Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes (11 page)

She shrugged defiantly.

“So it’s a little quiet. But I’m
useful
, more useful than I would have been back in the Dome—they
need
me here.” She scowled, looking at the screens that ringed her desk. “Fighting the future is tougher than I’d ever thought.” Her eyes slid back to me. “And the attraction for Mom is we live in one of the safest places there
is
. That and I’m away from the internet. And now you’re in, too. So sit and spill. How the hell did they pry you out of Chicago?”

“I volunteered?”

That took some explaining and she joined me on the couch while I went on about how I’d found out about the place—especially since I hadn’t been looking for
her
. Nobody was; she’d spent the last few months pretending in all her texts and emails that she’d still been going to the private school they’d enrolled her in in Springfield. Because of course not only couldn’t she tell me what she’d been
doing
, any references to Littleton had been redacted so cleverly I’d never notice any holes in her texts.

She pulled her feet up to rest her chin on her knees while I explained about the Kitsune-dream, Jacky’s revelations, everything. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the pose didn’t go with the clothes (and that was just the Mrs. Lori in my head, who Shelly had never listened to anyway).

When I finished she stared into space, absently rubbing her nose. Then she reached up and squeezed an earring I hadn’t noticed, an elegant little pearl-in-silver piece. It
really
looked like the one Jacky had used just yesterday.

“Do you know why they brought you down here?”

“I asked—”

“I know why
you
came, but do you know why they let you come? Really? Are you going to help them mousetrap Kitsune?” My expression answered her question and she shook her head. “Geez, Hope. Jacky shouldn’t have let you out of her sight.”

“What are you
talking
about?”

She groaned, throwing up her hands.

“Hope!
You
wonder how Kitsune even knows about this place? Well,
they
have to be dropping bricks over it. The best security in the world, and I should know, and that sneaky little fox has
gotten in
. He has to have, because if he hasn’t then… Forget it, Occam’s Razor says he’s here or at least popped in sometime so he knows what the place looks like. But if he’s here now, how did he send you a dream? We’re in a separate freaking universe—
telepaths
can’t call out of here. So he really is ‘magical’, not that there was a whole lot of doubt there.

“And if he’s here, why is he here? He’s an
international criminal
, so the answer to that question can’t be good. And why contact you? It makes no sense, but one thing our sneaky spy-guys have to be saying is that if he wanted to bring you here, and he’s
still
here, he might try and touch you. So dangling you and watching very, very carefully may be the best chance they have to catch a magical shapeshifter who’s already inside their security perimeter.”

“Now that’s just…”

She rolled her eyes. “Paranoid? We’re talking about the DSA here. And the US Marshals Service. And the Office of Naval Intelligence.
Professional
paranoiacs. They’re probably all hoping that Kitsune’s running some kind of con, throwing up smoke to cover a steal, because then the only threat is him and not some ‘other’ that he knows about but they don’t. But they won’t be betting on it—they can’t afford to.”

I
so
wanted to disagree, but… “Veritas came with me.”

“See? See? He’s
got
to be running checks on everybody, beating the bushes to see if a fox jumps out. Even Kitsune can’t hide from his truth-power if the guy asks him straight out. Easy question: ‘What is your date of birth?’ The boy or girl who lies is a four-legged varmint.”

She flashed her old grin, eyes bright.

“But you know what this means, right? Kitsune has
challenged
you—to stop him or to help him. So let
them
try and find him—
we
are going to figure out if he’s playing it straight and who he’s warning us is coming to light up the town.”

I wasn’t quite as certain of our plan of action as Shelly, but it seemed like it would be a better use of our time than playing Nancy Drew and trying to find Kitsune ourselves. And
I
was beginning to wonder just how long I was here for; until Kitsune showed his hand or someone really tried to light the town on fire? What about everything else? I’d left a lot in the air in Chicago. The Bees. School. A media-crisis. At the very least, I needed to find a way to phone home.

Shelly had to go over an intelligence package before she headed home. She didn’t threaten to drag me home with her, which would have made me suspicious if I’d had any brain left to think about it with; since the Oroboros didn’t expect anything from me on my first day here she synced our phones and called a guide, a tiny Frisbee-shaped drone to escort me to the Director’s office. The drone led me up to the third floor aboveground, taking us through three automatic security checks along the way and past Director Shaw’s receptionist.

Ali welcomed me into her office with the same coolness as before, and I wondered if she was just one of those people who didn’t accept capes. Which wasn’t the same thing as not accepting breakthroughs, a good thing since she had to be one of the most exotic breakthroughs I’d ever seen; she was a calico cat-girl—predominantly white and orange but with black spots, one on the side of her nose that made her face oddly lopsided. She was also barely taller than me but much better endowed, which made her a
sexy
cat-girl even in the office suit, and she seemed comfortable enough with herself.

She pointed me to a chair. “So, are the two of you caught up?”

“Um, yes? I hadn’t known we
needed
to catch up.”

“Security protocol. Nobody living here is allowed to let anyone know they’re living here. We all have covers, usually residency in a small town in the wilds of South Dakota.”

“And how do you—” I shook my head. “What will I be doing here?”

“Other than working with the Oroboros and Sheriff Deitz?”

I didn’t recognize the name. “If you already have the files, why do you need me? Or Shelly?” She didn’t blink or ask what I was talking about.

“Shelly should be obvious.”

“But she’s not— She’s not a computer anymore. She’s just Shelly.”

“So she’s not useful?” Ali considered me, absently rubbing the black spot on her nose. “She’s still got the highest IQ I’ve ever seen. You didn’t know?”

