Aid and Intervention teams searching the lakes for eggs and godzilla-young.
Shelly sighed again.
“I was wondering when you’d ask me that. She wasn’t due for another two years.”
“Hey what?”
She scowled, looking worried.
“The Teatime Anarchist’s files are all history files he collected on his trips to the 22nd Century, right? And every time he came back knowing what was going to happen, he’d change things just by knowing? Same for his quantum-twin, and their little games could change things big-time, right?”
I nodded. “But you told me there’s a kind of inertia—like time is a river. Whichever way it goes, it’s still headed for the sea.”
“Yeah. The Anarchist told me once it’s like, if you could go back to 1914 and keep those Serbian goofs from assassinating Archduke Ferdinand, World War One would still have happened, because Germany and France would have just found some other reason to fight. Probably over the African colonies.” She snickered at my look. “Hey, all of the world’s history right here in my head, remember?”
“Brag brag brag.”
“But the war would have happened later, right? Maybe a lot later,” She chewed her lip. “So stuff changes, but it’s still kinda the same. Whoever’s behind the Godzilla Plague, I think the Big One, or maybe the Whittier Base Attack, made them move up their timetable.”
“Oh.”
Well, that made sense; in another history the Whittier Base Attack had been the White House Attack. The Ring had used the opportunity created by the Big One to take their shot ahead of schedule. And Atlas died instead of me.
“So you’re saying the Big One sped things up?”
She shrugged, frustrated. “Some things. And long term it’s got to be changing lots of things; over fifty thousand people died—that’s a lot of rocks thrown in the river. So far sixteen high-tech companies that would have started up this year, haven’t. And one big political scandal never happened now. And this year’s mid-term elections? Don’t even ask.”
Hearing Shelly talk like an expert on stuff that had never interested her before was deeply weird.
“So the future’s out of date,” I said. “‘Always changing, is the future.’”
She giggled, then turned serious again. “I’m not going to be as much help as the Anarchist thought,” she said glumly.
“Sure you are—lots of the stuff we’re going to run into is older than last year, or won’t be changed much by it. So it won’t happen the same way: we’ll deal.”
She didn’t look happier.
“Hope...” she said softly.
That was the Trouble Voice. Something bad had happened, or was about to.
She flipped her hair out of her face and looked at her sneakered feet. I noticed they had magic-marker graffiti on them.
“The last history-dump TA got before the Big One was from 2030,” she said.
“And?”
“It was different.”
My eyes stung, but I waved it away.
“I know that; Atlas was alive and we lived happily ever after, right?”
“No—I mean, yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about. In the last pre-Big One future, Blackstone died two months ago.”
I stopped breathing.
“How?”
“He was murdered.” She avoided my eyes.
My stomach seized. It felt like somebody had snuck up and punched me in the gut.
“No. Why? By who?”
“Nobody ever found out. But it was the same guy who killed Mr. Moffat—at least the method was the same.”
Dear God, no. I was going to be sick. Projectile-vomit from five thousand feet.
“The thing is,” Shelly continued in a rush of rising panic as I tried to shut out the image of Blackstone-soup in a box, “since the Big One he spent the last few months recruiting and managing the team.”
I nodded. After the funeral I’d been half-useless for weeks, sleepwalking my way through my exercise regime, focusing on my classes and now-solitary aerial patrols, smiling until my face froze. I was pretty sure I’d scared Shelly, and I knew I’d scared my parents, who’d been through it before when she died, but even I’d seen how Blackstone had stepped up to fill the leadership void left by Atlas and Ajax.
But now…
“He’s back in his team-intelligence role now,” I said, starting to think again. “What was he working on before?”
“I don’t know. The guy keeps secrets like nobody’s business.”
“Does he know about the danger?”
“Yes! I told him as soon as you told him about me!”
“Did you tell him about tonight?”
“Duh, as soon as we knew what was in the box.”
“Okay. And?”
She shook her head. “He said ‘Thank you.’”
I sighed, relieved.
Shelly wasn’t. “But what if the supervillain who killed Mr. Moffat is a hit-man? Detective Fisher said the Outfit might have had it