Aimee Ogden
Seventy-eight. Seventy-nine. Eighty—
Cerebrelle came back to herself all at once.
It took her a moment to remember where she was. Shattered glassware and smashed computer parts: a laboratory. Poison Dart’s lair? Yes. She remembered the mission now, locked onto the situation at hand before it could slip away again. She ran a quick self-assessment before moving on. Damage? Yes. Her wrist had been badly wrenched. Her vision telescoped inward, and she could see millions of red blood cells flooding into the injured region. No fractured bones, no ligaments stretched or torn.
She let her awareness expand back out to her whole body and flexed the injured wrist once—nothing serious. She looked left, then right, and her eyes fell on the perpetrator of her injuries. She flinched.
Badger Girl’s broken body lay across a cracked black laboratory bench to Cerebrelle’s left. Cerebrelle closed her eyes and turned away from the too-still face. Should she even think of her as Badger Girl anymore? She doubted the Protectors let you keep your call sign once you took to defending the secret lair of the Coalition’s favorite mad scientist. Besides, Badger Girl hadn’t even suited up in her black-and-red uniform. She was dressed civilian-style in a denim jacket and T-shirt; only her motorcycle boots would have passed super-heroic muster. Cerebrelle’s sidekick—gone rogue.
Cerebrelle squared her shoulders and turned back to Badger Girl. There would be time to deal with the fallout of her sidekick’s betrayal later. But for now, she had work to do, and she had to do it fast. Badger Girl had always been more than a physical match for Cerebrelle. Of course, a solid punch wasn’t everything—you had to know where it was going to strike, too—but it still meant Cerebrelle had a limited time frame to work. She pulled Badger Girl down from the bench, leaving a smear of red on the broken computer screen where the younger woman’s head had been resting. She’d seen a lot of Badger Girl’s blood over the years, but this time, she turned her eyes downward to avoid it.
Cerebrelle grimaced as she cinched Badger Girl’s hands behind her back with a frayed length of electrical cord and knotted it twice for good measure. As she twisted the cord tight, she could feel the rough edges of broken bones grinding together. She pulled back, but too late: she was spiraling down the black hole of Badger Girl’s injuries. Her mind contracted down to count leukocytes and chase platelets through capillary beds, then just as suddenly it was rocketing outwards, assigning numbers to stars never before seen from Earth, let alone from deep underground in Poison Dart’s hideout. She triangulated distances, chased the highest prime number. —Three hundred and twenty, three hundred and twenty-one, three hundred and twenty-two— She counted the hairs on Craig’s head . . .
Craig? Who the hell was Craig?
No time to worry about that now. Cerebrelle rubbed her eyes and dark sparks flew behind her eyelids. Badger Girl would heal; that was what Badger Girl did, after all. And Cerebrelle had work to do. Her gifts were mental, not physical. But it didn’t take a powerhouse like Badger Girl or Red Comet to wreak havoc on some helpless technology.
Helpless only until Poison Dart’s henchmen showed up, though. Cerebrelle glanced over her shoulder and took in the three access points to the room: door, upper right. Door, lower right. Ceiling duct. Imaginary laser fire trajectories arced through her mind, weaving a perfect spider web . . . or a complex manifold. She blinked and the web folded in on itself, resolving into a Klein bottle.
No. Not now. She lifted a boot and brought it down hard onto an exposed hard drive. Plastic shrieked, wires ripped, the plastic carnations decorating the adjacent desk flew through the air, and suddenly Cerebrelle was translating the complete works of Neruda into Farsi.
—I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. A thousand and twelve, a thousand and thirteen, a thousand and fourteen—
Wires frayed into a tangle of neurons. Glassware shattered into elaborate constellations. Cerebrelle panted as she stared at her dark, fragmented reflection in the remains of a busted flat screen and tried not to let her heart beat in time with the nearest pulsar star, tried not to count the sodium ions scurrying between action potentials in her brain. Her mask was crooked. She pushed it back into place with a shaking hand. Bring it back. Close it all out. There’s a job to do. —Four thousand three hundred and two. Four thousand three hundred and three—
“Lian?”
