Ever The Hero (Book 1): Ever The Hero

by Harn, Darby

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “And then my mother died. And my father is invisible. I think he thought I could just disappear, too, behind the money. And you can. You can get absolutely lost, among all the other things. You become part of the collection. I suppose that’s all I am. Something to show off at parties, or board meetings. But I’m not just a prop. And this won’t always be his company. For now, I want to be healthy. I want to be happy. I want to be in a place I can be the person GP needs. That Break Pointe does. I wish it wasn’t two hundred miles above the earth. But it won’t so bad. Not if you’re there. Say yes. Come with me.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say yes.”

  All I want to do is say yes. The words assemble on the launch pad. Countdown begins. Engine failure.

  “Ma… she needs me. You don’t understand.”

  “I do,” she says, and smiles, that way people do when they know something they shouldn’t. “You lie there all night, crying yourself to sleep. Begging for some understanding. Peace. You think you’re alone, but you’re not. I hear you, Kitty.”

  Pressure seizes me again, but it’s not hers. It’s the gravity of rushing past all this feeling, all this backfire and backdraft inside me to get back to what I can manage.

  “I don’t cry,” I say.

  She kisses me. “You’re not broken. You’re just you.”

  I don’t want to be broken. I don’t want to be a piece that goes with nothing and no one else. I want to be. I want to fire. How do I do it? How do I just let it happen?

  “Do you know how I’ve been able to hold on these past few days, Kitty? I’ve been able to focus on something. It all gets too much and I think about you. I think about when I took your hand down at the wall, and…” Valene takes my hands. My pulse races beneath my skin, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm. “I think about how you helped me to focus, and it all goes away. I know if you come with me, you can help me. We can help each other.”

  She kisses the salt off my cheek. The tears off my lips. I lean into her. So tired. Exhausted. I didn’t sleep last night. I haven’t slept. Is this some kind of dream or delusion? All I want is to rest in her arms, and let my engine manage some kind of peace for once, ba-dumm, but I can’t.

  “I need to check on my mom,” I say.

  She touches her PEAL. “I’ll send someone.”

  “It really needs to be me.”

  The dome slides back. Sunlight blinds me.

  “Think about it,” Valene says.

  I seize her lips again, pressing, searching for that spark. “You are all I’ll think about.”

  The limousine drops me off back at the Halfway Hotel. I slog tired up to the sixth floor, wooden steps creaking the whole way and I fear for Valene’s peace, across the river. For once, I don’t have any fear for the future. Things will be different now. Things will be better. Even if it doesn’t last with Valene, and how it can last, at least there’ll be a chance to rest now. A chance to breathe. A chance to live and the apartment is quiet. Still. I set my keys on the kitchen counter.

  “Ma?”

  There’s no sign of her. There’s no sound in the apartment, except the ruffle of the blinds, troubled by the breeze off the lake. The flutter of anxious birds careening through the open window, drawn toward the cold, glass heart buried in my room. I don’t follow them this time. I stay at the window, caught on the sight of Ma still on the street below, free of her cage.

  No one comes. There aren’t any police or emergency services in Break Pointe. City cut them down to the bone and the last of them walked. I activate my GP emergency beacon. No one comes. I text Val. Ten minutes go by before she says it’s complicated, someone coming, but is there someone there who can help me? What’s left of the peace I found last night pancakes onto the hell of right now. Everything flattens. Everything is pulverized, compressed down and down and down and half my life I’ve lived in this building. On these streets. I don’t know anybody here. I see their faces, but I never say hello. I go by their doors, but I never go inside. The whole time I’ve been here. What am I thinking? I’m thinking, if I don’t go in, if I don’t become familiar or regular, I don’t live here. If they don’t see me, they don’t know me, then I’m not here. All my life I’ve been leaving, jittery like the birds at the window of the apartment, wings mad with flight that never takes.

