“It’s been months, babe,” Emily said.
“Months is a relatively short time span for me,” Neal said.
“Don’t be a martyr,” Emily said.
“Neal,” Henry said. “Will you please tell Emily here to put the moisture generator somewhere safe?”
“Follow me, Designation: Entropy Emily,” Neal said.
Emily bopped along behind him happily. She yanked her mask down low enough to stick her tongue out at Henry before following the wheeling AI inside a broken gap in the Tower’s armored hull.
“You’re killing me,” Henry said.
As Emily approached the hole in the hull, someone else emerged, pulling a protective hood up over a neon-orange mohawk. The newcomer was as much machine as human, with both legs gleaming metal below the knee, one entire arm and the other from the elbow down also replaced with cybernetic parts. Her right eye was a glowing green piece of robotic hardware. Still, despite the alarming amount of artificial parts she wore so proudly, the cyborg known as Bedlam looked better than Jane had ever seen her. Henry Winter had helped her improve the parts that had been installed sloppily by the evil organization who had done this to her, and while much of her was obviously, as Bedlam often joked, “not off the shelf,” those parts looked more and more natural, streamlined, and human than ever before. She loosened her over-shirt a bit and Jane caught sight of the gleaming power source embedded in Bedlam’s chest. Once an Indestructibles adversary, Bedlam had changed sides to join them, and her no-nonsense personality had quickly won over Jane. The cyborg woman spotted the solar-powered girl on the dune and strolled up to join her.
“You’re back,” Bedlam said.
“Just got here,” Jane said. She nodded to where Emily and Henry had just been. “They’ve been at it all day?”
“Hours and hours. I don’t know how they get anything done. And it’s worse when they have an audience.”
The young women walked back down toward the ship and followed the perimeter so that Bedlam could walk in the shade while Jane stayed in the sun.
“What’s the latest?” Bedlam said.
“No word from Billy,” Jane said. Billy Case, the Indestructible known as Straylight, had gone to Saturn with others like him—heroes from across the universe sharing their bodies with aliens known as the Luminae. They were building a new home base on Titan. The very idea of it felt unreal to Jane, who had seen so many things in her young life that almost nothing should seem impossible. And yet a race of symbiotic aliens building a new home world on one of Saturn’s moons… that seemed a step beyond the pale. And yet that was where their friend had disappeared to.
Jane studied Bedlam’s reaction to the news. The cyborg felt out of place almost everywhere—which was the reason, really, why she stayed in the desert helping to rebuild the Tower. Billy had promised to bring her to Titan as soon as it became habitable. She is so uncomfortable she wants to leave Earth to start over, Jane thought. She wished there was something she could to fix that.
“And Kate’s in the City, holding down the fort, so to speak,” Jane said, referring to the ballerina turned vigilante known as the Dancer. Kate had been different since they stopped the alien invasion. They’d all been different. Nearly everyone on the team had faced down their own mortality in that final battle, and Kate had been the one to drive the Tower into the attacking armada, a suicide mission she never expected to come home from. Naturally, she’s different, Jane thought. I’m different. Emily is different. None of us are the same.
But Kate… They’d never been the warmest of friends, but there had always been something between them, a shared understanding. The vigilante had become more closed off than ever. Jane worried about her.
Jane worried about everyone, if she were honest with herself.
“What about the hairball?” Bedlam said.
“Titus is up to something,” Jane said, almost smiling. If everyone on the team had pushed the limits of survival during the space battle, the werewolf Titus Whispering had looked death in the eye and won. But unlike the others—Kate’s closed-off behavior, Billy disappearing, Emily loudly putting on a brave front, Bedlam’s hiding, and even Jane’s own quiet melancholy—Titus came back better. The shy, unconfident boy who went into space always seemed to have a plan now. He gave Jane hope. She always knew that if something happened to her as the de facto leader of the team, it would have to be Titus who stepped up. Whatever he was doing right now, she could tell it was to be better prepared for whatever happened next.
“And the old guys?” Bedlam asked.
“Doc sent Korthos back into space to take care of something or possibly to keep him busy and out of trouble,” Jane said. “I don’t know what. And Doc said he’ll be back soon. He’s following up on something weird he got wind of on the… however magicians communicate with each other.”
“He scares me a bit,” Bedlam said.
“He should,” Jane said. Doc had long been her mentor, her guardian, her hero. He’d saved her life and she’d saved his. But no matter how close they were, she always knew: those who touched magic brought danger with them wherever they went. Magic, Doc Silence taught his students, is the most dangerous thing they’d ever face.
“One last question,” Bedlam said, unhooking a canteen of water from her belt.
“Shoot.”
“Can you get your friend the sentient hurricane to stop by and dump a nice big storm on us? I’m so sick of sweating.”
“That’d destroy the ecosystem,” Jane said. “But I can fly you home any time you want to.”
A bang erupted from inside the ship, followed by incoherent arguing between Emily and Henry.
“I just might take you up on that,” Bedlam said.
Chapter 2: The City after the fall
Not long ago, monsters fell from the sky.
