“I can’t hear you,” I say and throw my hands up.
Not knowing who I really am, Night Angel gives a petulant sigh and extracts her gum and squishes it into the middle of the screen and flounces back to her bench, the eye contact between her and her cell-mate showing they’re not exactly best buds. I might say or even think more at this stage except two well-dressed agents sweep in from beyond my field of vision and step through a hitherto unseen panel in the screen that hisses open.
Annie Black and Heracleon.
“Since when were you working for the Feebs?” I ask the former (new) Sentinel.
Heracleon still wears the headband despite the Armani duds and his brow furrows beneath the jewelry as he eyes me up and down as if seeing me for the first time.
“Excuse me? I didn’t know we’d met,” he says, and of course technically he’s correct.
I snap my mouth shut, trying not to let Cusp’s lip tremble as I switch my gaze to Miss Black, trying for sympathetic and instead coming up with something closer to irritated. A mime I ain’t.
“Name?” Annie barks at me.
“Excuse me?”
“Your name,” she says archly. “We don’t have you on file. Are you registered?”
“I think I might plead the fifth on this,” I tell her, then thumb-motion at her offsider. “Can’t he tell you who I am? He’s a pre-cog, right?”
“I’ve explained this a million times,” Heracleon says. “It’s cosmic awareness, not fortune-telling, OK?”
I shrug. Annie checks me over once more looking mystified.
“Have we met before?” she asks. “You know, apart from the other day?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Nice of you to turn on your own people in a crisis – those of us who haven’t rolled over already,” I add, eyes back to Heracleon.
“We’ve deputized a number of registered parahumans as part of the crisis response,” Miss Black says sans excuse. “Likewise, we’ve had to press these old holding cells into service, so . . . apologies if the facilities aren’t to your liking.”
The last line is pure snark and we both know it. I give her a look and she gives me a look and frankly we could cat-fight then and there, except Heracleon clears his throat as if he really can see that coming, which brings us back to the present moment.
“So, are you gonna tell us who you are?” Annie asks.
“Cusp.”
“Right. Good. And do you consent for us to –”
“Listen,” I interrupt. “Why the hell are you rounding up all these masks? If the city is in crisis, don’t you think you’ll need every –”
“We have orders,” Annie says.
“From who?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t answer to you,” she says. “Our orders are from the top.”
“Who at the top?”
“I don’t think you’re hearing me.”
“I don’t think you’re hearing me.”
Annie harrumphs and somehow produces an iPad she thrusts towards me with some kind of official-looking document enlarged.
“We just need your thumb print here,” she says.
“Thumb print? I don’t think so,” I say. “What’s it for?”
But Annie’s malicious smile turns into a feral sneer as she nods sideways to her partner.
“That’s a refusal,” she says. “Discretionary powers authorized.”
“‘Discretionary powers’? What the f–?”
Heracleon gives me his best sad face.
“You really should have complied . . . but I knew you wouldn’t.”
“You don’t know shit, you turkey,” I snap.
They take me by the upper arms and move me out into the corridor and I wouldn’t think twice about fighting them off except I feel as weak as a newborn lamb – that, plus the eight-man brick of heavily-armed SWAT guys waiting for us outside.
*
WITH ESCORT IN tow, the agents frog-march me down the corridor and into an industrial lift. All the while I berate Annie Black with questions and imprecations saying maybe she should be examining her “orders” a little more closely. Agent Black shrugs me off with that officious confidence common to bureaucrats everywhere and members of the Waffen-SS. As they propel me into another large cell, the ceiling festooned with sophisticated equipment, I can’t help feeling like the façade of this panopticon is starting to crack.
“Agent Taurus will oversee the examination,” Annie says and she and Heracleon scarper.
“Taurus?”
My first thought is fuck. This is a guy capable of the subtlety you’d expect from a guy with hooves for feet. Or trotters. Or whatever it is you call bull’s feet. And of course, just when I’m thinking this can’t get any worse, Taurus pushes through the doorway with a black-clad figure in tow who makes my stomach heave.
