FOUR YEARS BEFORE THE MASK COMES OFF

MEGAJOULE, 49, DEAD.

Those three simple words bring the world to standstill on May 13th, 2073. The wrench that built the machinery is jammed back into the gears, destroying all forward momentum.

Paul parks the car and stares, helplessly, hopelessly, out the window. A grim landscape waits outside the car, cracked and burned by superhuman war. What buildings remain standing are mere husks; the highway is choked with cars and corpses.

“Vanguard National Press reports that about fifteen minutes ago, outside Houston,” the spokesperson wavers, as if under a tremendous weight, “Megajoule was killed by Carnality, the cloak responsible for the last two days of crisis in the city.”

Every single word is false. Megajoule actually died about three weeks ago. Paul was there. And Carnality is no more responsible for her actions than a bull for charging a matador.

“Shit, she went to Houston,” Paul mutters. He’d hoped she wouldn’t. Maybe he should turn the car around, go somewhere else. Chase Terry down to wherever he went. But he dismisses that idea as quickly as it occurs to him – Houston is the last best chance. They’re still a free city.

“His body has been recovered by Vanguard National officials and is being taken to Denver. We’re hearing that several other capes, as well as Houston’s local Affected, witnessed his final moments, and that he saved them and the city from something much more disastrous—”

Paul turns the radio off, runs his hands through his hair, and then gets out of the car to quietly catch his breath. His shaking hands worm their way to the inner pocket of his coat for the flask he always keeps there. He sips at the whiskey, wrestles it down his throat, hating how humid the air has turned and knowing it will only get worse as they head further south.

Dallas sits on the horizon to the east, barely visible in the late evening twilight, broken skyscrapers lined up like the bottom jaw of a mouth of rotten teeth around a few patches of light, and Fort Worth’s corpse surrounds the road they’re taking south. Paul smells a hint of smoke on the wind, though there’s no fire in dwindling light that he can see. No headlights from other cars, not even a row of high mast lights to give away a Vanguard rail. The only sound is the lonely wail of wind on the vast plains of north Texas.

It seems to Paul like the end of the world is a progressive disease.

It’s catching up to the Vanguard, finally showing symptoms. The tumor has hit the brain, killed the Vanguard’s very soul. If the Vanguard persists after Megajoule, it does so in an undead shamble. And sooner rather than later, even that will end.

Paul shakes his head and pockets the whiskey, intent on rationing it until they make it to Houston. He looks up at the broken buildings around them, at the frescoes of Megajoule and other famous capes that still stand by some luck. Megajoule looks down on him with kind eyes and an easy smile, over a slogan that says, “Rest Easy, We Will Protect You!” But Megajoule’s perfect cape smile isn’t what Paul recalls now. It’s the man’s last moments: the pink, swollen eyes, the pain and agony, the despair of facing death, the blood streaming down his cheeks and neck. As far as heroic ends go, it doesn’t feel very heroic to Paul.

The rear passenger door opens, snapping Paul from his thoughts. Gabe unfolds all his lanky, gangly height, a good foot above Paul’s head. He has all the same features as Megajoule—dark, wavy hair, icy blue eyes, and that dimpled chin. In demeanor, though, the kid is very different, with a brooding stare that could cut through steel. Nothing like the beatific man on the crumbling frescoes around them or even the black and green t-shirt that Gabe’s wearing.

As an empath, Paul also sees the Affect, the source of humanity’s superpowers and the aether of their emotions. To Paul, Gabe’s feelings are an aura radiating from his heart, unfurling from him like a flower. The fires of anger, wisps of curiosity, heavy clumps of sorrow; it all roils and sparks and twists around him. Paul sees the real Gabe, the Gabe beyond the body. His soul. Like everyone else’s, it is a chaotic mass swirling with tendrils of many emotions. Unlike everyone else’s, it is a massive beast, a sign of the well of power Gabe has inherited. One of the biggest reservoirs of engrams Paul’s ever felt.

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All that power, wedged inside the moodiest looking kid Paul’s ever had the misfortune of bearing thousands of miles across the country.

“Hey,” Paul half-barks, still overwhelmed by the not-so-news. “You can’t be out here. If a drone catches footage, we’re cooked.” Not that he really needs to worry about that here in the abandoned city. The worst thing that could happen is one of the Vanguard’s high-flying drones might catch a glimpse of their car’s headlights, a tiny ember in the ashes - and that might be a very, very bad thing, no doubt, but even so, the risk is low.

