by wildbow
And it was alive. A living thing.
She knew without having to think about it, each of those echoes or extensions of the entity was as much a part of a connected whole as her hand or nose was to her. Each was something this living entity was aware of, controlled and moved with intent and purpose. As though it existed and extended into those possible selves all at once.
It’s dying, she thought. The outermost extensions of the creature were flaking off and breaking into fragments as it swam through an emptiness without air, not moving but sinuously adjusting itself through the existences that held the echoes, shrinking away here and swelling there, carrying itself away at a speed that outpaced light. In its wake, flakes and fragments sloughed off of the entity like seeds from an impossibly large karahindiba, or dandelion, in a steady wind. Seeds more numerous than all the specks of dirt across all the Earth.
One of those fragments seemed to grow, getting bigger, larger, looming in her consciousness until it was all she could perceive, as though the moon was falling, colliding with the earth. Falling directly on top of her.
—k!> the soldier finished without missing a beat.
Hana stirred. She was still in the forest, hands stinging with the scrapes, feet sore from the walking. Her heart pounded and she could taste fear like bile in her mouth.
Already, the memory was fading. Had it even happened? As hard as she struggled to retain it, it was eluding her. It was like a dream that escaped her when she woke, but so slippery that even the idea that she’d dreamed in the first place was quickly retreating from her mind.
The soldier shouted something too complex for her to understand, directed at his comrades. Hana let the scraps of the memory slip from her attention. This, here, was the priority. Either she walked forward, and she would die, or she would stand by and watch the others die for her cowardice. With just the vestige of an idea that something had happened, she had been shaken from her paralysis. Maybe she could step forward.
She raised her foot—
And stopped. Something stood in her way. A blur hung in the air at chest level, crackling, shifting with a manic ferocity. She let her foot fall back down where it had been a moment ago and stared at the kaleidoscopic shimmer of black and green.
She touched it, and felt a weight settle into her palm. Her hand automatically closed around it, feeling the warmth of it. It felt almost like when she pet a friendly dog. An odd thought, given what she found herself looking at.
A gun, polished gray steel. Somehow familiar. Identical to the smallest guns she had seen the guerrilla fighters carrying.
I can’t use this. The thought was cold in her mind. If I use this, they’ll kill the others the second I fire.
The gun shimmered, became that blur of green and black, then settled into a new shape. She’d seen this, too. One of the fighters had been talking to Hana, showing her his English gun magazine, in an effort to get in good graces with her older sister. This was similar to the gun she’d just had in her hand, but there was a metal tube on the front, nearly doubling the gun’s length. The tube, she knew, made guns quieter.
The rest of the children and the other soldiers were far behind. It was still nearly impossible, but—
She wheeled around, holding the gun in both hands. She took a second to steady her aim, and the Turkish soldier’s surprise bought her just enough time to pull the trigger.
Hannah’s eyes snapped open.
This is why I don’t sleep.
She was still wearing her costume, she noted, as she rose from her bed and walked to the bathroom. At least she’d had the sense to remove her scarf so she didn’t strangle while she rested.
She was the only one who remembered. Everyone else forgot that impossibly huge being, if they were even graced with a glimpse of it. She couldn’t be sure. If any others saw it, they would inevitably forget it before they could gather their thoughts enough to speak of it. Like she was supposed to.
But she remembered. She touched the combat knife that was sheathed at her hip, as if to remind herself it was there. She harbored her suspicions about her gift: her powers had taken a part of her psyche and given it concrete form. The angriest parts of her, the most childish parts, the parts of her that dreamed, and those that forgot. The knife at her hip slept for her and dreamed for her, she imagined. She had gone nearly a year at a time without needing to stop and put her head to rest on a pillow.
When she closed her eyes and let herself drift off, it was because she felt it was something she ought to do, not because she had to. Even then, she never dreamed. She remembered, instead, her mind replaying past events in perfect detail. And through some chance of fate, this meant she remembered the entity, and she remembered forgetting it, as paradoxical as that was.
And she would never speak of it to anyone.
She’d killed the soldiers that held the other children of her village hostage. After the first, she had feigned fear, pretended the guerrilla fighters were in the woods. Then she had waited for the moment they were too busy watching the woods and mowed the rest of the men down with an assault rifle. She didn’t even feel bad about it, nor did she lose much sleep that one of the children, Behar, had been shot in the skirmish.
She regretted the deaths, that went without saying, but she didn’t feel guilty about it. Of the ten of them, seven had made it back, because of her and her gift. They had returned to their village, moved the bodies out of sight, and did what they could to conserve their food until the guerrilla fighters came through once again.
Hana had made the others swear a promise, to not speak of her gift. She knew the guerrilla fighters would recruit her, use her, if they knew. Whatever this power was that she had received, she didn’t feel it was for that.
