Free Seven Wonders by Adam Christopher Page A

paint to scrawl an Ω on your chest and that was it, you were in the Cowl's gang. He'd even seen some shirts with the logo – the brand – properly screen-printed, some even attempting to copy the entire sigil. Now that was commitment to the cause.
      None of it was his doing, but it pleased him nonetheless. As his grip on the city tightened, so more and more gangs − just kids, really − came out at night, dressed in black, calling themselves the Hoods, or the Executioners, or the Black Hats, or the End Times. He liked those names. They sounded like metal bands. No one in San Ventura dressed like the Seven Wonders, or formed vigilante justice groups to patrol the night. It wasn't that kind of city. The night belonged to the Cowl and his admirers. The night was what everyone feared.
      The Cowl snapped out of his reverie at the sound of slow, soft footfalls. They were a block away still, but he'd been waiting for them and his subconscious tuned the sound in, focusing on it, judging speed, distance, direction. He wasn't sure whether he still had superhearing or whether he was running on pure instinct and years of experience. The footsteps were matched with a third sound. It was hollow, brittle, muted. A walking stick with rubber foot. The target was getting closer.
      It was a bad area of town, but even so, the man with the stick walked it every night, late, late. He even left the street − which was at least doused with the tobacco smudge of yellow sodium streetlamps − and walked down the dark alley. A suicidal shortcut in any large city in America, surely, the very kind of cliché that delighted fans of every cheap B-movie thriller.
      But the man was never afraid and never hesitated, and for good reason. The Cowl knew he had the protection of the Seven Wonders − the personal protection of them. Or at least he had. The old man always walked the same route, closing his laundromat at 7pm precisely and heading home via the same street and the same alley. The Cowl knew about the arrangement with the city's protectors, and that was why he'd always warned the gangs off the man. The more usual kind of criminal, the regular or garden-variety mugger, had tried a few times, but more often than not had found themselves at the end of Linear's silver supersonic fists, or being held by a rapidly tearing shirt front from two hundred feet in the air, Aurora or the Dragon Star still climbing high.
      But that hadn't happened for a while. No one had tried anything in forever. Perhaps the word had got around the bums and drunks that this guy was too much effort and not worth the risk. The impossible crime.
      But tonight… well, tonight the Cowl had something he needed to collect. He could be in and out before the Seven Wonders were alerted. And he knew for a fact that most of the superteam were otherwise engaged, prepping security with the SVPD for the annual grand police charity ball tomorrow, which was due to start in just a few hours. The city's rich and famous and beautiful would all be in attendance. The Cowl allowed himself a smirk at this, and stretched out his arm, trying to exercise the pain out of the joint.
      The target turned into the alleyway. The Cowl was practically invisible in the night to most people, he was sure of that, and he also knew that the target was a frail seventy year-old man with bad eyes and bad hearing. As far as the old man was concerned, the alley was empty.
      And besides, while the Cowl had declared the man a no-go for the gangs, he knew that someday, one day, he'd need the information he carried, locked in his elderly mind.
      Were the Seven Wonders stupid, or just arrogant? Both, probably. The whole purpose of these protectors of knowledge was that their secrets would be kept from the Cowl. The ease with which he'd taken the bank manager had proved that perhaps the Seven Wonders really were that stupid. The Cowl had known about the "vaults" for years, the living strongboxes,