IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT. That’s how late it felt, anyway. Cole didn’t dare peek his head out from under the comfort of the blanket. His mother could come in at any point, and then he’d be busted. The flashlight wasn’t visible from outside the blanket. He knew: he’d tested it. The blanket, handmade by Elder Mariah, was thick. What he hadn’t planned for was how it might look for his mother to enter his bedroom and see a large, upright lump underneath the blanket.
When he heard the bedroom door open, he stopped turning the pages of his comic. He stopped breathing too. The door shut. He heard footsteps moving across the bedroom floor. They stopped at the side of his bed. He felt the blanket compress over his right shoulder, a gentle touch. He heard his mother say, “Cole,” almost apologetically. This didn’t feel right. When he’d previously been caught reading comics in the night his mother had never sounded sorry about it. Oh, sorry, honey, I didn’t mean to interrupt your reading; please, stay up all night, was something he absolutely never heard, and never expected to hear.
He pulled the blanket off his body and turned towards his mother, shining the light directly in her face. She smiled and turned it off. It was just them, sitting there in the glow of the northern lights, so close that they looked like mist hanging over the grass in the morning.
“Cole.” She sat down at the side of his bed.
He put the comic down. Her eyes were red. She’d been crying.
“What is it, Mommy?”
“Come here.” She gathered him into her arms. She squeezed him tight. “Your father, Cole. He died today.”
He tried to pull away from her, as though it was her fault, as though if he ran away from her as far as he could it would make what she said not true. He started to cry, then sob, and it made his mother’s shirt wet. She just held him tighter and tighter, and they sat there well into the night. She rocked him back and forth in her arms. He cried into her shirt, she cried into his. Finally, sometime in the morning, when the northern lights had given way to the warm hues of the rising sun, he asked, “Are you going to die, Mommy?”
“One day I’ll die,” she said. “But not for a long time.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“I like that memory best,” Choch said.
Cole opened his eyes to white as his vision came into focus. There wasn’t pain, not at first. There was only the white light at the end of the tunnel, the pathway to the sky above, with the spirits dancing, waiting for him. After everything he’d been through, he would’ve been happy there. But Choch’s intrusion meant that Cole was alive. If that weren’t enough, a dull ache in his chest closely followed. He held the wound, bandaged now and coated in dried blood.
“But she lied,” Cole said.
“She was wrong.” Choch sat forward and handed Cole a small cup of water. Cole took it, sipped it, and handed it back. “There’s a difference.”
“Maybe I’m the liar,” Cole said with a grunt. He grunted after everything, every word, every movement.
“How so?” Choch asked.
“I wanted to save her as much as I did Brady and Eva. I wanted to save all of them, and I didn’t,” Cole said.
“Now, Cole, you really need to get over it. Honestly, it’s been ten years of beating yourself up, and look what it’s done to your poor nerves.”
Cole didn’t respond to that. He was listening, but didn’t have anything to say. In fact, he agreed with Choch, and was surprised that he did. It surprised him as much as Choch saying something without a hint of humour or sarcasm.
“Mr. Kirkness,” Cole said.
Choch rolled his eyes, and nodded like, okay, okay, okay, as though Cole were a child in a store having asked for a toy one thousand times. “To avoid any unnecessary exposition, because Creator knows how boring that all is, especially to readers, and because nobody wants to see you go from bedside to bedside, here’s what you need to know: as Dr. Captain indicated, Wayne will pull through. He was brought here just in time, thanks to you. Eva’s been playing musical chairs between you and her father. It’s rather cute, actually…”
“She sat here?”
“Yes, yes, yes, she sat right here.” Choch got up from the chair and briefly motioned to the red cushion before sitting back down again—farting at the same time, it must be said, as embarrassing as it might be (but not for Choch, of course). “Wetting your lips with a damp Q-tip, and playing with that ring you made her like it was some charm, I suppose.”
Cole managed a smile at this. She hadn’t thrown it away.
“Where was I?” Choch asked. “Oh yes. Scott, whom yes, everybody now recognizes as the one who killed your friends, also survived. He’s here in the clinic, near death I should add, due to being pulverized by yourself and shot by your lovely friend. You won’t be able to see him, so don’t bother trying. Move things along, you know. And—”
“Elder Mariah…”
“I was just about to…” Choch started, flabbergasted. “Honestly. I say I’ll summarize, and then—”
“Sorry.”
“I suppose you did just almost die, so I can forgive your rudeness.”
“Thank you,” Cole said, but Choch didn’t start right away. Always the showman. “Elder Mariah?” Cole prompted after growing impatient.
“Quite ill, I’m afraid,” Choch said. “Quite ill.” At this, Choch sounded unequivocally upset. He looked away from Cole, to the floor, lost in thought. Imagine that, Cole wondered, a spirit being like him, lost in thought. Choch snapped out of it, and said, in a rush to finish, “And Jayne is probably off playing with her friends at the cemetery. I’m sure she’ll be by to check on you as well. You are, after all, the man of the hour.”
