Hench

by Natalie Zina Walschots

“Do you have any other questions?” he asked automatically. He was already looking at the screen embedded in his desk.

  “I have a request, if I may.”

  “Speak.”

  “I would like to be cleared to go back to work.”

  His body language remained quite relaxed, but his eyes snapped back to me, pale and probing. “Medical has recommended several more months before permitting you to resume even partial responsibilities, and I am inclined to agree with them. Not to mention learning to use your augmentations will take time.”

  “I am aware of my limitations, Sir,” I said quietly. “I understand I have a long way to go, but . . . I have found being away from my work troubling.”

  He scanned my face, his gaze moving slowly, like a sensitive instrument. “I should refuse this. Having you fully healed is of great importance. Exerting too much effort too quickly could delay your recovery and cause you to perform at a level beneath your usual quality.”

  “I appreciate all of your concerns. You are right on all counts. This is a selfish request.”

  Something over his mouth shimmered. He was allowing me a small opening to speak my case, which I recognized as a significant indulgence. I let that give me courage and pressed forward.

  “I feel that returning to work, in whatever limited capacity, would aid in my recovery.”

  His head tilted slightly. “How so?”

  I made a fist. This was surprisingly difficult to articulate. I didn’t know how to explain that, every moment, I knew the cost heroes wreaked on the world was adding up, with nothing to balance it out. I didn’t know how to tell him that every day I wasn’t working, I was being wounded by the constant, intrusive knowledge of those numbers ticking upward, unanswered. It was bad enough before I’d been enhanced; now it was so much worse.

  I chose to say something I knew would resonate with him. “Every moment I am out of commission, I feel defeated. Like our enemies have won.”

  “Rest is a weapon.”

  “I am rested.” I tried as hard as I could to sound patient. “Let me at least begin to sharpen myself again.”

  He was quiet for a long moment. In my head, I began processing his refusal.

  “With regular evaluations from Medical, and extremely close supervision, I will allow it,” he said quietly.

  My head jerked up. I opened my mouth to start to thank him, but he cut me off, raising his hand before I could make more than an inarticulate sound.

  “Your time at work, including engaging in any strenuous cognitive activity or looking at screens of any kind, will be limited. I will personally provide you with these guidelines and expect strict adherence. You are not to put yourself at risk in any way until I am fully satisfied with your resilience.”

  My smile felt like it might break my face. “Thank you, Sir.”

  He stared at me with heavy seriousness. “There are further conditions.”

  “Of course.”

  “There is a project that I had hoped to bring to you, pending your full recovery. If you insist on returning early, I require that it be on this specific endeavor, which will allow me to directly supervise both your work and recuperation. As I determine you are able, you may assume your previous duties, in time. Do you agree?”

  I looked at him a long moment. I’d hoped to get back to my team, to resuming the work I loved. I had been actively daydreaming new ways to ruin heroes’ lives. This was a disappointment, but also deeply intriguing.

  “I defer to your good judgment,” I said, curious enough to acquiesce.

  “Goodness has absolutely nothing to do with it,” he promised, “but there will be a great deal of judgment.”

  BY THE TIME I made it back to my apartment, giddy and stunned, there was a message waiting in my email, informing me that my first assignment was to meet with Vesper the following morning. We were to immediately begin work to help me adjust to and maximize the potential of my new augmentations.

  We met in the courtyard absurdly early, when the light was still slanted and golden and the lovely little green spaces mostly empty. He brought coffee, like a human angel, and welcomed me to the “cyborg club.”

  Our first lesson together involved me looking at things around me and telling him what I saw. It was shockingly arduous.

  “You have to keep in mind that you’re already perceiving more,” Vesper said patiently. “The data is already there.”

  “I’d say it hurts,” I said, rubbing my temple, “but that’s not quite right.” I was struggling with taking everything in. There were days when I missed my eye patch fiercely, which was something I never thought I’d say.

