Hope hit the snowdrift and tumbled butt over blonde bob, but the snow was soft and she could have fallen a lot further without injury. The snow was also barely cold enough to announce the sensation and tasted like spun carnival sugar on her tongue.
“Watch that step,” Jackie snarked, helping her to her feet. She stood on the snow, her quality leather boots not sinking more than a quarter-inch into the drift, but that was a trivial note in the symphony of impossible that stretched out in front of Hope.
Curtains of blue and green fire lit the night sky above them, the Northern Lights in extravagant, glorious performance. Nothing less would have matched the scene below. Down the slope from the girls awaited a collection of buildings half-buried in new snow, a village painted by Thomas Kincaid or some other artist capable of painting sentiment and warmth into every brick and cross-paned window. People smaller than the size the buildings called for moved from shop to shop in the cobblestone square, around the huge striped pole that marked the center of the impossible town.
Hope started to laugh.
“The North Pole? Really? Jackie Frost?”
Jackie grinned. “Now you’re getting it, kid. C’mon.”
Breathless and dizzy, Hope lifted to glide down the hill rather than flounder along beside Jackie, and they hit the cobblestones and strolled through town without the scurrying elves paying a bit of attention to them. Jackie led her through the square and to the building on its other end, half a toyshop and half city hall.
Hope stopped at the steps.
“I’m going to meet…”
“The Easter Bunny? Yeah, right through those doors.” She laughed at the tongue Hope showed her. “You know who. Scared?”
“No,” Hope whispered, forgetting Jackie’s teasing. “No.” She ran up the steps.
The front hall smelled of pine and cider and cocoa and sugar cookies, every smell Hope had ever associated with Christmas. Jackie led her past open shops where elves spun wishes into reality, and through a small door at the back of the hall. Out of the bright hall, Hope blinked as her eyes adjusted to the dimmer lamp and fire-lit room. It was a smaller office, with wall-to-wall shelves stuffed with account books, an old carved roll-top desk, and a big chair in front of the fireplace.
Santa Clause sat at the desk, shirt collar open and sleeves rolled up, a pencil behind his ear. He stood as Jackie closed the door on them.
“Hello, Hope.”
He opened his arms, and Hope barely remembered not to crush him. His beard smelled like winter forests, but she forced herself to let go before hugging a huge man to whom she hadn’t been introduced got awkward.
“Thanks for that, child.” He twinkled at her. “Sit down.” A second chair had appeared by the fire, with a hot-chocolate laden table.
Hope sat. “I’m in a coma, right? I’ve been dreaming since the sorority house?” She knew it wasn’t so, but had to check off the boxes anyway, and Santa smiled to acknowledge the hidden question.
“Would that it were so simple. But given your own experiences, you know that it isn’t.”
Hope found a mug of cocoa in her hands, her feet up in front of the fire. “Would it be rude of me to ask? How real this really is?”
“On a line with God on one end and the idlest post-cookie dream on the other, this place falls only slightly to the right of your waking life, my dear. Dear Vel asked if you could have sanctuary here if it came to it, and although I knew nothing about you until your name appeared on the Nice List last night, it is my absolute pleasure. If only you could stay.”
And the cocoa didn’t taste quite so perfect. “Home.”
“Yes, I assume that is where you eventually wish to go. In some ways this place is but a reflection of the magic of your home.”
Hope nodded, the sudden wave of absolute longing nearly crushed her, until the wood in the fireplace popped, throwing out a spark and bringing her back to herself.
“My domain is Christmas,” Santa gently explained. “It is the holiday that anchors Winter, and my borders reach only as far as the reality you just came from. That’s why your name only now appeared on my list.”
Hope chased Santa’s hint to its conclusion. “Which means nobody will be able to find me, here.”
“No. You have ‘broken your trail,’ so to speak.” He pushed his spectacles down his nose, regarded Hope over them. “You are a good girl, Hope. One of the best. And you are welcome here for as long as you wish to stay—indeed Christmas could use you. Hope is one of its greatest gifts, after all. But home… That you will have to look for.”
