Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes (4 page)

Today marks the third cycle of open elections in the US Territory of Byzantium since Congress ratified the Byzantium Convention’s territorial constitution. Across the Bosporus in East Istanbul, large demonstrations marked Voting Day as thousands of Turks marched to protest the US seizure of West Istanbul as “Constantinople,” the capital of the territory taken from Turkey in the peace settlement ending the Caliphate War. In Constantinople, territory troops stood ready with the city’s ten CAI teams to respond to Caliphate attacks, but the day ended peacefully; this year at least, the Islamic-nationalist terrorist organization has failed to make any public attempts.

AP Archives: Byzantium Elections.

Grendel hit me so hard my breastplate rang and I bounced hard off the impact-wall before I could recover. But I didn’t drop Malleus and I used the bounce to come back harder. The physics were simple; wearing my armor and swinging my short-handled titanium battle maul, I massed more than twice what I did standing in my underwear and that meant twice the imparted force from the same hit. Grendel managed to move with my swing, but it still hammered him off his feet.

But he’d expected it and tried to turn his fall into a grapple. Claws denser than steel carved my armor and
almost
got a purchase before my backswing caught his shoulder and pushed his fall harder.
 
The impact-wall boomed again, third point for me.

“Match!” Shell blew her whistle. Grendel couldn’t see her and the short referee uniform t-shirt, black kickin’ booty shorts, and baseball cap she was wearing, but he could hear her through his earbug Dispatch link.

He climbed to his feet while I waited and watched him change, floating so my toes barely brushed the floor. With anybody else I’d have rushed to give him a hand up, but sparring with me always put Grendel in full fight-mode (the reason I wore the armor). He braced against the wall while his hunched posture straightened, his subcutaneous armor plates melted away, his skin smoothed out, and his claws and fangs receded.

His eyes changed, too, from pure black to human irises circling shrinking pupils. Night-black with silver flecks. I liked his eyes.

“Three to two,” I gasped, breathing hard. “Good match.”

He breathed, held it, let it out—a tantric breathing technique Chakra had taught him—and pushed his dreads out of his face. They’d come out of their tail somewhere in the match.

“Good one,” he agreed, voice steady and grin mostly fang-free. He pointed at my gouged breastplate. “You okay?”

I fingered the deep slanting grooves and shrugged.
 
“Vulcan won’t be happy, but it did its job.” Touching down, I joined him at the wall. When I slid down to sit, he joined me on the floor. Shell obligingly faded out; she was getting good at knowing when I wanted some one-on-one time.

Resting Malleus beside me and leaning back, I pulled off my mask and wig to wipe at the sweat. I still felt a little light-headed; sparring all-out with Grendel was always… hard on the hindbrain. Buffed up and ready for battle, his loominess and claws and fangs always made the ancestral monkey in my head want to run screaming and throw fruit and nuts at him from a safe tree branch.

He turned his head to look at me. In his stripped-down mode I could see traces of the Brian Lucas I’d seen in his confidential files, the upper-class black kid from St. Louis who’d rebelled with his dreads and danced like a man burning to move every moment of every day.

Not that I’d ever met that kid, which was the problem; now the boy was a freaking
wall
, tougher than the one we rested against. After half a year, I didn’t know Grendel much better than I did from his Hillwood file. I didn’t know
Brian
at all.

“What are you thinking about?” the wall asked.

Huh?
I blinked, realized I’d been staring at him. At least I didn’t blush.
Smooth, Hope, reeeeal smooth.

“You did good,” he said. Rumbled, really. “Down in Cairo.”

“You think?” I let my head fall back against the wall. “I let Boomer completely blindside me. Atlas would
so
have called me on it. One of the first things he taught me was not to step into a hot superhuman fight, even if it’s just verbal. ‘If you get that close, you should be swinging first.’”

“Mmm.” Just the rumble, no words. Like the world’s biggest lion. “What was he like?”

“Really?” I drew my legs up, clasped my hands around my knees. “Amazing.
 
Hard. Not— Not perfect, but…what he had to be, I guess.” Almost a year and a half after the Whittier Base Attack I could actually think about him and smile, but Grendel’s question surprised me anyway. M
ost everyone I knew didn’t ask me about Atlas.
 
“You didn’t do so bad, yourself. How are you doing? After everything?”

Grendel shrugged. He
hadn’t
done bad; in fact he’d done the best of anybody in last night’s disaster. His first shot—knocking Boomer through the wall right after me for me to finish—had gotten the most potentially destructive opponent away from the civilians. Then he’d grappled Slamazon and taken her outside, too. Grendel had come off better than anyone else; Tsuris wasn’t going to score any points with the IA investigators—his wind attack on Spinner had been effective, but there in the church rec room it had almost sucked in Ozma, Rush, and the civilians.

No, Grendel had been great. But then he’d been
eaten
. Doctor Beth had cleared him, but who wouldn’t be seriously bugged by being swallowed whole by a rainbow-colored flying lizard?

I watched him out of the corner of my eye. Half the time his psychomorphic body was as good as a mood ring—bulking up, shrinking, claws and fangs growing depending on how easygoing or aggressive he felt at any moment—but he practically
defined
stoic. And recently he’d been getting a handle on the unthinking changes, too, so those visual cues were starting to go away.

So I still didn’t have any idea what went on in his head, and that was the problem. I was strong, Watchman was strong, and people thought we were pretty awesome;
Shell
thought Grendel was awesome with a side of awesome sauce, and had the numbers to prove it. Morphing into his strongest configuration he was already the strongest Ajax-type known, and he was getting
stronger
. According to the future-file he was
never
going to see it had taken three US supersoldier squads to take him down in the end—and the after-action report had concluded that the only reason they’d won was
he let them
.

