Molly walked off the dance floor as the thump of the music wore on. Leah was by her side, sweat soaking her dark skin, a smile on her face. “Yeah, okay, that was fun,” Leah shouted over the sound of the music.
“Let’s get you some water,” Molly said, practically carrying Leah to the table. The girl had pushed herself too hard trying to keep with Molly.
They reached the table, where water and drinks covered the table. Sphinx sat in the back of the booth and Molly smiled. She didn’t like this sort of place and she had come anyway because Molly asked. After depositing Leah, Molly slid over to Sphinx, “Sourpuss,” she said, putting her arm around her friend.
“Clubs aren’t my thing,” Sphinx said, her voice quiet amid the club’s din. “You guys having fun?”
“For sure,” Molly said. “Something of a dearth of cute guys but beyond that.”
“What about that guy?” Sphinx said, pointing at a figure in the club’s crowd who was looking right at her.
He was a youngish guy, with a short black beard and a leather jacket that must have gone out of style before he was born. To be honest, he was not Molly’s type. “Oh, I hadn’t noticed him.” He turned his gaze away the moment she looked at him.
“He’s been watching you for a few minutes,” Sphinx said. “Do you want me to deal with him?”
Molly snorted. Sphinx was smarter than she was, that was true, but she was also far less dangerous. “No need for you to get worked up over a fan,” she said, squeezing her friend’s shoulder before standing up. She didn’t love fan-work but it was only decent, “I’ll go talk to him.”
Sliding through the crowd, Molly felt the tension of the water in her body as she approached the man. He was busily not paying attention to her now, though she could tell from his movements he was doing it on purpose. “Hey, you’re pretty new at this, huh?” she said, keeping her voice cheerful.
“It’s not too long after midnight,” the man said and Molly felt a shock of recognition. It was a code phrase and it was barely eleven.
“Oh, you’re new at this in the other way,” Molly said, keeping her back to Sphinx as she did so. “I bet you want to give me your number?”
The man blinked for a moment and then said, “Yeah. Uh, yeah, I’d love to give you my number.” He reached into the inside pocket of the jacket and took out a sheet of paper, handing it to Molly.
“You got a pen?” Molly asked.
The man blinked for a second.
“For the number?”
“Oh, right,” the man replied. He hastily patted around his pockets till he found a pen, putting a string of numbers on the outside of the envelope.
Molly smiled as he did so and kissed the man’s cheek, “Next time, stare less and approach more quickly,” she whispered as she pulled away from his flushed face. She held up the numbered paper in the air like a trophy, making visual contact with Sphinx.
Sphinx shook her head in the distance and Molly knew that she was rolling her eyes. Molly tucked the paper into her swimsuit in a way that she hoped looked flirtatious and then headed back to the table.
“I can’t believe you took that guy’s number,” Sphinx said as she got back to the table.
“Oh, it’s slim pickings tonight,” Molly groused. She was worried that Sphinx might find that suspicious.
“Maybe for you,” Sphinx said.
“You’re pretty enough without that mask,” Molly said.
Leah startled at that, “You’ve seen her without the mask?”
“We met first that way,” Molly said, as if it were just a coincidence. Even though she’d first met the mixed race girl as Sophia, she still thought of her as Sphinx.
“The few, the proud,” Sphinx said, her voice sardonic. In truth, Molly was probably her closest friend – Sphinx was just standoffish.
Tee spoke up, “That doesn’t mess up your vow of humility or whatever?”
“Love required an immediate intervention,” Sphinx said. “Nereid was a Rampant.”
Molly smiled as the old lie wound its way around the team. Molly, like most people, wanted to think of herself as an honest person. But her whole life as Nereid had been one long, clever lie. “Oh no, was anybody killed?” Tee asked
“Molly was swimming in a lake when it happened,” Sphinx replied. “As powerful as she was in that moment, it was mostly about isolating people.”
“Except for the guy I almost drowned,” Molly said, tucking herself in next to her friend. “Sphinx jumped in and saved him.”
