by Paris, Sevan
She puts her hands on her hips. “…. Sure, Gabe.” She starts up the stairs to her bedroom. “Whatever you want. It’s always just … whatever you want.”
Mom’s bedroom door slams shut upstairs. I rub my eyes. This is just too much. Liberty is doing God knows what to get back at me. Mom thinks I’m being irresponsible, and … ‘Whatever I want’?
“Since when do I get whatever I want?”
Well you did just fly us into the sun earlier, just so you could have your way. And before that, you told me you would only accept the bonding if we played Superhero. And—
“Enough.” I raise my hand. “Just—what are we going to do?”
AND don’t forget the time you introduced yourself to HEROES against my better judgement. That was the decision that landed us in this crap pile.
“You know we had to do that,” I whisper while walking up the stairs. “It was the only way to keep Deathbot’s little nanite things from wiping out the city.”
Well that was ridiculously admirable of you, Gabe, but tell me this: Who is going to keep him from wiping us out?
“Nothing comes to mind.”
I walk into my bedroom, greeted by dirty laundry all over the floor—which I never pay enough attention to—and a Scarlett Johansson poster on the far wall, which I always pay more than enough attention to. According to M, some alien civilizations pay less attention to their deities than I do to that poster.
Well, something had better come to mind fast. I don’t even have enough power to sense Liberty’s approach right now. For all I know, he could be under your bed, in your closet, or behind that—
A hand clamps over my mouth like a vice—Liberty’s hand.
—door …
Liberty lifts me off the floor before my flailing legs hit something. He gently shuts the door and raises his index finger to his lips. “Shhh … I’m not killing her tonight. Unless you make me. Blink if you understand.”
It takes every ounce of pride I have, but I blink.
Liberty slowly sets me down. My hands ball into fists.
“What do you plan to do? Fight me?” he says, calmly.
“Leave,” I say in a quivering voice.
“Or what? What will you do? Your mother obviously doesn’t know you’re Galaxy. Some part of you still hopes you’ll get through this without her finding out. That’s what kept you from changing earlier. And it’s what will keep you from changing now.”
Thankfully, Pink hasn’t told Liberty I can run out of power. It would just be something else he could use against me.
“This is between you and me,” I say. “It has nothing to do—”
“Oh no, it did have nothing to do with her and then that changed, remember? I gave you a choice. Register before the weekend was through, or I was going to bury your family on the moon. You never registered,” Liberty looks in the vague direction of Mom’s bedroom. “Now it’s almost time for the burying.”
“If you touch her …”
A gush of wind rushes through my bedroom—Liberty shifts to the right, just barely. He grins and holds up something an inch long, white with a forked end. The burning pain in my mouth tells me what the object is before my brain has a chance to catch up with what I’m seeing.
One of my front teeth.
His hand clamps down on and my nose and open mouth, muffling my scream. I try to pull away.
“Stop,” he says.
I punch, pull, and claw, at his arm. Part of my brain knows how stupid it is. But the primal part that wants to survive—the panicked part triggered by a mouth full of blood and not being able to breathe—doesn’t listen.
“Stop,” he says louder, holding my tooth between his thumb and index finger. “Last chance. This could just as easily have been your eye, your nose, or your throat.”
I raise my hands away from his arm. He moves his grip to my shoulder, and I gulp air. Blood fountains down my chin and neck.
“You have no idea the agony that you’ve brought down on you and those that you love.”
Scarlett Johansson and the wall that she is on slowly meanders back and forth behind Liberty’s head. I step backwards and start to fall over my computer desk. He guides me to the chair.
“Why?” I barely say through panic stricken breath. “Why are you doing this?”
He pulls up the thighs of his blue jeans and squats next to me. “Why do you think, son? The Wertham Act is my responsibility to enforce. And if I let one unregister—just one—circumvent the system, others will quickly follow. Eventually, we have all out anarchy. And countries don’t survive in anarchy. They need rules. Order. And people that can make hard choices to maintain that order.”
“Is that what you call this?” My words slur through the blood and missing tooth. “A hard choice?”
“Oh, that. Well, it might seem a bit unfair, I’ll give you that. But I’ve dealt with others like you—powerful Supers with romantic, juvenile notions. Putting you in prison only encourages your ideas to spread … past the confines of your cell, like a cancer. Infecting other like-minded idiots until eventually it takes a hundred deaths to solve what could have been fixed with a single, horrific one. So horrific, it demands attention.”
He stands. “Quite simply, people—that is to say the ones I’m worried about—take notice. And later, aside from a few people in HEROES, everybody will think a Supervillain killed the both of you. We’ll probably blame Weather Witch or some other villain in the area. I’ll publicly honor your memory, and say that if you’d only registered, we might have been able to foresee this. Used our resources to prevent this horrible, horrible tragedy.”
In spite of the pain, in spite of the situation, I can’t help but think of Casa. That entire rant about seeing a pattern of control in the government, in Liberty, in the Wertham Act—he was absolutely right. Liberty and Casa phrase it differently, but it’s two sides of the same freaking coin.
