In the back of my mind, I had thought I would reconcile with Neha eventually. When the Sentinels kidnapped her, I feared I would never get the chance to patch things up and apologize for acting like a royal jackass. But now, flying back toward Astor City with Neha underneath me again, I had my chance. A second chance.
Though the memories I had of our marriage and son were but fragments of an Omega spirit-induced dream, I just knew I could make that dream a reality. Since acquiring the Omega weapon, I had learned that nothing was impossible. Surely matters of the heart were no different.
I knew Neha still didn’t love me. Not the way I wanted her to, at least. She had been clear about that months ago. That was the past. I had been a different person then. Now, I would make Neha love me. I would find a way. I was the Omega. I had moved the immovable neutronium spear, captured Hannah’s killer, tricked the Sentinels, and liberated Neha. I could do anything.
How to begin? I had so much I wanted to say. I didn’t know how to say any of it. It did not matter. I was positively giddy being with Neha again, even under these circumstances.
I looked down at her. I felt myself grinning like an idiot. “So, how’s everything since I last saw you? Anything interesting happen lately?”
“Mmmmm, mmmmmm, mmm,” was all Neha could say through her metal gag.
“I can’t. Sorry. Though I’m flattered, now’s not the best time for that sort of thing. Maybe later, when we’re in private. I can understand your anxiousness to see me naked again, though. You’re not the first woman to fall under my body’s spell. You know what they say: ‘Once you’ve had a taste of Theodore, you’re always looking for more.’”
“Mmmm, mmm, mmmm, mmmmmm!” she said, more insistently this time. He eyes flicked down to her metal gag, then back up at me.
“Sorry, I didn’t quite get that last part. You’ll have to speak up. On second thought, I take that back. Don’t speak up. The quiet’s kind of peaceful.” I was so relieved I had gotten Neha out of the clutches of the Sentinels. I couldn’t stop beaming from ear to ear. “You know what? I think I like you better this way.”
Neha was staring daggers at me now. She looked like she wanted to hurt me almost as much as she wanted to hurt the Sentinels.
Intoxicated with relief and happiness, I laughed out loud. Neha had been wrong months before. What I felt was no brain chemistry trick, no side effect of mere horniness for the only woman I had slept with. I did love Neha. And I would find a way to make her love me.
Ungagging her seemed a good first step toward that. I’d had enough fun teasing her. I reached out with my powers to probe the gag around and in Neha’s mouth. Careful to avoid hurting her, I applied telekinetic pressure, breaking the metal in several places.
My enhanced powers detected the quick flash of an energy surge from the metal manacles binding her hands and ankles together. I instinctively raised my personal shield. It was the same sort of automatic reflex that makes you pull your hand away from a hot stove.
The manacles exploded. Night became day. Neha and I were engulfed by a huge fireball that expanded like an exploding supernova.
If it hadn’t been for my Omega weapon enhanced powers, I never would have survived the explosion. Since Mechano believed I had given up the Omega weapon, he undoubtedly thought the explosion would get rid of me once and for all.
He was wrong. I survived. Not only did I survive, but I flew away from the explosion without so much as a singed eyebrow. Physically, I was fine.
Emotionally, it was an altogether different matter.
Given even a tiny amount of more time, I know I could have done something. But there had been no time. There had been but a sliver of a fraction of a second between the metal’s energy surge and the explosion. Enough time for my reflexes to kick in and protect me.
Not enough time to protect Neha.
The blast vaporized her. Not even her ashes were left behind. Believe me, I looked.
I had not even told her I was sorry.
For everything.
27
I slammed to a stop. The hard floor of the Situation Room cracked and cratered under me. I had already sliced through Sentinels Mansion like a bullet through paper after first swatting away the missiles and smaller projectiles the mansion’s now active defenses had lobbed at me.
