Ever The Hero (Book 1): Ever The Hero

by Harn, Darby

  Ma withdraws from me, and goes to the window. No. Ma shoves up the window, out to a dead dark sky. “Go on now.”

  “But Ma…”

  “Go, Kitsie. Fly.”

  Shadows fall across the apartment, cast from the magenta glower outside. I go to the window. A faint star flickers beyond, beckoning me to continue. I look back at Ma. She smiles at me. She nods. Go on. Go on, then. I crawl through the window, out onto the ledge. I look up, as I always do. I reach for the star. What am I reaching for now? Who? Birds crowd the ledge. They flap against me mad, and I lose my footing.

  Darkness fragments into a veil of dust as I fall. Shards of crystal float in the veil, hardened energy that rains like diamonds on a jagged ground covered in them. I crash to a landing at the bottom of all this darkness. A disc, like the ones floating through the In Between. The distant star resolves into the Myriad, burning in the heart of the Ever.

  We must be restored, they say.

  I step back, afraid my war with the Ever is about to end in my complete erasure. “Stay away.”

  Thunder cracks through the void as the Ever approaches me. Lightning flashes and nine shadows cast off the alien. There are eight other Ever. My God. I see them now, or at least the memory the Ever has of its kin. Each of them scours a different universe, a different dimension, collecting energy to transmit back to the ship. So I assume. The interdimensional link we all share broke when the ship crashed in Break Pointe. I have no way of perceiving their whereabouts without restoring the link, and they have no way of perceiving mine.

  Pretty sure I want to keep it that way.

  You are us, the Ever says. We must continue.

  “You can bin us continuing anything,” I say. “You’re acquiring everything, everywhere… you’re like locusts.”

  If the ship is destroyed, the work will be lost forever.

  Everything they acquire collects in the ship. The core, like some kind of backup drive. “I don’t…”

  Take it, the Ever says, gesturing to the Myriad.

  When Blackwood induced the meltdown and the ship malfunctioned, the work stopped, and this ancient campaign of the Ever was nearly destroyed. Maybe Blackwood is a hero, after all; he accidentally saved the entire universe. Right now, the core is failing again. When it does, the Earth will be a cinder, but the rest of the cosmos will be spared this locust plague the Ever has visited on so many worlds and galaxies before.

  I gaze into the light in its chest. “I’m not going to complete your work. I’m not going to hurt anyone.”

  The Ever considers me. We are you. You are us.

  “You want to destroy me.”

  We are you, the Ever says.

  “I don’t understand.”

  The fluid anonymity of the Ever morphs into the police officer. The warrior from Destos. Danny Vale. Me. I touch my own jaw, round, hard, soft, crystal, everything at once.

  We were lost. Dead. Broken. When you touched the Myriad, your light fused with ours. You fixed what was broken.

  “What?”

  You became us. We became you.

  Energy crackles between me and the Ever. There’s no distinction. This light is mine. This energy. This power. My hands sink into the soap bubble of the alien’s chest. Current surges through me, pulling me closer, within and I look into the face of the alien. My mother’s eyes. The infinite.

  Take it, the alien says.

  “I won’t be hurting anybody.”

  We will do as we must.

  I don’t make connections easy. But I’m getting better.

  “I am you,” I say.

  You are us.

  All the stars the alien visited constellate. All the worlds bead in the drops of an eternal ocean, swelling within me. All the lives in its possession. All the souls. All the knowledge. All the power. All the possibility. I connect.

  I fire.

  The hardened crystal of my skin cracks. Bad glass shears away, revealing only light. Synthetic infection burns away in the cosmic heat roiling within me. The terminal reacts to my magnetic will. The ship does. The meltdown shudders to a stop.

  The clumsy legs of Blackwood’s containment suit stagger back against the terminal. “Impossible…”

  “Nothing’s impossible,” I say, naked in light.

  In power.

  Twenty-Eight

  “Never let a bird in, Professor,” I say.

  “What?”

  A portal slashes open behind Blackwood. With a single burst of magnetic energy, I nudge him onto a shoal of crystal floating in the endless expanse of the In Between.

