Hench

by Natalie Zina Walschots

  “When Doc told me about Leviathan . . .” she said suddenly. “Holy shit. I knew they’d use another body, but I didn’t know why.”

  “I think part of me knew before the rest of me caught up. As soon as Doc said he wasn’t wearing armor, though . . .” I thought about his hands. I hadn’t been looking at gauntlets, but chitinous, segmented fingers.

  “I guess . . . I guess neither of them were what we thought they were.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not that. I just can’t fucking believe what they did to him. It’s so much worse than I imagined.”

  She nodded gravely. “If they put a dummy there, then he’s almost certainly still alive,” she said. “The Protocol is in action.”

  I nodded. While Supercollider and Tardigrade were generally considered the toughest known heroes, Leviathan outclassed them all in sheer stubborn invulnerability. There was some evidence of an advanced healing factor, but he was so impossibly difficult to injure there wasn’t enough data to really tell. I didn’t find that fact very comforting, though. There were a lot of unpleasant things you could do to someone without hurting them, and the words “study” and “interrogate” had been keeping me up at night.

  “We need to get him out now,” I said. “We need someone to take us to him.”

  “Who? No one’s seen Collider since it happened.”

  “I see he’s not super anymore.”

  She shot me some cut eye. It was one of her most attractive features and there were a lot to choose from. I let her intimidate me into changing the subject.

  I started to pace. “He’s going to stay underground playing with Leviathan and licking his wounds until there’s a world-threatening situation that he can’t ignore.”

  “Can’t you make one of those? Isn’t that your whole thing?”

  I felt a ripple of unfathomable and useless irritation. “My ‘whole thing’ is data analysis. But even if I had every resource the Boss did and wanted to give it a shot, I’d be pretty clumsy at it, I think. We’re running ops out of this shithole now with an eighteenth of the resources we had a week ago. I could commit arson or release a sex tape, but nothing on a scale that would necessarily lure him out.”

  Quantum’s brow furrowed. “So how do we get his attention?”

  Ruin him, I thought. Make him furious enough to come after you again. But she didn’t volunteer, and I wasn’t in a position to give orders.

  What I was in the position to do, though, was be the bait.

  There was a slow, terrible conclusion I had been coming to for a while: that my extracting Leviathan would probably mean dying by Supercollider’s hand.

  “I think I could do it, but I wouldn’t survive it,” I said. “Frankly I’m on borrowed time right now. As soon as Collider’s bored of poking at Leviathan in whatever bunker he’s keeping him in, I expect to wake up with a snapped neck. Or for this place to inexplicably become a crater if we’re all unlucky. The next time he sees me he’s going to kill me for sure.”

  Quantum was quiet a long moment, and I sat back down. Despite the fact that they had essentially signed her death warrant in that press release, she was still adjusting to the idea that Supercollider was capable of premeditated murder.

  I decided to try something different, problem-solving by a more circuitous route. “How was Doc.”

  She snorted. “You care?”

  “I do, actually. He was a perfect gentleman.”

  “You could have killed him.”

  “For what it’s worth, his kidnapping had nothing to do with me at all. I almost had a fucking aneurysm when the ransom video showed up.”

  “That was—”

  “The first I knew of it, yeah. I hate it when he doesn’t tell me things.”

  She relaxed a tiny bit. “Collider was like that.”

  I disliked the comparison. “Usually he does. But he’s not himself when Collider’s involved.”

  “They definitely care more about each other than they do about us.”

  I swept whatever that feeling was immediately back into the pit from whence it came. “Hey, I’m just on the payroll,” I said, and laughed raggedly.

  “Right. You’re on payroll, so come up with something.” She turned herself toward me. “Such as: What the fuck do we do now?”

  I dug my fingers into my scalp. “I don’t have all of the pieces yet. But I am starting to put things together.” I knew, though, that we needed to finish what we started. I told myself all the things I had been whispering to Leviathan: we must knock down his last two pillars of support—his public and his mentor. We needed to tear Supercollider all the way to the ground.

  I said, “He doesn’t have you. His relationship with Doc is strained but intact. As much public backlash as he’s received so far, he could still recover from it. It needs to be something he can’t recover from.”

  “Okay. What does that look like.” She was holding me with her eyes, trusting I had a plan even if she couldn’t follow. I really hoped I did.

  “In the ransom video, the Boss said something I didn’t understand. That the reason he was doing what he was doing had something to do with ‘the second law of thermodynamics.’ When you were talking to Doc, I think I figured it out.”

  Her eyes widened. “Entropy. The villain.”

  I snapped my fingers. “Got it in one. The Boss never spoke of her, but he kept her mask in his office. He grieves her, clearly. She’s been dead a decade and a half and it still motivates him today, for some reason. And he blames Supercollider and Doc for it.”

  She was thinking hard. “The story is she died of a heart attack.”

  “The story always is. A heart attack. An accident. Collateral damage. Does anyone know what really happened to her, though?”

  She made a sound. “Doc does. He never talks about it, but he knows for sure.”

  “We need to get Doc talking to someone.”

