Behind the Mask

by Link, Kelly; Rambo, Cat; Vaughn, Carrie

  Emma, Sufferer of Delusions.

  “He’s killing all the heroes,” I say.

  Focus looks out the window. I wonder if he can perceive the city the way I do, unmade and remade, its near destruction flattened into inked pages in a comic book.

  He speaks with little moments of hesitation, as if holding up and discarding all the words that don’t quite fit his meaning. “I’ve seen . . . flaws in the patterns around him. Every time a new comic series comes out, there’s a strangeness to the world, like pieces of a blanket were cut out and . . . patched back together.”

  “Do you remember when the other heroes were real?” I ask.

  “No. Whatever he does, it affects me, as well.”

  “He’s changing everything. I think I’m the only one who sees it.”

  Focus turns back and nods slowly.

  “So go after him!” I say, a little too loudly.

  He regards me from deep under the dark hood. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  His voice is strained and surprisingly young. “For months now, I’ve been aware of him . . . studying me. Trying to trace my connections, discover my identity, my story.”

  That’s how all the comic books start: with the secret identity. No one knows Focus’s origin story.

  He continues. “My privacy is my only defense. I believe if he can . . . discern my personal history, he can do me harm.”

  “You can stop him first.”

  He leans in, so close I can hear him breathing through the dark wraps that encircle his face. “Tucker is surprisingly . . . disconnected. If he’s rewritten history, then he’s written himself out of it. I know his location, nothing more. And he has . . . influential friends.”

  “Other supervillains?”

  “No. People who are very . . . connected. People I need as partners . . . in my work.”

  What’s he talking about? The excitement I felt at being believed is already draining. “I need your help,” I plead.

  He shakes his cowl. “No, you don’t. Go home. You should—” He angles his head, sensing something in my pattern. “You brought a gun.”

  I’d almost forgotten about it myself.

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” I admit.

  “That was—”

  Filaments shoot from the seats, passing through me. Something is wrong. They reach out for Focus, lightly at first, like a mother touching her newborn, then wrapping his arms and legs in glowing shackles.

  “No!” He howls. “Please!”

  A shimmering fiber bursts through the wall of the limo and enters the back of his head. His body jerks as if electrocuted. More filaments encircle and bind him. With visible effort, he pulls the fabric wraps from his face. He’s handsome. I could see talking to him longer, on a train or somewhere normal, in a normal world.

  “He found me,” he gasps. As the threads cocoon him, he blurts out an address and apartment number.

  Then he’s gone.

  “Where you going?” the driver asks. I’m not in the limo anymore. I’m in a New York taxi.

  I swallow, trying to dispel the violence of what I’ve just seen. “Have you ever heard of a superhero called Focus?” I ask.

  “You mean like a comic book guy?” the driver asks.

  “A real man. Focus. He perceives patterns.”

  The man hesitates. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You mean a DJ or something?”

  I think about looking for a bookstore, so I could see if Martin Tucker’s latest creation has hit the stands yet.

  I direct the driver to the address Focus gave me.

  I have a gun, I remind myself. I don’t have super strength, and I can’t fly or perceive underlying patterns, but I have a gun, and that passes for a superpower among normal people like me. I can kill Martin Tucker if I want to.

  • • •

  They say that every time you remember something, you open up the memory and repack it again, like viewing a painting and making a perfect copy of it, over and over. With time, the details smear and change, until the picture is something entirely different, not a transcription of the way the world was, but your own creation.

  But my memory of the Outsider feels perfect, untouched.

  Dust blew around me. Not like a sandstorm, but an unspeakable darkness, the pulverized remains of people, buildings, and dreams. Blocks of debris impacted nearby, like the footsteps of an approaching giant.

  My mother, somewhere in the dust, was screaming my name.

  Then he was there.

  He never bothered with an extravagant costume, never indulged in theatrical capes or high collars. He wore the same simple shirt and pants he had on when he came back to our time. When his feet settled on the cracked sidewalk beside me, I felt the solid, reassuring thump through the bottoms of my shoes.

  “And what are you doing here?” he asked. There was a faint accent, an endearing lilt he never quite shed when he learned our language.

  I knew him by sight. Everyone did. I’d watched him in videos, on the news, and listened to my parents debate whether he was a hero or something else.

  I stared.

  “Do you have a name?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Emma.”

  A man ran out of the swirling dust, his face contorted in panic, and vanished back into the storm.

  Outsider smiled. Caked dust cracked at the corners of his eyes. “Emma the Brave,” he said.

  • • •

  “We’re here,” the driver tells me.

  It’s one of those buildings where you need a key or someone to buzz you in. I wait a few minutes, hoping to slip in behind another resident, but no one comes along, so I pick an apartment and ring the intercom.

  “It’s Sara from down the hall,” I say to the buzzy voice in the grill. “I forgot my key.”

  “What apartment?” the voice demands.

  “Uh, 503?” I can’t keep the lie out of my voice. Emma, Master Criminal.

  Click.

  It will be pretty pathetic if my quest to meet Martin Tucker ends on the front stoop of his building.