When the fighters had returned, they saw the state of the children and elected to evacuate them. The fighters took them to a city, and a man there saw that Hana and the others were shipped off to the United Kingdom, where many other refugees were going. They were split up, and the others were sent one by one to homes for orphans and other troubled children. Hana’s turn came late, nearly last, and she was taken to fly on another airplane to her own new home. It was there she ran into difficulty. She’d moved through the archway—what she would later learn was a metal detector—and it sounded an alarm. Guards had found the weapon she couldn’t drop or leave behind, and Hana was carried off to another place. Interrogated, asked many questions. She was taken to the bathroom, patted down on her re-entry to the interrogation room, and they found the same gun on her that they’d taken away just half an hour ago.
Everything else had happened very fast, after that. It was an American in a military uniform that rescued her. He took her to America, saw that she was put with a family there. When the first three Wards teams were established, she was enlisted. She barely knew a hundred words of English, her numbers and the alphabet, when she first went out in costume.
Hannah bent over the sink and washed her face. She found a toothbrush and cleaned her teeth, then flossed, then scraped her tongue. Too easy to forget those things, without the rhythm of sleep to break up the continuity of days. Better to do these things a little too often, than to forget. She gargled with mouthwash, then bared her teeth to see the dentist’s work, where he had capped them. Teeth that were perfectly shaped, white. Not really hers.
Her weapon found its way into her hand at some point after she put the mouthwash down, a handgun not unlike the first shape it had taken for her. She spun it around her finger by the trigger guard a few times before holstering it as she left the bathroom. She went to the window and stared at the city across the water. Colors shifted subtly in the refracted light of the PHQ’s forcefield, oversaturating the view like a TV with bad picture settings.
Even if she never dreamed, America still had a surreal, dreamlike quality to it. It was so distant from where she had come from, so different. There was no war here, not really, and yet
the people here managed to find so much to complain about. Men in suits, trouble in love, medical care and not having the latest touchscreen phone. Such complaints often carried more emotion and fervor than anyone in her village had used to bemoan the death of loved ones or the methodical eradication of their people. When she heard the complaints of her friends and coworkers, she simply nodded and gave the necessary words of sympathy.
Bright lights and conveniences and wanting for nothing and televisions and sports cars and capped teeth and chocolate and the list went on… It had taken her the better part of a decade to even start getting used to it, and everything moved so fast that any time she thought she was getting a grasp on it, there was something new, something she was supposed to know or understand.
She’d accepted without complaint when her adoptive parents told her to start writing her name in the more American ‘Hannah’. She’d agreed and signed the papers when they took the last name her parents had given her and replaced it with their own. Small things, so minor, compared to what she had seen and done. It didn’t bear complaining about. Everyone praised her for how dutiful she was in school and her training. She never gave up, never quit. Why should she? This was nothing compared to those hours she spent in that forest.
So hard to believe that the events from her dream had occurred just twenty-six years ago.
It never felt entirely real. More than once, she had let herself begin to believe she’d died, that she’d taken that step forward and never made it out of the forest. She had made mistakes when she let herself think that way, had put herself in too much danger, back in her earliest years as a hero. Now, when she found herself slipping into that mindset, she often tried to sleep. Her memories as she slept were perfect, unblemished, almost more real than real life, which was why she never did it too often. Ironic, given how necessary it often was, to keep her grounded in reality.
She’d grown to love this country. Truly love it, for what it stood for. She’d had to fight to wear the flag as part of her costume. America wasn’t perfect, but nothing touched by human hands could be. There was greed, corruption, selfishness, pettiness, hatred. But there were good things too. Freedoms, ideas, choices, hope and the possibility that anyone could be anything, here, if they were willing to strive for it. As she accepted her new country, she let herself make friends, boyfriends, let herself get close to her parents and their church. By the time she started college, her accent had all but disappeared, and she knew enough to at least pretend to know what others were talking about when they spoke of pop culture, music and television.
People were judgmental, she knew, and so she would never speak of what she had seen in that moment she received her gift.
Even among other faithful, she would be met with suspicion and scorn, were she to say she’d seen God, or one of His warrior angels, such as they existed beyond the scope of human understanding. That He had given her this ability so she could save herself. Others would offer different interpretations, argue that He had given such gifts to bad people, too, they would point to the science of it. Maybe some small part of her suspected these hypothetical individuals were right. Still, she preferred her faith to uncertainty. The notion that this thing she had seen was something other than a benign entity watching over humanity, that it might be malign, or even worse, that it existed with no conception of the effect it had on mankind? An elephant among gnats? It wasn’t a comfortable thought.
She glanced at the clock; 6:30 in the morning. She draped her flag-printed scarf loosely around her neck and lower face, then left her room. The energy became an assault rifle hanging at her side, bouncing a comforting beat against her hip as she walked. She made her way up a flight of stairs and down to the end of a hallway.
She heard a male voice, a female one. She paused at the open doorway and knocked.
“Yeah?” Armsmaster called out.
“Am I interrupting?”
“No. Come on in,” he replied.