Cole thought of Elder Mariah. He wondered how bad she really was, how close to death. Frantically, as frantic as he could allow himself to be, he checked the clock on the wall. It read 3:57 p.m. But—what day?
“Relax,” Choch said. “It’s just the next day. There’s time.”
“Time for what?”
“Time to get your strength back up before you go trying to save another life. You are, after all, The Reckoner, are you not?” Choch got up, straightened out his pants, his hat, and got himself looking perfectly fine.
“Choch, you didn’t just—”
“Now, now. No need to get all weepy. I’d best get back to the diner.” He made his way over to the door. “My shift’s about to start.”
“You’re staying?” Cole asked. “Like, here?”
“Why yes, naturally. The jackfish here is to-die-for. Right out of Silk River and onto the plate. Fresh as a daisy.”
“But why would you—”
“I get free meals every shift. Silly boy.”
Cole slept the afternoon away. When he woke up in the evening, the chest pain seemed to have lessened quicker than what seemed natural. He figured this, too, was a gift he had been given. He wondered, though, if he had held up his end of the bargain, then why did he still have these abilities? Was it something he got to keep? Now that he knew how to use his strength and speed, he wondered what good he could do. The world’s first Indigenous superhero? The world’s first superhero, period. He just happened to be Indigenous. He was daydreaming about this, setting aside the hard days he’d just experienced and giving himself superhero names while simultaneously debating whether he was borderline appropriating his own culture, when Eva and Brady walked into the room.
“Wow,” Brady said. “You’re sure getting the hero’s treatment. Hard to find a room without a bunch of beds in it.”
“They’re just making sure he’s not exposed to the illness,” Eva said to Brady. “It’s okay, Cole, don’t mind B.”
“Hey, I think it’s cool,” Brady said.
Brady had come into the room with some levity, but Cole knew better. This was an act. Somewhere in the clinic, Elder Mariah was dying. Brady was trying to shield Cole. It wasn’t necessary, but Cole didn’t say anything. Cole shimmied to sit up, propped against some pillows.
“Easy,” Eva said to him. “You just had a knife stuck in your chest. Dr. Captain said another inch and you would’ve been toast.”
“It’s okay,” Cole said. “It must not have been that bad, really.”
“Not that bad?!” Eva said. “Cole, he stabbed you with a fu—”
“I put some, uhhh…” Brady pointed at the wound. A spot of blood seeped through the gauze pad taped to Cole’s chest. “Medicine on the wound when you were asleep. I guess it worked.”
“Thanks, Brady,” Cole said.
Eva was leaning forward in the chair. The ring was outside of her shirt, and she was twirling it around in her fingers.
“Where’s Michael?” Cole asked.
“With his mom, I think,” Eva said.
“How is he?”
“As good as you could expect? Both of them are. As good as you could expect.”
Cole shook his head. “He must’ve hated me.”
“He’s fine now, I think. He’ll be fine, anyway,” Eva said. “He knows you didn’t…” She trailed off, couldn’t stand to say Alex’s name right now. Cole just nodded.
“You saved me.” Cole had his hand resting at his side. He moved it to the edge of the bed slightly, just in case she might get the signal. He opened his hand, palm up. She traced the scar on his palm with her fingertip, and then she took his hand and squeezed it.
“I guess that makes us even.”
She let go of his hand, and for a moment, even though his two best friends were there, he felt alone.
“I just can’t figure it out,” Brady said. “Why did Scott do all those things? Why did he kill Ashley, Alex, Maggie? Why did he want to kill Eva?”
Cole looked back and forth, between Eva and Brady, and argued with himself how much to tell them. All he had were pieces, and he wasn’t sure yet how they all fit together. What could he say to them that would make sense, if nothing made much sense to him?
“Do you know those files I told you about?” Cole asked Eva.
“Yeah,” Eva said.
“Eva told me about them, sure,” Brady said.
“It wasn’t just a hit list or whatever. They were talking about an experiment or something. We were getting tested for a cure for a virus. They called it God Flare. I think…” Cole remembered what Choch had just said to him, about saving Elder Mariah’s life. Could he? Was that what it meant on his file when it read “SUCCESSFUL”? “It’s the same virus that everybody has now.”
“That’s why Ashley,” Brady started, “that’s why everybody was killed? Because of a stupid virus? Why?”
“A cover-up? I don’t know,” Cole said. “All I know is that kids were getting a placebo, or a real test that failed. Except mine. Mine said it worked.”
“What, like you can cure it?” Eva asked.
“I don’t know,” Cole said. “Maybe.”
Brady looked around the room. Cole did, too, out of curiosity, wondering what Brady was looking for. They were in a storage room with a bunch of things stuffed along the sides of the room—boxes, chairs, medical supplies. Brady saw what he was searching for. He walked to the back corner of the room and grabbed an old wheelchair. He unfolded it, brushed off some dust, and wheeled it up to Cole’s bedside.
“What are you doing?” Cole asked.
“If you think you can cure this thing,” Brady said, “Then you’re going to start with my kókom.”