“Oh, not much,” Shade says, despite grinning openly. “You don’t pal around with a bunch of supers without learning a few nasty secrets. I guess I may’ve let a few slip.”
“Like?”
“Oh, I dunno . . . Bull’s thing for Japanese hookers, Iron John’s second family stashed away in the 1400s, Unicorn’s erection problems. . . .”
“How do you know about his erections?”
Shade just looks at me and laughs and gently pushes me away even though we’re hovering in the air.
“It’s all just a bit of fun, right Zephyr – you know that, right?”
“Yeah, sure,” I reply perhaps a bit too hurriedly. “I was just, you know, surprised. You’ve got something of a reputation.”
Shade smiles knowingly, but she looks away. The dust rises from her place like from a factory fire.
“A carefully crafted one at that, so you’d best fly on to do what you have to do, me lad. Alright?”
She says the last word like she’s the female DJ Ali or something. I nod, a new sick feeling in my chest as I tumble back into contemplation of the things I had so suddenly forgotten: the Demoness, my missing father, and of course then Loren. As the first of the news helicopters start to arrive I nod to Shade once more and gently touch her arm.
“I’ll be off, then,” I say in a crap mimicry of her speech. “I think I left the top of my costume down there, so I’ll just grab that and I’ll be seeing you, OK?”
Shade makes an effort to brighten her smile.
“Thanks for a hot night, tiger. It gets cold around here.”
“I guess it’s cold always being in the shade,” I smirk.
She smirks back and we’re OK, though I’m not sure what I am really feeling – apart from like a card again – the smell of Shade mingling with the stench of battle and my own morning breath and the memory of Loren probably still curled up in the Atlantic dark on my cum-stained sheets.
I nod tightly and sigh and drop quickly to the level of the destruction. The quartet from the Union Jacks have some kind of advanced hover vehicle thing parked in silent mode just near the edge of the stylized wharf and the apartment complex they’ve helped destroy and Bull helps the others load into it and I guess they’re hoping to make a getaway before the press arrive. The big red-faced bruiser looks back at me and grins so fiercely, trying to telescope the expression for my benefit, I guess, that I genuinely can’t tell whether he’s actually angry or just some punch-drunk, overpowered fuckwit caught in a perpetual cycle of destruction and release. I guess you could say the same for me, though I like to think I have a higher purpose now.
I find the leather jacket beneath the remains of the bed and shake it clean and slip it on. Through the hole in the wall I can see water police approaching along the muddy scarp of the Thames and once more discretion is the better part of valor and I step back briskly through the gaping hole made by Bull’s mad charge and do the crouch thing and I’m away.
Zephyr 6.12 “The Harlequin Breeze”
I HEAD BACK into darkness. It’s a nice metaphor, I know, but also the truth as I circumnavigate the globe and strike the terminator, into the literal twilight zone, and the words in my head spark associations and I wonder how the mad queer big bastard is getting on since last we tersely met. Such thoughts are a distraction from the stomach-gnawing intensity of what I aim to uncover, and while flying at a thousand miles per hour is no time to pull the printed sheet from the Visionary’s lair out of my belt, in my mind I picture the laser-inked finality contained in that one fragile sheet and imagine the secret history of my own future may as well be written thereupon as well, for all the good it would do me, the invisible ink of the unknown as intangible as statues hiding inside marble blocks just waiting for their creators to summon them into public life.
My trajectory takes me back across the storm-battered Atlantic and then my own dearly beloved reconstructed city and its only then I consider, had I gone the other way, I could’ve been flying into the future with the dawning day rather than this filmic dissolve, the length of the journey much the same, but the timbre of the symbols more life-affirming and positive one way than the other.
I realize it was my unconscious compulsion to stop in at headquarters, such as it is these days with me alienated from the team whose leadership I have also managed to decapitate on one fell swoop. And yet that compulsion to stop over is more than the wish for a shower or to appease my nagging guilt with she-who-was-Seeker. Again, it is more of that dangerous trepidation and vacillation that could see me shirk this confrontation for another thousand years if I’m not careful.
