Ever The Hero (Book 1): Ever The Hero

by Harn, Darby

  Birds twist labyrinths through the air. The Interdictor tracks them, following their strange strands like I did once, expecting to find what he’s looking for and he punches empty sky. I wave my hand, generating another magnetic wave, and the birds chase it in the opposite direction. He chases them, swinging, jangling, missing. Fifteen minutes I do this, before The Interdictor gives up and hoofs it back across the river.

  I don’t know. There might be some upside to this.

  Being invisible isn’t so different than how it was before. No one ever noticed me. I tried hard not to be noticed. What’s different is I never saw, either. Eyes always on my shoes. My focus on the ruins. The sky. Some hopeless invention I was working on, successful only in the time I wasted with it. Now, I see. Responders scour the island for me. News helicopters buzz around and around, hoping to catch a glimpse. Orange notices paper the surviving houses and buildings on Shelley, alongside bills proclaiming RECLAIM RESTORE RETURN. New billboards over on the peninsula feature generic Responders, flying above a new, restored Break Pointe skyline, towering and full.

  My hand buzzes. Abi. ❤❤❤

  Not everything is clearer. My fingers hover over the screen. Everything is different now. I don’t know how to navigate some of this. How can I. No one knows where it’s going.

  A notification blooms on the PEAL. I swipe the screen and live video plays of Frankie, hair a windblown mess as she talks into the camera in the plaza outside the Blackwood Building.

  “That’s right, Don. The emergence of this so-called ‘alien’ in The Derelicts has certainly complicated matters in Break Pointe. Many here consider them to be a hero. Chief among those that do is The Uniform, whose public comments on the alien’s role in putting out the fire have led to his recall to Washington. In the meantime, GP steps up its efforts to capture the alien, initiating raids in The Derelicts like those here…”

  The video cuts to images of Responders forcing their way into one of the apartment buildings over on Simonson. Responders force people out and when they resist, into the pens on the landed gondola of their airship. Voices well up from the street. You’re supposed to be helping us. No reply except more force.

  “…executed in the belief that the alien may be sheltered by the people here on the island that view them favorably,” Frankie says. “You have to appreciate the gall over there at GP, who have never worked harder in their corporate lives, and you have to wonder what’s next? What will the city finally do, as it deliberates essentially transferring all administrative control to GP? How will this alien – whatever her name is – respond?”

  I tap the video away, and look up, as I always do. What would Valene do? What happens to her, if I go to war with her father? The truth comes out. No one wins. He isn’t who he says he is. Neither am I. Who am I? Invisible? A featureless container containing all the truths of this city? A scared woman who just wants everything to go back the way it was. I open my saddlebag. Sift through the things I carry. Pictures. Ma, blurred in laughter, in some moment I’ve forgotten now. I’ve forgotten so much of our lives. I didn’t want to remember. I didn’t want to be there for it and I wasn’t there and I put the picture back. I’ve work to do now. I’ve something to say.

  It’s the alien –

  IT’S HER.

  We’re all going to die.

  WE’RE SAVED.

  My shadow falls across the Responders and they abandon their raid on the old sugar factory on the lakeshore. For decades, people have squatted here out of the cold, the harshness of their poverty, worse fates at home. Now, the latest tenants bash against the metal pens GP has thrown them in.

  Not for long.

  I hover in the air between the landed gondola and the patrol ship tethered to it. With a magnetic nudge, I decouple the gondola from the ship. The cable lashes against the cracked, weed-strewn roof of the factory and the Responders all flinch. Three of them. There are seven total assigned to the strike team dedicated to Break Pointe. Not that it matters. An entire building of Empowered is just a mile away. I suppose they could all come over for a bash, so long as they’re on the clock.

  One of them rockets into the air, face to face with me. Nosedive. A flyer. Fast. Strong. “Show your face.”

  None of the government-era Vanguard uniforms had masks; the ERA didn’t permit them. I stretched the pliable fabric of the neck of my suit up over my mouth in a kind of bandana.

