“You have made your point, councilor,” Sanderson ruled. “The court finds that it can, in good faith, accept the witness as Astra, legally recognized by the State of Illinois. The defendant will be able to confront his accuser in cross. Objection denied.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. It had mostly been a mime show for the benefit of the jury and media, but not completely. The legal principle had been firmly established, but still wasn’t universally accepted. Other state courts had ruled differently, appeals were still winding upward to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Judge Sanderson had never ruled on it in trial.
“Thank you, your honor.” Dan turned to me. “Astra, can you state for the record your whereabouts on the night of May twenty-fifth?”
* * *
When court adjourned, I found Seven in the private hallway outside the courtroom, talking to a pretty young woman in a pencil skirt. Seeing me, he broke off. She brushed his lapel and gave him her card before turning away. My escort these days, Seven had been in the crowd when I landed on the courthouse steps. He was really there to protect everyone around me from collateral damage if I got attacked in public.
The Paladins had taken a shot at me last spring, but nobody had been able to prove Conspiracy to Commit against the organization. So now wherever I was publically scheduled to go, outside of patrols, Seven went ahead unobtrusively. Even to my “good” stops, which this wasn’t.
He misread my look and smiled, showing his cheek-dimple. The man had too many dimples. “Thinking the goons will try something?”
The accused, Benny Larkin, was a goon (over-muscled, shaved head, steel-capped boots, a tattoo somewhere that said “Kill them all”). Goons had started showing up in Chicago after our takedown of the Brotherhood and Sanguinary Boys last year; organized, they’d gotten busy thinning out the villainless minions. Now, with Benny, they’d moved up to taking on the few street-villains we’d left free and the new ones creeping in to fill the void.
Goons vs. minions, now goons vs. supervillains. Did they just want to fill Chicago’s vacated ecological niche? And did we care? I just wanted to get back to the Dome to see how Shelly was doing on her lunch-date with Mal and find out when we got to make our pitch to Hillwood.
Dan joined us in the hall. We’d both left by the judge’s door to avoid the gallery and the newsie flock in the public hall. He shook my hand.
“Thanks, Astra. I’d have rather gotten Judge Halder, but we took it. The jury loved you. Great testimony, you’ve put Benny away.”
I squeezed back carefully and let go, just glad my part in the trial process was over.
Last May, Benny had walked up to Taipan — a D Class generic strong/fast muscle-type — on the street and shot him three times in the face (heavy caliber, armor-piercing rounds), dropped the gun, and ducked into a crowded theater-club complex. Taipan had been without minion backup that night. Drunk and surprised, he hadn’t had time to use his speed and strength at all, and Benny had been able to disappear. The only reason he hadn’t gotten away free was the single witness: me.
With villain violence way up (Blackstone said a power vacuum encouraged the survivors to take a proactive and competitive approach to filling the spots at the top), the CPD had asked us to stage random and targeted night patrols in high-violence areas. I’d been taking a break on top of a tenement building across the street.
I hadn’t been close enough, couldn’t move fast enough to stay with him, and I couldn’t chase suspects once contact had been lost unless they were in the process of committing a crime. But my description had led to a CPD BOLO and Benny’s arrest, and today my reading five random names — scribbled in tiny letters on an index card and flashed from across the courtroom — convinced the judge that I’d been able to read the tattoo on the back of his head from across the street and ten stories up.
Dan straightened his autumn-orange tie, cleared his throat. “Going out the back?”
I shook my head. “With all my fans out front? Never.” Much as I wished they’d all disappear. Seven laughed and Dan nodded reluctantly.
“Well then. I — my office will call you if we need you, but you were perfect in the cross. No chance Benny’s attorney is going to put you back on the stand. Good luck out there.” He juggled his briefcase, offered his hand again to both of us, and departed for his next engagement. Seven watched him go with his usual quirky smile, then crooked his arm.
“Shall we?”
