Ever The Hero (Book 1): Ever The Hero

by Harn, Darby

  No. There is something I can do.

  I tear past Piller out of the aisle. I have to be quick; I’ve only got hours now. If that. I twist my ankle stepping on someone’s toes in the aisle. No scream. Only thunder. Cheers. A storm of support. I limp out of the balcony, down the main stairs. People clog the lobby. Security blocks the way out. Reporters push past me, knocking me to the floor.

  “Val,” I say, but no one hears me.

  The Myriad sparkles inside my mind, inside its crystalline cocoon, a puzzle waiting to be solved and I hurry out of the tower, into the marbled plaza sprawling between it and the lake. The bike rack. Where’s the bike rack? A cool, harsh wind shunts me off course, grounding the gulls always loitering in the plaza. I pull my leather jacket on as I fumble with the keys.

  Abi sits on the end of the rack, with an open bottle of wine. “I was worried about you.”

  I unlock the bike. “I have to go.”

  Thunder caroms off the plaza. A skimmer docks with the tower, high above. I don’t have any time. Don’t think. Don’t feel. Just do something.

  I side saddle the bike. “She needs me.”

  Abi shadows me through the plaza. “What do you need?”

  I stop. “What?”

  “Nobody ever asks you that, huh? Not even you. What if we got a drink over at the Pav? I think you need to talk to someone. I think you want to. You want to say something, but you can’t really do that with her, because obviously.”

  “I’m not going for a fucking drink with you, Abi.”

  Abi wilts. “I’m just trying to help.”

  I bite down hard on my lip. Words bleed out anyway. “I don’t need any help. And I don’t have time for this.”

  “You don’t have any bandwidth. Not for silly stuff like girls who crush hard on you. And not for your own pain. You have no idea how much pain you’re in.” She brushes my lip with her thumb, and wipes away the blood trickling down my chin. “You just pick up everyone else’s. You think you don’t understand it, that’s like some alien language, but that’s only because you can’t filter it. You can’t process it. It’s too much.”

  “Ok,” I say. “I have to go.”

  Abi grabs my hand. “Come get a drink with me. Just talk to me. I get lonely, too. I get scared, too.”

  I’m terrified. All the time. Every day with Ma, I lived in fear of what might happen next. What might never happen. I never admitted it. I never permitted it, I couldn’t. Not if I wanted to function. Someone had to function. Someone had to get us through the day. My mother was gone, but the fear lived on. The fear had only gotten stronger. Stranger. Heavier.

  I look back at Abi. “Why are you scared?”

  She shrugs. “I think they all see me. I think they all know I don’t belong here. I mean, I don’t have any powers. I’m not a genius. I’m not anybody’s daughter. I’m here because I have to be here and then I met you. And you’re like the most frustrating chick on Earth.” She brushes my cheek. “See? She can smile.”

  “Abi…”

  “One drink.”

  “You’re the kindest person.”

  “Ok, two.”

  “You are. You’re lovely to me.”

  “So… let’s get drunk and be lovely together.”

  I step back. “I’m in love with Valene.”

  “Are you, or are you because you feel like you have to be?”

  I don’t answer. There isn’t an answer for Abi. There’s only one for me, and it’s waiting for me back in the garage.

  “Good night, Abi.”

  “Kit, that was wrong. I didn’t mean that.”

  I pedal away, fighting the wind clipping off the lake as I leave the gleaming tower, back into a world of darkness.

  I snap my fingers. Nothing happens. No sonic bubble forms around the suit. Energy flickers inside the Myriad. Power pulsate from within, ba-dumm but none of the inherent power of the device transfers via the filaments I’ve wed to it.

  Damn it.

  My PEAL buzzes with a text. I swipe at the screen, thinking it’s from Val, that’s she’s staying, but it’s from Abi.

  I’m so sorry.

  I flick it away.

  Another arrives a second later. I will now begin to text you one line at a time the complete and unabridged Shakespeare in an effort to indicate the depth of my shame.

  I mute my PEAL. Sweat stings my eyes as I fight the narrow, blind corners of the power pack. I don’t understand. I thread filament and rearrange the composition of ad hoc conduits again and again and again. Nothing proves successful. Minutes become hours in the basement and I tear off my gloves off in frustration. Daylight cracks through the basement door.

