by Harn, Darby
“If you unlock this, and she’s like ‘Come up here and let’s be space lesbians and stuff,’ you’re going to do it. Right? You love her. Obviously. I get that. And I’m probably going to step in it again but… a itty bitty part of me thinks an itty bitty part of you wants to let go, though. And this is like pulling you back. Do you? Want to let go?”
The untidy thoughts I’ve had since the buoy arrived bubble up. I box them all away again. “She needs help. She needs me.”
Abi takes my hand. “What do you need?”
“I want to live,” I say, and pull the skin of my suit up over my lips. We kiss again, almost, as her life pulses ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, through her lips, her fingers, me.
I sit at the desk, all night. My mind exploding with possibilities. The buoy heavy with just one. Its aluminum shell is smooth. Thin. Porous. Do I want to know? Do I want to let go? I go back and forth and the GP database becomes a distraction, like the ruins did for me once before. A refuge. Every file is a new hole to fall down into deep, dry technical bureaucracy.
Deep within the archive, I stumble into a valley of video files. Surveillance footage from missions across the country. Body-cam footage from each and every Responder, for each and every moment they were on duty. One in particular stands out.
FILE ID: BP-5475
RESTRICTED
The footage consists of nearly six hours of the same view of a dark, quiet city from the top of the Blackwood Building until the time stamp reaches 11:30 in the evening, and a star blooms in the south, out of Kirby International. Flight 347 teeters on an uneasy axis. The wobbly cluster of the plane’s taillights brightens, grows larger, and the perspective of the body-camera becomes that of a probe approaching a planet in deep space. The panic on the woman’s face in the window on the yawing wing dissolves to hope. For a moment, in the curved oval of the window, I see the reflection of the Responder filming the scene. The Interdictor. The wing stretches beneath the frame as her relief transforms to horror and the plane shrinks from the sky upside down into the darkened husk of the city below.
I play the last thirty seconds of the video three times. The maze I lost myself in floods with molten anger. Magnetic lines constrict the air, static with my lightning.
Abi comes in from the bunkroom. “Kit?”
I go dark. “You need to see something.”
Twenty
Video of the crash projects from my PEAL, again and again, scarring the dark of the office with its horror. “I also have the logs from the passengers that activated their beacons. Thirty were from cities in good standing with GP.”
Vidette storms out of the office. A moment later, a thud so loud I think the entire city is caving in reverberates through the zoo. A cloud of powderized concrete drifts into the office. Piller leaves after her, hands locked behind his neck.
I’m careful not to get too angry. This city has seen enough anger. There isn’t much hope it would survive mine.
Abi keeps her seat, her rage exhausted from the first time she watched the video. “But GP said the alerts came too late. They said they couldn’t have done anything, even if…”
“They lied,” I say.
“Do you know which Responder that is?”
“088-06-5475. The Interdictor.”
“He was right there…”
Vidette returns to the office, her fist caked in dust. “You’ll need to put something up on the wall in there, honey.”
“I’ve been meaning to redecorate,” I say.
Piller wanders back in. “Who knows you have this?”
“You guys.”
“Leak it,” Vidette says.
Piller shakes his head. “No.”
She starts pacing and that tug pulls on me. That battle between my two poles. Pragmatism. Idealism. Not rocking the boat and waiting the storm out. Setting a course headlong into it.
Vidette points to the laptop. “We violated valid contracts when we let that plane crash. We violated the law.”
“None of those people had personal contracts.”
“You’re assuming.”
“On a commercial flight?”
“Oh, fuck you, Ronny.”
I want to leave. I want to get on my bike, and ride this out, but there’s no escaping this hell.
Piller throws up his hands. “They had coverage they purchased through their hometowns, like most people do.”
“You’re splitting hairs right now?”
“I’m explaining it to you, Vi.”
Abi punctuates a long, exasperated look by putting her finger to her head and pulling the trigger on a gun.
“Go on, Ronny. Explain it to the women in the room with the genius level IQs and the doctorate from John Hopkins.”
He sighs. “You tell me, then.”
“This needs to go to the press. We have to go to Frankie.”
“I don’t trust her,” I say.
Vidette jangles with impatience. “She’s no fan of GP.”
“Just so I’m clear,” Abi says. “We already know GP let the plane crash. They’re kind of low key proud of it. So now there’s a tape. How does that make it worse, exactly?”
“Play it back,” Vidette says. I start the last thirty seconds of the video again. The Interdictor approaches the plane. In the window, that woman’s fear becomes hope. “Stop. That. That right there is what’s different. It’s one thing to hear it. It’s another to see it. This is a beautiful young woman falling to her death. Screaming. A beautiful young woman with a family. A senator. There will be lawsuits. Hearings.”
Piller stands before the street map of old Break Pointe, staring into it the way he did the test chamber whenever an experiment failed. “Consider the consequences for once. Bottom line: this tape comes out and GP is finished. Who’s going to clean up the wreck then? Who’s going to spend the money to rebuild Break Pointe then? Someone has to start over. That doesn’t have to be him. It does have to be Great Power.”
