Jake Johnson
The sun hung low in the blustering of the Gobi, outlining an endlessly rearranging sine curve of dunes. The protective clothing issued to Fukayna was a joke, and the mask was as stifling as any other. This could’ve been done in a corn field somewhere, but there was secrecy here. It was well-documented that the heroic Bibliosoph liked to be stored away from sunlight, in cool dry places—therefore no one would suspect her.
In the helicopter, trying to enjoy the pinhole breeze of the AC, she ruminated that she should complain less. The pilot, Iachimo, was armed with something taller than he was and almost as wide, a sleek and glossy parody of a woman which spat nineteen flavors of death with the precision it would take to hit the moon. Though they were both Russian, he was born on native soil, and it showed in the pallor of his skin.
It was a warlord today, located somewhere on the outskirts of Côte D’ivoire, who had the ability to birth children early. That is, or so she was told, he would rub his hand on a pregnant woman’s stomach and—whoosh!—she’d go through painless labor in an hour’s time. Her kid would grow up fast, too, ten times faster than normal. He’d been at it for eight years or so, building up a cult, then an army, then a micro-nation. They’d begun declaring war on neighboring areas in a quest for territory, and since there was nothing more pressing on her agenda Fukayna had to help out with him.
She wasn’t allowed to know his name, or see his face. She used to wonder if the government hid those details from her because they were important. She never knew her father, and it was entirely possible that he was one of the individuals she worked her magic on. After a few months she stopped believing her emotional state mattered to her superiors. She was being shielded from the knowledge because it would make her a liability to anyone else with the right talents. There were plenty of people who could see through her, or worse, given contact.
When Fukayna danced her libraries, people took notice.
In this case the question of whether she was the warlord’s daughter was a purely academic one, given that she was in her early twenties. The desert was more immediate than that, and frankly less pleasant, but it was approaching steadily to make port with her. She waited until they were hovering over the ground to put on the mask. It was a nondescript slip of black, like a shard of something deep in the earth, and its visor was tinted heavily enough that it couldn’t be told apart.
When the shard-faced, jumpsuited woman ambled out of the aircraft, she found sand in all directions, whipped about here and there by occasional wind. She knew that, under a microscope, all of it would look beautiful. One of her earliest targets had been a science teacher (not on purpose, of course), and it was through him that she learned sand was nothing but tiny, almost-invisible gemstones. She pictured herself traipsing a landscape made of uncut sapphires, and felt a little better.
Iachimo wasn’t always the one flying her, but they’d been out together more than the pilots had with her. He idled in the heli, watching her with the Gun lying on her seat, its butt filling in the depression she’d left. Fukayna didn’t have to get too far from them to dance, but she didn’t want such a ludicrous firearm in her periphery while she concentrated.
Without the warlord’s name, they had a lot of informational ground to cover. To dance a library, Fukayna needed to pinpoint one person in the world out of all the others. The warlord had only become a viable target because he had become a member of a nation with under 5000 residents. A [brown-eyed] [male] [warlord] living in [The Court of the Holy Children] with [one arm] narrowed it more than enough.
The motions of her feet started slowly, and she watched them to make sure she didn’t misstep. A crossing of the knees here, a rapid twirl that made the landscape a nauseating brushstroke, a raising of the shoulders and gyration of the wrists . . . This went on for at least five minutes, and all the while the air grew thick. She was sweating even as the sun began to vanish entirely, and soon a door had risen up out of the ground to meet her. It was drawn upward in all its unbreakable steel splendor, coaxed like a deer to eat from the palm of her hand. It opened to her touch, and she vaulted inside.
Every library was a mass of chambers, each stacked to a thirty-foot ceiling with bookshelves. Each was an interface, a representation of the heart and soul of its subject. Every day, thought, feeling, written word, piece of knowledge, sexual fantasy, embarrassing secret and half-formed subconscious belief was listed here, each in its own little volume. She could only read them and take volumes out, and neither would have any effect on the person involved, although it was sometimes useful to pretend that she could rewrite passages if she so desired.
Bibliosoph was, to the sort of arrogant paranoids who believed their secrets more dangerous than the next person’s, the most abjectly terrifying person in the world. To others, she was a particularly literal object lesson in securing your identity from theft by others. To anyone big in the powered circuit, she was small potatoes. The real action in Russia came from the assassin squadrons and the unnatural codebreakers, and even that was sparse compared to nations like Iceland and Japan.
By God, though, she could find blackmailing material. She knew the locations of each book as clearly as if she’d set them all in place herself, and she strolled through the airy rooms for a few minutes until she could seize a simple volume on the weaknesses of his ability. Then his known fears, his unknown fears, his hidden weaknesses. Each volume was thick with experience, weighing half a lifetime in her hand. She learned not to read these sorts of books, long ago.
It didn’t take more than a half hour to gather all the books she needed and walk the way back out. When she left, the door would disappear into the ground and never be seen again—assuming they didn’t send her out for a second try. When she emerged into the increasing cool of the night, the books suddenly felt much heavier, as if all the history and psychology had only now decided to become paper. She threw the stack of hardbacks into the back of the heli, and climbed into her seat.