  I don’t have any time.

  I put my hand on the Myriad, nestled inside the power pack like a piece of coal that won’t fire. Static electricity snaps at my skin. Light cracks beneath its crystalline surface. I stand back, startled. The Myriad changes shape every second, an embryonic Big Bang waiting to explode. Shit. Arcs of energy leap from the device into the suit. Oh, shit. The sonic receivers I’ve spent months replicating vanish. A hyaline tide sweeps away every last trace of my desperate work until it’s gone.

  I probably shouldn’t have messed with this.

  The last of the suit burns away and the Myriad hangs in the air, a ball of gnarled lightning that spits out bolts into the form of arms. Legs. Caustic light ripples across the walls of the basement as the Ever steps out of the container.

  Absolutely, should not have messed with it.

  A ganglion of writhing energy tendrils project out of the heart of the Ever. Jesus. I scramble behind a slumping mattress that catches fire from the whip the Ever lashes at me. What did I do. The alien flickers in and out of view, the storm in its heart fading and I decouple the cables I’ve got running to the power box. Nothing.

  I run for the stairs. Pressure tugs at my ankles. Heat. There’s nothing to hold on to as the Ever lassoes me up in coils of energy. I go numb. My fingers scrape against stone. Energy burns through my skin. Flames burn through the dress.

  I fire.

  Cords of energy twist around me, within me, tighter and tighter. Every breath produces enormous pressure on my chest, inside and out and I can’t breathe. There’s no air, there’s no air, I’m dying right now and the alien crushes me down, all my disasters pancaking into one and then

  I’m falling

  into the infinity of my own body, the Myriad a star at the heart of a scarlet nebula expanding in voices thundering out of the void I plummet into. So many I hear nothing else, not even the beating of my heart

  ba-dumm

  but I’m still me, disintegrating into voices, into my own collapsing consciousness

  I’m

  still

  Eight

  Shades of burgundy illuminate white cliffs plunging into perfect blue that deepen the farther I fall. Ribbons of me trail off of me. I grab for the cord and I slam against an invisible barrier. I clump against the wall of a sonic bubble. Valene hovers above me in the a pressurized version of her sonic suit, her laughter ricocheting around the bubble, sending ripples through it and pinching the surety right out from under my arms.

  “I told you,” she says. “I’ll never let you go.”

  This is three months ago. This is my memory. I’m remembering, or I’m dreaming, or I’m dying and this is where my mind retreats to: the one good day we had. Peace at 40,000 feet.

  “You dropped me,” I say, my voice propagating into the layered harmonies of a Queen song as soon as it leaves my mouth.

  “You’re fidgety.”

  I float back to Valene. “I’m no such thing.”

  She kisses me, and my legs kick like a sleeping dog.

  “Fidgety,” she says.

  Winds carry us far from the city, north over the lake. Above, stars murmur in the confusion between day and night, refusing to be caught. Popcorn canyons erode beneath us. My hands tremble as I lock my arms around her. I don’t want to do this. I kno
w I’m going to do this. The memory plays out and I close my eyes. Don’t look down, don’t look down, don’t look down and fireworks burst far below, near the surface. Is it the Fourth of July? Can’t be. We met after that.

  Valene kisses my cheek. “I told you it would be fine.”

  My legs bolt around her. “We’re going to use up this air. We could pass out, and drop all the way to the ground.”

  “Shh.”

  “We could die of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  “That’s unlikely, isn’t it?”

  “We don’t have parachutes, Val.”

  “We don’t need them. We don’t need any of this.”

  She zips down the front of my jumpsuit. My gasp echoes around the inside of the bubble so fast it warms. Chilly fingers touch off goose pimples on all over my skin.

  “You’re freezing,” I say.

  Her whisper brushes my ears. “You’re warm.”

  Her fingers sink into my heat. My surprise reverberates through both of us. My naked joy. When was the last time someone touched me; when was the last time I felt anything like this. My heart pulses between her fingers, ba-dumm, quickening with her hand and let this last. Please. Let this be the last thing I’m thinking of as it all goes dark, her hand between my thighs, skin tingling with sonic vibrations. By the time we drift into Canada, Valene has to stop and warm her hands five more times.

