Dashing as ever, Bella had been deliberately dressing androgynous lately, cutting back on the girlish little habits—tossing her hair, biting her lip. Right now, out buying diapers with Natasha, she kept her chin tilted up in a haughty sort of pose, swaying as she talked.
Natasha looked at her strangely. "You got ADHD or something? What's with all the swaying? Never noticed this tic before—you'd better not pass it on to the kid!"
Bella wanted to roll her eyes, but that felt too feminine, so she forced it down. "I'm itchy!"
"Itchy where?"
"Everywhere! ...No wonder they don't use the stuff. This body-tempering potion is unbearable—itchy enough that I want to go rub myself against a wall."
Natasha's face twisted with distaste. She didn't say a word, but the message came through loud and clear: You rub yourself on a wall and I'll stop talking to you.
Natasha pushed the stroller; Bella pushed a mountain of baby supplies. The two of them left the convenience store.
Natasha liked Bella's new short-haired look. "Hey, think I should cut mine short too?"
"No."
For the next three or four years, Bella planned to keep this neutral, short-haired style—all so their daughter would have a basic way to tell them apart.
"Don't be difficult. Do it for the kid. Be good!" She turned down Natasha's request flatly, which earned her a stream of grumbling. Bella argued her case point by point, from the child's psychological wellbeing all the way to future fashion sense, and finally talked Natasha out of the idea.
"If you want short hair, that's a problem for three or four years down the line."
"Now that you've got a daughter, you don't love me like you used to!" Natasha said, half joking, half not.
"What are you talking about?"
"If you love me, then you go have one too."
Bella coughed and coughed. To change the subject, she scooped Little Elsa into her arms, then lifted the baby's tiny finger toward the sky. "Sweetie, look up there—what's that? Watch my lips: big—air—plane!"
Seeing her playing with the baby, Natasha didn't think much of it and glanced up. First look, nothing. Then something felt off—and in this area, she was far sharper than Bella.
"Take cover! Move! Over there!" Natasha shoved her toward the far side.
"What's going on? What happened? Did something happen somewhere?" In her past life Bella had racked up plenty of hours in LOL and Honor of Kings, and by her logic, whenever things went sideways or the team got wiped, the first person to ping "???" or type "what's happening?" usually seized the initiative.
The plane was still some distance off, and she felt no omen of death, so she didn't take it seriously.
Still dazed, she was dragged over to the wall—and the words had barely left her mouth when the thing she'd called a "big airplane," a C-130, opened up with its cannons, raining bullets down on the pedestrians below.
"...This? This! Th-that... isn't that a U.S. military C-130? Has somebody turned traitor?"
Bella didn't know modern weaponry cold the way Natasha did, but she wasn't clueless either. The C-130's reputation preceded it; she knew what it was.
This one looked modified—firepower a notch below an AC-130, a notch above a standard C-130.
Even a notch below, those cannons were terrifying against unarmed civilians.
The C-130 tore into the ground below without restraint—no specific target, no hesitation—men, women, old, young, all cut down under its guns. Bella was furious. This was a massacre! This was flat-out terrorism!
Two F-22s tried to intercept it, and were shot down almost at once.
"Useless!" Bella was angry enough to hit someone. The enemy was already slaughtering people, and those two F-22s were still trying to warn it off? Were they stupid?
"The markings must be wrong—they probably read it as friendly." Natasha squinted. It was evening now, and no matter how good your eyesight, you couldn't make out the paint job on the plane; in the rush, it was the only explanation she could come up with.
"Let's not hang around here. Move!" Natasha took the baby from Bella's arms. The C-130 kept strafing the ground, and crowds of civilians heading home from work were killed without ever knowing what hit them. In an instant, the calm, peaceful city was drowned in screams and blood.
The distance was too great; a sniper rifle couldn't reach a plane in the sky.
And Bella's spells couldn't reach the enemy either—Teleportation, Flesh to Stone, Chain Lightning, Disintegrate, all had the same problem: too far.
The modified C-130 was aimed straight at the White House. It dropped altitude at the right moment and unleashed a dense storm of rounds at the many guards on the roof.
The guards were brave enough, but firing rifles at an aircraft was simply too tall an order.
The C-130 swept over the White House, the cannon on its left side raking the guards on the rooftop and some of those below like a plow tearing through a field—a bloodbath.
Then it flew on, meaning to loop around and come back for a second pass.
The F-22s from Andrews Air Force Base arrived again. This time their orders weren't to drive it off—they were to shoot it down.
Two AIM-120 air-to-air missiles struck the C-130 one after another. The transport plane, still bearing U.S. military markings, trailed thick smoke from its tail and slammed into the Washington Monument. The monument was sheared clean through at the one-third mark by the wing, and the transport tumbled down onto the plaza west of the monument, where it erupted in a violent explosion moments later.
Two blocks away, Bella and Natasha stared blankly at the scene, both a little stunned—mostly in disbelief. In this timeline, the 9/11 attacks had never happened. Previously, under President Sawyer, America's relations with the rest of the world had been less than warm, but they had never come to anything like this.
"Are they insane? Whether it's a country or an individual, once this gets traced, it's guaranteed to bring down retaliation!" Natasha clutched the baby and ran with Bella toward their love nest.
Neither of them was ordinary, and each had her own read on world affairs.
They talked it over as they went, ruling out the key suspects one by one, until the one left standing was almost certainly the real culprit.
"The Koreans? Because of the troops stationed there?" Natasha had never been to Korea and had no idea how bad its biohazard crisis had gotten.
Bella, on the other hand, knew a fair amount, and she knew that deep down the Korean public hated the American military. That middle-aged man in the suit who'd blocked the door to Car 11, the old conductor in his fifties who never spoke a word of English—none of them liked Americans. It was a common enough sentiment.
"Maybe the radicals? They're an impulsive bunch, and the corruption over there is serious—seriously serious. Buy a C-130 off the US military, then use military comm codes to slip into Washington's airspace... there'd be room to pull it off." Bella wasn't sure how to sum up the Korean temperament, and since she didn't really know the radicals either, she kept it vague.
The two armchair politicians debated as they ran, while Little Elsa hugged her bottle and watched them, puzzled.