by Harn, Darby
She smiles. “I love you. I love you so much.”
I let go. “I always will.”
Silence settles over the room. The deepest silence I’ve ever known. Words come to Valene’s lips in false starts.
“What more can you be expected to give, Kitty?”
My entire life, I’ve denied everything. My pain. My self. My fear. I don’t want to anymore. I want to be free. I want to give. I want to give all of this, and just be who I am.
“All I have,” I say. “This is all I have.”
“You have me.”
The want to stay is overwhelming. The need. Stay. What good are you for anyone down there? Be good for someone, at least. “Valene. You are a good in my life. I wanted to be a good in yours. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t have been better.”
Valene stares hopelessly down at the deck.
“I wish it was different. I wish none of it happened sometimes, and then… there has to be some good. I’ll try and make good. I’ll do my best. I’ll do better.”
“I feel responsible,” Valene says.
“I wish it was different.”
“You don’t have to leave right away.”
“If I don’t, I never will.”
Her voice breaks. “Don’t go, Kitty.”
“I love you. So much. Be well.”
I release the lock on the outer hatch of the airlock. My eyes never leave Valene’s as I float out into space. Part of me thinks she’ll say, Wait. I changed my mind. But she doesn’t. The station recedes, speeding away until it’s just another star among many, and then nothing at all. My heart goes with it. Sorrow floods into the cavity where it had been. Guilt. Fear. None of it keeps. I keep nothing now, but my resolve. My duty. A nervous system of yellow light webs North America, except for a conspicuous dead patch around the lower western jaw of Lake Michigan. I dive for home, carrying the dawn with me.
Twenty-Seven
Dust obscures downtown. Smoke. GP patrol ships drift in and out of the gloam. City Hall ghosts in and out of the haze. Dozens of Responders bound over the barricades, pushing the defenders back. Windows shatter. Cars tumble down the street. People scream for help. Fresh craters gore an already desolate landscape and I follow the trail of screams to a family huddled behind a barricade of stacked tires. Nosedive crashes through it and then she rockets back down, right on top of them.
“No,” I say, but I’m too late.
A massive hand pinches Nosedive right out of the air. Her scream fades as she lands somewhere in the river. Near transparent eddies of energy crackle through the liminal boundaries of this ridiculous floating hand. I look up, expecting it to be attached some monster but it’s not a monster.
It’s The Uniform.
“Baldwin,” he says. Another Responder charges out of the smoke. The Uniform clotheslines him. “I’m maintaining a perimeter around City Hall, but there’s too many of them. I count twenty, maybe thirty Responders. Half a dozen patrol ships providing close air support. The Interdictor is out here somewhere. Vidette has him, at least for the moment.”
“The fuck,” I say.
“You were right,” he says. “My fight is here.”
I look up, as I always do. “Valene…”
He puts his hand on my shoulder. “We all have to make our own choices. And not all of our battles are here and now. The city has the hero it needs.” He smiles. “Now. Take out those patrol ships, and then drive back their line toward the river. We’ll reconnoiter here and deal with The Interdictor, together.”
A Responder stumbles out of the chaos, to a face first plop on the pavement. Mike emerges from the haze behind him.
“I’m helping,” he says. “I helped.”
A shadow falls over the street. Too late, I look up and Vidette meteors out of the sky. Concrete fractures beneath my feet. The street caves in. Everything goes black. When the smoke clears, I’m floating over a massive crater in what was Siegel. I don’t see Mike. The Uniform. I don’t see anyone else, except Vidette, lying at the bottom, caked in blood and dust.
“Vi…”
The Interdictor slams into the crater between us. “Baldwin. I see your reputation for being late was well earned.”
“Get away from her,” I say. “Now.”
The Interdictor grabs Vidette’s hair. “Or what?”
I zip down the front of my suit. No more holding back. No more denying my power. I focus everything I have on one single burst and nothing happens. Light shatters within me, into sharp fractals. My skin hardens to crystal. Energy curls within me like ingrown hairs and I’m trapped. I can’t move.