  “Your brain is blocking much of it out or ignoring it because it’s new. That data is overloading your ability to process everything you’re seeing.”

  “It’s like I can see less,” I protested. We were sitting on a bench in one of the larger green spaces, surrounded by grass. Everything was drenched in light. It was an overwhelming experience—all the new information being gathered by my implants and augmentations, my new eye—a frantic jumble in my head.

  “The new data clutters up what you’re used to,” Vesper said, nodding.

  “It gives me a headache,” I admitted.

  “I don’t doubt it. Okay, let’s try this: What’s the hardest thing to look at out here?”

  I squinted and swung my head around. “Flowers,” I said. “Definitely the flowers. They seem to be throbbing.”

  “Ah, so you can see ultraviolet now?”

  “And some infrared.”

  “You’re seeing what the bees can. They can see ultraviolet light, so the flowers have special patterns just for them.”

  “It’s like . . . extra visual noise.”

  “Yes. Like more voices in a crowded room. Now take it further: What do you think it’s trying to say?”

  I breathed in, attempting to beat back the frustration, and looked again. There was a brilliant shock of white and purple crocuses spraying out of a clump of dirt nearby. Laid overtop of the familiar colors were much deeper hues—glass-bottle green and bilious yellow—and in the center of each a rich core of indigo.

  “Bull’s-eye,” I said suddenly.

  He cocked his head toward me, the lens of one mechanical eye narrowing like a camera’s zoom.

  “The marks, like concentric rings—they must help the bees aim.” I looked again, seeing every flower like a beacon, more semaphore than decoration.

  “Very good. It’s all like this. It’s all data. Everything new means something, but in a language you’re still learning.”

  I looked down at my hands and forearms. The familiar skin was now a complex, battered landscape of freckles and dimples, splattering errors of pigmentation, scars, and sun damage. An ocean of evidence.

  “I’m not sure if this makes everything uglier or more beautiful,” I said.

  “Both.” His face had a wise, robotic sadness in that moment.

  “I like infrared better,” I admitted. It was almost pleasant to study the way the body radiated heat. The slightly cool pits of the eyes, the warm cavern of the mouth, the pulse fluttering in the neck.

  “That’s how mosquitoes see us,” Vesper said. “Always out for blood.” He paused a moment and then suggested, “Try to focus on just that: just the heat. Push the other data away.”

  I couldn’t isolate it entirely, but I did find that, with practice, I could focus on a single spectrum. Infrared was the easiest to sort out—seeping heat so different from the bounce of light. My infrared vision wasn’t in color, like it would be represented if I were wearing goggles: the cooler blacks, blues, and greens, teasing yellows, surging reds and purples. In my new eyes, it was something else entirely—a depth and richness, an issue of saturation more than hue. I fancied I could almost smell it as much as see it.

  I watched a young woman take off her jacket and stretch. I stared a bit, entranced by the hot vulnerability of her underarms, the veins and nerves so close to the surface. Something I
didn’t say to Vesper was that part of the unexpected deluge of sensory data was learning there were so many new things I was attracted to. Suddenly someone’s heart rate was stunning, or their array of capillaries made me breathless. I had a whole new library of preferences to deconstruct and fret about.

  “It makes me feel so naked,” I said.

  “How so?” Vesper was watching me carefully.

  “I’m also giving off all of this information. Anyone could look at me and see where all my blood is, where my softest parts are, what the sun has done to my skin.”

  “Not everyone.”

  I looked at him sharply and smirked. “No, but you sure can.”

  “Well.” He blushed. Or, rather, I watched a warmth surge to the surface of his skin. “Welcome.”

  “The strangest thing is that so much of what I can see now seems to be saying the same thing. Flowers, mammals—doesn’t matter.”

  “What’s it saying?”

  “‘I’m delicious. Eat me.’”

