by Hayes, Drew
Dean Blaine paused, allowing himself a deep breath and bracing for whatever came next. “When you are sent to engage a Manhattan Class, civilian life is shifted to a low, almost non-priority. Your primary goal as a Hero is to stop the criminal as fast as possible. If people die in the process… then they die.”
The mumbling wasn’t as loud as he’d expected—certainly softer than it had been in previous years. No one yelled, either, which didn’t happen often, but was always nice to not deal with. Dean Blaine stared at them, waiting for the whispers to die down before pressing on.
“You cannot save everyone. None of us can. Once you accept that, it becomes clear that the best a Hero can do is take the course of action that saves the most people. Some may die in the stopping of a Manhattan Class Super, but far more would perish if the threat wasn’t neutralized. It isn’t a pretty truth; it isn’t one you can take comfort in. Honestly, this fact alone will keep most of you up on more nights than you’ll be able to count. But it is true. Think long and hard about the last trial. About the people you couldn’t save. Understand that, at best, some of those Sims were flirting with Demolition Class. I want you to dwell on this; I want you to turn it over in your head for as long as it takes. Because if you can’t make peace with knowing you’ll be asked to let some die to save the rest, then there is no place for you in the Hero world. I don’t say that to be cruel, simply to let you know what’s really out there.”
As the class sat in silence, staring ahead while they tried to reconcile what the reality of Hero work would demand with the fantasy they’d once held, Dean Blaine tapped the final words on the chalkboard.
“Armageddon Class is treated much the same as Manhattan, except that no priority is placed on civilians. Your orders will be to kill on sight, no matter what it takes. Even if it costs other Heroes their lives. Armageddon Class, as the name implies, is someone who could theoretically cause the end of humanity, if not the Earth itself. No one, not civilians, not Heroes, not you, is more important than stopping that. Be grateful that they come along rarely, because when they do, there are always too many funerals. Now, I’m sure you’ve got questions, so let’s—”
The words were barely out of Dean Blaine’s mouth before almost every hand in the room shot up. This would take a while, and he was fine with that. Better they ask, better they understand, than push themselves into a world they wouldn’t be able to bear.
92.
The spy moved to the veranda where golden sunshine streamed in, heralding his path to freedom. Not all would be lost if he made it, but her cover would undoubtedly be blown if Alice tore into the sky and used her power to bind him. She repositioned herself, still artfully engaged in conversation with a diplomat who was far more interested in her cleavage than her words. As the spy moved, she kept careful track of him. Her window for this would be incredibly tight.
The spy took a straightforward route, not wanting to dilly-dally with freedom so close at hand. It was an understandable choice, but a poor one. If he’d picked a circuitous path, Alice’s plan would have been scrapped for something new. Thankfully, he kept on course, which took him directly by an expensive vase positioned on a podium.
Handling her powers inside the Blonk had taken some getting used to, since she had to use small gestures rather than actually activating her abilities. With one quick motion, she created a sudden flux of gravity at the spy’s hip, sending him tumbling over and crashing right into the vase, which shattered on the marble floor so loudly that all eyes turned to him. In moments, security had surrounded her quarry. There was no doubt going to be a long talk about the priceless art he’d just destroyed, and well before they were done, someone would notice the ambassador’s safe had been opened. The spy’s plan had revolved around stealth and speed, getting in and out before anyone could notice his work, and Alice had shot that all to hell with one tug of gravity.
She smiled to herself as she detached from the conversation and headed back to the champagne table. Alice wasn’t entirely sure if she would get more or fewer points for not being the one to catch her prey; all the simulation had demanded was that she stop the spy without exposing herself. Well, the spy was stopped, and no one had any reason to believe the silly blonde American had been even slightly involved.
Halfway to the champagne table, the room flickered. Her time was nearly up, it seemed. Letting out a frustrated sigh, Alice began the powering down process, waiting until the helmet signaled her it was ready to be removed.
Tugging it free, she was surprised to find she wasn’t alone in the Blonk’s chamber. Professor Pendleton was sitting there as the simulation came to an end, reading one of his trashy romance novels.
“Checking up on me?” She began the process of disentangling herself from the sensors and wires that helped make the virtual training so realistic.
“Twenty-nine hours.” He didn’t look up from his book as he spoke; merely turned the page to what was surely another swarthy and frustrating scene. “That’s how much time you’ve logged so far this week. Twelve on Sunday, nine on Monday, and eight today. I’m betting if Will hadn’t signed up for the next session, you’d have kept going.”
“What? Suddenly there’s such a thing as too much training in the HCP?” Alice asked. “I’ll bet Chad spent more time than that working out.”
“But Chad’s always been working out like that. You just up and suddenly started logging out of our world and into another. And given when it started, you can see how I might be concerned that you were running away from something. Don’t worry; you’re not the first. In fact, the Blonk has a system to detect when activity suddenly spikes, and it lets the overseer know. That’s how many times it’s happened.”