Gabe doesn’t get back in the car. He clenches his fists, making Paul worry he’s about to start throwing punches, and shouts, “They’re lying!”

Paul steps back and calms his own emotions, careful not to provoke the wild animal in front of him, and says, “Of course they’re lying. They can’t tell the truth about this.”

The kid hunches over, hugging himself, shuddering in pain. Paul wants to reach out, to assure him, but he’s afraid that if he touches Gabe, he’ll instinctively try to change something about the kid’s mind and emotions. And after everything, the lab, the torture, the other clones, Gabe deserves better than that.

Gabe stands upright suddenly, almost jumping off his feet and into the air, and his skin glows like a piece of the sun caught in human form. An incredible wave of heat escapes from him. The air hisses and recoils like a wounded beast in response. An eruption of force knocks Paul off his feet, drives the breath from his lungs. He watches, gasping, as the wind howls and the buildings around them stir at Gabe’s show of power, shaking off the dust of their abandonment.

A scream breaks through the roaring wind. “I could have saved him!”

Paul struggles to his hands and knees. Another wave of force shrieks out of Gabe’s body, rattling the windows of their car and bits of broken glass on the road. The kid’s shirt starts to smolder in spots, his jeans smoke from the heat bubbling off his skin. Paul grits his teeth - this isn’t a focused attack, these are the random lashings of pain. The kid could direct a pure whip of kinetic energy at Paul, instantly turning him into chunky soup, but instead Gabe seems to just be releasing it into the sky. Everything getting pulverized on the ground is simply caught in the wake.

Finally, Gabe calms, his chest heaving, lines of steam hissing off his arms and neck. His shirt is almost burnt off his chest. “He’s really dead.” He stares out at the broken city like he’ll find the ones responsible.

Paul’s heart is wedged between a rock and a blade. Even the tiniest movement, or flicker of emotion, will cleave him in two. “I’m sorry.”

Something in Gabe’s face changes. An expression, a tic, like the mask of Gabe switching owners. His tight, pinched lips turn up in a smirk, and his eyebrows arch in playful malevolence. Paul sees something that should be gone, should be asleep.

“Too easy, don’t you think?” Gabe asks, in a smooth, confident voice that sounds nothing like the one a second before.

“Let him go!” Paul rushes over, reaching out to snag Gabe’s hand in his own. Then, with his empathy, he reaches into Gabe’s Affect.

In the physical world, Gabe reels back with a glowing, burning hand to strike Paul down, but Paul is quicker - he finds the hole in Gabe’s mind this thing is poking its fingers through. In the depth of Gabe’s psyche, there’s a gap in the seams. This memory, this horrible thing, is trying to claw its way out.

Paul takes all those negative emotions, everything the kid was subjected to, everything that was meant to make him vile, powerful, to make him the weapon the Vanguard wanted, and weaves a shield around them. A compulsion to forget–not everything, not the shape of what happened, but just enough to protect the kid. It’s not the first time he’s done this to Gabe, but Metis he hopes it’s the last.

“You can’t keep me locked away forever,” says the other Gabe, the one that will be locked away forever if Paul has anything to say about it. The voice fades and dies out, and the intense outpouring of Gabe’s Affect vanishes with it. It’s not as if the wound was never there, more like Paul just bricked up the hole in Gabe’s head, locking the other tenant in the dark, unable to influence Gabe’s mind.

Unaware of the disaster that almost happened, Gabe’s expression changes again, and he’s back to the moody kid, back to the one who should be wearing that face.

“Are you okay?” he asks, seeing Paul wheezing and gasping for air.

Paul, ashamed, can’t meet the kid’s eyes. Once again, he’s plucked memories from Gabe’s head - left the shape of his time in the lab but none of the horrifying details of Megajoule’s death and the torture Gabe was subjected to. Mostly he’s ashamed of how easy it was - he’d done it a thousand times before at Lilac. Taking memories like that is difficult for an empath to master, but Paul’s had a lot of practice.

Paul steadies himself against the car. He nods and says, “Get back in before a drone sees you.”

Gabe retreats into the darkness of the back seat, finding a spare shirt in the pile of laundry below his seat, and Paul returns to the steering wheel. He scratches his eyebrow with his thumb, presses it against his temple and wishes he could just scoop out his own brain. Instead, he takes another swig of whiskey and starts the car. He checks the mirror to make sure Gabe’s still there, hoping against hope that the kid dove out the window, that he disappeared, that somehow he was spirited away to a better world.

But he isn’t. He’s still sitting there, staring out the window as they drive to Houston.