Hench

by Natalie Zina Walschots

  “The fool wouldn’t dare,” Leviathan spat. It occurred to me that staring at Supercollider’s face might be difficult for him as well; I closed the video and turned to look at him. His posture was even straighter and stiffer than usual.

  “Of course. Even he wouldn’t be that reckless,” I said soothingly. “It’s just that he doesn’t insist; he doesn’t take control of the situation and begin any kind of response. He’s waiting for the support structures around him to move into place first and then will follow.”

  Something else happened then: there was a shift in my brain. It felt weirdly mechanical, like a building settling on its foundations. I felt slightly dizzy and outside myself, for just a moment, before my mind righted itself. I found I was gripping the desk and my cane for support. Leviathan had moved closer. He wasn’t touching me but was prepared to leap into action if I fell.

  “His support structure . . .” I repeated.

  I shook my head to clear it, and stood straighter. Letting go of my cane, I let my hands fall back to the touch screen. I started closing files on the display, clearing room. I could see something—a network, a web—so clearly in my head and needed to illustrate it.

  I dragged the image of Supercollider into the center of the now empty screen and left him there. Around him, I began to arrange other images, web clippings, and files, like spokes in a wheel: Doc Proton, his mentor; the Collision Project, which had magnified his powers; the law enforcement agencies he collaborated with; Accelerator, the young hero who served as his kick; and Quantum Entanglement, his partner, who rivaled him in power, if not fame and reverence.

  “This is what he is,” I said. “This is what makes him a hero.”

  I added references to the scientists and government agents who had made him and supported him, as well as other old heroes who’d trained him.

  “This is his identity,” I continued. “It’s not what’s within him that’s important. What’s within him might be nothing. It’s what’s around and outside him that matters.”

  Both of us were silent for a long moment, staring. His photograph isolated in the center of the massive screen, Supercollider suddenly didn’t look like a force of nature. He looked lonely and small.

  He looked human.

  As we both looked at the data in front of us, Leviathan came to stand behind me, very close. It was like being close to a server tower, filling me with a deep, subaudible hum. I found myself holding especially still, waiting for his hand to rest on my shoulder or support my arm, but he didn’t touch me. “I thought I knew the depths of his treachery,” he said very quietly. “I knew what a foul, duplicitous creature he was. But in the war of attrition that consumed us both, I allowed my anger to cool. I abandoned outright conflict for smaller, meaner victories. I allowed the ground between us to become unsullied by blood.”

  I turned my head slightly, looking over my shoulder at him. His hands were clenched so tight I swore I could hear the gauntlets creaking. I could feel the anger arcing off him, and I felt a ripple of an ecstatic kind of fear.

  “I took peace for respect,” Leviathan continued. “I believed that he thought, as did I, that we were too evenly matched as adversaries, that the glories had become too small and the costs too great for open aggression.” He ground his mandibles. “I see now that he believes me weak.” He looked at me. It was hard not to flinch. “He would dare to lay a hand upon one of mine, upon a trusted lieutenant?” He lifted a fist toward my face, and gradually uncoiled his fingers. He swept his hand close to my jaw and temple, over my eye. His gesture encompassed my circuitry. “That he would think he could do this is insult I can barely fathom.

  “By the end, he will know how wrong he has been.”

  He looked back to the screen and the structure of information I had built, and I took the breath I didn’t realize I was holding. I followed his line of sight.

  “I shall have to remind them why they are so afraid of me.”

  “I know how,” I said quietly.

  His head jerked, and I felt him looking at me again.

  I kept my eyes fixed upward. “I can see it.”

  “What would you do, Auditor?”

  I thought a moment, got the phrasing right. This might be the best opportunity I’d ever have to prevent damage of this scale. All the lives the hero would blow apart, the people he’d hurt and the livelihoods he’d destroy; all the villains he’d create and all the evil he’d unleash; all of it might be avoidable. This could be my one shot to stop the natural disaster that was Supercollider. What would you say, if you could shut down an earthquake?

