“What?” I stare at her a second, but the agent is deep in her own private hell, picturing an eternity stuck in a virtual limbo, perhaps.
“Who?” I ask eventually.
“Negator,” she replies, blinking out of her reverie.
“What? I haven’t seen Negator for years. And he’s a fucking loony.”
“That’s not what the charge sheet says,” Synergy sighs. “He’s been clean for a few years now. Claim is you assaulted him on a film set?”
I can only blink at this and shrug.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What,” Synergy asks. “You can’t remember?”
“I can’t . . . No,” I say. “I can’t remember a damned thing about it.”
She only smiles – or smirks, I should say. If I didn’t know better, a guy could get paranoid. The whole not-dead-but-virtually-dreaming looms like the mother of all cock-and-bull stories. There’s more than a hint of Krgin in her grin – or perhaps Krgin’s handler.
“I prefer the Boromir from the cartoon, rather than the Ridley Scott adaptation,” I say to no one in particular.
Zephyr 8.7 “Empathy Fatigue”
I WAKE TO my own shitty existence, the smell of antiseptics, sweat and orange hydralite thick in the small hospital cell as I sit and clasp the furrow of my brow. A mirror opposite the bed shows the least of my injuries have already vanished, just a few light scratches across my cheek and chin flagging the other night’s encounter. A deep and expressionless sorrow remains. My eyes feel like they have been raped by leprechauns.
I shouldn’t quip. The news my mother might somehow miraculously, inexplicably, hell, quite implausibly be alive in some corner of this goddamned universe has me quivering like a plucked string. But it’s a bum note. Regardless of the time it is, morning, cold and deleterious, hangs on me like a funeral shroud.
As I am staring sightlessly, a monitor goes off somewhere and a nurse sticks his head in, backed up by two troopers in shock armor.
“How’re you feeling?”
“Like shit.”
“Pretty normal then?”
A handsome grin.
I nod. “I want to see Loren. Lioness.”
The guy’s mirth vanishes like an exorcism and in minutes I’m rubbing my wrists where the hospital tags were, now wearing my black leather pants and boots and the sleeveless black tee, domino mask in place. No one comments on the missing logo and this seems like a cosmic indicator of my irrelevance rather than people being nice for a change. The air reeks of sympathy, but I’m under my own black cloud and I allow myself to be led down endless corridors to a palliative care ward, the tricked-out guards nowhere now to be seen.
“I guess that means I’m no longer a threat,” I say to the nurse.
He has a short-trimmed honey-blonde beard and eyes that have learnt to mimic warmth, the true depth of his experiences like a callus on the soul. He only purses his lips in a non-smile and the slab of heavy door stands between us. Again, it’s hard not to think he’s Krgin in disguise.
“In here?”
He nods and genuinely probably doesn’t think to say anything else until the words come out in their own sudden release.
“Hey. Go easy on yourself in there.”
I can only frown and nod and push into the door, feeling my full strength on its way back thanks to Arsenal’s massive booby-trap fail.
The black thing on the bed is under surgical netting, an electronic device channeling up-to-date vital information to the rack of machines looming across the back like a line of alien priests waiting to administer the last rites. At first I cannot go too close. My repulsion is just one of many piled high emotions, nausea not the least of them. The body is unresponsive to my presence and I am relieved she doesn’t speak or turn or acknowledge me in any way, though it makes me wonder if I imagined her final words at Seagal’s hacienda.
The door opens and closes behind me and I look and there is a late middle-aged doctor with a grey demeanor.
“Is she going to live?” I ask.
“There is an unnatural force sustaining her,” the doctor says with a faint Kiwi accent. I look at him and he gestures off-handedly.
“It is hard to tell with you parahumans,” he says. “We are dealing with so many factors outside ordinary physiognomy.”
“She didn’t have any powers,” I say. “She . . . gave them up.”
