Never Missing, Never Found

by Amanda Panitch

  Katharina disappears. I look for her, a swell of fury rising in my chest, so ready to yell, and she’s nowhere to be seen. I don’t know where she went. The swell of fury rises in my throat as a hysterical laugh.

  “Scarlett,” Melody whispers, her eyebrows knitted together. “Scarlett, you sound crazy.”

  “I am crazy,” I say drily. “Didn’t you hear?”

  “They’re not going to call the police or anything,” she continues, like I haven’t spoken at all, like she hasn’t heard me, or like she doesn’t care. “They can’t prove anything. But, Scarlett, did you really try to push Cady off the ledge?”

  My shoulders slump and I shake my head, slowly at first, then more vigorously. I cannot speak. I’ve run dry of words.

  “Okay,” Melody says, but she doesn’t sound convinced, and somehow that’s the worst part of all.

  All I want is for Melody to like me.

  “Let’s go home,” she says.

  —

  The next day passes in a blur. I spend most of my time in bed. Matthew comes and prods me on the shoulder a few times, but I’m about as responsive as a dead frog and not nearly as interesting, so eventually he leaves me be. My dad does about the same thing, just more subtly, with calls through the door and concerned-sounding inquiries of “Are you okay?”

  Connor tries to call once, twice, but I send him straight to voice mail, which I proceed not to check. Katharina doesn’t show her face either, which does surprise me. I expected her to pop through my window or burrow up through my carpet, to do something so completely crazy I’d just completely crack.

  On Sunday, I finally drag myself out of bed to go to work. I’m not going to let them scare me into missing work and getting fired and stopping me from being Skywoman. Because I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything wrong.

  I dress mechanically, eat cereal that tastes like shreds of paper, and head out the door. My stomach roils the whole time I’m waiting in line at the employment office; I don’t know whether it would be worse to get sent to the south side with Connor and Rob, or the north side with Cady. Randall works on the east side, Tina on the west. There is no escape.

  So I’m pleasantly surprised when they send me to central. Central is the park’s Main Street area, with squat brick stores selling practical necessities like sunscreen and key chains and disposable cameras for the only people left on the planet who don’t have a camera in their phone. I get installed on a cart just outside the entrance, which means I don’t see any other team members but the manager assigned to ring me out and cover for me on bathroom breaks. Usually I hate being on a cart, because it’s hot and lonely and you don’t have a park phone, so if you need to go to the bathroom, you have to try to flag somebody down to tell your manager, but today I’m thrilled. If I were a superhero, I’d be Luckwoman.

  My new superpower holds until the end of the day, in the parking lot. Until I’m about to climb into my car, flush with luck and feeling like I’ve gotten away with something, which is stupid because I didn’t actually do anything.

  “Scarlett.” Katharina sings rather than calls my name. I stiffen. “Showing your face at the park?”

  I can feel her eyes raking the back of my neck. I can’t turn around. If I turn around, she wins. “I’m not afraid to show my face. I didn’t do anything wrong,” I say evenly. One hand unlocks my door, the other wraps around my can of pepper spray. “Have a good night.”

  “Scarlett, wait.” She’s talking, but I’ve caught a flash of copper hair at the other end of the parking lot: Connor. I duck into my car and peel out before anyone can see me. Katharina tosses words after me, but they must land on the pavement, because I don’t hear them.

  My heart rate starts to calm as I turn out of the employee entrance and onto the road, but then I glance in my rearview mirror and see it. Her. Katharina. She’s in her car, and she’s following me. She’s probably just going somewhere. She was going to her car at the same time, I tell myself, but I make a left and she follows, and then I make another left and she follows, and I make a right for no reason but to see if she turns too, because nothing is that way but woods and my thinking cabin, and she follows. And I’m actually happy, because it’s time to end this.