I held up my hands. “You first — even your luck won’t let you blend in if we step out together.” He waved my excuse away but followed Dan, leaving me to give him a head start. I bit my lip, watching him disappear around the corner, and almost went the other way. Coward.
Past the guard securing the hallway’s privacy, the public hallway echoed with feet and conversation as attorneys, court officers, defendants, litigants, and court-watchers negotiated the space with the Brownian motion of busy crowds. I kept a good pace and probably some of Seven’s luck rubbed off on me, because I made my way downstairs and out of the Daley Center before anyone paid attention to me. Then, of course, the crowd got noisy.
Citizens for Constitutional Rights protesters covered half of Daley Plaza, only a police line keeping them away from the doors. I could tell it was the CCR by the placards saying things like “Uphold the Sixth Amendment!” and “What do you have to hide?” I liked the CCR; they weren’t politically extreme, mostly, and even had a point. But then there were the rest; Humanity First extremists were the loudest part of the crowd, the pro-registration advocates holding up slogans like “Don’t live in fear!”, “Do you know what your neighbors are?” and “We register guns, why not superpowers?” Lots of registration advocates discovered their vocations the day of the Event, and the Domestic Security Act had only been their latest try.
“Wow,” Shelly whispered in my ear. “Did you know Jamal’s getting a new last name? Gee, I wonder why?”
“Don’t.” I managed to keep my face straight. “And hush — there’s Shankman.”
Mallory Shankman stood behind the police line a few steps from the Picasso — the ugly, metal, monumental cubist sculpture Picasso gave the city (Was it a baboon? An aardvark? Picasso’s pet dog?). He perched on a box, flanked by three of his bodyguards, to work up the crowd with a megaphone. Representative Shankman now; he’d won election to the Illinois General Assembly in April, mainly on a law-and-order and anti-cape platform. Word that Judge Sanderson had accepted my testimony had obviously gotten outside a while ago; he had the crowd doing a call and response.
“Let them hear you!” “NO MASKS!” “Let them hear you!” “NO MASKS!” It turned into a general roar when they saw me, and the cops stood even straighter, trying to stare down the crowd. Maybe the front door hadn’t been the best idea...
Then the guy in white popped out of nowhere between Shankman and the crowd with something in his hand. Adrenaline shot through me. Used to the way Rush and Crash could just appear from nowhere out of hypertime, I leaped forward before Shankman or his men even twitched. Not fast enough. No, no, no...
The man’s arm went back, came forward hard enough to deliver whatever weapon he held in a straight shot into Shankman’s face. Shankman staggered back, and I was there to get splashed as I pulled him down, came up between him and the thrower — who’d vanished again. Turning back to grab Shankman, fly him to the closest emergency room, I stopped. It wasn't blood — his face was covered in...cherry filling? What?
Then the idiot bodyguard on his left shot me. It went downhill from there.
Chapter Eight: Megaton
The Sentinels are masters of the superhero image. Blackstone is the elder statesman and mentor, dignified and mysterious. Lei Zi is appropriately professional and dangerous — a storm that’s on your side. Astra is their golden girl, noble and natural and wholesome despite sensationalist smear campaigns. The Watchman exudes patient ... watchfulness, and so on. The public forgets that Blackstone is an ex-Marine intelligence
officer, Lei Zi and Watchman are ex-Army, decorated combat veterans, and Astra, mentored and trained by Atlas and Ajax, killed enemies of this country in the first attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.
We forget because Astra gets cats out of trees.
Geraldine Roche, Public Opinion.
* * *
My day started out surreal.
First, I was on Powernet. Sure, trees ate an airport, but they hadn’t killed anybody so I came in a close second; the news page already had pictures of the bus and witness interviews. The only student they talked to who didn’t say something like “We should have seen it coming” was Tiffany, and she was barely coherent. There were no interviews with the driver’s family, but they had my freshman-year Fat Picture and last year’s wrestling team shots. They were building a story and had me halfway to supervillain.
