Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) (Volume 3) (11 page)

Nothing.

“Any time, now,” Variforce said. Watchman shook his head.

Nothing. Embarrassment added to the heat until my skin felt on fire and I thought I’d pop from the pressure in my bones, and
nothing
. Watchman studied me. “Think about the bus.”

That busted it — the heat and pressure dropped away like someone had stuck a tap in me and turned it wide. It all went back wherever it came from, leaving me light-headed and shaking.

He sighed, patting my shoulder. “Sit. Breathe. We’ll try again in a moment, without the bus.” He didn’t have to tell me twice. I dropped to the steel shock-plated floor and he squatted beside me.

“How did it feel?”

I told him. He rubbed his chin, shook his head again. “Well, we’ll try some more.”

Fifteen minutes later, Variforce was getting tired of holding his “shooting chamber” together and I was no closer to anything. Watchman called it a day.

“I almost had it!”

“No, you didn’t — your peak temperature has been dropping for at least five minutes.” An Atlas-type hero, he could watch me in infrared as easily as Astra. “Let’s get a sandwich — you’ve got to be burning calories and I need my strength to go beat somebody up.”

Sure, superhero costumes are flamboyant acts of self-expression, but they’re useful, too. The PR benefits aside, everyone knows you on sight — important if you need instant trust in a crisis. And recognizing friendlies is deadly important on the fast-moving superhuman battlefield.

The Harlequin,
Citywatch Interviews
.

Shelly ignored the red Occupied light, and nearly got decapitated when Watchman cannoned off the wall by the door.

“Bystander handicap!” she announced after ducking. The designated “villain” in this after-lunch fight, Watchman didn’t waste a second — he spun around to go for the grab and I dropped hard to deny him the hostage, but that was the inevitable move so he was ready, turning into my drop with a raised palm-strike that narrowly missed my chin as I twisted aside. Kicking off of the floor at the bottom of the drop, I grabbed his extended arm, spun to put my back to his chest, and curled to throw him hard at the far wall.
Yes!

“Go!” Shell gave a fangirl-cheer as I leaped after him. He got control and curved around without meeting the opposite wall, and we smacked together in the center of the Hard Room to wrap up into a clenching, punching, digging midair ball of nasty moves. Too close for fists, I got a knee into his kidney but he rang my head with an elbow under my ear, our hits echoing off the plated walls. Rocked by the elbow-strike, I let him get around me and he took full advantage with a groin-and-neck hold that pointed us in opposite directions and dropped us
hard
, hammering me face first into the floor. It rang like a gong as my world lit up.

I tried to push off, but my vision refused to clear, I’d lost track of down, and I could barely feel the grinding hold he put me in. Then the pressure went away and the floor rang again as he tapped out for me, calling it.

Enough situation-awareness came back that I could roll over, and a fuzzy blob above me resolved into his face.

He held out his hand, breathing hard. “You okay?”

The vertigo warned me against shaking my head or taking his hand. If I moved, I was going to vomit.

“Nuts,” I finally gasped. He laughed, winced.

Drat. Darn. Nuts. Phooey
. My language was ridiculously sanitary — growing up emulating a mom who was Ms. Manners (the truly
nice
kind, not the stuck-up kind) meant I felt bad about even a mild “dammit,” because “Good manners create respect and are a courtesy to those around you.” It was hard to be taken seriously when “darn it!” popped out under pressure, and when I really
needed
a colorful word, I had nothing. Thanks, Mom.

When everything steadied, I accepted his hand up.

“You almost had me until Shelly stepped in,” he fibbed politely. “I asked her to, but you made the right move and nearly carried it through.”

“She’d have won if she had her maul,” Shelly defended me.

“Maybe,” he nodded. “But she doesn’t carry it everywhere.”

He’d caught me still in my workout clothes, which had kind of been the point. Blackstone had asked Watchman to focus my training on situations when I didn’t have all the advantages I’d figured out, so I hard-sparred with my personal nemesis in full gear and without.

And he
was
my nemesis. He’d been recruited to add more muscle and mobility to the team, but also to continue my regular beatings. They
called
it training, but what Blackstone hadn’t told me was that Watchman’s last assignment had been as a fight instructor at Fort Hood in Texas — where he’d trained
supersoldiers for special Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine units.

That’s right; he’d trained superSEALs, superRangers, and other insanely lethal gods of war. His motto was “Training should be tougher than combat”; he’d gotten the scar that ran from his eye to his jaw in a
training exercise
, and now he got to focus on
me
. Oh, joyous day.

I wanted to score a real win off of him so bad I could taste it like the blood in my mouth (Somewhere in the fight, I’d bitten my cheek.). I grabbed a towel to mop the sweat.

“You’re really getting better,” Shelly said loyally, handing us the bottles she’d brought with her. “At least you’re lasting longer...”