“God, my mother would have killed me if she’d seen it. Cats can’t swim,” Sphinx quoted in her mother’s voice, not that Molly had ever heard it. “Would’ve been kind of ignominious, blubbering beneath the water.”
It had been genuinely heroic. That was the thing about Sphinx and much of the old guard. Tyrants they might be but they were heroes in fact as much as title.
The rest of the group seemed to be taking this in. “Damn.” Wands said after a moment. “How’d you get her to settle down?”
“God saves,” Sphinx replied in the typical fashion of a Knight of St. Galahad.
“The lake froze,” Molly said, rolling her eyes. Her friend was a brave woman, but her religiousness could be a little trying. Wands shared a look of commiseration. It didn’t help that Molly had a hand it, even if she hadn’t exactly caused it. The day had been cold and the front had been blowing in, that was part of why they picked it. They’d been thinking more that the Order would deploy one of its dozen or so cold cannons, but it had worked out anyway.
Conversation moved to less sensitive ground after that, without Sphinx hammering home her point. They laughed and talked and shared drinks, “I can’t believe you’ve never drunk before!” Vincent said, handing Tee another cider. “You lived in a dissenter town, there must have been drinking.”
“There was lots of drinking,” Tee said, taking a gingerly sip that he clearly was not enjoying. “Other people drank all the time. I think you’re underestimating how unpopular my family was.”
Vincent took a swig of beer and stared at him, “I thought they didn’t let people know you were Olympia’s.”
“No,” Tee said, looking down at his cider. “They didn’t like us because we were too hardcore.”
“How does that work?”
“To keep up appearances, Tee’s mom lived quite vocally unreconciled,” Sphinx said. Molly’s ears perked up at that. It wasn’t like her to stick her nose into a conversation she wasn’t invited to. There was probably more to the story.
“It embarrassed them, I guess,” Tee said, turning his drink to the bottom. “They interpreted it as my mom being Holier than Thou.”
“That seems excessive, why couldn’t you have just been filed as reconciled dissenters?” Molly asked. This was good information, exactly the sort of thing that she had given everything for.
“It was a security thing,” Tee said, his voice clearly effected by the drink. “They -uh- well, the Order took on a lot of – you know -”
“Misguided citizens who chose to put their extraordinary talents in the service of justice?” Leah asked and they all laughed. Molly didn’t hammer the conversation because she could feel Sphinx tensing next to her.
By the end of the night, they were all a little buzzed. Molly called a cab and slipped off from the others. In the back of a car, the air less thick with sweat, laughter, and alcohol, she felt the paper in her suit pressing like an accusation. She ignored it when she made it to her sleek, lakeside house, slipping off her suit and into sleep. The note would still be there in the morning.
The towers of Atlantis rose high and proud grew its kings. They counted themselves unconquerable and unchanging. The tides conquered them and in the depths of her dream, Nereid found herself swimming with them. Their fury consumed her in the night, swimming and surging through the streets. Her flood rushed into the Queen’s room, high in the highest tower, and saw the woman in her regalia and her princess beside her.
The queen had a dignity to her, a solid, unflinching glare that reminded Molly of Olympia in her power. Even for the queen, however, there was fear as she looked at her daughter. The tower was shaking, the collapse was imminent as the flood encroached further. Even from the tower now, she could see only a few pinnacle that remained intact above the newborn tide. “Not my daughter, please,” the queen begged, her voice shaking with fright.
“We are the end of the proud,” Molly felt herself say and the flood lurched with her. She wrapped the girl and the mother alike in her watery form. As the tower and the great city lowered into the belly of the sea, the girl opened her mouth to scream and Nereid felt her watery hand plunge down the girl’s throat.
Molly awoke, swirling in her bed, totally indistinct in form. She lashed her body together against the torrent of the tide. She emerged from the water and out of her bed, scrambling toward her suit in the dark. She felt the suit like an extension of her body, a lifeline and a marker of her humanity, and hurriedly put it on. As soon as it was on, she looked down to check on her hand again.
