Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) (Volume 3) (16 page)

Grendel

“I can’t believe I’m doing this for a
doll
,” Latisha groused.

I managed to keep the laugh in. Nix had solemnly informed me that her fairy garden, in the best tradition of fairy gardens, was
secret
— which meant that it was utterly hidden to mortals. This being Hillwood, “hidden” was a stretch; she’d located it in the shadow of one of the old main hall’s chimneys where a joint in the roof created a deep nook, far back enough nobody could see even the climbing vines from the ground.

Flyers
passed over it all the time, but Ozma had contributed a nothing-to-see-here charm; if Nix or someone else in on the secret didn’t tell you where it was, you just didn’t find it. Of course Latisha wasn’t a flyer; she’d wrapped her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist and held on as I scaled the building wall to pull us up on the roof.

The roof-garden was completely against school rules, of course.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry!” Nix called from the shadows. I carefully leaned out and began pulling up the load from the ground. Getting everything over the edge of the roof without scraping the wall and gutter was the trickiest part — I had to throw the rope up over the peak of the roof where Latisha could anchor it; sure I could lift lots heavier stuff easy, but
leverage
was a problem if I didn’t want to tip back over the edge. Finally, slinging it over my shoulder like a huge Santa-sack, I climbed over the peak to join them.

The night-poppies were open in the moonlight, drinking in starlight and moonbeams with their white petals. Half of the plants in Nix’s garden were
different
. Environmentalists who got nervous over genetically modified organisms like transgenic corn or cotton would shit bricks if they ever found out where Ozma got a lot of her magical ingredients.

“Come on! Come on!” Nix flew around my head, and even Latisha smiled. Sliding down to the “valley” made by the U of joined roofs, I unpacked the box frames. Half the plant boxes went in easy, and Latisha went to work on the trellis-linked ones.

She touched a tea vine out on its reaching tip, and it began to unwind, curling around her finger like a friendly snake. Vine by vine, she coaxed them off the trellises, then the lower creepers wound in with them.

She really was going to make a fortune someday; her power was over
hair
, but by some weird quirk, she could extend it to anything from clinging plants to shoelaces and she could braid anything into her styles. The trellises cleared, I pulled them out and replaced them with separate climbing frames for her to wind the vines up in while Nix fussed over each box.

“Thanks,” I whispered as she tied up the last climbing vine. She rolled her eyes.

“I’m not doing it for
you
. I’ll miss Nix.”

“Everybody will.” I hefted the first boxes and walked them back over the roof. Down in the shadows, half of Gilmore Hall’s residents were risking curfew to take them away and finish the packing job.

It was probably the biggest secret rebellion the Headmaster would never know about. We hoped. A perilous night for the temporarily expanded Army of Oz.

These children are dangerous! They are weapons pointed at your children! We do not allow children to own guns or to carry them to school; who knows how many “normal” students carry dangerous powers to school every day? And when they see superheroes, glorified vigilantes, acting outside the law, how many are inspired to take “justice” into their own hands?

Hiding the possession of superhuman powers should be a crime, must be made a crime, for their protection and ours!

Representative Mal Shankman

Shelly and I ended the night with a sleepover in my rooms. Robots don’t snore, but they do like to cuddle. They also rise early and leave strange Post-It notes on your forehead. The one that stuck to my hand when I stretched and rubbed my eyes said
Soylent Green is people!
If I asked, she’d probably reference some obscure dystopian or post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie.

The morning meeting started with a group review on yesterday’s fight. Blackstone and Lei Zi had spent the night breaking down our mask-cam recordings and witness accounts, and we got to watch a real time replay of the encounter. Which didn’t tell us much, since even Watchman and Safire arrived late to the scene. Blackstone froze the action at the moment when the villains disappeared under cover of the last wave of flash-bangs.

“The media has already named the three unknowns Balz, Twist, and Dozer — short for Bulldozer, and collectively dubbed them the Wreckers.” A touch switched the picture for a close-up of “Dozer” — Eric Ludlow, Gantry, helmet ripped away, face pale and shocked. “We have not released any Sentinels footage for public consumption. Yes, Astra?”

I lowered my hand. “Do we know anything yet?”

