Chapter Five
A protest outside Restormel, the base of the Hollywood Knights, turned violent today. The crowd, gathered to protest the Knights’
break with the National Superhuman Professionals Union over its support of the Domestic Security Act, threw bricks and even
improvised incendiaries at the gates. Baldur, the team’s photokinetic, flash-blinded the crowd, making it easier for police with
eye-protection to remove the rioters.
LA Evening News
* * *
Flying is without a doubt the coolest part of my breakthrough. I always loved stargazing, and the night sky high over Chicago had
become my sanctuary. There are few things as beautiful as a full moon over a sea of clouds, and tonight I needed it to get the
image of the box out of my head.
“Shelly?” I called. “You can come out now.”
She floated beside me, looking down at the gossamer white clouds below us. The wind ruffled her unruly red hair. A dream in my
head, a future-tech cyber-neural projection onto my senses, she was real to me.
“Thanks for keeping me out down there,” she said, hugging herself though she didn’t really need the 501 jacket she wore.
I smiled. A tired smile, but I could make it a real one. “I told you so.”
“Bite me.”
She sighed dramatically. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
A commuter jet roared by far below us, flying out of O’Hare.
“No,” I agreed. “We never played at ‘crime-scene examiner.’ But the dress-up was fun.”
Tucking my legs up into lotus position, I watched her play with her hair.
“Shelly? I’ve been thinking. Why didn’t you warn us about the godzilla? With all those future-files in your head, a historical
event like a godzilla attack on Navy Pier would be hard to miss.” Certainly nobody had really expected a godzilla attack to come
out the Great Lakes; Lei Zi still had Riptide, Galatea, and a scratch-team from the other Crisis Aid and Intervention teams
searching the lakes for eggs and godzilla-young.
Shelly sighed again.
“I was wondering when you’d ask me that. She wasn’t due for another two years.”
“Hey what?”
She scowled, looking worried.
“The Teatime Anarchist’s files are all history files he collected on his trips to the 22nd Century, right? And every time he
came back knowing what was going to happen, he’d change things just by knowing? Same for his quantum-twin, and their little games
could change things big-time, right?”
I nodded. “But you told me there’s a kind of inertia—like time is a river. Whichever way it goes, it’s still headed for the
sea.”
“Yeah. The Anarchist told me once it’s like, if you could go back to 1914 and keep those Serbian goofs from assassinating
Archduke Ferdinand, World War One would still have happened, because Germany and France would have just found some other reason to
fight. Probably over the African colonies.” She snickered at my look. “Hey, all of the world’s history right here in my head,
remember?”
“Brag brag brag.”
“But the war would have happened later, right? Maybe a lot later,” She chewed her lip. “So stuff changes, but it’s still kinda
the same. Whoever’s behind the Godzilla Plague, I think the Big One, or maybe the Whittier Base Attack, made them move up their
timetable.”
“Oh.”
Well, that made sense; in another history the Whittier Base Attack had been the White House Attack. The Ring had used the
opportunity created by the Big One to take their shot ahead of schedule. And Atlas died instead of me.
“So you’re saying the Big One sped things up?”
She shrugged, frustrated. “Some things. And long term it’s got to be changing lots of things; over fifty thousand people died—
that’s a lot of rocks thrown in the river. So far sixteen high-tech companies that would have started up this year, haven’t. And
one big political scandal never happened now. And this year’s mid-term elections? Don’t even ask.”
Hearing Shelly talk like an expert on stuff that had never interested her before was deeply weird.
“So the future’s out of date,” I said. “‘Always changing, is the future.’”
She giggled, then turned serious again. “I’m not going to be as much help as the Anarchist thought,” she said glumly.
“Sure you are—lots of the stuff we’re going to run into is older than last year, or won’t be changed much by it. So it won’t
happen the same way: we’ll deal.”
She didn’t look happier.
“Hope...” she said softly.
That was the Trouble Voice. Something bad had happened, or was about to.
She flipped her hair out of her face and looked at her sneakered feet. I noticed they had magic-marker graffiti on them.
“The last history-dump TA got before the Big One was from 2030,” she said.
“And?”
“It was different.”
My eyes stung, but I waved it away.
“I know that; Atlas was alive and we lived happily ever after, right?”
“No—I mean, yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about. In the last pre-Big One future, Blackstone died two months ago.”
I stopped breathing.
“How?”
“He was murdered.” She avoided my eyes.
My stomach seized. It felt like somebody had snuck up and punched me in the gut.
“No. Why? By who?”
“Nobody ever found out. But it was the same guy who killed Mr. Moffat—at least the method was the same.”
Dear God, no. I was going to be sick. Projectile-vomit from five thousand feet.
“The thing is,” Shelly continued in a rush of rising panic as I tried to shut out the image of Blackstone-soup in a box, “since
the Big One he spent the last few months recruiting and managing the team.”
I nodded. After the funeral I’d been half-useless for weeks, sleepwalking my way through my exercise regime, focusing on my
classes and now-solitary aerial patrols, smiling until my face froze. I was pretty sure I’d scared Shelly, and I knew I’d scared
my parents, who’d been through it before when she died, but even I’d seen how Blackstone had stepped up to fill the leadership
void left by Atlas and Ajax.
But now…
“He’s back in his team-intelligence role now,” I said, starting to think again. “What was he working on before?”
“I don’t know. The guy keeps secrets like nobody’s business.”
“Does he know about the danger?”
“Yes! I told him as soon as you told him about me!”
“Did you tell him about tonight?”
“Duh, as soon as we knew what was in the box.”
“Okay. And?”
She shook her head. “He said ‘Thank you.’”
I sighed, relieved.
Shelly wasn’t. “But what if the supervillain who killed Mr. Moffat is a hit-man? Detective Fisher said the Outfit might have had
it done. So, what if Blackstone’s working on something that they don’t like. Or somebody else doesn’t like?”
I wasn’t relieved anymore. The public knew Blackstone as a superhero stage-magician, but he was oh so much more than that. He
focused on developing threats, and he regularly worked with and consulted for the CPD, the DSA, and the FBI. He’d probably been
half the reason the Teatime Anarchist had originally taken such an interest in the team.
And if one of his investigations upset the wrong people... I thought of the box and tasted bile in my throat. Breathe. Think it
through.
“Shell? In the pre-Big One future, did the bank robbery happen?”
“Yes. Back in February.”
“And Mr. Moffat?”
She nodded.
“And then Blackstone was killed?”
“Yes!”
The cause-and-effect chain linked together horribly. Mr. Moffat’s horrific murder drew Blackstone’s attention to a new
superhuman threat. Blackstone decided to assist the CPD in the investigation, made somebody nervous, and became the next target.
Now it was just happening later.
And just how much would Shelly’s warning help him? He already took elaborate security precautions but, truthfully, there were a
lot of superhuman powers against which there was no defense other than hitting first or just not being there.
Mr. Moffat had been reduced to soup, his furniture reduced to scraps, in a thirty-story condo with heavy internal and external
security—there’d even been a camera on the balcony—and only a neighbor getting some air one floor down had heard anything. The
Dome’s security was an order of magnitude higher; it could even detect an unauthorized teleporter by the change in air-pressure
when he popped in. But there was no guarantee that whatever got to Mr. Moffat couldn’t still get to Blackstone. And Blackstone’s
powers weren’t really combat-oriented; levitation, illusions, teleportation, not the stuff for going up against whatever had
reduced Mr. Moffat.
So the only way to be certain he was safe was to catch the killer before he targeted Blackstone. But how could we find him if
Blackstone, with all of his resources and mad skills, hadn’t?