I leave her there humming to herself, her spear leaning awkwardly into the backseat. She’s got a communicator, so she’ll listen in and beep me if there’s a problem. My weight snaps a flagstone going up the front walk.
It’s like visiting the school bully’s mother. I’m going to sit down with the woman who raised Damsel, the most famous female hero in the world. With CoreFire gone, the leader of the Champions may be the biggest hero in the world, no exceptions. I wonder again why it’s me—I guess because I never worked with her before.
I think about Paragon going bad, how they found him. What am I going to find here? I scan the house with every faculty I have available. One human female inside, flat normal to anything I can pick up. Still, I brace myself for anything. I press the doorbell, and she answers.
She looks older out of costume. Softer, a princess grown fleshy and middle-aged. Is this really who Damsel was so afraid of?
I used to be a fan of the Elfland series myself, and maybe I was thinking she’d look more like the girl they cast for the movies. There’s a photograph that circulates on the Internet, supposedly from the earliest case files, of four children wrapped in shiny foil emergency blankets, grinning like maniacs. She might have been one of them grown up, black hair and pale skin, but much older. Her real name is Linda.
I step inside. Meeting the Champions was one thing, but the members of the Super Squadron are a step beyond, something closer to myth, their origins in the stars or among the gods. But her living room looks like any middle-class suburban housewife’s, and I’m surprised to find I’m a head taller than her. She glances twice at my face, the metal hand I extend to grasp hers. She lights a cigarette without asking.
“Can I offer you anything? Cocktail?” she says.
“Um, no thanks, ma’am. My metal half doesn’t like it.”
“Damsel must have sent you. You’re Fatale. The cyborg.”
“That’s right.” I actually wasn’t sure she’d remember me from her visit.
“We didn’t used to have them, you know.” The conversation grinds to a halt there. Maybe I should have brought Elphin along after all. I take a breath and get to the point.
“We need to know, well, about the Scepter of Elfland. Whether anything’s, well, happened with it lately.”
“Then you don’t know?” she asks. I sit forward. Maybe I’ve got something here after all.
“Why don’t you tell me.”
“I guess since I’m no longer part of their little fantasy club, it’s all right for me to talk about it. It’s not as if anyone ever believed us anyway.” She takes another drag from the cigarette. I’ve spent enough time around superheroes to recognize the look on her face. She’s going to tell me her origin.
“It’s hard to remember details now. I’ve had to tell the story so many times now, what I remember is a blur of therapy rooms, my years in costume, and then maybe, way at the back, what I remember may not be anything more than a glimpse of lights shining in a dark forest. It’s been thirty-four years since then, most of it in offices, entering sales data into computers. That’s what I do for a living now. My secret identity.”
She tells me the story of her journey to that other world, the story from the children’s book. How she’d stumbled into the other world one morning with her brothers and sister, and had adventures uncounted in a magic land beyond imagining.
“We came to what thousands of people have searched for since, a standing stone five feet high, marking a path we hadn’t seen before. It had writing on it, a message we didn’t bother to read; and maybe it was important, but it’s lost forever now. We turned down the path without much comment, expecting any moment to come out in someone’s backyard and turn around. We walked for ten minutes, and there was at some point a change that afterward we all remembered differently—to me, it was a shift in the quality of the light, but nothing I’ve ever been able to describe. And the forest grew darker and then lighter as we walked, and then we met the first of the fairies, standing there real as a policeman.”
And then one day, they stumbled back. She gets up and paces the living room as she speaks, mixes herself a drink, something strong-looking. She gestures a lot when she talks, and she doesn’t really look at me.
“I’m not saying it was a game, and I’m not saying it wasn’t a game. All anyone knows for sure is that we were gone for eleven days, long enough for the search to become national news. No one has completely explained where we were, or how at the end of it we showed up again in that field after volunteers had searched every square foot of it, in the midst of all those dogs and reporters and emergency personnel, dressed the way we were, and obviously happier than we had ever been in our lives. We certainly weren’t twelve years older than when we had left, although a moment before it had seemed that way.