  “Trust me, you’re better off not knowing who’s kicking your ass,” I say. “It will only embarrass you that much more.”

  “You wear that uniform,” she says, gesturing to the electric V slashing across my chest. “Like you’re one of us. Like you’re a hero. You’re a fraud. A joke.”

  Manic streams of energy arc from my hands to the roof. The street. “I don’t hear you laughing.”

  “Give it a sec,” she says, and crashes into me so fast I smash into the upper floors of the Rook a mile away, a black mush that breaks like stale potato chips. Fear doesn’t travel with me. Shock keeps me down for a moment; the lack of pain. Pain isn’t any bother at all. I don’t have bones, muscles, nerves. The only injury I suffer is to my sense of restraint. The more I test the limits of my new life, the less I fear them. Bad for me, given the circumstances. Worse for this chick.

  Nosedive plummets out of the sky at me and I lash out with a magnetic wave. She keeps coming. Not wearing anything metal.

  Uh oh.

  She drops like a bomb on me. What remains of the floor pancakes into the next as Nosedive drives me all the way down into the basement. I have no strength, like Vidette. I have no skill beyond fucking up on scales previously not fucked up before by man. I have absolutely zero defense against any of the Responders on the strike team outside of finding some gap in their armor and putting a gossamer finger to bare skin.

  I claw at Nosedive’s helmet. Guess who doesn’t have any strength, either. Only the momentum she generates in her free fall. She tries to untangle herself from me as debris showers on us through the hole she punctured through the building.

  I unfasten the strap on her helmet.

  “Don’t – ”

  Her helmet comes away in my hands. I club her over the head with it. Nosedive slumps unconscious into the heap she piled down into the basement. Enjoy your rest. I peel off my glove, and touch the full circle PEAL on her right hand. Messages between the strike team create a digital map of the raids they intend to carry out. This is all I want, but all the information in the PEAL zaps through my fingers. Everything the PEAL connects to. Firewalls GP has around its servers crumble and I’m in their network. Databases. The entire history of GP avalanches through my mind. I wrest my hand away before I catch on the web of everything in the city and the world the tower links to.

  I bring the helmet with me as I crawl out of the rubble and out of the bowels of the Rook, to the street. The other Responders wait for me. I throw the helmet at their feet.

  Long Legs, exceptionally thin and tall, picks the helmet up. “Nosedive… you killed her…”

  “I just gave her a headache.”

  His expression screws from shock to anger. Long Legs springs into the air. Before I can react – I really have to get better at reacting – he plucks me right off the ground and hurls me through the air. Bleeding Jesus. I can fly on my own.

  I don’t need the assist, guys.

  I land on the elevated track at the station on Delaney. Energy lances from my hands, seizing on the track. Current surges through the third rail, down the line all the way across to the peninsula, right along with my panic. All this power, all this metal, it’s a like a magnet acting on another. The Myriad pulls. I push. I can’t get free. I’m stuck. Sparks shower the street. Distorted rail bends and twists. Broken clumps of ties still attached to their spikes fall into orbit around me.

  I writhe in paralytic agony as Long Legs climbs the steel pillars of the station to the platform, smile as thin as he is. Down the line east, more patrol ships cloud the sky above the lake. N
o doubt they’ve alerted the rest of the team. The Interdictor. He shows up and I’m still stuck on this track, it won’t matter if I’m invisible or not.

  Long Legs stalks across the platform, rattling with the anxiety of their bolts. “Not so smart, after all.”

  I strain against the web I’m caught in. “Stay away.”

  He steps down to the track. “Don’t think I will.”

  “You seem really into this.”

  “You have no idea.”

  In the years before the enactment of the ERA, Empowered fought each other in bids for wealth, power or simply adventure. That was thirty years ago. As much as people pay out for GP, they don’t do a whole lot even if you’re current on your billing. Responders are living nuclear bombs, deployed to deter anyone from ever having to compel their use and so they pretty much go unused. Guess some of them are itching to be used.

