equals Yoshi the not-manager, hello?
When I failed to have any eureka! moments, I got up. Over breakfast, I broke the news of last night’s adventure to the parentals and found them worryingly unconcerned. As in, completely. Instead, Mom thwarted my attempt to mope around waiting for Rush and Vulcan to call by practically throwing me into “that nice spring dress” and dragging me off with them to mass at St. Chris. Afterward, I lit a candle for Mr. Early while they conspicuously lingered to talk to friends. Giving it a moment’s thought, I added one for Charming, then another for Nemesis and two more for the bystanders he killed and the ones from the Dome. And as always, candles for Atlas and Ajax and Nimbus. Father Kreiski gave me a funny look as he passed, and he had a point; my votive offerings were getting kind of large. I knew way too many dead people.
Work on that, please? I asked the Holy Mother. I didn’t want to know any more.
When I turned to go I bumped into Jacky and Father Nolan. A little healthy pink had appeared in her cheeks since she’d gotten a pulse and come out in the daylight, but she still looked like an evil Snow White. The red dress didn’t help.
What happened to Def-1? I was benched, procedurally and medically, but she should have been on station just in case.
She read my mind. “Almost useless during the day, remember?” she said quietly. “Wait while I talk to the nice priest?” I nodded and they disappeared. Nobody’s eyes followed them out; I had to find out just how much of her ‘influence’ she could really use when the sun was up. Was she sending out Don’t Look At Me vibes?
I let the parentals know I’d wait for Jacky (they weren’t surprised, so, aha), found a quiet pew, and tried to relax. So naturally both Vulcan and Rush called in minutes of each other, making me jump both times—I hate the vibrate setting. Vulcan gave me the thumbs-up on Shelly, and promised to have my own special request done by the time I’d healed; when I offered to come in for measuring, he reminded me Andrew had my stats down to the micron. Rush called to thank me for finding a place for Jamal, bug me for not telling him about Master Li, and let me know my requested addition to his combat-pack was an easy add—at least once he fixed the rack on his cycle for it.
Jacky finally came back and took me to lunch at Trattoria’s, the new Italian-Greek restaurant in the Harrison Arts District. She ordered the Greek pizza with house cheese while I stuck with grilled salmon in lemon sauce with basil (yum!). Tucking into my entre and looking at the framed paintings of sun-drenched Mediterranean villas that covered the walls, I finally started to relax; we were just two girls, out for a Sunday lunch.
Until she told me we were lesbian lovers.
Chapter Thirty Three
There are three of Me: me when I’m Astra, me with the mask off, and the me the newsies insist lives a much more exiting life.
Terry Reinhold, quoting Astra in “This is a job for…”
* * *
Some revelations should not be made over lunch.
Jacky started innocently enough, confessing complicity with Mom and Dad; I’d guessed right—she’d called them before sunrise to let them know what went down and that I was fine but ordered to take it easy. She had arranged to meet me after mass. Then she hit me with it.
“Terry called last night,” she said after downing a bite of pizza with an expression of absolute bliss.
“Terry Reinhold? The journalist?”
“There are other Terry’s?” She carefully tucked a long string of cheese away. After doing my interview last year, Terry had become the go-to newsy for Sentinels interviews; he’d done Jacky, and then Lei Zi, Seven, and Riptide as they’d each joined the team. I felt a gathering sense of doom.
“Did he want to know about last night?” Questions about talking to known mobsters—dead known mobsters—would be, well, awkward.
“Actually, no.” Jacky didn’t smile, but her eyes were dancing.
“Well that’s something, I guess,” I said cautiously. Maybe the Sentinels’ could avoid all the blowback from our wild adventure.
“He got a call from a friend who works for The Daily Metropolis, you know the one?”
Did I; it was the Chicago-based tabloid that devoted most of its page space to the doings, real and imagined, of the city’s hundred-plus capes; only the