by Harn, Darby
“And it did. Blackwood decided he’d heard enough from the women. We got demoted. Reassigned. Hit with NDAs. So I quit. I could have gone to Found. Opened my own practice specializing in Empowered. Made a lot of money. But we don’t worry about if we can afford to get sick. We don’t choose between a meal and a pill. So I’m over here, doing what I can.”
I take a drink. “You do a lot.”
“I could use some help.”
“My mom,” I say, swaying with the wine in my glass.
“Your mom?”
“Was a nurse. She was a nurse, when I was younger.”
“There you go,” Vidette says.
The ocean of wine and history it stems from swells within me. In the water, my mother wavers.
Are you the light?
I drain the rest of the glass and fill it again. “I’m free. I’m probably fired now. I’m pretty late for work.”
“You like to help people.”
“It would just be nice if I could.”
“I know the feeling. Ronny was telling me all about you at the anniversary gala. He said our kid would have been like you. Always pounding her fist on the table at the same time she’s trying to make sure the legs don’t fall out from under it.”
I circle the rim of my glass with my finger, making it sing. “What happened with you guys?”
Her smile stings. “The usual. We just grew apart. It happens. People want different things.”
“What did you want?”
Vidette stares up at the ceiling. “What did I want? I was the strongest person in the world. I was on Johnny Carson. Twice. I had an action figure. And it was great. But not what I wanted. I wanted to be useful. I wanted to make a difference.”
The glass turns in my hand. “He lives for his work.”
“He’s too much like Blackwood, except Blackwood wants for himself. He saved the world and all, and he did, but sometimes I think he believes that ship fell on him and not Break Pointe. You know? Like it was all for him. It’s like Frankie. She thinks all this is about her. Her career. Not people. Not justice.”
My lip curls. “She’s a snake.”
“I could see her getting longer the more she stood there.”
Out the windows of the patio doors, stars burn through the veil of night over the city. Some of them twinkle so fierce I think they’re moving. Airplanes. Meteors. Angels from heaven.
“You think you and Dr. Piller will ever get back together?”
Vidette sighs. “Just because someone isn’t in your life anymore doesn’t mean you have to let go of them. It just means you have a little more slack in your arms than you started with. But, hey. We all get a little loose in places.”
Her boozy smile vanishes. She goes tense. “Ah, shit.”
“What?” I say and then I hear his voice in my head:
Open up, Dr. Piller says. I know you’re both in there.
I spring off the couch, triggering a violent scatter in the birds anxiously waiting for me out on the patio. How do I get out; how do I fly away without anyone noticing? This entire city is cameras. Vidette keeps on the couch, ignoring Piller, the slur in his voice and the rattle of the door louder and louder until finally he punches or kicks it and she goes to the door.
Piller leans against the frame, eyes glassy and red. “Why don’t you answer your phone?”
She stands in the door. “You know where I am. You always know. This is such bullshit you do this to me.”
“It’s bullshit I care about you? She could touch you and you’d be gone.” I put my gloved hand on his. Piller jumps back so fast he trips over the coffee table and plops backwards onto the couch. “Whoa – what are you – wait. Why am I not dead?”
Vidette opens another bottle. “Presented without comment.”
Piller straightens up on the couch. “Are you… is she wearing your suit? You gave her your costume?”
She doesn’t say anything. Whatever she’s thinking right now triggers another sigh of frustration in Piller.
“She’s an alien,” he says.
“And you’re a drunk. I’m a drunk. We’re both drunks, Ronny, and yet somehow we still meet the minimum standard for being human. Tell me something. While you were at the bar getting loaded up with enough courage to come over here, didn’t it occur to you eavesdropping on our thoughts that it was Kit you were listening to, and not some extinction-happy alien?”
If he hears my thoughts, I must be real. I must still be me. Maybe it’s like Abi said; I’m a software patch. An updated operating system. I overwrote the Ever. I’m me, just different. More. But that would mean the old version is still there. The option remains to revert back to it. I can’t let that happen.
