FIVE MONTHS BEFORE THE MASK COMES OFF

“This job just gives me a bad feeling.” Paul fumbles with old, shaking fingers at the frayed seam where my goggles are woven into my patchwork mask. He picks at loose, blackened threads, and if I could see his face beneath his own mask, I’m sure I’d see his grimace. “You’re not being careful with your power, either.”

“Takes a lot of concentration to protect my threads.” I glance around my bedroom at the other outfits I’ve destroyed on the job but haven’t parted with yet, mostly because I can still kind of wear them. A sweater that used to have a reindeer on the chest but now only bears a charred hole. Several pairs of jeans, each with the buttons and zippers melted into slag. It’s taken a lot of practice to develop the finesse required not to destroy what I’m wearing. “What’s wrong with the job?”

Paul’s hand falls away from my mask. He moves like stiff leather, each bend of his elbow creaky and hesitant.He’s every old Caucasian man condensed into one person. You’d never mistake him for a younger man even covered head to toe in bland gray clothes as he is now, complete with a gray ski mask and goggles. “Thanh wants you to shut down an entire gang. A fight like that might draw the capes’ attention.”

“I’ll make it fast, hit ‘em hard and scare ‘em off.” I do a spin in the mirror, looking for any gaps in my outfit. Paul always makes me cover up so much I don’t show a single square inch of skin. I’ve got my hood drawn up to cover my hair, patchwork mask and goggles to completely cover my face, and my red and black baseball jacket that only shows my hands to the world. “It’s a thousand bucks. Split three ways, sure, but that covers you while I’m gone.”

The old man groans, and he runs his hand along the top of his ski mask to scratch at the crown of his head. “You’re not going anywhere.”

I glare at him, although neither of us can see each other’s eyes beneath the goggles. “I am. I’ve got to find out-”

“God, kid, this again? Really?”

Do you know that feeling when you enter a room and you can literally sense the anger, the tension, the bad blood? They used to think that was some quirk of facial recognition. Except you can feel it even if you’re blind or looking the other way.

That’s the Affect. It’s our souls, the emotions in between, and what gives people superpowers.

Now, Paul’s negative emotions rise to meet me like smog. I’d guess fury from his tone of voice: “There’s nothing there for you.”

As far as I can remember, Paul has only spoken to me twice about the lab where I was born, or made, or brewed like a fucking potion. The first time, all he’d say was that it’s gone, and that the people he’d known there are dead. The second time he told me never to mention it again. And then he got piss drunk and vomited on our dog, Pawpaw.

Of course, I’ve mentioned it as often as I’ve thought of it since then, but Paul only ever grunts and waves his hand. And him being an empath means I can’t even really understand what he’s feeling beyond what he wants me to know. Anyone can feel the Affect like anyone can hear music. Most people can tell you what different emotions are. But only an empath can compose, can tell you the exact notes that make up a chord, what this key means or what that arrangement does. Paul is immersed in the world’s emotions at a far greater level than I will ever be.

I remember very little about the lab. Just abuse, pain, and my brothers. There were so many other clones, all tortured to death before they could gain a handle of their power. I don’t remember how I became the lone survivor.

I clench my fists. “There’s got to be something. You didn’t even see-”

“I saw it. I looked back. I made sure. It’s gone, kid. You’re gonna waste your time like a fuckin’ moron.” Paul lifts his hands to the sky. “Your brothers are nothing more than bones, the whole place probably in ruins. I’m sorry but that’s the truth of it.”

I’m sure he can feel my anger. I aim it at him like a gun. “Careful old man. I’ll bite before I bark.”

“Bah.” He waves his hands as if that alone could dispel the bad air between us. “I can’t stop you, kid. I really can’t. I’ve got my own work tonight.

“You’re right. You can’t stop me.” I’m going to take this job and then I’m going to find out where I came from. I need to know why there’s a huge blank in my memory, even if the truth is simply “it sucked real bad.”

The conversation between us dies like roadkill. I leave on my errands, and Paul on his.

#

The Shells are an odd neighborhood, filled with rough people building their cabins on flotsam. Nearly a million people who’ve got soil from every part of the world on their feet. Its buildings have been sliced apart and burnt to the ground by gods. It’s a microcosm of what we lost. Nearly every building in the Shells has been touched by Affected war at some point in the last half century. Capes move overhead like unknowable moons shifting the tides of the lives below them. And after they’re gone, the people are the ones left to rebuild and sort things out.

