“No one will try to stop you.”
“Oh? Is Supercollider not behind you?”
“He is, actually.”
Leviathan looked at me then. Whatever script he was following in his head, this was not in it. His dark eyes, which I used to think were screens or lenses, but I now knew were as biological as my own corneas, were inky and unreadable, but there was a tiny bit of doubtfulness hovering around his shoulders.
“I brought you a present, Leviathan. Would you like to see?”
I ordered the Meat to bring Supercollider into the room. They hefted him between them and carried him in, with a scuttling kind of crabwise gait. They were close to exhausted and moving him was becoming more of a challenge every time. They couldn’t put him down gently anymore, and instead flung him more dramatically than was strictly necessary at Leviathan’s feet. He landed facedown with a sodden thump. There was a wet, slurping noise against the floor.
Leviathan stood. He was visibly thinner than when I had seen him last, his waist waspish, and the planes and angles of his body made harsher, more insectoid, by what I suspected was dehydration. His movement was not predatory but defensive. He was something cornered, moving a bit too slow and ready to sink his fangs in at a wrong move. The Meat sensed the threat in him and backed off, chests heaving with the effort. They smelled like fresh sweat; the thing on the floor was bile and fear and ruin.
Leviathan prodded Supercollider with his boot—not a boot, but a jointed appendage, like a mantis’s hydraulic foot—and the hero made a miserable gurgling sound. It might have been a plea, or just unhappy jabbering. Leviathan met my eyes again, his gaze wild now, panicking, and kicked Supercollider over onto his back.
Twisted almost beyond recognition, sunken into the center of his chest, mouth reduced to a grotesque orifice, there was just enough of the ghost of Supercollider’s face left that someone who knew him, really knew him, would know whom they saw. Leviathan knew exactly whose defeat he was witness to.
Leviathan screamed.
I had prepared myself for a lot, for maniacal laughter or complete disbelief or even rage. I wasn’t sure if Leviathan would be grateful or furious, gleeful or too distraught and confused by his confinement to understand what was happening. I made myself imagine the possibility he wouldn’t be conscious. But as he lowered his forehead to touch the floor, and my stomach turned to ice and ash, I realized I was completely unprepared to deal with his raw, unfathomable grief.
VESPER WOULD ALWAYS let me be quiet. It was a great gift of his. Greg would yammer on to fill the silence, shoving his glasses up his nose, hands awkward and always a little flailing. Keller would try and be rational, talk me through things, problem-solve. But Vesper would let me sit for a long time, thinking, and simply take up space with me. He’d sip his coffee contemplatively, and let me take my time. Then, with unerring accuracy, as soon as something finally shifted in my head and I was ready, he’d ask a question.
This time, he’d been standing in my new office—my new office in the compound—admiring the art I’d chosen for the walls, his head cocked contemplatively while I worked. Three beautiful, brand-new monitors glowed happily on my desk, each displaying a different set of social media feeds and data arrays, windows overlapping each other. There was the faintest smell of fresh paint still palpable in the room, and muffled by the walls I could just make out the very distant bang and mechanical whir of construction happening somewhere else on the floor of our building. Finally, he turned to me like he was about to remark on the weather.
“So, is he talking to you yet?”
I’d been waiting for this. I stared straight ahead, pretending I still cared about what was on the screen in front of me. “He’s making sure that I am kept apprised of his wishes.”
His eyeholes whirred and contracted. “This isn’t a status report. Is he speaking to you, using his mouth, while looking at your face, while you are physically in the same room.”
I winced. “No.”
“Any change at all?”
“He did forward me an email directly.”
“Any words attached?”
“No.”
“That barely counts.”
“It feels like not much but something.”
“Sounds like not much.”
A long but comfortable silence stretched between us again. I wasn’t expecting Leviathan would use something as crude as internal messaging if he wished to speak to me. The subaural tone hardwired directly in my head would thrum the second he had any interest in my presence or opinions. It had, since we’d brought him home, remained completely silent.
