But there was no reason to torture myself with that impossible equation. He was alive. I could not ascribe any value to doubt.
THE THING WITH the surveillance egg was that you could remove most of the bodily interference, the visceral noise, but you couldn’t eliminate it completely. Lightened as much as it was, you could still always hear a heartbeat. I’d heard Molly complain about this, how it was distracting, but I’d come to find it an invaluable secondary source of information. You could tell if the person who’d swallowed the egg was nervous, if the tension in the room shifted suddenly, if they saw something they couldn’t otherwise communicate, if there was going to be violence before it erupted.
Quantum’s heart rate was elevated, its staccato urgency reaching my ears. She could teleport out if she needed; it wasn’t physical threat that had her alarmed. It was that she’d been in hiding for weeks, and this was her first appearance in any sort of public venue since. Not to mention the headlines about her would be very different if she was detained at the gates to the Hadron, especially considering the fire and Proton’s kidnapping: turning Supercollider into a supercuckold and maybe having something to do with her former lover’s death was one thing, but if someone suspected she was up to something here, she’d be over the line for good. At that moment, I think, some part of her thought she could still go home.
We decided against giving Quantum an earpiece, which would almost assuredly have been spotted. Not everyone had the dubious luck of being in a situation to have a mic (of sorts) attached to their auditory nerve. It meant we couldn’t talk to her, but she could speak to us.
“I know it’s impossible, but I swear I can feel this thing in my gut. It’s like I am pregnant. With an egg. Eggnant?”
“Oh my god.” Keller had to put his head down.
“A hero with a sense of humor. She’s too good for them,” I said, adjusting the interference.
Security didn’t give her a suspiciously hard time, but they were as cruel as they could be. They searched her thoroughly, got in subtle digs wherever they could, made her sign in twice.
“You must understand, we have to be extra careful after all the recent incidents,” one of them drawled venomously. I could hear their hands on her through the walls of her body, feeling for anything they could harass her for. It made me unreasonably angry.
They couldn’t stop her from coming in, though, because she’d messaged Doc ahead of time and he was over the moon to see her. Doc was guarded, not imprisoned, and could still do what he damn well pleased. He might have been weakened from his ordeal (he hadn’t been seen outside the Hadron’s walls since he was returned to their care), but he was still gripping his own agency tight. He wanted to see her, and without an excuse they had to let her in.
“Oh, honey,” he said when he saw her, tears clouding his voice. “I am so glad you came.”
“Hi, Doc,” she said meekly. There was the thump and rustle of their hug; it sounded like he was sitting up in bed and he was bending over her awkwardly, his forehead making contact with her collarbone.
There was the scrape of her pulling a chair close to his bed, and she sat. “How are you feeling?”
He made a dismissive noise. “Bit tired, no worse for wear. Frankly, it’d been too long since I was in the middle of something. Made me miss it, got the blood pumping.”
“They didn’t hurt you, did they?”
“No, no. Downright civilized. I’m fine. But I’m worried about you, honey.”
“I’m—”
“You look so tired.”
“That means I look like crap.”
“You are lovely as the dawn,” he said, haughty and offended, and she laughed. “But anyone can see you’re having a time.”
“Do you know what happened?”
He sighed deeply. “Yeah, honey, I know.”
“You must be so disappointed.” She sounded so broken up I bit my lip at the pain of it.
“Not a chance.” I could imagine him solemnly shaking his head. “I know this life is hard and complicated, and I am not going to pretend like I understand what you were going through. You don’t owe me or anyone else an explanation.”
“Not everyone agrees.”
“I can’t believe they tried to do that to you, make you go in front of all those cameras. I can’t believe Supercollider allowed—”
“It was his idea.”
There was a very long silence between them. Miles away in the safe house I could feel myself get uncomfortable, could feel sweat under my arms, on the back of my neck.
“Have you spoken to him since?” Doc’s voice was hoarser now.
“No. I doubt I could speak to him now if I wanted to, which I don’t.”
“He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
“He probably can’t.”
“‘Probably’?” I said aloud. That was interesting.
“I know, I know . . . but did he try.”
“No. Not in the way that you mean. He was just . . . It was terrible, Doc. It really was. I don’t want to talk about it, I can’t tell you. But it was so bad.”
“It’s okay, honey, you don’t have to say anything.”
Her heart was pounding now. “He’s . . . He’s just . . . He’s not what everyone thinks he is.”
Doc didn’t answer her.
“I feel like I don’t even know him.”
“You might not, honey.” He sounded so sad.
“Help me understand. Tell me about him, tell me what I don’t know.”
“I don’t know what I—”
“You knew him. When he was practically a kid. You trained him. He looked up to you so much. Help me understand how he got like this, how he became whatever he is now.”
“He’s what he always was. He’s a hero.”
“Doc.”
Proton sighed. “There was never any other path for him. Not from the time he was a tiny baby, I’d wager. This is always what he had to be.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He didn’t become like this, he always was like this. Nothing changed him, honey. He’s always been this way.”
“I remember him differently.”
“Do you? Or do you wish you did?”