A low blow from Badger Girl. Poison Dart’s minions could be here any minute, and Cerebrelle’s secret identity would be blown. “I don’t want to talk to you right now.”
“Oh, no? Because it seems like a damn good time to me.” Electrical cords squealed as Badger Girl strained against them, and she grunted in pain. “What the hell do you think you’re doing down here? And a better question: why did you smash my head open?” Another groan from the cords. “They pulled me out of a date to come after you. She was cute, too. But they thought it should be me, I guess. Lian, are you listening to me?”
Of course the Coalition thought it should be Badger Girl. A twist of the knife. “Don’t use my name.” She moved faster down a row of desks. With a sweep of her arm, a cluster of glass bottles shattered to the floor. Under her boots, circuit boards splintered. “And I don’t talk to turncoats. How long have you been working for Poison Dart?”
“Turncoat?” The anger in Badger Girl’s voice was punctuated by the shriek of the electrical cords as she ripped free. “Is that what you—Lian, stop. Just listen to me. You’re going to hurt yourself, or me again, and neither of those options sounds great to me. You don’t understand—”
“I understand enough.” And Cerebrelle didn’t want to understand any more than that. What would make an old friend into an old enemy, what sort of blackmail or leverage would turn Badger Girl against her? She leapt over a silent server bank to put space between them as Badger Girl bore down on her. “Stay back!”
“I’m not going to hurt you!” Badger Girl cried. Her fist pounded down on a wooden desktop, splintering it.
Cerebrelle backed up farther. How much more damage would she need to do before Poison Dart’s chances of rebuilding were effectively nil? And she still needed to get out of here before Badger Girl forced her into a fistfight that Cerebrelle couldn’t finish. She didn’t want to—couldn’t end up as the latest addition to Poison Dart’s menagerie.
“Will you just sit still and listen to me for a goddamn minute?”
Cerebrelle looked Badger Girl in the eyes. She was the one wearing the mask, really, not Cerebrelle—how had Cerebrelle ever thought she knew that face, knew the person behind it? She watched for the twitch of micro-expressions to betray Badger Girl’s true purpose: a pinching of the lips, narrowed eyes, flaring nostrils.
No: she lingered too long, and her viewpoint ratcheted in even closer. Badger Girl’s blood was spiked with adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol, and the sinoatrial node in her heart was pulsing an electrical signal nearly twice a second. Millions of glycogen phosphorylase molecules were racing through her muscles, churning glycogen into burnable energy, and her major blood vessels had dilated to a diameter of—
“Stop it!” Badger Girl shook Cerebrelle hard, shattering her trance. Cerebrelle squeezed backward and upward out of arteries and back into the uncomfortably cramped quarters of her own mind. “Damn you Lian, stay with me here!”
“Stop calling me that.” A favorite Wing Chun escape twisted Cerebrelle free from Badger Girl’s grasp. She darted under Badger Girl’s arm and shoved the other woman off balance. A leap and a vault, and she’d scrambled up onto a bench top before Badger Girl’s hand locked around her ankle.
“Lian, listen to me. Do you know where you are?”
“Of course I know.” Cerebrelle closed her eyes, letting her awareness hang on Badger Girl’s muscles and nerves.
“Do you?”
She was no physical match for Badger Girl, but she was more than a mental match. A deep breath in through her nose, then a slow exhale. When Badger Girl pulled her backward, she was ready. Braced against the bench, she shoved herself backward in the direction of Badger Girl’s pull, like a tug-of-war combatant suddenly letting go of the rope. Like a compressed coil unwinding. The boot on her free leg clipped Badger Girl’s chin, and Badger Girl staggered backward.
