Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) (Volume 3) (27 page)

“Is
he
?”

“He’ll heal — Ajax-types are good at that.” He staggered over, rolled Mr. Ludlow onto his stomach, and got him into the alloyed titanium thumb-cuffs that had miraculously stayed on his belt. If Eric tried to break them, he’d rip out his thumbs first.

I slid back to sit, looked around. We’d ripped into the roadway’s southbound lanes. At one point, Watchman had decked Eric with a concrete slab. The left side of my face felt hot and numb from a back-swing hit and I’d lost my mask somewhere. He’d even managed to knock my earbug out — which beat having it hammered into my ear canal. I’d lost my cape somewhere and a dent in my armor wasn’t letting me breathe deep.

“The wagon is back down the hill,” Watchman said. “Grab an arm?” Balancing him between us, we flew him down to the waiting police. They’d formed two lines from the buildings to the Tollway embankment. Rush, Variforce, and The Harlequin waited for us, along with a smoking Fisher

“Nice fight, A,” Rush said, stepping out of the way.

I huffed. It hurt to giggle. “Yeah, the scriptwriters will fix the lame dialogue...” Endorphins make me stupid and I should never open my mouth right after a hard fight.

And I saw him. Against all reason, not all the apartment residents had taken the offered vans and a crowd had gathered beyond the police line. One pale face I
knew
— the business suit from the Daily Building fight, the “hostage” who’d disappeared, the one Blackstone thought was our teleporter.

“Down!” I shouted, launching myself through the police line. And I
got
him — my half-dead but empty left hand wrapped in his jacket collar, and then we were down on the ground and I barely kept myself from smacking him — he wasn’t Eric and it’d kill him — he gaped up at me, face shocked white, and we —

In psychology class, I read about a government-funded study that proved that men were more helpful to beautiful women and that good-looking guys did better on job interviews. No kidding. The study didn’t ask if people are more polite to the physically intimidating. The answer is yes. Except when they’re not.

Brian Lucas, aka Grendel
.

The alarm snarling by my bed died horribly, so Galatea took over my entertainment center’s speakers.

“
Get your big grey ass out of bed!
” The subwoofers shook the room. “
Suit up or I’m gonna come down there and kick your ugly butt!
”

“I can twist your head off.”

“
Oh, like I can’t get a new one. They haven’t had time to smack you with the training manual yet, but you just killed a Def-1 alarm and You’re. Not. Moving!
” She kept cranking the volume but by the end she was lying; I was up and pulling on my uniform (best thing about it, two easy steps).

“What’s going on?”

“
Talk less, move faster, Assembly Room now!
”

I got out into the common room before Ozma, who emerged buckling the Magic Belt on over a silk green and white robe. Reese staggered out, pulling on sweats, and we trailed in Ozma’s wake. Mal joined us in the hall outside the elevator, looking pale. Jamal caught up with us outside the Assembly Room; obviously he’d made good time coming across town.

Blackstone, Riptide, Galatea, and Seven waited for us. The screens opposite the doors had all been turned on and displayed overhead and up-close views of some kind of police action. Helicopter spotlights and area lights mounted on police vans lit up the scene, and open line chatter from cops and our guys filled the room.

Someone had trashed the place. One building had a big hole in it, and it looked like someone had bombed the crap out of an empty parking lot and stretch of road. Police surrounded the battlefield, but nothing was going on. Mal pointed to icons along the side of the main screen; Watchman, Rush, Variforce, and The Harlequin were on the scene.

“Please be seated, everyone,” Blackstone said — for our benefit, the others already were. Nobody was talking, Galatea stared, wild-eyed, at something somewhere else, and the tension I could
taste
was making my claws grow.

“Less than five minutes ago,” Blackstone began once we’d settled, “an unidentified superhuman we have named Drop removed Astra from the scene of a Sentinels-CPD action. She had lost her earbug earlier, and as we have also lost telemetry from the Dispatch links to her mask-cam, her current condition and location are unknown. We are reviewing footage, and do not yet know if this was a trap. Procedure dictates that in an attack on a Sentinel, the full team complement be put on alert until we are certain it is not the opening move of a general attack.

“We are securing the Dome, and will be pulling the field team back once Eric Ludlow, the target of tonight’s action, is deposited in the CPD’s hard-cells.”

Mal cleared his throat. “What are we doing to find Astra?” None of the others said anything, and Galatea wasn’t hearing anyone in the room.

“Everything we can,” Blackstone said finally, mouth tight.
We’re doing everything we can
: what adults said when they had no idea. When everything they could do was being done by someone else and probably wasn’t worth shit.

“So the Wreckers have got her?” Mal asked. “We got one of theirs and they got one of ours? Why? For leverage? And we can’t
do
anything? That’s crap!”

Blackstone winced.

“The CPD investigation of the Crew is ongoing, and they are following several promising leads. We are assisting, and our first priority is to learn what we can from Dozer. In the meantime, Galatea will coordinate with you as we remain on alert. You are to consider her instruction as coming from Lei Zi or myself. Are we clear, Mr. Scott?”

“Sure. Sir, I owe her — ”

“We all do, young man. And we will get her back.”

We crowded back into our common room, and Reese found the sodas in the mini-kitchen. “Shit, nothing like this ever happens in Saint Paul!” he crowed.

