Ever The Hero (Book 1): Ever The Hero

by Harn, Darby

  “Professor…”

  He smirks, a little. “You’re going to say, we can find a way to help you. That’s the first thought that enters your head. Someone else.” The smirk turns to a sneer. “Fifty years I’ve searched for a way to escape this limbo. There isn’t one. Well. There wasn’t, until you found the key to my cell.”

  “What… what do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to follow your instinct, Kit. Like I did. Reach. Explore. Embrace the power within you.”

  “And what? Finish the job? Acquire you?”

  Blackwood shrugs. “It’s what I wanted, isn’t it? I suppose there’s a lesson in all this. Any number of bad sci-fi novels or comic books probably could have instructed me to dial back the blind ambition of a young scientist presented with such a cosmic possibility, but you couldn’t have held back, either. Could you? You didn’t. Even when you knew it was impossible, when you knew it was dangerous, you kept tinkering with that thing. Well. Here we are, Kit. Frankenstein. Hyde. Icarus.”

  I round the ring, trying to get off. I keep coming back to Blackwood. There’s no way off. No way out.

  “Good thing we ignored those stories,” he says. “They tell us that the price of our ambition is steep, and final. But that’s not true, is it? The difference between Icarus and the two of us is we haven’t landed yet. We can still sprout wings, you and I. The power, the knowledge, the possibility, is still within our grasp. All you have to do is do what you came here to do, Kit. Face your reality. Acknowledge your power. Accept it.”

  “I’m not the alien,” I say. “I’m me.”

  His ethereal form hardens with frustration. “And for how much longer? How much longer can you deny the power? The alien?”

  “I compartmentalize really well.”

  He smiles. “Something will happen. Always does. Someone comes bursting through your door in the middle of the night. Another plane crashes out of the sky, and you have to use your powers. And when you do, you open that door just a little bit more. Eventually, it just stays open. The alien comes through. You get demoted down to the minors with the rest of them.”

  I arrive back at the terminal, again. “Isn’t that you want, Professor? To be acquired?”

  The smugness wafts off of him. “Now, see. There’s your problem. So smart. But myopic. You don’t see the big picture. I don’t want to be acquired, Kit.” His gossamer fingers taps the light shaded in my chest. “I want to be you.”

  Get out. Get out of here. My feet leave the deck but the magnetic grip of the core pulls me back down. I crawl on all fours across the deck, my arms and legs like concrete.

  “It’s true,” he says, chuckling. “I might be in for a bit of a wait. I was content to sit back and let you burn yourself out. I admit, I miscalculated. You’re like one of those kids who writes their names on everything they own with a black magic marker. No matter who picks it up later, you’re still there.”

  I get back on my feet. “Can’t you afford to buy new?”

  His smile gnarls into a scowl. “I can afford to wait. Fifty years I’ve waited for this day. Fifty years I’ve fought just to maintain a wisp of myself. Without the containment suit, I’ll just fade away. A magnetic resonance field. It’s all that holds me together. I’ve held together. I’ve waited. I’ve suffered and toiled and spent my life waiting for this opportunity and you stroll along and pick it up with no sense of its value.”

  I reach out magnetically to try and pull the floating deck plates toward me, so I can bridge a way out. Some of them drift out of their wander, but then float away again.

  “It was for Valene,” I say.

  He reaches for my heart. “It should have been me.”

  I back against the rail. “Stay away.”

  “What will you do? Acquire me? Please. Do.”

  Energy bristles in my fists. “I’m warning you, Professor.”

  He smiles. He knows. This power. Savage. Impatient. Uncontrollable. No. I can control this.

  I’m in control.

  “You fight. You resist.” Blackwood coils around me, a vapor thin snake. “But it’s inevitable. You will be suppressed, like the others. The alien will be whole again. And so will I.”

  I force him back with a magnetic push. “You can’t make me use this power. You can’t make me do anything.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  A magnetic wall flattens me against the deck. Sparks shoot off my suit as this invisible force drags me around the ring, and slams me hard against the pillar of the terminal.

