by Ben Langdon
“This is a training exercise,” Alsana said, keeping her eyes on the land cruiser below them. Dan blew into his hands to keep them warm.
“We’ve never had training before.”
Her eyes shifted to him and he shrugged. It wasn’t as if he was ever going to disagree with Alsana for more than a few jousts anyway, so Dan dropped his protests and focused his senses down below where a man in his fifties was talking on his cell phone while negotiating a tight exit from a parallel park.
The man was a married solicitor who had been doing the dirty with Alsana for about six months. Dan was gently appalled by the whole prospect, but also amused to finally find a chink in his handler’s armor. She’d always been so efficiently inhuman. It was nice to find out her life was just as messed up as his.
“Phone line is clear. It’s his wife.”
Dan could hear the conversation inside his head, electrical impulses that were intercepted and decoded. The man was distraught, his voice punctuated with sobs and pauses. Dan found his pleas a little boring, but the gist of the conversation was one of admission and repentance.
“He told her about the affair,” Dan said. “Promised that it didn’t mean anything. I think I saw this episode already.”
“What did he say, exactly?” Alsana turned around and looked away, back towards the stairwell. Her posture was stiff. Dan knew it was dangerous for him to be too frank, even though he was desperate for some payback. Alsana never treated him with anything close to kindness.
She was a horrible person.
But she wasn’t his enemy.
Dan closed his eyes, going for a theatrical stance in case she watched him. He lifted his left hand, fingers splayed, as if he was reading the broadcast. The truth was he received it instantly and translated it just as quickly.
“He’s saying that it wasn’t love,” Dan said.
“His words.”
“Right,” Dan said, awkwardness flooding through him. “I don’t love her, never did. I’d never hurt you.”
Alsana clucked her tongue.
“What else?” she asked.
“The wife is crying, saying she feels cheated.”
“Words, Galkin, words.”
“Right. It’s not that easy, you know? I’m not a voice recorder.”
“That’s exactly what you are,” Alsana said. “A device.”
Dan remembered how much he hated her, but he still couldn’t translate all of the hurtful details.
“I’ll never forgive you. You’re a … well, she’s not happy. But then he kind of grabs for her attention with something about their kids.”
Alsana walked off towards the exit, strong, deliberate steps.
“There’s a lot of swearing,” Dan called after her. She was hurting, but it was her own fault. What did she actually expect, Dan wondered, as if her little affair was going to end differently. He gave a last glance down to the car and followed her.
Back in the office, Dan cranked up the heating with his mind and took a seat opposite Alsana’s cluttered desk. There were always piles of reports on the desk and he wondered how much of the up-cycled program was kept on hard copy. Of course, he’d sneaked a look at the computer files hundreds of times, but she always seemed to have the mountains of files on her desk. His eyes darted to the small fan she had next to a reading light. Dan bit his lip and resisted the urge to turn it on and send the papers spiraling through the room. She didn’t look at him as he crossed his feet in front of him and stifled a yawn. She shuffled some of the papers into her top drawer and put on her reading glasses which made her look older. It also made her a little more approachable and he felt a rising guilt in his stomach, like he maybe did owe her something after all these years.
“Do you want me to blow up his car?” Dan asked.
“What?” she snapped, eyes narrowed for a moment before she ignored his comment and booted up her laptop. “Forget it.”
“I could…”
She stopped him with a sharp, severe intake of breath which rushed up her nostrils, flaring them slightly. It was business. Whatever happened on the rooftop was over. Dan wondered why the guy had parked out the front of the office and how convenient it was, but then realized he probably came to see Alsana. Maybe for the last time.
“Do you have a job for me?” he asked, instead of thinking more about Alsana’s messed-up life.
Her eyes moved back to the laptop for a moment before she turned it around for him to see. A photograph of Miranda Brody smiled out at him. Dan wondered why the girl kept popping up into his world all of a sudden. The screen’s image was from a promotional concert poster. Miranda’s headshot was flanked by six monsters, which looked like prosthetic and makeup until he read the words, and realized the heads belonged to ubers.
“The Human Tour?” he asked. “Isn’t that kind of insulting?”
“To you, perhaps. You’ll be working for Miranda Brody’s management team,” Alsana said, as if she were reading from a particularly dull pamphlet. Her eyes were locked on to him over her dipped reading glasses and Dan knew she was waiting for his usual arguments.
Despite his best efforts Dan was still obliged to work for her, and while it usually entailed surveillance work or decryptions using his powers, Alsana wasn’t too particular about what she got him to do. For four years he was required to sign in every fortnight, attend seminars on responsibility and civic duty, convince the counselors that he wasn’t lapsing into criminal tendencies, and do whatever it was that Alsana Owens deemed necessary for his rehabilitation.
He had been a teenage super-villain for two weeks. And no one was going to let him forget about it.
“So what would I actually do?” Dan asked.
“You tag along,” Alsana said. “There’s been some little problems in the States and something in Indonesia, so we’ve been asked to send you in.”
“Security?”
She sniffed and shook her head.