California sleeps beneath me as these thoughts pirouette through my mind in the silent hours of flying across the hard suburbanized mesa and then over the ocean, dropping low to create a furrow in the waves that sends spray fifty feet in the air and earns me a few honks from late evening trawler men making their way back to their home bays. And then the golden Pacific, and the sun appears like a hallucination in the sky as the darkness burns away and the dolphins flip and play in the water beneath me and the tiny islands in the middle of nowhere look so idyllic, American hardware and the odd cadaver moldering in their jungles, rust and compost for diverse ecosystems I can barely imagine.
I correct my course north for Japan as I cross the international dateline and suddenly it is tomorrow and I think – or perhaps I pray – that maybe I chose the right metaphor after all.
*
THE SPRAWLING SPIRES of the unsleeping city, Tokyo, glisten like wet and alien things in the sempiternal morning of Japan, the country known as the Land of the Rising Sun for good reason. The metropolis reflects back on itself in stainless steel and glass, advanced hovercraft mixing with traditional dirigibles and commuter planes landing at the central airport. The air is thick with whirring communications bots, off about their errands as common as the blenders of the Twentieth Century here in Japan.
And I have no idea about the Paladin building.
Tessa answers on the third ring.
“Dad, is that you? I’m in class, you know.”
“Don’t try and bullshit a bullshitter, honey. Are you near a computer?”
Tessa gives her best Windsong harrumph and I hear keys tapping.
“What is it?” she asks, not able to keep the curiosity from her tone.
“I’m gonna send you a few photos from my phone and an address,” I say as I stand on the roof sixty floors from the streaming carpet of the ground below and drink in the hermetically purified air – another function of the city’s famous auto-bots. “I need you to locate the building and then show it to me on the photos I’ve sent.”
“Oh great,” Tessa says. “I can’t tell if this is a promotion or not. Am I like your sidekick now or something?”
“Honey, please. This is important. It’s about grandma.”
I feel like a bastard, knowing exactly the somber chime this pronouncement would ring. Nonetheless, Tessa stops her whinnying and I take a few panoramic snaps and fiddle with the Enercom phone and manage to send them to Tessa’s cell, the main number programmed in. Tessa says she’ll ring back and I pocket the phone and idly ponder having a cigarette and note my stomach rumbling as a train, ten storeys from the ground, hisses past on its raised platform between stops.
The text bleeps and I check the data package and bingo, my little girl has circled one of the distant towers in one of the views and I quickly orient myself to find it. The Paladin Corporation does a fine line in real estate – but we’ll have no guarantees this one will still be standing come later this afternoon.
The phone buzzes and I answer before the hated ringtone can start up.
“Thanks, babe. I’ll call you when I’m on the other side of this.”
“Daddy, when are you coming home?”
I almost laugh at the sincerity of her tone – talk about inappropriate – and yet again find myself taken aback that anyone actually cares, even my own daughter. So I chew off and swallow the fi
rst couple of replies and eye the scenery while I play back scenes from our most recent outings.
“I guess I’ve fallen off the wagon of good dad-hood once again,” I say.
“I don’t need the self-pity dad,” Tessa replies gloomily. “I miss you. I’m worried. I’m, like, frigging sixteen in about two weeks, and for all I know I’ll be celebrating my birthday in goddamn England.”
“That’s not going to happen,” I say curtly. “I’ll speak to you soon. We’ll do lunch.”
“Lunch. Okay. Fantastic. Bye.”
Feeling I’ve lost that round, I listen to Tess sign off and then it’s just me and the harlequin breeze, the feeling of eternity stretching out in the skies before me.
*
THERE IS A blip in the sky. ‘Tis I. ‘Tis I. Hurtling in an arc from where I began atop the Nagatomi Building, I compress my acceleration to the point where the sound barrier doesn’t so much break as simply wither. By the time I hit the black glass plate of the thirtieth floor of the Paladin Building I’m doing something close to 1700mph – close to my upper limit even with a few hundred miles to gradually accelerate.
