All of us have special ones who have loved us into being.
Brass Monkey finished off the last of the Hate City gangsters by stuffing him into a dumpster in an alleyway off Jackson Avenue and crimping its lid closed. The blow she’d dealt to the nerve cluster at the base of his neck had shorted out his powers—which weren’t so hot to begin with—and he’d be helpless long enough for the police to arrive and cart him off to Powered Holding.
After taking a quick look around to see who was watching, Monkey pulled the Mask from her face. It came away easily enough, and Althea Dayo bloomed back into being.
It was just after eleven on a Sunday morning. Monkey had spent all night chasing those Hate City assholes across town after they tried to spring a trap on her in Wallingford.
In human form, Thea’s senses were not as keen—which was good, since this alleyway smelled of burnt hair and human waste. Even so, Thea felt an angry rumbling in her belly and knew she must have skipped dinner again last night. She shook her head, irritated with herself, as she opened her leather satchel and slid the Mask inside. She dug around a little, hoping for an energy bar, but all she found was a couple of crushed M & Ms.
She shrugged and popped the candy, considering what to do next. If she’d thought before changing back, she would have made her way home to Capitol Hill first, but now she’d have to bus her way there, which would take longer than she could safely wait to eat.
Thea bent a little and clutched her belly, grimacing. Her period was at least a week away, so she knew she must have missed lunch, as well. Transforming back and forth used up a lot of energy, and without fuel, Thea’s body couldn’t help but register its protest. We gotta take better care of ourself, Thea thought.
Brass Monkey didn’t answer.
Thea grabbed her cell phone and flipped it open as she slid into character. She dialed 911.
“Please state the nature of—?”
Thea cut her off. “Oh my God! Oh God! I just—! There was a guy in a fez and sunglasses, and he shot beams or something out of his hands and Brass Monkey hit him, and they went into an alleyway, and I heard them crashing around! Send cops! Send everybody! He’s got powers!”
◊
Thea was nearly broke after paying rent on Thursday, but Cham and Diep at Green Leaf usually let her eat for free. Besides, it was Sunday, which meant Simon would be working. Thea hadn’t seen him in days. As she walked, Thea considered the events of the previous night.
Honestly, she felt a little sorry for the Hate City Boys. With their leader dead, they didn’t seem able to get it together anymore—their powers had dulled, and they hadn’t executed a successful crime in months. Not even so much as a bank job. Every time Thea ran into one of them (in the old days, they’d never traveled alone) his suit looked slept-in, his fez looked half-squashed, or his mirrored sunglasses were all scratched-up.
But who was she kidding? A little despair wasn’t a tenth of what those jackasses deserved. The only reason they’d never killed anyone was because Brass Monkey stopped them at every turn. Besides: anyone who needed a father figure so badly that he’d place himself under the influence of Chairman Bombast had failed at life as far as Thea was concerned.
Thea turned down 8th Avenue South, rubbing her belly as she went. The restaurant was a hole-in-the-wall, but Thea loved it. The furniture was cheap and ill-matched, as were the dishes, but everything was immaculately clean. As soon as Thea walked in, she smelled meat and herbs sizzling on the grill, heard the kitchen staff yelling at each other in Thai, saw Simon bump his way out of the kitchen balancing a broad platter piled with dishes.
He cast Thea a quick smile as he began serving a large family gathering.
Since neither Cham nor Diep were out front at the register, Thea crossed the room to sit at a table by the kitchen door and watch Simon work. His skin was dark—almost bronze—and while he was slight of frame, he had an unobtrusive fighter’s musculature that made him look carved from wood.
◊
Thea and Simon first met after the Olive Way Massacre, when most of Seattle still seemed asleep on their feet, trying to drag themselves out of a terrible nightmare. People tended to lose track of their words, trailing off in the middle of sentences, or to stop on the sidewalk, staring up into the sky as if some vision there could make sense of what had happened. Thea felt a pang of guilt every time she saw someone struggling that way: After all, it was she, as Brass Monkey, who had seized their minds and drawn them to aid her in her battle against the King of Cats.
Simon, though, was one of the few who’d escaped the Call’s effects. He’d strolled into Coffee Messiah and ordered a soy mocha latte, and though they exchanged not a word, the grin he gave Thea as she handed him his drink made her heart skip in her chest. He’d started coming in every day after that, and whether he bought a drink or not, he always tipped Thea at least five dollars. Finally, Thea had asked him out dancing, and they’d spent a sweaty Friday night writhing together at a Belltown club.
She would have gone home with him. She’d wanted desperately to go home with him, but the noise of twisting metal and shattering glass from the street outside had told her she had work to do. An awful roar rolled through the city and the techno beat stuttered to a halt: A Chinese dragon had tossed a city bus into Key Arena.
Cursing her luck, Thea headed for coat check to grab her satchel and her Mask.
◊
Simon cast a smile at Thea over his shoulder, and when he’d finished serving his table, he crossed to join her.
“Hey, Lovely. What brings you by today?”
Thea blushed and looked away. “Well, I came to see you.”
When she glanced back at him his smile had become a grin. “Oh, yeah?”
