Ever The Hero (Book 1): Ever The Hero

by Harn, Darby

  The fog of anger clears. Some drift back to their seats.

  “She didn’t start this. We didn’t start this. They did. When they decided it was acceptable for an American city to bleed out on its own streets. When they decided that helping your fellow man wasn’t your obligation, but your privilege.”

  Boos become cheers.

  “Kit could have walked away. Any time. Maybe she wanted to. Maybe she should have. That’s right. What does she owe us? Her life? Her freedom? Her happiness? She doesn’t owe us any of that, but she gave it. She gave it all. For us. She could have strapped in on the love rocket to the stars with Valene – “

  “Ok,” I say.

  He nods and shakes his head at the same time. “But she didn’t. Because that is not relevant to this conversation. No. She stayed here. Kept the faith. Always. She’s The Ever.”

  The floor shakes with applause.

  “Who is she?”

  The Ever!

  “That’s right. Who are we?”

  We Ever!

  “Kit didn’t let this city go to pieces. She didn’t let that plane crash. She didn’t let innocent people get dragged out of their homes, not without saying something. She didn’t let any of it happen and we’re not letting this happen, either.”

  Voices call back to the dais and I can’t believe it. People reach for me. Call my name. I can’t really do any of this, but I need to let it happen. I need to become this, for whatever time we all have left here. This isn’t me, they’re cheering. This isn’t me, they’re rallying to. This isn’t me, holding her fist high. That’s the other Kit. That’s the hero.

  The Ever.

  Mike has become something else, too; the fun, nerdy boy has become a leader. “Are you going to let them take her? Are you going to let them take your city? Haven’t they taken enough?”

  He pounds his fist into the desk, pointing out people in the crowd, calling people out, calling people up and they come to the dais in twos and threes and fours and soon everyone in the chamber is on the risers. Chairs. Desks. They gush out of the stalls and out of the gallery up to the seat of the city and I’m surrounded, but not trapped. Not alone. Not anymore.

  The twenty-four hours come and go. I expect the attack to come in the middle of the night, but dawn arrives without the Interdictor. Fear swells within the building. People prepare, though I don’t know why; how can you prepare for a man crashing through the roof like an asteroid? I have to get The Interdictor away from the building somehow. Buy some time for people to escape. Doubt gives me whiplash. Is this the right thing? Hours drag on. Fear scrapes its nails across all of us. I move the children moved into the subway tunnels below, positioned for a quick exit south down the Star Line if things go badly.

  I expect things to go badly.

  Planes continue to leave from the peninsula, the only activity in Break Pointe and I want for something to happen. Used to be all I wanted was for a dull, empty day, smooth like a freshly laid tablecloth. When I was a girl, Ma set the table every day. No wrinkles. No creases. Perfect. Her entire day revolved around that table, until it didn’t. Someone bumped into the table. She left it. Table went unused, because what was there in eating on it anymore, after Dad. She left it. She only took to the tablecloth again to pull it out from under all the things she piled on it and I’d jump out of bed in the middle of the night, thinking we were being robbed. Just my peace. My sanity. Everything was still there, just in more pieces.

  I’ll fix it, I said, but I didn’t. I just hid the mangled cloth in the closet with the rest of the things I didn’t want her to break and I stopped. I stopped trying to smooth the wrinkles out of my mother. Out of me. Now I’m like someone who slept too hard on their pillow. The lines go right through me.

  Chains jangle somewhere in the distance. The Interdictor lowers out of the clouds above City Hall.

  I meet him in the sky. “Are we going to do this now?”

  “I am merely surveying the field before battle,” he says. “A tradition among kings.”

  “You’ve got an inflated sense of yourself.”

  He drifts a little bit on the cold, northern breeze. “Perhaps I don’t give you enough credit, Baldwin. You did all this to bring Valene down to earth.” Another plane takes from Crown Field across the river. “Congratulations. You have.”

