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Chapter 12

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Outside the convention center, brilliant sunshine ruled. The sky was blue, and a breeze off the lake to the east kept the temperature comfortable. Roland and I had agreed to meet at the Bean, the locals’ name for Chicago’s tribute to the millennium, located near the north end of Grant Park. The park was across the street from the convention center. A huge silver sculpture in an asymmetrical shape, the Bean resembled a legume, hence the nickname. On an ordinary day, the area was always busy with tourists and with people who had come out to enjoy the park and watch the presentations often given in front of the Bean. Today, the place was jammed. Obvious comicon attendees with their red badges and CP Comics tote bags or wearing superhero or fantasy costumes were taking a break and eating lunch. Vendors sold food from carts and there even was a dedicated food concession a few paces away.

As I got closer, I saw a comicon-related event taking place. Four men in superhero garb—colorful spandex costumes, capes, big boots, the works—battled with fantastic weapons made of plastic and what looked like lightweight aluminum. An announcer on a mic named and explained each move. The fighters stopped every few seconds to show the moves over again, to the crowd’s applause.

“Chloe! Over here!”

I looked around, and there was Roland, holding onto a prized piece of real estate, a wall low enough to sit on. As I neared him, the smell of pastrami hit me smack in the face. I took a deep, pleased breath. “Tell me you bought me a deli sandwich.”

“I bought you a deli sandwich.” Roland smiled at me. “Your favorite. With a pickle.  How are you doing, adventure girl?”

“Adventure girl?” I tried the words out. “Not a bad superhero sobriquet. I could get a mask and pretend to have a secret identity, and everything.”

I sat down and he handed me my lunch. As I ate, Roland ran down all the avenues he’d investigated. “The air system had only been shut off. Easy to flip the breakers. There was no sign that the lights had been tampered with again.”

“So she made an empty threat.”

“Or perhaps at the time she made it she had reason to believe she could douse the lights again.”

“If the threats were prerecorded. I talked to Jean Westover in the flesh, face to face, only a minute before that PA system threat. There’s no way she could have gotten anywhere in that crowd to physically tap into the system, unless she had some kind of sophisticated way to interrupt it.”

“No sign of digital interference. If this was a James Bond movie, she’d have some superspy device that could do it remotely without our system’s consent.”

Roland got excited when he explained technology.

“This isn’t a movie.” I said.

“Exactly. Such a device doesn’t exist commercially.”

I finished my sandwich. “What about that crazy ‘male gamers’ incident? Has the leader been identified? Were the police even called?”

“We had to call them, because the man brandished a weapon. His name is Joe Weisinger. He claims he was hired to put on a show, and got a little carried away.”

“I’ll say. Pointing a gun at the audience was scary. Who hired him?”

“Claims he doesn’t know. He received an untraceable phone call from a burner phone. The cash arrived anonymously. He and his buddies are all out-of-work actors.”

“I saw how angry he got. I’m not so sure he was acting,” I said.

Roland replied, “His gun wasn't real.”

“That’s a relief.”

Roland leaned closer. “It doesn’t add up. Compare the scale of these pop-up incidents today to the attempts to panic the crowd in the main exhibition hall.”

“How many people were injured yesterday?”

“EMTs treated over five hundred. There was one heart attack, and somebody got seriously injured by a booth falling on him.”

I remembered the man’s body draped across Damien Nast’s dealer’s table. I didn’t want to know if that man was the heart attack. “Also, we’ve got a gender issue,” I reminded him. “The voice was female. The flier was female. The gamer paramilitary guys deliberately inflamed a preexisting controversy that is male against female.”

“You missed the exciting pink-bombing of a gaming panel. A group of women all wearing blonde wigs and pink froufrou tutus stormed into a panel about Orb of Fightcraft—that’s a multi-player online game—and started throwing pink beads at the mostly male audience and the all-male panelists.”

I laughed. “Hardly a big violent threat.”

“When detained and questioned, the women also claimed they were hired anonymously,” he replied. “It’s a pattern of setting the sexes against each other.”

I asked the obvious question. “Who would want to do that?”

Roland shook his head. “Could be anyone. Even someone not involved with comics.”

“Here’s another piece of the puzzle.” I recounted seeing Ray Herriman and Damien Nast talking. “They knew each other, I’m sure of it, and Ray was angry. What did you get out of him this morning?”

“A load of baloney. He claims he’s worried about his aunt, thinks she’s gone round the bend.”

“Because?”

