“What the fuck is he doing here?” I ask with a voice of surrender.
“Zephyr?” the bull-headed schmuck replies. “I didn’t know you’d had the pleasure.”
“I have definitely not had any pleasure from this a-class douchebag,” I say.
“Then you have met,” Taurus says, pleased with himself as he maneuvers around the room and leaves him – fuck it, I’m just going to say Zephyr, as much as it galls – carte blanch to do as he will around the room.
“You can call me Agent Zephyr if you like, honey-bun,” my imposter says.
“He’s not an agent,” Taurus says quickly. “We’ve deputized compliant and registered vigilantes – people unlike yourself – to help with emergency relief efforts.”
“This is a relief effort?”
“Well, the crisis isn’t resolved yet, but we need bodies to help with processing.”
I flash Zephyr a look and one of the most self-congratulatory of smirks ever seen flowers across his face so fast that I have to look away again lest the existential nausea overwhelm me. In that moment, Taurus breaks protocol, taking me by the arm and putting me directly beneath the ganglia of technology filling the chamber, electronic hum like background muzak as a chair with restraints hisses up out of the floor and I allow myself to be urged to clamber onto it.
“Put your feet in the stirrups,” Zephyr catcalls.
“Fuck you.”
“Hey,” Taurus says and then stops us all a moment to sneeze.
“Easy with the language,” he says and dabs his snout with a well-used kerchief.
“What, you want to add bad language to my charge sheet? Which consists of what, exactly?” I hold his eyes and add, “This is bullshit.”
Taurus’s already glistening nostrils widen at the jab and he stares at me red-eyed for a long moment before turning back to my simulacra.
“She reminds me of you,” he says. “No wonder you two don’t get along.”
Matrioshka’s smart enough to play it low key, moving to the back of the room as two male technicians apply wires to me with sticky pads and reveal themselves as desperate mouth-breathing geeks as they try to carry it off without splooging in their pants. I grunt and flick hair out of my face without the benefit of my hands.
“You know one of you agents should be a woman,” I say to them.
“Emergency powers,” Zephyr shrugs. “The Mirror Act.”
“You understand we’re empowered to take whatever battery of tests we –”
“I get it,” I tell Taurus.
“Are you gonna kick up a stink or play it quiet?” he asks like he’s levelling with me. “You get out of here faster if you play by the rules.”
“The rules?” I try not to let my pretty blue eyes bug out of my head and basically fail. “Maybe you guys are a little too fond of the rules for your own good – a bit like your chain of command. Did you ever think about questioning the directives you’ve been given?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The city’s under siege,” I say. “Someone’s executed a co-ordinated attack to seal the world’s biggest city off from the rest of the world, and –”
“A good reason to monitor the whereabouts of every parahuman,” Taurus says.
This guy’s such a good soldier that Matrioshka doesn’t even have to use her powers to keep him towing the party line. And as far as I can tell, Belle herself is also nothing to do with whatever’s happened to Atlantic City – she’s more like an bystander enthusiastically jerking off at a vehicle crash – which means no matter what stripe of evil she might be, this chaos affects her too. Yet to read my Zephyr smirk played back at me, the only thing she looks like she’s missing is the popcorn. I flick my eyes to try and communicate some of my disgust, but a sardonic laughter is my just desserts.
“That’s strange,” one of the nerds off to the side pipes up.
Nobody actually asks the guy anything, but eyes swivel his way, thrusting him into the metaphoric spotlight. At Taurus’s irritated shrug, Poindexter motions to the bank of readouts none of us can actually see, let alone decipher.
“You said she’s unregistered, right?”
“Uh-huh,” Taurus answers.
“Dynamic field test is coming back positive, but the epidermal scan says negative.”
“What does that mean? In terms we can understand,” Taurus says and shoots me and Zephyr looks like he’s daring us to make a crack.
“It means there’s no evidence of parahuman abilities in her genetic make-up,” the technician replies.