“What’s happening…”
Professor Blackwood lumbers out of the smoke, in his containment suit. “Get any messages lately?”
Pinions of crystal protrude through my ethereal skin. Every time I move, something cracks. I’m breaking. What’s going on. Piece it together. Hurry. What did he do. What did you do. Message. The buoy. I hacked the communications buoy.
“A virus,” I say, his smile is so smug I can barely stand it. I can barely stand at all. “How…”
“Let’s just say I’ve had some time to think about how that thing in your chest works,” Blackwood says. “And how I’d make damn sure that the alien didn’t come back without fixing me.” The Myriad is a computer. A living machine, processing energy and information. I downloaded a virus. Somehow the virus is disrupting the energy flow of the Myriad. It’s not processing. It’s corrupting. Fragmenting. Destroying. If I don’t stop this, the bleeding thing will shut down.
“I’m not helping you,” I say.
“Oh, I think you will.”
Blackwood nods at The Interdictor, and I lift off the ground over his shoulder. I’m flying away with him but I’m falling, all this energy and power crashing around the inside of me, dying to get out like the bird off the window of the apartment, not realizing he was trapped and I’m trapped, forever, bounding off a cage I perceive but can’t escape.
Pain stabs through my entire body. Shards of crystal protrude through my iridescent skin, now a jumbled, jagged sheet of ice that cracks and breaks and then refreezes. Energy slows from the Myriad so much it’s slurry. Magenta sludge weighs me down. All the mass of the universe inside me, collapsing, crushing down to nothing and it’s all I can do to hold on.
I can’t hold on.
I slide off The Interdictor’s shoulder hard to the ringed deck enclosing the core of the alien ship. Mad, hematic light flares inside, flickering behind a swarm of shifting decks as dense and chaotic as the birds twisting into knots around us.
“What… what are we doing here?”
Blackwood’s face ignites inside the void of his helmet. “Completing our destiny.”
The impulse to punch that smile off his face dies in my hands. I still can’t move. Get up. Move. C’mon. I strain against the crystalline straitjacket my body has become.
Blackwood slogs across the ring, to the terminal. “You know, I assumed you’d crack open that buoy the instant you found it. And then I thought, no. She’s smart. She’s not falling for this. After all, a cursory examination would have revealed it’s not from the space station, but a standard patrol ship.”
Impotent energy curls within me. “Dr. Piller said – ”
Dr. Piller warps in the beveled visor of Blackwood’s helmet, as he emerges out of the magenta haze. He drops to Vidette’s side, a bloody mass at The Interdictor’s feet.
Anguish bends his voice. “You said no one would get hurt.”
“I said no one would get killed,” Blackwood says.
Piller wipes the blood and sweat and dirt away from Vidette’s face and I feel covered. Buried. Smothered.
“Dr. Piller… how could you…”
He holds out his hands. “I warned you.”
“How could you?”
“He was going to kill her,” Piller says, like it’s my fault. “He doesn’t care who lives or dies, Kit. I kept saying it and you wouldn’t listen to me. She wouldn’t liste
n.”
“You’ve ruined us…”
“What is it you think you can accomplish, Ms. Baldwin? The world changed in 1968. Forever. This isn’t a world of men anymore. Of laws. It’s a world of gods and monsters.” Piller looks up at the Interdictor, hovering just off the deck above him. “If humanity is going to survive, this is the only way.”
Piller cradles Vidette in his arms. “It’s the only way.”
Every time I try and isolate the virus, delete its information somehow – there has to be a fucking option to delete something I’ve acquired – its grip tightens. Figure it out.
Hurry.
“Such will,” Blackwood says. “Such sheer determination. I have to say I admire your persistence. You know, people dismiss the weak and powerless as just that, but they overlook their unyielding capacity to endure. Lucky for me, isn’t it?”
“Your luck just ran out,” I say.
He smiles. “You wanted to know why we’re here.” His metal glove falls heavy on the terminal. “You’re going to interface with the core. You’re going to become the key that unlocks all the secrets of the universe. That completes my transformation.”
