See These Bones

by Chris Tullbane

  It wasn’t until I looked over at her that I realized why.

  The sweats that had hung on Wormhole’s slim frame now struggled to contain her girth. The hand I held was well past pudgy, each finger as thick around as two of mine put together. Even her features were almost unrecognizable under a thick layer of fat.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Stare a bit longer, asshole.” She shook free of my hand, her body quaking even with that slight movement.

  “Sorry, I just…” I coughed. “Is this normal?”

  “You mean do I swell up like a blimp every time I teleport?” She wobbled her head. “No. It’s a factor of distance.”

  “I don’t understand. Are you… some kind of Shifter?”

  “As if.” She shrugged. “I don’t know how real wormholes work, but I fix two locations in my mind, and… sort of burrow between them. But I absorb some of the excess energy along the way and convert it to mass. On short trips, it’s almost unnoticeable. A few hundred miles, and you get…” She waved an obese arm. “…this.”

  A thought occurred to me. “Did I just completely ruin your chances of going to the dance?”

  Her smile was tight. “I’d say you pushing Paladin and Vibe together already did that, but it’s not like Matthew didn't have months to ask me if he was going to. This won’t make it any worse. My body starts dumping the excess mass as soon as we emerge. Shouldn’t be more than an hour or two until I’m back to normal.” She looked down at herself and frowned. “Maybe three. This is the farthest I’ve ever traveled. But at least I did it.”

  As I looked around us, I saw that she was right. Less than twenty feet away, a battered green sign, so desolate that not even a Druid had bothered to transform it, welcomed one and all to the town of Ludlow.

  We’d made it.

  •—•—•

  I don’t know what Ludlow was like pre-Break. Maybe it was a thriving metropolis or something. If so, the desert had spent the last eighty-plus years swallowing its pre-Break magnificence, because what remained made Bakersfield seem like Los Angeles. Hell, it made that nameless little town where I’d been tested seem like a real fucking city.

  Ludlow had five buildings. One was an old gas station that had been converted to electricity at some point. One was a dilapidated convenience store that I was convinced was older than our country. The other three were residences, and only one of those still had a roof.

  “You take me to the nicest places, Evelyn.”

  “No wonder I don’t remember it.”

  “Here I thought Bakersfield was the ass crack of society.” I turned to the Teleporter and extended the hand she’d shaken free of moments earlier. “Thank you. Have a safe trip back to the dorm. Tell Kayleigh—”

  “I’m not going anywhere yet,” Wormhole interrupted. “I have no idea if there’s a limit to what my body can absorb, and I don’t want to chance it, if so. Until I’m somewhere closer to normal, I’m staying right here.”

  “Oh.” A few hours alone with Evelyn wasn’t quite how I’d expected to spend my last day of freedom, but at least she wasn’t Winter. “Then let’s head over to the charging station and find some shade.”

  We were still twenty paces away when the long barrel of an ancient rifle extended from one of the open windows. A weathered voice called out. “That’s close enough. Not sure where you two came from, but I don’t have any cash on the premises, so you can just keep right on walking.”

  “I’d be happy to do so,” I shouted back, watching the rifle weave back and forth, “but my ride’s coming through Ludlow tomorrow, and I need to be here to meet it.”

  If the cracked voice and unsteady rifle barrel hadn’t already told me the unseen speaker was old, his loud cackle would have done so. “Ain’t been a ride through here for more than a month, young man. What makes you think one’s coming tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s Remembrance Day. President Weatherly arranged shuttles to the Hole.”

  “President Weatherly can kiss my wrinkled ass,” I heard the old man mutter. “Are you sure that’s tomorrow?”

  “Pretty sure, yeah.”

  “Well, shit. I better make sure the charging station’s powered up then.” The long barrel slowly withdrew out of sight, and the next thing we saw was an old man stomping his way out from the convenience store.

