She sighed again, straightening up. "I know. I don't date."
"Oh."
It was a polite oh, not intended to really go anywhere, but she looked at me.
"I had a boyfriend when I changed, and it didn't last." She stroked her shiny, slick-smooth cheek. It squeaked, the sound of rubber on rubber. "He said it felt like he was dating Barbie."
I honestly had no idea how to respond to that horrifyingly personal revelation, but she didn't seem to expect me to. We drove back to the Dome in silence. I kept quiet, grateful for the time to think. I still didn't know how I felt yet—everything was happening so quickly.
She probably thought I needed a few moments before what came next; with the costume it was official, and the whole team was waiting for me when we returned to the Dome. They welcomed me with a beating.
Chapter Seven
Protestors from Citizen's for Human Rights picketed the Dome this morning, this time to protest the Illinois Supreme Court decision upholding the right of superheroes to testify in court under their superhero identities, thus denying defendants the right to directly confront their accusers. A spokesperson argued "No court would accept the testimony of a Klan member wearing his hood, or of an 'anonymous source' on tape or a fuzzed out screen. Why should so-called superheroes get special privileges?"
Chicago News at Five
* * *
I exaggerate, but not by much. They weren't wasting any time; I had my costume, and without a moment to breathe I was going to meet the whole team. Atlas waited for us in uniform at the elevator.
"Astra," he said. He took in my new look and nodded. "I approve. Right this way." Stepping aside, he ushered us into the Assembly Room. I'd seen them all in pictures, of course, but now I stood in a room filled with some of the world's most famous superheroes, all in full costume and watching me. I nearly hyperventilated.
Ajax and Blackstone flanked what had to be Atlas' empty chair, Ajax looming large in his black-on-black armor. Across from him, Blackstone wore his usual elegant tuxedo and opera cape, his white mustache and Van Dyke beard elegantly trimmed, dressed to take the stage for his magic act.
Rush, the Sentinels' current speedster, sat on Ajax' left in his red and white racer's jumpsuit, his half-visored helmet off to expose a blond buzzcut and surfer boy looks. Nimbus sat beside him, a luminous white hologram of a woman surrounded by a glowing aura that fuzzed her edges and lines to softness. She looked ethereal, even angelic, but Quin had called her the most dangerous member of the team. Chakra sat next to Blackstone, dressed like a vaguely Hindu tribal dancer in a midriff-baring red vest and skirt loaded down with lots of gold jewelry. Beneath lustrous auburn curls her brown eyes regarded me warmly.
Quin walked around to sit on her right and I took the empty seat beside her as Atlas took his place. I fidgeted with my cape.
"Thank y'all for coming." he said. Most of them smiled at me encouragingly, though Rush just looked bored. I smiled back, as nervous as a cat at a dog show.
"There will be a welcoming dinner later, and Willis assures me it will be superb."
There were chuckles all around and he nodded to me.
"I would like everyone to welcome Astra to the team; she'll be training with us for now, and we'll be introducing her to the public. For later, who knows? Now, in a normal business this would be the point where we all introduce ourselves and share our favorite movies or do some such damnfool get-to-know ritual. Since she already knows everything the media feels fit to print 'bout us folks, and we've all read and discussed her file, we can forget about all that. Some embarrassment for the new hand is traditional, though, so, Astra? Could you say a few words?"
I jumped, then stood. Right. Thank you speech number one coming up. Thanks Mom. I cleared my throat.
"Only that I'm very grateful for the amazing opportunity to be working with all of you. I know this is a unique opportunity, and I'll work very hard not to let everyone down."
I sat and they applauded.
"Short as a Truman speech." Ajax said approvingly.
"Yup," Atlas said, standing. "And now I reckon we should get down to the main event."
We all trooped down the hall that led to the infirmary and gym as I wondered what was going on, but we went through the doors opposite. In all the movies I'd seen, superhero headquarters came with a high-tech training room that fired lasers and missiles, threw out traps, even created virtual reality environments to fight in. This was just a big, high-ceilinged room, completely bare except for some brightly painted red circles on the floor.
Here Ajax took over. He twirled his maul end over end, caught it as lightly as a baton, and gave me the same friendly smile he had this morning.
"This is our primary training room," he said. "For urban tactical training we share an open range outside of town with the Crisis Aid and Intervention teams, and there's a practice range down the hall for target practice. This room is strictly for drilling and sparring, and when we want to train against different threat types we invite others in to join us."
I nodded and he continued.
"We'll have plenty of time in the coming weeks to do serious training; today we just want to give you an idea of how we fight individually. I understand you've had some training yourself?"
I swallowed. "Just the Tae-Bo gym workout and mixed self-defense. And high school field hockey. "
His smile widened.