  Chin up, I tell myself. There are lots of apartments up there, full of different kinds of people. Smart people, suspicious people, gullible people. I just need one of the latter.

  After a few more tries, I find one, and I’m in.

  On the long, clacking elevator ride to the top floor, I slip my hand into my bag and touch the gun. I have no idea how one confronts a supervillain. Should I put the muzzle in his face as he opens his door? As a villain, he probably won’t show any emotion, but he’ll be looking to outwit me as soon as he can. I have to act fast.

  And by act fast, I guess I mean shoot him.

  I’ve never fired a gun in my life. I’m not cut out to kill someone, supervillain or not.

  If there were a reverse button on the elevator, I would press it, go back to ground level, and start the long walk back to Grand Central right now. Maybe I could stop by a few places I remember being destroyed, a tourist from another world.

  The clattering of the elevator rises to a crescendo, then falls silent. The doors open.

  I never had a master plan. I thought if I could enlist the help of Focus, we might have a chance at stopping Martin Tucker before he erased everything amazing from the world. This is utterly, stupidly hopeless.

  Speaking of hopeless, I’m going to be in more trouble back home than I’ve ever imagined. I swiped my parents’ credit card and stole a gun from their safe. I’m not compliant with my useless medications and not cooperating with my psychologists. I’ve been told that if I continue with my obsessive behavior toward certain figures in the comic book industry, I’ll be confined to a rehabilitation facility against my will. Being in Martin Tucker’s building with a stolen firearm probably qualifies as my last strike.

  On the other hand, I really want to know why he renamed my city.

  The elevator doors start to close. I put up my hand to stop them. Emma the Brave steps out.


  I leave the gun in my bag and knock on the apartment door. From within, there’s a mousy scurrying, then silence. The peephole darkens.

  “Who is it?”

  I utterly failed to plan for this phase. “Are you Martin Tucker?”

  “Who are you?” he asks.

  “I’m here to ask you what you did to Outsider!” I yell.

  A pause. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know how you got in here, but I suggest you leave.”

  He sounds nervous.

  “I’m not talking about the comic book,” I say, leaning in. “I mean the real Outsider.”

  He doesn’t answer, and I begin to wonder if he walked away from the door. “And I want to know why you changed Hyde to New York!”

  There’s no sound. Maybe I should have led with the gun. At last, he speaks. “Step back and let me see you.”

  I comply, looking directly into the peephole until I lose my nerve and stare at the carpet.

  “Are you the one who’s been hassling my agent?” he asks. There’s no anger in his voice. He actually sounds curious.

  “Uh, probably,” I answer. “I was trying to get in touch with you.”

  The door clicks and rattles as he draws back the locks. “Well,” he says. “I’d hate to disappoint a fan.”

  I was expecting someone more . . . villainous. He’s wearing a ratty gray T-shirt with a cartoon manatee on it and cargo shorts that reach below his knees. He’s mostly bald, with a scruffy goatee. He might be my dad’s age.

  “Place is a mess,” he mutters, gesturing me inside.

  His apartment is lit by huge windows full of sky, and it’s a dump. The red couch and three mismatched chairs look like furniture rescued from a sidewalk. They’re stacked with books, papers, and magazines, and there are more piles on the floor. The walls are bare. The sink overflows with grimy dishes. The only clear spot is a wooden stool and a space on the kitchen counter for his laptop.

  It’s about the furthest thing from a villain’s lair that I can imagine.

  I have the disconcerting feeling that I’m supposed to say something nice about the apartment. My parents used to say that was what everyone in Hyde did when they went over to each other’s places. “Nice windows,” I say.

  “Thanks.” He doesn’t make eye contact.

  We pause, as if uncertain who is supposed to speak first.

  “Please,” he gestures to the stool. “Have a seat.”

  “I’ll stand,” I reply, because I’m pretty sure that’s what you’re supposed to say to the villain. Then I feel foolish and sit. “Fine.”

  Martin Tucker leans against a dirty counter. “How much do you know?”

  No point in being coy. “You’ve been making superheroes vanish.”

  “Villains too,” he points out. “But continue.”

  “They vanish, and some time later, they show up in a comic book. Everyone thinks they’re fictional.”

  “Except you, it appears.”

  I nod. He seems nervous. “How do you do it?” I ask.

  Martin Tucker shrugs. “It’s just a matter of unearthing their secrets.” He meets my eyes for just a moment before again letting his gaze wander the room. “I discover their secret identity. I get the origin story. I write it up, hit ‘send’ to my publisher, and—poof! They’re long gone before the edition ever hits the stores. Thirty-two total, so far. Today will be the last, number thirty-three.”

  “Yeah,” I reply. “It already happened. I was there.”

  He looks shocked. “What?”

  “I was asking Focus’s help to defeat you.”

  Tucker laughs. Not a villain’s laugh—certainly not the laugh of an evil genius with a plan to rule the world from a gross apartment. It’s more like the tired way you laugh when someone else steals your cab. “And how did he weasel out of it?”

  I don’t try to hide my annoyance. “He wasn’t weaseling out.”

  “But he wouldn’t help.”

  I shake my head.