There was a long pause.
“We put all our hopes into him, Quantum. Everything we dream of. Everything we want him to be. It’s the power of his that no one talks about.”
“Holy shit,” Keller said. I grabbed his shoulder.
But Quantum didn’t understand. She made a sound in her throat, but Doc cut her off. “It’s an incredible ability, when you think about it. More than all his strength. The real miracle is making people believe in him. I wanted the perfect protégé, I got it. You wanted a partner as strong as you, and he was that hero. Poor Leviathan wanted a nemesis, and there he was.”
“It wasn’t real?” She sounded hollow.
“It was as real as your force fields, Quantum. Real as he could tear a building to the ground. But he can’t keep it up forever, see. You need to keep the hope, the dream, alive. And when it falters, and of course it does, he can’t maintain it on his own. It fails. Without hope he goes back to what he is.”
“What—what is that?” She sounded genuinely frightened. My hand tightened on Keller’s shoulder. I was frightened too, and a childish part of me wanted to turn off the audio before I heard an answer. But I was also fascinated, and that infernal curiosity won.
“I don’t know how to explain it, honey. What’s left is . . . whatever it is, it’s hungry.”
“Christ.” I let go of Keller. Doc was sobbing.
“Doc, you don’t have to. Shh.” The sounds he was making were suddenly closer and more muffled. I figured that she had sat on his bed and pulled him close, and he was crying onto her shoulder.
“No. No. I do. Supercollider should have left me. He should have let Leviathan do what he wanted. I deserved it, we all did, for what we did to him.”
“I don’t care what happened. I don’t
care what he looks like under that armor now—you didn’t deserve that.”
“No. Quantum. Listen to me. He’s not wearing armor.”
“Doc? That doesn’t make any—”
“There is no armor. He’s not wearing anything at all.”
“I’ll be fucked,” Keller said.
I stood up so suddenly that I stumbled and would have fallen if Keller hadn’t grabbed hold of both my arms to steady me. I felt a thousand things slam into place in my head at once; it was dizzying and difficult to process, but in my chest I also felt a surge of triumphant relief.
I brought up the memory of the last moment I had seen Leviathan once more. I thought of the first glimpse of him I caught: his shoulder. The pauldron was pulled up and a little away from his shoulder, the rerebrace around his upper arm twisted away almost completely. I could see the skin beneath, some of it torn, some bits of the metal embedded into the flesh. My brain recoiled from the image and I forced myself to stay with it, to focus on his shoulder.
It was ugly, that broken pauldron. Not just because it was broken and begrimed from the fight; there was something innately repellent about it. Something wrong. Under the smears of dirt and blood and ash, it was dull, lifeless. There was no uncanny iridescence, no trace of the eyespots I had stared at in wonder whenever I could. The shape was right, but the texture was wrong. It wasn’t alive.
I made a weird choking sound as my mind acclimatized to the idea that Leviathan’s armor wasn’t armor. It wasn’t something that he put on and took off, a wonder of engineering; it was his body. That wasn’t a grate over his mouth, but actual mandibles; the tiny flexible places I could see between each plate were tissue, not material; his gauntlets were his hands. It wasn’t something he wore, it was what he was. The dead armor I’d seen in front of me couldn’t be his because it could come off.
Leviathan was alive because that glimpse of naked flesh couldn’t have been his body.
The second, simultaneous realization was that if the body was a fake (probably some poor unfortunate Meat or cop they threw a good costume on, and the kind of people the hero worked with could have made a fake that was very good indeed), they wanted everyone to think Leviathan was dead. Which meant not only was he alive, he was being held alive for a reason.
I found my balance slowly. Keller’s face was a mass of worry lines, but I gently waved him off, promising I was all right. Putting these pieces together was exhausting, but I would push through and find new capacity. Because as much as I wanted to curl up in the moist-smelling reclining chair and never get up again, this was where the work truly began.
I called Ludmilla into the room. She needed to know next. Whatever else Doc and Quantum discussed, I could listen to the recording later.
It was not easy to get what we had heard to sink in.
“Watch it again.”
Ludmilla looked stricken. It was obvious she could barely stomach it, though she at least had some idea what I was trying to show her.
“Trust me. Watch it again.”
“I can’t.” Ludmilla was as gutted as I had ever seen her, pale and panicking.
“Watch it and tell me what’s wrong.”
“He’s fucking—”
“No,” I snapped, “he’s not.” I hated to be cold with her, but I would tolerate no more arguments. “Now watch it like this is proof of a hit. Watch it like this is a job. What’s wrong with what you see?”
She took a shuddering breath and watched. After a few views, a different frown settled over her face. Something was wrong. Something was catching and tugging at her mind. Once the hook had caught I could point it out.
“The pauldron.”
She frowned, and watched again. Her eyes narrowed and her brows drew in as she focused on it.
“The armor. It’s . . . wrong.”
“Leviathan has never been wearing armor. It’s his body.” My heart was pounding. “That can’t be him, because that poor fuck is wearing armor.”
“Not him,” she said. Her voice was steady, but seemed to tremble at the edges. “Not him.”