  Long Legs catches a twisted piece of rail out of the air. He swats away debris as he crosses into the cloud of crumbling track churning around me. Get up. Get free. Fragments of rail and steel and iron clump together, clotting into bigger, larger shapes picking up speed until their energy is greater than the magnetic force holding me down. I sling them one by one into the Responder, propelling him over the side, down to the street.

  Smart enough.

  I force other fragments into the disintegrating track. Electrical lines sever, freeing me from the grip of the current running through the line. Lesson learned. Stay away from metal. I should probably stay away from most things. Not really an option, so I’ll have to give that some more thought. I go invisible, and send out decoy magnetic waves to confuse the cavalry. I reappear at the sugar factory, lines of rail still swirling around me, snapping at the ground like cat’s tails.

  “These homes are protected,” I say. “Come here with anything other than charity and you will find none from me.”

  The last of the Responders, a teenager I don’t recognize, foots it into the ruins. People bang on the cages they’ve been stuffed in. Hatches and gates and bars rip away and reassemble around me into broad, majestic wings. Most retreat back into the factory, but a few remain on the roof, heaving their thanks up to me. A young man shakes a can of spray paint he takes from a bag, and tags the roof with a giant V, echoing my uniform.

  “I thought you were leaving.”

  I pin a tack to the old map of Break Pointe, on the wall of the zookeeper’s office. “You sound disappointed.”

  Dr. Piller paces the office behind me. “I guess I’m wondering what it is you’re trying to accomplish.”

  Aside from the birds, no one visits the Break Pointe Zoo. Bricked in windows and doors scabbed over in old white paint cast the office in a cold darkness. Like a lot of places, the office remains largely as it was in 1968, abandoned in a hurry and never reclaimed. Supplies take up what must have been some kind of fallout shelter. Rusted cans of Campbell’s soup lined shelves alongside tins of SPAM. Powdered milk. Cardboard tubs of Humpty Dumpty potato chips. A bed with a bare, stained mattress occupies a small bunkroom, but I don’t sleep. I type texts to Abi, but I don’t send them. I think of what GP might do, who else might get hurt, but I don’t fear. I don’t leave, even though part of me still wants to, even though I know to stay means pain for everyone who gets caught in my lines.

  I push another pin into the map, this one on Golding. “Right now I’m trying to figure out how to be in two places at once. You wouldn’t care to help me out, would you?”

  “You’re going to get yourself killed. Or someone else.”

  I turn to face him. “And here I thought I was being clever by not letting anyone I care about know where I was hiding.”

  He sighs. “I haven’t told anyone.”

  “Yet.”

  Piller goes to the map. Though it dates from 1908, much of the city is as it was, even then. The only difference the vast swathes of land, shaded in diagonal lines, marking parts of the island and peninsula yet to be developed. His fingers glide over the dots in the constellation I’m making.

  “What do you think is going to happen, Ms. Baldwin? You’re going to fight GP in the street until what? They just give in?”

  “That’s sort of the rough outline.”

  “For what?” Piller throws up his hands. “To keep people in homes that don’t have electricity? Running water?”

  “They don’t have lights or water because GP has been stripping this city for parts for thirty years.”

  “And what are you going to do? Put on a mask and go around in the night putting up affordable housing?”

  “No wonder Vi broke up with you.”

  He shakes his head. “There is such a thing as being too smart for your own good. What happens, Ms. Baldwin, when one of those Responders you run into during a raid is The Interdictor? You think you’re going to walk away from that?”

  “I’ve been flying away, generally.”

  “Listen to me. We’re on the same side here. We want the same thing. But this has to stop. Today.”

  I cross my arms. “Are you here to stop me?”

  “You understand my position.”

  I nod. “It’s to do nothing.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The city was burning,” I say. “You were all just sitting there, watching. This has gone on fifty years. Fifty years people have been living day to day, waiting for things to get better and now you just want to shovel them out with the shit? Like they’re the problem? No. We’re not the problem.”

