Ever The Hero (Book 1): Ever The Hero

by Harn, Darby

  “But why?”

  “GP has always been a one-man show, but beneath Blackwood the company operates more like a medieval feudal state than a Fortune 500 company. The board could oust Blackwood. GP could fracture into smaller companies. Without Blackwood, without Valene, there’s no telling what will happen in the future.”

  I look up, as I often do. “I didn’t want this.”

  “Some things can’t be avoided,” he says. “That doesn’t mean some things can’t be helped.”

  “You’re leaving, too?”

  He straps his helmet back on. “I have orders.”

  “I suppose they involve me.”

  His jaw sets. “You’re in possession of alien contraband. You used superhuman powers without sanction. You incited violence and dissent against the lawful defenders of the city.”

  I shrug. “Maybe I can work on my degree in prison.”

  The Uniform climbs on the ledge. “Work on the city.”

  “You’re not arresting me?”

  “I have orders. But I have a conscience, too. That’s what being an American means. A duty to speak truth to power.”

  “Stay,” I say. “Help us.”

  His expression hardens. “My fight is in Washington.”

  “Your fight is here.”

  The Uniform leaps from the ledge. Red, white and blue disappears from City Hall. Gray sky and the smoke of bonfires smudge the island. Another plane takes off across the river.

  I keep my place.

  I try taping the torn map of the city back together. The lines of streets won’t match. The puzzle pieces of neighborhoods. Some yet to be. Others that never were.

  Vidette paces through the office. Most of her injuries have healed, though bruises linger, dark and deep. “At least we won’t have to deal with soldiers coming through the doors. GP will still come. Now they’ll be angry. Now they’ll want to fight.”

  Abi looks up from her laptop, helpless to keep up with everything as the rest of us. “For what?”

  I puzzle over the fragments. “Did you leak the tape, Vi?”

  “Of course not,” she says.

  “You wanted to.”

  Vidette twists around the room. “I didn’t leak the tape. I didn’t do anything. No one does anything.”

  “I was trying to hold this all together,” I say, the torn map crumbling in my hands. “And now there’s nothing.”

  Vidette stops. “I said I didn’t do it.”

  “Then who did?”

  Abi closes the lid of her laptop. “Guys. C’mon.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Vidette says. “It’s out now.”

  “It doesn’t matter?” I bite my lip, but it’s not enough to trap the words clawing to get out. “The company could break up. It could go under. Valene could lose everything.”

  “Valene is your primary concern right now?”

  “She was last night, when I was standing in Blackwood’s crypt and he threatened to kill her unless I cooperated.”

  Vidette’s jaw sinks. “You were at the tower? Why?”

  “To cut a deal. To save Val. To find Dr. Piller.”

  Her eyes flood. “You did what?”

  “He was going to kill Valene,” I say, as Abi stares down into the shuttered laptop. “And then the tape leaked as I was standing there and I wrecked a lot of robots to get out. I had to do something. I had to try to do something.”

  Vidette’s hands ball into fists. “Try… you’re the most powerful person in the world. How can he make you do anything?”

  “No one’s stopping you, Vi.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You don’t need me to take on Great Power,” I say, my anger seeping into my voice. “Or to let you off the hook.”

  The spirit in Vidette’s smile is gone. “I don’t need you to let me off the hook.”

  “You have more power than I do, in your fists. If you want to tear it all down, tear it all down. Don’t wait for me. You’ve been waiting your whole life for someone else…”

  She shakes her head. “Is that what you think?”

  I turn away. This isn’t what I want to say. I don’t trust myself with anything I might. I don’t trust myself to lead, or inspire, or act in any way that would benefit anyone and these loose connections I’ve made sever. Clean. Easy. Total.

  Vidette wipes her tears away. “‘Smile,’ they said. They like it if you smile. I was the girl. I was the strongest. But that’s not why I was there. It was to smile. To look pretty. To sell toys. Maybe I need to be let off the hook. Maybe I was keeping my spot so you wouldn’t end up there with me. God, honey. You can still do so much, Kit. But you have to know what it is you’re fighting for. You have to know for who.”

