The Crimson Child:
The Indestructibles Book 5
by
Matthew Phillion
The Crimson Child: the Indestructibles Book 5
Lost Continuity Press
P.O. Box 1044
Salem, MA 01970
Printed in the United States of America
Copyright © 2019 Matthew Phillion
All rights reserved.
(also available in paperback format)
Front cover design:
Sterling Arts & Design
Five books for five heroes.
For Lucas, Adelyn, Nick, Callan, and Joey.
Prologue: The town that simply left
Chapter 1: Once, in the desert
Chapter 2: The City after the fall
Chapter 3: The low roads
Chapter 4: He returned from the stars
Chapter 5: Dreamless
Chapter 6: Just a little bit of magic
Chapter 7: New management
Chapter 8: A whole new man
Chapter 9: The town that once was
Chapter 10: Where you go to be forgotten
Chapter 11: The Lapines, formerly of New Orleans
Chapter 12: There were always others
Chapter 13: The Lady and the King
Chapter 14: Amongst the stars
Chapter 15: A matter of ownership
Chapter 16: Through the looking glass all over again
Chapter 17: The picture of caution
Chapter 18: Sage advice
Chapter 19: Everyone works for the bad guys
Chapter 20: The other side of the mirror
Chapter 21: The queen on her throne
Chapter 22: You’re a terrible person
Chapter 23: The powerful and the powerless
Chapter 24: The Guardians
Chapter 25: Magic and bargains
Chapter 26: Not my type
Chapter 27: The Zombies of Wall Street
Chapter 28: The castle of Queen Alice
Chapter 29: Altering the plan
Chapter 30: What they did with Lady Dreamless
Chapter 31: I’ve had better internships
Chapter 32: The Queen and the Wizard
Chapter 33: Mirror, mirror
Chapter 34: Questioning authority
Chapter 35: The weight of things
Chapter 36: Gather our army
Chapter 37: An unfair range of emotional abuse
Chapter 38: Nightmare
Chapter 39: We’re us
Chapter 40: The Myth of Katherine Miller
Chapter 41: We don’t get to be happy
Chapter 42: Moving monsters cross-country
Chapter 43: The anthill
Chapter 44: Pieces
Chapter 45: Entropia
Chapter 45: Why is Old Man Teddy Ruxpin talking to us
Chapter 46: Middle management for monsters
Chapter 47: A wrong of our own making
Chapter 48: Intruders in the queen’s lands
Chapter 49: Bold decisiveness
Chapter 50: Knock
Chapter 51: Beseeching
Chapter 52: Breakdown
Chapter 53: Monsters at the gates
Chapter 54: Betrayal
Chapter 55: The dead, walking
Chapter 56: Thieves of power
Chapter 57: Alice, the queen
Chapter 58: Things fall apart
Chapter 59: You can’t just drop a town
Chapter 60: The perils of middle management
Chapter 61: Home
Chapter 62: Ever and always through the looking glass
Chapter 63: We’re all indestructible, sometimes
Epilogue: Once, in the City
From the author
Book 5. What a long, strange journey this has been.
When I sat down to write the first Indestructibles book, I was looking for an escape—I wanted to write a story without worrying about a special effects budget, and I wanted a place where I could put everything I loved about storytelling in one place. Aliens and cyborgs. Magicians and werewolves. Knock-down, drag-out street fights and tiny little moments between friends. I didn’t know if anyone else would want to explore this weird little comic book world I set out to build.
But I am so glad you all did.
The Crimson Child is officially the place where I’ve gone beyond my game plan for the Indestructibles kids. From Day 1, I knew what would happen in the first four books. I knew the growing pains they’d through in Breakout, and the dark future they’d face in the Entropy of Everything, and I even knew the crazy maneuver Kate would pull off at the end of Like a Comet, even if I didn’t have a title for that book until it almost went to the printer.
But with this book, the gang’s in uncharted territory. They’ve grown up a lot, and they’ve come to surprise me with the things they do and say. It’s a lot of fun as a writer to travel past the known boundaries of the world you were planning on building.
I hope you enjoy the view. I sure had fun discovering it myself.
As always, a huge thanks to the folks who are willing to be my test subjects during the writing process—Stephanie Buck, Christian Hegg, and Colin Carlton, thanks for helping me figure out some key character moments this time around. And Christine Geiger, I can never thank you enough for the work you do as editor on these books.
Sterling Arts & Design has helped shape the Indestructiverse with each new cover, and once again, they’ve come through with something beautiful and dark.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Peter Sarno and PFP Publishing. While our partnership came to an amicable close this year, this series could not exist without your support. You changed my life taking a shot on a first time author, and I’ll never forget that.
And now I invite you all on the latest adventure of the Indestructibles, their most personal, dangerous journey yet.
