C.J. Carella's Website

Chapter One

Christine Dark

Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 11, 2013

Last stands suck.

Outnumbered a gazillion to one. Bullets and rockets and bolts of energy and angry glares and bad language rained down on her in an epic downpour of malice and destruction. She faced the slings and arrows and magic missiles of outrageous bastards and somehow managed to survive the onslaught. No problem, she told herself, I can handle this. Her counterattacks took the bad guys down in droves, stacked their quivering bodies like cordwood, but for every dozen she struck down, another dozen and a half showed up. The center cannot hold, or in other words we are totally effed up, this is the way the world ends, all banging and whimpering and burning sensations and not so fresh feelings. In the words of the ancients, we’re going from suck to blow and it’s going to hurt a lot before it is over…

Something bad was behind her, worse than the hordes of murderous men and beasties facing her. She most definitely did not want to turn around. So she turned around.

It was dead, but still deadly. It wore the face of her father.

She had no idea how badly things would have turned out, but luckily her alarm clock saved the day.

“Holy mother of crap!” Christine Dark groaned, and smacked the clock until it stopped beeping like an R2 unit in distress. That had been way intense. Her dreams were usually completely nonsensical dreck or small, anxious things. Showing up for class and realizing you had skipped classes for most of the semester, plus had forgotten to wear pants, that sort of thing. Oh, and the occasional dirty dream involving dark handsome strangers with very skilled hands and mouths. This one had been a Michael Bay does Marvel Comics after smoking a hefty dose of meth kind of thing. She had been in fear of her life, and the weirdest thing was, her dream-self had laughed in the face of death. In real life, Christine didn’t laugh even in the face of mild discomfort.

Her heart was racing. She didn’t ordinarily wake up feeling like she’d run a marathon. Weirdness. Even after showering and getting dressed, the world did not feel quite right to her, almost as if she was still dreaming. The surreal detached feeling persisted all the way through breakfast with her roommate Sophie. Sophie hadn’t spent the night in their dorm room, a not irregular occurrence, and had texted Christine to ask her to meet for breakfast. Christine agreed. She agreed to most of Sophie’s requests and suggestions.

“There’s a party tonight at the Delta Phi’s,” Sophie said as soon as Christine sat down with her tray-ful of sensible breakfast food.

“On a Tuesday night?” Christine asked. Most of her attention was on the food in front of her. She was starving and feeling a bit shaky on top of everything else.

“You should come,” Sophie continued. She hadn’t noticed Christine was feeling off this morning, but Sophie rarely paid attention to matters not pertaining to Sophie. Normally Christine didn’t mind, but her dreamlike state was beginning to be replaced by grumpiness.

Sophie Beaumont was tall, tan and blonde, built to the specs of your typical fourteen year old boy’s fantasy female ideal. Christine was short, pale and red-haired, and built to far less impressive specs. The two roommates had blue eyes, but Sophie’s were deep and dark blue, while Christine’s were pale and tended to go gray when she wasn’t in a good mood. Like now, for example. Unreality was giving way to dissatisfaction.

“It should be fun,” Sophie added cheerfully.

“You know I don’t like that kind of party,” Christine replied. “I’ll fit in like a Jawa at Rivendell.” Doing a little fictional mash-up helped her mood a little, but not enough.

“Like a what where?” Sophie didn’t get either reference, of course. Sophie didn’t get half of what Christine said, even when she bothered to listen to her. “Never mind. Just come along. Jeff has a friend who’s dying to meet you. He’s into engineering and stuff, so you can talk math to each other.”

“I don’t really talk about math during casual conversation,” Christine said. She’d rather talk about stuff she was reading, or watching, or playing. Hm. She didn’t talk about what she was doing, because she didn’t do much other than reading, watching or playing stuff. And thinking. She did do a lot of thinking. Maybe she should be doing stuff more often. Something to think about.

“Earth to Christine,” Sophie said. Christine blinked. “You went away inside your own head again. Boys don’t like that, you know. You need to pay attention to them, make them feel special.”

“I guess. Every one of them is a precious unique snowflake, or something like that, right?” Most conversations with Sophie ended up revolving about boys, and Christine’s deficiencies when it came to interactions with said boys. My freaking life can’t pass the Bechdel test, she thought bitterly.

Sophie smiled indulgently. “Whatever you say, Christine. So, are you coming with me?”

What the heck. She was already having a weird day. Some masochistic impulse drove her to agree to endure an evening of suckitude. “Fine.”

* * *

The suckitude, it hurt.

Christine tried to shrink into a corner, but the senior from the Phi Beta Gecko or Whatever House got all up in her grill anyway. His breath smelled of pepperoni-and-cheese pizza, stale beer and a hint of cheap mouthwash. “’Sup?” he said.

“Hi,” was her equally suave reply. She probably shouldn’t have had so much punch, but she had needed something to take the edge off. The third of a cup she’d downed had taken the edge and a good thirty or forty IQ points right off.

“I said wassup,” Phi Beta Gecko repeated in the determined, deliberate tone of the truly drunk.

“Uh, not much? My blood pressure? Gas prices?” None of the answers seemed to satisfy him. He leaned over closer.

“You’re kinda hawt,” he said. Very flattering. Luckily, his utter disregard for her personal space gave her an opening; she ducked and weaved and got out of the corner and away from him. He was too drunk to give chase. It was clearly time to leave. The night had been a total disaster so far and it could only get worse.

Sophie had tried to get Christine all dressed up in the latest slut wear but Christine had refused. She wasn’t wholly opposed to dressing provocatively – the outfit she’d worn at Dragon Con last year had turned many a head – but not when hanging out with the muggles, where she felt like an outsider, exposed, a fish out of water, loser-girl out on a stage where some d-bags would soon empty a bucket of blood over her head. She’d ended up in jeans and a nice silk blouse, and had acquiesced to borrowing Sophie’s high-heeled boots. After slathering a copious amount of makeup on Christine’s face, Sophie had deemed her fit for public display.

Upon their arrival to the already crowded, loud and rowdy frat house, Sophie introduced her to Jeff’s friend Donald or Dominic or Damian: something with a D. Something-with-a-D was kinda cute but there was a mean glint in his eyes that had put Christine off almost immediately. He looked her over and Christine had caught what she thought was either a tiny scowl or a twitch on the corner of his mouth, neither of which felt complimentary. Then she’d stopped being able to notice details like that because Sophie had plucked Christine’s glasses right off her face and taken them away. Okay, she probably should have worn contacts to this shindig, but she hated putting the darn things on her eyeballs. In any case, she was half-blind, which didn‘t help. Some punch-drinking and a few minutes of awkward conversation later, Something-with-a-D had mumbled some excuse and gone away. Sophie and Jeff had disappeared some time before that, so Christine was left alone in a crowd of people she didn’t know. If she wasn’t so drunk she’d be having an anxiety attack just about now.

She wanted to go home.

Christine looked around for the exit, which wasn’t easy in the crowded space. She took another sip of punch and tried to make her way through the inmates of this century’s version of Animal House. It wasn’t easy. People kept bumping into her. One of them bumped her hard enough to knock the remainder of her punch all over her, splashing her blouse and the front of her jeans with artificially flavored grain alcohol. Nothing beat the feeling of syrupy alcoholic fluid running down your clothes.

All in all, she would have been much happier playing World or Warcraft, watching that web show about people playing World of Warcraft, or quietly reading a novel or Supernatural slash fan fic. Or even writing Supernatural slash fan fic, which she’d been guilty of. Well, she’d tried, epic-failed, and now she was cold, wet and just plain annoyed. Time to say ‘Peace,’ head on home and read some Supernatural slash fic before going to bed.

The world flickered.

That’s the only way she could describe the sensation. For a second or two, everything – the crowd of partygoers, the loud music, the very floor under her high heel boots – went away, came back, went away and came back. It was like a light bulb on its last legs going on and off, but the flickering covered the entire effing spectrum of her senses. Well, that was weird, she thought to herself when the sensation stopped. A second later, her bafflement was replaced by the urgent realization that everything she had eaten today, and perhaps the week before, was swirling madly in her stomach and trying to come out the way it had gone in. Her eyes bulging, Christine clapped both hands over her mouth and tried desperately to make it outside.

“Look out, she’s gonna hurl,” one of the more perceptive Phi Beta Geckos warned the room, and people finally gave her a wide berth, plenty of space to stagger outside just as everything came geysering out her mouth and nose. She hated, hated, hated puking. No loved ones around to hold her hair while she did it, either. Christine ended up on her hand and knees on the mostly dead lawn outside the frat house, heaving uncontrollably and hating every second of it. A few partygoers – or more than a few, she really couldn’t see very far without her glasses – were looking on with varying degrees of pity, amusement or contempt, dealer’s choice; some were probably immortalizing the moment on their smartphones. She must be quite a treat for the eyes, down on all fours and giving the world a great shot of her butt if you didn’t mind a little vomit on the side. Hello, YouTube and Vine. Goodbye, dignity. Perfect end point for this particular quest. How could it get any worse?

The universe is always happy to answer that question, and few ever like the answers they get. She really should have known better.

The flickering came back. One second she was on her hand and knees on the lawn, trying not to look at what had been a veggie lasagna some hours and assorted digestive processes ago. The next, things went dark and quiet. Another flicker and she was on her hands and knees on a smooth flat surface with bright spotlights shining right into her eyes, blinding her. And the second after that she was back on the lawn outside the frat house. Absolute OMG WTF moment. Brain aneurysm? LSD-laced Rohypnol in the punch? What?

Christine felt as if something was pulling at her. The nausea came back, now with extra creepy sensations, as if someone’s fingers were reaching right through her skull and grabbing her by the medulla oblongata. Some force was dragging her somewhere. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she felt it down to her bones. She also felt that wherever that somewhere was, she didn’t want to go there. No effing way.

“What the fuck? Where did she go?” somebody yelled. Christine barely heard the words, too busy concentrating on not going wherever she was going in between flickers. Or firing neurons at random while her brain went bye-bye, one or the other. She felt certain she was fighting back somehow, and she had no idea why she felt that. The whole thing was like a bad dream where the craziest crap appeared to make sense. At least the nausea was gone, replaced by a falling sensation, even though she was mere inches from the ground. If I stumble they’re gonna eat me alive. The Metric lyrics flittered through her head like a bat out of hell.

Something went pop inside of her. This is it, she thought absently as she felt herself letting go. She was certain she was dying. Oh, Mom, I’m so sorry…

She was falling for real now, falling through the ground, through the planet, free fall into utter darkness, where is the light? Isn’t there supposed to be a light?

Oblivion.

Face-Off

New York City, New York, March 12, 2013

Humans in pain can make the most curious noises.

Case in point: Dan Giamatti, enforcer – soon to be former enforcer – for the D’Agostino crime family. The injuries: three broken ribs; one compound fracture, right forearm; two dislocated fingers, left hand, and several broken teeth. The sound: a panting moan, reaching scream levels only to turn into a strangled heaving gasp when the broken ribs made their presence known. It was a disturbing, pitiful sound. It even bothered me a little, and I was the one who had done the bone breaking.

Giamatti started a new tune, this one something between a wheeze and a sob.

“Can we talk now?” I said reasonably. I had been perfectly willing to have a peaceful conversation with the guy before killing him, but Giamatti had gone for a gun, a knife and finally a hand grenade. The hand grenade had earned him the compound fracture. Luckily for him I had been able to find the pin and put it back before the fucking thing exploded. A grenade explosion would have been a painful inconvenience for me, but rather lethal for him. That was some crazy-ass shit, deploying high explosives indoors, even for our crazy-ass world. Giamatti’s reputation as a hard case was well-deserved, but even tough guys could be broken if you applied enough pressure.

“Fuck you, Face-Off,” Giamatti blurted, spraying a bloody froth through his broken teeth.

I sighed. It figured; someone crazy enough to go mano a mano with a Neo was too crazy to know when to quit. Neos – Neolympians, or parahumans if you really want to get pretentious about it – have been around for close to a hundred years. Sure, most of us aren’t godlike unstoppable forces that can take over entire countries single-handedly, but even the weakest among us is stronger and tougher than your average bear. Giamatti should have known better. When I came bursting through the bedroom window, he knew he was dealing with the Faceless Vigilante, or Face-Off, depending on who you ask. He should have tried to talk, or even asked for his lawyer, even if the latter option wouldn’t have done him much good. Instead he got into a pissing match with me. He might as well have tried to outwrestle the F train.

I’d been careful not to inflict any permanent damage, which isn’t as easy as you think. I’m no heavyweight, but I can still bench press twenty thousand pounds. I could have wrung Giamatti’s neck like a chicken’s right from the get go, but it would have been harder to have a conversation with him afterward. Instead, I love-tapped him a couple of times, and only started breaking things when he wouldn’t stop trying to kill me.

"Just tell me where the girl is, Giamatti," I said. All I got back was more garbled profanities.

Time to apply more pressure. I grabbed Giamatti by an ankle, avoiding his feeble attempts to kick me, and dragged him from the living room of his expensive penthouse to the balcony. I resisted the temptation to smash him through the plate glass sliding door leading outside, and instead opened it before pulling his thrashing body out.

“Okay, Danny, it’s truth or flight time.”

“Fuck you!”

“Flight it is, then.” I swung Giamatti off the balcony. He had time to start a choked howl before he smacked against the side of the building, which didn’t help his cracked ribs one bit. I kept my grip on his ankle, so he ended up dangling upside down with nothing but twenty-five stories of New York City air beneath him. I swung him back and forth a few times to make my point. The howls got shriller.

“They’ve got some good Healer EMTs working for the city, Danny. They can fix everything I’ve done to you so far. But no Healer is going to put your Humpty Dumpty ass together if I let go of you. Capisce?”

Giamatti nodded frantically. Even hard cases can be afraid of heights.

“So, where were we before you tried to shoot me? Oh, yeah. Where did you take the Jane Doe you kidnapped from the hospital?”

Giamatti spilled the beans most satisfactorily. I leaned over the balcony, still holding him by one leg. There is a trick to doing things like that when you are superhumanly strong but don’t weigh much more than a normal human – if I wasn’t careful, I’d go over the balcony and we’d both fall to his death; I wouldn’t like the experience, but I’d recover after a while. To avoid falling, I had to brace myself carefully against the balcony. No big deal. I’d had a lot of practice and a couple good teachers.

“One more thing, Danny. You really shouldn’t have murdered those nurses when you kidnapped the girl.” Three nurses and one orderly, to be exact. Giamatti and his goons hadn’t left any witnesses behind. “Kidnapping was bad enough, but I’d have given you a pass. Killing four people because they were an inconvenience? You know I can’t let that go.”

Giamatti didn’t say anything to that. He understood what was coming.

I couldn’t let the murders go, so I let him go instead.

He howled all the way down.

* * *

Hell’s Kitchen isn’t what it used to be, but here and there you can still find small bits of Hell.

The warehouse was squatting on a prime piece of real estate, and would likely turn into overpriced condos in the not too distant future. For now, it remained a featureless box of concrete and steel with a two-truck wide loading dock and heavy security doors. From the looks of it, it was a mostly legit warehouse that only occasionally acted as a haven for the kind of stuff the authorities frowned upon, like holding stolen goods or abduction victims.

I walked right to the front door and waved at the security camera mounted above it. I didn’t even have to knock before the door opened and a big Italian guy who obviously didn’t believe in low-cal meals let me in.

“What are you doin’ here, Danny?” he asked me as I walked in. “Thought you were gonna take the nigh off.”

I smiled, and that’s when the goombah started to figure out something wasn’t right. I was wearing Dan Giamatti’s face as well as his clothes, and my build wasn’t all that different from his, but the smile didn’t look right. I hadn’t spent enough time studying Giamatti, mainly because I hadn’t even met the guy until a few minutes before I dropped him off a building, and apparently his normal grin didn’t look like what I had produced. Or maybe the guy just didn’t smile very often. He sure as hell hadn’t done any smiling during our time together.

“DG?” the guard said dubiously.

“DG sleeps with the fishes,” I said ominously. Well, with the rats at the dumpster he hit at the end of his final descent, but why let reality get in the way of a corny line?

“What the fuck?” The mobster was beginning to catch on that something was very wrong. He soon found out just how wrong things were.

I let Giamatti’s face go. His features sank into my head, and the Mafia henchman was now staring into a featureless span of skin. No nose, no eyes, no hair, no ears. That was the face, or lack thereof, I woke up to every morning. It usually made for a great first impression. I could make little kids cry and grown men soil themselves just by being me.

“Motherfuck!” the goombah shouted, looking for all the world like someone who has found a king cobra swimming amongst his morning Cheerios. He went for his gun, which I had to respect, since most people freeze for several seconds when I show them my real face. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t notice my fist moving towards his head until the right cross connected and broke his jaw and neck, at which point he stopped noticing anything.

The big guy’s body plopped to the ground with the limp finality of those who are never getting up again. I stepped over him, walked into the warehouse and took in the sights. Not much to see: the space was mostly filled with stacks of wooden crates and rows of metal shelves, some empty, some packed with boxes. The place was mostly shrouded in darkness. There was a light by the entrance creating a little island of illumination there, and another on a second level office. Two men up there had just witnessed their pal’s demise. They recognized me, which isn't that surprising; my no-face is fairly well-known.

“Shit, that’s Face-Off!” said another big guy in a track suit that could have been the recently departed’s brother or cousin and probably was.

“Fuckin’ Face-Off!” said his partner, a short skinny rat-faced guy. Nothing wrong with his reflexes; even as he spoke he drew out a huge revolver, a Smith & Wesson .500 Magnum, the kind of wrist breaker some people think will give them a chance against Neos.

I hate the name Face-Off, but since I’m not bonded and licensed, I don’t really get a say in what people call me. I don’t even own the trademark to (or get any royalties out of) either the Faceless Vigilante or Face-Off, not that there’s a big market for stories about freaks with no face. I’m not in this for the money, which is a good thing because I wasn’t going to make any. The mass media prefers good-looking guys and girls in tight and skimpy hyper-latex outfits. Last time I was featured in Buck Comics Presents, I was the villain of the piece, and one of the New York Guardians beat the crap out of me. None of that happened, but they never pay attention to the angry e-mails I occasionally send to BCP’s editors. Oh well, I’m not in this business for the glory, either.

I’m in it because I can’t help it. Because the rush you get when you stomp on someone who deserves being stomped becomes addictive after a while.

The little guy with the big gun opened fire. His first shot missed me by a country mile, and the next one was even worse. Idiot. I pulled out my own gun, a sensible Ruger nine millimeter, took aim while the little punk missed me with a third shot, and double-tapped him before he could fire a fourth time. All the while, his friend had been futilely trying to get his own oversized gun out of its shoulder holster. In all the excitement he seemed to have forgotten how to undo the clasp. He saw his little buddy go down and froze, his gun still safely holstered. Sucked to be him: I double-tapped him as well.

Most Neos disdain or positively loathe guns. I myself prefer to punch or kick my targets to death. But since I can’t throw fireballs or make people’s heads explode with my mind, I need a way to reach out and touch someone beyond arm’s length. Guns are fairly effective people-killing tools, especially when you throw in superhuman eye-hand coordination that allows you to hit a target at the maximum theoretical range of a handgun. In other words, the anti-gun caped crusaders can kiss my ass.

Three goons down. I replaced the gun’s magazine with a fresh one while I headed for the office. According to Cassandra, there had been five people in the snatch team, including the late Danny Giamatti. One of them was supposed to be a Neo. Where the hell was he? Maybe he had taken the night off like Danny had. My luck was rarely that good, so I wasn’t counting on it.

I was halfway up the stairs to the office when I heard a loud crackling noise behind me and realized I’d better be somewhere else very soon. I leaped off the stairs just ahead of a bolt of lightning that would have turned me into a crispy critter if it had hit me. I landed in a rolling tumble and saw my attacker standing by the entrance to the restroom downstairs. Apparently the superhuman member of the snatch team had been in the crapper when I made my grand entrance. I hoped he’d remembered to wash his hands.

The Neo was tall, black and handsome, and looked like a total badass, complete with shaved head, mirror shades, black leather coat and pants, and a combat stance that said ‘ex-military’ to me. I couldn’t identify him off-hand, so he had to be new or really, really discreet. I was hoping he was new.

“Face-Off,” he said, a big shit-eating grin on his face. “This is going to be quite the coup.” He had a slight French West Indies accent. Haitian, probably, which likely made him a veteran of Papa Doc’s bad boy squad. That pack of psychos had been holy terrors before the Freedom Legion went in and cleaned up the whole island a few years ago. That meant he wasn’t new, just discreet. Not good.

“Fucking hell,” I said while I picked myself off the floor. Giamatti’s clothes had gotten more than a bit singed by the near-miss. Too bad; they’d been pretty nice and I really needed a new suit. I’d held on to my gun, but decided to wait a sec before using it. Chances were it’d do me no good to shoot him from this distance anyway; even when they aren’t bullet proof (and most of us are at least bullet-resistant), Neos have reflexes like leopards on catnip, so you want to shoot them at point-blank range, preferably in the eye. No wonder so many people hate our guts.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” the Neo continued. “You may call me the Lightning King. And tonight I will be your executioner.”

“Pleasure,” I said, and shot him. I wasn’t expecting he’d oblige me and die, but some Neos like to trash talk before a fight. I blame comic books, movies and TV; all that bullshit makes many of them think they’re the stars of their own epic tale, never realizing they might just be bit players in someone else’s. If they are in the middle of a grandiose spiel, sometimes you can catch them off-guard and put a bullet in their eye.

Not this time. Even as I lined up the shot the Lightning King raised up his hands in a defensive stance. By the time I pulled the trigger, a ball of crackling electricity had appeared in front of him, a big lightning ball, big enough to shield him from head to toe. My bullets went into the lightning ball and did not come out. Fuck.

The Lightning King stopped wasting his breath and got down to business. He threw the giant ball of energy at me. It was moving faster than a baseball pitch but slower than a bullet. If it wasn’t for my own leopard-on-catnip reflexes, I would have ended up as a greasy smoking smear on the floor. I leaped out of the ball’s way, and it hit one of the metal shelves and exploded, sending up a spray of molten steel, flaming cardboard bits, and shattered jars of pickles.

The smell of electrically fried pickles has to be experienced to be believed.

I cursed Cassandra under my breath while I rolled away. My spiritual guide had mentioned one of the kidnappers had been a Neo, but I’d expected him to be a Type One, a lesser talent who could burn out surveillance cameras and maybe Taser somebody. The Lightning King had to be a Type Two, with enough mojo to take out a SWAT team. That made me the underdog in this little death match. I hate being the underdog. I hate fair fights too, to be honest. A fair fight means you lose half of the time, and in this business losing means they carry you out in a body bag, or in several small evidence bags.

I came to a stop on my hands and knees and realized my suit jacket was no longer singed; it was on fire. I hadn’t dodged quite fast enough.

Some people think Neos are impervious to pain. Don’t believe that for a second. Pain is too useful a warning system. We may be hard to kill, but we feel everything that happens to us, from a paper cut on up. I’ve been shot, stabbed, blown up, dipped in acid (don’t try that at home, kids) and once had an icepick shoved into my temple and then swirled around inside my brain for good measure, and man did I ever feel that. All of which means I was quite aware that my right arm and back were burning merrily while I dodged a couple more lightning bolts the fucker sent my way. That guy was beginning to piss me off.

I’d dropped my gun sometime during the festivities. I tried to close in on the Lightning King, but he was pretty fast on his feet. He kept his distance and forced me to keep mine by throwing a steady barrage of lightning bolts and flying energy balls. In between dancing around the electrical attacks, I managed to rip off the burning jacket before I got more than a few first and second-degree burns. The burns would be gone in a few seconds – we hurt, but we heal quickly – but I wasn’t going to be around in a few seconds if I didn’t finish this fight quickly.

A weapon would be nice just about now. I looked around and spotted the little guy’s big gun where it must have fallen after he went down. I leaped for the gun as a pretty impressive forked lightning bolt barely missed me and destroyed several boxes of restaurant supplies. I grabbed the gun and rolled on the ground, getting singed by a near-miss. As I leveled the gun at him, the Lightning King created another sphere of energy to protect himself. The shots were swallowed by the crackling energy ball. My guess was the shield was vaporizing the bullets before they could get through, even the big .500 caliber ones I sent his way. Two shots emptied the revolver anyway.

I got an idea even as the revolver made a harmless click on my third trigger pull. I flipped the gun so I had it by the barrel and flung it at the Haitian with all my strength. It hit the sphere, but the energy that will vaporize a seven hundred-grain lead bullet will only partially melt a three-pound chunk of high quality steel. The oversized revolver was still mostly in one piece when it emerged on the other side of the energy sphere and smacked the Lightning King right in the mouth.

Like I said, Neos feel pain just fine, and nothing will ruin your concentration like having a red-hot three pound piece of metal hitting your face at fastball speeds. A human would have been killed instantly by the impact, but the Lightning King was only stunned for a few seconds. Unfortunately for him, that was more than enough time for me to get into hand to hand range. I was in a piss-poor mood; second degree burns will do that to you. I didn’t hold back as I punched and kicked him. You can’t when it’s a fight for your life and the other guy is as hard to kill as you are. The Haitian tried to fire more electrical blasts my way, but he couldn't aim for shit after I broke both of his arms. By the time I was done, I’d cracked several knuckles in my hands and my feet were sore, but the King was dead, long live the King. He wasn’t a pretty sight anymore.

That was the entire crew, unless they’d kept a tactical reserve somewhere. I looked around, but saw or heard no signs of life. Several hundred pounds of assorted goods were smoldering, but no major fires had started. I headed back to the office, hoping I’d find the kidnap victim there.

And there she was, lying on a couch, wearing nothing but one of those embarrassing hospital gowns that lace in the back and black panties, plus several dozen feet of duct tape. Somebody had used the better part of a roll of silver duct tape and wrapped her wrists, ankles, arms and legs with it. And also covered her mouth and eyes under even more tape, all wrapped around her head and over her hair. Nice going, fuckers. If she was a vanilla human and started sniffling and clogged up her nose, she would have been dead in short order. Luckily, she seemed to be breathing normally.

That was crazy. Unless these guys were bondage freaks, wrapping someone up in tape like that made no sense, unless they were scared of her. Duct tape in those quantities might subdue one of the less physical Neos, however, especially Type Ones and low-range Twos. Cassandra hadn’t mentioned the girl was a Neo, only that she was important. Sometimes Cassandra likes to be cryptic for no good reason.

I ignored the pain in my healing knuckles and pulled off the tape gag and blindfold as gently as I could. The girl stirred and moaned when I pulled the tape off her head, along with a few chunks of hair, but her eyes never opened. Probably drugged as well; these guys really hadn’t taken any chances with her.