His hand scrapes across his jaw. “What were you thinking?”
“You tell me,” I say.
“Being glib isn’t going to help you now, Ms. Baldwin.”
“Doesn’t hurt.”
If I could just flick it away; if I could just smash it all to pieces and start over. What if that’s what Ma was doing? Smashing her troubles to try and make something new of their debris. She couldn’t. She didn’t have the tools to fix anything. I thought I did. I thought I was some type genius who could cobble a solution out of lint and gum, but I’m no better equipped than Ma. My bulbs are just bigger. Brighter.
“You’re Kit,” he says.
“What?”
He taps his temple. “The light bulbs. All the time in the lab, that’s all you were thinking of. Light bulbs.”
I don’t know what he means. I don’t think about them, at least not all the time. But I should be glad he was peeking on me. My thoughts are the same as before. My mind. My soul.
Piller digs his way out of the couch. “Ms. Baldwin. Kitsie. Come back with me to the lab. We’ll figure this out.”
“I’ll end up in the vault.”
“No, you won’t,” Vidette says. “Will she, Ronny?”
A notification on his PEAL interrupts his response. We all receive it, simultaneously, an urgent jolt in the hand. I tap my screen. A NOW news alert appears, and video starts to play.
Outside City Hall, Frankie Fleet smiles into the camera. “That’s right, Dan. A massive manhunt is currently underway in Break Pointe for the unidentified individual seen here…”
The live shot of downtown changes to the fuzzy cell phone footage from Abi’s apartment Frankie showed me earlier.
“…by all appearances, the Ever.”
This. Bitch.
I scramble into the garage to gather up all I have left and what do I have left? Everything I thought I needed from the apartment I’ve been carrying around in my saddlebag. Where’s the saddlebag? Where’s the bike? Fuck. I forgot.
The bike is gone.
Somebody took it. Everything was in there. Polaroid picnics. Shopping mall Santas. Surprise mutating to resignation. Resignation hardening to stillness at Dad’s funeral. There wasn’t a funeral for Ma. Just a case I kept her ashes in, and the idea I’d do something them. I don’t know if there is a place for either of us, two stray socks that made an unfit pair, lost in the tumble of the world. Maybe Ireland. The Liffey. The Shannon. Something big and expensive to make up for all the bad and I’ll help you, Valene said. Let me help you. But I didn’t want her help with the ashes. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want it weighing me down and now the case is gone.
Ma is gone.
This sound comes out of me. A broken wheel. No one hears. No one knows. Everything is gone. Dad. Ma. Me. This sound, this isn’t me; I don’t have lungs. Vocal cords. A tongue. This is energy, compressed into sound waves. This is simulacra, like the rest of me. I am what I always was. A shell. A skin, peeled off someone else and stretched over the body of someone better.
Maybe it’s better this way. I should call Frankie. Turn myself in. I am the alien. The freak. The monster. I’m the void containing all the voices and lives of others, but none of my own. Come close. Get a look. Stretch. Pull. Tear me to shreds.<
br />
My hand buzzes. Where r u???
I don’t answer Abi. It’s not safe for her to be around me. It’s not safe here at all. Where do I go? I don’t have anything. Anyone. I could be anyone. Maybe. Fear and paranoia tore the world apart in the immediate aftermath of 1968, as the world waited for more invasions, as they suspected people of being the Ever in disguise. All that fear will return now, and all of it will land on me. Any minute an army of Responders are going to show up. Valene will never know what became of me.
Where am I going?
Every few minutes the searchlights of the airships sweeping the city lash the night sky, illuminating a dark rain of Responders that never falls. I duck into an alley as the chrome cloud of the patrol ship drifts overhead, east across The Derelicts. Ships cut a grid across the island, scouring the ruins with light while at the same time broadcasting the same video of Professor Blackwood on a loop, his pancaked face stretched across the dirigibles’ digital canvas. His words echo through the empty streets on repeat: JUSTICE. PEACE. SECURITY.
