“You’ve got five minutes.”
The door pulled shut behind me with a harsh clang that promptly fizzled out, the strange metal used to build the walls dampening the sound rather than echoing it. The probing fingers of my power could touch it, could feel it when the lock engaged, but it was slippery. Tinkertech? Tinkers made materials too, didn’t they?
I tsked. Stupid. Why was I focusing on dumb shit like the walls?
[Rotlimb: Heh. I could think of a few reasons.]
I didn’t bother responding. The guard had said I had five minutes, after all. I might be able to push for more time—things were very, very different than how they had been just a few hours ago—but I refused to waste what might be the last chance I got to see my mother.
“Hello, Meteor,” she greeted me from where she sat on the edge of her cot.
[Delible: Elena…] The greeting brought me up short, my tongue tripping over what I’d been about to say. I managed a, “H-Hi?” in reply that prompted a round of laughter at my expense in the confines of my own head. An excellent start, unquestionably.
I swallowed down the bitter self-loathing and ignored the jeers in my head. Later. “Hi,” I reiterated, no longer a question. “It’s— I wanted to see you.”
“That’s sweet of you.” She smiled. The expression and her relaxed posture gave one image, but her eyes another. There was a storm brewing in them, and I didn’t just mean their color. It wasn’t anger, that much I could tell, but I couldn’t parse the emotion hiding in them beyond that.
There was a lot I could have asked her. Too much, really. There was the looming specter of our time limit, sure, but more than that, “How am I supposed to do this?”
“Meteor?” [Toro: Jesus fuck, is this shit eloquent or what?]
I cringed, Rotlimb’s reedy laugh and Butcher’s deep chuckles ringing in my not-ears. “I mean, this—this right now. How am I supposed to just talk to you after fifteen years of not knowing you? Except I do know you, just it’s—”
I thankfully stopped short of admitting I had memories that weren’t my own. I’d eat my hat—right after I bought one—if the PRT weren’t listening in on this conversation. I absolutely did not want the scrutiny that admission would invite.
“I know what you mean. Finally finding you, it’s like I’ve always known you.” She knew what I meant, of course. She was protecting me again, as easy as breathing. Unbidden, Klaus’ memory of that first night rose to surface of my thoughts, of when she called, inconsolable after finding their— our apartment had been raided. [Klaus: ‘Inconsolable’ … that’s one way to put it.]
I had intended to take things in a different direction, but with that fresh on my mind, I found myself saying instead, “I’ll find her.”
She stilled. “Ah. Gregor spoke with you?” [Alchemist: The walls have ears, do not forget.]
Gregor? No, no time. “I don’t know what happened, but I’ll figure it out, okay? I’ll ask Faultline…” The anger from before was back, a fire in my chest, flames licking at my throat. Fuck. How could I have forgotten for even a fucking second that she was dead?
[Belial: Being hard on yourself… Well, it’s understandable, Juniper.] “Meteor, I’ve been where you are.” [You weren’t ready for the world to know you’re one of us, so you didn’t use your full power.] “It’s easy to blame yourself, to listen to the devil on your shoulder.” [And now you are faced with that most dangerous of questions: ‘What if?’] “Do not let it consume you like I did…” [‘What if’ you hadn’t held back? Could you have saved her?]
[Klaus: Goddammit, Belial, would you stop it?] [Delible: Quiet! Both of you!] I wanted to laugh. Or cry. [Belial: Stop? Ah. How little you think of me.] Maybe both. [Delible: Stop!]
The lock slid open, and the guard swept back in as the uneasy truce in my head fell apart, the bickering of the chorus overwhelming all space for thought. One voice stood out from the rest, grabbing my attention not because it was the loudest or the nastiest but by just how broken it was. [Delible: Wait, no—! Elena!]
And maybe that made it easier. Having no room to talk myself out of it, and having solidarity in my mind of madness.
“Use my name,” I told her.
A moment of silence swept over the chorus, something unspoken compelling them. A smile let up Elena’s face as the guard ushered me out with a barely heard command, unimportant in the face of that joy. I didn’t push back or ask for more time as I whisked away into the hall, too stunned by my own temerity. The door slammed shut, and the lock slid back into place, but my mother’s smile didn’t leave me.
I barely noticed as I was led back through the security checkpoint to where Therese was waiting just down the hall from the elevator. She looked terribly out of place in her domino mask and casual clothes, the toe of her converse bouncing on the ground as she waited for my return with poorly concealed anxiety.
“Are you okay?” The words nearly tripping over each other on the way out of her mouth.
Fourteen people were arguing in my head, tearing one another and me apart, with only the ever hiding Ror’s voice absent from the chaos. I was most certainly not okay. She knew that, could see that. She knew that I knew she could see that. But she’d asked anyway. For a moment, I thought her words empty, a blind grasp for something to say in the face of someone in pain.
“You really take care of those, huh? … Your shoes,” I added, when she blinked at my non-sequitur.