Under the tape she looked ordinary enough. Most Neos look perfectly human, though – I am one of the freakish exceptions – so that could mean anything. Red hair, pale skin, pretty; she looked awfully young in her current unconscious state. It took a while, but I got her unwrapped and covered her up with a blanket I found in a closet in the office. The chemical burns the tape had left on her skin had begun to heal even in the few seconds since I removed it. Definitely a Neo, then; we can pretty much fully recover from anything that doesn’t kill us outright in an indecently short amount of time. That begged the question of what she was doing at a hospital when she was abducted. Most Neos only need medical attention after some serious injury, as in dismemberment serious.

I carefully carried her down to where Giamatti’s car awaited. I don’t own a car, being a confirmed New Yorker Pedestrian, and Giamatti wouldn’t need a ride wherever evil assholes go when they die. It was a nice car, too, a brand-new Tucker Raptor, all tricked up. Too bad I wouldn’t be able to hold on to it for long. I made a little nest with the blanket for the girl. She was sleeping peacefully, and snoring softly. She had a cute snore.

I’d put her somewhere safe and go get some answers from Cassandra.

Chapter Two

Christine Dark

New York City, New York, March 12, 2013

Christine opened her eyes. She was lying in bed in her dorm room. The last thing she remembered was falling into a dark place shortly after experiencing the mother of all acid trips. And puking. There had been a lot of puking involved. Had any of those things really happened?

“Still no signs of consciousness, but all her vitals seem normal, except for an unusually low BP.” The voice was young, female and competent-sounding. Christine had watched enough hospital dramas to tell that whoever was talking was a medical professional of some sort. What she couldn’t tell was who the heck was saying the words.

The voice seemed to come from somewhere above her head. She looked up, and realized she no longer was in her dorm room but in her old room at home. Well, Mom’s home now that Christine had left for college. It was her old room just as she remembered from high school, with the faded Sailor Moon poster over her bed and the bookcases stuffed with paperbacks and hardcovers and the desk with her ancient desktop PC. Except none of that stuff was at Mom’s house anymore; she’d boxed up all the books and that PC had gone to the great Circuit City in the sky, replaced with a neat little Dell notebook.

This couldn’t be real. She must be dreaming, although she’d never been this aware she was in a dream before.

“It is a dream, my dear, but not an ordinary one.” A new voice, but this one was coming from somebody close by. Christine turned and saw a tiny woman – four foot and not too many inches tall – standing by her bedroom door. She’d never seen her before, in dreams or real life, and she hadn’t been standing there a moment before, either. The woman had long black hair and a dark complexion that could have been Hispanic or Native American, but her features looked like neither. She didn’t look old – late twenties or early thirties, maybe – but something about her said ‘old’ to Christine. The woman’s eyes were sightless solid white orbs. That would have normally creeped the crap out of Christine – and immediately made her feel terribly guilty for feeling that way – but in the dream she wasn’t all that bothered by it.

“Uh, hello?” Christine said dubiously.

“I am very sorry to intrude in your mind like this, but I’m afraid this is the only chance we’ll have to talk,” the woman said. She was smiling, but it was a sad smile. “My name is Cassandra. It is nice to meet you, Christine.”

“Nice to meet you. Am I going insane? Are you going to be the imaginary friend I talk to when the meds wear off at the happy place with the padded walls? Or did I die when I was puking my guts out? If I’m dead, are you an angel?” Whenever she felt nervous or uncomfortable – and this was a twofer – Christine either talked too much or shut down completely.

Cassandra started to say something but the voice coming from above came back. “What are you doing here? This is a restricted…” There was a sharp metallic sound, and the voice was cut off.

“Fuck, Danny, why did you go and shoot her?” a man’s voice came in.

“I thought you said everybody was going to clear out before we got here.” Another male voice, snarling, angry and scary. “Somebody fucked up. Not my problem. No fucking witnesses, capisce? Just grab the bitch and let’s go.”

“I’m sorry,” Cassandra said. “This is going to be unpleasant.”

Christine was still trying to figure out what the hell the woman was talking about when she felt rough hands grabbing her. She jumped at the touch, but she couldn’t see anybody. It was terrifying. A sharp stinging pain on her arm followed, kind of like the last time she donated blood, but much more painful. She looked down and saw blood running from a puncture, right where an IV needle would go. “What’s happening to me?”

“Some bad men are taking you from your hospital room. It’s my fault. Your physical body is unconscious. Unfortunately, contacting you mentally has raised your awareness enough to experience what is happening around you. Help is on the way, however.”

“What..?”

More outside sounds. Another man’s voice. “Hey, what are you doing here?” More sharp metallic noises. Gunshots? They didn’t sound loud enough, but she thought that’s what they were.

Christine was thrown face down on the bed, and realized all of a sudden that she was wearing a hospital gown. Somebody was holding her arms behind her back. There was a tearing sound and she felt clingy tape burning her skin, being wrapped tightly around her arms and legs, over and over, binding them together. More tape covered her mouth, her eyes. She couldn’t see, couldn’t talk. She felt a sharp flare of pain as someone jabbed a needle on her backside. She screamed, but the sound was muffled by all the tape over her mouth.

“Christine.” Cassandra’s voice was firm. “Look at me.”

She couldn’t look at anybody, her eyes were taped shut! But a second later she found herself back in her bed, no longer bound and gagged. Cassandra was sitting on the bed, holding Christine’s hand. She could still feel the tape on her skin, but she could move, see…

Talk? “I’m so going to freak the frak out if you don’t tell me what’s going on!” Christine shouted. Maybe this was a hallucination her brain was making up while in the real world her body was being abused by murderous strangers. Or the whole thing was some delusion and she had finally gone out of her effing gourd. “Freaking out right now!”

Cassandra squeezed her hand. “Please believe me, child. You will be all right. I have seen that much, if nothing else.”

It was sheer insanity. Christine was experiencing two sets of feelings at the same time. She was sitting on her old bed in her favorite Hello Kitty pajamas, the ones she had stopped wearing when she was eleven. She was also strewn on the cold and dirty floor of a moving vehicle – probably a van – tied up with duct tape and with her ass hanging out of a freaking hospital gown. She forced herself to concentrate on the Hello Kitty pajamas experience. It was a lot less traumatic that way. “What’s happening to me?”

“I had to see you,” Cassandra said, which was kind of funny considering her eyes were obviously not in working order. “I wouldn’t be able to do this if you were awake. It would be like staring into the sun. You have so much power, child. I had to see what kind of person you are. I had to see if you can be trusted with all that power.”

Power? Several of Christine’s teachers had used words like ‘gifted’ and ‘brilliant’ when describing her, but even Mr. Gardener, the math teacher who had called her ‘a prodigy,’ had never referred to her as powerful. So now she was having delusions of grandeur mixed in with an abduction horror fest. It didn’t make any sense.

Cassandra started playing a violin she hadn’t been holding until just that moment. Trippy. Christine recognized the tune – one of Mozart’s sonatas, Number 18, wasn’t it? Christine loved music. She’d never quite managed to learn to play any instruments herself, but she’d learned to appreciate music. Mozart in particular fascinated her, with all the mathematical symmetry embedded in his work.

Christine listened to Cassandra’s playing and for a while she was able to deal with the other set of sensations without panicking. The music got her through the feeling of being picked up and carried off over someone’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She was finally dumped on some piece of furniture, like a couch and left alone, still wrapped up in tape. None of that seemed to matter as long as she could be in her old room listening to the strange woman play the violin.

Eventually, however, her brain kept asking questions she couldn’t ignore. “Uh, Cassandra?” The music stopped and the blind woman turned towards her. “So, what happens if I cannot be trusted with all that power you were talking about?”

Cassandra’s smile vanished altogether, and all that was left was sadness and grim determination. “In that case, I would have to make sure that power was not abused.”

I think the nice blind lady just threatened my life, Christine thought. That scared her more than the whole kidnapping bit.

“You seem like a nice young woman, however,” Cassandra went on. “You have suffered, mostly small hurts, but they have marked you nonetheless. You have been an outsider, an outcast. That could be dangerous for someone with your potential: the temptation to turn against everyone will be strong. On the other hand, your hurts and disappointments have taught you about suffering and made you sensitive to the pain of others.”

The patient’s deep feelings of inadequacy and demonstrated inability to fit into normal social patterns led to the creation of elaborate delusional constructs. She fashioned an illusory world where she was powerful and important. The patient’s fascination with fantasy fiction and computer games may have contributed to the development of these delusions. Oh, yeah, the psych evaluations just wrote themselves.

Cassandra smiled again, and despite Christine’s overwhelming need to believe all of this was just a weird-ass dream, she felt a surge of relief. “You will do, I think. You have a solid core, for which I think we must all thank your mother.”

Back in Abduction Land, she heard a bunch of gunshots and other loud noises she could not identify. It sounded like a small war had broken out.

“That’s your rescue,” Cassandra explained. “A young friend of mine is risking his life to save you.”

New pain and discomfort. Someone was taking the duct tape off her. It felt just the way she imagined duct tape would feel coming off her skin, except more painful. Her hair! “Can you tell your friend to watch the hair? ‘Cause he’s pulling my hair worse than Ellen Weathersby did back in sixth grade.” The tape coming off her eyelids was the worst. “Son of a bee! That hurt!”

“I can’t contact him while I’m here with you, unfortunately,” Cassandra said. “But now you are safe, at least for the time being.”

She could feel herself being wrapped up in a blanket, and whoever was carrying her off was being a lot gentler than the previous bunch. Knight in shining armor rescue fantasies annoyed her, but they were better than nightmares about being victimized by maniacs.

“Okay, so I pass the test and I’m the Chosen One and all that good stuff. What now? Do I get to go on a quest to find the Golden Dildo of Gondor or something?” Among all the fear and bewilderment, a brief flash of excitement poked through. A quest? That would actually be, really, really, wicked cool.

The delusions have become so strong the patient may never lead a normal life…

Screw you, imaginary shrink! I’m off to find the Golden Dildo of Gondor and stick it down the nearest Crack of Doom!

Cassandra said nothing, but Christine got the feeling the blind woman could hear her inner dialog just fine. Stupid dream know-it-alls.

“You will see, my dear. It’s going to be a difficult time for you. Try to keep in mind you are stronger than you think.”

“That should have been ‘Stronger than think you are, remember you must try.’ And you should be green and about two feet shorter,” Christine replied, surprising herself. Smart comebacks weren’t her thing; she could think of smart comebacks, but usually minutes or hours after the actual conversations when the comebacks would have been relevant. Her dream self was quicker on her mental feet, apparently. And sassier. She’d always wanted to be sassy and had never made it past awkward and unintentionally funny.

“Sleep now, Christine.”

And sleep she did.

The Freedom Legion

Atlantic Headquarters, March 13, 2013

It once had been an insignificant island in the Caribbean, somewhere off the coast of Haiti. Now it glittered with half a dozen skyscrapers, a permanent population of over ten thousand people, two universities, and one of the most sophisticated communication and sensor networks on the planet. Overlooking it all was a neoclassic monstrosity on a hill. It loosely resembled the Parthenon but was many times larger; the structure had been called ‘the mother of all city halls.’ The huge building was the Western Hemisphere's headquarters for the Freedom Legion. Freedom Island was a living symbol of the greatest accomplishments of humanity and parahumanity, working together for the welfare of all. At least that was what all the brochures said. He even believed it on his good days.

Watching from the viewing room on top of the tallest building on the island, the hero of the ages took it all in. After a while he closed his eyes and vividly recalled the ground-breaking ceremony, back in 1953. Europe was still recovering from the war, and the world was still struggling with the war’s aftermath. The theme of the ceremony had been ‘Never Again.’ Never again would the good people of the world allow the horrors of the previous two decades to be unleashed on the helpless and innocent. The Freedom Legion would be beholden to no nation or vested interest. It would be a truly transnational organization dedicated to the benefit of the entire planet. In his mind’s eye he saw the gathered leaders and dignitaries of all the great powers. Winston Churchill, who had just regained his seat as Prime Minister, watched the proceedings with a jaundiced eye. Dwight Eisenhower’s smile was forced and stiff, and Chiang Kai-shek had not bothered to conceal his scowl while the ceremony concluded and Freedom Island became an independent territory bound by no law but the Legion’s. Only the Soviet Union had refused to send a representative to the ceremony, but that failing empire was on its way to irrelevancy even then.

None of the victors of the war approved of the Freedom Legion’s internationalist program, but they could not stop it, not when all but a handful members of the Legion had pledged their support to its independence. The will of thirty-three Legionnaires was backed by more raw power than any nation state could command. Without the Legion, Nazi Germany would still dominate Europe. The Legion would ensure no other nation could become a threat of that magnitude ever again. It had been a lofty goal, and on that day he had felt the thrill of possibility, the promise of a great future almost within reach.

“John?”

John Clarke snapped out of his reverie and turned around to greet his old friend. “Kenneth. I thought you were going to skip the press conference.”

Kenneth Slaughter, a.k.a. Doc Slaughter, and more recently Brass Man, shook his head. “Artemis asked me to un-skip it. As you know, she can be very persuasive.”

“That she is,” John said wryly as he shook hands with his friend. The two men were very similar, tall and powerful, broad of shoulder, narrow at the waist, sporting the muscular build of professional athletes. Even the cast of their faces was similar, with firm square jaws and chiseled features generally set in calm and confident expressions. Slaughter’s pale blonde hair and sky-blue eyes contrasted with John’s dark brown and green, but otherwise they could have been brothers. In all the ways that counted, they were. “Why did she insist on you being here, though? It’s going to be the usual dog and pony show.” The monthly press conferences at Freedom Island were fairly boring affairs unless some crisis was developing. John suspected he knew the reason, but waited for his friend to confirm those suspicions.

“Artemis – Olivia – is worried about you. As am I,” Kenneth said, not wasting any more time on pleasantries. John wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t spoken with Kenneth for three weeks and had been avoiding him for even longer than that in order to prevent this very conversation. Now he understood why Kenneth had showed up for the press conference: he wanted to make sure John was up for it.

“E tu, Kenneth? I thought a fellow oldster would spare me the touchie-feelie stuff.”

“Watch it, youngster. I’m a good decade your senior, and you know it.” Kenneth’s smile was brief, and his tone became serious again. “We’ve all noticed it, John. We all feel the temptation to dwell in the past, but of late people have noticed you going into full-fledged fugue states. You were in one just now, weren’t you?”

“I was reminiscing, yes,” John admitted. He realized with some concern he could not remember how long he had been lost in thought.

“Even when you are paying attention to the here and now, there are other worrisome signs. You seem unusually unfeeling and disengaged. ”

“Disengaged? I have been anything but for close to eighty years, Kenneth. You want to worry about disengaged, worry about Janus. He’s the one who went on a twenty-year walkabout in outer space.” Janus had gone on a twenty-year walkabout in outer space and on his return had chosen not to reveal anything about what he had seen. John didn’t know what that meant, except it couldn’t possibly be anything good.

“Cassius… yes, he also worries us all. And when we worry about two of the mightiest beings on the planet, we’re truly worried. But this is not about Janus. Right now, you are worrying us a great deal.”

John shrugged. “I wish you hadn’t waited until half an hour before a press conference to bring this up.” Underneath the calm façade, he was very worried himself. What Kenneth did not know was that the cold demeanor John was affecting concealed a growing sense of anger and frustration. John was scared of acknowledging this, even to himself. He had managed to repress those feelings, and if the price was to be seen as emotionless, he would gladly pay it.

“Lately it seems like there’s never a good time, John. And yes, I know most of that is due to things beyond our control. There’s always some crisis to tend to. But the Legion has over two hundred full time members. You can afford to take some time off if you need to.”

“Can I? Can I really, Kenneth? Most of those two hundred kids are Type Ones and Twos. Things I can shrug off will kill them. Do you want to tell a widow or orphan that their dearly beloved bought the farm because I had to take some time off?”

“All true, but how many will die if your problems get worse?”

John bowed his head, acknowledging defeat. “All right. You win. You are right. Yes, I’m not feeling one hundred percent. And yes, we’ll talk about it. Say, dinner at six today?” He had been trying to deal with his troubles on his own, and it clearly wasn’t working. Maybe talking to Kenneth would help.

Doc Slaughter visibly relaxed. “I’m glad to hear it, John. Maybe it’s simply our version of shell shock. We certainly have experienced enough things to warrant it.”

“We called it ‘combat fatigue’ in my day,” John replied.

“Yes, and now it’s PTSD, unless they’ve replaced it with something even more harmless-sounding when I wasn’t looking.”

“People are softer nowadays, aren’t they?”

“In no small part due to our efforts,” Kenneth admitted. “I tend to think it’s for the best.”

“Probably true. See you downstairs?”

Kenneth nodded. “Let’s go make our grand entrance. Artemis should be doing the same.”

They shook hands, and Kenneth called forth his Brass Man suit of armor. John watched his friend take off, waited a few seconds, and leaped off the balcony.

John let himself fall for some time. He tried to feel the way a normal human would if he was plunging towards the ground a hundred stories below. Fear was a province of mortality. He felt nothing.

A minor act of will, and he soared towards the sky. That had once been a source of elation. He could fly higher and higher and leave the blue planet behind. Once, like Icarus, he had gotten close to the sun, close enough for the heat of its corona to envelop him. He had almost died that time; his internal temperature had risen well beyond the melting point of any earthly material and he had been forced to flee for his life.

Of late, the sun called to him. If he went back, he didn’t know if he would turn away from it.

John Clarke, a.k.a. Ultimate, the Invincible Man, flew through the sky, his metallic silver, gold and scarlet costume glittering in the morning sunlight. Once he’d had a cape that fluttered after him, but he had given it up as too childish. The damn thing would get ripped up all the time. No matter. Cape or not, his appearance over the waiting crowd on the ground was greeted with cheers and waves. Amazingly, people never tired of the spectacle of watching a man fly. Brass Man and a woman surrounded by a fiery nimbus joined him in the air. Artemis, the Living Goddess, waved and blew him a kiss as she passed him by. She looked magnificent in her golden breast plate and tiara, her trademark fiery spear held high in her right hand. John smiled. Artemis – Olivia O’Brien to her friends and relatives – always managed to cheer him up. Sometimes he wondered what would have happened if the lady wasn’t spoken for, but she was all too married, and to another friend to boot.

It didn't matter anyway. John had not truly wanted another woman since Linda’s death.

John dutifully performed some aerial acrobatics with his fellow Legionnaires, to the elation of the spectators below. Other than the press corps there was the usual gathering of tourists – whose financial contributions helped the Legion’s ever-growing budget needs – and a number of local residents, who despite working with Neolympians day after day seemed to retain their appetite for the pomp and pageantry of it all. Was he a source of inspiration, or merely titillation? He was no longer sure.

Time to come down to earth and mingle with the mortals.

Ultimate and his companions floated down to the podium and waited for the outburst of applause (mainly from the tourists) to die down. He did the usual dog and pony show, greeting everyone, introducing his fellow spokesmen – spokespeople, he corrected himself – and then ceding the floor to Doc Slaughter for the main fluff pieces: reports of progress assisting the victims of Japan’s earthquake, the capture of a cell of anarchist terrorists, and the release of three new pharmaceutical patents (one developed by Kenneth Slaughter himself, the other two by fellow genius inventor Daedalus Smith) into the public domain. One of those three drugs would soon make the HIV virus as irrelevant as smallpox or the common cold (the latter cure being another Daedalus Smith breakthrough).

Artemis took over and delivered statements dealing with some not-so-bright spots. Things in Iraq were getting nasty, with a neo-pagan movement led by several mythology-inspired Neos clashing with the Islamic Brotherhood. A joint Legion-UN mediation team had been beset by assassination attempts from both sides of the dispute. Things remained chaotic in several countries in Africa, thanks to Neolympian warlords stirring old tribal feuds into life. And of course there were the two great bogeymen of international politics.

“Will the Legion support new trading sanctions against the Empire of China?” one of the reporters asked as soon as the floor was open for questions.

Imperial China was one of those nightmares that refused to go away. Four hundred million people lived under the tyranny of the Dragon Emperor. Famine and repression had led to the deaths of millions, and only two brutal wars had prevented the Empire from overrunning the Republic of China.

John found himself flying over a burning city, helplessly watching thousands die under unrelenting artillery fire he was too late to stop. He saw a little girl run into a house seconds before a shell erased it from existence…

“… new sanctions will work?”

John shook his head and returned to the here and now. Those episodes of lost time were becoming more frequent every day. His mind wandered off without warning, especially when he wasn’t concentrating on something. John noticed some of the people in the press watching him intently. There already had been rumors circulating that Ultimate was losing it, mostly in the blogosphere, but that was becoming more and more important every day.

Hell, he was losing it.

“We are doing our best to build the international consensus needed to deal with rogue nations like the Empire and the Dominion,” Kenneth said smoothly. Too smoothly by half. John had been growing steadily more cynical about the two evil empires of the 20th century as they endured and prospered into the 21st. The Dominion of the Ukraine languished under the Iron Tsar, and its influence over Eastern Europe, Russia and the former Soviet states had only grown over the decades. The Chinese Empire had become more cunning after the Second Asian War, and now it could garner several dozen UN votes among smaller countries in Asia, countries that viewed the growing power and influence of the Republic of China with envy and trepidation. When the Dominion and the Empire cooperated (something that was happening with increasing frequency), they often had the votes to render the UN helpless. There was even a movement underway to grant the Empire a seat at the Security Council.

John suddenly realized he had missed another question, this one directed at him. “Can you say that again, Peter?” he said with an apologetic look. Ultimate: Going Senile? He could just picture the headline in one of the more lurid periodicals.

Peter Fowler was one of a new generation of independent Hypernet newsies. John admired some of them; their drive reminded him of times past, when he’d been a cub reporter for The World’s Journal during his all-too-brief attempt at having a normal life. But a few of them had the morals of a vulture and instincts to match. This particular journalist was one of them.

“I asked you how you planned to meet the demands for sensitivity training and closer supervision for senior members of the Legion?”

“Uh, I’m not sure what you mean,” John said.

“I’m sure you are aware of accusations of racism, sexism and general cultural insensitivity leveled towards Legion members,” Fowler said, apparently forgetting he was supposed to ask questions, not make statements. “There are some, shall we say ‘old fashioned’ attitudes among your members, and a lack of understanding that we live in a multicultural, more diverse society. The Legion seems to be dominated by white straight males with outdated views on women and minorities.”

“I am hearing a lot of comments, many of which I don’t agree with, and some which are utter falsehoods, and no questions,” John said in a flat tone that people who knew him would take as a sign to ease up, and quickly. He almost blurted out that one of the founding members of the Legion might have been male but also black and gay, and then remembered Janus had never made his sexuality a matter of public record. Wouldn’t that be great, outing his friend by accident?

“Here is my question. Don’t you think you and other members of the Legion need to do more work to acclimate yourselves to the mores of the 21^st century?”

“No, I don’t. Next question. Paula?” John gestured to the GNN correspondent, but Fowler kept talking.

“What do you say about claims that your wife left you because she was afraid of you?”

Dead silence.

In a tiny fraction of a second, he could turn Fowler into a thin red mist. So many ways to kill a human. Easier than snuffing a candle. He could kill all of them in the time it took to draw a breath. It would be so easy…

“Ultimate is not going to dignify that kind of question with an answer,” Artemis said forcefully, breaking the tense silence. John had no idea how long he had stood there, fantasizing about murdering Fowler and everyone else in the conference room. “Mr. Fowler, this press conference is not a forum for baseless slander,” Olivia continued. “Is that understood?”

Everyone was looking at Fowler like something nasty they had accidentally stepped on. “Understood,” Fowler said sullenly, blissfully unaware of how close he had come to dying. That was not an exaggeration. John had nearly snapped. He had never been so close to losing control over so small a provocation.

What is happening to me?

Chapter Three

Face-Off

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

I mostly prefer to be the man without a face. Whenever I’m relaxing by myself or with the handful (okay, three) friends I have, that’s how I look. Nobody has figured out how I can breathe, see or talk with a smooth layer of skin, flesh and bone where most people have a pie hole and assorted other orifices. I have no mouth, but people can hear my voice just fine. It’s a Neo thing. You wouldn’t understand.

On the plus side, I never have to worry about getting my nose broken or someone poking an eye out. On the down side, most people aren’t comfortable talking to me when I go blank. It’s pretty antisocial. When the damsel in distress woke up, I would definitely put a face on to greet her. Something soothing and friendly, with a full head of hair.

I used to have a regular face, but my stepfather beat it out of me. Sad, isn’t it?

At the moment, the girl was sleeping in the basement of the Church of Saint Theodosius, a Ukrainian Orthodox church presided over by one of my few friends. Father Aleksander was a Type One Neo with some minor healing and empathic abilities, abilities he had put to good use ministering to the local Ukrainian community. We had struck a fast friendship during an altercation with some Russian mob stooges that had ended with said stooges in prison after some time in the hospital. Hanging out with the good father always led to interesting conversations and the consumption of some very smooth vodka. Aleksander ran a discreet underground railroad for assorted people in need of a place to hide – refugees from the Dominion and Russia, mostly – and I trusted him to watch over Jane Doe and keep his mouth shut. The man took the concept of sanctuary very seriously.

After leaving her in Father Alex’s care, just as the sun was coming out, I went to a diner and enjoyed a tall stack of pancakes, courtesy of the nice wad of cash I’d collected from the mobsters I’d killed that night. I wore one of my regular faces – Tony the wannabe wise guy – in honor of all the Italians I’d recently sent off to their greater reward. After breakfast, I headed to the Bronx to see another friend.

Aleksander had eventually gotten used to talking to me face to no-face, although it had taken quite a bit of vodka to thaw him out. Cassandra, on the other hand, had never had any problems with me. It helped that she was blind as a bat, of course.

I know, a blind seer going by the name of Cassandra. The clichés trip all over themselves. I always poke fun at her about it, and she claims that her name was Cassandra before her parahuman powers manifested themselves. It might even be true.

Of course, she is blind only in a technical sense. Among her many abilities, my spiritual adviser is aware of everything within a three block radius around her. Aware as in she can read a letter inside a sealed envelope, or know how many rats are in the vicinity, and how many fleas are on each of those rats. It’s fairly impressive; you learn quickly to never play cards with the woman. And don’t ever try to sneak up on her. I tried a couple of times just for shits and giggles, and discovered she is quite fond of practical jokes and homemade traps. One such incident involved several bowling balls and a minor concussion. After that, I just walked up to her front door and knocked politely, at least until I ended up getting my own keys and a room at her place.

