CHAPTER 17 - FISHER

There was a footlocker that Fisher had dragged with him from Geneva. It sat at the foot of his hotel bed, securely locked and marked with the symbol of the Millennium Brigade. Brushing his teeth, Fisher found himself staring at it, and wondering why he even brought it.

Octopus ambled into the bathroom and sat in the doorway, staring at him. What would it be like to be a cat, Fisher wondered. Where everyone was always pleased with you, and the only thing that could possibly haunt you was not being able to find your favorite squeaky mouse. You didn’t—couldn’t—look back on a long list of failures and regrets. Couldn’t realize that you were the only constant between all of them.

He splashed water onto his face and stared into the mirror. People had always said he had a kind, handsome face. He didn’t see it—too many lines, too many scars. He’d always had narrow eyes, made him look like he was always sleepy.

When had he gotten so old? Or tired, or bitter? That idea to train Sabra to take on Taurine had made so much sense the day before, but now it just seemed asinine. He wasn't a teacher, and he was a superhero in name only. He hadn't put on the old costume in, what, a decade? He’d had a six-pack then. Now, if he put it on, he’d just look like someone’s dad in an Impel costume.

Had he truly let himself go that much?

Of course he had. The brain was all electrical, and electrons took the path of least resistance. Was it any surprise then that people, even him, would do the same? Even in Geneva, the world was doing what was easiest. Couldn’t blame them, really, when you looked at the state of the rest of it. But the only difference between there and here was that Asclepion was that much closer to the cliff.

He couldn’t do anything about the world. But Sabra would be going up against Taurine again, regardless of what he did. It’d be easier to stay out of it, simpler. But that’d be the path of least resistance, and that path had ended up throwing him against the rocks already. It’d be one thing if it was just him, but it wasn’t. Not anymore.

He’d do what he could for Sabra. And then, when she won, when she was standing over Taurine—if she won, if she was standing over her, some part of him said—then maybe, just maybe, he could get some justice for Mark.

Maybe, just maybe, that would make up for everything else.

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He’d picked out Resolution Square for its historical value. Back during the Golden Age, many of Asclepion’s heroes had trained there and people had come to watch. It had elegant stonework, a prominent fountain, a statue of Demigod atop it, and all manner of carefully arranged foliage. Some people mingled here and there, secure in the reassuring presence of the Citadel, but no one paid him any mind.

Over the way, a gaggle of uniformed schoolchildren clustered on the grass, paying close attention to one of Asclepion’s oldest heroes. Warden. The only surviving member of Demigod’s original twelve. He’d sat out of things when SOLAR had come to town, but he was still wearing the gold and silver panoply of the First Guard.

It was highly likely, Fisher supposed, that the only thing Warden could do while Star Patrol was in charge was what he was doing: entertaining children. Acting like nothing was wrong while everything slipped that much further towards the edge. Selling a lie.

Pavel, Mark said, whatever happened to that good mood?

“Yo, Pavel,” Sabra said. “So, are we going to spar or what?”

She was wearing an old, well-worn green hoodie over her fitness gear, hood up, and hands in the front pockets. It occurred to Pavel just how tall she was, and that she’d been slouching when he’d seen her at work.

“Waste of time,” he replied. “Seeing what I’ve seen of you, anyway.”

“Doesn’t help that you’re wearing a business suit.”

“I only brought one outfit with me,” he said. “Didn’t exactly think I’d be starting off a new partnership.”

“Is that what we’re calling it?”

“If it works, it works.”

“Seems more like I’m the prize fighter and you’re my has-been coach.”

“Does that change anything?”

“Dunno,” Sabra replied, shrugging. “I’m just saying.”

“Sure.”

“But I’m not your sidekick, okay? Just so we’re clear. I get top billing, and you get a thank you note in my victory speech. Oh, and a cut, of course.”

“That’s fine by me, Sabra. I’ll take my cut when you win, sound good?”

“Hell yeah,” she said, grinning. “I like the confidence. But, wait. Hang on. You’re not going to kill her, are you?”

“No,” Fisher said. “I’m not even sure it’s possible. If The Champion couldn’t manage it in San Diego back in 2050, then I’m not sure anyone can.”

Back then, it’d felt like an insult. The recurring thorn in the side of the Brigade hadn’t been the first empowered to confront that androgynous, alabaster titan, but had been the first to send him packing. The Savior of San Diego. Since then, other people had repeated the feat—The Champion was the easiest of his siblings to handle, it turned out—but, somehow, the fact that Taurine was a trailblazer was worse than had she stood alone.

“She fought The Champion?” Sabra asked, but with way more eagerness than anyone had ever said it. “Oh, man. And I took her one-on-one? Christ and Allah, that’s awesome.”

Fisher shook his head. “Sabra, listen to me. Taurine has a substantial body count, and she hasn’t survived this long by being stupid. If she wanted you dead, she would have done it.”

“Capes don’t kill people.”

