Halfheroes

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  "Miriam?"

  She was immediately annoyed with herself for calling out a second time. It was as if she were playing the lead in a melodrama, the rich widow panicking in an empty mansion.

  Cynthia wasn't the panicking kind.

  If her third husband, had been here, he would have tried to take the lead, start making phone calls. He would have paced up and down speaking too fast and jabbing his finger into the air. She was so glad he was dead. She'd married him for his political influence. God knows he'd offered her little else. The heart attack came after six years of marriage, but it could have come five and a half years earlier as far as Cynthia was concerned.

  When asked, she would describe herself as being "currently between husbands." The truth was she would never marry again. She was fifty-eight, still a handsome woman, but marriage offered no advantages now. Sex wasn't an issue. She had regular assignations with younger married men who thought they were using her, poor fools. She didn't crave companionship. Most people were dullards. The few that weren't were often as self-centred and narcissistic as Cynthia. The difference was, she knew it. She embraced it.

  She placed her Globlet face-down on the kitchen table. Coffee first, news later. If the world had ended, she would read the details after her first cup, not before.

  The light on the coffee machine was green, so she ground the beans while swirling the cup in hot steam. The aroma was delightful. Cynthia would not countenance using beans roasted more than five days ago. She tamped the ground beans in the basket, and twisted it firmly in place above the warm cup, before pressing the button. Four seconds later, the first drops of crema began to drip from the spouts, turning into an even flow. Twenty-four seconds after that, she picked up the cup and sat at the table.

  Only after the last rich, complex, mouthful did she finally turn on the Globlet and read the headlines.

  "Well, well."

  She clicked on her emails. Miriam's was the forty-third from the top in order of time received. Its subject was My resignation.

  "Tiresomely predictable, Miriam. And a bad decision to boot."

  Cynthia did a little reading, concentrating on the media coverage around Titus Gorman. She already knew more about him than most Americans. Gorman was, according to the Forbes list at least, the world's richest human. Although she considered herself semi-retired, it would hardly have been wise of her not to investigate a man who might be almost as wealthy as she was.

  She re-watched an early interview with him. Lately, he had limited his contact with the media.

  "No one can spend the kind of money I'm starting to make. In another ten years, I'll have more money than some countries. That's crazy."

  "Do you have plans for the money, then?"

  "Plans? Yes, you could say that. I have plans."

  "Care to let us in on them?"

  "No. It would ruin the surprise. It's going to take a few years to line everything up, then everyone will understand."

  "Okay, mysterious to the last. Thank you, Titus Gorman."

  Mysterious was the right word. Cynthia had dropped nearly a million dollars scratching around for more information about Gorman. That had been eight years ago. There had been little to find. Even his name, apparently lifted from a favourite author's rambling fantasy trilogy, gave no real clues. He was a phantom. In a world that had digitised every piece of information, a self-confessed master hacker could make himself disappear.

  Cynthia didn't understand what drove Titus. In the same interview, he claimed to have no interest in money. That was one point on which she and the mystery man agreed, although she doubted he shared her rationale. Cynthia saw money as a way of keeping score. She didn't care that no one else knew what her score was, she only cared that she was winning. And winning big.

  She turned on her mobile phone. There were no messages. The handful of people who had her number knew to email. She would speak to people at a time she chose. She dialled one of her five wealth managers.

  "Rory, how much money is in the account? Yes, I know, don't try to explain unless you have access to information that no one else does. Do you? Then just tell me the amount. Thank you. No, that will be all."

  She didn't cry, but she came closer to doing so than ever before. Her body shook with the force of the suppressed sobs. She was very glad Miriam was not there to see it.

  Cynthia didn't bother calling her other brokers. The number she had just heard, multiplied by five, came to seventeen thousand, four hundred and sixty dollars. Which was, according to every news organisation she had checked, the exact amount in every person's bank account on the planet.

  24

  Shuck's call, when it came, was a relief.

  "She's awake."

  "Already?"

  Abos didn't know why she responded with surprise. Habit, she supposed. She knew that Rasputin's new body—Susan—was conscious. She had known it as a stirring of fresh consciousness in her own mind, an opening of sorts. Unmistakable. Something similar had happened with Shuck, but, until it the second time, she had not known what it meant.

  She was speaking to Shuck from the top of the tallest building in New York. Shuck was probably standing in the yard in Cornwall as the mobile phone signal was strongest there. Abos could picture what he was seeing almost as clearly as the sun that was sinking behind skyscrapers in front of her.

  "I'll call you back."

  Something had been happening to her for days when she allowed it. A freeing up of areas of her consciousness. Abos would have been hard-pressed to describe it. How do you describe a new smell to someone if there are no grounds for comparison? How do you describe a new taste if it's neither sweet nor sour, rich nor thin, sharp nor bitter? In the simplest terms, she knew she was now able to experience a little of what Shuck, or Susan, were experiencing. She wasn't privy to their every thought. It was more like an extra sense, always present. She knew if they were awake or asleep.

  Abos was perched on the top of the spire of One World Trade Center. This reminded her of another thing she hadn't understood in the superhero movies Daniel had shown her.