  “He’s corrupt,” he says. His hands ball up and relax. “Like all of them. Someone got to him. A criminal group, or a government, or a company with deep pockets. They found something he cared about, and they applied pressure. No one is immune.”

  “He was fighting to stop corruption.”

  “No, he was fighting to stop some corruption, so that other people could sweep in and take a bigger piece of the pie. Those same people have been trying to find me, too, for several years.”

  “That’s not an excuse to kill him,” I say.

  “Well, technically, he’s just a fictional character now. You can’t murder someone who never existed.” He waves a hand in front of his face, as if swatting at flies. “But that’s arguable—I get it. What I want to know is this: do you miss the time before I started cleaning things up? When this city was almost destroyed?”

  “That’s not—” I begin, and don’t know how to answer. Because, yes, I miss it a little, and I don’t know what that says about me. I was terrified at the time. I had to sleep in my parents’ bed because I had nightmares in which buildings fell on them and they cried out to me from under the rubble. I hated it, and now I miss it. I feel wrong even admitting that.

  He picks up a pile of leather volumes from another kitchen stool and steps gingerly around the apartment, looking for a place to put them down. “I see. After all I’ve done to make it safe. Well, the least you can do is make a better argument than ‘it’s wrong to kill people,’ because that ship has sailed.”

  “You took something from me,” I say. “From everyone.”

  He drops the stack atop another pile on the couch, a little more noisily than he needed to, and returns to sit.

  “When I unmade the Unmaker? Spare me. Were you in the city when he fought Outsider?”

  I’m surprised how nonthreatening Martin Tucker appears. You’d think he would be sort of stiff, like a Bond nemesis, showing off his plans to irradiate the earth or drop the Hoover Dam on Washington. It occurs to me that he’s probably never had anyone he could talk to about his power. “I was outside Grand Central,” I admit.

  He opens and closes his mouth and seems to forget what he meant to say for a moment. “It’s just . . . guys like that embodied something I’ve always hated. He thought his anger and specialness entitled him to run the world. I really hate people like that.”

  “But you took away all of them. Even Outsider.”

  He shrugs. “Yeah, that was a tough one. Hard to write about a villain without including a superhero, too. And once I found out that Outsider’s power was fading, I knew he would eventually be corrupted, too. He was already showing signs of caring too much. It was only a matter of time before someone used it against him. To borrow a phrase: he was too big to fail.”

  I think about the dust caking the Outsider’s clothes, the way it broke around his eyes and in the corners of his mouth. He could have just picked me up, flown me to safety, and gone back into battle. But he paused.

  “Emma the Brave,” Outsider said. “Would you like to take a ride?”

  He squatted down and offered me his back. I wrapped my arms around his neck, hiked my legs over his hips. His back felt warm—solid but yielding, like my dad’s.

  “Are you ready?” he asked, standing and supporting my legs with his hands. I nodded into his hair, and we went up.

  “Why do you care, anyway?” Martin Tucker asks. “The world is getting along just fine without him.”

  “He saved me,” I explain.

  I clung to Outsider’s back as we rose through the swirling gray storm. Without warning, we shot into bright sunlight, and I saw the embattled city below. Dust ran in furious rivers between the buildings, darkness shot through with bright electrical flares. A bridge swayed, flinging its cables skyward like an enraged squid.

  It was terrifying and awful. And it was something else—something I barely understood and could not then admit. It was important. It mattered.

  I held on to Outsider a
nd flew.

  “I saved you,” Martin Tucker says.

  “The hell you did!”

  “You’re not quite old enough to grasp this,” he says, “but the only thing we love more than revering our heroes is destroying them. We wait for them to sell out for money or fame, or say something that conflicts with our values, or fail to agree with us on who the real enemy is. Then we trash them and move on.”

  I think about the angry people outside Focus’s building. “That’s what you think you saved me from? The disappointment of growing up?”

  “No—that of living. Most people would rather live in one of my story lines than the real world. You obviously wish you were still there. Despite the fact that many people died before I intervened.”

  “At least we had someone to look up to!”

  “No, that’s what I gave you. That’s the importance of fiction. People will always love Outsider now. We tolerate imperfection in our fictional creations. We root for flawed and damaged characters, people utterly unlike ourselves. Fiction is the new secret identity. It’s a refuge from which damaged heroes can continue to do good.”

  “Well, it wasn’t your decision to make,” I say.

  “Yeah, it was,” he barks a laugh, as if amazed by my stupidity. “Because I have the power. Like you. We run the show, until the last one of us is gone.”

  Us?

  I shouldn’t have come here. I’ve made a mistake.

  He nods, reading my thoughts. “Only we remember the alternate timelines. That’s a superpower.”

  “It’s not a power,” I counter. “Everyone thinks I’m nuts.”

  “Please,” he holds up a hand, “spare me the story.” He gets up and opens the fridge. It’s full of soda bottles. He pulls one out, offers it to me. I shake my head, wondering if he intends to erase me, too. What will it feel like to vanish? One moment, walking or riding the train—the next, nothing. A girl in a book. Emma the Nonexistent.

  “I’m not special,” I go on, the words coming fast. “I really can’t do anything. I just remember things. When I was a kid—”