Matthew Phillion
Salem, Massachusetts
June, 2019
Prologue: The town that simply left
They named her Alice, because her mother loved Lewis Carroll. Her mother always called her Alice properly, but her father called her Lissie, because, he said, Alice was a name she should grow into. But Alice also knew he called her Lissie because her mother preferred that he didn’t, and for that reason, it became a secret name they shared. She had a father-name and a mother-name, and she always felt very lucky to have both, even when she grew old enough to see how much the nickname frustrated her mother.
They loved each other, her parents, but Alice always knew there was something missing, some rift between them they never spoke about, a sadness without a name.
She would hide from that sadness, conjuring up imaginary friends to join her when she hid in lonely places, where she couldn’t hear her parents talk in that soft way they did to pretend they weren’t arguing. Her imaginary friends would disappear when her parents found her. They were never angry that she hid, but pulled her from dark closets, or beneath tablecloths, or beside the small vernal pool that formed in their backyard, apologizing as they carried her to the kitchen for dinner or to the car to visit her grandmother. It was always her father who took her to grandma’s house, and she knew, without the words ever spoken out loud, that her father needed a place to hide as much as she did. She was wise beyond her years, and she knew, if you were lucky, your family will let you hide.
But in all, she grew up quiet and peaceful in a quiet and relatively peaceful home, despite the sadness, despite the quiet worry. Her imaginary friends stayed with her, the teddy bear who came to life when no one was looking, the fairy wit
h the pink skin and eyes black as night, the shadow that pried itself off the floor and watched over her like a protector, the unicorn the size of a small dog. Other things, creatures beyond description, out of storybooks, out of dreams. She had so many friends. If only they were real, she’d think.
Perhaps, in another life, Alice might have realized that these were not imaginary friends. But the gifts she had that allowed her to bring these creatures—bear and fairy, shadow and unicorn—to life were not the sort of aspects ordinary parents, distracted by ordinary parent things, would have noticed. And Alice’s imaginary friends were very good at hiding. They did not want to be banished, you see. They knew they were not of this world, and they knew that the wrong person—someone with gifts like Alice’s, who knew how to control them, who knew how to make use of them to change the world—they could chase Alice’s imaginary friends away.
And so, they stayed imaginary, hiding when proper, coming to life when their protector, their conjurer, their little magician needed them.
They weren’t vindictive spirits, after all. They were little creatures called up from the other side of reality, happy for an escape from their ordinary existence, and they enjoyed watching over Alice.
Or rather, they enjoyed it until the day the rift in the world opened up.
They sensed it, the rift. Magic has a way of being everywhere at once, and if a rift opened in London there was no reason a spirit in a sunny town in America would not sense it if they were paying attention. All four of Alice’s protectors looked up in unison as it happened. Alice asked them why they stopped playing, and the bear looked to the fairy and the fairy to the shadow, whose hand had gone protectively to the multi-colored mane of the unicorn.
But then, like a sudden draft, it was gone. The bear cuddled into Alice’s chest and the unicorn pranced and the fairy flittered onto her shoulder. Only the shadow remained worried, looking off in the distance. Perhaps it was because he was made of darkness, and like calls to like when magic is involved. Perhaps the shadow-creature was simply a worrier by nature. But he knew something had joined them on this side of the veil that did not belong here, and he knew, somehow, that it would find its way to their conjurer.
Eventually the shadow turned his attention back to Alice as well, and all went back to normal, for a little while. Or at least as normal as things can be in the home of a child no one knew was a magical savant. Magic can be mundane, sometimes, too, with tea parties and late night gossip. Magic tends to steal innocence from those who encounter it. For that reason, for many who practice magic, for many who live and breathe it like the bear and the fairy, the shadow and the unicorn, innocence is utterly sacred. It is something to be cherished, and protected, to be guarded with the very fiber of your being. Perhaps Alice was too old for imaginary friends. But lonely children find joy where they can, and these were no ordinary imaginary friends she had.
It took some time for the thing that crept through the rift to find her. It was a peaceful stretch. Alice, who was Lissie less and less now, grew up a bit. She began to question her imaginary friends. She began to feel something other than ordinary. But she never had the chance to figure out what that meant for herself.
Then her twelfth birthday arrived. The day her father had a small heart attack and was rushed to the emergency room, Alice’s birthday cake still sitting on the passenger seat of his car. The day her mother raged at an airline attendant two thousand miles away that she had to get home, that her only daughter was turning twelve and she’d promised she’d be home in time. A day incredible thunderstorms raged down on the City like the tears of a heartbroken goddess. On this day something… some thing… came for Alice.
The bear and the fairy and the shadow and the unicorn became their true selves that moment, the forms they’d hidden away in toys and imagination, to defend their conjurer, their master, their Alice.
The battle was short. And in the end, Alice disappeared.
And her entire town disappeared with her.
Chapter 1: Once, in the desert
Jane touched town among the sandy dunes, the relentless heat of the desert sun hot against her shoulders, as if the sun itself came too close to the Earth here. She needed it, though, she thought, luxuriating in the solar energy her cells soaked up. She’d forsaken her uniform as Solar of the Indestructibles in favor of a tank top and shorts, the sort of summer clothing that should leave any normal human being burned to a crisp here in the desert.
