Destroy All Monsters

by Sam J. Miller

  “Thanks, Mr. Taglia,” I said, standing up.

  I called up Connor, because he hates phone calls. As Solomon’s stepbrother, he might have some information or insight that I lacked, into what had happened around the time I fell out of his treehouse. He didn’t answer, but I got three text messages in quick succession:

  I’m trying to learn here.

  Jerk

  Why can’t you text people like normal people do?

  The last one came with a winky face.

  After school he found me in the parking lot, sitting on my car’s fender, watching seagulls and sparrows squabble over scattered popcorn.

  “Hey, Ash,” he said, standing right in front of me.

  My motives had been pure when I called him up. But now that he was so close, with the familiar clean-clothes smell of him filling up my nostrils, I weakened. When I was down, when I was stressed, when the hole inside me was at its deepest—I won’t mince words, sex with Connor straightened me out.

  “Hey,” I said. I could have grabbed him by the hips and kissed his stomach, snatched a handful of T-shirt and pulled him down to kiss me, but I didn’t do any of those things. When we’re alone he has no shame whatsoever, but he’s weird about doing stuff that other people will see. Probably because we’re not technically A Thing.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about Solomon,” I said.

  His smile wilted, faded. “Did something happen?”

  “Not really,” I said. “But I’ve been thinking a lot about when we were kids. I’m afraid something happened to him, some traumatic thing he’s blocking out. That can happen, with . . . mentally ill people. And I was thinking that maybe helping him remember . . .”

  Connor nodded, and sat on the fender beside me.

  “Do you remember anything? Something I didn’t know about, or forgot after my accident? Something you saw, something your father might have said?”

  “About Solomon? No. It’s a sore subject around the house. My dad tried hard to help him, after his mother got locked up, but Solomon pushed him away. So I guess he feels like he failed him? I know I do.”

  I smirked. “People Who Failed Solomon. We could form a club.”

  The wind picked up, and started me shivering.

  “You’re cold,” Connor said matter-of-factly.

  “You’re not?” I tapped at his arms, bare below his T-shirt sleeves.

  “Nah,” he said, and inched closer so I could leach heat off him.

  “Want to come over to my house?”

  He smiled, knowing what I meant. “Sounds great,” he said, after a second, but not like a guy excited to sleep with somebody—like somebody doing a favor for a friend. Because Connor was a really good friend.

  We got in. I started up the car and pulled out of the parking lot.

  “The night of the accident. That was the last night Solomon ever spent in our house,” he said, halfway to my house. “I just remembered that. My dad was at the hospital until late—he felt so bad that you’d gotten hurt on our property—and Solomon slept in the basement. In the morning he ran off.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I hadn’t realized. Thanks.”

  I reached out my hand, and he took it. “At your service, my lady. Always.”

  With his crew cut, with his air of perpetual positivity, Connor seemed to be a creature out of time, a refugee from some other, less-fucked age. Some fictional 1950s of wholesome wood-paneled station wagons piled high with surfboards and poodle-skirt girls and Coke-bottle-brandishing boys.

  I knew none of that was real. I knew the 1950s was a pretty shitty time for most people. But I got it, why folks wanted to pretend like those were the good old days. Because Connor seemed to exist in that alternate reality where the world wasn’t a wretched place full of awful people. It made me happy just to be close to it.

  And then I pulled up in front of my house, and the bubble popped.

  Because there was Solomon, sitting on my front porch, strumming a guitar. And as happy as I was to see him, I was also superworried. Because Connor tended to freak Solomon out.

  “I didn’t know he played the guitar,” Connor said, his voice so much smaller already.

  I nodded. “Writes songs, too. He’s pretty good.”

  I parked. Got out.

  “Ash, hey!” Solomon said, waving, standing up, and I saw the precise second when his smile cracked, when he caught sight of Connor.

  “Solomon!” Connor cheered, waving, and it hurt my heart, to see him run toward his stepbrother, to see how Solomon stiffened, to see Connor give him a big, hard hug anyway, and to see Solomon finally relent, soften, hug him back. Shut his eyes. Smile.