  Someone touches my shoulder. The boy from down the hall. Sixteen. Seventeen. Basketball tall. He looks at me, like he expects to see something out of me, but he doesn’t get it.

  “It’s ok,” he says, and he scoops up Ma in the blanket I put over her. I follow behind him as he carries her six flights back up to the apartment, each step creaking and moaning like always, the heart of the building reverberating with an old anxiety built into its bones, troubled by any kind of life.

  I don’t fear.

  I don’t anything, as he rests Ma on her bed, as he says something I don’t hear, as he leaves out into the hallway swollen with people I don’t know but all want to say something, all want to make some connection with me, like they do.

  I sit in the deepening dark. All the bulbs gone, anyways. Numb. Ma rests on the couch beside me, in a metal can inside a cardboard box. A white sticker on the front with her name.

  Baldwin, Fiadh.

  We buried Dad in Break Pointe Pines. I don’t have the money for that, and she didn’t want to be here besides. I don’t have the money to take her back to Dublin, either. I don’t have anything right now, except this headache I’ve had since she opened the window. This knot between my eyes, twisting around the fear that this was me. My fault. The bleeding birds. That fucking crystal. I took it to have something I could turn into rent. Pills. Some kind of future, or at least a present with a little more elasticity in it and all I’ve done is collapse it down to nothing. A shrinking knot. This black hole inside me, eating away, gobbling up all the light in my life.

  All of me.

  My PEAL buzzes. A text from Val. You’re not hurting my ears to talk to me, Kitty. About anything.

  I don’t know what to say. What do you say. Another jolt goes through my hand. 8:37 PM. The last one was an hour ago. Where did an hour go? The dark swallows everything, even time.

  I know what you’re feeling.

  I type something back. What if I don’t feel anything?

  Sometimes there’s so much sound I don’t hear it. It’s just this pressure. This sensation. I know it’s there, even though I’m not completely aware of it. It’s ok, Kitty.

  This was supposed to help her.

  What was?

  Dull red light glows beneath my bed. The windows rattle with the unbroken agitation of birds. I get down on my knees and drag my saddlebag out. Inside, the crystal pulses, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm like this knot in my head, these constant thoughts: you left her. You killed her. You failed her.

  This was supposed to fix it.

  My hand buzzes. Come with me. We can have peace.

  What peace will I have on the space station? I’ll be stuck inside a rolled up tube of toothpaste, floating around with my own thoughts with nowhere to go but out to this dark. This cold. Here, I bike. I go. I vanish into hunting for things I can’t find. I won’t be able to do that there. Even with Valene. She’ll just be another ray of light I shred down to its atoms.

  This was supposed to be my peace.

  I grab the bag. A fortune in here. Find of the century. I don’t care. I don’t care if I’m out on the curb the next time Valene’s limousine pulls up. There’s nothing here for me now.

  I rip the crystal out of the bag and throw it at the wall. Except it doesn’t hit the wall. The Myriad floats in the air, turning slow on a wobbly axis, glowing like magma. My hand burns. I feel dizzy. Lightheaded, like I’ve just given blood or something. Bleeding Jesus. Dead bulbs spark in their lamps. My PEAL flickers like a TV going out. What is this? I pick up the lamp off my desk and throw it at the crystal.

  The lamp careens
into this loose orbit around the crystal until the base thumps against the wall and slides down to the floor. All the energy ebbs out of the Myriad, and the crystal sinks to the carpet of the bedroom floor, dead and dark.

  My hand jumps. Kitty?

  Wait. Wait a second. I open my laptop and search online for video of the Ever. A tiny square of 16mm footage plays in the middle of my rectangular screen. It’s shaky, out of focus, but the film provides the best view I know of the alien and its power. Soldiers sprayed the Ever with flamethrowers. The Ever became a walking inferno. The soldier became flame. The world did. Bullets arced into benign orbits around the alien. Grenades. Everything mankind threw at the Ever, it rejected, its power so great nothing could penetrate it.

  Not even sound.

