Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) Read online

  * * *

  “Humanity is destroying itself with its gasses and wastes. It breeds to fill every remotely habitable ecological niche, destroying biodiversity throughout the world. It wrecks the equilibrium of ancient ecosystems. It is a plague upon the Earth. Humanity is now served notice: it will voluntarily clean its house and reduce its numbers, or it will be removed as a threat to the continuation of life on this planet — ”

  Blackstone froze the Viewtube file and left the symbol of the Green Man on the screen. The leering face of twined leaves, it was the only visual the file had shown. He looked around the table. We were a much nicer looking bunch than we’d been an hour ago, and we filled the table in our by-now completely predictable order.

  It had really started happening without our paying attention to it, the way cliques form and freeze in school, and now the way we sat said everything about the team. Seven and Riptide and Rush tended to hang together off-duty. Chakra and Blackstone were an item of course, but with Blackstone doing research so much, Chakra and The Harlequin formed the Girl’s Club. Lei Zi didn’t mix much, Vulcan rarely came out of The Pit, Watchman and Variforce trained as obsessively as I did, and Variforce had family (so did Riptide, but he had a nanny for little Carlos). I was younger than the Seven-Riptide-Rush and Chakra-Harlequin sets and had a civilian social life I was trying to keep alive, so I sort of floated outside all the circles and Shelly and Jamal usually grabbed seats by me.

  “This video-file appeared online two hours ago,” Blackstone said. “The DSA assigns a high probability that this ‘Green Man’ is indeed the individual responsible for this morning’s events.”

  “He doesn’t see any need to be original,” Watchman observed. My fellow Atlas-type sat at attention, fresh Army-green jumpsuit and black uniform beret pressed and set with military precision.

  “Yes,” Blackstone agreed. “He lifted his manifesto almost verbatim from Deep Green’s official declaration.” Groans rose around the table.

  Riptide sneered. “Those the pajeros that think the world would be a nicer place with less of us in it?”

  “Indeed. Deep Green is one of the FBI’s top-list domestic terrorist groups. Among other things, they call for the abandonment of industrialism and urbanism and the reduction of humanity to no more than 100 million souls. So far, they have demonstrated their resolve only through extreme vandalism — destruction of infrastructure of construction companies, energy companies, buildings, equipment. Millions of dollars of damage but, as yet, no one has been hurt.”

  “Yet.” Watchman didn’t raise his voice, but looking over I could see that his fists were clenched on the table. “If the Green Man is with them, they weren’t careful today.” Watchman had been in no more personal danger than I had, but this morning was a special kind of nightmare for breakthroughs like us; as fast, tough, and strong as we were, we hadn’t been that much help and if we’d been fighting alone, the disaster would have just rolled right around us.

  Blackstone nodded, acknowledging the point. “The DSA team has provisionally ruled the new forest safe, and City Dispatch has thrown every drone it has into the sky to monitor the rest of the greenbelt and city parks. All Crisis Aid and Intervention capes with applicable powers remain on alert, and for now that is all we can do. So now let’s talk about the elephant in the room.”

  The screen changed to an aerial view of the new woodland. It sprawled across roadway and field, a wild green growth thrown across the orderly lines of the metropolis.

  “There have been florakinetics, plant-controllers, before, but never on this scale. The strongest previously has been Vitaceae, an Italian hero. He can control an acre of heavy-growth plants at one time. This,” Blackstone pointed at the screen, “is far beyond A Class. In the same way that the terrakinetic who triggered the Big One last January was beyond A Class.”

  I felt like someone had dropped an icicle down my throat to grow in my stomach — by everyone’s faces, a feeling shared around the table.

  “Didn’t the DSA investigation decide that Temblor’s powers had been boosted by his psychosis?” The Harlequin asked.

