“We had a breakout while some of us were starting to question the validity of the orders,” Annie says. “After that, and with food stocks an issue, we decided to deep six the remaining internees.”
“You . . . put them under?”
“Yes.”
“Windsong?”
“Your daughter was among them.”
“Jesus. I don’t know whether to be worried or relieved.”
“We can retrieve them all,” Annie assures me.
“Where’s the guy who was in charge of all this?”
“Which guy? There’s been a pretty . . . fluid personnel during all this disaster.”
“So you finally clued in to realize something wasn’t kosher, huh?”
“I guess you want to have the last laugh, Zephyr, your present . . . circumstances notwithstanding, hey?”
I abandon the early makings of a petulant scowl. Folding my arms across my bust doesn’t really help de-escalate the arms race of bitchiness between Annie Black and me. The ridiculousness of the situation strikes me at about the same time we reach a new embankment overlooking a fortified concrete half-amphitheater with an observation platform across the bow. We mount some white-painted concrete steps, everything more like a naval academy than a prison, and from this new vantage we get a solid view over the heart of the center of Atlantic City, the skyscrapers like concentration camp survivors, an ambient phosphorescence sourced from a thousand distant lights casting the cloud-packed sky in a reddish tinge, like fire in a barrel, the night’s breeze eerily silent despite hinting at distant screams and sighs. This is the desiccated corpse of a people, a civilization cast from the rack and found wanting. Something flashes briefly in the distance and a crack like ancient thunder eventually finds its way to us, meandering over those scores of silences where once people lived and laughed and only sometimes breathed their last.
“There are thousands of them out there still,” Annie says. “We’ve repelled intruders on plenty of occasions, and lost people to them too. Fortunately we inherited a National Guard barracks during the crisis and most of St Vincent’s Hospital evacuated here as well – nurses, doctors, the whole bit.”
“Your system was compromised,” I tell her.
“Not our system. Everything. It’d have to be everything, uh, Zephyr,” Annie says. “Tell me at least you’ve worked out who’s behind it?”
“Have you ever heard of Earthsong?”
“Earthsong? Jesus Joe, I wasn’t born yesterday, even if I am still a ‘miss’ in my thirties,” she snaps.
“OK well, we’ve never crossed paths before. Earthsong was a famous super, what, when you were a kid?”
“Was she bonking John Lennon or someone? I forget,” Annie says. “If I don’t follow them on Instagram, I kind of forget who the old ones were.”
I swallow my irritation and nod back towards the cadaveric city.
“Earthsong and her followers have five nukes liberated from a North Korean submarine,” I say tersely. “She’s headquartered with a bunch of mercenary bad guys with powers – I figure at least Infernus and Raveness, Killswitch, and a couple of others. And the nukes are already at strategic points in the city.”
“Strategic to what?”
“I dunno. Assured destruction,” I tell her. “Best guess is they want to bring the twenty-first century to a standstill to combat climate change or some such shizzle.”
“Sounds a little radical to me,” Annie replies. “I recycle!”
“You’re just being glib,” I say to her. “The thing these environmentalists never consider is the Earth will be fine no matter what the ocean or weather changes. It’s just us people who’ll be fucked.”
“And all the birds and animals,” Annie says.
“Yeah them too,” I say. “Almost makes you wonder if they’re right, right?”
“What? No!”
“You too? OK, obviously it’s just me then.”
“What’s the plan, Zephyr?”
“Just . . . call me Cusp, OK? It’s too weird.”
“Yeah, no, this isn’t at all weird.”
“Where’s the guy who can unfreeze your captives?”
“Our internees, you mean. Which guy?”
“I’m going to . . . have to guess. I can’t remember his name. Like a famous composer or something?”
“Tchaikorvski?” Miss Black asks.
“Ah, that’s the one.” I’m immediately wise to her own dark look. “What?”
“You got him fired, don’t you remember?”
“Oh OK, yeah that I do remember. Now.”
