“No, I don’t. But clearly you don’t think what happened is something you can keep living with, or you wouldn’t be talking to me. On that video it seemed like you were willing to die for it.”
“I don’t owe you anything. I don’t owe anyone anything but Entropy, and Leviathan.”
“What do you owe Leviathan.”
There was another very long pause and some shuffling sounds; for a moment I was sure Doc was going to call the interview, considering the fury that had crept into his voice. He was willing to hang himself, but to be accountable to someone else was still an imposition he could barely tolerate. But, after a long moment, he sighed heavily, resigned.
“She told him that if something happened to her, it was no accident. She told him that they’d forced her to retire, and he should be vigilant. That if she died, or disappeared, or stopped talking to him, it wasn’t her. That she’d never leave him. That it was the Draft that had come for her. So the next morning, when they announced she’d had a heart attack, he went to war. He was still a bit sick, but coming into his own. He needed help, though. He needed an ally. He went to his best friend.”
“He went to Supercollider.”
“Leviathan told him that something had happened to her, that they needed to stand up to this fascism even if it looked like heroism. You know. One of his speeches. He was already very good at speeches.”
Imagining a young, heartbroken Leviathan summoning all of the still-developing powers of monologue he possessed to try and win over his friend and avenge his mentor made my chest contract painfully.
“And Supercollider lied to him.” The journalist filled in what he saw as the next logical beat in the story, an unusual interview misstep.
“No. Supercollider told him everything.”
MCKINNON COULD HAVE focused on many places. The article could have been an exposé on the broken system of drafting superheroes, beginning with the standardized screening that started around puberty. Maybe look at how the Draft found Supercollider before he was in middle school and conscripted him into a fight he couldn’t possibly understand. Or eviscerate the system that took Leviathan, took a brilliant young person and completely annihilated him. Maybe even examine the problem of Leviathan’s armor directly, which would have been the hardest to stomach, but which unquestionably would have exposed Supercollider and his vast system of handlers for the unconscionable liars that they were.
Instead of beginning with something new, however, McKinnon chose to focus on something the world had already seen: the ransom video. Homing in on the phrase “the second law of thermodynamics,” and the way Doc’s face had crumpled; examining the weight of guilt that crashed down on him in that moment, something everyone had seen played over and over again. That festering mystery, something lodged just under the skin of discourse, held up to the light. What could make Doc Proton feel so awful that he’d be willing to accept his own death as retribution for it?
I thought, naively, that convincing McKinnon to work with me again and getting the article written was going to be the hardest bit of the process. After the interview with Doc, however, the story took over. McKinnon worked until exhaustion, until every word was a wound, and then filed it, triumphantly.
The editor, of course, rejected it outright.
For a moment, it looked like everything was going to fall apart in the most frustrating, mundane fashion imaginable. McKinnon said the editor was spineless and would publish whatever was filed. So it was, of course, this precise moment that the editor decided to invest in some vertebrae and refuse to run a piece that damaged his struggling online outlet’s “already tenuous hero-civilian relationships.”
McKinnon fought, of course, pulling rank and threatening to leave. The editor called his bluff and demanded a resignation. When McKinnon sent that update, probably from a BlackBerry while dry-heaving over a toilet, I bit the insides of my cheeks bloody, supressing the urge to scream and break everything in my immediate vicinity.
“I don’t understand,” Quantum said to me, completely baffled. “They have to publish it. It’s so important.”
“We’re the villains. No one wants to help us.” I was lying in the broken recliner with a cold, wet cloth over my eyes. “I imagine that’s going to take some getting used to for you.”
“What about other villains?”
“We’re not very good at group projects.” I said it automatically, but I found I didn’t believe it. Here we were, a skeleton crew working in a safe house in a last-ditch effort to save Leviathan. Quantum stood next to me, as long as I could convince her I could get her something she wanted, an extraordinary weapon I needed to figure out how to deploy. This rescue mission almost had a chance of actually succeeding if we could just keep our shit together long enough.
“Auditor?” I lifted the cloth off my eyes to find Vesper’s strange silhouette hovering, concerned, in my doorway. The set of his shoulders was odd, tense, and I could see his elevated heartbeat fluttering close to the surface of his skin. “You available?”
“Always here, always at your service.” I rubbed my temples.
“So, this might be stupid.”
“It might be, but I definitely want to hear it, as that is certainly the phrase that’s launched a thousand schemes.”
“We’re going to ask for help, eh? Did I hear that right?”
“I appreciate you straight up admitting you were eavesdropping, and yes, we are considering all the options.”
“What about Cassowary?” He looked at me expectantly.
I felt a few things move around inside my head, components suddenly fitting together.
“‘What about Cassowary,’” I repeated, feeling the edges of each of the words. A former bored heiress who used her vast trust fund and family investments to seed her villainous career, she’d dabbled in a few other industries before finding her passion in being a professional antagonist. She’d funded some tech start-ups, done a bit of digital strategy—and publishing.
“How many outlets does she still own?” I dove for my laptop.
“No idea. She sold off a lot, but she kept a few.”
