Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) (Volume 3) (34 page)

Grendel

Never mix into a girl-fight, even if it looks like it’s winding down. Her serene Highness ignored Galatea’s laser glare as I did my best looming monster impression. I loom, therefore I am. Astra — Hope, and didn’t the name just freaking fit her right down to her cheerfully hopeful default expression — went from scowl to smile in the time it took her to turn her head. That left the job of carrying the chill to Galatea, and the robot-girl tried hard.

It didn’t work real well against Ozma’s super-imperturbability.

Hope’s eyes slid past Ozma to focus on me, got wider. So did her smile, and she mouthed a
Thank you
before looking back at the princess. Every muscle in my body twitched and started bulking up like a fight was coming. Yeah, right — like she could threaten me on a
good
day.

“I am glad to find you well,” Ozma went on while I tried to figure out why the girl made me so twitchy, “and I have come bearing gifts. Brian?” I handed her the pepper tin, and she deposited it in Hope’s good hand with the kind of flourish that would look silly from anyone else.

The girl obviously had no idea. “Thank you? I suppose you can never have enough pepper...”

Ozma laughed. “May I?” Taking it back, she unscrewed the bottom compartment and held it out.

Holy shit. Holy freaking shit
.

Now
the little silver pill inside glowed softly, slowly pulsing dim and bright. It looked like a piece of the Moon — not a moon rock like the astronauts brought back but a piece of the Moon like you saw it on an icy clear night, sailing in its own halo.

“Baum always went light on description,” Ozma observed.

Gosh, do you think?
After the retrieval, I’d gone back and reread the pill parts of the story; “silver pills” didn’t exactly cover it. Hope couldn’t take her eyes off it — perfectly understandable since the pretty little thing was practically singing a subliminal siren song. She swallowed.

“What does it do?” she whispered softly. “How do you use it?”

Ozma laughed again. “It’s a little big, so
I
would take it with water. It’s the last of the Wishing Pills. In the story, you had to gulp it down and then count to seven by twos and wish for what you want to have happen. Baum threw the silly riddle in to make it look harder, but it’s really that simple; the hard part is what happens next.”

“Next?” That came out as almost a squeak.

“Next.” The princess wasn’t laughing anymore. “The bigger the wish, the harder the test. The Wishing Pill turns by degrees into the worst pain you have ever imagined, ratcheting up until the wish is granted or until you change your wish to ‘I wish I’d never swallowed the pill!’ Wish for that, and you won’t have. The pill will be back in your hand, unswallowed.”

Hope bit her lip, looking pale under the purple bruising. “I’ve taken things that have disagreed with me before.”

“Never like this, I promise you. You need to keep true to your wish in the face of unbearable pain. I couldn’t, not even to save myself and my friends. When it was me, I wished it out again.” She closed the tin, cutting off the calling moon-glow. “And there are limits. The wish must be for something immediate, concrete, and present. You can wish for Shelly to be human again, or for a chest full of diamonds, or for a total physical makeover, but not for peace on Earth.”

Hope and Shelly traded a look that meant absolutely nothing to me, but I was beginning to wonder if Oz was lots darker than Ozma let on. Seriously? A torture-test to see if you were worthy of having your wish granted?

But when you thought about it, the stories had lots of bad things happening: a king who sold his wife and kids to an evil gnome in return for immortality, a lady with a collection of heads she liked to swap to match her clothes. Hell,
Ozma
had been robbed of her memories, turned into a boy, and raised by an abusive witch — not exactly bedtime story stuff when you thought about the details.

Watching the girls, Ozma nodded. “I will keep the tin in my magic cabinet. When you
wish
to use the Wishing Pill, simply call on me — or on Nix if I am not present — to deliver it to you.”

The princess got us out of there as smoothly as she got us in, barely nodding to Variforce and Seven. Variforce waved us on; Seven was too busy giving signatures to a pair of nurses who looked ready to drag him into the nearest supply closet. She followed me close as I broke a path for us to the lobby and out, and I got my usual stares and starts from the civilians, but I was really too bothered to notice.

“So what was all that about, princess?” We had a moment while our driver, who Galatea called New Tom for some reason, pulled the van around to meet us.

Ozma looked up, distracted. “Hmm?”

“I get that Astra — Hope — made a deal with you, but why the big production now?” She’d practically rushed us here, stopped at the door long enough to hear the two BFs’ bonding moment (it had gotten kind of loud), timed her grand
Ta-dah!
entrance.

“Oh, that. The Question Box.”

“Huh?”

She patted my arm. “The Question Box surprised me this morning with an uncharacteristically unambiguous instruction to tell Hope about the Wishing Pill. ASAP was involved.”

