Hench

by Natalie Zina Walschots

  But while I worked, I kept an eye on Supercollider. There was a haunted, hollow look in his eyes that refused to fade. I knew we had struck home. I knew I had been right. And that meant we’d have to take another swing at him, whether I was prepared for it or not.

  At the first signs he might be beginning to heal, to regain a little bit of the titanic strength that defined him—no more than a genuine smile after a successful operation—I found myself called back to Leviathan’s office, looking at the map of data I had drawn months before.

  “It’s time to move again,” he declared, and I knew that he was right.

  I stared, not speaking, as the monolithic certainty of what I had to do next rose within me.

  “What shall we destroy next?” he asked almost giddily.

  Without a word, I expanded a photograph of Quantum Entanglement, and Leviathan crowed in sheer glee. Pleasing him ignited something in my chest, like I had a heart full of brimstone. As we plotted, leaning together over documents and data feeds, I felt a sliver of ice in my stomach whenever I looked at an image of Quantum’s face.

  “I’M GOING TO be fired.”

  A thing I always liked about Keller was that he was nearly impossible to shock. He was a cinder-block slab of a man, physically and intellectually built to be left standing after a natural disaster. Between his military career and his work with Leviathan, there weren’t a lot of crises that he hadn’t sailed through with frankly irritating placidity.

  So it was very rewarding whenever I could make his heavy eyebrows shoot up his forehead.

  He got his face under control quickly. “Well, that,” he said as he refilled the pint glass in front of him, “is the biggest load of horse pucky I have ever heard.”

  “You say that like it’s ridiculous.”

  “What, you suddenly suck at your job or something?”

  “Yes, Keller. Exactly that.”

  “Bullshit.” He sucked a bit of condensation off the tip of a fat finger.

  “I can’t do this job.”

  “Your job?”

  “This job.”

  “The fuck you talking about.”

  I took a deep breath. “I don’t know if I can ruin Quantum.”

  He hummed. “You caught the feelings?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know.” I rubbed my temple, letting my fingers trail into my hairline to the scar tissue there.

  Keller’s eyes followed my hand, caught the significance of the gesture. “After what he did to you, you don’t want to tear him to the ground?”

  I gritted my teeth. “It’s not that. I want him to fucking burn.” I looked down at my wrists, saw my pulse fluttering there. I concentrated on bringing my heart rate down, on cooling the heat flushes I could now see close to the surface of my skin in infrared.

  Keller waited. “Good,” he said finally. “So what’s the goddamn problem.”

  “It’s not her fault.”

  “So this isn’t about him, it’s about her.”

  “She didn’t do this to me.”

  He looked at me impatiently. “It’s not about her, it’s about the numbers. Even I’ve sat through enough of your goddamn Power-Points to know that.”

  I smiled sadly. “They’re pretty good PowerPoints.”

  “And my point is”—I groaned at his pun—“the numbers work. You proved to us they worked. That kid died, but how many people get to survive because of it? I know you know. You’re going to ruin this hero’s life, but how many lives are better when it happens?”

  I said nothing, but I did know. Every day I watched the cost of Supercollider rise.

  “Also, fuck her. She’s his partner. She warms his bed and cleans his cock and picks up his messes and makes his awful life more comfortable every day.”

  He was right. She gentled every edge in his life, lessened every blow he might have taken. She helped him immensely and her loss would reduce his capacity immensely. I’d run all that math and knew it worked out.

  The numbers didn’t lie.

  “She’s his right hand,” Keller continued. He pounded on the table. “Chop it off.”

  I was quiet a long time. “I also think he makes her miserable.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, changed his mind, and waited. No one listened like Keller did when he really felt like it.

  “I think she barely exists to him. She’s as strong as he is, easily, but she’s clipped and bound and confined in a thousand tiny ways to be a support to him instead of having the position she deserves. Accelerator needed to be in his shadow, but not her. She’s stuck standing behind him, and I think she hates it.”

