“Oh, that. The Question Box.”
“Huh?”
She patted my arm. “The Question Box surprised me this morning with an uncharacteristically unambiguous instruction to tell Hope about the Wishing Pill. ASAP was involved.”
I growled. “You used it again?”
“No, it got my attention. And it was certainly right; I have acquired two recruits for the price of one.”
She left it at that and I didn’t push it, but I couldn’t say I was happy. I didn’t trust the Question Box. Sure it had been one of Ozma’s royal treasures for most of a century, but it had been made by an evil sorcerer who hadn’t got much good from it and it certainly hadn’t warned the princess of the coup d'état that turfed her off the Emerald Throne. And these days it didn’t wait for questions — it answered questions you didn’t know you had.
New Tom got us back to the Dome, where we found The Harlequin waiting for us in our common room with Vulcan and a guy named Andrew, with something to make me forget all about the Question Box: costume designs.
They couldn’t be serious.
Chapter Twenty Eight: Grendel
“The worst thing about being outed is losing my sense of safety. And not just my safety — people around me are at risk now, too. A few months ago, I got shot with a shoulder-launched missile by Paladin fanatics while doing my job — now that they know who I am, they or anyone else can attack me anywhere, which means it’s statistically more dangerous to stand next to me and I have to be alert all the time. Do you understand? Standing in line at Starbucks, I’m putting other people at risk. Compared to that, the loss of privacy is just really, really annoying.
Astra, excerpt from the Citywatch “outing” interview.
* * *
They were serious.
And they were crazy.
With all the footage of our “arrival” in Chicago to fight the Green Man, the Sentinels’ PR guys had as much chance of keeping us under wraps for a full, publicized introduction as they did of keeping Rush’s tabloid-selling sexcapades out of the news (my favorite was his bet with the Chicago Bears cheerleaders). So Chandler Communications — the PR firm run by Atlas’ big brother — went the other direction; they dropped our codenames and power-sets on the Sentinels’ website and solicited costume ideas.
Yeah, really.
“C’mon! Just wear it once. Please?” Nix darted around my head, a hyper hummingbird.
Andrew, a guy who looked more like an Olympic triathlon athlete than a fashion designer, had brought each of us three costumes based on the “best” fan submissions that he expected us to model, with near-poster sized computer renditions of each so we could get a good look. The Green Man could attack any minute, and we were doing a freaking fashion show.
Every one of Reese’s costumes incorporated a helmet and body armor — fliers are great targets — and one included a huge cape. A bunch of people had gone back to the source for Ozma’s costumes; hers were art-deco and fluttery things, but since she wasn’t going to be a first responder superhero that was okay. Mine...
“Pleeeease?”
I grew fangs and growled at her while Ozma laughed. Reese knew better and just smirked silently. Andrew and The Harlequin wisely stayed out of it.
Armor wasn’t really on the menu for me — completely redundant and hard to adapt to my changing measurements anyway — but one fan had sent in a fantasy-medieval dragon armor design of plates held together by cross-webbing straps that could stretch to accommodate. It came with the biggest, most bad-ass sword I’d ever seen — seriously, the thing was as tall as I was and the blade had to weigh at least a hundred pounds. Vulcan claimed he could make it tough enough for me to swing more than once.
I was supposed to be a knight under a curse.
The second “costume” went with heavy black spandex shorts, which showed they’d at least researched the Academy’s gym uniforms, but added Celtic or Maori tribal tats all over my chest, arms, neck and shoulders, and even my face. I had to admit, the black-on-gray look was pretty cool and ratcheted the intimidation factor — which I was already naturally good at — even higher.
The third costume had gone ... the other way.
“Pleeeease?”
I was going to swat a fairy.
Costume number three was black dress pants, a snow-white shirt, black tie, and black vest with a fancy scrollworked ‘G’ for Grendel on the breast pocket. The tie hung loose as a noose, the shirt was untucked with sleeves rolled halfway up, and the vest was open, but still, what? What was it, prep-school grunge?
