2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  Sincerely,

  Granite

  • • •

  G-

  Sat at 8. Sounds good. Send directions.

  -L.O.

  PS: “I no doubt deserve my enemies, but I don’t believe I deserve my friends.”

  • • •

  On Saturday, Adam brushed his teeth, put on his uniform, and became Granite. He arrived five minutes early, but Lady Obsidian still beat him. He considered saying “hello” and instead said, “Walt Whitman.”

  She grinned. “I’ll give you something harder next time.”

  • • •

  Granite and Lady Obsidian met at the warehouse twice a week for eight weeks, testing out their battle chemistry and planning the scope of their first narrative arc. Granite was itching for the big stuff—the world in peril, nuclear bombs—but he knew they had to start small. They drew up a basic outline: Lady Obsidian would commit six small-scale crimes, all leading up to one master plan that would threaten everyone in Palm Springs.

  Granite didn’t know the details, of course. He would have to figure it out for himself and attempt to stop her, or else they were simply actors indulging in a stage play.

  Their first sparring match was decent, and Granite felt confident they would improve with practice. But even he had no idea how rapidly they would evolve. By the end of the second week, they transcended from a mess of sweaty arms and legs to something else entirely, something unified, cohesive, beautiful.

  Granite’s body was black and blue in places he hadn’t known it was possible to bruise, but it was all worth it. He hadn’t felt this alive in years. He was almost a little sad, when they decided they were ready to begin fighting for real. Looking forward to sparring sessions had gotten him through the mindless days of telemarketing calls and post office runs.

  He couldn’t end it like this. They needed to celebrate their graduation.

  “Do you want to get lunch or something?”

  “Sure,” Lady Obsidian said. “Let me just grab a disguise.”

  Lady Obsidian dressed as a clown. He dressed as a mime, and followed her to the park, where they walked around, playing literary charades and eating hot dogs together.

  It was hard not to think of the wasted years before they had found each other. Adam wished he had the power to change their pasts. He wished she had been the one to kill his parents.

  They stopped at a bench to feed the birds. “This is nice,” Lady Obsidian said softly.

  Adam couldn’t help but agree.

  He honked her nose. She laughed.

  • • •

  The first few crimes were bank robberies. Granite saved the hostages from an onslaught of lava, but she always got away with the cash. He did catch her at a research center once, but this ended up being a part of her plan. She escaped custody three hours later with rare diamonds lifted from the evidence locker.

  It was a good sign.

  The research center also began a change in her M.O., and Granite was grateful for the shift. Bank jobs were boring. Research centers, though—that would lead him to her ultimate goal. Whatever weapon she was building, it clearly had something to do with geology. He wondered if it would create a volcano. Volcanoes were tough. You couldn’t defuse a volcano.

  He chased her around the city, and she tried to kill him twice. Their battles verged on epic, and the press started paying attention. In between the kicks and punches and witty repartee, Granite and Lady Obsidian whispered book titles to one another. To Kill a Mockingbird, he murmured when he broke her left arm. She was in too much pain for a witty comeback, but she managed to nearly melt his face off before escaping in a stolen dive-bomber.

  Adam went to bed that night, the smell of singed hair lulling him to sleep, and dreamt once more of the ballroom. This time, he made it to Lady Obsidian and danced until they were the only ones left in the room. Then she leaned close and spoke in his ear. “How much do you really remember about your parents?”

  He opened his mouth, and she shoved a dagger through it. He heard his teeth crack and crumble apart. She kissed him through a mouthful of blood and whispered, “You saw what I wanted you to see. Mr. Malevolence was a pawn.”

  Adam woke then, fingers in his mouth, trying to catch pieces of broken teeth in his palm. He didn’t move for a long time, not even to withdraw his hand.