  He thought this over for a moment, then shrugged. “Love’s fucked.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t even think he likes her all that much; he ignores her as much as he can and treats her like a photo op the rest of the time. I don’t think she likes him either.” I didn’t say it out loud, but in my head I played some of the hours and hours of video of their interactions I’d watched over the past few weeks. The way she carefully kept a bit of distance between them whenever she could and, when she couldn’t, the way she micro-flinched when he touched her. You might only see it if you were looking for it, like I was.

  Keller rolled his almost empty glass around in his hand. “Sounds to me,” he said, leaning back in his chair and rubbing the stubble on his scalp, “that you’d be doing her a favor.”

  I felt something shuffle into place inside my head. I didn’t feel any better about it. There was still an awful, sour pit in my stomach. But a few more tumblers had clicked in place.

  Soon, Keller was yawning and we called it a night. Instead of going back to my apartment, I took a walk. I was irritatingly sober; one of the unexpected side effects of having a traumatic brain injury was that drinking was out of the question. Now my head was always clear, always crisp and humming cleanly; there was no way to look away from anything uncomfortable, or unsatisfying, or raw. I was always sheer and sharp.

  So, I walked. Walking by myself was still frightening. Long after my stitches were out, hypervigilance left me constantly holding my breath, waiting for a van to pull up behind me, for hands to wrap around my mouth. I’d never been good at being kind to myself, so the only way through that I knew was exposure therapy. Safe in the fortress that was Leviathan’s compound, I walked through my anxiety, through the lingering old fear, until it was familiar, worn smooth, almost friendly. Just an extra little jangle in the already crackling discomfiture in my head. The fear became comforting.

  Under all the white noise and unhappiness, as I walked, I started to sift data. I thought about Quantum crossing oceans to take up her new position as one of the great heroes of our age, traveling from New Zealand and leaving everyone she knew behind. I thought about her early power assessments, her staggering ability to reshape the very fabric of reality around her. I thought about the interviews she gave where she talked about choosing to get her face tattoos, a deeply personal Maori rite of passage, when she learned she’d be working with Supercollider.

  I thought about the private investigator whom Quantum Entanglement had hired nearly a decade ago, expecting to confirm her grim certainty that Supercollider was fucking his PA, or a cop, or a younger hero; I thought about how the PI had turned up nothing but the bland horror of his neglect. I thought about her dry-cleaning bills. I thought about the keyloggers installed on every device she touched, about all the reports that went back to Supercollider’s team about her fucking a bodyguard, or a bartender, or a hero. I considered her partner’s stark disinterest in these indiscretions. I thought about how her vast potential had been spurned and reduced to force fields and fireworks.

  Looking for weak spots, I found myself holding the manuscript to an extraordinary tragedy. Probing for a way I could dismantle their relationship, I found that the bond between Supercollider and Quantum was hideously sterile, barren as a dead moon. Looking for things to undo, I found her already so awfully betrayed and undone.

>   I expected that whatever plan I came up with, whatever awful series of events I decided to set in motion, would be the great horror of her life. It hit me, though—walking through the sweet coolness of that night garden over and over again—that Supercollider was already the worst thing that had ever happened to her. I would just be forcing her to confront it. That realization gave me the last push I needed to finally set my plan in motion.

  My leg ached by the time I finally let myself go back to my apartment. It was much warmer inside, and the sudden change in temperature made me feel at once clammy and oily. I showered irritably and, still wrapped in a towel, opened up my laptop and started to work.

  “TAKE ME THROUGH it. One step at a time.” Leviathan sat behind his desk, fingers steepled. His voice was nothing but cool efficiency, and it worried me. I’d hoped for a hint of murderous glee at least.

  “Were you displeased with my proposal?” I worked hard to keep my voice even, to tackle this like a logic problem. No amount of rationalizing could keep me from feeling devastated, verging on panicked, at the prospect of his disapproval.