  “Yes, and they labeled the new power level Ultra Class and concluded that it had been a one-off event. Now, I’m not so certain. Both events were acts of terrorism. Both are beyond what anybody thought possible. I believe it may be possible we’re facing something new, breakthroughs whose psychosis or fanaticism boosts their powers to unwitnessed heights. We know nothing about the Green Man yet, but I will be digging into Temblor’s history; perhaps the DSA investigation missed something.”

  He looked at me when he said it. Or Shelly. We both knew what he meant; the three of us knew that Temblor had been used by the Dark Anarchist — that the time traveler had somehow triggered the exponential boost to the psychotic villain’s powers.

  “I’m going to assume the worst-case scenario,” he concluded. “If someone out there has found a way to reliably boost breakthrough powers, we need to know. We could be facing a lot more than explosively growing forestlands, so stay ready everyone. Astra, would you remain behind?”

  * * *

  I’d expected Lei Zi and Quin to stay, too, maybe talk to me about my scheduled testimony in court tomorrow, but they left with everyone else. Shelly looked questions at me, and Chakra gave me an encouraging smile in passing. The ice in my stomach thickened. What was going on?

  Not Shelly, please, not Shelly.

  Blackstone sighed and stood. He really didn’t look good — even with Chakra’s help, he had to be burning his candle at both ends. Normally, he moved as if he stood on an intimate stage, but now his fingers played with his epad without direction.

  “Hope.” Another slip — he always called me Astra when I wore the mask. “We’re going to launch a cadet team, and I want you to lead it.”

  Not Shelly, and nothing I’d dreamed of. “But — why?”

  He smiled at that.

  “Why, when I’ve always resisted fielding minors even where it’s legal?”

  I nodded. Different states had different laws; in Illinois, so long as they didn’t deploy them directly into “combat situations,” CAI teams could field minors sixteen years and older if they had emergency-appropriate powers. Still, Blackstone had brought Crash on only provisionally; he trained with Sifu, sidekicked with Rush, and wasn’t part of the regular field team. Shelly...was a special case, but I was pretty sure he’d brought her on the team just to keep an eye on her.

  He sighed again. “The Green Man is not in the Big Book of Contingent Prophecy.”

  Oh. That explained the private talk. Blackstone now belonged to a secret society of three.

  Shelly and I had taken to calling the huge database of future histories the Teatime Anarchist had left me the Big Book of Contingent Prophecy, and we really hadn’t known what to do with it. What kind of person left that kind of thing in the hands of an eighteen year old? Even if he’d seen lots of potential Future Hopes and been totally impressed — which I didn’t know since he’d also blocked all direct historical references to me and my potential lives.

  After our fight with Villains Inc., I finally asked Shell to sort and classify the thing. She ignored stuff that might have happened but definitely wouldn’t now because of the Big One, pulled together all the stuff that might still happen, and we gave the whole thing to Blackstone — who promptly freaked over the fact that someone had entrusted the contingent future histories of mankind to an eighteen year old.

  Well, yeah.

  Seeing I was following his track, Blackstone nodded.

  “In the futures the Teatime Anarchist left us to see, Ultra Class superhumans do not begin appearing until much later — and their existence is one of the things that nearly brings future society to collapse. Temblor was an obvious insertion by the Anarchist’s twin.”

  He ran fingers through his hair, disordering gray locks. “We can spend a great deal of time debating the altered chains of cause-and-effect that are leading to the accelerated appearan
ce of threats like the godzillas and the Green Man. What we can’t ignore is that a bad situation is getting worse, and in some ways we are the victims of our own success.”

  Now, I blinked. “I don’t understand.”

  “Today is a perfect example. The Green Man made his debut here. Not New York. Not L.A. Atlas and the Sentinels created the template for the post-Event superhero and superhero team, and since then Chicago has been the place for breakthroughs to come and make a name for themselves — the reason we have so many CAI teams. Culturally, we’re the superhero center of the world, the focus of superhero fandom.