  I stagger to my knees. “What…”

  He clenches his fist, and I reel back into the terminal. I press against so hard I think I’m going through it. Blackwood opens his hand, and I snap forward, to my hands and knees.

  “You have magnetic power, too…”

  Blackwood smiles. “You’re wondering how, if I’m not the Ever. If I wasn’t acquired. If I’m stuck in limbo. Funny thing about this limbo, Kit. It’s a magnetic field.”

  A punch lands in my chest. Another. Jesus. Light ripples through me. I throw up my hands, and his magnetic anger blunts against mine. Get up. Get out of here. I lift off again and I snag in the air. Birds squirm around me, bugs trapped in amber and my body stretches and pulls and twists, tighter and tighter.

  “What’s it going to take?” he says, a bored look on his face. “Another plane? Two? How many people have to die before you get the idea, Kit? You’re in someone else’s seat.”

  I don’t make connections easy. Sometimes, people have to spell it out for me. Blackwood has been, for a few minutes. I didn’t crash the plane. He did. The ship hasn’t been pulling on me. He has. All to get me to use my power. Lose control.

  Give up my seat.

  “What have you done…”

  “I captured the alien in the act of trying to reactivate the ship,” he says, turning his hand, twisting the magnetic knife in me. “I protected the city. I protected the world.”

  “You think we’re all puppets…”

  “Puppets have strings. People have fears. Same principle.”

  What did he do. Think. See. Make the connection. He influenced the magnetic field of the ship. Blackwood amped his power off the dynamo of the core and brought down an airplane, all with a fraction of the power available to me.

  Birds flutter free. “You killed people…”

  Blackwood twists his hands. “There is a price to progress.”

  My magnetic field fuses with that of the ship and I repulse Blackwood so hard and so fast I snap free.

  “You hurt Valene,” I say, and scatter him.

  Contrails trace through the air, swirling back together into the loose shape of Blackwood. “She came out of it fine.”

  “How did she not end up like you?”

  “Full disclosure, I wasn’t the best father.”

  “You’re a monster…”

  “Look at it from my perspective,” he says. “I hold up the city for money, for control of the wreck, eventually I’m just a greedy old man. I figured she’d survive. Either way, it drew a line under how unsafe the city is. What a world it would be without Valene. Without the future. That’s what they all want, at the end of the day. I just want the Myriad. Worked out in the end, though, didn’t it? I cast my line, and reeled you in.”

  The strike was never about money. Principle. People. Blackwood let a city wither and die simply to get access to the ship again. This isn’t the first time.

  “You triggered the meltdown,” I say.

  He shrugs, as he did when he left the terminal in 1968, and told Danny Vale a lie. “They were going to destroy the ship.”

  “You betrayed them to the alien. Why?”

  “The ship was stranded. Damaged. It was a simple bargain for us both. I prevented it from being destroyed and in return, the alien would provide me all of its knowledge.”

  “People died. People suffered.”

  “I did what I had to do,” Blackwood says. “Yes, people suffered. I have suffe
red. Greatly. What path to human discovery isn’t tread in suffering? How many men and women died at the stake because they knew the world was round, or the sun was the center of the universe? People die, for knowledge. For advancement. And we’re advancing, far, far beyond what we had been. Ask me, a couple broken eggs is a small price to pay.”

  A violent magnetic wave erupts from me, rattling the ringed deck and sending the birds fleeing out of the ship. Blackwood disappears. Subtle vibrations shimmy through the magnetic field of the ship, but too miniscule for me to locate him.

  His voice echoes around the cavern of the core. “What are you going to do, Kit? Go and tell on me?”

  I float over the core, searching for him. “Everyone will know what you did.”

  “And who will they believe? The hero of 1968, or the alien menace? What does our war gain either of us, Kit? What does it gain Break Pointe?” Blackwood manifests on the ring. “There’s no need for us to fight. You want the city to be a better place. You want Valene to be healthy. We want the same things, Kit.”

