Translation: canceling the patient’s powers may be necessary. But how would that actually work? How did Marian make a tank that de-supers the person inside?
I poke at the tank some more. And oh, look, there’s the trick: the machine drains off energies of the Light and stores them in a weird metal canister. It leaves the patient totally human. Once the healing is finished, the energy gets shoved back inside the person it belongs to. You basically have another superhero origin, with the Light invading your soul and giving you powers.
The thought of that makes me shiver. While I was unconscious in the tank, did I have to go through the ordeal with my mother again? Or did I manage to avoid reliving those terrible few minutes? Since the Light had already tested me and found me suitable as a host, maybe it went back inside without a fuss—as if we’d both been metamorphosed to fit together.
Except.
My sudden new aversion to alcohol. It’s like the way vampires avoid garlic, or werewolves run from wolfsbane. Could that be because of the medi-tank?
Lots of Sparks have strange quirks and vulnerabilities. When my powers left and came back, maybe something changed in the process. My stats got slightly rewritten to include a new disadvantage: a prohibition against booze.
Crap. Is anything else different?
I think hard about everything I’ve been through since I got out of the medi-tank. When nothing comes to mind, I consult WikiJools.
Hello, Wiki? It’s me, Jools.
Shit. No answer. At least, nothing obvious. But just for the sake of experiment, I try listing the atomic weights of every element, starting at Lawrencium and going backward.
Easy peasy. Automatic.
No sense of downloading data. I just know.
Fuuuuuckk. Now I can’t tell where my own brain ends and WikiJools starts. The connection seems completely transparent.
How could that happen? Or why?
An idea pops into my head: maybe from me, maybe from elsewhere.
What if resurrection has a price?
We Sparks are creatures of myth: larger-than-life people subject to Fate and other intrusive tropes. We can come back from the dead; we can beat unbeatable odds. But in stories, you can only do the impossible by paying a price. You have to give up some piece of your life … and you’ll never get it back.
Is that it? The cost of my survival is becoming incestuously linked with WikiJools? And never drinking again?
Harsh.
Oh, shit, what about fucking? I hope I still like it. I can live with giving up booze, but giving up sex would break me.
Or maybe I’ve got everything wrong. Something else is affecting me, and I just haven’t figured it out yet. Like maybe the medi-tank does such a wonderful mental cleanse that I just feel more tightly linked to WikiJools. And the tank might also implant an urge to live healthily until you’ve fully recovered. For a few days, I’ll want to get eight hours of sleep, eat whole grains, abstain from intoxicants, yada yada yada. But once I’m 100 percent, the urge for clean living will wear off and my linkage with WikiJools will go back to having some friction.
That makes sense. And I like it a whole lot better than the alternative. I start examining the tank again, to see if it has features that do that …
Someone clears their throat behind me. I don’t know how long I’ve been lost in thought, prodding the medi-tank’s tech. I’m learning so much, I don’t want distractions, but something grabs my elbow and a voice says, “Really, you ought to stop.”
* * *
THE GRIP ON MY elbow comes from a big black shaggy Newfoundland dog. It’s really quite gigantic. Not unnaturally so—it’s not, like, eight feet tall. But Newfoundlands are humongous beasts, nearly the size of Saint Bernards.
This one has my arm in its mouth. It pulls me inexorably away from the tank. It’s not biting hard at the moment, but I get the impression it could chomp through my bones if I caused any trouble.
Wait a minute. I’ve seen a dog like this just recently. In the Transylvania Club—I brushed past a Newfoundland that I thought was a ghost. It was probably this very dog, wearing one of Marian’s doohickeys: the Cape Tech gadgets that let Robin Hood’s gang look like ghosts.
“Her name is Nana,” somebody tells me. It’s a scrawny kid in blue jeans and a ratty black hoodie. He’s fourteenish. Korean face but Midwestern American accent.
He’s trying not to stare at my codpiece. Or my boobs. Or my ass. Basically, he’s got the whole approach-avoidance thing going on: he’s shy and I scare him, but he’s also fourteen and chemically heterosexual. He has no idea where to aim his eyes. Eventually, he decides to look at the medi-tank, since it’s not going to judge.