“She was snubbed by CP comics. She’s not a guest of honor despite her forty years in the business. Her ex-husband was the former publisher of CP. Herriman claims when CP invited veteran artists to participate in their seventy-fifth anniversary shindig, they left her out totally—even though he’d reminded his bosses about her.”

“Ray works in the business?”

“On the distribution side for CP Comics. I’m expecting trouble at their party tonight.”

“The party’s at something called the Walker Mansion, right?”

“It’s across the river to our north, on the west side of Upper Michigan Avenue. In the 1880s and 1890s, that area was where the rich people built their lavishly decorated homes. The Walker Mansion has the distinction of never having sold off its side yard, as others did. It has a big walled garden.”

“So CP Comics is having an outdoor party?”

He nodded. “A garden party that starts at 10 p.m. and goes till 2 a.m. The convention is doing security for it, too, so I’ll be there. Are you going?” 

“I haven’t worked for CP, and I probably never will.”

He shot me a doubting look. “Two years ago you’d have sworn you’d never work for any corporate comics company, but here you are.”

My comics career stuck in his craw, and I knew why. “That was before I met Eric, before I was a temporary superheroine and learned a lot more about the history of conventional comics.”

His face held a hurt expression. “I told you tons of comics history when we were together.”

“But I had almost no context then. Now I do.”

“Your big shot boyfriend would get a VIP invite to the party. Go there with him as his date.”

“Arm candy, please. That’s my current role in his life,” I said.

“Something bothering you?” He shot me a questioning look.

“I’m tired of it.” I waved away further questions about my personal life. “What possible trouble could happen at this party tonight?”

“Something related to when CP Comics started, although the man running it today isn’t who ran it decades ago.”

“If that’s the true secret origin of Mistress Miraculous,” I noted. He smiled at my use of the comic book term “secret origin.” 

“I remember some of what you told me,” I said, a smile curving my lips.

Suddenly we heard a loud explosion. The Bean, which we were sitting very near, began to rock as smoke shot up from one side of it.

“Was that an electrical short from the loudspeaker?” I asked.

We both leapt up, as panicked people ran away from the Bean. The sword demonstrators backed away. Other people foolishly continued to stand under the huge piece of metal, pointing at how the sculpture was rocking back and forth. They didn’t seem to realize that if the Bean flipped over they’d be crushed.

Roland sent messages on his phone and spoke on his walkie-talkie. As he did, he said, “Chloe, use the Dimensional Diamond. You’re the only one who can help right now.”

I fingered it under my t-shirt. “I can’t stop the Bean from falling over, only delay it. Get everybody out of its path.” Then I pressed my fingers on the jewel and told it to slow the Bean.

When it slowed, the people who were leaving slowed, too. Was it the action of the jewel, or them thinking the crisis was over? Oh, rats.

“It’s not working right,” I said.

Roland switched his walkie-talkie to crowd announcement loudspeaker mode, and told people to leave the area. “This area is now closed. Please evacuate this area.”

They didn’t go.

I tried again. This time I pushed the jewel to move the people faster and I ignored the Bean. All around me, the crowds of people started to run away. The Bean rocked faster, though.

“Chloe, get out of the way!” Roland warned as he sprinted sideways toward some stragglers.

I moved back, but was afraid to get so far from the Bean that I’d have no effect on the people still menaced by it. A couple with a baby in a stroller and a crying toddler were too close to the Bean if it fell. They were having trouble quickly organizing all their stuff and moving away from the danger. Roland went over to help them or yell at them, I didn’t know which, because I was busy trying not to scream from the pain of the jewel heating up and singeing my fingers again.

Roland finally got the family away from the Bean. I yelled to him, “I’ve got to stop now,” although the crowd noise was tremendous and he probably couldn’t hear me. People were screaming like they did in the movies. Unreal. 

I couldn’t hold the Dimensional Diamond anymore. It burned my fingers. I dropped it back to my chest as I raced away from the Bean.

The Bean rotated unevenly, and faster. Then it simply slid over on one side, and flopped down on the pavement. It made a nasty crunching, scraping noise as it hit the stone and then settled. It even raised some dust. But as far as I could see, the Bean hadn’t hit anyone.

I was ready to hyperventilate. One minute I was eating a pickle and the next I was frying my fingers trying to save people from mass disaster. The Dimensional Diamond had a serious drawback. If my father had invented it or made it come to life, or whatever, he’d neglected to make it safe for a superheroine. I guess that’s what I still was, despite the lack of actual superpowers.

Roland would be busy for the next hour talking to local police. I didn’t need their nosy questions and with luck no one had even noticed I’d been doing something weird during the crisis. I decided to make myself scarce.