  Could it be true? His dreams had never been prophetic, but hadn’t he known, somewhere deep down, that Mr. Malevolence was not his nemesis? He had simply wanted to believe it—maybe this, too, was merely something he had deluded himself into thinking. Of course, it seemed unlikely that Lady Obsidian could have been responsible—she’d have been a child at the time—but who knew when she’d been experimented upon? She could have been vicious from the start.

  Lady Obsidian had never given any indication she even knew who his parents were, but she might merely have been biding her time. Villains liked to do that. They had a good sense of structure.

  She was building to a climax, and with closing chapters came revelations.

  Adam couldn’t wait to hear them. He was ready for their first last dance.

  • • •

  “It’s too late,” Lady Obsidian said. “I’ve rigged up hundreds of these devices. As soon as I push this button, a river of lava will erupt from beneath the city and drown every man, woman, and child.”

  Granite was a little disappointed. He had hoped for an actual volcano.

  Lady Obsidian’s secret headquarters turned out to be their training warehouse in the desert, a sentimental choice that Granite wanted to chide her for—but just couldn’t. He took a step toward her, eyeing the long, black fingernail hovering over the red button. “You don’t have to do this. Those people didn’t hurt you. They’re innocent.”

  There were no cameras around, but some things had to be said, even if no one was watching. There were supposed to be rules—life meant nothing without them.

  Lady Obsidian laughed. “No one’s innocent,” she said. “You should know that better than most.”

  She lowered her finger. Granite lunged for the remote.

  Lady Obsidian became obsidian just as their bodies collided. The controller flew out of her hand, bouncing and skittering to a stop, but she barely took a step backwards, while the force of the impact had him on hands and knees. She kicked him under the chin, soccer-style, and he landed hard on his back, only barely managing to roll away before she brought her stone fists down on his skull.

  He leapt up and charged, his fists a gray blur, but she easily absorbed each blow as if he was hitting her in the face with a feather pillow. His knuckles seemed to shatter and pop underneath the skin and blood dripped down his fingers to pool on the floor, but still he kept hitting because he had to, because good always triumphed in the end.

  Lady Obsidian’s left hook caught him on the temple, and he stumbled backwards, falling to the ground and bouncing his head against a wooden crate. By the time he got to his feet, Lady Obsidian was almost at the controller. He lunged for her again, this time catching her by the left arm and gripping so hard that anyone else’s bone would have exploded into white confetti. She barely seemed to react, still turned away, reaching for the remote with her other hand. Her fingers skirted just over the button that would spell the demise of Palm Springs.

  Granite twisted Lady Obsidian’s arm back as hard as he could.

  And the sound… it was not the crunching of bone, but a snapping, impossibly loud, a tree breaking in half. Lady Obsidian stopped pulling away to turn back and look.

  The stone arm had torn clear from her shoulder. It was still in Granite’s hand.

  Lady Obsidian’s lips parted, but the rest of her face stayed still. She didn’t seem to recognize the arm as a thing that belonged to her. Granite watched the black stone drain from her skin, leaving her face bone white. Blood spurted twice from the hole where her arm had been and then flooded down her side. “But,” Lady Obsidian said, and then slowly slumped to the floor.


  Granite stared at the arm in his hand, now milk flesh with long, delicate fingers. He gently set it aside and lay down on the floor beside Lady Obsidian. Her mouth was still slightly open. She rolled her eyes to look at him, sluggishly blinking once, twice. Then she was still.

  He stared at her for a long time, only inches from her face. Her blood pooled across the floor, seeped through his costume, cooled against his skin. He didn’t shy away from it. Eventually, he lifted his fingers and gently cupped her face.

  “‘My mother was dead,” Granite said, “‘but we still had duties which we ought to perform. We must continue our course.’ Frankenstein. You know the rest.”

  He kissed her on the forehead. It was unpleasantly cold.

  • • •

  Granite buried her body in the desert, a few miles away from the warehouse. Killing a supervillain wasn’t exactly a crime, but ripping a woman’s arm off never looked good, no matter what she had been planning to do to the city. Better no one ever know about her death or their arrangement.