It’s not just GP in search of ‘the alien menace.’ According to one of the endless news alerts throttling my PEAL, the military dispatched its top Empowered soldier here for ‘additional security.’ No one knows his name. People just call him the Uniform. Tall, dark, muscular, white.
I guess.
I wait for the ship to pass and then pull the hood of my jacket tight as I run through the dead weeds into Crown Station. The swap meets at varying times, to throw off scrutiny; word on the street was it’s been suspended indefinitely.
I don’t have indefinitely.
My footsteps clatter through the train shed like a retreating thunderstorm. Candlelight flickers in the window of the train car Gennady works out of. For a long time, I’ve thought the old man lives in the car. Finding him in his chair, hand perched on his cane, I’m certain he does.
“Kitty Cat. I am thinking you in space with Valene.”
I sink into the chair across from him. “I wish.”
Nothing in six months of news articles has told me a thing about Valene’s condition. The lid GP kept on her health is even tighter now; no one knows anything, or no one is saying.
“Where are you being, then?”
“The jury is still out on that.”
His brows arch. “You bringing me something?”
I pass him a backpack stuffed with all the random parts I’ve collected over the years that didn’t go into the suit or some other invention. Some of it is priceless.
He sets the pack down on the floor. “Cashing out?”
“I need to get out of town.”
He strokes his beard. “Why?”
I tug at the zipper of my jacket. Even with Vidette’s suit on underneath, I don’t feel any safer. “I just do.”
“Someone on to you?”
Birds flutter through the train shed, and flirt with hitting the windows of the car. “I’m picking up a following.”
Gennady taps his thumb against the top of his cane. “GP works, GP goes on strike, is all the same. Only thing that changes is price for them to leave you alone.”
“GP knows about the swap?”
He nods. “They shine their light and all the rats run away. Thing about rats, though. They get in everything. They go under, between, in and around. Da. They carry things. Disease. Secrets. Rats you live with. Rats you tolerate.”
Blackwood wants what’s behind the wall. He can’t get behind the wall. People like Gennady can. People like me.
“I need to go,” I say.
“You my best hound, Kitty Cat.”
“Not anymore.”
He taps his cane on the floor. “Eddie.”
Eddie comes out of the back with a cigar box. Gennady rests his cane between his legs as he counts through the thick stacks of cash inside the box. He counts out fifty one hundred dollar bills. Five thousand. More than I’ve ever seen. Enough to get me gone. Nowhere near enough to get me started again on the project of bringing Valene home. If I leave, I leave any hope of her.
“You don’t have more, Gennady?”
“I am having proposition for you. You are knowing things. Valuable things. I know a man. I trade with him, many years.”
I fidget with my gloves. “Who’s he with?”
The black market for alien technology is a global one, drawing interest from corporations and countries afraid of falling behind an America limitless in knowledge and ability. Some of them, like Wěidà, regard Break Pointe like a chessboard. Others, like Brexon, view it as a battlefield.
“Found Corp,” Gennady says.
I twist the strings of my hoodie around my fingers. The competition. Makes sense. I can trade some insider knowledge for cash, and no doubt Gennady will collect a nice finder’s fee. Doing this, I’ll be betraying GP. Valene. No. Betraying her would be to do nothing; to let her suffer in silence.
“I can’t wait,” I say.
“He is here, my friend.”
“In Break Pointe?”
“He help you. He help you now. Da?”
Another day and I might be in chains. “Yes.”
Gennady taps his cane in approval, and hands me the cash. I stand up to leave, feeling uneasy. A compass with infinite norths. A hundred times or more I’ve come and gone out of this train car, always knowing the way out. Now, I’m not so sure.
“I hate to lose you, Kitty Cat.” Gennady strokes his beard. “But you go to better home.”
I leave the station, down into the subway, trying not to think. Old advertisements of Valene fade inside cloudy frames in the tunnel between Crown Station and Harrison. She hovers in the air, arms outstretched, her promise written into the clouds:
GREAT POWER FOR ALL.
