Broke and Famous

by Elizabeth Gannon

  Thraex made a tsk-ing sound with his tongue to express his disappointment in her. “And after I come all this way to invite you back, too. What has happened to your manners, Darlin’?”

  “I’m not interested in being a part of… part of…,” she stammered, “whatever it is you’re doing, Thraex. I’m retired.”

  He blocked her path with his impressive frame once more, somehow getting in front of her again. During the course of this conversation, he’d managed to keep her penned-in exactly where he wanted her, despite the fact she kept trying to storm off.

  He’d always been quick. He moved with the craftiness and agility of a wolf circling its prey. Always. Confident and menacing and utterly sure that he was about to have himself a fine meal. There was never any doubt that he was constantly planning things out in his head, like a predator.

  He looked at Sasha like that sometimes. All the time, actually. It used to scare her, but now… now it made her almost sad.

  It made her think about sitting in the little garden atrium area in the Westgate Foundation building, talking and laughing with the boy from a dark and terrifying dimension. Recognizing the boyish attraction he felt for her, and although older than he was, feeling really desirable for the first time in her life. Feeling her mind inspired to go a mile a minute, with a million different thoughts and ideas and inventions and dreams.

  But that young woman was gone.

  Sasha Westgate was in The Window Seat Tribe now. And there was no coming back from that.

  Despite living in the same house as him, her mother had never liked Thraex and had eventually forbidden Sasha from talking to him. Not that she really listened to that. Sasha had always thought she knew best when it came to her own life. Besides, she’d been a good ten years older than the strange little boy from that horrible dimension, and she’d assumed that she could handle him.

  She’d thought wrong.

  The man was always more than he seemed and he had a nasty habit of coming out on top, no matter how weak or lost he first appeared.

  The Westgate’s world had collapsed.

  And Thraex was the last man standing, using the rubble of their lives to hoist himself even higher.

  “You don’t have enough money to live.” He reminded her sharply, his façade of mocking charm falling away and startling her from her momentary thoughts about the past. “I know. I checked. So you’re goin’ to come home and you’ll work until you have it.” It was a statement of absolute fact. Sasha recognized the commanding tone well. He didn’t use it much, but he never used it unless he was dead certain about something, and once he was dead certain about something, the argument was already over.

  He’d die before he backed down on an issue he was sure about.

  He whistled sharply and the driver’s side door of the luxury car opened, and Bentley Nash appeared. The woman had been the Westgate’s driver since… well… basically birth. And before that, her father had had the job. And before that, her grandfather.

  She was dressed in a 1920s calf length dark grey chauffeur’s coat, boots, and chauffeur’s cap. Her dark hair was cut in a bob, hanging down to her chin, which was tattooed in the traditional style of the women of Sand Island.

  Nash had always been like Sasha’s younger sister or other niece. …Only the Westgates paid her to be there and typically referred to her by her surname. But the sentiment was the same.

  Nash nodded to her in greeting. “Ma’am.”

  The woman was all business when she was working. Which she usually was.

  Thraex grabbed Sasha’s suitcase and absently tossed it to Nash, who caught it in one hand despite its weight, and was already placing it into the trunk of the car.

  “I… I don’t want to go.” Sasha said softly, feeling her chance for horrible freedom slipping away in favor of the safety of returning to secure captivity. It was basically like being picked up by a guard boat while futilely trying to swim away from Alcatraz: it kept you from drowning, but it took you back to where you were trying to escape from in the first place.

  “I don’t care.” Thraex informed her simply. “You’re a Westgate and Westgates work for the Westgate Foundation. You’re going. End of story.” He gestured over his shoulder to the sleek black vehicle parked by the curb. “Get in the car.”

  Nash opened the door to the vehicle for Sasha.

  Sasha shook her head and took a step back, perfectly willing to abandon her suitcase of meager belongings if it came down to that. Nash could send it to her once Sasha found a hotel which would accept her shoes as payment instead of money. “I don’t want anything to do with you or that place again.” She told Thraex, voice on the edge of breaking. “I don’t have to listen to you.”

