Not Your Backup, page 15
“I slept great; those sheets are so soft,” Bells says happily.
Guess he didn’t have the same problem.
Christine grins at Emma. “I’ve got mushrooms, onions, tomato, avocado, four different kinds of cheese, what do you want in your omelet?”
“Uh, everything, sure, thanks,” Emma says.
Emma watches Christine deftly toss the ingredients in a pan, shaking them as she hums.
Emma takes deep a draw of the rich caffeine. She immediately feels more alert, ready for the day. “Hey, do you have any unmonitored way of making holocalls?”
“Not really,” Christine says. “I’ve got the house connected for incoming data, sure, for the newsfeeds and stuff, but it’s definitely not secure. I’ve got a few unregistered DEDs that will bounce your location, so this house is safe, but—”
“Speak in code,” Emma says, nodding. “I got it.”
Emma sighs, holding Christine’s DED away from her. Her mothers’ voices echo from it, and she winces as they ignore all of Emma’s security warnings about speaking vaguely and in code. She just wanted to reassure them she was okay, but hearing from her was enough to set off a worried frenzy. It’s as if the conversation she had with them before leaving to work with the Villain’s Guild and build up the Resistance hadn’t happened at all.
Emma brings the device back to her ear. “Mom, look—”
“You need to come home right now!”
“You and Bells stole a car and left in the middle of the night—”
“It was his car!” Emma protests. “And don’t use names. This isn’t a secure channel—”
“You are grounded!”
“You can’t ground me; the Resistance needs me!”
“We need you. Do you know how terrifying it is, not knowing where you are and if you’re safe, and with the incoming meteor storm— you need to be in a Collective-sanctioned shelter, not gallivanting about the country!” Samantha Robledo’s voice takes on the sharp, determined cadence she uses in her Council speeches. “It’s time you stopped playing these games and causing trouble.”
Emma frowns. Parts of this doesn’t make sense at all— didn’t her mother warn her that the shelters might not be safe?
Josephine’s firm voice doesn’t waver. “We’re coming right to Nuevo Los Angeles and picking you up right away.”
What?
“You’re lucky that I’ve got a Council meeting there this week. We’ll bring you right home.”
Realization dawns on Emma. Her moms are playing to the monitored channel. It was a code after all. She exhales in relief, wondering what’s going on back home, why her parents felt the need to throw a false trail.
“Thank you, I love you. I’ll see you soon,” Emma says.
“I love you! This will all be over soon.”
Emma ends the call and sits, hanging on to her love and her hope.
“All right, if Jess is looking for us, we should get somewhere she could find—”
“We can go back to the park,” Bells suggests.
“That’s a great idea. We can go out in different disguises every day and wait for them to find us.” Emma nods at Bells.
“Is that the plan? Just waiting for all of them right now?” Christine asks. “If Jess can find us, we should be doing something in the meantime.” She sets a perfect omelet on Emma’s plate, smiling at her. “New Bright City is not only the capitol, but also the center of the Collective’s media and entertainment. As you saw yesterday, I’ve been pretty good about tracking down where they stream Starscream’s interviews—”
“I actually had an idea about doing this on a larger scale,” Emma says. “I agree, being here and getting broadcast in newsholos goes a long way toward changing public opinion—”
“That’s not the first time I did it,” Christine says, her mouth flattening into a thin line. “I know you all have been super busy out west with your Resistance recruiting campaign and stuff, but I’ve been getting broadcast at least once a week.”
Bells whistles, flicks through a holo-display, and gestures at the myriad results. “You’ve got a lot of hits for Crinoline,” he says proudly. He peers closer, reading a few of the headlines. “They’re all about how you’re an inept villain with strange fashion sense but it’s a good start!”
“Clearly, I’m no match for the Heinous Chameleon.” Christine giggles.
Emma gives Bells a jaunty thumbs up. “You’ll always be the number one most wanted.”
“It’s kind of difficult with all of this, come on.” He gestures at himself, smirking, until Emma tosses a pillow at him. He catches it; his smile broadens.
Emma enlarges the projections; the holos expand as she reads the articles. “None of these say anything about the truth about the League,” she says. “Look, it’s great that you’re getting yourself out there, but they’re just spinning you as another villain.”
Christine sighs. “Yeah, I’ve crashed livestreams before, but they usually cut it right after I start talking. And any recordings they scrub clean.”
Emma nods. “Right. But that’s just you as Crinoline, right? Now what if we had someone, live on a broadcast, who could talk to the public, someone they know and trust?”
“Like talk to a reporter directly?” Christine tilts her head. “So many are in the League’s pocket.”
Bells taps his chin; his hair shifts longer and curls.
Emma gestures at Bells.
He raises an eyebrow at her. “Me? Public enemy number one?”
Emma rolls her eyes and makes a wavy motion with her hands.
“What’s that supposed to be?” Bells teases.
“You know!”
