Chapter Six
“The entertainment industry gives most people a skewed idea of what superheroes really do. We’re not the police. Even in
Chicago, the Metropolis of the superhero world, we have only eight CAI teams plus independents. That’s less than a hundred card-
carrying capes, most of them B and C-class, covering 8 million people. Sometimes the CPD deploys us like SWAT teams, but mostly we
’re emergency-response. Fires. Bad accidents. We rarely fight ‘supervillains,’ but we are called in whenever a disturbance
involves other superhumans.”
Terry Reinhold, quoting Astra in “This is a job for…”
* * *
Thursday passed with no answer to our dilemma. I considered calling Fisher to get his promise not to consult Blackstone on the
case, but with Blackstone already alerted by Shelly I didn’t think it would do any good. So I patrolled, and went to school, and
worried at the problem.
Friday on evening patrol, Shelly caught me taking a break on the Sears Tower.
“Shots fired in Little Tuscany on 24th and Oakley!” she reported. “Rush is on another police call, and the caller says somebody
’s a superhuman. You’re the closest high-mobility asset.”
I was already diving. “I’m on it.”
Little Tuscany is a newly gentrified neighborhood centered on a cluster of Italian restaurants along West 24th and Oakley. It has
a cozy feel, streets lined with wrought-iron Old World lampposts and benches and well-kept trees and planters, hardly the kind of
place you expect serious action. The fight spilled out of Puccini’s as I dropped to the street, putting the brakes on just enough
not to make a crater. My timing was perfect; as I touched down an explosion of shots shattered the eatery’s street window. Two of
them hit me, one in the right temple. They stung. From the screams inside, they hadn’t been the first shots.
Atlas Rule #1: when in doubt, pacify the situation.
I went in through the window, landing in front of the shooter, a wild-eyed black kid with a pistol. Completely freaked, he still
wasn’t dumb enough to try it on me—grabbing his gun I looked around for more, but then he went down in a spray of blood, a
familiar eye-twisting blur behind him.
Oh no no No!
“Rush!” I yelled. “Sonic, code red!” Shelly would pass it on.
I broke the pistol’s barrel and tossed it, spinning around to track the blur. Another kid crashed into the bar, more blood
flying. I couldn’t be sure, but the speedster seemed to be swinging a baseball bat. A third kid, screaming rage and fear, waved a
Glock. This one was stupid or panicked enough to shoot at me, and I took two more to the chest before I closed the gap to grab the
barrel and wrench it up and away. Making a fist with my other hand, I punched him carefully in the solar plexus. He fell gasping
to the floor, his diaphragm shocked into spasms.
Where’s Rush?
Puccini’s is a small place, a family-owned restaurant packed with checker-cloth covered tables lit by candles in jars, and you
have to go around the bar to get to the dining area from the street. When the eye-twisting blur appeared again I snatched for it
as it went by less than a step away. I missed, saw a second blur, red and white, at the now-open door. The two blurs collided, and
then Rush stood in the doorway gripping a black kid in cornrows and wearing a bloodied biker’s jacket in a come-along hold.
“HeyAstra, what’sthefuss?” He cuffed the protesting kid with plastic ties, then dragged him over and anchored him to the bar’s
foot-rail almost faster than my eyes could follow.
“Do you need to get back to your own situation?” I asked over my shoulder as I checked out the scene, hiding my relief. All but
one of the injured were obvious gang-bangers. The exception, a middle-aged woman, sat on the floor, her face white with shock. Her
dinner partner pressed a folded linen napkin to her ribs. I knelt beside her.
“Nah,” Rush said, grinning under his visored helmet. “Violent home invasion, all done.” Sirens wailed, far away, and the kid
started to cry. Rush nudged him with his foot and decided he’d keep.
I gently checked the woman’s improvised pressure-bandage, whispering reassurances. She’d taken a stray bullet, but would be
alright until the paramedics arrived. I kept moving. Five gang-bangers were down, and the sixth, the owner of the Glock, let Rush
cuff him without trouble. We checked everyone over as the sirens got louder. Broken knees, cracked skulls, and, amazingly, nobody
dead—just injured gang-bangers and shocked diners. The scene didn’t go with the soft music and the fragrant smells of gorgonzala
and risotto, but the Reaper had passed by tonight.