I stood up to refill my mug from the coffeemaker, which was also new, and which sang a little tune when you selected how many shots of espresso you were in the mood for.
“I choose to believe this”—I swept my arm around me to encompass my beautiful workspace, one of the very first restored in the rebuild—“is a gesture of affection.”
He made a small, disgusted noise. “It is literally not even the least he could do.”
Vesper wasn’t wrong, but I wasn’t sure how to even begin arguing with him.
“Is this what you thought would happen?”
I shoved my hands deeper into my pockets, aware that the gesture was such a cliché. I wished I had a can to kick. “I don’t know.”
Vesper found a lovely new chair to perch on, which creaked when he settled onto it. “I think you do.”
“I thought—I hoped—that he would be okay . . . or okay enough. That we would get him back and—”
“Things would be the same again?”
“I didn’t think he would be so . . .” I trailed off. “I didn’t think it would be this hard.”
“When we got him back?”
“If we got him back. I thought there was a good chance he’d be whole, that they wouldn’t have been able to—”
“How did you think he would be with you?” Vesper was trying so hard to be kind.
I considered lying, but didn’t have the energy to try and hide my feelings from someone who’d taught me how to read people. “I just . . .” I let it hang. This was deeply embarrassing when I looked at it. “I thought he’d be happy.”
“And grateful.”
“Yeah.”
“You did more, and better, than he could have imagined. You expected, somewhere, that he would notice.”
I swallowed hard, and didn’t answer. We were both quiet a moment, in an awkward but not unpleasant stalemate.
“Is the clean-out done?” He decided to let me off the hook for a moment.
“Long done.” The safe house had been dealt with as soon as we had Leviathan.
“I’m going to miss your awful recliner.”
“RIP in peace.”
“Did they send in the nanobots?”
“Nah, just a little arranged arson, maybe a small EMP. Our roots there weren’t very deep.”
“Why be elegant when you can be effective.”
“And explained away.”
“So. Now what happens?”
“That depends on if Leviathan will ever talk to me again.”
“He will.”
“Probably.”
Vesper looked at his hands, and fiddled with the tip of one of his long, mechanical fingers. “Have you heard anything about her?”
My stomach dropped. “No,” I said. “Nothing since she blipped out.”
I thought back to the last moment I’d seen Quantum Entanglement. I didn’t know I’d be laying eyes on her for the last time, so I’d committed precious few details to memory. Almost all of my attention had been on Leviathan. For long moments, he would not move nor allow anyone to touch him. He stayed curled on the floor, racked by awful, rattling sobs. When I drew near him he flinched in open revulsion, and I couldn’t bear to try again. I wept silently. It was Ludmilla who finally coaxed him up and carefully led him out of the confinement room. Everyone followed them out, not speaking. We left Supercollider leaking on the
floor.
When we got through the doors, making a grim procession toward the elevator, I was lost in my own terrible thoughts. If I had not glanced up I might have missed her completely: the moment she saw Leviathan, her face registered raw shock and panic, and she phase-shifted out of sight.
At first, I thought that she was overwhelmed simply seeing him. A weakened Leviathan was still terrifying, and she had been through a great deal. As we withdrew from Dovecote, taking a few liberated villains with us but leaving most to find their own way back to their lairs, I expected her to reappear once she processed what she’d done. But she never returned. My focus was entirely on getting Leviathan to safety, and though her disappearance worried me, it was buried under far more pressing logistical and emotional problems.
It was only much later, when Leviathan was recovering under medical supervision and the lights were back on at the compound, that Darla said I needed to see something. They’d been processing some of the data we’d taken from Dovecote, ripping things from whatever hard drives we’d liberated, when they found something on a laptop one of the Meat had grabbed on her way out.
Anything related to Leviathan was flagged for a manual review, and once Darla broke the encryption, they called me over immediately.