“Listen,” Thea said. “I’m sorry about Tuesday night. Something came up.”
Simon’s expression darkened slightly. “Yeah, I—It was a bad night for me, too. But you called, so…so no big deal.”
“Really?”
“All will be forgiven you if you come to the park with me this afternoon.”
“I…can do that,” Thea said. “Two o’clock?” That would give her time to get home and change.
“Two is good. Meet me at my place and I’ll drive. Have you eaten?”
◊
The sky was unusually bright as Thea stepped from her bus onto Broadway. She tried not to dwell on her past, but more and more these days, she found herself wondering how her life had led her to this moment or that one, and now she considered Seattle and how she’d come here.
She remembered her bedroom at the Academy. Its rock show fliers, Japanese lanterns, and paper parasols. The East window offered a beautiful view of Silver Spring, and on a clear day, one might even catch the glint of the Potomac winding away in the distance. Thea had graduated high school by then, but she and her classmates had yet to complete their exit exams. Thea had taken to sneaking out at night as Brass Monkey, patrolling DC and Silver Spring. Sometimes she even went as far as Baltimore, quietly spotting and stopping trouble before it could start.
But then, Moloch.
The news footage made him look like a robot. He wore a suit of rusty, cobbled-together armor, ambient energy glowing through its chinks. He descended from the sky to the shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia, and banged his fists on the ground to set off an earthquake that rocked the Eastern Seaboard.
Everyone who could have handled him was either offworld at the time or tending to crises elsewhere on the planet, so Mr. Clown had streaked off to deal with Moloch on his own.
Thea and the other students watched on CNN as a swath of black lightning split the sky and hit Moloch head-on.
“He’s using a lot of juice,” Sakyo said.
“It’s broad daylight,” Thea said. “He’s got to end it fast.”
“Oh,” Sakyo said softly. The fight had moved several yards away, but the camera crew had followed. When they got him inside the frame, Clown looked the worse for wear. He drew back his fist and rammed it with a crack into Moloch’s chest, but his movements looked all wrong. He seemed drunk, almost, swaying on his feet.
Now Thea saw why: Moving almost too quickly to track, Moloch rushed Clown, grabbed him, and held him close, sucking the darkness right out of him. As they watched, Clown powered down until he was only John, a thin, freakishly tall man with long black hair and nut-brown skin.
John’s knees buckled as Moloch let him go. He spilled to the ground, and Moloch whirled to face the camera.
People of Earth, he said—His voice was a fuzzed-out electronic growl—This day belongs to Moloch. Bring me your children; I hunger for their flesh!
◊
Thea unlocked her apartment’s front door and threw it closed as she ran for the bedroom with her satchel. She heard the television on and knew that Barong Ket had spent the morning watching cartoons.
She knelt on the floor to pull a metal steamer trunk from underneath the bed and sighed softly as the smell of polished candlenut breathed its way into the room. She pulled the Mask from her satchel and held it for a moment, examining its contours as she would have a reflection of her own face.
Stay home.
“What?” Thea said. “Why?”
She put the Mask away and turned to see Barong Ket crouching on the hardwood floor outside the bedroom. In his left hand, he gripped an apple the way a man would grip a bowling ball. He scratched his beard and grunted, then turned to lope away, his tail bobbing behind him.
Thea rolled to her feet and followed the monkey into the living room. “Since when do you order me around? Why should I stay home?”
Barong Ket looked over his shoulder at her, then turned away again, scratching his beard.
“Speak,” Thea commanded.
Barong Ket shivered, helpless to obey. Bad things today, he chittered. Bad! Stay home!
“Oh, I know what this is,” Thea said. “You’ve been acting like this ever since I started seeing Simon.”
Now Ket turned. Thea have duty, he said, speaking with exaggerated calm.
“And I fulfill it!” Thea argued. “I protect the city. I defend its people from their natural predators. Why can’t I have someone?”
Thea can…. Just not him.
“Gods! Look, I know you like Sakyo. I like him, too! But he’s all banged-up and crazy inside—!”
Like Thea!
“But he’s too much like me. I need someone normal to remind me what I’m fighting for.” She paused for a beat. Then, “But you know what? I’m not going to argue this with you. In fact, I hereby forbid you to speak on this subject.”
First Thea say, “speak,” then Thea say “no speak”. What Thea want, really?
◊
Thea bit her palm and brooded all through the bus ride to Wallingford. She shouldn’t have treated Ket so harshly, but her relationship with Sakyo was a sore spot. Ever since Sakyo arrived at the Academy, everyone assumed some special connection between him and Thea. At first, Thea thought it was because they were both Asian, but over time she’d come to believe it was more than that.
In fact, the first thing Clown had asked her when Thea told him she was leaving the Academy for good was whether she intended to take Sakyo with her.
Certain they’d be grounded for life, Thea and the other students had suited up and rushed in to save Clown from Moloch. Jawal—Heat Boy—had acted as field leader, flying recon and drawing the fire from Moloch’s belly to feed his own flame. Monkey had slipped in to spirit John to safety, and the other kids launched a coordinated attack, pinning Moloch in place with zero point energy, dropping cars on him from a mile up, and frying him with thunderbolts. By the time they were finished, his armor had fused together, and the light inside it had died away.
