“WE LOST. I mean, that’s the reality: we lost.” Shade Darby paced across the living room of the brownstone.
“We haven’t exactly surrendered,” Malik said mildly. “We just got outplayed in the first game of a series.”
“We lost,” Shade snapped. “We went to take this bug guy down, and we walked away leaving him alive. We lost. We left a man behind, and it all would have been a hell of a lot worse without Francis.”
“How are you?” Malik asked Francis.
“Shaky,” she admitted.
“So Markovic is still around, and Williams is . . .” Dekka sagged into an easy chair, gripped the arms, and hung her head. “I wasn’t prepared. I led you guys into it, and I was not prepared. I won’t let that happen again.”
“What could we have done differently?” Cruz asked.
“I would have . . .” Shade glanced at Dekka. “We should have thought about what we were facing. We had no useful weapons to use against it.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t recall you making that suggestion earlier, when it might have helped.” It was clear, even to Shade, that Dekka was containing her anger, but might not hold it in forever.
Shade stabbed a finger toward Dekka, who sat, immobile, as Shade moved restlessly. “Listen, Dekka, we need some basic ideas for how we’re doing this. Priorities. And priority number one is take down the bad guys.”
“By letting Armo take a bullet in the head?”
Armo raised a hand tentatively, like a schoolboy who thought he might have an answer but wasn’t sure. He was ignored and lowered his hand.
“Yes, if that’s the only way,” Shade said. She was admittedly intimidated by Dekka sometimes, but intimidation didn’t stick with Shade. In her mind, Dekka had screwed up. She’d held her fire and she’d let herself be slowed down by Markovic, and worst of all, her plan had only gone as far as getting them all in place. Some distant part of Shade whispered that she was being unjust, that she was taking her frustration out on Dekka. But that was only a whisper.
“So as soon as you don’t like a decision I make, you figure it’s time for you to take over, Shade? One mistake and done, right? You want us to start counting up your mistakes? Because I’ll bet we’d all have some things to say on that topic.”
“At least I don’t forget my goal!”
Dekka stood. Self-pity time was over. “That’s the one thing you never forget, Shade: you. You, you, you.”
Armo sighed, stood up, and wedged himself between the two women as they moved closer to each other. “Dudes. Come on. Chill.”
“How many people are going to die because we weren’t ready?” Shade demanded, and she saw from the way Dekka winced that the blow had landed.
“You think I’m happy about that?” Dekka erupted. “Listen, little rich girl, this isn’t my first time making a decision that could turn to shit. But don’t throw that hesitation thing at me. I don’t sacrifice people’s lives, in this case Armo’s life.”
“Good leaders make sacrifices,” Shade said. “This is war, Dekka. This is a war to save human civilization. People are going to die. And if we’re part of this war, we’re going to kill. And sometimes we’re going to sacrifice the innocent. Because if we lose, then the villains win.”
“Your idea of a hero is someone who lets people die?”
“I don’t give a damn about heroism; I don’t like losing. My idea of a winner is someone who does whatever it takes to win. And as it happened, we didn’t exactly save Williams, did we? While we were talking with some blue bumblebee, Markovic was sending his bugs to infest Williams!”
Dekka stood dangerously still and silent, and Shade knew she’d gone too far. She tried to come up with words to take it back, but it was too late.
Finally, Dekka, speaking in a low, terse growl, said, “I didn’t exactly see you volunteering to take care of Williams, Shade. You were happy enough to leave that to me.” She held up her hands and looked at her own palms as if they had betrayed her.
With the power in those hands, Shade knew, Dekka had killed a man. A doomed man. A man begging for the release of death. But a human being, a man who had done no wrong, nothing to deserve being shredded into chunks no bigger than a McNugget . . . The accusation stung: she could have done it, maybe not as easily as Dekka, but she could have done it. And as Dekka said, she had not exactly volunteered.
Shade felt the anger drain away to be replaced by guilt and sadness. “He seemed like a good guy. Detective Williams.”
Dekka swallowed and nodded and could only say, “Yep.”
