by Jen Finelli
I wish I could pretend to cry or something, to play up that whole weak girl stereotype, but no one would buy that. I've never escaped a speeding ticket, and right now, I just don't care. “Look, okay, I'm starting to realize that maybe I'd be better off focusing on school, okay?! People betraying me and cutting me and not wanting to be rescued—” Actually, after saying that one aloud, I do want to cry. “Forget this mess!” I'm panicked: my forearm's bleeding, and it hurts like that time I fell against the stove. “Take both hands, one on each corner of my mask, and peel it off,” I pant. “That's where the Thunder lives.”
“I thought you said it was impossible to remove,” he squints, suspicious.
“I was buying time, okay? This time I'm not lying, you can take it off and test it and see, just please keep your sharp things to yourself.” My heart's pounding in my throat. “The removal command is 'mask away.'”
“Mask away,” he murmurs, as he peels my mask off my face and unhooks its rubber band. Blech the sticky gross feeling of his hands on my forehead, blech blech get your hands away from my eyes, man, I have a thing about my face!
“Okay,” I say. “Now can you get me a bandaid?”
“Tell me how to activate it,” he says. “It doesn't seem particularly...wait, you're lying to me, aren't you?”
“No, no, please just put it on and try it! Punch the ground!” I plead.
He puts it on, soaking in my sweat. Moment of truth. If this doesn't work, he's going to kill her. We all hold our breath as he rears back his arm—
When he hits the ground he richochets into the air on a Thunder-clap and almost falls right down on LoverBoy and Blue Hair. LoverBoy jumps out of the way, trying to drag Blue Hair with him, and at that moment his gun angles away from her.
And I'm in.
I dive for BlueHair, hurling Thunder behind me to knock these men off me. I yank her away, blast through the building roof, rip her blindfold off, and set her down outside.
“How did you—” she gasps.
“I fired Thunder under him so he'd think he fired it. Spoiler, the power's not in the mask. Brb.”
I leap back into the hangar to wave the traffickers against the walls like paper in the wind. I dive-bomb Bird Nose, rip my mask out of his hand, and shove it into my utility belt. I'm ready to throw this mo'fo' through the ceiling when he screams:
“Wait, no, we need to stop the aliens!”
“The what?”
I stand with his collar in my fist, my other hand stretched out behind me to tell LoverBoy I see him back there.
“You asked me why I want your Thunder,” Bird Nose pants. “You must have figured it out by now, that there's more going on here than just some underground slavery.”
Keisha. “There was this crab thing in the sky one night. A bunch of girls disappeared...”
“We're in over our heads,” he pants.
“The men talked about a 'shipment,' like it was any other shipment, but Thunder, they seemed spooked.”
“The aliens are invading tonight. We need your Thunder to protect ourselves.”
“What would scare them like that?”
“Oh, okay,” I start to laugh. “So the sex traffickers are the good guys now.” Or, more likely, Keisha set me up for this whole thing, from her first tip to that weird story, and this guy and Blue Hair and all of them, they're in on it. “Next you're going to tell me all the people I released are trying to lay eggs in our cereal. You know, I appreciate a good Saturday morning cartoon as much as the next girl, but—”
“You have to listen to me!” he spits, breaking into such a heavy sweat that it's like his face peed. “The alien invasion starts tonight, and it's our fault. We sold them our product, and they've interpreted that to mean the whole planet's for sale.”
“Oh, so now you're going Calvin and Hobbes on my butt, I see how it is,” I say, a little nervous in my sarcasm just because of the sheer volume of his sweat. “You've brokered a deal with aliens, just you and your lonesome.”
“No, I got screwed over by a client I couldn't handle,” he snarls. “I accept my mistakes, remember? I know what I did. But I don't want some outer space freak burying a probe deep into my—”
“We have exactly one minute to launch, Crane,” LoverBoy interrupts. “If we can't extract the Thunder we'll just have to fight on without it.” He's sweating, too.
Wait. I look around the room, and everyone's sweating so much liquid's literally pooling at their feet. I drop Bird Nose and step back, shaking out my hand because hooooly wait, what is going on right now? The sweat puddles start creeping and flowing towards each other, forming a shape like a crab in the middle of the floor. I step back into fighting stance, Thunder shaking in my knuckles and ready to fire. The 2D crab on the floor pops out into a 3D shape, a clear, shimmering, crustaceous droplet the size of one of the small airplanes, and begins to solidify.
“At least,” it says, in a metallic voice. “That's what they might have said four hours ago, when they were alive.”
And as the sweat forms into what looks like a small spaceship with claws, all the men in the room crumble to the floor, eyes staring at the ceiling in horror...dead.
A long scream sounds, a scream like a soul leaving a body, a nightmare's voice. I whirl to see BlueHair standing in the doorway, her wide-eyed, crazy gaze on her LoverBoy's corpse.
“We are the Magnate,” says the sweat-metal-crab thing, ignoring Blue Hair's pending insanity. “Surrender to the Magnate.” I look up, and around me, because somehow I'm hearing it echo a hundred times...
I grab Blue Hair and dash through the ceiling, one fist outstretched ahead of me. In the sky flit hundreds of metal crabs like that one. More arrive by the second, solidifying from the clouds in our atmosphere, awaiting humanity's last sunset.
