I was still putting together my psychological profile by the time Inez and Rachel arrived. They came with White Fox and Black Widow.
They arrived via airplane and then rideshare, and looked none too happy about it. Four people crammed into the back seat of a tiny Camry all the way from the airport to the Harold Washington Library. This right after they’d just gotten used to traveling Wakandan style.
Well, I came here flying commercial too, so they could all deal with it. I was still irked with Inez over the state of that apartment. Inez had dressed just as light as usual, but, to my incredible chagrin, didn’t even shiver as she stepped out of the rideshare. Like me, Inez is a mutant. Her gifts include super-strength and super-endurance. There are times when I wonder if super-cold-resilience is part of the package.
Rachel, more sensibly, was dressed in a lavish violet coat. The fur trim hung nearly to the ground. Even after all the time we’ve spent together, I’m still seeing her in things I never have before. I have no idea where Rachel keeps all these clothes. While this outfit did a good job of cutting a shapely figure, it left enough space to conceal the diamond-shaped grenades she always carried with her. Rachel contributed more to the team than just her social graces. She was our explosives and incendiaries expert.
Black Widow and White Fox are newer to the posse – new enough that I still think of them by their assumed names, rather than their given ones – but we’ve already been through a handful of hells together. And, honestly, I knew more about Black Widow than I’d care to admit. One of the key members of the Avengers? Who wouldn’t be a little in awe? I still have a couple action figures of her sitting on my shelf.22 She’s one of the few people I hang around with who I know has seen more action than me.23
White Fox has only shared a little bit of her history with me, but I knew she was in the running too. She was the last of the kumiho: a nine-tailed fox demon straight out of Korean mythology. They used to take the form of beautiful women to seduce men and devour their hearts. Now she uses that form to blend in. Just looking into her eyes, though, you could see something beyond human in her. She had an inner glow, like moonlight, underneath her eyes. Don’t make the mistake of thinking White Fox is beyond human concerns. She will – gracefully, luminously – grind you to paste if you threaten the people and the causes she cares about.
Shoon’kwa, as she had threatened, had stayed behind. Allegedly to finish patching up the holes some of Rachel’s explosives had punched in her craft during our last big operation. We’d been working with Tony Stark on that one, and he’d said he’d cover repairs. Still, if it had been my giant hypertech airship, I wouldn’t have been satisfied unless I’d patched it up myself. So she had an excuse. But an excuse was all it was.
Black Widow said, “If having us take the long way has been some kind of power play, I’m going to be even more disappointed.”
“Didn’t you used to be a spy?” I asked. “You traveled undercover all the time?”
“When I had to.” The message was plain: she didn’t think this job was worth her doing anything.
“You didn’t have to come along. It’d be nice to have help on this, but I don’t need it.”
“Call it professional curiosity.” A smirk. Still gauging me as a leader. Judging what I’d sign them up for.
“It’s hardly that we’re against doing the right thing,” White Fox said. “But… religious movements, an already half-beaten cult, a pair of adult siblings who’ve made their own decisions… doesn’t it seem a little small fry, after what we’ve already done together?”
“Then think of it as a nice vacation from saving the world,” I said. “For people with our talents, a small fry job should be easy, right?”
Funny how often small fry jobs could turn into big, thorny problems. They all knew it. Just because a job didn’t call for guns blazing all the time, that didn’t mean it was easy. What we’d been asked to do could become a big, messy, emotional horrorshow and they knew it.
“You really are determined to do this, aren’t you?” Rachel asked.
“It is quite a change from the last time we chatted, peaches,” Inez said.
“Yeah. Well. I have my buttons. Consider them pressed.”
I haven’t been telling you my stories about my battle in the Everglades, and my childhood, for no reason. As I’d been reading about Dallas Bader Pearson, my imagination had jumped back to them, too. Little flashbacks peppered every article. All those memories were knotting together, becoming one big tangle of trauma.
The stories about families bringing their children into Pearson’s cult were the first thing that had done it to me. If you want to get on my bad side faster than you can blink, show me a kid in a cage. Next thing had been Pearson’s megalomania. His sense of destiny. The ease with which he twisted other people around him, made every effort to appear selfless while doing it. I’d known more than a few monsters like that. One really stuck out in my memory.
Somewhere along the line, it had become important to me. It all left me unsteady on my feet, and it took all of my effort to hide that. The longer this argument went on, the more they’d see it.
So I didn’t let it continue. I turned and led them into the library. Decision made. Debate over.