“You shouldn’t play with Marian’s equipment,” he tells me. “You might hurt yourself, or break something.”
“It’s okay, I’m a science major,” I say. “I’m Jools. Who are you?”
“Friar Tuck.”
Well, that’s a surprise. My mental image of Friar Tuck is like the pictures by Howard Pyle … and I know frigging well that half a second ago, I had no idea who Howard Pyle was, let alone what his drawings were like, but never mind. Our modern Robin and Marian have done an excellent job making everyone believe that Friar Tuck is a roly-poly middle-aged man with a tonsured haircut. Either the photos I’ve seen are fakes, or else this kid is like Robin: completely different as a Spark than as a civilian.
I tell him, “You don’t look much like a friar.”
“I didn’t pick the name.” He does a turn-away/zoom-back thing with his eyes. This whole shy-boy routine will be endearing for another ten seconds, and then I’ll want to smack him.
“Robin just decided I had to be Friar Tuck,” the kid tells me. “He wanted us all to have names from the stories. But when Wrecking Ball signed on, she refused to be called Little John. I thought about doing the same, but by then I’d already been seen a few times looking … you know.” He mimes a paunchy belly, then pats his head on the spot where Friar Tuck is traditionally bald. “Marian decided I needed a disguise, cuz people would freak if they found out how young I was.”
Marian’s right. Friar Tuck has appeared alongside Robin for over four years. So this kid must have been ten years old when he first started going on Robin’s heists. Can you say, “Reckless endangerment and corruption of a minor?”
I can’t help asking, “How do you change your appearance? Did Marian invent a gadget that makes you look older?”
“No,” Tuck says, “I found a rat named Harold. He’s good at illusions.”
My brain has nothing about a rat named Harold. But nobody knows how many superpowered animals Friar Tuck can call on. In fact, people argue if his pets are even real. Does Tuck have a way of breeding animals with Spark powers? Does he sense where super-animals hang out, and then he tracks them down to befriend them? Or are Tuck’s pets mere projections from his own mind? His teleporting horse, for example: is it a real horse that lives in a Sherwood Forest barn? Or is it just a manifestation of something in Tuck himself?
I could easily believe this boy has a ton of superpowers that he externalizes as imaginary animals. It’s the kind of thing a kid might do if he got powers when he was really young. Like, say, if a bully went after him, Tuck might imagine a bear with super-strength showing up to save him. Tuck may be older now, but the way his powers work got cast in stone long ago.
On the other hand, Tuck’s power may be that he’s a magnet for super-animals. Somehow they find him. I was like that myself when I was little—always finding snakes and bugs that my sisters didn’t notice. Jools, the born biologist.
Do I really need to know how Tuck’s abilities work? They’re basically magic, like all other superpowers. The veneer of a scientific explanation is just for plausible deniability.
“So tell me, your holiness,” I say, “what brings you to the lab? Looking for Marian?”
“No, looking for you.” He drops his gaze apologetically. “Polly said I should watch you, cuz you’re going to
cause trouble.”
“Who’s Polly?” I ask.
He gestures at a lab desk outside the curtained area that surrounds the medi-tank. A bright red parrot perches on a robot arm that’s propped up on the desk.
Where the hell did the parrot come from? Shouldn’t I be, like, the most observant person in the world? How could I not notice a flashy-colored bird only a few steps away?
Polly glares at me. Bird faces don’t have the proper muscles for emotional expressions, but Polly does a damned good job of hostility.
I glare back. “Polly’s wrong. I won’t cause trouble at all.”
“Polly’s never wrong,” Tuck says. “She knows things.”
“So do I,” I snap back. But I have to ask, “What kind of things does Polly know?”
“Future things. What’s going to happen.”
“Oh,” I say. “One of those.”
Prognostication is a rare superpower, but some Sparks definitely have it. Usually, it’s just short-term prediction of events that are pretty much certain: stuff like Person X is about to come through the door. It may be a handy heads-up, but it’s not much of a stretch—you may not be able to see it, but Person X is just outside the door and heading in your direction.