Cassandra lives in a boarded-up three-story building in a bad area of the Bronx. From the outside, it looks like the kind of shithole self-respecting junkies would avoid. The inside is a lot cozier, though. Since I don’t really have a fixed address, I sleep there more often than not. The front door doesn’t look like much but is solid steel and has some unusual characteristics. It was open wide this morning, Cassandra’s cute way of letting me know she was expecting me. I walked in and ignored the loud clang as it slammed shut by itself. The first time it had done that had been pretty startling, but I was used to it.

The first floor looks like a condemned building should, complete with dust, peeling paint, cracks along the walls, and an atmosphere of disuse and abandonment that makes most people feel not just that nobody lives there, but that nobody should live there. No junkie has ever tried to set up shop in the building, and teenagers looking for a place to party always give Cassandra’s building a wide berth. I’m pretty sure it’s a psychic thing my friend does, but she likes her little mysteries, so she’s never confirmed or denied it.

Originally there were twelve apartments in the building, but that’s down to nine. Cassandra makes her home in the second floor; all the original apartments on that level have had some walls knocked down to turn the whole thing into one big dwelling, a huge apartment covered in rugs and tapestries and flickering in the light of a bunch of candles. Even though the place has electrical power, she uses candles for illumination and doesn’t have a TV or computer. My part-time crib is on the third floor, an apartment I’ve furnished over the years with a combination of Salvation Army furniture, lots of books, mostly second hand (I like to read a lot) and a few choice electronics I’ve ‘liberated’ from assorted assholes who had the misfortune to cross my path.

It’s a safe house, but it’s not my home. I don’t really have one of those. When I’m there I’m Cassandra’s guest. Same as when I crash at Father Alex’s or (far more rarely) at Condor’s underground base. When I want to be on my own or am entertaining a lady friend I usually sleep at cheap motels that charge by the hour, or the lady friend’s place if we’ve gotten chummy enough. I only keep stuff I need at Cassandra’s, without much in the way of decorations or personal touches.

Cassandra’s dwelling, on the other hand, is full of personal touches, a candlelit museum of eclectic tastes. Carpets and tapestries cover the floors and walls, mostly Middle Eastern designs that must have cost a fortune. In between the tapestries there is a lot of artwork, from a few paintings that are either very good replicas of old masterworks or have been liberated from someone or other, to a black velvet Elvis portrait whose eyes seem to follow you everywhere. One large room which I’ve dubbed the Hall of Knick-Knacks is filled with shelves stacked with little porcelain figurines and display cases with antique jewelry and objects that probably should be in a museum. And like I said, lit candles all over the place, in all shapes and colors. It’s a miracle she hasn’t burned down the place, but miracles are Cassandra’s stock in trade.

That morning, Cassandra was waiting for me in the room with the Elvis portrait in it, relaxing on an ancient-looking armchair and playing something Gypsy-sounding on her violin. My psychic pal is very short and strikingly beautiful, with smooth mahogany skin, high cheekbones and sharp features. She appears to be in her thirties, which doesn’t mean anything when you’re dealing with Neos, since we either don’t age or age very slowly, most likely the former. Most people thought she was black or Hispanic, but I suspected she was something more exotic, some multinational blend I‘ve never been able to identify. I don’t ask about that kind of thing, though. It’s enough that I know she loves music and laughter, and that she has never turned down anybody who needed her help. Her eyes are covered with a milky pale film, and to avoid making people uncomfortable she usually hides them behind sunglasses. Not when it’s just us, though; we are very tolerant of each other’s deformities.

I figure she was blind before her powers manifested themselves, since most Neos can recover from crippling injuries. That’s another thing I’ve never asked.

“Hello, Marco,” she said as I entered the living room. Cassandra is the only person who knows my legal name is Marco Martinez. Father Aleksander calls me ‘my friend,’ or ‘my young friend’ when he’s trying to pull rank on me. Condor, a friendly costumed Neo I often work with, just calls me Face. When I’m interacting with most everyone else I’m wearing a fake face and a fake name; when I’m wearing my real no-face people call me Face-Off or profanity-laced versions thereof.

I don’t mind that she calls me Marco, although I would like Mark better. It’s not my name anymore, but it used to be, and Cassandra lives in the past at least as much as she does in the future, so it’s fitting somehow.

I sat down on an overstuffed armchair facing her. “Hey, Cassie.” She nodded at me. “I found the girl.”

“I know,” she said. “I was able to see some of the rescue. The outcome was never in doubt.”

“That‘s nice. It got pretty hairy for a while. The Neo you warned me about turned out to be pretty tough.”

“I saw you dealing with him. He was powerful but overconfident. He never had a chance,” she concluded.

Working with Cassandra is equal parts helpful and maddening. Much of the time, she lets me know places to be or people to find. Thanks to her, I know where to go to stop trouble or find people who need killing, or at least need a good beating followed by some time behind bars. That works great for me, since it gives me something to do and people I can fuck up and rob with a clean conscience. But she often doesn’t tell me the whole story beforehand, and things sometimes end up being more complicated than they first appeared to be. She claims it’s the way her visions work and that giving me too much information can actually change the future events she has seen. The paranoid part of me thinks she just likes to make me sweat.

This last escapade made for a good example. “Why didn’t you send me to her directly instead of having me beat the location out of Giamatti? Not that I minded doing that. The fucker needed to be put down.”

“I wish I could have,” she replied. “The problem is simple; it’s very difficult for me to sense her location. It’s very difficult for me to perceive her at all, as a matter of fact.”

The job had been weird from the get go, even by our standards. Early last evening Cassandra had contacted me telepathically, which was unusual in itself. She only does that during emergencies, since she claims it takes a lot out of her. She told me about a girl being abducted from a hospital, how many perps had been involved and the name of the ringleader. I’d had to find the ringleader and get the girl’s location from him. Normally Cassie would have just sent me to the address where the girl was.

“What do you mean? You saw her get kidnapped, right?”

“I wish I could show you how I see things,” Cassandra said. She looked distracted, which happened when something in the future caught her fancy. In the flickering candle light, her face looked older than normal. She was clearly exhausted, which was rare enough to worry me a little. “The future is fluid, and the very act of observing it often changes it. I sensed this woman’s arrival, and how momentous it would be. Even then, I could not see her directly. I’m seeing the effect she has on the world. She leaves a… I guess you could call it a footprint, or an impression, on the very fabric of reality.”

“Great, that clears up everything. I didn’t see any scuff marks on the fabric of reality when I saved her. Just an unconscious Neo girl. I would have brought her here, but you told me not to. Didn’t tell me why, either.”

“I wish it were otherwise, but I cannot have her near me. Her presence would completely overwhelm my senses. From the moment of her arrival, my abilities have been affected.”

“Her arrival? What do you mean?”

“Whoever this girl is, she was not in this world twenty-four hours ago.”

“Nice. So she’s an alien?” That would be a first. Some Neos claimed to be from other planets, but so far every single one of them had turned out to be full of shit, batshit crazy, or both.

“I only know she’s not from this world.”

“So, like an alien. Or not,” I said. “She’s a Neo, so she’s as human as I am. Unless aliens took her away and just dropped her off. What else could she be? Time traveler? Visitor from a parallel dimension?” You did get some of those every once in a while, and things usually got very messy when they showed up.

Cassandra shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

“Now that’s something I don’t hear every day.”

“I know that her presence here is causing the future to warp in ways I can only vaguely glimpse. Things are going to change, perhaps radically, because of her. Things all around the world.”

This was getting better and better. “Sounds like a job for Ultimate and his super-pals. In case you’ve forgotten, Cassie, I’m just a Type Two vigilante. Since when do I handle threats to the world? I can do Brooklyn, Queens, parts of Jersey if I’m pushing it, Manhattan by special request. Acting locally, y’know?”

“We do what is required of us. Or live with the consequences of our inaction.”

“I’m getting the warms and fuzzies here. If you’re going to share some fortune cookie wisdom with me, do you at least have some leftover Lo Mein I can eat?”

Cassandra smiled. “You shouldn’t underestimate yourself, Marco. You are capable of much more than you expect.”

I shrugged. I was a freak with some superhuman abilities. I wasn’t going to run around saving the planet. If I hadn’t joined forces with Cassandra, I’d be jumping over rooftops at night looking for crimes to stop – and believe me, that’s one of the most useless things a wannabe hero can do. You could spend a year ‘patrolling’ and never see anything – the chances of you being at the right place and right time are not quite in the winning-the-lottery range, but they’re still pretty small. Supposedly Neos seem to find trouble more often than they should, statistically speaking, but even so it never happens as often as it does in movies or TV. My buddy Condor had a billion bucks worth of police scanners, surveillance cameras illegally installed all over town, and he had tapped into the security system networks of a dozen security companies. He still mostly spent his nights playing World of Warcraft while waiting for something to happen. Thanks to Cassandra, I'd been able to do some good, a lot more good than I would have by myself, but I knew my limitations. I wasn’t going to save the world. I wasn’t even going to save the city.

There’d been a handful of times in my dozen years of vigilantism when something major had menaced New York: natural disasters, or a high-powered Neo on a rampage. That kind of thing happens once every two or three years on average; it sucks, but people have gotten used to it. Dealing with major disasters was the job of the licensed and bonded parahuman team of the city, the Empire State Guardians. The Guardians had full legal enforcement powers, not to mention a sweet license deal that gave them a cut of any income generated by anything with their trademarked likeness, from t-shirts and coffee mugs to movies and video games. They got paid big bucks to save the Big Apple, back up the cops in dicey situations, and preen for the paparazzo in their skin-tight costumes. If the Guardians couldn’t handle something, the Freedom Legion would help them out. If the Legion couldn’t handle something, it was time to evacuate the city and move to another state. Luckily that hadn’t happened.

I mostly watched that kind of thing on TV, or did the superhero version of janitorial work – help people evacuate areas in danger, beat on looters, those kinds of shit jobs. Early in my career, I had tried to join the fray, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and ready to help. The first time I did, one of the Guardians politely asked me to leave. I wasn’t trained to work with a team, she explained, and I would end up getting in the way. The second time I’d tried to lend a hand, another Guardian, an officious prick called Star Eagle, tried to arrest me. I wrapped a light pole around his neck and left, and apparently he was so embarrassed by the incident he didn’t press charges. After that I learned to leave well enough alone.

“Capable or not, this doesn’t sound like my usual gig, Cassie. If this chick is going to be involved in some major catastrophe, why don’t we turn her over to the Guardians or the Legion? They handle that kind of thing all the time. This is way above my pay grade.”

“That’s not possible. And no, I don’t know exactly why.” Cassandra frowned. “I don’t like seeing only fog and shadows in the future, but that’s what I get whenever I try to focus on this woman. Remember, I don’t see the future. I see possibilities and probabilities. And she is blocking me somehow, so what I see is fragmented.”

“But you have a hunch taking her to the Guardian’s HQ is a bad idea.” It was a nice HQ, too, a big building with a nice view of Central Park.

“Let me put it this way. When I try to visualize you doing so, all I get is flashes of death. Death everywhere. The whole city and beyond. Death throughout the planet, Marco.”

Oh yeah, this was just up my alley. Planetary death? What part of ‘above my pay grade’ did she not understand? “And if we hold on to her?”

“I see you traveling with her, to many different places. And a great deal of danger wherever you go. The mass deaths are still a probability, but not a certainty. The worst thing is, I think I have seen all of this before, a long time ago, but I can’t remember when.” Her normally placid demeanor had been replaced with a bleak expression I’d never seen before. It made me feel queasy. “I hate not being able tell you more, Marco. This is going to be more dangerous than anything you’ve done before.”

When Cassandra saw danger, it meant that in some possible futures I ended up getting killed. Usually that wasn’t a big deal, since her visions allowed me to prepare for whatever would have killed me if I wasn’t careful. If she couldn’t see clearly, I was on my own. I probably should be worried about that, but it felt like too much effort at the moment. I was more concerned about fucking up than dying, to be honest. Fucking up meant people with something to live for ended up dead.

“I managed to mentally communicate with her while she was incapacitated,” Cassandra went on. “It was very difficult. The whole experience ended up being rather traumatic for both of us.”

“How did you pull that off?”

“With enormous effort and only because she was heavily drugged and even her subconscious abilities were at their lowest ebb. Even so, the task was almost beyond me.”

“I better get back to Saint Theodosius before she wakes up, then. If she is such a badass she can make you sweat when she’s out cold, I don’t know if Father Alex can handle her.”

“She does not pose a danger at the moment. I learned as much from my chat with her,” Cassandra explained, easing my mind a little. “She’s quite a nice young woman, as a matter of fact. Her name is Christine.”

“A nice young woman that can end the world. Sounds like my kind of girl.” Not really. My kind of girl was not nice at all. I’d been with a nice girl once. That had ended with me cradling her dead body in a cheap motel room. Never again. “So, to sum things up,” I continued. “I have to convince this Christine chick to stay away from the authorities, and to go on some sort of quest with me. Sounds perfectly reasonable, not creepy at all.” I didn’t have much experience dealing with people I wasn’t supposed to scare or hurt. How the hell was I supposed to convince her to come along with me?

On top of that, I wasn’t crazy about going to far-off places. I’d never been farther away from the city than Jersey and, once, Connecticut. I figured things and people were shit no matter where I went, so I’d never felt any urge to go anywhere. I wasn’t sure how I’d handle the world outside the five boroughs. If that was what Cassandra wanted, I’d do it, though. I trusted her.

It never occurred to me that she would lie to me.

Christine Dark

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

The universe was nothing but darkness and fear. And cold. The universe was nothing but darkness, fear and cold. And pain. Okay, the universe was nothing but darkness, fear, cold and pain…

Christine woke up with a start. Great Oogly Moogly! What time was it? She was going to be late for her test! Going to that stupid party had been the dumbest idea ever. Freaking Sophie and her drinking and promiscuity and Daddy-bought boob job, why did Christine hang out with her at all? Answer: because a bad BFF was better than no BFF at all. What kind of mess had her kinda sorta best-friend-forever gotten Christine into?

She’d had the worst and weirdest nightmare of her life. She didn’t want to even think about it, not before she was fully awake and halfway through a hot shower.

The bed felt a lot lumpier than usual; the sheets also felt different. She reached for the glasses on her nightstand, but her hand hit only air, so either she was sleeping upside down or she was in someone else’s bed. OMG. Had she and some frat boy..? Had they used protection? Had it been consensual? The idea of some troglodyte from Phi Beta Gecko having his way with her unconscious body almost made her throw up again. She had thrown up earlier last night, hadn’t she? 

Christine forced herself to take deep breaths and slow down her racing crazy train of thought. When she got anxious her mind sped up and started spinning out of control, and that wouldn’t do anybody any good. Okay, think. It’s dark, and don’t have my glasses or contacts on, which means I’m blind as a bat. No problem, I still have all my other senses.

She felt around the bed and found no other occupants, which made sense, since her discombobulated awakening should have woken up anybody with a pulse. After some more feeling around, she found a nightstand on the wrong side of the bed, assuming this was her normal bed, which it clearly wasn’t. She felt around that table, but found no eyewear, just a glass of water and a lamp.

“Lamp good, water good.” She turned on the lamp and then there was light. The lamp revealed an unusual room, not what she expected a frat boy’s lair would look like. It was small, with a fairly low ceiling and very little in the way of furnishings and decorations. On one wall there was an industrial-size golden crucifix, very ornate in a style that reminded her of Greek Byzantine art. The other walls were bare; the room was painted in a light pastel color. Besides the bed and nightstand, the only other furnishing was a plain chair. No mirror, no posters on the walls, no signs of individuality or even fashionable pretend individuality anywhere. So maybe this wasn’t a frat boy’s place.

Christine continued to take inventory. She was wearing white and pink striped pajamas, a couple sizes too large. For some reason she’d imagined herself wearing her old Hello Kitty pajamas, but that had been part of the weird-ass nightmare. Christine didn’t own any pajamas, hadn’t since she was a child; she was a t-shirt and sweatpants or undies in bed kind of girl. Which meant…

Someone else had dressed her.

Roofies. Not effing funny. I’m not a victim. This can’t be happening, can’t be happening…

Okay. Back to deep breaths. Slow down, brain. Please.

Christine tried to think things through logically. Logic and math were great tools, might as well use them. Solve the equation, figure out how things work, win valuable prizes. All right. She didn’t think striped pajamas and a big Byzantine cross fit with a date rapist profile. And she didn’t feel sore or in pain. In fact, she felt better than she ever had. Her eyesight, for example, was a lot better than it could be without glasses. She could make out every detail on the cross on the wall, for example, and normally without her glasses she would have been hard pressed to identify the object on the wall as a cross. Okay, not that bad but still, her vision hadn’t been this good since she was a child.

So somebody had roofied her, dressed her up in pajamas, and improved her eyesight? Let’s be logical and discard facts not in evidence. Pajamas, fact. Better eyesight, fact. Roofies, open question. What was the last thing she remembered before waking up here? See? Logic, step by step, cause and effect and we’ll be fit as a fiddle in two shakes of a lamb’s leg and let’s see how many metaphors and similes I can stack in one sentence…

I said slow down, brain!

She lay back on the bed – it was definitely lumpier than the one in her dorm room – and tried to remember the previous night. She’d had that strange dream the night before, which had left her feeling weirded out enough to go with Sophie to the stupid frat party. She had meant to hang out, nurse one drink, see if Jeff’s friend was a nice guy, assuming nice guys weren’t extinct, then go home and be in bed by one a.m. at the latest. She remembered getting more than a little tipsy. And then…

She had experienced the world flickering in and out of existence. She had thrown up; that memory was burned vividly into her cortex. And she had fallen through the world, or felt like she had. It had to be drugs. She had just said no to those during high school. She’d smoked pot a couple of times in college, but it mostly made her paranoid and her train of thought even more frantic, which sucked, so she’d avoided even contact highs like the plague. But there was no telling what devil’s cocktail some fraternity d-bag had slipped into her drink; what had it done to her most prized possession, her mind?

Breathe in, breathe out. What happened next?

The dream. Talking to a strange woman and at the same time being kidnapped from a hospital room, as if reality had gone split-screen on her. It had ended with her being the Chosen One or something like that, all very ponderous and important. Some more weird dreams after, stuff about darkness and pain and stuff she couldn’t remember. And then she woke up.

“That wasn’t as helpful as I hoped,” Christine said to herself. She was her own best audience, so she talked to herself quite a bit, much to the detriment of her social life. “Oh, I know something else. I really, really need to pee.”

She got up and saw that someone had left a pair of fuzzy bunny slippers on the floor. That made her feel a bit better. What kind of evil psycho would leave fuzzy bunny slippers for her? The really, really sick and twisted kind, her brain helpfully suggested. When she got out of there, Christine was going to punish her brain with a marathon run of Jersey Shore episodes.

Hello, door. Locked or not? She tried it, and the door opened. It led to a hallway, a staircase to her right, a room at the other end of the hallway, and – thank you Jesus, Buddha and Great Pumpkin – clearly marked public restrooms on her left. The whole place had a public building vibe, like a library or a community center. She ducked into the ladies’ room and did her business.

Christine looked in the restroom’s mirror after splashing some water on her face. Not much to look at. Red hair and blue-gray eyes, pale skin that burned under any sort of direct sunlight, a face that Sophie insisted was pretty but that Christine could find a dozen things wrong with in as many seconds of looking. She was skinny – slender, dummy, Sophie kept telling her – but not supermodel skinny. Some guy at the party had told her she looked quote kinda hawt unquote, but that was probably a combination of Sophie’s makeup application skills – all of said makeup was gone except for some smudged eye shadow – and Grade-A beer goggles. Neither of her ex-boyfriends had ever praised her looks except in the most cursory way and they’d both dumped her for prettier girls. Sophie was full of it. It didn’t matter. Looks didn’t last long; brains might not last forever, but they tended to keep on running a good while longer.

Christine had done up her hair for the party, but it was thoroughly messed up. It looked like someone had stuck gum in her hair and then ripped it off. Not having a brush or a comb available, she ran her hands through it, and found something stuck on it. It wasn’t gum; she managed to extricate it and found herself looking at a piece of duct tape.

The frakking dream had involved duct tape. She almost had a panic attack right then and there.

Let’s focus on the positive, shall we? I may have been duct taped at some point, but I’m not anymore. That’s good. So maybe, just maybe, I was in trouble, maybe even in distress, but I’ve been rescued. Yeah, let’s go with that, but be prepared to run and scream if anything seems amiss.

A man was waiting for her in the hallway when she came out of the bathroom.

He was an older gentleman, at least forty-something or older, with a full beard and somewhat scraggly features. And tall, six feet or close to it, which made Christine feel fairly tiny and vulnerable. He was wearing a smaller version of the cross in the bedroom over his gray turtleneck. Under the circumstances, running into him should have made her scream in terror, but she wasn’t scared of him even at first glance. Despite his size, his kind if somewhat tired eyes and deep laugh lines, visible even through the thick beard, comforted her somehow. She felt safe around him, which was weird since she rarely felt safe around strangers, especially ones that towered over her.

“Glad to see you are awake,” the man said. His voice was gruff and had a hint of an accent. Russian or Eastern European, maybe.

“Are you an Orthodox priest?” Christine asked. Not ‘Where am I?’ or ‘Who are you?’ That’s how she rolled, and she had learned to accept herself.

“Yes, I am,” he replied, unfazed by the question. “I am Father Aleksander. You are in the Church of Saint Theodosius in New York City.”

“New York? I was in Ann Arbor last night! That’s in Michigan, by the way, and it’s like a bazillion hour drive from here. Did they fly me here? I was in a hospital, am I okay? Why am I in church? I was raised Presbyterian, by the way, not Orthodox, but in any case why any church? And…“ Christine forced herself to stop talking. “Sorry. I get away from myself sometimes.”

Father Aleksander smiled. “That is quite all right. I wish I could be more helpful, but I don’t have all the answers to those questions. I will tell you what I can, and a friend of mine will tell you more. Would you like to have something to eat or drink while we talk?”

“Now that you mention it, I’m starving. And can I keep these slippers? They’re really comfy.”

The Freedom Legion

Atlantic Headquarters, March 13, 2013

Olivia O’Brien traded the burnished metal armor of Artemis for business-casual attire. Her office had a changing room with a closet whose space was filled by a combination of colorful costumes and austere business suits. That in a nutshell defined life in the Legion: a combination of circus performing, being a firefighter or soldier, and working as an executive at a large corporation. She came out of the changing room and smiled towards her assistant. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

Cecilia Ramirez was supposed to be a normal human, but her attention to detail, skill in maneuvering through bureaucratic mazes, and uncanny ability to gather and remember information from a myriad of sources bordered on the superhuman. She had been Olivia’s executive assistant for eight years, and she was invaluable as an aide – and as a friend. The petite Bolivian-American woman glanced at her E-tablet before starting. “The meeting with BC Multimedia to discuss next year’s new licensing projects has been confirmed for 2 to 3 p.m. They mostly want to talk about a new lineup for the Legion Unlimited MMO.”

Once upon a time, Buck Comics had been a small New York company best known for its Action Tales comic book series. In 1938 that comic book started to chronicle (and embellish rather radically) Ultimate’s adventures, and the rest was history. Now BC Multimedia owned multiple movie studios, publishing houses and software companies, and it lavishly marketed everything related to the Freedom Legion. The relationship had been mutually beneficial for the most part; licensing fees funded a significant percentage of the Legion’s budget. Most of the licensing process was left to the many civilian managers working for the organization, but BC’s people always wanted some face time with actual Legion members.

Olivia checked the appointment on her tablet’s calendar. “An hour sounds good, and don’t let me go over it, please.” BC’s people tended to ramble on if left unchecked. Better to give them a tight deadline. She enjoyed talking to them for the most part – even after becoming a large corporation, BC’s management was still dominated by actual fans of the Legion – but she only had a limited amount of time to give them. She reminded herself to change into her costume for that meeting, just to make them happy.

“Of course. Your presence has been requested a 3:30 pm at the Gymnasium. General sparring with the advanced students. .”

“Good, I could use the workout.” Even better, she could keep the costume for the sparring session.

The sparring session would be both an outlet to release some pent-up energy and an opportunity to watch some potential Legionnaires. There were several promising new students she wanted to see in action before considering their candidacy to the Legion. In addition to serving as the Legion’s headquarters on the Western Hemisphere, the island also hosted the Freedom Institute. The Institute was the premiere Neolympian training school, where young parahumans from all around the world could learn to control and refine their abilities, as well as study the ethics and responsibilities involved in being one of those select few. Most students blessedly took their lessons to heart and became useful and productive members of society. A large percentage of them ended up becoming full-time or reserve members of the Legion.

Thinking about the Institute reminded Olivia of the press conference that morning and the accusations Fowler had leveled towards the legion. ‘Sensitivity training’ indeed! She didn’t know what kind of game that little bastard Fowler was playing. The comment about Linda leaving John had been particularly malicious. Yes, there had been a brief separation, but Linda Lamar had never been afraid of her husband. If anything Ultimate – John – had been the one in fear, always worried about keeping his wife safe. The accusation had been deliberately provocative. It was almost as if Fowler had wanted Ultimate to attack him.

What worried Olivia was that during Fowler’s diatribe she had actually thought John was going to react violently. She had known her friend long enough to read his body language and to see the minute tension in his shoulders and face that indicated he was about to do something. If she hadn’t intervened and shut Fowler up, she didn’t know what might have happened. A man who had spent the better part of a century learning to control his powers and his temper couldn’t be so easily provoked, could he? When you added that morning’s incident to all the strangeness of the previous month, it was clear that something was very wrong.

Olivia realized Cecilia was waiting for her to stop woolgathering – her assistant was quite adept at sensing what was going through Olivia’s mind. “Sorry,” Olivia said. “I’m a bit worried about the incident with Ultimate this morning.”

“Yes, the whole thing smells like a skunk to me,” Cecilia said; she’d clearly been giving the matter some thought as well. “I took the liberty of doing some research on the skunk in question, as a matter of fact. Fowler’s blog was just picked by GNN, in a fairly lucrative deal for Fowler.”

“That explains what the man was doing on the island. It might even explain the slant of the questions,” Olivia said ruefully. The Global News Network and its founder Thaddeus Twist were not fans of Neolympians in general and the Freedom Legion in particular. Twist’s media empire never missed an opportunity to point out the real, potential and imaginary problems the world’s population of parahumans represented. Twist was an otherwise principled and progressive person, but his obsession with the evil Neos did or could do was a constant annoyance, not least because the man’s paranoia was not wholly unfounded. “Fowler has become part of the vast anti-Neo conspiracy, then,” Olivia said.

