Behind her, a wall-size video monitor flickers, showing weather patterns, locations of recent superhuman crimes, profiles of a few at-large supervillains. The eight people scattered around the conference table are some of the most famous superheroes in the world. People like Feral, Rainbow Triumph, and Elphin. The air is thick with power. These are people who have, quite literally, saved the entire world.
“Honey, we haven’t seen a serious threat for almost a year. I’ve been almost bored.”
This is Blackwolf. He doodles on a BlackBerry and twirls a combat knife in the fingers of his off hand. Former Olympic gymnast, millionaire, and onetime scourge of the underworld. Technically, he doesn’t have any powers at all, the paragon of the bare knuckle and gadgets style. His lack of a real superpower emerged as a point of pride—any powered hero who cared to make a remark soon found himself challenged to a friendly sparring match, and Blackwolf never lost. He’s also Damsel’s ex-husband.
Her field goes white for a split second. Then the cat thing, Feral, huffs a sardonic laugh. “Maybe you should be back at work, then. Spend some time on the streets.”
Damsel cuts him off. “He should answer his hail at least. He has the same fail-safe signal device as the rest of us.”
“I know,” Blackwolf replies. “I designed it.”
“Could he be off-planet?” I ask.
“Not without saying something. He and I have a deal about that,” Damsel says. I look for some sign as to whether this was a stupid question.
“You honestly think there’s something behind this,” Blackwolf says, as if I hadn’t spoken.
“I, too, have felt it. An emanation of the darkness.” We all turn to look. Mister Mystic’s voice is heavy with portent, and even in the sunlit boardroom the shadows seem to fall heavier in the corner where he stands. He wears a tuxedo and crimson-lined cape, like a cartoon of a stage magician, complete with a wand tucked into a sash at his waist. Rainbow Triumph rolls her eyes. I would laugh if I hadn’t seen news footage of him high above Colorado, crimson energy curling out of him to hold a falling satellite motionless above a Denver suburb.
Outside, the East River flashes in the sun. A pile of bagels sits untouched at the center of the table.
“Darkness? Crime, you mean.” Feral’s voice is a growl distorted by jutting canines. He’s a mutant, a genetic metahuman. Massive, he catcrouches in one of the office chairs—how could someone just be born like that? It must have been a genetic program, but officially he’s an accident. He has a long feline tail, and it’s lashing, thudding against the mesh back.
I know these people—everyone does. They started the Champions in the early eighties, just as the old Super Squadron started to retire, people like Go-Man and Regina. They were younger and sexier than their predecessors, the seemingly immortal heroes of the postwar boom, with their statesmanlike demeanors and bright costumes like the flags of strange countries. That generation had been compromised by the alien-war intrigues of the seventies, and these people became their newer, slicker replacements. If the Super Squadron were the golden age, they were the silver.
Some of them don’t even wear masks anymore. They don’t have secret identities as working-class chumps; they date movie stars and attend celebrity charity events. Even their powers are cooler—fast, fluid, nonlinear. Monumental blocks of muscle have gone out of fashion, and these new powers seem to emerge as pure style. The team roster changed every few years, but these were the core, the ones who had been there for the big breakup nine years ago.
I take a few stills out of the camera in my left eye in case I never get this close again, catching details you miss in the magazines, the precise way the light glints off of Lily’s skin. If Damsel looks almost ordinary, Lily never could—the daylight miracle of her skin is always there. I can’t believe they asked her here. No one is talking to her. Even Blackwolf keeps a wary eye on her.
“I don’t want a high-profile event. I’m not talking about getting the team back together, okay? I thought it would be smart for a few of us to just look into things. Informally.”
Blackwolf shifts in his chair. “This is CoreFire we’re talking about. The big guy can take care of himself.”
I watch him unobtrusively, aware of those preternatural reflexes. His hands as he holds the printout in front of him are strong but graceful. I can see scars and calluses. Hands of a pianist turned prizefighter.
“We’ve got some new faces here, so let’s make some introductions. I’m Damsel.” The famous face is carefully neutral behind the mask.