“Maybe thirty years ago, sure. You think SOLAR solves things with shoving and harsh language? Either way, she has killed, and she’ll do it again. Christ, I told you what she did to my partner, and she cut off my fucking hands!”

“Hey, easy, man,” Sabra said. “I’m taking it seriously, okay? It’s just a lot to take in.”

Fisher rubbed at his face, exhaled.

“Let me start over, Sabra,” he said. “I don’t doubt that you can fight. But if you go up against Taurine thinking that a suit of power armor is going to make it a sure bet, then you’ve already lost. If you’re going to win, you need to fight smarter, not harder. Come on, walk with me. Tell me what you saw at the bank.”

He set off towards the fountain, and he heard Sabra follow behind. “She’s a shapeshifter,” she said. “It was like she was getting bigger as the fight went on.”

“Close. She adapts. Stronger, tougher. Every attack you land doesn’t hit as hard as the first, and every hit from her hits harder than the last. What else?”

“There were those gunmen,” Sabra continued. “Five of them, at least. I put one of them on the floor, but it was dicey. She pulled an electron blade on me.”

“See, Sabra? Maybe Taurine won’t kill you, but they will.”

Over on the other side of the plaza, the schoolchildren dispersed from Warden and followed along with their teachers. Warden threw them a salute and took to the air with a sharp crack. Fisher watched him go, turning towards the Citadel. A thought came to him.

“You ever been tested, Sabra?”

“For what?”

“Empowered capability.”

“Nope.”

That took Fisher a moment. These days, everyone got tested. At birth, childhood, and adolescence. By then, if you hadn’t developed some capability to twist reality around your fingers, you probably wouldn’t. Asclepion had managed to maintain certain freedoms from the IESA machine, but surely not that one. Sabra sat down on the edge of the fountain.

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“Not at all?” Fisher asked.

“I think I missed it,” Sabra said, shrugging. “I think dad took me over to Japan for a few days when they were doing it. He says that’s how they get people in SOLAR, as kids.”

“That’s not exactly how it works,” Fisher said.

“Not exactly? So, some of it’s true?”

“It’s complicated,” Fisher said, moving past it. “I just want to be sure. This suit of yours. Did you build it? Was it like a tune you couldn’t get out of your head? Like an idea you just had to get down, even if you need to paint a blueprint on the floor? Anything strange like that?”

Sabra peered down into the water, frowning.

“No,” she said.

“You’re sure?”

“Pavel, I found it over in the boneyard block, okay? I’ve done all the hard work with this.” She tapped the side of her head with her knuckles. “There were no weird trances or nightmares or anything.”

See, the artisans scared the Functioning World most of all. It was one thing to punch through a vault door and another to give that power to a dozen others. Just about every technological development during the Golden Age had come from an empowered artisan, drawing that knowledge from whatever bizarre ether only they could plumb. That was a power that even the most prominent empowered heroes of the era lacked.

For a time, everyone thought that only the artisans and artificers would hold those secrets. But then, of course, the technologies were reverse-engineered. Whatever iridic ether they drew their works of art from, there was a certain rhythm to it, a certain pattern, and the governments of the world had set themselves on solving it — and they had. Fisher knew some who had made deals for security and safety, and had heard stories of others who had been compelled by the powers that be, and then discarded.

It was worth exhausting that possibility. But if Sabra didn’t have that particular brand of mad science and bizarre ingenuity, then she didn’t.

“Wait,” Fisher said. “Who said anything about nightmares?”

“Speaking of nightmares,” Sabra replied, “I’m starving.”

“You didn’t eat?”

“I thought we’d be sparring, and I didn’t want to overtrain. But right now, I could murder a cheeseburger.”

“Might as well talk things over a meal. They got a good pierogi place in this city?”

“What’s a pierogi?” Sabra asked.

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Later, they stood on a bridge overlooking a pedestrian thoroughfare. Fisher stared down at his little box of dumplings, chopsticks in hand, and frowned.

“These aren’t pierogies,” he said.

Sabra swallowed down a mouthful of cheeseburger.

“Looks like it to me. What’s the difference? Dumplings are dumplings.”

“The cheese sauce for one.”

“I can go get you some if you’d like?”

“It’s fine,” Fisher said, popping one in his mouth. “I’ll make do.” It didn’t really taste like anything. It certainly didn’t taste like home. But that was Asclepion for you—the meat was grown in vats, and the plants were all hydroponic.

Sabra slurped from her drink and said, around her straw, “I bet I could nail that dude down there with my cup.”

Fisher couldn’t determine who she was taking about, but it didn’t matter.

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“I’m not actually going to,” she said. “Don’t you sometimes just think about things like that? Just doing something crazy to see what happens?”

“Years ago, maybe.”

“When you were a superhero? What was it like?”

That was a hell of a question.

“Not like you think.”

“Huh, okay,” she said. “I’ve got another question.”

“Shoot, Sabra. I’m an open book.”

She nodded. “So, what’s the rarest superpower?”

“Seriously, that’s what you want to know?”

