by Alex Gabriel
Wow, Pat was such a bad liar. And of course Dad made an interested noise (kind of a shouted “ah”) at the mention of Pat’s work for the Andersen Estate. “Anything ever come of that in terms of information on the Paladin?”
“Nah,” Pat said, just a hair too quickly. “Nothing.”
It was what he always said, and it was true enough. Wasn’t like the kitchen was info central, and the AI was a serious badass when it came to security. But Pat hadn’t taken the job to snoop, anyway — he’d just needed something he could squeeze into his schedule. He wasn’t some kind of spy for the challenger network. He was just an urban design student trying to make ends meet.
Fortunately, his dad seemed satisfied with Pat’s reply. He dropped the subject and asked after Pat’s studies instead, seeming genuinely interested in Pat’s paper on the garden city movement.
“I know I can trust you to spare some time for the fun side of life while you’re young.” Dad laughed, the sound almost completely swallowed by white noise; Pat knew his laugh by heart, though, and heard it anyway. “Sometimes I wish your sisters would take a page out of your book. They are so serious! Well, except Zen, she has her moments. But don’t go overboard, Pat. You know what matters in the end.”
Pat laughed. “Family, the loyalty of your minions, and a reliable logistics support system?”
“That, too,” Pat’s dad shot back, now unexpectedly somber — as somber as possible, at least, when speaking in a shout. “But in this case, I was referring to a solid education, good health, and true friends.”
Pat took a moment to clear his throat. “Yeah. I’m… yeah. On it, Dad.”
“I’ll let you go in a moment — I have to check on the temperature in the skinning chamber. But tell me, Patpat, is there anyone special in your life?”
“No,” Pat said automatically, and then hesitated. “Well, I don’t — there’s just. But I guess, no, not really.”
Dad didn’t say anything for a while, letting the echo of Pat’s babbling and the low rush of static on the line speak for him. It was an eloquent commentary. Pat could see his father’s expression as clearly as if he’d been standing right in front of Pat. “What do your sisters say about it?”
Pat snorted. “Nothing. I can’t talk to them about this kind of thing — they’d tease me to death.”
“They won’t tease if it’s important, Pat.”
That wasn’t completely true, but whatever.
The static-strewn silence stretched on for much longer this time. Pat noticed he was clutching the phone rather hard, and consciously relaxed his hold. Good thing he didn’t have superstrength, or he’d be breaking stuff all the time. “Uh,” he said, when he couldn’t leave the silence to itself anymore. “I don’t know if it’s important yet. You know?”
It was only when he heard his own words echo in his ears, backlit by the ambient noise of a connection halfway around the world to a jungle village near the cavern where his father was watching over his hibernating mother as she shed her human skin, preparing to rise up in glory to seize the world in the scaled grip of her fist…
That’s when Pat realized that this thing with Nick, whatever it was, had the potential to become important. Might even be important already.
He stunned himself near-speechless with the unexpectedness of the revelation. It was a good thing the conversation with his father was already mostly over, and all there was left to do was to say goodbye.
Chapter Seven
Try to remember you’re in the process of taking over the world.
In the evening, Pat rode his bike to the Andersen estate. The ride took nearly an hour if he put in effort and didn’t dawdle, and Pat usually took the bus. This, however, was clearly a bike day. The combination of icy wind and exertion cleared his head, gave him time to think. Gods knew there were a lot of things that needed sorting right now.
It was a beautiful route, leading through the narrow, picturesque streets of the old town to the river. There were some beautiful buildings down here — villas, a church, an old brick waterworks that looked like a small castle, and had served as the seat for municipal government for a while. The tree-lined river promenade led all the way through town, from the outskirts through the center and back out again to the Riverside district, where a handful of elegant older villas competed with several modern mansions like Nick’s.
Pat whipped onto the promenade and picked up speed to swerve past a small group of joggers. As always, he gave himself a moment to admire the clean lines of the old university library, wreathed in ivy and the quiet elegance of centuries. Then he turned his head the other way, out over the water, and almost ran over a couple that shouted unfriendly names after him.