  Still, my heart jumps into my throat. Recklessly, I toss my car to the side of the road, shift it into park, and lunge out before it shudders to a complete halt. I can see the surprise on her face as she jams to a halt too. Which is good. If she wanted me dead, she could have just plowed me over. “What do you want?” I scream at her. My shoulders are quaking, and my hand around the pepper spray is trembling too.

  She’s shaking her head as she gets out of the car. “I just wanted to talk to you, Scarlett,” she says. “I really think you should quit your job. You’re clearly not stable enough to be around people.”

  Maybe she’s right goes through my head in a flash, but I push the thought away. “Why did you try to push Cady off the platform?” I don’t know I’m going to say it until it comes out, and then it all comes rushing out. I didn’t see anything on the platform, but this is the only explanation that makes sense. Katharina gaslighting me, trying to ruin my life. She was the only one who “saw” me do it, after all. “Did you do it specifically so you could blame me, or do you have something against Cady? Would you actually have pushed her over the side? Was she lucky she managed to catch herself, or did you grab her before she went over?”

  Katharina smiles patronizingly at me. It’s not even really a smile; it’s just the corners of her lips turning up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Scarlett.”

  It’s the way she emphasizes my name. It’s that that makes me certain, absolutely certain, it’s her. “Get back in your car and drive away,” I say, swallowing hard, trying to ingest some courage.

  She “smiles” again, and this time it’s twisted at the edges. “No, it’s time we talk. It’s about time. Don’t you think?” And she takes a step toward me.

  I’ve got my pepper spray out before I can blink, and it arcs in a long, shimmering line straight into her face. She shrieks in pain and doubles over, coughing so hard I think she might throw up. Her eyelids are already red and swelling. A little bit of pepper spray floats back toward me, a cloud, and I cough too.

  I have to get out of here. Her car is blocking mine, so there’s only one way to go: into the woods. To my thinking cabin. I can hide out there until she gives up. I go to run, take a step, and then stop.

  If I leave her here, she could press charges against me. Even if I toss my can of pepper spray into the woods and claim ignorance, she can snap a picture of my car with her phone, drag me into a mess. I have a personal interest in avoiding the police, for reasons Katharina fully understands. If she’s really her, alive somehow.

  I just need time to think things through. I just need time.

  I’m still not sure how I get Katharina to my thinking cabin; it’s all a blur of leaves and pine-needle crunches underfoot. She shrieks as I pull her, but when I let her go, she can’t do much but blindly stumble into trees, and nobody’s around to hear her scream. My heart is pounding by the time I’ve gotten her secured in the cabin, my padlock locked. I brought it out one year to keep out kids or vandals or the ghost of the mad hunter who may or may not have built the cabin, and never took the key off my key ring.

  Her screams echo in my ears all the way back to our cars, long after I’ve left her in the distance. Katharina’s keys are still in her car. I don a baseball cap I find scrunched in the backseat and return her car to the employee parking lot, careful to keep my head low so all that the cameras will be able to see is the hat. We’re similar enough in height and build and skin color that the black-and-white cameras won’t be able to tell the difference, I hope. I walk back to my own car through the woods and toss the hat into a creek once I get far enough away.

  I’m not a bad person. All I need is some time. Things aren’t always black and white. Skywoman and the Blade could tell you that.

&nb
sp; Skywoman, a.k.a. Augusta Leigh Sorensen, and the Blade, a.k.a. Emma Leigh Jacobs, were friends for most of their childhood and young adulthood. Their enmity began at age nineteen, when Emma Leigh Jacobs killed Augusta Leigh Sorensen’s parents and then absconded with papers from their secret library. Augusta Leigh was shocked and horrified and racked with grief, from both the death of her parents and the betrayal by her friend. Augusta Leigh’s parents had always treated Emma Leigh with nothing but care and respect, and here Emma Leigh had slaughtered them, had bashed them over the head and cut their throats like animals, with no motive at all. Emma Leigh certainly didn’t give one then, and every time she came face to face with Augusta Leigh–turned–Skywoman, she wouldn’t give one either. She copped to killing Skywoman’s first husband and many others, but she wouldn’t give a reason for the murders that launched her into her status as one of the comic-book world’s most notorious villains.