“No, but based on your testimony, Detective Fisher has obtained a warrant for Mr. Ludlow’s home, and they have placed it under discreet observation. If it was Eric at the Daley Center, he hasn’t been home since. You are tasked to serve the warrant with the detective’s team after the meeting.”

I nodded unhappily.

“We also hypothesize at least one, possibly two more members of the team, a Verne-type and almost certainly a teleporter. They may be the same person, but we’ve named the hypothetical unknowns Phreak and Drop. This is based on the complete signals blackout, and, of course, their entrance and exit. Any reconstruction is speculative, but there is no evidence in the building’s security footage of their presence before its system was hacked and shut down along with the phones. There is less than a three-minute gap between the time everything shut down and they made their appearance through the back wall beside the judge’s bench. Since no witnesses place them anywhere else in the building, we believe they teleported into the private hall behind the courtroom.

“According to bystander accounts, the court bailiff was an unintentional death when the wall collapsed inward under Dozer; the three went straight for Mr. Larkin. Twist snapped his neck with one of his cables while Balz’ spheres covered the scene. At that point they, might simply have been prepared to exit the way they came — witnesses generally agree that they weren’t threatening anyone else. However, Watchman and Safire entered the action before they could withdraw.”

He reset the scene to the beginning of the fight and we watched it again. Watchman’s first move had been to fly through the doors opened by the fleeing audience and smack into Dozer, separating him from the other two and throwing him back from the bystanders and against the half-collapsed wall. Then things got busy. Blackstone froze the scene when the first flash-bang sphere went off in Safire’s face.

“Debris analysis shows that the spheres wielded by Balz were not self-motivating or remotely directed. We hypothesize Balz to be a B or C Class telekinetic, unusually capable of multiple simultaneous levitations and manipulations. He fielded several types of spheres. Beyond the many flash-bang spheres, there were at least a dozen motion-triggered, short-ranged ‘taser spheres’ — which is how they neutralized Rush.” Skipping forward to a slowed shot of Rush appearing out of hypertime and getting zapped from three sides illustrated the point.

Across the table, Rush actually
laughed
. He shrugged painfully. “They got me good, guys. Too bad I dropped Seven at the doors.”

“Indeed. And considering the number of civilians within the combat zone, we are fortunate that no others became involved until Twist took his hostage.” The next skip took us to the moment when Twist wrapped one of his two arm-cables around the poor guy and hauled him into the middle of the fight. “We have yet to identify the hostage. Of course, there was no police cordon on the building after the fight, and not everyone remained on the scene to give their account of events to the police.”

I tried to remember if I’d seen him after the last flash. On the floor? Watchman saw my face and shook his head; he’d have checked first thing to make sure the guy was all right.
Wait
. Turning back I caught Blackstone giving me the eye as well — and he wasn’t showing footage
after
the flash. He gave me a bland smile and moved on.

“Your epads will have full stats for the spheres’ projected abilities once Vulcan has finished reconstruction of the bits that Watchman, Seven, and Astra left us, as well as an estimate of Dozer’s and Twist’s capabilities. Quin?”

Blackstone yielded Quin the screen. She moved slower today, and I wondered if she’d gotten any sleep at all last night; if not for her rubberized body, she’d probably have bags under her eyes. She brought up a frame from a news clip showing Daley Plaza, focusing on the shattered Picasso sculpture and the hole in the Daley Center.

“There has been no Internet download from the Wreckers declaring their intentions, but we are constructing a threat profile. Media reaction to our part has been mostly positive, although we are seeing the expected ‘why didn’t they respond sooner?’ buzz from anti-hero groups. The usual conspiracy theorists are claiming we arrived late and let them escape to cover our part in the ‘assassination.’

“The fact that there was only one bystander death helps. The second, injured bailiff is expected to make a full recovery. This will sound cynical, but bystander death in this case has had the positive effect of suppressing media commentators sympathetic to vigilante actions like these. Our assessment of the Wreckers, leaving out a few things such as Dozer’s suspected identity, and our respects to Officer Johansen’s and Officer Pratt’s families, will be on our public webpage by noon.”