  “Ah hell, you’re just kids.” He slowed as he reached us, eyes darting from Wormhole’s temporarily hulking form to me. After almost a year at the Academy, my ribs no longer showed, but I was still on the skinny side. “I’m not here to tell young people how to live their lives, but maybe the two of you should renegotiate your portion sizes?”

  “This isn’t what I normally look like!” protested Wormhole.

  “Not that it would matter if it was,” I put in. Wrecking Ball, one of the original Ten who’d come to Dominion’s call, had been wider than she was tall, and she wasn’t any less venerated than the other nine.

  “Easy for you to say, Skeletor,” Evelyn muttered.

  “It’s a Power thing,” I explained to the old man.

  “Didn’t mean nothing by it,” he muttered, taking a closer look at the Teleporter. Rheumy eyes dropped to her grey sweats and widened. “You both go to the Academy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Had a grand-nephew that graduated a decade or so ago. Druid who went by the name of Bramble. You folks hear of him?” He frowned as we both shook our heads, then shrugged. “Joined the Hammers of God out in Salt Lake City. Died a few years later.”

  “The Hammers do good work,” said Wormhole. “I’m sure he saved a lot of lives.”

  “Could be.” He shrugged again, shoulders as bony as mine poking through his light cotton shirt like the exposed scaffolding of a building. “Anyways, y’all can wait in the store if you want. Don’t have no vid screen working or nothing, but it’s got air conditioning and it’s a shit-ton nicer than out in the sun.”

  “Thank you…”

  “Randy.” He puffed out his chest. “Randal S. Thurston. Happy to be of service to the Free States’ finest.”

  •—•—•

  It took Wormhole four hours to return to her usual weight, and she got ready to go immediately after, swaddled in the clothes that would be skintight again when she re-appeared in Los Angeles. She filled her water bottle at the pump near the charging station and turned to me.

  “I think you’ll agree that I went above and beyond to help you out today.”

  They were the first words she’d said to me in almost two hours.

  “You did.”

  “Good. Because I have a favor to ask in return.” She slid the water bottle back into her bag. “Don’t come back.”

  My own plans notwithstanding, that kind of hurt.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s not that I think you’re a bad person. I just… there are a lot of good people in our class, and I don’t want—”

  “Me dragging them down,” I finished, feeling that old, familiar pain.

  “Yeah.” She swallowed and looked away. “Do whatever you have to do. Just… don’t come back.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” I said, but she was already gone.

  •—•—•

  Over the past year, I’d grown used to sunsets in Los Angeles. Grown used to watching the distant ball of fire drop down into the ocean, to twilights that seemed to last as long as the nights themselves. My stay in Ludlow reminded me just how different the desert was. Night came fast and once it did, there was nothing but darkness for miles in every direction, darkness that the two electric lanterns outside Randy’s convenience store did nothing at all to lessen.

  The storekeeper had wandered off to his house some hours earlier—muttering something about an early morning and what a pain in the ass it was going to be to have actual customers—but I’d decided to stay out by the store for the night. It was just as well that I did; the ramshackle walls of the old man’s home helped muffle the loud snores emerging from
within.

  With the sun down, the weather cooled quickly, and I moved from inside the store to its front step, my back resting against the old wooden door. I hadn’t missed Bakersfield often during my time at the Academy, but being in the desert felt a bit like coming home. A year at school had changed me, and the few friends I’d somehow managed to find had changed me even more, but that was another life, another me. For tomorrow’s meeting, for my father, I needed the old me, the one who’d never tricked himself into thinking he could be a Cape, the one who always did what needed to be done because he had no future to worry about.

  I looked from Mom’s ghost, barely visible in the middle of the empty road, to the cold stars that littered the desert sky, and I scrubbed at those new parts of me, the places where Alexa and Unicorn, Vibe and Silt, even Stonewall and fucking Paladin had managed to reach me. I scraped it all away until there was nothing left but the raw nerve underneath.

  “One more day, Mom.”

  I fell asleep with one hand on the moist warmth of my stolen weapon.

