Ever The Hero (Book 1): Ever The Hero

by Harn, Darby

  “Abi…”

  Chains rattle through the chaos and The Interdictor crashes into me as hard as he did the bridge. I don’t think I’ll ever land. I do, halfway into the ten-foot thick, steel-reinforced concrete wall enclosing the Quarantine Zone. Pulverized rock clouds the crater I make, leaving the city and the night hard to see, along with everything rocketing through it.

  This time, he punches me all the way through and I skid across the cratered, ashen no man’s land between the wall and ship. Abi. Get up. Get back to Abi and he lands on me.

  “I like you, Baldwin. Your ambition. Your spirit.”

  I drag the husk of an old, burned out tank across the wasteland and ram it into him. He doesn’t move. The cannon crumples in his hand as he bashes it into me, again and again.

  “Your strength,” he says.

  He keeps hitting me, ba-dumm, ba-DUMM, BA-DUMM.

  “You thought you could lead a violent mob into our city?” he says. “You thought you could terrorize us? Bully us? Bind us, like you do in your ignorance and your fascist laws? We will not be cowed by sentiment or vandalism, Baldwin. This is our city, now. This is our world. We will not be chained any longer.”

  “Go write it in a fucking letter,” I say, and seize his chains in my magnetic grip. Surprised eyes bloom beneath shaggy black hair as I rip the scrim-net cloak away and press my hand to his cheek. Burn, you arrogant gobshite dick for brains – The Interdictor doesn’t disappear. He doesn’t become a fading echo within me. I claw at his skin. Diamond. Bleeding Jesus. He’s just like Vidette. He’s impervious to the touch of the alien.

  “Oh,” I say, and he hits me so hard the ground flinches.

  I’ve never thrown a punch. Dad taught me not to. Evade. Deflect. Everything was deflection, always and his fists blur against me. They spark, flinting off Vidette’s impregnable suit. The Interdictor rips the zipper away, splitting me down the front and he reaches right through my chest and closes his hand around the Myriad. Lightning swarms him. He doesn’t relent.

  Light squeezes through his fingers. My light.

  “Blackwood wants the Myriad,” I say.

  The Interdictor smiles. “We don’t all get what we want.”

  I put everything into one last push. A magnetic shriek. He lets go. His fist meteors back down on me. I throw my hands up, not wanting to see, to feel, to let go, not yet and thunder cracks the afflicted earth. But not me. I lower my hands.

  His fist twists in Vidette’s palm.

  He hits her with his other fist. She doesn’t budge. It’s dark. Dust clouds everything. Still. That might be fear in his eyes. Vidette head bunts him square in the chest.

  He doesn’t budge.

  The Interdictor grabs her wrist, and squeezes until she lets go of his fist. “Dr. Rizzo. You’re under arrest.”

  “Get out of here,” Vidette says to me.

  “I’m not leaving you – “

  “Protect the others,” she says, and he hurls her into the carcass of an old brick building. Debris missiles out of the Quarantine Zone. The Interdictor launches into the dust and the ground shakes. Thunder pulses through the night, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, rattling the ruins down to powder. I should stay. Help. I can fix this, I just need to – my hand throbs. A message. Be a message. I swipe at my PEAL. Nothing. Just the vibration of the war between the two strongest people on Earth.

  “Abi…”

  Spotlights thread the dust and smoke over the eastern shore of the island. The broken towers in the water like chimneys. People climb out of a heap of steel and concrete just barely resembling the shape of a bridge. Hundreds more remain inside, their energy trapped in the web of twisted metal. I peel back girders with magnetic force. There’s only so much I can do. My magnetic field isn’t limitless; actually I think I’ve been doing things with it that the Ever never intended to do. Use your head. Get creative. Figure a way out of this.

  Energy.

  Everything is energy to me now. The Van Stitchel Bridge lies in ruin, but still retains all its inherent energy, bound in the steel, the concrete, the iron formed billions of years ago in the furnaces of dying stars and I put my hand to a cross-section of beams. All the energy trapped within leeches out, but I don’t acquire it. I set it free. The recoil sheers beams from each other, vaulting them skyward. The cage springs open.