Taken by surprise by my sudden appearance in the room, it took a moment for the startled Sentinels to react. I targeted Millennium first. As an Omega-level Meta whose powers I did not fully understand, he posed the greatest threat. He raised his hands toward me, his fingers dancing in the air. With a downward flick of my wrist, an invisible force field exploded down like a guillotine, ripping through both of Millennium’s wrists. Blood spurted, sweet-smelling and an inhuman sapphire blue.
Millennium screamed. The peculiar rustling sound of his voice mingled with a banshee’s wail as his hands went flying, amputated from his arms far more neatly than any surgeon’s knife ever could have done it. The gauntleted hands dropped like dead fish, plopping on the metal floor with a wet thump. Magical math: No hands equaled no spells.
With a dismissive wave of my other hand, Millennium went flying. His arms and legs flailed. His back and head hit a wall with a sickening crunch. I let him slide to the floor. He lay there on his back twitching, like a stepped-on cockroach, with ichor oozing out of his wrists.
Seer was on the move. She flew up toward the hole I had punched through the ceiling earlier. A rat fleeing a sinking ship. Though my suit blocked her precognition, you didn’t need a crystal ball to see she and Mechano were no match for me in the Omega suit now that Millennium was out of commission.
I raised my hand slightly. I closed it, using my powers to grab and hold Seer like a fly in a clenched fist. She resisted me with her own telekinesis. Her efforts were like a child trying to break the hold of a bodybuilder. The temptation to squeeze harder and reduce her body to so much jelly was strong.
Instead, I flung her toward Sentry. The metal tentacles extending from Sentry’s control panel rose to greet her, the helmet they were attached to ripping away at my mental command. The now free tentacles writhed like something alive. They enfolded Seer in an octopus’ embrace. A crossed wire here, a short circuit there, and the tentacles became electrified. Seer screamed. Her body danced in the tentacles’ embrace like someone gripping an electrified fence.
I broke more wires deep within Sentry’s innards. The electricity arcing through the tentacles shut off. Seer went limp. Unconscious, but alive.
Neutralizing Seer and Millennium took only a few seconds. Though they were no angels, I had saved the worst for last.
I turned my attention to Mechano. He stood far across the room, next to the Sentinels’ heptagonal conference table. Avatar’s red cape was spread out on it.
“You killed her,” I said. The words came out in a hiss. Fury, cold and implacable, fueled me.
Mechano’s single eye regarded me emotionlessly.
“You brought this on yourself. This cape is not the Omega weapon. It is a fake. You lied to us.”
“You didn’t know that when you planted those bombs on her. You planned on killing both of us the whole time. You wanted there to be no witnesses to what you had done. Dead men tell no tales to the Guild. When did you plan to kill Myth and Truman? Tonight? Tomorrow?”
I started to walk toward Mechano. His eye flashed red. A beam of powerful energy hit me in the center of my chest. I had a force field up, of course. Through it I absorbed the energy of Mechano’s beam. My own eyes burned. Beams of Mechano’s redirected energy shot out of them. They sheared off his right arm, right where a normal person’s bicep would connect with his shoulder. The arm hit the floor with a clang. Thick grey lubricant sprayed everywhere. The arm bent and unbent, the fingers twitching.
Another beam from Mechano hit my chest, this one a different energy and frequency than before. It made no difference. I absorbed this energy too. My eyes blazed. My eye beams cut off Mechano’s left leg where it c
onnected to his hip. Still advancing on Mechano, I shoved my hand forward, like I was pushing a door open. Mechano’s one-legged heavy body fell backward. He hit the floor with a force that made the entire room rattle. His detached left leg, still standing upright, spurted lubricant like a geyser. The stuff smelled like burning rubber.
Hobbled, still on his back, Mechano tried to skitter away. He crawled clumsily backward with his remaining limbs. His metallic body screeched against the floor. Energy blasted out of my eyes again. Right leg, gone. Left arm, gone. Lubricant gushed everywhere.
Mechano was now as immobilized as a dying beetle that had been flipped on its back.