  “They won’t let me in again, not after—”

  “No, not you. It needs to be on record. Maybe the journalist who wrote ‘Collision Course,’ whom I trust. What Doc says needs to be devastating enough to make Supercollider want to rip my head off on live TV.”

  She looked at me. “You’re willing to do that?”

  “I am. So let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “I just told you—we need to get the journalist to talk to Doc. You’re coming with me.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I want you two to talk.” I stood up and gave her a savage grin. “Be prepared for some spectacularly shitty coffee.”

  MCKINNON DIDN’T THINK I was actually serious when I said Quantum wanted to speak with him. But there she was, flesh and blood and magic, surrounded by the smell of bacon grease and the ancient cigarette smoke that would never come out of the carpet, a real-life fairy tale ready to speak. When the Lady of the Lake points you in the direction of a sword, you don’t demur or ask for time to speak to your editor or play hardball. You hit record, you listen, and you start composing in your head immediately.

  Arranging for the journalist to speak to Doc was more complicated. Quantum couldn’t go back now that she was an accused murderer, and security was still tight after his kidnapping, so McKinnon had to be expressly invited by Doc. And while Doc was willing to say all manner of things to Quantum privately, when he thought no other ears were present, convincing him to spill the secrets of his once-beloved protégé on record was something else entirely. There was the very real possibility that he would refuse, and we would fail.

  I wrote him myself, in the end. I sent a message to his personal email, the one no one but close friends and Family were supposed to have. I reminded him who I was, about the little time we’d spent together in that demolished Enforcement van. I apologized for his treatment, and said, truthfully, I didn’t know it was going to happen. I hoped that he was well, and that he was fully recovered from his adventure.

  I then reminded him that Supercollider had lifted me out of the wrec
kage by the hair, how he had gripped my arms like someone thinking of tearing them off. I wrote about the handprints on my neck that I still had to hide from my more squeamish coworkers, how it hurt every time I swallowed. How if no one was looking, I’d be dead.

  This is not all he’s done, not even just to me. This is what you have seen yourself, and therefore I feel you are most inclined to believe it.

  Holding this in mind, I am offering you a chance to balance the scales once more. Not with your life, as Leviathan offered, but with words. In many ways, I know this is asking more of you, and it might be more difficult to give.

  I would like you to think about the second law of thermodynamics. I would like you to think of his hands on my neck. And I would like you to consider speaking to a journalist.

  What I was really asking him was Do you believe in Supercollider, or do you believe in heroes?

  The old man chose ideas over the boy he’d loved, because that’s what heroes always choose: their ideas and ideals. He demanded to be interviewed by McKinnon.

  The journalist, in this moment of triumph, denied me the courtesy of letting me listen in, flatly refusing my gift of a surveillance egg.

  I’m going to write the story I want

  I could hear the snarl in that text. McKinnon was a lot sharper than most, and could feel my manipulative tentacles wrapping around the work.

  I tried to be reassuring.

  I’m not trying to control the narrative, I just want to listen

  You’ll see it when it’s out

  I’m very impatient

  You’re probably not going to like it

  I texted a string of threats and expletives, letting McKinnon feel like I was furious, while grinning the whole time. I sincerely doubted there was going to be any possible story I wouldn’t be thrilled with, providing McKinnon had any journalistic integrity left. So long as spite for Supercollider still exceeded distaste for me, I could ask no more from our alliance.

  McKinnon let me sweat for forty-eight hours after I knew that the interview was scheduled before a courier dropped a recording off at our ramshackle headquarters. I carried it up the stairs in my arms like a baby, awkwardly texting my thanks to the journalist on my way back to the office to devour it.

  You’re the goddamn Auditor

  Doc told you eh

  I should have made you wait

  You’re going soft

  Fuck you

  I grinned and locked myself in the office. I liked McKinnon quite a lot.

  I fast-forwarded impatiently through the false starts and awkward small talk, until things began in earnest the moment McKinnon spoke the name of Leviathan’s mentor for the first time.

  “Tell me about Entropy,” the journalist said, not ungently.

  Doc Proton’s mournful groan was audible. “She figured it out, didn’t she. The Professor or whatever her name is.”

  “Hey, I took chemistry in high school. It’s not the hardest riddle to solve.”

  “Fine. You’re clever too. I still don’t have to like talking about it.”

  “The story we have, the one we all know, is that the superhero, or superheroine, as she would have been called at the time, worked alongside you most of your careers. When you left active service, for the most part, you both chose to mentor particularly talented young heroes. Leviathan was in her charge. Despite being engaged in what we’d now call ‘gray heroics’—and thus causing you two to ideologically butt heads—you had a profound respect for her. So much so that you spoke eloquently at her rather sudden retirement, and delivered a eulogy at her funeral six months later.”

  “That’s right,” Doc said in a husky whisper.

  “What are we missing, Doc.”

  He made a noncommittal noise. Instinctively I knew it was too much, that void between his story and the official one. I could hear in that weird, groaning mumble his inability to get a mental handhold.

  “Was she ill?” the journalist tried to prompt him. “Had she been experimented on? Did something go wrong?”