  I push the beams clear magnetically and people run back into the streets of The Derelicts, the taut line of marchers now a scattered rain of confusion. Mike guides others out of the wreckage, blood streaming from a cut on his forehead.

  I lower down to him. “Where’s Abi?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, looking back.

  Dozens stumble out of the dust, wandering in a daze. Others swim out of the Wasigan, some pulling others, crying for help to those on the shore, diving in to help them and I don’t know where she is. I don’t feel her. I don’t sense her.

  All my connections fail. All these bonds of gravity and magnetism and humanity. Nothing works. Everything scrambled. Haywire. I don’t think. I don’t feel. I don’t fear.

  “Hey,” Mike says, grabbing my hand. “What’s the plan?”

  I look up, as I always do. Airborne Responders strafe the shore. What’s the plan. Did I ever have a plan. I levitate off the bridge on a magnetic swell. Currents of energy arc off me, hooks looking to jaw something, anything to acquire and the shadow of The Interdictor stretches across the illuminated dust.

  He coalesces out of the gloam, bloody and bruised. “Baldwin. I’m not finished with you yet.”

  “Where’s Vidette?”

  He smirks. “I guess she just didn’t have the stamina.”

  Vines of hungry magenta energy curl in denial against his skin. He swats them away.

  “You cannot defeat me,” he says. “Surrender.”

  I don’t think. Feel. Fear. I seethe, with angry light that flares out of the torn seams of my suit.

  “You’re going to lose,” I say.

  “A vote? Perhaps. There will come a time when we won’t need votes. Contracts. Sanction. Professor Blackwood is content to play by the laws of men. He won’t always be here. There will come a time when GP and the Empowered require a new steward.”

  “The company will be Valene’s after he’s gone.”

  Even with less than ten feet between us, the Interdictor ghosts in and out of haze. “And after she is gone?”

  I look up. The pink sky has fallen so low in fog and dust and smoke I can’t see any of the city.

  “You’ll never touch Valene.”

  “And neither will you. Your wings have melted, Baldwin. Now you fall, like the rest of them, as you should.”

  A halo of Responders surrounds me. I can’t stop The Interdictor. I can’t stop falling. Losing hold of the people I hold onto. Everyone who reaches out for me, falls with me.

  “Try and catch me,” I say.

  Light streaks behind me as I fly from the bridge. The Interdictor and every Responder that can fly abandons the protesters and chases me over the ruins. The repulsion of my magnetic field against the earths’ gets me moving fast. The Interdictor rockets after me at close to the speed of sound. I could go invisible, but they’d all just double-time it back to the bridge. Draw this out. Keep them away from the bridge.

  Protect the others.

  The Interdictor grabs me by the ankle and drags me off course into the unfinished superstructure of the Moore Building. I twist through the maze of exposed beams in the tower’s peak, hoping to lose the Responders. All of them prove far more adept at this whole enterprise of flying than I do. Everywhere I turn, there they are. I’d stop and ask them for pointers, but stopping is the last thing I should do, even though I really want to stop and The Interdictor swats me out of the sky with a steel beam.

  I crash into one of the towering cranes they used to raise the building from the inside out. The rusted crane lists toward its twin. I land between them on the incomplete floor below. Steel beams stab into the patchwork of concr
ete and exposed beams around me. Any direction I move, another impales the floor and like that, I’m trapped inside a cage.

  The Interdictor hovers above, the other Responders arrayed around him. “Surrender, Baldwin.”

  “Never.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  He grips the steel of the waning crane. The boom of the crane folds and the towering, aging apparatus falls towards me. I deny it like I denied the gravity of the bridge. Just like on the bridge, The Interdictor crashes toward me. A wrecking ball. He’ll destroy me this time. The Myriad. All the energy, the power, the current of knowledge streaming beneath the river of lives running deep inside of me and I can’t let him.