  Until one of the later issues. Readership was flagging, and Prodigy Comics had to do something to boost it, so they started teasing the series’ most dramatic revelation to date almost a year before the comic book was actually released. It worked. Everybody wanted to know, and everybody bought the comic book. Even the cartoon got on board, teasing the revelation with fades to black and dramatic voice-overs.

  Setting: the roof of a skyscraper, headquarters of the Silver Corporation (where Augusta Leigh’s parents worked for many years) in Silver City. Skywoman has been called to the scene of a dramatic break-in, only to discover scientists scattered dead over the floor and the Blade patiently waiting. Well, not so much patiently waiting as frantically searching, rifling through files and tossing papers over her shoulder. She stops as Skywoman bursts in through a window. “I thought you’d come,” the Blade says.

  Skywoman spares scarcely a glance at the five dead scientists. “You didn’t think I’d come—you knew I’d come,” she says. “We need to end this.” Though the shattered window is at the other end of the room, somehow wind still causes her unmussed hair to float in the air.

  The Blade stands, clutching a file to her chest. “Did you ever wonder why I killed your parents?”

  Skywoman flinches at the Blade’s bluntness. At this point readers were (or at least I was) screaming at the page, “Of course she wondered! She asks you every time you two see each other! She thinks it every night before she goes to sleep! She angsts about it to Wonderman every chance she gets!”

  Skywoman is much politer than the readers (a.k.a. me). “It doesn’t matter,” she lies through her (perfect, shiny, straight, white) teeth. “This needs to end.”

  The Blade paces circles around the room, stepping carefully over the bodies. Skywoman follows, stepping over the dead just as carefully. “Your parents worked for the Silver Corporation, in this very building,” the Blade says. Obviously, this was on the page and not on the screen, but I liked to imagine her voice as neutral, carefully measured, the same monotone as her voice actor. “For years. Did they ever tell you what they did?”

  The next panel is a close-up of Skywoman’s face, her eyes narrowed, her lips clearly trembling with the effort not to burst out and yell. All she says, though, is, “This needs to end.”

  “I’m sure you knew they were scientists,” the Blade continues as if Skywoman hasn’t spoken. The way she is stepping over the bodies over and over, backward and gracefully, is beginning to look like a dance. “But did they ever tell you what they did? What they were doing, here, in this building?”

  At this point you’d expect Skywoman just to go ahead and end it already, but she stills. You can see the conflict in her eyes: she wants to end this, as she keeps saying, but she also wants to hear what the Blade has to say. “What does it matter?” she says unconvincingly. “You’re just going to lie anyway.”

  The Blade slips the folder into her waistband and holds her hands in front of her, presumably to show that she doesn’t have any of her fingers crossed. “I would not lie about this,” she says, and something in her monotone must convince Skywoman, because Skywoman stops talking.

  “Your parents were trying to destroy the world.”

  The next panel shows Skywoman in shock: gaping mouth, wide eyes, eyebrows shooting up nearly to her hairline.

  “The Silver Corporation tasked them with the creation of a weapon greater than the nuclear bomb,” the Blade says. “And they were almost there. I tried to convince them to stop. Talked to them about what the Silver Corporation wanted to do with the weapon.” No indication is given about how the Blade found out about the Silver Corporation’s supersecret plans, but I didn’t care (though critics did). “They still wouldn’t stop.” The Blade pauses and looks at the ground. If Skywoman really wanted to, she could dive forward and snap the Blade’s neck while she isn’t looking. She doesn’t, though. “I had to think of the world.”

  “You’re lying,” Skywoman says, but her eyebrows are knotted in a way that says she isn’t convinced.

