Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) (Volume 3) Read Free Page B

Average looks, brown hair, brown eyes. He was pretty big, overweight but in a fit way, decent muscles under the fat. I guessed linebacker or wrestler.
    Chakra looked up from the screens, brow furrowed. “What happens more often?”
    “Deadly breakthroughs.” Blackstone sat back and closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Many breakthroughs come from trauma inflicted by other people, and the reaction is often extreme. Look at Safire — a nice enough stripper going to business school until her abusive boyfriend nearly beat her to death and she broke through as a B-Class Atlas-type. She killed him with one punch before she knew what she could do.”
    “Jamal — ” I said before I could stop myself. I’d stripped off my filthy mask and wig and washed my face, but hadn’t changed before quietly joining them.
    He nodded. “Crash, indeed. Fortunately, you and Rush stopped him from doing anything unforgivably permanent to the young hoodlums who attacked him.”
    Chakra watched Dr. Beth poke and prod our new problem. “Poor kid,” she said, echoing my own not happy inside-voice. “What will happen to him now?”
    “Legally? Nothing. Sometimes it’s hard to prove whether a breakthrough-related death was intentional or not, but in this case the death of the bus driver was clearly accidental.” He sighed. “But mentally?”
    Oh, yeah . This was going to mess up the kid’s head in so many ways. I must have given something away; ever-alert, Blackstone looked up at me, a bit of the twinkle back in his eyes.
    “Could you take this one, my dear? Young Mr. Scott’s parents are on their way, but Dr. Beth will be done with his poking and prodding soon, and we don’t want the boy left alone too long. Heaven knows, he could work himself back up and start blowing holes in the Dome. And Chakra and I are rather...fragile.”
    I opened my mouth to protest, closed it as Blackstone’s point sank in. How sensitive was the kid’s trigger? Would any normal person who upset him now end up drippy paste on pieces of wall? Dr. Beth was insane just being in the same room with the unexploded boy without knowing what could set him off.
    Jeez, calm down, he hasn’t blown anyone else up yet. Shelly wasn’t in my head anymore, but I could still hear her sarcastic response.
    I nodded, wishing Seven were here. “Okay. How long have I got?”
    Blackstone focused on the screen, where Doctor Beth had the boy’s shirt off. “I would guess you have perhaps ten more minutes before the good doctor is finished.”
    And Dr. Beth’s friendly talk could calm anybody down, giving me just enough time to change. I ran.
    “ Want to hear all about him ?” Shelly whispered in my ear as soon as the door closed behind me. I didn’t answer until I was safe in the elevator.
    “ Tell me you didn’t hack the school’s student files.”
    “ Hey, it’s a good cause .”
    “No, it’s not . It’s curiosity and we’ll know soon enough the legal way. We’ve talked about this.” Boy, had we ever , and she wasn’t listening and one of these days...
    I wanted to bang my head against the wall, but even Dome elevators could be fragile. Hindsight is always perfect; you’ve had time to think about the decisions you made, maybe more information than you had then, enough time for horrible realizations.
    The night of the Omega operation, I’d asked Shell to hack a military system, to redirect a missile, and now the U.S. military knew that someone could dance through their most vital defense systems and play with their hardware — which made her a Threat To National Security. To make it worse, she wasn’t a person , not legally. If she kept exposing herself, if they traced the hack to her ... even if the ACLU had three cases of Verne-science augmented animals and one unique car working their ways through the federal courts, Shell had no rights.
    Some nights, I woke up in cold sweats from a nightmare that they’d come to take her away and there was