“He may have been uniquely vulnerable.” Director Kayle tapped the report I’d just hand-delivered him. The public didn’t even know we were back yet; I’d flown directly to Washington once our plane had touched down at O’Hare. Shelly had called from Littleton, with the full weight of the Ouroboros Group behind her, to speak to him directly and get me the clearance. We’d needed to get this done now, even though it meant leaving the rest of the team, even Blackstone—especially Blackstone, back at the Dome to recover. It was the second time I’d been in this office.
“Can you summarize this? Bullet-points, please.”
“Okay.” I organized my thoughts. After his initial, startled exclamation, Kayle sat calmly at his desk, hands folded. “It started with more dreams—I was pretty sure they came from Quan Yin. Some kind of volcanism-related disaster.” They hadn’t been so much dreams as nightmares; I’d woken from each under a pressing weight of doom impossible to shake off. I was a good Catholic girl. How had I wound up being an oracle for an Asian goddess, as sweet as she was? “Consultations with Ozma and Shelly weren’t helpful, but one of the cryptic answers Ozma got made me call my fiancé.”
Kayle smiled dryly. “Yes, your sometime-thief and Asian James Bond.”
I fought down the heat in my cheeks. “Kitsune was back over in Japan, helping Defensenet Intelligence locate another One Land cell left from last year’s attacks. He calls it ‘Sneaking and sniffing for the Chrysanthemum Throne.’”
“They do have his loyalty.”
“Not his only loyalty. Not anymore.”
“That will probably make his games more interesting.” His bland expression said nothing at all, and I suddenly burned to find and read Kitsune’s full DSA file.
I bit my lip to fight the smile. “Probably.”
“Go on.”
“The clues from my visions and Ozma’s answers took him to some old sources. He found out that, a couple of years ago, One Land set up a ‘national disruption’ event targeting the US. Something on the same scale as the one they’d tried on Japan last year. The thing is, nobody knew what it was. The project was set up as a long game, and most everyone involved was dead.”
“Intentionally?”
“We don’t know. A few One Land cells suffered big losses after that.” A couple of them by me and Defensenet.
“But Kitsune got a name, Johnny Cho. He’s a One Land operative Kitsune’s pursued multiple times. Cho was unavailable too—because an Omega Class entity called Kabukicho had him in his collection.” I eyed the Marshals, considering how much I should say.
“Kitsune’s dealt with Kabukicho before. I suppose they’re both kami? Though that’s like comparing a bottle-nose dolphin to a blue whale and saying they’re both seagoing mammals . . .” I heard a suppressed chuckle. “Anyway, Kitsune brokered a deal. We could get Johnny Cho, if we played Kabukicho’s game and won. If we lost— Well, we had to stay as long as it took us to win.”
The Director sat back. “Which brings us to the Sentinels’ disappearance. Defensenet helped you get in and out of Okinawa? And this required nearly the entire team?”
“We knew some of us—Megaton and Crash—would pretty much sit it out.” Since the replay of events took place before either of their breakthroughs had triggered, Mal and Jamal would have just replayed a few days of school three years ago. We’d taken the rest and, assigned as our liaisons, Kaminari and Kochi had at least pretended not to recognize three heroically dead ronin. They’d deftly gotten our fielded team in and out.
“The game was for us to relive about two weeks in the months just after the California Quake. Johnny Cho had set up and aborted a One Land operation in Chicago then, and the god-fish’s game was for him to carry it through while we tried to figure it out and stop him from succeeding.”
“So you let this god-like entity collect you? For as long as it took to for you to win?”
“Three tries. Three. I died twice.”
His lips twitched at that and I smoothed out my expression. I was very thankful we only remembered the last recursion like a true memory.
“Kabukicho makes you forget everything not part of the drama you’re in. After all, you have to play your part. Kitsune and I were able to fight the god-fish’s suppression of our conscious memories, Kitsune because he’s a kami himself, and me . . . well, we we snuck off and got married the night before the game began.”
