Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes Read online

  “While you’re here you will be working with a select research team,” she explained as we walked. “You have a great deal in common and I think you’ll like them; they have a secret handshake and you even get to spit.”

  Turning us down a smaller side hall, she ushered me into a conference room with an island of standing desks surrounded by large smart-glass screens. The room wasn’t small, but the five people already in it filled it nicely—one of them the last person I’d have expected to see here.

  Standing together as a group when we came through the door, they’d obviously been told I was coming. Ali introduced them as the Oroboros Research Group: the dark, uniformed man with handlebar mustaches was General Arun Rajabhushan, the thin, bearded European man wearing a scholar’s jacket with padded elbows was Doctor Leiman Hall, the large blonde woman in the blue suit was Doctor Vivian Ash, and the deeply black and completely bald man in the sport coat and sweater was Doctor Kelly Humphries.

  General Rajabhushan gave me a warm smile. The rest of their responses to our introduction were mixed, but I paid barely enough attention not to be rude; the fifth team-member couldn’t possibly be here and it was all I could do to keep from screaming, from grabbing onto her and flying us out of here, up the open well, through the entry hall’s skylight, and out.

  The fifth Oroboros was Shelly.

  * * *

  “She’s all yours,” Director Shaw informed everyone. “Send her back to me when you’re done.” She turned and walked out. Huh?

  Behind everyone else’s back, Shelly grinned wide enough to break her face. I had to tear my eyes away from her to focus on the general, and I couldn’t have formed a coherent statement to save my life but Mom’s social training saved me.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet all of you.” Okay, not exactly a clever response, but better than babbling. The old general’s eyes crinkled, like he saw right through me and knew just how badly I was boggled.

  “The pleasure is mutual. I understand that you are not certain how long your stay will be?”

  Pull it together, Hope. “No, I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

  He nodded. “Of course. You are far too valuable out in the world. Then we shall treat you as a new adjunct, and take as much advantage of your experience as time permits. We should start, I think, with an explanation of our purpose. Doctor Hall?”

  The scholar cleared his throat, dropping into lecture mode.

  “Long before the Event, physicists considered time travel to be possible in theory while offering no solution to the problem of causality—the principle that causes must precede effects. How can ‘after’, which depends upon ‘before’, have any effect upon ‘before’?

  He watched me for objections or confusion, went on. “The problem of causality is not limited to time travel; visions of the future, precognitive awareness, prophecy, all violate causality. If a psychic foresees a disaster, and that disaster is then prevented, since it did not happen what did the psychic see?

  “Although of course the scientific community still takes an interest in the question, the Event rendered the whole argument moot. The apparent paradox of future-knowledge is beside the point; breakthrough psychics and mystics have made future-knowledge very real.”

  Dr. Hall’s pedantic drone reminded me of every tenured University of Chicago professor, but everyone kept quiet for it. Having pronounced the reality of foreknowledge, he even stopped to give me a moment to raise my hand. I didn’t.

  “The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency quietly set up the Oroboros Research Group the year of the Event, under the direction of the Department of Defense. DARPA brought together a team of scientists, statisticians, behavioral psychologists, economists, historians, and a collection of the first confirmed precognitive ‘psychics.’ Their emphasis was national security but their first question was simply, ‘Can a foreseen future event be changed?’ Or is future-knowledge itself causative? Are we doomed by our foreknowledge, as in the Greek tale of King Oedipus?

  “The answer to that question was a resounding No. Foreseen futures can be changed and psychic and mystic visions are warnings, not unalterable prophecies which fulfill themselves.

  “The second question the team asked was, ‘Can we learn enough about foreseen events to guide policy?’ The answer is ‘sometimes’. The Kayle Administration’s international policy benefited tremendously from Oroboros Research Group projection papers. Oroboros’ prediction of the collapse of China based on extrapolations from three precognitive episodes led to President Kayle’s Pacific Initiative and the creation of the alliance system that became the League of Democratic States.”

  He paused again for any questions from the class. Inside I was…not panicking, exactly, but working hard not to wig out. This was one of the Big Secrets. Maybe the biggest.

  I hadn’t followed politics much, before my breakthrough. Now I knew that a lot of people had wondered how President Kayle—before the Event a political party player with zero interest in international politics—had managed to guide not just us but pretty much the western world and half of Asia through the blowup and mess that followed the Event. Half the nations that came through it intact owed it to the alliance web he’d seemed to spin up out of nothing but pure will, an uncanny sense of timing, and the ability to always seem to guess right. President Infallible.

  Most of the conspiracy theorists out there believed that Director Kayle was a secret breakthrough. Instead he’d had the Oroboros.

  “Who knows?”

  “Excuse me?” Obviously not the question he’d been expecting from me.

  “Who knows about the Oroboros and what you do?”

  “The leaders of the nations making up the League,” General Rajabhushan answered for him. “The US President, the prime ministers of India, Australia, Japan, Great Britain, and the other parliamentary states. They agree to have their memories of the group’s true nature removed when they leave office. The same deal applies to members of the group itself, with a few exceptions. In Littleton, only the Institute Director knows what we really do.”