“Then I have to go.” Hope swallowed the growing lump in her throat, the song playing in her head. Childhood joyland, mystical merry Toyland. Once you pass its borders, you can never return again.
“Not true,” Santa said sternly. “Christmas is ever a return to this place. Adults visit it with their children every December the twenty-fifth—indeed you don’t really know Christmas until you’ve watched it with grown up eyes.”
Hope nodded again, blinking. “But I still need to go.”
“Not today, or even tomorrow. The elves are still preparing a few things you’ll need. But when you’re ready, there is this.” Santa held a snow globe in his hand, appearing like one of Blackstone’s tricks. Hope gingerly accepted it. In clearest crystal on a gold filigree base, wrapped in gently swirling snow, lay Chicago’s skyline. It wasn’t a model.
“I cannot take you home,” Santa said regretfully when she looked up. “As I said, your home lies beyond my boundaries. But this can send you on your way. It has twelve turns in it, one for each day of Christmas, and then it must wait for the next turning of the year to fully recharge its power. We can hope that twelve is all you need.” Then he smiled, and despite everything that waited outside of this moment, Hope laughed. It was his magic, and it wrapped her up in its warm embrace.
Three days later, properly dressed in an Astra-suit that he promised would weather her travels and more, the magic followed her when she turned the globe and disappeared in a rush of Christmas snow.
Vel looked up when Jackie came through the mirror.
“She’s gone?”
“On her way. She’s a tough kid. She’ll make it.”
Vel scowled. “She shouldn’t have to ‘make it.’ She should have been able to sit right here till her people came for her.”
“Yeah well, should—” Jackie shrugged. “You know it was The Super Patriots, right?”
“Duh. Cinemaniac pops over to Salem? Just on time to out her?”
“They were hoping you and Celia would fight for her. That woman is one tough bitch, and she’s got the power of a state behind her. But only when the law’s on her side, and Legal would have crushed you both.”
“Yea, well.” Vel mimicked her friend. “So they won’t leave me alone—I knew that already. I feel like punching bad guys until dawn. Want to patrol?”
“Can we invite Princess? And then shots!”
Vel laughed and it felt good. “And then shots. After the punching. A bunny has to have her priorities.”
“Damn straight! And maybe we’ll see the kid in another crossover. When The Super Patriots aren’t hounding your fluffy tail anymore.”
“I’ll put it on my wish list. Call Princess, and I’ll change.”
The Oz Job
by Marion G. Harmon
Grendel
“It is almost always true that the more titles one has, the less happy one is. The greater the title, the heavier its weight.”
Her Most Excellent Majesty Princess Ozma the Sixth, Defender of the Emerald City and Empress of Oz.
“Grendel, you are good to go. Go, go, go.”
I wanted to tell Dispatch I’d heard them the first time, but Watchman heard too and dropped me. Flying five hundred feet up had kept us clear of the cloud of superheated steam rising above the Braidwood Nuclear Station as Tsuris pushed it away from town, but I was down in it in seconds. The membranes I’d grown over my eyes cut visibility,
but saved my vision—it would have grown back, but temporary blindness right now would be inconvenient. The cork-textured thermal armor layer of skin, grown on the way up, left me feeling like I’d stepped into a spa instead of dropped into Hell. My outermost layer of nerveless leathery skin was already ablating away.
I barely saw the ground through the fog before it hit me, but I’d come down loose and ready. The broken pavement shattered a bit more, and I stood to look around.
The Braidwood Reactor was a pressurized water reactor, which they said meant it used water as both coolant and a neutron moderator in the plant core. Or it should have been; someone—probably the Ring—had decided to see what would happen if the plant’s pressure was compromised while its control-mechanisms were disabled. A bomb and a cyberattack had done the trick and now the Sentinels were trying to save the day.
We couldn’t save the plant; it was done for.