These alien invaders plummeted to Earth and began a brief reign of terror, symbiotic warriors cultivated from across the universe as soldiers for a planet-eating symbiotic species.
It seems ridiculous now, Kate Miller thought, perched on the edge of a building as she looked out over the city. But the invasion was real. And it targeted her home. From her vantage point here, she could still see the scars. The invasion was over quickly, a multi-generational cadre of heroes—and even some villains alongside them—driving back the darkness and saving the world.
But in the brief time they were here, the monsters did unspeakable harm.
There were places in the City where smoke still bubbled up from fires that never seemed to go out. Buildings lay in ruins where alien ships crashed, the damage too extensive for the owners to afford. There were more homeless now in the City, though the local and federal governments had worked hard to try to find homes for the displaced. But the City, Kate’s city, wore the battle scars of a place that had seen war. Because it had. Just a blink in the eye of time, shorter than any war humans had waged on each other, but it hadn’t taken long for the invaders to devastate the City.
And this was why Kate Miller, the vigilante known as the Dancer, stayed here while her friends and allies went to the desert to rebuild their spaceship, or went to the stars to build new homes for another kind of lost aliens. She stayed here because this was her city, and someone needed to watch over it.
There was less crime now, Kate realized soon after returning. People seemed too tired, too scared. Yes, there was petty theft, but overall, surviving the invasion had left the City’s residents disinclined to take from each other. She knew that would fade with time—human nature was not altruistic or kind by default, she believed. But for now, the City didn’t need an avenging guardian the way it had in the past.
She also found herself doubting her old tactics. She’d been angrier when she first started her career, and hadn’t ever considered the reasons why someone might turn to theft or other non-violent crime. She’d always preferred to hunt down the violent, those who did harm to others, but looking back, she felt a strange sense of guilt and embarrassme
nt. So blinded by her own need for revenge, she abandoned empathy and embraced the darkness. It had served her well for a while, but now, that anger felt like a burden, and one she still struggled to let go of.
But in a city with little crime for a crime-fighter to address, Kate Miller found another way to watch over her home town.
Many people went missing during the invasion.
Some would later turn up dead, of course, crushed under fallen buildings, victims of alien monsters, accidental casualties as ordinary people made mistakes of incaution as they tried to escape. Others disappeared for other reasons—a chance to leave behind a life they didn’t want, a chance to run away from who they were. And others, of course, were taken. And so, in the absence of people to punch or kick, the Dancer opened herself up to another kind of heroism. She prowled the City looking for the missing.
She’d been unsuccessful tonight, pursuing the trail of a teenaged boy she had begun to suspect, based on the clues she’d found so far, had simply run away from home. His family worried about him, but Kate saw the signs in the things he’d left behind, in the words he’d used on social media, that the boy had, like so many others, seen the invasion as a reason to disappear.
She’d wanted to disappear herself sometimes. She understood the instinct. But the family wanted some sort of answer, and Kate promised she’d find one. Whether that answer would be something the family would want to hear, that was another question entirely.
She slipped down the building’s fire escape and returned to street level. In the shadows of an alleyway, she removed the mask she used to hide her identity and wrapped herself in a long coat to camouflage her costume, turning up the collar against the first hint of snow falling from the sky. She unpinned the bun tightly holding her hair in place and let it fall to her shoulders before stepping out into the street.
She wouldn’t find the boy tonight, but another lost soul was on his way home and she’d promised to meet him at the train station.
Titus Whispering had already arrived when Kate strolled up to the station gates. He smiled at Kate so warmly it made her forget, for just a moment, just how angry she was with him.
Titus looked better than the last time she saw him. He’d suffered the most during the battle in outer space against the parasitic aliens, his body badly burned in an explosion. Titus was a werewolf, and very little could do a werewolf permanent harm, but even his powerful healing abilities still hadn’t quite fixed the baby-pink look to certain spots on his face and neck where the worst of the burns were still healing. He had cut his hair all the way to the scalp not for fashion but because it had been burned away in patches in the battle, and it still grew in unevenly, though Kate could already tell that damage was getting better as well. The hair that did grow back, though, turned more silver than dark, matching the color of his fur when he transformed. In a year or so, Titus had told her, it would look like none of this ever happened. But she knew he was wrong about that. He might heal, but some scars would remain. There was a haunted look to his eyes, the sort of ghostly presence someone who came so close to dying can’t hide.
I almost got him killed, Kate thought. It was my suicide mission into space. My idea. I’m the one who knew it would be a one-way trip.
Titus walked up to her, dropping his duffel bag at his feet to pull her into a ferocious hug. She stiffened, her frustration bubbling up again, but then there he was, the one person she cared about more than anything else in the world, and the words weren’t there anymore. She wrapped her arms around him and held him tight. He felt so small, she thought. He might be a three hundred-pound werewolf when they needed him to be, but when he was not, there simply wasn’t much to him.
The two of us. It’s like we’re barely ever here, she thought.
“I don’t like what you’re doing,” Kate said before Titus could say anything.
“I didn’t know hugs were a bad thing. Who doesn’t like hugs? I mean other than you,” he said, letting her go.
“You know what I’m talking about,” Kate said.
