by Lee Winter
All the defensiveness Lena usually felt when given unsolicited life advice didn’t constrict her throat as it usually did. Instead, she offered another smile.
“Goodness, you really are different,” Mrs. Finkel said in surprise. “Something changed you on your last assignment. And for the better.”
Lena met her kind gaze and admitted nothing.
“Well, I can see that’s as much as I’ll get out of you today,” her neighbor said with a chuckle. “Let me make you a coffee while we plan a revolution.”
“Plan a ‘typing assignment’ you mean.”
“Same thing.” Mrs. Finkel’s eyes sparkled.
“Another day, thanks,” Lena said and climbed to her feet. “I’m washed out right now.”
She waited for the elderly woman to get the hint, gather up the papers, and leave. Lena then headed to her bathroom, finding her mirror. She studied her reflection, trying to see what had changed that Mrs. Finkel had noticed. Plain blue eyes stared back. The same blonde sweep of hair. The same snub nose and ears that stuck out just a tiny bit. The same wide mouth and pale lips.
She inhaled at a memory. Lips that Nyah had worshipped. The guardian had explored her for hours, before holding Lena like she meant something to the world. Like she mattered. Even knowing who she was and what she’d done to guardians and her own mother, she’d held her. And she’d told her, that in her shattered, messed-up soul hid a white crow.
Lena smiled softly. She straightened, decision made. “Okay then,” she sternly told her jagged reflection in the broken mirror. She nodded more firmly, gathering her courage. “Okay.”
She went to her fridge door and took down the business card stuck to it by a magnet. Diane Finkel. The granddaughter looking for someone interesting to hang out with. Lena supposed she constituted that at least.
She hesitated for only a moment. And then she picked up her phone.
CHAPTER 17
THE TRUTH ABOUT GUARDIANS
THE SUPERHEROES WE DRUG, CONTROL, HIDE, DESTROY, AND SECRETLY BURY
WORLD EXCLUSIVE
BY JOSEPHINE FINKEL
Guardians are having mental breakdowns at a devastating rate, before being hidden and drugged in secret wards in the lower levels of the Facility buildings worldwide.
Deaths are being covered up as well, with manipulated footage and images released to the public to give the impression Earth’s protectors are all alive and well.
Shocking figures and testimony from an inside source leaked exclusively to this paper reveal the scale of the global outrage:
Eighty-seven guardians have died in the past century, nearly all while saving humans. (List of the dead on page 3)
Two hundred and eighty-five guardians have had mental breakdowns. All incidents have been covered up, the guardians’ absences hidden from the world.
Teams of secret enforcers, called trackers, have been finding and bringing back any guardians who go on the run to escape their restrictive lives.
Guardians are forced to work in slave-like conditions, never able to take a vacation as they are always on standby. This has led to a dramatic spike in breakdowns in the past few years.
Despite requests by guardians over the years for their leader, Talon Man, to improve working conditions, he has refused, citing the Pact’s clauses as binding.
Our source alleges that the cover-ups, lies, and ill-treatment of guardians have all been done to protect the myth of guardian perfection established by Talon Man.
World-renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Francis Butler, from the Institute of Mental Health Research in Boston, said the guardians’ inability to have any say in their own lives or career choices would put them under “an enormous and heartbreaking amount of stress.”
“The only shock for me is it’s taken this long for us to hear about their breakdowns,” Dr. Butler said.
He believed that locking up emotionally injured guardians without proper care and counseling from experts in post-traumatic stress disorder was “the worst possible treatment and a form of abuse that should be addressed urgently.”
A spokeswoman for Amnesty International, Melissa Goodwin, said the allegations should “shock all decent humans to their core” and must be investigated immediately.
“Make no mistake,” Ms. Goodwin said, “the disgrace is ours. How was it that the human race never stopped to ask whether our protectors took breaks and were well cared for when seeing things that would shake a hardened soldier? Amnesty International calls on the United Nations to tear up the Pact and rewrite it, allowing our superheroes the same freedoms that we all enjoy.”
Talon Man, when asked to comment, denied all claims vehemently.
“You’re being lied to,” he said. “By a bitter former employee, no doubt, with an agenda of hate and jealousy. Why would I abuse and neglect my own people? Why would I not want what’s best for my own kind? This is absurd.
“After a lifetime of selflessly helping your planet, you accuse me of this? The Facility has nothing to hide. This is a fiction. I’m disappointed you would stoop to this level in printing such baseless lies. If there was any truth to these claims, don’t you think it would have come out years ago?”
Talon Man hung up when we asked for a tour of the sub-levels of the Facility buildings. An hour later he posted on his social media account, @talonmanhero, warning people to ignore any forthcoming “smear campaigns” put out by our “terrible rag of a paper.”
Three independent experts in video and digital manipulation were asked to look at recent Facility-issued footage of guardians saving lives—guardians who our source tells us are actually dead. All experts confirmed that the footage is a series of brilliantly crafted fakes.
One of the experts, Roger Copeland of Special FX Imagineers, said: “There are certainly lies here—Talon Man’s right about that—but they are being told by the Facility and its leader.”