That was it for Quin, and she didn’t try to end her comments with anything upbeat. Yesterday’s fight had sucked, and the only good thing to say was it hadn’t been worse. Blackstone ended the meeting by announcing Mal’s assisted success last night, and we all gave the boy a round of applause. He looked conflicted. Or constipated. Beside him, Shelly was almost as hard to read in her silver-and-blue form, but she’d spent most of the meeting in her own world. Now she dashed off without even giving me the wink she usually dropped whenever she knew I was going to meet Detective Fisher. Blackstone broke off his conversation with Lei Zi when he saw I stayed behind.

“Walk with me, Hope?” He steered us down the hall to his office.

“About Shelly — ” I started as soon as his door closed. He held up his hand.

“I’m aware of her family reunion, my dear, and I hope it turns out well. Indeed, this is what I wished to speak with you about.”

Sitting, he took a moment to collect his thoughts. What was going on?

“Our need for secrecy presents us with a problem, my dear. Presently, outside of us two and Vulcan, everyone believes that Galatea is a remote platform — essentially a telepresence-piloted drone. It is easy enough to let everyone believe that you and the ‘pilot’ share a past — which is of course true — but I also suspect she has let Jamal, at least, in on her secret.”

He stopped again, which didn’t help my tightening nerves.

“I have spoken to Legal Eagle, and he tells me that creating a cover civilian identity for Shelly will not be as easy as we might have thought. Legal cover identities of the kind used by Variforce and even Seven require a real, legal identity beneath them; the person must already legally exist, the applicable agencies must know both his cover and his true identity. Creating a complete and unsubstantiated identity out of whole cloth is legal fraud.”

“Couldn’t we tell them...oh.” My stomach sank.

“You understand. To tell the appropriate authorities — the DSA in this case — exactly what Shelly is and why she needs a new identity would require full disclosure of her status, which is that of an artifact, not a person in the legally recognized sense.”

He watched me carefully. “Which would also mean revealing that she’s something that doesn’t exist yet — a true artificial intelligence. And if they trace her back to the systems breach the military experienced during the Omega operation...”

I covered my mouth and clamped down babbling panic. Sure, they were on our side, but government paranoia knew no bounds. And yes, any paranoid government agency that tried to seize her as a threat to national security or to take her apart to see how her quantum-mind ticked would have to go through me to get to her. But if they had the
law
on their side... How could we fight?

“We could create a cover identity ourselves — indeed, Shelly could do it with a snap of her fingers by hacking the necessary databases and falsifying records. But it would be thin, and itself illegal.” His face told me that was not an option he would support.

So Mrs. B — Mrs. H — couldn’t just reclaim Shelly. Because she wasn’t
real
. How was I going to tell her?

Blackstone just looked sad. “We will continue to pursue avenues of inquiry, my dear, but Shelly will not be leaving us any time soon and I thought that you should know. Perhaps now might be the time to broach another topic? Indeed, it is an observation Shelly brought me.”

That
got my attention back. He nodded when he saw I was focused.

“If this new Dozer is, in fact, our Eric Ludlow, it is a post-quake development. One of the first things Shelly did after the action was to look in the Big Book of Contingent Prophecy. There is no previous record of his going supervillain. To be frank, before he met you, all of his contingent futures ended in ... well, in a more personal downward spiral.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You do remember that he is a veteran of the China War? It is my belief he was self-medicating his PTSD-related depression with alcohol. In his previous futures, he went in and out of rehab several times before, one way or another, ending in prison or merely ending it. When even a B Class Ajax-type goes on a rampage or commits suicide, it is rather spectacularly newsworthy. But his contingent futures changed the night he met
you
.”

“Me?” I tried to remember the details of our “fight.” It had been my
first
fight, but not much of one.

“You. Previously, it was Atlas who brought him down for the police that night; his encounter with you, instead, was yet one more change in events begun the day you became Astra.”

He cleared his throat.

“I reviewed the recording of that fight. You understand that rehab only cleans the body of drugs? Certainly there is counseling, and it gives the patient space to review his choices and build new habits and resolutions with a clear head. However, afterwards, only a true commitment to change will keep him from going back into the same choices and patterns that took him there in the first place. That is why court-ordered rehab is rarely a permanent fix. So, something changed Eric’s attitude regarding going into rehab, something that opened up new contingent outcomes that night. I believe that something was you.”