by Ben Langdon
Less than a year later and even Dan was beginning to sense that having a teenager in the apartment was cramping their style. Brian was now on what he referred to as a fast track to management in human resources, and Noah had conjured up a premature mid-life crisis at twenty-four and discovered that he was an actor, even though his qualifications were in accounting. In fact it was Noah’s inability to match Brian’s income that allowed Dan to stay on for as long as he had, and even though he hated to admit it, Dan was only too aware of the situation.
The apartment itself was what real estate agents called a generous two bedroom townhouse. It was close to the train station, but not too close. It was within walking distance of the essentials but with three men living in a two bedroom place, Dan was relegated to the study nook – a minor setback he didn’t mind being burdened with given the alternative was going back into foster care or, worse, back to live with his mother. The nook was wide enough to accommodate his fold-out sofa bed and there was a ledge with enough room for his belongings.
Originally, Dan had only expected to stay for his final exams. Foster care hadn’t worked out, and the nook provided him with a place to feel safe, to cram for the tests and to ground himself in a seriously unwieldy time.
As he lay on the shared sofa looking towards the television he realized that, although he was comfortable enough, the screen was blank. He closed his eyes and rubbed at his forehead trying to decide where the others had misplaced the remote control.
Normally he’d just command the television to turn on, sending out an invisible pulse from his mind which would force a connection and bring up the images. He could sense it laying dormant in the corner of the room almost like it was asleep, gently snoring. But there were house rules in the apartment, rules which had been hastily discussed and implemented between Brian and Noah a number of weeks before. There had been an incident, or perhaps a series of incidents, involving the fusing of wires and a small house fire. It wasn’t particularly Dan’s fault. It was an old building and the landlord was more interested in harvesting rent money than in maintaining the integrity of the place. And that meant that the landlord hadn’t kept the wiring in good working order. And that, in turn, meant that when Dan absently played with the electrical networks he unintentionally overloaded the antiquated system. And that, of course, led to the small fire in the wall.
To Dan it was ancient history, but he knew Noah was still upset about it. So, as Dan lay watching the blank television screen, he resisted the temptation to simply activate the set with his mind. Instead, he turned his attention to the remote and he tracked the batteries and signal to the ledge above the gas heater. The remote was an equal distance away from him as the television.
It was as if Noah had done it deliberately.
“You’re home early,” Brian said from the doorway leading to the kitchen.
Dan arched his neck to look around and acknowledge his flatmate. He immediately severed the link he’d established with the remote control and sat up looking at Brian as if he’d just been caught out. Brian looked equally as uncomfortable as Dan.
“What’s up?” Dan asked.
“We’ve got to talk,” Brian said, as if from a script. Dan could imagine the two of them arguing over who would talk to the ‘kid’. Brian must have scored the short straw, or else Noah had thrown one of his theatrical fits. Either way it was clear that Brian found himself in a difficult and unwanted conversation with Dan.
“What’s the matter?”
“We can’t really have you here anymore,” Brian said. “The place isn’t big enough.”
Dan hadn’t expected an eviction, or at least, not that night. He’d been working hard since the morning and all he wanted to do was curl up and switch off his brain, to close his eyes and sleep. Brian, on the other hand, wasn’t about to let him rest. He stood in the doorway, not coming closer. Dan wanted to run.
“So, you don’t really fit in here anymore, Dan. School’s finished,” Brian said. His hands were stuffed in his pockets and he affected a disinterested stance, eyes watching the space just above and to the left of Dan’s head. Dan wondered if he spoke like this with his clients.
“I don’t take up much space,” Dan said, discreetly pulling his legs off the chair and trying to look innocuous.
“Yeah, but it’s space, you know. It’s not about how much you take up as it’s that you do take it up. The space, I mean.”
“Right.”
“And Noah’s girl’s getting serious, sending out the signals, you know? And let’s be honest…” Brian finally met Dan’s gaze, as if the word ‘honest’ required a certain degree of connectedness. It was only a brief moment and then Brian rolled his eyes and looked to the ceiling.
“Yeah.”
“Ever since you and Stacey and the party…”
Brian waved the details away with his hand, eye contact well and truly gone. It was as if he was waving away the details they both thought they knew while neither one really had any idea at all. There was some confusion over whether Noah and Stacey were still seeing each other, some escalating flirtation and then a morning that followed which featured an explosive Noah and an awkwardness that just never seemed to dissipate.
“Noah’s been weird about it,” Dan suggested.
“We’re all a little weird about it, Dan,” Brian said.
“No, Noah’s gone and … and gone weird about it. But he’s weird about a lot of things lately, as if you haven’t noticed. Like the newspaper, the crappy newspaper every morning, folded just right. And how he has to be the first to use the coffee plunger, as if we’ve all got leprosy or something, and don’t start on about the bloody cups.”
Dan stood up and a pulse of angry energy rippled through the lounge room, making the lights shimmer slightly and setting the clocks on the DVD player back to a flashing default. He pulled back on the wave, hoping Brian hadn’t noticed, but Brian hadn’t really paid attention to anything apart from the ceiling features.
