Hench

by Natalie Zina Walschots

  It was my Villains’ Union certificate that had fallen, the one Greg had given me long ago. “Congratulations, you have been Supercollided!” The metal frame had bent a little in the fall and the glass had shattered, a spiderweb of cracks radiating out from one corner.

  I stumbled back from it, put too much weight too suddenly on my bad leg and fell hard. The pain in my tailbone shocked me back into my body. A sick, cold wave passed over me, and I dug the heels of my hands into my eyes.

  In my head, I started to replay the scene once more. But what I was seeing wasn’t the video I had been watching on an endless loop for hours this time. What I needed was there, waiting for me: the moment I’d first seen Leviathan’s body myself.

  When I’d woken up after Supercollider unceremoniously dropped me, it occurred to me that I’d hit my head hard enough that I might be concussed. I tried to get up repeatedly and failed, overcome by knee-buckling waves of nausea. When I finally stood and stayed upright, scanning the field, the compound was a mess of capes and containment specialists. There were a pair of moderately injured Meat zip-tied together a few meters away, being questioned before being loaded into a Dovecote prisoner transport van. I was vaguely aware I should flee the compound (evacuation procedures would certainly have been triggered by then) and retreat to a safe house. But dazed as I was, something caught my attention, and instead I walked forward.

  A crowd was gathering, heroes and their handlers alike. They were all looking down at something. There was a body on the ground.

  A strange cloud of numb unreality overtook me. I didn’t want to know what they were looking at. My jolted brain was trying to protect me still, to lock out what I was about to see as long as possible. My heart was suddenly in my ears and an alarm started going off in my head, telling me to look away, to not get too close.

  I kept walking forward. I felt like I was moving through liquid glass, at once sharp and surrounded by sucking sludge. A woman in a Draft suit escorted a journalist and cameraman closer. The crowd shifted then, giving me a better view, and I caught sight of a shattered shoulder plate, a black suit of armor.

  I knew the elegant way those plates usually fit together. My throat moved but no sound came out. Leviathan was dead.

  In my office now, sitting on the floor, I let out the choking sob I couldn’t force out then. I dug my fingernails into my palms, and shook my aching head. Remembering the wreck of his beautiful armor made me want to gag. My brain recoiled at the memory.

  I took a few deep breaths and forced myself to think about what I had seen yet again, to think of the actual details. Because somewhere, my mind had made the leap from staring at his body to the certainty he was still alive. I needed to know where that insight came from. I needed to know if it was real, or a trauma response. I needed to know if I was rational. I bit the inside of my lip and called the memories back up again.

  The arrangement of his limbs was wrong. One arm was twisted behind his back and arched up, and one of his legs was parallel to his torso, doubled back at an impossible angle. There was a smoldering wound in his chest plate. In a few places the chitin—usually a beautifully clean matte black, now filthy and ashen—was torn away completely, and I could see the skin beneath. Seeing his bare skin was somehow more awful than seeing exposed viscera. It felt like a violation to see him, the nakedness of it.

  I had started to shake very badly then, and sank to my knees. Someone eventually tucked the silver recovery blanket around my shoulders and pressed that styrofoam cup of weak coffee into my hands.

  In my office, hours later, my hands still shook as I relived those moments in my head. The video picked up where my brain left off, when the containment bag was wheeled over, when his body was sealed inside it, and what was left of him was taken away to be analyzed and processed, to endure every conceivable indignity in death.

  Through the horror of that moment, a refrain started to gather momentum in my head: It’s not him. Leviathan isn’t dead. He’s not dead. He’s not dead. He’s not dead.

  My certainty felt different from irrational denial. There was something prickly about it, something bothering me. I was sure there had to be a fact not seen clearly, an image misunderstood, something my mercurial subconscious was able to process while keeping my surface mind in the dark. I was missing something, I was sure of it. There was more in my memory than grief, and more on that video than a record of the last moments anyone would see of Leviathan’s mortal remains outside a clean room.

  It had to be what I had seen myself. The hardest thing to think about, the images I had the hardest time focusing on most clearly, was the physical details of Leviathan’s body. My brain was shying away from that trauma; the secret must be there.

  I tried to recall the moment again, but my brain was becoming sluggish and confused. No matter how hard I willed myself to focus, my mind drifted. I touched my mouth and realized there was still dried blood crusted to my chin and neck, and my clothes were utterly filthy. For the moment, I conceded defeat.

  I’m not sure how I dragged myself back to my apartment. The door was open and the place had been tossed, clearly searched by some overzealous Z-grade heroes and their kicks when they swarmed the place, all looking for a piece of Leviathan’s downfall. There was nothing important there, nothing sensitive. Seeing my furniture tossed around and my clothes flung onto the floor would once have rattled me to my core, but now it left me weirdly emotionless. I absently picked up a few articles of clean clothing from the pile and all but crawled into the shower.

  I sat on the smooth enamel floor while the hot water washed over me; standing seemed an impossible effort. My hair was still sopping when I crawled into bed—well, onto the mattress that had been tossed onto the floor—wrapping a quilt around myself like a cocoon. I don’t think I even bothered to lock the door. I was so wrung out I wouldn’t have cared if, during the night, I was cryovaced into a bag in a fridge somewhere in Dovecote myself, as long as they let me sleep.