It was the Leviathan Protocol. Much of it was extremely technical, detailing the exact specifications of his confinement room, from the pH balance of any liquids he might come into contact with to the thickness of the concrete that made up the walls. I discovered I was right about the Faraday cage. The Protocol even theorized how many lumens might be necessary to cause him pain.
There was only a single specification that didn’t match, but it meant everything:
Under no circumstances is Leviathan to be kept alive for more than 48 hours after capture. All study and interrogation must take place within this window, after which he must be terminated. No extensions will be granted under any circumstances. Within the 48-hour allowable confinement period any attempts to break confinement or escape must be met with deadly force. Once death has been confirmed (see Appedixes 6 and 7 for instructions on how to pronounce subject officially deceased), study may continue.
Forty-eight hours. Not twenty-one days.
When Quantum came to us, she was lying; she thought he was already dead. She expected us to find a corpse in that room, or nothing at all. It was only because they couldn’t kill him after all (which I uncovered in an increasingly panicked series of memos among Dovecote staff) that our mission was still a rescue, and not retrieving a body.
Her deception hurt me, but her departure wrecked me. I was furious at first, storming around the office and ranting at anyone unlucky enough to be in my field of vision. Slowly, however, an aching kind of betrayal set in. Whatever I had felt, whatever connection I thought we had made, was once again misplaced. When things went wrong, when what she was using me for didn’t work out the way she expected, she vanished. It made me think of June, which made me feel even angrier and more pathetic.
“I hope she got what she wanted,” I said, much more viciously than I intended.
“You got what you wanted,” Vesper reminded me. I turned my face away from him, disliking the number of questions hovering around the edges of that statement. It also drew my attention to my own hypocrisy: I’d lied through my teeth to Quantum, often and at length. I manipulated her into putting herself in very real danger to achieve my ends. She did the same to me to enact vengeance (on Melting Point’s hapless murderers, maybe; certainly on Supercollider himself, in the end), and it was unfair to blame her for it.
That didn’t stop me, however. I couldn’t let go of the fact that she would have let me find Leviathan dead, or simply vanished. I hated that look of total fear I’d seen on her face, however briefly. She only helped me because she believed he’d never see the light of day again, because she thought he was already in pieces.
“Did you get what you wanted?” Vesper was still staring at me; I’d left him unanswered far too long.
I ran my tongue over my teeth and swallowed. I couldn’t banish the thought any longer: What if Leviathan never got over the knowledge that he hadn’t been able to free himself, and needed to be rescued? What if he never recovered from the fact that his archenemy’s ex-girlfriend defeated his greatest foe instead of him? What if he couldn’t process the idea that Supercollider might never recover, would never pose a threat again? What if his feelings of vulnerability and inadequacy turned into a new kind of hate—for me?
“What I wanted,” I said softly, “foolishly included Leviathan speaking to me.” And a great deal more than that, I thought but didn’t say. I stared out the window—my new office had a window—across the demolished courtyard. There were several large craters from the fight still blasted into the ground. A few mangy pigeons strutted about the yard, pecking the asphalt between tattered dead leaves and cigarette butts. Soon, it would be freshly landscaped again. I couldn’t bear the thought that I might not be wanted here anymore.
I thought of Jav and Darla and Tamara (whom we’d immediately rehired) working quietly in the semi-open space they shared next to mine. I felt a sudden sharp tug of affection for them all, working so hard to sort out the math, to keep an eye on the damage and help balance it. Even if I was never forgiven, and couldn’t stay, I hoped that, just maybe, they’d be able to hum along without me, to keep our little disaster engine careening forward.
“If he doesn’t talk to you soon—and grant you your every whim for the rest of your days, quite frankly—he’s not nearly as smart as we all thought he was,” Vesper said. He was fierce and intense, and I felt a twinge of affection for him too.
“Worse comes to worst,” I said, “I’m counting on you for a reference.”