“You need to move to the reactor vessel, Grendel. Temperature readings give us less than ten minutes to meltdown.” Meltdown—when the rods got hot enough to melt their cladding and contaminate the already superheated water in the core now depressurizing and boiling into steam. They’d told me ten times; if I couldn’t get the rods out, fuel-coolant interaction had a fantastic opportunity to generate enough H2 to spark a massive hydrogen explosion totally shredding the plant’s already compromised containment. The contaminated coolant would be into the air and groundwater, creating a Chernobyl Event. Fun times for everybody.
Following the ping of my GPS navigator, I punched where it marked the spot. A minute’s work removed the shielding above the core, and now I could feel the heat. I thickened my skin as much as I could without losing grip function, and started hand-cranking the rods back into their graphite-cladding travel housings.
And this was going too slow.
With oxygen-saturated blood, I could hold my breath for maybe eight minutes—letting superheated steam into my lungs wouldn’t kill me right away, but it would be a start and then I’d be helpless to keep myself from dying. “Dispatch, I need a bath. Now.”
“Understood, Grendel. Stand by.”
I pulled two more fuel rods and then had to stop and grab hold as Riptide dumped Lake Michigan on me.
“Temperature still rising,” Dispatch informed me redundantly.
Yeah, yeah. Riptide wasn’t close enough to command the water inside the core, but I could take a chance on breathing now. I didn’t die.
Five minutes later they announced temperature leveling, and eight minutes later I ripped the whole upper plate from the core barrel and carried it out of there to where suited plant workers could remove and store the rods.
“Crisis averted, Grendel,” Lei Zi said in my ear. “Good job.”
“Anytime.” I headed for the decontamination tent. The sun wasn’t even up yet, and already I wanted to call it a day.
Of course I couldn’t; my earbud chirped while I was in the chemical shower. “Grendel, we’re leaving cleanup to the Crew,” Lei Zi informed me. “I, Variforce, Riptide, and Tsuris are remaining to handle short-term containment and security. Watchman is flying you back to the Dome and then returning.”
I shook water out of my dreads. “What’s going on?”
“When you need to know, which you won’t until you’re back there. Go.”
Well that was fine; it wasn’t like the day could get any more exciting than stopping a nuclear meltdown, right?
Ozma
I had come to know Hope’s closest friend well. The girl had been through a respectable number of transformations: a human girl, a quantum-ghost copy of the deceased girl, a robot girl, and now a quantum-ghost and flesh and blood pairing referred to as Shell and Shelly respectively. They might be two people now (I was hardly certain of that, but willing to leave such questions to philosophers), but they still acted in concert to the point of ending each other’s thoughts when they were in sync. To live through so many fundamental transformations was a rare experience, even in Oz, and I found the two of them fascinating.
This morning I found them worrying. “You cannot find Hope anywhere?”
“No!” Shell confirmed. She’d burst into my lab wearing her civilian “gynoid dronebot” body. “And there are only a couple of ways that’s possible. Someone could be using a—”
“—quantum-interdiction field,” Shelly continued from the screen she’d commandeered to speak through. “But that’s Verne-tech stuff and—”
“—this mission didn’t have anything to do with that kind of thing. We think.”
“Very well.” I turned off the Bunsen burner I had lit to heat a distillation of cloud salts. “And what have you done so far?”
Both of them looked back at me helplessly.
“We can’t do anything,” Shell finally admitted. “She’s been gone for hours, but the mission she’s on is a classified Department of Superhuman Affairs operation. The DSA team she was with—”
“—and the investigation team they called in won’t let her disappearance out. We’ve been watching them, hoping—”
“—that they’ll figure out what happened. They haven’t.”
“They don’t even know if she’s alive,” Shelly finished.
I took off my lab coat. “And so you’ve called everyone in, I presume.”
They both nodded. “Even Jacky—she’ll be here by tonight.”
