guess, he has a bunch of PhDs," Billy said.
"Couple of 'em, yeah," Annie said. "Anyway, he was an employee until he got fired."
"Because he was bad at his job?" Emily said, scanning a box of paper printout reports.
"No. He was too good at it. Figured out a renewable energy source that could replace a lot of our existing technology," Annie said.
"I'm too good at my job," Billy said.
"Standing around looking pretty? You could be better at it," Emily said. "So basically he got terminated for developing something that could put his company out of business."
"Or the company's clients, yeah," Annie said. "If you're in the business of selling something, don't invent the thing that makes the product you're promoting obsolete."
Billy threw his hands up.
"Wait. So this guy gets let go and what, a year later he's working with some kind of super villain and has locked Emily in a cage turning her into a weapon?" he said.
"You'd be amazed the lengths people will go to in order to get back at a boss they're angry with," Annie said. "Though I honestly believe his original intentions were less nefarious. He hoped to build a better world, he just went about doing it wrong. You finding anything, Emily?"
She waived paperwork in the air.
"He was definitely working on variations of the Dyson sphere concept," she said. "Big brain stuff. Ideas grew out of his ideas."
"Wait a minute," Billy said. "So not only did they run him off, they held onto his work?"
Annie nodded.
"Depending on your contract, intellectual property reverts—"
"—See. This is why I'll never act like an adult," Billy said. "Because adults get screwed over all the time."
Hearing you bluntly state out loud that you never intend to mature is one of the more upsetting things you've ever done, Billy Case, Dude said.
"Big brain stuff?" Annie said. "Is that a technical term?"
"I learned it online, so it must be true," Emily said, smirking. "So if none of this had happened, I could be living a life of quiet desperation like Keaton Bohr? Watching someone take all my dreams and put them in boxes?"
"Happens to a lot of people, Emily," Annie said. "Not everyone gets to fly."
"Well, everyone should get to fly," she said. "Flying shouldn't be limited to a special few."
"How generous of you," Annie said.
"What can I say, I'm a woman of the people," Emily said.
"Are you actually getting anything out of all that paperwork you're looking at?" Billy asked.
Emily smiled, sorting a few piles of paper, and then held up a page with a familiar-looking spherical design sketched onto it. "I'm getting," she said. "Not enough to build one of my own. But I'm definitely understanding it well enough to break it if I have to."
"Good," Annie said. "Because that's exactly what we need you to do."
Chapter 37:
And let slip the dogs of war
"Designation: Fury. It is really okay," Neal said, in the female voice Emily had accidentally changed his settings to. "There is no need to try so hard to fix it."
"It's fine, Neal," Titus said, sweating and cursing under his breath as he tinkered with the mini-Neal computer they'd brought with them to the new hideout.
It really wasn't just about the voice itself. Yeah, Titus missed the familiar tone of their artificially intelligent friend, but Titus was more interested in fixing the computer because he couldn't determine how Emily had actually broken it. Returning Neal to his preferred vocalization was really a by-product of Titus's frustration that Emily had basically beaten the computer up until it started working again.
"It really bothers you the little blue-haired girl figured it out before you did, doesn't it?" Jessie said, sitting on the edge of an overturned countertop.
"It doesn't bother me that she solved something before I did, it irks me that I don't know what the hell she actually did," Titus said. "Can't I be intellectually curious?"
"Jealous more likely."
"I'm not jealous. I'm confused," Titus said. "In the meantime, though. Neal, can you find anything else of interest Broadstreet gave us?"
"What should I be looking for, Designation: Fury?"
"Maps, weapon designs, personnel information, something concrete," Titus said.
"I will do this," the computer said.
"Maps?" Jessie said.
"Yeah," Titus said. "I keep thinking, if Emily's going to figure out how to break the . . . Entropy sphere, we should try to locate it."
"And who we're going to have to get past in order to break it," Jessie said.
"Yep," Titus said.
Jessie picked up a USB thumb drive and inserted it into the computer so Neal could start taking in data.
"Low tech?" Titus said.
"Kinda," Jessie said. "But you'd be amazed at how slowly personal technology advances when you're fighting for your life."
She returned to her seat and continued watching while Titus explored Neal's computer guts.
"I always wondered why the big guy was so attached to this box," Jessie sai
d. "You don't figure gigantic, scarred-up werewolves care about their computers this much, even if the computer does have a personality."
"Neal and I are friends," Titus said. "I'm assuming future me is—was—friends with him as well before all this happed. I realize it sounds absolutely bizarre, but I think I'm the one who's most comfortable with Neal back home."
"The others sometimes struggled with my otherness," Neal said, startling Titus. He'd forgotten he was talking about Neal as if the computer wasn't right there in front of him. "You always treated me the most like a person."
"Because I know what it's like to be the other," Titus said.
"Also you are not a technophobe," Neal said. "That helps."
"Have I—the other me? Have I been distant, Neal?" Titus asked.
The computer paused, like a human being taking a deep breath.
"You hide behind a mask," Neal said. "I don't think you speak to anyone very much at all, Designation: Fury."
Titus looked at Jessie, who waved her hands vaguely.
"I'm the new girl," she said. "That guy in the other room? He's the only Titus I've ever actually known. But he gets the job done and keeps his people safe. I can't find anything wrong with that."
Titus nodded, then opened up another hatch on the computer. He reviewed the data spike Broadstreet had given them. He never had an opportunity to investigate it this closely before. A soft, red light pulsed on the surface.
"Neal, does this light indicate that you're pulling information off the drive?" Titus said.
"I do not know what that light signifies, Designation: Fury," Neal said.
"Could you find out?"
"One moment."
"You worried about something?" Jessie said.
"Blinking red lights. Ever see a blinking red light that meant something good?"
"Stop light?"
Neal chirped in, sounding sheepish.
"Designation: Fury. There appears to be some sort of tracking device attached to the drive," Neal said. "It is not embedded within the software. We missed it during our initial examination."
"We have to get out of here," Titus said.
"Tracking device?" Jessie said.
"Get everyone up," Titus said. "Leto! Finnigan! We need to move, we're being tracked!"
The Indestructibles (Book 3): The Entropy of Everything Page 16