Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) (Volume 3) (17 page)

“Now that’s just — I took him down! Put him in an armlock and
sat
on him! How could I have changed anything?”

“I watched the police recording. You were quite comforting with him.”

“I — ”
Shhhh. It’s going to be all right, Eric. You’re going to be all right.
My first fight, and the memory was so strong I could smell the damp grass and cracked concrete we’d lain across.

“Atlas put you in front on that incident because he hoped that Eric would see you as less of a threat, be less confrontational. I believe your sympathy had more of an impact than we knew.”

I shook my head. “You think I changed his life? Just by being
nice
?”

“No, and yes. Doctor Mendel could explain it to you better, but the psychology of decision-making is complex. The initial motivators of any path we take don’t have to be especially strong; once momentum is imparted, each decision, each action, adds to it until it takes a great deal of force to derail it.”

He tapped his forehead.

“Memory is a funny thing, so we may even look back at a particular moment, relatively inconsequential by itself, and assign it great retroactive significance. I believe you had a significant impact on his attitude the night he was arrested, which made a difference in the attitude he took with him into rehab. Ultimately, he rebuilt himself through his own strength and determination, but your small act of sympathy that night may well have taken on totemic significance in his mind, a bright spot to fix on as he fought his personal demons.”

“So he got clean just so he could go supervillain?”

“And there we turn back to the Big Book. Between the night of his arrest by you and January 1st, the last date on which the Teatime Anarchist retrieved any future-histories, all of Eric’s contingent futures were substantially positive. Therefore, whatever has turned Eric from that path happened after January 1st. Occam’s razor dictates that it is related to whatever has boosted him from B Class to at least A Class, and since we are already dealing with power-boosted breakthroughs with Temblor and possibly the Green Man, I find his change of status significant.

“But although this is all very important to know, we should also not lose sight of the fact that you may also have tremendous leverage with Eric, even now. If you should encounter him again in the field, I want you to keep that in mind. Can you?”

Wondering how I’d react if I fought Eric again kept me entertained all the way to my rendezvous with Detective Fisher.

Since Max had the superhuman beat (not so much
had
as held on to it with both hands and threatened to quit when they tried to promote him after the Villains Inc. mess), most of his assignments were heater cases — crimes kept on the front-burner because of all the media attention. For
this
one, though, his team was keeping a low profile. When I flew down, they were waiting for me, hidden in a stakeout van around the corner from Mr. Ludlow’s.

Max opened the back of the van when I knocked, looking his usual rumpled self. “Astra. Glad you could make it.” Officer Wyatt was with him, and a woman I didn’t know. Phelps was gone, of course; so was Max’s superior, Garfield, and the investigations and hearings that removed them went right up the chain of command. Max had a new boss and the city had a new Superintendent of Police.

I climbed in and he closed the door. “Hi, Jimmy.” I held out my hand to the new girl. “Hi, I’m Astra.”

She grinned with a dimple. “Jenny. Jennifer Stole.”

“From the lab!” Jenny nodded. She wore narrow, wire-rim librarian’s glasses and kept her hay-blonde hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. Max smiled around the unlit cigarette between his lips.

“Tell the kid what we’ve got.”

She flushed at being put on the spot, but rallied.

“We haven’t wanted to exercise the physical search warrant yet, but we have subpoenaed Mr. Ludlow’s financial, phone, and Internet records. We’ve also tapped his landline. We have the house under thermal drone and remote observation and even teleport detectors in place — ”

“How did you do that without going inside?”

“Laser sensors targeting his windows. Any teleporter popping in will raise the interior air pressure for a microsecond, which will be felt by the windows and measured by the lasers.”

“That’s very clever. Sorry.”

She waved it away. “We hoped he’d come home — we’d have had you guys down on him in a second.”

I wanted to talk to him, too. I imagined facing him down on his porch again, a replay of last year.
This
time... How strong
was
he now? How had he leveled up so much? I could still hope it wasn’t really him.

“So, now you’re here, we go in,” Max said simply. “Ready?”

He lit up and blew a cloud the instant he was out of the van. We made a tidy procession, down the street and around the corner, and Fisher actually knocked — pure formality since the house was empty. He stubbed out his smoke beside a stack of empty flowerpots, nodded to me, and I took hold of the knob and popped the door, breaking the lock. Listening with all my super-duper might just in case, I heard no sounds in the house. We moved in off the porch, me in front with Fisher’s team stacked up behind me.

When a quick room-to-room showed the house was clear, they holstered their guns. Fisher handed me some gloves and I snapped them on. I was really only here in case Things Happened, but the odds of Mr. Ludlow crashing through the wall were pretty long. I mostly stayed out of the way and watched them; Jenny made a beeline for the study desktop, leaving Jimmy to sort through the mail and check the phone while Max wandered through and just took it in.

The place was
tidy
. Even the piles of paperbacks by the couch were stacked neatly and had been regularly dusted. His entertainment center — with the newest Playcube and high stacks of game boxes — was just as orderly. Curiosity took me into the kitchen to check the fridge.