“I see.” I considered the girls for a moment. “Then it would be best if our meeting takes place here.” One of the first things I’d done when I moved in was set up protections to ensure privacy, and when those in authority believe a problem is their responsibility, they frown on others taking an independent interest. “While the rest are on their way, I can begin my own investigation. Nix? Will you please assist me?”
By the time Mal and Jamal arrived, I had consulted my mirrors and learned, to my carefully hidden relief, that I could not find Hope either. Whatever Hope’s physical state, she was beyond the reach of my magic as well as the quantum-twins’ ability to hear her through their link—a negative result that left open the possibility of a positive outcome.
And while there was a possibility, I would be positive.
Brian was the last to arrive, looking slightly cooked. He smelled of unnatural chemicals and I didn’t doubt he had an interesting story to tell, when an opportune moment arrived.
Seeing all of us together didn’t improve his mood. “What’s going on?”
I smiled fondly, pointing to a seat. I would never tell him that I had started my lab work early today to keep from spying on his mission. Or simply fretting. Princesses didn’t fret. “Perhaps now that you’re here, Shell will tell us.”
“Hope’s vanished!”
“Again?” Grendel sat. “She’s about due.”
I frowned at his flippancy, but had to allow that was true. Shell didn’t receive Grendel’s unconcern well. “We can’t find her! Nobody can.”
“Perhaps,” I suggested, “now that we are present you should take it from the top?”
“Right. Okay.” She visibly got a grip on herself. “The details are classified. The whole op is, but the DSA recruited Hope to be bait. Some breakthrough serial killer is targeting victims close to her description, under a very specific set of circumstances. So Hope and a basket of others with powers that pretty much guaranteed their safety were put in those circumstances. He picked Hope. Now she’s vanished.”
A wave of protest went around the lab table. Jamal raised a hand. “Hey, you said ‘killer’ and ‘victims.’ Did the previous victims vanish, too?”
“Nope. He just made them horribly dead.”
I put a hand on Brian’s arm; his claws were out and making chalkboard noises on my steel lab table. We had never discussed the matter, but I was certain that in our first months here Hope could have made Brian her boyfriend with the slightest expression of interest. Fortunately she didn’t play those sorts of games, and he had settled into a kind of older brother protectiveness towards th
e girl. “I assume that there was good cause to assume that our Hope would not be treated likewise?”
“Nearly invulnerable, duh. The others got—never mind, it’s not what happened to her.”
“Can you show us what happened to her?”
“Yes! Here it is, what she saw.” She pointed at the lab’s main screen, which lit up to show a bedroom. The camera motion told us this was the scene through Hope’s eyes, translated to digital through her connection with Shell. Hope closed the bedroom door and turned out the lights, then walked into the connected bathroom, flipping on the bulb over the vanity mirror. In the mirror we could see the pink University of Chicago tank top and white sleep shorts she wore, and the circus clown standing right behind her. Hope didn’t have time to turn before he came out of the mirror at her.
Then it got confusing, but after the first scream the rest weren’t hers—they were his as she grappled with him. He obviously couldn’t make her let go, and— I blinked. “I believe that the mirror swallowed them?”
Shell replayed the last couple of seconds in slow motion, and yes, when the clown’s flailing hand touched the mirror it seemed to jump right at us before the image froze. Nobody in the lab took this well and, pitching my voice evenly to try and inject a tone of calm, I summed up. “So, the killer succeeded in escaping back into the mirror.” It didn’t work, but it seldom did with Shell.
“With Hope! Wherever she’s gone I can’t find her, and the DSA agents on this have got nothing! Zip. Zilch. Zero. Nada. Nothing.”
I saw Brian open his mouth to protest, shook my head. “Is there anything else?”
“Only that the mirror exploded into a zillion pieces, completely stripped the paint off the opposite wall. Anyone else standing in the room would have been bleeding hamburger.”
“And what does the DSA make of that?” I didn’t ask how she knew what the DSA was doing, with Hope no longer there.
Wearing the Cape 6: Team-Ups and Crossovers Page 9
