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

“The hell it’s not!” I was on fire.

Her grip tightened, a soft vise. “
No
, it’s
not
. But it’s a debt. You owe a life, so save a life. It won’t make up for it, but we all have debts we can’t repay.”

“Save
who
?”

“Start with yourself and work outward.” Letting go, she sat back but kept her eyes on me. “So, are you going to...” She mimed an explosion.

I realized what she’d done and almost hurled for real. “You just tried to, to — ”

“Twice,” she agreed. “I meant to sneak up on you, too. Did you know your body temperature spiked both times?” Her smile came back, tentatively. “So I’m pretty sure you’re safe to stand next to, at least while you’re here. And we’ll help you figure it out so what happened today won’t happen again. Promise.”

Today, Representative Mallory Shankman spoke out in favor of the hotly debated Public Safety Bill, which would require the certification of dangerous breakthroughs and establish a public database of the names and addresses of all known superhumans. In the representative’s words, the recently passed
School
Safety Bill is “no more than a symbolic Band-Aid.” Representative Shankman also responded to this morning’s tragic breakthrough-related death with a call for more research to “detect these unstable breakthroughs before they kill more innocent people.”

Chicago News
.

That nobody had died in the woods was an absolute miracle. After handing off Mal to Willis (the Dome’s majordomo’s lunch creations were better than therapy), I went and lit a candle in the chapel and thanked the white jade statue of Quan Yin, Mary of the Pagans, while waiting for the team to come home.

My lucky early spotting had helped, but also the wet chilly morning had meant the greenbelt paths were lightly used, Chicago now had
four
A Class Minuteman-types able to evacuate in between seconds, and the wave of growth started at the lake and didn’t jump the river until we’d had time to gather most of Chicago’s heavies. Mal’s bus driver was the only related fatality and I lit a candle for him too, and one for Mal.

The FBI and the Department of Superhuman Affairs got permission from the mayor and landed a field team to examine the site before noon. Once they determined that there was nothing remaining of whatever had driven the explosively guided growth, the rest of the team came home. Blackstone gave them time to shower and change into fresh costumes before summoning us all to the Assembly Room to give us the bad news.

“Humanity is destroying itself with its gasses and wastes. It breeds to fill every remotely habitable ecological niche, destroying biodiversity throughout the world. It wrecks the equilibrium of ancient ecosystems. It is a plague upon the Earth. Humanity is now served notice: it will voluntarily clean its house and reduce its numbers, or it will be removed as a threat to the continuation of life on this planet — ”

Blackstone froze the Viewtube file and left the symbol of the Green Man on the screen. The leering face of twined leaves, it was the only visual the file had shown. He looked around the table. We were a much nicer looking bunch than we’d been an hour ago, and we filled the table in our by-now completely predictable order.

It had really started happening without our paying attention to it, the way cliques form and freeze in school, and now the way we sat said everything about the team. Seven and Riptide and Rush tended to hang together off-duty. Chakra and Blackstone were an item of course, but with Blackstone doing research so much, Chakra and The Harlequin formed the Girl’s Club. Lei Zi didn’t mix much, Vulcan rarely came out of The Pit, Watchman and Variforce trained as obsessively as I did, and Variforce had family (so did Riptide, but he had a nanny for little Carlos). I was younger than the Seven-Riptide-Rush and Chakra-Harlequin sets and had a civilian social life I was trying to keep alive, so I sort of floated outside all the circles and Shelly and Jamal usually grabbed seats by me.

“This video-file appeared online two hours ago,” Blackstone said. “The DSA assigns a high probability that this ‘Green Man’ is indeed the individual responsible for this morning’s events.”

“He doesn’t see any need to be original,” Watchman observed. My fellow Atlas-type
sat
at attention, fresh Army-green jumpsuit and black uniform beret pressed and set with military precision.

“Yes,” Blackstone agreed. “He lifted his manifesto almost verbatim from Deep Green’s official declaration.” Groans rose around the table.

Riptide sneered. “Those the
pajeros
that think the world would be a nicer place with less of us in it?”

“Indeed. Deep Green is one of the FBI’s top-list domestic terrorist groups. Among other things, they call for the abandonment of industrialism and urbanism and the reduction of humanity to no more than 100 million souls. So far, they have demonstrated their resolve only through extreme vandalism — destruction of infrastructure of construction companies, energy companies, buildings, equipment. Millions of dollars of damage but, as yet, no one has been hurt.”

“Yet.” Watchman didn’t raise his voice, but looking over I could see that his fists were clenched on the table. “If the Green Man is with them, they weren’t careful today.” Watchman had been in no more personal danger than I had, but this morning was a special kind of nightmare for breakthroughs like us; as fast, tough, and strong as we were, we hadn’t been that much help and if we’d been fighting alone, the disaster would have just rolled right around us.

Blackstone nodded, acknowledging the point. “The DSA team has provisionally ruled the new forest safe, and City Dispatch has thrown every drone it has into the sky to monitor the rest of the greenbelt and city parks. All Crisis Aid and Intervention capes with applicable powers remain on alert, and for now that is all we can do. So now let’s talk about the elephant in the room.”

The screen changed to an aerial view of the new woodland. It sprawled across roadway and field, a wild green growth thrown across the orderly lines of the metropolis.

