See These Bones

by Chris Tullbane

  Then my right hand, my good hand, reached up of its own accord. Fingertips brushed the exposed skin of the Black Hat’s thick ankle.

  I let all that emptiness go. Out of me and into him.

  Fuck you, asshole.

  They weren’t the greatest last words ever spoken—or thought, since I lacked the breath to speak them—but they were mine.

  Sometimes you just have to take what you can get.

  CHAPTER 75

  That’s how it was supposed to go anyway. Orphan Crow, Academy dropout, and would-be murderer giving his life to take the big bad down with him.

  Problem is, it didn’t quite work like that.

  Oh, I killed the fucker; make no mistake about that. All the death that had pooled in a hundred soldiers and I don’t know how many Capes flooded through me into Carnage like a tidal wave he couldn’t see. Asshole never knew what hit him.

  What I didn’t expect was that the emptiness I’d forced into him didn’t consume his energy so much as displace it. As black waters filled his nine-foot-tall, unstoppable frame, drowning every molecule of his existence, all the energy that had previously occupied that space was pushed out along the path of least resistance.

  Into me.

  For a brief, horrifying moment, I thought that was going to kill me, wild energy running roughshod through my broken body, but what my shell couldn’t hold spilled right back out of it. I pulled my hand away from Carnage’s ankle and the excess energy splashed into the bloody earth beneath me, soaking into the soil until it was lost from sight.

  When it was over, I took a breath and it didn’t hurt. Stretched my legs out and watched them move. Every part of me felt vibrant and energetic, whole and unharmed, and the emptiness at my center was silent and still for the first time in months, curled in about itself like a seed waiting for spring to sprout once more.

  I rose to my feet, and watched Carnage’s body crumble into dust. Looked from that swiftly decaying body to the wide eyes of the half-dozen Capes who had just arrived, their bright costumes scorched and pitted by what looked like magma.

  “You’re too fucking late,” I told them. “We already lost.”

  “Look again,” said the lead Cape, a pale-skinned woman in the Society’s colors.

  I turned and stared.

  A single man floated in the sky, the sun a halo around him as the last vestiges of Tempest’s storm dissipated.

  Dominion had arrived.

  •—•—•

  Thirty minutes after that, it was over. The Black Hats who didn’t scatter or surrender died where they stood, most of them swatted like insects by the Free States’ only Full-Five. Twenty minutes later, a rescue operation was in full swing. Fliers from the Society and Red Flight brought in paramedics from the 184th Regiment as well as both Academy Healers and the recruiter who’d been visiting campus.

  I stood in the middle of the chaos and tried not to be in the way.

  I stayed there for almost an hour. Mistral had just returned from taking some of the critically injured to the nearest hospital when she caught sight of me. I watched her land and make a beeline toward the open circle of space and silence that seemed to follow wherever I went. Someone intercepted her; a Cape I didn’t know. I couldn’t hear their words, but the way that other Cape kept glancing in my direction told me exactly who they were talking about.

  Mistral listened for a few seconds, then shook her head. She stepped around the other Cape, ignored whatever it was they were still saying, and continued in my direction.

  We stood together in silence for a long while before she spoke. “Hi, Damian,” she finally said. “Are you okay?”

  “My father is dead.” I’m not sure why I said it. I’m not sure that I even cared, but the words slipped out anyway.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t know if I am.” I frowned into the distance.

  “Maybe you should sleep on it?” she suggested. “There’s a kind of shock we all experience after even minor battles… and this one was anything but minor.”

  “Tempest died.” Maybe she was onto something. Maybe battle shock why I kept saying things she already knew.

  “I know,” said Mistral. “Rocket too. And Moth and far too many other good men and women, Powers and normals alike.”

