“What does that mean? Atlantic City’s been down for more than a week and there should be a relief effort –”
“You dopey tart,” Lionheart replies. “You think Atlantic City’s the only place gone down the tubes?”
“You what?” I stab back at him. “And WTF tubes are you on about?”
“The whole United Kingdom’s at point of collapse,” Lionheart says matter-of-factly.
“You were attacked too?”
“No,” the big Brit says and scratches at the replica mane adorning the broad fringe across the front of his plum-and-lion hair-colored bodysuit.
The middle of the chest is a heraldic crest – a shield, if you will – a gold pancake stack of rearing lions within a field of red. He doesn’t immediately go to explain himself.
“Their financial system collapsed within a day of the ACSX getting wiped out,” Maxtor says.
Lionheart nods. Mistress Snow and Sentinel move through and past us, following the trail of Mercury’s departure. I’m still picking over Lionheart’s comments – not so much the wider geo-political picture he paints, but the details about the hero’s own personal orbit.
“So you came to check on Atlantic City?” I ask him.
Lionheart nods.
“And London’s burning and you don’t care?”
“Oh, it’s not like that,” the Brit super says with a hurt look on his masked mug.
“Then what gives?”
“I’m like these guys,” Lionheart says and motions to Maxtor with the Enigma still bent slightly double beside him recuperating and scratching at his white-stubbled chin. “Crisis in Atlantic City’s brought them out of the woodwork. We’re tracing this to its source, to see if we can make a difference.”
“Shit, we could’ve used you in Afghanistan.”
“What do you mean? I was in Afghanistan,” Lionheart says – and I doubt my own memory a second, until he gives a tiny nervous titter and looks askance and I grit my teeth inwardly and curse myself for so often being right.
“I don’t remember seeing you in Afghanistan.”
“Well, I can’t say I remember you. What’s your call-sign again?”
“Cusp,” I snap.
“No, still don’t remember you.”
“Maybe that’s the thing about Afghanistan,” the Enigma chimes in. “If you can remember Afghanistan, then maybe you weren’t really there?”
He gives a weak giggle which only earns my scowl.
“Are you saying . . . you were in Afghanistan too?”
“Sure,” the old geezer says, finally upright again and absorbing all the light so meeting his eye isn’t so much uncomfortable as actually quite difficult.
“Afghanistan was the biggest event in the mask scene for years,” the Engima says with faux enthusiasm. “I wasn’t missing out on that. And what a party!”
“Look, I don’t remember you either –”
“I remember the Enigma,” Lionheart throws in cheerily. He meets the Enigma’s eyes a bit like I did, smiling weakly. “Right?”
The Enigma is slow to his nod, which only grows with vigor.
“Sure, man. Yeah. Yeah, I remember seeing you there too.”
“You assholes,” I mutter as Seeker’s shadow advances to join us.
“What’s your mission here?” she asks the geriatrics as Sentinel and Mistress Snow return like two lovers from a stroll.
“Your robot is missing,” Sentinel says.
“Screw Robocop.”
“There’s no mission,” Lionheart says amid the crossfire of dialogue. “We’re trying to get to the bottom of this. What about you two . . . and I must say, two rather fetching beauties?”
“Keep it in your pants, pal,” I snap.
Lionheart gives me the sort of bon vivant careless grin that was like statecraft for me as Zephyr, somehow only making it even more resoundingly awful. I force my face into a mask, doing that trick beautiful women everywhere do, the self-aware desultory flick of the lashes that may as well be like squatting to piss in my disdain. And as a weapon that only works if you’re hot enough to inflict harm on even the sturdiest egos, Holland is uranium-tipped. Lionheart sulks aside as I do my imperious girl twirl-thing to confer once more with Seeker.
“That was a hell of a distraction, but now what?”
“You’re asking me?” Loren replies. “I thought you were running the show here.”
“Me?”
“Yes, Zephyr.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“You can’t handle anyone else calling the shots anyway, so you might as well just get on with it,” Seeker says.