  I pause the video. Frame by frame, I advance it. In super slow motion, the shock and sound waves of bombs dropped from desperate B-52s blunt against the invisible bubble insulating the alien. Tessellating bow shocks intersect across the boundary of the alien’s magnetic field, right as they vanish from view. I can’t be sure of what I found in the wreck, or if I should even be messing with this thing, but whatever it is, it can help Valene. I can still salvage something from this. I can save her.

  I can fix this.

  “You want me to stay?”

  The soundproof material everything in the residence is made from suppresses her voice, and I can barely hear her. Apparently this is a common thing in here. Valene’s words caption on the windows for my benefit, each of them a screen displaying different values. The news. Stock market ticker. A real time transcript of lovers fighting over the logic of their future.

  “You told me the truth,” I say. “I’ve got to tell you mine. Valene… I was out scavenging for alien tech that night. My mom and I, we don’t have any money. We don’t have anything.”

  She brushes my cheek. “It’s ok.”

  “It’s not very glamorous, I know.”

  She smiles. “You’ve made your living off of alien technology. So has my father. I don’t see the difference.”

  Everyone here lives off the wreckage of the ship. All of us have been made by it. Some of us have been undone.

  “I found something in the wreck,” I say. “I found a way to insulate you from sound.”

  “How?”

  “I need you to trust me.”

  One of those mad brows goes up. “Is it dangerous?”

  I just need to harness enough power from the Myriad without setting off the sequel to 1968 no one ever wanted. No worries.

  “It’s fine,” I say.

  “I don’t know, Kitty.”

  “I know this stuff. I know it inside out. Better than most people. And that’s why I know I can help you.”

  “Everyone has tried,” Valene says.

  “I haven’t.”

  She rolls her eyes a little. “My father would like you. That’s a terrifying prospect.”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  She shakes her head. “No one talks to him.”

  “Let me look at his work. Let me see what they’ve done to try and solve this. I know I can solve it.”

  Her lips wrinkle. “How long would it take?”

  “I have the basic principle,” I say, trying to sound as confident as I can. “I just need materials. Equipment. I’ll work night and day. Nothing else matters. I know I can do this, Val.”

  She kisses me. “Some things can’t be helped.”

  “You really believe that?”

  Valene stands at the window, looking down on The Derelicts, my words printed across her view. “It doesn’t mean nothing can be done. What can be done about the alien ship? Nothing. It’s too dangerous to try and dismantle. So we built a wall around it. It’s not perfect and it’s not pretty, but you do what you can. You know this, better than anyone. You patch and you stitch, and you do it until it doesn’t hold together anymore.”

  Spirals twist out of all my thoughts. Instant whirlpool. Everything sinks down with it. Ma. Birds. A lifetime of broken bulbs and bent silverware and dusting it all up and binning it away. I dust it under the specs and diagrams of a sonic suit I build in my head. A new one for Valene, that runs off the power of the alien crystal, and will repulse sound instead of amplify it like her current one does. I go over every detail. Each individual sonic receiver embedded in the fabric, smaller than dimes, the thread-thin circuitry binding them a labyrinth pattern connected back to the power source. That’s the way out.

  Power.

  Valene takes me in her arms. “I know it feels like a failure. You do, because you have the want. The ability. The power, but you’re stuck watching the world out the windows, because the sound of its pain is too much to bear. Some things we can’t control. But some things we can.” She kisses me, so soft there’s no sound at all. “Let’s go away. Just you and me. You’ve done so much for me already, Kitty. More than I deserve. Let me take care of you. Does anyone take care of you?”

  I bite my lip. “I’m fine.”

  Valene looks at me like Frankie did that night on the roof; she’s evaluating me. “You’re so strong.”

  I’m not strong. I’m just fast. Faster than the gravity pulling at me and don’t think. Don’t feel. Just act. Keep going.

  “Please,” I say. “Let me try.”

  “Can you work from the space station?”