  I hold tight to her as we descend. “I love you.”

  Valene’s breath gushes hot against my neck. “Shh.”

  “I won’t ever let go.”

  Never. I’ll never let go. I’ll figure this out. Whatever is happening, I can figure it out and I can still save Valene. I can wake up from this bleeding nightmare and put us back together. God help me, I know I can and an airplane lances the clouds below us. The sound of its engines comes a moment later, a delayed punch that never lets Valene forget that no matter how high she goes, how far we run, it will never be enough.

  The bubble bursts. We plunge, so fast the clouds evaporate into fireworks. Red stars explode all around us. I rip away from her. I sink like a stone, into shockwaves of sound so strong I hear nothing. The force of them pushes me down, deeper and deeper. She springs up and away from me, rocketing into the nothing above until I can’t make her out from the other stars.

  “Val!”

  My feet flail as I hurtle back into The Derelicts. Strands of birds string out around me. I don’t fear, I just watch as I meteor toward some fate beyond understanding. At the very least, I’ll make a decent crater in the constellation along Byrne.

  I land on my feet.

  The street isn’t buckled. The buildings aren’t burnt out husks. The cars lining the curbs aren’t melted scabs. A blue and white Break Pointe PD squad car, fresh off the lot, blocks the intersection ahead. The officer steps out of the car, firing his revolver. Bullets pass clean through me.

  What is happening.

  Blood doesn’t well out of my jumpsuit. The nylon fabric ripples. I’m not wearing the suit. I’m not wearing anything. Now I’m a walking lightning storm, and I keep walking toward the cop, no control over my movements or my actions and a beam of red light erupts from my chest. The cop vanishes within it.

  I want to wake up now.

  The light fades and within my scream, I can hear his. He cries for Mary, alone in the house all day with no kids to mind. They’ve tried for years and it’s his fault; he knows it is, even though she keeps going to the doctors and she sits in the waiting room, holding his hand, the results hanging over them and Maybe we could adopt, she says. We could save up the money. He doesn’t say anything in the hospital. I’m in the hospital with them. I am him, staring into the mirror in the bathroom after the results, trying to square a circle and what is the matter with you? Are you defective? Are you a man?

  Who are you?

  Two years. If I put away ten dollars a paycheck for the next two years, we’ll have enough for the adoption. Mary saves all the stubs, placing them under a cellophane sheet in a photo album she buys at Sears for out eventual child and I can see all the pictures, all the frosted birthdays and wrapped Christmases, the school uniforms and family trips to D.C. or maybe New York, just to say we did it, but if I could, I’d like to be one of those boys flying on those rockets to the moon and I soar across the ashtray surface of the moon, unbound and unfettered in my wonder, my utter confusion out of this body toward a hundred thousand planets and moons tessellating in my memory.

  Bronze habitat rings float above an iron sea. Defense fighters fly to and from the rings, cities in the sky and somehow I know what this is. Smoke trails from the edges of the nearest one. Sounds of explosions boom across the jagged beach. The obsidian glass of soldiers’ helmets swirls with the conflagration. Lasers spit from their guns, right past me.

  I’d appreciate it if people stopped shooting at me.

  I’d appreciate a fucking clue, or at least a line I can pull to let me off this ride but I walk into the fire, mad, red energy surging through my entire body and then out like exhaust. The soldiers get closer and closer, until I see my reflection in their helmets. I don’t see a curly haired light skinned girl but the faceless visage of the Ever. A ball of lightning.

  But I’m me.

  Lasers burn into me. I shoot them right back out. I burn the strange beach black. The soldiers fight with their guns. Knives. Their bare hands. They tear off their helmets and hurl them at me. Underneath, they aren’t men but lizard things speckled in colored feathers. One after another, they vanish into my fireworks. The crumbs of who they were glitter within the light of the Myriad. The music of their thoughts has no rhythm I can understand, but the more I listen, the more their nonsense words become as familiar to me as English or Irish.