A light blood rain falls from red clouds that have slunk across the city from Carnality’s Null Zone to the southeast. The rain plinks on corrugated steel buildings as I make my way across the rooftops toward Saw Off’s hideout. Every time I jump across a gap between houses and land on the next roof, the entire skeleton of the building rattles, pools of blood scattering from the trenches under my feet.

A burly man with thick curly hair closes the shutters of his nearby food stall, lurking inside the busted ruin of a video store. He sneers and shakes his head at me as I land in front of the shop, but I move on too quickly for him to say something stupid. He can go fuck himself.

The air is thick with every kind of emotion. A wave of familial nostalgia comes from one house, and the inspiration of this feeling chases after it – a savory, tangy aroma of someone’s cooking wafts out from a jagged hole in their wall. A few houses further down, melancholy and apathy fall on me like a wet coat. Someone who’s given themselves over to despair. And worse, the smell of rotting food and mildew coming from their home peels through my mask. I scowl and move on as fast as I can.

However, the emotions I care most about are the ones coming from the auto service garage, a horseshoe building that’s half mechanic’s workspace and half normal house. The whole thing reeks of gunpowder. A neon sign that reads “Nobody’s Better Than Tom! still manages to buzz with a couple of its letters, spelling out “No Bett om.”

Whoever Tom was, he relinquished the building long ago. If he was smart, he got the message when people stopped using cars. Now, it belongs to the Smoking Guns, a crew of two that I help out from time to time.

A trickle of negative feeling leaks out of the garage, the kind of feeling that Paul told me comes from bad news, from a decision you don’t really want to make. I don’t like the feel of that, so I debate just leaving and doing the job by myself, but I know that’d piss off Saw Off even more.

The only entrance is a hulking, red-rusted metal door with a rectangular eye slit. I knock. The weight of the door feels good against my knuckles, and I wonder how much energy it’d take to punch a hole through it.

The eye slit slides open. Vibrant green eyes stare at me through the slit. The voice that accompanies them is gruff, but friendly enough: “Weren’t expectin’ you, Mr. No Name.”

I can’t tell them my real name, since masks don’t do that as a general rule, but I’ve never come up with a mask name that suited me. Mr. No Name works about as well as anything else. I nod to the man behind the door. “Lugs, I got a job I could use some help on if Saw Off wants in.”

With a gravelly laugh, he says, “I’m not gonna say no to that,” and opens the door.

Lugs is a literal goliath of a man, his shoulders and neck sun burnt from some kind of physical labor. Bits and bobs of metal shrapnel cover his right arm from his wrist to his shoulders. Nails, bolts, bullet casings, and larger scraps of sheet metal move as if they were simply the sleeve of his shirt as he motions for me to come on in. He wears a demon’s mouth mask that only covers the bottom half of his face. A shotgun dangles lazily from his chest, as if it were the most natural place in the world for a shotgun to be.

Everything that once made this place an auto service garage has been stripped away. Instead of cars, there’s a busted ping pong table in the middle of the room, covered in paper trash. A couple of couches, tattered and dirty, crowd around the table. No mechanic’s tools in sight – instead, guns of all kinds line the walls. Personally, I’ve never cared to learn about or use weapons like these, but they’ve been cared for far better than the rest of this place.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

The first person to catch my attention is a newcomer standing stiff as a board at the opposite end of the garage from me, across an old ping pong table from the door. I’ve never seen this mask before, not with Saw Off’s crew. She wears a motorcycle helmet and a leather jacket with the word ‘piss take’ written on the sleeve, and a rapier hangs from her belt, almost singing as it taps against her thigh. Her arms are crossed against her chest, and I get the impression she’s looking down her nose at her conversation partner from behind the visor of her helmet.

She might not be able to help that, though, because the person she’s looking down on barely comes up to my chest. Saw Off, the leader of this little crew, stands a duel’s distance away from the newcomer, her hands poised on the waistband of her khaki shorts as if to reach for guns at her side. Guns that she doesn’t need, unlike the rest of her gang. Like Lugs, she covers only the bottom half of her face, but with a bandanna embroidered with shark teeth instead to make it seem like her mouth. Camouflage makeup covers the rest of her exposed face.

My arrival has interrupted them mid-conversation. Saw Off shifts her hands from her waistband to her hips, adopting a bored stance. “If it ain’t Mr. No Name.”

“Mr. No Name?” the woman with the rapier asks. “You’re a mask?”

My mouth runs away from me a little. “What do I look like, a baked bean? Who the hell are you?” Her presence has fucked up my plan. She’s an unknown obstacle standing in the way of my easy money. I glance at Saw Off.