  They’re both big boys. But standing next to Solomon made Connor seem like a little boy again.

  “Missed you, man,” Connor said. “You never come to see me.”

  “Sorry,” Solomon said. “I know how busy you are. With the team and all.”

  Team or not, Solomon had always felt weird around Connor. I’d tried to get to the bottom of it before. Was it guilt? Jealousy? Inadequacy? Whatever it was, it was deep, and it was getting worse. They used to be able to have an actual conversation, but now Solomon was already shambling down the walkway, saying how he had to head down to the docks, and Connor and I exchanged a quick, weird glance because there are no docks in Hudson, nor anywhere near Hudson.

  “Solomon!” Connor called.

  His stepbrother stopped. Turned around. Showed us all the pain that was on his face, so that as soon as Connor spoke again I wished I could snap my fingers, stop the words from ever having been said.

  “I feel like you hate me,” Connor said, his voice sounding as low and small as a six-year-old’s. “And I don’t know why.”

  Solomon didn’t answer, not right away. Stared at his hands like he couldn’t get his head around what he’d done.

  “Neither do I,” he said, and turned and ran.

  We watched him go, and we didn’t speak for a long time after that. Sex was the furthest thing from my mind.

  “You want a ride home?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Connor said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” I said, and hugged him. He turned his face into my neck. I could feel his wet eyelids fluttering against my skin. He didn’t make a sound, but when he pulled away, my collar was damp.

  Ten

  Solomon

  Down at the docks, seagulls and tiny harpies squabbled in the air overhead. A plesiosaur rose from the water, its head as big as me and full of long snake-sharp teeth. I leaped back, but I had nothing to fear from this one: it was muzzled and harnessed to a transport raft, bringing crates from a ship docked out in the river. It kept rising and rising until its neck extended two stories up, and I could see the armor plating on its side, painted with the complex circular glyphs of the Sea Peoples.

  The Underbridge docks were busy, like they always were, with a hundred kinds of commerce, both legal and illegal, but right away I could see that something had changed. The volume level had been turned way down. The normal shouting and banging and crashing and stomping just—wasn’t. No racket of machines chugging in the background either. This could mean lots of things. Police crackdowns happened from time to time. War between smugglers. People also tended to be pretty somber, right after a big shipwreck or dockside accident, but I hadn’t heard about any of those things happening out here.

  Out on the plains, I’ve read, all the dinosaurs go silent when a new one comes along. When they don’t know whether or not they should be afraid.

  I had the sense there was a new dinosaur here in town, and I was pretty sure that dinosaur was the man I’d seen spray-painted on the bridge pillar.

  Radha was hard at work—doing laundry for her neighbors was one of the many ways she made ends meet—but she’d told me Connor was being babysat at the Mammoth Narwhal, so that’s where I went.

  My mind hadn’t been right, ever since leaving Ash. Seeing her smile
had been magnificent, but it had also reminded me how far gone she was. How much we were up against. And spending time with my foster brother was the best way I knew how to make myself feel better.

  A mammoth tusk and a narwhal horn hung in the window. Built on a floating platform, it was a shabby, glorious restaurant with good noodles, strong coffee, and cheap drinks. Sailors and merchants and dockhands all frequented it, alongside the folks who made their living illegally—smugglers, pickpockets, sex workers, drug dealers selling spiderwebbing or manticore scales or phoenix feathers.

  “Solomon!” Connor said. He caught sight of me as I walked in the door, before my own eyes had adjusted to the gloom. The restaurant smelled like heaven, like smoked ham and brown sugar. Shouts from the kitchen echoed off the low ceiling. He came running, and gave me a big, hard hug.

  “Hey, Solomon,” said Quang, who owned the restaurant. “You come to take this little troublemaker off my hands?”

  That was when I noticed smoke pouring out of the kitchen.

  “What did you do, you little monster?” I asked, hoisting Connor up.