  I lower back to the ring. “I’m nothing like you.”

  “You just don’t see it. You don’t see that your experience has been mine. Better worlds are built from the pieces of broken hearts. Broken lives. That is how it has always been. The weak covet their debris. The brave make something of it. You’re brave. You’re noble. I respect that. I can work with that. We can make a world where planes never crash. Where cities never burn. Where no one ever suffers. You and I, Kit. Together.”

  “Together?”

  “That sonic suit of yours. Inventive. We can complete your work, you and me. We can give Valene the peace she deserves. You can be together again. You can be free. With Valene.”

  I look up, as I always do. Through the rent in the ship, the faint twinkle of lonely stars punch through the black.

  He drifts closer. “She loves you. She misses you.”

  Light pulses in me, ba-dumm. “Did she say?”

  “Help me, Kit. And I promise, I will help you.”

  My hands curl. “I can’t touch her…”

  “Come back to the lab. Allow me to examine you. I can find a way, Kit. Just as I found a way to withstand the slow evaporation of myself, I can find a way to salvage you from this affliction. There must be a way. Of course there is a way.”

  “I can go back? To the way I was?”

  He nods. “You are energy. Energy cannot be destroyed. Only converted. With enough time and effort, I can recall you from the Myriad. You will be alive, Kit. You will be free.”

  Birds flutter back in through the broken hull. I’m not pulling any magnetic strings. Blackwood isn’t. The birds don’t have to be here, or obey any force other than their instinct, but it puts them here, back with me in the heart of danger.

  I step back from Blackwood. “Heroes aren’t free.”

  Tiny ripples seethe within his diaphanous form. “Big picture, Kit. We talked about this.”

  “You let homes burn. You let planes crash. You think I’d let you get away with that just to be with her again?”

  “You’d throw away everything you want for – what? Guilt? Guilt is merely perspective, Kit. You swim in an ocean of infinite knowledge and power and yet you still only perceive the world through the conformity of human thinking.”

  “Keeps me afloat,” I say.

  “What do you think you’re going to do? Run around in a mask? Stop progress? Keep the city in ruins, all to frustrate me? Are you going to use your powers? Sure you want to do that?”

  “I’ll do what I have to do.”

  His frustration is mine. What are we going to do? He crashes a plane, he pushes on me, I push back. I tell the truth about him. That really worked out for me before.

  “You’d waste this power,” he says. “This potential? On helping people hold on to – what? You are something new and yet you only see the world as it is right now. Not what it can be. What does the butterfly owe the caterpillar? Nothing.”

  Light tessellates in my chest, the Myriad morphing through one shape after the other, mirroring the scramble of my thoughts. Everything I knew is a lie. The truth is more awful than I could have imagined. I didn’t want to come here. I didn’t want to face this, and accept this, because I knew it meant leaving behind my life. Valene. I didn’t know how true that was.

  I float off the deck. “I might see it that way, if I thought you were the butterfly or the caterpillar. But you’re neither, Professor. You’re just a piece of shit.”

  A smirk draws through his haze. “And you’re just another mouthy girl who hasn’t learned her place.”

  “My place is here,” I say.

  That smirk fades out. “This city is a dangerous place. Alien on the loose. Apparently, some of the populace have ben sheltering this thing. Shameful, if you ask me.”

  “Stay out of The Derelicts.”

  “I have a job to do. You keep telling me to do it. So I will. GP will step up the raids. You’ll respond. I’ll complete the acquisition of the city. You’ll respond.” He webs a spectral trail around me again, forcing me back against the railing. “I’ll push, just like I have from the beginning, knowing you’ll have to react. I’ll push, until you go right over the edge.”

  I push back. “I told you. You can’t make me do anything.”

  He glances up at the stars. “I’m pretty sure I can get your attention. All it takes is making the sky fall.”

  I don’t make connections easy. But I’m getting better.

  A vicious magnetic wave erupts from the Myriad. Blackwood deforms in my anger. He pushes back with everything has. I don’t know what I’m doing. His containment suit is all that’s holding him together, he says. A resonance field. Maybe that’s what it will take to tear him apart. Hero of 1968. Father of the Empowered. Mass murderer. You want this power?