If GP leaves or is diminished, Break Pointe has less than it does now. It has nothing. I don’t have proof of Blackwood’s lies, but I have the tape. And I don’t need to leak it to get rid of Blackwood; I only need to show it to one person.
I pick up the buoy. “Valene.”
Vidette nods. “She won’t like this.”
Piller brushes away the idea. “She’s in no condition to do anything about it.”
“I can fix this,” I say.
“You fixing things is what got us here in the first place.”
Vidette flinches. “Ronny.”
I didn’t do this. Piller knows that. What’s he angry at me for? Wanting to do something. Pulling back the curtain on Professor Blackwood. Exposing the lie of Great Power.
“I’m angry,” he says, “because you still don’t get it. You think Valene will go against her father? For you?”
“She believes in what’s right,” I say.
Disappointment cuts his smile. “Used to be, we’d all sit around and wonder, ‘Where is God?’ Why does God let all these awful things happen? Does God have a plan? Or did God simply set the universe in motion and step back? Now we ask the same about Empowered. And do you know what the answer is, Ms. Baldwin?”
I bite my lip. “What’s the answer, Dr. Piller?”
“The same.”
His words burn, but I only feel coldness. Only the absence of Valene. Hope. There is no answer. No solution, but what we do for our own good. What disaster will I unleash by opening this box? What would I really be protecting in the end? He steps down. She steps up. GP protects a city, and the truth. None of it would ever come out. The plane crash. Blackwood’s secret. No. She’s better than that. She’s truer than that, I know it.
“Valene is our only hope,” I say.
Abi gets up from the desk. “Does anyone need anything? I’m going to see if there’s anything. Coffee or something.”
She dashes out of the office and I think about going after her, but I’m torn now between the poles of the video
and Valene. An undeniable past. A hopeless future. Nothing in between.
“This what we do,” Piller says. “We go to Evander. He steps down, or we leak the tape. He loses everything.”
Vidette thumbs the edge of the desk, digging into the old, fatigued wood. “That’s your plan? Blackmail the most powerful man in the world? Are you nuts?”
“It’s about as nuts as you driving the clinic into The Derelicts every day when they’re pulling people off the street.”
“This is my point,” Vidette says. “You’re telling me it’s not safe enough to give people the medical care they need in a fucking city, in fucking America, and you’re going to offer a man with unlimited power a chance to get away with murder?”
“Things are different, Vi. Justice doesn’t come in tights anymore. It doesn’t come in a cape or a cowl. It comes in an email. In a tape somebody recorded. That’s how the world works now. Everybody with a cell phone is a guardian of justice. You don’t need to go out and get in fistfights with GP. You can’t.”
I try to interject again. Both of them steamroll right past me. What would I say, anyways. Birds crash against the windows, drumming a steady percussion to their anger and the tension in me that refuses to relax. This headache starts like it did whenever Ma banged around the apartment and I walk out of the office. Their anger echoes after me down to the bunkroom.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
Abi draws her knees up to her chin, giving me some space to sit on the bunk. “I told you. I’m here for you. If you’re here.”
“What do you think we should do?”
She takes my hand. “What do you want to do?”
I don’t make connections easy. But I know. I know she’s not asking about the tape. Abi is asking about us. I look up, like I always do. Cobwebs. Peeled plaster. No stars to navigate by. I need to be on the roof at the Halfway Hotel, or somewhere just up in the sky, away from the Responders, the patrol ships, the protesters outside City Hall demanding action from the mayor.
“The mayor,” I say.
“What about him?”
“He can veto the resolution. We don’t need to release the tape. No one has to know it exists. He just needs to see it.”
Abi wrinkles her nose. “He’s kind of done absolutely nothing in six years, Kit.”
“We all have to start somewhere.”
“And then what? He vetoes the resolution and what next? There’s no GP, there’s no plan, there’s nothing.”
Ma only ever came off the ledge for the promise of something. Sometimes it was as simple as a bowl of cooked pudding so full of chocolate chips that she couldn’t eat it. Sometimes for the lie that things would be better.
“There’s me,” I say.
City employees are few and far between downtown. From what I gather, anyone still on the payroll when the city officially disincorporates will receive severance packages, and if they’re tenured enough, their pensions, all through GP. None of them are willing to risk it complaining to a reporter or anyone else. Christy Sedesky has nothing left to lose. At least that’s what Frankie says on the news. Sedesky is the only real opponent of the resolution on the record. She’s the mayor’s senior advisor, so that makes the prognosticators hedge their bets. I’ve never been good at gambling. My luck is pretty shit, really.
Christy thumbs a furious text into her phone as I enter her office. “I’m sorry, you have to make an appointment.”
I close the door. “It’s not like anything’s going on here.”
A drawer opens in the desk with the jangle of empty diet soda cans and Christy sets a full one on a stack of papers. “Are you a protester? How did you get up here?”
“My name is Kit Baldwin.”
Christy pulls back the tab. “Who?”
I unzip my jacket enough for light to peek out.
The color drains from her face. “I’m going to die.”
“That stuff will kill you,” I say. “But I won’t.”
Christy sets the can in a wastepaper basket. “Ok.”