The takeoff was smooth, the weight of the books negligible to the rotor. Fukayna reached up and removed the mask as they lifted from the sand, letting the air move over her. There was something symmetrical to all of it, although they’d be switching up their path on the way back to the Russian embassy in Ulaanbaatar. They were home by morning.
* * *
The Zapatista didn’t have much experience in making high-security prison cells, and it showed. They did, however, have a very talented individual named Lazo, who could pull things with incredible force. He’d dropped Russian satellites out of orbit, and then her aircraft when she’d come investigating. A young man named Lagrange had been wounded in the crash and separated from her, kept somewhere else despite her protestations.
The building had once been a barn, but it was reinforced with metal, and a thick futon was added amongst the fresh-cleaned hay. Bibliosoph was allowed to do whatever she liked in it, but her ankles were chained close together for the sake of security. A little bookshelf had been added for her benefit, although all of the books were in Spanish and so closed to her.
That would happen in her libraries, too, sometimes. No books were closed to her there, but every so often she would find a deep room, far away from the entrance, where the writing was in symbols that weren’t letters or numbers or pictograms, at least not that she could tell. They creeped her out, most of all because she could almost tell what they meant instinctively, but never quite managed it. As a result, every time she read something in a language she didn’t know (e.g. most of them), she felt a sense of dread tumble over her.
“You are here to prove a point,” the jailor had told her. She never learned his name. He was tanned but unmistakably English, with practiced eloquence clogging his sentences. “You represent a monolithic world power in a time where military reputation is the sole seat of international conflict. You must understand that an anarchic state, largely ignored on the world stage, has a lot to gain by capturing someone of your status. I expect you’ll be out of here in a week’s time and back to drinking vodka with the best of them.”
At the time, she’d sighed and laid back on the futon.
“I take it you’re mute,” he continued. “I’m solely a neutral party in all of this, but I’ll see if someone can bring you a notepad.”
That had been the last time she’d seen him. The notepad had arrived a while later, and from then on her only contact with the outside world was the check at a high window, once in a while, that she hadn’t manifested a library. It would’ve been impenetrable to anyone but her if she closed the door (in her experience, only she could move it), but it wouldn’t have done her any good tactically.
Although, when she really thought about it . . .
It was around this time, during this thought (and she’d become adept at measuring life in thoughts), that she heard arrhythmic buckshot in the distance, moving ever-closer. She stood and shuffled away from a nearby wall, expecting it to break apart and reveal her rescuer. Instead, it was the window. It shattered in a series of thwacks, and a teenager jumped in.
“Hey, lady! It’s time to get out of here!” said the boy. His name was Rugburn, young and blonde with lots of screaming fangirls and a lot of news coverage. Fukayna’d spent a little bit of time researching him. He disliked his mother, and was terrified of being rejected by girls.
Hello. She signed, and within ten seconds the ankle chains were unlocked.
“Let me get a lookout.” he said, and climbed like a spider-monkey to the window. When a bullet whooshed back at him, he dropped back down and looked thoughtful. She was perfectly aware that he didn’t know how good at it he was, although it was possibly the only thing keeping him alive.
Why did they send an American to Mexico to rescue a Russian from Egypt? She asked.
He shrugged. “Can’t understand a word, babe.”
The bullets had stopped flying, likely because she was more valuable alive than dead, but there were footsteps trudging everywhere. She never knew she was so well-guarded.
He snapped his fingers. “Got it!” Then, he jumped on the futon.
When Fukayna didn’t follow suit, he patted the cushion and nodded at her. Once they were both sitting, he crossed his legs and waited for her to monkey him. They started moving.
In a way that he’d practiced to seem effortless, he could take the friction away from himself, things he was touching, and things very close to him, and nudge them just a little in the right direction. In this case, it was the ground, and the entire barn started speeding across the countryside like it had the soul of a jaguar. The futon was crushed against the far wall, and Rugburn folded his arms and watched it happen.
“Yee-haw!” he said, without a shadow of irony.
They rode the barn until it fractured and split apart, and then they were near a jungle. An American pickup team grabbed the both of them, and they sat in relative silence for the hours to neutral ground.
The Zapatista Republic dissolved, under mysterious circumstances, four years later.
* * *
Fukayna’s test was interrupted when Alice walked over and collapsed onto her. With an attractive blonde girl draped over her shoulders like a cuddly boa, it took some effort to close the door and let it drop back through the carpet again. It screeched when it slid downwards, which was awful but necessary. She was in her late twenties now, and she’d grown obscure enough that she could indulge in her abilities sparingly.
She was living in a very artsy apartment, with the thick soundproofing mats decorated over with local paintings and little bits of jewelry. It was a little claustrophobic by some standards, but location didn’t mean as much to Fukayna as it used to. On some nights, when she and Alice fought an awful lot, she took some bedding, danced up a library, and slept in the mind of Neil deGrasse Tyson, or someone else brimming with bright knowledge.
