Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) (Volume 3) (22 page)

Golden hair whipping around her face, Ozma was
laughing,
so at least she was having fun. I angled belly down for maximum air resistance and decided our pilot was pretty good; he’d really put us right over the airport and the green wave attacking it. No need to angle our descent — a rock would have hit the top of the tower.

Reese caught me and Ozma in twin updrafts before we free-fell too far, and took us in. I was impressed — he had to be twisting air into tornado speeds to even slow me down. I shifted into armor mode, skin thickening and knotting into plates. I knew Reese — he’d drop me from as high as he thought he could just for kicks as soon as he had me over a spot where I wasn’t going to happen to any capes or bystanders.

And he did, maybe five hundred feet above the tarmac and naturally
over
the green. I smacked down into a runway, not that it wasn’t already cracked into pieces and buried under green — new trees and what looked like mutant kudzu, kudzu that
crawled
faster than I could run when I wasn’t configured for speed.

Thanks, Reese
. Absorbing my armor to run faster and extruding longer claws, I headed north for the terminal — the only landmark I could see above the trees — ripping up vines that tried to eat my feet with each step.

A fresh-faced blonde kid missing her cape landed beside me. “Glad you could make it, but can I give you a lift? Seriously, we don’t have time to for you to cut your way out!” Standing there ignoring the vines, she had to lean back to see higher than my pecs.

“Sure — hey!” Grabbing my right wrist in both hands — they barely got all the way around — she lifted off hard and threw us straight at the tower.

Past
the tower, close enough I could have reached out and given it a swipe as we arced over the main building and down to the screaming, stampeding crowd.

“We can’t help them empty the connected planes and concourses faster,” she explained as we flew. “But we need to clear the bottlenecks outside! Keep anyone from trying to drive out of here! Push any stopped cars out of the road so people can get away to the north!”

She dropped me on top of my first job — an abandoned airport shuttle stuck in a jam of taxies so wide people were crawling over them. Normally I scare people if I happen to them suddenly, but nobody paid me a second glance as I scrambled down off the shuttle. My biggest problem was where to move it to that wouldn’t put people under it, and finally I just tipped it off the road, crushing parking meters. Then I started sliding and stacking taxies, clearing openings for people to run through, trying to get a feel for the place.

The terminal building was
huge
. It stretched around a massive multi-level parking lot, and had a hotel smack in the middle. Escapees from the terminal building had to flee along the stacked arrival and departure roads. Finished with the bottleneck, I started dissuading drivers actually trying to
drive
out of the airport through the crowd — reaching through windows and ripping keys out as necessary, then shoving them off to the side. Chicago taxi drivers are tough, and
stupid
. One of them turned out to be carrying and shot me in the face, but that just meant I wasn’t polite and squeezed his pistol into a paperweight before moving on.

I didn’t wonder what was happening to the others — I had my own little corner of screaming chaos.

Megaton

“
Left! Fifteen degrees!
”

I couldn’t see around my blasts as they scraped advancing trees and vine away from the tarmac, couldn’t hear shouted directions over the roar, so Galatea guided me using other capes’ mask-cams.

“
Walk it left five degrees!
”

Were we winning? I had no idea. We’d kept my part clear, kept the planes parked and hooked up to the nearest concourse from getting buried in green and pushed over by upthrusting trees, and on my right some guy had dropped out of the sky to literally blow away aggressive green with tornado-speed winds.

“
And how are we doing, Megaton?
” Blackstone queried. Unbelievably, I was actually getting tired — a really weird feeling, not muscle fatigue, more like I’d been running too hard and not getting enough oxygen to my brain.

“I’m not sure, sir, but I may be getting down to fumes!”

“
Your suit telemetry does indicate some levels of distress
,” he returned. “
Lei Zi has tasked Rush with your extraction should you be unable to continue or break contact.
”

“Check, roger, acknowledged, whatever I should freaking say, sir.”

“
Traditionally, a ‘Copy, Rush tasked with extraction’ is appropriate, but we’re a little loose here, my boy. Hold as long as you feel you can, then call for relief
.”