Well, screw them.
When I finally came out of my rooms, The Harlequin cornered me over my corn flakes in the dining room that did not, in any way, resemble a school cafeteria. She grilled me about color preferences, but the first thing she said when she sat down was “Leather. Definitely.” Then Chakra joined us and got in an eye-rolling argument with The Harlequin over the merits of duster coats while I tried not to dribble into my cereal bowl. Both of them were seriously hot, even if “Call me Quin” looked like she was molded out of latex. Chakra knew they were shaking my couth, and obviously thought it was funny. I ate fast and excused myself for my morning appointment with Dr. Beth.
The Sentinels’ doctor reminded me of my childhood dentist: always happy to see me, and so cheerful it almost didn’t matter that visits were painful. He asked me to take off my shirt again. Even after years of high school gym I hated undressing in front of anybody, but he’d already figured that out and made it easier by not looking until he was ready to poke me with something.
He patted the examination table. “Sore anywhere this morning?”
“Not really.” After smacking the concrete yesterday, I’d expected to hurt all over. Instead, even the bump on my head barely felt tender. I’d put on the ankle brace this morning, but hardly needed it.
He “hmm’d” to himself, poking and prodding my back with latex-gloved hands. Nodding, he turned to a cabinet to retrieve a white metal box, opening it behind me.
“Tell me if this feels uncomfortable,” he said cheerfully and pressed something against my back, below my ribs. A click, and a little tap from the...rod? Tube? I shook my head. Click. A slightly stronger tap. Click. Tap. Click. Tap. Click. Tap. “Now?”
“I’m good.”
“Excellent.” More rummaging in the box. Click. TAP.
“Ouch!”
“And what did that feel like?”
I reached back and rubbed the spot. “Like someone poked me with a stick! What is that?” He held up what looked like a plastic gun. A tube ran from it to the box and it had an extended ring on the end — the part he must have been holding against my back.
“An air gun.” He checked its setting, made a note. “It fires bursts of compressed air at set pressures. At higher settings it can drive nails, and the last shot you felt would have driven the nail through steel sheeting. Congratulations.”
“For what?”
“You now possess D Class toughness. You had to, really, but it’s always good to confirm.”
“Huh?”
Leaning back against a counter, he regarded me with bright eyes. Something was seriously wrong with the man.
He boxed the air gun as he talked. “Yesterday, your first eruption threw a bus off of you. Your second, more sustained burst, threw you into the air. You obey at least one of the basic laws of physics: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So your first eruption should have flattened you into the ground, but you didn’t describe that at all.”
Letting me put my shirt back on, he led me over to one of his banks of screens. Tapping a couple of keys, he brought up a picture of a spray-painted “X” on a scorched and shattered concrete drive. “Also, judging from your elevation and velocity when your thrust cut out, you should have blacked out from the g-force involved.”
I stared at the picture. “That’s where I was?”
“Oh, yes.” He nodded happily, tapping the screen. “See. You struck the bus with several tons of explosive thrust, and the opposite ‘kick’ cracked the pavement. If your body had not also changed to withstand that force, it would have been like a paper gun firing a high-caliber bullet.” He slapped his hands together unnecessarily — I got the idea: squish.
“So, I’m stronger now, too?”
“Not stronger. Tougher. More resilient and resistant to damage. And you’ll find you heal faster too.” He made a wavy motion with his hand. “Perhaps a little stronger. Let’s find out.”
* * *
A series of scans and muscle-hammering sets later, he let me go with another lollypop. I was stronger. Not superhuman, rip-the-door-off strong, but I could rack more than I’d ever seen anyone do at school. Probably the only thing that stopped Dr. Beth from continuing his tests was a court appointment, but before pushing me out into the hall, he promised to drop a file in my Dome mailbox giving me the numbers.
The warm glow from realizing I was never going to be humiliated by some steroid gulping turf-head ever again lasted for all of a minute.
“You going to eat?”