  “You wanted the stars. Have them.”

  His agonized face stretches across the glass dome of his collapsing suit, his indignant scream stifled as I close the portal, and leave him stranded on the other side.

  Piller sheathes his telekinetic sword. “What did you do?”

  “I put him in time out.”

  “Forever, or..?”

  I shrug. “He’s a genius. He’ll figure it out.”

  Shame twists on Piller’s face. “I didn’t know he would…”

  Vidette almost pushes him. Good thing she doesn’t. He’d probably land somewhere in China. “I trusted you, Ronny.”

  “I was trying to save you. I was trying to save us all.”

  I don’t pity him; and I don’t judge him, either. Piller deserves no condemnation beyond the hell already closing in on him. “You can’t save everyone, Dr. Piller.”

  Vidette touches my arm. “Honey… are you ok?”

  Light burns so bright and free in me, the suit barely shades it. “We’ve never been better.”

  Tremors rumble through the earth. I brace against the terminal. These shocks don’t emanate from the ship; the core is stable. No more radiation leaks from it. No more infection. The city is safe, at least from the threat of the stars.

  “We have to get back,” I say, and birds helix around me as I soar out of the ship back into the battle.

  Pulse cannons fire from the patrol ships into City Hall. As if these assholes don’t have enough firepower. Here’s some more, then. I lathe them all from the sky. Vidette crashes clean through what survives. Piller bats away Responders with his telekinetic sword. Mike charges out of City Hall, leading a counterattack into the disintegrating lines of the Responders. The Uniform cleans them up. I drive them back with all my fury and The Interdictor smashes into me at the speed of sound.

  I’m really tired of people hitting me.

  My momentum is too great to slow my fall toward the lake, so I open a portal to the In Between ahead of me. I fly through the dimension, out another portal right into The Interdictor’s backside. There. How do you like it.

  Apparently not so much.

  He rockets out of the sky at me. I go invisible. The Interdictor slows up. Clouds evaporate in my anger. I lose sight of him in the steam boiling off the lake. A shadow falls over me. He drops out of the sky, out of the sun and sand melts to glass as I comet back to the beach at Delmont Harbor.

  A sonic boom cracks the air as he lasers down on me. I tear open another portal in front of him. He evades it, and the next one I try. No way I’m getting rid of him like I did Blackwood.

  How do I get rid of him?

  I hit him with all I have. The Interdictor powers through my energy blast. Step by step, inch-by-inch, he pushes forward into the gale of cosmic power I unleash on him. Spider legs of frantic energy crawl across his impervious body.

  “Is this all you’ve got, Baldwin? I have to say I’m disappointed. I expected much more of a challenge.”

  Strength. I need strength. I need muscle and the fingers of my hand web. My skin shimmers into green. My fist swells and I punch him down the beach. The tide sweeps over my feet. The warrior from Destos ripples in the water, his – my – alien strength bolstered by the gravity of the earth. I bound through the surf, and crash down on The Interdictor as he tries to make sense of this. I don’t know how to fight. I just bash him with my strange fists and h
e punches me far out into the lake.

  What else do I got in here?

  The Ever acquired every living thing it encountered on its long journey here. People. Androids. Hive minds. All kinds of animals. Birds. Fish. Insects. Big giant lizard monster things.

  Water erupts out of the lake in an atomic cloud as I transform into the Moimadon, a Blackwood Building sized creature from a planet where he was one of the little guys. The Interdictor hovers in the air before me, a little black speck.

  “Baldwin?” he says, and I flick him across state lines.

  I wade after him, but any time I move, I set off big giant waves, so maybe let’s go back to me for a bit. Shreds of Vidette’s costume rain down around me, stretched so far in my transformation the seams burst. Should have thought about that. I rise into the air, burning as bright as the sun, waiting for him to come back to the city and when he does, I change back.