Long-term predictions are rarer and not cast in stone. What will happen in a month is subject to unpredictable randomness. Strong influences may push toward a particular outcome, but there’s just too much chance for other factors to get in the way.
As for me causing trouble, I don’t know if that counts as short term or long term. I don’t intend to shit the bed in the near future, but when did my intentions ever matter? I have a knack for doing dumb things without even knowing.
Maybe I’ve already screwed the pooch, what with turning Robin into Vernon. I’ll also bet that my roommates are raising hell trying to find me. For all I know, Aria might come blasting into Sherwood Forest three seconds from now.
One. Two. Three. Nope.
But picturing Aria makes me think of something important. “Your holiness,” I say to Tuck, “can you help me with something? I got brought here and put in the medi-tank. You know about that?”
“Sure,” Tuck says. “It was Lightning who brought you. My teleporting horse.”
“Right. Your teleporting horse. And before I got put in the tank, Ninja Jane took all my stuff. I don’t care about most of it, but I had a ring, a ring that belonged to my mother before she died.”
Telling this lie makes me wince, considering that memories of my mom are pretty damned raw right now. But I want my comm ring back. I’m ready to fib if I have to. I say, “Do you know where Jane hid my ring? Maybe Polly knows. Polly knows things, right?”
I can see that Tuck is torn. Thanks to the parrot’s warning, he’s afraid I’ll mess up his world. But he’s also afraid of me, in that awkward intimidated-by-girls manner you see in a lot of boys his age.
Tuck must have led a sheltered life. He’s stuck in Sherwood Forest, where the only females are middle-aged ones like Marian and Wrecking Ball, or crazies like Ninja Jane. He might also catch glimpses of the women Robin Hood brings home as fuck buddies, but they’re probably too busy in bed to spend time socializing with a fourteen-year-old. I may be the first girl anywhere near his age Tuck has talked to.
I shouldn’t take advantage of his shyness. But too bad; I want my comm ring. So I let the kid sweat till he cracks. “Nana could find the ring,” he mumbles. “She’s got a good nose. And tracking is her specialty; she led me to you.”
He pats the huge dog at his side. She gives him a slobbery lick. Fantastic. I’m positive Nana has powers—her ability to track things is probably super—but otherwise she seems like a normal dog. It would weird me out if she could talk, or anything similar. I don’t know why that is. After all, I’m fine with the Inventor being a telepathic basset hound. But I just couldn’t handle words coming from a dog’s mouth.
I’m a biologist. I don’t like anomalous animal behavior.
Tuck says, “Let Nana sniff your hand. The finger where you wore the ring.”
I raise an eyebrow and give him a look. Why would one of my fingers smell different than the others? But superpowers follow idiosyncratic rules. I stick my ring finger under Nana’s nose.
She snuffles. She presses her wet cold nose against my finger. She gives me a lick with her huge sloppy tongue. Then she turns and sticks her nose in the air.
After a few seconds, she huffs without actually barking, then plods across the lab. Newfoundlands aren’t excitable hunting dogs who race after fleeing targets; they’re working dogs who patiently drag drowning people out of the sea.
Tuck and I follow as Nana walks past half a dozen desks covered with mechatronic miscellanies, then to an exit door hidden behind a giant Gundam head. Nana waits for one of us to open the door. Tuck hesitates, clearly worried about taking me places I shouldn’t go, so I do the honors myself.
I pull the door open and move quickly into a corridor that ramps at a downward angle. The walls are white plastic, very antiseptic-looking, like walls you’d see in a research center where they study diseases. It occurs to me that Marian might well do the same. However much she resembles an orange muumuu’ed hausfrau, she’s actually a Mad Genius. Considering her use of reptile DNA inside the medi-tank, it’s a slam dunk that Marian tinkers with genomes whenever she’s bored.
She may well have a lab where she plays with deadly diseases. Naturally, she’d separate it from all her other labs, to minimize the risk if accidents happened. And if Ninja Jane wanted to hide my ring where no one would ever look for it, where better than a lab full of viruses?