  “No, you sure don’t.” Thraex agreed, sounding commiserating. “You always were a free spirit, Miss Sasha, we all know that. ‘Unconventional Sasha,’ that’s you. And you’re at a crossroads, Darlin’, sure enough. You’re welcome to spread your bruised lil’ wings and fly in whichever direction suits you best, obviously. If you don’t wanna come home, you don’t have to. I wouldn’t dream of forcing you, that’d be downright ungentlemanly of me.” His façade of charm slipped away completely, exposing the unbreakable man beneath. “Of course, if you don’t agree to come home right now, I’ll kick your family out of the Westgate Foundation building and change the damn locks.” He leaned down to her again, his breath on the side of her face. “Do you think they can survive on their own, Miss Sasha?” He whispered in a seductive voice, mouth inches from her ear. “Do you want to be the one who did that to those poor godforsaken misfits?”

  Sasha swallowed, once again feeling the forbidden mix of unwarranted lust and frustrated irritation which had always marked her relationship with her family’s ward, ex-janitor, onetime step-brother, and new employer.

  “I really hate you.” She bit out, recognizing that she didn’t have a choice.

  Thraex had won.

  Thraex always won.

  “Lots of folks do, Miss Sasha, but it ain’t no nevermind to me. Hate me all you want, but you’re still getting’ your pretty face in the car.” He ushered her inside the vehicle. “After all, how ridiculous would it look if I returned with a celebratory ‘Welcome home, Miss Sasha!’ cake, but with no Miss Sasha in tow?”

  Chapter 2

  “Boyd Westgate. Died 1966. Crushed to death by some damn white blood cells after miniaturizin’ hisself and bein’ injected into a patient to try to understand how tumors form.”

  – Thraex, Damn Fool Ways Westgates Ended Up Graveyard Dead: Vol. 1

  When her family had first brought Thraex to this dimension, they’d taken him to one of the seers in the Horizon Academy, just as routine. The woman had pulled out three Tarot cards from the deck to read his fortune and when she flipped them over… all of them had somehow turned blank. No image on the front, no text, nothing.

  The people of Reichelt Park took that as a bad sign.

  Then the woman’s Ouija board burst into flames.

  And that had pretty much sealed everyone’s opinion of him. The years since had not helped matters, given his attitude.

  Thraex was an element of change interjected into what had always been a closed, stable system. And people had never been especially happy about it. Not even most of the Westgates.

  In the two weeks Sasha had spent living in the Westgate building again, she’d been reminded of why she left in the first place.

  At the moment, most of those reasons were seated around the table waiting to eat breakfast.

  “So, let me see if I get this straight,” Thraex put his fingers up to his temples, massaging away what was probably a building headache, “it is nine o’clock, but Kurtz is not down to breakfast yet?”

  “Uncle Kurtz said that he would just have an early dinner,” Colby informed him, her voice sounding characteristically far away, “he’s doing ‘very important things.’”

  “Such as?” Thraex demanded. “Experiments? Equations?”

>   Colby gave no indication that she even heard the questions, instead continuing trying to get her miniature giraffe to jump through a small hoop which the girl had set up for it on the tabletop.

  Sasha decided to get involved in the conversation before Thraex yelled at her niece. Not because Sasha was really afraid that Thraex would hurt Colby’s feelings, the girl was far too weird for that, just that his yelling would be pointless and would only make his headache all the worse.

  Yes, the man obviously deserved to have a headache, considering the number of them he had given her over the years, but he still wouldn’t be doing himself any favors by yelling at Sasha’s family this morning. It certainly hadn’t helped yesterday, after all. Or the day before.

  The Westgates were the one thing in the world which seemed capable of cracking his image as a devil-may-care charming rogue.

  Five seconds with her family and Thraex was getting stress headaches and yelling in frustration.

  It. Was. Beautiful.