  And I thought the difference in gravity made the warrior from Destos stronger. Heavy rain showers Break Pointe. Fish. Fifty years of trash and The Interdictor squirms somewhere beneath my giant foot, at the bottom of the lake. He pounds on my diamond claw with his free hand. Kind of tickles. Go on, then. Move me. You’re strong. You’re powerful. But you can’t breathe underwater. And you can’t move me for all your trying.

  His violence wanes. His urgency. He stops moving.

  If I let him up, he’ll just keep coming. How many more people will die because of him? How many more will suffer for his inaction? He needs to pay for what he’s done.

  Someone should pay.

  I transform back to me, and the sudden lifting of all that weight is enough to spring The Interdictor and a good cubic ton of mud all the way back to the harbor. He crawls through the scorched sand. He tries to stand, to fly, but he can’t. The Interdictor chokes for air. He sheds the mangled sheet of his chains, holding his throat, eyes bulging in shock.

  Fear.

  Even now, he’s not done. Most bullies are cowards. He’s not a coward. I touch down on the scarred beach. Fire bristles in my hands. Smoke shrouds the city, as it has too often. If I kill him, nothing changes. The battle goes on, as it has for fifty years, a game to be played to no outcome. A system, designed to corrupt and distort, bending and breaking everyone to the limits of its shape. All this started because the city couldn’t pay its dues. Being human comes with a cost, now. I suppose it does. Rich or poor, strong or weak, we all pay in the end. Some of us get nothing. Some of us do nothing, and get all the reward. Some of us just do, and do the best we can.

  “I forgive you,” I say.

  He clutches his throat. He finds enough strength to spit. “I don’t need your forgiveness, Baldwin. I don’t need the shackles of your feckless morality. I did what was right.”

  The broken links of his heavy chains drift through my magnetic web. I fashion them into a crude crown that I set molten on his head. His agony rattles across the shore.

  “So did I,” I say, and leave him among the ruins.

  Voices echo through the dust. People limp through the haze shrouding City Hall. Rubble trickles from the faces of damaged buildings. Blood trails through our victory, and through my mind as I consider all that happened. An hour ago, I was a frightened woman clinging to the hope of someone else. Now, I’m a big giant alien lizard. Among infinite other things. My neck kind of hurts from the whiplash. I’m sore all over, but it’s not from the blows The Interdictor landed. Blackwood is gone. The Interdictor defeated. GP routed. And I’m terrified. Did we win?

  What did we win?

  “We didn’t get it all,” Frankie says, hurrying out of the haze with Ben, recording. “Were you just a kaiju?”

  “Probably shouldn’t stand too close, Frankie.”

  She steps back. “What else can you do? Who can you be?”

  Light flows through my hands. My body. Each filament a delta in an infinitely branching river through existence. All the lives I acquired live within me still. I can be anyone. Everyone. Alien and human at the same time.

  “I can be me,” I say, and move forward, into the haze.

  The jigsaw at the heart of the alien wreck pieces together in endless variations, trying to find the right fit. Birds escort me as I descend through the hull breach. I stand at the terminal. So much to do. I promised to shut down the ship.

  We don’t want to do that.

  We don’t want to continue the work, but we don’t want to erase it, either. The ship needs to be preserved. All its cargo. Energy swirls within the core. Lives. Universes. On one hand, this thing is a giant cosmic eraser, deleting everything it comes across. On another, it’s a library. An ark. Could I get them out? Is there some way of untangling me from the alien? Where would I even start? I don’t know how to repair the ship, not with the materials available on Earth. I don’t know how to make the wreck safe without shutting down the core. If I do that, I shut down me. Us. I’ll figure it out. I’ll fix this.

  Birds startle out of their gentle orbit around me. I step away from the terminal. “There’s no trespassing here.”

  Johnny Albertine strides casually out of the magenta haze on the ring encircling the core. “Pardon the intrusion. You’re rather a hard woman to pin down, Kit.”

  “I had a change of heart.”

  He fixes on the fire in my chest. “Costume at the tailor?”

  I zip up my leather jacket. “Having a little trouble finding a needle that will penetrate the fabric. It’s just as well. This is me. This is who I am.”

  “Ordinary?”

  “Human,” I say.