I don’t know why I latched onto that. Something to ground me, maybe, the rhythmic tap tap tapping a counterpoint to the pennies spinning on the floor of what had been my own cell, only one separated from where my mother waited for the powers of bureaucracy to decide her fate.
I coughed, suddenly overcome with self-consciousness, but pressed on anyway, sheer stubbornness compelling me to finish the thought. “Soles look like they’re right off the shelf. Did you just clean—?”
“Take it upstairs,” the guard cut in, his tone nearly as lifeless as his bored expression. He had just reached the elevator, punctuating his statement with a jab at its button.
“Of course.” Therese pushed off the wall, her words short and perfunctory. She stepped towards him and the coming elevator, posture closed in a way I couldn’t place. “Sorry.”
“Make me.”
Silence. Silence in the hall, silence in my head. I had said those words, I realized. No, not ‘said’—I had growled, the two syllables raked over gravel and injected with more venom than I had known I possessed. My teeth were bared behind my mask, silently daring the guard, egging him to respond. Behind me, cylinders, armrests, and handles jerked—the pair of guards in the checkpoint swiveling around to face the brewing confrontation. The hand of the guard at the elevator twitched, an aborted move for the gun at his hip.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Genuine restraint? Or recognition of futility? [Belial: You are untouchable.] “I’ve stopped a sniper bullet I didn’t even see coming.” [You are unassailable.] “I could liquefy that pistol, leave you to drown with it sloshing around in your lungs.” [He lives because you are merciful.]
“Meteor!”
“I could bring this whole goddamn building down, bury you under a hundred thousand ton gravestone!” [Belial: He should be bowing before you.] “With a flick of my wrist, I could—!”
Water over the fire, I passed into the eye of a storm I barely recognized I was in. Therese’s hand was on my forearm, gentle and glowing, the rest of her between the guard and me. I blinked down at it, my breathing as heavy and veins pulsing despite enforced… It wasn’t—I wasn’t—calm. I was… worried? No, the emotion was more complicated than that. I shook my head, the chorus’ bleating discernible again.
[Butcher: That’s more like it.] [Edict: Whoa, kid, what are you doing?] [Diamondback: What is the point of this?] [Klaus: This is a can of worms you don’t want to open!] [Rotlimb: Aaay, now we’re talking!] [Caterpillar: ‘A flick of your wrist.’ If you wish to be incognito…] [Toro: Always a pleasure watching you work, Two.] [Quarrel: Do you see now, Sixteen?] [DZ: Do they have a panic button? They probably have a panic button…] [Alchemist: Oh dear, oh dear.] [Footloose: Daaamn, girl, that was fucking hot!]
“What did you say?” I didn’t need Deimos’ dry, stuttering laughter to notice the fear the guard was trying to hide under his bravado.
Tripped though I’d been, momentum still carried me forward. I didn’t glare, but I did eye him again, though this time with quiet restraint. “Be grateful my family and I were here to save you from the sword at your neck.”
The elevator pinged its arrival, the jaunty bloop cutting the remaining tension and leaving it to bleed out over the floor as the doors opened to reveal Legend within. The fall of his heavy boots muffled as he stepped out to stand next to the guard, leaving his apparitions behind. Strobe, the only one I recognized, raised his arm to hold the door open. The humanity of the gesture was almost enough to offset the implicit threat of what that raised arm could do.
“I trust you had a good conversation?” Legend blithely asked. He looked over the situation, his masquerade mask turning from one side to the other, from the curly, shining sun beams jutting out to caress his right temple to the smoothly curving arc of the moon hanging down over his left cheek. “Need more time, maybe?”
The last of the friction flowed out of me, and I eased into the calm Therese had pushed into me. I might have stopped spinning the pennies in my old cell. But no—unthinkable. “Yes.”
“Sir—” the guard began, cut off by Legend lifting his hand in the universal gesture of ‘stop.’
“To both? Yes, to both,” Legend remarked, asking then answering his own question. “And how much more time would you require?”
Earlier that evening, after the battle with the Teeth, I had shaken this man’s hand. The hero I thought I would never meet, the only one I respected— I shot a glance at Therese. She was still looking at me. Her domino mask couldn’t quite hide her expression, though it did make it harder? Relief and concern?
I shook my head, returning my attention to Legend and his unanswered question. “More than you could give.”
Delible made a noise of discontent at that but didn’t speak up. Perhaps because I was right. Perhaps because I felt the same way.
“Perhaps future visits could be arranged,” Legend mused aloud. He turned to the guard and dismissed him with a gesture. A thrill crawled up my spine, leaving icy trails in its wake as I watched the man struggle to comport himself as he stiffly marched past us to his compatriots in the checkpoint. “Shall we?”
Therese and I followed him into the elevator. I may have been watching Strobe’s hand keenly until it retreated upon our entry, the elevator door sliding closed. Legend pressed one of the buttons with an explanation of, “Your teammates are waiting for you.” [Diamondback: Wise, keeping an eye on that one. I’ve seen videos of those lasers. Very impressive.]