  He chuckled, eyes crinkling in wry amusement.

  “Wheels within wheels. Even here, to everyone outside the inner circle the Oroboros Research Group is just a think-tank of historians, economists, analysts, and political scientists dedicated to organizing intelligence data and pooling their expertise to write projection papers for the League’s leadership. We have our own segregated system and security measures.”

  “So you keep your…precognitives?...here in Littleton?”

  “No. Our psychic resources are scattered. Some are publicly known psis, but most aren’t. Here we keep something much more valuable.”

  And this was it. I could tell by the way the others inhaled almost in unison. Even Shelly had an odd look on her face.

  “Ms. Corrigan, do you believe in the possibility of time travel?”

  …

  Really? I mean, really? The big secret of the secret-handshake-and-spit Oroboros Research Group was the Future Files? If it wasn’t for Shelly begging me with her eyes not to say anything, I’d have asked if I was being punked.

  Mom would have been proud; I managed to keep all of that off my face—Social Face was good for so much more than just hiding boredom at society parties. My “Wow, really?” response to the next revelation, that the Teatime Anarchist (publicly America’s most wanted terrorist before his confirmed death), had been a time traveler was a piece of art. I held it together while Doctor Hall rambled through an explanation of the massive file of multiple-choice future histories the Anarchist had left behind and told me all about the reconfiguring of the Littleton Cell of Oroboros to analyze and data-mine it.

  It wasn’t even the same Big Book of Contingent Prophecy that the Anarchist had entrusted to Shelly and me—it couldn’t be, since they’d been working with it for over a year, before Shelly and I had finally turned it over to Blackstone to pass on. Which was a no brainer that made me want to face-palm; of course the Ana
rchist wouldn’t have entrusted something so valuable just to two teenage girls.

  I managed to keep it together and not melt with relief when the general passed me over to Shelly for “task orientation.” Shelly solemnly ushered me out of the conference room and into a tiny office—her office, judging from the pictures. I was in half of them.

  She closed the door, took two skipping steps, and threw her arms around me.

  “Eeeee! This is fantastic! They told me you were coming! Where are you staying? Isn’t this the best? So good!”

  I managed to return the hug, mind spinning.

  “Shelly, how?”

  She pulled away, still almost dancing. “They waited till I’d spent two months going crazy in Springfield before they recruited me. So? What do you think?” She posed. Hair as close to my shade as it was possible to naturally get and pulled back in a tail, dressed in office pants and suit—even sensible slip-on shoes—she looked like a peppy teen intern.

  “But why?” And when would I be able to manage more than two words?

  She stopped bouncing, tapped her head. “The Future Files, duh. That, and my other post-death brain mods. Hope? You okay? Do you want to sit down?”

  I nodded and dropped onto a little half-couch that crowded the wall under all the pictures.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I said. They recruited me.”

  “But you were out of it!” I fought to keep my rising voice down. “You were back with your mom, back in school! Why would you... Shelly, you promised me no more tall buildings.”

  Her smile dimmed.

  “That’s not—that’s not fair. It’s not like I’m in the field, this is probably the safest place on the planet. And Mom’s here. David, too. They always need good administrators.”

  They’d even brought in Mr. Hardt? I shook my head. “What about high school? Couldn’t you—”

  “Finish? Hang around for three years sitting in class learning stuff I already know? You liked school. I always thought it was a waste of a perfectly good day. Besides, they’ve got one here; I get three hours a day, art, PE, and lunch. Math? Science? I’m pre-loaded for biochem and biophysics degrees—I could teach the high school stuff. In my sleep.”

  “And you like it here?” She’d complained about Springfield—I couldn’t imagine her happy in Littleton, population five thousand. And in a lab?

  She shrugged defiantly.

  “So it’s a little quiet. But I’m useful, more useful than I would have been back in the Dome—they need me here.” She scowled, looking at the screens that ringed her desk. “Fighting the future is tougher than I’d ever thought.” Her eyes slid back to me. “And the attraction for Mom is we live in one of the safest places there is. That and I’m away from the internet. And now you’re in, too. So sit and spill. How the hell did they pry you out of Chicago?”

  “I volunteered?”

  That took some explaining and she joined me on the couch while I went on about how I’d found out about the place—especially since I hadn’t been looking for her. Nobody was; she’d spent the last few months pretending in all her texts and emails that she’d still been going to the private school they’d enrolled her in in Springfield. Because of course not only couldn’t she tell me what she’d been doing, any references to Littleton had been redacted so cleverly I’d never notice any holes in her texts.

  She pulled her feet up to rest her chin on her knees while I explained about the Kitsune-dream, Jacky’s revelations, everything. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the pose didn’t go with the clothes (and that was just the Mrs. Lori in my head, who Shelly had never listened to anyway).

  When I finished she stared into space, absently rubbing her nose. Then she reached up and squeezed an earring I hadn’t noticed, an elegant little pearl-in-silver piece. It really looked like the one Jacky had used just yesterday.

  “Do you know why they brought you down here?”