Thea remembered looking on from where she rode shotgun in Brass Monkey’s mind as Monkey cradled John’s broken body in her arms. “Give me a sitrep,” John said. “I need a sitrep. Casualties. What are the numbers?”
“Numbers fine,” Monkey said. “John okay. Everybody okay.”
“Ruh—Really?”
◊
Simon buzzed Thea in and she jogged up the stairs to his apartment. It was a clean little studio chock full of books and model airplanes. The only bit of mess was the unmade bed.
The bathroom door was open and Simon stood shirtless before the mirror, brushing his teeth. Thea sat on the bed and watched his shoulders. He turned to say hello, but his mouth was full, so he had to turn away again and spit first. “I should have just driven over to get you.”
“I wanted to come here,” Thea said. “I’ve only been twice.”
“Well, sure,” he said. “I just thought—I mean—I don’t want you to think I’m trying to get you into bed.”
“You’re not trying to get me into bed?”
Simon opened his mouth and closed it again with a snap. His complexion almost hid his blush.
“Are we really going to the park?” Thea said.
Simon just watched her.
“…Because we don’t have to if you don’t want to. We could just…you know…stay here.”
◊
Thea prayed for three days straight after the Moloch Incident. By the time she emerged from her bedroom suite, she felt she had an answer, but uncertainty burned in the pit of her belly.
The Incident had taken place on a Wednesday, and by that Friday, John’s god had healed him completely. Still, Dr. Claytor had ordered a weekend of bed rest, so Thea went up to see John in his rooms.
John’s bedroom smelled of old stone. Though it was fifty stories above the ground, his suite seemed somehow subterranean. John had blacked the bedroom windows to keep out the sun and now he lay shirtless, wearing a pair of his girlfriend’s bug-eye sunglasses. Something about the way his eyes shone through the tint made Thea a little nervous.
She sat on the edge of the bed, and, without speaking, John reached for her hand, gave it a squeeze. He held it after that, and his touch was cool and dry.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Thea said. “I saw Monkey holding you, and your heartbeat didn’t sound good.”
“You steadied me, I think,” he said, almost whispering. “Without you, I might have died.”
They sat in silence for a space.
“So what now?” Thea asked. “What about the Program?”
He made a sound almost like a laugh and coughed hard. “All of you graduated. Passed with flying colors,” he said. “I get choked-up just thinking about it. You—so many could have died.”
“Clown. John. You’ve been good to me. To all of us.”
“Aw. Can this—? Can this wait?”
“No,” Thea said. “Do you know where I’ve been?”
He didn’t seem to know how to answer.
“You know what it’s like to have a Calling,” Thea said.
“Don’t be hasty.”
Thea looked at him over her shoulder until he looked away.
“Will you take Sakyo with you?”
“He wouldn’t go if I tried.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” John said.
“Don’t—don’t distract me with your Clown bullshit, okay? That’s not fair.” She paused, gathering breath. “Okay. All right. Um. I’m sorry, but—but there’s one other thing. John…” Thea turned her body to look at him fully. “I have to be strong in this. I have to—I don’t—Don’t come to me out there.”
“Thea.”
“I mean it. The others are welcome, but not you.”
Without warning, John began to sob.
Seeing him weep this way filled her with a mixture of revulsion and guilt. She stared at him for a beat, stunned, and he made no effort to hide his tears. Finally, Thea opened her arms and he crawled to her.
◊
Darkness had crept into the apartment. Situated as it was, it got little light on even the brightest days; night came to it a full half hour before it flooded the rest of the city.
After screwing like beasts the first time, then making slow quiet love the second, Thea and Simon lay in bed holding hands, staring at the ceiling. From time to time, Thea would close her eyes and watch colored whorls dance on the inside of their lids as she listened to Simon’s breath.
“I like the way you smell in the dark,” he said.
“I smell like fucking.”
“Not that,” he said, sounding embarrassed. “I mean the you-smell. The part that’s just you, underneath perfume, even. You smell like good incense and like metal.”
“I do not,” Thea said, touched in spite of herself.
“I don’t need to know why you leave the way you do or why you stand me up sometimes. Not as long as you don’t lie to me.”
“…Okay.”
“Sometimes I think I’m two men.”
“Hush,” Thea said. “You’re falling asleep.”
“Twins in one body—one of stone and one of smoke.”
“Which are you, then?” Thea said.
“…Smoke, I think.”
Without a word, Thea straddled him again and felt him grow in her hand. She fit him inside her and rode.
◊
Sakyo Kemura—Mr. Dark Sky—wasn’t like Simon at all. He was Japanese, with ice-blue eyes, heavy, straight hair, and a swagger that would have looked foolish if it weren’t so thoroughly earned. He didn’t talk a lot, but when he did, what he said was worth hearing. He smoked too much, Thea supposed, and he had a terrible temper that he’d learned, over the years, to aim, like a fire-hose, at those who deserved it most. He lived for situations like the Moloch Incident—always ready to ram a lightning bolt straight up someone’s ass.