  “Oh, a lot went wrong, son. But no, she wasn’t sick. That old bird was supposed to outlive us all. I always figured she was made of titanium.”

  “What happened? Why did she retire?”

  “Retire . . . ,” he rolled the word around in his mouth, “is not exactly the word I would use. She and the Draft had started to disagree.”

  “About how the Draft treated those kids?”

  “Oh hell, a lot more than that. She was furious about what had happened to her boy, and I certainly can’t blame her for that. Leviathan was in some kind of chrysalis, in a coma after the experiments they—we—had done on him. We didn’t know he’d live yet, then. The Draft had also started to catch wind of some . . . extracurricular tutoring she’d been doing with her charges, Leviathan in particular. She and the Draft decided that it was easier to part ways.”

  “So she was retired.”

  “That’s right. But she didn’t go away. That’s the thing with Entropy, she was always so inexorable, so goddamn stubborn. She couldn’t just leave Leviathan, and I understood that. She wanted to keep vigil until he woke up—if he woke up. Then, she wanted to be around while he recovered and rallied. I’d have done the same if it was my boy.”

  “It sounds like that wasn’t all she did.”

  “No. No. When Leviathan was better—well, when he lived, and it was clear that the changes were what they were—she kept working with him, training him. Unofficially.”

  “Something I imagine the Draft objected to.”

  “Strenuously. They asked me to talk to her and I tried, I did, but she kicked me out and called me a coward. That . . . that would be the last time we spoke.”

  “Why did she think you were a coward?”

  “For siding with the Draft, as she saw it. For continuing to work with them after we knew what they were willing to do to these kids. For ‘choosing the greater good over doing good,’ that’s how she always said it. I said that was rich, coming from her, considering all the . . . unsavory things she’d done. She . . . she didn’t take too kindly to that and that was the end of it.”

  “What did the Draft do next?”

  “I didn’t know they were going to ask him to intervene. I had no idea, I swear. I never would have allowed it.”

  “Asked who to intervene?”

  “Supercollider.”

  “They sent him, what, to talk to Entropy?”

  There was a very long, terrible silence. “He told me, later, that they wanted him to scare her. I don’t think the woman would have been scared of the devil himself. But that’s what the boy claimed they told him. ‘Just scare her a little. Make her think about whether keeping in touch with Leviathan was such a good idea.’”

  “Did they tell him what they wanted him to do to her?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I only found out what they had done after.”

  “After.”

  “He. Supercollider. He brought her to me.”

  “He kidnapped Entropy and took her to you?”

  There was a pause where I could hear a strange, liquid noise: Doc swallowing repeatedly. I had no proof, but I imagined him shaking his head too.

  “He brought me her body.”

  I heard McKinnon’s shock in the silence.

  Doc began again after a long time. “I believe that it was an accident, truly. He didn’t want to hurt her, not badly. There was real panic in his face when he told me.”

  I wondered, absently, if that was the last time Supercollider had been afraid, really afraid. I hoped I got to see the next.

  “How did she die.”

  “It’s not—”

  “I think it is. What did Supercollider do to Entropy.”

  “He picked her up.”

  Doc tried to stop there. His silence was a plea now.

  “Go on.” McKinnon was having none of it.

  “He picked her up and leapt upward.”

  There was another pause.
“He took her up . . . high enough. He was jumping over buildings, he said. She was cold. Her nose was bleeding.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “He said his piece. She was to stop whatever training or communication she was carrying on with Leviathan, that she was to step out of the young man’s life and stop undermining the Draft. That she needed to retire for real. And . . . And he . . .”

  “What did he do, Doc.”

  “He dropped her.”

  “Oh my god.”

  “He didn’t mean to, but he lost his grip. Just a little.”

  “Jesus, Doc.”

  “I dangled a lot of villains off of buildings in my time, and I wanted to believe it was the same kind of thing. But gone wrong.”

  “Very wrong.”

  “A few things happened at once, we figure. First of all, she had a heart attack. It might have been enough on its own, you know. It’s a strange sort of comfort but I hope it was.”

  “What else.”

  “He did try to save her. But he caught her . . . badly. He just didn’t know his own strength. He grabbed her too tight, much too tight, and—”

  When Doc stopped here, the journalist didn’t push him to continue. They both let the silence hang. The sound of that quiet, recorded, was awful. It was long enough for me to realize I had my hands clamped around my forearms, digging my nails into my skin painfully hard. I let go, flexed my hands, rolled my neck, tried to get some of the tension out of my body.

  “What did you do,” McKinnon said finally.

  I could hear Doc shift, sitting straighter. “I did what I always did when things went sideways. I called my team. Neutrino, Siege Engine, and Cold Snap all came. I didn’t want Atom Bomb to see. We talked through it with Supercollider, calmed him down. We figured out what we would tell people. It should always have a grain of truth in it, whatever you tell the public. Once he was presentable, we called the boys at the Draft and let them come and clean things up.”

  “So you taught Supercollider how to lie.” The journalist wanted blood now.

  “My boy, we all lie to the public all the damn time.”

  “Would you prefer to say you gave him a crash course in crisis communications?”

  “You have no idea what it was like.”