“I’m going to kill you, Gabe Garrison,” he says bringing my thoughts screaming back. “And I’m going to kill your mother. Think about that for a moment and then let me know when you’re ready to hear the rest of what I have to tell you.”
I stare at him, refusing to say anything.
He nods. “I’m going to wait until midnight tomorrow. For two reasons. Reason number one: You’ve actually done some good for Prose, and that earns you the chance to say your goodbyes. Hell, you can drive, fly somewhere if it will make you feel better. With my connections and hearing, finding you won’t be difficult.”
“You—”
He grabs my knee and twists it sideways with a loud snap. “No interruptions.”
I come out of the chair, trying to scream, trying to reach for his face.
He covers my mouth again, keeping me in the chair. “Shhh-shhh. Remember,” he says barely above a whisper. “Don’t scream. You scream, you make me end it tonight.”
Gabe, we have enough power for me to numb some of the pain. We’ll get through this. Just hang on …
I stop struggling and Liberty removes his hand.
“Good. Now, I can finish making my point.”
He softly closes a grip around my other knee. I bite my bottom lip and start crying—horrible, pathetic crying that he is not worth.
CRACK!
He sits on my bed, crumpling the Star Wars sheets, and waits for the tears to stop. Waits for me to get used to the pain, to the misery.
He leans forward. “Now … reason number two: That one last day will give you something that will make your death that much more horrible—hope. I give you this not as a gift, but a curse. It will keep you from saying your goodbyes. Make you think there’s a way to beat me. Allow me to hurt you far worse than I can right now.”
Just a little longer, Gabe …
“If you can heal what Sentinel did to you, you can heal this. Your soul will feel better … until you remember this moment. Then you’ll feel despair again.” With a furrowed brow, he opens my balled up fist and places my tooth inside it. �
��See you tomorrow, son.”
He flies out the open window, parting the blue curtains with a whoosh.
“M …” I sound too hollow—like my voice is somebody else’s. “How …”
Fifteen minutes, Gabe. It will take fifteen minutes for our power to recharge enough to heal you. I suggest you move as little as possible.
ScarJo, bless her heart, keeps smiling at me like nothing’s wrong.
Her porcelain skin and ruby lips are the last thing I see …
***
I open my eyes.
It’s morning.
I jump up, out of the chair with two legs that thankfully work. “M!”
Yes.
“It’s morning.”
…. That’s very astute of you, Gabe.
“How—why is it morning? Why did you let me fall asleep? I—wait, I wouldn’t fall asleep. I couldn’t. You—you put me asleep.”
Yes, thirty seconds after Liberty left. It was the quickest way to heal you, and the only way to keep you from—
“Mom!”
Doing that. Relax, Gabe. She’s perfectly fine and in the kitchen, preparing fried strips of swine.
Opening my bedroom door warms my nose with the smell of bacon. “Mom?”
“In here,” Mom’s muffled voice says from the kitchen downstairs.
Perhaps you should clean yourself up first?
I look in the full length mirror on the other side of the door—and freeze. Blood cakes the front of my once white shirt. It’s thick as cardboard and my face looks like I’m an extra on The Walking Dead.
“Just a minute.” I bury my shirt and jeans in the bottom of my garbage can and go to the upstairs bathroom, taking a moment to look at the tooth still in my hand. A look in the mirror confirms M has grown an new one. “What’s our power reading?”
We’re a hundred percent. Am I correct in assuming that’s about to change?
“Damn skippy.”
I scrub as quickly as I can in the shower and change into some khakis and a white v-neck. I stick the tooth in my pocket and run downstairs to the kitchen with a wet head. Mom is just finishing pouring a cup of coffee from the Bunn.
“Good morning,” she says.
I ease onto the bar stool. “…. Good morning.”
“What’s wrong? You look like you’re waiting for something to attack you.”
Well, the ol’ broad got that one on the nose.
“Mom, I …” The words catch in my throat. What is it that I’m going to tell her exactly? That I didn’t want the last words we have to be bad ones? That, no matter who is in the right and who is in the wrong, I just don’t care? I just want one, good conversation before I go out there, before I give it my last best shot at beating Liberty? Doesn’t she have a right to know?
Before I die?
Before she dies?
Careful, Gabe. Our backs are up against the wall, but all isn’t lost yet.
“Yes?” she says.
“I’m sorry but …”
Don’t do this. At least not this way. You’re reacting. And even if we fail, what will you accomplish by telling her? If there is anything I’ve noticed about your species, it’s their insatiable desire to care for and make sacrifices on behalf of their offspring.
“Are you okay?” she says softly.
She may worry about dying. She’ll DEFINITELY worry about your dying, making walking out the front door even more difficult than it’s going to be. The best thing you can do, Gabe … is nothing.
M’s right. I have to carry this weight—this huge, we’re both about to die weight—for both of us. “I’m sorry for last night. And the way I’ve been lately.”
She smiles. “I’m certainly not going to be up for a Mother of the Year Award anytime soon, but your apology is appreciated. And I’m sorry for the way I handled it too.”
You need to talk to Casa and find out if Liberty has a weakness we can exploit. Or, at the very least, a place we can hide from Liberty until we figure something else out.