Alice said nothing as she finished extracting herself from the Blonk’s suit. Slowly, she stepped out of the system, letting her bare feet rest against the cold concrete. He wasn’t wrong; she had been trying to get away from things. But she’d been perfectly aware of what she was doing. After everything Abridail had shown her, after seeing her mother like that, Alice had needed to feel in control. She’d needed to train, to taste success and growth, to remind herself that she was powerful.
Because Alice would have to be, if she intended to save Shelby.
“Can we talk safely?”
“Seeing as we have a changing booth in here, I had Dean Blaine classify it like a bathroom, meaning there are no cameras or listening devices. The DVA didn’t object; on a blueprint this place is little more than a storage area. It’s not perfect, though. We’d need Dean Blaine to guard against stronger abilities and even that’s not a perfect guarantee.” Professor Pendleton pulled a bookmark from his pocket and wedged it between the pages. “But on campus, it’s about as secure a place as we’re going to get.”
Even a sophomore in their first year of Subtlety could have read between those lines: speak if she had to, just choose her words carefully. Alice weighed her options for how to start before deciding it was best to see how much she could skip entirely.
“I assume you’ve been brought up to speed on our negotiation attempt?”
“As of Sunday. Your co-asset was debriefed and the information was passed along. Apparently, he wants a meeting with me this week; seems he enjoys keeping others in the dark but isn’t quite so keen on the practice when it’s done to him.” Professor Pendleton smiled, despite the heavy atmosphere of the room. She didn’t think he’d have kept the connection between Charles Adair and Globe secret just to mess with Nick— although she wasn’t entirely willing to rule it out either.
“I sort of get shielding him; you wanted his investigation to move without any bias, leading wherever it led. But why not tell me? After how furious I was about not knowing you and Professor Hill were my uncles, you still kept me in the dark. Do I have any others I need to know about? Dean Blaine? Chapman?” Alice demanded.
“Shelby Adair had one half-brother, me, and one fraternal twin, Blake,” Professor Pendleton told her. “And though he has spent mo
re money than you’d believe covering it up, Charles Adair had one older brother, Phillip Adair. If there are any more secret family members, then they’re unknown to me as well.”
“Well, I suppose that’s a relief, at least,” Alice said. “But why not tell me? Shelby’s ordeal… while I won’t say I completely understand it, I can at least see the thought process there. No one wanted me to blame myself, and for the younger me that was probably the right call. The Globe thing, though, I just don’t get.”
“For one thing, I wasn’t kidding about how much effort Charles put into erasing any connection between Phil and himself. Ostensibly it’s for public image and business purposes; I’ll let you draw your own conclusions there. Telling his daughter was a very quick path to making an extremely powerful enemy, and with how tenuous the game we’re playing is, it wasn’t a smart risk.”
Professor Pendleton leaned back in his chair, staring at Alice. Only now, for the first time, she truly understood what he was looking at. He saw his little sister, the one he’d failed to save. Teaching her must be akin to being haunted by the ghost of one’s deepest failure. It was a marvel he could bear it… and perhaps explained a bit more why her father’s distance had only increased as she grew to be more and more like her mother.
“Beyond that, your father is a bastard, you’ve got one uncle who’s a convicted thief and another who’s no better than Charles’s lackey. Tossing a famously reviled criminal onto the pile just seemed cruel.”
“You all need to stop trying so hard to protect me,” Alice said. “I can handle the truth. And while I might have been spending a little more time than needed in virtual reality over the past few days, I’m in control. I just needed some space to work things out, to be someone other than the poor little girl with the tragic family. Give me a week, and I’ll be fine. That’s what you’ve taught us to do—work through and press on.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Professor Pendleton rose from the chair, tucking his paperback into a pocket on his jacket. “You’ve got ten minutes before Will is set to show up; I’ll leave so you can change in peace. Funny… I’d assumed this would be the harder talk, but now I think your co-asset will be much worse to deal with.”
“He does loathe feeling like someone tricked him.” Alice started to head to the changing booth, where she would slip from the black formfitting Blonk suit back into her own clothes. A thought struck her before she could make it though, so she turned and called to Professor Pendleton.
“What does this make Vince and me, anyway? Not sure what the term is when you’re cousins but one of your fathers abandons the family name.”
“At this point, I think you just say you’re family and leave it at that,” Professor Pendleton replied. “Have you told him yet?”
“No, but we will. Just waiting for the right moment,” Alice said.
Professor Pendleton laughed, a small, dark chuckle to himself. “Be careful with that. I started out saying the same thing, and two years later you learned the truth from a dream-walker. Those ‘right moments’ can take a lot longer to come around than you think.”
93.
“These four?” Crispin scanned the document carefully, taking in the hours of research that Sherman had spent compiling from their agents’ reports.
“They’re the likeliest candidates,” Sherman replied. “Aside from the fact that they visit him regularly, several of them have rather curious histories. Nothing overt that I could dig up—you know how well the HCP covers its students’ tracks—but certainly a few irregularities. The boy with silver hair, for instance, Vince Reynolds. Aside from the obvious marking of a Super, the files I found on him were much too clean. Homeschooled most of his life by a parent who passed away just before college began, strong scores on the SAT, but not so great as to draw attention, no worthwhile accomplishments or missteps to investigate… it’s all too tightly wrapped up. Like someone crafted the story without any loose ends to pull on, just in case someone went digging.”