“It looks like rehab was successful,” Max said behind me.

“No alcohol, not anywhere.”

He nodded. “And the books and games. Private entertainment to distract him, keep him from going out and being sociable where there might be temptation. I spoke to Timothy Curran, the Crew’s manager. Eric has been mostly going right from work to home since rehab. He’s been clean since last year.”

I looked around and it all made me feel worse. He’d come home from war with issues, hit bottom, pulled himself back up and gotten it together — why had he gone supervillain? What had
happened
?

I found myself whispering. “Does he have family? A girlfriend?” I’d never thought to ask.

“Parents dead — this was their home. No siblings, no girlfriend after the war.”

“Did he owe money?”

Fisher flicked me a
look.
“Stop it, kid — don’t go getting jammed up over this. It’s nothing you could have seen when he was on the job.” He shrugged. “It could be something from his old life. He had to have some point of contact with the others, maybe they were Army buddies. We’ll find out.”

I wondered what Fisher would think of Blackstone’s obvious theory: that the hypothetical teleporter, Drop, had been the “hostage.” If Blackstone wasn’t sharing, it had to be because he thought the CPD might still be compromised. The problem was,
Drop
might be Mr. Ludlow’s point of contact.

Wandering back into the living room, I naturally drifted over to his bookshelves. Mostly cheap paperbacks, a surprising number of them superhero fiction, but there were exceptions. I frowned, looked at the neat stacks by the couch.

“Fisher?”

“Yeah, kid?”

“Can I take a look at these?”

He looked around, nodded. “Leave it as you find it, but go ahead.” Carefully laying each pile down so I could pull books and put them back, I started flipping through titles.

The fiction books were seriously worn, the bigger ones with broken backs. Almost all of them had used bookstore stamps inside their covers. But there was another set of books, all in their own pile. These were worn too, but carefully. No stamps, lots of dog-eared pages along with pages marked by colored stickies. Thumbing through the books showed a lot of highlighted pages, too.

“What have you got?” Looking up, I found Fisher standing behind me.

“I don’t know.” I held up one, a copy of
The Sleeper Must Awaken
. “It’s mostly action and adventure novels except for these — have you ever heard of the Foundation of Awakened Theosophy?”

“FAT?” Officer Wyatt asked from across the room. “He has a couple of junk-mail letters from them.” Fisher squatted beside me, hand out. I passed it over and he read the back cover and inside page.

“Jenny?” he called without looking up from the book. “Check his computer history for anything to do with FAT. And let’s look at his bank account’s transaction history again.”

“Um, boss? You should — ”

“
Hope!
” Shelly rattled my ear. “
The 1st Precinct’s been hit!

Not many people can take a flight with only my grip between them and a fall to messy death without screaming — Shelly loved my rides, but even a terminal-velocity fall wouldn’t crack the titanium shell around her “brain.” Fisher insisted I give him a lift, brave man (if I dropped
him
, he’d splat and get better — but it would probably be a bit obvious). I flew fast as I safely could, but by the time we got there it was all over but the shouting.

The precinct building on the corner of 18th and State looked fine — if you ignored the big hole in the north wall. Chicago’s finest swarmed like a kicked beehive with no one to sting where the wall had been blown outward. The breakout had thrown bricks into the nicely trimmed trees and against the low iron fence separating the sidewalk from the precinct grounds. It wasn’t a huge hole, just something an A Class Ajax-type might make punching through it on his way out. My gut clenched.

Dozer, Eric
.

Riptide and Rush stood in the street watching the chaos. Riptide grinned when he saw us land.

“Hey,
chica
. Somebody knocked over the cop-shop, put down the
pajero
that tried to pop our new boy. Nice.”

The guy who took a shot at Mal in the café? In everything happening, I’d completely forgotten about him.

Fisher lit up and watched the scene. “How did you get here so quickly?”

Riptide shrugged. “Greek restaurant fire five blocks south. Rush got me there and I gave it a bath until the fire trucks arrived. We were just leaving when the call came.”

“See anything?”

Rush shook his head. “A big hole, body in the holding cell inside. Looks like the same MO — they broke the dude’s neck. No collateral damage this time and it happened fast. We got the call only after the bad guys let the station have its phones and computer system back.”

“Thanks, guys.” Fisher gave them a nod, turned away. “Astra?”

I skipped to catch up. “Sorry about Riptide — ”

He threw me his default twisty smile. “He’ll never love cops, kid — it’s not worth getting pissy over. Do you see the obvious?” Another of his little tests.

“Besides the bricks in trees?” I followed him over the low fence. “Not really, unless you mean they busted their way out this time instead of in.”

A nod. “So, not quite the same MO. We find out why, it’ll tell us something about them.”

I
wondered how much this was telling Shelly. This time their hacker had circumvented a
police station’s
security with everyone outside noticing zip.
So
not good.