“And I feel it. Ghah!” I stretched, flexed my neck, and felt something pop back into place. Watchman politely accepted his and took a drink, then reset the room’s function. The variable-mass weight machines Vulcan had designed and fabricated for us rose from the floor and he began doing shoulder presses.

I considered joining him, but I’d had enough. Finishing the stretch, I started doing yoga postures while Shelly watched; Chakra had started me on yoga when she introduced us to the mental tricks that
might
help us detect telepathic manipulation, and training against my own body’s resistance made sense and was even fun. I lingered a bit five moves into the routine, poised on my left foot, right leg straight out parallel to the floor and toes pointed at the ceiling, bent forward with arms extended along my leg, fingers interlaced as a saddle for my right foot, forehead resting on my knee.

“Now you’re just showing off. What is that even
called
?”

“Dandanayama-janushirasana.”

“Bless you.” She fidgeted, and I smiled against my leg where she couldn’t see. Should I ask Watchman how his session with Mal had gone?

“So, Seven?”

Okay, maybe Mal wasn’t the one on her mind.

“To quote Jacky, ‘Bite me.’” Cutting the routine short, I dropped into toe-stand position, balanced on the toes of my right foot so my butt rested on my heel instead of the floor, left leg folded over so my left foot rested on my right thigh in lotus position, hands in prayer position above my heart, eyes closed and breathing controlled. Since I hardly felt my own weight, I could keep it up as long as I maintained my balance (but staying up by “flying” was cheating).

“So, how long are you going to do that?”

“Shhh.”

“Seriously.”

“Waiting is all.”

“You know Chakra was quoting a science fiction character, don’t you?”

I kept my eyes closed, but couldn’t hide the grin. “Wisdom is where you find it, Sifu says. You gave me a week, Shell, now leave it alone.” I wasn’t about to tell her my Seven resolution; waiting would drive her
crazy
.

Not that she’d have to wait long; enough was enough. Last night, I’d woken from a courtroom dream that started with Dan Raffles asking me to describe the events of May 25th and ended with the defense attorney asking my opinion of Seven’s hazel eyes.
And may I remind the witness that she is under oath?
Judge Sanderson overruled Dan’s objection — that my opinion of the defendant’s eyes would be prejudicial to the jury — and my horror as my mouth started to open rocketed me out of bed. Literally.

I wasn’t twelve anymore, I had things to do, and it was time to get proactive; the next time Blackstone sent Seven and me out in the field together...

Shelly huffed. “So then — ” The lights dimmed, came back up shaded Emergency Red, and her eyes unfocused. “Crap. Blackstone’s calling. Something’s going down at the Daley Center.”

I fell out of position.

Megaton

Failure tastes like acid, the bile at the back of your throat when you think you’re going to toss your cookies. So lunch sucked. After Watchman and Variforce left me in the dining room with some encouraging words, I tried to slouch back to my rooms.

This ride blows. I want my money back.

Instead Willis found me — The Harlequin had summoned me back upstairs, this time to her office.

The idea of superheroes having offices was just ... wrong. Headquarters and briefing rooms and high-tech workout and training rooms? Yeah. But, offices? Rooms where you read reports and sign stuff? It turned out that hers was on a balcony level open to the City Room, so she could step out and watch Dispatch as it coordinated the patrols and responses of all the CAI teams in Chicago.

I’d seen the City Room before on a grade-school tour, part of the Dome Experience not available since Villains Inc.’s attack on the place last spring; now, visitors had to stick to the atrium, museum, theater and gift-shop. I took the stairs up to her office two steps at a time, wondering what she could want with me.

The Harlequin’s office was as colorful as her costumes, walls covered by Cirque du Soleil show posters. She looked up and smiled when I knocked on her open door, and the big guy with her stood up when I came in. He was taller than me, wide shoulders and all lean muscle.

He looked me over and nodded. “I can work with this.”

I looked back, feeling myself heat up. “Work with
what
?”

The Harlequin rolled her eyes. “Andrew, play nice. Sit, both of you.”

He laughed and handed me a large epad — the kind that could display whole magazine or comic-book pages in bright color. It showed
me
, front and back in ink and color, wearing a short, zipped-up red leather jacket with black shoulders and trim over a black high-necked shirt and cargo pants. I also wore combat boots, gloves, and a utility belt with the Sentinels “S”-logo. An asymmetrical explosive starburst decorated the back of the jacket. He gave me a moment to absorb the picture, then leaned forward and tapped the screen to drop a dark visored half-helmet on the figure. He’d written
Megaton
under the costume sketches.

Whoa
.
That’s just
—

“The shoulders are padded to de-emphasize your waist,” he said. “But you’ll probably work off your leftover child fat if you stay.”

That brought me down. “I can’t — I haven’t been able to control it yet.”

“Are you going to give up?”

“No!” I caught The Harlequin smiling. Andrew made a forget-about-it gesture and winked at her.

“They’ll get you straight, then. Might hurt. Might not. So, the design?”