  “Where was he?” She followed my gaze to where Dominion stood in his own circle of space and silence. “If he’d been here—”

  “Then we’d have lost all of Arizona and New Mexico to our southern neighbor,” said Mistral, her own voice going hard. “Tezcatlipoca took the field today for the first time in decades. Dominion spent seven hours battling him, giving the rest of us time to destroy the monster’s foot soldiers.”

  “Oh.”

  “There are no easy days, Damian. No easy days and no easy decisions.” For just a moment, she hesitated, then she reached out, patted me on the shoulder, and walked away.

  I watched her go, watched until she took to the sky with the next handful of injured victims, and then I turned and looked again at Dominion, still standing in his bubble of silence.

  •—•—•

  Any other day, a teenager drenched in blood would be the kind of thing that people took notice of… but this wasn’t any other day. As I walked through the crowd, I could tell who knew what I had done and who didn’t. The ones who did skittered out of my path like scared animals. The others ignored me entirely.

  It was almost a relief when I reached Dominion’s pocket of quiet.

  Maybe it was because he predated the Cape generation or maybe it was because he didn’t need to worry about things like public relations or sponsorship deals, but Dominion had never been featured in a single Cape vid. Even when people told stories about him, it was about what he’d done or said and not what he looked like. I think most of the country had built up a certain image in our minds. Taller than Paladin, stronger than Atlas, square-jawed and handsome, with eyes that blazed like miniature suns.

  Turns out Dominion was kind of short, with broad shoulders and a noticeable paunch pushing against his classic red and gold costume. His hair was cropped, but the stubble was steel-grey, and his skin, dark brown like the Bakersfield mud after a rainfall, was thick with wrinkles. He didn’t look his age—he had to be pushing at least a hundred, given that he’d been in his twenties during the Break—but he was a thousand miles of bad road from looking young. His eyes, an unremarkable brown, were locked on the corpse at his feet.

  In death, Tempest was older than she’d looked in the vids, white strands of hair mixed in with dark, and crow’s feet and lines around her eyes and mouth. Someone had wrapped her body in a blanket, hiding most of the damage she’d taken, and her eyes were shut. I’d love to say she looked peaceful, lying there, but that’s just not how death works.

  “Are you okay?”

  No clue why I, of all people, thought it was a good idea to check on Dominion. Maybe it was that battle shock again. Maybe sucking down Carnage’s life energy had fucked with my head. Only thing I knew for sure was nobody else had seemed willing to do it.

  Dominion kept his eyes on Tempest’s body, his reply a slow rumble that I had to strain to hear.

  “Some people see a light and all they want to do is snuff it out. It’s always been like that, even before Dr. Nowhere.” He bent over and picked up a ribbon that had come free from Tempest’s hair, clenched it tightly in broad, weathered hands that could shatter mountains. “But me, I wasn’t satisfied with just a light. I had to build a bonfire that our enemies could see from orbit. And what did it get us?”

  I wasn’t sure the question was meant for me. I wasn’t even sure what he was talking about, but I took my best shot at answering anyway. “A country where everyone can be free. Even normals.”

  “And what happens to this country when I’m gone?”

  After a moment’s thought, I shook my head and shrugged.

  “I guess whoever’s left will do what we can to hold the line.”

  He didn
’t say anything for a long moment, staring off into the distance, standing over the body of a dead heroine young enough to be his great-granddaughter.

  Eventually, he nodded.

  “Good man.” He spared me a second glance. “What’s your Cape name, son?”

  I discarded a half-dozen options, including—sadly enough—Baron Boner. Somehow, after a year of not knowing the answer to that question, only one name seemed to fit.

  “Walker.”

  CHAPTER 76

  Now that would be a good way to end the story.

  Problem is, that’s not how the story ends. Not even this little piece of it.

  You already know how it ends.

  I told you back at the very beginning.

  CHAPTER 77

  My expulsion hearing was held in a conference room near the Academy’s administrative offices. There were no lawyers or audience members. There wasn’t even a judge to bang his gold-plated gavel, like you see sometimes in old vids. It was just the review board and the defendant aka the accused aka me.