I stood directly over Mechano. He looked up at me. He made no effort to blast me again. He no doubt realized the futility of it. In the parts of his shiny torso that weren’t soiled with lubricant, I saw a reflection of myself. My eyes blazed bright yellow with barely suppressed energy. I felt no satisfaction in having the man behind Neha’s and my father’s death prostrate at my feet. Other than a block of icy fury that chilled the pit of my stomach, I felt nothing at all. The world seemed tasteless and grey. Nothing I could do to Mechano would bring either of them back.
Then, the strangest thing happened.
Mechano started to laugh.
It started as a chuckle. Then it became a belly laugh. It quickly transitioned to a full-throated, knee-slapping laugh, like that of a man who had seen something so incredibly funny that he could not control himself.
I waited until Mechano’s laughter played itself out. When it had, I said, “You think this is funny?”
“This is not,” Mechano said, “but you are.” Amusement was still in his voice. “Standing there like an avenging angel, looking like you’re about to smite a sinner. I must admit that for a second I was worried. I thought almost a hundred and fifty years of towering technological achievements were about to come to an abrupt end. But then I remembered who the man standing over me is. The man your father taught you to be. The man we Heroes trained you to be. You are not going to kill me. It is not who you are.”
I knew what he was doing. He was appealing to my better nature, to manipulate me into not damaging him further. Just as he and the Sentinels had manipulated me and the people I cared about for years.
“There’s no need to worry,” I said. My voice was strangely calm. “I’m not going to kill you.” I raised a hand slightly. I pulled Mechano’s various severed limbs toward us. I piled them on top of his torso, where they landed with a wet clatter. The stack of wet robot parts looked like a madman’s art project. Mechano’s head swiveled slightly in what would have been puzzlement on a real person.
I said, “I’m not going to kill you because I can’t. To kill someone means to take their life. You’re not alive. You’re just a collection of circuits and servos that pursues its agenda with no regard for how it impacts real people. You are nothing more than the phrase ‘the end justifies the means’ in mechanical form. Seer and Millennium will go to MetaHold. But not you. MetaHold is where they imprison Metahumans. You’re not human. You haven’t been for a long time.”
I gathered my will. I surrounded Mechano and me in a spherical force field.
“What are you doing?” I heard an emotion in Mechano’s voice I’d never heard there before: Fear.
“Taking out the trash,” I said.
I triggered my powers, reaching deep down inside of Mechano.
Late one night, back when I had been in the Academy, I had felt the atoms of everything swirling around me, like an intricate dance set to unheard music. In my half-asleep state, the energy that had bound the atoms together seemed to cry for release. I had almost triggered my powers to unleash that energy, but fortunately had not. The next day I calculated I would have set off a massive nuclear explosion that would have incinerated the Academy, everyone in it, and taken much of Oregon with it.
That was what I did to Mechano now. All at once, I broke up the molecules and atoms that composed his robot body.
Mechano’s body disappeared, replaced by blinding light. There was roar, like that of countless erupting volcanoes. The energy unleashed was immense. Even with the Omega suit, I struggled to absorb it all. The nuclear explosions the Metahuman John Tilly set off in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War Two paled in comparison to this one. If I hadn’t erected the force field around us to contain the energy I had unlocked by breaking up Mechano’s body, I would have released a destructive blast the likes of which the world had never seen before.
Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds, came unbidden words to my mind. They were from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scripture Truman had been reading in his office when I’d first met him. That seemed like a lifetime ago. It’s weird, the things that occur to you and when they occur to you.
Finally, I sucked into my body all the energy released from Mechano’s destruction. My eyes, burning with barely suppressed energy, probed where Mechano had been. Nothing of him remained. Every iota of him was gone, as if he had never existed. The bomb he had planted had left no trace of Neha. It seemed only fitting to do the same to him.