  He made a humming noise. “I wish to understand your thought process, how you arrived at this course of action.” He was giving me space. I wasn’t sure, however, if he was throwing me a line or giving me enough rope.

  “Certainly.” I stood—I had been sitting across from him—and hovered my hands over the touch screen on the surface of his desk, wordlessly asking may I? He inclined his head in assent and then turned his attention to the wall screen. I started to rearrange data, make it messier, more reflective of the place where I had begun.

  “When I first tried to tackle this problem, I thought it would be fairly simple. My initial impulse was to find a way to destroy Quantum Entanglement’s relationship with Supercollider.”

  “A logical first step.” There was perhaps the tiniest bit of petulance in his voice now. I realized that he was hoping for something bloodier. I wanted to repeat one of his adages about patience back at him, but let him fume quietly on his own, changing course ever so slightly.

  “It would be devastatingly simple; I would find all of the lies between them, all the little untruths, everything they kept from each other, all the pits and worms in their hearts.”

  He liked that; the sound he made was a slightly happier one.

  “It would be a process that started slow, a gradual lifting of veils and ripping out stitches until one of them encountered something so abject and disgusting it ruptured them badly enough that I could really sink my hooks in.” I moved some data files around for him to take note of: recorded phone conversations, PI reports, hotel reservations, audio clips from disgusted, gossiping security guards.

  He scanned the data; I expected him to react to it differently, to recognize how damning some of it was. Nothing registered the way that I imagined. “And what is this unforgivable injury?” It occurred to me that since we were talking about relationships, I shouldn’t expect him to have a recognizable frame of reference.

  “To be honest, I was not sure which of these would be the final straw. I had guesses, but it would be up to them what represented the breaking point.”

  “Fair. Continue.”

  “Then, I figured things would happen quickly and terribly. They would tear each other and their relationship apart, and both of them live so publicly there would be no way it wouldn’t spill over.”

  “What you have just described is the plan I expected from you.” It took a mighty effort not to shrink away physically from his disappointment. “What I have before me is very different.”

  I nodded. “I know it is.”

  The grill over his mouth wavered in irritation.

  I was not very good at speeches yet, but I summoned one. “Expecting to begin turning over rocks and find maggots wriggling underneath, I instead lifted the first stone and found only salt. With the lightest pressure, the facade of their lives fell away to reveal a stricken, barren landscape. Expecting excess and decadence and despair, I found only the stark, silent ugliness of something that had already been razed to the ground.”

  That startled him. He sat back suddenly; I fancied I could hear the liquid click of him blinking.

  I pushed forward. “I realized I had to rethink this plan. I didn’t need to reveal their awfulness to each other; that terrible task was long done. What I could do, however, was show the world just a bit of the horror I had uncovered. It wasn’t Supercollider and Quantum I needed to rip apart; it was the world’s infatuation with them.”

  “You are ruining a different kind of romance,” he said, something clearly clicking into place for him. This was a kind of relationship he understood: he knew what it was to be loved, or hated, by the general population.

  “Precisely. They aren’t even bothering to lie to each other, so there’s nothing there to ruin. They don’t love each other, but the world still loves them.”

  “So how will you sully that love story.”

  “In almost the exact same way.” I started to pull up different pieces of information now: images of public adulation for Supercollider, news stories that were obviously spun and wrong. “Imagine the world is Supercollider’s lover. He’s lying to them, and they blissfully believe him. Since these are the lies that have any meat—the ones with any love, any investment behind them—these are the stories we have to dismantle.”

  He stared up at the screen for a while, making his small thinking sounds. I imagined that he spoke quietly to himself while turning something over in his head, and it came through his armor’s external audio feed muffled and strange.

  “It’s the first steps that trouble me,” he said eventually.

  “It’s a deceptively benign beginning.”

  “Exactly. It strikes me as too conservative, in a way that you never are.”