“Perhaps.” The doctor shrugs. “As I said, there is something keeping her alive. Brain activity is good. Her mind is alive, though we have suppressed her consciousness until we can do something for her physical condition.”
“And if you can’t?”
“It may be kinder to release her,” the doctor says. “Let her go.”
I nod and stare at the bed. Over the minutes, my relief in her silence gives way to a gnawing, existential grief that can’t be expressed in such a confined and clinical space. As if suddenly furious at something, I stalk from the room and the door slams like a rifle-shot behind me.
Excelsior and Tempo wait at the end of the hall.
“There’s a problem,” the boy scout says and slides a thumb into the belt of his underpants.
“That, junior,” I say, “is the understatement of the fucking century.”
But of course he’s talking about something else entirely.
*
ON THE WIDESCREEN, chunks of what look more like gigantic hairy balls of shit than meteors thump down periodically across the city. Conveniently, a news crew is not too far from my apartment in Van Buren so I can be instantly updated on how the new neighborhood is rapidly turning into a third world country as the barn-sized organic globules unfurl into the most bizarre techno-organic motherfuckers I think I’ve ever seen. They vary in shape and size and physiognomy, though they seem to have the same basic purpose – to destroy as much stuff as possible as they assimilate civilians on the go. We watch, the other masks stunned, me just barely sociable as the sense of cosmic fucking inevitability hangs over the room and I see a guy in just a towel probably wondering why the hell he ever left his apartment as a big, green-brown, rolling, multi-armed, turd-like monstrosity overtakes him and he vanishes into the soft under-crust beneath the thing as it passes.
“What the fuck are these?” I ask because somebody’s got to do it.
Excelsior puts his finger to an ear-piece and shrugs.
“There’s nothing like this on file. Central Intelligence is assembling a committee. They want us to form a team.”
The big blonde lug looks at me and manages something like a comradely grin.
“What do you say, Zephyr. Are you with us?”
I shake my head and walk slowly from the room with stiff shoulders, like a man already carrying a load if that’s not too pathetically metaphoric for you – and not a very subtle one, at that. The guys with industrial Tasers decide to look the other way as I glower and find an exit and walk up the ramp and into a car park, the sky the color of an old sock and the occasional brown meatball trailing vapor and effluent in a diagonal streak to the south.
I think they call it empathy fatigue.
I pop the Enercom phone and my thumb has found the number before my brain has even formed the words, and this could be a problem as it’s Mastodon who answers the emergency code on the Sentinels phone.
“Who’s this?” the gruff voice comes loud and clear.
“Tell me your genius plan for dealing with this new disaster.”
“Zephyr. Is that you? You fucking cunt.”
“Hi ‘Don. It’s been a while. How’s your ass?”
“Better than yours is gonna be when we catch up with you,” Mastodon growls back. “Where have you been? And where’s Loren?”
“She’s . . . not well.”
“Great. What have you done now?”
“Shut up, Leonard.”
“Don’t fucking call me that.”
“Shouldn’t you be fighting these slimeballs from space or something?
That was why I rang. CIA’s crossing the rubicon on this one, or something. I’m sure there’s a role for the Sentinels, or at least a photo op.”
“Jesus, Zephyr. You make me sick. Were we ever friends?” he asks. “You have no idea what’s going on, do you? Or who these invaders are?”
“So tell me.”
I snort and gather a loogie and spit into a pile of rubbish currently being combed through by starved-looking pigeons.
“You remember Seeker’s mission? The one she, and like, ten centuries of nubile young virgins have been trained for and given powers since, like, the dawn of time?”
I swallow. Not gently.
“Yep.”
“And you fucked her and took her powers?”
“Yep.”
“This is what she they were all waiting for,” Mastodon answers.
“These fucking slimeballs from space, mister, they’ve been headed here since Christ was a kid and with one purpose only: to kill every single motherfucking creature on the earth.”
It’s hard to know what to say. Instead, my errant murmur infuriates my former colleague and I can practically hear him squeeze the phone as he stamps his feet to upsize.