But there weren’t any fights happening today, and Alice’s weight was something reassuring, like her voice, and the way her hair framed her head. Alice was patient, with an infectious love for life and an endless enthusiasm. She could’ve been a therapist very easily, though evidently she preferred life as a meteorologist.
“Quit working so hard and come to lunch,” she said, her words muffled by the shoulder into which she was speaking.
In a minute. Fukayna signed. I remembered something I wanted to try a couple years ago.
“Can’t it wait a bit? We can go somewhere you like this time . . .”
It won’t take much longer.
“You always say that!” Alice said, and soon the great and tricky Bibliosoph had been dragged away by her girlfriend to a meal.
After breadsticks, the sights, a local theatre troupe, a sunset and a very long night, Fukayna finally returned to her work. One-two, backstep, twist . . . And then the door flew back up to her, and she threw it open to look inside.
Then, she smiled.
* * *
With her early thirties came war, and a drop of true flashbulb fame. Her name changed from ‘Bibliosoph’ to ‘Atalburu’ almost overnight, when she showed her superiors what she could really do, and she gained a small cult following. Nobody ever came up to her on the street when she was in costume, but every so often her superiors would forward her a little piece of fan mail.
Chicago had become a hot button in the world after a handful of violent riots. Things had been getting worse and worse for the city, and now it was time for Russia to throw its two cents into the hat. When preparations had been made, she was flown over as fast as possible, checked through customs to instill a sense of safety in whoever was watching, and flown straight to the Windy Remains.
“Nice to meet you,” said a tall blonde woman, holding a gun to Fukayna’s head. Her voice was lithe, her face scarred. She hung in the air, standing, perfectly still, just off the side of the roof. The bitch didn’t even wobble.
The gun was something compact, more like a dollar-store toy than a real revolver. It was a few inches from her head, to be entirely accurate, but that was an academic point.
“Reckon I should share some of my hospitality with you?” the woman asked, and suddenly Atalburu was floating away, being held up by something else, and they were moving very quickly to the grubby, waiting arms of a group on the ground.
The whole gang, she learned very quickly, was called the Six Kings Nation. It was their chant as they pushed her around and, when she snapped and broke one of their lips, they started beating her as a group. She regained consciousness in a parking garage somewhere, unmasked and chained to a wall. She was bruising very badly, and couldn’t tell if it was night or day.
She could tell from a glance that the door wasn’t going to open from the inside, and so decided that this place was as good as any, and started dancing. She’d been getting steadily faster in years past, as time constraints grew shorter and shorter. It was more of a jig, now, and she was glad to be in private. The door rose up at roughly the same time the garage door was opened, letting in the nighttime.
On the other side was the bitch, who flopped on one side and didn’t touch the ground, gloatingly aloft. She paused to look at the door, and that was all the time Atalburu needed to throw it open.
Each library remained unchanged when it was sent away and called up again. Anything in it stayed inside for all time until it was brought back. She’d emptied flooded streets with doors and then opened them again in dried-up lakes. She’d smuggled things into small countries under various disguises, things that no one could get in on their own. Weaponry, medicine, propaganda, people . . .
The bitch stared as soldiers came piling out of the door like it was a clown car. Ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty. Every one was heavily armed and armored. When they were all assembled and pointing guns, her eyes were panicked. She zoomed away into the air, and they rushed out the door after her, filling the air with a volley of bullets.
There was a cracking explosion over the city, and a flash of light that reached straight to the garage as she was freed from the wall. She later learned that the woman was named Regina, and that she controlled hydrogen. She could split it from the other elements and prevent it from immediately igniting or destroying the metal around it. When a puncture wound came between her and her concentration, it detonated.
The Six Kings Nation wasn’t one of the larger players active in city limits, but it was a fair start.
* * *
When she was thirty-seven, Alice left her. They’d been married for eight years, and Fukayna had become too distant to live with. She was never home, and when she was she didn’t have the time to do anything. Deep down, she wanted Alice to leave; she knew that she could never really contain someone so lively and kind and beautiful.
Fukayna had killed people, and it had actually started haunting her. She thought about the way Regina exploded, the way that the action in her life came in such short bursts and seemed to end in death somewhere. She kept the apartment, which they’d never really moved out of. Alice took the paintings, decorations, and music with her. There were only soundproofed walls and thick couches, a padded environment for her contemplation.
The war . . . well, the war never really came to anything. It fizzled and guttered into a few desecrated cities and some scattered worldwide skirmishes. Some Eastern European nations changed hands a few times, and some treaties were made, but nothing else happened.
She began to wonder if, even in the world she lived in, her life was really so dramatic.
A sweltering Australian beach in the dead of night, bringing in bounty hunters and vehicles to capture one of the songline-protectors. The whole mission was completed in four days, most of which was spent waiting quietly and patiently while other people searched, and finally bringing up a door to hold the captured woman while they went back home.
France, the nuclear reactor Chivaux B, soon to explode with the countryside evacuated and a large group of people, powered and otherwise, working around the clock to fix it. Being flown in close to the last minute, dancing a library full of radiation equipment, getting everyone inside and shutting the door. Spending a couple days waiting inside, and realizing how maddening it was not to know what the outside world was like. Understanding all the faith that the people she’d carted around had exhibited, how helpless they’d really been.
