And it was only getting worse. The power bundles the Source was sending out were getting bigger and it was sending them out more frequently. That was the impending disaster that Daedalus Smith and the Iron Tsar had seen coming. They’d been total d-bags, but they’d been right. She had to do something to stop it.
She’d done multiple searches through the Codex, and learned the correct psychic keys to reach the Source’s version of a command prompt. It wasn’t easy; getting there was the mental equivalent of climbing a hill with a backpack of rocks on her back. She made it, though, and after a few false starts she was able to send out the right command: Stop Further Enhancements. One of the false starts resulted in the creation of a couple dozen new Neos, all of them pretty powerful Type Twos and Threes. Hopefully they’d all turn out to be nice peeps.
The command was sent; pressing the equivalent of the ENTER key required a massive amount of energy; she felt light-headed and wobbly after it was over, but it was worth it. The Source shifted colors and shapes a few more times, and she could tell it had stopped creating new Neolympians. The crisis was averted, assuming none of the current crop of Neos were crazy and powerful enough to destroy the world.
Christine considered calling it a day and retreating back into her own skull. She’d accomplished as much as they’d hoped, after all. But something – maybe the anger she was still feeling about Mark – made her keep going. Through her connection to the Source, she could in theory reach out and touch anything and anybody linked to it, like, say, any of the almost six thousand Neos traipsing around the planet’s face like so many insects. Maybe going after the Iron Tsar wasn’t a good idea, but Daedalus Smith was fair game. She could find him – the search engine inside the Source would pierce through any wards and psychic defenses – and do anything she wanted to him: make his head explode, turn off all his powers, render his Artifacts inert and useless, set him on fire. Anything.
Never mind Daedalus. How about Mr. Night? He had supposedly died in the explosion that had killed Mark, but he’d survived massive explosions before. For all she knew, he’d escaped and was still out there. He was a creature of the Outsiders, but his current body was Neolympian. She could find him and effing end him.
Yes. That would suit her just fine.
Christine pushed her mind and will deeper into the Source.
That’s when the First’s trap sprung up on her.
She knew it’d been him immediately: the empathic signature was unmistakable, a combination of childish glee and terror and sheer hatred. The initial attack had been a feint, meant to lull her into a false sense of security. A fraction of a second later, she was too busy fighting for her life to consider anything else.
The trap had been simple: it had waited until her connection to the Source was intimate enough that she couldn’t disentangle herself easily – and then it’d attacked the filters and safeguards keeping the massive energies of the Source from flooding into her. The attack had stripped her of her defenses, exposing her to everything in the Source – lethal levels of power and brain-melting knowledge.
More raw power than she’d ever wielded, observed or even imagined rushed into her. Knowledge and fire and blinding light exploded inside her head. The combination hurt her as badly as when she’d saved Mark and had stepped over the threshold between life and death to drag him back. She flailed desperately against the sudden onrush of uncontrolled power, and tried to restore her filters even as she struggled to disconnect her mind from the Source. Her hasty defenses burst under the pressure. Streams of information and pure unformed chaos swirled around her body and soul. Out in the real world, she felt the chair melt under her; alarms went off as she started glowing like the mouth of a live volcano.
Giving up wasn’t an option. Giving up meant the assholes won.
Christine mercilessly struck at her connection to the Source, much like Mark had severed his connection to her the day he died: same desperate move, same necessary harsh choice. It felt like gnawing off one of her limbs, but she did it anyway, ignoring the pain, cutting off pieces of herself to save the rest. At some point her perceptions dissolved into pure white light.
After some indeterminate time, the light went away. Christine was lying on a steaming, very hot surface. With a great effort, she raised her head and opened her eyes.
She’d trashed the lab. No, trash implied some stuff was still in one piece. She’d blasted the lab down to the ferroconcrete walls, floor and ceiling, and melted the walls and floor in some spots, like the semi-congealed lava pond she was lying on. The cleanup bill was going to be humongous.