The Director smiled. “‘For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’” I flushed, darn it. I remembered all of it now, Kitsune’s plan, my agonizing over it, our secret side-trip to the High Plane of Heaven. When a goddess officiates your marriage, you’re married.
“Dr. Cornelius would have said something about metaphysical truths being physical too, and the other way around. We already knew Kitsune would be able to wake me up inside the dream because of our bond—” The promissory bond the god-fish had brokered itself, which was hugely ironic. “—but only temporarily. We gambled that advancing to the full marriage bond would give me more immunity. Kitsune called it our ace in the hole.”
“And with Johnny in your hands, he just told you everything you needed to know?”
“Actually, he wouldn’t shut up.” Not once he found out we’d just return him after Jacky had her way with him if he didn’t cooperate fully. Whatever recursive loop the insane god-fish had been putting him through before we’d arrived, it hadn’t been anything like a few weeks in Chicago. “We turned him over to the Japanese government once we got what we needed. It’s all in the file.”
He tapped the epad. “Which you’ll simply give to me.”
“The next step’s kinda beyond our abilities.” And I really wanted to go home. Be with my family. Let my brain finish remembering where and when it was supposed to be. Explore the delights of snuggling with my new husband (which still felt really, really weird to say—though he was really, really good at it).
It beat long-term thinking—not something I felt up to just yet.
“But please keep us in the loop? Johnny Cho used the Ascendant to set up another California Quake-event, only bigger.”
Bigger was a good word for it. A selected mix of boosted One Landers had gone out and diverted an Earth-passing asteroid. They’d also done something to make it an almost completely invisible black-body, a hole in space. If we didn’t stop it, it would hit with a force of around 3,300 megatons, vaporizing about one hundred million cubic meters of rock. That by itself wasn’t world-ending; it would just kill everything within sixty miles.
But the rock it was aimed at sat on top of the La Garita Caldera in Colorado. The La Garita Caldera dwarfed the Yellowstone caldera by more than an order of magnitude; it was long extinct, but wouldn’t stay extinct after that hit and it would bury most of North America under ash. It was the Yellowstone Scenario taken to the next level. Between the ash and the global cooling, we and half the rest of the world would be too busy trying to survive to keep what was left of the People’s Republic of China from reclaiming its breakaway territories.
I’d dreamed of ashfall and gray rain for weeks.
If the Ascendant had known the details of the plan, he’d have wildly approved; the disaster was sure to overwhelm most national governments and of course create hundreds of thousands more breakthroughs.
I stood, straightened my cape. “So, we’ve done our duty and notified the appropriate authorities of a threat to national security. What’s going to happen to Veritas?”
The Director gave me a long look before standing. He leaned over the desk and shook my hand.
“Telepathic interrogation. Possibly memory-wipe afterward; he’s been my left hand for too many years. True memory erasure is . . . not easy and not without cost, but if he consents we may ‘rehabilitate’ him. I know it’s hard to see now, but he’s far too valuable to set aside if we can avoid it.”
Something in me unwound a little at that. Maybe it was a failure of my moral
imagination—after all the recursive version of Veritas had tried to let a terrorist attack that would have killed and maimed thousands go through—but I still couldn’t see him as truly evil. If he wasn’t, if he could be reclaimed . . . “If that’s what he wants, I’d like that.”
The Director nodded. “I’m glad to hear that. And yes, we will certainly keep you in the loop about this.
“Go home, Hope. Go be with your family, old and new. You’ve certainly earned it, you all have.” His smile deepened. “We’ll be in touch.”
Chapter Thirty One
Hello, you.
I know, I’ve neglected you terribly. I only started you because Dr. Mendel said it would help me organize my thoughts if I put them down as words I could read. Bonus, I get to come back later and realize how crazy my thinking was. Crazy; not a word Dr. Mendel likes to use. Of course I have Shell’s promise that the Sun will die before anyone but me reads any of this journal.
Because crazy fits, at least sometimes.
And reality-hopping earlier this year got me thinking about this, but this last little adventure really clinched it for me. So, here’s the thing.
It’s not fair.