I don’t have anything to do but wait. I’ve nowhere to go, not with the apartment, the garage, Abi’s building all under a microscope. I buy a new bike at the swap and just ride. All night. Raccoons scurry across streets like ray systems of craters vanishing into piles of rubble taller every hour. Vacant lots more infinite. My belly rumbles constant as the bike. Am I hungry? Do I still need to eat? Concrete heaves from broken water mains like my pulse through her hand and I hear you, Valene said and I keep on, hands numb, teeth sore.
Birds trail behind me. So much for anonymity. Energy radiates through the dark, through me, the people in the shadows. My senses aren’t my senses anymore, but the perception of the Myriad. Strands of energy invisible to any other eye crisscross the ruins, frustrating me, denying me and I lose control of the bike. I crash into the pitted asphalt on Excelsior. Vidette’s suit insulates me against the ambient energy free in the world, but not the chaos inside. A voice chases me in the dark, We must continue, we must continue, we must continue, a current luring me always toward the ship.
Another voice breaks the dark. “Need a hand?”
A man strides down the street, outfitted in a mostly white bodysuit, lined with red and blue. Shit. The Uniform.
“Identification,” he says.
Twelve
“I’ll wear my seatbelt next time,” I say.
He smiles a bit. “ID.”
This ought to be brief. “Well. This isn’t my bike. It is. But my old one was stolen and I had my bag on it and ID and money and really everything, so it was nice meeting you.”
The Uniform removes his helmet, which is more like an army type helmet that has a faceguard precision crafted to mold perfectly with the rugged lines of his tight chin. Very tight.
“PEAL,” he says.
“Pardon?”
He points to my right hand. “Your PEAL. It has all your biometric information on it. Let’s see it.”
I probably don’t want to show him my PEAL. Or anything else. “Did I wander past a checkpoint or something?”
“You really shouldn’t be out here, miss. We have a bit of a situation at the present, involving a possible alien threat. Maybe you’ve seen the news. It’s not a great idea for a young woman like yourself to be out here in t
he ruins alone at night.”
“Well, maybe you can walk me home, and if you’re a decent guy, I’ll ask you to the Sadie Hawkins dance.”
The Uniform tucks his helmet under his arm. “Sadie Hawkins. That’s a reference to something. Something old, right?”
He’s about the same age as me. Thirty, tops. Sadie Hawkins isn’t that old. I don’t know what people know. Mostly we forget. History doesn’t hold a lot of value to some people. What do they care what came before; they just want to make their own.
“Not a big reader?” I say.
He shrugs. “I’m more a visual guy. For instance, while you’ve been – admirably, I might add – stalling on your ID, I’ve run a trace on my own PEAL based on your image, Ms. Baldwin.”
“You didn’t even touch it.”
He taps his temple, and his PEAL, a full circle on his left hand lights up. “This one is military issue. Has a few special features not on the market. Shh. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Well, shit.”
Prison might not be so bad. I can make stuff in prison. People do all the time. Wine. Shavers. Shanks. Birds flap around me. Go away. Not now. I try and shoo them off with my hands.
“I wonder what’s got them bothered,” he says.
“They’re always bothered.”
He glances back at me. “Right.”
They tumble around me in wide, big arcs and I give them all a little invisible magnetic push. Confused chirps echo off the ruins, along with the mad flutter of anxious wings.
The Uniform comes closer. He takes a long look at me, like Ma’s relations from Dublin did when they came to visit when I was ten or so. Like they knew me, but they didn’t.
“That was weird,” I say.
“Seen anything else unusual lately?”
“It’s Break Pointe. Unusual is kind of the usual here.”
He nods. “All the more reason not to be out here. You should come with me, Ms. Baldwin.”
“Am I in trouble?”
He shakes his head. “You’re not who I’m looking for.”
My shoulders sink. “Way to wind me up.”