Ever The Hero (Book 1): Ever The Hero

by Harn, Darby

  “You heard what he said,” I say.

  “The resolution isn’t passing. Washington isn’t going to help. No one is going to help. It’s down to us.”

  “This has to stop, Vi.”

  She crushes the bottle in her fist. Beer suds through her fingers. “And we’re going to stop it. Leak the tape.”

  My uncertainty constricts, tighter and tighter, my head shrinking with every thought. I can fight Blackwood. GP. I can fight the vicious tug of the power within me, but fighting Responders in the street is one thing. Fighting soldiers is another entirely. My war is with Great Power, not America. If I fight the Guard, if I fight The Uniform, I attack the America most people think still exists. I attack the illusion of their control. Their freedom. The country I am trying to realize.

  “Maybe this is as far as it goes,” I say.

  “We were just marching.”

  “I didn’t want to.”

  Vidette drifts around the room, fists curling, looking for something to break. “Kit… what happened, it happened, because they’re monsters. Not because we were wrong to challenge them. We didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t. Abi didn’t.”

  “No one else is getting hurt.”

  “Do it, Kit. Bring it all down. Make last night count for something. Make all their sacrifices count.”

  The ruin of the bridge deforms the shoreline on the east side of the island. Another wreck. Another stop on the disaster tour for the ages. All we do is pile disaster. Despair.

  “There has to be order, Vi. Someone has to be in charge.”

  Vidette twists around and around the room. She bumps into the desk, the chairs, the tight lid I have on my memories of Ma, going through the apartment, smashing bulbs until Vidette comes back to me with the old map of the city, in shreds.

  Don’t think. Don’t feel. Don’t fear.

  “I knew it, too,” she says. “You’re just like him. Ronny said. ‘She reminds me of me.’ I’ll tell you what I told him. You can’t drive down the middle of the road, Kit.”

  The pieces of the map condense in my hands. “It’s not like I could find it now.”

  “You’re so smart. Maybe you know. Maybe you know better. Maybe you can preserve everything, honey. The city. GP. Blackwood. But what changes? What gets better?”

  “It’s not always about getting better. It’s about getting to the next day. If we leak the tape, there is no tomorrow.”

  Vidette’s smile finally returns. “For who?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “He’ll kill you if he gets his hands on you. But you’re holding the door open for him. For Great Power. For Valene.”

  I go back to the window. On the way, I stub my toe on the other transplant from the zoo. The communications buoy wobbles on its round bottom, a shiny egg yet to hatch.

  “You’ve got it wrong,” I say.

  “Do I? I don’t know. Maybe it’s easier this way.”

  “Easier?”

  “If I were you, if I thought for one second Abi was dead, I’d burn this fucking town to the ground. Ashes. All of it. At least then something would grow here.”

  Outside, the inherent energy in all the people of the city, the birds, the insects, the buildings, the broken bridges and the atoms and molecules that comprise them glow a bright orange. I blink, I close my eyes, and the world to me is fire.

  “Have you heard from Dr. Piller, Vi?”

  This groan wrenches out of her. She grabs hold of the loose, torn fabric of my suit. Her suit. “I guess we’re not everything we thought we were. I guess we’re not as strong.”

  She tries to smile.

  “Some things are meant to last, Kit. And sometimes, you have to break something to make it stronger.”

  Vidette leaves the room. I let go of the map, my hands curling, arms slimming to wire as anger cuts through me. Fear. All I wanted was to save Valene. My salvation is lost, I know that. Every action and inaction and failure damns me further, but if I could just break out of this bleeding cage I’m in. If I could fly, free, and set the sun right, before I fall.

  The gavel falls. “The resolution passes.”

  I shake with the surprise of hundreds of others crammed into the gallery above the council chamber. The council flees their seats, ahead of the reporters spilling out of the press box. Citizens climb the dais and shout their refusal to leave. No one denies them. Not the mayor, gone; not Christy Sedesky, retreating in numb defeat; not security, discharged of their duties and there is no duty left in City Hall but the solemn watch over the corpse of what had been an American city.