Annie seems satisfied and she calls for Heracleon. The newly-minted, tiara-wearing agent hurries across to us with Vanguard strutting after him in his trademark armor. Heracleon has the whipped-for-pussy look of a classic beta and crowds Annie with his undivided attention. The whole performance looks weirdly sexist, but judging Vanguard and Annie’s blank looks, I’m the only one really troubled by it.
“Agent Black, what can I do?” Heracleon asks.
“Where is Tony from the Morgue?”
Heracleon never more resembles some stoner footballer turned straight-edge New Age stockbroker than at that moment. He puts two fingers upraised like in a little salute to his own brow, perhaps implicating the medallion-thingy strapped around his forehead. His eyes flick open again almost immediately.
“He’s in level three. But he’s been sedated.”
“Shit,” Annie says. She snaps her fingers at several nearby guards and nods to me and Vanguard. “Let’s go.”
Heracleon just watches us, and as I think about the reality of a life in this body and slowly losing my essence to Holland’s fertile biology, I wonder what exactly Heracleon knows about what awaits us down below.
*
THE GUARDS USE key passes to open the elevator, but maybe because I’m paranoid, I suggest we forego the lift entirely. Vanguard hacks the lift controls from his armor’s telemetry and then uses super-strength to re-open the lift shaft doors. From there we descend with Annie casting a quick spell to mitigate her descent.
At the level three doors, Vanguard and I combine efforts to prise entry, noting at once the lights here are fried. I cast a white phosphorescence from one upraised hand that has me feeling like Galadriel advancing into Orcish badlands. We glimpse flickering lights ahead, and since there’s no immediate trap sprung, advance we do, eventually entering an open room lit by electric lanterns suspended at key points.
The room is part hospital theatre and part . . . I don’t know what: a cryogenics chamber or maybe the hyper-sleep room from a bad 80s SF TV show. I am familiar to this sort of set-up from Lennon’s crib in Afghanistan. There are at least two definitely deceased bodies moldering on gurneys, one covered by a sheet, while IV units and other doodads are hooked up to a slumbering figure I vaguely remember as one of the technicians at White Nine. Annie swiftly disconnects him from the tubes and drip-feeds sustaining his unconsciousness and he jerks and coughs and twists over, back still fortunately turned to us, hosing out mucus before slipping back into a safe unconsciousness. I join Annie’s side and slap the skinny young guy gently.
“Did this guy ever call you?”
“What?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Tony slowly comes to his senses holding the tube from his nose as I check the other bodies and see decay has set in and things have become complicated.
“Are they dead?” the young scientist coughs.
I nod and Tony tries to stay a gentleman despite the puke splashing his epaulettes. He makes nervous eye contact with me and wipes furiously with one surprisingly hairy, chimp-like paw, looking away and even here in this moment of existential crisis and turmoil this poor sap, who doesn’t know anything about the reality of me, finds himself seemingly transported into the presence of a perfect 10, and vomit-scented state aside, radiates with the awful sickly discomfort of male inadequacy and self-loathing knowing he wouldn’t even risk taking a chance on the
likely biblical rejection. And sadly that suits me fine right now. I’m hardly about to give him any delusions to the otherwise. I know how to act like an unattainable woman as easily as the next average Joe and I look up and away and can almost palpably hear his ego deflate even further, an inverse Whoopee cushion of malefaction and the ever-precious male tears.
“Who are they?” I ask him without making eye contact.
“Newman. Lawrence Newman. I think that’s Dave Herraro. He was a janitor.”
“A janitor?” Vanguard says.
“It was Matrioshka,” I say. “My bodyjacker. She would’ve had the run of White Nine, just jumping between these puppets.”
Everyone drinks that in. Tony looks woozily my way and then tries to straighten up as he discreetly eyes me up and down while I pretend not to see him looking. I almost expect him to lick one of his eyeballs. How easy these creatures are to scorn. Too easy, perhaps.