Titus scooped up his bag and together they walked outside into the snow. With the Tower sitting in the desert, Kate had set up an office in an apartment downtown as a makeshift headquarters. They headed that way.
“I have to do this,” Titus said.
“This,” the thing Kate was so upset about, was magic. He’d gone to see Leto, the ancient werewolf shaman who had mentored Titus early on in his transformation, to learn more about the sort of feral magic she practiced. It was not so different than the more classic magic Doc Silence knew, but Titus had chosen not to go to Doc for training.
“No, you don’t,” Kate said. “Doc has always said magic is the most dangerous thing we’ll ever face. I don’t know why you insist on making it your job to learn it.”
“Because Doc won’t always be there,” Titus said. “And when he’s gone, someone has to know the things he knows.”
“Why you? You have a job. You’re our monster,” Kate said.
“That’s very kind of you,” Titus said.
“You know what I mean,” Kate said. “You’re already putting your life on the line, physically, every day. Why should you add all of this mystic garbage to the weight you’re already carrying?”
“I’m the shaman on the hill, Kate,” Titus said.
She glared at him as he pulled a knit hat down over his stubbly scalp. He’s trying to grow a beard, she noticed. This ridiculous boy.
“You sound like a lunatic when you say that.”
“It’s what Leto said I was born to be. It’s what the Whispering werewolves are. We’re the shaman on the hill. We keep the monsters at bay. It’s my job, Kate. I was born to stop the things that go bump in the night.”
“You are a thing that goes bump in the night.”
“So are you.”
“True,” Kate said.
Titus paused. The snow caught on his coat and gleamed like stars. He seemed so far away, Kate thought. Standing next to me, worlds apart.
“Why does this bother you so much? You’re the last person to tell anyone they’re taking on too much of a burden. That’s all you do, take on other peoples’ burdens.”
Kate chewed her lower lip for a moment, letting the silence grow heavy and belligerent between them. Snowflakes danced in yellowy streetlights.
“You’re barely human, Titus,” Kate said. Titus opened his mouth to speak, but Kate cut him off. “No. No, I never talk. Let me talk.”
Titus nodded and waited.
“You’re not human, not really. You’re something else, you’re something more. And every time you go away, every time you go north to learn more about what you are, you come back a little less you, and a little more whatever it is you’re becoming. And that’s your right, Titus, that’s what you are and that’s what you deserve to be and I will not ever, not ever try to stop you.”
She stuffed her hands in her pockets and looked away.
“But magic makes people even less human,” Kate said. “Look at Doc. Look at the Lady. They’re barely here anymore. They exist… it’s like they exist in two places at once. Above and below. And I am just a person, Titus. I am just a pile of scars and bad decisions and nothing more than that, and I’ll never be anything more than that, and every time you… You’re…”
“Kate,” Titus aid.
“I don’t want you to become someone I can’t talk to anymore,” Kate said.
“I’m still here,” Titus said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“This is why I don’t talk,” Kate said. “I’m bad at it.”
“We don’t have to talk anymore tonight,” Titus said.
“Good,” she said.
And so they walked, vigilante and werewolf, silent but together, as snow fell on a broken city that still needed them both.
Chapter 3: The low roads
The sun splashed warm, golden light across the Plaza de Espana in Sevilla, the grand circular construction looking more like something out
of a fantasy film than a modern city. Doc Silence, one of the world’s last remaining magicians, did not look the way one would expect from a man of his career. No pointed hat or wizard’s robes, the magician wore a long dark coat over a tee shirt and jeans, his eyes—which, when unhidden, glowed with an indigo light—covered by red-lensed glasses. He had let his beard grow since the battle against the alien invasion, and he’d been unhappy to discover that hair that had once been supernaturally silver-blue had begun turning white.
Time, he thought. Time is catching up to me.
Aging didn’t concern him, though. Wizards had a way of living past their expiration date anyway. What worried him now, and what brought him here to this beautiful structure in Spain, was a series of clues that indicated that something was wrong in the shadow world where magic ran parallel to the ordinary one. He’d found hints across the world, traveling the low roads where distance was a suggestion and reality bent and warped in ways only the mystical would allow. He’d talked to seers in Louisiana and exorcists in Rome; monster hunters in London and demon-trappers in Tokyo.
Something wasn’t right, and no one was quite sure what it was. The magical world was sick. And it would take a doctor to fix it.
I never meant to be the last man standing, Doc Silence thought, enjoying the warm Spanish sunlight, listening to the voices of tourists and locals. Bells rang in the distance. He loved this place. He’d spent one good week in Seville before he’d become the accidental superhero he’d eventually grow into. Back when he had friends who were ordinary in the wonderful way people who aren’t like him are. Some of his last conversations as a normal person happened here, before he learned that nightmares were real, before he began a career sealing up monster-holes in closets and driving off evil spirits and stopping blood-cults from raising elder gods.
One week, one summer, drinking coffee out of tiny porcelain cups with people who knew his real name. Doc Silence gave up his real name to become a magician, as all magicians do. There were days he couldn’t call it to mind without trying.
The Indestructibles (Book 5): The Crimson Child Page 2