The force fields had held, thank God. She could see several faces on the other side, looking at her with wide eyes: Adam, Condor, John, and the pseudo-mage Nebiru, who probably was the reason the lab’s shields had held. It must have happened quickly, or Condor would have pushed the kill switch on her. They all looked at her with varying mixes of worry and relief.
At least, she thought so. She didn’t know what they were feeling. She couldn’t pick up their emotions at all.
Shocked, she tried to switch on her Christine-vision. Nothing happened.
She’d been psi-blinded.
Chapter Fifteen
Hunters and Hunted
Chicago, Illinois, May 27, 2013
Mr. Night struggled to his feet and wiped the blood seeping out from his nose, ears and eyes.
The psychic shockwave had been rather overwhelming. Even in his sanctum sanctorum, where he’d been resting ever since the battle over New York, protected by the power of his Masters, the girl’s telepathic scream had sent shocks of agony through him. Fortunately, his brand-new body was far hardier than his previous one. The minor injuries healed up immediately, and all was well.
All in all, he was rather satisfied with the new arrangement. One might say he had traded up.
The process had been fraught with contretemps, however, and he was far from fully recovered. It would take him months before he was ready to take action again. The attempt on the girl’s life had been ill-advised, the counsel of desperation. Well, desperation and the wrathful shade of Damon Trent. It had been a long time since Mr. Night had worked with a soul as black as his; not since his brief tutorial of child-murderer Albert Fish, certainly, and Fish had possessed but a fraction of the power that Damon-That-Wasn’t had wielded. The hateful manifestation had been very insistent they destroy the girl as soon as they had recovered from the effects of Daedalus Smith’s cunning little trap. That had been another fiasco, for which there would be a reckoning. Damon’s ghost only cared about the destruction of his daughter, however, and Mr. Night had felt obligated to acquiesce with his plan.
Said plan had been simple enough: attack her man while he was away from Freedom Island, to lure her into the open, and destroy her before she could fulfill her potential. That type of direct action had never been to Mr. Night’s taste: he much preferred to use puppets and useful idiots to do the actual killing. Damon-That-Wasn’t wouldn’t be denied, however, and Mr. Night had agreed to follow his fellow servitor into the fray. He’d hoped, if not to destroy the girl, then to bring her into communion with the Masters, as he’d managed to do with Janus not too long before. Plant a seed that would eventually bear deliciously bitter fruit.
Not unexpectedly, the girl had proven to be too much for the ghost of her father. Realizing he lacked the power to destroy her, Mr. Night had managed to reach her faceless companion, which almost resulted in her own downfall. Almost: just a euphemism for failure. The faceless man had thwarted him, and almost managed to destroy them both in a spectacular energy release.
Almost. In the end, the girl’s lover had also failed.
Mr. Night had been nimble, and quick. He’d used the corruption spreading through his opponent’s body and soul as a bridge and crossed it, leaving Medved’s body behind to explode: a substantial portion of the Russian’s mass had been converted into energy, masking Mr. Night’s exit quite well. He’d teleported to safety before th
e conflagration consumed his new host.
He tittered, running a hand over his familiar gaunt countenance, and its customary lopsided grin. As he did so, he let the face go and returned his head to its natural, featureless resting state. His new body was powerful and allowed him to be many different people. The possibilities were endless.
It would take time to repair the damage his body’s previous owner had inflicted on it, however. The heroic idiot had come very close to inflicting irreparable damage to it in his attempt to self-destruct.
Mr. Night had time to spare, fortunately. The painful psychic scream he’d just endured meant something had gone terribly wrong with Christine Dark’s attempt to join with the Source. he suspected some form of sabotage. He was by far not the only one who didn’t want the girl taking control over the Source; somebody else had managed to throw a monkey wrench into the works.
By the time the girl recovered from her mishap, it would be too late. A new player was on its way, and when it arrived everything would change.