I growled. “You used it again?”

“No, it got my attention. And it was certainly right; I have acquired two recruits for the price of one.”

She left it at that and I didn’t push it, but I couldn’t say I was happy. I didn’t trust the Question Box. Sure it had been one of Ozma’s royal treasures for most of a century, but it had been made by an evil sorcerer who hadn’t got much good from it and it certainly hadn’t warned the princess of the
coup d'état
that turfed her off the Emerald Throne. And these days it didn’t wait for questions — it answered questions you didn’t know you
had
.

New Tom got us back to the Dome, where we found The Harlequin waiting for us in our common room with Vulcan and a guy named Andrew, with something to make me forget all about the Question Box: costume designs.

They couldn’t be serious.

“The worst thing about being outed is losing my sense of safety. And not just
my
safety — people around me are at risk now, too. A few months ago, I got shot with a shoulder-launched missile by Paladin fanatics while doing my job — now that they know who I am, they or anyone else can attack me anywhere, which means it’s statistically more dangerous to stand next to me and I have to be alert
all the time
. Do you understand? Standing in line at Starbucks, I’m putting other people at risk. Compared to that, the loss of privacy is just really, really annoying.

Astra, excerpt from the Citywatch “outing” interview.

They were serious.

And they were crazy.

With all the footage of our “arrival” in Chicago to fight the Green Man, the Sentinels’ PR guys had as much chance of keeping us under wraps for a full, publicized introduction as they did of keeping Rush’s tabloid-selling sexcapades out of the news (my favorite was his bet with the Chicago Bears cheerleaders). So Chandler Communications — the PR firm run by Atlas’ big brother — went the other direction; they dropped our codenames and power-sets on the Sentinels’ website and solicited costume ideas.

Yeah, really.

“C’mon! Just wear it once. Please?” Nix darted around my head, a hyper hummingbird.

Andrew, a guy who looked more like an Olympic triathlon athlete than a fashion designer, had brought each of us
three
costumes based on the “best” fan submissions that he expected us to model, with near-poster sized computer renditions of each so we could get a good look. The Green Man could attack any minute, and we were doing a freaking fashion show.

Every one of Reese’s costumes incorporated a helmet and body armor — fliers are great targets — and one included a huge cape. A bunch of people had gone back to the source for Ozma’s costumes; hers were art-deco and fluttery things, but since she wasn’t going to be a first responder superhero that was okay. Mine...

“Pleeeease?”

I grew fangs and growled at her while Ozma laughed. Reese knew better and just smirked silently. Andrew and The Harlequin wisely stayed out of it.

Armor wasn’t really on the menu for me — completely redundant and hard to adapt to my changing measurements anyway — but one fan had sent in a fantasy-medieval dragon armor design of plates held together by cross-webbing straps that could stretch to accommodate. It came with the biggest, most bad-ass sword I’d ever seen — seriously, the thing was as tall as I was and the blade had to weigh at least a hundred pounds. Vulcan claimed he could make it tough enough for me to swing more than once.

I was supposed to be a knight under a curse.

The second “costume” went with heavy black spandex shorts, which showed they’d at least researched the Academy’s gym uniforms, but added Celtic or Maori tribal tats all over my chest, arms, neck and shoulders, and even my face. I had to admit, the black-on-gray look was pretty cool and ratcheted the intimidation factor — which I was already naturally good at — even higher.

The third costume had gone ... the other way.

“Pleeeease?”

I was going to swat a fairy.

Costume number three was black dress pants, a snow-white shirt, black tie, and black vest with a fancy scrollworked ‘G’ for Grendel on the breast pocket. The tie hung loose as a noose, the shirt was untucked with sleeves rolled halfway up, and the vest was open, but still, what? What was it, prep-school grunge?

Andrew solemnly assured me he’d made it with materials that could expand as far as I could, like he thought that helped.

“Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?”

“Nix,” Ozma admonished the doll. “Please don’t be tiresome.” She gave me a look. “You do realize she will wear you down.”
Translation:
I want to see it, too
.

“Fans have way too much time on their hands.”

“You could always be
my
knight ...”

“Yeah, no.”

“And I do not believe you want to be any scarier.”

I growled at her and she laughed, completely unimpressed.

Five minutes later, I had the freaking tie on. Andrew nodded and Ozma and The Harlequin smiled while Nix squealed, and Reese stopped smirking.

What?

Megaton

Variforce smacked me out of the sky again, but I managed to get my feet under me and blast before I splashed into the lake. Again.
And what have we learned? I can blast just fine underwater.