Cecilia’s eyes twinkled with amusement. ‘Vast Neo Conspiracy’ had become a common catchphrase among certain circles. The fact that some Neos did engage in all manner of Byzantine plots did not help, of course. “Aren’t conspiracies supposed to be secret?” has assistant replied. “Twist doesn’t really try to hide his misgivings about parahumanity.”

“No, he doesn’t. The sad thing is, I agree with many of his concerns,” Olivia admitted. “That’s one of the reasons we established the Freedom Institute, to help people with powers become responsible citizens.”

“You don’t have to convince me, Olivia,” Cecilia said with a smile before continuing in a more serious tone. “It was fortunate that Fowler picked on Ultimate instead of one of our more… volatile members. I shudder to think how Berserker would have reacted if provoked in that manner.”

“Yes,” Olivia said blandly. Cecilia didn’t know Ultimate very well. Olivia, on the other hand, knew how angry her friend and mentor had been. It worried her a great deal.

She had known John Clarke for her entire adult life. The first time she saw him she had been plain Olivia O’Brien, high school senior from Baltimore, in the long-gone year 1963. Her parents had taken her to attend the March on Washington that celebrated the passage of the Civil Rights Act earlier that year. As the child of a mixed couple, Olivia knew the racial issues dividing the country all too well. Even on the train to D.C. she had seen the ugly stares her parents attracted everywhere they went. That day she hadn’t been particularly upset by the sidelong looks, however. For one, she and her parents were not alone; she had never seen so many people of color together on a train before. More importantly, she felt like part of history in the making.

Reverend King had given his immortal speech that day. Janus also had been there, in his colorful Navy blue and gold costume, his half-mask doing little to conceal his race. His own speech had been cool and dispassionate, and Olivia had forgotten most of what he said, but she and the crowd around her had cheered him wildly nonetheless. Everybody knew Janus had quietly convinced several Southern leaders to change some long-standing policies in their localities. Rumor was some of the more radical white supremacists had disappeared without a trace at around the same time. Olivia didn’t think Janus would stoop to that kind of direct action, but she wasn’t sure. She cheered him enthusiastically nonetheless. Janus had been the first black superhero, the man who had won the war in the Pacific and who had forced the likes of MacArthur and Halsey to dance to his tune by the sheer force of his personality as much as by his raw power. His speech lacked Reverend King’s stirring power, but his presence at the march had meant a great deal.

A hush came over the crowd as Janus finished his speech and people noticed Ultimate flying over the gathering. The silver and red costume was unmistakable. Ultimate’s deeds in the European front had been glorified far more than Janus’ actions in the Pacific; there were rumors that the two Legionnaires were rivals. Would the Invincible Man try to suppress or intimidate the marcher’s gathering? The hero had eschewed politics since the Freedom Legion had become an international organization, but his presence over the gathered crowd seemed ominous.

Ultimate had landed next to Reverend King and shaken his hand, and embraced Janus in a brotherly display of affection. He had remained with King and Janus the rest of the day, saying nothing, respectfully standing behind the speakers of the day, but making clear where his sympathies lay. Plenty of people had bemoaned Ultimate’s appearance, her parents’ included. They had felt it had been a patronizing gesture, and Olivia could see their point. The teenage she had been only saw the world’s greatest hero standing up for what was right, however.

Olivia had never been so proud to be an American.

Things had changed quickly after that day, and not for the better. The Chinese Empire had started a war the next year, only weeks after President Kennedy finalized a major troop withdrawal from the Republic of China with the claim that it was ‘time to glean the dividends of peace.‘ As the US and the UN rushed troops back into Asia, that dumb blonde movie star had gone public with the story of her affair with the President. There were accusations that both the war and the scandal were payback for Kennedy’s support for the Civil Rights Act and its equally controversial counterpart, the Parahuman Registration Act. Southerners and Neolympians had allegedly joined forces to destroy the President.

Amidst the controversy, on a cloudy day in May of 1964, Olivia had been seized by convulsions on her way home from school and had collapsed unconscious. When she awoke she realized she had grown three inches in height and become a superhuman being. Her parents’ support for the Parahuman Registration Act had wavered when it was time for them to send their darling daughter off to a government facility to have her powers tested and recorded, but in the end Olivia herself had decided to do the right thing.

It was there that she had met Ultimate for the second time, or the first if you discounted that glimpse of him floating down from the sky. He had been one of her teachers, a kind and gentle man who had shown her how to control her powers, and more importantly how to accept who and what she was. Over the decades, as their roles changed from teacher and pupil to friends and equals, they had become close. They had stood side by side through battles and wars, weddings and funerals. He had cried on her shoulder the day his wife died. For a while, Olivia had feared grief would do to him what no weapon or parahuman power had, but John had recovered and moved on. Or so she had thought.

Olivia looked at Cecilia. She knew she could trust her friend implicitly, and she needed to tell somebody. She wished she could tell Larry, but confiding in her husband was no longer a possibility. “I first started noticing something wrong with John about a year ago,” she finally said. “It started out with little things. Absent-mindedness. Aloofness and coldness. Memory lapses.” She could not bring herself to mention the time a few weeks ago when he had called her by his dead wife’s name. It had been heart-breaking, embarrassing and disturbing at the same time. “In the last few weeks they’ve gotten a lot worse.”

“You are saying that Ultimate may be having some sort of breakdown.” Cecilia said, looking concerned.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Olivia admitted.

‘Neo Psychosis’ was a pop psychology term, a catch-all phrase that covered a multitude of problems. The fact remained that Neolympians had a higher incidence of psychological problems than normal humans. Some were the obvious result of being granted superhuman abilities, of course. The mere realization one had become an immortal being with godlike powers could unhinge many minds. Other problems were more subtle and included a variety of personality disorders: an addiction to dangerous thrills, sociopathic and narcissistic tendencies, or even megalomania. For the better part of a century, Ultimate’s presence had acted as a counterexample, showing the world a compassionate and steady person who retained those qualities despite being one of the most powerful beings on the planet. If he fell, what hope was there for the rest of parahumanity?

A slight tremor shook the building just as she was about to tell Cecilia more about her worries. In the distance, Olivia heard the unmistakable sound of explosions. What was going on?

“What’s that?” Cecilia asked, looking out the window behind Olivia.

Olivia swiveled around on her chair just in time to see fire and smoke erupt from the old Freedom Tower, now turned into a museum. “No!” The sky was full of missiles plunging down on their final trajectories. Pillars of smoke in the distance revealed the source of the explosions she had heard. Instincts honed by decades of combat took over. She was already moving and creating a flaming shield when the first cruise missile hit her office window.

The reinforced glass only served to detonate the high-explosive warhead and provide shrapnel for the fiery explosion. The shockwave washed over her, but she had planted her feet and willed herself not to be moved, and she remained standing. She glanced back. Cecilia had been partially shielded from the explosion and the shrapnel by Olivia’s shield, but the petite woman had still been knocked down and was lying semi-conscious on the office floor.

More missiles were coming in. Olivia felt the building shake noticeably as it was struck somewhere below her, and saw more missiles flying directly at her. She created and flung a flame spear at the speed of thought, and detonated one of the missiles a hundred yards away. The other two struck, one exploding directly on her shield, and the heavy warhead was powerful enough to knock her back and stun her for a couple of seconds. Parts of the ceiling collapsed over her

When she recovered, Olivia found herself half buried under fallen masonry. Her head was ringing, but her shield had blunted most of the damage and her superhuman physique had weathered the rest. She could hear other explosions. The building shook alarmingly beneath her.

Olivia lifted a reinforced metal beam off her and staggered to her feet, shrugging off pieces of concrete and rebar that would have crushed a normal human being. The office was a raging inferno. There was no sign of Cecilia or any of the other dozen people that worked in her office. 

“Cecilia!” she yelled, but her voice was lost in the conflagration and the new explosions. This couldn’t be happening! Freedom Island was one of the most highly protected sites on Earth!

The floor gave way, and Olivia fell as the building collapsed around her.

Chapter Four

Face-Off

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

I leaned back on the subway car seat and thought deep thoughts.

I was wearing the face of one of my old high school teachers so I wouldn’t scare the tourists. Mr. Grover had been a mean-looking son of a bitch, and his face fit my mood and convinced people around me to respect my space. My usual costume is a leather jacket (with discreet Hyper-Kevlar inserts), jeans and combat boots, so people only recognize me when I go faceless. While wearing a borrowed face I was just another disgruntled New Yorker.

Yeah, I know. I may be one of the top vigilantes in the Big Apple, but I usually take the subway to get where I’m going. I had dumped Giamatti’s car somewhere in the Bronx, just in case the bad guys had a way to track it other than the GPS device I had disabled before driving off with it. By now Giamatti’s Tucker Raptor was probably being stripped for parts at some chop shop, and I was back to using my usual mode of transportation. My other method of travel, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, was fine for short trips but not the best way to get around for anything involving more than a few blocks. When I really needed a car, I would steal it: pimps had the best wheels and they rarely called the cops, so they were my go-to people when I wanted a ride. At the moment, the train suited me fine. It gave me time to think.

This job was getting weirder and weirder. Cassandra had sent me off to check on the girl while she figured out the next step. If Christine was up and about I was supposed to learn as much as possible from her while I waited for Cassandra to get in touch with further instructions. My immediate worry was thinking of ways to keep the ex-hostage from contacting the authorities. While I traveled from the East Village to the Bronx and back, she might well have woken up and demanded to be let go. Father Alex wouldn’t keep her against her will, and neither would I, for that matter. My only hope would be to convince her it was in her best interests to stay under wraps while we figured who had ordered the kidnapping and why. Which was something that Cassandra would usually know by now, but with the astral plane or whatever being fucked up, we were flying blind. I was not happy.

I got off the subway and headed for Saint Theodosius. If the girl was awake, I’d offer to buy her lunch and see if I could persuade her to hang around. Talking to somebody I hadn’t beaten up or otherwise put the fear of God into wasn’t my specialty, except when I had a fake face and identity on. Maybe that was the way to go. Pretend to be an undercover cop or something like that. I lie to people all the time, but the idea of deceiving an abduction victim didn’t sit well with me. I’d play it by ear and see what happened.

I went to the back entrance of the Church. The door was open, as usual. I could hear Father Aleksander’s voice from the kitchen, so I headed there. He was talking to a woman. The damsel in distress must have woken up, then, and at least it didn’t sound like she was going to run right away. I walked into the kitchen, still undecided about what to say. I was leaning toward just laying my cards on the table and telling her everything.

Father Aleksander and the girl were sitting by the kitchen table while an inane morning show played on the flat screen TV hanging on the wall. The girl, wearing silly striped pajamas and a bathrobe a few sizes too large for her, was spooning up the last remains of a bowl of soup – borscht by the smell of it. A wrist-comm lay on the table next to her; hopefully she hadn’t used it to call the police.

“Hello,” I said; not much of an entrance line, but my normal entrance line is ‘Freeze, motherfuckers!’ and that really didn’t fit the setting.

“Ah, there you are,” Father Aleksander said amiably. He always knew it was me, no matter what face I had on. “Christine, this is your rescuer, the Faceless Vigilante.” Okay, we were going for all the truth and nothing but.

The girl looked at me, and I remembered I was still wearing Mr. Grover’s face, which made me look about fifteen years older than I really was, and not a sight for sore eyes at any age. But when her eyes met mine, I forgot about my face. I felt like she was looking through my fake face – through all the faces I could wear. It was like the first time I met Cassandra. This girl – Christine, her name was Christine – could see me.

Before I could start to process that first impression, Christine all but leaped from her seat. Next thing I knew she was hugging me like I was her long-lost brother or something.

I usually don’t react well when people make sudden moves. I react even worse when people invade my personal space and touch me uninvited. And I most definitely react very badly when someone hugs me without warning. Typical reactions to any of the above range from shoves to harsh language. If I’m in a pissy mood, gunfire isn’t out of the question.

Instead, I let her hug me. Nobody had hugged me like that since my childhood days with my mother, not even Aleksander when he got sentimentally drunk. It felt pretty good. Not that I would admit it to save my life. I’m fucking Face-Off. I don’t do affectionate.

“Thank you for saving me,” Christine said, still clutching me tightly.

“Yeah, sure, no problem,” I said awkwardly and lightly patted her back. I wanted to hug her in return, but I couldn’t muster the courage to do it, tough guy that I was. Especially not in front of Father Aleksander, whose face seemed to be struggling between expressions of amazement and delight. A second later he looked concerned, but he couldn’t say anything because Christine was talking at a few miles a minute.

“Also, thank you for taking me here, Father Aleksander is the nicest guy even if he’s not Presbyterian, which is okay. I still don’t understand what’s going on, but thank you anyway.” She let go of me and stepped back, still talking. “But I’m sure we can figure it out and holy crap where is your face.”

I realized I had let go of Mr. Grover’s features when Christine hugged me. That happens sometimes when I’m startled or lose concentration, both of which had happened this time. No wonder Father Alex had looked concerned. Christine fell silent for a whole second, and I braced myself for the shrieking that was the usual reaction when people caught me being myself. Instead, she stepped close to me. “That’s incredible! Is that why they call you the Faceless Vigilante?”

“Well, they mostly call me Face-Off, but yeah,” I said.

“Like that old movie with John Travolta and Nick Cage?”

“Uu, I don’t remember that movie. And I know who Nicholas Cage is, but John Travolta? You mean Joseph Travolta?” This was turning into the strangest conversation in my life.

“No biggie. Wow, your voice sounds just like before, but you have no mouth. No anything!” She stepped closer, her hands reaching for my head. “May I?”

Typically, people who reach for my face end up with broken fingers, but I found myself saying “Sure.” Mind control, it must be some form of mind control.

Christine gently touched my un-face. Her fingers ran down the smooth surface, pausing near the area where my eyes should be. “Does that bother you?”

“No. It’s as if I was wearing goggles. I can see you touching the surface, but it doesn’t feel as if you were actually touching my eyeballs,” I said.

“That’s amazing. It feels like touching the back of a skull, but on the front. Has someone done an X-ray of your head? And you can change face shapes, which means you must change your bone structure. We’d have to run an X-ray of your head before and after a shape change. Or an MRI would be better. Holy mother of crap, this is the awesomest thing I’ve seen!” She was smiling like a kid at a candy store, but all of a sudden she sobered up. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound like you’re a lab rat or something.”

“Oh, ah, it’s okay,” I said lamely. I wasn’t mad at her. I didn’t know what I was feeling, other than shell-shocked. I was supposed to be interrogating her, and she was ready to conduct a full parahuman power study on my no-face. Why wasn’t she scared of me?

“How can you do that?” she asked me, and there wasn’t a trace of fear or disgust in her voice, just open, almost innocent curiosity. “How is it even possible?”

“How can some people fly or pick up tanks? I’m a Neo, of course.”

“Neo? Like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix movies? ‘Take the red pill’ Neo?”

More movies I’d never heard of. And I loved going to the movies, usually on weekdays during the day, when I could sit quietly in a mostly empty theater. Cassandra’s words came back to me. Christine was some sort of alien, supposedly. Except I was beginning to realize she wasn’t from another planet, not exactly.

“I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard of that movie, either. Neo is short for Neolympian.”

“Okay, now it’s my turn to never have heard of something,” Christine said.

Definitely not from around here. This was going to be interesting. “Neolympians? Parahumans? Superheroes?” 

“Superheroes?”

“And super-villains, but most people just prefer to call us Neos.”

“I’m going to sit down now,” Christine said and went and did it. She was clearly upset, and seeing her like that was upsetting me, which again wasn’t like me at all. Other people’s problems don’t upset me, except for the urge to smack down the people responsible. Christine was looking at the wrist-comm on the table as if it was going to jump up and bite her. “Do you know what this is?” she asked, pointing at it.

“The wrist-comm? It’s a wrist-comm. Well, a wrist-comp officially, since you can surf the web with it and write e-mails, but everybody still calls them wrist-comms.” I said. One of the most common personal items since the 1970s, and she was looking at it like it was Smith Industries’ newest wonder gadget.

“Not a cell phone?”

I had a mental image of a phone inside a prison cell, and almost laughed, but Christine wasn’t laughing. “I don’t know what a cell phone is,” I said.

“Oh, this is not good at all,” Christine muttered.

Father Aleksander turned the TV up, interrupting the conversation before I had the chance to break the news to her. Not that I really knew how I was going to do that. Maybe I could say something like ‘Welcome to Wonderland.’

“I’m sorry, but something is happening,” Father Alex said before I could try the Wonderland line. Sure enough, Special Report banners were flashing and a news anchor had shown up and replaced the morning show.

Christine and I stopped talking and watched history being made.

The Freedom Legion

Atlantic Headquarters, March 13, 2013

The fastest man in the world was a day late and a dollar short.

The attack caught Larry Graham with his pants down, literally. When the first wave of missiles struck, Larry was busy cheating on his wife with a young Legion recruit in an out-of-the-way hiding spot. It was the worst possible time and place.

Even as he lay on his back while Dawn Zhang – code name Dawn Windstorm – rode him like a bronco, Larry didn’t think of himself as a bad guy. Weak and contemptible, yes, but not a bad guy. He had loved Olivia O'Brien passionately for over four decades, and he still loved her, just not the way a husband was supposed to love his wife. Larry had been raised to mean the words ‘until death do us part.’ “Now and forever,” he’d whispered to Olivia just before kissing her on their wedding night.

What he hadn’t counted on was how long forever would turn out to be.

Back when he’d been regular Joe College Larry at Boston U, he read a great deal about the Greek gods of mythology. He’d done so partly because Greek mythology had been all the rage after the rise of Neolympians, and partly because he’d picked up Greek as his language elective, and a lot of what the Greeks had written down involved their whimsical and oft malicious deities. The relationship between Zeus and Hera particularly fascinated him. Zeus just couldn’t keep his hands – and the rest of his anatomy – to himself. He just ended up with one dame after another – human or Olympian, married or a virgin, it was all grist for the mill to the horny bastard. Zeus was the ultimate dirty old man. Even though the tales amused Larry greatly, he had never figured out why Zeus did what he did. Hera must have been the ultimate ball and chain to drive her hubby to such extremes.

On his sophomore year in college, he went from reading about gods to becoming one. He was walking to his next class when he saw an old jalopy about to run over a woman crossing the street, well over a block away. He ran the intervening distance in the blink of an eye and got her out of the way just in time. A new hero was born that day. Larry tried to use Hermes as his code name, but some idiot newsie stuck him with the moniker Swift, and Swift he became.

Larry kept his identity a secret at first. It was 1940 and the war was in full swing, and even with the US remaining neutral, a few incautious New Olympians had been murdered, either by foreign agents or local super-criminals. He wore a mask and made sure Larry Graham remained well away from the limelight. While wearing the mask and costume, however, Swift became a hit with the ladies. It turned out that gods did get all the girls. Larry cut a swath through Beantown’s best and brightest, loving every minute of it. He only slowed down when he joined the Freedom Legion shortly after Pearl Harbor, and that only because Doc Slaughter gave him a pointed talk about the image the Legion had to maintain.

 Larry had been more discreet while he went to war, but even as he helped the Allies march through France, the Low Countries and Germany he rarely had to sleep alone. After the Legion became an international organization, he revealed his identity to the world, and Larry Graham became a celebrity. He dated movie stars and fashion models. He finally understood where Zeus was coming from.

He had thought he understood, at least. When Olivia came around, his world view turned upside down. They met in another continent, another war. Olivia was one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen, with cafe au lait skin, deep emerald eyes and a dazzling smile that turned ladies’ man Larry into a fool for love. Her exotic looks, her bravery and strength, the hidden vulnerability beneath, they had swept him off his feet. He’d turned his back on twenty-odd years as a happy bachelor, wooed her – yes, at first he had only thought about getting in her pants, but that had changed quickly – and eventually won her heart. In the midst of the death and destruction of the First Asian War, he made her his bride. He had never been happier.

For a while.

Forever was such a long time.

A year had become ten, had become twenty. On their twentieth anniversary, she looked as beautiful as ever. Nothing had changed. Nothing had fucking changed at all. That is, nothing except how he felt.

Little things grew and became big things. Habits and mannerisms that once had been charming became annoying. He knew what she would say or do in almost every situation, and vice versa. Jokes that had made her laugh now only brought about tolerant smiles or annoyed grimaces. They got on each other’s nerves. She wanted to talk about their problems. He most definitely didn’t.

It wasn’t all bad, of course. Rome didn’t collapse in one day. Their work in the Legion had often kept them apart for weeks or even months at a time, and their reunions had been sweet. Their love would spark and rekindle, and things would once again be well. For a while. For some time. For a week or a month, or even a whole year.

But not forever.

Forever. The word became hateful. As twenty years together became thirty, Larry had fully understood Zeus’ plight. Even if Hera had been the sweetest, most beautiful woman in the world, he would have gotten sick of her, given enough time. Immortals could not be monogamous, he decided. At least Larry couldn’t be monogamous, not for longer than a lengthy prison term he couldn’t. He never could figure out how John Clarke managed to stay faithful to his woman. That smug, self-righteous stick in the mud never strayed; Larry had watched him carefully over the years, sure his fidelity was an act, and had found nothing. He even arranged a couple of blatant opportunities for John, ‘chance‘ encounters with very interested women, to no avail. Ultimate seemed to be perfectly happy with his rapidly aging vanilla wife. Larry envied John bitterly for that, and despised him as much as he despised himself. Unlike John, he hadn’t been able to resist when opportunities presented themselves.

It had started slowly, in fits and starts. A night with a secret agent in Minsk during a covert operation, followed by months of guilt and, perversely enough, a renewed passion for Olivia, which, as always, did not last. Discreet call girls while on station in Beijing. A particularly wild fling with Chastity Baal – and boy, didn’t that almost let the cat out of the bag! And many more. Larry always regretted the affairs, always came crawling back to Olivia. She never suspected anything, or if she did, she kept her suspicions to herself. Of late, Larry had come to resent that. Why didn’t she know something was wrong?

The one-night stands and short-lived affairs had become a habit after a while. Larry had thought about coming clean and taking things to their logical conclusion. That was when he discovered another aspect of the tragedy of Zeus. The marriage, flawed and hollow as it was, had become part of his identity. He could not conceive of not being married to Olivia. The thought of their parting ways simply terrified him. That realization had led to almost a year of fidelity.

On the eleventh month, Dawn Zhang had joined the Freedom Legion and Larry’s downfall had begun.

Dawn was twenty-two, of mixed Chinese and European ancestry, tall and slender and utterly beautiful. Her hair had turned platinum blond the day her ability to control and create winds manifested itself. Her smile melted Larry’s heart. Feelings he had not experienced since the beginning of his relationship with Olivia came back with a  vengeance.

It was a complete disaster. She was a junior member of the Legion. He was one of her instructors, in a position of power over her, which made fraternization a clear violation of the Legion’s by-laws. She was in her early twenties and he had just celebrated his ninety-first birthday. They had nothing in common; the music she listened to was excruciating noise to him, and his cultural background was prehistoric twaddle to her. And yet his old jokes had made her laugh, possibly because they were so old she’d never heard of them. And Dawn’s initial hero worship had turned into friendship and mutual attraction. A late night's conversation had ended with a kiss. Things had snowballed quickly after that.

Having an affair in the days of goggle-cams and wrist-comps was hard enough. Having an affair in the Atlantic Headquarters of the Freedom Legion, one of the most heavily guarded and watched facilities on the planet, was a heroic undertaking. Rank hath its privileges, fortunately, and Larry was a Founder, with access to the highest level codes and overrides. They had found secret times and places to be together, and the sneakiness of it all had only added spice to the whole thing.

Larry and Dawn had been in the throes of passion – or, as Dawn put it, screwing like two minks in heat – in a little-used subterranean hangar where several obsolete Legion aircraft gathered dust before being decommissioned. The hangar was deep enough underground and far enough away from the central headquarters that neither of them even noticed the first few explosions. It was only when the hangar lights dimmed and were replaced by red emergency lights that Larry realized something was wrong. Dawn paused her pounding for a second, and Larry grabbed her, got on top and finished what they had started. Whatever was happening topside, some things just couldn’t be interrupted.

Larry’s post-coital aftermath was normally pleasant and lazy. Now as sex faded away dread filled him. The hangar shook noticeably.

“We’re under attack!” Dawn shouted needlessly as she groped around for her uniform. Larry did not waste his breath while he poured himself into his iconic blue and yellow jumpsuit. Comic book mythology to the contrary, he was only the fastest man in the world when he ran; getting dressed took as long for him as for any highly agile Neo. In other words, it was a matter of seconds, but not the blink of an eye.

He didn’t wait for Dawn. The calculating part of his mind that was always on, even in times of passion or stress, figured that it would be best if they joined the action separately. They were fifty feet underground but luckily even this mostly mothballed hangar had fast-deployment hydraulic catapults. He stepped into a cylindrical chamber and was launched up like a cannonball. He emerged from the hangar already moving at a good fifty miles an hour.

When his feet hit the ground, he raised that speed tenfold in one second.

Swift’s power had two main components. First, he created a frictionless force field around him that made him nearly invulnerable in addition to reducing air drag. To achieve higher speeds, the force field changed and he became intangible, no longer subject to friction and able to move at five or six times the speed of sound without unleashing a devastating sonic boom in his wake. All those powers only worked when he ran or spun in place, for reasons nobody had been able to fathom. The mechanisms behind his abilities remained a mystery. A liberal arts major, Larry had never been much for the hard sciences, and he didn’t care much about how his powers worked.

All he cared about was his speed, and all the tricks he could play with it.

Inside the field, the world slowed to a crawl. A cruise missile floated lazily overhead. Larry altered his trajectory and he shot up into the air, intercepting the missile and becoming solid just as he met his target, obliterating it. As he emerged from the explosion, he turned insubstantial again and ran through the air until he caught another missile and destroyed it. Neither explosion made an impression on him; he was back on the ground a fraction of a second later. Unfortunately those had been the only missiles within his reach, and too many of them had already struck their targets.

Where the Freedom Building had once stood there was nothing but a billowing cloud of dust and smoke.

Olivia had been there. He had memorized her schedule, the better to plan his date with Dawn.

Larry screamed his wife’s name and charged into the burning ruin.

Christine Dark

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

The TV report convinced Christine she wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

Father Aleksander had served her some truly excellent borsch. While she devoured it, he explained that she had been found unconscious in Central Park two nights ago and taken to New York-Presbyterian Hospital. There, he continued as she slurped on, some Mafia guys had abducted her. An associate of Father Aleksander had rescued her from her captors and brought her to the church, where a parishioner who happened to be a nurse had checked her out and dressed her in the funky pajamas. Father Alex called her rescuer the Faceless Vigilante, which sounded rather silly, but he had said the name very seriously.