Argentina, transporting a pop-star under fire by mercenaries. Nothing happening at all, nothing but interminable rides here and there and letting the man out in hotel rooms. Feeling the cold on her skin in the night air and trying to make it stick so all the other jobs won’t be so awful. Wondering why she chose to do this in the first place.
Ten minutes with a clairvoyant woman with dreadlocks, somewhere in the Caribbean she couldn’t be bothered to care about. Being told where her father was. Traveling there with a little of the excess money she hasn’t put toward food or rent, searching Rivercess, Liberia until she finds a cemetery. Learning his name was Hakim, and buying a bouquet of pepper flowers to put on the untouched dirt.
Oh, Alice.
* * *
The dusk of her forties, and time had shambled on. The tapestry of nations wove new patterns, and all that jazz. Atalburu fell back into total obscurity as the new generation started taking over. She spent years thinking about quitting, wondering whether she should go do something else with her time.
Eventually, they retired her. They weren’t even the same superiors, really; she didn’t know who the replacements were, but reasonably they must’ve all switched over at some point in the last thirty years. She wondered at what point she was working under a completely different set of people.
She threw off the apartment and bought housing in Greenland. Sometimes she received mail, or callers. The world wheeled around her all the while, even under her feet. Her legs started to become fragile, and her bones lost density. The dance couldn’t last forever.
Fukayna didn’t mind that as much as she thought she would.
K. H. Vaughan
I was at a waterfront bar deep in Helltown when I first saw him. The Raven was dark with no windows, the way a real bar should be, flat and low, filled with sailors and longshoremen. The owner lined up a hundred shots with beer chasers along the mahogany every afternoon when the day shift ended and the men went from zero to drunk in about fifteen minutes. That late though, The Raven was quiet and surly, half as full but twice as mean. Last call was ninety minutes past due when the lights went out and everyone froze because they knew something bad was about to happen. Then the lights came back on and we found out what kind of bad.
The Harlequin stood in the middle of the floor, smiling at no one in particular, and even though I’m one of the good guys it scared the shit out of me.
“Where’s the Russian?” he asked quietly.
There’s always a tough guy who’s drunk and stupid enough to take a shot at the guy in the mask, especially if you’re a skills-based hero. A hulking biker with full sleeves of skulls and neo-Nazi symbolism tried to bury a pool cue in the back of his skull. The Harlequin took it from him and broke it across the bridge of his nose in a single smooth movement, so fast I could barely see it. The drunk hit the floor moaning with blood pouring from his face and the hero laughed, low, flat, and dry. Heh. Eh-heh-heh. Heh.
The guy on the floor cursed and gurgled.
“That’s very funny,” the Harlequin said, deadpan, and you could almost hear everyone’s sphincter knot up. You have to be insane to want to be a hero in this city, and the Harlequin backs that up more than anyone. They say he walked into the business offices of the Corlisi syndicate in Midtown and threw the son, Bobby Corlisi, out of a fifteen story window because Bobbi skated on a statutory rape complaint. No one knows the real story, but that’s the point. No one wants to find out how far he’s willing to go up close and personal.
“The Russian,” he said again, except this time he wasn’t smiling. I looked around. Everyone trying real hard not to look at the guy bleeding on the floor or the splintered pool cue still in the clown’s hand. We all knew who he meant. A Russian sailor named Tretyak was doing rapes on shore leave, sending women to the hospital. I was here for the same reason, but I don’t have the stones or the reputation or the crazy to just walk into The Raven past closing time in costume and expect answers. He took one slow, steady step towards the bar and one of the sailors spoke, a high squeaking voice. I don’t know Italian but I could make out Arlecchino, per l'amore del dio, and something that sounded like don’t homicide. The bartender, who once plead a double homicide down to a five-year bid on manslaughter and kept a shotgun under the bar, stammered something about the Kapitan Kasheyev. The Harlequin nodded and I noticed that the green in his suit matched perfectly the green in his eyes. With that nod, a vigilante known as The Shroud separated from the shadows in the back corner and billowed across the floor, an indefinite mass of ragged black tendrils. He wrapped his cloak around the Harlequin and the two of them disappeared. Everyone started breathing again and the bar that always smelled like stale urine now smelled like fresh.
* * *
In the morning, the cops found the Russian zip-tied in the back of a police car parked in a secure lot behind the precinct. He confessed everything.
That’s how my night went. An established mask got the guy I was after. That, and I damn near got arrested by EXIT. EXtranormal Investigations and Tactics, which is the metropolitan paramilitary meta-human law enforcement division. Federally funded pilot program with a combination of forensic labs like you see on CSI, ex-special forces guys, and military hardware. They’ve got Stryker APCs, sniper teams with Barrett fifties, and Apache helicopters. With the right sequence of response they can get authorization to unload on a meta with 30 millimeter chain guns, Hellfire missiles, or whatever it takes. I saw an armored mech named Paragon machine-gun some thugs who had hijacked an armored car. They ran over an 8-year-old girl leaving the scene. Paragon lost his shit and opened up on them. EXIT waited until he’d emptied his forearm magazines into the crooks then put a HEAT round in his chest and blew him into itty bitty superhero pieces.
