Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes Read Online Free Page A

door to close behind us before she opened her mouth.
    “Tired?”
    “You think?” I stripped off my mask and wig, running fingers through my much shorter, bobbed hair, and kept stripping. The new costume bodysuit covered me from neck to toes in layered Vulcan-created fabric styled by Andrew. The new stuff wasn’t just enormously damage-resistant, it wick’d sweat and oils away from my skin into its layers and shed dirt and field stains away like nobody’s business, but I still wanted a shower so bad I could taste it. Especially since I’d been in a fight and even been knocked out for a second. Dr. Beth was going to want to poke at me.
    Shell sat on my bed and watched, wincing at the bruises that came into sight. The twist of sympathy in her lips looked totally natural—Vulcan had done a great job again.
    “How’s the new Shell-shell?” I asked before she could open her mouth.
    She wiggled her new eyebrows, stuck out her tongue and curled it. “Feels real, and there’s no signal loss as long as I stay close to the Dome. The Galatea shell can go farther since it doesn’t require as much signal load to drive. I still couldn’t have gone with you guys.”
    “Shell…”
    “I know, I’m useful riding along through Dispatch. It’s not like I’ll be risking myself with the Galatea shell.”
    Shell didn’t remember the months when she’d completely downloaded herself into the last Galatea, or almost dying in the last Green Man attack, but she’d learned from her downloaded self’s experiences anyway; she wasn’t going to expose herself to direct harm again. Not that I’d let her—she’d only won my approval the last time by lying to me, letting me believe that she’d been uploading a running backup of herself into memory. The future quantum-tech to Verne-tech interface hadn’t worked that way, and the first I’d known about that was when I’d almost lost her.
    I had lost her in a way; the Shelly who’d downloaded herself and spent months as Shelly-Galatea, gotten close to Crash, fought beside me, was flesh-and-blood now and living with her mother in Springfield. The Shelly sitting cross-legged on my bed was Shelly 3.0 and she knew it. She insisted we all call her ‘Shell’, not just as a nickname anymore, and now she’d styled her hair as short as my own shoulder-length bob and colored it black as Artemis’ raven locks. She’d also “aged” herself a bit, and looked like her chronological age of 20 instead of the 16 years she'd experienced.
    Shell and Shelly, one a quantum-ghost and   wingman and the other a high school freshman who texted and video-chatted a lot. Neither talked about the other much. Shelly still hadn’t used the bio-seed she’d taken with her to establish a neural link with Shell and I didn’t know why.
    Shell read my look and stuck out her tongue again, an attitude display instead of a demonstration of Vulcan’s craftsmanship. She hopped up and followed me into the bathroom.
    “So, do you want to hear about Powerteam now?”
    I turned on the water and stepped in, yelling over the heavenly waterfall-spray of five showerheads. “How are they even real ?”
    I could hear her snickering.
    “Their reality show format is built on tryouts and training. Crisis Aid and Intervention Certification is the official reward for those who make the team, but it’s really an excuse for vicious competition in the selection phase and soap opera drama in their headquarters-slash-communal residence. They’re a parody of a real team, but they don’t have to answer to a city or county that pays their bills so they can get away with it.”
    I lathered my hair, trying to wrap my mind around what that had to be like; just thinking about the awful social dynamics made me slightly queasy. It had to be like getting out of bed and jumping into a ripe cesspool every day.
    “Okay, so how did they end up here ? In Cairo I mean.”
    “They have to do something besides train and scripted bickering.