“Her media holdings were all under a company she called Paracrax.” I grinned. “Must have always had a thing for the flightless ones.”
Sure enough, her company still owned a couple of transmedia conglomerates. A quick search turned up a stroke of infernal luck: one of those happened to be McKinnon’s newly former employer.
I beamed at Vesper so brightly that he looked almost embarrassed.
“You know how to get in touch with her?” he asked the floor.
“Yes. I have Leviathan’s contacts.”
“What are you going to tell her?” I was suddenly aware of how uncomfortable, even afraid, Quantum looked.
“Everything, I think. The truth.”
“That the Draft and Supercollider have faked Leviathan’s death and we need to lure that broad-shouldered dickweed out so we might be able to sneak in and rescue him, so she needs to pull rank at a news outlet she doesn’t remember she owns to make sure an article calling him out gets published,” Vesper summarized while coming to stand behind my shoulder. I was sitting cross-legged on the shattered chair, already typing.
“Pretty much. Though you forgot the part about how the article contains Doc Proton’s great confession.”
“You are putting this into an email.”
“Fuck it.”
I’m not sure I honestly believed Cassowary would read the message I’d sent, and even if she did, I could hardly picture her doing anything but laughing openly at the absurdity. But when I woke up the next morning, my neck throbbing from the terrible angle I’d slept, still in my clothes from the day before, I had a string of frantic messages from McKinnon, who found himself suddenly and enthusiastically rehired. Apparently with a raise.
And his piece was running after all.
Beneath all of his manic updates was a two-word reply to my completely absurd request from Cassowary: “
Good luck.”
Greg happened to be loitering in my office, and read over my shoulder when he heard my yelp of joy. “She thinks we have a shot!” Sweet Greg. Optimistic Greg. Smart but about as perceptive as a lawn chair.
“Or she thinks we’re signing our own death warrant and it’s going to be interesting.” My tone was surprisingly cheery even to me. “I’m grateful either way.” I sent the most generous reply that I could think of: that I owed her a favor, and a big one, were I ever again in a position where I could repay anything. That I hoped I lived long enough for it to come to haunt me. I thought it might make her smile. Then I gathered the team, and we got to work.
8
WITH LESS THAN A DAY BEFORE MCKINNON’S ARTICLE WAS DUE to go live, I started an orderly evacuation. Our ramshackle operations had blown under the Draft’s radar so far, but as soon as that interview with Doc was out in the world, they would turn every resource they had toward tracking us down. While I actively wanted them to find me, there were many whose lives weren’t on the table this time. Information specialists and researchers, my core team and a few other henches who hadn’t been able to let go just yet—I wanted them safely dispersed, new IDs in hand in case everything went bad, and safely somewhere else when it was time to do the consequence math.
I had a plan, tenuous though it was. It had been brewing in my head for some time, and in those last hours it all came together very fast. All of my educated guesses and napkin calculations wouldn’t mean a damn thing if the final pieces didn’t fall in place, and I had little control then over how it was going to go. I’d tipped the dominoes and they were collapsing; what they spelled out now, though I’d carefully engineered the design, was officially out of my hands. And if I was wrong, very soon now Supercollider was going to kill me.
It’s hard to hold on to the fear of death when it’s an immediate possibility. It’s too big an idea, even if you’ve been near it over and over again. I’d be calm for long stretches of time, giving orders and doing my work in a reasonable manner, and then suddenly this sick, cold terror would seize me and I’d have to hide in the bathroom or a utility closet until the panic attack passed. Maybe I saw a towel in the kitchen and the red fabric reminded me of Supercollider’s suit, or I caught sight of one of my now faint and yellowing bruises, and suddenly the memory of his hands on me, the effortlessness of his violence, the way I weighed nothing and meant nothing to him, would splash over me all at once like an acid bath of remembrance.
Every time I would breathe through it, drawing on every self-soothing and CBT technique at my disposal. I’d gradually extract myself from the vivid sense-memory of his hands—his impossibly powerful hands ready to rip me apart—and back to a state of fear that was manageable. A terror I could work around. And when I could stand and breathe normally, I’d go back to whatever I was doing, the (very likely) possibility I was about to die placed just on the periphery of my mind for a few more hours.
I was recently recovered from one of these moments, almost absently cleaning out the tiny filth nest of my office, when Quantum came to find me. She had no roots here, so she had very little to do while everyone scurried around scrubbing their DNA off surfaces and packing up our scavenged equipment. I worked hard to appear my calm, ragged self, but my heart was in my throat.
“How much longer?” she asked.
I didn’t look up. It seemed too dangerous. “Until we leave? Under ten hours; we’re going to want to be long gone before that piece goes up tomorrow.”
I waited for her to ask about Melting Point’s killers, but she didn’t. “And what happens then?”
I swallowed. “We go to Dovecote. Supercollider will never be weaker than he will be at that moment. Without you, without Doc, with belief in him critically damaged—we’re never going to have a better chance than we will at that moment.”
“What are your odds?”
I coughed out a small laugh. “Terrible.”