  I don’t know how much time passed, but it was dark when I realized there was a hand on my shoulder, someone calling my name calmly and steadily. My mouth felt cottony and consciousness was a fight. For a moment I didn’t know where I was.

  “Anna. Come on, kiddo. Anna.”

  I sat up with great difficulty. It was Keller.

  “I’d’ve thought you’d be arrested with the Meat.” I felt like I was speaking through wet plaster.

  “Doc wouldn’t let them. It was the first time someone called me a ‘nice young man’ in a while.”

  Keller was on his haunches next to me, forearms resting on his knees. He looked downright concerned, his thick eyebrows turned upward and his frown lines especially deep.

  “I’m all right,” I said, rubbing my face. “Just tired.”

  “Greg said you’d lost it.”

  “Greg is an idiot.”

  “He adores you.”

  “He adores me and he is an idiot.” Awkwardly and painfully I managed to get my feet under me and stagger to the bathroom. I avoided my reflection and loaded my toothbrush up with a really unnecessary volume of toothpaste.

  Keller stood, his knees popping, and followed me. “He said you were rocking back and forth muttering.”

  “Sounds like me,” I mumbled, aggressively brushing my teeth.

  “He said you kept repeating that Leviathan isn’t dead.”

  “He isn’t.”

  The worry in Keller’s forehead creases deepened. I spat in the sink.

  “Anna. I saw it too.”

  I splashed water on my face, dried it, and finally looked at myself. My face was hollow and the dark circles under my eyes were a deep purplish black. My lower lip was swollen and scabbed over where it had split. My throat was covered in terrible handprints. I looked battered and exhausted, but I was lucid.

  I turned to Keller, walked a step or two toward him, and put one of each of my hands on his massive shoulders.

  “I know this sounds fucking impossible.” My mouth
was as minty as it had been sour. “I do. But he isn’t dead.”

  He looked like he was about to interrupt me, but then didn’t.

  I jumped on that little opening, the possibility of his belief. “I can prove it. I swear. I just need some time. I haven’t lost my shit. I know that it’s a huge thing to ask, but I need you to trust me. I need to be able to count on you.”

  He looked at me a long moment, gaze flicking back and forth between my eyes. “It occurs to me,” he said slowly, “that a good part of the latter half of my career has been believing someone who told me something impossible.”

  Relief hit me like a wave, and I let go of a tension I didn’t know I was holding. Somehow, I found the capacity to smile. It hurt my face. I let it fall quickly.

  “I will prove it.”

  “I know.”

  “I swear.”

  Keller wrapped his arms around me and squeezed. I let him hold me up for a minute, closed my eyes.

  “Anna.”

  I stayed behind my eyelids one moment more. “Yes.”

  “I believe you. But we need to figure out what happens now. Can you do that with me?”

  I drew in a long breath, held it, and let it out. Keller let me go. I opened my eyes and rolled my shoulders. I felt my brain humming, rattled but powerful. “Absolutely.”

  “It’s going to be bad.”

  I nodded. “What is our situation.”

  He’d been speaking gently to me, his voice a soothing growl. He decided I had it together enough to slip back into his usual commanding brusqueness. “Most of the nonessential staff have evacuated. There’s a skeleton crew here. The fail-safes fell into place as soon as they started searching so everything critical is buried under magma right now.”

  That was a relief. Leviathan’s office, the labs, the vaults—everything truly valuable would be sealed and surrounded in molten rock. That also meant, however, that none of us had access to the best equipment and resources. That would be challenging.

  “We need to take stock of who’s here and what we have. I need to know what we had in circulation, what didn’t get locked up, everything we have access to. Let’s get on the emergency comms, figure out who is still available, and press them into service.”

  He nodded and started moving toward the door. I started digging through my smoke-and-blood-reeking clothes on the floor for my comm; I could use the equipment in my head to tap in to the emergency frequency if I had to, but it gave me a headache.

  “Will you make the announcement, ma’am?”

  “I’m on it.” I found my comm and looped it around my ear.

  “I’ll get you a sit-rep and let you know what we have.” Keller nodded crisply and ducked out.

  My brain was still moving slower than usual, so it took me a moment to realize the terrible significance of that “ma’am”: it meant that Keller had just decided, in Leviathan’s absence, whatever it was, I was in charge.

  I swallowed hard, straightened my shoulders to shed some fear, and tuned my comm to the emergency channel.

  “All staff, this is the Auditor.”

  7

  WE COULDN’T STAY AT THE COMPOUND. WITH LEVIATHAN gone, the entire facility was on lockdown. Like most villains he was a control freak, and there were an awful lot of doors (and magma chambers) that once closed only he could open. Staff were already evacuated and scattering, and those who remained were edgy and exhausted. Some had even seen Leviathan’s body and were badly shaken. Others expected heroes who had missed the action to show up any minute, looking for scraps to loot, or a fight; it was not an unfounded fear.

