“Admitting that you’re an awful posthuman being is not a get out of jail free card, bucko,” Ellie said, taking his napkin off the table and blowing her nose with it. “Unless you follow that up with a promise to do better, you’re just telling me crap I already know.”
“I ain’t promising shit.”
“Oh, of course not. God forbid that you try to get along with him. You haven’t tried at all. That’s why you don’t know how much he looked up to you.” She sniffed, fiddling with the pendant of the necklace she was wearing. He didn’t like that he didn’t recognize it. “He’s a sweet kid, M.”
“No,” Marshal said, sharply. “He sure the hell is not a sweet kid. There’s something profoundly wrong with him. You’re not seeing it, but I do. I’m trying to protect you. Think you can give me about thirty percent less crap about it?”
“I know that he’s damaged. I just don’t think you or I have any place to judge him for it,” Ellie said, quietly.
“He can heal,” he added, knowing that she understood the emphasis. She’d been young, but she still had to have remembered.
“I said that I know.” She pawed back her wet hair, clearing her throat. “So are you eating something, or can I get to work?”
“Should I?” Marshal asked, an eyebrow arched. Ellie was still angry, angrier than he’d seen her in a long time. He knew that he deserved that, but he also knew that she was very capable of making his life a living hell.
“I don’t know. You feeling lucky, punk?” Ellie said, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand. Dropping her voice into an eerily perfect imitation of Marshal’s, she added: “‘Cause I ain’t promising shit.”
“Cheesing off your server is never in your best interest, smart guy,” Santini laughed from the doorway. He was generally a soft-spoken man, but his laughter was as big as he was. A gust of cold, rainy wind followed him inside. “When are you gonna learn?”
A quick glance at the clock confirmed that it was exactly a quarter after nine. When he was in town, Santini’s routine was as predictable as Marshal’s. They’d been meeting at the Dive for almost fifteen years, though they refused to acknowledge it as a tradition. They just both happened to get breakfast at the same place at the same time.
“Mornin’, Mr. Santini,” Ellie said, smiling warmly. “What’ll it be? I’m not on for another twenty minutes, but I can get your order started.”
“Farmer’s breakfast for me, biscuits and gravy for this sad sack,” Santini said, shrugging off his wet Covert and hat. He slid into the other side of the booth, filling it.
“The usual. Got it!” Ellie said, flitting away again.
Santini was a sharp dresser. His suits were well-made and well-tailored, so even drenched, he looked sleek and funeral-ready. Even so, Marshal knew that he hadn’t chanced being caught near the graveyard. The BPHA wouldn’t have approved of him paying any kind of respect to the Rook, and Santini followed his orders like every good Collector should. As far as his bosses knew, at least.
The wet wool stench of his suit tickled the inside of Marshal’s nose. He scrubbed out the itch with the back of his hand.
“Thanks for the save,” Marshal said, pushing the dainty cup of espresso across the table.
“You’re welcome,” Santini said, pouring cream into his tiny espresso cup. “Not that you deserved it.”
“Does everyone know that I roughed up the little monster?” He groaned, scrubbing both hands through his hair. “You’re not doing much to disprove my theory that the BPHA is one big gossip-fest around a water cooler.”
“I’m not disagreeing with you; the kid’s a textbook definition of a Foundie. But Corbin’s gone, and the kid’s all Amira has left of him. If you think she won’t defend her little Frankenstein to the death, you’re a fool. She’s a Queen who has conquered. If you forget it, she’ll remind you.”
Marshal didn’t doubt that. Amira wouldn’t lash out with physical violence, but he’d seen her disassemble entire lives with a few choice words.
“It’s Frankenstein’s monster, but yeah. I know. You’re talking to the guy who had her for a stepmother, remember?” He said, waving him off. “Which reminds me. I’ve run into a bit of a work problem. Think I can pick your brain a little, old man?”
“Not with that kind of lead-in, boy,” Santini said, though he paired it with a smirk.
“Tell me what you make of this,” Marshal said, and handed him the photo of Uncle Johnny and his mystery lady.
