Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) (Volume 3) (4 page)

“So — So, we need a bigger team. More heavies.”

“Indeed. More like young Mr. Scott, if he proves able to control his power. But we can’t simply expand. People identify with a smaller team, and if we just bulk up on more big guns, we’ll start looking like an army.”

That
I understood. I’d spent too much time with Mom and now with Quin to miss his point. It was all about
optics
, public perception.

Blackstone tapped the table. “You and Shelly and Jamal have helped to counter that impression, which has been a very good thing. And Hillwood Academy has been trying to convince us to take part in their internship program for many years now. As much as a third of their graduating students go on to wear the cape, and their program allows chosen seniors to finish their education while imbedded in a sponsoring team. We can start our new members in their senior year, keep them until twenty-one, bring new members in as they come of age. If they do well with us, they’ll be able to find positions in any CAI in the country.

“And me?” The ice in my stomach was gone — replaced by mutant butterflies.
I’m only just nineteen! The media still thinks I’m underage! I’m Girl Friday!

He smiled warmly. “The junior team would of course include Shelly and Jamal, and you did very well in our fight with Villains Inc. last spring. It would look very odd if you
didn’t
lead it, don’t you think?”

“But—” I shut my mouth. Under the screaming panic, my inside-voice was trying to get my attention.

Hillwood
.

I’d spent sleepless hours searching through the future files for a solution to Shelly’s dangerous situation. In all the previous contingent histories, legal protections for Artificial Persons had been years away, and Legal Eagle didn’t see anything on the near horizon. But there might be a
superhuman
solution, and one of them was at Hillwood now. Maybe. If
that
hadn’t changed.

Blackstone had no idea, but he was waving an opportunity so golden I hardly dared look at it for fear it would disappear.

“I want my own picks,” I blurted, dread and hope leaving me dizzy.

“Agreed. Anything else, my dear?”

Everything
. I wanted to run screaming — instead I took a breath.

“No. No, I’ll do it.”

“Excellent. I believe that we can bring on three more, giving you a team of seven.” He handed me an epad. “Let’s talk for a moment about power-sets and team balance.”

Shelly bounced on my bed, reached over, and poked me.

“Admit it, Hope, you were wigged.”

She’d ducked into my rooms on her way to somewhere else and caught me reading. Blackstone thought it unlikely, but for all we knew the Green Man might pop up any time, and we all had to stay ready to suit up as long as the Sentinels remained first in the response queue. I was back to wearing everything but my mask and wig, cape, and the breastplate armor I could buckle on in a second. Shelly needed the assembly rack upstairs in the launch bay to bolt her into her blue and silver “Fighting Galatea” gear and loadouts, so she dressed civilian.

I swatted her hand away, resisting the urge to hide my epad — she’d just hack it if she thought there was something I didn’t want her to see — and sighed. “No.”

“Really? The tree outside your window made you cry for
weeks
after that silly movie.”

Raising the pad higher, I ignored her smirk. “It kept scraping the window when the wind blew. I was
seven
, Shell — I was scared of a lot of things.”

“Doctors, trees, frogs...”

“Hey, they jump at you!” Eventually Dad had cut back the tree branch, but until then I’d slept with the parentals when Shelly couldn’t stay over. Mom and Dad never understood it; I’d get scared and cry, then Shell would tease me until I cried about
being
scared. “Mom expects you for dinner Friday night.”

She nodded absently, rolling over to lie on her stomach and pick blanket-fluff. “So...”

I switched off the pad and laid it on the bed, stretched. My eyes burned from hours of browsing the Hillwood Academy files and preparing my arguments, trying not to think about court tomorrow or about Seven (he wasn’t becoming an obsession,
really
), and I was glad to see Shelly for guilty reasons.

She was still Shell, my BFF, but we weren’t joined at the hip anymore. I wasn’t the girl who’d followed her everywhere. When I wasn’t training or studying or patrolling I was at school or trying to absorb all the procedures and manuals and action-histories Blackstone was dumping on me (in bigger and bigger piles, recently), and she liked to hang with Crash. She didn’t try and take my time with the Bees — didn’t even ask about them — and only went out with me now when I went home.

We were a team again,
different
, but I could still read her; I couldn’t tell her about Hillwood and my new plans, not yet, but I’d been expecting this conversation anyway.

“Mal isn’t in the Book either, is he?”

Shell rolled back over and kicked her bare feet. Only her too-smooth skin hinted that she wore a body fabricated in Vulcan’s labs.