Me.
Zephyr 21.5 “Apocalypse”
MY OWN SMUGLY-grinning face stares back at me as my bodyjacker Matrioshka sidles behind Taurus’s broad-shouldered girth, shooting me looks that are the absolute antidote to any fondness I might have once held for myself. Me, or I should say Belle, practically dances from tiptoe to tiptoe in the ecstasy of the moment, so many layers of dramatic irony in play that I can’t tell if this is a masterpiece of cosmic proportions or some kind of trigger for the apocalypse.
“What the fuck is he doing here?” I ask with a voice of surrender.
“Zephyr?” the bull-headed schmuck replies. “I didn’t know you’d had the pleasure.”
“I have definitely not had any pleasure from this a-class douchebag,” I say.
“Then you have met,” Taurus says, pleased with himself as he maneuvers around the room and leaves him – fuck it, I’m just going to say Zephyr, as much as it galls – carte blanch to do as he will around the room.
“You can call me Agent Zephyr if you like, honey-bun,” my imposter says.
“He’s not an agent,” Taurus says quickly. “We’ve deputized compliant and registered vigilantes – people unlike yourself – to help with emergency relief efforts.”
“This is a relief effort?”
“Well, the crisis isn’t resolved yet, but we need bodies to help with processing.”
I flash Zephyr a look and one of the most self-congratulatory of smirks ever seen flowers across his face so fast that I have to look away again lest the existential nausea overwhelm me. In that moment, Taurus breaks protocol, taking me by the arm and putting me directly beneath the ganglia of technology filling the chamber, electronic hum like background muzak as a chair with restraints hisses up out of the floor and I allow myself to be urged to clamber onto it.
“Put your feet in the stirrups,” Zephyr catcalls.
“Fuck you.”
“Hey,” Taurus says and then stops us all a moment to sneeze.
“Easy with the language,” he says and dabs his snout with a well-used kerchief.
“What, you want to add bad language to my charge sheet? Which consists of what, exactly?” I hold his eyes and add, “This is bullshit.”
Taurus’s already glistening nostrils widen at the jab and he stares at me red-eyed for a long moment before turning back to my simulacra.
“She reminds me of you,” he says. “No wonder you two don’t get along.”
Matrioshka’s smart enough to play it low key, moving to the back of the room as two male technicians apply wires to me with sticky pads and reveal themselves as desperate mouth-breathing geeks as they try to carry it off without splooging in their pants. I grunt and flick hair out of my face without the benefit of my hands.
“You know one of you agents should be a woman,” I say to them.
“Emergency powers,” Zephyr shrugs. “The Mirror Act.”
“You understand we’re empowered to take whatever battery of tests we –”
“I get it,” I tell Taurus.
“Are you gonna kick up a stink or play it quiet?” he asks like he’s levelling with me. “You get out of here faster if you play by th
e rules.”
“The rules?” I try not to let my pretty blue eyes bug out of my head and basically fail. “Maybe you guys are a little too fond of the rules for your own good – a bit like your chain of command. Did you ever think about questioning the directives you’ve been given?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The city’s under siege,” I say. “Someone’s executed a co-ordinated attack to seal the world’s biggest city off from the rest of the world, and –”
“A good reason to monitor the whereabouts of every parahuman,” Taurus says.
This guy’s such a good soldier that Matrioshka doesn’t even have to use her powers to keep him towing the party line. And as far as I can tell, Belle herself is also nothing to do with whatever’s happened to Atlantic City – she’s more like an bystander enthusiastically jerking off at a vehicle crash – which means no matter what stripe of evil she might be, this chaos affects her too. Yet to read my Zephyr smirk played back at me, the only thing she looks like she’s missing is the popcorn. I flick my eyes to try and communicate some of my disgust, but a sardonic laughter is my just desserts.