Mr. Night would heal and bide his time. He silently thanked the previous occupant of his fleshy abode, and wished him a happy stay in his new home.
Face-Off
The Darkling Plains, Time Undetermined
There are no colors here, only fear and pain.
My stepfather leans over me. “Okay, you little turd. You think you’re a man?”
He should be hitting me just about now, I think, but he isn’t. He’s cutting into me with something sharp instead, peeling strips of skin right off my body. I’m so scared of him that I don’t even struggle, just let him flay me bit by bit. The pain is nothing compared to what he’ll do if I really piss him off. Before my stepfather, there was a pimp called Pedro who’d hung me by the thumbs with piano wire and stabbed me a hundred and twenty-three times. I know the exact number because he made me count them out. Before that, it was a street gang who’d kicked me to death. And so on.
I die, and I wake up the next morning, knowing something just as bad is waiting for me.
“This is what a man gets,” Stepfather growls, and starts digging in with the piece of glass in his hand, making me scream.
That’s how it is, that’s how it’s always been, always going to be. I know that just like I know he’s going to kill me and I’ll wake up the next morning and somebody else will be waiting for me with knives or clubs or just hands and teeth.
“Okay, you little turd.” He’s getting worked up, and it’s going to get really bad. I can only hope he kills me quickly.
That’s when the scream wakes me up.
I hear it over my own screaming, a familiar voice crying out in pain and fear that cuts through the daze that prevents me from acting or thinking. I know that voice.
Christine.
The asshole pokes me again with the broken glass. What the fuck? Why am I letting him do that to me?
“This is what a man gets.”
“Is that right, motherfucker?”
He stops, eyes wide, and I kick him off me. That kick should have sent him flying like a punted football, but he only staggers back a few steps. I’m not super-strong anymore. The strips of skin he’s peeled off aren’t healing, either. I’m a vanilla human, except for the fact that I still have no face.
I don’t give a fuck.
“You little turd,” the asshole says, a little less certainly than before, but he comes at me with the piece of glass in his hand. I close in, get cut a couple more times before I grapple, knee him in the groin, put him in a headlock, and twist until his neck breaks.
His lifeless body collapses on the gray ground. A few seconds later, it turns into some sort of viscous shadow that vanishes like moisture in a desert. What the fuck?
What is this place? The sky is gray. Everything around me is gray or black, except for my blood. I’m dripping from all the spots where I got skinned or stabbed, forming pools of red on the colorless soil. I look around. I’m in a back alley, surrounded by old buildings. The streets in between are covered in gravel and sand. Some of the buildings look vaguely familiar, like distorted versions of places I know. This back alley looks a bit like the place where I rescued Fay from Pedro the pimp, for example.
Pedro was stabbing me to death not too long ago. Except that can’t be right, Pedro’s been dead for years. Then again, my asshole stepfather has been worm shit for a long time, too. As I start to remember the shit that’s been happening to me, I realize that all the assholes who have been torturing me are people I’ve killed.
I’m dead. I’m in Hell.
Not what I expected. Truth to tell, I didn’t expect anything but oblivion when I inevitably bit the big one. So instead of fire, brimstone and demons with pitchforks, Hell means I get tortured over and over by my former victims. Just fucking great. I guess karma can be a bitch after all.
Except Christine’s scream has woken me up somehow. Before that, I’d been in a daze, meekly letting myself be murdered without lifting a finger to stop it. Something isn’t right. I may be dead, but Christine was able to reach me here.
The blood loss is getting to me. I sit with my back resting against a brick wall, and try to put pressure on the cuts I can reach, but it’s useless. I’m going. I’m –
I wake up, somewhere else. The sky is a slightly lighter shade of gray. It’s morning, and I know the festivities are about to start again, but I’m still aware of what’s happening. Still awake, no longer in that stupefied, helpless state from before Christine’s scream, and in no mood to be tortured and killed. Plus I’ve never been a morning person.