"Then you've at least struck someone else with intent before. Good! You're now one of the strongest superhumans in the country, and when your training is complete you will be able to go one-on-one with any other Atlas-type out there. However, you have limits." He nodded to Rush and waved me forward. I followed Rush to the middle of the room, marked by one of the red circles, and we faced each other. I hastily took a stance, palms slick inside my new gloves.
"Begin." Ajax said.
Rush bowed and I copied him.
And he kicked me, knocked me to the floor, grabbed and rolled me, tossed me out of the circle. And bowed, back in the center.
I stared up at him, dizzy and wide-eyed.
"Done!" Ajax said. Rush's fists and feet, normal human bone and muscle under his armored gauntlets and boots, hadn’t hurt me at all. But I could hardly see him move, forget about touching him. It was like a cage match between a brick and a butterfly.
Ajax waved Nimbus forward, and she floated to the center as I scrambled up and returned to my position.
"Begin."
She flashed about the room, firing at me from each new position. Her low-power shots burned, the few that missed leaving scorch-marks on the wall as I tried to dodge. Then she flared, bright enough to burn herself into my retinas.
I blinked desperately, blind. She could burn a hole in me with a sustained megawatt laser burst without even trying if she wanted to. And since she was solid as a sunbeam I couldn't touch her any more than I could touch Rush.
"Done!" Ajax shouted.
She flashed back to the center and we bowed again as I tried to get my breath.
Blackstone multiplied himself into a dozen levitating Blackstones, all of them disappearing with a flourish and a puff of smoke.
The Harlequin just stood there, inviting me to hit her as hard as I could. When I nerved myself up to do it, I felt her bones bend and she bounced away like a superball. She rebounded off the wall and did spinning leaps back to the center to give us all a bow.
Rush laughed and even Atlas smiled. I flushed.
When Ajax donned his helmet and marched out to stand in the center, I wanted to run. Instead I took a shaky breath and settled into a defensive stance, weight on my back foot, fists up.
I can do this.
"Begin," he said.
We bowed.
And I launched myself at the far wall like the goal posts at the end of the field. Through him.
He folded over me with an explosive grunt as, still accelerating, I drove us both into the wall. It boomed and rebounded, and as he slid to the floor I flew t
o the ceiling, where I hovered, breathing hard.
Everyone stood in shocked silence as he climbed to his feet and removed his helmet.
And roared in deep, booming laughs. "Done!" he shouted, applauding.
He retrieved his maul. "You won't spar with Atlas today, and Chakra's psychic powers provide tactical support. I believe you have learned the lesson?"
I landed, light-headed.
"It's paper-scissors-rock, isn't it?"
"That's a simplification, but yes. Each of us has our strengths and weaknesses, and the purpose of a team is to cover them for each other. Well done." I flushed again as they all applauded and gathered around to shake hands like I'd passed some sort of initiation. All except for Atlas, who stood in the door with a smile that stopped with his lips.
* * *
Everyone was perfectly nice, but after dinner I went back to my rooms. Mom had sent over my entire winter wardrobe, my laptop, school things, and even a big box of odds. I killed a couple of hours putting everything away the way I wanted it, till I found myself endlessly rearranging my bathroom stuff. Flopping on my bed, still in costume, I tried to think about tomorrow and the rest of the week.
And the next.
It still seemed unreal, like I was an unwilling guest at one of those live-action adventure parties; no matter how much I wanted to I couldn't break character and leave. Or maybe I'd been kidnapped by elves, dragged off to fairyland where everything was the same but different, full of magic and odd rules I had to learn or else. I tried to remember my earlier resolve. Maybe I could click my heels three times and go home?
My mask itched and I peeled it off.
There came a knock at the door and I scrambled to open it to find Atlas in the hall, still in costume too. I remembered reading that he'd bought a penthouse somewhere in the Loop after his divorce. Was he flying home?
"Are you done for the day, or do you have a little time tonight?" he asked.
"Yes. I mean—yes, I have some time."
"Then I'd like to show you something. Put your mask back on."
He took me up another elevator, a secure one that didn't stop at the ground floor atrium, and we stepped out into a bay as big as a five-car garage. Racks of pallets lined the walls, and at the push of a button the ceiling opened. It was a launch bay for fliers like us, complete with loads of emergency equipment.
Now he grinned.
"Try to keep up."
I started as he launched himself through the bay doors, then leaped after him. He got a good head start, and without my new super-vision I'd have lost him as he climbed straight up into the night sky. My ears didn't pop as we raced upward, but the whistle of air thinned, and then I lost sight of him in the clouds.
But he wasn't trying to get away; when I broke through the cloud layer he was waiting for me. As I floated up beside him (that's really what it felt like—like I was a floating, self-directed balloon) he smiled. A genuine smile this time.
"Look around."
I did, and gasped in delight.
