Villains Inc. (Wearing the Cape)

by Marion G. Harmon

  Where’s Rush?

  Puccini’s is a small place, a family-owned restaurant packed with checker-cloth covered tables lit by candles in jars, and you have to go around the bar to get to the dining area from the street. When the eye-twisting blur appeared again I snatched for it as it went by less than a step away. I missed, saw a second blur, red and white, at the now-open door. The two blurs collided, and then Rush stood in the doorway gripping a black kid in cornrows and wearing a bloodied biker’s jacket in a come-along hold.

  “HeyAstra, what’sthefuss?” He cuffed the protesting kid with plastic ties, then dragged him over and anchored him to the bar’s foot-rail almost faster than my eyes could follow.

  “Do you need to get back to your own situation?” I asked over my shoulder as I checked out the scene, hiding my relief. All but one of the injured were obvious gang-bangers. The exception, a middle-aged woman, sat on the floor, her face white with shock. Her dinner partner pressed a folded linen napkin to her ribs. I knelt beside her.

  “Nah,” Rush said, grinning under his visored helmet. “Violent home invasion, all done.” Sirens wailed, far away, and the kid started to cry. Rush nudged him with his foot and decided he’d keep.

  I gently checked the woman’s improvised pressure-bandage, whispering reassurances. She’d taken a stray bullet, but would be alright until the paramedics arrived. I kept moving. Five gang-bangers were down, and the sixth, the owner of the Glock, let Rush cuff him without trouble. We checked everyone over as the sirens got louder. Broken knees, cracked skulls, and, amazingly, nobody dead—just injured gang-bangers and shocked diners. The scene didn’t go with the soft music and the fragrant smells of gorgonzala and risotto, but the Reaper had passed by tonight.

  The cleanup always lasts longer than the action. By the time four squad cars pulled up in quick succession, Rush and I had patted down the gang kids and restrained the ones not too injured to make trouble. Rush got with a patrolman and administered a sandman pack—a drug injection that would knock an elephant out—to our new speedster friend so they could safely transport him after the patrolman read him his rights. One of the patrolmen pulled a collapsible stretcher from his trunk, and I helped secure the injured woman. She told me she was Donna Burcelli, thanked me graciously, and made no fuss as I flew her over to Westlake Hospital. Her husband followed in his car.

  I just managed to miss the swarm of reporters and paparazzi who descended on Puccini’s, and saw Rush hop his motorcycle and disappear over the Wall into hypertime. Leaving Westlake, the flight back to the Dome gave me time to dictate a full after-action report. Back in my quarters, I surveyed the damage.

  “You look like the victim of a squirrel attack,” Shelly laughed, sitting on my bed, her feet tucked up and arms around her legs.

  “Get your imaginary feet off my bed,” I shot back, and she stuck out her imaginary tongue.

  “That was more like it,” she said. “Not a proper supervillain fight, but...”

  I fingered the bullet hole in the leather face of my mask, right at the edge of the wig. My hands were trembling.

  Nobody died. I took a deep breath.

  “He was a mad and scared breakthrough, Shell.”

  From the statements of badly shaken diners, the kid had run into Puccini’s, chased by the six gang-bangers. They’d proceeded to corner and beat on him, and he learned just how fast he could be. They escalated to guns when he started speeding, and he got the trophy bat off the wall and went to town. I really couldn’t blame him, though if Rush hadn’t arrived I couldn’t have done a thing to keep him from killing every one of his attackers if he’d wanted to. I might be a maid of steel, but I’m not faster than a speeding bullet and it was a miracle nobody had been killed.

  And I’d hated calling for Rush, though admitting that made me feel small. In the showdown with the Teatime Anarchist’s twin, Rush had been on the wrong side. The subsequent investigation proved he’d been “handled” and lied to, but I hadn’t liked him much for a lot of other reasons before then and I didn’t like disliking a teammate.

  Shrugging it aside, I stripped down. The torso of my costume was a loss too: four holes, one of them in my built-in bra padding. Well, I had more. I grabbed the terrycloth bathrobe the staff provided and headed for the shower, blissfully anticipating using all four heads and the waterfall. I wondered if, in the unchanged history, we’d have still met the kid tonight.

  And stopped, frozen by a fugitive thought.

  “Hope?” Shelly said behind me as I tried to nail it down. I waved her quiet without turning around. I’d been chasing my tail, but now…

  The godzilla was early. Blackstone’s alive…

  I felt dizzy.

  “Shell?” I whispered, afraid of losing my epiphany. “Why don’t we cheat?”

  “Huh?”

  “The Time War messed everything up, but you said lots of things are still the same?

  “Yeah, but—”

  I spun around.

  “And you know about everyone the team would have ever met before, right? Everything that might have happened for the next hundred-plus years?”

  She nodded, wide-eyed.

  “Everything that made it into the history books, anyway.”

  “So, why can’t we cheat? You said Blackstone’s murder doesn’t get solved—but do you know anybody who could have solved it? Who’s active now?”