“Oh! Haha, okay, someone like—” Bells’ face completely rearranges, his shoulders broaden, and then, sitting at the table with them, is Lowell Kingston, complete with immaculately coiffed, ash-blond hair. Bells adjusts his shirt collar and straightens his charcoal-gray suit with the seal of the Collective pinned to the lapel. “Citizens of the Collective, I implore you…”
Emma shakes her head. “No, that would get scrubbed too fast. Kingston would definitely notice that we were impersonating him.”
“Yeah, but he’s the most politically powerful person in the country, so…”
“A reporter,” Emma says. “A specific reporter who only talks about superheroes, who everyone loves.”
Bells winks at her and snaps his fingers. “Why didn’t you say so?”
He shifts again. His hair elongates into a sparkling pompadour and his jawline squares. Wilton Lysander, the Collective’s most famous superhero reporter, trusted for the latest in gossip, news, and every salacious detail. People would snap up his segments immediately.
Christine raises her eyebrow. “Wouldn’t we have the same problem? What if the real Lysander notices and shuts it down?”
Bells points his fingers at Christine in Lysander’s trademark posturing. “Good point.”
“Okay, but Lysander prides himself on being the first to know what’s happening,” Emma says. “He wants, above all else, for people to watch his show and to share it.”
“Yeah, he definitely did a number on me with the whole ‘Chameleon is the world’s greatest villain’ thing,” Bells says. He shifts back into himself, shrugging. “But I would say, he definitely has his self-interest first.”
“He probably already knows the truth,” Christine says. “He must suspect, at least, having covered superheroes for so long, and helping the League spin stories. I mean, unless they’re feeding it to him, and he’s just regurgitating it.”
Emma takes a deep breath. “We don’t know his motives. If a broadcast of Bells as Lysander goes viral, Lysander won’t deny it. He wants those ratings, those views, those clicks. And who knows? Maybe we’ll convince him.”
Christine nods. “I think it’s a good idea, Em! You know, there are a few reporters I’ve noticed who have been questioning some of the weirdness, you know? Like how a bunch of villains disappeared last year, and some heroes too, and then all of a sudden we’ve got new people.”
“New people?”
Christine manipulates the holos on the table, scatters them, and pulls out files and expands them; the light dances in her fingertips as she goes. “I saved some livestreams about it. Hang on, here we go.”
Emma recognizes the reporter in downtown New Bright City: Farha Rao, wearing a pink dress and a matching headscarf, smiling at the camera. “And we return to the scene where the new hero Sublimate has just recovered a stolen painting from the Museum of Modern Art. I wonder if Sublimate is any relation to the now retired Aerodraft? They do seem to have the same powers. The Collective has been very secretive about anything to do with the meta-gene and how it manifests, but we do know that these powers tend to be passed down genetically. I wonder, if Aerodraft and Sublimate are siblings, then why have we never seen Sublimate until now? And why did Aerodraft retire so suddenly at the age of thirty-six? I’m Farha Rao, back to you at BNN.”
It’s a lot to take in. “So was this scrubbed?”
“Yeah. It’s not on the Net anymore. But it was definitely broadcast.”
Bells studies the holo and Farha’s intent expression. “She’s great. She was the one who covered our train heist in Middleton.”
Christine smiles. “That was you? I thought it seemed very specific, targeting those MR-D4Rs.”
Emma chuckles. “Yeah. We destroyed a good number of them. Farha’s the only one who picked up on the fact that it wasn’t some new villain, that maybe we were trying to say something.”
“She covers Middleton, mostly, and a few smaller beats in New Bright City, but she asks a lot of good questions.” Christine expands the holo until Farha’s face is life-size; her curious eyes look right back at them with a piercing gaze. “Can we trust her? What if she sends us to the Authorities?”
“There’s a chance of that, but I have a feeling she’s been looking for answers, and we have them.” Emma hopes this is going to work. It’s the last plan she’s got.
Ch. 11…
“She looks nervous,” Bells says, peering through the binoculars. He hands them to Emma. “What did you say?”
The intrepid reporter is at least twenty minutes early to their meeting. Farha adjusts her headscarf, looking around. Taking everything in, her eyes dart to the top of the roller coasters, then to the snack carts. Two small cameradrones buzz about her head while Farha speaks into her DED as if she’s recording notes for herself.
Emma likes her immediately. She’s smart, planning for a meeting with an anonymous source, looking for all the potential ways to escape should the meeting go wrong. It’s what Emma would do.
“Maybe I was a bit too cryptic,” Emma says. “But she’s here!”
It was easy enough to find Farha’s direct line; her citizen ID number was listed on the Broadcast News Network holopage. She’s scheduled today to livestream the opening of a new ride at Roaring City Adventures, one of the many theme parks in New Bright City. Emma wasn’t sure Farha would even respond to her message, but she agreed to the meeting.
Now to just talk to her.
“Should we go over there?” Christine asks.
“Let’s stick to the exact time, otherwise she might mistake us for someone else,” Emma says, handing the binoculars to Christine.
Christine hums in agreement, watching through the binoculars.
With Christine’s generous wardrobe and Bells’ shapeshifting skills, it’s easy for them to adopt any number of disguises. Today Emma is wearing a long, flowing, blonde wig, over-sized sunglasses, and a bright yellow dress Christine designed. It was fun, at first, having long hair to throw around, but the wig is itchy, and she keeps wanting to scratch her head.