I’d spread my research materials across a table. Splayed-open magazines, newspapers, city planning maps and permits, and – the focus of my past hour – an old Tribune “Life & Style” article on Pearson’s home in Forest Glen. Complete with an aerial glamour shot of the whole complex.
The article predated Pearson’s fall from grace. Still, it was plain that some of Pearson’s lifestyle choices had struck the writer as odd. She twisted herself in knots to avoid referring to his movement as a cult. He didn’t have a compound, he had a “home open to adherents of his church.” His followers weren’t creepy zealots, they were “enthusiastic and faultlessly full of praise for the man who’d given them so much.”
Whatever. The real prize was the detailed aerial shot of his compound. Pearson, like most cult gurus, was paranoid. But he’d been enamored with fame and praise. His own headline in the “Life & Style” section must have really stoked his ego. So he’d made no objection when the aerial photographer had gotten close in for a detailed shot.
The Church of the Spiritual Revolution had taken over an old, failed boarding school. The school had been a place where families, and sometimes courts, could send “troubled” children in need of a “structured environment.” The patina of caring had been so thin they might as well not have bothered. It had been a jail. The story-and-a-half-tall fencing ringing the campus didn’t make any pretensions. The top of the fence was bent inward… to prevent anyone from climbing out. Parents or judges sent kids they couldn’t be bothered dealing with in any other way here.
If I’d been a little less lucky, I could have ended up in a place like this rather than with Father Boschelli.
When the shell game of the school’s financial plans caught up with them at last, the whole project folded in a month.24 Horrible as the boarding school had been, it, like a lot of abominations, had provided jobs to the local community. So the locals hadn’t been inclined to ask too many questions when Pearson had bought the whole place up and moved in with all his followers. Such a large church moving in must have seemed like a godsend. A good investment in the local economy.
All gone sour now. Pearson hadn’t been interested in providing jobs to anyone beyond his loyal followers. Anyone from the outside community who joined his flock quickly had their wealth drained from them, and shortly after cut off ties with friends and family. And then the sexual harassment allegations and the exposé had brought the media vultures swooping down.
The article’s writer had been told that about three hundred people were living in the compound, but that information was months out of date. After Pearson had been exiled from city government, he’d called as many of his followers to his compound as were able to come. The boarding school had been like a little college campus: six buildings, including live-in housing for students and faculty, classrooms, a good-sized church with a bell tower, and a single rec building. The dorms were still in use as dorms, and the church for Pearson’s sermons. I couldn’t find any details on how the other buildings were being used.
What I knew from the investigations that followed the exposé was that the compound was all but sealed up. The fences had been reinforced, and barbed wire added to the top. Guards stood behind the gates, monitored the paths between the buildings, or watched the fences. Mail was supposedly still getting in and out, but I had no doubt that any letters that left the compound had been heavily edited and censored – if not written to script. So far as any article I’d read knew, there was no cellphone access inside the compound. Pearson’s followers gave up their worldly possessions when they went inside.
There were definitely more than three hundred people living inside now.
I could sneak past guards, past cameras, past all kinds of electronic surveillance equipment. What I couldn’t sneak past was lots of eyeballs. Especially lots of people who knew each other well, and would certainly recognize someone who wasn’t acting the way they were supposed to. That would be our first, and maybe our biggest, obstacle. I couldn’t underestimate it. I’d had an easier time sneaking into paramilitary bases with shoot-on-sight policies than I expected I would have in this place. It didn’t matter that the people we were up against weren’t trained soldiers or professional killers. This was still going to strain our abilities.
I said, “We’ll need a safe way in and a safer, quieter way out. Latter’s going to be a lot harder than the former.” I nodded to Black Widow. “If you’re still of the opinion this is beneath us, you can have that job. You and White Fox are going to help us get in and out, and be on standby if anything goes sour.”
If Black Widow still wanted to pick a fight, she didn’t choose this moment. I just got some curt nods. Inez watched me for an overlong moment.
I said, “Just because this place isn’t a paramilitary base, or a secret government lab, or a freaking alien superfortress – or anything else you’ve all dealt with – doesn’t mean it’s going to be a cakewalk. Especially since our goal is to get in without causing much of a fuss, so we don’t traumatize or hurt the two people we’re there to pull out. And especially since we’ve got to get those people out – again without causing a fuss.”
I almost would have sworn Rachel pouted. “I suppose you won’t have much use for an explosives expert, then,” she said.
“Now, now,” I soothed. “I didn’t say that at all.”