Cerebrelle dropped to the ground between Badger Girl’s feet but sprang upward immediately. Badger Girl had already recovered her balance—her arm shot forward toward Cerebrelle.
But Cerebrelle was already waiting. She blocked Badger Girl’s swinging arm, trapped it over her shoulder, and shot upward as hard as she could.
Badger Girl screamed as freshly-knitted bones snapped anew. Cerebrelle grabbed the broken arm by the wrist and pushed backward. Her heart squeezed at the sound Badger Girl made when the two splintered bone ends smashed together—but she hadn’t left Cerebrelle any choice.
Badger Girl arced backward and crashed into a pile of smashed glass bottles and beakers. Cerebrelle ripped the front of the plastic casing off of the server bank and used the broken piece to smash the contents. Surely this much damage would keep Poison Dart too busy to . . .
To do whatever it was that Poison Dart was planning to do? The villain’s plan was a dark, dizzying hole in Lian’s memory, and she turned away from it. Something dire, something dreadful. It was Poison Dart, and that was all anyone really needed to know. Counting comforted her; numbers had always been a familiar and reassuring place to turn when the universe grew too big or too small around her. —Five thousand six hundred and seventy-two. Five thousand six-hundred and seventy-three—
She still didn’t hear the sound of jackbooted footsteps marching in lockstep, and a tentative spin of her senses down along the hallways behind both doors revealed nothing untoward. But her luck wouldn’t hold out forever. And Badger Girl would heal again before long.
She clambered back up on top of the lab bench and tore the panel out of the ceiling vent. The odds were too good that she’d be spotted—either by one of Poison Dart’s minions or a security camera—if she left by one of the regular doors.
How had she gotten in here in the first place?
It didn’t matter now, did it? She put her arms up in the vent and braced them on either side. She was about to pull her body up inside when Badger Girl’s voice stopped her: “Lian.”
That name again. Cerebrelle looked down, jaw set and tight. But Badger Girl was still on the floor, her broken arm cradled against her chest. Her slack face betrayed thin lines and wrinkles far beyond what her age warranted. Working for Poison Dart was hard on more than just the conscience, apparently. A tendril of pity stirred in Cerebrelle’s heart, and she couldn’t bring herself to choke it out entirely. “Badger Girl, stay down. You were my sidekick once, whatever that’s worth now. And I don’t want to see you get hurt any worse.”
“Badger Girl?” Badger Girl’s eyes went wide, then crimped shut. Her head dropped back onto the floor. “Lian, I haven’t—this is worse than I thought.”
She had an opening to make her getaway, but Cerebrelle couldn’t tamp down worry for her former sidekick long enough to convince her body to make a break for it. She took her arms out of the duct and dropped down beside Badger Girl. “What? What’s worse?” A thought ricocheted to the forefront. “Are you under deep cover? Badger Girl, are you in danger?” She began constructing escape routes that would let her maneuver Badger Girl’s greater weight over a long distance while still minimizing their odds of being discovered and intercepted.
But Badger Girl interrupted her before she could chase down that line of thought. “Lian, no one’s called me Badger Girl for ages now.” Badger Girl—Evvy—dragged her jacket sleeve across her face. Was she crying? Evvy had never cried, in or out of uniform. Cerebrelle stared at the wet smears under her eyes. “I’m thirty-one years old, Lian. I’m not anything girl anymore. I go by Sun Bear now. I have for, I don’t know. Forever.”
Cerebrelle was still looking at the teary streaks on Evvy’s face. Molecules of prolactin and encephalin spun and collided in every drop, a plain mark of authenticity: real emotional tears, not fakes nor a reflexive response to the dust adrift in the demolished lab. She got caught in the Brownian motion of the particulates suspended in the air around her for a moment before she realized what Evvy was saying. “What? I don’t understand.”