Turning back to Saw Off, the mystery woman raps the ping pong table with her knuckles. “The Front’s offer is very good. The alternative is the slow death of Houston’s masks. You may be the last ones standing, I don’t know, but you will be caught eventually.”

At first I want to snap at her, considering I just asked her a question. But the mention of the Front puts me on edge. She can only mean the Houston Liberation Front, the city’s most infamous terrorist group. Even I’ve heard of them, me, who keeps his head down and his ears closed. They’ve killed a few Houston capes, blown up some buildings, standard terrorism stuff. All that comes with attention I don’t want and can’t afford.

Saw Off’s younger than me, which means she’s not great at hiding her Affect. A brew of positive emotions hits me from her, and I realize she’s seriously considering the woman’s offer. Joining the Front, rebelling against the capes, against the Vanguard itself. “Thank you, Silent. We’re thinking about it. You can tell your Epione we’ll talk to her if she wants.”

What awful timing. ”Saw Off, you can’t seriously be considering this, can you?”

Saw Off glares at me. “Of course I am, No Name.”

“I’ve got an offer worth more than that.“ I try to hide my many negative emotions, probably fail.

“No offer can compete with ours,” Silent says. “Our reward is the world, earned back from the capes. What do you have for them, some Old States dollars on a job that might get them killed?”

“You think I’m more likely to get them killed than you?” I bark a laugh. “That’s rich!”

“Will you shut up?” Saw Off shouts at me.

That catches me off guard, and I want to shout back, but at this point I’m just here to get some help on a job, so I shut my mouth.

“There’s a place for all of you, even Mr. No Name here if he can learn some manners.” Silent nods to Saw Off, her shoulders high and back like a soldier. With a sure, proud stride, she makes her way past Lugs to the entrance of the hideout. She sweeps the room with one more look and then she’s gone.

Saw Off, Lugs, and me all stare at each other in perfectly awkward silence.

Then, Lugs says, “Errr, so about that job.”

Saw Off tugs her shark teeth bandanna down, revealing the rest of her painted face. “No Name, what’s your problem?”

“You don’t see the problem? The Front is out there making problems where there aren’t any. They’re number one on the Vanguard’s wanted list.”

“You know that the Street Devils lost one of their members last week?” Her eyes get wild and she shakes her head as if I’d have anything to say about it. “Nobody knows where he went. He’s just gone. And he’s not the only one; mask gangs all over Houston have members disappearing left and right. Either the Vanguard is ghosting them, or someone else is. We’ve got to band together.”

“Band together with terrorists?” That doesn’t sound like a way to survive to me at all. “You’re gonna wind up tangling with a cape, a real one, and then what? The entire city’s gonna come down on your heads.”

“No Name,” Saw Off hisses. “City’s changing in a bad way. We gotta do something.”

“Then do something. I don’t give a shit. But I’m not signing up with you.” Getting involved, getting tangled up in all this… it’ll only end badly for me. I have to stay focused if I ever want to find out what happened at the lab. It’s better if I just leave, cut ties, and move on.

I turn to leave, but Saw Off hooks me by my arm. She tugs me around to face her angry scowl. “Lugs and I, we’re good. But No Name, your Affect is in a league of its own.”

“Hey now,” Lugs says, offended, but Saw Off ignores him.

“With you, we could bring back the old Houston, the one before the capes.”

I sigh, wanting to pull free, but her grip is unrelenting. “I can’t.”

“You can’t? You mean you won’t.”

“I won’t because I can’t. Whatever.” I rip my arm free.

“Gah, you won’t even tell us a fake name, you won’t tell us anything about you!” Saw Of points at her own face. “You basically know what I look like, you know what I’m about, but we don’t know anything about you. But we could be a real crew if we did.” Her frustration fills the entire room.

It’s not fair, living the way I do. Even if I give them a fake name, even if I try to tell them something about me, it’d just be another mask over the real face under it all, the face I share with Megajoule. They’ll never know the real me, they can’t. No matter how many fucking masks I tear off for them, I’ll never get to the center of it. The only way I’m going to get to the center of it is by finding the lab.

Saw Off crosses her arms. “Whatever, you won’t help the Front. Fine. What’s this job you’ve got?”

I don’t feel like sharing the work anymore. I can just imagine Saw Off harassing me the entire time, maybe even following me home or something more stupid. She’s always pried at my identity, thinking it’d bring us together if we knew some things about each other. A full thousand bucks is starting to sound a lot better than splitting it three ways with people trying to convince me I’m meant for bigger things.

