Hero

by Robert J. Crane

  “If I can avoid getting into a fight with General Krall,” Lethe said, not turning from the window.

  “She really is a hardcore bitch,” I said. “Do you just look at her and want to punch her in that saucy beast-face, too …?” Lethe nodded, almost imperceptibly. “Thank God, I thought maybe it was just me being ornery,” I said.

  “—but regardless of how many years your grandmother has,” Hades went on, apparently well used to talking over us by now, “someone has to take up the role of—”

  “Apprentice?” I asked. “Because there’s always two Sith, right?” Reed would have been so proud of me.

  Hades chuckled under his breath. “Movie metaphor aside … there needs to be an heir waiting in the wings. This country may be small, but it will not remain so. We are growing even now—”

  “That’s what happens when you annex Russia, yeah,” I said. “You get bigger.”

  “—and require a continuity of leadership behind the scenes,” Hades said. “Someone to be the face to the public in times of crisis. The one they look to, the one they respect—”

  “Oh, shit,” I said, “that’s why everyone sees me as a hero. You’ve been feeding them propaganda as to how awesome I am, in preparation for my arrival.”

  “However you want to look at it,” Hades said, “here, yes, you are a hero to the people. They see you as we have seen you. A bit more idealized, I suppose. Perhaps a few of your more jagged edges filed off. But they know the good you have done, and don’t automatically assume the bad the way your own press has. They have given you the benefit of the doubt, and thus …”

  “I’m a hero here,” I said. “And now you want to make me …” I knew the word. I was just having trouble saying it out loud.

  “The crown princess,” Lethe said, turning to face me. “That’s what you’d be. Second in line for the throne.”

  “Princess Sienna Nealon,” Hades said, with the trace of a smile. “It has a nice ring to it, wouldn’t you say?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Dave Kory

  Brooklyn

  … The Eden Prairie incident, in which Sienna Nealon attacked a crowd of innocent, unarmed protestors and reporters, murdering over—

  Dave stopped typing and flipped over to the click counter. His latest article was blowing up the internet, driving traffic so heavy that they’d probably have to start bringing some more temporary servers on to handle all the clicks. “Booyah,” he whispered to himself.

  It was his single biggest article yet.

  “Hey, congrats on the big hit, Dave,” Mike Darnell said, passing his cube, popping a hand on the wall as he moved by. “You’re really showing us the way on this one.”

  “Thanks, man,” Dave said. “Coming from you that really means something.”

  Mike stopped. “Oh?”

  “Well, yeah, I mean your pedigree? Top notch,” Dave said, tearing his eyes away from the click counter for a moment to look at the former Times reporter. “Come on. Most of the people who work here are fresh out of college or come from the blogosphere. Nobody comes from the big leagues to flashforce. Until you. I mean, I predict more of it will happen as time goes by, but, uh … yeah.”

  “Well, I’m a little counterintuitive,” Mike said, brushing a few strands of greying hair at his temples, “and I can see which way the wind is blowing.”

  “Yeah, the meteor is definitely streaking toward the dinosaurs,” Dave said, “so you picked the right time to find shelter in the new paradigm.” Had his clicks really jumped that much in the time they’d been talking? He could barely even remember any more. The counter was just flying up.

  Word was getting out. Flashforce.net was the place to go for all things Sienna Nealon.

  “Can I ask about your big scoop?” Mike asked, leaning on the cube wall.

  “Sure.” Dave didn’t want to look away from the click counter. It was entrancing, it was climbing so fast. He would have seen dollar signs, if he’d cared about those at all. He did, to a point, but it wasn’t the big driver for him.

  Instead … he saw prestige. This was the stuff they were making their name on. It was a warm little feeling inside, and it validated all the trust Russ Bilson had placed in him when he’d invited Dave into the Network, given him the app that was like the keys to the kingdom. Hell, yes, he was doing good work. That cross-pollination project? Was paying the right kind of dividends for his business. He hoped that Director Chalke was pleased as well. She’d certainly seemed eager to get this out. But the other connections he’d made through it … they were worth their weight in gold, in the form of clicks.