“Nice going, asshole.”
“There’s the kid,” I say. “The girl?”
“Yeah. She’s missing. Freaked before the first meteor even hit,” Mastodon says. “Middle of last night, actually. Said something to Stormhawk about feeling hot and then she was gone. Room empty. Brasseye and Smidgeon are out looking for her.”
I think this over for a minute as the tiny gears and levers in my brain whir and hiss and then I gently disconnect from the call and tuck the phone away.
There’s still some link between the new Seeker and Loren.
Zephyr 8.8 “Mythological Creatures”
I THUNDER BACK down the stairs and Excelsior and Tempo and some guy in purple with a face mask look surprised to see me, but it’s not them I’m after. I turn back down the way I came until I manage to navigate back to Loren’s room and it’s just the two of us again, me and the oxygen tent, and this time I stride up to the edge of the space-age fabric and look down at the remains of my love and it’s only the steel in my jaw that keeps me from falling to my knees.
“Loren.”
My voice sounds croaky and fucked in the clinical air. The skeletal black mass on the bed doesn’t move, but the face with the gauze taped over lidless eyes flinches slightly in my direction.
“Loren.”
There is little of the woman I knew left. The majority of her frame is mercifully cloaked by the surgical cover. The tubes and bleepy things might be a constraint for anyone else, but they look to be about the only thing keeping her from breaking into disparate chunks of charcoal peppering the nice clean hospital sheets.
“Loren. Seeker. We need Seeker. To find Seeker.”
She makes a noise, a newborn kitten of a thing.
And then: “They’re here.”
“Yes.”
“Amari.”
“If you say so,” I tell her. “I have to find the new Seeker. She’s missing.”
“Hurt.”
“Maybe.”
Loren goes still for a while. Though it’s strange to be talking to her at all, it’s stranger yet to have her here, cocooned in medical apparatuses, blackened flesh moist and angry and depleted and awful. I can only confirm some unnatural power is keeping her alive as the doctor suggested, and it’s my only hope.
“Honey?”
“She’s calling.”
“Where is she? Candace? Where is she, honey?”
The corpse on the bed tsks me.
“Home.”
*
IT’S POSSIBLE EXCELSIOR tries to waylay me on my way through the facility and I hear him say something about still needing to have me examined by a skilled psion, but the missile array doesn’t move as I leap from the prison quadrangle and take to the air like a thunderbolt, almost breaking my back with the vague out-of-practice unfamiliarity of flying as I throw my body in the direction of Van Buren across the river.
Hurtling over the water, another of these huge turf balls plunge towards the city and because we are on similar vectors, I power forward on an intersect and let lightning revel over my body as I accelerate and slam the fucking thing into the Port Authority building where the walls buckle and shake and the whole disaster comes down, burying the alien terror, people and cars from the evacuated tower spilling further across the roadway as I pass over the land and my shadow looks like a hawk in flight as I take the crow’s path for Van Buren.
Parts of the city are aflame. I don’t know why. It happens every disaster. I know in some areas the looting has already begun. Never mind the threat to life and limb when there are free appliances on offer. Another of these alien wildebeests is downtown, the wreckage of nearby buildings like gaping mechanical vaginas around it as a speedster in a blue costume and someone who I take to be Coalface try and keep the situation under control, a news crew in hot pursuit filming from two angles as the track of destruction widens by the second. I contribute with a wallop of electrical dosage as I zoom overhead, but there is a more strategic and daresay selfish imperative at the forefront of my mind.
The warehouse and in fact the entire street near the pier remain intact. I thump down and continue at a run and absurdly jog up the rusting steel fire escape to my apartment like I’m some conscientious home owner averse to simply smashing in through the roof like any good action hero might. I’m thrilled rather than alarmed to see the door wide open – what am I gonna do, worry about muggers? – and I barrel into the barren living space with my eyes cast wide as nets for the slip of a girl named Candace.