“It’s our name on the lease,” he said.
And that was when Dan realized the truth. In classic shared accommodation style there were the official occupants and then there were the sub-letting, sub-human occupants who slept on a pull-out bed in the study nook.
“Are you going to give me notice?” Dan asked.
Brian waved his hand again and Dan wanted to yell at him to stop playing the hand waving act. Instead he stood there and watched Brian walk back into the kitchen.
“This is notice, Galkin,” Brian said.
Dan felt his fists clench and he raised them up so he could see the whites of his knuckles. Just below the surface he knew that he was capable of letting loose, that if he wanted to, he could turn the apartment into a swirling maelstrom of lightning and destruction.
He could hear his grandfather’s voice. The coaxing, reassuring commands.
He shot a glance at the kitchen and heard Brian preparing something. He looked back at his fists and unclenched them, freeing his fingers and watching them separate slowly.
Dan didn’t follow his grandfather anymore.
He wasn’t a brainless kid.
The room was suddenly too hot and too crowded, even though Dan was the only one left. Brian’s continued presence was felt, but the noises coming from the kitchen provided nothing but a dismissive reminder that he wasn’t wanted anymore.
His sofa was still in its place, wedged into the nook which looked smaller than it ever had before. There was no way he would sleep in it again, no way he could pull it out and crawl inside the covers. It had always been an inconvenience, jutting out into the lounge area, but now the whole idea of it was suddenly and irreversibly gone. Like dust.
Chapter 6
The Small Gods
The Grampians, Five years before
Dust.
It was everywhere, covering every surface in the dimly lit basement. The old man was standing in the middle of the room with his eyes looking up at the ceiling, his wild grey hair standing
up in tufts like he’d only just woken up. And that newly awake look was in his eyes too, with flashes of light reflected from the torches they’d brought down with them.
“He looks crazy,” Bree said softly, shifting the weight of her backpack from one slender shoulder to the next. Dan shrugged. He’d seen crazy before.
His grandfather had brought the four of them on a hiking trip to the Grampians, far to the west of the state. Dan was used to being alone with his grandfather, but he wasn’t accustomed to the presence of other kids, especially the ones his grandfather had assembled.
Bree was three years older than him, and at fifteen she seemed to have left childhood behind and looked at the world with knowing eyes. Dan thought maybe he was a little in love with her. The other two were older still. Halo was the eldest at sixteen and brimming with anger; while the quiet, wide-eyed Lily was somewhere in between. They’d never met before, although Dan knew that Lily was family in a way, being sort of cousins despite her being Chinese and him being Russian.
“Is this a bomb shelter?” Halo asked, arms crossed as he stood at the top of the stairs leading down into the basement. Lily, Bree and Dan had wandered down with the old man but Halo hadn’t left the filtered sunlight coming in the windows from upstairs. Dan looked up and noticed the way the light formed around his head, casting his features into darkness but brightening the edges.
“Of a sort, yes,” the old man said. “A shelter for bombs.”
He coughed a little and waved away motes of dust. After a few more waves of his hands, the lights in the basement suddenly burst into life, flickering a little before burning at full intensity. Dan felt the wave of energy coming from his grandfather and it washed over him like a warm breeze, tingling his skin.
“And then there was light,” Bree muttered as she dropped her bag to the floor. “Are you coming down or are you just going to hover up there?”
Halo leaned against the door, keeping it open, but said nothing. He hadn’t spoken at all on the trip from Melbourne.
“This isn’t my idea of a holiday either, you know?” Bree continued, although she didn’t look up at him, instead concentrating on the benches and cabinets set up in neat rows like a museum. “My guardians didn’t give me a choice.”
“None had choice,” the man said. “This is no holiday. Each of you is here for training.”
Dan sat on a high stool at a bench and leaned his head on folded arms. He watched Lily reach out to touch a glass cylinder containing a skeleton of some small, slender creature. All around them were remnants of strange collections. Lily’s fingers stopped before they touched the surface but Dan could see the glass frost suddenly, blossoming outward from where the girl’s fingers hesitated. Their eyes met and she quickly dropped her hands, thrusting them into her jeans, and turned away to look listlessly at more dust.
“What kind of training?” Halo asked, stepping down two of the steps. Dan lifted his head and watched the Pakistani kid come closer. His head was shaven and he wore a tank top which accentuated the hardness of his toned body. Dan felt like a minnow next to Halo.
“For our powers obviously,” Bree jumped in, suddenly surrounded by a mistral whirlwind of dust. She weaved her hand, index finger extended, around her body and the dust trailed after it. In the light of the basement it looked spectacular. With her captivated audience following the dust trail, Bree wiggled her finger a final time and the dust concentrated in on itself until it formed a dark solid ball, the size of a marble. She opened her palm under the dust ball and it dropped innocently into her hand.
The man clapped his hands three times, clearly proud of the moment.
“You are gods,” he said with a wide open smile. He pressed the hair back down on his head and nodded to himself. “You are the small gods, walking amongst us.”
“We’re not gods,” Halo said. “We’re monsters.”