  "Why do they always do that? Find a high place in the city and stand, or squat there?"

  "Probably cause it looks great. The cape blowing in the wind. Moody, atmospheric. You know."

  She didn't know.

  "And what about the way they land? Many times they ruin the surface, crack the concrete because they are not landing properly. If they can fly, they can certainly land without causing an earthquake. It's irresponsible."

  "Abos, I'm not sure superhero movies will ever be your thing."

  Now she thought she understood. She wanted to be alone, unreachable.

  She had failed Daniel.

  Abos had spent the previous days following a trail that was never really there. Someone had taken Daniel, the rest of his IGLU team, the Newcastle drug dealer and his companions. Whoever was behind this had the resources to break into the Gravesend prison—a place no one was supposed to even know existed—and to use an unlisted private jet with no flight plan history.

  Twenty-six hours earlier, she had been in Tokyo hotel investigating a sighting of a Gulfstream G650 that morning. The lead had been a dead end. An email response from Palindrome hadn't lifted her spirits.

  D,

  Have you inherited some money, or what? Should I be putting my prices up? These babies aren't cheap if you're thinking about buying one.

  There are two-hundred-and-sixty-seven G650s in operation, but we're talking about the usual suspects. Saudi, UAE, China, USA. A couple in Korea, one in the UK. List attached, but it may not be entirely accurate. The very, very rich sometimes make deals where no money changes hands. A hotel complex gets built, and, as part of the deal, a Gulfstream changes hands. It's done on a handshake. What I'm saying is, if you're trying to trace the owner, you might be shit out of luck. Especially if they don't want their identity known. Very few G650s are owned by an individual, anyway. Two-hundred-and four belong to shell companie
s based in tax havens. I can trace the actual owners if you like. It'll take three to four months at least, even if I drop the other thing. Oh, about that. Getting closer. And it's getting weirder. If I'm right about where Hopkins diverted all that money, you'll never believe it. I'll let you know when I'm sure. I'm such a tease...

  Palindrome didn't know Abos existed, so she had used Daniel's details, email address, and passwords, even going as far as copying his sentence constructions and vocabulary. Palindrome had been George's most prized criminal contact. If Palindrome thought someone other than Daniel was using this email address, that would mean a sudden, and permanent, end to their working relationship.

  Abos had gone through the list of companies, but it had left her no closer to finding Daniel. She couldn't think of anything else to try. Daniel would have come up with fresh ideas if their roles were reversed, but she had come up against an insurmountable obstacle: her imagination. She didn't have one. Abos had abilities humans might never match, but she also had limitations. Her mind just didn't work like a human's.

  Abos suspected she'd never had an original thought. Her mental processes were efficient and logical. She had experienced empathy, and she had an aversion to violence, but the spark of originality that humans treasured? No.

  This new opening of consciousness with Shuck and Susan suggested there were parts of her mind that she was yet to explore. But they would take her further away from her affinity with humanity.

  She watched the cars crawling along the streets. The sounds of the city were barely audible at this distance.

  Someone had rounded up halfheroes and taken them somewhere. Who? And why? Had it been against their will? Abos lacked the imagination to suggest answers to her own questions. She had come to America because the highest number of Gulfstreams were bought by Americans.

  And, in America, she'd run out of ideas.

  As the evening air grew cold on top of One World Trade Center, she remembered the night on the Shard in London with Daniel. There was pain in allowing the memory to surface, but it was a pain she welcomed. Her connection with humanity was, as far as she knew, uniquely strong among her species. She was a parent. Shuck and Susan were not.

  She wanted, more than anything, to find Daniel.

  A loud snap called her back to reality. Abos had been squeezing the iron structure at the top of the tower and a piece of the spire had broken away. She stared at the fractured metal in the half-light. There was nothing she could think of to do for Daniel. But there were others who needed her.

  She took out her phone again and called Shuck.

  "I'm coming home."

  25

  He was in a restaurant, and he was speaking French.

  This should have been surprising, as he hadn't spoken a complete sentence in the language since failing his GCSE. Yet he was as unconcerned by the improbability of his fluency as he was by his opulent surroundings; the candles, the heavy drapes, the white tablecloths and silver cutlery.

  A waiter stood at his elbow. He ordered coffee and two large Armagnacs, specifying the brand. The waiter nodded in approval. He was no tourist. After his mother and step-father had been killed in a car accident, he had moved to Paris with no plan other than getting away from everything and everyone he knew.

  That memory was so real, so convincing, that he did not challenge the fact that it had never happened.

  Sophie was sitting opposite. Her smile had gone, her dark eyes looking into his. She loved him and he had just told her he was leaving her, leaving Paris.

  It had all been a beautiful, glorious lie. A lie spun with the best intentions. A lie begun in grief and completed in love. But a lie nonetheless. He had hidden everything about himself from her, even his name. He was a fiction, a fantasy. And he had let Sophie live in the story he had written, not thinking about how it might hurt her. He regretted it now, a little. He didn't yet know it was a regret that would continue to grow, one he would carry for the rest of his life.