  WE FELL INTO a pattern quickly. We’d meet in the courtyard, he’d bring me a coffee, and we would look at things together. I started learning to handle the visual data I was taking in broadly at first, getting a sense of the different spectrums I was seeing and what each new color or hue or intensity meant in a basic sense. It wasn’t long before I started to get a much more sophisticated sense of what I was seeing, Vesper helping me decode it instead of my just coping with the processing. I started to see the difference between a nervous flush in the presence of a new lover and the way heat redistributed in someone’s body when they were lying. I began to get a sense of what the color of fear was.

  In the process, I learned that his innate gentleness and generosity were not the only reason he was willing to spend so much time with me. It took brain surgery and superpowers, but I was finally starting to learn how to decipher when someone found me attractive. His interest had scent and color, temperature and vibrational frequency. It was quantifiable and measurable, and there was something deeply comforting in that. I didn’t feel capable of exploring the attraction, but I didn’t discourage it either. I tried to treat his fondness with care, and found I hoped I would be able to give those feelings more space at some nebulous point in the future.

  As overwhelming as it was for me, my enhanced data intake was still extremely limited. One of the most surprising discoveries I made during the early stages of our work was that Leviathan displayed almost none of the vulnerabilities I was learning to detect. His armor blocked any heat his body emitted, aside from the faintest ghosts of warmth around the joints and between the plates. And he was not a walking bull’s-eye of ultraviolet light. Instead, he simply glowed, his armor lit up like the bioluminescence generated by the weirdest creatures dwelling in ocean trenches. His shoulder blades, I realized with a start, even had eyespots: a warning.

  After just under a month of working with Vesper, I found myself sitting in the deep chair opposite Leviathan’s desk while he stood behind me, enduring the last screening before he decided whether he was going to permit me back on the job sooner rather than later. He’d called me in to unveil the new project he had in mind for me.

  I was deeply interested in discovering what this was, but in the moments while he pulled up the files, I allowed myself to indulgently stare. I’d developed this bad habit whenever his attention drifted elsewhere, to an instrument or screen, filling those moments by just looking at him. Now, I realized after a few seconds that he was fully aware of me watching him steadily and was looking back with an expression I would have called amusement in someone I believed capable of the emotion.

  I cracked an embarrassed smile. “I’m still getting used to the new equipment,” I said, tapping the side of my head. “Forgive the vacant expression.”

  “Anything but vacant,” he replied, turning away from me to change the wall-size display screen in his office from a lifelike view of the outdoors to a massive data feed. He began to pull up and organize files and folders on the desktop, layering things over each other.

  “‘Hyperfocused’ is perhaps a better word,” I ventured. “It’s easy now to allow a single thing to command my attention.”

  “Your myopia will become less severe as your abilities develop,” he said crisply, throwing images and documents onto the display as though he were dealing cards in a casino. “You will find yourself caught between the gravity of a specific detail and how that detail fits into a larger context. How you navigate that space will come to define you.”

  I wasn’t sure if Leviathan was complimenting or threatening me (a common problem when interacting with him), so I didn’t reply. Instead, I watched his hands for a few minutes, making quick, vicious little movements across the surface of the touch screen embedded in his desk. There was something barely controlled in the way he was handling the files, and it dawned on me that he was actually quite angry.

  I turned my attention to the screen on the wall above us. He was now arranging the files, photos, media clippings, our own data files.

  “If you wish to return to work,” he said quietly, “then I require you to assist me with something quite specific.”

  “This is all about Supercollider,” I said. The hero’s name, image, or insignia was on every single bit of data scattering across the screen. “I’ll do anything you need.”

  Leviathan’s hands slowed. He pulled one photo of Supercollider out into a far corner of the screen: the hero in motion, one hand raised in a fist, framed by sky and sunlight as he flew. In another corner he placed negative publicity—culled from damage estimates, police reports, insurance claims—in an unsettlingly small pile. Other data, he tossed around seemingly at random, as though waiting for a pattern to emerge.