  “I would cut every cable, knock down every beam, tear out every bit of foundation supporting him. I would rip the world down around him. It’s everything surrounding him that makes him a hero, so I would take everything he touches and relies on away. With all that gone, if you met him alone on an empty plain, what would be left?”

  I could feel sweat on my forehead and my hands were shaking. There was a long beat of silence, silvery and mercurial. I was certain for a moment that I had managed to say something very stupid. But then a remarkable thing happened: Leviathan threw back his head and laughed.

  It sounded like a locust singing.

  5

  WE WENT AFTER ACCELERATOR FIRST.

  The kick was an outlier. As I immersed myself completely in the data of Supercollider’s career, I noticed almost all of the missions with the highest cost, the largest body count, involved Accelerator. When Supercollider worked alone or with other heroes, he wasn’t exactly mindful of property damage, but with Accelerator in the mix he was a wrecking ball. Most remarkable, though, were the additional civilian casualties that resulted whenever Accelerator was on the scene with him. With the kick at his side, there was a surge in collateral damages.

  I analyzed those missions and formed a hypothesis: Supercollider was more dangerous because he was protecting Accelerator. If a speeding car was headed for the kick, he’d toss it out of the way, regardless of the fact there was a family on the sidewalk and an old man driving. He’d knock a building down to save his charge, whereas if he’d been alone he might have only kicked in a few doors. He valued Accelerator’s life above anyone else’s he happened to encounter, and the cost of that value was spectacularly high.

  Accelerator himself was relatively harmless. He was bad for the world, certainly, but nowhere near the scale of Supercollider. He could have been offset by becoming vegan and making regular donations to Greenpeace.

  Personally I bore him no ill will. He’d been in the room when my leg was shattered, but he’d done nothing to cause the injury and, as best as our intelligence could determine, had no knowledge of or involvement in my abduction. By all reports, he was a perfectly decent, if slightly arrogant, young man.

  But when he was around his mentor, he made the scourge of a hero so much worse. If Supercollider was a forest fire, Accelerator was the drought that turned the leaves to tinder. Neither the numbers nor the body count left any question as to our course of action.

  I chose him first because he was vulnerable in other ways as well. He was relatively new to Supercollider’s inner circle, so it would be harder to notice irregularities in Accelerator’s behavior. His speed was physics-defying, to the point of being the subject of several Ph.D. theses. This made him nearly impossible to track and hit, and capable of mind-numbing feats of nimbleness. But his body was surprisingly fragile, uniquely adapted to deal with the friction, the wear and tear associated with speed, but he remained vulnerable to most kinds of damage.

  When I proposed focusing our efforts on Accelerator, the challenge wasn’t convincing Leviathan of the target. Instead, it was getting him to stick to the plan and exercise restraint. As soon as I mentioned Accelerator, he was ready to hire a double-jointed Russian cleaner to fire a blowgun dart into his neck and call it a day.

  “I don’t want to start with assassination,” I explained patiently. “There are many ways that this can go. We ran a lot of simulati
ons besides killing and the numbers look good in all of them.”

  “How would you set things in motion, then?” His arms were crossed and there were subtle patterns flashing across his armor, as if he were an agitated squid. He was clearly a little annoyed at being contradicted, but interested enough to at least allow the line of inquiry.

  “Drive a wedge between Accelerator and the hero,” I said, curling my hand around a cup of tea. We were sitting at the long table in his office. The display screen was off, and neither of us was paying attention to any data outputs other than each other. We’d both been in the mood for some good, old-fashioned plotting.

  “And how would you sow these seeds of discord?”

  “They’re already planted, we just need to water them. Accelerator thinks his mentor is holding him back. It’s out of affection, sure, but he feels too protected and believes he cannot prove himself while being overshadowed.”

  “Yet he does seem rather content in the shade cast by the colossus; he makes no move to spread his wings and seek the sky.” Leviathan drummed his fingers on the surface of the table.