She frowned at me and put a hand on her hip. “But isn’t that what you do, check the odds and make the best decision?”
“It is,” I allowed. “Sadly, our choices are all bad. We’ve chosen the best one, which isn’t saying much. If everything goes perfectly, and we get in a few lucky blows with a brimstone laser, we might hit ten percent.”
I let the silence hang between us. The fact was, there was a Quantum-shaped hole in the center of my plan, and if she didn’t step into it, the whole thing would collapse. I needed to lead her close enough to that empty space that she’d be able to see it for herself and step into it, but not drag her over in a way that felt manipulative. I hoped I had done enough.
“I could protect you.”
The wave of relief almost knocked me down. I put my hand on my desk to steady myself, and hoped the gesture looked more like surprise.
When I had my composure back, I looked at her, hard. Her hair was twisted up, and her short nails looked freshly bitten. Her eyes were tired and haunted, and she looked strong enough in that moment to have torn the city out by the roots.
“Can you?”
“I can. I’m stronger than he is. Not by much, but I am.”
“This wasn’t part of the deal.”
Her lips tightened. “Let’s make a new one.”
“What do you want?”
“A piece of him.”
“Do you hate him now?”
I thought that might make her angry, but she took the question seriously. Her brow knit, and she thought about it. “I hate everything that made him. I don’t know if there’s enough of him to hate.”
I nodded. “He’s empty. He’s a collection of everything that made him.”
She tilted her head to the side, considered. “You’re right.” She nodded once. “Yes. I hate him.”
I had no way to let her know how grateful I was in that moment, so I said, “You know what’s more criminal than anything I have ever done? That you’ve been overshadowed by that lantern-jawed cock-wit when you’re obviously better than him in every imaginable way.”
Pain crossed her face. “Well. No one is willing to make some bitch the head of the greatest superhero team in the world.”
She was repeating something that had been said to her; I could hear it in her voice. I dug my nails into my hands, where she couldn’t see. I was so angry that I went quite still and quiet inside. I drew careful lines around that piece of anger and made a note to track down whoever it was who had first uttered those words in her presence and, if they were still living, solve that problem.
To her, I said brusquely, “Well, you’re precisely the kind of bitch I’d like to see in charge more often.”
She laughed. It was a little bitter, but a bit of sweet, syrupy catharsis crept in. “I’ll take it.”
She walked over and dropped herself down into my terrible reclining chair, like it was a bed at a sleepover. She leaned back, rolling her shoulders and stretching her muscular arms up onto the headrest. She was looking at the ceiling absently, and I let myself stare at her, at the strength in her biceps and the sharp line of her collarbone. For just a moment I allowed myself to imagine we were just two people alone in a bedroom, sharing space, with nothing terrible happening.
“I don’t suppose it matters much if you clear your name now, does it,” I said.
“You trying to weasel out of our deal?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Then, what do you mean?”
“Since you’re officially out of the hero business.”
She looked disgusted. “There’s a pretty big difference between a literal murderer and a superhero, you know.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Is there? For people like us?”
Something lit up her face from the inside. “There should be.”
I had touched a nerve, and so I pressed harder. “Is that what you want?”
She tossed her head, thinking. “I think the system is fucked.”
“We’re agreeing more and more all the time.”
She threw up her arms, then let them fall to her sides. “If you’re going to try and explain the math again, let me spare you the effort.”
I shrugged. “It sounds like you’re already on board with the idea that forcing anyone with powers to choose superheroism or be labeled a villain is deeply flawed.”
She nodded, perhaps suspicious of our opinions aligning.
“So you want to try and be . . . something else?”
She looked away from me, weighing a thought. “You’ll think it’s stupid.”
“Considering the schemes I am setting in motion this very moment, I find that extremely unlikely.”
I saw her clench her jaw. “Someone needs to hold them all accountable. Someone needs to make sure that the ‘heroes’ act like goddamn heroes. There’s got to be a way to keep them in check.”
It was a wonderful fantasy to entertain: someone to haunt all of the heroes and keep them in line. I could imagine Quantum inhabiting the role perfectly, merciless and beautiful.
I calculated the risks, took a breath, and said, “I’ll help you.” I felt like I was watching myself speak the words.
Her eyes locked on mine, sudden and piercing. Her hair was up, but curls were escaping around her face. The black roots were growing out, contrasting the hyper-bleached white-gray of the ends.
“You would want to work with me?” Although it was subtle, I could swear I heard a slight emphasis on “you” and “want,” and my palms got a little sweaty. I knew she was an invaluable ally. Someone who was unafraid of the Draft was someone I wanted on my side. And I liked her. She felt like a friend. She felt like she could maybe be more.
“Yes.” I hoped it sounded real and solid.
“Really.” She thought I was messing with her.
I put a hand to my chest. “I swear. This is an endeavor I can get behind.”
She started to smile a little. “We’re rather uniquely qualified for the role, aren’t we.”
“I think we’d crush it.” I beamed at her, letting the fairy tale take root in my mind. If someone like her existed, people like me wouldn’t have to.
Hench Page 30