The man took in a breath at the words, as if he recalled them from an earlier time. He looked up at Halo and his face was reflective of the boy’s pain. Dan turned away, resting his cheek on his arms which lay on the bench. He could see a console to his left, small red lights lit up in a row. There was a hum from within the machine and he absently played with the circuitry, channeling energy one way and then the next, testing its limits and formulating new paths, new possibilities. The console was a monitoring device and Dan felt the remote cameras and sensors which lay out beyond the cabin, all focused on maintaining the secrecy of this hidden place.
“You are gods,” the man repeated louder, having walked up to meet Halo on the stairs. He took the boy’s hand, unclenched the fist and held it within his own. “You see this?” he asked, gently shaking the combined hands. “This is promise to you, Sohail Pirzada.”
Dan took a second look at them. His grandfather was below the boy, almost in a supplicating pose. A part of him wanted to be where Halo stood, to be the center of his grandfather’s attention.
“A promise,” the man repeated. “You will be god.”
Later that night, after they pitched their tents in the open quadrangle between the cabin and what was supposed to be a boat or trailer shed, the four campers sat around a campfire. Dan’s grandfather was in the basement, supposedly re-establishing its glory days, whatever that meant.
Halo brightened up during the day, filled with the confidence that one day he would be able to crush all those who had ever opposed him. He flashed his charismatic smile at the girls and told them about his family, about their escape from persecution, their arrival in Australia followed by their meteoric rise to fortune. He was a self-described golden child and they all believed him.
Especially Bree.
“But what about your gifts?” Bree asked him. “What can you do?”
He leaned in close to her, tucking a strand of black hair behind her ear. She kept his gaze but made no other effort to play his game. Dan felt his heart sink.
“I’m golden,” he said. “And I can read your mind.”
She looked away then, smiling a little self-consciously.
“You’re a liar,” she said.
“I can talk to machines,” Dan said, desperate to change the topic, desperate to fill the awkward gap that opened up between him and Bree. “Sometimes.”
“Sometimes?” Halo mocked.
Dan nodded.
“And what do machines have to say?” Halo asked.
“Leave him,” Bree said. She leaned back on her arms and cocked her head up towards the stars. “That’s a great gift,” she said. Dan closed his eyes and smiled, letting the words hang in the air.
“Yeah, well, let’s see how great it is tomorrow in training,” Halo said.
“Yeah,” Dan said, hopeful.
Chapter 7
Dan
Melbourne, Present Day
“This has to be illegal, doesn’t it?” Dan asked as he leaned against the railing and looked down to the street. There was a breeze behind him and it was picking up, blowing his hair forward across his face. “I mean, are you actually serious about me spying on your boyfriend?”
Alsana Owens stood next to him on top of the seven storey car park, but she didn’t hold on to the railing. Instead, her hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of her black duffel coat. Her hair was held down by a beret and her face was severe with piercing green, deadly eyes.
It was close to midnight. All of the normal people of the city were either partying or sleeping. The satchel at his feet contained a bunch of clothes and stuff he’d grabbed from the apartment. It felt pathetic against his leg. He looked at Alsana, at her gaunt profile in the moonlight, and then back across the street. Neither of them was normal, he figured. Probably hadn’t been normal for a very long time.
Alsana was his handler, a government appointed official with a tenuous link to the Uberhuman Affairs Office. After being arrested as a twelve year old supervillain and bundled through the courts and juvenile justice system, Dan had been nominated to be up-cycled. It was a program for underage ubers w
ho managed to get on the wrong side of the law, usually for petty crimes. But in Dan’s case, things were a little more complicated. Dan had been involved in a massacre. People had died. And then there was the issue of his family.
His grandfather was the Mad Russian, an international psychopath with enough atrocities in his name to rank him up with the worst of the 20th Century supervillains, like Doctor Death or the Armageddon Krew. He was able to bring the forces of law and order to their knees in his time. But his time was, of course, firmly in the Cold War-era, well before Dan was even born. Since disappearing five years ago without a trace, the Mad Russian was generally written off as killed or otherwise indisposed. But now Dan heard his grandfather was back in town, not dead at all. He wondered what Alsana would make of that. Not that he’d ever volunteer that information. He wasn’t stupid.
And after being apprehended, tried in a juvenile court and finally up-cycled, Dan was working for the greater good on a regular basis. Redemption had no payment, but Alsana often laughed that it was good for his soul.
He wasn’t the only one, of course. The beauty of the up-cycled program was that a handful of uberhuman juvenile delinquents moved through the courts every year and those who were convicted were slapped with the program. In some cases, especially up north in Sydney, ubers with useful and impressive powers were trained to work in government-funded teams of law enforcers. It was a case of giving back to the community. In Melbourne, things were more low-key. Alsana had only three or four ubers on her books at any one time, and deployed them as she saw fit. The program was deliberately vague when it came to the duration of service. Dan had been a part of it since he was thirteen. There were others who had been in longer. In the end it seemed to depend on how useful an uber was. If they were more of a pest than an asset then they were generally let go after a few months. And so, Dan tried his best to irritate without getting into worse trouble.