Her hand was still there. Nothing had happened. The tide hadn’t come in yet. She could see out her window onto the lake of New Avalon. Ringing the water, New Avalon was asleep in its bed and very much alive. She felt her body shudder and leaned up against the bed, breathing rapidly.
She grabbed her phone off a nightstand, the dark of the room hanging over her. She wanted to talk to someone.
“Molly?” Sphinx’s voice said on the other end of the line. She sounded groggy but worried.
“Sorry for waking you,” Molly said. She felt something uncoil in her as Sphinx picked up, proving that it hadn’t happened yet.
“It’s okay Nereid,” Sphinx said, her voice almost half asleep. “I’d’ve gotten up in like an hour anyway.”
Molly occasionally wondered if it was worth it to learn the Knights’ weird sleep tricks. “Thanks Sphinx,” Molly said, her voice cracking. “It’s just…”
“You don’t have to apologize for suffering, Molly,” Sphinx said.
“It’s been awhile right?” Molly asked, feeling like a heel for asking for reassurance.
“Stop keeping track!” Sphinx barked as Molly calculated the number of weeks it had been.
“I know, I know, it’s…” Molly said, feeling guilty for relying on Sphinx. Especially since she was actively betraying her.
“No, Molly, ugh I – you know – neither of my families’ are big on these kind of talks. Don’t feel guilty okay? You don’t need to think these talks are somehow adding up to a debt, I’ve never met an hour I’d rather not spend helping you.”
Molly couldn’t explain herself so she just let it go.
“You going to call the guy from last night?” Sphinx asked, trying to move past the silence.
“Probably not,” Molly said, looking around for the paper. “Everybody’s more exciting in the club.” It was lying on the floor. She’d ignored it. Was that why she’d had the nightmare? Or was it the way she’d just been one of the proud that night?
“I get it,” Sphinx said.
Molly kind of doubted it. Sphinx was deep down serious in a way that the excitement of a club or a dance could not reach. She appreciated the sympathy though, “Hey, I gave him a good story though. How many people have gotten a kiss from an Order Member?”
“Well, not as many from the women,” Sphinx said and they both laughed.
They continued to talk for awhile after that. By the time the conversation wrapped up, the sun was peaking over the lake and Molly’s room was naturally lit. The paper on the ground sitting there in the dawn light and Molly grabbed the paper up.
She unfolded the paper and gave it a splash of water from her hands. It was another message from Robin Hood. They’d found an agent of the Nine Tails, some train corporation bigwig from Japan who was working with the Transportation Ministry. They wanted her to search his place for a mystical relic they were told was there.
She folded up the paper and tried not to be annoyed at Robin Hood. It wasn’t his fault her powers were like this. She put on a set of civilian clothes over her suit and had breakfast before she started heading for the Ziggurat.
This wasn’t going to be too easy of an assignment, Molly thought as she drifted up toward the Ziggurat. She climbed the steps of the mighty citadel of the Order, the crystaline structure irrepressibly bright in the morning sun. “Nereid!” Sphinx said when Molly reached the training room. “Good to see you,” she said, giving her a hug. She wasn’t in her full helmet, just her half mask.
“Sphinx,” she said, squeezing her friend as if she were trying to squeeze the guilt out of her own soul. “It’s good to see you.” Molly looked around the room to see the dark haired young Boy Titan standing in the room in his adaptive armor, looking a little tired. “You holding up there, Tee?”
Boy Titan gave her a look that indicated he wanted to complain. “It’s not like she’s injured me or anything,” he said instead of complaining.“It’s good for me, I’m sure.” He had a good attitude. Molly liked him in spite of the fact that he was now an heir apparent of the whole Olympian Order. He was a very humble guy, one of the benefits of growing up an outcast she guessed.
Molly grinned at that, “Sphinx insists that we be prepared even when we’re all-star talents.”
Sphinx snorted, “There are people just as strong as either of you out there,” she said confidently. “And you’ll be grateful when you meet them.”