The clouds below weren't thick, and the lights of Chicago lit them from beneath so that we seemed to be floating above a sea of pearlescent fog. Then he pointed up. Undimmed by the lights of the city and the denser air below, the Milky Way stretched above us in a great celestial arch, impossibly bright and surrounded by more stars than I'd known existed. I blinked and felt tears cooling my cheeks, but I didn't care.
It was beautiful.
"I thought you should see this," he said softly. "Before you spend too much time down there in the mud and the blood. With everything that gets taken from you, you get a few things too."
"Thank you." I watched the clouds drift.
"Atlas?" I said.
"Hmm?"
"About the Teatime Anarchist—"
"Nope."
"What?"
"I wondered when you'd ask. Every Crisis Aid and Intervention team in Chicago is on alert, all of us are in the Dome, and why do you think I'm still in uniform? But even if we got the call tonight, you wouldn't be with us; you're a trainee, with no skills yet despite the stunt you pulled on Ajax."
"But—"
"We should be hunting him? The feds are doing that, with a lot more resources than we have. Blackstone is our team intelligence specialist, and he has no leads. We're glorified emergency response professionals, rescue workers, and civilian contractors to the police when other superhumans are involved."
He shrugged.
"We're not gods, Astra; half the time all we get to do is the cleanup. Leave the counter-terrorism to the pros. Go to your party tomorrow. Say goodbye to your friends, and next week we get serious. Come back inside when you're ready, the Dome'll be open."
And he dropped out of sight, leaving me alone above the pearl-bright sea.
PART TWO
Chapter Eight
Miraculous powers have not made the world a more peaceful place. Governments, whether liberal democracies or totalitarian oligarchies, rest upon a monopoly of force or the threat of force, and history has shown us what happens when significant centers of non-government force emerge: insurrections, civil wars, criminal oligarchies, warlords, terrorist movements. The results are all around us. China fragmented into the Chinese states. North Korea collapsed completely. Radical Islamists carved the Caliphate out of the Muslim states of the Middle East and nearly wiped out Israel before they were stopped. Mexico fights an ongoing civil war with supervillain-led drug cartels. The Event has forever broken the monopoly on force.
Prof. Charles Gibbons, The New Heroic Age
* * *
Thursday started with the press conference. Quin and Al directed it, moved me about, and had me give a short statement—a repeat of my little speech the day before. I hoped the media saw a confident new superheroine instead of a scared girl playing dress-up. After the supervised interview Quin had promised Terry, she handed me off to Ajax for my first training session.
It wasn't at all what I expected.
Instead of going right to the fight-training, Ajax started me on what he called "resistance training." He didn't mean bodybuilding; he meant teaching me how to react to everything using less effort. Much less.
I'd done pretty well the past few days just not hurting anybody or doing any damage—except for the warped steering wheel, burst pillow, shattered cup… It felt like everything around me was made of tissue, thin plaster sheet, or cardboard. And people, Ajax said, were just as breakable. I had to learn to move safely through a fragile world, and our first session made me completely paranoid.
But I had to do the gallery event. It was my show, my last chance to see the Bees before "leaving town," my last day, really, of remotely normal life. I conferred with Susan through the day, went over the lists one more time, and made sure the gallery had good insurance. They could hardly lock me in the Dome, but Ajax made me promise to eat off napkins instead of plates, be very careful shaking hands, and not make any sudden moves.
A lot of Chinatown burned the day of the Event and the renewal brought serious gentrification, so the Silk Road Art Gallery stood just down the street from the Pui Tak Center in a shiny-new outdoor mall designed to look like a street in ancient China. The night's charitable donations were going to build health clinics and water treatment plants for villages in Anhui, China's poorest successor-state (President Touches Clouds had continued the East Asia Marshall Plan launched by President Kayle, and private charities were a big part of it). But the event would also bring a lot of upscale attention to the gallery and the shops around it, the reason the entire mall was hung with hundreds of paper lanterns, Yuet's next door had agreed to provide incredible Cantonese delicacies for our guests, and Shennong's Book across the mall offered to supply the erhu musician and tea.
I'd vowed to be no-touchy, but Annabeth practically clotheslined me when I crossed the gallery's threshold at seven. She pulled me into a hug and I froze as we narrowly missed knocking an ivory figurine to the floor. Holding me at arm's length, she and the
rest of the Bees gave my little green cocktail dress a once-over. I'd bought it for the party, and it had an empire waist with a ribbon round the front to define my hint of a bust. She gave it her critical approval, then hugged me again.
"Omigosh!" she enthused. "This party is amazing!"
Megan rolled her eyes while Julie laughed. Dane loomed beside them, there squiring Annabeth. They'd been together since freshman year when she'd started dating him because he was a jock and they made a matched set.
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