  He screamed in delight, mock-struggling, as I carried him.

  “I just wanted to show him a way to cook the noodles faster! It was taking too long.”

  “You practically cooked the whole kitchen,” Quang said, laughing. We sat down at a table, beside a window with green river water rippling right outside.

  Quang was an othersider, with the ability to transport any object over any distance. Power like that, most people would go crazy with. Steal money out of cash registers, build an empire on thievery, but Quang just wanted to live a simple life. He had a sea wyvern tattoo on his forearm, and rumor had it that he was telepathically linked to a monster as big as a battleship, dwelling deep in the sea. He did a good, honest business—although, allegedly, when a local tough guy did something terrible to one of his waitresses, he teleported the guy clear to the far side of the Waterlands. Never to be seen again.

  “Solomon,” said Evvy, one of the cooks. A big, beautiful butch woman, she shook my hand so hard I had to wince. Which made her laugh.

  I handed Connor a paper place mat, and sat him down on my lap. He began to draw, using his finger—focusing a tiny flame, burning black lines onto the white surface, slowly sketching out Maraud’s familiar outline.

  “You’ve gotten so good at that,” I said.

  “Shhh,” he said, lips tight with concentration. Under the faint scent of smoke, I could smell the laundry soap of Connor’s clothes.

  I turned to Quang and Evvy. “You guys know anything about this ‘Destroy All Monsters’ nonsense popping up all over the city?”

  A long pause. They looked at each other. Then they burst out laughing.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Tough subject,” Quang said. “We been arguing about this all week.”

  “Not arguing,” she said. “Discussing.”

  “Evvy is a sympathizer.”

  “Shut up,” she said, and turned to me, alarmed. “I’m not, I swear. I just think Quang is wrong to write them off.”

  “Write . . . who off?”

  “The nativists. The anti-othersider mob,” Quang said. “The ones behind ‘Abolish All Magic’ and ‘Destroy All Monsters’ and all that sh—” He looked at Connor, chose another word. “Nonsense.”

  I asked Evvy, “How could you sympathize with creeps like that?”

  “I told you, I don’t. But my brother does, and my dad, and so do lots of this-siders. People who are scared of what this city has become. We shouldn’t have to live in fear all the time.”

  I’d heard this a million times before. People actually believed that othersiders were violent—or more violent than this-siders, just by nature. They believed that their powers were weapons, and that they’d use them against a this-sider whenever they felt like it. Just for fun.

  Idiotic. But lots of people swallowed that nonsense. And if someone was stoking those idiotic beliefs, I could see them gaining a lot of power.

  “I’m sure their message resonates with a lot of people,” I said diplomatically.

  Connor looked up. “Are they going to get us?”

  “Shhh,” I said, and kissed the top of his head. Feeling awful, for saying stuff that had scared him. “No one’s going to get anybody.”

  “But they hate us.”

  “They’re just scared,” Evvy said.

  This was all so new. Seemed like just a little while ago, Connor tuned out every grown-up conversation and never had an idea what any of us were saying.

  “I got you, kid,” Quang said, and picked up a spoon from the table. “Anybody tries to hurt you, I’ll do this to them.”

  The spoon vanished, and then reappeared outside the window. Plummeted into the river; sank like a stone. Connor laughed, and clapped.

  “My boys,” Radha said, walking in.

  “Look at Connor’s latest,” I said, holding up the place mat.

  “Such an artist,” she said, pulling up a chair. She reached out, took Connor’s hand in one of hers and mine in the other. I could feel the cracks in her skin.

  Stout and sturdy and fearless as she was, I could see the weariness in her face.

  “Noodles?” Evvy asked, and at our enthusiastic nods she headed for the kitchen. Connor hopped off my lap, began to run through the mostly empty restaurant.

  “You shouldn’t encourage this,” Radha said, pointing to the place mat.

  “Why not?”