  “Of course, the Silver Corporation didn’t stop just because the project’s two lead scientists had been assassinated,” the Blade continues. “I couldn’t let them complete the weapon.” She hesitates again, probably for dramatic effect. “They even put the police on the case. To guard the weapon. I tried to convince them to take my side, but…”

  “My husband,” Skywoman says. “You killed him because the Silver Corporation employed him to protect the weapon.”

  “He was in on it,” the Blade says. “Do you know what the Silver Corporation wants to use the weapon for?”

  Skywoman shakes her head. Her mouth hangs open. She looks like a guppy. A beautiful guppy.

  “First they’re going to set it off in a city nearby. Not Silver City. A different city.” The Blade’s eyes are flat. “Kill everybody within a ten-mile radius. Gruesomely. The weapon isn’t just about death; it’s about suffering. A million people or more will bleed through their pores and feel their bones crumble and eventually choke on their own bodily fluids.”

  “My parents would never have taken part in something like that,” Skywoman says, but the shivery way her dialogue is written makes it clear her voice is shaking.

  “Once they’ve slaughtered all those people, the Silver Corporation will come forward and claim responsibility. Tell the government it was only a demonstration of their power, and they’ll do it again. They’ll have the whole world at their knees. They’ll be able to do anything they want to.” The Blade shakes her head. “I couldn’t let that happen, even if it meant I had to sacrifice people I cared about.” She looks up and off into the distance. “Even if it meant I had to sacrifice everything I’d ever hoped and dreamed of, and even though it meant everybody I cared about would hate me. Even you, Augusta.”

  Skywoman jolts at the sound of her name. “It’s been a long time since I heard that name,” she says. She doesn’t ask why the Blade didn’t just come clean years and years ago, which would have saved everyone a whole lot of pain and heartache. Critics did, though.

  “I’m sorry that I had to hurt you, but I’m not sorry for what I did,” the Blade says. She holds out her hand. “Augusta. Will you join me? Will you help me take the Silver Corporation down?”

  Skywoman stares at the Blade’s hand, the hand that slit her parents’ throats and shot her first husband to death. “Can you prove what you’re telling me?”

  “I can.” The Blade doesn’t waver. “I can’t do it alone anymore, Augusta.”

  Skywoman stares at the Blade’s hand for another moment, another very long moment…and then takes it.

  This issue was a game changer. It turned readers’ assumptions on their heads and caused months of outcry and speculation as to the future of the series, now that the Blade had brought Skywoman over to the “dark” side.

  It was my favorite issue. Skywoman wasn’t all good, and the Blade wasn’t all bad. Until that issue, Skywoman had saved lives and protected Silver City, but she’d also unknowingly enabled evil. The Blade had killed innocent people and terrorized an
entire city, but she’d also saved millions of lives and kept the country from being pressed under the thumbs of people who wanted to do it terrible harm.

  You can be a good person and do bad things. And sometimes it may look like someone is doing something bad, or evil, but when you look more closely at the situation, you realize your assumptions were wrong, and that whatever’s happening may not be so bad or evil after all. It may be warranted. Maybe even good.

  As I head home, with Katharina in the cabin, tied to the windowsill and spitting mad, a gallon jug of water and some granola bars I stored there long ago at her feet, I feel like I might sprout a cape and fly away.

  I don’t get out of bed all the next morning. I’m supposed to work, but I don’t remember until after my shift’s supposed to have started. I may get fired, but I can’t stop picturing Katharina’s face as I left her behind.

  I can’t leave her in the cabin forever. Eventually she’ll need more food and water. But I also can’t let her out. I can’t let her back into my life, not after what she did to me. After what I did to her.

  The person who gets me out of bed, finally, is Melody, whom I haven’t spoken with since the incident on the Blade’s Revenge. After I’ve spent the morning hiding under my covers, she marches through my door and throws open my curtains. I squint at the sudden influx of light.