  Have it.

  I push, and push, and push. Blackwood stretches and frays like the top of a thundercloud, scalped by high, angry winds. He vanishes. I lose him. The birds launch out of the ship to safety and I might have overdone it. The shimmering breaches that open in the air, burning through space and time around the core, they rip apart. I stumble off the deck, out of the wreck.

  Out of reality.

  The ground beneath me is a burnt garnet. Chromatic light pulses and strobes through lattices of crystal, scabbed in a thin, basalt like crust that powder my shoes. Mountains of loose crystal float in a scarlet gloam above and below me. Two chunks collide overhead, smashing each other to pieces that scatter through the chaos. I step back from the edge. I’m on some kind of disc, roughly the size of a football stadium.

  “Where am I…”

  The strange ground slopes beneath me as the disc becomes concave, sinking toward an inverted pyramid, floating just above the center. The three sides of the pyramid turn with each other, clockwise, seeming to connect, to crash together and then drift apart again. Light beads between the shifting spaces of the plates, tiny sunrises that dawn and die every few seconds.

  “What is this…”

  Magnetic waves cascade across the disc, invisible. Other waves propagate through the chaos beyond, more distant in space and time, a steady tide that pushes toward an unknown shore. I seize the wave, and I ride it off the disc, out of the strange wrinkle in between my world and that of the alien, back.

  Home.

  I float over the wall. If I focus, I can sense the magnetic folds and wrinkles the ship creates in the space around it. I can stretch them out. Pinch them together. Rip them apart. With enough force, I can open a tear back to the In Between, or close it. This is how the alien ship arrived. It didn’t travel across the stars, but snuck through this dimension from somewhere else. Is this where the alien comes from, or just how it gets around? Jesus. The universe is just on the other side of this sky. Universes. Infinite dimensions and realities, some of which the Ever pilfered already. Endless others it’s yet to know.

  We must complete the work.

  Break Poi
nte smolders below. Responders hang in the air across the river, a black rain so thick it can’t fall. I don’t, either. I keep my place in the ashen sky, a daytime star, resolute to never use these powers, to never return to the ship and to never let Blackwood hurt the innocent again.

  The work is here.

  Eighteen

  Rocks rain down on the mobile clinic as it stops in front of the Halfway Hotel. The people lined up outside, waiting for treatment. Protesters flood the street, chanting, pointing, screaming Get out! I don’t understand the anger in their voices. The people in The Derelicts are victims of the fire, same as the protesters you’d think, but their signs, they’re not made from weathered scraps of plywood. All their I’M NOT PAYING FOR YOU ANYMORE, their MAKE BREAK POINTE GREAT AGAIN, is printed. Glossy. Pretty sure their nice, clean clothes didn’t come out of a thrift shop. The bottles of water and energy bars tucked in the pockets of their warm coats and jackets, none of that came from the food bank. None of these people come from here.

  I do.

  Using these powers freaks me out, but I don’t have to use any to put on a really good show. All I have to do is zip down the front of my suit, and burn red over Six Corners. Protestors scatter, most of them down Harrison where they get back in unmarked white vans that tear off for the bridge. I rise high enough they can see me in their rear view, all the way across the river to wherever they unload on the peninsula. Whatever satisfaction I get out of putting a scare into them is short lived. I’m high enough the Responders hovering around the pinnacle of the Blackwood Building can see me, too.

  The Interdictor springs from his station above the tower. Using these powers scares me, but I’m curious about them, too. Thanks to Professor Blackwood, I know a little more about what I can do. I wait until The Interdictor is over the black scorch the plane left in my neighborhood and then I disappear.

  Chains whiplash against his body as he comes to a dead stop in mid-air. He flies around a bit, searching Six Corners, but he can’t see me. No one can. Turns out I can manipulate energy across the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio waves, infrared, X-rays. Sort of what Blackwood does, only better.