“Security at this place is pretty lax,” I say after nearly a full ten seconds. “First you let Hubris loose. And all those brain-dead Titan clones got lifted by some ne’er do well as well. Jesus Christ, there’s no coincidences here. And you guys let me escape as well, don’t forget.”
Miss Black declines the opportunity to take the blame for the whole facility.
“I’ve got a sinking feeling about all this,” I say to myself since no one else in the room seems to give a damn.
I exit the room and Miss Black and then Vanguard follow into the corridor.
“What are you talking about, Joe?”
“I’m sick of Matrioshka playing with me like a kitten with a piece of string,” I say.
“You’re the piece of string?” Vanguard asks.
“No, I am the kitten,” I say with a dramatic and quite genuinely flustered sigh. “I am the fucking kitten and the string is my body and Matrioshka is the hand that dangles everything just painfully out of reach. Jesus Christ I am sick of this. I just want to sleep for a week.”
“I have a cot in my office,” Tony says, trying to keep up from behind.
“I was just being melodramatic,” I say to him with dead eyes. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead. At least that’s what seems to be the deal this lifetime.”
I march out of the room not really thinking about the shitty impression I have made – in other words, business as usual.
*
IT TAKES A few hours to unfreeze enough masks for my purpose and a few of them use the chance to take flight instead, but in the middle of it all I manage maybe thirty minutes’ sleep. My eyes snap open in the shitty grey light of dawn over Ryker’s Island with Shade au naturel but for a man’s black dinner jacket gently midwifing me into consciousness.
“Hey,” I say slow and sleepily and brush back my tousled green hair.
“Tony says to tell you your daughter’s awake and finished the hose-down,” Shade says. “Normally they need a full regenerative treatment, but it’s less than a fortnight some of these guys have been under.”
“And Tessa?”
“She’s eating in the main breakfast hall whenever you’re ready.”
“Jesus. The day of judgement. Is it tomorrow already?”
“Yes.”
“We have to keep moving,” I say.
“You slept for thirty-four minutes.”
“Can’t understand why I feel so nervous then.”
Shade smirks, conciliatory given I’m pretty sure maybe she and my daughter fucked.
“You can be the mother she never had.”
“You don’t know her mother.”
“Actually, we met once,” Shade says.
I am snapped more into awakeness by this than anything said thus far. I guess Shade doesn’t have to be exactly telepathic to ken my look and she adds further detail with a casual and only slightly awkward shrug.
“I went with her to a dinner thing once, remember? And I met your ex when I arrived.”
“I had no idea.”
“She seemed like a bit of a cunt, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“I am shocked, but no, I don’t mind you saying it. It’s better than me saying it.”
“You probably don’t let yourself,” Shade replies. “For all you might be a right Kevin sometimes, Joe, you still take all the blame on yourself more times than not.”
“I forgot you have a psych degree on top of your quaint little quantum physics hobby,” I snap in belated self-defense.
“Actually, yes I do,” Shade says. “But I don’t need to be Freud to know you suffer from esteem issues.”
“Esteem issues?” I bark back at her. “Are you fucking crazy?”
Needless to say we are up and I am dressed at this point.
I want to know about the others and Shade grows darker and growls something bass about meeting me downstairs and I feel my blood starting to boil and fondly remember the time we brawled in downtown Atlantic City, and an endorphic grin becalms me.
*
DOWNSTAIRS IT IS a congress of the bizarre. About fifteen of our hand-picked internees mill about a cafeteria spread of a dozen tables, freshly laundered costumes counter-point to the many nursing aggrieved scowls. First to stand at our arrival is Chamber, though as I should’ve long suspected, a different man now wears that armor than the one I called a teammate a lifetime before. Joining Chamber is Manticore, Volt, Stiletto, Night Angel and Nocturne, who looks thinner yet somehow bustier than I remember, and also wearing her hood so most of her coffee-colored face remains visible. I nod to her and then to tawny-furred Lynx, and there’s something about the evocative curl of her prehensile tail that makes me check myself wondering if I did succumb to that temptation some time I can’t quite recall back when I was physiologically capable of such things.