“That’s some passive aggressive shit you’ve got yourself there, girlfriend.”
“Don’t call me girlfriend.”
“Don’t call me Zephyr.”
“Fine,” Seeker says, her armor veritably bristling with irritation.
She moves off a moment, hands on spiked hips, a gently frustrated “Fucking hell” escaping like a deprecatory laugh at herself and us and our predicament that is humanizing and at the same time utterly adorable.
“Thank you,” I say. “I always loved hearing you swear.”
“You swear too much, Joe.”
“Sometimes, I honestly think I don’t swear enough, given the fucking state of the world and the state of Being in it, you know? The human predicament. I dunno. It does my fucking head in.”
“So you’re always telling me.”
I hear a cough to one side and there’s Sentinel giving us his best leg-opener, a steely sideburned stare with his enormous arms crossed over his almost busty chest. I give him the moment he so obviously craves and note his gaze – this man who was our very own Superman, immortalized in song and even on stage when I was a boy – and his noble acknowledgement dips to my cleavage twice in two eye-blinks. I can’t help the bizarre matronly disapproval that overwhelms my face, and Sentinel’s gaze hardens in reply and the sullen look becomes nearly, but not quite a jeer.
“When you ladies have finished making out, we have work to do,” he says.
I’m too surprised at my childhood hero oppressing my newfound femininity to actually say anything, which is a first to be sure, yet for Seeker, it seems like it doesn’t even register. She only nods, an acknowledgement of the more pressing reality underlying all our varied histories and interpersonal bullshit. And in unloosening that look, she ropes the others into a battlefield conference.
“We need to combine all the strength we can so we can act quickly when we’re ready,” I say.
“Ready for what?” Mistress Snow asks.
“That’s the bit we still have to figure out yet.”
“I don’t follow.”
I blink at the older woman, slowly trying to get a read on her sincerity.
“Are you telling me you don’t understand or was that just the Alzheimer’s?”
Mistress Snow fixes me with her best droll look.
“You say that like there’s some kind of stigma around mental illness, Cusp,” she replies. “As a woman, I would’ve thought you might be more forgiving to an older woman, competing like we do in this men’s world.”
“Look, if you actually have early onset dementia I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean it to be a personal slur,” I say. “I guess I just didn’t like your uppity tone and the general aura of entitlement flowin’ around you.”
“Nice.”
“Jesus Christ, ladies,” Sentinel growls, then lowers his voice to a loud whisper as if to impart some urgency – as if the sincerity of his words therefore make them truthful. “Would you crazy bitches please just calm the fuck down for five minutes so we can figure out what we’re doing here?”
We achieve faster-than-light travel in our solidarity. Mistress Snow steps alongside me and Seeker glides in behind, increasingly with the bulk of some weird human-to-mecha transformation going on that I wonder for a moment if I should be worried about.
“That’s seriously uncalled for, Sentinel
,” I tell him.
“If you would please calm the hell down then it wouldn’t be necessary.”
He says it in a levelled tone, but it is an implied threat with his powerhouse physique behind it, however many years Sentinel might have under his belt.
“So you calling us ‘crazy bitches’ is actually totally on us, because we made you say it because we didn’t hear you clearly?” I say slowly back to him like I can’t quite believe the shit I am saying myself.
Sentinel pauses a moment and reluctantly nods.
“How does that sound to you, you know, as far as all those values and ethics and shit you’ve always said you’re defending?”
I stare at him for two or three breaths. Shit wouldn’t melt in this guy’s mouth.
“Man,” I say again slowly. “You were my childhood hero, you know. I was so thrilled to get powers because I wanted to live a life of adventure and being famous for helping people and being badass like you were, you silver fox old bastard. Now look at you. You’re just . . . You’re an asshole.”
“You’ve got a mouth on you, young lady –”
“Do not say what I think you think comes next.”