“There have been florakinetics, plant-controllers, before, but never on this scale. The strongest previously has been Vitaceae, an Italian hero. He can control an acre of heavy-growth plants at one time.
This
,” Blackstone pointed at the screen, “is far beyond A Class. In the same way that the terrakinetic who triggered the Big One last January was beyond A Class.”

I felt like someone had dropped an icicle down my throat to grow in my stomach — by everyone’s faces, a feeling shared around the table.

“Didn’t the DSA investigation decide that Temblor’s powers had been boosted by his psychosis?” The Harlequin asked.

“Yes, and they labeled the new power level Ultra Class and concluded that it had been a one-off event. Now, I’m not so certain. Both events were acts of terrorism. Both are beyond what anybody thought possible. I believe it may be possible we’re facing something new, breakthroughs whose psychosis or fanaticism boosts their powers to unwitnessed heights. We know nothing about the Green Man yet, but I will be digging into Temblor’s history; perhaps the DSA investigation missed something.”

He looked at me when he said it. Or Shelly. We both knew what he meant; the three of us knew that Temblor had been used by the Dark Anarchist — that the time traveler had somehow
triggered
the exponential boost to the psychotic villain’s powers.

“I’m going to assume the worst-case scenario,” he concluded. “If someone out there has found a way to reliably boost breakthrough powers, we need to know. We could be facing a lot more than explosively growing forestlands, so stay ready everyone. Astra, would you remain behind?”

I’d expected Lei Zi and Quin to stay, too, maybe talk to me about my scheduled testimony in court tomorrow, but they left with everyone else. Shelly looked questions at me, and Chakra gave me an encouraging smile in passing. The ice in my stomach thickened. What was going on?

Not Shelly, please, not Shelly
.

Blackstone sighed and stood. He
really
didn’t look good — even with Chakra’s help, he had to be burning his candle at both ends. Normally, he moved as if he stood on an intimate stage, but now his fingers played with his epad without direction.

“Hope.” Another slip — he always called me
Astra
when I wore the mask. “We’re going to launch a cadet team, and I want you to lead it.”

Not
Shelly, and nothing I’d dreamed of. “But —
why
?”

He smiled at that.

“Why, when I’ve always resisted fielding minors even where it’s legal?”

I nodded. Different states had different laws; in Illinois, so long as they didn’t deploy them directly into “combat situations,” CAI teams could field minors sixteen years and older if they had emergency-appropriate powers. Still, Blackstone had brought Crash on only provisionally; he trained with Sifu, sidekicked with Rush, and wasn’t part of the regular field team. Shelly...was a special case, but I was pretty sure he’d brought her on the team just to keep an eye on her.

He sighed again. “The Green Man is not in the Big Book of Contingent Prophecy.”

Oh.
That explained the private talk. Blackstone now belonged to a secret society of
three
.

Shelly and I had taken to calling the huge database of future histories the Teatime Anarchist had left me the Big Book of Contingent Prophecy, and we really hadn’t known what to do with it. What kind of person left that kind of thing in the hands of an
eighteen year old
? Even if he’d seen lots of potential Future Hopes and been totally impressed — which I didn’t
know
since he’d also blocked all direct historical references to me and my potential lives.

After our fight with Villains Inc., I finally asked Shell to sort and classify the thing. She ignored stuff that
might
have happened but definitely wouldn’t now because of the Big One, pulled together all the stuff that might
still
happen, and we gave the whole thing to Blackstone — who promptly freaked over the fact that someone had entrusted the contingent future histories of mankind to an
eighteen year old
.

Well,
yeah
.

Seeing I was following his track, Blackstone nodded.

“In the futures the Teatime Anarchist left us to see, Ultra Class superhumans do not begin appearing until much later — and their existence is one of the things that nearly brings future society to collapse. Temblor was an obvious insertion by the Anarchist’s twin.”

He ran fingers through his hair, disordering gray locks. “We can spend a great deal of time debating the altered chains of cause-and-effect that are leading to the accelerated appearance of threats like the godzillas and the Green Man. What we can’t ignore is that a bad situation is getting worse, and in some ways we are the victims of our own success.”

Now, I blinked. “I don’t understand.”

“Today is a perfect example. The Green Man made his debut
here.
Not New York. Not L.A. Atlas and the Sentinels created the template for the post-Event superhero and superhero team, and since then Chicago has been
the
place for breakthroughs to come and make a name for themselves — the reason we have so many CAI teams. Culturally, we’re the superhero center of the world, the focus of superhero fandom.

“But the Guardian teams are mostly street-heroes, my dear. Today, all the added effectives from the other CAIs only doubled our weight where it mattered, and when a new supervillain wants to make a big statement, he comes here. Last spring we were the only freshwater port to get a godzilla. The Green Man started here for the same reason. And although the future files are far from a sure guide, in all previous contingent trends, once begun, the proliferation of Ultra Class threats continues.”

He looked away. “And in those previous futures, we still had Atlas.”

I swallowed past the block in my throat, nodded. Reading the Sentinels’ pre-Big One future files still wasn’t easy for me, as useful as they might be; I was blocked from reading the ones involving me and in most of the older ones Atlas, John, died hard. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later, but always hard.