Sabra shrugged. “I’unno,” she said. “Seems like a pretty good one to me. Look, I’m the student here, and I’m trying to expand my mental horizons or whatever.”

“Psammokinetics,” Fisher said.

“What-kinetics?”

“Sand, Sabra,” Fisher replied, turning one of the fake-pork dumplings in its sauce. “People who can manipulate sand. IESA’s only ever identified two, both were villains, and both died during the Collapse. It’s why everyone uses it in their training arenas.”

“Like the pankration.”

“Not exactly the kind of training I had in mind but, yes.”

“Not gonna lie,” she said. “I figured it was, like, someone who could stop time or resurrect the dead.”

“Sure, if we’re counting abilities that no one has ever had then, yes, those would be the rarest.”

“But why sand?”

“Beats me. Might as well ask why some people get absolute powers and why others come with conditions. Might as well ask why Preceptor showed up first. It’s just the way things are, Sabra.”

“I don’t like it when people say that,” she replied, but moved right on before Fisher could ask her about it. “So, which one were you—absolute or conditional?”

“Closer to the first category. I was around before they brought in the Dynamis scale. I think I would’ve been pegged as a D8.” He raised his left hand, held it up against the sky, turned it this way and that so the light caught on the artificial surfaces.

“So, why do you need me?” Sabra asked.

“Because I lost everything. Don’t even rate on the scale now. D0.”

Few empowered had ever lost their abilities like he had. They’d scanned his brain after the incident and found no trace of damage, nothing that fit the usual models and explanations. It’d been too academic for him then, and now he hardly ever thought about it. It’d been a long time since he’d been superhuman and, in some selfish way, it was liberating to be free of it.

Yet here he was.

“That gives me an idea,” Sabra said. “The APD has nullifier cuffs, right? If we could get those onto Taurine, then we’d take away her ability.”

“Sure, if. And that’s a big if.”

Losing them was one thing, taking them away was another. Humanity hadn’t quite cracked where they’d come from (much less why) but someone had some inkling of how. Whoever had invented nullifier cuffs, some said, had saved humanity.

The irony, of course, was that an empowered themselves had designed them. In the end, the single biggest paradigm shift in human history was nothing more than another entry in the long list of play and counterplay, action and reaction.

Push and pull.

“So, story time,” Sabra said. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?”

“Beyond these dumplings?” Fisher thought it through. “I was one of the capes who responded to the Shanghai Event, back in ‘44. I was 28.”

“No way.”

“Yeah,” Fisher said. “Third-largest city in the world, and it was just gone. The Engineer had just walked out of the ocean and unmade it. Hell of a way to introduce himself to the world.”

“What’d you do?”

“There was nothing to do, Sabra. There was nothing there. Still isn’t.”

Sabra was staring off into the distance. Ketchup dripped from her burger and onto the deck of the bridge. “Why? Why on Earth would someone do that?”

“Beats me, Sabra,” Fisher said. “Why do any of the Seven do anything?”

“I thought there was nine of ‘em.”

“Two don’t count.” You had to draw a distinction between true gods and false ones, after all. “And there’s no more than that. But keep that in mind. If Taurine’s calling herself The Bull, then that’s the kind of destruction she wants to unleash.”

“But all those people...”

Fisher didn’t say anything. Didn’t bring up the Missing 40. Didn’t mention that the entire population of the city being wiped from existence was the best-case scenario. Sabra sat back on a bench and ate her burger. Fisher threw half a dumpling to a pair of pigeons.

It was too much for her to take in. Whatever she’d been dealing with, however Asclepion had been treating her, it was all small-scale problems. The play-fighting of street-level heroics. The pantomime between people who prospered within the rules of the game. But what was the punishment for metrocide?

Maybe it’d get through to her. Whatever unspoken rules she thought protected her when she was playing vigilante would last only until they didn’t.

“This is the most depressing training session I’ve ever had,” Sabra said.

“Sorry,” Fisher replied. “But that’s history for you.”

His eyes wandered along the contrast between buildings and sky. Someone had once told Fisher that there was a simple way of measuring the prosperity of any city.

It was the cranes, the number of them you saw operating in any given skyline. The more cranes, the more things being built, the more work going around. Fisher didn’t see a single one over Asclepion. Hell, he wasn’t sure the last time he’d seen one anywhere.

“Actually,” Fisher said. “I lied. About the worst thing I’d ever seen.”

“Oh, Christ and Allah,” Sabra said. “Why’d I ask?”

“It was New York.” Somehow, the memory was so much sharper than the barren wasteland of what had been a city. A single figure floating over the skyline.

“Megajoule had just sent Mister Cherenkov packing. Someone had just taken that famous shot of Mega, floating above the city with his arms crossed, the setting sun behind him. It was a hell of a fight. I was there. That was when I knew.”

“Knew what?” Sabra asked.

“That the Golden Age was going to end.”

Sabra sucked ketchup from her thumb and slurped up the last of her drink.

“You’re a real buzzkill, you know that?”