  CHAPTER 68

  Randy was up way too early for comfort. I’d left my Glass back in the dorm room, so I didn’t know what time it was, exactly, but the sun was barely peeking over the eastern horizon when the old man tottered out to the charging station, joints creaking. I sat up and gingerly rolled my head from side to side, feeling every day of my almost-nineteen years. I still didn’t remember much of the brawl at The Liquid Hero, but I must’ve seen some action because I kept finding bruises in interesting places.

  This once, it would have been nice if Gladys and the other Healers had brought me up to one-hundred-percent.

  Randy was over by the charging station, frowning at a squat grey box partially buried in the dirt next to one of the coils. With a grumble, he hauled back and kicked it, the sole of his shoe flapping in the wind.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Yup. This old girl just gets temperamental in the morning.” He grinned, exposing several empty sockets where teeth had once been. “Kind of like my two ex-wives! But she should be warmed up and ready to go by the time the shuttle gets here.”

  I took a closer look at the box he’d kicked. “Is that a generator?”

  “Nah. We’re on solar out here, but after you store that excess energy, you need to be able to get it back out to actually use it. That’s what this does.” He checked the readings on the nearest charger and nodded in satisfaction before turning back to me. “So why’s a kid like you going to a place like the Hole? And without your pretty friend?”

  “Same as everyone else, I guess. I’ve got a relative down there. My father.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” He ran one hand through the strands of white hair that were already plastered to his scalp. “Guess the apple fell pretty far from the tree though, you being in the Academy and all.”

  “Yeah.” Against my ribs, the Legion tech gun pulsed like a heartbeat. “Guess so.”

  •—•—•

  Pre-Break buses were weird things. Gas burning, smoke belching, and noisy as fuck, with too many windows, too few wheels, and no armor whatsoever to speak of. No shock that public transportation had died out everywhere but the major cities, I guess. If Aspen had been riding in one of those old school death traps when Major Disaster threw it through a building, the Free States would have been one Cape poorer.

  Modern buses still aren’t all that common. I’d never seen one up close, but they’ve made it into enough vids that I knew what to look for; low-to-the-ground, heavily armored, and slow-as-hell.

  The shuttle that showed up in Ludlow was all of those things, and yet it still bore almost no resemblance to a bus. If anything, it looked like some sort of wheeled centipede, multiple armored segments attached to each other in a long line that stretched almost seventy feet down the road. There were no windows to speak of and every segment of the centipede sported a round turret on its roof and side walls.

  It wasn’t the array of armaments that had my attention though—the security at the Academy put even a shuttle like this to shame, after all—it was the figures soaring overhead.

  The shuttle was escorted by Capes.

  It made sense, in retrospect. The information on the shuttles had been freely available on the net, as Silt had already demonstrated, which raised the likelihood of Black Hat intervention. The army was all well and good, but where Black Hats were concerned, you needed Capes to fight them. If every shuttle had an escort like this one, it meant a significant number of the Free States’ heroes were working escort duty instead of their usual patrols.

  It also meant my margin of error was smaller than I’d anticipated. It was one thing to smuggle a weapon past normal soldiers, and even to use that weapon before the Hole’s guards could take me down. It was another thing entirely to do so under the watchful eyes of the country’s finest.

  The lead Cape swooped down from the sky. Her crimson and silver costume identified her as Mistral, a long-time member of the Society, the other Los Angeles super-team. Unlike the Bay Area Brawlers, who Tessa had accurately labeled as San Francisco’s “B” team, the Society Capes were just as well regarded as their counterparts in the Defenders.

  The Society also believed that there was no such thing as too much firepower, which is why the Wind Dancer held a cannon that was everything Randy’s old rifle hadn’t been; sleek, modern, and capable of spitting out over a thousand rounds a minute.

  Mistral came to a halt ten feet in the air above us, her crimson sash streaming in the breeze that kept her afloat. An armored helmet hid her features, including a nose that I knew had been broken at least a dozen times. “Names and occupations, citizens.”