Jamal, who’d been a pretty laid-back kid at the party, looked ready to smack him.
I
couldn’t; if I hit anybody, it counted as seriously excessive force. Ozma heard my growl and sat beside me with a sigh.

“He’s a gooch, the provokingest boy I’ve ever met and his heart isn’t true.” She cocked her head. “But things that aren’t can be made to are, with practice and attention.”

Galatea sat alone, still in her silver-and-blue chrome form, ignoring the whole room. She could have been a movie prop. Mal watched her but wasn’t getting bothered by it, and Ozma took to sipping a mini-soda and humming to herself. It sounded like a limerick.

Great start to a new team. If this was a
Sentinels
episode, we’d be tracking some clue the bad guys had left behind and getting ready to bust through the wall to their secret headquarters. Unless it was close to the end of the season, in which case Astra would stay kidnapped into the break as a cliffhanger. But nothing bad ever happens to the determinedly perky ingénue, right?
Yeah, and they kill major characters in this series.

Finishing her drink, Ozma set it down and capped it, whispered, “I am retiring to the lab to see if our new captain is findable. Don’t let anyone hurt Reese.”

Sure, give me the hard job
.

Astra

I woke from a falling nightmare because I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t sit up, couldn’t see
anything
. No, blinking hard and trying to get a full breath, I could see shapes in the dark...barely. My face ached and, when I tried to touch it, weights held my arms down.

A whimper escaped before I could stop it — I was back in the Dark Anarchist’s cell and if I started I wouldn’t stop screaming.
Don’t panic. Don’t panic
. Whatever was constricting my chest was keeping me from hyperventilating, and I took a few minutes to not panic.

Okay. What would Atlas do? Kick ass. Not an option. What would Blackstone do? Gather information. Okay. I was lying on a mattress. Sheets? Pretty good ones, smooth under my hands, not hotel-rough. I tried moving again, pulled my working right arm in until it
clinked
against my side.
Oh
. My bracers were holding my arms down, feeling like they weighed tons. Why? Breathing mystery solved anyway — it was my dented cuirass keeping me from getting all the air I wanted. But — Why couldn’t I move? Why was everything so
heavy
?

Move now, think later. Don’t panic again
,
just,
don’t
, Shelly will laugh
.

I
really
wanted to hear her laugh.

I dragged my right arm over my chest, found the clasps with my half-numb left hand. I’d barely been able to lift Mr. Ludlow with it after the fight, and tears ran down into my hair before the last clasp finally popped open. Right arm free, my left bracer went faster even though the clasps were shut hard. They hadn’t been damaged tonight, but my fingers still felt bruised from fighting with them.

All my moving around hadn’t brought anybody, and I took a few minutes to stop gasping, letting the spots clear from my sight. Every shift made my left arm throb from my shoulder to my hand, and it should have been feeling better by now.

Okay
. Exploration told me the clasps on my cuirass hadn’t been bent out of shape fighting Eric, and aching fingers finally popped them. I pulled the
heavy
front piece away and it slid off onto the floor with a loud thud. Sitting up, I wanted to scream, and I sat and gasped through clenched teeth until my left arm settled down to throbbing agony. At least I’d left the back piece on the bed; an eternity later, my legs were free of their impossibly heavy armor and more tears fell as I painfully swung my legs off the bed. Everything hurt too
much
.

I can move, that’s progress. What happened?
I couldn’t remember. Grabbing Drop, incredible, head-spinning nauseating pain, an...old man? Shouting, surprised. He’d touched me. Then, just nothing. Nothing until I’d dreamed of falling.

And now everything was too much. Too heavy, too painful, I couldn’t
see
right...
Oh no. No no no no no.
Hand over my mouth, I kept the scream down to a whimpering, breathy whine.

I’d been
de-powered
.

Don’t panic don’t panic don’t panic
. The perfect mantra for mind-blowing panic, and the giggling helped, too. Crying was even better, but made my aching face throb.

Of
course
I hurt — I wasn’t healing anymore.

It took a while to think of anything else. I didn’t think I was dying, but it might be hard to tell.

Way back last year, Ajax had given me a series of lectures on how
fragile
normal people were. It had amazed him how fast super-strong breakthroughs forgot. Not just bones and stuff,
insides
, and they didn’t heal like I was used to doing now. His lectures had given me nightmares. Accidentally hugging one of the Bees too hard...

Watchman had probably seriously concussed me just last week, head-slamming me into a steel-plated floor. The hypothetical concussion, which meant
bleeding into the brain
, went away with no symptoms beyond transient dizziness; if I’d been normal, it would have continued until alarming symptoms like blown pupils, vomiting, and death made me pay attention. The rabbit-punch Watchman had used to end the fight tonight (if it was still tonight), used by a normal person on another normal person, could easily cripple or kill; it was a hit to the medulla oblongata, the brain stem, which did
not
normally regenerate.

Playing field hockey in school had cured me of any fear of aches and pains, and the fight-club beatings Ajax, now Watchman, administered had gotten me past worrying about serious injury because I
healed
. Fast. Now, I was shivering. I might have been concussed
tonight
, my head certainly hurt enough, and who knew what kind of internal bruising I’d sustained?