  This being the Academy, the review board was mostly Capes. Bard was the lone normal, flanked by Macy Johnson, Isabel Ferra, the adult Paladin, and Dominion himself. I didn’t know how my Ethics professor had made the cut, but I was pretty sure she was the only one of the bunch who actively hated me.

  By the fourth hour, I was considerably less confident.

  By the second day, I was wondering how I’d survive on the streets when they were done.

  It’s kind of funny… I’d spent the whole damn semester worrying about getting kicked out because I was too weak to be a Cape. The battle at the Hole had proved I belonged… yet it was my presence at that battle that might end up getting me expelled.

  Shit’s just never easy, is it?

  “I think we’ve spent enough time on the specifics,” said Bard, a very long time after I’d come to the same conclusion. “Mr. Banach left campus without permission, breaking one of the stipulations of his continued enrollment, and he did so by convincing his classmate to engage in a potentially dangerous overreach of her abilities. There’s also the question of his woeful academic performance, several reported incidences of physical violence, and a multitude of vehement complaints from at least one of his professors.”

  Isabel Ferra didn’t even have the grace to look ashamed about that last bit.

  “Do you have any words you’d like to offer in your defense, Damian?” finished Bard.

  I frowned. “I had to leave campus if I was going to see my father. Maybe the timing sucked, but that was President Weatherly’s fault, not mine. And if I hadn’t been there—”

  “Your actions at the Hole are irrelevant to these proceedings,” snapped Isabel.

  “Well, that’s pretty convenient for that one anonymous professor who’s had it in for me from the moment she heard a Crow was coming to school,” I shot back.

  “Damian…” warned Bard.

  “Sorry.” It’d been almost two weeks since the battle, but I was still sleeping even worse than normal. I pinched the bridge of my nose and tried to muster up a usable defense. “I only asked Wormhole for help because the brawl made me miss my shuttle. She didn’t seem concerned about the distance of the jump.” I paused to hedge that statement just a bit. “Outside of being able to fit into her dress for the dance when all was said and done.”

  “As for my grades…” I shrugged. “I was passing most of my classes until it became obvious I wasn’t going to make it to second-year. And I did pass the first semester. Right?”

  “Somehow,” muttered Isabel.

  I nodded. “Well, there you go. Is there anything I missed?”

  “I’m pretty sure there was something about violence,” Macy said helpfully, tossing in a wink and a grin.

  That was one accusation I felt no guilt over. “Violence is part of what we do, isn’t it? Half our classes are about training us to fight. I’m not saying I’m a model student,” I admitted, “and maybe I could have handled some things better—like when that dickhead accused me of killing Unicorn—”

  “Mr. Banach,” warned Bard.

  “Right.” I winced. “Anyway, Capes need people that will run toward the action instead of away from it. If nothing else, I’d say I meet that criteria.”

  “Courage is part of what makes a Cape, but self-control is an even greater necessity,” said Dominion, speaking for the first time in hours.

  “I’m not the first-year who punched Backstreet in the face—”

  Matthew’s father scowled.

  “—but yeah, self-control is something I should work on,” I admitted.

  “Mr. Banach is not the first student to get in a fight on campus, and he’ll be far from the last,” said Paladin dismissively. “Unlike Isabel, I am interested in his exploits at the Hole.” He leaned forward in his chair, pinning me to mine with a hard-eyed stare. “In particular the fact that he used a piece of Legion tech to kill Firewall.”

  I hid another wince. The revelation that they knew about the gun had been an unpleasant surprise. Of the six civilians that Fallout had spared for hostage usage, two others had actually survived… and one had not only witnessed my shooting of Firewall but reported it during his debriefing. The only reason I wasn’t on trial for possessing contraband technology was that the witness only remembered me shooting it. Nobody knew I’d been the one to smuggle it in, which meant I’d been able to keep my plot to kill my dad—and Her Majesty’s involvement in that plot—secret.