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Turn to Pages 2–4 for our list of the dead guardians, obituaries, and statistics of guardians who have had breakdowns.
Page 5: Full analysis of the fake footage that has fooled the world.
Page 6: The NDAs Facility employees are forced to sign—hear from the former mental health nurse ruined for trying to reveal the truth decades ago.
Pages 7–23: More stories and an in-depth analysis of how the Pact and Talon Man’s quest for perfection has been killing our heroes.
The Facility buildings were burning. Everywhere Lena looked, news footage showed outraged protestors gathering in front of the towers worldwide. In Paris, students were burning cars and mobbing the entrances. In Istanbul and Athens, they were throwing fire bombs at the buildings. Sydney’s protestors had dumped a truckload of manure in front of the Facility. And in cities across the US, chanting protestors in their thousands burnt effigies of Talon Man, his orange outfit blistering in the flames. A thick cordon of riot police forced them back in every city, but it was only a matter of time before the Facility buildings fell, one by one.
There were rumblings now. Every day she heard more. A civilian taskforce might be set up and everyone would be fired. Bruce Dutton was rubbing his thinning hair, looking anxious and fearful. Most of her colleagues were looking for new jobs. Well, those who hadn’t already resigned.
Lena supposed she should feel guilty about all of it.
She didn’t.
Talon Man had disappeared from the feeds now. It was incredible. After a lifetime of seeing him wall-to-wall on the news monitors each day when Lena arrived to work, suddenly they were all black.
She’d seen the guardian leader twice in the office, stalking through it, jaw tight with fury. His empire was falling. He wasn’t taking it well. And he still didn’t seem to really believe it. He’d actually stopped once as he passed, looking at Lena speculatively, wondering at her loyalties no doubt. The timing of everything imploding looked incriminating for her, of course. But it was also entirely circumstantial.
She’d done her best to return his lo
ok with a projection of idiocy and confusion so perfect that he’d shaken his head and kept on walking. A man like that, always sure his outlook was right, always convinced he could read people with accuracy, was child’s play to manipulate.
Lena went back to work. She had a gardener on the fourth floor to see and a deal to make.
Another week had passed. Lena slipped around the back of the building—late for work again. No one commented on it these days. It was lucky if any employees got through the dense circle of protestors, even with the riot police forcing paths through the baying mob for employees.
Moscow Facility had shocked everyone by falling overnight. Rioters had torn the place apart looking for the sub-levels and the hidden, injured guardians. The security on those levels—complete with biometric scans in elevators—prevented their access, of course. That wouldn’t last. Not when the UN finally agreed to rip up the Pact, throw out Talon Man’s self-governance clauses, and intervene. A vote was due any day now on that. Everyone already knew what the result would be. Soldiers were on standby in every nation that housed a Facility, just waiting for the order to go in. The world was holding its breath.
Lena picked up her pace, the wind carrying the latest chants from the front of the Facility her way.
“Ho-ho, hey-hey, how many guardians did you drug today?”
Catchy.
She couldn’t blame them their rage, and didn’t complain that she now had to go almost a block out of her way to use one of the hidden rear entrances, connected via a storage facility. Another tidbit she’d learned about, thanks to her (now fracturing) network of insiders.
A high-pitched noise cut through the air. Skidding to a halt, Lena turned her head to listen. A series of heavy squeals of air brakes punctured the silence. Five squeals, one after the other. Lena waited a few minutes. Then, there it was. Marching. Toward the Facility. The cadence was heavy and in step. So, military then, not protestors.
The vote had to have happened at the UN. That meant it was on. Right now. Lena yanked out her phone and scrolled to a number she knew by heart.
“It’s me,” she said urgently. “They’re going in now. Soldiers. Five trucks’ worth. They’ll have to be popping the cork on the sub-levels now so you’ll need to be here with a video crew for when they bring them all out. This is the footage that’ll break him. It’ll break everything.”
There was a soft inhalation. Then she heard, “Of course, dear. Thanks for letting me know. Stay safe.”
Lena ended the call to Mrs. Finkel. Stay safe? Funny thing was she’d never once feared for her life in all this. Sure, there’d been injuries overseas when Facility staff and protestors clashed, but no deaths. The anger was all spitting and curling Talon Man’s way. The only real danger, she thought, was his lies not being exposed. Of his protests of innocence being believed. It was the reason why she stayed on at work, feeding Mrs. Finkel updates as the world came apart around her ears.
Sirens shrieked, announcing the arrival of ambulances. She’d been right. They were going in to rescue the breaks. There would be chaos when they surfaced. Lena considered her options. Work was a write-off now. It would all be over soon. The Facility buildings everywhere would be cleared, and that would be that. So what should she do now? Her mind blanked. It really was over.
She stared vacantly at the alley in front of her, when a movement caught her eye. The door from the Facility’s storage building had opened. She crept over for a better angle and watched as a figure emerged.
Rats and sinking ships came to mind.