“Shit! Don’t do that!”
Shelly — Galatea — tried to look innocent, like she hadn’t just snuck up behind me in the empty hallway and nearly scared the bang out of me. Giving it up, she closed her mouth on whatever she’d been about to say, sighed loudly.
“Sorry. It’s a habit — Astra’s super jumpy. And ticklish, not that it’s safe to do that anymore. Really, I was coming to apologize for last night.”
“And how ‘bout now?”
The laugh was back. “Don’t push your luck. Are you going to eat?”
She’s going to kill me. Never kissed a girl, and I’m going to stroke out.
“Great!” she said, because obviously I’d agreed somehow while imagining my death. “Let’s get out of here.” Out of here meant escaping the Dome. She collected a blue hoodie from Bob at the lobby desk and tossed it to me. We were in the elevator before I remembered I was news and said so.
“So what?” She turned on me, exasperation rolling off her. “You going to hide in here for the rest of your life? First, you look nothing like your yearbook pictures; you were shaved bald in that team group shot. Plus you...had more padding. So put up the hood — you’ll be fine.”
She pulled me through the crowded atrium lobby and out the doors, and it seemed to work; at least nobody stopped us or even looked twice. Not that they’d recognize her, anyway, and she wasn’t wearing the same attention-grabbing t-shirt as last night. How many obsessive cape-watchers could be here?
How many gambling addicts do you find at the track?
“C’mon!” she urged, tugging. Her hand felt warm, real, and cut it out — she’s a robot.
“Where’s Jamal?”
“Probably studying or washing cars or something.”
“Huh?”
She dodged us around a flock of tourists. “He’s getting homeschooled while learning to kick much ass — Sifu makes him do that whole ‘wax on, wax off’ thing to build character or something when he’s not out with Rush. C’mon, we want to beat the lunch crowd!”
Her choice was the Artist’s Café, in the Fine Arts Building across Michigan Avenue from the new Atlas Memorial. Starving art students made good hamburgers, and we did beat the midday crowd. She explained all about Crash’s foster situation (living in a martial arts school sounded pretty cool). I had to ask why a robot would want a burger with an egg on it.
“Because I’m not a robot. Well — I am, but that’s not all I am.”
“So Jamal was serious? You’re really a ghost?”
She picked at her fries. “Sort of. I’m a ‘quantum-mirror mind emulation.’” A shrug.
“I really did die origin-chasing. Nearly four years ago now, though for me it’s been less than a year and I only got my first prosthetic body last spring. I was Astra’s BFF ‘til I... Which makes the irony of her breakthrough just ginormous, you know?” She gave a huge sigh, bit a fry.
I didn’t follow any of that. “How did you...”
Her smile flashed. “I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. Seriously, no-kidding top secret stuff. What it means is that it’s all me in here now — I don’t even have an active or updated backup anymore, the platform tech isn’t compatible. But I didn’t drag you here to talk about me.” She looked at me sideways. “How are you, you know, doing?”
Suddenly, I wasn’t hungry.
“Besides ki — Besides my accident yesterday and all the cape-watchers deciding I’m the new twisty breakthrough? I’m great.”
“No — well yeah, that stuff too. But I meant, you know, family. Your parents will come around you know.”
And now I wanted to return what I’d eaten. “They just sat there.”
She shook her head emphatically. “You weren’t listening, yesterday. They didn’t abandon you — they gave the team provisional power of attorney, the right to act as your legal guardian. You’ll get a state caseworker, but we’re here to help you get what you need.”
“But — ”
She bounced a fry off my head and leaned in, voice low and intense. “Just don’t give up on them, okay? You just jumped out of their make-him-do-his-homework-and-keep-him-out-of-trouble box. So they’re not handling it well. Big freaking deal, most parentals don’t, even if — ”
Even if their kid doesn’t kill somebody. I could feel the burn coming on, pushed it down. Like it was her business, like she knew anything.
Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) Page 6