The black helicopters patrol with FLIR, broad-spectrum electromagnetic and chemical sensors, and advanced biometric recognition software that cross-references against the CCTV network at street level and the EXIT and federal databases. My suit’s got some stealth capacity but when the bird wheeled around and hovered for ten minutes overhead I thought they’d made me. The law was proportional force, so they couldn’t cap me without cause. Not legally, but no matter how righteous you were, we all sweated the helos.
I’m called Nocturnum. Between the comics and the real guys, all the good superhero names are taken. I’m new in the city and haven’t established a rep yet. Selene has some major players but anyone will tell you there’s more than enough evil around here for another hero. We’ve got all the corruption of New Orleans, the blight of Detroit, the population of Los Angeles, and a higher-than-average number of metas. I run with a loose group called the Alliance:
Fury and Vanguard: fliers and energy projectors, brother and sister. Twins.
Paramount: near invulnerable strongman.
Razor Jane: a martial artist who likes to cut people.
And me. I’m a skills-based guy with a little tech, and not enough money to support that kind of habit. We didn’t have a formal hierarchy, and tried to make decisions by consensus. We met in an abandoned warehouse, surrounded by rats and trash.
“Fishhook?” Fury said, incredulous. “No. No freakin’ way. That means going down into the sewer system where we can’t fly. There’s no room to maneuver. I don’t even think some of those drains are big enough for Paramount. I’m not dying down there in some fin de siècle shitpipe.”
“Yeah, it’s nasty down there,” Vanguard said. “You get cut in that environment and who knows what kind of disease you’re gonna pick up. Nightmare. You can’t wash that stink out plus all the trace evidence you pick up. How do you explain that one to the law? Can you afford to burn extra uniforms?”
I wasn’t going to fight them too hard on this. Fishhook was six feet of meta-human psychopath who filed down his teeth and lurked beneath the streets picking off people for dinner. Lightning fast, strong, and a stone freak. Like Gollum on some kind of super soldier serum. I was using shareware GIS mapping software to narrow down his range. He looked like a classic localized hunter but the software was based on street traffic and I wasn’t sure how well it worked with the sewer system. They didn’t even have maps for everything down there. I wasn’t real keen on getting dragged away through the sludge in one of his barbed nets screaming and begging, where the last thing I would ever hear to be that monster hissing “tasty little fish” in my ear.
“Plus, he only takes skells, so citizens aren’t gonna throw us a parade for that gig,” Fury said, and I couldn’t argue with him on that either. The way this was going, I’d be out of cash before long, so we needed to draw some good press and patronage.
“How about Pure Breed Coalition?” Jane said. PBC was a group of white supremacist metas who knocked off banks so they could fight the New World Order and racial miscegenation or some shit.
“That’d be a good score but I hear they’ve moved up the coast toward Virginia,” said Paramount.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I saw where they pulled a job in Wilmington. How about Fem/Dom?” Fem/Dom was an all-female bondage-themed radical feminist team that beat the living hell out of sexual predators and destroyed targets that were symbolic of the Patriarchy. Jane just shook her head. I knew she would turn that one down as soon as I said it. It was quiet for a while.
“I think I’ve got a good lead on the Lords,” Paramount said finally. Paramount was a classic brick. Big, strong, tough. Liked to hit things. He wasn’t stupid but was smart enough to let people think he was. The Lords of the New Apocalypse were hardcore. Probably out of our league powers-wise. Paramount laid out how he had a guy that drove around in a tricked out van pulling data. Heat signatures, radiation emissions, the whole spectrum of sensors. If he got a hit, he’d do surveillance and when he thought he had enough he moved the data to supers.
The leader of the Lords, Appa Clypse, was a brick who could fly and project energy too. Just unfair. He was radiation-based and well-controlled but he was an emitter, which meant that sometimes he’d leak energy. Paramount said his guy picked up a small anomaly, put in some cameras and caught a crazy IR signature which could have been Holocaust. Chemical sniffers picked up a trace of thidiglycol, which almost had to be the third member, Chemos. Three out of four blips on the radar all in the same place.
“Why haven’t the cops picked up on this?” Fury said.
“It’s mostly luck that he got the hit, and he said something about a radiation source that you would probably ignore. I’m guessing something industrial that would make a Geiger counter chirp but you wouldn’t think much about it. EXIT’s spread a little thin. Most of their active surveillance is from the helos and they’ve got to reserve those for rapid response. This guy’s a freelancer. Surveillance is all he does.”
“Great,” I said. “Where are they hiding?”
“Here’s the thing: he gets five large for the lead. Cash in advance.”
“What? Fuck that!” Fury scowled.
“This is his business.”
“What if it doesn’t pan out?”
Paramount shrugged his massive shoulders.
“Great.”