“No, he’s not.” Which made sense and echoed Blackstone’s observations. It was statistically
un
likely that many post-January 1st superhumans from the old future, the one without the Big One in it, would be appearing now. Instead we’d be getting more and more new and different superheroes and supervillains that the Teatime Anarchist had never seen or read about. Like the Green Man. One change led to another in a domino cascade; alter one tiny detail and change could propagate pretty fast.

Like how I would have never have become Astra if TA’s evil twin hadn’t changed my future by dropping a freeway overpass on me.

Like how I would have
died
in Washington fighting The Ring, if TA hadn’t asked Atlas to bring me onto the team and keep me in Chicago. Like how The Ring would have attacked Washington later, instead of hitting us early in Los Angeles because of the opportunity created when DA triggered the Big One and pretty much derailed the future.

Like how Atlas wouldn’t have died instead of me.

“Hope?” Shelly tipped her head back, looking at me upside down. “You’ve got that look.”

“Sorry.” I rubbed my eyes with fisted hands. “M’okay, seriously. I just...” I looked for a distraction she’d accept, found it and realized my face was heating up. Knowing she could tell just deepened the flush.

“Do you think it’s okay for me to be — to like someone now?”

I realized I should have known better than to give her that kind of ammunition when her eyes lit up. They didn’t look artificial at
all
.

“Eeeeee! Ohmygodwho?” She’d never stop now.

“Seven,” I whispered. “He kissed me the night of the Omega operation, but it wasn’t like...” It wasn’t like for luck, or like the time he’d playfully kissed me at Metrocon last year. It was different, like he hadn’t been sure I was coming back and wanted to get it in
just in case
.

Did I
want
it to be different? I’d finished the mission, gone back to pizza with the Bees, and Seven hadn’t said anything about it. Not a word, which was just
wrong
. Who does that? And I didn’t dare ask, but The Kiss kept getting bigger and bigger in my head and the current security situation meant Blackstone was sending us out together
all the time
. My dreams were getting interesting again, and his blond mop and chin dimple were getting
way
too fascinating. Nope, not obsessed.

I dropped back against the headboard, and Shelly rolled to her knees so she could get a better look. I closed my eyes but she’d seen enough.

“OMG,” she breathed, whatever else she’d come in here for forgotten. “I’d been wondering — you used to crush at least once a year and it’s been almost that long. But you never had one of them
die
before.”

I groaned and grabbed a pillow to hide behind. “Don’t
say
that. What do I
do
?”

“Kiss him back!”

The pillow turned my scream into a muffled protest. She grabbed it and pulled. Since she was as strong as Vulcan could make her and I didn’t want feathers everywhere, I let her tug it down.

“Seriously Hope, you are
such
a chickenshit. You
never
make the first move. Or even the second unless they’re stupefyingly obvious. We could pass him a note: ‘Check
yes
if you want to go out with me.’”

“Don’t you dare!”

She rolled her eyes. “Duh — we’re not in middle school anymore. But I’m not letting you do this again, so
one
of us is going to pin him to a wall and ask what his intentions are.” She slid off the bed.

“Wait!”

“One week,” she agreed with a laugh and a wink. “Then if you haven’t, I will. Study if you can...” She was out the door and on her way to her next scene of mischief before I could think of
anything
that didn’t involve threats of dismemberment. My head hit the headboard again.
Thunk, thunk, thunk
.

Vulcan could always put her back together, anyway.

Geez, what had I done?

C’mon Hope. You fight godzillas, intercept nuclear missiles, give safety lectures to six year-olds. You literally threw yourself at Atlas. How can you be so scared?

It didn’t even occur to me to wonder where she was off to.

Megaton

Seven showed me my rooms, like he was staff and not
Seven
. He hadn’t talked much while my parents were here and we listened to Legal Eagle explain everything. Astra hadn’t been lying — nobody was saying what happened had been my fault, thanks to school security cameras that caught the whole thing. But the superhero-lawyer explained what had to happen, now that I was a “known risk.” I had to get trained, and if I couldn’t control my
gift
, I had to cooperate in finding ways to mitigate it or “go where I wasn’t a danger to anybody.”

I was all for that; Mom couldn’t stop crying and Dad would barely look at me. They signed a bunch of papers turning me over to the state, then they were
gone
.

“Mal,” Seven repeated.

“What? Sorry.” The guy had been freakishly cool about me all day; everyone else except Astra — who hadn’t come back — had been
careful
around me. Not that I blamed them. Now he leaned against “my” computer desk, watching me look at my room. Rooms.

He grinned. “Astra told me it’s the nicest jail she’s ever seen.”

It took me a moment to catch what he was getting at. “This happened to her?”

An easy shrug. “In a way. Ask her about the downside of super strength some time.” Tapping the narrow brim of his fedora, he straightened up and headed for the door. “Night, sport. Big day tomorrow.”