on the wrong side. The subsequent investigation proved he’d been “handled” and lied to, but I hadn’t liked him much for a lot of other reasons before then and I didn’t like disliking a teammate.
Shrugging it aside, I stripped down. The torso of my costume was a loss too: four holes, one of them in my built-in bra padding. Well, I had more. I grabbed the terrycloth bathrobe the staff provided and headed for the shower, blissfully anticipating using all four heads and the waterfall. I wondered if, in the unchanged history, we’d have still met the kid tonight.
And stopped, frozen by a fugitive thought.
“Hope?” Shelly said behind me as I tried to nail it down. I waved her quiet without turning around. I’d been chasing my tail, but now…
The godzilla was early. Blackstone’s alive…
I felt dizzy.
“Shell?” I whispered, afraid of losing my epiphany. “Why don’t we cheat?”
“Huh?”
“The Time War messed everything up, but you said lots of things are still the same?
“Yeah, but—”
I spun around.
“And you know about everyone the team would have ever met before, right? Everything that might have happened for the next hundred-plus years?”
She nodded, wide-eyed.
“Everything that made it into the history books, anyway.”
“So, why can’t we cheat? You said Blackstone’s murder doesn’t get solved—but do you know anybody who could have solved it? Who’s active now?”
She got the far-away look that said she was accessing the hundreds of contingent histories of the future-files.
“Maybe… There’s a supernatural investigator who shows up—might show up—in a couple of years. He specializes in murders by projections, thought-forms, stuff like that. His name’s Dr. Cornelius, and he actually speculated about Blackstone’s murder though he couldn’t solve it then.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. But he first pops up doing quiet jobs for Orb, a top-shelf Hollywood PI. And she’s active now.
So, maybe. It was worth a shot, but my heart sank.
“And Orb’s in LA?”
Shelly nodded solemnly.
LA. The last place on Earth I wanted to go.
Chapter Seven
Come on and rescue me!
I’ve been waiting here all night
Just hoping that you’ll see.
Fly down and rescue me!
From Rescue Me, by Have No Fear.
* * *
I made some calls and headed home. If I’d lived on campus with the Bees, I’d have been dragging my laundry home every weekend. Instead my parents had bought me my own little condo in Boyd Tower, the residential tower sitting on top of the Dome’s secret backdoor garage-entrance, but after everything that happened I preferred to stay in my quarters in the Dome. The Dome’s staff provided maid service, so I didn’t have the bag-of-laundry excuse, but I went home anyway. I so needed the normal.
I came to another decision while driving West on Eisenhower, this one about Shelly.
After all these months, Shelly still hadn’t got up the courage to get in touch with her mom. I understood why; Shell wasn’t really Shelly. She was a quantum-ghost of my BFF, a future-tech operating system who remembered being Shelly. Was she real, did she have a soul? Father Nolan said so, on the excellent proof that she had a heart. That was enough theological reassurance for me, but how would Mrs. Boyar take it? Would she accept Shelly as another daughter, or reject her as a blasphemous copy? Shelly had died three years ago; it might be best to leave it alone.
But besides Artemis, Blackstone, and me, only Father Nolan knew the truth about Shelly. She chatted remotely with her Dispatch coworkers every day, but she had to lie to them (they thought she was a lot older, and, well, physical—a paraplegic shut-in somewhere).
I’d asked if we could give her mom the same neural link that I had, and she’d mailed me a new bio-seed from wherever her system is located. It looked like a little pink pearl, and if you swallowed it, it grew and braided itself into your central nervous system to create the neural link. Now it just sat in a jewelry box on my dresser at home, and I was still the only family she had. If anything happened to me, the consequences didn’t bear thinking about.
And now that I’d made up my mind, this was going to be fun.
Springtime meant art festivals and musical events for the Foundation, so despite it being the witching hour I found Mom in the den going over tomorrow’s to-do list. Bent over her laptop, her dark hair back in a bun, in the dim light she looked like a witch reviewing her spells.