I watched slow certainty break over her face. “We have a rescue mission to plan,” I said.
At that, it was like Ludmilla sprang back to life, gripping my hand with shocking intensity. “I am yours,” she said, cheekbones like flint knives.
My hand creaked audibly as I stretched it out.
“Let’s get him back fast,” Keller said, already turning to leave the room and begin whatever preparations he felt were necessary. Ludmilla followed, vibrating with joy.
I was as elated as they were. But as I groped back to my chair and put my head in my hands, I found myself trying to hold the joy above water while exhaustion threatened to close in over my head.
THERE WAS A tiny courtyard behind the apartment building that had become our makeshift headquarters. Accessible through an alley that ran between our building and the next, it was little more than a staging area for garbage and old mattresses. A dry fountain, filled with dead leaves and cigarette butts and the odd frolicking pair of raccoons, stood in the center. There was also a busted couch that had once been upholstered in purple velvet that, despite being in a moderate stage of rot, was in remarkably good structural shape. It sat beneath the dubious shelter of a tarp-covered fire escape.
That’s where Quantum found me when she eventually came back, sitting on the decaying velvet. It was slightly too cold to be entirely comfortable, but being inside was worse. The walls were making me feel claustrophobic. Besides, the wifi inside was terrible. I had been holding my laptop at awkward angles by my desk, trying to get a signal. A very important news conference had just started, and I needed to see it.
Outside, the video finally played, and the same Draft suit they’d had when they were going to put Quantum in the stocks was gravely addressing the press.
“. . . a shame, a terrible shame, but the Draft, and Supercollider, believe we have no choice. In light of this new, conclusive evidence that Quantum Entanglement is responsible for the deaths of Melting Point and his long-term partner, with possible ties to Electrocutioner and the Rule of Nines, it is with heavy hearts that we must take this to mean that she has officially crossed the line. The Family asks that you respect our privacy during this incredibly difficult time.”
There was an explosion of questions, and the suit held up a hand to wave them away.
What a joke, calling it “the Family” still. That was what the Draft had always called the unstable nucleus of Supercollider’s inner circle. For the past twelve years it had meant he and Quantum Entanglement, and whatever other heroes or kicks who were deemed worthy enough, for a while, to be on the inside. With Accelerator dead and Quantum Entanglement excommunicated, who was even left to call “Family” now?
I lowered my laptop and saw Quantum walking toward me across the courtyard, her head down. It was like watching a thunderstorm approach over a lake. I closed the device out of courtesy and tucked it beside me, sliding over a little to make room. She sat down next to me and for a long time neither of us said anything.
She found her capacity to speak first. “I held up my part of the bargain. You’d better hold up yours.”
I thought it was safer not to reply. The silence between us was deeply uncomfortable.
“Do you smoke?” Her voice was hoarse.
“No. I wish I did right now.”
“That’s a shame. It’d be fitting.”
An alarm bell started to ring in my mind. I stuck my fingers into a hole in the fabric, felt it give and tear a little more. I touched the slightly damp stuffing, the sharp edge of a broken spring.
“You saw the press conference, I take it.”
Her mouth tightened. “Was it you.”
Everything suddenly came into hyperfocus. I seemed to be aware of every hair follicle and pore on my body. It was a feeling I recognized now: brushing close to my death.
“I am afraid,” I said automatically, “that you’ll have to be more spe
cific.”
She leapt up then, so that she was towering over me. “Did you frame me. For murdering them. Was this you.”
I was strangely relieved that I didn’t have to lie to her. “I know this might look like my work, but I did not do this.”
“I could make you tell me.”
“The inefficacy of torture is well documented.”
“I know what you are, what you do.”
I swallowed hard, and hoped even that involuntary gesture didn’t make me seem guilty. “I’m probably worse than what you know about me. But I didn’t order the hit on Melting Point, and I had nothing to do with the Draft framing you.”
Her face was terrifyingly unreadable. She was running some calculations of her own, but what they could be, I had no access to.
Sometimes, a small admission of guilt can cover up larger culpability. I decided to take that risk, a tactic that had sealed the deal on innumerable plea bargains. “I spoke to the journalist. McKinnon.”
The potential for violence fled her body; I saw it pass, like a spirit that had been possessing her suddenly loosening its grip. She slumped back down on the couch next to me.
“That was you,” she said quietly. “When did it happen? That botched robbery with the Red King?”
“No. Nothing that bloody. The press conference the Eel held.”
“When he kidnapped the kid?”
“I was one of the seat fillers, looking confused.”
She stared at her hands. They had been clenched so tight, there were little crescent moon impressions on her skin from where her nails had cut into her palms. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have threatened you. I should be apologizing.”
I felt some of the tension leave me, sublimating through my skin. The likelihood of my imminent demise decreased, leaving me sweaty and tired. “You’ve had a day. I’ll spot you this one.”
We sat quietly together for a long time. I watched some leaves and garbage blow across the courtyard. There were a few crows on the building opposite, talking to each other and wondering if one of us was going to drop a french fry.
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