“I have to go to school, but … can we do that talk-thing later? Say around eleven tonight?” That is just under Liberty’s deadline, which will at least give me a chance to grab her and run—fly, whatever.
“Of course, but it’s Friday. You don’t have any classes.”
“No—but I have to see my instructor.”
***
I open the double doors to Grota Hall. Most of the crowd gets out of my way. The ones that don’t get a shoulder full. A couple of students start to say something, but a quick look makes them think better.
I push the button for the elevator and wait.
And wait.
And wait.
I give up and take the stairs two at a time to Casa’s office. I barely turn the knob before opening the office door, bouncing it off the inside wall.
Casa looks up from a dry erase board that he’s scribbling formulas on. Near the top is the word ‘Egypt’ in red letters.
“That’s what I get for not locking the door,” he says.
“Shut-up.”
His eyes narrow. Like yesterday, Casa is sporting stubble that matches his wavy, unkept hair. His white button up shirt that, although is different from the one he had on last night, still looks slept in. He puts the cap on the marker and tosses it on the desk. “You’re surprisingly determined. Which means things are serious.”
“The serioust.”
It takes twenty minutes to tell him everything … well, almost everything. I give him the details about my first encounter with Liberty, Deathbot, last night, and this morning. I keep out anything about M.
He raises his eyebrows. “ …. Are you okay?”
I nod.
“You’re lying.”
“I’m ly—of course I’m lying! How could I possibly be okay after that?”
“It wasn’t an accusation, just an observation. NOW comes the accusation: You’re obviously here because you need my help. Which I’d give if you weren’t about to crack.”
“I’m not—I don’t—”
“If you’re thinking clearly, your decisions will be better, and your actions won’t be reckless. However, if you’re about to go bananas, you may unintentionally expose me to HEROES. Which means I’ll need to spend more time preparing for my death than helping you with yours.”
Why is everyone so set on dying?
“I’m not about to crack,” I say slowly. “I’m just … understandably freaked. And I don’t know what to do. You told me a paradigm shift was coming. That Liberty and his regime—”
“I promise you I never called it a ‘regime.’ ”
“—were going to … that I was going to change things. Well, in light of last night, I’m feeling pretty freaking change-y.”
You should probably begin by changing your lexicon.
“That’s right, I said it was coming,” Casa says. “Not that it was here. You go up against Liberty now, and you’re dead.”
“What choice do I have?”
“You hide—you just can’t hide anywhere here. We put you and mommy in another dimension.”
Now we’re talking. Any chance we can get cable there?
“Come again?”
“Since 1963, we’ve discovered twenty-three gateways to other dimensions, both artificial and natural. Currently, I have access to four of them, one of which has a semi-hospitable environment—provided you steer clear of the dinosaurs.” He rummages in his middle desk drawer until he produces something that looks like a universal remote had an unholy baby with a sundial. It beeps and lights up at random intervals. “Now, go and get your mother—”
I slap the remote out of his hand, clattering it to the floor in two pieces.
His shoulders sag. “Well, guess now I’ll never see a triceratops. Thanks for that.”
“I’m not running. If he can’t find me or Mom, he’ll keep looking until he finds somebody I could care about. Somebody to get at me. The only option is taking him down. And that’s what I’m going
to do.”
Casa laughs.
Hard.
After a fifteen second fit, he thumbs tears away and says, “That’s—thank you, that’s good. I needed that.”
“Are you finished?!”
“YOU’RE the one that’ll be finished! Liberty is the most powerful Super that ever lived and probably ever will live.”
“You said I have enough power in me to make me a level ten like him.”
“I said you MIGHT have enough power in you. And just because it’s there doesn’t mean you can access it. You go up against him now, and you’ll be nothing left but a fine paste on the concrete.”
“So help me.”
“No.”
“But you said you would!”
“Help you escape—not get killed.”
“Fine. If I can’t get your help, I’ll get somebody else’s.”
“Who? Who is going to help you? The only people that are smart enough aren’t brave enough. The only ones that are brave enough aren’t strong enough.”
“ …. You told me last night that you needed my help to keep you from becoming like him. If we don’t do something now, how many other people are going to suffer in the meantime? How many are going to die—Casa?”
“Don’t insult me—Gabe.”
I sigh.
“I’ve done the math,” he says. “And unless the thing you’re not telling me is big enough to make a difference, there’s nothing you can do tonight except get yourself and your mother killed.”
“Wait—what do you mean ‘not telling you’? I told you everything.”
“You may have told me everything you think I need to know, but you haven’t told me everything. Deathbot isn’t from Earth, which means somebody off planet wants you captured or killed.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Did it ever occur to you that someone had to contact Liberty before Deathbot arrived to work out their little arrangement? That means somebody in space hates you. Given the nature of your appearance when you’re Galaxy, it’s not a stretch to say that your powers are alien in origin. So I say you either know exactly who is after you or you at least have an idea.”
“ …. No. My powers are from space, but I don’t know who sent Deathbot. And he’s dead, so we can’t ask him.”