“You’re lying.” I was heating up.
“No, I’m not. I want you to call her when you — when you can. Son — ” He ran fingers through his short gray hair. “Your mother has always wanted to leave the city, ever since the Event. Most of the Humanity First stuff in our house was hers — though I supported her views on a lot of it. I won’t apologize for that. We both wanted you and Sydney growing up in a safe environment. Now she thinks you’re ... she worries about Sydney.”
“And why are you still here, Dad? You gave me to the Sentinels.” I felt like I was glowing, but he shook his head.
“We gave them custodial rights. We — we didn’t know what to do. But I’m not going anywhere, Son. I realize that might not be what you want to hear, right now — I’m sorry. I’m sorry. We didn’t take any of this well, and I hope someday you’ll forgive us.”
I was back on my feet, and he stood, too.
“Dad, you can’t just — Shit!” Everything I’d wanted to say since the first day came up in my throat, blocked it all. He gave me an awkward man-hug and I squeezed my eyes shut.
“So.” He pulled us apart. “Are you going to introduce me to the young lady who’s so worried about you?”
* * *
I introduced Dad and Tiffany to everyone. She liked Jamal, but Seven made her forget how to talk. All the parentals looked like they were going to start a Superhero Parent Support Group on the spot. There would probably be bumper stickers: Proud Progenitors of a Chicago Sentinel or something. I finally figured out why Blackstone sent us, at least part of the reason; Seven was here to provide his luck to Astra’s family, Jamal and me because of our mobility if something happened somewhere else.
When the sun went down, Seven sent Jamal and me to meet our mysterious resource. They’d actually managed to reopen a couple of runways at the Chicago Executive Airport, and Jamal took us to the terminal. Riding through the streets in hypertime on Jamal’s bike (a clone of Rush’s) was a freaky experience, like the whole world was one big 3D stop-motion shot. We found Bob — How many of this guy were there? — waiting with a car in the parking lot.
“Crash. Megaton,” he acknowledged.
Jamal kicked down his bike-stand as I peeled myself off the back. “Have they landed yet?”
“They have.” He pointed out to the field, where a twin-engine business jet was taxiing toward the terminal. Crash took his helmet off and played with his cornrows.
“Right. Right. Dude... Just, be cool, okay?”
“Be what?”
“Seriously. She’s not as scary as she seems. Well, she is but — ” He shrugged helplessly. What the hell was I missing?
The plane coasted to a stop and the cabin door opened, steps swinging down. Reese had told me they’d rated a deluxe cabin with a flight attendant, but this one had to be smaller; the pilot got off first, then helped someone else hand down their luggage. Then two more people stepped down and headed our way.
One of them was a bouncy blonde, seriously pale but dressed for summer, almost dancing on the tarmac as she pulled her luggage. The other walked at a fast clip, not in a hurry, just moving along. Her midnight-black hair was pulled into a tight tail and her pale skin stood out against all the black. Black leather jacket, black jeans, black boots, black carry-on — the only luggage she had — and absolutely zero smile.
Over the curb and crossing the parking lot, she stopped in front of us and handed Bob her bag.
“Bob, this is Acacia. She’s on a liquid diet.”
“Good evening, Artemis. It’s good to have you home.”
“Not yet. But it will be.”
Chapter Twenty Five: Astra
A breakthrough is nothing more than an awakened soul, a monad that has deepened its connection with the universal oversoul. The ancients used to think of the night sky as a black dome and stars as holes through which the light of Heaven shown; so it is with each incarnate soul, and breakthroughs shine the most brightly of all. Each of us has it in himself and herself to awaken, to make that connection and burn with the light of Heaven.
Dr. Simon Pellegrini, The Sleeper Must Awaken.