“Go play terrorist.” I march away. Lugs only makes a token effort to stop me, a simple hand outstretched as I hurry past him.

“No Name!” Saw Off calls after me. “Come on, don’t go!”

Outside the shop’s doors, I pause for a moment. I’m shaking, my breath coming in shudders. I clench my fist, trying to relax, trying not to feel so… angry about it. I don’t even know why it makes me angry at all. It shouldn’t matter.

While I try to calm down, Lugs pulls open the eye slit. He doesn’t come outside, he only watches me from the hole.

I sigh, hanging my head, and ask, “What?”

“I’m with ya, man. Ain’t a lot of good that’ll come sticking our heads into that bush.”

I kick at the pavement instead of answering him. My chest feels tight, like it’ll squeeze all the heat out of me.

“But admittedly, Saw Off is gonna do what Saw Off is gonna do. She’s got stars in her eyes about the old days. She was just a kid then, so all she’s got is nostalgia. You and me, we’re a little bit older, see.”

With a grim laugh, I tell him, “Actually, as far as I know, I’m twenty-one.”

“As far as you…” He trails off, shaking his head behind the eye slit. “Well, still. I remember. City weren’t that great before Vanguard. It ain’t great now, but it weren’t great then, either. But she don’t know that. So I figure, what’s the harm in letting her blow off a bit of steam, meet some masks, and talk her out of signing up with the Front later.”

“Whatever.”

He coughs. “And I also figure, I’d feel a lot better poking my head into that bush with you along with us.”

“No. I’m not doing it.”

“Friend to friend, that’s all I’m asking.”

My whole damn body feels like a broiler about to blow. I walk over to the eye slit, meet him eye to eye. I shout at him through the hole: “We’re not friends! We’re not anything! You don’t even know who I am!”

Lugs’ eyes narrow, but he doesn’t flinch or back away. He holds my gaze and simply nods, then closes the eye slit.

#

The blood rain lightens up to a drizzle as I make my way through the Shells toward the warehouse Thanh told me belonged to the gang. I fume the entire way about leaving behind Saw Off and Lugs, but as I get closer, I start to think about the fact that a thousand dollars goes a lot farther than the three hundred I was originally going to bring home. That cools me off a bit.

I find the intersection of Joyner and Ledbetter, where the pavement rises up like the stalk of a giant plant cut down close to the roots. The air is thick with desperation, an Affect impression left from the battle that created the intriguing monument. I glance around, searching for the warehouse labeled Marskin Deliveries.

My investigation is interrupted by the whistling of a drone overhead. Avoiding it is trivial, as it can’t sense my Affect until it’s so close I can smell the metal. I search for a suitable place to hide, find one in a desiccated candy shop just across the street. I slip inside, ready to retreat further if necessary.

While it wouldn’t bother me too much to be seen on camera, since I’m masked, it does mean that capes will likely swarm the area within two minutes. Wearing a mask is a crime-enhancer, a crime-spice, if you will. It is by itself only a misdemeanor, but it makes every other crime you do about ten times more illegal in the Vanguard’s eyes.

The drone passes by on its nightly errands, floating on to bother someone else with the long arm of the law.

Before I leave, I give the candy shop one more glance, checking for danger. Whoever owned this shop was a big cape clutcher. A dozen faded posters dedicated to various capes line the back wall, and the tatters of a dozen more cover the ground below. The four biggest posters on the wall belong to Megajoule.

As far as the Vanguard is concerned, he was the greatest cape ever to live; an exemplar of what it even means to be a cape. In the middlemost poster, he wears the uniform of his latter days — black with accents of silver and green throughout — and despite its connection to cape heroism, the outfit makes him seem to me like an ancient necromancer. He’s portrayed flying high in the sky, saluting to whoever happens to be looking at him with an easy smile on his face.

Aside from the smile, it’s like I’m looking into a mirror. A mirror that ages you up a bit, gives you a few wrinkles, but still, a mirror. I stole every bit of my face from him, from his dark wavy hair to his dimpled chin to his icy eyes.

A low murmur of voices fills the room. My hackles rise, my flight response kicks in. I whirl around, searching for the source of the chorus, hoping that it’s the capes. Because at this point, I’d really rather it’d be the capes coming to arrest me or kill me. It’d spare me one more day hearing a voice I’d really rather not hear.

But there’s no one else, no capes, no Saw Off or Lugs or any other masks. Just me and the posters of Megajoule. Their eyes are locked on me. I step right, and left, and every single gaze follows me.

The Megajoule in the middle poster turns his head toward me and winks at me. “If it isn’t my favorite clone.”