It hurt but we each came up with a grand. I had to max out my credit cards but I figured he wasn’t dumb enough to try and rip off a bunch of metas.
* * *
We staked out the location for two days: an abandoned industrial plant west of Helltown in the Wasteland, blocks and blocks of empty buildings rotting from a defunded urban renewal project. Nothing there but street gangs and homeless. They don’t even power the street lights. Paramount said that whatever they used to make there wouldn’t leave thidiglycol, which is a metabolite of mustard gas found in the urine of exposure victims. I guess Chemos oozes the stuff. I was ready to go in right away but the twins have day jobs so we had to wait. Paramount used the time to get building plans from City Hall. Probably not current. It was a risk because EXIT might trace it back to him. They never stopped trying to crack your identity. I didn’t think Paramount would rat us out if he went down, but who knew? He could have a family to take care of. Something the Attorney General could use for leverage and force him to take a deal. There wasn’t much activity but on the second day a panel van pulled into the warehouse. It left a lot lighter than it went in, so something illegal and covert was happening in the building. If it wasn’t the Lords, maybe we’d get something else for the investment.
* * *
We went under cover of night, Razor Jane and I crept up to the building while the twins hung back. When we were in position, Paramount adjusted his chi or whatever it is he does in order to get buffed and ran flat out through the front door. When he crashed in, the twins flew after him and Jane and I entered from the other side.
I could hear yelling and destruction as soon as I got in the building. Jane sprinted down the center of a derelict production line. By the time I caught up, Paramount was heading in my direction, flying backwards through a wall in a blast of dust and cement fragments. I dodged him and dove off to the side behind the line to set up for whatever was coming after him. I was outmatched against any of the Lords. All I could do was try to tip the balance.
Appa Clypse came flying through the hole he made with Paramount. He was in street clothes, but I recognized the face and those long dark ringlets of hair. Clypse had the ego to want to go toe-to-toe with another brick, and I was counting on it as I tried to move up on him. Paramount got to his feet in time to catch him as he charged and attempted to maneuver him into a guillotine choke as Clypse drove him back, crushing machinery as they went. They took out a structural column and debris and asbestos exploded everywhere. I was useless. They were so fast and strong. True metas. Even if I could sneak in the perfect liver shot on Clypse I’d just break my foot. I followed after Jane to the front room in time to see the twins jet up through a new hole in the roof after a trail of fire that must be Holocaust.
Jane and Sheol were circling each other. She was wearing her grey Kevlar-reinforced jump suit with her raven hair pulled back, finger blades flashing in the harsh light of camping lanterns. Sheol was black and faceless, a half-formed homunculus approximating human shape like a manikin with no well-defined features but for his horrible Pez-dispenser mouth. I jumped in behind him, flipped the safety off of my electric stun gloves and delivered a one-two to his kidneys, the knuckle contacts discharging with a satisfying crackle. There was no give in his flesh and he took the hits without so much as a grunt, so I guess what they said about his nervous system being different must be true. His backhand reached me faster than the smell of ozone from the gloves, snapping my head back like I was hit with a steel pipe, but it was enough for Jane to connect with a vicious slash across the throat. It buckled him and she followed up with a knee to the chest. She’s got an armored strike plates on her knees and I could hear a wet snapping sound of broken ribs. While she gathered herself for the next strike I gave him a spinning roundhouse kick to the head. He dropped and we proceeded to kick the hell out of him until he stopped trying to protect himself. I caught my breath and trussed him up with cuffs, then glued his hands and feet together with a quick setting binary epoxy.
“You all right?” I said. Jane nodded. She was bleeding from the temple and it was pooling along the upper edge of her mask like rain in a clogged gutter. Razor Jane would have looked hot draped in a blue nylon tarp, but in that skin-tight suit, flushed with combat, she looked amazing. I made a move on her once after some beers, but she brushed me off. She didn’t seem offended though.
I could hear more crashing and explosions, both outside and back in the room where I’d left Paramount and Clypse fighting. The whole building shuddered under another impact. Jane and I grabbed Sheol by the arms and hauled him out to the street in front.
Above, Holocaust, Vanguard, and Fury were trading bolts of energy, Holocaust’s fire against the twins’ plasma bolts, the three twisting and wheeling in the dark sky like an old aerial dogfight. There was a massive crunch behind us and Appa Clypse and Paramount came through the side of the building, bringing down the wall and exposing the wreckage inside.
“We’ve got to help him somehow,” Jane said. “If Clypse flies him up in the air he’ll be in real troub—”
We could both smell it. Something pungent and nauseating. My eyes started to tear and I saw a bilious yellow cloud rise up behind Jane, topped by a floating head in a WWI-era helmet and gas mask. I looked into the foggy sepia glass covering the eyes and began to cough and feel faint. The rubberized fabric of the mask looked fused to his grey skin.
