Vaughn grinned, “They’re already involved. They were reporting to Daniel’s dad about Futuren Capital. They thought Magnus was involved.”
“I rember,” I said. “Sydney wanted buzzers for them. I genuinely don’t rember if I provided them at this mont. I know I provided people in the community with designs.”
I hoped none of them got to the Nine, but chances were good that they might have. Plus, during the mushroom zombie fight, I learned that you could overwhelm them if you had enough people with voice powers.
I needed to see where I could improve the design. Maybe I could call Julie to help test. My sonics might give her an equivalent volu boost. Whether they’d convey the subtleties of her power was another question.
Reminding myself of the current conversation, I decided to listen and forget the need to fix it.
Vaughn was talking. I didn’t think I’d missed too much of what he’d said.
“—I’ll talk to Dayton first. He’s generally reasonable and it’s not like we didn’t tell them. Amy told them her suspicion right after she absorbed part of Jody’s soul, right?”
Rachel looked around the group, “I need to hear what happened while I was gone in more detail than I got it.”
“That would take a long ti,” I said, “but Jody tried to attack Alex when he used his powers to tell the fungus zombies’ central brain to die. One of the previous Bloodmaidens was in control of Amy’s body and she drained Jody. When Amy returned, she said that she’d sensed that Jody wasn’t controlled by anything. He attacked Alex on his own. She wasn’t sure though, since she didn’t absorb the energy directly.”
Rachel’s eyes widened, “That doesn’t leave with fewer questions. I’m going to talk to Amy and find out what she does rember and if she can ask the other Bloodmaiden. Did Daniel scan him?”
I shook my head, “Not deeply. He did a surface scan, but after being drained Jody’s thoughts were fragnted and not in a way that conveniently explained everything. In a perfect world, we might have insisted on keeping him for observation, but Daniel was tired like everyone else. I don’t know what we’re hoping to do with Jody, but you’re right, we should have Daniel probe his mind. If he’s working for the Nine, though, there’s no chance he’ll be cooperative and plenty of reason to think that he might have a block like ours.”
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Vaughn let out a low whistle, “Yeah. That’s not the kind of thing you want to see from a speedster. You punched the mayor when he went into your head. Jody could throw a grenade or a bigger bomb and run out of range before it exploded.”
“Worse,” I said, “he might have sothing Rook designed with the Heroes’ League in mind—sothing that would allow him to locate our base for example. From what I understand, they’d have a hard ti ssing with the Stapledon Project’s work in Jody’s head, but they might be able to put in an additional command with Dominator voice stuff. We’d probably have to bring in Julie to know for sure.”
Vaughn leaned back in his chair. When he leaned forward, he said, “Okay. This is more complicated than I thought. We’re going to have to try to find out whether he’s really a traitor, but also be ready for all hell to break loose the mont we begin and we don’t want to do it here in case his costu’s full of Abominator tech Rook salvaged from the Moon before he started his Mars project.”
Jaclyn raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t even think about what Rook got out of the moon. I thought you were summarizing and then you dropped that in… This is worse than I thought.”
Leaning back to smack Jaclyn shoulder, Cassie said, “People assu Vaughn’s dumb because he’s a people person, but he’s not that dumb.”
She smirked at Vaughn and he shook his head.
“He’s smarter than I am,” Cassie added, “but if you want my suggestion, we work it out so that when we scan Jody’s brain, we do it on neutral territory, maybe even outside. We don’t want to risk our base, but if we go to theirs, you never know what the Nine planted inside. I want to use our downtown office, but they know it’s full of explosives from when we fought the Cabal.”
Rachel raised her hand, “All good points. We need to start. While Vaughn’s talking to Dayton, why don’t we co up with a few ideas for where to scan Jody? Maybe Dayton even has a suggestion. Nick can move the bots into better positions as we discuss. We don’t want to lose track of whatever Magnus is doing.”
I nodded, “I’ll move the bots. I think I’m also going to look into improving the buzzers.”
Haley nodded, “I’ll talk to Kayla, update everyone on what you’ve done, and check with Daniel, Julie, and Amy.”
Rachel looked over the group, “Does anyone else feel like we’re missing sothing?”
"Lots," Marcus said, "but I've got a bad feeling that we won't know what until we try it."
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