The account matched her memories of the dream much too closely; that almost freaked her out all over again. Somehow she managed to keep her cool. Father Aleksander’s friendly demeanor helped calm her down, or maybe his borsch’s secret ingredient was a generous helping of Xanax. She was scared, but the fear wasn’t overwhelming her, and that was so unlike her it added an extra scary layer to the whole thing. It was so weird she had to set it aside for the moment. Christine concentrated on eating and listening and tried not to dwell on anything right away.

Things got even weirder when she asked to borrow a phone.

“You can use my wrist-comm,” Aleksander said. He unstrapped a weird cell phone from his wrist and handed it to her. Okay, so maybe that’s what they called them in the Ukraine or whatever.

The phone wasn’t like any mobile device Christine had seen, and she had changed plans on a nearly seasonal basis since age sixteen; between her and Sophie they had tried everything under the sun, including all the I-stuff Apple gleefully pushed out every year. The device she was holding was clearly meant to be worn strapped on your wrist, like an old-school wristwatch. It was bigger than your typical smart phone, and it had a flip cover over a screen that lit up, with the date and time on the top, a row of icons off to one side, and a colorful background picture of an ancient church. It had a keyboard and the screen was touch-sensitive; the whole thing was fairly user-friendly, although not quite like anything else she had ever used before.

Christine decided to try Sophie’s number first, to try and find out what the frak had happened the night of the party. It was also one of the only three numbers she had memorized, the other two being her own and her mother’s. She really didn’t want to call Mom, not until she figured out what was going on.

“I’m sorry,” the wrist-phone or comm or whatever said in a pleasant female voice. “Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please make sure to enumerate the area code and the eight digit number you are trying to reach.”

Eight digit number? Christine typed the number again – and got the same message. She tried to punch a 1 before the area code to make it to eleven digits, and she got a slightly different message that pretty much said the same thing. “I don’t think the phone is working,” she said.

“Are you sure? It seems to be in working order.”

“Phone numbers are seven digits long,” Christine said. “With the area code, that makes ten.”

Father Aleksander looked confused. “That’s quite wrong, I’m sorry to say. Phone numbers are eight digits long, eleven with the area code.”

Christine gently put the wrist-phone thingy down and had some more some soup while she tried to think things through.

Explanation Number One: The good Father was out of his freaking gourd, kind eyes or not, and he’d probably put that useless talking wrist thingy together with a pieces of discarded I-Phones and baling wire. She wasn’t in New York, she was probably in some abandoned church in Michigan, and any second now Aleksander and the Faceless Vigilante, who probably was a leather-clad gimp living in a steamer trunk in the next room, would grab her and do unspeakable things while they sang a jaunty song from Oklahoma.

Explanation Number Two: Christine’s brain had been scrambled by some roofie combo last night, and she’d apparently forgotten a few facts of life, such as phone numbers having one more digit than she remembered and that the latest mobile devices had wrist straps. The damage was probably permanent and she’d spend the rest of her life painting pleasant watercolors in some innocuously-named institution with beautiful lawns and tall walls where they played soothing Enya tunes in the background.

Explanation Number Three: This was all a dream, and she was in a hospital, or lying unconscious on the frat house lawn, dreaming of Ukrainian Orthodox priests and wrist-comms and cabbage and kings. She would either wake up eventually, or check Explanation Two, except add more Enya, eliminate watercolor painting or any activity and, for an added bonus, orderlies rolling over her comatose body checking for bedsores every other week. With her luck one of the orderlies would be called Buck and he’d be there to… you know.

There was an Explanation Number Four, but she didn’t want to go there. Might as well enjoy the borsch and watch the boob tube, which was playing Live! With Regis and Betsy, which was weird because Regis had retired a while back and weirder still because there was no sign of Kelly Ripa or even Kathy Lee anywhere and she had no clue who Betsy was. Whatever she did, she would not explore Explanation Number Four, because that way lay madness.

The arrival of the Faceless Vigilante had stopped her brain from shooting up into the stratosphere for a whole three seconds or so. One look at him and she’d known several facts with total conviction: she could trust him with her life, he wasn’t nearly as old as he looked, and she was going to hug him like his name was Teddy and it was stuffed bear season. Which led to discovering his real face was impossibly featureless. Which should have freaked the frak out of her, but somehow didn’t. The crazy is strong with this one, this one being me. Either she had quietly flipped out or her weirdness threshold had been exceeded to the point that her her freak-out engine was out of gas. Explanation One was discarded, which left Explanations Two or Three, but Four was beginning to poke its crazy little head from the corner of her mind she had consigned it to. People like Face-Off didn’t exist in her world. Which meant…

The news report came in, and that did the trick. Especially when they switched to a live report from the observation deck of the World Trade Center. The fact that the live report also showed several people in colorful costumes flying through the air in the best comic book tradition was only icing on the crazy cake.

Explanation Four: She was in a different world, where superheroes were real and Keanu Reeves wasn’t, where John Travolta was named Joseph, and people wore their cell phones on their wrists like people used to do with watches. Where Faceless Vigilantes could be literally faceless. Among God only knew how many other different things.

Face-Off and Father Aleksander watched the news intently until they went to a commercial break. For Pan Am Airlines. Which Christine only recognized from a short-lived TV show about an airline that no longer existed. In her world. No longer existed in her world. She had the sickening realization she was going to be using those words a lot. Her world. She wasn’t in her world anymore.

“Guys?” They turned to her. “My brain is about to explode. I don’t normally do this before noon. Or at all. But could I have something alcoholic in a glass? Or an IV bag, I’m not picky. Pretty please?”

Chapter Five

The Freedom Legion

Atlantic Headquarters, March 13, 2013

Kenneth Slaughter rushed towards the sound of the guns.

Off to his left, both the Freedom Tower and the Freedom Building were collapsing under multiple missile impacts. Up ahead, dozens of aerial platforms moved in a precise death dance, firing missiles from external launchers and maneuvering off to let following waves move into position for their own strikes. The swarm of projectiles reached out towards the still-standing buildings or targeted some of the running or flying individuals trying to defend the island. The attack was all beautifully coordinated, human ingenuity used for efficient death dealing.

The paradox had never been lost on Kenneth. He had become intimately aware of it in 1917, when he had been a terrified young man forcing himself to climb up a trench wall and charge towards massed machine guns and artillery, exquisitely crafted tools designed for the single purpose of ending life.

Even worse, he had learned he himself was quite capable of murder.

One night Kenneth had been in a trench raid that ended disastrously, flares dispelling the darkness, machine guns mowing down the rest of his squad. He had found himself alone and surrounded by enemies. He tried to surrender but an angry and terrified soldier, no younger than he was, had stabbed him with a bayonet. The sudden agony and the outraged sense of betrayal had overwhelmed Kenneth. The world had dissolved into a red haze. When he regained his senses, he was the only living thing in the trench, surrounded by the bloody remains of twenty-three men he had slaughtered in his frenzied state. The incident had terrified him. He had resolved to forever bury his inner beast under a rational, emotionless façade. More importantly, he had devoted his life to seeking some form of redemption.

Over the ensuing decades, Kenneth had applied his superhuman talents toward finding a way to bring true peace to humanity. He had finally accepted that killing was an inherent part of the human condition, impossible to remove without destroying humanity itself. Since then, he had done his best to minimize the evil that men would invariably do.

The attack had found him in his underground lab, where he had been performing a routine review of the sixteen projects he was currently overseeing. Like all Genius-Type Neolympians, Kenneth was given to flashes of intuition that allowed him to envision amazing breakthroughs in a variety of scientific fields. His projects ran the gamut from high-energy physics to biotechnology. The development process was the main obstacle for Neolympians, who all tended to suffer from the scientific equivalent of short attention spans. Kenneth had long learned to pass on his ideas to teams of normal but patient scientists and engineers who would proceed to bring his visions to fruition. He still needed to periodically revisit the ongoing projects to make sure his subalterns didn’t miss some important detail that could derail a project.

The reason Genius-Types could produce so many breakthroughs in different fields was not a product of intelligence or education, Kenneth had concluded after years of observing his own talents. It was a psychic ability to identify the right answer without having to resort to the game of trial and error that normal scientists had to play. Furthermore, many Neolympian inventions were really not actual technological developments but artifacts created by the same mysterious force that gave parahumans their powers. Those creations could not be duplicated or mass-produced, and telling the two kinds of inventions apart often took a great deal of work.

To Kenneth’s eternal regret, all the technological wonders and miraculous creations of the Neolympian era had not stopped murder. If anything, they had made killing easier than ever before.

The evidence was literally exploding all around him.

As he emerged from the underground laboratory, Kenneth activated his own signature artifact, the Brass Man suit that had earned him his second code name. In the Thirties, he had been Doc Slaughter, one of the mystery men who battled evil during the chaotic years of the Great Depression. Under that name he had helped found the Freedom Legion during World War Two. A generation later, he developed his suit of powered armor, and the press dubbed him Brass Man and treated him almost as a completely separate persona. In some ways, the distinction was correct. His personality underwent some changes when he was behind the armor suit, becoming even more dispassionate and machine-like. It probably was a coping mechanism, necessary when he found himself wielding even more power than normal.

From hidden compartments in his belt, back and boots, metal bands emerged and wrapped themselves around his limbs, head and torso, the flexible organic metal hardening into unyielding armor strips once all its pieces were in place. Doc Slaughter became a living bronze figure, a thing of overlapping plates and decorative rivets gleaming in the reflected sunlight and explosive flashes around him. Brass Man leaped and took flight, the propulsion jets built into several points of the armor suit giving him better acceleration and maneuverability than the most advanced fighter aircraft.

Becoming Brass Man was a heady experience. The sensor suite built into the armor flooded him with information only a mind as adept at his could assimilate. While in his armor his strength and durability were the equal or superior of most Type Two parahumans. He would need all the power at his disposal to help deal with the current situation.

The attackers were using waves of unmanned drones. A quick sensor sweep revealed their capabilities: they were low speed but high stealth weapon platforms, each armed with half a dozen cruise missiles. His sensors also detected the source of the attack, a flying vessel the size of a pocket battleship; that vessel had launched the drones. Freedom Island was guarded by one of the most sophisticated air defense systems in the world, but somehow the flying carrier ship had managed to get close enough to attack while remaining undetected. The first strike had destroyed or disabled most defense systems; the second one had struck buildings full of innocent civilians.

First things first. Twin balls of plasma shot out of his gauntlets, hitting a pair of drones dead center and vaporizing them. The plasma explosion also generated a large electro-magnetic pulse that fried the electronic systems of another half-dozen pods around the initial targets. Three more shots took care of seventeen drones. A part of him felt a rush of savage elation and wished the drones had been piloted by the murderers who had seen fit to attack innocent civilians. He pushed the dark emotions deeper down, where they could not bother him.

Other Legion members were on the offensive as well. Daedalus Smith flashed past Kenneth in his Myrmidon battle armor. Kenneth suppressed a surge of irritation at the sight. Daedalus had built his own armor suit not too long after Kenneth had become Brass Man. Kenneth could not deny the Myrmidon armor was highly effective and more powerful than his own, but the constant games of one-upmanship Daedalus insisted on playing got on Kenneth’s nerves, not that he ever let his feelings show. The Myrmidon soared through the drones and blew up several of them with a barrage of charged particle beams.

Behind the two armored warriors, other Legionnaires were dealing with the remaining cruise missiles. Dawn Windstorm surrounded herself with a tornado that intercepted several rockets and sent them spinning down into the sea. Hyperia the Invincible Woman chased down another missile and detonated it before it reached its target; she emerged from the fiery explosion unscathed and looking for more targets. From the ground, a couple dozen other Legion members and advanced Freedom Institute students were engaging the last remaining targets with a myriad powers ranging from telekinesis to laser beams.

The battle was not entirely one-sided, however. Some of the missiles were targeting Legion members. Kenneth’s sensors coolly listed a growing casualty list, Legionnaires killed or injured by direct hits or buried under collapsing buildings. The injured would most likely survive; Neolympians could recover from almost anything that did not kill them instantly. There dead could not be brought back, however.

All of the missiles and most of the drones were destroyed after a brief but brutal battle. The few survivors headed back to the carrier vessel, presumably to rearm. The carrier was moving as well, continuing on a direct heading toward Freedom Island. Kenneth flew towards the ship.

He was not alone. Telekinetic adept Mind Hawk had picked up four other Legionnaires – Gun Bunny, Shocking Susan, the Illusionist and Hercules Seven – and headed directly towards the flying carrier. The assault team had pulled ahead while Kenneth dealt with the drones. Kenneth followed them even as his sensors picked up Ultimate flying behind and rapidly overtaking him. Kenneth felt a familiar pang of envy. It shamed him to admit it, but a part of him was jealous of the Invincible Man. Even in his battle suit, Kenneth would never wield the sheer power that the likes of Ultimate and Janus had been blessed with. Perhaps it was better that way. The temptation to use such power for the betterment of mankind, whether or not mankind agreed, might have been too much for him to resist.

Kenneth shrugged off the unworthy emotion and concentrated on the task at hand. One of the dozen screens glowing on the inside of the helmet showed a schematic of the huge tender vessel. Thousands of tons of metal were kept aloft by six anti-gravity devices. The devices had been developed by the Dominion of the Ukraine decades ago, but remained rare and hideously expensive; they were artifacts, each hand-made by the handful of Neolympians with the gift to make such things. Their power requirements were massive, and only a nuclear power plant or some parahuman-created equivalent could meet them. Sure enough, his sensors detected the tell-tale particle emissions of a fission reactor placed near the center of the vessel. 

Ultimate flew past him, moving at supersonic speeds and still accelerating. A second later Hyperia also overtook Kenneth. They would quickly catch up with Mind Hawk and his team. Myrmidon was flying in a wide arc in an attempt to get on the other side of the vessel should it or any of its crew try to escape in that direction. That put him out of action for the time being, but Ultimate and the assault team would be able to deal with anything they encountered. They would need to be careful not to damage the ship’s nuclear power plan, however.

“Brass Man to attack elements,” Kenneth said through his comm system. “Be advised, there is a nuclear reactor inside the vessel. Try to capture it intact if possible.”

“Roger that.” Ultimate sounded like his own self. John was always calmest during emergencies. It was only during the interludes between times of crisis that his mind seemed to feed on itself.

There was a brief flurry of acknowledgments from the other Legionnaires as they flew closer to their target – and came into range of its defensive systems. The tender ship was more than a carrier: it boasted its own formidable armaments. Two dozen heavy air to air missile launchers and a storm of auto cannon and laser fire reached out towards the approaching Legionnaires. Ultimate just flew through the barrage. Depleted uranium slugs and megawatt-laser beams bounced off him like so many raindrops.

Kenneth’s armor was nowhere near as resilient, so he had to maneuver around the worst of it and use his plasma guns to knock down missiles before they could hit him. A few near misses and a direct hit with a high-intensity laser made Kenneth grunt with pain. The armor absorbed most of the damage, but the residual heat that got through would have knocked out or killed a human pilot.

Mind Hawk’s attack group was shielded by an energy bubble, courtesy of Shocking Susan. They seemed to be weathering the attacks just fine, and had nearly reached the craft. The Invincible Man got there first: he flew straight into the side of the ship and plowed through its battleship-grade armor plating as if it was cardboard. The rest of the attack group entered through the breach Ultimate had made.

The ship exploded a fraction of a second later. The nuclear reactor about the vessel had been more than a power source: it was also a weapon.

A small sun was born over the Caribbean.

Searing light and heat washed over Kenneth, blinding him. He could smell his own flesh being roasted. He had time for a brief scream before the blast wave from the nuclear explosion swatted him from the sky and sent him crashing into the sea.

Hunters and Hunted

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

Vincent Bufalino – ever since becoming a made man, he had insisted on being called Vincent, and people called him Vinnie or Vin at their peril – stared sourly at the security camera footage on his computer screen and puffed furiously on his Cuban cigar.

“Fuckin’ Face-Off,” Dominic D’Onofrio, Vincent’s second-hand man, muttered under his breath as he and Vincent watched Face-Off kill the Lightning King on the screen one more time. Vincent had blown close to a million bucks bringing the Lightning King into the States and setting him up as an enforcer, and the colored freak had lasted all of three months before the faceless fucker wasted him. Fucking Neos. Vincent hated Neos, despite the fact that he technically was one of them. Just a Type One, though, barely better than a normal human. Sure, he’d taken his gifts and put them to good use, but he still hated the freaks, not least because he’d gotten the short end of the stick when they were handing out super powers.

“Yeah, that fucker really screwed us.” How badly, Vincent wasn’t sure, but he feared it would be as bad as it could get. He’d gambled and lost, and he didn’t know if he could cover his stake.

“We gotta find ‘em,” Vincent growled. “Him and the girl. Shit, I don’t care if I never lay eyes on his ugly mug, but we gotta find the girl, Dom.”

“We’ll find her, Vincent,” Dom said, but Vincent could tell Dom was just going along. There was no way they would find her in time. Vincent had thought he could get a better deal if he played the angles, and now he’d lost big time. Fucking Neos were supposed to be luckier than regular folk on top of all their abilities, but his luck had been all bad this time.

Doing business with the Russians was always a bad idea. They were bugfuck crazy, for one, and you never knew if they were doing something for the money or if they were working for that crazy metal-headed freak running the show back in the Motherland. But they had a lot of money and special toys, so it was hard to turn them down. Especially because if you turned them down the crazy fucks might take offense and decide that your head would work great as a bowling ball.

So when they had offered a good payday for a simple snatch and grab – okay, not so simple, at a freaking hospital, but easy enough – Vincent had seen no reason to decline. The Russians had been respectful and had come to him instead of trying to do business on his turf without his say so. Russians weren’t short of muscle but they didn’t do well outside Brooklyn, and Vincent had contacts everywhere. He had half a dozen rackets running out of New York-Presbyterian, so grabbing some skirt out of there sounded easy enough. Everybody wins, nobody gets hurt.

When the details of the job started coming out, however, Vincent had gotten suspicious. And greedy, let’s not mince words. The job was more complicated than it had sounded at first, and Vincent had smelled a bigger payoff. For one, the girl had to be kept heavily sedated and trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey. That could only mean she was a Neo. As soon as he figured that out, Vincent had done two things right away: he’d sent out one his own Neos and his top enforcer, Danny Giamatti, along on the job, and he’d started figuring out the angles.

He was supposed to drop off the girl somewhere in Brighton Beach as soon as they got her, but Vincent had decided to delay the delivery for a bit, and see if he could renegotiate the contract, sweeten the deal a little. He would hold on to the girl and claim there had been some complications, so now the job wasn’t worth his while unless the Russians upped the ante. The Russians would be pissed, but they would pay up. They might be crazy, but Vincent ran most of Manhattan and the surrounding areas. They weren’t crazy enough to start something just because they’d been shortchanged a little bit. Vincent wasn’t even going to ask for much more, just a couple of concessions here and there, get his foot in the door on some of the Russian rackets, like those new ray guns they were getting from the Ukraine. They were going for fifteen grand a piece, and word was they would deep-fry a guy no matter how much body armor he was wearing. Vincent was already collecting taxes on any transaction the Russkies did on his turf, but he wanted a real piece of the action. So instead of delivering the girl, he’d told Giamatti to sit on her and made a few phone calls to get things rolling on the negotiations.

It had been a nice plan, except things had gotten fucked up from the get go.

First, Giamatti had gone off the reservation and killed four civilians at the hospital, the stupid mook. It should have been an easy in-and-out job. Vincent had greased the wheels with the hospital people so they knew to get out of the way and be on a break when Giamatti and his boys showed up. Somehow someone had zigged when they were supposed to zag, and Giamatti had started shooting people like this was a fucking Asian War. Okay, that had been bad, but not the end of the world. In fact, it even gave Vincent a perfect excuse to demand a better deal. But then Giamatti had decided to take the night off instead of staying with the skirt he was supposed to be watching – which normally wouldn’t have been a big deal, granted – and fucking Face-Off had been waiting for him at his place. Why Face-Off had decided to go after Giamatti tonight of all nights, Vincent didn’t know.

He had some suspicions, though.

Face-Off mostly went after small-time assholes, especially guys who killed or hurt civilians – gang bangers, serial killers, sick fucks that had little or nothing to do with Vincent's rackets. Vincent's people usually didn't bother civilians; they mainly went after others in their business – competitors or traitors, assholes nobody was going to make a fuss about. That kept his dealings off the radar of vigilante types like Face-Off or Condor. Once in a while things went wrong; usually that meant one of Vincent’s guys had decided to break the rules, and then vigilantes would step in and mess things up. If things got too serious, Vincent had his own Neo muscle ready at hand, although most of the time his freaks were there to impress the paisans and deal with the competition.

Thing was, Face-Off knew stuff, stuff he had no business knowing. Not too long ago, the faceless fuck had found out one of Vincent’s guys had been running a snuff film racket using girls nobody would miss. That was something Vincent hadn’t had a clue about until Face-Off shut down the whole operation and put three of his people behind bars and four others in the morgue. While cleaning up the mess afterward, Vincent had gone over the operation, and the security had been tight. The seven guys involved had been careful, and left no witnesses or clues behind. And yet Face-Off had just strolled in like he knew every little detail. He probably had some Neo juju that let him know things, clairvoyance or something. And that had to be how he’d found Giamatti, and then the girl. Vincent fucking hated Neos. You never knew what kind of shit they could pull on you.

Things had gone from bad to downright horrible. Face-Off had whacked everybody at the warehouse, including the expensive Type Two Neo Vincent had sent along, and made off with the girl. Vincent had known something was wrong when Giamatti didn’t check in, but by the time he sent some guys to the warehouse, it was too late. The only good thing about the situation was that Face-Off wasn’t the type to go to the cops, not that it mattered much at this point.

Vincent had already set up a sit-down with the Russians to renegotiate the deal, and now he didn’t have the girl to deliver. He’d figured on working things out in a few hours, tops. The Russians had sounded like they wanted the girl very soon; the whole job had been set up in less than a day. There was no way Vincent was going to be able to find her before the Russians figured he either didn’t have her or was trying to screw them. When they did, the shit would hit the fan.

Like all Neos, Vincent hadn’t gotten any older after reaching full adulthood. He’d been born in 1935, and he looked like he was in his thirties; if he dressed up like the asshole kids did nowadays, he might even pass for someone in his twenties. His top lieutenant Dominic was the grandson of the original Dom, who had retired to Florida and died of a stroke during a shuffleboard game. Vincent was not going to die during a shuffleboard game, but that didn’t mean he was going to live forever, either. His years of experience had gotten him where he was, at the head of the D’Agostino family, wiping out all the original D’Agostinos along the way. He ran New York and all of Jersey that mattered. But this kind of screw-up was how heads of families got cut off.

He could delay the Russians for a bit, but soon enough they’d know. If the girl was important enough, this could mean war. At the very least, there would be retaliation. They might even decide to go after him personally. That would be crazy, but the Russians had cornered the market on crazy for a long time.

Vincent had a great big house – ‘the manor’ his wife called it – out by the Catskills, but he spent maybe three days a week there. His home away from home – not counting the three apartments he kept for his mistresses – was hidden under an old restaurant in Little Italy. That was the heart of his turf, the place he had grown up in. He’d single-handedly kept the Chinks from moving into the neighborhood, and kept the place Italian, the way it was meant to be. He’d owned La Trattoria for close to five decades, turned the small eatery into one of the best restaurants on Canal Street. The restaurant proper only occupied a small portion of the entire city block that served as Vincent’s headquarters. He had offices, a hidden fortified bunker that only a few made guys knew about, and a nice little apartment that would go for a few million if he ever wanted to sell it. The hidden bunker was where he held important meetings, where had had signed many a death warrant, and where, on three occasions, had done the deed himself.

He should be safe there. The best defense was secrecy. People knew he owned the restaurant and that he ate there all the time. Only a handful of people – two of them were in the room with him – knew about the secret bunker belowground. To enter it, he had to go into a basement on Spring Street with a hidden door leading into a tunnel. He’d had to grease a lot of palms with assorted city workers to get it done, and afterwards he’d quietly disposed of everyone involved in the project. On top of that, Vincent always had a pretty impressive Neo bodyguard around. He and Dom were as safe as could be. Of course, he couldn’t stay in the bunker forever. Going to the mattresses only worked for a while. But if he could string the Russians along, maybe he could fix things.

“Dom, let’s get things going. Start with Jerk-Off. Send the guys out to find any known associates, friends, anybody he fucking hangs out with. See if anybody knows where he could be.” That was probably just pissing in the wind, but he had to start somewhere. “Next, find me a Neo tracker. There’s one guy in Atlantic City and another in Newark, they can find people with their minds.”

“Yeah, I know those guys,” Dom said. “They’re expensive.”

“Get them both. We need to find that little bitch quick, before the Russians figure out we fucked up.”

Dom nodded and started talking on his comm. Vincent left him to it and walked to the bar. The bunker office had all the amenities and his bodyguard could mix a killer Bloody Mary in addition to his other skills. “The usual, Tor.”

“Yes, Mr. Bufalino,” Toreador replied, his Spanish accent still noticeable despite having lived almost twenty years in the US. He was a real Spaniard from Spain, not some jumped-up Mexican or Cuban like the people doing the dishes at La Trattoria. Pretty classy guy, knew how to show respect. He also was a trained Neo assassin and a veteran of the Second Asian War. Vincent should have sent him on the job instead of Giamatti and that lightning-throwing punk, but he never felt safe when Toreador wasn’t around. He was a guy Vincent could trust.

Toreador had been on the run from the Freedom Legion, something about war crimes during the Asian War. Stupid shit, really; hadn’t they gone over there to kill gooks? What did they think would happen? Vincent had recruited him and given him a whole new identity and a place in the organization. Toreador was alive and free because of Vincent, and he never forgot it.

Vincent got his Bloody Mary and drank it while he thought on the best way to about the situation. He’d let the Russians stew for a bit, let them call him first, and try to stall. If that didn’t work, maybe it would be best to hit them first, before they knew what was going on. If the girl was so valuable to them, he should find out why. Maybe it was something he could use. He smiled. Yeah, he was in deep shit, but if he played his cards right he might come out of it smelling like a rose. He was Vincent Bufalino, and he owned Manhattan.

The smile vanished from his face when the bunker’s reinforced door started to burn. “What the fuck?”

The door was built like a vault door, reinforced metal with multiple locking rods. The inside was covered with wood paneling. The paneling was smoking and smoldering. Something hot enough to cut through reinforced steel was drawing a blazing line through the entrance’s locking mechanism. The stench of burning wood and melting metal filled the room. Someone was using a blowtorch on the door, or a Neo was doing a blowtorch impression on the door. Either way, it meant they had found Vincent’s hideout. Only Dominic and Toreador were with him. Chances were he was fucked, with no way out.