He halts. To be fair, maybe he wasn’t going to say anything at all. We face off a moment and I give a sigh. Relenting.
“You’re not an asshole,” I say regretfully. “I don’t know you well enough to judge you like that. That’s me doing the same thing you’re doing to me because someone else did it to you and being bulletproof and able to fly and melts steel beams with your eyes, none of that shit makes us any more impervious to that shit either.”
We meditate on the truth of that as a collective.
“But the eyebeams thing, that’s totally awesome by the way,” I say, trying to keep the tone of a mildly demented transgender fanboy from my voice. “If I had that power, I honestly don’t know how I’d stop myself just melting idiots to death some days if they got in my way.”
“No one could,” Sentinel says and we share a laugh.
“Seriously you faggots, what’s the freaking plan?” the Enigma says from off to one side.
I roll my eyes at yet more thoughtcrime and sigh and let that one go through to the catcher. At least we’re not beating the shit out of each other, which was totally on the cards a few moments before.
“The bit we have to work out,” I say and motion to Mistress Snow as if we’re just resuming our conversation after a coughing fit of medium length and a glass of water. “That’s where we find out exactly WTF is going on here and who is behind it.”
“You’ve said that twice now. What is ‘WTF’?” Sentinel asks.
Before I can demand to know if Sentinel’s serious, Maxtor intervenes.
“What the fuck. It means ‘what the fuck’,” he mutters.
“We need to find out who’s behind everything going wrong,” Seeker says.
“And we have a lead, right?”
Nodding, she replies, “Yes, but we’ll have to leave Atlantic City. Baroness was the procuring agent for whoever hired the guys who hit the Stock Exchange. She’ll know who she was putting them up for – and Baroness is in England.”
I rock out on the logistics of that one and for one fleeting moment imagine explaining myself if I drop in on my ex-wife.
.
That would be hot.
Zephyr 21.12 (Coda)
IN THE RUINS of a vivisected shopping mall, we pull a big white plastic table and chairs upright and sit like the last knights of some round table on a Counter Earth where male and female supers live like nobility in the ruins of the world they have wrought, distinct from the underclass of everyday peasantry below them. And then I remember The Twelve. And the ruin of their world hangs over me as we contemplate the unclear task ahead, rumbling stomachs disappointed by an earlier scavenge showing the whole place already picked clean.
“What do you know about Baroness and how do you think it ties to this Mikhail Whats-ski?” I ask Loren.
“Khodorkovsky,” she says.
“I actually knew that,” I say, because I did. “Except I don’t know how. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“No. By now I’d be on my cell Googling it,” Seeker says.
“Same.”
“Where have you heard the name before?” Maxtor asks me.
“If I knew that, we’d already have the answer to my question.”
“But that’s not the relevant question, is it?” Sentinel says. “Where are we going?”
“Do you know Twilight and do you know where he lives? His island?”
The three male masks look blank at all mentions, but Mistress Snow discreetly lets us know she’s has visited said destination previously as the guest of Twilight’s Ride-My-Face Airlines.
“I’ve been there before,” she says throatily. “I could take us there again.”
I would go on, but I pause to scrutinize the tiny embarrassed fey smirk decorating the older woman’s face. She catches my eye and her stare hardens, emboldened, challenging. This woman was born with a dick in her mouth, so any stupid and more than slightly hypocritical ideas I might have about slut-shaming such a veteran party girl dissolve beneath her sodium glare.
“Alright, fuck,” I say only partly to myself. “We need to regroup –”
“Again?”
“Fuck off, Maxtor,” I say. “If Twilight has any of my . . . I mean, any other, you know, masks with him, we can assemble a force that might be able to start taking the city back.”
“From who?”
“One fucking thing at a time, OK? Jesus.”