The whole exercise was The Harlequin’s fault; she’d insisted that I needed more public exposure, and since the Green Man wasn’t attacking (yet) and my powers didn’t support a patrol function, she’d convinced Watchman and Variforce to move my training outside. Five hundred feet over Lake Michigan.

I blasted my way back up to decent altitude, tracking Variforce high above me in his cloud of supporting fields. The mission was simple, I just needed to get past him to “tag” Watchman. Naturally, we had an audience; telescoping cameras pointed our way from boats and the shore and cape-watchers with binoculars followed my bright blast-column as I climbed toward the afternoon sun.

Maybe Dad was watching.

“
One more time, Megaton
,” Watchman warned me, “
and we’re done. Since we could be going into action any time, we don’t want to run you out of juice first
.
So put it all in
.”

He didn’t sound a bit worried by the possibility that my “all in” might actually
reach
him. At least my “all in” didn’t include an Astra-style death ride, but what could I put “all in” that I hadn’t?

Doctor Beth had spent hours and hours breaking down what my explosive blasts were actually
doing
, and he’d found out a few interesting things that made
no
sense. First, my blasts didn’t really come from inside me. Instead they drew from some internal source but they erupted fully in thickening waves
outside
the point of my body projecting them; which explained why I could keep my gloves on when I “shot” explosive bolts from my hands — there was a still zone between my skin and the eruption point. Same for my legs and feet when I rocketed.

Second, there were at least three factors to the energy blast I projected: heat, light, and “pure kinetic force.” What the hell was pure kinetic force? Dr. Beth didn’t know. He called it a “force without a material component outside its source,” like magnetism or gravity, and he suggested I should visualize my kinetic blasts as explosions of
invisible pellets
that “dissipated when they encountered a solid object to which they could transfer their kinetic energy.” According to his fancy toys, kinetic force was normally the main component of my blast; the heat and light, and the bang and roar, was just wastage from the main reaction (though I could dial it up to where heat and light was the main component, like I had when facing the green).

So how could I use what I had? Variforce’s fields could dissipate heat and refract light easy, so “all in” had to be the kinetic kick — but the concentrated fireworks that came with them made my blasts easy to track; he just thickened his fields at the point of impact, dissipating the hit all through his cloud of fields. It was like punching a sack of gym balls.

But he had to focus on the point of impact. If I could spread his focus and close the distance...
Okay then, maybe “all in”
does
mean a death-ride this time.

I poured on the roar, picking up speed and targeting Variforce squarely in my helmet sights, visualized a tight stream of invisible pellets, as organized as photons in a laser, aimed, and erupted.

The blast looked dim in the afternoon light, at least by my standards, but Variforce’s fields went almost opaque where he braced them for the hit as I twitched, fired, twitched, fired, twitched, fired, blasting as fast as I could at different angles while still closing on him. Separation disappeared as his field cloud seemed to leap at me, and then I gave it everything I had, almost straight into him, kicking my rocket-column up another notch and blasting hard.

The fields tore, shredded, and I was past him and
through
, clear sky between me and Watchman. I didn’t even think, just fired one more time, tagged him before he could blink — and couldn’t believe what I’d done. It didn’t even rock him, fast-shot weak as it was, but it was a
hit
.

“
And that’s game
,” came Watchman’s dry voice. “
Congratulations, Megaton. Variforce?
”

What? I looked back and down. Variforce’s field cloud churned, closing the hole I’d blasted through it. I’d probably roared through within a few inches of the guy.

“
I’m good
,” Variforce confirmed
.
“
And, kid? Good hit. You’ll make a decent opposition force with more training
.”

Watchman dropped lower, letting Variforce anchor an outlying thrust of field to him for faster flying, and we headed in. “
How do you feel?
” He asked as the shore got closer.

“Okay, I guess. A little tired, like I’ve been running laps. I’ve got a lot more — I just have to let it build before I let it go. Kind of like charging a capacitor.” One bright spot to all this was I could let my inner science-geek come out.

“
Good to know. Once the whole Green Man thing is behind us, we’re going to have to take you somewhere and see just how much you can build up. You may be one of the most powerful energy projectors we’ve seen until now
.”

“I could have a nuclear option?”

“
Maybe. If you do, let’s wait to use it until we know the size of the hole you’ll make. Got it?
”

Caution rang in Watchman’s voice; he wasn’t my coach, he was my firing range instructor.
Don’t play with your guns until we can test-fire them somewhere safe — the life you save may be your own.
He hadn’t had to tell me twice. I knew what “Let’s see what this does” experiments led to: evacuating the school, if you were
lucky
, and we didn’t want to accidentally blow anyone else up, did we?