  Given the magnetic properties of the Myriad, might not be the best thing. “This is probably a ground-based operation.”

  “I can’t do this, Kitty.”

  I take her hands. “I can do this. I can. Just give me a little time. A couple weeks. A month. Please.”

  Half a moon rises over The Derelicts. The island gains some definition. Fifty years the ship has sat there in its crater, an open wound no one knows how to close. How do you power down a star? But just because we don’t know how to do something, doesn’t mean we can’t. Nothing has to stay broken. And nothing is unfixable. You just have to keep trying.

  You have to keep going.

  Pain mars her smile. “I do owe you, don’t I?”

  I kiss her. “You won’t regret it. I’ll make this work.”

  Valene nods in a nervous rhythm, the same way she constantly touches her ears, hands cupped like wings, always fluttering with the possibility of flight. She can be free now. She can live, like she meant to. This is why this happened. This is why I’m here now. I can make it right, and Valene can make it right for the city. Then it will be good.

  It will be right.

  Four

  Power surges along microscopic lines and Valene slips on the new sonic suit I’ve built for her, a grateful, relieved smile on her face. She’s safe now. Free of the prison of her powers. Our lips meet, the smack of the kiss muted and I go over the sequence again in my head, as I’ve done every day for the last three months. Filament splices in my mind. Conduit twines. I go over every millimeter of the suit, the specs I memorized, the 3-D model, every waking minute spent trying to harness the cosmic power of the Myriad. I see it in my head, perfect, but I haven’t been able to realize it. Why? What don’t I see?

  Someone bumps into me. “Oh. Sorry.”

  The man drifts off with a scowl. Maybe I bumped into him. I can never be sure, and I can never tell what people are angry about outside the Blackwood Building. Protestors mass before the front gates, more every day. I walk my bike through the crowd, trying to be as invisible as possible. That’s hard, especially with the reporters on scene, and with one in particular.

  “Here,” Frankie says and stakes her claim to the eroding space between the protesters and security guards. The stocky man trailing her moves his hands across the capacitive controls on his flak jacket like apparatus. The tiny light next to the camera embedded in his helmet switches from red to green.

  “The expected meeting between city leaders and Great Power did not take place this morning, and this crisis drags on.”

  A smirk wrinkles in the corner of her mouth, as she listens to the response from
the studio in her earpiece.

  “We’ve yet to hear an official response from GP as to why the meeting did not take place. Maybe if someone is watching inside the Blackwood Building, they can turn off the fan that's blowing all the money around and hear the phone ringing.”

  Protestors crowd behind her, cheering and I inch my bike past the scrum. Diagrams unfold in my mind. Specs. Valene molds out of white space as Frankie lunges out of the crowd at me.

  Her eyes bristle. “Moving up in the world, I see.”

  “I’m late,” I say.

  She tugs on the lapel of my lab coat. “But not on your rent, though. Not anymore. Right?”

  I grip the handlebars. “You don’t know me.”

  “Want to set the record straight?”

  “You know I can’t talk to you.”

  “I know a lot of things, I just can’t report them without sources. For instance, GP is telling City Hall something needs to be done about the debt, or they’re going to leave.”

  “But the city’s broke. If GP leaves, then… there’ll be nothing. How is Break Pointe supposed to solve that?”

  Frankie smiles. “Find out for me.”

  “Do you like beating your head against a wall?”

  Her smile sharpens. “I like beating someone else’s.”

  A gap opens in the protest line. I make my move. As quick as it opens, the gap clamps shut on me. Winter thick clots of spit stick in my hair. The hood of my sweatshirt trails behind me and I fall under an avalanche of voices. My hair rips away, as savage as the yank of the brush through all my curls whenever Ma had tried straightening them back when I was a girl.

  “Get off,” I say. “Get off me!”

  Chains jangle on the wind and the mob scatters as The Interdictor descends down on the street.

  “You’re all trespassing,” he says. “Disperse. Now.”