* * *
It had to be the most surreal day of my life. After careful consideration, I dubbed the neuralkinetic Puppetman. Puppeteer was already taken, and Geppetto sounded too clever. It was an important decision; if he wasn’t already a known supervillain and I reported him first, I got naming rights. That out of the way, I actually fell asleep again — amazing, I know, but if I didn’t move it didn’t hurt too bad, and in the absence of terror my poor abused body wanted to sleep and heal; I could have used some serious painkillers, but the Sandman was willing to work without them.
They didn’t come back until lunch, so I missed a beautiful opportunity to carve the Gettysburg Address in the wall. We repeated the scene; they pushed on the door, I woke up, got up. Puppetman didn’t take his eyes off me as they replaced the cart, but he didn’t freeze me in place either. He probably didn’t want to share my pain again.
As soon as they left, I retrieved the knife and, careful of my arm, pulled out the dresser and carved as fast as I could while keeping it readable. Astra Depowered Old Whitehair Guy/ Drop/ Neuralkinetic. Not great, but the best I could think of. If they moved me and if the team ever tracked me this far, then at least it was something.
After eating the sandwiches they’d brought this time (Willis’s sandwiches were much better but these looked professionally cut and served, which had to be A Clue), I checked my arm again. It didn’t feel worse anywhere, and my left hand had more feeling in it, but I was sniffling and tearing by the time I pulled my collar closed. I pushed the bed back against the door and got horizontal again.
I wasn’t trying to be all plucky and fearless — it was just that nobody was threatening me. The room, the food, the fact they didn’t talk (Drop hadn’t even made eye contact), it was all very unvillainous. I mean, sure they obviously hadn’t planned to capture me, but they had me and were acting like they didn’t want me. Like I’d come along and spoiled their plans. Shelly would have been banging on the door and demanding to know what was going on, and it said something about me that I didn’t even try and listen at the door. I really didn’t want to know. If I didn’t think about it, I wasn’t back there, in the Dark Anarchist’s cell. And these guys definitely weren’t Ripper, which didn’t mean I was safe but was still a lot.
Which left me time to obsess on the rest of my situation. Now that my head was clearer, I knew the old man from last night — I’d seen him in the author’s picture on the back cover of Eric’s books. Doctor Simon Pellegrini, and it was no wonder they were ignoring me now; he’d killed Astra with a touch and I was just little Hope Corrigan again, no threat to anybody. And since I wasn’t wearing Blacklock’s finest titanium accessories right now, they obviously didn’t expect my powers to come flooding back any time soon.
Was it permanent? Did I want it to be? I couldn’t begin to wrap my head around the possibility. If the team busted through the wall and rescued me, then what? Surgery and physical therapy for my arm and then... Back to school? A normal life? All I had to do was get through this last adventure and eventually the public would forget about Astra. No more training, no more fights, no more bad accident scenes or disasters to clean up after. No more nightmare-fuel. Would one less cape make a difference?
I tried to picture living with the Bees in Palevsky Commons. Pledging, hanging out, having a life again. Would that be wrong?
And, making it not all about me, what did it mean?
It seemed like a hundred years ago Blackstone had been talking about the California quake, the Green Man attacks, and Mr. Ludlow, and wondering if there was a process for boosting breakthrough powers. Well, duh, if Dr. Pellegrini could steal my powers then I was willing to bet a lot of money he could boost powers too. Were all the Wreckers boosted? It would explain a lot.
But if Dr. Pellegrini could reliably boost powers, then why wasn’t he busy making himself obscenely
rich the legal and easy way? Forget about his cult; national governments would pay billions for him to boost their supersoldiers like he’d done Eric. And was it a stretch to jump from Eric to linking the man to Temblor and Green Man? If he was behind everything, what was he trying to do? What did the California quake and the Green Man attacks and killing goons and Paladins have in common?
My mind went round and round it all, like a kitten chasing its own tail until it fell over from vertigo.
The third time they pushed the door open, they were cartless and had Twist with them, wearing his armor so I couldn’t see his face. My heart sank and turned into a lump of ice in my gut; obviously the Pollyanna part of my brain that had silently hoped my benign neglect would continue was wrong.