Like all the other Academy students—except for Thea—Sakyo had stayed on at Shuster Academy after finishing the Program. They christened themselves the Next and became a “paranormal incident response team” looking down their noses at quaint notions like crime fighting and secret identities. They rejected old-fashioned body suits in favor of jeans, sneakers, and pictogram T-shirts.
All of them helped Thea move in to her Seattle apartment, but Sakyo was the only one who came to visit after the house warming. Every month or so, he announced his presence in Seattle with a clattering thunderstorm. He and Thea would go for drinks or dinner, or veg out on her sofa watching music videos or awful movies. He never had much to say about the team.
But what was there to say? Thea could pick up a newspaper any week for the latest story. One week, they were in Romania, fighting back an army of invading monsters from the fabled realm of Alkonost, and the next, they were on the Plutonian star base, offering aid to alien refugees while Thea ate ramen noodles for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, then fought tooth and nail to keep powered freaks from carving up her city.
The Next seemed beloved the world over, but Seattle was ambivalent at best when it came to Brass Monkey. The headlines said it all: NEXT KIDS RECOVER STOLEN MOON. NEXT BEAT BACK ANCIENT THREAT IN OUTBACK. NEXT BEAT BACK DEEP ONES IN PACIFIC OCEAN. And for Monkey: BRASS MONKEY SAVES SEATTLE? BRASS MONKEY BULLIES FREMONT TROLL.
Thea envied the Next. She envied their press, their money, their alien technology, but Sakyo’s monthly visits somehow made it bearable.
…Until recently.
It was stupid—so, so stupid!—but after the Massacre, Thea had needed someone to deliver her from herself. Until then, she’d considered Brass Monkey and Althea Dayo separate entities, but the Massacre had shown that to be a lie. Thea’s body had become a prison from which she could not escape, and only Sakyo seemed able to unlock it. He began coming around more often—every couple of weeks instead of every month—but he never called or warned Thea when he failed to show, and on those nights, Thea took to the streets as Brass Monkey, patrolling in a snit. God help any criminal foolish enough to cross her path.
Now, though, it had been three weeks since she’d seen Sakyo, and despite the pleasure she took from Simon’s company, Thea had begun to ache.
◊
Thea started awake and lay still, trying to remember where she was. A profound languor overshadowed her, and she felt pressed into the mattress by an unseen hand. Panic stole along the edges of her mind as she realized she’d left the Mask in its case at home. But she was home. Wasn’t she? All she had to do was roll out of bed and reach down to grab it.
She remembered coming to Simon’s apartment and what had happened there. Get a hold of yourself, she thought in Monkey’s voice. She had spent four years training with John until she was dangerous even without Brass Monkey’s super strength and invulnerability. She could fight if she needed to—but she didn’t need to. She was safe here.
Thea’s elbow bumped Simon’s arm as she sat up, trying to straighten out her thoughts. Simon stood naked before the window across the room, craning his neck to watch a bruised sliver of night sky.
Thea stopped short as she realized that Simon was still fast asleep beside her.
“Don’t,” both Simons said sleepily.
“Don’t what?” Thea asked.
“Don’t…Don’t come near. You…I’m not afraid.”
“Good,” Thea said, and felt Monkey’s voice mingling with her own. “We mean you no harm.”
“Dark sky. Dark Sky. Storm coming.”
Simon-at-the-window whirled on Thea to stare at her with bloodshot eyes. “Get…out!” His voice was low and full of blood. “He’s mine. Mine!”
◊
Thea was already in motion when she opened her eyes. Ket stood staring outside her bedroom door as Thea hit the carpet on her knees and reached for the chest that contained her Mask. She pulled it out, opened it, pressed the Mask against her face. In the old days, the sensation was like thousands of hot needles pushing through her skin, but after so many years, it felt much more natural. Instead of a desertion of her proper body, the transformation felt like shrugging into a familiar suit of clothes. Thea was Thea, as always, but now she was Brass Monkey, too.
Monkey yanked the window up with her forehands and swung through it, back feet first. In a split second, the weightless sensation of falling gave way to that of running full-tilt, until she crossed Broadway and leaped onto the roof of Bulldog News. From there, she kept to the rooftops, moving with liquid speed.
◊
Monkey smelled blood and shit and burning hair. The lights were off in the apartment, and without thinking, she aimed her body through the window, exploding through the pane in a shower of glass.
Her skin drew tight over her bones as she took a look around. She tried to distance herself from what she saw, tried to think of this as a crime scene, but her body betrayed her. Brass Monkey fell heavily to her knees.
Blood. Blood everywhere.
◊
Thea first found the Mask in a crawl space at her uncle Arto’s house after he disappeared. The moment she saw it, she knew it was important. As she pulled it from its wrapping of butcher paper, the sounds of the house receded from her senses. This mask looked a lot like the ones her father made, but Thea couldn’t tell what it was made of. It smelled wooden, but it shone like brass. It hummed and vibrated, singing silently to her. Thea knew immediately that she would keep it and that she would tell no one of her discovery. The thought that the Mask was magic never crossed Thea’s mind, but looking at it caused a physical stirring inside her, much like the one she felt when she watched the boys at school wrestle each other.