  “Not yet, but let’s give him a nudge and see what happens.”

  “A nudge.”

  “A romantic one, I think.”

  I ASSIGNED NOUR to the job I had in mind. Nour, who inspired such trust and confidence in everyone she spoke to, who was so lovely and cordial, who could make you feel like her whole world revolved around you simply because of the way she listened. We scrubbed her record, got her an internship with the massive PR conglomerate that represented Supercollider’s North American activities, and let her work her magic.

  She and Accelerator were seeing each other within a month. She’d studied hard for the role. She took to wearing a perfume that smelled like vanilla, almond, and cinnamon to evoke his favorite cookies, and wore purple like his grandmother favored. And she listened—oh, how she listened. And we listened too, via the robin’s-egg-size surveillance device she swallowed before every date. Though it was slightly muffled by the barrier of her body and distorted by the steady whoosh of her heart, we were still able to clearly hear that fast, fierce, proud boy pour his soul out to her with only the gentlest bit of prodding.

  She made him feel like a young god. She made him forget how little experience he had and how often he felt afraid. She made him forget his mistakes and remember only his victories, see his potential as his present. He could be a great hero in his own right, she insisted, and could start right now to build his own legacy and gain the credit he rightfully deserved. She made him believe in that entitlement with every fiber of his being.

  “He’s smothering you,” Nour cooed. “He doesn’t mean to, but he is. Like a tree overshadowing a sapling, he’s denying you light, keeping you small.”

  “What should I do?” he said fretfully, his lips at her neck.

  “Reach for the sun.”

  AFTER A FEW months of her making him feel invincible, Accelerator approached Supercollider and asked for things to change. He wanted a vastly expanded role in team operations. He didn’t want to be a kick any longer, but a colleague. He wanted a full partnership.

  The falling-out was legendary.

  Supercollider felt Accelerator was asking for too much too soon, becoming ambitious before his powers fully blossomed and he was adequately prepared. He also knew that his kick was intensely vulnerable, more so than Accelerator would ever admit. He was that perfect combination of offended and terrified that made him explode like an overbearing parent.

  Accelerator, of course, interpreted his hero’s resistance as an attempt to put him in his place and belittle him, just as Nour suggested. Things got ugly. There were some very awkward media appearances where Accelerator went off script. He repeatedly no-showed for major crises where he was expected to assist, and even worked a few operations alone, without Supercollider’s knowledge or permission.

  Things got so tense I wondered if there would be a public confrontation, but it didn’t come. Whatever happened between the two of them, those words were exchanged in private. Even Nour wasn’t able to ascertain whether Accelerator was fired or quit. She had to write a report about the encounter—he burst into her apartment without warning, eyes feverish, still full of adrenaline from that final argument. She didn’t have time to swallow a surveillance device, so she tried to reconstruct his manic ranting from memory. The phrase he repeated over and over was “I’m on my own now.”

  In the days that immediately followed, there was a scramble to assemble a hastily constructed narrative of personal growth and achievement, and suddenly Accelerator was setting himself up as an independent hero. A press conference was called. Accelerator alone spoke to the media, his words their usual blur. His elocution coaches were forever pressing him to slow down, take his time, but that day the words sped out of him.

  He was grateful, so grateful, for everything Supercollider had taught him, but it was time to move on. “I’m ready to run at my own speed,” he said, and the press gallery laughed obediently. Quantum Entanglement had a seat nearby, serene and achingly beautiful. She was there to congratulate the young hero on his new venture, while Supercollider was conveniently kept away by a top secret mission.

  I was watching the press conference from my desk, running through possibilities for our next moves, when my head buzzed with the specific tone reserved exclusively for messages from Leviathan. I pulled out my phone.

  Shall we kill him now?

  I smiled involuntarily.

  I’d rather maim at this stage.

  I am impatient.

  Trust me.

  I will. Do not let me down. It is time for blood, Auditor.