He solidified, a lean and twisted specter from a nearly-forgotten war. Chemos grabbed Jane’s wrist and stabbed her in the back with a trench knife. He dropped her and raised his hand toward me. I narrowly dodged the caustic chemical agent that sprayed from his desiccated fingertips. I retreated, trading her safety for mine, told myself I was trying to draw him away from her. I didn’t believe it though. Chemos stalked toward me, the vintage trench knife in one hand, Jane’s blood running down over the brass knuckle guard in the light generated by the energy projectors battling in the sky. He went vaporous again, and billowed toward me, almost on me when he abruptly froze in place and then boiled away in a toxic cloud, retreating into the ruin of the Wasteland.
I ran to Jane and fumbled for a pressure bandage. Then I heard the helicopter and the loudspeaker ordering Holocaust and the twins to power down and surrender. It warned them a second time, and Holocaust sent a ball of flame in their direction while trying to dodge plasma from Fury and Vanguard. The helicopter’s minigun opened up and Holocaust exploded in the sky like a bladder of napalm. Behind him, Vanguard’s glow sputtered and she dropped like a stone. Fury hovered, watching his sister fall, then he screamed and charged the EXIT chopper, blowing through the armored airframe in a gout of fire. Fury flew down to his sister’s side and gathered her in his arms. In the next moment he went supersonic, shattering the few windows left intact in the abandoned buildings in the area as he carried her away. Chunks of the helo crashed in a field of concrete rubble and burned, ammunition starting to cook off. I helped Jane get to her feet and we staggered off back to the truck. The last thing I heard was the rumble of a building collapsing somewhere in the distance.
Razor Jane was in bad shape from the knife wound and whatever Chemos had gotten on her arm was blistering her skin. We were both coughing and light-headed. I washed the chemicals off us with a high pressure spray nozzle in a self-serve car wash bay and helped her change out of her costume into street clothes. After an argument I dropped her off at a Helltown clinic with a bad reputation where you could buy them out of the mandatory police report for a knife wound. She couldn’t fight me too much. She’d lost too much blood. I bagged her clothes and gear for disposal.
* * *
Paramount turned up at the backup meeting place in two days as planned and we broke into an empty house off Carnival Street to talk. We figured the usual place was compromised; couldn’t take the chance. He had one arm in an over-the-counter sling from a drugstore. We drank scotch and he ate a fistful of Percocet. I didn’t know enough about his metabolism to know if that was a good idea or not.
“Fuck, I’ve got headaches,” he said. “I was throwing up all day yesterday. I remember waking up underneath a pile of rubble about a mile from where we started. I think he threw me through a building.”
A lot of these invulnerable muscle guys ended up with concussion syndromes. It doesn’t matter how hard you are on the outside, if you snap your brain around inside your skull enough it catches up. Short careers from traumatic brain injury. The Subjugator had early dementia by 40. They always showed that video of him rambling and pissing himself when the cops took him away. There’s another guy named Stalwart doing eight to ten in a meta-human ultramax because he tried to break up a kidnapping and hit The Invincible Bastion so hard he had a cerebral hemorrhage and died on the spot. Some types seem immune but I didn’t know why or how you knew which kind you were going to be.
“You think they can hang a felony murder charge on us?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Fury killed those EXIT cops and we were part of same initial act. If they can make a case that we kidnapped Sheol it’s possible. I don’t see how they’ve got the initial felony, but I’m not a lawyer.”
“This isn’t good though.”
“No. Those cops had families. They’ve got Sheol out at Blood Island but that twisted fuck isn’t likely to cooperate. You, me, and Jane might get out of this, but Fury?”
“I’m pretty much fucked, right?” Fury floated into the room. I handed him the scotch and he took a long pull.
“Sorry about Vanguard,” I said.
“Yeah,” Fury said. “You know, I took her up, gave her back to the sun. I can’t handle it out of the atmosphere for more than a few minutes, but I flew out there and went as hard as I could toward the sun and let her go. I hope she makes it.”
“You shouldn’t have trashed the chopper,” Paramount said. He was slurring his speech from the booze and Percocet.
“You think I don’t know that?” Fury yelled. “They killed my sister. I didn’t wake up with the plan to kill cops. I just wanted to go out there and do some goddamn good for a change.”
“Well, you sure fucked that up then, didn’t you?” Paramount stood up, and I edged toward the door.
“Hey, I didn’t start it. It was the fucking—” and he stopped short. “The fucking . . .”
“The fucking what?” Paramount said. “Finish the god-damned sentence.”
“It was the fucking . . . humans,” Fury said, and then he broke down and started sobbing. Paramount and I sat there and watched him cry. There wasn’t anything else to say about it. After a while he got up.
“You know, her name was Margaret, but I always called her Peg,” he said. “She hated that.”
He flew off.
We never saw him again.
* * *
We agreed to lay low and see how it shook out. Two weeks later I had seen the gun camera footage from the EXIT Apache a thousand times. Unless they were holding something back, they didn’t have video on Razor Jane, Paramount, or myself. Our names weren’t showing up in the paper and no one knocked on my door. I got hold of Jane through a hidden board she had set up on an onion router—the same kind of anonymous proxy system used by terrorists and child pornography rings. She was done. She left a lot of blood at the scene so they had her DNA. If she got picked up for anything else they’d match it. EXIT would never forget and she assumed that they’d kill us all for being involved, no matter what the law said. I wasn’t as convinced. I asked if she wanted to meet in real life, like normal people, and she said no.