“So your sleaze ball boyfriend sold people to aliens, and you never knew about it,” I shout as Blue Hair's terrified fingers dig into my back. We tumble towards the ground again, and I fire another blast to stay airborne.
Her wails answer the affirmative. “Aliens? Aliens?”
“Yes, aliens.” Another blast propels us forward.
“Oh my gosh, they wanted you,” BlueHair weeps into my braids. “They let everyone get away, they didn't care! They wanted you because they thought you could stop them.”
“Thought?”
“Yes, thought, they're letting us go now, they don't care! Oh gosh aliens, they don't care!”
“We'll give them something to care about.” We flee towards the city, and maybe I'm tripping but I disagree with Blue Hair—they aren't letting us go, I've got crabs on my tail, and not in the health class way! Yellow beams shoot past us; I'm guessing I don't want to touch those.
Everything's clearer mid-air. I don't know where to hide Blue Hair so she won't hurt herself, but the whole planet needs me now, and I can't keep carrying this girl and her doubts and her fears. I can't keep fighting if I'm the only hero to everyone else's victim. She's lost the privileges of victimhood. She's lost the safety of slavery.
She's going to have to live with freedom.
“It's time to avenge your boyfriend,” I tell Blue Hair as I put her down next a tollbooth. “Call the Guardians. You know the number?”
She nods. Everyone knows it: 1314*.
“Let 'er rip, taterchip.” I give her a high five and rocket off into the sky.
Someone once told me that if you think a lot about the things you want, they'll come to you. “That's stupid,” I said at the time. “You want something, you have to go get it.”
But the truth is, in this end-of-the-world starlight we're both right. From my six year old fantasies to the service club to the physics lab to the street, between the wanting that made me work and the work that screwed me over, I've been preparing for this my whole life, and suddenly, as the world flips upside down I'm right at home. I never belonged in the right-side-up world. I was born for apocalypse. No more sneaking around, no more finesse, no more wondering if the history te
acher's going to ruin my college career. I'm crushing alien spaceships between my fists.
My lungs expand with the glorious exertion of cold air and my own hoarse breath. I dance in the sky like the heroes of the constellations: I'm Orion, Hercules, and the Pleiades. My rings rumble, shaking my bones. I lied about them, back there: they don't “choose” a person, they're not attached to me, and anyone could wear them. But I'm the one wearing them, because I'm the one who wanted them enough to make them. If I got anything from Mama's all-day church services, with the singing and the altar calls and the dancing and the yelling about Moses, I got hunger, hunger for more than just the after-service potluck.
“Come and get it!” I roar, throwing sound waves across the atmosphere. “Come and feast!”
And here, complete at last, the prison breaks, the boredom dies, and the shadows dissipate as I become,
once and for all,
free.
~The End
You can read more about Natasha and the Magnate in the upcoming Becoming Hero novel, and in future comic books.
Did Natasha’s story seem troubling, unrealistic, or overstated to you at any point?
Almost a million human beings are trafficked across international borders each year—and domestically, within the United States, the number of minors engaged in domestic sex trafficking fluctuates in the tens of thousands. By state—and yes, it happens in every state—victims usually number in the hundreds. To put those numbers in perspective, the infamous Atlantic Slave Trade transported 388,000 total slaves to the United States during its entire lifetime spanning over a hundred years. Worldwide, that was 12.5 million people displaced. We’ve met those numbers easily in just the last twelve years. Slavery isn’t just “not dead”—it’s thriving.
And it’s thriving because we fail to educate ourselves on how to stop it. The encounter between Keisha and the cop isn’t meant to be over-dramatized political commentary: it’s based on real clashes between human trafficking victims and poorly-trained law enforcement who’ve failed to learn the factors that force teens into prostitution and labor slavery. In other countries, human trafficking victims have even been sentenced to death for carrying drugs they were forced to carry as slaves; in the US, many human trafficking victims are wrongfully deported back into the risk-laden circumstances that made them vulnerable to capture in the first place. This is largely due to a failure of legal, medical, and lay personnel to train ourselves about the legal options available to human trafficking victims, like the U and T visas—and due to our laziness or fear when it comes to identifying them.
For more information on real human trafficking, I recommend the free eleven-week online class that doctors and medical students take: https://cmda.org/resources/publication/human-trafficking-continuing-education
Here’s a brief factsheet about how to keep your children and yourself safe from school-based trafficking: https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oese/oshs/factsheet.html
Always report anything human trafficking-related to 1-888-3737-888, and they’ll connect you with the good guys. Well-trained law enforcement are fantastic heroes, and in my personal life they’ve actually rescued someone I know. Let’s try to make their job easier.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this anthology, and the little author’s notes and activism links. It’s my dearest dream that because of something you read here, you make a difference in someone else’s life—but I’ll also settle for knowing that you had a good time.
More books by Jen Finelli: byjenfinelli.com
More in the Becoming Hero series: http://becominghero.ninja/
Written with thanks to James Beamon.
Table of Contents
Origins The Guardian Anthology
Welcome
Hierro Carlos Serra Rivera
The Girl in the Red Hijab Asia Fareedi
The Man by the River Skye Yamada-Johnson
Mark of the Beast
When the Thunder Rolls
Table of Contents
Origins
The Guardian Anthology
Welcome
Hierro
Carlos Serra Rivera
The Girl in the Red Hijab
Asia Fareedi
The Man by the River
Skye Yamada-Johnson
Mark of the Beast
When the Thunder Rolls