Vincent was many things, but not a coward. There was a weapons locker in the office, and he and Dominic hurriedly armed themselves with Thompson M10 submachine guns, big heavy fuckers that fired a fifty-caliber cartridge. The big bastards kicked like mules even with their advanced recoil suppression system, but they would take down anything smaller than an armored truck or a heavy-duty Neo. Toreador didn’t take a gun. Instead, he concentrated and a metallic black fluid flowed from his pores and covered him from head to toe, turning him into an ebony statue of living metal. Twenty-inch blades of the same black material grew out around his hands. Whoever came through that door was going to get a warm reception.

The smoke in the room cleared fairly quickly. High-end air scrubbers built into the bunker saw to that. When the door swung open, the invader was clearly visible. “Mr. Bufalino,” the man said. “I’d like to speak with you. Will you do me the courtesy of not shooting at me until I say my piece?” The man’s voice was deep and had a faint Russian accent.

“Yeah, sure,” Vincent said. “We can hear you fine from the door. But take a step in here and we’re gonna light you up.”

“Fair enough.” The stranger stood on the threshold. He was a short and skinny fuck, maybe five six; he would weigh a buck forty soaking wet if he was human, which he sure as shit wasn’t. His face was a curious mixture of old and young, with deep wrinkles on his forehead and the sides of his mouth, but bright blue eyes that sparkled with good humor and an otherwise youthful complexion. His hair was silver-white and parted down the middle in a style that had been old-fashioned before Vincent had been born. All his clothes were snow-white, from a well-tailored suit down to his shoes. His skin was naturally pale but the guy had also powdered it to look as white as a mime’s. The fucking finnochio was the whitest guy Vincent had ever seen.

“You may call me Archangel,” the man in white continued. “I’ve been sent here for the girl. The organization I represent does not like it when their associates renege on their promises.”

“The girl ain’t here,” Vincent said. “If we all calm down and talk about it, I’m sure we can work things out.”

“All I need from you is her location. Tell me, and I will go in peace. We are not pleased with your actions but they are forgivable, if you give us the girl.”

Lying would do no good. “I don’t have her,” Vincent admitted. “A vigilante took her. A shithead by the name of Face-Off; I’m sure you’ve heard of him. I got my people working on it. We’ll find him, and her, I swear. I just need a little time. I’ll deliver her to your people, as agreed. At no extra charge,” he added hopefully.

“That will not be necessary. Unfortunately, your failure to deliver her as promised cannot be overlooked.”

“Overlook this, motherfucker!” Vincent fired off a long burst in the middle of his sentence. Dominic fired a second later. The recoil pushed Vincent’s gun up and half of the shots hit only the wall and the ceiling, but at least three or four rounds hit the pasty-white freak dead-center in the chest. Dominic also scored several hits.

The man in white did not fall. The fucker was bulletproof.

Vincent had emptied the sub gun. He reached for a fresh clip as the intruder strolled into the room. Toreador rushed to intercept him, his black blades weaving a complex pattern as he swung them so quickly they became a blur. The man in white squared off with the Spanish assassin, the kind of thing comic book assholes loved to put in their covers. Vincent would have appreciated the spectacle a lot more if his life didn’t depend on the outcome.

Toreador moved with the grace and speed of the bullfighter he once had been, but there was power behind his movements. Vincent had seen those solid black blades cut through metal plates as if they were made of cheese, and soft cheese at that. Even bulletproof Neos should fear them.

The intruder produced his own sword, a thing of solid energy that shone like the heart of a lightning bolt, its light so intense it left afterimages in Vincent’s eyes as the man in white swung his weapon as swiftly as Toreador wielded his. There was a flurry of combat, so quick that even Vincent’s enhanced hand-eye coordination could barely follow it, and Toreador jumped back. One of his blades was gone; so was the hand that had been attached to it, severed at the wrist. There was a brief spurt of blood from the stump before the living metal armor covered it and sealed the wound. For the first time in his life, Vincent saw Toreador look hesitant. The Spanish assassin held his remaining blade in a defensive posture and backed away. The man in white stood his ground, smiling mockingly.

Toreador’s retreat had unmasked the intruder. Dominic fired another burst from his Thompson. The shots did nothing. The man in white turned to Dominic, gestured at him with his free hand and unleashed a solid beam of light the same intense cyan color as his sword. Dominic didn’t have time to scream. He fell limply to the ground, but not before Vince could see the saucer-size hole the beam had charred all the way through his lieutenant’s chest.

Dominic’s death had bought Toreador some time, and presented him with an apparent opening. The Spaniard pounced like a cat and unleashed a storm of cuts and thrusts. For a moment, the man in white was on the defensive, and Toreador even managed to score a couple of hits, drawing blood and marring the Russian’s clothing. Vincent felt hope for a whole three seconds. On the fourth second, Toreador’s body fell to the ground; the Spaniard’s severed head went spinning off and hit a wall with a sickening wet sound.

The Russian turned towards Vincent. The cuts he had sustained no longer bled. A second later, his suit was impeccably white again, no trace of blood anywhere.

“Wait,” Vincent said. “Wait! You can’t do this. Don’t you know who I am? I own Manhattan! This means war!”

The man in white said nothing. His smile never wavered as he walked towards Vincent, sword poised to strike.

I fucking hate Neos, was Vincent’s last thought.

Face-Off

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

Christine took the generous shot of vodka Father Alex poured for her and downed it in one gulp. She started coughing and sputtering almost immediately. I turned off the TV while she recovered from the coughing fit. The news from Freedom Island could wait. An attack on the Freedom Legion’s headquarters was pretty big news, but the Legion always came out on top, the self-righteous pricks.

“Take it easy,” I said, and patted her lightly on the back. She got the coughing under control and leaned back on her chair.

“I’m okay,” she replied. “I think I needed that. Okay, maybe not needed, but wanted it. Or thought I wanted it. Now I’m not so sure.” She took a deep breath, and I braced myself for another verbal avalanche, but instead of babbling she exhaled slowly and closed her eyes. I glanced at Father Aleksander, who seemed to be deep in thought, and back at Christine, who had opened her eyes again.

“Relaxation technique,” she explained. “Tense up breathing in, loosen up breathing out. I feel a little better now.”

“That’s good,” I said, mainly to try and keep her from chattering up a storm again. It didn’t work.

“Okay. The Many Worlds Interpretation must be true,” she said. She looked at our blank faces – well, mine would have been blank regardless – and went on to explain. “You know, quantum mechanics. Do you know about wave function collapses, that sort of thing?”

I read a lot, but mostly historical and pulp fiction. I knew what quantum mechanics were, in the sense that I had heard the term before, but I’d be damned if I could explain what the words meant. “All Greek to me,” I said admitted.

“I speak Greek,” Father Aleksander said. “But I still don’t understand.”

“Okay, no problem. Layman’s terms. Sorry, I’m kind of a nerd,” she said with a nervous smile. She looked like she smiled nervously a lot, and my heart went out to her a little bit. “Okay, say I flip a coin. It can come up heads or tails, right? Right. According to some theories, there is a universe where it will come up heads and another where it will come up tails. One universe for each possible outcome. Okay, that’s not the most accurate explanation but it’s good enough for now.”

“You’re talking about parallel universes,” I said. “Yeah, we know about those. A few years back, L.A. got hit by an army of weird South African Nazis who’d gated in from an alternate Earth where they had taken over the world. They made a big mess before they got kicked back to where they belonged.”

“Yes, that’s it. Wow, Nazis from another universe? So this place really is a freaking comic book world come to life. Holy crap!”

“And you are from a parallel universe,” I said. “I was trying to figure out a way to tell you, actually.”

“That’s kinda funny, since people that know me are always saying I must be from a different planet. In my reality, there are no Neos. No people with superpowers, unless you count doping and steroids, damn you, Lance Armstrong.”

No Neos? Interesting. Maybe they were better off without us freaks.

Christine wasn’t done talking, of course. “Neos, where did they come from? When did they show up? It’d be neat to find the point of divergence, or points of divergence, between your world and mine. Can’t be too far back in history. New York is New York, you’re speaking English, the US is the US. So…” She paused and the nervous grin came up again. “I guess you need me to stop talking now.”

If I had a mouth, I would have smiled back. “Just a little bit,” I said, not unkindly; normally I would have told someone talking that much to shut the fuck up already, but I really didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Very strange. “Okay, let’s see,” I went on. I’d been a Neo fanboy long before I became a freak with no face, so answering her question wasn’t much of a chore for me. “The earliest Mystery Men appeared during the Roaring Twenties. There was one confirmed Neo during World War I, a German flyboy, Von Richthofen. The guy got shot in the face a few thousand feet in the air, crashed his plane, and walked away from it. There were stories about some American guy with the French Foreign Legion, but those weren’t confirmed. More Neos showed up during the Nineteen Twenties; the real flashy and powerful ones appeared during the Thirties. The Berlin Olympics of 1936 was the big turning point; that’s when the term ‘Neolympian’ was used for the first time. Adolf Hitler unveiled the Teutonic Knights during the Olympics, made a big splash. The Knights could do things most people back then thought were impossible; bend steel with their bare hands, fly, that kind of stuff.”

I waited to see if Christine was about to launch into another stream of consciousness tirade, but she was listening raptly, so I kept talking. “Hitler was the first to recruit Neos and put them to work out in the open. He also dressed them up in costumes and gave them code names. The US had a bunch of Neos – we still have the largest concentration of freaks on the planet, for no reason anybody can think of – and some of them had been featured in pulp magazines and radio shows, but it took a while to figure out they weren‘t just very talented normals. Then came Ultimate, the Invincible Man, in 1938. He got his own comic book, Action Tales, not too long before the Germans were rolling through Poland.”

“Okay. World War Two, both here and in my world, check. Since you’re not speaking German, I’m guessing the good guys won?”

“Yep. Germany and Japan surrendered in 1945. By then most of the Teutonic Knights were captured or dead. Same with the Kami Warriors of Japan – well, they were all dead.”

“Wow. Wowie-wow. Okay, I can see we could spend hours talking about this. Later. I mean, we most definitely will, later. Let’s get to current events for a sec. Who’s President?”

“John Colletta,” I replied, and saw Father Aleksander frown. I hoped we wouldn’t get into a political argument.

“That crazy wrestler,” Father Alex said disapprovingly.

“That crazy war hero,” I replied, and turned to Christine. “Never mind him. Colletta’s a good man. He beat JFK Jr. and that bozo from Florida who ran for the GOP; Colletta ran on the Reform Party ticket, and both Democrats and Republicans are a bit sore about the election. He’s also our second Neo President.”

“JFK Jr. – you mean John-John is alive? He died when I was a kid in my world. My mom cried.”

“Serves the Democrats right, sending the kid of a one-termer to run for the Presidency,” I said.

“One-termer? That’s kinda harsh, isn’t it? Or… wait, JFK Senior wasn’t assassinated?”

“Unless you mean character assassination, nope. He just lost in ’64 to the first Neo President: Ray Stephens, a.k.a. The Patriot.”

“Okay, so we could spend hours talking about current affairs, too, ‘cause we’re going to have to go back to historical events to make sense of the current affairs. My head’s so going to explode. Why don’t we talk about me for a second? We can start with, what the eff am I doing here?”

“We don’t know. Somebody or something brought you here, some trans-dimensional portal or para-temporal machine is my guess. Like those Afrikaner Nazis in L.A., or the Magister in his fucking teleporting Porta Potty.”

“You’re serious. A teleporting Porta Potty.”

“I didn’t invent it. Thanks to him, people get paranoid at construction sites, concerts and anywhere else you need to use those fucking things. You never know when you go take a crap whether or not you’ll find yourself in a whole different universe. Don’t ask me why he didn’t go for something more sensible, like a car or a telephone booth.” Now I was talking up a storm. She wasn’t just a chatterbox, she was contagious.

Christine started to say something, stopped herself and shook her head. “Later. Okay, let’s say some super-nutjob brought me here. Why? Sorry. You don’t know, of course, you’d have to find out which super-nut brought me here. But some goons took me from the hospital, right? And you rescued me, thank God. So you do know who’s behind all of this.”

“Well, not really,” I said apologetically. “They were local Mafia muscle, and I don’t see how they could have grabbed you from another universe. Somebody must have hired them when you landed in New York.”

“They didn’t know who hired them? You didn’t ask them?”

“I, ah, sort of killed them before I had the chance.”

Christine looked shocked. “You killed them?”

“They had already murdered four people. I didn’t want one of them getting to you. And one of them was a Neo himself, a pretty heavy-duty one.” And – this I didn’t say – I was in a bad mood, and some people just need killing. And here I was, justifying my actions to someone I’d just met, and feeling – guilty?

“I’m not going to get all judgmental and stuff, because I don’t know all the facts, and also because you saved me from guys who clearly weren’t very nice. But killing is something pretty final, and you sounded kinda casual about it, but I’m going to stop now.”

“I concur,” Father Aleksander said. “And I’ve had similar arguments with my young friend here. But perhaps there is a better time for that, no?”

Christine nodded bleakly. “Okay. Setting aside morality, it’s going to be hard to find out who hired them, now that they can’t tell us anything, on account of their being dead.”

First she made me feel like shit, and now she made me feel like a dumbass. I normally didn’t give a damn what people thought about me, so this was worrisome. You start doubting yourself out in the streets, and someone’s going to strangle you with your own guts while you ponder the whys and wherefores of your actions. I had to admit to myself that I had been a little too kill-happy at the warehouse. Then again, I normally got all my info from my psychic pal; I didn’t need to interrogate criminals very often. Giamatti had been a special case, though I’m sure he hadn’t felt very special on his way down from the penthouse.

“I normally get all my info from an associate of mine. Her name’s Cassandra.”

Christine’s face lit up at the mention of my psychic pal and I felt another grin forming up behind my blank face, not a common occurrence. “Cassandra! Yes, she came to me in a dream vision thingy when you rescued me. She seemed pretty cool,” she added.

I nodded. “She is. She would normally know who did this and why, or at least give me some good clues, but she said that you are somehow interfering with her visions.”

“Yes, she said something like that in the dream. Holy crap, I’m in other people’s visions and they are visiting me in my dreams. I’m probably crazy, but I might as well go with the flow.” She paused for a second and her eyes went wide. “Wait, my glasses, I don’t need them anymore. I'm the Amazing Tobey Maguire! And I got roughed up during the kidnapping, but I feel fine now.” Her eyes got wirder. “I’m one of you, aren’t I? A Neo? But how? I’m not from a super-world like you...” She paused again, and her eyes got wide enough I worried her eyeballs would pop out. “Holy crap, it’s my freaking father. He’s a freaking freak from another reality! I can’t freaking believe it!”

“Ah, Christine?” I tried to break in, but she was having none of it. Her stream of consciousness was more of a waterfall of consciousness now.

“Oh, God, please don’t let it be the Porta Potty guy! My dad is a freak from another world who travels around in a Porta Potty? It can’t be.” She turned to me. “Quick, who else can travel between worlds? There’s more than one, right?”

“Well, the Magister is the best-known Neo with trans-dimensional abilities, but he’s not the only one. There is Marcus Magus, and of course the Traveler, he claims he’s been around since Victorian times, but everybody’s pretty sure he’s full of shit and he just stole the name from H.G. Wells. But wait, are you sure that..?”

“That my crazy father is a Neo from this world? Absolutely. I always knew something was seriously wrong with him. And not just because he knocked up my mom and disappeared, and nobody can ever find him, except when he shows up once every blue moon to check on me. Oh, God, that rat bastard!”

“You’re sort of jumping to conclusions, aren’t you? Although it does seem to fit.”

“He’d better not be Porta Potty Man! I’ll kill him!”

“Probably not,” I said reassuringly. “The Magister isn’t much for one-night stands, according to the stories. He mostly drags some girl or another through assorted adventures through space-time, then dumps her and gets someone else, and nobody’s claimed he knocked them up as far as I know. He’s fucking creepy, but I don’t think he’s the guy.”

“Okay. Or I’m going to need another shot of vodka.”

“Besides, maybe it’s not your father. Neos who have kids – and not many do – have mostly human children. I think the chance of having a Neo child is something like twenty-five percent when both parents are Neos, and something much lower when only one parent is parahuman. It could have been a naturally-occurring mutation. Nobody knows where Neos came from in the first place. Maybe you’re the first one on your planet.”

“Maybe. Another thing, when do you get powers if you’re a Neo? I mean, there’s been plenty of times when I’ve wished I could set somebody on fire. Like every day when I was in high school, but I’ve never gone Carrie or Firestarter on anybody.”

“Neo powers manifest at different times for different people,” I explained. “Usually after puberty, although there are exceptions, and usually before middle age, but again, there’s exceptions there too. As far as I know, there’s no hard and fast rules, either, sometimes a potential Neo just wakes up with super powers, sometimes a traumatic event triggers them. I figure your abilities triggered when you crossed over. That’s why you’ve fully recovered from the kidnapping. All Neos heal fast.”

‘Which leads to my next question: what are my super-powers? Other than 20-20 vision and healing fast. Should I try to concentrate and set something on fire, or something like that?”

“Let’s take it one step at a time,” I said quickly before she actually tried to set something on fire. There had been some tragic incidents along those lines. “Usually when powers manifest it’s pretty obvious, but you were unconscious at the time. Just don’t try anything right now, okay? You might accidentally set me or the good father on fire.”

“Oh, God, okay, I see your point.”

I could tell that Father Aleksander wasn’t crazy about all the taking of the Lord’s name in vain Christine favored, but he was restraining himself from saying something. I’d also caught him smiling while watching Christine and me talking. I wasn’t sure why.

“At the very least, you can interfere with precognitive and clairvoyant abilities,” I went on. Jesus H. Christ, I’d never spoken for so long with somebody I‘d just met except when doing undercover work. “That’s why Cassandra wanted you as far from her as possible while she tried to figure things out. And you might be able to travel between worlds, in which case nobody brought you here, you did it yourself.”

“But if I did it myself, why did someone try to kidnap me?”

“Point. And we still don’t know why you appeared in Central Park. If someone was bringing you here, why wouldn’t they drag you directly to their home base?” I shrugged. “Not enough information. We can make guesses until the cows come home, but we need information. Cassandra is working on it; meanwhile we can learn more about you. Your powers, for one.”

“So where can I learn about my powers?”

“Well, I do know a guy.”

Chapter Six

The Freedom Legion

Caribbean Sea, March 13, 2013

After a while, he dreamed.

“Clarke! John Clarke!”

He turned around and saw her for the first time, standing in the bullpen of The World’s Journal. She was beautiful, and angry, and beautiful when she was angry. Her fiery red hair and blazing blue-grey eyes expressed her anger beautifully. She walked determinedly toward him, a rolled-up newspaper in her hand.

“Yes, I’m talking to you, buster! You stole my story. Nobody steals Linda Lamar’s stories, let alone some upstate small-town bumpkin fresh off the farm! Who do you think you are?”

“Ma’am?” he said, confused and bewildered. He had no idea what she was talking about. For one, his father wasn’t a farmer, but a doctor, albeit a small town doctor.

She poked his chest with the rolled-up newspaper. “Don’t ma’am me, you gaping chimpanzee! I spent three weeks working on the O’Doule brothers and their extortion racket! I was about to write a whole feature on it, and what happens? Some mystery man busts them up, and you write about it!” She poked him again. “You get a Page One byline and a job at the Journal! What do I get? Not a heck of a lot! Thanks for nothing, buster! You pull that stunt on me again, you’re going to be walking funny for a week!” She stalked off before he could formulate a reply.

That had been the first time.

“John, please go away.”

That had been the last time.

The pallid scarecrow on the hospital bed was ninety-three years old. Linda Lamar had endured three cancer operations, a heart transplant and every measure modern medicine had developed against old age and death. She had been shot nine times, stabbed six times, and had lived through more narrow escapes than possibly any other normal human being. She had celebrated her ninetieth birthday singing and dancing, looking like a vigorous woman in her early sixties. The collapse had happened two years later and it had been sudden and total, as if a dam had broken and let all the ravages of time flow at last.

“I can’t bear to have you look at me like this. Before, it was all right, but now…”

He gently shushed her and held her hand, weeping silently as he watched her go. He whispered the only three words that mattered, and she whispered them back. At the end he had seen her fear, and had been overwhelmed by despair. For all his power, he had not been able to help her. She died in fear and pain, and he couldn’t make it better.

Slow mocking applause started behind him.

“Pathetic.”

The hospital room was gone. John now stood in one of the many lairs of his greatest foe.

Hiram Hades clapped his hands a few more times. “You are so very weak, for a man who can move mountains,” he said with a contemptuous smile. “She didn’t die of cancer, or even old age. What did finally kill her? It was your ethics, boy. Your moral cowardice did her in.”

“I did everything I could,” John said. The words sounded hollow and false even as he spoke them.

“Buffalo chips. Daedalus Smith offered you an alternative. All you had to do was take him up on it.”

“Cloning a full adult body is illegal!” John snapped back. “And a brain transplant would have resulted in the clone’s death! Linda wouldn’t have wanted to live by murdering an innocent.”

“Ah, but you never asked her, did you?” Hiram said triumphantly. “You didn’t dare tempt her with the chance of youth and vitality. You were afraid she might have asked for it, begged you for it.”

John didn’t say anything.

“They call you the Defender of Liberty, but you never gave her the freedom to choose. You knew better than her, of course. She was only human, and you are a living god. The only difference between you and me, boy, is that I never hid my certainty than I was better than the mortal rabble beneath us.”

“You may have been better than them, but you weren’t better than me,” John growled, and the scenery shifted again. Another lair, this one high in the Peruvian mountains. Hiram was there as well, lying broken and bleeding at John’s feet. Hiram’s adamantine black armor and all his gadgets and artifacts lay shattered and scattered around him. He was dying, but his mocking smile still showed through his bleeding mouth and splintered teeth.

“That was the day you finally grew some balls, boy. How many lives would have been spared if you had done what was necessary the first time you beat me?”

“I wised up. You would have gotten the death penalty in any case, but I couldn’t risk you escaping while you went to trial. You had done it too many times before.”

“So you stepped on my neck until it snapped, and all my cybernetics and healing systems could not put Humpty Dumpty back together again. It was your finest moment, Ultimate. But you squandered it and went back to your old phony persona, merciful and compassionate when all you really want is to kick apart the miserable anthills humanity has erected. You let people who are your inferiors in every way tell you what to do, mock you and insult you. You think your restraint makes you better than they are, when all you are doing is bringing yourself down to their level. Pathetic.”

“So what should I do, then? Become like you? Kill and destroy, only to end up dead and unlamented?”

“I tried to rule humankind and lost,” Hiram admitted. “But think about it, boy. You could try and win.”

John started to reply, but cold water filled his throat, his lungs.

He woke up at the bottom of the sea, surrounded by the darkness, cold and pressure of the deep.  His body had been brutally battered, burned and irradiated by the explosion, but he was recovering quickly. His costume had been mostly torn off, but he was fine, physically, at least.

John was not much given to introspection, not until the last few months. He had grieved Linda and moved on, acknowledging his regrets and losses but not obsessively dwelling on them. Recently, however, it seemed like the past was all he could think about.

He needed to do something about this.

Christine Dark

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

“It’s freaking surreal,” Christine whispered to herself as she strolled through the brave new world she’d found herself in.

She’d never been a fashionista, something that Sophie was never reluctant to remind her of, but there were things that just jumped at you. Men’s hats, for example: about one third of the people over thirty she saw on her way to the subway wore them. Old-style hats, the kind of thing she’d last seen on Mad Men. Her uncle Pete had once joked that JFK had killed the hat industry by refusing to wear one, and that maybe people should have looked for a disgruntled hatter at the grassy knoll. Maybe JFK turning into a disgraced one-term president instead of the Martyr of Camelot had changed fashion history along with capital-H history. Neat theory, and probably wrong, of course. Other than hats, she noticed more men of all ages wearing button-down shirts. T-shirts were there aplenty, though, and a lot of them seemed to have stylized insignias for assorted superheroes. She saw dozens of red-on-silver ‘U’ symbols, which must stand for Ultimate, who certainly seemed to be a popular guy. Comic-book t-shirts weren’t just for children or geeks on this planet. That cheered her up quite a bit.

She didn’t see any Face-Off merch anywhere. Her rescuer didn’t seem to be much for self-promotion. Or maybe he had a lousy publicist.

Women wore skirts and dresses of all lengths, from micro-minis to down-to-the-ankle numbers, with a minority in jeans or slacks, and a larger minority wearing tight and shiny leggings in various colors, including several people who really, really shouldn’t be wearing anything tight or shiny. A lot of them also favored 80s style big hair, with lots of product to keep it just so. It made her shoulder length, just-hanging-there hair seem drab, and she’d been lucky to get a hair brush from Father Aleksander to undo some of the damage her abductors had inflicted on it.

Since Christine couldn’t really go out on the street wearing striped pajamas and fuzzy slippers, Father Aleksander had let her rummage through the church’s donation box clothes selection. She’d ended up in faded blue jeans, sneakers, a plain t-shirt and a pink sweater. One of the priest’s parishioners had also dropped off some new underwear for her, so at least that wasn’t second hand. She didn’t stand out much, and nobody was going to mistake her for a fashion model, so that was okay. As long as they didn’t figure out she was an alien from another dimension, she’d be happy.

Cars looked different, too. Christine was into cars even less than she was into fashion, but she did notice a ton of electric cars on the streets, noticeable because they made a funny buzzing sound which Face-Off explained was built in so they wouldn’t sneak up on people. Some brands she recognized – Ford and General Motors – and others she didn’t, like Tucker. Whatever company Tucker was, it made a lot of cars in this world. The foreign cars she could see were European (mostly German Mercedes), a few Japanese models and lots of others she’d never heard of, like Donfeng and Fujian Motors, which Face-Off explained were Chinese. “Made by the good Chinese of the Republic of China,” he added. “As opposed to the evil Chinese of the Chinese Empire.” Which definitely would merit a whole other conversation sometime soon.

People were on the phone as they walked, same as in her world, but most of them were using the wrist-thingies instead, and most of them were Skype-ing or whatever they called it here, using screens on said wrist-thingies. She had no idea how people could walk and do video conferencing at the same time but they seemed to manage just fine. A lot of people were also wearing goggles or mirror shades with antennas on the side, which were the most common alternative to the wrist-thingies.

They were in Times Square, which was as crowded as the one in her universe, and had just as many neon signs and giant screens. At first glance most of the buildings and stores she could see were pretty similar to the ones in her world. This Times Square also had flying guys in leotards, though.