  The lights go out. Darkness prevails in The Derelicts. I guess this is GP’s way of introducing their customers to the new ownership. Candles illuminate windows. PEALs. The island a cluster of dense stars. Clouds salt the island with sun-kissed snow as I keep watch on the roof of City Hall, though the purpose of it comes and goes with my willingness to do anything should the soldiers come. I pray they don’t. For some door to open back to the apartment, where my only expectation in life was to die, old and alone, asleep in a chair. Undiscovered.

  The door creaks open. I expect Vidette, or Mike, or maybe The Uniform, delivering his final notice of eviction. But I don’t sense them. This spectrum of light, or energy I perceive or I’m part of or both, it wrinkles. Constricts. Pulses.

  Ba-dumm.

  I turn around. “Abi…”

  She’s white as the snow that won’t stick. The way her shirt hangs off her, it’s like she’s lost ten pounds but she smiles, easy. “You will not believe the day I’ve had,” she says.

  I unplugged all this. I boxed all this, to not feel the pain or the fear or the guilt and so nothing happens. Nothing comes online. I just stand there, staring at her.

  “Ok,” I say.

  She stumbles into me. “You miss me?”

  “Abi.”

  Her fingers hover over my lips. “I know.”

  I take her in my arms. “Are you ok?”

  “You don’t have any cookies, do you?”

  “You’re so warm,” she says, sliding her arm around me. Her hair, wet from a quick, cold shower, drizzles her cheeks in amber. I peel it away and she kisses the inside of my wrist. She tugs loose the belt of her bathrobe and she’s naked with me inside the sleeping bag we share. Abi snuggles up to me tight, my warmth becoming hers, mine and ours. “You’re so warm.”

  I caress her hair. “Abi, I…”

  “You don’t have any more cookies?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She kisses the stitched seam over my heart. “It’s ok. You’re my chocolate chip cookie. Mmmmmm. Cookie dough.”

  “What happened?”

  She squeezes me tight. “I got trapped in the wreckage. One of the Responders caught me trying to get out. They took me to the tower and I was like, ‘You can’t scare me with this Gestapo shit, dude,’ but I didn’t. It was scary. But I didn’t crack.”

  “Did they hurt you?”

  Her arms vise into me. “You’re so warm.”

  “Abi.”

  “It’s ok.” Her drowsy lips linger on me. “I’m ok.”

  “They let you go?”

  “I wasn’t exactly a fountain of information. And I always had to go to the bathroom. I was pretty annoying.”

  What could she say, that Blackwood doesn’t already know? What value did she have as a prisoner or hostage, when no one knows what she means to me? No one knows. They could have hurt me. Put a crack through me deeper than The Interdictor did with his fist, but they didn’t know. Nobody can ever know. I love Valene. I’m in love with Valene. But I didn’t work before Abi. I didn’t fire. Wild rivers of energy stream through me, until they slow, until they find a natural, even current on the quick, steady rhythm of her heart, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm.

  “I love you,” I say, but she’s asleep now. I hold her close. No one is going to hurt her again. No one is going to suffer or fear one more day in this city because of me.

 
A home reflects the needs of its owner, but Evander Blackwood has no needs beyond his containment suit. No kitchen in his penthouse in the Blackwood Building. He doesn’t eat. No bedroom. Doesn’t sleep. No closets. The invisible man wears no clothes. Nothing hangs on the walls. No shelves. No books. No statues. No photographs or evidence of a life. Blackwood decorates himself only with his ambition, which he sees in 360 degrees from over a mile above the ground. His penthouse takes up the top floor of the great, glass tower, but he doesn’t live there. Blackwood doesn’t live anywhere. He doesn’t live.

  Robotic servants attend to the maintenance of the penthouse, all of them progenies of the original ALPHA model Blackwood created back in the 80s. One descends into a sunken living area near the terrace. A couch rings the pit, dotted by the iris of a broad, flat table. The robot touches the haptic computer interface on the back of its transparent hand and a vault-like hatch opens out of the table. A staircase spirals down into a safe room, inaccessible from the rest of the tower.