  “Kurtz is playing the online ‘Adventure Academy’ game with what’s-her-name from the Consortium of Chaos.” Sasha helpfully supplied, trying to talk the man down. “He’s just relaxing with…”

  Thraex’s expression darkened, which in itself was fairly impressive, given his odd neon steel appearance.

  It had only gotten prettier, the older and angrier Thraex got. If he weren’t about to kill Sasha’s brother, she would have really been enjoying it.

  “Kurtz is missing breakfast…. to play video games? With supervillains!?!” Thraex demanded, voice hoarse with deep reverberating anger.

  “Sure, it sounds bad when you put it that way.” Bentley Nash added, calmly turning the page of her newspaper. “For what it’s worth, that entire super-team is a bunch of idiots. I’m a driver for one of them, and she’s got a lot of problems. Way more than we do.”

  In addition to being the Westgate’s driver, Nash also ran a sort of… well… super-person Uber in the city. You called her and she’d drive you wherever you wanted, however fast you wanted, no questions asked. As business models went, it was a fairly good one, although it wasn’t always what someone might call “legal.” Sasha chose to ignore that aspect of the woman’s chosen career.

  It was nice that Nash had found her calling.

  Sasha had had a calling once. But she was obsolete now. She could feel it. Every morning, she woke feeling like she had lost whatever it was which had once made her special. Life was now a struggle to just get a single idea which would work. Any idea, really. Just something to jot down on paper to show her family that she was trying. Trying so hard not to disappoint them…

  Sasha had never really done anything. She’d done a lot, but at the same time, nothing. All she had left to show for her life was her family, but that wasn’t really the kind of success Sasha was talking about.

  Besides, her family… well…

  The Westgates were the first family of interdimensional travel. It said so on their business cards. It had been gold-leafed on the front door here since before she had even been born. It was the keystone upon which she’d built her entire life: the Westgates were explorers and scientists and there was NOBODY who could do a better job than they could. They were the ones who were supposed to be at the forefront of everything. The first, the best, the Westgates. If there was science involved, they were the ones the superheroes called for help.

  They had the seats closest to the future.

  But Sasha didn’t really feel like that anymore. The family was falling apart. They were… They were done. She could see it. Even before she’d left, she could see it. It was one of the reasons why she’d left in the first place.

  Sasha’s grandfather, Professor Beardsly Westgate, had been left behind and killed in the Cretaceous while on a time-traveling field trip with his students and their family.

  Damn Ferrals. They were all insane.

  He never should have taken that job, but he’d done it as a favor to the Freedom Squad, the city’s go-to superheroes at the time, and look how it had turned out. That creepy family had fled in the time machine and abandoned him, sentencing him to death in a primordial nightmare.

  Not that things had been perfect for her family before that, but since then, things had only gotten worse for the Westgates.

  The Freedom Squad had decreed that her grandfather’s time machine was too big a danger to the world, and they’d destroyed it. In retrospect, it probably had more to do with protecting their own sinister plans than from any desire to protect the public.

  Her brother, Baxter Westgate, had taken it upon himself to go back in time and rescue their grandfather, which meant building his own device from scratch without his grandfather’s notes. Unfortunately, something had gone wrong and he’d somehow brain-switched himself with a gallimimus before he could complete the mission to rescue Professor Beardsly. The Westgate Foundation then sent both Baxter and the dinosaur to the lead scientist of the Freedom Squad, The Architect, so that Howard could fix things, but that idiot only succeeded in killing the dinosaur which had Baxter’s mind in it.

  That was what happened when you trusted your science to someone who wasn’t a Westgate. She’d told her father that, but the man hadn’t listened.

  So, now Sasha’s brother’s body was occupied by the mind of an ornithomimid dinosaur, and instead of being one of the most intelligent people in the world, the remaining Westgates bought him a variety of exotic roaches to eat when he behaved himself.

  Yes, the Westgates were a shadow of their former selves.