  Granite went home, took off his uniform, and became Adam Acker again. He washed the blood off his skin and brushed his teeth and flossed. There was an episode of Jeopardy waiting for him, but he wasn’t up to watching it yet. Instead, he went to his computer, deleted Lady Obsidian’s emails, and stared at her red business card.

  “We weren’t wrong,” he told it. “Not entirely, anyway. We were just wrong for each other. That has to be it.”

  Granite and Lady Obsidian, they had been too similar. Both young, both booklovers… they would have made better allies than enemies. His real nemesis would be his polar opposite, the dark to his light, the yin to his yang.

  Adam didn’t know what the opposite of granite was, but it was out there somewhere, waiting for him.

  He went into his bedroom, pulled out the little, black box, and slid Lady Obsidian’s business card inside. Mr. Malevolence’s broken glasses took up a lot of space. Adam hoped finding his true nemesis wouldn’t take too long.

  Otherwise, he’d need a bigger box.

  Marcus Sakey became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of Brilliance (2013), from Thomas & Mercer.

  Visit his website at marcussakey.com.

  * * *

  Novel: Brilliance (excerpt) ••••

  BRILLIANCE

  (excerpt)

  by Marcus Sakey

  First published as Brilliance (2013), by Thomas & Mercer

  • • • •

  Chapter One

  THE RADIO HOST had said there was a war coming, said it like he was looking forward to it, and Cooper, coatless and chilly in the desert evening, was thinking that the radio man was an asshole.

  He’d chased Vasquez for nine days now. Someone had warned the programmer just before Cooper got to the Boston walk-up, a brick rectangle where the only light had been a window onto an airshaft and the glowing red eyes of power indicators on computers and routers and surge protectors. The desk chair had been against the far wall as if someone had leaped out of it, and steam still rose from an abandoned bowl of ramen.

  Vasquez had run, and Cooper had followed.

  He’d gotten a hit on a forged credit card in Cleveland. Two days later a security camera tagged Vasquez renting a car in Knoxville. Nothing for a while, then he’d picked up the trail briefly in Missouri, then nothing again, then a near-miss this morning in a tiny Arkansas town called Hope.

  The last twelve hours had been tense, everyone seeing the Mexican border looming large, and beyond it, the wide world into which someone like Vasquez could vanish. But with each move the abnorm made, Cooper got better at predicting the next. Like peeling away layers of tissue paper to reveal the object beneath, a vague form began to resolve into the pattern that defined his target.

  Alex Vasquez, twenty-three, five eight, a face you wouldn’t notice and a mind that could see the logic of computer programs unfolding in three dimensions, who didn’t so much write code as transcribe it. Who had waltzed through MIT’s graduate program at age fifteen. Vasquez had a talent of wondrous power, the kind they used to say happened only once a generation.

  They didn’t say that anymore.

  The bar was in the first floor of a small hotel on the outskirts of San Antonio. Cooper made himself a bet as he walked in. Neon signs for Shiner Bock, smoke-stained drop ceiling, jukebox in the corner, pool table with worn felt, chalkboard with specials. Female bartender, a blonde showing dark roots.

  The specials turned out to be on a dry-erase board, and the bartendress was a redhead. Cooper smiled. About half the tables were occupied, mostly men but a few women too. The tabletops held plastic pitchers and cigarette packs and cell phones. The music was too loud, some country-rock act he didn’t know:

  Normal was good enough for my grand-daddee,

  Normal’s all I want to be,

  Normal men built the USA,

  Normal men taught me how to play.

  Cooper pulled out a high-backed stool, sat down, tapped out the beat on the bar with his fingertips. He’d heard once that the essence of country music was three chords and the truth. Well, the three chords part still stands.

  “What can I get you, hon?” The roots of her red hair were dark.

  “Just coffee.” He glanced sideways. “And get her another Bud, would you? She’s about done with that one.”