I know, I know, everybody says “Life’s not fair.” It’s a cliché, because nobody’s life is perfect, or at least what they consider perfect. But it’s not fair.
First, fine, I was finally okay with being “Astra, plucky girl hero.” You bet I put that in quotes, because that’s how I’ll forever be seen.
But experiencing the huge difference between the me of right now and me of back then, when I was at my lowest? Well I just want to put my arms around myself and tell her it will be alright. Like, is it possible to feel like an older sister to a recursive iteration of your past self ? But I’m only different in my head, and I’m always going to be “Astra, plucky girl hero.” No amount of costume changes or world-saving fights are going to change that—not even for my most die-hard fans. The best I’ll probably ever be able to do is “Astra, cute-but-scary girl hero.”
Second. Has anyone else, right from the beginning, started their career as a wanna-be-hero with a prophecy hanging over their heads? And not just a prophecy. Prophecies, plural. Shell tells me that the Teatime Anarchist made a dozen or so jumps to check out the potential futures after his evil twin used a bunch of C-4 to drop the Ashland Overpass on me, triggering my breakthrough. And in practically every one of them I become this Big Darn Hero. When I don’t die, anyway, and even sometimes when I do.
So, no pressure whatsoever. Just you know, destined to Save the World or Die Trying. I need to put that on my coffee mug. Or maybe “No Apocalypses until I’ve had my first cup.”
Worse, Shell can’t tell me anything about those Awesome Me futures. Apparently after seeing what that kind of disclosure did to people, the Teatime Anarchist put a lock on passing along personal details. I can sort of understand that. After much deep thinking I think that Atlas’ romp-of-the-day approach to his romantic life (before meeting yours truly) may have been because of actually watching a video-file of his own death in a fight with Villains Inc. I know there were potential futures where I didn’t make it, either, but I’ve never seen myself die or read my own obituary. Well, except for my visit to my Worst World reality. And yup, that one Freaked Me Out. Lots of work for Dr. Mendel to do, there. Nobody looks good in their own coffin. Except maybe Jacky, but that’s because she can still accessorize.
And Shelly isn’t any more cooperative with the Ouroboros Group files, even when all I want is to know about some Happy Endings. Apparently it’s not really any better to know about good stuff that won’t or might not happen now. After my experience with that shinigami in the graveyard in Japan, I can sort of see her logic. But still, knowing that all that stuff is there, and not being able to see it, feels like an itch I can’t scratch.
It’s less of an itch now, with Good Stuff happening more and more, but still.
Also good, and bad:
It’s just been three years since the Big One, and Shell and Shelly both assure me that the future we’re actually experiencing now is so far off the rails that the Big Book of Contingent Prophecy might as well be called the Big Book of Really Detailed Fanfiction. Its helpfulness is dwindling by the day. Soon it’ll be totally AU.
Which only makes sense, since before the California Quake those potential futures never showed Dr. Pellegrini getting outed as the Ascendant, the Green Man hitting Chicago, One Land’s attack on Tokyo, etc. etc. We’ve been blown into dark uncharted waters by the Dark Anarchist’s last great act of supervillainy and DA/TA’s murder-suicide. Is the Scylla Option even valid anymore? Are our prospects better, now? Worse?
So now it’s like, “Hey, Hope, you helped save the world once! A couple of times, even! None of what we know about that’s going to help you do it again!”
Customer service announcement: The warranty on your prophecy is no longer valid.
Enough about that—or instead here’s what brought me back to all that.
Because we did save the world! Again! Yay, us! But . . .
We wouldn’t have.
It looks like Kitsune was right. In the original history, Johnny Cho cut his op short, right before bringing his trigger-man up to Chicago and priming him to go off. He aborted the op only because someone in the DSA (maybe Veritas—the Director is tearing his agency apart finding out) tipped him off that Defensenet Intelligence was on his tail.
If Kitsune hadn’t been after him, if he’d carried the op through, he’d have succeeded and we might have taken the first steps towards a civil war. Or maybe a Final War with the PRC, millions dead, the collapse of Eastern and Western Civilizations, Apocalypse incoming, etc.