* * *
That night I went back out on patrol. I was on a rooftop near the corner of Carnival and Albemarle looking across tightly packed tenements towards the Midtown skyscrapers when I saw him the second time. It was a good spot, sheltered beneath a rotting water tank, scanning with night vision, looking for ordinary crimes committed by ordinary perps. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to take on the big-time metas, but I could at least drive some of the scum off of the street. I thought I had been pretty stealthy, but I heard a voice behind me, quiet and thoughtful.
“Find what you’re looking for?”
It was the Harlequin, sitting on the roof of a bulkhead access. I switched the safety off on my stun gloves. His suit and gear were expensive. Way out of my league. He had deep pockets or connections.
“You here to arrest me?”
He cocked his head as if thinking about it and then smirked. “Why would I want to do that? You’re a superhero aren’t you?”
I didn’t know how sarcastic he was being and didn’t know how to answer that anyway.
“No? No matter. Why don’t you meet me on the roof of The Club 40 at around four. I think I know someone you’d like to meet.”
He did a handstand off of the side of the building and was gone.
* * *
He was dancing on the roof of The Club 40 later that night, surrounded by tatterdemalions of various ages, all of them young. The music pulsed and throbbed through the roof, some sort of house techno mix, and if anyone at street level knew they were there they gave no hint of it. I assumed he noticed me long before he reacted, but after about fifteen minutes he beckoned and walked away from the dance floor within the ductwork. At the edge of the roof, on the side facing the Wasteland to the south he stood with a woman. A girl more like it. I doubt she had reached voting age, but however many years she’d had so far had been hard ones.
“Your Majesty, I present to you Nocturnum,” he said. “Nocturnum, this is the Queen of the Angels.”
I looked at the kids on the roof. Angels. Street kids who lived on roof tops in the wastes. Abandoned and forgotten except by one another. A boy, maybe ten, was hiding behind her skirts.
“Tell this man what you saw,” she said.
“I saw a dark man, who came from the sky, and there was another with him. He was thin and cloaked in smoke and was all twisted like bed springs after a fire. The dark man flew away and the other turned into fog and drifted away. There,” he said and pointed across the urban blight.
“Thank you, poppet,” Harlequin said. “You were very brave.”
And then he bowed farewell to the Queen and walked to look out at the wastes in the direction the boy had pointed. In the faint light of false dawn, the blue in his suit matched perfectly the blue in his eyes.
“Do you want to find him?” he asked.
“Chemos? Yeah.”
He took my team from me. Took Jane. I knew it was our mistake to try and take them down, but he’s the one who stabbed her in the back.
“There’s no record of who he is,” he said. “But he was first seen in Europe around 1920.”
And it hit me, what he was trying to show me. It wasn’t a vintage costume. It was what he was wearing when some sort of chemical attack in the war triggered his metagene and transformed him. The blasted landscape of the Wasteland, ruined buildings, piles of rubble, pools of stagnant water. A no man’s land within the city. If Chemos thought he was still in some trench at the Somme or Ypres, where would he go to ground? Someplace that looked like home. I stared out at the landscape and eventually I realized that the Harlequin was gone again.
* * *
It took a few days but deep in the Wasteland, in an area where the bulldozers had made progress in clearing building before the funding was cut off, I found it. Between piles of brick and debris, sticking up from the ruin like the city’s last beacon of hope, the remains of L'église St. Colette. The shell of a French Catholic parish, remnants of stained glass in the windows, and even some strings of rusted barbed wire pulled across the approaches between the piles of rubble. It had to be the place. He must have stolen the wire from some fence or construction site and arranged it there, like he’d done a hundred years ago. I waited until dark and was rewarded by the faint glimmer of candlelight within. I kept hidden until after midnight, scanning the area carefully for movement, but there was none. I made my way cautiously from my lookout spot down to the church.
The roof was gone, and the pews within mostly smashed for firewood. The walls were covered with graffiti and soot. It looked like a bomb had gone off long ago. It was empty but for a few candles at the altar, and small votives at the shrine to St. Colette. I moved down the center cautiously, knowing he would be there somewhere in the flickering shadows. Shuffling, half deaf and blind in the sweaty confines of a stolen USMC MOPP suit, rotating slowly down the aisle like flotsam on a benighted tide. Shadows took shape in my imagination as my heart hammered at my chest.
He emerged out of a dark corner of the nave, coalesced into existence ahead of me, a frail and twisted shape set about by drifting fog. As I approached he stood and gazed at me like I was a distorted mirror image from another place and time and slowly straightened. Before the altar he stood at attention and saluted me, stiffly and painfully erect as if I were an officer inspecting the troops.
I raised my .45 and fired a hollow-point through his eye. He fell and sublimated away into horrid vapors, leaving only the bloody trench knife on the stone floor at my feet.
I don’t know what I would have done if it hadn’t worked.
I never had any backup plan.