I DON’T KNOW if Leviathan listened in on that conversation, providing an impetus for him to speak with me again. It could have been a coincidental matter of timing. But the day after I spoke to Vesper, my head rang with his summons at last.
I did what anyone did when Leviathan called them: I went to him. It was the longest elevator ride I’d ever taken in my life. I’d always been anxious stepping into his presence, as would anyone with a shred of self-preservation, but this was paralyzing. My heart hammered in my throat and my chest squeezed so tight I wasn’t sure I would make it to him. Despite the urgent humming in my head, I stood outside his doors longer than I should have, willing my courage to come together.
Finally, I stepped across the threshold, the massive doors smoothly opening for me. The smell of that room, and the noise of it, the buzz I could feel in my entire body, sent such a rush of aching familiarity through me that I thought I would lose my composure. I had missed this. Missed this weird, vast, terrible office so badly. I could finally put that longing down—if only for a moment.
I saw his eyespots first. They were shining like bioluminescent creatures deep in the ocean, bright on his shoulder blades. He was sitting with his back to me. Something had his attention, and it let me gather myself and step forward.
When I felt I could do so, I spoke.
“You look well, Sir.”
He unfolded himself from his chair, stretching long, angular limbs. He was still thinner than he had been, but was recovering from his confinement. As he moved, he gleamed. I studied every joint and segment and took in the truth and beauty of him; there was no longer an unspoken underneath to wonder about.
“That is kind,” he said quietly, “from someone who knows what they are looking at.”
It occurred to me, for the first time, he might be ashamed to have someone know.
“I’ve always known exactly who I’m looking at.”
That took him aback; it passed across his face like headlights through a window. He covered his surprise by turning quickly to activate one of the huge screens behind his desk. Then, he came to stand beside me. I heard his joints click into place, and felt the eerie warmth he emitted. I could have leaned toward him, the familiar sense impressions of him were so comfo
rting. Every moment he was alive and whole released tension I forgot I was holding.
“I had a great deal of time to think, Auditor.” He tapped his tablet and a single image appeared on the screen in front of us. “All it seemed I had was time. I returned, over and over, to that which you accomplished, and all you would have deployed if given the chance.” He paused, and I swallowed hard. “Time to sit with the consequences.”
With a hand on my shoulder he turned me to face him. The abject misery I had seen before was no longer there. Instead a deep, mindful grief had settled over his face.
“No matter my personal feelings”—there were oceans in those words—“I had to lay them down. When I could do so, when I could allow my thinking to ascend, I saw your plans as though for the first time.”
“Thank y—”
“No longer bound to consider each cog and coil, I saw the vast machinery all at once.” Whatever genius he thought I possessed, he was not interested in hearing me talk. “You proved that it works. You have given the world, given me, decisive evidence that once the pieces are assembled, a hero can fall. A king can fall. No matter how absolute the stranglehold of power might seem, I can take them down. The data is there.”
“I knew it would work,” I said quietly. I still ached for the glory that could have been, for the parts of my plan I was never able to execute.
He knew what I thought, as he always had. “I am through getting in your way, Auditor.”
Agreeing with him seemed dangerous, but I nodded and closed my eyes. This was his apology. It was far too little bandage over too large a wound, but I could also see what a mighty effort it was for him to offer it at all. I’d find a way to keep that wound from festering.
“The strategy is clear,” he said, gesturing toward the screen, where the massive, stylized logo of the Draft loomed above us. “We must see if it scales.”
The vastness of his proposal was a blow. Instead of taking on hero after hero, destroying them one by one, he wanted to take on the Draft. He swept his hand across the screen and another logo popped up: Superheroic Affairs. As his fingers moved, more images assembled: the governmental agencies involved with selecting, transforming, controlling, monitoring, and deploying heroes. Every part of the process, every bit of the Draft. He wanted to take it all down.
Hench Page 35