But Cho still would have succeeded, even if he didn’t get what he really wanted out of it. He succeeded twice in Kabukicho’s game, even with Kitsune after him. Only Kitsune’s gambit, giving me an extra push to remember the third time around, got us to the Good Ending. At least my memories of dying the first two times are fuzzy—only our final “performance” on Kabukicho’s stage is crystal clear. Blackstone gets to keep the full memory of dying in the final recursion, but Chakra’s pretty good at keeping his head straight. Or so he says, and he smiles when he does.
(Yay, Chakra. Seriously.)
So we didn’t have a second civil war or an apocalyptic war with the People’s Republic of China, not because of anything we did, but because the bad guy called it off.
But we did save the world from the Big Meteor of Death! More on that in a moment. Right now, I have some relationship angst to vent.
And that’s the third thing. Seriously, can’t I ever do anything the right-way round?
But no, I have to fall into not one but two loves that anyone knowing the details would only call . . . problematic? First there’s Atlas—I know, I know, bad idea, rushed into it too soon, made all my decisions in what was practically a war-zone, never thought about the consequences, never had time to really figure out if we had what it took or if we’d end up hating each other because of like snoring or being messy or whatever. Tragic, tragic, no time, frozen in angsty, what-should-have-been-could-have-been stasis. Looking back I’m cringing, but totally sad still.
And now Kitsune.
The Kitsune of Tenkawa. Yoshi. Rei.
I choked him the first time we met! Then he goes and quotes poetry to me as Pretty Boy Yoshi before nearly getting shot. Was he chasing me, even then? Was dragging me into the Littleton thing a ploy to, I don’t know, put me in his debt a little? I’d feel better if I knew it was, because I still can’t forget that kami have rules. Is it right, that he loves me now when it was all about that stupid fish’s games? How did I find myself married without really knowing how I feel about it? And how many times can a girl get engaged without telling her parents? I blame that stupid crazy god-fish for all of it.
(Writing that actually made me feel better. I’ll bet that’s one point that will hold up with future rereads. Stupid god-fish.)
But get this. At one point, maybe lots of points, Kitsune mirrored me. Enough that he knows me. 100%, inside and out, more than even Shell does. And he loves me so he wants to be what I need so the feels are amazing. And the sex? Yeah, sooooo not going there. Just, wow, and it’s embarrassing how much he knows, it’s like I’m his instrument and he knows just how to play me so all it takes is a look and then we’re finding somewhere private and . . .
I’ll be back.
. . .
Hello, again. At least he’s an itch I can scratch. Um. That came out a bit wrong, or maybe too right, but I’ll leave it to groan over later.
Anyway. Back to complaining about Saving the World. Again.
Because we did. Director Kayle didn’t just keep us in the loop—he brought us into the project. Smart, keeping the whole operation internal while completely shaking down the DSA to root out the rest of DA’s network.
Of course the operation turned out to be pitch black; no telling anybody who didn’t need to know that multi-megaton death had been aimed at us. The first part turned out to be deduction and research. Shell and Shelly inventoried all known large Earth-crossing meteors, then partnered with observatories around the world to see if any had gone missing. When they found it—or didn’t find it—we partnered with Boeing Aerospace. They sent probes out along every possible vector the Shellys figured the Big Meteor of Death could be on that could end in Earth-impact, and they found it.
Then it was my turn, which was awesome.
I got to work with three cool spacers—that’s what astronauts call themselves these days, like “capes.” Wifflebat’s an Atlas-Type variant; she’s maybe C Class for toughness and strength but she’s fast. Way faster than I am, and she uses her unbelievable accel to push her little ship around the Solar System. When she works for Boeing Aerospace her crew is her friend Pinky (her nickname, I swear), a kind of Vern-Type who can fix anything. And there’s Sirius. He’s another Verne-Type who specializes in prosthetics and waldos—remote-manipulation equipment. He stayed in Armstrong Base while Wifflebat, Pinky, me, and Megaton, flew out in Wifflebat’s ship.
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