They all know one another, but we go around the room anyway. I can’t help but feel it’s a courtesy to me.
“Feral.” It comes out as a breathy cough.
“Blackwolf.” He nods, looking just like his GQ cover. In costume, his black bodysuit shows up that perfect musculature. Almost forty, he looks twenty-five. Genetically perfect.
“Rainbow Triumph.” Rainbow Triumph’s is a bright chirpy cartoon of a voice.
“Mister Mystic.” Mystic’s is baritone perfection, crisp and resonant. I wonder if he used to be a professional actor.
“Elphin.” A child’s whisper but somehow ageless; the voice that once lured naïve young knights to their doom.
“Lily.” The glass woman. Her name brings an unmistakable tension into the room. She worked the other side of things for a long, long time. She’s stronger than almost anyone here, and some of them know that firsthand. Now she’s come through the looking glass, into the hero world. I wonder how she got here.
When it gets to me, Damsel says a few polite words about my work on the sniper killings. No mention of the NSA. I stand awkwardly to say my code name, conscious of my height.
“Fatale.” There’s a digital buzz at the back of my voice that the techs never managed to erase. When I sit back down, one armored elbow clacks noisily against the marble tabletop. I don’t wear a mask, but I fight the urge to hide my new face behind the silver hair they gave me. Most of it’s nylon.
They found me in Boston, living on the last of the reward money from that sniper thing, plus a kill fee from the NSA when they voided my contract. Becoming a superhero doesn’t happen all at once, and by that point I was working the bottom end. Spending nights lurking in Allston, or Roxbury, or Somerville, senses open to the police bands and 911 lines, sprinting to be there before the authorities. Supposedly, I grew up around there, but I didn’t remember these neighborhoods. There was no particular money in it or even superhero glamour, but I needed to be working. I was lucky to find that sniper thing.
Damsel was just there one day when I got home, standing on the shag carpeting in front of the television. She gave me an appraising stare. I knew who she was, obviously, and apparently she knew me.
“You must be Fatale.” She glowed a little. She was being projected here as a hologram, the superhero phone call. Her left foot wafted through a thrift-store coffee table—there hadn’t been much room to materialize. I wondered where the transmitter was.
“Damsel?” I ducked a little to come inside.
“I’m here to offer you an opportunity. Part of a group effort we’re putting together. If you’re willing, there’s a meeting coming up at the Manhattan facility. I understand you’re temporarily at liberty.”
“Uh, right. Of course. Well of course I’m interested. And no, I’m not, uh, engaged right now.”
“Excellent. Details will arrive by courier. We’ll expect you.” She winked out. Whatever level of technology they used, it was pretty far from anything you’d see on the street.
I noticed she didn’t promise anything. And she didn’t use the word team, like the old Champions were. They’d been more like a family, even before Blackwolf and Damsel married. No one expected that to happen again. They wanted an available hero who could be a technician, like Galatea was, but they weren’t pretending it was going to be that relationship again.
I could picture the conversation that led to my selection.
“So who can
we get? Somebody who does machines.”
“Dreadstar?”
“Eh.”
“Calliope? Argonaut? The Breach?”
Chorus of shouts: “Not the fucking Breach!”
“Who, then? We’ve got no psychics, nobody technical…”
“Please, just find somebody who’s not going to be a total disaster. Have the computer give us a list.”
They’d looked at my schematics, and my references had checked out, and Damsel was dispatched. The official invitation came later in a heavy envelope of crisp, velvety paper. I was to report to their headquarters for the informational meeting two days later. They sent me a plane ticket along with. I’d never flown first-class before.
Talking about CoreFire, they fall into old rhythms. They used to be a team—once; they did this for a living. They all seem rusty at first. Damsel’s just a part-time crime fighter now. For all her power, she spends more time fund-raising for groups like Amnesty International. Elphin has a line of beauty products. Mister Mystic works as a consultant, to an odd and exclusive clientele.
“All right, say he’s missing. Now what?” Blackwolf’s natural charisma seems to make him cochair of this meeting.
“Who saw him last?” Damsel asks.