“I’m not complaining,” Molly agreed. Some dark night, she might be facing down Olympia by herself. It would help that she had trained then.
“Kind of surprised you opted in this morning, haven’t you already been in three times this week?” Sphinx asked. It was a delicate way to ask about if she should be in today at all.
“I’ve got a lead on a Nine-Tail, actually,” Molly said. It was true, as far as it went.
“A nine-tail?” Boy Titan asked. If the government had sense, the Nine-Tails would be known as a public menace.
“A secret society,” Sphinx said. She looked at Molly, “You’re sure?”
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“Oh, absolutely not,” Molly replied. It was better to convince Sphinx to go in for an ambiguous possibility than to tell her she had a surefire lead. Surefire leads brought a lot more questions than hunches.
“Wait, a secret society? Like the Seraphites?”
“The Seraphites were a doomsday cult,” Sphinx said. “The Nine-Tails are just kind of a secret cartel of business people? They’re a nuisance, certainly, but they aren’t exactly about to start World War III.”
Molly nodded along with the explanation. She knew that Sphinx liked being knowledgeable about things and didn’t want to intrude on that. Personally, she thought that the sort of crimes that the Nine-Tails got away with deserved more respect as crimes qua crimes, but there were few in hell worse than the Seraphites.
“Wait, how many secret societies are there?” Boy Titan asked.
“A lot,” Sphinx said. “Mass conspiracies are still something of dark phenomenon in sociology, but they do occasionally occur. The Knights of Saint Galahad have had contact with the Nine-Tails since the opening of Japan and the Society of Lilith since, so far as I can tell, forever. There are more modern ones and any dissident group that figured out how to run one would be a major thorn in our side.”
They were certainly working on it. “So how’d you find out about this?”
“Overheard something fishy at the club last night,” Molly lied. “I spent a bit this morning looking into the name and he seems like he’d be a Nine-Tail Fox.”
“What’s the guy’s name?” Sphinx asked.
“Akiro, he’s here on a business visa of course. Consulting with the Ministry of Transportation on building trains.” Molly said.
Boy Titan frowned at that, “Ministry of transportation stuff is important, isn’t it? We’ve been struggling to get the national and city rail systems up for as long as I’ve been alive.”
It was true that messing with a foreigner who worked for the MoT would probably make the transportation ministry’s problems worse, not that Molly cared. It was an interesting sensitivity to the modes of government coming from him. Olympia had always been a conscientious leader around law enforcement, criminal law, and preternatural policy but otherwise the state tended to sag around anything where patronage could be distributed.
“If he does work for the Nine-Tails, it’s better that we know,” Sphinx said. “If not, well, we do pay foreign experts a lot, so they have to put up with these kinds of thing.”
Molly knew that was part of why they had so much trouble improving their talent pool but that was one of the conditions of the regime that she was happy to allow to exacerbate itself. There were worse things in the world.
“Alright, well, I’ll put the word and we’ll get straight to it tonight. No need to disturb the upper ranks with a hunch right?”
“Wasn’t the robot a hunch?” Boy Titan said.
“Yeah, and look at all the good press that got us,” Sphinx said. “Come on, eye on the prize.”
Molly thought they could’ve done with a little less good press. Thankfully, a Nine-Tail being caught would never become public. She’d get him arrested, make off with the scroll they were after, and nobody would be any the wiser.
By the time evening rolled around, Molly had taken a good solid nap and enjoyed a long breakfast. She didn’t have any disturbing dreams this time, which was a big relief. Once Wands and Gate arrived, they rolled out the guy’s home floor plan.
“This wasn’t custom built and there haven’t been any big renovations,” Sphinx said, pointing at the blueprints on a large table in their conference. “So this should be it.”
Wands was wearing his flashy musketeer-y costume and looked deadly serious, “We really expect it to be a cakewalk to get this guy? If he’s a Nine-Tail, he could have any kind of relic from across Asia.”
“In theory,” Sphinx agreed. “But in practice, he’d have to get it here. As much of a pain in the ass as it is, we’ve got very thorough border checking protocol.”