“I’m sorry, Dekka,” Shade said, hanging her head. “I just . . . It doesn’t matter, I’m sorry.”
Dekka sighed, and as Armo stepped aside she took Shade in an embrace. “It’s hard, Shade. All of this. Violence. Hurting people, even if you have no choice. Seeing people hurt. Seeing people afraid or in pain. It just hurts, Shade.” And Shade felt Dekka’s body shake with suppressed sobs.
“I used to wonder why so many FAYZ survivors became drunks or druggies. Or suicides.” Shade stepped back and brushed away tears. Cruz appeared with a box of tissues.
“This stuff, you want to just put it all in a box,” Dekka said. “But it never fits. You can never quite close the lid on that box. All of a sudden, from nowhere, for no reason, it just hits you.” She accepted a tissue with a nod to Cruz. “We had this girl, Mary? She was a saint—I mean, if I ever met a saint. Mother Mary, we called her . . . and she broke. All of it, the fear mostly, I guess, it broke her. I watched Mary lead a group of little kids off the edge of . . . That kind, sweet girl . . . She just came apart. And people always think, ‘Oh, that won’t happen to me; I’m tough.’ But you’ll be standing in a line at Starbucks or whatever, everything fine, and then it’ll come back, and suddenly you have to sit down, you know? It knocks the wind out of you.”
Armo said, “Look, as long as we don’t know the game, we can be outplayed.”
“It’s not a game,” Shade said, frowning. “This is people’s lives.”
“But it’s still a game,” Armo insisted, “and we don’t know what the rules are. Do we sacrifice people? How many? Do we just kill any mutant who does something bad? I mean, what is it we’re doing? What are we?”
Shade was about to say something dismissive, but she recognized that there was truth in what Armo was saying.
“Maybe Armo’s right,” Shade admitted, her voice sounding like she felt: defeated. “If we play by some set of rules we don’t even understand or know, we’ll lose going up against assholes who know exactly what they want.”
Cruz started to speak but was ignored.
“I thought we were supposed to be the good guys,” Dekka said. “What the hell is the point if we’re as ruthless as they are? If we turn into them, how is that a win?”
Shade shook that off impatiently. “We need to cut out the false equivalence here. We aren’t looking to hurt people. We aren’t looking to enslave people. We’re trying to stop all of that.”
Cruz tried to speak again, but again was overridden, this time by Armo. “Hey, it’s not like we’re giving up. We lost a round, just a round. Like Malik said. Round One, ding-ding-ding.”
Cruz held up a hand and was ignored again, then said, “Ahem. Excuse me! If I could maybe say a word or two?”
“What?” Shade snapped.
“We’re all here, all six of us, and yet I hear footsteps upstairs,” Cruz said.
That stopped conversation dead. Shade was already morphing. But then someone appeared, walking down the stairs.
“Who the hell are you?” Dekka demanded. “You’ve got like three seconds.”
“We’ve met,” the girl said. “My name is Simone. Simone Markovic. Sometimes I’m blue.”
“How did you get in here?”
Simone raised an eyebrow. “I fly, remember? I followed you and came in through a bedroom window. And I’m not here looking for a fight.”
“Well, what do you think, Shade?” Dekka snarked, some of her anger coming back. “Should we just go ahead and kill her? You want me to shred her, or do you want to do it yourself?”
“Simone?” Malik stood and held out his hand. “We spoke briefly . . .”
“You mean you distracted me so Shade could throw a blanket over my father.”
Malik tilted his head in acknowledgment. “Why don’t you have a seat?”
Simone, cautious, edged past the glowering Dekka and the bemused Armo and sat stiff and rigid. Cruz sat beside her, signaling her own choice to listen rather than attack.
“Are you here to beg for your father’s life?” Shade asked.
“I guess in a way I am,” Simone said. And with that the temperature in the room dropped a few degrees. There was a collective sigh.
“Understandable,” Dekka allowed. “He is your father.”
“Look, don’t misunderstand,” Simone said, holding both hands palm out as if ready to push away any misconceptions. “I know my father. He’s power hungry, a control freak, and really doesn’t have much idea of right or wrong.”