“I did.” Blackwolf answers her levelly. “He looked fine.” Blackwolf holds the distinction of being the only human ever to knock CoreFire unconscious. He still patrols in costume, part-time, but it’s mostly publicity for his corporate holdings.
“He always looks fine,” says Feral. He’s one of the few heroes on this level still working the streets, still busting up drug deals and foiling muggers. “Damsel? I know you two kept in touch.”
“I haven’t seen him in a year. When we took down Impossible together last time. He was on form. Untouchable as ever.”
I follow the conversation, feeling useless. I’ve never met CoreFire. I’ve never even seen him in person.
“He always had that vulnerability to magic. I saw an arrow go right into him one time. Some kind of magic arrow thing.”
“A magic arrow is not an object you understand, Blackwolf,” Mister Mystic responds. “In my current pursuits, I seldom traffic in such things, but I will inquire.”
“The forest realms say nothing,” Elphin offers wide-eyed, wings rustling.
Damsel takes a deep breath.
“Look, this is what I’m proposing. CoreFire’s never failed to answer a hail before, and if he’s over his head, this is going to be serious. If this is Doctor Impossible, it’s the moment he’s been waiting for. We’re setting up a…group. People from the powered community. You people are the short list.”
That makes them think. The Champions meant a lot to the community before they split, but the core members haven’t all been in the same room since then.
As a group, they seem to have trouble keeping still. Feral paces and lashes his tail. Damsel rewraps the cord on one of her sword hilts while she speaks. Elphin flies up to perch on one of the computer banks, her long eldritch spear held lightly in one hand, the barbed metal tip nearly touching the curved ceiling.
Rainbow Triumph taps one foot, glances over at me or at the ceiling, and drums polished fingernails. She was an obvious choice, a high-profile hero with great approval ratings and generous corporate backing. The invitation had probably been cleared through Gentech, and her agent. I’m a little surprised to see her still in the field. Child superheroes so rarely turn out well—look at the Impkin now; look at poor Theodore Bear.
I rub one arm at the line where the steel alloy bonded with my skin. No seam at all—it’s like two layers of Neapolitan ice cream, flesh and alloy, some protein voodoo they managed mostly by luck. Underneath it’s a lot uglier; wires run everywhere like bad kudzu, and there’s still a lot more human tissue in the right half than anyone thinks. Only the Protheon team knows for sure.
Blackwolf watches everyone else, eyes flicking to elbows and knees, all the weak spots. He puts a lot of time and thought into working out exactly how, if it came to it, in a fight, he could hurt the person he’s looking at. It’s not personal. It’s the only thing he’s good at, and it’s amazing he’s survived this long. He was diagnosed mildly autistic before he was a superhero.
Only Lily keeps utterly still, in a chair a few places down the table, a sculptured plexiglas form. She raises one crystalline arm.
“So…why do we think it’s Doctor Impossible? Isn’t he still in jail?” Lily’s voice sounds carefully neutral. Damsel answers, looking straight at her.
“I don’t, personally, but who knows what he’s capable of? And something this big doesn’t happen without his knowing.”
“Do we know where he is?”
“That setup near Chicago, locked down tight.”
“Look, if you’re so worried about him, why not just ask him yourself?” Lily looks almost amused. She and the Doctor were an item back in her not-so-distant villain days.
“He knows us. He won’t talk to us. Unless you think you could do better?” Blackwolf’s tone is even, genial; he’s watching to see how she’ll take it.
“I was hoping that between us we’d have a few leads, Lily.” Feral holds her gaze, tiger face unreadable. They say he has a drinking problem now, but he’s pure havoc in a fight.
“I don’t have all my old connections, as my presence in this room ought to tell you. CoreFire has a lot of enemies. Any one of them could have found that stuff he hates. The iridium.”
“We scan for that. Always,” Damsel shoots back.
“I’m just saying, there are a lot of people trying to figure out how to do this. And you haven’t been watching. You’ve been out doing…whatever you’ve been doing.” Lily watches their reaction; this part, I now realize, is her job interview.