Santini’s eyes widened, pupils blown. He knew.
“Give me some background.”
“So Mama has been keeping her eyes peeled for me,” Marshal said, searching his face for any further cues. “If she picks up any chatter relating to Dad’s business, she sends it my way. Last night, I intercepted the sale of this photo. And get this— the courier was the Leak.”
“Good middleman,” Santini agreed, nodding absently. “Tragic glandular problem.”
“Yeah, so, he risked going through my territory to deliver this. Mr. the Leak is no greenhorn— he knows how this game is played. That leads me to believe that this is, in fact, a genuine article.”
“Jesus Christ, kid. Do you realize how much you ask of me already?” He put the photo back down, shaking his head. “This... it won’t come cheap. You’ll have to make it worth my while.”
“Fine,” Marshal grumbled. “I’ll make you a deal. What do you want?”
“A blank check,” Santini said, folding his big hands on the table. “My terms.”
“Are you f—”
“That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
Santini didn’t expect him to take it. Had he been any less desperate, Marshal wouldn’t have given such a scarily open-ended IOU a second thought. It was the steepest price that Santini could name.
One year later, and Marshal was still trying to put a name to the puzzle he was trying to solve. All he had was a handful of pieces— some concrete, some metaphorical— and the vague-but-pressing sensation that he needed to find more. It was the feeling that he was missing something. Sometimes, it felt like a physical thing, like he should be looking for his keys, or his phone, or his wallet, even though he knew exactly where they were. Most of the time, it was more abstract than that. It was a quiet knot of a feeling, binding up his lungs when he wasn’t expecting it.
The need for answers, for structure, for the corner pieces that would make the rest of the jigsaw puzzle easy to assemble, haunted him, so Marshal had taken to haunting the daylight hours. As a man raised nocturnally, lurching around outside in the dead of noontime was as much a show of mental unrest as an insomniac’s midnight wanderings. The exhaustion was getting to him. The whole thing with Malek shouldn’t have happened.
“Damn my insatiable curiosity,” Marshal muttered, snagging Santini’s napkin. On it, he wrote: THIS ENTITLES SALVADOR ARTURO CAVALLERO SANTINI TO ONE (NON-TRANSFERABLE) FAVOR FROM MARSHAL MICAH UNDERWOOD. XOXOXOXO
“If you lose your marker, the transaction’s void,” he said, signing his name at the bottom. “If I have to have the Favor of Damocles hanging over my head, you’re going to live with a sticky napkin in your wallet until you cash it in.”
After embellishing it with a few more hearts, he passed him the napkin. Santini read it over, then carefully folded it up. For a guy who just got a hell of a deal, he didn’t look very happy.
“Her name is Doris Riley,” Santini said, very quietly.
It felt like he’d screamed it.
“Fuck you,” Marshal hissed between his teeth.
“I’m serious. This is Doris Riley.” Santini tapped the woman in the photo with one fingertip. “God, you look like her. I’m surprised you didn’t see the resemblance.”
“No. No, no, no, no.” Smacking his hand away, Marshal pointed to John. He was so furious, his finger shook. “You’re wrong. Look. Wright’s in his Commander uniform. His current one. He was still transitioning from the Knight when I was born, and when I was born, Mom died. You know
that.”
“I know what your father told you, but the woman in this picture is Doris Riley,” Santini said, rubbing a hand over his eyes.
Santini was straight off patrol and thoroughly exhausted. Marshal wanted to be sorry, but he was too angry for sympathy. He wasn’t like his dad. He could shut that part of himself off.
“I need a straight answer,” he said, gripping the edge of the table like it would help him keep it together. “If my mother’s alive, I need to know.”
Santini didn’t look up. He just stared at the photo, his thick brows knit. Marshal didn’t know how to interpret his expression, but his ticker was working overtime.
“For the love of God,” Marshal burst out. “Throw me a bone. Please.”
He didn’t care how desperate he sounded. He was desperate. He’d exhausted his resources, had pushed away anyone who could distract him from his search, had done everything he could think of, but he felt like he was still trying to figure out where to start.