  With that directive, I did something more direct than I had ever done before: quietly, with little fanfare, I placed a hit on Accelerator through a series of middlemen and false fronts. It was a common thing to do, and most heroes had a host of bounties out on them at any moment. For most henches, it was a “welcome to the neighborhood” type of hit, almost friendly, almost a courtesy. And it didn’t necessarily mean that Accelerator was about to die.

  I knew what I was doing; I knew I was placing him in danger. I wanted him to feel out of his league, and vulnerable. I wanted him to be hunted from the very moment he was on his own, to put him and Supercollider under more, ever-increasing stress. I wanted to give Leviathan everything he wanted.

  Accelerator had spent too much time hiding behind the invulnerable muscles of his benefactor, and thanks to us had started to forget how much he needed that shelter. He believed everything Nour had told him, and believed himself so much stronger than he was. When the threats started coming, he didn’t falter or retreat—why would he? He was a hero! He met them head-on. I didn’t expect him to be quite as foolhardy as he was after those first attempts on his life. But instead of becoming more cautious, he took more risks. He refused to be afraid.

  And then, in a crowded, dirty alley, he was jumped by a handful of mercs while foiling a botched mugging. According to the narrative that ended up on the news, Accelerator found himself penned in, trapped by brick and bodies, with not quite enough room to utilize his superspeed or agility. There was trash everywhere, and in the middle of the fight, one of the hired goons got their hands on a discarded wine bottle. He broke it against the wall and, with an awkward, awful lurch, shoved the glass into the young hero’s gut.

  The wound was jagged and deep, and right away it was hard to control the bleeding. Splinters of glass had broken off when Accelerator had been kicked, bottle still in him, as he defeated the last of the hit men. The police arrived quicker than usual and he was whisked off to a Draft medical facility at record speed. The doctors cut him open and sewed him up, then went back in a few hours later when he kept hemorrhaging. His intestines had been sliced up, and during one of the attempts to repair the damage, a surgeon unknowingly perforated his bowel. Whether it was that or the filth on the bottle from the alley, his wounds became hopelessly infected. It took four days for sepsis
to take him.

  Supercollider’s face as he spoke at the public memorial was like sickness itself. He looked as though he wanted to run, and had turned pallid beneath his perpetual tan. He spoke of Accelerator’s bravery and potential, his voice breaking. He said he wished he could have done more.

  “I could have stepped between them—” he said, and then suddenly he could speak no more, and walked out of the room entirely.

  Leviathan and I watched the memorial in his office. Leviathan was unabashedly thrilled, puffed out and proud as a bird, pacing up and down. I couldn’t share that pride. I knew the data supported our success, but mostly I felt a weird combination of nausea and guilt. I left his office as soon as I felt it was reasonable to do so. I spent most of the night afterward fighting off strange waves of tears.

  We collected Nour after the funeral. I expected to be able to debrief her and, after whatever leave or therapy she needed, welcome her back on to the team. Instead, she asked to be released from her contract. A little bit of the warmth had gone out of her eyes, and there was a hardness around her mouth and in her shoulders now. I realized I had sacrificed her too for this assignment, ruined a bit of the gentleness that had always defined her. It was something she would never get back. I hadn’t accounted for that.

  I tried to apologize in her exit interview, but she cut me off.

  “I knew what I was getting into,” she said. “You told me what to expect, and I said I could handle it. That responsibility is mine.”

  “There is no way you could have really known.”

  Her mouth tightened. “You tried to tell me, at least. I appreciate that.”

  There was nothing else I could say. I allowed her to go and let her know the door was always open for her, even while certain she’d never walk through it again.

  Leviathan gave me space. He let me return to my former work for a time, as I had to rebuild the team and our relationships as best I could. He also seemed to sense I needed to retreat into the numbers for a while, to run experiments that only impacted heroes’ lives in much tinier, less consequential increments. A marriage gone sour here, terrible table service there. No one dying.