Evvy gestured to the room around her with her good arm. “What do you think this is, Lian? Where do you think you are? This was Poison Dart’s lab a decade ago. We took him down together, but that was—Jesus, that was so long ago. He’s not even called Poison Dart anymore.” She put her hand over her eyes. “His name is Plasmid, and he’s reformed or something. He even works with Alpha Particle and Beta Ray sometimes.” A ragged laugh burst out of her, and a bubble of snot burst on one nostril. “God, Lian, he brought frittatas to last year’s Protector Christmas party, and you asked for the recipe.”
“I don’t understand,” Cerebrelle repeated. She looked down at the nebula of shattered glass all around her, at the unwoven network of wires and the deep snowbanks of dust. “That isn’t right. I had a mission . . .”
“Yeah. You did.” Evvy dragged herself to her knees, which brought her nearly to the level of Lian’s face. “And you finished it, and you went home, and you did a lot more missions, and you retired. Except you didn’t really know how to quit, did you? You had to keep chasing that power trip, until there wasn’t any room left in your giant brain for you.”
Cerebrelle reached behind her. The heavy black countertop offered support, but the swarms of delocalized electrons in the aromatic rings of the phenolic resin begged her to chase them through probability clouds, and she yanked her hands back. “Evvy, stop it—”
“Sure, I’ll stop. As soon as you can tell me my birthday. Or my last name.” Evvy’s black brows crashed together. “Or your last name, Lian. Come on. Just a word—one word. I’ll wait.” She folded her arms across her chest, and the broken elbow slipped back into place with a sickening crack.
Lian stared down at her. Inside her brain, neurons fired; rich, oxygenated blood poured into her cerebral cortex. She dug for answers, but came up empty-handed.
Lian staggered away from Evvy, and sat down hard atop the server bank when her knees gave out. A puff of dust went up in her wake. Evvy caught her before she could drop all the way to the floor and crushed her into an embrace. Lian could smell blood and sweat on the shoulder of Evvy’s stained jacket. “I don’t . . .” she said, “I don’t know what to do now.”
“I’ll take you home.” Evvy pulled back, put her arm around Lian’s shoulders. It was an odd, backward gesture; Lian had always been the mentor, the leader. An uncomfortable echo of how things were supposed to be. “Does Craig know?”
“Craig?” Lian asked, and Evvy’s face fell.
• • •
Evvy parked in front of a little brownstone house. Lian thought it looked familiar and knew, through some blunted instinct, to look under the front leg of the painted Adirondack chair on the porch for a spare key. She stood in front of the door in the civvies Evvy had bought for her and felt the lines of the key cut into her hand. Her face felt too cool without the familiar contour of a mask to cover it.
Evvy offered, not for the first time, to go in with her, but Lian shook her head. “I’ll talk to the other Protectors,” Evvy said. “And some of the auxiliaries too, especially the Piconauts.” She cracked half a smile. “Maybe even Plasmid. One of them will be able to help you, Lian, I’m sure of it.”
Lian smiled back, even though she didn’t understand the joke. She put the key in the lock, and it turned without a sound.
The house was dark and quiet and cool. Lian slipped off her boots and left them paired tidily on the floor by the door. She paused by the staircase to watch a Jeep drive past the bay window in the front room. Someone she knew drove a Jeep like that, but she couldn’t quite put a finger on who it was.
Something she didn’t understand drove her up the narrow staircase to the second floor, where the door on the left was cracked just enough to admit her with a tiny creak.
There was a man sleeping in the bed—a man with a broad open face marked by deep furrows between the brows and a fine web of lines framing each eye. On the dresser beside him was an orange bottle of pills, its lid partially ajar, and a half-empty water glass.
When she sat down opposite him on the bed, he rolled away from her, leaving two brown hairs behind on the pillow. She picked them up, then reached out and ran a hand through his curls. —One, two, three— Lian started counting faster. She had a long way to go.
Aimee Ogden is a former biologist, science teacher, and software tester. Now she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Baen.com, Persistent Visions, and the Sockdolager.