  Now, in the way she looked at him, the way she paused before sipping the Armagnac, in a hundred unspoken ways, he saw Sophie fall apart.

  When she left, she did it without saying goodbye. She finished her drink—she'd always loved a good Armagnac—closed her eyes as if listening to music, stood up, and walked away without a backward glance.

  He felt the weight of it settling on him.

  The waiter brought a second Armagnac, setting it down quietly before withdrawing. Over the next hour, as the restaurant emptied, no one disturbed him. The waiter addressed him in English as he held open the door.

  "Goodbye. And good luck."

  "Merci, André."

  Back in the apartment he packed a small bag, then tried to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Sophie the first night she had stayed. The little moue of pleasure he'd noticed for the first time that night, the half-laughs he had grown to love. He remembered the softness of her lips, the touch of her fingers as she traced a line from his shoulders onto his chest, cupping his soft breasts before—

  Wait, cupping what?

  Daniel opened his eyes and sat up in bed.

  He went to the sink and splashed water onto his face. A little embarrassed, and hunching over so the cameras wouldn't see what he was doing, he brought his hand up to his chest, half-expecting to find breasts. When his fingers traced the solid slab of muscle, a little less defined now from the poor diet, he was almost disappointed.

  It wasn't just that the dream had been more real, more vivid than any he had experienced before. That wasn't the reason he was breathing heavily, feeling shaky. It was the complete loss of self that was making him look again in the mirror, checking the face staring back was his own.

  The lights were still dim, which meant it wasn't morning yet, whatever 'morning' meant in a windowless cell.

  Daniel laid back on the bed and closed his eyes, but sleep wouldn't come. The dream had disturbed him at such a profound level that he was scared to sleep in case he lost his identity again. What if he woke up and couldn't remember who he was? He hadn't just dreamed about being someone else, it was far more powerful than that.

  Exercise might help make sleep possible. After seven push-ups, he felt lightheaded, pinpricks of light floating into the edges of his vision. He tried stomach crunches. After four repetitions, his head started to swim again, and his muscles complained. He ignored it and made it to ten, before rolling onto his side, sweating and trembling, his pulse throbbing in the skin around his face and scalp, bile rising in his throat.

  "I'll get out of here, Gorman," he whispered into the concrete floor. "I swear it. I'll get out or die trying."

  The day passed as all days passed. Food arrived about an hour after the lights came on. Much later, long after any normal person would have eaten lunch, another meal appeared, as insubstantial as the first. That was it as far as sustenance was concerned.

  Daniel had hoped he might learn to accept the constant state of hunger, but it hadn't happened. The physical effect of receiving only survival-level nutrition was one thing, but the mental effects were even more debilitating. It was hard to concentrate, to focus on any one thought for more than a few seconds before hunger interrupted any attempt at cogent reasoning.

  Sara had made a better job at overcoming the mental effects of a near-starvation diet. She called out to him three or four times a day. He listened, mostly. He tried to contribute to the conversation, but was thick-witted and slow, often unable to follow her reasoning.

  "It's not that you're less intelligent than me," she said that morning. Daniel hadn't been paying attention. He'd been trying to convince himself that the second, and final, meal of the day was imminent. His bowels told him he was wrong. He always took a shit about two hours after breakfast, long before he was even halfway through the wait for the next tray of food. As he hadn't yet done so, it was still morning, no matter how vehemently he pretended otherwise.

  He realised Sara had said something.

  "What?"

&nb
sp; "I weigh much less than you. You're the biggest guy I've ever seen. You eat as much as two people - three when you're working. But there's no fat on you. You're a freak of nature."

  "Thanks."

  "You're welcome. We all are. I eat much more than other women my size because the calories enable me to do what I do. Halfhero powers need fuel. Having that fuel rationed has prevented me using my powers, but I can still think straight. Just about. I'm amazed you can even stand up, let alone put together a coherent sentence."

  "Are piss taking the you?"

  "You still have a sense of humour. Amazing."

  "Yeah." Daniel fought off the lethargy pulling at him. "Amazing." He had started allowing himself a nap in the afternoon, but no more. It was too easy to sleep, and that twilight existence was too reminiscent of the years he had spent drugged at Station.

  "Here are my observations so far. We see the same two guards every day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. We saw no one at all during Howell's attempt to get out. The place is mostly automated. My best guess is eight guards in total."

  "Why eight?"

  "When one guard is doing meals on wheels down here, there must be another in a control centre watching. If anything goes wrong, he or she can shut the place down. We know there's a shift change before the second meal, so let's assume the control centre guy changes too. Three eight-hour shifts is six guards. Two more to cover time off and sickness. If they work twelve-hour shifts, there are six of them."

  TripleDee's voice broke in.

  "Or there could just be the two ugly twats that we see every day. It's not a tough job, is it? And have you noticed what they've got in common?"

  Sara, unable to see the drug dealer from her cell, raised her eyebrows at Daniel.

  "Go on."

  "They're both deaf."

  "Pardon?"

  "I said, they're...oh, very fucking funny, pet. The hours just fly by with you around."

  "Why do you think they're deaf?"