“If I interface with the core… if I lose control to the alien… then the world burns, Professor.”
“Not if the virus goes untreated.” He leans down and taps my nose. “I know you’re still in there, old friend. Are you listening? You don’t get the antidote until I have what I want. Deny me, and you die, Kitsie. Both of you do. Once and for all.”
All these bloody people. Pushing and pulling on me. Do this. Don’t do that. Be this. You’ve got to be that. Maybe I am gullible. Slow. Too bad for Blackwood I catch up eventually.
“Fuck you,” I say.
“Thought you might say that.” Blackwood’s hand hovers over the terminal, just as it did in 1968, when he initiated the shutdown that nearly destroyed the ship. “Do it. Or else.”
“You wouldn’t,” I say.
“You and I both know I would.”
I look to Piller, desperate. “How could you…”
Piller eases Vidette to the deck. “Evander… what is this?”
A lazy smile floats across the shimmer of Blackwood’s face. “To be fair to Ronald, I didn’t tell him this part. But it was always going to end here. Wasn’t it, Kitsie?”
Decks break like tectonic plates, colliding, crashing together all around me. Everything crumbles into a red hell and still I can’t move. I can’t do anything.
“Someone stop him,” I say.
Vidette stirs on the deck. “Kit…”
Chains jangle in anticipation. “Dr. Rizzo,” The Interdictor says. “Good. I was beginning to feel cheated.”
She plants a fist in the deck and upends Blackwood. The Interdictor flies towards Vidette so fast all I see is a metallic blur. Next thing I know he’s rocketing out of the ship.
Vidette wipes the blood from her chin as thunder bellows through the city beyond. “Let her go, Professor.”
Hope finds me again; resolve.
Blackwood stumbles back to the terminal. “What do you know… the teenage sidekicks. Putting the band back together?”
Vidette clenches her fists. “We never broke up.”
“You had your day. And now I’m having mine.”
“You’re not destroying Kit,” Piller says, standing with Vidette. “You’re not destroying anyone else.”
“Or what?”
Cerulean light manifests around Piller, sharpening into a telekinetic sword he grips in his hands. “Or else.”
Blackwood scoffs. “Ronald, you’re fired.”
His hand plunges to the terminal. No. Currents arc off the core into the hollow of the ship. The core writhes and spins in mad revolutions, shrinking and expanding as it fights its own destruction. Tremors quake through the troubled earth below.
Piller tries to navigate the storm of images on the screen of the terminal. “Stop this. Evander, for Christ’s sake!”
“I can’t stop it. Only she can. Only the alien.” Blackwood looks at me. “You know what to do.”
The core brightens, the pitch and intensity matching the storm in my chest. Radiation floods the ship. Soon it will poison the city. The world. If the core implodes, the destruction will make 1968 look like a brush fire.
“I know what I have to do,” I say, and open my heart.
I put my hand to the terminal. All the light of the Myriad winnows into a single stream of energy flowing out of me, into the terminal, a key turning a lock. A door opens to eternity.
Oblivion.
Magnetic currents drag me deeper into the depths of the core, into the overriding power of the ship as it reconnects to the Myriad for the first time in fifty years. A leeching, unrelenting force peels me from the light like I’m the weak skin of a soft fruit and I’m peeled, shredded to ribbons and falling, falling forever. A cold numb envelops me. Voices drown me. Memories not my own. Other worlds and lives ripple in a dark ocean, expanding until they’re interrupted by others. The further I sink, the more distant the core becomes. I reach out to grab something, anything and I catch a piece of a string.
My shadow flickers on a concrete floor. A cloudy light bulb sways just overhead, throwing light on and off of tattered mattresses stood up against the cracked, dripping walls of the basement beneath the old auto garage on Dickens.
I spent hours in the basement. Months. In all the time I invested in assembling the sonic suit for Valene, the bleak desolation of the basement never bothered me. The dark. The dank. None of it seeped in but now, back in the place where I lost my life, I’m slick with a cold, heavy fear.