  “What do you see?” Leviathan asked abruptly.

  “Is this everything significant we have?”

  “Nearly.”

  “It’s . . . frustrating.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Most of the data is useless.”

  “Explain that.”

  I sat back and considered the request. Then I leaned forward, rubbing two fingers across my left eyebrow, where there was still an ache from my implants healing.

  “We have so little on him, and even less that could be weaponized.”

  “Go on.”

  “There’s no way to get under his skin right now. He has no alter ego to reveal. He has no life outside of being a superhero—it permeates every aspect of his identity. He’s a walking archetype more than he is a person.”

  “What else?”

  “He’s impervious, and I don’t just mean physically—although knowing you can fire a nuke at the fucker and he won’t stay down is annoying as hell.” Leviathan made a rumbling sound I recognized as a laugh. “The entire world is invested in what he is, in maintaining and upholding it. Besides, there’s no point in trying to tear down the facade because there’s nothing beneath it.”

  He inclined his head slightly. I squinted at the screen.

  “May I?”

  He gestured me over to the touch screen on his desk. It felt a little strange to be on the other side, with Leviathan so close, near my shoulder, watching, instead of across from me, demonstrating. Tentatively, I touched the surface, getting a feel for it. Once I got a sense of the friction of it, I started to rearrange things.

  After working for a while, I asked Leviathan, “Now, what do you see?”

  He was quiet a long moment, then said, barely audible, “He’s hollow.”

  I nodded. “The reason we don’t see anything to exploit is because there isn’t anything. He—”

  Something caught my attention and my brain refocused on it mid-thought. I’d come across a cached copy of a news story and now expanded it. It was coverage from my rescue from the medical facility at Dovecote.

  I’d avoided reading too much about the aftermath of my time there, finding that any direct reminder of my near-lobotomy would suddenly make me feel as though my chest were clos
ing in. As usual, the story was framed as an attack. But this time, the attack wasn’t attributed to Leviathan, but another villain. Larvomancer had immediately, even gleefully, taken credit, claiming that his “exploding grubs” had caused the damage. Leviathan didn’t need to tell me he’d invited the vivisectionist to take credit; Larvomancer was a diva always looking to bolster his reputation, so his cooperation probably hadn’t been expensive.

  What surprised me was that law enforcement was willing to go along with Larvomancer’s story so readily. Despite the only tenuous evidence being that the damage to the medical building involved explosions, both the police and the Draft immediately adopted the narrative.

  “Only Supercollider, Hero of the Burning Oceans Crisis and Right Hand of Superheroic Affairs, seemed disturbed by the Special Task Force’s findings,” the article read. “While the hero, who was in town on a diplomatic mission”—I snorted aloud at this—“would not elaborate, his face clouded throughout the press conference. In response to questions from the press, he merely hinted that he expected ‘something even more sinister’ was responsible for the attack.”

  I moved the story aside and pulled up a video search. It wasn’t difficult to find a copy of the press conference in question, given at Dovecote immediately after I was broken out. The director of the Special Task Force was a dour man with terrible wire-framed glasses and salt-and-pepper hair. He said with a confident authority that they had their target identified and would be pursuing Larvomancer with all their significant resources. Sure enough, there stood Supercollider behind him, his face a grim mask.

  Even looking at the hero’s visage was difficult. It was suddenly impossible to breathe comfortably. I forced myself to study him, his controlled anger and disappointment. He was unmoving and implacable behind the podium. He was contained.

  I paused the video and enlarged it so I could look at Supercollider’s face more closely. It was pixelated, but there was something in the set of his eyebrows that bothered me.

  “He knows,” I said, mostly to myself. “He knows what happened and he’s standing there like these normal people in suits can actually control him. He says almost nothing, even though he knows exactly what must have occurred. Even though he hates it, he’s allowing them to pursue their incorrect line of inquiry. Why doesn’t he just march the Draft up here?”