  I won’t.

  Arcs of energy whip the crane into the night. I’m in as much shock as The Interdictor; somehow I’ve turned the absorbing nature of the Myriad’s tendrils repellent. Responders swoop down on me from above. Bolts hit them with such concussive force they careen off the tower into darkness. Tendrils swirl around me with all the feverish intensity of a summer lightning storm.

  Focus.

  The Interdictor launches upwards, and then shoots back down at me, evading the arcs as they snake wild through the air. I focus all my attention on him and the sprawl of energy emanating from me condenses down into one, solid beam. Burning shreds of his uniform rain down on me. He doesn’t.

  I don’t think he lands.

  Patrol ships close on the tower. Fog evaporates as I cast fire into the sky. So does the nerve of the pilots. The ships move off and I float off the top of the unfinished tower. Energy streams from my hands into the building, not after the ships, but anyone who doesn’t get the message. They’re getting the message, all of them, whether they want to or not.

  I fly back toward the city, the letter V tagged across the eastern face of the building in molten steel.

  Twenty-Three

  Armored personnel carriers roll down Shelley. Helicopters fly low over the ruins, whipping up curtains of dust. Thousands of National Guard patrol on foot through The Derelicts, moving from building to building, searching, clearing, emptying. The Uniform marches at the head of the line, back in the city, back on the mission of defending freedom against the alien menace. I suppose I take some solace in how unhappy he looks about it, but how happy can you be with bodies still washing up on the shore of the river. Eleven dead. Dozens more missing. Abi.

  Abi is missing.

  I keep watch above City Hall, a guiding light for the survivors of the bridge, the fire, decades of neglect. The atrium, the corridors and subway tunnels beneath swell with refugees. The council remains locked behind closed doors. The final vote imminent. Blackwood’s voice crackles out of everyone’s PEALs as he delivers our sentence. The city is devolving into anarchy. There must be law and order. The mayor must ask himself a very simple question. If he vetoes the measure, what then? What does he want his legacy to be? Dread hangs over Break Pointe, the city a life-size engineering model conceived by an architect of doom. Through it all, I hold my place, a fixed star for all those lost in the ruins.

  Vidette keeps in the Assessor’s office in City Hall, in the dark, away from any kind of care I can give. She turns down bandages. Ice. Any appreciation I have for what she did. All she comes out for is to take over watch from me on the roof. In the morning sun, her hurt is worse. Blood stains her eyes. Flanges of broken skin peel off Vidette’s knuckles. Contusions and abrasions lash her face. The worst wound I think is to her pride. I know from Vidette’s personnel file that she hasn’t endured so much as a scratch since her powers manifested.

  “Abi isn’t back?” she says.

  I shake my head.

  “I’m sure she’s ok, Kit.”

  She could be under a million tons of steel. She could be at the bottom of the river. She could be hurt, right now, and waiting for me to come and I don’t fear. That isn’t me.

  “You have the watch,” I say, heading for the door.

  All my birds scatter as The Uniform bounds on to the roof. Fire catches in my fists. Vidette clenches hers.

  He removes his helmet. “Ladies. I just want to talk.”

  “Do you mind?”

  The Uniform screws the cap off a beer bottle as he stands before the map of Break Pointe I relocated from the zoo to the Assessor’s office in City Hall. This is home base now, I guess.

  “Not if you share,” Vidette says, and he tosses her a bottle from the six-pack he brought. She holds the bottle against her sore cheek. “Too bad it wasn’t a bottle of moscato.”

  “I’m here to disappoint,” he says, and takes a long drink off the bottle. “I’ll get right to it. You surrender, Kit. To me. The federal government. Not GP. I remain on scene here in the city, with the Guard, and preside over the transition. If there is one. No more raids. No more trains. No more bridges.”

  I join him at the map. The word FUTURE marks empty plots beyond city limits the planners expected to develop as the relentless pace of progress in the early 20th century continued.