“It was raining the day we came back. We had set out riding that spring morning, the four of us, to look at what the flooding had done. The footing grew uncertain and we tied the horses and walked ahead. We began to hear faint helicopters and engine noise, and the whiff of exhaust, and I think we all realized what was happening at roughly the same time. It was exactly like waking up out of a dream, and the exact moment when you realize you’re waking up is the moment after which you can’t possibly get back to sleep. And then the noise broke on us all at once, and through the trees we could see the bright colors of tents and windbreakers. One of the rescue workers saw us and yelled, and then people were running toward us with blankets.
“I remember two things the most vividly. One was the recognition on Sean the High King’s face. I think he may have known first, having lived the longest time at home. The other was Wendy, who in the moments before they reached us tore off the amulet she had won from the White Queen, snapping the chain, and threw it as hard as she could back into the trees. We never found it, or Sean’s hammer. Nothing except the clothes we wore, and my scepter. Sean always claimed the rescue workers took them, but they would never admit it.
“I still thought we were going to give brief explanations and goodbyes, and set off back to the kingdom. It never occurred to me or any of us until later that something so real and concrete could vanish forever into a group of trees so thin, you could see the back of a house behind them.”
Years of therapy followed, and explanations piled on explanations for what had happened to them—hidden caves; a drop in the water table; drugs.
“There are still things that need explaining. The clothes we were wearing. The sounds that were heard in the woods that first night we were back. Wendy had a whole new way of speaking, and she looked straight at you instead of ducking her head. And I had the long scar on my inside right forearm, which my mother claims was already there, but I will never believe it, ever, until the day I die.
“People couldn’t resist the charm of the whole idea, and it snowballed once that clinician went on NPR. Then there was Four Children in Elfland, the case study that became the children’s book, and those sequels that the other guy wrote. And then we were on T-shirts. I changed my name when I turned eighteen, and again at twenty-three. People dressed up as us and ran web sites and held conventions. They all hate me now, too. I’m sorry, but I’m a little tired of defending myself.
“We did try to go back, you know. The first time was only a week afterward. And on the one-year anniversary, we spent a whole day there, combing the wet grass for any sign of the marker stone. I must have gone back a dozen times alone or with David, whenever we were feeling especially depressed or bored, or felt like cutting school. I know Sean camped out there for two weeks one summer. But time runs much faster in Elfland, and it must have run a long time there by now.”
I can see the last cocktail taking effect, and she keeps going, gesturing a little more broadly. The eldest had been a king or emperor of something, and he tried to take control of the group. They fought endlessly; not all of them even agreed on what had happened, or if anything had happened at all. There was a lot of talk about the gifts they�
��d received, and whether Linda had stolen one of them. In the end, they vanished together, leaving Linda under a somewhat farcical “decree of exile.”
And what could she do then? Linda reemerged in her public persona as Regina, Queen, Crusader of Elfland, one of the first and most successful female superheroes. She’d married Stormcloud after Damsel’s mother left, and retired from active life.
“I wouldn’t even be in therapy if I could just forget about these things. The court dances, men and women crossing the pink-and-white tile of the ballroom on autumn nights. Going out onto the terrace to cool off, the night air icy on my face, and looking up at the Moon to wonder if the Earth were real at all. Stopping one morning for an hour by a wooden bridge while David and Sean argued over whether we had lost the way. Wendy and I sat and played a game with a pattern in the carvings on the wooden railing. I would know it if I saw it tomorrow. I could draw it now. Believe me.”
“But the staff?” I ask. I can’t resist. “The Scepter, I mean. It works, doesn’t it? I mean, that’s proof. That you went.”
“Agatha’s wand. Sometimes I don’t even know if I saw it in Elfland, or if it’s something from a game we played afterward, or a dream. Here, I’ll show it to you. I keep it with the costume.”