She stepped into the room. It fell somewhere between a workshop and an office. Two spare suits stood at one side of the room, each with minor functional differences. A set of halberds were placed on a rack behind Armsmaster’s desk, one shattered in pieces. One of the spaces on the rack was empty—Armsmaster had the halberd in front of him.
“You worked too hard and forgot to go to sleep again, Colin?” Hannah asked, though the answer was obvious.
He frowned, reached over to his computer and hit a button. He saw the time, muttered, “Damn it.”
“Good morning, Miss Militia,” a woman’s voice came from the computer.
Hannah blinked in surprise, “Dragon. Sorry, I didn’t realize you were there. Good morning.”
“You’re up early,” Dragon commented. “And you were out late, from what I’m seeing on the web. Trouble sleeping?”
“I don’t sleep,” Hannah confessed. “Not really, since I got my powers.”
“Oh? Me either.”
Colin leaned back and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, “I’d give my left foot for that little perk.”
Hannah nodded. There were others like her? She asked the computer screen, “Do you remember?”
“Sorry? I don’t understand,” Dragon replied.
“Nevermind.” If Dragon did remember, Hannah knew the answer to that question would have been different. Dragon was too smart to miss the connection.
“We were talking shop,” Colin spoke. He motioned to the halberd he had in front of him. “Procrastination through tinker stuff. I think tonight’s project was a success.”
“Oh?”
Armsmaster stood, seizing the halberd in one hand. He pressed a button on the handle, and the blade blurred. Without even swinging the weapon, he let the heavier top end fall against an empty stainless steel mannequin that might have held a spare suit of his armor. Dust blossomed where the blade touched the mannequin, and it passed through without resistance. Pieces of the mannequin clattered to the ground.
“Impressive,” she told him.
He pressed a button, and the blur around the blade dissipated in a steel-colored smoke, leaving only the normal axehead top of the weapon.
“Only problems are that it’s vulnerable to forcefields, fire, and other intense energy, and the apparatus takes up too much space in the upper end. Even with my power, it likely means I’d have to do without some of the kit I’ve gotten used to.”
“I trust you’ll figure it out,” Hannah told him. Then with mock sternness, she put her hands on her hips, “Now, no more distracting me. Just what are you procrastinating on?”
Colin ran one of his hands over his short cropped brown hair, sighed. “Right. You have as much say as I do, in this.”
He walked back to his desk and slumped down into his seat. He kicked a screwdriver and a pair of pliers from the corner of the desk to put his feet up, one ankle crossed over the other. Reaching in the opposite direction, he grabbed a stack of folders and let them fall to the desk.
“Piggot has decided to take action in reflection of recent events. Both the Wards and the Protectorate are being restructured.”
Hannah winced, “How bad?”
Shrugging, Colin told her, “As far as the Wards go, we’re losing Aegis. Piggot and the PRT want to see how he does leading a different team, and the boy’s parents are amenable. He’ll stay in the Wards for a little longer, to suggest he’s younger than he is.”
“A shame. Who do we get?”
“It’s a swap. It’ll be Weld from the Boston team.”
“I don’t know him,” Hannah admitted.
“He’s a good kid with a good record,” Dragon chimed in from the computer, “Ferrous biology, absorbs metals through his skin. Strong, tough, good grades across the board, high marks in the tactics simulations. Likable, and a scan of the web shows feedback for him is higher than average, which is impressive, considering he’s one of the Case 53s.”
“He’s got the tattoo?” Hannah asked.
“The mark i
s branded into his heel, not tattooed, but yes.”
Hannah nodded. “What else?”
Colin frowned, “We’re supposed to pick two others from our Wards team to transfer to one of the other major teams, nearby. I settled on Kid Win, I’m stuck on the others.”
“Browbeat?”
“Too new. Might be able to sell it to Piggot, but my suspicion is that she’ll think it looks bad, giving up our newbie.”
“Hm. Gallant won’t be able to leave for Boston. Too many logistical issues,” Hannah glanced at the computer. She couldn’t say more.
“You can speak freely,” Colin spoke. “Dragon has either read the record in question, or she’s reading it as we speak.”
“Gallant has local responsibilities, and is expected to start helping with his father’s local business enterprise,” Dragon spoke, giving truth to Colin’s words, “Miss Militia is right, he’s a local fixture. And his girlfriend is here.”
Hannah nodded, “Painful to give up Vista or Clockblocker. They’re our big guns, and they’re local heroes after the role they played in that bomb scare. Shadow Stalker?”
Colin shook his head, “There would be more trouble over handing over someone like Shadow Stalker to another team than there would be if we gave away a newbie like Browbeat. Discipline problems.”
“Still?” she asked. Armsmaster nodded.
Hannah frowned, “Alright. This is what you do, then. Propose Shadow Stalker and Kid Win. If Piggot does refuse Shadow Stalker, and you should make an argument that Shadow Stalker might need a change of scenery, Piggot will have a harder time refusing Browbeat, right after.”