Andrew solemnly assured me he’d made it with materials that could expand as far as I could, like he thought that helped.
“Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?”
“Nix,” Ozma admonished the doll. “Please don’t be tiresome.” She gave me a look. “You do realize she will wear you down.” Translation: I want to see it, too.
“Fans have way too much time on their hands.”
“You could always be my knight ...”
“Yeah, no.”
“And I do not believe you want to be any scarier.”
I growled at her and she laughed, completely unimpressed.
Five minutes later, I had the freaking tie on. Andrew nodded and Ozma and The Harlequin smiled while Nix squealed, and Reese stopped smirking.
What?
Megaton
Variforce smacked me out of the sky again, but I managed to get my feet under me and blast before I splashed into the lake. Again. And what have we learned? I can blast just fine underwater.
The whole exercise was The Harlequin’s fault; she’d insisted that I needed more public exposure, and since the Green Man wasn’t attacking (yet) and my powers didn’t support a patrol function, she’d convinced Watchman and Variforce to move my training outside. Five hundred feet over Lake Michigan.
I blasted my way back up to decent altitude, tracking Variforce high above me in his cloud of supporting fields. The mission was simple, I just needed to get past him to “tag” Watchman. Naturally, we had an audience; telescoping cameras pointed our way from boats and the shore and cape-watchers with binoculars followed my bright blast-column as I climbed toward the afternoon sun.
Maybe Dad was watching.
“One more time, Megaton,” Watchman warned me, “and we’re done. Since we could be going into action any time, we don’t want to run you out of juice first. So put it all in.”
He didn’t sound a bit worried by the possibility that my “all in” might actually reach him. At least my “all in” didn’t include an Astra-style death ride, but what could I put “all in” that I hadn’t?
Doctor Beth had spent hours and hours breaking down what my explosive blasts were actually doing, and he’d found out a few interesting things that made no sense. First, my blasts didn’t really come from inside me. Instead they drew from some internal source but they erupted fully in thickening waves outside the point of my body projecting them; which explained why I could keep my gloves on when I “shot” explosive bolts from my hands — there was a still zone between my skin and the eruption point. Same for my legs and feet when I rocketed.
Second, there were at least three factors to the energy blast I projected: heat, light, and “pure kinetic force.” What the hell was pure kinetic force? Dr. Beth didn’t know. He called it a “force without a material component outside its source,” like magnetism or gravity, and he suggested I should visualize my kinetic blasts as explosions of invisible pellets that “dissipated when they encountered a solid object to which they could transfer their kinetic energy.” According to his fancy toys, kinetic force was normally the main component of my blast; the heat and light, and the bang and roar, was just wastage from the main reaction (though I could dial it up to where heat and light was the main component, like I had when facing the green).
So how could I use what I had? Variforce’s fields could dissipate heat and refract light easy, so “all in” had to be the kinetic kick — but the co
ncentrated fireworks that came with them made my blasts easy to track; he just thickened his fields at the point of impact, dissipating the hit all through his cloud of fields. It was like punching a sack of gym balls.
But he had to focus on the point of impact. If I could spread his focus and close the distance... Okay then, maybe “all in” does mean a death-ride this time.
I poured on the roar, picking up speed and targeting Variforce squarely in my helmet sights, visualized a tight stream of invisible pellets, as organized as photons in a laser, aimed, and erupted.
The blast looked dim in the afternoon light, at least by my standards, but Variforce’s fields went almost opaque where he braced them for the hit as I twitched, fired, twitched, fired, twitched, fired, blasting as fast as I could at different angles while still closing on him. Separation disappeared as his field cloud seemed to leap at me, and then I gave it everything I had, almost straight into him, kicking my rocket-column up another notch and blasting hard.