“Flying dude. That’s a flying dude over there,” she blurted out.

“Stop staring, you look like a tourist,” Face-Off said in an amused tone.

“I am a tourist. Do you know him?” she asked. Flying Dude cut an impressive figure in his skin-tight red and yellow costume and shiny full face helmet in the same colors. Color-coordination was a must in superhero world, apparently.

“Little bit. Name’s Star Eagle. He’s a prick.”

“Bummer.”

Face-Off had a face on right now, as well as hair, which he could grow and remove at will. He looked a bit like Christian Bale. Christine wanted to ask him if Christian Bale existed in this world, but she had way too many questions ahead of that one. Maybe when she had a chance she’d check Imdb.com and find out, assuming they had Imdb.com in this world, which was yet another question on the list. She’d managed to ask only about a dozen questions on the subway trip to Times Square, which left her with about three or four hundred to go.

The subway cars in this world were a bit cleaner and more comfortable than back home: the cars were more like the ones in the London Underground, which she had seen firsthand on a trip with her mother and one of her few rich boyfriends. The trip had been a last-ditch attempt by the boyfriend to impress her mom, an attempt that had failed rather messily. The sights had been awesome, but the drama had spoiled much of the fun. London had been cool and different, but she’d never been as culture-shocked as she was now. The combination of familiar sights and stuff straight out of Bizarro Sunnydale was making her head spin.

Christine tried not to stare at the flying dude, which wasn’t easy to do, as he kept circling Times Square and performing aerial maneuvers, to the delight of hundreds of picture-snapping tourists. The local New Yorkers hardly spared him a glance, which went to show that New Yorkers were the same throughout the multiverse. After a while, they walked out of Times Square and left Star Eagle the flying prick behind.

“I don’t want to sound like a nine-year old, but are we there yet?” she asked Face-Off. “I need to sit down and process all this stuff.”

“We’re close. Just another couple of blocks.”

“Okey-dokey,” Christine said, somewhat uncertainly. A part of her still wasn’t a hundred percent sure she wasn’t imagining the whole thing. On the other hand, if her imagination was that good, she might have to start writing movie scripts as soon as she woke up. She turned her attention on the tourists. They were an international bunch, lots of Chinese and East Indian ones, plus the usual assortment from every continent. A few were using their wrist-thingies to take the pictures, but most of them were using dedicated cameras or some sort of goggle-built devices.

“So what’s the deal with the wrist-thingies?” she asked, trying to at least cross a few more questions off as they walked. “Back home we have cell phones, and we keep them in our pocket, or purse, belt-holder or even fanny packs.”

“Not much to tell. We’ve had wrist-comms here for over fifty years, and wrist-comps for about twenty. I think the first one who started using them was a Chicago police detective back in the 1940s, Richard something or other. It wasn’t a phone, just a two-way radio, but a few years later he started using a wrist communicator with a TV screen. Someone started calling them wrist-comms, and after a couple decades everybody started using them. I keep mine in a pocket, though. Having an electronic gizmo strapped to your wrist while you’re punching people out isn’t a good idea.”

“Interesting.” Christine’s brain had been getting bored of watching stuff like a slack-jawed yokel, and it jumped at the chance to work on a new problem. Wrist TV-phones for fifty years, that was way older than cell phones in her world. Older than personal computers; had PCs developed earlier in this world, too? Add another question to the list, darn it.

Speaking of worlds, she needed to have some shorthand when thinking about them. Christine decided to name her world Earth Prime. Her current location in the multiverse would thereafter be known as Earth Alpha. There you go, neither world would have to feel bad or marginalized.

“I wish we had more time so I could show you the town properly,” Face-Off said. “Maybe after this is over, we can take some time off and you can play tourist and I can play local guide, unless you’re in a rush to get back home.”

“That’d be cool,” she said. Except for the whole kidnapping thing, and luckily she’d mostly slept through that, this whole situation was pretty freaking awesome. She definitely wanted to get all her questions answered and Earth Alpha was an uber-geek wonderland. She wasn’t into comic books all that much; she’d gone through a short-lived X-Men movie madness phase, but had outgrown it early in life. She was still burning to know how superheroes would work in real life, even if this wouldn’t have been her choice of alternate universe to visit. If given her druthers, which nobody was handing out so far, she’d have stumbled into one of her guilty-pleasure fantasy romance worlds, complete with bare-chested silent and strong men with hidden sensitive sides (although, to be honest with herself, those worlds would also be sorely lacking in basic sanitation and other modern conveniences, and people would be somewhat more rapey than she’d like).

Come to think of it, she had a silent and strong male companion right by her side, if not all that bare-chested, and he kinda-sorta had just asked her out on a kinda-sorta date. Face-Off wasn’t a muscle-bound type, and he had no flowing hair or soulful eyes – or any kind of hair or eyes when he was himself, but on the other hand he could look like anybody he wanted to, which meant she could get flowing hair and soulful eyes a la carte. Not that she really wanted to hook up at the moment, especially with a very strange stranger.

Christine knew few actual facts about her rescuer, but she was certain about a couple things about him. Face-Off was in a lot of pain, and there was a lot of pent-up rage inside him. Something bad had happened to him, or lots of bad somethings. She didn’t know why she felt so sure about that; they hadn’t had an Oprah-style interview or anything, and he hadn’t really volunteered much information about himself. She suspected that one of her Neolympian powers was some sort of super-empathy.

Her Christine-sense also told her that Face-Off was a pretty lonely guy, something she could sympathize with. She’d never been good at making friends. In high-school she’d been a total nerd; her love of books, computer games and obscure TV shows and movies had been her first social strike. A brutal acne outbreak and braces that didn’t come out until her seventeenth birthday had pretty much been strikes two and three. Throw in her absent-mindedness and endless chattering whenever she got nervous, except when she got so nervous she just shut down and couldn’t speak at all, and it all added up to a perfect pariah paella recipe. In college she’d gotten a bit better, but even there half of her friends were people she’d never seen except as avatars on online games. Agreeing to go to the fateful frat party had been an impulsive last-ditch attempt to come out of her shell, and instead she’d ended up in another world, shell and all.

Speaking of absent-mindedness, she barely noticed Face-Off had led her to an elevator to another subway station, the kind of thing most people that weren’t on wheelchairs or carrying luggage never even noticed, since the stairs were so much quicker and more visible. They got on the elevator, and Face-Off started pushing its buttons in a complex pattern. Now that she was paying attention to her surroundings, Christine followed the pattern and memorized it. It was a thirteen number combo punched in a rapid fashion. The elevator went down, and down, at least two levels lower than it should have. Pretty neat. Christine wondered how somebody had managed to build entire elevator levels on the down-low, and sighed. The last thing she needed was more questions.

The elevator doors opened up into total darkness. Face-Off produced a flashlight out of a coat pocket and turned it on, casting a small island of light ahead of them. From what little she could see, they were in a disused section of the subway system. The concrete floor was covered with dirt and assorted detritus, and she was pretty sure she saw a couple of rats the size of Boston terriers scurrying about. Yuck.

“Looks cozy,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant. Her voice broke halfway through ‘cozy,’ so she failed miserably.

“All part of the ambiance,” Face-Off said without a trace of chalant in his voice. “This is an entrance to my buddy’s secret lair, and he doesn’t exactly roll out the red carpet for visitors.”

“But you guys are friends, so it’s okay, right?”

“Yeah. Haven’t seen him in a while, but he’s good people. We’ve worked together a lot, and he’s the go-to guy for Neos who need to learn about their abilities but don’t want to go into the system. He was my teacher.”

“System, as in prison?” Christine asked as they walked into the darkness, down an old tunnel with old and rusting railroad tracks running along its length. This wasn’t her idea of a good time; talking about something, anything, helped her anxiety a little.

“Not quite that bad. Every Neo is supposed to register into the Parahuman National Database, get tested for powers and mental defects, get a background check and all his shots like a good doggie, and if he or she is deemed fit to be out in the wild, he’s free to go.”

“Oh, okay. That doesn’t sound too bad.”

“You have to provide them with your fingerprints, blood type, DNA samples and a Kirlian Aura impression. If the government ever wants to find you, the database makes it easier than a Google search.”

“Okay, I can see why people might object,” Christine said. She felt unreasonably happy to hear Earth Alpha had Google.

“Yeah, a lot of us object. They still haven’t made it a crime to avoid registration, but somebody is always introducing a bill in Congress to make it illegal. For now, it just means unregistered people using their powers can be prosecuted even if they don’t harm anybody.”

“Yikes.” Christine wasn’t thrilled to find out her rescuer was in effect a criminal.

Face-Off stopped walking, and she bumped into him. “Hey, I know this isn’t fair to you, tagging along with an illegal like me,” he said. “If you want to turn yourself over to the authorities, they’ll hook you up with a parahuman counselor and social worker, and you’ll probably end up having the Empire State Guardians or even the Freedom Legion looking over your case. I would have put you in touch with them after I rescued you, but Cassandra told me it would be a bad idea. I trust her judgment, but it’s up to you.”

“That's cool. I mean, thank you, but I’ll stick around for now. I know I can trust you not to intentionally hurt me; I also know you will stop anybody who tries to hurt me; you might hurt them more than you need to, but I guess I can handle that. The killing stuff still bothers me, though. To quote a wise guy: ‘Do not be too eager to deal out death in the name of justice.’”

“’Even the wise cannot see all ends,’” Face-Off finished the quote, surprising her. “So they have Lord of the Rings in your universe, too,” he added, and she could somehow sense a nice smile behind his no-face.

“Yes! Speaking of Lord of the Rings, are we going to be wandering around this pretty good simulation of the Mines of Moria for too much longer? I’m starting to get dark- and creepy-phobic. My last name may be Dark, but I’m not a fan of it, not really.”

“Almost there. But sometimes my pal likes to play tricks on his guests, so be on the lookout for anything,” Face-Off said. “As a matter of fact…” He whirled around and shone his flashlight back the way they’d come. Christine turned around and caught something moving away from the light, bigger than any rat could be.

“Getting sloppy, Face,” a voice said from the darkness. A female voice. “I could have tagged you and your girlfriend half a dozen times.”

“Fucking hell. Is that you, Kestrel?”

“Aw, you still remember me after all this time. I’m Condor’s new official sidekick. Congratulate me.”

“Congrats,” Face-Off replied. He didn’t sound very enthused at all.

“Friend of yours?” Christine whispered.

“Sort of,” he said. He spoke towards Kestrel’s voice, searching for her with the flashlight. “So are you the welcoming committee?”

“I just wanted to say hi personally.”

A figure came hurtling out of the darkness and attacked Face-Off with a flurry of punches and kicks, knocking the flashlight out of his hand. In the brief flashes of illumination the spinning flashlight provided, Christine caught a glimpse of a woman in a black latex catsuit, thigh-high boots and a stylized bird mask, also black. She was getting positively medieval on Face-Off, who was on the defensive, blocking and dodging blows like a stunt-man in a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon sequel, minus the flying leaps. A few seconds into the fight, the flashlight hit something and broke, plunging everybody into darkness.

Christine could still hear the sounds of a fight, but now she couldn’t see anything. Not only was she a non-fan of being in the dark, but now she was in total darkness while bad things were happening pretty close by. She didn’t like it one bit. She wanted, no, needed to see what was going on.

And just like that, she did.

It wasn’t like normal sight at all. The Kung-Fu Fighting duo in front of her looked like two figures made of multicolored swirling lights, mostly reds and yellows in a multitude of hues. The tunnel outlines were rendered in a flat and dead grayscale tone, with little splashes of color here and there which she instantly knew were rats and some of the larger roaches and spiders in the area. She also knew that the woman attacking Face-Off was enjoying the violence with an almost – or maybe not so almost – sexual passion. Face-Off, on the other hand, was mildly amused and resigned to go along with the fight. This was Kestrel’s idea of a friendly greeting, but underlying that was also a test of strength, the kind of macho posturing that Christine thought was mostly a guy thing.

Now that she could see (or sense, or whatever) the fight, it wasn’t that scary at all. The dynamic dumbos were trading punches that could break bones on a normal person, but they weren’t getting hurt; she knew that just the same way she knew what they were feeling. That is, she didn’t have a clue how she knew those things, just that she knew them. Christine set the mystery aside, figuring she would go insane if she thought about it too much. Instead, she watched the fight and waited for it to stop.

“Hey, lovebirds!” said somebody behind Christine. “Cut it out or I’m going to turn a hose on you!” Light – the real deal, not the weird stuff she was seeing with something other than her eyes – shone out, also behind her. Her normal vision returned as soon as there was enough light to see by, and the multicolor sensory input went away. Interesting.

A door had opened off one of the tunnel sides, and a man stood by it. He was tall and athletic, and was wearing a black, gray and silver outfit that seemed to be equal parts rubber, chain mail and metal plates. A silver helmet with a different bird design covered most of his face. He had a big flashlight he was using to illuminate them.

Kestrel stopped her attack on Face-Off as suddenly as she had started it. “Good workout, killer,” she said in a sultry voice. Christine had never been able to pull a sultry voice in her life: the few times she’d tried people thought she was having a stroke. Unfairly or not, she started hating Kestrel just a little bit.

“Yeah, was it good for you, baby?” Face-Off said sarcastically. Those two had history together, Christine realized, the kind of history that involves bumping uglies followed by throwing plates and other stuff at each other. She felt a slight pang of jealousy, followed by a not-so-slight burst of annoyance. Yeah, let’s be the cliché damsel in distress getting all clingy Klingon on her knight in shining no-face. Not cool at all, Dark.

“Face. Good to see you, bud,” Condor said, walking up. The two shook hands and Condor clapped Face-Off lightly on the shoulder. Christine figured Face-Off didn’t hug it out with most people, even friends like Condor.

“I see you’ve met my new partner,” Condor said. Kestrel moved to Condor’s side and draped herself around him in a way that indicated their relationship involved a lot more than kicking criminal ass together. Kestrel the Super-Slut, Christine thought. Just great.

“Condor, this is my friend Christine,” Face-Off said. Condor offered his hand, and Christine shook it politely. She sensed that Condor wasn’t a bad man, not exactly, but he had a healthy – or perhaps slightly unhealthy – ego, and even with Kestrel all over him, he still managed to check Christine out; she got the feeling the guy had gleaned her dress and cup size with one quick glance. Even without her new over-sensitiveness power, she could tell the guy gave off God’s Gift to Women vibes. Under that there was a darker undercurrent, but Christine didn’t try to study it too closely; she felt like she was snooping way too much already.

“And you’ve already met Kestrel,” Face-Off continued. Kestrel looked Christine over but didn’t offer to shake her hand. It took her one look to pass judgment on Christine, who didn’t need super-empathy to know what the judgment had been: plain awkward girl, not a threat, someone to be mocked or otherwise ignored. Some things didn’t change across universes. There was a lot more about Kestrel than that, of course. Even a cursory peek with her new Christine-sense picked up a toxic emotional stew that left her reeling and without any desire to look any further.

“Any friend of Face is a friend of mine,” Condor said.

“Too bad all of Face’s friends can fit in the back of a rickshaw,” Kestrel added.

“Yeah, I love you too, K,” Face-Off replied. He turned back to Condor. “Now that we’re done with all the pleasantries, can we get to work? Christine could use some help.”

“I told you I would help, Face,” Condor replied. “If we all step into my lair, I’ll set up my equipment and we can do a full scan and all the basic power tests.”

Hopefully they would be grading the tests on a curve.

Chapter Seven

The Freedom Legion

Atlantic Headquarters, March 13, 2013

Buried alive.

Olivia O’Brien regained consciousness in total darkness. Concrete and metal pressed down on her, hundreds of tons of it. She tried to draw a breath and inhaled a mouthful of dirt instead. For a second, panic overwhelmed her, and she trashed against her prison. Something shifted above, and the pressure above her increased. Olivia stopped moving, and forced herself to think.

She wasn’t in any immediate danger. Neolympians could not be suffocated, a fact that had baffled and infuriated biologists for decades. Lack of oxygen could cause temporary unconsciousness in parahumans, but sooner or later the same mysterious force behind their powers took over and restarted their metabolism, releasing oxygen by breaking down carbon dioxide in their system.

Olivia had been in similar situations before. Wars and battles against parahumans often led to collapsing structures. Usually she was strong enough to dig herself out. She wouldn’t be doing so this time, not with much of a skyscraper piled up on top of her. She could lift a tank over her head, but she couldn’t move hundreds of tons of metal and stone, and even if she could, she would risk accidentally crushing any human survivors. She would have to wait for rescue teams to reach her.

That gave her time to think, and to grieve. Cecilia was gone, and so were hundreds of people she had known, worked with, befriended. It had been twenty years since the Second Asian War, the last time she had lost so many people in so brief a time. Without wishing to do so, she found herself remembering the bad old times.

1991. China. The Middle Kingdom had been a battleground for five decades, the site of two major wars and countless lesser skirmishes. This was no lesser skirmish. The Emperor and fifty armored divisions had burst out from the Dragon Wall and lunged toward Beijing. The Freedom Legion had assembled to defend the sovereign capital from the invaders.

Olivia flew over the battlefield, her flaming bolts shattering T-95 tanks; Brass Man, Myrmidon and the dozen other flying heroes that made up Second Squad followed her lead. They had already scoured the skies clean of all Imperial Air Force aircraft. Down below, her husband Swift darted through the enemy forces, sending armored vehicles flying like discarded toys. The Patriot, hastily recalled into service, followed in Larry’s wake, leading Third through Fifth Squads, dozens of ground combat specialists, each of them able to fight a tank platoon single-handedly. Above her First Squad – the most powerful Legionnaires, including Ultimate, Janus and Hyperia – battled the Emperor himself and his Celestial Warriors; their struggle generated energy discharges capable of leveling entire city blocks. Behind her, the Seventh and Eight Squads of the Freedom Legion waited in reserve, ready to counter any breakthrough into the hastily assembled Chinese and UN defensive forces that stood between the Imperial horde and a city of eighteen million people.

An intense flash of light above her was swiftly followed by a wave of overpressure that almost knocked her off the sky. Later she found out the massive explosion had scattered First Squad miles in every direction, temporarily removing its members from the fight. The explosion had also obliterated the Emperor's remaining Celestial Warriors. Olivia looked up and saw the Dragon Emperor, a tall man in a green-and-gold robe, surrounded by a coruscating flux of elemental energies. Held high in his hands was a miniature star, too bright to look at directly.

“No,” Olivia whispered, a prayer more than anything else. Like so many prayers, it had gone unanswered.

The Dragon Emperor flung the energy sphere down towards the rear of the defensive lines. It struck Seventh Squad’s positions.

“No!” Her scream was lost in an apocalyptic explosion.

The blast was later determined to have an explosive force equivalent to ten kilotons of TNT. Only one member of Seventh Squad survived. The other fourteen men and women, all friends and comrades, were lost, along with six thousand ROC and UN troops killed and three times as many wounded.

Olivia screamed in wordless rage as she flew towards the Emperor. His elemental aura had faded somewhat, his power drained by the massive release of energy. Her flaming spears struck him again and again, sending him spinning in the air. Her rage fueled her powers to levels she had never reached before or since.

Maybe she managed to hurt him in his weakened state. Maybe he sensed First Squad rallying and coming back. For whatever reason, the Emperor fled, leaving behind over half a million Imperial soldiers to be killed or captured in the ensuing days. After the mopping up operations, the Legion held funerals for its fallen members: Olivia endured a heartbreaking parade of family members, friends and other loved ones paying their final respects to the dead.

It would happen again. More neatly lined coffins, some draped in the national flags of the deceased’s countries of origin, others in the blazon of the Legion. More grieving men, women and children in black or the funereal colors of a dozen other cultures, some sobbing quietly, others in mute agony. Some looking at her with hatred for daring to survive what had killed so many others.

“Artemis. This is Daedalus. Can you read me?”

Her cochlear implant had survived the explosions and the ensuing building collapse. She subvocalized a response. “I read you, Daedalus. I’m safe for the time being. Please concentrate on other survivors first.”

“Way ahead of you, Olivia,” Daedalus said. “You’re the last one. Larry is clearing a path towards your position. Stand by.”

Now that she had been dragged back to the here and now, Olivia could hear and feel the sounds of Larry using his abilities to liquefy stone and metal, opening a tunnel into the debris. Sweet Larry, who still loved her even if he couldn’t help straying with other women. None of that mattered, of course. She had dead friends to bury – and to avenge.

Olivia waited for her husband while nursing thoughts of retribution.

Face-Off

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

“Just lie down on the table and relax,” Condor said in his best public servant voice. “The scans will only take a couple of minutes.”

“Okey-dokey,” Christine said dubiously. She tried to smile but couldn’t quite pull it off. “I’m not big on doctor visits and stuff like that. I’m glad I get to keep my clothes on, at least.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Condor replied. “The scans are non-intrusive. You’ll be safe as houses.”

“I’ll be right here,” I added, trying to sound reassuring. I suck at being reassuring; I’m much better at being intimidating and threatening. She managed to smile at me, so I guess I did well enough.

Christine lay on the examination table. An assortment of scanners and cameras loomed over it. Condor gently lowered a brain-scan helmet over her head and adjusted it. I stayed close by for moral support, and Christine grabbed my hand and squeezed it. I gave her a gentle squeeze back and she relaxed a bit.

“So what sort of scanners do you use?” Christine asked. “MRI’s? Thermal Imaging? Sound waves?”

“All of those, sure, and a couple others,” Condor said. “Okay, we’re all set. We’re going to go into the other room and run the tests, okay?”

She let go of my hand. “Do I get a lollypop afterward?” she asked. “Just kidding. Actually, a lollypop would be nice.”

Condor chuckled.

We stepped into the monitoring room. We could watch Christine through a glass partition on the wall. She lay back and started doing her breathing exercises.

“Interesting girl,” Condor commented as he started the scanning runs. Half a dozen monitors came to life. One of them displayed a thermal image of Christine, another her heart rate, body temperature and assorted other vitals, and so on. Condor had the best equipment money could buy, and some stuff he had invented himself and couldn’t be found anywhere else at any price.

“You don’t know the half of it,” I said. “According to Cassandra, she is very important. She is also not from this world.”

“She isn’t? She looks pretty ordinary at first glance. Pretty enough, just a bit on the plain side for my taste.”

“She’s not plain,” I blurted out. Condor grinned at me much like Father Alex had. What the hell was wrong with everyone today?

“Well, we’ll know more about her in a minute,” Condor said, watching the monitors. “Her metabolic rate is Neolympian all right. Resting heartbeat is at 35 bpm, which is typical for a Neo; its picking up a little, but that’s probably just anxiety. I’ll have her brain activity in a few.”

“Good. So when did you and Kestrel team up?” I asked Condor while he worked the scanners, trying to sound casual. That pairing could not end well, but I wasn’t close enough to Condor to just come out and say it. Luckily, Kestrel had excused herself quickly and left us alone. Having her hanging around while trying to test Christine would have been a pain in the ass; Kestrel didn’t get along with other women, not one bit.

“Oh, about three, four months,” Condor replied, equally casual. “Not too long after the last time I saw you. She’s… well, you know. We get along. Nobody’s getting a ring on their finger, and we don’t ask many questions about what we do on our own time. And – hey, check out Christine’s brain activity. She’s definitely a Genius type.”

“Sounds about right,” I said.

“Aura scan is coming online… Damn, it’s maxed out.” On another screen, we could see Christine’s psychic aura. It glowed blindingly bright, all yellow and white. “That’s a high Type Two, or maybe Type Three. My scanners are only up to measuring a 2.7 or so. We’ve got to be very careful doing the stress tests. My facilities are not really up to handling a Type Three.”

I nodded. Type Twos – 2.0 to 2.9 in the Parahuman Ability Scale – were full-fledged superhumans. Type Threes were powerhouses, the kind that can take over a country – or destroy it. There were about five thousand Neos in the planet, but only a couple dozen or so known Type Threes. The planet probably couldn’t handle many more than that; there was some question as to whether it could handle the ones already there.

“My first choice would have been to turn her over to the Guardians or even the Legion,” I said. “But Cassandra insisted we do this on the QT for now.”

“No problem. Cassandra’s always right. Besides, those sanctimonious assholes would probably lock her up first and ask questions later.”

“Yeah, especially if she’s a Type Three.”

“Spectrographs are back – she’s flesh and blood, no abnormal organs or cell formations. Decent healing factor, fast metabolism, none of them at unusually high levels. Bone density is pretty good; she could bounce a .45 caliber bullet off her skull, but she wouldn’t enjoy the experience.”

“Yeah, I usually don’t,” I said dryly.

“Me either, that’s why I wear a titanium-Kevlar helmet. Other than her aura, nothing in her readings screams Type Three. Why don’t you go get her and meet me at the gym? I’ll set up and take some precautions so she doesn’t bring the whole complex down if she loses control.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

I went back to the room and helped Christine off the table. “So how freakish did I turn out to be?” she asked.

“So far, your bones are tough enough to resist bullets, you can heal damage very fast, and you are somewhat stronger than a normal human – we’ll find out how much stronger when we do the stress tests. Plus you have a very strong aura, so that means you may have some very powerful abilities. We’ll try to discover them during the stress tests, too.”

“Wow. Er, how stressful are the stress tests? Is it like a Danger Room kinda dealio? I don’t handle confrontations all that well. As in, I tend to panic and go all deer-in-headlights and spazz out.”

“No problem. We’ll take it easy,” I said as I walked her through the high-tech complex. The walls had sensor and weapon pods on every corner. Like I said, Condor had spared no expense.

“So your friend Condor is like super-rich,” Christine commented, glancing around.

“You could say that. His father was a major industrialist, and he inherited a controlling interest in a dozen mega-corporations. “

“So why did he decide to become a superhero? Did someone shoot his parents when he was a child or something?”

“Not quite. When he was sixteen or seventeen, a terrorist gang kidnapped him and tortured him for several days. Condor’s powers manifested themselves while one of those assholes was trying to carve an anarchy sign on his chest. Things got pretty bad for the kidnappers after that. Since then he’s been doing the vigilante thing, just like me.”

“Uh-huh. How about his ‘sidekick’ Kestrel?”

We got on an elevator and started going deeper underground. “Kestrel is… I guess you could call her a bit eccentric. She used to call herself the Kinky Kestrel; besides fighting crime she also runs her own, uh, dungeon.”

“Dungeon? Like a lair with monsters and hidden treasure?”

“Well… monsters yeah, I guess. And if you consider whips and chains treasure, then that too.”

“Oh. That kind of dungeon. You’re saying she is a super-dominatrix, aren’t you?”