  She released my hand. “Are you blind? Don’t you see what’s happening in this city? You haven’t heard that people are disappearing now? All over, dozens of othersiders—not coming home from work, vanishing on the way to school. It is not safe for him to use his power out in the open where anyone can see.”

  I knew that people were being targeted—harassed. I hadn’t heard that people were disappearing. Certainly not by the dozens. I’d have to ask Cass about that one. See what she’d learned. Because of course the Darkside Police Department wouldn’t be doing a damn thing to rescue abducted othersiders.

  “Mama, look!” Connor called.

  A bird made of fire flapped its wings in the air in front of us. Quang and I clapped, but Radha leaped up from her seat and grabbed Connor by the arm.

  “Stop. Stop it right now. You must never, never do that again,” she hissed.

  She yelled at Connor from time to time. You had to, with a kid so energetic and loud.

  But she wasn’t yelling now. Her voice was dead calm. And that made the blood in my veins turn to freezing-cold river water.

  The bird blew away in a wisp of black smoke. Connor began to cry.

  “I need you to understand. Do you understand?” she whispered. She had to say it a couple more times, before he nodded.

  Connor sat down, crying hard now. I rubbed his shoulder, and he got up and sat on my lap. Buried his head in my chest.

  “Shhhh,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  He sniffled, and nodded again. I felt glad that he still believed me.

  Radha turned her head away so he wouldn’t see her tears. We sat there in silence and waited for our noodles. I wished there was something I could say.

  Here’s what I think: my magic has something to do with emotion. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but sometimes, when I feel a strong emotion, I get the kind of tingly sensation that some othersiders describe when their powers are starting to trigger.

  I felt that tingle then. It made me wonder if maybe I could help Radha and Connor. Make them less afraid, less sad.

  I shut my eyes, tried to access it. Focused on my spine, the way the Palace trainers had taught us—felt energy running along it, coursing through my body. Breathed deep. Felt the tingling get stronger. Tried to think happy, positive, peaceful thoughts.

  But something was wrong. I tried to move my arms, and couldn’t. I opened my mouth to ask for help, but no words emerged. Just like always, before a freak-out.

  “Solomon?” Radha said, but he
r voice sounded very, very far away.

  Eleven

  Ash

  What makes a photograph great?

  Taking pictures is easy. I take dozens, every day. With my camera, with my phone. I post them to Instagram. Facebook. People like them. But I still don’t know what I’m doing.

  Every night I’m on the internet, or flipping through books, stalking the images of famous artists and social media nobodies, trying to figure it out. Which photographs move me, and why? Face after face slides past me, each one full of unreadable emotion. Whole lives I will never know anything about.

  Look up Richard Avedon’s photo of Marilyn Monroe. Look at her face. See how much pain is there, how lost she is. Compare that to the tens of thousands of other photographs that were taken of her, the smiling happy sex symbol, and you know that Avedon caught something special. Something haunting.

  How? Cass told me the story about that one. How Avedon spent all night photographing her, in his studio, with props and backdrops and costumes, in motion and standing still, hundreds of exposures as he tried to get at the truth of her. Country girl Norma Jeane, who created a fictional creature to hide behind, and made her into the most famous woman in the world. He couldn’t break through that facade. Finally, he told her he was all finished with the shoot. She relaxed. Let her guard down. All the exhaustion she’d been hiding flowed into her face. In that instant, he took a photograph. And that’s the one.

  On the one hand, it’s kind of a dick move. To trick a woman into revealing something she tried her hardest to keep hidden. To steal her secret, and tell everyone. On the other hand, there’s a truth here, a story Hollywood didn’t want to hear, about a lonely person who was tired of being exploited and crying out for help. If more people had heard that story, maybe she wouldn’t have taken her own life at thirty-six.

  Being an artist sometimes means breaking the rules of civilized human behavior.

  I shut my laptop. I counted to ten.

  That evening, I’d gotten a call from Solomon’s aunt. His mother’s sister; his legal guardian. A sweet woman, overwhelmed by everything the world had thrown at her. She’d been crying. And when I hung up, so was I.