Shade had the impression that Dekka was holding herself back from saying something like, Hmmm, now who does that remind me of? Which, Shade had to admit, would be fair.
“So, what is it you want?” Shade demanded.
“He needs to be stopped,” Simone said. “But he’s still my dad . . .”
“You want us to stop him, but not hurt him?” Cruz asked.
Simone sighed and hung her head. “Look, I’m new to this, all right? Yesterday I was being gunned down in a field. Then I could fly. Then my father turned into a cloud of bugs. Now I’m sitting here talking to the Rockborn Gang. I just walked into a room full of people who could kill me.”
“How do we know you’re not a spy for your father?” Shade demanded.
“Because I’m here to help you stop him. He has to be stopped. He can’t . . .” She looked down. “I saw what he did to that policeman.”
“Francis and I saw what he did to some other guys, too,” Dekka said. “I’ve seen some very bad things. I’ve seen children burning. And this was worse. Your father is sending people into unending pain and horror. He’s condemning people to a living hell.”
“You have some brilliant idea for how to stop your father without killing him?” Shade asked.
Simone met her eye coolly, not seeming as overawed as Shade had hoped. “You need to go at him when he’s off guard. Find a way to . . .” She sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe some nonfatal bug spray? Then take him to a cell. A jail. Somewhere he can be held safely until this is all over.”
Shade was ready with a mocking rejoinder, but Malik held up a hand, stopping her. “Simone, there is no ‘all over.’ This isn’t a phase. Or even a FAYZ, F-A-Y-Z: this is life now.”
Simone’s eyes widened as she took that in. “I don’t . . . how would you know that?”
Patiently, like he was giving bad news to a grieving mother, Malik explained. “There are tons of the rock. Each ton is thirty-two thousand one-ounce doses. Say that there is a total of just one ton, just to simplify. Say that governments around the world have control of two-thirds of that, okay? That means there are still more than ten thousand doses of the rock out in the world somewhere. That means a possible ten thousand random people who can become Rockborn. Just one, Justin DeVeere, so-called Knightmare, destroyed a passenger jet, brought down the Golden Gate Bridge, and wiped out a famous lighthouse—and guess what? He’s still out there. It only took one Dillon Poe to nearly destroy an entire city. And if he’d been a bit smarter, he might have literally taken over the country. That’s reality now.”
Dekka decided this would be a good time to sit again, so Shade did as well, signaling the end of their emotional back-and-forth. For now.
“The point is, just a handful of Rockborn, people no worse than we’ve already seen, could do as much damage to civilization as nuclear war.” Malik let that sink in. “And that’s assuming the government—anyone’s government—doesn’t start up another Ranch and start creating their own superpowered soldiers.”
“So . . . so what’s your big plan?” Simone asked.
“We don’t have one,” Malik said softly.
“Whac-a-Mole,” Shade said. “Bad guy causes trouble; we take him down.”
Simone said, “It took the six of you to not quite stop Knightmare, and not really stop Napalm, and not stop that starfish kid, who I guess is dead now, but you didn’t kill him. The six of you barely stopped Dillon Poe, and you had nothing when it came to dealing with my father.”
Dekka nodded. Shade frowned and nodded, too. Then the two of them exchanged a confused look.
“She’s right,” Shade acknowledged. “We don’t have a plan. All we have is Whac-a-Mole. And that is a losing strategy in the end.”
“So your enemies are every clown with a piece of the rock, plus possibly every government on earth?” Simone looked around and saw blank faces.
“Parts of the government, not all of it,” Shade said, then added, “But you’re right: too many of them, not enough of us.”
“Right,” Simone said. “So your plan is to play Whac-a-Mole until sooner or later you’re all dead. And then the world belongs to the bad guys.”
Cruz interjected, “We’re not the only so-called good guys.”
“Exactly,” Simone said. “You need more people. You need more power. And you need to stand for something more than just killing bad guys.”
“More people?” Armo guffawed. “Who’d be dumb enough to join us?”
“Well . . . ,” Simone said. “For a start, me.”