A quick scan of the room meets no one ready to confront my irritated glare, so I curtly nod and dust myself off and secretly wish for a bowl of crushed chocolate-and-cherry pop tarts soaking in milk as I move through the shattered atrium of the mall and only notice the broken helicopter suspended upside-down high above us like we are in a Dario Argento movie as I move to the main exit and see the daylight succumbing to its nightly defeat by the forces of darkness, the slither of something feral moving amid the rubble, the sinister rock-slide of shifting pebbles and the echo of the vacant city and the chill night wind arising like serpents of ancient times summoned in the frost.
Zephyr 22.1 “Barely Legal”
SEEKER FOLLOWS ME into the newly-minted night. Somehow I can see a satellite, and then moments later I notice the stars – just a pinprick few, somehow brave or strong enough to break through the fading haze of Atlantic City’s stalled pollution.
A win for the planet.
I will only come to recognize the irony of this observation in the next few days following my trip to England to confront this Baroness creature. For now I catch my own reflection in the jagged black glass of the opposite icon building likewise defenestrated on the most cataclysmic scale possible. I look ridiculously sleek and curvaceous in yonder profile despite my exhaustion, and when I look down over this stolen body I see the elements haven’t been kind to my costume. It’s barely legal in a few places, the leather pants in strips at the thighs. I feel a deep inner exhaustion that is the least sexy thing I could imagine. The left side of my face is one deepening bruise from my fight with Mercury before.
Seeker steps beside me, a hand on my shoulder now half metal-clad.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
“People still say that?” I reply.
“I say that. What are you thinking?”
“That I always thought of myself as a male lesbian. I ever tell you that?”
“Only about twenty or thirty times, Joe.”
She shakes her head. A few waifish wisps of hair escape the hard-to-describe nanotech and not-entirely-corporeal helm-thing now ensconcing her like a halo, a glowing blue strip above her forehead casting a pallor over Loren’s natural haunted beauty, rendering her ghost-like and spectral, her head just a three-dimensional hologram.
“How are you?” I ask. “Quite a change of duds.”
“Yes,” she says, and for a moment as Loren ex
amines her own outstretched arm glistening with what now appears to be a sheen of nearly crystalline metallic elements only half-pretending to be an armored suit, I fear her mind has gone to the alien realm of whoever designed her misappropriated non-Euclidean tech.
Then a mischievous light affirms in her eye and she swivels to look at me.
“It’s healed me, Joe. I can feel it. Completely.”
I look her up and down, realizing how truly she speaks. No amount of alien technology is going to remove what this woman has seen and experienced, but the flesh is fuller on her blue-lit face, the lips like I knew them once, a glamour to the set of her brows, always cast as they are in that quizzical mix where naivety becomes suspicion.
“You look . . . better,” I say weakly.
“The Glow’s gone,” she says as enthusiastically as if I’d said nothing. “I don’t want it either.”
“Seeker?”
“The powers? I think they’re gone. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know that I care.”
Loren looks thoughtful a moment, then her eyes flash and she snaps back to me with an audible whirring of concealed mechanics.
“It’s inside of me, Joe,” she whispers, hand clasping my shoulder, her voice tinkling with guilty delight to share the strangeness of it all.
“You’re liking the new Seeker,” I say and laugh and add, “Hell, I’m liking the new Seeker. Where did it come from?”
“The suit?” Loren replies. “I don’t know. I don’t know it wants to tell me.”
“Oh here we go,” I say almost tiredly. “The suit has a brain?”
“No, nothing like that. You wouldn’t understand. Besides, you can hardly talk about parasites, Zephyr. Or should I say Cusp? Or should I just speak direct to whatever that thing is I can detect on these sensors . . . What is that coiled within her, Joe?”
*
I’M STUNNED LOREN knows my dark secret, but she quickly explains the ideational costume comes with its own galactic-class sensory apparatus. She can discern the being within me in ways I can’t imagine and which she can’t explain within the limits of human language. We end in the slightly unhappy middle ground of Loren being cool with me not disclosing my possible possession and me now knowing she can scan and assess me fifteen million ways to Sunday and I can’t even detect it, let alone do anything about it.
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