Wands sighed, “Maybe? Magic is still not a specialty of the Ministry of Security.”
“Maybe if the Magician didn’t-” Sphinx began to launch into her diatribe against the Magician’s secret keepung.
“Alright,” Molly said, “So there might be some magical item but probably not something that sticks out too much.”
Sphinx stopped and sighed, “Yeah.” She conceded instead of continuing.
“You guys want the stealth spell I used last time this time?”
Sphinx shook her head, “I’d be less surprised by actual guards than anything I can’t kill with a call to the grid.”
They got in a vehicle and drove toward their location, the tension of the mission beginning to settle in over all of them. Molly thought it must be worst for her. Only Molly was betraying them all simultaneously. Maybe she’d get lucky and the magic scroll wouldn’t even be there.
Maybe the sun would rise at the bottom of the sea.
They reached Akiro’s house in New Avalon. It was a nice, if not exceedingly large, single family home. Sphinx’s helmet was probably taking in all kind of data. “No major sensors, I’ve sent the command to the grid to cut off the flow of signals to the outside from inside it.”
The whole troupe of teenagers nodded and Molly couldn’t help but feel a little silly. They were breaking into the house of some guy twice their age for her say so. This wasn’t a great thing to sanction as a government.
Gate opened a gate to the backdoor, completely skipping over the perfectly manicured lawn. Sphinx popped the door open in twenty seconds and they were inside the house. Molly shifted into her watery state, slipping along the floor.
The house was still silent as they crept through it, “Split up?” Molly suggested in a hushed gurgle.
“Gate and Wands, Tee and Nereid, and then me.” Sphinx said as a command. They slipped apart.
Shifting on the ground, she could feel Boy Titan’s nervousness. “It’s alright,” she whispered as she sloshed across the carpet without leaving a drop.
“Breaking into someone’s house feels kinda gross,” Boy Titan admitted as they entered a study. It was covered, floor to ceiling, in bookcases with the sort of covers that struck Molly as fancy and official looking.
Molly dashed her eyes around the room, “I’ll check the desk, you check the books” she said as they entered the room. If the scroll was in here, as seemed likely to her, she’d have it in an instant. She could roll it up and nook it in some hole until she could come and retrieve it.
She washed over the desk, going into each drawer and found a ledger with one of the identified cyphers of the Nine Tails on it. She kept moving through the desk after that, trying to find the scroll. Nothing there. She looked at the wall and back at the door. The room seemed a little bit small for what it should have been. She looked at the bookshelf and rolled up to its bottom in the dark as Boy Titan stood perilously close.
It was a little too small, so she slipped under it. In a shallow drywall, there was a golden scroll case. Molly debated leaving it there and coming back for it. But if the Nine-Tail wanted out, he might give it up or sell it out. She wrapped her watery form around it like a snake and slipped up the house’s wall with it, punching a hole out at the ceiling to carry out the scroll. She manifested her human form and tucked the scroll into her adaptive suit. It was a good thing it was dark because someone would surely have otherwise been curious about the whole thing. She burst through the desk and grabbed the book, “Come on,” she said, holding the cypher book in front of her. “I can’t read this but it’s a Nine-Tail cypher, let’s go.”
Molly and Boy Titan were walking when they heard a crash from upstairs. In a moment, Molly was burst at her top speed up the steps and Boy Titan was hurrying after her. They reached the hallway as they saw Gate and Wands emerge from a hall room.
“What’s going on?” Wands asked, his voice shaky but still trying to stay quiet. “Something in the house is suddenly profoundly off balance.”
Molly shrugged and lied, “No idea. We’ve got the cypher to prove he’s a Nine Tail, let’s find Sphinx and go.”
“Alright,” Wands said after a moment. “Sphinx! Get out here!”
There was another crash on the other side of the hallway and they all rushed toward it. Pushing into the master bedroom, a large pack of fox-like aerial things were attacking Sphinx. She was batting it off with her staff but it was not looking good.