  “But the Guardian teams are mostly street-heroes, my dear. Today, all the added effectives from the other CAIs only doubled our weight where it mattered, and when a new supervillain wants to make a big statement, he comes here. Last spring we were the only freshwater port to get a godzilla. The Green Man started here for the same reason. And although the future files are far from a sure guide, in all previous contingent trends, once begun, the proliferation of Ultra Class threats continues.”

  He looked away. “And in those previous futures, we still had Atlas.”

  I swallowed past the block in my throat, nodded. Reading the Sentinels’ pre-Big One future files still wasn’t easy for me, as useful as they might be; I was blocked from reading the ones involving me and in most of the older ones Atlas, John, died hard. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later, but always hard.

  “So — So, we need a bigger team. More heavies.”

  “Indeed. More like young Mr. Scott, if he proves able to control his power. But we can’t simply expand. People identify with a smaller team, and if we just bulk up on more big guns, we’ll start looking like an army.”

  That I understood. I’d spent too much time with Mom and now with Quin to miss his point. It was all about optics, public perception.

  Blackstone tapped the table. “You and Shelly and Jamal have helped to counter that impression, which has been a very good thing. And Hillwood Academy has been trying to convince us to take part in their internship program for many years now. As much as a third of their graduating students go on to wear the cape, and their program allows chosen seniors to finish their education while imbedded in a sponsoring team. We can start our new members in their senior year, keep them until twenty-one, bring new members in as they come of age. If they do well with us, they’ll be able to find positions in any CAI in the country.

  “And me?” The ice in my stomach was gone — replaced by mutant butterflies. I’m only just nineteen! The media still thinks I’m underage! I’m Girl Friday!

  He smiled warmly. “The junior team would of course include Shelly and Jamal, and you did very well in our fight with Villains Inc. last spring. It would look very odd if you didn’t lead it, don’t you think?”

  “But—” I shut my mouth. Under the screaming panic, my inside-voice was trying to get my attention.

  Hillwood.

  I’d spent sleepless hours searching through the future files for a solution to Shelly’s dangerous situation. In all the previous contingent histories, legal protections for Artificial Persons had been years away, and Legal Eagle didn’t see anything on the near horizon. But there might be a superhuman solution, and one of them was at Hillwood now. Maybe. If that hadn’t changed.

  Blackstone had no idea, but he was waving an opportunity so golden I hardly dared look at it for fear it would disappear.

  “I want my own picks,” I blurted, dread and hope leaving me dizzy.

  “Agreed. Anything else, my dear?”

  Everything. I wanted to run screaming — instead I took a breath.

  “No. No, I’ll do it.”

  “Excellent. I believe that we can bring on three more, giving you a team of seven.” He handed me an epad. “Let’s talk for a moment about power-sets and team balance.”

  * * *

  Shelly bounced on my bed, reached over, and poked me.

  “Admit it, Hope, you were wigged.”

  She’d ducked into my rooms on her way to somewhere else and caught me reading. Blackstone thought it unlikely, but for all we knew the Green Man might pop up any time, and we all had to stay ready to suit up as long as the Sentinels remained first in the response queue. I was back to wearing everything but my mask and wig, cape, and the breastplate armor I could buckle on in a second. Shelly needed the assembly rack upstairs in the launch bay to bolt her into her blue and silver “Fighting Galatea” gear and loadouts, so she dressed civilian.

  I swatted her hand away, resisting the urge to hide my epad — she’d just hack it if she thought there was something I didn’t want her to see — and sighed. “No.”

  “Really? The tree outside your window made you cry for weeks after that silly movie.”

  Raising the pad higher, I ignored her smirk. “It kept scraping the window when the wind blew. I was seven, Shell — I was scared of a lot of things.”

  “Doctors, trees, frogs...”

  “Hey, they jump at you!” Eventually Dad had cut back the tree branch, but until then I’d slept with the parentals when Shelly couldn’t stay over. Mom and Dad never understood it; I’d get scared and cry, then Shell would tease me until I cried about being scared. “Mom expects you for dinner Friday night.”