The fields tore, shredded, and I was past him and through, clear sky between me and Watchman. I didn’t even think, just fired one more time, tagged him before he could blink — and couldn’t believe what I’d done. It didn’t even rock him, fast-shot weak as it was, but it was a hit.
“And that’s game,” came Watchman’s dry voice. “Congratulations, Megaton. Variforce?”
What? I looked back and down. Variforce’s field cloud churned, closing the hole I’d blasted through it. I’d probably roared through within a few inches of the guy.
“I’m good,” Variforce confirmed. “And, kid? Good hit. You’ll make a decent opposition force with more training.”
Watchman dropped lower, letting Variforce anchor an outlying thrust of field to him for faster flying, and we headed in. “How do you feel?” He asked as the shore got closer.
“Okay, I guess. A little tired, like I’ve been running laps. I’ve got a lot more — I just have to let it build before I let it go. Kind of like charging a capacitor.” One bright spot to all this was I could let my inner science-geek come out.
“Good to know. Once the whole Green Man thing is behind us, we’re going to have to take you somewhere and see just how much you can build up. You may be one of the most powerful energy projectors we’ve seen until now.”
“I could have a nuclear option?”
“Maybe. If you do, let’s wait to use it until we know the size of the hole you’ll make. Got it?”
Caution rang in Watchman’s voice; he wasn’t my coach, he was my firing range instructor. Don’t play with your guns until we can test-fire them somewhere safe — the life you save may be your own. He hadn’t had to tell me twice. I knew what “Let’s see what this does” experiments led to: evacuating the school, if you were lucky, and we didn’t want to accidentally blow anyone else up, did we?
Flying over the line of cameras on the shore, I still felt pretty good.
Astra
Everything was heavy. My muscles hadn’t atrophied or anything, but when I’d gained my powers, I’d lost my sense of the weight and solidness of things. I’d had to learn to touch the world lightly. Even when I’d been hurting, put back together by surgeons after breaking nearly every bone in my body and traumatizing every organ, just standing up, making myself move, hadn’t made me hurt worse. Now, dressing to leave the hospital left me wiped and shaking, remembering how much fighting pain took out of a normal person and grateful again for Chakra’s magic hands.
They took me out through a side exit, where fans and paparazzi couldn’t see me and spot which car I got into. New Tom held the door while Seven kept his hands free. Rush had replaced Variforce before they let me check out (he could carry me out of any bad situation before it had time to get bad, I supposed), and he helped me into the car. The armored sedan’s tinted windows meant I didn’t have to wear shades Hollywood celebrity style, though I could have used a pair to help hide the bruising. New Tom drove carefully, like I was fragile, but got us to the hidden parking entrance to the Dome without incident.
Seven stayed with me, and Blackstone and Jacky were waiting for me in the Assembly Room. Blackstone stood when I came through the door. He took my good hand and kissed it.
“How are you, my dear?”
A lump rose in my. “I’m okay. I — I’m okay.”
“Good. We won’t keep you long, but we really must debrief you, understand everything you went through yesterday. Are you up to it?”
This time I just nodded, and he pulled out a chair. Seven sat with me and Willis appeared from nowhere with coffee, obviously Jacky creations this time. It felt so normal I could have cried as I sipped from my mug. I cupped it for the warmth and started at the beginning. “Teleporting with Drop leaves you disoriented...”
Blackstone’s usual procedure meant recording and listening to the full story, beginning to end any way you wanted to tell it, then going back and digging into moments of interest, looking for details. He let me talk, and not talk when I needed a minute to collect myself for the hard stuff, nodding to show his attention. Jacky stayed quiet, sitting statue-still through most of it.
He didn’t ask for descriptions of anyone, but he focused on the dining room, the platform I’d seen, and every remembered detail of my dinner conversation with Dr. Pellegrini while I wilted under the effort of not forgetting anything.
I still didn’t know what to think of yesterday. I’d been captured and held prisoner again (the second time in one year, which at least gave our television writers plenty of “real” peril to use), but this time, once the terror of helplessness wore off, I really had felt more like a nuisance — except to Dr. Pellegrini, who’d been delighted. And Pellegrini had sounded more like a scholar and humanitarian than a mass-murderer.
