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

hack it if she thought there was something I didn’t want her to see — and sighed. “No.”
    “Really? The tree outside your window made you cry for weeks after that silly movie.”
    Raising the pad higher, I ignored her smirk. “It kept scraping the window when the wind blew. I was seven , Shell — I was scared of a lot of things.”
    “Doctors, trees, frogs...”
    “Hey, they jump at you!” Eventually Dad had cut back the tree branch, but until then I’d slept with the parentals when Shelly couldn’t stay over. Mom and Dad never understood it; I’d get scared and cry, then Shell would tease me until I cried about being scared. “Mom expects you for dinner Friday night.”
    She nodded absently, rolling over to lie on her stomach and pick blanket-fluff. “So...”
    I switched off the pad and laid it on the bed, stretched. My eyes burned from hours of browsing the Hillwood Academy files and preparing my arguments, trying not to think about court tomorrow or about Seven (he wasn’t becoming an obsession, really ), and I was glad to see Shelly for guilty reasons.
    She was still Shell, my BFF, but we weren’t joined at the hip anymore. I wasn’t the girl who’d followed her everywhere. When I wasn’t training or studying or patrolling I was at school or trying to absorb all the procedures and manuals and action-histories Blackstone was dumping on me (in bigger and bigger piles, recently), and she liked to hang with Crash. She didn’t try and take my time with the Bees — didn’t even ask about them — and only went out with me now when I went home.
    We were a team again, different , but I could still read her; I couldn’t tell her about Hillwood and my new plans, not yet, but I’d been expecting this conversation anyway.
    “Mal isn’t in the Book either, is he?”
    Shell rolled back over and kicked her bare feet. Only her too-smooth skin hinted that she wore a body fabricated in Vulcan’s labs.
    “No, he’s not.” Which made sense and echoed Blackstone’s observations. It was statistically un likely that many post-January 1st superhumans from the old future, the one without the Big One in it, would be appearing now. Instead we’d be getting more and more new and different superheroes and supervillains that the Teatime Anarchist had never seen or read about. Like the Green Man. One change led to another in a domino cascade; alter one tiny detail and change could propagate pretty fast.
    Like how I would have never have become Astra if TA’s evil twin hadn’t changed my future by dropping a freeway overpass on me.
    Like how I would have died in Washington fighting The Ring, if TA hadn’t asked Atlas to bring me onto the team and keep me in Chicago. Like how The Ring would have attacked Washington later, instead of hitting us early in Los Angeles because of the opportunity created when DA triggered the Big One and pretty much derailed the future.
    Like how Atlas wouldn’t have died instead of me.
    “Hope?” Shelly tipped her head back, looking at me upside down. “You’ve got that look.”
    “Sorry.” I rubbed my eyes with fisted hands. “M’okay, seriously. I just...” I looked for a distraction she’d accept, found it and realized my face was heating up. Knowing she could tell just deepened the flush.
    “Do you think it’s okay for me to be — to like someone now?”
    I realized I should have known better than to give her that kind of ammunition when her eyes lit up. They didn’t look artificial at all .
    “Eeeeee! Ohmygodwho?” She’d never stop now.
    “Seven,” I whispered. “He kissed me the night of the Omega operation, but it wasn’t like...” It wasn’t like for luck, or like the time he’d playfully kissed me at Metrocon last year. It was different, like he hadn’t been sure I was coming back and wanted to get it in just in case .
    Did I want it to be different? I’d finished the mission, gone back to pizza with the Bees, and Seven hadn’t said anything about