“Here, lemme fix that,” Christine says, tucking one of Emma’s escaping curls under the wig cap. She also opted for a more modern look today, nixing the petticoats in favor of a long tunic and leggings.
“Thanks,” Emma says. She glances at the time on Christine’s watch; they’re still early. She adjusts her earpiece. They probably won’t need the short-range radios, but it’s always good to be prepared.
Bells pulls out his sketchbook and doodles as they wait. He’s shifted into a boy with a wide nose, an easy smile, and sandy brown hair that falls in waves across his eyes. It’s another one of the faces he’s been using, and Emma almost has to smile because, despite whatever shift he’s using, he’s still so clearly Bells. Maybe it’s the way his eyes squint in concentration or his slow, easy smirk when he realizes she’s watching him.
Emma peers over Bells’ shoulder, and he shuffles over to make more room and flips the pages for her to see.
There’s Jess’ face, her broad smile emerging from the smudged lines of Bells’ sketches, and Abby tilting her head with her eyebrows lifted at a calculating angle. The page is wrinkled and a bit torn from erasures, as if Bells has been drawing and drawing, trying to remember their faces.
“I miss them,” Bells says.
“Me too,” Emma says. “I hope they’re okay.” She looks up at the sky, at the city, and beyond. It’s strange how distinct the difference is between New Bright City and the forest that surrounds it. In the Nevada region, the desert had been a constant. The cities themselves were pockets of light and metal and people, and the wild scrub of the Joshua trees and creosote bushes and the deep reds of the canyons dominated the landscape. The countryside had been sparsely populated, even before the cities themselves were built.
But New Bright City seems surrounded by ghosts. Just outside the city, there’s another skyline of towering skyscrapers, some still standing, some crumbling and falling apart, their metal bones long picked over by recycling crews. The skeletons of the buildings remain, rising out of the new-growth forests, only memories now of the cities that were here hundreds of years ago. They’re barely visible outside of the glimmering protective shield that has been raised around New Bright City in preparation for the impending P019 impact. The projected date is still more than a month away, but the shield is activated today to show to the citizens of New Bright City the strength of its protection.
Emma wonders where Jess and Abby are, if they’re getting closer, if Brendan went with them, if the Trans and Genevieve and the other adults are okay, or if they were all captured in that attack.
“They’re gonna be fine,” Emma says, maybe more to herself than anything, as if saying the words will help make it true. “I only wish they would get here sooner, I hate this waiting.”
“Speaking of waiting, it looks like Farha isn’t,” Bells says, peering over the bush.
“What?”
Farha is running off, her cameradrones following right behind her, buzzing.
“She must have seen something!” Emma gets to her feet. “Come on!”
Christine sprints ahead, dodging through the crowd. Bells hastily shoves his sketchbook and pens and colored pencils into his bag before following suit.
Emma can barely see Farha ahead of them; her pink dress is a blur as she runs as fast as she can, dodging people left and right.
“Move, people!” Emma curses, halting in her tracks, nearly bumping into a group of people stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “What are you all staring at!”
“Oh, no, that’s so awful!”
“Where’s Starscream! Somebody call for help!”
“No, Starscream can’t fly, we need…”
“Captain Orion?”
“No, Captain Orion is a villain…”
“Those poor people!”
“What other heroes can fly?”
Emma follows their gaze and stops just short of Bells and Christine, who are also frozen, watching the sky with horror.
“Up there!” Bells points at the tallest roller coaster, where a set of cars is stalled at the top of one of the loops. Everyone has stopped to stare and hold up their DEDs.
“Oh, no,” mutters Emma, looking at the top of the roller coaster. There are people waving from the track and shouting. “We should—”
She blanks. They should do something to help, but what can they do? She racks her brain, scanning the surroundings. Bells is frozen, looking at the height. Maybe Bells could shift the nature of the track back to functional? But they don’t know what’s wrong with it, what if there’s a virus in the tech or something, what if it hurts Bells—
Bells pushes forward, and Emma follows, grabbing his hand. “What are you doing? We need a plan!”
“I can fix the track. It’s magnetic, right? Same concept. I’ve done the opposite before, so, in theory, I just need to get close enough to touch it.”
“Yes, but—”
Terrifying, high-pitched screams echo from above.
“Okay, go!” Emma says, rushing forward. They pass Farha, who is surrounded by cameradrones and a knot of anxious people.
“I’m here at Roaring City Adventures, where an electronic malfunction has stalled a car full of park-goers at the top of the COFAX Scream’N’Dream ride,” Farha says into her microphone, facing one cameradrone hovering right in front of her. The other tiny drone is speeding to record the people stuck at the top of the track.
“What went wrong?” Emma wonders as she brainstorms for potential solutions. “Maybe if we get to the control room, we could figure out how to fix it.”
“Control room is that way—”
Farha continues, her voice grim. “I’m hearing now from the technicians that there is no way to fix the Scream’N’Dream until the power comes back on. A generator was destroyed by the surge of power from the shield demonstration.”