  Guilt swirls around me with all my birds. “I’m not the one who sat by while a plane of innocent people crashed and burned.”

  “I obeyed the law.”

  I roll my eyes. “Do you all have the same script?”

  “I followed the letter of the law, Baldwin. A law written by men and women ostensibly elected to serve your interests. There are no Empowered in Congress. There are none on the Supreme Court. If there were, I imagine much of the ERA would be found to be unconstitutional. Perhaps now, there will be a call for the law to be relaxed, and the chains you have all bound us will be loosened so we may serve you that much faster.”

  “You killed people on that bridge, but I should feel sorry for you? Can you be anymore full of shit?”

  “You should open your eyes, Baldwin. You think I am the enemy. You think this is a war between weak and strong. It is. Except you are confused as to which side is which.”

  This fucking guy. “You could have broken the law.”

  “Like Valene?”

  I shrug. “Why not?”

  “Why San Francisco?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t follow.”

  “The earthquake. She hears it in the ground. Why not Fukushima? Why not some village in Afghanistan? It’s not as if she didn’t hear those earthquakes. Why wasn’t she descending from on high every time somebody screamed for help?”

  “The ERA,” I say.

  “Doesn’t apply in Japan.”

  “Her father wouldn’t let her.”

  “Or California was about to pass Proposition 47 and Great Power would have been locked out of doing business in the fourth largest economy in the world. But the measure failed. She got a tickertape parade. And an extra zero on her bottom line.”

  Birds twist in knots around me. “You think you can stand taller by stepping on her? She’s better than all of us.”

  “She would be justified in thinking so, but Valene does not consider anyone. If she did, she would be here.”

  “She’s not well,” I say.

  “Valene suffers. Ever since she was a girl, she has only suffered…” The rigidity in his voice wanes. “And he never paid any attention. Everything she does is for his esteem. All of you see a princess, born of grace, born to her role. I see a little girl vamping for an audience of one. I know her, Baldwin. What I don’t know is how much of her pain now is genuine, and how much is theater, for man who will simply never see it.”

  “And who are you trying to convince?”

  His chains jingle with muzzled laughter. “So much fear in your voice… do you hear it? She doesn’t.”

  “She’s coming back. You’re going to pay for what you did.”

  “Everyone pays, Baldwin. You think you’ve paid the ultimate price. You haven’t. Not yet. Tomorrow, you’ll pay for this city’s debts. You’ll pay for its sins. When I crush that rock in your chest, and the specter of the alien goes out forever, you will have paid in full. And you will be free.”

  The Interdictor rattles away back toward the Blackwood Building and I rattle back to City Hall, everything I know and everything I believe loose and held together in frayed links.

  Sleeping bags tile the floors of the council chamber. The walls and the steps and the risers and I stand atop the dais, one candle among many, as Frankie and Ben creep through the sleeping and shivering. Ben records everything as Frankie talks in a reverent hush into the camera, dwarfed under the helmet and flak jacket she wears. A badge across her chest. PRESS. Finally, their macabre tour through the chamber leads them to me.

  Frankie holds the mic out. “Anything to say, Kit?”

  “I’d leave if I were you,” I say. “I
don’t think that press badge you’ve got on is going to make any difference with GP.”

  She smiles. “I thought we were partners.”

  “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “The tape was uploaded online anonymously,” she says. “I just reported it. Ok. I may have gotten a tip.”

  I cross my arms. “You reported that it was me.”

  Frankie turns to Ben. “Give us a minute.”

  The green light in his helmet-cam goes red, and Ben wanders through the dense labyrinth of people, out of the chamber. She looks back at me with a smile, eyes bright and feline.

  “Where’s the little girl’s room?”

  Frankie slips out of her flak jacket, and rests it in a sink halfway down the line. Her reflection splinters between the spotted, smudged mirrors along the tiled wall of the ladies restroom, tucked in a closet almost, outside the chamber.

  “This is all going to make for a great piece,” Frankie says. “Definitely some Valley Forge vibes in here.”