At least he has the courtesy to look abashed at talking about me like I’m not in the room, though he plunges on with his explanation for a still baffled-looking Agent Taurus.
“Nine times out of ten cases, that means a non-terrestrial generative origin explanation if abilities are found to exist.”
“‘Do exist.’ What does that mean?”
“You know,” the guy says sheepishly. “In case someone just fucked up.”
“Oh, she’s got abilities alright,” Zephyr chimes in. “She’s dangerous.”
“So you’ve met before?” Taurus asks and looks back at him.
“Cusp and I? Oh yeah.”
And Matrioshka shoots me a grin of pure menace.
“You’re a fucking turd,” I mutter.
“OK, OK,” Taurus says, raising hands the size of dinner plates in consternation. “You tell me what classification then. We need to put this woman on record and then on ice. This is taking long enough as is.”
“On ice? What are you talking about?”
“It’s just a safety precaution,” Taurus says sideways, not even bothering to look at me. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll be fine. A little nap and this whole thing’ll be over. Good guys’ll clean up the city and you can get on with facing whatever charges you deserve for whatever you’ve been doing.”
Zephyr snickers as I scour the room in rising panic. I start pulling off sensors and Taurus moves in, smothering me with his superior strength.
“Chill the fuck out,” he snaps at me. “Classification?”
“Non-terrestrial,” the technician says in a panic now things are going titties up.
“You said that already. Be specific.”
“Extra-dimensional,” the guy says quickly. “If I had to guess – oh gee, there goes the sensor data – if I had to guess, I’d say sorcery. Magick. You know, in case I needed to explain that.”
It’s not just Taurus’s inappropriate hug that makes me go still.
The technician’s pronouncement drips into my consciousness like coffee through a filter. And my thoughts spiral off as I try to understand what this even means.
*
FOLLOWING THE EXAMINATION, Taurus, a chortling Zephyr, and the ever-waiting hit squad of goons escort me back to my holding cell. The gun-toting agents back away, as does Taurus, big nostrils flaring with indifference as another nameless technician bolt-guns a plastic bracelet on me, and for reasons I just can’t fucking fathom, this life-size parody of the man I once was lingers in the room a moment, cheeky asshole grin all but waving the white flag that the ruse is up, not that anyone appears to give a shit, panic mode the norm outside and plenty more innocent costumed adventurers filling the other holding cells. I guess now I understand how I get away with some of the shit I pull sometimes.
Zephyr – as I shall continue to call him like some mad emperor talking in the third person – turns to the hazard crew and waves that shit-eating grin like it’s a universal credit card or something.
“I just need a moment alone with this honey for a second, OK pops?”
Admittedly the squad leader is a fair age, but his expression hardens at the implied insult, though the goons merrily shut the cell door behind us all the same.
“Goody,” Zephyr says and sings, “I Think We’re Alone Now.”
“What are you even doing here?” I snap.
“Look, we’ve only got five minutes. Are you sure thi
s is how you want to spend it? Arguing?”
“What are you talking about?”
I give myself one of those open-palmed looks as eloquent as the shrug that follows.
“Well,” he says. “You know, I’m you and you’re hot. I thought we could –”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t want to fuck yourself.”
My jaw is only hanging together by a pin at this point as Zephyr gives a nonplussed shrug and walks slowly around me in the tiny cell as if making a rent inspection.
“I thought you’d be up for that. Sorry, I really did.”
“You’re playing the role well, but you’re not me, Belle.”
“Joseph,” he replies. “Call me Joseph now.”
“Fuck you.”
“‘Fuck you, Joseph’,” he chortles, then asks me, “Do you know her name?”
“It’s Holland,” I say painfully. “I didn’t know her surname. She lost her memory. Did she even know herself?”
I stare daggers, angry already and angrier still knowing how prettily my cheeks burn at this moment. I try to settle.