There was a glow over the water, lying close to the river’s surface like a colorless, luminescent mist. Pat had never seen anything like it. It was entirely insubstantial, more like a reflection than anything else… but a reflection of what, Pat couldn’t say.
The air was strange by the river, as well. All the hair on Pat’s arms was standing up, a low crackle building in his ears as the hair on his head began to plaster itself to his brow and cheeks with static electricity.
Pat sped up until he was flying down the promenade at breakneck speed. A good number of people were out and about, jogging or walking their dogs or merely enjoying the crisp blue winter evening. None of them was looking at the water with anything but idle appreciation. Had anyone else had been able to see the glow, Pat was sure they would have reacted in some way — if only to stare fixedly, or retreat from the river, or even climb over the railing and try to get a closer look.
By the time Pat reached the Andersen Estate, he was itchy and jittery, restless energy sparking through him like distant fireworks. He dismounted by the estate’s river gate and waved into the camera. The gate clicked open before he’d even rung the bell, which Pat interpreted as a sign of welcome as well as one of an alert security detail.
Sure enough, Bart was the security lieutenant waiting to greet Pat at the gatehouse. He held up a fist with a grin and a waggle of his bushy brows, and Pat grinned as he bumped it with his own. Static sparked between them when they touched, zapping Pat with enough force to be near-painful.
“Heya, Bart. Everything quiet around here?”
“Quiet enough to hear your grandma whistle,” Bart confirmed.
Pat was startled into a laugh. He was more than half convinced Bart made up these strange sayings to mess with people, and usually, he’d have bantered with him a little about the proverbial (or non-proverbial) whistling grandma and why she only achieved such low volume. Right now he was a little preoccupied, though. “You haven’t noticed anything strange? Nothing at all?”
Bart gave him a questioning look, but it wasn’t as though Pat could elaborate. The river is invisibly glowing wasn’t something he felt comfortable saying out loud.
“Not a thing. Why do you ask?”
“I just… thought I saw something weird, but never mind. Must have been my imagination.”
“Uh-huh.” Bart seemed unconvinced, but had the grace not to keep digging. “You read too many thrillers, kid.”
Inside the guard station, his partner sighed loudly. Pat had no idea what that was about, but he took it as his cue to sign the arrivals’ log with a thumbprint and wheel his bike up the estate’s expanse of classical garden architecture. Privately, Pat thought this particular garden design was a bit bland. He preferred a more modern, less symmetrical approach. But he could see how someone as freakishly obsessive as Nick might go for straight lines and clear views without even thinking about it.
The handover from the day staff was uneventful, the only unusual thing being that a sous-chef had stayed late specifically to instruct Pat on the use of several prepared foods she’d just put into stasis, and to forbid him (on pain of gruesome but unnamed horrors) to heat up the gazpacho verde.
As soon as he was alone with the AI, he called Hell — or rather Hell’s voicemail. “Hell, call me w
hen you get this, okay? Something weird is going on with the river. Do you know if anyone’s planning special activities?”
Once he’d put everything in order for the night, Pat puttered around the kitchen for a bit, rearranging things that were plenty arranged already and poking through the contents of the stasis freshers. The AI flashed contented green lights at him no matter how often Patrick prompted the thing. There wasn’t even any paperwork.
Pat wished Nick would call him up. But it was way too early for that — the earliest Nick ever called for company was 2 in the morning.
After failing dismally to read the next chapter in his assigned urban ecology textbook, Pat went to make the rounds of the mansion. Usually he gave it several hours before his first walk-through, which was only good sense given that the day manager checked everything was in order before leaving. Right now, though, Pat was so keyed up he just wanted to move, to do something.