  “I’m a little confused,” I say. “You’re here for my surrender, but I didn’t kill eleven people last night.”

  His head sinks. “The Interdictor’s actions fall within the aegis of the sanction the President granted. He was defending the city against the alien threat. Against you, Kit.”

  Good thing I can’t throw up. “And you believe that?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I believe. I have my orders. The President gave them sanction, but not a blank check. She wants this over. The country wants this over. I think you do, too.”

  I turn to him. “Were you following orders the night of the fire? You let me go, to put it out. Why can’t you now?”

  He pulls out a chair, and sits with a pained smile. “I don’t agree with everything going on here. I sure as hell don’t agree with selling an American city to a corporation. This country was formed in dissent. Protest. Rebellion. It was also formed on the idea we all play by the same rules.”

  “You think GP is playing by the rules?”

  “So far as the law is concerned.”

  “How can the law be right, if GP is using it to kill people? Tell me, what ‘aegis’ do I need to get you to see that?”

  “You’re in possession of alien contraband. That’s a federal felony. You’re using powers unsanctioned under the law. You’re using them against federally mandated officers of that law, tasked with your arrest. You might be Kit Baldwin, and you might be right in this, but you’re not above the law.”

  “Blackwood is, though.”

  He takes a drink. “I let you go to put the fire out. The city is still on fire, Kit. Now you’re expecting the mayor to put it out. So far as he’s concerned, you’re holding the match.”

  “You don’t know everything,” I say.

  “Washington knows about the tape,” he says.

  Vidette sighs. “Of course they do.”

  They know; they’ve seen it. They don’t care. I don’t understand where people’s anger is. Where their morals are. This violence and depraved indifference goes on and on and on and people swipe to the next story. They shrug. They forget.

  “If you surrender, the President will declare Break Pointe a federal disaster area,” The Uniform says. “There will be law. Order. There will be food and medicine and supplies.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “If you don’t… my understanding is there are a lot of people on the Hill very invested in Great Power. Leak the tape, injure GP, and there will be nothing for the city. No bailout. No anything, on a federal level. The Guard withdraws. Break Pointe is a no man’s land. And your problem.”

  “You can’t be serious,” I say.

  “Of course I’m serious. I brought beer.” He sighs. “I don’t want any of that. I know you don’t, Kit.”

  I bite my lip. “But Blackwood wins.”

  “Blackwood has friends in Washington. He has enemies, too. You don’t let Americans die without paying a price. Blackwood wants th
e city. The ship. He wants you. He doesn’t get you.”

  Vidette nurses the bottle. “What happens to her?”

  “Kit has too much power, and too much support, to put on trial or disappear into a lab. My guess is she becomes like me.”

  Vidette winces through her smile. “A government tool?”

  He shrugs. “A soldier. You can still fight for your country, Kit. You can still do the right thing.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?”

  The Uniform finishes off the beer. “You are illegally loitering on municipal property.”

  “Pretty sure I was jay walking last night.”

  “This is serious,” he says.

  “My friend is dead.”

  “Abi is – “ He opens another beer. “She’s a tough cookie.”

  I go to the window. Pigeons line the cardiac peaks of the wrecked bridge. “How do you know?”

  “I escorted her home that night. It was an education. Mostly in the trouble I’d be in if I did anything bad to you.”

  I can’t stop my smile. “You saw what he did. What GP is doing. And now you’re helping them. You’re doing their work.”

  “We’re ensuring the safety and security of Break Pointe.”

  Vidette groans. “For who?”

  The Uniform drains his beer. He sets the empty in the carton with the rest. “I’m going to leave you the rest of this beer. Think about the offer. Think about your people.”

  “The resolution may not pass,” I say.

  He touches my shoulder. “Think about it.”

  He straps his helmet back on, and heads for the door. When he gets there, he stops, and looks back.

  “I know what you’re going to do,” he says, and leaves.

  Vidette grimaces as she gets up and goes to the rest of the beer. “We’re leaking the tape.”