She disappears, then comes back with a small wooden case, maybe twenty inches long.
“It was weakening on my last adventure. It had become something else, just a stick, or maybe that’s what it always was. The ruby doesn’t even look like a ruby anymore. Just colored glass.
“Maybe it’s the curse. Or maybe it’s Sean’s fault; maybe his silly decree actually did something. Doctor Impossible won’t be coming here if he knows what he’s doing. Tell Damsel I’m sorry.”
Out of its case, it looks like a stage prop, and I wonder if it ever was magical. It must have been…I guess. I’m out of my depth here. I thought the Super Squadron was the one thing you could trust, the real heroes, if there are any. Now it’s just us. I wonder how long Damsel has known that.
I thank her and walk quietly down the walk. It’s dark as I leave. As I start the engine, I see her on the front step, looking down at us, peering to see Elphin through the tinted windows. I press down on the accelerator and we pull hastily away before I even notice that Elphin is weeping, tears pouring unheeded down her face. I manage to pretend not to see as I drive us back to the airport, and the waiting ChampJet takes us to our next mission.
Blackwolf’s scheme isn’t working. It’s 6:14 a.m. by that ever-blinking clock, and none of us has slept all night. I sag in my harness, tired of clinging to the museum roof. The Nightstar sits untouched in its leaded-glass display case at the Institute for Advanced Thought. Doctor Impossible didn’t come. No one is coming. And Blackwolf has managed to direct the whole operation without speaking to me once.
Disgusted, Blackwolf tears off his hat and tosses it in the trash, walking away from his role as a fake security guard in a lifelike rubber mask. In a few minutes, the regular staff will get here, and we’d rather be gone.
The rest of us are concealed around the chamber. Lily, cast as a fake statue, lowers her arms with a loud sigh and follows him, brushing plaster dust from her face and hands. The rest of us keep to our places and watch them go, sensing a showdown.
Sure enough, their conversation gets louder and louder, until we can hear Blackwolf from the lobby.
“Wait. You say you saw him?”
“I’m sorry I told you any of this. What did you want me to do?” says Lily.
“He is a wanted criminal. This is exactly the reason your membership is probationary.”
“He wasn’t doing anything!” I look at Damsel, still in her own place as a carved Madonna. Elphin, probably the only convincing-looking art object among us, is still posed by the door, watching curiously.
“Except gloating. Except laughing in our faces,” responds Blackwolf.
“We just talked for a second. It doesn’t always have to be a superfight.”
“He would have surrendered.”
“With Phenom there? And Salvo? It would have been murder.”
“CoreFire was murdered. He could be coming for you next. Did you ever think of that?”
“You don’t know any of this for sure. Doctor Impossible was in jail.”
“But you weren’t, were you? Where were you before CoreFire disappeared, anyway?”
“For the millionth time, I had nothing to do with it.”
“This would all be easier if we could establish—”
“Bullshit! I know who CoreFire was looking for, and it wasn’t Doctor Impossible, I’ll tell you that much.”
“He escaped right after CoreFire disappeared. He hates CoreFire; we know that. And now he’s trying to take over the world. Just what is missing for you?”
“You ever think about what you look like to us? You’re just a gang of high-tech thugs and bullies and…and weirdos.”
Blackwolf, for once, is silent.
“Just don’t follow me.” I can tell from her voice that she’s already walking away, heels clicking on the polished floor.
Blackwolf comes back, a uniformed silhouette against the arched doorway. “I told you she was a mistake.”
Damsel, Lily’s plaster double, looks after her thoughtfully. “I wonder whose?”
Lily is gone when we get home. She must have visited the tower on her way back—she took off her transponder and left it in her room. I find it sitting on what was CoreFire’s old bed.
I guess I thought we were going to be friends, and now I don’t know what we are. Do we have to fight now? Has she gone back to Doctor Impossible? She could have been tipping Doctor Impossible off for weeks, I guess—that’s what Blackwolf thinks. But then how did we surprise him at the funeral? I can’t really believe it.