“Do something!” Molly commanded Wands.
“I don’t know what kind of spirits those are,” he said angrily back, calling up his grasping chain spell. The chains tried to grasp around the oni but they kept pulling them apart like paper clips. Then, almost from nowhere, Wands spilled down onto the floor as a middle aged Japanese man knelt into his back.
“Akiro,” Molly warned, “Call them off!”
“If you’ve made it this far, you must know enough about us to know that I’m not going to do that.” Akiro leapt out at Gate and she put up a gate that dropped him straight in front of Molly
She shifted her hand to water, “Call them off!” she said, stuffing her hand down his throat.
He panicked there, she saw his eyes fill with fear as he began to spill downward. After half a moment of him on the floor, she withdrew her hand and stared at him. Boy Titan had grabbed the man, holding him as he struggled to land a hit. Fighting someone with Boy Titan’s level of strength was probably theoretically possible for a baser, but it didn’t seem to be something which he was any good at.
“Stop!” Akiro screamed, “The scroll demands you stop!
Sphinx screamed. Molly turned to see the two oni slamming their fists into her.
“Call them off!”
“Your friend won’t make it, you should all go. Arrest me too, please,” Akiro said, his body half sagging and half shaking with fear. “As long as we get out of this house right now.”
Why hadn’t the foxes attacked her? What was going on? “What are those things,” Wands said, pushing himself off the floor.
“Two oni guardsmen, bound by a scroll. They have to obey it, they’re supposed to guard my house. I guess one of you must have damaged the scroll somehow. We have to go now.”
Molly surged over to the two Oni and tried to slam into them. These things were brutes, brutes in a way that made even her considerable hitting power bounce off them. “Gate! Can you get us out?”
“Maybe!” Gate replied from a distance. “It’s hard when there’s that much movement in that small a space.”
Molly slipped under Sphinx and tried to drag her under the oni and out of there. The oni stepped on her and slammed down another hammer blow. It wasn’t working. She wasn’t going to get Sphinx out like this. Her water form senses told her that Sphinx was on the edge of working. She looked at the situation over where her friends were.
Akiro was wrapped in Wands’ manacles, freeing Boy Titan to handle the Oni. Boy Titan was tough enough and strong enough to wrestle one of the Oni but then the other one reached down to Molly’s form and hurled her against the wall. She slammed into it as if she were solid and felt her body shake. Her powers helped her healing but it wasn’t enough to be immune to injury if there was a contact.
“The Oni are powerful,” Akiro warned, his voice frightened. “Give up on the girl, let’s run away. I will tell you what you want to know.”
Molly pushed her body up and looked at the Oni. They were fearsome things, that was certain, and if she revealed the scroll to Wands, they would certainly fall into the hands of the Order. It wasn’t fair or right to give power to the Order to preserve one of its members. The Order didn’t have any right to rule and however personally decent Sphinx might have been she was an important part of their whole edifice. If she died here, that would likely disrupt the relationship between the Hellhounds, it would undermine the new team. It might make Boy Titan more fearful.
The logic of all of this was unassailable. The best plan was to let Sphinx die and keep the scroll hidden. Whatever story Akiro told later, he would never manage to convince them it had been in the wall where she took it from.
But then Molly saw the Oni pacing back towards Sphinx and the pretense went out of her.
She yanked the scroll out of her suit and held it up, “Uh, is this it?” she said, playing the ditz.
“Yes!” Akiro said, his voice estatic. “That’s it, hand it to me girl and I will command the Oni off your friend.”
“I’m not completely brainless,” Molly said and handed it to Wands.
Wands stared at it, “Yeah, okay,” he said. He read it and began to chant. There was a shimmering in the two Onis and they turned into bronze statues as if their living skin were falling off like a snake’s. Sphinx was unconscious on the ground.
Molly rushed to Sphinx’s side and picked her up without any trouble. She was breathing but her breaths were fast and shallow. Molly ran her hand to her neck and took her pulse, feeling as it beat rapidly.
