Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) (Volume 3) (31 page)

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.

“Truth is,” Detective Fisher said once we were back out under open sky, “most of what we walked through down there is just the last line of containment; they have ways of controlling the inmates, keeping a breakout from becoming general. The Pit is built to keep people
out
as much as it is to keep them in.” He lit up again. “You okay, kid?”

“Hell, no.” I shook myself, feeling like I’d just climbed out of a bottomless hole. The DSA agents gave me room — a couple of them twitched, half-hefting their autorifles without realizing it.

Most people’s reactions to me are pretty predictable; my size, claws, fangs scream
Danger! Danger!
to the piece of the human hindbrain tasked with instinctual threat-assessment, so even when they’re not scared, normal people dance around me like I might accidentally eat someone. Fisher didn’t. He smirked, chuckled dryly. “Yeah, I get that. Let’s go home.”

Watchman flew wingman outside the plane for the flight back. Detective Fisher used the time to tell us Astra stories featuring her police liaison job. Half the stories involved dead bodies; cops have a strange sense of humor.

We touched down after dark and Watchman gave me a lift back to the Dome. With nothing going on, I went and found Ozma’s new lab.

Open boxes sat on every table and had been stacked in corners. They’d certainly provided her enough glassware, even a sealed clean room for mixing the really interesting stuff (that made me feel a lot better). Her Witchy Highness sat perched on a lab stool, poring over a notebook. Someone had decided labs required lab coats and she’d turned hers green.

Beside her, Nix stood in front of one of Ozma’s smaller mirrors, behind a camera set up on a stack of books. She waved at me then went back to watching the mirror. The goth girl standing
behind
the watchful doll looked away from the mirror long enough to check me out, and holy shit, it was Artemis, the Sentinels’ mysterious vampire-vigilante. Midnight-black hair and cold eyes to match, in a face pale enough to make you believe she never saw daylight. Just a
look
from Spooky Girl, and my body started bulking up for a fight.

I shook it off. “Princess.”

Ozma held up a hand, made a notation in her notebook, then leaned over to whisper something to the mirror. “Yes!” cried Nix, and I heard the camera
click-click-click-click
as she captured whatever was there. Then the mirror cracked all the way across, spiderwebbing from edge to edge. Ozma sighed, dropping her head to rest her chin on folded arms.

“Hello Brian. I hope you had a boring day?”

“Better than yours?”

A pointed finger directed my attention to a stack of broken mirrors propped against the wall. “Watch out for glass, I swept three mirrors ago.” I felt the crunch of glass slivers underfoot.

Right ... how many years bad luck?
“What are you doing?”

“Watching our Astra. Wherever she is has good magic or psychic wards and I’ve only been able to catch her in one mirror, and we can’t go through it to get her or make her see us.”

“But she’s okay?” She hadn’t mentioned any of this in the morning briefing.

“She is alone and injured, poor child, but fiercely, fiercely brave. Look.” Sitting up, she tapped the laptop beside her and brought up a screenful of picture files. Now I understood what the camera was all about; since she obviously couldn’t
keep
a mirror on Astra, Ozma was opening a view and snapping as many shots as she could before the connection was literally broken.

The viewing wheel showed dozens of shots. It looked like we were seeing through a bathroom mirror into a small bedroom. We might not have been able to see her except she’d pushed the bed she was lying on up against the opposite door. In the earliest ones the lights were out so there was nothing at all to see beyond dark shapes, and in most of the rest she was asleep, but a series of eight shots had caught her looking in the mirror. She’d had her costume top open, poking her shoulder as tears ran down her face. Half her face was purple, her shoulder and arm purple and black, and her lips were pressed tight over her teeth. My throat closed up.

Ozma sighed. “I’ve met our team doctor and he believes, based on the time since the fight, that she isn’t healing.” She patted my arm. “Someone has stolen our hero’s power, but we will have her back.”

Nix nodded solemnly.

Spooky Girl hadn’t said a word, or moved, and I jumped when she said “Send the pictures.”