  She didn’t want that to be the case, obviously. She’d had many sleepless and tear-filled nights trying desperately to come up with some way to save her family and their Foundation. But that didn’t look like it was ever going to be the case. And it had only gotten worse since she’d left.

  They were doomed.

  They would go the same way as so many other formally great families in this city. Particularly the super-empowered lines. Every generation or two, everything went to hell and a new group of families would appear to have their time in the sun.

  And the sun was setting on the Westgates. The shadows were only deepening.

  Most of that was Sasha’s own fault, obviously. There really wasn’t much use to an inventor who didn’t invent anything. Or an explorer who didn’t explore. Or a scientist who didn’t… science?

  Sasha was washed up. And she knew it.

  The fork in Thraex’s hand bent into an unrecognizable shape, as he momentarily lost control of his incredible strength and crushed the utensil in his grip. He swore viciously in an odd mix of Cajun and the language from his own dimension, neither of which Sasha spoke, then nodded to himself like he’d made an important decision. “I’m gonna kill him.”

  Nash looked up from her newspaper, dark eyes suddenly serious. “Easy, sir.” She warned, afraid the man would actually follow through on the threat. Which to be fair, was a valid concern. Keeping Thraex calm and under control was a constant balancing act.

  He was charming and flirty, but if you did something he didn’t like, he was a dangerous person to anger.

  Thraex glared at the woman for a beat, then stormed from the room.

  “I think he’s going to kill Uncle Kurtz, Zoe.” Sasha’s niece Colby worriedly confided to her nine inch tall giraffe.

  The tiny animal stared at the young woman with beady little black eyes, uncomprehendingly, then cautiously wagged its tail.

  Colby was a brilliant girl. Truly. From almost the time she was born, she was already as smart as any Westgate had ever been and was well on her way to surpassing the lot of them. She seemed to think on a different level than anyone else, unable to even express it. But now, two decades into life, the girl’s genius was all inward facing. She was serene and eccentric and a dreamer. She was out of step with society, and she liked being alone. Doing her own thing, in her own way, and avoiding human contact whenever possible. When she spoke, it was in soft airy tones, like she didn’t see reality
as being the most important thing in her life anymore. And even when she did speak, it was mostly about her pet, rather than herself. She moved around the world like everything was a dream. Whispers and softness. It was becoming increasingly difficult to talk to Colby at all, she’d just… drift off.

  That worried Sasha. She hadn’t seen Colby in years, but it seemed like the girl was considerably worse now.

  Most of that was probably being forced to live here with Thraex, she couldn’t imagine that it was making for an overly secure environment for the girl. She wasn’t entirely sure how Colby had been drafted into living here in the Westgate Foundation building rather than with her father or on her own, but either way, Sasha didn’t approve. She didn’t like what it was doing to Colby. She wanted her niece to have more from life than miniature circus animals, tacky jewelry, an over-the-top psychedelic Laugh-In fashion sense, and writing the occasional tweet about quantum mechanics.

  Like Sasha herself though, Colby seemed to be wearing down. Or perhaps, in Colby’s case… just floating away, like soft pedals on a breeze.

  The Westgates were not meant to live in this world anymore, it seemed. It had passed them by.

  They were all part of The Window Seat Tribe now.

  A moment later, Sasha’s brother Kurtz was propelled through the doorway, as if thrown. The man stumbled on the floor, trying to keep his balance.

  Kurtz Westgate was supposed to be the family’s “Next Big Thing,” their leader in the next generation. Their father had groomed the boy for greatness, always pushing him to excel and surpass his brother Baxter, especially after Bax’s accident with the dinosaur. Her father had entered Kurtz into every scientific or heroic contest which had ever been invented, and demanded that he spend most of the day studying.

  Kurtz was truly the smartest person Sasha had ever known, and that wasn’t simply because she was his older sister. Kurtz genuinely was that smart. They’d given him an IQ test in elementary school and it had impossibly come out somewhere in the high four digits. His potential was through the roof, and the expectations that created were even higher.