After Rangda the Widow-Witch murdered her family, Thea retrieved the Mask and put it on for the first time. The pain and madness of the transformation blotted out her consciousness and left Brass Monkey incomplete, acting purely on instinct. For months, Monkey prowled the Seattle streets, keeping to the shadows as Thea’s consciousness slowly rebuilt itself.
At first, Thea had no idea that she could pull the Mask from her face and be a girl again. By the time she did, her whole life was gone, as if blown away by monsoon winds.
Sometimes, in her bleaker moments, Thea felt that her life was nothing but a series of tragedies. The happy summers spent dancing the Legong in Ubud, the years she’d spent living among friends at the Academy, were insignificant. All that mattered were the bloody crime scenes, the brutal battles. A warrior without a banner, Thea moved from darkness to darkness, treading an ocean of gore.
◊
The stench of Simon’s agony soured the air of the room. He had been torn apart, but not before the skin had been flayed from his body. Shreds of it lay scattered like confetti around the room. Had the process taken hours? Minutes? Seconds? The blood pattern and the way the gore had been distributed told Thea that he’d been conscious, and even on his feet, most of the time. A mess of bloody fingerprints covered the front door where Simon had tried to escape. The bedclothes had been yanked from the bloody mattress and thrown into the far corner of the bedroom.
You’ve got to stop.
Monkey ignored the thought.
Really! Stop!
Stop what?
Stop screaming!
She had to get out of here.
Rangda!
No!
Rangda kill Simon!
No. Rangda hadn’t done this. Monkey had killed her years ago. Besides, Simon’s remains were spread around the room. Rangda would have…Rangda would have devoured his body and his pain, used them to become him.
Listen to us, Thea thought. We’re—We’re coming apart! We can’t work a case like this! We—!
“We need help,” Monkey said aloud.
◊
Monkey didn’t remember leaving the apartment. One moment, she was standing there, surrounded by blood and offal. The next, she was Thea again, standing at a pay phone up the street. She closed her eyes, clenched her teeth, and realized she was crying. She picked up the receiver and hung it up again. Now that she was Thea again, her purse was with her, and inside was her cell phone. For a long time after she left the Academy, she’d carried a spare comm with her, knowing she’d never use it. Now she wondered what she’d done with the alien gadget. She flipped open her phone and dialed.
“Next,” said a voice Thea didn’t recognize. “How may I direct your call?”
It must be a reception AI.
“This is Althea Dayo. I need Sakyo. I need Dark Sky.”
“I’m sorry. Dark Sky is currently unavailable. Shall I connect you to our duty operative?”
“No! Don’t put me through to comm. I need—Give me John. Give me Clown. Please.”
“One moment, please.”
A soft click, and then a voice Thea hadn’t heard in years: “Clown.”
“John! John, it’s Thea. I—! Something happened! There’s been—! It was a murder!”
“I’ll be right there.”
“You don’t know—!” Thea began, then froze as a hand fell on her shoulder.
John drew her to himself and held her silently for a beat.
“It’s awful.” Thea said, speaking into John’s belly. “He—He’s all torn apart.”
“Who is?”
“You’re not reading my mind?”
He pushed her gently away to look her in the eye. “I’m only a man right now.”
It was true. John’s face was gaunt, but not supernaturally so. His brown skin bore a healthy sheen, and his glossy black hair had been tied back into a ponytail that fell down his back. Thea almost asked him how he’d gotten here so quickly if he was only a man, but she realized he must mean he was powered down for the time being.
Thea explained her relationship with Simon and told John what she’d discovered in his apartment.
“Was it him?”
“Was—? What?”
“Was it him? In the apartment. Are you sure?”
“I smelled him, but…but of course his apartment smells like him. I don’t know. It could be anyone.”
“I’ll go take a look.”
“I’ll—I’ll go with you,” Thea said. “John. Wait. I asked you not to come here.”
“Would you rather I left?”
“No! No, that’s not what I—!”
“Then let’s talk about that later.”
◊
The apartment was spotless. No blood, no waste, no sign of struggle. Had they come to the wrong place?
“I don’t—I don’t understand,” Thea said. “I know what I saw.” She turned to John. Helpless.
“I believe you,” John said darkly.
“Am I cracking up? Am I—?”
“No,” John said. “You’re in shock. There’s a body in the bathroom.”
Thea covered her mouth with her hands.
As she stood, trembling, John stepped into the bathroom and carried Simon’s body out into the studio. He lay the corpse on the bed and stood back to examine it in silence. “So,” he said.
Thea pulled herself together and looked at Simon, trying to see what John saw. At the edge of her hearing, she sensed a slight buzzing, much like the one emitted by the Mask secreted in her satchel.
“I feel it.”
“It’s unmistakable: Old magic. Very powerful. Where was he from?”
“Thailand. He’s Thai.”