At such a speed my natural physiognomy’s enhanced by a friction bubble that wraps like a shield around me, though I have my arms crossed over my face as I hit the glass and it wobbles and explodes and I burst through, smashing office furniture and hallway dividers clear, and then I punch through the first stylish marble and brass-fitted wall and papers and debris and several Japanese workers are sucked into my wake as I pitch lower to the ground and hit the second wall and go through executive bathrooms in a catastrophe of ceramics and plaster and stone cladding and plumbing and I roll over my shoulder and come up in a stance shaking dust and shards of marble from my hair.
The conference room is as big as a small warehouse. The onyx table is oval, as big as a room in itself, and the Demoness stands from one narrowed end with her lustrous black hair already exploding into action, though for the moment she makes no further visible move. Here on nearly the far side of the building there is a curved wall of ceiling-to-floor windows tinted to evade the afternoon sun. Behind her there is a stylized water feature, just one pivotal section of the exterior wall not given over to glass. Instead, a corrugated surface conjures musical notes from the trickling flow and as the dust clears and Ono stares across at me, this is the only noise in the world until the belated security alarm starts its caterwaul and the startled civilians and armed guards holler madly somewhere close by beyond.
For a moment the old woman looks lifeless, her face showing something of her true age in the glacial ice shelves of her cheekbones and the deep hollows of her manicured eyes. She wears a costly white blouse and a Genevieve Salander checkered grey skirt, black stockings and heels by Franco Sarto. Her black tresses unspool like ink spills in water, an impossible loom of hair that unfurls around her like a dire flag that seemingly rewrites her appearance as it caresses the monochrome air. Gone is the professional businesswoman and in her place stands a short but shapely black menace in thigh-length leather boots and matching elbow gloves, a cat mask and dark purple bodysuit under a corset of identical black leather.
“Darling,” she says in her difficult, accented voice. “You’ve come home at last.”
“You helped kill Tommy Hilfiger and I’m willing to bet you helped kill my mother,” I snarl with barely contained rage.
Now that I am here and in the thick of it, I have to show restraint not to simply tear the old woman apart.
“Where’s Arsenal?” I snap.
The Demoness walks calmly around the curve of the table’s ellipse with her black heels ringing on the marble tiles.
“I don’t know who you mean,” she says. “Zephyr? I’m glad you found me. Now you can join with us. That’s all your father ever wanted.”
I stare at the woman and hold up one blazing hand in the hope to persuade her that she comes no further. Dutifully, the Japanese woman halts and puts her hands on hips that no woman her age has a right to make look so sultry and demure at one and the same time.
“My father was a madman,” I tell her.
“No,” Ono says, and despite the mask and her angular viper’s face, her expression softens with genuine love. “He is a great man. When he returns, you shall see. It will all be for the best.”
“What – genocide?” I growl. “There’s nothing you can say to convince me. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but you betrayed my mother for decades and now she’s dead. It’s your turn to die.”
“No, my son,” the woman says. “It wasn’t like that. You – you, dear Joseph – were the great contingency plan. Your mother knew that and understood. She gave her life willingly, as we agreed should you ever be discovered.”
“That’s crap,” I say.
“We nurtured you in the dark to save you from him, in case he should fail,” she says. “You must understand this.”
Her voice is urgent, pleading as she steps closer.
“If that’s true, then why did you have Arsenal kill my mother?”
My accusation is greeted by a flat silence. Into it, I hear Ono draw a deep breath that emerges as a mournful sigh.
“Ah,” she says. “So it’s no use then?”
“Afraid not.”
“Then it is you who must die.”
And she turns, walking away as she clicks her fingers and a concealed door slides open just across from where I have torn an immense hole, and tie-wearing, white-shirted security guards crouch there, armed with guns whose names they probably cannot pronounce.