  And of course, there was the feeling he got, of being connected to these important people, of rubbing elbows with the big names moving the world forward. Titans of society.

  “Seems like you’ve got a couple highly-placed sources in the Gondry administration,” Mike said. “You couldn’t get either to go on the record?”

  “Well, you know how it is,” Dave said. The counter was moving up even faster. “They don’t want to get fired for telling tales out of school.”

  “Hm,” Mike said. “I’m surprised that the PressSec didn’t confirm any of it.”

  “I sent him an email,” Dave said. “Didn’t get word back before I published.”

  “How long before you published did you send the email?”

  Dave spun around in his chair, grinning faux-guiltily. “I dunno. A minute?”

  Mike just blinked. “What the hell, man? You didn’t even give them a chance to respond?”

  “Why would I?” Dave asked. “I wanted to break the story. They’d just deny it anyway, so …” He shrugged, and tore himself away from the sky-rushing page load counter and flipped to his email. “Oh, look, they responded.”

  Mike stepped into the cubicle behind him. “An hour ago. They replied to you an hour ago, and you haven’t even checked it yet …?”

  “Look,” Dave said, keeping his eyeroll under control, “the only way their reply is interesting is if it allows for a new story. And anything that includes, ‘We have no comment at this time’ is only worthy of an update. Which does not drive much traffic.”

  Mike’s face reddened. “But … if they do have something to add, it could change your story.”

  “I’m not changing my story.” Dave shook his head. “Look at the traction it’s getting.” He flipped back to the link counter. “We’ve hit a stage of viral here that most editors only have wet dreams about.”

  “But what if it’s not true?” Mike asked.

  “You don’t think Sienna Nealon is in Revelen?”

  “I don’t know if she’s in Revelen,” Mike said. “She could well be. But you’re the reporter, who’s supposed to take the information he gets from sources, present it, preferably with a name attached so I, as your reader, can decide whether the info is solid or not.”

  “Pfffft,” Dave said, waving him off. “That’s not what people are looking for.”

  Mike’s eyebrows crept up his face. “You don’t think people are looking for the truth?”

  “Psychology tells us people are not looking for the truth,” Dave said. “Consumer behavior tells us people are not looking for the truth. This click counter tells us people are not looking for the truth—whatever you think the truth is.” He leaned closer to Mike, lowered his voice. “Look … I think I’ve printed the truth here. But I don’t care if I didn’t, because I printed it as best I knew—”

  “While ignoring any possible rebuttal from people who would tell you their name and allow you to print it, who might be saying, ‘You’re wrong.’”

  “It’s the White House press secretary,” Dave said. “Come on. It’s their job to spin, and let’s face it—Sienna Nealon escaping their custody is a prime thing to spin. Nobody wants to tell that like it is—‘We had her, we totally screwed up, and now she’s in a foreign country where we can’t get to her.’” He grinned at Mike. “Seriously. They’re not going to say that. They’re going to say �
�” And he clicked on the email from the press secretary.

  “‘The White House has no comment at this time,’” Mike read. “Look, Dave … you are obviously the genius in this nouveau world. And I’m here to learn from you—”

  “Thank you, thank you,” Dave said, “now hit me with the ‘but’ …”

  “But,” Mike said, “what if … and I know it’s a small chance … what if the press secretary had said, ‘Yeah, you’re right, but here’s how it actually went down, here’s an amendment that changes the story.’”

  Dave shrugged. “They wouldn’t do that.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Dude, I called it before we even opened the email.”

  “This time,” Mike said. “Look, you could have this story a hundred percent right. But we used to do things differently …”

  Dave could not contain the eyeroll this time. He mimed a yawn, too. “Yeah. The good old days, I’m sure.”

  Mike closed his eyes for a second. “Look … I’m telling you this because … doing things this way, it’s … how many of these big stories do you think you can get wrong, like big-time wrong, before you blow your credibility?”