“One moment.” Ozma pulled the flash drive out of the camera and plugged it into the laptop. Another short stream of pictures dropped onto the screen and she forwarded them to the epad I hadn’t seen in Spooky Girl’s hand. In the new shots, Astra stood with her back to the open bedroom door, like she’d just come back in. Behind her the camera had caught the faces of two men I didn’t recognize, part of a third. Ozma laughed delightedly and Nix cheered. I didn’t.

She’s scared. Freaking terrified.
I couldn’t say why I knew, it didn’t show on Astra’s face, but I felt my claws growing. My body was weirdly psychoreactive tonight.

“Nice timing,” I said, almost growling. Spooky Girl looked up from her pad and gave me a predator’s smile.

“Timing, yes,” Ozma agreed, turning her head to frown at me. She knew what it meant when my voice got deeper. “Since it takes too long between pictures, I have been attempting a sortilege formula to choose informative moments. None of the pictures tell us where she is, that would be too gracious a gift, and I can’t find other mirrors around her. Artemis?”

Spooky Girl’s spooky smile widened. “Got another one. The third guy’s Redback, a street villain with the Sanguinary Boys — one of the few left outside Detroit Supermax after the Sentinels rolled them up last year. He can paralyze you with a look — maybe more than that now, if Blackstone’s right — but I made him a snack the couple of times we met. Shelly? Have you narrowed down the location?”

“
Do vamps sleep in the daytime? Yes they do, and is one of fifty rooms narrow enough? Hi, Brian!
”

I almost felt sorry for the guys holding Astra. With a magical princess, a vampire vigilante, and a techno-ghost hunting them, they didn’t have a chance. But only almost; I wanted to
talk
to them and “fifty rooms” sounded real promising.

Ozma patted my arm again. “Stop bulking up, Brian. They are not hurting her, and I believe your strength will be required presently.” Her lips quirked. “So go. Eat. Fuel up and be prepared to ride to the rescue. Shoo.”

“Don’t go too far, pretty boy,” Artemis said without looking up from her epad. “I’m going to need you to break stuff soon.”

The promise of violence in Spooky Girl’s voice started my fangs growing again and, with one last look at the screen, I let Ozma push me away. The princess was good about her promises, too; if she didn’t think it would be long, it probably wouldn’t be, and my looming wouldn’t help.

But I needed to find out where the workout rooms were so I could seriously attack something.

I got my fight-fuel; Willis — the Dome’s majordomo and wasn’t that a weird title — had made sure the kitchen got my dietary requirements. Protein, lots of it. But I didn’t get my workout; as usual, Ozma nailed it and I hadn’t even finished gorging on the tower of rare prime rib cuts the cooking staff had prepared for me when my earbug sparked with an excited “
Move it, people! Assembly room now! Follow the lights if you’re lost, newbies!
”

A cheeky light flashed over the dining room door. Robot-girl was going to be seriously annoying.

Even the Sentinels’ weird Verne-type, Vulcan, sat for
this
meeting, and with the addition of the detective and a beefy DSA agent (whose dark glasses made him look just like Bob in shades), we filled the seats. Nox and Nix sat on the table in front of Ozma, and Nox couldn’t take his eyes off Artemis (I could understand why; Nox liked
dark
, and with her black body armor, hooded Death’s-head, and guns, the vampire looked like a freaking goth assassin).

“Hey — ” Reese started. The eyes in the black skull half-mask focused on him and he shut up. A smile flickered across her lips before she returned her attention to Blackstone.

“Thank you, everyone,” Blackstone said once we’d all sat down. The old magician looked better than he had last night. “We have found Astra, and we are going to get her. Detective Fisher?”

The rumpled detective got to his feet and took control of the screens. We gave him our complete attention.

“My team is tasked with the Wreckers investigation. Eric Ludlow, Dozer, had cleared his email history and his phone records were unhelpful. However, bank records showed us that he joined this organization — ” the symbol of an eye in a radiating triangle backing the words
The Foundation of Awakened Theosophy
came up on the screens “ — last January. We were unable to get a warrant to do any digging until a search of the Crew’s records from the California Quake put him together with
this
man.” The image changed to a shot of a guy, brown hair, brown eyes, average everything.