  I realized that backhanded compliment might just give me the space to maneuver in this conversation that I needed. “When you’re trying to ruin a relationship, you don’t go for the big-ticket items first. It might seem logical to go straight for the deepest hurts: infidelity, abuse, drugs.”

  He didn’t respond, but was listening, and carefully. If strategically exploiting weak spots in romantic relationships was not something he had much experience with, as I suspected, this would all be new data for him.

  “When you aim for the core, relationships close ranks. Even if someone knows that what you’re saying is true, they’ll flagrantly deny it. They’ll deny it harder exactly because it’s true. Then the armor goes up and the daggers come out and you will find yourself facing a united front.”

  “You theorize that the public would leap to Supercollider’s defense if you reveal the worst of his treachery at once.”

  “Yes. So we start inconsequential. Skirt the big issues and go for the irritants.”

  “The pain points they feel safe in admitting to.”

  I started to smile. He was following me, picking up the bread crumbs now. “If a partner has a gambling problem, start ruining the dry cleaning and the takeout orders. Add a few minor, unrelated expenses to a household secretly being bled dry. Those small bothers will burrow right down into the heart meat quicker than you can believe.”

  “I can believe it.” There was a little buzz of excitement in his voice now.

  “Even if the infection is slow to spread, it’s better to let it fester long and deep.”

  He looked at the screen again, tapping his fingertips on the surface of his desk.

  “Don’t disappoint me,” he said eventually, and my heart leapt.

  BEING DISMISSED FROM that meeting felt like a release, and by the time I got back to my desk my hands were shaking badly. Experiencing a sense of relief after leaving his presence was new, and I disliked it intensely. I collapsed into my office chair and cradled my head in my hands for a few minutes. I had pushed aside how stressful—no, how frightening—Leviathan could be when he was anywhere close to displeased. I was very lucky in that I saw it so seldom, that my compe
tence dovetailed so well with his priorities. Being confronted with the fact that I was just as capable of irritating him or letting him down as anyone else was a rude reminder.

  I thought of June with sudden, intense longing. I wished I could tell her how stupid all of my feelings were, so she could make fun of me. I pulled out my phone and stared at it for a moment.

  I put it away.

  Once I got my heart rate under control and started to consider next steps, I came to the deeply unpleasant realization that I was going to have to weaponize my own pain to pull off the plan I had in mind. This was something I had avoided. I’d watched myself become ever more dispassionately willing to sacrifice someone else’s trauma to the gristmill (I felt a pang for Nour in that moment). It was now time to offer up my own badly knit flesh, the parts of me that were broken and unrecognizable. I knew it was the only way to get the best work out of myself.

  There was a version of me that was still sympathetic. It wasn’t what I was now, or more precisely, what I was becoming. Someone who was constantly performing elaborate equations to calculate the most accurate pain points and best places to sow misery was not someone it was easy to feel sorry for. I was now someone who saw in infrared and ran the math on death. But there were parts of me, the ragged parts I was rapidly discarding, that could inspire my pity.

  My leg still throbbed. I’d never walk the same way again. I had been treated badly by both heroes and villains, and that wounded loneliness was something I could offer. I couldn’t be the only one who’d escaped an encounter with Supercollider and was left in a similar state. There must be others he’d hurt. A reporter somewhere who’d been at the wrong place at the wrong time. Someone with an audience and a voice who’d been “Supercollided.”

  I didn’t go to the gossip columnists with some of the uglier details I had found, offering a sordid and juicy tale of a sham marriage. I didn’t go after the elaborate structures built to hide Supercollider’s broken personality, or the less wholesome habits that Quantum had picked up to cope with her loneliness. Instead, I found an older, respected columnist with a complex spinal injury from his own now long-ago encounter with a hero. And then I put on what was unquestionably the most difficult voice I had ever assumed: my own. Shakily, as Anna, the scared and injured temp worker, I reached out to him to see if he could help me tell my story.