“I suspect you’re right, but it could just as easily mean that he’s a Super with a checkered past.” Crispin’s eyes moved steadily, examining every word and detail with relentless scrutiny. “Picking out the Powereds will take more than hunches. Do any of them have people to lean on? Someone who might let a few crucial details slip under pressure?”
Sherman had anticipated this line of questioning and was prepared for it. “As you know, we can’t go after anyone tied to Nicholas. With the Heroes already out for blood, the last thing we need is the criminal world turned against us as well. Alice Adair, the tall blonde, is the daughter of Charles Adair. Reaching him would take far more resources than we have, perhaps more than we possessed even before the attack on Lander. Vince Reynolds, as stated, has no family—at least, according to the file. Mary Smith, in contrast, has an entire extended family still living, and Hershel Daniels has a mother and father, though they’re divorced.”
“Smith or Daniels then, if we want to dig deeper,” Crispin said. “A lone parent is easier to chat up than an entire group, so Daniels’ family seems the better target. Neither of them remarried?”
“Not according to public record,” Sherman said. “Sally Daniels still lives in Chicago, while Owen moved out to Brewster.”
Crispin’s eyebrow rose ever so slightly. “Lot of Heroes in that town. If we assume Hershel to be in the HCP, then we have to allow for some chance that he’s a legacy. Were you able to uncover why his father was in Brewster?”
“Bar consultant.” Sherman had needed to dig deep to find this information, as employment records weren’t easily accessed. He missed having a whole research team at his disposal, along with a few Supers that could get them into nearly any system. Still, the job went on, so he’d persevered. “He owned his own bar for a long while, then got headhunted to manage a few others when the local economy around his place began to tank.”
“Hmm.” Crispin finally looked away from the file, meeting Sherman’s eyes. “I know we’re low on manpower, so investigate the mother first. There are Heroes in both towns, but a sudden move to Brewster strikes me as a touch too coincidental. If she doesn’t show any openings, then we move on to the father. And when the time to approach comes, send our best. We can’t afford to squander a potential lead.”
“Yes, sir.” Sherman turned and strode out of the small concrete room, careful to keep the door open as briefly as possible. Deep down, he couldn’t help wondering if perhaps Crispin was putting too much into what was ultimately a long shot. They were assuming so much for any of this to be worthwhile: that Nick was a former Powered and socialized with others who shared the same distinction; that discovering who the former Powereds were would lead them closer to finding out how the conversion had happened; that they would then be able to steal the information for themselves. So much depended on shaky possibilities. The odds very clearly said that this was nothing more than tilting at windmills.
But once before, when Crispin had proposed the idea of weakening Heroes by attacking an HCP, others had called it mad. Sherman had given his leader faith then, and in repayment he’d borne witness to the first true blow against the so-called unassailable HCP.
If anyone could turn a long shot into a success, it was Crispin. And Sherman would do all he could to help see that victory realized.
* * *
According to the reports, it had been a perfectly normal Halloween party. The students drank too much, wore silly costumes, and a few ended up leaving together despite arriving alone. They’d even kept the noise contained enough to avoid having the cops called; though, given how crazy the college town got on Halloween, that wasn’t a terribly hard accomplishment to achieve. No matter what angle Ralph Chapman looked at the reports from, there was simply nothing suspicious about Nick’s party.
Which was, of course, exactly why he knew something important had happened there. Underestimating Nick was an easy mistake to make, and Ralph had certainly been guilty of it early on. But to keep underestimatin
g him was pure folly, and that was a sin Ralph refused to commit. Nick didn’t do anything, from taking a piss to tying his shoes, without connecting the act to his various schemes by at least three separate threads. That was how it felt, anyway. Something this big, that went to such efforts to look normal, had to be concealing a serious secret.
Unfortunately, Ralph could only dedicate so many people to spying on a Halloween party without drawing suspicion from the higher ups. Much as he enjoyed the manpower and presence of other DVA agents on site, it had been a lot easier to get things done the year before. As it was, he’d had to concoct a thin theory that powers might be used around regular people, and that had only gotten him a pair of agents to watch the party through the windows.
It hadn’t been entirely fruitless, however. While no one had seen anything suspicious inside the event itself, the agents had noticed a car parked nearby occupied by someone who looked an awful lot like they were doing surveillance of their own. Ralph wouldn’t put it past Nick to hire a fake spy just to send the DVA on a wild-goose chase, but he also couldn’t afford to ignore the possibility that someone was trying to gather intel on HCP students. That was the sort of thing the DVA took damn seriously, which meant Ralph was going to be able to requisition plenty of resources to dig into it.
And if, in the process, he also just so happened to find out what Nick was up to this time, it would be a very happy coincidence. Ralph would have to be careful, strategic, and thorough to make it work, though. At no point, in any area of the operation, could he afford to count on luck.