  Dave just snorted. “Credibility? Dude. Look at the clicks. Credibility is for suckers. Credibility is for the Toledo Examiner, more worried about triple checking to be sure they never put a wrong foot forward on a story—”

  “Hey, we make plenty of errors even doing things the right way,” Mike said. “But when we put a story out there, it’s easier to stand behind it when you can identify your sources, when you can give your readers a little more information to make their decisions—”

  “That’s not what our readers are looking for, Mike,” Dave said, spinning around to face him, leaving the click counter behind for a moment. “Get this through your head, because—I’m thinking, man, this is the thing you need to adapt to in this ‘new world.’ It moves at the speed of thought. People aren’t looking for some disinterested source to calmly present them the facts. They want the hottest info, the hottest takes, and they want it yesterday.” He reached back and tapped on the click counter. “That’s what brings them running. That’s what drives up the ad revenue. Hotness. Not slow and steady, not calm and calculated. Nobody comes running for a thoughtful article about how Sienna Nealon is really not that bad, okay? They’re looking for something to fire the emotions.” He clicked back to his article in progress. “See? She’s attacking unarmed protestors and reporters. That gets people fired up. They can imagine themselves in that situation. They can share the fear of her—which is a reasonable fear of a crazy person with superpowers, right? Who’s now on the loose.” Dave nodded. “See where we’re going here?”

  Mike just stared at him for a minute, then folded his arms over his chest. “Yeah. I think I get it. You want to move people. Generate an emotional reaction.”

  “Yes.” Dave pointed at him, smiling. “Light ’em on fire, and they’ll keep coming back for more.”

  “Whether it’s true or not,” Mike said.

  Dave shrugged again. “If it’s true, it’ll come out in the wash. If it’s not, it’ll fade into the background. People have thirty-second memories these days. They’ll get out of our articles what they want to get out of them. But they’ll get them from us and not somebody else, and that’s what’s important.” He pulled up a subsidiary counter to his main story one. “This is how many clicks we’re getting from my latest article to other stuff on the site.” He puffed up a little with pride. “That’s a lot of ad revenue, my friend. A lot of people coming to flashforce.net. Way more clicks than the Times is going to get today, I can tell you that.”

  Mike nodded slowly. “You’re right about that,” he said, but he did not sound fully convinced. He walked away, though, back toward his cube.

  He’d get it. Dave could sense his hesitation; it was the tough part of working with these dinosaurs who’d learned under the old J-school model. They didn’t “get” the new world. Mike was kinda smart. And he definitely brought prestige.

  Sooner or later, he’d figure it out … or he’d get gone. Dave didn’t care which just now. He had an article to finish. Where had he left off? Oh, right, Eden Prairie … he searched for another word, a proper adjective to describe Sienna Nealon’s attack … he settled on ‘bloodthirsty,’ and he was off and writing again, hurrying to finish his next scoop to keep those clicks coming.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Sienna

  “Lemme get this straight,” I said, looking at Hades, who sat by my bed, earnest, pale and commanding, and Lethe, who stood by the window, almost as pale, almost as commanding, and reminding me—just a little—of Mom, “you want me to be … your …?”

  “Princess,” Hades said, nodding. “Crown princess.”

  “Sorry, I had to hear it repeated because I’ve never been anyone’s princess before,” I said. This was really having trouble getting through the bullshit filter.

  “Well, it is a unique circumstance,” Hades said.

  “Unique.” I blinked at him, trying to get my head around his … offer? Request?

  I’d been certain I was coming to Revelen to kill Vlad the Impaler, whoever he was. I predicted battle, carnage, a tough fight against a metahuman older than much of the earth’s dirt and so mean that he’d developed enough of a reputation for bloodthirst that legend said he literally drank it.

  Instead, I was here with my great-grandfather, who was presently trying to dub me the crown princess of his country.

  “This is so damned trippy,” I said under my breath.

  “We can hear you, you know,” Lethe said, turning slightly to look at me. She still wasn’t smiling.