  Steam fumes from the large glass chamber at the center. Variegated light swirls within, like the hypnotic whirl of a lighthouse on a foggy night. Blackwood’s containment suit stands prone in a coffin-like charging station at the base. Tiny light bulbs blink their report off a display running in a racing strip around the circumference of the room. Switches and knobs speckle the control panel, marked in embossed substrate pressed out of a label maker. The spindly robot checks the readings of the chamber, decades out of date of the machines that serve it.

  Blackwood’s voice swirls around the room like the steam. “Least you could do was knock. I’m not decent.”

  I manifest in magenta. “I knew that coming in.”

  The mute light radiating from within the robot’s rigid plastic-shell flashes with urgent red as it takes notice of me.

  “Leave us,” Blackwood says, and the robot obeys.

  The swirl of light within the chamber drains into the containment suit. The phantom face of Evander Blackwood appears in the helmet, and he lumbers out of the charging station.

  “I outfitted this entire building with pressure sensors that could detect me, even cloaked, so I could work while invisible. None of them picked you up until just now.”

  I shrug. “Maybe I’m just better at it than you.”

  “Should we go on measuring dicks, or get down to it?”

  “Seeing how neither of us has one, let’s.”

  “You think you’re so smart.”

  I cross my arms. “No, I don’t think so.”

  Blackwood limps toward the display panel. “Did you come to congratulate me on my victory? A card would have sufficed.”

  “I leak the tape today, unless we come to terms.”

  He follows the strip around the room, the metal hand of his containment suit skipping across the panel. “The time for negotiating is over. The city is mine. All you do now in leaking the tape is salt the earth. We both know you won’t do that. So. If you don’t mind telling all your friends at City Hall to be out by about nine tomorrow morning, I’d appreciate it.”

  “That’s not all I’ll leak, Professor. I have your entire database. Fifty years of your secrets, your lies, your intellectual property and it becomes public domain, along with your position in every field that GP operates in. Little snots like me will be building fusion reactors in their basement, based off your schematics, and yours will rot on the shelves.”

  He stares at me. “Is that right?”

  “GP will be worthless. Just like you.”

  “And Valene?”

  I bite my lip. “You’ll announce Great Power will act only as a steward of Break Pointe. Once the city is back on its feet, you’ll turn it back over to the people. You’ll step down. The Interdictor will retire. And Valene takes over.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.” Blackwood vanishes into the steam fuming off the chamber. The joints of his suit creak somewhere beyond. “I see why Ronald likes you.”

  “Where is he, Professor?”

  Blackwood’s voice echoes from deep within the chamber. “Oh, he’s around here somewhere.”

  “He had no part in any of this.”

  “He keeps saying. Thing about a man who knows everyone else’s thoughts: he has a terrible poker face.”

  “Where is he?”

  “You know, I had hoped Ronald would follow me in my work. I depended on it. Valene is intelligent, but her interest is celebrity. Clothes. Women. I don’t have any use for any of those things. Do you?” He emerges out of the steam right in front of me. “Your ambition has always been the work, hasn’t it?”

  I stumble back onto the pedestal supporting the chamber. “I’m nothing like you, Professor.”

  He looms over me. “You’re right. We’re nothing alike. You have supreme restraint. Works for you, given your circumstances. Keeps the lid on tight. But it limits you, from doing the hard thing. The necessary thing. Me, I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  Blackwood reaches for a display panel on the wall. After a few inputs of digital code, a green-lined three-dimensional schematic of the Laputa appears on the screen.

  I fall off the pedestal. “You’re not going to hurt Valene. She’s the company. The future. Your legacy.”

  “She’s an asset,” he says. “Some assets depreciate over time. Can’t be helped. The space station, for instance. I spent billions on this thing. Never really got any use out of it. I pay more to keep it up than I did to build it. Take the primary oxygen tanks. These things are thirty years old.”