  Abi gets up. “I’m going home.”

  The city jumbles in my hands. “The apartment?”

  She tugs at her blouse. “New York.”

  Vidette’s repetitive course diverges out of the office into the hall. She doesn’t come back.

  I go to Abi. “New York?”

  Tears race down her cheeks, easy. “I told you. So long as you’re here, I’m here. But you’re not.”

  Don’t think. Don’t feel. Don’t –

  “No,” I say, reaching for her. “No.”

  “You’re doing all of this for her. Everything.”

  “Abi.”

  “I know. I know, Kit. I know you’re fighting for people and you have been so brave… but you’re hedging your bets.”

  “I’m not…”

  “You went to the tower to make a deal for what, exactly?”

  I bite down on my lip, trying to hold it all back as the world falls out from under me again. “No one can know.”

  She smiles through her tears. “I know you love her. And I know what it’s like to love someone who isn’t there.”

  My blood burns with the same panic it did the night I learned Valene was leaving. “Abi, please.”

  “I thought when I came back… things might be different with us, but… so long as all of that is open and raw with her, you’re not going to let go. And I can’t ask you to.”

  Abi picks the crumpled shreds of paper out of my hands.

  “How can you fix a city, when you don’t know where you’re broken? When you won’t even allow anyone to know? Everyone knows who you are now, but no one knows your heart. That light in your chest is all your fear and pain and confusion just crushed down and down, every second of every day. Maybe you don’t even know. It just gets pushed deeper all the time. Converted to all this energy you use to try and put other people back together.”

  I cradle Abi’s hands in mine. Her heartbeat running through them both ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm.

  “I know you,” she says. “I know your heart. It was big enough to hold the universe before all this. You couldn’t handle it, and that’s ok. It’s ok to not be able to deal, Kit. It wasn’t your fault, what happened with your mom.”

  “Abi.”

  “Saving Valene won’t change it. Saving the city won’t. Nothing can change what happened. But the future can be whatever you want. You don’t fix the past, or you. Just make a future.”

  She packs up her laptop. Her sweater. She smiles as she leaves, like she’s just going out for a walk. Her footsteps echo through the hallway, underlining the beat of her heart until the pulse goes out of the building. The city. My life. Heaviness settles in my chest. Coldness. Emptiness. I pick up the torn pieces of the map, as if I know how to put them back together. There isn’t even tape. What’s left I tuck into my saddlebag. I’ve been lugging it around with me place to place. It only gets heavier. Jewelry. Old Irish coins. Unseen pictures.

  A reed of a man walks up Sigel from Shuster, slow. Alone. He comes to the barricade and his hand goes into the air in a limp wave. I float off the roof, down to the street.

  “Dr. Piller?”

  Bruises discolor his face. “I know. I’m late.”

  Blood shoots his eyes. His face pale. But a loopy grin holds
on Piller’s face as Vidette examines him in the first aid station she converted out of the county clerk’s office.

  “It was all part of my plan,” he says.

  A thousand questions swirl in my head, but all the energy in the room flows between Piller and Vidette. Any time I try and get a word in, Vidette cuts me off.

  Her stethoscope moves across his bruised chest. “Uh huh.”

  “It was,” he says. “I’d get captured, endure all this torture from them trying to get me to turn you and Kitsie and then when they let me go, you’d see me like this and…”

  “Sounds like something you’d think up.”

  “Worked, didn’t it?”

  I clear my throat. “What happened – ”

  “What did they do to you, Ronny?” Vidette gently rubs the channels shackles bored into his wrists. “What did they want?”

  “A way to stop Ms. Baldwin,” he says, as if it were obvious. “Evander wanted me to work on some way to disarm or disable the Myriad. They wanted me to try and talk her back to the lab. Coerce Ms. Fisher. I wouldn’t do it.”