“Technically, she’s a switch. She’ll be happy to beat you until you squeal, but she’ll also let you beat her up, whip her with a real cat o’nine tails if she feels like it – she will heal the damage almost right away – and if you can afford her hourly rate. Of course, if she says her safe word and you don’t stop right away, she’ll mess you up. Bad.”

“Holy crap. Yuck. I mean, I guess it’s okay as long as it’s consensual, whatever floats people’s boats and all that.” Christine gave me a look. “You, ah…”

I chuckled and shook my head. “Not my kind of thing. When I first met her, I thought she was just another vigilante. I learned about her extracurricular interests later. Here is the thing...” I trailed off and considered what else to say.

It had happened early in my career, shortly before meeting Cassandra. I had been just another vigilante looking for trouble, and I had found it in spades. Some mad scientist type – a former high school chemistry teacher of all things – had developed a designer drug (street name Ultimate Drops, U-Drops for short) that temporarily boosted normal humans and gave them Neo-level strength and agility, along with PCP-like immunity to pain and meth-like short temperedness. U-Drops became very popular with the local gangs.

Of course, there were drawbacks. The super-strong users could easily break every bone in their bodies by pushing themselves past human limits, and that was if you didn’t keel over from a heart attack or stroke. Other possible side effects included liver and kidney failure, catatonia, permanent insanity and anal leaking.

The Empire State Guardians eventually busted the asshole who’d invented the drug, and luckily the drug was an Artifact, not a Gadget, which meant only the original creator could make it, and it couldn’t be mass-produced like an ordinary drug. Every once in a while someone came out with worthless knock-offs that claimed to be the real thing, but so far all of them had turned to provide few or none of the benefits while keeping all the side effects.

That night, it was just my luck that I tried to bust a dozen bangers hopped to their eyeballs on U-Drops. One of them hit me over the head with a fire hydrant he had ripped right off the sidewalk. He ended up in a wheelchair for his troubles, but I went down for a couple of seconds and his buddies proceeded to stomp me into the pavement with assorted blunt and sharp objects. I might or might not have bounced back and fought them off – all modesty aside, I’m pretty damn tough – but I didn’t have to. Kestrel had been passing by and joined in the fun. She kept the bangers off me long enough to recover, and between the two of us we put nine of them in the hospital and three in the graveyard.

Here’s one of the not so secret facts about Neolympians: we are adrenaline junkies. Being in dangerous situations gives us a huge rush. Winning a tough fight is like an aphrodisiac. Winning a tough fight with a hot chick fighting alongside you is… well, let’s just say I was ready to go by the time we were done. Kestrel and I mopped up the last gang bangers, and then we scrambled up to a rooftop and did some private banging of our own. As a first date, it was great.

We hung out on and off a few times after that and eventually gave the couple thing a try. The sex was damn good, but we didn’t have a lot in common besides the obvious stuff, and her kinky side turned me off pretty quickly. I like hurting people, but I don’t like hurting people I like. Our personality flaws didn’t mesh well, either: she was pushy and abrasive, and I was stubborn and sullen. Cassandra didn’t like her one bit, which didn’t help one; my relationship with Kestrel was one of our main bones of contention when my psychic pal took me under her wing.

After a while we avoided each other’s company unless we were kicking the shit out of somebody or fucking like bunnies. Over the course of a couple of years, the avoidance times got longer and longer, and eventually became a permanent thing. I hadn’t seen her in years. 

I wasn’t sure how much of that I wanted to share with someone I’d barely known for a couple hours. A part of me weirdly wanted to share the whole thing with her.

Christine waited quietly a whole six seconds for me to say something, which had to be some kind of record. “Okay, I know it’s none of my business,” she finally said. “Sorry. It just sounded like you two had a history.”

“We did, a few years back. It didn’t end well. Irreconcilable differences I think is the legal term.” There. Three sentences to encapsulate twenty-six months of heaven, hell and lots of purgatory.

“And now she’s with Condor,” she said. She didn’t say anything else, but I could read between the lines. Yeah, she didn't think that was going to end well, either.

“Condor sounds like he knows the score. He should be okay,” I said. I wasn’t going to say anything against my friend, especially not to someone I‘d just met, no matter how comfortable I felt around her.

“You don’t sound all that sure.”

I wasn’t, but it was none of my business. “Consenting adults. They’ll work it out one way or another. Worst case, Condor is just as tough as me, so she probably won’t do any lasting physical damage. Mental damage… Neos are all a bit crazy anyways. Who knows, maybe they are made for each other. I'm not a couple's counselor, or an expert in relationships.”

I left it at that and didn’t share the fact that my last girlfriend had been a stripper with a heart of plutonium and a temper like well-aged dynamite; she'd never even known my real identity, and thought she had hooked up with some local tough guy. That hadn't ended well, either.

The elevator doors opened into a very large chamber. Heavy battleship-grade metal plates covered the walls and ceiling. Dozens of devices stood off in clusters along the walls: a few of them looked like implements of torture, and under the right – or wrong – conditions could be exactly that. I knew them all well; Condor had helped me learn my limits and train my abilities years ago. He did it informally for many ‘illegals,’ Neos who for one reason or another didn’t want to go through normal channels and get their doggie licenses. In my case, it was because the first thing I’d done with my powers was knock my stepfather through a brick wall. Step Dad hadn’t survived the experience and if I’d stayed and taken my medicine, the best I could have hoped for was several years in Neo Juvie.

Thanks to Condor, at least a dozen Neos who might have ended up as hardened criminals had gotten their shit together instead and now were out there doing good deeds, or living normal lives if that was their choice. Three of them had gone fully legit, and one of those three was a member in good standing of the Freedom Legion, which is about as legit as you can get.

I looked at Christine as she took it all in.

“I got the butterflies in the stomach thing all of a sudden,” she said. “And the dry mouth and the palpitation thingies, too.”

“It’s going to be okay,” I said with a lot more confidence than I felt. None of the people Condor had helped had been a Type Three, although there had been a couple of high Twos.

It was going to get interesting.

The Freedom Legion

Near the Dragon Wall, East Kazakhstan, March 13, 2013

Chastity Baal crawled to the top of the rocky hill slowly and carefully. The human eye could notice motion at surprising distances and although this remote part of the Empire of China was sparsely guarded, all it took was a bit of bad luck – an enterprising junior officer deciding to patrol vigorously along the Wall, for example – to unravel the best-laid plans. Upon reaching the bare promontory, she uncased her binoculars and looked down on the scene below.

The Imperial border with East Kazakhstan was protected mainly by mountains that channeled would-be travelers into a few easily-defended passes. One such pass lay below her: the Dragon Wall blocked it quite thoroughly. Even without her binoculars, the hundred-foot tall construct a mile and a half from her position was clearly visible, a glowing featureless expanse that appeared to be made of red glass but wasn’t. Even from a mile away, Chastity felt the wall’s crimson energy pulsating with a rhythm not dissimilar to a heartbeat. Some said the Dragon Wall was a living thing, or an extension of the Dragon Emperor’s mind or soul. Chastity remained agnostic on the subject. It certainly was an awe-inspiring sight, a mute testament of the godlike power of its creator.

Nobody on this side of the Wall knew much about it. It had sprung all along the frontier of the Empire back in 1948, when the Freedom Legion and the Republic of China’s Ten Thousand Immortals – a lofty name for the two dozen Neolympians comprising said Immortals – had chased the Emperor and his minions into the Chinese hinterland. It was an energy construct, impenetrable to all but the most powerful conventional weapons, and self-repairing in a matter of minutes even when breached. Travel and commerce were nearly impossible except where and when the Emperor wished. Winston Churchill had called it ‘a fiery curtain that shall mar Asia for generations.’

“That is a pretty sight,” Celsius said from below. He was watching her binoculars’ input through his wrist-comp. “They say you can see the Dragon Wall from space. But didn’t they say the same about the old wall, too?”

Chastity ignored her partner’s prattle and continued her examination of the area. This remote area of Kazakhstan was thinly populated and had no paved roads. Her team had been inserted via a stealth helicopter flying from a ship disguised as a cargo vessel sailing in the Caspian Sea, hundreds of miles away. It was a complex and costly operation, but it had gotten them to the back door of the Empire, where the local garrison was small and fairly inattentive. Said garrison would consist mainly of people being punished for some infraction or another; the border with Kazakhstan was nobody’s idea of a vacation spot. Such guards would likely be lax in pursuing their duties.

Kazakhstan had wrestled its independence from the Soviet Union in 1951, following one of the many brutal revolts instigated by the Dominion of the Ukraine during World War Two. Thousands of ethnic Russians had been massacred and many more thrown out of the country, along with other minorities. The new country had quickly descended into chaos and civil war and ended up as something of a chess board where the Dominion of the Ukraine and the Dragon Empire played their little games against each other, helping this warlord or that and ensuring nobody held onto power for long.

Most of Kazakhstan’s border with Imperial China had become a sort of no man’s land, lightly populated and without even the corrupt oppression that passed for law and order in the rest of the country. Imperial patrols often operated on the Kazakh side of the Wall, but did so sporadically and mostly along the more populated areas of the border. Thus, this locale was ideal for extracting an important defector, if said defector could make it past the Wall. And if the extraction team did a proper job.

The two-member team was a study in contrasts. Chastity Baal was five feet nine inches tall, athletic and slender, her dirty-blonde hair tied back in a severe ponytail under a desert-pattern camo hat, her hazel eyes currently peering intently through her binoculars. Celsius – nee Howard Kowalski – was two inches shorter, a squat, heavily muscled man with coarse brown hair and neatly trimmed beard. Chastity was cool and distant in her dealings with him, as she always was to people she found lacking in any interesting qualities.

Celsius had started out their partnership with a barely polite come-on attempt, and followed that with thinly-veiled resentment at having to follow her orders. He was a Type Two Neo, after all – a 2.4, he had proudly told her within minutes of making their acquaintance – and Chastity was a mere 1.1, only slightly more formidable than a normal human, and female to boot. His lack of respect for her was but one of Celsius’ many failings.

Patience was a paramount virtue when conducting covert operations, a virtue Celsius simply did not have. The man was a reasonable competent Legionnaire for missions involving dash and panache while gallivanting around in colorful costumes, but a complete failure as a covert operative. He had been assigned to this mission to provide backup should something go wrong. Chastity had reluctantly and against her better judgment allowed him to join the operation. She had quickly regretted her acquiescence.

Celsius had been angry about trading his resplendent red and white costume for a set of camo fatigues much like the ones Chastity was wearing. He had adamantly refused to carry a gun, despite Chastity’s attempts to explain to him than an unarmed man in the wilds of Kazakhstan would be viewed as a target, which might lead to trouble if some enterprising bandit gang took a swipe at them. Working with someone for the first time wasn’t easy in the best of circumstances. Working with a rank amateur who refused to learn was a recipe for disaster.

She preferred to work alone. Tommy Leary, the one person she’d trusted without reservations, had died of old age in 1992, tending bar at the little Boston pub he had purchased shortly before his retirement from a colorful life of crime. Chastity missed Tommy with all her heart, but she had been alone before him and had soldiered on after his passing.

Chastity had thought she herself would have retired peacefully decades ago after a long and eventful life, starting with her experiences as a Caucasian orphan surviving in the rough and tumble streets of Macau. Said orphan grew up into a rather successful international criminal and eventually a reformed do-gooder and occasional freelance consultant for Interpol. The discovery that she was one of the vaunted Neolympians had come as a shock to her, although both her friends and enemies had nodded knowingly upon hearing the news.

Even before realizing she was not aging physically, Chastity had come to the conclusion retirement was not for the likes of her. Immortal or not, living an ordinary life just didn’t have any appeal to her, and even if it had, trouble always had a way of finding her even when she did not actively seek it out.

In the ensuing decades, Chastity became involved with the international paragons of the Freedom Legion. She would not don some garish costume and perform heroic deeds in the public eye, but she was quite capable of performing discreet if perhaps dastardly deeds in the service of the greater good. Her membership in the Legion was a secret, which allowed her to continue to use her reputation as semi-retired criminal and her connections with the international underworld for assorted ends. The current assignment, to assist in the defection of a disgruntled Imperial Mandarin, was the kind of operation she excelled at, even if she had been saddled with a partner with little understanding of the way things were done.

“They should’ve scrapped this mission,” Celsius complained after a few blessed minutes of silence. “Someone’s nuked the Legion, for fuck’s sake! We should be doing something about that, instead of sitting here at the arse end of nowhere.”

The report of the attack had come in just as they were getting ready to leave the helicopter. Chastity had filed the information away and moved on. Celsius hadn’t. “It may not have occurred to you that the Empire is a very likely suspect in the attack on the Legion, and that an important defector could have vital information on that regard,” Chastity said. “It almost certainly has occurred to our superiors.”

“Right,” Celsius said in a slightly chastised tone. “I’m not used to this, all this waiting doing nothing,” he added, the closest thing to an apology Chastity was going to get.

“Nine parts boredom to one part abject terror. That‘s how this type of operation goes,” she explained to him. “If we’re lucky, we’ll be spared that last part.”

“Too bad,” he replied. “I wouldn’t have minded having a go at one of the Celestials. That would be something, wouldn’t it?”

Celsius was a young man, not yet thirty, blessed with more raw power than common sense. He would make a perfect front-line soldier, or better still the rampaging warrior type you sent out first to soak up bullets that might otherwise hit someone useful. Here and now he was a disaster waiting to happen. “If it comes to that, Celsius, we’ll probably not face just one Celestial. And our objective is to rescue a defector, not finding out just how great and powerful you are.”

Sullen silence was his only response. “Jhew lun dou,” Chastity muttered to herself. The Cantonese curse didn’t do much to alleviate her mood. The little pig-genitals idiot behind her didn’t speak the language, so the insult went unnoticed. After the operation was over she might just have to translate it for him.

The late afternoon started slipping into dusk when she spotted movement at the wall. An opening appeared on the glowing surface and a black sedan – a Fujian Motors model imported from the Empire’s hated rival and main trade partner, the Republic of China – emerged from the opening and started down the poorly-maintained dirt road that led into Kazakhstan. “He’s coming,” she told Celsius, who had settled down for some sleep.

“About bloody time,” the Neo grumbled but headed towards their vehicle and started the engine. The defector’s car would not last long on those roads; the trip to the waiting helicopter would be made in their modified Jeep Seven. Chastity slowly backed down the slope and joined Celsius. The two vehicles met a quarter of a mile from the Dragon Wall, masked by the rising mountains in between. The sedan veered off and came to a stop as the Jeep approached. Its driver got out and greeted them.

Bao Xia Ming was an unprepossessing man of middle stature. His expensive Hong Kong suit was exquisitely tailored, and he displayed his wealth openly through gaudy rings around almost every finger and a bejeweled gold-cased wrist-comm. One of the rings had the dragon sigil of the Emperor: its wearer could open doors into the Dragon Wall at will, although they unfortunately were attuned only to the person for whom they had been designed. The man’s demeanor showed he was someone used to wielding great power and who found the experience of having to drive himself anywhere profoundly demeaning.

Bao stepped forward and shook hands with Celsius, ignoring Chastity completely. Imperial attitudes towards women were rather unenlightened. “Thank you for here being,” he said in accented English. “Got to get out, by goddamn. We go now?”

“We go now,” Celsius replied sardonically. While they spoke, Chastity had been using one of the many devices in her rather unique wrist-comp to scan the defector for tracking devices. She found three of them; his ornate wrist-comm and two rings.

“You have to leave these items behind,” Chastity said in perfect Mandarin, pointing at the jewelry. Bao couldn’t have looked more astonished if she had sprouted wings and taken flight. “They all have electronic tracers,” she continued. “You must dispose of the Dragon Ring as well; it might also be used to find your location. By now they will know you have crossed the Wall. We must hurry.”

“What’s going on?” Celsius asked. He spoke only Polish, English and a smattering of Russian, mostly swear words.

Chastity explained while Bao, muttering angrily under his breath, got rid of the expensive jewelry. Bao next demanded his luggage be transferred to the Jeep. Celsius grabbed the three heavy suitcases and carried them effortlessly to the waiting vehicle. “Come on, let’s go!” he yelled at the dignitary. The Jeep finally got underway.

They drove deeper into Kazakhstan. Ideally they would drive all the way to where their helicopter lay in wait. Flying even a stealth vehicle too close to the Dragon Wall was a risky proposition. With any luck, they would reach the landing site and be on their way in under an hour.

Luck was not with them, unfortunately.

Hunters and Hunted

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

Peter Fowler felt a bit wobbly and light-headed as he walked to his crappy studio apartment from the liquor store, where he had spent more than he could really afford. He needed a drink or ten after his harrowing experience at Freedom Island, though. He’d almost gotten killed twice in one day, and if that didn’t warrant getting sloshed, nothing did.

Life as a Hypernet blogger was never easy. Making a decent living at it was nearly impossible unless you were in the top one hundred or so, and the field was crowded with thousands of wannabes. Fowler had started out early, clawed his way up and attracted a small but loyal following. He’d managed to scrape by, although only because his mother would send him a check every other month or so to help cover the bills. Every check came with a handwritten warning in impeccable Palmer script that this was the last time she would help him, and sooner or later that last time would come. Fowler was looking at a future that involved waiting tables to supplement his income. That's when the GNN people had come calling.

GNN had offered to buy his domain name (xw.fowlertalks.net) for the equivalent of five times the advertisement revenue he had made on his best year; it wasn’t exactly big money, but it was real money, enough that he wouldn’t need to bother his mother for a good long while. More importantly, the network would add his blog to its opinion section and put him on salary as part of its editorial staff. His articles would be viewed by millions of people and he would make at least three times what he had before. Fowler had thought about it for about four seconds before saying yes, never bothering to look for any attached strings.

He’d been in GNN’s thrall for a couple of weeks. When the first check came, he’d celebrated by buying a brand-new computer and using it to send a nasty e-mail to his girlfriend’ he’d rubbed his success in her face and broken up with her – he could do better now. He’d followed that bit of conspicuous douchebaggery with some wild partying. He had gone a little crazy and managed to blow most of the money before the strings attached to his newfound fortune made their presence known.

Fowler had a lot of pet peeves: he hated the government (any government; he wasn’t picky), he hated the mainstream press (who were all lackeys of the government, natch), and he hated Neos. Neos were above the law. They could do whatever the hell they wanted, unless other Neos deigned to step in and stop them. And, although this was something he only admitted to himself when he was well and truly drunk, he hated them because he wasn’t one of them. Like so many children of the modern world, Fowler had grown up idolizing the costumed freaks and wishing he could join their ranks. In his case the disappointing realization it wasn’t going to happen had turned into resentment.

Word from above had come quickly enough. Tone down the anti-government and anti-press stuff, and concentrate on the anti-Neo stuff. Fowler had been indignant for a whole fifteen minutes, until a look at all the crap he had bought with the domain name sale money provided him with a moment of clarity. He’d sold out, plain and simple, and now it was time to sing for his supper. All in all, he didn’t particularly mind concentrating on Neos. Those freaks deserved whatever they got.

The strings got pulled again right after he’d gotten invited to Freedom freaking Island to be part of the monthly Legion press conference. The importance of the invitation wasn’t lost on him. Few bloggers ever got to join the respectable members of the mainstream media for events of that magnitude. Peter might have sold out, but he hadn’t sold out cheaply.

The day before he was supposed to fly to the island with the rest of the press corps, a creepy little man from GNN – he’d said his name was Mr. Night – had dropped by and told Fowler what to ask Ultimate during the press conference. Fowler hadn’t been thrilled about being told what to do, but he’d gone along and done his best to make Ultimate lose his shit live on international TV and Hypernet newsfeeds.

The story about Ultimate’s wife leaving him was not completely groundless: the power couple had gone through a two year separation back in the 1970s. By then Mrs. Ultimate was getting on in years, being a normal human being. Fowler figured being afraid of Ultimate had nothing to do with it: she was probably not revving up his Ultimate-motor anymore and he’d sent her packing before the bad publicity made him take her back. You couldn’t have the Defender of Liberty dumping wifey because she was getting a bit thick in the middle, could you? In any case, the facts didn’t matter. If his new bosses wanted him to run with a ‘have you stopped beating your wife’ angle, that was fine by him.

At least in theory, that was. For a second there he’d thought Ultimate had been mad enough to actually go after him. If the Invincible Man decided to pop Fowler’s head like a pimple, who the hell could stop him? That could have been pretty bad. He’d never been in fear for his life before. Peter had survived, but his performance got him punted off the island via the next available flight that very morning; he left with the impression he was lucky he hadn’t had to swim all the way back to New York instead. No buffet lunch or island tours for him, and he guessed he would never get invited back, GNN connections or not.

On the other hand, being thrown out meant he’d dodged yet another bullet. A few hours after the press conference, somebody had bombed the crap out of Freedom Island. Fowler had followed the news, and it looked like several journalists had gotten blown up along with the freaks and their pet humans. He had been spared, but the scathing op-ed he’d spent the flight home writing was useless now. You couldn’t blast Ultimate and the Freedom Legion on the same day they had gotten bombed and then nuked. He’d have to come up with a softball piece, get in a few subtle digs while praising the selfless heroes and their human friends. Maybe focus on the human victims of the attack? After all, only a few freaks had died while hundreds of innocent people had been slaughtered right in the raid. Yeah, that could work. He’d think about it after a few drinks.

He was a few steps away from his building’s front door when somebody grabbed him and shoved him into a blind alley. Fowler slammed into a trash dumpster; the paper bag he’d been carrying was knocked out of his hands and the sound of breaking glass was quickly followed by the smell of booze.

“Hey! What the fuck…” Peter’s words froze in his throat. Three men were blocking the alleyway. They wore leather jackets over silver t-shirts with the letter ‘U’ in red.

They all had Ultimate rubber masks over their faces.

“You don’t fuck with heroes,” one of them said, his voice muffled under the rubber mask.

“Hey, man, hey,” Fowler replied feebly. He wanted to say something that would make things better. He considered himself a wordsmith. All his words deserted him when he needed them most.

“You don’t fuck with heroes,” the man repeated. The three moved in on him, brass knuckles in their hands. Fowler had time for one brief scream before one of them punched him in the pit of the stomach, paralyzing and silencing him. Fowler fell and the trio stomped and punched him until he stopped twitching. The attackers spray-painted a slogan on the alley’s wall, rushed out and drove off in a van.

A slight man wearing a black suit and sunglasses emerged from behind a dumpster in the alley. There had been nobody there a moment before. He was old and deeply unattractive, with a lopsided smile on his face, an awful thing that most people couldn’t look at for long. He sauntered over Fowler, who was wheezing in agony. The slogan painted on the alley wall over the dying man was simple and to the point: ‘Don’t Fuck with Ultimate.’ The man in black leaned over Fowler. The blogger only had one functioning eye at the moment, but even through the shock and pain he recognized the man looming over him. It was the weird GNN guy who’d given him his marching orders for the interview. Mr. Night, the little man with the creepy smile.

“Help,” Fowler tried to say. It came out as a choked, meaningless sound.

“Sorry, little boy,” the man said in the reedy voice that had set Fowler’s teeth on edge the first time he’d heard it. “Martyrs have to be dead.” Mr. Night examined Fowler’s injuries with a clinical eye. “You really don’t look too bad. You might even recover if given proper medical attention. Can’t have that.”

Mr. Night’s brow furrowed in concentration and Fowler stopped breathing. The blogger tried desperately to force air in his lungs, but nothing happened. “Off you go,” Mr. Night said pleasantly.

The last thing Fowler saw was Mr. Night’s smiling face. Something dark and inhuman seemed to be floating behind his sunglasses.

He’d escaped death twice that day, but the third time, as everyone knows, is the charm.

* * *

Fowler’s body was discovered seconds later. By then Mr. Night was well away from the scene. His work was never done, and even with his little gifts he had to hustle to keep up with his many duties. The little man in the black suit vanished as soon as good Mr. Fowler had breathed his last. He reappeared somewhere not quite in the physical world, wrapped in comforting darkness and pondering about the work of the day.

Great things often came from humble beginnings. The death of an unlamented blogger was of little consequence in and of itself, but it added color to the little tableau Mr. Night was carefully sketching. The paranoids on the web would spread their own pet theories. Fowler had dared to question Ultimate and had paid the ultimate price, pun definitely intended. While few would actually blame Ultimate directly, the death would plant seeds of doubt in the minds of many. It was all part of a delightful scheme to turn the beloved hero of millions into a despised villain. Mr. Night appreciated the beauty of the plan, even if he wasn’t its mastermind.

He wore many figurative hats. To the well-intentioned members of the Foundation for Humanity, he was plain vanilla human Mr. Night, doing his bit to save the world from the growing Neo threat. To the vast Neo conspiracy that sought to rule the world by seizing control of the source of parahumanity’s powers, he was a trusted operative, using his strange abilities to carry out the orders of his putative masters. And to his true masters, Mr. Night was a man who had sought knowledge and found it, terrible knowledge that had flensed off his humanity and left him only with a somewhat twisted sense of humor and an overriding purpose. He very much looked forward to the time when he would reveal who and what he really was to his purported employers.

Mr. Night returned to the world he despised, the world of harsh lights and sharp edges where the teeming plague of humanity crawled and sweated and spawned. He longed for the day when the whole planet would be cleansed of the plague of life. There was still much work to do before that blessed event, but the day was creeping closer, very close indeed.

He emerged from a shadowy corner in an office, startling a man working at a computer. The flunky jumped in his seat, spilling coffee all over himself. “Holy shit!” he shouted. “Mr. Night, sir,” he went on more respectfully. Everybody at the secret facility had been exposed to Mr. Night’s eerie comings and goings for some time now, but nobody had gotten used to them.

“Has the girl been found?” Mr. Night asked. So many things revolved around the little girl from another world. He had caught a brief glimpse of her during the extraction operation, when she had been dragged into this plane of existence. She was a thing of bright light and colors, hope and power made flesh. He could hardly bear to look at her. Only the knowledge she wouldn’t survive the uses the plan had in store for her made her presence tolerable. But he hadn’t had to endure said presence for long; the cursed girl had managed to fight off the summoning process and ended up relocating elsewhere.

The flunky visibly hesitated before delivering the bad news. “She was taken from the hospital, but something went wrong. Archangel is still trying to sort things out.”

Mr. Night’s smile didn’t waver. It rarely did, mainly because it was no more a reflection of his actual moods than the flesh and bone he hid behind were representative of what he really was.

“Place a call to Archangel, would you?” he said. The Russian troubleshooter might need help in finding the girl, and Mr. Night would make sure he got it.

The girl was proving to be rather troublesome. If time permitted, he would have to put some effort in making her demise a memorable experience for everyone concerned.

 

















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