Emily patted the seat next to her. Bedlam, resigned, sat down.
"Look, we're just going to bomb the Bechdel test right now, but I'm just going to say it: Billy has had a crush on you for like more than a year and I don't want to see you mess with him in any way," Emily said.
"Are you seriously calling dibs or something?" she said
"What? Huh? No! Oh. No, not at all," Emily said. "Billy's not my type. I'm—no. He's my best friend, though, and I do not truck with people messing with him."
"Why do you think I'm going to mess with him?" Bedlam said.
"Because you strike me as the type of person who messes with people," Emily said.
"This from you. I've hung out with you approximately twice and all you do is mess with people," Bedlam said.
Emily growled.
"I'm just saying. He's sensitive. Don't toy with his heart or whatever," she said.
"You realize he and I have never actually had a conversation outside of either beating the hell out of each other or breaking him out of prison, right?"
"… I thought he asked you out to coffee," Emily said.
"Apparently we've all been really, really busy or something," Bedlam said. She studied the younger girl, in her mismatched uniform and blue hair and bravado. Her annoyance drained away. "Look, I don't know him at all, okay? I barely know any of you. It's funny to joke that he has a crush on me but it's like having a crush on a cartoon character. We're not real people to each other."
"Not yet," Emily said.
"Right, not yet," Bedlam said. "Do I think he's a good looking kid? Yeah, I think he's a good-looking kid. I'm a little weirded out that he's got an alien living in his brain, but half my body is made out of car parts so who am I to judge anyone else for their quirks? I don't get why you're so freaked out about this."
"He's a profoundly sad guy," Emily said, not making eye contact. "I'm just concerned about him is all. He's my best friend and I don't like worrying about him, and I can't protect him against things like crushes. Aliens I can help out with. Monsters? Sure. A crush? Nope."
Bedlam leaned back against the wall behind her. She could hear the servos in her limbs humming. Most of the time she could tune it out, but sometimes all she heard was her cyborg pieces and it drove her insane, some sort of white noise endurance test.
"Trust me, he's not the only profoundly sad person around," Bedlam said. "I get the impression there's two more of us right now in this stupid waiting room."
Emily stopped staring at the floor and faced Bedlam.
"Yeah," she said, her eyes shiny and big.
"A tough life, isn't it?" Bedlam said.
"I'm pretty sure there's no other kind of life than a tough one," Emily said.
"That's pretty deep for a lunatic," she said.
"I get that a lot," Emily said and popped up out of her chair. "I'm going to go see if he's awake yet. You want to come with me?"
"Not afraid I'm going to walk in there and pull his heart out, 'Temple of Doom' style?"
"Can we pretend we never had that part of the conversation?" Emily said.
Bedlam laughed.
"Fine," she said, standing up. "Sure, I'll come with you. And hey?"
"Hey what," Emily said.
"What is your type, anyway?" Bedlam said.
Emily made a face and wagged her hands in the air.
"Wouldn't you like to know?" she said, laughing. "C'mon. Let's go freak Billy out. He doesn't know you're here."
Chapter 32:
The god on the island
Doc Silence and Henry Winter materialized on a snowy island, gray mist hanging all around them like a sad song. Henry immediately turned up his collar and grimaced as his cane sank into the snow.
"Could've warned me I needed to bring a hat," he said.
Doc ignored him.
Henry walked to the edge of the island, and where water should have been, he found nothing but open air, a drop into foggy gray nothingness. He kicked a clump of snow over the edge and watched it fall away into the mist.
"This place goes against everything I believe in," Henry said.
"You traveled through a magical portal to get here," Doc said. "You going to pull the scientist card on me right now?"
Doc started to walk away, but slowly, allowing Henry to limp along and catch up.
"It's just… it's an island in the sky, Doc," Henry said. "Even you have to question why it doesn't fall."
"Magic," Doc said, smirking. Henry hit him on the shin with his cane. "Watch it or I'll make that cane evaporate."