“She never said!”
That
had to be obvious from my face.

“She scores above one-sixty on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. She also has true eidetic memory, she’s effortlessly multilingual, and even her motor-learning levels are off the charts; she learned how to play the violin to a concert-worthy standard at the school here in only two months. She can multitask without loss of speed or reliability to the order of three parallel tasks, and that’s something brain researchers have proven impossible. Her mind is unique.”

I’d have sat if I wasn’t already sitting.
Shelly, why didn’t you tell me?

Tilting her head, Ali made an odd little humming sound. “Shelly calls you her Blue Fairy? She says that she became a ‘real girl’ because of you?”

I laughed weakly. “I made a wish…”

“Then I would guess that your wish was for the Shelly you knew—who happened to be a hyper-intelligent AI—to be a living and breathing human being again. The result is a Shelly with as smart a meat-brain as it is possible to have. Magic tends towards the literal, but there are limits when outcomes conflict.”

She said it nicely, for her anyway, not implying that I should have thought of all this. It didn’t help; I’d made the mistake of thinking that human Shelly meant the same Shelly who’d impulsively jumped to her death at the age if fifteen, just with some memories added.
Stupid, stupid, stupid
,
Hope!
 
Then I’d cheered at the idea of her going just back to school, like she wasn’t any different and the last two years hadn’t happened. Why hadn’t Shelly laughed in my face?

Obviously deciding she’d given me enough time, Ali stood up.

“The plan while you’re here is to plug you into Shelly’s own intern role while you are not working with the sheriff’s office. Shelly has been focused on data-mining for patterns behind events recorded in what she likes to call the Big Book. I don’t know how useful you will be, but while you are here you have been given to the Oroboros to offer…field perspective. And I would appreciate it if you could keep Shelly happy and not distract her.”

She actually smiled, with the possibility of real warmth this time, and shook my hand again while I fumbled for the right answer to her underwhelming expectations. “The girl really is one of the best minds in the building.”

Ali led me back down to the lobby, where Veritas mysteriously reappeared. He kindly ignored my befuddlement; if my head hadn’t been still trying to wrap itself around how badly I’d misunderstood my BF and what she needed, I’d have started to feel like a package the way they handed me off.

This time he drove us less than three blocks, back onto what passed for their main street, pulling into a diagonal parking space while I was still thinking over everything that had just happened.

“This is your last stop,” he said cheerfully.
 
“Then I’ll take you to settle in.”

“Where—”

He pointed at the bronze plaque on the single-story brick building in front of us.
Littleton Sheriff’s Office
.

He pulled out his cellphone. “Sheriff Deitz will orient you while I make some calls.”

Okay
… I got out, looking up and down the quiet street. Nobody nearby looked at all alarmed or even curious to see a cape get out of a truck. Squaring my shoulders, I pushed through the door.

And blinked. It really was a sheriff’s office—in fact it reminded me of the one in Grand Beach: it was all wood paneling, with a big open space with three desks and extra chairs for people there on business. A huge photographic map showing everything from the X marking the Garage’s entry-point in the south to the lake bordering the north side of town covered one wall. A wood rail divided the visitor’s area with more chairs from the business side. It even had the cells in one corner, keeping everybody together in one big public room that was empty now except for Sheriff Deitz.
Deitz
, and I should have recognized the name.

“Astra.” He looked up from his desk when I came through the door, then stood up and came around it, hand out. I pushed through the gate at the rail and we shook. “Glad that you made it. Did Veritas drop you? I can get your bags.”

“No you can’t. Well you probably could, but you’d sprain something and anyway he’s outside—” I stopped talking. Same long-jawed, earnest face, same “How can I help you, ma’am?” attitude. Same small-town sheriff, except that he should have been in
Grand Beach
. I was meeting far too many people I knew today, and I took a breath. “Hi, Sheriff. It’s good to see you again.”
When I’m not under arrest, and what are you doing here?

“You know, you can take off the—”

“I know.”
 
I took another breath and finally pulled off the mask and wig. Shaking out my bob I tried a smile.

He returned it. “That wasn’t so hard, right? Sweet is out right now, but she’ll be happy to see you.”

“Angel is here, too?”

“It’s a small world. When your little fight in Grand Beach last year put a media spotlight on the place, they rotated us both in here.” He waved to a chair. “I never got a chance to tell you, good work with Villains Inc. Glad it turned out well; I see they gave you the badge.”

“Yes. Why?”

“Really? They didn’t tell you anything?”

I shook my head and he sighed. Leaning back, he propped his feet up on his desk.

“That figures. Let’s start at the top. What do you know about Littleton?”

“Population five thousand, give or take? You use it for Witness Protection? Really, what
is
this place?”

“Brigadoon.”

“What?”

“Sorry.” His easy smile showed dimples. “Bad joke. About eight years ago, one of the crazier Verne-types working out of the Navy base labs got tired of the heat and decided to create himself a little home away from home. He was from Wisconsin. It took a while for the Navy guys to figure out where he was disappearing to and coming back from with lake fish you don’t find in Cuba. Littleton is an extra-reality pocket.”

Extra-reality: the first time I heard the term I’d thought it applied to virtual reality, but it was meant like extra
terrestrial
–something outside of our reality. Like Hypertime, or the Teatime Anarchist’s potential futures. Or where Ozma said she came from.
 
Brigadoon.
Now
I got the reference, and it didn’t make me happy. Shelly had said—

“We’re in another
reality
?”

“The Littleton Pocket. That flash you saw back in the Garage? That tuned you to Littleton’s ‘frequency’, whatever that really means.”