I HAVE BELLE go on her merry way with clear instructions, having done a quick fly-by of our proposed battleground on the journey into the city. With my Tornado costume still in place and the taste of Hallory’s misgivings on my palate, I quickly stab Sal Doro’s number into the Enercom phone and wait a few rings.

“This better not be a ghost,” Sal’s grumpy-ass voice comes back up the line.

“I’m alive and well,” I say glibly. “And I need a favour.”

“Oh-oh, what is it? Need me to bang some models for you or somethin’?”

“You wish. No, I –”

“Yes I do. I do wish.”

“OK settle, Sal. I got a proposition for you with what you might call ‘mutual benefits’.”

“Those benefits include nubile young models coked out of their minds on proximity to you?”

“Afraid not.”

“OK,” Sal says, sounding instantly another few levels less interested. “Pitch me.”

So I tell him the plan. I need a photographer at the old shipyards site ready to give press coverage to a hot young heroine on the town. That momentarily piques his interest, but as the details spill out of me like diarrhoea from a snot-nosed kid, Sal’s gravelled whine deepens once more.

“I’ll do you one better, Zephyr, but there’s no payday in this for you.”

“I’m on points for this one,” I tell him. “What’s one better?”

“If this was the housing crisis or drug gangs or city corruption, I might have a hard time, but since the Post is now in the superhero business almost full-time, mere mention of a drop of lycra and I can conjure a chopper at less than an hour’s notice.”

“A chopper? Really? For a photographer.”

“We’ll stream it off our site,” Sal says like the very idea he’s spruiking appals him, and therefore like he’s offending himself. “Web hits, you know … It’s a complicated business. Not sure I understand it all myself, but the guys above me, you could hang a clothes iron off those boners.”

“I don’t need that mental image right now,” I say.

Giving Sal the location, I disconnect with vague uneasiness not much different to the disquiet that’s been troubling me since the day I was born.

And then the Human Tornado takes to the sky.

THE COLD DAY has turned clear on us. A brittle and near indescribable blue sky throws its arms across the city like a well-meaning uncle, its compliment just all the more underscoring our shortcomings. The grandiose and at times rushed redesign of huge city precincts thirty years ago gave improper consideration to future planning and the once-in-a-century opportunity it truly was to position the eastern seaboard for the 21st century, and the inevitable bureaucratic circus and shysters taking advantage of the gaps in red tape mean many of the obelisks built to service all our future needs are now starting to show the signs of their hurried creation. Like roaches scuttling, the architectural skin of the city puts up a good show in weak light, a little Vaseline on the lens, but this day is too perfect, much more thanAtlantic   Citycan either deserve or actually handle.

The sagging waterfront is somehow more honest in its cataclysmic depression.

The huge Baltic shipyard-looking edifice still wears its redeveloper’s signage like a cheap tart on a red light street, but the signs are more a wolf in sheep’s clothing than painted allure.

I land athwart the vast, slightly dented roof of faded blue tin sheeting, disturbing gulls the size of peacocks in their roosts. Amid the beating of frantic wings I scan the scenery, no immediate sign of Bellwether. It is mid-afternoon, the sun, rekindled in all its finery, beats off the aluminium-flensed gargantua of the shopping precincts further up from the river mouth, causing me to raise one hand as a shield as I discern the not-so-distant heart beat of a chopper’s thrumming blades and smile to myself in grim satisfaction at another con well done.

“Stay where you are, evil-doer!” a feminine voice calls from my six.

Still grinning, trying to channel a little more villainy into it, I turn to admire Belle hovering a few dozen paces off, a yard or two into the air above the roof. She looks slightly more like a kid playing dress up with one of Gumbel’s bedroom curtains press-ganged to play the part of a cloak in her somewhat pedestrian get-up, if I can use that term to describe the costume of a person flying two-hundred feet above ground.

For the merest instant we share a knowing mutual self-amusement that I banish with an iron frown, hand moving into a theatrical pose as I scan away to the looming gnat of the news helicopter.

“Leave me be, Bellwether!”

Belle’s telepathic lasso surrounds me in that instant as we had trained. Making the action more authentic, I barely have to work to restrain my shots as I send a pummelling fist out to drive compressed air her way, mimicking the weather controller for what I have often been mistaken. Having more than telegraphed the punch, it’s hard to feign surprise as Belle twirls out of the way of what’s admittedly a pretty weak counter-attack. She swoops in and body checks me with a noise like old trash can lids smashing together as I propel her in turn away.

“Tag! You’re it,” she cries.

I glimpse the chopper in position now a quarter-mile off. Chances are their cameras are zoomed to the max and getting everything, if not sound, so I snarl for the admiring public and throw out a net of electrical force dissembled to less resemble my powers, but of course Belle easily escapes those clutches.

She scoots around, me tracking her with a look I have to strangle so that I appear battle-prepared and less like a doting parent as she comes back and down at me like a wrestler from TV, slamming her foot hard into the metal roof at the same time she punches me to give some kind of impression we are actually doing this for real.

Like I said, the kid’s got some degree of augmentation common to parahumans even with mostly psionic abilities. Her foot doesn’t just clang into the sheeting causing reverberation. It smashes out that panel and creates a cascading effect as the aging metalwork gives up its flagging fight against entropy with a sigh and collapses wholesale.

Bellwether is grinning in my face, fist curled in a twist of the red fabric as the roof caves in and she gleefully rides it down like a surfer.

Our descent banishes daylight. We crash down in the ambient gloom and away from the chopper’s prying eyes, Bellwether unhands me and gives me a look as if to ask how-am-I-doing-so-far?

“I think the idea is to put on a show, isn’t it?” I ask in a caged whisper. “A bit hard to do from down here.”

I try to match her wry grin, but when my eyes focus I see Belle staring off past my shoulder with a look of confusion.

Intuitively I turn as well, momentarily unable to explain the light sparkling from a huge wall of bleeping electronics, the parti-coloured machine a curious mix of space age machinery and jerry-rigged appliances I have a strong feeling should be more familiar than it is. A figure – a figure with a slightly mottled gait – moves in front of the big contraption, and I turn quickly and grasp my young companion by the shoulder.

“Go! Now.”

Of course she wants an explanation, and of course by then it is too late.

Zephyr 15.7 “A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing” is a post from: Zephyr - a webcomic in prose