“That’s strange,” one of the nerds off to the side pipes up.
Nobody actually asks the guy anything, but eyes swivel his way, thrusting him into the metaphoric spotlight. At Taurus’s irritated shrug, Poindexter motions to the bank of readouts none of us can actually see, let alone decipher.
“You said she’s unregistered, right?”
“Uh-huh,” Taurus answers.
“Dynamic field test is coming back positive, but the epidermal scan says negative.”
“What does that mean? In terms we can understand,” Taurus says and shoots me and Zephyr looks like he’s daring us to make a crack.
“It means there’s no evidence of parahuman abilities in her genetic make-up,” the technician replies.
At least he has the courtesy to look abashed at talking about me like I’m not in the room, though he plunges on with his explanation for a still baffled-looking Agent Taurus.
“Nine times out of ten cases, that means a non-terrestrial generative origin explanation if abilities are found to exist.”
“‘Do exist.’ What does that mean?”
“You know,” the guy says sheepishly. “In case someone just fucked up.”
“Oh, she’s got abilities alright,” Zephyr chimes in. “She’s dangerous.”
“So you’ve met before?” Taurus asks and looks back at him.
“Cusp and I? Oh yeah.”
And Matrioshka shoots me a grin of pure menace.
“You’re a fucking turd,” I mutter.
“OK, OK,” Taurus says, raising hands the size of dinner plates in consternation. “You tell me what classification then. We need to put this woman on record and then on ice. This is taking long enough as is.”
“On ice? What are you talking about?”
“It’s just a safety precaution,” Taurus says sideways, not even bothering to look at me. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll be fine. A little nap and this whole thing’ll be over. Good guys’ll clean up the city and you can get on with facing whatever charges you deserve for whatever you’ve been doing.”
Zephyr snickers as I scour the room in rising panic. I start pulling off sensors and Taurus moves in, smothering me with his superior strength.
“Chill the fuck out,” he snaps at me. “Classification?”
“Non-terrestrial,” the technician says in a panic now things are going titties up.
“You said that already. Be specific.”
“Extra-dimensional,” the guy says quickly. “If I had to guess – oh gee, there goes the sensor data – if I had to guess, I’d say sorcery. Magick. You know, in case I needed to explain that.”
It’s not just Taurus’s inappropriate hug that makes me go still.
The technician’s pronouncement drips into my consciousness like coffee through a filter. And my thoughts spiral off as I try to understand what this even means.
*
FOLLOWING THE EXAMINATION, Taurus, a chortling Zephyr, and the ever-waiting hit squad of goons escort me back to my holding cell. The gun-toting agents back away, as does Taurus, big nostrils flaring with indifference as another nameless technician bolt-guns a plastic bracelet on me, and for reasons I just can’t fucking fathom, this life-size parody of the man I once was lingers in the room a moment, cheeky asshole grin all but waving the white flag that the ruse is up, not that anyone appears to give a shit, panic mode the norm outside and plenty more innocent costumed adventurers filling the other holding cells. I guess now I understand how I get away with some of the shit I pull sometimes.
Zephyr – as I shall continue to call him like some mad emperor talking in the third person – turns to the hazard crew and waves that shit-eating grin like it’s a universal credit card or something.
“I just need a moment alone with this honey for a second, OK pops?”
Admittedly the squad leader is a fair age, but his expression hardens at the implied insult, though the goons merrily shut the cell door behind us all the same.
“Goody,” Zephyr says and sings, “I Think We’re Alone Now.”
“What are you even doing here?” I snap.
“Look, we’ve only got five minutes. Are you sure this is how you want to spend it? Arguing?”
“What are you talking about?”
I give myself one of those open-palmed looks as eloquent as the shrug that follows.
“Well,” he says. “You know, I’m you and you’re hot. I thought we could –”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t want to fuck yourself.”
My jaw is only hanging together by a pin at this point as Zephyr gives a nonplussed shrug and walks slowly around me in the tiny cell as if making a rent inspection.