Everything was in excellent order all through the mansion, of course. Pat hadn’t ever actually encountered the kind of problem Suze had mentioned might arise (open windows or doors, water running in one of the bathrooms, AI sensor malfunctions, missing artwork or inventory, that kind of thing). In any other household, Pat suspected he’d have been checking for the principal’s snooping and/or larcenous friends, drinking companions or hook-ups, too. In Nick’s mansion, of course, the only visitors were employees and the occasional hoagie coming to consult Silver Paladin.
Pat sighed, and pushed through a sliding glass door into the mansion’s smaller courtyard. The competition-sized pool was filled and heated, lit with pleasantly indirect underwater light. The pool didn’t glow with anything more out of the ordinary than its energy-saving stasis cover. Thanks to the cover, Pat couldn’t even dangle a hand in the water, or fill his nose with the familiar, oddly reassuring scent of chlorine.
He felt like he was going to jitter out of his skin. Instead of settling down in the quiet dusk, Pat was getting more and more wound up. Something was wrong. He knew it. He had gooseflesh all over, his skin was all but crawling, and his curls were plastered to his face and neck. They actually crackled with discharging static electricity when he tried to push them back.
Yoga was good for calming and clearing the mind, right? Cea and Zen were always nagging at him to come to their yoga studio with them, claiming it would make him a new man. So, yoga it was. The fact that Pat had never done yoga before was no more than a speed bump on the road of his glorious plan. It was all about a bunch of bendy stretches and weird strenuous positions that had you stick random body parts in the air, right? Pat could do that, easy.
Thanks to this laudable resolution, Pat was mostly upside down, limbs entwined in a brezel shape with his head hanging low, when everything froze.
For an eternal moment, Pat couldn’t breathe. His heart thumped in his chest as though it was trying to burst out of his ribcage; he collapsed in an inelegant heap, barely managing to catch himself enough not to brain himself on the tiles.
He forced a breath into his lungs, another. When he sorted himself out and turned over, the darkening sky had turned into a hazy expanse of virulent, glowing green.
“Huh,” he said. How about that — an energy shield. Rather old-school, but still effective. There was something to be said for the classics — at least that’s what Hell always said.
Alarms were going off everywhere, now. The mansion’s security system was howling, the AI loudly proclaiming various things that Pat didn’t listen to; slightly more distantly, the city’s emergency siren was whooping in the most penetrating frequency imaginable. Pat felt much better; the strange oppression had lifted from the night, and Pat felt more himself than he had all evening.
Something burst into Pat’s field of vision from the left, blazing across the green-backed sky like a silvery comet. Silver Paladin, gaining height as he arched away towards the city center. Pat squinted after him until he was entirely out of sight, and then went inside to find out what — or rather who — was going on.
Bitterfly was broadcasting her ultimatum on all radio and TV stations, gloating over entrapping the entire city beneath her shield (she called it the “Dome of Terror”, which was so over the top it made Pat cringe with second-hand embarrassment). She’d clearly gotten a tech upgrade, but her costume was still the same: all glittery, slinky ballgown-esque silhouette enhanced by iridescent dragonfly wings and a shitload of gauzy, trailing scarves and sleeves.
“This city now answers to me, and me alone,” shrilled Bitterfly’s wild-eyed miniature on the AI’s media screen. “I will have vengeance on all who have mocked my fashions. I will cast down all overrated designers and crush their vile creations into dust beneath my exquisitely shod foot. I will bring taste and style back to my beleaguered, downtrodden people. For you all are now my people, and my solemn promise to you is that you will never have to wear polyester, flannel or paisley ever again!”
“Now that’s just crazy,” Pat told the image. He could have gotten behind the ban on paisley, and he couldn’t say he had strong feelings about polyester either way. But flannel? When he thought about how well Nick had worn Pat’s shirt the other night… no way.
“There will be no more soy lattes!” Bitterfly screamed.
Pat heaved a sigh and closed down the channel.
Pat would miss Nick a lot more than soy lattes (he’d never actually had one, though he made a mental note that this had to change as soon as possible). But then, Bitterfly had never held her own for longer than a few days. Both Nick and soy lattes — not to mention flannel shirts that brought out the gorgeous strong muscles in people’s arms — would be back fairly soon.