“If it was a security issue, they’d send in a professional. No, this Brody girl has a thing for freaks. Her management has agreed to let you in as surveillance. Turns out you’ve already met their security detail tonight. They seem to like your look, they’re interested in your powers, but don’t want anything more than a visually appealing footnote, okay? No heroics.”
She laughed and swung her chair around so she could stand up.
“I told them not to worry about that,” Alsana continued. “Danny’s not the heroic type.”
Dan remained silent. He knew it would be a few more minutes before Alsana would allow him to leave, so he purposefully looked at the window. It was dark outside, clouds smothering the stars and moon.
“You’ve got a meet and greet tomorrow night,” she said, moving around behind him as she cut laps in her office. “They’ve requested you dress in black, nothing too flashy, nothing too off the rack.”
Dan set his jaw and bided his time.
“Then you’ll be given details on the concert. Aren’t you the luckiest little uber-crim in the world?”
“Can I go now?” Dan asked. “It’s past my bedtime.”
“You can thank me,” she said instead. “Anytime now. I mean, people would think you’d prefer the alternative than to be this little princess’s play thing.”
Alsana never offered alternatives. They were phantoms, like fringe benefits or the concept of a personal life in her eyes. But Dan also knew she required penance and she liked to talk her way into clever conversation.
“What alternative?”
“Prison, wearing those orange jumpsuits and scrubbing the floors of the shower block. A part of me would love to see you there, Danny, of course I would, but prison isn’t actually a very nice place.”
She smiled and Dan felt like walking out. He knew how the conversation would play out, but he didn’t go anywhere. If he did anything stupid, she would reprimand him, write up an incident report, and he’d have to go back through the counseling course. So, instead, he sat and waited.
“But you know that anyway, don’t you?” she said. He knew what he was supposed to say, to do. He was supposed to get angry, maybe fry some circuits. “Do you even remember daddy’s face?”
“Not so much,” Dan said and stood up, avoiding her cruel face. There were bright flashes at the corner of his eyes, threatening to bring up memories from the plaza five years before. But he wasn’t going to let her play him so easily. He picked up his satchel and slung it over his shoulder as he turned to the door. Alsana made it back to her desk and she leaned on it, studying him. Dan figured a full lap of the office was enough of a lecture. He reached for the handle.
“Disappointing.”
“Get used to it,” he said “So the meet and greet is at six? I’ll be there.”
“You’ll need this,” Alsana said.
He turned back, reluctantly, and looked at a silver wrist band on her desk. The Human Tour was clearly visible and his mind could detect subtle electricity within the silver band. He recognized it as a security tag. State of the art but still just a way to label a person.
“Thanks,” he said, took it in a quick swipe, and headed for the door again.
He could feel Alsana’s eyes on his back as he left but she made no more sound. Outside the office he walked past the security camera which fed directly into Alsana’s office, and then jogged down the front steps, eyes closed as the cold air greeted him.
Stupid.
It was pointless to aggravate Alsana, and Dan knew it.
As he walked down the street he wondered how Miranda’s people found out about him. He remembered the security guy outside the hotel, but it still seemed a stretch for them to put everything together, especially in the one night.
But it was late and Dan just needed to find a place to crash. Even though he hated the idea of it, he found himself on the route to his work. Each step seemed like another reminder at how pathetic he had become.
“Can I crash here tonight?”
Dan had his hoody pulled up against the rain, but the light from inside Birdie’s back room sliced across his face and made him blink. The woman who opened the door didn’t look surprised to see him. Her mouth was loose around a sad looking cigarette, and her painted-on eyebrows were frozen-serious. She rubbed her hands dry on an apron and let the door open wider for Dan before heading back to cleaning the grills and fry-pits, cigarette ash dispersed in her wake. Tabitha lived above the shop and knew the owner, Marco, from some trip to Europe. She’d managed to score a cash-only job cleaning his place when she rocked up in Melbourne a few years before. She wasn’t an especially nice person, but she generally let others ruin their own lives and got on about the business of ruining her own. Since Dan started working at Birdie’s he’d heard about the procession of dead-beat boyfriends and late-night hospital visits. Some stories were back-room myth, some were true. Tonight, though, he just wanted to sleep it all away and work out his problems in the morning. Besides, Dan had all the unpleasant personalities he could handle with Alsana.
Marco had a small office in the back of the shop, and while he only ever visited in the weeks before the end of financial year, or when there was someone to hire or fire; the office was kept spotless. This was because of the electronic key lock on the door rather than through any sense of loyalty from the employees.
Dan dropped his satchel on the floor and leaned against one of the benches Tabitha had already cleaned. He looked around and figured she had another twenty minutes to go, and because he didn’t want her to see him break into the office, he decided to watch her instead.
Her hair was tied up on either side of her face in thick piggy tails, but she wasn’t a young woman and wore it that way for practical purposes rather than vanity. In fact, apart from the eyebrows, Tabitha seemed to be devoid of any kind of self-love. She worked without talking, rubbing at the benches with a cloth after a spray of disinfectant, all the while chewing on the end of her cigarette. Dan would have opted for headphones and music to get him through the shift, but Tabitha didn’t even hum or do the little shuffle-dance he’d seen some of the girls do at closing time. She just worked her way through.