The cleanup always lasts longer than the action. By the time four squad cars pulled up in quick succession, Rush and I had patted
down the gang kids and restrained the ones not too injured to make trouble. Rush got with a patrolman and administered a sandman
pack—a drug injection that would knock an elephant out—to our new speedster friend so they could safely transport him after the
patrolman read him his rights. One of the patrolmen pulled a collapsible stretcher from his trunk, and I helped secure the injured
woman. She told me she was Donna Burcelli, thanked me graciously, and made no fuss as I flew her over to Westlake Hospital. Her
husband followed in his car.
I just managed to miss the swarm of reporters and paparazzi who descended on Puccini’s, and saw Rush hop his motorcycle and
disappear over the Wall into hypertime. Leaving Westlake, the flight back to the Dome gave me time to dictate a full after-action
report. Back in my quarters, I surveyed the damage.
“You look like the victim of a squirrel attack,” Shelly laughed, sitting on my bed, her feet tucked up and arms around her legs.
“Get your imaginary feet off my bed,” I shot back, and she stuck out her imaginary tongue.
“That was more like it,” she said. “Not a proper supervillain fight, but...”
I fingered the bullet hole in the leather face of my mask, right at the edge of the wig. My hands were trembling.
Nobody died. I took a deep breath.
“He was a mad and scared breakthrough, Shell.”
From the statements of badly shaken diners, the kid had run into Puccini’s, chased by the six gang-bangers. They’d proceeded to
corner and beat on him, and he learned just how fast he could be. They escalated to guns when he started speeding, and he got the
trophy bat off the wall and went to town. I really couldn’t blame him, though if Rush hadn’t arrived I couldn’t have done a
thing to keep him from killing every one of his attackers if he’d wanted to. I might be a maid of steel, but I’m not faster than
a speeding bullet and it was a miracle nobody had been killed.
And I’d hated calling for Rush, though admitting that made me feel small. In the showdown with the Teatime Anarchist’s twin,
Rush had been on the wrong side. The subsequent investigation proved he’d been “handled” and lied to, but I hadn’t liked him
much for a lot of other reasons before then and I didn’t like disliking a teammate.
Shrugging it aside, I stripped down. The torso of my costume was a loss too: four holes, one of them in my built-in bra padding.
Well, I had more. I grabbed the terrycloth bathrobe the staff provided and headed for the shower, blissfully anticipating using
all four heads and the waterfall. I wondered if, in the unchanged history, we’d have still met the kid tonight.
And stopped, frozen by a fugitive thought.
“Hope?” Shelly said behind me as I tried to nail it down. I waved her quiet without turning around. I’d been chasing my tail,
but now…
The godzilla was early. Blackstone’s alive…
I felt dizzy.
“Shell?” I whispered, afraid of losing my epiphany. “Why don’t we cheat?”
“Huh?”
“The Time War messed everything up, but you said lots of things are still the same?
“Yeah, but—”
I spun around.
“And you know about everyone the team would have ever met before, right? Everything that might have happened for the next
hundred-plus years?”
She nodded, wide-eyed.
“Everything that made it into the history books, anyway.”
“So, why can’t we cheat? You said Blackstone’s murder doesn’t get solved—but do you know anybody who could have solved it?
Who’s active now?”
She got the far-away look that said she was accessing the hundreds of contingent histories of the future-files.
“Maybe… There’s a supernatural investigator who shows up—might show up—in a couple of years. He specializes in murders by
projections, thought-forms, stuff like that. His name’s Dr. Cornelius, and he actually speculated about Blackstone’s murder
though he couldn’t solve it then.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. But he first pops up doing quiet jobs for Orb, a top-shelf Hollywood PI. And she’s active now.
So, maybe. It was worth a shot, but my heart sank.
“And Orb’s in LA?”
Shelly nodded solemnly.
LA. The last place on Earth I wanted to go.