  She got the far-away look that said she was accessing the hundreds of contingent histories of the future-files.

  “Maybe… There’s a supernatural investigator who shows up—might show up—in a couple of years. He specializes in murders by projections, thought-forms, stuff like that. His name’s Dr. Cornelius, and he actually speculated about Blackstone’s murder though he couldn’t solve it then.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know. But he first pops up doing quiet jobs for Orb, a top-shelf Hollywood PI. And she’s active now.

  So, maybe. It was worth a shot, but my heart sank.

  “And Orb’s in LA?”

  Shelly nodded solemnly.

  LA. The last place on Earth I wanted to go.

  Chapter Seven

  Come on and rescue me!

  I’ve been waiting here all night

  Just hoping that you’ll see.

  Fly down and rescue me!

  From Rescue Me, by Have No Fear.

  * * *

  I made some calls and headed home. If I’d lived on campus with the Bees, I’d have been dragging my laundry home every weekend. Instead my parents had bought me my own little condo in Boyd Tower, the residential tower sitting on top of the Dome’s secret backdoor garage-entrance, but after everything that happened I preferred to stay in my quarters in the Dome. The Dome’s staff provided maid service, so I didn’t have the bag-of-laundry excuse, but I went home anyway. I so needed the normal.

  I came to another decision while driving West on Eisenhower, this one about Shelly.

  After all these months, Shelly still hadn’t got up the courage to get in touch with her mom. I understood why; Shell wasn’t really Shelly. She was a quantum-ghost of my BFF, a future-tech operating system who remembered being Shelly. Was she real, did she have a soul? Father Nolan said so, on the excellent proof that she had a heart. That was enough theological reassurance for me, but how would Mrs. Boyar take it? Would she accept Shelly as another daughter, or reject her as a blasphemous copy? Shelly had died three years ago; it might be best to leave it alone.

  But besides Artemis, Blackstone, and me, only Father Nolan knew the truth about Shelly. She chatted remotely with her Dispatch coworkers every day, but she had to lie to them (they thought she was a lot older, and, well, physical—a paraplegic shut-in somewhere).

  I’d asked if we could give her mom the same neural link that I had, and she’d mailed me a new bio-seed from wherever her system is located. It looked like a little pink pearl, and if you swallowed it, it grew and braided itself into your central nervous system to cre
ate the neural link. Now it just sat in a jewelry box on my dresser at home, and I was still the only family she had. If anything happened to me, the consequences didn’t bear thinking about.

  And now that I’d made up my mind, this was going to be fun.

  Springtime meant art festivals and musical events for the Foundation, so despite it being the witching hour I found Mom in the den going over tomorrow’s to-do list. Bent over her laptop, her dark hair back in a bun, in the dim light she looked like a witch reviewing her spells.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked. Normally if she stayed up he found company business to review until she was ready to go up to bed.

  She looked up and smiled.

  “Your father is at the office preparing for a presentation on the Becker Contract. You’re late.”

  I shrugged. “There was a last-minute thing.”

  As lightly as I tried to pass it off, something pinged her radar. She took off her reading glasses to look at me.

  “Trouble?”

  Falling into Dad’s reading chair, I told her about Puccini’s.

  “What’s going to happen to the boy?” she asked when I finished.

  “I don’t know. He didn’t kill anybody, and it looks like aggravated self-defense to me. But most public teen breakthroughs wind up in Hillwood Academy.”

  Hillwood Academy, first a Prohibition Era millionaire’s home, then a prep school, was now the home for kids who’s breakthroughs isolated them or made disciplining them in normal home and school environments impossible. Preteens went to Whitlow’s Academy, and, from what I’d heard, neither was a particularly happy place; a lot of young breakthroughs got triggered by abuse, which meant lots of those kids had serious issues.

  She gave me a look and I laughed, stretching against the chair’s soft leather arms.

  “Okay, okay, I’ll see what I can do about it. Promise.”

  She nodded, but continued to study me.

  “I saw Mrs. Lori today,” she said. “At the Founder’s Day committee meeting.”

  I looked at her askance.

  “She asked when you were going to end your mourning period.”

  “Mom…” I sighed. “You and Dad wouldn’t have approved anyway.”

  I’d been going to tell them about Atlas and me when we got back from LA. I confessed to the engagement and getaway when the scandal broke after the funeral, and it had been an even bigger shock to my brothers since till then they hadn’t even known their little sis was Astra. From Mom and Dad’s reaction to learning about Atlas, I’d been pretty sure that if he’d survived they would have tried to pack me off to a convent—or at least to Aunt Vicky’s in France—and we hadn’t discussed it since.

  But now Mom studied me like I was a puzzle for her to solve.

  “No, we wouldn’t have,” she agreed. “But not because of Atlas. Your father has always known what was behind his reputation.”

  I raised my head. “So it’s age? ‘Cause Dad’s what, fifty years older than you.”