  One voice among them sticks to the inside of the drain the others all funnel down. His dying consideration Destos, another world apart from this one of the iron sea. I blink, and I’m there. I’m him, this is me, shimmering like an oil slick, walking with a woman of blue skin, wearing a dress like it was weaved from the wings of a fly. My partner. My love. Eight moons. We’ve been together eight moons, and she doesn’t want me to go, but I have to go because if we don’t fight the Ever – me – then we’ll fight them here. She gleams in the light of a thousand stars, on a warm night along the river of the Fallen City. This is my last thought, as I scatter in the scouring light of the Ever and I’m the alien again, culling the Fallen City. All the cities on Destos fire off me, a magenta spark that burns across the entire planet. The galaxy. The universe.

  So many worlds. So many people. The people.

  They’re all here. I sense them. Hear them. Thunder. A thunderstorm crushed into the space of a neutron star, a lump of crystal containing a stolen universe of energy, of life and memory bleeds together. Photo albums at Sears. Leaden shores. Goosebumps at cruising altitude. My life fuses with the lives of others, paint mixing into endless color and I am all the people the Ever has ever acquired. The police officer. The warrior on Destos. All their lives are my life, my mind now a room with countless doors that open on cities and worlds and universes. The Ever doesn’t consume the infinite souls they acquire.

  They store them.

  The answers are there, beneath the surface of the ocean bottled within me. The farther I sink, the less there is of me and the more there is of the voices, compressed like coal into a diamond pain grinding me down into nothing, my fear and grief and pain burning bright as a star being swallowed into a black hole but I have no pain to give. No grief. No fear. None of that ever got installed me. They didn’t fit, or didn’t take, doesn’t matter it sits in boxes unopened in the closet, dragged out only in fits of confusion. I pick them all up, like I do the broken glass of light bulbs, trailing through the apartment, into Valene’s residence in the sky, into her arms as we fall through the clouds and I hold tight to her. It’s too much, she says, letting go and I crash against the basement floor of the garage.

  “What…”

  The co
ntainer looms behind me, empty. Months of work, vaporized in an instant. Speakers toppled over. Mattresses on the floor, blackened and charred. The Ever is gone. The Myriad. It’s like it didn’t even happen. I push up off the floor and my hand is a soap bubble, speckled with light. No. Oh, no. I can see clean through my hands, my fingers, my arms, my body an empty glass, save for the lambent fire in my heart.

  I scream for a long time.

  My color comes back. My softness, or at least my flesh. I don’t know I’ve ever been soft. My clothes are my clothes again, and not facsimiles blown in liquid glass. The teeming light beneath my breast remains. My skin a lampshade. Fractals of peach, wine and violet float like bubbles through my hands, up and down my arms, before sinking out of view.

  “What… what is this…”

  I swipe at the back of my hand. Tendrils of energy bristle against the transparent boundary of my skin. Only the half circle outline of the adhesive the PEAL stamped on my hand remains. Burnt blobs of glue. I reach for the laptop and a current of energy arcs out of the palm of my hand into the computer. Quick as I blinked from Byrne in 1968 to Destos, whenever, all the information I’ve got stored on the computer, the specs, the files arrive in my head. So much information clouds my thoughts I forget what I’m doing; where I am. Who I am. The Ever reflects in the screen. Electric panic shoots through me and the alien flickers away, leaving me behind.

  Am I the alien, or am I me?

  A dream; has to be a dream. I’m still asleep. I drank something, at the gala. Someone spiked the wine. I fell asleep, exhausted from the stress of this work, from Val, my mind stretched to its limits. That’s all. I’m fine. I’m ok. A dream. A nightmare. Nightmares are just like the bullies I ignored in school. I didn’t engage. Didn’t react. I stayed above it all and watched my demons plummet back to their smallness, their reach exceeding their grasp and I bite the inside of my cheek.

  My face ripples.

  I don’t think this is a dream. Questions spark a thousand others. Was I acquired by the Myriad? If so, how I am still here? Still me? I’m still me. Everything snaps at me like static cling and I taste this burnt sort of metal, it’s gross, but I’m still me. I’m ok, I’m just – what happened? What was I doing? The last test failed. I tore my gloves off in frustration. I touched the Myriad. The suit came to life. The alien did.