We are the enemy of the proud a voice echoed in her mind and she ignored it. She felt her body tremble, shaking with watery weakness for a moment and then it passed.
Sphinx was alive, “Let’s get out of here,” Molly said, holding carrying Sphinx to the rest of them. Boy Titan had extracted himself from the Oni’s presence and looked at her nervously, “Is she alright?”
“She’ll be fine,” Wands said. “The Ziggurat has the best medical facilities in the world. And the Knights are… Well, I don’t know how, but their current leader is minimum fifty and has had that happen to him at least a dozen times.”
Molly couldn’t bring herself to agree with Wands, but she let it pass. The beating of her heart and the shallowness of her breath might bring this all to an end at any moment.
By the time they had gotten out of the house, a saucer had already arrived with Hellhound’s personnel and they stepped aboard. Molly followed Sphinx into the medical section.
By the time Sphinx woke up, Molly had been up nearly twenty four hours beside the Hellhounds. “You can go to sleep,” one of them said, not for the first time. His voice was harsh as flint, but she knew he was the nice old one as opposed to the young mean one. “We’ll tell her you waited.”
Molly shook her head. She couldn’t do that. “I can’t think of any place I’d rather be than here when she wakes up.”
“Not sure it does much good,” a voice croaked from the bed and Molly rushed over to her side.
“Sphinx,” Molly whispered, her whole body letting her feel something beside quiet dread. If she hadn’t wasted so much time not giving them the scroll, Sphinx would’ve been fine.
Sphinx grinned up at Molly and said, “Go to bed you idiot.”
“I don’t wanna,” Molly said in a mock whine.
“You haven’t gone to sleep here,” Sphinx said, as if ticking off the options, “The boss is trying to send you home, so I know this isn’t the second shift or something. So you must have been up since this morning,” her eyes flicked to a clock. “since yesterday morning before and I know you need sleep.”
Molly said nothing.
“It’s fine Molly, I’m awake. You got me out. I’ll recover.”
Molly went home. It was almost light outside again and she had probably gotten six hours of sleep in the last forty eight. she collapsed onto her bed in her adaptive fiber. She hoped, hoped against hope, that she would sleep a dreamless sleep.
Of course, she did not.
Atlantis drowned again in her dreams. But earlier now, among the janissaries and guardsmen in the streets trying to guard the boats for the escape. Among the nobles in their silks and libraries, trying to preserve some last scrap of beauty or truth. Judgment day coming early.
Molly almost jerked herself awake as she struggled against the nightmare. Her body was spread across half the room and she pulled it back together, like dragging a boat onto shore, panting and huffing and sobbing as she sat on the ground of her apartment. From the morning light streaming in through her window, it couldn’t have been an hour or two of sleep.
She pushed herself up against her bed and stared out at the lake, wondering if she could drown.
“Hello Molly,” a voice said from inside her room. She almost disintegrated back into water but willed herself steady. Someone was hidden in her room, almost invisible.
There was only one other person than a Knight of St. Galahad who could do that. “Robin Hood,” she said, her voice ashamed. She had failed. He hadn’t come to see her in a long time.
“You lost the scroll,” Robin Hood said.
“Yes.”
“The spirits in it are cunning as well as strong,” Robin Hood said, “In the hands of the Magician, they will contribute more to the Order than you know.”
Molly felt her body shaking, “I’m sorry. I tried my best.”
Robin Hood sighed and sat down against a wall opposite the window where the morning light had not yet crept in. His dark green armor and his full-face mask were all she had ever seen of him. “I know kid,” he sighed. “I have the report already.”
“How?”
“The Order doesn’t know what they have yet.”
“So it’s lower security information than it should be.”
“In time, they’ll erase this whole incident from their internal tactical analysis logs.”
“You came to lecture me?” Molly asked.
Robin Hood shook his head, “I understand how the knights can be. Leaving one of them to die, even if it would be for the best… They have good hearts, it’s their ideas that are bad.”