  He smiles. “That’s optimistic.”

  “Is there something you want?”

  Albertine gazes at the core. “We can still help one another, Kit. The city may have a protector, but it has no benefactor. Unless Valene intends to return to earth and assume the throne… which, if the rumors are true, may be necessary.”

  I cross my arms. “I have enough friends.”

  He puckers out his lips. “You’ve certainly got enemies. People love you here. Once you get past city limits, it gets more complicated. Your display the other day reinforced every fear about you. As much as people sympathize with Break Pointe, they’re terrified of the avenging alien. And for good reason.”

  “No one has anything to fear from me,” I say.

  Albertine wanders past me, trailing his finger along the railing. “Oh, they all start out saying that.”

  He reminds me of Frankie. Always telling me what I am. How things really are. “I’m not like everyone else.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me. You’ve helped Found Corp immensely, by putting the screws to GP. People may not like you, but they certainly don’t like Great Power. A lot of people are cancelling their contracts, and coming to Found.”

  “You’re welcome,” I say.

  He smiles again. “As a token of my appreciation, I’d be willing to – quietly – provide some material support for you and your people. Food. Medicine. Blankets. Whatever you need.”

  We need everything. There still isn’t power. Water. Every day it gets colder. Every day the city shrinks into the spaces that aren’t ruins, the island a ledge of civilization. I’d be a fool to deny anything that would get us back on our feet.

  “We’ll manage, thanks.”

  “Not exactly a queue forming to help you out here, Kit. I don’t expect GP will get round to tidying up the place now. As a matter of fact, with Blackwood gone and the company hemorrhaging cash, they might cut their losses and sell the city off.”

  “Break Pointe isn’t for sale,” I say. “And neither am I.”

  Albertine looks down his nose at me. “You can protect them. How will you feed them? Clothe them? Where will the jobs come from? You see, you’re right back where you started and now it’s not Gardner’s fault. It’s not Blackwood’s. It’s yours.”

  “I have ideas,” I say.

  “Cheers to ideas. I have one. Let’s pick this up in a few months, shall we? Say once winter has s
et in, and the wolves are sniffing round your door.” His smile stretches out like taffy. “Then we’ll see what is and isn’t for sale around here.”

  Albertine turns and thins so much I lose sight of him. He bleeds into the haze masking the core. His shadow remains. The helmeted woman in dark armor. She lingers on the deck, just staring at me, and then she’s gone, too. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Doesn’t matter now. Break Pointe might be ashes. Some of them are smoldering. Embers. I keep their flame. I keep their promise, holding the fire against the dark.

  The smell of soot greets me on the other side of the door. Jet fuel. Mildew. Every disaster, let in the apartment through the window I never bothered closing. I set down my saddlebag on the kitchen counter and I start to close the window. Down on Shelley, traces of snow stick to oil spots. Angels in the street. I leave the window. I open them all, letting the air in. The staleness out. I open every cabinet. Closet. Drawer. Loose change dances across the linoleum. Burnt out bulbs. Next I unearth everything Ma and I had been keeping for so long, making a pile in the living room I’ll take to City Hall or another shelter. The apartment empties, until there’s room for all that I want to keep. I place all my pictures along the mantle, the counter, the windowsill, Ma everywhere, always.

  Every face in the crowded atrium of City Hall is a dry riverbed, caked in clay and channeled in tears. A palpable sense of fear replaces the anxiety we’ve been living with since the strike started. Before, it was always, What will happen next? Now, it’s Will anything happen at all? People look at me, afraid. Expectant. Like I have all the answers. Pretty sure I told them I did. Ma always depended on me, especially after Dad passed. Fix it. Sort it out. Get us through. I can do this.

  I’ve been doing it my whole life.

  Book shuffles through the atrium, flipping through his pages, not paying any attention.

  “Where’s your coat, Book?”

  He smiles, and shows me yellowed, crumbly old comic book pages, pressed into the middle of his omnibus so deep the ink stains the pages beneath them. Men of steel. Women of wonder. Worlds of tomorrow. It’s possible. Anything is possible.