  I lean against the cracked tile of the bathroom wall. “Where will you put your Pulitzer?”

  “I didn’t say it was you, Kit. I said it was probably you.”

  I wish Abi was here. I wish she had a plate of fresh baked cookies and one of them was shaped like Frankie, so I could bite its fucking head off and spit it back out.

  “Why?” I say. “Why would you do that?”

  She shrugs. “You’re the one with the tape. Aren’t you?”

  “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  “Isn’t this what you wanted?”

  “What do you want, Frankie?”

  Frankie checks her face in the mirror. “Mostly, I want the perfect pair of jeans, but I want the story to keep going. On one hand, you’re about to be dead. I’m here to tell you. Martyrs. Solid blue-chip investment. On the other, there isn’t much drama in GP bulldozing The Derelicts and putting up riverfront condos. So. How do we keep the story going, Kitsie?”

  My instinct is to walk out of here, and leave this bitch once and for all but I feel as trapped in Frankie’s web as the birds of the city must do mine. Everything I do, everything I say, right along with everything I don’t, gets twisted into whatever shape Frankie desires. No matter what I do now, no matter how I project myself, martyr or monster, Frankie decides.

  “There’s nothing you or I can say or do that will stop The Interdictor from crashing through the front doors,” I say.

  Frankie dabs a bit of lip balm on the end of her pinky. “Sure about that?”

  “What will you try and blackmail me to do now, Frankie? What is it you think I have left to lose?”

  She puckers her lips. “Valene.”

  I sigh. “She’s gone. You made sure of that.”

  “You haven’t figured this out, yet.”

  “What’s that?”

  “All of you think the war is here, in the street. Right and wrong. Good and evil. There’s only one war, Kit. Truth and fiction. The rest of them are just proxies. Your battlefield isn’t a city, it’s the hearts and minds of every American. You’re sitting in here wondering if these toilets will flush, but out there, some think you’re going to burn down the world. Others think you’re going to save them. But you know what almost all of them think? Valene Blackwood is an angel. A saint. And she hears them. That’s press you can’t buy. That’s power. You should use it. Her old man has been her entire life.”

  “How?”

  She smiles into the mirror. “Who leaked the tape?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I can’t reveal sources,” she says, “but it had to have been someone with access to it. You only ever showed it to people. Didn’t share it. Very smart. So the leaker got it straight off the GP mainframe. Which means they’re a GP employee with very high clearance. Someone with a conscience. Who could that be, I wonder? Who at GP has demonstrated in the past a willingness to buck company policy and even the law, to do the right thing? The human thing? Oh, that’s right. Valene.”

  I brace against a sink, battered by all the wars swirling around in the quagmire within me. I can’t fight them all.

  “Valene didn’t do anything,” I say.

  Frankie leans against the sink beside me. “You don’t know that. She could have. Nothing I said is wrong, is it?”

  Not necessarily. “Just because you wrap a lie in a bit of truth doesn’t make what you do acceptable, Frankie.”

  “It makes it easier to go down. Which any doctor will tell you is the hardest part of the job. Medicine is bitter, Kit. So is the truth. No one wants to take the truth. So soften it up. Gussy it up. Watch how easy it goes down.”

  I push off the sink. “We’re not lying about Valene.”

  “Tomorrow, The Interdictor kills you and hundreds of others. GP gets their city. You become a martyr. Or, we say it was Valene who leaked the tape. And boom. GP goes into spin control. The Interdictor doesn’t knock down the doors. Valene has to go on the record to deny it. She has to stand behind her father and everything he has done, or she has to stand with you.”

  “You think she would come back?”

  Frankie smiles. “Change the story, Kit. You’ve changed it already. You’re a hero. The old fashioned kind. You can save the day and get the girl, if you play ball with me.”

  I reel, from desire to fear. God help me. I could have everything I want: Valene. A restored city. An end to the war tearing me apart. All I have to do is play the game. Rules are simple. Ask a question. Answer with a question.