I find her in the bathroom, which is to say the tiled end of the kitchen where the plumbing lends itself to a Giger-esque fusion of pipes and domesticity, stuff on the kitchen table succumbing to rot and otherwise much as Loren and I left it before gallivanting off on the trip that forever changed our lives.
The girl is curled around the toilet in a position that practically gives me déjà vu for all the time I’ve spent there myself, a fur-lined anorak over her ridiculous white bodysuit streaked with vomit like the season’s hottest accessory. Her cornflower blue eyes are bloodshot and raw, abundant blonde ringlets moist from the bowl. She looks miserable and frail and every one of her however few years it is as I move in, conscious I am not completely in costume still, and lift her from her repose and carry her easy as a bunch of sticks into the main space with the view over the water and the bed stale with the scents of past lovemaking.
“Candace. What’s going on, honey?”
I put the back of my hand against her forehead, not surprised to find it hot.
She is just a girl, maybe no more than fifteen or sixteen, but not womanly like my own kid, skin like rose petals flushing pink from the fever. Loren’s provocative costume is loose in the wrong places and the big white heat-resistant boots are almost ridiculous on her, like a skinny girl caught dressing in her mother’s clothes. Her face is more curiously adult, the lips full and bruised from whatever has its grip on her. Those full-lidded and suddenly dark-seeming eyes don’t let go of me as I lay her down on the dusty comforter and frown in concern.
“Zephyr?”
“It’s me. You can relax, kid. What is it?”
“You slept with her, didn’t you? And made it go away?”
She is scared and vulnerable and beautiful. Her arms remain locked around my neck. I feel like the huntsman who carries the wounded mythological creatures from the forest.
“Please, Zephyr. Fuck me too?”
Zephyr 8.9 “The Most Curious Look”
WELL, I CAN only laugh.
“I’m not one to turn down a pretty lady, especially one with such nice manners, Candy, but that’s probably illegal in this state, not to mention just being a generally bad fucking idea,” I say as I slide my arms from beneath her and Candace, whom perhaps I should be calling Seeker, reluctantly lets the a
rms around my neck drop.
“Talk to me, baby. What’s happened?”
“It’s them. The things falling from the sky. I’m the one.”
“The what?”
“The Seeker,” she says and moans and rolls over, not an easy feat on the tangled landscape of the bed, and like some fucking cartoon, I have to practically tug my eyes away from her ass as she rolls over and her bony hips rise into the air like the flags of some metaphoric ship on which I know I cannot sail.
“Who are they, the Amari?”
“Death from space,” she replies and again comes the kittenish moan.
“That doesn’t tell me much, kid.”
“Please, Zephyr.”
She twists around again and sits up, hair tumbling fetchingly about her heart-shaped face.
“You did it for Loren. She’s hurt, isn’t she? The Ancients whisper of her pain. Help me too? Release me?”
To my horror and unwitting arousal, the girl begins tugging at the neck of her costume and the fabric gives a tiny inchoate rip and then my hand flies so fast to stop her I’m surprised there’s not a mini sonic boom or something. Candace’s eyes snap open again and up and she does the puppy dog thing and I scowl and look away.
“Honey, please. Other women have tried and failed. Don’t go there,” I say. “You don’t even know what you’re asking. Your gig, baby, it only comes with the maidenhead. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Jesus Christ, Zephyr. Why do you think I’m asking?”
I blink.
“Because I’m exceptionally hot and you’ve got a thing for older dudes?”
“Maybe.”
She laughs, but any merriment deserts her teenage eyes in an instant and I don’t need to be the earth’s most pre-eminent psychic to understand pain beyond reckoning – at least pain of the spirit – awash in those tears that come tumbling down her pallid cheeks.
I take Candace’s hand.
“You’re still linked to Loren,” I tell her. “And she’s hurt bad. Can you heal her? Help her?”
“I don’t know,” Candace replies. “Is she close?”
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