  “It’s like I told you,” I said, lying through my little Crow teeth, “I saw it on the ground after the initial attack and grabbed it. I knew a gun when I saw one.”

  “Care to hazard a guess on where it might have come from?” That was from Dominion, who was a hell of a lot harder to lie to than Paladin.

  I shook my head. “All I can think is that one of the other conspirators smuggled it in, like Jaws’ wife did the dampener override. Maybe they dropped it when Red went ballistic?”

  “That seems far-fetched,” said Paladin.

  “Does it?” Macy shook her head. “The alternative explanation is that some unrelated third party also smuggled in Legion tech. Who? Why? And what are the chances that this individual was, by pure coincidence, in the same group of twenty that was down there when the escape attempt occurred?”

  “All good questions,” said Bard, rubbing his eyes tiredly, “and ones which I suspect the Security Council will be grappling with over the next several months. However, as Isabel pointed out, Mr. Banach’s actions at the Hole are not on trial here. Is there anything else you’d like to say, Damian?”

  I’d had two days to think about what I wanted to say. I straightened up in my chair and met his gaze. “Yeah. Whether you all want to talk about it or not, what happened at the Hole proves I have some power. All I want is the opportunity to use that power.”

  For a terrifying moment, I thought nobody would ask, but finally, Dominion spoke.

  “For what purpose?”

  “To protect the people who don’t have any. Isn’t that why Capes exist?”

  •—•—•

  I thought I’d scored some points by paraphrasing Dominion’s own quote about power, but ten minutes later, I was back out in the hall, sitting in an uncomfortable, slightly wobbly chair while the review board debated my fate within.

  It had been a tiring two weeks and I was still a long way from processing everything that had gone down out in the desert. As horrific as the battle had been, it was the stuff before it that was keeping me up at nights. My father. Sally Cemetery. The mysterious third party and whatever it was he had done. I’d gone to the Hole for answers and revenge. In some ways, I’d gotten both, but they had only made things worse.

  Stifling a yawn, I watched a student amble down the hall in my direction, Glass in one hand and a manila folder in the other. He was about my age, but short, and soft around the edges. Either he was a normal student—working as an office aide through the year-end break—or a
n incoming first-year, with no clue whatsoever about the hell Nikolai had in store for him.

  With his head buried in his Glass, he’d almost reached me before he realized someone else was there. He shrieked and threw up his hands.

  I plucked his Glass out of the air, but the manila folder went everywhere, spilling out type-written pages and a handful of black and white photographs.

  “You okay?” I passed the Glass back over.

  “You’re him, aren’t you?” His eyes were wide and glued to my face.

  “Him who?”

  “The Crow who killed Carnage.”

  Got to admit it; I really loved the sound of that. The little bit of awe in his voice didn’t hurt either.

  “Call me Walker.” The first thing I’d done with my own Glass was verify that the name hadn’t already been claimed. For once, luck had been on my side.

  “What was it like?”

  In my mind, I watched Tempest fall from the sky. Just like that, the conversation stopped being fun.

  “A lot of good people died,” I finally said. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t worth it.”

  “Oh.” He dropped his eyes, and started stuffing photos and pages back into his manila folder.

  “Wait.” I peered over his shoulder. “What are those?”

  “Black Hat files,” he told me, opening the folder wide. At the top of the loose stack was the picture that had gotten my attention.

  Her Majesty was instantly recognizable in the figure-hugging leather outfit and ever-present motorcycle helmet. The helmet’s visor was down, as usual, showing that same smiley face decal, and she had one gloved hand raised toward the camera, middle finger extended.

  “That’s—”

  “The Queen of Smiles,” the student supplied helpfully. “Now there’s someone worth going bad for, am I right?”

  I tucked that name away for future research. “I heard she was more mercenary than Black Hat.”