Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) (Volume 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

the psychotic villain’s powers.
    “I’m going to assume the worst-case scenario,” he concluded. “If someone out there has found a way to reliably boost breakthrough powers, we need to know. We could be facing a lot more than explosively growing forestlands, so stay ready everyone. Astra, would you remain behind?”
    ----
    I’d expected Lei Zi and Quin to stay, too, maybe talk to me about my scheduled testimony in court tomorrow, but they left with everyone else. Shelly looked questions at me, and Chakra gave me an encouraging smile in passing. The ice in my stomach thickened. What was going on?
    Not Shelly, please, not Shelly .
    Blackstone sighed and stood. He really didn’t look good — even with Chakra’s help, he had to be burning his candle at both ends. Normally, he moved as if he stood on an intimate stage, but now his fingers played with his epad without direction.
    “Hope.” Another slip — he always called me Astra when I wore the mask. “We’re going to launch a cadet team, and I want you to lead it.”
    Not Shelly, and nothing I’d dreamed of. “But — why ?”
    He smiled at that.
    “Why, when I’ve always resisted fielding minors even where it’s legal?”
    I nodded. Different states had different laws; in Illinois, so long as they didn’t deploy them directly into “combat situations,” CAI teams could field minors sixteen years and older if they had emergency-appropriate powers. Still, Blackstone had brought Crash on only provisionally; he trained with Sifu, sidekicked with Rush, and wasn’t part of the regular field team. Shelly...was a special case, but I was pretty sure he’d brought her on the team just to keep an eye on her.
    He sighed again. “The Green Man is not in the Big Book of Contingent Prophecy.”
    Oh. That explained the private talk. Blackstone now belonged to a secret society of three .
    Shelly and I had taken to calling the huge database of future histories the Teatime Anarchist had left me the Big Book of Contingent Prophecy, and we really hadn’t known what to do with it. What kind of person left that kind of thing in the hands of an eighteen year old ? Even if he’d seen lots of potential Future Hopes and been totally impressed — which I didn’t know since he’d also blocked all direct historical references to me and my potential lives.
    After our fight with Villains Inc., I finally asked Shell to sort and classify the thing. She ignored stuff that might have happened but definitely wouldn’t now because of the Big One, pulled together all the stuff that might still happen, and we gave the whole thing to Blackstone — who promptly freaked over the fact that someone had entrusted the contingent future histories of mankind to an eighteen year old .
    Well, yeah .
    Seeing I was following his track, Blackstone nodded.
    “In the futures the Teatime Anarchist left us to see, Ultra Class superhumans do not begin appearing until much later — and their existence is one of the things that nearly brings future society to collapse. Temblor was an obvious insertion by the Anarchist’s twin.”
    He ran fingers through his hair, disordering gray locks. “We can spend a great deal of time debating the altered chains of cause-and-effect that are leading to the accelerated appearance of threats like the godzillas and the Green Man. What we can’t ignore is that a bad situation is getting worse, and in some ways we are the victims of our own success.”
    Now, I blinked. “I don’t understand.”
    “Today is a perfect example. The Green Man made his debut here. Not New York. Not L.A. Atlas and the Sentinels created the template for the post-Event superhero and superhero team, and since then Chicago has been the place for breakthroughs to come and make a name for themselves — the reason we have so many CAI teams. Culturally, we’re the superhero center of the world, the focus of superhero fandom.
    “But the Guardian teams are mostly street-heroes, my dear. Today,