  Why San Francisco?

  The entire GP database unravels inside my mind. Emails. Memos. Files. PROP 47. Do I want to know? Do I want to burst the bubble I placed Val in so she’s no longer hermetically sealed from the shit that swirls around the Blackwood Building? What if the earthquake was some kind of stunt? A lie? The truth is people believe in her. What she represents. Altruism. Compassion. Humanity. I go digging around for the truth, I take away one of the last symbols people have of a world where we’re obligated to more than just our own self-interests. If I tell a lie, and say she leaked the tape, just to get her down here, to save my ass, to lift this cloud over the city, it’s no better.

  “No,” I say.

  Frankie scoffs. “Hold on a second. You want to win? You want to save this city? Then save it.”

  Saving the city isn’t destroying someone else, anymore than saving someone makes up for losing another. I’m tired of being a plot point in Frankie’s ever evolving story. My story has never been mine, not once. All my life, I bit my lip, filed the edges off my accent, boxed up my life and only said the bare minimum to get by. To get through. I wanted to be invisible. No one. My life has become Ma’s life. Valene’s. A hundred thousand scared faces in City Hall. I’m ready to tell my own story.

  I hand Frankie her flak jacket. “No more games.”

  “Don’t be stupid. If I leave, you have no nothing – ”

  “I have information, Frankie. Power. You keep telling me.”

  “What do you have?”

  “The truth.”

  Frankie pulls the jacket back on. “What’s the truth? She’s a saint? Is she better than her father? Sure. Is she any different? She’s the most powerful woman in the world. Absolute power, Kit. It corrupts, absolutely.”

  “Power reveals. Power doesn’t change you, Frankie. You just end up doing what you want with it.”

  “That’s quaint.”

  “You don’t care about right or wrong. Truth or fiction. You just care about the next thing, Frankie.”

  Her eyes blaze. I really don’t know what she thinks. “You think there’s such as right and wrong? The truth? The truth is a mirror, Kit. Everything you see in it is reversed.”

  I double in the mirror above the sink. My entire life, I’ve been in a war over my truth. Am I Irish, or American? White, or black? Gay, or straight? Human, or alien. I didn’t always know, but I know no one else could say. No one else will.

  I push open the door. “You’r
e leaving now.”

  Frankie drifts toward the door, eyes pinched in surprise. “This city and this country have the same future, Kit. It’s that dark horizon you see when you look out on the lake. It’s nothing. You’ll see. Doesn’t matter how bright you burn. Doesn’t matter how hard you fight. That story is already written.”

  “Be careful about that mirror, Frankie. Everything that you see is reversed, too.”

  Her steps are uncertain on the way out of the council chamber, stopping and starting, changing direction, the sound of thunder from a storm gathering in the distance. Whatever happens tomorrow, people will make their own truth of it.

  All I can do is live mine.

  My fingers tremble over the touchscreen on the buoy Valene sent. The code. I don’t know the code.

  Why a code.

  I want to send a message to Valene. A goodbye we didn’t get before. No matter what happens tomorrow, I want her to hear me, one last time. Energy bleeds through the vellus skin of the concept containment suit. You did all this to bring her down to earth… I access the hard drive of the buoy. …and you have. With a thought, I bypass the security code. Unlock the message.

  Static riddles the audio. “Kit…”

  “Val…”

  “Help… I need your help…”

  Twenty-Six

  “You can’t just leave,” Vidette says.

  I push open the door out to the roof. “She needs me.”

  Confusion swirls in the air above City Hall. Thousands of birds writhe in the oil slick of the night sky. I can barely make out the stars. I don’t need them. Somewhere in all the thoughts slinging around in my head – what am I going to say? What am I going to do? Fly to space? – is the telemetry from the space station, streaming back to the Blackwood Building and the ground control computers I can still connect to through their mainframe. The Laputa courses around the world, 18,000 miles an hour, a constant star. I know exactly where to find Valene.