  “Did you know they had Abi, too?” I say.

  He squints. “No. I didn’t know anything. I wasn’t exactly present. Thank my supernatural ability to disassociate by diving into someone else’s thoughts as someone is pounding into me.”

  Vidette brushes his hair. “Ronny…”

  “I never lost sight of you, Vi.”

  “Maybe once or twice.”

  “Never again.”

  Vidette kisses the raw, red skin of his hand and I step out of the room. Birds beat against the windows, ba-dumm, but there’s no rhythm or life, just impulse. These impulses fire, but out of sequence. Without any sense. It’s too much. It’s all too much, so I don’t. I don’t think. I don’t feel.

  I don’t fear.

  A few minutes later, Vidette comes out of the office, tears on her lips. “It’s not all bad, huh?”

  I go to the window. “They just let him go?”

  Her smile fades. “There was no point in holding him. There’s no point in them doing anything, now.”

  “I don’t understand why they pressed him for me. Not when they had Abi, and not when Blackwood knew everything about me.”

  “I guess he’s been a source for Frankie.”

  “What?”

  Vidette crosses her arms, and drifts over to the window with me. “He’s been leaking to her for years. He never said a word. Idiot. He should have told me.”

  I can’t believe it. He’s been playing both sides, all along. “Do you think he leaked the tape to her?”

  “Why would he, after everything he said?”

  I nod. “I’m glad he’s ok.”

  She smiles. “Me, too.”

  “I’m happy for you, Vi.”

  “How you doing, honey? With the Abi thing.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re a terrible liar.”

  “I’ve been told. Vi. I’m sorry, for the things I said.”

  “Me, too. About everything. You know… we’ll see how this all plays out. Doesn’t have to be the end of the world.”

  Shadows of wings flutter across me. Glass rattles inside the wooden pane. “When Piller told me to forget about Val…”

  Vidette sighs. “My mother, God rest her. She hated Ronny. ‘He’s so tall. Not enough air to the brain. This is his problem. Tell him to sit down more often.’ My mother.”

  “My mom…”

  Vidette touches my arm. “Yeah?”

  Birds thud against the window. “I always wanted out. But I couldn’t leave. There was no one else, you know? And outside was… I’d go out to get away. In the ruins. But even then I was avoiding the world. It was just too much. I wanted to make it work. I wanted to fix it. But I couldn’t fix it.”

  Vidette squeezes my arm. “You did your best.”

  “Did I?”

  “That’s all we can do. I do the same thing with Ronny. I always have. Nurse it along. Maybe I’m just a sucker. He’s good in bed. Helps to have a guy who knows your thoughts.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  She smiles. “Abi kinds of knows what you’re thinking.”

  I nod. “She’s like a descrambler. Do you know? I’m all this signal. All this code. Gibberish. She decodes me.”

  “And Valene?”

  The disquiet of the birds mounts. I step away from the window, but I’m not sure where I could go I wouldn’t frustrate them. I always want out. But I can’t leave.

  “You should make it work with Dr. Piller. Everything is bad. If you can make good with somebody, you should.”

  Vidette cringes a bit. “Why didn’t you tell Abi that?”

  Abi’s arm laces around my waist in the dark of the office. Her heat drumming ba-dumm. We’ll figure it out, Kit. You and me.

  “Because she deserves better.”

  Mike down the corridor, out of breath. “Upstairs. Now.”

  The air rattles as The Interdictor hovers above City Hall. I brace for another battle, and the disaster sure to follow, but he remains fixed in the air above us.

  “Just now falling back to earth?” I say.

  “Your powers continue to grow,” he says, just a hint of peeve in his voice. “Good. I appreciate a challenge.”

  Vidette grinds her fist into her palm. “Let’s see you take on both of us, then.”

  “Dr. Rizzo,” he says. “I see your injuries are healing.”

  “Dents just pop right out,” she says.