Blackstone picked up on my confusion, but was too professional to offer any perspectives; he’d call them guesses and they might have biased my reporting. He’d listen to the recordings of the session later, pick my statements apart for meaning and nuance and pull out more solid extrapolations than I ever could, but even I knew there was something there I should see. There was something I wasn’t getting but couldn’t forget. It was like staring at one of those computer-generated pictures that looked like a flat surface of dense black-and-white squiggles that transformed into a 3-D silhouette when you squinted just right: you knew it held meaning, you just couldn’t see it.
Head pounding, I gave up before he did, but he let me go before my voice started shaking with fatigue. Jacky followed me out. Silly me, I thought she was just taking me to my new rooms.
The staff had finished moving my rooms, along with Shelly’s and Jamal’s, to the “new” wing set aside for the cadet team, and extreme fatigue kept me from really noticing the big gold ‘YS’ covering the common room’s double doors. The applause that burst out when they opened startled me, but Jacky kept me moving.
Everyone was waiting for me and in uniform, even Jamal who wasn’t spending much time here yet. I almost didn’t spot all the parentals (and a blonde civilian I didn’t recognize) behind all the color; the room had turned into a serious fashion show for our newbies, and I stared.
Reese looked superhero-standard in a good way in a gray and white leather armor-stiffened bodysuit and helmet, and Ozma looked royal and ethereal in a strapless white catsuit and Magic Belt under a gauzy open-front overdress. It was gathered at her breasts by a huge jade Z-inside-an-O brooch and floated around her like an under-the-arms cloak, with long white opera gloves to match. Brian looked like Frankenstein’s monster gone GQ. Casually GQ, hulking muscles, tight dreadlock mane, fangs, and all. It was like looking at a Siberian tiger — he still looked like he could eat you, but he was beautiful.
Galatea, Crash, Megaton, Tsuris, Grendel, Ozma — my team, and I realized only now, the team that had come to get me last night.
So of course I cried, and thanked everybody, and got hugs from Shelly and the parentals including Shelly’s mom. There was cake, and a happy flying fairy, and eventually
Jacky got me through the room with last hugs and into my new bedroom and into bed.
And sometime in the night Atlas sat down for dinner with Dr. Pellegrini and me to point out the obvious: we’d captured Eric and outed the Foundation. And Pellegrini didn’t care.
Chapter Twenty Nine: Astra
“There is a reason why you train all the time, solo and as a team; you’ve got to know what you can do, what the others can do, and what you can do together. Most supervillain ‘teams’ are not a serious threat to most CAI teams because, whatever the power imbalance might be, CAI teams train.”
Blackstone, 9th annual Crisis Aid and Intervention Conference address.
* * *
Jacky was the worst correspondent in the world and still hadn’t told me everything about her first New Orleans trip, so we had serious catching up to do.
The blonde from last night was Acacia, and Jacky had brought her along to keep her out of trouble. She was also the nicest vampire I’d ever met (admittedly out of two, and I only got minutes to meet her before she went to sleep with the dawn, but Jacky had described lots of others), and she matched every blonde joke I’d ever heard. Hanging with the Bees, I’d heard a lot.
Not that she was a ditz, but she made it hard to tell; she was a fan. From what Jacky said while whipping up some Jacky Creations (I’d seriously missed her coffee, too), the girl had grown up in a one-church Louisiana town and had somehow become a goth and a fang fan in a community that didn’t consider black an appropriate color except at funerals. Trying to picture her as a goth hurt my brain, but apparently she’d found a sick monster in New Orleans who thought it worked for her. He’d drunk her blood, tortured her, brainwashed her, and triggered a vampire breakthrough somehow (and Jacky couldn’t talk about that except to say he hadn’t been like Psycho-Vlad).
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