* * *
Twist led the way and the others followed behind me. I managed to walk straight and not shiver as they took me down a long hall of doors just like mine but with locks on the outside and most of them open, through a pair of doors into an empty dining room. A big dining room, with the look of a place used for conventions or seminars. One wall was all bay windows so I could see it was night outside, and three big chandeliers hung ready to light the place. Only one was dimly lit. Years of working for Mom made it easy to recognize the function of the place, and if it wasn’t for the weird bedrooms I’d have thought I was in a big hotel. Some big abandoned hotel.
And they were making use of the space, too; the room had been cleared of tables to leave space for a steel platform with a raised chair in the middle of it. A bunch of boxes had been stacked on the platform, like they used it to move stuff, but I didn’t see any wheels.
Trying to soak in all the clues I could, it took me a moment to realize the room wasn’t completely cleared; a table by the windows had been set with covered plates, and Dr. Pellegrini waited for me there.
Twist took me straight to him.
“Good evening, Miss Corrigan.” He stood and removed the dish covers as I carefully sat and waited for the spots in front of my eyes to clear. Puppetman actually pushed my chair in for me, and my trio of keepers retreated across the room to take up stations at what I assumed was the kitchen doors.
I arranged the dinner napkin in my lap, took the opportunity to examine him as he filled our water glasses.
Except for his eyes, he could have been one of my university professors — he even had the regulation tweed blazer with leather elbow patches, and he sounded and looked like the kind of older professor whose father or grandfather had made a big pile of money so he could ignore it in pursuit of higher knowledge. But there was nothing absentminded or preoccupied in his silver-gray eyes, and he looked at me like I was his next fascinating thesis subject.
He sat and arranged his own napkin, and only Mom’s social training let me pick up my soup spoon and taste the basil-sprinkled cream of tomato. He carried the small talk while we ate our way through the soup and salad courses, let silence rule the fish course, and got more personal with the dinner and dessert courses. He inquired after Toby’s condition and apologized for not letting my arm heal a little before “suppressing my gift.”
The boggling weirdness of the whole thing had me nearly seeing double. Laying his dessert fork beside the remains of his cheesecake, he finally laughed.
“Miss Corrigan, you should see your face. I am sorry; this isn’t supposed to be how it goes, is it?” He smiled, putting his hand over his heart. “When a supervillain mastermind captures a brave and beautiful young superhero, certain things are expected, aren’t they? Threats, bondage, tedious monologuing. Well, I thought we should make you comfortable while we could.”
“They won’t trade Mr. Ludlow for me, you know.” My right hand joined my left in my lap so he couldn’t see it was shaking.
“Of course not, and I am more than happy with the way things fell out last night. Even if you have forced a degree of improvisation on our plans.”
“So are you going to kill me?”
He actually looked shocked. “Perish the thought! I would never snuff out a light as bright as yours.”
“A — What?”
“Have you read my books? No? They are often poetic, but less than metaphorical. When I close my eyes, you are one of the brightest lights I see, shining with all the power of the Oversoul. Beautiful. With all that I do to awaken more souls, ending your light would be the blackest crime.”
“But my powers are — ”
“Occluded, Miss Corrigan, merely occluded. They will return in time. Again, I apologize for the physical discomfort it leaves you in now but, considering my plans, it is entirely likely that our paths will cross again and so for me it has been a fortuitous opportunity to meet you. ‘Know your enemy,’ as Sun Tsu said. The Teatime Anarchist quite failed to do so, didn’t he?”
My face felt like ice and I wondered if I was going to faint. My inside voice decided it was time to start screaming and crying incoherently, but I didn’t give it a vote. The fight in Reno was classified big-time, and even the government didn’t know what really happened.
“Yes, he did,” I managed. “Were you allies?”
“Allies? No.” He shook his head. “The man was too obsessed with politics. But we were both useful to each other — indeed he advanced my research by at least a decade. I will always wonder how he knew what he knew.”