  She nodded absently, rolling over to lie on her stomach and pick blanket-fluff. “So...”

  I switched off the pad and laid it on the bed, stretched. My eyes burned from hours of browsing the Hillwood Academy files and preparing my arguments, trying not to think about court tomorrow or about Seven (he wasn’t becoming an obsession, really), and I was glad to see Shelly for guilty reasons.

  She was still Shell, my BFF, but we weren’t joined at the hip anymore. I wasn’t the girl who’d followed her everywhere. When I wasn’t training or studying or patrolling I was at school or trying to absorb all the procedures and manuals and action-histories Blackstone was dumping on me (in bigger and bigger piles, recently), and she liked to hang with Crash. She didn’t try and take my time with the Bees — didn’t even ask about them — and only went out with me now when I went home.

  We were a team again, different, but I could still read her; I couldn’t tell her about Hillwood and my new plans, not yet, but I’d been expecting this conversation anyway.

  “Mal isn’t in the Book either, is he?”

  Shell rolled back over and kicked her bare feet. Only her too-smooth skin hinted that she wore a body fabricated in Vulcan’s labs.

  “No, he’s not.” Which made sense and echoed Blackstone’s observations. It was statistically unlikely that many post-January 1st superhumans from the old future, the one without the Big One in it, would be appearing now. Instead we’d be getting more and more new and different superheroes and supervillains that the Teatime Anarchist had never seen or read about. Like the Green Man. One change led to another in a domino cascade; alter one tiny detail and change could propagate pretty fast.

  Like how I would have never have become Astra if TA’s evil twin hadn’t changed my future by dropping a freeway overpass on me.

  Like how I would have died in Washington fighting The Ring, if TA hadn’t asked Atlas to bring me onto the team and keep me in Chicago. Like how The Ring would have attacked Washington later, instead of hitting us early in Los Angeles because of the opportunity created when DA triggered the Big One and pretty much derailed the future.

  Like how Atlas wouldn’t have died instead of me.

  “Hope?” Shelly tipped her head back, looking at me upside down. “You’ve got that look.”

  “Sorry.” I rubbed my eyes with fisted hands. “M’okay, seriously. I just...” I looked for a distraction she’d accept, found it and realized my face was heating up. Knowing she could tell just deepened the flush.

  “Do you think it’s okay for me to be — to like someone now?”

  I realized I should have known better than to give her that kind of ammunition when her eyes lit up. They didn’t look artificial at all.

  �
��Eeeeee! Ohmygodwho?” She’d never stop now.

  “Seven,” I whispered. “He kissed me the night of the Omega operation, but it wasn’t like...” It wasn’t like for luck, or like the time he’d playfully kissed me at Metrocon last year. It was different, like he hadn’t been sure I was coming back and wanted to get it in just in case.

  Did I want it to be different? I’d finished the mission, gone back to pizza with the Bees, and Seven hadn’t said anything about it. Not a word, which was just wrong. Who does that? And I didn’t dare ask, but The Kiss kept getting bigger and bigger in my head and the current security situation meant Blackstone was sending us out together all the time. My dreams were getting interesting again, and his blond mop and chin dimple were getting way too fascinating. Nope, not obsessed.

  I dropped back against the headboard, and Shelly rolled to her knees so she could get a better look. I closed my eyes but she’d seen enough.

  “OMG,” she breathed, whatever else she’d come in here for forgotten. “I’d been wondering — you used to crush at least once a year and it’s been almost that long. But you never had one of them die before.”

  I groaned and grabbed a pillow to hide behind. “Don’t say that. What do I do?”

  “Kiss him back!”

  The pillow turned my scream into a muffled protest. She grabbed it and pulled. Since she was as strong as Vulcan could make her and I didn’t want feathers everywhere, I let her tug it down.

  “Seriously Hope, you are such a chickenshit. You never make the first move. Or even the second unless they’re stupefyingly obvious. We could pass him a note: ‘Check yes if you want to go out with me.’”