“I don’t think we should involve ourselves. First he was torn apart. Now here he is, whole, but dead, his apartment clean as a whistle. Chances are, tomorrow morning, he’ll wake up, right as rain.” He paused, made a face. “More or less.”
“He—You think he’s one of us?”
“I’m a priest of the Night and its champion,” John said. “I’m no demigod. But this one…?”
“But he’s dead!”
“I’ve been dead. So have you.”
Thea surprised herself by bursting into tears.
John seemed unsure what to do. He’d taken her into his arms before, and Thea wished he would again.
“Thea.”
“It’s always something. Always.”
◊
When Thea first arrived at the Academy, John was being Called. His god was Osa, Queen of Night and Games, and John fought Her summons as hard as he could. He had manifested powers at the onset of puberty, but he was hardly religious, and he believed that his abilities could be explained through science. His struggle leeched the color from his skin until it looked like parchment, and when he thought no one was looking, a haunted, hunted look would appear in his eyes.
One morning, Thea found him in the greenhouse, kneeling before a bed of alien flowers, his face buried in his palms. She wavered for a moment, then went to him, resting a hand between his shoulder blades.
John was a telepath, and while he kept silent, the physical contact sent a bolt of emotional agony coursing up Thea’s arm. He didn’t seem to notice, and Thea didn’t pull her hand away. Instead she stood, trying to lend him what strength she could.
After a moment or two, the pure pain in him subsided a bit—or Thea adjusted to it—until she could sense his actual thoughts.
It’s not me. It’s not. You’re wrong. I’m not him. I’m not the Guy. Please—! Please just let me go!
In the stillness and among the scent of blooming plants, Thea heard something answer.
You are Ours. You are Our Clown and Our Angel of Night.
Thea had never heard her own god speak—not in words.
She didn’t think he’d noticed her, but without speaking, John turned and buried his face in Thea’s belly. He sobbed loudly, weeping like a little boy. “Why won’t she listen? Why won’t she listen to me?”
“She doesn’t understand,” Thea said. “She can’t. But…but it’s not so bad, really, belonging to a god. Some people spend their entire lives longing for what you and I wish we didn’t have.”
◊
The moment Clown and Thea appeared in Thea’s apartment, Ket squawked a greeting and leaped into Clown’s arms. He crawled round John’s back and perched on his shoulder, watching Thea.
“This is…This is so fucked. I think—I need a drink.”
John handed her a shot of whiskey.
Thea took it in one gulp as John set a bottle of Glenfiddich on the kitchen counter. Next, he handed Thea a lit cigarette.
“Wait. You can do that now? You can just materialize things?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t do that! Don’t!”
“I didn’t materialize it,” he said. “This is the bottle I keep in my cabinet at home. I reached in there and got it for you.”
“By magic.”
“By magic,” he said.
“I am so—I am sick to fucking death of magic and spirits!”
John and Ket watched as she poured herself another shot, and another.
“Listen,” John said. “I can go, if—”
“Don’t. Don’t leave me.”
“All right.”
“You just—Why did you stay away?”
He hung his head. “I understood why you warned me away. I was trying to respect your decision.”
“My decision. I’m just some girl.”
“…But you’re not.”
◊
One night during her second year, Thea snapped awake in the darkness. Jawal lay next to her, sleeping heavily.
Clown’s voice sounded at a slight remove from her own thoughts. Are you decent?
“What?”
Are you decent?
“No. What do you want?”
I need you to see this.
“Okay. Just—”
Now Thea found herself standing, fully clothed, in utter darkness. “Hey! I can’t see!”
“Sorry,” John said. “I forget sometimes.”
The lights came up, showing Thea a vast panel of black glass hung with weapons and trophies. Thea goggled at them for a full thirty seconds. Finally, “Where are we?”
“I’m not sure this place exists in any conventional sense,” John said. “It was my uncle’s.”
John’s uncle, Kid Armistice, had been, very possibly, the most powerful paranormal in history.
“Oh,” Thea said. “Oh. What did you want to show me?”
John reached into the pocket of his khakis and withdrew what looked like an orb of concentrated night. The ball grew as he held it, levitating above his hand, and now Thea saw the Mask that hung at its center. It was much like Thea’s own, but it was pop-eyed, and its nostrils flared. Its teeth stood out from shredded lips, and its black tongue lolled from its mouth. As Thea stared at it, she thought she heard ghostly children wailing in terror.
“Where did you get this?”
“Is it what I think it is?” John said.
“It is. Rangda. It’s her Mask.”
“I brought it here because I figured this was where it would do the least harm,” John said. “But it tried to escape, so I imprisoned it. It’s—It doesn’t like being trapped. Keeping it bound causes me pain, and I’m not sure how long I can hold it.”
“This—Where did you get it?”
“There was a Thing in the Philippines. A brothel full of monsters was enacting rites to destroy the veil between worlds. Doc Crisis wasn’t available, so I went instead. One of the creatures there had this hidden under the floorboards in her bedroom. Tell me how to destroy it.”
“Destroy it?”
“If it was created, it can be destroyed,” he said. “Otherwise, it will make its way into the world, and Rangda will be reborn.”