  “Randal S. Thurston, ma’am.” Randy gave the Cape a little bow that didn’t look nearly as ridiculous as it should have. “Proprietor and, as of about two years ago, sole resident of this here town.”

  “And you?” That visor rotated in my direction, the cannon in her hands as steady as a rock.

  “Damian Banach,” I told her, mindful of the other Capes that had spread out to encircle us from above.

  “The boy’s a student at the Academy,” Randy filled in helpfully. “Here to catch a ride to the Hole.”

  I couldn’t see Mistral’s frown, but I could hear it. “This was supposed to just be a charging stop. I wasn’t told anything about additional passengers. How did you even get out here?”

  “I had a classmate from the Academy teleport me over.” I shrugged. “Meant to board back in Los Angeles, but I kind of overslept in the medical ward.”

  “In the med ward, huh…” For the first time, something like humor entered the other woman’s voice. “You wouldn’t happen to have been part of the little brawl that went down at The Liquid Hero?”

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  “The bar?” She laughed. “I graduated in 61. We practically helped build that place. As for the fight, it’s all anyone’s talking about. I hear Paladin’s kid put Backstreet right on his ass?”

  Jesus. Word really did travel, considering the shuttle had left the very next morning.

  “Yeah. First time I’ve ever seen Matthew lose his temper.”

  “Good for him. Wasn’t sure the boy had it in him.” Mistral descended the rest of the way to the ground, touching down in a brief swirl of dirt and wind. Up close, she was shorter than I’d expected, the gleaming costume emphasizing her broad shoulders and narrow waist. She was dark-skinned and remarkably stacked, one of the few details I did remember from her vids.

  Growing up without much in the way of an outlet for my hormones… was it any surprise I’d gravitated to Cape vids? Now that I’d spent a year at the Academy, I understood just how much sweat and tears went into maintaining the physiques I’d seen on all those vids. Frankly, that just made me appreciate it even more. And a little bit relieved I wasn’t going to live long enough to wear a costume of my own

  “You’re going to have to wait here for just a few minutes, Mr. Banach. Like I said, we
weren’t expecting new passengers, so all of the equipment is packed away.”

  “Equipment?”

  “President Weatherly’s order grants access only to blood relatives or spouses of the inmates interred within the Hole. We need to verify your identity and that you meet the criteria.” A few armed soldiers had left the shuttle’s lead car, carrying something heavy between them. “You don’t mind a little blood, do you?”

  “I’m a first-year,” I reminded her. “If I did, I’d be screwed.”

  “True enough.” She had a nice laugh. “Mr. Thurston, is there an external outlet we can hook up to?”

  “Sure enough,” said Randy. “Also have a suggestion for you young folk. Given the size of that behemoth on wheels over there, recharging’s going to take a while. You might want to get that started first.”

  “Not a bad idea.” Mistral said something into her short-wave radio—one of the multi-band versions only Cape teams had access to—and the shuttle inched its way up to the charging station.

  By the time it had arrived, the soldiers were there with their own burden. While the scale didn’t compare, it had a lot of similarities to the machine used for the powers test. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it also reminded me of the Maze.

  “It’s a modification of the testing machine’s design,” Mistral confirmed.

  “And the Maze?”

  “Different Technomancer, I think, although the testing machine may have been his starting point.” She paused. “How do you know about the Maze? I didn’t think they’d brought it out for this year’s Graduation Games.”

  “They didn’t.” I swallowed. “I saw it up close and personal during the year. Unfortunately.”

  “The High-Three Healer boy?”

  “Unicorn. Yeah.” Guess I shouldn’t have been surprised she’d heard about that too.

  “That was a dark day for the Free States. Lost both a Healer and a High-Four Pyro. Minor miracle we didn’t lose the other two on the scene, from what I hear.” She paused again, but this time, the silence lasted for a good ten seconds. “Wait… Damian, you said?”