  “Well, this isn’t exactly how I planned my trip to Revelen going,” I said.

  “Oh?” Hades asked. “How did you see it going?”

  “To be brutally, viciously, Sienna-y honest, I figured I’d be knee-deep in kicking your asses by now,” I said, sliding off the edge of the bed. Hades moved to help me, and caught my elbow, which he held—gently—until I took up my own weight. It was a very grandfatherly thing to do, I thought, based on my limited experience of never having a grandfather. “Instead I’m being asked to be your princess.”

  “Crown princess. The crown is important,” Hades said. “And literal. It has many diamonds.”

  “I get to wear an actual crown? That’s badass,” I said, touching my head, which ached just a little. “But … I just told you I came here to kick your ass.”

  He shrugged. “My wife killed me. My brothers wanted me dead. This is hardly a new experience for me.”

  “Gah, we really play Family Feud a different way, don’t we?” I asked, looking up to see Lethe almost—almost—smiling. “I’ve fought my mother, fought you, apparently,” I nodded at Lethe. “Like for real, fists a flying, fights. Knocking out teeth and making each other bleed.”

  “It has always been rougher among metahumans,” Hades said, almost reassuringly, “because we are more sturdy than humans. This is how we settle our disputes. Low-intensity punching. And maybe sometimes high intensity.”

  “You guys … you really have sent trouble my way that you haven’t explained yet,” I said, eyeing Hades. “I know you say you didn’t, but … I’m sorry, but it’s just not true.”

  Hades shrugged. “Ask about your troubles. We will explain as best we can.”

  “Fine, starting at the beginning,” I said, “ArcheGrey and the Glass Blower—Yvonne, I guess—mounted an attack on New York, destroying evidence for—”

  “Contract work,” Hades said. “A job for Nadine Griffin. We did not set them to the task. Indeed, they were not even in our employ yet, though once we realized what we had with their skill sets, we hired them immediately. You don’t let talent like that go to work for the enemy.”

  “Benjamin … uh … I don’t remember his last name,” I said. “Normal American when he left Minnesota. Comes back home, has an emotional meltdown, and goes full Gavr
ikov on the customs line at MSP airport. Kaboom, I mean—”

  “I understood that reference,” Hades said with a slight smile. “All the references, usually.”

  “—he was a wild card who killed a lot of people and caused a lot of damage to my state,” I said. “Why would you give him powers?”

  “We didn’t do it intentionally,” Lethe said. “He must have been visiting during the time when we first opened up the serum into the water supply to empower the people. Maybe he drank the local water. Everything that followed … I’m sorry for the death of anyone that he killed, but we’re no more responsible for what he did with his powers than we are for you killing someone with yours.”

  “An argument could be made you’re very responsible for me,” I said, “being directly up the family line, but fine … I’ll let that go. For now. Benjamin, though … if you gave him a nuclear weapon and he accidentally set it off … pretty sure you’d still be held responsible. Legally and morally.”

  “I’ll make sure to lock up my nuclear weapons then,” Hades said with a glint in his eye. “You know, now that I have them.”

  “That was a little disquieting,” I said.

  “What?” He shrugged, still amused. “We are nuclear now. Is it wrong to take some pride in this achievement?”

  “I’ll leave that one aside until later,” I said. “The entire serum development thing.”

  Hades raised an eyebrow at me. “Yes? What of it?”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You are not amazed by the pace of scientific progress?” he asked, and pushed to his feet. “This is a thing where we partnered with others. Your President Harmon, for instance.”

  “Way to go on that, by the way. He almost enslaved the world with serums derived from what you gave him.”

  “Hardly,” Hades said. “I was in Washington, DC, when you stopped him.” He pulled out a phone and flipped through pictures, coming to a selfie of him standing in front of the White House. There were a whole lot of ambulances and police and such in the background behind him. “If he had tried to move to the next phase of his attempt … I was prepared to deal with him.” He held out a hand, made a slurping noise. “I suppose I should thank you for that, because I didn’t really want Harmon in my head.”