"Ha ha," Henry said.
They came across a campsite, logs in a semi-circle covered in snow, a fire pit burned down and blackened, cool and damp. On the far side of the camp there stood a cave, ringed with snow like a frozen mouth, too dark to see inside.
"We really need to ask him to help?" Henry said.
"I'm not about to throw these kids into space and possibly to their death and still allow his royal highness to sit in a cave and ignore us," Doc said. "I refuse."
"You do all the talking, then," Henry said. "He never liked me."
"He never liked any of us," Doc said. "But that's not relevant now."
Doc strode around the dead campfire, throwing a fireball from his hand into the pit, setting it ablaze. He pulled a bottle of what looked like red wine out of his coat—Henry wondered briefly if there had been a hidden pocket inside, or if Doc conjured the bottle from thin air as well—uncorked it with a twist of his wrist, and took a sip.
"Korthos of Aramaias, the Truthbringer, the Dragon's Son! Get your sorry backside out here and talk to me. It's Doc."
No sound came from the cave. Doc rattled the bottle. Henry could hear the booze lurching around inside.
"Come on, Kevin, get out here. I want to talk to you," Doc said. "I have mead."
"Go away, wizard. I want none of what you're selling," a booming voice rumbled from within the cave. "And don't call me Kevin."
"I'm certainly not calling some petulant child hiding in a cave the Dragon's Son," Doc said. "You want to be treated with respect, start acting like you deserve it."
Henry's breath caught in his throat. Snow fell in light flecks, catching on Doc's dark coat. Finally, a shape appeared at the mouth of the cave—a man, seemingly made of nothing but writhing muscles. He was shirtless and wearing an armored kilt below the waist, his hair, the dark blue of early morning sky, belt-length and braided to hang over one shoulder. His beard, the same dark blue, was also long and elaborately braided and framed a face that was something both human and not, as if he were from another place and time, carved out of the ancient ancestors of humanity. He was both handsome and horrible to look at, a wonderment of violence. In his hand he held a halberd taller than he stood, its blade black as oil.
"Hi, Kevin," Doc said.
Henry cringed again. That name. Doc was taunting him. Goading him.
"You have come to my island uninvited, magician. You best have a better reason than a bottle of sour mead," the massive man said, snatching the bottle from Doc's hand and drinking half of it in one long drag.
"You know that fight you've always wanted? The one where you can finally prove yourself? Well it's coming," Doc said. "I thought you might like to know."
"I'm done with fighting for your world," Korthos said. He spit into the fire.
Henry heard the saliva sizzle there. For the first time, the huge man seemed to notice him.
"I see you brought the tinker with his soft money-counting hands."
"Good to see you too, Korthos," Henry said.
The warrior shot Doc a disdainful look.
"Even the tinker knows to call me by my proper name," he said.
"I'll call you what I want to, Kevin. Until you prove to me you deserve all those honorifics after your name."
"I have fought wars on a dozen planes. By your side and alone. I have murdered tyrants and killed monsters from across dimensions. I deserve—"
"If you deserved
respect you wouldn't have to ask for it," Doc said. "All I know is you came up here to your little island and ignored your home world for years and now that it needs you again you're still sitting here, what, playing dice games all by yourself?"
The warrior rose to his full height. Somehow, Henry thought, the silence was worse than the bluster.
"What are your 'years' to me," Korthos said. "I am of time unending."
"And what good has that done you?" Doc said. "You used to have purpose. Now you're just the son of a dead god from a religion no living human except myself has ever even heard of. Instead of honoring your fallen pantheon, you retired. I hope the fishing is marvelous here on your little floating island."
"How dare you speak of my family like that?" Korthos said. "I am—"
"You're what, Kevin? What?" Doc said. "A god? You're a demi-god. And you used to be a hero. You used to be a fine, wonderful hero. And now you're either lazy or cowardly, and neither of those things look good on you up here."
Henry's stomach became a pit of acid. He could feel the anger emanating off Korthos like static electricity.