Also back from the deep sleep are a few names I just picked at random based on their preliminary survey results since none of them were registered supers: Freestyler, Kid Dynamo and Firehawk. Also with them is Blue Streak, who I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever met, and an old rival I might’ve once even called a nemesis, grey-suited Wolfram. I dare say the story of my enforced transgenderism has done the rounds already as the wolfish Wolfram gives me a heavy-browed look I suppose he thinks is seductive and then moves back to let the others aside. Last but not least on my list even with my doubts aroused is Paragon. He looks pretty composed for a guy whose ex-villainess wife was torn to shreds by the birth of her Star God-possessed baby on their wedding day. Yeah, oh boy that really happened. Ol’ Para only nods to me, uncomfortable maybe with my transition into NSFW I mean LGBT territory. The customary gold radiance emanates from his muscular frame.
Although they are starved of information, the masks do part to let me meet my daughter. Tessa stands likewise masked, arms crossed over her stocky-busty-sexy thing she seems to have made her own now she’s barely legal, the nod to Zephyr’s costume in her chest W only really registering on me for the first time. Even with the disguise I can tell the discomfort of the moment is too much for her.
“Hey, this is pretty weird,” I say in greeting.
I’m hoping for the fatherly hug I now realize is never coming again, and that shocking recognition stabs into me like a wraith’s knife. Windsong’s arms remain folded and her lowered gaze still takes in the dozens of eyes watching us.
“This isn’t the time,” she says. “I’m glad you’re not dead.”
“Touching. Likewise.”
“They all want to hear the plan and I do too.”
“And we wouldn’t mind knowing what the hell is going on, while you’re at it,” Wolfram catcalls in a rich baritone.
It’s been a long time, but even with my body-swap, our eyes clash, and Wolfram’s spark with psionic energy causing me to look away. This really isn’t the time – Tessa’s right about that.
I nod and clap my hands together and note the majority of breakfasts consumed and Shade enters the cafeteria quietly and so does Annie Black and the FBI goons and I move a few folding chairs aside and take center stage a
nd wish I could wipe the feeling of grease off my tongue with the back of my hand. Instead, I cadge a glass of water from one of the tables and then hold it without drinking as I hold up my other hand for calm.
“Alright,” I say and then say it again. I feel more like the school MILF convening her first PTA meeting under the disapproving glares of rivals.
“OK, listen up and gather round, people.”
Zephyr 23.5 “Sixty Seconds”
“OK I HAVE a story for you. We have a villainess with a cause, a militant tree-hugger called Earthsong, bankrolled by a billionaire Russian oligarch hell-bent on stopping the Twenty-First Century. I don’t know why. Maybe it was something we said. Months ago they started planning this. They had some way to take control of the whole North American telecommunications network and then take it down. They’ve systematically bombed key city buildings, most of ‘em probably housing data for the world’s financial system, causing shockwaves all around the planet. This is the big one. And they have five pretty serious megaton North Korean nukes.”
I look up a moment, the masks arrayed in concentric circles around me and the meaningless diagrams I draw with my hands leaking colors into the dim air.
“Lynx put your hand down, I’m not answering questions,” I say.
“I’m limbering up.”
“OK, cool,” I say. “I recommend you all do the same. We’re flying into a shitstorm. You’re going to form into five squads on standby when Shade and I go down and beat their locations out of this Earthsong bitch and her cronies.”
“What? No way,” Windsong says. There’s an awkward silence into which she offers, “The two of you aren’t going to be enough.”
“Earthsong hired a bunch of paid villains with the money Khodorkovsky supplied,” I tell her. “Each squad’s gonna have its moment. Trust me.”
“None of us are going to have our moment if you don’t get that info and what if she just sets off the nukes the moment you and Shade arrive?” Tessa says.
Her intercession is one unending teenage datastream that leaves most the others awkwardly contemplating the father-daughter shit in the room.
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