Straight after she finished up and packed a box of her things, Louise stepped onto the street and saw a newspaper headline on a placard at a nearby street kiosk:
SUSPECT CAPE-KILLER IN CUSTODY!!
While the girl normally shied away from the broadsheets, on this occasion she wasn’t able to resist. After she looked at the picture on the front page and blanched, she bought a copy, rapidly skimmed through the accompanying article — and then reread it more carefully, horror seizing her.
Worse was to come.
Over on page two was a smaller story, a recap about a bombing three days before at the League of Unmitigated Rotters, one in which one Rotter had died, several others were wounded, and an Equalizer — Southern Cross — seriously so.
Louise didn’t know when, exactly, she realized she had her knuckles in her mouth and was snivelling. She’d wiped her cheeks with a handkerchief and took off at a run.
Now, the paper was closed, folded and tucked under an arm as she fetched the house keys from her bag, unlocked the security door, slowly stepped upstairs, and went to the apartment.
She couldn’t — wouldn’t — believe what the article said, with all the ‘alleged’, ‘claimed’ and ‘possible’ disclaimers holding together the text. That the Prof had been systematically murdering Bops over the past two months. That he was a cold-blooded killer, a vigilante, a complete stranger.
And Jack — she had to know if the man was all right; prayed he was.
Louise would’ve gone directly to City Hall, except for some bizarre impulse that told her to swing by home to make sure it wasn’t all some rude coincidence, to see if the Prof wasn’t there, fiddling with his contraptions and his Vita-Rays, and whether or not Jack had called.
Instead, she found this darkened apartment, and the shop downstairs had yellow police tape across the entrance, along with an official poster warning people to stay away from these premises.
Outside in the quiet evening, standing smoking a cigarette beneath a streetlamp near the front door to the brownstone, was a man in a brown coat and red hat.
“Hey, miss,” he said as Louise stepped past. “There’s only two things in this world that a ‘real man’ needs: a cup of coffee and a good smoke. Got the ciggie, but not the Joe. Can you lend me a dime?”
The girl stared at him, blinking, wasn’t sure she understood the question. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have somewhere I need to be.”
“Sure you do. Well, aside from the Joe, my head honcho wants to have a chinwag.”
“Is that so?” The mention of chins made Louise suddenly aware she was in the frame of mind to bust another jaw.
“My boss says to tell you that the lives of the two blokes in your life — the old codger’s and that poor excuse for a Bop, Southern Cross — hang in the balance.” The man pushed the hat to the back of his head, revealing an unremarkable face. “Says to tell you he can help save both of them.”
“Really?” the girl uttered, resolve broken in an instant.
“I have a car over there, the yellow Plymouth. You coming?”
“This man…your boss…he can really help?”
“Sure as houses, miss. C’mon.”
#158
“Hang on — stop. This is insane. How can a Blando be a Cape?”
“Allow me to explain,” the Professor said while Jack sought to grapple with the lowdown he’d been thrown in the old man’s previous sentence. “You’re closer to the truth than you realize. The Reset is equitable with a disease, and as with any disease there are those who are immune. In this case, not the body — cutting oneself shaving would always mend overnight compliments of the Reset — but the electrochemical signalling of the mind. In here.”
The old man tapped the right side of his forehead.
“I am one of those people. For some time, I self-indulgently believed I might be the single person in Heropa who could remember and think with complete continuity beyond a twenty-four-hour timeframe — save for the Capes, of course. I was a scientist in the employ of Metro College. While my peers would begin work each and every morning, puzzling over devices and formulas they’d started assembling the day before — scratching their heads, with absolutely no memory of these things — I was blessedly able not only to encode and store, but to retrieve this information and work on my projects for weeks on end.”
The old man suddenly sneezed, and wiped his nose.
“Excuse me.”
“Go on,” Jack urged.
“Well, it goes without saying that such behaviour was eventually noticed. The chancellor of the college, Mister Wright, got whiff of my progress—”