“I thought you’d be up for that. Sorry, I really did.”
“You’re playing the role well, but you’re not me, Belle.”
“Joseph,” he replies. “Call me Joseph now.”
“Fuck you.”
“‘Fuck you, Joseph’,” he chortles, then asks me, “Do you know her name?”
“It’s Holland,” I say painfully. “I didn’t know her surname. She lost her memory. Did she even know herself?”
I stare daggers, angry already and angrier still knowing how prettily my cheeks burn at this moment. I try to settle.
“Seriously,” I ask again, voice dropping an octave and a few decibels. “Did she find out who she was in the end, before you . . . you erased her?”
“She put up a fight. I’m sorry about that,” Belle-as-Zephyr says. “She was a hell of a girl. A real role model for us ladies, huh?”
“You’re the worst kind of pervert I’ve ever met, and that’s saying something.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“Jesus, enough with the petty rejoinders,” I say with an honestly exhausted sigh. “How did I ever think you were a normal person? You’re the greatest actor I’ve ever met, Belle. You pulled the wool over on me too.”
“It wasn’t hard,” Zephyr says, cocksure with fists on hips and staring back at me with an anticipatory smile. “Once you believed I was immune to your charms, you had nothing. You’re just a soft little puppy beneath all that bluster, Joe. Who woulda guessed you really are somehow a good guy under all that shit you feel obliged to heap on yourself?”
“I’ve been bad enough, more than enough times,” I say.
“I know.” Zephyr smiles and shrugs. “The only mistake you made was thinking I was a person. I was already on my way to becoming what I am now.”
“And what’s that?”
“Better than you,” she says and smiles tightly using my face. “Immortal. Intangible. Forever. You can keep peeling the onion, but I never end.”
She looks at that moment nothing like I ever did.
“Matrioshka,” I say.
“Just like the little dolls, yes.
There’s always someone else inside.”
“I met another you once on another world,” I tell her/him. “Nothing like you. Dangerous, yes. Terrifying. But different.”
At this, Zephyr gives a theatrical snicker.
“Your chance is running out,” he says more jovially and opens his arms like I might be a lost lover, but I am not running anywhere here and s/he knows it.
“I don’t know what I ever saw in you.” I say the line with a tough guy movie voice I don’t feel and certainly don’t hear in the ladylike tones that spill from me. “But you know what?”
“What?”
“You can go fuck yourself.”
Belle only gives another laugh, whistling as she steers my stolen body, practically skipping back towards the doorway at which she stops and turns. I’m getting sick of seeing my own familiar gestures distorted in the funhouse mirrors my life has become and that anger manifests frustratingly well on my face, I’m sure, as it reflects back at me in Zephyr’s bemused reply.
“What do you even do this for, Joe? Play hero, I mean. Look at where it’s all got you.”
I stare at myself, fancying I can see something different about the depths of the eyes behind the domino mask, but maybe I’m just wishing it were so. His smile slowly eases as it seems like I won’t reply, but my words are just a long time forming, bubbling up from somewhere east of my unconscious and north a few miles off my moral center.
And I calmly take a breath.
“Can you imagine what it was like to live in medieval times, or before that?” I ask him.
Zephyr shrugs. My conversational tone stills the cut snake within, at least for now.
“I mean, really think about it,” I say. “Before there were real laws, police, government, all the stuff our society guards itself with to fool us we’re not locked in with lunatics, assassins and thieves. Think about what it was like just to be an everyday person back when you never really knew you were safe. You weren’t. If the fucking . . . plague or something didn’t get you, it could be an infected wound or a drunk neighbor or even the lord of the estate imposing his will on the peasants under his lordship, right?”
“What about it?”
“If you were a person in those times you lived with a background anxiety, an unease, a deep knowledge you just weren’t fucking safe . . . that something awful could happen to you or someone you cared about at any minute,” I say.
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