“The mayor needs to see this.”
“See what?”
I remove my glove. Christy’s chair wheels back against the wall. I put my hand to Christy’s laptop. Energy arcs through my fingers, into the machine and the footage from Flight 347 begins to play on the screen. Christy wrests her eyes off me and my glowing, diaphanous hand and watches the scene unfold.
“Play it again.” Christy watches the video three times. “So, this is all real? You’re real?”
“I like to think so,” I say. “The footage is real and can be corroborated by multiple sources within GP.”
“Why haven’t you leaked it, then?”
“People die in that video, Christy. More will if it comes out. Gardner needs to see this. He needs to know the truth before the next council meeting. He needs to veto.”
“If he vetoes… GP is gone for good. There’s no hope.”
“There’s me.”
“And what are you, exactly?”
“Committed. I have knowledge and I have power. I’ll use them to make the city safe. And I’ll promise you something else. So long as I’m here, Blackwood isn’t going anywhere.”
“You put out the fire,” she says. “Are you from space?”
“I’m from the neighborhood.”
Christy takes the soda can out of the garbage. “I really want to drink this.”
“Don’t let me stop you,” I say.
The can keeps in Christy’s hands. “Play it again.”
“There’s nothing?” I say.
Abi gazes into her laptop. New posts update nearly every second on the scrolling ticker of the Thumper website. “There was a raid near Brewster Park that apparently didn’t go so hot. The Responders were repelled and the airship left the area.”
“Repelled? By who?”
“Doesn’t say. Here’s something.” She clicks on a thread. “Someone tagged you.”
“Tagged me?”
Tonight. Billy Town. People need to see this. #EverTheHero.
I lean over her shoulder. “Ever The Hero?”
Abi smiles. “That’s what they’re calling you.”
“But I’m just me.”
“I kind of like it,” she says. “And I think it’s good for people to have a way to connect to you.”
“Oh.”
She squeezes my hand. “People want to connect to you.”
“Ok.”
“Don’t freak out,” she says. “This is good PR. Plus, it’s a cheap, easy substitute for the GP emergency beacon. I get push notifications anytime someone declares an emergency. You going?”
Could be a trap. Could be nothing. “Probably.”
“You’re kind of antsy,” she says.
“I don’t like to just sit around.”
Abi wrinkles her nose. “When does the council vote?”
“A week.”
“A week… this entire city is about to go off as it is. You think the mayor will veto the resolution?”
I bite my lip. “Sedesky said he’s thinking about it.”
“Well, all we can do is wait. So you’ve got time.”
“For?”
Abi swipes at her PEAL, and some soft, lazy jazz crackles through the zookeeper’s office. “I’m going to embarrass you now,” she says, swaying in what could charitably be called a kind of rhythm, though I’ve yet to discern it.
“Just me?”
Abi flounces around the room toward me. “If I don’t see myself in a mirror, I won’t turn to stone.”
“I’ll break all the mirrors, then.”
“That’s bad luck,” Abi says.
“I think I’ve gotten my share.”
Her arm slides around my waist. Her erraticism, my jitters, they both ease into a slow, steady motion. She stretches the collar of my suit up over my chin and kisses me soft. Light floods my lips. This sensation of blood rushing to my head.
“Want to make out?” she says.
“
You’re the most persistent person I’ve ever met.”
“I take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’.”
“That’s accurate.”
“That’s sexual innuendo, by the way. Licking.”
“Ok.”
Her hand slides down my chest, until it catches on the zipper of the suit. “I want to run an experiment.”
“Abi…”
Dawn breaks in the office. Tendrils of energy bristle against my skin, eager to break through.
“We can touch,” she says. “You can control this.”
“It’s not safe.”
“You’re the best thing in my life. You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me… you don’t know. I love you.”
Numbness aches through me, dull and constant, like it has since my transformation. The tension between me and everything my magnetic will compels leaves me with a kind of Novocain hangover. Fogs over every experience. Maybe it’s always been this way. Everything fascinates me. Moves me. Too much for me to process or appreciate and so I just ride around, trying to keep moving so all the metal bits trailing after me never catch up. I can’t speak. Can’t move. Words fail. Birds crash against the cage of the aviary outside, unable to break through.
The office door groans as Vidette came in. She sets her medical bag down on the desk. “How are my girls?”
“Busy,” I say, and step away from Abi. I zip up the suit quick, but Abi’s eyes sink to the floor.
Vidette smiles. “I can come back.”
“No, I’m going,” I say. “There’s something I want to look at over in Billy Town. Could be nothing, but I’ll check it out.”
“I’ll go with you,” Vidette says.
“Have you heard from Dr. Piller?”
Her bracelets rattle with frustration. “He’s probably just lying low. I’m sure Blackwood is watching him like a hawk.”
Someone at GP is going through my personnel file. Every second of security camera footage inside the tower. They’re talking to my colleagues. Examining my computer. Discovering all the gaps I created in my log disguising my work for Valene.
“You don’t think he would…”
Vidette shakes her head. “He’s a fool, but he’s not an idiot. It’s fine. Ronny can take the heat. So can I.”