But Jane was no ordinary human. She was the solar-powered girl, and here, in this place, she felt more powerful than ever.
Well, that’s a lie, she thought to herself. I almost feel like my old self. Not long ago, in the cold reaches of space, she’d expended every bit of stored up energy she had within her to stop an alien spacecraft from reaching her world. The act had nearly killed her, left her wilted and half-dead in orbit. But the sun, in the end, always provides, and she’d taken full advantage of being here under the desert sky to renew herself. She felt strong, she felt healthy, and, hearing the bickering of her friends on the other side of the dunes, she felt at home.
Jane kicked off her hiking boots to feel the heat of the daylight through the soles of her feet. Again, a mere mortal would be catastrophically wounded by the temperatures. But not the solar-powered girl. This act was just one more way to take in as much power as she could. For her, this was as comforting as a tucking her feet into the sand on the beach.
Not so for her friends, who were wrapped in khaki, with balaclavas protecting their necks and faces from the blistering sun.
“That doesn’t go there! That goes there!” yelled a man’s voice, sounding less angry than put upon.
“I know exactly where it goes! You showed me yesterday!” said a young woman’s voice. She did not sound angry either. In fact, she sounded like she was deliberately infuriating her companion.
Jane crested the dune to see a large piece of spaceship drifting in the air. Her eyes, with her senses amplified by all the sunlight she’d taken in, could just make out the glimmer of a bubble surrounding the component as it hung in the air. A minute figure in gigantic goggles and a sky-blue balaclava stood below, holding that piece of spaceship up with her mind, one hand outstretched lazily to hold it in place. Entropy Emily, the girl who could control gravity, sort of. Emily’s hand was sheathed in a mechanical gauntlet, a smaller, more streamlined version—though certainly improvised by the look of it—of the gloves given to her before the great space battle that nearly killed them all. They were given to her, in fact, by the man she currently argued with.
That man was Henry Winter. He looked like a cross between an aging movie star and a parody of an explorer in his khaki outfit. One leg was framed by a sort of exoskeleton brace, a device Winter had created to compensate for a long-injured leg that had left him limping and relying on a cane for years. Former high-tech hero, former billionaire, a man previously thought dead by the entire world, Henry had temporarily given up a job with the government agency dealing with super-powered threats to the world to be here, in the desert, working with Jane and Emily and the others on a task he considered even more important.
They were rebuilding the Indestructibles’ base.
Half-buried in the sand, a blocky space craft jutted out, blackened in places, shattered in others. The ship was still called the Tower by Jane and her teammates, because, when they first encountered it, the craft had been hidden, embedded on top of a skyscraper in the City. But it had been nearly destroyed in the space battle, used by one of their other teammates as a battering ram to destroy an enemy attack vessel. None of them thought it would fly again, that it would be any use at all, but here they were. Henry Winter’s expertise, alongside some very specialized help by the ship’s former Artificial Intelligence, Neal, had been able to get many of the craft’s functions working again. Things like a food-generator, an air temperature moderator, lights, and many of the ship’s communications devices. Still, it looked like a small child had pushed a compl
icated Lego creation off the table and onto the floor, with square-ish pieces scattered and sticking out of the sand like the bones of a great mechanical beast.
Jane chose not to interrupt, but rather to listen to the banter and assess whose side she might have to take. She had very little doubt Henry was right in this case. Emily had a telltale tone to her voice when she was being deliberately antagonistic.
“This goes over there,” Emily said. “You said it goes over there.”
“Then why are you bubble-of-floating it over here?” Henry said.
“Because my gut instinct says you’re wrong,” Emily said.
“I—which one of us is the scientist here?”
“I am a certified genius,” Emily said. “That has to count for something.”
“I’m a MENSA member,” Winter said. “I have six Ph.Ds. How many doctorates do you have?”
“Those are just pieces of paper. I believe in the school of hard knocks.”
“Will you please, please put the alien moisture generator somewhere it will not be buried in a new pile of sand overnight?”
“How about over there,” Emily said.
“You know what? I don’t care,” Henry said.
Behind him, a machine that looked like a a wheeled trash can joke struggled through the sand to join them. Inside that wheeled trash can was the sentience that had once embodied the Tower itself, the AI Neal. Neal survived the Tower’s demise by escaping into the portable body he now inhabited. Jane thought he must find it very frustrating and limiting after living in the body of a spaceship for generations, but the AI, ever patient, seemed unbothered.
“If I may interject,” the AI said.
“Oh, Neal,” Emily said. “We really need to upgrade your body. I hate seeing you living in a bucket.”
“I would not dissuade you from providing an upgrade,” Neal said. “But I must admit this framework is a fine temporary solution.”
The Indestructibles (Book 5): The Crimson Child Page 1