“Are you out of your mind? This mask wasn’t created, John. It just is. It’s a fact of the Universe and it’s turning.”
“It—She killed your family. She nearly killed you. You are under my protection, so in doing this, I—”
“Get over yourself!”
John was visibly taken aback.
“That came out wrong,” Thea said. “But it’s—Do you understand that by bringing this thing here and showing it to me, you’ve made me responsible for loosing it back into the world?”
“…I’m sorry.”
“You should be. Things work the way they work. You and I, we’re only people. To tamper with the Grand Design is worse than folly, it’s…it’s a kind of evil.”
“And you’re just going to release—You want to just let it escape?” he said.
“What I want is to grind it to dust and then grind the dust into nothing,” Thea said. “But that’s beyond me. It’s beyond you, too.”
“This is insane,” John said with a bitter shake of his head. He paused, and glowered at the orb. The Mask glared back, seething in bondage.
After a beat, the orb disappeared with a sigh, and the mask clattered to the floor.
Thea’s limbs felt cold, wooden with terror, and for a moment she just stood, rooted in place. “God damn it, John,” she said.
“It’s not too late.”
“It is,” she said. “It always was.”
Thea willed herself to approach the Mask and leaned down to face it. “Go,” she said. “Do your worst. But understand that when we meet again, I’ll kill you.”
The mask’s mouth seemed to twist a little, not with malice, but with sorrow. Even staring directly at it, Thea lost sight of it somehow. She blinked and found that it had gone.
Thea leaned on her knees, her belly boiling with unease. When she could, she straightened to look at John, who, at first, showed her no emotion. She could tell it was an effort for him, but he let his guard down and relaxed out of his Clown persona. “Forgive me,” he said.
Thea couldn’t look him in the eye “I’m going to need a few days.”
◊
“I’m not cut out for this,” Thea said.
She sat on the floor, her legs splayed out before her, the empty shot glass dangling from her hand. John had watched her kill half his bottle, stopping every so often to cry hard, like a little girl. Finally, he’d sat down beside her, taken the bottle, and reached up, without looking, to set it on the counter.
“You are. We both are. That’s the problem.”
“Oh yeah?” Thea said. “Then why don’t I know what my god wants? Why can’t I—? Why can’t He just talk to me the way yours talks to you?”
“You wouldn’t…It’s worse that way, believe me.”
“I should have let you try to break it,” Thea said. “I should have let you try to destroy Rangda for good. Maybe the world would have ended, and none of this would be happening.”
“I ended a world once,” John said casually. “A better one than this.”
Thea sat very still. Years ago, just after he took Thea in, some cataclysm had shaken all existence. Thea had never thought too closely on it because it seemed entirely beyond her, but she understood that John had been at the center of a cosmic struggle, and that whatever action he’d taken had saved everyone—herself included. He’d never spoken of it since.
“Do you know how I did it?”
“…No.”
“My uncle ascended to something resembling godhood. He killed me for standing in his way, and then he killed just about half of everyone everywhere. Then he started over: new Earth, new universe, new everything. But he didn’t leave me dead. Oh no, he let me into that other world. Gave me the life I’d always wanted. I grew up with my family. I went to school. I had a girlfriend who loved me dearly. It was wonderful. Fewer people. Less crime, and what crime there was was…It was of a different order, you know? Not so mean-spirited. In that world, my little cousin was never abducted, never tortured to death. She was a great kid, and I got to watch her grow. But after a while, my god got a hold of me. At first, I didn’t remember this life, this world, but She told me what had happened and what to do about it.”
“What did you do?”
“I fought Armistice as hard as I could, but he was just too much for me. There was no way I could beat him, unless…The whole thing, he’d done the whole thing to give his daughter the life she deserved. He only let me into that world because he knew Laurie would be happier with me around. So, I grabbed her out of the air—just like I summoned that bottle for you just now—and I held her head, like so…” he pantomimed the motion, “…and I killed her right before his eyes.”
“You…What?”
John shook his head. “That whole world, that whole existence, my uncle held it together by will alone. He was so powerful that he could do all that and kick my ass at the same time without hardly trying. But when he saw what I’d done, his concentration was ruined. His control slipped, and this world sort of…snapped right back into place. That’s how I did it. That’s how I saved reality…such as it is.”
“But Laurie’s alive. She’s—She’s okay. Better than okay.”
“She doesn’t remember. No one remembers but me.”
“Your god asked that of you?”
“She didn’t ask me. They never ask. She commanded me, clear as crystal. No room for argument.” Now he spoke haltingly and without looking at Thea. “So I’ve been, ah, living with that for, what is it now? Six years? Laurie, she was one of my best students. She’s saved my life four times now. Sometimes I look at her, and I just remember her standing there with her head all gone because it happened so fast that it took her body a moment or two to realize she was dead and fall down.
“I’m telling you this because—Well, I’ve gotta tell someone, and I’m too chickenshit to tell Laurie. I stayed away because I knew. I knew I would tell you if I saw you again, and that’s the—the last thing you need. I’m sorry. I’ve got to—I need forgiveness, or this burden on my heart will fucking kill me. Just—You know me. You know how I live, and now you know what I’ve done. Can you puh—please fuh—forgive me?”