I dropped the force field around me. My entire being shook with the effort of containing all this energy. I was like an overcharged battery. I had to release this energy before my control of it slipped. During the Trials, when I had absorbed an explosion’s energy for the first time, I had vented the excess energy up into the air to avoid injuring anyone. With the kind of energy I now contained, I hesitated to vent it like that again. It was possible I would set the Earth’s atmosphere on fire.
I hesitated, tempted. With the woman I loved dead because of me, the world seemed empty and without meaning. Would it be any great tragedy to watch it burn?
I took a long, ragged breath. I tried to shove the selfish thought aside. I had sworn a Heroic oath. Unlike these three Sentinels, I intended to honor it. Mom was dead. Dad was dead. Neha was dead. My oath was the only thing I had left.
Before I gave into the dark temptation which threatened to seduce me like a whore’s embrace, I sprang into the air. With all the power my body now contained, I punched through the solidly constructed floors of the mansion like they were mere soap bubbles. I rose in the night air, higher, higher, higher, and higher still, until I was well clear of Earth’s atmosphere.
I turned away from the planet. Space was dark and cold as a tomb. I opened my mouth. The energy that had been Mechano vomited out of me. It raced into the lifeless void of space. The temptation to follow it until there was no air left in the force field that surrounded me was almost irresistible.
I reluctantly turned my back to space and the thought. Earth glittered like a jewel. Despite all that had happened, it kept right on spinning. The sun would rise in the morning. People would wake up, kiss their spouses and kids goodbye, and go to work. Because I carried the Omega spirit and wore a Hero’s cape, it was my job to make sure that what had happened to the people I loved did not happen to the people they loved.
I did not want the responsibility. Before Dad died, I had not wanted to be a superhero. I sure as hell didn’t want to be one now. I just wanted to crawl into bed, pull the covers over my head, blot out the world, and dream of the people I had lost until I too was lost.
But, like it or not, I did have this responsibility. It was clichéd, but true: With great power came great responsibility. Otherwise, you wound up behaving like the Sentinels had.
Though I did not want to, I would try my best.
Trying is all.
28
I stood on top of the UWant Building. It was late. I was wide awake and alert despite not having slept much in the days since Neha died. The Omega suit made it so I got along just fine on a few hours of sleep. It was a blessing. I did not much like going to sleep anymore. Neha awaited me in my nightmares.
I was perched on the roof’s ledge. My eyes were closed. My hands extended in front of me, like a maestro conducting an orchestra. My telekinetic touch was so acute n
ow thanks to the Omega suit that I could monitor much of what was going on in Astor City without the bother of having to fly around on patrol. My silver white cape flapped in the breeze. It matched the color of the omega symbol on my chest. It was a silly affectation, letting this cape sprout out of the neck of the Omega suit. The cape served absolutely no practical purpose. And yet, wearing it made me feel more official somehow.
It was a cold night. Colder than usual, even up this high up where it was always cold. Local weathermen said this coming winter would be an especially harsh one. If only the weather were the least of Astor City’s problems.
Dad is dead because I refused to train in the use of my powers, I thought.
Miles away, in Dog Cellar, five young men walked behind a shambling homeless man, whispering to themselves, egging each other on. The homeless man was dressed in rags, muttered to himself, and walked with a limp. He had nothing of value. The five following him must have known that. That did not prevent them from jumping him as soon as they all rounded the corner. My fingers splayed out. The men—no, the children, because that’s what they were in all the ways that mattered—were flung off the homeless man, yanked into the air by my powers.
The homeless man cowered on the sidewalk. He looked up at the five in amazement through covered eyes, his eyes round through his fingers. The five hung in the air, yelping in surprise and confusion, their limbs sawing the air. Using a spray can from a nearby trash can, I quickly wrote a single word on the streetlamp lit sidewalk: “Run!” Then I smashed all five of them together like they were in a mid-air mosh pit, hard enough to rattle their bones. I shut off my hold on them, letting them fall heavily to the sidewalk. The instant they scrambled to their feet, they took off running away from the homeless man as if he were the Devil himself.
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