  The woman on the stool beside him was peeling the label off her longneck. The knuckles of her right hand brightened for a moment, and her T-shirt tightened at the shoulders. “Thanks, but no.”

  “Don’t worry.” Cooper flashed a wide smile. “I’m not hitting on you. Just had a good day, thought I’d share the mood.”

  She hesitated, then nodded, the motion catching light on a slender gold necklace. “Thanks.”

  “No trouble.”

  They went back to looking straight ahead. A row of bottles lined the back of the bar, and behind them faded snapshots had been tacked up in a collage. A lot of smiling strangers hanging on each other, holding up beer bottles, all of them seeming to be having a great time. He wondered how old the photos were, how many of the people in them still drank here, how their lives had changed, which had died. Photographs were a funny thing. They were out of date the moment they were taken, and a single photograph rarely revealed much of anything. But put a series together and patterns emerged. Some were obvious: haircuts, weight gained or lost, fashion trends. Others required a particular kind of eyes to see. “You staying here?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Your accent. You don’t sound local.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “Nope,” Cooper said. “Just passing through. Be gone tonight, everything goes well.”

  The redhead returned with his coffee, then pulled a beer from a cooler, the bottle dripping ice water. She spun an opener from her back pocket with easy grace. “Four dollars.”

  Cooper set a ten on the bar, watched the woman make change. She was a pro, returned six singles rather than a five and a one, made it easy for him to tip extra. Someone at the other end of the bar yelled, “Sheila, sweetheart, I’m dying here,” and the bartendress headed away with a practiced smile.

  Cooper took a sip of coffee. It was burned and watery. “You hear there was another bombing? Philadelphia this time. I was listening to the radio on the way in. Talk radio, some redneck. He said a war was coming. Told us to open our eyes.”

  “Who’s us?” The woman spoke to her hands.

  “Around here, I’m pretty sure ‘us’ means Texans, and ‘them’ means the other seven billion on the planet.”

  “Sure. Because there aren’t any brilliants in Texas.”

  Cooper shrugged, took another sip of his coffee. “Fewer than some other places. The same percentage are born here, but they tend to move to more liberal areas with larger population density. Greater tolerance, and more chance to be with their own kind. There are gifted in Texas, but you’ll find more per capita in Los Angeles or New
York.” He paused. “Or Boston.”

  Alex Vasquez’s fingers went white around her bottle of Bud. She’d been slouching before, the lousy posture of a programmer who spent whole days plugged in, but now she straightened. For a long moment she stared straight ahead. “You’re not a cop.”

  “I’m with the DAR. Equitable Services.”

  “A gas man?” Her pupils dilated, and the fine hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

  “We turn out the lights.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “We almost had you in Arkansas this morning. That’s ten hours and change from the border, too far to make in daylight. You’re smart enough to plan to cross during the day, when it’s crowded and the guards are sloppier. And since you’re more comfortable in cities, and San Antonio is the last big one before the border…” He shrugged.

  “I could have just hidden somewhere, laid low.”

  “You should have. But I knew you wouldn’t.” He smiled. “Your patterns give you away. You’re running from us, but you’re also running toward something.”

  Vasquez tried to keep a straight face, but the truth was revealed in half a hundred tiny tells that glowed like neon signs to his eyes. You could give this up and play poker, Natalie had once told him, if anyone played poker anymore. “I thought so. Not working alone, are you?”

  Vasquez shook her head, a tight, controlled gesture. “You’re awfully pleased with yourself.”

  Cooper shrugged. “Pleased would have been catching you in Boston. But keeping you from releasing your virus counts as a win. How close were you?”

  “A couple of days.” She sighed, lifted the beer bottle, and tilted it to her lips. “Maybe a week.”

  “You know how many innocent people that could have killed?”

  “It only targeted guidance systems on military aircraft. No civilian casualties. Just soldiers.” Vasquez turned to look at him. “There’s a war, remember?”