From the doorway emerges a line of six young people, only one of them with Asiatic looks. Like me, they wear black, though most the costumes incorporate Ono’s evil bruised purple into the color scheme. Several have cloaks and one of the girls, a blonde with a lip ring, wears some kind of bondage biker’s cap. The oldest is about twenty-five and the youngest is no more than sixteen. The young one, a boy with a spiky black haircut and slitted shades, claps his hands together and begins to bolt toward me.
There’s not much to do but strike a pose and clench my fists and hope these are some of the runts of the Lennon litter.
Zephyr 6.13 “The Automaton Look”
THE YOUNG GUY bounds with enthusiasm into close quarters and I look over the top of his spiky hair-do to see the five other Lennon kids fanning out with a creepy, unspoken precision. Six-on-one was never my favorite odds and the automaton look in my mother’s eyes in the last moments of her life seems visibly echoed here.
But not on my attacker. The sixteen-year-old sports a nasty grin as he moves like a stocky dancer and then thrusts his hands at me, fingers splayed, the flesh more like charcoal than anything else, and I slap them away at the same time his fingers shoot out into twelve-inch spikes, retracting like a trick of the light as he takes advantage of my distraction to kick me in the knee and then repeat the same move as before. This time a few of the fingertips thrust forward like deadly syringes and pierce the upper chest of my leathers and I feel pain and wetness as they retract, blood in the air, an exultant look on the little bastard’s face.
“What the fuck is this?” I snap. “Who are you?”
“I’m Carbon,” the young guy replies. “Get ready to feel some pain, big brother.”
Rather than press the advantage, Carbon cartwheels back and one of the girls, Japanese-looking, runs forward from the outer formation, a samurai sword held low by her side. A sizzle of electricity runs over my knuckles as I prepare for what looks like a predictable defense, but then the girl explodes into three identical copies of herself.
Carbon cheers from the back of the boardroom.
“Ruse,” he grins.
One of the clone girls comes in chopping high with the sword and I do the only thing my speed allows, foolishly lifting my arm to block with the hope my leather and denser-than-average muscle and bone will lessen the attack. Instead, it fades right through me the same time one of the other copies attacks – the real one, as it turns out
– and she puts her boot into the side of my knee and I crumple with an alarmingly girlish scream.
The illusory copies are a flutter of black and purple before me and another boot sails out of the ether to collect me upside the chin and I am snapped back across the hard floor.
“Fuck,” I stutter, spitting blood from my cut lip. “This is gonna be harder than you’d think.”
I pull my cell from its back holster and press the pre-programmed emergency number and roll out of the way of another attack and stand, discharging with my left and playing the shell game – getting lucky this time as the girls to the left and right disappear and the one in the middle yelps prettily and hurtles back.
It’s only two rings and someone at Sentinels HQ picks up and I’m fortunate perhaps it’s Loren.
“Seeker. You know that code we were going to set up for an emergency team transport so we could just press one button and not have to actually talk?”
Her reply is breathless.
“Yes?”
“I can’t remember the button, but I need you all, now.”
And I stash away the cell as a tall young guy steps slowly from the semi-circle of my siblings, theatrically craning his neck and stretching like he thinks maybe we’re in a Bruce Lee movie or something.
“I’m Hardass,” he says and grins, I must admit, quite handsomely.
Family resemblance, you know.
“Cute,” I reply and wipe away blood with the back of my hand that I can’t help but briefly inspect.
“Yeah,” the tall kid says and lifts his fists. “I’m meant to be called Bastion, you know, because like my name’s Sebastian? Lame, anyway. I’d rather be called what I truly am, and that’s your worst fucking nightmare, buddy.”
“I don’t know, kid,” I reply tiredly, stalling for time as we begin to circle like streetfighters and he can’t see the drawbridge lowering like from a ghost castle fading into co-existence across the other side of the room and my erstwhile teammates stepping out.
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