He refilled my water glass, giving me a moment. His aesthetic hands had age spots on their knuckles.
“So. I know the official story is that a DSA team tracked the Teatime Anarchist to Reno and deputized an Army supersoldier team to take him out, but I know that he had acquired you, and I don’t believe he could have been taken that way. Will you satisfy an old man’s curiosity?”
I swallowed. “He killed himself.”
He raised an eyebrow, studying me. “I see. Well. I am sure it must be an upsetting topic for you, and I assure you that there will be none of that here. Are you quite finished? Is there anything you would like?”
We dipped into the end-of-night conversation prescribed for winding up a social engagement — something I could do on autopilot while keeping the panicked babbling inside my head. When my escort trio took me back to my room and locked me in, I pushed the bed back against the door and threw up in the toilet.
Grendel
Ozma disappeared back into her lab after the morning briefing, but Blackstone gave Watchman and me the job of riding along with the DSA team transporting Dozer from his Chicago PD hardcell to Detroit Supermax.
The DSA marshals gave me as much room as the transport plane’s bay allowed, but I was used to that; Dozer — Gantry, Eric Ludlow, whatever — was trussed up in what amounted to a titanium straitjacket for the trip, but I’d morphed into my heaviest strong form and looked so much more like something they should be worried about. The scruffy-looking, chain-smoking cop along for the ride — he’d introduced himself as Detective Max Fisher — split his attention between the marshals and Dozer. Watchman ignored the marshals completely after making sure that they stayed clear of the compartment hatch; he’d told me if Dozer tried anything, he intended to throw him off the plane and deal with him on the way down. Planes are fragile.
Detroit Supermax — not actually in Detroit but close — had its own airfield, so we didn’t have to offload prisoners like Dozer and drive him through “civilian” areas. Why didn’t Watchman just fly him from Chicago to Detroit himself? According to the handbook I’d finally started reading: Rules. We weren’t feds or cops, and couldn’t take charge of prisoners and transport them between jurisdictions. But we could “escort” as contractors. Dumb, I know, and with all the precautions we didn’t fly out of Chicago until the afternoon. We made the trip without Dozer so much as twitching, but he didn’t act beaten down, just like he wasn’t ready to fight. I could have slept through the flight, and when the ramp dropped, we paraded off onto the tarmac.
Detroit was a city with no luck. Every city got hammered by the Event, but even before then Detroit had been in decline, an industrial
town losing its jobs. And Detroit hadn’t had an Atlas or Ajax stepping up to help, so the place had had a really hard time. With its anti-superhuman sentiment, the city hadn’t had a lot of success attracting superheroes for its two Guardian teams either; in Hillwood, we learned about it as a law enforcement Worst Case Scenario.
So the city diversified; it built Detroit Supermax to hold the superpowered prison populations of twelve states, and even contracted with the federal government for some of their prisoners. It was a big business; the place held virtually every supervillain the Sentinels had ever taken down and dozens more. Watchman caught me looking around, and chuckled.
“Doesn’t look like one of the most secure prisons in the world, does it?”
It didn’t. The airport sat outside the prison, and there wasn’t a barbed wire-crowned fence anywhere. No tall guard towers either — just a two-story brick wall with weird metal cones spaced along the top. We loaded Dozer into a waiting open-topped van, and it took us through a gate that deposited us in an elevator. It didn’t feel like we went down far, but when the elevator-gate rose we drove out into a space bigger than a decent-sized athletic stadium. It curved, stretching away in both directions, and the wall directly across from us had only one entrance I could see, another big gate.
“The outside ring circles the prison, it’s the only way up and out,” Watchman said. “It’s full of switchable mines, laser sensors, remotely manned weapons, you name it. It’s never been breached, and forget about digging out through the ceiling or floor. Let’s just say they’re hostile environments. The Army puts its convicted supersoldiers here.”
Yeah, now this was more like it. Half an hour later, we’d dropped Dozer off and were on our way out.
Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) Page 22