  “I asked—”

  “I know why you came, but do you know why they let you come? Really? Are you going to help them mousetrap Kitsune?” My expression answered her question and she shook her head. “Geez, Hope. Jacky shouldn’t have let you out of her sight.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She groaned, throwing up her hands.

  “Hope! You wonder how Kitsune even knows about this place? Well, they have to be dropping bricks over it. The best security in the world, and I should know, and that sneaky little fox has gotten in. He has to have, because if he hasn’t then… Forget it, Occam’s Razor says he’s here or at least popped in sometime so he knows what the place looks like. But if he’s here now, how did he send you a dream? We’re in a separate freaking universe—telepaths can’t call out of here. So he really is ‘magical’, not that there was a whole lot of doubt there.

  “And if he’s here, why is he here? He’s an international criminal, so the answer to that question can’t be good. And why contact you? It makes no sense, but one thing our sneaky spy-guys have to be saying is that if he wanted to bring you here, and he’s still here, he might try and touch you. So dangling you and watching very, very carefully may be the best chance they have to catch a magical shapeshifter who’s already inside their security perimeter.”

  “Now that’s just…”

  She rolled her eyes. “Paranoid? We’re talking about the DSA here. And the US Marshals Service. And the Office of Naval Intelligence. Professional paranoiacs. They’re probably all hoping that Kitsune’s running some kind of con, throwing up smoke to cover a steal, because then the only threat is him and not some ‘other’ that he knows about but they don’t. But they won’t be betting on it—they can’t afford to.”

  I so wanted to disagree, but… “Veritas came with me.”

  “See? See? He’s got to be running checks on everybody, beating the bushes to see if a fox jumps out. Even Kitsune can’t hide from his truth-power if the guy asks him straight out. Easy question: ‘What is your date of birth?’ The boy or girl who lies is a four-legged varmint.”

  She flashed her old grin, eyes bright.

  “But you know what this means, right? Kitsune has challenged you—to stop him or to help him. So let them try and find him—we are going to figure out if he’s playing it straight and who he’s warning us is coming to light up the town.”

  * * *

  I wasn’t quite as certain of our plan of action as Shelly, but it seemed like it would be a better use of our time than playing Nancy Drew and trying to find Kitsune ourselves. And I was beginning to wonder just how long I was here for; until Kitsune showed his hand or someone really tried to light the town on fire? What about everything else? I’d left a lot in the air in Chicago. The Bees. School. A media-crisis. At the very least, I needed to find a way to phone home.

  Shelly had to go over an intelligence package before she headed home. She didn’t threaten to drag me home with her, which would have made me suspicious if I’d had any brain left to think about it with; since the Oroboros didn’t expect anything from me on my first day here she synced our phones and called a guide, a tiny Frisbee-shaped drone to escort me to the Director’s office. The drone led me up to the third floor aboveground, taking us through three automatic security checks along the way and past Director Shaw’s receptionist.

  Ali welcomed me into her office with the same coolness as before, and I wondered if she was just one of those people who didn’t accept capes. Which wasn’t the same thing as not accepting breakthroughs, a good thing since she had to be one of the most exotic breakthroughs I’d ever seen; she was a calico cat-girl—predominantly white and orange but with black spots, one on the side of her nose that made her face oddly lopsided. She was also barely taller than me but much better endowed, which made her a sexy cat-girl even in the office suit, and she seemed comfortable enough with herself.

  She pointed me to a chair. “So, are the two of you caught up?”

  “Um, yes? I hadn’t known we needed to catch u
p.”

  “Security protocol. Nobody living here is allowed to let anyone know they’re living here. We all have covers, usually residency in a small town in the wilds of South Dakota.”

  “And how do you—” I shook my head. “What will I be doing here?”

  “Other than working with the Oroboros and Sheriff Deitz?”

  I didn’t recognize the name. “If you already have the files, why do you need me? Or Shelly?” She didn’t blink or ask what I was talking about.

  “Shelly should be obvious.”

  “But she’s not— She’s not a computer anymore. She’s just Shelly.”

  “So she’s not useful?” Ali considered me, absently rubbing the black spot on her nose. “She’s still got the highest IQ I’ve ever seen. You didn’t know?”

  “She never said!” That had to be obvious from my face.

  “She scores above one-sixty on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. She also has true eidetic memory, she’s effortlessly multilingual, and even her motor-learning levels are off the charts; she learned how to play the violin to a concert-worthy standard at the school here in only two months. She can multitask without loss of speed or reliability to the order of three parallel tasks, and that’s something brain researchers have proven impossible. Her mind is unique.”

  I’d have sat if I wasn’t already sitting. Shelly, why didn’t you tell me?

  Tilting her head, Ali made an odd little humming sound. “Shelly calls you her Blue Fairy? She says that she became a ‘real girl’ because of you?”

  I laughed weakly. “I made a wish…”

  “Then I would guess that your wish was for the Shelly you knew—who happened to be a hyper-intelligent AI—to be a living and breathing human being again. The result is a Shelly with as smart a meat-brain as it is possible to have. Magic tends towards the literal, but there are limits when outcomes conflict.”