"I will not be spoken to like this! Not by some petty charlatan hedge wizard who—"
Doc pulled off his glasses, his eyes flaring in bright purple flames. Their light reflected off the snow, turning the campsite into a violet hellish nightmare.
"I am Doctor Silence, last Silver Wizard of the Council Prime, holder of the Seven Flames. The Eye of All Things Points to me. I am Demon Blooded, High General in the Army of the Dreamless, First Mage of the Nightmare Kingdom, the Flame of the Forgotten Way. And by all my names Korthos Truthbringer . . . I. Will. Speak. To. You . . . however I bloody well want to."
Henry Winter stared with his mouth hanging wide open as the wizard and the warrior stood like statues, eyes locked in a battle of wills.
The bottom of the bottle of mead cracked and fell away, spilling the remains into the snow like black blood. Doc spoke softly then.
"You forgot to pour a draught for your fallen brothers, Kevin," Doc said. "If you remembered who you were, you would have done that first."
The monstrous man looked at the empty, broken bottle in his hands with an unreadable expression. He no longer made eye contact with Doc.
"Consider what I said, Korthos Aramaias," Doc said. "There's a war coming. It would be a better war if you were on our side once more."
With that, Doc stormed away, leaving Korthos illuminated by the firelight, still staring at the empty bottle.
Henry waved at him weakly. "It was good to see you again, man," he said, hobbling away quickly. "Um. Sorry about the mess." Then, he scurried along, catching up to Doc, who was walking with long, angry strides toward the shore of the floating island.
"What the hell was that!" Henry said.
"It was properly motivating him to stop pouting," Doc said.
"And all those names? Were you just making stuff up at the end?"
Doc stopped, put his glasses back on his face, and smirked at Henry. "I might have made a few of them up, yeah."
"You really are a charlatan, aren't you?" Henry said.
"All magicians are, by degrees," Doc said. He let out a deep sigh of relief, and Henry could see the wizard had been terrified the entire time, his whole body bound up in fear and tension.
"If you were just going to do all that, why even bring me?" Henry said.
"You were here in case it didn't work and he decided to chop my fool head off," Doc said. "I figured you could at least stall him long enough for us to teleport out of there."
"And if I couldn't?" Henry said.
"Well, if nothing else, I wanted a witness if he killed me," Doc said.
Henry exhaled his own sigh of relief as Doc opened up a portal home.
"Do you think it worked?" he asked.
"No idea," Doc said. "I guess we'll find out if he shows up."
Chapter 33:
Hidden treasures
Prevention—or Laura, as Agent Black kept reminding himself she wanted to be called now, I guess we're on a first name basis—parked their Land Rover in a seemingly desolate place under the North Dakota sky. They hadn't seen another human being for hours, not on the road nor on the dirt path they'd taken to get here. If she hadn't been so chatty, Black would've thought Laura had been leading him out to the middle of nowhere to kill him.
She gestured at a rocky outcropping fifty yards away.
"There's our destination," she said.
Black gave it a once-over, letting his cybernetic eye run a complete scan on the area. No abnormalities, nothing particularly threatening, no hidden soldiers or guns as far as he could tell. Just a rock in the middle of nowhere.
He reached down and loosened the gun on his hip. Laura noticed.
"So you're a shooter, huh?" Laura said. "Gunman."
"Yeah," Agent Black said, checking his weapon for the tenth time, studying it, looking for flaws in the machine.
"You must love guns."
"The opposite," Black said. "To tell you the truth, I hate guns. I absolutely hate them."
"Is that so?" Laura said. "Seems counterintuitive for how you've made your living."
"Maybe," Black said, drawing the gun and shifting the weight of his massive pistol back and forth between his hands. "But here's the thing. I can take this device, this ignorant tool, and aim it at another living being and pull the trigger—push one button, really—and a nugget of metal will fly hundreds of yards away and punch through that person's eye and end their life. And that's it. That life is over. There's no taking it back. There's no changing your mind. One button. One life."