  “You think I don’t care.”

  “Didn’t you tell me I couldn’t help everyone? That I couldn’t fix everything? Work for who you can help. That’s what you said. Work for people who can pay, you meant.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand perfectly. You care about your job.”

  Piller knifes a pin into the map. “I lie awake all night. Every night. I close my eyes and it’s like air traffic control. Every single person within twelve miles, they’re there. Their thoughts. They move in. They move out. Sometimes they disappear. People blink out. Poof. They’re gone. Every day, since I was a boy. Car accidents. Heart attacks. Plane crashes.” He pulls out the pin. “I can’t do anything about it. I couldn’t, even if there was no ERA. You can’t save everybody, Kit. You can’t.”

  I couldn’t imagine Valene’s hell. And I can’t imagine his, either. Then again, given they both suffer for their powers, I’d have thought Piller would be more invested in helping Valene, but he’s yielded to his suffering. He’s accepted it.

  “Dr. Piller…”

  “Call me Ron.”

  “You could live out in Wyoming or something.”

  His smile comes off as gruff as he does. “What would I do there? Here, I can do something. Here, I can try and find a way to be helpful. At GP, I have a voice. I have a vote on the board. You have to play inside the system, Kit. How am I supposed to change anything out in the street?”

  “Vi does, every day.”

  I don’t need to be able to read his thoughts to know his frustration. “She’s pushing you to do this.”

  I tack another pin in the map. “The boy crying for his life in the window seat of the plane pushed me to do this.”

  He sits at the desk. “After Molly Swift, Vi was… motivated. She kept talking about the Peace Corps or something and… I just thought about all the lights that would be blinking out as I tried to sleep wherever it was in the world we were. People would still suffer. Being there doesn’t change that. What changes it is changing the circumstances that contribute to their suffering. Disease. Malnutrition. War. The reasons people kill each other. Putting a bandage on it doesn’t work.”

  “If you don’t treat it, it gets infected.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  I trace the line of Shelley down the spine of what the map labels Pastel City. “It is. This is inhuman. This is wrong.”

  “They’re doing what they’re doing because GP thinks an alien is on the loo
se in Break Pointe, Kit.”

  “He knows it’s me,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Blackwood knows it’s me, Dr. Piller. He’s not invisible because the radiation mutated him like the rest of you. He’s invisible because he touched the Ever right before it malfunctioned. He wasn’t acquired. He was altered.”

  Piller stands. “What?”

  I open my thoughts to him. All of them. He sees what I saw, in 1968, in the present, at the ship. He sees the truth.

  He lists against the desk. “But… if that’s true, then…”

  “Do you really believe you can’t do more, Dr. Piller? Or is that just Blackwood’s bullshit you’ve swallowed? Valene has suffered all her life, and you could have done something. You talk about changing the circumstances. You could have saved her a lifetime of hurt, and this city decades of misery.”

  “My God…”

  “I couldn’t help her. It tears me up. And I know. I know I’ve lost her forever, but…”

  I push in another pin. The raids are going on throughout The Derelicts, at all hours. He’s right; I can’t help everybody.

  But I’m going to try.

  “Ms. Baldwin. Who else knows?”

  “No one,” I say. “Yet.”

  “Listen to me,” he says. “For God’s sake. Kitsie. You cannot go to war with Evander Blackwood. He’s an American hero.”

  “He kept telling me.”

  “And you are – as far as anyone is concerned – an alien menace. Without proof, it’s just your word against his.”

  “Do my thoughts count as proof? My memories? Can’t you testify to them, Dr. Piller? Telepathic evidence is evidence.”

  He shakes his head. “You can’t.”

  “Why are you protecting him?”

  “I’m protecting Valene. The company. The future of this city.” His hand falls light on my shoulder. “Come back to the tower with me. We’ll sit down with Evander. We can work this out. All of us, together. You haven’t lost Valene.”