  “Ten years, dear. And I was hot for your father the moment I met him.”

  “Eeeww!” I covered my ears. “Too much information!”

  “But I was twenty, and had been in a relationship before. And after my summer internship ended we didn’t work together anymore.” She smiled fondly. “I did make certain that by the time I left your father was hot for me.”

  I shuddered. “Bleeding! My ears are bleeding!”

  “Hope, John left Texas and moved to Chicago when he was sixteen. He became Atlas at eighteen, and the Sentinels made him their field leader when Touches Clouds left to go into politics. He became an adult early. I’m sure that, from his perspective, you were mature enough to know yourself and what you were ready for.”

  And I wasn’t. I didn’t say it aloud.

  John had intended to wait. I’d intended to wait, until getting shot out of the sky by a random act of madness convinced me we might not have time. Then I’d pushed it, and I’d been right, just not the way I’d thought.

  Mom took my silence for understanding, and smiled, letting it drop. She’d gotten the message across, and I felt better. A mom-daughter night was coming, with much ice-cream and spillage of details. Meanwhile… I giggled.

  “Everything, later. I promise. But there’s something I want to show you tonight. Please?”

  Her look turned arch. “The last time you said wanted to ‘show me something’ it was your breakthrough, and now my daughter is risking her life as a superhero. The time before that it was an improbably innocent kitten in a box, and now he owns the house and sleeps on my shoes. Should I be worried?”

  “It’s not in a box, but I think you’ll like this one.” Pulling myself up, I sat on the corner of the desk so I could lean over her laptop and brought up the prepared web-page. Mom’s laptop webcam lit up, and Shelly looked out of the screen.

  “Hi, Mrs. C!”

  Who knew Mom could scream like a little girl? Some moments are priceless.

  Five minutes of explanation later, I went up to bed happy in the knowledge that Shelly and Mom would be talking into the wee hours. Mom had been Mrs. C, our house a second home, since the day Shelly and I met in first grade and became joined at the hip. Most weekends it had been a tossup where we were sleeping, and when I’d been diagnosed with childhood cancer Mom relied on Shelly to let her know what was going on in my head. It didn’t bother me at all that she would certainly enlist Shelly again.

  * * *

  I flew out in the predawn light, using one of Vulcan’s chameleon-suits. A baggy, hooded jumpsuit with mitts and booties, it gave me amazing camouflage as I took off. Once west of Chicago, I peeled it off and stowed it in my travel bag before pouring on the speed. The first time I’d made this trip I’d been hanging onto Atlas’ feet as he’d taken us above Mach 4. I wasn’t nearly that fast yet, so it took me a couple of hours to reach LA.

  Only four months had passed since the Big One flattened LA, San Diego, and most of Southern California, but I flew over busy freeways and the city looked clear of rubble. Downtown, where business buildings had fallen like dominoes, the skeletons of new buildings rose everywhere.

  One of the advantages of the Post-Event world was how fast we could recover from hits like the Big One; South Cal had been flooded with superheroes and superhuman-staffed construction companies like The Crew. It didn’t make up for the reality that the Big One had been triggered by an insane superhuman, but it helped.

  But it didn’t help me. I still saw the ghosts of collapsed buildings, the dust that had hung over everything, and I could almost smell the broken sewer lines and bodies of January. And Whittier Base, now Fort Whittier, still stood south of the reviving downtown. The military was turning the base into a memorial park and training center.

  Fortunately my destination lay in north LA.

  Lunette’s is on Santa Monica Blvd, along the old Route 66. It’s a club for superheroes, like The Fortress in Chicago, and I’d expected something the same when I got there. It couldn’t have been more different.

  The low building squatted behind a strip-mall, out of sight of the street. It had obviously started life as something else, and its windows were covered and painted over. The sign over its steel doors was just a crescent moon, and both the doors and the sign looked old. The only splash of color came from a pair of low concrete pylons that stood sentry in front of the doors—obvious barriers to anyone who wanted to try crashing the gate with a car. Those looked new.

  It was Saturday morning and I’d raced the dawn to the coast, so only a few forlorn vehicles huddled in the nearest corner of the fenced-in parking lot. I pushed through the doors and blinked. If not for my ability to see into the infrared spectrum, I’d have been blind till my eyes adjusted to the low interior light. The club had a long bar and an open dance floor surrounded by tall club tables, and I saw doors that probably led to private rooms. Everything looked cheap, purchased from timely bankruptcy sales, and hip-hop music played to a nearly empty room. Wher
e The Fortress was filled with superhero memorabilia, Lunette’s was bare of decoration. It could have been any hole-in-the-wall club (not that I’d been in many).

  Orb didn’t look like she had either. She sat at one of the club tables, wearing a cream colored business suit and lime green tie, legs crossed, one foot hooked on the rung of her chair, the other foot bouncing gently in its designer shoe. I joined her, ordering the club’s best bottled water while she watched me.