“I don’t know anything about this. Fake, legit, I can’t tell you which it is,” Santini said, slowly. “But I did know Doris. And if this isn’t her, well. It’s a damn good imitation.”
“I didn’t know you knew my mother.”
“Not well,” he admitted, smoothing his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. “What I do know is that she wasn’t ready to be a parent. She was sixteen when you were born. What Corbin said, he said to protect you. And her, too, I think.”
“That’s my old man,” Marshal said with a hard bark of a laugh. “Why tell your kid that his teenage mom didn’t want him when you can tell him that she died because of you?
He felt like he’d had the wind knocked out of him, but he wasn’t really all that surprised. There was no getting around the fact that his father could be a heartless piece of work.
“Listen. Before you go any further than this— before you commit to going down this road, you’ve got to ask yourself if it’s worth it.” Santini massaged his forehead, rearranging the worry-creases. “If the Bureau gets wind that you’re looking for family, they’ll use it against you. They’ll lean on anyone connected to her.”
Like good ol’ Santini himself. And he was good, too. As much as he wanted to say that he used his nickname ironically, it was one that he’d earned fair and square. Marshal knew that if the Collector hadn’t helped him and Ellie out the night they left home, things would have ended very differently for them. Marshal would’ve been caught and incarcerated, and Ellie...he didn’t know what would have happened to her. It wasn’t something that he liked to think about.
“So if I start sniffing around, I lose my inside man.”
“I enjoy our time here,” Santini said. His deep sigh seemed to deflate him. “For what it’s worth.”
Fortunately, the arrival of their meal saved Marshal from having to dredge up a response to that uncomfortably honest moment. Ellie brought by their breakfast, gave Marshal an extra side of stink-eye, then darted off to deal with the growing stream of brunching customers. She didn’t give him time to ask how she was doing, or, more importantly, request more salt. The shaker on the table was empty.
“Great,” Marshal muttered, flicking the saltshaker over.
“Allow me.”
Santini’s fingertips twitched with a tiny come hither movement. As Marshal watched, a thin, scintillating ribbon of salt wormed out of the shaker on the table behind him. He guided it over his plate, giving it a light dusting.
“Need more than that?”
“Nah, that’s good.” Marshal’s lips twisted up with an almost-smirk. “Show-off.”
“Using my gift to make the world a better place,” Santini said, guiding the excess salt to his own plate. “Salt has shaped civilization for thousands of years, you know. My father’s ancestors conquered the world in the name of salt. In fact, my asshole ancestors found the chunk of land that your father’s asshole ancestors would later take as their own. They lost a war, then— ”
“Then Columbus was like hey y’all, I found India— except not.”
Santini slowly shook his head, caught somewhere between amusement and exasperation.
“What do you want from me?” Marshal grinned, arms spread. “I was homeschooled.”
And for what felt like the millionth time that year, Marshal remembered that his father was gone, and that he’d forgotten. Not for long, but he had. One year later, and he was trying his best to act like it was just another day, to carry on as usual, but what should have been a joke felt like a self-inflicted stab wound.
He tried to keep grinning, but his facial muscles seized from the effort. He let it drop, rubbing a hand over his mouth.
“He, uh. He called me, y’know. Dad. The night before— ” Marshal flapped one hand, unwilling to put a name to the disaster that had trashed the Nest. “ —he called my personal cell. Shouldn’t have even had that number, but you know him.”
Santini’s pulse spiked. He could say what he wanted and pretend all he liked, but there were some physiological reactions that not even he could contain.
“What did he say?”
“I didn’t pick up.” Marshal pulled a jerky shrug. “And now he’s dead.”
The statement hung, suffocating. He pushed his plate away. He didn’t smell anything off about his breakfast, but he’d lost his appetite.
“That’s the way regret works, yeah?”
Peeling it up off the formica table top, Marshal tucked the photo of Maybe-Doris Riley and the Commander back into his breast pocket. The only person who could verify its authenticity was Uncle Johnny himself, but he had burned that bridge years ago.