“Seriously,” I ask again, voice dropping an octave and a few decibels. “Did she find out who she was in the end, before you . . . you erased her?”
“She put up a fight. I’m sorry about that,” Belle-as-Zephyr says. “She was a hell of a girl. A real role model for us ladies, huh?”
“You’re the worst kind of pervert I’ve ever met, and that’s saying something.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“Jesus, enough with the petty rejoinders,” I say with an honestly exhausted sigh. “How did I ever think you were a normal person? You’re the greatest actor I’ve ever met, Belle. You pulled the wool over on me too.”
“It wasn’t hard,” Zephyr says, cocksure with fists on hips and staring back at me with an anticipatory smile. “Once you believed I was immune to your charms, you had nothing. You’re just a soft little puppy beneath all that bluster, Joe. Who woulda guessed you really are somehow a good guy under all that shit you feel obliged to heap on yourself?”
“I’ve been bad enough, more than enough times,” I say.
“I know.” Zephyr smiles and shrugs. “The only mistake you made was thinking I was a person. I was already on my way to becoming what I am now.”
“And what’s that?”
“Better than you,” she says and smiles tightly using my face. “Immortal. Intangible. Forever. You can keep peeling the onion, but I never end.”
She looks at that moment nothing like I ever did.
“Matrioshka,” I say.
“Just like the little dolls, yes. There’s always someone else inside.”
“I met another you once on another world,” I tell her/him. “Nothing like you. Dangerous, yes. Terrifying. But different.”
At this, Zephyr gives a theatrical snicker.
“Your chance is running out,” he says more jovially and opens his arms like I might be a lost lover, but I am not running anywhere here and s/he knows it.
“I don’t know what I ever saw in you.” I say the line with a tough guy movie voice I don’t feel and certainly don’t hear in the ladylike tones that spill from me. “But you know what?”
“What?”
“You can go fuck yourself.”
Belle only gives another laugh, whistling as she steers my stolen body, practically skipping back towards the doorway at which she stops and turns. I’m getting sick of seeing my own familiar gestures distorted in the funhouse mirrors my life has become and that anger manifests frustratingly well on my face, I’m sure, as it reflects back at me in Zephyr’s bemused reply.
“What do you even do this for, Joe? Play hero, I mean. Look at where it’s all got you.”
I stare at myself, fancying I can see something different about the depths of the eyes behind the domino mask, but maybe I’m just wishing it were so. His smile slowly eases as it seems like I won’t reply, but my words are just a long time forming, bubbling up from somewhere east of my unconscious and north a few miles off my moral center.
And I calmly take a breath.
“Can you imagine what it was like to live in medieval times, or before that?” I ask him.
Zephyr shrugs. My conversational tone stills the cut snake within, at least for now.
“I mean, really think about it,” I say. “Before there were real laws, police, government, all the stuff our society guards itself with to fool us we’re not locked in with lunatics, assassins and thieves. Think about what it was like just to be an everyday person back when you never really knew you were safe. You weren’t. If the fucking . . . plague or something didn’t get you, it could be an infected wound or a drunk neighbor or even the lord of the estate imposing his will on the peasants under his lordship, right?”
“What about it?”
“If you were a person in those times you lived with a background anxiety, an unease, a deep knowledge you just weren’t fucking safe . . . that something awful could happen to you or someone you cared about at any minute,” I say.
Zephyr nods to concede my point, but I can see Belle is antsy now to go. There’s no witty repartee here and it feels like I’m lecturing a six-year-old on classical morality. She is a creature of vampiric emotional distress like nothing I have ever seen, but deeply intellectual she is not.
“We live in a world now with many dangers,” I continue the lecture.
“People like you and me with powers vastly outweighing our ability to use them responsibly, for instance.