~~~~~
Four days — that’s how long the dome stayed up. Pat was impressed; Bitterfly had never pulled off anything this big before. She’d really stepped up her game, and could be genuinely proud of herself. All the more so because she’d never been a physical challenger, but nevertheless managed to deliver such a solid roundhouse kick in the final battle that Captain Cool crashed dramatically through a wall and lost his helmet.
The only thing that would have improved the highlight reel was a greater presence of Nick, particularly during the showdown. The glow of his force fields would have looked awesome against the backdrop of the dusky riverside park, with the old castle rising craggily against the green-tinged sunset. But Nick had been busy wrangling civilians, making sure nobody was flung into the river or crushed by uncoordinated combatants (though — since Star Knight had been caught outside the dome — that was a relatively minor issue). The news programs mostly stuck to replaying a single clip of him, bundled with a brief sound-byte of an exhilarated young woman describing how Silver Paladin had cut through the roof of her trapped car to airlift her to safety. Pat watched the entire thing so often he ended up making retching sounds at the screen and sticking out his tongue at ‘Marigold, Financial Analyst’ whenever she appeared.
How did hoagies decide on who got to be in the limelight? Did they take turns taking top billing? Or maybe Nick simply volunteered to take care of bystanders, flying off without a word to do what needed to be done. He wasn’t a glory hound the way so many superheroes (and, okay, challengers) seemed to be. He just wanted to make sure everyone came out safe, sound and with BadMadRad albums in hand.
Anyway. The important thing was that now that Bitterfly was vanquished, Nick once again had time to spare, which in turn meant that the AI pinged Pat in the middle of the night to play a recording of Nick’s quiet “uhm, send up Pat. The blond one. Patrick West.”
Fifteen minutes was a damn unlikely response time for anyone who wasn’t already inside the mansion, but Pat was willing to bet this was another thing Nick would never realize unless it was pointed out to him. So there was no reason for Pat to wait around in the kitchen, was there?
Nah. No reason at all.
~~~~~
Pat didn’t see Nick right away when the AI let him into the lab. It was only when he’d ventured deeper into the r
oom that he spotted the lab’s owner, sprawled on the huge couch towards the back of the lab, next to a rack of lances and armor parts.
“Hey.” Nick greeted Pat with the dorkiest wave in the history of the world. He’d set up the screens taking up the entire back and right-hand walls with a peaceful vista of ocean waves lapping at a sun-drenched tropical beach, and was evidently chilling out in front of the view.
Pat grinned helplessly, sticking his hands in his pockets in an attempt to look casual as he sauntered over. “Hey.”
A moment passed in expectant silence. Nick was in his usual lab-time civvies — a faded pair of jeans and an ancient sweatshirt that might have been red at one point and was now a grayish shade of rose. The logo splashed across the chest was so faint that Pat couldn’t even make it out anymore.
He looked really good. Exhausted, yes; hair sticking up oddly like he’d taken a nap just before, all pale and bleary with too little sleep and too much flying around saving Marigold the financial analyst and others like her. But still really good even so.
After another moment, Pat realized Nick wasn’t going to provide a conversation starter. The man seemed content with watching Pat, wearing a faint, tired smile.
It was… weird. Not that he’d been looking forward to the dude’s freaky ways and lame questions, except — well. Actually, he had been, Pat found. It was part of the Nick experience, and Pat had gotten so used to starting off with a wildly offbeat segue that now that it wasn’t happening, it felt like the conversation had gone off schedule before even starting.
Fine, then; there was an easy fix for that. “So,” Pat said resolutely, grin widening as the superhero on the couch sat up a bit, attention sharpening. “Which ch— villain would you be, if you were a villain?”
The glare that gained him might have set a lesser man on fire, but Pat shrugged it off with raised eyebrows, shimmying his shoulders a little as though shaking raindrops from a non-existent coat.