  Keller and I decided that the best strategy was to let almost everyone go. Let the heroes think the henches were rats leaving a sinking ship. Much of the Meat and most of the henches were told to reenroll at the Temp Agency (including Tamara), as though they were all back to the drawing board and looking for new nefarious work. We could keep them on the payroll quietly for a while, but they were to take jobs if they needed to maintain cover (though there weren’t going to be all that many jobs with the market so newly flooded). Once they were settled, we got to work.

  We moved the core of our limping, ramshackle operations to one of the shadier safe houses, a low-rise apartment building that usually served as the base of a small side business we maintained providing new, good identities when one of our team (or well-paying associates) needed one. If all else failed, we thought, at least we could get that last core team set up with new names.

  Keller and what was left of Enforcement took over most of one floor, with Molly staking claim over a large corner unit with the few prototypes they’d managed to stash and retrieve. The other two floors became a chaotic mess of makeshift offices and living arrangements. I found an abandoned reclining chair and a battered desk, and planned to set up camp with the remaining Information team in a modest room. Keller made a bunch of noise that I should take more space, assert my dominance. I initially dismissed this as bullshit, stating that I felt more comfortable within easy reach of a keyboard.

  “I’m not telling you to stop working,” Keller said. “But do it from a place of power. Even if that place has black mold and leaks.”

  I saw his point, and claimed a space with a window for my own. I insisted, however, on keeping the chair.

  Soon, I was also grateful for the privacy. I needed time to prove that Leviathan was still alive (the “and then what” part of the problem was something I actively wasn’t thinking about yet). My team believed me, though some more adamantly than others. Keller had my back and Ludmilla would have followed the faintest bit of hope into hell. Most of the rest at least knew that my brain was weird enough to believe something I said that didn’t seem possible.

  In that ill-lit space with awful vinyl floors, I resumed torturing myself with the footage and my own memories the first moment I could. I knew he was alive; I just needed to explain how I knew—including to myself. I needed to make the math work. I needed to reward everyone who had given me their faith with facts. And I knew I had a very limited amount of time in which to work before the only responsible thing to do was disband everyone completely.

  I just had no idea how to do it.

  In terms of process, I monitored every social media feed and every major news source to see how Leviathan’s apparent death was being discussed: what was being reported, what wasn’t; what the tone was and what jokes were being made. The progress I made was agonizingly slow, however. It was all intensely painful to look at, and I found myself only able to work in short bursts before having to tear my eyes away or rest. Because of my injuries I could only look at screens so long and was worried about complications from my new brain trauma. It was also impossible to analyze what I was seeing with any critical distance. Every rehashed news story and clever quip was a fresh wound.

  I felt the noose tightening when I learned to my dismay that Supercollider had vanished after the fight—probably personally escorting Leviathan into whatever containment pit had been devised for him. I tried not to think about that too closely, but the image came up over and over, unbidden. I wondered if Leviathan knew the world thought he was dead. I imagined Supercollider relished telling him that everyone was certain his lifeless body had been carted away, that no one was coming, that he’d be forgotten in a heartbeat.

  The narrative around Quantum Entanglement was being carefully controlled as well, and not for the better. Someone finally decided, conveniently, to look at the details of the medical examiner’s report, and noticed that there were some discrepancies between how Melting Point’s powers worked and the circumstances of his and his ex-partner’s deaths. There was now an official Superheroic Affairs investigation into her supposed role in the incident. Supercollider was clearly ready to string her up.

  Through it all, I was flailing. I had data in front of me and could make no sense of it. I had resources (scattered and in shambles as they were), but no sense of how to deploy them. I couldn’t relax, but had no capacity for work. I
couldn’t even text June; I ached for her now in a way I hadn’t in months. I composed messages to her that I didn’t send, describing the exact texture of my dread and the stakes of failure.

  I know you’d hate this, but I can tell you down to the month what I’ll cost us all if I’m wrong

  I bet you’d love to see me be wrong

  You are a world-champion gloater. Prepare your finest artisanal told-you-so

  I am glad you aren’t here so this can’t hurt you, but I miss you. So much

  I was increasingly sure that I should just do my best to get everyone as safe as I could, set up in new locations with new identities, and walk away from all of it. I was on the verge of giving up, having just spent hours scouring the internet for any grainy, shaky phone video footage some overexcited kick might have uploaded after raiding Leviathan’s compound, when Keller called.

  “Hey, Ke—”

  “Security feed, front door.”

  I clicked over to the video feed from the camera pointed at the building’s main entrance. There was a tall woman, her hair tucked under a toque, ringing the doorbell. She had a small duffel bag in one hand, clutching the strap tight. She was wearing a hoodie and jeans, and I couldn’t see her face, which was carefully angled away from the camera eye. But I would have recognized that queenly stance and the set of her shoulders anywhere.

  “Well, shit.”

  The first thought I had was that she had come to kill me. She had somehow figured out that I was the person who had utterly ruined her life to get to Supercollider, and she was here for revenge.

  But then my second thought was Why is she knocking?

  “I can lock the foyer down and fill it with gas,” Keller said.

  “No, let me go down.”