Clown’s confession had shocked Thea stone sober. She wasn’t sure the wrong he’d done was hers to forgive. The events he’d related could hardly fit inside her head—in a sense, they couldn’t fit at all. She could only make sense of his story by reducing its details to abstractions. But one thing was not abstract—and that was the pain her friend, her mentor, was in.
Thea turned and took John into her own arms. He half-sat, half-lay against her, holding the back of her head as he pressed his face into the crook where her left shoulder met her neck. “Of course I forgive you,” she said. “Of course I do.”
He shook against her, weeping hard, making choked animal sounds.
“We’ve all done terrible things,” Thea whispered. “Our gods call upon us, and all we can do is answer. Think of all the lives you saved. Billions.”
Eventually, he pulled away, and laughter mingled with his tears. He rose and stretched, popping his spine. “Sorry about that. Sorry, I—You know, there aren’t a lot of paranormals like us. There aren’t a lot of Champions.”
“I know,” she said, looking up at him. “But you know I love you, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I love you, too. You were always my favorite.”
“Get out!”
He seemed surprised. “Wasn’t it obvious?”
“You adopted Heat Boy as your own legal heir!”
“I love Jawal. He’s my son. But you…you were like a big sister and a little sister at the same time. That doesn’t make any sense.” He paused, watching her for a moment. “Listen. For what it’s worth, I think that our problem is that you and I, we are cut out for this. For this and this only. And even if we weren’t? Our gods don’t care. They don’t understand our loneliness or our pain—and if they understood, they still wouldn’t care because they’re more than we are. Greater. We can’t imagine the stakes of the game they’re playing.”
“You…”
He was silent for a long time. “Anyway, that stuff I said before, what I told you; I take it back.”
A strange sensation fluttered against the surface of Thea’s mind—like fingers plucking lint from fabric.
“Take what back?”
“Don’t worry about it,” John said. “Listen, I have to go, but one thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t go near that boy again. He’s bad news. He’s like us. He’ll probably skip town as soon as he wakes up, and when he does, don’t look for him. Clear?”
“Cluh—Clear. What were we talking about?”
“When?”
“…Before.”
“I was rambling,” John said. “You want me to tuck you into bed before I leave?”
“No. No, I’m okay.”
“I’ll leave the bottle,” John said.
He didn’t fade. He didn’t even disappear.
“…And then he was not,” Thea thought.
She thought of Simon, beautiful Simon, and of the shambles her life had become.
◊
Hours later, Thea still sat in her favorite chair, fuzzy-headed and silent, staring away at nothing. Barong Ket loped into the living room and climbed onto the sofa where he grabbed the television remote. He turned the TV on, then off again. He hopped down from the sofa and crossed to Thea.
Clown is wrong.
It was unusual for him to speak this way, Thea noticed dimly. Usually, he’d say, “Clown wrong.” He must be making an extra effort to be understood.
“Wrong about what?”
What the gods want of you—all of you—is both simpler and infinitely more complex than he imagines. They want you to be better than you are. That is why they demand more of you than you can give. In striving, you achieve. From time to time, every believer cries out under the yoke of faith, but faith gives more than it takes.
“But why does it have to be so—? Why do I have to feel this way?”
Ket sighed and scratched his beard. Because you are a weapon, and your god is forging you like steel.
Thea fell silent. She thought back to the morning after she was discharged from the hospital, when the social worker, Ms. Hand, took her home to gather her things. She’d asked to be alone in her bedroom for a moment, and Ms. Hand had agreed. As soon as the woman was gone, Thea knelt and pulled the Mask from its hiding place.
The numbness in her face told her she was crying. She couldn’t even feel the tears. “Give it to me,” she sobbed. “I know Arto was your Champion. Let me take his place.”
In the silence that followed, Thea listened as hard as she could. She heard no voice, but something touched the core of her. A vast, overwhelming intelligence turned its attention toward her—or no—she had the sense that she’d always held its attention, but now it focused on her directly. She must seem so weak in its eyes, so unworthy.
“Anything,” she said. “I’ll do anything. If I’m too weak, then make me strong. Make me what you need.”
No definite answer came. No words or thoughts, but now she had an impression that her plea had been heard and that the terms she’d laid out were agreeable. The Presence she felt receded to the background, and a sense of peace flooded through her. The sensation was so powerful that she swooned as she knelt, and the next thing she knew, she was in Ms. Hand’s car, headed for the group home.
◊
“That’s what this is?” Thea said aloud. She spoke not to herself or to Barong Ket, but to the Presence, which, while it seemed distant, was not altogether absent. “All this is to make me stronger?”
Ket wavered for a moment, then turned and left the room.
Thea rose from her chair and knelt before it. Her body ached. She wondered how long she’d been coasting along the edge of her endurance. “O great god who leaps across continents,” she said. “God of my father and his father before him. Ever your servant, I entreat you: hear my humble prayer…”