I just hope Jane didn’t stash it in a vial of bubonic plague. But I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?
* * *
NANA LEADS US DOWN the sterile corridor. Polly arrives in a great flap of wings and lands on Tuck’s shoulder. She stares at me with hostility as we descend.
At the bottom of the ramp, we go through a door into another sterile-looking room. Three walls are made from the same white plastic as the corridor. The fourth wall is a clear glass window. Finally, I see what lies outside Sherwood Forest.
Nothing.
Empty sky. But not our familiar blue one. The sky is a cloudless purple, even though the sun shines brightly a short distance above the horizon.
The purple extends downward as well as up. Far below us, I see the tops of clouds.
“Huh,” I say. “Where are we exactly?”
Tuck turns to the parrot on his shoulder. “Polly?”
The parrot answers in a parroty voice. “Latitude forty-three degrees twenty-eight minutes north. Longitude eighty degrees thirty-one minutes west.” I recognize the numbers as the coordinates of Waterloo. Then the bird adds, “Altitude twenty-five kilometers.”
All righty then: we’re in the stratosphere. Well above commercial air routes. Also above the jet streams and most other factors related to the weather. That’s why the sky isn’t blue. The usual blue color is caused by Rayleigh scattering off particles in the atmosphere. Up here, the air is much thinner, so particles are fewer and farther between.
I can now fill in a lot more details about Sherwood Forest. It’s a pressurized airborne environment, big enough to hold a fair-sized forest, not to mention Robin’s house, Marian’s gigantic lab, and who knows what else.
You’d think people would notice something so huge floating high above Waterloo. Apparently, nobody has; otherwise, the location of Robin’s headquarters wouldn’t be such a deep dark mystery. Sherwood must be invisible. Also cloaked against radar, IR-sensing satellites, and whatever else might look in our direction.
How did Marian build such a thing? I don’t mean the cloaking devices; I take it for granted that Marian could invent invisibility machines. But my mind is blown by the resources required. You need a fuck of a strong shell to contain a breathable atmosphere when there’s virtually no air pressure outside. And then to keep it in flight! Where does the energy come from? Solar po
wer is guess number one, but nuh-uh. Intercepting sunlight casts a shadow. The more solar energy you absorb, the less reaches the ground, and soon you’re a big dark blob in the sky.
How can it all work? How much did the building materials cost? And how can you construct a great honking aircraft the size of a supertanker without anyone noticing? A gazillion spy satellites watch every inch of Earth’s surface, precisely because they’re trying to catch Mad Geniuses making shit like this. Yet apparently, Marian built this place and launched it with nobody being the wiser.
I don’t understand how that’s possible. But even as I contemplate the difficulties, my mind toys with possible solutions. And heck, it must be doable because here we are.
Besides, Marian isn’t the only Spark outlaw to build something colossal without being caught. Mad Geniuses regularly pump out robot armies, Godzilla-sized monsters, and super dreadnought-destroyers without being spotted till it’s too late.
One thing for sure: Sherwood Forest represents a shitload of money. No matter how much Robin steals, there can’t be a lot left over for healing the sick and feeding the hungry. Robin robs from the rich and gives to construction cartels.
It makes me sad. I’d hoped Robin Hood would be noble. But honestly, the Robin I met didn’t show a laser-like focus on charitable deeds. Marian has more potential in the focus department, but given the choice between inventing awesome new gadgets or sneaking cash donations to UNICEF, I can guess which she’d find more attractive.
I shouldn’t judge her. I can feel my own brain tugging on its leash, wanting to race back to the lab and play Frankenstein. But when I compare Robin and Marian to someone truly altruistic like Miranda …
I miss Miranda.
I miss K and Shar, too. I miss my own bed, Shar’s new kitten, and watching Netflix with my friends.
I pat Nana’s rump. “Let’s find that ring.”
But at that very moment (dammit!) , Polly says, “Incoming report from spy code name Gisbourne. Darkling agents intend to transport the Diamond gun from Waterloo to an Ottawa research center. It will be loaded onto a train within the hour.”
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