“Good to know!” I tried deep breathing, couldn’t tell if it helped, but the choice was
easy
. Stand your ground until you can’t stand.
You owe a life, so save a life.
If this was my down payment, then Rush was going to have to
carry
me out of here.

Astra

We weren’t going to make it.

Dispatch and airport security reported that the concourses were mostly clear, but there was always
somebody —
lost and panicked kids, injured passengers, some of them possibly trampled, and others not so mobile. And the terminals were full of choke-points: escalators, stairways, gates, any narrow pass, with thousands trying to push through like their lives depended on it. Even with all the capes not holding the line pouring into the buildings, it would take time we didn’t
have
.

I dropped another battered bystander by the aid station getting set up around the O’Hare Airport Rescue building. A scratch-team of workers was getting the big runway-scraping bulldozers into gear; they were built for pushing heavy snow, but their drivers were going to try and back up the capes. Another team was laying a berm of foam as a perimeter; when the green broke past us, they were going to use it to channel a lit up fuel-spill for a firewall. Maybe it would work.

“
Astra, status?
” Lei Zi broke in. Without my mask-cam, I was a wandering wildcard even if Dispatch could track my location by my earbug.

“Dropping passengers, going back into the terminal!”

“
Scratch that — retrieve Ozma at my position and get her to Blue Fire!
”

What?
What?
“Retrieve Ozma and deliver her to Blue Fire, got it. Galatea?”

“
They’re south of the west concourses, Blue Fire is in the middle on Megaton’s right!
” She hardly had to tell me; flying back over the terminals, I spotted Lei Zi by the cracking, jumping field of supercharged Saint Elmo’s Fire that danced along the edge of green in front of her as she drew from the nearby power station to fight her arc of the front.

Ozma stood by Lei Zi, watching with interest. For a teenager with a wand, she was the furthest thing from a Magical Girl I could imagine, dressed in casual Lands’ End pants, buttoned blouse, even a
scarf
. The wide white and sparkling belt was interesting, and of course the wand was the princess’s signature scepter — maybe twenty inches of achingly artistic etched gold that forked into a smooth Y towards the end. The cradle of the Y framed her classic Z-inside-an-O, the crest of her royal house.

She smiled a perfect smile when I landed. “You’re my ride?” If it hadn’t been for four years exposed to Annabeth, I’d have cried from sheer physical envy. She thrust her wand through her belt, held out her hands like she’d done this before. I smooth-lifted and then we were over the green starting to break through Variforce’ waning fields and Megaton’s blasted zone to Blue Fire’s end of the fight.

Blue Fire
ruled
her zone, her cold blue flames licking out in auric spikes to freeze the attacking green and turn it to dust. She shivered, swaying with fatigue, but nothing made it past her searching flames. Ozma didn’t blink at Blue’s blue-tattooed skin and brief outfit. I wasn’t sure what to say — what was
planned
— but they were both ready.

“How big a flare do you need?” Blue gasped, already clued in.

Ozma pulled her wand. “Can you put a ring around me?” I scooted out of the way, fast, as Blue threw a flare of aura out to twist around her.

“Perfect!” Ozma laughed and began chanting in Latin. It sounded almost like a
limerick
, and she reached out at the end of each line to touch her wand to the dancing flames.

“
OMG
,” Shelly whispered in my ear — she had to be watching from Blue’s mask-cam. Every touch of Ozma’s wand broke a tongue of blue flame free from the fire ring to dance around her. Each dancing flame grew, stretched, went from blue fire to a burning blue fire
man
complete with flaming axe. She kept chanting as more and more burning firemen sprang free to dance the widening circle, once twice, three times and then spin away to race up and down the front of the green tide.

“
OMG
,” Shell repeated. I nodded, pretty stunned myself. Blue looked ready to die of shock, aura stuttering before she got it back under control. I lost count of burning firemen somewhere after thirty but they kept coming, reminding me of Mickey Mouse’s broom army in
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
. I could almost hear the music as they rushed away to hack and freeze vines and trees — literally — in their tracks.

“
Thoughts?
” Blackstone gently broke in to ask.

I found myself laughing helplessly. “I’m glad she’s ours?”
Please, let her be ours.

“
Indeed, one hopes so
.”