“You have, maybe. I do my job. I always have,” Feral rumbles, and leans back in his chair.
It’s an uncomfortable silence. Too many heroes in this room, and too much history.
Most of them are naturals, superpowered since puberty or before. Powers that came on their own. Naturals are the wild talents that form out of the ever-churning soup of the human megapopulace by accident or fate. Once in a hundred million times, a lifetime of factors align, and at the right moment something new coalesces out of high-tech industrial waste, genetic predisposition, and willpower, with a dash of magic or alien invention. It started happening more often in the early 1950s, and no one knows why—nuclear power plants, alien contact, chlorinated water, or too many people dancing the Twist.
A very few of us got this way on purpose. Manufactured, treated with chemicals, surgically altered. Sheer force of will, or radical educational measures, or a willingness to take insane gambles for power. Blackwolf, for example, is little more than a superbly gifted athlete.
His father, legend has it, taught him most of what he knows in their backyard with only a baseball bat, a German shepherd, and an old rubber tire hanging from a tree. I’ve been snubbed before, for doing for myself what destiny did for others. But it may be a nobler thing to claw one’s way up, to seize by an effort what others had handed to them. What they were born with, or what dropped from the sky one calm summer night.
Damsel breaks the silence. “If someone out there has figured out how to beat him, we need to know it.”
“We owe it to the man, don’t we?” The question hangs in the air. Whatever had split them up made that an actual question.
“He was one of us,” says Elphin with finality, in the clarion tones of an Amazonian warrior. “If he truly has fallen, we cannot let him go unavenged.”
Elphin sits to my left, looking around with a disturbingly avian stare. We rode up in the elevator together. She’s not a teenager; she only looks like one. According to her press kit, she was born in tenth-century England. She’s a fairy.
They say she’s the remnant of an elite fairy guard, a warrior woman, one of Titania’s picked few. When the rest of the fairies departed this world, Titania asked her to stay behind. Where
her friends had gone, no one knew. All those years, she’d lasted it out with no word from her own people, sipping tea from acorn cups and hunting the shrinking forests of England with flint arrowheads, fairy tech, while the centuries passed.
And then she’d come out of hiding to battle the enemies of humankind. That’s if you take her word for it. I admit she looks like a fairy. She’s around five feet tall, with ethereal blond hair, big bright eyes, high cheekbones, tiny breasts. And she acts like you’d think a fairy would act—cute and flighty, blond and haughty. Merry without projecting anything much like happiness. Pretty, but only approximately human.
Her wings look about right; long and iridescent, they whir like an electric fan when she’s in flight. She shouldn’t be able to fly at all, but should can’t be depended upon to mean what it’s supposed to when she’s around. I don’t like to look at the place where they join her back, where the insect anatomy joins the human, where the whole thing gets touched with horror. She carries a long spear or pike, a shaft of pale wood tipped with a barbed curlicue like a corner of spiderweb. In her hands it’s like a willow wand, but I’ve seen her punch it through the door of an armored car.
I don’t know what she is. Sometimes she acts like the heroine of an epic fantasy novel and sometimes she acts like she’s about nine years old, which might be cute if she didn’t kill people. But if you tried to make up a list of reasons why a person would look and act like she does, “fairy” would be about the least likely. Maybe it just suits her to say that—better than “wacky elective surgery” or “spy from evil wasp-persons,” or whatever it is that made her this way. God knows, my story is no better than hers.
I had four major operations, the longest lasting seventeen hours. The bones and armor went in first, to support the weight of the rest of it. I gained 178 pounds overnight, most of it lightweight alloy steel, bonded by an electrochemical process they wouldn’t explain.
For the next six days, I wasn’t allowed to move, not that I could have easily. I lay on my back and watched movies and healed. The worst part of it was my skull and jaw. The way it runs across my face like a stripe of silver paint, that took getting used to. My jaw too heavy, my tongue fumbling against metal teeth and cheek, like a strange metal cup always at my lips. At that point, it was all dead metal, like a suit of armor that wouldn’t come off.
Soon I Will Be Invincible Page 3