  Schematics of the oxygen tanks appear.

  “Aerodynamics keeps telling me they have to be replaced. Sometimes the electrical circuits short. They spark.”

  My confusion burns into fear. “Professor…”

  “You can actually induce an overload from the ground, by simply ordering the main computer to transfer all power to – ”

  I grab his hand. “Don’t!”

  “How much more valuable will Valene be dead, do you think? What future will I need to tend to, once I have possession of you? The Myriad? I’ll be aboard the alien ship, piloting my destiny. But go ahead. Leak the tape. I press this button. I have a feeling, it’s all going to come out in the wash for me.”

  I think of Valene, alone 250 miles above the earth, only an inch of aluminum alloy between her and the vacuum of space. The air ignites. Her skin. Hair. Clothes. Her lungs burst in flame and the fire chokes out in the cold void as soon as it scorches her. The frantic, uncertain light within my chest withers, and so does any hope I had of reaching a peace with Blackwood.

  “Please… don’t. Don’t hurt her.”

  He steps away from the control panel. “I was prepared to burn down the world to get what I wanted in 1968. I have brought the most powerful and deadly Empowered to heel. Senators. Presidents. You thought you could black mail me? With a tape? You don’t deserve your power. You don’t deserve my mercy.”

  “Please…”

  “Tomorrow, you go on television. You surrender to the Interdictor. You come to the tower. I complete my work.”

  I never had any plan. Or at least any plan beyond the one I’ve always had. Do what I need to do to make it stop. Fix it. Mend it. Get it through another day.

  My head sinks. “Please.”

  A chime sounds from the panel. A small monitor sputters to light within the racing stripe along the wall. Blackwood’s shit eating grin smears right off his vaporous face as Frankie speaks live into the camera outside the Blackwood Building.

  “NOW News has obtained this shocking footage…”

  A faint point of light emerges in the darkness of the screen, brighter, larger, until the light resolves to the wobbly cluster of the plane’s taillights.

  Twenty-Four

  Private jets take off from Crown Field over on the peninsula like clockwork. I count ten in an hour from the roof of City Hall. Doubt any of these will crash. Here on the island, it’s the National Guard racing for the exits. Helicopters buzz away
from The Derelicts, in a swarm back across the lake. Down in the street, people cheer. People celebrate, like they’ve won something. Barricades of office furniture and loose rubble burn with their excitement, but I just feel the dogged chill of the northern breeze, sharp and cutting across an island without any heat or electricity. I hover above downtown, a signal flare for anyone thinking they’re lost. The street flickers in and out of my light, the city in and out of darkness and neither wins or loses, at war between form and shape neither controls.

  My PEAL buzzes. The dominoes fall with each news alert. The Senate launches an investigation. The families of the victims of Flight 347 file a lawsuit. Cities and communities across the country suspend their contracts with GP and I can’t keep up with the news. The news can’t keep up with itself.

  Neither can Frankie.

  Not just every hour block on NOW. Frankie turns up on every network, no longer a reporter, but an expert, a witness, a participant in a crisis she’s covered from the absolute jump.

  “My suspicion is Kit Baldwin leaked the footage,” Frankie says, from City Hall. Behind her, protesters jeer and boo.

  I swipe the video away. “I didn’t do this.”

  The Uniform rests his helmet on the ledge of the roof. “I thought you were a pragmatist, Kit.”

  “I don’t know who leaked the tape.”

  “Who else did you give it to?”

  “No one.”

  The only computers I’ve interfaced with since were the mainframe at the tower and Abi’s. Well. Christy’s laptop. Was it her? The council? Gardner? Why would they do it, after the vote?

  “I don’t know who could have done it,” I say.

  He watches another plane leave the peninsula. “Maybe it was one of the members of the board.”

  I join him at the ledge. “This is them, leaving?”

  “They’re looking to distance themselves from the scandal. Blackwood takes credit for all of GP’s success. They’re happy to let him take the blame for all its failures, too. They hear about this tape. Find it in the GP database. And they leak it.”