He didn’t press any other buttons. I flicked my eyes up to meet his, deep wells nestled within ornate finery. “Sorry to drag you away from your work.” [Butcher: Don’t apologize. You are above that.]
[Alchemist: We have been over this, Butcher. There is no shame in being apologetic in the right circumstances.] Legend dipped his head, his expression neutral. “Accepted. And I meant what I said before. I cannot make guarantees, but send word if you wish to see your mother again and can maintain your composure.” [Butcher: Fuck off, Eight.]
Ah. I’d figured as much. “I’m fine.” [Footloose: Heh. Y’know what ‘fine’ means, Sixteen?]
“Now,” he acknowledged. His eyes shifted to Therese, who was doing a remarkable job of looking constipated. “With help.” [Footloose: Fuckable, insatiable, naughty, and exotic!]
“… now,” I agreed with a wince, fighting down a sigh and the urge to demand silence from the chorus, as they degenerated into more bickering over Footloose’s bastardization and taunts of my responses to Legend.
But Legend’s eyes had not moved from Therese. Her apparent constipation grew worse, and I realized she was desperately fighting down the urge to squirm under the intensity of his gaze. “Have you made a decision, Gallant?”
Decision? Whatever Legend was referring to, the mere mention of it left Therese to come undone at the seams. Her face took on an unhealthy pale, the discomfort on her face twisting into despondency. Her eyes flicked to me and away so quickly I might have convinced myself I’d imagined it, except she couldn’t settle on where to look. Trapped in an elevator with two people she apparently couldn’t—wouldn’t?—bring herself to face directly, she looked everywhere except us, but she couldn’t keep her focus on any one place for longer than a few seconds at a time.
“I, I— I had—” Again, I swore she looked at me, but with her gaze as fidgety as it was, I just as easily could have imagined it. “—but things are…”
“Complicated, I should imagine.” Something was off. Instinct inherited from the chorus had me furtively searching the elevator for the source while maintaining my outward composure.
“Thank you for your patience—”
There, the cables! “The elevator,” I cut in, barely realizing I had spoken over Therese. How had I not realized it wasn’t… moving…?
Our surroundings changed. Whether the reveal was conscious or a side effect of my drawing attention to the effect on the elevator, I couldn’t tell. The walls, the doors, the floor, our clothes, us—we were all blue. Shades ranging from rich velvet to bordering on black. One of Legend’s apparitions, their bodies of black shadow cast in blues of deepest midnight, turned to look at me. There were no eyes, but I knew it was looking at me because I felt it.
“What is this?!” Therese hissed, stepping towards me and gripping my arm tightly enough I might have winced if it weren’t for my inherited powers. “Legend?!”
“Changing one’s name is difficult in any circumstance,” Legend replied, entirely unperturbed by the blue effect. “much less now.”
“Legend,” I demanded, and if I hadn’t been more alarmed by his obvious power use, I might have spared a thought that I was growling again. “Explain.”
“She called herself ‘Blueshift,’” he acquiesced, his words taking on an almost nostalgic note. “A scientist, you see. A simple power but an effective one. Up to an hour compressed into the previous second past, nearly unnoticeable by most. But then, you are no longer ‘most,’ Meteor.”
Was he implying that he knew? The thought sent a shiver down my spine, and I insisted, “The cables should be moving if the elevator is.”
He dipped his head. “Your mastery of your power is impressive. You truly belong among the Triumvirate.”
… what?
“You have potential, Meteor. You could be a very good person. Or a very bad person.”
What. The. Fuck?
“I would feel better knowing you are better equipped to be the former, and Gallant here seems quite up to the task of being the angel on your shoulder. All the better, then, that she is in desperate need of assistance you can provide.”
I was confused. I was in the Triumvirate? Did Legend know I had inherited the Butcher powers? Gallant needed help? My help? I was very, very confused.
“And so I apologize for overstepping—” The hues of the blue world around us began to change, at first slowly but quickly accelerating rapidly back to normalcy, leaving the cables moving again and the chorus once more chattering in my head. Maybe I would have enjoyed their absence more if I had noticed it sooner; as it was, I only just resisted the urge to groan. “But might I insist the two of you discuss a mutually beneficial arrangement over some night breakfast? The cafeteria is open, and the pancakes are sinfully good. My treat.”
And with that enigmatic statement left to hang, the apparition who had stared at me before—‘Blueshift,’ apparently—swiped her hand, and Legend vanished. The rumble of a stomach cut through the silence that followed, prompting Therese to admit with a wince, “Eating… does sound good.”
[Footloose: Wait, did you just negotiate eating out Knight Girl? Sixteen, you dog!] That time, I couldn’t stop the groan. “Foo— uh, invasive thought, sorry,” I told her when she blinked in confusion. “… and yeah.
"Yeah, food sounds good right now.”