I look around – I’m in the ruins of a building that could have been Cassandra’s place – and see someone heading towards me. Hey, it’s my old buddy, the pedo from Hoboken. He looks bigger than he did in life, and he’s got a set of chains and manacles in one hand, and a sharp metal hook on the other. I’ve got some idea of what he’s planning to do with those.
It’s not his lucky day. I find a loose stone, and when he comes around the corner I bash his skull in with it. He vanishes into smoke after he’s dead, just like Step Dad did, but the metal hook fell out of his hand while I was taking care of him, and it stays behind. I heft it; it’s not my first choice for a weapon, but it will do.
Now that I’ve taken care of my torturer of the day, I can think more about my situation. I’m wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and my wounds are gone. I vaguely remember that’s how all my days start out, until the bad stuff begins to happen. It still sounds a lot like Hell.
Christine’s scream keeps nagging it at me. I heard it with my mind, not my ears. I try our special mental connection, and I get nothing. I remember shutting it off, but I can’t seem to turn it on again. Thinking about it makes me remember stuff outside this gray Hell. I’d been fighting Mr. Night, and he’d infected me with the Outsider shit. I’d tried to blow myself up. By the looks of it, I must have succeeded.
Wherever this is, I heard Christine, though. If I can hear her, I can reach her.
I’m going to find you, Christine.
I’m going to find you.
Christine Dark
Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, December 2, 2013
Mark.
She woke up with the name of her dead lover on the tip of her tongue, but left the word unsaid. Just as well.
John Clarke, lying in bed next to her, would have heard her and been upset.
His arm was draped over her as they lay cuddled together in bed. His massive form made her feel safe most of the time, but at the moment his presence was smothering, stifling. She gently disentangled herself from him and slid out of bed. The move woke him up, of course – supers were light sleepers as a rule – and he gave her a quizzical look.
“Bad dream,” she said. “I’m just going to drink some milk and chill out.”
John nodded. He knew all about bad dreams. “Want to talk about it?”
“Maybe later, ‘kay? Go back to sleep.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied with a grin, and d
id just that.
He seemed to be fine. Probably was. She didn’t know for sure, though. She had no idea what he was feeling, other than by the way he acted or the things he said.
It drove her crazy, not knowing for sure.
Funny, she thought as she quietly walked to the kitchen and poured herself a glass a milk. One would think she’d get used to not having empathy powers after six months without them. She’d only had the powers for less than three months, had constantly bitched about what a burden they were, and now she felt crippled without them. Hopefully time would heal that wound, along with all the others.
Some old wounds were taking their own sweet time to heal, though.
She’d never gone a day without thinking of Mark at least once, but the little bursts of sorrow and regret had grown weaker over time. Until the last few weeks, that is. She’d been having a semi-recurring dream since before Thanksgiving: Mark and a motley group of people, running and hiding in a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape, all grays and blacks, ruins and deserts populated by the living dead. The dreams had filled her with a sense of urgency and panic, a need to go find the place and rescue Mark.
Chrisinte shook her head and sipped her milk, blinking the stinging burn out of her eyes. There was nobody to rescue. Mark was dead. Her empathy had been alive and well at the time, and she had felt his soul being snuffed out like a candle in the Elton-John-loving wind. Her mind was just playing tricks on her.
You just can’t be happy with what you got, her brain diagnosed. You just have to second-guess every darn thing, that’s all.
She kinda did, yes. There was no reason for it. Overall, things had finally started getting better. Mostly. She still wanted to go home, but Uncle Adam still hadn’t figured out how, and her ability to connect to the Codex had been crippled as badly as her empathy, so learning new Words was out of the question. She still only knew one – Power – and at a first grade level; attempts to improve her knowledge only managed to trigger brutal migraines, some of which had left her semi-conscious for days at a time.
New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance Page 22