  I put my hand on Vidette’s shoulder. “Get on with it.”

  “I have a message for all of you,” he says. “The city and all its municipal holdings are now the province of Great Power. You are trespassing on private property. You have twenty-four hours to vacate these premises, and the island, or you will be removed. With extreme prejudice. Your time starts now.”

  His shadow stretches across the roof until it casts all of City Hall in darkness. Whatever reprieve I enjoyed in the return of Piller or his reconciliation with Vidette vanishes with the moon behind low clouds. There will never be any peace for me.

  Tomorrow, there will be only war.

  Twenty-Five

  A bead of electricity circuits the sky along an invisible line. The space station is brighter tonight, heavier, as if it might fall but it’s only because there’s little light left in Break Pointe for it to compete with. The station glides through the cobweb of the Milky Way on its way toward the southern horizon, larger as it sinks, always falling but never falling. The door creaks open behind me. Light interrupts within me.

  Who do I want it to be?

  Mike sits next to me on the ledge of the roof. A ream of orange skin peels off in his hands. “What you thinking?”

  “It would be nice if you were five foot tall and a woman.”

  He nods. “Right?”

  I zip up my jacket over the suit, drawing a blind on the star in my heart. I have all the power in the world. I have all the freedom in the world to do what I want with it.

  “I’m going to turn myself in.”

  He offers me an orange slice. “Noble thing to do, I guess.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “This fight is going to happen, whether you’re here or not,” Mike says. “This fight’s been coming a long time. You just kicked over the can is all. We stand a better chance if you’re here. If we lose, we lose. We fought for what’s right.”

  Airships prowl the island like lazy bombs. Spotlights scour ruins from alien wars, earthquakes and plane crashes.

  “I can’t be responsible for any more people dying, Mike.”

  “What did I say when we met? You got to let people do their thing. If people want to leave, they can leave. If they want to keep, we’ll keep. How about we let them decide for once?”

  Sweat and fatigue and despair render the air noxious inside the city council chamber. The building a powder keg. I’m the match. Quick, someone throw water on me. They switched the water off. W
hat did I do with that wrench? Where is my bike? How did I get here? I stand behind the chairman’s desk atop the dais, looking down on the standing room only crowd crammed into the chamber and the gallery above. Like I know what I’m doing. What I’m going to say. What can I say now?

  “I’m not who you think I am,” I say and explain, as best I can, the knotted story that led me and everyone else to the precipice we stand on now. “I did a very selfish thing. I thought I was doing it for someone else, but… I’ve tried to make it right and I don’t think there’s ever any making it right. I’ve made it worse. I just keep making mistakes and it would be a mistake for me to stay here. For any of you to stay here.”

  A man stands up in the stalls. “Sure. Now you leave us. After we’ve lost everything.”

  Boos erupt from the gallery. Jeers. The trickle out of the chamber becomes this flash flood.

  “That’s not what this is. I tried…”

  Mike comes to the microphone. “What were you waiting for?”

  The race out of the chamber slows. Some look back, some turn back, as he crosses his arms, face cast in disappointment.

  “Hey. You all hear me? I said, what were you waiting for? All this time? Someone to save you? Valene Blackwood? GP? What were you going to do if Kit never showed up? Just go on waiting? Or just take it, like we’ve been taking it for years?”

  Vidette looks down at her hands, curled at her waist like they’re shackled.

  Voices shout from the gallery. We’ve lost everything. She worked for them. How do we know this isn’t what they wanted?

  “I waited forever to be a cop,” Mike says. “Not just to be like my dad. But to have that uniform. That badge. That respect. And you know what I found out? You can’t wait for someone to give you respect. You’ve got to respect yourself first. And if you don’t, if someone took that from you, then you got to go get it back. We can argue later about messing around with powers you don’t understand – and really maybe someone would have just been better off reading Frankenstein to start with – but that’s not what we’re here for. We’re all here because this city has been left to rot for fifty years. Because we all have.”