Grimly, Lena dropped her hand to her hip, unlatching the clip holding her Dazr. The figure hadn’t seen her yet. Pressing herself against the brick wall behind her, into the shadows, she aimed her weapon, and thumbed up the power setting.
Once set, she coughed.
Talon Man jumped in shock. His stance was wide, an arm lifting, ready to launch into the skies.
Lena waggled her Dazr. “I wouldn’t. You’ll drop like a bowling ball if I paralyze you midair. Might even kill you.”
She stepped out of the shadows, and he looked at her, then at the gun, and back to her.
“You,” he muttered in recognition. “Wait…you?” he asked again, incredulously. “After everything we’ve done for you? After our little chat about loyalty, you want to arrest me?”
Lena made a show of tapping the safety off and waited for him to finally join the dots. It took almost a minute.
“You disgusting gutter shreekopf! YOU were the leak?”
And there it was.
His chest puffed out in fury, and he jabbed a small, stubby finger in her direction. “My staff suggested it might be you, but I told them it was absurd. You lack the intelligence to mastermind any of this. So who was behind it? Really?”
Lena said nothing, but her mocking expression required no words.
His mouth fell open when he understood. “I’ll sue you for breach of contract,” he snarled. “That NDA is iron-clad.”
“Is it? You had a third-gen guardian sign a clause written for commons. And you think I’m stupid?”
“You really did this?” Shock covered his features. “Don’t you see what you’ve done? Do you even care? It’s in ruins. Everything I’ve built.”
“It deserves to be. Look at what this place did to your people. All by trying to make them live a lie. No one’s perfect, and it’s cruel forcing that standard on anyone.”
“You don’t understand anything! Humans would have slaughtered us all the day we arrived if we hadn’t shown we were better than them. They had to see. Be impressed by us. They had to know that we were worthy of saving.” His voice broke. “Perfect.”
Lena stared at him, aghast. “Oh my God, that was a century ago. Are you kidding me? Are you really still that frightened alien sitting on the grass in England, terrified by the guns trained at your heads? Is this what this whole fucked-up thing has all been about? Building an empire so big and so powerful that no one will ever try to hurt you again? All this time you’ve just been scared?”
Hate filled his eyes. “You’ll never understand what we went through. We’d lost our whole world, and your planet wanted us dead. They shot at us before they even spoke to us. They made us perform for them like animals to prove our worth. They could have killed us at any moment, and do you know the only thing that saved us? They didn’t know they could.” He gave an incredulous laugh. “So that lie of perfection that you mock so much saved us many times. It’s why you’re alive today. Not that you’d ever grasp that. You’re just a shreekopf traitor.”
Lena glared at him. “Are you done? Because what I see is a frightened little man who had no clue how to lead, and who built his house on sand. You tortured and drugged your own people to shore up your empire, yet you call me the traitor? You’re as screwed up as those you sent to the sub-levels. But you don’t care about them—only your own hide. You disgust me.”
He gave her a toneless laugh. “What are you going to do?”
For all his cockiness, Lena heard a ripple of fear in his voice.
“Hey, listen,” Lena said, angling her head in the direction of the Facility. “They’re chanting your name. They sound angry, don’t they? They have a right to be. So I think I’ll give them what they’re demanding. You’d hate that wouldn’t you? Being humiliated? Me dragging you out there? Not only less than perfect, but exposed for the slippery speed agent and fraud you are.”
“What do you want? Money?” Talon Man hurled at her angrily. “Name it. I have resources.”
“Can’t you hear them? ‘Talon Man, Talon Man’,” she said copying the sing-song chants. “Is it just me or does it sound like more of them than before?”
“I can give you Mind Merge!” Talon Man said suddenly, looking paler. “Family! I can make it so he’s in your life. You’ll have a grandfather. You want that? Family. Since your mother…” He faded out.
Lena stared at him. “You’re unbelievable. You think I give a tagshart about some stranger who
was nowhere around back when it might have mattered? Is that how pathetic I seem to you? Or is it all humans? Christ, to think our world worships you. Sorry,” Lena corrected helpfully, “make that worshipped. Past tense.”
Wails and furious shouts began to fill the air from a block away.
“I’d say by the crowd reaction, your time’s up,” Lena continued. “Sounds like the first of your broken guardians are surfacing. What will they do to you when I haul your ass out there?”
“Please!” His whole body shivered with the word. “Please,” he said again, even more desperately. His mouth moved wordlessly. The bravado had completely evaporated.
Lena gaped at him, never expecting this. It was worse than a meltdown. It was a complete capitulation. Or was she being manipulated? She narrowed her eyes, seeking the lies. She couldn’t find them, though. Was the man really this cowardly?
“We share the same blood lines,” he whispered, his voice shaking. “Doesn’t that mean something? Don’t do this.” Panic covered his face. “Just tell me what your price is. Tell me!”
“My price?” Lena mocked him. “You don’t have it in you.”
His head snapped up, sensing a crack, a sliver of hope. His eyes filled with the possibilities. He looked exactly like the scheming used-car salesman he was deep down. Still trying to do a deal from the bottom of a manure heap.