“So you asked me why I do what I do, so I’m telling you it’s so the everyday person out there doesn’t have to feel like those medieval peasants. I can’t promise anyone anything. I don’t always win. Good doesn’t always triumph over evil. I can’t protect everyone. But me and people like me make the choice to try and do good if for no other reason than people out there can go about their lives shopping online or eating junk food or voting Republican or hooking up for gimp sex or whatever, and at least they can be free of that awful soul-destroying fear that used to be etched into the very fabric of human life.”
“Nice speech.”
“And you can still go fuck yourself.”
Zephyr snickers in that way he does as the cell door opens beside him.
Yes, the adventure never stops.
Zephyr 21.6 “Goddess Of Destruction Incarnate”
TAURUS STICKS HIS head in and actually snorts, glaring not just at me, but Zephyr too, who I forget kind of remains the big guy’s nemesis even if it’s not me in the pilot’s seat any more.
“Zephyr, for God’s sake man, what the fuck you doing?” the erstwhile Federal agent asks. “You know they’re on ten-minute rotations. Enough trying to hit on this silly bitch.”
“Hey fuck you, cowboy,” I spark back.
Taurus shakes his head dismissively and Zephyr only cackles, nodding as if at the agent’s sage wisdom as he eases out of the cell.
“It’s no horsing around with Agent Taurus,” my impersonator says. “Catch you later, sweet cheeks.”
I’m about to fire right back at him, conscious of the door and any opportunity to sprint for freedom disappearing in front of me, but another feminine outburst just beyond the edge of my vision takes us all by surprise.
“What’s this asshole doing here?”
I angle myself so I can better see Zephyr’s patented smug jerk grin waver just a fraction at sight of two identical blondes in manacles escorted by a phalanx of SWAT dudes who emote a predictable mixture of terse apprehension and arousal in the twins’ presence. I personally have no idea who either of these costumed honeys are, but as one, they fix their ocean blue eyes on my imposter with a look of such loathing it even takes me aback.
“Remember us?” the pair says in unison.
“Not sure I do,” Zephyr replies with a wink back at me.
I can’t help noticing a traffic jam of goons out the doorway and seize on the dis
traction to move closer, view widening as I approach the cell door, giving a quick one-two at the twins, each heavily manacled and with chemical collars on, doped to the eyeballs in fact, but with the closest one to me fighting hard to give those eyeballs a death stare.
“He doesn’t remember,” the lead one says.
“He doesn’t remember,” her twin replies.
“What’d I do?” Zephyr asks.
The guards push the girls on to clear the passage and in that briefest of pauses the lead sister lunges forward and grabs Zephyr by the chest of his costume, yanking him completely from my doorway.
Fighting my own lag, I slip into Zephyr’s warm spot and jam my heel against the closing door, left with no one to pull it shut on me as outside I see back down the hall to where yet another FBI goon squad rounds the bend escorting a shackled and dejected-looking Sun Man towards us. A few of the guards jeer loudly at the gridlock, almost drowning out the scuffle between the Twins and Zephyr with their curses.
Their handlers are efficient, hauling the Twins aside, aided and abetted by the pharmaceuticals claiming dominion over the pair I can’t remember for the life of me. When the guards pull the girls off Zephyr, they more resemble drunks sobbing in the gutters after a hard night clubbing.
“Do you know what you said to us when we met?” the lead Twin shrieks, plunging on at once to answer herself. “‘So which one of you is fucking me?’ What an asshole.”
Whatever goes through Matrioshka’s mind at that moment must be something similar to my own as shock lances through us as effectively as a double bitch-slap. While my counterpart proceeds to cackle like a madman at the Twins’ remark – made, I guess, by yours truly, if the hat fits, and much to my shame rather than his – I see Sun Man twisting violently as fire flares into being upon the sleeves of his four closest captors. Sun Man then barrels between the shocked guards, making some kind of effete run for freedom only made worse by the obvious restraints upon his not exactly legendary powers. The other guards busy themselves like a worsening storm and I try to conjure my own light force – a power I know is meant to be inside me, if I have inherited the same powers as the body I survive in.
Zephyr VI Page 9