Go into a berserk rage and slaughter a village full of innocent civilians along with the bad guys, and you might not be as motivated to fight back as you could be.

But that was a future that hopefully would never happen. Here and now he just gave me a shrug. A huge and yes,
awesome
shrug, but that was it.
Sigh
. Moving on, then.

“So.” I kept my gaze innocent. “Going out today?”

There was an upside to being “out of the field”; after inventory and packing we were all set to enjoy some R&R and Ozma’s Anonymity Specs let Grendel go out with the rest of us without causing a panic or fan-frenzy. I thought I’d seen everything until I watched Grendel swallow three monster burgers in the middle of a crowd of students at the Artist’s Café. Nobody noticed the looming gray beast in the room because he was
wearing glasses
.

Magic is
weird
.

Now he actually grinned. “Navy Pier’s arcade has a Dance Dance Revolution machine that can take me, and I’m two up on Crash so it’s on.” The rat was laughing before he finished, toothy grin widening as my brain shut down at the mental image.

“That’s…good…”
Don’t laugh don’t laugh don’t laugh don’t laugh
. I dissolved into helpless giggles.

“So, did you get him to talk about his feeeeelings?” Shell mocked me.

“No.” Out of my armor, I started stripping again. My day could involve a lot of changes.

Shell sat on my bed and watched as I chose civies for the night, a sea green party dress. Above the knee but flowy, it had been Julie Approved—part of her inspiration-collection and her campaign to create a Look for me that fit with the level of fashion the Bees intended to work with when they launched their first boutique.

The one real upside to being grounded
now
was Shell and I weren’t going to miss Annabeth’s wedding-date celebration, which was great because I’d gotten us reservations at Fancies before the flooding began. Shell was already dressed to go out, in a black party dress that matched her hair. All dressed up, her Shell-shell looked older than I did, which hardly seemed fair.

“Told you so. He’s a
guy
.
 
You’re a
gurrrrl
. He could be completely weirded out from starring in his own production of Jonah and the Whale, St. George and the Dragon, whatever, and he’s not going to tell you about it.” She dropped her voice as far as it would naturally go.
 
“Hey, man, it’s cool. I’m just going to go crush Jamal on Dance Dance Revolution. Because I
can
.”

I smiled in spite of myself.
 
“Think he’ll talk to Jamal?”

“Probably. In the two word sentences boys use to communicate. Wear the silver pumps.”

I snagged them, started working on makeup. We had time, and Julie had been specific about what the night required. “Anything on the water tower search?”

Shell groaned theatrically. “No,” she mirrored me. “And I even went international
and
into the Big Book of Contingent Prophecy.”

That was
not
what I expected to hear, and I stopped, tube of lipstick in my hand. “Really? That’s—” That wasn’t right. The dream had seemed so
real
. And what possible use was an allegorical water tower? But everything had a picture somewhere in the interconnected world of the internet cloud, and if I’d seen a real place Shell should have been able to find it. And it was
important
; remembering it brought back that cold sense of certain doom. I stared at my lipstick.

“Shell? Could you search for this?” Reaching up, I drew an outline of the six-pointed star I remembered on the vanity mirror, a less exact squiggle of the eagle in the middle.
No
… I grabbed a wipe, rubbing out the eagle and drawing it bigger, overlapping with the star’s edges. Shell sat up and scowled at it for a moment, then filled it in virtually using our neural link. She added a ring around it with words, and a familiar symbol defaced the mirror.

“It’s the US Marshals symbol,” she said needlessly.

I stared at the star, thought of the dream. She’d nailed it; I’d forgotten about the ring until now, hadn’t tried to read the words in my dream.
Justice, Integrity, Service
.

Finishing my face on autopilot (years of Mom’s foundation meetings made it easy), I thought hard. This was going to involve
government
. How?

“Call Blackstone?” Shell guessed when I didn’t say anything.

“No… Call Jacky. We’ve got time. Secure me?” New Orleans was in our time zone and it wasn’t sunset yet there, either, but she liked to be awake and outside for it. I grabbed my cell, punched Jacky’s icon. Shell gave me two thumbs up as it rang—the line was secure as only a twenty-second century cyber ghost could make it.

It rang twice. “
Hi, Sunshine
.” Just hearing her voice, deep, confident, take-no-prisoners, made me feel better.

“Hey, you. Can I take advantage of my favorite fiend of the night?”

“
Tell me
.” Keeping it light hadn’t fooled her, and her voice tightened. I told her about Kitsune and the dream. She was quiet after I described the Marshals symbol.

“Jacky?”

“
Give me a moment
.”

Shell rolled her eyes. “Well, this is reassuring. Not”

“Hush.”

“
What?
”

“Not you.”

“
Have Shell send me the details and don’t talk to
anybody
. I’m flying up tonight
.” She hung up, leaving me staring at my cell.

“Okay,
I’m
freaked now,” Shell quipped. “Sent and done, so let’s go—we’re going to be late.”

Shell and I found New Tom waiting for us when we came out the Dome’s “back door.”

“Ladies,” he greeted us, tapping his chauffer’s hat. New Tom’s black suit hid body armor and at least two guns that I knew of, but his passengers weren’t always as tough as me or Shell. Holding the passenger door of one of the team’s tinted-window town cars for us, he climbed into the driver’s seat once we were settled.