Molly felt a rush of reassurance. It was good to know just that she wasn’t crazy. She hadn’t gone royalist if Robin Hood could say these things. “The nightmares are getting worse,” she said.
“I’m keeping my eyes out, but there’s limits. Some things don’t have a solution.”
Molly stared out at the water again.
“How’s Sphinx?” Robin Hood asked.
Molly looked at him for a moment, unsure of what to say. What if he used it to hurt Sphinx? Molly wasn’t sure she wanted that.
“I’m not going to sneak into the Ziggurat to attack her, even I have limits. I’m just asking if anything good came of it.”
“She’s woken up,” Molly said. “The doctors say she’ll be back in fighting shape within a week or two.”
“I’m glad. I didn’t get into this to hurt people, Molly, and neither did you.”
“That’s a nice thing to say,” Molly replied. “But I’m not sure I didn’t.”
Robin Hood let out a low whistle, “Oh leave the baggage train, Molly. You’re a fighter, you were never going to take this regime lying down. But I don’t think old wounds made you take up your part in all this.”
“I was so angry, back then. They hurt so many people and there’s no one who makes them pay. They say Justice Prevails and they are the ones who define it, so who can say otherwise? I was so mad.”
“We’re all mad, Molly. But I’ve seen you out there saving people. In the days before, you would have been fighting the good fight with Titan and Hellhound. Things look a little different now, but you saved Sphinx. I don’t think you could have done that if this was about hatred for you.”
“Maybe it was!” Molly shouted, her body shaking and the water flowing through her. “Maybe that’s all it was! Maybe that’s why that stupid amulet broke open for me!”
The green mask was silent for a moment after the yelling and then he approached Molly and wrapped her in a hug. “That wasn’t why,” he whispered before releasing her. “That wasn’t why. I knew you then, I know you now, there were angrier people who it could have chosen. I don’t know why it picked you but I don’t think it picked you for hatred.”
Molly shook her head. Atlantis drowning was still as fresh in her mind as if she had killed it with her own two hands. However sincere Robin Hood might be, however much he might mean it, she didn’t buy that this wasn’t because she was deeply messed up.
Robin Hood sighed and gripped her shoulder, “Believe what you want. I trusted you as infiltrator when I trusted no one else. That wasn’t just because you were our most powerful preter. I trust you still. You’re the best shot we’ve got of getting to the inner workings of the Order.”
Molly nodded as if he had said something she agreed with and wiped at her face, where tears had begun to slip out like deserters from the army. “She almost died, Robin Hood,” Molly whispered. However kind he was being, Robin Hood was a mentor, not a friend. Her best friend was lying in a hospital bed because she’d kept a secret.
“We didn’t know the scroll would react that way,” Robin Hood said.
“I know,” Molly said honestly. Some part of her wanted to believe they were lying to her but it wouldn’t have been helpful to them if she’d been the one who got jumped. If she could believe they were betraying her, then she could find a way to caught this gordian knot of loyalties she was tied up in.
“Molly, we’re here for you. If this isn’t working, let me know. It’d be good to have you with us again.”
Molly smiled at the offer and looked around the palatial house her wages as an order member bought her. “It wouldn’t be so bad to leave this all behind and go back to cheap cots and plastic cups,” Molly agreed. The romance of the whole revolutionary thing was thicker then and she could imagine herself lauded and loved in the pages of glory. “But that’s not what this country needs.”
“No, it’s not,” Robin Hood agreed.
He squeezed her arm one last time and headed for a door. Before he stepped out of the door, he gave her a parting word. “Remember, however bad it gets, we’re not fighting to kill the bastards. We’re fighting to free people. They can get out of the way at any time.”
Molly watched as he managed to disappear into the beach. She sighed as he vanished and shook her head. It was a nice thing to say and imagine. Maybe the Knights of St. Galahad and Olympia and her friends on her team would all pull together and realize that fighting against freedom was wrong.
Anything can happen in the world of hopes and dreams. But Molly had a feeling that however this ended for everyone, her story was more likely to finish with her watery hand down the throat of a good person with bad ideas.