“Yeah,” Marshal sighed. “Guess it is.”
°
Even buried in the deep pockets of his coat, Marshal’s fingers ached from the cold. He was hung over from his own tiredness, partially numb, and hungry. A more reasonable person would have left the parking lot hours ago, but Marshal was rarely accused of being reasonable.
He wasn’t sure why he was doing there, since he couldn’t get close enough to see his father’s grave. Honestly, he didn’t know where else to go. If he left, he’d spend the rest of the night plagued by the feeling that he hadn’t at least tried to be a good son. He’d royally screwed up on the big brother thing, so he felt compelled to make amends where he could. There was no doubt in his mind that the BPHA was waiting for him, so the best he could do was sit in his freezing car in the funeral home’s parking lot until he’d satisfied his guilt.
Marshal hadn’t been able to go to his father’s funeral. Hadn’t been allowed to, really. He’d given his seat to Ellie, since a) she had wanted to go, and b) he hadn’t felt like breaking out of jail that day. The BPHA wasn’t big on granting amnesty. It didn’t matter how many times he’d been on the number one rookie list, how many lives he’d saved, or how much of himself he’d sacrificed at the altar of The Good Fight— they wouldn’t start playing the Greatest Hits of Marshal Underwood until he was six feet under, too.
His sigh fluffed up on the cold air, cottony. Deciding that wasting a little fuel was worth having feeling in his hands, he started up the car again.
A sharp rap of knuckles against the driver’s side window made Marshal jump. His damp clothes and hair had fogged up the glass, so he hadn’t seen their approach. He recognized the silhouette, though, so he rolled down the window with a smile.
“Howdy, Your Highness. Imagine running into you here.”
Amira smiled placidly from beneath the wide brim of her umbrella. Since she spent most of her time in Fake Oregon, she wasn’t used to the rain.
“You can come out,” the Queen said. “It’s safe. It completely slipped their minds to set up an ambush for you today. Serendipitous, no?”
Marshal drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Technically, Amira was obligated to turn him in. Public heroes didn’t retire— they got moved to the inactive list, went bad, or died. The Queen believed in fair play, so he didn’t think that she’d walk him into
a trap. He would have been surer of it if he hadn’t recently knocked a few of her kid’s teeth out. There was no way he wasn’t on her naughty list.
“And I suppose I’ve got you to thank for that?”
“Watching the Collectors watch your father’s grave is no way to honor his memory. I won’t allow them to use the anniversary of his death as an opportunity,” the Queen said, chin raised. “We cannot have him, so they cannot have you.”
He twisted his keys out of the ignition, getting out of the car. She always had been better at forgiveness than the rest of them.
Wordlessly, Marshal followed his stepmother through the graveyard. There weren’t very many flowers at his father’s grave, but that was okay. He’d never been a flowers kind of guy.
“He’s really gone, isn’t he? A part of me always thought that he’d...I don’t know...” Marshal rubbed the back of his neck, sighing.
“You imagined that one day, a stranger would approach you on the street. He wouldn’t need to reveal himself— you would know that it is him,” the Queen said, addressing the grave instead of looking directly at him. “And he would laugh. He’d laugh at his own cruel cleverness. He’d laugh at you for having been fooled. He’d laugh, because he’d gotten away.”
Marshal snorted. “Sounds about right.”
“But he didn’t. Not this time.” She had to tip her umbrella back to look up at him. “But you already knew that. Or has someone else been putting his affairs in order?”
“Guilty as charged.”
It’d been an entire year since the funeral, but he was still burying his father at least once or twice a month. When his father had died, so had everyone else he’d been. As it turned out, that was several dozen people. He’d had no idea how many shifts his father had been juggling.
Since his retirement, the Rook had been living at least five lives, simultaneously— five separate lives, not including his own. He’d avoided being Corbin Underwood as much as possible. Personally, Marshal thought that he had trouble being Corbin when he couldn’t escape to the Rook. After Matt, he’d just dissipated.
The Posterchildren: Origins Page 41