"But you're a trained killer," Laura said. "This is your profession. That's the tool of your chosen profession. A blacksmith doesn't hate a hammer."
"But that's the point, Laura," Black said. "Any ignorant bastard can pick up a gun and end a life. They're not the tools of an artisan. Most of them are made so you can hand them to terrified kid on a battlefield and tell him to aim it in the right direction and fire. Anybody can do what I do."
"Not as well as you do it," Laura said.
Black held the gun with his metal hand, tightened his grip on the specialized padding, watched as the weapon interfaced with his cybernetics. Ammunition counts, wind fluctuations, distance to target, all manner of information flowed into his false eye, feeding his head's up display, telling him better ways to kill. He put the gun back down.
"No, not as well as I do it," Black said. "But does it matter? A bullet's a bullet. Death is death. And guns are so easy. That's why I hate them."
"How many men have you killed, Agent?" Laura asked.
"Not as many as you'd think," he said.
"Really?" Laura said, her lips quirking into a half smile.
"Honestly," Black said. "Because fear is more useful than murder. More often than not, my job is to instill fear, so I don't have to shoot anyone. I'm hired as a deterrent to violence, not as a spark to it."
"And here I thought you were just a big scary guy with a gun," Laura thought.
"Then my reputation has done its job," Black said. "The less often I have to pull the trigger, the happier I am."
Laura nodded. She unbuckled her seatbelt and slid a jacket on in her seat.
"What about you?" Black said. "You have telepathic powers. Or at least that's what your file says. What's your ethical stance on those?"
Laura thought about her life when she was known as Prevention—someone who, if her reputation were even half-true, had a history of telepathic interrogation and mind wipes—turned her eyes out over the hood of the truck and paused.
"I wasn't given my powers," she said, leaning back in her seat. "I was born with them. And it took a long time to learn how to not accidentally invade the minds around me. You'd think being a mind reader would be tantalizing, but it's as invasive for the telepath as it is for the person whose mind you read."
"So you don't go around just reading peoples' minds like browsing a magazine in line at
the supermarket?"
"Deciphering someone's mind is like going into a stranger's home," she said. "It's uncomfortable. It puts you ill at ease. You don't know where anything is. You feel like you don't belong."
"Then how'd you get into this line of work?" Black asked. "If you don't like it."
"If there isn't much work for a guy with a metal arm," she said, "how much normal employment do you think there is for a telepath?"
"We do what we have to," Black said.
Laura nodded. She slid out of the vehicle, and Black followed her.
The sensors in Black's cybernetic implants picked up on it before his eyes did, a hidden door carved into the ground where the rocky outcropping began. Laura knelt down beside it and brushed away the dirt until she found a small hatch. Flipping it open, she entered a code into a keypad.
"Give me a hand with this," she said, indicating a pair of handles in the dirt. They each grabbed hold of one and lifted. Inside, a darkened staircase led deeper into the earth.
"You're kidding me," Black said.
"You know the Department had this place out here when I came onboard?" she said. "Just locked up and abandoned. So I used it. Off the books."
"Off the books," Black repeated. Suddenly his speculation that she'd driven him out here to kill him didn't seem so farfetched.
"Yeah," she said, heading down into the dark. Black followed her, his cyborg eyes kicking up the light to make up for the shadows. At the bottom of the stairs, he could hear Laura feeling around for a light switch.
"What is it, a bunker?" he asked. Maybe the plan is to hide out until the invasion hits, he thought. Wasn't the best plan in the world; he'd seen worse.
Laura found the lights and instantly the entire space was illuminated. It was roughly the size of a football field, and filled with an array of contraptions and vehicles, some of which were easily identifiable, others which straddled the line between machine and modern art.
"I started stockpiling things the Department found," Laura said. "Not everything, but if I could divert something that might be useful some day, I moved it here. I thought this might be a good place to look for some toys."
Like A Comet: The Indestructibles Book 4 Page 17