I don’t fear.
I go to the basement stairs. They’re gone. I circle the cage of the basement, pressing the walls, searching for a way out. The only open door belongs to the tin coffin that held the sonic suit, and the Myriad I foolishly tried to wed to it. I touched it, and got dragged into a tug of war with a cosmic force I’m still fighting. Am I? Have I lost? Is this the fate of every person consumed by the alien, to tumble around the disintegrating fuselage of their memories until they scatter?
I’m still me.
The container door whines open, as it always did, never wanting to shut. A sound caroms around the basement, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm. I walk around the container, just big enough for a body. Inside, an infinite void. A magenta star twinkles in the distance. Before, I stayed. I denied the void inside me. I chose Valene’s pain over my own. I worked only to fix someone else, never able to fix myself or even admit I was broken. How can you fix a city, when you don’t know where you’re broken? Abi said. That light in your chest is all your fear and pain and confusion just crushed down and down, every second of every day.
I’m broken.
I don’t know how to be. I don’t know how to fix me. Let me fix someone else. I have the want and the skills and the love, I have love to give, I just can’t make it work in me. I have to make it work. Figure this out. Get out of this.
Hurry.
I step inside the container. There’s no back. Only that distant star, just beyond my reach. I inch ahead through the infinite dark. Glass smashes in the distance. A voice echoes around me without any sense of direction.
Are you the light, Kitsie?
Her voice always paralyzes me. I cower here in the dark, afraid to go back. Afraid to go on. You’ve got to go on. Hurry. The star in the distance grows, brightening until it’s the morning sun peeking through the dark curtains Ma hung in the living room of the apartment. She goes room to room, unscrewing all the light bulbs and smashing them against the floor. Blood runs from her hands, in a trail I follow into the kitchen.
“Ma,” I say.
Blood smears across Ma’s nightgown. Dried rust of yesterday’s anger. Ma winces at the sight of me. I’m always a surprise. I reach for her hands. This time, she doesn’t fight as I uncurl each bloody finger. Deep cuts riddle her palms.
“These need stitches,” I say.
Ma’s hand
s curl, but I keep hold of them. Confusion lingers on her face. Uncertainty. Since I can remember, my default response was to retreat. Hide. Deny. Go out on the bike, and come back when it’s over. Disappear in my work. What was I ever working on? What was I ever doing, except trying to fit things together to make up for what I couldn’t make sense of at home?
“I didn’t know how,” I say. “Ma. I didn’t know.”
She shakes with nervous energy. “Are you the light?”
I cradle her hands in mine. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Are you the light?” Ma says. “Or the bulb?”
Blood streaks the frosted glass cap of the kitchen light above. The bulb inside flickers red and quick, like the Myriad. I don’t understand what’s happening to me. My existence unravels around me, my identity sacrificed to placate the hungry god of the alien ship but here I am, in the basement, where I died. In the apartment, where Ma did. These broken places. These broken pieces of me. I’m breaking now, and this is the last of me. This is where my mind goes. Ma. Home. What I couldn’t fix.
Ma pulls her bloody hands back, and me with them. I take her in my arms. She’s burning. She’s shivering. She’s alive, like she’s real and I’m not remembering this or imagining this. Ma’s fists clench against my chest, pulse beating through her hands, into me, ba-dumm and we’re alive, for now.
“I’m sorry. I love you,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Kitsie…”
I know I’m not responsible for Ma’s suffering, anymore than I’m responsible for fixing it. Still, the guilt gnaws at me. Regret. If I’d been smarter. Stronger. Healthier. Better.
Ma peers into the strange, burnt-out glass of my chest. “What is this, Kitsie? Where are we now?”
“I think these are my memories,” I say.
“Memories? I’m inside your head? You?”
“Always.”
Ma releases her fists. She sighs deep and tired into me and I just hold her, a lifetime of regrets coming to my lips but I don’t voice them. I don’t want to live everything I didn’t do. I just want this. I just want to be. And I am; I’m all these broken things. All at once. Fear. Love. Helplessness. Power.