“Have you got another one of those?” he asked as she moved past him to grab the stringy broom which hung behind the back door. She looked at him and took it down, banging it twice on the side of the bench to dislodge any dust.
Dan pointed.
“Another cigarette?” he asked.
She leaned the broom against the bench and pulled out the stub from her mouth, crushing it into the bench top. Her eyes were on him, and Dan felt like pulling the hoody back up and just waiting for her to go. Instead, she walked towards him and pulled out a crumpled packet of smokes.
“These are mine,” she said. “You want to kill yourself; you buy your own, okay?”
“Just asking,” Dan said.
“Just telling. Now get your ass out of the kitchen so I can finish up. And if you come here again after tonight, I’m gonna tell Marco.”
Dan shook his head and smiled at her.
“Figures.”
“You think you have problems?” she asked, stepping back into his space. “You’re a kid, you have no idea what life can throw at you. Sure, you’re whining because your mummy came in and embarrassed you today, showed everyone that you’re a freak.”
Dan felt his fists clench over the bench top. She shouldn’t have known about that, he’d made sure the cameras were wiped and none of the other staff would dare talk to Tabitha. He’d even paid the new kid twenty dollars to keep his mouth shut.
The kitchen lights flickered.
“Suck up your pride, Dan,” Tabitha said. “Apologize to whoever you ticked off and go back to your little suburban life, okay? Blue skin or not, you’ve still got a mum and I bet you still have your prissy friends. Don’t think you’ve got it tough.”
She picked up the broom again and started to shove it hard across the floor, sweeping thick lines along the linoleum. Dan grabbed his bag and slipped out of the kitchen. He pressed his hand against the office keypad, scrambled the signals and pushed into the small room.
It smelled of rice.
But it was dark and secure and Tabitha would be going away up to her apartment and out of his life. And in the morning, Dan had a feeling he’d play it all over again, only this time he wouldn’t have anywhere else to be kicked out of.
Chapter 8
Miranda
The thick hotel curtains held back the day as Miranda woke suddenly, the smell of fuel in the room, a shriek clutched at the very edge of her consciousness. She had been dreaming of Jakarta again.
The boy had died. Her legal team briefed her late the night before, but it still didn’t feel real, or else she wanted it to feel more real, like it actually mattered. Her manager declared the whole situation unfortunate but not anything to worry about – legally. Miranda wanted to know how things got so messed up, how it didn’t seem to really matter if someone died. But having the boy up on her stage, smiling like they shared some secret and then burning himself to death; Miranda wanted it to mean something.
Anything.
She got dressed and sprayed deodorant around the room. The vanilla scent masked her dreams and reminded her of the early days when she and her sister played at being rock stars in cheap hotel rooms, while her mother cleaned. Miranda looked at the large suite around her and felt the absence of her family deeper. Even the music had changed now she was famous. Her fingers ached for her guitar. She missed the feeling of the nylon strings, the sensation of strumming, the connection between her hands and her voice. It was gone now, outsourced to the faceless band. All she had left was her voice, and even that had been transformed.
Made better.
She picked up her tablet and ran her fingers across its surface. She flicked the screens of her schedule, her eyes taking in media appointments, choreography and then the Big Event in the evening where she would be singing and smiling and hopefully making the record companies and distributors very ha
ppy.
She tossed the tablet on the bed and walked to the window, pulling it across as she stepped from one end to the other, letting in the light which looked somehow different to the California sun she knew so well. It was brighter here, or perhaps whiter. She looked down at the street and saw a number of people walking past. There were no large crowds like the night before, no screaming fans or probing journalists. She smiled. Perhaps it would be a better day.
There was a knock on the door and she turned as it opened. The man only barely fit through the door, his head nearly scraping the top. He wore a dark suit which looked brand new, and barely concealed his enormous wrestler’s physique. He bowed his head slightly and stepped in, closing the door behind him.
“Sully,” Miranda said with more relief than she expected. She ran to him and leapt, wrapping her arms around his neck and burying her face in his shirt. He smelled of jasmine.
“How are you, little one?” he asked softly, holding her up like a father would. He gently kissed her head and then she reluctantly slid out of his embrace and shrugged her shoulders.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Better than the boy in Jakarta.”
Sully frowned. And then he touched her arm, no words necessary. She quickly showed him the suite and walked to the balcony. Sully nodded his approval at the view and then stroked his black beard, looking closely at Miranda.
“This riot last night, it has made you a little melancholy,” he said, like he had assessed her as they walked through the suite. “Too much pressure cannot be good for one so young.”
It was his usual speech. She turned away from him and looked down at the street again, the breeze blowing her hair back.
“You were younger than me when you started your career,” she said. “You’ve told me enough times, and I know you don’t really think I’m too young, or too naïve.”