I go back to the computer, hoping for some detail here that I missed before. If CoreFire wasn’t looking for Doctor Impossible, then who? His old girlfriend, maybe?
I’m browsing through early file photos when I see the thing I shouldn’t see. CoreFire’s only a year or so out of college, at a black-tie fund-raising dinner. He’s wearing his costume, a little incongruous-looking, but it’s the woman next to him I notice, a raven-haired woman in glasses, smiling and directing a sly-seeming remark to the hero over an expensive-looking steak as he grins into the camera.
She’s smartly dressed and wearing glasses but even under the makeup, I recognize her. Solidly visible, and a good seven years before she arrived from the future and committed her first crime. Lily.
My communicator beeps and Damsel cuts in.
“It’s happening. Turn on NPR.”
I do, and immediately I hear Doctor Impossible’s voice. He’s surfaced at last to make a public statement, and they’re rebroadcasting it all over the country. Probably the world.
It begins with “Greetings, insects!” and goes on from there, and I don’t listen to the whole thing. Not exactly a prose masterpiece, but the message is clear. He’s found whatever it was he needed to find and he’s going to be taking over the world soon—surrender or be destroyed. I guess he didn’t need the Nightstar after all.
The tower hums with tension; I can hear the jumpjet revving its engines over my head.
Everyone’s calling for the Champions to save them, and it’s giving me a funny feeling in what’s left of my guts. He’s been a step ahead of us the whole time. I bet he planned this entire thing.
I haven’t had time to think very much about what this means for me. I wasn’t joking with Blackwolf, I really could be a spy, or a traitor, or a bomb, and I might not know it.
I wonder if this makes Doctor Impossible my nemesis, and what exactly I should do about that. Maybe Doctor Impossible will know—he’s had nemeses before. In fact, he should be in the market for a new one right about now. I wonder if he’ll know who I am, and whether we met before the operation, if we talked at all. I’ll have to ask him about it if I get the chance. He may be the last man in the world who can
tell me who I am. This could really turn into something.
It makes me feel better, having my own reasons for being on the island. I picture our big showdown, brain against brawn with the rest of the New Champions looking on in awe. When he’s at my mercy, I can demand things, tell him things, make him explain. I should probably start working on my speech, just in case.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
JOIN ME AND WE CANNOT BE DEFEATED
Two days now. Two days before the world falls beneath the heel of my red patent-leather boot. The New Champions know it and I know it. The game, as they say, is afoot, and I must return to my island, or what’s left of it.
Forty thousand feet over the Pacific Ocean, a red-and-gold flier sails silent and radar invisible; the sun is setting beneath a perfect sea of clouds. Alone in the cockpit, I can take a minute to watch my island come into view. Below, invisible, a homing beacon wakes to guide me in, spiraling down into the dusk.
My flier comes to rest in the ruined courtyard, and I step out, smelling the familiar smells of jungle and burned oil. This was my home.
Looking around at the devastation, I can still feel the aches of when they brought me in last, two years ago. The last battle was a messy one, but even so, I can tell they’ve been back here. The footprints make it plain—Blackwolf’s athletic step, like a dancer’s, next to that cyborg’s metal tread. One of mine, I think—a promising idea, but one of the software people I hired ratted me out. I got her out of the hospital anyway; you’d think she’d go easy on me.
And Lily’s been here with them, picking through my things with the rest of the heroes. I wonder if she thought about the last time she’d been here, when I flew her in after her Paris fight, and watched the coverage on CNN. I wonder if she showed them my control room. And I wonder where she is now.
Sighing, I begin checking over systems. There’s a little power left in the reserve generators. The front entrance opens to my touch, and I step into the entrance hall. There’s a musty smell. A lot of water got in during the rainy season, but it’s still impressive, if only the scale of it.
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